From the beginning, God has been at the center of the Republican presidential race. And He has not been kind to the GOP or its would-be leaders. While John McCain back-tracked from his claim that "the most important thing is that I am a Christian", Rudy Giuliani left it to the priests to decide whether he is a good Catholic. A desperate Mitt Romney delivered a speech on faith in which he ejected Muslims and atheists from the American community. Even former minister Mike Huckabee is experiencing a backlash from his extremist agenda to "take this nation back for Christ."

How ironic, then, that a Republican Party facing electoral perdition at the polls in 2008 may now be the recipient of divine intervention. As the New York Times reports today, God's gift to the GOP may take the form of an independent presidential bid by the Jewish mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg.

After months of denials, Bloomberg is laying the groundwork for a White House run using the cover of a "national unity" campaign decrying the hyperpartisanship of both parties. (That politics of polarization, of course, is almost exclusively the handiwork of the GOP.)

But far from being the savior who will transcend partisan conflicts, Bloomberg is an insider's insider. A lifelong Democrat who by necessity joined the GOP to enable his initial run for mayor, Bloomberg spoke at the 2004 Republican National Convention. As Glenn Greenwald's devastating assessment concludes, Bloomberg's quixotic quest would be nothing more than a $1 billion ego trip:

"A Bloomberg candidacy would have no purpose other than satisfy his bottomless personal lust for attention and bestow the wise old men threatening the country with his candidacy with some fleeting sense of rejuvenated relevance and wisdom. His political views are conventional in every way and he's little more than an establishment-enabling figurehead. The whole attraction to his candidacy has nothing to do with any issues or substance and everything to do with an empty addiction to vapid notions of Establishment harmony and a desire to exert control, whereby our Seriousness guardians devote themselves to a candidate for reasons largely unrelated to his policies or political views, thus proving themselves, as usual, to be the exact antithesis of actual seriousness."

But while Bloomberg's pending decision to head up the Vanity Party ticket in 2008 may have elements of the comic, it would be deadly serious for the Democrats.

Michael Bloomberg is neither Ross Perot nor Ralph Nader. In 1992, the populist billionaire Perot took votes from both parties, but may well have undone the reelection of George H.W. Bush by siphoning off disaffected "Reagan Democrats." In 2000, Nader was a grassroots movement candidate whose under-funded campaign sufficiently weakened Al Gore from the left so as to cost him Florida - and the White House.

If anything, Bloomberg may resemble John Anderson. The liberal Republican garnered over five million votes in 1980 and provided the margin of victory for Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter in several states including Wisconsin, Connecticut, South Carolina and even Massachusetts. (Anderson was not the deciding factor, given the scope of Reagan's landslide.) Bloomberg, who spent $69 million of his own fortune to win office in New York, wouldn't merely be Ralph Nader on steroids. His progressive positions on social issues combined with his ability to wage a 50 state media campaign could make him a boutique candidate for some so-called limousine liberals.

Unlike John Anderson, Bloomberg's billions could be enough to swing several too close to call states - perhaps Florida, Ohio, New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Iowa - to the Republican nominee. Bloomberg's candidacy at worst could represent the prospect of eight more years of GOP rule, no doubt including the transformation of the Supreme Court for a generation.

2007 was not a good year for the Republican Party. 2008 is looking to be even worse. But for God's Own Party, salvation may come in the cramped form of Mike Bloomberg. As another Republican Abraham Lincoln once said, the "judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

UPDATE: In Times Square on New Year's Eve, Mayor Bloomberg proclaimed, "Look, I'm not running for President." Stay tuned for the Bloomberg honesty watch.

As the 2008 campaign begins in earnest, one of the emerging storylines is so-called hyperpartisanship, the bitter and increasingly divisive conflict between Democrats and Republicans that is said to be fueling cynicism - and apathy - among voters. In Iowa, Barack Obama proclaims that he will transcend partisan cleavages, while John Edwards vows to fight. Meanwhile, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg will meet in Oklahoma next week with prominent figures from both parties to encourage the 2008 candidates to form a "government of national unity." But lost in the cries of hyperpartisanship is the undeniable fact the Republican Party is almost exclusively responsible for it, aided and abetted by an "infotainment" media that has transformed politics into theater.

As the Washington Post first reported this morning, Bloomberg is hosting the January session with the intent of prodding the leading Democratic and Republican White House hopefuls to curb their partisan venom or potentially face the prospect of an independent, third party bid:

Conveners of the meeting include such prominent Democrats as former senators Sam Nunn (Ga.), Charles S. Robb (Va.) and David L. Boren (Okla.), and former presidential candidate Gary Hart. Republican organizers include Sen. Chuck Hagel (Neb.), former party chairman Bill Brock, former senator John Danforth (Mo.) and former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman.

Boren, who will host the meeting at the university, where he is president, said: "It is not a gathering to urge any one person to run for president or to say there necessarily ought to be an independent option. But if we don't see a refocusing of the campaign on a bipartisan approach, I would feel I would want to encourage an independent candidacy."

Unfortunately, well-meaning politicians and pundits alike are dangerously mistaken both when diagnosing the cause of the disease of political polarization and its cure. While Newsweek's Evan Thomas decries "the closing of the American mind" and the Los Angeles Times' Ron Brownstein abhors the "Second Civil War" (where denizens of DailyKos conduct a "a scorched-earth opposition to the GOP"), the Republican Party happily continues its strategy of "divide, suppress and conquer" it pioneered in the 1960's and perfected under Karl Rove. Just as important, the success of that GOP strategy would not have been possible without the advent of the 24/7 infotainment media complex where politics, news and opinion merge into just another form of entertainment. The route of hyperpartisanship is a one-way street where all signs point to the right.

Divide, Suppress and Conquer

Today's politics of polarization has its roots in the 1960's transformation of the Republican Party into a bastion of exclusion and divisiveness. The Civil Rights movement and to a lesser degree Vietnam fueled Kevin Phillip's "Southern Strategy" that drove Richard Nixon and subsequent Republican leaders. While GOP water-carriers like Bruce Bartlett are quick to point out that Southern Democrats "regularly defended segregation and white supremacy throughout most of the 20th century," they ignore the warm welcome they found in the Republican Party after the civil rights movement and the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in the 1960's.

President Lyndon Johnson, who signed those acts into law, presciently predicted, "There goes the South for a generation." Make that two; even as savvy a politician as Johnson severely underestimated the devastation Democrats' support for civil rights would produce among white voters in the South.

As Thomas Frank and others have noted, the eras of Ronald Reagan and Karl Rove completed the devolution of the GOP into the Party of Hate. Advocating retrograde economic policies and other prescriptions consistently opposed by a majority of Americans, the Republican Party aided by the increasingly subservient religious right instead converted political debates into morality plays about good and evil. (The Republicans' drive to impeach Bill Clinton, an inquisition overwhelmingly opposed by most Americans, makes little sense outside this context.) For the GOP, as Lakoff and Frank suggest, potential opponents can be swayed to abandon their self-interest and become allies in the culture wars against those the GOP claims they should fear: African-Americans, gay Americans, immigrants and, of course, Muslims.

That has been the hallmark of Republican politics in the Age of Rove. In their grim electoral calculus, Republicans only care about the "half of the half" that actually vote. That's where the GOP's 25% Solution comes in.

The Republican strategy of "Divide, Suppress and Conquer" is simple. First, fire up the base with red meat issues such as abortion, stem cell research and same-sex marriage, while using the proven conservative "distribution" channel of churches and single issue advocacy groups to get them to the polls. Second, drive down the participation of potential Democratic and independent voters through curbs on registration, unprecedented redistricting, onerous new ID requirements, and brazen polling place eligibility challenges. (Last but certainly not least for the Republican party of Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman, when in doubt, just cheat.)

Despite American's overwhelming preference for Democratic positions virtually across the board, Republicans enjoyed victories in 2000, 2002 and 2004 thanks to divide, suppress and conquer. If not for the scope of the Iraq disaster plus the Jack Abramoff and Mark Foley scandals, the GOP might have retained its hold on Congress in 2006.

Unprecedented GOP Obstructionism

Still, the Republican politics of polarization continued even after Tom Delay's 2006 farewell battle cry that hyperpartisanship "is not a symptom of democracy's weakness but of its health and its strength." With the Democrats now in control of Congress, Republican partisan warfare just took a new form.

While President Bush promised to stay "relevant" with vetoes and recess appointments, the Congressional GOP waged a historically unprecedented campaign of obstructionism to deny the majority Democrats any legislative wins and thus brand theirs a "do nothing Congess.". The GOP's omnispresent talking point of "Up or Down Vote" magically disappeared after November 2006. As Robert Borosage detailed in July, while Democrats in the House kept their promise to pass a raft of legislation including Medicare drug negotiation, the minimum wage, student loan reform and more, Republicans in the Senate stymied overwhelmingly popular bills at every turn:

"Bills with majority support -- raising the minimum wage, ethics reform, a date to remove troops from Iraq, revoking oil subsidies and putting the money into renewable energy, fulfilling the 9/11 commission recommendations on homeland security--get blocked because they can't garner 60 votes to overcome a filibuster."

Former Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott (R-MS) was one of the essential architects of the filibuster fever in the Grand Obstruction Party. While decrying that "the Senate is spiraling into the ground to a degree that I have never seen before" and "all modicum of courtesy is going out the window," Lott was also brutally frank about his strategy to prevent any Democratic wins come hell or high water:

"The strategy of being obstructionist can work or fail. So far it's working for us."

An analysis by McClatchy showed that by July Republicans have already resorted to the filibuster 42 times and on track to block Senate action over 150 times this term, shattering the previous record by almost a factor of three. By December 18th, as the Campaign for America's Future detailed, the GOP easily set the record in just the first year of the 110th Congress:

"62 times conservatives have used the filibuster to block legislation (or force modification of bills) in the first session of the 110th Congress. In just the first year of this two-year Congress, their use of the filibuster in the Senate topped the previous record, reached during the entire 107th Congress."

Politics as Theater

But the undeniable success of the Republican politics of polarization over the past generation would not have been possible without the concomitant transformation of the American media environment.

In a nutshell, American politics must now compete with an oversupply of other entertainment and information sources, from television, radio, books, newspapers and magazines to web sites, online video, Podcasts and more. As I noted in my May 2007 discussion of Al Gore's book The Assault on Reason, in highlighting the peril of the "well-amused audience" that is now the U.S. electorate, Gore may have significantly understated the transformation of American politics. The trends he cites have fundamentally mutated "politics as discourse and debate" into "politics as theater and entertainment."

The result is a 21st century "infotainment complex" where politics, news, opinion and entertainment are virtually indistinguishable. Thus, there is no journalistic search for objective truth. Instead, all controversies are presented as ideological clashes featuring morality plays with two - and only two - sides. In that format, the "best" entertainers are the loudest, most aggressive and most theatrical. As I wrote in a 2005 review of George Lakoff''s Don't Think Like an Elephant, that gives conservative themes and messages a huge built-in advantage:

Politics is now entertainment, part drama and part competition in a passion play where confrontation, conflict, and good versus evil rule the day. In a time of great uncertainty at home and abroad, for overworked Americans awash in sea of information, visceral appeals and gut-level emotions, not data, facts and analysis, cut through the noise.

And that gives the conservative message machine a significant, built-in advantage over liberals. Lakoff's "strict father" model for conservatives is tailor-made for the infotainment media of the 21st century. In this environment, confrontation, indignation, morality plays, good guys and axes of evil naturally dominate political debate, just as they do in Hollywood blockbusters. The initial progress of the liberal Air America Radio notwithstanding, the fury and self-righteousness of Fox News, Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Hannity and Coulter makes for much better theater than "nurturers" like Bill Moyers. Conservatives rage, liberals whine. And rage is much more entertaining.

The resulting damage to American politics and public policy is clear. The United States blindly rushed to war in Iraq, virtually without debate and without opposition. As an October 2003 PIPA survey showed, even after the invasion of Iraq, majorities of Americans continued to believe Bush administration claims about Saddam (Iraq role in 9/11, an alliance between Saddam and Al Qaeda, and Saddam's WMD) all long since proven false. (Unsurprisingly, viewers of Fox News were the most delusional.) As late as July 2006, fully 50% of Americans still believed the discredited claim that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. And as Gore well knows from his experience evangelizing action to curb global warming, the right has been very successful in creating the ephemera of "scientific uncertainty" through the propagation and promotion of hucksterism packaged as legitimate dissent. (For more on the time-tested conservative tactic of undermining reasoned public policy through the creation of uncertainty, see The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney.)

In his excellent book A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency, Glenn Greenwald described the sadly successful but tremendously damaging Manichean politics of George W. Bush and the Republican Party. But even Greenwald underestimates the degree to which a servile press let the Bush administration demonize political opponents and march the United States to war under false pretenses. The American media, especially the cable news outlets, didn't simply fail their test as journalists after 9/11. Much worse, they perpetuated the seismic shift of politics to the realm of entertainment and theater. And in that universe, George W. Bush and the GOP offered the equivalent of a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster. The Republicans simply had the best show going.

The American yearning for national reconciliation, "middle ground" and "third ways" is understandable. Barack Obama's appeal to transcend partisan politics and embrace hope is no doubt a powerful one. But unfortunately, in this environment the way forward is not compromise and conciliation - at least not yet. The claims of Gordon Smith (R-OR) and Susan Collins (R-ME) notwithstanding, there is no longer any such thing as a "moderate Republican." (And there certainly is no GOP equivalent of the "Blue Dog" Democrats.)

Now is not the time to make nice. Democrats must first win convincingly, capture the White House and Congress, and protect the Supreme Court, all before changing the tactics and tone of politics. Reaching out to the other side, enacting need electoral reforms and finding consensus is something Democrats can only do from a position of strength. After all, that philosophy has no place in the Republican Party of Karl Rove.

As the saying goes, you don't bring a knife to a gunfight. And to misappropriate another old saw, there's no substitute for victory.

On Saturday, President Bush scored a triple victory when he quietly signed a bill extending the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) through March 2009. First, the President teed up "socialized medicine" as the definitive 2008 GOP talking point in response to any new health care initiatives coming from the Democratic Party. Second, he added another win for the GOP campaign of obstructionism, blocking Democratic successes at any cost in the hope of painting Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi as leaders of a "do-nothing" Congress. And last, George W. Bush kept intact his consistent record of fierce opposition to the popular children's health insurance program dating back to his days as Governor of Texas. And as in Texas, he went on to claim credit for it.

Unable to override the two Bush vetoes of their $35 billion proposal expanding S-CHIP coverage from 6.6 million to 10 million beneficiaries, the Democratic leadership gave up the fight for now. While Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) vowed to press on ("What we couldn't resolve, the American people will resolve in November") White House spokesman Tony Fratto proclaimed victory:

"We're pleased that the program will be extended and that states can be certain of their funding."

The Bush administration's ultimately successful campaign to block the expansion of the very successful - and wildly popular - S-CHIP program began in earnest this summer. In August, the White House fired the first salvoes in Bush's second war against the insurance program for children. Just two weeks after the House and Senate each approved major expansions of S-CHIP, the Bush administration announced draconian new eligibility rules that would trim thousands of low income children from the rolls. But unlike his Texas two-step when he claimed credit for a program he fought tooth and nail, this time George W. Bush isn't running for anything.

As the New York Times described, the White House quietly dispatched a letter at 7:30 PM on a Friday evening outlining its new curbs on S-CHIP eligibility. With Congress out of session, Dennis Smith of the federal Center for Medicaid and State Operations notified states that they must reach 95% enrollment of families below 200% of the poverty level before they can expand their programs. Of course, no state currently approach the 95% figure today (nationally, almost 30% of eligible children remain unenrolled in S-CHIP). Worse still, several states previously received the federal government's OK to extend their coverage to even higher income levels and more are considering further expansion still:

In New York, which covers children up to 250 percent of the poverty level, the Legislature has passed a bill that would raise the limit to 400 percent - $82,600 for a family of four - but the change is subject to federal approval.

California wants to increase its income limit to 300 percent of the poverty level, from 250 percent. Pennsylvania recently raised its limit to 300 percent, from 200 percent. New Jersey has had a limit of 350 percent for more than five years.

It's no wonder incredulous state health care officials are horrified by the Bush administration's new regulations. Ann Clemency Kohler, deputy commissioner of human services in New Jersey, said "It will cause havoc with our program and could jeopardize coverage for thousands of children."

If this all sounds vaguely familiar, it should. As I wrote in July ("S-CHIP on Bush's Shoulder"), the unfolding saga over children's health insurance is a repeat of then-Governor George W. Bush's performance in Texas. There, Bush first opposed the S-CHIP program and then tried to limit its scope with restrictive income eligibility requirements. Facing certain defeat over the popular program, Governor Bush ultimately caved to public pressure. Of course, he then took credit for it.

As The New Republic noted, we've been here before. In the 1990's, then Texas Governor George W. Bush opposed a bi-partisan effort to expand S-CHIP in his state. Despite Texas' worst-in-the-nation status (then and now) in the percentage of residents without insurance, Bush (then as now) opposed the broadened program on both fiscal and philosophical grounds. As Salon reported in July 2000, Bush tried to limit eligibility to families with incomes at 133% of the poverty line, compared to the 200% standard adopted in most states (and over Bush's opposition, in Texas). Bush's hard line would have kept 200,000 kids off the program's rolls. As it was, the difficult and cumbersome application process limited sign-ups to only 28,000 of the 500,000 children eligible by mid-2000.

None of which stopped George W. Bush taking credit for the program during his 2000 presidential campaign. As Joshua Micah Marshall reported in Salon:

In Bush's press release it says: "When the CHIPs program was first implemented, Governor Bush embraced it as an opportunity to help deliver health coverage to thousands of uninsured children, and signed legislation providing health insurance for more than 423,000 children."

On July 20, 2000, Al Gore made a trip to San Antonio, Texas. Gore described Governor Bush's opposition to the program and the onerous eligibility process he set up to blunt participation by Texas families. "As a result," Gore said, "there are 600,000 children in Texas eligible for health insurance who don't have it." Sadly, Bush never paid a price for stonewalling on S-CHIP and his war against Texas' children.

Now, as Bush prepares to exit the stage, he again is claiming for an S-CHIP bill he furiously opposed. But with his S-CHIP "hat trick" today, George W. Bush may be setting up his Republican Party for a beating in 2008. As a hockey fan will tell you, the player scoring the hat trick of three goals in one game today is likely in for a fight the next time the teams play.

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto has given the White House hopefuls of both parties ample opportunities for grandstanding. While Hillary Clinton predictably played up her past relationship with Bhutto, John McCain touted his foreign policy experience. The co-chair of New Hampshire's Veterans for Rudy Giuliani declared his candidate would chase Muslims "back to their caves." But for the most disturbing - and ironic - reaction, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee is in a class by himself.

Bhutto was killed, Huckabee suggested, because she posed a threat to the fundamentalist vision of the role of women. That vision, it turns out, is not far from his own.

In Iowa on Friday, Huckabee with no apparent sense of irony offered his analysis of the forces that led to Bhutto's doom. As the Huffington Post reported:

Huckabee called Bhutto's death a tragedy, but he suggested she had been a threat to Islamic fundamentalists. "An educated, sophisticated, strong, capable woman leader -- that does pose a threat to those who don't believe that women should be given that platform and that level of equality," Huckabee said.

Americans could be forgiven for their confusion. Huckabee, after all, has made it clear that he himself is one of those "don't believe that women should be given that platform and that level of equality." As I noted previously, in 1998 then Governor Huckabee was one of 131 signatories on a full page ad in USA Today which praised the Southern Baptist Convention, for among other things, its defense of traditional marriage and the subservient position of women. The ad declared:

"You are right because you called husbands to sacrificially love and lead their wives.

You are right because you called wives to graciously submit to their husband's sacrificial leadership.

More importantly, you are right because your statement is based on biblical truth."

Sadly, Huckabee's outrages in the wake of the Bhutto assassination don't end there. On Thursday, the GOP frontrunner again confirmed his foreign policy neophyte status by stating the U.S. needs to consider "what impact does it have on whether or not there's going to be martial law continuing in Pakistan." Reprising his ignorance of the Iran NIE, Huckabee seemed blissfully unaware that Pervez Musharraf lifted martial law restrictions in Pakistan two weeks ago. On Friday, Huckabee suggested that the attack on Bhutto in Rawalpindi, Pakistan required the profiling of Pakistanis coming to the United States:

"We ought to have an immediate, very clear monitoring of our borders and particularly to make sure if there's any unusual activity of Pakistanis coming into the country."

Even as Benazir Bhutto was laid to rest in Pakistan, the U.S. and Musharraf government claimed the assassination was the work of extremists. As Perrspectives documented here and here, Mike Huckabee should know one when he sees one.

UPDATE: Ignoring the old dictum that when in a hole, one should stop digging, the Huckabee campaign continued to embarrass itself in the wake of the Bhutto assassination. After first offering his "apologies" rather his sympathies to the Pakistani people, Governor Huckabee failed geography 101 in placing Afghanistan to the east of Pakistan. In his defense, a Huckabee aide admitted his man has "no foreign policy credentials."

As the Washington Post detailed on Tuesday, the Supreme Court this term will decide a set of voter identification cases which could well determine the outcome of the 2008 election. In a narrow legal sense, the cases will address the constitutionality of new voter ID laws in Indiana and other states. But more important, the Roberts Court will decide whether to rubber stamp an essential tactic in the all-out Republican war to suppress the votes of minority - and likely Democratic - Americans.

The combined cases to be argued on January 9th, Crawford v. Marion County Election Board and Indiana Democratic Party v. Rokita, have their genesis in the wave of draconian new voter identification laws passed by Republican majority statehouses around the nation. As the Post noted, Indiana joined Georgia, Missouri and Arizona in enacting stringent new photo ID requirements for voters, despite a complete absence of polling place fraud in these or any other state:

The state's Republican-led legislature passed the law in 2005 requiring voters to have ID, even though the state had never prosecuted a case of voter impersonation...

...Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita (R) said voter fraud was something he was asked about "almost daily" by constituents. "At the Kiwanis Club, the chamber of commerce groups, people would say, 'Why aren't you asking who I am when I vote?' " Rokita said.

The state law he and the legislature came up with requires voters to show a government-issued photo ID that has an expiration date, such as a driver's license or a passport. Nondrivers can receive an identification card from the Bureau of Motor Vehicles.

To date, the courts have agreed with Rokita. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Indiana law by a 2-1 margin. Unsurprisingly, the Court's two Republican appointees blessed the Indiana Republican tactic. Reagan appointee Judge Richard Posner proclaimed, "It is exceedingly difficult to maneuver in today's America without a photo ID." But Clinton appointee Terence Evans in his dissent stated the obvious motivation and desired outcome of the Hoosier State GOP gambit:

"Let's not beat around the bush: The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic."

Which is exactly right. As I detailed just before the 2006 mid-terms, the Indiana, Georgia and other similar laws are an essential ingredient of the Republican strategy of "Divide, Suppress and Conquer" which aims to drive down the participation of potential Democratic and independent voters through unprecented redistricting, curbs on registration, onerous new ID requirements, and polling place eligibility challenges:

Not content to prevent the enfranchisement of new voters, the GOP is committed to blocking their exercise of the right to vote. At the both the state and federal level, the GOP in the name of battling fraud has put up a raft of new roadblocks and barriers to voting with burdensome voter identification requirements.

The fact that voter fraud in the United States is virtually non-existent doesn't derail Republicans in their quest to block access to the ballot box. Just this year, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission issued a report refuting the myth of fraud at polling places. "There is widespread but not unanimous agreement," the report concluded, "that there is little polling place fraud, or at least much less than is claimed, including voter impersonation, "dead" voters, noncitizen voting and felon voters."

The result is a host of new state laws advanced by Republicans with the transparent aim of suppressing the potential Democratic - and especially black - vote. As Perrspectives reported previously, Georgia's onerous new voter ID card program requiring voters to visit one of the state's limited number of offices, would have trimmed up to 150,000 people (primarily African-Americans and the elderly) from the rolls. (The bill's sponsor, Augusta Republican Sue Burmeister explained that when black voters in her black precincts "are not paid to vote, they don't go to the polls.") Versions of the Georgia law have been ruled unconstitutional twice by federal judge Harold Murphy. And while Indiana's new voter ID law and the milder version in Arizona have to date withstood judicial scrutiny, another measure in Missouri similar to that in Georgia has been blocked during the 2006 elections. In his rebuke to the state of Missouri, Judge Richard Callahan deemed the right to vote "a right and not a license."

Voter suppression has been a centerpiece of the Karl Rove Republican electoral strategy in both the states and within the Bush administration. (While supporting the new voter ID laws, the Bush administration's only prosecution for violations of the 1965 Voting Rights Act was against the African-American head of the Democratic Party in Noxubee County, Mississippi for using coercion and intimidation to prevent the white voters from going to the polls.) Voter suppression, after all, was the primary objective of Alberto Gonzales' purge of United States attorneys. As I wrote in March:

Simply put, the Bush White House planned to systematically drive down the turnout of Democrats and independents at the ballot box through an unaccountable campaign against "voter fraud"...

...While former White House counsel Harriet Miers first raised the specter of replacing all of the prosecutors in early 2005, it was President Bush himself who emphasized the importance of supposed voter fraud to Attorney General Gonzales:

Last October, President Bush spoke with Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales to pass along concerns by Republicans that some prosecutors were not aggressively addressing voter fraud, the White House said Monday. Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, was among the politicians who complained directly to the president, according to an administration official.

The case of Seattle prosecutor John McKay illustrates the Republicans' preoccupation with voter fraud. Washington State Republicans, including Congressman Doc Hastings, were furious at McKay over what they claimed was his inaction on vote fraud in the wake of Democrat Christine Gregoire's 129 vote margin of victory (out of almost 3,000,000 votes cast) in the twice recounted 2004 gubernatorial campaign. On July 5, 2005, Tom McCabe of the Building Industry Association of Washington wrote to Hastings, blunting demanding, "please ask the White House to replace Mr. McKay. If you decide not to do this, let me know why."

In 2008, the Supreme Court will decide whether or not the Republican Party will succeed in its fraudulent campaign against mythical vote fraud. (It does not require a crystal ball to predict where John Roberts and Sam Alito will come down on the issue)) With the Republican Party in danger of losing the White House and yielding even larger Democratic majorities in Congress, the stakes for the GOP are high indeed. The stakes for the American people and the future of American democracy, of course, are much higher.

In one of the most disgusting and disingenuous acts of political misdirection in recent memory, former Reagan and Bush 41 advisor Bruce Bartlett is asking Americans to ignore the Republican Party's racist present and instead focus on the Democratic Party's racist past. Taking to the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Bartlett extracted a catalog of quotes from Jefferson to Biden to document the Democratic Party's' shameful past history when it comes to African-Americans. But no amount of sleight of hand can obscure the inescapable truth of American politics today. It is the GOP which plays to win with the Race Card. And no doubt, the GOP is the Party of Hate.

As a partisan Republican, Bartlett can be forgiven for lamenting the GOP's dismal performance among black and Hispanic voters. (African-American American voters continue to support Democratic candidates by almost 9 to 1 margins; the GOP's xenophobic assault on immigration reversed virtually of George W. Bush's gains among Hispanics, who by the 2006 mid-terms gave Democrats by 69% of their votes.) But his obvious history lessons in his new book (Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past) about post-Civil War Democrats in the South neglect to mention that they virtually all found a new home in the Republican Party in the 1960's:

"They were openly and explicitly for slavery before the Civil War, supported lynching and 'Jim Crow' laws after the war, and regularly defended segregation and white supremacy throughout most of the 20th century."

Most of the 20th century, that is, until the civil rights movement and the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in the 1960's. President Lyndon Johnson, who signed those acts into law, presciently predicted, "There goes the South for a generation." Make that two; even as savvy a politician as Johnson severely underestimated the devastation Democrats' support for civil rights would produce among white voters in the South.

This transformation, apparently the only theory of evolution conservatives understand, is perhaps the defining political reality in the United States today. Many people once believed the earth is flat. Democrats no more believe that now than any of the race-baiting messages produced by the Republican National Committee and its water carriers. The last - and only - bastion of political racism in this country sadly resides in the Party of Lincoln.

As I detailed last year in "The Amazing Race Card," Nixon's southern Strategy is alive and well in today's Republican Party. The party's efforts policies, messages, slurs and gaffes in the Bush White House, on Capitol Hill and in the states:

"...are only the latest signs that racial bigotry is not the exception in the GOP, but perhaps the rule itself...

...Clearly, today's Republicans have no claim to the mantle of the "Party of Lincoln." As Joe Klein described it, the race card in Karl Rove's hands is no accident, but key to the GOP strategy for the 2006 mid-term elections: "if things get really desperate, he will play the race card, as Republicans have ever since they sided against the civil rights movement in the 1960s."

And Republican racism and fear-mongering hardly ended with the GOP's crushing defeat in the 2006 midterm elections. As I documented just last month in "The Party of Hate":

"In Washington, House Minority Leader John Boehner is struggling to rebrand a downtrodden and disheartened Republican Party in time for the 2008 elections. It's no wonder. Its agenda stymied and burdened by an unpopular war and an even less popular President, the GOP is being pulverized in the polls. And with its evangelical base splintered and big business supporters jumping ship, the only message seemingly uniting Republicans is disdain - of immigrants, of blacks, of gay Americans and above all, Muslims. The GOP is now the Party of Hate."

The degree to which Ronald Reagan was himself a skillful player of the race card with his symbolic 1980 speech at Philadelphia, Mississippi (as Paul Krugman would suggest and conservative stalwarts like Bruce Bartlett and David Brooks would reject) may be open for debate. But the omnipresent racism and none-to-thinly veiled racial appeals of the Republican Party is beyond dispute.

Democrat Woodrow Wilson is dead. The race card is alive and well in today's Republican Party.

For more background on the evolution of GOP into the Party of Hate, see:

UPDATE: For an excellent discussion of Bartlett's subterfuge, visit Matthew Yglesias. There, the author himself shows up - and get smacked down.

In an unprecedented and blistering "undorsement" on Saturday, the Concord Monitor implored New Hampshire voters not to support GOP White House hopeful Mitt Romney under any circumstances. Labeling Romney "a disquieting figure" who "most surely must be stopped," the Monitor profiled the serial flip-flopper whose pronouncements on national security and civil liberties issues "are often chilling." Just how chilling, it turns out, Salon's Glenn Greenwald detailed the very next day.

While Americans by now have grown accustomed to Romney's tough talk and testosterone-addled posturing on terrorism (conflating all Muslims, pledging to "double" Gitmo, saying of Bin Laden, "he's going to pay, and he will die" ), little light had been shed on his truly extreme views of presidential power. Until now.

On Sunday, Greenwald dissected a revealing survey of the presidential candidates by the Boston Globe's Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Charlie Savage. Savage asked each of the leading Democratic and GOP candidates a dozen questions concerning national security, presidential powers and American civil liberties. And as Greenwald details, Romney's responses were truly alarming, extending "even beyond what the Bush/Cheney cadre of authoritarian legal theorists have claimed."

In a set of mind-boggling claims for the unlimited expansion of presidential power ("the President must also protect the prerogatives of his Office"; "so long as they do not impinge upon the President's constitutional authority"; "remain faithful to commander-in-chief powers and obligations to keep this country safe"), one Romneyism stands out. In a nutshell, for Romney Americans' civil liberties must always take a back seat to war-time presidential powers:

1. Does the president have inherent powers under the Constitution to conduct surveillance for national security purposes without judicial warrants, regardless of federal statutes?

Intelligence and surveillance have proven to be some of the most effective national security tools we have to protect our nation. Our most basic civil liberty is the right to be kept alive and the President should not hesitate to use every legal tool at his disposal to keep America safe.

Here, Mitt Romney is merely echoing the now standard Republican "Give Me Death" defense of infringing upon Americans' civil liberties. As I wrote in February 2006, Pat Roberts (R-KS), Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and John Cornyn (R-TX) are just some of the GOP leading lights making that dangerous and disgusting case:

During brief comments to the press, Sessions referring to the rightness of Bush's domestic spying after 9/11 declared melodramatically:

"Over 3,000 Americans have no civil rights because they are no longer with us."

The Republican leadership is singing from the same Karl Rove fear-mongering hymnal to justify the President's lawbreaking. On February 3rd, Kansas Senator Pat Roberts, who has stonewalled the Phase II investigation into the misuses of pre-Iraq war intelligence, similarly claimed:

"You really don't have any civil liberties if you're dead."

Roberts, who also authored a vitriolic 19-page letter defending the NSA domestic surveillance program, merely followed in the footsteps of Senator John Cornyn. Cornyn, a Texas Republican, said on December 20, 2005:

"None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead."

Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold responded with Patrick Henry's clarion call, "Give me liberty of give me death."

In its often-hilarious editorial, the Concord Monitor aptly portrays the robotic Romney. "If you were building a Republican presidential candidate from a kit," the paper suggested, in addition to the perfect hair, beautiful wife and business career, "you'd pour in some old GOP bromides." And when it comes to violating Americans' constitutionally-protected liberties, you would end up with Mitt Romney.

On Friday, right-wing mouthpiece and failed Bush Labor nominee Linda Chavez demonstrated the Iron Law of Republican scandal management. Claiming the CIA official purportedly responsible for destroying detainee interrogation tapes "deserves a medal," Chavez showed the conservative commitment to rewarding those who conceal White House wrong-doing. The corollary, of course, is the GOP Payback Principle: those exposing Bush administration criminality should be prosecuted.

In her Friday column titled "Destroying CIA Tapes Deserves a Thank You," Chavez argued that the 2005 decision by Jose Rodriguez, then-head of the CIA's clandestine service, should be lauded. Chavez expressed her gratitude that Rodriguez destroyed evidence of "enhanced interrogation techniques" such as waterboarding, acts which may have violated U.S. law and American treaty commitments:

In the next few months, his name will likely be dragged through the mud, and he will be vilified as a rogue official engaged in a massive cover-up. I think he deserves a medal...

Even though he is likely to become a scapegoat, what he did was right. He protected not just his men but all of us. I, for one, thank him.

If Chavez wants to pin medals on those who help President Bush avoid a black eye, John Gibson from Fox News wants to bestow honors on those who exact revenge on Bush's opponents. Last month, Gibson cheered the White House operation to out covert CIA operative Valerie Plame as retribution for her husband Joe Wilson's July 2003 op-ed debunking President Bush's bogus claims about Iraq seeking uranium in Niger. Ending the classified career of CIA agent deeply involved in critical nuclear proliferation work and compromising her global network was essential, Gibson argued, because "this was about an anti-Bush cabal at the CIA" that needed to be "rooted out." Again, this right-wing water carrier declared, there ought to be a medal:

"I'm the guy who said a long, long time ago that whoever outed Valerie Plame should get a medal. And if it was Karl Rove, I'd pin it on him myself."

Unsurprisingly, President Bush's amen corner was none too pleased when CIA director George Tenet (himself a later Bush medal recipient) called for the Justice Department to investigate the outing of Plame. After all, she was, in Karl Rove's words, "fair game."

But while conservatives opposed a DOJ investigation into the Plame outing, they are positively ecstatic about the prospect of going after CIA agent John Kiriakou in the CIA tapes case. For reasons that remain unclear, Kiriakou came forward with an account of the interrogation and waterboarding of Al Qaeda terrorist Abu Zubaydah. In murky and often contradictory interviews with ABC News, the Washington Post and other media outlets earlier this month, Kiriakou claimed that Zubaydah "broke" after 35 seconds of waterboarding. Despite Kiriakou's unsupported claim that the interrogation disrupted "maybe dozens" of Al Qaeda attacks, he also concluded that the harsh techniques used were "torture."

CIA officials are said to be "furious" with Kiriakou and have asked the Justice Department to launch a criminal probe into whether he disclosed classified information. [It is worth noting that Kiriakou's lawyer Mark Zaid called this "both expected and normal," adding "It is a routine act that the CIA undertakes even when they know no violation has occurred."] But unlike in the Plame affair, this time the conservative chattering classes are thrilled with the inquiry. As the right-wing blog Atlas Shrugs put it:

"When did we stop prosecuting seditious behavior? When did we stop defending the sanctity of war time classified information...Send the bastard to jail!"

For conservatives, of course, the ultimate in payback for the leaking of information detailed President Bush's clandestine criminality involves NSA domestic surveillance. Clearly illegal before the passage of FISA revisions in the August "Protect America Act," the regime of illicit NSA spying on Americans was one Bush's allies wanted to conceal at all costs.

As it turned out, hell hath no fury like a conservative scorned. After the revelations about the NSA program by the New York Times, President Bush on December 19, 2005 raged about what he deemed "a shameful act" that is "helping the enemy". Claiming he didn't order an investigation, Bush added "the Justice Department, I presume, will proceed forward with a full investigation" At a subsequent press conference that same day, Alberto Gonzales suggested the retribution that was to come:

"As to whether or not there will be a leak investigation, as the President indicated, this is really hurting national security, this has really hurt our country, and we are concerned that a very valuable tool has been compromised. As to whether or not there will be a leak investigation, we'll just have to wait and see."

The FBI raid of the home of suspected NSA leaker Thomas Tamm reported in August 2007 was not enough to quell Republican calls for revenge in the NSA case. For the goose-steppers in President Bush's amen corner, retribution against those bringing the White House's crimes and misdeeds to light can't come soon - or harshly - enough. The day after the Tamm raid in the NSA case, Gabriel Schoenfeld took to the pages of Commentary to renew his 2006 claim that the New York Times should be prosecuted under federal criminal statutes, if not the Espionage Act of 1917. Ironically, Schoenfeld wanted the Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau to get the Judith Miller treatment:

"If Risen and Lichtblau promised their source confidentiality, they might choose not to testify. That would potentially place them, like Judith Miller in the Libby investigation, in contempt of court and even land them in prison."

And on and on it goes. For the conservative chattering classes, Bush opponents and whistleblowers should face prosecution for the patriotic act of revealing White House criminality. For the likes of Linda Chavez and John Gibson, those who conceal the administration's crimes or smear the brave Americans who bring them to light are deserving of medals.

That honor, as Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Bremer, George Tenet and Tommy Franks all demonstrated, is one President Bush used to reserve only for the incompetent.

The similarities between President Bush and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, it would appear, are seemingly endless. On Wednesday. Putin followed in Bush's footsteps as the 2007 recipient of the Time Man of the Year. And now, Putin too has grand plans to reap a financial windfall upon leaving office. As it turns out, though, the scope and scale of Putin's post-presidential avarice puts George W. Bush to shame.

As we learned from Bush biographer Robert Draper back in September, the President is looking forward to cashing in just as soon as he leaves the Oval Office. As the New York Times recounted:

First, Mr. Bush said, "I'll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol' coffers." With assets that have been estimated as high as nearly $21 million, Mr. Bush added, "I don't know what my dad gets - it's more than 50-75" thousand dollars a speech, and "Clinton's making a lot of money."

Then he said, "We'll have a nice place in Dallas," where he will be running what he called "a fantastic Freedom Institute" promoting democracy around the world. But he added, "I can just envision getting in the car, getting bored, going down to the ranch."

Last week, departing Mississippi Senator Trent Lott provided more speculative fodder regarding Bush's life after the White House. As the Washington Post detailed on Wednesday:

This week, as Lott was preparing to retire from the Senate, he found himself yukking it up with the president at the White House.

Lott told On the Hill that Bush even joked that he may join the Mississippian in the lobbying sector. Lott is considering going to work with longtime friend John Breaux, the former Democratic senator from Louisiana who bolted from the Patton Boggs lobbying firm to launch his own shop starting next month.

But Bush's plans pale in comparison to the ill-gotten riches awaiting his "good friend" Vladimir Putin at the conclusion of his days in the Kremlin. As the Guardian, the Washington Post and other outlets have reported, Putin has secured a fortune which may approach $40 billion.

With his hand-picked successor Dmitry Medvedev in line to replace him as President, Putin is seeking to reap the rewards of his relationships with Russia's energy oligarchs even as continues to pull the strings behind the scenes. As the Guardian detailed on Friday, Putin is fighting to secure multi-billion assets in Swiss banks and off-shore accounts:

Citing sources inside the president's administration, [Russian political expert Stanislav] Belkovsky claims that after eight years in power Putin has secretly accumulated more than $40bn...The sum would make him Russia's - and Europe's - richest man.

In an interview with the Guardian, Belkovsky repeated his claims that Putin owns vast holdings in three Russian oil and gas companies, concealed behind a "non-transparent network of offshore trusts".

Putin "effectively" controls 37% of the shares of Surgutneftegaz, an oil exploration company and Russia's third biggest oil producer, worth $20bn, he says. He also owns 4.5% of Gazprom, and "at least 75%" of Gunvor, a mysterious Swiss-based oil trader, founded by Gennady Timchenko, a friend of the president's, Belkovsky alleges.

That is what George W. Bush would call replenishing the 'ol coffers. It's no wonder the failed energy executive turned American president said of his Russian counterpart in 2001:

"I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul. I knew that President Putin was a man with whom I could work."

In a Belfast courtroom Thursday, a judge acquitted electrician Sean Hoey, accused of the 1998 bombing that killed 29 people in Omagh, Northern Ireland.  But while coverage of the story in Northern Ireland, Ireland and the UK focused on DNA evidence, police incompetence and the legacy of past terror incidents, many American newspapers had a different agenda altogether.  The Oregonian and other news outlets instead chose to turn the Omagh verdict into anti-abortion propaganda.

In Belfast, Dublin and London, coverage detailed the ruling - and the reaction of devastated families - in the case Justice Reg Weir deemed "one of the worst atrocities of the Troubles."  In the LA Times, William K. Graham and Kim Murphy also reported the judge's disgust with the "slapdash approach" of the police, which led to the acquittal of Hoey.  In their story titled "Suspect Acquitted in N. Ireland Bombing," they wrote:

The defendant was charged with 29 counts of murder in the 1998 bombing of the shopping district in Omagh that left 29 dead, including a woman pregnant with twins, and 370 injured. [emphasis mine]

But that's not how the Oregonian, the San Jose Mercury News and the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette presented the same Graham-Murphy story from the LA Times and Washington Post.  The print edition of the Oregonian (the online version ran only an AP account) ran the same article under the headline "Defendant Acquitted in Blast That Killed 31."  The Oregonian edited the paragraph above to read:

The defendant was charged with 29 counts of murder in the 1998 bombing of the shopping district in Omagh that left 31 dead, including unborn twins, and 370 injured.  [emphasis mine]

While Reuters, AP and another Washington Post piece only referred the 29 killed in the case (and thus the 29 counts against Hoey), the San Jose Mercury News mentioned only that the bombing "left 31 dead and 370 injured."  The Fort Wayne web site used the same language as the Oregonian (left 31 dead, including unborn twins, and 370 injured).

Clearly, the Oregonian and other news outlets made a conscious decision to inject the rhetoric and tactics of the anti-abortion movement into their reporting of Omagh.  Reprising the debate over the murder of Laci Peterson and the Unborn Victims of Violence Act signed into law by President Bush in April 2004, the Oregonian conferred personhood on the fetus where the law - and media - in Northern Ireland did not.  This slippery slope tactic of the opponents of reproductive rights may now be legally codified in many states in the U.S., but it had no place in the coverage of the Omagh trial.

The Omagh tragedy is a story of terrorism, sectarian schism and the legacy of colonialism in a Northern Ireland now finally enjoying the first glimmers of peace and self-rule.  Instead, the Oregonian turned it into an opportunity for pro-life propaganda.

Americans watching President Bush on Thursday could be forgiven for confusing his press conference with the movie Groundhog Day. In the 1993 film, Bill Murray wakes each morning only to realize he's reliving the previous day. Discussing the mushrooming CIA tapes scandal yesterday, President Bush claimed he had no recollection of knowing about the tapes' destruction in 2005 until briefed by CIA director Michael Hayden last month. Of course, that's virtually the same line he offered regarding the controversial Iran NIE just two weeks earlier. And as it turns out, Bush has been reading from the same script ever since the 2003 Plamegate affair.

Asked Thursday about his previous knowledge of and support for the 2005 destruction of secret CIA detainee interrogation tapes, President Bush did what comes naturally - he played dumb:

"The first recollection is when Mike Hayden briefed me. That's pretty clear. Secondly, I am confident that the preliminary inquiry conducted by the AG and the IG of the CIA, coupled with the oversight provided by the Congress, will end up enabling us all to find out what exactly happened. And therefore, over the course of these inquiries and oversight hearings, I'm going to reserve judgment until I find out the full facts."

President Bush first debuted his version of Alberto Gonzales' Sgt. Schultz defense regarding the CIA torture tapes 9 days earlier during an interview with ABC's Martha Raddatz:

"My first recollection of whether the tapes existed or whether they were destroyed was when [CIA Director] Michael Hayden briefed me," Bush said.

"There's a preliminary inquiry going on and I think you'll find that a lot more data, facts will be coming out," he said, "that's good. It will be interesting to know what the true facts are."

(It is worth noting that President Bush's pleas of ignorance were central to the White House's attack on the New York Times on Wednesday. When the Times reported that top administration lawyers were involved in meetings with the CIA leadership over the tapes, press secretary Dana Perino cited Bush's "no recollection" statement to successfully counter the charge that the "White House Role Was Wider Than It Said.")

If President Bush's evasion in the CIA tapes imbroglio sounds familiar, it should. After all, he deployed virtually the same language when describing the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran released earlier this month.

On December 4, President Bush faced withering criticism for his recent inflammatory "World War III" statements and other fear-mongering belied by the just released NIE. Again, Bush played dumb. Despite overwhelming evidence that he knew about the conclusions of the NIE and Iran's cessation of its nuclear weapons program no later than August, President Bush claimed he'd just been briefed:

BUSH: I was made aware of the NIE last week. In August, I think it was John - Mike McConnell came in and said, We have some new information. He didn't tell me what the information was. He did tell me it was going to take a while to analyze...

REPORTER: Are you saying at no point while the rhetoric was escalating, as World War III was making it into conversation - at no point, nobody from your intelligence team or your administration was saying, Maybe you want to back it down a little bit?

BUSH: No - I've never - nobody ever told me that.

Bush's formula tried and true scandal deflection formula of proclaiming both his ignorance and his desire to know the "full facts" dates back at least to the Plamegate affair. On October 7, 2003, a comically nonchalant Bush pretended he wanted to get to the bottom of the outing of covert CIA operation Valerie Plame, skullduggery which involved at least four members of his administration:

"I mean this town is a -- is a town full of people who like to leak information. And I don't know if we're going to find out the senior administration official. Now, this is a large administration, and there's a lot of senior officials. I don't have any idea. I'd like to. I want to know the truth. That's why I've instructed this staff of mine to cooperate fully with the investigators -- full disclosure, everything we know the investigators will find out. I have no idea whether we'll find out who the leaker is -- partially because, in all due respect to your profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers. But we'll find out."

As it turned out, not so much. After then-press secretary Scott McClellan disastrously announced the innocence of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, the Bush White House quickly shifted to the new "ongoing investigation" talking point. As Dana Perino demonstrated again with the CIA tapes case ("I'm not able to comment on anything...except for what I said on Friday - which is now, and since then, the Justice Department and the CIA have started a preliminary inquiry"), that old canard remains a White House scandal-fighting staple.

So we're being treated to the Groundhog Day presidency of George W. Bush. Or as Yogi Berra famously put it, "it's deja vu all over again."

These last few days have not been kind to Rudy Giuliani. New revelations in the Bernard Kerik case are keeping the spotlight on the former New York mayor's ethical woes. New polls show Giuliani's national lead in the GOP White House race has evaporated and the prospect of dual losses in Iowa and New Hampshire threaten his national campaign strategy. Adding insult to injury, Giuliani checked into a Missouri hospital yesterday after experiencing flu-like symptoms.

But in one aspect of his life, at least, there was a little good news. A new study on the impact of divorce suggests that the serially-married Giuliani isn't necessarily as terrible a parent as most Americans assume.

The research from the University of Alberta concludes that divorced parents do just as good a job at raising their children as married couples. The study followed 5,000 Canadian children in two-parent households beginning in 1994 and then examined changes in the parenting practices between the intact families and the 200 households subsequently experiencing divorce. Researchers then surveyed the parents about three classes of parenting behaviors, including "nurturing" (involving praise, play and laughter), "consistency" (following through on promises of rewards or punishment) and "punishment" (manner of addressing their children's misbehavior).

The results generally showed no differences between the divorced and stably married parents. Parental education and income levels, however, did appear to have an impact. Parents with no more than a high school education became less consistent over time, relying more on punishment. Households in lower income brackets also displayed less nurturing behavior than their wealthier counterparts.

Lisa Strohschein, a sociologist at the University of Alberta who worked on the study summed up the surprising results:

"My findings that parenting practices are unrelated to divorce appear to fly in the face of accepted wisdom.

Some parents may overcompensate and be extra-conscientious, and there are definitely some parents who do have problems parenting afterwards. But on average, parents don't change their behavior"

"Undoubtedly, some parents will be overwhelmed and unable to cope with the demands of parenting in the post-divorce period, but the expectation that all parents will be negatively affected by divorce is unfounded."

How there children do, of course, is another matter and there the data is more mixed. A 2003 Ohio State study showed that many of the problems observed in the teenage children of divorced parents are evident long before the divorce is final. 2006 research at the University of Florida found that while children of divorced parents don't perform as well academically, "girls whose parents divorced do better in school than girls from similarly troubled families whose parents went to the brink of divorce but remained married." These and other studies suggest it is parental conflict, and not separation, that principally triggers problems for children.

Of course, the debate rages on and the research continues. A 2003 USA article described the battle between different camps (and agendas) in the assessing the impact of divorce on children. Elizabeth Marquardt from the Institute for American Values, a think tank on "family issues," rejects the "adult-centered" notion of the "good divorce", arguing "a divided family often requires children to confront a whole set of challenges that children in married-parent, intact families do not have to face." In contrast, sociologist Constance Ahrons noted that "an accumulating body of knowledge based on many studies that show only minor differences between children of divorce and those from intact families, and that the great majority of children with divorced parents reach adulthood to lead reasonably fulfilling lives."

The relationship of the twice-divorced Giuliani with his children has unfortunately become grist for the media mill. In March, news outlets reported that Giuliani's daughter was actually a supporter of Democrat Barack Obama and described frosty relations between father and son Andrew. (Andrew later rejected that assessment, claiming "That story was overdone," he says. "It was nowhere near as bad as the story made it sound.")

Still, the challenge is clear for Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Fred Thompson and other frequently marrying, would-be leaders of the supposed party of family values. In early 2007, a Gallup survey found that 28% of Americans would not vote for someone who is on his third marriage. (No doubt, clandestinely spending taxpayer dollars on Hamptons romps with his then-mistress now wife Judith Nathan isn't helping matters for Giuliani.)

Rudy Giuliani may or may not be a rotten father. Regardless, the data suggests being twice divorced probably has little to do with it one way or the other. And to be sure, there are many more important reasons to never, ever vote for the man.

This morning Time named Russian President Vladmir Putin its 2007 Man of the Year. It is altogether fitting that Time selected Putin as a successor to two-time winner George W. Bush. Like his friend the American president, Putin for good or ill (mostly ill) has made his nation a major force in global affairs. And as Time notes, he did so "at significant cost to the principles that free nations prize."

The similarities to his American counterpart are striking. In using his cult of personality to ensure the continuation of his leadership, Putin resembled the 2004 Man of the Year recipient Bush, who Time recognized for "reshaping the rules of politics to fit his ten gallon style." And Putin's dark machinations in the just completed election (which produced a massive majority for his United Russia party and a certain premiership to let Putin manipulate his pliable, hand-chosen successor) are eerily reminiscent of Bush's triumph in 2000. "41's son," as Time noted then, was "elected President in the most controversial fashion."

From the beginning of his presidency, George W. Bush sensed that Vladimir Putin, the former KGB chief, was a fellow traveler. In November 2001, President Bush famously proclaimed:

"I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul. I knew that President Putin was a man with whom I could work."

As it turned out, Bush was wrong that "the more I get to see his heart and soul...the more I know we can work together in a positive way." From the Iranian nuclear program to U.S. plans for a missile shield in eastern Europe, Putin has thwarted President at almost every turn.

And yet Putin remains the "good friend" Bush described in 2001. Their connection, apparently, is much deeper than mere policy disputes. As his past statements and domestic policies suggest, George W. Bush shares Putin's dim view of democracy:

"A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it." (President George W. Bush, July 26, 2001.)

"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." (President-elect George W. Bush, December 18, 2000.)

"You don't get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier." (Texas Governor George W. Bush, July 1998)

Bush, of course, was extolling the virtues of dictatorship in jest. Sadly, the joke was on us.

UPDATE: On Thursday, President Bush with no sense of irony offered this assessment of Putin's selection by Time:

"I presume they put him on there because he was a consequential leader. And the fundamental question is, consequential to what end? What will the country look like 10 years from now? My hope, of course, is that Russia is a country that understands there needs to be checks and balances."

As Perrspectives noted previously, the Romney clan will never be mistaken for the Fighting Sullivans. In August, Rachel Griffiths of Milan, Illinois asked Romney about the non-service of his privileged sons, one of whom was at the tim completing a 99 county tour of Iowa in a campaign RV. Romney's answer was, well, Romneyesque:

"My sons are all adults and they've made decisions about their careers and they've chosen not to serve in the military and active duty and I respect their decision in that regard. One of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is helping me get elected because they think I'd be a great president. I respect that and respect all those and the way they serve this great country."

Clearly, Romney viewed his own campaign as his sons' ultimate sacrifice for their nation. But this week in Londonderry, New Hampshire, he showed his own support for the war in Iraq by manufacturing ersatz tears while contemplating the hypothetical loss of one of his non-servings sons. As the AP reported:

The soldiers that I was with stood at attention and saluted," Romney told employees at Insight Technology Inc., a company that makes infrared optical equipment for U.S. troops. "And I put my hand on my heart, and tears begin to well in your eyes, as you can imagine in a circumstance like that. I have five boys of my own. I imagined what it would be like to lose a son in a situation like that.

As the 1994 Planned Parenthood flap suggests, Romney would do better to imagine what it would be like to lose in Iowa.

Running against Ted Kennedy for the Massachusetts Senate seat back in 1994, Mitt Romney needed to prove his pro-choice bona fides. In addition to his proclamation that abortion should be "safe and legal in this country," Romney bolstered his pro-choice facade through his wife Ann's $150 contribution to Planned Parenthood. (Romney maintained that position through his 2002 gubernatorial campaign, declaring "I fully respect and will fully protect a woman's right to choose.")

All of which posed a major problem for Romney as his prepared for 2008 run for the GOP presidential nomination and its minefield of religious right primary voters. Romney didn't merely complete a total flip-flop on the abortion issue, proclaiming "my political philosophy is pro-life". He claimed he had "no recollection" of his wife's contribution to Planned Parenthood. Romney spokesman Kevin Madden added that Mrs. Romney was also experiencing selective amnesia, noting "As Mrs. Romney has stated previously, she is unfamiliar with the circumstances of a check she wrote close to 14 years ago."

As it turns out, not so much. This morning, ABC News published a photograph showing the Romneys was a Planned Parenthood fundraising "house party" in Cohasset, Massachusetts in June 1994 with Nicki Nichols Gamble, the organization's president and CEO. And unlike the Romneys, Ms. Gamble seems to remember the event very well:

"They were both there, and I remember very well chatting with both of them, and talking about his support for the pro-choice agenda. We talked about the fact that he was taking a pro-choice position on the issues, and we were very pleased about that."

And so once again, Mitt Romney falls victim to his own gymnastic flip-flopping. Like Woody Allen's Zelig, Romney is a human chameleon, whose infinite desire to please leads him to change his positions - even his identity itself - as the latitude, longitude and time zone dictate.

Here, then, are 10 More Moments in Mike Huckabee's Extremism:
11. Huckabee Vows to Take Nation Back for Christ
12. Huckabee Declares Culture War in 1998 Book
13. Huckabee Declares Women Should Graciously Submit to Their Husbands
14. Huckabee Predicts Victory over Islam at the End of Times
15. Huckabee Boasts About Theology Degree He Doesn't Have
16. Huckabee Destroys His State Computer Records - and Church Sermons
17. Huckabee Offers State Appointments in Exchange for Gifts
18. Huckabee Uses Wedding Registries to Furnish New Home
19. Huckabee Offers Clemency to Repeat DWI Offender (and GOP Donor)
20. Huckabee Intervenes to Save Dog-Killing Son from Legal Jeopardy

11. Huckabee Vows to Take Nation Back for Christ

While most presidential hopefuls usually vow to take back Washington for the American people, Mike Huckabee has another recipient in mind.

In 1998, Governor Huckabee explained to the National Pastors Conference why gave up his church pulpit for the bully pulpit:

"I didn't get into politics because I thought government had a better answer. I got into politics because I knew government didn't have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives...I hope we answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ."

(With his recent insinuations about Mitt Romney's Mormon faith, Huckabee is clear that his gift of America is for Jesus, and not his supposed brother Satan.)

In case there was any doubt, Huckbee's campaign advertising tells the story. In Iowa, his TV spots proclaim (in all capital letters) that Mike Huckabee is a CHRISTIAN LEADER. And now in new ads, Huckabee tells voters of all faiths that at this time of year:

"What really matters is the celebration of the birth of Christ and being with our family and our friends."

With Bill O'Reilly decrying a mythical "war on Christmas" and Tony Snow proclaiming a liberal "war on God," Mike Huckabee sounds more like a Fox News anchor and less like a President of the United States.

12. Huckabee Declares Culture War in 1998 Book

In advance of a White House run, most would-be presidential candidates author the obligatory book featuring a heroic biography and bland policy prescriptions. But as David Corn reports, in 1998 Mike Huckabee instead penned a declaration of culture war in his vituperative tome, Kids Who Kill: Confronting Our Culture of Violence.

While Huckabee today claims to be a "uniter" ("We've got to be the united people of the United States"), in 1998 he was anything but. Written the wake of a Jonesboro, Arkansas school shooting, Huckabee laid virtually of all of America's ills at the feet of everyone - and everything - he hates:

"Despite all our prosperity, pomp, and power, the vaunted American experiment in liberty seems to be disintegrating before our very eyes."

"Abortion, environmentalism, AIDS, pornography, drug abuse, and homosexual activism have fragmented and polarized our communities."

"It is now difficult to keep track of the vast array of publicly endorsed and institutionally supported aberrations - from homosexuality and pedophilia to sadomasochism and necrophilia."

Even in the aftermath of last week's tragic Colorado church shootings by one of their own, don't expect Huckabee to revisit his thesis.

13. Huckabee Declares