Presidential Roundup

Your Monday Morning One-Stop Shop

The beret is planning to check in with Bob Vander Plaats and Newt Gingrich this afternoon, as the famIly leader tour stops by the People's Republic. That line in Bob's pledge about marital fidelity could produce a moment of awkward...

The pledge itself, of course, has been amended after the national press interpreted it as... pro-slavery? Here's the controversial part:

Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President.

The controversy, of course, is in the line 'election of the USA's first African-American President." The amended version reads "Socialist Muslim Kenyan 'president' (sic)."

So what does the pledge revision do for the two who signed the antebellum version, Bachmann and Santorum? Does it help them in South Carolina?

But as the great philosopher R. Zimmerman once said, if you ain't got nothin' you got nothin' to lose. Thus Gary Johnson, the alternative for folks who find Ron Paul too socialist, is the only candidate who had the gonads to tell BVP to stick his petition where... well, in a place where it would be illegal to stick much of anything if Bob had his way.

---

The big non-Pledge news is of course this AM's TheIowaRepublican poll:

Bachmann 25
Romney 21
Cain 9
Pawlenty 9
Paul 6
Gingrich 4
Santorum 2
Huntsman 1

That only adds up to 76, so it seems there's a lot of undecided, scattered, and "anyone else." The real winner here may be Rick Perry. And, as always, Sarah Palin is hoverin' over this.

Another bizarro blip on the Bachmann front, this time a past association with a heavy metal fundamentalist -- you read that right -- "who believes gays are responsible for the Holocaust and endorses Muslim law calling for the execution of homosexuals." Maybe she's hoping for an endorsement from Tipper Gore. (Yeah. Still pissed. In other news, Members Of Twisted Sister Now Willing To Take It.)

I hate to say anything positive about a Screw Iowa strategy, even a modified one, but it seems Romney has made a smart choice. Last time he threw everything he had into Iowa and got a second plice 30 percent. Here he's doing nothing more than openly saying Screw Iowa like Huntsman, and he's at 21.

As for Herman Cain, he hits a bump in the road in his campaign for Secretary of Commerce as he's denounced by Hispanic Republicans, both of them.