1. When Will Newt Say When?

2. Exacerbating the ‘Perception Problem’: Center for American Progress Chronicles the American Right’s Decade of Baseless Aggression Against Islam

3. PolitiFact Proves Yet Again It Is a Left Wing Attack Machine With Nonpartisan Veneer

4. Jon Huntsman’s Legitimacy: A Near Sexual Fantasy for Some on the Left

5. The Texas record.

1. When Will Newt Say When?

One of the saddest spectacles of the 2012 season is seeing Newt Gingrich, who for so long was the ideas guy of the right, run out of steam.

American Solutions, his once much heralded organization, is now shut down. Newt left the organization to run for President and it could not keep the lights on without Gingrich there.

But Gingrich seems to be having trouble keeping the lights on in his campaign.

This weekend saw a straw poll at the annual Georgia Republicans’ fish fry in Perry, Georgia. The event, started by former Governor Sonny Perdue as a campaign fundraiser for himself and the party when he got elected back in 2002, is a huge affair for the state party. Folks come from every corner of Georgia to eat fish and politick.

There are two Georgia sons in the 2012 race: Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich. Cain is a businessman and former talk show host in metro Atlanta. Gingrich was and, for many is, “the Speaker.” He taught at my wife’s alma mater; his first wife was my wife’s high school math teacher. He then went on to represent the Atlanta suburbs in Congress for quite a while, eventually becoming Speaker.

This weekend, as they might say in Georgia, the dogs didn’t hunt for Newt Gingrich.

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2. Exacerbating the ‘Perception Problem’: Center for American Progress Chronicles the American Right’s Decade of Baseless Aggression Against Islam

The far-left Center for American Progress (CAP) today released a report on the “Islamophobia network” it claims is responsible for the “genesis of anti-Muslim propaganda” in America, which coincidentally began, the report claims, ten years ago (“[S]even foundations over the past decade have helped fan the flames of anti-Muslim hate in America,” writes Faiz Shakir at the CAP’s ThinkProgress blog).

It’s both typically ironic and sadly predictable that CAP lays blame for the instigation of the last decade of skepticism about Islam and its adherents’ aims in the west and around the world at the feet of a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy while almost entirely ignoring another, far more responsible and relevant event that took place ten years ago: the hijacking of four airliners by radical Islamist terrorists and the murdering of 1,629 Americans in New York, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania. September 11, 2001 is mentioned only twice in the 130 page CAP report, and both times it is entirely in passing (pp. 42 and 75, with both mentions using 9/11 only as a reference point for supposedly extremist commentary by members of the “Islamophobia network” CAP seeks to unmask). Additionally, blame is laid at the feet of this “Islamophobia network” for the actions of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian extremist who murdered nearly seventy people in a bombing and shooting spree in July, while also blaming the “network” for the speculation that abounded while Breivik’s attacks were ongoing that the perpetrator(s) might be Islamist extremists (bear in mind that credit for the attacks was claimed on a jihadi message board while they were ongoing).

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3. PolitiFact Proves Yet Again It Is a Left Wing Attack Machine With Nonpartisan Veneer

As a general rule of thumb I heard somewhere, fact checkers don’t check facts.

Fact checkers exist to put an objective, nonpartisan veneer on whatever some reporter wants to say. And when fact checkers take it upon themselves to be arbiters of truth, they use their own biases. One of the worst is Politifact, which the media now hides behind routinely to give cover to a left-of-center spin on truth.

There is an egregious example today over the number of doctors in Texas and whether tort reform mattered.

According to Politifact, tort reform did not impact the number of doctors in Texas.

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4. Jon Huntsman’s Legitimacy: A Near Sexual Fantasy for Some on the Left

At what point does Jon Huntsman’s campaign begin to look like a sexual fantasy for the some lefties in the media and the left in general and not like a Presidential campaign? At this point I think. His only useful purpose has become being the pin up Governor that the left can fixate on, breath lustily at, and whisper “if only the Republicans were like him.”

With a hat tip to Ben Domenech’s awesome Transom, I found this post at the Corner by Katrina Trinko.

The Politico and NBC are doing the next GOP Debate. Why the GOP would want to do a debate with the Politico and NBC — both of which have a well documented history of being mouthpieces for Obama (First question: What’s it like to be a Christofascist terrorist, Ms. Bachmann?) — is beyond me.

In any event, they set the criteria to get into the debate as “4 percent in one of eight national prominent polls of Republicans taken since November 2010.”

Why not a more round number like 5%?

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5. The Texas record.

Texas has been the home of the last two Republican presidents. With Governor Rick Perry now in the fray, we’re fixin’ to find out if Texas can make it three in a row.

When examining what makes Texas the benchmark conservative state, the best place to start is the size of its government. Back in 1987, total state and local expenditures in Texas were about 18 percent of private gross domestic product (GDP), versus a national average of just over 19 percent. In 2008, Texas was still at about 18 percent, while the national average had risen to over 22 percent. Spending in California, our biggest competitor, grew during that period from about 19 percent to more than 25 percent of private GDP.

Stats about where Texas ranks in taxes and spending tell the same story. The Tax Foundation says that Texas ranks 45th in state and local tax burden. StateHealthFacts.org ranks Texas 47th in total state spending. And the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau has Texas 42nd in education spending.

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