Rand Paul is taking advantage of his dad's crazy internet comment troll machine to clean up in fundraising, and he's ahead in every poll taken since last November. He's won the coveted Sarah Palin endorsement.

Ron Paul is crazy, but he is at least anti-war, anti-drug war, pro-habeas corpus, anti-death penalty, and anti-PATRIOT Act. His wonderful son Rand combines the worst of libertarian philosophy (no social safety net, progressive taxation, Welfare state, or, whatever, public infrastructure for anyone) with more "conventional" Republican views on foreign policy and social issues. (Always being pro-killing-everyone everywhere with bombs all of the time and being pro-locking up young people for ten years for smoking the demon weed are the "more conventional" political opinions.)

But Dr. Paul the Younger's still got that Tea Party Patrick Henry marching-around-with-funny-signs mojo working for him. And we're pulling for him! Because it would be hilarious to watch the GOP mainstream lose at the hands of the populist anger-junkies they're all riling up all the time. The establishment Republicans do not want someone who is even slightly aligned with the Ron Paul wing to actually hold a precious Senate seat, because he might not be a reliable vote to support future President Mitt Romney's war on Scandinavia.

Ron Paul wrote his list warning them that the dreaded "neo-conservatives" are fundraising against poor Rand. Which is true!

This other guy, Grayson, he's a nonentity. Kentucky's Senior Senator and fellow nonentity, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, is hosting fundraisers for Grayson. And to combat the power of the Tea Parties and Queen Sarah Palin, they've brought in.. Dick Cheney.

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One of Dick Cheney's scary henchmen elaborates on the Cheney endorsement in The Corner, writing that Rand Paul has "strange and troubling positions" on things like our having invaded Iraq for no fucking reason.

What's fun is that this is Kentucky. Being an actual crazy person is hardly a bar to holding public office. If the Republicans hadn't basically forced him out, Jim Bunning probably woulda gotten reelected this year, and that man has pretty much lost his mind.

A rabid dog, fresh from biting an adorable little girl in a princess dress, could probably win a state-wide election in Kentucky, as long as it was pro-life. But Rand Paul's occasional statments about "closing Guantanamo" might actually put him outside the mainstream there. So for the good of America we should hope that the Tea Partiers push Rand over the top—because then either the GOP loses the safest Senate seat they have or they end up keeping it with a guy who they can't fucking stand.

Joe quotes Reagan and he says that we should not shoot our way back to prosperity.

Joe DioGuardi will totally be a senator! And if he's not good enough to be a senator, someday he will professionally judge and criticize aspiring would-be senators on a television show.

As of a year ago, Charlie Crist was polling in the high 60s among Republicans and Independents. And Democrats. He should've waltzed right in to the US Senate. Today, more conservative challenger Rubio leads Crist among Republican voters 60-28. 29% of Republicans approve of Crist's job performance as Governor. Crazy bad numbers. "Drop out of the Republican primary and run as an Independent" numbers.

But Crist is soldiering on! Really stupidly!

And so, dashing, silver-haired Crist accused his Cuban-American primary opponent of needing to have his back waxed on Fox last night. Because that'll really turn off the primary voters. Supposedly Rubio charged this gross back-waxing to a Republican Party of Florida credit card, and that is the scandal here. Misappropriation of party funds. Not the gross hairy back thing.

(Crist also insists that he gets his own haircuts for $11, "from a guy named Carl the Barber." We are just guessing that the guy is not actually named "Carl the Barber.")

This is almost as dumb as when the closeted Crist married a woman because he thought he'd be John McCain's running mate.

The former drug addict who is always wrong about everything relating to the field he is supposedly an expert in told Human Events that he is very, very happy at CNBC, where they don't expect him to be right about things all that often.

"But, and this is a very important thing, and from the heart, I love my work at CNBC. I just love it. And that's the reason why I have no plans to run for the Senate at the present time," Mr. Kudlow explained.

"The network has been great for me. It's a second career and it's gone very well with God's grace. Frankly, that's a major impediment to any political campaigning," he said.

The real problem, as the Observer points out, is that Chuck Schumer's approval ratings have come back up to almost 60%.

For the love of god, we need Mort in this race! If he quits, who else do we have... Kudlow? We'll have to start caring about fucking Texas and California or something.

None of them have announced their actual candidacies. All of them are establishment hacks with mundane ideas pretending to be outsiders. (Though who the fuck knows what any of them actually believe, besides that rich people should not have to pay taxes.) They are the absolute worst New York has to offer, and we say this going into the third term of a blinkered billionaire mayor and the soon-to-be-aborted partial first term of the accidental incompetent blind governor who took over the for the raging vengeful prick who had to quit because he fucked prostitutes with his socks on.

And despite their ridiculousness we must take each of these people semi-seriously entirely because of their friends, who have money and power and influence (and who are all, universally, vapid and stupid people). Ford has the DLC and the Rattners. Mort has Bloomberg. Andrew has, uh, New York's Democratic Party—a particularly useless organization of corrupt wardheelers, rich dingbats, and general incompetents. (Andrew is also the only person on this list guaranteed the job he has not yet deigned to campaign for.)

But Larry "Kuddles" Kudlow just might have the best friends of all. For they are Roger Stone's friends!

GOP dirty trickster Roger Stone has finally openly jumped on the Kudlow-for-Senate bandwagon. The inexplicably still-employed always-wrong economist wants to run against Chuck Schumer.

(Please keep in mind that the "Draft Kudlow" movement is an attempt to invent a drumbeat of popular support for a man who is already running for office, before he acknowledges that he is running for office. Also it is a fundraising campaign.)

Now, Stone correctly notes that Kudlow is a very good dresser. Stone is also right that Chuck Schumer is "perhaps the most odious, pushy, abrasive and self-absorbed jerk in Congress today." (But, you know, very few of those qualities necessarily make someone a bad legislator.) Stone is also right that Kudlow got everything wrong in the run-up to the economic collapse. Then he stops being right.

Some decry Kudlow, saying he was wrong in his economic predictions as our global economic meltdown approached. But who was right? Here is what we do know: taxing and spending got us to where we are today, and higher taxes and more pork spending are making it far worse.

Amazing. I didn't even know we knew that! (This comes after a line about leftists "rewriting history" to make it seem like supply-side economics don't work, just fyi.)

What Stone leaves out (which is funny, because surely a political operative as experienced as Roger knows this) is that Larry Kudlow was also, for more than a decade, a cocaine addict who spent tens of thousands of dollars a month on binges and who went to rehab for his addiction four times. But, to borrow Stone's inspiring defense of Kudlow's awe-inspiring constant wrongness, who hasn't been fired from The National Review for being a crackhead?

Congrats, Larry Kudlow, for making Harold Ford look electable.

[Top photo by Amy Sussman/Getty Images]

Wayne Barrett at The Village Voice noticed that the Times story on Mort's supposed Senate dreams was bylined by media reporter Tim Arango and City Hall reporter Michael Barbaro. Those two have shared a byline only once before: when they broke the news that Mike Bloomberg was going to campaign for a then-forbidden third term as mayor, and that he'd enlisted the support of Daily News publisher Zuckerman, New York Post and Wall Street Journal publisher Rupert Murdoch, and Times publisher Pinch Sulzberger. That was a great big scoop that revealed precisely the method Bloomberg would employ to buy his way into a third term: aligning the city's papers behind him and convincing every reporter in the city to operate as if his third term was an inevitability.

The rushed Post editorial encouraging Zuckerman's entry into the increasingly ridiculous Senate race makes a bit more sense when you remember that it was the Zuckerman-Murdoch-Bloomberg alliance that got Mike reelected.

But aren't these the same guys forcing a ridiculous Harold Ford run down our throats? Have they decided that the Ford campaign is too ridiculous to be salvaged? (Ford will reportedly come to decision regarding his "political intentions" at the end of this week, or possibly at the end of February, according to a brief Daily News story today—he has one more "listening event" left on his schedule.) It's hard to see Murdoch and our city's Republican mayor having any influence over a Democratic primary. But Mort has been tacking hard right lately, and these guys might just think that in this climate, the only thing standing in the way of a Republican pickup is a candidate with money and name recognition. Ford might make a run as an independent, but he wouldn't end up on the GOP ticket. Mort, on the other hand, might even attract some of that Tea Party excitement these billionaires have heard about lately!

Crucially, the Barbaro story that launched the beautiful Ford campaign named Democratic donors Steven Rattner and Maureen White as the big names behind Ford. Mayor Mike was only said to be "open to the possibility of supporting a challenger of Mr. Ford's stature." Which, you know, the couple from the Hillside Honda commercial have turned out to be "of Mr. Ford's stature." (Sulzberger's apparent absence from the Zuckerman discussions is probably because he's still sticking with the candidate owned by his friends the Rattners, which is why his paper keeps running stories like "Boy, Harold Ford's wife is so pretty and down-to-earth.")

The Ford flirtation and this apparent Zuckerman campaign are the best proof yet that Mike has completely lost it. Is aide Keven Sheekey still telling him that he could be president? (Memo to Mike: you are an unmarried socially liberal billionaire Jew who lives in New York.) He barely bought his reelection in a boring campaign against a complete nonentity. His inflated poll numbers are at their lowest point ever. He's exhausted his political capital. Now he and his dumb rich friends are mistaking their other dumb rich friends for people of stature. Mort Zuckerman is a lightweight. At least ambition-troll Harold Ford can work a hotel lounge.