Grayson Schmitz is never at a loss for words. According to the New York-based catering chef, "Whatever is in my head I say." So I couldn't resist asking her what went through her mind during the last episode of Top Chef: Texas when the special guest judge turned out to be the one and only Pee-wee Herman (who entered the kitchen set riding his trademark red bicycle). Grayson, who trained under Fabio Trabocchi ("the man taught me how to make pasta") and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, was first amused by the spectacle. "Okay, that's fun," she thought, "but he better not be one of our f—g judges." He was.

"I'm not going to say I felt great about [Pee-wee] as one of our judges," said Grayson. But even Pee-wee seemed to recognize the awkwardness of the situation at judges' table and, as Grayson noticed, actor Paul Reubens went in and out of character. "He wasn't about to say 'Ha-ha!'" while one of us was being eliminated. The New York chef added that Reubens, who was himself off-camera, "was the sweetest, most sincere guy" and a far cry from his darker days.

Not that Pee-wee's appearance was completely random. The elimination challenge took place at the Alamo, where the actor appeared during his film Pee-wee's Big Adventure. (Still, it seems a strange locale to have dinner considering it's the site where hundreds of people were killed. Why not a Hawaiian-themed dinner at the Pearl Harbor memorial with guest judge Ben Affleck?)

As for Tom Colicchio, Grayson was relieved to clear the air with the head judge during the after-show on Bravo. (In a previous episode, Colicchio chastised the chef for not doing something more adventurous than chicken salad. "Like a meatball?" she shot back, referring to a rival's choice of dish. Colicchio seemed stunned while Grayson was horrified she had offended him—he was not offended in the least.) Prior to that incident, Grayson had also bragged to Colicchio that her dish was like "sex in the mouth," leaving all the chefs speechless. "I don't know what possessed me to say that," she now says, although she partly blames it on sleep deprivation.

In Last Chance Kitchen, Grayson competed against Beverly Kim, but the winner, who will return to the competition, will be revealed next Wednesday.

A new poll from PPP shows Mitt Romney with a commanding lead heading into Saturday's caucuses in Nevada. Romney has 50 percent support there, according to the poll of likely caucusgoers. His numbers double those of Newt Gingrich, who only receives 25 percent support, with Ron Paul and Rick Santorum at 15 percent and 8 percent, respectively. That's Romney's best position in Nevada yet, and if the numbers hold or the trend continues, he could look at garnering more than half of the vote for the first time in this primary season.

Romney's impressive numbers are in no small part thanks to the large proportion of Mormon voters in Nevada. According to the poll, Romney leads 78-14 over Paul with Mormons, who will constitute 20 percent of the vote. Read the full results of the poll here.

Lawrence Kaplan takes the Obama administration to task for prematurely declaring that “the tide of war is receding.” Here's a taste:

“In America, and in Iraq,” Vice President Joe Biden assured an audience in Baghdad last December, “the tide of war is receding.” For its callowness, this observation was noteworthy. (The tide of war was not receding from Iraq; Joe Biden was.) President Obama, introducing his plan to cut defense expenditures a few weeks later, offered up this analysis by way of justification: “The tide of war is receding.”

Opponents of Obama’s foreign policy, unwilling to credit the president with coherence in any enterprise apart from campaigning for reelection, will get nothing from these words. In President Obama’s speeches, after all, peace ranks among several reasons to shrink the military budget. In his Pentagon address, the president added this explanation: “We have to renew our economic strength here at home.” Or, as he put it in an address last year explaining his decision to draw down American forces in Afghanistan, “It is time to focus on nation-building here at home.”

The president’s vision of a receding tide of war may be in response to various domestic policy needs. But those who trivialize it entirely do so at the cost of discounting a worldview that appears to be sincerely held. The most recent application of the “tides” metaphor—a proposal to cut, among other elements of America’s defense establishment, ground forces by 100,000—provides the clearest illustration of this view. “Now, we’re turning the page on a decade of war,” the president explained. “Even as our troops continue to fight in Afghanistan, the tide of war is receding.” As to what this means in practice, the president summarized the logic of the cuts this way: “As we look beyond the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and the end of long-term, nation-building with large military footprints—we’ll be able to ensure our security with smaller conventional ground forces.” Peace, in the president’s telling, is what permits this dividend.

Whole thing here.

It's noteworthy, also, that the president is tried this approach in his State of the Union Address. "The renewal of American leadership can be felt across the globe," President Obama told the joint session of Congress last month. "From the coalitions we’ve built to secure nuclear materials, to the missions we’ve led against hunger and disease; from the blows we’ve dealt to our enemies; to the enduring power of our moral example, America is back. Anyone who tells you otherwise, anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about."

Yet, the president's policies--cutting defense spending, "leading from behind"--do not support his sudden denial of American declinism. 

Newt Gingrich was hardly a perfect speaker of the House, but he did not resign in “disgrace” as has been repeatedly claimed by Mitt Romney. I say this as a former member of Congress who was part of both the “coup attempt” against him and the subsequent successful effort to remove him as speaker after the 1998 election. There is a distinct difference between removing someone from a position because of ineffective management, as, say, Bain Capital regularly does, and resigning in “disgrace.”

The word “disgrace” implies a moral failing. I know this better than most because I failed not legally, electorally, or in doing my job: I failed at a personal moral level, so I resigned. I am thankful for God’s limitless grace. Newt was not a candidate for sainthood, but he wasn't removed because of the ethics report. Rather, his leadership had become indecisive and confused, his anger flared too often, and operationally we House Republicans could no longer function. The proof is that we first sought Bob Livingston as his replacement, and then Dennis Hastert. They were not especially known as idea men or even electoral leaders of our party, but as skilled at management.

Newt Gingrich was certainly the point man in leading us to victory in 1994, the first House Republican majority in 40 years. He is a visionary, about that there is no doubt. We freshmen were the “Newt, Newt” chanters of media fame. The first sign that it wasn’t all worship, however was the victory of Tom DeLay as whip over Bob Walker in December 1994. Bob was an outstanding conservative and wonderful man. When he learned that I was voting for DeLay, though my background and district might have dictated that I would back him, Bob basically hollered into the phone: “Don’t you understand that I am Speaker Gingrich’s choice for whip?” My answer was that yes, I and many others did understand exactly that point, which is why we were voting for DeLay (or Bill McCollum)—because we wanted some independent leadership. The election wasn’t about Bob and Tom.

The first two years our our new majority were rather tumultuous, with the government shutdown and other setbacks, but we managed to hold the majority. The Democrats, thirsting for revenge because Newt wasn’t always the nicest to them (he had led the successful effort to force out former Speaker Jim Wright), went after Gingrich with a vengeance, lodging multiple complaints with the House Ethics Committee. Newt, not exactly a perfectionist for details, certainly left them some openings. As Byron York explained last week in the Washington Examiner, "the center of the controversy was a course Gingrich taught from 1993 to 1995 at two small Georgia colleges. The wide-ranging class, called 'Renewing American Civilization,' was conceived by Gingrich and financed by a tax-exempt organization called the Progress and Freedom Foundation. Gingrich maintained that the course was a legitimate educational enterprise; his critics contended that it had little to do with learning and was in fact a political exercise in which Gingrich abused a tax-exempt foundation to spread his own partisan message."

Today’s jobs report is all good news for the country, and bad news for Republicans who are hoping that a failing economy is all they need in order to unseat President Obama. The economy added 243,000 jobs in January, 257,000 in the private sector, driving the unemployment rate down to a three-year low of 8.3 percent from 8.5 percent in December and 9.1 percent in August. Previous job-creation estimates for November and December were revised upwards by 60,000. Add that average hourly earnings ticked up, and don’t be surprised at more than a little chortling from the White House.

Happy days, however, might not be here again: Almost 24 million Americans continue to look for full-time work, and over 5 million have been unemployed for 27 weeks or longer. But the trend is in the right direction, and if it continues, the president will surely claim credit, and demand more stimulus and whatever else he can tie to the improvement in the jobs market.

I have long felt that Republican strategists who thought they could ride into the White House on the backs of the unemployed were in for a shock. The real issue is not this or that uptick or downtick in some economic indicator. It is the president’s vision of where he wants to take the country, a vision now wrapped in talk of a long-term, sustainable economy to replace the current model that has produced a financial crisis, a recession, rising inequality—you know the rest.

To counter this vision we have Republican attacks on reforms of the financial services sector, a refusal to countenance any increase in any taxes, a grudging attitude towards help for the unemployed, and calls for protectionism that will alienate farm belt voters heavily dependent on exports.

Alone among contenders for the nomination, Newt Gingrich has a coherent view of a response to the president. But he also has what has come to be called “baggage,” which includes personal traits that many voters find off-putting. If Mitt Romney is not only to win the nomination, but compete effectively with the president, who himself cannot be accused of having a lack of a vision of what a “transformed” America should look like, he had better do more than repeat his defense of capitalism and free markets, and put some flesh on those very bare bones. 

Steve Hayes, with A.B. Stoddard and Charles Krauthammer, last night on Fox News:

Yuval Levin & Ramesh Ponnuru: "Romney vs. Obamacare"

Time: "What Is a Conservative?"

CNN: "Panetta believes Israel could strike Iran this spring"

Politico: "Obama: Jesus would tax the rich"

Daily Caller: "After cutting ties with Planned Parenthood, Komen donations up 100 percent"

If you weren't able to watch today's congressional hearings with Attorney General Eric Holder on the Fast and Furious scandal, here's a taste of what it was like. Two American law enforcement agents are dead, and despite bearing a significant measure of responsibility, the Justice Department has been stonewalling for months and several pieces of evidence suggest the DOJ has not told the truth about what it knows. When members of Congress voice their frustration with this, Holder is defensive and says he deserves "credit":

Here's a transcript, via the Washington Examiner's Joel Gehrke, who did yeoman's work covering the hearing live today:

"I should be held accountable for, certainly, my role -- whatever I did or didn't do in connection to the supervision of Operation Fast and Furious," Holder said during the hearing today. "But, yeah, I'm Attorney General of the United States and I should be held accountable, perhaps even given some credit -- imagine that, given some credit -- for the things that this Department has done under my leadership." Holder cited his role in "revitalizing" the civil rights division as an example of his good leadership, among other things.

In response to Mitt Romney's remarks about the poor yesterday, Senator Jim DeMint told Roll Call's David Drucker that Romney needs to change his message: 

“He needs to address it,” DeMint told Roll Call. “Because I know he does care about the poor. But I think he was trying to make a case that they’re taken care of. But, in fact, I would say I’m worried about the poor because many are trapped in dependency, they need a good job; they don’t need to be on social welfare programs. I think he needs to turn that around because — the middle class is key, and we have to focus on that. And, really, the problem with the middle class is not successful people, it’s politicians — but the key to making our country successful it to get everyone on that economic ladder.

“I think all of this is a teachable moment for America,” DeMint continued. “I think Bain Capital was, and I think he finally turned that around and showed some confidence in his success, and we need to do that here. We do worry about the poor when they’re trapped in government dependency programs and the education system’s not producing the skills [and] character for them to succeed, and I think it is an important thing for him to backtrack on that. I don’t think anyone thinks he doesn’t care about the poor, but I think he’s trying to say they’re taken care of right now with these programs. Those are the programs that are hurting, not just the poor, but our country. We need to address it at every level.”

Via GOP12, Charles Krauthammer explained last night on Special Report why Romney's remarks were so bad:

"This is bad .... It's not just that it strengthens the stereotypes Romney as the patrician who's only aware of the poor as people who clean the streets and wash his car.

The real problem here is that it shows he doesn't have a fluency with conservative ideas. Conservatives are not the ones who either engage in the war of the classes or the division of America into classes.

Obama and the Democrats will win that kind of argument every day. The moral case for conservative economics is that our policies are going to help everybody, including the poor.

.... The idea that somehow we consign the poor to the safety net or we patch it and dependency is a liberal idea. It's not our idea.

And Romney is a guy who came late to his new ideology, and he still can't speak it very well."

Over at Commentary, Peter Wehner delivers a stinging rebuke: 

Romney’s answer is also a tip off that he’s simply unfamiliar with the intellectual/policy work done by conservatives over the years whose explicit purpose has been to help the poor, including reforms in welfare, crime, and education. (Many of those reforms have been terrifically successful.)

Eric Holder is currently getting grilled on Capitol Hill over the Fast and Furious gun running scandal. But the family of slain border patrol agent Brian Terry isn't waiting around for the Attorney General to come clean about the role the government played in Terry's death:

The family of murdered Border Patrol agent Brian Terry has filed a $25 million wrongful death claim against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives claiming Terry was killed with AK-47s that were knowingly sold under the Fast and Furious gunrunning probe to a straw purchaser for drug cartels.

In a 65-page complaint, served on the government on Wednesday, attorneys for the family claim ATF "wrongdoing" in Operation Fast and Furious.

“ATF's failures were not only negligent but in violation of ATF's own policies and procedures," the complaint claims.

It is very hard to imagine that Terry's family does not have very good legal standing to go after the government. It's also another richly-deserved headache for Holder and the Justice Department who have mishandled and downplayed this scandal from the beginning.

Last spring, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards went on CNN and claimed that if Congress cut off funding to Planned Parenthood "millions of women are going to lose access, not to abortion services, to basic family planning, you know, mammograms." But as pro-life activist Lila Rose documented in a video, Planned Parenthood does not provide mammograms. 

This story is worth recalling in light of the news this week that the Susan G. Komen foundation, one of the nation's largest breast cancer charities, has cut off funding (more than $600,000) to Planned Parenthood. Cecile Richards wrote that the foundation's decision to "end its support of lifesaving breast cancer screening at Planned Parenthood health centers comes as a blow to women across America."

But as Nancy Brinker, founder and CEO of Komen foundation, says in a video, Komen came out with a new set of standards this year designed to free up dollars for "higher impact programs."

"Wherever possible, we want to grant to the provider that is actually providing the lifesaving mammogram," she said. 

Now obviously Planned Parenthood's role as America's largest abortion practitioner seems to be a significant factor in Komen's decision. Many Americans who would like to fund breast cancer research without lining the pockets of abortionists have pushed Komen to end its Planned Parenthood grants in recent years.

But why does Planned Parenthood feel entitled to a private charity's donations, especially considering the fact that Planned Parenthood's president falsely claims on national television that the group provides mammograms? Isn't Komen free to give its money to organizations that do more than provide mammogram "referrals" and breast cancer screenings?