... the expectations are now set that Romney has spent so much time and energy in Iowa that the candidate who finishes in second-place should still be far behind Romney.  In short, it's not enough for Romney to win; he has to devastate his opponents.  That's setting the bar pretty high.

The theory is that by working so hard in Iowa, Romney may have inadvertently created a situation in which there is little upside to winning, and where finishing second would be devastating.

Let's suppose Mike Huckabee, for example, finishes close behind Romney, in second place, while spending a fraction of the money.  Huckabee's team might then spin the results and argue they actually won Iowa.  Of course, if this were effective, it might also diminish the bump Romney would receive coming out of the state ...

... Is there such a thing as working too hard?  Maybe.  By raising expectations, Mitt Romney may have created an atmosphere in which a mere win may not be satisfying ...

In a recently published article in Government Executive Magazine Robert Brodsky uncovers that "the 20 biggest federal contractors received at least 80 earmarks worth more than $212 million." (See the chart below to see who garnered the most)

These big companies know how to maneuver through the system, and how the current system operates, that means they have lobbyists willing to make campaign contributions to members who are willing to sponsor earmarks.  They also know this is an easy way of circumventing the competitive bidding process, thereby undercutting smaller firms.

The House has established rules for transparency, requiring members to certify who requested the earmark as well as whom the beneficiary would be.  The Senate established a similar rule before the Democratic leadership watered down the rule so that the requesting Senator only has to declare that the earmark will not end up in personal financial gain. 

The 80 earmarks scrutinized by this report are only from members of the House;  meaning that roughly $5.3 billion were sponsored or cosponsored by one or more members of the Senate, without disclosure of the beneficiary.

I don’t know about you, but $5.3 billion is not a small sum of money, and if I am paying for it, I want to know where it is going and for what.

It is clear from this report that the earmarking process is far from reformed.

It should be noted that earlier this year, Townhall.com invited Republican candidates to participate in a conservative radio/online debate.  At the time, the frontrunners were McCain, Rudy, and Romney. 

To give you an idea of how a Townhall debate might have gone, it would have probably featured a moderator like Bill Bennett, instead of a moderator such as Anderson Cooper ...

Unfortunately, of the frontrunners invited, only Mitt Romney accepted our invitation. 

So what's stopping Townhall.com -- or RedState -- or National Review -- from having our conservative readers submit YouTube questions to be answered by the GOP candidates?

Frankly, it's the candidates' willingness to participate...

If we're going to get away from the CNN's of the world, it will require the candidates to do their part in picking the venue that will be more favorable to them.  That means saying "no" to CNN, and "yes" to conservative media outlets.

RedState and Human Events are happy to combine forces and offer the following.

We have a base of readers who represent the Republican wing of the Republican Party. You – and the Republican Party – deserve to face the questions posed by undecided Republicans, not Democratic activists. We will solicit and obtain YouTube videos from those people and vet each questioner to establish that they are – really - - undecided Republicans. We hope to include soldiers in the field in Iraq, Young Republicans, and others who still have not decided among you.

Miami-Dade detectives have detained at least three people in Lee County for questioning in the death of Washington Redskins football star Sean Taylor.

Investigators believe the young men learned of Taylor's house through someone who unwittingly set up the burglary by bragging about the football star's wealth.

The suspects include a teenager and two men in their 20s who hail from the Fort Myers area.

The former University of Miami star was not supposed to be home. While the Redskins played in Tampa, he had come home to get a second medical opinion on his injured knee.

Florida Department of Law Enforcement agents and Miami-Dade homicide detectives picked up the young men Friday morning....

HH: Do you feel a little bit like Greenberg now when you read the Daily Kos, or the other virulent blogs of the left?

TB: No, I think…I’m still tracking the patois. He had not ever heard a speech like Al Lowenstein gave in California, when he was trying to organize the anti-war movement, within the party. Carl had grown up, you know, covering…I remember the story that Carl told me. In 1948, they were doing the winners of the Congressional election, to get them into the paper, and this man came up and handed him his card, and it was Richard Milhous Nixon. It was the first time he ever met him. And Carl was the one that Nixon singled out on that infamous news conference in which he said you won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore. And the only fair reporter, he said, was Carl. So you know, rhetoric did change. The politics didn’t operate within the confines of smoke rooms anymore. You couldn’t go to a few bosses and get the story. It was spread out across the landscape, and he was having a hard time keeping track of all that.

HH: Isn’t that, though, playing…I think that’s playing out again. I won’t put it as a question. I’ll put it as a statement, and have you comment. That’s playing out again as old media looks around, whether your colleague, Dan Rather, during the meltdown on the false papers about Texas Air National Guard…

TB: Yeah, right.

HH: Or last night’s YouTube debate. I just don’t think the suits at Rockefeller Center or in the other networks know how to deal with this new media environment. They’re scratching their head like Carl Greenberg did.

TB: I think everybody is going through that with all…look, we are in what I call the second big bang.  We’re creating a whole new universe out there, all of us. You included, by the way. And we’re trying to figure out which planets are going to support life, and which ones won’t, which ones will drift too close to the Sun. Who knows how long talk radio will be around, and before it becomes a medium that’s under assault as well. How are we going to marry all of these traditional forms of delivery together? I was at the Washington Post the other day, and in the lobby, they’ve got a great testimonial to their very modern, state of the art printing press. And I was reading it, and fascinated by the numbers that were there, about 75,000 copies an hour, and the automatic role of ink that goes in. And as I walked away, I thought, I wonder if in ten years, I’ll see that at the Smithsonian.

HH: How interesting. And Jim Brady is the editor of Washingtonpost.com. He’s got it. I mean, he’s figured it out.  I just think there’s a lot of Carl Greenbergs wandering around.

As Trochilus Tales points out, CNN is either incredibly incompetent or deeply deceptive given how its senior executives sold the debate:

As has been duly noted elsewhere, here is a CNN story, "Funny, poignant questions pour in for GOP debate" dated just this past Monday (11/26), in which CNN Vice President, David Bohrman made it quite clear that the specific intention of the hosts of Wednesday night's debate was for Republican questioners to ask the Republican candidates questions.

Here is exactly what Bohrman said on topic in the story, just a few days ago:

"This debate is to let Republican voters pick from among their eight candidates," said David Bohrman, Washington bureau chief and senior vice president for CNN. "We are trying to focus mostly on questions where there are differences among these candidates."

Bohrman also told "The Caucus (ht: ProteinWisdom)," the blogger for the New York Times that they would weed out any "gotcha" questions.

Both claims were utterly and completely untrue.

More on the debate meltdown in the San Francisco Chronicle's blog, and across the new media.

A smash-up of this magnitude in other than a media corporation would result in heads rolling, but the peculiar defensiveness of old media about its infallibility is kicking in.  Confronted with overwhelming evidence of its premeditated mediocrity, the network plus along as though nothing happened, and its old media colleagues are happy to assist in the attempt to induce amnesia. (Glenn Reynolds gives a couple of examples.)

The Chron blogger Joe Garofoli wrote that I got Brokaw  "to pile on his mainstream media bros."  Brokaw's very mild observation of the obvious screw-up is piling on?

But of course it is viewed that way from within the beseiged towers of old media, where ad revenue is draining away, and the generation gap is as obvious as the sun in the sky.

Mark Steyn, as usual, put the arrow in the bullseye (the transcript of our conversation from yesterday is here):

HH: What did you make of that spectacle last night? 

MS: Well, I thought it was a joke. If we’re going to have gimmicky novelty debates, if politics is too boring that you can’t have serious, meaningful debates, I’d rather we just got the candidates to take part in Dancing With The Stars. I mean, that would be a lot more fun than these lame attempts to oomph up political debate, starting with that pathetic guitarist. It’s a sort of quintessential thing of what kind of square guys do when they’re trying to make something interesting. This guitarist who sang a novelty song about the candidates, with these insipid lyrics, a funny song that isn’t funny with just these lame lines about Tancredo wanting to build a fence, and Huckabee’s lost weight, they’re not even funny couplets. And it set the tone for it, pathetic, squaresville CNN producers trying to get hip with the beat, and just looking pathetic and demeaning, and degrading everything they touch. 

HH: You know, I think you’re right. It’s the Austin Powersization of cable network news, and they were looking pathetic as the night went on. But let’s get to some substance about this. It is so wrong to have Ron Paul invited to this debate, then put him in the corner for 35 minutes, and then ask him a conspiracy-nutter question. 

MS: Yeah.

HH: That is to me emblematic of everything that went on last night. 

MS: Yes, and I think in fact, CNN behaved disgracefully. I don’t know, I mean, you’ve been on CNN before. I find CNN a very tiresome network in part because when you, when they try to book you on something, they want to have these pre-interviews, which are big time wasters, and I never agree to do them, where they want to discuss your views for an hour beforehand, before you do your two minute on-air bit with whoever the host is. So it seems to me incredible on its face that for example, this gay general who’s supporting Hillary, that they couldn’t have done the minimal amount of work necessary to find out that this guy is not Mr. Undecided Voter, but he is in fact on the Hillary campaign, that the woman who asked the abortion question is not, you know, Little Miss Undecided Feminist Voter, but in fact an explicit John Edwards supporter. I simply don’t buy the fact that even the overmanned, deadbeat production staff at CNN simply were incapable of finding out the truth of this thing.

CNN is of course going to the mattresses, just as every MSMer does when the collision with their own bias and/or incompetence arrives.  But like Rathergate, the YouTube/BoobTube debate is already a major milestone in the accelerating collapse of credibility of the MSM. 

Powerline has much more.

"If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough." 
    -- James A. Thomson

A decade ago, Thomson was the first to isolate human embryonic stem cells. Last week, he (and Japan's Shinya Yamanaka) announced one of the great scientific breakthroughs since the discovery of DNA: an embryo-free way to produce genetically matched stem cells.

Even a scientist who cares not a whit about the morality of embryo destruction will adopt this technique because it is so simple and powerful. The embryonic stem cell debate is over.

Which allows a bit of reflection on the storm that has raged ever since the August 2001 announcement of President Bush's stem cell policy. The verdict is clear: Rarely has a president -- so vilified for a moral stance -- been so thoroughly vindicated.

Why? Precisely because he took a moral stance. Precisely because, as Thomson puts it, Bush was made "a little bit uncomfortable" by the implications of embryonic experimentation. Precisely because he therefore decided that some moral line had to be drawn.

In doing so, he invited unrelenting demagoguery by an unholy trinity of Democratic politicians, research scientists and patient advocates who insisted that anyone who would put any restriction on the destruction of human embryos could be acting only for reasons of cynical politics rooted in dogmatic religiosity -- a "moral ayatollah," as Sen. Tom Harkin so scornfully put it.

Bush got it right....

Read the whole thing.

It’s been slightly more than 24 hours since the two-hour CNN/You Tube GOP debate finally sputtered and wheezed to its conclusion (appropriately, with a silly question to Rudy Giuliani about why, as a fanatic Yankee fan, he rooted for the Red Sox in the World Series).

Conventional wisdom suggests that this flashy show with its quirky, often frivolous questions will have scant influence on the electoral outcomes in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida and other early, crucial states in the nomination process. For two reasons, I suspect the conventional wisdom is wrong, and televised extravaganza could profoundly and immediately scramble the already confused contest for the Republican nomination.

First, no one can ignore the fact that this confrontation, whatever its insipidities and excesses, drew an unexpectedly huge viewing audience. Some five million people watched the Republican candidates go at each other with gusto and expertise -- 25% more than watched the Democrats in their biggest debate of the pre-primary season. The Republicans pulled more viewers than any other political debate in cable TV history. The press coverage and water cooler factor also brought some of the debate high lights (and low lights) to people who didn’t watch it live. The Iowa Caucuses are only one month and four days away, and there’s reason to believe that voters across the country have begun to concentrate on a wide open and fascinating race.

And it is wide open – more so than ever after Wednesday night. The second reason this particular debate will matter is that the putative front runner, Rudy Giuliani, delivered an unexpectedly clumsy and uncertain performance that should badly damage (if not shatter) the aura of invincibility and inevitably he had begun to construct around himself. Rudy is usually sharp and likeable in these debates, but this time he looked petty, immature, defensive and un-Presidential.

The first few minutes of the evening provided Rudy’s worst moments of the entire campaign so far, and if his opponents know what’s good for them they’ll come up with ways to remind people of the former mayor’s awkwardness. The first You Tube questioner asked Giuliani about charges that he had made New York a “sanctuary city” and asked if he planned to continue “aiding and abetting” illegal immigrants in “their flight into this country.”

Rudy gave a dry, legalistic response, trying to defend his record without ever communicating any real emotion or indignation about our porous borders. Mitt Romney then pounced, insisting that New York had indeed been a sanctuary city and slamming Rudy for declaring that “undocumented” were welcome in New York.

At this point, it began to look like a playground brawl involving fifth graders, taunting each other over meaningless trivia --- “your mother wears combat boots!”/ “oh yeah? So’s your old man!”—but, sadly, the exchange only got worse.

“It’s unfortunate,” Giuliani snarled, “but Mitt generally criticizes people in a situation in which he’s had by far the worst record….At his own home, illegal immigrants were being employed, not being turned in to anybody or by anyone. And then when he deputized the police, he did it two weeks before he was going to leave office, and they never even seemed to catch the illegal immigrants that were working at his mansion. So I would say he had a sanctuary mansion, not just a sanctuary city.”

No one listening to this childish cheap shot could fail to cringe--- especially those of us who admire Mayor Giuliani and want him to do well in this campaign.

Romney fought back with the altogether reasonable point that “if you hear someone that is working out there, not that you have employed, but that the company has. If you hear someone with a funny accent, you, as a homeowner, are you supposed to go out there and say, ‘I want to see your papers.’ Is that what you’re suggesting?”  Rudy shot back that Mitt deserved the criticism because of  his “holier than thou attitude” – perhaps some subtle reminder of his presumed vulnerability as a devout Mormon.

In any event, if Team Rudy wanted to slime Mitt Romney because some landscaping company that once worked at his home used to hire illegals (surely, the only landscaping company in the entire nation to ever employ the undocumented), then there were other ways to make the point. Why not let a surrogate, or a campaign spokesman, raise the issue with the press? Why make the Mayor himself look so unbelievably small and mean as to raise the charge to Romney’s face on national TV?

The result of the interchange was that the very beginning of the debate, when the biggest part of the audience was still watching, showed both front-runners looking undignified and nasty, like mean-spirited light-weights rather than inspiring leaders.  

While our economy struggles to avoid recession, we face a looming entitlement meltdown, and millions of Islamo-Nazis still want to slaughter every one of us, the two top Republican candidates spent considerable time and energy in front of a huge TV audience trying to score points with each other regarding a crew of gardeners who worked on the Romney home several years ago.

How pathetic.

During the entire course of the debate, none of the candidates or questioners even mentioned the big Middle East Peace Conference that President Bush and Secretary Rice had just convened in Annapolis. Do the candidates think it was a good idea, or just another trap to force Israel into dangerous and unilateral concessions? The candidates surely have some thoughts on this matter (Rudy—who possesses dazzling expertise on the whole Middle East conflict – most surely does) but they never got to express them.

The result?

Any sense that the Republican struggle had come down to a two-man race between Rudy and Romney evaporated with their nasty spat. Throughout the evening, Huckabee and McCain and even, unexpectedly, Fred Thompson, looked more presidential, displayed more gravitas, than the two bickering front-runners. The Rasmussen Poll released before the debate already showed Huckabee moving into an Iowa lead and the televised smack-down will only add to his momentum. In New Hampshire, McCain was already in the hunt (running second or third in most polls) and some Giuliani supporters will shift toward him after the debate (because he spoke more passionately and substantively on the war than his rivals, and looked like a bigger man than Rudy). Some of the same independents who made McCain a Granite State winner in 2000 landslide might ultimately come back to him, so the Arizona Senator could make a credible run at Romney

In other words, the field remains wide-open, with none of the clarity or shape or predictability Republican operatives always crave. With most of the big states dividing their delegates (only New York and New Jersey among the early major delegations hand out their prizes as winner-take-all), four or even five candidates could grab major delegate hauls on Tsunami Tuesday, February Fifth.

My pal Hugh Hewitt claims that “a vote for Huck is a vote for Rudy,” but that’s like telling Democrats that a “vote for Edwards is a vote for Clinton,” on the theory that Obama’s the only one who could beat Hillary. In fact, all three Dems are bunched together in an Iowa dead heat, and the national polls will begin to show similar multi-candidate divisions on the GOP side (in several national polls, Huckabee’s already passed both McCain AND Romney, for third place after Rudy and Thompson. Since Giuliani and Fred both rely on name recognition rather than real enthusiasm for strong showings in these early polls, Huckabee’s rising stock looks particularly impressive)

At this point, if Edwards wins in Iowa among the Democrats (entirely possible) he’s an instant contender in a host of other states, and if Huckabee wins in Iowa he’ll also show unexpected strength in numerous other states.

Could Huckabee, plausibly, score the early knock-out that many pundits expect someone to win after the February 5^th big state primaries? 

No way, but then it looks like Rudy or Romney may also face a tough time closing the deal some six months before the convention.. The votes will remain divided, contradictory, making for an open field for months to come.

That’s good for the party in the long run, so even Rudy loyalists should take comfort after their guy’s disappointing performance.

And for those who believe that one debate can’t alter the direction of a campaign, just look at the Democrats: Hillary’s televised stumbling over driver’s licenses for illegals, her inability to answer direct questions, brought about an instant and drastic decline in the polls. She’s now fighting to maintain her front-runner status.

Rudy may also find his poll leads evaporating, until he can clean away the unpleasant taste he left behind after the confrontation in Florida. He should remember for the future: no talk of sanctuary cities, no sanctuary mansions, and no sanctuary for serious candidates from conducting themselves like applicants for the world’s most important job rather than hormone-addled adolescents.  

I asked veteran MSMer Nancy Gibbs, co-author with Michael Duffy of the wonderful