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Good day for Santorum could GOP scramble race -- again
By Byron York: The Washington Examiner
On Monday morning, the eve of caucuses and primaries in Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri, the Romney campaign sent out notice it would hold a conference call to discuss rival Rick Santorum's "long history of pork-barrel spending." The call would feature former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty explaining why Santorum "is simply not ready to be president."
Santorum's aides were delighted to hear the news. "They've turned their attack machine against us in the last 24 hours," top adviser John Brabender said that afternoon. "I can only read into that that they're looking at polling numbers telling them we're they're biggest threat. It's a badge of honor that Romney has decided to try to destroy us."
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The global war on Christians
By Ayaan Hirsi Ali: The Daily Beast
We hear so often about Muslims as victims of abuse in the West and combatants in the Arab Spring's fight against tyranny. But, in fact, a wholly different kind of war is underway-an unrecognized battle costing thousands of lives. Christians are being killed in the Islamic world because of their religion. It is a rising genocide that ought to provoke global alarm.
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Bam's bogus youth agenda
By Ron Meyer: New York Post
President Obama is making a big push to recover his lost popularity with youth - but his promises don't address the real needs of the under-30 crowd.
Since Inauguration Day, the president's approval rating with the 18-to-29 crowd set a record for the most precipitous drop in Gallup Poll history, from 77 percent approval to 48 percent.
The Youth Misery Index (which combines youth unemployment, average graduating college debt and the national debt) is at an all-time high, and Millennials are taking an economic shellacking.
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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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