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Conscience check: Obama versus Catholics
By Peggy Noonan: Wall Street Journal
What a faux pas, how inept, how removed from the essential realities of America. Yes, I'm referring to President Obama.
But let's do Mitt Romney first.
He's taken heavy fire for his statement, in an interview with CNN's Soledad O'Brien, in which he said, "I'm not concerned about the very poor."
Every criticism has been true. It was politically inept, playing into stereotypes about Republicans and about his own candidacy. It was Martian-like in its seeming remove from the concerns of everyday citizens. We're in a recession here! It was at odds both with longtime American tradition and with rising ...
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Religious liberty trumps ObamaCare
By Marco Rubio: New York Post
Religious freedom is a core American principle, one that our Founding Fathers enshrined in the Constitution and called on future generations of leaders to preserve and protect.
Despite our deeply rooted heritage of religious liberty, the Obama administration recently issued a mandate under ObamaCare that will require church-affiliated organizations to offer their workers private-insurance coverage without out-of-pocket charges for birth control, something they are morally opposed to. In doing so, the administration ignored efforts by numerous faith-based organizations to be granted an exemption on religious grounds.
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What's wrong with this guy
By Mark Steyn: National Review
Romney's is a benevolent patrician's view of society: The poor are incorrigible, but let's add a couple more groats to their food stamps and housing vouchers, and they'll stay quiet. Aside from the fact that that kind of thinking has led the western world to near terminal insolvency, for a candidate whose platitudinous balderdash of a stump speech purports to believe in the most Americanly American America that any American has ever Americanized over, it's as dismal a vision of permanent trans-generational poverty as any Marxist community organizer with a cozy sinecure on the Acorn board would come up with.
After half-a-century of evidence, what sort of "conservative" offers the poor the Even Greater Society? I don't know how "electable" Mitt is, but, even if he is, the greater danger, given the emptiness of his campaign to date, is that he'll be elected with no real mandate for the course correction the Brokest Nation in History urgently needs. In last Monday's debate, Newt said he wasn't interested in going to Washington to "manage the decline". Mitt's just told us that he's happy to "manage the decline" for the poor - but who knows who else?
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Obama's maddening, winning speech
By Daniel Henninger: Wall Street Journal
Mr. Obama may not know much about the private economy, but he knows a lot about the uses of human anxiety. Proposing to replace his own bad economy with a virtual substitute "built to last" allows Mr. Obama to place himself outside the White House and on the street making common cause with the genuine economic anxieties of the American people. It also lets this president put in motion what he thinks he knows best-empathy. In "The Audacity of Hope" he put empathy "at the heart of my moral code." Practice makes perfect.
It is beyond audacious. How can a president simultaneously hammer real job creation with the Keystone XL pipeline decision, then go into the country and claim kinship with the anxieties of the jobless? No problem. Just do it.
It could work. If we know nothing else about Barack Obama it is that he can play "hope" like a Stradivarius. The version of "An Economy Built to Last" that he performed at Intel is his concerto for re-election.
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Romney leaves Gingrich in his rearview mirror
By Rich Lowry: Fox News
Florida shows why when running for president, you usually need to have a presidential campaign to be successful. Gingrich was a lone man raging -- often quite literally -- against the machine arrayed against him. It turns out that all those aides who quit on Gingrich way back at the beginning of his campaign, for all their disloyalty, were right that he needed to build a traditional campaign infrastructure. He got far on his native wit, his imagination, and his gutsiness, but you can't buy TV advertising with any of those qualities.
After South Carolina, the cyborg that is the Romney campaign locked Gingrich in its sights and marked him for destruction. It wasn't particularly inspiring, and at times, it wasn't even fair. The Romney team made ready use of the old ethics charges against Gingrich that were a Democratic smear job. But Gingrich has so many vulnerabilities he is practically the personification of a target for negative ads. He reacted in Florida exactly as he did to a similar assault in Iowa: badly.
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Newt in a parallel universe, denies reality
By Toby Harnden: Daily Mail
If you'd just landed here in Orlando from a Gingrich-inspired moon colony this evening you wouldn't have known that Newt had just had his clock cleaned by Mitt Romney by a 15-point margin.
Magnanimous Newt was not in attendance. Apparently, no one had told the former House Speaker this was supposed to be a concession speech. Who knows, perhaps no one even told him he'd lost. He mentioned Romney only in passing - "Massachusetts moderate" - and never came close to congratulating him, or Rick Santorum (who he needs to butter up) and Ron Paul.
There was World Historical Newt. How could he defeat Romney? "It was stated at a historic moment in 1863, in dedicating our first national military cemetery by the president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, who said we have government of the people, by the people, for the people. And we're going to have people power defeat money power in the next six months."
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Obama's $5 Trillion and Change
By Review and Outlook: Wall Street Journal
The political strategy behind Obamanomics was always simple: Call for "stimulus" to rescue the economy, run up the debt with the biggest spending blitz in 60 years, and then when the deficit explodes call for higher taxes. The Congressional Budget Office annual review released yesterday shows this is all on track.
CBO reports that annual spending over the Obama era has climbed to a projected $3.6 trillion this fiscal year from $2.98 trillion in fiscal 2008, or more than 20%. The government spending burden has averaged 24% of GDP, up from an average of about 20%. This doesn't include the $2 trillion tab for ObamaCare.
For his part, Gingrich had two must-dos: 1) deal with Romney's attacks in a calmer, more seasoned way than Gingrich handled the last Romney barrage, during the campaign in Iowa; and 2) keep up the solid message he rode to victory in South Carolina.
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Why Romney won -- Why Gingrich lost
By Byron York: The Washington Examiner
Coming off a decisive loss to Newt Gingrich in South Carolina, Mitt Romney needed to do three things to win the Florida primary: 1) attack Gingrich with a level of ferocity not yet seen in the already-contentious Republican presidential campaign; 2) raise the level of his performance in debate; and 3) improve his on-the-stump message to give voters more substance and fewer platitudes.
For his part, Gingrich had two must-dos: 1) deal with Romney's attacks in a calmer, more seasoned way than Gingrich handled the last Romney barrage, during the campaign in Iowa; and 2) keep up the solid message he rode to victory in South Carolina.
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The Florida smear campaign
By Thomas Sowell: Townhall
The Republican establishment is pulling out all the stops to try to keep Newt Gingrich from becoming the party's nominee for President of the United States -- and some are not letting the facts get in their way.
Among the claims going out through the mass media in Florida, on the eve of that state's primary election, is that Newt Gingrich "resigned in disgrace" as Speaker of the House of Representatives, as a result of unethical conduct involving the diversion of tax-exempt money. Mitt Romney is calling on Gingrich to release "all of the records" from the House of Representatives investigation.
But the Wall Street Journal of January 28, 2012 reported that these records -- 1,280 pages of them -- are already publicly available on-line. Although Speaker Gingrich decided not to take on the task of fighting the charge from his political enemies in 1997, the Internal Revenue Service conducted its own investigation which, two years later, exonerated Gingrich from the charges. His resignation was not due to those charges and occurred much later.
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Why Gingrich's Tax Plan Beats Romney's
By Arthur Laffer: Wall Street Journal
If we judge both leading contenders in the Republican primary, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, by what they've done in life and by what they propose to do if elected, either one could be an excellent president. But when it comes to the election's core issue-restoring a healthy economy-the key is a good tax plan and the ability to implement it.
Mr. Gingrich has a significantly better plan than does Mr. Romney, and he has twice before been instrumental in implementing a successful tax plan on a national level-once when he served in Congress as a Reagan supporter in the 1980s and again when he was President Clinton's partner as speaker of the House of Representatives in the 1990s. During both of these periods the economy prospered incredibly-in good part because of Mr. Gingrich.
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