As promised, we have more of Greg Sargent’s interview with John Deady, the co-chair of Veterans for Rudy in New Hampshire.

Greg asked Deady if he stood by his Muslim-bashing remarks recorded on video by the Guardian:

“I most assuredly do. I’ve been very concerned about this Muslim thing for quite awhile. The average American does not know beans about what the Muslims are about. I am talking about the Muslims in general. I don’t subscribe to the principle that there are good Muslims and bad Muslims. They’re all Muslims.”

The rest of Greg’s report is here.

Pinch Sulzberger taps Bill Kristol to write a weekly column for the New York Times.

I’ve been knocking for most of the day on these weird inconsistencies emerging in the accounts of the death of Benazir Bhutto; and now the biggs seem to be digging deeper. A number of clinicians who’ve written in today have said the government’s story — that Bhutto died because she basically knocked her head on the car sun roof while ducking to avoid the bullets — is deeply implausible. A number of reasons are given, the most common of which is that you would have great difficulty generating enough force to inflict the kind of injury that would lead to death so quickly.

But when you step back and look at the constantly changing and mainly contradictory stories, you have to say, to what end? Other than a lot of confusion and irresponsible statements, what’s the point of the different stories? Perhaps there’s none. But the oddity of the final account — that in so many words she died of a self-inflicted head injury when trying to duck gunfire — comes not only from its improbability but from the level of detail.

The idea here, remember, is that you have a very chaotic and rapid chain of events that leaves Bhutto pronounced dead in less than an hour after the first shots were fired. With no post-mortem, which would seem necessary to conclusively identify the cause of death as this sort of head injury, they not only pronounce on the cause of death but even describe in some detail just how she came to have the head injury — a blow to the head while trying to get away from gunfire.

To put it plainly, it simply seems incredible to me that they could have any real sense of how she got the head injury, even if they could establish, absent any clear evidence, that that was the cause of death.

And this suspicion is, I think, added to by the named accounts of doctors who actually treated her. This is from a late report from CNN …

Dr. Mussadiq Khan of Rawalpindi General Hospital, who treated Bhutto before she was declared dead, said she had “a big wound” on the side of her head “that usually occurs when something big, with a lot of speed, hits that area.”

The key details are there, something big at high speed. I guess ‘big’ is relative in this context, but that sounds a lot like she got shot or hit by a bomb fragment. And frankly, how likely is it that someone shoots at you several times at point blank range, near so (the video suggests no more than ten feet), and then detonates a bomb a few feet away from you and a few minutes later you’re dead and it has nothing to do with either of those things?

I’d say, not likely.

But again, why?

From the current CNN headline story, I’ve seen what strikes me as the first explanation that makes sense of all facts …

CNN national security analyst Ken Robinson, who worked in U.S. intelligence in Pakistan during the Clinton administration, said he suspects Bhutto’s enemies are attempting to control her legacy by minimizing the attack’s role in her demise.

“They’re trying to deny her a martyr’s death, and in Islam, that’s pretty important,” Robinson said.

Bhutto, he said, threatens to become more influential in death than she was in life. “Her torch burns bright now forever. She’s forever young; she’s forever brave, challenging against all odds the party in power and challenging the military and Islamic extremism.”

Obviously, I have no idea beyond Robinson’s surmise. But in a case like this I find myself looking for some explanation that makes sense of the seemingly nonsensical data. And this makes sense. The bonk on the head theory is ridiculous on many levels, not simply on that of implausibility, but because it makes her a potential object of ridicule, mockery and the manner of her death somehow ignoble. That would be a pretty harsh take, certainly; but they seem to play pretty rough over there.

For my money, if she happened to die in such a freakish manner in the process of an assassination attempt, it wouldn’t diminish her heroism or bravery. But I would imagine many would see her death as tied in some way to cowardice and diminish, as Robinson says, any sense of her as a martyr.

I’ve written a lot today on this question of how Benazir Bhutto died. So let me add to the discussion the latest I’ve read. Earlier today, when the Pakistani government suggested that Bhutto sustained her fatal injury in the process of ducking out of the way of gunfire, I asked why these statements seemed to discount what seemed like a more plausible scenario — the head injury was the result not of her ducking but the force of the explosion pushing her into something.

Carlotta Gall’s report is now out in the Times and her report suggests that this is what the government is saying …

With many of Ms. Bhutto’s supporters openly blaming the government for her death, the Interior Ministry made the surprising announcement that Ms. Bhutto had died not from gunshots or shrapnel but from a skull fracture when she was thrown by the force of the suicide bomb and hit her head on a lever of the sunroof of the car in which she was riding.

Whether this is true or not, it at least sounds much more plausible. Whether this is a revised version of the story or whether the earlier accounts were garbled accounts of the government story is not clear to me at this point.

Camp Rudy considers canning campaign surrogate who says Rudy will send the Muslims back to their caves.

There’s been a lot of speculation about just what Mr. Sulzberger must have been thinking adding William Kristol to his stable of opinion columnists at The New York Times. Yes, Kristol’s on record saying the paper should be prosecuted for its reporting on the warrant-less wiretapping program. And some of his predictions have not panned out.

But the weirdest thing about the choice is that Sulzberger and Co. have failed to grasp the taxonomy of the neoconservative literary cartel. David Brooks is the house-broken William Kristol, the cadre tasked with operating just behind enemy lines, or at least in the no-man’s-land where only a kinder gentler version of the faith can be propounded. And they already have him.

So why you’d want both Kristol and Brooks on staff is a question that simply has no logical answer unless they got some sort of two for one deal or other kind of group discount.

There is a flurry of late Iowa polls. And the big headline is that it’s basically a photo finish. That is even more so when you consider that the “viability threshold” rule in the Democratic caucuses creates what is in effect a much larger margin of error, if what we are interested in is not individual voter support across the state but who will actually get the biggest number on caucus night.

With that said, however, it is clear that there is another late breaking trend — toward John Edwards.

The latest poll out from McClatchy/MSNBC (conducted by Mason-Dixon) has it Edwards (24%), Clinton (23%) and Obama (22%).

As you can see, the trend is also clear enough to be visible in Pollster.com/Charles Franklin trendline graph — Hillary consolidating what had been a softening lead and Edwards finishing strong and quite possibly in line to take second place if not first.

Here’s one email we got in a couple days ago from a long-time TPM Reader …

I’m volunteering for obama in new hampshire. Out of non-Obama supporters, Edwards people are rock solid. They often aren’t even interested in talking. HRC supporters are much more wavering and persuadable. They are also much more likely to say that they are considering Obama.

The other question to ask is, is Edwards close enough in New Hampshire to vault into contention if he’s the big story coming out of caucus night?

Okay, the judges have all returned their verdicts for the first annual Golden Duke Awards. We’ll be announcing them in tomorrow’s episode of TPMtv. But today we’ll be bringing you some previews of how particular judges voted in particular categories and their explanations for doing so.

Also, sort of a surprise in Best Scandal, General Interest.

Here’s a late report from Britain’s Channel 4 news on the Bhutto assassination, with newly acquired video that appears to further contradict Pakistani government reports of what happened …

Sitting here in the US it is difficult, I think, to fully grasp the significance of one theory being true over the other, though certainly only one can actually be the case. It is as though the dispute is a proxy for the larger battle between the different parties. This remains the best explanation I’ve seen for why the government is to be sticking to a story that appears at least contradicted by most of the available evidence.

Okay, results are in for the Golden Dukes. Six winners. Pretty stiff competition in Best Scandal — Local Venue, and Best Scandal — Sex and Generalized Carnality. But not in Outstanding Achievement in Corruption-based Chutzpah. The winner in this category was unanimous.