“As a citizen, I have always supported New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary,” Gingrich said in a prepared statement.

“Now, as a candidate for president, I am committed to competing in and maintaining the first-in-the-nation status of the New Hampshire primary. Therefore, I will not compete in a state which holds its contest inside of one week of New Hampshire. I trust Governors Romney and Perry will join me in protecting the New Hampshire primary and campaigning in New Hampshire towards a January 10th primary contest.”

Earlier Thursday, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman indicated he would not compete in Nevada if it maintained its current caucus date of Jan. 14. Although Huntsman challenged all the 2012 GOP candidates to follow suit, he, like Gingrich, specifically called out frontrunner Mitt Romney — the campaign that is believed to have played a role in Nevada’s decision to set such an early date. Gingrich, however, is the first to single out Rick Perry.

New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner sounded the “December alarm” earlier this week, indicating that his state would move into 2011 for its primary if Nevada left it no other choice. By state law, the New Hampshire contest must precede any other contest by at least 7 days. Since Iowa has tentatively named Jan. 3 as its caucus date, and New Hampshire is locked into a Tuesday election, there is no wiggle-room left in January for Gardner.

Although the four states sanctioned by the two prominent national political parties to begin the nominating process — Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina — were scheduled to hold their contests in February, a Florida committee chose to usurp the rules and move its primary to Jan. 31.

Any state in violation of the nominating calendar set forth by the political parties can face sanctions, namely a loss of delegates to the national convention. Because the political parties have not historically followed through with such penalties, however, states have mostly scoffed at the possible consequences.

Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann hasn’t received any endorsements from fellow members of Congress, according to a list put together by Roll Call.

Bachmann’s campaign has been struggling since her win at the Iowa Straw Poll in August, largely sunk by a series of gaffes. Though Bachmann isn’t the only candidate without congressional endorsements, she’s the only current member running without such support.

Mitt Romney leads the race with 18 congressional endorsements. Rick Perry has 9, Newt Gingrich has 4, and Ron Paul has 3, including his son Sen. Rand Paul. Former Sen. Rick Santorum hasn’t picked up the support of any of his colleagues and neither has Rep. Thaddeus McCotter. Several other candidates including Herman Cain, Fred Karger and John Huntsman also lack congressional endorsements.

Bachmann founded the House Tea Party Caucus and has yet to draw any of those members to her side. However, other candidates have enticed members of Congress to support them.

Rick Perry has drawn the support of Tea Party Reps. John Culberson and John Carter of Texas, and Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana.

The majority of Newt Gingrich’s support comes from Tea Partiers. Reps. Joe Barton and Michael Burgess of Texas are backing him as well as Rep. Tom Price of Georgia.

Even Mitt Romney, whose campaign has often been criticized by the Tea Party has picked up three endorsements from Bachmann’s caucus: Reps. Rob Bishop of Utah, Ander Crenshaw of Florida, and Wally Herger of California.

AMES, Iowa — Tensions reached their apex Thursday night during the Fox News/Washington Examiner GOP presidential debate, sending Republican enthusiasm through the roof with less than 48 hours until the Ames Straw Poll gates open Saturday.

Debate topics were typical: conflict in the Middle East, American’s floundering economy, immigration, states’ rights, and of course, hot button social issues. Not to be missed were references to dog food and Mickey Mouse.

Atypical? How candidates came out swinging — at each other, at President Barack Obama and even at the debate moderators.

Twice, Rep. Michele Bachmann, a Straw Poll favorite and tea party darling, and former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty traded heated words about the other’s political records and policies.

Poised and never appearing flustered, Bachmann deflected attack after attack fired by Pawlenty, including her compromise on raising Minnesota’s state tax on cigarettes in 2005. Pawlenty was then governor, Bachmann, a state lawmaker.

Bachmann explained she initially opposed the tax, but later compromised upon learning of a provision in the same legislation that gave strong support to the anti-abortion community and platform.

“You can get money wrong, but you can’t get life wrong,” she said in the debate.

Pawlenty, who has been slow to gain momentum in the Hawkeye State, came back swinging, claiming the congresswoman’s D.C. record was void of anything substantial.

“As to her record: she’s done wonderful things in her life, absolutely wonderful things, but it’s an undisputed fact that her record in Congress in nonexistent,” Pawlenty said. “She’s got a record of misstating and making false statements.”

“You’re killing us,” Pawlenty told Bachmann, drawing audible reaction from the audience.

The congresswoman remained on point, countering the governor by comparing his own record to Obama’s, stating: “You said the era of small business is over. That sounds a lot like Barack Obama if you ask me.”

Within the first hour of the debate, Bachmann and Pawlenty’s volleys almost overshadowed the other six candidates. Forty-five minutes passed in the debate with only a couple minutes from former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, a Catholic Conservative from Pennsylvania. Finally, in the second hour, a frustrated Santorum called Fox News moderator Bret Baier out for not giving him the same face time as Bachmann and Pawlenty, raising his hand and declaring, “I haven’t gotten to say a lot.”

Santorum and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) sparred over American intervention in Iran, with the long-time congressman blaming the U.S. for hostilities in Iran.

“Anyone who says Iran is not a threat is not seeing clearly,” Santorum said.

The former senator also had his chance to stand out late in the debate, when he gave an impassioned argument on why the debt ceiling had to be raised — a stance the other candidates, particularly Bachmann, have taken vehemently against. Santorum maintained while it had to be raised, it should have been done so with a balanced budget in place.

Prominent Atlanta businessman Herman Cain seemed to spend a significant amount of his face time clarifying past comments and telling America that it “needs to learn to take a joke.” However, Cain also touted his private sector experience in repairing the economy.

“It is imperative we get this economy going in the in next 90 days,” after the next president is inaugurated, he said. One of the foundations to that is making tax rates permanent and setting a maximum tax rate for corporations.

Frontrunner Mitt Romney, who earlier in the day incited political fireworks at the Iowa State Fair, stuck to oft-heard phrases on his campaign stops.

But when asked about the bipartisan legislation that raised the debt ceiling, Romney bluntly said, “I’m not going to eat Barack Obama’s dog food. What he served up is not what I would have done as president of the United States.”

Fellow candidate Newt Gingrich, who served as U.S. House Speaker in the 1990′s, was even more blunt, calling the super-committee borne from the debt ceiling drama “dumb,” and characterized debate moderator Chris Wallace’s questions as “playing Mickey Mouse games.”

Obama was the target of several political missals from the candidates, who admonished the president’s economic and fiscal policies, as well as his military strategies overseas.

New to the candidate stage was former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, Jr. Though previously pledging to skip Iowa during his campaign, Huntsman, who was also Ambassador to China under the Obama administration, visited the Iowa State Fair before the debate.

Huntsman stood out from the other seven participants on stage: the practicing Mormon believes “in traditional marriage first, but also civil unions. Our country can do better when it comes to equality,” and added the issue of marriage should go to the states. Most of the other candidates who spoke on the issue, with the exception of Paul, support a federal amendment defining marriage between one-man-one-woman exclusively.

Huntsman also has not publicly presented an economic development plan. However, he stated Thursday he would repeat the policies implemented in his native Utah.

“I’m going to do exactly what I did as governor. It’s called leadership,” he said. “We cut taxes historically and created the most business-friendly environment in the country.”

And to those who are still flirting with a 2012 bid? Bring it on, candidates said.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry — expected to join the fray this weekend — and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin have not officially declared candidacy, but should they choose to, their would-be opponents are ready to welcome them to the field.

Newt Gingrich says he has six times as many Twitter followers as all the other GOP presidential hopefuls combined, and he’s right: His 1.3 million followers trumps even Minnesota’s Michele Bachmann, who has more than 67,000 followers. But a new analysis by a tech company shows that all is not as it seems: Only 8 percent of those followers are “actual people,” with the rest made up of spammers, business accounts and private or anonymous users.

Three days ago, The Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal published an interview with Gingrich that detailed how he was going to overcome the negativity that has surrounded his campaign. Of course, there was some media bashing involved. But Gingrich also referenced a Politico article that gauged candidates on their Twitter presence.

“And it says, ‘now it’s true that Gingrich has 1.3 million followers and Bachmann only has 59,000, but she’s getting more new people every week.’ It turned out I have six times as many Twitter followers as all the other candidates combined, but it didn’t count because if it counted I’d still be a candidate; since I can’t be a candidate that can’t count,” Gingrich told the Daily Journal. “So we’ve been a little bit like a sailing ship in the middle of a hurricane in which we are sailing straight into the teeth of the media, and that slowed us down.”

And, if you visit Gingrich’s Twitter page, it clearly states that he has (as of 11:00 CST) a total of 1,326,093 followers — well above all the other 2012 GOP candidates.

Unfortunately, recent analysis by PeekYou, a New York-based search company, identified the large gap between perception and reality last week during a testing session for its soon-to-launch service, PeekAnalytics, in which the company compiled a “Followers Report” on all 2012 candidates.

The service looks at and identifies a “consumer ratio,” or the percentage of Twitter audience that is identified as a “consumer” versus businesses, private/anonymous and spam accounts. An average range is about 30 to 60 percent human, depending on the type of account. But Gingrich’s account was at 8 percent — the lowest the team had seen by more than five percentage points.

“We have seen some pretty low consumer ratios in our testing, but Newt Gingrich’s was the lowest we had ever seen,” said Michael Hussey, chief executive and founder of PeekYou. “At first, we actually thought it might have been a bug on our side, but a quick manual look at the data showed our analysis was true.”

What the ratio means, acording to Hussey, is that Newt’s true follower count is only about 8 percent of his total — or 106,055 actual people. Further analysis by PeekYou showed that of those roughly 100,000 real people followers, about 60 percent are male, 40 percent are over the age of 35 and 60 percent have only about 100 connections on Twitter.

To make matters worse for Gingrich, a former staffer told Gawker that “Newt employs a variety of agencies whose sole purpose is to procure Twitter followers for people who are shallow/insecure/unpopular enough to pay for them.” The former staffer estimated that 80 percent of the accounts set up by the agencies were fake.

Rep. Michele Bachmann is the third presidential candidate to be “glitter bombed” by activists, suggesting that such actions are congealing into a full-fledged campaign to toss glitter at anti-LGBT politicians. Like Tim Pawlenty and Newt Gingrich before her, Bachmann was subjected to showers of glitter Saturday because of her statements about LGBT people and for her support of controversial anti-gay preacher Bradlee Dean.

“‘Glittering’ is a fun, safe way to draw attention to some very serious issues,” said Rachel E.B. Lang, a Minneapolis attorney who tossed a handful of glitter on Bachmann at the RightOnline conference on Saturday. “Young people deserve the right to feel safe and respected, and have their families reflected at school. And I deserve the right to see my lesbian mom get married one day! I’m not willing to be silent about the vicious attacks on families like ours.”

Lang said it was Bachmann’s connection to Bradlee Dean that prompted the glittering. “My mom is a Lutheran minister and has taught me the values of love and compassion that I so desperately wish Michele Bachmann and Bradlee Dean would cherish too,” she said in an email Saturday.

Footage of Bachmann being glittered:

GetEQUAL, an advocacy group that supports direct action to achieve LGBT equality, took credit for the action and has set up a “gliteratti” movement, urging more events like Saturdays to draw attention to anti-LGBT politicians.

“Glitter bombing” got its start last month when Nick Espinosa threw glitter on Newt Gingrich at an event hosted by the Minnesota Family Council, a group that opposes LGBT rights and that has compared being gay to engaging in pedophilia and bestiality. Last week, Tim Pawlenty was showered with pink glitter at a San Francisco book signing because of his stances against LGBT rights and abortion rights.

Espinosa and Lang spoke about their glitter-bombing at Netroots Nation on Saturday.

Mike Huckabee, a former presidential candidate who opposes LGBT rights, called for glitter throwers to be arrested in an interview over the weekend.

“The people ought to be arrested who did that. That’s an assault,” Huckabee said. “It’s one thing to yell at a candidate, but you never put your hands on him, you don’t touch him. You’ve got to draw the line.”

The Minnesota Family Council, the prime mover behind an anti–gay marriage amendment to be listed on the 2012 ballot, has a history of involvement with Bradlee Dean, the controversial head of You Can Run But You Cannot Hide ministries. Both groups have claimed credit for getting the amendment passed through the Minnesota Legislature.

Dean’s controversial prayer before the Minnesota House that seemingly slammed President Obama and his strong statements about gays and lesbians have garnered the minister notoriety in Minnesota. And Dean’s relationship with the Family Council has brought his ministry in contact with rumored presidential hopefuls such as Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann and Mike Huckabee.

Dean told HOPE 95.9 FM that it was marriage amendment backers who stopped him from giving a press conference about a controversial prayer he gave at the opening of the Minnesota House.

“I get down to the Capitol, had about three legislators and a couple of other people say,’Please don’t do this, please don’t do this,’” he said. “What I did was I honored the requests of those who had been working hard for the last eight years to get the bill through. So I stood down.”

One of those marriage amendment proponents was Tom Prichard. At the height of the fracas over Dean’s prayer, someone at the Capitol snapped this photo (Prichard is second from right; Dean is at left).

The head of the Minnesota Family Council, Prichard appeared on Dean’s radio program back when it was on KKMS and was called “the School of Hard Knocks Roxx.”

Another member of the Family Council, Barb Anderson, who works as an education researcher for the group, has appeared twice on Dean’s radio show.

In March 2010, Anderson said that sexual health education in public schools “normalizes homosexuality and other deviant behaviors,” that homosexuality “is just a death sentence” and that “homosexual activists” want “gay sex sodomy taught as normal behavior.”

In October 2009, Anderson spoke about Safe Schools programs that work to decrease bullying and harassment of LGBT students. She characterized the trainings as “nothing more than a smokescreen for getting acceptance and normalization of homosexuality in the schools.”

Dean’s ministry has also rubbed elbows with rumored presidential candidates at Minnesota Family Council fundraising events. In May 2010, the group attended and tabled an event with Mike Huckabee. Just days before Dean gave his prayer before the Minnesota House, his ministry attended a Minnesota Family Council event featuring Newt Gingrich and Rep. Bachmann.

The group sent out an email announcing their participation: “We are delighted to inform you that the Sons of Liberty and You Can Run But You Cannot Hide Intl. Ministry will be participating at the Minnesota Family Council & Institute’s 2011 Annual Dinner with Speaker Newt Gingrich and Special Guest Congresswoman Michele Bachmann.”

Forget Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. Minnesota will play host to a religious right event in May that’ll feature two potential presidential contenders. Rep. Michele Bachmann will join Newt Gingrich next month for the Minnesota Family Council’s annual fundraising dinner in Minneapolis. The event, called “Reconnecting Faith, Family and Freedom,” will feature Gingrich’s film “Rediscovering God in America,” which was produced by Citizens United.

“There is no attack on American culture more deadly and more historically dishonest than the secular effort to drive God out of America’s public life,” says Gingrich. “‘Liberty is a gift of God,’ said Thomas Jefferson. ‘Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are a gift of God?’ The Minnesota Family Council understands this and is vigorously defending our God-given freedom in our communities, schools, at the Capitol and the ballot box. Join me and Congresswoman Michele Bachmann in rediscovering God and the vital role of faith and family in our American freedoms.”

The event had previously been listed as featuring Gingrich. Bachmann’s name was added late last week. It’ll be held May 17 at the Minneapolis Hilton. Tickets are $100.

Potential presidential candidate Newt Gingrich and his wife will be in Minneapolis in May to present their film “Rediscovering God in America,” a Citizens United production. The event is hosted by the Minnesota Family Council, according to an event listing on the Newt Gingrich’s campaign website. The film recounts Gingrich’s assertion that the founding fathers envisioned a religious United States and decries secularism.

The film is produced by Citizens United, of corporate expenditure fame. The “American values” film is narrated by Gingrich along with Callista Gingrich, his third wife and former mistress. Though the film and associated book are over two years, old, the Minnesota Family Council will be bringing it to Minneapolis. In 2009, Gingrich made the assertion at a “Rediscovering God in America” event that Christians are surrounded by paganism in America. The Minneapolis event will take place on May 17 and information about the location is not yet available.

Here’s a video clip of Gingrich talking about “Rediscovering God in America.”

And here’s the official trailer for the film:

In the lead-up to Iowa’s first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses, our sister site in Iowa enlists local journalists, academics, political consultants and pundits to help take the pulse, albeit unscientifically, about how various candidates are perceived in the Hawkeye State. In its first edition of the 2012 cycle, the Iowa Independent’s Power Rankings puts Mike Huckabee in first place if the caucus was held today, but Minnesotans Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann also place in the top five.

Huckabee — who won the 2008 Iowa Caucuses — tops the list due to his still-high name recognition and the former Arkansas governor’s proximity to Iowans, as well as the fact that he never dismantled his statewide campaign organization.

Pawlenty ranks second, with proximity in his favor, and due to that factor, good name recognition. Where he lags, according to Power Rankings contributors: “Charisma and an ability to connect with people in small settings.”

“Pawlenty will likely be a lot of people’s second choice, which is both good and bad. There certainly isn’t room for both he and fellow Minnesotan Bachmann, who has a lot more charisma and a lot higher name ID, at the top of Iowa power rankings,” noted one participant.

In general, several of our panelists noted that Pawlenty comes across as “too slick and polished” to earn widespread support in the Iowa caucus. But, each is also quick to point out that it is still early and that Pawlenty has attracted key and influential Iowans to his team. In short, we suspect that Pawlenty will remain a mainstay in the Power Rankings.

Trailing Newt Gingrich, in third, and Mitt Romney, in fourth, is Bachmann:

Proximity, name recognition and the support of a certain Iowa congressman were the three determining factors that narrowly placed Minnesota’s Congresswoman Bachmann into our first top five.“ Bachmann is an Iowa native [and] congresswoman from neighboring Minnesota who is a major ally of U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa). His endorsement alone is worth its weight in bronze.”

Bachmann, who is expected to garner a large share of support from tea party activists and social conservatives, has a fate that is inextricably hitched to that of Huckabee. If he officially plunges into the 2012 race, her stock sinks. If he openly announces that he will not seek the party’s nomination, Bachmann is poised to build a coalition from her two key demographics that is likely unattainable for other candidates leading our first rankings.

The next edition of the biweekly 2012 Power Rankings is scheduled for Mar. 27.