I've been waiting for a story like this for a long time now. Turns out that not only does Romney have the most ridiculously perfected hair on the face of the planet (if you like hair gel, anyway), but he's been forking over John Edwards-esque amounts on beautifying himself. How touching.

Yeah, yeah, I know that anyone who goes on TV has to wear makeup. But there's a difference between putting some powder on before you head on, and paying $150 per makeup session to make sure you're just beautiful and perfect on a Paris Hilton-type, plastic and unreal, scale. The former is, incidentally, what I, and pretty much everyone else I know, do before we go on camera. The latter is what Mitt does, apparently. And frankly, it strikes me as self-important, prissy, and, well, exemplifying of the extent to which Romney wants everything engineered so that it's just perfect-- even at the risk of everything being artificial, contrived and (no pun intended, honestly) entirely made-up.

Of course, that's one of the criticisms I have of Romney and his entire campaign anyway. It's all about figuring out what makes you look ideal to the largest number of diligent voters and then saying it, no matter how asinine, meaningless, or factually incorrect it is. The image, and getting votes, is literally 100% of what matters. At this stage in the game, nothing else seems to count at all. Real commitment to concrete, discernible principles or ideas certainly takes a back step to what's popular with "The Base" (hence how Romney can one day brand himself the uber-moderate, then switch to conservative, then claim he's a libertarian with his supposed "free-market" health care plan, then go back to being government-favorable with his support for No Child Left Behind, and so on and so forth)-- contrary to Romney's assertions in one of his older, now discarded ads, where he lauds the importance of co...

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Yep, you read that right. Federal taxes on cigars are set to go up from 5 cents per cigar to $10 per cigar. $10, people. That's a tax increase of 20,000 percent!

But it's not just taxes on cigars that are going up. Federal tax on a pack of cigarettes is set to rise from 39 cents a pack to $1 a pack-- another hefty increase.

You'll be surprised to know that this is part of a Democratic plan to better fund a health program-- SCHIP, which basically covers medical care for poor kids. It's a worthy objective, but big tax increases, even "sin taxes," where one might argue that the consumer consents to the outrageous level of taxation by purchasing the relevant product, are not the way to go in achieving said goal.

Of course, we can all look on the bright side-- the Democratic contingent in the House apparently wanted taxes on cigars pegged at 53% of their sales value. A $10 maximum tax on each cigar seems like small beans compared to what that 53% could have amounted to.

Not that any of this is in any way acceptable or anything...

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From Gallup:

A new Gallup survey, conducted July 12-15, 2007, finds little change from earlier this month in public preferences for the Republican and Democratic presidential nominations.

[...]

In the Republican race, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani continues to overshadow his opponents, leading former Sen. Fred Thompson by 10 percentage points in the straight ballot question, 30% to 20%, and by a sizable 20-point margin in a "narrow down" with Fred Thompson.

[...]

Mitt Romney (who has been officially running for his party's nomination since January) and Newt Gingrich (who has yet to make his intentions to run known) are about tied for fourth place in the GOP field, with neither breaking the 10% voter support threshold in the latest poll. No other Republican exceeds 3%.

I know Romney's been seeing some movement in his numbers in places like IA and NH, largely because of him running ads there. But it must really suck to be spending all this money on TV and makeup and still not be able to get to even 10% in a major national poll like this...

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