Meanwhile, Little Rickie thinks that children whose parents can’t afford their medications should just die already. Because “We either believe in markets or we don’t.†From Rawstory:
Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum told the mother of a child with a rare genetic disorder on Tuesday that she shouldn’t have a problem paying $1 million a year for drugs because Apple’s iPad can cost around $900.
You might have heard that one of Santorum’s children also has a genetic disorder and recently had to be hospitalized. One assumes he has insurance.
I am pleased to report that none of the remaining GOP contenders are dropping out yet. Party on!
Dylan Byers at Politico figured out that each Romney Florida vote cost the Romney campaign and its superPAC $19.94, whereas runner-up Newt spent just $6.38 per vote. And for the $15,389,287 it cost the Romney tribe to win Florida, he still got less than half of the vote.
Also, Gingrich won more votes in the panhandle than Romney, which suggests Mittens really does have a Southern problem.
Nate is giving Mittens a 97 percent chance of winning the Florida primary today, so it’s all over but the votin’. The establishment, faced with a choice between Mittens and Newt, have now congealed around Mittens. Barring an intervention by God, Mittens will be the nominee.
However, word is that Newt is crazy/deluded/narcissistic enough to keep campaigning. I hope so; Mittens is such a crashing bore.
Speaking of the Great Gas-Passing Orifice — Newt’s latest contribution to our nation’s political discourse is another doozy —
GINGRICH: Now, I think we need to have a government that respects our religions. I’m a little bit tired about respecting every religion on the planet. I’d like them to respect our religion.
And what religion would that be, Newt? The Church of Asshattery? But you see why I would be sooo disappointed if Newt drops out now.
Newt says President Obama and Mittens have been waging a “war against religion,” most recently for not permitting the Catholic bishops to dictate the reproductive choices of their non-Catholic employees. Apparently this violates the bishops’ “freedom” to force their beliefs on people who don’t agree with them.
I’ve been checking this story out, and it appears to be all true. Basically: In 1989, while Mittens was CEO, Bain Capital bought a medical testing company called Damon Corporation. Bain took Damon public in 1991, and Mittens sat on the board of directors. Damon was sold to Corning in 1993 for a nice profit to Bain. Mittens personally made $473,000 on the deal, according to The Real Romney by Boston Globe reporters Michael Kranish and Scott Helman.
Very soon thereafter the sale it was revealed that Damon had been under federal investigation, and in 1996 Damon pleaded guilty to Medicare fraud. They’d been over-billing Medicare for unnecessary tests. Federal prosecutors say that the over-billing was going on from 1988 to 1993, during the entire time the company was owned by Bain. The feds credited Corning for helping out the fraud; no word about Bain.
Today Mittens said he didn’t know about the fraud, but when he was running for governor of Massachusetts in 2002 he said that he had “blown the whistle” on Damon and had taken steps to stop the fraud. There’s no indication that Bain did anything except send some lawyers over to review Damon’s Medicare billing practices, which appears to have gone nowhere. In any event, no Bain executive, including Romney, was implicated in the fraud.
If Mittens is the nominee, I doubt this will be the last we’ll hear of the Damon Corporation and Labscam.
Nate Silver expects Mittens to win Florida, and conventional wisdom says that will effectively be the end of the contest. If true, we have only a few more days to snark about Newt. Unfortunately I am snarked out at the moment. Even Charles Pierce is out sick, and his replacement’s efforts fall a bit short on the coffee-snorting meter.
But if any of you are in the mood to snark, be my guest.
I didn’t watch last night’s GOP debate, but the consensus this morning is that Newtie did not impress anyone. “He sounded bad, he looked bad, and generally came across like a weasel who had finally been cornered by Animal Control,” said Ed Kilgore.
I agree with Steve M that Newt needs someone to bash, or he doesn’t know what to do with himself. And after South Carolina, the questioners have been careful not to throw him a cudgel.
Timothy Egan has an unusually frank (for the New York Times) portrait of Newt:
Gingrich, as he showed in a gasping effort in Thursday night’s debate in Florida, is a demagogue distilled, like a French sauce, to the purest essence of the word’s meaning. He has no shame. He thinks the rules do not apply to him. And he turns questions about his odious personal behavior into mock outrage over the audacity of the questioner.
Nate Silver has Mittens pulling ahead of Newt in his Florida projections. But Newt’s SuperPAC is expected to blitz the state with television ads over the weekend, so it’s possible the race will tighten again.
The latest numbers at Nate’s place suggest Mittens might win Florida after all, although it’s currently close. And the GOP establishment is petrified. But, really, this train wreck is entirely their own fault.
Money is the primary mechanism that parties use to herd voters toward the choices the elites would prefer them to make. The nomination of George W. Bush offers a classic example. Bush and his network had organized so many Republicans to donate so much money that the contest was essentially over well before a vote had been cast. …
…In 2000, the Bush network froze challenger John McCain out of party fund-raising networks. Now, the GOP is trying to do this again on behalf of Romney. … Ten years ago, this sort of edict would have suffocated Gingrich. But under the present system, Gingrich can simply have a single extremely wealthy supporter, Sheldon Adelson, write a series of $5 million checks.
The Super PACs are supposed to be independent of the campaigns, and of course that’s a charade. But once again we see the sharp teeth of unintended consequences. The Right believed that SuperPACs would be key to crushing progressivism once and for all, and so far it’s not working out that way.
In the last post I linked to a Steve Koracki article about Newt’s flat performance last night.
The atmosphere for the debate the Peacock network hosted in Florida Monday night was a marked departure from what we saw in South Carolina last week. Whereas Fox and CNN amped their live audiences up beforehand and encouraged boisterous responses during the proceedings, the NBC opening was comparatively sober; this time, it didn’t seem like it had been farmed out to a team of NBA producers. When moderator Brian Williams opened the telecast, the crowd was silent and respectful, and it remained so for virtually all of the next 100 minutes. …
… on Monday, there was no energy in the hall for Gingrich to feed off of, and no one on the media panel willing to step up and play his foil. From the very beginning, his responses were jarringly flat and unfocused. When an unusually sharp and focused Mitt Romney came after him hard in the debate’s early minutes, Gingrich seemed unsure how – or even whether – to engage him. And when Romney dismantled Gingrich’s defense of his lucrative Freddie Mac work like a seasoned prosecutor, the normally loquacious former speaker was literally left speechless.
Newt has been bragging about he’s the best Republican to face Barack Obama in a debate. But what we’re seeing is that Newt really isn’t a very good debater. As Kornacki says, in the South Carolina debates “all he was doing was playing to persecution complex of a fired up, rabidly partisan crowd, whose euphoric response rubbed off on like-minded viewers at home.” It may have been great political theater, but it wasn’t true debating.
Now Newt is saying he won’t allow the television debate hosts to “control” the audiences.
“I wish in retrospect I had protested when Brian Williams took [the crowd] out of it because I think it’s wrong,†he said. “I think he took them out of it because the media is terrified that the audience is going to side with the candidates against the media, which is what they’ve done in every debate.â€
Gingrich’s debate performances are widely viewed as having propelled him to an overwhelming victory at Saturday’s South Carolina primary.
His fiery performances often came at the expense of the debate moderators for questions he deemed inappropriate, and the conservative crowds often rewarded the former House Speaker with applause and even a standing ovation for his attacks against the media.
But NBC asked the crowd to hold their applause until the breaks, and moderator Brian Williams didn’t offer any opportunities for Gingrich to go after him.
As a result, some of Gingrich’s attacks that might have energized his supporters at previous debates seemed to fall flat. At one point Gingrich even seemed flustered, and paused in silence to collect his thoughts.
“We’re going to serve notice on future debates that we won’t tolerate — we’re just not going to allow that to happen,†Gingrich continued. “That’s wrong — the media doesn’t control free speech. People ought to be able to applaud if they want to. It was almost silly.â€
Does Gingrich think he would ever be allowed to debate Barack Obama in front of a fired-up, hand-picked right-wing audience primed to applaud and hoot and holler? Is he nuts?
When Kennedy and Nixon debated in 1960, they were in a studio with no audience at all.
Imagine President Obama and Newt Gingrich in a studio debate with no audience. Heh.
I won’t be home tonight to live blog, but y’all can comment away. Credit to the New York Public Library for the image of the fashionable gentleman in the top hat.
Indiana under Daniels gave away the store to business interests and they got absolutely nothing in return. Gutted business regulation, gutted environmental regulation, sold state assets, deregulated and privatized public schools, destroyed public sector unions, and the unemployment rate in Indiana is comparable to the midwest states around Indiana, states that didn’t make all the concessions demanded by the “job creatorsâ€. The promised jobs never arrived.
When John Boehner speaks of Mitch Daniels he has to claim that Daniels was working on “a climate for job creation.†Not jobs. A “climate†where jobs might blow in like the weather, maybe, sometime, depending. Boehner has to use that odd and abstract language because Boehner knows what the unemployment rate is in Indiana, and he also knows that Daniels is a two-term governor who had a free hand to put in place the whole conservative-libertarian wish list. For years. That’s all in place, but the job creators just keep on demanding more concessions from Indiana, and Mitch Daniels just keeps handing them over.
It’s a sure bet the bobbleheads will gush about how “moderate” Daniels is tonight. He’s not. Well, unless your idea of “moderate” is any white guy dressed in a suit who is not a Democrat.
I think the fact that 10,000 people came out in the middle of the day to protest against Indiana’s egregious attempt to turn itself into Mississippi on behalf of the people who think Mitch Daniels should be president might warrant a little more coverage than it’s getting. After all, every single one of the Republican candidates is in favor of right-to-work laws, including Ron Paul, the last hope for progressive politics. And Mitch Daniels is at the very toppermost of the poppermost of all those holy-Christ-these-guys-are-such-a-sack-of-hair lists of people who might save the Republican brand, if only they’d run. David Brooks, for one, has been spurned and regularly is seen weeping over a picture of Mitch in a heart-shaped frame.
