On Thursday we beheld the last Presidential debate before the Florida primary; Byron York points out that it didn’t end well for Newt Gingrich:
All in all, Thursday was simply a bad night for Gingrich. Yes, he had some good moments, but after a lackluster performance in last Monday’s debate, and with his poll numbers slipping a bit in Florida, Gingrich needed a strong performance, and he didn’t get it. Failing to deliver made Gingrich’s job between now and next Tuesday’s primary all the harder.
Rick Santorum, however, did very very well on Thursday:
Unfortunately, I don’t think that will be enough for him to take the state.
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There’s been some talk lately that the Electoral College should be scrapped. This comes up every election cycle, and the bluest of the blue states are pushing it, as usual: they think it’s to their advantage. Charles Lane at the Washington Post (and of Shattered Glass fame) has some objections to abandoning the electoral college, but I believe he misses the main one: a pure popular-vote campaign would effectively end the days of retail politics. No longer would it be cost-effective for a campaign to bother with the likes of a New Hampshire, an Iowa, or a Nevada. It would be all about the large media markets, saturated with slick TV ads. Joe Scarborough has it spot on:
The last thing this country needs is a media-generated candidate.
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Do you remember the Scooter Libby case, and how outraged the press were over that? Well, here is a story that I suspect the legacy media will have less interest in:
John Kiriakou, 47, was charged with four counts that ranged from disclosing classified details about counter-terrorism operations to the press, to lying to the CIA about the origin of sensitive information he published in a book about his career.
Kiriakou, whose CIA career spanned from 1990 to 2004, was depicted in a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Alexandria as a significant source for articles including a detailed account in The New York Times of the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
Why isn’t this a story? Perhaps because Kiriakou was an aide to Senator John Kerry: after all, if a Democrat is involved, it’s just not very compelling.
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The Keystone decision is still having ramifications that may not be so good for the White House. On the one hand, the railroads owned by Warren “Raise My Taxes” Buffett will profit from the rejection of the project. On the other hand, it looks like Congress is not taking this lying down:
The State Department is bashing House GOP legislation to force approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.
The legislation, which Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.) is pushing, “imposes narrow time constraints and creates automatic mandates that prevent an informed decision,” Kerri-Ann Jones, the State Department’s Keystone point woman, says in written testimony set to be delivered to a House Energy and Commerce Committee panel Wednesday morning.
The last thing Democrats want to see is a vote in Congress, wherein Democrat legislators would be forced to choose between backing the President or backing the pipeline—and the jobs and energy independence it will bring. No matter what the MSM tell you, the Democratic Party knows how those votes would fall.
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Why do you think the MSM was so anxious to avoid broadcasting Herman Cain’s response to the President’s speech? It’s because they know that talk of the President’s electability is just that . . . talk.
If you want to watch Cain’s speech, it’s here.
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Speaking of people who understand the score, Mark Oxner is running against Alan Grayson, and has released this ad:
The last thing any Congressional candidate wants is to be linked to Obama.
. . . Of course, if you want to sell books, heated exchanges with the President work very well, as Jan Brewer found out!
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If you want to know why Richard Dawkins tends to avoid debates with believers, look no farther than this:
Where Dawkins goes next in the DNA article is intriguing, as he claims that Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama were potentially nonbelievers. Of course, he uses their intellect as a basis for his theory.
“I think Lincoln, Kennedy, Clinton, Obama may well be an atheist,” he said. “Obama’s a very intelligent man. He probably is an atheist.”
The concept that intellect indicates atheism would be laughed out of any room of competent historians (or cognitive scientists)—but when one is wedded to one’s unbelief (read: belief) to the degree that Dawkins is . . . there is nothing left but reasoning that is both warped and circular.
I see no difference between Richard Dawkins and the most tawdry of televangelists . . . in professional and intellectual terms.
At the same time, Dawkins has done well in marriage: His wife is the beautiful Lalia Ward, who played Romana with the Fourth Doctor in the Doctor Who franchise. Ms. Ward has also been featured in both the Companion Chronicles and the Gallifrey series . . . so Dawkins must have as much going for him as a human being as he lacks as a writer and thinker.
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In Egypt, it looks like the recent changes will, um, pay off:
A press freedom index published by Reporters Without Borders says Egypt fell 39 places during the past year, al-Ahram Online reported Wednesday.
Last year Egypt was 127 on the press freedom list but the 2011/12 index placed the country lower at 166.
That can’t be: after all the revolution in Egypt was all about freedom, wasn’t it?
Isreali Matzav finds the Reporters Without Borders methodology to be suspect; maybe we can find another way to measure of Egypt’s prospect, such as foreign investment:
Investors bought less than a third of the 3.5 billion Egyptian pounds (US$580 million) worth of Treasury bills offered to the market on January 22, a red flag warning that Egypt’s foreign exchange position is close to the brink.
Yields on Egyptian government debt maturing in nine months jumped to nearly 16%, but the government could not place its local-currency debt to Egyptian investors, even at that exorbitant rate.
This is a new and ominous decline in the financial position of the most populous Arab country.
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The news of Egypt came via Gateway Pundit, who notes that financial decline seems to follow nearly everthing that the Obama Administration touches:
Another of Obama’s “green energy” stimulus disasters just went belly up. Ener1, an Obama-backed electric car battery-maker, follows the lead of Obama’s other failures, Solyndra and Beacon Power, in the race to squander taxpayer money. This time, we get to say buh-bye to $188.5 million.
I hope the administration never endorses my radio show.
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Last week was the annual March for Life; as usual, the March drew hundreds of thousands of members, while the opposition . . .
The resistance to the March was futile as usual, with only 25-30 so-called “pro-choice” people waiting for us at the Supreme Court building, taunting us with chants and occasional obscene gestures (typical liberal petulance). Our numbers were in the low hundreds of thousands, perhaps 250,000 by my estimate. The vast throng of humanity seemed to go on forever . . .
This didn’t stop CBS from excluding pro-life individuals from their slideshow!
But not to worry: the left which couldn’t muster 100 people to oppose the pro-life march, countered with a “virtual” march. Surely, online they could match the pro-lifers . . . couldn’t they?
Sponsored by Planned Parenthood, NARAL, MoveOn, Ms. Magazine, NOW, and a host of smaller pro-abortion groups, the Trust Women Week march has only signed up 87,784 people to participate.
If these guys can’t even draw online half the numbers that pro-life groups managed to physically get to D.C. (not even counting various smaller events nationwide), you would think that would be news worth reporting by the media—but no. Elizabeth Scalia puts it best:
they have become truth-phobics, our mainstream media. They can’t tell you the truth about anything, anymore — they can only do whatever it takes to sustain the narratives they’ve constructed.
That’s why you hear no reports about Fast and Furious, or a member of the DOJ pleading the Fifth about that. It’s why you don’t hear about Solyndra and the “green jobs” myth. It’s why you hear no caterwauling from the press about the fact that we are 1000 days into this administration without a budget.
You want the truth? You think you deserve it? The press can’t handle the truth; they can’t bring it to you. The New York Times just ignores inconvenient truth, entirely.
That’s why 250 people camping out in a park gets thousands of stories, while half-a-million marching on Washington does not get reported at all—or, if it does, the pictures are cropped; the attendees are caricatured, mis-named and under-represented, while their opponents are over-represented.
Well, at least you aren’t seeing judges ordering abortions and sterilizations in Massachusetts against people’s will . . . oh, wait:
Since Moe planned to keep her baby, her parents, in conjunction with the doctors, filed a petition with the local courts, which would give them the power to force her to get an abortion.
Incredibly, Massachusetts justice Christina Harms not only granted the petition, she went a step further. She told Moe’s parents that it didn’t matter how they got Moe to have the abortion, even if it meant she had to be “coaxed, bribed, or even enticed . . . by ruse.” Not only this, but she directed that whatever medical facility performed the abortion go ahead and sterilize Moe . . . without her permission.
Even in Massachusetts, the judges’ ruling was a bridge too far. For now.
But keep in mind that even as the pro-abortion side wins these battles, it may be losing the larger war.
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We’re really looking forward to next week’s Superbowl, and it may even cheer me up about the overall direction the country is going in. Operative word: may.
