Claiming the mantle of Reagan is the most important process in becoming the face of the GOP. Mitt has the look and the animus towards the poor down pat, but Gingrich isn’t letting this one go without a battle.

I don’t really buy the current narrative that the fighting between Mitt and Newt is destroying the GOP brand. You may recall a few years ago wondering how sycophantic Hillary supporters could ever be convinced to support Obama and a few weeks later wondering if people would stop holding hands and singing long enough to realize he wasn’t as great as everyone thought.

Negatives are up today for the GOP candidates, but voters have no memory and hatred for Obama is the Gorilla Glue of the Republican party.

The Lord gives gifts in mysterious ways. Unlike Rick Santorum, I favor a liberal return policy.

Friday: Reagan Endorses!

Wow. Exclusive: Rich Guy Said Something. How on earth did Stephanopoulos get Trump to open up to him?

Running for president itself has pretty much devolved into self-promotional tool to elevate one’s speaking fees and book deals so you can’t blame other rich people for noticing and taking advantage of people like Stephanopoulos. That’s beltway journalism in a nutshell: men paid millions of dollars to transcribe another millionaire’s bullshit.

More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.

–Adam Gopnik’s must-read essay in The New Yorker.

You know what would be an amazingly grandiose idea? Getting everyone health insurance before we build a lunar colony. I’m all for space exploration–as well as people living on the moon for some reason–but I’d like to see people not sleeping under bridges before we start shipping tons of building material to into space.

Tuesday: God’s Gift

If you live under one of the few rocks without a good wifi connection, you may have missed the “Shit People Say” videos, which range from horrendous to racist to funny depending on who did it. “Sh*t Nobody Says” was probably my favorite, especially with a reference to Papyrus, the font I most enjoy hating.

I’ve been holding off on campaign cartoons as long as I can, but the non-stop onslaught of debates has worn down my defenses. I have succumbed to the madness and will issue more cartoons shortly.

Monday: Moonday

The reaction Washington had to the internet blackout over SOPA/PIPA kind of surprised me. I was under the impression that phone calls to Senators and internet petitions were meaningless window dressings to our faux-Democracy wherein bills breeze through Congress based on arrangements between lobbyists and lawmakers.

Every sensible person seems to agree the language of the bills were so broadly worded as to invite massive censorship. There’s still a need to crack down on sites illegally pirating work, as well as a general understanding about copyrights (and paid labor) that needs to take hold on the web. I’m real glad Reddit saved the internet. Now, any chance their users can learn how to credit creators and sources of copyrighted material?

Amid all the cries about the complete destruction of freedom as we know it, it’s good to remember that Facebook and Google are themselves hugely profitable corporations who haven’t exactly shown themselves to be totally awesome on the issues of copyrights and privacy, so I’m a bit wary of them as well.

Friday: S#*! Mitt Romney Doesn’t Say

Seems noteworthy that Newt ran to Romney’s left on immigration & Bain; not clearly more conservative on anything else.

— mattyglesias (@mattyglesias) January 22, 2012

I’ve seen this sentiment a few times these past few days as people try to shoehorn Newt’s victory into a narrative. If you are going to claim South Carolina’s GOP primary voters went for the most progressive candidate, I’ve got a statehouse with a Confederate flag on top with a great “Buy Now” price.

Pretty much everything you need to know about Gingrich’s victory is captured in the last panel of this Pollak cartoon, but publishing it everywhere and giving credit to a cartoonist would undermine the arrangement pundits have of being paid a lot of money to say nothing.

Someone is already doing that.

Butch Bakery in New York sells camo pattern cupcakes and had a “MAN-ifesto” that reads “Our objective is simple. We’re men. Men who like cupcakes. Not the frilly pink-frosted sprinkles-and-unicorns kind of cupcakes. We make manly cupcakes for manly men.”