I have never liked Newt Gingrich since I saw how power turns him into and arrogant jerk. In this race, the mere hope that he'll win. We saw him go into scorched earth mode when when is rise in the polls evaporated. He's not nearly mature enough to be in politics and his claims to have repented and changed have been disproven by his behavior. He slips into megalomania. Jen Rubin reviews Newt's "messy life and flawed charactef, and defends Marianne's story from his dismissal and arrogant evasion. I also felt that her credibility was getter than his.

Drudge leaks the existence of a two hour interview with Marianne Ginther given to Brian Ross of ABC News. ABC News first said they wouldn't air the story this close to the election, but they've done three reports about Mitt Romney showing that they have double standards. But since Drudge leaked the story, ABC has changed its mind and will air the interview after tonight CNN South Carolina debate. And Brian Ross is quoted as saying

that Marianne Gingrich claims her ex-husband wanted an 'open marriage.' "He came to her and said, 'I want to stay married to you and still have an affair with Calista, his current wife," said Ross. "According to Marianne, he said 'You need to share me,' and she said 'I don't want to share,' and the marriage ended," he added.

That detail was certainly new to me, and will definitely not impress those who see him as a true conservative. He's already proven that his claims that he has changed, become more mature, etc. are false. He has a history of citing studies or factoids that appeal to him at the moment but seem bizarre in retrospect. I've read a lot of comments that his adultery is a disqualification. Some have attacked Romney for once trying to avoid the abortion issue by noting that as governor, he couldn't doe anything to change the laws declared by the Supreme Court. It's not the same with the Presidency, since POTUS can appoint Justices who will overturn Roe vs. Wade, and rerurn the issue to the states to decide. Conservatives have lambasted Romney as a flip-flopper, but Newt is looking now as a much bigger flip-flopper than Mitt will ever be. Odd that Mitt gets hammered for his failure to flip on so-called Romneycare and gets no credit for changing his position on abortion.

SuperPAC pitches I quit readaing

Throughout History - The times have called for a certain type of man with a certain set of skills. 2012 is calling for the knowledge, leadership, intelligence and perspective of such a man. That man is Newt Gingrich.

Mark Steyn: The Last Laugh or the return of the Memory Hole

Dr Lazar Greenfield, president-elect of the American College of Surgeons, whose career came to a sudden end after he wrote a light-hearted Valentine’s Day piece for Surgery News on the health benefits for women of semen. Although right on the facts, he offended the tender sensitivities of his feminist colleagues, and his decades of illustrious service availed him naught. Like Kundera’s protagonist, Dr Greenfield had made an ideologically unsound joke, and was disappeared: Surgery News wound up pulping the entire issue.

Read the whole thing. I recommend a new epithet for these people, "memholes."

Santorum: Romneycare a 'Real Scarlet Letter'That's what we'd expect Santorum to say, but in tonight's debate in South Carolina, he defended his vote against a national right to work, which he says he was personally for, on the grounds that he was elected to represent the people of Pennsylvania which has no right-to-work law, and so felt that he should reflect their sentiments. Wasn't Romney just representing the people of Massachusetts who were paying the medical bills for free riders taking advantage of emergency rooms, particularly since universal health care was a popular idea with the 85% Democrat controlled legislature. Given that setting, Romneycare made sense for a governor of Massachusetts. Romney had made enough statements promoting it that it makes no sense for him to try to evade the issue or pretend he wasn't in favor of it. Of course, he could say now, ala Santorum, that he didn't think the whole idea of universal health care was a good idea, but he was just representing the will of the people.

Larry Kudlow: Isn't a Bain turnaround what America needs? That's a pretty tall order, given that Bain's methods haven't been tried on anything as huge, broke and dysfunctional as the United States today. Would Bain Capital consider investing in it a sound risk of its investors' money, especially given the restraints that politics places on more debt and deficits now and the problems of cutting entitlement spending? On the other hand, with a revitalized economy, who can tell how long a turnaround would take? We know the tactics which the opposition would use, sowing fear of reforms, and how it has hurt previous modest attempts. This could be the biggest proxy fight in history and who can say that it would hold for long, once unemployment recedes and things began to improve? One is reminded of how the Israelites after their exodus began to complain of their hardships and talk about how they missed the flesh pots of their Egyptian captivity. I'm convinced, as Mark Steyn is, that America is unlikely to recover in the long run. We're just too dependent on welfare statism. Most of us have never known anything else, and most of those who do are acolytes of the New Deal and its aftermath. Many of Ron Paul's followers are young people disillusioned by the failures ahead for Social Security and liberal politics but still attracted by his libertarian ideas of permissiveness, never realizing that self-discipline and responsible behavior are the keys to true freedom. The real path forward is to choose those principles, because without insisting that everybody obey them a healthy society can't thrive and without that, the idea of rights has no meaning. God decreed freedom as the natural state of man but only so long as we live in a manner to retain it. Ron Paul's ideas are dead ends.