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The race in the 23rd congressional district in New York is a good example of the competing narratives in the GOP. We have four items on the subject. First Toby Harnden updates his weekend column in the Telegraph, UK, on the race.

NEW YORK state’s 23rd District, which juts into Canada and is bordered by the People’s Republic of Vermont, is an unlikely place to send a message to the Republican party about how to defeat President Barack Obama in 2012. …

…The local Republican bosses feared that the district was trending to the Left and that a conservative candidate might alienate swing voters. What has happened to Mrs Scozzafava, however, is what conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh described before her ignominious withdrawal as a “teachable moment”.

Mr Hoffman shouldn’t have had a prayer but polls indicated he was neck and neck with Bill Owens, the Democratic candidate. Under pressure from Republican leaders who were rapidly re-thinking their initial stance, Mrs Scozzafava, in third place and sinking fast, pulled out of the race yesterday (Sat), making it probable Mr Hoffman will be elected. …

…Candidates imposed from above by party bosses are liable to be rejected in an environment in which trust in government, according to a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll this week, is at a 12-year low.

It is, moreover, self-defeating to have a broad church that admits anyone no matter what their beliefs. The message Republican activists have sent from the 23rd is that abandoning conservative principles and going Obama-lite is no way to win back the White House …

We also have Toby Harnden’s post after Scozzafava’s telling endorsement.

If Dede Scozzafava had a shred of political integrity about her she would have backed Doug Hoffman or declined to endorse anyone. The fact that she took the Republican party’s cash, failed miserably as a candidate and then vented her spleen by trying to torpedo the new de facto Republican candidate (the one who would have beaten her in a primary had there been one) underlines what a losing bet she was right from the start. …

…The Scozzafava debacle underlines how badly the 11 local Republican honchos who chose her screwed things up. That’s what happens when an arrogant party imposes an inappropriate candidate. That’s why the primary system in the US tends to work so well – it’s democratic.

This all underscores the potential depth of popular anger against Barack Obama and Obama-lite Republicans.
While the whole thing is being portrayed as Right-wing nutters hijacking poor Dede’s candidacy, the reality is that this is local democracy in action – despite the backing of a major party, ordinary voters, including a substantial number of independents, were rejecting her. Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin didn’t fix the polls. …

…There is an angry electorate out there and the Democratic attempts to smear Hoffman as some kind of crazy zealot and their embrace of the politically amoral Scozzafava will only underline the growing feeling that Obama and Co they will do or say anything to cling to power.

Dr. Zero from Hot Air posts on the “stupid party.”

… Meanwhile, the Republicans keep running “moderates” who prove to be very useful to the Democrats… which keeps the growth of the State bubbling along at Bush levels.  The radical nature of the current Administration makes the idea of “moderate” compromise laughable. What’s the moderate position on freedom-crushing trillion-dollar health care and environmentalist legislation? They’re okay, as long as the Democrats pinky-swear to keep the cost under $800 billion? That’s the kind of promise no politician could keep, even if it was made in earnest. A moderate Republican is someone who lives in a state of perpetual surprise as he ponders the monthly bills for nanny-state government. What’s the point of electing people who are guaranteed to spend the rest of their political careers complaining about how they’ve been played for fools?

Too much of the Republicans’ “Stupid Party” strategy is based on the mechanics of getting people with little elephants on their campaign signs elected. They view the election as the conclusion of a contest, when in fact it’s only the beginning. A successful Republican Party doesn’t have to be ideologically rigid, but it should insist on candidates who possess an intellectual foundation of conservative theory, and the ability to explain it at least as well as the thousands of people posting comments on conservative blogs.

Republican voters would be well-advised to ignore the people who engineered the Scozzafava debacle, and listen for the sound of Sarah Palin’s monster truck instead. America needs conservatives more than it needs Republicans.  Both the party, and the country, benefit when they are one and the same.  Next Halloween, just to be on the safe side, we should test the blood of every “moderate” Republican with a hot wire and a petri dish, just to make sure we don’t have another DIABLO on our hands.

Closing the section, Roger Simon has thoughts.

… Hoffman’s capital-C Conservative campaign, however, tried to separate itself from the majority parties by making a big deal of the social issues. He was all upset that Scozzafava was pro-gay marriage, seemingly as upset as he was with her support for the stimulus plan. He projected the image of a bluenose in a world that increasingly doesn’t want to hear about these things. Hoffman’s is a selective vision of the nanny state – you can nanny about some things but not about others. I suspect America deeply dislikes nannying about anything.

There is, of course, a message in this for the Republican Party going forward. You can choose to emphasize the social issues or not. Today may show the former is a losing proposition.

Victor Davis Hanson pens a mild-mannered Jeremiad.

Obama’s mega-borrowing is predicated on a rather thin margin of safety. We can service nearly $2 trillion in additional debt this year—on top of the existing $11 trillion—only because interest rates are so low.

But as a veteran of the near usury of the 1970s and early 1980s, I see no reason why interest rates won’t shoot up to 10% once the economy recovers and the U.S. has to convince lenders to buy our paper in an inflationary spiral. In other words, we could fork out each year about $150-200 billion in interest costs on our annual red ink, in addition to paying annually another trillion dollars to service the existing debt. (We forget that many of us young people in the 1970s and 1980s simply never bought anything new due to high interest: my first new car was not purchased until 1989 when interest was only 7.2% on it; my parents bought a small condo in 1980 for the unbelievably low rate of 8.8%, due only to redevelopment incentives in a bad neighborhood of Fresno. Inflation will be back, even in this quite different age of globalized competition and low wages.)

When Obama talks of a trillion here for health care, a trillion there for cap-and-trade, it has a chilling effect. Does he include the cost of interest? Where will the money came from? Who will pay the interest? Has he ever experienced the wages of such borrowing in his own life? Did he cut back and save for his college or law school tuition, with part-time jobs? Did he ever run a business and see how hard it was to be $200 ahead at day’s end? …

…Integral to public debt are two eternal truths: a public demands of the state ever more subsidies, and those who pay for them shrink in number as they seek to avoid the increased burden. …

Robert Samuelson says that with governments continuing to spend more than they take in, the levels of debt amassed is bringing us to uncharted finance territory.

The idea that the government of a major advanced country would default on its debt—that is, tell lenders that it won’t repay them all they’re owed—was, until recently, a preposterous proposition. Argentina or Russia might stiff their creditors, but surely not the likes of the United States, Japan, or Great Britain. Well, it’s still a very, very long shot, but it’s no longer entirely unimaginable. Governments of rich countries are borrowing so much that it’s conceivable that one day the twin assumptions underlying their burgeoning debt (that lenders will continue to lend and that governments will continue to pay) might collapse. What happens then?

The question is so unfamiliar that the past provides few clues to the future. Psychology is decisive. To take a parallel example: the dollar. The fear is that foreigners (and Americans, too) lose confidence in its value and dump it for yen, euros, gold, or oil. If too many investors do that, a self-fulfilling stampede could trigger sell-offs in U.S. stocks and bonds. People have predicted such a crisis for decades. It hasn’t happened yet. The currency’s decline has been orderly, because the dollar retains a bedrock confidence based on America’s political stability, openness, huge wealth, and low inflation. But something could shatter that confidence, tomorrow or 10 years from tomorrow.

The same logic applies to exploding government debt. We have moved into uncharted territory and are prisoners of psychology. Consider Japan. In 2009, its budget deficit—the gap between spending and taxes—amounts to about 10 percent or more of gross domestic product (GDP). Its total government debt—the borrowing to cover all past deficits—is approaching 200 percent of GDP. That’s twice the size of the economy. The mountainous debt reflects years of slow economic growth, many “stimulus” plans, an aging society, and the impact of the global recession. By 2019, the debt-to-GDP ratio could hit 300 percent, says a report from JPMorgan Chase. …

In Forbes, Paul Johnson discusses some of the different types of conservatives, and ends with these thoughts:

…A true conservative today should stress construction, encouragement, moderation and understanding instead of destruction, prohibition, extremism and slogans. A conservative thinks in terms of countless minor corrections and improvements based on experience and experiment rather than in terms of a universal, uniform solution based on theory and enforced by inflexible law.

A conservative, in the best sense, sees the world and its inhabitants as an interdependent organism, comprising innumerable local communities and territories, each adapting to particular conditions. A conservative is someone who goes with the grain of humanity and the nature of the physical world, rather than trying to regiment and fashion a utopia through force of law. And, needless to say, an acceptable conservative is not one who thinks all the answers are obvious but is a modest person who admits that problems are not easily solved, that perfection is unattainable in this world and that it is often necessary to admit mistakes, change one’s mind and start again.

Republicans should start looking now for a person who embodies these characteristics. If one can be found there should be no difficulty in putting Mr. Obama into his true historical place as an interesting and instructive one-term President.

The Economist reports on amazing new technology that desalinates water using solar power

THERE is a lot of water on Earth, but more than 97% of it is salty and over half of the remainder is frozen at the poles or in glaciers. Meanwhile, around a fifth of the world’s population suffers from a shortage of drinking water and that fraction is expected to grow. One answer is desalination—but it is an expensive answer because it requires a lot of energy. Now, though, a pair of Canadian engineers have come up with an ingenious way of using the heat of the sun to drive the process. Such heat, in many places that have a shortage of fresh water, is one thing that is in abundant supply.

Ben Sparrow and Joshua Zoshi met at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, while completing their MBAs. Their company, Saltworks Technologies, has set up a test plant beside the sea in Vancouver and will open for business in November. …

…Mr Sparrow and Mr Zoshi, by contrast, reckon they can produce that much fresh water with less than 1 kWh of electricity, and no other paid-for source of power is needed. Their process is fuelled by concentration gradients of salinity between different vessels of brine. These different salinities are brought about by evaporation. …

…It is a simple idea that could be built equally well on a grand scale or as rooftop units the size of refrigerators. Of course, a lot of clever engineering is involved to make it work, but the low pressure of the pumps needed (in contradistinction to those employed in reverse osmosis) means the brine can be transported through plastic pipes rather than steel ones. Since brine is corrosive to steel, that is another advantage of Mr Sparrow’s and Mr Zoshi’s technology. Moreover, the only electricity needed is the small amount required to pump the streams of water through the apparatus. All the rest of the energy has come free, via the air, from the sun.