The so-called Eleventh Commandment — “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican” — which was popularized by President Ronald Reagan, has been violated numerous times in this electoral season. Now, following his somewhat unexpected success in Iowa, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum appears to have violated the unspoken Twelfth Amendment: “Thou shalt not insult Ronald Reagan.”

At a New Hampshire event on Wednesday, Santorum addressed America’s financial crisis and spoke candidly about entitlement spending. Rather than praising Reagan, who is revered by many conservatives as a stellar president and a political savior of sorts, the 2012 hopeful said that the former president contributed to the entitlement crisis by kicking the can down the road on Social Security issues. According to Santorum, Reagan should have dealt with long-term Social Security problems during a 1983 bipartisan deal.

The Daily Caller reports:

Santorum was walking the audience through what he called the “ancient days of yesteryear” in a interminable and incredibly detailed response to a questioner. He explained that in the 1983 deal Reagan brokered with Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neil to fix Social Security, the retirement age was moved back to 67, but that change wasn’t slated to be enacted until the politicians responsible were out of office.

Speaking in third person, he said, “If Rick Santorum gets elected and we do what I said that we need to do, which is to deal with the entitlement programs now, not 10 to 20 years from now.” Then, he went in for the “kill” that may leave a sour taste in the mouths of Reagan-loving conservatives.

“You’ll know — unlike Ronald Reagan who maybe was a better politician than me — you’ll know that it was Rick Santorum that worked together and got the American public to gather together to fix this problem,” he said. “Why? Because it is our problem.”

 Read More at The Blaze By Billy Hallowell, The Blaze

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says he thinks the real story out of Iowa is that three-fourths of the state Republican caucus-goers “repudiated Mitt Romney.”

Commenting today on Romney’s mere eight-vote victory over former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum in the Iowa caucuses Tuesday, Gingrich said: “I think what is really striking about last night is that three out of four Republicans repudiated Mitt Romney. How can you take seriously somebody after that kind of campaign?”

Gingrich, who finished fourth in the caucuses, said during an MSNBC interview from New Hampshire this morning that “we got diverted” by Romney’s negative advertisements. He added that he has to figure out a better way to run in such an environment.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Romney hasn’t been truthful about his record, Gingrich said, again criticizing negative ads that an independent group that backs Romney ran against him.

Also during the MSNBC interview, Gingrich repeated his congratulations to former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum on his near-miss loss to Romney in Iowa.

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Read More at Newsmax

Last night’s nail-biter in Iowa marked the beginning of election year 2012. And with Americans heading to the polls — next in New Hampshire, then South Carolina and beyond — they will hope to rely on the integrity of the election system to ensure that every legitimate vote counts and that fraud is not the deciding factor on the local, state or national level.

Unfortunately, despite all the technological advances in our modern democracy, voter fraud still occurs, and yet there is still resistance to one very simple tool that could help eradicate it — voter ID. Some, like The New York Times, say that voting fraud is a myth, that “there is almost no voting fraud in America.” But as Heritage senior legal fellow Hans von Spakovsky explains, voter fraud is all too common in America today:

The fraud denialists also must have missed the recent news coverage of the double voters in North Carolina and the fraudster in Tunica County, Miss. — a member of the NAACP’s local executive committee — who was sentenced in April to five years in prison for voting in the names of ten voters, including four who were deceased.

And the story of the former deputy chief of staff for Washington mayor Vincent Gray, who was forced to resign after news broke that she had voted illegally in the District of Columbia even though she was a Maryland resident. Perhaps they would like a copy of an order from a federal immigration court in Florida on a Cuban immigrant who came to the U.S. in April 2004 and promptly registered and voted in the November election.

Even former liberal Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens agrees. Stevens wrote in a 6-3 majority opinion upholding an Indiana voter ID law: “That flagrant examples of [voter] fraud…have been documented throughout this Nation’s history by respected historians and journalists…demonstrate[s] that not only is the risk of voter fraud real but that it could affect the outcome of a close election.”

Given the incidence of voter fraud — and the simplicity of requiring voters to present a valid ID in order to be able to vote — it’s not surprising that 70 percent of likely U.S. voters believe that voters “should be required to show photo identification such as a driver’s license before being allowed to cast their ballot,” according to a recent Rasmussen poll. Meanwhile, only 22 percent of Americans are opposed to the requirement.

Despite the fraud — and the support for voter ID measures — Attorney General Eric Holder intends to examine new state voter ID laws for potential racial bias. Von Spakovsky writes that the allegations of bias are baseless, and there is evidence to prove it. In Georgia, which enacted a photo ID law before the 2008 election, the number of African American voters increased after the new law went into effect. “According to Census Bureau surveys,” von Spakovsky writes, “65 percent of the black voting-age population voted in the 2008 election, compared with only 54.4 percent in 2004, an increase of more than ten percentage points.”

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Read More at The Foundry By Mike Brownfield, The Foundry