We have your winners! Golden Dukes Awards announced right now. Click here to see who won.
In a final weekend push, Rick Santorum goes on the radio with an ad touting praise from Sarah Palin.
A number of times over recent months I’ve noted the importance of the ‘Murdoch Primary‘, the battle for the support of the far-flung News Corp/Murdoch media-political empire. The most visible face of it today is Fox News, the dominating national conservative cable news outlet. But that’s only one tentacle. There’s also the New York Post, an important news vector and particularly significant in the New York media world where a big chunk of the political media lives. Then there’s the higher-brow and deeply influential Wall Street Journal editorial page, owned by Murdoch as of about four years ago. And don’t forget all the British Murdoch papers that help seed political stories into the US press while only having nominal levels of US audience in themselves. Read More
Today’s the day. Like every year for the last 5 years, today we’re announcing the winners of this year’s Golden Duke Awards. The Dukes are our annual awards program honoring great feats in public corruption, scandal and all betrayals of the public trust. You nominated the nominees for this year’s Dukes. And our judges (Jack Abramoff, Gene Weingarten, Hendrik Hertzberg, Dahlia Lithwick, Susie Bright and Twitter phenom @PourMeCoffee) have been toiling away for the last week separating from merely scandalous from the truly scrumptiously awful to bring you this year’s winners.
So who won this year for Best Scandal — General Interest? or Meritorious Achievement in the Crazy? The announcement is only hours away? Come back later this afternoon to hear the ugly truth!
The candidate performing best among evangelicals in the Iowa polls is not who you think it is.
Mitt’s son starts pushing for Obama’s ‘birth certificate’ and grades to be released.
Evan McMorris-Santoro’s latest dispatch from Iowa, where Mitt Romney was rallying supporters outside a Hy-Vee grocery store
One more data point on the Rick Santorum surge: A poll just out from “We Ask America” has Santorum sitting in second place behind Romney with 17 percent.
About a month ago, when Newt’s numbers were shooting the moon, I wrote that as much as the numbers suggested otherwise there was simply no way the GOP establishment would let Newt Gingrich take the nomination. Just too stupid an idea, too suicidal for the party and everything connected to it.
That was no great insight. And I’m chagrined to say I briefly wavered in my certainty that Newt simply couldn’t happen — the numbers were just so strong!But I’m thinking back on it now because at the time a lot of TPM Readers wrote in to say, what Republican establishment? Who is this Republican establishment and how’d they make out against Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell in 2010? Just what levers does this ‘establishment’ have access to? What exactly would this establishment smackdown look like? Read More