Just as it’s becoming clear that Mitt Romney will become the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, and the first Mormon presidential nominee, we’ve been seeing a predictable uptick in the frequency of exposés about Romney’s zany religion.  Now that Rick Santorum has dropped out of the race and Newt Gingrich is making conciliatory remarks, expect to see a lot more of this.

In “7 Questions for Mitt About Mormonism,” religion columnist Jeffrey Weiss declares, “[I]t is past time for Mitt Romney to address relevant questions about his religion.”  Weiss casts a suspicious eye on such un-American Latter-day Saint doctrines as “[E]ach individual is accountable for his choices and actions…  If we have been frugal and saved for a rainy day, then we can more easily weather the financial storm.  If we have lived beyond our means, then we pay the consequences of our own actions when the bills come.”  Social Darwinism alert!  read more »

Talk about chutzpah.  The same chief executive who refused to provide a speck of guidance to one branch of government in crafting his signature legislation is now threatening another branch of government not to overturn it.

Does President Obama believe in the separation of powers?  You wouldn’t know it from his intemperate comments Monday on the legal challenge to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which the Supreme Court is now deliberating.  Just days after skeptical justices subjected administration lawyers and their opponents to a historic six hours of questioning, and just as the judges were retreating to contemplate the competing claims in private, Obama stood up in the Rose Garden and loudly warned the nine “unelected” rubes that they’d better get this one right.

Obama declared that overturning his health care law would be “unprecedented” and “extraordinary”—which is funny, because that’s what a lot of people have been saying about his health care law.  read more »

Apparently “the system worked” in exonerating Casey Anthony, but we don’t need the system in order to be certain Trayvon Martin’s shooter is a racist, cold-blooded murderer.

Several weeks ago, 28-year-old George Zimmerman eyed 17-year-old Martin ambling around the Retreat at Twins Lake gated community in Sanford, Florida and called 911 to report suspicious behavior.  Zimmerman followed Martin throughout the complex against the 911 operator’s recommendation.  At some point Martin and Zimmerman scuffled and Zimmerman shot Martin.

Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee told reporters there wasn’t enough evidence to arrest the shooter: “In this case, Mr. Zimmerman has made the statement of self-defense.  Until we can establish probable cause to dispute that, we don’t have the grounds to arrest him.”

Never mind—the left wants him arrested, charged, and prosecuted anyway.  They’ve jumped to the conclusion that the attack was unprovoked and racially motivated.  Civil rights groups insist the Sanford Police Department and Seminole County State Attorney’s Office are racist.  read more »

In 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama ran, not against the promises of Republican nominee John McCain, but against the policies of second-term president George W. Bush.  In 2012, Obama apparently plans to run against Bush once more.

Obama sure doesn’t seem to want to run on his record, since the economy is still in terrible shape after three years of his leadership.  Instead, it appears he’s going to campaign on the conceit that Bush left him with a much worse economy than anyone—he, economists, Nostradamus—predicted.  Obama now would have us believe that his policies prevented an economic slide the likes of which would have made 2010 look like boom times.

That’s a very interesting campaign platform, because even a cursory look at the trajectory of unemployment rates and economic growth in the months following the country’s recessions of the past 50 years shows that the downturn that started in December 2007 is singularly deep, protracted, and devastating.  If Obama’s right, and our economy would have been much worse had he not enacted his resuscitating policies, then our country narrowly dodged a plunge to a standard of living on par with that of the 1960s.  read more »

On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” GOP presidential soon-to-be also-ran Rick Santorum dismissed frontrunner Mitt Romney’s snowballing delegate count, declaring, “This isn’t a mathematical formula.”  Later that day he told a Fox News reporter, “It’s pathetic isn’t it?  I mean, now you’re gonna make the argument, ‘I should be president’ because of math.”

Actually, what isn’t mathematical about the delegate accrual process?

Presidential primary nomination season is rife with mathematical calculations.  Each state boasts its own complicated apportionment formula, ranging from mostly proportional to quasi-proportional to winner-take-all.  Savvy campaign managers earn big bucks planning winning strategies for accumulating the requisite number of delegates.  Campaign tacticians create sophisticated statistical models to predict state, district, and citywide outcomes and to plot contingency routes for reaching a majority of delegates.  Campaign finance staff forecast revenue from donations, estimate advertising costs, and manage a budget equivalent to that of a midsized company.

What does Santorum think is going to happen after his failure to clinch the nomination: that God will intervene and change the laws of mathematics for him?  read more »

Here are five surprising 2012 Super Tuesday delegate predictions, based on my analysis of Real Clear Politics polling averages, public opinion polls, straw polls, and recent events in the ten states voting tomorrow.

(The takeaway: Non-Romney candidates will have their moments in the sun… and then the Romney juggernaut will continue crushing everything in its path.)

Prediction #1: In almost every primary state, the candidate who wins the most delegates will win more delegates than all other candidates combined in that state

In other words, in each of the seven primary states (not the three caucus states, where anything goes), one candidate will almost always win more than 50% of that state’s delegates.  This may seem unlikely, given the fractious nature of the 2012 GOP primaries, dispersed support for the remaining candidates, and the proportional nature of delegate allegation.  However, these states’ apportionment systems are quasi-proportional, which means that large numbers of delegates end up going to the top two (occasionally three) candidates, and none to those who fail to meet a minimum threshold of 15% or 20% of the vote.  An even larger haul goes to the first-place winner, even if he beats the runner-up by only a small percentage.

Prediction #2: Rick Santorum will win only two states, Oklahoma and Tennessee  read more »

So far there’s not a whit of evidence that Mitt Romney’s “gaffes” in inadvertently referencing his personal wealth at campaign appearances and debates have cost him a single vote in the 2012 presidential election.

We hear from mainstream pundits and wire service reporters—most of whom wouldn’t dream of voting for a conservative but are terrified that Romney will be the GOP nominee—how Romney’s horrifying Freudian slips are bound to alienate undecided voters, Reagan Democrats, and moderate Republicans.

Romneys’ unspeakable comments have: extolled voluntary contracts in the free market (“I like being able to fire people… if someone doesn’t give me the good service that I need”), affirmed the social safety net (“I’m not concerned about the very poor—we have a safety net”), challenged candidate Rick Perry on a falsehood (“$10,000 bet?”), and expressed his support for the Detroit auto industry (“Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs”).  These forbidden lines have supposedly frightened off otherwise open-minded voters and driven them straight into the comforting arms of everyman Obama.  Good citizens everywhere were supposedly all set to pull the lever for Romney, but are now running screaming at the thought of a president who has achieved phenomenal business success in the private sector and isn’t ashamed of it.  read more »

Poor Greece is on the verge of defaulting on its bills and declaring bankruptcy.  Credit rating agencies S&P, Moody’s, and Fitch long ago downgraded Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain (the PIGS) and gave them negative outlooks, with Greece getting Cs across the board.  (Cuba, Pakistan, and Burkina Faso are a few of the nations with better ratings than Greece.)  If Greece runs out of money and fails to pay €14.5 billion to service its debt on March 20, European markets could be badly shaken.

Greece’s financial woes are the result of its unsustainable social welfare entitlement state, whereby working adults are promised generous pensions and early retirements, and younger generations must cough up the money to pay for these goodies, though they won’t receive similar benefits when they retire.  (Sound familiar?)  The government has been borrowing to subsidize these pensions, but it’s not enough—partly because Greece has one of the lowest birthrates in the world, and partly because swaths of young educated Greeks are fleeing the country and emigrating elsewhere to find work.  read more »

Michael Barone titled a recent column “Romney Appeals to White Collars, Santorum to Blue.”  Santorum’s appeal to blue-collar workers—at least those who believe in hard work, small government, personal responsibility, and self-driven upward mobility—is highly suspect.

Santorum woos primarily conservative voters who obsess over opposing abortion and gay marriage.  These voters would gladly hand over the country to a big government “compassionate conservative,” so long as he channels his policies on social issues from holy men in white collars.

Mitt Romney downplays social issues relative to Santorum (which isn’t hard) and focuses on economic issues, emphasizing his private sector business experience running Bain Capital and the Salt Lake City Olympics.

How are “blue collar voters” supposed to get excited about a candidate whose strongest campaign positions are outlawing abortion and gay marriage rather than stopping the federal government from micromanaging our economy via taxes, regulations, and shovel-ready-job-killing “green” initiatives?

Santorum boosts “faith-based initiatives”—basically welfare redirected toward religious rather than secular agencies.  He calls for expanding Medicare, and authored a “Social Security Guarantee Act” that promises never to cut seniors’ benefits—in fact increases them every year.  read more »

The media have been aghast over GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney’s remark in an interview with CNN’s Soledad O’Brien last week that the very poor in this country can go to hell.  The comment supposedly reinforces Romney’s image as a cold, heartless country club Republican who eats orphans for breakfast.

Of course Romney said no such thing; what he said was, “I’m in this race because I care about Americans.  I’m not concerned about the very poor—we have a safety net there.  If it needs a repair, I’ll fix it.  I’m not concerned about the very rich—they’re doing just fine.  I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90 to 95% of Americans who right now are struggling.”

Only a party with a very dull, tiresome axe to grind would willfully misunderstand the obvious meaning of Romney’s response.  (Then again, this is the party that heard “I like being able to fire people…  If someone doesn’t give me a good service… I want to say, ‘I’m going to go get someone else to provide that service to me’” as proof of a sadistic streak.)  read more »