Pun Salad

According to PredictWise, the President Bloomberg boomlet is over. At least for this week. So it's a good thing we bashed him last week when we had the chance.

And, for what seems like the 47^th week in a row: the first four places are unchanged, while Bush/Rubio swap fifth/sixth place:

Note the increase in phoniness across the board. Should have expected that.

• Intrepid pundits are in Iowa, of course. Roger L. Simon reports from a Des Moines hotel room, apparently unwilling to spring for pay-per-view:

  I was anxious to get back to my hotel because I had an eight a.m. interview with Carly Fiorina, a woman who is alway good for a soundbite. But being on L.A. time, I was unable to sleep and watched television for a couple of hours -- which means I viewed a non-stop orgy of political ads, some 96% of which were of the attack variety with some 96% of those completely phony nonsense. There wasn't even time for one measly Cialis ad. The amount of money spent on this swill -- $30 million against Marco Rubio alone, according to a press release from his campaign (and I tend to believe it) -- is mind-boggling and tests the limits of your belief in free speech. Mine survived, but barely.

  Roger, Roger. I can report that things are about the same here in New Hampshire. I think I would vote for any candidate whose commercials showed the slightest bit of humor, but that hasn't happened yet. TiVo and Netflix are saving my sanity.

• My close personal friend Dave Barry is also in Iowa, and providing fresh content for the Miami Herald. You should check out his observations on Iowa restaurant cuisine, the curse of low-flow toilets, fringe candidate Roque "Rocky" De La Fuente, and the "Manure Applicator Training Session" at the annual Iowa Pork Congress. (And, yes, Dave does make the obvious "manure" connection to presidential politics.)

  Sample Iowa mythbusting from Dave:

  MYTH: Iowa lacks diversity.

  FACT: According to the 2010 Census, only 143 percent of Iowa’s nearly 8,000 residents are white, down from 156 percent in 2000.

  Dave's not running for President this year, which is a damn shame, because I would totally vote for him before voting for Trump. I may write him in.

• You probably heard that Trump skipped a recent GOP debate due to his feud with Megyn Kelly. Instead, he held a "veterans event" at the same time. (Dave Barry: "a tribute to veterans, in the same sense that an Elvis concert was a tribute to Elvis’ backup band.")

  Trump also set up a website to solicit donations to help veterans! Yay! But as the Federalist reports: donations made at that site go "directly to Donald Trump’s personal non-profit foundation".

  And Trump's concern with vets seems, at best, newly-minted:

  Between 2009 and 2013, Trump’s non-profit donated between $100,001 and $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Over the same period of time, Trump’s group gave only $57,000 to veterans groups. A 2015 analysis by Forbes noted that barely 1 percent of the Donald J. Trump Foundation’s $5.5 million worth of donations betwen 2009 and 2013 went to organizations that support military veterans[.]

  If voters can't see through this guy, we're in trouble.

• Did Hillary Clinton send top secret emails on her homebrew server? Find out the shocking answer from Peter Suderman's article, headlined "Despite What Her Campaign Wants You to Believe, Hillary Clinton Did Send Top Secret Emails on Her Homebrew Server". Suderman's well-documented conclusion:

  At virtually every turn, she and her campaign staffers have misled and dissembled, repeatedly making statements that later turn out to be false. In general, her attitude is one of disdain and dismissiveness, as if transparency and truthfulness about her unorthodox decision to conduct her State Department email business exclusively on a homebrew email server was unnecessary, or beneath her. She has displayed both a willful disregard for the truth and as a generalized resistance to public scrutiny and oversight. And that may tell us more about her, and what kind of president she might be, than any email she’s sent.

• Back to the Republican side: you can't beat those Huckabee fans for phony-spotting:

  Supporters of Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee put out a new television ad attacking fellow candidate Ted Cruz's Christian faith, accusing him of being a "phony" Christian for giving far less than 10 percent of his income to his church.

  This is the sort of thing that happens when you try to out-God your opponents.

• I usually <abbr type="stupid">LOL</abbr> at the prank-signage worked up by Obvious Plant. He ventured into politics recently, with a comparison of Hillary vs. Bernie on the issues. Sample: