Top Items:
Rasmussen Reports:
Election 2008: Florida Republican Primary — Florida: Huckabee 27% Romney 23% Giuliani 19% — Mitt Romney's strategy for winning the Republican nomination was to win the early states and build momentum. Rudy Giuliani's plan was to accept defeats in the early states and come back strong …
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CNN Political Ticker:
S.C. poll: Huckabee bolts to top of GOP; Obama cuts into Clinton lead — WASHINGTON (CNN) - Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee surged to the top among Republican presidential candidates in South Carolina, while Sen. Hillary Clinton's lead over Sen. Barack Obama among Democrats narrowed since July in that state, according to a new poll.
Ed Tibbetts / Quad City Times:
Obama, Huckabee lead new Iowa poll — Presidential candidates Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee hold 9-point leads in Iowa with less than three weeks to go before the Jan. 3 caucuses, according to a new poll conducted for the Quad-City Times and other Lee Enterprises newspapers.
Sarah Liebowitz / Concord Monitor:
Obama edges Clinton in poll — Romney well ahead in 'Monitor' survey — December 14. — Barack Obama has come from behind to turn the Democratic presidential race in New Hampshire into a toss-up, according to a new Monitor opinion poll. The results - which show Obama with a one-point edge …
Gordon Trowbridge / Detroit News:
New polls in the Michigan primary campaign — Two new independent polls of Michigan primary voters out today add to the evidence for a surge for Mike Huckabee in Michigan, a decline for Rudy Giuliani and the possibility of a John McCain surge if the GOP contest draws lots of independents and Democrats.
Peggy Noonan / Opinion Journal:
The Pulpit and the Potemkin Village — Would Reagan survive in today's GOP? And is Mrs. Clinton in for a fall this winter? — What is happening in Iowa is no longer boring but big, and may prove huge. — The Republican race looks—at the moment—to be determined primarily by one thing, the question of religious faith.
CNN:
FISA Bill With Telco Immunity To Be Debated Monday — WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Friday that debate on the legislation underpinning the government's warrantless wiretapping program will begin Monday. — Speaking in the Senate, Reid said he would bring forward …
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BBC:
Iraqi oil exceeds pre-war output — Iraqi oil production is above the levels seen before the US-led invasion of the country in 2003, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). — The IEA said Iraqi crude production is now running at 2.3 million barrels per day, compared with 1.9 million barrels at the start of this year.
Michael Hirsh / Newsweek:
Why Isn't Gore Running? — The White House is the place to battle global warming. — There he was again on the world stage—in Oslo this time—celebrating his Nobel Peace Prize with singer Melissa Etheridge and actress Uma Thurman, the Hollywood hottie who called him "adorable" …
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Dan Froomkin / Washington Post:
Bush Demands Freedom to Torture — President Bush's repeated insistence that "we don't torture" appeared even more transparently bogus yesterday as the White House threatened to veto a House bill that would explicitly ban a variety of abhorrent practices. — The bill would require U.S …
Discussion:
West Virginia Blue, Washington Wire, Political Machine, normblog, Daily Kos and AMERICAblog
Rich Lowry / National Review:
Huckacide — Editor's note: This column is available exclusively through King Features Syndicate. For permission to reprint or excerpt this copyrighted material, please contact: kfsreprint@hearstsc.com, or phone 800-708-7311, ext 246). — The ghost of Howard Dean haunts the pundit class.
Michael Crowley / The New Republic:
Hillary's New Pitch: "No Surprises" — Johnston, Iowa— Hillary just held an extraordinary press conference here after taping an interview with Iowa public television in which she introduced a provocative new theme to her candidacy: "[T]here are no surprises."
Discussion:
Ben Smith's Blogs, Matthew Yglesias, The Debatable Land, The Swamp, Althouse and The Carpetbagger Report
Gateway Pundit:
MULLAHS PUNKED— So Much For That Modesty Campaign — Sadly, someone played a video switcheroo on the Iranian hardliners. — This probably didn't sit too well with the mullahs and their battle against immodesty and women. — The billboard video display was certainly not cleric approved …
Peter Robinson / The Corner:
Last Thoughts Re Abe and Fred — From a reader: … Thompson isn't actually my guy—he still has to prove he wants the presidency badly enough to work for it—but, yes, I'm plenty sympathetic. — And, from another reader, an observation that I find, simply, unanswerable:
Matthew Yglesias:
Class Warfare — Here's a chart based on Paul Krugman's writeup of data from the CBO's new "Historical Effective Federal Tax Rates" report. Naturally, the only solution is tax cuts.
Scott Shane / New York Times:
House Passes Restrictions on Interrogation Methods — WASHINGTON — Defying a veto threat from President Bush, the House of Representatives voted Thursday to prohibit waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods used by the Central Intelligence Agency against high-level prisoners from Al Qaeda.
Paul Kane / Washington Post:
Rove, Bolten Found in Contempt of Congress — Senate Committee Cites Top Bush Advisers in Probe of U.S. Attorney Firings — A Senate panel found former presidential adviser Karl Rove and current White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten in contempt of Congress yesterday for refusing …