By: Ben Shapiro

Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ), who is widely expected to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, may have just harmed his chances by signifying his support for the policies of ultra-liberal New York governor – and possible 2016 Democratic opponent – Andrew Cuomo. Talking with union leader Larry Bulman, political director for United Association of Plumbers, Pipefitters and Steamfitters, Christie reportedly said, “I’m not much different from Andrew Cuomo. I probably agree with him on 98% of the issues.”

Christie leans liberal on a myriad of issues. While he maintains that he supports traditional marriage, that position is clearly malleable for him; he grandstands when it comes to federal disaster funding; he has ties to groups that are questionable in terms of Islamism; his anti-union rhetoric masks the fact that he gets along quite well with most of the unions in his state, including the much-maligned teachers unions; he blasts the NRA on a regular basis.

Christie will have trouble in early 2016 primaries. But he is taking the John McCain/Mitt Romney path to glory: move left before the primaries, move right during the primaries, and then attempt to move left again before the general election.

Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the book “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013). Follow him at Twitter @benshapiro.

Romney made clear his ambition for elected office has ended. | AP Photo

By ANNA PALMER

Mitt Romney’s campaign ended, but he’s not getting out of politics.

Romney told top Washington bundlers, donors and senior campaign leadership in a meeting Friday morning that he would help out GOP candidates for governor in 2013, during the upcoming midterm elections and the 2016 presidential race, according to two people who attended the meeting.

Romney also made clear his ambition for elected office has ended, according to another source present.

Romney has stayed out of the limelight since Election Day, leaving many to wonder if he would keep a lower profile or even leave politics all together.

“We lost, but I’m not going away,” Romney told the crowd, according to a person who attended the meeting. “I will continue to help.”

The source also said Romney had been laying low deliberately after the election.

“[Romney] explained that he had been out of the news and that was purposeful,” said the source in the room. “He didn’t want to say something on the fiscal cliff and have the president use that as a wedge between the speaker and the minority leader… He said it wasn’t going to last for long and that he was going to come back and start talking about the things that matter to him.”

Individuals in the group thanked Romney for running and more than one Mormon backer praised Romney for showing their faith in another light.

The meeting at the J.W. Marriott came before a larger lunch of nearly 100 people hosted by Catherine Reynolds and Bill Marriott, Jr. Romney’s wife Ann and his former running mate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and his wife Janna Ryan also attended. Veteran Republican operatives Wayne Berman, Ed Gillespie, Jack Gerard, Ben Ginsberg, Bobbie and Bill Killberg, Bill Graves and David Beightol, among others were in the meeting.

Several Republican senators attended the lunch, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Sens. Orrin Hatch (Utah), Rob Portman (Ohio) and Roy Blunt (Mo.).

At the lunch, Ryan also spoke telling attendees that he was “grateful for the opportunity” and thanked the Romneys for “treating us like family.”

Romney also touted the policy successes of Republican governors across the country and encouraged finance operatives, particularly those who had engaged for the first time to remain active in the process.

Romney will also attend Alfalfa Club’s annual dinner Saturday night.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/mitt-romney-in-washington-im-not-going-away-86741.html#ixzz2J7XrmFlI

By: Jay Nordlinger    NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE

About 20 years ago, I often said, “You can say anything about Clarence Thomas. No matter how vile, false, or even racist, you can say it about Thomas, and get away with it. The culture permits it. It’s open season on Clarence Thomas.”

Many years later, I said something similar about Sarah Palin. And I can almost say something similar about Mitt Romney. What I have heard since Election Day is astonishing. Romney has been turned into something he has never been.
The Left has been atrocious, because, why wouldn’t it be? It’s my fellow conservatives I’m talking about. Instant revision and reviling is natural after a loss, I suppose. But the number done on Romney has been galling, to me.

I propose to make a few notes . . .

A few weeks ago, I settled down to read a column by Iain Martin, the excellent British journalist. I did not get past the second paragraph. Because in that paragraph he wrote that the likely explanation for the American election result was that “the Republicans had blundered by choosing as their candidate a plutocratic chap called Mitt Romney who, having been born into great privilege and luxury, seemed to be out of touch with the concerns of most voters.”

Romney is not plutocratic, he is democratic — a democratic thinker and politician through and through. A democratic spirit. His proposals were designed to help millions of others enjoy some of the success that he and his family have enjoyed.

Romney is classically, almost stereotypically, American — at least as we used to conceive Americanness. The reference to him as “plutocratic” is not just lazy but moronic. I would expect it from my fellow Americans — the rot, the idiocy, set in here long ago. I have higher standards for the Brits.

As for Romney’s being “out of touch with the concerns of most voters,” I can tell you that he was in touch with my concerns. And those of many others, I gather: He got 48 percent on Election Day.

But that is not most voters, to be sure . . .

A footnote: A couple of weeks ago, I picked up a new book that, in the initial pages, described Ron Radosh as “an anti-communist ideologue.” I could not go on with the book. Maybe I missed something and should have persevered. Maybe I would have been rewarded. But my thinking was, anyone who could describe Ron as “an anti-communist ideologue” is either too ignorant or too dishonest to be worth the time.

Over and over again — day after day — my fellow conservatives have been saying that Romney scanted the “middle class.” He paid too little attention to the “middle class.” He offered nothing to the “middle class.”

It has been maybe the chief refrain on the right since Election Day.

First, “middle class” is such a bogus term — meaningless, obnoxious, cheap. It is a term of Marxists and demagogues and that whole Bidenesque world. My fellow conservatives are using it constantly. I expect them next to refer to the “petite bourgeoisie.” That is hardly a less respectable term than “middle class.”

Second, Romney talked about the “middle class” until he was blue in the face. I know, because I regularly knocked him for it.

After one blessed debate during the Republican primaries, a conservative pundit said, “Romney didn’t even mention the word ‘middle class’!” This was supposed to have been a terrible failure — practically a crime against humanity. Romney was talking to Americans as Americans, not as classes. I praised him for it.

But he did not often make that mistake again — the “mistake” of not saying “middle class.”

Do you remember this moment during the primaries? Romney said, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. There’s a safety net there, and if it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich — they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the heart of America, the 95 percent of Americans who are right now struggling.”

I guess he meant the “middle class.” In this instance, he called them “the heart of America,” or “the 95 percent.” Anyway, conservatives went absolutely nuts. They wet their pants. “Romney said he doesn’t care about the poor! Eek, eek!” He had committed a terrible gaffe, according to the media at large. Romney was always being accused of committing “gaffes” when he said perfectly sensible things — such as the above.

So, what did Romney offer the “middle class”? I’ll tell you what: He offered to avert financial collapse. To do something about the debt and the deficit. To reform entitlements. To reform the tax code. To foster the conditions in which economic growth occurs. To help put people back to work. To save the frickin’ country.

That’s not program enough for the “middle class”? What does he have to do, enter each of their homes and bake them muffins? Swab their floors? (Actually, knowing him and his neighborliness, he would do that.)

Saving the country — that should have been enough. And if it wasn’t good enough for the “middle class,” then the “middle class” is an ass.

READ MORE AT NRO……

Is life like a pizza, where if some people have too many slices, other people have to eat the pizza box?

By P.J. O’ROURKE

Given that hypocrisy is an important part of diplomacy, and diplomacy is necessary to foreign policy, allow me to congratulate you on winning a second term.

I wish I could also congratulate you on your conduct of international affairs. I do thank you for killing Osama bin Laden. It was a creditable action for which you deserve some of the credit you’ve been given. Of course the intelligence was gathered, and the mission was undertaken, by men and women who, although they answer to your command, answer to duty first.

And it is difficult to imagine any president of the United States who, under the circumstances, wouldn’t have ordered the strike against bin Laden. Although there is Jimmy Carter. Thank you for not being Jimmy Carter.

But even though it violates the insincere amity that creates a period of calm following national elections, no thank you for the following, and it is only a partial list:

• Telling the Taliban to play by the rules or you’ll take your ball and go home;

• Leaving Iraq in a lurch (and in a hurry);

• Watching the EU go down the sink drain and into the Greece trap and wanting to take America along on the trip;

• Miscalculating human rights and strategic engagement in the Chinese arithmetic of your China policy;

• Being the personification of bad weather during the Arab Spring with your chilly response when you encountered its best aspects and your frozen inaction when you encountered its worst;

• Playing with Russian nesting dolls, opening hollow figurine after hollow figurine hoping to find one that doesn’t look like Vladimir Putin;

• Sitting and doing nothing like a couch potato watching a made-for-TV movie as the Castro and Chávez zombies continue their rampage;

• Hugging the door on your date with Israel;

• Putting the raw meat of incentives in your pants pocket when you go to scold the pit bulls of Iran and North Korea;

But the worst thing that you’ve done internationally is what you’ve done domestically. You sent a message to America in your re-election campaign. Therefore you sent a message to the world. The message is that we live in a zero-sum universe.

There is a fixed amount of good things. Life is a pizza. If some people have too many slices, other people have to eat the pizza box. You had no answer to Mitt Romney’s argument for more pizza parlors baking more pizzas. The solution to our problems, you said, is redistribution of the pizzas we’ve got—with low-cost, government-subsidized pepperoni somehow materializing as the result of higher taxes on pizza-parlor owners.

In this zero-sum universe there is only so much happiness. The idea is that if we wipe the smile off the faces of people with prosperous businesses and successful careers, that will make the rest of us grin.

There is only so much money. The people who have money are hogging it. The way for the rest of us to get money is to turn the hogs into bacon.

READ MORE AT WSJ.COM……

Both Obama and Romney declined public financing for their campaigns. | AP and stock photos

By KENNETH P. VOGEL, DAVE LEVINTHAL and TARINI PARTI

POLITICO

Obama: $1.123 billion vs. Romney: $1.019 billion.

That’s the final fundraising tally in the most expensive presidential election ever, according to reports filed Thursday with the Federal Election Commission by the rival campaigns and party committees.

And that doesn’t include an explosion of late advertising funded by last-minute checks from mega-donors like Las Vegas casino owner Sheldon Adelson and Chicago media mogul Fred Eychaner, whose emergence as political forces may be the enduring legacy of 2012.

Adelson and his wife gave $39.7 million to GOP-allied super PACs in the campaign’s final weeks to bring their total disclosed contributions to almost $90 million, while Eychaner gave $2 million, bringing his total to $14 million.

Thursday’s filings lay bare those donations and other jaw-dropping financial details of the first modern presidential campaign in which donors could give unlimited contributions for political ads and in which both major party candidates declined to participate in a Watergate-era public financing system designed to limit fundraising. The reports also show how the two candidates and their allies navigated the new big-money system using divergent strategies until the bitter end.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2012/12/barack-obama-mitt-romney-both-topped-1-billion-in-2012-84737.html#ixzz2EUFLgcYU