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  My Pick Of The Litter Today

Newt wipes out

 By Jennifer Rubin

 Newt Gingrich got slammed in the debate by a remarkably invigorated Mitt Romney, an impressive Rick Santorum and CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, who really wouldn’t let him get away with much.

 Romney was clearly on his game, ready to swat down Gingrich. He vigorously defended his success in business and skewered Gingrich on his carping about his capital gains. He tied Gingrich to Freddie Mac and wouldn’t let go, making it clear that Gingrich was a cheerleader for the entity that contributed mightily to the financial crisis.

 When Gingrich accused him of investing in Freddie, Romney pointed out that they both had investments in mutual funds which held Freddie bonds.

 On Gingrich’s loony moon colony, he was restrained but emphatic that this was fiscally irreponsible. He gave a very succinct and smart answer on the need to equalize the tax treatment for individually-purchased and employer-provided health care insurance.

 When it came to talking about his wife he lovingly explained his wife Ann’s fight against MS and cancer. This was a better, sharper, more aggressive candidate than we have seen to date. He very likely sealed a victory for himself in Florida, where he is already leading.

More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/newt-wipes-out/2012/01/26/gIQAbfMJUQ_blog.html

     All About The Debate:

 Jacksonville Debate: Two Winners, One Loser 

JACKSONVILLE, FL – We had two winners tonight: From a ‘micro’ perspective, Rick Santorum was terrific and narrowly won the evening.  On a macro level, Mitt Romney came awfully close to winning the debate outright, and just owned Newt Gingrich during three dramatic exchanges.  Because Newt didn’t have a particularly strong showing, the political inertia stays in Romney’s favor heading into Tuesday.  Here’s my instant review of each candidate’s debate performance:
 

Mitt Romney – The former Massachusetts reportedly worked with a new debate coach ahead of tonight’s tilt, and it showed.  He was aggressive, sharp, and focused.  He also repeatedly bested Newt Gingrich in direct confrontations.  Early in the evening, he thumped Newt over his heinous (and subsequently pulled) “anti-immigrant” radio attack ad.  It was a Democrat-style attack, and Romney smartly invoked Marco Rubio’s strong statement denouncing it in jumping down Newt’s throat.  Newt tried to double down, and in a pronounced shift from South Carolina, the crowd turned on him.  Romney finished off the exchange with an effective “eleven million grandmothers” line, mocking a Gingrich trope.  He also prevailed in a second important segment, firmly defending his private sector record, refusing to apologize for his wealth, and scolding Newt for belittling his income as not really earned.  Finally, while on the offensive against Newt (again, much more effective than his previous defensiveness), Romney hit the former Speaker on his lucrative connection to Freddie Mac.  When Newt countered that Romney had invested in Fannie and Freddie, Mitt cooly explained the concept of a blind trust (anyone with a 401K should understand this), and pointedly remarked that Newt had done the exact same thing.  Checkmate.

Other highlights included Romney’s excellent answer on Israel and a very strong closing statement. There were lowlights, too.  Rick Santorum dismantled him on Romneycare with persistence and precision.  Romney lost the exchange and erred in saying that Santorum shouldn’t get “upset” over the issue.  Actually, yes he should.  Yes we should.  We’re talking about people’s lives and health — that’s deeply personal, and it matters.  Did Romney sleep through the healthcare townhall meetings in 2010?  Also, Romney looked silly claiming that he didn’t know about an ad that he approved, and the phrase “my trustee” isn’t exactly going to play with a lot of voters.   As the forum wound down, National Review’s Rich Lowry suggested that Romney clinched the win and probably the primary. 

More: http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2012/01/26/jacksonville_debate_two_winners_one_loser

Debate Takeaways: Gingrich Loses Groove, Romney Gains Ground

1.    Newt Gingrich has lost his groove. After dominating two debates in South Carolina, he has misplaced his timing in Florida. All night, he seemed like a power hitter in a slump: he lunged at change-ups and stood frozen at fastballs. Whether he tried confrontation or conciliation, Mitt Romney constantly beat him to the spot. Though Gingrich received more enthusiastic applause from the HLN crowd when he was announced than any other candidate, his attacks on Romney drew little response from the audience (the one exception was when he accused Romney of profiting, through his investments, on Freddie Mac and the housing crisis in general); Romney’s responses, in fact, generally elicited more applause. And when Gingrich tried to take the high road, deriding moderator Wolf Blitzer’s question about Romney’s finances, the former Massachusetts governor still whacked him for failing to repeat on stage criticisms he has made on the stump. It got worse: Under assault from both Romney and Rick Santorum, the lunar space colony that Gingrich has talked about seemed not visionary but fanciful and impractical. Romney had his own share of awkward moments (when he denied knowing about an ad that he provided the voiceover approval for and when he also denied knowing about the investments in his trust). But on almost every direct encounter with Gingrich, Romney came out ahead.

 Last debate before Florida sunk Gingrich

Tonight’s Republican presidential debate on CNN was the last one before the Florida primary as well as the last one for almost a month. That made it critical for New Gingrich, the man whose candidacy has largely depended on success in debates to do well tonight. But instead of another triumph in which he was able to use attacks on the moderators and his rivals, Gingrich came out flat. While there is little doubt that Rick Santorum did the best of any of the candidates tonight and Ron Paul had a few good jokes, the real winner was Mitt Romney who attacked Gingrich relentlessly and with good effect.

Gingrich’s poor performance not only undermines his argument that he would trounce Barack Obama in debates but also squandered what might be his last chance to turn the momentum of the race around. Gingrich’s usual trick of turning on the moderator flopped. So did his attacks on Romney. Along with Gingrich, Romney took a pounding from Santorum but even that worked to his benefit. Any votes Santorum gains in Florida will be at Gingrich’s expense. The Jacksonville debate may have sealed Gingrich’s fate in Florida and perhaps the entire race.

 Romney came out strong taking Gingrich to task for his attacks on him and then followed up by taking the former speaker to task on his connection with Freddie Mac. Gingrich then attempted to deflect a Wolf Blitzer question about his attacks on Romney’s finances back on the moderator. But, unfortunately for Gingrich, Blitzer would have none of it. The result was that he was made to look foolish while Romney took him further to task. That was a pattern that repeated itself throughout the evening as Gingrich missed opportunities to make points at his rival’s expense and never was able to seize a moment and get the boisterous crowd behind him. Instead it was Romney who got more applause for his aggressive focus on Gingrich’s weak points including his latest “grandiose” idea: a moon colony plan that he denounced as a blatant pander.

More: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/01/26/last-debate-before-florida-sunk-gingrich/

    Stories/Articles You Might Find Interesting – or not

Unhinged lefties heckle Governor Walker during Stat of the State speech

There’s so much good news to report out of Wisconsin, I don’t know where to begin.  I suppose this is as good a place as any:
 

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) is ahead in his likely recall election even as his campaign raises — and spends — millions of dollars in expectation of a tough race later this year.  According to a new Marquette Law School poll the governor leads Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, a likely candidate, 50 percent to 44 percent. He leads former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk, the only declared Democratic candidate, 49 percent to 42 percent margin, former Rep. David Obey 49 percent to 43 percent and state Sen. Tim Cullen 50 percent to 40 percent. Democrats started targeting Walker last year, when he spearheaded controversial legislation limiting collective bargaining for public employees. Under Wisconsin law, Walker was not eligible for a recall election until January of this year.

By all means, lefties, please pour more cash into this race.  The Washington Post story quoted above focuses heavily on Walker’s fundraising and political spending in anticipation of the recall election, yet ignores the massive money game on the other side.  For instance, Democrats outspent Republicans by nearly $3 million in their failed attempt to re-take the Senate via recall elections last year, and the Left is re-filling its coffers to take out their prized bete noir in 2012.  Even so, Wisconsin Democrats and their media allies are outraged — outraged! — that Walker has raised a pile of cash, some of it from (gasp) out of state, to beat back the sore-loser recall movement.  Badger State taxpayers should be reminded that much of the money being used to attack their chief ally in Madison flows from government sector unions, which is to say, from them.  This is the game government unions play.  Their members’ paychecks are extracted from public funds, and a portion of each paycheck (prior to Walker’s reforms) went directly into the unions’ pockets.  This was mandatory and automatic.  Those unions, in turn, donated generously to Democrats to protect their interests.  Democrats, in turn, steadfastly opposed any Republican effort to break the vicious cycle — even going so far as to flee the state to block votes.  This nasty little anti-taxpayer racket carried on until Wisconsin Republicans displayed the political will and fortitude to break it up — even in the face of menacing hoards and death threats. 

As we’ve described before, Walker’s reforms are working.  Christian Schneider of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute documents the success:
 

The unions’ battle against Walker’s reforms has rested on the argument that the changes would damage public services beyond repair. The truth, however, is that the reforms not only are saving money already; they’re doing so with little disruption to services. In early August, noticing the trend, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported that Milwaukee would save more in health-care and pension costs than it would lose in state aid, leaving the city $11 million ahead in 2012—despite Mayor Tom Barrett’s prediction in March that Walker’s budget “makes our structural deficit explode.”

The collective-bargaining component of Walker’s plan has yielded especially large financial dividends for school districts. Before the reform, many districts’ annual union contracts required them to buy health insurance from WEA Trust, a nonprofit affiliated with the state’s largest teachers’ union. Once the reform limited collective bargaining to wage negotiations, districts could eliminate that requirement from their contracts and start bidding for health care on the open market. When the Appleton School District put its health-insurance contract up for bid, for instance, WEA Trust suddenly lowered its rates and promised to match any competitor’s price. Appleton will save $3 million during the current school year.

At the outset of the public-union standoff, educators had made dire predictions that Walker’s reforms would force schools to fire teachers. In February, to take one example, Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad predicted that 289 teachers in his district would be laid off. Walker insisted that his reforms were actually a job-retention program: by accepting small concessions in health and pension benefits, he argued, school districts would be able to spare hundreds of teachers’ jobs. The argument proved sound. So far, Nerad’s district has laid off no teachers at all, a pattern that has held in many of the state’s other large school districts. No teachers were laid off in Beloit and LaCrosse; Eau Claire saw a reduction of two teachers, while Racine and Wausau each laid off one. The Wauwatosa School District, which faced a $6.5 million shortfall, anticipated slashing 100 jobs—yet the new pension and health contributions saved them all. The benefits to school districts aren’t just fiscal, moreover. Thanks to Walker’s collective-bargaining reforms, the Brown Deer school district in suburban Milwaukee can implement a performance-pay system for its best teachers—a step that could improve educational outcomes.

More: http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2012/01/26/video_unhinged_lefties_heckle_scott_walker_during_major_speech__plus_walker_leads_in_possible_recall_contest

More Obama allies funding anti-Romney ads to help Gingrich in Florida

Something To Think About

Why is it that no one appreciates the value of constructive criticism more thoroughly than the one who’s giving it?

President Opts For Small-Ball Demagoguery

by Charles Krauthammer

Once upon a time, small ball was not Barack Obama’s game. Tuesday, it was the essence of his State of the Union address. The visionary of 2008 — purveyor of hope and change, healer of the earth, tamer of the rising seas — offered an hour of little things:

• Tax-code tweaks to encourage this or that kind of behavior (manufacturing being the flavor of the day).

• Little watchdog agencies to round up Wall Street miscreants and Chinese DVD pirates.

• Even a presidential demand “that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn 18.” Under penalty of what? Jail? The self-proclaimed transformer of America is now playing truant officer?

It sounded like the Clinton years with their presidentially proclaimed initiatives on midnight basketball and school uniforms. These are the marks of a shrunken presidency, thoroughly flummoxed by high unemployment, economic stagnation, crushing debt — and a glaring absence of ideas.

More: http://news.investors.com/Article/599062/201201261809/obama-small-ball-visionary-solyndra-buffett.htm

 Adding Up To Nothing

O’s fast talk on the economy

by Charlie Gasparino

More: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/adding_up_to_nothing_8K1eBN3afYXNELupfK8tRL

 Senators Shy From Obama Filibuster Reform

President Barack Obama’s call for a sweeping overhaul of Congressional ethics and procedure has little chance of becoming reality in an institution adverse to change and built to benefit from its rules.

In his State of the Union address, the one-time Senator proposed that the Senate approve a version of the “nuclear option,” which would end filibusters of presidential nominations. Obama said nominees should get an up-or-down vote after 90 days, regardless of whether they could garner the 60 votes needed to overcome a procedural blockade.

“A simple majority is no longer enough to get anything — even routine business — passed through the Senate,” Obama said. “Neither party has been blameless in these tactics. Now both parties should put an end to it.”

The call to end the filibuster is not new, and executing the change remains improbable.

“It seems so obvious and clear until you get into it, then you find that getting the necessary votes together [to change the rules] and holding them through this process is more difficult,” said Senate
Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), before noting his understanding of why Obama would want to pursue it.

“You turn on C-SPAN for classical music because you’re not getting business out of the Senate,” Durbin added. “Three days or four days at a time on every nomination? Come on, I mean the reality is that doesn’t work for any president.”

But the Illinois Democrat did not fully endorse the 90-day limit as the right solution. He said it was unlikely that Senate Democrats would bring nominees to the floor and force a days-long filibuster standoff with Republicans.

Even Obama himself was opposed to making such a drastic move when he was a Senator in 2005, when then-Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) contemplated forcing a rules change.

More: http://www.rollcall.com/issues/57_85/Senators-Shy-From-Obama-Filibuster-Reform-211822-1.html?pos=hbtxt

Image of the day from the animal kingdom:

Maybe I should just let “this” bird alone.

  What’s Going On In The World?

Fear may save the euro, but not necessarily Europe

Link: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/fear-may-save-the-euro-but-not-necessarily-europe/article2315053/

Quote For Today:

 
  The cruelest lies are often told in silence.  ~Adlai Stevenson

  My Pick Of The Litter Today

Marco Rubio gets off the bench

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) stepped into the fight for the Republican primary vote in Florida on Wednesday, lending his star power to help Mitt Romney beat back an attack on his immigration stance.  

Rubio, who has pledged neutrality in the race and is considered the odds-on favorite to be the GOP’s vice presidential nominee, chastised Newt Gingrich’s campaign for airing a Spanish-language radio ad that labeled Romney “the most anti-immigration candidate.”

“This kind of language is more than just unfortunate. It’s inaccurate, inflammatory and doesn’t belong in this campaign,” Rubio said.

Gingrich’s campaign quickly withdrew the ad, a testament to the junior senator’s pull with Republicans in the state and across the country.

link: http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/206659-marco-rubio-gets-off-bench-supports-romney-president

    Stories/Articles You Might Find Interesting – or not

Rubio rebuffs Gingrich

Newt Gingrich is as clueless as he is presumptuous. Yesterday, he trekked around Florida comparing himself to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Mitt Romney to the party-switching milquetoast Charlie Crist. Rubio was having none of it and in a rare moment decide to intervene in the GOP presidential race. He put out a statement: “Mitt Romney is no Charlie Crist. Romney is a conservative. And he was one of the first national Republican leaders to endorse me. He came to Florida, campaigned hard for me, and made a real difference in my race.” Boom.

Rubio’s nod certainly is welcomed by the Romney camp. Rubio continues to distinguish himself not only in the Senate but also in the party at large. His video response to the president’s State of the Union address confirms that, like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), he has become a prominent antagonist of the president.

Gingrich’s misstep — in essence, forcing Rubio to comment on the race, in which he pledged neutrality — is not unlike Gingrich’s suck-uppery regarding former U.N. ambassador John Bolton. Gingrich declared Bolton to be his choice for secretary of state; Bolton shortly thereafter robustly endorsed Romney, citing his “executive temperament.” Gingrich apparently overestimates his appeal among named conservatives.

A prudent, well-organized candidate would reach out to figures in advance of his statements to make sure he’s not going to get embarrassed. But Gingrich is neither prudent nor well organized. Moreover, he believes his own spin and assumes others share his distorted view of himself and reality.

link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/rubio-rebuffs-gingrich-romney-is-no-charlie-crist/2012/01/25/gIQAn3b2PQ_blog.html

 The Marvelous Meekness of Merely Mitt

Link:  http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/01/the_marvelous_meekness_of_merely_mitt.html

Gingrichonomics added up equals nothing but budgetary dysfunction

Newt Gingrich, unexpectedly, has become a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. He won the South Carolina primary and is now the front-runner in some polls nationally. He has been debating well, shaking off criticism of his personal life and doing his best to bolster his reputation as an ideas man.

Regrettably, on economics, where the country could use some fresh thinking, his ideas are a mixture of the alarming, the implausible and the banal.

On monetary policy, the former House speaker has called for a more transparent Federal Reserve, which we applaud. But he has also spoken ominously about creating a presidential “Gold Commission” that would “look at the whole concept of how do we get back to hard money.” And he insists that Representative Ron Paul, the author of “End the Fed” and a rival for the nomination, “has been right for 25 years” when it comes to central banking, something that would surprise most economists.

link: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-26/gingrichonomics-added-up-equals-nothing-but-budgetary-dysfunction-view.html

Geithner doesn’t expect Obama to ask him to stay if he wins election

More: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-25/geithner-doesn-t-expect-obama-to-ask-him-to-stay-if-he-wins-re-election.html

Evidently Geithner aka Turbo Tax Timmy, is aware that his exiting would be a plus for Obama. Must suck to be him.

Gingrich lost his crowd pleasing groove in Tampa

It didn’t take long for his frustration to surface. During one memorable exchange with Romney over the details of his consulting work in Washington, a noticeably flustered Gingrich stood shaking his head while Romney denounced the former speaker’s alleged conflicts of interest. When it came time for Gingrich’s rebuttal, he responded with moments of silence that seemed an eternity, searching for the caustic comeback that would not come.

More: http://decoded.nationaljournal.com/2012/01/gingrich-lost-his-crowdpleasin.php

Something To Think About

Why do we pay extra attention to what actors say when all they do is pretend for a living?

Obama’s lofty speeches

By Peter Wehner

It’s stiff competition, but arguably Barack Obama’s chief courtier in the press is Jonathan Alter. Consider this analysis from a recent op-ed he wrote on five myths about Obama:

3. Obama is an effective public speaker.

Obama’s lofty speeches during the 2008 campaign led even his detractors to admit that he is a gifted orator. Some critics try to minimize his skill by saying he relies on a teleprompter–a ridiculous charge considering that he often writes big chunks of his speeches and often speaks off-the-cuff.

That said, there are few examples of Obama’s speeches actually moving popular opinion. That’s because he speaks in impressive paragraphs, not memorable sentences. He is allergic to sound bites, and that keeps him from effectively framing his goals and achievements.

The roots of this allergy may lie in his famous Philadelphia speech on race in 2008, which followed the revelations of incendiary comments by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The speech lacked memorable lines, but it was a big hit. I believe it convinced Obama that the public could absorb complex ideas without bumper sticker lines. He was wrong.

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal, whose daily take on events is very nearly indispensable, summarizes Alter’s argument this way: “So it turns out Obama is an ineffective public speaker because the public lacks the intellectual acumen to appreciate the brilliance of Obama’s speeches.”

All of this got me thinking about some other bumper-sticker lines in American history we could have done without. For example:

• “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
• “With malice toward none, with charity for all.”
• “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
• “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
• “I have a dream.”
• “Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall.”

The mistake Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, King, and Reagan made is in failing to understand that the public could absorb complex ideas without these bumper-sticker lines. (These sound bite artists unfortunately succumbed to the temptation to use memorable sentences to mask their shallow arguments and unimpressive paragraphs.) Obama, on the other hand, employed sophisticated and complicated phrases to articulate his public philosophy – phrases like “yes we can” and “hope and change.” Against such eloquence, Abraham Lincoln never stood a chance.

 http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/01/25/obama-lofty-speeches/#more-781951

Gingrich rise is triumph of style over substance

On the eve of Newt Gingrich’s landslide victory in the South Carolina primary, CNN’s Erin Burnett let the former speaker expound on the success of his “kick the moderator” debate strategy.

“I think there’s something going on here that’s very deep,” Gingrich said. “People want a leader who’s forceful. … Part of it is, you know, if I’d said ‘The color is blue!’ — it’s the forcefulness. … That delivery, that clearness is as important as the specific topic,” he explained.

Watching the interview, I had a disturbing thought: Has Newt Gingrich become self-aware?

I’ve never heard a better explanation for the former speaker’s ability to cloud conservatives’ minds. How, after all, did a man who’s the very model of a Beltway-consensus influence-peddler convince Tea Party voters he represents “real change”? It’s the “forcefulness,” stupid!

Unfortunately, what’s going on here is not “very deep.” Gingrich’s rise represents the triumph of rhetorical style over substance. In a way, it’s the ultimate tribute to Barack Obama.

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein asked a good question on Sunday: “What are Newt Gingrich’s big ideas?” “I’m at a loss to name even one,” he admitted.

Gingrich has an enviable rep as a one-man think tank, but in his wilderness years, he made a sweet living as a “forceful” pitchman for utterly conventional center-left policies: Medicaid expansion, the individual mandate, cap and trade, “clean energy” subsidies, and the like. Newt does a great impression of a red-state firebrand, but when it comes to policy, “the color is blue.”

That’s not to say that Gingrich has never had an unconventional idea. This is a guy who bragged in a 2005 GQ interview that “I first talked about [saving civilization] in August of 1958″—when he was a rising sophomore in high school.

Some of Gingrich’s big ideas are charmingly batty. Given his worries about global warming, Newt has probably abandoned his 1984 plan for “a mirror system in space” that “could affect the earth’s climate by increasing the amount of sunlight.”

But the Trekkie zeal remains, judging by one of my favorite recent headlines: “Gingrich Said Freddie Mac Could Be Good Model for Mars Travel” (Bloomberg, Dec. 2, 2011).

Some of Gingrich’s other fancies are less charming. The candidate who’s warned of a “gay and secular fascism” sweeping the country has an impressive authoritarian streak of his own.

As Klein notes, in 1996, Gingrich had the “big idea” of instituting the death penalty for anyone who brought more than 2 ounces of marijuana into the United States.

Today, Gingrich condemns the Stop Online Piracy Act as censorship, but in 2006 he supported empowering “federal judges who’ve served in combat” to shut down “jihadist” websites.

This December, he advocated sending U.S. marshals to arrest activist judges who rule against religious displays in public schools (maybe combat-hardened jurists will get a pass).

more: http://reason.com/archives/2012/01/24/gingrich-rise-is-triumph-of-style-over-s

Obama and Governor Brewer spar over her book

When President Obama landed in Phoenix on Wednesday, he was greeted with sunny skies and a kerfuffle with Republican Gov. Jan Brewer.

After welcoming the president upon his arrival, Obama told Brewer he didn’t like the way he was characterized in her book, ‘Scorpions for Breakfast,’ the governor told reporters traveling with the president.

At one point in the tense conversation on Wednesday, Brewer pointed her finger at Obama and at another time, they were talking over one another, according to a White House pool report.

Obama appeared to walk away from Brewer in the middle of their conversation, according to the pool report.

“I said I was sorry he felt that way but I didn’t get my sentence finished,” she said. “Anyway, we’re glad he’s here. I’ll regroup.

 link: http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/206641-on-visit-to-arizona-obama-and-gov-brewer-spar-over-her-book

Obama walked away while the Governor was still speaking? How rude. Not to mention that his majesty Obama was guilty of not showing “Noblesse oblige“.

2012 Florida Republican Primary

Mitt Romney has jumped back ahead in the fevered Florida Republican Primary race with his support back to where it was before Newt Gingrich’s big win Saturday in South Carolina.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Florida Republican Primary Voters, taken Wednesday night, shows Romney with 39% support to Gingrich’s 31%. Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum earns 12%, and Texas Congressman Ron Paul runs last with nine percent (9%). Four percent (4%) prefer some other candidate, and seven percent (7%) are undecided.

Link: http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/elections/election_2012/election_2012_presidential_election/florida/2012_florida_republican_primary

U.S. Financial worries rival 1992

Worry about job loss up to 34%

link: http://www.gallup.com/poll/152180/Financial-Worries-Rival-1992.aspx

Image of the day from the animal kingdom:

Find the “real” Corgis.

 The State Of The Union Is Angry

Obama has long had very poor approval ratings among independent voters, which ought to make him easy to defeat. Obama’s angry appeal is not going to win over unhappy independents. The great imponderable is whether Gingrich’s anger would put them off and thereby neutralize Obama’s–or, to put it another way, whether independent voters are fed up enough with Obama to respond to Gingrich’s angry appeal the way Republicans do.

link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203718504577183131189889516.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond

 What’s Going On In The World?

Iran set to turn off oil supply to Europe

The European Union embargo on Iranian oil will only come into effect in six months, but the leadership in Tehran wants to act first: Exports to Europe are set to be halted immediately. It is a move which could mean added difficulties for struggling economies in southern Europe.

It’s a move which has tit-for-tat written all over it, but one which could nonetheless have a serious impact: The Iranian government wants to present a bill to parliament this weekend calling for an immediate halt to oil deliveries to Europe. The move, with most reports citing the Iranian news agency Mehr, has come about in response to the EU agreement to impose sanctions against Iran, which were announced earlier this week.

 The sanctions banned any new contracts for buying oil from Iran, but allowed existing deals to continue until July in order to give countries time to find other sources. But that process is now at risk after the latest move from Tehran, a step the Iranian government had already threatened.

“If this bill is passed, the government will be forced to stop selling oil to Europe before the actual implementation of their sanctions,” said Emad Hosseini, spokesman for the Iranian parliament’s energy commission, reportedly said. The bill is set to become law on Sunday.

The EU sanctions allow for oil deliveries from Iran until July 1. Any pre-empting of this timescale by Tehran could prove problematic for countries like Italy, Greece and Spain, who would need to urgently find new suppliers.

China, meanwhile, a major importer of Iranian oil, has also criticized the EU sanctions. The Xinhua news agency quoted the Chinese Foreign Ministry on Thursday as saying: “To blindly pressure and impose sanctions on Iran are not constructive approaches.”

Link: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,811507,00.html

Quote For Today:

   Why don’t they pass a Constitutional Amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as Prohibition did, in five years we will have the smartest people on earth. ~ Will Rogers

  My Pick Of The Litter Today

Diminished Obama State of the Union strikes a tepid tone

President Obama launched his re-election campaign tonight with a State of the Union speech that attempted to conjure of the spirit of an earlier era of national unity even as he sought to focus national resentment on wealthy Americans and his political opponents in Congress.

With no record of accomplishment to his credit, other than the unpopular Obamacare and stimulus, Obama put forward a limited agenda of government intervention in the economy and the tax code in a laundry list of initiatives that did little to break new ground on any issue and was bereft of the passion and vision that drove his 2008 campaign for the presidency. All in all it was 65 minutes that ought to worry Democrats more than it annoyed Republicans.

The president knows he will get nothing passed this year and his speech reflected that reality. He began and ended with the killing of Osama bin Laden. In between he spoke of a peace dividend from the end of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that he would use on building projects and green energy production. He called for a massive bailout of homeowners even as he pandered to public opinion by saying there would be no more bailouts for banks. He vowed to prosecute those responsible for the mortgage crisis and said that teenagers would no longer be allowed to drop out of high school, no matter how much trouble they were causing. No mention was made of either Obamacare or the stimulus. Nor did he speak of the Keystone XL pipeline project that he cancelled. He called for lower taxes; less regulation and more exploitation of our natural resources even though he has raised taxes, increased regulation and made it more difficult for the nation to use more of its oil and gas and that of our neighbor Canada.

On foreign affairs, Obama spoke of victory in Iraq and Afghanistan and pretended that he had increased Iran’s isolation rather than wasting three years on failed engagement and feckless diplomacy that gave the Islamist regime more time to build a nuclear weapon. He claimed to be Israel’s greatest friend even though he has used his time in office to pick constant fights with the government of the Jewish state. The shout out to wavering liberal Jewish Democrats betrayed an administration that was clearly worried about November.

The only substantive portion of the speech dealt with his desire to raise taxes on millionaires. Even if he got his way and raised the rates for millionaires to 30 percent it would do little to deal with the deficit or pay for the runaway costs of entitlements. But that isn’t really the point of his advocacy. Obama isn’t interested in raising those taxes to achieve an economic purpose. He has seized on this phony issue in order to exploit it politically this fall. For all of his talk about unity, his decision to let loose the dogs of class warfare rhetoric doesn’t so much seek division as to treat it as his golden ticket to re-election.

More: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/01/24/diminished-obama-state-of-the-union-tepid-tone/

All About The State of the Union Speech

A Mediocre Stump Speech

President Obama delivered his third, and hopefully final, State of the Union Address tonight in the House of Representatives.  It was a laundry list of minor programs and legislative tweaks, with plenty of conspicuous campaign rhetoric mixed in.  The president strained to sound peppy and upbeat, painting a rosy national picture that the 16 percent of Americans who are unemployed, underemployed, or have ceased even looking for a job likely found unrecognizable.  On the areas that still require improvement (namely, everything), he urged Congress to work together to pass — surprise — his agenda.  Unity, interestingly, was a major theme throughout the address.  He called on Washington to lower the “temperature” of its discourse — just a few months after the man over his right shoulder explicitly said that Republicans were aiding and abetting “rape and murder” by opposing an unpaid-for second stimulus, and weeks after his hand-picked DNC Chair suggested that Tea Party rhetoric contributed to the Tucson shooting. 

More: http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2012/01/25/a_mediocre_stump_speech

The Eternal State of the Union

Why does every State of the Union Speech sound eerily familiar? Because president have been say the same things for a half-century.

Link: http://reason.com/archives/2012/01/24/the-eternal-state-of-the-union

Lawmakers politely take a beating during combative Obama SOTU

The combative and direct tone of Obama’s speech kept members of Congress, particularly Republicans, in their chairs for stretches at a time, but it provoked no outbursts and no “You lie” moments.

Lawmakers leapt to their feet when Obama praised American soldiers and lauded the nation’s spirit and resilience. Yet when the president told Congress that most Americans expected “nothing will get done this year,” there were only knowing chuckles. And when Obama called the debt ceiling debate that roiled Washington last summer a “fiasco,” he was greeted with stony silence.

Democrats lapped up most of Obama’s policy proposals, which Republicans greeted with chagrin.

“It was a very divided speech, trying to divide the country instead of unite the country,” the third-ranking House Republican, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), told The Hill afterward.

link: http://thehill.com/homenews/house/206369-lawmakers-politely-take-a-beating-during-combative-obama-state-of-the-union

    Stories/Articles You Might Find Interesting – or not

States weaken tenure rights for teachers

The changes are occurring as states replace virtually automatic “satisfactory” teacher evaluations with those linked to teacher performance and base teacher layoffs on performance instead of seniority. Politically powerful teachers’ unions are fighting back, arguing the changes lower morale, deny teachers due process, and unfairly target older teachers.

The debate is so intense that in Idaho, for example, state superintendent Tom Luna’s truck was spray painted and its tires slashed. An opponent appeared at his mother’s house and he was interrupted during a live TV interview by an agitated man. Why? The Idaho legislature last year ended “continuing contracts” — essentially equivalent to tenure — for new teachers and said performance, not seniority, would determine layoffs. Other changes include up to $8,000 in annual bonuses given to teachers for good performance, and parent input on evaluations. Opponents gathered enough signatures to put a referendum that would overturn the changes on the November ballot.

Luna says good teachers shouldn’t be worried.

“We had a system where it was almost impossible to financially reward great teachers and very difficult to deal with ineffective teachers. If you want an education system that truly puts students first, you have to have both,” Luna said.

More: http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2012-01-25/teacher-tenure-rights-firings/52772354/1?csp=YahooModule_News

  Latest Freddie Mac Contract Describes Gingrich As a Hired Gun 

Newt Gingrich insists that he was not a lobbyist for Freddie Macand a second contract released Tuesday night spells out that fact. But it also makes clear that Gingrich was a hired gun brought in to discuss “business and public policy issues” with “major stakeholders” (read: lawmakers and regulators.)

More: http://influencealley.nationaljournal.com/2012/01/2nd-gingrich-freddie-mac-contr.php

 Details Unfold About Gingrich’s Freddie Mac Role

New details are trickling out about Newt Gingrich’s role at Freddie Mac, and the latest reports continue to contradict his claim that he objected to the mortgage giant’s business model while serving as an advisor.

Last November, Gingrich’s campaign said that “on numerous occasions in meetings with Freddie Mac, Speaker Gingrich advised that a business model that involved lending money to people with bad credit and no money down was unsustainable and a bubble, and that it was dangerous to buy securities made up of these mortgages.”

But according to Politico, his activities weren’t just confined to advising and lobbying on behalf of Freddie Mac. He also rallied an audience of Freddie Mac political action committee donors in 2007:

New details from Newt Gingrich’s $35,000-a-year contract with Freddie Mac show that the Republican hopeful wasn’t just a boardroom consultant, but served as a high-profile booster for the beleaguered organization. He even gave a rallying speech to dozens of the group’s political action committee donors in the spring of 2007.

Shortly after the “rah, rah” speech, as one source described it, Gingrich gave an interview for the Freddie Mac website, where he supported the group’s model at length. The interview is no longer on Freddie’s site.

If Gingich was supposedly the internal critic of Freddie Mac, what was he doing giving speeches to the group’s PAC donors? The story doesn’t add up. Of course it’s possible that Gingrich brought up his concerns at some meetings, but he gave no public indication that he was trying to reform the group at the time. Everything that’s been released has shown the opposite – him praising Freddie Mac’s business model and trying to boost the group’s reputation.

More: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/01/24/details-gingrich-freddie-mac-role/#more-781864

Romney resists hitting the panic button

LEHIGH ACRES, Fla. — His political life may be on the line these days, but you wouldn’t know it from Mitt Romney’s demeanor as he campaigns in Florida.

After a debilitating double-digit loss in South Carolina, Romney has fallen behind Newt Gingrich in both Florida and nationalpolls and is about to come under another withering, multimillion-dollar assault over the airwaves here from the pro-Gingrich Winning Our Future super PAC, which announced a new $6 million Florida media buy on Tuesday.

But instead of dialing up the intensity level or test-driving a new strategy, Romney appears content to stay the course.

While they can be under no illusion over how precarious their position has become, he and his brain trust are retooling their message rather than blowing up the game plan with a week to go before the critical Florida primary.

Stuart Stevens, Romney’s top national strategist, conceded that it had been a dismal week leading up to the South Carolina defeat but suggested that the campaign known for its even-keeled personality would not give up on its analytical approach in order to channel some of Gingrich’s more visceral appeal.

“I think that we got caught up about tax returns, so we’ve got that behind us, and I think we probably didn’t do as good of a job as we should have talking about big issues — we talked too much about process,” Stevens said. “Because people are angry does not mean they are looking for another candidate who is the most angry candidate. That just simply never seems to be the case, or you would have wonderful talk show hosts getting elected president all the time.”

Amid his campaign’s attempt to portray Gingrich as a rabble-rouser more in the vein of Jerry Springer than a statesman harkening Ronald Reagan, Romney has also sharpened his attacks on Gingrich but has not done much to loosen up his own approach.

More: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/01/25/romney_resists_hitting_the_panic_button_112892.html

Liberalism On Life Support

By Walter Russel Mead

Writing about the onset of the Great Depression, John Kenneth Galbraith famously said that the end had come but was not yet in sight. The past was crumbling under their feet, but people could not imagine how the future would play out. Their social imagination had hit a wall.

The same thing is happening today: The core institutions, ideas and expectations that shaped American life for the sixty years after the New Deal don’t work anymore. The gaps between the social system we inhabit and the one we now need are becoming so wide that we can no longer paper over them. But even as the failures of the old system become more inescapable and more damaging, our national discourse remains stuck in a bygone age. The end is here, but we can’t quite take it in.

In the old system, most blue-collar and white-collar workers held stable, lifetime jobs with defined benefit pensions, and a career civil service administered a growing state as living standards for all social classes steadily rose. Gaps between the classes remained fairly consistent in an industrial economy characterized by strong unions in stable, government-brokered arrangements with large corporations—what Galbraith and others referred to as the Iron Triangle. High school graduates were pretty much guaranteed lifetime employment in a job that provided a comfortable lower middle-class lifestyle; college graduates could expect a better paid and equally secure future. An increasing “social dividend”, meanwhile, accrued in various forms: longer vacations, more and cheaper state-supported education, earlier retirement, shorter work weeks, more social and literal mobility, and more diverse forms of affordable entertainment. Call all this, taken together, the blue model.

In the heyday of the blue model, economists and social scientists assumed that from generation to generation Americans would live a life of incremental improvements. The details of life would keep getting better even as the broad outlines of society stayed the same. The advanced industrial democracies, of which the United States was the largest, wealthiest and strongest, had reached the apex of social achievement. It had, in other words, defined and was in the process of perfecting political and social “best practice.” America was what “developed” human society looked like and no more radical changes were in the offing. Amid the hubris that such conceptions encouraged, Professor (later Ambassador) Galbraith was moved to state, in 1952, that “most of the cheap and simple inventions have been made.”¹ If only the United States and its allies could best the Soviet Union and its counter-model, then indeed—as a later writer would put it—History would end in the philosophical sense that only one set of universally acknowledged best practices would be left standing.

Life isn’t this simple anymore. The blue social model is in the process of breaking down, and the chief question in American politics today is what should come next.

One large group, mainly “blue state” self-labeled liberals who think the blue model is the only possible, or at least the best feasible, way to organize a modern society, wants to shore it up and defend it. This group sees the gradual breakup of the blue social model as an avoidable historical tragedy caused by specific and reversible policy errors. Supporters of the model point to the rising inequality and financial instability in contemporary American life as signs that we need to defend the blue system and enlarge it.

Others, generally called conservatives and often hailing from the “red states”, think the model, whatever its past benefits or general desirability, is no longer sustainable and must give way to an earlier, more austere but also more economically efficient pre-“big government” model. Often, backers of this view see the New Deal state as a great wrong turn. Their goal is to repair the errors of the 1930s and return to the more restrictive constitutional limits on Federal power from an earlier time.

But even as the red-blue division grows more entrenched and bitter, it is becoming less relevant. The blue model is breaking down so fast and so far that not even its supporters can ignore the disintegration and disaster it now presages. Liberal Democrats in states like Rhode Island and cities like Chicago are cutting pensions and benefits and laying off workers out of financial necessity rather than ideological zeal. The blue model can no longer pay its bills, and not even its friends can keep it alive.

Link: http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1183

Something To Think About

 Is the reason that there is a lot of knowledge in universities because the freshmen bring a little in and the seniors don’t take much away so knowledge just sort of accumulates?

 White House to miss budget deadline for third year

The White House told Congress on Monday that its budget will be late this year, meaning President Obama once again will miss the deadline set in law.

Congressional officials said the president now will send up his budget on Feb. 13, which is a week later than the usual date. The law requires the budget be sent by the first Monday in February.

Late budgets are common in the first year of a presidency, but this move, in Mr. Obama’s fourth year, drew fire from Congress. Rep. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, called it an “abdication of leadership.” Mr. Obama missed the mark in 2009 and 2011, though he was on time with his 2010 budget.

Link: http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/inside-politics/2012/jan/23/white-house-miss-budget-deadline-third-year/

What use is a “deadline” set in law if it is routinely ignored?

U.S. auto dealerships turning away the Chevy Volt

According to numerous auto trade reports, a number of U.S. car dealerships are turning away the Chevy Volt. Despite the fact that General Motor’s Chairman and CEO Dan Akerson who will testify to Congress on Wednesday and tell lawmakers that the Volt is a safe plug-in hybrid vehicle, there is little confidence his testimony will do much in terms of a bottom line for the Volt at local dealerships across America.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigated the Volt back in June when fires erupted in three of it’s cars during safety testing. 

Automotive News reports that in the New York City market, “GM allocated 104 Volts to 14 dealerships in the area.” :  

“Dealers took just 31 of them, the lowest take rate for any Chevy model in that market last month. That group of dealers ordered more than 90 percent of the other vehicles they were eligible to take, the source said.”

 link: http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/watercooler/2012/jan/24/picket-us-auto-dealerships-turning-away-chevy-volt/

Newt’s Victory is the Tea Party’s loss

Hundreds of Capital Hill Staffers didn’t pay taxes in 2010

As Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich parse the details of their individual tax returns, hundreds of Capitol Hill employees are taking taxpayer dollars to the bank without paying their share.

Internal Revenue Service data show that 3 percent of Senate staffers and more than 4 percent of House staffers owed taxes in 2010, adding up to about $10.6 million in unpaid taxes. More than 98,000 civilian federal employees were delinquent on their taxes in 2010, adding up to more than $1 billion in taxes owed, according to the IRS.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, last year introduced a bill to require federal employees to be fired if they are “seriously delinquent” on their taxes. Seriously delinquent is defined as outstanding federal tax debt for which a public lien has been filed. The bill was passed by committee in June but is still waiting for a vote from the full House.

“If you work for the federal government and you don’t pay your taxes, you should be fired,” Chaffetz said in a statement provided to FoxNews.com. “It is totally unacceptable to live on the federal payroll and not pay your taxes. The Obama administration has totally ignored this cheating. Congress should pass my bill and hold federal workers accountable.”

Under current law, only IRS employees can be fired for not paying their federal income taxes, according to Chaffetz’s office.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., in 2010 introduced a similar bill, to make delinquent taxpayers ineligible for federal employment.

“Legislators and government employees should not be exempt from the laws they write and enforce,” Coburn said when introducing the bill. “The very nature of federal employment and the concept inherent to ‘public service’ demands those being paid by taxpayers contribute their fair share of taxes. They should lead by example.”

link: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/…./#ixzz1kOzmj48R

Buffet’s Burlington Northern among winners in Obama rejection of pipeline

link: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-23/buffett-s-burlington-northern-among-winners-in-obama-rejection-of-pipeline.html

Gingrich’ Social Security hooey

link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/gingrich-social-security-hooey/2012/01/24/gIQAYaBVOQ_blog.html

Image of the day from the animal kingdom:

Newt Gingrich is shameless

More: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/01/newt_gingrich_is_shameless.html

Guess this is supposed to tell us if you can’t beat um, join um. No thanks, I’ll take a pass. If noxious Newt is the nominee I’ll vote 3rd party. I thought I was an “anyone except Obama” voter. That was when it didn’t appear that Newt had a snowball’s chance. Now I know that voting for this POS is a bridge too far down the  slime trail for me.

 What’s Going On In The World?

Greek debt deal back to the drawing board as deadline looms

Quote For Today:

   We operate under a jury system in this country, and as much as we complain about it, we have to admit that we know of no better system, except possibly flipping a coin.  ~ Dave Barry

  My Pick Of The Litter Today

Romney paid 6.2 million in taxes – gave even more to charity

The basics, via Reuters:
 

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney released tax records on Tuesday indicating he will pay $6.2 million in taxes on a total of $42.5 million in income over the years 2010 and 2011.  Bowing to increasing political pressure to provide more detail about his vast wealth, the former private equity executive released tax returns indicating he and his wife, Ann, paid an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent in 2010. They expect to pay a 15.4 percent rate when they file their returns for 2011.

Romney’s tax rate is below that of most wage-earning Americans because most of his income, as outlined in more than 500 pages of tax documents, flows from capital gains on investments.  Under the U.S. tax code, capital gains are taxed at 15 percent, compared with a top tax rate of 35 percent for wage earners.

 
Before we go any further, two timely reminders from conservative wonk Avik Roy regarding that last bolded bit:
 

(1) This 15% Romney tax rate issue is a canard. Romney paid both 15% and corporate income taxes (usually 30%+) on his investments, as all do.

(2) Companies that Bain invested in paid income taxes that are thereby not passed through as profits to partnership.

 
Roy reinforces points argued eloquently by the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore last year during the Democrats’ “Buffett Tax” nonsense:
 

The reason for the light capital gains and dividend tax is that corporations pay up to a 35% tax on their profits before a dime of it is passed on to shareholders. The real tax rate on corporate income paid to individuals through capital gains and dividends is not 15%. It is closer to 45% once you count the tax on corporate profits. If the dividend tax rises to 20% next year from 15% today, then the total tax on dividends paid to shareholders would be closer to 50%, and that doesn’t include state and local taxes.

 
Here’s another detail that Lefties won’t want to focus on, conveniently buried in the penultimate paragraph of Reuters’ write-up:
 

Regardless, the emerging picture was of a man of great means who contributes mightily to charity. The documents showed he and his wife contributed $7 million in charity over the two years, much of it going to his Mormon church.

 
So between taxes and charity, the Romney’s paid $13.2 million since 2010 — roughly one-third of their income.  How will the media treat these numbers?  Blogger Exurban Jon has it about right:
 

The headline should be that Romney donated 15% of his income [to charity]. Instead it’ll be that he “only” paid 14% to almighty government.

 
Right, because private charity isn’t the State, and the State is king.  Hey, remember this?

 http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2012/01/24/breaking_romney_paid_62_million_in_taxes_over_last_two_years_gave_even_more_to_charity

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The Florida Debate: Losers and more losers

More: http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katehicks/2012/01/23/the_florida_debate_losers_and_more_losers

 15 questions the mainstream media would ask Obama if he were a Republican

During the practically endless series of Republican debates, we have heard almost every question imaginable asked to Republican candidates – if by every question imaginable, you mean horribly slanted, often irrelevant questions designed to make them look bad and help Obama. We’ve heard questions about contraceptives, religion, Newt’s angry ex-wife, Gardasil, etc., etc., etc. So, what would happen if the mainstream media treated Barack Obama the exact same way that they treat Republicans? The questions might sound a little something like this.

1) Numerous Mexican citizens and an American citizen have been killed with weapons knowingly provided to criminals by our own government during Operation Fast and Furious. If Eric Holder was aware that was going on, do you think he should step down as Attorney General? Were you aware that was going on and if so, shouldn’t you resign?

2) In 2010 you said Solyndra, which gave your campaign a lot of money, was “leading the way toward a brighter and more prosperous future.” Today, Solyndra is bankrupt and the taxpayers lost $500 million on loans that your administration was well aware might never be paid off when you made them. What do you say to people who say this is evidence of corruption in your administration?

3) Unions invested a lot of time and money in helping to get you elected. In return, they gained majority control of Chrysler, the taxpayers lost 14 billion dollars on General Motors, and General Motors received a special 45 billion dollar tax break. What do you say to people who view this as corruption on a scale never before seen in American history?

More: http://townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2012/01/24/15_questions_the_mainstream_media_would_ask_barack_obama_if_he_were_a_republican

Just attack the media and we’re at your feet

By Mona Charen

So the message South Carolina voters sent was — “Anything goes so long as you attack the media.”

 Whatever you think about Mitt Romney’s shortcomings as a candidate — and I agree with Mark Steyn, who said of his stump speech, “The finely calibrated inoffensiveness is kind of offensive” — embracing Gingrich is like bashing yourself in the face to relieve the pain in your foot.

Certainly it’s possible that the voters have done all of us a favor. If Gingrich’s success there scares Romney into becoming a better candidate, then it may work out well in the general election.

But really South Carolina — a whooping ovation for Gingrich’s denunciation of John King? King asked a perfectly legitimate question. It was Marianne Gingrich, not “the liberal media” who made this a story. Gingrich knows this perfectly well, but he can turn a hangnail into a conspiracy by the media. And so he crafted his reply to leave the second Mrs. Gingrich’s agency out of it entirely. “To take an ex-wife and make it two days before the primary, a significant question in a presidential campaign, is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine.”

“Every person in here has had someone close to them go through painful things,” Gingrich added, as if he were the wounded party.

Sorry, but it’s impossible to sit still for that kind of cynical manipulation of an audience. Gingrich is not just someone who has “gone through painful things.” Instead, he has inflicted pain quite promiscuously to those nearest him and justified it because he was destined for greater things. He cheated on his first wife, Jackie, and then divorced her while she was fighting cancer, telling a friend that she was neither “young nor pretty enough” to be the wife of a president. Jackie was obliged to petition the court to enforce child support and alimony orders. Gingrich later peddled the story that it was she who had wanted the divorce. “He can say that we’d been talking about it for 10 years,” she told the Washington Post in 1985, “but it came as a complete surprise.”

More: http://townhall.com/columnists/monacharen/2012/01/24/just_attack_the_media_and_were_at_your_feet

  Romney Strikes Back as Gingrich Plays Defense

At the last two debates in South Carolina, Newt Gingrich took charge with stinging attacks on the moderators and on Mitt Romney. But in the first of two Florida debates this week, Romney took the offensive landing a number of telling blows on Gingrich. For the first time in this series of debates, the former Massachusetts governor didn’t play the frontrunner attempting to rise above the fray with his only focus on Barack Obama. Instead, he zeroed in on Gingrich’s record as a Washington influence peddler and paid advocate. Though at times he tried to turn the tables on Romney, Gingrich was consistently put on the defensive as he tried to defend his record leaving him few opportunities to score points or to deliver one of his trademark rants at the expense of those hosting the debate.

In the midst of what was one of the most boring of all the GOP debates it was a good night for Romney and may help slow down Gingrich’s momentum. But this was no knockout. Gingrich was on his heels most of the night but there were no gaffes. Nor is it clear whether merely going on the attack is going to convince conservatives that Romney is their kind of candidate. For all of his aggressiveness and strong arguments about free enterprise, Romney still lacked the ideological passion that helped propel Gingrich back into the lead last week.

More: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/01/23/romney-gingrich-florida-debate/

He’s no damn good

Gingrich resigned from the house under a cloud 

Mitt Romney contended Monday night that Newt Gingrich “resigned in disgrace” from his job as House speaker. Gingrich said he left voluntarily. But there was a good chance he would not have been reelected speaker if he had stayed.

“The truth is that the members of his own team, his congressional team after his four years of leadership, they moved to replace him,” Romney said. “They also took a vote and 88 percent of Republicans voted to reprimand the speaker and he did resign in disgrace after that. This was the first time in American history that a speaker of the House has resigned from the House.”

Gingrich did resign from the House in early 1999, but not as a direct result of his 1997 House reprimand for ethics violations. He left under pressure from Republican colleagues after the party did poorly in the 1998 House elections.

Putting the best light on that chapter of his career, Gingrich said in the debate that he took responsibility for Republican losses in House races, and added, “I didn’t want to stay around, as Nancy Pelosi has. I wanted to get out and do other things.”

His rival on the stage, Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, was closer to the truth when he suggested Gingrich had too little support in the Republican caucus to be reelected speaker. “He didn’t have the votes. That was what the problem was,” Paul said. “So this idea that he voluntarily reneged and he was going to punish himself because we didn’t do well in the election, that’s not the way it was.”

Romney cited a House Ethics Committee investigation aimed at Gingrich that looked into whether he had violated federal tax law and misled committee investigators. Gingrich said all but one of the charges were dropped –- the one that stuck was that he had misled investigators on the committee. However, as the Washington Post Fact-Checker notes, the committee also concluded that one of Gingrich’s political groups had improperly coordinated with a tax-exempt project he had launched.

Romney is right that most Republicans voted to reprimand Gingrich at the time, and the speaker was fined $300,000 to pay the costs of the investigation.

http://nationaljournal.com/2012-presidential-campaign/gingrich-resigned-from-the-house-under-a-cloud-20120123

Newt puts deserved pressure on Mitt

More: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/opinion/op_ed/view/20220124let_gop_nod_be_won_on_merit_newt_puts_deserved_pressure_on_mitt/

 Mitt vs. Newt: the Gloves Come Off

By Pat Buchanan 

Newt Gingrich’s surge to success in South Carolina has surely brought joy to the Obama White House.

For his 12-point victory ensures the fight for the GOP nomination will not end soon and will get nastier. Indeed, it already has. Whether Newt or Mitt Romney emerges victorious, the candidate who comes out of the Republican convention will be bruised and bloodied.

Consider, first, Newt.

According to a Fox News poll, 56 percent of the American people have an unfavorable opinion of the former speaker. Only 27 percent hold a favorable opinion. By two to one, the nation has a negative view of Newt. And as Newt has been a national figure for two decades, to reverse the impression he has left on the country would require an immense volume of positive media, free and bought.

And Newt is getting neither.

Now, in Florida, Romney has decided to tear the scab off, and 24 hours after his South Carolina defeat, he is busy at it.

Newt, said Mitt, “was a leader for four years as speaker of the House. … And at the end of four years … he was a failed leader, and he had to resign in disgrace. … He was investigated (by) an ethics panel and had to make a payment associated with that, and then … 88 percent of his (fellow) Republicans voted to reprimand Speaker Gingrich.”

“What’s (Newt) been doing for 15 years?” Mitt asked. “He’s been working as a lobbyist … and selling influence around Washington.”

Mitt did not bring up Newt’s three wives and the tawdry tale told by second wife Marianne to ABC. Yet the super PACs of the Democratic Party will make sure the women of America know how Newt treated his first two wives, should he become the nominee.

Yet Mitt has his own problems, after his worst week in South Carolina.

By going negative on Newt, he will drive Newt’s negatives higher. But attack politics polarizes a party and drives up the negatives of the attacker, as well. The Eagle Scout image of Mitt will suffer — both from what Newt is doing to him and from what he feels he must do to Newt.

Rep. Dick Gephardt decided he had to take down Howard Dean, who was riding high in Iowa in 2004. Gephardt ended up taking both of them down. John Kerry evaded the bloodletting, won the caucuses and cruised to the nomination.

Mitt has suffered, too, from the malicious portrayal of his days at Bain Capital by Gingrich and Rick Perry, who portrayed Bain as a vulture sitting on a tree limb, looking for sick companies to swoop down on, pick the carcass clean and leave a skeleton.

Romney’s revelations last week that he pays only 15 percent of his income in federal taxes, that he has investments in the Caymans, that the $375,000 he earned in speaking fees did not amount to much and that he enjoys firing people — even if it was insurance companies — all feed into the caricature of a country-club Republican with nothing in common with people who live from paycheck to paycheck.

Wealth is not necessarily an impediment to political success. FDR, a Hudson Valley aristocrat, and JFK were men of wealth who did less to earn their money than Mitt did to earn his. But they carried it more easily.

When JFK was being attacked because his father, who amassed his pile in stocks and liquor, had poured huge sums into the West Virginia primary on his son’s behalf, Sen. Kennedy joked about it, telling the Gridiron Club that his father had sent him a telegram just before the primary: “Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary. I’ll be damned if I’ll pay for a landslide.”

It is hard to recall a primary season that got this ugly this early. Words like dishonest, liar and corrupt, and phrases like serial hypocrite have come not just from independent and unaccountable super PACs but from the paid media of the campaigns and the candidates themselves.

The primary season that much resembles this one is 1964. Then, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, icon of the Eastern liberal establishment that had imposed nominees Wendell Willkie, Tom Dewey (twice) and Dwight Eisenhower on the party, lost the California primary and the nomination to Barry Goldwater.

Speaking to that divided convention, Rockefeller was booed and jeered from the balconies when he called on the delegates to condemn the John Birch Society equally with the Ku Klux Klan and Communist Party.

The party never came together that fall. Goldwater suffered a defeat unequaled since Alf Landon carried two states in 1936. The ideological divide between Romney and Newt is not nearly so great as that between Goldwater and Rockefeller, but the personal animosity is certainly approaching that.

With the Tea Party recoiling from Romney and rallying to Newt, and regular Republicans coalescing around Mitt, with dozens of primaries and caucuses ahead, Tampa just might end up looking like the Cow Palace in ’64.

http://townhall.com/columnists/patbuchanan/2012/01/24/creators_oped

Image of the day from the animal kingdom:

Breaking: Obama’s SOTU Will Be Same-Old, Same-Old, with Cliched GOP Response

From Politico, a vague preview of the speech that will itself be a vague preview of the next year:

Obama aides have already forecast that the president’s message will describe a sharp philosophical divide on the proper role of government in the modern economy, with Obama leading Democrats in insisting that government promote greater opportunity and fairness. …

Democratic strategists say Obama has been laying the groundwork for months for an election-year agenda — and possibly a second term — that is focused squarely on the economy and the middle class.

More here.

What is this, 2000? 1980? I don’t know what is more frustrating and tedious: All the talk about the “middle class” or the pretense of a grand divide over the “role of government in the modern economy.”

link: http://reason.com/blog#article_155230

Quote For Today:

 The heart never grows better by age, I fear rather worse; always harder. A young liar will be an old one; and a young knave will only be a greater knave as he grows older. ~ Lord Chesterfield

  My Pick Of The Litter Today

Democrats cry extremist

By Lorita Doad

Democrats seem to have two preferred adjectives to describe Republicans this year– racist and extremist. Angry charges of “Extremists!” have become common and ubiquitous. Rarely do leading Democrats, such as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, ever talk about Republicans without adding the charge of extremist. Listen to them and it becomes quite clear that they believe “extremist” Republicans in Congress are the root of all evil. And, that these very “extremists’ that are responsible for the American credit-worthiness downgrade, loss of competitiveness, high unemployment, and a sluggish economy. Golly.

Charges of “extremists” Republicans have grown so common, that Democrat leaders such as Wasserman-Shultz have recently taken an even greater leap in logic and lament that fact that these same “extremist” Republicans are responsible for a break down in common civility and even hateful violence. Not only has the main stream media missed the irony of that charge, but all too often they echo the very same charges of “extremism”.

A closer look at what Democrats mean by “extremists” is long overdue–so what (by Democrat standards) does it really mean to be “extreme”?

Let’s see. The Tea Party is considered by Democrats to be “extreme” because they gather in huge numbers to protest profligate spending, out-of-control expansion of government, excessive intrusion of government into the private sector and individual lives and, of course, because they are concerned with a growing trend to ignore the Constitution. So, according to Democrats, anyone with those kinds of beliefs is “extreme”.

What else do Democrats consider “extreme”? More than anything else, anyone talking about the $15 Trillion ($15,000,000,000,000.00) of debt our nation has incurred, anyone who is worried about how we are going to repay that debt is automatically viewed as a “extremists”.

Democrats, by comparison, almost never voluntarily talk about the huge national debt and annual trillions of dollars of spending deficits. For good reason too. Long ago, Democrats understood the dangers of reminding voters that our national finances are precarious, spending unsustainable, and our debt has ballooned.

Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, has not bothered to approve a budget in over three years because it is likely that he does not want Americans to know just how dire out national finances have become. Instead, Reid hopes to squeeze one more Democrat golden egg (green jobs programs, posh bailouts to cronies such as Solyndra, dubious high-speed rail lines to nowhere, subsides for unions) before the Golden Goose that was once the American economy is smothered and killed by the enormous new burdens and bureaucratic impediments he and others in the Democrat party have so unwisely championed.

More: http://townhall.com/columnists/luritadoan/2012/01/23/democrats_cry_extremists/page/full/

    Stories/Articles You Might Find Interesting – or not

It’s Working In Walker’s Wisconsin

More: http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_1_scott-walker.html

 Gingrich’s tax plan would eliminate any tax liability for Romney

Perhaps like others who hope for a Romney nomination, I like Gingrich.  I wish him well — I hope he continues to prosper and to generate ideas for the conservative movement.  However, his shining oratory has outpaced the cogency of the ideas expressed therein.  As he tries to gin up populist resentment against Romney’s wealth, he has lost all philosophical and political coherence.  He needs to be called out with regard to his mocking of Romney’s tax payments, in particular.

As was pointed out in a news release from Reuters, Newt’s tax code ideas would mean that people like Romney would pay much less in taxes — nothing, actually —  whereas Romney’s tax proposals would be much more progressive by comparison.  If Newt believes that Romney’s paying 15 percent on his capital gains is somehow unethical or otherwise worthy of ridicule, he needs to be advocating tax reform which would ensure those “in the upper one percent” pay more, not less on their income.  He cannot have it both ways. 

Under Gingrich’s plan, Romney would pay nothing in taxes, nor would billionaire hedge fund managers pay anything, who also report their income as capital gains.  Newt’s plan would not only mean that Romney would pay zero in taxes on capital gains, but that he would pay nothing in taxes at all!

Under Romney’s tax plan, those who earn under $200,000 would not pay capital gains taxes, and therefore this cut would not benefit him personally.  Instead, Romney’s tax proposals on capital gains would simply maintain the status quo as it would apply to those making more than 200k annually.

According to another report from Reuters, Gingrich’s tax records reveal that he paid thirty-one percent income taxes and that his income comes from his media and consulting conglomerates, Gingrich Productions and Gingrich Consulting.  A lot of that income probably derives from lobbying, but his tax returns are not particularly transparent and therefore his fees and clients from lobbying are not clear for the public to see.

Gingrich pays taxes at a higher rate not necessarily due to his civic virtue, but due to the tax code. That tax code locks Romney in at 15 percent regardless of his own volition.  As Gingrich probably realizes, most Americans who are just casual observers of politics will not make such distinctions.  He wants to benefit from populist resentment of wealth disparity while advocating policies that would exacerbate that disparity.  That hardly makes Newt the working class hero he is apparently positioning himself to be. 

 http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/01/gingrichs_tax_plan_would_eliminate_any_tax_liability_for_romney.html

For the past few months we’ve been hearing a lot in the mainstream media about the demise of the Tea Party and conservative Republicans in general. After their triumph in 2010 the Tea Party’s influence was supposed to have peaked last summer during the debt ceiling crisis. The failure of presidential candidates who openly identified with the movement such as Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Rick Perry was seen as evidence of their not being able to even influence the GOP. But yesterday’s big victory in the South Carolina primary by Newt Gingrich is a clear indication that conservatives are still calling the tune in the Republican Party and anyone who thinks their concerns can be ignored or swept to the side is mistaken.

Gingrich won because, unlike Mitt Romney, he was able to tap into the genuine anger that conservatives in this country feel for President Obama and his cheerleaders in the liberal media echo chamber. While Gingrich’s claim to be the true conservative in the race is highly questionable, there is no question that he was the best at articulating the same fervor that helped galvanize Tea Party sentiment and sweep the last midterm elections. If Romney hopes to keep Gingrich’s latest comeback from gaining enough momentum to deny him the GOP nomination, he is going to have to find a way to convince conservatives that he is not merely a technocrat who understands the economy but a man who understands and can articulate their core beliefs. In other words, not only is the Tea Party’s moment not in the past, it is still very much the future of the Republican Party.

Needless to say, liberals are not taking this development with a good grace.

The New York Times editorial column this morning attempted to rationalize Gingrich’s win by attributing it to conservative racism. This is a liberal canard that has been repeated endlessly in the last two years without any proof to back it up. But the anger that the Times and other liberals mistake for racism is genuine. It is not, however, fueled by racism or a wish to deny minorities opportunities but a function of the frustration that many Americans feel about Obama’s reckless spending and taxing that is leading the country over the economic cliff.

 link: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/01/22/south-carolina-conservatives-tea-party-gingrich/

It’s not wonder we have so many phonies in office. Here is another, one of many, articles that is urging Mitt Romney to be someone he isn’t. Phony up the rhetoric and personna and you too can lie your way into the White House. It has become all too apparent to me that we have the government we deserve. God help us all.

Something To Think About

Why do people vote for candidates they know are lying to them?

  Giffords to resign from congress

More: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/71787.html

Romney throws first punch in Florida

ORMOND BEACH, Fla. – In the opening round of what promises to be a slugfest in Florida, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Sunday called rival Newt Gingrich a “failed leader” and influence-peddling lobbyist while suggesting it’s now a three-way contest for the GOP nomination – a strategic assessment that favors his own chances of winning the state’s Jan. 31 primary.

At a campaign rally after his disappointing loss in the South Carolina primary Saturday, Romney offered a biting portrayal of Gingrich’s record as House speaker and later as a business consultant to companies seeking access to Capitol Hill power brokers.

“At the end of four years (as speaker), it was proven that he was as failed leader. And he had to resign in disgrace. I don’t know whether you knew that,” Romney said, referring to a 1997 House reprimand of Gingrich for ethics violations, which also resulted in a $300,000 fine.

“Well, what’s he been doing for 15 years? He’s been working as a lobbyist, yeah. He’s been working as a lobbyist and selling influence around Washington. He’s been working for Freddie Mac. Heard of those guys?” Romney said, in a state where housing foreclosures, including some presided over by the mortgage giant, have left the economy in tatters.

http://nationaljournal.com/2012-presidential-campaign/romney-throws-his-first-punch-in-florida-20120122?mrefid=election2012

White House rushes to define Keystone message ahead of Republicans

 link: http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/205655-white-house-rushes-to-define-keystone-message-ahead-of-gop

The truly dismal State of the Union

There is one person — one American among the 300 million of us — who is not to blame for the state of the union. Everyone else, each of you, in some small or large way, bears some share of the blame, but not this guy. Not one little bit.

This guy is Barack Obama. He is not the least bit to blame for the dismal state of the U.S. economy. George W. Bush is, for sure, and that evil Dick Cheney, oh, no doubt. House Speaker John A. Boehner — evil, too — is, of course, to blame. But guess what? So is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, and every Democrat in the House and Senate.

Now, President Truman made it very clear: The buck stops with him. No passing the buck for that guy. But Mr. Obama blames everyone but himself. Mr. Bush, he says, left the nation in a ditch, a deep ditch, and he’s been digging out since he took office. And Congress? Those guys are just plain awful, he says. So mean. Wah, they won’t do anything I want done! Mr. Obama feels so sure about it that he’s basing his re-election campaign on bashing Capitol Hill.

But with the president delivering his State of the Union speech to Congress Tuesday night, let’s pause here to take as hard look at the real state of America, by the numbers, using only cold, hard facts.

link: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jan/22/curl-the-truly-dismal-state-of-the-union/?page=all#pagebreak

The road ahead looks good for Romney despite South Carolina

McClatchy Newspapers

link: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/01/22/3385304/the-road-ahead-looks-good-for.html

Image of the day from the animal kingdom:

Oh good, Mother Nature has spread some camouflage for me.

Quote For Today:

 Government is merely a servant – merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn’t. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them. ~ Mark Twain

Sunday Sermon

    Stories/Articles I found of interest this Sunday Morning

  Romney gives strong speech after South Carolina primary   

 Mitt Romney, in his speech after the South Carolina primary, spent time focusing on Barack Obama and the alternate choices that the GOP can offer America: it’s a party that believes in prosperity, and celebrating success, rather than big government.

He also said he’d win the battle if Obama wanted to compare his record of job losses and crony capitalism with Romney’s record of job creation and free market success.

Romney also assured he’s in it for the long haul.

“I will compete in every single state,” Romney declared.

Fox News’ Bret Baier, in his report, also highlighted the Romney statement that those who pick up the weapons of the Left today will find it turned against them tomorrow (a hit at Gingrich, perhaps?).

Romney also said he would embrace competition, and that it’s making his campaign stronger.

link: http://townhall.com/tipsheet/elisabethmeinecke/2012/01/21/romney_gives_strong_speech_after_south_carolina_primary

Newt’s open marriage with conservatives

Jeb Bush Refrains From Endorsing Anyone

Jeb Bush, the popular former Florida governor, said he will “stay neutral” in the state’s Republican presidential primary while warning his party’s candidates to leave the “circular firing squad” of their debates behind and start appealing to a broader audience.

Bush’s remarks, in an exclusive interview, establish a challenge for his party’s candidates as the contest advances to Florida, where the Jan. 31 primary will take the race into its biggest and most diverse arena yet. The winner will be awarded all of the state’s 57 presidential convention delegates.

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich have courted Bush’s endorsement in recent days, he says. In December, his father, former President George H. W. Bush, told the Houston Chronicle he was giving Romney an “unofficial” endorsement. John H. Sununu Sr., the senior Bush’s former White House chief of staff, is serving as a surrogate for the Romney campaign.

ink: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-22/jeb-bush-cautions-republicans-on-tone-without-endorsing-any-candidate.html

IMO this is worse news for Romney than Gingrich. I don’t think anyone expected Bush to endorse Gingrich.

 Three takeaways from South Carolina

Analysts are kidding themselves if they say Romney is the inevitable nominee. Simply put, there are very few states where he can perform among the major demographic groups the way he performed in South Carolina and still expect to win. And remember, this is still in many ways the electorate that selected Christine O’Donnell, Carl Paladino and Linda McMahon as its standard-bearers — in very blue states with relatively moderate GOP electorates, no less.

This vote was an utter repudiation of Romney, and it absolutely will be repeated in state after state if something doesn’t change the basic dynamic of the race. It is true that Gingrich doesn’t have funds or organization, but he gets a ton of free media from the debates, and he has an electorate that simply wants someone other than Romney.

That’s not to say that Romney’s money and organization don’t give him advantages — they do. He remains the GOP front-runner, in my view, because it isn’t clear how well Gingrich can survive the long haul. But there’s a not-insubstantial chance, call it 35 percent, that Romney won’t be the nominee. 

More: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/01/22/three_takeaways_from_south_carolina_112861.html

Will a Long Race Help the Eventual Winner?

One of the pieces of conventional wisdom we’ve been hearing a lot of in the last few weeks is that a long, tough fight will be better for the eventual winner of the Republican presidential contest than one that is quickly decided. Since Newt Gingrich’s win in South Carolina tonight ensures that the nomination can’t be sewn up in short order, that theory is going to be tested in the coming weeks and months.

The proof for this thesis is supposedly the outcome of the 2008 Democratic primary battle in which an extended contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama was seen as helping Obama in the long run.

Most observers believed Obama was toughened up the process in which he was forced to campaign all across the country. But there is a big difference between what happened to Obama and what Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich will undergo in the days ahead. Without the sympathetic if not adoring coverage that Obama got in the spring of 2008 from the mainstream press, the result of further GOP bloodletting will be two bleeding candidates no matter who turns out to be the winner.

It should be remembered that though Clinton criticized Obama for his shortcomings, most of the press did not choose to make much of the eventual Democratic nominee’s weaknesses. Even those stories that were reported extensively, such as his association with the radical Reverend Jeremiah Wright, were quickly put to rest after an Obama’s speech about race in which he skirted the basic issues.

More: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/01/21/gop-race-long-battle-gingrich-romney-obama-clinton/

President Newt? Not likely but scary for GOP

Humiliated and humbled, Romney remains the front-runner for the GOP nomination and, by all conventional measures, is best equipped to push Obama from office. But he has now lost two of three races and leaves South Carolina as a tarnished brand: Equivocations over his tax filings and tone-deaf comments about his wealth and status played into Democratic plans to portray Romney as a cold-hearted, flip-flopping, fat cat who would say or do anything to get elected.

Gingrich is an unabashed egoist (“I think grandiose thoughts”) who likes to compare himself to historic figures including Abraham Lincoln, Charles de Gaulle, the Duke of Wellington, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. He might soon add Jesus Christ to that list because Gingrich has had more political resurrections this past year than the son of God.

Abandoned by his staff  last spring and written off by the GOP establishment in Iowa, Gingrich’s record is a testament both to his resilience and volatility. Republicans who worked the closest with Gingrich while he was House Speaker — a tenure marked by extraordinary success and failure — call him brilliant thinker but an insufferably mercurial leader. Many of them oppose his presidential candidacy.

More: http://decoded.nationaljournal.com/2012/01/not-for-publication.php

 With Keystone it’s Harvard vs Heartland

Two people named Redford have sharply differing opinions about Barack Obama’s decision to block the contentious Keystone XL oil pipeline, which would have run from Alberta down to Texas. The obscure Redford (Alison, the Premier of Alberta) is “bitterly disappointed,” while the famous Redford (Robert, the Hollywood celebrity) is ecstatic. He calls it “a victory of historic proportions” against “one of the most nightmarish fossil fuel projects of our time.” Whose side you’re on may say a lot about where you live and who you voted for.

Meantime, a new energy boom has broken out in the United States. As companies tap into vast new reserves of shale oil, thousands of new jobs – far more than the pipeline promised – are being created in Texas, North Dakota and Ohio. On Tuesday, the day before the Keystone decision, the President’s Council on Jobs called for aggressive “all-in” expansion of gas, oil and coal production.

As for Keystone, much of it probably will get built anyway – just not, for now, the bit that goes over the border. Harvard may have won the battle. But the heartland is winning the war.

link: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/margaret-wente/with-keystone-its-harvard-vs-the-heartland/article2309950/

Image of the day from the animal kingdom:

   Quote For A Sunday Morning:

     “I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself. ” ~ Oscar Wilde

  My Pick Of The Litter Today

Illinois gets downgraded by Moody’s

 Say, remember when the state of Illinois took the Democratic approach to fixing their budget woes by raising taxes?  The debt problems of the Land of Lincoln would disappear, Governor Pat Quinn argued, if the state hiked corporate and personal income tax rates by as much as two-thirds.  The extra revenue would stabilize the state’s fiscal footing and pull them from the brink of financial disaster.

How well did that work out?  As the Wall Street Journal reports today, Illinois debt has now been downgraded to the lowest rating of all 50 states by Moody’s:

Though too few noticed, this month Moody’s downgraded Illinois state debt to A2 from A1, the lowest among the 50 states. That’s worse even than California. The state’s cost of borrowing for $800 million of new 10-year general obligation bonds rose to 3.1%—which is 110 basis points higher than the 2% on top-rated 10-year bonds of more financially secure states.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Only a year ago, Governor Pat Quinn and his fellow Democrats raised individual income taxes by 67% and the corporate tax rate by 46%. They did it to raise $7 billion in revenue, as the Governor put it, to “get Illinois back on fiscal sound footing” and improve the state’s credit rating.

So much for that. In its downgrade statement, Moody’s panned Illinois lawmakers for “a legislative session in which the state took no steps to implement lasting solutions to its severe pension underfunding or to its chronic bill payment delays.” An analysis by Bloomberg finds that the assets in the pension fund will only cover “45% of projected liabilities, the least of any state.” And—no surprise—in part because the tax increases have caused companies to leave Illinois, the state budget office confesses that as of this month the state still has $6.8 billion in unpaid bills and unaddressed obligations.

Another state tackling debt and budget issues went another direction, and Moody’s noticed the difference — and the WSJ warns Wisconsin voters to take a look at the alternative:

In contrast to the Illinois downgrade, Moody’s has praised Mr. Walker’s budget as “credit positive for Wisconsin,” adding that the money-saving reforms bring “the state’s finances closer to a structural budgetary balance.” As a result, Wisconsin jumped in Chief Executive magazine’s 2011 ranking of each state’s business climate—moving to 17th from 41st. Illinois dropped to 48th from 45th as ranked by the nation’s top CEOs.

Yet Mr. Walker, who balanced the budget without new taxes, is the governor facing a union-financed attempt to recall him from office this year. If Wisconsin voters want to see where a state ends up without the kind of reforms that Mr. Walker made, they need only look to the Greece next door.

Dan Mitchell says that the Illinois approach only exacerbated the problem by feeding the spending addiction rather than starving it:

In other words, higher taxes led to fiscal deterioration in Illinois, just as tax increases in Europe have been followed by bad outcomes.

Whenever any politician argues in favor of a higher tax burden, just keep these two points in mind:

1. Higher taxes encourage more government spending.

2. Higher taxes don’t raise as much money as politicians claim.

The combination of these two factors explains why higher taxes make things worse rather than better. And they explain why Europe is in trouble and why Illinois is in trouble.

They may finally be getting the message in Illinois.  Republicans in the state legislature, outnumbered though they may be, have started an effort to repeal Quinn’s tax hikes.  The failure of Quinn in Illinois does provide a valuable example of how not to address a fiscal crisis brought on by overspending, and one that voters in every state should study carefully.

Link: http://hotair.com/archives/2012/01/20/illinois-gets-downgraded-by-moodys/

    Stories/Articles You Might Find Interesting – or not

Pleading the fifth – Gunwalker witness refuses to testify

Patrick J. Cunningham, chief of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona, is invoking his Fifth Amendment rights and declining to testify about Operation Fast and Furious in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Cunningham’s attorney Tobin Romero suggests his client is being scapegoated:

“Department of Justice officials have reported to the Committee that my client relayed inaccurate information to the Department upon which it relied in preparing its initial response to Congress. If, as you claim, Department officials have blamed my client, they have blamed him unfairly.”

Romero claims Cunningham did nothing wrong and acted in good faith, but the Department of Justice in Washington is making him the fall guy, claiming he failed to accurately provide the Oversight Committee with information on the execution of Fast and Furious.

“To avoid needless preparation by the Committee and its staff for a deposition next week, I am writing to advise you that my client is going to assert his constitutional privilege not to be compelled to be a witness against himself.” Romero told [Congressman Darrell] Issa.

This schism is the first big break in what has been a unified front in the government’s defense of itself in the gun-running scandal. Cunningham claims he is a victim of a conflict between two branches of government and will not be compelled to be a witnesses against himself, and make a statement that could be later used by a grand jury or special prosecutor to indict him on criminal charges.

Romero’s letter to the Oversight Committee points out that the gunwalking plot began in 2009, and notes that Cunningham did not join the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona until months later, in 2010. Romero’s insistence that his client could not have been involved in the creation and approval of Fast and Furious seems like an airtight alibi. However, what he knew after he became chief of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona — and chose not to act upon — could indeed lead to administrative action or criminal charges.

More: http://pjmedia.com/blog/pleading-the-fifth-gunwalker-witness-refuses-to-testify/

Labor Union leaves bluegreen alliance over Keystone disagreement

The BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of environmental groups and labor unions, confirmed LIUNA’s exit Friday afternoon.

“The BlueGreen Alliance regrets the decision of the Laborers’ International Union of North America to leave our strategic partnership of labor and environmental organizations,” the group’s executive director, David Foster, said in a statement.

The move underscores the intense political divide among unions over the pipeline, which would carry oil sands crude from Alberta, Canada, to refineries along the Gulf Coast.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said earlier this month that the group’s membership has been unable to come to a unified position on the pipeline.

More: http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/205441-labor-union-leaves-bluegreen-alliance-over-keystone-disagreement

 Lower Than Low

Congress’s approval ratings can’t get much worse. How many incumbents could lose their seats?

The ABC News/Washington Post and CNN/Opinion Research national polls released this week that show Congress’s job-approval rating dropping to record low levels are barely creating a ripple—because the news is not new. With the exception of the immediate aftermath of extraordinary events like 9/11, the public routinely holds Congress in, as they say, “minimum high regard.” But now, the new norm is record lows. Both polls showed that upwards of eight of 10 Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike disapprove of the institution—an instance of rare agreement for three such disparate groups.

What is new is that in recent months, the long-held distinction between how voters see Congress overall and how they view their own members of Congress seems to be diminishing as well. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey in August found that 54 percent of respondents would choose the option (if it were on the ballot) to defeat every single member of Congress, including their own. Only 41 percent would not do so. Now, routinely, when voters are given the choice of reelecting their own (unnamed) member of Congress or choosing to “give a new person a chance,” majorities opt for the latter.

One of the more unfortunate trends in recent years has been that Washington and the political world have increasingly looked at politics and policy on a single lateral partisan or ideological plane, without considering other possibly important dimensions. Too many view everything on a left-right ideological axis or on a Democratic-Republican plane, viewing every issue or development as a zero-sum game. If we can make the other side look bad on this issue or subject, we will look better, they reason.

Political operatives and reporters, cable political shows, and Internet blogs tend to feed this tendency. Members of Congress gamely go along with it. Little appreciation exists for how much these attacks damage the institutions or the process. Lawmakers seem unaware that they are also inflicting damage on themselves. The cumulative impact of this mutually assured destruction is that congressional service that used to be viewed back home as a pedestal may start looking like a ditch; the advantage of incumbency, in other words, can become a disadvantage.

More: http://nationaljournal.com/columns/cook-report/the-cook-report-lower-than-low-20120119

Something To Think About

 a Herd of Cows

 

a Flock of chickens,

 

a School of fish

 

and a Gaggle of geese.

 

However, less widely known is:

a Pride of lions,

a Murder of crows

 

(as well as their cousins the rooks and ravens),

 

an Exaltation of doves

 

and, presumably because they look so wise:

 

a Parliament of owls.

 

 

 

Now consider a group of Baboons.

 

They are the loudest, most dangerous, most obnoxious, most viciously aggressive and least intelligent of all primates.

 

And what is the proper collective noun for a group of baboons?

 

 

 

 

 

Believe it or not ……. a Congress!

 

 

A CONGRESS OF BABOONS!

 

I guess that pretty much explains the things that come out of Washington !

 

You just can’t make this stuff up.

 

Doesn’t that one in the middle sort of resemble Debbie Wasserman Schultz? Hmm?

 

  Fox Host Can’t Contain Frustration During Actual Eye-Rolling Interview With Debbie Wasserman Schultz 

If you follow politics, you’ve probably seen a lot of interviews where the interviewee refuses to answer the questions and instead spews only talking points. If those interviews frustrate you, get ready to pull out your hair when you see this one with DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Link: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/fox-host-cant-contain-frustration-during-actual-eye-rolling-interview-with-debbie-wasserman-schultz/

Indiana Democrats abandon ship. Again.

Not The Conservative Movement’s Finest Hour

By Peter Wehner

know that the conventional wisdom is that in answering last night’s question from CNN’s John King, about whether he had asked his then-wife to enter into an open marriage, Newt  Gingrich “hit it out of the park.” He certainly brought the GOP audience to its feet. He’s winning praise from all sides for how he turned the question into an assault on the mainstream media.

I accept the fact that Gingrich helped himself politically with his answer. He may even win the South Carolina primary tomorrow. (Indeed, I think it’s quite likely that will occur.) But I do think that it’s useful to excerpt the debate transcript and analyze what it might tell us.

Here’s how the exchange went:

MR. KING: As you know, your ex-wife gave an interview to ABC News and another interview with The Washington Post, and this story has now gone viral on the Internet. In it, she says that you came to her in 1999, at a time when you were having an affair. She says you asked her, sir, to enter into an open marriage. Would you like to take some time to respond to that?

MR. GINGRICH: No — but I will. (Cheers, applause.) I think — I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office. And I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that. (Cheers, applause.)

MR. KING: Is that all you want to say, sir?

MR. GINGRICH: Let me finish.

MR. KING: Please. (Boos, cheers, applause.)

MR. GINGRICH: Every person in here knows personal pain. Every person in here has had someone close to them go through painful things. To take an ex-wife and make it two days before the primary a significant question in a presidential campaign is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine. (Cheers, applause.) My — my two daughters, my two daughters wrote the head of ABC, and made the point that it was wrong, that they should pull it. And I am frankly astounded that CNN would take trash like that and use it to open a presidential debate. (Cheers, applause.)

The language Gingrich used to describe the media – “destructive,” “vicious,” “negative,” and guilty of reporting “trash”  — is typical of the understatement we’ve come to expect from him. But I want to focus on Mr. Gingrich’s claim that to report this story two days before the South Carolina primary is “as close to despicable as anything I can imagine.”

Really? Anything Mr. Gingrich can imagine? More despicable than, say, rape? Or murder? Or genocide? Or – just to pull an example out of mid-air — serially cheating on your wives? And to do so when you’re, say, Speaker of the House? During the impeachment of Bill Clinton over crimes that grew out of an affair with an intern? Reporting that story was more despicable than any of these things?

I’m sorry, Gingrich supporters throughout the land, but words have meaning. And for Mr. Gingrich to make the claim he did – and to win thunderous applause for it – is both amazing and somewhat dispiriting.

More: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/01/20/newt-gingrich-marianne-press-debate/

The part that expressed how I feel about this the most was this:

It was quite revealing to me that Mr. Gingrich, in his answer, didn’t show any contrition or remorse. Instead, he reacted with indignant self-righteousness. So think about this: Mr. Gingrich, a candidate for the presidency, is enraged because the press interviewed his ex-wife and, in the process, has drawn attention to his own infidelity and mistreatment of his ex-wife, which no one disputes. And in all of this the injured party isn’t Marianne Gingrich but rather Newt Gingrich. The offending party isn’t the former speaker; it’s the press for daring to raise this matter.

Winners and Losers in online piracy battle aka SOPA – PIPA

link: http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/205539-winners-and-losers-in-online-piracy-battle-sopa-pipa

What’s Going On In The World?

 link: http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/europe-downgrades-ratings-agencies/

Way to go! If you don’t like the ratings form your own rating company to comply with your wishes. Might not have much credibility though.

Image of the day from the animal kingdom:

Okay, jokes over. This has ceased to be amusing!

Quote For Today:

      The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop. ~ P. J. O’Rourke

  My Pick Of The Litter Today

How Much Economic Freedom Do We Have in the United States?

By Judge Andrew Napolitano

The root of economic freedom is the recognition of the right to own private property. That includes the right to utilize it unmolested, to dispose of it without anyone’s permission and to exclude anyone from it, even the government. Suffice it to say, no American president since the advent of the income tax and the Federal Reserve 100 years ago has fully accepted or meaningfully defended that right. The more the government extracts in taxes and the more it inflates the money supply, the more it rejects and assaults property rights.

Every president in the 20th century, even Ronald Reagan, signed legislation raising income taxes. The theory behind the income tax is that the government’s need for cash is so great, it can just take it from your employer after you earn it but before your employer pays you — before you even see the cash — and use it as it sees fit. This presumes that the federal government has a greater right to your income than you do. There really can be no rationale for income taxes without that belief.

Do you know anyone outside the government who believes this?

If you believe you have the natural right to own your property and to trade and spend your money as you see fit, then there is only one Republican presidential candidate who agrees with you. That candidate, when asked last week in South Carolina what the rate of income taxes should be, replied: ZERO. One needs to laugh at Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich as they pitifully attempt to defend natural rights and the right to pursue happiness, when they have no respect for the right to own private property.

More: http://townhall.com/columnists/judgeandrewnapolitano/2012/01/20/how_much_economic_freedom_do_we_have_in_the_united_states

    Stories/Articles You Might Find Interesting – or not

Newt is debater-in-chief, but President?

“I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country harder to attract decent people to run for office,” Gingrich said to cheers. “I’m appalled you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that.” His attack neutralized the issue as effectively as could be done.

But Gingrich for president? That’s another matter. Look, we know that Newt is basically the last man standing against the all but inevitable nominee, Mitt Romney, with Santorum fading fast (despite a somewhat effective performance tonight; he was the only one still attacking Romney). And yes, there has been a gradual numbing-down of the nation’s sensitivity over sexual escapades since “Monkey Business” and Monica Lewinsky. But the allegations from Newt’s ex, Marianne, about his request for an “open marriage” are a bit much even in today’s environment, especially coming in socially conservative South Carolina.

More: http://decoded.nationaljournal.com/2012/01/newt-debaterinchief-but-presid.php

 Gingrich Bashes Media, Then Gets Whipped By Santorum

The last debate before the crucial South Carolina primary started off with a bang when CNN host John King asked Newt Gingrich about his second wife’s charge that he asked for an “open marriage.” The former speaker responded with a tirade against the media that earned wild applause from the audience in Charleston and may well have been the most significant sound bite from the evening. But the rest of the night didn’t go quite as well as for Gingrich, who entered the evening leading in some of the latest polls in the state.

The reason for that was this turned out to be Rick Santorum’s strongest performance in any of the debates. The former Pennsylvania senator scored points all night at the expense of both Gingrich and Mitt Romney, who spent much of the night on the defensive. That’s problematic for Romney, who might be able to salt away the nomination with a win on Saturday night. But the question for Republicans is whether Santorum’s pounding of the two men ahead of him in the polls will take away enough votes from Gingrich to let Romney squeak out a win in the state. Even more importantly, they will be left wondering whether Gingrich will be able to get away with dismissing his ex-wife’s comments as “trash” if a win in South Carolina enables him to effectively challenge Romney for the nomination.

More: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/01/19/gingrich-media-santorum-south-carlina-debate/#more-781410

There is nothing, including my loathing of Obama, that would make me vote for a Social Conservative like Santorum. However I hope he stays in the race a while longer. Does the term “useful idiot” strike a chord? By dividing the social conservatives, who with their “family values” somehow can bring themselves to supporting a POS like Gingrich, Santorum provides a service to people with a brain.

 A Libertarian Democrat Considers Romney

So much for the hope that Obama would move the party in a back-to-the-future Jeffersonian liberal direction.

He flip-flopped on health insurance. He’s interventionist. He backed off gay rights. He has no serious immigration plan. He supports the drug war. He’s coldly analytical, but with a loving family.

More: http://reason.com/archives/2012/01/19/a-libertarian-democrat-considers-mitt-ro

Something To Think About

It’s called the Left, isn’t it? So why hasn’t it?

  And Overall…

 Aside from John King’s failure to ask even a single question about foreign policy, it was an interesting debate.

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/carolplattliebau/2012/01/19/and_overall

Va. Gov. McDonnell Endorses Romney

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell endorsed Mitt Romney for the GOP presidential nomination on Friday, ahead of Saturday’s South Carolina primary.  

“Mitt Romney has been an effective leader his entire life, in business, the Olympics and as governor,” McDonnell tweeted before scheduled appearances on several cable news networks.

More: http://nationaljournal.com/2012-presidential-campaign/va-gov-mcdonnell-endorses-romney-20120120

All About Keystone

 Obama’s Keystone not going over so well

Yesterday, I urged Republicans to pummel President Obama for his indefensible, job-killing, ideological decision to block the Keystone XL pipeline project.  Today the that task became even easier, as some unexpected allies joined the anti-Obama chorus.  A brief review, starting with the Washington Post’s editorial board: 

Mr. Obama’s Jobs Council could start by calling out . . . the Obama administration. On Wednesday, the State Department announced that it recommended rejecting the application of TransCanada Corp. to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline, and Mr. Obama concurred. The project would have transported heavy, oil-like bitumen from Alberta — and, potentially, from unconventional oil deposits in states such as Montana — to U.S. refineries on the Gulf of Mexico coast.

…We almost hope this was a political call because, on the substance, there should be no question. Without the pipeline, Canada would still export its bitumen — with long-term trends in the global market, it’s far too valuable to keep in the ground — but it would go to China. And, as a State Department report found, U.S. refineries would still import low-quality crude — just from the Middle East. Stopping the pipeline, then, wouldn’t do anything to reduce global warming, but it would almost certainly require more oil to be transported across oceans in tankers…Pipeline skeptics dispute the estimates of the number of jobs that the project would create. But, clearly, constructing the pipeline would still result in job gains during a sluggish economic recovery.

The Chicago Tribune editorial board:

Keystone should be approved. This is a good project. It will give us energy and give us jobs. You want stimulus? This is a $7 billion deal to be done with private-sector funding. Keystone is designed to stretch 1,711 miles down through the Plains from oil-sand deposits in the Canadian province of Alberta to U.S. refineries and terminals along the Gulf Coast. It would make the vast network of pipelines already crisscrossing the central states significantly more efficient. Labor unions rightly supported the project. But it ran into opposition from environmentalists.

Blocking construction of the Keystone pipeline became the No. 1 objective of the green lobby, which raised concerns that construction and operation would pollute aquifers and destroy wildlife habitats. There just isn’t much evidence for those threats, though. Pipelines are the safest way to transport oil. The designers of this particular pipeline engineered it with lavish safeguards. No one need worry about crude gushing out of their shower heads. But you never would have known it from the signs at anti-Keystone protests, which touted slogans such as, “U can’t drink oil OR money!”

 More: http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2012/01/19/obamas_keystone_not_going_over_so_well

 Keystone Madness

 By Robert Samuelson

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico is an act of national insanity. It isn’t often that a president makes a decision that has no redeeming virtues and — beyond the symbolism — won’t even advance the goals of the groups that demanded it. All it tells us is that Obama is so obsessed with his re-election that, through some sort of political calculus, he believes that placating his environmental supporters will improve his chances.

More: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/01/20/keystone_madness__112829.html

The Land of Obama Make-Believe

by Michelle Malkin

And where’d he head after that? Why, up to Manhattan for more high-priced campaign fundraisers charging up to $38,500 per partier. The business of wining and dining politically connected donors ain’t child’s play, you know.

Obama touted a White House foreign tourism initiative on Thursday with Cinderella’s castle as his backdrop. “America is open for business,” he proclaimed chirpily to the rest of the globe.

Tell that to the Keystone managers in Canada whom Obama and his State Department rebuffed — after years of planning and review — in order to appease militant environmentalists and Hollywood celebs. The Animatronic Divider robotically lambasted Republicans for pushing him to make a decision this week. But Senate and House Democrats issued the sharpest rebukes to White House obstructionism:

“President Obama’s decision on the Keystone XL pipeline is a major setback for the American economy, American workers, and America’s energy independence,” Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., said.

More:http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/01/20/the_land_of_obama_make-believe_112834.html

Newt’s Adultry: Forgive and Forget?

link: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/71698.html

Forgive? That’s not up to me. Forget? Not damn likely. If it had been one slip up perhaps but this is Newt’s history. Plus his hypocritical hounding and denouncing of Bill Clinton while he was bringing his latest little cookie home to his and his wife’s marriage bed. His repentence and forgiveness is up to a much higher authority than me, and I don’t mean the damn evangelicals. But the lack of character his actions showed tells me that he is not the kind of a man that we should have in the White House representing our country. Character does count. And I don’t believe Newt Gingrich has any.

Anyone but Harry Reid

After dutifully watching all of the Republican presidential debates, I have arrived at an irrefutable conclusion: regardless of which GOP contender you may want to challenge President Obama this fall, our collective goal must be to get rid of this guy once and for all.

I refer, of course, to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

I know, I know. The planet is fixated on the primary sweepstakes at the moment, largely because the media have successfully marketed this process as a must-see-TV event combining the best elements of American Idoland the UFC. And to their credit, the networks and cable providers have created a hit show in an otherwise forgettable TV season.

(This is not my observation. My son is currently a writer and producer of The Office on NBC, and a while ago I asked him how the network’s new fall lineup was faring. His response: “I don’t think we’ll have one show that will run as long as the Republican debates.”)

So don’t touch that dial. All I am asking my fellow GOPers and curious independents to do between episodes of the Republican Road Show is to check out what is happening in the Democrat-controlled Senate under the direction of Maestro Reid.

Perhaps I should say: check out what is not happening. On January 24, 2012, while we focus on Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address, Harry Reid’s Senate will be celebrating their 1000th consecutive day without passing a budget. Not only is this an unprecedented dereliction of duty, it may actually be a violation of law. However, given the president’s cavalier attitude towards the legality of recess appointments and his attorney general’s reluctance to protect voters in Philadelphia from Black Panther harassment, don’t look for the feds to come down too hard on Harry and the boys.

link: http://pjmedia.com/blog/2012-anyone-but-%e2%80%a6-harry/

What’s Going On In The World?

Hosni Mubarak’s unfair trial

SINCE TAKING power 11 months ago, Egypt’s ruling military council has perpetrated a host of injustices. It has subjected some 12,000 civilians to summary military trials, in which 8,000 have been convicted. It has imprisoned bloggers and liberal activists while shielding police and troops who have shot and killed protesters. It launched raids against American and U.S.-financed non-government groups involved in human rights and democracy promotion.

To all that must be added this: The generals have also staged a trial for their former president, Hosni Mubarak, that in every respect has been a travesty.

Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hosni-mubaraks-unfair-trial-in-egypt/2012/01/18/gIQArTP4BQ_story.html

Oh my, the WaPo is all upset about Hosni Mubarak’s unfair trial. Fancy that. When a trial begins with the assumption of guilt and the trail just being in the way of getting down to hanging the sonofabitch, that’s not the kind of justice I was raised to believe in or trust.

Does anyone actually believe for one moment that Saddam got a “fair” trial? Does anyone care? I don’t think so. What bothers me is that if you don’t care about justice for all of us, the good, the bad and the very ugly, then you don’t really care about justice. And that makes these “show” trials in the Middle-East a travesty. A travesty we ignore or applaud.

Image of the day from the animal kingdom:

Nap time.

39% say U.S. has crony capitalist system

With Republicans debating Mitt Romney’s record as a venture capitalist, Americans continue to agree that capitalism is better than socialism, but they give mixed marks to the type of capitalism practiced in this country.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 64% of American Adults now rate capitalism as a better system than socialism. Just 15% think socialism is the better way to go, with another 21% who are undecided.

Link: http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/business/general_business/january_2012/39_say_u_s_has_crony_capitalist_system

   44% worry government will do too much to counter bad economy

Concern that the government will do too much responding to the bad economy has reached its highest level in seven months after falling to a three-year low in December. 

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 44% of Likely U.S. Voters are now more concerned that the government will do too much in reacting to the nation’s economic problems rather than not enough.

Link: http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/business/federal_bailout/january_2012/44_worry_government_will_do_too_much_to_counter_bad_economy

Six in 10 Voters Would Be OK With Obama-Romney Matchup

Democrats would be the most satisfied

Quote For Today:

  Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone. ~ Ayn Rand

  My Pick Of The Litter Today

Democrats receive more Bain Capital dollars than GOP

Democrats have accepted more political donations than Republicans from executives at Bain Capital, complicating the left’s plan to attack Mitt Romney for his record at the private equity firm.

During the last three election cycles, Bain employees have given Democratic candidates and party committees more than $1.2 million. The vast majority of that sum came from senior executives.

More: http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/205025-dems-receive-more-bain-dollars-than-gop

    Stories/Articles You Might Find Interesting – or not

ABC News plans explosive interview with Newt’s second wife

This story is getting the flashing light treatment on Drudge, so it’s destined to blow up.  Here we go:
 

Marianne Gingrich has said she could end her ex-husband's career with a single interview. Earlier this week, she sat before ABCNEWS cameras, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned. She spoke to ABCNEWS reporter Brian Ross for two hours. Her explosive revelations are set to rock the campaign. But now a "civil war" has erupted inside of the network, an insider claims, on exactly when the confession will air!

ABCNEWS suits determined it would be “unethical” to run the Marianne Gingrich interview so close to the South Carolina Primary, a curious decision, one insider argued, since the network has aggressively been reporting on other candidates.

A decision was tentatively made to air the interview next Monday, after all votes have been counted. Gingrich canceled a press conference on Wednesday to deal with the matter. “He believes that what he says in public and how he lives don’t have to be connected,” Marianne Gingrich, Newt’s wife of 18 years, explained to ESQUIRE last year. “When you try and change your history too much, and try and recolor it because you don’t like the way it was or you want it to be different to prove something new … you lose touch with who you really are.”

Rumors are swirling that the controversial interview could air as early as tomorrow night, which may coincide with the scheduled Republican debate on CNN.  Let’s face it: This issue (Newt’s ample personal baggage) has been the giant elephant in the room throughout the nomination contest.  None of Gingrich’s GOP rivals have tackled it directly, but you can bet your bottom dollar that Democrats wouldn’t hesitate plumb the depths of personal gossip to make Newt as toxic as possible in a general election setting.  It is an indisputable fact that Newt cheated on two successive wives, and is now married for a third time.  He has also blamed his indiscretions on his own inflated sense of patriotic duty.  It’s also true that some of the whispers about him are maliciously false.  But when a national candidate has at least one estranged ex-wife out there who’s willing to dish dirt, that can’t be dismissed as a non-issue.  Also, since Newt has justified his supporters’ dishonest explorationsof Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital as a legitimate part of the “vetting” process, and that he was simply “asking questions” about topics that would surely arise in a general, I don’t see how this situation is materially different.  If a major shoe is going to drop, let’s have it drop now. A few questions, as we ponder this possible game-changer:

(1) Are these supposed “bombshell” revelations anything new and uniquely damaging, or will they be a recapitulation of sundry unpleasantries we’ve heard about in the past?

(2) Did the former Mrs. Gingrich come forward on her own volition, or did a rival campaign nudge her toward Brian Ross?  This is irrelevant in terms of the story’s impact, but would still be interesting to know.

(3) Will South Carolina voters see this as an unfair MSM ploy to destroy Gingrich (as many viewed the Herman Cain/Politico imbroglio, at least initially), or will they grow nervous that Newt is a ticking political time bomb?

(4) Will ABC News release the infamous Rashid Khalidi tape, in which then-State Senator Barack Obama reputedly toasts his great friend and Palestinian Liberation Organization activist at a going away party in Chicago?  ABC has had that tape in its possession since the 2008 campaign, but has steadfastly refused to disseminate it in any form.

More: http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2012/01/18/oh_boy_abc_news_plans_explosive_interview_with_newts_second_wife

Would this be some of the oft mentioned “Gingrich baggage?” And why does the “family values” party find Newt appealing in any way? Just wondering.

Obama bows to special interests

The 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta, Canada, would daily transport more than 500,000 barrels of oil derived from oil sands to the Gulf of Mexico. The U.S. already imports about 2 million barrels of oil per day from Canada. Since the pipeline crosses our border the president has the reponsibility to decide if it is in the national interest. President Obama under pressure from the environmental lobby punted on approving the pipeline – bravely putting off his decision until after the elections in November. In December, the Republicans in Congress passed legislation that required the president to make his decision by February 21st. Apparently, he now has.

Proponents of the pipeline point out that the project is shovel-ready and would create 20,000 construction jobs. In addition, the pipeline has passed environmental muster twice already. And the company has agreed to re-site a portion of the pipeline in order to allay exaggerated fears that a leak from it might harm the Ogallala aquifer. Nevertheless, the National Journal is reporting: 

The State Department is expected to deny a permit for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline on Wednesday afternoon ….

The announcement is expected at 3 p.m. by Deputy Secretary of State William Burns, the sources said.

Rejection of the permit would not necessarily kill the 1,700-mile project to carry oil from Canada’s tar sands to refineries in Texas, however.

The Obama administration has said it simply could not adequately review the proposed project in time to meet a 60-day deadline for a decision on the permit imposed by Congress in the payroll-tax package enacted in December.

In a statement emailed to the media, Daniel Weiss, Senior Fellow and Director of Climate Strategy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, praises the decision to further delay the project: 

Today President Obama made a courageous decision that says that special interests will not decide our clean energy future.

Depends on what the meaning of “special interests” is. 

  http://reason.com/blog/2012/01/18/president-obama-bows-to-special-interest

Mitt’s Game

Something To Think About

If it’s true that a nation gets the politicians it deserves isn’t it time we looked at ourselves and determine what we did to deserve this?

  Will unions unseat Wisconsin Governor?

Opponents of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker have now succeeded in collecting over 1 million signatures for mounting a recall election, which now appears certain to take place later this year. Will the enemies of reform succeed in removing him?

They’ll have plenty of outside money for that cause. The state is the focus of the national battle to rein in the power of public-employee unions. And Wisconsin is a must-win swing-state for President Obama this fall, so Democrats want to start rolling back the wave that put Walker, a Republican, in office.

But if voters judge by results, the governor should be safe. The evidence so far contradicts the unions’ claim that the reforms have rendered the state ungovernable.

The GOP’s Gingrich dilemma

At some point after former congresswoman Susan Molinari ripped Newt Gingrich in a conference call arranged by the Mitt Romney campaign, but before we knew that ABC was on the verge of airing a potentially fatal interview with one of Newt’s ex-wives, the Ripon Society circulated a timely reminder. Though “people don’t normally associate Newt with being a champion of women’s rights,” Ripon Forum editor Lou Zickar said in an email, Gingrich does have some female fans in politics.

link: http://decoded.nationaljournal.com/2012/01/the-gops-gingrich-dilemma-now.php

 If would appear that the ex Mrs. Gingrich subscribes to the idea that you needn’t get mad, you get even. Priceless!

Poetry Page

Storms
By Margie DeMerell

 There will be storms, child
There will be storms
And with each tempest
You will seem to stand alone
Against cruel winds
But with time, the rage and fury
Shall subside And when the sky clears
You will find yourself
Clinging to someone
You would have never known
But for storms.

A Dispirited, Polarized, Pessimistic Electorate

by Peter Wehner

Jon Cohen and Dan Balz, writing about a new Washington Post poll, say that President Obama “faces a dispirited and polarized electorate that is sharply divided over his record, worried about the pace of the economic recovery and deeply pessimistic about the country’s trajectory.”

According to the poll:

Obama’s job ratings in the Post poll are 48 percent approval and 48 percent disapproval.

On the economy, easily the most important issue to the public, the president’s approval rating is 41 percent (57 percent disapprove).

Only 9 percent of Americans see a strong economic recovery.

Twice as many people say they are worse off financially since Obama became president than say their situations have improved.

More than half the respondents — 52 percent — say Obama has accomplished “not much” or “little or nothing” as president.

Obama appears to have recovered from a number of career lows in several important areas. But as the Post reports, “the president’s ratings on a series of domestic and economic issues paint a portrait of an incumbent facing a difficult re-election campaign.” My guess is that will be true for most, if not all, of 2012.

This presidential race remains the GOP’s to lose.

 http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/01/18/dispirited-polarized-pessimistic-electorate/

And a fine job of losing it there are doing! Bash each other some more boneheads!

What’s Going On In The World?

Greece: Civilization In Reverse

by Victor Davis Hanson

In Greek mythology, the prophetess Cassandra was doomed both to tell the truth and to be ignored. Our modern version is a bankrupt Greece that we seem to discount.

News accounts abound now of impoverished Athens residents scrounging pharmacies for scarce aspirin — as Greece is squeezed to make interest payments to the supposedly euro-pinching German banks.

Such accounts may be exaggerations, but they should warn us that yearly progress is never assured. Instead, history offers plenty of examples of life becoming far worse than it had been centuries earlier. The biographer Plutarch, writing 500 years after the glories of classical Greece, lamented that in his time weeds grew amid the empty colonnades of the once-impressive Greek city-states. In America, most would prefer to live in the Detroit of 1941 than the Detroit of 2011. The quality of today’s air travel has regressed to the climate of yesterday’s bus service.

 link: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/288436/civilization-reverse-victor-davis-hanson

Image of the day from the animal kingdom:

Men interviewed for anti-Romney/Bain movie tell Megy Kelly they were taken grossly out of context

The following revelation will likely cause an uproar among Mitt Romney supporters and bring significant heat on his detractors. The integrity of the “King of Bain” — a political movie which claims to tell the story of the former Massachusetts Governor’s time at Bain Capital – is being called  into question after two men interviewed for the film claim that, not only were they unaware  the film was about Romney or Bain Capital, their interview clips were taken grossly out of content.

So egregious was the alleged spin, according to UniMac workers Tommy Jones and Mike Baxley, that both men claim the clips in which they are seen talking about personal hardships were in fact references to incidents that came long after their time at Bain Capital. According to the interview subjects, the hardships they speak of in the film refer to a time when they decided to strike it out on their own by starting an independent business.

link: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/men-interviewed-for-anti-romney-bain-movie-tell-megyn-kelly-they-were-taken-grossly-out-of-context/

Oh that Newt, he’s such a kidder!

Election 2012: South Carolina Republican Primary

link: http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/elections/election_2012/election_2012_presidential_election/south_carolina/election_2012_south_carolina_republican_primary

Election 2012: Generic Presidential Ballot

PRINCETON, NJ — Americans’ satisfaction with the size and power of the federal government is at a record-low 29% and their satisfaction with the size and influence of major corporations remains near the all-time low at 30% — making both highly susceptible targets for politicians and presidential candidates in this election year.

link: http://www.gallup.com/poll/152096/Americans-Anti-Big-Business-Big-Gov.aspx

Quote For Today:

 The government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. ~ Ronald Reagan