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Sunday, March 18, 2012 It's Time For Gingrich To Drop Out of Race For GOP Nomination EDITORIAL The time has come for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to drop out the Republican presidential race and allow Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum to battle it out for the GOP nomination. After an up-and-down campaign, Gingrich based his chances primarily on a Southern strategy. That worked, with wins in South Carolina and Georgia. Then Gingrich set his sights on Alabama and Mississippi, where voters make their decisions on Tuesday. Gingrich had been first or second in those two states in pre-election polls....

These results are based on Gallup Daily tracking interviews conducted March 8-15 with more than 1,900 Republican registered voters, including a sample of 290 Gingrich supporters. Some conservative Republicans have called for Gingrich to drop out of the race on the assumption that conservative primary voters would then unite behind Santorum as the conservative alternative to the more moderate Romney. But Gallup data indicate that Gingrich voters would not be likely to coalesce behind Santorum, suggesting that factors other than candidate ideology may be attracting voters to Gingrich, Santorum, and Romney. Gallup can simulate Republican preferences without Gingrich in the...

Rick Santorum: If I Win The Illinois Primary, I Win The Nomination By Andrew Rafferty EFFINGHAM, Ill. -- Rick Santorum on Saturday guaranteed that a win in the Illinois primary will result in his nomination as the Republican presidential nominee. "This is a primary, and turnout is everything. You do your job, you do your job, then this is the pledge," Santorum said. "If we're able to come out of Illinois with a huge or surprise win, I guarantee you, I guarantee you that we will win this nomination." Illinois has largely been predicted to favor Mitt Romney for Tuesday's...

All Odds Aside, G.O.P. Girding for Floor Fight By JEFF ZELENY and JIM RUTENBERG CHICAGO — For the first time in a generation, Republicans are preparing for the possibility that their presidential nomination could be decided at their national convention rather than on the campaign trail, a prospect that would upend one of the rituals of modern politics. The race remains Mitt Romney’s to lose, and if he continues to accumulate delegates at a steady clip starting with contests in Puerto Rico on Sunday and Illinois on Tuesday, he can still amass the 1,144 necessary to secure the nomination before...

Gingrich Forges Ahead As A Spoiler By Daniel Malloy and Katie Leslie The Atlanta Journal-Constitution CHICAGO -- Newt Gingrich has unabashedly taken on the role of spoiler in the Republican presidential nomination contest, as a pair of losses in Tuesday’s Deep South primaries cemented his position on the margins of the race. (snip) Appearing on a radio show Wednesday morning in Chicago, Gingrich talked about the results in Alabama and Mississippi -- where he came in second to former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania -- as if he and Santorum were a kind of conservative tag team. “Between the...

WASHINGTON -- Mitt Romney would stand to benefit just as much as Rick Santorum if Newt Gingrich exited the presidential race, according to a new poll released Friday. The Gallup poll defied conventional wisdom by suggesting Romney would peel off just as many Gingrich supporters as Santorum would. Forty percent of Gingrich supporters in Gallup's daily tracking poll said Romney was their second choice while 39 percent said they would migrate to Santorum. "If two candidates for a presidential nomination compete in the same ideological space, it would make sense that if one dropped out that the other would benefit,"...

Texas governor Rick Perry is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination now, at least in the national polls. Undoubtedly that’s the main reason so many East Coast pundits and Beltway wags are making fun of him. He likes guns! He’s from Texas! He talks funny! He’s a — gird yourself now — Christian! New York magazine and others mock his harmless, Bush-like pronunciation of nuclear (“nuke-ular”). They’re scandalized that he doesn’t go to a golf course to relax, but a shooting range. It’s already a cliché among liberals to describe him as the sort of cartoonish, ignorant cowboy they...

President Barack Obama has signed an executive order directing the federal government to design a new strategy for hiring, promoting and keeping workers of diverse backgrounds. The three-page order released Thursday directs the head of the Office of Personnel Management, a deputy director at the Office of Management and Budget and two other agencies to develop the strategy within 90 days. Agencies then have 120 days to implement it. An Office of Personnel Management report says that in fiscal year 2010, the federal workforce was 66.2 percent white, 17.7 percent black, 8 percent Hispanic, 5.6 percent Asian/Pacific Islander, 1.8 percent...

(KMOV) – Three men have been indicted for hate crime after threatening to harm an African American on June 4 in Mascoutah, Illinois. Anthony Kunkel, 25, Christopher Berry, 25, and Christopher Jeffrey, 25, have been indicted after the victim says the three men uttered racial slurs and threatened bodily harm to him which disturbed the victim. The three suspects were each charged with hate crime. If convicted, they face one to three years in the Illinois Department of Corrections or up to 30 months probation.

Gov. Perry chose to bypass the legislature and on Feb. 2, 2007, he issued an executive order making Texas the first state in the country requiring all sixth-grade girls to receive the three-shot vaccination series (which cost about $120 per shot). ... The controversy over Perry's decision deepened as it came to light that his former chief of staff was a lobbyist for Merck and that his chief of staff's mother-in-law, Rep. Dianne White Delisi, was the state director of an advocacy group bankrolled by Merck to push legislatures across the country to put forward bills mandating the Gardasil vaccine...

A few minutes ago, NAACP officials asked me to leave the NAACP’s seminar on “civic engagement.” The seminar was listed in the official program, among several concurrent workshops. However, I was soon informed that it was “not open to media.” I complied by leaving, though not before collecting my belongings, including the NAACP’s manual for voter registration, canvassing, and get-out-the vote efforts in 2012. The few seconds of video below are all that I managed to obtain before being asked to leave.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to certify that gays can serve openly in the armed services

New York (CNN) -- We were at a Manhattan water park when it happened. I was with my then 3-year-old daughter, Luna, playing in a sandpit on a foul, chilly morning beneath clouds that looked like ripped paper. It was no day to be outside, but living in a city of small apartments, it was no day to be inside with a child either. A little girl approached the two of us, clearly interested in playing. But when she arrived, she addressed only Luna. Pointing a finger at me, she asked her, "Is that your baby sitter?" I've been mistaken...

A Bronx man was viciously assaulted and robbed on a subway train Sunday by four men who he says taunted him for being white. Police confirmed they are investigating the assault and robbery of Jason Fordell, 29, but have not labeled it a hate crime. They are seeking the four assailants, who fled the scene. A fifth passenger who police say spontaneously joined in the attack has been arrested. "Everyone on the train was egging them on," said Fordell, 29, of the early-morning attack on the 4 train. ..." [SNIP] "People started saying stupid little comments - cracker this, white...

The stumble came in the word zulo, which means "hideout" in English, for San Antonio's sole contestant in the first-ever National Spanish Spelling Bee. Linda Duann Rodriguez, about to start her freshman year at East Central High School, confused the letter "z" with the letter "s" in the competition at the National Hispanic Cultural Center on Saturday morning. After the judges told her "incorrecto," she exited the stage as the third student disqualified and watched as the finalists continued competing. ...After two hours, Evelyn Juárez, a seventh-grader from Carlos F. Vigil Middle School of Santa Cruz, N.M., emerged victorious after...

Perhaps we need a new definition of the word racism because it is now bandied about in a frivolous manner by race baiters who've never undergone its scourge. All we need to do is look at the history of racism in this country particularly in the South to get a real perspective of the pain suffered by blacks during that dark period. Those who underwent that torment are for the most part deceased but their pain has been exploited by modern day race-baiting demagogues who've benefitted by the changes in our civil rights and in the hearts of most Americans....

If you thought the media attacks on Sarah Palin and her family were deplorable in 2008, it's clear with the 2012 presidential campaign starting and her name being bandied about, you ain't seen nuttin' yet. Take the Washington Post's Richard Cohen for example who penned a column Tuesday concluding, "She could not be the president of black America nor of Hispanic America": In her new book, she reportedly takes Michelle Obama to task for her supposedly infamous remark from the 2008 campaign: "For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country because it feels like...

There is one African-American in the current Senate: Illinois Sen. Roland Burris, who was appointed to fill out the rest of Barack Obama's term after he was elected president... All three African-American candidates are projected to lose their races: Florida's Kendrick Meek to Marco Rubio, Georgia's Michael Thurmond to Johnny Isakson and South Carolina's Alvin Greene to Jim DeMint. (All three are Democrats.)... African-Americans are better represented in the House, where there are currently 41 black members.

Don't read Newsweek magazine while drinking a beverage. A spit take is the obvious first reaction to a column by Julia Baird headlined "The Shame of Family Films." On the Internet, this article is coded as "Why Family Films Are So Sexist." Baird's denunciation of Hollywood's fraction of decent entertainment began: "They have all been smash hits: 'Finding Nemo,' 'Madagascar,' 'Ice Age,' 'Toy Story.' Fish, penguins, rats, stuffed animals, talking toys. All good innocent family fun, right? Sure, except there are few female characters in those films. There are certainly few doing anything meaningful or heroic -- and no, Bo...

... The best way to understand Obama, I believe, is to think of him as a sort of braid, intertwining the three dominant strands of modern liberalism. The first of these is “interest group” liberalism. Liberals are for unions, minorities, the poor, gays, trial lawyers, and so on. Liberals are against what they usually call “the rich,” but what in practice means anyone not primarily self-identifying as a member of one of their pet interest groups. This has been the dominant strand of liberalism in people like Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Ted Kennedy – and is the dominant strand in...