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WEST DES MOINES, Iowa - Giuliani's support here has plummeted into single digits....according to new surveys released yesterday. A Reuters poll shows the ex-mayor capturing just 8% of the vote - tied for fourth place with Thompson and Ron Paul. An MSNBC poll shows Giuliani tied with Paul for fifth place with a measly 5% of the vote - near the bottom of the pack. "Where has he been? He stopped showing up," said conservative activist Jamie Johnson, who runs a radio station. Giuliani did not air a single TV ad in Iowa, and his 15 trips here were far...

....an oversized sample shows Huckabee slipping and no longer ahead of Romney. A private corporate interest commissioned a phone-bank survey of 15,000 Iowans who will attend Republican caucuses Jan. 3....showed Romney with 30%, Huckabee 26%. Sen. John McCain was third with 12%, Rudy Giuliani fourth at 9%. Fred Thompson had 1%, with slightly fewer votes than Rep. Ron Paul (also at 1%)....McCain was the leading second-choice candidate for both Huckabee and Romney voters.

HAMPTON, N.H. — Rudolph W. Giuliani has entered a turbulent period in his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, marked by what his aides acknowledge are missteps, sharp shifts in strategy and evidence that reports about his personal life have hurt his national standing. A $3 million investment in radio and television advertising in New Hampshire, a belated effort to become competitive in this state, is now viewed by the campaign as a largely wasted expenditure. A Boston Globe poll published Sunday found that support for Mr. Giuliani had dropped in New Hampshire over the past month, even before any...

Here's why I support Giuliani, and it has nothing to do with his response to September 11: Rudy Giuliani eliminated street crime in New York City. The conventional wisdom said it couldn't be done, and the reasons are suspiciously similar to what the same bloviators say about the war against Islamofascism today: 1. There actually isn't a problem; if you think it's a problem, you're a racist. 2. Okay, there is a problem, but it's because of white racism; to try to eradicate the problem using barbaric force without solving the root causes is useless. 3. Okay, force can in...

--SNIP--Giuliani is finally suffering from the natural gravitational pull of his messy personal life (as mayor, he financed a security detail for his mistress) and his ideological heterodoxy (especially on social issues).......it has dragged him down to a level where it is no longer an invisible force. His supporters thought that he'd bump up in the NH polls once he started advertising. But since Nov 10 he's spent more than Romney and McCain, and Giuliani's numbers have, if anything, declined slightly. Pundits speculated that the WOT was the new social issue, more important to Republicans than abortion or gay marriage.........over...

--SNIP--Giuliani's messy personal life is a big turnoff to women voters....causing the public humiliation of his second wife, tax-paid bodyguards for his girlfriend and a frosty relationship with his kids: It all makes wives and moms around the country skeptical of putting him in the White House. "If he can't control his personal life, I just don't see how he can control the country," said a Lucas, Kan housewife. Fifty % of women overall - and 48% of GOP women - said that Giuliani dumping second wife Donna Hanover at a 2000 press conference would make them less likely to...

Giuliani admits his personal faults in a major speech today....according to excerpts released by his campaign. The thrice-married ex-mayor will say, "If you are looking for perfection, you are not going to find it in me." Giuliani's speech comes on the heels of unflattering media coverage......Team Rudy selected Florida for his address because the state's Jan. 29 primary is considered his "firewall" should he lose several early-voting states.

Mike Huckabee was supposed to have a target on his back when he walked into an Iowa auditorium yesterday. But the former Arkansas governor, suddenly the leader among Republicans in the state set to render the first presidential verdict Jan. 3, emerged unscathed and was allowed to rise above the fray and address the nation yesterday as the great uniter. This was the final debate before voters head to caucus and was the last chance for his rivals to try to cut Huckabee down to size, but it was an opportunity missed – either because of a stilted debate format,...

Late in his tenure as mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani billed tens of thousands of dollars in travel expenses to little-known city agencies as he was beginning an extramarital affair, a political Web site reported Wednesday. The report, on the Politico Web site, cited documents obtained under the New York State Freedom of Information Law. But it was unclear from those documents whether Giuliani allocated those travel costs, from 1999 through 2001, to obscure city offices in an attempt to conceal expenses associated with the relationship or for some accounting purpose. The administration of Giuliani's successor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg,...

Giuliani stammered his way through a defense of tax dollars spent on a security detail for his girlfriend when he was New York's married mayor. "There were threats; they had to be responded to," Giuliani told NBC's "Meet the Press"....."Judith didn't particularly want it, but it was done because they took the view that it was serious and it had to be done this way." Giuliani has been dogged about how much his extramarital affair cost the city.

It's not easy keeping track of Rudy Giuliani's shag-related expenditures of taxpayer money while mayor of New York. For one thing, it's impossible to get a total of the amount spent guarding the mayor's then-girlfriend. And the available records are spotty at best. But we gave it the ol' TPM try. So here, without further ado, is our timeline. 5/99 -- Judith Nathan and Giuliani meet at Club Macanudo, a cigar bar on the Upper East Side. 7/3/99 -- NYPD Officers charge the city for gas to "accompany the mayor to Southampton." 7/31/99 -- Four officers accompanying Giuliani stay at...

Giuliani tried to ride out new questions over taxpayer-funded chauffeur police services witnesses said were provided to Judith Nathan well before the married mayor revealed his extramarital involvement in 2000..... asked about Nathan's city-funded wheels, Giuliani non-answered "Thank you," and "Have a good night." Nathan's police escorts were thought to have begun in December 2000, after Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik said she was threatened and needed around-the-clock protection. (Giuliani hid security detail and travel expenses for Nathan in obscure city agencies.) "If Nathan was provided police protection prior to their being a security-threat assessment, it probably was an illegal use...

CLEAR LAKE, Iowa - Hillary Rodham Clinton and Rudy Giuliani have seen their once-formidable leads sliced in a new national poll - she lost 11 points while Giuliani plummeted by 9 points in the last month. Clinton dropped to 39% from 50%.....Giuliani dropped to 25% from 34% over the same period.

The day-to-day operations of Rudy Giuliani's consulting company have been formally turned over to one of the candidate's longtime advisers - and the former mayor hasn't been to his office in more than a month..........."My role is chairman of Giuliani Partners," said Peter Powers, deputy mayor under Giuliani and a friend since childhood. "I run the company on a day-to-day basis; Rudy's role is none........He has an equity interest in the in the firm, but he is not involved in the management of the firm. He is not involved in any clients."

A former Giuliani administration official says he's "sick" that his little-known agency was used to hide taxpayer money that funded police escorts during the ex-mayor's Hamptons romantic rendezvous. "The cover-up and explanations have been so disingenuous," said Brendan Sexton, Procurement Policy Board Chair in 2000.....which was charged $29,757 for travel bills racked up by Giuliani's security detail as he hung out with then-girlfriend Judith Nathan on Long Island. "It's disturbing that any government organization could be used to conceal from the public how their money was being spent."

BLUFFTON, S.C. (AP) -- Republican White House hopeful Rudy Giuliani said Friday he wouldn't try to change laws that make citizens of children born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants, noting that it's a matter determined by the Constitution. "That's a very delicate balance that's been arrived at, and I wouldn't change that," Giuliani said in response to a question while campaigning at Sun City Hilton Head, a sprawling retirement community down the South Carolina coast from Charleston.

TALKING POINTS MEMO is swimming in credit card receipts from Rudy Giuliani's administration; one thing in particular has struck us: in 2001, apparently with an eye to future globetrotting, Giuliani's administration sent a check for $400,000 to American Express. Though the amount was billed to the Assigned Counsel Administrative Office, an office that provides lawyers for indigent defendants, the money served as an advance against Giuliani's future travel, and other expenses later incurred by the mayor's office and his security detail. The unusually large prepayment, as yet unreported, adds weight to the theory that the Giuliani administration was using accounting...

Giuliani's secret relationship forced taxpayers to pay a mayoral aide's hotel tab according to city documents....while Giuliani was visiting Judith Nathan at her LI condo. Taxpayers also paid security detail motel bills in Pennsylvania, Nathan's home state......records show two charges for gas on April 8, 2000, in Tannersville, Pa, about 1/2 outside Nathan's hometown of Hazleton. It isn't clear if security was guarding both Nathan and Giuliani, or if she was alone at the time......Nathan began receiving police protection, not long after her relationship with Giuliani became public.....paid from obscure mayoral agencies.........

CLEARWATER, Fla. Sliding in the polls, Giuliani is no longer sure he can win the nomination--taking Florida after losing early states that traditionally determine the nominees. Giuliani's problem is not so much tactical as it is substantive. During Wednesday's debate, Republicans saw the Rudy they've been doing their best to pretend did not exist. He wasn't the crime-fighting, terrorist-bashing, smiling hero they've come to like so much....he's the gun-grabbing, abortion-supporting philanderer that Republicans don't waste much time with - especially in Florida where conservatives turned the Terri Schiavo case into a national cause.

Giuliani says obscure city agencies were billed for out-of-town credit-card charges of his mayoral security detail because the NYPD was so slow in paying its bills.......the Mayor's Office spent $165,985 for out-of-town travel in fiscal 2000 and in 2001 $184,796. It allocated another $143,867 to 12 agencies under Giuliani's control in 2000 and $435,215 in 2001, periods when he was conducting an extramarital affair with Nathan, now his third wife. Over two years, $579,082 in travel bills - including rental cars, motel bills and plane tickets - run up by Giuliani's security team didn't immediately appear as an expense incurred...