I won’t be home tonight to live blog, but y’all can comment away. Credit to the New York Public Library for the image of the fashionable gentleman in the top hat.

Mitch Daniels will be giving the Republican response. Bill Kristol says there is a groundswell of support to nominate Mitch Daniels as president. I haven’t seen such a groundswell myself. But see Mitch Daniels screws middle class working people in his state, before he heads off to give his speech to the pundits:

Indiana under Daniels gave away the store to business interests and they got absolutely nothing in return. Gutted business regulation, gutted environmental regulation, sold state assets, deregulated and privatized public schools, destroyed public sector unions, and the unemployment rate in Indiana is comparable to the midwest states around Indiana, states that didn’t make all the concessions demanded by the “job creators”. The promised jobs never arrived.

When John Boehner speaks of Mitch Daniels he has to claim that Daniels was working on “a climate for job creation.” Not jobs. A “climate” where jobs might blow in like the weather, maybe, sometime, depending. Boehner has to use that odd and abstract language because Boehner knows what the unemployment rate is in Indiana, and he also knows that Daniels is a two-term governor who had a free hand to put in place the whole conservative-libertarian wish list. For years. That’s all in place, but the job creators just keep on demanding more concessions from Indiana, and Mitch Daniels just keeps handing them over.

It’s a sure bet the bobbleheads will gush about how “moderate” Daniels is tonight. He’s not. Well, unless your idea of “moderate” is any white guy dressed in a suit who is not a Democrat.

Charles Pierce:

I think the fact that 10,000 people came out in the middle of the day to protest against Indiana’s egregious attempt to turn itself into Mississippi on behalf of the people who think Mitch Daniels should be president might warrant a little more coverage than it’s getting. After all, every single one of the Republican candidates is in favor of right-to-work laws, including Ron Paul, the last hope for progressive politics. And Mitch Daniels is at the very toppermost of the poppermost of all those holy-Christ-these-guys-are-such-a-sack-of-hair lists of people who might save the Republican brand, if only they’d run. David Brooks, for one, has been spurned and regularly is seen weeping over a picture of Mitch in a heart-shaped frame.

Elsewhere — Newt can’t deliver without a screaming audience.