It’s Thursday, December 15th, 2011….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, the WSJ‘s Dan Henninger insightfully suggests Newt may be the only person able to prepare Romney for the fight of his life:

The Sparring Partner

Mitt Romney needs a sparring partner to make him fit to compete with heavyweight champ Barack Obama. That would be Newt Gingrich.

The best sparring partner is a madman who goes all out. —Bruce Lee

Every presidential election is a heavyweight fight. It is big, bloody and long. An incumbent president is always favored to win. No matter what the numbers say, running against a sitting president, you generally are overmatched from day one. See the Kerry and Dole campaigns.

Now comes Mitt Romney. Is he a contender? That eternal 25% ceiling on him says no, not yet. For months, Mitt has been The Front-Runner, whatever the polls said. It’s hard to say that after last Saturday’s GOP debate.

About a third of the way in, Newt Gingrich said to Mr. Romney: “The only reason you didn’t become a career politician is you lost to Teddy Kennedy in 1994.”

The Front-Runner looked stunned, as if he’d just been hit with a left hook out of nowhere. No one—not Undercards Bachmann, Cain or Perry—had been able to land one like this. Literally, you could see Mitt trying to clear his head. His words came in clumps: “Now, now wait a second, that—I mean you’ll—OK, go ahead.” (He looked like Colt McCoy after being head-butted by James Harrison.)

What we saw Saturday is that Mitt Romney is reachable personally. Somewhere under that cool front is a wafer of thin skin. If we have learned anything about Barack Obama the past three years it’s that he enjoys hitting. He will be merciless with Mitt. Ask Hillary. Ask the respectful Republicans that Obama pistol-whipped in that George Washington University speech. Ask Wall Street’s Democrats.

To compete against a do-what-you’ve-gotta-do opponent, Mitt Romney needs more of what Newt Gingrich gave him Saturday night: pressure. Forget the pleasures of a no-sweat primary season. He needs a sparring partner, someone who will toughen him to handle what he’s going to get next fall. That would be Newt Gingrich, the best sparring partner in American politics.

Barack Obama, a novice in February 2007 when he announced for the presidency, survived an arduous set of primary battles and debates with Hillary Clinton, who was plenty tough herself. John McCain had to contend with . . . Mitt Romney. (And a tough guy named Rudy Giuliani, who failed to answer the bell.)

The Republican establishment is writing at great length that no matter how smart Newt is, he can’t be part of this because he is an unhinged and unreliable creature of the Beltway cesspool. But if he were gone or discredited, the Romney candidacy will go into a virtual coma.

The Romney campaign may think their man is ready to compete against the president. They should watch the tape of the Saturday night “$10,000 bet” meltdown. In that brief, disastrous exchange over the Massachusetts health-insurance “mandate,” a smirking, taunting Rick Perry showed why he won three governor’s races. And Mitt buckled, as he had 10 days earlier when Fox’s Bret Baier leaned on him about the mandate.

If Mitt Romney still can’t handle needling attacks on the Massachusetts mandate, there’s not much chance he’ll stand up under the withering mockery of Barack Obama over Bain Capital. Newt’s own Bain Capital attack on Mr. Romney this week is taken as proof Newt is no conservative. What difference does that make so long as someone forces Mr. Romney to find a persuasive defense of Bain and free-market capitalism before September?

Newt Gingrich will either get Mitt Romney into shape for 2012, or he will take Mitt down in next year’s primary contests before the former Massachusetts governor gets himself, and his party, in over his head.

And what if the man who was House speaker 13 years ago does defeat Mr. Romney? If somehow he steals the party’s nomination, the Republican establishment—its leadership and its donor base—can blame themselves for failing to find one strong Republican willing to run against a vulnerable president.

For all the guff he is getting now from that same establishment, Mr. Gingrich is the one was willing to stand in and—altogether predictably—take it in the neck over everything from spending at Tiffany to his often antic speakership. The top-tier candidates stayed home. They wouldn’t do it. He did.

So let’s push past the sparring- partner metaphor. If this improbable figure wins those primaries, Newt Gingrich will become the Rocky Balboa of American politics—a flawed, scarred figure who, against the odds, resurrects himself. If he self-destructs in the primaries, he’s gone. If not, he’s got a shot in the general. (As for Newt’s egregious Freddie Mac lucre, let the record show that Rocky was working as a loan shark’s collector.)

It has come to this—a Republican nomination out of Hollywood, which too often is where this process has been the past seven months. But it isn’t going to have a Hollywood ending. Tinker Bell isn’t going to conjure Chris Christie or anyone else out of fairy dust before the primaries begin. These two are it.

Newt Gingrich’s flaws have been posited. Mitt Romney’s inadequacies are known. It’s time to put these two in a cage together so that one can emerge a fighter, ready to compete for the presidency.

And may the most Conservative win!

Next up, in the Environmental Moment, we learn about….

All the Hot Air in China

Cutting carbon emissions requires restructuring the economy. Which is why Beijing won’t do it.

China made ripples earlier this month when its lead climate negotiator suggested that Beijing would be willing to strike a deal on carbon emissions. It hardly matters that this willingness won’t kick in until at least 2020, which is one reason the U.N. conference on climate change held in Durban, South Africa, flopped last week. Those who care about such things (we aren’t among them) are nonetheless parsing the outcome for signs of whether Beijing really is serious now.

Hint: The current regime is not serious about emissions and is not likely to get serious, ever. The reasons are worth contemplating because this is at heart a business and political-economy story, not a carbon story.

The optimistic strand of conventional wisdom holds that Beijing will one day be willing to sign on to limits on carbon emissions. The theory is that China simply needs some more time as a heavy polluter to grow itself to a level of prosperity where it can afford greener technologies. Cutting emissions is expensive.

Then again, Beijing is willing to invest billions of dollars in green technologies already. A Wall Street Journal article last week noted that China increasingly is a more receptive market for American clean tech than America is.

Perhaps some factor beyond cost is at play. Japan offers a clue as to what that factor might be. A couple of prime ministers ago, Yukio Hatoyama pledged to cut his country’s emissions by some 25% from their 1990 levels by 2020. It was a particularly foolish idea for an economy that, thanks to decades of high oil prices and strict regulation, already boasts manufacturers that are among the most efficient in the world in carbon emissions per unit of production.

After one has made every last power plant, jet engine, assembly line and car as efficient as they can possibly be given today’s technology, one either hopes for an energy-boosting technological miracle or else starts restructuring the economy. The question is whether the regulatory structure of an economy as a whole allows, let alone encourages, business to make efficient decisions about energy usage and by extension emissions.

In Japan, long accustomed to an array of government supports for exporting manufacturers at the expense of other industries, the answer was uncomfortable, which is why Tokyo lost its appetite for pressing the carbon issue. Japan was not among the deal enthusiasts at Durban.

Imagine the questions Beijing would face if China really were to get serious about carbon. Would it make sense to continue extending cheap credit to state-owned heavy manufacturers at the expense of greener private-sector start-ups? Might allowing freer communication over the Internet hasten the arrival of less-polluting service companies, an area in which China noticeably lags? Would it be feasible for China to shelter domestic green “champions” with various protectionist measures, or would the country be better off importing top-of-the-line green tech immediately?

China probably is closer to crunch time on such issues than is commonly assumed. While the country’s existing power generation, manufacturing, transport and the like are all generally less carbon-efficient than those found elsewhere, China is adding new capacity at breakneck speed and the new stuff is at the technological frontier already. Reform, not technological investment, will soon be the only way forward.

Take aviation. The challenge facing American Airlines, say, is how to retrofit or retire an aging, fuel-inefficient fleet. But Chinese carriers are in the process of acquiring large numbers of new planes from scratch as they add capacity. Those planes already will boast the least-carbon-emitting engines available anywhere.

As a result, much of any carbon efficiency gains in Chinese aviation would have to come from regulatory reform. Beijing would be forced to consider whether it makes sense to allow the politically powerful military to control some 80% of China’s airspace, leaving only narrow, idiosyncratically shaped corridors for commercial use and thereby requiring planes to follow circuitous, excess-fuel-burning routes to their destinations.

Would leaders in Beijing, atop a delicately balanced authoritarian system, have the stomach to take on the military in the name of helping the aviation industry meet a global carbon emissions target? Not any more than those leaders would have the stomach to take on politically powerful large industries, let alone to tolerate the economic disruption that would accompany a shift to a potentially greener, market-determined balance between services and manufacturing.

Those who are justifiably skeptical about man-made climate change might still allow that carbon usage is one indicator of overall economic efficiency. Beijing seems to recognize this, too, which is the real reason not to hold your breath for a climate deal.

Then there’s today’s Money Quote, brought to us, courtesy of HoosierAccess.com, by a member on the Unhinged Left, one “Rabbi” Joshua Hammerman:

New York Rabbi: A Tim Tebow Win Will Cause Christians to Burn Mosques, Bash Gays

“If Tebow wins the Super Bowl, against all odds, it will buoy his faithful, and emboldened faithful can do insane things, like burning mosques, bashing gays and indiscriminately banishing immigrants. While America has become more inclusive since Jerry Falwell’s first political forays, a Tebow triumph could set those efforts back considerably.“

You know….like when the Cowboys, led by Christian quarterback Roger Staubach went amok raping, torching and slaying gays, Muslims and mosques across the Texas prairie.  And when born-again bag-boy Kurt Warner took the Rams all the way; they were so many bodies in the Mississippi the week following the game you could walk from shore to shore and not get your feet wet.  Ditto in Green Bay, which, following Evangelical Aaron’s MVP performance winning Super Bowl XLV, experienced a veritable orgy of koran-burnings rapes and homicides.

No offense “Rabbi” but you sound more like a Hammerhead than a Hammerman.

Speaking of hammerheads….

Sen. Boxer Warns EPA Provision in GOP Tax Cut Bill Will Lead to Thousands of Deaths

Sen Barbara Boxer warned Tuesday that more than 8,000 people will die every year if Congress passes the Republican-backed payroll tax cut bill — because it includes a provision that would delay regulations on industrial boilers.

Boxer, chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, trained her sights on a provision that would slow the controversial boiler rule out of the EPA. “By stopping the clean boiler rule from going into effect, more than 8,000 people per year will die for every year that that rule is delayed,” she said. “And yet the Republicans in the House have just done that in their payroll tax cut bill.”

Boxer, citing “peer-reviewed science,” rattled off a string of statistics that come from the EPA regarding the impact of the House proposal. She said the GOP bill would lead to 8,100 “premature deaths” per year, 52,000 more asthma cases per year and 5,100 more heartattacks per year, in addition to hundreds of thousands of “lost work days.”

“Time and time again, House Republicans have added quote ‘poison pill’ unquote riders to must-pass legislation,” she said. “But this time these are really poison riders, because they are in essence saying we’ll have more poison in our atmosphere.”

Gee….if she’s THAT certain about the issue, why not just get the 8,000-odd guys that are going to die into other lines of work?

On the Lighter Side….

Which of course is blood kin to the infamous Rabbit of Caerbannog!

I soiled my armor!

Magoo