Yay! GO RON PAUL!!!!!

Sniffing around these results I detect Santorum bubbling up from the bottom.

Associating Ron Paul with Ayn Rand is intellectually lazy, Paul. They may have a lot in common and Ron Paul might even enjoy her fiction, but that hardly makes him an objectivist.

I don't vote, but I do hope Ron Paul runs again and brings more attention to Austrianism.

Speaking as someone who grew up in Indiana, Mitch Daniels seems a fairly reasonable guy, for a Republican, at least. He spoke at CPAC here: http://cspan.org/Events/Top-Republicans-…

Plays to his base quite a bit, but if you listen closely, he's willing to cut military spending, and he doesn't play up this idea that there are trillions in "waste" that we can easily cut. Not sure his positions on things like gay marriage, drugs, etc. though.

MATT LUBY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You crazy libertarian kid, how has life been treating you?

@3: Why? Are the Austrians up to something?

@6: I assumed he misspelled Zoroastrianism.

Mr. Luby alludes to the Ludwig von Mises / Austrian School of Economics.

Unless something happens, Romney's the nominee. He's got it in the bag. Something will happen, of course, but I still think it's his if he wants it. He may not want it if the economy comes back to life (which is the only thing that matters).

Most interesting to me is the rise of Michelle Bachmann from 0% to 4%, and the fall of dear Michael Palin's worst nightmare to even less than her.

Area man who constantly mentions he doesn't vote secretly in love with Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own A Television?

It seems like Michelle Bachmann is beating out Sarah Palin in the race to be Sarah Palin.

Although Keister probably has it right, I think--venomlash and emma's bee--that what Matt was subconsciously thinking about was a problem called Maria.

I don't think who the Republican candiate is really matters because, well, they're Republicans. But I'd vote for RuPaul.

a more appropriate verb, which requires no footnote of explanation, is "handicap."

The following is pasted from the Merriam-Webster website entry for "handicap" as a verb.

transitive verb
1 a : to give a handicap to b : to assess the relative winning chances of (contestants) or the likely winner of (a contest)
2 : to put at a disadvantage

Examples of HANDICAP

1. It's very hard to handicap the election at this point.
2. [the baseball player's small size did not handicap him in the least]

Merriam-Webster's website has a valuable, free-to-use dictionary and a thesaurus. People who write for a living would do well to consult language and usage reference materials regularly.

The CPAC Straw Poll is historically quite inaccurate when it comes to predicting who will the get the Republican nomination.

Gary Johnson is #3? Inaccurate indeed. I totally forgot about that douche. As a former resident of New Mexico, if this is as good as the republicanscan do, Obama has nothing to worry about.

@15 That's probably why Paul made a point to mention that.

If Romney gets the nomination for 2012, it will be due to a similar set of circumstances to 2008, this time even more churned up courtesy of the teabaggers, that led to the nomination essentially falling into McCain's lap.

However, I think that it's also as likely that, should Romney get the nod, either a third party for the teabaggers will come into being (more sound and fury than substance, most likely, but their noise will hurt just the same), or many of them will sit on their hands in 2012.

Which makes me think that Romney's chances will collapse if someone can make a go as a candidate of placating both the money and the crazy effectively.

The problem is, I don't see that person on this list. The money doesn't trust Paul, Palin, Bachman, or Huckabee. Mitch Daniels might be a little too sane for the crazy, but that's open to question, the passing of time and the strength of his ambition. Pawlenty and Thune will work hard to make the money happy, but they just don't excite.

Given the huge piles of money the Republicans will have access to in 2012, maybe what happens instead is that the Republicans put just enough money on whoever is running against Obama to be able to react to the slim chance of lightning striking, while focusing on consolidating their gains in the statehouses and in DC, plus trying for a majority in the US Senate. If the economy stays where it is or, God help us, gets much worse, the resulting increased desire for radical solutions works in the Republicans' favor - if they can in turn control the teabaggers, and not end up being the tail wagged by the new dog in town.

Isn't it weird that all Ludwig Von Mises and Austrian School devotees are all awful racists?

And by weird I mean, doesn't it makes sense?

Palin only got 1% more than John Thune? Who in the world is John Thune?

@19 REALLY? I mean....REALLY?

Isn't it weird that people make sweeping, unsubstantiated statements when they're blogging anonymously?

I'm more interested in who the Democratic challengers will be (hopefully).

Romney would be great! For Obama!

Let's see a Mormon who created a versio of "Obamacare" for his home state of liberal Massachusetts.

Awesome. It doesn't get any better for Obama.

That said, polls are very meaningless at this point. At this time in 2007 EVERYONE knew that the next presidential race would be between Hillary Clinton and Guiliani.

@ sirkowski -- Well, I think the others have smacked you down enough, but you are just a dolt. Please come to the Seattle Austrian Economics Reading Group some time. I think you'll find that we are not racists. But then I doubt you would ever come since you are too busy posting stupid ad hominems in internet comments threads to ever read a scholarly economics article and discuss it intelligently.

@ Canuck -- Aww, made my day. I'm still being a crazy libertarian kid! I had a nice little libertarian activist moment with U.S. customs on my way back from Canada around a month ago.

Cool story, Internet tough guy.

Hey. Is "mattluby" Matt Luby? The same Matt Luby who spent half a year using every tired old trick and troll in the book to make himself despised far and wide by man and beast? And now he cries ad hominem?

It's almost as if there is some sort of causal correlation between acting like a dick and people not liking you.

Let's get the torture lovin', war mongering, bald face liar Obama out in 2012. I'd like to see Barry, Bush, and all of their string puller tried at the Hauge personally, but that's not likely. Vote Ron Paul if you have an aversion towards tyranny.

@ sirkowski -- There is a high degree of irony inherent in someone posting behind an assumed name calling the only person in this thread posting with his real name an internet tough guy.

@ Wretched Harmony -- Go back and read my archive. I never used ad hominems. I never sought out hatred. I just wrote what I believed and observed, and given that many Sloggers disagree with my perspective on the world, this necessarily led to conflict.

Matt, if you think I'm anonymous, what you don't know could fill an arena. Internet detective FAIL.

This is very, very true.

I'm voting for Lindy West. While I might not agree with her always, she has more balls than anyone on that list.

Does the Seattle Austrian Economics Reading Group serve Sacher Torte and Linzer Torte? Because I would speedread Hayek to get some Linzer Torte: es schmekt wirklich gut.

No, but I did make a Sachertorte for Christmas dinner. It was pretty good. I am probably alone in the SAERG in terms of being a person who actually loves Austria in addition to economic ideas that originated in late 19th century Austria.

My bet:

A Romney/Palin ticket.

Let me know when there's an Austrian Economics Eating Group meeting. You should have introduced the Sacher-Masoch-Torte to The Stranger staff when you were interning there: I'm sure you'd have heard lots of "Thank you Master! May I have another?"

I am probably alone in the SAERG.

Fixed that for ya.

@31: too true, it took me all of three clicks. Luby, you got schooled. And I love Vienna and its pastries, but that didn't turn me into an anarcho-capitalist freeloader.

@ Keister Button -- Still haven't read "Venus in Furs." Might be time to do that.

@ emma -- Viennese pastries or otherwise, something did certainly turn you into, a sour old socialist who doesn't understand the words you try to throw around intelligently. Get a clue. You're just as intellectually limited as the Republitards who call Obama a communist.

Obviously you haven't been offered a paying writing job, matluby. One does not wonder why.

If it was Paul vs Obama I'd probably vote Paul. Conservatives are really missing out. One thing that really makes me sad, is that not a single person on there cares anything about the environment. None that I can tell at all. It's a shame there isn't going to be a challenge to Obama in 2012. I thought the conservatives would have been smarter than that.

It's very unlikely a Mormon could actually get the nomination. A significant portion of the country is less likely to vote for a candidate if he's a Mormon:

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/648/romney-m…

In a poll of Jeb Bush versus Obama, Jeb Bush lost by a major margin.

Nobody wants them. They should move back to England. Or Russia.

Consider the bottom of the barrel well and truly scraped.

@41: Glad to see firsthand the evidence that you avoid ad hominem attacks, as you've asserted.