Many people may be voting for Mitt Romney because of the view in some quarters that he is the inevitable Republican candidate for president of the United States, and the candidate with the best chance of beating Barack Obama, rather than because they actually prefer Romney to the other candidates.

Inevitability has a very unreliable track record. Within living memory, totalitarianism was considered to be “the wave of the future.” During the primary season, people should vote for whomever they prefer, on their own merits, not because pundits have pronounced them inevitable.

Regardless of what the polls or the pundits say about Mitt Romney’s chances of winning the Republican nomination, the conditions that made him the front-runner in the primaries are the direct opposite of the conditions for the general election.

The biggest single reason why Governor Romney is the front-runner is that he has had the overwhelming advantage in money spent and in “boots on the ground” running his campaign in states across the country.

Romney has outspent each of his rivals — and all of his rivals put together. His campaign organization has been operating for years, and it has put his name on the ballot everywhere, while neither Santorum nor Gingrich had a big enough organization to get on the ballot in an important state, Virginia.

Read more at National Review HERE.

Breitbart.com has uncovered video from 1995 of then-U.S. Attorney Eric Holder announcing a public campaign to “really brainwash people into thinking about guns in a vastly different way.”

Holder was addressing the Woman’s National Democratic Club. In his remarks, broadcast by CSPAN 2, he explained that he intended to use anti-smoking campaigns as his model to “change the hearts and minds of people in Washington, DC” about guns.

“What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that’s not cool, that it’s not acceptable, it’s not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way in which we changed our attitudes about cigarettes.”

Holder added that he had asked advertising agencies in the nation’s capital to assist by making anti-gun ads rather than commercials “that make me buy things that I don’t really need.” He had also approached local newspapers and television stations, he said, asking them to devote prime space and time, respectively, to his anti-gun campaign.

Local political leaders and celebrities, Holder said, including Mayor Marion Barry and Jesse Jackson, had been asked to help. In addition, he reported, he had asked the local school board to make the anti-gun message a part of “every day, every school, and every level.”

Read more at Breitbart.com HERE.

Two prominent Australian philosophers created a firestorm of outrage recently by arguing that killing newborn children is morally equivalent to abortion, and that mother’s rights trumped the rights of their unwanted infants. While the argument may be the next logical step for a society that promotes the destruction of developing children in the womb, the article produced a vehemently negative response from the general public.

Monash University’s Alberto Giubilini and the University of Melbourne’s Francesca Minerva published the article “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?” in the Feb 23, 2012 online version of the prestigious Journal of Medical Ethics. The article raised not a few hairs on a few necks and earned the authors death threats amidst the stream of angry responses.

In the article, the ethicists made the case that sometimes unsuspecting mothers will give birth to disabled children, whom they might have aborted had they known of the babies’ disabilities before birth. Since these children have as yet no awareness of the lives they are losing, the mothers should have the freedom to cut short their unwanted babies’ lives in an “after-birth abortion.” (As long as the execution is painless.) The authors make a point of calling the practice “after-birth abortion” and not “infanticide” because they equate it morally with the killing of a fetus rather than a child.  They also reject the term “euthanasia” since the mother and not the child is the focus of concern.

In a contorted sense, the authors are right. There is little real difference in killing a child inside the womb rather than outside the womb. The few inches of distance from the uterus to the outside world has little bearing on the nature of the action. A human child is alive, and then she is dead. In neither case did she die as a natural result of her developmental abnormalities; she died because her mother made a decision.

Giubilini and Minerva could be roasted for suggesting that the lives of developmentally abnormal children have less value than others, drawing an outcry from the disabled community, except that the authors did not stop there. They said mothers should be allowed to kill their healthy newborns as well.

Print full article HERE.

Looking toward the critical primary in Illinois, Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney wrapped up a shortened campaign trip to Puerto Rico on Saturday as he prepared for more tough contests against chief rival Rick Santorum.

The former Massachusetts governor dramatically curtailed his trip to the U.S. territory, which holds its primary Sunday, in favor of spending more time in Illinois, where polls have shown him slightly ahead of Santorum. Romney had planned to spend the weekend and visit a polling place Sunday, but instead left the island immediately after a morning appearance.

Santorum left Puerto Rico earlier this week and was spending the morning in Missouri, where he already won a primary that awarded no delegates. Missouri Republicans were meeting in county caucuses Saturday, the first step toward choosing delegates to the national convention who are committed to specific candidates. Santorum was headed to Illinois Saturday night.

Romney campaigned Saturday morning with Puerto Rican Gov. Luis Fortuno, shopping for tropical fruit and meeting with voters a day after a massive, energetic rally in San Juan celebrated his arrival here.

“It was Ronald Reagan who very famously in our party said that it was important for the people of Puerto Rico to have the choice to become a state, and if the people of Puerto Rico choose that path, I will be happy to lead that effort in Washington,” Romney said after the crowd began chanting “Statehood now! Statehood now!”

Read more at USAToday.com HERE.

Is President Obama’s birth certificate a forgery? Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., believes it is. He recently held a press conference in Phoenix to discuss the findings of a new 10-page report. Mr. Arpaio’s investigators have come to a stunning conclusion: The long-form birth certificate Mr. Obama released last year is a “computer-generated forgery.

With the exception of The Washington Times, however, no major U.S. media outlet reported this bombshell story. The liberal press corps is desperately trying to suppress any discussion of Forgerygate – potentially one of the biggest scandals in American history. The media class is betraying its fundamental mission to pursue the truth.

“Based on all of the evidence presented and investigated, I cannot in good faith report to you that these documents are authentic,” Sheriff Arpaio said. “My investigators believe that the long-form birth certificate was manufactured electronically and that it did not originate in paper format as claimed by the White House.”

The Washington Times story, written by Stephen Dinan, points out that Mr. Arpaio has called for Congress to investigate the matter. Think about this: A high-profile sheriff orders a team of former law enforcement officials to examine whether the president is truly a natural born citizen and that he has the constitutional and legal right to occupy the White House. Their official report is that Mr. Obama’s documents are shoddy and he likely engaged in deliberate fraud. And yet, most of the American press corps doesn’t believe this is an important news story? The liberal media has become rotten to the core.

Ironically, the foreign press reported widely on the story. For example, Pravda – that’s right, the former official organ of the Soviet Communist Party – did an extensive analysis of Mr. Arpaio’s findings. The article by Dianna Cotter asks the obvious question: What are U.S. journalists afraid of?

Read more at Washington Times HERE.