SPOKANE, Wash. — Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said President Obama “surrendered” Thursday when he apologized to the Afghan government for the burning of several Qurans at an American military base near Kabul.

Referring to the burning of “radical Islamic material” that included the Qurans, the former House speaker said the situation had been “blown into a huge incident by various fanatics in Afghanistan.” He told a crowd gathered at a campaign rally at the Bing Crosby Theater that while the president had apologized for the burning, he had not called on the Afghan government to issue an apology for the deaths of two NATO soldiers who were killed by a man wearing an Afghan army uniform during increasingly violent protests of the desecration of the Muslim holy book.

“There seems to be nothing that radical Islamists can do to get Barack Obama’s attention in a negative way,” Gingrich said, “and he is consistently apologizing to people who do not deserve the apology of the president of the United States, period.”

Obama sent a letter to Afghan President Hamid Karzai in which he wrote, “I wish to express my deep regret for the reported incident. I extend to you and the Afghan people my sincere apologies,” according to the New York Times, quoting Karzai’s press office. Obama did not release the text of what it called a three-page letter on a “host of issues” between the two countries, “several sentences of which relate to this issue,” the Times reported.

Although Presidential apologies are rare, they are not unheard of. President George W. Bush offered an apology to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki after a U.S. soldier fired several bullets into a Quran in 2008. And Bush also said he was “sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families” following the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Read More at CBS News By Sarah Huisenga, CBS News

One of the biggest myths of the 2012 presidential campaign, propagated by Team Romney and the mainstream media, is that Willard Mitt Romney is a hard-liner on immigration issues. One easily could reach that conclusion if Romney were judged on his speeches, press releases, and sound bites.

However, as all conservatives should know, it is foolish to predict how a politician will govern based on campaign rhetoric. The more reliable way to determine a candidate‘s position is to review his actual record.

It is clear the Romney campaign, beginning with his 2008 bid, decided to use immigration as one of the few hooks it had to lure conservatives to its camp. With Romney’s dismal record on fiscal and social issues, his consultants must have concluded that with so little said about immigration by Romney while governor, they could get away with creating a phony record.
Indeed, if one digs deeply, a disturbing pattern emerges. Romney’s “hard-line” positions on immigration suddenly arose as he began thinking of running for president in 2006. Moreover, his current views on immigration usually contradict what he actually said and did as governor. It appears that Romney’s immigration positions have been created solely for his presidential run or were based upon events that simply never occurred.

ROMNEY’S SUPPORT FOR MCCAIN’S AMNESTY
Romney has made opposition to any amnesty proposal a central campaign plank. This message first surfaced during the run-up to his 2008 race when his potential rival, Senator John McCain, introduced an immigration measure that included amnesty. Romney attacked it:

I strongly opposed today’s bill going through the Senate. It is the wrong approach. Any legislation that allows illegal immigrants to stay in the country indefinitely, as the new “Z-Visa” does, is a form of amnesty . . . today’s Senate agreement falls short of the actions needed to both solve our country’s illegal immigration problem and also strengthen our legal immigration system.

Read More at National Review By Steve Baldwin and Deroy Murdock, National Review

After tonight’s debate, in which Ron Paul and Mitt Romney repeatedly attacked Rick Santorum over his 16-year record in Congress, the former US Senator for Pennsylvania hinted that something nefarious was going on.

“You have to ask Congressman Paul and Governor Romney what they’ve got going together,” Santorum told reporters in the spin room in Mesa, Arizona. “Their commercials look a lot alike and so do their attacks.”

Santorum’s top strategist John Brabender went even further, charging that the two men had “joined forces” and were coordinating attacks against his man

“Clearly there’s a tag team strategy between Ron Paul and Mitt Romney. For all I know, Mitt Romney might be considering Ron Paul as his running mate. Clearly there is now an alliance between those two and you saw that certainly in the debate.”

The was also coordination in their attack ads, he charged. “Ron Paul for all practical purposes has pulled out of Michigan. Correct? Where’s he running negative ads against Rick Santorum? Michigan.

Read More at Daily Mail

Charles Murray has done it again. His new book, Coming Apart, has blown the lid off the most crucial development socially in the United States over the last 50 years: the rise off bastardy. He concentrates on whites.

The book is receiving a lot of attention. His books usually do. Losing Ground in 1984 was a great book. It exposed the welfare state as a fraud. It has not decreased poverty. It was right, and the Left attacked it.

The Bell Curve a decade later was a great book. It exposed the new elite, based on IQ, and the liberal university system that trains this elite. It was right on both counts, and the book was savaged by liberals.

His new book is getting attention, but the liberals are ignoring its main argument: the rise of bastard culture since 1960. Here is what he writes. His two towns are fictional: Fishtown (lower-class white) and Belmont (upper class white).

Marriage: In 1960, extremely high proportions of whites in both Belmont and Fishtown were married—94% in Belmont and 84% in Fishtown. In the 1970s, those percentages declined about equally in both places. Then came the great divergence. In Belmont, marriage stabilized during the mid-1980s, standing at 83% in 2010. In Fishtown, however, marriage continued to slide; as of 2010, a minority (just 48%) were married. The gap in marriage between Belmont and Fishtown grew to 35 percentage points, from just 10.

Read More at The Tea Party Economist By Gary North, Tea Party Economist