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December 06, 2011 | | BRAVE Michele Bachmann’s had plenty of uncomfortable moments on the campaign trail, but wait until you see this: at a South Carolina book signing, an 8-year-old boy named Elijah whispered to Bachmann, “My mom is gay and she doesn’t need fixing.” Bachmann responded with a blank expression, then waved to him as he ran away. Watch the video at The Daily Beast. FRONTRUNNER There’s nothing like a last-minute surge to make the presidential race more interesting. According to two new polls out Tuesday, Newt Gingrich took the lead in two key states: Iowa and South Carolina. In a Washington Post/ABC News poll, Gingrich had the support of 33 percent of likely caucus-goers in Iowa, the state with the influential first caucus. In the same poll, Mitt Romney and Ron Paul each received 15 percent. In an NBC/Marist Poll, Gingrich leads Romney by nearly 17 percentage points in South Carolina, where the GOP’s second primary will be held on January 21. But the picture is not all rosy for the former House Speaker: Reports Tuesday showed the candidate is scrambling to raise enough money, where he lags well behind Romney and Rick Perry. SUPPORT Syria’s rebels got a boost of support from Hillary Clinton today, meeting with the secretary of state in Geneva. Clinton cheered the possibility of ousting President Bashar Assad, calling for “removing the Assad regime” and replacing it with one of “tolerance and freedom.” Meanwhile, reports from Homs, the restive city that has been at the center of the crackdown, indicated a surge in violence, with 50 reported dead in government-sanctioned killings. Assad spoke with Barbara Walters in an interview set to air Wednesday, his first since the uprising began. COURT BATTLE The oil giants are turning on each other. In a court filing on Tuesday, BP accused Halliburton of intentionally destroying incriminating evidence related to last year’s devastating Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. BP, a British company, says that Halliburton trashed records of faulty cement slurry it made for the Macondo well off the coast of Lousiana. BP also accuses Halliburton of deleting a damning computer model, and asked a court to hire a team of computer experts to dig it up. Eleven people died when the well blew out and the rig exploded, and BP has so far shouldered most of the financial penalties. OUTRAGED The Daily Beast’s Buzz Bissinger has been one of the media’s most outspoken critics of Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky—and now he’s turning his outrage on The New York Times for giving the accused child rapist a softball interview. The newspaper’s four-hour Q&A served as “an open microphone for Sandusky to give another round of convoluted and unconvincing explanations,” and was accompanied by a sympathetic online video that showed Sandusky sadly contemplating his future. “It would have brought me to tears,” writes Bissinger, “except I still hear the smacking sound that was apparently made when he was allegedly violating a little boy in the shower.” | | 
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