Romney is running to become Liar-in_Chief

Rachel Maddow has called Romney out. Romney is not just a flip-flopper. He is a liar, who when called on his lies, then lies about them. Mitt Romney cannot be trusted. Nothing he says seems to be based on anything other than whether it will fool someone into giving him something he, personally, wants.

Here's Rachel Maddow's description of the lies Romney has been telling over and over again.

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That's not enough to convince you? Here is his flip-flop on Climate Science.

Jon Stewart on Romney's taxes

This may be Jon Stewart's best opening monologue yet.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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I still think that Romney will be the Republican candidate for President, Adelson's $10 million (so far - in about a month) to Gingrich notwithstanding.

Romney will be the Republican nominee

Right now the four possible Republican candidates for President are Romney, Gingrich, Ron Paul and trailing the pack, Rick Perry. But the recent announcement that Gingrich and Perry failed to qualify for the very significant Virginia primary to be held March 6, 2012 pretty much establishes that Romney is going to be the nominee. Let's look at Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and Rick perry individually.

Ron Paul

Ron Paul has a good chance to win the Iowa caucuses according to Nate Silver. But he isn't likely to be able to build on that relatively strong showing in Iowa. His support is quite strong, but very narrow. Nate estimates that at the very best Ron Paul might be able to get about one-third of the Republican votes.

Nate bases his opinion on a series of polls. But his analysis comes from before the Republican establishment really started going after Ron Paul because he was beginning to appear to be a real threat to Romney. The growing chorus quoting Ron Paul's racist writings in his 1980's and 1990's news letters will lower these numbers. So will wider distribution of his views regarding pulling American troops back to the American shores and entering a new period of American isolationism.

Ron Paul's fervant supporters will keep him in the Republican nomination process until it ends, but I think Nate Silver's estimate as high as one-third of Republican voters is highly optomistic.

Newt Gingrich

The next candidate to look at is Newt Gingrich. Newt's disorganization has jumped up to bite him big time. He has failed to qualify for the Virginia Primary which is to be held on Super Tuesday March 6, 2012. His campaign needed signatures from 10,000 registered voters, including 400 from each of the states 11 Congressional Districts. The Newt campaign could not organize itself well enough to achieve a relatively small admininstrative requirement by the deadline. This failure demonstrates what most observers already recognize - Newt is horribly disorganized.

It will be interesting to see if Newt's secretive backers and their Super Pacs who have funded Newt's recent rise from obscurity to being considered a viable candidate forthe Republican nomination as an alternate to Romney will continue throught the Spring.

Rick Perry

Rick Perry, the only other non-Romney candidate likely to be able to compete into the Spring, also failed to qualify for the Virginia primary. Like Newt, Rick Perry has had the appearance of being a well-funded alternative to Mitt Romney. His series of gaffes in the debates have clearly demonstrated that he is not Presidential quality, but his deep-pocketed funders in Texas have been willing to shell out the money for the primary season anyway. I'm not sure what his funders thought they were going to buy, but it's pretty sure Rick Perry will never deliver to them. America as a whole is the winner here.

Mitt Romney

Given the weaknesses of Romney's three major opponents and the fact that the Republican establishment is circling the wagons in support of Mitt it looks like Mitt Romney will, as previously expected, be the Republican nominee for President.

Is there a chance this line up will change this spring? There's always a chance, but that chance is getting smaller and smaller. Without the Virginia votes on Super Tuesday Gingrich and Perry are very unlikely to be able to effectively challenge Romney. Ron Paul will never get over 35% of the Republicans and I'll be surprised if he gets 20%. The more Paul moves to become a real challenger the more the fact that he is utterly insane will become clear even to the Republican voters. The field of candidates really has winnowed down that tightly.

Both the tea partiers and the evangelical Republicans are going to make a lot of noise objecting to Romney, but as spring moves forward their hatred of Obama and the hope that Romney can defeat him will damp down that noise. As much as the evangelicals dislike Romney's Mormon religion, they hate Obama and the Democrats worse. They will hold their collective noses and prepare to vote for Romney in November.

The media is going to hate this. Where is the conflict that drives ratings and advertising? No drama Obama isn't going to give it to them, and while Romney will try to lure the media in he doesn't have much to offer them until after the Republican convention in August. That leaves the media in about a six months long silly season from Super Tuesday until the conventions. Then it will be Obama vs Romney - just as has been clear since last summer.

Republican Whoppers last night.

Republicans simply cannot be trusted to tell the truth. Alex Wagner from the Huffington Post explains.

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Here's some more of the same:

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Rick Perry is lying about Social Security being a Ponzi scheme. At it's core Social Security Retirement is a term insurance plan in which the money paid in during the current year pays the benefits paid out the same year. That is exactly the same plan as term life insurance, and it is a financial model of the reality. The working people this year much provide sufficient goods and services to support all workers and all non-workers together. Remember, non-workers include non-working spouses, children, retired individuals and wealthy investors who don't do anything real for the economy.

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One million dollars anonymously to Mitt Romney's campaign - source a foreign government?

This is a very important question. Why, with the Citizens United decision in place is this level of secrecy required?

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The organization, W. Spann, LLC was created and six weeks later contributed $1 million to the Romney campaign. No one knows where the money came from. Eleven weeks later the organization was dissolved. It operated from an address (590 Madison Ave, NY, NY) which is also the address of Mitt Romney's investment company, Bain Capital.

Since the Citizen's United decision makes it legal for corporations to donate unlimited amounts to candidates, what is the reason for the secrecy? My bet is that his is money donated from a foreign government trying to influence the American Presidential election. If this is not the North Korean government or some similar government contributing (with the knowledge of Romney - the address proves that) then the Romney campaign better tell us where the money came from

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Addendum 8/7/11 12:02 CDT
The individual who donated the $1 million has come forward and Benjy Sarlin at TPM has reported on it.

Ed Conrad, a former executive at Bain Capital, which Romney co-founded, told Politico on Friday that he had funneled the money to Super PAC Restore Our Future on the advice of his lawyers.

"I am the individual who formed and funded W Spann LLC," he said in a statement. "I authorized W Spann LLC's contribution to Restore Our Future PAC.I did so after consulting prominent legal counsel regarding the transaction, and based on my understanding that the contribution would comply with applicable laws. To address questions raised by the media concerning the contribution, I will request that Restore Our Future PAC amend its public reports to disclose me as the donor associated with this contribution."

I'd like to see more on this, especially where Ed Conrad claims HE got the money. This is a man who was a close associate of Mitt Romney and who could easily be expected to fall on his sword to cover up something illegal or immoral like transmitting a contribution from a foreign government.

Onion "report" on Romney's tolerence - No! Wait! It's Cnn!

It's horrible. Horrible, I tell you. Just how utterly tolerent can Mitt Romney really be??


Mitt Romney Defends Himself Against Allegations Of Tolerance.

[h/t to Atrios.]

Romney's father was an illegal immigrant from Mexico

I wonder if Tom Tancredo knew this history before he dropped out of the race for the Presidential nomination and endorsed Mitt Romney.

It seems that Mitt Romney's father was born in Chihuahua, Mexico and illegally entered the U.S. across the southern border.

Here's one reason for the Ron Paul phenomenon

Taylor Marsh reports discussing why all her Mormon relatives like Ron Paul and detest Mitt Romney. Go read it.

If I hadn't lived in Ron Paul's district for an election, I might have agreed with them. They're right that the speaks his mind honestly. And he has some really good ideas. Unfortunately, he has some ideas that are really screwed up, too. His comments on the American Civil War simply run off into insanity. Not that his approach wouldn't have been far better in 1860 - had it been close to possible, but Jesus, Man, this is 2007!

He is right that it would have been far cheaper to have the federal government simply buy up the slaves and free them, but at the time the Southerners fired on Fort Sumpter and Lincoln properly sent in troops to put down the local rebellion (similar to Shay's Rebellion under George Washington), no one seriously thought combat would last six months or that the rebellion would spread to the entire South and become serious warfare. With that attitude, how could a bill to buy the slaves and free them ever pass Congress? Not to mention the fact that the Southerners could have easily blocked it and certainly would have. Which is entirely beside the point. Ron Paul may think this is 1860, but it's really not. Ron Paul is simply a wack job and a fruitcake. It's just that sometimes only the insane dare speak the Truth publicly. That doesn't make him acceptable as President on all these issues.

Back to Taylor Marsh's relatives, though. They want Ron Paul to run as an independent when the Republicans refuse to nominate him, and Ms. Marsh thinks that if he does he will also get a whole lot of Democrats who are disgusted with the Democratic Party to vote for him also, seriously messing up any predictability in November 2008. I know that my disgust with Harry Reid, Nancy (impeachment is off the table) Pelosi and the Democratic so-called leaders has reached a high level, so that the only reason today to be a Democrat is that the Republicans are headed rapidly towards Fascism, and the Democrats are only assisting them to get there, not actively pushing.

So that's my opinion. Go read Ms. Marsh's article and see what you think.

Mitt Romney hallucinates - purpose? to get what he wants - a trophy Presidency

Apparently in defense of the recent racist refusal of his Mormon religion to accept Blacks, Mitt Romney reports that he wasn't one of "those Mormon." He stated:

"I saw my father march with Martin Luther King."

Unfortunately, that never happened. The Boston Phoenix reports that although Romney stated that in his "Religion" speech in College Station, TX and again to Tim Russert, it just wasn't something that really happened. The Boston Phoenix reports an update to its earlier article: "A spokesperson for Mitt Romney now tells the Phoenix that George W. Romney and Martin Luther King Jr. marched together in June, 1963 -- although possibly not on the same day or in the same city."

Shades of the spin doctors explaining away what Bush said with the sanitized and vetted version of what his handlers wish he had said!

Romney wants the Republican religious right to accept him as one of them - racism and all - but he doesn't want the independent voters to consider him as personally racist. Like his stance on abortion - Romney will say whatever he thinks the immediate audience he is speaking to will buy, and he leaves it to his handlers to deal with his many, many inconsistencies. It has left most of us wondering what Romney stands for. Who is he really?

Actually that isn't that hard to answer. Romney is another rich man who wants to cap his career with the trophy of becoming President of the U.S. He believes that he deserves it, and he'll say or do anything that will get him that trophy.

He believes that really strongly. Nothing else. Just that he is rich and entitled. He'll say anything - believe anything - hallucinate anything - to get what he wants.

Break up of the alliance of Repub econo/cold-warriors and Repub evangelicals?

Eric Kleefield over at TPM Election Central writes about how the polls of Republicans in the primary states consistently show a sharp drop for Rudy Giuliani coupled with a rapid increase for Mike Huckabee. When we look at the utter horror the Republican pundits are displaying at the growth of Huckabeemania, then it seems likely to me that we are seeing signs that the traditional econo/Cold-Warrior Republicans and the evangelical Republicans are each going to go their own, separate, way in November 2008.

The Republican Party since Reagan has been an uneasy alliance between the econo-Repubs (which includes the foreign policy Repubs - mostly left over Cold Warriors) and the Evangelists, with the Evangelists generally getting federal judges and a lot of lip service from the party, while the econo/cold-warriors have gotten most of the economic and foreign policy power. This has worked as long as the Republican alliance had a reasonable chance to win the Presidency - that meant both sides got enough from the alliance to be willing to put up with the idiocies of the other side. As long as the followers felt that a Republican win was possible for the Repub alliance, they stuck together.

With the Republican primaries starting in three weeks, the rank-and-file Republicans are taking a serious look at the Republican prospects for 2008. No one thinks that the Republicans can win the Presidency, and the possibility of that Presidential power has been the glue that held the alliance together. So the evangelical followers are looking for someone - a purist - who can represent what they believe. Under the old rules Rudy or Romney, representing the econo/cold-warrior branch, could talk Southern religious racism and the Evangelical leaders could convince their follower that since they have no strong candidate of their own in the fight, the econo/cold-warrior candidate offered the evangelicals their best shot at national influence. But that becomes a much harder sell if the Republican candidate has no reasonable chance to win the Presidency. Why should the evangelical rank-and-file vote for and work for a loser who doesn't even represent the religious values that have motivated them to work in politics in the first place?

Neither Rudy nor Romney can deliver a Presidency, and Rudy has come to look worse and worse on a daily basis. Romney still isn't viewed as a Christian by a lot of evangelicals, and for a lot of them that is a deal-breaker. Enter Huckabee, a Southern governor who speaks true evangelical as a native language and who has truly awesome political skills.

With nothing to tie the the evangelical followers to the econo/cold-warrior candidates who have severe religious and moral baggage, the evangelical followers are leaving the Repub alliance and moving towards Huckabee. I think that's is what we see in these statistics, with Rudy collapsing, Romney dropping and Huckabee doing a rocket imitation going up.

Does this present an opening for McCain? Maybe with the econo/cold-warriors, but the evangelicals didn't like him in 2000 and the feeling was mutual. The enmity is not something that McCain can paper over by sweet-talking the evangelical leaders, particularly since the econo/cold-warriors are at best luke-warm about him and he has shown no indication that he can win in November. With Huckabee in the race, the evangelical followers are not going to switch to McCain.

I think we are watching the evangelistic Republicans as they decide they have nothing to win by voting for the econo/cold-warrior candidates. If Huckabee gets the nomination (unlikely) the econo/cold-warriors will sit at home in November. If Romney (or, much less likely, McCain) gets the nomination, the evangelicals will sit at home or run a third party in November. If that happens then the Republican alliance will have broken apart by November 2008. The leadership will try to keep the party unified, but without any hope of winning the Presidency, the leadership has nothing to offer their followers.

Then, just for fun, consider Ron Paul. Dr. Paul is running for the Republican Presidential nomination because it allows him to present his Libertarian philosophy on a national scale. When he ran for President as a Libertarian in 1988 no one ever heard of him. His effort this year has made him a household word. But neither the econo/cold-warriors nor the evangelicals are going to vote for Dr. Paul. Dr. Paul is the greatest hope that the Libertarians have ever had. Ron Paul is going to run as a third party candidate. That will split out the Libertarian Republicans from the econo/cold-warriors.

So we are looking at the strong likelihood that the national Republican Party is headed for a major crackup in November.

That makes the likelihood of a strong win for the Democratic candidate for President very likely. He or she is going to have coattails, too. Add the Presidential coattails to the drag Republicans will face from the now inevitable recession and from the continued fighting in Iraq, and it looks like the Democrats can be expected to win big next November.

Would I expect a Democratic win as big as in 1964? I wouldn't bet on that his far ahead of the election, but if nothing breaks favorably towards the Republicans by late Summer 2008, then I wouldn't want to bet on much Republican success next November. I do think, even now, that the Democratic nomination for President will decide who our next President will be.

2008 is going to be an interesting year.

Best Romney ad yet - he opposes giant flesh-eating rats

Someone is telling us all about Romney.



This looks a lot like the excellent Huckabee ad from yesterday.

[ Again, h/t to David Kurtz at TPM. ]

Romney's "I'm one of you" speech to the Republican religious right extremists

Romney is running for President as a representative of God and religion, but he refuses to explain his religion because the Constitution forbids a religious test for those who hold office.

He is trying to have it both ways. A vote for him is a vote for God, but don't ask him about his minority religion which many consider a non-Christian cult.

From his speech:

Today, I wish to address a topic which I believe is fundamental to America's greatness: our religious liberty. I will also offer perspectives on how my own faith would inform my Presidency, if I were elected.

"There are some who may feel that religion is not a matter to be seriously considered in the context of the weighty threats that face us. If so, they are at odds with the nation's founders, for they, when our nation faced its greatest peril, sought the blessings of the Creator. And further, they discovered the essential connection between the survival of a free land and the protection of religious freedom. In John Adams' words: 'We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion... Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people.'

"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

That's just a sample. That's running on the proposition that America should be led by someone who represents religion. Here is where he speaks directly to the evangelistic Republicans:

"As a young man, Lincoln described what he called America's 'political religion' – the commitment to defend the rule of law and the Constitution. When I place my hand on the Bible and take the oath of office, that oath becomes my highest promise to God. If I am fortunate to become your President, I will serve no one religion, no one group, no one cause, and no one interest. A President must serve only the common cause of the people of the United States.

"There are some for whom these commitments are not enough. They would prefer it if I would simply distance myself from my religion, say that it is more a tradition than my personal conviction, or disavow one or another of its precepts. That I will not do. I believe in my Mormon faith and I endeavor to live by it. My faith is the faith of my fathers – I will be true to them and to my beliefs. [Snip]

"There are some who would have a presidential candidate describe and explain his church's distinctive doctrines. To do so would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution. No candidate should become the spokesman for his faith. For if he becomes President he will need the prayers of the people of all faiths.

"I believe that every faith I have encountered draws its adherents closer to God. And in every faith I have come to know, there are features I wish were in my own: I love the profound ceremony of the Catholic Mass, the approachability of God in the prayers of the Evangelicals, the tenderness of spirit among the Pentecostals, the confident independence of the Lutherans, the ancient traditions of the Jews, unchanged through the ages, and the commitment to frequent prayer of the Muslims. As I travel across the country and see our towns and cities, I am always moved by the many houses of worship with their steeples, all pointing to heaven, reminding us of the source of life's blessings.

He is stating how very important religion is to America. Then he shows exactly what he is promising the evangelical Republicans - religious, yes, but secular, no.

"We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong.

"The founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation 'Under God' and in God, we do indeed trust.

"We should acknowledge the Creator as did the Founders – in ceremony and word. He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history, and during the holiday season, nativity scenes and menorahs should be welcome in our public places. Our greatness would not long endure without judges who respect the foundation of faith upon which our constitution rests. I will take care to separate the affairs of government from any religion, but I will not separate us from 'the God who gave us liberty.'

So he'll give religious people their due, but for those who do not profess a Christian faith, he withdraws government. He is saying that America has only a religious - and Christian religious at that - history and no one else will be consider worthy.

That's exactly what the evangelical Republicans want to hear. He offers Americans freedom for religions, but not freedom from religion. He just doesn't want to be penalized by the Christians for belonging to a non-Christian cult. He makes it clear - he's one of them!

The audience he is speaking to should remember, though, that he was pro-abortion before he became anti-abortion. Mitt has a long history of saying whatever his audience wants to hear, even when it conflicts with what he told previous audiences. But I'm sure that when he has watched all the lies Bush has told in the last eight years, Mitt feels that he is fully qualified to carry on that tradition.

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Addendum 10:20 PM CST
Digby got it right.

The religious right has managed to make it an unspoken test that a president must be not only a person who claims an approved religion, but that they are personally deeply religious. (And Democratic advisors are working overtime to get their candidates to join them, unfortunately.) [Snip]

Kennedy successfully tempered a long standing anti-catholic bias held by a rather large number [in his 1960 speech that put to rest the fear many had that electing him would place the Pope in charge of American policy.]in this country by appealing to the fundamental American belief in a separation of church and state and by reassuring them that he would make decisions based on what his conscience tells him is in the national interest "and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates." Romney will be trying to temper an anti-Mormon bias among a sub-set of the Religious Right by assuring them (through coded conservative Christian language) that he is just as biased against other religions and non-believers as they are and will definitely bow to outside pressures or dictates --- from them.

Kennedy's speech was given 60 days before the general election and was designed to put to rest the fears of the general election voters. Romney was speaking solely the Republican radical evangelist reich-wingers because Huckabee has been making major gains among the likely Republican primary voters who don't want to vote for a Mormon. Romney's problem is that the rest of us heard him tell the Republican evangelists that he was their puppet.

If Romney gets the Republican nomination he will spend the entire campaign trying to dig out from under the promise he just made to the radical Republican religious bigots (also known as the Social Republicans.) Mitt might get the nomination, though, since the entire field of candidates for the Republican nomination seems to have fractured the Republican party to an extent that is hard to believe.

Romney, Huckabee, both want government to prevent access to contraception

I missed this previously. Mitt Romney has been saying to the public "I fought to define life as beginning at conception rather than at the time of implantation."

That is a code phrase to the Evangelical Republicans saying that Romney opposes Contraception. We know that Romney opposes Row vs. Wade and abortion. But that statement shows that, as his Mormon religion requires, he also opposes contraception.

Christina Page explains.

Todd Gitlin points out that Mike Huckabee agrees with Mitt Romnney on this. Huckabee also wants to ban access to contraception for American women.

Whither the Republican nomination contest?

Not a single vote has been cast in a primary and the nearest caucus is at least six or eight weeks away, so We have only polls and news reports of isolated comments to base any conclusions on regarding who the Republicans will nominate for President. So such predictions are probably quite risky.

That won't stop me from throwing out my opinion.

Josh Marshall was reviewing some charts of approval polls for each of the Republican candidates for the nomination, and reported his 'epiphany.' [Click through to TPM, click on each of the charts, and then go down to the charts by candidate for the most interesting view.] The polls show that Giuliani has been dropping continuously since 2006, while Romney has been increasing in approval. Josh's 'Epiphany' was that Romney was going to go into the actual primaries with surprising power. Josh considers it most likely that Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee.

I don't. I still think it will be Giuliani. Here's why.

I think that the evangelical Republicans will look at the threat of nominating a non-Christian, a Mormon, and as a block, reject him. I think that enough of the evangelicals will shift over to Huckabee to throw the nomination to Giuliani. The New York Times today has a report that the Mormon issue is hurting Romney in Iowa, and the beneficiary is Mike Huckabee, the ordained Baptist minister from Arkansas.

I think that Huckabee will draw enough evangelical votes from Romney to throw the nomination over to Giuliani.

But then Huckabee is going to suffer the same fate as Reverend Pat Robertson did when he ran for President in 1988. Huckabee is going to look good in Iowa, as Robertson did twenty years ago, but when he runs out of evangelical voters and people take a serious look at him he won't go the distance to the nomination. It's still a Romney - Giuliani race. So Rudy is going to pick up the evangelical vote as the least of all evils.

The only other Republican of any interest is Ron Paul. The Libertarians love him, and they have a large on-line presence. Dr. Paul is, however, the favorite of a small constituency, and when they run out he peaks out. The average Republican is not going to vote for him, and he has zero chance at all in any general election. Dr. Paul also ran for President in 1988 and attracted very little interest. He gets more interest today because Libertarians and the Internet seem made for each other, but a quick review of his record of bills presented in the House of Representatives show that he is not a viable candidate for President. I described Dr. Paul as a fruitcake in an earlier post and I stand by that description.

The only other two candidates of any interest, McCain and Thompson, have both seen their campaigns collapse over the Summer. McCain can't interest enough Republican voters favorably to fill a school bus, and his inability to raise money means that isn't going to change. The graph of Thompson's approval shows that the interest in him as a candidate peaked about the time he announced he was going to run and has gone downhill since.

So that's it. The only two real candidates remaining are Romney and Giuliani. Both are acceptable to the Republican money donors but they seem to prefer Rudy. Texas and Southern Republicans already appear to be coalescing around Rudy. Rick Perry, Republican Governor of Texas has come out strong for Guiliani.

If there is to be a real surprise that changes this evaluation, I think it will appear in the South Carolina primary. That primary is going to clarify all the muck and the Republicans will then know who to coalesce around to avoid a brokered convention next Summer.

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Addendum 6:37 PM CST
Looks like I posted my opinion a few hours too early. From TPM election Central we get a report that Rudy is way down in South Carolina.

"On the heels of polls showing Rudy dropping fast in New Hampshire and out of contention in Iowa, a a new poll finds him sinking fast in a third key state: South Carolina. The Clemson University poll finds Mitt Romney now taking the lead with 17%, followed by Fred Thompson at 15%, Mike Huckabee with 13%, John McCain at 11% — and Rudy at only 9%.

It's definitely not a good result for Rudy, especially in light of recent polls showing him in third in both Iowa and New Hampshire. And it's great news for Romney, who apparently now leads in all three of the key early contests.

So it looks like the winner of Iowa, New Hampsire and South Carolina will be Mitt Romney. Rudy is going to find it difficult to convince Republican voters that they should nominate the guy who lost the first three contests.

I still see the size of the vote for Huckabee to be an indicator of how many evangelical Republicans will sit out the 2008 Presidential Election and not vote at all rather than vote for a Mormon. Also, I still DON'T see the Econo-Republicans supporting Huckabee. They have no hold on him and he is frankly too populist for their taste. Almost any other Republican candidate would be preferable to them outside of Ron Paul. I also see Huckabee as being fatally subject to TV ads that point up his flaws. I previously posted on some of Huckabee's flaws in " Huckabee - from an Arkansas reporter "and "Huckabee - more to confirm Brantley's report", both posted Nov 13, 2007.

Feel free to disagree with me. I'm just trying to read the tea leaves and use the results to predict which way the voters in the Republican primary are currently trending, and which changes are likely to expect. The tea leaves themselves (various news reports) may or may not be good indicators of voter sentiment, so I have to use my judgment to try to "weight" each report for consistency with the others, then see what is suggests.

I have tried to link to the reports I am basing my guestimates on, so go look. Weight them yourself and draw your own conclusions. Then, if you disagree with my conclusions, I have more to learn from disagreement than I do from agreement. Maybe I'll learn to do a better job. (And maybe trying to predict the future is just a fool's game.) In any case, feel free to disagree, but I want to know why. What do you see that I don't. Specifiy if you have evidence, or just a different judgment in weighting the evidence.

And do go look at the charts Josh Marshall refers to. As far as I can tell, that's the best relatively unbiased trend data currently available, all nicely wrapped up in a presentation that permits each comparison between candidates. Note that it does not include data from the last couple of weeks.

Personally, I think that watching politics beats watching a good poker game - and as the war in Iraq has proven, the stakes are a lot higher.

Who is going to be the Republican Presidential Nominee?

If I had to guess right now, it would come down to a contest between Giuliani and Romney, both of whom have real problems with the Republican Christian right. Giuliani seems at the moment to be the leading candidate. Keep always in mind that right now we are in the money-polls campaign, though. There has not been a single vote cast in any primary or caucus.

Given that caveat, My best guess is that answer to who the nominee will be revolves around Rudy and the social conservatives. I see three alternatives.

1. Rudy's opponents identify a single competitor they can agree on and nominate in Rudy's place. If that happens it will be a process that 'jells' as the primaries get started. My best bet at the moment for such a candidate is Huckabee. He is especially attractive to all Christian Republican groups, but just doesn't have the fundraising, name recognition, or national organization to bring him to prominence this year in the pre-primary fundraising primaries. He may look different (to the social conservative Republicans as desperation builds and Rudy's nomination looms. Yesterday's hit piece on Huckabee strongly suggest that he is anathema to the economic conservatives, and the story of his release of an Arkansas serial killer who went on to kill again probably makes Huckabee unelectable in the general election. For Huckabee to win the nomination would mean that the Republicans had given up on winning the 2008 Presidential election, but also that the takeover of the Republican Party by the religious right was total.

Assuming that no such contra-Giulianni Christian candidate takes hold in the first quarter of 2008, the second and third alternatives are:

2.that the social conservatives will hold their collective noses and tepidly support Rudy as better than the Mormon Romney, or

3. that the nomination will actually go into a brokered convention in which the hold-outs will still be praying for a miracle and refusing to compromise. Without a strong contra-Giulianni candidate (either Romney or a Christian candidate) a brokered convention would still nominate Rudy, with the argument being that he is the most electable candidate.

I don't think the party professionals will permit a brokered convention, particularly since Rudy will seem unbeatable by then anyway. That leaves alternatives 1 and 2 as most likely. Right now the contra-Giulianni forces are holding out trying to force Rudy to rigidly commit to the social conservative positions before they let him have the nomination, and are still hoping for a miracle in the early primaries.

These are the “before the primary votes” guesstimates. The actual primaries are going to quickly shake out the unknown factors here. Josh Marshall summarizes a New York Times article on how the primaries are likely to stack up.

It seems more than likely that Mitt Romney will win Iowa and New Hampshire. Nothing is for certain; but his leads there are substantial and consistent. But South Carolina is where the white evangelicals -- en masse -- come into play. If Rudy can't win there, the importance of his strong plurality showings on the national level probably fade quickly, both as an indicator and as a reality, since Romney will likely pick up the support of others who throw in the towel. If Rudy can win there it probably means the lifers will trade their principles on abortion for beefed up aggression abroad.

If the evangelicals won't go for Giuliani in South Carolina I think it unlikely they can field a credible Christian candidate of their own, so that makes the evangelical contra-Giuliani candidate extremely unlikely.

So then the question comes to whether the evangelicals will vote for a Mormon or just sit home.

The nature of conservatives in general is to follow the guidance of the leaders. Bob Jones, evangelical founder of Bob Jones University has publicly stated that while he does not consider Mormons to be Christians, he does recommend voting for Romney.

It looks like a lot of things will be made clear by the Republican primary in South Carolina.

M. Romney - "Habeas Corpus? Probably not if I am President.

Glenn Greenwald has centered on a key plank that appears likely in the Republican platform if Mitt Romney gets elected President.

Various Republican candidates attended a meeting of Club for Growth, and afterwards, National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru spoke to Cato Institute's President Ed Crane about what they said. This brief report from Ponnuru is simply extraordinary:

Crane asked if Romney believed the president should have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens with no review. Romney said he would want to hear the pros and cons from smart lawyers before he made up his mind.

Mitt Romeny can't say -- at least not until he engages in a careful and solemn debate with a team of "smart lawyers" -- whether, in the United States of America, the President has the power to imprison American citizens without any opportunity for review of any kind. But in today's Republican Party, Romney's openness to this definitively tyrannical power is the moderate position. Ponnuru goes on to note:

Crane said that he had asked Giuliani the same question a few weeks ago. The mayor said that he would want to use this authority infrequently.

It sounds like Giuliani is positioning himself in this race as the "compassionate authoritarian" -- "Yes, of course I have the power to imprison you without charges or review of any kind, but as President, I commit to you that I intend (no promises) to 'use this authority infrequently.'"

Two of the three leading Republican candidates for President either embrace or are open to embracing the idea that the President can imprison Americans without any review, based solely on the unchecked decree of the President. And, of course, that is nothing new, since the current Republican President not only believes he has that power but has exercised it against U.S. citizens and legal residents in the U.S. -- including those arrested not on the "battlefield," but on American soil.

Habeas corpus has been the basis of all legal Freedoms since King John signed the Magna Carts in 1215. There is only one reason for a President to do away with habeas corpus, even in extremely limited circumstance, and that reason is to impose an authoritarian government.

An authoritarian government operates under "Rule (of the population) by Law," not as we function here in America, under the "Rule of Law." Under "Rule by Law" the top government officials are not subject to any limitations built into the law. They are above the law.

Someone ought to ask Jose Padilla how well that works.