So Republicans..Whose your guy/gal???

[Elok]

Cain's "suspended" his campaign. Huzzah.

[Berzerker]

Managed the end of the Cold War extremely well, demonstrated intelligence and restraint in waging the first Gulf War, and raised taxes even though it hurt him politically because it was the responsible thing to do.

He didn't manage much of anything extremely well, the end of the Cold War was in the hands of the Russians while we watched, he lied us into the first Gulf War and left an army in Saudi Arabia to enforce sanctions and 9/11 and the mess we're in now was the result. He sat on the S&L scam during the election (funny how the GOP seems to be in the WH when the BS hits the fan) and he chose Dan Quayle as his VP. He presided over the Iowa accident, Ruby Ridge and I hold him accountable for the BATF at Waco. He's a douchebag surpassed only by his son, Obama is better than either piece of Bu****. Its rather poetic Obama got OBL while douchebag jr went from promising to get him to not thinking about him much cuz he's in a cave somewhere.

[HalfLotus]

Ron Paul's positions on justified military action are rooted in Just war theory. His positions on military action for US troops are firmly rooted in the Constitution. Both huge improvements over our last many presidents, and certainly more defensible than the aggressive warmongering of every candidate for 2012, including Obama.

And if you really think Americas troops have been recently used to "stop genocides" or "protect from dictators" and other such nonsense propaganda, you may want to take another look at history.

[KrazyHorse]

Can somebody tell me why the rise of newt's chances for the repub nomination (per intrade) hasn't positively impacted obama's chances? I thought the received wisdom was that newt is unelectable.

[Elok]

You're the market guy, you tell us. I really don't see Newt getting the White House, just due to the incredible amount of baggage he's got. But maybe Obama's just going to get pulled down by the economy even if they nominate Gilbert Gottfried to run against him.

[KrazyHorse]

This doesn't have to do with "markets" in general. This is about politics.

As for markets, the relevant point here is that equities underwent an enormous rally last week, which should have positively impacted obama's chances (really, what's happened is that macro conditions are seen to have improved, which helps both equities and obama). Obama got a small bump earlier in november, but he's slid since then.

Newt is sitting at 35% likelihood of winning on intrade. This has been at the expense of Romney, who has dropped from near 70% to under 50%.

[KrazyHorse]

a relevant timeframe to look at on those charts is over the last week-2weeks or so (27th or 20th and onwards). Obama's flat to a bit down while romney's way down, newt's up and equities are up.

It would have seemed impossible 2 weeks ago, but markets seem to be telling us that president gingrich is a real possibility

[giblets]

Can somebody tell me why the rise of newt's chances for the repub nomination (per intrade) hasn't positively impacted obama's chances? I thought the received wisdom was that newt is unelectable.

Divide Gingrich's chance of getting elected by his chance of getting nominated and you get ~49%. For Romney you get ~45%. So per intrade, Romney is actually less electable than Gingrich.

[Hauldren Collider]

Yeah, I think Intrade's wrong on this one. I think gingrich's primary chances are also highly overstated.

[KrazyHorse]

Divide Gingrich's chance of getting elected by his chance of getting nominated and you get ~49%. For Romney you get ~45%. So per intrade, Romney is actually less electable than Gingrich.

Didn't notice that they already had an individual market for gingrich

[HalfLotus]

Neocon Bombthrower
Newt-Onian Foreign Policy

Newt Gingrich’s foreign policy views are a combination of wild, irresponsible, and aggressive warmongering, extraordinary naivete about the nature of government, and juvenile hero worship. One only needs to read his September 7, 2006 Wall Street Journal article entitled "Lincoln and Bush" to see the truth in this statement.

First, Congress should declare that we are in World War III, says Gingrich. This in turn will require a "dramatically larger budget." And what should be done with this dramatically larger budget? According to Gingrich, the U.S. military should invade Lebanon with the purpose of "disarming Hezbollah." This would effectively commence another war with Syria, says Gingrich, as it would be "the first direct defeat of Syria," which supposedly pulls the strings of Hezbollah. It would also be an assault on Iran, says the former House speaker, and would therefore be an act of war against that country as well.

Next, full-scale warfare should be waged against North Korea, Iran and Syria with the objective of "replacing the repressive dictatorships" in those countries. All of this would somehow serve in "restoring American prestige in the region," says Gingrich. Yes, murdering hundreds of thousands of Iranians, Syrians, and Lebanese, and destroying their cities and their infrastructure of civilization, which is what war does, would surely lead the people of those countries to think of Americans as "prestigious."

Gingrich seems vaguely aware that war always causes an explosion of governmental powers and a corresponding destruction of liberty and prosperity at home. Thus, he makes the case for magically transforming the Pentagon into a paragon of efficiency. He sounds a lot like an early twentieth-century communist preaching the praises of "scientific socialism." "Clear metrics of achievement" should be implemented, as though the usual politics would not prohibit such a thing, as it has for hundreds of years in all societies. The Pentagon must be made more "business-like," an oxymoron if ever there was one.

The domestic police state should also be expanded exponentially, said Gingrich, as long as the Fatherland Security Bureaucracy is also run in a super-efficient manner, with "metrics-based performance" measurements. He does have his business school lingo down cold.

Just in case anyone criticizes his proposal for a half dozen or so new wars, Gingrich plays the standard neocon "ace-in-the-hole" strategy of quoting the "sainted" Abraham Lincoln. "We must think anew and act anew," he quotes Lincoln as saying. He praises Lincoln’s response to Fort Sumter, where not a single person was harmed, let alone killed. In response to the knocking down of some bricks at the fort, Lincoln responded with a full-scale invasion of all the Southern states, waging total war on the civilian population as well, and killing some 350,000 American citizens in those states. This of course was the very definition of treason under Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution, which defines treason as only "levying war upon the states" or "giving aid and comfort to their enemies."

Gingrich says that secession would have meant "the end of the United States" when in fact the exact opposite is true: The voluntary union of the founding fathers – their United States – was destroyed by Lincoln’s war. To Gingrich, Lincoln’s unconstitutional invasion of the Southern states was "the road to victory." (Lincoln’s greatest failure was his failure to do what all the other major powers of the mid nineteenth century did with regard to slavery, and end it peacefully).

Gingrich also seems totally unaware of or unconcerned about blowback or retaliation for American military aggression. He screeches that "terrorist recruiting is still occurring" (duh) without making any mention of the fact that such recruiting is an inevitable consequence of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Such "recruiting" will increase by many orders of magnitude should Newt Gingrich be elected president and enter the U.S. into World Wars III, IV, V, and VI, as is apparently his pipe dream.

http://lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo220.html

[giblets]

Does anyone have access to the full version of this article? I want to see if Gingrich really did advocate WWIII.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115758846085255848.html

[Hauldren Collider]

Yes, and no, it doesn't look like he did. I think it's kinda a dumb article though.

[giblets]

I think this is it:

http://www.aei.org/article/foreign-and-defense-policy/bush-and-lincoln/

Five years have passed since the horrific attack on our American homeland, and, still, there is one serious, undeniable fact we have yet to confront: We are, today, not where we wanted to be and nowhere near where we need to be. In April of 1861, in response to the firing on Fort Sumter, President Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to serve for 90 days. Lincoln had greatly underestimated the challenge of preserving the Union. No one imagined that what would become the Civil War would last four years and take the lives of 620,000 Americans.
By the summer of 1862, with thousands of Americans already dead or wounded and the hopes of a quick resolution to the war all but abandoned, three political factions had emerged. There were those who thought the war was too hard and would have accepted defeat by negotiating the end of the United States by allowing the South to secede. Second were those who urged staying the course by muddling through with a cautious military policy and a desire to be "moderate and reasonable" about Southern property rights, including slavery.
We see these first two factions today. The Kerry-Gore-Pelosi-Lamont bloc declares the war too hard, the world too dangerous. They try to find some explainable way to avoid reality while advocating return to "normalcy," and promoting a policy of weakness and withdrawal abroad.
Most government officials constitute the second wing, which argues the system is doing the best it can and that we have to "stay the course"--no matter how unproductive. But, after being exposed in the failed response to Hurricane Katrina, it will become increasingly difficult for this wing to keep explaining the continuing failures of the system.
Just consider the following: Osama bin Laden is still at large. Afghanistan is still insecure. Iraq is still violent. North Korea and Iran are still building nuclear weapons and missiles. Terrorist recruiting is still occurring in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain and across the planet.

* * *

By late summer, 1862, Lincoln agonizingly concluded that a third faction had the right strategy for victory. This group's strategy demanded reorganizing everything as needed, intensifying the war, and bringing the full might of the industrial North to bear until the war was won.
The first and greatest lesson of the last five years parallels what Lincoln came to understand. The dangers are greater, the enemy is more determined, and victory will be substantially harder than we had expected in the early days after the initial attack. Despite how painful it would prove to be, Lincoln chose the road to victory. President Bush today finds himself in precisely the same dilemma Lincoln faced 144 years ago. With American survival at stake, he also must choose. His strategies are not wrong, but they are failing. And they are failing for three reasons.
(1) They do not define the scale of the emerging World War III, between the West and the forces of militant Islam, and so they do not outline how difficult the challenge is and how big the effort will have to be. (2) They do not define victory in this larger war as our goal, and so the energy, resources and intensity needed to win cannot be mobilized. (3) They do not establish clear metrics of achievement and then replace leaders, bureaucrats and bureaucracies as needed to achieve those goals.
To be sure, Mr. Bush understands that we cannot ignore our enemies; they are real. He knows that an enemy who believes in religiously sanctioned suicide-bombing is an enemy who, with a nuclear or biological weapon, is a mortal threat to our survival as a free country. The analysis Mr. Bush offers the nation--before the Joint Session on Sept. 20, 2001, in his 2002 State of the Union, in his 2005 Second Inaugural--is consistently correct. On each occasion, he outlines the threat, the moral nature of the conflict and the absolute requirement for victory.
Unfortunately, the great bureaucracies Mr. Bush presides over (but does not run) have either not read his speeches or do not believe in his analysis. The result has been a national security performance gap that we must confront if we are to succeed in winning this rising World War III.
We have to be honest about how big this problem is and then design new, bolder and more profound strategies to secure American national security in a very dangerous 21st century. Unless we, like Lincoln, think anew, we cannot set the nation on a course for victory. Here are some initial steps:
First, the president should address a Joint Session of Congress to explain to the country the urgency of the threat of losing millions of people in one or more cities if our enemies find a way to deliver weapons of mass murder to American soil. He should further communicate the scale of the anti-American coalition, the clarity of their desire to destroy America, and the requirement that we defeat them. He should then make clear to the world that a determined American people whose very civilization is at stake will undertake the measures needed to prevail over our enemies. While desiring the widest possible support, we will not compromise our self-defense in order to please our critics.
Then he should announce an aggressively honest review of what has not worked in the first five years of the war. Based upon the findings he should initiate a sweeping transformation of the White House's national security apparatus. The current hopelessly slow and inefficient interagency system should be replaced by a new metrics-based and ruthlessly disciplined integrated system of accountability, with clear timetables and clear responsibilities.
The president should insist upon creating new aggressive entrepreneurial national security systems that replace (rather than reform) the current failing bureaucracies. For example, the Agency for International Development has been a disaster in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The president should issue new regulations where possible and propose new legislation where necessary. The old systems cannot be allowed to continue to fail without consequence. Those within the bureaucracies who cannot follow the president's directives should be compelled to leave.
Following this initiative, the president should propose a dramatic and deep overhaul of homeland security grounded in metrics-based performance to create a system capable of meeting the seriousness of the threat. The leaders of the new national security and homeland security organizations should be asked what they need to win this emerging World War III, and then the budget should be developed. We need a war budget, but we currently have an OMB-driven, pseudo-war budget. The goal of victory, ultimately, will lead to a dramatically larger budget, which will lead to a serious national debate. We can win this argument, but we first have to make it.
Congress should immediately pass the legislation sent by the president yesterday to meet the requirements of the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision. More broadly, it should pass an act that recognizes that we are entering World War III and serves notice that the U.S. will use all its resources to defeat our enemies--not accommodate, understand or negotiate with them, but defeat them.

Because the threat of losing millions of Americans is real, Congress should hold blunt, no-holds-barred oversight hearings on what is and is not working. Laws should be changed to shift from bureaucratic to entrepreneurial implementation throughout the national security and homeland security elements of government.
Beyond our shores, we must commit to defeating the enemies of freedom in Iraq, starting with doubling the size of the Iraqi military and police forces. We should put Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia on notice that any help going to the enemies of the Iraqi people will be considered hostile acts by the U.S. In southern Lebanon, the U.S. should insist on disarming Hezbollah, emphasizing it as the first direct defeat of Syria and Iran--thus restoring American prestige in the region while undermining the influence of the Syrian and Iranian dictatorships.
Further, we should make clear our goal of replacing the repressive dictatorships in North Korea, Iran and Syria, whose aim is to do great harm to the American people and our allies. Our first steps should be the kind of sustained aggressive strategy of replacement which Ronald Reagan directed brilliantly in Poland, and ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet empire.

The result of this effort would be borders that are controlled, ports that are secure and an enemy that understands the cost of going up against the full might of the U.S. No enemy can stand against a determined American people. But first we must commit to victory. These steps are the first on a long and difficult road to victory, but are necessary to win the future.
Newt Gingrich is a senior fellow at AEI.

Kind of vague, doesn't explicitly say we should invade four different countries on top of already having Afghanistan and Iraq occupied.

[giblets]

I think Gingrich just want the president to wag his finger at the foreign dictators until they step down in fear, like when Reagan used his magic wand to liberate Poland. The President of the US can do anything if he just sets his mind to it and uses his LEADERSHIP powers to win over the opposition. Obama can't get the Republican congressmen to cooperate because of his lack of LEADERSHIP.