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Open Thread for Night Owls: Breaking electoral politics out of the hands of the 0.0000063%

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A contributing writer for The Nation, Ari Berman is the author of Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics. He writes:

At a time when it’s become a cliché to say that Occupy Wall Street has changed the nation’s political conversation -- drawing long overdue attention to the struggles of the 99% -- electoral politics and the 2012 presidential election have become almost exclusively defined by the 1%. Or, to be more precise, the .0000063%. Those are the 196 individual donors who have provided nearly 80% of the money raised by super PACs in 2011 by giving $100,000 or more each.

SuperPac moneybags Sheldon Adelson and Foster Friess
(Reuters/Voices To Action with Alice Linahan)

These political action committees, spawned by the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Citizens United decision in January 2010, can raise unlimited amounts of money from individuals, corporations, or unions for the purpose of supporting or opposing a political candidate. In theory, super PACs are legally prohibited from coordinating directly with a candidate, though in practice they’re just a murkier extension of political campaigns, performing all the functions of a traditional campaign without any of the corresponding accountability.

If 2008 was the year of the small donor, when many political pundits (myself included) predicted that the fusion of grassroots organizing and cyber-activism would transform how campaigns were run, then 2012 is "the year of the big donor," when a candidate is only as good as the amount of money in his super PAC. “In this campaign, every candidate needs his own billionaires,” wrote Jane Mayer of The New Yorker.

“This really is the selling of America,” claims former presidential candidate and Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean. “We’ve been sold out by five justices thanks to the Citizens United decision.” In truth, our democracy was sold to the highest bidder long ago, but in the 2012 election the explosion of super PACs has shifted the public’s focus to the staggering inequality in our political system, just as the Occupy movement shined a light on the gross inequity of the economy. The two, of course, go hand in hand. [...]

More than 300 super PACs are now registered with the Federal Election Commission. The one financed by the greatest number of small donors belongs to Stephen Colbert, who’s turned his TV show into a brilliant commentary on the deformed super PAC landscape. Colbert’s satirical super PAC, Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, has raised $1 million from 31,595 people, including 1,600 people who gave $1 each. Consider this a rare show of people power in 2012.

Otherwise the super PACs on both sides of the aisle are financed by the 1% of the 1%. Romney’s Restore Our Future Super PAC, founded by the general counsel of his 2008 campaign, has led the herd, raising $30 million, 98% from donors who gave $25,000 or more. Ten million dollars came from just 10 donors who gave $1 million each. These included three hedge-fund managers and Houston Republican Bob Perry, the main funder behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004, whose scurrilous ads did such an effective job of destroying John Kerry’s electoral prospects. Sixty-five percent of the funds that poured into Romney’s super PAC in the second half of 2011 came from the finance, insurance and real estate sector, otherwise known as the people who brought you the economic meltdown of 2007-2008. [...]

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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2009:

With "several ways of going forward," President Obama will make a decision "shortly" on increasing troop levels in Afghanistan [...]

"This is the first time that this president has been asked to deploy large numbers of troops overseas, and it seems to me a thoughtful and deliberative approach to that decision is entirely appropriate," Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last week.  [...]

The US commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, has requested up to 30,000 additional troops, including three more combat brigades and an aviation brigade and support troops.

While we can argue whether or not committing more troops to Afghanistan is a good idea, I think we can all agree that it must be done with clearly defined goals, a definition of victory, and with an exit strategy.  

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Tweet of the Day:

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High Impact Posts are here. Top Comments are here. The Overnight News Digest is here.

Daily Kos Elections Polling Wrap: The merit of giving readers ALL of the polls

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Yesterday evening, my beloved laptop appears to have finally bit the dust, courtesy of a computer virus (as my friends with Macs smirk knowingly). That explains the absence of the Polling Wrap on Wednesday night.

Based on the numbers from the last two days, you might think that Mitt Romney's presidential ambitions might be about to bite the dust, as well.

To be clear, his polling numbers right now, both in the Republican primary and in a potential general election matchup with the president, are sagging badly. If you believe the data coming out over the past several days, Romney will not win Michigan, and his once-formidable lead over the field in Arizona is all but gone. What's more--his national numbers are perhaps even worse. Meanwhile, Barack Obama has solid leads over the entire field, and Romney's once clear "electability" edge (as it relates to how he fares against Obama versus the other Republicans) is gone.

But if you only rely on certain media outlets for your political news, you might not know that. Indeed, one of the bigger polling stories today was a small kerfluffle over polling itself. It is a debate which we here at Daily Kos have a clear interest in, given the pollster that has been our partner for quite some time.

My thoughts on that debate will follow. But, first, we have two days of data to peruse. With that in mind, let's take a crack at the Republican primary data first:

NATIONAL (Gallup Tracking): Santorum 32, Romney 31, Gingrich 14, Paul 10

NATIONAL (Rasmussen): Santorum 39, Romney 27, Gingrich 15, Paul 10

NATIONAL (YouGov): Santorum 29, Romney 27, Gingrich 16, Paul 14

ARIZONA (American Research Group): Romney 38, Santorum 31, Gingrich 15, Paul 11

MICHIGAN (Glengariff Group/Detroit News): Santorum 34, Romney 30, Gingrich 12, Paul 9

MICHIGAN (Marketing Resource Group/Inside Michigan Politics): Santorum 43, Romney 33, Gingrich 11, Paul 8

MICHIGAN (Mitchell Research/Rosetta Stone): Santorum 34, Romney 25, Paul 11, Gingrich 5

NEW YORK (Quinnipiac): Romney 32, Santorum 20, Paul 14, Gingrich 10

NORTH CAROLINA (High Point University): Romney 30, Gingrich 19, Santorum 13, Paul 11

OHIO (Quinnipiac): Santorum 36, Romney 29, Gingrich 20, Paul 9

OHIO (Rasmussen): Santorum 42, Romney 24, Gingrich 13, Paul 10

That metric ton of polling dutifully consumed, let's now turn our attention to an equally heavy dose of general election polling, which includes new looks at a couple of states that haven't seen a ton of polling recently: New Mexico and Washington.

NATIONAL (CNN/Opinion Research): Obama d. Romney (51-46); Obama d. Santorum (52-45); Obama d. Paul (52-45); Obama d. Gingrich (55-42)

NATIONAL (Democracy Corps): Obama d. Romney (49-45)

SWING STATES* (Fox News): Obama d. Romney (47-39); Obama d. Santorum (48-39); Obama d. Paul (48-36); Obama d. Gingrich (52-32)

NATIONAL (Rasmussen Tracking): Obama d. Romney (47-43); Obama d. Paul (44-39); Obama d. Santorum (47-41); Obama d. Gingrich (51-37)

NATIONAL (YouGov): Obama d. Romney (49-42); Obama d. Santorum (49-42); Obama d. Paul (49-41); Obama d. Gingrich (52-37)

MICHIGAN (PPP): Obama d. Santorum (50-39); Obama d. Romney (54-36); Obama d. Paul (52-34); Obama d. Gingrich (56-34)

NEW HAMPSHIRE (Benenson Strategy): Obama d. Romney by 8 points (no % reported)

NEW MEXICO (Rasmussen): Obama d. Santorum (55-37); Obama d. Romney (55-36)

NEW YORK (Quinnipiac): Obama d. Romney (52-35); Obama d. Santorum (53-35); Obama d. Gingrich (57-31)

OHIO (Fox News): Romney d. Obama (44-38); Santorum d. Obama (43-40); Paul d. Obama (42-41); Obama d. Gingrich (43-37)

OHIO (Quinnipiac): Obama d. Romney (46-44); Obama d. Santorum (47-41); Obama d. Gingrich (50-38)

WASHINGTON (Elway Poll): Obama d. Romney (49-38); Obama d. Romney and Paul (44-28-17)

(*)--"Swing States" defined by pollster as: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin

Now, follow me past the jump, as I look at the tale of the tape in the battle between a college professor and one of the better known voices and faces in the political media.

Mitt Romney's auto bailout claims take a beating

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Mitt Romney's Detroit News op-ed about how President Obama saved the auto industry the wrong way and therefore sucks has drawn a significant critique: Romney doesn't know what he's talking about. First off, let's not forget that the Bush administration had made loans to GM and Chrysler before Obama was even in office. We can see why Romney would gloss over that, but more interesting is the widely held view explained by the New York Times' Michael Shear:

Officials in Mr. Obama’s administration, and many economists in both parties, scoff at Mr. Romney’s suggestion that a managed bankruptcy was possible without the billions of dollars in government aid to the car companies. They say Wall Street and private equity firms in early 2009 were in no position to lend the kind of money that the companies needed to manage the bankruptcy process in an orderly fashion.

Steven Rattner, who headed up Obama's auto industry task force, is still more blunt, saying that Romney's claims about how the auto companies could have been saved "would get somebody a C-grade at best at the Harvard Business School" and that, in the 2009 search for private financing for the industry, "We took every phone call, we made as many outgoing calls as we could think of."

Rep. Gary Peters (D-MI), too, makes this point, writing that "in early 2009 I met with Bob Nardelli, who was at the time the Chairman and CEO of Chrysler, and he told me that if the government did not act as the 'lender of last resort' the company was three weeks away from liquidation."

A central part of Romney's insistence on his way of doing things, though, is that he doesn't think unionized auto workers suffered enough; he would have made sure the beating they took was fatal, to their unions at least. But as Peters continues,

In Mitt Romney's experience as a leveraged buyout expert, he learned to put the claims of creditors and investors ahead of workers, but what President Obama understood is that the value of the American auto industry is more than just its return on investment for shareholders—it's also the millions of good paying, middle class jobs that the industry supports.

Romney's false claims about bailouts and union bosses and crony capitalism may play well in the Republican primary he's currently fighting to win. But if he makes it to the general election, the strength of the auto industry and the jobs resurgence it's bringing with it will speak for the president who made it possible, not the candidate who wanted none of it.

Republicans are having a cow over Obama possibly reducing U.S. nuclear arsenal to 300 warheads

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Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) says reducing the U.S. nuclear force by 80 percent is “reckless lunacy." Rush Limbaugh admits he doesn't know how many nuclear warheads the Russians have, but he knows Barack Obama plans to shift the balance of power in Moscow's favor. "And this, I'm here to tell you, is by design," he says.

The country's 38-million-dollar-a-year blowhard has been joined by others of the right-wing media and GOP contingent on Capitol Hill in lambasting the president after the Associated Press reported Monday that the administration is considering a reduction in the U.S. nuclear arsenal that might go as low as 300 warheads.

Emphasis on might.

Anybody who has followed disarmament negotiations since the 1980s when noted peacenik Ronald Reagan proposed a vast mutual reduction in the U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenal knows that there's a whole bunch of talking to be done first. The reduction written into the first START treaty that Reagan initiated was, by the way, 80 percent. Now the Pentagon is actually looking at three reduction proposals: 1,000 to 1,100 warheads; 700 to 800 warheads; 300 to 400 warheads, according to the AP. So far, the brass has not presented any of these detailed options to the White House.

(Continue reading below the fold)

Rick Santorum, preacher-in-chief

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If Rick Santorum really doesn't want to be seen as a one trick pony of evangelical social conservatism, he's got a funny way of showing it. A recent Idaho appearance came off closer to a tent revival than a political rally:

The crowd was a big part of the event — booing U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., calling Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg “traitor!” and reminding Santorum that American revolutionaries had more than muskets.

“And God!” said a voice from the crowd, prompting one of a dozen standing ovations during Santorum’s 75 minutes on stage. [...]

Santorum began reciting, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their — ” but paused for the crowd to shout “Creator!” — before continuing, “with certain unalienable rights.”

“That is who we are, that’s where our rights come from,” he said, eliciting “Bless the Lord!” from the audience.

Well, he certainly does get lively crowds, I'll grant him that. But even when Santorum pretends to talk about issues, he can't help himself from seeing every damn little thing as a battle between the true God-fearers and the atheists and/or heathens and/or Muslims:

Santorum said the Obama administration believes it has the right to force the Catholic Church to hire women priests. “They’re going to fight because they believe their secular values should be imposed on people of faith.”

Yeah, what's next? First they demand that just because you run a hospital or college you shouldn't be able to impose your religious beliefs on your non-religious employees, now they're going to demand women priests! Wait, they're not demanding that? Oh, well, screw that. Let's just say it's true anyway, because when you lie for Jesus it's not a sin.

He noted his longtime call of alarm about the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, saying the Cold War arms race that checked the Soviet Union won’t work with the mullahs.

“Mutually assured destruction worked. Why? Because they didn’t want to die. Because when atheists die, that’s it. Or, maybe better stated, they think that’s it.”

But in Iran, “They believe these end of times (are) a good thing for them, that’s the time they will conquer the world and rule it for Allah. ... Bringing about Armageddon for them is not a deterrent. It is an inducement.”

Well, but that is true of a hell of a lot of extremist Christians as well, right? I've lost track of all the various supposedly Christian groups whose primary interest in Israel revolves around shipping enough Jews there to trigger a good Christian apocalypse, or honest efforts to breed pure red heifers because when someone breeds a pure red heifer the world is supposed to end. (Yay, destruction! Come for us, Jesus! Don't spare the hellfire!)

So if Rick Santorum doesn't want to be seen as the guy who's all about being anti-sex and pro-theocracy (as long as it's the right kind of theocracy, not that bad kind over there), he's apparently got his work cut out for him. Maybe he could try spending just a little time a day not telling people what God wants, or not immediately supposing that anyone who disagrees with his various pronouncements hates Jesus? Try 10 minutes at a time and work up from there?

Of course, then he'd apparently lose nine tenths of his audience, so maybe that's not such a hot idea. Meh, just smile and give 'em what they want, Elmer Gantry. Just smile and give 'em what they want.

Energy Chairman Fred Upton's dogging of White House over Solyndra may be about to bite him

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GOP Sanctimony: Comeuppance Department

As we learned last November, House Energy Committee and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI), a ferocious critic of the Obama administration's energy policies, lobbied the Department of Energy in 2009 to provide loan guarantees for United Solar Ovonic. The company is a subsidiary of Michigan-based Energy Conversion Devices, a maker of rooftop solar panels. In a move that surprised no one after months of notices about lay-offs and a suspension of operations, ECD filed for bankruptcy Tuesday and said it will sell off USO. The Club for Growth, the anti-tax group that is pondering support for a primary challenge against Upton, has already chastised Upton for seeking DOE backing for the company.

Together with 13 of the other 16 members of the Michigan congressional delegation, Upton sent a letter in December 2009 to DOE Secretary Steven Chu seeking loan guarantees for several companies, including USO.

The request would be nothing out of the ordinary except the Republican congressman is engaged in a long-running investigation of the guarantee for Solyndra, a California-based company that received a $535-million guarantee to great fanfare, including a visit from Obama. It went bankrupt in September 2011. Upton and other Republicans have been hounding the administration about it every since.

Just days after Solyndra's bankruptcy announcement. Upton said in a statement: “It is not the role of government to pick winners and losers. Let’s learn the lessons of Solyndra before another dollar goes out the door.” During a hearing in November, Upton excoriated Chu: "The number of red flags about Solyndra that were raised along the way—many from within DOE—and either ignored or minimized by senior officials is astonishing."

Red flags apparently weren't on Upton's mind two years ago. USO's troubles were clearly visible well before the congressman signed onto the letter seeking DOE backing. In fact, just two weeks before the letter was sent, USO had announced 425 lay-offs. The DOE did not provide ECD with a loan guarantee.

Club for Growth spokesman Barney Keller said Thursday: "Every Republican supports an investigation of Solyndra—the question is, where were you before? Fred Upton has a long record of supporting market-distorting energy subsidies."

The club's fat wallet may be a problem if it decides to open it for former state Rep. Jack Hoogendyk, the tea party-backed candidate who is challenging Upton in Michigan's 6th District for the second time. In 2010, Hoogendhyk lost by 11,000 votes, a margin of 14 points. To Hoogendyk's $64,000, Upton spent nearly $1.5 million on the primary that year. Upton already has $1.7 million in the bank ready for the 2012 contest.

But if Hoogendyk can gain the Club for Growth's full-throated endorsement (and its checkbook), many race watchers believe that the Energy and Commerce chairman could face a serious threat come primary day on Aug. 7.

"It probably surprised Upton that Hoogendyk got that much support [in 2010], but it kind of shows you to what extent the Republican Party has moved to the right here in Michigan and elsewhere," Bill Ballenger, a longtime Wolverine State political analyst who writes the newsletter Inside Michigan Politics, said yesterday.

On the Democratic side, John Waltz, a disabled veteran of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, has filed to run against whoever emerges from the Republican primary.

Darrell Issa's hearing turns into circus

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Rep. Darrell Issa's "religious freedom" hearing, at which no women were allowed to speak to talk about the potential impact on their lives allowing religious institutions to dictate their health care, was, well, as ridiculous as you would imagine.

Exhibit 1:

Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Mich., a former pastor, told the religious leaders to “speak with clarity” to their congregations, lest America lose its guiding principles of religious freedoms.

“I don’t normally quote Stalin,” Walberg said, “but today he said something appropriate.” Walberg then read a quote from the former communist leader about causing America’s collapse by undermining its “spiritual life.”

“I would encourage the church to fight back strongly against what Stalin understood,” Walberg said solemnly.

“I presume the gentleman brought Stalin up only to bring him down,” Issa quickly interjected.
“Absolutely!” Walberg responded.

And exhibit 2, in which Rep. Rosa DeLauro D-N.Y. spoke about surviving ovarian cancer and how taking birth control reduces the risks of cancer.

“I am alive because of the grace of God and because of biomedical research,” she said. “And I have to ask each of you: Are you morally opposed to allowing women who work in your facilities, many of whom are nonreligious … are you opposed to allowing them to take a pill in cases where their lives depended on it?”

Most of the panelists agreed: In times of medical necessity, it was OK to take birth control.

I wonder who the other panelists were?

Here's exhibit 3, from the testimony of Bishop William E. Lori of Bridgeport, CT.

Once upon a time, a new law is proposed, so that any business that serves food must serve pork.  There is a narrow exception for kosher catering halls attached to synagogues, since they serve mostly members of that synagogue, but kosher delicatessens are still subject to the mandate.

You can only imagine where it goes from there. But you dont have to imagine the reaction of Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown student who the Democrats on the committee had invited to testify, but whom Issa refused to hear from.

Fluke sat directly behind the bishop as he made the orthodox deli analogy.

“He spent his entire testimony talking about a hypothetical story,” she said. “It was very difficult to hear his testimony about a hypothetical story and  not about the real stories, about the women in my story.”

Here's some of what she would have said had she been allowed to testify:

MSNBC and Pat Buchanan part ways. He blames everyone else.

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It's officially the end of an era for MSNBC and Pat Buchanan. How ... anticlimactic:

My days as a political analyst at MSNBC have come to an end.

After 10 enjoyable years, I am departing, after an incessant clamor from the left that to permit me continued access to the microphones of MSNBC would be an outrage against decency, and dangerous.

The calls for my firing began almost immediately with the Oct. 18 publication of Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?? [...]

Pat then goes on to blame loudmouthed Obama supporters, homosexuals, Jews, and I don't know, maybe werewolves. Yeah, let's say werewolves.

Buchanan's recent book may have been MSNBC's excuse for finally taking him off the air for good, but it seems mostly to be a "final straw" sort of thing. Buchanan has been mourning the downfall of white America for a considerable time now, so this latest book was hardly new ground for him. He has been accused of anti-Semitism even by such conservative stalwarts as William F. Buckley, and got in hot water a few years ago for a bizarre column proposing that Hitler was misunderstood. No, his pissy statement sells himself rather short on the number of ridiculously bigoted things that would regularly come from his mouth. No matter what he said on air or off, though, the network would always prop him up in front of the television cameras.

Well, it's not like he died or anything. We'll still be hearing from him. Maybe Fox News will give him a home, since that seems to be where discredited pundits who have otherwise worn out their welcome in polite company go to ply their trade.

Tax returns show that millionaire Rick Santorum paid twice the tax rate as Mitt Romney

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Rick Santorum likes to stress his working-class roots, of having grown up in public housing as the grandson of an immigrant coal miner. “It’s a story that resonates, and I have policies to fit the story,” he says.

He's been more resistant to telling the story of being a coal company "consultant," who in 2010 and 2011 took home $142,500 from Consol Energy, one of the biggest coal-mining companies in the United States. As shown by the tax returns Santorum finally released Wednesday after much delay, that haul was just a fraction of the income he reported in the past four years. He's a freshly minted millionaire.

If you'd like to check out Santorum's tax returns for yourself, you can see them here: 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. What you'll find, as reported by Maggie Haberman, is that his adjusted gross income was $659,000 in 2007, $952,000 in 2008, $1.1 million in 2009 and $923,000 in 2010. Not exactly in the same league as Mitt Romney, who reported income of $27 million in 2010.

But Santorum paid a higher tax rate than Romney, more than 28 percent compared with the 13.9 percent the former Massachusetts governor paid in 2010.

"I don't have wealth. I don't have investments. I don't have capital gains," said Santorum, who added that "most of the assets that I ended up building was paying down a mortgage on my house that went down in value."

"So that's where most of my money went. But as far as the tax rates were concerned, (Romney) had dividend income, he had capital gains income and was taxed at 15 percent," he said. "I had ...income, which was taxed at a higher rate."

That four-bedroom house in northern Virginia sits on five acres and was assessed at $1.4 million in 2010.

Santorum contributed $16,289 to charity in 2010, 1.8 percent of his income.

Among other sources of income:

• Five rental properties in Pennsylvania worth $1.75 million
• $400,000 in compensation and stock options for serving on the board at Universal Health Services
• $230,000 for appearances on Fox News
• $65,000 from American Continental Group, a D.C. lobbying firm
• $125,000 from the Clapham Group, a Burke, Virginia firm "committed to promoting the good, true and beautiful in the public arenas of politics, policy and pop culture." The client list is made up mostly of religious rights organizations.

His ties to the 99 percent are purely ancestral.

Conservative pundits not feeling the love from Mitt Romney

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The takeaway from this story seems to be that conservative pundits don't feel loved by Mitt Romney, and they're pouting about it. Apparently it's not enough that Mitt meet with them and listen to their carping: He also has to pretend more sincerely that he gives a damn.

He needed to do a better job reaching out to conservative writers and pundits, [Newsmax chief executive Christopher] Ruddy told the candidate. But then, sensing that he wasn’t breaking through, Mr. Ruddy stopped.

“There was a lack of interest on his part as to specific recommendations I might have,” he later recalled.

“My feeling from them was that while they were happy to listen to the information, they weren’t going to act on it.”

The article goes on to portray Romney as conspicuously distanced from the conservative pundit corps, and notes that while the Romney 2008 campaign was quick to register complaints with conservative pundits that badmouthed him, this year they're not doing that. Apparently they're bitter about that too.

I'm not sure any of that is surprising, though it does string together nearly all of the core criticisms of Romney from the right. He is not a part of the movement; he has no particular devotion to conservative ideas; his interactions with them are robotic at best, etc. They are afraid that as president they would not have the ear of the White House, which is the only thing they care about, and that makes them exceedingly nervous. Now, I'm not sure why they think they can hammer Romney all day, every day and still expect Romney to be all flowers-n-candy at them, but I think that, too, is part of the natural pundit ego. The president exists to take their advice, not the other way around.

It's interesting that they have such skepticism of Romney, however, while at the same time Grover Norquist is trying to shore up at least begrudging Romney support by assuring audiences that as president Romney would definitely do what they say. What's the difference? I think it's the difference in focus. Grover Norquist is about one thing and one thing only: Cutting taxes on filthy rich people. As a filthy rich person himself, Mitt is already quite committed to that agenda, and in fact it is the only agenda Romney can regularly articulate. Other conservative powerbrokers, however, the ones that dwell on social conservative issues, hardline militarism, and the like, have much less evidence that Romney would really be in their camp.

It's yet another symptom of the larger divide, in other words. The corporate conservatives want one sort of candidate, and as a pliable and very corporate type himself, Romney fits that bill perfectly. The social conservatives (and more importantly, the base) want a true believer, and nothing less; their support has shuffled to and from each not-Romney candidate in turn, looking desperately for someone who is both an absolutely, 100-percent-pure true believer and who won't shoot their own foot off the first time they're given a microphone. This has been a harder thing to accomplish. That they're down to Rick Santorum as their last standing not-Mitt should tell you all you need to know on that front.

Sarah Palin eager to 'help' if her party can't find another nominee

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We've mentioned the pining for a brokered convention coming from dissatisfied Republicans before, but at this point I think they're just trying to get our hopes up. From a Fox Business interview with Sarah Palin:

“If one of the nominees, one of the GOPers, doesn’t get enough delegates, it could go to a brokered convention,” said Fox Business Network’s Eric Bolling in an interview. “If it does get to that, and someone said, ‘Governor, would you be interested,’ would you be interested?”

“For one, I think that it could get to that. … If it had to be closed up today, the whole nominating process, then we could be looking at a brokered convention. … Nobody is quite there yet, so I think that months from now, if that is the case, all bets are off as to who it will be, willing to offer up themselves up in their name in service to their country.”

“I would do whatever I could to help,” she added, her voice rising.

All right, what do we have to do to make this happen? I want this. No—I demand it. A brokered convention, mass chaos, but then America's Favorite Quitter leaps into the spotlight, ready to do her civic duty, ringin' those bells and warning, um, whoever needs warning. We've had Michele Bachmann, and Herman Cain, and Rick Perry (Lord, that was a fun one), and professional historian Newt Three-Wives, and now even poor Rick Santorum is getting a turn in the spotlight, but none of them can hold a candle to Palin. She combines Bachmann's conspiracy-theorizing, Cain's penchant for the bizarre, Rick Perry's eloquence and Newt's oblivious sense of personal entitlement.

The only possibility for a "brokered" convention is if the not-Romney's hang on. Specifically, Rick Santorum, at this point. The odds are still pretty remote that it'd really come to that. The odds are even more remote that some new GOP savior (like Palin! Sarah Palin!) would waltz in and be officially appointed Republican Savior in Chief, but hey—stranger things have happened. Dare we dream?

Open thread flashback: Stephen Colbert mocks NOM's anti-gay marriage ad

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Taping of The Colbert Coalition has been suspended temporarily—possibly because of an illness in his family—so in the hopes that he is able to return to the air early, here's a classic flashback—his April, 2009 ad mocking NOM's anti-gay marriage campaign.

Mitt Romney's empathy for poor people is because of lousy French toilets

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In a meeting Thursday with the Detroit Free Press editorial board, Mitt Romney was on the defensive about his ridiculous ideas on what should have been done with the American auto industry in 2009.

“That is so absurd,” to suggest that he would have stood by while the automakers were liquidated, Romney told the Free Press editorial board this morning. “I can’t even listen to that. Of course I wouldn’t have allowed them to be liquidated.”

Gosh, I wonder how anyone got such an absurd idea.

Trying to prove that he's just an ordinary guy who can relate to the struggles of working people, he resuscitated a line he's tried out before:

On his empathy for the poor: "I lived in France in an apartment with no toilet. I don't remember whether it had a refrigerator."

It's well established, though, that he spent at least eight months of his time in France living in a mansion, complete with servants, and his campaign trail descriptions of the toilet situation make clear that it's not that there were absolutely no toilets, but that they were not what Americans were accustomed to. But here's the thing: Let's say that—as unlikely as it is reported to be—Romney did spend all but eight months of his Mormon mission in France living without a toilet, refrigerator, or bath. Even if that were the case, it was still a brief interlude in a life of privilege, and one that had a defined end. Willard Mitt Romney was not worried that he would never again have a toilet in his life. He was not worried he would go hungry.  

Implying that you can empathize with poor people because part of your mission in France was (possibly, according to you) spent in less than ideal circumstances is like saying that because you had the flu once, you know what it is to be chronically ill. Or that because you've been on a diet, you know what it is to be hungry because you cannot afford food. Believing that because he, for a specific reason, chose to live for a while below his usual standard of living, he knows what it is to be chronically deprived, to be worried about whether you will be able to support yourself or your family, is in its way as good a piece of evidence of Romney's blindness to his own privilege as his $10,000 bet was.

The birth control fight is all about women's health

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A New York Times headline reads: "Both Sides Eager to Take Birth Control Coverage Issue to Voters." Here's their lede:

The furor over President Obama’s birth control mandate has swiftly entered a new plane, with supporters and opponents alike calling the subject a potent weapon for the November elections and mounting what they say will be prolonged campaigns to shape public perceptions of the issue: Is it about religious liberty or women’s health?

Considering the furor was limited to the Catholic bishops, their Beltway punditry enablers, and opportunistic Republicans, how potent of an issue this can really be in November for the Right is questionable. This isn't an issue where there are "both sides." There's a tiny group of mostly male extremist fanatics (most of them were at Rep. Darrell Issa's hearing) and then there's the rest of the world.

Between the strong public opinion polling on the president's mandate, and the fact that family planning is an integral part of daily life in America, the Right is up against it. Even if they manage to to get anyone to buy that this is really about religious freedom and not about women's health, they're going to have an awfully hard time convincing people that having their birth control taken away in order to protect religious freedom is a good thing.

But part of this also depends on how women's organizations and Democrats react, and how they approach this fight. The NYT tells us that all the women's organizations are ready to engage the fight, but we've heard this from them before. For the last few decades as they've kept up the good "fight," women's reproductive rights have consistently shrunk. More and more, the fights over these issues have seemed to be more about growing mailing lists and having fundraising drives. That has to change. Now.

Now that the Right has come completely out in the open about their "pro-life" stance being about birth control and controlling women's lives, the Left has a real opportunity to brand the Right on all of women's health as the true extremists they are. But for that to work, our side has to get it and be willing to give up any ideas of working with the other side to find a compromise. There is none. The Right will continue to chip away, compromise by compromise, until birth control is as hard to get as an abortion is. Our political leaders have to recognize that, and women's organizations have to be willing to hold those politicians' feet to the fire.

We should relish and easily win the immediate fight, with an ample assist from crazy Sen. Roy Blunt. But it's not going to be the end. Between this and the Komen kerfuffle, this is the best opportunity we've had in years to start regaining lost ground on women's rights. If we make it happen.

The death of the Republican dog whistle

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Amazing.

The Republican brand is in a state of collapse – over 50 percent of voters give the Republican Party a cool, negative rating. The presidential race and the congressional battles are interacting with each other to drive down their lead candidate, the party, and perceptions of the congressional Republicans.

In the idealized version of the GOP primary, establishment Republicans would curry favor with their Wall Street pals while sending coded dog whistles to their foot soldiers—on race, immigration, reproductive freedoms, etc. Those dog whistles would motivate the GOP base without revealing their true radical nature to the American mainstream. It was a genius system while it worked, one that saw no parallel on the progressive side.

But the days of the dog whistle are over. The election of President Barack Obama created an entire cottage industry trying to prove how un-American and Kenyan he supposedly is, while Republicans like Rep. Pete Hoekstra run blatantly anti-Asian ads. Republicans laugh about electrocuting immigrants who will cut off your head in the desert if they're not stopped, while passing laws openly hostile to brown people. Attacks on homosexuals have escalated to new hysterical highs as society becomes more tolerant and open to equality.

But really, if there was one dog whistle I thought would persist, it was their hostility toward contraception. I mean, they've always hated it. This nonsense is nothing new. As I wrote in American Taliban:

While the laws have changed, and society long ago moved on, the American Taliban clings to its outmoded efforts to eliminate contraceptives. “Sex is a powerful drive, and for most of human history it was firmly linked to marriage and childbearing,” reads the official abstinence policy for Focus on the Family. “Only relatively recently has the act of sex commonly been divorced from marriage and procreation. Modern contraceptive inventions have given many an exaggerated sense of safety and prompted more people than ever before to move sexual expression outside the marriage boundary.” Of course, people have had sex for pleasure long before contraception became available, a cardinal sin for this gang. Alan Keyes, on his MSNBC show “Alan Keyes is Making Sense”, speaking about sexual abuse in the Catholic church, said on April 2002, “We don't need more voices that are going to somehow get [the bishops] to believe that all kinds of sex outside of marriage and apart from God's plan of procreation are to be regarded as joyful and wonderful and somehow consistent with Catholic teachings. It is those corrupting voices that exactly kept them from understanding the gravity of what they were tolerating."
 Joseph Schiedler, the national director of the virulently anti-abortion Pro-Life Action League, is certainly outraged at the notion of sex as joyful and wonderful, “I would like to outlaw contraception. Contraception is disgusting, people using each other for pleasure.”

While conservatives may have been disgusted at sex for pleasure, at least they had the good sense to publicly pretend that their entire motivation was to save fetuses. But of course, that mask is off. What they want is to control female sexuality, and the hell with any candidate who doesn't scream it from the rooftops.

And that's the legacy of the 2012 presidential contest. Had Romney won South Carolina, this contest would be over and Romney would be bashing Obama over some bit of wingnut nonsense or another. Instead, we were gifted $10 million from Sheldon Adelson, and this thing continues to get dragged.

And every day that this race continues is a day in which base conservatives demand their candidates—including that former "moderate" Romney—pledge vocal and overt fealty to an agenda so outside the mainstream, that independents are flocking to the Democratic Party.

Conservatives got great mileage out of their dog whistles, even if they're not 100 percent extinct ("food stamp president"). Their new bullhorns? Eh, not so much.