A Cornerite notices what I’ve been noticing: Immigration, despite the hype, has been essentially a non-issue in this GOP campaign once votes are cast.

Julian Sanchez and David Weigel take a look into who wrote Ron Paul’s notorious newsletters: Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr., along with assorted others.

It’s long been an open secret in the libertarian movement, but they seem to have nailed it down as best as possible with the main actors denying it in the face of all evidence.

The biggest surprise to me is how much money Paul was making off all of this. So, to those like Andrew Sullivan who seem to want to just forgive and forget, I’d ask: Would you give Hillary Clinton the same kind of pass if she made almost $1 million a year off of selling vile racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic pamphlets and didn’t think the public was even owed a full accounting of this shameful chapter of her career? Wouldn’t you think she maybe even should give that money back somehow, either to the newsletters’ vile subscribers, or, better yet, to charity? Can any serious political actor keep company with respectable folk after something like this?

Can anyone really look at all of this and say, without equivocation, “Paul is not a racist”? Really?

The evidence really seems to point the other way, especially given how close Paul still is to Rockwell.

Mike Huckabee wins Iowa; John McCain wins New Hampshire; Mitt Romney wins Michigan. Now, if only Fred Thompson can win South Carolina on Saturday and Rudy Giuliani can win Florida on January 29, we’ll finally have a real race on our hands.

My take in the N.Y. Post in the morning.

Over at her Dynamist blog, Virginia Postrel takes some time out to bitch slap Reason — the magazine she used to edit — for trying to use Ron Paul as a symbol of libertarianism rising, while ignoring his dark side:

I did not mean to criticize the essentially apolitical people like him and his wife [Ron Paul supporters] who heard some good things from Paul and decided to support him. …

I do fault my friends at Reason, who are much cooler than I’ll ever be and who, scornful of the earnestness that takes politics seriously, apparently didn’t do their homework before embracing Paul as the latest indicator of libertarian cachet. For starters, they might have asked my old boss Bob Poole about Ron Paul; I remember a board member complaining about Paul’s newsletters back in the early ’90s. Besides, people as cosmopolitan as Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch should be able to detect something awry in Paul’s populist appeals. (Note that by “cosmopolitan” I do not mean “Jewish.” I mean cosmopolitan.) I suspect they did but decided it was more useful to spin things their way than to take Paul’s record and ideas seriously. As for Andrew Sullivan, his political infatuations are not his strong point as a commentator.

For my own part, I’ve been more than skeptical of the Ron Paul phenomenon from the beginning — and have argued that it has next to nothing to do with libertarianism and everything to do with anti-war populism mixed with conspiracy theory-ism — but I’ve also, like Virginia, probably not invested enough energy in sounding the alarm.

Like Virginia, I disagree with Ron Paul on the war and on immigration, and I’ve never considered him the “face of libertarianism.” To many people, though, that’s probably exactly what he is. It’s a shame so many had to be taken in and that his bat-shittery will tarnish the name of an otherwise respectable strain of political philosophy.

So, to those who were taken in, some words of advice going forward. Now, perhaps I’m just ultra-sensitive to this stuff as a Jew, but when you hear a lot of talk from a group of people about “international bankers”: RUN THE OTHER FUCKING DIRECTION!!!

This was all more than foreseeable and foreseen.

…super wrong.

On the Dem side, I’ll take comfort in numbers and having been wrong along with everyone else. It seems like all of this even took the Hillary folks by surprise. I haven’t heard a satisfactory explanation for what happened yet. So…

The Republicans

I got the order roughly right here (Rudy did finally nudge by Paul — woo-hoo!). But the magnitude wrong. A McCain blowout.

I do enjoy watching Mitt Romney fade from the stage — repugnant, principle-less little toad that he is. But I’m not about to climb aboard the McCain-is-the-frontrunner bandwagon. The press may want to crown him, but the base is going to have other ideas nationwide. Frankly, I give the once-implausible-seeming Huck a better chance at the nomination than McCain. Rudy still has a shot, I think, but will need to reboot his campaign and make a big splash between now and Florida. The question is when do Romney and Fred drop out. Thompson has zero justification for remaining in at this point; Romney has cash and a chance in Michigan, but should likewise step aside.

Let the chips fall where they may, I say at this point. I sort of have no dog and three dogs in this primary. A Huckabee win would prove every warning I gave in my book prescient. A Giuliani win, I think, would still be best for moving the party past the Bush era. A McCain win might be the best thing to keep the existing coalition together and put off tough decisions to another year (though, God help us as to what sorts of judges we would get out of McCain paired with a Democratic Senate, should he win the general).

At least one prediction from way back has come true: With open primaries on both sides, this is the most chaotic, exciting election imaginable. It also makes me reel just trying to game out the thousands of plausible scenarios moving forward.

Great article from Jamie Kirchick over at The New Republic, detailing the years of vile newsletters put out by Ron Paul, filled with racist, anti-Semitic, anti-gay, and conspiracy theory rantings.

I truly don’t understand the Paulites’ defense that Ron Paul bears no responsibility for any of this … just because. (Read the comments to the article — as usual for the Paul brigades, they’re unhinged.)

At least Andrew Sullivan may be waking up to the fact that the Ron Paul “revolution” is a front for something much uglier than opposition to the Iraq war and defense of the Constitution.

To be clear: It doesn’t matter one bit if Ron Paul wrote any of this. It went out under his name, it reflects the views of many of his supporters, and he’s at the very least tacitly endorsed all of it for years by not denouncing it. Ron Paul doesn’t get to be judged by a lower standard because he’s a fringe candidate anymore. If Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, or anyone else had stuff like this under his name, it would be a career ender. That it’s not for Ron Paul shows exactly what his supporters are all about.

UPDATE (3:59 p.m.): Here’s a page with links to PDFs of the newsletters.

UPDATE II (4:02 p.m.): Ron Paul responds. He’s denounced the newsletters before, he says. Yup. And he waited about a decade after they were published under his name to do so. Ron Paul ain’t going to be president, so it doesn’t really matter. But if he runs a third-party campaign, it will be worth revisiting.

Mike Huckabee uses bizarre Evangelical code words.

I just made these predictions privately to a friend, so — what the heck — here they are for the record. Off the cuff, of course, and guaranteed to be wildly inaccurate:

Dem:

Obama - 38
Edwards - 33
Clinton - 27

GOP:

Huckabee - 29
Romney - 27
Thompson - 13
McCain - 9
Paul - 6
Giuliani - 5

My reasoning?

On the Democratic side: I’m going largely by the expectations games being played by the Big Three candidates. The Hillary Dash to Downplay Iowa has been amazing to behold. And I can’t believe the Obama folks would risk sounding this over-confident if they didn’t have good internal data showing a very likely win. The Edwards folks seem to be downplaying Iowa a bit, too, which is just comical given how much time he’s invested there.

On the Republican side: My first instinct on the Republican side is to ask, “Who the $#@% knows!?” My second is to make some guesses and assumptions. Huck vs. Mitt is neck and neck, and anyone who claims any special knowledge here is lying — everyone has a 50% chance of being right. My guess is that anti-establishment Huck enthusiasm will edge out hyper-organized and hyper-funded Romney resignation. (Maybe that’s a phrase I should coin — Romney Resignation: the feeling one is overcome with after realizing whomever you really want to vote for can’t win or isn’t in the race.) As to the rest of the field, Thompson’s had his mini-boom, and he’s a natural fit with Iowa voters, so that could add up to a third-place finish. Some people will predict McCain in that role; it’s possible, but I don’t see Iowans going with him any more than they’d suddenly give a boost to Giuliani. As for Giuliani, I expect a very low place, almost certainly below Ron Paul. Ron Paul will under-perform his poll numbers, putting lie to the idea that pollsters are somehow missing the existence of a “Ron Paul Revolution.”

So, in only a matter of hours, I can be mocked for getting it wrong.

UPDATE (6:23 p.m.): Just one other note on McCain. I admit that right now he has the best chance of winning the nomination he’s had all year (though, I still believe that means he has a 1% chance instead of a 0% chance). If he does, though, it will be through sheer luck, having run one of the worst primary campaigns in the history of primary campaigns. Even in the last couple weeks, he’s made a huge blunder by visiting Iowa and raising expectations there. He could take third place tonight, and in that case it gets spun as a victory by a media dying to write the McCain Comeback story. But why take the risk when he’s already got a great shot at New Hampshire? Why risk a fourth place finish being seen as a loss? Just another unforced error.

UPDATE II (1:01 a.m.): OK, well, I was actually really close on the Democratic side, where I have little expertise; Edwards was just a hair ahead of Clinton, but Obama really did win that big. On the GOP side, I got the order right, but the magnitude way off. Huckabee didn’t just squeak it out by a point, he blew the doors off this mutha by almost 10 points. Also, Thompson and McCain were basically tied. Ron Paul got around 10% — proving, once and for all I hope, that his poll numbers are not missing some gigantic “revolution” — rather, they’re perfectly in line with the number of votes he actually got. So stop all the but-all-the-young-supporters-have-cell-phones-and-ron’s-going-to-be-the-next-president and-we’ll-take-back-this-country-from-the-Jews stuff. It’s over.

The Politico story about Rudy Giuliani shifting travel expenses, supposedly to hide trysts with Judy Nathan, struck me as willfully and wildly overblown at the time (even the original article admitted, way down, that plenty of non-Judy travel had been accounted for in the same way as the Judy travel), but now we have what looks like confirmation that there’s nothing to the story — from a certainly-not-in-Rudy’s-pocket source. The New York Times.

The Web layout doesn’t allow one to link to the story, unbelievably enough, so I’ve screen capped it here. Click on the thumbnail to view.

Given the damage done by the original Politico story, one might expect to see them address this. Unless I’ve missed, they have yet to do so.

(HT: Byron York)

UPDATE: And it appears Byron managed to get the text out. Here it is:

The headlines have dogged Rudolph W. Giuliani’s presidential campaign for weeks. “Security costs for trysts draw attention,” said one. The articles questioned whether, as mayor, Mr. Giuliani tried to hide his visits to Judith Nathan in the Hamptons by burying the associated security costs in the budgets of obscure mayoral agencies like the Loft Board.

The answer is not likely, according to a review of the city records originally cited as the basis for the assertion.

All eight of Mr. Giuliani’s trips to the Hamptons in 1999 and 2000, including the period when his relationship was a secret, were charged to his own mayoral expense account, according to the records.

After his affair became public, the mayor’s office in 2001 did charge several trips to the Hamptons to the Assigned Counsel Plan, which was designed to coordinate legal efforts for the poor.

But the total cost of those trips, $2,474, represents less than 1 percent of the $281,338 in travel expenses that was charged to the obscure agencies.

And those expenses were not incurred until two years after Mr. Giuliani’s office first began to shift some mayoral travel expenses to lesser-known units.

It’s still not clear why Mr. Giuliani’s office did that, or why it began prepaying his American express bills, both practices that other administrations frowned upon. Former Giuliani administration officials say the shifting of expenses was a temporary, and appropriate maneuver until the Police Department reimbursed the mayor’s office for the security expenses.

The Bloomberg administration is still looking for the backup records for $40,000 of the $632,119 in travel costs that Mr. Giuliani’s office incurred between May 1999 and December 2001, when Mr. Giuliani left office.

But the records reviewed so far, which account for 93 percent of the mayor travel expenses for that period, suggest that Mr. Giuliani’s efforts to see Ms. Nathan, who is now his wife, had nothing to do with any accounting legerdemain.

UPDATE II: And a proper link.

In my N.Y. Post column this morning, I take a look at Huckabee’s strategy of playing the Evangelical victim card:

‘TIS the season: What better time than Christmas for an all-out war between Christian conservatives and the rest of the Republican Party?

The Evangelical insurgency of the Mike Huckabee campaign having spooked the GOP establishment into counterattacking with a vengeance, the former Arkansas governor has a plan to keep the Huckmentum rolling: Play the victim card. Hard.

“There is a level of elitism that has existed,” Huckabee told the Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody in an interview that ran yesterday. “People like me,” he said - that is, “Evangelicals” and people “from the middle of America” - are expected to “come to the rallies and stand in lines for hours to cheer on the candidates . . . but when they got elected, behind closed doors, they would laugh at us and speak with scorn.

“It’s OK if you guys get a seat on the bus,” he added, mocking the tone of the country-clubbers against whom he aims to incite the pitchfork-wielding mob’s rage. “But don’t ever think about telling us where the bus is going to go.”

It’s a common complaint of the religious right. At the risk of agreeing with Huckabee (a despicable peddler of class warfare and various forms of bigotry), on this count he is without a doubt correct.

Of course, if the Evangelicals think they get screwed, they should talk to the libertarians.

Anyway, attacking Huckabee at this point probably helps him a lot more than it hurts him. This is a victimization campaign, and anyone who points out that Huckabee is fiscally liberal bigot who knows nothing about foreign policy is just his victimizer.

A look at Mike Huckabee’s gifts — the ones he liked to receive in Arkansas from people with business before the state:

At least in Iowa:

Mike Huckabee once advocated isolating AIDS patients from the general public, opposed increased federal funding in the search for a cure and said homosexuality could “pose a dangerous public health risk.”

As a candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in 1992, Huckabee answered 229 questions submitted to him by The Associated Press. Besides a quarantine, Huckabee suggested that Hollywood celebrities fund AIDS research from their own pockets, rather than federal health agencies.

“If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague,” Huckabee wrote.

“It is difficult to understand the public policy towards AIDS. It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population, and in which this deadly disease for which there is no cure is being treated as a civil rights issue instead of the true health crisis it represents.”

…

When asked about AIDS research in 1992, Huckabee complained that AIDS research received an unfair share of federal dollars when compared to cancer, diabetes and heart disease.

“In light of the extraordinary funds already being given for AIDS research, it does not seem that additional federal spending can be justified,” Huckabee wrote. “An alternative would be to request that multimillionaire celebrities, such as Elizabeth Taylor (,) Madonna and others who are pushing for more AIDS funding be encouraged to give out of their own personal treasuries increased amounts for AIDS research.”

Of course, by the early 1990s (and well before that, really), it was entirely clear that AIDS could not be spread through casual contact and thus a quarantine could serve no legitimate purpose. Given that, Huckabee’s position really seems to be explained by another answer he gave on the questionnaire:

“I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk.”

There are major parts of the Republican base where this won’t hurt Huckabee, of course. But I think this just makes clearer than ever that Huckabee would not just be a weak general-election candidate, he’d simply be implausible.

UPDATE (4:33 p.m.): The Huckabee camp puts out a statement. He hides behind the science, which wasn’t terribly ambiguous in 1992, as best I know. His current position on AIDS research is much more liberal. I wonder if his views on homosexuality have evolved? (Resisting urge to make evolution joke … damn. Couldn’t resist.)