Iowa

Truman Capote, from his unfinished book Answered Prayers: "In fact, I was a kind of Hershey Bar whore-- there wasn't much I wouldn't do for a nickel's worth of chocolate."Yesterday, the NYTimes fleshed out the conventional wisdom about Trump being a racist and a latter-day Know-Nothing. They pointed out, as an example, that when he wanted to prevent a rival casino from getting into business 15 years ago, he ran ugly ads that said, "The St.

EMILY's List perverting the meaning of "progressive" in IA-01Every cycle EMILY's List picks at least one horrid conservative to get behind. People thought this might end after their campaign for Memphis recruit Nikki Tinker exploded in their face.

The Sanders surge is about Sanders, not Clinton. Click to enlarge.by Gaius PubliusWe know that Sanders is gaining in many polls, and that some are attributing his rise to a growing "anyone but Clinton" mood among Democrats. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com disagrees.Data first, via Silver:

Iowa's senior U.S. senator, Chuck Grassley, has been in Congress since 1975. Before that he was a state rep for 15 years. He won his U.S. Senate seat in 1980, and if he wins in 2016 and serves out his full term he will be 88. He's had an honorable political career, and although no one likes to talk about it above a whisper, he slips into senility more and more frequently, often very publicly.

Bernie Sanders draws nearly 10,000 people in Madison, Wisconsin (source). Click to enlarge; it looks pretty good full size.

In the most recent poll of the GOP contenders in Iowa, Scott Walker, governor of neighboring Wisconsin, is still in the lead. He's polling at 18%, eight points ahead of Trump and Ben Carson, who are at 10% each.

When the world first got wind of a $900 stipend being offered to young scholars to partake in GMO banana trials to be tested on live, human, Iowa State University students, many were in an uproar.

If you think of average Iowa voters as common-sense pragmatists who swing back and forth between the two parties-- Iowa went for Clinton in 1996, Gore in 2000, George W. Bush in 2004 and Obama in 2008 and 2012-- you're not thinking of the activists who turn out every 4 years for the Republican caucuses. These are not, for the most part, common-sense pragmatists or even mainstream conservatives. Ideologues, religious lunatics and extremists dominate the Republican caucuses.

Last year I was certain that Ted Cruz's ruthlessness and willingness to pander to the most extreme factions of the neo-fascist right would trump the big money Establishment Republicans who, at the time, were lining up behind Jeb Bush and Chris Christie. Christie is no longer a factor, Bush hasn't caught fire and Cruz could still pull it off-- but right now the front-runner has got to be ridiculous Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

Iowa Republicans turned up at recent Chris Christie appearances in the hope of seeing him scream at someone, preferably an elderly woman or a teacher. They've been disappointed and he's getting a poor word-of-mouth about the hardcore GOP base.