Sometimes – well, frankly, pretty often – Mitt Romney scares the crap out of me.

I’m already on record saying that I think he’d be a much better President than Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum, and nothing that has happened in the last month has changed that. Both Gingrich and Santorum are completely devoid of either the temperament or experience to handle the job of chief executive of the massive Federal government, a point which Newt Gingrich in particular seems determined to reinforce every single day between now and Super Tuesday (at least). Additionally, both Gingrich and Santorum have been C- candidates (at best) in terms of building a national campaign organization and raising money, both of which are necessary to have any chance to get the job of President, if they want to prove that I’m wrong about their experience and temperament. I am as close to 100% certain as I can be that both would lose in a landslide to Obama.

The problem is that I’m coming close to reaching that same conclusion about Mitt Romney. I don’t know what his problem is. I know there are some pretty serious questions about his ideological moorings, but that’s really less important (note that I did not say not important at all) in an executive than it is a legislator. That said, the number of people who have succesfully gained the nomination of either party without engaging in a substantial amount of flip-floppery is pretty small. The guy’s negatives, at least on paper, would seem to be clearly outweighed by his positives: he is clearly smart, clean cut, completely free of skeletons in his closet, able to self fund, and with a respectable dossier of executive experience. Furthermore, as I have explained before, he has spent the last 6 years ingratiating himself to conservative primary voters in a way that few previous candidates have (remember how McCain didn’t even bother to show up at CPAC in 2007 and in fact tried to set up a competing event down the hall?)

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As of today, Rick Santorum officially has no more delegates than he had yesterday. That said, as CNN is just now this moment calling Colorado for Santorum in a stunning upset, his clean sweep of the states who voted/caucused today is a stunning rebuke to both Romney’s purported march through February and Newt Gingrich’s position as the favored not-Romney candidate.

Santorum’s performance was impressive in each state, vastly outperforming his position in the polls, which had him losing by 9 points in Colorado (he won by 5) and winning by only 9 in Minnesota (he won by 18). It is hard to tell who got clobbered worse – Romney, who fell all the way to third in Minnesota, or Gingrich, who finished well behind the flailing Romney in every state. Newt Gingrich didn’t even bother to give a speech tonight, which was probably a good idea if Romney’s shell-shocked and confused concession was any indication of what we could have expected. Although Santorum didn’t get any official delegates tonight, he certainly has bought himself one heck of a news cycle, and has in one day sucked the oxygen out of virtually every other campaign with the stunning results tonight.

For about the 9th or 10th time during this news cycle, the race has fundamentally changed its structure. For the first time I can recall, we are less than a month away from Super Tuesday and no one has any idea what is going to happen. Right now the question becomes whether Rick Santorum can get himself the money and organization to make this last beyond this week and into expensive contests in the larger states. One thing is for sure – this thing is a long way from over.

People like to say, “Ron Paul’s got a great domestic program, it’s just his foreign policy I don’t like.” Really, people only say that because they don’t take the time to understand what Ron Paul’s domestic program is all about, or at least the more insane details thereof. One particular example of this is Ron Paul’s view on monetary policy.

Paul, who likes to present himself as some sort of Constitutional scholar, has said in his last several concession speeches that “the Constitution still says that only gold and silver can be legal tender!” This absolutely absurd reading of the Constitution is universally rejected by anyone who can read English. Let’s look at Article 1, Section 10, from which Ron Paul draws his support:

No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.

Emphasis mine. However, it is also worth noting that Article 1, Section 10, is conveniently titled “Powers Prohibited of States.” Ron Paul might still have at least a non-farcical point if it were not for the existence of Article 1, Section 8 (helpfully titled “Powers of Congress”):

The Congress shall have Power. . . To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof[.]

Get it? The reason states do not have the power to create their own legal tender (other than gold or silver coin) is because that is a power expressly reserved to the Federal government. Remember that this was one of the central evils of the Articles of Confederation – that every state had its own currency, which hindered trade and created economic chaos – and so the founders reserved to the Federal government the right to establish a single currency for the whole nation. States are absolutely and completely prohibited by these sections of the Constitution from generating their own currency other than literal gold and silver coins.

Therefore, even if you ignore that Article 1, Section 10 is expressly confined to restrict the powers of the States, it would not stand for the proposition that Ron Paul wants it to stand for, which is that the Federal government must constitutionally adhere gold/silver standard. It would instead mean that the Federal government was prohibited from using currency that was not literally gold or silver coin. This conclusion is of course absurd (and ultimately would have no salutary effect on monetary policy whatsoever) which is why no person who hasn’t suggested that the government is using paper money to try to track you has ever suggested it.

I get that some people want someone who is a principled, small government isolationist constitutionalist. Sadly, Ron Paul is not that person – he’s just a nut onto whom people are projecting those qualities.

Should be an interesting night. Click the box or join in in the comments!

Today could end up being an embarrassing day for any Republican presidential candidate not named Rick Santorum.

Today, Colorado and Minnesota hold their caucuses, and Missouri holds their weird non-binding primary. Newt failed to qualify for the Missouri ballot, which means Santorum is widely expected to win Missouri today. The only company polling Minnesota right now is PPP, which today released a poll purporting to show Santorum leading by 9 in that state. Additionally, PPP released a poll showing Santorum running a strong second in Colorado. To recap, at the end of the day today:

• Rick Santorum, whose campaign was left for dead after an abysmal finish in Florida, might win 2 of the 3 contests today.
• Mitt Romney, who was supposed to sweep February, could end up only winning one of the three caucuses today, and that by a relatively slim margin.
• Newt Gingrich is facing a day with two third place finishes and a DNQ. His argument that Santorum should step aside grows weaker by the day (incidentally, anyone who says Santorum is a stalking horse for Romney has not been paying attention to the Santorum campaign).
• Ron Paul could finish the day far behind all three of the other candidates in delegates.

I would like to take a moment to address something that you hear every Presidential cycle and which is making the rounds again in force this year – the threat that “if [Candidate X] wins the nomination, I am going to stay home/vote third party/vote for Obama.” The loudest and most vocal group of these folks during this election cycle are the Romney opponents; however, I’ve heard a lot of libertarian conservatives make the same threat about a potential Santorum nomination, and a lot of folks bothered by Newt’s serial adultery who have made the same threat if Newt gets the nomination.

Let me start out by stating the obvious – there is no one who is going to force anyone to vote and each person is certainly entitled to make their own choice about whether they will take time out of their day once every other year to go to the voting booth and cast a ballot – a point which applies a fortiori when it comes to the decision whether to donate to/volunteer for a candidate. If a person simply feels that they can’t pull the lever for Romney/Santorum/Newt, then I respect that decision even if I disagree with it. After all, I myself would have been unable to pull the lever for Rudy in 2008 because I have moral qualms against voting for candidates who are in favor of legalized mass infanticide.

The problem I have is with the folks who believe that their statement of refusal to vote for the Republican nominee presents some sort of existential threat to the Republican party that the party should heed and pay some sort of special deference to. The entire mentality that says, “If you, the Establishment, foist Mitt Romney upon us, then we are going to show you good – we are going to start a third party and destroy the Republican party forever!” A few points are in order about this line of thinking.

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It is good to see that Jim Moran is not resting on his laurels. Even though he already held the title of most racist member of Congress, he has been busy making absolutely sure no one even approaches catching up with him.

“People like Mr. [Allen] West, and Governor Brewer and so on, particularly Mr. West, is not only not representative of the African-American community or of the Republican Party, let alone of the American public. So what he says really is of little or no consequence, but it’s unfortunate,” Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) said[.]

He just seems clueless not that he has climbed abroad ship. He’s climbed this ladder of opportunity that was constructed by so many of his ancestors’ sweat, sacrifice, blood, you know they did everything they could for his generation to be successful. But now that he’s climbed abroad ship, instead of reaching down and steadying the ladder, he wants to push it off.

You see, in Jim Moran’s world, white people are smart enough to think about which party they want to belong to and make an informed choice about which one they will support. However, everyone knows that black people are only allowed to see the Democrat side of things. To Jim Moran, if you’re black and Republican, then you must not be a real black person, because black people are not smart enough to think for themselves about which political party they are going to belong to. It is one thing when racist blacks try to enforce this sort of conformity because they openly hate white people; it is quite another when a racist white person like Moran tries to enforce it because he thinks black people are too dumb to think for themselves.

To kick things off, via the MRC, we have a reminder that there are still some people in this country who are ignorant, racist trash. Language warning.

Open thread!

One of the most bizarre narratives I have ever seen take hold during a Presidential campaign is the narrative that Newt Gingrich, who spent three decades in Washington, ultimately rising to the top of the House leadership, is the “outsider” and “TEA Party” candidate whereas Mitt Romney, who has never had a job in Washington in his life (although admittedly that is not for lack of trying), is the “establishment” or “insider” candidate. Newt is not without his redeeming qualities but I have to confess that whenever he rants in his inimitable style about the “Establishment” I am struck with a powerful sense of vertigo.

It isn’t just Newt’s ancient past that presents this problem. As recently as 2010, when TEA Party fervor was sweeping the nation, Newt Gingrich was completely absent from its key battles or just as often was on the completely wrong side of the debate. In NY-23, Gingrich endorsed Dede Scozzafava right before she bolted the party and endorsed the Democrat (for the record, Romney donated $5,000 to and endorsed Hoffman). In Utah, Bob Bennett kicked off his campaign with an endorsement from Newt Gingrich who aggressively campaigned on his behalf (Romney also supported Bennett and then donated $5,000 through his PAC to Mike Lee). In Delaware, Newt confidently predicted Mike Castle would win and then was completely absent from the discussion over the race until O’Donnell won the primary (Romney donated $5,000 to O’Donnell, but I’m not clear whether that was before or after the primary was over).

In virtually every major TEA Party fight in 2010 – Toomey vs. Specter, Paul v. Grayson, Crist v. Rubio, Gingrich was either AWOL until the matter was completely decided or on the wrong side. The only Senate candidate that Newt’s PAC donated to whatsoever was Scott Brown.

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Neil Stevens predicted Romney would win by 10. Nate Silver predicted Romney would win by 15. According to CNN’s early exits, the margin of victory for Romney may be unexpecedly small tonight. Click the box to join the discussion or join in the comments!

 

For years and years, the Susan G. Komen Foundation has pointlessly given money to Planned Parenthood, despite the fact that Planned Parenthood’s claims regarding breast exams have been exposed as wildly exaggerated. Today, after years of work by pro-life activists, that ends:

NEW YORK (AP) — The nation’s leading breast-cancer charity, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, is halting its partnerships with Planned Parenthood affiliates — creating a bitter rift, linked to the abortion debate, between two iconic organizations that have assisted millions of women.

The change will mean a cutoff of hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants, mainly for breast exams.

Planned Parenthood says the move results from Komen bowing to pressure from anti-abortion activists. Komen says the key reason is that Planned Parenthood is under investigation in Congress — a probe launched by a conservative Republican who was urged to act by anti-abortion groups.

The AP’s phrasing here is of course – millions of unborn women have been somewhat less than “helped” by Planned Parenthood, in addition to an unknown number of women involved in the sex trafficking trade. In any event, one of America’s most unabashedly corrupt and evil organizations has lost some of its funding, which is cause for at least some rejoicing.

Javier Manjarres is reporting that Allen West has announced that he is switching Congressional districts, from FL-22 (which was drawn to doom him) to FL-16. I don’t know the particulars of that district since it has been redrawn but it used to be one of the safest GOP seats in the country (and is now infamous for having two consecutive congressmen resign in disgrace in the face of criminal probes). Too early to tell whether West will face a serious primary challenge as the current incumbent is also moving to another district.

Meanwhile, the question of who was responsible for turning FL-22 into a Democrat sinkhole continues to swirl. I’ve had folks who are involved in Florida politics tell me that Florida Senate President Mike Haridopolous was responsible as payback for West refusing to support Haridopolous in his abortive United States Senate bid, or for one imagined slight or the other. Haridopolous, for his point, insists that the maps were basically required to be drawn that way due to a new FLorida law designed to prevent gerrymandering of districts. Allegedly, however, other district maps were proposed and rejected which would not have been quite as injurious to West’s chances in FL-22. At this point, it is difficult to know what to believe.

It seems likely, however, that unless the composition of FL-16 has changed remarkably in the redistricting process that West has a better chance of winning a primary and the general than he did in winning the original FL-22, which was always going to be a very tough fight. It’s too early to celebrate yet but it looks like there’s a good chance that West will be around and kicking for a while longer yet.

What I am about to say will probably not be very popular around here, and may end up costing me several good friends, at least on a temporary basis. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to say it anyway: when it is my turn to pull the lever on Super Tuesday, I’ll vote for Mitt Romney. And it won’t even be an especially difficult choice.

I have said all along that as a Super Tuesday voter, I fully expected my choices to come down to Romney or one other option. I have thus been able to lay back in the weeds to see if a candidate who is preferrable to Romney would survive the early primaries. Now that it is apparent that the only serious alternative to Romney will be Newt, I can confidently say that the answer to that question is “no.” Let me explain how I reached this answer so easily.

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As an outspoken black conservative with a high national profile, Allen West already had a huge national target painted on his back going in to 2012. As part of reapportionment as a result of the 2010 census, Florida gained 2 Congressional seats. Despite that, it appears that the Republican-controlled Florida legislature seems to have somehow managed to make Allen West’s seat much more difficult to defend. Via Shark Tank:

 Over the past several weeks, many Republicans have voiced their disappointment towards the Republican legislature after the release of the preliminary redistricting maps. Much of the ire concerns the proposed boundaries of Congressman Allen West’s 22nd Congressional District that would be redrawn to include far more registered Democrats.

West’s congressional district inexplicably sheds the most out support as compared to all other incumbent Republican and Democrat Congressman. A few weeks back we quoted an unnamed legislator saying that, “Allen West was screwed”, a statement which was originally made about made five months before the purposed maps were made public, leading insiders to believe that the fix was in against Allen West. But in light of Weatherford’s comment, it is increasingly clear that this is a fait accompli.

According to Weatherford, those preliminary maps will not change- at the most, any additional changes would be minimal, and those changes would not make any appreciable difference from the preliminary maps. In addition, Weatherford stated that a deal was struck between him, Senate President Mike Haridopolos, and Senator Don Gaetz to finalize these maps and push them through as soon as possible. Weatherford also said that the proposed maps are in legal compliance with both the Voting Rights Act and Amendment 6.

So based on Weatherford’s comments, the 22nd Congressional District is now very much in play for the Democrat Party, and West is at an even larger disadvantage than he was previously- it will be a very difficult and expensive seat for Republicans to defend.

The Florida Senate passed their plan on January 17th and the Florida House passed theirs on Friday. I am not really sure what, if any, distinctions exist between the plans with respect to FL-22 (West’s district). At this point the maps will be subjected to legal review for compliance with the Voting Rights Act and Amendment 6.

If you live in Florida and are a fan of Allen West, now might be a good time to call your state Representative and Senator to let them know how you feel about any action that would harm his chances of re-election in the fall.

It is a sad commentary on the state of our world that stories like this one (warning, .pdf) (via the Population Research Institute) barely shock us anymore. The gist of the story is as follows: a Massachusetts woman, identified in court pleadings only as Mary Moe, is pregnant with her third child. She aborted her first child. Sometime between this abortion and the birth of her second child, she suffered a “psychotic break” and was diagnosed with shizophrenia and bipolar mood disorder, for which she takes medication. Reading inbetween the lines, it is reasonable to assume that the woman’s first abortion may have been a contributing factor in her mental illness:

The GAL report and the record generally provide additional background. The defendant suffered a psychotic break when she was a college student. Thereafter, she believed people were staring at her and stating that she killed her baby. She becomes agitated and emotional when discussing the pregnancy that ended in an abortion.

Now that Moe is pregnant for the third time, her parents went to a probate judge in Massachusetts in an attempt to get a court to force her to have an abortion, apparently on the theory that the medications Moe takes for her mental illness would be harmful to Moe’s unborn child. Somewhat unsurprisingly, given this history, Moe went to great lengths in front of the judge to avoid having an abortion forced on her, claiming devout Catholicism (a contention that her parents dispute) and denying that she even was pregnant.

Somehow the judge, a Dukakis appointee, got the idea that the best thing for this poor woman would be to force her to have another abortion (because the first one clearly worked wonders for her mental health). This despite the fact that the guardian ad litem appointed by the judge had found that if Moe were not suffering from mental illness, she would not herself choose to have the abortion.  The judge astoundingly ordered that Moe’s parents should get her to the abortion clinic even if Moe had to be  “coaxed,   bribed, or even enticed … by ruse[.]” Additionally, even though no one (including Moe’s delightful parents) had asked for this remedy, the judge sua sponte ordered that once Moe’s parents had successfully conned her into the abortion clinic, Moe must be sterilized so she could never get pregnant again.

Thankfully, the probate judge was overruled on appeal, mainly for failing to make appropriate factual findings and failing to appropriately consider the recommendations of the guardian ad litem. Thus, in this one case, the appropriate result was reached, but reading the judge’s opinion, a different set of circumstances might very well have permitted “Mary Moe”‘s parents to force her to have an abortion against her will. This is the inevitable consequence of a society that has accepted the false premise that under certain circumstances, abortion is the only choice a sane person would make. Such a premise should be rejected by anyone who is truly “pro-choice,” but happily too many who claim to be “pro-choice” let the mask slip from time to time and show us all that when the chips are down, they really are pro-abortion, and nothing else.

I never thought I would see the day, but it looked an awful lot like Newt finished fourth out of the four candidates in tonight’s debate. For the first time during this primary season, Newt paid a price each and every time he went after Romney personally, who looked unusually aggressive and actually managed a passable impersonation of a human being. After the second time, he attempted to follow Santorum’s lead by saying that the tax return question was a distraction, and in a bizarre twist, Newt actually got his liver eaten by a moderator when Wolf Blitzer nailed him for having been the one who made an issue out of the tax returns.

Newt managed to look at least better during the second half of the debate but he did so mainly by staying in the weeds and making several unsubtle appeals to Paul voters. Even then he was overshadowed by Santorum (who has had back-to-back strong debate performances) and even Ron Paul, who a) was clearly on his medication and b) having conceded a last-place finish in Florida, was committed to having some fun at the other candidate’s expense.

In the last three days, Newt has watched a 7-point Florida lead evaporate into a 7-point deficit to Mitt Romney. He needed a bump from tonight’s debate in order to mount a challenge to Romney in Florida and hold his momentum heading into Super Tuesday. Instead, voters saw Romney displaying a killer instinct for perhaps the first time during the campaign, and Newt clearly overshadowed even on style points by both Rick Santorum and Ron Paul.

If Mitt Romney ends up winning the nomination, we may end up looking back at tonight as the night the tide finally turned in his favor for good.

Unbelievably, yet another debate is on tap tonight. Thankfully, this one is on CNN, so hopefully we will have fewer questions about Terri Schiavo and the Great Beet Sugar Menace. Click the window or chime in in the comments!

You’re not going to believe this, but there is YET ANOTHER debate tonight (this one on NBC moderated by the strangely crooked-faced Brian Williams). Click the window to join the chat or chime in in the comments.

With the State of the Union upcoming, House Republicans have made a pretty decent video to highlight (among other things) the fact that we’ve gone 1000 days (and counting) without an Obama budget. I don’t keep up with these things historically so I am not sure what the record is, but it seems evident that Obama is going to shoot for a nice, round four years before this whole thing is up.

Keep in mind that for a substantial portion of this time period, Democrats controlled the White House, Senate, AND House, and were still unable to pass a budget because they were too busy forcing bills the American people didn’t want down their throats. Way to go, guys. Makes everyone just tingling with anticipation about all the things we’re going to get to hear about in the SOTU address.

Click the window to join the chat or join in in the comments. How big will Gingrich win?