Okay, now that we’re getting into the thick of things I thought I’d take a look at the consensus views of those willing to put some money on the line with their predictions. Here’s a graph of the latest results, not including today, from the Iowa Political Markets GOP nomination market.

Now, the graph’s small. But Blue is Rudy, Green is Romney, and Red is some other candidate than the ones they’re currently taking bids on. Today I think they started trading in Huckabee. But this was yesterday. So you could only buy Rudy, Romney, McCain and Thompson. And you can see the basic trend. Until about two weeks ago it was basically Rudy and Romney, with Rudy consistently ahead.

First Romney starts to fall; then Rudy. By yesterday “some other candidate” was trading five points ahead of Romney and five points behind Rudy.

TPM Reader CR on Huckabee and Dumond …

I’ve seen the Wayne Dumond affair referred to as Huckabee’s “Willie Horton” problem a number of times, including on this blog this afternoon in a post by David Kurtz linking to Murry Waas’ excellent piece. But this case is only superficially like Willie Horton. As I recall, Michael Dukakis did not advocate the release of Willie Horton specifically, whereas Mike Huckabee *did* advocate specifically for the release of Wayne Dumond. Of course, Dukakis as governor *did* move to continue the program of furloughs for prisoners serving life without parole as a measure he believed would effectively rehabilitate prisoners, and in my opinion that was both dangerous as a matter of public policy and stupid at a purely political level. But the equivalency developing between the Willie Horton story and the Wayne Dumond story is ridiculous.

The bottom line is simple. Mike Huckabee championed the release of a specific convicted rapist who, once release, raped and killed a woman in Missouri. The furlough policy advocated by Mike Dukakis led to the furlough of Willie Horton, who raped a woman in Maryland and stabbed her fiancee. But Mike Dukakis had never heard of Willie Horton, whereas Mike Huckabee was well aware of the crimes and dangers posed by Wayne Dumond. Anyone who doesn’t see the substantive difference between the two cases just isn’t looking.

John Bolton, writing in today’s WaPo on the new Iran NIE:

[T]he NIE suffers from a common problem in government: the overvaluation of the most recent piece of data. In the bureaucracy, where access to information is a source of rank and prestige, ramming home policy changes with the latest hot tidbit is commonplace, and very deleterious. It is a rare piece of intelligence that is so important it can conclusively or even significantly alter the body of already known information. Yet the bias toward the new appears to have exerted a disproportionate effect on intelligence analysis.

It recalls such “hot tidbits” as those aluminum tubes, Curveball, and Niger yellowcake.

Congress is prepared to pass yet another ban on CIA torture techniques. Will it really have any effect?

The Administration’s most persistent spin of the new Iran NIE is that it vindicates their position because it shows that Iran did in fact have an active nuclear weapons program in 2003. That’s quite some vindication.

What it really means is that faced with two neighbors in the spring of 2003 who both harbored nuclear ambitions, we invaded the country without an active WMD program while ignoring the one that did. I’m not suggesting we should have invaded Iran instead, but by the Administration’s own reckoning, we should have.

It puts an exclamation point on the colossal folly of our Iraq adventure.

Majority Leader Harry Reid wants answers from the White House on what the President and Vice President knew about the new Iran NIE and when.

Part of a statement released by Reid this morning:

“I am growing increasingly concerned about the White House’s inconsistent explanations of when the President was told about important new intelligence information regarding Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions. It appears the President and Vice President were briefed in August on this information, before both the President and Vice President began to ratchet up their increasingly-heated rhetoric on the threat of Iran.

“I urge the White House to fully and accurately explain what the President and Vice President knew and when they knew it, and why the Administration’s rhetoric was not adjusted when presented with new data this summer.

I’ve been digging into this controversy over Huckabee and the rapist Dumond. And when you break it down, what they seem to be arguing over amounts to an almost ridiculous distinction — one that doesn’t put Huckabee in a very good light.

If I’m understanding this right, Huckabee’s accusers are saying that he met with the parole board and tried to persuade them to parole Dumond. To which, the Huckabee people respond, no, they were trying to persuade Huckabee not to commute Dumond’s sentence.

I must confess that what I’m saying here sounds so ridiculous that many of you are probably wondering whether the Huckabee camp could actually have said this or whether I’m just kidding around. But I’m not. Here’s the passage from Team Huck’s new memo …

It is this October ’96 meeting which is now the focus of attention. One of the Board members, Charles Chastain, is now alleging publicly that the Governor used that meeting to pressure the Board to grant DuMond parole.

In fact, just the opposite is true: Mr. Chastain attempted to dissuade Governor Huckabee from his intent to grant clemency to DuMond.

“They are saying that the Governor was trying to persuade them to grant parole,” said Reeves, “it was the other way around, they were trying to persuade him not to grant clemency.”

Just the opposite is true!

Now, commutation to time served and parole wouldn’t have been exactly the same thing — in the later case he’d still be under parole supervision. But it’s a pretty fine distinction for a serial rapist. And just from a common sense point of view the difference between the two descriptions of the conversation seems so minor that I could easily imagine both sides honestly recollecting the same conversation in these two different ways.

What seems not to be in dispute is that Huckabee went in to the meeting having bought into the anti-Clinton whackjob theory that serial rapist Dumond was a victim of Clinton justice and was unjustly imprisoned. The parole board apparently thought otherwise.

Again, everyone seems to agree to that. Now why the parole board did eventually parole Dumond I can’t say. Pressure from Huckabee seems the likeliest explanation. But I’d think the parole board members still bear a lot of responsibility.

But again, to the extent this is a political issue today about Huckabee’s judgment, their defense seems pretty hard to distinguish from the charge.

Most of the MSM (but to its credit, not CNN) punts on Bush’s Iran intel lie.

From Vice President Cheney’s interview with The Politico:

Most striking were his virtually taunting remarks of two men he described as friends from his own days in the House: Democratic Reps. John Dingell (Mich.) and John P. Murtha (Pa.).

In a 40-minute interview with Politico, he scoffed at the idea of two men who spent years accruing power showing so much deference to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in the big spending and energy debates of the year.

Murtha “and the other senior leaders … march to the tune of Nancy Pelosi to an extent I had not seen, frankly, with any previous speaker,” Cheney said. “I’m trying to think how to say all of this in a gentlemanly fashion, but [in] the Congress I served in, that wouldn’t have happened.”

But his implication was clear: When asked if these men had lost their spines, he responded, “They are not carrying the big sticks I would have expected.”

As I set forth below, as a practical matter, I think Huckabee’s defense on DuMond is so damning as to be almost indistinguishable from the charges leveled by his critics. But TPM Reader MR has a speculative but fairly convincing explanation of what may actually have happened …

In your “Glass Half Full! No, Half Empty!” post I think you have missed what is likely the real story of what happened at the parole board meeting in question. I believe what went down is that Gov. Huckabee told the parole board that if they didn’t grant parole to Dumond, then he would commute his sentence. That is how he forced their hand on the parole, and it explains the statement that you included from “Team Huck.” This statement is a typical case of careful parsing, it is technically true, but misses the real point of what the meeting was about. I have no doubt that Mr. Chastain tried to talk Huck out of granting clemency, but he almost certainly didn’t want to grant parole to Dumond. He did it because they thought it better to have this man on parole and monitored then to have him released as a free man.