I was taken aback by David Brooks today.  I had to check the byline three times.  

Krauthammer hates Huckabee!  That's what I got from his column.  Lots of gratuitous rhetoric like "slick former Governors from Arkansas lusting for the Presidency."

You know, the CW is that Huckabee is rising at Romney's expense, but I remember seeing a poll that actually shows Romney's numbers have been fairly constant in Iowa, and that Huckabee's support is coming out of McCain's and Thompson's numbers, plus the undecideds. So Huckabee hurts Romney in the sense that losing Iowa hurts Romney, but not in the sense that he's actually stealing away any Romney voters -- Mitt stalled out all by himself. Anyone else seen anything about this?

Romney could have praised the "rationality of nonbelievers."

Romney's not the only one who thinks you have to be religious to be a good person.  Hillary is, too: www.dailykos.com/.../416275

Ivanova, good point!  I think the real competition is over the uncomitted and soft supporters of all the candidates.  The question I never see well-documented is the percentage of each candidate's support that is committed versus soft.  I suspect Thompson's and Giuliani's support is all fluff and those guys will not make it very far (despite my wish that they would, because they are both such beatable buffoons for the general election).

Ivanova, that's pretty much spot on. Check these graphs I posted elsewhere: www.able2know.org/.../viewtopic.php

One specification: though Thompson and McCain did each slip a couple of percentage points in the last few months, Huckabee's sharp rise mostly seems to coincide with the sharp drop in undecideds.

Back in the summer, June-July, the percentage of undecideds averaged out at 32%; in the polls of the last half a month, it averages out at 13%. If you compare the polling averages of June/July with those of the last half month, meanwhile, almost all the Republican candidates are up or down at most 4%, except for Huckabee - who's up 22%.

"The first casualty is the national community. Romney described a community yesterday. Observant Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Jews and Muslims are inside that community. The nonobservant are not. There was not even a perfunctory sentence showing respect for the nonreligious."

That was David Brooks, whom I've always respected, even though (or perhaps because) he has the capacity to really irritate me sometimes -- a thoughtful commentator and wise words in this column.  We are seeing here (and with Krauthammer's piece as well) the resistence of sensible, sophisticated conservatives to the religious right's debasement of basic American values.

On the upside:  Karl Rove is said to be a nonbeliever.  My source, I think, is Hitchens.  I always hesitate to mention that because it gives us fellow nonbelievers a bad name.  It opens us up to the "Stalin-was-an-atheist" sort of attack.  Still, if Romney doesn't think nonbelievers have any positive role in America, we can at least be assured that Rove won't be masterminding the good governor's future follies.

Or should I have said: He won't be conjuring any blossoms from Mitt's turds.