I have an article up at FPM this morning analyzing  some of the numbers from Obama’s fantasy budget he released yesterday.  I like James Pethokoukis’s take on it:

Of course, it has no chance of becoming law. But as a campaign document, it is quite instructive:

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Ross Douthat on why Gingrich can’t win the GOP nomination:

Ross also cited Gingrich’s “lackluster debate performances†and how hard it will be to regain that “aura of invincibility†as a master debater — a key selling point for Gingrich who seeks to convince GOP voters he can destroy Obama in open debate during the fall campaign.

I don’t think Romney did much convincing as far as his ability to be “tough.†Watching Romney on the attack is like watching a Toy Poodle in  a standoff with a Great Dane. He can’t help but look cute rather than ferocious.

That said, Douthat nails the demographics of Newt’s problems. It would be one thing if Gingrich had come within 5 points or so of Romney. Then he’d be crowing about being outspent 13-1 and coming within a yard of paydirt.

But he didn’t. He got slaughtered. And where Gingrich carried every demographic group in South Carolina, he lost most of those same voters in Florida. It’s hard to see where Newt can get his MoJo back anytime soon. Next on the calendar is Nevada (2/4) — where Ron Paul is lying in the weeds waiting to ambush Mitt Romney — and the beginning of the Maine caucus process (2/4-11). The state that sent Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins to the senate would seem to be decidedly unfriendly to Newt’s brand of populist conservatism.

It doesn’t get any easier. On February 7, two more Not-Ready-For-Newt states will hold caucuses; Colorado and Minnesota. Missouri will hold a beauty contest primary with no delegates at stake on the same day. Then on February 28, Arizona and Michigan will hold their primaries. Romney’s ties to Michigan are well known, but Arizona might be more receptive to Newt’s bread and butter message. Whether he will have the cash to compete there is another question altogether.

In short, it’s hard to see at this point where Newt can make a stand and stop the bleeding with a victory. Georgia holds its primary on Super Tuesday (3/6), as do Oklahoma and Tennessee — three states where he has a very realistic shot at competing. But he’s not even on the ballot in Virginia and without the money to compete in Ohio and a deficient organization in the three states holding caucuses that day, Super Tuesday is shaping up to be a Romney avalanche.

But Gingrich declared he plans to defeat “money power†with “people power†in the coming months, casting his campaign as a counterbalance to the “establishment.†That may be. But the history of insurgencies in major parties would suggest that Newt is fighting for principle now, and not the GOP nomination for president.

Originally appears on PJM’s The Tatler.

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I had high hopes for the OWS movement when it started. I thought they would actually try to incorporate other points of view and develop a true grass roots reform movement to address the shrinking middle class - which is really what “inequality” should be about.

Instead, OWS has turned into just another lefty pressure group - albeit, a more dangerous one. While there is no George Soros sitting in his office pulling strings and directing the movement, there appears to be a common thread beginning to run through these demonstrations that is extremely troubling; they have been co-opted by radicals who seek to overthrow the existing order. What began as a left leaning critique of Wall Street and the big banks, has morphed into a systemic attack on American values and our character as a nation.

This, I cannot abide. And I really let them have it in this piece I wrote for FPM this morning on the Oakland riots:

Now comes the fun part; the GOP will try to tie Obama and the Democrats to the OWS movement. What makes this so delicious is that there is going to be a probable riot in Chicago during the G-8 Summit in April. Adbusters, the radical consumerists who got the ball rolling with OWS, are calling on 50,000 demonstrators to descend on Chicago in April and, in their words:

A lot of bombast to be sure. But they include a call to imitate the “Chicago 8″ - the radicals charged with inciting a riot during the 1968 Democratic convention. Not very subtle, huh? This is a movement now that needs violence in order to get attention. And Obama, who has never really embraced the movement but has made supportive noises,  has adopted the rhetoric of OWS in order to skewer the GOP. The GOP should be all over him and his fellow Democrats when the crap hits the fan in Chicago and the tear gas is as thick as a morning fog over Lake Michigan.

I would guess that most of those who march or identify strongly with the OWS movement are peaceful Americans seeking reform. They will be cruelly used by those who are experienced at using the naive and innocent as cannon fodder for their revolutionary goals. This is not a reform movement anymore. It is an attempt to upend and overturn American society to make it something alien and unrecognizable from what we are today.

This is a piece that I took enormous pleasure in writing - first time in a while I actually had fun scribbling away.

It’s up at PJ Media so enjoy!

A sample:

The RINO Hour of Power is back! Two of the most famous RINO’s on the web — Jazz Shaw and Rick Moran — are ready to rock your political world with their unique blend of humor, wit, and sharp analysis.

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Whether you believe Marianne Gingrich’s story about Newt’s offer of an open marriage or not, the sad fact is, this is a morally flawed candidate who has shown a shocking disregard for his family, and specifically, the women in his life. Two divorces caused directly by his philandering is evidence that Newt cannot be trusted on a personal level. And he has given us no indication that we should trust him on a political level either.

It is beyond hypocrisy for Newt Gingrich to talk about family values when his own personal failings highlight someone who could care less about those values, and more about his personal, hedonistic pleasure. The right didn’t put up with that crap from Bill Clinton - rightly so. So the question is; will conservatives overlook the massive personal failings of Newt Gingrich just to nominate someone for president besides Mitt Romney?

It is incomprehensible that culture warriors and values voters on the right would swallow hard and look the other way when it comes to a candidate’s obvious shortcomings with regard to the very issues they hold dear and proclaim to champion. But judging from the debate last night when Gingrich received a standing ovation for avoiding the issue of his second wife’s charges, it would seem that many values voters have thrown those principles under the bus in the name of a crass political expediency. And if that be the general reaction from the mass of voters on the right in the entire electorate, Gingrich may very well skate through to seriously challenge Mitt Romney from now until the convention.

I am not a values voter. I am a pragmatic conservative who wants to see Obama defeated and the Democrats tossed out of the senate next November. Newt Gingrich is not the man to lead the party to that victory. He will be a millstone around the neck of the GOP, dragging the down ballot candidates with him as the GOP loses its identity as a party of principles and values and is defined as a party of opportunistic and cynical calculation. Already it is apparent that nominating Gingrich would open a gender gap in the general election through which Obama would march to triumph. Add to that those who are simply disgusted with the personal moral turpitude of the candidate and Obama doesn’t have to work very hard to fashion an electoral college majority.

The hatred by many on the right of the “establishment,” and of “moderates” — Romney’s perceived sins — has apparently overcome their reason and logic. Romney is not the best conservative to nominate. He may not even be the best candidate to challenge Obama in November and win. But at least he has a grounded moral center that people can sense and that gives him a strength of character so obvisouly lacking in the former speaker of the House.

Better to swallow hard and nominate and support a “RINO” for president than swallow hard and betray every important principle and value you stand for in order to stick it to the establishment.

This blog originally appeared at The American Thinker

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God bless the US Marines.

Every society — even the freest and the most civilized — needs a warrior class to protect it. And the Marines, generally regarded as the best warriors in the world, function in that regard for America.

They are the sharp end of the spear of American policy and their arrival on the battlefield strikes fear in the breast of our enemies. They are trained for one purpose, and one purpose only; to kill our enemies. We don’t send the Marines in to negotiate, and we usually don’t send them in to build schools and hospitals. We send them in to seek out and kill as many of the enemy as can be found.

To accomplish this necessary goal, we train the Marines to see the enemy as not quite human. There are many subtle ways this is done, but the bottom line is that it relieves our warriors of the tremendous psychic burden that being civilized human beings has placed on them; that killing another person is murder.

Dehumanizing the enemy in war, then, is unavoidable if we wish our warriors to survive and achieve success. Thus, the questions raised by the Marines who, at the very least, disrespected the dead by urinating on them, have far more to do with who we are as a nation than what we think of the Taliban.

We should not mourn the death of any Taliban. They are trying to kill Americans and killing them first is the best way to fight and win the war. But every society has customs and rituals associated with the dead and deliberately violating them by desecrating the bodies of our enemy is not in the “warrior ethos” as Corps Commandant Genearl Jim Amos said in a statement responding to the video of the act.

He’s right. We’re better than that. The Marines are better than that. It’s not political correctness that is at the heart of the real criticism of the actions of the Marines. (criticism by domestic critics and America’s enemies is exaggerated and mostly without merit, having more to do with politics than ethics). It is the notion that America is an exceptional country and that by definition, we hold our warriors to a higher standard. The argument that the Taliban does worse, or Muslims have desecrated the bodies of Americans as they did in Somali doesn’t hold water. Are we to ape the worst behaviors of the enemy and justify it as tit for tat? Or, are our standards superior to our enemies and thus, criticism of the Marines is justified?

Sebastion Junger, director of the superior documentary “Restrepo” which follows a company of Marines for a year in the “Valley of Death” - the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan — has an interesting piece in the Washington Post about the Marines and why they may have acted as they did:

We sometimes forget the tremedous psychological cost to our warriors of fighting for our country. The epidemic of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome cases of our soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq should remind us of this. Dealing with the stress of combat is an individual war within the war and, as Junger writes, we shouldn’t be shocked when a release of the kind the Marines chose to effect occurs.

But this can’t excuse the behavior.Despite war being a dehumanizing venture, it nonetheless demands that a baseline of ethical and moral behavior be followed. One of those ethical lines in the sand has to be a simple respect for the dead bodies of our enemies who, after all, can no longer harm anyone and are someone’s husband, father, or brother. Inflicting pain on the innocent by desecrating the body of their loved one is not exceptional. It is fundamentally wrong whether there is a written rule in the Geneva Conventions, or the Marine Corps Code of Conduct, or not. The bottom line is, we wouldn’t want an enemy soldier treating our dead that way — a good rule to follow when fighting for an exceptional country like the United States.

What kind of punishment - if any - should the Marines be subject to I can’t say. Nor should the Commandant determine their fate based on the outcry from those who hate the Marines for what they do without recognizing their existential value to the nation. The idea being advanced by some on the left that this is some sort of “Abu Ghraib” repeat is idiotic. No one was hurt. No one was tortured. No one was killed. The notion that this is some kind of “war crime” is equally nonsensical - a criticism made more for political effect than any reflection of reality.

I hope General Amos places their actions in the proper context and makes his decision on whether to punish the Marines or not by basing it on the high standards set by the Marine Corps and not the rantings of civilian partisans who want to use the incident to further their own political agendas.