“Three years ago this week, a newly elected President Obama faced the American people and said that if he couldn’t turn the economy around in three years, he’d be looking at a one-term proposition. We’re here to collect.” That was the central focus of GOP front-runner Mitt Romney’s rousing victory speech. He delivered his remarks after enjoying a sweeping victory in the Florida Primary. “There are fewer candidates than when the race began, but the three gentlemen left are serious and able competitors,” he added. “And I congratulate them on another hard-fought contest in this campaign. Primary contests are not easy – and they’re not supposed to be.” “As this primary unfolds, our opponents in the other party have been watching,” Romney said. “They like to comfort themselves with the thought that a competitive campaign will leave us divided and weak. But I’ve got some news for them: A competitive primary does not divide us; it prepares us. And when we gather here in Tampa seven months from now for our convention, ours will be a united party with a winning ticket for America!” He added that leadership is about “taking responsibility, not making excuses.” “In another era of American crisis, Thomas Paine is reported to have said, ‘Lead, follow, or get out of the way.’ Mr. President, you were elected to lead, you chose to follow, and now it’s time for you to get out of the way!” Romney exclaimed to resounding cheers. Watch Romney’s speech below via PBS. A partial transcript follows: Below is a partial transcript of Romney’s speech: My leadership helped build businesses from scratch. My leadership helped save the Olympics from scandal and give our athletes the chance to make us all proud. My leadership cut taxes 19 times and cast over 800 vetoes. We balanced every budget, and we kept our schools first among fifty states. My leadership will end the Obama era and begin a new era of American prosperity! This campaign is about more than replacing a President. It is about saving the soul of America. President Obama and I have two very different visions of America. President Obama wants to grow government and continue to amass trillion dollar deficits. I will not just slow the growth of government, I will cut it. I will not just freeze government’s share of the total economy, I will reduce it. And, without raising taxes, I will finally balance the budget. President Obama’s view of capitalism is to send your money to his friends’ companies. My vision for free enterprise is to return entrepreneurship to the genius and creativity of the American people. On one of the most personal matters of our lives, our health care, President Obama would turn decision making over to government bureaucrats. He forced through Obamacare; I will repeal it. Like his colleagues in the faculty lounge who think they know better, President Obama demonizes and denigrates almost every sector of our economy. I will make America the most attractive place in the world for entrepreneurs, for innovators, and for job creators. And unlike the other people running for President, I know how to do that. President Obama orders religious organizations to violate their conscience; I will defend religious liberty and overturn regulations that trample on our first freedom. President Obama believes America’s role as leader in the world is a thing of the past. He is intent on shrinking our military capacity at a time when the world faces rising threats. I will insist on a military so powerful no one would ever think of challenging it. President Obama has adopted a strategy of appeasement and apology. I will stand with our friends and speak out for those seeking freedom. President Obama wants to “fundamentally transform” America. We want to restore America to the founding principles that made this country great. Our plans protect freedom and opportunity, and our blueprint is the Constitution of the United States. Together, we will build an America where “hope” is a new job with a paycheck, not a faded word on an old bumper sticker. The path I lay out is not one paved with ever increasing government checks and cradle-to-grave assurances that government will always be the solution. If this election is a bidding war for who can promise more benefits, then I’m not your President. You have that President today. But if you want to make this election about restoring American greatness, then I hope you will join us. If you believe the disappointments of the last few years are a detour, not our destiny, then I am asking for your vote. I’m asking each of you to remember how special it is to be an American. I want you to remember what it was like to be hopeful and excited about the future, not to dread each new headline. I want you to remember when you spent more time dreaming about where to send your kids to college than wondering how to make it to the next paycheck. I want you to remember when you weren’t afraid to look at your retirement savings or the price at the pump. I want you to remember when our White House reflected the best of who we are, not the worst of what Europe has become. That America is still out there. We still believe in that America. We still believe in the America that is a land of opportunity and a beacon of freedom. We believe in the America that challenges each of us to be better and bigger than ourselves. This election, let’s fight for the America we love. We believe in America. Thank you. And God bless America.
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Romney Recalls Obama‘s ’One-Term’ Proposition in FL Victory Speech: ‘We’re Here to Collect’
On the front page, Editor-in-Chief of THE BLAZE Scott Baker has a post about a new book : “A Nation of Moochers.” The book takes a look at mooching in America in the macro sense. But I took a look at mooching in the micro sense, meaning a few of our writers here. FireWire editor Mike Opelka told me that he’s a “recovering moocher” but added, “I give, too.” (P.S- Opelka had a lot more to say on this, which I’ll be writing in a follow-up post). “Moocher: no. Smoocher: yes,” BLAZE magazine editor Chris Field said. “I come from a small farming community where everybody works from the time they’re kids.” The Newt Gingrich American dream. I asked our business editor Becket Adams for an example of how he mooches. He said he catches the draft of semi trucks to “save on gas.” I asked if that was the only thing he did. “That’s not strictly illegal, that I’ll admit in public? Yes,” he said. Chris Santarelli , an assistant editor, is one of those people who refuses to buy their own french fries and instead nibbles on the ones his friends order. “I never buy fries, say I don’t like them, but always ask for one from a friend,” he told me. The worst. Buck Sexton , who writes on the front page, dismissed the idea of him mooching altogether. “I’m a WASP. We hate mooching,” he said. As for me, I work in media living in D.C. Events around the city are typically free for journalists, often with open-bars and free dinners. Hors d’oeuvrs, at the least. Mooching is almost forced on me.
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Santarelli mooches on friend fries
This an amazing post at Watt’s Up With That, ” Legal exemplars cited in Michael Mann’s UVA email case “: The selected emails include graphic descriptions of the contempt a small circle of largely taxpayer-funded alarmists held for anyone who followed scientific principles and ended up disagreeing with them. For example, in the fifteenth Petitioners’ Exemplar (PE-15), Mann encourages a boycott of one climate journal and a direct appeal to his friends on the editorial board to have one of the journal’s editors fired for accepting papers that were carefully peer-reviewed and recommended for publication on the basis that the papers dispute Mann’s own work. In PE-38, he states that another well respected journal is “being run by the baddies,” calling them “shills for industry.” In PE-39 Mann calls U.S. Congressmen concerned about how he spent taxpayer money “thugs”. PE-18, 20 & 27 illustrate the typical fashion with which Mann used a UVa email account to accuse co-authors and other respected scientists of incompetence, berating them in emails copied to colleagues living throughout the world. UVA claims this is somehow exempt from VFOIA as scientific research. In PE-22, Mann alludes to his “dirty laundry” which cannot come out, requesting his correspondent to not pass the email or the data attached to it to anyone else (UVa has claimed no attachments to any emails were preserved on their system). In this email, Mann admits he has failed to follow the most basic tenet of science, to keep a record of exactly what he did in his research, and thus himself could not reproduce his own results. PE-24 & 25 characterize the efforts of this small group of academics to hide what they are doing and to avoid their work being held up to inspection under the Freedom of Information Act. In PE-26, Mann goes so far as to ask a federal employee — impossibly, as he send it to an email account subject to the federal FOIA — to “treat this email as confidential” though all the email does is complain about a Wall Street Journal author’s efforts to report the science impeaching Mann’s early work. PE-26, like many other emails UVA wishes to keep secret, is subject to release under the federal FOIA. Continue reading . PREVIOUSLY : ” Evidence Does Not Support Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming .”
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Michael Mann’s Emails
Media, take heed. Following last night’s NBC presidential debate in Tampa, Florida, Republican candidate Newt Gingrich has announced that he won’t allow debate moderators to prevent the audience from applauding. But could it be a moot point? As the New York Times reports , the catalyst for these comments originated on Monday evening when debate moderator Brian Williams told the 500-member audience to withhold their applause until the commercial break. On Tuesday, Gingrich responded to this action in an interview with FOX News’ “Fox & Friends,” during which he said that the audience members’ free speech was impeded by NBC’s policy on debate silence. Additionally, he seemed to indicate that the ban on audience noise was somehow tied to the medias’ own self-preservation. The action, Gingrich said, was likely employed out of a fear that the audience would turn against Williams. “I wish in retrospect I’d protested when Brian Williams took them out of it because I think it’s wrong,” Gingrich said. “And 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.” Watch Gingrich’s FOX interview, below: Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com The Times blog piece was entitled, “Gingrich Threatens to Skip Debates if Audiences Can’t Participate.” The article read , “Mr. Gingrich, a former House speaker, on Tuesday morning threatened not participate in any future debates with audiences that have been instructed to be silent.” While the candidate did, indeed, share his displeasure with the process at last night’s debate, nowhere in the FOX interview did Gingrich make this proclamation. Instead he said that he wouldn’t allow any crackdowns on audience expression. “We’re just not going to allow that to happen. That’s wrong,” he said during the interview. “The media doesn’t control free speech. People ought to be allowed to applaud if they want to.” On the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin weighed in, writing : This is one more indication that Gingrich is not a general-election candidate. In the presidential debates they don’t allow audience reaction either. At the start of the Sept. 26, 2008, debate Jim Lehrer explained: “The audience here in the hall has promised to remain silent, no cheers, no applause, no noise of any kind, except right now, as we welcome Senators Obama and McCain.” Considering that the Presidential Debates Coalition, which oversees general election debates, often forbids applause as well, it will be interesting to see how Gingrich reacts should be secure the GOP nomination. (H/T: Drudge )
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Gingrich: I‘m ’Not Going to Allow’ Media to Stop Audience Applause During Future Debates
Many were surprised by former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman’s quick endorsement of rival Mitt Romney when announcing his departure from the 2012 Republican presidential primary. Huntsman had been one of Romney’s biggest critics on the campaign trail, and recently said that the campaign front runner was “making himself completely unelectable.” As Huntsman’s campaign is in postmortem, examination of the endorsement makes the choice seem even stranger as more details point to a longstanding tension between the two Republican candidates. At face value Huntsman’s endorsement of Romney seems obvious–both are former governors with ties to the business community, both are perceived as moderate by pundits in comparison to the current philosophical stance of the party, both are Mormon. Their supporters are similar, as AP reports that polls show Romney was most often the second choice of Huntsman backers than any other candidate. However, the Huntsman campaign from the onset produced more attacks against Romney’s “core” and record than it did any other candidate, and The Washington Post reports that there has been a rivalry and tension between the two for sometime: “Six years ago, after a private dinner with their wives, Romney came away believing he would have Huntsman’s backing for president, according to a Romney adviser. Romney was so sure of the then-Utah governor’s support that he asked him to write position papers on China, a country Huntsman knows well. Romney even shared internal strategy with him. Then, in July 2006, Romney found out from news reports that Huntsman had officially endorsed Sen. John McCain (Ariz.). A source close to the Huntsman family countered said that any depiction of Huntsman misleading Romney was “’fabricated.’ Nevertheless, Romney saw the endorsement as a stinging, personal rebuke — one that further alienated the governors, who did not know each other well but whose families did. For years, the scions of two of the country’s most prominent Mormon families — they are, in fact, distant cousins — had waged an uneasy and at times bitter rivalry that would only intensify once the prize became the White House.” “The ambitions of Romney, 64, and Huntsman, 51, first collided in 1999, when the scandal-plagued Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City sought a new leader. Both men pursued the job aggressively, seeing it as a springboard to a political career. After much behind-the-scenes politicking, Romney won the job. It was a stinging defeat for the Huntsmans, considering how hard the family patriarch, Jon Sr., had lobbied for his son. ‘It was a painful, miserable loss for the Huntsman family,’ said one family confidant, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. ‘Two powerful juggernauts competed over the most important thing in the home state of their religion. One won and one lost. And one not only won the prize, but elevated himself on a national platform by running a successful Olympics.’ In the 2008 campaign, the elder Huntsman dutifully raised money for Romney. His son’s decision to side with McCain prompted angry phone calls from Romney, Karen Huntsman said in an interview last year.” With years of baggage, bitter rivalry and public comparison, it’s fair to say that the call Romney received from Huntsman Sunday night may have been much more awkward than the ordinary concession call between political opponents. POLITICO reports that Romney did not ask for Huntsman’s endorsement, or offer anything to get. Reid Epstein and Juana Summers describe the five minute conversation: “They spoke about ‘the state of the race’ and how Huntsman could help Romney with certain moderate voting blocs in South Carolina, Huntsman spokesman Tim Miller said Monday. Huntsman offered to record a robo-call on his behalf. Huntsman did not ask Romney to help retire his campaign debt or take on any of Huntsman’s now-unemployed staff, Miller said, common practices when primary candidates step aside and back an opponent — and as Romney did for former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Romney didn’t offer to. There was hope in Huntsman’s campaign — categorized even by Huntsman sources as ‘wishful thinking’ — that Romney would offer to help. High-level discussions did take place between the two candidates’ campaign managers about Romney taking on Huntsman staffers, with Huntsman campaign manager Matt David sending Romney chief Matt Rhodes resumes of staffers, a high-level Huntsman campaign source said. But Huntsman didn’t make an explicit request to Romney. Had he done so, the answer, with Romney knowing more candidates are likely to come asking the same thing, would have been no. ‘Bad time to set that precedent with others out there that might go soon and want the same thing,’ said one Romney campaign source. But the real obstacle, another Romney source explained: ‘You help your friends,’ which the two are most certainly not.” Putting a wet blanket over the already chilly endorsement, POLITICO writes that Romney wasn’t invited to Huntsman’s dropping-out speech Monday, and didn’t come even though he was also in Myrtle Beach in the morning and had no public schedule. The Hill writes on the Romney campaign’s passive reaction to the endorsement: “The former Massachusetts governor did not appear with Huntsman at Monday’s announcement and waited until after Huntsman stopped speaking to issue a terse statement: “I salute Jon Huntsman and his wife, Mary Kaye. Jon ran a spirited campaign based on unity, not division, and love of country. I appreciate his friendship and support.” In contrast, when Tim Pawlenty endorsed Romney in September, the campaign blasted out a two-paragraph release, calling the former Minnesota governor a ‘trusted adviser’ and naming him a co-chairman of Romney’s campaign.” Whether Huntsman will come around to stump for his opponent turned presidential choice, as Pawlenty did, seems unlikely. After his two sentence endorsement of Romney Wednesday, Huntsman ignored questions from reporters and headed straight for the door, on a plane home with his family by early afternoon.
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Longstanding Tension Makes Huntsman’s Romney Endorsement Seem Even Stranger
The Obama re-election campaign has attacked Mitt Romney’s oft-touted business record, thereby adding to the growing chorus of seemingly anti-business rhetoric aimed at the former Massachusetts governor. President Obama’s re-election campaign sent out a memo on Friday accusing Mitt Romney of “destroying companies and good-paying jobs in order to reap huge profits,” according to Jamie Dupree of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution . These are some excerpts from the memo: … Romney’s objective in business was never job creation. …Romney closed over a thousand plants, stores and offices, and cut employee wages, benefits and pensions. He laid off American workers and outsourced their jobs to other countries. And he and his partners made hundreds of millions of dollars while taking companies to bankruptcy. Although some of the businesses in which he took a stake undoubtedly added jobs, neither Romney’s campaign nor any independent fact checker has supported his claim of producing a net increase of 100,000 American jobs – or even anything close to it. … Armed with the facts, the American people will determine whether Mitt Romney’s track record shows he believes our prosperity will come from an economy where the wealthy and powerful can rig the game at the expense of working Americans, or every American who works hard and acts responsibly will have a fair shot at success. Voters can judge for themselves whether his vision for the future is based on outsourcing and bubble economies that enrich speculators and corporate raiders, or an economy built to last in which the productivity of our workers is rewarded. … Our economic crisis and endemic income inequality were caused in large part by a few who put profits over people. Taking advantage of an uneven playing field, where there was one rulebook for those at the top and another for everyone else, Mitt Romney and his friends made money hand over fist while working families lost their grip on the middle-class lifestyle they earned. The memo’s authors quickly switch from condemning Romney to praising President Barack Obama for creating jobs and growing the economy: “ … [he] has taken formidable, decisive steps to protect free enterprise , investors and consumers – and why he’s fighting for an economy that’s built to last… ” “ …the President championed Wall Street reform that requires more rigorous disclosure and tightens oversight of the kind of speculation that caused the market meltdown… ” The memo also claims the president rescued the U.S. auto industry, revived manufacturing, and freed businesses from “burdensome regulations.” However, it’s not the boasts about President Obama’s economic “successes” that have some critics scratching their heads. It’s the decision to attack Mitt Romney via private equity. Considering the fact that President Obama has “both taken donations from the industry and appointed a number of private equity veterans to his administration,” as Alexander Burns of Politico writes, this line of attack seems very odd. Here is a sampling of some of the “private equity veterans” President Obama has surrounded himself with (via Politico ): Jack Lew : The new White House chief of staff was previously a managing director at Citi Alternative Investments Nancy-Ann DeParle : A deputy chief of staff who helped lead the president’s health care reform effort was also a managing director at CCMP Capital Jeffrey Goldstein : The recently-departed undersecretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance was also a managing director at Hellman & Friedman before he joined the administration. He’s returning to the private equity firm now that he has resigned Steve Rattner : A former auto czar who came out of the world of private equity before briefly working with the administration Mark Gallogly : Works for Centerbridge Partners, and is formerly of the Blackstone Group. He was on the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board Richard Parsons : Former Time Warner executive on the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. He is also linked to Providence Equity Partners Inc Walter Jones : Currently the U.S. executive director of the African Development Bank, he was also a senior private equity executive with Gravitas Capital Advisors And these are just a few examples. This list doesn’t even mention the other “private equity veterans” currently employed by the President’s Management Advisory Board, the Board for International Food and Agriculture Development, the National Infrastructure Advisory Council and the Advisory Committee of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. “If President Obama plans to campaign against Mitt Romney and the alleged evils of private equity, then he will need to start by purging the ranks of his own administration,” a private equity insider told Politico . Final Thought : Seeing as how they’ve decided to target him specifically, as opposed to any of the other GOP candidates, it seems the Obama re-election campaign is confident Mitt Romney will win the GOP nomination. Read the full memo here.
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Obama Re-Election Campaign Accuses Romney of Being a ‘Corporate Raider’ and Exploiting the Middle Class
NEW YORK (The Blaze/AP) — Barbie has been an astronaut, an architect, a NASCAR driver, and a news anchor. Now, there’s an online movement to get her to attempt what could be her biggest feat yet: going bald to fight cancer. A Facebook page titled ” Beautiful and Bald Barbie! Let’s see if we can get it made ” was started a few days before Christmas. By Wednesday evening, the page had more than 20,000 fans. The goal is to get toy maker Mattel Inc. to create a bald Barbie in support of children with cancer. Friends Rebecca Sypin and Jane Bingham, who live on opposite coasts but have both been affected by the disease, hatched the idea to use Barbie for the movement because she’s such a popular children’s toy. Bingham has lost her hair due to chemotherapy treatments to treat lymphoma. Sypin’s 12-year-old daughter, Kin Inich, also lost her hair this year in her own battle with leukemia. Mattel didn’t return calls on Wednesday seeking comment, but the women said they have contacted the company through some general form letters. In return, they said, they’ve received form letters that say Mattel doesn’t accept ideas from outside sources. Last year, Mattel created a one-of-a-kind bald Barbie for a 4-year-old girl undergoing cancer treatment, New York CBS affiliate WCBS-TV reported . The women say making a bald Barbie available for everyone would provide a huge platform to raise awareness for children with cancer.
Advocates say simply cutting or shaving the hair off an existing Barbie isn't acceptable — doing so results in patchy, unsightly clumps. (Image source: Facebook)
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Bald Barbie? Group Lobbies Toy Company for Doll to Help Kids Cope With Cancer
Romney and McCain: The GOP Frenemies’ Club by Michelle Malkin Creators Syndicate Copyright 2012 Michael Corleone said to “ keep your friends close, but your enemies closer .” But what, pray tell, do we do with our frenemies? This is the awful, election-year quandary of movement conservatives. And everything you need to know about our heartache can be summed up in one image: 2008 presidential election loser John McCain and Mitt Romney together on the campaign trail. When they’re together , they look like they’re holding each other (and the rest of us) hostage. Their toxic chemistry makes seething, ex-newlyweds Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries look like Fred and Ginger. In New Hampshire last week after Romney’s Iowa caucus squeaker, an overly giddy McCain mocked his endorsee for his “landslide victory.” Awkward. Then in South Carolina on Friday, McCain mistakenly referred to Romney as “President Obama” – as Romney and South Carolina GOP governor Nikki Haley rushed to correct the gaffe. Freudian slip? Senior moment? Sabotage? All of the above? Of course, if you choose to pal around with a double-talking, big government barnacle, you get what you deserve. McCain is the entrenched incumbent Arizona senator/war hero who lost to a neophyte, radical leftist community organizer from Chicago. The “straight-talk” GOP candidate flip-flopped on everything from illegal immigration to global warming to offshore drilling to closing Gitmo. He pandered to minority grievance-mongers and the liberal media. He proposed massive government interventions bigger than Obama’s. This Beltway fossil who now poses as a Tea Party hero proudly teamed with Big Government liberals Teddy Kennedy and Russ Feingold. He’s the “maverick” who supported the $700 billion TARP bailout, the $25 billion auto bailout, the first $85 billion AIG bailout , and a $300 billion mortgage bailout – yet, who now carps about “record deficits and debt.” A career politician for the past 30 years, McCain set the stage for the suicidal anti-capitalist rhetoric now polluting the GOP primary. Four years ago this month during a GOP primary debate held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, it was McCain up on stage denigrating Romney’s private-sector experience. Asked whether he thought Romney’s record as CEO made him qualified to lead, McCain snarked: “I know how to lead. I led the largest squadron in the United States Navy. And I did it out of patriotism, not for profit.” Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, and Jon Huntsman have all followed suit, bashing Romney’s venture-capitalist past at Bain Capital with Occupy Wall Street-style zeal. It’s one thing to carefully dissect Romney’s investments, as the Wall Street Journal did, and weigh his wins against his losses. (The paper found that “in total, Bain produced about $2.5 billion in gains for its investors in the 77 deals, on about $1.1 billion invested. Overall, Bain recorded roughly 50% to 80% annual gains in this period, which experts said was among the best track records for buyout firms in that era.”) It’s quite another to shamelessly disparage those who work in private equities as immoral corporate raiders and avaricious job-killers, as the three aforementioned GOP Occupiers have done. If they keep it up, they’ll soon be chaining themselves together with bike locks performing “mic checks” and “down twinkles” at the next GOP debate. Gingrich has pushed McCain’s profit-bashing line the furthest. Backed by a super PAC (the very campaign finance vehicle he was whining about last week) flush with $5 million from casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, the vendetta-driven former House Speaker accused Romney and a “handful of rich people” of “ looting ” companies. Channeling left-wing propagandist Michael Moore, Gingrich railed that Bain “manipulate[d] the lives of thousands of other people.” Gingrich – who raked in millions consulting for the taxpayer-subsidized Freddie Mac racket — also served on the advisory board of private equities firm and leveraged buyout experts Forstmann Little. But, hey, it’s only “looting” if it doesn’t line your own pockets. Mitt Romney’s chronic flip-flopping political career is teeming with reasons for grass-roots conservatives to oppose his nomination — from his support for racial preferences and government funding of abortion, liberal judges, global warming enviro-nitwittery, TARP, auto bailouts, the Obama stimulus, gun control, and of course, the Massachusetts individual health insurance mandates that presaged Obamacare. But instead of focusing on his long political record of expedience, incompetent non-Romneys have borrowed from McCain’s 2008 playbook and thrown wealth creators of all kinds who take risks in the private marketplace under the bus. With frenemies like these, who needs Democrats?
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Romney and McCain: The GOP Frenemies’ Club
