RUPERT MURDOCH'S REALLY, REALLY, REALLY UNEXAMINED LIFE

Spotted on Twitter this morning:

This is jaw-dropping on so many levels. First, and most obviously, we now know who's winning the "Murdoch primary," and it's the same guy who seemed to be winning it a month ago, based on one of Murdoch's first tweets: the guy who lost his last election by 18 points is the guy Murdoch hopes can take down Obama. A shrewd judge of what's best for his side, that Rupert.

Beyond that, though: Murdoch is talking about "moral regeneration," Santorum style? The guy who gave us Page 3 Girls and who likes to salt his TV programming with lesbian cheerleader makeout sessions admires the moral code of the guy who says he's never sat on a couch with a woman who wasn't his wife? Seriously?

Oh, and Murdoch is reading Charles Murray -- the guy who's all over the place right now telling us that the well-to-do should set an example for the lower orders by preaching the virtues of marital stability and living in the same towns as the proles? Where exactly has Murdoch been reading Murray? At his $44 million triplex on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan? Or his $10.5 million estate in Oyster Bay? The 8,700-square-foot, 11-bedroom villa in Beverly Hills? The Confucian-style mansion in Beijing with the underground pool? The private yacht? The Gulfstream? All while snuggling on the sofa with Wendi Deng, his third wife?

Look, I understand: Murdoch's spirits are lifted every time someone comes along who seems to have a fresh approach to smiting the liberal infidel. Right now, that's Santorum and Murray. But the tweet suggests that Murdoch actually believes he shares the values they're preaching. He doesn't just see these guys as hired thugs for the liberal-bashing cause. That's delusional.

OH, AND I'M SURE ALL THE TEABAGGERS WILL BE JUST FURIOUS THAT THE BANKS GOT OFF EASY!

I'm not loving the Obama administration's settlement with the banks, though it may be the best we can get, and it does include a significant concession to some of the real heroes of this story, the state attorneys general (especially New York's Eric Schneiderman) who don't want to let the banks off the hook:

...the agreement is the broadest effort yet to help borrowers owing more than their houses are worth, with roughly one million expected to have their mortgage debt reduced by lenders or able to refinance their homes at lower rates. Another 750,000 people who lost their homes to foreclosure from September 2008 to the end of 2011 will receive checks for about $2,000....

"I just don't think it's going to be a life-changing event for borrowers," said Gus Altuzarra, whose company, the Vertical Capital Markets Group, buys loans from banks at a discount....

Mr. Schneiderman was able to win significant concessions from the banks in recent days.

... prosecutors and regulators still have the right to investigate other elements that contributed to the housing bubble, like the assembly of risky mortgages into securities that were sold to investors and later soured, as well as insurance and tax fraud.

Officials will also be able to pursue any allegations of criminal wrongdoing. In addition, a lawsuit Mr. Schneiderman filed Friday against MERS, an electronic mortgage registry responsible for much of the robo-signing that has marred the foreclosure process nationwide, and three banks, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, will also go forward.

... California's attorney general, Kamala Harris, also pushed for her state to be able to use the state's False Claims Act. That would enable state officials and huge pension funds like Calpers to collect sizable monetary damages from the banks if officials could prove mortgages were improperly packaged into securities that later dropped in value.

So the Obama administration may have outsourced the war on financial terrorism to the state AGs, but it looks as if they're not going to have to fight with both hands tied behind their backs. That's something, I guess.

****

So, um ... this is going to denounced as a sellout to the evil bankers by all the tea party people, isn't it? And by some in the GOP field, right?

I'm joking, of course -- but a significant percentage of the punditocracy still believes that the teabaggers hate Big Money as much as they hate Big Government; I bet if you were a guest on Morning Joe and said to the panel, "I imagine some members of the tea party will criticize this as a sellout to Wall Street," you'd get nods of agreement.

I guess, theoretically, Newt Gingrich could attack Obama from the left on this -- but who am I kidding? He won't. He attacked Romney from the left because he fell into a fugue state of anti-Romney hate, and because accusing people of corruption is one of his favorite sports (ask Jim Wright). It failed spectacularly for him -- ever since he went in that direction, he's lost his status as the #1 anti-Romney, and he doesn't seem to be getting it back. So, no, he's not going to go after Obama that way. No one on the right is. And yet, if you believed many of the pundits to this day, the settlement would infuriate tea-oriented righties.

THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD

Right now I'd have to say it's this guy:

In 2002, at the height of the outcry over the sexual abuse of minors by Roman Catholic priests, the Archbishop of New York, Edward M. Egan, issued a letter to be read at Mass. In it, he offered an apology about the church's handling of sex-abuse cases in New York and in Bridgeport, Conn., where he was previously posted....

Now, 10 years later and in retirement, Cardinal Egan has taken back his apology.

In a interview with Connecticut magazine published on the magazine's Web site last week, a surprisingly frank Cardinal Egan said of the apology, "I never should have said that," and added, "I don't think we did anything wrong."

He said many more things in the interview, some of them seemingly at odds with the facts. He repeatedly denied that any sex abuse had occurred on his watch in Bridgeport. He said that even now, the church in Connecticut had no obligation to report sexual abuse accusations to the authorities. (A law on the books since the 1970s says otherwise.) And he described the Bridgeport diocese's handling of sex-abuse cases as "incredibly good." ...

That's from Andy Newman at The New York Times, who's clearly trying to find a judicious, objective-sounding way of telling us that Cardinal Egan is a lying, evil SOB. Go to the Connecticut magazine interview and you'll see that same point being made by interviewer Tom Connor with no punches pulled:

Ten years ago this spring, the sexual abuse crisis involving hundreds of Roman Catholic priests and thousands of young victims broke nationally in the media, engulfing dioceses from Boston to Los Angeles but also the Diocese of Bridgeport, where 23 lawsuits against seven local priests were working their way through the courts.

Three years earlier, however, this magazine had reported on long-standing and widespread abuses in the diocese ("Gods and Monsters," May 1999; link opens a .pdf of the original story), then under the leadership of Bishop Edward Egan. In that article, Egan was portrayed as a wily, coldly-calculating defender of the Church and abusive priests, more corporate lawyer than spiritual guardian. The article revealed that he had let accused priests continue to work in local parishes, authorized payments to victims in exchange for silence agreements, and lied about those payments during a deposition....

And that indignation extends to the interview, as it appears on the site. Here's the cardinal claiming he just cleaned up his predecessor's mess, and did it so skillfully there were no further incidents -- which turns out not to be quite accurate:

EGAN: You know, I never had one of these sex abuse cases, either in Bridgeport or here (New York). Not one.... I took care of them one by one. None of them did anything wrong. One of them spent four years in treatment at the Institute of Living in Hartford. I investigated this and at the end I put him in a convent as an assistant chaplain in Danbury. Only once did I not use the Institute of the Living -- I used Johns Hopkins because the man was in Baltimore.

CT Magazine: You mean Laurence Brett (a serial molester who was cycled through eight parishes in the diocese and a family of ten in California before relocating to Maryland, where he was accused of abusing more boys. He was still on the run from the FBI when he died in the Caribbean in 2010).

EGAN: Yep. I sent him to the most expensive place and I did exactly what we were told to do. And as a result, not one of them (the accused priests) did a thing out of line....

The interview is all like that: Egan claiming nothing bad happened on his watch, arrogantly denying any responsibility for suffering, whining about the fact that people still ask him about this, and displaying not an ounce of compassion or empathy for the victims.

Oh, and did I mention this?

Leslie Lothstein ... a psychologist at the Institute of Living, in Hartford, has treated about 300 Roman Catholic priests, not only those with sexual problems, but also those with alcoholism, depression and other mental illnesses....

He unwittingly found himself in the news almost 10 years ago, when it was reported that the Catholic Church had sent priests to the Institute of Living for treatment without always telling the doctors the full details of the priests' transgressions.... What's more, the Catholic hierarchy often ignored the institute's recommendations about the priests' fitness for service.

"I found that they rarely followed our recommendations," Dr. Lothstein told The Hartford Courant in 2002. "They would put them back into work where they still had access to vulnerable populations." ...

And these priests are the people who lecture us about morality because we support abortion rights, or gay marriage, or full access to birth control.

HOW TO FAKE A FIRESTORM

The New York Times:

WASHINGTON -- Facing vocal opposition from religious leaders and an escalating political fight, the White House sought on Tuesday to ease mounting objections to a new administration rule that would require health insurance plans -- including those offered by Catholic universities and charities -- to offer birth control to women free of charge....

Please note that this is an "escalating political fight" even though polls show that clear majorities of Americans -- and Catholics -- support birth control coverage. The leadership of the Catholic Church is peeved, but rank-and-file Catholics aren't. So why is this a firestorm?

It's a firestorm, I think, because the American political elite teems with high-profile right-wing Catholics -- among them converts such as Newt Gingrich, Robert Bork, Sam Brownback, Laura Ingraham, Lawrence Kudlow, and Ramesh Ponnuru. There's been a concerted effort in recent years to win influential wingers over to the Catholic Church (Father John McCloskey, a prime mover in this effort, was described in a 2002 Slate article as "The Catholic Church's K Street lobbyist"); the effort seems to be the political equivalent of Scientology's focus on converting famous entertainers.

When you combine all these wingnut Catholic converts with birth Catholics who are prominent right-wingers (William Bennett, Scalia/Thomas/Roberts), you get a Catholic-winger noise machine that can convey the sense within the Beltway that Catholics believe a certain thing when, in fact, only prominent right-wing Catholic pols and pundits believe it in great numbers.

This is a great mechanism for fooling easily spooked non-right-wing Catholics such as Cokie Roberts and E.J. Dionne -- both of whom have engaged in fretful hand-wringing about the terrible political misjudgment President Obama has allegedly made. Well, it really does looks like a terrible decision -- if the only Catholics you encounter regularly are your Georgetown cocktail party pals.

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

THE GOP ESTABLISHMENT AND THE OTHER GOP ESTABLISHMENT

So Rick Santorum swept the contests yesterday, winning the Minnesota primary and the Missouri and Colorado caucuses. I suppose I should have seen that the fix was in a couple of days ago, when right-wing pollster/propagandist Scott Rasmussen made the startling "discovery" that Rick Santorum is the GOP's strongest general-election candidate:

In Rasmussen's latest general election poll, Mr. Santorum is the only GOP candidate who leads President Obama. The former Pennsylvania senator edges out Mr. Obama by a point, while Mr. Romney trails the president by four and Mr. Gingrich trails him by eight. Just a week ago, Mr. Santorum lagged by eight. The key to Mr. Santorum's bounce appears to be his 10 point lead among independents.

Rasmussen's poll result was, to put it mildly, an outlier -- the last six non-Rasmussen polls have found that Obama beats Santorum by anywhere from 8 to 15 points. Are Rasmussen's numbers phony, or is the firm just wildly oversampling right-wingers? And if the numbers are phony, why would the GOP's house pollster want to push Santorum? Alternately, if the numbers come from oversampling of wingnuts, why are wingnuts drifting to Santorum?

Well, the right-wing noise machine has been in "war on Christianity" mode in the past few days, hammering away at the Obama administration's contraceptive-coverage ruling (lead stories at Fox Nation over the past couple of days included "Fear of Civil Disobedience: Army Chaplains Asked Not to Read Disapproval of Contraception Mandate" and "Catholic Church Ups Ante Against Obama...Threatens Fighting in the Streets"). Never mind the fact that a solid majority of Americans, and an even larger majority of Catholics, favor the contraceptive coverage mandate, according to a Public Religion Research Institute poll -- the right wing considers Job #1 to be dividing the country in the hopes of conquering it, and that takes precedence even over rallying around the party's presidential front-runner. (It takes precedence over everything, at all times.) So this issue, which seems on paper to offer a golden opportunity to generate anti-Obama among swing-state Catholics, is being pushed relentlessly (more, it seems, than even the Prop 8 or Susan Komen stories).

So the message going out via the tribal drum to the GOP voter base is a Santorum-friendly message -- it plays to his key issues. Thus, I guess it's no surprise that Rick did so well. Part of the GOP establishment wants to close ranks around Romney, but part of it has other priorities -- or maybe you could say that the same people have conflicting priorities.

*****

I suspect Santorum isn't going to get traction, but if he does, it's going to be interesting watching Mitt Romney's people try to launch a character-assassination campaign against him. Attacking Gingrich that way seems sort of appropriate, and suited to his angry-baby personality. Santorum? He's the whiny wounded warrior who was felled by evil Pennsylvania liberals in 2006 for Taking A Stand. To wingnuts, he's a Boy Scout. If Romney attacks him, are they going to see it as cruel? Or is it that they find him as unlikable as we do (an unlikable Boy Scout), but they're voting for him now because they're sick of Gingrich and don't see any other not-Mitt choice?


*****

AND: Headline of the day, from Gawker:

Shocker: Rick Santorum Goes Three For Three In Tuesday’s Elections Despite Being Rick Santorum

*****

UPDATE: Second link fixed.

Rove: Still Evil, Still Not Crazy

The liberal consensus on Rove's hissy fit over that Chrysler ad seems to be along the lines of what was he thinking? (see, e.g., Jonathan Chait, Mahablog, or Ta-Nehisi Coates). I'm not so sure. I would agree if I thought the American public was the audience he was trying to reach, but I don't think we are.

I think Chrysler was. Chrysler, and any other corporation not deeply committed to right-wing hegemony.

Rove's rant was a warning shot across the bow. It's a taste of what's in store for corporate heretics. The message is this: either get on our side, or stay out of the fight. And if you don't, we'll unleash the winged monkeys on you. That reference to "Chicago-style politics"? That's not about Obama; that's an implicit threat, a reminder of Rove's rules.

This is about Citizens United. Rove et al. can spend unlimited corporate cash to back right-wing candidates. Democrats can't possibly match what they can raise. But that's not enough. So now he's trying to dissuade any potentially Democratic-minded corporations from putting their money into the race, by making it clear that if they do they'll face the right-wing hate machine.

You know what Karl Rove really finds offensive? The thought of Democrats having the same weapons as Republicans.

LIMBAUGH: CLINT EASTWOOD IS STUPID AND POWERLESS
(updated)

Just saw this at Politico:

The verdict is in from Rush Limbaugh on the Chrysler ad featuring actor Clint Eastwood that stirred up quite bit of controversy on Super Bowl Sunday: "Eastwood got scammed."

"I think he got scammed. I think he got roped into doing something he thought was patriotic and ended up being played. I do," the conservative radio host said on his show on Tuesday. "I'm just going to give him the benefit of the doubt and suggest he got suckered into this."

Right -- because after 57 years in the business, and nearly 82 years on earth, Clint Eastwood is a helpless simpleton who can't read a script and decide for himself whether it's suitable for him. And despite four decades of superstardom as an actor and director, he's so desperate for work he can be arm-twisted into doing something that's not in his best interests. And, of course, he's such a weakling, right? Typical of the SOBs that they'd take advantage of such a nebbish.

All those liberal bullies pushing around a weak, helpless, delicate flower -- yeah, that's it.

****

UPDATE, THURSDAY: Now it's Fox's Stuart Varney who says Eastwood is a helpless naif who needs to be coddled and protected because he can't look out for his own best interests:

I think it was sleight-of-hand to convince Clint Eastwood -- an icon -- iconic American and known conservative -- to put his face and voice on that ad which looked very much like it was supporting a second term for President Obama. I think it's one of the great sleight-of-hand political operations of the last generation.

Poor helpless guy!

NOT JUST OBNOXIOUS, BUT INEFFECTUALLY OBNOXIOUS

A three-judge panel of the Federal 9th Circuit has declared California's Prop 8 unconstitutional -- and wouldn't you think the next sound you'd hear after that bit of good news would be the angry bleat of Rick Santorum? But I can't find any reaction from him -- nothing on his campaign site (yes, that's the real one, not that, um, other site), and nothing in any news feed.

I know he's going to do well in today's contests in Missouri and Minnesota. I expect that this ruling will bring out a few additional voters for him. I think Dave Weigel is probably overthinking things when he says that this will help restart Newt Gingrich's campaign (Weigel says this because Gingrich has called for the abolition of the 9th Circuit, which wingnuts loathe, and he's already out there with a tweet reiterating that position and denouncing this ruling). I still say the day belongs to Santorum -- he's been leading, and people know this is his issue, especially those in the crazy base. But you'd think Santorum would be out there making gay-ade out of this ruling, denouncing it from the housetops and declaring that the Apocalypse is now nigh. That's what the base really, really wants. So it's no mystery why he's mostly struggled at the polls: he won't be loudly, demagogically, rafter-shakingly obnoxious even about his pet issues. He's just a kvetch. (That's an old Pennsylvania Dutch word, right?)

****

Really, did Romney beat Santorum to the punch on this? C'mon, Rick -- you're base wants you to hate with gusto.

FOR ONCE, MAYBE WE SHOULD PLAY INTO THE RIGHT'S HANDS

Many people have pointed out the racism of Pete Hoekstra's "Debbie Spend-It-Now" Super Bowl ad, but now we're being warned -- by Chris Hayes on Rachel Maddow's show last night, by Mistermix today -- that we could be doing just what Hoekstra wants us to do, by making him (in the eyes of right-wingers, at least) a victim of liberalism and "political correctness." Yes, that's worth noting -- Politico reports that Hoekstra is claiming a serious uptick in fund-raising since the ad went public. (All this is happening even as we get yet another opportunity to point out the Hoekstra team's racism -- we're learning that the HTML code on Hoekstra's site refers to the Asian woman in the ad as "yellow girl.")

I see the point Hayes and Mistermix are making -- but for once I'm optimistic. This seems to be a year when the public is becoming sick of the GOP rage machine and might be turning back to Democrats for a little uplift and comity (and a little common decency).

What Hoekstra's doing is certainly going to work for him with his fellow Republicans -- although why he's bothering with it when he's all but assured of the GOP Senate nomination in Michigan I don't know. Going into the general election, however, I think the racism itself could be a liability. Even people who usually shrug off or overlook racist dog whistles (including barely coded ones) seem as if they might be sick of the all-attacks-all-the-time style of the Republicans; they seem as if they might vote against divide-and-conquer politics this year. So why not point out the attempts to divide? If voters are getting fed up with the vitriolic, maybe it's a good idea to shine the light on the vitriol.

DON TURDBLOSSOM DRAPER

I guess I'm trying to figure out what sort of Chrysler ad actually would have met with Karl Rove's approval. I suppose it would have said something like this:

Look, that evil Kenyan put a gun to our heads and forced us to take his filthy socialist money. We never should have done it -- in fact, we never should have tried to survive at all. We should have been left to die. Creative destruction, y'know? That's really the American way.

We're sorry we exist. We're sorry we're still making cars, and directly and indirectly keeping hundreds of thousands of people employed. A real American president would have kicked our union thugs to the curb and cut them off without unemployment benefits. But since we're all still here wasting America's money by working and producing actual consumer goods rather than exotic financial instruments, maybe the few bleeding-heart liberals out there who aren't too effeminate to be watching the Super Bowl could throw us a few bucks and buy a car. If you do that, of course, it's because you hate America. But we know all you goddamn liberals really do hate America, so this is a perfect opportunity for you.

We're Chrysler. Regrettably for America, we're not going anywhere.

Is that more or less what you would have preferred, Karl?

IT'S OBVIOUS WHY REPRESENTATIVE FLEMING BELIEVED THAT ONION ARTICLE WAS REAL

You know about this, of course:

Congressman Falls for The Onion's Planned Parenthood 'Abortionplex' Story

Meet John Fleming, the unfortunate Republican U.S. Representative from Louisiana who made that wonderful and all-too-common mistake of thinking that an Onion article was real and telling his Facebook followers to read it....

The Onion article depicts a preposterously massive complex where abortions are gleefully done in thousands of rooms at once and further abortions are excitedly encouraged. Why would a right-wingers believe we'd build such a thing and goad women on to more and more abortions?

Well, a lot of these folks have started to believe their own talking points, the key one in this case being the one that posits the existence of a "liberal culture of death." It's not clear what the hell wingers mean when they say this -- start Googling it and you find that it manifests itself in, say, Hollywood movies about gay people, or (according to Glenn Beck a while back) a campaign to push a death-oriented sci-fi anthology to the top of the Amazon bestseller list. But primarily the wingers mean a support for abortion rights, sometimes accompanied by belief in a right to euthanasia, or support for stem cell research, or, God help us, opposition to Sarah Palin, which all wingers ascribe to our alleged disgust at the fact that she didn't abort Trig.

The statistic that frequently accompanies discussions of the "liberal culture of death" is that 92% of Down syndrome pregnancies end in abortion -- though how this can be blamed on liberalism I'm not sure, unless America suddenly went 92% liberal and I just missed it.

But the notion is that liberals relish death, savor death, embrace death for its own sake -- we feel about death, according to these folks, the way they feel about God, or Sarah Palin, or Trig, or puppies, or something equally wonderful.

They actually believe this about us. So, sure, they'd think Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood would say, as she does in The Onion's fake story,

"Although we've traditionally dedicated 97 percent of our resources to other important services such as contraception distribution, cancer screening, and STD testing, this new complex allows us to devote our full attention to what has always been our true passion: abortion," said Richards, standing under a banner emblazoned with Planned Parenthood's new slogan, "No Life Is Sacred." "And since Congress voted to retain our federal funding, it's going to be that much easier for us to maximize the number of tiny, beating hearts we stop every day."

It's gone beyond a belief that we're all sluts and slut-lovers with no morals or sense of responsibility (which is Atrios's theory). Now, in their eyes, we're Freddie. We're Jason. We're Hitler. We're nihilists who kill for sport.

MORE ON CHARLES MURRAY'S ASSERTION THAT JUST LIVING NEXT TO HIM MAKES YOU A BETTER PERSON

As part of his Scold the Poor Tour 2012, which he launched a couple of weeks ago to promote his new book, Charles Murray invited a New York Times reporter to his home in Burkittsville, Maryland, where he explained why just being in proximity with him is good for the poor:

Looking at America Mr. Murray sees a country increasingly polarized into two culturally and geographically isolated demographics. In Belmont, the fictional name Mr. Murray gives to the part of America where the top 20 percent live, divorce is low, the work ethic is strong, religious observance is high, and out-of-wedlock births are all but unheard of. Meanwhile in Fishtown, where the bottom 30 percent live, what Mr. Murray calls America’s four "founding virtues" -- marriage, industriousness, community and faith -- have all but collapsed.

... The first step, he writes, is for the people of Belmont to drop their "nonjudgmentalism" and lecture Fishtown on the importance of marriage and nondependence: to "preach what they practice," as Mr. Murray puts it.

Next they need to leave their upper-middle-class enclaves and move closer to Fishtown.

That's exactly what Mr. Murray said he did two decades ago, when he and his second wife, Catherine Cox, a retired English professor, moved from Washington to Burkittsville, Md., a historic rural town of about 170 people about 50 miles to the northwest....

Life in Burkittsville, as he described it, approximates the small-town virtues he enjoyed growing up in Newton, Iowa....

Yes, Burkittsville -- it's Anytown, USA ... if Anytown had a median household income that's about 40% higher than the national average (or, according to another estimate, 30% higher than that, or nearly $100,000), and if it included the occasional $895,000, 6,472-square foot house:

This spectacular estate sited on 83 (+/-) acres exudes quality and character. Being sold by the estate, the home features embassy sized rooms, extraordinary detail and wonderful views of the two ponds and the farm.. Very formal, very private, but very livable at the same time with large kitchen family area overlooking indoor pool. First floor master suite with 4 additional bedrooms up.

And surely Murray's Iowa boyhood home had something like this right next to Pop's Malt Shoppe:

Martin Paule, 45, gave up a white-collar job in Los Angeles as a paralegal in 1979 and came east seeking a "more rural, more tranquil existence." In 1980, he found it in Burkittsville.

Mr. Paule owns Deva (pronounced Day-vah and meaning "shining one" or "angel" in Sanskrit), a "cottage industry" on East Main Street that makes free-flowing colorful "natural fiberwear for women and men." Mr. Paule says the business has a mailing list with 100,000 names and projected 1992 sales of $2 million.

Ah, but this just means that Burkittsville is the glorious exception to the rule that chi-chi folks and regular Joes don't mingle. So I guess that means the regular Joes are learning from the good example of their betters and are hard-working and industrious -- right? Er, not according to what Murray tells the Times:

In Burkittsville, he said, he and his wife attend Quaker meetings and enjoy friendships with both other professionals and blue-collar tradespeople, whose travails he cited to counter the suggestion that the problems described in "Coming Apart" might have something to do with the disappearance of working-class jobs.

Until the recession hit, Mr. Murray insisted, his blue-collar friends were eager to hire apprentices at good wages but struggled to find anyone willing to do the work. "They are looking at a marked deterioration in industriousness that is real and palpable," he said.

Or maybe the fact that Burkittsville is 50 miles from D.C., 65 miles from Baltimore, and 75 miles from Annapolis leads the local kids to believe that there's are opportunities out in the world that don't involve working blue-collar in a town with 126 residents -- even if leaving town means passing up the golden opportunity to watch Charles Murray and his wife ring church bells on New Year's Eve. (I'm sure Murray thinks that alone ought to have encouraged at least two blue-collar horndogs to stop living in sin and tie the knot.)

I have no problem with Murray's decision to move to Burkittsville -- a lot of financially comfortable people buy houses in small, rural towns in middle age.

But most of them, when they do it, aren't so egomaniacal as to think that they're doing their neighbors a favor.

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

SERIOUSLY, GUYS, JUST STOP

Most of the news in the new ABC/Washington Post poll is very good for President Obama:

... Overall, 55 percent of those who are closely following the campaign say they disapprove of what the GOP candidates have been saying. By better than 2 to 1, Americans say the more they learn about Romney, the less they like him....

Obama's overall approval rating stands at 50 percent, the highest in a Post-ABC News poll since a brief run above 50 percent immediately after Osama bin Laden was killed in early May....

In a general-election test, Obama leads Romney 52 to 43 percent among all Americans; more narrowly, 51 to 45 percent, among registered voters....

I just want to point out a couple of things that suggest a slow learning curve on the right.

One concerns the way Romney and other Republicans, especially Rick Santorum, try to talk about Obama as if he's a sandal-wearing hippie out of touch with bellicose Real Americans. It ain't working, guys, so just give it up:

Challenged for lack of foreign policy and military knowledge in 2008, both are strong for [Obama] now: He leads Romney by 56-37 percent in trust to handle international affairs and by a similar 56-36 percent in trust to handle terrorism...

You can question some of the things Obama did to get to this point, but really: after the last forty years, did you ever think you'd see a Democrat with a double-digit lead over a Republican on questions like this?

The other number I want to point out concerns the GOP race for the nomination. Here's a poll question:

For each item I name, please tell me if it is a major reason to (support) that candidate, a major reason to (oppose) that candidate, or not a major factor?

The first item listed is "Romney's business experience" -- and, well, 48% of voters overall consider it a "major reason to support" Romney, while only 12% consider it a "major reason to oppose" him -- but among Republicans and Republican leaners, that jumps to 67% support, 5% oppose.

Newt Gingrich, are you listening? Republican voters love Mitt Romney's business experience. Every time you attack him on this, he seems more genuinely Republican in the voters' eyes, and you seem less so. Really, Newt, stick to attacking journalists and non-white people.

The stuff about Romney is a mixed bag. Voters overall think Romney doesn't pay enough taxes -- that's by more than a two-to-one margin -- and they think Obama is much more likely than Romney to protect the middle class. But they're split on whether Romney's wealth is a positive or a negative, they really think his business record is a positive, and they think he'd be better than Obama on the deficit.

In a sane country, nominating a heartless fat cat would be political suicide this year; right now, it appears to be, at worst, a moderately bad idea. That might be good enough for the Democrats, however.

****

(Scan the poll's highlights here.)

WANT TO RETHINK THAT ANSWER, CLINT?

So I see that Clint Eastwood starred in the Super Bowl ad of the night, on behalf of Chrysler, the subject being Detroit's comeback:




It's halftime. Both teams are in their locker room discussing what they can do to win this game in the second half.

It's halftime in America, too. People are out of work and they're hurting. And they're all wondering what they're going to do to make a comeback. And we're all scared, because this isn't a game.

The people of Detroit know a little something about this. They almost lost everything. But we all pulled together, now Motor City is fighting again....

Yeah, Clint -- and how is it exactly that the people of Detroit didn't lose everything, and managed to pull together and resume fighting? Because I'm thinking of a discussion you had with Katie Couric back in 2010:

Clint Eastwood, legendary actor and director, told Katie Couric that while President Obama is a "nice fella," he's "not a fan of what he's doing at the moment."

During an interview about his latest film "Hereafter," Eastwood told Couric that the president is not "governing" and he's laying out lines in the hopes that people will believe him "so he can stay in his position." ...





Clint? If Obama hadn't been "governing" with regard to Detroit back in '09, you'd have had to be in a freaking Toyota commercial tonight. So I hope you've rethought that answer.

SOMEWHERE IN HELL, JESSE HELMS IS SMILING

Vile ex-congressman and corporate lobbyist Pete Hoekstra has decided that the way to beat Democratic incumbent Debbie Stabenow in this year's Michigan Senate race is to run a racist ad on Michigan TV during the Super Bowl broadcast:

The advertisement, which will run in Michigan during the Super Bowl and afterward, features an Asian female with a conical straw hat riding a bike through a rice paddy field.

"Your economy get very weak. Ours get very good [sic]," the actress says, in broken English.

"Thank you Michigan Senator Debbie 'Spend-it-now'. Debbie spend so much American money [sic]," the actress says, without a Chinese accent. "You borrow more and more, from us... we take your jobs. Thank you Debbie 'Spend-it-now.'"

See it below or at debbiespenditnow.com (a Hoekstra for Senate page full of scare headlines in faux-Chinese lettering).





Really, what's the difference between that ad and this one?





I'm sorry there isn't a larger Asian-American community in Michigan to raise hell about this -- people of Asian descent make up 2.4% of Michigan's population, which is half the national average, though why any decent person of any ethnic background should fail to be outraged by this, I don't know. Of course, Hoekstra has to win a Republican primary first, so decent people are in short supply in the electorate that will vote on him next.

This ought to be Hoekstra's "macaca moment" -- although George Allen, who had the original macaca moment, nearly won the 2006 Senate election in Virginia and is a strong contender for the seat this year. (Nothing ever permanently disqualifies a Republican.)

One irony: Hoekstra, in the ad, says he wants to be thought of as "Pete Spend-It-Not" -- but he's airing this ad during the TV coverage of the Super Bowl at the exorbitant cost of $150,000, which means he's eating up 10% of his campaign's cash on hand just to run one ad briefly ten months before the election. Way to show your fiscal prudence, Pete.

****

And yes, this is a shameless attempt to defend the ad:

The Hoekstra campaign called the advertisement "satirical" and explained the broken English in the video as a reflection of China’s increasingly competitive education system.

"You have a Chinese girl speaking English -- I want to hit on the education system, essentially. The fact that a Chinese girl is speaking English is a testament to how they can compete with us, when an American boy of the same age speaking Mandarin is absolutely insane, or unthinkable right now," Hoekstra spokesperson Paul Ciaramitaro told POLITICO. "It exhibits another way in which China is competing with us globally."

Well, 60,000 American students were learning Mandarin in 2007-2008, so it's not "unthinkable," even though that's a very low number. But why am I arguing? That's a transparently phony explanation for what this ad is about. (Though it does suggest that Hoekstra and his spokesperson think teaching a foreign language to students is some sort of educational miracle that only a turbocharged superpower could accomplish -- though they're Americans, so I suppose you can't blame them for feeling that way.)

ZERO UPLIFT MAN

Until last night, I hadn't seen one of Mitt Romney's election-night speeches at full length. What struck me about it -- and I gather it's just his standard speech -- is that it's completely devoid of uplift. The anger at Obama seems sincere, possibly because Obama genuinely annoys him, possibly because annoyance is Romney's natural mode. Then, at the very end, the effort at an extended bit of patriotic inspiration comes off as too short and utterly pro forma. Overall, the speech is pure sourness, which isn't going to work in a country that always wants its presidents, not just the current one, to offer hope.

One reason for Romney's approach, of course, is that he's playing to crowds that don't particularly love America (it's too full of people who dare to disagree with them). Liberals are much more likely to dream of an idealized America than modern right-wingers; instead, right-wingers dream almost exclusively of vengeance against their enemies. So, midway through the speech, when Romney tries to slip an uplift line into a series of Obama attacks -- "We want to restore America to the founding principles that made this country great" -- he says it as if he means to add at the end, and we want to do that just to piss Barack Obama off! Watch it, starting at about 4:59:





I'm sure the plan is to switch Romney's tone around convention time, with a soft-focus thousand-points-of-light speech a la Poppy Bush in '88. But there was a part of Poppy Bush's soul that genuinely did have a sentimental love for America, and I think that's true of every post-Nixon president we've elected. I'm not sure it's true of Romney. He can recite the lyrics to "America the Beautiful" all he wants, but I'm not sure he can find any sincere cornball feelings about America in his end-of-the-nation-state financier soul.

****

On a somewhat related note, Frank Bruni writes today that Romney should embrace his Mormonism on the campaign trail, because that would humanize him. Bruni cites a recent biography of Romney:

To read "The Real Romney" ... is to realize the utter centrality of religion in his life. One of the book's most arresting passages describes a moment when Ann, his wife-to-be and then a Protestant, asks him what Mormons believe. His detailed explanation moves her to tears, perhaps because it's so heartfelt, perhaps also because he's so nervous about her reaction....

"His church experience is, I think, one of the great humanizing influences in Mitt Romney's life," said Patrick Mason, a professor of Mormon studies at Claremont Graduate University. Mason noted that if Romney would embrace that side of himself, he could beat the rap that he’s never been exposed to hardship by recounting his missionary experience. "That's usually a very spartan lifestyle, and by definition most of the people you're talking to are going to be poor."

Romney's even longer period as a Mormon lay leader in Boston involved counseling and consoling people dealing with marriage problems, addiction, unemployment: some of life's messiest, scariest stuff. He must have gained a fluency in human frailty. But when The Times's Sheryl Gay Stolberg was researching an article about that time, Romney predictably declined her interview request.

But I'm not sure he wants to humanize himself. Obviously, he'd be less cautious about discussing this kind of thing if he'd grown up as an evangelical Protestant -- but I think in that case he'd use his religion as a stick to beat us secular humanists with, the way most modern Republicans do. I don't think any modern Republican wants to seem vulnerable. The point isn't to show empathy, or a sense of unity with all of one's fellow Americans -- it's to show tribal solidarity and disgust for the "others." It's to define and blame the enemy.

I don't think this is going to work for him in the fall. To win, he's going to have to change his tone -- he's going have to emphasize hope and uplift, and seem at least semi-sincere doing it. I'm not sure he's capable of doing that. And given the party he operates in, I'm not sure he'll ever realize he should try.

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

KOMEN: SURRENDERING OR JUST GOING LOCAL?

Katha Pollitt is skeptical about the Komen climbdown -- not just the bit about merely keeping Planned Parenthood eligible for future grants (which suggests that the grant applications may not be approved), but also this:

And what about the bit about allowing affiliates "to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities?" Does that mean affiliates will be free to refuse to support PP, setting the stage for state and local anti-choice takeover efforts?

Yeah, that sounds very suspicious. It would suggest that the Komen thinking is: OK, shock and awe didn't work, so now we're going fight a land war. Or, to put it another way, the effort to deprive Planned Parenthood of Komen funds is going to be like the larger fight to ban abortion: if it's politically infeasible to do it nationwide, it'll be done in red states and localities, bit by bit. And we know how successful that effort has been.

Pollitt goes on to write:

Nonetheless, this is a real win for pro-choicers. We hear so much anti-choice propaganda, we may not always remember that, actually, Planned Parenthood is not sketchy and controversial out there in mainstream America. It is beloved. Beloved.

But is it sufficiently beloved to withstand a right-wing war on multiple fronts? Let's hope so.

AN EXTREMELY WELL-FINANCED CIRCULAR FIRING SQUAD

I saw this at Mother Jones last night:

Last week, the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers held their latest get-together with wealthy conservative political donors.... Last September, Mother Jones obtained exclusive audio recordings from a Koch seminar held outside Vail, Colorado, where Charles Koch had declared that the 2012 election would be "the mother of all wars" ...

According to a Huffington Post source, 250 to 300 guests attended the most recent event, which was held in Palm Springs, California. They included Citadel CEO Ken Griffin and casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who along with his wife has given a staggering $10 million to a pro-Newt Gingrich super-PAC....

Former ThinkProgress.org blogger Lee Fang ... wasn't able to get inside [the Palm Springs event], but he did manage to identify several additional guests by scoping out their private jets at the Palm Springs International Airport. They included ... Foster Friess, a Wyoming investor who's helped keep Rick Santorum afloat by pumping $381,000 into two super-PACs supporting the candidate....

So these guys get together for the Koch confabs, pledge to spend millions of dollars in order to defeat Barack Obama ... and then go out and spent millions of dollars trying to beat up one another's candidates. Adelson is bankrolling Gingrich's super PAC; Friess is funding Santorum's. Ken Griffin, as we learn from the chart accompanying this New York Times article on super PACs, is funding Romney's (as, by the way, is William Koch, brother to Charles and David, who organize these gatherings; William has had legal disputes with his better-known brothers).

This right-wing wealth machine is formidable. We won't really have a democracy as long as such a thing can have the undue influence it has on our politics. I'm not sure our side can beat it -- the best we can hope is that it beats itself. And, given the ugly nature of the GOP primaries, which really should be effectively over by now but aren't, maybe that's precisely what's happening.

WHAT I GOT WRONG

When I speculated that the Susan G. Komen people, under the influence of newly hired wingnut VP Karen Handel, might have concluded that there was money to be made rebranding the group a right-wing cause celebre, I wasn't thinking too much like a crazy right-winger -- I was failing to think enough like a crazy right-winger. I was imagining that these people knew that there was likely to be fallout from ditching Planned Parenthood, and that they thought there might be some advantage -- that ongoing sense of team loyalty and solidarity and grievance -- in aligning themselves with the right.

In fact, what they really seem to have been thinking -- not just Handel but (as we now learn) Ari Fleischer, who was brought in as Komen adviser -- was that ditching Planned Parenthood really wouldn't come with much of a cost. Clearly Handel, Fleischer, and whoever else shared their worldview live in an epistemically closed wingnut world and believe that everyone feels about Planned Parenthood the way they do, with the exception of a tiny liberal sliver of the population. That was a tremendous misjudgment, and it comes because the right increasingly believes its own deceitful talking points about how extreme and out of touch liberals are. Well, don't stop believin', folks. Do us a favor and keep making bad judgments like this.

MEANWHILE, OVER IN THE PARALLEL UNIVERSE...

I know I care about this a lot more than you do, but I'd like to point out that none of the stories most of us have been paying attention to in recent days -- Komen and Planned Parenthood, Romney's "truly poor" remark, the Trump endorsement, the job numbers -- have been a big deal over at Fox Nation. Over there, the only story that matters is Fast and Furious. This is the lead story at Fox Nation now, as it has been for most of the day; prior to that, this was the lead story for most of yesterday.

I've got to say that I'm not sure why the right-wing noise machine is failing to make Fast and Furious a big deal in the country at large. I know Fast and Furious isn't getting much coverage outside of Fox and talk radio, but neither did the ACORN and "Ground Zero mosque" stories at first. Is the GOP Wurlitzer starting to creak?

Maybe it's that, which would be nice. Or maybe this is specific to Fast and Furious.

I think part of the problem is that the message of the righties on F&F is that the Obama White House didn't do a good enough job controlling guns. Hunh? Aren't you righties always telling us that Obama has both the desire to control all guns and totalitarian superpowers that allow him to disarm the masses whenever he sees fit? Isn't your message here just the opposite?

And aren't you the ones who say that allowing a country to become awash in guns is always a good thing? So if the administration let a bunch of guns into Mexico, shouldn't that have been a positive development -- by your usual standards?

Sorry, guys, it's kind of a muddled message.

BUT WOULDN'T REDUCING THE NUMBER OF UP-CLOSE ROMNEY MOMENTS ACTUALLY HELP HIM?

Mitt Romney now has Secret Service protection, and The New York Times argues that this could be a problem for him:

The most important side effect will be on Mr. Romney's interaction with supporters, whose access to the candidate at events is likely to be inversely proportional to the number of agents assigned to him.

Reid Cherlin, a GQ contributor who is covering the Republican primaries, worked on both President Obama's campaign and in his White House, and said that having a Secret Service detail "complicates things" for everyone involved.

"Especially in retail-focused states, all of a sudden roads are closed, there are traffic jams, people can't get close to the candidate, the local press feels mishandled," he said. "So there you are cruising down a two-lane blacktop in a tiny town at 80 miles per hour in these black S.U.V.'s. It can be a fun spectacle in a bigger city, but in tiny towns where people want to meet the candidate, it can be a problem."

... For a politician like Mr. Romney, who is remarkably disciplined in public and rarely mixes up his stump speech, those moments on the rope line offer brief glimpses into an impromptu and unscripted version of the candidate. It was on the rope line that we learned about his penchant for guessing voters' ages and heritage -- often incorrectly.... All of those moments will become more difficult to see and hear as the security buffer around him expands.

See, that's why this could be a good thing for Romney. He obviously has a formidable campaign machine ... in which he's the loose cog. The fewer spontaneous moments he has, the fewer chances he's going to have to embarrass himself, and the better it's going to be for him. And the more motorcades he has, the more he's going to look like Presidential GOP Daddy.

On the other hand, he could be the first presidential candidate to seem more robotic than his Secret Service detail. So there's that.

I GUESS GOP VOTERS DON'T BUY LEFT OR RIGHT ARGUMENTS ABOUT ROMNEY'S GAFFE

Mitt Romney has supposedly been the king of fail since he won Florida on Tuesday, but Republican voters in Nevada seem not to have noticed:

Romney up big in Nevada

Mitt Romney is headed for a dominant victory in Nevada on Saturday. PPP finds him polling at 50% to 25% for Newt Gingrich, 15% for Ron Paul, and 8% for Rick Santorum.

Certainly in Nevada the Mormon vote will get a lot of attention and Romney leads Paul 78-14 with that group, which we project to account for 20% of the vote. But Romney's dominance in Nevada goes well beyond that. He's winning voters describing as 'very conservative,' a group he's had huge amount of trouble with in other states, by a 43-34 margin over Gingrich. He's also winning men, women, Hispanics, whites, and every age group that we track. This will be a pretty thorough victory for him....

The poll was taken on Wednesday and Thursday. Romney's big gaffe -- his national-TV rollout of that talking point about the "very poor" -- happened Wednesday morning. Clearly it's had no negative impact on his standing with his party's voters in Nevada.

The left criticized Romney for seeming to be heartless. Nevada Republicans, being Republicans, don't care if he's heartless. The right attacked Romney for endorsing a government safety net at all. Now, you'd think Nevada Republicans would be quite Randian on that subject -- Republicans do think government is horrifically evil. But, in my experience, Republicans do acknowledge the existence of a subset of the population called "the truly needy" -- they do know there's that kid down the street with cystic fibrosis who can't really be described as a "bum on welfare." But wingers think this population bloc is tiny, and further believe that anyone whose problems aren't glaring is a bum on welfare -- except themselves when they need (or become eligible for) government benefits; then it's "Keep your government hands off my Medicare" time.

So, at least as far as the GOP rank-and-file is concerned, the concept actually was pitched correctly by Romney and his message-crafters -- he just messed up the delivery. He probably alienated swing voters he'll need in the fall, and he screwed up by igniting a media firestorm, but he didn't say anything that offended or alienated his base.

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

IS THAT THE KOMEN PLAN? TO BECOME THE FOX NEWS OF CHARITIES? (Updated)

The Daily Caller tells us that Susan G. Komen for the Cure is claiming a 100% increase in donations over the past two days, following Komen's decision to stop supporting Planned Parenthood. After reading that, and reading Jeffrey Goldberg's report on the steps that led to Komen's decision, I have to wonder: was this just a cave-in to right-wing pressure, or an expression of new VP Karen Handel's wingnuttery -- or was it an attempt to make right-wing pressure groups' lemons into lemonade by beginning the process of making Komen a pet cause of the right?

I know that Planned Parenthood has also seen an uptick in donations -- but I'm not sure our side can match the right in passion for fighting the culture war. Is it possible that the Komen people feel -- rationally or otherwise -- that tacking to the right will make religious rightists, teabaggers, and Fox News watchers give so much money to them, on an ongoing basis, that they'll come out ahead of where they've been, and never miss the support they're losing now? Remember that the right-wing media could try to turn this into a new front in the mythical "war on religion," particularly targeting corporations that try to sever ties with Komen. Planned Parenthood is getting a bump now from our side, but this could become a long-term project of the right. Maybe Handel got the leaders of Komen thinking that the free publicity would be worth its weight in gold. And given the relentlessness of the right, I'm not sure that's irrational.

****

UPDATE: Well, Komen has now reversed itself. I still wonder if Karen Handel walked into Komen last year with a bad case of epistemic closure and persuaded the rest of Komen's leadership that this was a good idea (or just pushed some people around, acting on her worldview). The fact that this proved to be a terrible strategy doesn't preclude the possibility that Handel thought it was a clever and brilliant strategy, and doesn't preclude the possibility that she brought other people around to that point of view.

Oh, and:

Komen says they will allow @PPact to apply for future grants. NOT that they'll continue grants.

Which appears to be true -- current grants will be funded, and then Planned Parenthood will be allowed to apply for future grants, but we'll see if PP continues to be funded. So the wingnuttery may well have been been postponed, not abandoned.

****

AND: Ezra Klein writes:

[Komen CEO Nancy] Brinker goes on to make clear that they will amend their guidelines so only “criminal and conclusive” investigations affect their funding decisions....

So they are, perhaps, backing down. Or perhaps not. Yesterday, the Komen Foundation said the investigation was not the cause of their reduced support for Planned Parenthood, and that the real issue was that Planned Parenthood did not directly provide mammograms. This statement doesn't address that concern at all. So it would appear to leave open the possibility that the foundation intends to reject Planned Parenthood's future grant applications -- albeit on less overtly political grounds.

Indeed. Or that they need congressional Republicans and the right-wing noise machine to crank up the investigations and find something "criminal and conclusive." Unleash James O'Keeffe? Unleash Fox? Redouble efforts to make Planned Parenthood the new ACORN?

IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING HOW "MODERATE" MITT WOULD DEAL WITH A TEABAG CONGRESS...

Some insider pundits believe it's likely, or at least possible, that Mitt Romney will govern from the right-center if he becomes president, even if teabaggers and other far-rightists control one of both houses of Congress. But if what David Corn writes about Romney and the Trump endorsement is true, we have our answer to that question, and it isn't pretty: Mitt, if you can't stand up to Donald Trump....

A day after Mitt Romney was slammed from all sides for declaring he's not "concerned with the very poor" ... why would he accept an endorsement from celebrity-birther-.001-percenter Donald Trump and appear at the magnate's Las Vegas casino to do so?

... Romney may not have had a choice. This morning, several media outfits -- Politico, the New York Times, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution -- were reporting that Trump was going to endorse Newt Gingrich. This suggests The Donald was talking to both camps to boost his leverage as he was negotiating a deal. (Quelle surprise!)

The Romney camp had to worry that a Trump endorsement of Gingrich would hurt the front-runner's efforts to keep Gingrich from mounting a full-scale Tea Party rebellion against Romney.... Winning Trump's seal (or bark) of approval would certainly have helped Gingrich in this endeavor and, undoubtedly, caused the commentariat to question whether Romney really could win over the party's conservative base....

To prevent that, Romney needed to be hired (politically) by Trump. And it's not hard to imagine Trump laying down a demand: if I endorse you, you better damn well hold my hand in public. So what's a rich guy gonna do? He will allowed himself to be played by Trump, to be his sidekick, if only for the moment. This shows that Romney cannot escape the gravitational pull of GOP craziness....

You know what else it shows? That Mitt Romney is a freaking coward. He's up by 20 points in the Nevada polls with less than 48 hours to go before the caucusing starts. Coming up soon are states where he has a natural advantage -- Michigan, Maine -- followed by big-money Super Tuesday. He's winning. So why doesn't he have the guts to tell Trump where he can stick his endorsement if it comes at a painful, humiliating cost? I know Trump could theoretically make Romney's life miserable in the fall by mounting a third-party run, but does anyone seriously think he was ever going to do anything other than tease us with that prospect? And with tea party heroes and heroines going every which way in this campaign -- Sharron Angle endorsing Rick Santorum, Ann Coulter continuing to cheerlead for Romney -- why assume that Trump is the Pied Piper of Teabaggia?

If Romney doesn't have the guts to stand up to Trump, he won't have the guts to stand up to the congressional tea party crowd or Al Qaeda. What a gutless wonder.

NEW MEME: WHEN ROMNEY SAYS SOMETHING EMBARRASSING, IT'S THE MEDIA'S FAULT FOR LISTENING

You expect Jennifer Rubin, who clearly has a desperate desire to be Romney's C.J. Cregg or Ted Sorensen, to say that the fallout from Mitt Romney's "I'm not concerned about the very poor" remark is the media's fault, but the meme has spread to NPR as well.

Rubin:

Romney as the nominee will be flyspecked and criticized over every word. He needs to avoid actual gaffes. But he can't keep the media from editing out all the inconvenient parts of every sentence, paragraph and interview.... Perhaps a less crazed approach to covering Romney would restore their credibility.

The hosts of NPR's Morning Edition:

STEVE INSKEEP: Here's a view of the news media that's cynical but all too often true.

RENEE MONTAGNE: Reporters, it's said, look for stories that confirm stereotypes about people, and if you're a very wealthy presidential candidate with an elite background and a reputation for a tin ear, reporters will listen extremely closely to your offhand remarks about poor people.

First of all, as I said yesterday, it wasn't an "offhand remark," and Romney has said the same thing in the past. (The reporter whose story Inskeep and Montagne were introducing actually made the latter point.)

Second of all (I'm talking to you, Jennifer), Romney's point wasn't taken out of context. He really was saying that the very poor have it just fine, or would with a little tinkering we can do in our spare time.

But what's really toxic about this -- and Inskeep and Montagne are usually better than this (though Rubin obviously isn't) -- is that it suggests that we shouldn't listen to the words politicians actually utter, and we especially shouldn't listen if what they say confirms our impressions of them. How far should we extend that? If Newt Gingrich says something grandiose and bombastic, or Sarah Palin says something in an ill-informed and tongue-tied way, should we ignore it because it's not polite to pay attention when the character flaws we've detected in people who'd like to govern our country actually manifest themselves?

This isn't what these people are saying. Rubin, of course, is saying, "For the love of God, please vote for the guy I've all but openly endorsed, and pay no attention to any evil bastards who point out his flaws." But Inskeep and Montagne are saying that we must limit our attacks on the Republican Establishment's chosen standard-bearer for the party because suggesting that a leader of the GOP is beyond the pale rends the social fabric. As in an abusive household, it's always necessary to maintain the fiction that the leaders of the GOP are upright and respectable, not abusive or pathological or utterly lacking in empathy. We can't say there's something seriously wrong with them. These are the rules.

IF GINGRICH REALLY WANTS TO PUNISH ROMNEY, WHY NOT RUN THIRD PARTY -- WITH TRUMP? (Update: oops.)

(UPDATE: Is this post already invalid? CNN now says Trump will endorse Romney. Still, the third-party idea still seems valid, if vengeance is Newt's goal....)

Well, you probably know this:

Word started leaking out in Las Vegas earlier that Donald Trump's "major announcement" is to back Newt Gingrich, and sources are confirming it to POLITICO.

The announcement is expected to come at an 12:30 p.m. press conference tomorrow that The Donald is holding.

The move is a bit unexpected since Trump had talked even within the past few days about how he may be compelled to run a third-party campaign of his own if he didn't see a Republican candidate who he thought could beat President Barack Obama....

One thought crosses my mind: Trump is willing to endorse Gingrich but he waited until after Florida? There's got to be a huge bloc of New York-born Floridians who still remember Trump fondly as that nice young man who fixed up the skating rink in Central Park. Poor Newt.

Now? I don't know if this really helps Gingrich -- doesn't Newt already have the pro-grifter vote sewn up? Is this going to add any new supporters?

But it brings to mind something I've been thinking for a while. We know Gingrich isn't going to win the GOP nomination -- upcoming contests include states such as Maine and Michigan where Romney has ties, plus Nevada, where 25% of 2008 caucus-goers were Mormon, and then comes Super Tuesday, which is a pure money contest like Florida, except across multiple states -- so if Newt's goal is vengeance against Romney, how much longer is he going to be effective at that?

Whereas if he ran third-party -- perhaps pursuing the Americans Elect ballot line, and taking his crazy supporters with him -- he could not only punish Romney all year, he could destroy any chance that Romney could win this thing.

And hey, why not make the ticket Gingrich/Trump? As Public Policy Polling noted (in a December survey that showed Romney leading President Obama head-to-head):

One thing that could confound Romney's prospects is if a strong third party candidate entered the race. We find that pretty much all of the big names who have been mentioned for potential independent bids would take a lot more voters from Romney than Obama.

The strongest potential independent candidate we tested is Donald Trump who gets 19% in a three way contest with Obama at 45% and Romney at 31%. The folks who say they would support Trump go for Romney 71-10 in a straight up head to head with Obama.

So there's your ticket! And I think it could be deemed technically in compliance with the Americans Elect requirement that the two people on the ticket be from different parties, because Trump became an independent in December.

As I've said before, I'd happily join Americans Elect just to get Gingrich the ballot line. Hell, if that wasn't possible, I'd circulate petitions for Gingrich/Trump if legally allowed to do so, and I'd urge all of you to do the same. Operation Chaos II! Let's do this!

WILL NO ONE SHED A TEAR FOR THE POOR, PERSECUTED PLUTOCRATS?

Ted Olson may support gay marriage now, but he's still a right-wing hack. Here he is on the Wall Street Journal editorial page literally describing the Obama administration's response to the Koch brothers' anti-Obama jihad as McCarthyism:

How would you feel if aides to the president of the United States singled you out by name for attack, and if you were featured prominently in the president's re-election campaign as an enemy of the people?

What would you do if the White House engaged in derogatory speculative innuendo about the integrity of your tax returns? Suppose also that the president's surrogates and allies in the media regularly attacked you, sullied your reputation and questioned your integrity. On top of all of that, what if a leading member of the president's party in Congress demanded your appearance before a congressional committee this week so that you could be interrogated about the Keystone XL oil pipeline project in which you have repeatedly -- and accurately -- stated that you have no involvement?

Consider that all this is happening because you have been selected as an attractive political punching bag by the president's re-election team. This is precisely what has happened to Charles and David Koch, even though they are private citizens, and neither is a candidate for the president's or anyone else's office....

When Joseph McCarthy engaged in comparable bullying, oppression and slander from his powerful position in the Senate, he was censured by his colleagues and died in disgrace."McCarthyism" defined by Webster's as the "use of unfair investigative and accusatory methods to suppress opposition," will forever be synonymous with un-Americanism. Army counsel Joseph Welch's "Have you no sense of decency?" are words that evoke the McCarthy era and diminish the reputations of his colleagues who did nothing to stand up to him....

The misuse of government power to damage or demean one's political enemies is abhorrent and the very antithesis of a free society and a government of laws, not men. It is time for the public to ask those engaged in these practices, "Have you no sense of decency?"

Your reaction to the first couple of paragraphs may be to compare the supposedly totalitarian tactics of the White House to those of Monty Python's Spanish Inquisitors: Poke them with ... the derogatory speculative innuendo! And your inability to shed a tear for the poor, suffering victims of this persecution may be reinforced by the knowledge that the net worth of Charles and David Koch has risen from $19 billion each in the last year of the Bush administration to $25 billion each last fall -- an increase of more than 31 percent over three years. If that's McCarthyism, then put my name on a blacklist -- please.

Ol' Perfesser Instapundit has a curious response to this:

...I was talking to a CEO last year -- an Obama supporter no less -- who told me he was amazed at how openly Administration officials threatened to use media demonization if he didn't play ball....

But now some of those officials have to be thinking that the people they threaten will be around after Obama's gone, and they'll remember.

So if corporate CEOs take vengeance on administration officials after Obama leaves office, hey, no prob! In other words, the reaction of Glenn Reynolds to the notion of alleged McCarthyism is like his reaction to a lot of other things: it's fine if it's privatized.

(X-posted at Booman Tribune.)

THAT WAS NO GAFFE. THAT WAS A BRAND-NEW TALKING POINT.
(Update: or maybe not so brand-new.)

This is being called a gaffe, but when you get an accidental gaffe from Mitt Romney, believe me, you know it -- when he slips up and says something even he knows is embarrassing, he doesn't repeat it. In this case he did repeat it, carefully and deliberately. So maybe this is a terrible campaign miscalculation, but, in the usual sense of the term, it's not a gaffe:

After winning the Florida primary, GOP presidential nominee hopeful Mitt Romney explains to CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien that he is focused on a particular portion of the American population in his campaign.

Romney says, "I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair , I'll fix it. I'm not concerned about the very rich.... I'm concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling." ...

Via Think Progress, here's the clip. I'll explain what I mean below.





Romney says:

By the way, I'm in this race 'cause I care about Americans. I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I'll fix it. I'm not concerned about the very rich. They're doing just fine. I'm concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling. I'll continue to take that message across the nation.

This is lite dog-whistling. Note that the very poor (and, yes, the very rich) are not, according to Romney, Americans. Romney is codedly implying that a certain Kenyan Muslim socialist Negro with ties to Goldman Sachs and George Soros is, in fact, excessively concerned with the needs of the people at the very top and the very bottom. Maybe it's not racial dog-whistling precisely, but it's Beck-like -- at the deepest level, it taps into the notion that rootless-cosmopolitan sophisticates like Obama (and Soros) wallow in government-linked high-finance riches and the decadence of the lower orders simultaneously. It's what you get when you take the overt ethnic stereotyping out of the early-twentieth-century notion of the International Jew foisting rampaging, jazz-inflamed Negroes on poor white Christians down on the farm.

Soledad O'Brien questions Romney's statement and he testily replies (addressing her as "Soledad" in the pointed way that Gingrich addressed "Juan"?):

Well, you had to finish the sentence, Soledad. I said I'm not concerned about the very poor that have a safety net, but if it has holes in it, I will repair them.

I think the challenge right now -- we will hear from the Democrat Party the plight of the poor. And there's no question it's not good being poor, and we have a safety net to help those that are very poor. But my campaign is focused is on middle-income Americans. My campaign -- you can choose where to focus. You can focus on the rich -- that's not my focus. You can focus on the very poor -- that's not my focus. My focus is on middle-income Americans -- retirees living on Social Security, people who can't find work, folks that have kids that are getting ready to go to college. These are the people who've been most badly hurt during the Obama years.

See? He keeps repeating it. It's a rehearsed line. It's a talking point he wants to take into the campaign. He wants to divide and conquer; he wants middle-class people who've had the rug pulled out from under them in this recession to feel that their interests are in opposition to the interests of "the very poor." He wants them to think that President Obama is excessively concerned with "the very poor" at their expense.

Will this work? I don't know. But it's no slip-up. It's no gaffe.

(And yes, he did say "Democrat Party." So when are we going to start calling it the "Republic Party" at every possible opportunity? I'm ready.)

*****

UPDATE: Well, maybe it's not a brand-new talking point -- Bill Scher notes that Romney said the same thing in October:

In October, I reported here that Romney made this exact same argument while stumping in Iowa: "In our country, the people who need the help most are not the poor, who have a safety net, not the rich, who are doing just fine, but the middle class."

Video at the link. (Hat tip: Pam Spaulding.)

GOSH, I WONDER WHAT PERCENTAGE OF ROMNEY'S ADS AGAINST OBAMA WILL BE NEGATIVE

You've probably seen this stat:

Negative ads were so prevalent in the final week before the Florida primary that they accounted for 92 percent of all campaign commercials that ran....

Mr. Gingrich, outspent and underfinanced, was the primary target.

The bulk of the ads were run by Mr. Romney and his PAC, Restore Our Future, which spent a combined $15.4 million on television and radio advertising in Florida....

The tone and content of the commercials were almost as lopsided. Of all the spots that ran in Florida for the last week, 68 percent were attacks on Mr. Gingrich, Kantar Media found....

Mustang Bobby writes:

Besides a lot of money, the other thing that Mitt Romney has going for him is that he is running against thoroughly unlikeable opponents. Mr. Romney is no Mr. Personality, but the striking thing is how lucky he was to run against people like Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Rick Santorum, all of whom generated a hateful vibe, even for Republicans.... I think one of the big factors in his win last night was that Florida Republicans saw Newt Gingrich bombasting on TV and thought Wow, do I want to watch that asshole for the next four years?

I strongly disagree with this. Republican voters? They fall for Santorum's aw-shucks Boy Scout act and think Bachmann is just a nice lady who hates gay people only because she has such a deep, abiding love for Jesus and freedom. As for Gingrich, GOP voters may have ultimately soured on him, but watching him for four years is precisely what they want, or wanted for quite a while. They wanted to watch him smite Barack Obama with his mighty tongue on continuous loop all through the fall, and then watch him smite reporters and brown people and Harry Reid endlessly after that. It's their version of a first-person shooter game, and they they wanted to spend the rest of their lives playing it. I think they still feel that way -- or at least they still secretly hanker for the Newt they saw in the debates with Juan Williams and John King, the one who seemed as if he couldn't be stopped. Romney stopped him, which made him look weak, and vulnerable to the Obama campaign, so they reluctantly gave up on their view of him as a conquering Visigoth. But they still want a conquering Visigoth.

As Charlie Pierce notes, they got a semi-Visigoth in Romney:

Very early [last] evening, the MSNBC embed with the Romney campaign opined that following Romney around the last couple of days, when it became clear that the election was in the bag, was something like watching an episode of Dexter, the TV show about the charming-as-hell serial killer.... In addition to being a singularly appalling liar, Mitt Romney also has all the basic qualities of a considerable bully. He ruthlessly shoved aside a hapless but nonetheless incumbent Republican governor in order get himself elected in Massachusetts. You've seen him have to rein it in a little on the debate stage. (Believe me, there's more of that to come.) And you saw it on Tuesday night, when Willard accepted victory, and then launched into his usual litany of lies about the president (the president doesn't "want to amass record deficits" -- honestly, no, he doesn't) -- spiced with just the right amount of upper-crust sneering.

I was particularly amused by this little aside: "Like his colleagues in the faculty lounge who think they know better, President Obama demonizes and denigrates almost every sector of our economy."

... But it was how Romney delivered the speech that was so revelatory. This is a rich kid who likes flogging The Help. There were just enough shit-eating, country-club grins as he delivered his rancid material to show you what the guy must have been like in those golden moments when he realized that there was more dough in wrecking a company than in investing in it.

Even after twenty-plus years of Limbaugh and fifteen or so of Fox, the ugliest presidential campaign of modern times is still arguably the Poppy Bush campaign of 1988. Well, I think Romney's campaign this year is going to be that Lee Atwater/Floyd Brown campaign on steroids, specifically super-PAC steroids. It's not just Romney's personal and demographic similarity to Bush the Elder. The "faculty lounge" crack quoted by Pierce is an echo of Bush's assertion that Michael Dukakis's policies were "born in Harvard Yard's boutique." The willingness to brazenly fake patriotic sanctimony -- see Romney's incessant invocation of "America the Beautiful" -- precisely echoes the visits to flag factories and other showoffy efforts Bush made to distinguish himself from the ACLU-invoking opponent whose wife was scurrilously rumored to have burned an American flag.

And mock that "America the Beautiful" stuff if you will, but that plus the new habit the Republicans have of beginning debates with the Pledge of Allegiance or the national anthem tells me that Romney's going to jab President Obama on patriotism until he draws at least a little bit of blood. I can easily imagine him turning to Obama on a debate stage and challenging him to recite second and third verses of some patriotic song or other; we Jon Stewart watchers will chortle, but it might actually connect in Appalachia. I have no doubt that Romney would stoop to that McCarthyite low.

And the ads -- remember that the Willie Horton ad came not from the official Bush campaign but from an ostensibly independent outside group. (Yes, Citizens United.) It's going to happen again. We're not going to get birtherism, but we're going to get distortions and insinuations that approach birther level -- whatever the right thinks will go just to the limit and not quite give the mainstream press the vapors. It's going to be ugly. It's going to be every stereotype from the Protocols of the Elders of Liberalism. It's going to be patriotism and race and gun-grabbing and Soros and Molotov cocktails tossed to a Grateful Dead soundtrack. Romney and his super PAC aren't going to refrain from any line of attack.

Will it work? I don't know. Obama's no slouch. But it will be exceedingly nasty.