Recommended Reading Regarding Republican Runners

Recently, Matt Parrot wrote a couple of articles at Counter-Currents on two of the Republican candidates for President of the United States and I would highly recommend the latter of those two articles, which concerns Mitt Romney.  It covers, in a way that won’t be seen in a mainstream outlet, Romney’s Mormon roots and gives speculation as to how those roots affect Romney’s demeanor and sense of purpose.  I cannot say that I fully endorse the article as my knowledge of Mormonism is incomplete and the article is a bit speculative.

Mr. Parrot’s earlier article about Herman Cain is also worth a look.  It’s a bit more polemic in nature and I disagree with the fundamental assessment that Herman Cain has a significant chance of winning the Republican nomination for the Presidency, which he then translates into an argument against the functioning of American democracy.  I do think that there are flaws with our political system, but it would take an actual Herman Cain nomination for me to see as dire a situation as appears to Mr. Parrot.

That said, I do find myself more in agreement with Mr. Parrot than I am with John Derbyshire concerning the seriousness of Herman Cain’s candidacy.  While Mr. Derbyshire seems quite a bit overoptimistic about Herman Cain’s chances in a general election against President Barack Obama, he does offer some interesting speculation concerning the aptitude of black politicians, pivoting off of the admittedly limited sample of the executives in the levels of government over Harvard University at the time of the media furor over the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates.

All three articles go beyond the bounds of what is considered polite or acceptable in modern American political discussion and all three articles leave the reader with material to think over as the first contests leading to the Republican nomination get underway this coming January.

Wisconsin Collective Bargaining Limits Pass

Last night Republicans in the Wisconsin State Senate passed a bill that enacted the most contentious element of their proposed budget, the stripping of many of the state’s public unions’ collective bargaining rights through a procedural measure by stripping the element from the budget and ensuring that it contained no language of direct fiscal effect, allowing them to pass the bill without the three-fifths quorum necessary to pass any bill with fiscal impact.

While it does seem that this standoff will be politically costly for the GOP in the near term, I don’t think that it’s been particularly edifying for the unions or Democrats who are now complaining of the unfairness of passing the measure through a procedural technicality which they blocked using a procedural technicality.  While in the short term, the public sector unions have garnered some public sympathy, the erosion of their power means that less state money will be funneled into liberal activist outlets, which will curtail some of the Democratic Party’s power, as James Kirkpatrick points out at Alternative Right.

In the long run, however, it’s hard to see where this will lead.  If Democrats manage to win back both houses and the governorship at some point, which is a likelihood, given Wisconsin’s recent role as a Democratic-leaning swing state, they will be sure to restore the powers that this year’s Republicans are managing to curtail.  While I don’t think that public sector unions are justified entities, it seems that my view is a minority one for now and I doubt that we’ll see Republicans flee across the border when the tables are turned.

For now, Wisconsin has won a respite from the rent-seeking powers of public employee cartels.