Congressman Dennis Kucinich has dropped out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. He won't endorse another candidate.

He had great positions on issues. I've always appreciated his willingness to run a race he knew he couldn't win in an effort to get his message across.

I hope people listened. I know I did.

The United States Treasury is $5 million poorer today. The Bush Administration has paid Zacarias Moussaoui's flight instructor a $5 million reward for providing information that led to his arrest and conviction.

Moussaoui had no part in 9/11. He was neither the 5th pilot nor the 20th hijacker, despite having claimed to be both at various times, depending on his mood. Ultimately, he recanted both assertions.

Then there's this:

The reward from the State Department's "Rewards for Justice" program is the first and only one to date to a U.S. citizen related to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the officials said.

It is also unusual because Moussaoui, who was imprisoned at the time of the attacks, was never named as a wanted suspect by the program. The program mainly seeks information about perpetrators or planners of terrorist acts against U.S. interests and citizens abroad.

The Florida primary will likely determine the Republican nominee. McCain and Romney are locked in a tight race as Rudy continues his implosion. Huck ran out of money.

Tonight brings an important moment, a much anticipated debate in Boca Raton, to be televised by MSNBC at 9. Timmah and Brian Williams will moderate. Watch and see if they pull the same stunts they do with Democrats. Do nothold your breath. But it should be a fun watch as Rudy is likely to throw a Hail Mary pass, the Mittster is likely to go after Saint John and McCain will pander to extreme base of the GOP on immigration, abortion and tax cuts.

Should be quite a spectacle. I'll live blog it for as long as I can stand to watch it.

Via TPM:

Earlier today CNN reported that the Hillary campaign has yanked their radio ad in South Carolina hitting Obama for saying the GOP is the "party of ideas." The Hillary campaign is claiming that it was scheduled to come down. Now the Obama campaign has responded in kind with their S.C. ad hitting Hillary for being willing to "say anything" to win. Obama spokesperson Bill Burton tells us: "Once we confirmed that Clinton was taking down her attack ad, we instructed radio stations in South Carolina to take down our response ad."

What do I think? I think this confirms that John Edwards has been moving up. Negative ads always knock down both the attacker and the attackee. Edwards seemed too far behind to constitute a threat. Looks like that calculation was wrong. But I must say, all the handwringing about this from the Left blogs and the glee filled attacks on the Clintons by the Media are simply ridiculous. No one was called corrupt. And only Obama challenged Clinton's integrity. [Many of] [t]he Left blogs in particular provided a pathetic display of double standards. They are not to be trusted in this campaign imo. I do not question their integrity. I question their rationality on this. They have a horse in this race - Barack Obama.

Arianna at Huffington Post is not big on pollsters. Today the site launched a new feature, Huffpollstrology.

It will keep you up to date on the latest poll results, along with the candidates' latest horoscope predictions, the latest online political betting lines, and the latest weather forecasts for key primary states (and we know how accurate those often turn out to be!). Pollstrology is a great way to see who is hot and who is not -- and which candidates' stars say they might be lucky in voter love today.

I know the astrology part is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I'm going to take it a step further anyway. HuffPo gives us the birthdates of the three top Dems, but we need more. We need birth times so we can examine their entire charts. We need rising signs, Moon and Venus placement, a picture of what planets are in their 10th houses. Thanks to Google, the results are below:

A post-debate South Carolina Reuters-Zogby poll was released today. Obama is still ahead, but his lead has narrowed and Edwards has gained.

Obama's lead fell 3 points overnight to give him a 39 percent to 24 percent edge over Clinton in South Carolina, according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released on Thursday.

Edwards, a former senator from neighboring North Carolina, climbed four points to reach 19 percent -- within striking distance of Clinton and second place.

Obama's drop is among black voters -- and Hillary gained two points with them. Among white voters:

Edwards held a slight lead over Clinton among likely white voters at 35 percent to 32 percent. Obama had 19 percent.

There's an editorial today by three physicians in the New England Journal of Medicine. Shorter version: Regardless of what the Supreme Court decides in Baze v. Rees, physicians should not participate in executions.

This spring the U.S. Supreme Court in Baze v. Rees1 will rule on the constitutionality of the three-drug regimen currently used for lethal injection in most state executions. The Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits punishment that is "cruel and unusual." The central question before the Court in Baze is whether the use of sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride violates that constitutional prohibition.

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Update (TL): Firedoglake is live-blogging.

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Chris Dodd has announced he will filibuster the FISA Amendment which includes telecom immunity. You can watch the debate here.

Update [2008-1-24 11:56:34 by Big Tent Democrat]: Clinton a No Show. Shame on her.

Update (TL): Obama isn't there either. I didn't expect either of them to be there.

Via Stoller:

[JACK WELCH]: I gotta ask you this. Part of the reason that there's so much excitement about your campaign is to leave some of the divisive politics behind, and you made a comment about Ronald Reagan and his Presidency and I can tell you that probably half of this country looks back on those years and there's a lot of, you know, admiration left for President Reagan. Even the Wall Street Journal, I don't know if you saw the editorial, seemed to commend you for that. Then in the debate the other night it looked like you couldn't run fast enough from those comments when you were debating Senator Clinton. How do you really feel about the Reagan years?

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I'm working most of the day, so here's a place for those of you who want to discuss news and issues other than the presidential election.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey has announced the Bush Administration will give $200 million to state and local governments to fight crime. Among his reasons:

Mukasey also rapped U.S. Sentencing Commission plans to allow some 19,500 federal prison inmates, most of them black, to seek reductions in their crack cocaine sentences. The attorney general described many of the inmates as violent gang members who could threaten public safety if released sooner than initially expected.

"A sudden influx of criminals from federal prison into your communities could lead to a surge in new victims as a tragic but predictable result," Mukasey told the mayors.

Only a small percentage of those 19,500 inmates will get any benefit from the change. For those that do, in most cases, the average sentence reduction is expected to be about 16 months. Many of those serving these draconian sentences are not violent criminals but drug offenders unlucky enough to have been caught possessing or selling the wrong drug.

Bush and Mukasey should have put the $200 million into drug treatment and offender re-entry programs. It would be far better spent and of greater ultimate benefit both to the inmates being released and the communities that receive them.

I guess this shows Mukasey, like Bush, intends to continue to be tough rather than smart about crime. [More....]

In Monday's South Carolina debate, John McCain and who could beat him was a big topic. Both John Edwards and Barack Obama argued they could beat John McCain and Hillary Clinton could not. Sorry Barack, the polls do not support you:

Clinton 46
McCain 42

Obama 41
McCain 42

The interesting finding here is Obama simply does not have the type of solid support with DEMOCRATS that Clinton does. And he runs no better with Independents against McCain than does Clinton. The moral of the story? The Kumbaya Unity schtick is a BAD general election strategy. There is no reason for it. Obama needs to jettison it NOW. It hurts him in the primaries. And would hurt him in a general election against McCain.

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