Nuts, no rotting vegetables handy

I'm sitting in the Orlando Barnes & Noble and the PA touts the book-signing to come later in the afternoon of Newt Gingrich. Ah, so that's why the two dopes at adjacent tables just segued from tsk-tsking about affirmative action to the saintly wonders of free market capitalism. Did you know that the market fixed the economic damage of the Great Depression? Neither did they, but they think they know it. As it happens, they also mistook Michigan State for the University of Michigan when they bemoaned affirmative action, but what's a few mere facts among conservatives.

That Newtie could title a book Real Change and not be laughed into a low-rent whorehouse suggests how faith-based our national conversation is. He's pretending to be a rational seeker of the right hard choices irrespective of ideology. Yeah, right. Still, his fans think he's great. After all, they agree with his sclerotic, faux intellectual, reactionary nostrums.

I left before the two Republicans got fully wound up into the perils of Medicare, but I did hear one describe how some group he was in would always call an ambulance rather than the EMTs because of better reimbursement. So, one perverse incentive vitiates an entire program! Or that's the reasoning of conservatives.