Pat Robertson predicts a stock market crash. That means it's time to buy.

Well, America's favorite New Year's prognosticator, Preacher Pat, is back at it again.

Let's recall last year's prediction of a terrorist attack, possibly involving a nuclear weapon that would cause 'mass killings' in the U.S.

That follows Preacher Pat's May 2006 prediction about a tsunami hitting the United States by the end of the year.

In the past, he's made some really stupid statements, including saying that Ariel Sharon's stroke was a punishment from God for the Israeli pullout from Gaza in 2005 or suggesting that God's wrath will be visited upon the town of Dover, Pennsylvania as punishment for the citizens of Dover voting a bunch of creationists off of the school board. Still waiting on that one.

Earlier this year, he broke with many of his cultural conservative brethren and endorsed then-frontrunner Rudy Giuliani, just about the same time that Giuliani started to tank.

So in other words, Robertson's record on 'predictions' is distressingly poor, especially for someone who claims to have an open line to God.

So today he said that in 2008 there will be a recession in the United States, with a major stock market crash by 2010.

I'm not going to guess one way or the other about the recession, because I'd call that even money about now. You could predict that there will or that there won't and have a decent chance of being right. But his prediction of a stock market crash, together with his past record on these kinds of predictions tells me that there is only one thing to do: BUY!

Why is the Republican establishment so afraid of Mike Huckabee?

This week, new GOP co-frontrunner (hard to say who is in front over there) Mike Huckabee has been taking a lot of flak from Republicans. Of course this is to be expected when it is from other candidates, who are competing for the same prize he is (and they have certainly gone after him, especially Mitt Romney, who has seen Huckabee come out of nowhere to suddenly be on the verge of snatching Iowa from Mitt.) One Romney commercial attacked Huckabee's record on pardons as Governor of Arkansas, saying "Huckabee granted more pardons than the previous three Governors of Arkansas combined." Them's fightin' words in a Republican primary, because they well know who one of those former Governors of Arkansas was. And Huckabee probably earned the barbs from Romney after making an anti-Mormon comment during an interview for the New York Times magazine.

What is really different though is that Huckabee has been getting a lot of flak from 'establishment' Republicans, such as Condi Rice (part of the Bush administration) and Rush Limbaugh, who usually either praise or say nothing about candidates in Republican primaries. While Rice was responding to a comment by Huckabee critical of the Bush policy in Iraq to be sure, some of the Bush administration's policies have come in for much harsher criticism during the campaign by other candidates and the administration has chosen to turn the other cheek, so the comment by Rice represents a change from how they've treated other candidates.

It is clear to me why they are suddenly treating Huckabee like a cat in a dog pound.

The truth is, that the GOP establishment has patronized the religious right and their millons of votes sort of like patronizing a crazy old uncle, but they have been careful not to let religious conservatives get too close to the tiller, afraid they will run the party onto the rocks. They promise them the moon, and give them enough bones to make them happy.

Originally the Republican establishment wanted John McCain. He was the early front-runner, and with his traditional appeal to independents they calculated he was the Republican most likely to hold the White House for the GOP. But then McCain ran his campaign into the ground, creating an organization that required more money than he was able to raise. "Mr. fiscal conservative" was embarrassed out of the lead, and dropped into the second tier during the summer as his campaign seemed to fly apart and was deep in debt. So then Rudy Giuliani jumped up as the apparent choice of the Republican establishment. As a social liberal with a base in the northeast, they figured he could be the one who could challenge the Democrats, on their home turf. They even tried hard to sell Rudy to social conservatives as a guy who 'could win,' and Rudy, the pro-choice Republican, promised to only appoint 'strict constructionist' judges. But social conservatives never warmed to Rudy (selling a guy with Rudy's positions and his personal history to the religious right is a little like trying to sell a package of ground beef to a vegetarian.) So then they brought out former Senator and lobbyist (about as 'establishment' as it gets) Fred Thompson to try and appeal to religious conservatives, but the former actor had all the appeal of one of those zombies from, "Night of the living dead." So they went back to trying to sell them on Rudy, even convincing social conservative Godfather Pat Robertson to endorse Giuliani.

But a string of recent scandals has soured many Republicans, not just members of the religious right on Giuliani. So now, McCain (remember him) who has been hanging around on the edges of the race has re-emerged as the apparent choice of the 'establishment.' They don't want Mitt Romney, though they will get behind him if he muscles his way into the nomination (and being worth a quarter of a billion dollars and having shown himself willing to spend freely on his own campaign, Romney has the muscles, at least financially.)

But Huckabee is the guy who scares them to death. He puts exactly the face on the Republican party that they don't want. An ordained Baptist minister, he is wildly popular with social conservatives, but many of his positions (such as wanting to teach creationism in schools) are viewed with skepticism (to put it mildly) by the majority of Americans. Even on areas where he tends to the center he becomes less electable. I personally admire Huckabee for being willing to actually seriously consider his authority as a Governor to exercise pardons (he still did deny 90% of them) even when he runs the risk of what happened, that one of the many people he pardoned subsequently went to Missouri and committed a brutal murder. But it's a very risky position politically, because people will remember (or be reminded of, a la Willie Horton) the one failure and not of the dozens of people who turned their second chance into something good for themselves, their families and society. His record on taxes and spending irks fiscal conservatives (the reason his success elsewhere has not been mirrored in New Hampshire, a state where fiscal, not social conservatives dominate the Republican primary.) Unfortunately for the GOP, fiscal conservatives make the most inviting target for Democrats to appeal for crossover votes. Most national Democrats are diametrically opposed to the position of social conservatives on abortion, gay rights, creationism and other hot-button issues, but it is possible for a Democrat to be nominated who preaches or has a record of fiscal responsibility at least as good as that pushed by most Republicans. Fiscal conservatives are in many cases disillusioned by the Bush administration and GOP Congress that actually accelerated the rate of increase in Federal spending and ran up huge deficits in the process. A Huckabee nomination would make them ripe for the picking if a Democrat was ready to capitalize on this concern, and GOP insiders know it.

For these reasons, they fear Huckabee, or rather they fear that if he is the nominee he could well lead the GOP to a historic landslide defeat. Given that Congress is already firmly in control of the Democrats, and that Democrats will likely gain Senate seats this year, Republicans fear most that there could be a Democratic Presidential landslide, electing a President who had a lot of political capital to push for something like, say, national health care and who would sign all of the bills that Congress has been frustrated with this year, everything from a timetable for Iraq withdrawl to comprehensive immigration reform. There is even an outside chance (though they'd pretty much have to run the table in terms of winnable open seats and knocking off vulnerable GOP incumbents) that Democrats could next year win a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. This is very unlikely but would become more likely if the GOP suffered a crushing landslide defeat in the Presidential race.

So Huckabee in fact scares the GOP establishment. That is why they tried to establish him early on as 'second tier.' And now that he is clearly up with the raft of candidates they've been pitching to the GOP faithful, they will do anything they can to try and prevent him from actually winning the nomination.

The only candidate that would scare the GOP establishment more than Mike Huckabee if he wins the nomination, is Ron Paul.

FOX News owners sued by publisher who said they ordered her to lie.

We already know that Rudy Giuliani wants to keep as much distance as he can from Bernard Kerik. We already know that in 2000 he was briefed on Kerik's ties to known mobsters and chose to hire him as police commissioner anyway.

We also well know that Rupert Murdoch's 'fair and balanced' FOX News network tilts strongly to the right.

But we learned today about just how far they are willing to go to keep the Giuliani-Kerik link out of the news.

A publisher was ordered by network executives to lie to Federal investigators to protect him. Of course, lying to Federal investigators is a felony, as we recently saw in the case of Olympic sprinter Marion Jones who is facing prison time for lying to investigators during a steroid investigation.

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Senior executives at News Corp. urged publisher Judith Regan to lie to investigators about ex-New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik in order to protect Rudy Giuliani's presidential ambitions, Regan alleges in a lawsuit filed this week.

The lawsuit does not name the executives or cite any documents to back up her allegation. News Corp., which is led by Rupert Murdoch and is the parent company of the Fox television network and cable news channel, called the suit's claims "preposterous" Wednesday.

But Regan says she was the victim of a smear campaign "to save the reputation of Kerik and, by association, Rudy Giuliani."

Regan says she had an affair with Kerik that began in 2001.

The 70-page lawsuit was filed in a state court in New York just days after Kerik's indictment on federal corruption charges in a case that has fueled criticism of Giuliani, his longtime patron.

We will see how this plays out. But we've already seen multiple instances of FOX being willing to lie or stretch the truth on a story on the air in order to help Republicans. So this is hardly a surprise, unfortunately.

Thompson can tell the difference between a crook and a former crook; Rudy can't.

It's very rare that I am complimentary towards a Republican. It's even rarer that I would be complimentary towards a Republican running for President. It's most vanishingly rare that I would be complimentary towards a rabid right-wing Republican running for President like Fred Thompson. In fact in my only post specifically devoted to Thompson, back when he was higher in the polls as a not-yet-announced candidate than he has been since he announced, I poked some fun at him while pointing out his deficiencies.

But I'm going to say he is doing the right thing today. And it's not about any laughing matter. Specifically, he is standing by Philip Martin, who is the co-chair of his campaign. It was reported over the weekend by the Washington Post that Martin has a criminal past, which between 1979 and 1983 included convictions or guilty pleas for selling marijuana and cocaine.

In today's 'gotcha' environment, many politicians would immediately sever all ties with Martin. But I'm glad that Thompson is taking a stand and not severing them, especially now that the campaign is entering a critical stage. We will see how intense the heat is and whether he continues to stay with Martin, but it does speak well that at least Thompson's initial reaction was to stand behind Martin.

So why am I applauding Thompson for standing by Martin, especially when I've been very critical of Rudy Giuliani's decisions to hire mob associate Bernard Kerik, coke dealer Thomas Ravenel or child molester Alan Placa?

First and foremost, it's a matter of time. I wrote a post once, called the prison that follows prison that dealt with how hard it is for a convicted felon in America to become a productive member of society, or for that matter to be anything other than a convicted felon in the eyes of most people. For that matter, unless he's had his rights restored, Philip Martin would not be allowed to vote in most states. But look, his last conviction was TWENTY-FOUR years ago! TWENTY-FOUR bloody years ago! Do we EVER forgive anybody, or let them move ahead with their lives? The man has kept out of trouble for nearly a quarter of a century, and some people want to haul up what he did in 1979 or 1983. Guess what? Besides it being a long time ago, he was also a lot younger then. Sometimes younger people do foolish things, and then they learn from them. All the evidence is that Philip Martin did learn from his mistakes. I'd expect that the Thompson campaign probably did a background check on him (or maybe he's known Thompson for some time) so what this says is that Fred Thompson actually can recognize that people can change if they have the opportunity (now if only that would give rise to a progressive social policy when it comes to prison reform and rehab programs.)

In stark contrast, as was reported in the March 30 New York Times, Giuliani hired Kerik as police commissioner in 2000, shortly after he was advised that Kerik was very closely associated with known mobsters (and as we now know he was getting 'free' work done by them for him while he was police commissioner.) It is true that Rudy may not have known about Ravenel (who resigned from Rudy's campaign after being busted for dealing coke), but Placa, whose association with Rudy goes back to high school, was hired by Rudy's law firm after he was suspended by the Catholic Church from continuing to practice as a priest following the 2002-2003 investigation by the Suffolk County Grand Jury into child molestation in the Diocese of Rockville Center, in which Placa figured prominently. Unfortunately the statute of limitations has run out on many of the crimes which Placa was tied to in the investigation (you can read more in the link I provided above if your stomach is strong enough) but that is hardly the same thing as Martin having plead guilty on the cocaine charge and paid his debt to society.

With the recency of the crimes, and in particular Rudy's being willing to hire a guy with known mob ties as police commissioner, it seems as if Rudy Giuliani just doesn't care about whether he hired criminals or not, and it raises some serious judgement issues.

And that's where it is also an issue. Giuliani has demonstrated poor judgement by continuing to hire criminals who have committed crimes in the very recent past (or are under suspicion at the time of continuing to commit them, as the March 30 Times article made clear in the case of Kerik) while Thompson is giving a second chance to a guy who has kept his nose clean for 24 years. I call that compassionate, and that's very, very rarely a word I'd ever put in a sentence with Fred Thompson.

Is Rudy really a simpleton, or is he just talking like one?

GOP candidate Rudy Giuliani is claiming that he can end illegal immigration in three years.

OK. So that means he can probably end global warming in four years, and probably end hunger, disease and poverty. Heck, he can probably get us out of Iraq in-- oh, never mind-- like the rest of the leading GOP candidates he has no plans for getting the U.S. out of Iraq, ever.

He suggests he can do it by an enforcement only mechanism, of walling off the whole border and beefing up the border patrol. He says if people show up at the border they will see the wall and turn around. The exact quote is,

"If you do this for two or three years, you'll change behavior... If people come to the border and figure they can't get in, they'll stop."

Yeah. I guess he figures that no one will have the ingenuity to come in via shipping container (like thousands of Chinese do every year) or by boat like the Cubans and Hatians, or by getting on a cheap flight to Canada first (or does he plan to wall off that border too?) or sneaking in hidden among the crates in the trailer of one of those many thousands of Mexican trucks that the Bush administration has generously allowed to operate all over the U.S. What a simplistic moron Rudy is if he actually believes that.

He says he can do it 'like he brought down the crime rate in New York.'

Uh, note to Rudy: While he was mayor of New York, the crime rate dropped sharply NATIONALLY. That was after the Clinton crime bill was passed in 1993 that put 100,000 cops on the streets, and was roundly criticized by Republicans (remember, 'midnight basketball?') and which was passed despite their fighting it tooth and nail. Well, guess what? It worked. It worked in New York. It also worked in Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, Washington, Detroit, and all over the country. So maybe if Rudy wants to 'end illegal immigration' like he 'ended crime' in New York, what he means is that he plans to find a way to take credit if someone else figures out a way to bring it down.

Or, maybe that isn't it either. We know that Rudy likes to hire criminals, as I've blogged on before featuring his hiring of mob associate Bernard Kerik, cocaine dealer Thomas Ravenel and child molester Alan Placa. So that seems to be his crime plan, just hire them all. From which we can surmise that it may be that his plan for getting rid of illegal immigrants is to give them all government jobs, or working for his campaign.

Rudy is spewing simplistic rhetoric, and either he knows it, or he is himself too simple to be President. I suspect it is the former.

Rudy Giuliani's confidante and partner: a pedophile priest

Rudy Giuliani has long been accused of not having exactly the finest circle of friends. We all know by now about Bernard Kerik, the former police commissioner with ties to organized crime, about whom Giuliani was briefed in 2000 before he became police commissioner and decided to let it go. Kerik of course has since been convicted of corruption and is a major embarrassment to Rudy.

Then he hired Thomas Ravenel to run his South Carolina campaign, and was embarrassed when Ravenel was caught dealing cocaine.

But is there a limit to who Rudy would hire?

Apparently not. I mean, if anybody would be radioactive politically, you'd think it would be a child molester.

According to 2002 testimony before a Suffolk County (NY) Grand Jury investigating abuses by the Catholic Church, Monsignor Alan Placa is referred to in reports as 'Priest F' If we read the specific report on Priest F, we read

In Priest F’s first assignment, he appears to have made feeble attempts at abusing a boy who was an alter server. Once, when he was working at the rectory on a slow evening, the boy was in the office watching TV, Priest F came in and asked if he could join him. He pulled up a chair next to the boy and put his right hand on his thigh. Slowly his hand began to creep up towards the boy’s genital area. Alarmed, the boy covered his crotch. After Priest F’s efforts to push his arm away failed, Priest F gave up and left. The boy remembered that Priest F was very nervous. He never told anyone at the time because he didn’t think anyone would believe him.

The conduct repeated itself within a week, only this time, the boy crossed his legs as soon as Priest F pulled up his chair. Even so, Priest F tried to push his hand between the boy’s legs. Throughout both encounters, Priest F never said a word. Even after this second incident, the boy never told anyone. He was embarrassed and didn’t want any of his friends to think he was a homosexual. This victim came forward decades later, only after Priest F denied sexually abusing anyone in a local newspaper story about sexually abusive priests.

Later on in the same report we read:

Once, Priest F approached one of the boys behind the school stage. He grabbed his crotch. The boy reacted violently, pushing Priest F away and warning him never to touch him again.

At one point, two victims complained to the schools’ rector, a priest, about Priest F. The complaint resulted from one boy’s suspicions, later confirmed to be correct, that Priest F was abusing another younger boy. The pair thought a complaint by two of them would have to be believed. It wasn’t.

The tragic death of a victim’s father led, finally, to the end of Priest F’s sexual abuse of him. At the funeral home, Priest F approached the boy, moving close to him. As he moved his hand towards his genitals, the boy told Priest F, “Don’t ever fucking touch me again or I’ll kill you.” This event was witnessed by another boy who saw the abusive conduct by Priest F and heard the response to it.

We also read this:

Priest F was cautious, but relentless in his pursuit of victims. He fondled boys over their clothes, usually in his office. Always, his actions were hidden by a
poster, newspaper or a book.* He talked continuously as he fondled them. Everyone in the school knew to stay away from Priest F.
Once, Priest F approached one of the

The footnote is even more outrageous:

One of the victims remembers the first incident of abuse taking place when preparations were underway to attend a right-to-life march on the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. The students were making banners with Priest F’s help. It was a banner that was used as the foil on this occasion.

Monsignor Placa is named in the Grand Jury report completed in 2003 as having both abused children himself and covered up abuse by other priests. Although the abuse happened long enough ago that the statute of limitations for criminal charges against Monsignor Placa had expired by that time it was fundamental in pursuing a suit against the Diocese of Rockville Center.

After the report was issued, Monsignor Placa was stripped of his authority and suspended from serving as a Catholic Priest. But who should show up to rescue him? None other than an old friend. An old friend whose first wedding he had been first man at, and then officiated at for his second wedding in 1984. An old friend named Rudy Giuliani.

Placa was hired in 2002 as a consultant by Giuliani Partners, a New York legal firm which is run by the former mayor. He remains on the payroll even today.

So if Rudy Giuliani is willing to hire a priest who has been disowned by the Catholic Church for child sexual abuse, then there are three questions we have to ask:

1. Is there anybody he wouldn't hire? He's already been willing to hire a mobster, a coke dealer and a child molester. Who does that leave? Osama bin Laden?

2. What kind of judgement does this show in a man who wants to be President? Even George W. Bush's defenders admit that his unyielding willingness to stand behind friends, everyone from Harriet Miers to Donald Rumsfeld in the face of stark evidence that they can't do the job, has resulted in some appallingly poor decisions. Wouldn't this kind of pattern suggest that Rudy could be more of the same?

3. We know that Rudy's own kids won't even talk to him because of how he treated their mother (who learned that he was planning to divorce her and marry his current wife via a televised news conference.) And now we see that he is willing to reward a man who hurt other people's kids. So if he becomes President, how much do you think he will care about what happens to your kids?

A President whose best friend is a child molester, and he rewards him for it with a job. I wonder, if Rudy is elected, do you think he will appoint Alan Placa as secretary of Children, Youth and Families?

Poll casts perspective on how weak GOP primary field really is

As if we've not had enough confirmation of the fundamental weakness of the Republican field:

Today AP-Ipsos released a poll of the top four candidates in the GOP field (Rudy Giuliani, yet unannounced candidate Fred Thompson, John McCain and Mitt Romney,) and 'none of the above' beat all the candidates.

Yes, it's true. That option got 23% (and I doubt if it's because they all wanted to pick Duncan Hunter), while Giuliani (whose own consistent decline in polls over the past two months has only not been noticed because McCain has been falling faster) got 21%, with Thompson at 19%, McCain at 15% and Romney at 11%.

In contrast, even with some Democrats still holding out hope for Al Gore, most Democrats have expressed satisfaction with the candidates running (and if a poll sampled just Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards and Bill Richardson, the top four Democrats, we'd already have more total support according to all recent polls than would be needed to ensure that 'none of the above' didn't do very well at all.)

Put it this way-- another measure of how weak the Republican field is, is that John McCain is still polling at a level that puts him in the thick of the race. Most national Republicans (and even a lot of them right here in Arizona) don't like John McCain, don't trust John McCain and certainly don't support John McCain. Further, 'Mr. fiscal conservative' is coming off a terrible stretch of bad news, in which he pretty much destroyed his own campaign by assuming he would raise mammoth amounts of money ahd setting the spending curve so high that it is hard to imagine how anybody could be that broke after raising over $20 million more than fifteen months before the next Presidential election (and more than six months before the first primaries.) In any normal year, with decent GOP candidates, a candidate who had the high negatives of McCain who then proved himself so incompetent at running his own campaign would be long gone, or at least relegated to the 2% or below level (and yes, the candidate is responsible for his campaign if nothing else-- otherwise how could you expect him to handle being responsible for the whole country?) But he is there anyway because what other options are there?

Giuliani, as I mentioned has been slowly losing air. His campaign has not fallen as fast as McCain's, and he has raised more money than any Republican (Thompson does not have to report contributions since he still officially only has an exploratory committee) but since he grabbed the lead from McCain earlier this year, it seems like a lot of his supporters have been giving having second thoughts and have moved away from him in the polls. Maybe it's the nasty divorce he had while in the middle of an affair that has caused his kids to stop speaking to him, maybe it's his position on abortion, maybe it's the fact that other than working for a Houston based law firm that helps out Big Oil he's done little since leaving the mayor's office, maybe it's his flip-flop on gun laws, maybe it's a concern among GOP primary voters that if his successor as mayor, Michael Bloomberg runs as an independent he could all but destroy Rudy's candidacy by picking off many of his core voters, but whatever it is, the 'magic' that Rudy seemed to have, has quite clearly rubbed off with Republican voters.

Thompson keeps getting compared to Reagan. Yeah, he's a conservative and an actor. But he obviously doesn't have Reagan's charm with Republican voters, since he still can't beat 'none of the above,' and even evangelicals-- who Thompson was courting-- have not really committed to a candidate. And the truth is, Thompson has spent most of the past few years as a lobbyist on capitol hill. Many Americans believe that lobbyists are precisely at the root of what has gone wrong with Washington, and to elect one of them President would be handing the keys to the henhouse to the fox.

Romney has gone up consistently, but he is behind the other three and also hasn't made many inroads with evangelicals who are probably as important in GOP primaries as, say, African-American voters are in Democratic primaries.

And the irony is that you'd think it would be easier for these guys to convince Republicans. After all, there are fewer of them since about one in eight Republicans has left the party in the past three years.

But obviously those left are still having a tough time figuring out who to support.

Rudy already making political hay out of Glasgow attack

Though Glasgow Airport's main terminal is still closed as police search for clues among the smouldering remains of a Jeep, it apparently isn't too soon for GOP Presidential contenders to start making hay out of it, in a misguided attack at that.

Touching on a theme which is popular with GOP primary voters, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani attacked immigrants and said the attack shows we need a strong immigration policy.

You mean, like for example an immigration policy that actually would let us know who is in the country? That is one thing that would have come out of the immigration bill that was defeated this week, since one provision would have required that immigrants who entered the country wanting work permits would have to register and notify authorities of where they were from and where they were going. Undocumented residents currently in the U.S. -- people we know so little about that even the number is only estimated to be between 12 and 20 million-- would have to pay a fine and could then obtain a permit to work legally-- and hence we'd have a record of them.

Or is Rudy trying to appeal to the more extreme elements in his party, you know the folks who like to talk about building a wall around the country, mass deportations and throwing people in prison for trying to get a job?

I agree that the fact that there are still terrorists means that we need to do a better job, among other things, of policing the border, but that should be part of a comprehensive, not just 'tougher' immigration policy.

Giuliani state chair busted for dealing drugs.

South Carolina isn't exactly the kind of state where Rudy Giuliani is pinning his hopes of winning the GOP Presidential nomination on. Though the state has been reliably Republican in national elections, the Republicans in South Carolina are likely to be skeptical of him for reasons of his positions, past or present, on abortion, gay rights and gun control.

Add another one though. Today, the chair of his statewide Presidential campaign, State Treasurer Thomas Ravenel, was indicted on Federal cocaine charges. The investigation finds that he began distributing cocaine in late 2005, and has since distributed an undisclosed amount, though less than five hundred grams (which that is still more than a pound of coke-- worth thousands of dollars on the street.)

COLUMBIA, South Carolina (AP) -- South Carolina Treasurer Thomas Ravenel, a former real estate developer who became a rising political star after his election last year, was indicted Tuesday on federal cocaine charges.

Thomas Ravenel is also the state chairman for former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign.

Of course, Ravenel will be asked to resign, especially since Giuliani is already vulnerable to charges that he stood by Bernard Kerik for too long even after having been briefed years ago on Kerik's ties to organized crime. But if Rudy had any thought that he might be able to steal a win in South Carolina's primary (which is likely to set the tone for the rest of the South) it sounds like today it was snorted away.

Giuliani was told of Kerik's ties to organized crime, and still made him chief of police

According to an article in today's New York Times, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was briefed in 2000 about Bernard Kerik's ties to organized crime, but chose to appoint Kerik police commissioner anyway (you might remember Kerik-- he almost became the Secretary of Homeland Security after being nominated by President Bush for the position-- on Giuliani's personal recommendation; Revelations about his sex life and multiple mistresses led to more revelations of his corruption and abuse of public funds, which in turn led to the publicization of his links to organized crime.)

Giuliani acknowledges that he was briefed but claims not to remember anything about the briefing. If that is true, then it means that 1) at the time he was either not paying attention (just what we need in a President-- in fact we already have that) or 2) he doesn't remember because to Rudy Giuliani, a trusted confidante being linked to organized crime is just a routine matter, and would not disqualify him from being police commissioner.

In fact, there is only one piece of good news for Giuliani: His closest rival in the GOP Presidential sweepstakes, John McCain, also has ties to the mafia, through his father in law.

I know it isn't a real high standard, but can we just ask that Republican Presidential candidates and their organizations not be linked to the mafia? Is that asking so much?

Rudy made sure they found the gold. Then he quit looking.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has jumped to the head of the GOP Presidential field, despite not having actually run for any office in nearly a decade (maybe that is why he is so popular).

His biggest plus, according to everyone was his exhibition of leadership on September 11. He got the second biggest accolades for heroism on that day. The biggest of course, were for the first responders, especially the New York Fire Department, which lost 343 of its members. Those who went into the buildings to help others get out of them.

So how are the Firefighters responding to Rudy today? Not well, it turns out. They drafted a letter listing very specific reasons they are not supporting him.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- One of the nation's largest firefighters' unions has accused Republican presidential contender Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, of committing "egregious acts" against firefighters who died in the September 11 terrorist attacks.

In a letter to its members Friday, the International Association of Fire Fighters excoriated Giuliani for his November 2001 decision to cut back the number of firefighters searching the rubble of Ground Zero for the remains of some 300 fallen comrades.

The 280,000-member union accused him of carelessly expediting the cleanup process with a "scoop-and-dump" operation after the recovery of millions of dollars in gold, silver and other assets from the Bank of Nova Scotia that had been buried.

Now granted, by November of 2001, it was certain that no one else would be found alive in the rubble, but it is a fact that only a small portion of the rubble was really searched thoroughly through for remains (and the discovery of several sets of remains since then even in the industrial scale cleanup operation since shows that it would not have been all that hard to find most of them, at least). Don't the family of the real heroes even deserve that?

Well, no, apparently. It is clear that Rudy's biggest concern was to make sure that the gold and silver were found and recovered. After that, nothing else was left that was as important as the reserves of the Bank of Nova Scotia.

So this is a union, and they always back Democrats, right?

No again. It is true that they endorsed John Kerry in 2004 after the Bush administration's promises to fund first responders turned out to be more flourish than substance. But in the 1997 mayoral race, the last time Rudy Giuliani ran for office, he beat Ruth Messinger with their backing and their votes.

It seems that Rudy's leadership on September 11 is a bit overrated. The tragedy itself happened in the heart of the nation's biggest metropolitan area, where the infrastructure remained otherwise intact, and everyone who survived had a home to go back to so there were no refugees. In this regard it was far less of a test of leadership than, for example, Katrina which devastated an entire region, including homes, hospitals and shelters. So the real test of leadership came in the days, weeks and months after the September 11 attacks, and it is clear that once the gold was safely back in the Bank of Nova Scotia, Rudy Giuliani simply turned his back on the real heroes of the day.