South and Central Florida – where Romney did best – are full of transplants from the Northeast. These are the same type of voters that catapulted Romney to the governor’s mansion in Massachusetts. I would expect Gingrich to sweep the South and do well in blue-collar places like Ohio where Romney will come off as an out-of-touch elite.

When Gingrich says that he will go all the way to the convention he means it, especially if Santorum drops out of the race. If you consolidate the anti-Romney vote in a state less hospitable to Romney than Florida then Gingrich has a decent shot at winning quite a few primaries. Romney might have won tonight, but this race is far from over. Expect a conservative backlash against Romney in the primaries to come – especially in the South.

This next ad is running in South Carolina after Gingrich lost in Iowa and New Hampshire:

Of course Gingrich’s ad is softball compared to what George W. Bush did to John McCain in South Carolina during the 2000 Republican primary. McCain was accused of fathering an illegitimate black child and it cost him big time. The Arizona senator lost by 11 points after having pulled off a major New Hampshire upset. Can Gingrich manage to derail Newt with similar negative attack ads? The tightening polls certainly indicate that he could. Of course this time, unlike with McCain, Romney will deserve the verbal beating on television.

Super PACs have outspent Republican candidates by more than 2 to 1 in Iowa and other early primary states this election cycle, according to data from the Federal Election Commission and Kantar Media/CMAG, which tracks ad spending. The gulf is even wider when the picture is broadened to include other independent groups, many of which already haves spots on the air in Colorado, Ohio and states that are likely to be key battlegrounds in November.

The clearest beneficiary of the onslaught has been former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who was able to fend off a last-minute surge by former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) with the help of more than $4 million in advertising from Restore Our Future, a super PAC staffed by former Romney advisers. Romney’s campaign spent relatively little ad money in Iowa.

Democracy is for sale. The only real winner? Large corporations looking to legally bribe politicians (or punish them for voting the “wrong” way).

Obama insisted that he signed the bill simply to keep funding for the troops. It was a continuation of the dishonest treatment of the issue by the White House since the law first came to light. As discussed earlier, the White House told citizens that the president would not sign the NDAA because of the provision. That spin ended after sponsor Senator Carl Levin (Democrat, Michigan) went to the floor and disclosed that it was the White House and insisted that there be no exception for citizens in the indefinite detention provision.

The latest claim is even more insulting. You do not “support our troops” by denying the principles for which they are fighting. They are not fighting to consolidate authoritarian powers in the president. The “American way of life” is defined by our constitution and specifically the bill of rights. Moreover, the insistence that you do not intend to use authoritarian powers does not alter the fact that you just signed an authoritarian measure. It is not the use but the right to use such powers that defines authoritarian systems.

Obama is not going to indefinitely detain American citizens, at least abusively to target political opponents. However, could you imagine this kind of power in the hands of a man like Richard Nixon? Obama will only be in office for – at the most – five more years. Do Democrats mean to say that they trust this kind of power with a Republican president? Would they be defending George W. Bush if he had signed this into law? The hypocrisy is astounding. Signing this bill is the single biggest mistake of President Obama’s career.

The facts are not on his side. Right-to-work states like South Carolina have a considerably higher unemployment rate than Indiana (10.5% vs. 9%) and their workers have lower wages. Daniels should get his talking points straight before he makes false and misleading claims about the jobs situation in Indiana. Unions are not the problem, Indiana Republicans’ willingness to sacrifice wages and workplace safety is the problem.

Daniels goes on to claim that, “I’d be completely opposed to this if it affected the right to organize. But every right-to-work state has unions and some of them have a higher percentage of union members than Indiana does. I’d be completely against anything that reduced the right to organize. This is only about whether you have to pay the dues or don’t.”

I’ll give the governor credit, he knows how to weasel out of his positions – at least rhetorically – even while still maintaining them. The bill has nothing to do with jobs and everything to do with killing unions. Right-to-work is a way to drain a union’s resources. If you can benefit from a union and not have to pay for it then who would offer up their dues? It’s called free-riding. For a party that would love to see all resistance to corporate power crushed, right-to-work makes a good deal of sense.

The withdrawal doesn’t mean that the U.S. presence has ended. As CNN points out: “The United States will still maintain a presence in Iraq: hundreds of nonmilitary personnel, including 1,700 diplomats, law enforcement officers, and economic, agricultural and other experts, according to the State Department. In addition, 5,000 security contractors will protect Americans and another 4,500 contractors will serve in other roles.”

The U.S. embassy in Iraq is the largest in the world despite the two countries having little in common culturally or economically. They don’t even share a border. Why we need over 11,000 people to man an embassy is anyone’s guess (I think you can surmise why we are still there), but should a civil war occur, a lot of Americans will be in harm’s way. It is almost begging for another Iran hostage crisis to happen.

With polls showing that Newt Gingrich is now the prohibitive national favorite, as well as the leader in Iowa, South Carolina, Florida and numerous other states with the notable exception of New Hampshire, these final ten days could very well decide who will be the Republican nominee. Mitt’s hands-off approach to Iowa could be his downfall. It worked when his ascendant rivals imploded within a few weeks of taking their leads: Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain.

There is no indication from last weekend’s debate that Gingrich’s momentum is slowing down. Unlike the others Gingrich is a gritty political veteran. If anything Romney took the most damage with his $10,000 bet challenge to Rick Perry – acting as if it were chump change (and it is for a man worth nearly $200 million) – following up with a testy exchange on Monday with a Vietnam War veteran over his opposition to gay marriage. Gingrich is in the driver’s seat and time is running out for Mitt Romney.

That would be the provision of the law, called the medical loss ratio, that requires health insurance companies to spend 80% of the consumers’ premium dollars they collect—85% for large group insurers—on actual medical care rather than overhead, marketing expenses and profit. Failure on the part of insurers to meet this requirement will result in the insurers having to send their customers a rebate check representing the amount in which they underspend on actual medical care.

This is the true ‘bomb’ contained in Obamacare and the one item that will have more impact on the future of how medical care is paid for in this country than anything we’ve seen in quite some time. Indeed, it is this aspect of the law that represents the true ‘death panel’ found in Obamacare—but not one that is going to lead to the death of American consumers. Rather, the medical loss ration will, ultimately, lead to the death of large parts of the private, for-profit health insurance industry.

Ultimately if these changes force some for-profit health insurance companies out of business, so be it. They don’t need to exist anyway. All health insurance companies are middle men that drive up costs. America would be better off if we had a system of not-for-profit medicine. Of course the doctors and nurses will remain well paid, the people that do the actual grunt work, but the unnecessary insurance cartel will be put in its place. I think it’s a little too optimistic to say that insurers are going the way of the dinosaur anytime soon, but it is a step in the right direction to force them to spend a set percentage on doing what they are supposed to do: funding healthcare.

“Those of you that will be 21 by Nov. 12th, I ask for your support and your vote,” Perry said on the campus of Saint Anselm College to a group of college students. “Those of you who won’t be — just work hard — because you are going to inherit this and you’re counting on us to get this right.”

Better at deepthroating corndogs than 4th grade social studies

The problem?

The voting age is 18 and Election Day is on November 6, 2012. If he was referring to the New Hampshire primary, that is held on January 10, but with Rick Perry it is pretty hard to make sense of what he actually means. Before you chalk it up to being a casual mistake, consider that the voting age has been 18 since 1971 with the passage of the 26th Amendment. Perhaps Rick Perry was too busy partying at the time to take notice of such a significant event, but any serious presidential candidate should have learned such a thing… in POLS-101.

Perhaps an even likelier scenario for Paul would be to run as the nominee of the Libertarian Party as he did in 1988. This would give him a guaranteed spot on the ballot in a number of states, including critical swing states such as Indiana. Instead of focusing on collecting signatures for an independent run, Paul could get an automatic position on the ballot and instead focus on campaigning. Given the reality of the electoral college, Paul could conceivably win enough electoral votes to deny either Obama or Romney a majority. That would send the race to the U.S. House of Representatives.