With Halloween coming up on Monday, there’s going to be a lot of grown-ups attending masquerade parties this weekend. Which, unfortunately, has meant a lot of long, last-minute lines in crowded costume stores — including the one in Washington, D.C., where all the Republican presidential candidates went shopping earlier this week.

Call it incredible luck, call it determination, call it political skill or call it a sign of the poor state of the modern Republican party. Whatever the cause or set of causes, Mitt Romney has managed to end up basically the last legitimate Republican nominee standing.

The way the Republican Party keeps shuffling through front-runners for its 2012 presidential nomination, you almost start to wonder if these folks aren’t firm advocates of recycling after all.

Disposability is certainly something they have down pat.

I can’t wait to see what Larry “I wrote laws, MFer! With Pat Moynihan!” O’Donnell has to say about his GOP man-crush Tim Pawlenty dropping out of the presidential race. Perhaps he’ll not report it at all, and act as if the T-Paw juggernaut in his head continues on apace? Or — maybe he’ll have an hour-long In Memoriam segment for the brilliant but tragically misunderestimated Pawlenty “movement”?

Pawlenty’s candidacy was very much predicated on winning Iowa, a neighboring state to Minnesota. He hoped the momentum from that early victory would slingshot into other states. He spent months in Iowa and put up the first TV ads of any candidate there. But he never gained traction, either there or nationally.

I think it’s pretty clear that someone played a dirty trick on Michele Bachmann (probably Tim Pawlenty’s campaign) by planting a story in The Daily Caller about her frequent migraine headaches. The DC article hinted at salacious allegations of pill popping and headaches that leave Bachmann incapacitated for days. ABC News piled on with similar allegations from a former staffer that said Bachmann’s headaches left her unable to function.

The NYT’s Mary Williams Walsh fails to mention the role played by the massive tax cuts that the vast majority of states pushed through in the 1990s. It was known, as far back as 2002, that these tax cuts were going to cause major problems down the road — in fact, they were already causing problems for the states, and the people who help.

The hardest thing I had to do over the past twenty-four hours was keep my lips zipped about this, once I’d got the advance word from a friend of a friend.

Tonight at 8pm ET, seven Republican Presidential aspirants will debate at St. Anselm’s College in Manchester, New Hampshire. CNN will carry the debate live. The seven participants include everyone who is currently announced as a candidate for President, as well as a couple others who have not formally announced. Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Herman Cain and Ron Paul will debate tonight.

You know things are bad for Republican candidate when his plan for cutting trillions in taxes is panned on Fox “News”. Tim Pawlenty, too boring to get any attention except with a radical plan that is too radical for Republicans.