Record Turnout

Last week in Iowa, the caucus turnout was tremendous. In fact, to say that it was record breaking would be an understatement worthy of the understatement hall of fame. Not only was the turnout greater, but Democrats outnumbered Republicans by a staggering factor.

Come we now to New Hampshire, where turnout today is, as it was in Iowa, record breaking. Also in New Hampshire, fully forty percent of the voting public are independents. Those independents voted in the Democratic primary by a 3:2 ratio.

Let me repeat, one more time, that this thing just got started, and is far from over. Two small, largely rural states have held their nominating contests, and less than a million people out of a country of 300 million have voted or caucused. Neither of the states that have weighed in really looks all that much like America.

But there are some interesting trends to take note of. For one thing, Democrats are fired up and turning out. Republicans are showing up, with dirge-music playing in the background. Independents are going with the Democrats in significant numbers. In both states, literally thousands more people have caucused or voted for Democrats while Republican numbers are, well, anemic.

What I am comfortable speculating about is the sell-by date on the Republican brand. It expired in late August of 2005.

All four of my eyes are on Iowa tonight...

Regularly scheduled blogging to resume after the Iowa caucuses conclude this evening.

If you are interested reading a first-person account of the caucus from western Iowa, go to Watching Those We Chose, where Henry P. Wallace will be blogging the process and updating frequently.

In other words, he couldn't possibly care less

Well, isn't this precious? It seems that aWol can't be bothered to watch the Iowa returns. His need for sleep is paramount to the course being charted for the Republic tonight in Iowa.

Asked if the president planned to stay up to find out who wins the opening contests of the 2008 election season, White House press secretary Dana Perino said Thursday: "What time do all the results start coming in? Because he goes to bed early."

Later, Perino said Bush planned to watch a bit of the returns but would not stay tuned for the accompanying political punditry.

Republican caucus results could be in by mid-evening. Democratic results might be late.

"Look, obviously it's a very exciting time for America as they look to all the choices that they have for who is running for president," Perino said. "And the president is watching it as he has been over the past little while, as an observer, as somebody who is obviously very interested in politics. But he's not spending a lot of time on that."

So I guess that now that his Dionysian work is all but complete, he's sticking his fingers in his ears and singing "la la la la la! I can't hear you!"

What a petulant fucking dork.

This reign of error can not possibly end soon enough. If he goes sideways five minutes from now, it's still seven fucking years too late - but on the bright side of that equation, I bet THEN we could get some Impeach Cheney momentum going!

Will 2008 be the Year of the Populist?

Perhaps.

How else to explain the insurgent popularity of Mike Huckabee?

There is always a populist somewhere in the Democratic field, at least early on. John Edwards has tapped into a vein of traditional Democratic working-class and man-of-the-people appeals; and as the message seems to be catching on this election cycle, other Democratic candidates are scurrying to don the populist cloth. Even Hillary. "The wealthy and the well-connected have had a president for seven years," she told a crowd in Ottumwa last night. "Meanwhile, most Americans have seen their incomes stall."

But I honestly don't think I can place a single Republican populist in the Republican field, ever. I have certainly never seen one with the support Huckabee is currently enjoying.

The Huckabee campaign presents a real opportunity for head-scratching on the part of the bought-and-paid-for corporatists of the Republican Party, which has traditionally been business friendly at the expense of all other interests.

None of the other Republicans candidates have taken up the charge. In fact, Frederick of Hollywood stuck to the script (there's a writer's strike on, you know) and continued to insist that "[N]ot enough has been done to tell what some call the greatest story never told, and that is that we are enjoying a period of growth right now."

It doesn't hurt the populist message any that oil hit a hundred bucks a barrel the day before Iowans caucus. John Edwards immediately seized on the price of oil and incorporated it into his campaign message the day before the first votes are cast. "Today's report that the price of oil has reached $100 a barrel is just another example of how corporate greed is squeezing the middle class," said Mr. Edwards, a former North Carolina senator, in a statement. At a packed coffeehouse in downtown Iowa City yesterday, he asked the crowd, "Are you going to let corporate greed steal your children's future?"

That message can't help but hit home in a state where towns are far-flung, and farms dot the landscape. And every one of those farms has at least a couple of 250-gallon tanks (one for gas, one for diesel) that have to be filled up regularly, and there is no buy-in-bulk discount. (Those Massey-Fergusson and John Deere tractors and combines that plant and harvest a lot of the food you buy at Albertson's and Safeway get fueled up at home, not in town at the gas station.)

Huckabee frequently cites escalating fuel prices as a major concern for voters, and even goes so far as to contrast CEO pay with stagnating wages. On New Years Day he told an audience that "A president needs to understand that what's good for the American economy needs to be good for all Americans."

He also contrasts his own humble roots with the privileged life of his chief rival here in Iowa, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. "If politics is going to end up being nothing more than about who has the most money, then we've not had a presidency, we've had a plutocracy, and we might as well put it on eBay and sell it to the highest bidder," he said yesterday in Mason City.

Huckabee might be getting grief from that embarrassing gasbag Limbaugh and his slavering minions of the so-called "right" - but his message is resonating with people who are more concerned about paying for their next tank of $3 per gallon gasoline than whether they ditched their illegal viagra before they attempted to clear customs after their latest Dominican fleshpot cruise.

One of the pillars of Huckabee's economic plan is a "fair tax" - a national sales tax that would replace the income tax (this is anathema to business interests, which guard their favorite loopholes in the tax code as jealously as a Texas high-school cheerleaders mother). Conservatives and liberals alike denounce the notion as dangerous, because it would have to be much higher than what Mr. Huckabee has proposed in order to raise enough revenue to keep the country running. Critics also charge that the "fair tax" Huckabee proposes would hit the very working-class people he aims to help the hardest.

But that doesn't stop it from resonating. It hit home with 22-year-old Jason Downs, a University of Iowa student who recently went to a Huckabee rally. "Right now the middle class is paying more taxes, the upper class has abilities to get accountants and move funds around and all that. Where if you have a consumption tax, it's going to be a fair amount," said Mr. Downs.

John Edwards, who never left Iowa after the 2004 election, has been priming the populist pump in Iowa ever since. And with energy prices so high, and healthcare so tenuous (farmers are self employed and have to buy their own health coverage, unless a spouse works "in town" and likely only took the job in the first place in order to get insurance. And still the premiums and copays keep going up.)

Whatever happens tonight in Iowa, and next week in New Hampshire, the economic message of populism is going to influence the rest of the campaign.

And while I am not a populist (insert joke about city dwellers and public transportation here) I welcome the message. For too long corporate interests have run roughshod over the interests of ordinary people, to the point that it now represents a serious threat to our liberty. So I welcome anything that might reverse that trend.

The Lawless Insanity of Mike Huckabee

Some snark always works when you're out of ideas, and besides--why attack a Democrat when attacking a Republican is so much more fun and appropriate?

From the campaign trail in Iowa:

On the Republican side, two former governors, Mike Huckabee of Arkansas and Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, are vying to finish first in Iowa.

Amid murmurs of "Amen!" at a pizza parlor in Sergeant Bluff, Huckabee urged hundreds: "Don't go alone. Take people with you. Fill up your car. Rent a van. Hijack your church's bus, whatever you've got to do to get people to the caucus who are going to vote for me."

Yes, that's candidate Mike Huckabee, encouraging supporters to HIJACK the buses used by their church in order to support him.

Hijack? Did a candidate actually say that? In a day and age when, if you or I said something like that in line to get on a plane, we'd be tasered and thrown in the back of a van and sent to the county jail?

Irregardless, that little snippet of frantic campaigning stood out to me. A candidate should clearly not be telling people to commit felony vehicle theft and commit a serious act of felony mischief and "hijack" a church bus. There's a word for all of this. It's called "judgement." And, clearly, that sumbitch doesn't have any "judgement."

Case in point, his hiring of Ed Rollins:

Rollins says it had been his idea to show the ad [the controversial attack ad that Huckabee pulled, only to show it to reporters and "hope" they would rebroadcast it for free]to reporters, the logic being that it was already in the hands of television stations. As for the gathering, Rollins says, "Now would I have loved to cancel the press conference? You betcha. Would I have loved to pull the signs down? Yes. But this decision was made about 11, 11:10 in the morning." The news conference was scheduled for noon.

Riding in the elevator afterward, Rollins says, he told Huckabee, " 'Governor, this is what it means to be president. The president gets lots of advice and makes a lot of tough decisions . . . But you made the decision.' "

"I admire the fact he's trying to change the environment," Rollins says. "What I have to do is make sure that my anger with a guy like Romney, whose teeth I want to knock out, doesn't get in the way of my thought process."

Felonies, felonies, felonies. That's what you'll get when you pick someone like Huckabee.

Maybe I should run for president?

I mean, I don't have any foreign policy credentials either (unless you count a couple of brushes with foreign law enforcement back when I was a Brat and reasonable people had a sense of humor about joints and Jagermeister - you remember - back when most adults realized teenagers are, to a one, pretty much all just hormone-drenched idiots).

But at least I can read a fucking map!

How the hell is Mike Huckabee getting any serious support at all? The fuckers a joke. (Back when I was getting shipped to the G-rents for the summer, and wanking around in the northern tier counties of Missouri, the other teenaged idiots used to say Iowa was an acronym for Idiots Out Wandering Aimlessly. I kinda winced - I also got sent to my Aunts house in the Quad Cities for part of most summers, too, so I kinda took it personally. You know - for my cousin's sake.)

But seriously! Are there that many end-timers up there that think we need to cut to the chase and get Armageddon underway already, cuz they are ready for the rapture? Enough that this clown is leading in the polls? (Here's a clue, you uptight fucking morons. Have an orgasm. That's rapture.)

Here is Mike Huckabee's latest gaffe. I don't know where this idiot went to high school, but where I went to school, if I made a blunder like this, my high school history and geography teacher would get up out of her grave and come to my house, thirty years later - and give me detention and extra work.

He is one of those people that can't find a place on a map. He thinks that Pakistan shares and eastern border with Afghanistan. (Ask any seventh grader in a decent school: It's India.)

People who questioned my view of foreign policy probably need go back and read the speech that I delivered back in Washington in September. … What we’ve seen happen is that in the Musharraf government, he has told us that he really does not have enough control of those eastern borders near Afghanistan to be able go after the terrorists. But on the other hand, he doesn’t want us going in because it violates his sovereignty.

He also, immediately after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan yesterday, played the fear card before her body was cool for his fundamentalist, Christianist, American-Taliban base.

"In light of what happened in Pakistan yesterday, it's interesting that there are more Pakistanis who have illegally crossed the border than of any other nationality except for those immediately south of our border," Huckabee said Friday.

Americans might "look halfway around the world and say, 'How does that affect me?' ... We need to understand that violence and terror is significant when it happens in Pakistan, [and] it's more significant if it can happen in our own cities. And it happens if people can slip across our border and we have no control over them."

"The immigration issue is not so much about people coming to pick lettuce or make beds, it's about people who could come with a shoulder-fired missile and could do serious damage and harm to us," Huckabee said, "and that's what we need to be worried about." (emphasis added)

Senator Iselin Governor Huckabee boldly asserted that he had in his hand a list of 207/104/275 communists employed by the Defense Department 660 Pakistanis entered the United States illegally last year!

Border Patrol says maybe a handful.

(I wish someone would ask him what he thinks about stepping up the effort to keep tabs on Saudi immigrants. After all, the Kingdom supplied 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers. You remember - the folks who actually attacked us? And who funded all those madrassas in Afghanistan, that produced all those terrorists and Taliban?)

But who ya gonna trust? The professionals who actually, you know, know what the fuck is going on, or a Huckster bible-bleater?

When pinned down about the gaffes later, a Huckabee aid finally just said outright that the Governor is a foreign policy moron, and he had been instructed to steer the issue to immigration when foreign policy came up, because he is totally out of his depth and says stupid shit like Pakistan is west of Afghanistan. (I paraphrase, but I don't really exaggerate.)

The fact that he is polling so well scares the hell out of me. I can live with the occasional wacko end-timer, so long as they have no power or influence and aren't a threat to others (but to themselves? I really could not care less.) But we can't have one of these magical-thinking, superstition believers that close to the levers.

That so many people don't seem to get this, or worse - don't care because he loves Jesus too! - is fucking appalling.