Yes, that's Chuck Norris.

Newt's CPAC speech:

It could happen. We should be making people aware of opposition in China every day.

Doesn't mean we have to take the field with the same team.

There was substantial controversy in the conservative blogosphere about Clint Eastwood's ad for Chrysler in which the actor/director claims it's halftime in America. Many feel that it's a not so subliminal endorsement of the Obama administration. Critics of the ad point to the half-time metaphor as a plea for a second term to "win the game." I think there's a degree of hypersensitivity going on here. First of all, one ad in February, no matter how good, is not going to get Obama reelected 10 months from now.

But more importantly, if one examines the ad with a less narrow focus it's not about the present administration, halftime being 4 years into a potential 8 year period. Perhaps it's about being 236 years into a 500 year period. Just yesterday Marco Rubio addressed CPAC and reprised his message from his maiden speech: the 20th Century was undoubtedly the American century and we need to make decisions to ensure that the 21st is an American century as well.

So I'm in total agreement with Newt Gingrich about this Chrysler ad. It is halftime in America and we need to make some strategic adjustments before we continue the game. And that means a new quarterback.

The Obama administration's latest overreach regarding health care has been the cause of a lot wrenching of hair and gnashing of teeth. At the root of the kerfuffle is the announcement by the administration's Health and Human Services department that employer-sponsored health plans will have to provide birth control with no co-pay. The outrage has centered around the Catholic Church which doctrinally opposes anything but natural birth control. The debate thus far has focused on the religious liberty aspect of the policy. Many are saying this is an infringement on the first amendment of the constitution which guarantees religious liberty.

I'm here to tell you that this issue is not about religious liberty. This is about liberty. Period. Where the hell did the President or the federal government get the power to mandate that ANYTHING must be covered by employer health plans? I would argue that if this new mandate were about bunions instead of contraception it would be every bit as grotesque an abuse of power by the federal government.

The state have always had differing approaches to regulating the health insurance industry. In some states certain basic procedures and tests are mandated to be covered free of charge to the insured person. But now we have blanket mandates coming from Washington DC. Anyone that says that ObamaCare is not a top-down one-size-fits-all federal takeover of the health industry is lying through his teeth or simply doesn't understand the ramifications.

Literally since the day ObamaCare was jammed through the congress with no bipartisan support we've been discovering unsavory aspects of the law. It stinks more today than it did then. Let's not make this a religious liberty issue. It affects every American, not just the minority who think artificial contraception isn't moral. The real question is are we are subjects of this government or is the government subject to us, its citizens?

If you'd like to see Marco Rubio be the GOP nominee that emerges from a brokered convention vote for him in this poll.

Every time I see Mitt Romney's face one word keeps coming to mind, that word is "postalita". For those of our non-Cuban readers, postalita is a slang term that basically means "pretty boy, showoff." I actually googled the word and found this item near the top of the results:

Meek calls Crist a"postalita"

"He's [Charlie Crist] what my Hispanic friends would call a 'Postalita'", Rep. Kendrick Meek, the Democratic candidate, said using a Cuban slang word that translates roughly to a someone who is all show, and no substance . "Mr. Crist is someone that is willing to say ' Hey, I'm for everything on any day but we need leadership, someone to speak out."

Yeap. It fits Romney perfectly.

Tish @KamaainaInOC
Wanted: President. Qualifications: Good businessman, good family man, articulate, presents well. No other exp necessary. Liars accepted.

Yeap, that's about right.

I had a teacher in high school named Pat Collins. He taught (teaches) an 11th grade Government class. At that time, he said something that has remained with me for the 25 years since. He explained that while political parties are ideological in nature that one should not conflate party with ideology. They are too separate things. He went on to explain that for a variety of reasons there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans.

It appears that Mitt Romney is going to win the Florida primary tomorrow by anywhere between 7-12 percentage points. As a Newt Gingrich supporter, I believe this is a shame and I'll tell you why. We are one step closer to nominating not only a liberal Republican (when what we need in the White House is a conservative to undo the considerable mess made by Obama, and yes by Bush and the previous congresses) but a Republican that can't even be considered a Republican in any real sense.

In the 1970s when Newt Gingrich first ran for congress in Georgia, the natural place for a young conservative would have been the Democratic party. After all, like all other southern states Georgia had been in firm control of the Democrats since the reconstruction. But Newt joined the Republican party and lost. And then he ran again and lost. And the third time was a charm.

Gingrich, now a presidential hopeful, traveled West and North Georgia during the 1970s and ’80s, preaching the Republican gospel and arguing that the GOP had to choose between remaining a silent, permanent minority or aggressively taking the fight to Democrats.

In Washington, Newt Gingrich fought entrenched interests in both parties. Despite a series of attacks from Romney surrogates that have been disproved, Gingrich was a stalwart defender and loyal lieutenant of President Ronald Reagan.

In the early 1990s Newt Gingrich dreamed of achieving what seemed impossible, leading a Republican takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time in more than 40 years. Sounds easy now but let's not forget that Bill Clinton was in the White House, he had been elected with a plurality of 43% and was trying to take the country radically leftward. Newt harnessed the backlash against liberalism and channeled it into a stunning win for the Republican party. Newt's Contract with America was a rallying point, a 10-point agenda to be passed by the House if Republicans were swept into the majority. Video here. Newt and congress delivered on their promises and a difficult chapter for Clinton began. Clinton was and is a smart politician so he pivoted and begrudgingly adopted some of the Republican issues and signed several of the contract items into law. For the first time in decades the Federal budget was balanced and a liberal president was ruling as a conservative because Newt and House Republican freshmen were holding his feet to the fire. Nobody can dispute this history.

Now, Newt Gingrich has many negatives, no doubt. He's been married three times, he admits that adulterous affairs ended his first two marriages, he was charged with ethics violations during his time as speaker (of which he was eventually cleared). It's easy to forget how partisan the attacks on Gingrich were as conservative commentator Dan McLaughlin recently tweeted:

Dan McLaughlin @baseballcrank
I'd actually forgotten until this campaign what a trumped-up bit of partisan nonsense the ethics charges vs Newt were.

I have no illusions about Newt Gingrich's negatives, as I said when I personally endorsed Newt Gingrich on October 13th of last year, there are no perfect candidates in this race. Which leads me to Mitt Romney, the most imperfect of the three remaining serious contenders (Rick Santorum being the third).

Mitt Romney is neither a conservative nor a Republican. As recently as 1992 Mitt Romney was an independent voting for Democrats in presidential primaries.

Unlike Newt Gingrich, you don't have to manipulate 25-year old speeches or video to get anti-Reagan sentiments from Mitt Romney. You just have to see how he ran against Ted Kennedy for the Senate in 1994.

In 1994, a time when Newt Gingrich was rallying conservatives and Republicans toward an unprecedented shift in power, Mitt Romney was trying to get himself elected in liberal Massachusetts by running away from Reagan, Gingrich and the Contract with America. He could have chosen the hard road Gingrich chose, being a conservative Republican in a Democrat state but didn't.

Despite not being a Republican for the vast majority of his life, Mitt Romney is running for Republican nomination. He's using surrogates, Super PACs, and an incredible fundraising advantage not to build his own case but to tear down others. When Newt Gingrich began to surge in Iowa, Romney flooded the airwaves with attacks. As I pointed out previously, there's no doubt that Romney slung first mud in this primary and he hasn't stopped. We shouldn't be surprised, he did the same thing to Governor Mike Huckabee in 2008.

Mitt Romney's campaign thought they left Newt for dead in Iowa but Newt continued to connect with voters and won a stunning victory in South Carolina. So Mitt the Destroyer is back at it. In Florida, Romney has spent 4 times as much as Gingrich. I don't have a problem with the spending, only with the content. Mitt Romney has not made a compelling case for himself, only a scorched-earth smear campaign against his chief rival.

So the Republican Floridians that haven't voted yet have a choice tomorrow. They can vote for Newt Gingrich, an imperfect man who has always been a party builder and who, when he had power, governed conservatively or we can vote for a man who is neither conservative nor a Republican party man.

Over the weekend I was on twitter asking Romney supporters to give me affirmative reasons that Romney should be the Republican nominee. I explained that I didn't want to hear negatives about other candidates, I wanted to know what Mitt Romney has done in his career to earn the mantle of the Republican party in this upcoming election. The responses I got were that he's a great family man, a great businessman and that he saved the Olympics. All very admirable but I would argue that that's not enough.

I believe that at the very least we should nominate a man who believes in and stands up for our party and the ideology that it's supposed to be espousing, conservatism. Yes, Mr. Collins, the two are not the same but at a minimum the Republican candidate should have one of those characteristics. Mitt Romney is obviously lacking both. Mitt Romney was notably AWOL in the great ideological and partisan battles of the late 20th century and now he wants us to believe he's going to lead us in the next one this century? I'm not buying it and I urge my fellow Floridians to reject it tomorrow at the polls.

A very enlightening piece about the nature of private equity firms like Mitt Romney's Bain Capital was published by the New Yorker. It explains the perverse incentives created by the government:

Some highlights:

The real reason that we should be concerned about private equity’s expanding power lies in the way these firms have become increasingly adept at using financial gimmicks to line their pockets, deriving enormous wealth not from management or investing skills but, rather, from the way the U.S. tax system works. Indeed, for an industry that’s often held up as an exemplar of free-market capitalism, private equity is surprisingly dependent on government subsidies for its profits...

If private-equity firms are as good at remaking companies as they claim, they don’t need tax loopholes to make money. If we capped the deductibility of corporate debt, and closed the carried-interest loophole, it would not prevent private-equity firms from buying companies or improving corporate performance. But it would reduce the incentives for financial gimmickry and save taxpayers billions every year. Private-equity firms are excellent at gaming the rules...

In 2004, for instance, Wasserstein & Company bought the thriving mail-order fruit retailer Harry and David. The following year, Wasserstein and other investors took out more than a hundred million in dividends, paid for with borrowed money—covering their original investment plus a twenty-three per cent profit—and charged Harry and David millions in “management fees.” Last year, Harry and David defaulted on its debt and dumped its pension obligations. In other words, Wasserstein failed to improve the company’s performance, failed to meet its obligations to creditors, screwed its workers, and still made a profit. That’s not exactly how capitalism is supposed to work.

As if this weren’t galling enough, taxpayers are left on the hook. Interest payments on all that debt are tax-deductible; when pensions are dumped, a federal agency called the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation picks up the tab; and the money that the dealmakers earn is taxed at a much lower rate than normal income would be, thanks to the so-called “carried interest” loophole. The money that Mitt Romney made when he was at Bain Capital was compensation for his (apparently excellent) work, but, instead of being taxed as income, it was taxed as a capital gain. It’s a very cozy arrangement.

But hey, an attack on Bain is an attack on capitalism. Heh.

Remember an eternity ago when Mitt Romney won the Iowa caucus by 8 votes. Well the hayseeds up there are still counting the votes and they are saying that counting the votes that haven't been lost, Santorum actually won.

The irony is that this actually helps Mitt Romney. Why? Because Rick Santorum has been claiming that he, not Newt, is the legitimate anti-Romney and he kept pointing to his very close 2nd place finish in Iowa to deflect calls for him to get out of the race. As the winner of Iowa he for sure is going to continue on, and continue to divide the conservative anti-Romney vote.

Iowa is the state that keeps on giving. It gave Mitt Romney a false win and momentum and now it gives him a great stalking horse in Rick Santorum. Why do we put up with this ridiculousness from Iowa?

Much ado has been made about attacks on Mitt Romney regarding his time as CEO of Bain Capital. I'm already on the record as stating that an attack on Bain Capital is not an attack on capitalism itself and that being pro capitalism is not the same as being pro business. Most businesses would gladly accept regulations that interfere with capitalism but give them some leg up.

The real problem that Mitt Romney has with his Bain Capital years is intertwined with his refusal to date to release his tax returns. You see, Mitt Romney has more than likely benefited from an egregious tax loophole that lets private equity managers have most of their compensation taxed at the capital gains rate (15%) which is significantly lower than the income tax rates. The capital gains tax rate is lower because presumably the gains made by investors are from investments made with after-tax money. But this loophole allows private equity managers, who use other investors' money to have this preferred tax rate.

From the New Yorker in 2010

In a typical private-equity fund, the managers get paid two per cent of assets as a regular fee, plus twenty per cent of the fund’s profits. They pay regular income tax on the two per cent. But on their share of the profits, which is called “carried interest,” they usually pay only long-term capital gains—even though they put up hardly any of the fund’s actual capital, most of which comes from outside investors. The difference in tax rates saves private-equity managers billions of dollars a year, and means that they pay taxes at a much lower rate than, say, your average lawyer.

That's why it's not surprising the Mitt Romney recently said that he pays about 15%. For some perspective in 2010 after I got all my deductions for my mortgage, my two kids, childcare, healthcare, etc. I paid an effective rate of 14.22% and I'm just a white collar executive making a decent salary, not a multi-millionaire like Romney. Currently the highest marginal income tax bracket is for income earned in excess of $379,150 and people fortunate enough to make that much pay 35% on every dollar they earn over that amount. In short, Mitt Romney probably paid far less than he should have on his compensation and it was all very legal.

The problem with Bain is not that Mitt Romney became wealthy by closing factories and plants in the US (although that's not a virtue either), it's that Mitt Romney has taken great advantage of the archaic tax and regulatory structures to do it. This is not capitalism. In capitalism, we would have a simplified and fair tax code that treated everyone the same. Should Mitt Romney go to jail for doing what we all do every year, try to minimize our income taxes? No, of course not. But perhaps voters in November won't be easily convinced that Mitt Romney's tax strategy is the most noble of traits.

Today the opposition research book about Mitt Romney which was assembled for John McCain's campaign was posted on the internet. It's 200 pages that closely examines Romney's public and private life. I just started going through it and found this interesting anecdote:

Romney praised 2005 plan by Citgo Petroleum Corp. – ultimately controlled by the Venezuelan governmentand President Hugo Chavez – to provide low-income Massachusetts residents with discounted heating oil.

I remember when this Chavez first announced this propaganda stunt. At the time, Babalú contributor Mora wrote the following:

Santa Chavez and his many dupes
By Mora, on November 25, 2005, at 10:17 pm
Investor's Business Daily has a new editorial out about the Useful Idiots like the Kennedys and Rep Bill Delahunt who willingly are helping Hugo Chavez distribute cheap heating oil to the U.S. in the name of communism. They are pretending it's all sorts of stuff but the fact is: It's A Bribe, For Political Purposes. To allow Hugo Chavez to do just about anything he wants with impunity. Read the whole gross thing here.

The IBD editorial complements Pedro Burelli's magnificent essay on the real story behind the Kennedys and their fascination with Venezuela and cheap oil. It's here.

The IBD editorial concludes with this about lefty representatives Bill Delahunt and Jose Serrano:

As congressmen protest their wonderful efforts to "help" constituents, the real issue is their willingness to let a hemispheric predator gain influence inside the U.S.

Well it turns out those lefty congressmen weren't the only ones cheering the Chavez propaganda stunt along. From the Boston Globe in 2003:

Joseph P. Kennedy II, chairman of the nonprofit Citizens Energy, which is helping to administer the discounted oil, said it was unfair to criticize Chavez’s motives when other oil-providing nations had given no aid...

In Venezuela, “you have a country led by somebody who cares for the poor.”

Governor Mitt Romney yesterday hailed the accord, though he declined to discuss Chavez.

“I’m delighted to hear we’ll be able to purchase oil at a lower price than the market for our citizens,” he said.

It's a fairly obvious point that Mitt Romney is a flip-flopper. It's hard to think of a single major issue that he hasn't been on both sides of. Most people who are intent on beating Barack Obama in November look at this trait fairly superficially, as a character weakness. But they balance this with other areas of life where Mitt Romney has certainly exhibited character. As his ads point out, he's been married to the same woman his entire adult life, he's been in the same church his whole life. He's steady. But Mitt Romney's record of flip-flops is more than a minor character flaw that can be kept in check by the conservative grassroots if he's elected. It's a major political flaw that can be disastrous for our country. Let me explain.

There can be no doubt this upcoming election is going to be a very important one. The pundits always say that, but think about the unemployment rate, the debt, the lack of economic growth, the exponential growth of entitlement programs. Europe is a few years ahead of us on this curve toward oblivion and hardly a day passes that we don't hear about impending doom for the Euro. As Marco Rubio stated in his maiden speech, we need to make very important decisions right now if we intend for the 21st century to be another "American century" as the 20th was. It's not going to be easy.

Now, there's no issue that's more instructive about Mitt Romney than abortion. Running for governor of Massachusetts, a very liberal state, he promised to set aside his personal pro-life views and preserve the status quo. In practice, his tenure as governor was very friendly to abortion advocates. His signature accomplishment, RomneyCare not only gave power to the country's biggest abortion sales organization by name, it codified taxpayer funded abortions into Massachusetts law.

Now, where you personally stand on the issue of abortion is irrelevant to the point I'm making. The truth is that Mitt Romney is pro-life (I truly believe that) but he went along to get along in Massachusetts. He didn't campaign to sway people. He didn't speak passionately about the unborn trying to win hearts and minds. He licked his finger, put it up in the air saw which way the wind was blowing and went in that direction.

My question is simple, at this critical moment in history how can we be sure that Mitt Romney will be an advocate for the kind of small government, pro-growth policies that most Republicans think we need to right the ship? How can we be assured that not only will he not be disruptive to conservative aims but that he will champion them and sell them to the American people? I just don't see any real evidence that Mitt Romney is a fighter. Sure he fights his opponents but he doesn't fight for concepts, for ideology.

The liberal Democratic base is deeply disappointed with Barack Obama. They wanted him to take the government sharply to the left. He did in many regards but not enough to satisfy them. They projected their own personal ideology onto Barack Obama, ignoring his lackluster record as a legislator in Illinois and Washington DC and were blind to the real world difficulties a president faces when trying to change the paradigm. Barack Obama is a true believer but he's not really a fighter and that's what has these liberals resenting him. Is Mitt Romney our Barack Obama in reverse? A guy who may be fundamentally conservative (who knows?) but too weak to fight for conservatism?

If you think it's enough to simply get Barack Obama out of office, that that will do the trick and get us on the right path, then Mitt Romney is probably you're guy. If you think we need a paradigm shift toward conservatism, a new approach that says anything is possible, an audacious attempt to restructure government then I suspect you'll be sorely disappointed with President Mitt Romney.

UPDATE:
Here's another example of Mitt's political calculations outweighing what's right for the country:

Because having a self-censored bureau that does no real reporting on what's happening on the ground in Cuba is not enough.

The GOP primary race has gotten very nasty, and most of the nastiness involves Newt Gingrich. But how did we get here? Let's take a short stroll down recent memory lane.

By late November Newt Gingrich was surging in the polls. He had considerable leads over Mitt Romney nationally as well as in Iowa, South Carolina and Florida. Suddenly, Mitt Romney's inevitable nomination was in clear jeopardy.

How did Newt Gingrich manage to suddenly become the front runner with hardly any money or national organization? Simple, he had the best debate performances of any other candidate. When the serious issues were discussed, Newt articulated the best vision for the future and effectively attacked the Obama administration and the liberal media. When people heard Newt they found themselves agreeing with him more than with any other candidate. Even when he held a controversial view like the shocking idea that we shouldn't be in a hurry to deport someone whose been living in this country for a quarter century.

Newt Gingrich took great pains not to attack his rivals for the nomination. And what did it get him? A barrage of negative ads about him in Iowa that dissolved his lead and his momentum. Some have calculated that 45% of all the ads in Iowa were attacks on Gingrich. That's amazing considering there were a half dozen candidates in the race. Notably Mitt Romney and the Super PAC supporting him were the biggest spenders in the Gingrich attacks.

Gingrich's disappointing defeat in Iowa was a major set-back to his campaign as it moved to New Hampshire, a state that everyone knew Romney would win. So Gingrich finally decided to hit back. Karl Rove says you don't hit an opponent where he's perceived to be weak, you hit him where he's perceived to be strong. And that's what Gingrich did. Mitt Romney has been running for five years as a job creator, something which is especially important in this election which is about growing the economy and creating jobs.

A Super PAC that supports Newt purchased the rights to a film called "When Mitt Romney Came to Town" which had already been produced (by a former Romney staffer) and was for sale to highest bidder. The film is an obviously one-sided account about four different companies that Mitt Romney's firm, Bain Capital, acquired. It's not a pretty tale and paints Mitt as an unsavory character who took foreign investor money and used it to buy and bankrupt American corporations while making himself and those foreigners rich in the process and leaving thousands of workers without jobs.

The attacks by Newt and the PAC that supports him on Romney created a new wave of anti-Newt sentiment, accusing him of being an anti-capitalist and committing a heresy for a supposed conservative. But it's been interesting to observe what's happened. Many have suddenly been forced into a virtual classroom to learn about things such as private equity and venture capitalism and "creative destruction."

I and many others have argued that an attack on Bain Capital and its business model is not an attack on capitalism itself. The question is, is a man who made a lot of money using tactics that though legal, put a lot of Americans out of work? Making and selling adult movies is a legitimate if morally repugnant business. If Mitt Romney were a smut king would people say that attacking his line of work is an attack on capitalism itself?

I came across an interesting video from learnliberty.org, an advocate of free markets and capitalism. The title of the video is "Top 3 Common Myths of Capitalism". In the video Jeffrey Miron, PhD explains that the first myth is "that being pro capitalism is the same as being pro business. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The point of capitalism is to make sure that businesses have to compete vigorously against each other and that benefits consumers. It's not good for the businesses per se because they have to work really hard so many business understand this and they hate capitalism and they are constantly trying to get government to erect various rules, restrictions, regulations that help them but that are not in the interests of the consumers." Just because Bain profits from the rules and regulations put in place by government does not mean Bain itself is pro-capitalist.

Many people are mistakenly conflating the idea of business and capitalism. But the truth is that almost every single business would welcome a regulation that aided it and hurt its competitors. That's not capitalism. And as I stated in earlier post, Bain under Romney was expert at navigating the rules that give certain business advantages and tax breaks and protection. All perfectly legal but perhaps not very appetizing when unemployment is hovering around 9%.

The fact remains that nobody knows for certain whether Bain under Romney was a net job creator or destroyer. There's too many variables at play and too many standards to judge. Do you credit Romney with jobs created after he was gone? What about jobs lost after he was gone? When was he really gone? There are conflicting reports on this. But Romney has done a poor job substantiating his claim that he had a part in creating 100,000 jobs at Bain. By the way, that claim ballooned from 10,000 when he ran against Ted Kennedy for Senate in 1994. Romney's Bain record was eventually going to become an issue in this campaign. And so are his tax returns which he's shown no indication of disclosing.

But here's the thing, regardless of how you feel about Bain and the so-called vulture capitalist model it used, the attacks on Romney seem to working as the latest South Carolina polls show Romney holding steady but Gingrich is consolidating second place and inching closer. South Carolina is a state that has been hard hit and lost a lot of jobs. From the left the state was attacked by president Obama and the NLRB when they tried to block Boeing from building a plant there. And from the supposed right Bain Capital happened to have closed two plants in South Carolina. So in this jobs election, it wouldn't surprise me to that many South Carolinians say "a pox on both their houses." I believe the GOP can be the party of capitalism without being the party of Bain.

It should be noted that the film, "When Mitt Romney Came to Town" received four Pinocchios from the Washington Post and a lot of the criticisms are valid. But the Romney SuperPAC ad that did the most damage to Newt in Iowa also received four Pinocchios from the same source. So in this very dirty campaign you have to keep one thing in mind:

Mitt Romney slung first mud.

Was just wondering about the pros and cons of Mitt Romney as the GOP nominee. Here are the cons as I see them:

1. He's never been a winner. He's won one election in his life and that was with a plurality, not a majority. If he had run for reelection as governor he would have lost.
2. He's a wind sock who flip flopped on many important issues, including key social issue of abortion and seems to have no core ideology
3. As governor he implemented a healthcare model which was used to design ObamaCare
4. He was a self-proclaimed independent under Reagan bush and repudiated Reagan in his 1994 Senate campaign
5. His tenure as CEO at Bain makes for a large target for Obama to aim at (whether justified or not).
6. He's a mormon. While that doesn't bother me one bit, there is a significant segment of evangelical Christians who see voting for him as voting for the anti-christ himself. Those people are overwhelming Republican.

So Romney is a candidate who can't legitimately attack one of Obama's weakest points, the unpopular ObamaCare legislation he muscled through, and whose supposed key strength plays right into the narrative of the left. Someone remind me again what his pros are?

In response to an overwhelming wave of attacks from Mitt Romney which cost him leads in Iowa, South Carolina and Florida Newt Gingrich has decided to hit back. And it's the way that he's hitting back that has a the same conservative pundits that have consistently attacking Newt in a tizzy. You see, Newt Gingrich is making an issue of Mitt Romney's private sector business experience as the founder and CEO of Bain Capital, a private equity firm that among other things buys and sells companies. A SuperPAC that supports Newt purchased the rights to a short film called "When Mitt Romney Came to Town" that portrays Romney as a heartless corporate raider that put thousands of people out of work to enrich himself, his partners and investors.

The conservative pundits see this attack on Romney and Bain as an attack on capitalism and the free market economy itself. I disagree. Others have written extensively on this so I'll skip the preliminaries.

I think one thing most conservatives can agree on is that the current business environment is far from free. The regulatory and tax structures that have been put in place over decades create all kinds of moral hazards and perverse incentives as the housing bubble clearly demonstrated. It's like a shoddily put together old mansion with all kinds of nooks and crannies and hiding places. Some very entrepreneurial people have become experts at navigating this haunted house of horrors and used that expertise to their benefit. I believe Mitt Romney was one of these people. More than likely everything he did was perfectly legal, but a lot of it would be considered unsavory to many people. For example, if Bain bought a company, took it to bankruptcy in order to break cumbersome pension deals with employees and left the taxpayers on the hook for the shortfall that would be legal but not necessarily something a free market capitalist like myself would like to defend. These are exactly the sort of tactics that Romney is accused of using during his tenure at Bain.

I think it's important to note that despite the fact that Mitt Romney has been running for president for 5 years this story is just beginning to be investigated. Does it feel a little unseemly to see candidates who claim they are pro-business like Newt and Rick Perry attacking Romney for his business practices? Yes, but this is an issue that the Obama campaign was certain to make hay out of especially since the OWS narrative of the 1% vs. the 99% has taken hold in the mainstream media. Remember Romney is supposed to be the most electable one but Obama could easily explain that the pain America's workers are experiencing is precisely because of characters like Romney.

I am 100% in favor of a capitalism and free market economic system but let's not kid ourselves. That's not what we have today. We have an archaic system of laws and regulations that give a few well-connected insiders a leg up on the competition. We have regulations that kill business here at home and make it easy for corporations to outsource jobs. We need to tear down the rickety old house and build a new, spacious and brightly lit one where corporations operate out in the open. Mitt Romney may have been an expert at navigating the trap doors and false walls of the current system but that does not make him a good candidate for president.

If it had not been for the fact that he led Britain to victory in the second world war we would have scant memory of [Churchill]

That from a BBC journalist claiming that Winston Churchill is one of the top overrated figures in history.

Jonas Salk? A middling scientist except for that whole Polio vaccine thing.

Ever since I came out in support of Newt Gingrich on October 13th I've been debating my Republican friends about conservatism and who in the field is really conservative.  There's been a meme propagating on the internet that Newt is not conservative.  Some folks have rallied around Rick Santorum as the conservative Anti-Romney but the simple fact is that during their careers in office Newt Gingrich was measurably more conservative than Rick Santorum.

A data point for your consideration:

The lifetime ratings given by the American Conservative Union, Gingrich 90, Santorum 83.

Erick Erickson at Red State is supporting Rick Perry for president but does a good job rounding up key votes in which Rick Santorum did not side with conservatives.

H/T: @josh_painter

Winning caption by HONEY.