The latest polls show a three-way race between Mitt Romney, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum. Movement toward Santorum sprung from one poll, from CNN, which sampled only Republicans, despite the ease of same-day party registration in Iowa and the expectation of up to 20-25% of the caucus electorate being composed of Democrats and independents.

The $6 billion-a-year ethanol subsidy really will expire in a matter of days. But that may not spell the end of ethanol-based tax credits. Specifically, the $1.01-a-gallon production tax credit for cellulosic ethanol – made from switchgrass or wood chips or corn husks – is a priority for the renewable fuels industry. That production tax credit does not expire until next year, and the industry wants a five-year extension.

Concerned about a nonexistent threat to the integrity of the caucuses, the Iowa Republican Party will move their ballot-counting operation to an “undisclosed location.” Meanwhile, the same Republicans who spent all year fretting about voter fraud, and who are shrouding their vote tabulation activities in secrecy, do not require a photo ID to vote in the caucuses they run.

The latest poll out of Iowa shows Ron Paul hanging on to a tenuous lead, with Mitt Romney close behind and Newt Gingrich further back. This has led every candidate in the race, and especially their anonymous SuperPACs, to train their guns on Paul, shifting the negative advertising away from Gingrich and toward the Texas Congressman. Citizens United!

Thanks to Citizens United and a subsequent court decision, Super PACs can raise unlimited sums, and spend it all advocating directly for or against a candidate, as long as there’s no coordination between the Super PAC and the candidate’s campaign. But this prohibition against coordination doesn’t really have much significance in the real world.

The tribunes of the conservative establishment made pretty clear today that they do not accept Newt Gingrich as the nominee of their party for President next year. In nearly identical op-eds, David Brooks and Michael Gerson criticized Gingrich’s fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants approach to problem solving, and claimed that he would damage conservatism. Other leading pundits had harsh words to say.

Now, the punditocracy is likely to have no effect on the conservative base’s decision-making in the primaries. But it does tell you where the establishment wants the race to go, and that’s certainly not toward Gingrich.

In a said day for anyone who likes to laugh, Herman Cain suspended his Presidential campaign after multiple allegations of sexual harassment and extra-marital affairs, quoting Pokemon on the way out the door and shifting his prodigious star-power into a website rife with misspellings.

Today was the day that challengers in the Republican Presidential primary took out their heavy machinery on the front-runners. In two pretty devastating Web ads, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney are filleted, cut down by their own past public statements.

Whether Herman Cain is actually reassessing his campaign or not, he’s done on the Presidential stage. And the data show that the biggest beneficiary of this is Newt liberal-hater Gingrich.

Mitt Romney, recognizing that he stepped in it by refusing to endorse an anti-union ballot measure in Ohio while standing in the Republican Party HQ, where they were phone banking on that ballot measure, reversed course today, and desperately tried to associate himself with the initiative, which is doomed to go down to defeat in two weeks time.