Byron York had an interesting report the other day on the process Mitt Romney went through before running for the Senate. He noted, for example, that the Massachusetts Republican traveled to Salt Lake City in 1993 in order to brief several leaders of his church about the policy positions he intended to take.

That in itself may prove controversial, and raise questions about Romney’s appreciation for the church-state line.

But before he did even that, Romney took a poll.

How Romney handled that dilemma is described in a new book, “Mitt Romney: An Inside Look at the Man and His Politics,” by Boston journalist Ronald Scott. A Mormon who admires Romney but has had his share of disagreements with him, Scott knew Romney from local church matters in the late 1980s.

Scott had worked for Time Inc., and in the fall of 1993, he says, Romney asked him for advice on how to handle various issues the media might pursue in a Senate campaign. Scott gave his advice in a couple of phone conversations and a memo. In the course of the conversations, Scott says, Romney outlined his views on the abortion problem.

According to Scott, Romney revealed that polling from Richard Wirthlin, Ronald Reagan’s former pollster whom Romney had hired for the ‘94 campaign, showed it would be impossible for a pro-life candidate to win statewide office in Massachusetts. In light of that, Romney decided to run as a pro-choice candidate, pledging to support Roe v. Wade, while remaining personally pro-life. [emphasis added]

So, let me get this straight. Mitt Romney was pro-choice because a poll told him it was the easiest way to advance his political ambitions? And then he decided he wasn’t pro-choice anymore, when that was the easiest way to advance other political ambitions?

There’s going to be a point later this year when voters will be asked, “How can you trust Mitt Romney?” and the answer, even for Republicans, will be far from clear.

We talked earlier about a fascinating exchange during last night’s “60 Minutes” on CBS, when Lesley Stahl noted that Reagan raised taxes and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s press secretary threw a fit. It appears my post wasn’t well received by some on the right.

To briefly recap, Stahl and Cantor were talking about the nature of political compromises, and the CBS correspondent noted that Reagan, Cantor’s hero, was willing to compromise and the Republican icon “raised taxes.” Cantor’s press secretary, off camera, interrupted the interview, yelling that Stahl was lying about Reagan’s record.

One far-right blogger today offered a unique spin on reality.

Stahl, was not being honest. When Ronald Reagan took office, the top individual tax rate was 70 percent and by 1986 it was down to only 28 percent. All Americans received at least a 30 percent tax rate cut. Democrats like to play with the numbers to pretend that Reagans [sic] tax increases equalled [sic] his tax cuts. Of course, this is absurd.

… Unfortunately, Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly continued to misrepresent Reagan’s record on tax cuts. It’s just soooo difficult for liberals to understand that tax cuts work. Sad.

While some left-vs-right disputes quickly fall into the realm of opinion and/or subjective analysis, the question here is surprisingly straightforward. Stahl said Reagan raised taxes; Cantor’s press secretary and this conservative blogger said Reagan didn’t raise taxes. One side is right; one side isn’t.

Fortunately, there’s no need to “play with the numbers” or “pretend” anything. Either Reagan signed tax increases into law or he didn’t. Even conservatives should be able to accept these basic terms.

And in this case, reality is crystal clear and the facts are indisputable: in Ronald Reagan’s first term, he signed off on a series of tax increases — even when unemployment was nearing 11% — and proceeded to raise taxes seven out of the eight years he was in office. The truth is, “no peacetime president has raised taxes so much on so many people” as Reagan.

It’s true that Reagan cut taxes in 1981, but a year later, he also approved what is generally considered the largest tax increase — as a percentage of the economy — in modern American history.

And unfortunately for the right, the economy boomed shortly thereafter.

There’s nothing to debate here. Between 1982 and 1984, Reagan raised taxes four times, and as Bruce Bartlett — who worked for Reagan — has explained more than once, Reagan raised taxes 12 times during his eight years in office.

Now, if Cantor’s office and right-wing bloggers want to argue about the efficacy of Reagan’s tax policy, we can have a serious debate. If they want to discuss the impact of these tax cuts on the deficit — Reagan added $2 trillion to the debt in eight years, after promising to do the opposite as a candidate in 1980 — I’m certainly game. If they want to point out that Reagan only raised taxes reluctantly, as part of a compromise with congressional Democrats, they’d be on firm ground.

But instead Cantor’s office and right-wing bloggers want to contest the basics of reality. And that’s just silly.

As regular readers may know, I place very little stock in Rasmussen polls, but given yesterday’s discussion about whether we’re seeing the worst Congress in American history, I found this amusing.

A new Rasmussen report of likely voters has Congress’ approval rating (people believing they are doing an “excellent” or “good” job) at an unimaginably low 5%, with 68% of those responding thinking that Congress is doing a “poor” job. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee went on Fox and Friends Monday morning, and noted that it places Congress, “just barely above a pedophile.”

It also reminded me of this chart that made the rounds once Congress’ approval rating slipped to single digits several months ago.

It’s certainly understandable that voters were frustrated going into the 2010 midterms, and hoped conditions would improve just as soon as they elected dozens of unhinged, right-wing Republican lawmakers. But since that time, every major pollster has seen Congress’ approval rating drop to levels unseen since the dawn of modern polling.

It’s a case of buyers’ remorse on a rather grand scale.

Campaigning in Iowa today, Mitt Romney took a relatively new tack in going after President Obama, characterizing the president as having promised to be a savior to the entire planet.

“I’ve been watching some clips of President Obama, then candidate Obama, when he was going across Iowa four years ago,” Romney said. “And the promises were just non-stop of all the great thing he was going to do: heal the nation, bring us together, repair the nation and repair the world.”

I watched the 2008 race pretty closely, and I’m fairly certain Obama never promised he’d single-handedly “repair the world.” What’s more likely is that Romney, an enthusiast of “post-truth politics,” simply made this up. He does that a lot.

But as lies go, this one is fairly important because of what it tells us about the larger Republican strategy. Peter Wallsten has a good piece today on the literal GOP playbook.

With Republican voters in Iowa set to finally begin picking a nominee to challenge President Obama, GOP officials in Washington are quietly and methodically finishing what operatives are calling “the book” — 500 pages of Obama quotes and video links that will form the backbone of the party’s attack strategy against the president leading up to Election Day 2012.

The document, portions of which were reviewed by The Washington Post, lays out how GOP officials plan to use Obama’s words and voice as they build an argument for his defeat: that he made specific promises and entered office with lofty expectations and has failed to deliver on both.

Not surprisingly, I happen to think the GOP officials are wrong, and that the president has kept his promises and had extraordinary successes under nearly impossible circumstances. Some of the promises Obama made four years ago were no doubt scuttled by the global economic crash — which came nine months after the 2008 Iowa caucuses and five months before Obama took the oath of office — but sane voters should realize that campaign pledges made a year in advance had to adapt to radically changing circumstances.

The more interesting point here seems to be the part about “lofty expectations,” which Romney alluded to with his “bring us together” comments this morning.

It’s not unreasonable to look back and recognize that Obama, as a candidate, really did have grand ambitions about changing politics and improving the way policymakers approached problem-solving. He also came into office at a time of remarkable crises — I’d argue no president since Lincoln took office and faced the kind of challenges Obama did — and sincerely hoped well-intentioned officials on both sides of the aisle would be willing to do the right thing, regardless of party.

Three years later, did the president help usher in a “post-partisan” era? Of course not. And if Republicans are successful, voters who expected otherwise may take out their disappointments on the incumbent president.

But here’s hoping sensible voters pause to consider why political conditions deteriorated as they did. Greg Sargent had an important piece on this earlier today.

…Obama had barely been sworn into office before the national Republican leadership mounted a concerted and determined effort to prevent any of Obama’s solutions to our severe national problems from passing, even as they openly declared they were doing so only to destroy him politically. Republicans have admitted on the record that deliberately denying Obama any bipartisan support for, well, anything at all was absolutely crucial to prevent voters from concluding that Obama had successfully forged ideological common ground over the way out of the myriad disasters Obama inherited from them. […]

[A]s Steve Kornacki recently noted, blaming Obama for failing to transcend politics as usual despite determined GOP opposition may be the best way to give indys and moderates a reason to vote against Obama even though they generally agree and sympathize with him. And so, after doing everything in their power to prevent Obama from successfully transcending partisanship and achieving transformative change — even if it meant repeatedly opposing solutions to profound national problems they once embraced — Republicans will now attack him for failing to transcend partisanship and achieve transformative change.

Greg posted that at 9:13 this morning. Before lunch, Romney had already proved him right.

As part of an aggressive Republican “war on voting,” GOP policymakers in much of the country are putting new hurdles between Americans and their election process. The most common — and arguably most odious — are mandatory voter-ID laws, intended to block traditional Democratic constituencies (African Americans, students, the poor, the elderly) from participating in elections.

When defending the voter-suppression tactics, Republican invariably say the measures are necessary to prevent imaginary voter fraud. But it’s interesting to see when those concerns disappear.

While Republicans pushed for tough new voter-identification standards throughout the past year — passing stricter laws in more than a dozen states — the GOP’s Iowa caucusgoers won’t even need to bring a photo ID to the polls on Tuesday.

As blogger Brad Friedman first noted, the Iowa GOP enjoys full control over its caucuses, including determining voter eligibility. Iowa Republican Party spokesman Ryan Gough told The Huffington Post that would-be voters will be checked against rolls of registered Republicans taken from the Iowa Secretary of State’s office. Attendees will have to prove their identity and address, but have plenty of options besides a driver’s license or passport.

“If you have, for instance, a student ID and utility bill or a pay stub with your address on it, you’re good to go,” Gough said.

Iowa Republicans will also be allowed to register on the night of the caucuses without any additional form of ID.

Remember, from coast to coast, Republican officials keep insisting (1) same-day registration is a scourge on democracy; (2) student IDs can’t possibly be good enough; and (3) voter IDs are absolutely necessary.

So are we to believe these same Republicans are outraged by the Iowa caucuses are consider the first nominating contest corrupt?

Over the weekend, Rick Santorum told an Iowa audience, “Diversity creates conflict. If we celebrate diversity, we create conflict.” It seemed like an odd thing for a presidential candidate to say.

The line does, however, help explain a bit about how the Republican presidential candidate thinks. (via Jamil Smith)

“Having that strong foundation of the faith and family allows America to be in a position where we can be more free,” Santorum says. “We can be free because we are good decent moral people.”

For Santorum that means cutting government regulation. Making Americans less dependent on government aid. Fewer people getting food stamps, Medicaid and other forms of federal assistance — especially one group.

“I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money,” Santorum begins. “I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money and provide for themselves and their families.”

Santorum did not elaborate on why he singled out blacks who rely on federal assistance. The voters here didn’t seem to care [emphasis added].

Why didn’t Ron Paul’s racist screed undermine his campaign in Iowa? This might have something to do with it.

As for Santorum, this is the sort of subtle racism — much like Newt Gingrich’s recent comments about low-income youth — that Republicans often don’t recognize as being racist. In Santorum’s mind, when he thinks of programs like food stamps, he automatically associates them with “black people’s lives.”

Why? Just because.

Also note the substance behind the policy position: Santorum thinks he’ll improve “black people’s lives” just as soon as he makes it harder for low-income families to eat and get medical care.

There’s a reason this guy lost re-election by 19 points in his home state.

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:

* As the Republican race in Iowa gets closer, the same cannot be said about New Hampshire. A Suffolk University poll released yesterday shows Mitt Romney with more than double the support of his next closest rival. The former Massachusetts governor, who owns a mansion in the Granite State, leads with 41%, followed by Ron Paul at 15%, and Newt Gingrich at 11%.

* Once the Iowa caucuses are finished, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann have said they’ll head to South Carolina, giving up on New Hampshire since it doesn’t appear competitive.

* Jon Huntsman promised voters months ago he wouldn’t use his personal wealth to finance his presidential campaign. He continues to break that promise and told supporters yesterday he’ll match, dollar-for-dollar, all donations made over the next three days.

* Kept from the state’s presidential primary ballot, Perry is suing Virginia, challenging the existing process and eligibility standards. Over the weekend, Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, and Huntsman announced they’ll join the suit.

* Romney’s team is beginning to flex its fundraising muscles, and his Super PAC has begun spending another $1 million on campaign ads in Florida and South Carolina.

* Speaking of money, after struggling to raise any money at all for most of the year, Gingrich claims to have raised nearly $9 million in the fourth quarter of 2011.

* In Wisconsin, Democrats have reportedly collected over 500,000 petition signatures, making a recall race against Gov. Scott Walker (R) practically inevitable.

* Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson has officially given up on the GOP process and will seek the Libertarian Party’s nomination for president.

* And it now appears unlikely that Gingrich will be the Republican nominee, but if he somehow manages a comeback, he’ll “certainly” consider former half-term Gov. Sarah Palin as a possible running mate.

As Republican presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann sees it, the key to turning around her collapsing campaign is talking up a military confrontation with Iran.

The Minnesota lawmaker, who is courting conservative voters in Tuesday’s caucuses, said she would put U.S. missiles “on alert” and consider a blockade against the oil-rich nation in an effort to express disapproval of Iran’s apparent intent to obtain a nuclear weapon.

“What we need to do is take a very aggressive posture toward letting Iran know that we mean business, that we don’t want them to seek a nuclear weapon,” Bachmann said on CBS’ “The Early Show,” adding that her administration “will do whatever it takes” to send a “strong signal that the United States is on high alert.”

She said that includes deploying Patriot missiles, ballistic missiles and other weapon systems in the U.S. and the Middle East.

Maybe Bachmann has a poll showing Iowa Republicans support yet another war in the Middle East?

Given that Bachmann will never be the president of the United States, it’s tempting to just marvel at her saber rattling and move on with the comfort that comes with her dwindling poll numbers. But I’d note just one detail that sometimes goes overlooked: even after Bachmann leaves the presidential campaign trail, she’ll return to Capitol Hill, where House Republican leaders a year ago made her a member of the House Intelligence Committee, giving her access to some of the world’s most sensitive and important secrets.

That, in and of itself, is scary enough.

Every year, tens of thousands of young, undocumented immigrants graduate from American high schools, but are quickly stuck — they can’t qualify for college aid, and they can’t work legally. America is the only home they’ve ever known — in most cases, they were, at a very young age, brought into the country illegally by their parents — but at 18, they have few options.

The DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act), which has traditionally enjoyed bipartisan support, provides a path to citizenship for these young immigrants — graduate from high school, get conditional permanent residency status, go to college or serve in the military, pay some steep fees, and become eligible for citizenship. The Pentagon has urged Congress to pass it, and the CBO found that it lowers the deficit, a priority Republicans at least pretend to care about.

President Obama strongly supports the bill, and were it not for a Republican filibuster, it would have become law a year ago. Mitt Romney, meanwhile, has vowed to veto the DREAM Act if elected.

Mr. Romney offered his usual stump speech — a focus on President Obama, with no mention of his Republican rivals — but when a voter asked him if he’d veto the Dream Act as president, Mr. Romney said, “The answer is yes.”

Though Mr. Romney has previously been critical of the legislation, which would provide a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who were brought into the country at a young age and then went on to attend college, Saturday marked the first time that he has outright declared that he would veto the legislation should it cross his desk as president.

Keep in mind, we’re talking about legislation that was written in large part by Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) — neither of whom are especially moderate — and it used to enjoy the enthusiastic backing of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

I mention this context because it suggests the DREAM Act is arguably the least controversial, bipartisan immigration reform measure. The proposal is just humane.

But Romney doesn’t care. He’s running for the Republican presidential nomination, for Pete’s sake.

This comes on the heels, by the way, of a new report from the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group, that found Latino voters aren’t pleased with President Obama’s deportation policy, but they nevertheless strongly prefer the president to his Republican challengers, including a 68% to 23% advantage over Romney.

As these voters hear more about Romney — not just his opposition to the DREAM Act, but his animus towards Latino immigrants in general — the former governor is digging himself a deep hole with one of the nation’s fastest-growing constituencies.

Lionel Sosa, a Texas strategist who advised George W. Bush John McCain on appealing to Hispanics, recently told the NYT, “[Romney] can make as many trips to Florida and New Mexico and Colorado and other swing states that have a large Latino population, but he can write off the Latino vote. He’s not going to gain it again.”

Given the size of the Latino population, that’s writing off a huge chunk of the American electorate.

The Iowa caucuses are, of course, just a day away, and for campaign junkies following the contest, the polls can’t come quickly enough. But because the race is changing so dramatically in the 11th hour, new data matters most.

Indeed, the Des Moines Register’s Iowa Poll, widely considered the gold standard for Hawkeye State polling, included a fascinating tidbit: Rick Santorum was running third in the poll with 15%, but “if the final two days of polling are considered separately, Santorum rises to second place,” with 21%.

The DMR’s poll was conducted from Tuesday to Friday last week. A new survey from Public Policy Polling, meanwhile, was in the field on Saturday and Sunday, and it shows an even more competitive top tier:

1. Ron Paul: 20%
2. Mitt Romney: 19%
3. Rick Santorum: 18%
4. Newt Gingrich: 14%
5. Rick Perry: 10%
6. Michele Bachmann: 8%
7. Jon Huntsman: 4%
8. Buddy Roemer: 2%

When the top three candidates are within two points of one another, it’s safe to say it’s an unpredictable contest.

PPP’s analysis added, “The momentum in the race is completely on Santorum’s side. He’s moved up 8 points since a PPP poll earlier in the week, while no one else has seen more than a one point gain in their support…. Santorum’s net favorability of 60/30 makes him easily the most popular candidate in the field. No one else’s favorability exceeds 52%. He may also have more room to grow in the final 48 hours of the campaign than the other front runners.”

Reiterating a point from yesterday, I still think the order of the bottom three may very well end up mattering more than the order of the top three. Santorum will get a boost no matter where he ends up in the top tier, in large part because he was a largely-ignored afterthought as recently as two weeks ago.

Poor showings among the second-tier candidates, meanwhile, may knock one or more candidates out of the race altogether.

During Mitt Romney’s Senate campaign 17 years ago, the Republican politician was faring quite well against Ted Kennedy, right up until voters started hearing from some of Romney’s victims.

To briefly review, Romney got very rich running a private-equity firm, Bain Capital, which broke up companies and laid off American workers. He had considerable success orchestrating leveraged buyouts, seeking taxpayer subsidies, flipping companies quickly for large profits, and making money for investors, even when the employees of those companies were deemed collateral damage.

In the 1994 campaign, this mattered. Many of Romney’s victims drove to Massachusetts to protest the Republican’s campaign, and Democrats put together a half-dozen ads featuring laid-off workers who said they suffered while Romney lined his pockets at their expense.

It proved effective in 1994, and Dems hope it will work again in 2012.

A former employee of Bain Capital, GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney’s former company, said Sunday that Romney’s decisions cost him and many others their jobs.

Randy Johnson said Sunday that the former Massachusetts governor’s decisions as Bain’s CEO put him out of work.

Romney was the chief executive officer of Bain Capital in 1992 when the company purchased American Pad & Paper, or Ampad, and oversaw the management of that company and others.

Ampad went bankrupt in 2000, and investors netted over $100 million from the deal, according to the Boston Globe.

Johnson told reporters yesterday, “I really feel that he didn’t care about the workers. It was all about profit over people.”

For its part, the Romney campaign recently began arguing that critics of Bain Capital’s layoffs are borderline communists, trying to “put free enterprise on trial.”

Between this and Romney’s agenda — take away health care coverage from millions, tax breaks for the wealthy, free reign for Wall Street, more foreclosures — the “man of the people” routine may prove to be a tough sell.

CBS’s “60 Minutes” ran a good profile on House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) last night, but there was one portion of the interview that was especially important.

In this video, it starts at about the 10:19 mark. For those who can’t watch clips online, Cantor told Lesley Stahl, “Nobody gets everything they want.” Asked if that means he’s ready to compromise with Democrats, the oft-confused Majority Leader replied that he’s “ready to cooperate.” Stahl, of course, noticed word choice, and pressed Cantor on the difference between cooperation and compromise.

It led to this exchange:

Stahl: But you know, your idol, as I’ve read anyway, was Ronald Reagan. And he compromised.

Cantor: He never compromised his principles.

Stahl: Well, he raised taxes and it was one of his principles not to raise taxes.

Cantor: Well, he — he also cut taxes.

Stahl: But he did compromise —

Cantor: Well I —

At that point, Cantor’s press secretary, off camera, interrupted the interview, yelling that Stahl was lying when she said Reagan raised taxes. As Stahl told “60 Minutes” viewers, “There seemed to be some difficulty accepting the fact that even though Ronald Reagan cut taxes, he also pushed through several tax increases, including one in 1982 during a recession.”

Let’s call “some difficulty” a dramatic understatement.

Unfortunately for Cantor and his press secretary, reality is stubborn. The facts are indisputable: in Ronald Reagan’s first term, he signed off on a series of tax increases — even when unemployment was nearing 11% — and proceeded to raise taxes seven out of the eight years he was in office. The truth is, “no peacetime president has raised taxes so much on so many people” as Reagan.

Of particular interest is the “Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982,” the largest of Reagan’s tax increases, and generally considered the largest tax increase — as a percentage of the economy — in modern American history. In fact, between 1982 and 1984, Reagan raised taxes four times, and as Bruce Bartlett has explained more than once, Reagan raised taxes 12 times during his eight years in office.

Why do Cantor, his press secretary, and Republicans everywhere deny what is plainly true? Because reality is terribly inconvenient: the GOP demi-god rejected the right-wing line on always opposing tax increases; he willingly compromised with Democrats on revenue; and the economy soared after Reagan raised taxes, disproving the Republican assumption that tax increases always push the nation towards recessions.

In other words, Reagan’s legacy makes the contemporary Republican Party look ridiculous. No wonder Cantor’s press secretary started yelling: Stahl was bringing up facts that are never supposed to be repeated out loud.

Over the weekend, it became clear that Rick Santorum, after months of having been largely ignored, is on track for a top-three finish in the Iowa caucuses. By some measures, the former Pennsylvania senator is coming on so strong in the 11th hour, he has a credible shot at actually winning in Iowa tomorrow.

And how does Santorum know for sure that he’s doing well? Because his Republican rivals who pretended he didn’t exist have started taking shots at him.

Late last week, Texas Gov. Rick Perry went after Santorum over earmarks, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney took on Santorum yesterday over the length of his congressional career.

Though he began his answer by saying that he had not “spent a lot of time trying to describe differences on policy and detail among myself and the other candidates,” [Romney] went on to contrast his background with that of Mr. Santorum and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

“Like Speaker Gingrich, Senator Santorum has spent his career in government, in Washington — nothing wrong with that,” Mr. Romney said. “But it’s a very different background than I have….”

It’s probably safe to assume Romney’s internal polling is similar to what all the other polls are saying: Santorum can’t be ignored anymore.

It’s also hard not to notice that Romney has one stand-by attack for just about all of his rivals. As Nate Silver mentioned last night, “Romney campaign seems to default to the ‘career politician’ line whenever it gets nervous.”

That’s true. When Perry looked like a leading challenger, Romney launched an aggressive “career politician” line of attack. When Gingrich was on top, Romney took the same tack. Now Santorum is closing strong, so he gets the same label. (Two weeks ago, Romney even used this against President Obama.) I have no idea why voters would find this persuasive, but the fact that Romney keeps using the line like a crutch suggests the focus groups must like it.

Regardless, when it comes to the substance, it’s worth noting a pesky detail: Romney and Santorum both first sought statewide office in 1994, when they both ran for the Senate. One was successful; one failed. Indeed, the most notable difference between them is the detail the former governor prefers to overlook: Santorum repeatedly earned voters’ support and has won most of his races for public office, while Romney has struggled with voters and lost most of his campaigns.

Romney, in other words, would be a career politician if only the public liked him more.

We covered a fair amount of ground over the weekend. Here’s a quick overview of what you may have missed.

On Sunday, we talked about:

* President Obama intends to run against Congress this fall. Given that this might very well be the Worst Congress Ever, that’s not an unreasonable strategy.

* Rick Santorum believes diversity “creates conflict.” That’s ridiculous.

* The president signed this year’s NDAA, but as expected, it came with a signing statement.

* Newt Gingrich, apparently unaware of his entire career, believes politics has “become a really nasty, vicious, negative business.”

* The fact that Rick Perry’s staffers are already blaming one another for the campaign’s failure really isn’t a good sign.

* Where things stand in Iowa.

And on Saturday, we talked about:

* The Des Moines Register’s closely-watched Iowa Poll shows Mitt Romney leading, but Rick Santorum coming on strong.

* Mitt Romney wants to talk about Marie Antoinette. That strikes me as a good idea.

* Last week, Fox News and conservative activists picked a new target: the Girl Scouts.

* Interest in Romney’s tax returns, and his desire for secrecy, isn’t going away.

* Will Congress extend the payroll tax break through 2012? After seeing who Republicans sent to the conference committee, I’m fairly certain the policy will expire in late February.

* In “This Week in God,” we covered, among other things, a fascinating church-state conflict in Illinois, where a major Roman Catholic charity wants to be able to accept taxpayer funds while discriminating against some taxpayers.

* Remember in 1972, when Ed Muskie wept outside the offices of New Hampshire’s Union Leader, and it was, at the time, a political disaster? Crying in politics has come a long way since.