He talks and talks and talks about energy.

Forget about your short attention span because Newt Gingrich would like to talk to you about an exciting new opportunity: energy! "It means you'll have more money in your pocket," says the presidential candidate to anyone who might still be listening 26 minutes and six seconds into his new video. Gingrich has latched onto gas prices as his new stump topic of choice, claiming as president he would bring down prices to $2 a gallon. The former House Speaker's new short film, clocking in at nearly 30 minutes, will air in its entirety in "key cities" leading up to March sixth's Super Tuesday primaries. 

Read it at Wall Street Journal

Swears it won't benefit the 1 percent.

Mitt Romney gave a sneak peek at his new and supposedly improved tax proposal while campaigning in Arizona Wednesday. In a change from his original plan of maintaining the current top rate of 35 percent, Romney announced that he would now cap the top individual income tax at 28 percent. Top Romney economic adviser, Glenn Hubbard, explained that under the new plan all tax brackets would be cut based on taxpayer’s income to create a new set of tax brackets. Speaking to a crowded gymnasium at a Christian school in Chandler, Ariz., Romney insisted that his new plan was not intended to benefit the 1 percent. “In order to limit any impact on the deficit, because I do not want to add to the deficit, and also to make sure we continue to have progressivity in our code, I’m going to limit the deductions and exemptions particularly for high-income folks,” he said. Romney is expected to elaborate more on his plan at tonight’s debate in Mesa.

Read it at New York Times

A pro-Obama super PAC is out with a new advertisement focused on opponent Mitt Romney's opposition to the federal government's auto bailout.

Spokesmen insist he’s always been pro-life.

This week, the Huffington Post dug up an interview with Rick Santorum in a 1995 issue of Philadelphia magazine in which he admitted he “was basically pro-choice all my life, until I ran for Congress.” The site also found a statement by the presidential candidate during his 1990 House of Representatives campaign in which he said it was “very difficult to criminalize” abortion since “a large portion of society” views it as “right.” Now top Santorum aides are denying the former Pennyslvania senator’s supposedly pro-choice past. “Rick Santorum has always been pro-life,” insists his spokesman. “He ran as a pro-life candidate and got elected as a pro-life candidate. He was always a solid pro-life vote, wrote and passed pro-life legislation and consistently received the highest rankings from pro-life groups.” Another top adviser told The Washington Post that he spoke to Santorum about this himself and can confirm “he never held a pro-choice position.”

Read it at Huffington Post

Praises his values and voting record.

The Arizona Right to Life Political Action Committee, also known as AZRTL PAC (still a mouthful), has deemed Rick Santorum the most pro-life candidate of them all. Naturally the Santorum campaign is excited about this endorsement, and immediately sent out a press release announcing the big news. The pro-life organization’s president Michelle Clements explained the group’s choice in a statement in a statement. “There are few who are as articulate and passionate on life issues as Senator Santorum,” she said. “He not only voted the right way, he talks about the dignity and value of every human life whenever he has the opportunity, and he lives out those values in his own personal life. We are grateful for his leadership and proud to endorse him.”

Read it at Rick Santorum Campaign

Including Eva Longoria and Rahm Emanuel.

Obama for America, the president’s reelection campaign, has released a list of 35 co-chairs, supporters from all over the country who will act as surrogates and ambassadors for the campaign. On the list is former White House Chiefs of Staff Bill Daley and Rahm Emanuel, Caroline Kennedy, former senator from Wisconsin Russ Feingold, Human Rights Campaign president Joe Solmonese and actress Eva Longoria, among others. The diverse list aims to reach out to a variety of voter demographs such as progressives, gays and lesbians, and labor, as well as voters in key swing states. 

Read it at Politico

Mitt gets two newspaper endorsements.

With one week to go before the crucial Michigan primary, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum are deadlocked, according to a new NBC/Marist poll. Romney received two valuable endorsements Wednesday from Michigan newspapers. Acknowledging Romney’s family’s political history in the state, the editors of The Oakland Press insist that Romney deserves the votes of Michigan Republicans on his own merits and “unlike Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul—we believe moderation is a virtue, not a vice at this delicate juncture in our nation's history.” The Detroit News editors urge their state’s Republicans to “go to the polls Tuesday with two missions: Pick a presidential candidate capable of leading this nation to prosperity and stability and choose a nominee who will give the GOP a fighting chance of defeating President Barack Obama this fall."

Read it at MSNBC

His inevitability frayed to a thread and rattled by twin Santorum surges in Arizona and Michigan, Romney debuts a new tax plan Wednesday. Peter J. Boyer on the candidate’s desperate attempt at audacity.

Inevitability and electability having failed him, Mitt Romney has decided to try seeming bold.

Romney is expected Wednesday to begin the rollout of his new tax plan, a proposal to lower tax rates by broadening the base through the elimination of some deductions and loopholes. Romney’s plan, to be fleshed out at Wednesday night’s debate and more fully at a big Detroit speech on Friday, may not seem especially dramatic—it’s sort of Simpson-Bowles ultralite—but for the Romney campaign, hitherto defined by its caution and calculation, it approaches audacity.

When Romney and his team designed a 2012 presidential strategy, they contrived a set of policy positions they called “a plan for governing,” as distinct from “a plan for campaigning.” The approach seemed suited to a candidate who, though unlikely to arouse voters’ passion, hoped to excite their imagination—asking them to envision a general election in the fall with Barack Obama having to defend the economy against a successful private-sector manager with a calm, reasoned plan for turning the country around.

One of the problems with this approach is that it underscored Romney’s carefulness in a primary environment that rewarded passion and daring (“9-9-9!”). For a candidate with a serious deficit of political pheromones—the harder Romney tries to “connect” with a crowd, the more stiffly antic he becomes—the relative timidity of his policy prescriptions suggested that a sense of entitlement, rather than vision, animated his candidacy.

Worse, Romney’s competitors all had ideas, however hare-brained they might at times have seemed, that clearly were designed for campaigning. Herman Cain had 9-9-9, and Rick Perry had the elimination of whole federal agencies, and each spent time atop the Republican heap. Newt Gingrich has churned out bold ideas as fast as he can pronounce them, his latest, unless it has already been supplanted, being a plan to bring gasoline prices down to $2.50 per gallon. Gingrich has twice surpassed Romney in the polls and fully expects to again.

Read More  Read Full Story 

The GOP’s new frontrunner will be under a harsh spotlight in Wednesday’s CNN debate after widely covered remarks on explosive social issues like Obama’s theology, prenatal care, and home schooling.

It doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict the kinds of questions Rick Santorum is going to get at the CNN debate in Arizona.

President Obama practices a “phony ideology” that’s not “based on the Bible?” Check.

State government involvement in public schools is “anachronistic”? Check.

Prenatal testing leads to more abortions and prompts us to “cull the ranks of the disabled”? John King, over to you.

When Santorum takes the stage Wednesday night, the glare of the spotlight will be unusually harsh. Despite complaints from his campaign about distorted media coverage, he is the one who has raised every one of these issues, along with birth control, in recent days. Reporters weren’t peppering him with questions about home schooling or amniocentesis. He’s the guy who put these subjects in play.

Read More  Read Full Story