Fire Hydrant of Freedom

It looks like it's all over in Florida. Even before the voting has begun in Tuesday's primary, polls show Mitt Romney with a comfortable lead. If the former Massachusetts governor wins by a respectable margin, it would be completely understandable to take it as confirmation that he needs to stick with his campaign strategy.

It would also be a colossal mistake.

At least since South Carolina, Mr. Romney has been laboring under the assumption that his most serious challenge is to defeat Newt Gingrich. It's not. Mr. Gingrich's viability after months of also-ran status owes itself almost entirely to Mr. Romney's glaring weaknesses. The governor's challenge is not merely to best Mr. Gingrich but to do so in a way that addresses those weaknesses.

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GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich
.For those who have dealt with him, Mr. Gingrich presents an oddly captivating figure. Where Ronald Reagan was the Teflon president for the way that attacks never seemed to stick to him, Mr. Gingrich is like the blob from some horror movie, absorbing everything shot at him without stopping. That's why Nancy Pelosi's claim that she has something that would sink him is laughable: At this stage, is there really anything left that could discredit this man?

GOP voters know all about Mr. Gingrich's dirty laundry. What attracts them, especially in the debates, is that they see him taking the fight to all the people they oppose: liberal Democrats, the liberal press, and squishy Republicans afraid to challenge either with conservative ideas.

On the other hand, Mr. Gingrich has attacked Mr. Romney from the left on his earnings at Bain Capital and disparaged the man's character. With his usual reach for superlatives, the former speaker of the House accuses Mr. Romney of giving "the most blatantly dishonest answers" not just in this race but "in any presidential race in my lifetime."

Related Video
 Columnist Dan Henninger on the Florida primary and Romney-Gingrich dogfight.
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.Mr. Gingrich is neither the front-runner nor the likely nominee. But he may be the candidate who ensures that the present nastiness continues right up and through the convention. And while Mr. Romney may win Florida, dusting off Bob Dole to launch an assault on Mr. Gingrich's character will do nothing to kill the larger threat from the Newt insurgency.

That's because at bottom the Newt insurgency is fueled by the sense that Mr. Romney's tepid policy agenda reflects no fixed beliefs. Many who support Mr. Gingrich will concede he is not their ideal candidate. In fact, it's telling that Mr. Romney's GOP rivals are defined as non-Romneys, each standing for something lacking in the front-runner.

The most constructive way for Mr. Romney to kill off his rivals while bringing the party together is simple: Steal their best ideas. Mr. Gingrich has done precisely that with Ron Paul by calling for a commission to study the gold standard. Mr. Romney could easily do the same, echoing Mr. Paul's call for an honest dollar or adopting Mr. Gingrich's flat tax.

He might steal a lesson in style from Rick Santorum. With little money and a shoestring organization, Mr. Santorum has managed to articulate the core arguments of the conservative agenda: why we need to address Iran, why we need to help Americans keep more of what they earn and, most of all, why the words of our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution matter still. In the last debate he proved you can be tough without being personal, skillfully demolishing all the governor's pat answers about RomneyCare.

Ronald Reagan always understood that ideas were more potent than invective. Nor was he above looking to others for those ideas. The across-the-board tax cut he made the heart of his 1980 campaign was largely the work of a then-obscure congressman from upstate New York named Jack Kemp.

There's no reason Mr. Romney could not likewise work with the chairman of the House Budget Committee, Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan, on a complete rewrite of our debilitating tax code—which would give all Republican Party candidates something substantive to rally around in this fall's campaign against President Obama and his Democratic allies on Capitol Hill.

In the end, the arguments for Mr. Romney come down to this: He has executive experience in both business and government, he's got the most money and the best organization, and he's electable. They are good points. Still, they add up to one argument by résumé and two from process.

Those of us who believed that a primary fight would toughen Mr. Romney up have little to show for it. Far from sharpening his proposals to reach out to a GOP electorate hungry for a candidate with a bold conservative agenda, Mr. Romney has limited his new toughness to increasingly negative attacks on Mr. Gingrich's character. It's beginning to make what we all assumed was a weakness look much more like arrogance.

What is a human right?

Consider the case of a Romanian man named Ionescu—not the absurdist playwright himself, but very much in the master's tradition—who once took the 2,000-mile bus ride from Bucharest to Madrid. His seat did not fully recline. The bus company's advertising had promised it would.

So Mr. Ionescu sued. For €90.

First he sued his way through the Romanian judiciary, including the High Court. After his appeals failed at home, he went to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, France, insisting that the Romanian courts had denied him a right to a fair hearing.

The complaint was lodged in October 2004. It was rejected, by a seven-judge panel, in June 2010. Mr. Ionescu did not get his €90, though what his case cost European taxpayers the ECHR did not say. The court did note, however, that the suit was "[not] manifestly ill-founded or an abuse of the right of application." In other words, the ECHR thought the case was a close call.

It would be nice if the Ionescu case were just another piece of Eurosilliness of the likes British tabloids love to lampoon. Closer to the truth is that it's a comic emblem of a tragic decline. One after another, public institutions and private organizations devoted to the defense of human rights are bringing those rights into wholesale disrepute.

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Abu Qatada
.Take the ECHR, which grandly claims to "protect the rights of 800 million people in 47 states." In 1999, the court agreed to consider 8,400 applications. A decade later it was dealing with 57,200 applications, plus an additional backlog of 119,300. The court says that 90% of those cases are inadmissible and has taken steps to deal with it.

But the explosion in cases begs the question of why so many people are now turning to the court. In an important and overlooked speech last Wednesday, British Prime Minister David Cameron offered an answer: The court, he warned, was in the process of turning itself into an immigration tribunal, a small-claims court and a "court of fourth instance"—a kind of super-Supreme Court for petitioners who have exhausted their options at the national level.

Call it the legal corollary of Say's Law: Supply creates its own demand. The more "human rights" there are, the more human rights cases there will be.

Is that a problem? It is, when the cases are spurious. It is, too, when a court's definition of human rights routinely contradicts the views of ordinary people, democratic parliaments, and duly constituted national courts.

The latest Exhibit A in ECHR over-reach is its Jan. 16 ruling in the case of Abu Qatada, a radical Islamist cleric born in Bethlehem, based in London, and wanted on terrorism-related charges in Algeria, Jordan, the U.S., Belgium, Spain, France and Italy. The U.K. government (which has never charged Mr. Qatada with a crime though it has repeatedly detained him), wants to deport him to Jordan and has negotiated a "no torture" agreement with Amman. Britain's Law Lords blessed the deportation in 2009.

But not the Strasbourg court. It stopped the deportation on the grounds that a prospective conviction of Mr. Qatada in a Jordanian court might be based on evidence extracted by torture from a co-defendant. A deportation, the court ruled, would "legitimize the torture of witnesses and suspects."

Maybe that's high-minded. But the upshot for Britain is that Mr. Qatada is a free man, getting £1,000 a month in welfare checks. Not bad for a guy who arrived in the U.K. on a fake passport, won asylum on grounds that he faced religious persecution in Jordan (while practicing it in his sermons), and then became a tutor and inspiration to the likes of Mohammad Atta, Richard Reid, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Nor is Mr. Qatada's case an aberration. A U.K. government report released last year found that in 2010 some 200 foreign criminals avoided deportation by citing Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the "right to family and private life"—the latter defined as "studies, employment, friendships and sexuality." Altogether, 3,775 former foreign national prisoners remained in Britain despite efforts by the U.K. Border Agency to send them home.

In his speech, Mr. Cameron put his finger on the effects of all this. "For too many people, the very concept of rights is in danger of slipping from something noble to something discredited," he said. "It has a corrosive effect on people's support for human rights."

That's right. And it's equally corrosive when Amnesty International makes a poster child of Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner and suspected al Qaeda recruiter, or when Human Rights Watch becomes the leading anti-Israel propagandist of the present day—to the point of being publicly denounced by its founder. Human rights were once a pillar of democratic decency. The people who now usually claim to speak for those rights have systematically transformed them into a weapon against democracies and a shield for terrorists.

What is happening to human rights today is not a first: Other Western ideals—democracy, equality, freedom—have all been hijacked by the enemies of democracy, equality and freedom. How do you mount a rescue attempt for human rights? That has to be a task worthy of some philanthropist's largess.

By LEIF BABIN
America's premier Special Operations force is once again in the headlines after a team of Navy SEALs rescued two hostages from captivity in Somalia last week. Elite U.S. forces have carried out such operations periodically over the past decade, always with skill and bravery. The difference in recent months is that the details of their work haven't remained secret. On the contrary, government officials have revealed them for political gain—endangering our forces in the process.

The floodgates opened after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden last May, and the Obama administration's lack of discretion was on display again at last week's State of the Union address. As President Obama entered the House chamber, in full view of the cameras, he pointed to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and exclaimed: "Good job tonight, good job tonight." Clearly something had happened that he wanted the world to know about.

After delivering his speech, which included multiple references to the bin Laden raid, the president again thanked Mr. Panetta. "That was a good thing tonight," he said as if to ensure that the viewing public, if they missed it initially, would get it a second time around.

Sure enough, shortly thereafter, the White House announced the successful rescue of the hostages in Somalia by U.S. Special Operations forces. Vice President Biden appeared on ABC's "Good Morning America" to highlight the success the next morning, and Mr. Panetta also publicly praised it. Then came the "anonymous U.S. officials" to provide extensive details of who conducted the raid and how. As with the bin Laden operation, the top-secret unit that carried it out was again front-page news, as were its methods and tactics.

Our special operators do not welcome this publicity. In fact, from conversations I've had in recent days, it's clear they are dismayed by it.

Adm. William H. McRaven, America's top special-operations commander, wrote in his 1996 book "Spec Ops" that there are six key principles of success in special operations. Of paramount importance—especially given the risk and sensitivity of the missions and the small units involved—is what the military calls "operational security," or maintaining secrecy. If the enemy learns details and can anticipate the manner and timing of an attack, the likelihood of success is significantly reduced and the risk to our forces is significantly increased.

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President Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta before the State of the Union address in Washington on Tuesday.
.This is why much of what our special-operators do is highly classified, and why military personnel cannot legally divulge it to the public. Yet virtually every detail of the bin Laden raid has appeared in news outlets across the globe—from the name of the highly classified unit to how the U.S. gathered intelligence, how many raiders were involved, how they entered the grounds, what aircraft they used, and how they moved through the compound. Such details were highly contained within the military and not shared even through classified channels. Yet now they are available to anyone with the click of a mouse.

It's difficult for military leaders to enforce strict standards of operational security on their personnel while the most senior political leadership is flooding the airwaves with secrets. The release of classified information has also opened a Pandora's box of former and retired SEALs, special operators, and military personnel who have chosen to violate their non-disclosure agreements and discuss intricate details of how such operations are planned and executed.

We've already begun seeing specific examples of strategic harm from the post-bin Laden leaks. In June, Pakistan arrested several individuals who allegedly provided information to the CIA in advance of the raid. One of those charged with treason was a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi. This Sunday, Mr. Panetta confirmed to "60 Minutes" that Dr. Afridi had provided "very helpful" intelligence to the CIA. That may have condemned Dr. Afridi to death or life imprisonment.

Such disclosures are catastrophic to U.S. intelligence networks, which often take years to develop. Recklessness not only puts lives at risk but could set U.S. intelligence-collection efforts back decades. Our ability to carry out future operations is significantly degraded—something not lost on Pakistan.

A week after the bin Laden raid, then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates expressed dismay about Washington's loose lips, telling a town hall meeting of U.S. Marines at Camp Lejeune: "Frankly, a week ago Sunday, in the Situation Room, we all agreed that we would not release any operational details from the effort to take out bin Laden. That all fell apart on Monday—the next day."

Do the president and his top political advisers understand what's at stake for the special-operations forces who carry out these dangerous operations, or the long-term strategic consequences of divulging information about our most highly classified military assets and intelligence capabilities? It is infuriating to see political gain put above the safety and security of our brave warriors and our long-term strategic goals. Loose lips sink ships.

Mr. Babin is a former Navy SEAL officer who served three tours in Iraq, earning a Silver Star, two Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart. He left active duty six months ago.

Personal income increased 0.5% in December while personal consumption was unchanged To view this article, Click Here
Brian S. Wesbury - Chief Economist
Robert Stein, CFA - Senior Economist
Date: 1/30/2012
Personal income increased 0.5% in December while personal consumption was unchanged. The consensus expected a gain of 0.4% for income and 0.1% for consumption. In the past year, personal income is up 3.8% while spending is up 3.9%.
Disposable personal income (income after taxes) was up 0.4% in December and is up 2.3% from a year ago. Increases in private wages and salaries along with dividends and social security pushed disposable personal income higher in December.
 
The overall PCE deflator (consumer inflation) was up 0.1% in December. Prices are up 2.4% versus a year ago. The “core” PCE deflator, which excludes food and energy, was up 0.2% in December and is up 1.8% since last year.
 
After adjusting for inflation, “real” consumption was down 0.1% in December, but is up 1.4% from a year ago.
 
Implications:  Despite surveys showing strong consumer spending in December; government data show a temporary lull, but this should not last. Purchasing power is up, even if you exclude government transfer payments. Excluding transfer payments, “real” (inflation–adjusted) personal income was up 0.4% in December and up 2.4% from a year ago. Real spending remains near record highs and will continue to move higher.    Private-sector wages and salaries are up 4.6% from a year ago, which is faster than inflation. There were additional benefits paid to some social security beneficiaries in December which was due to retroactive payments to recent retirees based on a recalculation of the earnings base.  In addition to the gain in wages and salaries, consumer spending is being supported by the large reduction in households’ financial obligations the past few years.  Recurring payments like mortgages, rent, car loans/leases, as well as other debt service, are now the smallest share of after-tax income since 1993. Also, autos are still selling below the pace of scrappage and growth in the driving-age population. This should lead to continued demand in the auto sector in the months ahead. On the inflation front, overall consumption prices are up 2.4% in the past year, above the Fed’s supposed target of 2%.  “Core” prices are up 1.8% from a year ago, the most since 2008.  But, given the loose stance of monetary policy, we expect inflation to accelerate in the year ahead, both overall and for the core.

JDN:

The material you quote seems simple and obvious to me, yet your point is unclear.  What is it?

"Trim the deficit seems to be our mantra; why not start with the bloated military?"

1) As a % of GDP, military spending is rather low right now when measured against long term averages.  Furthermore even were we to wipe out the military completely, we would be still be in serious debt crisis mode.

2) The tremendous inefficiencies of the procurement process are in not insignificant part due to Congressional pork barreling as well as the inherent nature of the military way of doing things-- but it is more than a little worth noting that there have been A LOT OF PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN SERIOUSLY OVERWORKED SINCE 2001 AND WHO HAVE PERFORMED HEROICALLY.

3)  My political prediction should the military cuts envisioned by the Paulites and the Progressives be made, the support for  entitlements cuts will be nowhere to be found.

It might be different if we had been offered a coherent policy , , ,

President Obama keeps pushing the (Warren) Buffett rule that nobody making more than $1 million a year should pay less than 30% in taxes. He'd do better by the economy if he adopted a Solyndra Rule, in which no company touting unproven and expensive technology should receive millions in taxpayer subsidies.

After the demise of Solyndra (with its $535 million loan guarantee) and Beacon Power ($43 million loan guarantee), last week saw the bankruptcy of Indiana-based lithium-ion battery maker Ener1. In 2009 an Ener1 subsidiary was awarded a grant worth up to $118 billion from the Energy Department, with Vice President Joe Biden touring and touting its factory a year ago.

Like Solyndra, Ener1 was a foolhardy bet for taxpayer cash. Founded in 2002, Ener1 had not turned a profit by the time of its grant and has proceeded to hemorrhage the $55 million of the DOE money it has received to date. Its losses in fiscal 2010 were $165 million.

The company has had to compete in a market with a glut of battery makers, all of which are selling into a lackluster electric-car market. This battery glut was created in substantial part by the Obama Administration, which handed out money to no fewer than 48 different battery technology and electric vehicle projects in 2009.

In the small favors department, defenders of the White House's green corporate welfare are noting that, unlike Solyndra, Ener1 is not closing its doors while in bankruptcy. Then again, Ener1 has created fewer than 400 of the 1,700 jobs it had promised by this year, and a successful restructuring is by no means assured.

Mr. Obama is undeterred. In last week's speech, he defended his taxpayer "investments" in private commercial companies, noting that "some technologies don't pan out, some companies fail." He would know. Though perhaps if Mr. Obama weren't throwing hundreds of millions down the green sinkhole, he wouldn't have to target the nation's real job creators for higher taxes to foot his losses.

By ARYEH SPERO
Who would have expected that in a Republican primary campaign the single biggest complaint among candidates would be that the front-runner has taken capitalism too far? As if his success and achievement were evidence of something unethical and immoral? President Obama and other redistributionists must be rejoicing that their assumptions about rugged capitalism and the 1% have been given such legitimacy.

More than any other nation, the United States was founded on broad themes of morality rooted in a specific religious perspective. We call this the Judeo-Christian ethos, and within it resides a ringing endorsement of capitalism as a moral endeavor.

Regarding mankind, no theme is more salient in the Bible than the morality of personal responsibility, for it is through this that man cultivates the inner development leading to his own growth, good citizenship and happiness. The entitlement/welfare state is a paradigm that undermines that noble goal.

The Bible's proclamation that "Six days shall ye work" is its recognition that on a day-to-day basis work is the engine that brings about man's inner state of personal responsibility. Work develops the qualities of accountability and urgency, including the need for comity with others as a means for the accomplishment of tasks. With work, he becomes imbued with the knowledge that he is to be productive and that his well-being is not an entitlement. And work keeps him away from the idleness that Proverbs warns leads inevitably to actions and attitudes injurious to himself and those around him.

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 .Yet capitalism is not content with people only being laborers and holders of jobs, indistinguishable members of the masses punching in and out of mammoth factories or functioning as service employees in government agencies. Nor is the Bible. Unlike socialism, mired as it is in the static reproduction of things already invented, capitalism is dynamic and energetic. It cheerfully fosters and encourages creativity, unspoken possibilities, and dreams of the individual. Because the Hebrew Bible sees us not simply as "workers" and members of the masses but, rather, as individuals, it heralds that characteristic which endows us with individuality: our creativity.

At the opening bell, Genesis announces: "Man is created in the image of God"—in other words, like Him, with individuality and creative intelligence. Unlike animals, the human being is not only a hunter and gatherer but a creative dreamer with the potential of unlocking all the hidden treasures implanted by God in our universe. The mechanism of capitalism, as manifest through investment and reasoned speculation, helps facilitate our partnership with God by bringing to the surface that which the Almighty embedded in nature for our eventual extraction and activation.

Capitalism makes possible entrepreneurship, which is the realization of an idea birthed in human creativity. Whereas statism demands that citizens think small and bow to a top-down conformity, capitalism, as has been practiced in the U.S., maximizes human potential. It provides a home for aspiration, referred to in the Bible as "the spirit of life."

The Bible speaks positively of payment and profit: "For why else should a man so labor but to receive reward?" Thus do laborers get paid wages for their hours of work and investors receive profit for their investment and risk.

The Bible is not a business-school manual. While it is comfortable with wealth creation and the need for speculation in economic markets, it has nothing to say about financial instruments and models such as private equity, hedge funds or other forms of monetary capitalization. What it does demand is honesty, fair weights and measures, respect for a borrower's collateral, timely payments of wages, resisting usury, and empathy for those injured by life's misfortunes and charity.

It also demands transparency and honesty regarding one's intentions. The command, "Thou shalt not place a stumbling block in front of the blind man" also means that you should not act deceitfully or obscure the truth from those whose choice depends upon the information you give them. There's nothing to indicate that Mitt Romney breached this biblical code of ethics, and his wealth and success should not be seen as automatic causes for suspicion.

No country has achieved such broad-based prosperity as has America, or invented as many useful things, or seen as many people achieve personal promise. This is not an accident. It is the direct result of centuries lived by the free-market ethos embodied in the Judeo-Christian outlook.

Furthermore, only a prosperous nation can protect itself from outside threats, for without prosperity the funds to support a robust military are unavailable. Having radically enlarged the welfare state and hoping to further expand it, President Obama is attempting to justify his cuts to our military by asserting that defense needs must give way to domestic programs.

Both history and the Bible show the way that leads. Countries that were once economic powerhouses atrophied and declined, like England after World War II, once they began adopting socialism. Even King Solomon's thriving kingdom crashed once his son decided to impose onerous taxes.

At the end of Genesis, we hear how after years of famine the people in Egypt gave all their property to the government in return for the promise of food. The architect of this plan was Joseph, son of Jacob, who had risen to become the pharaoh's top official, thus: "Joseph exchanged all the land of Egypt for pharaoh and the land became pharaoh's." The result was that Egyptians became indentured to the ruler and state, and Joseph's descendants ended up enslaved to the state.


Many on the religious left criticize capitalism because all do not end up monetarily equal—or, as Churchill quipped, "all equally miserable." But the Bible's prescription of equality means equality under the law, as in Deuteronomy's saying that "Judges and officers . . . shall judge the people with a just judgment: Do not . . . favor one over the other." Nowhere does the Bible refer to a utopian equality that is contrary to human nature and has never been achieved.

The motive of capitalism's detractors is a quest for their own power and an envy of those who have more money. But envy is a cardinal sin and something that ought not to be.

God begins the Ten Commandments with "I am the Lord your God" and concludes with "Thou shalt not envy your neighbor, not for his wife, nor his house, nor for any of his holdings." Envy is corrosive to the individual and to those societies that embrace it. Nations that throw over capitalism for socialism have made an immoral choice.

Rabbi Spero has led congregations in Ohio and New York and is president of Caucus for America.

Why I support Newt Gingrich for president
  January 29th, 2012 |   Author: Herman Cain
 
Herman Cain
In a sea of negativity and distractions in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, I decided to throw my support behind former Speaker Newt Gingrich because I can now see much clearer distinctions between President Obama and Newt than I do between Governor Mitt Romney and the president.
These distinctions are between Obama’s hodgepodge of foggy small ideas, which he talked about in his State of the Union address, and Speaker Gingrich’s clear and bold solutions for solving the crises we face as a nation. And yes, my bold 9-9-9 tax reform plan is a serious consideration for Speaker Gingrich, which is why I accepted his invitation to co-chair his Economic Growth and Tax Reform Advisory Council.
The polls do not agree with my assessment of Speaker Gingrich, and it appears that the so-called political establishment does not agree. But remember, I’m Mr. Unconventional, and the ability of the Republican nominee to highlight distinctions clearly in the general election campaign will be critical to achieving the ultimate mission of defeating President Obama.
My decision was not based on the political pundits’ attempted labeling of the candidates as conservative, most conservative,moderate, liberal Republican, not a true conservative, not a real conservative or any other of the concocted labels by which they try to pigeonhole candidates.
My decision to support Speaker Gingrich was also not influenced by all of the attacks and dirt dug up from Newt’s personal and political past, which all of the campaigns are guilty of doing – including Newt’s. As a reminder, Newt specifically tried to stay out of the negative attack mode but was forced into it after being bombarded with attacks in Iowa, and some early attacks in South Carolina, where he not only survived but won the primary.
The bombardment of attacks on Newt is being launched again in Florida. I believe he will survive as the clarity of his solutions rises above the rhetoric.
And now, some of the former Members of Congress who served with Newt when he was Speaker of the House are trashing Newt, even though many former members thought highly of his leadership as Speaker. Their trash and attempts to say Newt was not a “Reagan conservative” (here we go again with the labels) are certainly adding credence to the emerging perception that the so-called Republican establishment is pushing hard for Mitt Romney to be the nominee.
That’s because the establishment does not want bold changes in Washington, D.C.
The bottom line is that the voters will decide. That’s why the voters got my first endorsement as announced previously, because the people have to remain inspired or the establishment wins. Most of us just want the people to win, and win with a people’s president in November.
Here are nine of Speaker Gingrich’s positives:
•   He successfully led the passage of nine out of ten provisions in the Contract with America when he was Speaker of the House.
•   He was a key player in passing welfare reform in the 1990s, and got President Bill Clinton to sign the legislation.
•   He left Congress and spent years studying and developing bold ideas and solutions to our problems, many of which he is using as a candidate. This hiatus as an elected official gave him time for his head to clear and identify how to fix a broken Washington, D.C.
•   He will ruffle feathers in Washington in order to change Washington.
•   He will be bold in boosting economic growth because he understands that less government is the key, not more government as Obama believes.
•   He believes in removing regulatory barriers so this country can become energy-independent by maximizing all of our natural resources.
•   He is an outstanding debater and his language connects with people.
•   He fearlessly body-slammed the media in a recent debate, which showed strong conviction, character and leadership qualities.
•   His motivation to be president is the same as our motivation for bold solutions in Washington, D.C. It’s not about us. It’s about the grandchildren.
Thomas Jefferson said, “When people have the right information, then they will make the right decisions.” It is way past time for the media and campaigns to focus on solutions so people can get the right information.
We must make the right decision in November 2012.

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The career path of former U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke can be charted through an ascending string of jobs from Arizona's Supreme Court to the U.S. Senate, White House, Department of Homeland Security and Justice Department.
It is a resume that spans more than two decades in three branches of government.


Then, suddenly, it nose-dives on Aug. 30, 2011, when Burke resigned as U.S. attorney amid a scandal over a gun-smuggling case known as Operation Fast and Furious.


Since that day, the gregarious public servant has gone silent, and nearly invisible, except that his name appears prominently in Justice Department documents, congressional hearings and news reports.


Burke's political downfall may have been shocking, but an Arizona Republic analysis of his career suggests that the cause -- firearm politics -- has been a pet theme through most of his 23 years in government.
The end came after federal records and testimony revealed that Burke last year pressed colleagues and superiors to deny that the Justice Department knowingly allowed guns to be smuggled into Mexico under his watch, and that two of those weapons wound up at the murder scene of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
In e-mail exchanges with DOJ officials, Burke incorrectly described allegations about Fast and Furious by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, as "categorically false." He also reviled congressional investigators as "stooges" for gun-rights zealots.


Burke finally quit his post after testifying in secret to congressional investigators about the case.
He was not the only federal official to suffer fallout. At the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, national Director Kenneth Melson was reassigned and Arizona's top agent, William Newell, was transferred. On Capitol Hill, Grassley called for the removal of Lanny Breuer, second in command of the Justice Department, and many in Congress have said Attorney General Eric Holder should be fired.


But, of all the officials caught up in America's so-called "gun-walking" scandal, Dennis Kiernan Burke is the only one to lose his job.
A resignation letter to President Barack Obama said simply, "It is the right time to move on to pursue other aspects of my career and my life."
The question: Has he hit bottom yet, and can he rise again?
'A stand-up guy'

Since leaving his skyscraper office in downtown Phoenix, Burke has turned down all interview requests, leaving his lawyers to describe him as a "stand-up guy" who didn't intentionally mislead Congress or the public.
An inspector general probe is still under way, as well as congressional investigations.


Friends say Burke, who had been touted as a possible candidate for governor or Congress, is lying low, volunteering full time with a rape-crisis network and playing golf. All of them speak of him with glowing adjectives: articulate, positive, hardworking, decent, funny, loyal.


"He doesn't have enemies," said Robbie Aiken, a longtime friend and vice president for federal affairs with Pinnacle West Capital Corp. "All the things he's done, yet I've never really heard anybody say anything negative about him."
But there are critics, especially among staunch Second Amendment advocates, who paint Burke as a liberal apparatchik who was willing to let criminals move weapons to Mexican cartels if it would help justify new firearms restrictions.
"It's no coincidence that Dennis Burke, a longtime anti-gun policy person, was made U.S. Attorney in mid-2009 ... the same month (sic) that Fast and Furious begins," said Mike Vanderboegh, a gun-rights blogger. "They picked precisely the right guy to run a clandestine program." (The operation began a month after Burke's appointment was confirmed.)


Curiously, the supporters and detractors agree on one point: They say Burke became a scapegoat to protect higher officials in the Justice Department or White House. Dave Workman, a gun-rights blogger, described Burke as "the chief sacrificial lamb."
Sen. Grassley, in an October statement, said: "Mr. Burke is to be commended, to some extent, for being the only person to resign and take responsibility for the failed operation. Of course, I do not believe he should feel obligated to be the only fall guy."


Phoenix attorney Andy Gordon, a close friend for nearly two decades, said Burke may be loyal to a fault, protecting higher-ups in the Justice Department. "DOJ threw him under the bus. That's my view," Gordon said.
Another friend, attorney Tim Nelson, said: "I don't know the workings of the Obama administration, whether they were looking for a fall guy or what. But it certainly looks that way."


Whether those evaluations are valid or not, associates agree Burke was devastated to lose a dream job and see his reputation tainted by scandal.
Kevin Burke, an older brother who serves as a county judge in Minnesota, said Dennis is focused on defending himself as investigations continue.
"He's certainly bummed," Judge Burke said. "You want people to understand what you did and why you did it." Asked if Dennis privately admits to making mistakes, Kevin answered, "I can categorically deny that. The idea that he is going around saying, 'Boy, I really screwed up'? He's never told me that."


Strong work ethic and ambition
Since Dennis Burke got his law degree at the University of Arizona in 1988, he has flourished in high-profile government jobs, handling politicians, journalists, lobbyists and lawyers with aplomb.
Born in 1962 in Chicago, the last of five children in an Irish-Catholic home, Burke once credited his immigrant grandfather with instilling a work ethic to match ambitions. When Dennis was just a boy, the family moved to Phoenix, where he attended Catholic schools. (As an adult, he once said his life motto was "Love your neighbor as you do yourself" because "several nuns beat that into my head in grade school.")


After graduation from Brophy College Preparatory, Burke earned a bachelor's degree at Georgetown University and got an early taste of national politics by serving as an intern for U.S. Rep. Martin Sabo, D-Minn.
"He was kind of bitten by the Hill bug," said Kevin Burke, who is president of the American Judges Association.
Former Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D
-Ariz., who hired Burke from law school as a congressional intern, said the student stood out for legal smarts and people skills. "Just really bright," DeConcini said, "and he was good with Republicans."
Fresh out of law school, Burke won a coveted position as clerk with the Arizona Supreme Court under Justice James Moeller.


Then, in 1989, he was hired as a low-level staff lawyer at the U.S. Senate. Within a year -- at age 27 -- Burke was assigned to the Judiciary Committee, eventually playing a behind-the-scenes role in confirmation proceedings for three Supreme Court justices.


And he began working on gun control. DeConcini said Burke helped draft the Anti-Drug Assault Weapons Limitation Act of 1989. A five-year battle ensued, ending with President Bill Clinton signing the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which made it a federal offense to possess certain semiautomatic rifles manufactured after the law's passage.


DeConcini said Burke fostered the measure in concert with a key figure in the White House, policy analyst Rahm Emanuel, who years later would become chief of staff for President Obama. Emanuel now is mayor of Chicago.
"Dennis was the one who worked with everyone on the Judiciary Committee to line up these members and votes," DeConcini said. "Dennis had all these pictures of these guns -- the Streetsweepers and the AK-47s. And it passed by one vote. A lot of it was not my eloquence on the bill, it was stuff that Dennis had done."


The law was adopted shortly before Burke left his Senate job for a position in the Clinton White House as a senior policy analyst for law enforcement and drug issues, again working with Emanuel.
According to preserved e-mails, Burke continued handling firearm issues, discussing whether executive orders could be used to extend the Brady Handgun Violence Protection Act requirement for background checks.
In 1997, Burke became a federal prosecutor under U.S. Attorney Janet Napolitano, getting firsthand experience with Mexican syndicates that were smuggling narcotics and firearms. In an interview that year with the Arizona Business Gazette, he identified earlier gun-regulation efforts as the most fulfilling professional assignment he'd undertaken.


Over the next decade, he served as a chief deputy to Napolitano as she became Arizona attorney general, governor and then director of Homeland Security, where he again dealt with gun-running into Mexico.
Fast and Furious launched

On July 10, 2009, President Obama named Burke as his nominee for U.S. attorney for Arizona. He was confirmed by unanimous consent in the Senate on Sept. 15 of that year.


From the beginning, there were huge controversies: Senate Bill 1070, Arizona's anti-immigration law, was under challenge in court. The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office was being investigated for alleged civil-rights violations. Border security had become a political firefight, with Arizona as a funnel point for smuggling amid growing fear that Mexican violence would spill onto U.S. soil.
Authorities in both nations were blaming liberal U.S. gun laws for arming the cartels. The assault-weapons law had expired in 2004. Restoration of the statute had been on Obama's platform, and Burke was among the public adherents.
During a news conference in 2010, Burke complained that scores of guns from Arizona were being recovered in Mexico. "We have a huge problem here. We have now become the gun locker of the Mexican drug cartels." What Burke did not mention was that his prosecutors had allegedly instructed ATF agents to let some of those weapons "walk" across the border.


In fact, just one month after Burke's appointment as U.S. attorney was confirmed by the Senate, Operation Fast and Furious was secretly launched in Arizona.
According to congressional testimony and DOJ records, the idea was to follow the firearms south so that drug lords who received them could be identified and prosecuted. Over a two-year period, smugglers moved as many as 1,400 weapons across the border. The problem: Those AK-47s and .50-caliber rifles were being used for mayhem in Mexico, and U.S. investigators had not devised a successful way to track them.
Agent Terry's death

Burke's supporters question whether he understood that the ATF strategy knowingly let guns into Mexico, but critics say e-mails and other Justice Department records indicate he knew exactly what was going on.
For example, an ATF memo in January 2010 says Burke was briefed in detail on Fast and Furious and expressed "full agreement" with a strategy allowing "the transfer of firearms to continue to take place ... in order to further the investigation and allow for the identification of additional co-conspirators."
In an April 2010 e-mail to a colleague, Burke predicted that the operation would have a huge public impact: "It's going to bring a lot of attention to straw purchasers of assault weapons," he wrote. "Some of these weapons bought by these clowns in Arizona have been directly traced to murders of elected officials in Mexico by the cartels, so Katie-bar-the-door when we unveil this baby."
However, available Justice Department documents do not include any record where Burke explicitly acknowledged an awareness of the gun-walking strategy, and it is unclear whether he believed a furor would result because of the investigative tactic, or because so many U.S. firearms were responsible for Mexico's cartel bloodshed.


At least some ATF agents bristled at the ATF operation, warning of potentially fatal consequences. Those predictions proved true on Dec. 14, 2010, when Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in a midnight shootout with bandits near Nogales. Within hours, Burke was notified that two guns found at the scene were linked to Fast and Furious.


A man, who bought them 11 months earlier at a Glendale firearms store, was promptly arrested on suspicion of illegal-weapons purchases, along with other gun-buy suspects. Yet, at a news conference announcing the busts, federal officials failed to reveal the link with Terry's death and denied that guns had been allowed to "walk" as part of the case.


ATF agents, horrified at what happened, became whistle-blowers, leaking information to Congress. Last January, Sen. Grassley sent letters to ATF, alleging that the bureau had knowingly allowed guns into the hands of Mexican criminals and that two of those weapons were tied to Terry's murder. Burke reacted by sending e-mails to DOJ colleagues denouncing the senator's assertions as "categorical falsehoods."


In early messages to DOJ superiors, he incorrectly claimed weapons found at the murder scene were purchased before Fast and Furious started. Later, he clarified that although Fast and Furious was under way, the buyer was not being surveilled at the time he bought them.
Bitter denunciations

On Feb. 1,The Republic published the first mainstream news story on the gun-running scandal and about a congressional inquiry into Fast and Furious.
Burke e-mailed a top Justice Department official, complaining about the bad publicity and about Grassley's letter. "They (ATF) got smoked today in the Arizona Republic. Just smoked," he wrote. "They punted going on the record to deny completely fabricated assertions that cut at the heart of their agency and the mission of law enforcement."


ATF and Justice officials spent three days arguing over language for a rebuttal to Grassley's letter. Burke, who wanted a hard-line denial, complained bitterly to colleagues: "What is so offensive about this whole project is that Grassley's staff, acting as willing stooges for the Gun Lobby, have attempted to distract from the incredible success in dismantling SWB (Southwest Border) gun trafficking operations," he wrote. "Not uttering one word of rightful praise or thanks to ATF -- but, instead, lobbing this reckless, despicable accusation that ATF is complicit in the murder of a federal law enforcement officer."
In another missive, Burke wrote, "I am so personally outraged by Senator Grassley's falsehoods. It is one of the lowest acts I have ever seen in politics."
DOJ eventually issued a letter denouncing Grassley's allegations about Fast and Furious as "false."


Holder has since acknowledged that the senator's assertions were true, and that Fast and Furious was a flawed operation. Spurred by those admissions, congressional investigators redoubled their efforts, digging up more records and questioning witnesses under oath. This past summer, Burke was called before congressional investigators for two closed-door interviews.
According to subsequently released excerpts, Burke acknowledged mistakes and accepted blame. "It should not have been done the way it was done," he said, "and I want to take responsibility for that. And I'm not falling on my sword or trying to cover for anyone else."
Motives debated

Attorneys Lee Stein and Chuck Rosenberg, who represent Burke, said their client did not intentionally provide false information to colleagues and superiors in the Justice Department.
"Dennis has cooperated with congressional investigators and the (Justice) Department's inquiry into this matter," Stein said. "He takes his public service seriously."


Critics say the constellation of facts points to Burke as a ramrod behind Fast and Furious, working to provide political powder for more firearm regulations.
In a Dec. 18 post, Second Amendment blogger John Richardson wrote: "Looking at Burke's background and his attitude towards gun rights and those who support them, I see this as even further confirmation that the intent of Operation Fast and Furious from the very beginning was to build support for another so-called assault-weapons ban. I just don't think it was coincidental that Operation Fast and Furious was centered in Arizona."


DeConcini, who has sought to help Burke behind the scenes with members of Congress, said such inferences are "totally unfair," and he insisted that Burke did not learn of the gun-walking strategy until after Brian Terry's death.
Kevin Burke said it is absurd to suggest that his brother came up with some "Machiavellian plan" to justify gun-control measures. He said Dennis was dedicated to stopping firearm deaths -- not adding to them -- and he would never have risked lives or his career on such a gambit.


David Steele, a political consultant and friend, agreed: "The Dennis Burke I know doesn't engage in that kind of political triangulation," he said. "The whole notion that he did this as a conspiracy for gun control is laughable."
Epilogue

Investigations by Congress and the inspector general are ongoing.
Guns from Fast and Furious continue to surface at crimes scenes in Mexico and the United States.
The case against those accused of killing Brian Terry is sealed in federal court.
And Dennis Burke remains under a cloud.
His attorney Stein said the experience has been "sobering," but Burke keeps busy volunteering with a rape-crisis network. "He's really been using this time to reconnect with family and friends, and to try to get through all this and decide what he'll do with the rest of his life," Stein said.
Other friends say he understands how scandals work in the nation's capital. "It's a tough town," said Aiken, who worked in the Reagan administration. "Dennis knows that. He's a tough guy. And I suspect he'll come out of this A-OK. (But) I don't think he was treated altogether fairly."


by Dennis Wagner - Jan. 28, 2012 10:21 PM


https://www.azcentral.com/arizonarep...al-career.html

When the last American troops came home from Iraq in December, thousands of Iraqis who had worked with the Americans were left behind. Many have already been targeted by militants, and some had taken refuge on American military bases. But once the bases were closed — or handed over to the Iraqi government — those Iraqis were forced into hiding. Unless Washington lives up to its moral obligation, many more will suffer or be killed.

The Special Immigrant Visa program was enacted by Congress in 2007 for Iraqis who helped the military, other parts of the American government and military contractors. It authorized 5,000 special visas annually — but only 3,317 were granted through 2011. Iraqis who aided American non-governmental organizations and media outlets can apply under the refugee program and are also having a hard time. But the special visa program has the worst delays.

Because of security vetting, processing has always been slow. The programs came to a near halt last year when two Iraqis living in Kentucky were charged with providing arms and money to Al Qaeda. The Obama administration then imposed additional security checks on all applicants. Approval in the Special Immigrant Visa program is now taking at least a year.

The American government never kept track of how many Iraqis it employed, so no one knows how many thousands of Iraqis are potentially eligible for admission. It is unclear exactly how many thousands of those Iraqis have visa applications pending. The administration refused to disclose a number last week.

Last July, the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project at the Urban Justice Center, a nonprofit, put the estimate at 62,000 Iraqis, including 29,000 who worked for the Americans, plus their family members. The group now says it has been told that 19,000 cases were dropped from the process, perhaps because people went into hiding, or they were just lost track of. The Philadelphia Inquirer recently used a figure of 15,000 Special Immigrant Visa applicants.

The United States has a responsibility to rigorously screen visa applicants and ensure they pose no threat to this country. The process needs to be transparent and accountable — and it needs to work expeditiously.

Today, Iraq is more stable than it was at the height of the violence, but with American troops gone, sectarianism and bloodshed are on the rise. The State Department is concerned enough about safety trends that this month it again formally warned Americans against all but essential travel to Iraq. There should be as much concern for the Iraqis who risked their lives to work with Americans — and are still living there and still at risk.

This seems to me to raise the right questions:

EVERY day, those of us who live in the digital world give little bits of ourselves away. On Facebook and LinkedIn. To servers that store our e-mail, Google searches, online banking and shopping records. Does the fact that so many of us live our lives online mean we have given the government wide-open access to all that information?

The Supreme Court’s decision last week in United States v. Jones presents the disturbing possibility that the answer is yes. In Jones, the court held that long-term GPS surveillance of a suspect’s car violated the Fourth Amendment. The justices’ 9-to-0 decision to protect constitutional liberty from invasive police use of technology was celebrated across the ideological spectrum.

Perhaps too quickly. Jones, along with other recent decisions, may turn the Fourth Amendment into a ticking time bomb, set to self-destruct — and soon — in the face of rapidly emerging technology.

Dog sniffs. Heat sensors. Helicopter flyovers. Are these “searches” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment? The court has struggled with these questions over the years.

Writing for the court in Jones, Justice Antonin Scalia looked to the 18th century for guidance. In his view, attaching the GPS was the sort of physical invasion of property the framers had in mind when they wrote the Bill of Rights.

Though Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. agreed that GPS tracking was a search, he ridiculed Justice Scalia for focusing on “conduct that might have provided grounds in 1791 for a suit for trespass to chattels.” For Justice Alito, the risk the GPS posed was loss of privacy, not property. Instead the question was whether long-term GPS tracking violated today’s “reasonable expectations of privacy,” not those of another era. As a matter of existing doctrine, he asked the right question, but when applied to the government, the standard he used could turn our lives into the proverbial open book, and soon.

Focusing on public expectations of privacy means that our rights change when technology does. As Justice Alito blithely said: “New technology may provide increased convenience or security at the expense of privacy, and many people may find the tradeoff worthwhile.”

But aren’t constitutional rights intended to protect our liberty even when the public accepts “increased convenience or security at the expense of privacy”? Fundamental rights remain fundamental in the face of time and new inventions.

Paradoxically, Justice Scalia’s approach will better protect privacy rights over the long term. (He didn’t deny the importance of today’s expectations; he simply stressed that at the very least, the Fourth Amendment protects rights we had when the framers drafted the Constitution.) Still, his approach is problematic. There isn’t always an available 18th-century analog for current government conduct, like GPS tracking. Justice Alito facetiously suggested that the only 18th-century analog would have been a constable hiding in the back of someone’s carriage. (When Justice Scalia agreed, Justice Alito wryly remarked that “this would have required either a gigantic coach, a very tiny constable, or both.”) And when 18th-century analogs run out, the court is left with its reasonable expectation test.

In a related case, Kyllo v. United States, even Justice Scalia held that police use of a thermal imager to detect marijuana “grow lamps” within a home was a search — but only so long as such technology was “not in general public use.” There’s that time bomb: expanding use of technology narrows rights.

Among the justices in the Jones case, only Sonia Sotomayor insisted that fundamental rights not be hostage to technological change. She called into question the court’s longstanding reliance on expectations of privacy, which she deemed “ill-suited to the digital age.” She suggested reconsidering the rule that the police can, without a warrant, get the vast amounts of information about ourselves that we give to third parties. To her, sharing our secrets — including e-mail and banking histories — with someone else does not necessarily mean the government gets access, too. It is too bad her separate opinion mustered no other votes.

Barry Friedman is a professor at the New York University School of Law and the author of “The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution.”

May I suggest that you do so in a way that he will want to agree with us more instead of less? 

When Bain Capital sought to raise money in 1989 for a fast-growing office-supply company named Staples, Mitt Romney, Bain’s founder, called upon a trusted business partner: Goldman Sachs, whose bankers led the company’s initial public offering.

When Mr. Romney became governor of Massachusetts, his blind trust gave Goldman much of his wealth to manage, a fortune now estimated to be as much as $250 million.

And as Mr. Romney mounts his second bid for the presidency, Goldman is coming through again: Its employees have contributed at least $367,000 to his campaign, making the firm Mr. Romney’s largest single source of campaign money through the end of September.

No other company is so closely intertwined with Mr. Romney’s public and private lives except Bain itself. And in recent days, Mr. Romney’s ties to Goldman Sachs have lashed another lightning rod to a campaign already fending off withering attacks on his career as a buyout specialist, thrusting the privileges of the Wall Street elite to the forefront of the Republican nominating battle.

Newt Gingrich, whose allies have spent millions of dollars on advertisements painting Mr. Romney as a heartless “vulture capitalist,” seized on Mr. Romney’s Goldman ties at Thursday’s Republican debate in Florida, suggesting that he had profited through Goldman on banks that had foreclosed on Floridians. And as the fight over regulation of financial firms spills onto the campaign trail, Mr. Romney’s support for the industry — he has called for repeal of the Dodd-Frank legislation tightening oversight of Wall Street — may draw more fire.

Mr. Romney’s positions and pedigree have helped draw to his side major donors in the financial world. The securities and investment industry has given more money to Mr. Romney than any other industry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and some of its leading figures have donated millions of dollars to Restore Our Future, the “super PAC” bolstering Mr. Romney’s campaign. Goldman employees are also the biggest source of donations to Free & Strong America PAC, a group Mr. Romney founded but no longer controls.

But Mr. Romney’s personal finances are particularly entwined with Goldman.

His federal financial disclosure statements show Mr. Romney and his wife, their blind trusts and their family foundation to be prodigious consumers of the bank’s services. In 2011, Mr. Romney’s blind trust and the couple’s retirement accounts held as much as $36.7 million in at least two dozen Goldman investment vehicles, earning as much as $3 million a year in income. Mrs. Romney’s trust had at least $10.2 million in Goldman funds — possibly much more — earning as much as $6.2 million.

Tax returns released by the campaign this week also highlighted some of the privileges Mr. Romney enjoyed as a friend of Goldman: In May 1999, a few months after he left Bain to run the Salt Lake City Olympics, Goldman allowed Mr. Romney to buy at least 7,000 Goldman shares during the firm’s lucrative initial public offering — a generous allotment even among Goldman clients, according to people with knowledge of the deal. When Mr. Romney’s trusts sold the shares in December 2010, a few months before he formed his presidential exploratory committee for the 2012 race, they returned a profit of $750,000.

A spokeswoman for Goldman declined to comment, as did a spokeswoman for Mr. Romney.

Investing with Goldman was not without risks: Like other Goldman clients, the Romneys invested money in a family of funds known as Whitehall, which placed highly leveraged bets on office buildings, casinos and hotels. Some Whitehall deals collapsed during the financial crisis, saddling Mr. Romney and its other investors with big losses.

And some of the attacks on Mr. Romney have overreached. While Mr. Gingrich charged on Thursday that his rival did business with a firm that “was explicitly foreclosing on Floridians,” that is not accurate: The family’s holdings include a Goldman fund that, like other investment funds, has invested partly in mortgage-backed securities. Goldman sold its mortgage servicing arm, Litton Loan Servicing, last year.

But other elements of Mr. Romney’s personal and business ties to Goldman may prove more controversial. Bain’s mid-1990s acquisition of Dade Behring, a medical device maker with factories in Florida, has become a totem of the economic upheaval that private equity can inflict. Goldman invested in the acquisition, which brought the bank $120 million and Bain $242 million — but led to the layoffs of hundreds of workers in Miami. Democrats hammered Mr. Romney over the deal this week.

When Mr. Romney was building Bain into one of the world’s premier private equity firms, Goldman’s bankers clamored for Bain business, and won assignments advising or financing an array of Bain deals, including Bain’s 1997 $800 million buyout of Sealy, the nation’s largest mattress company, which it later sold.

As Mr. Romney amassed his fortune, Goldman also offered up the services of an elite Boston-based team in the bank’s private wealth management unit. The relationship gave him access to Goldman’s exclusive investment funds, including private equity vehicles known as Goldman Sachs Capital Partners.

Mr. Romney is far from Goldman’s largest client — some investors have billions of dollars at the firm — but his political connections and founding role at Bain have elevated his importance there. His Goldman investments are handled by Jim Donovan, who has built one of the largest-producing businesses in Goldman’s private wealth management unit, managing several billion dollars for the firm’s individual clients.

Goldman gave Mr. Romney’s trusts access to the bank’s own exclusive investment funds and helped him execute an aggressive and complex tax-deferral strategy known as an “exchange fund” in 2002. (Since 2003, most of Mr. Romney’s money has been held in blind trusts, meaning that he no longer makes many of his own investment decisions.) According to tax returns released this week, the family’s three principal trusts earned more than $9 million from various Goldman Sachs investment vehicles in 2010.

Floyd Norris, Michael Barbaro and Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.

Lets be more precise here:

a) To be precise, as has already been posted here (but perhaps you missed it?), the first wife and NG already had been formally separated for several years and the effort at reconciliation wasn't working and SHE wanted to divorce him.  None of us know what was going on between them-- which is kind of how it belongs.

b) Yes NG had hubris in the front/back of the plane incident, but the shutdown of the govt. was about a mighty effort to cut govt spending, an effort from which the Reps flinched. 

c) I could be wrong, but I remember the ethics charges as being relatively minor and in part due to NG having stepped on toes, many of which needed stepping.  The charges were two years before his resignation.  His resignation came because of Rep losses in the elections which had just taken place.  This was recently exlained here in this thread in the Krauthammer piece.  Perhaps you missed it?

Newt has taken quite a razzing on his lunar colony idea, and Romney hit him with a devastating zinger in the debate last night about it, but I say Newt tonight speak at quiet uninterrupted length with Greta Van Sustern (whom I normally don't watch, but it was there when I turned on the TV to see if the new Spartacus was recording, but I digress , , ,)  It was actually QUITE thoughtful.  I doubt I can do it justice but before I go upstairs I would toss out some thoughts for consideration.

1) The Chinese ARE going.

2) The US space program, thanks to His Glibness, is in utter disarray.  We even have to rent rides with the Russians to go to outer space to fix what we have up there now;

3) Much of our military dominance requires dominance of space and the Chinese are working to turn that into our Achilles' heel;

4) Anyone up to establishing a colony on the moon would be able to develop the ability to launch rocks, a.k.a. meteors, at targets on earth with the consequences of nuclear bombs without the radiation.  (for the non-scientific gist of the idea, see Robert Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress")

Think on this , , ,

Nor did we hear it much last night from Newt, who would have done much better if had focused on Baraq's State of the Soviet Union speech.  Instead he tried playing gotcha games with Mitt and lost badly.

http://www.creators.com/opinion/jackie-gingrich-cushman/setting-the-record-straight.html

I thought Santorum was far stronger last night than the chattering class seems to be giving him credit for.  His answer to the Latin America question was outstanding, both on content and in terms of the politics of the state of FL.  The Cuban vote there will recognize a depth of familiarity with the issues that cannot be faked.  His pithy rejoinder to Ron Paul's attempted criticism was withering. 

He took the lead in steering the moderator and Newt-Mitt away from the catfight the two of them were having (with Romney spanking Newt at a couple of moments-- how utterly feeble of Newt to try the "you owned stock in FMs" only to be humilated by the "Yeah, you dumb fk, it was in a blind trust" retort.)   Newt had the wit to jump on board, and slightly pick up lost ground when Mitt kept it going a bit longer, but really the leader in this was Santorum.

I thought Santorum really soared at several moments last night.  I still think him out of the running (and a big loser against Baraq), but then, as is recorded here, I thought is candidacy an irrelevancy many months ago even though I liked him, and he has proven far more formidable than I would have given him credit for.

For the latest example of regulatory overreach, look no further than the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which is pushing through a rule to support racial loan quotas a few months before the Supreme Court will rule on whether that's legal. The Obama Administration's "fair housing" agenda, apparently, just can't wait.

At issue is the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which prohibits discrimination "because of race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin" (our italics). The language clearly implies an intent to discriminate. But courts have brushed the pesky text aside over the years, citing language in other 1960s-era statutes that allows the use of "disparate impact" analysis, which doesn't require intent and relies instead on statistical data about lending outcomes over larger populations of borrowers.

The Obama Administration's Department of Justice has taken full advantage of this loophole, accusing banks big and small of racial discrimination under the Fair Housing Act. Most CEOs have decided to settle rather than risk PR damage and litigation costs that could cost banks millions of dollars.

The Supreme Court decided to weigh in on November 7 when it agreed to hear Magner v. Gallagher, a case that will address whether disparate-impact analysis under the Fair Housing Act is legal or not. On November 16, HUD issued its proposed rule and concluded it is. HUD general counsel Helen Kanovsky says the rule was "on the agenda" since the Obama Administration took office and she hoped the Court would "wait" for HUD's rule-making. Well, that's a strange view of the judiciary's role to interpret the constitutionality of laws versus a regulator's role to implement them.

HUD closed the comment period on the proposed rule last week and the letters are instructive. A George Washington University sociologist wants HUD to hurry up and issue the final rule, "given the Court's deference to agency interpretation of statutory language in regulations." The ever-politicized Attorneys General of New York, Massachusetts, Illinois and other states think "discrimination and segregation in housing remain pervasive and intractable problems" but present no evidence to prove those claims.

Forcing banks to lend to minorities has a dangerous cascading effect. Banks will often make credit available to borrowers who shouldn't get a mortgage, merely to meet their quotas and avoid lawsuits. When those loans go belly up, banks and their shareholders have to pick up the tab—and that raises the price of loans for everyone. Some lenders will conclude they don't want the litigation risk and exit the market, reducing competition and choice.

All lending in a capitalist system requires some form of discrimination to determine who can afford a loan, and some kind of bargaining to strike a deal. HUD seems to want to eliminate both and deem who can get what loan, at what cost. As the Justices consider Magner, we trust they have noticed HUD's unseemly rush to issue a rule in a bid to sway their decision.

By MIKE MCCONNELL, MICHAEL CHERTOFF AND WILLIAM LYNN
Only three months ago, we would have violated U.S. secrecy laws by sharing what we write here—even though, as a former director of national intelligence, secretary of homeland security, and deputy secretary of defense, we have long known it to be true. The Chinese government has a national policy of economic espionage in cyberspace. In fact, the Chinese are the world's most active and persistent practitioners of cyber espionage today.

Evidence of China's economically devastating theft of proprietary technologies and other intellectual property from U.S. companies is growing. Only in October 2011 were details declassified in a report to Congress by the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive. Each of us has been speaking publicly for years about the ability of cyber terrorists to cripple our critical infrastructure, including financial networks and the power grid. Now this report finally reveals what we couldn't say before: The threat of economic cyber espionage looms even more ominously.

The report is a summation of the catastrophic impact cyber espionage could have on the U.S. economy and global competitiveness over the next decade. Evidence indicates that China intends to help build its economy by intellectual-property theft rather than by innovation and investment in research and development (two strong suits of the U.S. economy). The nature of the Chinese economy offers a powerful motive to do so.

According to 2009 estimates by the United Nations, China has a population of 1.3 billion, with 468 million (about 36% of the population) living on less than $2 a day. While Chinese poverty has declined dramatically in the last 30 years, income inequality has increased, with much greater benefits going to the relatively small portion of educated people in urban areas, where about 25% of the population lives.

The bottom line is this: China has a massive, inexpensive work force ravenous for economic growth. It is much more efficient for the Chinese to steal innovations and intellectual property—the source code of advanced economies—than to incur the cost and time of creating their own. They turn those stolen ideas directly into production, creating products faster and cheaper than the U.S. and others.

Cyberspace is an ideal medium for stealing intellectual capital. Hackers can easily penetrate systems that transfer large amounts of data, while corporations and governments have a very hard time identifying specific perpetrators.

Unfortunately, it is also difficult to estimate the economic cost of these thefts to the U.S. economy. The report to Congress calls the cost "large" and notes that this includes corporate revenues, jobs, innovation and impacts to national security. Although a rigorous assessment has not been done, we think it is safe to say that "large" easily means billions of dollars and millions of jobs.

So how to protect ourselves from this economic threat? First, we must acknowledge its severity and understand that its impacts are more long-term than immediate. And we need to respond with all of the diplomatic, trade, economic and technological tools at our disposal.

The report to Congress notes that the U.S. intelligence community has improved its collaboration to better address cyber espionage in the military and national-security areas. Yet today's legislative framework severely restricts us from fully addressing domestic economic espionage. The intelligence community must gain a stronger role in collecting and analyzing this economic data and making it available to appropriate government and commercial entities.

Congress and the administration must also create the means to actively force more information-sharing. While organizations (both in government and in the private sector) claim to share information, the opposite is usually the case, and this must be actively fixed.

The U.S. also must make broader investments in education to produce many more workers with science, technology, engineering and math skills. Our country reacted to the Soviet Union's 1957 launch of Sputnik with investments in math and science education that launched the age of digital communications. Now is the time for a similar approach to build the skills our nation will need to compete in a global economy vastly different from 50 years ago.

Corporate America must do its part, too. If we are to ever understand the extent of cyber espionage, companies must be more open and aggressive about identifying, acknowledging and reporting incidents of cyber theft. Congress is considering legislation to require this, and the idea deserves support. Companies must also invest more in enhancing their employees' cyber skills; it is shocking how many cyber-security breaches result from simple human error such as coding mistakes or lost discs and laptops.

In this election year, our economy will take center stage, as will China and its role in issues such as monetary policy. If we are to protect ourselves against irreversible long-term damage, the economic issues behind cyber espionage must share some of that spotlight.

Mr. McConnell, a retired Navy vice admiral and former director of the National Security Agency (1992-96) and director of national intelligence (2007-09), is vice chairman of Booz Allen Hamilton. Mr. Chertoff, a former secretary of homeland security (2005-09), is senior counsel at Covington & Burling. Mr. Lynn has served as deputy secretary of defense (2009-11) and undersecretary of defense (1997-2001

Newt Gingrich's South Carolina bump is fading, and polls show Mitt Romney again leading in Florida. A Romney victory in the Sunshine State could sew this up.

It won't be because Mr. Romney has become a better or more effective candidate. Primaries exist to help with that process, to let contenders read signals from the political landscape, to adapt, become stronger. Successful politicians absorb the signals and change up. Not Mr. Romney. If politics were evolution, the governor would still be swimming in the primordial soup.

That much was clear this week. The first signal was Mr. Gingrich's resounding victory in South Carolina. If Mr. Romney were listening, he'd have understood that vote was as much against him as it was for Mr. Gingrich. It took but one punchy Gingrich debate performance to have voters abandoning the front-runner in droves.

South Carolina voters also clearly explained why. Exit polls showed that Mr. Romney's two (and only) messages—that he is the best suited to turn around the economy and to defeat Barack Obama—aren't working for the majority of voters. Mr. Gingrich beat Mr. Romney on both issues. The electorate explained that they first and foremost want a candidate willing to passionately promote conservative ideals.

Mr. Gingrich then followed his victory with a week in which he all but goaded his opponent into voicing some bigger principles. He kept up the "Massachusetts moderate" label. He again went populist and accused Mr. Romney of not working for all his money and profiting from big banks. He compared Mr. Romney to Charlie Crist. Among Florida conservatives, there is no greater diss.

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Candidate Romney
.A candidate with even half the usual complement of political antennae would have seen this as a game-changing opportunity to win with conservatives. It was Mr. Romney's moment to turn his occasional defense of Bain Capital into a broad rallying cry for capitalism. Florida posed the perfect backdrop to elevate his causes of free-market housing and energy. It was a chance to unveil a simpler and bolder economic reform plan.

Mr. Romney had some strong moments in Thursday's debate, but on the Florida stump he's mostly been plodding on. As in Iowa, as in New Hampshire, as in South Carolina, he's still criticizing Mr. Gingrich. He's still running on his biography. He's still sending the media press releases announcing the latest Miami Dade politician to pronounce him most electable against Barack Obama.

Which gets to the other story of this week: the president's State of the Mitt Address. Mr. Gingrich might have some Republicans spooked, but Democrats are still hoping for the Massachusetts governor. They, too, have noticed that Mr. Romney is ducking the class-warfare debate, and that not even the Gingrich threat has moved him to engage. They take that as an invitation to make it the central theme of the Obama re-elect. The president's Tuesday speech was a direct assault on Mr. Romney's wealth and tax breaks for "the rich."

That challenge, coming on the back of Mr. Romney's tax release, was all the more reason for him to change the narrative by seizing on a big idea like comprehensive tax reform. He could have underlined how the tax code that Mr. Obama wants to further contort only undermines growth and leaves average Americans paying a higher effective rate than does Mr. Romney. Instead, he complained that Mr. Gingrich's tax simplification plan would let off rich guys.

Mr. Romney has his unscripted, inspired moments. Late in South Carolina, a feisty Mr. Romney chastised a heckler—who was slamming him for being the 1%—for seeking to "divide the nation . . . as our President is doing," and then riffed on America's great economic model. Romney strategist Eric Fehrnstrom boasted it was "Mitt Romney at his best." He was right. And it lasted all of 30 seconds. A few days later Mr. Romney was back to borrowing the heckler's language, telling Floridians "the 1% is doing fine. I want to help the 99%."

The Romney camp lives in terror of deviating from the months-old script. It did, and will, defend RomneyCare. It did, and will, stick with a 59-point economic plan. It did, and will, promote only the "middle class." Did. Will. No flip-flops here, folks. Move along.

Yet it is precisely Mr. Romney's past flips that now require him to adjust, to convince conservative voters that the convictions he today claims are real and strong. Mr. Romney likes to repeat that he is a free-market conservative. What voter is going to blame him for proving it by putting out a roaring tax reform? That's not a flip-flop. That's progress.

Mr. Romney isn't beating Mr. Gingrich in Florida on the arguments. He's barely eking ahead of a man whose own history and temperament are his hurdles to victory. Mr. Obama won't have that problem. If a Nominee Romney thinks he can win the White House with the sort of uninspired performance he put in this week, he's got a long 2012 ahead of him.

"We had been told, on leaving our native soil, that we were going to defend the sacred rights conferred on us by so many of our citizens settled overseas, so many years of our presence, so many benefits brought by us to populations in need of our assistance and our civilization.

We were able to verify that all this was true, and, because it was true, we did not hesitate to shed our quota of bloo...d, to sacrifice our youth and our hopes. We regretted nothing, but whereas we over here are inspired by this frame of mind, I am told that in Rome factions and conspiracies are rife, that treachery flourishes and that many people in their uncertainty and confusion lend a ready ear to the dire temptations of relinquishment and vilify our action.

I cannot believe that all this is true and yet recent wars have shown how pernicious such a state of mind could be and to where it could lead.
Make haste to reassure me, I beg you, and tell me that our fellow citizens understand us, support us and protect us as we ourselves are protecting the glory of the empire.

If it should be otherwise, if we should have to leave our bleached bones in these desert sands in vain, then beware of the anger of the Legions."

Marcus Flavinius, Centurion in the Second Cohort of the Augusta Legion

MRS. GINGRICH'S REVENGE
By DICK MORRIS
Published on DickMorris.com on January 26, 2012

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All the male commentators and pundits got it wrong!  Marianne Gingrich's sorrowful remembrances of her marriage to Newt have, indeed, arisen to bite the former Speaker's candidacy.
 
Both the Rasmussen and the Monmouth University Polls show Romney pulling ahead of Gingrich in Florida.  After the former Speaker opened the primary with a nine point lead, he now trails Romney in both surveys by almost ten points.  Monmouth has Romney ahead by 39-32 and Rasmussen has him up by eight at 39-31.
 
There are, of course, many reasons for this turnaround:  Romney's attacks on Newt over Freddie Mac are scoring, especially because Gingrich was unable to give a good explanation of what he did for the money in the Monday debate.  Newt's attacks on Romney focus on his flip flopping and Romney care, negatives that have already received quite an airing over TV in the debates and are old news.  Either voters buy Romney's explanations or they don't, but a negative ad is not likely to do much one way or the other.
 
But the gender breakouts in the Monmouth Poll tell the story:  Newt is ahead among men by 5 points but trails among women by 19!!!  This 24 point gender gap can only be attributable to the Marianne Gingrich interview aired on Thursday night of last week.  It had no immediate impact on the South Carolina vote two days later, nor was it in evidence in the post-South Carolina polls in Florida.  But, after a round of breakfast table conversations and talks over lunch, women have reached a verdict:  They are not voting for Gingrich.
 
Monmouth has Newt winning men by 38-33 and losing women by 45-26.  This stunning turnaround mirrors poll findings at the start of the presidential race when Gingrich was winning twice as many men as women.  But the former Speaker had closed the gender gap in subsequent polls only to have it open up wide now with his presidential ambitions squarely on the line.
 
There is, of course, a debate tonight and Newt often wins such contests.  Much could change, but it looks bad for Gingrich among women in the Florida balloting.