With his ad campaigning on the basis of being a Baptist minister, where does Huckabee go in the general election? Evangelicals are not a majority of America, and making it the key part of his identity could get Catholics remembering why they used to be mainly Democrats. 

And here’s another point: Mormons are not a big percentage of voters, but they are a major part of several states in the West. I am pretty sure that Huckabee as the white knight of Christianity is going to come across to them as just one more professional Mormon basher, remembering the hatchet job the Baptists did on Mormon beliefs when they had their convention in Salt Lake a decade ago. As a result, a lot of Mormons are going to sit out the election, vote for a third party candidate, and others will vote for even Hillary Clinton out of disgust or even fear of government persecution from a Baptist preacher at the helm of the government–they had their fill of that back when the Radical Republicans ran the government and took away Mormon rights to vote.  Clinton demonstrated his disregard for Utah when he created the huge Escalante-Grand Staircase National Monument even while lying about it to the governor and the Utah congressional delegation.  There are many other ways a president has discretion to injure a state he doesn't like, like closing a military base.  As a result, Utah, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado could, by a plurality (and winner take all of their electoral votes), go for the Democratic candidate. And that, all by itself, would be enough to lose the election.

If Huckabee is nominated, is he going to make the traditional visit to the LDS Church president in Salt Lake? Huckabee might feel like trying to make nice to the Mormons, but on the other hand, the same people who told him to make religion an issue in the Iowa caucuses might say that he’s going to be betraying his base if he visits Salt Lake.  And if he does ignore the Mormons, the opposition to him personally is going to solidify.  If he gets only a little Mormon money, or campaigning, or voting, it will turn several states from Red to Blue.   And there are going to be other people who react to Huckabee the Crusader the same way that others react to Mitt the Mormon. They don’t want the Southern Baptist Convention controlling the White House.

I think Huckabee has taken the “America is a Christian nation” thing too seriously. He thinks the US is his brand of Christian, rather than being a Catholic-Baptist-Episcopalian-Lutheran-Mormon kind of Christian.

Back when Genghis Khan ruled China and more of the world, he used a lot of foreigners as advisors and government administrators, because they had no political base that they could use to threaten him. For the same reason, electing Romney would be a way for Americans to ensure that he is responsive to all of them, since he has no large political base of his own. On the other hand, if Huckabee is elected, he would feel a primary loyalty to his own brand of Christian, that would in fact take priority over his debt to Catholics or Mormons or anyone else. The Christian Right has pressed George Bush to be loyal to it as his base of support, but that is nothing compared to the pressure that will be on Huckabee to live up to the expectation that he will rule as an explicit Baptist.

The foreign policy consequences of that will be interesting, but I doubt they will be positive. Osama bin Laden will take it as a propaganda point: America is being run by a Baptist minister who has declared that is his core identity, the president is on a crusade, and all Muslims must oppose it by defensive jihad.  And what will Huckabee do when Evangelicals appeal for him to help their missionaries who try to be active in Muslim countries where they are not legally invited to preach? 

Huckabee is trying to differentiate himself in the market, and has chosen his brand identity.

I think for Romney, this may create both the need and the opportunity to give a speech about religious tolerance and pluralism in America. Romney can now brand himself as the candidate of tolerance for diversity and freedom of speech and thought. He can point to the Christians who put Article VI in the Constitution and created the First Amendment and declare that he is that kind of Christian.  A Christian who seeks common ground with all Americans rather than to exclude them from political salvation. 

Chris Cannon was quoted in the Salt Lake Tribune that he thinks we need to be careful about running off half-cocked and doing expensive things to "fight" global warming with little knowledge of how effective or even necessary they might be. 

If man's combustion related CO2 is the cause of global warming, why was the year of highest tmperature in the last century in the US 1934? From 1935 to 1975, global temperatures dropped, even as we burned unprecedented amounts of fuel in World War II and the post-war industrial expansion. Meteorologists in 1975 were predicting we were descending into another of the periodic ice ages (which is overdue by 8,000 years). From 1976 to 1998, temperatures rose again, to almost the level of 70 years ago, but they have been pretty level since then.
   
   Back around 1000 AD, when the Vikings coloniezed Greenland and discovered America, temperatures were just as warm as they are now. That was certainly not due to man-made causes. Then in the 1300s they dropped again, and stayed down until the 1800s. Maybe the higher temperature of the Medieval Warm Period is the norm, and the colder temperatures have been the anomaly.
   
   Let's make some points clear: 

(1) Scientists have not demonstrated they can predict future climate. They flunked in 1975 and did not foresee the abrupt reversal. They have made an hypothesis about where temperatures will be over the next century, but we won't know if their prediction is correct until we get there. Their models do not even account for water vapor, which is ten times as significant a greenhouse gas as CO2, because as water vapor increases, so do clouds, which reflect sunlight and cool things down. 

(2) Temperature trends in the 20th Century have NOT correlated with CO2 concentration trends for 40 of the 100 years. If you presented this as proof in a science class, you would get an "F". 

(3) The actual consequences of warming are pretty minor: 

(a) Only 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer by 2100, a hundred years from now! Whoop de do, it will only be 18 below zero in Idhao Falls instead of 20 below!  

(b) Sea level rise? Only 10 inches by 2100, versus the same rise during the 20th Century. If your beachfront house can't cope with one inch a decade, how do you cope with the storm surges of 10, 15 and 20 feet that are normal? Indeed, wouldn't it be simpler to put your beach house on stilts than make the rest of us go without heating and air conditioning and cars and beef?   

(c) No, Al Gore, hurricanes do NOT get worse due to warming: 2006 and 2007 had NO major hurricanes hit the US! Indeed, some scientists forecast warming would DECREASE hurricanes. 

(d) Glaciers? The Antarctic ice cap is GROWING. The glaciers that are retreating were doing so during the 40 year COOLING period of 1935-1975. Others are growing. Glaciers are like slow rivers; they depend on snowfall. 

(e) The polar bears are NOT actually dying off; there is no evidence of it. The species got through the Medieval Warm Period OK. It still gets to minus 60 in the Arctic, and there is plenty of ice. It's not going to turn into the Caribbean any time soon. And bears don't eat ice, they eat mammals, and their are lots of those on land as well. Polar bears can run and hunt on land (and do so around the landfills of Arctic villages). 

(f) Generally, being a couple degrees warmer is NOT going to hurt plants and animals in North America; it did not hurt them at the end of the ice age, they just expanded their range northward. 

(g) It still gets to minus 20 in the winter here in Idaho Falls. Whether we get more or less snow depends more on transitory chaotic phenomena like El Nino than worldwide average temperatures. Utah had some record cold days last winter.  How does that correlate with global warming? 
   
(4) The most important point is this: The US could shut down its economy, and CO2 buildup would continue, because China is determined to become the world's superpower, it is building a new major coal-fired power plant like the ones in central Utah EVERY WEEK, and it has told the Europeans that it is not going to worry about warming. China's output is going to overwhelm anything the US does. All we will accomplish by following Al Gore is send all industry to China, and impoverish the US. 

(5) Additionally, the CO2 in the atmosphere already, according to the UN IPCC, is enough to keep warming going indefinitely, so we won't even see warming slow down until 50 years in the future! Basically, Al Gore wants us to kill our economy and make us all poor and hungry so that summer air conditioning bills will be 5% lower in 2050 (although our winter heating bills will be higher).
   
   The only good news will be that illegal immigrants will find the economy in Mexico is better than here.