Republican establishment still hoping to find some way to get a GOOD candidate into the nominating process.

Courtesy of the Huffington Post:

Efforts are underway by some wealthy Republican donors and a group of conservative leaders to investigate whether a new Republican candidate could still get into the presidential race. The talk is still preliminary and somewhat wishful, but it reflects dissatisfaction with the two leading candidates, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney. 

Conservative leaders are looking into whether it is feasible for a dark horse to get on the ballot in select states. The deadline to qualifying for the ballot has passed in Florida, South Carolina, Missouri, and New Hampshire. But a candidate could still get on the ballot in states like Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Michigan and Texas. At the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, voters write in their choice, so there is no formal filing deadline.

Somehow this reminds of the girl in the bar at closing time who keeps looking past the two drunken losers offering to give her a ride home, in the desperate hope that there is SOMEBODY better still in the bathroom, or maybe around a dark corner somewhere. Except of course there isn't, and she is destined to wake up in a broken down trailer, lying next to a guy with two missing teeth and a bright red rash all over his nether region.

(Oh come on! If that does not describe Newt Gingrich then I don't know what does.)

However, according to James Carville, the reason the pickings are so slim is because that is really all the Republicans deserve anymore:

We have watched GOP debates where audience members booed gay soldiers and cheered the prospect of someone dying without health insurance. We've seen a candidate who wasn't penalized in the least for not knowing that China has had nuclear weapons since 1964 but had to drop out because of a consensual sexual relationship. We have seen a member of the House Intelligence Committee who apparently didn't realize that we haven't had an embassy in Iran for the last 30 years, candidates who don't believe in evolution, and a candidate that didn't even know the voting age in the United States. Maybe Bush, Daniels, Christie, Barbour and Thune figured out ahead of time what Fairleigh Dickinson University uncovered just recently: that people who watch Fox News are actually more ignorant than people who watch no news at all. Could you imagine what they would have found had they studied people listening to talk radio? 

Perhaps the Republicans are getting exactly the kind of candidates that best match the intellectual composition of the majority of the people in their party -- just a thought, but it's my only explanation of our low bidders. Looks like their chance at the presidency is going, going, gone.

In other words, it looks like the Republicans live in an alternate reality where anybody with enough intelligence to actually perform the job of President, is way too smart for the brain damaged viewers of Fox News, and listeners of Talk radio, to trust with the job.

You know Republicans I believe this is the part of the movie where the main character wakes up screaming, only to realize it was all a bad dream. Go ahead. pinch yourself.