Not long after stipulating that he would enter the race if he could raise $30 million in pledges before Oct. 21st, Newt Gingrich has decided not to run for President.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich will not run for president in 2008 after determining he could not legally explore a bid and remain as head of his tax-exempt political organization, a spokesman said Saturday.

“Newt is not running,” spokesman Rick Tyler said. “It is legally impermissible for him to continue on as chairman of American Solutions (for Winning the Future) and to explore a campaign for president.”

Gingrich decided “to continue on raising the challenges America faces and finding solutions to those challenges” as the group’s chairman, Tyler said, “rather than pursuing the presidency.”

This is unfortunate, as having Newt on the same stage as the other Republican candidates would be a good way to get them to commit to adopting principled conservative reforms to specific problems. Te onus now is on us now. Newt’s doing tremendous work in spreading ideas for real solutions to real problems. Now we, as voters and interested citizens, must let the candidates know that we expect them to address these problems with specifics and not just platitudes.

It is disheartening to see how ignorant so much of America, in particular our elected officials and various government organizations, remains regarding the level of Islamist activity right here in United States. That this can happen is simply inexcusable:

Virginia?s Democrat governor appointed the head of an extremist Islamic group who publicly advocates ?the jihad way? to an important new state commission.

Like a good politician, Gov. Timothy Kaine claimed ignorance and said he had no idea about his new appointee?s radical history until damaging videos appeared on a popular web site this week.

They featured the new appointee, Esam Omesh, condemning Israel and advocating the jihad way. Omesh also accuses Israel of genocide and massacre against Palestinians and says the ?Israeli agenda? controls the United States Congress. He also tells a group of Washington Muslims that the jihad way is the way to liberate their land.

Omeish has since resigned, but the threat of Islamist infiltration at this point should be so thoroughly ingrained into government officials at all levels that accidents like this simply should not be possible. How much more evidence do they need?

Yes, theirs is an ambitious plan. But the enemy lurking within is assiduous, patient and well-organized. We are only now starting to see its tentacles, thanks to a landmark federal terror-financing case under way in Dallas.

News about the secret Islamist plot against the U.S. is starting to trickle out from the few media covering the trial against the Holy Land Foundation, the largest Muslim charity in America.

It hasn’t made the politically correct evening news yet. But the Associated Press has dared to quote from the chilling courtroom exhibits, and now the Dallas Morning News has weighed in with a lengthy feature story.

“Amid the mountain of evidence released in the trial, the most provocative has turned out to be a handful of previously classified evidence detailing Islamist extremists’ ambitious plans for a U.S. takeover,” the newspaper said.

“Terrorism researchers say the memos and audiotapes are proof that extremists have long sought to replace the Constitution with Sharia, or Islamic law.”

Well of course they have! This shouldn’t be a secret, since Islamists are often upfront and open about their intentions.

. . .One secret document outlines an anti-American cabal by the major Muslim groups in America ? all of which are considered “mainstream” and “moderate” by the media and many pols, but in fact are U.S. franchises of the Muslim Brotherhood, a worldwide jihadist movement that gave rise to Hamas and al-Qaida.

Islamic scholars call for jihad:

One of the world?s most respected Deobandi scholars believes that aggressive military jihad should be waged by Muslims ?to establish the supremacy of Islam? worldwide.

Justice Muhammad Taqi Usmani argues that Muslims should live peacefully in countries such as Britain, where they have the freedom to practise Islam, only until they gain enough power to engage in battle.

His views explode the myth that the creed of offensive, expansionist jihad represents a distortion of traditional Islamic thinking.

The list of Islamist front groups operating in the U.S. is staggering. The Holy Land Foundation trial has identified over 306 unindicted co-conspirators, including the media adored Council on American-Islamic Relations.

We already knew that education was failing in America, but until you see a story like this you don’t quite realize just how bad the problem is.

Forty-four percent (44%) of American adults say that health care services should be made available for free to all Americans. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 39% disagree and 17% are not sure.

How can 44% of Americans be so ignorant as to not understand the inherent contradiction in “free health care to all Americans”?

Here’s the relevant definition of free from Dictionary.com:

11. provided without, or not subject to, a charge or payment

The important concept in determining what is “free” is determining whether or not the individual receiving the good is the one to pay the cost or not. You can give something free to an individual, though someone else is still paying for it. But how can you give something free to all of society when that society is paying the cost? That’s not free. All you’re really doing in that situation is taking the power of choice away from the individual and giving it to government. You’re still paying for health care. That’s not free. In fact, it’s simply socialism, which is the central planning of the distribution of goods and services - in this case health care.

I’m not sure what’s worse, that 44% of Americans want socialism or that they probably aren’t even aware enough to realize that it is such.

After a bondage fair benefiting the depraved Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence posted an ad depicting da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” as a leather clad orgy replete with sextoys, Bay Area Christians took to the streets in rage. Incensed by the inflammatory anti-Christian rhetoric which has made it’s way into the mainstream of San Fran culture, thousands of religious zealots threw rocks through store windows, tipped over cars and started fires throughout the city, chanting “death to the non-believers”. The national guard, led in the field by the terminator himself, quickly restored order over the city, and the dawn fogs brought a restive calm. City officials plan to meet with leaders of the Christian community to address any perceived grievances to avoid a repeat of last nights deadly antics.

Or not.

I imagine it was a hard choice between this and the 72 dominatrices of Mohammed ad.

Very convenient for liberals that the solution to global warming always seems to be…liberalism. More taxes, more government, less individual freedom, wealth redistribution, worldwide government, more market regulation, etc. If I didn’t know better, I’d say climate change was just a ploy to advance the left’s agenda.

Dealing with global warming will be painful, says one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress. To back up his claim he is proposing a recipe many people won’t like _ a 50-cent gasoline tax, a carbon tax and scaling back tax breaks for some home owners.

“I’m trying to have everybody understand that this is going to cost and that it’s going to have a measure of pain that you’re not going to like,” Rep. John Dingell, who is marking his 52nd year in Congress, said Wednesday in an interview with The Associated Press.

Dingell will offer a “discussion draft” outlining his tax proposals on Thursday, the same day that President Bush holds a two-day conference to discuss voluntary efforts to combat climate change.

But Dingell, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that will craft climate legislation, is making it clear that he believes tackling global warming will require a lot more if it is to be taken seriously.

Voluntary, shmoluntary. Don’t you plebes worry about a thing. Just leave it to us bureaucrats.

“This is going to cause pain,” he said, adding that he wants to make certain “the pain is shared in a way that is fair, proper, acceptable and accomplishes the basic purpose” of reducing greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels.

This is going to hurt, but it’s for your own good.

Remember, in the liberal dictionary, fair means it hurts productive citizens the most whilst sparing the bumps-on-logs.

You will not enjoy this, This will not be over quickly, I am not your elected representative.

Just when you thought British dhimmitude couldn’t get any more ridiculous. Trevor Phillips, the head of some silly “human rights and equality commission” has decided that British history just isn’t inclusive enough.

He said Muslims were also part of the national story and “sometimes we have to go back into the tapestry and insert some threads that were lost”.

He quoted the example of the Spanish Armada, which was held up by the Turks at the request of Queen Elizabeth I.

“It was the Turks who saved us,” Mr Phillips told a Labour fringe meeting.

Dhimmi Watch asks if Mr. Phillips is planning to include the slave raids carried out by Turkish clients against British ships and towns in his new tapestry? Somehow I doubt it.

Mr Phillips thinks that bending over backwards, destroying his national identity and rewriting one more suitable for Muslims will reduce their aggressive posture and ambition. He couldn’t be more wrong. Cultural concessions are to the culturally aggressive Islamists what military concessions were to Hitler. All Mr. Phillips is doing is proving how weak British culture is, that nothing in the country is worth standing up for. Anything and everything can be compromised. He might as well have already converted to Islam for all the good that will do.

Protectionism is one issue that spans the ideological spectrum. One’s just as likely to come across calls for protectionist policies on the right as the left. Case in point as a conservative blogger using the name arclightzero writes on “The Reality of Economic Globalization.” According to the author, this is a reality where American jobs and the quality of goods are being sacrificed at the alter of globalization. “[M]anufacturing in America is dying,” he declares. But how accurate is this reality? A little research combined with some basic understanding of free market principles shows why this author has it all wrong.

I’ll start with his conclusion first. Is the American manufacturing sector dying? This seems like something that one should be able to prove or disprove empirically. So what do the facts say? Far from the image of a dying sector painted by the author, the facts show that American manufacturing is booming! The American manufacturing sector reached its all-time peak just last year, in 2006. Daniel Ikenson’s analysis for the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute titled, “Thriving in a Global Economy: The Truth about U.S. Manufacturing and Trade,” dispelled many of these myths. From the executive summary:

Since the depth of the manufacturing recession in 2002, the sector as a whole has experienced robust and sustained output, revenue, and profit growth. The year 2006 was a record year for output, revenues, profits, profit rates, and return on investment in the manufacturing sector. And despite all the stories about the erosion of U.S. manufacturing primacy, the United States remains the world?s most prolific manufacturer?producing two and a half times more output than those vaunted Chinese factories in 2006.

. . .In the first six months of the 110th Congress, more than a dozen antagonistic or protectionist trade-related bills have been introduced, which rely on the presumed precariousness of U.S. manufacturing as justification for the legislation. Justification for those bills is predicated on the belief that manufacturing is in decline and that the failure of U.S. trade policy to address unfair competition is to blame. But those premises are wrong. The totality of evidence points to a robust manufacturing sector that has thrived on account of greater international trade.

Arclightzero’s assertion that the manufacturing sector is dying is not all that is wrong with his article. There are several points of reasoning that I take issue with. Consider the following passage:

For every job that is shipped to India or China so that the company can make an extra couple of bucks, there is another American that won?t be able to buy that company?s product or service due to the loss of a job. It?s a very short-sighted way to run a business and an economy.

He errs here by viewing job loss as a static phenomenon, rather than as part of a larger process. Creative destruction is a necessary part of the capitalist system. Nor is what he describes unique to jobs lost to other countries. The same argument could be made within any economic subgroup experiencing dislocation, and it would also be equally myopic. Such constant efficiency maximization is what drives transformative and innovative growth. Without these processes we would be stuck with outmoded and immobile industries. Furthermore, our record low unemployment seems to indicate that jobs lost in this process are replaced by new job gains. In addition, the lower cost of goods provides a higher standard of living for all.

He also makes a case that these cheaper foreign goods are of a lower quality. That may or may not be true, but it’s entirely irrelevant. Consumers retain the same ultimate say in the matter regardless of who produces the goods. If the quality is not at a high enough level to satisfy consumers, the products will not be bought. The only way to circumvent this simple fact is by insisting that some other opinion, such as that of a government regulatory body, should matter more the opinion of the consumer. I don’t think it’s necessary to explain the folly of that position on this blog, nor do I believe the author would even take that position.

I find the biggest fault in the author’s reasoning to be that his analysis of the “human factor” completely disregards any negative feedback from the global economic system as a result of protectionist policies that would attempt to “[keep] work and production here at home.” When we enact policies to achieve that end, other nations respond in kind. In fact, he doesn’t acknowledge any connection at all between the strength of the American economy and the global economy, whether it be positive or negative.

The American economy has benefited greatly from the opening of trade and will see even more such gains in the future if we continue to open trade. Recent research compares the gains of free trade versus the type of lose the author is experiencing and finds that the net outcome is overwhelmingly positive for America.^[1]

. . .We find that trade opening since World War II has added between $800 billion to $1.4 trillion to the US economy, or about $7,000 to $13,000 per household. More speculative estimates of the potential additional gains from removing the rest of US trade barriers range from $400 billion to $1.3 trillion, or about $4,000 to $12,000 per household. Since trade opening permanently raises national income, these gains are enjoyed annually. Trade opening inevitably entails adjustment costs. We estimate that the lifetime cost of all worker dislocations that have been triggered by expanded trade in the United States could be as high as $54 billion, although probably less. The permanent gains from past and potential liberalization easily swamp the modest sums necessary to alleviate the temporary pains of adjustment. In the future as in the past, free trade can significantly raise income ? and quality of life ? in America.

It’s easy for individuals to see only the localized dislocations and not the dispersed gains of globalization, as evidence by the fact that the author of this particular protectionist piece claims to be a “devout capitalist” who nevertheless says that “[a]nybody who thinks that sending work offshore doesn’t hurt the economy and capitalism need to have their heads examined.” The evidence begs to differ.

Further Reading: The Case for Free Trade by Milton and Rose D. Friedman

^[1] See “The Payoff to America from Globalisation,” by Scott Bradford, Paul Grieco and Gary Hufbauer in The World Economy. Volume 29, Issue 7. July 2006.

The comments of many liberals over this whole Ahmadinejad affair serves to illustrate that Western Liberal states are facing a mortal danger. That danger is not simply coming from the likes of Ahmadinejad; it’s coming from within. The President of Columbia has already demonstrated the left’s myopic tendency to bend over backwards for America’s enemies while simultaneously and hypocritically displaying their disgust for American institutions.

But the worst is the complete inability of the modern left to recognize any threat to Western Liberalism. To the President of Columbia, Ahmadinejad is nothing more than “offensive and even odious.” To a rational individual, there are much better adjectives to describe him. How about mad, dangerous, threatening or evil.

There’s a reason the left cannot reach these conclusions. They’ve long since given up their self-preservation concerns in favor of reliance upon the state. Health care, welfare, social security; no longer individual concerns, these are best left to big government. This has left liberals incapable of distinguishing between people that are merely offensive and people that are dangerous. They no longer care to make that distinction because there is no need; big government will protect them if there’s any actual threat, just the same as it protects them from sickness and in their retirement and all other important matters.

Unfortunately, they are wrong. Western states derive power from the people, and so their lack of concern is self-defeating. When constituents don’t care, neither do politicians. Democrats work within government to ensure that it doesn’t do anything to protect people from this threat because no one who votes for them recognizes that any threat even exists. Until the left realizes that survival is an individual concern, they will continue to work to drive the West down a path of suicidal self-delusion.

Last year the City Council of Irving, Texas unanimously approved implementation of the Criminal Alien Program which allows for constant communication between local law enforcement and federal authorities to deport illegal aliens suspected of a crime. Since then, the city has turned over for deportation at least 1,600 illegals accused of crimes - crimes in addition to breaking immigration law, of course.

[Mayor] Gears said he believes Irving turns over more illegal immigrants for deportation than any other city in the country. And he estimates the number at about 300 people a month ? from 23 countries, including Mexico and El Salvador.

The No. 1 offense that people are arrested for is driving with a suspended license, he said.

Mr. Gears, however, opposes using a federal program called “287g” that trains local officers and jailers to act as immigration officers.

“Why do we have to turn our officers over to the federal government?” he asked.

In testimony to the effectiveness of such enforcement measures, the Mexican consulate has urged it’s citizens to avoid Irving like a nuclear disaster zone.

“In this city, one has to be extra careful,” he told Al D?a. “And if possible, avoid going through there, because we suspect, and with good reason, that people are being detained simply because of their appearance.”

Actually, people are being detained first because they were committing a crime, such as driving with a suspended license, and then because further investigation exposed their immigration violations. Their appearance has nothing to do with it, and any perceived racial disparities are solely a consequence of almost all illegal immigrants in this country being hispanic. But hey, if race-baiting sleight of hand works for the Jena 6, why can’t it work for the millions of criminal aliens in this country?

Should Mexican citizens heed the consulate’s advice, no doubt the citizens of Irving will reap the dividends of having extricated themselves of the burden of a class parasitic invaders there to suck on the lifeblood of the community. Makes you wonder. If every city in America took a similar approach toward illegal immigration, maybe the consulate would suggest that the illegals avoid our country altogether.

As with every issue, the solution to the illegal immigration problem is too simple for Washington to figure out. Cut off their welfare benefits, employment opportunities and actually enforce the laws, and you don’t even have to deport them. They’ll go away on their own.

First term Democratic Congressman Phil Hare has a piece at Politico calling for “fair trade.”

I certainly support free trade. But trade must also be fair. Unfortunately, the pending trade agreements with Peru, Panama, Korea and Colombia follow the same flawed NAFTA model that resulted in the hemorrhaging of good paying jobs in America and a race to the bottom in Mexico.

I have seen the effects of unfair trade policies in my home state. The manufacturing sector, historically a key component of a once-thriving Midwest economy, has seen 3 million jobs lost to NAFTA. And our trade deficit has gone from $100 billion to over $700 billion since its passage.

There are indeed many countries we trade with that do not compete fairly. They place restrictive tariffs on American goods while demanding open access to U.S. markets. But nothing the Congressman describes here is proof of “unfair” trade practices (though he does later sight an actual such case with Korea). Labor is a good like any other. How is it unfair for other countries to compete with our labor force? The benefit of cheaper labor is cheaper goods. Artificially protecting American labor is itself a form of “unfair” trade practice.

Claiming that we need to ensure that free trade is also fair underscores a sad misunderstanding of what free trade means. If it’s not fair, then it’s not free. It is right to demand that trade be fair, but we must remember that the best way to ensure fairness is to guarantee that it is free.

As one of eight freshmen in the House Trade Working Group, I am committed to fighting for a new direction on trade that protects American jobs while promoting labor and environmental standards. Fortunately, these two goals reinforce each other.

What Congressman Hare calls for is unfair trade in which “protections” are offered for such and such groups. Exactly the type of practices he would condemn in another country.