The 44th President of the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama, recently performed a self-assessment, which aired on NBC before the Superbowl last Sunday.

Thehill.com reports:

President Obama in a pre-Super Bowl interview aired on Sunday said that despite being unable to completely turn the economy around in three years, he still deserves to be re-elected.

“I deserve a second term but we’re not done,” Obama told NBC’s Matt Lauer in an interview broadcast from the White House.

Lauer noted that in a pre-Super Bowl interview three years ago, Obama had said “If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.”

Obama said that three years ago the economy was losing 750,000 jobs a month and the latest unemployment data from Friday shows. “Now we are creating 250,000,” he said.

Obama said that more needs to be done to boost manufacturing and improve worker skills.

“The key right now is just making sure we aren’t turning in a new direction that could throw that progress off,” he said.

In the NBC interview, Obama reiterated that at this stage military options are not off the table in dealing with Iran’s possible quest for a nuclear weapon.

Obama said that diplomacy is preferred because of the risks of military action.

“Obviously any additional military activity in the Gulf is disruptive and has a big effect on us,” he said, noting “it could have a big effect on oil prices.”

Obama said that he doesn’t think Israel has decided whether it would attack Iran, but indicated his belief the U.S. would not be blind-sided.

“We have closer military and intelligence consultations than we ever had,” he said.

The president’s glowing self-assessment of his job performance hardly represents a consensus of America’s opinion.

According to realclearpolitics.com, the president’s job approval stands at 48.6% favorable, 47.4% expressing disapproval, representing an average of 5 different polls.

Regarding the direction America is heading in, again, per an average of 5 different polls by realclearpolitics.com, 29.6% of American believe that we’re heading in the right direction, compared to 63.4% of us who believe that Obama’s leading the country to Hell in a hand basket.

Those polls help to explain the resurgent popularity of a painting completed in 2010 by Christian Conservative artist John McNaughton.

KXNT CBS Las Vegas has the story:

Sales soared for a painting depicting Obama trampling on the Constitution after a story CBS Las Vegas produced last weekend went viral.

John McNaughton’s “The Forgotten Man” sold in one day “what we would sell in three months.”

The amount of traffic the story generated even crashed his website.

“I hate to think of the sales I lost with the site being down, but I’m pleased that the message got out,” he told CBS Las Vegas.

His webmaster needed to increase the amount of bandwidth for the site four times before it went back up Saturday night.

While sales of the painting went up, McNaughton said he got reactions from a “mixed bag of people” over the story.

“People really loved the painting and some were really angry,” he told CBS Las Vegas. “Our country is really divided and emotions run high on both sides of the aisle.”

Because of the delicate subject matter raised in his art, McNaughton was often accused of racism.

“I think racism is a legitimate issue. But I think if you want to speak out against Obama and his policies is one thing, but being called a racist gets tiresome when it has nothing to do with the painting.”

McNaughton was hesitant to paint “The Forgotten Man” before it was released in 2010, but “pushed to do it” despite his friends’ reservations.

Since “The Forgotten Man” was released, McNaughton painted what he described as “a sequel.”

The painting is called “Wake Up America” and it features “The Forgotten Man” trying to saw himself out of the chains of debt.

Throughout the tableau there are faces of sadness, blame, and desperation. President Obama is also prominently featured as a ring leader to the madness.

McNaughton also did another painting called “Via Dolorosa” in which historical figures bear witness to Jesus’ crucifixion.

“A lot of it has to do with modern day Christians and where they stand in history,” McNaughton said about the painting.

As for his next work, McNaughton is keeping the details under wraps.

“It’s called ‘One Nation Under Socialism.’ It’s political, but I want to keep it under my hat. I want to surprise people so there are no misconceptions.”

“One Nation Under Socialism” will be released in about a month.

Barack Hussein Obama is turning out to be the most divisive president in U.S. History.

With his recent decision to force Catholic Hospitals to offer all forms of birth control, including the controversial morning-after pill, he has demonstrated a laser-like focus on completing the socialist course which he has charted for the greatest nation on God’s green Earth (i.e., “spreading the wealth around”)…regardless of the consequences or the wishes of its citizens, and, in the process, ignoring the oath he swore on January 20, 2009:

Going into last night’s trifecta of Caucuses in Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri, Mitt “The Legacy” Romney had already been declared the presumptive Republican Nominee by his Conservative-website-invading horde of obnoxious paid and unpaid posters.

Which was remarkable in itself, considering that Romney had only amassed 101 of the 1,144 delegates needed to win the Nomination as the Republican Presidential Candidate.

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to Mitt’s coronation.

2 out of the three states , Minnesota and Colorado, actually had delegates at stake last night (a total of 70).  The third state, Missouri, had no delegates at stake, and was labelled by the media and political pundits as a “Republican Beauty Pageant”.

Rick Santorum, who had already won the Hawkeye Cauci, was declared the winner of the contest in Missouri early in the evening, eventually winning by the margin of 55% of the vote to Romney’s 25% .  Gingrich was not on the ballot.

By around 9:00 p.m. Central, Santorum had been declared the winner of the Minnesota Caucus, as well, leading Ron Paul, with 45% to 27% of the vote.  “Mr. Electability”, Mitt Romney, was in third place.

Finally, as we woke up this morning, we were greeted by an upset, as Santorum beat Romney, 40% – 35%,  in Colorado.

Per the Associated Press, Santorum has worked hard in preparation for last night’s contests:

He campaigned more aggressively this week than any of the other contenders, and he spent the day hopscotching from Colorado to Minnesota to Missouri in hopes of nailing down a victory in one of the states. Touting himself as a true conservative – a slap at Gingrich – he sought to undermine Romney’s electability claim at the same time by predicting the former Massachusetts governor would lose to Obama.

Romney responded by assailing Santorum as an advocate of congressional earmarks – shifting the criticism he had leveled at Gingrich when the Georgian seemed a more imposing threat.

In the hours before the caucuses convened, the front-runner sought to lower expectations.

“Mitt Romney is not going to win every contest,” Rich Beeson, the campaign’s political director, wrote in a memo for public consumption.

“John McCain lost 19 states in 2008, and we expect our opponents will notch a few wins, too,” Beeson wrote. McCain, the Arizona senator, won the Republican nomination four years ago.

In fact, Colorado and Minnesota were among the states that McCain failed to win, and he lost them to Romney.

In the four years since, the GOP has become more conservative in both. That posed a challenge for Romney, who runs as the Republican most likely to defeat Obama and is still trying to establish his credentials among tea party activists suspicious of a one-time moderate who backed abortion rights.

Two years ago in Minnesota, establishment candidates for governor were swept aside in the primary, and tea party-backed insurgents for governor and the Senate in Colorado won the party nominations.

In all three cases, Democrats won in the general election that fall.

Gingrich spent the day campaigning in Ohio, one of the primary states on March 6.

His campaign went into a downward spiral after he won the South Carolina primary in an upset. The former speaker was routed in the Florida primary to Romney, then finished a distant second in Nevada over the weekend.

Last night’s winner remarked to a jubilant crowd in St. Charles, Missouri:

Tonight, we had an opportunity to see what a campaign looks like when one candidate isn’t outspent 5- or 10-to-1 by negative ads impugning their integrity and distorting their record. This is a more accurate representation, frankly, of what the fall race will look like.

I don’t stand here to be the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney, I stand here to be the conservative alternative to Barack Obama.

Regarding the political issues of health care, cap and trade and the Wall Street bailout, Santorum added:

Mitt Romney has the same positions as Barack Obama.

Speaking to supporters in Denver, Romney congratulated Santorum:

This was a good night for Rick Santorum. We’ll keep on campaigning down the road, but I expect to become our nominee with your help.

And then, he offered a bit of solicitous prophecy:

When this primary season is over, we’re going to stand united as a party behind our nominee to defeat Barack Obama.

Of course, that is what Romney hopes.

The gigantic hurdle he faces, is the fact that he is about as appealing to the Conservative base as the incumbent president he will be facing if he becomes the Republican Nominee.

Earlier in this post, I mentioned the hordes of supporters, both paid and upaid, that have seemingly invaded the comments sections of Conservative websites, in what can only be described as a slash and burn Romney offensive, designed to convince Conservatives that Romney is “a man of the people”.

Unfortunately for the Romney Campaign, “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry”.  The posters offering their support for Romney, through rude and obnoxious comments and insults aimed at everyday posters on these sites, have actually done more to reinforce the image Conservatives in the Heartland hold of Romney as a pompous, stuffed shirt.

These supporters have basically helped to, at least temporarily, stall whatever momentum Romney was building.

Whether he can get that momentum back or not, depends on whether he’s willing to actually campaign in earnest among average Conservative Americans in the Heartland, or he remains content to allow his internet operatives to continue to cajole and insult Conservatives into begrudgingly voting for him as the “last man standing”.

Tags:  Santorum, Romney, conservatives

The Mid-East remains a power keg, with a very short fuse attached.

Israel is getting ready to turn Iran into a parking lot, and the Obama Administration-lauded Arab Spring has replaced the Moderate Despots we knew with Muslim Despots we don’t.

In the home of the Sphinx, the Egyptian Revolution and the subsequent elections have produced results that those purveyors of Smart Power!, President Barack Hussein Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the State Department, weren’t exactly counting on.

Israelnationalnews carried this story last December:

Americans can be thankful President Barack Obama never pursued a career as an investment banker.

The Obama administration spent some $200 million backing liberal and pro-Western political parties in Egypt’s elections.

But with 65 percent of the vote going to Islamist parties – including the Muslim Brotherhood – it looks like a poor investment.

According to Campaigns & Elections magazine the money was funneled into Egyptian politics through the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute.

Stephen McInerney, executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy, told C&E the focus of the monies – officially ear-marked for “infrastructure development” – was primarily spent on helping smaller political parties compete against the better organized Freedom and Justice Party, the Muslim Brotherhood’s party.

The first round of Parliamentary elections in Egypt this week saw voting in nine of the country’s 27 provinces. The staggered elections will continue over the coming months.

The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party – whose leadership advocates implementing Sharia Law – won 40 percent of the vote on Wednesday. An additional 15 percent went to hard-line Salafi Islamists.

In addition to an utter failure to organize Egypt’s moderate and secular parties into a meaningful force at the polls, Obama’s left-handed funding of foreign political parties outside the United States has fueled an underlying anti-American sentiment and accusations of US “meddling” on the banks of the Nile.

Amid the Islamist electoral avalanche, Egypt’s military ruler has sworn in a new government that he says will have more powers than its predecessor. Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi promised to transfer some of his ruling military council’s executive powers to Prime Minister Kamal el-Ganzouri.

The interim junta did not go into specifics on what new powers the Cabinet will have, but said only that it will continue to control the judiciary and the armed forces. Egypt’s generals have been tightly in control of managing the country’s affairs since Hosni Mubarak stepped down in February, infuriating critics who accuse them of maintaining the status quo – and demand civilian rule.

The interim junta has sought to maintain the geopolitical status quo – including the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty – as a means of protecting the billions of US foreign aid dollars that have turned Egypt into a regional power-player.

The Obama administration’s meddling in the domestic politics of foreign countries is not limited to Egypt. USAID dollars under Obama have been routinely routed into NGO’s in Israel that pursue political agendas – raising the specter of sanitized US government monies potentially finding their way into Israel’s elections as well.

I’m sure, by now, you’ve heard President Obama described as Carter on steroids.

President Carter had his Hostage Crisis…and now President Obama has one of his own:

washingtontimes.com reports:

Ignoring a stern U.S. threat, Egypt on Sunday referred 43 NGO workers, including 19 Americans, to trial before a criminal court for allegedly using illegal foreign funds to foment unrest.

The decision marked a sharp escalation of the dispute between Cairo and Washington over Egypt‘s crackdown on U.S.-funded groups promoting democracy and human rights. The two countries have been close allies for more than three decades, but the campaign against the organizations has angered Washington and jeopardized the $1.5 billion in aid Egypt is set to receive from the U.S. this year.

On Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned Egypt‘s foreign minister that failure to resolve the dispute may lead to the loss of American aid. The Egyptian minister, Mohammed Amr, responded Sunday by saying the government cannot interfere in the work of the judiciary.

“We are doing our best to contain this but … we cannot actually exercise any influence on the investigating judges right now when it comes to the investigation,” Mr. Amr told reporters at a security conference in Munich.

Among the Americans sent to trial is Sam LaHood, the head of the Egypt office of the Washington-based International Republican Institute and the son of U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. Five Serbs, two Germans and three non-Egyptian Arab nationals are also among those referred to trial.

All 43 have been banned from leaving the country. A date has yet to be set for the start of the trial.

Obama has been diplomatically wooing the Muslim Brotherhood, the Terrorist group who is rapidly becoming the nation’s Power Brokers in Egypt.

A fat lot of good that’s doing.

Just ask those 43 prisoners.

It appears Smart Power! is neither.

tags:  Egypt, Smart Power!, Obama, Foreign Policy, Arab Spring, revolution, Muslim Brotherhood, Mubarak

I reached a personal goal this week.  Not exactly the way I wanted to reach it, but I reached it nonetheless.

More on that in a moment.

As I was hanging out on my third (behind kingsjester.wordpress.com and genehoyas.com) favorite Conservative website, hotair.com, this week, I noticed something:

Conservative Americans are divided and yet, united, at the same time.

We’re divided by 2 things.

1.  Definition – There are Americans out there identifying themselves as Conservatives, who are as far from being a Conservative, as President Barack Hussein Obama is from being a Southern Baptist.

Now, some of them believe if you only agree ideologically with one of the three criteria President Ronald Reagan presented as the three-legged stool of Conservatism (Fiscal, Social, and National Defense), then you’re a Conservative.

These folks proclaim themselves Fiscal Conservatives.  In reality, they are either Moderates or Liberals.

From behind the anonymity of a computer screen, these self-righteous “Conservatives” have labeled Reagan Conservatives “True” Conservatives, meaning it as the ultimate derision, brought about by an over-estimation of their own intellect and political astuteness.

What completely blows their minds, is when you confront them with the fact, per Gallup, that 75% of Americans proclaim Christianity, and 92% of Americans believe in God, because, it turns out, that a lot of these “Fiscal” Conservatives actually seem to have something in common with Karl Marx:  They view religion as “the opiate of the masses”, something which is beneath their gargantuan intellects.

They are a bitter bunch, as a whole.

2.  Conservatives are divided by geographical region.  A lot of these before-mentioned “Fiscal” Conservatives seem to live up in the Northeast or out West.

Gallup.com has released a survey ranking the states as to how Conservative they are:

Mississippi remains the most conservative state in the union, and, along with Utah, Wyoming, and Alabama, is one of four states with 50% or more of its population identifying as conservative. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, 40% District of Columbia residents and 30% of Massachusetts residents identify as liberal; all other states have a liberal population of 26% or less.

As has been the case in recent years, Americans overall are significantly more likely to identify as conservative than as liberal. Forty percent of more than 218,000 adults 18 and older interviewed in Gallup tracking in 2011 said they were conservative, 36% were moderate, and 21% liberal. Only in the District of Columbia and Massachusetts did liberals outnumber conservatives.

Politics in America today varies widely across the states and regions of the country, and ideology is no exception. Mississippi and Massachusetts are the two states that provide the most extreme contrast, with 53% of Mississippians identifying as conservative and 11% identifying as liberal, while 29% of Massachusetts residents are conservative and 30% are liberal.

More generally, the 10 most conservative states in 2011 were in the South (Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee), the Midwest (Oklahoma and Nebraska), and the West (Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho). None were on the East or West Coast.

By contrast, all of the 11 most liberal states in 2011 were coastal — the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Connecticut in the East, and Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, and California in the West.

…America remains a conservative nation, at least as measured by the ideological labels Americans choose to use to identify themselves. Residents of all states of the union except for Massachusetts and the District of Columbia are more likely to identify as conservative than as liberal, and in every state except D.C., residents are also more likely to say they are moderate than liberal. The general distribution of ideology across the states follows traditional red-blue distinctions, with liberals most highly represented on the East and West Coasts, while conservatives dominate in Southern, Midwestern, and Western states.

So, how are Conservatives united?

We all want Barack Hussein Obama to become an ex-president as soon as possible.  We share a common bond:  We are the American Majority:

Political ideology in the U.S. held steady in 2011, with 40% of Americans continuing to describe their views as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 21% as liberal. This marks the third straight year that conservatives have outnumbered moderates, after more than a decade in which moderates mainly tied or outnumbered conservatives.

The percentage of Americans calling themselves “moderate” has gradually diminished in the U.S. since it was 43% in 1992. That is the year Gallup started routinely measuring ideology with the current question. It fell to 39% in 2002 and has been 35% since 2010. At the same time, the country became more politically polarized, with the percentages of Americans calling themselves either “conservative” or “liberal” each increasing.

Gallup measures political ideology by asking Americans to say whether their political views are very conservative, conservative, moderate, liberal, or very liberal. Relatively few Americans identify with either extreme on this scale, although 2 in 10 Republicans self-identify as very conservative — double the proportion of Democrats calling themselves very liberal.

Hanging out on the Internet, one can become burnt-out and extremely depressed.  There are a lot of nattering nimrods of negativity out there, claiming to fly the banner of Conservatism.

Just as you do in your real life, spend your cyber life hanging out with people who lift you up.

If Conservatives stick to Conservative principles, lift each other up, and keep our eyes on the prize, 2012 is going to be a great year.

Now, about that personal goal I mentioned earlier.  When I married my bride in July of 2009 I weighed 254 lbs.  As of today, after losing my final 5 lbs this week due to a bout of bronchitis, I weigh 210 lbs, my collegiate weight (at 53 years old), a goal which I set for myself when I began to lose weight in January of 2010.  There was no secret to it.  I backed away from the table, ate more grilled chicken, and used the stairs.  Here are a couple of before and after pictures:

As Conservatives, we need to set a goal of sending Obama back to Chicago.  Because, no matter how lousy the Republican candidates are, every single one of them is better than the present occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC.

What a difference a day makes. Hey, that would be a great song title…oh, never mind.

Yesterday morning, Mitt Romney was sitting on top of the world, Ma.  He had just won decisively in Florida (the Southern state full of Northeastern refugees.)  It looked like smooth sailing ahead, as his campaign staff, their paid internet posters, and the MSM had a lot of Americans convinced that the flip-floppin’ Moderate was, in fact, a Conservative.

Then, Mitt’s not-so-very-nice day began.

The morning started off with news that Mitt has inserted his foot in his mouth:

Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney, confident after his Florida primary victory, ended up inviting criticism Wednesday when he said he’s “not concerned about the very poor” because they have an “ample safety net.”

Democrats and Republicans alike – including opponent Newt Gingrich – pounced and the GOP front-runner quickly sought to explain his remarks.

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” Romney told reporters on his campaign plane when asked about the comments. “No, no, no. You’ve got to take the whole sentence, all right, it’s mostly the same.” He said his remark was consistent with his theme throughout the race, adding: “My energy is going to be devoted to helping middle-income people.”

Despite that explanation, Romney’s comments quickly became an immediate distraction from his message that he’s more conservative than Gingrich and from the double-digit thumping the former House speaker sustained in Florida. His campaign worked behind the scenes to provide context for the comment.

Spin, baby, spin.  Now we know why his handlers don’t let Mitt speak extemporaneously very often.  But, hey, he still has all those delegates from Florida, huh?

Uhhh…maybe not.  Foxnews.com reports that

The Newt Gingrich campaign is gearing up to challenge the results of the Florida Republican presidential primary based on the Republican National Committee’s own rules which state that no contest can be winner-take-all prior to April 1, 2012.

It was assumed that Mitt Romney, who won Tuesday’s contest, would gain all 50 of the state’s delegates. But the Gingrich campaign plans to challenge Florida’s allocation and demand the delegates be divvied up proportionally.

Fox News has learned exclusively that on Thursday, a Florida Gingrich campaign official will begin the process of trying to have the RNC rules enforced so that the Sunshine State delegates are distributed based on the percentage of the vote each candidate got.

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus warned Florida Republican Party Chairman Lenny Curry of the violation in a December letter quoting the rule, “…’winner-take-all’ states cannot hold a primary or caucus before April 1, 2012.”

Tuesday night’s Romney victory in the Sunshine State awarded the former Massachusetts governor all 50 Florida delegates (the state was already docked half its delegates for moving the election up on the calendar). Romney won the primary with 46 percent to Gingrich’s 32 percent. Rick Santorum finished third with 13 percent and Ron Paul with 7 percent.

That would mean Romney would receive 23 delegates, Gingrich 16, Santorum 6.5, and Paul 3.5.

Where they are going to find a couple of .5 delegates, I have no idea. 

Finally, as the sun was fading into the Western sky, so was the lie that Romney is a Conservative.  Mouth…meet second foot:

Mitt Romney said Wednesday that he supported tying the federal minimum wage to inflation, a move that would result in automatic increases to the pay rate. The position is a break from fiscal conservative orthodoxy — which generally seeks to eliminate the minimum wage — but could help Romney rebound from damaging comments he made earlier Wednesday when discussing the “very poor” in America.

“I haven’t changed my thoughts on that,” Romney told reporters aboard his campaign plane on Wednesday, according to The Associated Press. He was apparently referring to a statement he made in 2002 when running for governor of Massachusetts, when he advocated an increase in the minimum wage and indexing it to inflation — a proposal President Obama touted in 2008 during his presidential run.

But in 2006 Romney vetoed an increase in Massachusetts’s minimum wage, arguing that a salary hike would cause a loss of jobs. The last federal increase, which passed in 2007, implemented gradual increases until 2009, when the minimum wage hit its current rate of $7.25 an hour.

Since then, Romney has made reference to an indexed minimum wage on the campaign trail, signaling that he still supported the idea on a federal level.

Newt Gingrich said last month that he was “surprised” that Romney held the position when asked about it during a New Hampshire town hall.

“I’m surprised because what it does is guarantees higher unemployment,” Gingrich said. When his questioner offered video of Romney supporting the inflation-based minimum wage, Gingrich joked he’d “like that a lot.”

I’ll bet.

What was Romney thinking?  He had it made.  All the formidable resources of the Republican Establishment were carrying his water in 50 gallon tubs.

The inimitable Mark Steyn fired off this missive directly after the day’s first gaffe of the day was announced:

Romney’s is a benevolent patrician’s view of society: The poor are incorrigible, but let’s add a couple more groats to their food stamps and housing vouchers, and they’ll stay quiet. Aside from the fact that that kind of thinking has led the western world to near terminal insolvency, for a candidate whose platitudinous balderdash of a stump speech purports to believe in the most Americanly American America that any American has ever Americanized over, it’s as dismal a vision of permanent trans-generational poverty as any Marxist community organizer with a cozy sinecure on the Acorn board would come up with.

After half-a-century of evidence, what sort of “conservative” offers the poor the Even Greater Society? I don’t know how “electable” Mitt is, but, even if he is, the greater danger, given the emptiness of his campaign to date, is that he’ll be elected with no real mandate for the course correction the Brokest Nation in History urgently needs. In last Monday’s debate, Newt said he wasn’t interested in going to Washington to “manage the decline”. Mitt’s just told us that he’s happy to “manage the decline” for the poor – but who knows who else?

He answered Steyn’s question later yesterday.  He wants to “manage” a benevolent nanny-state, as well.

“Conservative”, my hindquarters.

On January 2nd, politico.com reported the following:

Charlie Black, the longtime Washington power broker and former top adviser to John McCain, has come off the sidelines of the 2012 campaign to back Mitt Romney for president.

Black was one of the operatives involved in planning a possible White House bid for Mitch Daniels, and said after Daniels opted out of the race that he intended to stay neutral.

That changed around Thanksgiving, Black told POLITICO, when he and his wife concluded that Romney was just about the only candidate in the field with the capacity to run a race all the way to November.

“It looked to us like he was the best guy to win and maybe the only guy in the field who could win,” said Black, who explained he’s “trying to help however I can.”

Black predicted that Romney would be able to wrap up the nomination relatively quickly once the early primary states winnow the GOP field.

“As it narrows down, Romney’s not going to have any trouble going from 25 percent to 35 to 45 to 55,” Black said. “When the choices narrow, Romney’s in an excellent position … His message and experience is exactly on point with what people care about now.”

Romney has made headway in recent months — the third quarter of 2011 especially — in winning over veteran GOP campaign hands like Black, and his supporters expect that movement to accelerate once he starts winning primaries.

Now, exactly one month after hiring Mr. Black, Mitt Romney and his Campaign Staff are to be congratulated for their overwhelming victory in Florida.

Who is Charlie Black?

Mr. Black grew up in Wilmington, N.C., the son of Southern Democrats who switched affiliation to vote for Barry Goldwater in 1964. He joined Young Americans for Freedom at the University of Florida, and moved to Washington to work for the group’s national staff, where he met one of its big supporters, Mr. Helms.

In 1975, Mr. Black and two other young conservatives, Roger Stone and Terry Dolan, founded the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which set a new standard for negative advertising with its campaigns against six liberal senators in 1980, portraying them as “baby killers” for their support of abortion rights, cozy with Castro and soft on national defense. His first hire at the 1980 Reagan campaign was Lee Atwater, who was just becoming famous for a slashing brand of politics.

Yet while his partners delighted in their reputations as princes of darkness, Mr. Black has avoided celebrity.

“I’ve always believed you’re in politics to help these candidates and not yourself, and you should stay out of the news if you can,” he said. “Roger and Lee are examples of guys who never did anything to discourage a little bit of a bad boy image.”

He started his lobbying firm in 1980, as he said, “thinking someday I’m going to need a real job in between campaigns.” Black, Manafort and Stone — it would later expand to include Mr. Atwater, who died in 1991 — became one of the most aggressive and well-connected Republican lobbying shops in Washington.

The firm was so entwined with the Reagan White House that administration officials gave it a heads-up so it could cancel its contract with a client, President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, two hours before Reagan withdrew his support.

It became bipartisan in the mid-1980s, and its political consulting wing was so successful that its partners frequently worked for both sides in a race. Senior partners were granted Mercedes-Benzes and memberships to the country clubs of their choice. In 1990, they sold the firm to Burson-Marsteller, reportedly making them multimillionaires.

In recent years, Mr. Black’s clients have included AT&T, Johnson and Johnson, the worldwide lottery firm GTech, Lockheed Martin, United Technologies, Yukos Oil, and the governments of Greece, Armenia and Cyprus. BKSH worked for Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, as well as the Lincoln Group, hired by the Pentagon to generate positive stories about the Iraq war.

“The Republican Party’s quintessential company man,” as one friend calls him, Mr. Black has worked in every Republican presidential campaign since 1972, and sometimes a couple each season, being diplomat enough to get along with both sides in some of the fiercest rivalries.

Including the failed 2008 Presidential Campaign of John McCain.

During the Reagan Administration, African Dictators were negotiated with, including the infamous Angolan Warlord, Jonas Savimbi, whose rebellion left thousands dead or homeless.

The man oiling Washington’s political establishment on behalf of most of this rogues’ gallery is Charlie Black, according to the group Citizens for Ethics Black started his Washington career with segregationist Jesse Helms and worked on Reagan’s re-election campaign in 1984. He used those contacts to ease the path to the Oval Office for his clients. In 1985 the Black lobbying firm reportedly made at least $600,000 from Savimbi.

Well, after all, as Mitt Romney said the other day, while making fun of Newt:

Politics ain’t beanbag.

Nope.  It’s more ruthless than that.

I remember watching Johnny Carson on the Tonight show years ago.  Already on the couch were three legends:  Bob Hope, John Wayne, and Dean Martin.  Comedian Lonesome George Gobel came out to do a stand-up routine.  He came over to sit by Johnny.    For those of you unfamiliar with “Lonesome George”, as he was called, George was around 60 years old, with a brush cut and a face like a basset hound.

George looked down the couch at the three legends sitting there, paused for just the right amount of time, grinned at the camera and said:

Did you ever feel like the world was a tuxedo and you were a pair of brown shoes?

Going into the Republican Primary today in Florida, Newt Gingrich must feel that way.

This past week, Gingrich was the object of an unbelievably intense attack by the Main Stream Media, any Democrat that could get close to a microphone, and, of, course, Mitt “The Legend” Romney.

And it’s continuing even as I write this blog.  According to MSNBC:

Calling himself “the legitimate heir to the Reagan movement,” Newt Gingrich recently cited a 1995 speech by Nancy Reagan in which the former First Lady said that her husband “passed on the torch” to him.

“In 1995, Nancy Reagan at the Goldwater Institute was very generous,” Gingrich told voters in Florida on Sunday. “And she said ‘Just as Barry gave the torch to Ronny, Ronny has passed on the torch to Newt.’”

But as NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reports, Gingrich appears to be taking that comment out of context.

Sources close to Nancy Reagan said the speech itself was written by the host at the Goldwater Organization – where Mrs. Reagan delivered the remarks – and that she was referring generally to Congress and not specifically to the former Speaker, Mitchell reported on her MSNBC program.

Gingrich’s claim that he was a key figure in the Reagan revolution in 1980s is “patently false,” added Al Hunt, executive editor of Bloomberg News, during an appearance on Mitchell’s show.

Hunt said that Reagan biographer Lou Cannon has contended that Gingrich had nothing to do with the “Reagan Revolution.”

“He was a backbencher. Lou’s not even sure Reagan knew who Gingrich was,” Hunt said.

Hunt painted a stark contrast between “can-do optimist” Reagan and Gingrich, whose appeal derives from being able to “attack Democrats better than anybody.”

“I think they are quite different people. And certainly at a minimum, the Speaker’s claims — or his latter-day Reaganism — are exaggerated” Hunt added.

So, what was Newt doing while this “story” broke?  He was out campaigning with MICHAEL REAGAN.

Meanwhile “The Legacy”, gracious individual that he is, was not out attacking Obama and explaining all the great things he’s going to do if he wins the Republican Nomination and, somehow, beats the incumbent. (If Obama doesn’t bring up the whole “rich guy” thing or, shudder, Romneycare.)

Nope.  He was making fun of Gingrich:

A confident Mitt Romney solidified his lead in Florida polls and ridiculed Republican rival Newt Gingrich on Monday, calling his opponent’s attacks “sad” and “painfully revealing” the day before the state’s crucial presidential primary.

Romney’s self-assuredness was on full display during a campaign tour that felt at times like a victory lap, with the front-runner telling a crowd of 2,000 in Dunedin, Florida: “With a turnout like this I got a feeling we might win tomorrow.”

Romney has a double-digit lead in most polls in the state, where he said voters responded to his more aggressive criticism over the past week of Gingrich’s work for mortgage giant Freddie Mac, his ethics probe and his resignation as U.S. House of Representatives speaker.

“There’s no question that politics ain’t bean bags, and we have made sure that our message is out loud and clear,” Romney said on NBC’s “Today” show.

Gingrich, hit hard last week by a more aggressive Romney strategy, branded his rival as a party insider and elite friend of Wall Street while pledging to stay in the presidential race for the long haul no matter what the outcome in Florida.

“On big philosophical issues, he is for all practical purposes a liberal and I am a conservative and that’s what this fight is going to be about all the way to the convention,” he said of Romney on “CBS This Morning.”

Romney shrugged off the continued Gingrich attacks, drawing cheers from the crowd when he said Gingrich was not doing too well and had been “flailing about.”

“I know, it’s sad isn’t it?” Romney said, calling it “painfully revealing” and adding: “You’ve just gotta shake your head.”

Funny.  Mitt didn’t deny he was a Liberal, did he?

There’s a reason that “The Establishment” Republicans, the Democrats, and the Main Stream Media have gone out of their way to destroy Newt Gingrich’s Reputation and political aspirations:

They will tell you whom they fear.