Which presidential wannabes are announcing when and where? Here’s our quick guide.

Hmmm. From TPM Reader RP …

Last we heard was just before the elections, now comes this news, out of the blue that Saddam has to be sentenced within the next 30 days. Would it not then put it right before the state of the union address so that the Commander-in-chief and after all the surge in negative discussion from the announcement about a surge in troops. Is the surge even to stem the violence backlash from the sentencing. I am not wiling to overlook any conspiracy theory by this corrupt bunch.

DC lobbying giant Dutko Worldwide behind election robocalls.

Carroll (Iowa) Daily Times Herald reporter explains why Obama could win the Iowa caucuses.

Uhhhh-boy … Dennis Prager, take two …

If you want to predict on which side an American will line up in the Culture War wracking America, virtually all you have to do is get an answer to this question: Does the person believe in the divinity and authority of the Five Books of Moses, the first five books of the Bible, known as the Torah? (“Divinity” does not necessarily mean “literalism.”)

I do not ask this about “the Bible” as a whole because the one book that is regarded as having divine authority by believing Jews, Catholics, Protestants and Mormons, among others, is not the entire Bible, but the Torah. Religious Jews do not believe in the New Testament and generally confine divine revelation even within the Old Testament to the Torah and to verses where God is cited by the prophets, for example. But “Bible-believing” Christians and Jews do believe in the divinity of the Torah.

And they line up together on virtually every major social/moral issue.

And then the kicker: “This divide explains why the wrath of the Left has fallen on those of us who lament the exclusion of the Bible at a ceremonial swearing-in of an American congressman. The Left wants to see that book dethroned. And that, in a nutshell, is what the present civil war is about.”

Sometimes you have a hate-hawker like Prager’s become and they step in it and he just can’t let go. Just has to keep looking for someone to blame. Keep diggin’…

The Pentagon’s dropping big bucks to build a courthouse at Gitmo — to try 80 prisoners. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.

Gallup has put out a blurb noting that Gerald Ford was apparently one of the least popular presidents of the post-WW2 era, coming in with an average of 47.2%. A quick run-down at the Gallup site tells the basic story. He comes in in the low 70s. That ends quickly a month later when he pardons Richard Nixon. That brings him down to 50%. And he goes down hill from there, punctuated by bad news out of Southeast Asia. Given that he was picking up the pieces of the Nixon presidency, it seems like a bit of an unfair measure. But there it is.

Rudy starts recruiting 9/11 relatives for his Presidential campaign.

It’s interesting to see how much contrary opinion Gerald Ford kicks up even more than thirty years after the events that will forever define him in American history — the denouement of the Watergate scandal and his presidency which was inevitably defined by it. In noting his historically low approval ratings in the post below I had actually meant primarily to point out that this seems like a harsh measure for his presidency — since he was coming off a low-point in public trust in the presidency and didn’t serve long enough to rebound in public estimation. One TPM Reader wrote in demanding that I take the post down because it was inappropriate to discuss these statistics on the day after Ford’s passing. I definitely don’t agree with that, especially when I was interpreting them in the way I was. Quite a few more, however, wrote in to say that there’s nothing unfair about this measure in the least since Ford’s presidency itself, in their view, was born in the corrupt bargain he struck with President Nixon over his subsequent pardon.

For my part, I can’t help but see Ford in a basically positive light and think he did the country an important service in balancing the ship of state after the trauma and shame of the Nixon years. But I’m curious how much that view is tied to my not having lived (or lived with sufficient awareness — I was 5 and 6) through the period. Thoughts?

More evidence that glitz DC lobby shop Dutko was tied to those pre-election robo-calls.