Mushrooming super PAC spending leaves mark on Fla. ads – USATODAY.com
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/story/2012-01-27/gop-primaries-ad-spending-super-pacs/52895296/1

The spending is leaving its mark on Florida, the site of today’s crucial GOP primary. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and his allies, especially the pro-Romney Restore Our Future, aired 12,768 television commercials in the state through Wednesday compared with 210 by former House speaker Newt Gingrich and his supporters, a study released Monday by the Wesleyan Media Project shows.

“It’s one-sided domination,” said Erika Franklin Fowler, the project’s co-director and a Wesleyan University political scientist. “If you have a television on in Orlando or Fort Myers or West Palm Beach,you are seeing Romney ads and very few pro-Gingrich ads.”

And so it goes….

Hopefully this will get over soon, and Mitt can get to convincing half the people he didn’t just say half the things the things he said to get the nod.

Senate gives preliminary backing to abortion ultrasound bill | Richmond Times-Dispatch
http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/2012/jan/30/senate-gives-preliminary-backing-to-abortion-ultra-ar-1650692/

A bill that would require a woman seeking an abortion to have an ultrasound took another step toward passage in the Virginia Senate today — but not before outnumbered Democrats rose to express their opposition in clinical terms.

Sen. Janet D. Howell, D-Fairfax proposed an amendment — that any man seeking prescription medication for erectile dysfunction must first submit to a digital rectal exam and cardiac stress test.

Howell told her colleagues on the Senate floor that she was proposing the amendment because Senate Bill 484 requires women “to have an unnecessary medical procedure, it’s adding to the cost and and it’s opening them up for emotional blackmail.”

“I think we should just have a little gender equity here,” Howell added.

I am all for this…and then scrapping these idiotic laws.  Scarlet letters are the next step for these idiots, and they will, of course be exempt.

NYT: Children’s A.D.D. Drugs Don’t
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/opinion/sunday/childrens-add-drugs-dont-work-long-term.xml

What gets publicized are short-term results and studies on brain differences among children. Indeed, there are a number of incontrovertible facts that seem at first glance to support medication. It is because of this partial foundation in reality that the problem with the current approach to treating children has been so difficult to see.

Back in the 1960s I, like most psychologists, believed that children with difficulty concentrating were suffering from a brain problem of genetic or otherwise inborn origin. Just as Type I diabetics need insulin to correct problems with their inborn biochemistry, these children were believed to require attention-deficit drugs to correct theirs. It turns out, however, that there is little to no evidence to support this theory.

I hate, hate, hate how one if the most common ‘disorders’ in modern times doesn’t have a pathogen or any way to be physically diagnosed.   But my god look at the marketing effort. 

syracuse.com : Gingrich urges students to get jobs, apparently unlike himself
http://mobile.syracuse.com/advsyra/pm_29245/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=m8rjxx8G

“Students take fewer classes per semester. They take more years to get through. Why? Because they have free money,“ Gingrich said. “I would tell students: ’Get through as quick as you can. Borrow as little as you can. Have a part-time job.’ But that’s very different from the culture that has grown up in the last 20 years.“

Or maybe it is not so very different.

In a 1995 profile for Vanity Fair, author Gail Sheehy discovered that Gingrich financed his own education largely via the hard work of this then-wife. When things got tight, finding a job was not high on his to-do list. Sheehy wrote that Gingrich turned first to his adoptive father for help, and then to his biological one:

“Newt, who avoided Vietnam with student and marriage deferments, resisted taking a job. During his college years, Newt called up his father and stepmother to ask for financial help. His stepmother, Marcella McPherson, can still hear his exact words: ’I do not want to go to work. I want all my time for my studies. . . .Bob Gingrich told me he will not help me one bit. So I wondered, would you people help me?’ Big Newt began sending him monthly checks.

“Dolores Adamson, Gingrich’s district administrator from 1978 to 1983, remembers, ’Jackie put him all the way through school. All the way through the PhD. . . .He didn’t work.“

The Gingrich campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

I mean…c’Mon, this has to be a joke.  And by ‘this’ I mean, Gingrich with a reasonable chance of being nominated for President. 

But Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton, who was standing just feet away from the president and the governor on Wednesday during their now-infamous encounter, told TPM that Obama seemed calm the whole time.

“He wasn’t tense at all,” Stanton said on Friday. “The guy’s a pro.”

Though Stanton declined to discuss exactly what the governor and president said to each other, he said Obama’s classic coolness was evident.

“He doesn’t get animated, but he looks you in the eye and tells you what he thinks,” Stanton said. “And I think that’s honestly what he did is he looked the governor in the eye and spoke and told her what he was really feeling.”

Stanton, a Democrat, is now the second elected Arizona official whose account of the incident contradicts the way Brewer has described it.

via 2nd Mayor Says Obama ‘Wasn’t Tense At All’ During Brewer Encounter | TPMMuckraker.

This is a silly little story, but it’s got a nice dramatic picture to it, so there’s some open spin territory for certain folks.   Always nice to have a witness to the actual event, however.

NPR.org » On Florida’s Space Coast, Gingrich Aims For The Moon
http://m.npr.org/story/145882817?url=/2012/01/26/145882817/-president-gingrich-promises-permanent-moon-base&ps=cprs

‘The First Permanent Base On The Moon’

The space shuttle mission ended last year and with it the possibility of any imminent manned space flight. It also meant job losses on the Space Coast and a lack of a well-defined mission for NASA.

If elected, Gingrich promised, “by the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon, and it will be American.”

Gingrich said he would encourage commercial activities in space, including science, tourism and manufacturing. And he promises, in about eight years, a rocket capable of reaching Mars.

Gingrich gave no details on how much a re-energized space program might cost or how he proposes to pay for it, except to say that commercial interests might be promised prizes in the billions of dollars for developing the hardware.

Details, p’shaw, those are for the devils to figure out.

Comparing the Gingrich and Romney tax plans – CBS News
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57366331/comparing-the-gingrich-and-romney-tax-plans/

Romney has come under fire from some conservatives – and the Wall Street Journal -because they say his tax plan is too timid and doesn’t go far enough to lower taxes now.

The non-partisan Tax Policy Center in Washington estimates that if the Bush tax cuts stay in plane, the Romney plan would add $180 billion to the deficit in the year 2015. The Gingrich plan would add $850 billion that year.

The candidates argue that cutting taxes would create so many businesses and jobs that ultimately there would be more tax revenue, not less.

Hrrm, that sound awfully familiar.  One would think, if this actually worked..we’d be swimming in jobs and growth right now, as we have the same tax rates that Bush Jr, promised would do the same thing.

Oh…and who is suprised Romney wants to completely get rid of the estate tax?  Anyone?