The Nevada Caucuses and Mitt Romney. Plus a message to Obama from Victor Davis Hanson

CBS   Newt takes second over Paul, 23% to 19%.


Rick Moran: Romney wins big in NV: Still can't crack 50%
"All the entrance poll mumbo jumbo comes down to the fact that your increased tea party and conservative support came largely from the outsized Mormon vote."

http://townhall.com/political-cartoons/2012/02/03/96006

Romney to Obama: "Not so fast" ;  Then this: DECONSTRUCTING ROMNEY, PART 1


Stephen Hayes: Romney in Context; The candidate’s rhetoric needs a safety net.  "But in many respects Romney’s words are more problematic because of their context. He seemed to consign the poor to a station in life. He suggested that society has done its duty because of the fact that “we have a safety net.” 
"In so doing, Romney seemed utterly unaware of a long strain of conservative thought on the morality of capitalism. He seemed oblivious to the argument​—​central to the conservative movement​—​that free markets allow the poor to transcend their position, that poverty is not destiny."   (Emphasis added). Hayes quotes Arthur Brooks :

Welfare programs rely on the idea that poverty is simply a problem of a lack of money. As W. C. Fields put it, “A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money.” But the problem is that giving the poor money does not alleviate poverty in the long (or even the short) run. Instead, it masks cultural conditions by treating the symptoms.

Big Government: For the GOP, Moderate Is the New Conservative  "The completion of the takeover of the Democrat Party by progressives was shown to have come to completion 4 years ago and today I think it’s clear that the Neo-Cons and moderate conservatives now control the vast majority of the GOP. That includes all the Tea Party’ers that walked out their doors November of 2010 and voted establishment beltway insiders back into office. Shame on you.

"The GOP cries for another Reagan but it will never find him. Because the party of Reagan and Goldwater is dead. The tides have shifted. The Democrats will represent modern socialism. The GOP will represent wafflers, flip floppers, moderates, former Democrats, fiscal liberals that claim to be fiscal conservatives and social conservatives."

But can't we at least find a candidate who can explain and defend with conviction the greatness that is capitalism and free enterprise?

The bitter, conservative-hating, leftist Pat Oliphant does have a point here.

Finally, this message is for you, Mr. Obama:
Victor Davis Hanson:  What We Do Not Want to Hear Anymore

The State of the Union could have been written [1] by a computer program. All the now familiar Obama furniture was in the room: the mock outrage at “them,” the psychodramatic first-person boasting (as in, “I will oppose..,” “I will not work with…,” “I will decline…,” “I will not stand by …,” I will not cede…,” “I will not walk away…,” “I will not back down…,” “I will not go back…”); the now customary rear-view-mirror jab at his fading predecessor; the monotonous promising that something is so bad that we must have a new program for it (each year the same threat, the same solution, the same failure); and the silence about the Obama legacy of stimulus, debt, and ObamaCare.
But the people are tired and simply by now shut their ears [2]. Here are five things in the current age that exhaust us. Keep reading...