Good morning all.

Mr. Gingrich commented in one of his speeches that the government cannot legislate happy.  Our founders suggested “the pursuit of happiness.”  

Mr. Gingrich went further to say that there is no Department of Happy, and that government cannot take happy from one group or individual and give happy to another.  There are no “Happy Stamps.”

On the telephone in one of our early calls, when I told a friend about this, she had the perfect response.  ”Our laughter is our happy stamp.”  Individuals can share happiness with laughter, smiles general good cheer, well wishes and prayer.

I hope each one reading this has a wonder-filled day.

GB

Good morning! I think you make a good point about Santorum and I appreciate you calling it like you see it. I recall that Gov. Palin was criticized for not campaigning in Delaware for COD the weekend before the elections in Nov 2010. Turns out that she was home as Trig was having surgery. It apparently was a minor procedure, but her place was at his side.

The pressure on Romney is huge because he doesn’t just need to win FL, but needs to win big. A victory of 5-points or less may be seen as a defeat even though he’d get all the delegates. Plus, a narrow loss for Gingrich will increase the pressure on Santorum to get out and that would be very bad news for Romney.

I am hopeful the Tea-Evangelicals will pull out a victory! Turn-out may be key. Perhaps all this talk about Romney having a huge lead will cause some of his supporters to get complacent and stay home.

I suspect that Mitt Romney will win Florida tomorrow.

He won’t get my vote. Had the Governor said nothing, I would have voted for Ron Paul. However, as it serves the strategic interests of Palin and the Party in general for Gingrich to get a second wind, I will vote tactically and follow Palin’s advice.

However, the race will be close enough to deny Romney the kind of overwhelming beatdown that could have a posse of Grey Men show up on Newt Gingrich’s doorstep with an ultimatum to GTFO our be exiled.

So Gingrich will come in second, but a close second. It’s his organization and his fightback that might help him get close. The fact that he has people, run by McCollum, in each county of this state is going to help him keep this close. That will help his turnout. Predictions of a Romney Romp will NOT help Mittens.

I expect Santorum to come in a distant third, precisely because he was called away from Florida because of concerns about his daughter. Lastly I expect Paul to be a presence only in some urban areas where libertarians gather.

Paul’s problem is that while his candidacy is a Vanguard Candidacy, much like Eugene McCarthy’s was for lefty Democrats in 1968, the Paultards are not enough of a critical mass to mount a post-election Putsch to take the Party from the Establishment.

Palin, too, sees that the rank and file are headed in Paul’s direction. Paul’s problem is that he’s too old and his foreign policy is a non-starter for too many members of the Reagan wing of the Party, like Palin, who believe that a sound military is the prerequisite for a foreign policy of non-interventionism mixed up with Peace Through Strength. 

Make no mistake, though, Pat Buchanan and Paul are where the Party is headed. The Republicans are returning to the roots of the GOP that dominated the Party from Lincoln’s day through Taft’s battle against Eisenhower.

Palin gets what is going on; she is playing a very long game withing the GOP. The smart elites know this and are frightened of it, because at some point, the Paultards and the Palinistas will form a natural coalition that will dominate the right. There’s already a quiet but firm alliance between Palin herself and Ron Paul’s son, Rand. This coalition will rise out of the catastrophe of an Establishment defeat at the hands of Obama.

Paul himself knows he won’t be the nominee, but he also knows that Romney is likely to lose the election, as does Palin. His intent is to push the GOP towards the One True Path of Gold, Hard Money, Solvency, and Limited Government. Foreign Policy and the Jooooooos are less important to Paul, and are probably thrown out there by him because he probably has two or three bundlers who were active in White Nationalism and some folks active in the Arab American Community. That will be a problem for Palin to confront, but since this is Paul’s last campaign, any coalition with Paul will have to come with the firm understanding that the Totenkopfverbande from the White Nationalist community and the Hamas Fellow Travelers who hang around at the fringes of Paultardia will have to go.

Palin is much more center-right reformist than people have ever given her credit for so being. Whitney, Nicole Coulter over at The Other Site, and RAM, have all (and they aren’t the only ones) written extensively about her willingness to entertain pragmatism in the search of larger goals. In this case, Palin will be looking around for an ally to help her dominate the Right and prevent the rise of False Flag Conservatives like Michelle Bachmann who will be floated by the Establishment in an attempt to keep the Right divided. Palin will therefore hook up with Paul, for both pragmatic and historical reasons.

Palin’s experience with the last campaign, her shock at the Establishment’s unwillingness to stand up for her after Tucson, and their covert attempts to sabotage her nascent campaign this time around, lead me to believe that she decided this year that the GOP in its present form is a Lost Cause, akin to the Confederacy after the fall of Atlanta. They neither care about limited government, nor the welfare of their Middle Class rank and file, nor give a damn about what Reagan stood for during his entire career. Their anger at Palin is that she is continuing to expose the Establishment as an elite with no clothes, fiddling as Rome burns. And she refuses to submit to them because she knows that the bell will toll for them, and she wants to be on the right side of history.

I’ve run hot and cold about Palin since October 5th. I didn’t like how she handled her withdrawal, but I didn’t know everything she knew, either. That said, Conservatism as Reagan understood it needs a champion, and there’s no one out there who can argue Reagan’s case to the country better than Palin. It is Conservatism’s great misfortune that Palin has chosent to absent herself from this race at this time. That may change. I doubt it, but one never knows.

Ronald Reagan believed in timeless things, such as the Constitution as originally considered, hard money, and a sober, if muscular, approach to foreign affairs. A firm belief in great and timeless truths have a way of begetting great policy. However, Reagan had much greater strength within the Party than does Palin today. For her part, I believe that Palin, while in a hurry, is patient enough to make the kinds of alliances (like the one I describe above) that will inevitably make the GOP as friendly to her brand of politics as it once was to Reagan’s. That is Palin’s aim; it is different from Paul’s, but it one that is congruent with the good Dr..

Until than, however, the Establishment is on a deathride, the outcome of which is as certain as that of any Japanese flyer for the Special Attack units that bedeviled the American Fleet in the last days of WWII. Palin knows this, too. Which is why she is standing clear of the wreckage and planning for the Reconstitution of the GOP thereafter.

Last summer, before the caucuses and primaries, and when all the candidates were still smiling and glad-handing each other, I thought there was no way the Republican nominee could fail to beat Obama in 2012. But that thinking has now been turned on its ear. Now it looks as though none of candidates are capable of beating Obama. What happened? A year ago Obama was as vulnerable as any sitting President has been since Jimmy Carter. The problem goes, as much as anything else, to the way the candidates have conducted themselves in this process.

Instead of concentrating on the multitude failures of the Obama administration and taking advantage of the media exposure that was available to them for purposes of educating the general electorate on the problems the country faced and clarifying such things as Obamacare, Fast and Furious, and spotlighting the complete incompetence of the Obama administration, the candidates have allowed the debate media sponsors to dictate the debate issues. In the process, all of the candidates have come out looking like total fools.

 Here are some of the issues that could have been discussed in the primary campaign and used to distinguish the candidates, and the ultimate nominee, from Obama:

1. The so-called stimulus that did nothing but waste a trillion dollars and pad the pockets of Obama cronies. Cash for Clunkers, Solyndra, and many other fiascos.

2. The bail-outs and the interference in the markets. The government investing in private businesses and short-circuiting the bankruptcy system.

3. Obamacare and other socialist initiatives. 

4. Trillion dollar deficits. Three in a row and a fourth looming. There had never been even one before. The future is mortgaged beyond repayment and the U.S. turned into a Poverty Nation. Future generations will never know what a great nation the U.S. once was.

5. “Fast and Furious” gun-running by the Attorney General.

6. Failure to enforce the border.

7. Unemployment compensation for 99 weeks and more with extensions. In the past in was called insurance and was funded by employer assessments. Now just a welfare system? No wonder the recession had lingered longer than any before.

8. Downgrade of U.S. credit rating. Total incompetency. Every problem has been made worse by Obama.

9. Obama = The Food Stamp President.

10. Recess appointments when they was no recess. 

11. The silly stuff like Obama’s personal campaigning to get the Olympics for Chicago, bowing to foreign leaders, kowtowing to dictators such as Chavez and others, and the audacity to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.

12. Many other boondoggles too numerous to mention.

The public doesn’t understand much of this, they only know that things are bad. The candidates have talked in generalities about issues such as Obamacare, Fast and Furious, and the Poverty Nation Obama has deliberately created but have never spelled out the details.

Obama’s policies have damaged our country far worse than any foreign enemy could possibly have hoped to have done over the last three years and he needs to be held accountable for what he has done.

In addition to having defaulted on their responsibility to discuss the issues the candidates have gone further with their personal attacks than I have ever seen in any previous campaign. In the process, all they have done is to show the general public that none of them are qualified to be President. 

The candidates should be ashamed of themselves for what they have done. They have allowed their own personal lust for power to override their responsibility to the nation. Whoever wins the nomination will have a hollow victory and will be easy pickings for Obama when the real campaign starts this summer. They have assured Obama’s reelection.

The Elites put way too high a premium on perfectly creased pants.
Nerds.

Great rundown. I agree on Santorum. I thought for sure when his little one was taken to the hospital he would suspend or drop out. I was a bit surprised he did neither. His wife also has MS.

On Gov. Palin, I think it was a combination of things. Little Trig’s needs, being away from Alaska, and  the constant attacks. You can only take so much before you say screw it. She is still playing a vital role and her and her family are not getting hammered.

Lots of links in your post too-awesome.

Afternoon All:

Well, isn’t this quickly turning into a very depressing race.  Confident Romney is almost as annoying as Liberal Romney.  He can’t even talk trash the right way when going after Newt in the final days of the FL primary. Ugh.

Sorry, but I can’t get myself on the Santorum train either.  I’ve listed my issues with him before, but Fire makes another very good point about his family obligations.  For a man who speaks of family values, why are there different rules for him?  Let’s say Bachmann were still in the race and had a young child at home in similar circumstances, would he make this an issue or leak something to the press that a Mom should really be with her child?  Cynical me says yes he would.

As for Newt, he needs to cut the whining about Romney’s ads and attacks.  Noone wants to keep listening to it and it makes him an unattractive candidate.

I just caught Palin’s interview with the Judge from Sat night.  I understand her point about Newt getting lambasted from all sides, but I’m not sure I would have used the word crucified either when discussing Newt. I understand she wants to stir up the emotion to motivate the voters, but just didn’t agree with her approach. Just my opinion. 

I’m going to point out something and all of you will agree with me:

The Establishment sucks.

The end.

moved

“(knew I was right to not like Judge Pirro. I’ve never liked her interviewing style especially her “hard breaks””

what, i don’t see why not to like pirro. she asked great questions, because her questions allowed sarah to explain her logic, not simply state her logic without explaining much. pirro played devil’s advocate and challenged sarah in a respectful way. and her “hard breaks?” she can’t control when the show takes a break. yet you blame her… wow.

anyway i read your theory on why she did not run. it seems to me like she chose not to run because she wanted to protect her family from the “politics of personal destruction” that the other candidates, and media, would do. but actually i thought that was a reason she SHOULD run! she is the toughest against that kind of thing, she went through that in 2008. this time she could have said “no, i will NOT let the media make a false narrative of me and my family, i will have success unlike 2008.” but she chose not to take that chance. now, there are many people who still have a false narrative of sarah in their minds.

and you say that the establishment wouldn’t let her hire a good staff? no, i don’t think so, i think if she really wanted to hire a great staff, she could have. the establishment didn’t stop her from running, she stopped herself. it was her own choice not to run. and in the sullivan interview, when she said she wouldn’t be able to gather organization, i think she was referring to right NOW. now, at this point, she would have to gather organization VERY quickly and that’s just not possible at this point in time. it was possible before but not now. so she was right, when she said that on sullivan’s show. but it was her choice not to run, she could have run earlier and gathered staff and organization, but she didn’t want to do that. i think she is the only person who fully understands the reasons she didn’t run, because i sure as heck don’t.

So they threatened anybody that joins her campaign. It would seem possible. That is why Palin needs to recruit those outside of the system or those that have left the game. That doesn’t suprise me and I look forward to it in her third book.

This things about Rick needing to drop out is garbage.  That is a newtbot answer.

Obama has kids and so did JFK.  Sounds like Newt should drop out to work on relationships, this being his third wife.

Palin is the only answer to this conservative mess.