Did Rick Santorum really win Iowa? The allegation has been leaking out for days now, but there are growing rumblings that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney may not have won — which means he didn’t make history by winning Iowa and New Hampshire. Here’s part of John Avlon’s must-read-in-full post on The Daily Beast: Did Rick Santorum win the Iowa caucus? That’s what it looks like if numbers from a caucus in the town of Moulton, Appanoose County, are correctly counted...

Just look under the Hollywood sign.

For the Obama re-election campaign, Mitt Romney is the gift that keeps on giving. At least so far. Never mind that the former Massachusetts governor is supposed to be the un-Obama, a man who has the expertise to turn around the economy by creating jobs while reducing the federal budget deficit. Today, three days before the South Carolina primary, which will validate Romney as the Republican presidential nominee, he is under withering attack from his presidential wannabe opponents, the effects of...

GQ’s Top 25 Power People in DC? One and a half women. One and a half. And a whole lotta white guys. Here’s the full list of 50 from Mike Allen’s Politico Playbook: FIRST LOOK – GQ’s “The 50 Most Powerful People in Washington (People with the last names Obama and Biden not included,” by Reid Cherlin, Rob Fischer, Jason Horowitz and Jason Zengerle: 1) Eric Cantor 2) Mitch McConnell 3) David Plouffe 4) Leon Panetta 5) Hillary Clinton 6) Ben Bernanke 7) David Petraeus Kevin...

I have for some time now been dismayed as I watched a conservative movement I once respected, and considered myself a student and sometime sympathizer of, apparently become adrift in a haze of “free market” rhetoric that was more style than substance, more twitch than thought. I remember well one such “conservative” who went utterly ballistic on me not too long ago when I noted the rather unremarkable fact that in today’s world, the fastest way into the economic elite...

Nate Beeler, The Washington Examiner HOBBS, N.M. — You learn something new every day. In driving around the country, I’ve learned that oil companies reserve large numbers of motel rooms in this city and others so that oil rig workers have places to stay. In some cities it’s almost impossible to get a hotel room. You have to carefully plan in advance. That’s also the story of the months leading up to the 2012 presidential election: we’re learning something new every day....

Yes, it’s true. Arizona Sen. John McCain’s 2008 opposition research file on former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney has now been posted online. Every page of it HERE. The immediate reaction is to suggest this is bad news for Romney. Actually it’s good news for Romney: if his advisers are smart (and the jury is still out on that) they will go through every line and sentence of it and prepare counter arguments and even overprepare. I’m sure there is some overlap with this and Obama &...

At the End of Our Rope? by Peter Funt A few hours with the TV and radio the other night — one lowlight being a commercial for a holster guaranteed to prevent getting “pinched” by your concealed gun — underscored what a troubled and divided nation we have become. Fox News Channel carried the latest debate among GOP presidential candidates, during which Mitt Romney pledged never to support any laws whatsoever that limit gun sales in any way. Moving on to foreign policy, Romney said...

Rick McKee, The Augusta Chronicle This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

WASHINGTON – This isn’t a left right thing. Yesterday afternoon at a live streaming briefing on the issue you had Adam Green of Bold Progressives standing up to applaud Rep. Darrel Issa for his leadership on this issue, which I watched unfold. Here’s a list of some of the people who took part in the streaming online event yesterday: Alexis Ohanian, reddit co-founder (via video) Craig Newmark, craigslist founder (via video) Rebecca MacKinnon, Global Voices co-founder Adam Green,...

Only months ago Wisconsin’s union-busting Gov. Scott Walker seemed to feel he was on the path to becoming another President Ronald Reagan. But now it sounds as if he’s more likely to be on the path to becoming another California Gov. Gray Davis, the Governor recalled by voters in 2003: Critics of Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin submitted to the state on Tuesday more than a million signatures, nearly twice as many as required, on recall petitions against him to force a new election. State...

By all accounts, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is poised to win the South Carolina primary and go on to win big in Florida. Very soon this lady will have sung. But now — at the seeming moment of his triumph — things are suddenly getting rockier for Romney. You can see it in three development. DEVELOPMENT ONE: The Democratic National Committee was apparently ecstatic over his performance at last night’s South Carolina debate. So much so that they quickly put out a video....

Eric Allie, Caglecartoons.com This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

The same Republican presidential wannabe who would send U.S. troops back into Iraq and thus would most likely again need the use of Turkish land and air space to provide logistics support to our troops there, now labels that nation a country that is being ruled by Islamic terrorists — and worse. During Monday’s GOP presidential candidates debate in South Carolina, Texas governor Rick Perry also expressed doubts on whether Turkey belongs in NATO and indicated that it is time to have a...

Can’t Rick Perry take a hint? I mean, REALLY…

Does being a CEO of an organization mean you are better qualified to be President of the United States? While I was studying for a masters degree in Political Communications, this was the most interesting question that I came across. It is a question I asked myself when I was studying George W Bush’s candidacy in 2000 and it is a question I have been asking myself as I have watched Mitt Romney’s campaign. As impressive as Mitt Romney’s accomplishments are in the private sector, I keep asking...

As you’ve surely heard by now, Jon Huntsman — Huntsman the Formidable, I once called him — has pulled out of the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. His withdrawal at this stage was hardly a surprise. Though he finished a fairly strong third in New Hampshire, where he campaigned relentlessly and into which basket he put pretty much every egg he had, he has never been a viable contender for the nomination. The latest Gallup national poll has him at just two percent,...

The First Lady turns 48 today. I know because an e-mail from the President last week reminded me with two links to a fund-raising site: “The decision to become part of this campaign was deeply personal for a lot of people, and Michelle and I are no exception… “This fall, Michelle and I will have been married 20 years. The next 10 months will be harder than any we’ve experienced together, and I couldn’t do it without her. I know she’d love to hear from you today.” With...

Wikipedia is shutting down its English language site tomorrow to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales tweeted the announcement yesterday, “Student warning! Do your homework early. Wikipedia protesting bad law on Wednesday!” “The whole thing is just a poorly designed mess,” Wales said in an email to The Associated Press. “I am personally asking everyone who cares about freedom and openness on the Internet to contact their Senators...

Mitt Romney at the debate last night: My care by getting in this race is about my belief in America and my concern that what we’re seeing with this president is a change in course for America to be become something we wouldn’t recognize. I think he is drawing us into becoming more like a European social welfare state. I think he wants us to become an entitlement society where people in this country feel they’re entitled to something from government and where government takes from some to give...

Milt Priggee, www.miltpriggee.com This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

WASHINGTON — From all evidence, the issue of economic justice isn’t going away. Break the news gently to Mitt Romney, who seems apoplectic that the whole “rich get richer, poor get poorer” thing is being discussed out loud. In front of the children, for goodness sake. “You know I think it’s fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms,” he told the “Today” show’s Matt Lauer last week. “But the president has made this part...

Another of the many ‘balance the budget’ programs, this time from the NYT I’ll be curious to see how folks tackle this. I presume some will do nothing but spending cuts while others will focus mostly on tax hikes and cutting the military. But it’s a fun exercise

There was a time not long ago when free speech was guaranteed in America, and if someone had a problem with that the Supreme Court would weigh in with a reminder that the concept is a foundation on which our democracy is built. But a funny thing happened on the way to the second decade of the new millennium. According to a new study, the court led by Chief Justice John Roberts is hearing fewer free speech cases and ruling in favor of free speech at a lower rate than any of the courts of the...

First, an observation which I seldom see in print: King remembered going to a lecture on the principles of Gandhi, and how it changed his thinking. And Gandhi remembered reading Henry David Thoreau‘s “Civil Disobedience” while in jail in South Africa. Now, of course, we know that another South African prisoner, Nelson Mandela, was, in turn, inspired by King in South Africa, where Gandhi had both spent time in jail, and read “Civil Disobedience.” Some may recall that...

Due to travel, I got online late. The following are some live blogging entries on the debate in South Carolina between GOPers seeking the 2012 Republican nomination. These are the reactions of an independent voter who has been in both parties — reactions not to political stands as much as to how they answered, came across and how what they say will help or hurt them with their voters and independent voters. Since I’ve started this late I will also include some live blogging from other...

Polls are coming out faster now than McDonald’s hamburgers — and new ones keep delivering good news for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and mixed news for President Barack Obama. How much in disarray is Romney’s opposition? So much so that evangelicals are now enmeshed in an accusation war about whether the vote of 150 social conservative activists this weekend was somehow rigged so that former Pennyslvania Senator Rick Santorum and not former House Speaker Newt Gingrich came...

Daryl Cagle, MSNBC.com This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Is there any historical basis for the alliance between certain Latin American nations and Islamic fundamentalist Iran? For Spain’s La Vanguardia, apparently exasperated columnist Pilar Rahola says that, “If Simon Bolívar were raise his head and see Ahmadinejad and Chávez in his noble land, he would die a second time of pure shame.” For La Vanguardia, Pilar Rahola writes in part: At what point did they lose all sense of proportion? How can they reconcile undigested readings of...

My Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial “If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.” – Martin Luther King Jr. Doug Bursch blogs and tweets Fairlyspiritual.

No. It’s not your imagination. You’re not a conspiracy hysteric. There is a force out there that is controlling our economic, political and social lives to an extraordinary extent, reducing one of the most sacred traditional rights of a free society, privacy, to increasing irrelevance. To give it a name, call it the MASC — the Marketing-Security Complex. In a 1961 speech, President Dwight Eisenhower used a term akin to this, the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC), sometimes rendered...

Steve Roth wonders, how do incarceration rates affect unemployment numbers? Europe has consistently higher unemployment than the U.S., but the U.S. has far and away the highest incarceration rate in the world — .75% of the population. (World Prison Population List [PDF], compiled since 1992 by Roy Walmsley of the International Centre for Prison Studies.) Only Russia comes even close, at .63%. (Canada: .12%. Australia: .13%. China .18%. Germany .09%.) Our rate is four to eight times that of...

A quick post. I am in Alamogordo, New Mexico right now about to leave my hotel here for another city on my national tour, but it needs to be said: Barring some huge political event, the GOP nominee WILL be former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Why? 1. A series of new polls show Romney is way ahead of the others nationally. 2. A new poll shows that if Romney runs against Barack Obama the President will beat him by one point. Yes, I know the GOP has been accused of having a death wish, but this would...

When I read this letter for the many-eth time in my life, I see MLK’s spiritual discipline, the knowledge of how to go forward in four steps, the leadership, the clear demands, the efforts at negotiation, the spiritual self-examination so one doesnt go off half-cocked caught up in the yelling… and the non violent protest for clear cut goals. When I read Reverend King’s letter from Birmingham jail, I know he was in a defeatest mood for he could not get the support he needed (as...

Our political Quote of the Day comes from Andrew Sullivan, who concludes what I have also concluded: Barack Obama seems to be operating on a different wavelength than many past Presidents so his foes may underestimate him at their peril. I’ve concluded that when history is written Barack Obama won’t be categorized as “another JFK” or like FDR, Harry Truman, or even as his critics suggest like the ever-hapless Jimmy Carter. Rather, he has his own unusual style and the jury...

Five years ago, in another political world when Barack Obama was getting ready to run for president, I wrote this: West Side residents of Chicago now have a U.S. Senator who looks like them and it may be, in more ways than one, due to the man whose birthday we celebrate tomorrow. Martin Luther King Jr. preached nonviolence to the oppressed. “Our weapon is love,” he told them, and he used it with stunning force. At the dawn of TV, he brought into American homes images of peaceful Southern protesters...

How hateful has our politics become? This hateful: An email recently sent by Kansas House Speaker Mike O’Neal (R-Hutchinson) to his Republican colleagues appears to endorse a controversial prayer that some say calls for the untimely death of President Obama. “Pray for Obama. Psalm 109:8.” That’s the slogan an email from O’Neal refers to, a phrase that’s become popular in some circles on bumper stickers and other merchandise. The bible passage itself reads, “Let...

With the primary season underway it is already time for people to speculate the winner in November. Of course this is hardly a new situation; pundits have been trying to predict the outcome of the elections for decades and usually with mixed results at best. In the early 1980′s, a political scientist named Allan Lichtman decided to try and figure out a way to predict the outcome of Presidential elections without having to rely on the polls. Over the last 25 years he has worked to modify and...

New Jersey Democratic Senator Robert Menendez has relented and is no longer blocking the appointment of Judge Patty Shwartz to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. His obstruction was apparently due to Menendez’s antipathy to Shwartz’s long time boy friend, federal prosecutor James Nobile, who had investigated Menendez for possible corruption charges in 2006. Menendez’ blockade came despite Judge Shwartz having been designated unanimously well qualified by the American...

(PORTIONS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN JANUARY 2007) When I was first cutting my teeth in the newspaper business, my editors sent me out on “house ends,” visits to homes where I would interview families of interest because something very bad of interest had happened to them. It was the late 1960s and many of these house ends were the result of the death of a young man, usually an Army or Marine Corps infantryman who had been drafted and sent to Vietnam. Most were African-Americans...

AP reports that Jon Huntsman will endorse Mitt Romney for the GOP Presidential nomination sometime Monday in South Carolina. Ironically, the state’s largest newspaper, The State, endorsed Huntsman on Sunday. But the unhealthy demand for ideological purity obscures a hopeful fact about the GOP presidential field: There are actually two sensible, experienced grownups. And while Mr. Romney is far more appealing than any of the other choices, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman is more principled, has...

WASHINGTON – This film is dreadful. If the trailer above was actually representative of the final product you would have had something worthy of the woman who ruled Great Britain with an iron will. However, the trailer is not the journey you take with Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in Iron Lady. That the film actually disrespects and marginalizes a woman as large as Margaret Thatcher is movie making malpractice. Peter Travers is his review long before the film broke, elevates the premise...

It can happen. Miraculous resurrection can sometimes emerge from unspeakable tragedy. On Sept. 11, 2001 Lauren Manning, senior vice president and partner at Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment bank which had several floors of offices in the World Trade Center, was on her way to work and getting ready to enter the elevator at the North Tower when the 9/11 terrorist attack punched the building — and a giant, massive fireball originating on the 90th floor engulfed her in the lobby, burning her to...

WASHINGTON — This is what progress looks like for a president named Barack Hussein Obama. Not so long ago, many in conservative and Republican ranks were eager to paint him as an alien creature far removed from American life as most Americans understand it. A determined cadre insisted Obama was not even eligible to be president, claiming he was born outside the United States. Obama eventually put that to rest by making public his birth certificate, which proved he was born in Hawaii. ...

Daryl Cagle, MSNBC.com This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

UPDATE: As expected, Former Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. of Utah formally announced that he is ending his Republican presidential run “with a call for party unity, asking the five candidates he leaves on the field to end their negative ads and chastising President Obama for engaging in ‘class warfare.’” More from the New York Times: “This race has degenerated into an onslaught of negative and personal attacks not worthy of the American people and not worthy of this critical time in our nation’s...

Reports breaking this evening that Jon Huntsman will drop out of the 2012 Presidential race and endorse Mitt Romney for the nomination. I can’t say I am surprised but I am disappointed that such a well qualified candidate could not proceed in the increasingly narrow Republican party.

Is This Land Made for You and Me? by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship The traveling medicine show known as the race for the Republican presidential nomination has moved on from Iowa and New Hampshire, and all eyes are now on South Carolina. Well, not exactly all. At the moment, our eyes are fixed on some big news from the great state of Oklahoma, home of the legendary American folk singer Woody Guthrie, whose 100th birthday will be celebrated later this year. Woody saw the ravages of the Dust Bowl...

From the Super PAC now headed by Jon Stewart, Attack In B Minor For Strings, “If corporations are people, then Mitt Romney is Mitt the Ripper.” Watch: The ad is narrated by John Lithgow, who won an Emmy for his role as a family man serial killer in season 4 of Dexter. The note and press release from Jon Stewart, who took over Colbert’s Americans For A Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow Super PAC, is below. Colbert handed off the Super PAC on Thursday in order to “announce that I am...

Mitt Romney’s Anti-European rhetoric is stronger than the Anti-American statements by leading German politicians in the last few election campaigns. Romney seems to assume that Republican voters are so stupid, uninformed and Anti-European that he can get their votes with scaremongering. His Europe bashing seems to be his response to the criticism of his "socialist" health care policy in Massachusetts and his French language skills. (Newt Gingrich released the attack ad “The French...

…He claimed that he didn’t seek reelection as Massachusetts governor because “that would be about me” — as if running for president, which he did instead, was a gesture of sacrifice and altruism. Romney, the conservative writer Jonah Goldberg argued this week, has an “authentic inauthenticity problem.” And that is precisely why his struggle is so familiar. He is the political reincarnation of Al Gore, whose campaign I covered with an equal amount of cringing a dozen...

WASHINGTON — He would be an elder statesman now, a lion in winter, an American hero perhaps impatient with the fuss being made over his birthday. At 83, he’d likely still have his wits and his voice. Surely, if he were able, he would continue to preach, and to pray — and to dream. For the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., dreaming was not optional. It was a requirement of citizenship to envision a fairer, more prosperous nation no longer shackled by racism and poverty. It was...

GEORGE HODEL AND ELIZABETH SHORT Sixty-five years ago today, a 22-year-old beauty by the name of Elizabeth Short was found brutally slain in a vacant lot at 39th and Norton streets in Los Angeles. Her body was cut in half at the waist with surgical precision, her face and breasts slit, and there was a large gash where her vulva should have been. She had been drained of fluids as if prepared for an embalming and she was left in a garish pose, her head turned to the side and one arm above her body. The...

WASHINGTON – Newt Gingrich is deservedly getting booed in South Carolina for his Super PACS’ “The King of Bain.” Meanwhile, South Carolina remains a state where political ethics and honesty got to die. The New York Times has a unintentionally humorous story about one of the towns targeted by Newt Gingrich’s Super PAC, which depicts a place that didn’t know they were so much trouble. Glen Kessler has bestowed on “King of Bain” the dreaded 4 Pinocchios....

Moyers & CompanyCheck your local PBS schedule*, fire-up your DVR. Bill Moyers is back with a new show, Moyers & Company. The series, produced by American Public Television, begins with three broadcasts focused on the intersection of politics and money. Moyers, who will “believe corporations are people when Texas executes one” (Stephen Colbert interview, 10 January), interviews Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson in the first episode. The two political scientists wrote “Winner-Take-All...