now that pandering to the evangelical right is temporarily off the table
while the party gets that pesky Huckabee situation taken care of*, Grandpa Fred is sprinting to the front of the next great parade
Gramps (coming soon to a caucus near you, if you happen to be in Iowa) is getting quite a bit of worshipful attention from nativist right wing bloggers these days (he handily won la Malkin's Boy Most Likely poll). They're pretty darn excited about the Steve "electrified cattle fences - good for furriners and other livestock" King (R-IA) endorsement.
He's also picked up the Bill Salier endorsement. Bill Salier is the former Iowa state chair for single-issue anti-immigrant candidate Tom Tancredo. Tancredo's endorsement went to Romney. Salier says the Romney endorsement was "pragmatic" and it confuses him.
The upside here is for Mrs. Thompson, who has had to cycle from DC insider babe through sweetly christian housewife and mother to hard-charging professional political operative and back to sweetly christian housewife and mother over the course of the race so far. It's got to be far less work for her to appeal to this new demographic. She doesn't even have to speak english particularly well, as long as it keeps being her first language.
In other news:
the Times (and RNC spokesbot Patrick Ruffini) think Giuliani's in a slump.
The AP points out that despite what he may have said when he was trying to explain away his latest scandal, Our Beloved Former Mayor's administration was, as a matter of policy, not-transparent to the point of illegality
FYI, it seems possible to me that if his campaign continues to hemorrhage, he's going to decide that the flood of scandals are hurting his business too badly to keep going. Not for nothing, but when it became abundantly clear that no-one in New York was interested in voting for him and he backed out of the race against HIllary, we heard about it right after a reporter totally accidentally bumped into him at the hospital, where he'd just that very minute discovered that he had prostate cancer which was going to force him out of the race.** Just something to keep in mind while we wait for his campaign to tell us what tests he took for the flulike symptoms and/or headache that forced his plane to turn around.
Romney (despite having spent approximately six gajillion dollars on inevitability) has to fight off McCain in his own back yard, where one of the papers just endorsed pretty much anybody running who isn't him (Romney, the Concord Monitor says, is an inauthentic composite candidate and "most surely must be stopped") and the other one went for McCain
the AP has a stuff Mitt made up roundup. TBogg found another one.
Over at FDL, I have a piece on another Joe Klein classic from the Man of the Year issue of Time
You know, for a while there, I really wasn't enjoying politics any more.
Hasn't been a problem lately.
*Heritage Foundation apparatchik big Bill Donohue is on the job (you know, this guy). You didn't think "the wackos" were going to get to choose their own candidate, did you? Prominent pulpit-pounder the Pegster has even surgically removed the interest in religion she grafted on to Reagan in the first place is how bad the usual suspects don't want this guy. In other people who don't get to pick news: Tim Russert kicks Ron Paul's ass on MTP on behalf of GE munitions and his wife's prayerful hope of getting someone one can dine with in the White House.
**that was also when New York officially met the current Mrs. Giuliani and got to see what our taxes were paying for. He dumped his family at the same time
Janice Easley's fury over illegal immigration boiled over Saturday as she confronted Republican presidential hopeful Fred Thompson at the Music Man Square museum.
She said she recalled a film about Mexicans who wanted to take over California and New Mexico. Calling illegal immigrants a taxpayer burden, she wondered whether Americans could march in the streets of Mexico and demand welfare. When Iowans call up the power company, she said, "everything is in Spanish; it's sickening."
"You are so, so right," Thompson responded. English should be the national language, he told the retiree, and immigrants bear some of the blame for the home-loan crisis. "A lot of them couldn't communicate with the people they were getting the mortgage from," he said.
Gramps (coming soon to a caucus near you, if you happen to be in Iowa) is getting quite a bit of worshipful attention from nativist right wing bloggers these days (he handily won la Malkin's Boy Most Likely poll). They're pretty darn excited about the Steve "electrified cattle fences - good for furriners and other livestock" King (R-IA) endorsement.
He's also picked up the Bill Salier endorsement. Bill Salier is the former Iowa state chair for single-issue anti-immigrant candidate Tom Tancredo. Tancredo's endorsement went to Romney. Salier says the Romney endorsement was "pragmatic" and it confuses him.
The upside here is for Mrs. Thompson, who has had to cycle from DC insider babe through sweetly christian housewife and mother to hard-charging professional political operative and back to sweetly christian housewife and mother over the course of the race so far. It's got to be far less work for her to appeal to this new demographic. She doesn't even have to speak english particularly well, as long as it keeps being her first language.
In other news:
the Times (and RNC spokesbot Patrick Ruffini) think Giuliani's in a slump.
The AP points out that despite what he may have said when he was trying to explain away his latest scandal, Our Beloved Former Mayor's administration was, as a matter of policy, not-transparent to the point of illegality
FYI, it seems possible to me that if his campaign continues to hemorrhage, he's going to decide that the flood of scandals are hurting his business too badly to keep going. Not for nothing, but when it became abundantly clear that no-one in New York was interested in voting for him and he backed out of the race against HIllary, we heard about it right after a reporter totally accidentally bumped into him at the hospital, where he'd just that very minute discovered that he had prostate cancer which was going to force him out of the race.** Just something to keep in mind while we wait for his campaign to tell us what tests he took for the flulike symptoms and/or headache that forced his plane to turn around.
Romney (despite having spent approximately six gajillion dollars on inevitability) has to fight off McCain in his own back yard, where one of the papers just endorsed pretty much anybody running who isn't him (Romney, the Concord Monitor says, is an inauthentic composite candidate and "most surely must be stopped") and the other one went for McCain
the AP has a stuff Mitt made up roundup. TBogg found another one.
Over at FDL, I have a piece on another Joe Klein classic from the Man of the Year issue of Time
You know, for a while there, I really wasn't enjoying politics any more.
Hasn't been a problem lately.
*Heritage Foundation apparatchik big Bill Donohue is on the job (you know, this guy). You didn't think "the wackos" were going to get to choose their own candidate, did you? Prominent pulpit-pounder the Pegster has even surgically removed the interest in religion she grafted on to Reagan in the first place is how bad the usual suspects don't want this guy. In other people who don't get to pick news: Tim Russert kicks Ron Paul's ass on MTP on behalf of GE munitions and his wife's prayerful hope of getting someone one can dine with in the White House.
**that was also when New York officially met the current Mrs. Giuliani and got to see what our taxes were paying for. He dumped his family at the same time