Newt Gingrich announced today that he would not be running for President in the next election.  He cited an incompatibility that arose from McCain-Feingold campaign laws.  It would be illegal, apparently, even to investigate a Presidential bid, if he still wished to stay as chairman of his brainchild organization, American Solutions.  

He believes that leading American Solutions in its infancy is a more important role for him now than the Presidency.

I've been a huge fan of Newt for several years and am bitterly disappointed by the news.  There's many a saddened visitor at newt.org tonight.

So why are supporters unhappy?  Because many feel he picked the wrong fork of the road, and some such as myself feel it leads to a dead end.

I hope American Solutions works, I hope it lasts, and I hope it changes the country for the better.  But I know that Newt as President would have.  Guaranteed.

There are some culpable vagueries about this decision earlier today.  First, how can you go for years both creating American Solutions and also positioning yourself for a Presidential bid, and not find out ahead of time that they would be mutually exclusive?  A deceitful excuse at worst, but more than likely just poorly-executed due diligence.

Second, why the rush to judgment?  Within hours after a phone call with his attorney that he couldn't do both, he had a press statement saying that he wasn't running, no way, no how.  Surely when you are running you want to get the word out, but can there ever be any reason to announce immediately that you are NOT running? 

Third, he should have looked for other possibilities.  Certainly there's more collective brain-power in the world audience than just one attorney's opinion.  Newt was already scheduled to be on ABC's talk show on Sunday morning.  He could easily have explained there that he was going to be forced not to run because of those McCain-Feingold issues.  Maybe there'd be a suggestion or a savior, maybe he really could have done both or had someone step in to run American Solutions.

But even if there was no workaround, he still should have chosen to run for President, and resigned from American Solutions.  Even if it meant the death of his new organization.

Newt had a lot more chance of effecting change from the office of the President, rather than from what's looking to me like an organization that simply puts on seminars.

I was excited about American Solutions when I first heard about it.  A grass roots effort, where ideas would be assimilated from the rank and file, packaged, and presented to the important decision makers within government.  I signed up right away, and I got emails every so often that it was coming soon, in just so-and-so many days.  I wrote down any ideas I had for new ways to change the status quo.

But from the beginning, I never knew how or even what I was really supposed to contribute.  I kept waiting for an email to explain my role, and it never came.  I looked for web pages with some information, and couldn't find any.  It reeked of the stench of poor organizing.

Then I figured out that there really was no role for me.  I could try to find a workshop in my area, from a small list of first names and no addresses.  I didn't know if they were in town or in another state.  Not appealing, and still no idea what I would be doing.

It came down to watching seminars on the internet.  The moderators/speakers could give me action points I could do later.  It hardly sounded like a bottom-up organization.  In fact, the notion was so uninteresting, that American Solutions Day came and went and I had forgotten to participate.

My experience may be unique, but I have the hunch that there are many others like me who could have contributed to some ideal organization, and could not find a way to express their voices.  Still, it didn't matter to me, so long as Newt could be President and get his ideas enacted.

Grass roots efforts are hard simply to will into being; they have to emerge from emotions and luck.  Ross Perot's United We Stand did not have a name for a long time.  It had already happened before it was even christened.

Assuming they do materialize, there's not much history of them being effective.  With the exception of the civil rights movement, all the others I can think of ended miserably and unsuccessfully (the Populists, United We Stand, Howard Dean's campaign).

Another facet of American Solutions was to provide non-partisan reports to politicians at all levels and branches of government.  The hope was probably to have the spirit of acceptance that the 9-11 Commission report and the Iraq Study Group received.  They provided much cover to politicians so they did not have to think for themselves or be held accountable.

This raison-d'etat will never occur through American Solutions.  First, it is almost entirely a conservative base, because conservativism appeals to solution-oriented thinkers.  Second, as long as Newt Gingrich is the leader of it, it will never be accepted as non-partisan. 

Third, most politicians do want to be seen as having their own mind, not parroting whatever an outside organization says.  It's okay for a single report on an extremely sensitive topic, but not for issue after issue. 

Lastly, if the organization ever does achieve true non-partisanship, the results will be as milquetoast as those of the other bi-partisan commissions I mentioned.  Effective leadership comes from initiative, not by committee.

So to throw away a golden opportunity for his late entry into the Presidential race, in lieu of a small sickly organization with no future, is by far the wrong choice as I see it.  I'm sorry Newt saw it so differently.

I believe you have to grab the bully pulpit outright, only then you can stand up and start preaching.

What Newt should have done, and still can frankly, is become the Republican Party's candidate and then evoke the exact same grass roots inclinations behind American Solutions, but with the full power of the party backing him.  

Make the Republican Party the party of ideas and solutions, and make these workshops paid for and sponsored by the party.  To get back to Reagan principles, the Republicans need to embrace their ideals and conclusions anyway, not run from them in favor of blander bi-partisan acceptance.

If Newt were President, he could command that from his party.  And maybe both parties would start coming up with ideas and solutions, rather than repackaging style over substance.  We'd all be better off.

But we'll never end up knowing.  Newt's made his choice it seems.  And it's not to be President.

Deep down I still hope it proves to be the right one.  But I have my doubts.

The pro-choice position is something I really don't understand, so I'm hoping someone will comment and clarify this to me. 

I can understand someone being pro-abortion.  They don't believe a fetus is a person, and so killing it is no different from birth control, so abortion should not be outlawed.

But someone like Rudy Giuliani has said he believes that abortion is WRONG, but the state should not outlaw it.  So here's what I don't get:

If you believe that abortion is indeed wrong because it is murder, then you really believe that fetuses are people.

So then if you believe that fetuses are people, how can you say that it's okay for the state to allow people to get murdered within its borders?

What difference is there between that and murdering infants and children?  We outlaw and punish that.

How does it differ from tourists visiting this country?  They are not American citizens yet people can't just go around murdering them.

I'm not trying to argue, I just really don't understand it, and I'm hoping someone will explain it to me.  Until then I have more respect even for people who are pro-abortion than ones who are simply pro-choice.

So a kid got suspended for making a map of his high school and playing it as the setting in a video game?  Talk about a ridiculous and misguided over-reaction. 

Here's an article about the current state of the situation, which occurred in Fort Bend school district in Sugarland, TX:
 http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/metro/4766843.html

I've played a lot of first person shooter games, and I can tell you that making a map of a high school is a very labor intensive process.  It is a work of art, and this poor kid is getting punished for it.  A real crazy person can't do the kind of engineering and artistry required to make a map like that, there's not enough crazy-payoff.

The reason the map is of his high school, is simply because that's the place where he spends his day.  It's not because he wants to simulate murdering everyone there.

I always wanted to make a map of the place where I worked.  Not because I had some fantasy of going on a rampage, but only because I wanted to be able to recreate it in a virtual world and play a game in it.   The fantasy is about playing a game in an otherwise restricted and serious place.

An important part of this is that the game is Counter-Strike, which pits terrorists versus counter-terrorists.  These are the good guys and the bad guys.  Although the VA Tech lunatic played this game, on any day there are hundreds of thousands of people playing it.  This second as I write this, there are over 250,000 people playing this game.  RIGHT NOW. 

Statistically, there's more justification in saying that everyone who goes to VA Tech is a possible mass-murderer, than saying that someone who plays this game is.

Ironically, in Counter-Strike, all the players are penalized badly if the innocent hostages get killed.

In fact, if the game were Grand Theft Auto, it might be a different story.  In GTA you are supposed to get excited by going around murdering innocent people without consequence.  (I played this game for a brief period and then was completely bored by it.)  But that's not Counter-Strike.

It's saddening that dumb school administrators can so badly misinterpret the tragic VA Tech events as to persecute a kid who was diligent and artistic enough to make a 3d replica of his high school.  Now his whole education is being damaged because of idiotic bureaucrats.

There's no question that people are scared by the Virginia Tech event.  But being scared is no excuse for people in power doing something dumb. 

The Virginia Tech affair wasn't about a video game making a crazy person act out.  That's happened plenty of times before video games even existed.  

The truth about the mass killing was that Freedom comes with a Cost.  If we lived in Nazi Germany, the killer would have been deemed crazy and executed years ago.  But so would a lot of completely harmless and even righteous people. 

In our free society, guys like him are the chaff, the crazy fringe that we all have to accept because protecting the rights of the innocent and of decent citizens unfortunately has to empower crazy people to a certain extent.  It's an unintended but unavoidable cost.

Suspending a creative kid won't change that.

In this upcoming election, I will be voting Republican down the line.  I do this somewhat begrudgingly, as the GOP has had tremendous opportunity with control of both houses and a presidency, and yet has failed to accomplish real change.

The problem with the Democratic party is their inextricable marriage to the pro-Abortion position.  Of all the issues to disagree about, the abortion issue is one of only three I can think of that are based on moral principle.  (The other two are capital punishment and gay marriage.)

These issues of principle are irreconcilable.  For example, I personally believe in stricter environmental policies but in a stronger war against Islamic supremacy.  These are not exactly issues of principle however, because I can trade off one for the other.

But on the abortion issue, I cannot in good conscience vote for a candidate that is in favor of abortion.  (You can't be pro-choice without being pro-abortion, in my opinion, but that is another discussion entirely.  Suffice it to say that if you are pro-choice, I won't be voting for you.) 

Whether you agree with me or not about the core issue on abortion, it is impossible to deny that there is a portion of the voting populace that holds this issue as a matter of principle.  It is lopsided however, because the ones who view it as principle are anti-Abortion only, and that hurts the Democrats.

To be more precise, voting for pro-abortion candidates is not just a discomfort, it is morally unacceptable to this segment of the population.  On abortion, the side in favor of "pro-choice" could be seen in some circumstance at some point willing to compromise and vote for a "pro-life" candidate if they were perfect in every other respect.  Not so the other way around.

So what does it mean?  It means that the Democrats, virtually none of whom are anti-abortion, will always be selecting their voters from a smaller pool. 

They can still win, as it's only a certain percentage that view abortion as a principle-issue, but it's like spotting the other team a touchdown to start the game.  The Dem's have to do just that much better on all the other issues.

Capital punishment is a similar principle problem (one that favors the Dems) but it doesn't have nearly as many people holding the issue near and dear.  Gay marriage is more important an issue than capital punishment, as the 2004 election showed, but even this issue is not to the level of abortion.

I yearn for a Democratic Party that could have pro-life candidates, but that will never happen.

So I'll stick to my Republican ticket, and vote for them, with a little bit of sadness that I can't make my positions on other issues more clear in my vote.  But when you come down to it, it really is a matter of principle.  That's that.

Despite the glorious aura of football's return to the Superdome, the truth that no one wants to admit is that New Orleans must carry the blame for its own demise.  A centuries-old legacy of bad choices, corrupt government, and party-all-the-time laxness, under the brand name "The Big Easy", was the fallacy that reductio ad absurdum led to the vast suffering post-Katrina.

People talk about Hurricane Katrina devastating New Orleans, as if the city were struck from the sky by some meteor, but Katrina was not an epic disaster in and of itself.  It took human incompetence to make it that way.  On its own, Katrina was only a Category 3 hurricane at landfall, without the destructive winds or the storm surge that plenty of other coastal cities have withstood.  Was it bad?  Yes.  Should it have been cataclysmic?  Hardly.

The death of New Orleans that we have seen was simply this:  the culmination of perfectly bad government.  What sane person would have believed it was a fine idea to have half a city built below sea level, surrounded by a levee that could be breached with only a moderate hurricane at best, and do nothing about it?

The prior residents had these options: 1) Move out of town and relinquish their heritage,  2) Elect effective government, or 3) Put their heads in the sand.  Unfortunately they ended up collectively choosing Option #3.  It's no secret that drug use and alcoholism were rampant in New Orleans, the best way ever created to avoid confronting a real danger.  In a city where anything goes, everything went.  Like a modern day equivalent of Aesop's fable of The Grasshopper and the Ant, they chose to be the Grasshopper.

Regrettably, the people are not changing their government even now.  They thought it fine to re-elect Ray Nagin, the mayor so brutally outsmarted by the tag team of Mother Nature and Bad Engineering.

So apparently being irresponsible is okay in the Big Easy, even when you are in the city's single most important position of Mayor.  No doubt a lot of blame was thrown around as a decoy until it hit the Federal level, but New Orleans seemed to prefer only to fire their football coach, rather than their mayor.  We've yet to see how they'll handle their Governor.

Any quick look at the crowd at last night's game showed a pack of rich white people nursing their injured civic pride.  Something about the blatent disparity of the demographic mix of the happy fans, versus last September's tortured refugees, makes the Superdome the perfect symbol for how sick New Orleans was, is, and will continue to be. You can only spread so much sauce over rotten meat.

The unspeakable truth is that New Orleans is an embarrassing example of where democracy failed:  the inevitable consequence of entrusting important decision making to everyone, simply because they reside within a jurisdiction. 

This debacle was a laboratory experiment to show what can happen to a community of people not savvy enough, or involved enough, or powerful enough, to elect effective government.  While the only important issue in New Orleans for the last 100 years should have been "Hey let's build some higher walls around our below-sea-level homes", for whatever reason, that issue was ignored.

In a word I believe the problem is complacency.  The people of New Orleans were too complacent to learn about issues and vote on them, too complacent to scrutinize leaders, too complacent to demand safety, too complacent that the ineffective government they elected would somehow save them.  They took the Big Easy concept to its extreme, and had to suffer its horrific conclusion.

The city failed in its duty to protect itself.  Certainly questioning the responsiveness of FEMA and Bush himself after the incident is a valid debate, but it is really moot.  A response has nothing to do with a failure of a city to protect its citizens beforehand.  Spike Lee may hate and blame George W. Bush, but half the city still would have been underwater regardless of who was President. 

That any human beings would have to suffer what some in New Orleans have dealt with is gut-wrenching.  While I believe it is the logical natural result to be expected from the choices they themselves had made, it does not make me weep any less for the people whose lives have been destroyed.  Truly a dismal time, but by analyzing it, we can seek to prevent it from happening elsewhere. 

The ins-and-outs of why such ineffective government ruled that city and killed it are important on a national level as well.  First, we are banking our foreign policy under the Bush/neo-Con ideal that democracies are peaceful and benefit the entire world.  This assumption is proving out quite questionable when highlighted in Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon, with their hate-mongering of Israel and succumbery to Islamic Supremacists.  Even the established democracies of Western Europe turn a despicably blind eye to the future of the world, preferring the easy way out of letting America alone worry about tomorrow while they themselves earn a fast buck. 

Second, and this may be even more important long-term, there's an irrational supposition that any resident is capable of making the best choice for their future.  This was clearly not the case in New Orleans.  They elected state and local officials that did not protect them. 

Watch any episode of Cops, and when a 19-year-old unwed mother of 3 on food stamps and welfare, living in a trailer park, just gets beaten up by her alcoholic boyfriend for the umpteenth time, consider that her vote has every bit as much weight as yours.  You cannot tell me that this is a person who is good at making decisions.  She can't even make simple ones for herself, let alone figure out who should control power over the future of the world.

The end result is that you get the best-looking candidates in office rather than the smartest.  Real decision making is too hard.  Instead the public elects the candidates that most remind them of actors who play Presidents in the movies.  We even had a real actor elected President, who luck would have it turned out to be a great one.  On the other hand, let's not forget we also got a smiling saxophone player, who philandered his way through his tenure and slept while our enemies got stronger, bequeathing us a superpower China, a nuclear North Korea and Pakistan, and a worldwide group of powerful Islamic Supremacists wielding terror as their first weapon. 

It will take a mind far smarter than mine to come up with an effective structure to move citizens finally to choose a government wisely, while still safeguarding fairness toward all. 

While I do not have an answer, the problem is clear when more people care about American Idol than an American military victory overseas.  2008 will be a referendum for the American people to show they are worth saving.  If we end up with a President Smiles-A-Lot, and not a President Newt Gingrich let's say, it will show we only favor looks over smarts, and at that point God help all of us.

New Orleans had similar referendums time and again, but failed themselves.  Today we can all see the kinds of consequences that can result. 

Make no mistake, that's what all of America is facing from here on out.  It's time to wake up:  We can either choose to be the Grasshopper like New Orleans did, or choose to be the Ant. 

Here's hoping for the Ant.

The U.N. is the single greatest source of suffering since the days of Hitler.  How many times do we have to be convinced that this organization is a negative on civilization?

When this world forum gives the likes of Ahmadinejad and Chavez and George Clooney equal consideration with George Bush, one has to question, yet again, how rational and sound an organization it is.

Is the United Nations meant to be simply a propaganda instrument?  How can the U.N. allow Ahmadinejad, who clearly expressed his desire to eliminate Israel from the map, not only to remain a part of it, but have the honor to speak to it?  No fair organization would ever do that, a propaganda tool would.

I have believed for a long time, as I imagine most Americans, that the U.N. is irrelevant.  But it's more than that.  It's a force for "bad".

The same lack of accountability that makes anonymous internet posts such a cesspool, keeps any nations from banding together to solve the problems of the world.  The genocide occurring in Darfur... were it not for the U.N., enough world ire might have been raised, coalitions formed, and real solutions attained.  But in a world of nations that can dismiss responsibility by dumping the job on the "group", nothing gets done.  How long does the list have to be?  Rwanda, Oil-for-Food, Saddam's unpunished defiance, Iran's defiance, North Korea's, Darfur, Israel's vilification, Lebanon, the Al Qaeda war in Iraq...

My biggest grievance about the U.S. in world affairs is our desire to lead without courage.  Leadership of lasting import requires substantial courage, often to a point of offending.  The historically greatest Presidents in the U.S., Lincoln, Washington, Reagan, etc. had atrocious poll numbers (or popularity), but they had the courage to fight through the adversity, and eventually history vindicated them.

The U.S. however seems to be content with taking these great problems, throwing up our hands, and like the rest of the world mailing it over to the U.N.  The most damnable part: we keep going back.

Look, I could have written this in 2002.  Nothing has changed, not even our ability to break free from the U.N.  How much is enough, Gordon?

The solution to me seems clear: 

1) Kick the U.N. out of New York.  There's a perfect occasion to break up:  a new U.N.  building.  See if Paris will build it, or Tehran.

2) Lower our contribution to the bare minimum.  I'm not certain any figures about how much the U.S. contributes to the U.N., but we should move it to the lowest amount.  I tend to doubt it currently is there.

3)  Stay in the U.N., stay on the Security Council, but veto everything.  This will make the U.N. truly irrelevant because not a thing will pass.

The U.N. was a dumb idea, just like the League of Nations.  It's hard to think of very much they have done that has benefited the world, whereas the opportunity cost they have fostered, this groupthink in lieu of action, has cost many a life and many a happiness.

But what will other nations think???  Sorry to tell ya, but they'll still hate us.