watch the candidates

Not as Governor of Alaska, anyway: Governor Palin announced today that she will not seek re-election and, indeed, will resign her office in the near future. Her statement is here. She isn’t retiring, but says she will continue “to make a positive difference and fight for ALL our children’s future from OUTSIDE the Governor’s office.”

Most observers assume that means she will devote full time to running for President. I guess so. Frankly, it seems bizarre to me, unless Palin calculates that in order to run she will have to spend most of her time in the lower 48, and the logistics of doing that while continuing as Governor are impossible.

That’s all I have to say. I’m curious to know what our readers think. Weigh in via comments, but remember that your comment will only appear if you include your first and last name. We’ll quote salient observations from our readers in updates to this post.

UPDATE: The comments are pouring in. Rather than try to select a few to quote from, I’d suggest you take a look if you’re interested or want to participate. To a remarkable degree, readers who have commented so far are supportive of Palin’s decision. This includes some who think she is (and should be) running for President and others who think she is just tired of constant abuse from the left. Several expect her to make a third-party run in 2012; I think that’s farfetched. Surprisingly few–surprising to me, anyway–think that by resigning she has pretty much taken herself out of the running for 2012. Some expect her to resurface soon as a television commentator. That could well be true. Anyway, as I say, the comments are interesting and I recommend checking them out. Maybe I’ll try to select a few representative ones to quote later in the day.

I understand the Democratic National Committee has put out a statement on Palin’s resignation, but I haven’t been able to find it. Does anyone have a link?

FURTHER UPDATE: At The Corner, Kathryn Lopez says that on MSNBC, they’re speculating that Palin’s resignation must be due to some impending scandal. Good grief.

My new Townhall.com column looks ahead to the weekend.Transcripts of yesterday’s conversations with Mark Steyn about Michael Jackson as well as the offensive in Afghanistan and the turmoil in Honduras, and with Mitt…

In a time when many states are experiencing fiscal crises and economic decline, one state stands out above all others as a success story: Texas. I recently heard Governor Tim Pawlenty say that during the year or so before job growth turned negative and the country as a whole was still adding payroll jobs, 53% of all of the jobs created in the U.S. were created in one state: Texas. No wonder that Texas’ government is running a surplus and its economy remains strong despite trying times.

At PJTV, Glenn Reynolds has a new show called InstaVision. Today he interviewed Texas governor Rick Perry. It was a fascinating conversation, in which Perry explained the “secret” behind Texas’ economy and denounced the Obama administration’s cap-and-tax bill. Glenn and Governor Perry talked about the tea party movement and upcoming festivities in Dallas, too. Go here to watch the interview.

InstaPundit has lots of tea party coverage, too; contrary to some predictions, the tea party movement is going strong.

A ”Washington Post” reporter, E.J. Dionne on November 14, 2008, reminded Americans  –  right after Barack Obama was elected president  –  of one of Obama’s “most important promises.”  That “was to end the cultural and religious wars that have disfigured politics for four decades.”  Obama’s campaign promise was much like Bill Clinton’s campaign promise in 1992 to keep abortion “safe, legal and rare.”   

E.J. Dionne goes on in his column:  “Obama added: ’Nobody’s pro-abortion.’  Once he assumes office, Obama might be tempted to forget that moment, issue pro-choice executive orders that the abortion rights movement expects, and move back to the sagging economy.”   

Well, guess what?  Obama during his first day in office signed an executive order which will greatly increase abortions.  Yesterday, because of the Obama Democrat-controlled Congress, all federal abstinence funding ceased in America which of course will greatly increase abortions.   

Last week, the Obama Democrats in the House Financial Services Appropriations Subcommittee in the United States House of Representatives approved their annual appropriations bill with language which will gut the longstanding ban on funding in the District of Columbia for abortions paid for by American taxpayers which former Congressman Robert Dornan introduced many years ago.     read more »

Kind of cute, but I don’t like the way it implies that the debt is an ongoing problem. The debt is an ongoing problem, of course, but the kind of staggering, jaw-dropping debt we now face is an entirely new…

Next week is “thrillers” week on the show with interviews with Brad Thor, Alex Berenson, Steven Pressfield, Daniel Silva and Vince Flynn running on Tuesday through Friday.As an appetizer to next week’s feast, though,…

Today is the anniversary of the birth of American songwriter supreme Frank Loesser. This would have been his ninety-ninth birthday. Loesser prospered writing songs for the movies, for the war and for Broadway. As John Bush writes in his Allmusic profile of Loesser, “it appears that Frank Loesser had several careers packed into his one life.”

Loesser wrote “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” in April 1942. It was only the second song for which he had written both the words and the music; the first had preceded it by three years. Yet it made him a celebrity. In her biography of her father, Susan Loesser writes: “Schoolchildren sang it in assembly; housewives hummed it while they ironed; the Office of War Information, concerned that the public might tire of it prematurely, limited its performance to once every four hours….The song sold over two million records and a million copies of sheet music.” Loesser enlisted in the Army the following fall.

Mark Steyn’s admiration of Loesser’s work is manifest throughout his 2000 musical history Broadway Babies Say Goodnight: Musicals Then & Now. Mark opened his Wall Street Journal review of a new study of Loesser with a distincty Steynian post-9/11 tribute:

Frank Loesser isn’t as famous a songwriter as Irving Berlin or Cole Porter, but, unlike them, he’s apparently responsible for this whole clash-of- civilizations thing. A few decades back, a young middle-class Egyptian spending some time in the U.S. had the misfortune to be invited to a dance one weekend and was horrified at what he witnessed:

“The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips . . .”

Where was this den of debauchery? Studio 54 in the 1970s? Haight-Ashbury in the summer of love? No, the throbbing pulsating sewer of sin was Greeley, Colo., in 1949. As it happens, Greeley, Colo., in 1949 was a dry town. The dance was a church social. And the feverish music was “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” written by Frank Loesser and sung by Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban in the film “Neptune’s Daughter.” Revolted by the experience, Sayyid Qutb decided that America (and modernity in general) was an abomination, returned to Egypt, became the leading intellectual muscle in the Muslim Brotherhood, and set off a chain that led from Qutb to Zawahiri to bin Laden to the Hindu Kush to the Balkans to 9/11.

I’m a reasonable chap, and I’d be willing to meet the Islamists halfway on a lot of the peripheral stuff like burqas for women, nuking the Zionists, beheading the sodomites and whatnot. But you’ll have to pry “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” from my cold dead hands and my dancing naked legs. A world without Frank Loesser and “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” would be very cold indeed.

Mark also mentions “Loesser’s marvelously inspired opening to ‘Guys and Dolls’ — the ‘Fugue for Tinhorns.’” Mark observes that it “has a trio of gamblers each boasting that he’s ‘got the horse right here.’ In a way, it’s a brilliant musicalization of the source material — a ‘Broadway fugue’ is the perfect musical equivalent of the stylized vernacular Damon Runyon used in the stories that inspired the musical.” The clip of the “Fugue” below is from the film version of this greatest of American musicals. We saw a production of “Guys and Dolls” at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven a few years back and found it to be a show that still brings the house down.

Mark expresses regard for the Loesser study he reviewed, but it sounds like a somewhat academic affair. For those seeking a good introduction to Loesser outside the music itself, I strongly recommend A Most Remarkable Fella: Frank Loesser and the Guys and Dolls in His Life, the 1993 biography by Loesser’s daughter Susan.

As American troops prepare to turn over almost all combat duties to Iraqi forces this week, the first of what will certainly be a wave of “Iraq as South Vietnam” stories appears on schedule in the New York Times. Rod…

I’ve never been accused of suffering from an inferiority complex, which makes living in Minnesota a bid odd. Minnesotans tend to be schizoid: becomingly modest about their state in public, while at the same time convinced that our inherent wonderfulness is so obvious that people will flock here no matter how high we raise our taxes. Actually, of course, people have never exactly flocked to Minnesota, in part because of our challenging climate. Why do you think it is that so many Minnesotans are descended from people who grew up in Norway, Sweden and Finland?

Minnesotans’ defensiveness about their state was notoriously exemplified by a big sign in the Metrodome, down the right field line, that said “We Like It Here.” That prompted endless groans until it was finally, and mercifully, removed. Still, the defensiveness remains.

One of the billions of the earth’s citizens who doesn’t seem especially eager to become a Minnesotan is Ricky Rubio. Rubio, if you haven’t heard of him, is an 18-year-old Spaniard who has been playing professional basketball since he was 14. Two years ago, he wowed Americans like Kobe Bryant and Lebron James in international competition. As a passer–but not, significantly, as a shooter–he has been compared to Pete Maravich. The kid is good:

The NBA draft was held yesterday. Rubio was by far the most charismatic player in the pool, but he slipped to number five, where the Minnesota Timberwolves selected him with the first of their four first round choices. That doesn’t mean, of course, that he will ever play here. Within minutes after the Wolves made their selection, Rubio’s father said that he would likely stay in Spain for another year or two. The Wolves’ general manager said that was OK, he is happy to wait.

New York basketball fans–who are quite a bit more numerous than their Minnesota counterparts–seem to think that Rubio is <a href=”destined to be a Knick. They could be right. Somewhat weirdly, the Wolves chose another point guard, Jonny Flynn of Syracuse, with the number six pick in the first round, which they also owned. Our new GM swore that he would be delighted to play Rubio and Flynn together, but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Wolves don’t seriously expect Rubio to sign with them. More likely, he is trade bait for a deal with a more glamorous franchise.

That, of course, is nothing new for Minnesota. Ricky Rubio was quoted as saying that he didn’t know anything about the state except that it is very cold. Many Americans share the same limited impression. But it isn’t cold all the time. This time of year, Minnesota is hard to beat.

For one thing, our days are really, really long. I got up today and caught up on the news in preparation for the radio show. I was on the air from 11 to 1 central and then worked on our garden. This is an extraordinarily fertile part of the world; these delphiniums are six feet tall:

After a few hours of gardening in the hot sun, my wife and I took it easy:

It’s now 9:00 p.m., and still daylight. So, Ricky: don’t be too quick to dis Minnesota. You might, after all, like it here.

Given the changes in Washington, it is urgent that political leaders understand that America’s Christian voters expect strong moral leadership in government. Leadership that respects and reflects our values - not attacks them at every opportunity.

That’s why we’re conducting a massive survey of America’s politically active Christians - so we can show the politicians and the media exactly where we stand.

We’re surveying hundreds of thousands of conservative Christians nationwide, and we want to make sure your voice is included.

This is your chance to send a strong message to America’s political leaders as well as members of the media. Urge them not to ignore the issues and concerns of America’s Christians. Don’t let them claim that they never heard from you.

Click here to take the survey and have your voice heard!

(Individual answers will be kept confidential. Only the overall total results from all respondents will be released.)