What's next for Gingrich?

I figure, go back to "not lobbying." After all, not lobbying has made him a wealthy man. Don't know how he does it. I don't lobby either and I'm constantly right next to flat broke.

If he'd done Sugar Daddy Adelson a little prouder maybe he could have found a sinecure in Sheldon's casino empire. As it stands, Adelson has already told the NYT that the next dollar he spends on Republican candidates will go to Romney, so that's not looking like a viable option.

David Frum has a plan for Gingrich. You remember Frum? Canadian kid. Dad was a Toronto dentist who figured out there was more money in strip malls than root canals and rode the late 20th century wave of real estate inflation to a tidy fortune.

David grew up surrounded by the rich and politically well-connected, and eventually parlayed his advantages into a speech-writing gig for W. It was he who coined the phrase Axis of Evil. (Just to toot my own horn here it was me who coined the phrase "other axis of evil" as a reference to the US/NATO hegemon, but as is obvious I owe Frum three quarters of the credit for that.)

Frum was so pleased with this turn of phrase that he couldn't stop taking public credit for it, which led the White House to send him packing.  Apparently W's handlers wanted the President and only the President to take credit for that clever bit of wordsmithing. He landed at the American Enterprise Institute as a "resident scholar".

That gig ended in acrimony in 2010, with suspicions that Frum may have the vocabulary of a conservative but the heart of a unreconstituted liberal. But back to Frum's career plans for Gingrich.

Frum says Newt should bow out of the race now, while he doesn't look quite like a complete loser yet, and then work behind the scenes to ensure an Obama victory. Then Newt would have an entire four year run of being able to shout "if only you'd voted for me" from every town hall lecturn in the land.

"I'm the real conservative; Romney was just a richer and whiter Obama!"

So there you have it; cut and run today, run again for 2016.

Powerful labor union tramples on citizens' rights

Oh my God! Did I just write that?

Yes I did. If you've followed the Falling Downs blog at all you know we're totally pro-labor here. Or pro-labour if you happen to be reading this in England or Canada.

So I'm feeling more than a little conflicted. Looking on the bright side, maybe that title will get me some funding from the Koch brothers or the American Enterprise Institute. I'm like Newt; I'll take the money wherever it comes from.

But it's true, and it's happening not an hour's drive from here, in Port Elgin, Ontario.

The CAW wants to put up an industrial scale wind turbine at their "education center" in Port Elgin. Many years ago Bob White took the Canadian auto workers out of the UAW and birthed the CAW. I have nothing but respect for Bob White and the CAW, but they've failed to test the wind on this one.

Alternative energy is a great idea, but given the present state of technology it can't exist in the Ontario market without massive government subsidies. These subsidies run rampant in Ontario, and the CAW has organized the workers in a few foreign owned branch plants that assemble components for both solar and wind technology. So I can see the thinking of the union guys; let's support policies that keep our membership employed.

Unfortunately, the industrial scale wind turbine developments that have been sprouting up all over the province in the last ten years have pissed off a lot of people. Generally, the closer you are to a wind farm the more pissed off you'll be. And the CAW wind turbine is pretty much in the middle of a small vacation community where people go to get away from it all.

They're not happy with the proposed CAW wind turbine.

So I hope my union friends figure out which way the wind is blowing. You can bulldoze over the objections of the locals and put up your windmill, as a show of support for a government policy that might keep a few of your members employed in the short term, but is doomed to failure in the long run.

Or you can do the right thing, be a good neighbor in the community, and scrap that wind turbine.