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A test for Romney, GOP officials, and the former speaker himself
From The Wall Street Journal
Newt Gingrich’s sweeping victory in South Carolina throws the GOP Presidential contest into a useful uproar and poses a challenge for Mitt Romney, what’s left of the Republican establishment, and not least for Mr. Gingrich himself. We’ll see who rises to the occasion.
There’s no denying the breadth of the former House speaker’s triumph in the Palmetto State. He won among rank-and-file Republicans, tea partiers, men and women, all manner of conservatives, most income groups, and every age group save those under 30 (who went narrowly for Ron Paul over Mr. Gingrich).
Most strikingly, he routed Mr. Romney on what had been the former Massachusetts governor’s greatest strength—electability. Some 45% of voters in the exit poll said defeating President Obama was the candidate trait that mattered most, and they went for Mr. Gingrich over Mr. Romney, 51% to 37%.
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This reflects Mr. Gingrich’s debate skills but perhaps more his willingness to promote conservative values. Since Reagan, Republicans have had a President or nominee who was typically either tongue-tied or timid in defending their policies and principles. With Mr. Obama preparing a re-election assault on those principles, GOP voters understandably want a tenacious advocate. Voters sense that, whatever his other failings, Mr. Gingrich can match Mr. Obama on the issues and won’t go down without a fight.
This is in contrast to Mr. Romney, who is cautious at his most tenacious but in the last week has seemed befuddled by questions he surely knew were coming. The demand to release his tax returns was inevitable, especially with Mr. Obama preparing to attack him as “Mr. 1%.” Mr. Romney said Sunday he will release his 2010 tax return on Tuesday, but blowing that layup suggests either personal stubbornness or the lack of an adviser who can tell him when he’s wrong.
The more serious flaw exposed by the tax debate is Mr. Romney’s inability, or unwillingness, to make a larger and persuasive case for free-market economic growth and lower tax rates. Before last week, he seemed to believe he could dodge a class-war battle by not proposing a cut in tax rates. This was always implausible given Mr. Obama’s campaign, but it is impossible now that he has disclosed that his own effective tax rate is 15%.
He faces a fundamental political choice: Duck and cover against the barrage of attacks on his 15% rate, the lower rate on “carried-interest” and any overseas income he might have, or go on offense by standing for something larger than his own career, such as a major tax reform to spur growth.
Mr. Romney and his advisers are making the mistake that John Kerry made against George W. Bush in 2004—believing that voters are so unhappy with the incumbent that all Mr. Romney has to do is present himself as a safe alternative. Mr. Romney seems to think it’s enough to run on his biography as a businessman.
It won’t be enough—unless the economy goes into another recession, which no one should want in any case. The Republican nominee will have to make a sustained and specific case that Mr. Obama’s policies made the recovery weaker than it should have been (stimulus, health care), squandered resources on political boondoggles (Solyndra), and how and why GOP policies will do better. Mr. Romney’s 59 economic proposals are fine but forgettable little ideas. He needs a big idea.
Read the article here.
(Romney is going to lose, because he can not really defend himself and his record. he will resort to lying about Gingrich, but really people know that Romney is just a whiter version of Obama)
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Think about this. Obama is scary when what he says is so damn near to what Hitler said!
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The EPA, acting as if it has no one to answer to, is single-handedly destroying not only our ability to produce energy but is also making it almost impossible for farmers to get pesticides.
More:
They’ve basically said they are JUDGE, JURY AND EXECUTIONER when it comes to rulings.
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STATISTICAL PROOF THROWING MONEY AT EDUCATION IS A WASTE!
Hilarious! The Row versus Wade fight!
More on TSA and Paul Rand….
The law protects him from detention but that does not seem to matter to the TSA.
The U.S. Constitution actually protects federal lawmakers from detention while they’re on the way to the capital.
“The Senators and Representatives…shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same….” according to Article I, Section 6.
And, of course, the Obama Regime sided with TSA.
I am certain that if it had been Princess Pelosi or Harry Reid or any other dirtbag democrat the White House would be demanding the head of the TSA himself.
The White House is standing by the Transportation Security Administration in its standoff with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and his father, Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas)
The elder Paul called the TSA a “police state” Monday after Sen. Paul was reportedly detained by TSA after he refused to take a pat-down from TSA officials at the Nashville International Airport.
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Monday that he didn’t have any reaction to Paul’s comment about “police state.”
But Carney sided with the TSA saying, “I think it is absolutely essential that we take necessary actions to ensure that air travel is safe.”
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Okay, I am torn on the above matchup. Gingrich for sure as President! Allen West, I don’t know yet how he would stack up against say Rick Santorum. For sure, West has a cleaner history than Rick.
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Keystone project to make a comeback?
Allen West: I was glad to see Newt stand up to the liberal elite media
Westboro Baptist Freaks Plan To Protest Joe Paterno’s Funeral Can’t believe these freaks are still around.
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The Council on American-Islamic Relations says it will send Rick Santorum a copy of the Qur’an this week to help the Republican presidential candidate to “educate himself about Islam” after he was quoted as implying that Muslims do not worship the Judeo-Christian God.
The advocacy group targeted the former Pennsylvania senator just days after condemning fellow GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich for his negative views on shari’a (Islamic law).
Addressing supporters in South Carolina on Friday night, Santorum said that the concept of equality emanates from “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” – not from Islam or eastern religions.
Since equality comes from God, he went on to say, people should “live responsibly in conforming with God’s laws.
(you know the islamics are in a panic because they know that if republicans finally take over the presidency and the congress, that finally the idiocy of the liberal and obama regime of kissing islamic ass will come to an end)
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Face it, for me, I would never go to geico insurance. Their commercials have always been a bit laughable.
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KIRKWOOD (KMOV) – Members of Occupy St. Louis and the Council on American-Islamic Relations joined forces Sunday afternoon to protest outside the Kirkwood Walmart and Lowe’s over advertising dispute.
Organizers say they are protesting Lowe’s decision to pull its advertising funds from TLC’s television series “All-American Muslim”. Protesters are accusing Lowe’s of pulling the ads after pressure from the Florida Family Association.
Lowe’s officials say the program brought up a “lightning rod” of complaints and they didn’t want their ads to be associated with the controversy.
Multiple protests have been happening nationwide since Lowe’s pulled their ads.
(dirtbags and ragheads. what a shitty combination! and this boycott is not having any effect at all!)
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Blindfolded and handcuffed to each other on a barren hilltop, Pakistani soldiers wait for death at the hands of a merciless Taliban fighter.
Fifteen men were lined up for execution, the chilling scene captured on film by the Taliban for a video released as a warning to the Pakistani army operating near the Afghan border.
The Frontier Corps soldiers were seized last month in what the Taliban said was an operation to avenge the deaths of insurgents in Pakistan.
The video shows one of the killers from the Pakistan Taliban, or TTP, holding an AK-47 rifle and speaking with fury about revenge.
‘Twelve of our comrades were besieged and mercilessly martyred in the Khyber Agency [area],’ said the militant. ‘Our pious women were also targeted.
‘To avenge those comrades, we will kill these men. We warn the government of Pakistan that if the killing of our friends is not halted, this will be the fate of you all.’
One of the men shoves a clip into his assault rifle and fires a few rounds into the back of the heads of some of the soldiers. ‘God is greatest,’ the Taliban yell.
Other fighters step up and take turns pumping bullets into the men, some wearing green military uniforms. Each time a soldier collapses, the man standing next to him is pulled in that direction by the handcuffs. After the executions, the Taliban militants stare at the bodies slumped on the ground.
‘If the killing of our friends is not stopped, this will be the fate of all infidel armies, God willing,’ says one militant.
(and these guys are our friends? So says biden, obama, and liberals. maybe if the taliban grabbed 15 liberals and did this?)
“Angry Black Woman” Michelle Obama
Michelle Obama’s claim she’s being branded an ‘angry black woman’ underlines White House desperation
Oh dear. A female New York Times journalist who is very well-disposed towards the Obama family writes a book about the First Couple, their marriage and the White House that portrays the President and his inner circle as dysfunctional.
What does the Obama administration do? Frantically trying to blunt the coverage about the book, including revelationS of f-bombs from Robert Gibbs, then Press Secretary, and lavish parties during a recession, it puts Michelle Obama on television to state this:
“You know, I guess it’s more interesting to imagine this conflicted situation here and a strong woman and a, you know, but that’s been an image that people have tried to paint of me since, you know, the day Barack announced, that I’m some angry black woman.”
I’m sorry but it simply won’t wash. It’s an attempt to change the subject. It’s a way to say that any criticism of the Obamas – or even any truthful warts-and-all portrayal – is racist and therefore unacceptable. And people will see through it.
There are parallels with Hillary Clinton’s claim as the Monica Lewinsky scandal was unfolding that there was a “vast Right-wing conspiracy” to get her husband. Certainly, Bill Clinton had determined antagonists on the Right but the reaction of most ordinary Americans to Hillary’s conspiracy claim was: “Yes, but your husband was having sex with an intern.”
You can watch the CBS interview with Michelle Obama here. It’s worth watching the whole thing because it’s a train wreck right from the moment at the outset where the First Lady claims she hasn’t read the book (she’s on television to rebut things in a book – of course she’s read all the relevant excerpts).
She then states she’s “never had a cross word” with Rahm Emanuel. The now Mayor of Chicago is one of the most combative men on the planet. If she’s never had a cross word with him, she’s almost unique in Washington and Chicago.
If anything, Michelle Obama’s evocation of a racist conspiracy is even less plausible than Hillary’s claim.
I listened on NPR yesterday to an interview with Jodi Kantor about her book. You couldn’t imagine a person less likely to initiate a racial attack on Michelle Obama. Almost everything she said was positive and complimentary about the Obamas. She even talked about how unfair the “angry black woman” label was.
The book, however, is dynamite. It portrays Obama’s inner circle as riven by dissent and jealousy. Gibbs is quoted as saying that Valerie Jarrett, a long-time Obama friend who is so close to the couple that she holidays with them, was a liar and not someone he subsequently took “at all seriously as an adviser to the President of the United States”.
And although Kantor clearly admires Michelle Obama there is much fodder for critics and many passages that will raise eyebrows. The First Lady is portrayed as often unhappy and sullen and on occasions fiercely critical of her husband and his aides, who are fearful and unwilling to confront her.
Obama is quoted as being reluctant even to run for president (“I don’t need this. I don’t need anything.”) and as looking forward to his post-presidency. During a debate preparation session, she told her husband: “Barack, feel – don’t think!”
There a part which describes Obama’s delight at being in Norway, suggesting he found Scandinavians much more appealing than Americans. The trip to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 “passed like a brief, happy fantasy for the President, a Nordic alternate reality where citizens were learned and pensive, discussions were thoughtful, and everyone was a fan”.
And at times she comes across as peevish and hard to please:
“The First Lady’s complaints about the president’s team in the White House tended to sound a lot like Michelle’s personal complaints about her husband over the years. Not planning, not keeping her informed, focusing on his own needs, taking on risky projects without seeing their potential for failure – they were all charges she had leveled against him since the beginning of their union”.
These are certainly things the White House might not wish to see in print but overall the book is complimentary rather than derogatory.
To seek to trash a book that is anything other than pure hagiography has become standard White House practice. But it is also foolish and counter-productive because it only draws more attention to the things they don’t like. Playing the race card will backfire.
(personally, from what I have read about how the queen acts and rants and raves and treats everyone in the white house, I would use the word “bitch”)
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US Marines piss on corpses of dead Muslim Taliban terrorists. YAWN
From HERE.
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McDonald’s UK has announced that it will be temporarily replacing the toy commonly found in the company’s familiar “Happy Meal” with a book.
The fast food chain will thus become — at least for the duration of the giveaway — Britain’s biggest retailer of children’s books, as distributes nine million copies of War Horse author Michael Morpurgo’s Mudpuddle Farm titles.
Morpurgo will reportedly be donating his royalties from the promotion to benefit his charity, Farms for City Children.
In an amusing twist, the Children’s Food Campaign has expressed concern that giving away Mudpuddle books will “make fast food more attractive to children.”
I’ll take fat and well-read over skinny and illiterate any day.
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Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan latest Iranian scientist to die in car explosion, becoming fourth nuclear-program-affiliated academic to be assassinated.
Joran van der Sloot pleads guilty to murder of Peruvian woman Stephany Flores.
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour raises eyebrows with unconditional pardons for 193 inmates, including several convicted murderers.
State media puppet Wolf Blitzer “salutes” politicians for taking time out of being rich to answer the “annoying questions” of the unwashed masses.
Newly discovered frog species is the world’s smallest vertebrate.
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The Obama administration will resume peace talks with the Taliban as soon as Afghan President Hamid Karzai formally blesses the negotiations, according to senior administration officials who indicated the process could be under way within weeks.
Marc Grossman, the senior U.S. diplomat who shepherded a series of secret U.S. meetings with the insurgents last year, will meet with Karzai late next week to ensure that the Afghan president is on board, officials said.
“If Karzai were to tell [the administration] to go ahead, then we’d start talking again,” said one of two officials who discussed the secret negotiations on condition of anonymity.
The administration, which has said negotiations must be “Afghan-led,” insists that its own talks with the Taliban are only a preliminary effort to build confidence before actual negotiations over Afghanistan’s future can begin between the insurgents and the Karzai government.
One hurdle is that the Taliban prefer to talk to the United States and are so far “not willing to sit down with the Afghan government’,” one official said. “Our job is to see if we can break through that door.” Karzai has been under pressure from domestic opponents of negotiations to stand firm against the talks.
(we take orders from this man? WTF???)
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In a speech to employees of the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday, President Barack Obama said that EPA regulations are good for the economy and create jobs and that the agency “touches” the lives of every American every day.
“We can make sure that we are doing right by our environment and, in fact, putting people back to work all across America,” Obama told the federal workers.
“When we put in place new common-sense rules to reduce air pollution, we create new jobs building and installing all sorts of pollution-control technology,” Obama said.
“When we put in place new emissions standards for our vehicles, we make sure that the cars of tomorrow are going to be built right here in the United States of America, that we’re going to win that race,” the president continued.
(he is touting an agency that actually puts people OUT of work? he is living in dream land!)
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(Reuters) — The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s command center routinely monitors dozens of popular websites, including Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, WikiLeaks and news and gossip sites including the Huffington Post and Drudge Report, according to a government document.
A “privacy compliance review” issued by DHS last November says that since at least June 2010, its national operations center has been operating a “Social Networking/Media Capability” which involves regular monitoring of “publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites and message boards.”
A DHS official familiar with the monitoring program said that it was intended purely to enable command center officials to keep in touch with various Internet-era media so that they were aware of major, developing events to which the Department or its agencies might have to respond.
The document outlining the monitoring program says that all the websites which the command center will be monitoring were “publicly available and… all use of data published via social media sites was solely to provide more accurate situational awareness, a more complete common operating pictures, and more timely information for decision makers…”
The DHS official said that under the program’s rules, the department would not keep permanent copies of the internet traffic it monitors. However, the document outlining the program does say that the operations center “will retain information for no more than five years.”
The monitoring scheme also features a five-page list, attached to the privacy review document, of websites the Department’s command center expected to be monitoring.
CONTROVERSIAL SITES
These include social networking sites Facebook and My Space – though there is a parenthetical notice that My Space only affords a “limited search” capability – and more than a dozen sites that monitor, aggregate and enable searches of Twitter messages and exchanges.
Among blogs and aggregators on the list are ABC News’ investigative blog “The Blotter;” blogs that cover bird flu; several blogs related to news and activity along U.S. borders (DHS runs border and immigration agencies); blogs that cover drug trafficking and cybercrime; and websites that follow wildfires in Los Angeles and hurricanes.
News and gossip sites on the monitoring list include popular destinations such as the Drudge Report, Huffington Post and “NY Times Lede Blog”, as well as more focused techie fare such as the Wired blogs “Threat Level” and “Danger Room.” Numerous blogs related to terrorism and security are also on the list.
Another blog on the list, Cryptome, also periodically posts leaked documents and was one of the first websites to post information related to the Homeland Security monitoring program.
Also on the list are JihadWatch and Informed Comment [leftist professor Juan Cole -ed.], blogs that cover issues related to Islam through sharp political prisms, which have sometimes led critics to accuse the sites of political bias.
Also on the list are various video and photo-sharing sites, including Hulu, Youtube and Flickr.
While a DHS official involved in the monitoring program confirmed the authenticity of the list, officials authorized to speak for the Department did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.
(hey big brother! welcome to my blog. enjoy reading it)
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Weird, just weird. And no, I won’t vote for her! Obama Expert Predicts Chelsea Clinton Presidency
Berkeley Professor Assigns Students To Dig Up Dirt On FOX News For Taxpayer-Funded PBS Hit Piece Standard liberal ass professor on the government dole!
Tom Friedman in Egypt: The Joy of Wishful Thinking Interesting read. Do so…..
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Late night eye candy for you all:
