Month: January 2008

In Iowa:

Ron Paul will outperform his poll numbers, but McCain should still be able to take third on the GOP side.

With video:

The second half of the speech is a revelation.

The Dish continued obsessive-compulsively through the Christmas break. Some items you may have missed: the results of the 2007 Dish Awards, with Keith Olbermann and Peggy Noonan among the winners you voted for; a random end-of-year favorites list, featuring Judge Judy and the movie, Zodiac; Obama’s closing pitch in full; Bush’s complicity in the CIA torture tapes; and the morality of potheads. Happy New Year.

Wow:

A third-place finish for Paul is not out of the question.

Would Fox still be able to exclude him if that happens?

Some big ones do seem to be trending down in traffic. And the right-wing ones seem to have had a buoyant end of 2007. One thought: is the intellectual ferment among conservatives more engrossing right now? There are fewer internal liberal battles as ferocious as those now raging on the right. The Dish, for what it’s worth, just had a record year. Am I in line with conservative blogs? Or an outlier for liberal ones? Or sui generis?

Some global beauts among the finalists. The above is by Wink – or Tyler E. Nixon – the overall winner. The finalists are a great place to start when looking for some of the best photography on the web.

The Onion has a helpful explanation.

Christopher Potter Stewart notes:

There is no question that the Republican "establishment" is having serious trouble getting excited about Mike Huckabee’s run for President. To put it mildly.

But in 2000, most of the same folks who are now trying to stop Huck by citing his "inexperience" quickly got behind George W. Bush’s run for President. Why? …

We think that if your answer (prominently) includes Bush’s bloodline, Bush’s money and his family’s connections well, you’re on to something.

I’m with Phil Weiss:

The Iowa process is completely transparent and charming. It is quirky. Again, if you have the gumption, you get to play your part. And the people who take part are highly informed and willing to dig their cars out of the snow, etc. That’s the sort of elitism I like: a democratic elite.

Whatever happens this week, the process has done one thing: it really has flushed out a lot about the candidates. If Clinton wins, her opponents will at least be reassured that we were able to put all the bad stuff on the table, prevent an unexamined rush to a coronation, and air the salient issues (with the sole and understandable exception of her husband’s potential bimbo eruptions). If Obama wins, the question of his relative newness to national life will have been throughly aired. Even the slick Romney machine has been laid bare – and the real Rudy revealed. These are good things; very few other countries get to do this kind of thing. The current prime minister of Britain, for example, went through no such democratic hazing. I’ve been particularly impressed by the GOP: they’ve let it all hang out. And given what has been done to conservatism under Bush, that was more than necessary.