The Occupy protests seem to have captured the attention of one of the top Republican pollsters — and they’ve scared the hell out of him. Chris Moody has a terrific report on this today.

The Republican Governors Association met this week in Florida to give GOP state executives a chance to rejuvenate, strategize and team-build. But during a plenary session on Wednesday, one question kept coming up: How can Republicans do a better job of talking about Occupy Wall Street?

“I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist and one of the nation’s foremost experts on crafting the perfect political message. “They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”

As is his wont, Luntz provided Republicans with a series of carefully-crafted rhetorical suggestions in order to help manipulate audiences. For example, “waste” and “government spending” are apparently supposed to be interchangeable. Calls for “sacrifice” and “compromise” are easily misunderstood. Voters don’t believe Republicans are defending the middle class, so GOP officials should instead talk about “hardworking taxpayers.” And Americans are supposed to be told that government “takes from the rich,” not “taxes the rich,” because taxing the rich is popular.

That last point was of particular interest, because Republicans, polls to the contrary notwithstanding, like to pretend that asking more from the very wealthy isn’t popular at all.

And as Greg Sargent noted, that suggests Luntz’s research includes “a pretty striking concession.”

This longtime GOP pollster, adviser, and messaging expert is admitting that the Dem push for tax hikes on the rich has Republicans on the defensive, and that Republicans need to come up with a better way of obscuring what Dems are trying to achieve on the issue. He’s also admitting that the public isn’t inclined to believe Republicans represent the interests of the middle class.

No wonder Republicans are so worried they’re losing the message war over jobs and the economy — they are losing.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) was asked today if it would hurt the U.S. economy if the payroll tax cut expires at the end of the month. He replied:

“I’m not an economist. I don’t know what kind of an impact it’s going to have on the economy.”

Is that so. Here’s a follow-up question: would it hurt the U.S. economy if Bush-era tax rates expire at the end of 2012? I have a hard time believing that Boehner would respond, “I’m not an economist. I don’t know what kind of an impact it’s going to have on the economy.” Call it a hunch.

For that matter, since when does Boehner care what economists think anyway? Economists begged him not to hold the debt ceiling hostage, have urged him not to pursue an austerity agenda, and pleaded with him to invest in job creation. In each instance, the Speaker blew off the concerns of those who know exactly what kind of an impact those policies would have on the economy.

For the record, the consensus among economists is that the domestic economy would take a significant hit if Republicans killed the payroll break extension.

The Republican National Committee today sent out what has to be the strangest press release I’ve seen in a long while. The RNC, in turns out, is outraged that President Obama hasn’t embraced the Simpson-Bowles debt-reduction plan.

There’s quite a bit of this going around. The Wall Street Journal recently published a similar condemnation, and a variety of Republican lawmakers have begun calling for a vote on the Simpson-Bowles blueprint.

This is getting pretty weird.

Look, I’ve never been especially fond of the Simpson-Bowles plan — its approach to Social Security “reforms” is a mess — so I’m delighted Democratic leaders didn’t pursue it, but perhaps now is a good time to remind the RNC and other conservatives of a significant detail: Republicans used to hate the Simpson-Bowles plan. In fact, the reason it’s called the “Simpson-Bowles plan” as opposed to the “Simpson-Bowles commission plan” is that GOP officials on the commission refused to support it, guaranteeing the commission’s failure. Indeed, how many of the Republican lawmakers on the commission agreed to support the chairmen’s plan? Zero.

(As with the super-committee, there’s a pattern of these panels coming up short because Republicans don’t believe in compromise.)

And why did Republicans hate Simpson-Bowles? Because it, among other things, raised taxes — a lot more than Obama’s debt-reduction plan, by the way — and slashed defense spending. It also allowed all of the Bush-era tax breaks to expire on time at the end of 2012.

Matt Yglesias recently asked a good question: “Do Simpson-Bowles fans know what’s in it?”

The Obama White House was the prime mover behind the creation of the Bowles-Simpson Commission and liberals didn’t really like its output, so ever since Obama chose not to throw his presidential weight behind the terms of their proposal citing Bowles-Simpson has become a staple of the president’s critics. The problem is that most of these critics don’t seem to be familiar with the content of the plan which has double the tax increases and double the defense spending cuts of the more recent plans out of the White House.

If it were really true that Bowles-Simpson represented the right pole of the debate in Washington, we’d be having a very different conversation. The more likely reality is simply that Bowles-Simpson is “bipartisan” and not what the president put on the table. Since various people want to criticize Obama, and want to be bipartisan, this is the flag they’re waving even while they simultaneously object to the president proposing more modestly scaled versions of the same ideas.

Part of me is left to assume that Republicans have decided they like Simpson-Bowles as some kind of bizarre knee-jerk reaction — Obama hasn’t embraced it, so it must be good. Two weeks ago, two Republican senators — Lindsey Graham and Mark Kirk — voiced support for the plan, apparently without having read it, and today, the Republican National Committee is pretending to be outraged that the president hasn’t endorsed the proposal.

News tip for the right: Simpson-Bowles is much further to the left that anything Republicans have been willing to even think about on debt reduction. Do they not understand this?

Here’s an even more salient question: if Obama were to announce today that he’s on board with Simpson-Bowles — he shouldn’t, but if he did — would the RNC, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and Republican lawmakers rejoice, or would they decide en masse that they’ve suddenly changed their minds?

The Boeing/NLRB issue hasn’t been especially prominent at the national level, but in Republican circles — especially in the presidential primary in South Carolina — it’s a big deal.

And as of today, it’s pretty much over.

After decades of bitter relations, Boeing and the machinists’ union vowed a new era of cooperation on Wednesday as they announced a far-reaching four-year contract extension that would raise wages, improve pensions and add thousands of new assembly jobs in Washington State to build an updated version of its 737 jet.

Union officials said that the deal resolved their disputes with Boeing and that they would ask the National Labor Relations Board to drop a politically charged case against Boeing over a new plant it opened this year in South Carolina. The agency, which filed the case in April in response to a complaint by the machinists’ union, is asserting that the company’s decision to build the $750 million plant in South Carolina constituted illegal retaliation against machinists in Washington for exercising their right to strike.

When the NLRB targeted Boeing, GOP officials, most notably Gov. Nikki Haley (R), were apoplectic. So too was Republican media, with the story drawing overheated (and largely wrong) condemnations from Rush Limbaugh, Charles Krauthammer, and a variety of on-air Fox News personalities, several of whom crafted wild conspiracy theories about President Obama trying to crush the private sector at the behest of union bosses.

The right’s fury was predictable but misguided. The NLRB had ample reason to believe Boeing illegally moved from a union plant (in the state of Washington) to a non-union plant (in South Carolina) to retaliate against previous labor strikes, and the board took steps to enforce the law. Republicans seemed outraged by the notion that a federal agency could intervene to prevent an illegal corporate move that circumvented labor laws.

The agreement reached this week should effectively resolve the conflict.

It should also, as Alec MacGillis notes, take away a key Republican talking point.

Republicans have seized on [the NLRB’s] action as Exhibit A of the Obama administration’s war against private industry, and even some labor supporters privately acknowledged the move was not ideal in its symbolism or timing. [NLRB general counsel Lafe Solomon] believed that he had no choice but to take the action to enforce the law, as a Boeing executive was on the record telling a newspaper that the move to South Carolina was being undertaken in response to threats of labor unrest in Washington state. But while plenty of labor supporters believe strongly in the larger issue at stake — the damage done when companies shift work to lower paid, nonunion workforces — it was clear that this was not the best moment to be having that argument, in the midst of an anemic recovery when Republicans could point to the empty plant in South Carolina, put on hold by Solomon’s action, as explicit proof of Obama’s alleged anti-business intentions.

And now, it appears to be over. Nikki Haley will have to find something else to talk about.

From time to time, I find it enjoyable to poke fun at congressional Republicans and their, shall we say, limited understanding of the world around them.

But this quote, delivered on the House floor this week by Rep. Rob Woodall (R) of Georgia, is one of my new favorites of the entire year. Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.) had just finished saying that students who get degrees invariably improve their income levels. Woodall didn’t care for the observation.

“My colleague who was here right before me said the value of higher education, in terms of future earnings, is undisputable [sic]. The value of higher education, Mr. Speaker, in terms of future earnings is undisputable. And then went on to talk about all the federal programs that provide money so that people can seek higher education. Now my question is, Mr. Speaker, if the value is undisputable why do we have to pay people to do it? If the value is undisputable, why do we have to pay people to do it?” [emphasis added]

So, in Rep. Woodall’s mind, college students don’t necessarily want to get their degrees, but policymakers coerce them to pursue higher education by paying them to attend classes.

He didn’t appear to be kidding.

If Republicans want to argue that we should cut student aid because of a philosophical objection to federal action in education, fine. They’re wrong, but there’s at least an ideological foundation for the argument. If GOP officials also want to argue we should make it harder for America’s youth to get degrees based on some kind of class-based tough-love approach — if you’re poor, you should worker harder than the wealthy to get ahead — that’s offensive, but I at least understand the point.

But to argue that we “have to pay people” to go to college, as if the aid is forcing students to go, is just bizarre, even by the standards of congressional Republicans.

Honestly, is there any entity in politics more effective in slamming Mitt Romney than Jon Huntsman’s presidential campaign?

In this new video, Team Huntsman not only draws additional attention to Romney’s awful interview with Fox News, but also fact-checks Romney’s denials about flip-flops.

As is usually the case with Huntsman’s videos, any party or campaign can use a clip like this. Lob off the last five seconds, and anyone hoping to undermine Romney is ready to go.

This is just the latest in a trend. Huntsman is struggling badly to compete, and nearly every national poll shows him in last place among Republicans, but Huntsman and his campaign have been focusing heavily on slamming Romney, and they’ve proven to be very good at it.

Just this week, Huntsman hit Romney as a candidate voters “don’t trust,” and described him as being “in the hip pocket of Wall Street.”

And looking back over the last several weeks, this anti-Romney video from Huntsman was brutal, as was this one, and this one.

For that matter, one of the key anti-Romney lines of the year came from Huntsman’s spokesperson over the summer: “You know your job creation record is bad when you brag about leapfrogging a state ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. The reality is Mitt Romney’s record on job creation was abysmal by every standard.” It was an immediate clip-and-save quote.

For reasons that elude me, nearly all of the Republican presidential candidates have been content to give Romney a lot of passes, barely even trying to lay a glove on him over the last several months. Huntsman, clearly, is the exception. His attacks would probably have greater salience if Huntsman were a more competitive candidate, but the content should nevertheless be adopted by other campaigns as the season progresses.

Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that won’t necessarily generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers:

* For much of 2011, Mitt Romney ignored Iowa, making only two appearances in the state in the first eight months of the year. Now, however, Romney is going all in with an aggressive new strategy in Iowa, including the launch of a new television ad.

* Romney also hoped to cruise to an easy win in New Hampshire, with minimal investment. Yesterday, however, the former governor began airing a TV ad in the state, despite polls showing him well ahead of his Republican rivals.

* Herman Cain struck a defiant tone at a campaign stop in Ohio, but later said he’d announce whether he’ll stay in the race next week.

* Ron Paul’s campaign released a hard-hitting attack video yesterday, targeting Newt Gingrich. The web-only clip is over two minutes long, and probably won’t be aired in broadcast media.

* A new poll from University of Massachusetts Amherst shows Elizabeth Warren (D) taking the lead over Sen. Scott Brown (R) in Massachusetts’ U.S. Senate race, 43% to 39%.

* For the second time this week, a poll out of Florida shows Gingrich with a big lead in the race for the Republican nomination. Public Policy Polling found Gingrich leading Romney, 47% to 17%.

* In Montana, PPP also found Gingrich leading the Republican field, topping Ron Paul, 37% to 12%.

* Speaking of Gingrich leading at the state level, a poll from a CBS affiliate in Louisiana found Gingrich leading Romney, 31% to 23%.

* In Pennsylvania, the GOP field is not yet set in the race against Sen. Bob Casey, but PPP shows the incumbent Democrat leading all of his likely Republican rivals by double digits.

* In Missouri’s gubernatorial race, Republican businessman Dave Spence is hoping to scare away potential primary rivals by investing $2 million of his own money into his new campaign.

* And as Americans Elect looks for a presidential candidate, Republican Buddy Roemer, whose GOP campaign has struggled badly, would like to be considered.

There’s been quite a bit of talk lately about Congress debating an extension of the payroll tax break, which is set to expire in just a month, and for good reason. An increase would undermine the economy at a delicate time. But as Laura Clawson noted yesterday, “The payroll tax isn’t the only thing that needs extending to help families keep making ends meet. Congress also needs to extend emergency unemployment benefits.”

Quite right. It’s a policy many leading congressional Democrats are eager to fight for.

Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chairman Tom Harkin vowed today to prohibit Congress from adjourning for the holidays unless it passes an extension of unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless.

Flanked at a press conference by House and Senate Democratic colleagues, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis and scores of unemployed workers who traveled to the Capitol, the Iowa Democrat guaranteed that Congress will remain in Washington, D.C., through Christmas if the benefits are not extended.

“Let me just put it this way: There will be no Christmas for Congress unless there is an extension of the unemployment insurance benefits,” Harkin said. “Believe me, we have a number of us on the Senate side. We’re not going home. We’re not going to have Christmas for Congress until you get an extension of unemployment benefits.”

House Democrats are thinking along the same lines, with House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and House Ways and Means ranking member Sandy Levin (D-Mich.) saying Congress shouldn’t adjourn until jobless aid is approved. “We’ll see if Congress has the heart and soul to act,” Hoyer said.

The White House, for the record, strongly supports an extension of both the payroll tax break and unemployment benefits.

And in case anyone’s forgotten, when it comes to bang for the buck, jobless aid is an excellent stimulus. In case Republicans have forgotten, Paul Krugman had a column a while back that GOP lawmakers might find helpful.

When the economy is booming, and lack of sufficient willing workers is limiting growth, generous unemployment benefits may keep employment lower than it would have been otherwise. But as you may have noticed, right now the economy isn’t booming — again, there are five unemployed workers for every job opening. Cutting off benefits to the unemployed will make them even more desperate for work — but they can’t take jobs that aren’t there.

Wait: there’s more. One main reason there aren’t enough jobs right now is weak consumer demand. Helping the unemployed, by putting money in the pockets of people who badly need it, helps support consumer spending. That’s why the Congressional Budget Office rates aid to the unemployed as a highly cost-effective form of economic stimulus. And unlike, say, large infrastructure projects, aid to the unemployed creates jobs quickly — while allowing that aid to lapse, which is what is happening right now, is a recipe for even weaker job growth, not in the distant future but over the next few months.

The odds appear to be against an extension — Republicans seem to have an almost-personal disdain for the unemployed — but it’s a fight worth having.

There are a whole bunch of well-sourced reports this morning on the race for the Republican presidential nomination, and they all pretty much say the same thing: (1) Mitt Romney and his team never expected Newt Gingrich’s recent surge; (2) Romney and his team aren’t sure what to do about it.

Here’s the L.A. Times’ Doyle McManus, for example.

The Romney camp is worried.

By this point in the Republican presidential campaign, Mitt Romney’s backers had hoped that conservative voters would be coalescing around the former Massachusetts governor as the inevitable nominee.

But that’s not happening. The disappointed partisans of Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain haven’t flocked to Romney; they haven’t even trickled. Instead, Romney’s support in national polls declined over the last month. In many surveys, there’s a new front-runner: Newt Gingrich, whose candidacy once looked so moribund that his staff left in droves and he took off for a vacation in the Greek islands.

Now, Romney and his aides are having to contemplate nightmare scenarios: A Gingrich upset in New Hampshire, a Gingrich victory in South Carolina, a Gingrich endorsement from Sarah Palin — and a bitter, two-man race all the way through the 11 primaries of Super Tuesday on March 6.

Romney’s staff had planned for a series of potential scenarios, and their expectations surrounding Pawlenty, Bachmann, Perry, and Cain turned out to be right. But Gingrich’s rise was one of those developments the Romney campaign just didn’t see coming.

The Washington Post reported today, “For this unexpected turn in what has been a steady and sure campaign, the Romney team has no road map. With just five weeks until the Iowa caucuses, the former Massachusetts governor and his advisers are trying to figure out what to do.”

Politico, meanwhile, that Team Romney is prepping its offensive.

They know the stakes are higher with five weeks to go before the Iowa caucuses and a challenger who now poses their most substantial threat. They’re preparing a robust, sustained attack that tags the former House speaker as a Washington insider and serial flip-flopper who can’t be trusted with the nation’s economy.

A senior Romney campaign strategist added that Gingrich has “just gone through so many incarnations.”

Hmm. The race for the GOP nomination will apparently come down to two candidates, each of whom will accuse the other of being a bigger phony and a more shameless flip-flopper.

I suspect Democrats will be making plenty of popcorn.

The White House, the Pentagon, the FBI, the CIA, and the director of national intelligence, and the head of the Justice Department’s national security division all told senators the same thing: yesterday’s Senate vote on indefinite detention was a bad idea.

It didn’t matter. Dahlia Lithwick explained:

On Tuesday 60 members of the United States Senate voted to preserve a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act — that would be the bill that funds the Pentagon — allowing the U.S. military to pick up and detain, without charges or trial, anyone suspected of terrorism, including American citizens, and to restrict transfers of prisoners out of Guantanamo Bay. Specifically, 60 senators voted against an amendment that would have invalidated the part of the bill which empowers the president and the military to detain anyone they suspect was involved in the 9/11 attacks or supports al-Qaida, the Taliban, or “associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.”

President Obama has said he will veto the larger bill if the detainee provision remains intact, but that hasn’t been enough to sway the Senate.

Just 38 senators did the right thing when the measure reached the Senate floor. One of them was Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), who explained to his colleagues just how significant this step is.

” [W]hat we are talking about here is that Americans could be subjected to life imprisonment. Think about that for a minute. Life imprisonment. Without ever being charged, tried, or convicted of a crime. Without ever having an opportunity to prove your innocence to a judge or a jury of your peers. And without the government ever having to prove your guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. I think that denigrates the very foundations of this country.”

For more on this, I’d encourage folks to check out Adam Serwer, whose day-to-day coverage of this fight has been terrific.

For a presidential candidate who believes she hasn’t had a gaffe, Michele Bachmann says some truly remarkable things.

The quote that got the most attention yesterday was Bachmann’s assertion that, if she were elected, “we wouldn’t have an American embassy in Iran.” It was amusing, of course, because there hasn’t been a U.S. embassy in Iran for several decades, though Bachmann’s campaign has an almost-plausible explanation to defend the context of the remark.

But some quotes can’t be explained away so easily. Take this extraordinary comment Bachmann made in Iowa, when asked about the legality of public school science classes teaching religion.

“I think what you’re advocating for is censorship on the part of government. So the government would prohibit intelligent design from even the possibility of being taught in questioning the issue of evolution. And if you look at scientists there is not a unanimity of agreement on the origins of life…. Why would we forestall any particular theory? Because I don’t think that even evolutionists, by and large, would say that this is proven fact. They say that this is a theory, as well as intelligent design. So I think the best thing to do is to let all scientific facts on the table, and let students decide.”

So, to review, Michele Bachmann doesn’t know what “censorship” means, she doesn’t know what evolution is, she doesn’t understand what constitutes “science,” and she has absolutely no idea what a “scientific theory” is.

Later, the right-wing Minnesotan told Glenn Beck that a “new axis of evil” is forming, which will include “North Korea, the Chinese, Russia, Syria.”

Remember, Bachmann isn’t just a presidential candidate, she’s also a member of the House Intelligence Committee.

Mitt Romney’s interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier on Tuesday was a bit of a disaster. The Republican presidential candidate, who generally goes out of his way to avoid anyone challenging him on anything, came across as combative, agitated, and overly defensive.

It’s one thing, though, to screw up a media appearance. It’s something else to whine about the questions.

Baier told Bill O’Reilly last night that Romney complained directly to Baier — twice — that the questions were “overly aggressive” and “uncalled for.”

After having seen the interview with the candidate, there’s just nothing there to complain about. Some of the questions were tough, but there were no cheap shots, and we certainly didn’t see Baier interrupting Romney the way he did with President Obama in March.

But even if Romney convinced himself that the interview was outrageous, complaining about it is, as Nate Silver put it, “Drudge-siren level stupid.”

There’s a growing sense that Mitt Romney is, for lack of a better word, a wuss. Even if voters were willing to overlook Romney’s incessant flip-flopping, his inexperience, his affinity for Wall Street elites, and his far-right platform, most Americans just don’t care for candidates who convey weakness.

And Republicans who can’t handle interviews on Fox News are, I’m afraid, just weak.

What’s more, notice how this ties into the larger concerns we’ve seen in recent months about Romney’s apparent cowardice: the former governor is afraid to lead, afraid to tell the truth, afraid of core principles, and afraid to be consistent. Now he’s afraid of tough questions, too.

Once a politician develops a reputation as a coward, it’s awfully tough to repair that image.

In the meantime, the DNC put together this video yesterday — before we learned about Romney whining to Baier — noting the reactions to Romney’s interview. It’s pretty brutal.

The good news is, we’ve reached a point on Capitol Hill at which both parties seem eager to extend the payroll tax break for another year, avoiding a tax increase on over 100 million Americans that economists believe would severely hurt the economy.

The bad news is, the parties aren’t even close to agreeing on how best to pay for it, and the clock is ticking.

Democrats have a pretty straightforward financing option: they’ll pay for a payroll tax break benefiting all U.S. workers through a slight surtax on millionaires and billionaires. Yesterday, Republicans presented an alternative.

Senate Republican leaders introduced a bill that would keep the payroll tax rate at its current level for another year. The cost is roughly $120 billion. Senate Republicans would offset most of the cost by freezing the pay of federal employees through 2015 and gradually reducing the federal work force by 10 percent.

In addition, Senate Republican leaders would go after “millionaires and billionaires,” not by raising their taxes but by making them ineligible for unemployment compensation and food stamps and increasing their Medicare premiums.

I guess we should be mildly impressed Republicans didn’t make demands related to the Bush tax rates?

The bulk of the GOP plan is about shifting the burden away from the very wealthy and towards federal workers, who will in turn find their buying power diminished. Republicans are fully comfortable with the notion of sacrifice, just so long as millionaires and billionaires aren’t feeling the pinch.

Also note, part of the Republican approach is built around cutting the federal workforce by 10%, a favorite goal of Mitt Romney. We already know this is a horrible idea, because we’ve seen the effects in practice.

The rest of their financing plan is rather silly. The GOP wants to means-test unemployed aid and food stamps, but there are already income eligibility restrictions in place. Republicans want to create a mechanism that allows wealthy Americans to voluntarily write checks to the Treasury, but that already exists, too. It’s a reminder that the GOP, when given a chance to present a serious policy proposal, can’t quite overcome its instinct for gimmicks and nonsense.

And what about the House? I found this pretty interesting.

During the closed-door meeting, [House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio)] and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) urged rank-and-file members to support the extension, saying it was necessary for a party that historically opposes tax increases, a leadership aide said.

Cantor told members that “taxes are a Republican issue and you aren’t a Republican if you want to raise taxes on struggling families to fund bigger government,” according to a source in the room.

In other words, for all the posturing, GOP leaders don’t want to get tagged with having increased taxes on American workers a month from today.

This should, in theory, give Dems some leverage — Republicans are showing their cards, and they want to make a deal.

Today’s edition of quick hits:

* The central banks act: “The Federal Reserve said Wednesday that it joined some of the world’s major central banks in a coordinated action to inject liquidity into the global financial system as the euro zone’s financial crisis threatens to squeeze credit worldwide. Joining in the move were: the Fed, The Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan and the European Central Bank, the Fed said.”

* Investors were pleased: “Stocks rallied in the United States on Wednesday after the Federal Reserve and other central banks took action to try to contain the debt crisis in the euro zone, with market indexes gaining more than 4 percent and the Dow Jones industrial average ending up 490 points.”

* Mark Thoma, Sarah Kliff, and Matt Yglesias have helpful takes on what, exactly, the central banks did today.

* Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has arrived in Nay Pyi Daw, measuring “the depth of the political and economic opening the country’s new government has unexpectedly begun.” Among the issues to consider: is it Burma or Myanmar?

* Further isolating Tehran: “Iran is rapidly heading for increased isolation from Western countries, as the European Union is set to decide during a crucial meeting Thursday in Brussels to downgrade relations, diplomats said Wednesday.”

* Shifts continue on Capitol Hill over extending the payroll tax break. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) is even open to some tax increases.

* NLRB: “The National Labor Relations Board voted Wednesday to move forward with portions of a controversial union election rule after the board’s lone Republican member showed up to register his opposition.”

* Detainee policy: “Defying the Obama administration’s threat of a veto, the Senate on Tuesday voted to increase the role of the military in imprisoning suspected members of Al Qaeda and its allies — including people arrested inside the United States. By a vote of 61 to 37, the Senate turned back an effort to strip a major military bill of a set of disputed provisions affecting the handling of terrorism cases.”

* Mitt Romney’s Fox News interview yesterday really didn’t go well.

* New Hampshire Republicans tried to force through an anti-union “right to work” bill, but came up short. Good.

* NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg probably shouldn’t think of the NYPD as his “own army.”

* Daniel Luzer on higher-ed cost cutting: “In light of Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s challenge yesterday to American universities: cut costs, somehow, it’s time to consider options.”

* Today’s quote of the day, by way of Newt Gingrich: “One of the real changes that comes when you start running for president — as opposed to being an analyst on Fox — is I have to actually know what I’m talking about.” It tells us a little something important about Gingrich’s former Fox News colleagues.

Anything to add? Consider this an open thread.