Romney is the Best of an Exemplary Field
Posted: 14 Dec 2007 12:24 AM CST
Steroids in Baseball: Say It Ain't So
Posted: 14 Dec 2007 12:25 AM CST
Posted: 14 Dec 2007 12:28 AM CST
A GOP Debate with the Church Lady
Posted: 14 Dec 2007 12:30 AM CST
Could Clinton Lose Because of Women?
Posted: 14 Dec 2007 12:32 AM CST
Is Huckabee the None of the Above Candidate?
Posted: 14 Dec 2007 12:40 AM CST
A Second Democratic Year in '08?
Posted: 14 Dec 2007 12:45 AM CST
Posted: 14 Dec 2007 12:50 AM CST
By Mona Charen
Friday, December 14, 2007
Link: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NWExZDFjMzYyNDU4MzUzMTA3OWEwYjZmM2FhMWIxZDc=
Pretty much every election year since I can remember, a complaint has arisen that goes like this: "Why are we stuck with these awful choices? In this vast country of highly successful individuals, why don't any of the best people run for president?" Some years evoked more howls than others, and admittedly, 1976 really did present two underperformers, as did 1996. So let's pause to notice the fact that this year we have some exemplary choices.
Fred Thompson is an excellent man who is running a refreshingly substantive campaign. John McCain has demonstrated not just personal courage (which is admirable enough) but the courage of his convictions. And Rudy Giuliani achieved a seemingly impossible task in transforming
But no one running is more impressive than Mitt Romney. It was his speech on religion in American life that caused me to take another look at him. Until then, I confess that I saw him as a sort of robo-candidate: smooth, articulate, but perhaps a little opportunistic and possibly even insincere. The religion speech cast a new light on him.
The question as to whether someone's religious convictions are a fit subject for public scrutiny is not as simple as it sounds. It's too pat to say, "There should be no religious test for public office and there's the end of it." If a candidate were, say, a fundamentalist Mormon like Warren Jeffs, or a Scientologist, that would be an obstacle. But the mainstream Mormon Church has enough of a track record in producing excellent Americans that the particularities of its doctrine are by now a matter of purely scholarly interest. No one thought to raise objections to Mormonism when Mo Udall ran for president, nor even when Mitt's father, George, made a bid. The Senate majority leader is a Mormon and this fact causes not a flicker of interest on the part of his colleagues. Besides, Mitt Romney served as governor of
What Romney's religion speech demonstrated was not so much his devotion to his own faith (though he declined to run away from it) as his understanding and embrace of
But then Romney has been masterful in everything he has attempted. It is not insignificant that this cum laude JD/MBA graduate of Harvard guided Bain Capital to become a hugely successful private equity investment firm and rescued Bain & Company from financial collapse. Romney was brought in to save the 2002 Winter Olympics when the games were mired in scandal and $379 million in debt. Romney was able to turn the situation around completely so that the games actually turned a $100 million profit instead. (He also gave back his salary.) That's not slick, that's substance.
When Mitt Romney took office as governor of
It is difficult to find any significant weakness in Romney. He is refreshingly articulate, exceedingly well prepared and self-disciplined, clearly an excellent manager with both private and government experience, happily married with a large, supportive family, and well within the mainstream of conservatism on every major issue. His nomination would not divide the base.
He is just the sort of candidate people complain that they never get.
Mitt Romney is right, of course, when he argues that his Mormon religion shouldn’t be a factor in judging his quest for the White House.
Nevertheless, his attempt last week to put the issue to rest was disheartening. Romney’s speech in Texas clearly was designed to evoke John F. Kennedy’s address to Protestant ministers in Houston in 1960. Like Kennedy, Romney stressed the importance of separation of church and state, to allay fears that he would serve a particular denomination or take direction from his church’s leaders.
But there the similarity ends. Kennedy’s assurance of separation was unqualified and was what his audience at that time wanted to hear. On the other hand, although Romney invoked separation to divert scrutiny from his own Mormon beliefs, he hardly argues that religion is an irrelevant political consideration. Indeed, he emphasized his Christian credentials, deplored “the religion of secularism” and argued that a society must possess religious faith to achieve freedom. That seems to place non-Christians and people of little or no faith lower on his American pecking order.
For any true sci-fi fan, you already know about this, but didn’t know it was for real. When you look at the communicators on Star Trek, and today’s cell phones, Sci-Fi had it right. If you remember in Star Wars, Lando operated a gas mining operation, what were they mining? In Battle Star Galactica , they had to mine asteroids for fuel for their engines.
Well folks, the Chinese and Russians don’t think this is science fiction anymore. What if there was an unlimited supply of a new energy source only three days away and 7 tonnes supplied all the electrical energy for the entire US for one year.
And the best part, the new energy source is not radioactive. Well folks you gotta read about this stuff.
Helium-3 (He-3) is a light, non-radioactive isotope of helium with two protons and one neutron, which is rare on Earth; it is sought after for use in nuclear fusion research. More abundant helium-3 is thought to exist on the Moon (embedded in the upper layer of regolith by the solar wind over billions of years) and the solar system's gas giants (left over from the original solar nebula), although still in low quantities (28 ppm of lunar regolith is helium-4 and 0.01 ppm is helium-3).[1] It is proposed to be used as a second-generation fusion power source.
The helion, the nucleus of a helium-3 atom, consists of two protons but only one neutron, in contrast to two neutrons in ordinary helium. Its existence was first proposed in 1934 by the Australian nuclear physicist Mark Oliphant while based at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory, in an experiment in which fast deuterons were reacted with other deuteron targets (the first demonstration of nuclear fusion). Helium-3, as an isotope, was postulated to be radioactive, until helions from it were accidentally identified as a trace "contaminant" in a sample of natural helium (which is mostly helium-4) from a gas well, by Luis W. Alvarez and Robert Cornog in a cyclotron experiment at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in 1939. [2]
Now I already hear you naysayers, “on the Moon” yup, and guess how it’s processed? You scoop it up at 1/6 earth gravity and you squeeze the rock and dust of the moon surface. Guess what you get? Two components He-3 for fuel, but you also get H2-O, WHAT! That’s right folks, you get water. The by product is a compressed building block called, you got it a Brick!
Now all you chemistry nerds out there, if you pass electricity through water what do your get? Right, you strip off the Hydrogen and you get Oxygen. This is how our submarines produce Oxygen to stay under the water indefinitely.
So lets see, we have got unlimited solar energy on the moon for power. Everything is 1/6 the weight, we have building materials, we have water, we have oxygen, we have minerals, we have soil. HUMMMM
The Russians and the Chinese want to begin operations in 2020, and neither of these countries have been much concerned about killing people to get things done. So the
Oh and if any you thought I forgot about Lando? We could build a Gas mining platform in lunar orbit, using the lunar elevator system, then tow the platform to Jupiter’s moons. There we could extract the gas directly.
All this would likely take 100 years to complete, but what a goal.
Mark
Campaign Tip
Online Opinion Surveys
By Nancy Guthrie
Email addresses are almost as prevalent these days as residential addresses. But so far in political and issue campaigns, online email surveys and polling are largely untapped. Measuring the court of public opinion through online email surveys and polls is affordable, fast, easy and effective. It is an immediate way to take the pulse of the public and gather intelligence that can be used to develop a winning campaign strategy.
Unlike typical response rates of 10-15 percent, email surveys and polls are experiencing response rates between 40-50 percent. The email results are collected over one week compared to the month or longer it takes to collect mail surveys. And case studies suggest that the majority of email surveys and polls are completed and returned within the first 72 hours. Results can be viewed in real time via an online tracking report, and a summary analysis of survey results can be turned over within a day. (Read more about online surveys at Political Resources)
Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee continued tussling in Iowa today on the eve of the last Republican debate before the Jan. 3 caucuses.
In response to a new Romney TV ad that hits him on illegal immigration, Huckabee introduced a new supporter -- Jim Gilchrist, the leader and founder of the Minuteman Project, a controversial group that has sent members to the borders of both Mexico and Canada to watch for illegal immigrants.
Huckabee also told reporters that the Romney ad is a sign of "desperation" by the former Massachusetts governor, who has fallen behind Huckabee in the polls.
The Romney campaign repeated that Huckabee's record on illegal immigration is fair game, and an issue on which voters deserve to know the differences among the candidates.
Romney, Huckabee, and the other Republicans will debate Wednesday afternoon in a forum sponsored by The Des Moines Register.
A new poll out this afternoon from Rasmussen Reports gives Huckabee a 39 percent-23 percent lead over Romney among Iowa Republicans, not quite as large as the 22-percentage-point lead that a Newsweek poll released Friday gave Huckabee.
