By DEROY MURDOCK, Scripps Howard News Service

NEW YORK - A bunch of racists in South Carolina is trying to hold down blacks by forcing them, and everybody else, to show photo identification before they can vote.

Astonishing!

Despite losing Tuesday's Florida primary, Newt Gingrich's Sunshine State effort showcased his voluntary, 15 percent flat tax: 2012's smartest idea yet, both strategically and substantively.

Liberals love to laugh off voter fraud. It's "a made-up problem invented by GOP operatives," Robert Koehler, a self-termed "peace journalist," snickered in the Jan. 5 Huffington Post. Regarding ballot hijinks, Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz chuckled: "There is almost none."

Willard Mitt Romney these days could not be more explicit about abandoning President Barack Obama's carbon-dioxide restrictions.

Good news! On economic freedom, America is in the global Top 10.

Bad news: America is No. 10 -- one blond hair ahead of Denmark.

Hot on the heels of his eight-vote Iowa-caucus landslide, Willard Mitt Romney is crisscrossing New Hampshire before Tuesday's key primary. Romney is masquerading as a limited-government, free-market executive from next-door Massachusetts. From the Golden Gate to the Granite State, voters should greet Romney's impersonation with a quarry full of skepticism.

TEMECULA, Calif. - As a gay-marriage proponent, I was pleased to learn that then-Gov. Willard Mitt Romney, R-Mass., issued at least 189 special-issue, one-day marriage licenses to same-sex couples in 2005 alone. These documents let these 378 people enjoy nuptials officiated by relatives, friends and others who normally do not perform weddings.

TEMECULA, Calif. - Had Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, slammed himself over the head with a frying pan on the House floor, he would have done more for the Republican cause than what transpired Tuesday. The convoluted GOP response to the Senate's payroll-tax-cut extension hands Democrats a truckload of skillets with which to smack Republicans until November 2012.

HONG KONG - Beyond the intricate Chinese pictograms captured in iridescent neon and the incense spirals that smolder in the Man Mo Taoist Temple on Hollywood Road, Hong Kong's most exotic gift to a visiting American is a reminder of how economic dynamism looks.

NEW YORK - Only in Washington could nearly $700 billion fester as Congress scrambles for cash.