Earth To Karl Rove: 'Get Off My Lawn'

You have to hand it to the Republican Party: It not only seems incapable of turning the other cheek, but habitually makes matters worse when a little controversy crosses its path.

The latest little controversy is a Chrysler Corporation ad titled "It's Halftime in America" aired during Super Bowl on Sunday evening. The ad, rather drearily uninventive as were most this year, featured Hollywood icon Clint Eastwood extolling the success of the Bush and Obama administration-engineered bailout that saved the asses of Chrysler and General Motors although neither president was mentioned by name.

Rather than turning the other cheek, Republicans have asserted that the commercial with its unabashedly populist message could pass for an Obama re-election ad, besides which all four remaining presidential candidates opposed the bailouts.

The bloviater in chief this time around has been Kark Rove.

Rove, who has nibbled down all of his finger and toenails to nubs because his GOP has deftly turned a good shot at recapturing the White House and Senate into a long shot in part because the kind of bare-knuckle politics and right-wing ass kissing that he espoused, told Fox News that:

"This [ad] is a sign of what happens when you have the government getting in bed with big business like the bailout of the auto companies. They begin to, the leadership of the auto companies feel they need to do something to repay their political patrons. Remember, we lost $1.8 billion as taxpayers on the government bailout of Chrysler, and we’re going to lose $14 billion in the bailout of Chrysler and General Motors. And you got to bet in the boardrooms and management suites of these two big car companies, they are saying to themselves, 'Look, the president bailed us out rather than making us go through the normal bankruptcy, he bailed us out. We’re going to end up not having to pay back this money to the taxpayers.' ”

Rove, of course, is one of the most adept obfuscaters in contemporary politics, and Stanley Blow does a masterful job of taking him apart in a New York Times column:

* The overall bailouts saved an estimated 1.14 million jobs.

* It was George W. Bush who signed the first Chrysler bailout check.

* Of the total of $14.5 billion loaned to Chrysler, the company has returned $11.5 billion to taxpayers.

* The government has sold its Chrysler stock, further limiting taxpayer exposure.

* Trying to eschew Bush’s role in order to tarnish Obama’s results is fundamentally dishonest.

* Eastwood, of course, is a dyed-in-the-wool Republican whom Bush's father, George H.W., considered as a running mate in 1988.

One would think that with Michigan being a crucial swing state, Republicans would want to move the conversation as far away from the bailouts as possible, especially because Romney -- who has been accurately portrayed as a grim reaper when it comes to jobs -- has been especially vociferous in opposing them.

Blow concludes by saying, "Oh, Karl. That thing slapping you in the face is called the truth. As Clint Eastwood might say, 'Get off my lawn.' "

But it was Ta-Nehisi Coates who had the best line: "When Republicans line up against Clint Eastwood and cars, one has to ask, 'What could they possibly be for?' Child labor? Charters for blah people? Midnight Basketball?"

Cartoon du Jour

Tom Toles/The Washington Post

So What If Bush's 'Axis Of Evil' Speech Has Held Up? The World Has Changed.

It was 10 years ago, give or take a few days, that President Bush delivered a State of the Union address with a passage alluding to an “axis of evil” and asserted that the world’s leading rogue state — Iran, Iraq and North Korea, by name — and terrorist groups like Al Qaeda threatened world peace. He not only did not include Pakistan as a rogue state, which it was and is, he praised it.

David Frum, who had a hand in crafting the speech, writes that it has withstood the criticism it received at the time as well as the scrutiny of 10 years. I happen to believe that Frum is correct, but that belief is tempered by the fact that times have changed, which goes a long way to undercutting his argument.

On a personal level, Frum has been banished from the Republican temple for refusing to hew to the hard right-wing political orthodoxy that has run roughshod through the party formerly known as the Big Tent, producing among other things a litter of presidential wannabes who almost to the last man want to start new wars or revisit old ones.

On a global level, the war in Iraq is over and the war in Afghanistan finally is winding down. Iran and North Korea are still schoolyard bullies, but the Obama administration is looking past their sand kicking while still keeping an eye on them, and has instituted a foreign policy where bellicosity is a last resort that is paying dividends. For this we also can thank Hillary Clinton, the best secretary of state since forever, and Vice President Biden, who unlike his predecessor long ago stopped fighting the Cold War.

Beyond Myanmar acting like it wants to come in from the cold, the ouster of Moammar el-Qaddafri and the nascent Arab Spring movement, all of which the Obama administration can take some credit for, the global playing field has changed substantially and not to the Republican Party’s benefit.

It is ironic (but then is there anything that the GOP does these days that isn’t ironic?) that the Republican Party, tone deaf to the concerns of ordinary Americans when it comes to their health and well-being, remains the War Party at a time when most of us are sick of war.

There is another trap for Republicans in this regard: Obama has made it clear that he supports a vigilant military ready to take up arms in faraway places when the need arises, but he also advocates a leaner Pentagon, which is anathema to the GOP despite its deficit-reduction frenzy.

And should the eventual Republican presidential candidate bring up the tired refrain that Obama is weak on terrorism and foreign policy, which John McCain continues to do when having one of his senior moments, the president can point to an admirable record that has included icing Osama bin Laden and most of his AQ cadre.

This mostly admirable record includes Iran but not Pakistan, where Obama continues to walk a tightrope between conciliation and retaliation for that country's historic and ongoing meddling in Afghan affairs while clandestinely supporting the Taliban

With Iran, the U.S. is leading an effort to restart nucular . . . er, nuclear negotiations by increasing economic sanctions. The E.U. has bucked up and agreed to forgo Iranian crude, which represents about a fifth of Iran's oil exports, by July, while the value of Iran's currency has dropped dramatically because of sanctions.

The knock against Obama here is that he was not a helpmate during the convulsive student-led “green revolution” of 2009 and had he been more forceful that Amahadinejad and the ayatollahs would have been sent packing. That’s bull bleep because the Iranian opposition didn’t want direct American support knowing that it would have given the regime the ability to wave the Great Satan cudgel.

When the regime recently made noises about shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, the Obama administration was quick to suggest that the consequences of doing so would be regrettable and not to Tehran’s liking. The regime heeded the warning and a crisis was adverted. For the time being.

And so where once advocating war with Iran made Republicans look tough, it now makes them look silly.

Cartoon du Jour

Romney's Gaffe About The Poor Masks Unpleasant Realities About America

Mitt Romney's gaffe about poor people has triggered an overdue if likely short-lived debate about America's underclass.

Speaking to CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien after his victory in the Florida Republican primary, Romney blurted out, "I’m not concerned about the very poor."

Taken in context, the remark wasn't quite what it seemed to be because the candidate, in another of his breathtaking flip-flops, said in the course of the interview that he was confident that the government safety net would take care of the poor and could be repaired if it doesn't, which was a sharp reversal from his previous position and one at odds with conservative Republicans who carp endlessly about how undeserving the poor are of any government help.

Predictably and correctly, the news media, Democrats and many Republicans are painting Romney as out of touch (he made a similar remark in October), but they miss a larger point: The real outrage is not that he doesn’t want to do more for the poor; it’s that he thinks they are well taken care of and worse yet, that the welfare state is working just fine, thank you.

The facts are these:

The nation's poverty rate rose to 15.1 percent (46.2 million) in 2010, up from 14.3 percent (43.6 million) in 2009 and to its highest level since 1993. A large percentage of those millions are children, and people with annual incomes under $25,000 -- some 28.7 percent — don’t have any kind of health insurance.

The government's definition of poverty is based on total income received. For example, the poverty level for 2011 was set at $22,350 (total yearly income) for a family of four. Most Americans (58.5 percent) will spend at least one year below the poverty line at some point between ages 25 and 75.

There certainly are welfare queens and others among these many millions who are too lazy to work, as well as people who receive government aid and spend assistance money not on food but drugs and other vices. But the vast majority are poor not by choice, and the government safety net is full of holes despite a welter of programs, including Medicaid, LIHEAP, Food Stamps, unemployment payments and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, all programs that many Republicans want to cut back or eliminate altogether.

On January 22, which is light years in the past considering Romney's serial vacillations, he asserted that safety-net programs have "massive overhead," and that because of the cost of a huge bureaucracy "very little of the money that's actually needed by those that really need help, those that can’t care for themselves, actually reaches them."

Romney's own tax plan probably would have a devastating impact on the safety net.

Under the plan, the Bush tax cuts and taxes on corporations, the wealthy, and upper-middle class investors would be sharply cut while tax breaks that help the poor would expire. The result, according to the Tax Policy Center, would be a $69 tax cut for the average individual in the bottom 20 percent and a $164,000 tax cut for the average individual in the top one percent to be paid for through unspecified cuts to domestic programs which mostly go to the poor and the elderly.

So we'll take it on faith that Romney is not concerned about the poor but seems to be awfully concerned about the rich, no?

Cartoon du Jour

Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate

GOP House Leadership Finally Gets The Joke, But Will The Faithful Go Along?

The damage that House Republicans have done to their party brand and their chances to take back the White House and Senate is incalculable, but like the last person in the room to get a joke, they finally appear to be wising up.

I have spent a good deal of time -- usually while sitting on the porcelain throne or chasing the lawn mower around the back yard -- trying to fathom why the likes of House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor believed that success laid on the other side of a rainbow of blacks and grays built on opposing President Obama on everything as he struggled to revive a moribund economy and through rewarding the rich while screwing the middle class, poor, elderly and infirm. I finally gave up.

This strategy has worked resoundingly well -- for Obama and the Democrats.

A mere 18 percent of voters approve of the job the House is doing while Obama's numbers have ticked slowly but steadily upward, joblessness has now fallen to a three-year low, and Boehner's leadership is being questioned by more moderate congressfolk on the one hand and by renegade freshmen on the other who want to continue the Give 'Em Hell brand of politics that thrice brought the federal government thisclose to shutdowns.

A result of the leadership finally getting the joke is that there is no talk, as there was this time last year, of repealing health-care reform and overhauling the tax code or any other kind of heavy lifting. Eric Cantor's agenda is embarrassingly painfully modest by comparison with stuff like modest tax cuts for small businesses.

Insiders tell The New York Times that . . . are you ready for this? House leaders want to reestablish the GOP as the party of jobs creation. This of course will mean doing a One Eighty that would snap weaker necks because . . . are you ready for this, as well? it will require bi-forking-partisan compromise.

The strained relationship between Boehner and Cantor is an open secret and harkens back to the days when Newt Gingrich ran the House Republican caucus like a dungeon master. Their tensions are so well known that the president riffed on them at a black-tie banquet Saturday night, joking that “Speaker Boehner, it is good to see you at the head table. I know how badly Eric Cantor wanted your seat.”

Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Cartoon du Jour

Jeff Danziger/New York Times News Syndicate

Breast Cancer Imbroglio: I'll Never Look At A Pink Ribbon The Same Way Again

 The reversal of field today by the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation on its decision to terminate funding to Planned Parenthood clinics is doubly heartening.

This is because a grave injustice has been corrected and it was corrected to a substantial degree by the pushback by many thousands of people who vented their displeasure with Komen on Facebook and Twitter, the first such instance in the U.S. of social media playing such an important role as it has in Arab Spring protests. 

Breast cancer is a very real and too often fatal disease, which made Komen's decision as the leading breast cancer advocacy group all the more disturbing. 

The more we learn about breast cancer the more links to lifestyle, diet and such become apparent. And who doesn't know women who have survived breast cancer, as well as succumbed to it. I can count four of the former and one of the latter among my friends alone. 

But beyond all of this is a puzzling conundrum: Why are more women dying for breast cancer-related reasons despite the increasingly sophisticated screenings that they undergo? And why has the disease become a right-wing Republican cudgel? 

A big part of the answer to the first question is that the benefits of breast cancer screenings have been overstated and come with the risk of overtreating small cancers while missing cancers that are deadly. Same for prostate and some other cancers. 

The Dear Friend & Conscience has been a health-care professional all her working life. She has toiled for many thousands of hours in intensive care units and is certified every which way. She regularly self examines her breasts but refuses to have mammograms because she has long believed their benefits to be wildly exaggerated. And the American Cancer Society, of all organizations, acknowledges that she is correct.  

"We don’t want people to panic,” says Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the cancer society. "But I'm admitting that American medicine has overpromised when it comes to screening. The advantages to screening have been exaggerated." 

The American Cancer Society bombshell came on the heels of a recent study that recommended most women should start regular screenings at age 50, not 40, women age 50 to 74 should have mammograms every two years, rather than every year, and self-breast examinations are not what they're cracked up to be. 

Left unsaid in Brawley's candid and perhaps even courageous comment is that breast-cancer screenings and the invasive radiation treatments, painful needle biopsies and surgeries that often result are a multi-billion dollar industry that gets filthy rich on overdiagnoses. Then there's this: Too many women who have been treated for breast cancer-related reasons cannot get health insurance or are dropped by their insurers. 

Being a woman can be pre-existing condition in and of itself, of course, and it will not be until 2014 that the Affordable Care Act will fully prohibit insurers from using pre-existing conditions as a pretext for denying or dropping coverage. 

Though breast cancer researchers and advocates perpetually plead for more money, the disease is awash in it. 

Last year, the National Institutes of Health, the nation's top agency for health-related research, allocated $763 million to the study of breast cancer, more than double what it committed to any other cancer. The Department of Defense also funds breast cancer research ($150 million this year), as do several states. All that is in addition to the money raised by the roughly 1,400 IRS-recognized, tax-exempt charities devoted to breast cancer. Komen grossed $420 million last year alone. 

Some breast cancer organizations, including Komen, have been highly critical of the screening study, asserting that more lives will be lost because of later and fewer screenings, and it is a fact that American women have the highest incidence rates of breast cancer in the world, 144 per 1,000 among white woman and 122 per 1,000 among African American women. 

Komen, of course, is in the news because it had joined forces with the right-wing Republicans who wield that cudgel. And irony of ironies, it made a choice -- now reversed -- where many women cannot without Planned Parenthood. 

The foundation had said it cut off funding to the group because it is under investigation, as in guilty until proven innocent. It is under investigation because of a right-wing Republican witch hunt against Planned Parenthood, which does 750,000 breast cancer screenings a year. Abortions make up only about 3 percent of its work, but the witch hunters also object to its leading role in providing access to contraceptives, many of which go to women who could not otherwise afford them. 

Komen's demonization of Planned Parenthood came at a time in which the Republican Party is doubling down on denying women many rights, when rape is viewed by one of its president candidates as “a gift from God,” and workplace gender discrimination is tacitly approve of by the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Foundation CEO Nancy Brinker Komen, who was a protocol chief and ambassador during the Bush administration, tried to cover her tracks yesterday in claiming that the decision had nothing to do with Planned Parenthood specifically. 

In a statement released today, the foundation asked everyone "who has participated in this conversation across the country over the last few days to help us move past this issue. We do not want our mission marred or affected by politics – anyone’s politics." 

It was the perception that Komen was inserting politics into providing health care services, especially to underserved women, that helped prompt the firestorm of debate. 

Koman's president is Karen Handel, a conservative Republican who ran for governor in Georgia in 2010 and is believed to have pressured Koman, while the foundation's board includes the general chairman of the virulently anti-choice Susan B. Anthony List and the wife of right-wing Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. 

The backlash against Komen was been severe with all seven California affiliates of the foundation saying that they opposed the decision. Several board members resigned in protest, and in the end the foundation, perhaps realizing that its public image had been sullied and this might result in a drop in donations, reconsidered its decision. 

Twenty-six senators had urged the foundation to reconsider, while pledges to Planned Parenthood of $250,000 each from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Lee Fikes, a Texas oil baron, as well as small donations, have more than make up the $700,000 it lost, which was a tiny part of Komen's $93 million budget. 

To Planned Parenthood, the decision amounted to a betrayal of the organizations' shared goal of saving lives through breast cancer screening programs. Cecile Richards, Planned Parenthood's president, said her organization was gratified by the support the controversy has brought and later praised Komen's decision to resume funding. 

"We provide care to one in five women in America, and over the last two days it seems we’ve heard from every one of them, through Facebook, Twitter, e-mail and all sorts of ways," Ms. Richards said. "It's a true show of women standing for women." 

Perhaps.   

They say that the sisterhood is powerful, but in the case of breast cancer the sisterhood is caught between an industry that gets rich off of it and a political party that uses it as a punching bag.

§  

In addition to pulling funds from Planned Parenthood, Komen also decided to stop funding embryonic stem cell research centers, which makes it clear that the organization has morphed from non-political non-profit to a partisan advocacy organization. 

That means the loss of $3.75 million to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, $4.5 million to the University of Kansas Medical Center, $1 million to the U.S. National Cancer Institute, $1 million to the Society for Women’s Health Research, and $600,000 to Yale University. That’s a loss of nearly $12 million dollars in research money to eradicate breast cancer this year alone.

§  

Click here to make a tax deductible online contribution to Planned Parenthood.

Get Yer Pretty Pink Handgun Here

The Susan B. Komen for the Cure foundation has numerous corporate and other sponsors, but you have to question the wisdom of partnering with a handgun retailer.

A blurb at Discount Gun Sales' website:

Discount Gun Sales is proud to team up with the Susan B. Koman Foundation to offer the Walther P-22 Hope Edition in recognition of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. A portion of each P-22 Hope Edition will be donated to the Seattle Branch of the Susan G. Komen Foundation.

The P-22 Hope Edition has an exclusive DuraCoat Pink slide in recognition of Breast Cancer Awareness month. Utilizing the same reliable controls and firing mechanism that has made the Walther P-22 America’s top selling handgun, the Hope Edition will be a limited production pistol offered exclusively through Discount Gun Sales.

Cartoon du Jour

Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate

The Nancy Komen-Planned Parenthood Debacle: Don't Just Get Mad, Get Even

NANCY BRINKER KOMEN

The Susan Komen-Planned Parenthood debacle is a defining moment for women's rights in America.

As Taylor Marsh writes, it is an egregious example of liberals being asleep at the wheel, but it is much, much more: It is a watershed event in the politicization of women's reproductive rights in an era in which the Republican Party is doubling down on denying women virtually all rights, when rape is viewed by a president candidate as "a gift from God," and workplace gender discrimination is tacitly approve of by the U.S. Supreme Court.

My initial reaction to the debacle was to go online and double my annual donation to Planned Parenthood. My second reaction was to become angry that in 2012 in the land of the free and home of the brave people are trying to dictate -- and succeeding to an alarming extent -- what my beloved, my daughter and my woman friends can and cannot do with their uteruses. My third reaction was to write this post, but I guess that is obvious.

What also is obvious is that there had been a time bombing ticking away at the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation for some time and the explosion in the form of Komen terminating funding to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screenings -- no not abortions or even birth control but for a disease that afflicts one in eight women -- is a result of CEO Nancy Brinker Komen coming out of the closet and revealing herself as just another heartless conservative who puts political considerations ahead of a woman's well being.

Koman was President Bush's chief protocol office and ambassador to Hungary, while Koman's board includes the general chairman of the virulently anti-choice Susan B. Anthony List and the wife of right-wing Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

The good news is that the backlash against Komen has been severe and I can only hope that it will be sustained.

Folks like myself have already more than covered Komen's annual Planned Parenthood funding with a Texas oil baron donating $250,000, at least one Komen affiliate has withdrawn its affiliation with mother ship, and Senator Barbara Boxer, among other politicians, were harshly critical of the move.

Dawn Laguens, an executive vice president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said that Komen’s money had over the years underwritten breast cancer screenings for 170,000 women, some of whose lives were saved as a result. She said she had no sympathy for Komen’s attempt to mollify donors by ending its relationship with a provider of women’s health services for whom abortion services are only a small part.

Komen denies that it pulled funding in response for right-wing reactionary politics. A spokeswoman explained tha the main factor in the decision was a new rule adopted by Komen that prohibits grants to organizations being investigated by local, state or federal authorities. Planned Parenthood, of course, has been repeatedly investigated at the behest of right wingers, which makes the excuse disingenuous and the decision even more deplorable.

Cartoon du Jour

Tom Toles/Universal Press Syndicate

Don Cornelius (1934-2012)

MORE HERE.

Photograph from Mad Vision Entertainment

Should We Believe Mitt Romney's Claim That He Created 100,000 Jobs?

While Mitt Romney may be misunderestimating, as a certain former president would say, the damage that his get-filthy-rich tenure at Bain Capital is causing, opposition researchers are having a devil of a time disproving his claim that he created 100,000 or 120,000 jobs (he has cited both numbers) as CEO of the private-equity company, while supporters are having an equally hard time proving that he is right.

In any event, the majority of the jobs Romney takes credit for creating come from a single source: Staples Inc., and a closer look shows that he is kind of right and kind of wrong.

Romney is kind of right in saying that he helped create 89,000 jobs at Staples, which is the number of employees that the office supply giant currently has. But Bain's investment in Staples was a mere 10 percent of the start-up cash it raised and when Romney left Bain the fledgling retailer only had a single store with fewer than 200 employees.

The larger picture is muddled.

Steve Kaplan, writing for The American, the online magazine of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, attempts to unmuddle the numbers by looking at jobs created and lost in Bain companies at the time Romney left the firm in 1999 and then looking at jobs created and lost in those same companies today.

Kaplan notes that among Bain's investments under Romney, the large job creators were Staples and Sports Authority. At the end of 1998, Staples had more than 42,000 employees and Sports Authority had almost 14,000 for a total of 64,000, while today Staples has 89,000 and Sports Authority, which is now a private company, had 14,300 employees in 2006, the last time it revealed job numbers.

Citing four companies that the Wall Street Journal looked into -- American Pad & Paper (Ampad), Dade Behring, DDI, and Stage Stores—that Bain made very profitable investments in and took money out of that later went bankrupt, Kaplan arrives at these numbers:

Stage has about 3,900 more employes today than in 1996 when Bain invested in it, Dade Behring in its present incarnation has about 1,000 fewer jobs and DDI about 1,500 fewer jobs, while the numbers for Ampad are impossible to ascertain.

"What the article does not tell you is what happened before and after those bankruptcies," Kaplan writes. "When you add it all up today, even in these investments, it looks likely that Bain Capital created jobs overall."

He concludes that "While we will probably never be able to measure the true numbers, it seems pretty clear that 'looting' is an inaccurate description of what happened with these companies."

Tim Murphy, writing for the left-leaning Mother Jones, isn't buying.

This, he says, is because Romney himself has failed to produce credible numbers. He and his surrogates have cited Staples and Sports Authority as success stories but have said zilch about the Bain investments that have lost jobs.

Meanwhile, the Obama re-election team, using the 100,000 jobs-created number as a benchmark, taunts Romney by saying "his claim is ever changing" in this chart:

The bottom line, Murphy says, is that the 100,000 figure was not actually calculated; it was "just a composite of a couple of data points, and there's no evidence that it's actually a 'net' figure," according to Romney's own campaign.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Last of the right-leaning Weekly Standard enters the fray with the cogent observation that people don't credit the jobs created by McDonald's, Home Depot, and Apple to the money men. The credit goes to the idea men -- Ray Kroc, Bernard Marcus, Arthur Blank, Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak.

"This doesn’t make Romney a bad guy," writes Last. "It makes him a wise investor -- and investors are incredibly important. But the skills of an investor aren’t those we think of first when contemplating the presidency. If they were, Warren Buffett would be squaring off against George Soros every four years."

"More importantly, Romney's real skills differ in important ways from the ones he's been advertising. Voters may sense this. And it's one more reason why Romney hasn't been able to close the deal with skeptical Republicans."

When challenged on the accuracy of his job creation figures during a Republican debate by George Stephanopolous of ABC News, Romney told the audience they should just trust him.

"I'm a good enough numbers guy to make sure I got both sides of that," he said.

Okay, Mitt, we trust you.

Cartoon du Jour

Ted Rall

If Newt Loses It's Still Far From Over, But For The GOP It's Over Bar The Shouting

Vote for Newt. Annoy a liberal. ~ SARAH PALIN

When the sun comes up tomorrow in the Sunshine State, it is probable that Mitt Romney will have bounced back from his drubbing in South Carolina and defeated Newt Gingrich in the latest installment of the see-saw race for the Republican presidential nomination despite fellow serial adulterer Herman Cain's last-minute endorsement of the former House speaker.

A Florida victory, of course, is good news for Romney, but it also is great news for President Obama and his re-election team because Gingrich will make it clear that he's not going anywhere except back to Florida in August for the national convention in Tampa because his arch rival won't be able to get a majority of delegates.

Primary delegate selection rules would seem to back up this boast.

Rules instituted this year require primary states to distribute their delegates proportionally instead of by winner-take-all. This means that Gingrich can keep amassing a sizable number of delegates even if Romney keeps beating him. Same for Ron Paul, who is now tied with Rick Santorum for third in most polls, and although the number Paul brings may not be sizable, Romney may be unable to get a majority.

In another rule change, the name of any candidate who receives a plurality of delegates in five states will be placed in nomination. In addition to South Carolina, it is not outside the realm of possibility that Gingrich could get a plurality in Georgia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas.

Candidates feigning determination to fight on against long odds are a staple of campaigns, but Gingrich is different because of his visceral loathing of Romney and the Republican establishment.

"When you take all the non-Romney votes, it's very likely that at the convention there will be a non-Romney majority and maybe a very substantial one," the candidate said on Sunday. "My job is to convert that into a Gingrich majority."

Gingrich also has an ace in the hole of a sort because the opposition to Romney among the GOP's tail-wagging conservative base has not diminished and it is difficult to see Tea Party diehards capitulating to Romney in Tampa. But having noted that, Gingrich may not get to play his ace. This is because if no candidate has a majority of delegates after the first convention ballot, the job of selecting the nominee will fall on the Republican National Committee, which is comprised of state party chairs and other power brokers who will overwhelmingly favor Romney.

There has been a flurry of commentaries comparing Gingrich's refusal to accede to the law of gravity to Hillary Clinton in 2008, but the comparison is bogus because Clinton was able to hold on because she had a ton of money, which Gingrich does not have even with Sugar Daddy and Mommy Adelman, and a deep national campaign infrastructure, which Gingrich most definitely doesn't have.

Meanwhile, the idea of a White Knight galloping into the fray is ludicrous.

A late entrant would be unable to get on the ballot in many primary states where deadlines have passed, and the 11th hour entry of a draft candidate like Mitch Daniels at the convention is most unlikely. With the election a mere 10 weeks out at that point, this candidate would be screwed with no organization, no money and . . . oh, no platform. Besides which, fantasy candidates always look great because they haven't been subjected to the attacks real candidates have to face.

Beyond the big dance, a prolonged primary battle is more bad news for congressional Republicans.

They have been repeatedly upstaged by the president of late, most recently with the State of the Union speech, their message -- a Big Fat No to anything that would help jump start the economy and create jobs -- isn't playing well out on the hustings, the gulf between House Speaker John Boehner and renegade freshmen is growing, and more moderate Republican senators are increasingly at odds with their lower chamber peers.

But the biggest reason that the primary season has been a mess is because it is a reflection of what the Republican Party has become.

The party's myriad factions have more or less hung together in recent years not because they agree with each other; in fact, there are serious policy disagreements within several of the factions. They have hung together because of the intensity of their hatred for Barack Obama. And that, in the end, is not going to be nearly enough to win the White House is Romney survives or if, miracle of miracles for Democrats, Gingrich prevails.

Cartoon du Jour

Glenn McCoy/Universal Press Syndicate

Bella's Getting Better, No Hope For Dad

It's been a rough few days for the three-year-old daughter of Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who remains in a hospital with pneumonia.

The longshot candidate described Bella Santorum's improvement on Sunday as "a miraculous turnaround" and it may indeed be a God job. But the top flight medical care she is getting at a Washington, D.C. area hospital may have something to do with her family having health insurance because of Santorum's lavish Senate retirement benefits and personal wealth. But in yet another of the hypocrisy-tinged ironies that abound in today's Republican Party, he is against the government helping provide health insurance to the families of all the other Bellas in America who become ill but cannot afford decent care.

In fact, doing a little extrapolating, of the 45 million Americans without health insurance, there probably are at least a million or so three-year-olds in that situation, while about 1,000 children die of pneumonia in the U.S. each year

Bella's pneumonia is complicated by the fact that she has a genetic condition known as Trisomy 18. The condition typically proves fatal and Santorum often says his daughter wasn't expected to live past 12 months. That she has survived and thrived also may indeed be a God job. But the top flight medical care she is getting may have something to do with her family having health insurance because of Santorum's lavish Senate retirement benefits and wealth. But in yet another of the hypocrisy-tinged ironies that abound in today's Republican Party . . . You know.

As recently as last Friday, Santorum excoriated fellow candidate Mitt Romney, who pushed through the nation's first comprehensive health-care reform as Massachusetts governor, and President Obama for "wanting to tell Americans that as a condition of breathing in America, you have to go out and buy private sector insurance so (sic) the government will fine you."

What Santorum was saying is that under ObamaCare, individuals at a certain income level could be fined beginning in 2014 if they don't get insurance to help fund a pool for insurance for people who cannot afford it. The fines will be small, and there is widespread agreement outside of the Republican fever swamp that the government will not be aggressive in pursuing fines.

This post will attract criticism because by some people's lights writing about a sick child to hammer home the point that her father is a hypocrite should be off limits. But then so would going after Newt Gingrich for his none-of-your-business private life, specifically the fact that as a married man he was having one of his serial affairs as he led the charge to impeach President Clinton for his affair with a White House intern.

In any event, we wish Bella a speedy and full recovery. As for her father, there is no hope.

Cartoon du Jour

Ben Sargent/Universal Press Syndicate

Who Is Saul Alinsky & Why Is Newt Gingrich Yammering About Him?

On the night of his triumph in the South Carolina primary, Newt Gingrich declared that "The centerpiece of this campaign, I believe, is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky."

That reference and subsequent references to Alinsky surely puzzled viewers of a certain age and probably many viewers of all ages. This is because Alinsky, a legendary community organizer, died in 1972.

Translated, Gingrich’s dog-whistle demagoguery is:

I am sure that a threateningly ethnic and Jew boy name like Saul Alinsky will resonate with Southern Republican voters. Oh, and Barack Obama was a community organizer in Chicago like Saul Alinsky, whose views are at the heart of all that is wrong with our great republic today, and like Saul Alinsky, the man whom I will oust from the White House is an anti-religious radical who demeans our great republic. Did I mention that ours is a great republic?

I happen to think that Alinsky was not a radical although he considered himself one. His Rules For Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, was one of the most influential books that I read as a young man in educating myself on outside-the-mainstream politics and philosophies. Published shortly before Alinsky’s death, it is a handbook for community organizers.

Alinsky writes in the prologue that: "What I have to say in this book is not the arrogance of unsolicited advice. It is the experience and counsel that so many young people have questioned me about through all-night sessions on hundreds of campuses in America. It is for those young radicals who are committed to the fight, committed to life."

Now it so happens that Obama did once work in a Chicago community organizing project inspired by Alinsky, but there the similarities end, which Gingrich should well know if he is the student of history that he claims to be.

And if he was the student of history that he claims to be, he would recognize a couple of ironies: The religious fundamentalist of the 1980s and the Tea Partier of today emulated Alinsky's organizing methods, while Gingrich himself uses Alinsky's tactic of exploiting resentment.

Alinsky, it turns out, was a deep believer in grassroots democracy and institutional religion. He frequently quoted Jefferson and Madison and was disdainful of 1960s leftists who burned American flags. He did much of his work with the active support and resources of the Roman Catholic Church. Yes, the same religion that Gingrich converted to when he married Callista Bisek. (Three marriages and three religions, but so little time.)

In 1969, Alinsky received the Pacem in Terris Peace and Freedom Award, given annually by a coalition of Catholic groups in the Midwest to commemorate an encyclical about human rights and alternatives to war written by Pope John XXIII. Most honorees have been ardent reformers of one faith or another. They include Martin Luther King, Jr., Desmond Tutu, Cesar Chavez, Daniel Berrigan and Lech Walesa. Oh, and Mother Teresa.

That's our Newt. Terrific demagogue and lousy historian.

Cartoon du Jour

Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate

A Great Calendar & A Worthy Cause

The capacity of the blogosphere to do good deeds is under appreciated and under utilized. Which makes the union between John Cole's Balloon Juice blog and Charlie's Angels, an animal rescue organization, so worthwhile.

John and his fellow bloggers have been tireless advocates of the rescue and adoption of homeless pets, especially those who might otherwise be euthanized. This has led to the creation of an annual Balloon Juice pet rescue calendar that is chockablock with owner-submitted photographs of their rescues and adoptions, mostly dogs and cats with the occasional wabbit.

The 2012 calendar is now available, and who cares if January is almost shot. The $22 bucks for each calendar goes to Charlie's Angels, which is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. All donations directly to Charlie's Angels are fully tax deductible.

The rescue effort resonates deeply for the Dear Friend & Conscience and myself. We currently have five rescue critters, three cats and chocolate Labrador sister-brother Nicky and Jack, who if you click on and enlarge the top image can be seen near the upper right-hand corner frolicking in the snow behind our mountain retreat.

Click here to order a calendar.

Florida Primary Was Once A Cakewalk For Mitt Romney But Is Now Pivotal

SMUG CAPTION ABOUT WHITE REPUBLICANS GOES HERE

With five days to go before the Florida presidential primary, public-opinion polls in the Sunshine State are sending a mixed message. But one thing is for sure, a primary that once appeared to be a cakewalk for Mitt Romney may well turn out to be pivotal for the hapless candidate.

An averaging of the polls on Wednesday revealed a 4 percentage point lead for Gingrich. With a plus or minus 3 percent error margin, that is not much of a lead. A new poll out today puts Romney ahead by 7 percentage points, and there are indications that Gingrich might have hit a ceiling in support. As if it matters, Rick Santorum is a distant third and Ron Paul even further back.

Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight forecast model at The New York Times still projects Gingrich as the slight favorite, giving him a 2-point lead and a 60 percent chance of victory, a lead that has diminished considerably from two days ago when the model saw a potential double-digit win for him.

The Florida vote is pivotal because national polls also show likely voters trending toward Gingrich and that was happening before he wiped the floor with Romney in South Carolina.

The most reliable and time-tested of national polls is the Gallup national tracking poll, which shows Gingrich up by 4 percentage points over Romney and gaining by the day. The latest Rasmussen Reports national poll, which was taken after South Carolina, shows Gingrich up by 7 percentage points.

While Gingrich must be smiling about those numbers, they mask others.

The latest Fox News national poll of registered Democratic, Republican and independent voters found that 56 percent of respondents had an unfavorable opinion of Gingrich, while only 27 percent viewed him favorably. Only three other presidential wannabes have had negatives like that since 2000: Pat Buchanan, Al Sharpton and Sarah Palin.

Meanwhile, the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that independent voters are turning off to Romney and they would be more likely to vote -- if they vote at all -- for Obama if Gingrich defies gravity and becomes the nominee.

Debates seem be having an outsized influence this primary season and so the debate tonight in Jacksonville might be crucial for Romney, who has underperformed in the face of red-meat attacks from Gingrich and Santorum.

Unfortunately, the outcome may come down to which candidate can better exploit the other's dirty laundry.

In a gaffe of monumental proportions, Romney released his 2010 tax return and estimated 2011 return on the morning of President Obama's State of the Union speech, which gave the president a perfect opportunity to offer a point-by-point refutation of Romney while not mentioning him by name.

With the tax return story still dominating the news cycle, this gives Gingrich a built-in opportunity to go after Romney -- and he is doing so with relish over Romney's Swiss bank accounts and a newly-aired accusation that Romney profited handsomely from the epidemic of home foreclosures in Florida.

Romney will hit Gingrich hard on his ties to Freddic Mac and ethical lapses as speaker of the House. He is intimating that Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker who was on the investigative committee that looked into Gingrich at the time, is holding back a secret dossier of damaging information that she would share if he becomes the nominee.

Given the overwhelming approval that Obama's speech has received, the Gingrich-Romney fisticuffs must be doubly satisfying for the White House. The Republicans brought this mess on themselves and only they can undo this mess themselves.

Unless, even at this relatively early date, it's already too late.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, conservative pundits and some of Gingrich's former House colleagues have turned on him with a panicked vengeance in labeling him, in effect, an anti-Reagan, Clintonian fraud:

* The Drudge Report ran a story today under the banner headline: "Insider: Gingrich repeatedly Insulted Reagan" that links to a devastating takedown by Elliott Abrams in the National Review, who wrote, among other things, that Gingrich had a long record of criticizing and undermining Reagan’s most transformative policies.

* Drudge also linked prominently to the American Spectator’s R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.’s similarly harsh takedown of Gingrich over character, calling him "William Jefferson Gingrich" in comparing him to Bill Clinton.

* Ann Coulter warned: "Re-elect Obama, Vote Newt!" and lambasted Gingrich for a "hotheaded arrogance is neither conservative nor attractive to voters."

* Tom DeLay, a top Gingrich deputy during the Republican revolution of the mid-1990s,said in a radio interview that "He’s not really a conservative. I mean, he'll tell you what you want to hear. He has an uncanny ability, sort of like Clinton, to feel your pain and know his audience and speak to his audience and fire them up. But when he was speaker, he was erratic, undisciplined."

Cartoon du Jour

Tony Auth/The Philadelphia Inquirer

A President With The Wind At His Back

For the first time in his presidency, Barack Obama was able to deliver a State of the Union address last night with the economic and political winds at his back as the lingering aftershocks of the recession ebb and Republican infighting diminishes the party's chances of taking back the White House.

Obama's approval ratings are identical to those of the Great Conservative God, Ronald Reagan, at the same point in his first term and are rising, while the Tea Party militancy that has infected the core of the Republican Party has driven public support for Congress and Republicans in particular to record lows.

Absent the effects of a worsening economic crisis in Europe, it is the domestic economy and not Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich, let alone John Boehner and his hapless Housemates, that will be Obama's chief adversary in the run-up to the November election. The president hammered hard on a populist message, specifically the income inequality that it at the heart of the long-term American economic malaise and where coddle-the-rich Republicans are the most vulnerable.

The soaring language of Obama's State of the Union speeches was absent as he repeatedly presented himself during the address long on tactics as a champion for middle-class families struggling to get by and declared that "we've come too far to turn back now."

Summoning the power of incumbency, the president sprinkled his frequently sharp-elbowed remarks with anecdotes and shout-outs to key cities in election battlegrounds and hit back against GOP attacks on an array of foreign and domestic policy areas while taking credit for saving the domestic auto industry and taking the first steps toward health-care reform.

He also riffed on tax reform, including reductions in corporate rates; more spending and accountability on education and infrastructure investment; and streamlining of the regulatory environment, as well as a number of small-ball, feel-good initiatives that won't cost taxpayers and arm and a leg.

The infrastructure investment is particularly noteworthy.

The president would use half of the savings from winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for public-works projects could put hundreds of thousands of people back to work, although Republicans, who are allergic to anything that would create jobs, are sure to insist that the money be used for deficit reduction.

A discordant note: Obama declared that he would not allow Wall Street "to go back to the days when [it] was allowed to play by its own set of rules," a rather hollow promise considering that most of his economic team are Wall Street insiders and there have been few crackdowns on miscreant financial institutions on his watch.

The timing of the speech could not be worse for the struggling Romney, and although the president did not mention Romney by name, in some respects the speech was a point-by-point refutation of where the one-time front runner stands on key issues.

The president emphasized his support for the "Buffett rule," named for the billionaire investor who has criticized a tax system that allows him and other investors to pay a lower rate than their staffs. The rule would require people making more than $1 million a year to pay at least the same tax rates as middle-class Americans, which can be close to 30 percent. Buffett has said he paid an effective 17.4 percent rate last year.

Buffett’s secretary was sitting in the gallery, while voters learned earlier Tuesday that Romney, too, is a symbol of what the White House is portraying as a major inequity. In 2010, he paid an effective rate of 13.9 percent on $21.7 million in income, most of it from investments, some of them at tax-free offshore sites.

"Now, you can call this class warfare all you want," Obama said. "But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense."

Class warfare is exactly what Republicans are calling it. House Speaker Boehner, who sat behind the president during the speech along with Vice President Biden, suggested earlier in the day that the president's politics of "division and envy" are "almost un-American." Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, who delivered the post-speech Republican rebuttal, said that "no feature of the Obama presidency has been sadder than its constant efforts to divide us, to curry favor with some Americans by castigating others."

Meanwhile, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll found independent voters quickly souring on Romney, whose strength with that group not long ago made him the opponent that many Democrats feared most, while overnight polls and a focus group with swing voters found that the president's populist pitch went over well.

Adding to the notion that the State of the Union address was, in effect, a campaign speech, Obama departed this morning on a three-day swing to five competitive states — Iowa, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado and Michigan — where he will turn up the heat on Republicans.

* * * * *

A little more than two hours before delivering his address, Obama learned that Navy SEALs had conducted a successful helicopter rescue mission in Somalia to free a U.S. citizen and her Danish colleague, who had been taken hostage by pirates three months earlier. The SEALs were from the same commando unit that killed Osama bin Laden.

Microphones in the House chamber picked up Obama saying "Good job!", congratulating Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey as he greeted them in the audience. But the administration did not explain the remark because the special-forces operators were not yet safely on the ground.