The Crossed Pond

In response to Ta-Nehisi Coates:

“I acknowledge this newsletter incident is ugly, indefensible and, above all, cynical. I don’t think it is all that matters in the remarkable late career of congressman Paul. And that hunting for heretics rather than celebrating converts is a losing political strategy.”

—Andrew Sullivan

I have to say Coates’ blog has become pretty much unreadable since he decided to merge two areas of his current interest where his own estimation of his expertise and perspective (the Civil War and Ron Paul) seem to me to far exceed how valuable his insights actually are. That in this election, in this spot in American history, Coates has decided that the rip-roaring conversation we ought to be having in this election is Ron Paul’s historical opinion on the causes of the Civil War and how that proves…I’ve no idea what…is so far down the rabbit hole of hunting for heretics that it’s not even something I can constructively engage with anymore, even as a reader. I just find it exceedingly dull and irrelevant.

But, if it gets his rocks off and makes him feel all warmly professorial, more power to him I guess. But it is entirely unclear to me what Mr. Coates thinks he’s proving, means to prove, is proving, or why even I, a civil rights minded Ron Paul supporter, should give two shits.

Having followed Dole closely for many years, I find this hilarious. It’s perfectly Doleish in every respect. In a statement released by the Romney campaign this morning:

I have not been critical of Newt Gingrich but it is now time to take a stand before it is too late. If Gingrich is the nominee it will have an adverse impact on Republican candidates running for county, state, and federal offices. Hardly anyone who served with Newt in Congress has endorsed him and that fact speaks for itself. He was a one-man-band who rarely took advice. It was his way or the highway.

Gingrich served as Speaker from 1995 to 1999 and had trouble within his own party. Already in 1997 a number of House members wanted to throw him out as Speaker. But he hung on until after the 1998 elections when the writing was on the wall. His mounting ethics problems caused him to resign in early 1999. I know whereof I speak as I helped establish a line of credit of $150,000 to help Newt pay off the fine for his ethics violations. In the end, he paid the fine with money from other sources.

Gingrich had a new idea every minute and most of them were off the wall. He loved picking a fight with Bill Clinton because he knew this would get the attention of the press. This and a myriad of other specifics helped to topple Gingrich in 1998.

In my run for the presidency in 1996 the Democrats greeted me with a number of negative TV ads and in every one of them Newt was in the ad. He was very unpopular and I am not only certain that this did not help me, but that it also cost House seats that year. Newt would show up at the campaign headquarters with an empty ice-bucket in his hand — that was a symbol of some sort for him — and I never did know what he was doing or why he was doing it.

In my opinion if we want to avoid an Obama landslide in November, Republicans should nominate Governor Romney as our standard bearer. He has the requisite experience in the public and private sectors. He would be a president we could have confidence in.

I’m not really sure how to summarize, or what headline I’d use.

An Oklahoma Republican is pushing a bill to outlaw the use of human fetuses in food, because, as he says, “there is a potential that there are companies that are using aborted human babies in their research and development of basically enhancing flavor for artificial flavors.”

State Sen. Ralph Shortey introduced a bill on Tuesday “prohibiting the sale or manufacture of food or products which contain aborted human fetuses.”

Though he has allowed that he is not aware of this occurring in Oklahoma, or anywhere for that matter, Shortey cited research he did on the internet that claimed that some companies use embryonic stem cells to help develop artificial flavoring. [...]

“You may think it’s ethical to kill a child in the womb,” he said. “But the question now before us is: is it ethical to then use that aborted child for research and development to enhance flavors in food?”

So, I was originally going to post this just to make fun of it:

Nancy Pelosi told CNN last night that Newt Gingrich would definitely not become president, whether he was the GOP nominee or not.

“He’s not going to be president of the United States,” Pelosi said. “That’s not going to happen. Let me just make my prediction and stand by it. It isn’t going to happen.”

Asked why she was so certain by CNN host John King, Pelosi said, “There’s something I know,” but did not elaborate on what she was referring to.

Because…come on.

But Romney’s suggestion that Pelosi might be referring to ethics issues while Gingrich was at the House gives me pause:

Asked about Pelosi’s comments on Fox News this morning, Mitt Romney used the comments as a way to call on Gingrich to ask Congress to release more of the documents related to his ethics investigation.

“I wish I knew what that was,” Romney said about Pelosi’s remark. “I’d tell people what it is right now. That’s one of the reasons why I’m saying that all of the records that were part of the ethics investigation, all of the transcripts, all of the records have to be made public. Not just the final white-washed report, but the full record, the reason that 88 percent of the Republicans in the House voted to reprimand their own speaker, the first time in American history that’s happened.

“We need to understand why that is,” Romney added, “and those records need to be released because you know that if Nancy Pelosi knows those things right now, she will hand them to Barack Obama’s campaign if Speaker Gingrich were our nominee.”

And now I’m thinking that’s a promising line of attach for Romney. I think Romney’s tax returns will effectively end that line of attack (they’re pretty inoffensive, and just underscore that he’s rich), and this is a nice counter-strike, if he can sell it. Because I have no real trouble believing that of all the interviews and background research the House did on Gingrich in pursuance of that investigation, much of it could very easily be slapped together out of context (as well as in) and make Gingrich look pretty horrible. Which is to say, I have no real trouble believing that Gingrich was probably pretty horrible.

Too quiet around here lately. My excuse is that I’m dedicating all my free time and resources to the creation of a competitive Quidditch team; what’s yours?

…at the Nashville airport. So reports his father Ron Paul via social media. Further bulletins as events warrant. This should be good…

EDIT: Full-body scanner detected an anomoly; he was denied permission to walk through the scanner again, and refused a subsequent full-body pat-down.

This is probably going to be a major problem, because the actions of TSA in this case are in open, brazen defiance of Article I, Section 6 of the Constitution: “They (Congresspersons) shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.” As Senator Paul was attempting to board a flight to DC for this afternoon’s Senate session, this would not appear to be in any way an ambiguous matter legally.

Gary Johnson is polling at between 8 and 10 percent in some states, drawing largely from Republican support. He’s virtually certain to draw off almost all Republican Paulites unless Rand is on the ticket. At that point the only scenario in which the Republican candidate wins the Presidency is if Europe tanks badly enough to take the US down with it.

This is probably the single most under-covered aspect of the Presidential election at the moment. I doubt it will stay that way.

Man, just a few bars, but you gotta admit he kind of kills it at this fundraiser at the Apollo.

The Iranian government, which captured a U.S. stealth drone in December, has agreed to give the top-secret spy craft back, but with a catch.

Instead of the original RQ-170 Sentinel drone, the Islamic Republic said Tuesday that it will send President Obama a tiny toy replica of the plane.

Iranian state radio said that the toy model will be 1/80th the size of the real thing. Iranian citizens can also buy their own toy copies of the drone, which will be available in stores for the equivalent of $4.

Buy yours today!*

*(actually don’t, because that would put you in violation of several American and international statutes**)

**(and serious ones too, unlike the ones preventing you from legally purchasing a fine, fine, Cuban cigar)

Former Dishtern Conor Friedersdorf makes the forest-instead-of-trees reply that Andrew Sullivan’s Time cover story demands.

And nobody cares.

I have to admit, as an evangelist of Sarah Palin’s lack of party influence and relative unimportance in national politics (pushing back against the Andrew Sullivananian idea that “OMG the Republicans are the party of Palin and she rules 40% of the electorate in this country and is the leader of the Tea Party movement!”), even I’ve been pretty surprised as just HOW unimportant she actually is. I predicated, in making the case in 2010 that there’s no way she would run for President (still waiting for Sullivan’s mea culpa on that one), that she would instead lord her endorsement over the candidates and her involvement in the campaign would win up being a month of Sarah Palin – kingmaker.

Nope. It really does look like Sarah Palin’s 15 minutes of fame – certainly as a political figure, but now even as a tabloid/media figure – is pretty much up. Thank God.

Sam Cooke – Don’t Get Around Much Anymore

In the pantheon of songs I’m always singing (I sing to myself a lot), this one probably gets the most rotation. Love the slow, subtle crescendo of it. And I say again: Sam Cooke is the greatest singer of all time.

“While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don’t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of ‘free,’ but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit.[...]

An authoritarian nation is defined not just by the use of authoritarian powers, but by the ability to use them. If a president can take away your freedom or your life on his own authority, all rights become little more than a discretionary grant subject to executive will.”

—Jonathan Turley, “10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free”

That’s the report from this weekend, that he’s dropping out and endorsing Mitt Romney.

Kind of a curious move, timing-wise, as it was, for the first time, starting to look like he was getting a serious look (and just got a key SC endorsement) and might in fact be the last non-Ron Paul non-Romney standing. But my guess is that his team looked at it, and decided that this was the highest note they were likely to have the opportunity to go out on, leaving the race at least not looking like a loser and maybe getting some party brownie points for being the first to consolidate behind the nominee, besides.

All of which strongly suspects Huntsman is angling for something, be it a job in the Romney administration, or, short of that, being positioned for 2016.

A rather incredible question, asked completely honestly and earnestly and with no real sense of how far down the toilet mainstream journalism in this country has gone.

Oh, and I say “asked completely honestly and earnestly,” but I should point out that the public editor is not actually saying they might start doing this – he’s more engaging in the intellectual exercise.

Hey, kudos to the editor for at least having the balls to point out that, as a rule, they don’t currently – they merely transcribe what public figures tell them without comment. Still, I can’t think of a better finger-on-the-dying-pulse-of-American-journalism.

…is Senator Rand Paul.

At a stroke, Romney ensures the full support of the Paulites, who would otherwise overwhelmingly defect to Gary Johnson in November; indeed, he likely cements them to the Republican Party for a generation. He brings any possibility of a third-party campaign by Ron Paul to a screeching, immediate halt, and resolves any possible convention dispute by giving Ron Paul a Thursday night speech in which he introduces his son–a platform on which Ron will promote the ticket rather than his own pet causes. He enhances his candidacy in an otherwise loseable state and region and bucks up otherwise questionable support among independent libertarian centrists AND tea partiers.

Meanwhile, he adds to the ticket a candidate with much of the appeal of Ron Paul but none of the baggage, racist or otherwise. Rand Paul is a critic of defense spending but otherwise very much on the wagon with the party on foreign policy. On domestic policy his views on the drug war might be fractious but his credentials on federal spending and against Obamacare are unmatched.

Finally, if the ticket wins, the vacated Kentucky Senate seat is very winnable for the GOP.

What’s not to like?

To celebrate, you owe it to yourselves to read these two op-eds from actual Gitmo detainees.

My Guantanamo Nightmare
Notes from a Guantanamo Survivor

And, in doing so, note two things:

1. These two stories are hardly exceptions: indeed, they are probably closer to the norm than the popular image of 24-style terrorist mastermind or AK-47 wielding guerrilla fight attacking American soldiers. Remember, since 10 years ago today, more than 80% of these “worst of the worst” detainees to have gone to Gitmo were eventually released or deported without charge, even in the tribunal system weighted laughably in the government’s favor. Scott Horton’s (very good) Gitmo-anniversary post reiterates this point, that the political realm is plainly, falsifiably lying to you on this matter, and has since the beginning.

The second underreported lesson of Gitmo relates to the poisonous effect of partisan politics. No one expected matters as deeply felt as 9/11 to remain entirely outside of partisan politics, but the idea of Gitmo was cast soon after the attack, amid a political campaign. Republicans made it an issue in the midterm elections of 2002, marketing it as a “robust” or “proactive” approach to defending the nation against terrorists. The message worked marvelously, scoring enormous gains for the G.O.P.

Unknown to most Americans, though, just before the fall vote, representatives of the CIA and FBI went to the White House to break the bad news: Gitmo had been filled not with dangerous Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but with a bunch of nobodies. Political considerations plainly dictated the response. The government would not review the prisoners’ cases or grant releases, we were told; instead, “the president has determined that they are all enemy combatants.” Not only did this approach deny facts later borne out in case reviews and habeas petitions, it aggressively demonized the Gitmo population in order to create a sort of political insurance policy.

The Bush Administration’s shameful response continues to distort the domestic political dialogue about Guantánamo, which amounts to an extended effort to avoid accountability for a series of stupid political mistakes.

2. And, remind yourself, that these guys were, in a way, lucky. Had they received the same level of “guilty until proven” innocence consideration that, in the early days of the war, got you dropped into the black hole detainment system, today are just as likely to get you bombed by killer sky robots (you, and whoever happens to be around you at the time like your family or neighbors) , or otherwise assassinated. Or, you know, still dropped into the black hole detainment system, because it’s not like that possibility has been foreclosed on.

Glenn Greenwald has more.

A series of random, unconnected, and spontaneous murders keep blowing up Iranian nuclear scientists and university professors. It’s the damndest thing.

And, before I even put it up, the race is called:

1. Romney
2. Paul
3. Huntsman

Kind of amazed it was this quick a call – not only for Romney, but for second and third.

There is of course a reason I’m posting this particular song after this weekend (you’ll have to figure it out on your own), but Calexico is one of those bands that is just consistently, voluminously great. You could score an entire T.V. show with their catalogue.

Calexico – Crystal Frontier

I will point out that I’ve been saying this for a year. Salon runs an article called “Ron Paul’s Long Game“, which lays out a premise identical to mine in the post “Why Ron’s Running” Essentially, that the number one animating principal, at least to start, as to why Ron Paul is in this race is to keep the torch burning long enough to hand it off to his son in 2016 and 2020. I think that’s been fairly obvious to people closely watching his campaign and the people around it for some time now.

I guess I never gave my own qualitative judgement of that. The short version is, I foresee problems with Rand (in a weird way, he doesn’t have the guile-less form of guile that in some manner shields his father, and he has a tendency to try to be over-philosophical and runs into the problem of thinking himself smarter than he sometimes is, whereas is father usually starts from a place of aw-shucks humility which suits the message much better), I see problems with the Paul inner circle (more than half of whom hold positions in both Rand and Ron’s offices, btw, and who can be vindictive, short-sighted sonsofbitches when they feel cornered, which is often), and I wish that more effort would be made to turn this from a nepotistic dynasty to an ideological one (at some points, the endorsement/CFL game looks dangerously close to cult-building). But, I’d be lying if I said I’m not jazzed by the prospect of a true libertarian wing of the party not only emerging (I think it has emerged, see: Pauls, Tea Party), but really establishing itself as a long term presence. And I’m not sure that anything LESS than the kind of play the Pauls are running (injecting water into the cracks of the party machine concrete; freezing it and letting it open up space) works. Perfect really has been the enemy of the good for libertarianism in this country. The Pauls sure ain’t perfect. But they’re damn good.

Predictions!

Mitt Romney 31
Ron Paul 22
Jon Huntsman 19
Newt Gingrich 9
Rick Santorum 8

Sort of playing it safe on my part, save I think Huntsman and Paul actually battle it out fairly closely for 2nd place, with Paul barely outperforming polls but Huntsman doing so significantly, and Gingrich bests Santorum.

Ron Paul is roundly ignored despite proving he’s more viable than any Romney challenger. Headline going out: “Huntsman!”

The first cases of totally drug resistant tuberculosis–strains immune to treatment by all first- and second-line pharmaceuticals–emerge in India.

Not to be confused with that dude from Weird Soda Review doing a song about the stripey menace.

Patrick & Eugene – The Birds and the Bees

(more…)

Bit of housekeeping. Some inactive sites cleaned out, added a few. Any suggestions?

Let’s put this out front, because for the next few weeks or even months a lot of people are going to try and pretend that this isn’t the reality:

Mitt Romney is the presumptive Republican nominee.

I wrote regarding Iowa:

At this point it is nearly impossible to fathom how he doesn’t get this nomination in a cakewalk. If you’re Team Romney, and guys like Gingrich and Perry have fallen away to a last-minute Santorum surge and a Ron Paul ~20% beachhead – you almost couldn’t write that script better. Mitt Romney not being the Republican nominee would be a collapse of historic proportions. He is more of a prohibitive favorite than any candidate in a non-incumbent primary in the last decade at least – in fact I can’t even think back to a time when a candidate’s path looked this much like a cakewalk.

You will not get this message from most mainstream sources or even political bloggers. I thought it was bleedingly obvious, but for some reason the coverage has been anything but “Mitt Romney running away with it.”

There are still interesting storylines to be sussed out, btw – most notably Ron Paul having staked out nearly a fourth of GOP voters as Ron Paul Republicans, which is pretty amazing when you think about it. But the competitiveness of the nomination is not one of them, nor is the prospect of anybody but Romney having a realistic shot at the nomination.

Sure I can caveat that – it goes without saying that nothing is outside the realm of possibility – but let’s face facts. As far as I’m aware there is not a single state in the union where Mitt Romney is not leading. He won Iowa despite only showing up in December. He is up 30 in New Hampshire. He is leading in South Carolina according to the latest post-Iowa polls (Rasmussen and PPP). The overwhelming likelihood is he wins Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina – a nearly unprecedented opening running-of-the-table for a contested nomination race (and this considering that, in Iowa and South Carolina, he’s leading despite never having thrown himself into competing there). He has more money, establishment support, and organization than any other candidate by far.

His only remote competition, at this point, is a constantly-marginalized candidate who probably has a pretty hard ceiling of 25% (Ron Paul), and a candidate who is only in the conversation at all due to sheer, dumb luck (Santorum). The media will pretend that the Santorum “surge” says something about the Republican party, but really, Ezra Klein is right here:

Santorum’s finish doesn’t say much about his ideology, or his campaign skills, or his endorsements. Quite the opposite, in fact. In a race where a large number of anti-Romney voters were desperate to find a candidate, Santorum was unable to attract significant support until the very end, when the anti-Romney vote literally had nowhere else to go. If he had been a better candidate, he would have crested earlier.

Or, to use an analogy from Andrew Sullivan, the only reason Santorum is in this is because, in the game of musical chairs, he just happened to be the guy closest to the last empty chair when the music stopped. “In this game of musical chairs, if the music had stopped earlier, the nod would have gone to Newt or Ron. But that’s politics. Timing is everything.”

Think of it like Wheel of Fortune, with Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum all being little more than segments of the wheel (for whatever reason, Paul, Huntsman, and Johnson have a different kind of niche). It just happened to be Santorum’s square that was there when the needle stopped.

Now, again, I’m not discounting the possibility of some non-Romney upsets. I see Ron Paul having a good chance of stealing some smaller states like Nevada, and the possibility of the anti-Romney forces freaking out and flocking to Santorum in enough numbers to bolster him to a few early wins in places like South Carolina is very real – perhaps even likely.

But besides Romney, the only candidate with a national campaign of any note is Ron Paul. And besides Santorum, there are no other ciphers left.

Jacob Weisberg puts it most bluntly:

We journalists are sorriest of all, because Romney coasting to victory is a weak story. Were the press any other industry, cynicism about its self-interest in promoting marginal challengers would prevail. Local television stations (many of them owned by media conglomerates such as Slate’s owner, the Washington Post Company) count on election-year revenue bumps from political advertising in important primary states. If the nomination contest is effectively over by, say, the time of the Michigan primary on Feb. 28, valuable money will be left on the table. But for reporters, rooting for the underdog, any underdog, is really a matter of wanting a more dramatic story. The straight-laced front-runner winning Iowa and New Hampshire before securing the nomination early on does not count as a compelling narrative. Hence the media’s pretense of taking seriously a succession of nonviable candidates with outlandish views. Rick Santorum is not, under any circumstances, going to be the GOP nominee.
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This confluence of motives amounts to an insider conspiracy to resist the obvious.

So expect to hear more and more about less and less likely alternatives to a Romney victory in the coming weeks. Jon Huntsman, the only candidate yet to enjoy a moment of popular enthusiasm, could do better than expected in New Hampshire. Once Rick Perry joins Michele Bachmann in dropping out, conservative sentiment could coalesce around the unlikely survivor Rick Santorum.* Chris Christie could still change his mind! Anything could happen, of course, but it won’t. In the end, the GOP is overwhelmingly likely to nominate Romney because he is the most electable candidate available and at this point, no one else can beat him.

So rather than a lot of thought given over to Rick Santorum or this or that nuance of the contest for distant second (again, save Ron Paul, which is interesting if not necessarily relevant to the contests of 2012), the electoral reality we live in is a Barack Obama vs. Mitt Romney race for the Presidency. If you need to ponder or conjecture something, it should be that.

…it’s apparently cool now to make recess appointments when Congress is not actually in recess.

As sympathetic as I am to blowback from the obstinacy of Congress, particularly on appointments, this is the kind of thing, I think, that does more damage to the republic than any annoying single appointee, terrible law, or bad campaign. Just the decision that “you know what, we don’t like the way this works, so we’re just going to collectively agree that we don’t have to abide by it anymore.” I’m sure progressives love that Obama is finally sticking it to the GOP to get a consumer protection administrator through. I’m sure they’ll love it a lot less when it’s President Rick Santorum appointing a full slate of 100+ federal judges.

And lest you think I’m being hyperbolic, as evidence I point you to every single other one-off executive power-grab of the last 10 years that was billed as being required for a “special circumstance” and has since become the baseline for every circumstance.

So the results that will likely stick, at least over the next few days when it matters, is that Mitt Romney won by 8 votes, beating out Rick Santorum by a brass section. Ron Paul placed third with 22%. Newt Gingrich third at something like 11%, Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann in the single digits, and Jon Huntsman with 1%.

Some of these thoughts are pretty obvious:

1. Because of the way these things are reported, the only thing that matters here is the ordinal. Mitt Romney wins. Rick Santorum second. Ron Paul strong third. Everybody else = losers. The margins mean essentially nothing – this result shakes out the three frontrunners, and in fact likely shakes it out further to trying to shoehorn a Romney-Santorum horserace, because do not underestimate the extent to which Paul is dissmissable as a frontrunner. The media, and casual voters, want an “X vs. Y” equation, and unless Paul consistently stakes out first and second place finishes, people are going to bend over backwards to consider him a footnote in this race.

2. The most obvious: this is a great, great night for Mitt Romney. At this point it is nearly impossible to fathom how he doesn’t get this nomination in a cakewalk. If you’re Team Romney, and guys like Gingrich and Perry have fallen away to a last-minute Santorum surge and a Ron Paul ~20% beachhead – you almost couldn’t write that script better. Mitt Romney not being the Republican nominee would be a collapse of historic proportions. He is more of a prohibitive favorite than any candidate in a non-incumbent primary in the last decade at least – in fact I can’t even think back to a time when a candidate’s path looked this much like a cakewalk.

3. The flotsam – Michelle Bachmann says she’s still in, Rick Perry is heading back to Texas to “reassess”, but both are done. Perry’s got money to continue, Bachmann does not, but both have to be staring down the “…if not Iowa, where?” problem. Perhaps, given the fact that this cycle has seen everybody who has stuck around get a second, third, and fourth look, they’re hoping for a second wind down the road, but for the most part, I think we can start writing them off.

4. Jon Huntsman, likewise. At this point all he’s got left is a bit of staff, no organization, no money, and will likely stop making whatever debates are left. And expect, if he doesn’t suspend his campaign, his staffers to start jumping ship. One of the most disappointing candidacies in terms of unfulfilled potential in a long long time.

5. The Santorum thing is interesting. I am of the opinion that his surge here is almost completely, entirely blind, stupid luck. This entire race so far has been about the Republican base looking for their anti-Romney consensus candidate, looking, looking, looking…and then saying “well, this person looks kind of interesting” and that person becoming a “frontrunner” for a few weeks until they wilt and entirely discredit themselves and go away. See: Tim Pawlenty, Donald Trump, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich. The ONLY thing different about Rick Santorum is he had the blind, stupid luck to get his moment in the sun essentially right as the clock ran out and there was no time left for him to get too long a look before people realized he was…well, Rick Santorum.

6. But, it is luck in the sense that now, people looking for a Romney alternative that are unwilling to vote Paul are stuck with him. They are going to have to carry what amounts to a dead weight of a candidate, and many will try – Christian organizations, various conservative mouthpieces and talking heads, etc. It will actually be kind of amusing to watch as they are forced to essentially make Rick Santorum seem like a viable, respectable candidate through sheer force of will. Imagine a two person footrace: on one side, a reasonably healthy guy in gym shorts and sneakers. On the other, 8 guys trying to drag a bloated, stinking 2000 pound horse carcass. That is what this race is going to look like for a few weeks at least.

7. The Ron Paul problem is interesting. I strongly suspect the newsletters cost him Iowa, which is beyond frustrating for so many reasons. But be that as it may, it’s clear that his ceiling is much higher than 2008, and unlike the other also-rans, he’s not a flavor of the week – his 20% will likely stay there in nearly every state from here to the convention. But because every other candidate is so week, he won’t be able to count on a fractured field much longer, which means his 20% will go less and less far as the race wears on (at least in the early season). That said, Rick Santorum is such a weak candidate, that he’s in a rather interesting position of being an ever-present not-Romney option for essentially every Republican voter from here to eternity regardless of what happens with the rest of the field. How that plays out is unclear to me. He’s pretty much guaranteed, at least in delegates, a #2 finish in this nomination contest, but will he at any point begin threatening or being treated as a legit challenger? To put that another way, even those he’s almost assured of a #2 finish, he may very well do that without a single marquee win and never attaining the patina of being an actual challenger for the nomination – so how much does being #2 actually matter?

Hasa Diga Eebowai–from “The Book of Mormon”