The Debate

I am too cheap to buy cable so I didn’t watch and will need to catch it on youtube. However after hearing snippets on the radio where I was thinking Cain was not defending his plan as well as he could and after reading the papers I still like Protein Wisdom’s general analysis and this in particular [bold is mine]:

Cain — who it’s become fashionable to bash, if you happen to be in my Twitter feed (his rise is simply too precipitous, and if so many people are taken with him, the way to distance yourself is to show that you are unimpressed) — is, both as a candidate and as a person, just plain refreshing. He says what he thinks, and he acts like a leader. I don’t expect a candidate to know everything about everything. I do expect him to have the courage of his convictions, and the capacity and curiosity to assimilate information and delegate authority, and Cain has that. I’ve been arguing for some time — and it was echoed by Gingrich tonight — that the specifics of Cain’s 9-9-9 plan don’t matter as much to me right now as does the fact that he is taking the “bold” step of running on a complete reform of the tax code. I like the flat tax idea better, but that’s really beside the point. Cain is willing to bring up reforms that, to politicians, have long been thought of as non-starters. Cain makes up in charisma what Steve Forbes lacked.

Bottom line: every candidate is an improvement over Obama, and in a debate that pits conservatism against Obama’s brand of democratic socialism, the American people will be able to chose the path going forward based on a clear demarcation. Where Romney fails — and why I desperately don’t want to see us make the mistake of nominating him — is that he is not a reformer, not a movement conservative, and he rides the political winds, saying what he anticipates people want to hear. He is, in my parlance, the losing more slowly candidate. Yes, he is far better than Obama; but he is also the kind of status quo politician who kicks the can down the road.

Read the whole thing.

Afghanistan

I’ve been reading Romney’s book (highly recommend it) and am at the end where he’s doing a round up of Afghanistan where things started falling apart.

Today in the NYPost, Arthur Herman is catching us up on Afghanistan and frankly, it sounds like there is hope.

But late last year they cleared out Helmand province in the south, once the most dangerous place in Afghanistan, and handed over control to the Afghan army. Now they’re steadily driving out the terrorists from the provinces east of Kabul, and back across the border into Pakistan. In 2012, the Taliban will try to regain that lost ground. If we beat them then, they’ll almost certainly have lost Afghanistan for good.

General Petraeus is in Afghanistan by the way.

Keystone XL Pipeline

You’ve all seen the map of the pipeline:

It’s hard to even imagine a pipeline that long through those many states and that much private property.
Turns out, yes, those property owners are not all on board with this so Canada is turning to eminent domain to get the land.

Eminent domain laws generally allow for the confiscation of private property if taking it is judged to serve a larger public good.

So the larger public good here is for a foreign country to sell their tar sands to some private company in Texas in order to process oil?

Where is the enterprising person in Montana who can build a refinery? Are they stopped due to regulation? Yet this pipeline itself has less? This is madness.