Now that Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have won Georgia and Massachusetts respectively, it will be interesting to see which candidate wins a higher percentage of the vote in his adopted home state.
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*in his adopted home state. Gingrich was born in Pennsylvania and Romney in Michigan.

Remember when our hand-wringing friends in the legacy media as well as in the Democratic Party faulted Republican presidential candidates for not condemning a man who booed a gay solider?  Well, now we have someone booing a U.S. Senator and calling him “the devil.”   By Democratic logic then, every Democratic present at this event must condemn the boor lest they be considered to support his antics:

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) raised eyebrows Monday evening when he was unceremoniously booed during an appearance at the Kennedy Center’s D.C. CAP-ital Stars Gala.

The Senator raised eyebrows!?!?  Interesting way to put it.  ”Midway through the Kennedy Center event to benefit the D.C. College Access Program,” Jenny Rogers reports, Blunt

. . . was honored by the board for his support of education in the Senate. While Blunt was being introduced, an audience member shouted, “Blunt is the devil.” A tense moment passed without comment before the ceremony continued. As Blunt took the stage, the heckler loudly booed.

Look, there are boors are both sides of the political aisle. No Democrat needs distinguish himself for this individual’s antic unless said partisan holds to the notion that Republicans must “differentiate themselves” from the angry rhetoric of the extremists on the right side of the political aisle.

Perhaps the one quality which gives Mitt Romney the most significant advantage over his challengers for the Republican nomination is his ability to stay on message and avoid taking the bait of liberal journalists and pundits.  Look at how he reacted  to former Clinton advisor George Stephanopolous’s question on contraception at the ABC/Yahoo!/WMUR New Hampshire debate:

George, this is an unusual topic that you’re raising. States have a right to ban contraception? I can’t imagine a state banning contraception. I can’t imagine the circumstances where a state would want to do so, and if I were a governor of a state or…

. . . or a — or a legislature of a state — I would totally and completely oppose any effort to ban contraception. So you’re asking — given the fact that there’s no state that wants to do so, and I don’t know of any candidate that wants to do so, you’re asking could it constitutionally be done?

Romney goes on to call the moderator’s question “kind of a silly thing”.  He doesn’t delve into the benefits (or lack thereof) of contraception.  That’s not a president’s business.

“While GOP rivals Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich,” Byron York reports, “have gotten sidetracked by contraception, Sandra Fluke, and other media obsessions of the moment, Romney has stuck close to his message on the economy and government spending.”  The former Massachusetts governor makes clear his focus is  ”more jobs, less debt, and smaller government.”

He’s not just disciplined on policy issues, he’s also disciplined in his emotions.  He remains calm under fire–as CBS News’s Rebecca Kaplan reported last month:

Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney on Friday deftly put down an aggressive attack by a few hostile members of a town hall audience, who challenged him repeatedly on issues ranging from his overseas investments to his support for hydrofracking.

It was a rare bit of rhetorical chaos at a Romney event, which are typically as subdued as the candidate tends to be. But the former Massachusetts governor defended himself in a calm and concise manner, (more…)

California slipping toward bankruptcy, again:

California is going broke. Again. The state controller has estimated that the state will run out of money sometime this month. California will need to find $3 billion in cuts or revenues to keep the state in the black through the rest of this fiscal year.

And next year looks even worse. California’s Legislative Analyst Office projects that, even with billions in one-time revenues from Facebook’s impending IPO, Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget will run a $6.5 billion deficit.

Must be George W. Bush’s fault.

RELATED: Victor Davis Hanson, In California, Whom Will They Blame?

With the stock market’s major plunge today, we have another datum suggesting that the economic recovery may not be as robust as some have been reporting.  Couple that with the big drop reported earlier this month about the big drop in factory orders and shipments and it’s no wonder the president is feeling anxious about his chances this fall despite improving poll numbers.

Those poll numbers seem to have ticked upward in conjunction with continued acrimony among Republicans presidential candidates and increasing reports of economic improvement.  Well, that acrimony will eventually diminish.  And those reports might be fewer and farther between.

And now we have reports of the president hoarding his campaign cash:

President Barack Obama has a bleak message for House and Senate Democrats this year when it comes to campaign cash: You’re on your own.

Democratic congressional leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, have privately sought as much as $30 million combined from Obama for America and the Democratic National Committee — a replay of the financial help they received from Obama in 2008 and 2010.

But that’s not going to happen, top Obama aides Jim Messina and David Plouffe told Reid and Pelosi in back-to-back meetings on Capitol Hill on Thursday, according to sources familiar with the high-level talks.

Ed Morrissey (to whom I tip my hat for this report) finds “only two conclusions to reach if this report is true.  Either Barack Obama is so self-absorbed that he can’t share the wealth himself, or his fundraising is going so poorly that his campaign has little wealth to share.”

I would add another that he may be husbanding his resources in anticipation of a potentially uphill contest this fall.

UPDATE:  Over at Hot Air’s Green Room, Karl offers a similar sentiment, asking “You know who doesn’t think Obama won the election already?” And answering: (more…)

Last month, we reported that a government inspector forced a 4-year-old to eat a school lunch rather than the nutritious fare her mother had packed for her.

This month we learn that the “teacher involved in ‘supplementing’ a preschooler’s lunch with chicken nuggets in Hoke County has been suspended indefinitely.”  (H/t:  Glenn Reynolds.)

Score one for the new media?  Or just to a good mother standing up to the school system?

Our reader V the K linked this report about Sandra Fluke’s distaste for opposing points of view:

As a student at Cornell and treasurer of a pro-choice organization at the school, Sandra Fluke, helped shut down a pro-life speech on Cornell’s campus by counter protesting. She argued that a pro-life organization at Cornell was about “manipulating [students'] emotions” with misleading statistics about abortion.

So, if this organization offered misleading statistics, why then didn’t Ms. Fluke take it upon herself to demonstrate their inaccuracy and argue the merits of her own position?  If this story is true [and it appears it may not be*], this woman is not much interested in debating ideas, but in preventing the airing of views with which she disagrees.

In this, she has much in common with her ideological confrères in the Occupy Movement.

Just over a week ago, “unruly Occupy students at American University in Washington, D.C., shouted down Republican governor Jan Brewer of Arizona on Friday, forcing her to flee the room with aid from security guards.”  H/t:  Instapundit.

This week, they disrupted “a panel discussion [at AIPAC] led by Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Miami, FL led a discussion about Stopping Iran: Can the West End Iran’s Nuclear Drive?”

In the fall of 1964, liberal students at the University of California/Berkeley launched the “Free Speech Movement”; they wanted to end the school policy preventing student groups from operating “on campus if they engaged in any kind of off-campus politics, whether electoral, protest or even oratorical.”  Now, liberal students want to prevent their ideological adversaries from expressing their views.

They times, they are a-changing.

* (more…)

If Bill Maher didn’t feel so insecure about his mean-spirited attacks on Republican women, he wouldn’t have made the attempt to distinguish himself from Rush Limbaugh as he did this past week:

The allegations of sexism against Rush Limbaugh have had the somewhat unexpected result of bring allegations of sexism against Bill Maher to the fore. Many have pointed out that, if Limbaugh has to answer for calling someone a “slut,” surely Maher has to answer for the time he used a c-word of Latin etymology to describeSarah Palin. Maher heard about it and, last night, was frustrated to hear that Limbaugh himself had brought it up and “tried to drag me into this bullshit he caused.” He laughed in his monologue and made a clear distinction between his show and Limbaugh’s: “I don’t have sponsors.”

Bill, my friends, is feeling the heat. The new media have given conservatives a punch we lacked just a few years ago. Our fight against liberal double standards is having an impact. Maher felt compelled to defend himself.

No, Bill doesn’t have sponsors, but some liberals on Facebook are pushing for Clear Channel to drop Rush. Maybe they should also be pushing HBO to drop the mean-spirited leftist.

Bill Maher is playing defense.  Andrew Breitbart lives!