A little more than a year to go. Can we survive?

Some thoughts on The Walking Dead

This post was mostly eaten by blogger when I first put it up and this has been my first chance to fix it.

I caught the first (and now the second) episode of AMC's The Walking Dead and had a few thoughts.

1. This is left over from last season.  What's the deal about guns being so scarce that someone had to go back into the heart of zombie occupied Atlanta to retrieve a bag of firearms?  This is Georgia in the heart of the American Southeast.  If you want a gun just go into any house and chances overwhelmingly favor finding a few laying around. If you don't want to enter a private residence then go into any gun store, pawn shop, sporting goods store or any big box "mart-mart" and you'll find at least rifles and shotguns.  Also you can go into any sheriff's office, city police office or state highway patrol office or National Guard armory.  In the NG armory you just might find full auto weapons and explosives as well.

2. This season they are searching for the missing girl and hear church bells.  They find a church which is clearly identified as "Southern Baptist".  They find that the bells are recorded chimes (we will not ask where the electric power came from) and set about to exploring the building.  Upon entering they find a giant crucifix hanging behind the pulpit - just like one might find in a Roman Catholic church, but would not see in a Southern Baptist church.

3. What's with the ratty old camper?  They are in the Atlanta metropolitan area!  There are dozens of dealerships with brand new RV's, some nearly the size of Greyhound buses that they could help themselves to.  There are also plenty of dealerships full of new SUV's that they could expropriate.

4. And while we're on vehicles why have the redneck ride a chopped Harley with hangers when a good dirt bike would be far more practical?  After all he could go off road when necessary and maneuver through much tighter areas.  But why have a motorcycle riding point anyway since a biker would be much easier for the zombies to unseat and dine upon than someone enclosed in a car?  It would be better to tow the bike behind the camper and use it when needed.

5. They need to have a wrecker with winch and push-board to ride point so that it can clear obstructions.  An armed man can ride shotgun.

6. Disarming everyone is a spectacularly bad idea.  The theory is that only the two deputies are trained to use firearms however the alternative is to give everyone an edged weapon.  Ask yourself this, which is easier to use without training, a handgun or a sword?

It seems very obvious to me that the writers and directors of this show have never been south of Washington DC.

It's time to thin the herd

There have been enough debates by now for the public to have formed an impression of the candidates who are contesting for the GOP nomination and so it is time for those with no chance of being the party's standard bearer to step aside so that remaining debates can focus upon those the public had decided to take seriously.

Michelle Bachmann would make a very good president, but the impression she has made is not adequate to give her the victory and she should withdraw.  That she does not indicates that she is no longer running for president but for vice president or, and more likely, Speaker of the House.  There is nothing wrong with these ambitions, but continuing to advance them in this forum is destructive to the GOP and its chances of picking a thoroughly vetted candidate that can defeat Obama next year.

Much the same can be said of Rick Santorum.  He would make a wonderful president, but it won't be him.  At least not this time around.  I think he knows this.  In fact I think he has always known this.  His goal in entering the race was either to secure the VP slot or another cabinet position.  Or to increase his stature back home in Pennsylvania for another Senate run.

Newt Gingrich just might be narcissist enough to have thought he could have gotten the nomination and then won the White House.  But probably even he was not that delusional.  This is almost certainly a vanity run for Newt whose real purpose is to allow him to raise his speaking fees and get a new book deal or two.  Of course a cabinet post or even the vice presidency could also be in his sights.  Whatever his true agenda remaining in the race only harms the party and by extension the nation.  Newt is smart enough to understand this so if he chooses to remain in the race it will be because he has made the conscience choice to put his interests ahead of the country's. 

John Huntsman never had a chance but is probably too stupid to have realized it.  Remember when the White House leaked that Huntsman was the one Republican that Obama feared running against.  No?  Don't be embarrassed it was only in the news for about two days.  Democrats always do this.  They leak the name of some clueless liberal RINO that they know that they could beat in their sleep as the "one Republican that could defeat us" and hope that the GOP takes the bait.  Like we did in 2008.  The result is always the same.  When we bite we go down in flames. 

Ron Paul is the best guy in the race on domestic fiscal issues however his views on national security and the closely related field of foreign policy utterly disqualify him from serious consideration.  If you want to know what Paul's response to a threat from a foreign power would be just look at how The US and the Great Powers of Europe dealt with Hitler.  That is Paulism in a nutshell.  Except that when Germany invaded Poland Europe did, at last" go to war.  If Paul had been running things I doubt that even the Blitz would have stirred him to combat.  After all war is the health of the state.  Paul knows that he isn't going to be president.  This campaign is just a way for him to raise his stature for future book sales and speaking engagements.

Rick Perry might make a good president.  He has a good record as governor of Texas but his views on illegal immigration are deeply troubling.  If 10 plus million Mexicans suddenly gain the right to vote in US elections they will give the Democrats an unbeatable electoral majority for at least the next 50 years.  From that point forward every president and congressional majority will be like Obama/Pelosi on steroids.  If you want America to become Venezuela vote in a president and congressmen who favor amnesty.  Having said that it is still a fact that Perry is the popular governor of a large and very prosperous state so he must, for at least a little while longer, be taken seriously as a candidate in the primary process.  If he continues to implode over the next couple of months he should leave but for now he has a legitimate place in the race.

Herman Cain never expected to get this far but now he is the front runner.  While he has not thought out clear positions on all the issues that a president will have to deal with (especially foreign policy) he has good instincts and as a very successful CEO knows how to seek and follow good advice from legitimate experts.  As the frontrunner he absolutely has a place in the race.  In fact right now he is the candidate I'm backing.

Mitt Romney.  What can you say about Mitt?  He has been running for the presidency since 2007.  I supported him back in 2008 after the Thompson candidacy imploded as the only man who could keep John McCain's name off the top of the ticket but that was just a choice between the lesser of evils.  Romney should not be president but his place as the number 1 or 2 candidate in polls earns him a place one the stage.

As things now stand the debates are so crowded with also-rans in the race only for ego or to further other ambitions that it becomes impossible to examine the three serious candidates properly.  It is very important that they be encouraged to withdraw. 

The mainstream media will not put pressure on any RINO candidate to leave the race while they will restlessly hammer an conservative candidate.  It will be up to rank and file Republican voters to push the dead wood off the stage.  That means that those with a soft spot in their hearts for Bachmann or Santorum need to face reality and let their candidate know that it is time to leave and throw their support behind Perry or Cain (preferable Cain).

Ron Paul supporters are as hopeless as he is.  Libertarianism is a utopian cult which at its heart is as anti-American as the nihilist death-cult of progressive liberalism.  Ron Paul's pod-people supporters don't give a rats ass about the good of the nation as long as they get to run wild through the primary process spray painting their graffiti all over the walls and gaming the results of every electronic poll to make it look like Paul has the support of more than a handful of basement dwelling malcontents.

To sum up the campaign season started early this year so the time has already come to thin the ranks of the candidates.  Otherwise we will wind up with Mitt Romney running against Barack Obama.  Liberal-lite running against Liberal-extreme.

Not a good outcome for the nation no matter who wins.

Trying so hard to take them seriously

H/T: American Thinker

It better

More good news

From USNews:

Here's how much political trouble President Obama is in: A new poll by the authoritative Evolving Strategies firm finds that Herman Cain, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney would all beat Obama it the election were held today.

Worse for Obama: the poll, which showed some 1,000 Americans videos of both Obama and the candidates speaking on the economy, backed up recent analysis that the president has lost his mojo when it comes to tackling the deepening recession and blaming Republicans for standing in his way.

Evolving Strategies put the video spin on their poll because most of the Republican presidential candidates still aren't known outside of Washington, the early primary and caucus states and to political junkies. Their idea was to show respondents a video clip and have them read a short 120-word biography.

As a result, the respondents felt they had more information and familiarity with the candidates and felt better making a judgment on a head-to-head contest question. Ironically, Obama still beat a "generic" Republican, but not the three front runners. Unfortunately for Obama, since the GOP primary race is now known, there is no more generic candidate to wish for.

[Read: Cain Jumps 20 Points Ahead of Romney in Poll.]

It is too soon to tell who the nominee will be but things are looking good for Cain and as things stand now that it good for the country.

So clever that only Satan could have thought it up

Ross Kaminsky in The American Spectator's website:

Robert Jeffress, the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, made news last week when referring to Mormonism as a cult while introducing Texas Governor Rick Perry to the Values Voters Summit.

In the past couple of days, Jeffress is doing anything but backing away from his comments, saying on Sunday that "Part of a pastor's job is to warn his people and others about false religions. Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Mormonism are all false religions. And I stand by those statements."

My views on these various religions aside, this sort of rhetoric is distinctly unhelpful in reaching the goal that a majority of Americans now share: ending the Obama administration after one term.

The "mainstream" media are already foaming at the mouth over Jeffress's remarks, using them to reinforce their journalism school-learned bias against Republicans as small-minded bible thumpers, or perhaps, to coin a phrase, as people bitterly clinging to religion.

If Mr. Kaminsky gets his way Satan will have won a victory of incalculable magnitude.  He will have literally guaranteed that no Christian can be elected president of the United States.

If the mainstream media's (and Ross Kaminsky's) attempt to force GOP candidates to prove their worthiness for office by affirming that a non-Christian cult is a legitimate Christian denomination it will have the same effect as making candidates deny the deity of Christ, his bodily resurrection and his future return.  All indispensable bedrock doctrines of true saving Christian faith.

Mormons do not believe that God is eternal.   They believe that he was born a mortal human in the distant past on a distant planet (a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away) and that he earned his godhood by perfect obedience to the Mormon religion.  They believe that upon his death he was judged worthy and elevated to godhood and that he then called out the name of all his wives who then were elevated to the status of goddesshood.  That he then formed his own heaven and earth (our earth) out of already existing materials and began populating his heaven by having sex with his goddess wives, who became pregnant and gave birth to babies who had only spirit bodies.  The first of his spirit children was Jesus and the second was Lucifer.  They call this life in spirit form before getting a body "the preexistence".  

After a goodly number of spirit children were created the Mormon god called a counsel and asked his offspring to bring plans to the table on how he was to govern the world he was preparing to populate.  Lucifer proposed a plan to force all humans to believe and obey their heavenly father and Jesus proposed allowing men to possess free will.

The Mormon god chose Jesus' plan and in anger Lucifer defied his father and drew one third of the spirit children with him into his rebellion.  They became Satan and the demons and they attempted to overthrow Elohim (the Mormon god's proper name).  Some spirit children fought bravely in support of their father and some were cowardly and did not take part in the fighting.

The Mormon god then created Adam and Eve and ordered them to be fruitful and multiply in order to create physical bodies for his spirit children to incarnate into.  The reason Mormons are instructed to have large families is to create more bodies for the spirits in the preexistence. Those spirit children who fought bravely in the battle for heaven in the preexistence were rewarded by being born with skin that was "white and delightsome" while those who had displeased god would have a "skin of blackness".

"And he had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, and they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them."

       From the Book of Mormon - 2 Nephi 5:21

It should be pointed out here that all this has happened before and all this will happen again (just like in Battlestar Galactica).  This happened on Elohim's home planet and on the planet of the god who created Elohim's planet.  It is happening on countless planets across the universe at this very minute.

On each of these planets a Jesus will be born and go to the cross in order to begin the work that a future Joseph Smith will finish when he is called by the god of that world to become the prophet of the Mormon religion.  And on each of those planets some number of men will be perfectly faithful to the demands of Mormonism and will earn their own godhood.  They will the create their own planets and the whole process will start over and so on into eternity (each cycle is called a "heavenly round").

I could go into more details but you get the point.  There is simply no way that this is compatible with biblical Christianity and forcing presidential candidates to say that it is will do nothing more than exclude believing Christians from the presidency.

Of course this is a free country and anyone may believe anything he pleases.  I am also aware that we are electing a national political leader not a national Sunday school teacher.  And I am aware of Heinlein's dictum that "one man's religion is another man's belly laugh". 

I have no objection to a Mormon as president - as long as he is a genuine constitutional conservative who understands that socialized medicine is not just bad for the entire nation when imposed by the federal government but bad for any individual state when imposed by that state's government.  Who understands that the Second Amendment means exactly what is says and who has a clear and consistent record opposing abortion.

None of which can be said about Mitt Romney - BTY.

However I refuse to allow the claim that Mormonism is a legitimate form of Christianity to stand.  It is not.  To make claiming that Mormonism is true Christianity a test of whether someone should be allowed to become president is no different that making a Jew (like Joe Lieberman) affirm that Jesus was the true messiah or making an atheist affirm his belief in an "all-powerful creator god".

Individual Americans have the right to use religion as a basis for their decision on who to vote for if they wish to do so.  We are free to vote only for Southern Baptists or Roman Catholics or Wiccians or atheists or any other faith or non-faith as we see fit.  However we owe it to ourselves to know exactly what we are doing when we do it.

Essential bedrock doctrines of the Mormon faith have no more common ground with biblical Christianity than Hitler does with Netanyahu.  Making a Christian who knows what Christians believe say that Mormons are not a cult is making him deny his faith.

If GOP candidates like Perry or Bachmann buckle under this pressure and affirm that Mormons are Christians then they have denied Christ (1 John 2:19)

Yawn

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie says he is backing Mitt Romney for president as "the man we need to lead America" and said attacks on his Mormon religion are "beneath the office of the president of the United States."

So, one RINO endorses another RINO.

Is anyone surprised?

The incredible imploding presidency of B. Hussein Obama

From The New York Post:

Aimless Obama walks alone
 

Last Updated: 3:45 AM, October 9, 2011

Posted: 2:49 AM, October 9, 2011

The reports are not good, disturbing even. I have heard basically the same story four times in the last 10 days, and the people doing the talking are in New York and Washington and are spread across the political spectrum.

The gist is this: President Obama has become a lone wolf, a stranger to his own government. He talks mostly, and sometimes only, to friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett and to David Axelrod, his political strategist.

Everybody else, including members of his Cabinet, have little face time with him except for brief meetings that serve as photo ops. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner both have complained, according to people who have talked to them, that they are shut out of important decisions.

The president’s workdays are said to end early, often at 4 p.m. He usually has dinner in the family residence with his wife and daughters, then retreats to a private office. One person said he takes a stack of briefing books. Others aren’t sure what he does.

If the reports are accurate, and I believe they are, they paint a picture of an isolated man trapped in a collapsing presidency. While there is no indication Obama is walking the halls of the White House late at night, talking to the portraits of former presidents, as Richard Nixon did during Watergate, the reports help explain his odd public remarks.

Obama conceded in one television interview recently that Americans are not “better off than they were four years ago” and said in another that the nation had “gotten a little soft.” Both smacked of a man who feels discouraged and alienated and sparked comparisons to Jimmy Carter, never a good sign.

Blaming the country is political heresy, of course, yet Obama is running out of scapegoats. His allies rarely make affirmative arguments on his behalf anymore, limiting themselves to making excuses for his failure. He and they attack Republicans, George W. Bush, European leaders and Chinese currency manipulation -- and that was just last week.

The blame game isn’t much of a defense for Solyndra and “Fast and Furious,” the emerging twin scandals that paint a picture of incompetence at best. 

Obama himself is spending his public time pushing a $450 billion “jobs” bill -- really another stimulus in disguise -- that even Senate Democrats won’t support. He grimly flogged it repeatedly at his Thursday press conference, even though snowballs in hell have a better chance of survival.

If he cracked a single smile at the hour-plus event, I missed it. He seems happy only on the campaign trail, where the adoration of the crowd lifts his spirits.

When it comes to getting America back on track to economic growth, he is running on vapors. Yet he shows no inclination to adopt any ideas other than his own Big Government grab. His itch for higher taxes verges on a fetish.

Harvey Golub, former chairman of American Express, called the “jobs” bill an incoherent mess. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, he said that among other flaws, the bill includes an unheard of retroactive tax hike on the holders of municipal bonds.

“Many of us have suspected that economic illiterates were setting the economic policy of this administration,” Golub wrote, adding that the bill “reveals a depth of cluelessness that boggles the mind.”

The public increasingly shares the sentiment. A new Quinnipiac polls finds that 55 percent now disapprove of Obama’s job performance, with only 41 percent approving. A mere 29 percent say the economy will improve if the president gets four more years.

The election, unfortunately, is nearly 13 months away.

The way Obama’s behaving, by then we’ll all be talking to portraits of past presidents, asking why this one turned out to be such a flop.

Can't say that anything here surprises me.  This is the first time in Obama's life that he has been held accountable for his actions.  There is no one here to step in and rewrite a "C" term paper into an "A" for him (or just change the grade).  No ghost writer to take his notes and turn it into the autobiography that he couldn't finish.  No unspoken agreement among his fellow law students to refrain from commenting on the fact that his only signed article was something that would have embarrassed a high school senior taking college prep courses.

Little Barry is all on his own and even the MSM can't (and is increasingly unwilling to try to) disguise the fact that his is simply in way over his head.  He was unqualified for the job.  Had no experience to help prepare him for the job and had never come face to face with any of the hard cold realities of the real world outside of a very brief stint in a private sector law firm in which he said that he felt that he was "behind enemy lines".

Obama has never before had to consider that the faculty lounge Marxism that he absorbed from his moonbat mother, from his Marxist professors, from the "structural feminists" and "radical foreign students" that he deliberately and exclusively cultivated as friends during his college career might just be utterly wrong.  Never before has little Barry had to face the fact that the ideas for a utopian society based on the radical redistribution of wealth that he has never even once thought to question might fail disastrously when put into practice.

And now he can't process the fact that nothing that he has done has worked.  Marxism really is The God That Failed.

If the reality of the horror that Marxism brings hadn't been out there for any thinking person to see before Obama was even born I might feel a bit sorry for him.  But as it is I can have no sympathy.  He made his bed and now he must lie in it.

The tragedy is that for the next 15 months the rest of us must lay there with him.

Evil Corporations Hypocrites

This was posted on Knowledge is Power and is one of the best commentaries on the current stupidity going on in New York, and other large (and no so large) cities.

Groveling before the MSM

I just read a piece on American Thinker by Robert Eugene Simmons Jr. entitled Palin's Withdrawal Means Obama Wins.  I would urge you to go and read the entire thing if you have wondered, like Rush Limbaugh, at the way that beltway Republicans cringe and cower before the mainstream media.

Mr. Simmons begins:

Unfortunately, it looks like the forces of smear, slander, and threat have finally claimed their intended victim.  With Palin's announcement that she won't run for president, the election is essentially over.


The calculus is fairly simple: the media and GOP establishment want Romney to be the nominee.  Once a progressive is at the head of the Republican ticket, low turnout for Republicans will hand a narrow victory to Obama.

This is very much the way it would have gone in the past when there was no alternative to the MSM.  However in 2011 the mainstream media is dying and Fox News, talk radio and the internet are where a majority of people now get their news.

Think about it.  George W Bush left office with an approval number in the low 30's but it took the MSM nearly six years to get it there.  He was reelected despite the foaming hatred of the left's propaganda organs (otherwise known as broadcast network news, CNN, MSNBC and most daily newspapers).  In the days before Rush Limbaugh created modern talk radio and Al Gore gifted the world with the internet it would have only taken the MSM two years to poison the public against a sitting president and his political party.

And the MSM is less influential now than it was in 2006.  At least if you take viewership and sales figures seriously.

Mr. Simmons reasons:

So here is how the election will go.  The media hasn't seriously opened up on Herman Cain, but most assuredly they will.  Cain has been in business for decades, and the liberal media will troll through every relationship, every business deal, every word he has ever spoken.  If that fails, the lies will start.  To see evidence of this, we need not look at far as Palin.  Rick Perry, another progressive, was attacked for something that someone painted on a rock on land his family leased out.  That narrative will be used to attack both Perry and Cain -- Perry for having "allowed" it and Cain for making a big deal over "nothing."  Both narratives will be forwarded, potentially in the same program.  Once the liberal media goes through Cain's past with a fine-toothed comb, they will doubtless find disgruntled business adversaries, accusations of infidelity, and more.

A couple of points need to be made here.  One, Perry's slide in the polls among GOP primary voters began before the foolishness about the rock.  In fact almost all of the governor's fall is attributable to his poor debate performance and his views on illegal immigration.  Conservatives, who make up the bulk of GOP primary voters, were disgusted with his use of left-wing talking points to defend his support for in-state tuition for illegals in Texas.

Of course the media is going to give Cain a colonoscopy, just like they will do to whoever wins the Republican nomination.  But our side now has just as loud a voice - if not a little louder - than they do.  Remember how the left-wing media destroyed the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and how Kerry was swept to an easy victory in 2004?  No, because that isn't what happened.  The Swift Boat Vets took away what was almost the only thing that made John Kerry attractive to mainstream voters - his war record.  And nothing that CBS/NBC/ABC/CNN/MSNBC/The Washington Post/New York Times/Newsweek/Time and all the others combined could do could stop the process because the people had just as many places to go to hear the truth as they could to hear the MSM's lies.

Simmons does make one good point:

Furthermore, Obama will eviscerate Romney in the debates.  When the subject of health care comes up, Obama will challenge Romney, who will have to reiterate the lame excuse for the statist intrusion he signed into law in Massachusetts.  Obama will also be able to point to Romney's support of Brady and other gun control bills, state-run health care, and any number of other progressive-statist stances Romney has taken, or vacillated in and out of, in the past.  Obama doubtless has an excellent research team, and they will be in full force to try to destroy Romney.  This will suppress the voter turnout.

 

But this doesn't mean that Obama will win next year.  This is just why, at the end of the day, Romney doesn't have any better chance of getting the GOP nomination than the "Rent Is Too Damn High" guy does. 

Then there is one more factor that has to be considered.  Ronald Reagan in 1980.  

This was before Rush Limbaugh or Fox News or the internet.  Yet Reagan, who was hated by the RINO establishment and the Left and its media outlets, crushed Jimmy Carter and then won reelection in an even bigger landslide four years later.

That was because Jimmy Carter was one of the worst presidents in the history of the Republic.  In fact we haven't had a president as bad, let alone worse, than Carter since - Barack Obama.

That is why the Republican nominee, whoever he or she is, will win next year.  The nation is going to be so sick of Obama (as they already are) that they will elect anyone who is not currently serving time for child molestation.  

Republicans need to remember this and refuse to be intimidated by the increasingly irrelevant dying dinosaur media.  We need to pick a candidate who has the ideas, the courage and the energy to turn this nation around and stop its decline and restore us to our proper place in the world.

Any of the announced GOP candidates would be vastly better than Obama, even Ron Paul or Mitt Romney.  However Republicans are in a position this year where we do not even have to consider settling for "the best we can get under the circumstances".  

We three candidates in the race now who would make wonderful presidents, Cain, Bachmann or Santorum.  Let's focus on one of them and let the MSM worry about how the New York Times is going to handle the transition from "America's Paper of Record" to a weekly shopper.

Steve Jobs - ART (Assumes Room Temperature)

By now you have heard about Apple's Steve Jobs assuming room temperature.  Many have waxed rhapsodic about what a good businessman Mr. Jobs was and about how uber-cool his products are.  All very true.

Jobs was a very smart and inventive man and he was a master marketer.

However Jobs was also a left-liberal who used his wealth and the power of his reputation to promote the very policies which place an obstacle in the path of anyone trying to replicate Apple's success.  Which, I suspect, is at the heart of most limousine liberals liberalism.  The desire to keep the super rich people's club as exclusive as possible.

When you strip away all the hype what Jobs did was give us really cool toys to distract us from the fact that he was trying to deprive us of our liberty and prosperity (strange isn't it how the public policies he advocated would have drastically shrunk the pool of potential customers who could have afforded his products).

At the end of the day Jobs was either a very stupid man in all areas other than his particular field of expertise or he was a profoundly evil man for promoting political ideas which would have done, and are doing, great harm to his nation.

Either way I will neither miss him nor morn him.

Good News!

From YahooNews:

In news sure to inject shock and awe into the Republican political primary season, a Zogby poll released Thursday showed Herman Cain leading the Republican field, topping former front-runner Mitt Romney by an astonishing 20 points. Cain would also narrowly edge out Obama in a general election, the poll found, by a 46 to 44 margin.

Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, would lose by a point to the president, 40 percent to 41 percent. Texas governor Rick Perry, who has slipped in the polls of late, would lose to the president 45 percent to 40 percent.

The poll found that 38 percent of Republican primary voters said they would vote for Cain if the primary were held today. Eighteen percent said they would throw their support to Romney, while 12 percent each said they would vote for Perry and Texas congressman Ron Paul. No other candidate attracted double-digit support.

This is the second month in a row in which Zogby has found Cain leading the pack; he has surged another 10 points ahead of his competitors since September. Romney, on the other hand, has remained in the same place, while Perry’s share of the primary vote in the Zogby poll has steadily declined since he announced his candidacy in August.

Other pollsters have found Cain at or near the top of the field, with Fox News declaring him a top-tier candidate following its poll last week. That poll found Cain had 17 percent of the vote, trailing Perry by just two points and Romney by five.

A CBS News poll released Tuesday found Romney and Cain tied at 17 percent, with Perry trailing at 12 percent; a YouGov/Economist poll released Thursday found Cain leading with 21 percent, four points ahead of Romney.

With Palin opting out of a 2012 run, Perry revealing an inability to capture the loyalty of GOP primary voters and Bachmann fading to also-ran status Cain is stepping forward to take the status of Republican front runner and save the party from another Republican establishment candidate in the spirit of McCain/Dole/Ford - which is surely what Mitt Romney would turn out to be.