Rossputin.com

It is with pleasure that I can let you know that I’ll be hosting The Ross Kaminsky Show on Denver’s NewsRadio 850 KOA on Sundays from 11 AM to 2 PM.

The show’s home page at the 850 KOA site will be:
http://www.850koa.com/pages/ross.html

I’m very grateful to the management of KOA for giving me the opportunity to be on the air on Colorado’s premier talk radio station and I’ve promised them I’ll keep you entertained and informed at the same time.

The show will frequently be pre-empted in whole or in part by sports programming, as KOA is the voice of the Colorado Rockies, the Denver Broncos, and the University of Colorado “Buffs.” (I have a feeling that a Broncos game is slightly more profitable for the station than the Ross Kaminsky Show will be, if just barely.)

So, I won’t be on the air (at least not on Sundays) during most of football season, and during much of baseball season the show will either be pre-empted entirely or else will run just an hour or two. (Frankly, as much as I love being on the air, especially on “the blowtorch", this schedule is perfect for me as it will allow me to talk to you – my listeners, readers and friends – for much of the year but also allow me some full weekends to spend with my wife and family.)

I’ll try to put up a brief preview of each Sunday’s show on these pages on either Friday or Saturday, to let you know what we’ll be talking about and encourage you to join the conversation.

Also, I’ll be posting to 850 KOA’s Facebook page regularly during the show (and once in a while at other times), so I hope you’ll “Like” us and join the debate at www.facebook.com/850koa

Podcasts of the show will be found HERE, and for anyone who uses RSS to grab podcasts, that XML link is HERE.

I’m very excited about this opportunity, and I welcome any and all feedback on what you liked or didn’t like about a show. Thanks for listening!

Although Florida Senator and rising Republican star Marco Rubio has repeatedly refused to endorse a candidate in the Republican primary, his words this week have done great and perhaps unrepairable damage to former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s chances of winning the Florida Republican primary and the Republican nomination for the presidency.

On Tuesday, Gingrich compared his contest against former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney to the 2010 Florida US Senate race between Marco Rubio and the liberal (and eventually not Republican) former Florida Governor Charlie Crist. Rubio would have none of it, saying “Mitt Romney is no Charlie Crist. Romney is a conservative, and he was one of the first national Republican leaders to endorse me. He came to Florida, campaigned hard for me, and made a real difference in my race.”

Then on Wednesday, Rubio assailed the Gingrich campaign for running a Spanish-language radio ad aimed at Florida’s politically important Cuban community, in which Gingrich called Romney “the most anti-immigration candidate.” Rubio said the ad was “inaccurate, inflammatory, and doesn’t belong in this campaign.” Gingrich promptly pulled the ad, after which Rubio offered Gingrich an olive branch in an interview with CBS: “I think Speaker Gingrich made the right decision. I’ve known Speaker Gingrich for a long time, I’m an admirer of him. I think he made the right choice.”

But the damage was done.

Please read the rest of my article for the American Spectator here:
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/01/27/newts-rubio-rumble

H/T “Airbus”

http://www.kearneyhub.com/news/local/article_f3523be2-4834-11e1-a1fe-001871e3ce6c.html

The Economic Freedom Project has developed a project on economic freedom, which you can find at the eponymous URL: http://www.economicfreedom.org/

In their second YouTube video, they discuss the decline of economic freedom in America and how it correlates with the longest period of sustained unemployment since the Great Depression.

As they put it, “Across the globe, the societies that have the best quality of life are those with the highest levels of economic freedom. From lower unemployment to better-protected civil rights and cleaner environments, economic freedom is vital to improving the well-being of society, especially for the most vulnerable. New research shows that Colorado has fallen in its economic freedom ranking and driving the decline in economic freedom are increased government spending and declining labor market freedom.”

It’s a critical point to understand and share as we go into the 2012 election, trying to remove a president who is the biggest foe of economic freedom since FDR. (And for those of you who want to give credit to FDR for getting us out of the Great Depression, please read some history. What got us out of the Great Depression was that the rabidly anti-capitalist FDR died.)

Here’s the video:
http://youtu.be/F4fWQnguR1E

Canada’s Fraser Institute does an annual survey of economic freedom at the state and (Canadian) province level. Here in Colorado, we’re fortunate to be the 4th most economically free state in the US, one notch better than last year, though even our total level of economic freedom dropped slightly from 2008 to 2009 (the last year for which data is available.) In other words, Colorado became slightly less economically free but a state which was ahead of us before became even less free. Where Colorado’s particular weakness shows is in increased government spending. Colorado’s total score is its lowest since 1996, though the score has been within a fairly narrow range during the entire period, between 7.4 to 7.8.

The best and worst of the USA, according to Fraser, keeping in mind that the count includes 10 Canadian provinces:

The 10 states with the highest levels of economic freedom are: Delaware (2nd overall), Texas (3rd overall), Nevada (4th overall), Colorado (5th overall), Georgia (6th overall), South Dakota (7th overall), Wyoming (8th overall), Utah (9th overall), North Carolina (10th overall), and Nebraska (11th overall). The Canadian province of Alberta ranked first overall.

The lowest levels of economic freedom among U.S. states were found in West Virginia (55th overall), New Mexico (54th overall), Mississippi (53rd overall), Hawaii 52nd overall), Alaska (51st overall), Montana (50th overall), Maine (48th overall), Vermont (47th overall), Rhode Island (46th overall), and Kentucky (45th overall).

Scene: Mitt Romney and family standing in front of a very nice, large, expensive house with American flag waving in the breeze.

I’m Mitt Romney and I’m a successful businessman. In fact, while my Republican opponents and the left’s class warfare machine want to hold it against me that I’ve earned more money than any of the other candidates, it’s something I can’t and won’t apologize for.

Those who focus on my tax returns, trying to figure out how to turn my business success into political failure, completely miss the point.

Speaker Gingrich’s earnings, much of which like our current president’s earnings comes from book sales, are largely the result of self-promotion. And while there’s nothing wrong with that, the handful of people he employs hardly speaks to a broader understanding of the real-world economy. Furthermore, Mr. Gingrich’s past earnings have, also like our current president, included more than a million dollars eventually taken from taxpayers.

Cut to scene: A street of homes with foreclosure signs in front of them

To be fair, Mr. Gingrich apparently did not recognize the national disaster his “client” was about to inflict on homeowners across the nation, (Cut to image: Newt Gingrich reading something that looks like a history book) but then a “historian” should have known the inevitable outcome of government trying to buy homeowners’ votes without regard to economic consequences.

Please read the entirety of my article for the American Spectator here:
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/01/25/the-ad-romney-should-run

Even the Obama-loving AP has debunked the claim that President Obama will make again tonight, using Warren Buffet’s secretary as cannon fodder, that the rich need to pay more in taxes:

http://news.yahoo.com/fact-check-rich-taxed-less-secretaries-070642868.html

In last night’s Republican debate, the newly aggressive Mitt Romney came out slamming Newt Gingrich, repeating the charge that Gingrich “resigned in disgrace", blaming Gingrich for Republican losses in the House in 1998 (though the GOP retained its majority), and reminding people of Gingrich’s work for Freddie Mac. He also directly questioned Gingrich’s leadership qualities.

From a purely tactical level, this strategy may be necessary but it is a mixed bag for Romney.

First, Romney doesn’t play the angry aggressor very well, so when he does so it makes him seem as if he’s willing to appear less than genuine in order to go after an opponent. This is a big problem for Romney when one of voters’ big fears about him is that they’re not sure who or what he really is. Even though those fears have been on policy issues, i.e. “Is he really a conservative, or did he change his views for purely political reasons?", a parallel will be created in peoples’ minds: “Is he really a nice guy or is he just pretending to be so to get elected?” The latter will be easier for people to conclude the latter if they already question his sincerity on policy. (For the record, based on what friends who know Romney have told me, he is indeed a nice guy, but some small fraction of one percent of the American electorate will ever actually meet a presidential candidate.) While voters might not put “nice guy” near the top of their lists of characteristics they care about in a nominee, it still removes one clear differentiator between Romney and Gingrich, since “nice guy” would not fall from any Republican’s mouth when asked to describe the former Speaker.

Second, to the extent that Romney’s charges against Gingrich are disproven or adequately explained by the former Speaker, it puts Romney’s truth-telling ability into question. It’s one thing to represent facts in a way which favors your side, but it’s something else to make a statement which the public comes to believe was simply untrue.

Third, on the good side for Romney, these attacks will keep Newt Gingrich slightly off his game, keeping him from spending as much time on “big ideas” and other things which the public really wants to hear from him. It falls somewhat into the category of, as former Congressman Bob Schaffer has reminded me, “if you’re explaining, you’re losing.” The other side of the coin, though, is that it also takes Romney off of his game which is talking about how he will put the economy in a position to create jobs, and how the real enemy of prosperity is the Obama administration.

Fourth, Romney’s criticisms of Gingrich are unfocused. They don’t force people to focus on a particular issue or flaw, whether ethics, Freddie Mac, or whatever. When putting the frame around your opponent, having people think a little bit about a bunch of things is not nearly as effective as having them unable to forget one particular thing.

What would be more effective for Romney, while he’s making these various attacks and accusations, is to continually tie them to his fundamental point – which he is leaving mostly implied when it should be explicit – that Newt Gingrich is unlikely to be able to beat Barack Obama. Poll after poll has shown that that characteristic – electability – is foremost in Republicans’ minds. It’s one thing for Romney to attack Gingrich’s history, but if he wants those attacks to do anything other than make himself look like a guy who is “desperate” and will “say anything", as Gingrich put it, then he must make the conclusion in voters’ minds: Gingrich’s history makes him unelectable.

The way Romney is doing it now, with scatter-shot attacks on multiple aspects of Newt’s history, is not working. After last night’s debate, betting odds showed a few point increase in Newt Gingrich’s chances of winning the Florida Republican primary, rising to about 60 percent, with Romney falling about 3 percent to 40 percent. While Romney is still trading around 63 percent to be the eventual nominee, these are his lowest betting odds in more than a month.

Gingrich’s success is taking Romney away from the strength of his game. Romney can’t play Gingrich’s more aggressive game and expect to do well. Instead of all-over-the-map criticisms of the former Speaker, Romney should pick one or two major issues to go after Gingrich with, tie that to the question of electability, and return some of his focus to what was working before: a focus on jobs and the economy, emphasizing his own expertise in the private sector and not apologizing for his success.

On Monday morning during an interview with Fox News, Mitt Romney gave his most aggressive words yet against Newt Gingrich, showing that he’s now (rightly) concerned about Newt as competition for the Republican nomination.

Among Romney’s barbs:

• When asked about the economy and real estate, Romney turned the question to Freddie Mac, saying that it “caused part of the underpinnings and the collapse that have hurt so many people here in Florida. And of course Newt Gingrich was working for Freddie Mac. He said he was an historian. But he got paid $1.7 million. I don’t believe he was an historian. He was out speaking up Freddie Mac, and that was an enormous mistake and contributed to the crisis that’s here.”
• Romney continued by suggesting Gingrich should turn over his “work product” regarding Freddie Mac: “What was the contract? What did they pay him for? You don’t may someone $1.7 million just to write your history….Did he write their history or did he instead talk about policy and provide access to people in power?”
• More generally, regarding Gingrich as a “big idea” guy: “The speaker has been working for the last 15 years on K-Street in Washington DC. It’s a form of influence peddling or lobbying, depending on whose definition you want to use, but basically he’s connecting corporations with government. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just very different from the way he portrays himself as an author of big ideas. Big ideas like Freddie Mac, giving mortgage guarantees to people who couldn’t possibly repay those mortgages. That’s a big idea. I don’t think it’s a very good big idea.

Clearly the Romney campaign recognizes that the Freddie Mac issue was kryptonite to Gingrich early in the campaign and they’re going to stick with it. The idea that Gingrich was in any way responsible for Freddie Mac’s behavior in the mortgage market is ridiculous and Romney’s attack will leave room for one of Gingrich’s patented outraged responses. On balance, however, this issue remains a real problem for Newt until and unless he can prove that what he did does not fit into the characterization that Romney is providing. And after all the time that Gingrich and others have spent demanding Romney’s tax returns, it will be difficult for the Speaker to argue against divulging the terms of a contract made with a company which was a quasi-governmental entity. By the way, when did the amount Gingrich got paid go from $1.6 million, as Romney’s Super-PAC ads say, to $1.7 million as Romney claimed this morning?

• Romney also asked for the contents of the House ethics investigation of Gingrich: “As you know, the Speaker was the only Speaker in American history to be reprimanded by his own members…and of course he was forced from office; he resigned in disgrace. So let’s look at the full record of what was said as opposed to the sanitized version of the final report. Because you know that if Nancy Pelosi has that record, it’s ultimately going to be in the hands of the president if Newt Gingrich were to become the nominee.”

This is a dangerous road for Romney to go down, perhaps as likely to backfire on him as to damage Gingrich. On the surface, Gingrich’s response will be satisfying: The ultra-partisan House Ethics Committee, led by Nancy Pelosi, heard 84 ethics charges made against Gingrich – all of them made by Democrats – and found him guilty of one charge, which related to the tax status of a course Gingrich taught. There was also a question of whether information provided related to the course was misleading, but Gingrich asserts that the shoddy work was done by a law firm which did him “a great disservice.” Gingrich paid a $300,000 fine which he is characterizing as a reimbursement for the cost of the investigation. Gingrich further claims that he asked House Republicans to vote yes on the reprimand in order to get it over with. In other words, Gingrich is going to turn this debate into reminding voters that his antagonist was Nancy Pelosi, and make himself seem the sympathetic victim of the Wicked Witch of the West.

Or at least he’ll try. Unfortunately for Gingrich, it’s not quite that simple. The Washington Post’s pro-Romney blogger, Jennifer Rubin, as well as the left-leaning Politico are reminding people of Gingrich’s larger ethics issues including involvement in the House banking check-kiting scandal, the latter referring to a 1992 New York Times article which explains Newt’s banking Achilles heel while also foreshadowing Newt’s rise to power:

“His own 22 overdrafts, including a $9,463 check to the Internal Revenue Service, were the heaviest weapons against him in an anti-incumbent campaign waged by an underfinanced former state senator. After lavishing $1.1 million on the race, Gingrich survived, by 980 votes, and the district is so Republican that he seems a shoo-in in November. If anti-incumbency campaigns like the one waged against him defeat enough Democrats, he may someday achieve his ambition of becoming Speaker of the House.”

This issue, more than 84 ethics charges brought by friends of Nancy Pelosi, would seem to have the potential to damage Newt Gingrich and, as the Romney campaign desires, remind people that Gingrich “has more baggage than the airlines.“

• After pounding the Freddie Mac and ethics issues again, Romney added “We need to understand, by the way, who his clients were in the health care world because he was lobbying for a Medicare bill, a health care bill, that could have significantly benefited some of his clients. If that’s the case, he was not only lobbying and influence peddling, he may have done things that were improper.”

Amusingly, the Fox News anchor, Bill Hemmer, then asked Romney “On that point, on the debate, do you need to get tougher on Newt Gingrich?” Romney responded, as if forgetting the last 5 minutes of his own words, “I think we need to always be focused on the real target here, which is President Obama” – but even then Romney actually trained his fire in part on Gingrich: “Speaker Gingrich’s success in the last debate or two were because frankly the people who asked him questions asked him softball questions about the president or about himself. He didn’t attack the rest of us on the stage; he attacked either the moderator or the president, and that’s probably the best way to go.”

There’s a backhanded compliment if ever you’ve heard one.

I trust the Gingrich campaign staff are preparing for Mitt Romney’s sharp elbows which will no doubt be flying during tonight’s debate (9 PM Eastern on NBC) and Thursday’s debate (8 PM Eastern on CNN). If there’s one thing you can say about Gingrich, it’s that when he can properly guess what pitch is coming, nobody hits more home runs. Indeed, one of the hardest to understand aspects of the Republican debates to date is Mitt Romney’s apparent unpreparedness for questions of his income and his tax returns which even a political amateur would have known were coming. An argument can be made that Romney’s fumbling responses to questions about releasing his tax returns cost him the South Carolina primary. And while Romney’s 2010 tax return and 2011 estimate are due to be released on Tuesday, Romney’s recent promises to release “multiple years” will cause his putting out just two years to generate more questions than answers, doing precisely the opposite of Romney’s stated strategy of wanting to release all of his tax information at one time.

A Rasmussen Reports poll released Monday morning shows Newt Gingrich having jumped 9 points ahead of Mitt Romney in Florida, after Romney being 22 points ahead just eleven days ago. Newt’s strength is among Florida’s most conservative Republicans, with Romney still leading among moderates. That same poll shows 42 percent of Florida Republicans saying that Gingrich is strongest against Barack Obama versus 39 percent believing that of Mitt Romney.

Exit polls in South Carolina showed that Republican voters are intensely focused on beating Obama, far more than they are on having the most conservative candidate.This explains why Romney will focus so intensely on proving to voters that Gingrich’s history makes him unelectable whereas Gingrich will counter that Romney is not bold enough, not enough of a fighter, to beat Barack Obama.

All that said, the poll of Florida voters still shows an expectation of Romney becoming the nominee. As Scott Rasmussen put it, Romney now seems to be the likely nominee rather than the inevitable nominee. If you thought the last two debates were important, just wait until you see the next two.

I’ll be on NewsRadio 850 KOA (in Denver) from 11 AM to 2 PM (Mountain Time) today.

Topics will include:

In the 11 AM hour: the SC primary, and what’s next for the GOP race

In the noon hour: banning photo traffic enforcement (red light cameras and speed cameras), with guest State Senator Scott Renfroe who is introducing a bill to do just that

In the 1 PM hour: Cougars! Has the phenomenon of older women chasing younger men changed so much in the last couple of years that a high school is now prevented from using “Cougars” as the school sports mascot? Is there a double standard in 40-something women chasing 20-something men, versus older men and younger women? And what about Newt Gingrich? How many of you know that his third (and current) wife is 23 years his junior?

Please listen in on 850 AM or at http://850koa.com and join the conversation at 303 713 8585

H/T Greg Staff

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcruw_Jx97A