the Weekly Standard

Rick Santorum

Rick Santorum had a pretty good week. He finished a distant fourth in the Nevada caucuses, but the turnout was so low--down nearly 25 percent from 2008--that the event became yet another indictment of the front-runner.

On February 3, during a rare Friday prayer lecture at Tehran University, Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that Iran would "support and help any nations, any groups fighting against the Zionist regime across the world, and we are not afraid of declaring this." Khamenei continued, “The Zionist regime is a true cancer tumor on this region that should be cut off.

Public Policy Polling surveys Tuesday's caucuses in Minnesota and Colorado and finds good news for Rick Santorum:

Last night's results in Nevada were bad news for Newt Gingrich and PPP's first day of polling in Colorado and Minnesota indicates things may only get worse for him in the coming days.

Here's Mitt Romney's victory speech, as prepared for delivery, given tonight after he was projected the winner in the Nevada contest:

Tonight, I want to thank the people of Nevada.  Once again, you have given me your vote of confidence.  And this time, I intend to take it all the way to the White House!

CNN  reports: 

Rick Santorum

Rasmussen's latest tracking poll finds Rick Santorum faring better than Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney against Obama:

There's been a great deal of sound and fury over the jobs report. Here are two thoughts that come to mind.

Against the bulls: An increase in 245,000 payroll jobs was about 100,000 above expectations (at 150,000). But exactly a year ago, the experts were calling for a January 2011 increase of about 140,000 jobs and the initial number was just 36,000, or about 100,000 below expectations.

The Scrapbook has a well-documented weakness for acknowledgments. No, not the virtue of gratitude or the practice of recognizing indebtedness in general. We refer to those explanatory paragraphs, usually appended to the end of a book, where authors traditionally thanked the various libraries and archives they had consulted.

chris beatrice

Since President Obama arrived in the Oval Office three years ago there have been many efforts to explain his foreign and defense policy succinctly. Is there an Obama Doctrine? While many theories have been propounded, the recent State of the Union speech settles the matter.

Clinton campaigns for president, 1992.

AP PHOTO / STEPHAN SaVoia

"It’s the economy, stupid,” was a useful slogan for the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign. Of course, it wasn’t really true. The Clinton campaign was about much more than the economy. It was about “ending welfare as we know it,” for example, and putting government on the side of those who “work hard and play by the rules”—all of this part of a broader redefinition of the Democratic party away from the failed liberalism of Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.

Geert Wilders during his hate-speech trial

NEWSCOM

GARY LOCKE

On October 1, 2010, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney described the genius of the American idea and lauded its results. “No nation has done more to lift people out of poverty than this nation,” he said in remarks at Benedetto’s, an Italian restaurant in Tampa, Florida. “Our free enterprise system has lifted billions out of poverty.” 

Jackie Kennedy, Charles Collingwood beneath Gilbert Stuart’s George Washington (1962)

Getty Images

As British troops reached Washington on August 24, 1814, Dolley Madison was emptying the President’s House. As she packed up the silver and drapery, the object she most wanted to rescue was causing trouble: Gilbert Stuart’s full-length portrait of George Washington. So firmly was this fastened to the wall that the White House doorkeeper and gardener had to chop its frame to pieces before it could be ingloriously carted away to safety.

Moby Dick as seen by Rockwell Kent (1930)

Lydia Davison Whitcomb

We Americans—so the rough sketch of our archetypal character has it—are a people of rugged individualism, ambition, and, above all, unfettered, unrepentant movement. Summing up the 19th century in America, Frederick Jackson Turner wrote that “movement has been its dominant fact.” But movement was no less a part of the colonial era or the 20th and 21st centuries.