Pun Salad

It's the same lineup as last week. Rick Santorum's strong showing in the Iowa caucuses caused him to (occasionally) blip up above our arbitrary 4% threshold at Intrade this week. But as I type, he's underwater (at 3.8%), so he stays out for now.

Newt is barely hanging in at 5.0%. Which makes (ta-da) Mitt Romney quickly moving to the "prohibitive favorite" stage at 83.4%

As for phoniness itself, the President maintains his massive lead:

• President Obama's primary phony activity this week was making "recess appointments", bypassing the normal Senate confirmation process in a manner allowed by the Constitution. Only problem: the Senate was not in recess; they were conducting so-called "pro forma" sessions, which had been previously considered to prevent recess appointments.

  It was an unprecedented power grab. Amusingly, the Obamites pointed to an op-ed written by two Bush-era Justice Department underlings which called such pro forma sessions (I am not making this up) "phony". (One of the authors went into more detail at the Volokh Conspiracy blog here.)

  Why it seems like only a few years ago that Democrats regularly excoriated the Dubya-era Justice Department as a criminal conspiracy to deliver America into the dark night of totalitarianism. (Oh, wait: it was only a few years ago.) But now they're happy to use its past employees' pronouncements as dicta to excuse this latest end run around the Constitution.

• I have not received the Ron Paul letter where he calls Newt Gingrich a counterfeit conservative. But there's still a chance with tomorrow's mail.

• Newt, on the other hand, offered Mitt Romney some campaign advice:

  I just think he ought to be honest with the American people and try to win as the real Mitt Romney, not try to invent a poll-driven, consultant-guided version that goes around with talking points, and I think he ought to be candid. I don't think he's being candid and that will be a major issue. From here on out from the rest of this campaign, the country has to decide: Do you really want a Massachusetts moderate who won't level with you to run against Barack Obama who, frankly, will just tear him apart? He will not survive against the Obama machine.

  Hm, that advice may not have been provided in good faith.

• Fake Mitt Romney, on the other hand, has endorsed Ron Paul: