Pun Salad

Our candidate list is shaken up once again due to our (arbitrary) inclusion criterion for GOP candidates: a 4% probability or greater at Intrade for capturing the nomination. Today:

• Mitch Daniels is gone; Intraders noticed that he announced his decision not to run last night, and dropped him right down to 0.2%. Pun Salad is officially disappointed, because Pun Salad was officially impressed with his reading list. (That's probably not the best way to choose a candidate, but I can't think of a better one right now.)

• Newt Gingrich dropped off the map (3.0%), almost certainly due to his stupid answer about Paul Ryan's plans on Meet the Press last week.

• Michele Bachmann is back in at 5.4%. Intrade is still misspelling her last name.

• We haven't looked at Jon Huntsman much, but he's up here in New Hampshire this weekend. Does he have what it takes, phony-wise? At Commentary, Jonathan S. Tobin thinks so: "Huntsman Makes Romney Look Principled".
  According to a piece in Politico, LDS members are viewing Huntsman's decision to place his national campaign headquarters in Orlando, Florida rather than on the shores of the Great Salt Lake with dismay. Even worse, various opinions attributed to Huntsman about his Mormonism are being interpreted as an effort to distance himself from his religion. At a time when the LDS church has become a popular culture piñata with HBO's recently concluded Big Love and Broadway's Book of Mormon both skewering the Saints, they have good reason to be sensitive about a public figure that seems ashamed or uncertain about his identity.

  TIME magazine calls Huntsman the GOP candidate that "Democrats most fear". As if they'd know. But here's the sort of thing Tobin et. al. are talking about:

  And as for whether or not Huntsman still belongs to the Church of Latter-day Saints, I know less than I did before I asked him. ("I'm a very spiritual person," as opposed to a religious one, he says, "and proud of my Mormon roots." Roots? That makes it sound as if you're not a member anymore. Are you? "That's tough to define," he says. "There are varying degrees. I come from a long line of saloon keepers and proselytizers, and I draw from both sides.")

  I think this means he has the proselytizing saloonkeeper vote sewn up.

• True fact: browse over to the one-page website http://jonhuntsman.com/ and you'll find a copy of Huntsman's hand-written thank you note to President Obama on his appointment to be ambassador to China. ("You are a remarkable leader - and it has been a great honor getting to know you.") There's a pretty border of pink hearts.

  Via this Politico story about "smear sites". (Which seems a little strong.)

• John Nolte finds Sarah Palin to be a lot less phony than the MSM narrative about her:
  The idea is, at all costs, to undermine her seriousness and to create a relentless storm of nonsensical controversies around her that serve the leftist MSM's partisan desires in three ways. First, by creating a narrative out of the ridiculous, the Governor is never allowed to get her message out. Second, it furthers the goal of turning her into a punchline. Finally, this Palin-Fury the MSM constantly brews up is meant to condition us to wince every time she pops her head out of the ground.

  John shows how this worked with Palin's reaction to Osama bin Fishfood's recent demise.