As Republicans gnaw at each other’s throats, playing a desperate game of “I’m more conservative than you,” something yet more depressing and deeply ironic is occurring: Capitalism is saving Obama.

In the spirit of “no bad deed goes unrewarded,” the very system our president cut his teeth on despising — the unbridled free market — is on its way to securing him a second term. (Well, it may not be as “unbridled” as it once was, but it is unbridled enough to work some magic.)

Yes, I am well aware that the unemployment numbers are fudged; that whatever recovery exists is flimsy at best and most probably not even there. In fact, we may be poised on the brink of a depression even greater than the Thirties.

But the reverse may also be true. Capitalism — that sturdiest of systems — may be righting itself to some degree. A recovery may be under way despite the wrongheaded policies of an administration seemingly determined to undermine it.

Investors apparently think so. The stock market had a remarkable January and, if this trend continues, it could start to spill cash, positively influencing the economy at large, even the depressed housing market at the heart of the global meltdown.

More likely not. More likely this is just one of those temporary roller-coaster swings that occurred during the Thirties. Nevertheless, elections are about perception and capitalism, of all things, appears to be giving the euro-socialist Obama a reprieve. The media is already trumpeting his success and, of course, they will continue to do so into the Fall.

Meanwhile, the social issues have, at least for the moment, taken over the Republican debate. I would be very surprised if they remained meaningful during the general election. The American public, suffering through one of the longest recessions on record, is thirsting for economic salvation. A party that tries to win the battle of 2012 over condoms, abortions or gays is fighting the wrong war at the wrong time.

It is also playing into the hands of its adversaries and making them stronger.

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Forget Frommer, Fodor or Lonely Planet. If you’re planning a trip to Israel in the near or distant future, get a copy of Israel: An Introduction by Barry Rubin, just released by Yale University Press.

Yes, you will still need guides to specific archaeological sites like the City of David, but Rubin’s book, written with numerous co-writer/experts in various fields, is the best overview of the Jewish state I have read and the best preparation for a trip. It is also the best book for the armchair traveler and the best general purpose resource on Israel yet published.

(OBVIOUS FULL DISCLOSURE: Rubin is the Middle East editor for this site and a friend. Does this disqualify me as a reviewer? Possibly, but that would similarly disqualify a fair percentage of reviews written in many publications.)

Rubin’s book excels in two areas: historical overview and Israeli sociology.

The eighty-some pages devoted to the history of the state are a useful review of the Israel story even, I would imagine, for those who consider themselves relatively knowledgable about the subject. This survey takes us through the early days of the “yishuv” — literally “the settlement,” but actually a kind of ur-Jewish state — the often violent struggle for independence with its militant factions from the Irgun to Lehi through the UN declaration of a state of Israel and the subsequent unceasing battle to survive.

Following this narrative, remembering some events better than others, I was most struck by the depressing ironies of the post-Oslo period. Like many of my generation, although apprehensive, I was deeply moved and hopeful in 1993 watching Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shake hands on the White House lawn under the beaming paternal gaze of Bill Clinton. That moment of optimism seems centuries ago now and, by tracing the post-Oslo steps carefully, Rubin shows how the Palestinians have yet to demonstrate a genuine interest in a two-state solution despite the good will of significant portions of the Israeli populace. The Palestinians could have had a state of their own decades ago if they had really wanted it.

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To say the least, things do not look good for the Republicans at this moment. Rasmussen polls released Tuesday showed Romney trailing Obama at 49 to 42 and Santorum lagging even further behind at 41. No word on Gingrich, but it’s hard to be optimistic.

According to the pollster: Among unaffiliated voters, the president leads Romney by 10 and Santorum by 16.

Yikes. For those who don’t want to see a second Obama administration this is, as Riley used to say, “a revoltin’ development.”

And it gets worse. The candidates, bunched closely together in the polls and looking to separate themselves, are too busy denigrating each other to pay much more than temporary lip service (except on the evening of a primary victory) to the main enemy in the White House who expands his lead over them even while his own approval rating is a dismal -11.

What seemed even weeks ago as potentially a banner year for Republicans now appears a potential debacle. Not only is the continued loss of the presidency (Intrade now has Obama’s reelection at 60%) and the Senate an increasing likelihood, the loss of the House looms as a possibility.

The Republicans have only themselves to blame. Sure they have to contend with a dishonest and biased media, not to mention a meretricious administration honed on Chicago and Alinksy — but this is a surprise? In reality, what the Republicans mostly have to contend with is themselves in an endless roundelay of “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the most conservative of all?” – a game more befitting a theocracy than a democracy.

The debates came down to a contest about who had the more unsullied conservative bona fides and who would really fulfill their campaign promises about curtailing government spending and appointing pro-life judges to the Supreme Court. In truth they all would, but the media played up (and encouraged the candidates to play up) the idea that one or all of them might be lying, that there was a hidden liberal under the rock waiting to explode, whether it was Santorum with his earmarks and anti-right-to-work voting record, Gingrich with Fannie/Freddie links and global warming flirtation, Romney of RomneyCare and one time tolerance of abortion, etc., etc. The Republican electorate, like automatons in some Huxley novel, sat complaisantly at the debates as the media manipulated them into thinking one after the other of the candidates might be prevaricating. No one paid the slightest attention to the candidate’s actual ideas, even though the country was and is in the worst pass it has been in decades. And so, with little encouragement, fewer ideas were discussed in public, most relegated to the back pages of a website.

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Rick Santorum — a man who lost his last election in his home state by eighteen points — is suddenly threatening the frontrunner status of Mitt Romney for the Republican presidential nomination. He, not Newt Gingrich, is emerging, at least for the moment, as the conservative alternative to Romney, having won decisively in three state contests this week.

I say “for the moment,” because only a dopey pundit like me would assert that this race is over, as I did immediately after the Florida primary.

Nevertheless, things are looking good for Santorum. Events, again “for the moment,” are swinging his way, with Obama coming under heavy, and justifiable, criticism from conservatives and some liberals for crossing the line on religious freedom. The Obama administration issued what amounts to a diktat to Roman Catholics to toe the liberal line on birth control, even to the extent of paying for the contraceptives their faith finds immoral. For shame.

Santorum, the candidate most associated with religious faith, should profit from this execrable policy, especially in the short run. But definite perils are ahead for the Republican Party if it allows Santorum-style social conservatism to dominate the election. And those perils go well beyond the obvious that the campaign will be largely about the economy.

The greatest danger is that Rick Santorum will be singled out as the spokesperson for extreme right-wing religiosity and made to look like a bigot to the largest voting group in our country — the independents. This is particularly true in the area of gay rights, but not because those people favor gay marriage. The majority of them probably don’t. But most people these days have homosexuals among their friends, family, or work colleagues and don’t appreciate even the whiff of bigotry. It’s become a big no-no.

Santorum does not have a good track record in that regard. He is the only politician I know of who merits his own Wikipedia entry on the subject: “Santorum controversy regarding homosexuality.”

Some of the quotations at that site from the former senator are not pretty. In one rather notorious interview with Lara Jakes Jordan of the Associated Press, Santorum, defending his position on sodomy laws, which he apparently supports, or supported then, asserted he did not oppose homosexuals, but rather homosexual acts. In other words, it’s fine to be a homosexual, as long as you don’t have a sex life.

On the marriage issue, he picked a rather peculiar analogy:

In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be.

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On the day of the Minnesota caucus, shocking video from James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas – broken here first at PJ Media – shows how easy it is to register NFL stars Tim Tebow, Tom Brady and practically anybody else to vote in that state.

No identification of any sort is needed, just a name! In fact, you can take 20 application forms home, fill them in, check the “no ID” slot and batch register people in absentia. Even local election officials are dismayed with the complete lack of authentication of any sort. On the video, they admit “We’re not the police.”

The above version is ten minutes. The uncut, one-hour version is now available below.

Minnesota voter registration form — note third slot for registering without identification.

Updated with uncut video:

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The gang at PJM Central has been working overtime calculating the results in our first (and hopefully not last) Nostradamus Contest — in this case to predict the order of finish in the recent Florida primary accompanied by the most accurate percentages. We now have the three winners and, no, for once none of them are named Meryl Streep.

They are Steve Grammatico, Bill Kotzbucher, and Jerry Jordan. All three gentlemen will receive iPad2s plus a three-month free subscription to PJTV.

We asked the three wizards how they arrived at their conclusions, by-passing thousands of competitors.

Steve Grammatico told us:

How did I formulate my predictions? I ignored the polls because they were all over the place and changing, it seemed, every ten minutes. I went with my gut. Took me about thirty seconds. Forgot to factor in the write-ins, but I guess that didn’t matter.

And then he added:

Actually, I did employ a stratagem, worked out over several years, involving bivariate analysis, interval variables, and the effects of stratified sampling on Likert Scale datasets. I’d be happy to entertain questions from Rasmussen and Gallup about my methodology.

You will not be surprised to learn that Mr. Grammatico is a satirist who has written for Big Government.

As for Bill Kotzbucher:

I heard about the contest through the PJ Media website. I’m a regular reader.

I entered the contest because my wife has recently observed that I never win anything. I’d like to tell you that I had a specific method but all I did was to recall a recent poll and then adjust to hit exactly 100%. In other words, it was mostly blind luck.

The only other thing I would like to add is that your site has some of the most intelligent conservative writing on the web.

No, we didn’t pay Mr. Kotzbucher to say that and he’s still only getting one iPad. As for Jerry Jordan, well, he didn’t share with us his methods, which may mean he is the man to watch in the next Nostradamus Contest.

That one, most probably, will be a real mind bender — Super Tuesday. I’d have enough trouble counting the number of primaries for that one, let alone predicting the percentages in all of them. Hell, I don’t even think I could predict who will be running at that point.

Nevertheless, a lot of people had fun with this contest, so we are pushing on to the next. No word on what the prizes will be, but watch this space. One thing I can predict — it won’t be an all-expense paid cruise on the Costa Concordia.

Meanwhile… big congratulations to the winners. I understand Mr. Grammatico is going to appear on PJTV to accept his award. At that point, he may explain what Likert Scale datasets are.

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As we all know, it ain’t over until the fat lady sings.

But I’ve seen a few fat ladies singing myself in the amusingly ersatz courtyard of Sheldon Adelson’s The Venetian hotel in Vegas. Sometimes it was Traviata, sometimes Aida, sometimes even Lucia di Lammermoor.

And, although I wasn’t in attendance this time, I think the fat lady was singing there again tonight, an aria bringing a quick conclusion to that opera called the Republican nominating competition.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m glad it’s over. This opera — not composed by Verdi, Puccini, or anyone close — was getting pretty screechy.

The candidates had nothing left to say. After all, three of them (not Paul, of course) pretty much agree with each other about everything of substance. The debates were no more than puerile exercises in name-calling, orchestrated and encouraged by the mainstream media. The rest of the candidates’ salvos, those outside the debates, again pretty much amounted to the same thing, trying to convince the voters the other guy was lying when he said exactly what the rest of them were saying. How edifying… Okay, I’m kidding. How mind-numbing. How self and mutually destructive.

So when the fat lady began singing the final aria, “Romney has won in Nevada! Romney has won in Nevada! From The Venetian to the Wynn, Romney has won!” I had no choice but to join the chorus — not because I think Romney is anything special (I don’t think politicians in general are anything special, not until they prove themselves against history in big ways like Reagan and Churchill) but because this opera has gone on too long. This is Wagner times ten.

It not only is over, it should be over. And if Republicans have any interest in winning against Barack Obama, they better make it over.

Because beating Obama is getting harder by the minute. The train is leaving the station, as the say, and that train is called lower unemployment numbers. In case you live on former planet Pluto, the unemployment rate just went down to 8.3%. Maybe it’s bogus. Indeed, I suspect it’s bogus.(Romney tonight spoke of 15% real unemployment — including those who have stopped looking — in his victory speech.) But if the American public can be convinced the economy is improving — and you can bet the media and the administration will do their best to make it so — Obama II is here. Book it.

To the myriad conservative pundits screaming Romney’s a fake, Gingrich is sleazy, etc., etc., I say “Shut up, already!” This isn’t sports. It’s history.

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That’s the droll title of an article by Patrick Michaels at the prize-winning science blog Watts Up With That. Michaels is having fun while making some trenchant observations about the uproar surrounding a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “No Need To Panic About Global Warming.” It’s by sixteen concerned scientists, including the estimable Richard Lindzen of MIT, who were aiming their words, at least in part, at the current presidential candidates (hello, Newt Gingrich).

This article apparently set off a @#$%storm in the already beleaguered warmist community, including the NY Times‘ leading enivro blogger, The Guardian, a gaggle of “climate scientists” led by Kevin Trenberth of Climategate fame, and the rest of the usual suspects. It’s amazing these people still cling to their views, but cling they must, I suppose, even in the face of more bad news like this from The Daily Mail: “Forget global warming – it’s Cycle 25 we need to worry about” (and if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again).

The supposed “consensus” on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. [Remember them? -ed.] It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

A painting, dated 1684, by Abraham Hondius depicts one of many frost fairs on the River Thames during the mini ice age
Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.

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For a supposedly smart guy, Newt Gingrich made a bonehead error in Florida that not only cost him that state but almost certainly any serious chance of the Republican nomination. And in so doing, he, almost idiotically, undercut the very thing that had made his candidacy successful in the first place.

After his solid victory in South Carolina, Gingrich did not continue the obvious strategy that got him there – running against Barack Obama by presenting himself to Republican voters as the great orator and thinker who could bring down the noxious incumbent, the man who rose above internecine intra-party squabbles for the greater good of his country.

Instead, he did the exact opposite. He spent the balance of his time in Florida running against Romney when he had already beaten the former governor in South Carolina. Talk about dumb. Newt let his personal antipathy overwhelm his good sense. He played defense about the picayune and the irrelevant when he should have played offense on the philosophical and substantial.

No wonder Gingrich’s poll numbers dropped and dropped. What the Republican electorate cares about is Obama and who can beat him. Newt took his eye off the ball, wasted time and demeaned himself attacking Romney — not the least of which was an extraordinarily vicious (not to mention untrue) accusation that Romney denied kosher food to Holocaust victims.

Just ten days ago I asked the question on this site: “Will Newt Gingrich Grow Up — And Win?” Unfortunately, we got the answer sooner than we expected.

Now I know Gingrich fans (and I was one, if you read the column referenced above) are going to say that Romney played dirty first, so Newt had to. Nonsense. If that’s what Gingrich thought, he was far less smart the we give him credit for. He might be a big thinker (at least for a politician), but he’s also a thin-skinned sucker. He should have taken a breath and stayed completely on the high road, keeping whatever “vision thing” he had focused on the big rodeo in November.

If I, with no more political experience than running for junior high school president, knew something so apparent, surely Newt did. But he was unable to follow through on it, unable to keep his cool.

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Papa drank a daiquiri in Key West and it was good. It reminded him of the Plaza de Toros in Pamplona and how the matador waved the maleta at the bull of Miura. The bull was noble, but he charged too often. He snorted when he should have been quiet and he waved his horns around when he should have aimed them straight at the torero’s stomach.

The name of the bull was Gingrich.

The name of the matador was Romney.

There was a banderillero named Santorum and a skinny picador named Ron Paul.

They didn’t sound like Spanish names, but Papa didn’t care. He poured more rum in his daiquiri. You could never have enough, he thought. Sometimes he preferred Myers’s and sometimes he preferred Havana Club. And sometimes he even preferred Maker’s Mark, though he knew that was not rum.

Still, it was good.

He wondered who would win the Florida primary. Papa didn’t like politicians. They didn’t look like Ava Gardener and they couldn’t shoot an elephant. And they told more lies than a movie producer. But sometimes they liked to go deep sea fishing like the one named Hart. So they were not all bad. Just mostly bad.

One of them was the president, but Papa couldn’t remember his name. He was more boring than Francis Macomber. Still, they could help him make some money. Or win one of these iPads. He had never seen one of those, but he heard you could read A Farewell to Arms on it. Or maybe something by John O’Hara, if you could stand that.

Anyway, he was going to enter the contest. He had heard of Nostradamus too, a French geezer who wrote predictions in quatrains. You could say anything you wanted in quatrains. No one could understand you.

But to win the contest you would have to do it in real numbers. This was not good. Well, not necessarily.

But Papa had a plan. He would go to Real Clear Politics and read the latest polls. Papa often went to Real Clear Politics after he had six or seven daiquiris. This time it was clear the matador Romney was ahead of the bull Gingrich. But wasn’t that always so? Well, except for when Manolete got that cornada from the bull of Miura. But that was 1947.

So Papa studied the poll trends and entered the Nostradamus Contest. He thought he could write again if he had that iPad. He wants to tell another story about Mount Kilimanjaro. There is a leopard there. It is frozen. But you know that.

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Join Papa and compete in the PJ Nostramadus Contest. Win an iPad and write your version of The Snows of Kilimanjaro — or better. But hurry. Contest closes primary day Tuesday at noon Florida time.

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