Via Poulos, I see that Ron Paul is polling better (3%!) than several of the other better-known, somewhat more-hyped second-tier candidates, such as Hunter, Huckabee and Tancredo.  (Poor Tommy Thompson pulls a whopping 1%.)  Granted that this is Zogby, and granted that it is a phone poll of adults, but it seems noteworthy that Brownback doesn’t even show up in the results and Ron Paul is already pulling a third of the support of the super-hyped Fred Thompson and the money-laden, media-soaked Mitt Romney.  Brownback’s absence makes me a little skeptical of the poll’s reliability, since he will be a player in Iowa even if he fails everywhere else, but if accurate it would mean that Ron Paul is in a solid fourth place among actual, declared candidates for the Republican nomination.  You never thought you would read that sentence, did you?  I expect that National Journal will be changing their presidential rankings accordingly.  Yeah, that’ll happen.