Posted on 12/30/2011 4:41:59 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Mitt Romney and Ron Paul are battling for the top spot in Iowa but the second tier of candidates is closing in, according to a NBC News-Marist poll released on Friday.
Romney leads the poll of likely Iowa caucus-goers at 23 percent, followed by Paul at 21 percent.
However, the second tier of candidates, led by Rick Santorum and Rick Perry, are suddenly within striking distance of the frontrunners.
Santorum came in third at 15 percent, followed by Perry at 14 percent.
Newt Gingrich has fallen to fifth place at 13 percent. The former House speaker led the same poll earlier this month at 28 percent, but has been battered by his rivals over his divorces and ties to Freddie Mac.
Michele Bachmann is at six percent.
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
Buying candidates through corporate and special interest bundling gets us the Socialist/RINO country we have.
You wanna keep it that way, I guess.
Hello folks
This is a poll conducted by two left wing operations
NBC and Marist !
These commies spread lies and spin for the DNC and nothing else.
The Keyesian Trap……”Moreover, [his] self-assuredness disabled in him the instincts for self-censorship that allow most people to navigate the world without getting into constant fistfights. [He] said whatever popped into his mind, and with dogged logic would follow over a cliff just about any idea that came to him.
These words describe almost perfectly the intellectual and rhetorical bearing and style of Newt Gingrich. Only they weren't written about Gingrich. They are Barack Obama's words -- from The Audacity of Hope -- about former Ambassador Alan Keyes, Obama's Republican opponent in the 2004 election for Illinois' open Senate seat.
I was struck by two things as I recently watched old footage of the 2004 Obama-Keyes debates. First, Keyes comes across as a better debater than Obama. He seems more polished, smarter, and more confident than Obama. Keyes' verbal fluency makes Obama's use of verbal fillers and stutters, his repeated words and incomplete and restarted sentences, all the more noticeable.
The second thing I noticed were the striking similarities between Keyes and Gingrich. Keyes is more theatrical than Gingrich, while Gingrich is more overtly egoistic and self-reverential. (He has at various moments called himself "the most serious, systematic revolutionary of modern times" and a "definer of civilization.")
But the two share many characteristics. For one thing, they both hold Ph.D.s (Keyes in government, Gingrich in history). Perhaps this helps explain why both Keyes and Gingrich have a tendency to talk down to opponents and debate moderators. Keyes was antagonistic toward the Illinois journalists who moderated the Senate debates, cutting off questioners and reacting harshly when moderators told him his time was up.”…..
Leni
“Perry and Santorum may have a chance. We conservatives need to decide which one now.”
Maybe this will help:
Rick Santorum, Earmarxists, and the Pro-Life Statist
http://www.redstate.com/erick/2011/12/29/rick-santorum-earmarxists-and-the-pro-life-statist/
by Erick Erickson
Thursday, December 29th at 7:23PM EST
A number of people read my post yesterday -— http://www.redstate.com/erick/2011/12/28/no-surprise-iowa-social-conservatives-are-about-to-shoot-us-all-in-the-foot-again/ -— about Rick Santorum and still are scratching their heads.
In my book RedState Uprising I spent a bit of time dealing with “pro-life statists” who will be the death of the conservative movement if we do not start standing up to them.
Rick Santorum is a pro-life statist.
My friend Ned Ryun introduced me to the term and his post on pro-life statists written in the wake of Congressman Mark Souder’s resignation sums up every issue I have with Rick Santorum:
“A hard-line conservative, Souder recently survived a tough GOP primary in the Hoosier State, edging two opponents who held him under 50 percent. Souder’s Republican rivals criticized Souder over his support for the Troubled Asset Relief Program and Cash for Clunkers programs.”
I take exception to that description: no real conservative would have voted for TARP or Cash for Clunkers. The mistake made is the assumption that because someone is pro-life means he or she is a conservative. Someone who is pro-life, but votes to expand the state and state spending, is in fact not a conservative, but a pro-life statist.
As someone who is deeply pro-life, and became even more so when my daughter was born four months premature, I absolutely believe in the sanctity of life. But I have a problem with many elected officials who call themselves social conservatives, as though that were all that mattered, and then go and vote for more government and more government spending.
The bigger government becomes, the more invasive it becomes, the more it becomes the enemy of life and freedom. So these pro-life statists show a deep ignorance of government and freedom: the greatest freedom is economic freedom. I say that because if you are an economic ward of the state, you can neither be politically or religiously free. Exhibit A: China. The invasive state dictates how many children you may have, the free flow of information, and political freedom is not even worth really discussing.
I believe one of the reasons that we have gotten to this stage as a country, with the massive growth of government, is because some have thought only one or two social issues are all that matter, and willingly give a pass on pretty much everything else. To those people I would say enough, stop living under an illusion. You must become more comprehensive in your conservatism.
Rick Santorum participated in raiding the federal treasury as an earmarxist, perfectly happy to pork away on Pennsylvania’s behalf. He did not join conservatives who fought against No Child Left Behind. He did not join conservatives who fought against the prescription drug benefit.
Rick Santorum was part of the problem in Washington. He was one of the Republicans the public rejected in 2006. The voters in Pennsylvania rejected him in 2006 because of his and the Republicans’ profligate ways. Along with Tom DeLay, Rick Santorum led the K Street Project, which traded perks for lobbyists for money for the GOP funded with your tax dollars through earmarks and pork projects.
Sure, you can say 2006 was a bad year for Republicans, but in 2006 Rick Santorum fell 18 percentage points behind his Democratic rival and his defeat and terrible campaign can be linked to the loss of four Pennsylvania house seats.
That was not a defeat for Rick Santorum. It was punishment. He is a pro-life statist and I see nothing in his career since leaving Washington that shows he has changed his ways.
Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard coined the term “big government conservatives” in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. He wrote
IS PRESIDENT BUSH really a conservative? When that question came up this summer, the White House went into crisis mode. Bush aides summoned several of Washington’s conservative journalists to a 6:30 a.m. breakfast at the White House to press the case for the president’s adherence to conservative principles. Aides outnumbered journalists. Other conservative writers and broadcasters were invited to luncheon sessions. They heard a similar spiel.
The White House needn’t have bothered. The case for Bush’s conservatism is strong. Sure, some conservatives are upset because he has tolerated a surge in federal spending, downplayed swollen deficits, failed to use his veto, created a vast Department of Homeland Security, and fashioned an alliance of sorts with Teddy Kennedy on education and Medicare. But the real gripe is that Bush isn’t their kind of conventional conservative. Rather, he’s a big government conservative. This isn’t a description he or other prominent conservatives willingly embrace. It makes them sound as if they aren’t conservatives at all. But they are. They simply believe in using what would normally be seen as liberal means—activist government—for conservative ends. And they’re willing to spend more and increase the size of government in the process.
Being a big government conservative doesn’t bring Bush close to being a moderate, much less a liberal. On most issues, his position is standard conservative: a pro-lifer who expects to sign a ban on partial birth abortion, he’s against stem-cell research and gun control, and has drawn the line at gay marriage. His judicial nominees are so uniformly conservative that liberals are furious.
That’s Rick Santorum. He sees government as the means to conservative ends. But in using government to get conservative ends he has expanded government and set precedents for liberals to use government in the same ways for more liberal government. Rick Santorum was complicit in making Americans more dependent on government and justified it under the rubric of compassion.
Before Rick Santorum was purged from Washington for his pro-life statism, the Washington Post summed up his, George Bush’s, and the GOP’s sins in an editorial titled “Big Government Conservatism.”
Back in 1987, when Mr. Reagan applied his veto to what was generally known at the time as the highway and mass transit bill, he was offended by the 152 earmarks for pet projects favored by members of Congress. But on Wednesday Mr. Bush signed a transportation bill containing no fewer than 6,371 earmarks. Each one of these, as Mr. Reagan understood but Mr. Bush apparently doesn’t, amounts to a conscious decision to waste taxpayers’ dollars. One point of an earmark is to direct money to a project that would not receive money as a result of rational judgments based on cost-benefit analyses.
Mr. Bush, who had threatened to veto wasteful spending bills, chose instead to cave in. He did so despite the fact that in addition to a record number of earmarks the transportation bill came with a price tag that he had once called unacceptable. The bill has a declared cost of $286 billion over five years plus a concealed cost of a further $9 billion; Mr. Bush had earlier drawn a line in the sand at $256 billion, then drawn another line at $284 billion. Asked to explain the president’s capitulation, a White House spokesman pleaded that at least this law would be less costly than the 2003 Medicare reform. This is a classic case of defining deviancy down.
This is why I do not support Rick Santorum. I do not want a co-conspirator to government largess premised on the rhetoric of compassionate or big government conservatism being rewarded.
bttt
I love how a Santorum surge turns into a
“It’s Perry and Santorum”
Deep in the minds of ever voter is the fear of the Perry sound of silence, long, painful...in front of Obama in a debate.
Sorry,can’t risk our nation to Perry.
...anyway, it’s Iowa...Nationally, Both Romney and Gingrich are beating Obama...only Gingrich can defeat Romney.
snip........
Zero's presidency is the most corrupt and scandal-ridden in modern memory if not US history - yet the enemedia ignores it all completely and will continue to do so no matter what monumental new scandals emerge next year. Ditto with bad economic news. Without question, we have the most pathologically dishonest press our country has ever seen.
And that press will rip Mitt Romney apart. It's delusional to believe he stands a chance, much less "We have to support him because he's the only one who can beat Obama." Rubbish. The same goes for Gingrich. Santorum is ridiculous. For me, I am seriously sick and tired of hearing about Iowans and their phony "caucuses."
Iowa on January 3 (next Tuesday) means nothing. It is all media hype. Not a single delegate is chosen. Iowa chooses its 28 delegates to the Republican National Convention at its state convention on June 16.
Let's keep going. By the end of February, only 174 delegates will have been awarded in GOP caucuses and primaries - just 15 percent of the 1,143 the Pub candidate needs.
By that time in 2008, 1,407 delegates had been chosen, with McCain having so many Romney dropped out. In 2010, the GOP changed its rules to slow things down, requiring states that award delegates prior to April 1 to do so proportionally. States agreeing to wait until April got the ability to give all their delegates to the winner.
The race for the Pub nomination is a marathon, not a sprint. There is no Super Tuesday after which it's all over. One of these days, this is going to dawn on the outside world. The only two candidates capable of this marathon, mentally (dogged persistence) and financially (fund-raising), are Perry and Romney. One of them will be the nominee.
Population of Iowa: 3,007,856 - Blue State - Voted for Zero 2008
Population of NH: 1,324,575 - Blue State - Voted for Zero 2008
There are 2 other states voting in January, South Carolina and Florida. All 50 states have a say in the primary. GO NEWT !
January
? - Iowa 28 delegates
? - New Hampshire 12
Newt - South Carolina 25
Newt - Florida 50
February
Newt - Nevada 28
Newt - Maine 24
Newt - Colorado 36
? - Minnesota 40
Newt- Arizona 29
? - Michigan 30
March
Newt - Washington 43
Newt - Alaska 27
Newt - Georgia 76
Newt - Idaho 32
RINO - Mass 41
Newt - North Dakota 28
Newt - Ohio 66
Newt - Oklahoma 43
Newt - Tennessee 58
? - Vermont 17
Newt - Virginia 50
Newt - Wyoming 29
Newt - Kansas 40
Newt - Alabama 50
? - Hawaii 20
Newt - Mississippi 40
Newt - Missouri 52
? - Illinois 69
Newt - Louisiana 46
April
Newt - Maryland 37
Newt or Perry - Texas 155
? - Wash D.C. 19
Newt - Wisconsin 42
? - Connecticut 28
? - Delaware 17
? - New York 95
Newt - Pennsylvania 72
? - Rhode Island 19
May
Newt - Indiana 46
Newt - North Carolina 55
Newt - West Virginia 31
Newt - Nebraska 35
Newt - Oregon 29
Newt - Arkansas 36
Newt - Kentucky 45
June
? - California 172
Newt - Montana 26
Newt - New Jersey 50
Newt - New Mexico 23
Newt - South Dakota 28
RINO - Utah 40
Perry was a conservative Democrat, changed parties and has explained this. What I look at is results and Texas is a showcase for this man’s ability to create a climate ripe for prosperity. I want that for the rest of the country don’t you?
Erick Erickson is a Rick Perry hack who only supports candidates that will give his site, Redstate, the time of day. Notice he’s started to warm up to Huntsman now that he gave Redstate an interview.
Rick Perry is a sanctuary city loving doofus and the only candidate we have that could not beat Obama in a debate.
Newt GIngrich will win the Red States. Liberal and Independents are not popular in the Red States.
And their “CONservative” candidate, (former Democrat) genius Rick (can't remember my name) Perry.
And Santorum...Mr. “Earmarks” himself. There never was an earmark or amount of available Federal Money that he failed to scarf up! And he did set a record for his district, having the largest majority in PA history, who could hardly wait to vote him out of office!
Let's all fall over ourselves to vote for this guy, in the very last week before Iowa starts! (Panic driven stampede!)
Iowa voted for Zero in 2008. As did New Hampshire.
South Carolina and Florida both have more delegates, more populations and are also held in January. Go Newt!
I’ve said it many times. If not Newt, it will be Mitt. It’s playing out as predicted.
Don’t get me wrong. I like both Santorum and Perry. I just don’t think they have a prayer nationally against Romney. Santorum especially lacks the money and organization. They may do well in Iowa, but beyond that it’s not likely to translate. This will be doubly so if Mitt comes in 1st in Iowa. The media spun perception game and momentum will be hard to stop by the time N.N. is done.
You can’t underestimate the vacuous reasons that cause people to vote one way or another. Wanting to vote for the one they think is going to win is one of them. It’s like some sort of twisted self validation for the clueless - “see how smart I am, I voted for the winner.”
The desire to vote for who they think can beat Obama will be powerful. The establishment/media’s effort to sell Romney as the only one that can beat Obama will be relentless. The media and our so called “conservative intelligentsia” will sell hard the notion that Perry and Santorum can’t win.
Sorry sports fans. If this all plays out in Iowa as the polls suggest, then Romney’s inevitability quotient will go through the roof.
Lemmings, headed ever closer to the cliff.
Erickson has not been consistently on board with Perry. I read his blogs so I know.
Regarding your misinformation about Perry (again) Rick Perry ordered a special session re "sanctuary cities" -- the legislature (who are looking at their viability) dropped the ball and went home. Also, Rick Perry supports E-verify done right -- as of now the database is inaccurate and the procedure is burdensome on small businesses -- it doesn't work.
In his own words:
"“I agree that some kind of electronic verification system is needed so we can make sure employers comply with the law not to hire illegal immigrants. E-Verify is a federal government created and run program, and as a result there have been a number of problems with it so far. The Department of Homeland Security estimated the system could fail to identify more than half of all illegal immigrants.
But just because it has problems doesn’t mean we should throw employee verification out. It means we should make it work. Employee verification needs to be accurate so American citizens aren’t denied jobs based on bad data and undocumented immigrants don’t slip through the system. And it needs to be less cumbersome for employers to use, so it’s not costing them money they could be using to create jobs.
So as president, I’d work to put in place an E-Verify system that’s more accurate, less burdensome and really delivers the results we need it to.”
Iowa and New Hampshire are Blue States. They voted for Zero.
Romney is not popular in the Red States. The Red States will decide the nominee. January has 4 primary/caucuses. And why does IA get more delegates when they have a lower population than South Carolina? Who gives IA all this power when they have fewer people living in their state? That's jacked up.
January
? - Iowa 28 delegates
? - New Hampshire 12
Newt - South Carolina 25
Newt - Florida 50
“Erickson has not been consistently on board with Perry. I read his blogs so I know. “
LOL
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