Conservatives

A longtime friend and savvy D.C. veteran emails with these worthwhile thoughts:

Bill, I trust conservatives will resist temptation to join the chorus to “sack Holder.” As Jack Germond used to say, “It is like wetting yourself in a dark suit, it feels good, but nobody notices.”

Kimberley Strassel, writing for the Wall Street Journal:

The White House insists President Obama is "outraged" by the "inappropriate" targeting and harassment of conservative groups. If true, it's a remarkable turnaround for a man who helped pioneer those tactics.

Acting Labor Secretary Seth D. Harris addressed the Annual Legislative Conference of the International Association of Firefighters (IAFF) on Monday. As part of a scathing attack on attempts to reform public employee labor unions, Harris told a joke that he said was “making the rounds a few years ago”:

Michael Hough​—​a second-term Republican state legislator from Frederick County, Md.​—​is about as conservative as blue-state legislators come. He played a prominent role in opposing the state’s new gay marriage law, holds an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association, and received a 100 percent score from the state’s business lobby.

Ross Douthat, writing in the New York Times:

IN November 2008, just after John McCain was routed by Barack Obama, Jim DeMint addressed a Myrtle Beach conference on the future of the Republican Party. The first-term South Carolina senator was there to reassure his audience: Republicans might have lost an election, but conservatism hadn’t lost the country.

Are conservatives ready to coalesce around a presidential candidate? A new poll commissioned by the Committee for Work Families PAC finds that a vast majority of grassroots conservatives want the Republican party to unite around one particular candidate: Rick Santorum.

A new poll from Gallup today finds that a majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents find Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney "acceptable" nominees for the GOP. For Gingrich, 62 percent of those polled said the former House speaker was an acceptable Republican nominee, while 54 percent said the same for Romney. The remaining six Republicans, including former candidate Herman Cain, were deemed "not acceptable" candidates for the party's nomination.

Against Reform
by John Pepall
Toronto, 176 pp., $19.95

Canada’s Conservative party won a clear majority in last week’s federal election. So the Canadian constitution is safe, for now.

Who’s the most powerful conservative leader in the Americas, north and south? That may sound like a trick question, but it’s not. The answer is Stephen Harper, the Canadian prime minister who triumphed last week in an election that all but destroyed two opposition parties, the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois (BQ).

It’s not war but a “time-limited, scope-limited military action.” The United States has been in the lead, but will be stepping back, ASAP, in favor of command (supposedly) by a squabbling coalition of the not-so-willing. The objective of the “kinetic military action”—which is going to last days, not weeks, unless it does last weeks—isn’t regime change in Libya. Our broader objective, however, is to topple Muammar Qaddafi.

Mary Katharine Ham wonders if Krugman's Ph.D. is in Epistemic Closure, not economics. After reading this squib from Krugman, it's a legitimate question: