New NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showing Gingrich nine points ahead of Romney among GOP voters nationwide — but he does worse even than Santorum in a general match-up against Obama:

“Gingrich is Goldwater,” said Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart, who conducted the survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. “In the general election, Gingrich not only takes down his ship, he takes down the whole flotilla.”

I’m thinking that Republican voters, having seen how badly Newt whiffed these last two debates against Romney and even Santorum, may be reconsidering their love for the Moon Man.

By the way, Andrew Sullivan points out that Romney lied tonight when he said he voted for a Republican every time there was one on the ballot.

Hey everybody, it’s our 19th! This might be the last one that matters, though. The next one isn’t scheduled for almost a month from now. If Romney wins Florida, I’m thinking this thing is over. If Gingrich wins, well, the two debates set for between now and Super Tuesday will be critical.

UPDATE: By now, it’s unlikely that any relevant question has not been put to these Republican debaters at some point. We all know where they stand, I think. The most significant part of this debate is stylistic. What will Gingrich and Romney convey about themselves, and about each other?

I’m really tired of Ron Paul taking every other question in these debates back to his anti-war beliefs (which I support, by the way) or his views on federal monetary policy.

UPDATE.2: OK, it’s on — Romney pummeling Mitt Newt now, effectively, on his immigration attacks. “You know, our problem is not 11 million grandmothers, alright?” Romney scoring. Gingrich wobbles.

UPDATE.3: Good question on Latin America.

“I think we’d be a lot better off trading with Cuba,” says Ron Paul.  “I strongly believe we should have friendship and trade with Cuba.” The man has cojones, saying that in Florida.

UPDATE.4: According to Politifact, Gingrich didn’t specifically call Spanish the “language of the ghetto,” but it was clear from the context of his remarks that he was speaking of Spanish. So Romney is substantially correct in his ad.

I really do think Romney is getting the best of Gingrich in this debate, especially on the Fannie/Freddie lobbying point.

UPDATE.5: Santorum is going to be Romney’s vice presidential pick.

UPDATE.6: Weasel Newt tried to get out of answering Blitzer’s question about an accusation against Romney. Blitzer rightly wouldn’t let him out of it: “Mr. Speaker, you made an issue of it this week.”

Romney jumped: “Wouldn’t it be nice if people wouldn’t make accusations somewhere else that they’re not able to defend here?” And then Romney gave a clear, capable, winning response — the first time I’ve seen him do that. He’s running away with this thing. Newt is looking like a chump.

UPDATE.7: Ramesh Ponnuru tweets: “A politician investing in Freddie doesn’t strike me as nearly as bad as Freddie investing in a politician.”

UPDATE.8: Oh law, NASA. Good for you, Romney, saying that it’s too expensive to create a base on the moon. Gingrich sounds like he’s trying to back away from his grandiose claim that he’ll build Fort Lunatic in his second administration. And what does Newt mean, saying he wants to have an American on the moon before the Chinese get there. Um, Newt, we got there over four decades ago.

Santorum: “We’ve got to start cutting federal programs, not talking about how to grow them.” Excellent attacks on Gingrich’s space gooniness. “Those are things that sound good, and maybe make big promises to people, but we’ve got to be more responsible in how we allocate our resources.” Gingrich really is out on the limb here. The Romney-Santorum-Paul triple-team on the space issue really does highlight how kooky Newt can be.

UPDATE.9: Newt, is it really the case that we don’t have corporate investment in space shots because there’s a government monopoly on space exploration? Really?

Romney is on fire tonight, accusing Newt of going from state to state, pandering to local voters, spending gobs of money. “That’s what got us into the trouble that we’re in now. We’ve got to say no to this kind of spending.”

Unless he has a major stumble tonight, Romney has won this thing already. He’s made a fool of Newt.

UPDATE.10: Daniel McCarthy tweets: “If 13,000 Americans were living on the moon, they could apply for statehood, says Newt. That really happened.” It did!

Santorum is on a roll against Gingrich and Romney on healthcare, and flip-flopping. Santorum has exactly one tone, though: frenzied.

UPDATE.11:New NBC/WSJ poll finds Newt with a huge nine-point lead nationally over Romney, among GOP voters — but far more vulnerable against Obama than any of his opponents.

UPDATE.12: Good grief, if I had to listen to Santorum’s hectoring voice for four years, I’d shove hatpins into my ears to save my sanity.

UPDATE.13: How in the world does Ron Paul know that Hispanics are less inclined to war than other people? What a weird thing to say.

UPDATE.14: Alex Massie tweets that Newt will say he knows Callista will make a good first lady because he’s interviewed other candidates. Heh.

UPDATE.15: “It is our responsibility to share the gift of freedom with people throughout the world,” says Romney. Oh brother.

UPDATE.16: Puerto Rican statehood? Now’s a good time for Your Working Boy to go to the kitchen for a diet Coke.

UPDATE.17: Ron Paul has no good answer on why he’s the best one to beat Obama, because it’s not possible to make that case.

Romney is screwing up this answer too. He ought to have landed the final blow on Newt right here. A stupid mistake. The correct answer is something that puts the question to voters, “With so much at stake, do you really want Mr. Moon Colony going up against Obama?” But he’s done very well tonight, so it probably won’t hurt him too bad.

Gingrich blew it too. His main case is that he’s not a wishy-washy fair-weather conservative, but the kind of guy who can tear into Obama. This is why he’s doing so well today: he sent that message out from South Carolina. Romney must have taken all the fight out of him tonight.

Santorum had the best answer to this question. But he’s not going to win.

Romney won this debate, and probably Florida, and so the nomination. Newt collapsed, as bullies and blowhards often do when somebody fights back. Santorum auditioned for Romney’s VP, and greatly enhanced his chances. Ron Paul shines on, that crazy diamond.

Mollie over at Get Religion has an amazing catch about the coverage CBS News’s website posted about the annual March for Life. Writes Mollie:

The online producers at CBS posted a photo slideshow the other day that appeared under the following rather literal headline:

Activists Hold Annual March For Life On Roe v. Wade Anniversary

So, just thinking out loud, what percentage of the pictures in this gallery would you expect to be of, well, the thousands and thousands of activists who traveled to Washington, D.C., in order to take part in the annual March For Life on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade?

If you guessed anything other than zero, you would be wrong.

There are literally no pictures of any pro-lifers in this feature.

Megan McArdle says that the Buffett secretary tax claims are nonsense, and that it’s “beyond bizarre” that Buffett would make them.

(Sorry the blog has been quiet today. I was out doing some shopping, and seeing “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol,” which was just the thing.)

Something personal. I knew this kid in high school, T., who was a Vietnamese immigrant. He started his journey to America as a child. He crossed the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Cambodia. His parents were dead. I can’t remember if they had died before he left, or on the trip. Somehow, little T. made it to a refugee camp in Thailand, and then, in time, to the United States. He settled — or rather, was settled, because he was still a boy — in the New Orleans area. T. did well in school, and made it into one of the state’s top public high schools. I didn’t know him well. He was shy, and didn’t speak great English, but I recall him as being exceptionally kind and tender. I wondered back then how a kid survives all the things that he went through, and maintains his humanity. Just to look at T. was to see someone who would do anything in the world for you. An extraordinary young man.

News came yesterday that T.’s wife just died from an inoperable brain tumor. He is now left to raise their children alone. I don’t know why God allows things like this to happen, and I know it’s pointless to ponder it for too long. Please, if you pray, say a prayer for that good man T. and his children. He has seen things, and endured things, that none of us should have to see and to endure. You might have thought those soul-crushing days of trial and torment were over for him. You might have thought.

Gotta love Derb:

Watching the president deliver his speech tonight, listening to all the gassy cant and bogus concern, the promises to “create” jobs by “investing” in grand government projects, the hollow claims of benevolence and omnipotence, I kept thinking, “They don’t have a clue. None of them has a single [expletive] clue.”

That’s not specifically an observation about this president. Obama has been less of a calamity than I feared. He has probably done less harm to the nation, net-net, than his predecessor. He has conventionally leftist opinions but no real ideology, no grand transformative plan. His natural interest is in politics: raising funds, getting elected, making appointments—and in the hundreds of millions of dollars he will accumulate after leaving office. In British terms, he is a Tony Blair. I shouldn’t care to spend any time with Obama (and shall call myself blessed if I go to the grave never having spent a minute in the same room as his dimwitted shopaholic wife). If we were to trade opinions on matters of public policy I doubt we’d have a single point of agreement, but I don’t feel any animosity toward him.

I merely don’t think he has a clue. Not him, not Geithner or Mrs. Clinton, not Reid or Pelosi, not Romney or Gingrich or Boehner—I don’t believe any of them has a clue.

Read the whole thing.  I don’t recall having read anything that summed up the malaise I feel when I contemplate our political situation, and its possibilities. Like Derb, I don’t share the hatred of Obama common among our political confreres. Indeed, the last Bush was far, far more destructive of the country and the national interest than Obama has been. But to be fair to Obama and to his political opponents, who among us does have any clue what to do? I find it impossible to listen to anything Obama or the GOP candidates (Ron Paul excepted) say without feeling that I’m hearing a sales pitch. I don’t know which is more troubling: the belief that they’re lying to me, or the belief that they’re lying to themselves.

Perhaps Newt “Moon Unit” Gingrich wants to colonize the moon so we can lower the food stamp rolls by shipping the poor and hungry off to work in the lunar mines. Hey, man, think big! Sharon Astyk brings to mind why Gingrich’s slam on Obama as the “food stamp president” ticked me off so bad:

It is absolutely true that there are more food stamp recipients as a percentage of the population than ever in history – and that that was also true during the last two years of George W. Bush’s presidency. President Obama’s claim that this is due to the recession is only partly right – the reality is that as fossil energies, health care and housing costs have risen, most households have a smaller and smaller portion of their income to devote to discretionary expenses like food – and oddly, food as become functionally discretionary for many people, I’m not just being facetious, although I wish I was.

For most people with fixed costs for transportation, medications and high housing and associated costs, food is one of the few things you can cut back on – which means that the end of the month looks very different than the beginning. The incredible draw on food pantries, food stamps and soup kitchens isn’t about dependency – or at least dependency on social programs. It is about another kind of dependency, on an economic system that is slowly chewing people up and spitting them out.

It is disturbing that 1 in 7 Americans will soon probably depend on food stamps and 1 in 3 children. As I have argued before that represents a fundamental shift in our culture – we can no longer afford to eat well even on the cheapest food in the world, and the US has now functionally joned other nations that have to subsidize food for its people in order to ensure that they eat. This is a huge fundamental shift – but we also know what happens when we don’t subsidize food for the hungry poor in any nation. The kids suffer, the elderly suffer and those with the strength and the anger riot.

During the recession in the early part of the last decade, I talked to the head of a big food pantry in Dallas, who told me they had begun seeing luxury cars pulling into their parking lot — this, a sign that even the prosperous had fallen on times so hard they had to turn to a food pantry to feed themselves and their families. I really do struggle to fathom the kind of hard heart that begrudges people subsidized food. Does Gingrich think most people actually want to be on food stamps? When I was a teenager working check-out at a grocery store in my town, lots of people paid with food stamps. They were almost always obviously poor. Whatever their personal situation — I mean, for all I knew, they were taking their food-stamp savings and blowing it on Mad Dog 20/20 — there was no way in hell anybody not on food stamps would want to trade places with them.

Last fall, Sen. Jeff Sessions blasted SNAP, the federal food stamp program, for its skyrocketing budget. Excerpt:

Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions has set his sights on a federal government program that he says has quadrupled its cost during the last decade. This year the federal government is projected to spend $80 billion on food stamps. Sessions says the program’s cost has doubled in the last three years and is set to increase another 14 percent this year.

Sessions told The Daily Caller that no large government program’s cost has expanded as quickly as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamp program, which is dwarfing the budgets for other federal responsibilities.

“There is no doubt, if this country isn’t willing to look under the hood of the food stamp program as we try to bring our surging debt under control, we are obviously not serious about what we are doing,” Sessions said. “You know, for example — this is important — the federal highway program is about 40 billion [dollars] … The entire Department of Justice, including the prison system, is about about 30 [billion]. This program is 80 [billion], and it’s doubled in three years.”

Why do you suppose the budget for the federal food stamp program doubled since 2008? The country suffered its worst economic collapse since the Great Depression! We’ve got a far higher unemployment rate than we did prior to the crash. Unemployed people, unsurprisingly, don’t have money to buy things like they once did — things like, well, food.

The Pentagon estimates that it will spend $107 billion in Afghanistan this year. We’re spending more to fight a losing war in Afghanistan, a country of no importance to us, than we are to feed poor or economically stressed Americans. I’m not saying we should be satisfied with spending $80 billion a year to subsidize food stamps, but of all the things the taxpayer subsidizes, food for the poor during a prolonged economic crisis ought to be low on our budget-cutting priorities.

On the other hand, economist Casey Mulligan explains why food stamp costs have gone up so much in the past few years. It has a lot to do with eligibility requirements having been relaxed. Mulligan says that when the economy gets better, these more generous regulations will probably remain. That’s potentially a problem. But consider what it takes to qualify for the federal food stamp program:

 Household income must not exceed 130 percent of poverty; for a family of three that would be a gross monthly income of $2,008.

True, most states don’t have a program in place to test for assets, to make sure people aren’t defrauding the food stamp program. Still, is it really the case that we want to tell people making $24,000 per year that they’re too rich for food stamps? Should that be a priority? Republicans worry about creating a new dependent class, but when you read stories of real people who have had to turn to food stamps, it hardly  seems like they’re layabouts enjoying ribeyes on the taxpayer dime.

To be clear, I’m not saying that the food stamp program ought to be open-ended. I am saying that aside from the politics of resentment, I don’t understand why, given the extraordinarily difficult economic times this country has suffered these past three years, and will continue to suffer through 2014, if the Fed’s forecast is accurate — I don’t understand why the money Washington spends to subsidize supper for the poor and the working poor is such a big damn deal to Republicans.

The NYT draws attention to an op-ed in the top science journal Nature, arguing that peak oil (though the authors don’t use the term) is posing a huge strategic economic risk to the US, and that our government isn’t doing enough to deal with it. The Nature piece is gated behind a subscriber firewall, but the Times characterizes it thus:

James Murray of the University of Washington and David King of the University of Oxford point out that global oil production appeared to hit a cap of about 75 million barrels a day in 2005. Since then, they note, small supply bumps have caused big price gyrations, yet even when prices spike above $100 a barrel, supply appears incapable of rising to meet the demand.

The professors make only a glancing mention of the term “peak oil,” a widely promoted and widely attacked concept, but their argument resembles some of the less feverish versions of the peak oil case.

They essentially argue that oil supply now represents a large strategic risk to global economic growth, and that smart governments ought to be developing comprehensive plans and pushing hard to move their citizens into more efficient cars, onto public transit and so forth – a greener energy path that would also be good for the climate.

As the Times says, the peak oil argument has never received serious treatment in a journal as prestigious as this one.

Of all the things I miss about my former life in Dallas, one of them is not the antics of County-Commissioner-for-Life John Wiley Price, a race-baiting rabble rouser who can do no wrong. FBI raid of his office and house? No problem! Just another day in the life for JWP.

Price’s latest embarrassing episode is his nomination of a racist black radical to the county’s Homeland Security Advisory Committee. Excerpt:

The nomination infuriated civil rights groups – because McCarthy founded “New Black Panther Party for Self Defense.” The Anti-Defamation League says the group is the “largest organized anti-Semitic and racist black militant group in America.” The original Black Panthers call the group a “black racist hate group.”

Aaron Michaels is best known nationally as the founder of the radical activist organization the New Black Panther Party. He is best known in Dallas for his sometimes violent protests during DISD demonstrations in 1996 and 1997.

He is now back in the public eye as Commissioner Price’s appointee to the Dallas County Homeland Security Advisory Committee.

Here’s a little backgrounder on the ideology preached by Commissioner Price’s nominee and his organizational colleagues. And here is some of what the group long supported by John Wiley Price supports. Excerpt:

NBPP leader Khalid Abdul Muhammad, speaking at a protest in Baltimore, Maryland, February 19, 1994: “Our lessons talk about the bloodsuckers of the poor. … It’s that old no-good Jew, that old imposter Jew, that old hooked-nose, bagel-eating, lox-eating, Johnny-come-lately, perpetrating-a-fraud, just-crawled-out-of-the-caves-and-hills-of-Europe, so-called damn Jew … and I feel everything I’m saying up here is kosher.”

Malik Zulu Shabazz, the party’s national chairman, protesting at B’nai B’rith International headquarters in Washington, D.C., April 20, 2002: “Kill every goddamn Zionist in Israel! Goddamn little babies, goddamn old ladies! Blow up Zionist supermarkets!”

King Samir Shabazz, head of the party’s Philadelphia chapter, in a National Geographicdocumentary, January 2009: “I hate white people. All of them. Every last iota of a cracker, I hate it. We didn’t come out here to play today. There’s too much serious business going on in the black community to be out here sliding through South Street with white, dirty, cracker whore bitches on our arms, and we call ourselves black men. … What the hell is wrong with you black man? You at a doomsday with a white girl on your damn arm. We keep begging white people for freedom! No wonder we not free! Your enemy cannot make you free, fool! You want freedom? You going to have to kill some crackers! You going to have to kill some of their babies!”

You can see what a credit it is to Dallas that a man like John Wiley Price is a county commissioner, has been since 1985, and will be until he either dies or is sent to prison. Whatever this charlatan and clown may do wrong, his ridiculous constituents keep voting for him because he can be counted on to do the one thing that matters to them most of all: stick it to whitey.