Huckabee is finished in his run for president. It may not be official yet, but with the Southern Baptist preacher’s loss in a South Carolina primary full of conservative Southern white Christians… he ain’t got nothin’.

Literally.

Not only does he not have the votes of what he has tried to form into his “base,” he also has no momentum, no money and no campaign organization to compete on the national level with giants like McCain and Ward Cleaver Romney. However, what Huckabee can say is that he energized the Christian conservative base like no one else has in this campaign (although that is not saying a lot), and this will likely win him a the number two spot on the ballot when McCain leaves Romney in the dust saying “Golly gee whiz! What happened?” and Giuliani… wait, who? Oh, nevermind…

McCain is a suspicious creature to the religious right, and his pandering to them went over about as well as his friendship with Bush. If he wants to shore up their support in November, McCain will have to run with someone with some more credibility on the Republican’s issues - God, guns and gays. Not only does Huckabee provide this, he also manages to do it while wooing the crap out of bleeding hearts like me, who rarely meet Baptists that seem trustworthy.

A McCain-Huckabee ticket hits all the right Rovian wedge issues on the head, but with a twist of compassion.

War on Terror? Check - Mac’s a war veteran and former prisoner of war that everyone respects.

Experience? Check - McCain’s been in Washington since Lincoln was shot.

Fresh face of change? Check - We’re not sure if Huckabee has even been anywhere in Washington besides Russert’s studio.

Hate-mongering religious issues? Check - Huckabee is a Southern Baptist, BUT he manages to take the GOP’s edge off these issues and make you realize he has actually put some deep soul-searching into them (AND, he supports the major aspects of Christianity that got dropped from the GOP platform because they didn’t meld well when the Sons of Confederate Veterans made a change and decided to leave the Dems and join the GOP). Double whammy - ridicu-liberals will continue to despise him for comments he made 15 years ago (no matter how irrelevant now), and moderate Christians will feel all warm and fuzzy inside about him.

All other wedge issues? Check - Huckabee is southern and white and Republican. No matter what he might have done with taxes as governor of Arkansas, those three qualities will turn enough good ol’ boy heads away from whoever the Dems run that it won’t matter.

You heard it here first. McCain-Huckabee versus… someone… in 2008.

Be sure to check back in July when I pry my foot out of my mouth.

OK, I know I have said in the past that Ron Paul adds nothing of any value to the intelligent discourse of the presidential race, but I have to recant that statement. After watching the ABC/Facebook debate tonight and watching that nutty backwoods conservative scream over and over about the Iraq War and the welfare state, I have to say, he’s a hell of a lot of fun to watch. I don’t know how much longer he can last, but I almost want to give money to his campaign to watch the fireworks continue.

On domestic issues, I am about as opposed to him as I can be. I think he is a moron to want to cut the federal government as much as he wants to (that’s not to say it couldn’t use a little trim here and there). However, on foreign policy, while I disagree with his isolationist stance as a whole, there are some good and sound messages in there that we should take to heart.

The rest of the field fell all over themselves to say that Al Queda didn’t attack us because we have bases in Muslim countries, while Ron Paul was man enough to say that was the main reason it happened. Of course, none of them were able to say that it could have been a combination of that and the values that we hold dear as a nation (which it of course is).

So, I recant. I hope Ron Paul hangs in there as long as he can.

Friday morning, there wasn’t a major paper in the country that did not have full coverage of the Iowa Caucuses on the front page. Even Friday’s financially-minded Wall Street Journal splashed Huckabee and Obama all over the top of its front page. All of the dailies did the same, both on paper and on their website. In fact, as I write this on Saturday afternoon, the websites for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Fox News, MSNBC all have residual news about Thursday’s Iowa caucuses and articles looking ahead to Tuesday’s New Hampshire primaries. Only CNN, of the major news websites, does not still have Iowa caucus news up. This is pretty amazing, since none of the major networks had live Iowa caucus coverage on Thursday night, and CSPAN apparently went on some quixotic campaign to show an entire caucus meeting from beginning to tedious end and make me realize I would rather be trapped in a room with Tom Tancredo and a truck load of illegal immigrants than sit through that mind-numbing process in person.

After unfortunately working late Thursday (all the while following news rolling in via Politico.com and Hotline on Call), I got home to find my wife watching The Apprentice on NBC. “Wha… where is the caucus coverage,” I asked as I dropped my bag to the floor. “CSPAN has some weird local thing on. So, I’m watching this,” she said. “What do you mean some weird local thing?” After she explained it to me, I asked about the networks. “That’s what this is,” she replied, making me realize how dumb a question I had just asked.

As you may have guessed, my wife and I don’t have cable. We don’t want to flush a ridiculous amount of money down the drain for 120 channels when we will only watch 12 of them. Until we can get an a la carte package, it will probably stay that way and we will keep enjoying our NetFlix subscription and get whatever comes through our building wiring (which we are pretty sure is not illegal, considering the cable guy came and set up our internet service and knows what channels come into the TV. Anyway, I digress…)

On caucus night, while every major print media outlet in the country was foaming at the mouth of their website over the Iowa caucuses, and I presume all of the cable media from what I have seen on their websites, NOT ONE OF THE MAJOR NETWORKS HAD LIVE COVERAGE! Instead, I had to battle with my wife over switching back and forth from sleaze like Desperate Housewives to the networks and CSPAN to see if ANYONE had any coverage besides what I was pulling up on my computer. I couldn’t believe it. And, what stunned me even more was that when the news finally came on, it was the local news that we saw – no national coverage until Nightline came on.

Luckily, I had my laptop and was able to keep up with everything, and when the time came, we watched Obama give his victory speech via the live Associated Press feed online. Then at some point CSPAN (which until that night had had great Iowa coverage) woke up and realized they needed to stop showing farmers argue about whether their county should include in its proposal to the state party platform whether the federal or state governments to regulate gay marriage, and they showed John Edwards’ speech.

How pathetically apathetic do the network executives think this country is? Do they not realize how badly Americans want to see someone else as president – if only in their imagination? Why else would voters have accepted the incredibly early beginnings of 2008 campaigns in 2007… er, 2006? Do they really think that TV watchers are so stupid that they don’t want to watch something more intelligent than Donald Trump firing a playmate?

ABC will partially make up for this tonight with its coverage of the New Hampshire debates, but it does not have any primary coverage on its schedule for Tuesday night. Neither do NBC or CBS. And, of course, ABC planned this debate for Saturday night, so who the hell will be home to watch it?

Don’t know if anybody out there caught this, but humans are evolving at much faster speeds than previously expected. It turns out the fast globalizing, flattening world isn’t producing a more similar race, but the continental divides (and in some cases, ethnic/religious) have people evolving differently depending on where they live.

Pretty amazing stuff. Even Mike Huckabee might find it interesting…

(image credited to Joseph Di Nicola)

Shifting gears, since it’s December it must mean… appropriations time!!!! And with that comes massive omnibus spending bills that are loaded with lots of stuff nobody really cares about or need. These big, stinky bills are usually not overly difficult to ram through Congress once all the chips are down and the clock is ticking on the year (egads, somebody might lose some vacation time if they don’t finish!). Every so often, Congress is forced to pass a continuing resolution because they can’t work out a compromise on new appropriation legislation… so they have to just continue the previous year’s. This happened last year… mainly because Congress fully flipped for the first time in 12 years and the Republicans weren’t about to let a spending bill go through right after a devastating loss.

Well, that’s fine (and to be expected), but this year they’re having major problems again. They’ve spent the whole year haggling, arguing, and ahem… OBSTRUCTING. But when the chips are down (hooray for a repetitive cliche!), they pass spending bills because it’s their bread and butter. Not this year, not yet at least. Gleaning from the media reports, it seems that agreements had been reached and they were on the verge of passing next year’s spending bills.

But wait! Republicans can’t let that happen!! No no no, they need to show how weak the Dems are… and the Dems are usually more than willing to comply. Thankfully, David Obey, chairman of the Appropriations committee and man with steel huevos, is standing firm and giving his counterparts the proverbial omnibus middle finger. This can lead to two possible conclusions… one, the appropriations process gets deadlocked and we’re forced to endure another continuing resolution which means that for a WHOLE CONGRESS, the Dems have had Republican spending bills on the books. The other requires the majority party standing firm and shoving this bill down the obstructionist’s throats.

It’s obvious which conclusion I’m rooting for.