YOUR LIBERAL MEDIA

Radar reports:

Noted neocon and New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus ... has been given control of the paper's Week in Review section. Prepare for (justified) liberal outrage....

I'm not sure "Noted neocon" is the exact term I'd use for Tanenhaus, but the link at those words is to a Jim Sleeper column at Talking Points Memo that lays out the evidence of Tanenhaus's fondness for writers who think the biggest threat to the Republic is the "hate-America left":

... mightn't Tanenhaus reconsider his extended parading of conservative, neoconservative, and liberal war hawks such as Peter Beinart, Paul Berman, Richard Brookhiser, David Brooks, Christopher Hitchens, and Joe Klein, who still can't stop assailing the "hate-America left" and its liberal fellow travelers ...?

...He has been way too kind to Beinart, who keeps baying that Michael Moore and Markos Moulitsas are more dangerous than Bush and his minions. And he has been far too kind to Brooks, who, fresh from heralding the end of ideology and urging a new civility, demonstrated his own post-ideological civility by remarking Connecticut Senate candidate Ned Lamont's "vicious," "Sunni-Shiite style of politics," whose "flamers… tell themselves their enemies are so vicious they have to be vicious, too."

[Tanenhaus] couldn't resist some gratuitous left-bashing of his own in The New Republic: Quoting George Orwell's observation that English intellectuals' attraction to Stalinism "betrayed 'a secret wish ... [to] usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip," he adds that

"It is no less true today. The intellectual left, most conspicuously in its Ivy League, Manhattan, and Hollywood variants, still clings to its dream of the whip handle, just as the educated right dreams of the day when the intelligentsia will be the first to feel the stinging cord."

... his gesture toward balance ("the educated right...") seems only a fig leaf for a continuing lust to catch the intellectual left dreaming of a Stalinist whip....

This guy now gets the reins at a much-read news-and-opinion section of the most important Sunday paper in America. Talk about liberals being people who don't think it's polite to take their own side in an argument....

HEATHER #1

Digby and Atrios are understandably disgusted at this Washington Post article on Hillary Clinton's wardrobe:

... Women have come a long way from the time when wearing a pair of pants was considered "borrowing from the boys." So it would be highly regressive to suggest that the candidate is using trousers to heighten the perception that she can be as tough as a man. And yet ...

This is a campaign in which gender stereotypes are being challenged even as the old assumptions are proving stubborn and resilient. Voters are being asked to envision something this country has never had: a female commander in chief. And the culture is gently roiling as audiences try to color in the outline of an XX president....

Who cares? WHO CARES???

I just want to remind you that this nonsense comes from Robin Givhan -- the same "journalist" who, a couple of months ago, told us about the micron of cleavage Hillary seemed to be revealing on C-SPAN.

Five bucks says she eventually gets a Pulitzer. (UPDATE: Oops -- as the Eccentric points out in comments, she's already won one. And, to give her her due, she is the one who told us about Dick Cheney's ski parka at Auschwitz.)

THE ANGRY PARTY IS THE CRAZY PARTY IS THE SILLY PARTY (AND THEY'RE ALL THE GOD PARTY)

Is the GOP getting nicer? Frank Rich seems to think so:

The real reason for Mr. Huckabee's ascendance may be that his message is simply more uplifting -- and, in the ethical rather than theological sense, more Christian -- than that of rivals whose main calling cards of fear, torture and nativism have become more strident with every debate. The fresh-faced politics of joy may be trumping the five-o'clock-shadow of Nixonian gloom and paranoia favored by the entire G.O.P. field with the sometime exception of John McCain.

And, via the Mahablog, I see that over the weekend Charles Pierce said this about Mitt Romney at The Guardian:

Within the struggling Republican party, there is the Angry party and the Crazy party. Sometimes -- in fact, often -- those two overlap. This year, those two elements between them have produced in the current Republican field the single biggest public fruitcake in the history of electoral government....

Romney had the money and he had the record to disenthrall his party from the influence of the extremists that have taken it over the cliff and onto the rocks below. In this, he was powerfully equipped to do his party and his country a great service. Instead, against all odds, he's spent two years carving out yet another political subset. To borrow a famous bit from the Monty Python crew, Mitt Romney seems bound and determined to fashion himself into the leader of the Silly party.

The fresh-faced politics of joy vs. Nixonian gloom and paranoia? The Angry Party vs. the Crazy Party (morphing into the Silly Party)?

The rise of Huckabee may mean that the GOP isn't quite the Angry Party or (my term) Rage Party. Of course, it's usually doesn't seem to be the Overt Rage Party in any case -- Pat Buchanan never won the Republican presidential nomination, and Tom Tancredo is stuck in the low single digits this year. Republicans often gravitate to leaders who seem like happy warriors but have an undercurrent of rage about a sixteenth of an inch below the surface -- think George W. Bush, or the faux-jolly Rush Limbaugh. I'd even throw in Ronald Reagan, who's universally regarded as a genial fellow despite the disproportionate amount of speaking time he devoted to demonizing Democrats, liberals, and the existence of governments. And Giuliani (still the presidential leader in most GOP polls) tends not to raise his voice, though his undercurrent of rage is hard to miss.

But Huckabee's surge suggests that maybe the GOP isn't the Angry Party exactly -- it is, rather, the We Have a Monopoly on Truth and Virtue Party.

That would cover Reagan, Limbaugh, Bush, Rudy, and Huck, no?

Or maybe it should be the We Have a Monopoly on Divine Truth and Virtue Party -- after all, it doesn't seem to take much to persuade GOP voters that a Republican who claims to have all the answers is touched by the hand of the Almighty.

Divorced, non-churchgoing Reagan has received a postmortem makeover as a man of God. Secular, multiply divorced, "adult beverage"-drinking Rush Limbaugh seemingly offends no one in the Christian right when claims to have "talent on loan from God." Ann Coulter, in between well-(self)-publicized makeout sessions with pornographer's sons, Muslims, and Jewish Democrats from New York, claims to take great comfort from the Bible and Christianity (and bashes Jews as "imperfect" Christians).

Giuliani had a lot of Republicans convinced that he had all the answers (on foreign policy and taxes, at least), and that everyone who disagreed with him was an idiot; usually that's more than half the battle, and all that's necessary after that is to throw the Christianists a religious bone or two. They like (right-wing) Catholics; all he would have had to do was pretend to (re-)embrace the faith of his youth (and wring his hands over abortion and gay rights) and the right would have been willing to declare him God's Newest Republican Son. But he blew it.

Romney, of course, has tried to take the this course, but he's a Satanic Mormon, so he's finding it hard going.

The term "Silly Party" implies that we can have a good hearty chuckle about all this, which isn't the case. Even "Crazy Party" is too lighthearted a term. In fact, Republicans are dead serious about having a monopoly on Godly virtue and about ascribing evil to those who disagree with them -- and whether it's intelligent design in your school system's textbooks or a quagmire in Iraq, they turn a lot of their crazy ideas into official policy.

Maybe the new "lite" absolute God-given certainty of Mike Huckabee's followers is a real change from the traditional absolute God-given certainty of recent Republicans. I hope so. But I suspect it still has an undercurrent of belief in Absolute Evil (i.e., us).

APPARENTLY, THE STUPIDEST BOOK PUBLISHED THIS WINTER WON'T BE JONAH GOLDBERG'S LIBERAL FASCISM

Today's New York Times Book Review includes a review of Philip Davis's book Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life. Here's the paper's capsule biography of the book's reviewer:

Lee Siegel's "Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob" will be published next month.

That's the name of Lee Siegel's new book? Just this title is breathtakingly wrongheaded.

(You remember Lee Siegel. He began blogging for The New Republic and soon afterward declared that he saw in the blogosphere "hard fascism with a Microsoft face," after which he began railing against "blogofascism." His attack on an academic named James Kincaid who writes about images of child sexuality in the media included unsubstantiated charges that Kincaid is a pedophile, despite the fact that Siegel himself has written about his regrets that he did not sex with Uma Thurman when she was sixteen. Ultimately, he lost his New Republic blogging gig after creating a sock puppet named "sprezzatura" who gushingly praised his writings and viciously attacked his critics.)

But ...Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob? Wow. Just wow. So much stupidity in a mere twelve words.

First, the main title: If you want to be taken seriously as a cultural critic (and an adult), why on earth would you give your book 75% of the name of a band whose most enduring contribution to the culture is the chant "Fuck you! I won't do what you tell me"? (Yeah, they did rawk, but still.)

Then the subtitle: Er, what could be more human than a mob? OK, yeah, some animals also travel in packs and engage in group violence -- but a mob is (and was long before the Internet came into being) a whole bunch of humans. In the Internet age, it's still a whole bunch of humans. The "electronic mob" (assuming you think such a thing exists) isn't a bunch of electrons. And the victims of mobs also tend to be humans, or humans' handiwork. So in what way would being either part of an online mob or the victim of such a mob threaten your humanity? Even if a whole bunch of blogofascists got together and hounded you to your death (which, of course, happens all the time, right?), you'd still be human.

Here's a sentence from the publisher's description of the book, via Amazon:

The web and its cultural correlatives and by-products -- such as the dominance of reality television and the rise of the "bourgeois bohemian" -- have turned privacy into performance, play into commerce, and confused "self-expression" with art.

Hunh? Yuppies like bare-wood floors and locally baked organic bread, and that somehow is linked to the popularity of American Idol? And the beginning of the modern reality-show trend is a "cultural correlative" of the Internet, even though the first big hit in the current wave of reality shows was The Real World, which premiered in 1992, when most people had never seen a Web browser? And, yeah, privacy was being turned into performance back when people put themselves on 24/7 Webcams, but has anyone even looked at a performance-art Web cam since the late '90s? (Porn doesn't count.) And, er, wasn't there a hell of a lot of performance art decades before that?

Dumb. Stupendously dumb.

BALANCED COVERAGE

The New York Times has a new article today in its series on the backgounds of the presidential candidates, "The Long Run." This article is about Hillary Clinton.

And actually, quite a few "Long Run" articles have been about Hillary Clinton. Here's the series page, and here's the breakdown:

Obama: 7 articles
Clinton: 5
Giuliani: 4 5 (see below)*
McCain: 2
Romney: 2
Thompson: 2
Dodd: 1
Edwards: 1
Huckabee: 1

So I guess the guy who seems to be the new GOP frontrunner has a life story that's only about 14% as interesting as Obama's, and about 20% as interesting as Hillary's. The same for John Edwards. Romney is only 28% as interesting as Obama. And apparently nothing interesting has ever happened to Bill Richardson, Joe Biden, Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, or Duncan Hunter. Glad that's been worked out.

*****

*UPDATE, MONDAY: Another day, yet another Giuliani article in the series.

WAYNE DU-WHO?

Did you notice one unintended consequence of the Romney religion speech? It knocked the biggest scandal threatening Romney's toughest challenger completely off the front pages. A couple of days ago, some were speculating that the pardon issued to Wayne Dumond, and Huckabee's lack of forthrightness concerning his involvement in that pardon, could sink his candidacy. And then Romney spoke and everyone forgot about Wayne Dumond.

Oops.

Then again, it probably wouldn't have mattered -- the evangelicals are rallying to Huckabee regardless, and now we have this stunning Newsweek poll (conducted just as the latest Dumond stories were surfacing, by the way):

The ordained Southern Baptist minister now leads Romney by a two-to-one margin, 39 percent to 17 percent, among likely GOP caucus-goers. In the last NEWSWEEK survey, conducted Sept. 26-27, Huckabee polled a mere 6 percent to Romney's 25 percent, which then led the field.

The problem is, for religious conservatives, the Dumond situation can't be a problem, by definition -- failing to be tough on crime is something liberals do, and Huckabee to them, cause he's an extremely devout Southern Baptist, can't possibly be a liberal. His supporters can't fit the Dumond story into their image of him, so they're just ignoring it.

It's true that some other right-wingers are able to process this -- but only the ones who aren't completely won over by his religious faith, and who are completely won over by the attacks on him by the Club for Growth and others as a tax-and-spender. Thus, in a Free Republic thread on the Dumond case, one Freeper exclaims, in what seems to be a non sequitur but isn't:

Michael Dale Huckabee is just a slick nanny stater!

Only rightists who put Huckabee into that frame seem able to process the Dumond story -- his religious supporters apparently can't. Similarly, when Huckabee responded to a reporter's question on the Iran National Intelligence Estimate by pleading ignorance of the report and treating the question as a "gotcha," Shawn Macomber at The American Spectator's blog sneered:

Alas, liberal on taxes, liberal on the environmentalism and liberal in his desire to ultimately be a victim...

Mitt Romney, of course, appears to have the opposite problem: He served up a heaping helping of theocrat red meat this week, yet it's quite likely that fundie voters simply can't process this fact because Romney is a dirty filthy Satanic Mormon.

We seem to be watching a Republican crack-up. If, heaven help us, Huckabee really is on his way to the nomination (he's leading in South Carolina, too, according to two new polls, and is now a strong second nationally according to one), that would mean the GOP had undercut three candidates who really could win in November.

First, wingnuts turned on John McCain (who's probably still the most electable Republican) for his immigration stance, his disrespect of the religious right, and his support of campaign finance reform. Then religious-right leaders turned on Giuliani, and now the religious-right rank-and-file seems to be giving the back of its hand to Romney.

I still can't quite believe that the GOP will hand the reins to that doe-eyed naïf from from Arkansas -- remember, Giuliani is still leading in most national polls, and maybe we're finally going to have a race that isn't over before Super Tuesday, and the big non-rural states that vote that day will put Rudy (or Mitt) over the top.

If that happens, I think (alas) the GOP will pull itself together. But maybe the Republicans really are so besotted now with notions of purity in the culture wars that they'll hand it to Huck and go down in flames with him.

WAAAAHHH! WAAAAHHH!

Another fundie whiner:

The battle between science and creationism has reached the prestigious Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where a former researcher is claiming he was fired because he doesn't believe in evolution.

Nathaniel Abraham filed a lawsuit earlier this week in US District Court in Boston saying that the Cape Cod research center dismissed him in 2004 because of his Christian belief that the Bible presents a true account of human creation.

Abraham, who is seeking $500,000 in compensation for a violation of his civil rights, says in the suit that he lost his job as a postdoctoral researcher in a biology lab shortly after he told his superior that he did not accept evolution as scientific fact.

...In a 2004 letter to Abraham, his boss, Woods Hole senior scien tist Mark E. Hahn, wrote that Abraham said he did not want to work on "evolutionary aspects" of the National Institutes of Health grant for which he was hired, even though the project clearly required scientists to use the principles of evolution in their analyses and writing.....

Hi, my name is Steve. Would you consider my application for employment at your hospital? Yes, it's true that I don't believe in the germ theory of disease transmission. But my principled opposition to washing my hands should not be an impediment to my employment at your facility, and I'll sue you for discrimination if you disagree.

Hmmm ... I wonder if Mr. Abraham's ex-governor will decide that Woods Hole is being "politically correct" and come to his defense....

MAKE LEMONADE

Let me predict that the next sound you hear will be Mitt Romney trying to score points with religious conservative voters by boasting that he's being attacked by the "liberal media" for his religion speech.

Never mind the fact that his critics include David Frum, David Brooks, and Peggy Noonan -- I think he's going to try to turn the criticism into a badge of honor, and declare that all of his critics are secular-humanist liberals.

If you need further evidence that he's heading in that direction, check out this new Romney TV ad, in which the narrator uses the phrase "When it wasn't politically correct" three times in the first twelve seconds while describing stands Mitt has taken.



Being a Mormon may make it impossible for him to persuade social conservatives that he should lead their permanent culture war, but he's going to try his damnedest to make that case anyway.

DESTROYED INTERROGATION TAPES: PROTECTING OUR SAUDI AND PAKISTANI PALS?

Don your tinfoil hats and learn about a message relayed this morning by David Frum. The message is from Gerald Posner, author of Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11 and other books:

Re the breaking news that the CIA destroyed the videotapes of interrogations with 2 terror suspects, you might have seen that the tapes of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah were destroyed....

Zubaydah, wounded when he was captured in Pakistan, was fooled in a fake flag operation to believe that the Saudis held him. Instead of being afraid of the ‘Saudis,’ he demanded to talk to three Saudi princes (one, the nephew of the King, who happened to be in the U.S. on 9/11). He gave his interrogators the private cell phone numbers of all 3. He did the same regarding the chief of Pakistan's air force....

Make the interrogation tapes public and then we'll know whether one of the top al Qaeda operatives accused leading Saudi royals and a top Pakistani military man ... of being his sponsors. And accused two of them – the King’s nephew and the Pakistani air force chief – of having advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. Now, suddenly coincidence of coincidence, the CIA says the Zubaydah interrogation tapes are destroyed. How convenient.

So the tapes, if they existed, could have confirmed (or disproved) this story, Posner says. By the way, whatever happened to the three Saudis and the Paskistan air force chief?

Posner:

After the U.S. told the Saudis and Pakistanis of Zubaydah's finger pointing, all four men had tragic 'accidents.' The King's nephew died of complications from liposuction at the age of 43. A day later, the 41 year old Prince named by Zubaydah died in a one-car accident on his way to the funeral of the King’s nephew. The third named prince, age 25, died a week later of "thirst," according to the Saudi Royal Court. And shortly after that, the chief of Pakistan’s air force died when his plane exploded with his wife and 15 of his top aides on board

I have no idea if it's true, but it's a hell of a yarn.

DAVID BROOKS ALMOST GETS IT

Brooks on the Mitt Romney speech, in today's New York Times:

...In rallying the armies of faith against their supposed enemies, Romney waved away any theological distinctions among them with the brush of his hand. In this calculus, the faithful become a tribe, marked by ethnic pride, a shared sense of victimization and all the other markers of identity politics.

...Romney's job yesterday was to unite social conservatives behind him. If he succeeded, he did it in two ways. He asked people to rally around the best traditions of America's civic religion. He also asked people to submerge their religious convictions for the sake of solidarity in a culture war without end.

Well, no, he didn't "ask[...] people to submerge their religious convictions for the sake of solidarity in a culture war without end."

He asked them to continue submerging their religious convictions for the sake of solidarity in a culture war without end.

Surely Brooks knows that right-wing evangelicals and right-wing Catholics have recognized their common interest in a culture war (over abortion, gay rights, Terri Schiavo, and other issues), and surely he knows about the efforts to strengthen these ties spearheaded by Chuck Colson and Father Richard John Neuhaus, which led to a 1994 manifesto called "Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium." And surely he also knows that a number of right-wing Catholics, particularly Father Neuhaus, have been quite influential in the Bush White House.

And surely he's also noticed that President Bush, whom Republicans still respect, doesn't seem to think it matters what you believe as long as you believe in God:

...In sessions usually lasting more than an hour, Bush, a committed Christian of Texas by way of privileged schooling in New England, and [Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-]Maliki, a Shiite Muslim of Abu Gharaq by way of political exile in Iran and Syria, talk about leadership and democracy; troop deployments and their own domestic challenges. Sometimes, said an official who has sat in on the meetings, they talk about their shared level of faith in a God they call by different names.

"They talk about the challenges they face being leaders," said the official, who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations. "They, of course, also share a faith in God, and that's also a tie they share." ...

(Anyone who thinks Maliki is the one directing the conversation to that subject is invited to buy a bridge.)

And maybe Brooks hasn't noticed this, but in the years since right-wing Catholics and Protestants declared that there was a "war on Christmas," quite a few prominent Jewish right-wingers, including Jack Abramoff ally Rabbi Daniel Lapin, have risen up angrily to denounce the secularists' "war." (Lapin, by the way, is the author of America's Real War: An Orthodox Rabbi Insists That Judeo-Christian Values Are Vital for Our Nation's Survival, which -- click the "Editorial Reviews" tab --has been endorsed by Gary Bauer, Ralph Reed, William Bennett, and John Ashcroft.)

So submerging theological differences is a tactic of wagon-circling that the culture-war right has been engaging in for a long time. In his speech yesterday, Romney wasn't recommending this strategy -- he was endorsing it.

FROM MY LOFTY PERCH, EVERYTHING LOOKS SIMPLY APPALLING

Marty Peretz on the Romney speech:

The Religion of Secularism

Boston has always been a city of religion. Or of religions. It began with the Puritans.... But since it was a part of the king's venture into the new world it also had a deep strain of Anglicanism. And then of other Protestantisms, like the Congregationalists. Roman Catholicism followed and, with the immigrations from Ireland and Italy, exploded. Then, of course, the Jews....

Now, of course, Greater Boston has become a center for "the religion of secularism." That's the phrase that Mitt Romney put into the campaign today as a hostile characterization of that faith that knows no faith...and often derides the faith of others.... in Boston (where for decades as a reputable citizen and then as governor Romney has practiced his religion with barely anyone noticing) and elsewhere around the country, the name of God seems to give a lot of people the creeps....

I do not like Romney. I did not vote for him in Massachusetts. And, since I'm a Democrat, I will not have even the opportunity to vote against him (at least in the primary). But I hope that his speech will explain to fervid religious people who disdain Mormonism and to fervid secularists that faith is no impediment to service.

You know what you need to do, Marty, if you think Boston is a cesspool of hostility toward religion? You need to get on the T (you know what that is, don't you?) and take the Green or Orange or Red or (my old) Blue Line to some neighborhood you've never, ever been to. Get off, leave the station, and look around.

You know what you're seeing? I'll explain. They're called "ordinary people." Few if any of them have Ivy League degrees, and it would be surprising if a single one of them had ever had an op-ed published in The New York Times or had ever appeared on Charlie Rose or had ever joined prominent intellectuals and activists in signing a full-page ad denouncing (or supporting) some policy or other of the U.S. government. Nope, these are just regular folks.

And you know what else? A hell of a lot of them go to church. They're not hostile to religion -- they practice religion. They turn to houses of worship to get married and buried. Quite a few of them send their children to religious schools. They believe.

I know these people. I was raised among them. I was one of them, baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church (before I lost the faith).

I assume you're aware, Marty, that one of the groups formed in the Boston area in response to the church pedophile scandal was called Voice of the Faithful. Do you understand the significance of that name? Here was a religious institution responsible for horrible crimes, horrible betrayals of trust -- and people wanted to stay in the church anyway. Even after molestations and cover-ups, they didn't lose their faith. They wanted the church to change -- they wanted to fix it, not destroy it. They wanted to remain faithful.

Maybe your part of Boston is "a center for 'the religion of secularism.'" But try going to the parts of Boston you don't know. There, as in the rest of America, religion is doing just fine, thank you.

INDEED

Barbara at the Mahablog on Romney's line "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom":

Millennia of human history in which religion did just fine without freedom are cheerfully ignored.

Good point.

"LIBERAL" MEDIA LOVES ROMNEY'S "ATHEISTS HATE FREEDOM" SPEECH

Or, at least, the part of the "liberal" media that features Chris Matthews chatting with Pat Buchanan and Joe Scarborough. Watch the clip here.

...MATTHEWS: I have to say that if he wins the presidency, it started here, Pat.

BUCHANAN: It certainly did. It was a magnificent speech, splendidly delivered. It was moving.... He used terms, Chris, of "secularism" and "public square" which are very familiar to conservatives. He placed himself very squarely in the conservative tradition. I've got to agree with you: If Governor Romney wins the Iowa caucuses and wins the nomination, it will be because of this speech here....

MATTHEWS: For the first time in this campaign, and it's been a long campaign already, I've heard greatness this morning.

SCARBOROUGH: ...I thought this was a great idea. He got to stand next to the president of the United States, he got to talk about his faith, and he hit this thing out of the park....

Well, Matthews is right at the top of that excerpt -- if Romney wins the presidency, it started with getting an endorsement for the message "Freedom requires religion" from the mainstream press. But, really, it's been inevitable that whomever the Republicans nominate will make outrageous far-right statements and these guys will say those statements are absolutely centrist.

Oh, and Joe Scarborough, I didn't realize Poppy Bush was still the president of the United States.

The only dissenter in the clip is, of all people, Sally Quinn -- and good for her:

QUINN: I have to say that I'm really stunned because I think it was an obliteration of the idea of the separation of church and state. He eliminated anybody who was a doubter, an atheist, an agnostic, a seeker. It's like, if you believe in God or Christ, you're on my side. If not, you're not.

The rest of them don't care -- he's not reducing them to second-class citizenship, so what's the problem?

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm actually looking forward to reading what Christopher Hitchens has to say about this speech.

HOLY CRAP (AND I MEAN THAT IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE)

Romney, from the speech he's going to give today:

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.

"Freedom requires religion"? Gee, thanks, Mitt -- I'm an atheist, so I guess I hate freedom. But give the SOB credit: Not only did he out-God Mike Huckabee, he almost out-authoritarianed Rudy Giuliani's notorious "Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do."

There's more in the speech, and a lot of it is precisely the religious-right boilerplate I expected:

"...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.'"

But I think he felt that wouldn't be enough, that religious rightists would see the speech as Theocracy Lite and stick with Huckabee. So he tried to swing for the fences at least once, and he may have hit a home run -- with "Freedom requires religion," the Mormon (or, rather, his speechwriting shop) may actually have concocted a phrase that Protestant fundies will quote forever as they try to turn America into a Christian nation.

Meanwhile if he gets the nomination and tries to run in the general election as a warm, fuzzy centrist, the rest of us should never forget that he said this (i.e., never let the GOP and the media try to make us forget that he said this).

****

The Politico puts "Freedom requires religion" in the headline. Yup, that's the money quote.

****

UPDATE: D. Sidhe says in comments,

I suppose one could argue that freedom requires the *possibility* of religion, as in the right to believe whatever you feel like.

But (as she realizes) that's not what Romney is saying. I'd say he's doing a twist on the old right-wing argument that "morality is impossible without religion," and just substituting "freedom" for morality because he hopes it will rally the theocrats, anger a lot of the rest of us, and make him into a victimized, persecuted advocate of the Right Way.

HUCKABEE: A REVERSE HOWARD DEAN?

When I look at Huckabeemania, I'm struck by the fact that Republicans seem to doing exactly the opposite of what Democrats did in late 2003 and early 2004.

In that election cycle, Democrats embraced Howard Dean, a second-career governor from a poor rural state who had no foreign policy experience and who seemed to a lot of people to be too far to the left to avoid a general-election blowout. Then, as the primary season approached, Democrats began to have doubts about his electability and turned away from him.

Mike Huckabee is a second-career governor from a poor rural state who has no foreign policy experience and who seems to a lot of people to be too far to the right (or at least too far to the Christian right) to avoid a general-election blowout -- but Republicans are gravitating toward him, at just about the same point in the election cycle that Democrats began shying away from a Dean vote.

Why the different reactions to an inspiring candidate with, presumably, limited across-the-board appeal? Well, Republicans have been worried about electability -- hence the Giulianimania that prevailed for most of the year (and Rudy is, of course, still leading in most national polls).

But Republicans generally worry less about going outside the bounds of acceptable opinion, probably because the GOP noise machine has been so good over the years at redrawing those bounds. They're not nearly as much in the habit of giving a damn about what the general public thinks as Democrats are. So maybe they've just stopped caring.

I've been the gloomiest guy in America on the subject of the Democrats' chances in the '08 presidential race (well, maybe Bob Somerby is gloomier), but even I think nominating Huckabee would be electoral suicide for the GOP. But who knows? Maybe, once there's a Democratic nominee (especially if it's Hillary), the mainstream press would decide Huckabee was eminently suitable for the presidency.

*****

Here's something I hadn't noticed:

Grover Norquist, who as head of Americans for Tax Reform is the de facto policy pope of the supply-side right, has pointedly refrained from joining in on the anti-Huckabee assaults mounted by the Club for Growth and allied columnists like Robert Novak and Jonah Goldberg. Mr. Norquist recently told David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network that he looked kindly upon Mr. Huckabee's centerpiece tax reform -- institution of the national retail "fair tax" ...

True, Mr. Huckabee has been more accommodating of Mr. Norquist than the group he likes to call "the Club for Greed" -- he's lately signed on to the ATR pledge to introduce no new tax increases from the White House. But it's at least as striking that Mr. Norquist -- best known for his pledge to shrink the state until it could be drowned in a bathtub -- seems barely to blanch at a recidivist tax hiker like Mr. Huckabee.

Norquist is a beloved non-Bible-belting member of the Beltway establishment. If he's cool with Huck, can Chris Matthews and Joe Klein be far behind?

MORMON-BASHING, PLUS ANOTHER GENTLEMAN'S C FOR BUSH

Cyndi Mosteller, co-chair of Fred Thompson's South Carolina campaign, is upsetting Mitt Romney fans and some other Republicans with anti-Mormon remarks such as this, about Mormon doctrine:

So I think it's inconsistent with so many basic Christian doctrines and it's very unusual to the point that it's almost unbelievable. These concepts are things that are theologically beyond our orthodox imagination.

Ouch. That's nasty.

But surely the damage control has begun, right? Surely the Thompson campaign has begun to walk back her remarks.

Nope:

Asked if his candidate had any thoughts on this analysis, Thompson spokesman Todd Harris said: "We respect her opinion just as we respect the opinions of those who disagree with her."

Wow. Republicans have gotten so used to dealing out low blows, blatantly and in full public view, anytime they think they can get away with it that they can't even restrain themselves from doing it to one another.

******

(By the way, according a new Pew poll -- see page 6 of the PDF -- claims that only 6% of Republican voters would absolutely not vote for Mitt Romney. That's a surprisingly low number, given the conventional wisdom that evangelicals won't vote for a Mormon and the poll results Tom posted last month showing that large numbers of voters wouldn't vote for Romney, or consider it unlikely that they would. I can't tell what's going on, but I still think that by the time November rolls around, GOP hatred of whoever the Democratic nominee is will be so great that nothing about the GOP nominee will be a dealbreaker. For now, though, I think the Pew number is very low.)

*****

Oh, and here's another remark from that Cyndi Hosteller interview:

I think particularly the [Mormon] Church's history, and almost theology, on the issue of race -- particularly the black race -- will be a very difficult issue to defend and to move forward with.... There are some issues there and I don't quite see how you resolve them and seek out and obtain anywhere near the same level of African American support that President Bush obtained both in 2000 and 2004.

Er, Bush got a whopping 9% of the black vote in 2000 and 11% in 2004.

I think even if Romney became the GOP nominee got exactly zero black votes, the words "anywhere near the same level of African American support that President Bush obtained" would apply to his total.

SEEKING A CLARIFICATION

I just want to make sure I grasp what happens next. Mike Huckabee is now near the top of the GOP heap (or, according to one poll, at the top). So will one of the next couple of debates (either the Spanish-language one in Florida on Sunday or the English-language one in Iowa next Wednesday) be the Pile On Huckabee Debate, where the point will be not to learn the entire field's views, but rather to try to rattle Huck by hitting him with every question he might not want to answer for fear of alienating GOP conservatives or general-election moderates -- on his role in releasing serial rapist Wayne DuMond, his belief in creationism that may or may not include a belief that it should be taught in the schools, his initial unawareness that the NIE report on Iran existed, and (for the righties) his opposition to waterboarding and distaste for Guantanamo, his support for tuition breaks for some undocumented immigrants, and his willingness to raise some taxes?

Is that what's going happen? Or does the press like Huckabee too much, or think that kind of treatment should be reserved for Democrats (or Clintons)?

BUT I THOUGHT IT WAS ALL OVER

AP reports:

The No. 2 U.S. commander in Iraq [Army Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno] said Tuesday that 15-month combat tours are too long for U.S. soldiers but probably cannot be shortened until next fall as troop levels decline....

Gen. George Casey, who became the Army chief of staff in April after spending more than two years in Iraq as the top overall commander, told a think tank audience in Washington on Tuesday that the Army decided to go to 15-month tours "with the full understanding that it was temporary."

"We can't sustain that and have to come off of that," Casey said. As the Army considers how soon it can return to shorter tours it wants to be "darn sure that we're not going to have to go back" to 15 months....

But why would we have to go back to 15-month tours? Haven't right-wingers told us repeatedly that we've already won the war?

WHY ON EARTH WOULD GOP VOTERS SWITCH FROM GIULIANI TO HUCKABEE?

Switching from the urbanite to the Arkansan? Switching from the thrice-married, drag-wearing pro-choicer to the Baptist minister? Switching from the angry guy to Mr. Nice Guy? Strange, but according to the L.A. Times, it seems to be happening:

Mike Huckabee, the ascendant Republican presidential candidate in Iowa, is enjoying a surge of support across the country -- and Rudolph W. Giuliani seems to be paying the biggest price, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found....

In the Times/Bloomberg poll, Huckabee was preferred by 17% of likely GOP voters -- up from 7% in a similar October survey.

Support for Giuliani, the former New York mayor who once enjoyed a commanding lead in national polls, slid 9 percentage points over the last two months -- to 23%.

Support for other GOP candidates remained largely unchanged....

And Huck is cutting into one of Rudy's big voting blocs:

Among self-described conservatives, Huckabee is running even with Giuliani, with support from 20% of voters -- a big swing from October, when Giuliani drew 34% of conservatives and Huckabee 9%....

I thought I saw this happening a week ago, and I took a tentative stab at trying to explain it:

...the Rudy appeal was always that he was that he was a transcendent secular saint, a guy who'd survived an encounter with Death. Huck is a wimpy preacher who's encountered the Big Bad Media and is beating their ridicule while waving a Bible, which must seem even better, even more transcendent, to many GOP voters than emerging from the smoke of Ground Zero.

Conservatives always want a hero, someone who'll be a bulwark against Pure Evil -- which may be defined as Al Qaeda or Saddam or Ahmedinejad or "the liberal media" or Mexican immigrants or the Clintons or Satan. (Conservatives would say I repeated myself with those last two.) They always think their enemies are both all-powerful and weird, while their heroes embody all the virtues of manly normality.

My guess is that the used to think Rudy was the pure American man on a white steed -- and now they're starting to see that he's weird (and far from pure). Huckabee, by contrast, seems quite pure, and isn't weird to conservative Republicans -- he's jes' folks.

And maybe the worst thing that could have happened to Giuliani was the spread of stories that violence is down in Iraq -- or the spread of stories that say Hillary Clinton is in trouble. He was supposed to be the big smiter of those two sources of Pure Evil, the Al Qaediraniraqis and the Clintons -- and now a lot of his voters seem to be turning instead to a guy who says he can slay Ol' Nick. Because if you're conservative, you gotta have an enemy.

*****

Yes, I know I'm agreeing somewhat with Peter Beinart's contention that a sense of improvement in Iraq is helping Huckabee, and I know Lord Atrios has told us that that's not an acceptable opinion on the left. But while Atrios is right that concern about Iraq isn't fading, that it's still very much the #1 issue on the minds of respondents to a new USA Today/Gallup poll, it should also be noted that the same poll shows a significant recent increase in the numbers of Republicans and Republican-leaners who say the surge is working. The L.A. Times/Bloomberg poll also surveys both Republicans and Republican-leaners. So it may still be their #1 issue, but they do think the situation is now less dire.

DID HUCKABEE JUST LOSE IOWA?

Righties are flipping about about this:

...After the Iowa poll showed that Republican voters like him but found him much less "presidential" and "electable" than Romney, Huckabee sought to build his foreign policy credentials, meeting with a group of retired generals who are in Des Moines to urge the 2008 candidates to commit to opposing torture. After the meeting, Huckabee joined Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in declaring his opposition to the interrogation procedure known as "waterboarding," and said he would support closing the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a contrast with the other leading Republicans....

Power Line:

MIKE HUCKABEE -- TOO MORALISTIC TO PROTECT NATIONAL SECURITY

...Waterboarding and long-term detention aren't very "Christian"; they merely keep terrorists out of action and, in special circumstances enable us to find out where we're going to be attacked next and/or where we can find those who are planning the next attacks. But if Huckabee actually did reach his position based on the views of a handful of generals, and without consulting the people actually charged with protecting this country from terrorists, then he's even less qualified to be president than I suspect....

The American Pundit:

Huckabee: Let's Close Gitmo Because the World Doesn't Like It

...With any luck, this will be the end of Huck's presidential chances.

Ace of Spades:

Jimmy Carter, Part II

In past posts about the candidacy of Mike Huckabee, I said I didn't want to become the anti-Huckabee blogger.

Allow me to recant that statement. We simply have to stop this man from getting any further in his quest for the presidency. Mike Huckabee is simply unqualified to be the commander in chief in a time of war....

(The blog ComMITTed to Romney!, in a post called "Huckabee's Frightening Views of National Security," also compares Huckabee to Jimmy Carter. There are few worse insults on the right.)

Am I wrong to think Romney is going to out-Daisy Ad the Daisy Ad by suggesting in a 30-second spot very soon that President Huck could get all the fine upstanding Republicans of Iowa killed? Am I wrong to think that a lot of those fine upstanding Republicans will believe it?

Oh, and, via Hot Air, I learn that it's a flip-flop. From June:

Detainees being held at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on suspicion of connections to terrorism enjoy conditions better than many prisons in the United States, Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee said Sunday.

While the government's handling of Guantanamo detainees has come to symbolize "what's gone wrong" in the fight against terrorism, the former Arkansas governor said, it's better to err on the side of protecting the American people....

"I can tell you most of our prisoners would love to be in a facility more like Guantanamo and less like the state prisons that people are in in the United States," Huckabee said on a cable news network....

Maybe I'm reading this completely wrong, but I think, for the GOP base, rage trumps faith. So I expect Romney to hammer Huck on this.

THE SAFETY OF YOUR MEDICINES AND YOUR DINNER DEPENDS ON A WOEFULLY UNDERSTAFFED FDA ... AND COMPUTERS THAT STILL RUN DOS

At least it sure looks DOS at about 1:07 of this video.

Here's a screenshot (click to enlarge):



Yeah, that sure makes me feel the government is doing everything it can to keep E. coli out of my salad.

Story here:

...Gail Cassel, co-author of a 56-page report titled "FDA Science and Mission at Risk," said, "The wheels are coming off. In fact, I would say they're off. They're already off."

The report uncovered failures at every turn. The most glaring is that the FDA lost 600 inspectors in the past four years, making the agency unable to protect the country's food supply. And the FDA's responsibilities have grown, rendering the agency ineffecitve.

Bill Hubbard, a former FDA associate commissioner, said, "When I came to the FDA in the early 1970s, we were doing 35,000 food inspections a year. This year, the agency will be doing 6,000."

...The report found the agency's computer system, which tracks hazardous foods and drugs, is so antiquated, it's constantly breaking down.

...Many front-line employees don't even have a computer. Inspectors must write urgent reports by hand, which often end up lost in huge warehouses.....

But haven't Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani told us that government already too big and too wasteful?

Here, you tell me:

"Currently each American pays about a penny and a half a day for the FDA," the report says. "An increase to three cents daily would not, in our view, be a great price to pay for the assurance that our food and drug suppply is, indeed, the best and safest in the world."

Hey, I'd gladly spring for twice that.

MORAL CLARITY

Blogging at Time, Jay Carney said yesterday,

The inevitable spin out of the Bush Administration will be that the NIE is proof that their approach on Iran has worked.

In fact, the spin of the right in general, or at least part of the spin, is that Bush's approach on Iraq has worked:

Victor Davis Hanson at National Review Online:

... Iran, like Libya, likely came to a conjecture (around say early spring 2003?) that it was not wise for regimes to conceal WMD programs, given the unpredictable, but lethal American military reaction.

...one result of the 2003 war ... might have been the elimination, for some time, of two growing and potentially nuclear threats to American security....

A.J. Strata at the Strata-Sphere:

... Iran stepped down from developing nuclear weapons in 2003 (after we invaded Iraq [hint, hint])...

... we spooked them by taking out Saddam so damn fast they stood back for a while from building their bombs....

So we laid waste to a country that posed no threat to us, killed and injured massive numbers of civilians, sent into exile literally millions more, and fomented a civil war -- but it's cool because we scared other countries into not messing with us.

Basically, they're telling us that even though Thomas Friedman, given a do-over, might not give his notorious "Suck on this!" recitation of why it was necessary to go to the Arab/Muslim world and do serious harm anywhere we chose just to prove that we could, they would happily give the same recitation.

****

UPDATE: dnA called it.

HOLDING PEOPLE ACCOUNTABLE FOR THE CONSEQUENCES OF THEIR ACTIONS IS SO SEVEN MONTHS AGO

Barbara Walters just interviewed Don Imus for ABC because, apparently, he's one of her "10 Most Fascinating People of 2007."

What, George Allen and the prosecutor in Jena weren't available?

*****

Oh, and I see that that nice guy everybody likes, Mike Huckabee, is going to be a guest on the show, either today or Thursday.

ROMNEY'S SPEECH WON'T BE ABOUT HIS MORMONISM -- IT'LL BE ABOUT HOW MUCH LIBERALS SUCK

Curiously, there doesn't seem to be a real announcement of Mitt Romney's upcoming religion speech at his campaign Web site -- there's just this abridged version of a CBS story about the speech, with a link to the full story. I wondered why the Romney campaign would want you to read this story in particular; here's what it says in part:

..."This speech is an opportunity for Governor Romney to share his views on religious liberty, the grand tradition religious tolerance has played in the progress of our nation and how the governor's own faith would inform his Presidency if he were elected," said Romney spokesman Kevin Madden in a statement released Sunday evening.

..."I can tell you I'm not going to be talking so much about my faith as I am talking about the religious heritage of our country and the role in which it played in the founding of the nation and the role which I think religion should generally play today in our society," Romney said in an interview with WBZ-AM....

Steve Benen says:

Romney wants to "share his views on…the grand tradition religious tolerance has played in the progress of our nation."

I’m not sure if Romney's been paying attention to Republican politics lately, but right-wing Iowa caucus voters ... don't much care for "religious tolerance." Indeed, many of them revel in their intolerance.

But, see, that's what "religious tolerance" means to people like us. Romney knows perfectly well that that's not what it means to people in the GOP base. He knows that, to them, it means "acceptance of religious conservatives' right to impose their religious beliefs anywhere and everywhere they choose." It also means "acceptance of their belief that America is a Christian (or possibly Judeo-Christian) nation." When people in the GOP base talks about "religious intolerance," they mean the unwillingness of people like us to have their religious beliefs imposed on us and their religion-drenched version of the nation's history taught as the truth. We don't like either of those things, so we're intolerant.

And that's going to be the real subject of Romney's speech.

The giveaway is what he said to WBZ: that he'll be "talking about the religious heritage of our country and the role in which it played in the founding of the nation and the role which I think religion should generally play today in our society." He couldn't have given a more blatant signal that he's going to say America is a Christian (or Judeo-Christian) nation, that he as a right-wing Mormon is just as persecuted as a right-wing Protestant or right-wing Catholic or right-wing Jew, and that he doesn't need any lip from some pointy-headed liberal at the ACLU or Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

He knows that Mike Huckabee, however pure his evangelical Protestantism, isn't dishing out the hate this way. So he's going to tell the Rage Party what it really wants to hear about religion.

****

UPDATE: Just to clarify, in response to Aimai in comments: He's not going to give a lock-and-load Pat Buchanan-type speech. It's going to be a Romneyesque speech, which means it will seem reasonable in tone, so the pundits will think it is reasonable. And yes, there could well be a fair amount of centrist window-dressing -- but not so much that the base won't get the message.

****

UPDATE, TUESDAY: Told ya:

Mormonism not focus of Romney speech

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney said Monday that he would not focus on his Mormon beliefs in a major speech on religion this week and instead would discuss his concern that "faith has disappeared from the public square."

The former Massachusetts governor encouraged Americans to learn about Mormonism but said he did not see himself as a spokesman for his religion.

"There's plenty of ways that people can learn more about my faith if they'd like to, I'm sure -- a lot of websites people can go to," Romney told reporters as he opened a two-day New Hampshire campaign swing....

Oh, man -- "faith has disappeared from the puiblic square"? That line is to religious conservatives with persecution complexes was "Woo pig sooey!" is to Arkansas Razorbacks fans -- the ultimate rallying cry.

PILING ON (AND POSSIBLY SHIFTING SOME OF THE BLAME)

Well, everyone's in on the act, and the New York Post is no exception:

Rudy Giuliani'S breakup with Donna Hanover cost tax payers a lot more than his extramarital relationship with Judith Nathan, according to city documents.

The documents show that the distraught Hanover repeatedly fled Gracie Mansion to seek refuge with her parents in California as her high-profile marriage was crumbling.

At all times, she was accompanied by an NYPD security detail that ran up at least $110,000 in credit-card charges for airfare, lodging, car rentals and gasoline.

"They're stuck on you," said one source of the protective detail. "They go where you go." ...

One one hand, it's hard to see how voters across the country could read this and not see it as a big, sleazy mess (assuming they don't just shrug it off). On the other hand, this story wasn't on the front page (the Post has never put the scandal on the front page), there's a quote from former mayor Ed Koch, a longtime Giuliani critic, defending the security, and, of course, the first sentence says that the ex-wife was responsible for much more frittering away of taxpayer dollars than the current wife.

Did I say "the ex-wife"? I meant "the ex-wife who performed The Vagina Monolgues and appeared in The People vs. Larry Flynt." (Is there some hope on Murdoch's part that she can become the Hollywood-liberal villain of this piece?)

At Lucianne.com, by the way, this story is teased with what seems an awful lot like slander of Hanover:

More of the drip-drip-drip on the Merry Wives of Rudy has Wife 2 fleeing to California at the taxpayers' expense to seek solace with Mummy and Daddy. Some say she had more interesting things to do in the Golden State. That's not in the story, just vicious gossip which is usually true.

Does your lawyer know you posted that, Lucianne?

GIULIANI BACKER GENERATING PRO-HUCKABEE ROBO-CALLS IN IOWA?
(And did I mention the name Ken Blackwell?)

(UPDATE: 6:30 P.M. MONDAY: Well, the theory advanced in this post was nice, but it's not accurate. See the last update below.)

The Politico reports:

A newly-formed group claiming to support Mike Huckabee hit the phones of Iowa Republicans tonight with an automated push-poll attacking Huckabee's GOP opponents and praising the former Arkansas governor....

For each target, the pattern was the same -- a recorded message using voice recognition technology asked the recipient if they would participate in the caucuses, considered themselves pro-life and thought marriage should be between a man and a woman.

Then the dirt came, right after those called were asked which candidate they were backing.

For all three, the calls were phrased in the same manner: "If you knew that..."

But different candidates were targeted with different attacks....

There were attacks on Thompson, Giuliani, and McCain.

At the end, the automated voice directed the recipient of the call to www.trusthuckabee.com....

Now, here's the clue:

The group claims to be affilliated with a larger 501(c)(4) called "Common Sense Issues."

...Groups called "Common Sense Ohio" and "Common Sense 2006" last year spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to attack Democrats in targeted Senate races using similar such automated calls as went into Iowa tonight, per the New York Times.

A Cleveland Plain Dealer blog told us this about the Common Sense groups in 2006, during Ken Blackwell's campaign for governor:

...Joining the legions of lawyers who have sued Secretary of State Ken Blackwell in recent years, attorneys for the Ohio Democratic Party filed suit today in the Ohio Supreme Court, seeking to force Blackwell to unmask donors to a nonprofit group that spent more than $1.5 million last month on anonymously financed TV ads that hammer Rep. Ted Strickland.

The ads, paid for by Common Sense Ohio, rip the Democratic candidate for governor for, among other things, supporting same-sex unions and the use of tax money to pay for abortions.

Common Sense Ohio has concealed its donors' identities by forming Common Sense 2006, a so-called "electioneering communications" entity that is required under the new law to reveal its donors. And, much to the frustration of Democrats, it has done so -- its sole donor is Common Sense Ohio, which gave $1,537,500 to Common Sense 2006.

...The legal architect behind Common Sense Ohio and Common Sense 2006 is Columbus attorney Bill Todd, the brilliant master of the campaign-finance loophole.

Buckeye State Blog tells us Bill Todd is a Giuliani donor, which a search of campaign finance records confirms.

Giuliani also campaigned for Ken Blackwell.

And whois.com tells us this about trusthuckabee.com:

Registrant:
Common Sense Issues
3046 Brecksville Rd
c/o New Media Communications
Richfield, OH 44286
US

Yup, Ohio. (But see second update below.)

Rudy needs for Huckabee to win so Romney doesn't seem inevitable after Iowa and New Hampshire. He has the motive. And why not include calls insulting himself? He won't win Iowa anyway.

****

UPDATE: From The Telegraph in England:

Giuliani and Huckabee agree to pull punches

Rudolph Giuliani, the Republican frontrunner, and Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor now surging up the party’s rankings, are pursuing an unofficial non-aggression pact as they try to knock rivals out of the race for the presidential nomination.

In the week that the battle for the Republican nomination turned ugly in a bad-tempered televised debate, the former New York mayor and the ex-Arkansas governor have been at pains not to knock each other, according to campaign insiders.

Advisors to Mr Giuliani told The Sunday Telegraph that they were deliberately refraining from public criticism of Mr Huckabee, despite his increasing popularity, in the hope that he can derail their mutual rivals, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson....

****

UPDATE: Holy crap, somebody involved in this robo-call campaign clearly read what's being written about it, and now the whois listing gives an address in Hernsdon, Virginia. But note this:

Record created on 22-Oct-2007
Database last updated on 03-Dec-2007

The listing was definitely changed in response to the Politico story and maybe this post. Damn, I wish I'd grabbed a screen shot.

****

UPDATE: I'm now "the left"! (Scroll down to the last paragraph here.)

****

UPDATE: Well, the Politico's Jonathan Martin has the story:

...Patrick Davis, a Colorado-based political consultant who served as political director of the NRSC in 2004, is running the organization and confirmed in a telephone interview that they were a pro-Huckabee outfit and were responsible for the calls.

...He wouldn't reveal any donors' names, but one active member of the group is Harold "Zeke" Swift, a retired executive at Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble.

...Swift and his wife served as co-hosts for a Huckabee fundraiser earlier this month in suburban Cincinnati.

Swift was also involved in the efforts of sister independent groups last year, both called "Common Sense," that sent similar calls into states with competitive Senate races. The 501 (c) (4) parent group of the Huckabee organization is called "Common Sense Issues." This organization is also playing in contested Senate races in 2008, and just began airing an ad attacking Rep. Mark Udall (D), who is running in an open seat race in Colorado.

Swift wouldn’t say if another member of the 2006 effort and current Procter & Gamble executive, Nathan Estruth, was involved in funding "Trust Huckabee," but Davis said the donors "were similar but not identical" to last cycle.

Estruth was also a sponsor of Huckabee's fundraising reception earlier this month and he and his wife have already given $2,300, the maximum allowed in a primary, to Huckabee....

So, yeah, it's the old Common Sense crowd that supported Blackwell, but I'm struggling to find a Giuliani connection.

Davis, by the way, is a Fred Thompson donor.

WHAT DOES A REPUBLICAN HAVE TO DO TO BECOME A PARIAH IN THIS COUNTRY?

I assumed he'd give a speech like this eventually, but I'm rather taken aback at the location:

...Mitt Romney will take to to the Bush Library in College Station, Texas, on Thursday to give a long-anticipated, much-debated speech about his Mormon faith and the role of religion in American public life.

...That it it's coming at Texas A&M is not a surprise nor an accident.... Romney has given a major speech there before and is close to George H.W Bush and his wife, Barbara.

[Romney spokesman Eric] Fehrnstrom said they "reached out to President Bush's office last week, and they graciously agreed to host the event."

The 41st president will introduce Romney....

Couldn't even get 40% of the vote when he ran for reelection? Sired the worst president we've ever had, a guy whose approval rating barely breaks 30%? So why isn't Romney running screaming from him and all other Bushes? Why aren't any of the Republicans (apart from Ron Paul)?

Good grief, maybe Jeb will be the damn VP nominee.

****

UPDATE: Greetings, C&L readers ... while I have your attention on the subject of Romney's speech, please be forewarned: He's not going to defend his Mormonism. He's going to tell everyone that the evil liberals are persecuting religious people.

SOON WE WILL BE INVINCIBLE!

How many times has Frank Rich naively forecast the imminent end of the dominant GOP as we know it? Today he was doing it again, this time as a consequence of a possible upset in the Democratic primaries:

... the Republicans have fallen into a trap by continuing to cling to the Hillary-is-inevitable trope. They have not allowed themselves to think the unthinkable -- that they might need a Plan B to go up against a candidate who is not she. It's far from clear that they would remotely know how to construct a Plan B to counter Mr. Obama. The repeated attempts to fan "rumors" that he is a madrassa-indoctrinated Muslim -- whether on Fox News or in The Washington Post, where they resurfaced scurrilously on the front page on Thursday -- are too demonstrably false to survive endless reruns even in the Swift-boating era.

Oh, give me a break. If they hadn't "allowed themselves to think the unthinkable," they wouldn't have come up with the strategy of floating the madrassa rumor in the first place. And recall that the sub rosa spread of that rumor is working quite effectively:

In the Wichita [evangelical] churches this summer, Obama was the Democrat who drew the most interest. Several mentioned that he had spoken at [Rick] Warren's Saddleback church and said they were intrigued. But just as many people ruled out Obama because they suspected that he was not Christian at all but in fact a crypto-Muslim -- a rumor that spread around the Internet earlier this year. "There is just that ill feeling, and part of it is his faith," Welsh said. "Is his faith anti-Christian? Is he a Muslim? And what about the school where he was raised?"

"Obama sounds too much like Osama," said Kayla Nickel of Westlink. "When he says his name, I am like, 'I am not voting for a Muslim!'"

(Now, I wouldn't care what evangelicals think of Obama, except for the fact that we keep being told, by Frank Rich and others, that evangelicals' loyalty to the GOP is no longer absolute and that their votes are in play in '08. I don't believe that, but everybody else does.)

And if hinting at a madrassa education or frequently repeatedly noting that Obama's middle name is Hussein isn't effective, the GOP character-assassination machine will tell us that his ties to indicted fund-raiser Tony Rezko are sleazy, or that the pastor of his church is a black separatist, or that he'd leave America vulnerable because he'd talk to Chavez or Ahmedinejad. And those are just the cards the GOP has chosen to show now. They'll portray him as "Obambi" -- I can just image Republican operatives going on the new Imus show and chortling with the host about how "whipped" he is. (Sorry, I just spend way too much in the heads of the right-wingers. Sometimes I feel like an FBI profiler trying to think like a psycho killer. But mark my words, this will happen.)

I don't care if (as Rich says) many Republicans have praised Obama. I don't care if Hillary is an singularly delectable object of their hatred. Republicans will Swift-boat anyone who runs against them, and the media will play along.

But the biggest vulnerability Obama has, I fear, is preciusely what he's praised for most -- his "post-partisanship." I'm afraid that's a nice way of saying he won't get his back up and (apart from opposition to the war) strenuously challenge Republican policies. And I'm afraid it means he won't fight back hard enough if he's attacked on any grounds whatsoever.

I've been through this before, with a Democratic presidential candidate who also wasn't born into the ruling class (he was the son of Greek immigrants), who also got a great education nonetheless in the Northeast, who also liked to remain even-tempered on the campaign trail, and who didn't denounce partisanship in so many words but did say, "This election is not about ideology. It's about competence." Michael Dukakis, of course, had his head handed to him by the Republicans in 1988. He seemed constitutionally incapable of fighting back -- just as Obama seems to have made it a matter of principle not to be a battling ideologue. I can't bear a repeat of twenty years ago.

If Obama wins the nomination, I hope I'm dead wrong about him. I hope he fights -- or I hope the public rallies to him precisely because he won't wallow in the gutter with the sleazebags of the GOP. But I worry that he's just the kind of candidate the GOP can chew up and spit out.

****

UPDATE: Yes, I didn't address the obvious question -- how Obama's race affects his electability. See my answer in comments -- I don't think there's a simple answer to that, and I think the issue plays out indirectly. And also see dnA's comment, and the post he links.

NEED SOME LAUGHABLY IMPLAUSIBLE SPIN RETRANSMITTED? TALK TO ME, BOB NOVAK, AT HACKS-R-US!

Yeah, right, Bob, we really believe this:

Strategists for Mitt Romney's Republican presidential campaign were actually pleased that fast-rising Mike Huckabee moved ahead of Romney in the Rasmussen poll in Iowa, eliminating surprise if Huckabee finishes first there in the Jan. 3 caucuses.

A Huckabee victory in Iowa would kill Romney's plans to win the first two 2008 tests in Iowa and New Hampshire, followed by sweeping the board in all other primary states. Instead, the contest for the nomination could extend through the Feb. 5 primaries, with Rudy Giuliani given a chance in the high-population state primaries that day.

The consolation for Romney strategists is that a Huckabee win in Iowa would no longer be a shock that could stampede the process.

Next up: Elaine May explains to Novak that making Ishtar was really the best thing that could have happened to her film career.

VOTERS SHRUGGING OFF GIULIANI SCANDAL?

You have to take random-interview newspaper surveys with many grains of salt, but to me this one rings true (and note that it's from the New York Daily News, a paper that's been giving it to Rudy with both barrels, not Rupert Murdoch's Post):

N.H., Iowa Republicans care more about terror than Rudy Giuliani's trysts

Many voters shrugged off the renewed spotlight on Rudy Giuliani's extramarital affair...

"Anybody who is a mayor or President, they always have security whether it's on personal time or business time," said Sam DeYoung, of Swanzey, N.H. "It seems like they're trying to make a lot of nothing."

...Amy Underwood, 19, an engineering student at the University of New Hampshire, said last week's bookkeeping scandal won't affect her vote.

"I guess I don't really care so much about that when I look at the progress that was made on New York City under his power," she said.

Judy Romine, 65, of New Virginia, Iowa, who raises horses and goats, was unfazed.

"It's like Bill Clinton all over again, isn't it?" she said, referring to Clinton's affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. "He's not the first President to have affairs, and, hell's bells, he won't be the last." ...

That's pretty much what I predicted voters would say when I first posted about this. Voters are numb to all but the worst financial scandals. And divorce and adultery are so commonplace in this country that nobody cares. (Isn't that what many of us were saying back in the '90s during Monicagate -- that the public was way ahead of the finger-wagging reporters on whether consensual extramarital sex was a hanging offense? Have we forgotten that in this case because the cheater is a guy we don't like?)

We're told that a reporter asked him about the scandal at a town hall forum in New Hampshire, but the civilians didn't. We're told that former Maryland governor Bob Ehrlich, who's with the Giuliani campaogn, is concerned, but voters aren't.

I fear Rudy's coming out of his tailspin right now (assuming he ever really was in a tailspin in the first place) -- the "shag fund" scandal was at least temporarily forgotten when the Hillary hostage crisis happened, and now Rudy gets an early Christmas present in the form of a new poll showing Huckabee five points ahead of Romney in Iowa (a Huckabee win in Iowa = no Romney sense of inevitability after Iowa and New Hampshire = a big fat opening for Giuliani). So don't count him out yet.

CAMPAIGN JOURNALISTS: WE LOVE HILLARY'S INAUTHENTICITY AND ARROGANCE!

There's a weird double message in two news stories about the aftermath of the New Hampshire hostage crisis, by Glen Johnson of AP and David Paul Kuhn of the Politico -- they both seem to be saying, "Hillary's slick phoniness looks impressively presidential." It's as if these guys want to praise Hillary, but can't stop thinking of her as a slick, cynical faker who arrogantly thinks we owe her the presidency -- so they present her as all that even as they praise her.

Here's Johnson:

When the hostages had been released and their alleged captor arrested, a regal-looking Hillary Rodham Clinton strolled out of her Washington home, the picture of calm in the face of crisis.

"Regal-looking"? We're constantly told that we'll elect Hillary at our peril -- we must avoid "dynasties." Even seeming to compliment her, Johnson seems to have internalized this notion.

And now comes the inauthenticity:

The image, broadcast just as the network news began, conveyed the message a thousand town hall meetings and campaign commercials strive for -- namely, that the Democratic presidential contender can face disorder in a most orderly manner....

Little more than three hours later, just in time for the 11 p.m. local news, Clinton reaffirmed that perspective. In New Hampshire, she embraced her staffers and their families, and lauded the law enforcement officials who brought a siege at her local campaign headquarters to a peaceful conclusion.

It was a vintage example of a candidate taking a negative and turning it into a positive....

Over the ensuing five hours, as a state trooper negotiated with the suspect and hostages were released one-by-one, Clinton continued to call up and down the law enforcement food chain, from local to county to state to federal officials.

"I knew I was bugging a lot of these people, it felt like on a minute-by-minute basis, trying to make sure that I knew everything that was going on so I was in a position to tell the families, to tell my campaign and to be available to do anything that they asked of me," the New York senator said.

At the same time, the woman striving to move from former first lady to the first female president was eager to convey that she knew the traditional lines of command and control in a crisis, even if the events inside the storefront on North Main Street were far short of a world calamity.

"They were the professionals, they were in charge of this situation, whatever they asked me or my campaign to do is what we would do," Clinton said.

Everything is calculated, none of it is real. Typical Clinton behavior. Impressive!

And then we get to the human factor, or lack thereof:

... Clinton offered up a third dimension to her crisis character: humanity. She said she felt "grave concern" when she first heard the news of the hostage-taking.

"It affected me not only because they were my staff members and volunteers, but as a mother, it was just a horrible sense of bewilderment, confusion, outrage, frustration, anger, everything at the same time," Clinton said.

It was a thawing moment for a stoic figure who once snapped that she opted for professional life instead of staying home to bake cookies....

Translation: For a cold, calculating bitch, she sure seemed human!

****

Kuhn, at the Politico, gives us a similar narrative, starting with his title: "Clinton Seizes Opportunity After Crisis." What does that mean? Clinton shows the ability to take charge? Clinton shows that she'll grab hold of anything and use it to her advantage? I can't help thinking the latter is the subtext, even if the former is the text.

Kuhn writes:

... as soon as [the hostage crisis] ended, Clinton took full advantage of the opportunity she had unexpectedly been handed.

In her New Hampshire press conference, she stood before a column of police in green and tan uniforms. She talked of meeting with hostages. She mentioned that she spoke to the state's governor about eight minutes after the incident began.

The scene was one of a woman in charge.

Yes -- carefully stage-managed, but impressive.

"It looked and sounded presidential," said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. "This was an instance of the White House experience of this campaign. They knew how to handle this."

That the crisis was outside Clinton's control gave it a rare quality in this era of hyper-controlled politicking, Sabato added.

"What's most important about it is that it's not contrived," he said. "It's a real event and that distinguishes it from 99 percent of what happens in the campaign season."

Even as she's praised for how she dealt with something unscripted, we're reminded how scripted her campaign is.

...In her two public appearances after the hostages were freed, she was stern, but she also spoke of the concerns she felt as a mother, admitting to a "horrible sense of bewilderment" and "outrage."

...The personal has at times been hard to find in Clinton. She heads the largest and most manicured of all operations.

Her campaign has an especially organized staff that surrounds her. She stays on script and she stays on schedule....

Again: For a cold, calculating bitch, she sure seemed human!

Right-wing bloggers (e.g., Rick Moran at Right Wing Nut House and Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters) find these stories excessively one-sided in Hillary's favor. Me, I just think they're odd -- Kuhn and Johnson seem to be impressed, but their minds are colonized by right-wing memes.

IF I CAN'T BE PRESIDENT ANYMORE, I'M GOING TO TAKE MY WAR ON TERROR AND GO HOME

What the hell is he thinking?

The Bush administration intends to slash counterterrorism funding for police, firefighters and rescue departments across the country by more than half next year, according to budget documents obtained by The Associated Press.

...The department wanted to provide $3.2 billion to help states and cities protect against terrorist attacks in 2009, but the White House said it would ask Congress for less than half — $1.4 billion, according to a Nov. 26 document. The plan calls for outright elimination of programs for port security, transit security, and local emergency management operations in the next budget year....

Oh, and a big loser is the region where, er, that huge terror attack happened a few years ago:

Tens of millions in federal anti-terror funds that bolster New York metropolitan-area police, fire and emergency response agencies could be cut in half under a Bush administration proposal.

...The leaked document calls for slashing the federal program geared to the highest-risk cities, from which the New York region receives the lion's share of its funding -- about $134 million this year....

Another proposed change would prohibit federal funds from being used to cover salaries -- a huge potential hit to New York City, which uses a portion of its grant money to pay some of the 1,000 cops assigned to terrorism.

...Since the 9/11 attacks, the federal government has poured more than $23 billion into state and local coffers for anti-terror efforts, but "it remains unclear what years of annual grant awards have achieved," the memo said....

Um, maybe what they've achieved is a lack of terrorist attacks on the U.S.?