The 2012 Speculatron Weekly Roundup For Jan. 20, 2012

The overwhelming majority of Republican primary debates have included eight candidates. The New Hampshire Primary has proved that I am currently one of the top eight candidates in the 2012 Republican presidential primary. I beat Michele Bachmann by 40%. Congresswoman Bachmann was in 12 national debates, raised $10 to $12 million, received massive news coverage, has huge name ID and we beat her in New Hampshire. I have scored 2% or 1% in more than a dozen national polls that have included me and have tied Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Jon Huntsman, Rick Perry and beat Rick Santorum in many of these. That is correct; I have tied all of my Republican presidential primary opponents in methodologically sound polls of primary voters except for Mitt Romney and Ron Paul. I am now only one of seven Republicans actively running for president who will appear on Michigan's GOP ballot in February, Puerto Rico's in March and Maryland's ballot in April and I will be competing in other state primaries and caucuses as well.[...]Eric Kleefeld of the Talking Points Memo reported that CNN breaks it's own rules to include Governor Rick Perry in the CNN - SLRC South Carolina Debate. CNN DC Bureau Chief Sam Feist explained that Rick Perry does qualify because a subset of a CBS poll that does not allow participants to choose "Someone Else" shows Perry at 7%. This is the same logic that Governor Gary Johnson used to prove he qualified for the CNN - WMUR - St. Anselm College Debate in June but that CNN rejected. By including Governor Perry, CNN has changed its "pre-established objective criteria" and thus is in violation of Federal Election Laws. Rick Perry and I received less than 1% of the vote in the First-in-the-Nation Primary, so why did CNN not include me in the South Carolina Debate as well?

"I'm not dropping out and endorsing Newt Gingrich or anybody," said Fred Karger in a phone interview with Free Times.The 61-year-old California native and gay activist, who worked for Ronald Reagan and on nine presidential campaigns as a staffer, beat Michele Bachmann by 135 votes in the New Hampshire primary where he'd heavily campaigned.The Minnesota congresswoman had already dropped out, but it still gave Karger some confidence."I'd argue that even dead candidates win elections sometimes," he laughed.

The logical conclusion is that Gary Johnson's message is increasingly palatable to those fed up with the current political duopoly and its disingenuous stranglehold over the public policy discourse. As his national media exposure increases, so does his support. As Gov. Johnson told Alex Witt, "It's always been about the message. I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't think there was the opportunity to actually win."

The article below from the LA Times is just one of many today reporting that we - millions of Americans who see the Internet as a last bastion of freedom - are maybe, just maybe, getting Congress attention about two very bad ideas: SOPA and PIPA.Kudos to Wikipedia and the thousands of other sites who took action to let people know of these threats to Internet freedom, the flow of information, and the free market. As I have said, there are NO problems with the Internet that we want the government to try to fix!This evening, as millions of parents find themselves answering their kids' homework questions without the help of Wikipedia or any number of other sites that have changed the world, I hope everyone will visit Wikipedia, Google.com, or other sites to sign petitions or otherwise let Congress know that we want the government to keep its hands off the Internet.

The right's core case is that Obama has governed as a radical leftist attempting a "fundamental transformation" of the American way of life. Mitt Romney accuses the president of making the recession worse, of wanting to turn America into a European welfare state, of not believing in opportunity or free enterprise, of having no understanding of the real economy, and of apologizing for America and appeasing our enemies. According to Romney, Obama is a mortal threat to "the soul" of America and an empty suit who couldn't run a business, let alone a country.Leave aside the internal incoherence -- how could such an incompetent be a threat to anyone? None of this is even faintly connected to reality -- and the record proves it. On the economy, the facts are these. When Obama took office, the United States was losing around 750,000 jobs a month. The last quarter of 2008 saw an annualized drop in growth approaching 9 percent. This was the most serious downturn since the 1930s, there was a real chance of a systemic collapse of the entire global financial system, and unemployment and debt -- lagging indicators -- were about to soar even further. No fair person can blame Obama for the wreckage of the next 12 months, as the financial crisis cut a swath through employment.

What liberals have never understood about Obama is that he practices a show-don't-tell, long-game form of domestic politics. What matters to him is what he can get done, not what he can immediately take credit for. And so I railed against him for the better part of two years for dragging his feet on gay issues. But what he was doing was getting his Republican defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to move before he did. The man who made the case for repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" was, in the end, Adm. Mike Mullen. This took time -- as did his painstaking change in the rule barring HIV-positive immigrants and tourists -- but the slow and deliberate and unprovocative manner in which it was accomplished made the changes more durable. Not for the first time, I realized that to understand Obama, you have to take the long view. Because he does.

No, Obama isn't a radical Kenyan anti-colonialist. But he is a lawbreaker and an advocate of radical executive power. What precedent could be more radical than insisting that the executive is empowered to draw up a kill list of American citizens in secret, without telling anyone what names are on it, or the legal justification for it, or even that it exists? What if Newt Gingrich inherits that power? He may yet. Over the years, Sullivan has confronted, as few others have, American transgressions abroad, including torture, detainee abuse, and various imperial ambitions. He's long drawn attention to civil-liberties violations at home too, as a solo blogger and as lead editor and writer of a blogazine. When I worked for Sullivan, he not only published but actively encouraged items I found that highlighted civil-liberties abuses by the Obama Administration, and since I parted ways with The Daily Dish, he and the Dish team have continued to air critiques of Obama on these questions. But his Newsweek essay fits the pattern I've lamented of Obama apologists who tell a narrative of his administration that ignores some of these issues and minimizes the importance of others, as if they're a relatively unimportant matter to be set aside in a sentence or three before proceeding to the more important business of whether the president is being critiqued fairly by obtuse partisans.