Nomination Excitations: Hat Trick Rick
SANTORUM TRIUMPHANTES:
-A hearty ‘Huzzah’ to Rick Santorum for scoring impressive wins in Colorado, Michigan, and Missouri last night. You can see the results by clicking here.
-The award for Best Line goes to the Evil Blogging Lady for this quip:
This reminds me of that moment of recognition by Michael Corleone in Godfather II that the rebels in Cuba could actually win…
That’s when Michael realizes all the Mob’s carefully laid plans could fall apart.
If the GOP were as smart as Michael, they would start planning for that possibility. If they were that astute, they would start showing Mr. Santorum some respect…but most of them won’t.
-Honorable Mention to Zilla Of The Resistance for this bon mot:
…Rick was Godzilla last night, Mitt, Newt and the other guy were Tokyo. Go Rick!
Just when they think he’s defeated and dead, Rick Santorum rises again.
-The folks at Fox News have made sure to stress over and over again and again that these three victories were in ‘non-binding’ contests. I suspect that Rove, Baier, and the others are worried that their inevitability rhetoric has become constipated.
As Stacy McCain points out:
And as to the bizarre self-perpetuating media meme that “no delegates” were at stake Tuesday: This was legally true in Missouri, but given Santorum’s 2-to-1 margin in the “beauty pageant” vote, does anyone really think someone other than Santorum will get the lion’s share of the delegates at next month’s Missouri caucuses?
As for the presidential preference votes at Tuesday’s precinct caucuses in Minnesota and Colorado, yes — those votes were “non-binding,” officially. But if a precinct caucus votes 45-27 for Santorum over Romney (i.e., the typical Minnesota precinct), do we suppose that this caucus will then send a slate of Romney delegates to the next phase of the state party nominating process who will vote for somebody else besides Santorum? Or should we, as I suggest we should, assume that the delegates chosen at the precinct level will eventually vote at the state level to send delegates to the national convention in roughly the same proportion as the preference expressed in the precinct votes?
Like I said, the Iowa caucus vote on Jan. 3 was also “non-binding” in the same sense as the Minnesota and Colorado precinct caucus votes, but almost nobody mentioned that at the time. However, it seems that somebody’s campaign – and I’m thinking it might be somebody whose name sounds like “Ritt Momney” — was very diligent in spreading the message about these “non-binding” votes that Rick Santorum won Tuesday.
And as he wrote in a reply to one of his readers:
…if you recall at the hype and ballyhoo that attended the results in Iowa and N.H., it’s kind of ridiculous for anyone — including Karl Rove — to pretend that Santorum’s hat-trick Tuesday was trivial or insignificant.
Indeed, Mr. Santorum and his staff deserves a lot of credit for scoring victories in those three states and Iowa, areas where he had been written-off. I think it obvious that the overall strategy they’ve been employing so far has worked.
Kudos also to those conservatives in the four states who decided to send a very strong message to the GOP Establishment and Newton Leroy: we aren’t buying your crap.
-Stacy also filed a post, over at TAS this morning, that brings we Santorum supporters back down to Earth [are the supporters of Newton Leroy still on the Moon Base?]:
Monday night, I sat looking at the GOP primary schedule and, considering Mitt Romney’s enormous fundraising advantage, was filled with a sense of foreboding. After Newt Gingrich’s meltdown in Nevada, the prospects for the conservative "Anybody But Romney" opposition looked grim indeed.
Rick Santorum’s 3-for-3 hat-trick Tuesday night, however, revives the glimmer of a possibility that Romney can still be beat. But it will nevertheless be a difficult challenge and, in the short term, will require at least tacit cooperation between the Santorum and Gingrich campaigns.
Stacy goes on to explain why he thinks they must do this. I don’t know. I’ll have to ponder it further. What I do know, however, is that we can’t let these victories make us relax in our quest to see Willard’s Quest For The Holy Grail fail.
-Over at NRO, Quin Hillyer tells the naysayers off:
Santorum has run a campaign on a budgetary shoestring. He has been written off repeatedly by the pundit class and by the entire political establishment. He was supposed to appeal only to social conservatives. But he has triumphed tonight, after winning in Iowa, after winning four — count them, four — uphill races in purplish-blue Pennsylvania. It is high time that people start respecting Santorum’s political skills, his political appeal, and his heartfelt conservative principles.
-Michelle Malkin’s coverage from last night and the wee small hours of this morning is well-worth a read. Her best quip:
Mitt Romney: Tonight, you were Rick-rolled.
-Pundette’s morning-after take is also well-worth a look at. Her best remark:
Wow! And Santorum didn’t just beat Romney; he trounced him. Newt was reduced to an also ran.
NEWT DESTRUCTA EST!:
-Who?
-Well, at least, Tiffanys will make some bucks off this [gotta keep Plastica happy, don't you know].
ROMNEY DELENDA EST!:
-From Smitty I learned that Willard wants to index the Minimum Wage to inflation. He provides a quote from and a link to Thom Sowell who demolishes Mandate Mitt’s reasoning.
One has to wonder why Willard brought up this issue when it hasn’t even been trumpeted yet by the Bolshes. Is he trying to make amends and suck up to the poor?
Perhaps The Bain Of Our Existence [as Smitty so wonderfully and accurately labels Willard] is a Pander Bear?
Smitty comments:
Romney, combining the worst aspects of a politician and a roulette wheel, will probably come out strongly at war with Eastasian minimum wage laws, which he has always fought.
Just a matter of time…and circumstance.
-Speaking of Willard being a victim of circumstance [nyuk, nyuk]: he certainly was last night. Conservatives told him and the GOP Establishment to put their Inevitability Meme where the sun don’t shine.
QUI PUTAT SE POSSE PRAEDICERE EVENTU CERTAMINE, INSIPIENS EST.
“will require at least tacit cooperation between the Santorum and Gingrich campaigns.”
It better not. Newt’s a dog whut’d piss in the corncrib, IYKWIMAITYD
Afte having spent several hours thinking about Stacy’s idea, I’m against it because it won’t work. Newton Leroy just can’t be trusted.
I’m proud that my state (Minnesota) could give Santorum a big margin of victory, but I’m not holding out much hope that anyone can take down Romney anymore.
When anyone tries to convince me that Romney will be an ‘o.k.’ Conservative, I hit them with a well known quote from famous football coach Bill Parcells: “You are what your record says you are.” And Romneys record?? **spit**
George W turned out to be a RINO, and now we’re about to have a nominee who is to the left of even him.
It’s depressing and the odds are against us, but it’s our duty to make the fight.
I could get behind Santorum – as the next best debater of conservatism behind Newt. All I need from ‘ol Rick is a promise to not use the blunt instrument of gub’ment to impose his morality via federalized right wing social engineering projects.
d(^_^)b
http://libertyatstake.blogspot.com/
“Because the Only Good Progressive is a Failed Progressive”
I am going to commit a small heresy: I don’t see much wrong with a minimum wage, in theory, nor do I have a problem indexing it to inflation. If the minimum wage were, say, $4/hour, that would be fine by me. It’s not principled, it still interferes with a market, blah blah blah, but it does provide a very, very basic protection against exploitation.
The problem isn’t minimum wage, per se – it’s what the federal government has done with it. I’m here to tell you that $7.25/hour in rural areas is a living wage, not what you should be getting for flipping burgers. I’m also here to tell you that when minimum wage is $8/hour, it’s suddenly a lot harder to justify paying your admins $23,000 a year (which might be a fine wage for them), when that’s just a smidgeon above actual minimum wage, and they aren’t doing smidgeon-above-minimum-wage work. The problem with liberals is that they don’t understand the minimum part of minimum wage – they treat it like “ideal” or “acceptable for someone with a degree in art history.”
Yes, a lower minimum wage just means that fewer workers are priced out of the market, but I really can’t help but think that there just aren’t many people who can’t get hired for anything more than $3.90 an hour, but there are a fair number of people who could be exploited if minimum wage were totally abolished. Balancing competing interests and all.
Anyway… one of the other problems is that you can’t lower the minimum wage, and states can’t override the federal government’s nonsense. In this economy, a sane minimum wage, if you buy the idea that we should have one, might be $5/hour ’round these parts. But we would have to wait another generation for inflation to take us to that point, which is deeply problematic.
I’m not surprised with Mr. Santorum winning Minnesota. The state’s actually more Catholic than Lutheran, and since the favourite children dropped out, I’m not sure who else would win. Neither Mr. Romney or Mr. Gingrich look like the types to have ever gone fishing.