National Review Online

Despite losing Tuesday’s Florida primary, Newt Gingrich used his Sunshine State effort to showcase his voluntary 15 percent flat tax — 2012’s smartest idea yet, both strategically and substantively. Through the November 6 election, this concept can inoculate Republicans from the Democrats’ ceaseless lies about the wealthy “not paying their fair share” of taxes. And, if implemented, Gingrich’s prescription would reinvigorate America’s feeble economy.

Among the barbs that Gingrich and Willard Mitt Romney traded, the former House speaker made this generous-sounding comment at the January 23 Tampa debate:

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Allow me to draw attention to a dog not barking: President Obama almost never gives press conferences. Now, that’s not the end of the world, as far as I’m concerned. But I have memories of previous administrations . . .

During the eight years of Reagan, the press often slammed the president for not holding more press conferences. And I remember him as being in the East Room, during prime time, quite a lot. Helen Thomas, Sam Donaldson, Bill Curtis — they’d all try their hardest to trip him up.

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It’s unusual when a reporter sympathetic to a politician writes a story that makes his subject look bad. But Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker has now done this twice.

The first time was in an article last April on Obama’s foreign policy, in which he quoted a “top aide” (National Security Adviser Tom Donilon? it sounds like him) saying that the president was “leading from behind” on Libya. Not what most Americans expect their presidents to do.

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As Senator Obama said during the 2008 campaign, words matter. Modern “liberalism” is strikingly illiberal; the high priests of “tolerance” are increasingly intolerant of even the mildest dissent; and those who profess to “celebrate diversity” coerce ever more ruthlessly a narrow homogeneity. Thus, the Obama administration’s insistence that Catholic institutions must be compelled to provide free contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients. This has less to do with any utilitarian benefit a condomless janitor at a Catholic school might derive from Obamacare, and more to do with the liberal muscle of Big Tolerance enforcing one-size-fits-all diversity.

The bigger the Big Government, the smaller everything else: In Sweden, expressing a moral objection to homosexuality is illegal, even on religious grounds, even in church, and a pastor minded to cite the more robust verses of Leviticus would risk four years in jail. In Canada, the courts rule that Catholic schools must allow gay students to take their same-sex dates to the prom. The secular state’s Bureau of Compliance is merciless to apostates to a degree even your fire-breathing imams might marvel at.

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There is an old claim, oft-repeated as gospel truth, that the only living thing that would survive a nuclear attack is the cockroach. The power of modern weaponry has likely rendered this false, but in its place we might well put the disgraced “community organizing” organization, ACORN. Reports of ACORN’s demise are greatly exaggerated, a fact by which nobody with even a cursory familiarity with their practices should be surprised. The evidence suggests that the group has weathered the fallout from its scandals with a remarkable fortitude — it is not just surviving, but thriving; and it is doing so with thousands of those federal dollars that it is explicitly banned from receiving.

Since it was ignominiously stripped of all federal funding in 2009, ACORN has steadily maintained its extensive network of “affiliates” — more specifically, tax-exempt progressive 501(c)3 and 501(c)4 organizations, most of which have been renamed since the scandal hit. For 40 years, it appears, ACORN employed many of these groups to funnel millions of federal dollars its way — and it continues to do so today. It appears to be getting away with it. When somebody buys a gun for a convicted felon, it is called a “straw purchase,” and it is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. When ACORN takes money prohibited to it by employing others as collection agents, it is called “accounting.” This is the financial equivalent of being dishonorably discharged, but continuing to serve, and anyone who respects congressional authority should be outraged.

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Add class warfare to the list of contemporary political skills that Mitt Romney hasn’t quite mastered.

In a mere 18 hours, he managed first to step on his big Florida primary win with a lollapalooza of gaffes, declaring that he “was not concerned about the very poor.” Then, in the classic GOP style of doubling down on stupid to overcompensate for any hint of a compassion deficit, he called for raising the minimum wage to keep pace with inflation. Gee, Mitt, just for inflation? Why not double or maybe even quintuple the minimum wage?

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Much of the American media have been overtaken by a cancerous rhetoric in recent days: It has been suggested that the Susan G. Komen Foundation, the breast-cancer charity, should be no more. In the eyes of many, such as National Organization for Women president, Terry O’Neill, Komen has gone from being a women’s health charity to becoming “anti-woman.” O’Neill predicted to MSNBC host Ed Schulz that, within five years or so, Komen will cease to exist. And good riddance!

Komen — which had literally turned the White House pink for breast-cancer awareness, and had pink products all over the Macy’s makeup counter this Christmas — has been an overwhelming presence in American culture. It is the force behind the walks for breast-cancer education, fundraising, and memorializing. Its campaigns are everywhere. And just yesterday, it seems, it was regarded a good sister to the liberal-feminist sisterhood, endorsed by the likes of O’Neill and the political activists who keep the Democratic party singing the abortion industry’s tune. That, however, was until Komen crossed Planned Parenthood. 

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Message to Mitt: A rising tide lifts all boats.

That great phrase was coined by the late Jack Kemp, who believed that growth and opportunity for all is the answer to poverty. In fact, Kemp believed it was the answer to all things economic. And he was right. The best anti-poverty program is the one that creates jobs. The answer to large budget deficits? Grow the economy, create jobs, watch incomes rise, and let the tax revenues come rolling in.

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During a debate in January, Rick Santorum charged that “Speaker Gingrich for 20 years supported a federal individual mandate.” Pointing to a series of statements Gingrich had made over the years, beginning with his 1993 comment on Meet the Press that he was “for people, individuals — exactly like automobile insurance — individuals having health insurance and being required to have health insurance,” Politifact rated Santorum’s statement as “mostly true.”

But now, Gingrich’s campaign insists that its candidate is opposed to the individual mandate. “Newt has become convinced by people like Governor Rick Scott, Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia, and attorneys general in more than half the states that a mandate is unconstitutional,” e-mails Gingrich communications director Joe DeSantis. “If the government can force you to buy insurance, it can force you to buy anything. He’s also become convinced by seeing what’s happened in Massachusetts because of Romneycare: bigger government, higher costs, less access.”

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So twisted are the Left’s conceptions of life and law, conscience and the Constitution, that many in their quarter praise a federal mandate that would force private religious organizations to facilitate the distribution of contraceptives, even as they condemn the decision by the secular, apolitical Susan G. Komen for the Cure to disentangle itself from abortion mega-provider Planned Parenthood.

Early reports suggested Komen decided to break ties with Planned Parenthood because the latter runs afoul of a recently adopted in-house rule barring grants for any organization under government investigation. While this sounds like a perfectly sensible rule to us, Komen founder and CEO Nancy Brinker has made clear that the defunding decision was in fact made for still more practical reasons. In a new video aimed at responding to the on-cue hysterics of the militantly “pro-choice” and their adjuncts, Brinker avers that the decision came as a result of  “a comprehensive review of our grants and standards” begun in 2010, part of an effort to “eliminate duplicative grants, freeing up more dollars for higher impact programs,” including such programs that are “actually providing the lifesaving mammogram.”

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Conservative opponents of Mitt Romney are nervous. If Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich continue to battle for the primary’s non-Romney, non-libertarian slot, the former Massachusetts governor could coast toward the GOP convention as the indubitable front-runner.

Maybe, supporters of both candidates say, the other will come to his senses and drop out, uniting Romney’s opposition behind their guy — the true conservative who can beat Romney and President Obama.

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President Obama is obsessed with green energy as a terrier is obsessed with a bone. He digs the issue up time and time again with a single-mindedness that is remarkable in contemporary politics. Last week, during his State of the Union address, he gnawed on that policy again, offering it to voters as the foundation of his economic recovery plan, a pillar of his foreign policy, and a hedge against global environmental catastrophe.

President Obama, of course, is not alone in this regard. For 40 years now, green energy has been one of the primary opiates of the educated elite, a drug imbibed in varying doses by politicians on both the left and right. But no president has so energetically and dramatically spent political and economic capital on green energy as has this one.

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JONATHAN ADLER
On the field, the New England Patriots will avenge their loss in Super Bowl XLII with a convincing win on the backs of their tremendous tight ends. Indy may be Manning Country, but that’s Peyton, not Eli. Off the field, union activists will give the labor movement a self-inflicted black eye insofar as they try to disrupt the festivities to protest Indiana’s new right-to-work law. Activists try to politicize the Super Bowl at their own risk.

— Jonathan H. Adler is director of the Center for Business Law & Regulation at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law.

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On Tuesday, director Joe Carnahan announced on Twitter that he had embarked on a remake of the Charles Bronson vigilante classic Death Wish. The main question, for any director approaching such a topic, especially with source material as infamous as Death Wish, is “Have you read any reviews lately?”

Vincent Canby, in the New York Times, dubbed the original Death Wish “a despicable movie, one that raises complex questions in order to offer bigoted, frivolous, oversimplified answers.” Dirty Harry, whose 40th anniversary passed in December, attracted similar distaste. Pauline Kael savaged the film’s “fascist medievalism,” and described it as a “single-minded attack against liberal values.” Variety called it a “specious, phony glorification of the police and of police brutality.” Roger Ebert condemned its “fascist moral position.”

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As regular readers know, I think a lot of Rob Portman, Pat Toomey, Jeb Bush, and some others, and think they ought to run for president — they’d be good. (In the Oval Office, I mean, whether on the campaign trail or not.)

I have been singing the praises of Portman since long before he reached the Senate. He’s one of the most impressive public servants around. In fact, he’s one of the few about whom you don’t have to be embarrassed to use the phrase “public servant.”

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First they come for the alcohol, then for the tobacco, then for your sugar.

When the day arrives when you have to undergo a background check and endure a three-day waiting period to enter a Dunkin’ Donuts, you can trace the loss of your unrestricted access to a Boston Kreme or French Cruller to this moment. Namely the publication in the journal Nature of an article calling for regulating sugar as a health hazard, although stopping “far short of all-out prohibition” (that would be too extreme). 

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 Congressman Jim Moran is an old white Democrat from Virginia who thinks he can judge whether we minority conservatives are acting sufficiently non-white. Moran’s an inveterate bully, a brawler, a crook, and a bigot. And not one of his civility-preaching liberal colleagues has the courage to call him out.

Responding on cable news to GOP congressman Allen West’s blunt criticisms of President Obama this week, Moran derided the retired U.S. Army colonel, who is black, as “not representative of the African-American community.” Moran then launched into the kind of tired race-traitor tirade I’ve heard from progressives of pallor for more than 20 years.

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Years ago, a friend told me a story from her days living in South America. The movie Wayne’s World had come out, and she went to see it. She spoke English, but it was interesting to read the Spanish subtitles.

For instance, early in the film, Wayne says: “Shyeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt!”

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In 1992, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton built his campaign for the White House on doing more for the “forgotten middle class.” Calling it the “New Covenant” (Democrats since Roosevelt have tried to work the words “new” or “deal” into their campaign slogans), Clinton promised to focus on the people he called “the backbone of the country, the ones who do the work and pay the taxes and send their children off to war.”

Sound familiar? Here is Mitt Romney, the morning after the Florida primary: “I’m in this race because I care about Americans. I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90 percent, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”

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Imperial regimes can crack when they are driven out of their major foreign outposts. The fall of the Berlin Wall did not just signal the liberation of Eastern Europe from Moscow. It prefigured the collapse of the Soviet Union itself just two years later.

The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s Syria could be similarly ominous for Iran. The alliance with Syria is the centerpiece of Iran’s expanding sphere of influence, a mini-Comintern that includes such clients as Iranian-armed-and-directed Hezbollah, now the dominant power in Lebanon; and Hamas, which controls Gaza and threatens to take the rest of Palestine (the West Bank) from a feeble Fatah.

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