US Republican ‘frontrunner’ Romney loses primaries

This video from the USA says about itself:

Visit http://santorumexposed.com or http://www.facebook.com/exposesantorum to see more of the crazy sh*t that Rick Santorum says.

Rick Santorum Tells Boy Not to Use Pink Bowling Ball: here.

By Patrick Martin in the USA:

Santorum wins Republican primaries in Alabama, Mississippi

14 March 2012

Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum won the Republican presidential primaries in Alabama and Mississippi Tuesday, narrowly defeating former House speaker Newt Gingrich and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, who finished second and third, respectively, in the two states. The fourth candidate in the race, Texas Congressman Ron Paul, did not campaign in either state and trailed badly.

Santorum’s margin of victory was relatively narrow—35-29-28 in Alabama, 33-31-30 in Mississippi—and under the rules of the two state Republican parties, the three leading candidates will get roughly equal shares of the 84 delegates to the Republican National Convention chosen in the states.

Nonetheless, the twin victories for Santorum stalled the campaign of frontrunner Romney, who poured millions into the two states in an effort to finish off his two major rivals. Romney had the support of nearly all Republican state officials in Mississippi and most of those in Alabama.

According to exit polls, Santorum was leading among those who rejected the theory of evolution, those who claimed to believe Obama is a Muslim (50 percent of the voters), those who thought banning abortion the most important issue, and those who said a candidate’s religion was very important to them (a measure of anti-Mormon sentiment among the evangelical Christians who made up three quarters of the electorate).

One pre-election poll found that a quarter of likely Republican primary voters in the two states believed that interracial marriages should be illegal. These voters sided more with Gingrich, who has made thinly veiled appeals to racial prejudice a part of his campaign. Last week he gave a speech devoted to “states’ rights,” the banner under with Southern segregationists fought the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

The two primaries continued the pattern of the 2012 campaign, which has seen voter turnout well below that of 2008. Barely 500,000 voted in Alabama, down more than 50,000 from four years ago. Voter participation in Mississippi was slightly up compared to 2008, but only because the primary four years ago took place after the nomination had already been decided. As a proportion of those eligible to vote, turnout in Mississippi was even lower than in Alabama.

Santorum’s victories in Mississippi and Alabama followed a much wider win in the Republican caucuses in Kansas, where a tiny turnout of barely 25,000 people delivered him nearly all of the state’s 40 delegates.

The outcome of the three contests raised the likelihood of a protracted contest for the Republican presidential nomination, possibly extending all the way to the convention in Tampa in early September—only two months before the general election.

In television interviews late Tuesday night, Gingrich rebuffed suggestions that his second-place finishes had made his campaign unviable. He said that because of new party rules establishing proportional representation and the presence of four contenders, no single candidate would be able to win an outright majority of the delegates.

In that event, he said, Romney would have failed to win the nomination and the anti-Romney majority would be compelled to come together to choose a candidate, either Santorum, himself or someone not currently seeking the nomination. …

As the campaign has continued and the Obama administration has moved further and further to the right, his Republican opponents have been compelled to adopt ever more extreme positions in order to outflank him.

Romney, in particular, has repudiated nearly all the policies he pursued as governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2006 in order to embrace a series of political litmus tests laid down by the ultra-right Tea Party elements.

The most recent example was his conversion on the issue of the minimum wage, which he supported in Massachusetts and even during his 2008 campaign for the Republican nomination, advocating indexing the wage to inflation. But in a television interview last week, he reversed himself, declaring, “There’s probably not a need to raise the minimum wage.”

‘Occupy Wall Street’ protesters target Romney fundraiser: here.

Bain Capital Tied to Surveillance Push in Chinese Cities. Andrew Jacobs and Penn Bullock, The New York Times News Service: “In December, a Bain-run fund in which a Romney family blind trust has holdings purchased the video surveillance division of a Chinese company that claims to be the largest supplier to the government’s Safe Cities program, a highly advanced monitoring system that allows the authorities to watch over university campuses, hospitals, mosques and movie theaters from centralized command posts”: here.

Birthers want proof that Mitt Romney was born in America: here.

Siding with Gov. Walker in union fight could cost Romney in Nov.: here.

Romney’s Top Five Assaults on Women’s Health. Annie-Rose Strasser, ThinkProgress: “Of women under 50 years old, only 30 percent support Romney, while over 60 percent back the President…. Romney’s record on women’s health is hardly strong, and women voters, especially the young voters who tend to be pro-choice and pro-contraception, are likely responding to Romney’s affront on these issues. But it hasn’t always been this way…. Romney has moved significantly to the right on almost all women’s health issues”: here.

Did the Koch Machine Put Romney Over the Top in Wisconsin? Adele Stan, AlterNet: “Mitt Romney won the Wisconsin Republican presidential primary by a mere 4-point margin over Rick Santorum … He outspent Santorum on television ads by a margin of 4-to-1 during the Wisconsin, all for a weak finish. And of Romney’s top Wisconsin endorsers, four are solid allies of the state’s muscular Koch machine, a political apparatus comprising a particularly aggressive state chapter of the Koch-founded Americans For Prosperity, as well as a handful of think tanks and associations”: here.

Is There More to Sen. Snowe’s Resignation Than Congress’s “Crumbling Center”? Danny Weil, Truthout: “Snowe is hardly a moderate. Casting the conservative senator from Maine as such exemplifies how far to the right this country has moved … Snowe’s announcement she will not seek another term in the Senate may have little to do with ‘civility’ or ‘loss of the center’ within contentious politics and more to do with the fact her husband is knee-deep in controversy over an educational for-profit college chain know as Educational Management Corporation or Wall Street ticker (EDMC)”: here.

Limbaugh, Santorum, Sex, and the Origins of the Roman Catholic Church: here.

VOTER SUPPRESSION 101: How conservatives are conspiring to disenfranchise millions of Americans: here.