Even after losing the Deep South primaries, Newt Gingrich refuses to back down from his bid for the Republican presidential nomination:
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says there’s probably no circumstance that would lead him to pull out of the Republican presidential sweepstakes before the party’s August nominating convention.
“I’ll be with you in Tampa,” Gingrich tells CBS’s “This Morning” show, when asked about his plans.
The former congressman from Georgia has won primaries in only two states, South Carolina and Georgia. But when asked Friday what conditions could lead him to withdraw from the race, he says, “Probably none.”
At Talking Points Memo, Pema Levy reports on the Republican state houses that have taken the failed Blunt amendment—which would have granted a broad “conscience” exemption to employers for virtually anything—and run with it:
Writing for Reuters, David Cay Johnston describes the wildly divergent recovery from the Great Recession:
The 1934 economic rebound was widely shared, with strong income gains for the vast majority, the bottom 90 percent. In 2010, we saw the opposite as the vast majority lost ground.
National income gained overall in 2010, but all of the gains were among the top 10 percent. Even within those 15.6 million households, the gains were extraordinarily concentrated among the super-rich, the top one percent of the top one percent.
Just 15,600 super-rich households pocketed an astonishing 37 percent of the entire national gain
It’s entirely possible that everyone is losing the GOP primary, in one way or another.
As much as I want to endorse the well-founded notion that Mitt Romney will cruise through the rest of the primary, actual events are keeping me from making that plunge.
Even though the vast majority of African American voters and lawmakers are Democrats, it may be black Republicans who have the best chance to reach the U.S. Senate or win governorships, at least in the near future.
Writing in Politico, Glenn Thrush finds Republicans terrified of the possibility that their likely nominee—Mitt Romney—has completely alienated Latinos with his harsh, anti-immigration rhetoric, and left Obama with the space to rack up a huge margin of support among the Latino community. Here’s Thrush:
Hispanics, a powerful bloc whose vote could decide the outcome in pivotal states such as Nevada, Florida, Colorado and Arizona, seem to have responded by abandoning Romney, with only 14 percent of Hispanic voters favoring him over Obama in a recent Fox Latino poll — one-third of the Hispanic support George W. Bush enjoyed in 2004.
Thus far, I’ve been convinced that Republicans will rally around Mitt Romney if and when he wins the nomination. The former Massachusetts governor might not be popular with Republican voters, but Barack Obama is the most hated figure in the GOP, and unity is necessary if Republicans want a shot at taking the White House.
I’m kind of a nerd for productivity software and writing applications in particular. My favorite text editor for the Mac, Byword, just made its iOS debut, and you should check it out.
Mitt Romney can’t help but sound like a huge tool when it comes to discussing his wealth.
Analysts predict that Apple will sell a whole lot of iPads:
“With our checks indicating record pre-orders and 2–3 week wait times for new iPads, we anticipate a record iPad launch this weekend,” said analysts T Michael Walkley and Matthew Ramsay.
They raised their iPad unit estimate to 65.6 million from 55.9 million for 2012, and to 90.6 million from 79.7 million for 2013, saying rivals will likely struggle to introduce competitive products over the next couple quarters.
On Monday, a handful of polls came out that showed President Obama in a bad place, with flagging approval ratings and an unhappy public. I argued that those results had more to do with methodology than the actual mood of the public, but the conventional wisdom seems to be that, yes, Obama has a problem.
Unemployment has declined nationwide, but as Reutersreports, the change has been greatest in swing states:
Over the three years Obama has been in office, North Carolina and Florida also hit record high jobless rates, both reaching 11.4 percent two years ago. But in January 2012, North Carolina’s rate was the lowest since April 2009 and Florida’s the lowest since March 2009.
In Colorado, another swing state, the jobless rate climbed to a record 9 percent at the end of 2010. By January, it had fallen to 7.8 percent, the lowest since March 2009.
Ruth Marcus is bored by the 2012 presidential election and wants us to turn our attention to 2016 which, she argues, will be a lot more interesting:
Enough about the 2012 election already. Let’s talk 2016, which promises to be far more interesting — and consequential.
The precise contours of that election, of course, will be shaped by what happens this November. Yet either way, the 2016 campaign will be, much more than 2012, a battle for the ideological soul of one or both parties.
The pre-election polls for the Republican primaries in Alabama and Mississippi showed a close race. Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich were in a near-three-way tie for the first-place spot in both states, with Gingrich edging out his competitors in Mississippi, and Romney taking the slightest of leads in Alabama.
This morning, I argued that President Obama’s poor performance in the New York Times/CBS News poll had more to do with the methodology of the survey than it did with any underlying change in Obama’s standing with the public. The Times oversampled partisan Republicans, and as such, guaranteed a skewed result. For further evidence of Obama’s stability, look no further than a trio of polls released today.
