THE OTHER SHOE DROPS: Turning back the tide of information overload with a digest of the latest developments in news conservatives need to pay attention to:

 

† CNBC Debate Reveals The Only Republican Challenger Obama Can’t Talk His Way Past: Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is disproving the old adage about never getting a second chance to make a first impression, The Washington Times reports:

 

After stumbling badly out of the gate, Newt Gingrich's presidential campaign is showing surprising signs of life — rising in the polls and even attracting rising support from evangelical voters who have long been cool to the former House speaker. …

 

Coupling a string of strong debate performance with rising doubts among the party faithful about the viability of Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Mr. Cain, Mr. Gingrich could become the race's new magnet for Republicans looking for an alternative to Mr. Romney. …

Contrary to the beliefs of many in the party, voters on the Christian right have not written off Mr. Gingrich despite a personal history that includes multiple marriages and admitted infidelities.

 

"Evangelicals will definitely go for Newt if he is the nominee," insisted Jim Garlow, credited with organizing the evangelicals in the drive to pass a same-sex marriage ban in California. "I used to hear them say, 'He's the smartest one in the room, but he has personal issues.' I've seen an enormous shift in the past four or five months. They no longer talk about personal issues, but about intelligence and capability of being president." …

 

In virtually all Republican presidential debates to date, including this week, Mr. Gingrich has received strong reviews, drawing praise for substance, intellect and fluent answers.

 

The Christian Science Monitor suggests that Gingrich’s new-found popularity may be attributable to voters disliking former MA Gov. Mitt Romney more than they like him:

 

Is it possible that GOP primary voters are so ambivalent about former Gov. Mitt Romney’s presidential bid that they might turn instead to a thrice-married former lawmaker – one who has a penchant for bestowing extravagant gifts on his wife during a time of economic malaise?

 

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is experiencing a mini-surge in November – an apparent sign that voters are sampling the wider field as their affections for some alternatives to Mr. Romney, particularly businessman Herman Cain and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, begin to diminish. The new national CBS survey of Republican primary voters shows Mr. Cain at 18 percent, a modest advantage over Romney and Mr. Gingrich, who are tied at 15 percent.

 

Gingrich is the only one of the trio to see an uptick in certain pockets of his numbers since October.

 

“Any port in a storm,” says Ross Baker, political science professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. “With Romney distasteful, Cain unelectable, Perry mortally wounded, where can Republicans turn? To the man whose scandals are years old and who has resurrected himself as a kind of elder statesman.

 

He adds, “If his solipsism doesn’t get in the way, he may be a strong candidate.” …

 

Gingrich is a formidable thinker, able to communicate his ideas and chart national history with a clarity that eludes many in the field. Humility is not a Gingrich strong suit, however. …

 

Gingrich’s feisty debate performances might appeal to primary voters and GOP activists, but “every time Gingrich opens his mouth, he tries to prove that he’s smarter and better than everyone listening,” says Washington-based Democratic consultant Mo Elleithee. “That shtick will wear pretty thin with independent voters.”

 

Elleithee won’t get an argument on this point from The New York Times:

 

There is also a caustic side of his personality that emerges when he is challenged. To some of his critics, he can sound mean.

 

“Newt has an authoritative assertiveness that can be off-putting,” said Rick Tyler, who was a close aide to Mr. Gingrich for a dozen years and still regards him highly. “He doesn’t suffer fools. He makes people look bad. He knows exactly how to do it, and he’s very good at it. It’s probably been part of his success, and he doesn’t give it up easily. He can really make someone look small and foolish. But he’s not trying to be mean.”

 

Noting that “[i]n the past, he has often been his own worst enemy,” The Washington Post asks, “Will this time be different?”:

 

Rather than attack his rivals, he is auditioning to lead the attack on President Obama.

 

If Republicans are looking for a nominee who will go on the attack against Obama, no other candidate has honed those lines quite the way Gingrich has. …

 

No one relishes debates more than Gingrich. Running an underfunded and idiosyncratic campaign, of which he is the chief architect and implementer, he is dependent on the debates to project himself as a candidate capable of going toe-to-toe with the president next year and as the most knowledgeable Republican in the field.

 

The Post points out that Gingrich’s Dr. Jekyll also has a Mr. Hyde who has “a desire not just to show what he knows but to say to people he knows more than anyone else”:

 

That is the other Gingrich, the one that still stands in the way of his hopes of becoming the alternative to Romney and of defeating him for the nomination. He not only relishes debates, he delights in over-the-top rhetoric, stridency, extravagant criticism and condescension toward his enemies. He becomes a scold.

 

Gingrich has various attributes, which have kept him as a prominent voice in the Republican Party for more than two decades in spite of setbacks and self-inflicted wounds. For reasons mostly beyond his doing, he may have been handed a new opportunity for redemption and leadership. Whether he can restrain the impulses that have brought him down in the past will now be his biggest challenge.

 

Though Gingrich clearly could have easily showed up former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain during their recent 90-minute Lincoln-Douglas style debate, he showed the grace and maturity to rein in his intellect enough not to embarrass his rival. But Cain is also Gingrich’s friend and Obama is not – and should Gingrich debate the incumbent as the Republican challenger, he would have to avoid the look of smug satisfaction that Scott Pelley had on his face during Saturday night’s CBS-National Journal “Commander-in-Chief Debate” (0:31 in this clip). Americans still expect winners of a contest of strength or skill to exhibit good sportsmanship, and spiking the ball after each touchdown would mar Gingrich’s victory over Obama.

 

† Herman Cain Rocks 'Em Like A Hurricane: And not in a good way, this time. Leaving aside the allegations of sexual harassment that have dinged Cain in the latest polls, in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel he said that federal employees should have collective bargaining rights over pay and benefits – they have collective bargaining rights over working conditions only – as long as there is no undue burden on taxpayers. And then he went former MA Gov. Mitt Romney’s flip-flop one better and contradicted himself and suggested that OH voters rejected Issue 2 because state lawmakers had had gone too far in stripping public employees of collective bargaining rights when they included firemen and police officers.

 

But that’s not the worst of it.

 

In that same interview, he reinforced the impression that many got during the CBS-National Journal “Commander-in-Chief Debate” Saturday night that he was out of his depth discussing foreign policy and national security issues. It seemed to The Stiletto that he had boned up on everyone else’s answers in previous debates and was reworking them in his own words – and when that failed, he agreed with what former Gov. Mitt Romney and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said.

 

The Journal Sentinel asked whether he agreed with Obama’s policy on Libya and he alternated between silence, talking v-e-r-y-s-l-o-w-l-y to buy time because he had “all this stuff twirling around in my head,” repeating the question, shifting around in his chair, asking the interviewer to repeat the question, taking a swing from his water bottle, and basically BS’d his way through and repeated several times that he would have done “a better job” of assessing the situation. Finally, after a lot of prompting from the interviewer Cain wended his way to a half-way decent answer (starting at 4:12 in the clip below):

 

Cain: The opposition who wanted to overthrow Gadhafi: Who are they?; How organized are they?; How strong are they?; Who would be the [unintelligible] leader?; Did they have a plan for how they would govern or are you going to end up with a country in complete chaos?

 

Journal Sentinel: So if you didn’t have that [information] would you have backed off and not gotten involved?

 

Cain: It would depend upon which part they didn’t have. What I’m saying is, it’s not a clear yes/no answer because all of those things I think should have been assessed.

 

JS: And you don’t think they were assessed.

 

Cain: I don’t know that they were or were not assessed. I didn’t see reports of that assessment.  

From the first debate on May 5^th to this tenth debate, Cain seems not to have advanced one iota in his understanding of geopolitics and national security – which means that instead of leading the knowledgeable team of people he says he will surround himself with, he will be led by them. Worse still, he may continue the practice of this current administration of leading from behind when it comes to world events.

† The Magic Is Gone: The Wall Street Journal crows that the results of the off-year election in VA (“every Republican incumbent – 52 in the House, 15 in the Senate – won”) suggests that the Electoral Map will revert to its pre-2008 configuration (related article, first item on page) and that Dems not only disassociated themselves from the increasingly toxic President Barack Hussein Obama, they tried to hitch a ride on Gov. Bob McDonnell’s coattails – even though he’s a Republican:

 

Elected state Democrats – who form the backbone of grass-roots movements – couldn't distance themselves far enough from Mr. Obama in this race. Most refused to mention the president, to defend his policies, or to appear with him. The more Republicans sought to nationalize the Virginia campaign, the more Democrats stressed local issues.

 

State House Minority Leader Ward Armstrong felt compelled to run an ad protesting that it was a "stretch" for his GOP opponent to "compare me to Barack Obama." After all, he was "pro-life, pro-gun and I always put Virginia first." (Mr. Armstrong lost on Tuesday.) …

 

Criticized as being too socially conservative for Virginia when he was elected in 2009, [Gov. Bob McDonnell], Mr. McDonnell has won over voters by focusing on the economy and jobs. His approval ratings are in the 60s, and he helped raise some $5 million for local candidates. He's popular enough that Democrats took to including pictures of him in their campaign literature, and bragging that they'd worked with him.

 

For some reason, The Washington Post thinks – or would like its readers to think – that this turn of events is a big yawn (“[t]he GOP victory lacked the drama of a landslide”):

 

The Senate’s new partisan divide, with each party holding 20 seats, favors the Republicans only because of the tie-breaking clout of the lieutenant governor. That alone should represent a cautionary note for the party’s bigwigs.

 

A more notable blinking yellow light is the fact that most Republican campaigns in Virginia did not stress social issues, and many hardly mentioned them at all. They ran, and won, on opposing new taxes, promising an even friendlier business climate and vowing to create jobs. Republican candidates, particularly in Northern Virginia, said they were rarely asked about social issues – or, in many cases, any state or local issues at all – as they campaigned.

 

But when Obama campaigns in the state, he’ll have a hard time rounding up state and local officials for photo ops and endorsements.

 

† It’s A Topsy-Turvy Campaign: A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain while his base is still riding the Cain Train despite the parade of women making sexual harassment allegations against him, a higher percentage of Republicans still looking for their Anybody But Romney candidate have a negative view of him than last month (36 percent vs. 17 percent).

 

And nearly as many Republicans had a favorable opinion of TX Gov. Rick Perry as an unfavorable opinion (41 percent to 38 percent). Perry’s favorability dropped from 49 percent last month, whereas negative views of him zoomed up from 11 percent in September. 

 

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s favorability rating in the poll was 57 percent, with 23 percent of Republicans having an unfavorable opinion of him – which is pretty much where he’s been since March. Even though a new CNN/Opinion Research poll showed him within the margin of error against Romney, Gingrich is the first to admit that Republicans are very restive this election cycle, The Washington Post reports:

 

“This is the most volatile race of my lifetime,” Gingrich said at a meet and greet Monday at an insurance company headquarters in West Des Moines. “This is a wild race, OK? Who knows what the polls are going to be two months from now? I’m not going to tell you that I’m on the way.” …

 

Even Gingrich himself is suggesting that his rise in the polls is built more on cardboard than cinder blocks. And he’s right. Every frontrunner in this race has been a fragile one — even, one might argue, Romney.

 

Gingrich may have been speaking more to the state of the race than the state of his reputation, but the latter plays a big role too. Every candidate to rise and fall has fallen due largely to his or her own faults. And Gingrich has his skeletons. …

 

Politico has already called attention to an e-mail circulating in GOP circles that contains some of Gingrich’s less conservative bona fides — including his support of action on global warming and words sympathetic to the DREAM Act and cap and trade. And Gingrich’s work on behalf of Freddie Mac has already been raised at a debate.

 

Gingrich’s unfavorable rating with Republicans isn’t as high as Perry’s and Cain’s, but that’s with relatively little scrutiny being paid to his campaign and his past.

 

So does all this leave former MA Gov. Mitt Romney as the cheese that stands alone? According to The WaPo, “[i]n the past few weeks, a realization appears to have dawned on the political world: Mitt Romney is very likely to be the Republican nominee for president in 2012” which explains why President Obama’s campaign surrogates have focused their critique exclusively on Romney of late”:

 

“No campaign has shown they have the resources, the organization, the candidate and the strategy to capture voters in a sustained way,” noted [said Jim Dyke, a senior party strategist not affiliated with any of the candidates, of the Romney campaign].

 

And yet, “It’s not easy to see how he gets beat, but there are a thousand ways he could lose,” said veteran GOP operative Ed Rogers. “There is a lot of time left, and a lot will happen.”

 

† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: Los Angeles Times reports that vacant foreclosed homes in Las Vegas are being converted into indoor hydroponic pot farms:

 

Much of the marijuana produced in the United States and Mexico is grown outdoors, experts say. But those who grow hydroponic marijuana indoors can better control temperature and light and produce a higher-grade product. While a pound of Mexican marijuana sells for at least $750, said DEA spokesman Jeffrey Scott, a pound of hydroponic marijuana sells for at least $3,000.

 

Sgt. Russ Cutolo of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department has seen nearly identical setups at multiple homes, suggesting some groups take a chain-restaurant approach to farming pot. Another grower constructed a fake front room with timer-controlled lights so the house appeared occupied.

 

Some homes are well-armed: In 2009, nearly 40% of the firearms that southern Nevada narcotics detectives seized came from marijuana-growing operations, said a report by the Nevada High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program. …

 

This year, authorities have busted at least 130 indoor grow sites, nearly two dozen more than at the same point in 2010, Cutolo said.

 

† Imported From Detroit: Three weeks after a 20-mile-per-hour side-impact crash test, the lithium-ion batteries in a Chevrolet Volt burst into flames (click here for related article), touching off a safety review of electric car batteries by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, as well as a call for carmakers to develop post-crash procedures to prevent injury to occupants and emergency personnel, The New York Times reports:

 

General Motors, which began selling the Volt last December, defended it as “a safe car” and said the fire would not have occurred if G.M.’s protocols for deactivating the battery after the crash had been followed. The Volt, a plug-in hybrid, was designed to operate primarily as an electric car with a backup gasoline engine. …

 

The large, high-voltage batteries used in plug-in vehicles can be more easily damaged in a crash than traditional car batteries and create more potential to electrically shock occupants and rescuers. The Volt’s 400-pound, T-shaped battery extends under the middle of the car and between the back seats rather than fitting under the hood with the engine of a gas-powered vehicle. …

 

G.M. was not aware of fires involving any other Volts after a crash, a company spokesman, Jay Cooney, said, and N.H.T.S.A. said the incident was the only time an electric vehicle it crash-tested had caught fire. Neither G.M. nor the agency was able to replicate the incident during subsequent testing.

 

The agency said it planned to work with the Energy Department to conduct additional testing in the next few weeks.

 

The Times notes that the Obama administration has “poured billions of dollars” to promote battery and electric-car manufacturing in the US and – coincidentally, or not – government safety officials said they consider the Volt to be safe.

 

† NJ Taxpayers Must Choose Between Dollars And Dolphins: Unlike NJ Gov. Chris Christie, who had the political courage to put the kibosh on an expensive commuter rail project (related article, eighth item on the page), CA Gov. Jerry Brown (D) is committed to building a 500-mile bullet train connecting San Francisco and Anaheim, though his state is flat broke. Three years ago, voters approved a $9 billion bond measure, based on projections that the infrastructure for the high-speed train would cost only a third of the current $100 billion estimate, that and the line would service 9 times the 10 million riders per year now expected, and that the project would be financed by private investors instead of government subsidies. Wrong, wrong, and wrong. The project now threatens to derail all other taxpayer- funded spending, The Wall Street Journal reports:

 

The White House has so far offered the state $3.2 billion in grant money – provided that it builds the train in a way that guarantees a taxpayer loss. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has required the state to construct the first segment in the scarcely populated Central Valley and break ground next year. The Obama Administration's logic seems to be that if it forces the state to build a train to nowhere, the state will then dig deeper into taxpayer pockets to connect it to somewhere. …

 

The state treasurer's office recently released a report warning that the state can't afford to authorize much more debt without severely squeezing public services. Debt service costs California $7 billion per year. Borrowing $90 billion to finance the train would cost about $10 billion a year. Forget about building new schools or revamping the state's rickety water system. …

 

State Senator Doug LaMalfa suggests that the legislature give voters a do-over on the $9 billion bond measure they approved in 2008 when they were high on hope. … Congressman Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield has also proposed legislation to freeze federal funding for the project, which would make the train a nonstarter.

 

† 10 Reasons Michelle Obama Should Be Proud – Really Proud – Of America: This latest installment in The Stiletto Blog’s ongoing series (previous article, last item on the page) meant to help instill the necessary pride of country in Michelle Obama’s consciousness to enable her to serve as an unofficial ambassador focuses on the Casper family of MN. As they have since 1983, they will provide a traditional Thanksgiving dinner free to any local resident who is too poor or disabled to do the cooking themselves – even though a fire caused $750,000 to one of their two restaurants recently and “we are receiving no income” from it, Pioneer Press reports:

 

Last month … after a fire ravaged their Eagan restaurant, owners Jim and Rick Casper began to doubt whether they could pull it off. …

 

The brothers changed their minds, though, after speaking with local organizations and churches, who relayed to the Caspers that the demand for such a dinner is probably greater than ever. Some also offered to help out financially and raise money through a community fund. …

 

About $5,000 has been donated since the fund was set up at Anchor Bank in West St. Paul last month. Rick Casper expects it will cost about $12,000 for this year's dinner.

 

The Caspers rely on about 20 organizations, including Neighborhood House, Neighbors Inc. and local churches to invite those in need. Some also provide transportation and deliver meals. …

 

Last year, the restaurant served about 1,200 meals, while volunteers delivered another 2,100 meals to people's homes.

 

This year, they expect to go through about 350 turkeys, 350 pumpkin pies, 1,700 pounds of dressing, 1,700 pounds of mashed potatoes and 4,000 rolls.