The Miami Herald reports that Giuliani has imploded in Florida. Polling courtesy of our own Kellyanne Conway, who has some serious money quotes in the story.

Not meaning to laugh or anything, especially prematurely, but wasn’t it just the other day that we were reading this in the Drudge Report:

“The field is still wide open, which is what we wanted,” said campaign manager Michael DuHaime, the man behind what the team calls its “late-state” strategy to win the Republican nomination. “You want to avoid a whole lot of momentum for one candidate. The further we get into the calendar, the better it is for us.”

So there you have it. As things stand today, Michael DuHaime is on track to be the Bob Shrum of the Republican Party. Well, assuming anyone ever hires him again anyway.

UPDATE, March 8, 2008: As I should have expected, given the clubby nature of the political consulting business, I definitely spoke too soon about Mike DuHaime’s job prospects. Immediately following what even wealthy Giuliani supporters call the worst-run campaign in American history, he was actually picked up by the RNC as senior advisor for Political Operations, which means that he will be running McCain’s state-by-state get-out-the-vote operation. To be fair, as a Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman deputy, DuHaime actually did a tremendous job with this for George Bush in 2004, so the hire probably shows McCain as a good manager who can get the most out of his available assets. But you have to be glad that this kind of inside-baseball stuff doesn’t get much play, because without all that detail, this is the sort of thing that just makes everyday Republicans crazy.

Here are a few gazillion Americans participating in the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C. It’s an obviously enormous crowd. It’s there every year.

Have you seen it in the mainstream media? Of course you haven’t. Everyone knows only a handful of extremists support the Right to Life, and Katie Couric means to make sure you keep “knowing” that.

In the words of TheVanguard.Org member Lance Fairchok, “This is how they manipulate us. If it had been 50 anti-Bush wackos it would have been front page news.” Indeed.

From London’s Evening Standard: Sir Richard Branson does it again.

The Virgin Galactic spacecraft, which was being unveiled in New York today, is already under construction. Test flights are expected to begin in June, with commercial flights starting 12 months later.

More than 200 potential astronauts are believed to have already paid deposits for the £100,000 flights, including actress Victoria Principal, scientist Stephen Hawking, and Princess Beatrice.

Flights will last for two hours and will include four and a half minutes of weightlessness.
The 60ft ship is expected to reach an altitude of 110km - 68 miles - and will be launched from underneath a mother ship called White Knight.

Once the mother ship reaches 50,000 feet, which was the cruising altitude of Concorde, the spaceship is released and its rocket is fired, accelerating the craft up to 2,500mph, and taking it to 110km, officially making its passengers astronauts.

Fifty years of government space programs have been singularly unable to achieve what Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have done in less than a decade: open up space to the whole world. Government stifles, private enterprise liberates. And over the next few decades, we are about to see more examples than we can easily count.

No matter which Republican ends up facing Hillary or Obama this fall, count on that person to be the abortion establishment’s worst nightmare.

But wait a second, you say.  Of the four leading GOP candidates, only one of them, Mike Huckabee, is both a longtime and a passionate pro-lifer.  Mitt Romney appears ardent on the issue, but he’s a relatively recent convert.  John McCain has never supported the pro-abortion position, but has historically lacked passion on the matter.   And Rudy Giuliani remains unapologetically pro-choice. 

 So what is the extremist left — the supporters of abortion any time, any place, for any reason — so worried about? (continue reading post »)