This is a great reference for all your delegate allocation questions.

After some brief consultation, I noticed that CA, NY, MD, DE, CT, MT, UT, PR, NJ,  and VA are all either strictly winner-take-all or winner-take-all if the winner gets a majority.

That’s 500 delegates in the bag for Mitt, right there.

He has about 100 delegates so far, and is projected to have about 250 by Super Tuesday. So just based on those numbers, Mitt already basically has 250 + 500 = 750 delegates in the bank for all intents and purposes. 1144 are needed. That means Mitt has a mere 400 delegates to find elsewhere to clinch the nomination. This is not going to be a problem.

Now, let’s look how it stacks up for Newt:

Not a single Newt-friendly state is winner-take-all except AL and MS. IN is a bit confusing as to how delegates are allocated, but my money’s on Mitt there regardless.

Newt has been talking about Texas deciding the race. He’s been saying he plans to take the race until Texas and see where things shake out for him at that point. But…

Let’s just say Gingrich, Paul and Santorum stay in until Texas for this example.

TX has 155 delegates, which are totally proportional.

Say the result looks like this:

Gingrich – 50%
Romney – 30%
Paul – 15%
Santorum – 5%

In the best-case scenario for Newt, he gets about 78 delegates, and Mitt gets about 50. That’s a 28-delegate pickup.

That’s nothing. Montana has only 26 delegates, but it’s winner-take-all. Imagine Texas being only as decisive as Montana?

So, in short, Mitt is the nominee. Or at least Newt isn’t. Santorum looks like the final not-Romney candidate, but the math is almost as bad for him anyway.

Mitt Romney pulled out a big win in Nevada. Right now with 43% reporting, these are the results:

Mitt Romney 42.4%

Newt Gingrich 26.1%

Ron Paul 18.3%

Rick Santorum 13.0%

The only county left is Clark County, where Mitt currently has 59.8% of the vote reported, so I expect his lead to grow throughout the night. This is a big win that should give him a good boost going into the contests on Tuesday.

In other news, Newt Gingrich continues to say that he’ll run a positive campaign and then continues to attack Mitt Romney. His vitriol is becoming sickening as he seems to continue a suicide mission to take out Mitt Romney. For the sake of the party, I hope his supporters eventually switch to Rick Santorum, so that they will have a much more positive connection once Mitt Romney raps this up. The media is becoming more and more vocal about Gingrich’s ridiculous rhetoric. Watching Fox and CNN tonight, both channels were saying that Newt had a bad night (referring to his self-proclaimed “positive” speech that continued to assault Governor Romney. Honestly, I used to really like Newt. But this process has shown me that he should be nowhere near the presidency. He can’t drop out of the race soon enough.

Here’s one person’s take on Newt’s speech tonight:

Gingrich should carefully play a tape of his post–Nevada caucus performance, and then he would quickly grasp that it was little more than a litany of excuses, whining, and accusations — characterized by stream-of-conscious confessionals and rambling repetitions. And, I think, will hurt him more than anything yet in the campaign.

Gotta wonder what this is all about.  Does he want to distract people from his second electoral drubbing in one week or is he taking his ball and going home?  We shall see.

Instead of the traditional election night party, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich will hold a press conference after the Nevada Caucus on Saturday, raising new speculation about his future in the race.

An e-mail sent to reporters on Saturday morning set the Las Vegas press conference for 11 p.m. to midnight

Gingrich has had a rough time on the trail ahead of the Nevada Caucus, the first presidential contest in the West. Sources in or close to his campaign gave reporters incorrect information that Donald Trump would endorse Gingrich (he endorsed rival Mitt Romney). Gingrich also missed a meeting with the Silver State’s popular governor, Brian Sandoval, a Rick Perry supporter who was viewed as a possible Gingrich endorsement after Perry dropped out and endorsed the former House Speaker, according to The New York Times.

A Las Vegas Review-Journal—KLAS-TV poll released on Friday gave Romney a large 20-point lead over Gingrich heading into Saturday’s caucus.

National Journal

Many people have got to be getting tired of the Sour Puss Gingrich!  I remember how contentious the McCain vs. Romney match was in 2008, yet they still called to congratulate each other when each of them would win a state.  Gingrich claims that Romney ran a very dishonest campaign and “outspent him 5-1 on ads”, but there’s a huge problem with that premise.

Gingrich can’t blame Romney for being far more effective at raising money, especially given the complete incompetence of the Newt 2012 campaign.  We all know very well that if Newt had as much money he would have spent millions upon millions to blatantly lie about Mitt’s business record, as has been proven to be a lie.  On this note, he’s being a sore loser and a big sour puss.

But the biggest problem with Newt’s premise is that Romney’s ads were historically factual.  Were the Romney ads hard hitting?  Yes.  Were they merciless?  Yes, but you try to stay as positive as you can as the front runner, and Romney learned that you can’t sustain the attacks in politics without responding.  But here’s the biggest problem with Newt’s premise: His ads were far more deceptive and inaccurate than Romney’s.  Consider that Newt took it so personal and so far in his attacks on Romney that he betrayed his, and the Republican Pary’s values, in a desperate attempt to attack Romney while waging a full frontal assault on Capitalism, Free Enterprise and Private Equity.

He took it even further when he and Rick Perry tried played the leftist card of “class warfare”, demanding that Governor Romney release his tax records for the sole purpose of making him look out of touch with the American people.  They know Mitt Romney is an honest man, they just wanted to show the poor and middle class that he pays a lower tax rate than them (his income from the past ten years comes from Capital Gains, which require a lower tax rate).  Gingrich had to be chastised by Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush for falsely accusing Mitt of being “anti-immigration”!  When’s the last time Mitt was chastised for lying about his opponent….by those who said they’d stay out of the endorsement business while these candidate were campaigning in their state?

I’m reminded of the Biblical teaching “for how considerest thou the most that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?  Oh thou hypocrite, first cast the beam out of thine own eye, then shalt thou see clearly to cast the more out of they brother’s eye.”  I’m also reminded of something Steven R. Covey said, “We don’t see people and things as they are, we see them as we are.”

Governor Romney was right to tell Newt to “look in the mirror.”

Mitt Romney Talks Foreign Policy With Sean Hannity

Trump: Romney is What The Country Needs

Part 2

In the clip, John McCain advisor Steve Schmidt, played by Woody Harrelson, tells the candidate that he needs something dramatic to alter the trajectory in his campaign, something to capture the “YouTube” 24/7 news cycle. Enter Palin, who scores with her rollicking speech at the Republican National Convention before beginning to wilt under the glare of the media spotlight.

Schmidt and McCain’s team soon find to their dismay that not only is Moore-as-Palin thin on policy and disinterested in prep work, she is fiercely independent, bucking her campaign handlers at every turn. “I am not your puppet!” she barks.

The real Palin, who lately has been trying to insert herself into the GOP presidential fight between Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, criticized the book when it was released for being inaccurate.

The release of the film (scheduled for four days after the “Super Tuesday” slate of GOP primaries) is likely to provoke another round of clashes between Palin’s defenders and detractors. The website “Conservatives4Palin” is already on the case.

Great response from Governor Romney regarding Obama’s attack on the Catholic Church!  Five past ambassadors to the Vatican have endorsed Governor Romney!

The Obama administration is at it again. They are now using Obamacare to impose a secular vision on Americans who believe that they should not have their religious freedom taken away.

On January 20, 2012, the Obama administration affirmed a rule that would force Roman Catholic hospitals, charities, and universities to purchase health insurance for their employees that includes coverage for contraception, abortifacients, and sterilization, in violation of their religious principles. This is wrong.

My own view is clear. I stand with the Catholic Bishops and all religious organizations in their strenuous objection to this liberty- and conscience-stifling regulation.  I am committed to overturning Obamacare root and branch. If I am elected President, on day one of my administration I will issue an executive order directing my Secretary of Health and Human Services to issue a waiver from its requirements to all 50 states. And on day one I will eliminate the Obama administration rule that compels religious institutions to violate the tenets of their own faith. Such rules don’t belong in the America that I believe in.

The America I believe in is governed by the U.S. Constitution and I will not hesitate to use the powers of the presidency to protect religious liberty.

Religious liberty is at the heart of the American experiment. As a nation founded in part by religious dissenters, we enshrined it as the first freedom in our Bill of Rights. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” is how the First Amendment begins. James Madison put the moral principle behind the amendment succinctly: “Conscience is the most sacred of all property.” And accompanying the moral principle came the social principle that only religious liberty could ensure tranquility in a new land composed of men and women of differing faiths.

But, now, more than two centuries after the drafting of the Bill of Rights, religious liberty is facing the most serious assault in generations. And the assault is coming from liberalism itself. In the process of implementing Obamacare, the Obama administration is pressing forward with a rule that tramples on religious freedom, taking particular aim at Roman Catholics. The Obama administration is forcing religious institutions to choose between violating their conscience  or dropping health care coverage for their employees, effectively destroying their ability to carry on their work.

Those of us who object have an irrefutable case. American courts have long held as a foundational principle the right of religious institutions to control their own affairs. It was reaffirmed by the Supreme Court as recently as January 11  in a case involving ministerial hiring. It is notable that in that case, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church v. EEOC, the Obama administration was also challenging the basic time-honored principle of ecclesiastical autonomy. But a unanimous Court rejected the Obama administration’s position, declaring it to be “extreme” and explaining that the suit was “hard to square with the text of the First Amendment itself, which gives special solicitude to the rights of religious organizations.”

Seemingly in line with this “special solicitude,” the Obama administration has put forward a “religious employer” exemption regarding contraception and sterilization insurance coverage. Unfortunately, the Obama administration lawyers narrowed its actual force almost to the vanishing point. It only applies to religious organizations engaged primarily in serving people of the same religion. But that is not what many religious institutions do; serving the broad public is the essence of their divine mission. Accordingly, they will be compelled to provide health coverage to which they object as a matter of conscience.

In an effort to mollify the Bishops, Health and Human Services has now given religious institutions an additional twelve months to comply. That twelve-month extension is a clumsy attempt to push this matter past this year’s presidential election. As long as the rule hovers in front of us, we must keep up the battle. In a polity that provides all manners of exemption on the basis of religious freedom, it is an appalling trespass on the First Amendment.

Liberals and conservatives have made common cause to defend the rights of religious minorities in the past.  But somehow, today, when it comes to the agenda of the left-wing of the Democratic Party—those who brought us abortion on demand and who fight against the teaching of abstinence education in our children’s schools—their devotion to religious freedom goes out the window. They would force Catholics and others who have beliefs rooted in their faith to sacrifice the teachings of their faith to the mandate of federal bureaucrats.

It is a prerequisite to the preservation of our liberty that our government not dictate to religious institutions the principles by which they are to carry out their charitable and divine mission. Religious liberty and freedom of conscience flow from the common conviction that it is freedom not coercion that exalts the individual, just as it raises up the nation.

What the Obama administration has done is indefensible. But this is about even more than President Obama denying America’s Catholics their constitutionally protected rights. This is about the preservation of our freedom. We must come together to make sure that these egregious violations of our Constitution do not stand.

PPP Nevada Caucus Survey

• Romney 50%
• Gingrich 25%
• Paul 15%
• Santorum 8%
• Someone else/not sure

Favorables

• Romney 70/25
• Santorum 64/23
• Paul 45/46
• Gingrich 41/49

PPP surveyed 937 likely Republican caucus voters on February 1st and 2nd. The margin of error for the survey is +/-3.2%.

Mitt Romney Sits Down in Wynn Casino Interview With Mitt Romney.  A strong Interview!

Part 2: