Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

Southern Blacks Are Split on Clinton vs. Obama. And the problem is so bad, it's even tearing marriages asunder!

-- MELISSA McEWAN

I've been a bit puzzled by the relative absence of the worsening economic news is from the presidential primary campaign. If you'd dropped by Iowa a year ago and listened to some rhetoric and dropped by Nevada today to hear some rhetoric, you wouldn't necessarily assume anything had changed in-between. A bit more talk of stimulus now, a bit more talk of Iraq then, but the level of urgency has held basically constant.

-- EZRA KLEIN

It would be wrong to discuss Mitt Romney's actual religious beliefs, but perfectly fine to discuss Barack Obama's fictitious ones.

-- ATRIOS

Aside from its pesky illegitimacy, the Iowa election – on the GOP side – was deeply reassuring to me. For a brief moment, it threatened to restore my faith in Republican voters – not so much for electing Huckabee, but for rejecting Romney. To be blunt, Huckabee’s not my candidate of choice, but at least he’s not full of excrement. That said, the fact that Romney is a BS artist doesn’t bother me per se. I’m a political junkie – verbal excrement is a passion. With Romney though, it’s not merely that he’s full of crap. It’s the particular nature of his full-of-crapness that bothers me – that really bothers me.

-- PUBLIUS

Fred Thompson's seeming indifference to AIDS in Africa is astonishing.

-- MICHAEL GERSON

The larger problem is that no Republican candidate has energized the social, economic, and foreign-policy components of the modern conservative coalition. That means that whoever wins this competition could inherit a fractured party in which at least one significant bloc of voters will be unenthusiastic, at best, about the outcome.

-- RONALD BROWNSTEIN

There once was the mayor called Rudy
Who went to Long Island for booty
The taxpayers paid
So that he could get laid
Did 9/11 come before Judy?

-- ANDREW SULLIVAN

Obama's surprising words about [Ronald] Reagan won’t garner him too many GOP votes. But it will soften his image so that he doesn't look like quite the progressive ogre many on the right would like to paint him.

-- RICK MORAN

The hysteria that is energizing the campaign to smear Ron Paul and his supporters as "racist" is reaching a crescendo of viciousness, as the Beltway "libertarian" crowd revs up its motors for a righteous purge.

-- JUSTIN RAIMONDO

Half a century ago, after the Supreme Court desegregation decision, an Arkansas governor named Orval Faubus stood in the doorway of Central High School in Little Rock with National Guard members to keep African American teenagers out. Now Mike Huckabee is doing a Faubus impersonation in South Carolina.

-- ROBERT STEIN

Cartoon by Jeff Danziger/New York Times Syndicate