Allow me to prove that:

Who is your favorite author?” Aleya Deatsch, 7, of West Des Moines asked Mr. Huckabee in one of those posing-like-a-shopping-mall-Santa moments.

Mr. Huckabee paused, then said his favorite author was Dr. Seuss.

In an interview afterward with the news media, Aleya said she was somewhat surprised. She thought the candidate would be reading at a higher level.

“My favorite author is C. S. Lewis,” she said.

And that’s why, when you hear one of these idiot moralists railing on about how we have to censor something or ban something, “because of the children,” it’s actually “because of the parents.”

Mike Huckabee | No Comments »

Today is the first day in a week and a half that I’ve felt almost like a human being. I usually get a very bad cold about once every two years, but that’s about it. This one was a bad one, and had me pretty miserable for most of the last twelve days. Of course well-meaning people have been all over me to go to a doctor, get antibiotics (for a viral cold??), get antivirals, maybe it’s asthma, maybe it’s the flu, whatever.

I know it’s not the flu because I haven’t had fever since the first day. I do know one thing: “flu-like symptoms” don’t put you in the hospital unless you’re pretty damned sick, and if you’re that damned sick, you’re not out the next day “feeling great”.

But then, I’m not Rudy Giuliani:

A day after “flu-like symptoms” led him to turn his airplane in mid-air and seek medical attention, Rudolph W. Giuliani smiled and said he felt “great” as he walked out of a hospital here Thursday afternoon. But his campaign provided few details of what had caused the problem that led him to spend more than 14 hours in the hospital.

Mr. Giuliani was admitted to Barnes-Jewish Hospital here on Wednesday night after he fell ill on a campaign swing through Missouri. His aides said that he had felt increasingly ill as the day went on, and that after his plane left for New York he experienced such a severe headache and flu-like symptoms that the plane returned to Missouri.

After spending the night in the hospital, and being given a series of tests, Mr. Giuliani walked out shortly before 3 p.m. “I’m feeling fine, thanks to the hospital,” Mr. Giuliani, clad in a dark suit and a blue necktie but no overcoat, told reporters.

Just what had ailed Mr. Giuliani was unclear. His communications director, Katie Levinson, said he had been given “a clean bill of health” before he left the hospital. “Doctors performed a series of precautionary tests and the results of all the tests were normal,” Ms. Levinson said in a statement.

The campaign declined to elaborate on what his symptoms were or to specify which tests were performed. Hospital officials said the campaign had asked them not to provide any information about Mr. Giuliani’s health and to refer questions to the campaign.

Jake Tapper similarly wonders about how one can be so sick as to be hospitalized one day and just fine the next:

What was wrong? What tests did he get? What was causing such severe pains? Giuliani gave no details.

His campaign will not release any concrete medical information to the press — raising questions about the former New York mayor’s health and the transparency of his campaign.

Giuliani was experiencing headache pain so severe Wednesday night he had his charter plane turn around and go back to St. Louis and was rushed to the emergency room.

His campaign shared no concrete medical information about which tests the mayor undertook and what the exact results were, also refraining from allowing the media to see his medical records or speak to his doctors.

A senior Giuliani campaign official told ABC News, “He’s fine. He campaigns very vigorously. He did 77 events in 53 cities this month. He just got sick.”

The former mayor was all smiles for the cameras as he left Barnes Jewish Hospital in St. Louis Thursday afternoon after spending the night and the better part of a day in a Missouri hospital.

“I feel great. Take care. Merry Christmas, I’m feeling fine, thanks to the hospital. They did a great job,” Giuliani said, refusing to answer any reporters’ questions as he left the hospital.

Now this bug that I’ve been battling had as part of its early stages a constant band of headache around the back of my head, which at its peak had me awakening in the middle of the night with pounding head pain. But I wasn’t hospitalized.

I know that Saint Rudy of 9/11 believes that everything about him is his own personal business — his marital and extramarital affairs, his client list, his business dealings, and now his health. But if he wants to be president, he’d better get used to the fact that the health of the guy who may have to make split-second decisions for the entire country IS the people’s business, not just his own. And if he can’t deal with that, then let him withdraw from the race and go back to private life where no one will care about his health.

(cross-posted at Brilliant at Breakfast)

Election 2008 | 2 Comments »

Yesterday, the Boston Phoenix investigated this claim from Mitt Romney that his father “walked together with Martin Luther King” in favor of civil rights. Turns out he, um, didn’t. Here’s the Romney campaign’s explanation:

A spokesperson for Mitt Romney now tells the Boston Phoenix that George W. Romney and Martin Luther King Jr. marched together in June, 1963 — although possibly not on the same day or in the same city.

Romney, according to one piece of written source material provided by the campaign, made a “surprise” appearance at a small march in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, in late June — several days after King led a much larger march in Detroit. Romney spokesperson Eric Fehrnstrom suggests that these two were part of the same “series” of events, co-sponsored by King and the NAACP, and is thus consistent with Romney’s claim that “I saw my father march with Martin Luther King.”

“The record is convincing and clear – George Romney marched with Martin Luther King and other civil rights demonstrators,” Fehrnstrom wrote in an email.

Yes, it’s perfectly clear: George Romney knew how to walk, Martin Luther King walked in the state of Michigan once: that means they were best friends!

Now, when Al Gore made statements that were clumsy, they were taken completely out of context and put into the worst possible light to make him appear like a “serial exaggerator.” Yet here we have Romney, and really not just him on the Republican side, lying over and over again, changing their stories, endlessly parsing their own statements.

So will we seem the same media narrative placed on them?

Mitt Romney | 1 Comment »

Mitt Romney, seeing his personal fortune ground into a second-place finish in Iowa, is going where no Republican has dared to go in this race: he’s praising President Bush.

ABC News’ John Berman Reports: Standing on the banks of the chilly Mississippi River in Davenport, Iowa, Mitt Romney gave a great big political bear-hug to President Bush. Praising the president’s foreign policy, Romney said, “I believe that our president has acted in good faith, and in an effort to protect his country, and do everything in his power to keep America safe.”

Bush has been without majority public support for 35 months straight, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released in December, with only 33 percent approving of the president’s job performance. So, why would a candidate show so much love for a president so low in public opinion polls?

Good question. But Romney doesn’t have a choice. He’s being torched by Huckabee in Iowa, and nobody’s talking to the bitter-enders, the Bush=R0XX0R crowd, so he’s drawing a distinction with the guy who claimed Bush had an arrogant bunker mentality.

Of course, once the election’s over, if Romney winds up with the nomination, he has this recent record of cozying up to the most unpopular President in American history. But changing his position at the drop of a hat has never been a problem for him before.

Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney | 1 Comment »

It never ceases to amaze me how Republicans can keep recycling the same old warhorses, no matter what kind of criminal indictments or universal disapprobation they receive from the outside world. John McCain traveled today with Henry Kissinger. Now, Kissinger is a Beltway elder of the highest order, and so this would raise nary an eyebrow in DC. But over in the rational universe, Henry Kissinger is a war criminal. Whether it’s the overturning of the Allende government in Chile and the installation of Augusto Pinochet, the illegal bombing of Cambodia that led directly to the rise of Pol Pot, or countless other crimes undertaken by the national security apparatus of this government while Kissinger was holding sway over it, the documented cases of kidnapping, murder and violent overthrowing of sovereign governments ought to be enough to earn him the shame of a nation. But he keeps bopping along, giving wooden speeches in support of candidates – and nobody finds this odd in the least.

The media is dying to write the “Comeback McCain” story, and in New Hampshire he appears to be doing well. But this appearance will never be reported as a misstep. It’s because Kissinger is a Village elder, and the DC establishment would never cast one of their own to the wolves.

Endorsements, John McCain | No Comments »

Once every candidate started to sound as over-the-top crazy on immigration as he has, Tom Tancredo decided that there was no longer any need for him, and tomorrow he’ll drop out of the race.

But it should give pause to these Republicans who think smugly that a fierce anti-immigrant line will lead them to victory in November, that Tancredo never got out of the blocks. If his message is so important, and he’s so pure on what is considered the signature issue, how come he never had a chance? How come his message was so easily co-opted by candidates who are riddled with differing positions on immigration in the past? Maybe these so-called smart Republicans are only talking to themselves on this issue.

Tom Tancredo | 1 Comment »

It was never credible that Mitt Romney suggested that the Planned Parenthood contribution drawn from his family’s joint checking account was merely from his wife. Now we have visual evidence of Romney attending a Planned Parenthood house party.

Of course, that was then, before scientists tried to clone human beings and harvest them for Soylent Green.

Mitt Romney can attend fundraisers for any organization he chooses. He just ought to tell the truth about it.

Mitt Romney | 1 Comment »

So Mike Huckabee continues to try and wage his campaign below the radar, shunning high-profile appearances like Meet The Press in favor of dogwhistle TV ads which invoke the birth of Christ.

He managed to hire a staffer, after all this time, but since it’s so late in the day, he could only get the guy who paid black leaders to suppress the minority vote in New Jersey many years back, and who was part of the juggernaut Katherine Harris campaign in 2006. Meanwhile, the other campaigns are emptying out the oppo, particularly on executive clemency, just to keep up with him.

“You’re going to do something which people don’t expect,” Mr. Romney told them, “which is give me a victory.”

His campaign is working feverishly to right itself, zeroing in on Mr. Huckabee’s past moderate record on immigration with critical television advertisements, a mailing and recorded phone calls from a former Arkansas lawmaker who says, “I know Mike Huckabee’s a likable guy, but I also know what he did to our state.”

As the Democratic candidates crisscrossed Iowa on Sunday, the Republicans pounded one another, with Mr. Huckabee’s ascendancy rippling across the field. Mr. Romney demanded that Mr. Huckabee apologize to President Bush for comments he made about the administration’s foreign policy, with Mr. Huckabee firing back, while Fred D. Thompson flung the ultimate conservative insult, calling him a “liberal.”

I do think that the flap over Huckabee’s comments about George Bush reveal why he would be such a terrible general-election candidate. When he was a longshot, Huckabee could let ‘er loose and not worry about the consequences. But when called on his anti-Bush comments, he reflexively backed down, and now we have something we haven’t seen in this race in months: the front-runners fighting to say who likes Mr. 24% more.

Huckabee: “I didn’t say the President was arrogant…. I’ve said that the policies have been arrogant…. I’m the one who actually supported the President’s surge. I supported the Bush tax cuts, when Mr. Romney didn’t. I was with President Bush on gun control, when Mitt Romney wasn’t. I was with the President on the President’s pro-life position, when Mitt Romney wasn’t.”

That’s electoral suicide, to align yourself with the most unpopular President in modern history. But Huckabee is now bearing the burdens of being the standard for the party. And the shoulders are starting to sag.

Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney | No Comments »

That Ron Paul collected $6 million yesterday, has over $17 million for the quarter, and could reach as high as $20 million, which would be more than any Republican candidate in any quarter this cycle (he may be there already).

In the polls, Mike Huckabee has come from nowhere. In the money race, Paul is destroying the competition.

The Republican establishment really threw out some fine choices this year, didn’t they?

Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul | No Comments »

Rudy is pulling out of New Hampshire.

Giuliani is moving resources (read $$$) out of the New Hampshire media market.

Giuliani scaled way back on his TV buys on Boston stations for this week compared to last week [...]

In the case of Boston TV however, records confirm Giuliani’s team purchased one large number of TV spots and then trimmed it back or canceled it six days later.

This could be part of a strategy to shift more ad money to Florida, where some polls show his large lead slipping, or to Michigan, which votes a week after New Hampshire and is Romney’s birth state.

An attempt to reach the Giuliani campaign for comment was unsuccessful.

Giuliani is attempting the first “gain momentum by losing every primary” tactic.

Election 2008 | 1 Comment »