Red Barron

Set your DVRs – or stay up way past a reasonable bed time – to see me on Fox News Red Eye at 3 am tonight/tomorrow morning.  Totally stoked that GOProud Advisory Council member and Fox News contributor Margaret Hoover will be rocking the leg chair tonight!

From the Daily Caller, why I still support Gary Johnson for President:

I simply can’t put the square peg in the circle hole. I am firmly committed to defeating Barack Obama and turning back his disastrous policies, and I wanted to believe that I could support whomever the Republican Party nominated. Unfortunately, I cannot in good conscience do that.

Let me be crystal clear: I am speaking only for myself and not for GOProud, the organization that I co-founded. I fully expect the GOProud Board will endorse the eventual nominee of the Republican Party. I, however, will not cast a vote in favor of that.

Partisan political affiliations are far less important to me than principle. I don’t consider myself a Republican first, I consider myself a limited-government conservative first; the party label comes in a distant second. I won’t simply blindly support a Republican nominee just because he has an R beside his name. The truth is political parties don’t believe in anything — well, anything except winning — and believing in something is exactly why I got involved in politics in the first place.

When it comes to selecting a candidate for president, I don’t want to settle on the lesser of two evils or support the nominee just to be a good “team player.” I want to believe in that candidate.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/02/20/3068272/#ixzz1mxp26CXD

Just an FYI… I will be speaking at the Students for Liberty Conference this morning in downtown DC… If you can’t attend in person, but want to see what’s going on you can watch the live stream of the conference here.

Santorum has certainly made a strong play for the take us back to the 18th century crowd with his talk of the dangers of contraception and his support for giving states the right to criminalize gay sex.  And given the large populations of Amish in the key swing states of Pennsylvania and Ohio, you might think this is a genius strategy.

Unfortunately for Santorum, very few Amish vote (as in less than half are registered to vote and only about 15% of the half who bother to register actually vote).

As Romney and Santorum duke it out to see who can be less appealing to anyone with a sex life, or a social life for that matter, I am thinking no matter who ends up winning the nomination that Adam Ant might be a good addition to this year’s Republican National Convention.

For the last two months, I have said that Mitt Romney is the only Republican candidate with the national infrastructure and the money to win the GOP nomination.  As recently as last week, I told CNN that there was no real horse race here – that Romney will be the nominee.  To quote Chevy Chase in Fletch Lives, “It takes a big man to admit when he is wrong, I am not a big man.”  

The reality, however, is that it is clear that Romney is no longer the inevitable nominee.  The most recent Real Clear Politics average of polls from Michigan show former PA Senator Rick Santorum leading Romney by 8 points.  What was unthinkable just two weeks ago – that Romney could lose in Michigan – now not only looks possible, it looks probable.

Mitt Romney still has big advantages in money and organization, but so far neither of those seemed to have been as important in this cycle as they have been in previous cycles.  That having been said, this election will go national soon, and Super Tuesday will be the real test of whether Romney’s conventional campaign can beat back the insurgent campaign of Rick Santorum.

Mitt Romney is still the likely nominee, but he is no longer inevitable.

In an election that should be about jobs and the economy, even considering nominating Rick Santorum is like hiring a plumber to fix your car.  Santorum is not a fiscal conservative, has an economic “plan” that could be borrowed from John Edwards, and proudly proclaims that we don’t need a CEO in the White House.

Democrats want a culture war because they can not defend President Obama’s record of economic failure. The fact that Republicans would even consider giving them what they want and nominating a culture warrior like Rick Santorum is mind-numbingly stupid.

At times, the behavior of some in the conservative movement reminds me of a rebellious teenager – determined to do what they want, no matter how wrong, how stupid or how dangerous it is, just to prove they can do it.

Rick Santorum lost his home state of Pennsylvania by almost 20 points in his last election.  As a Presidential nominee, Santorum would be competitive in only the reddest of red states.  His nomination would all but guarantee that Republicans would not be able to recapture the Senate and could put control of the House in play.

At a time when our country is at crossroads, staring at an unprecedented fiscal and economic crisis, conservatives are free to nominate who ever they want, but lets not pretend that nominating Rick Santorum would be anything but the movement showing all of the maturity of a 16 year old girl.

Below is the response of my colleague Jimmy LaSalvia, Executive Director of GOProud, to Romney’s speech yesterday.  I concur 100% with Jimmy.

(Washington, D.C.) – Today, in remarks before the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney said that he had “stopped Massachusetts from becoming the Las Vegas of gay marriage.”  In response, Jimmy LaSalvia, Executive Director of GOProud - anorganization of gay and straight Americans seeking to promote freedom by supporting free markets, limited government, and a respect for individual rights – released the following statement:

“We are deeply disappointed with Governor Romney’s speech at CPAC today.  Instead of simply saying that he opposed gay marriage, Romney instead chose to play to the ugliest and most divisive impulses in this country.  If he thinks this is the way to appeal to Tea Party conservatives who have reservations about his candidacy, he is dead wrong. 

“The left wants a culture war, because they can’t defend this President’s record of failure on the economy.  Conservatives shouldn’t give them the fight they want – and that’s exactly what Mitt Romney did today.”

Much has been made about where Herman Cain stands in regards to the current crop of GOP candidates.  Former Cain supporters, like myself, have ended up in many different camps.

Last night, during a Q&A session after Cain delivered the Tea Party response to the State of the Union address, Cain gave some thoughts on the two front-runners for the GOP nod.

On Gingrich and Romney, Cain said, “I think they are both excellent candidates and I am not endorsing either one.”

On which one would best be able to beat Obama in November, Cain said, “I think they both can if they can overcome their ‘ifs’.”

Cain clarified the ‘ifs’ facing both candidates as he sees them.

On Romney, “He must be more specific… Particularly when it comes to the economy.  I have looked at his plan and the 59 point plan won’t cut it.”

On Gingrich, “One of his big ifs is if he can shake off these attacks on how he left Congress in the 1990s.”

When pressed on his opinion of the character attacks on Gingrich, Cain said, “Voters aren’t stupid. They know [these attacks on Newt] were well planned.” He went on to say, “The American people are waking up to dirty gutter politics”