Today’s edition of quick hits:

* Good economic news on construction spending and manufacturing activity.

* Warnings from Iran: “Iran’s army chief on Tuesday warned a nuclear-powered U.S. aircraft carrier not to return to the Persian Gulf, as Iran’s navy ended 10 days of tense war games in the Persian Gulf. The U.S. Defense Department promptly rejected the warning.”

* Afghanistan: “The Taliban announced Tuesday that it has agreed to open a ‘political office’ in Qatar to hold talks with the United States, the first time the militant group has confirmed it has an interest in negotiating with Washington. The Taliban said in a statement that it and the United States are the ‘two main sides’ that have a vested interest in finding a solution to Afghanistan’s problems.”

* Seems like a good move from the Fed: “The Federal Reserve will begin later this month to publish a forecast of its own actions, inaugurating a policy that is intended to magnify the power of those actions by shaping the expectations of investors.”

* It’s one of the reasons Panetta got the gig: “Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta is set this week to reveal his strategy that will guide the Pentagon in cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from its budget, and with it the Obama administration’s vision of the military that the United States needs to meet 21st-century threats, according to senior officials.”

* A recess-appointment window closes: “Today was the day that legal experts and many aides in both parties thought President Obama would provide a recess appointment to Richard Cordray, his nominee to administer the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The rationale is quite technical, but here’s the bottom line: one reading of the Constitution and of executive branch administrative law suggest that today is Obama’s last day to recess appoint any of his languishing nominees, at least until the next time the Senate leaves town several weeks from now.”

* We can probably expect a major labor standoff in Indiana, where Republicans are poised for a big push on a so-called “right-to-work” initiative.

* Chris Mooney offers the latest evidence that suggests “Republicans really are anti-science.”

* Daniel Luzer: “Columbia University will apparently next semester offer a course in Occupy Wall Street.”

* Apparently, there are on the left who see Ron Paul as worthy of some political support. Kevin Drum helps set these folks straight.

* I get the sense we had “American history” to the list of subjects Rick Perry doesn’t understand especially well: “Rick Perry compared his campaign’s final push to American efforts during the Revolutionary War and on D-Day during a campaign stop Tuesday in Iowa.”

Anything to add? Consider this an open thread.

I have a hunch as the campaign progresses, we’ll be hearing this quote again.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

For those who can’t watch clips online, Mitt Romney was on MSNBC this morning, and fielded a question from Tom Brokaw about whether Romney expects to deal with rising poverty if he’s elected president. The Republican replied:

“Well, I want to make sure we have a safety net to care for those that are poor, but I want to get those who are poor into the middle class.

“My ambition is to make sure that we start creating jobs again in this country and that we have rising median incomes, as opposed to the 10% decline we’ve seen in the last four years.

“To get people back into work, get higher incomes, and let people have a middle-income life standard they had in the past. That’s the whole effort that I’m involved in.

“Somebody who’s fallen from the middle class to poverty, in my opinion is still middle class.”

Putting aside the fact that it’s fundamentally dishonest to blame President Obama for falling median wages during the Bush era, I’m just not sure what Romney means when he defines “middle class.” As he sees it, even if someone falls into poverty, he or she is still middle class? In what universe does that make sense?

No wonder Romney thinks he, despite having a quarter-billion in the bank, is part of the middle class — this guy is so far out of touch, he no longer even understands what middle class even means.

Jennifer Rubin today reflects on President Obama’s re-election strategy, and argues he’ll struggle to point to meaningful accomplishments, especially from his first two years in office.

Recall that Obama had two years with majority control of the both houses of Congress. Aside from jamming through ObamaCare, which has, among other things, ended the career of Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), he accomplished nothing other than hiking the debt. It’s hard to run against your own party in Congress.

Looking back at 2009 and 2010, Rubin raises an interesting point. Obama “accomplished nothing,” she says, other than “jamming through” — which is apparently synonymous with “passing with large majorities in both chambers, following a year-long fight” — the Affordable Care Act.

Well, he also passed the Recovery Act, which prevented a depression and created 3 million jobs.

And there was also the Wall Street reform package, passed with bipartisan support, which featured the most sweeping overhaul of financial industry regulations since FDR.

Come to think of it, we also saw a rescue of the American auto industry, DADT repeal, a breakthrough student-loan-reform bill, ratification of New START, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the biggest overhaul of our food-safety laws in 70 years, new regulation of the credit card industry, a national service bill, expanded stem-cell research, the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, net neutrality, the most sweeping land-protection act in 15 years, and health care for 9/11 first responders.

Jonathan Cohn has more along these lines, documenting other Obama accomplishments on education, environmental, and tax policy.

It’s curious that Rubin doesn’t remember any of this. Most historians, experts, and journalists look back at 2009 and 2010 as a period of expansive policymaking, when President Obama racked up an extraordinary number of accomplishments. “He accomplished nothing” except health care and debt? I’m afraid 2010 really wasn’t that long ago; even conservatives with short memories should be able to recall some of the more noticeable highlights.

If Rubin wants to condemn these accomplishments, that’d certainly make sense — most of Obama’s breakthroughs are longstanding progressive goals, and I wouldn’t expect conservatives to approve of them on substantive or policy grounds.

But why pretend these accomplishments don’t exist? Wouldn’t it be better to have an honest discussion about the Obama agenda on the merits?

The Washington Post’s Charles Lane has a piece today arguing that the recent poll numbers are “gloomy” for President Obama.

Campaign 2012 is upon us. Time to size up President Obama’s reelection chances. What do the data suggest?

In 2011, an average of 17 percent of the public was “satisfied with the way things are going,” according to the Gallup Poll. That is roughly the same as 2008 — so Obama enters this year leading a country as unhappy as the one he inherited.

The president’s approval rating is lower than his disapproval rating. In mid-December, Gallup had him “underwater” by eight points: 42 percent approval and 50 percent disapproval.

This is an odd argument. For one thing, the same Gallup tracking poll Lane uses as the basis of his observation also showed Obama “above water” as recently as December 23, with a 47% approval and 45% disapproval. Since these results came after the poll Lane referenced in his column, they’re arguably more reliable.

For that matter, Gallup tracking polls aren’t the be-all, end-all when it comes to measuring public opinion. The third week in December, CNN and the Washington Post each released national polls putting the president’s approval rating at 49%. That’s not necessarily evidence of soaring popularity, but it’s not “gloomy,” either. I’m not sure why Lane overlooked all of this.

But the larger concern is with the exercise itself. It’s only natural for the political world to invest some time in speculating about the presidential election that’s 11 months away, but there’s a limit on how much we can learn this far out from Election Day. In the first week in January 1996, CNN released a poll showing President Clinton’s approval rating at 42%, and Clinton trailed Bob Dole in a hypothetical match-up, 49% to 46%.

And if memory serves, Clinton managed to do pretty well 11 months later.

The point isn’t that Obama’s road to re-election is an easy one; it almost certainly won’t be. The point, rather, is that a lot is going to happen between now and November. We’ll have plenty of data to chew on, but I’d recommend caution before making any sweeping assumptions — or writing ominous columns — about unpredictable events.

Mitt Romney addressed one of his biggest vulnerabilities — jobs policy — on Fox News this morning, and made a series of claims his campaign seems awfully excited about:

“This is 2 million jobs that he lost as president. And by the way, when he was overseeing General Motors and Chrysler, how many factories did he close? How many dealerships? How many thousands upon thousands of Americans had to be let go in an effort to try and save those businesses? That’s what we did in our business.

“And I’m very happy in my former life; we helped create over 100,000 new jobs. By the way, we created more jobs in Massachusetts than this president’s created in the entire country. So if the president wants to talk about jobs, and I hope he does, we’ll be comparing my record with his record and he comes up very, very short.”

It’s worth unpacking this, because this argument is very likely to dictate who will be president of the United States in 2013.

The problem here is that none of what Romney is saying stands up to scrutiny.

First, there’s no comparison between President Obama’s rescue of the American automotive industry and Romney orchestrating leveraged buyouts at his vulture-capitalist firm. Obama wasn’t trying to profit; Romney was trying to make himself and his investors rich.

Second, Romney now claims to have created “over 100,000 jobs” at his vulture-capitalist firm, but he appears to have made this number up out of whole cloth. Keep in mind, just a few weeks ago, when Romney’s Super PAC ran an ad claiming he “helped create thousands of jobs” as CEO at Bain, Super PAC officials were asked to back that up with evidence. They refused. Fact-checkers haven’t been able to substantiate the claim in any way.

Third, Romney seems eager to boast about his record in Massachusetts, but that’s a mistake. His administration’s record on job creation was “one of the worst in the country,” ranking 47th out of 50 states in job growth. It’s one of the reasons Romney left office after one term deeply unpopular, and why his former constituents don’t want him near the White House.

As for Romney’s claims about Obama’s jobs record, Greg Sargent had a great take on this.

…Romney’s claim that two million jobs were lost under the Obama presidency is based on the idea that there’s been a net loss of jobs since he took office. In other words, Romney is taking into account the fact that the economy continued hemorrhaging jobs at a furious rate after Obama took office — before Obama’s stimulus passed. But the figures show that once it became law, monthly job loss declined over time, and turned around in the spring of 2010, after which the private sector added jobs for over 20 straight months, totaling around 2.2 million of them.

You can debate whether the stimulus underperformed. You can debate whether the stimulus is the reason the economy did add private sector jobs. You can argue that public sector jobs loss should be factored in. But it is not debatable to claim that the overall net jobs loss number Romney cites is a fair measure of the success or failure of Obama’s policies.

I’m going to make this easy on Romney and the journalists who might ask him questions.

Here’s a chart showing private-sector job gains and losses over the last two decades. Blue columns show years in which there’s a Democratic president; red columns show years in which there’s a Republican president. (Note: the 2011 totals do not yet reflect December’s job numbers.)

The “A” marks where we were when the economy crashed, and the “B” marks were we are now. Can anyone explain why Romney thinks “A” is preferable to “B”?

Here’s another chart, showing private-sector job totals by month since the start of the Great Recession.

Again, “A” marks where we were when the economy crashed, and the “B” marks were we are now. Why, exactly, does Romney think “B” is worse than “A”?

Under Obama, the nation’s jobs picture improved rather quickly. We haven’t yet made up for all of the job losses caused by the crash that occurred before Obama took office, but 2011 was the best year for job creation in the last five years, and as these charts show, things are getting better, not worse.

Romney doesn’t have to like it, but he shouldn’t lie about it.

There’s no great mystery as to why Newt Gingrich’s support collapsed in Iowa: Mitt Romney and his friends spent nearly $4 million in three weeks to tear Gingrich apart.

But before the disgraced former House Speaker began calling Romney a “liar,” he used a different word to describe his recent experiences: Gingrich said Sunday he felt “Romney-boated” by the attacks. The reference, obviously, referenced the loathsome Swift Boat ads run and financed by Bush/Cheney allies in 2004, casting doubts on John Kerry’s heroic military service.

It was a fascinating choice of words for Gingrich. As Eric Boehlert explained this morning, “Newt Gingrich, a leader of the modern-day conservative movement, presidential candidate, and proud Republican partisan adopting language that acknowledged the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are synonymous with unsubstantiated campaign attack ads. With his ‘Romney-boated’ comment, the former Republican Speaker of the House reinforced what progressives have been saying for years.”

Quite right. And as it turns out, some of the Swift Boat liars aren’t happy about it.

John O’Neill, the swift-boat captain who led the anti-Kerry movement, is none too pleased with the comparison. “To me, it reflects Gingrich’s very cynical hypocrisy, which he shares with Kerry,” O’Neill tells National Review Online.

O’Neill proceeded to elaborate on his disdain for Gingrich, but the larger point is unavoidable: the Swift Boat liars lied about a war hero, they got caught, and their legacy is a standard for vicious campaign smears.

O’Neill may not like the comparison, but when the attack fits….

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:

* Newt Gingrich said yesterday of his chances in Iowa, “I don’t think I’m going to win.” A few hours later, he reversed course, saying, “We may pull off one of the greatest upsets in the history of the Iowa caucuses.”

* Mitt Romney, meanwhile, is feeling nothing but confidence, boasting yesterday he is going to “win this thing.”

* Gallup reported yesterday that the 2012 race for the Republican presidential nomination is “the most volatile … since pollsters first started tracking front-runners decades ago.”

* Campaigning in Iowa yesterday, Rick Perry complained about “the Bridge to Nowhere in Arizona.” The bridge in question is actually in Alaska.

* Rupert Murdoch relied on Twitter yesterday to say very flattering things about Rick Santorum, calling him, among other things, the “only candidate with genuine big vision” for the United States. News Corp confirmed that Murdoch’s Twitter account reflected the media mogul’s personal sentiments.

* Rep. Steve Austria, a two-term Republican from Ohio, will retire at the end of the year, rather than face one of his House colleagues in a post-redistricting primary.

* Speaking of Ohio, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, after considering moving to the state of Washington to remain in Congress, will instead run against incumbent Rep. Marcy Kaptur in a Democratic primary latter this year.

* And speaking of redistricting, the fact that an independent overseer will draw Connecticut’s new district lines is a win for Republicans.

* With Sen. Ben Nelson (D) retiring in Nebraska, will former Sen. Bob Kerrey (D) launch a comeback bid in the Cornhusker State? He expects to make a decision within the next two weeks.

Bill Clinton left the White House in January 2001, and in the 2004 race, Democratic candidates were tripping over each other to connect themselves to the nation’s 42nd president. I remember one September 2003 debate in which literally every Dem running for the party’s nomination said they’re the rightful heir to the Clinton legacy.

Al Sharpton, after a while, apparently couldn’t take it anymore. “I know that within the next hour we’ll say that Bill Clinton walked on water,” he joked.

George W. Bush, meanwhile, left the White House in January 2009, and in the 2012 race, Republican candidates prefer to pretend the nation’s 43rd president doesn’t exist.

While the candidates routinely lionize Ronald Reagan and blame President Barack Obama for the nation’s economic woes, none has been eager to embrace the Bush legacy of gaping budget deficits, two wars and record low approval ratings —- or blame him for the country’s troubles either.

“Republicans talk a lot about losing their way during the last decade, and when they do they’re talking about the Bush years,” said Jack Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont-McKenna College. “For Republicans, the Bush administration has become the ‘yadda yadda yadda’ period of American history.”

The eight-year Bush presidency has merited no more than a fleeting reference in televised debates and interviews…. The former president himself has been all but invisible since leaving office in 2009 with a Gallup approval rating of just 34 percent. […]

In a presidential contest dominated by concerns over the weak economy, government spending and the $15 trillion federal debt, the Republican candidates have been loath to acknowledge the extent to which Bush administration policies contributed to those problems.

This isn’t surprising, of course. I don’t imagine many would-be GOP presidents were eager to bring up Hoover in the 1936 election, either.

But the challenge for Democrats is to not let this stand. Not only is Bush responsible for nearly all of the messes Obama is trying to clean up, but nearly all of the Republican candidates are eager to bring return to Bush-era policies — only this time, they’ll be even more right wing.

It would seem, then, that the tack for Obama’s re-election campaign is pretty obvious: “A vote for Romney is a vote for the Bush policies that got us into this mess in the first place. Let’s not go backwards.”

John McDonough has a good piece on an overlooked benefit from the Affordable Care Act: it’s doing quite well in combating fraud and abuse, which in turns saves Americans quite a bit of money. (via TOA)

Members of Congress of both parties often complain about fraud and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid (M&M;), usually charging that the President is not doing enough to keep bad guys from stealing money from these vital programs.

Guess what? Thanks to provisions in the Affordable Care Act (ACA/ObamaCare) and to an unprecedented effort by the Obama Administration, more progress has been made in the past three years to combat health care fraud and abuse than ever before. There was a 68.9 percent increase in criminal health care fraud prosecutions from 2010 to 2011, and 2010 was already the highest ever.

McDonough helped work on the ACA’s provisions related to fraud prevention, and sketches out the areas in which the law is improving enforcement.

Part of the effort involves hyper-charged efforts to catch bad guys through the Health Care Fraud Prevention and Enforcement Action Team (HEAT), and a bigger part involves re-engineering the system to keep them out. For example, prior to the ACA, if a bad guy got kicked out of one state Medicaid program for fraud, he got kicked out of one program; under the ACA, when he gets kicked out of one, and he gets kicked out of all them, including Medicare. That’s smart, and that’s just a tiny bit of what the ACA does on fraud & abuse.

Let’s take stock for a moment, shall we? Much of the Affordable Care Act won’t take effect until 2014, assuming it survives until then. But provisions that are already in place have:

* brought coverage to 2.5 million young adults;

* delivered big savings for seniors on prescription drug costs;

* given a significant boost to small businesses through ACA tax credits;

* slowed the growth of Medicare spending;

* provided new treatment options for cancer patients like Spike Dolomite Ward;

* saved taxpayer money by cracking down on fraud;

* and offered new coverage protections for those with pre-existing conditions.

These are tangible, real-world benefits, making a meaningful difference in people’s lives. It’s also a reminder that the health care law, polls and attacks notwithstanding, is working.

Of course, all of these benefits and improvements will quickly disappear if Mitt Romney is elected and follows through on his commitment to repeal every letter of this law.

The NYT has a good piece today on the extent to which Republicans used to support high-speed rail, and the fact that GOP presidential hopefuls like Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry used to be some of the policy’s biggest champions.

“If you want to be the most competitive country in the world in 2040 or 2050, you have to think large,” Mr. Gingrich said in 2009 at a videotaped forum sponsored by the National Governors Association and Building America’s Future, an infrastructure advocacy group. Mr. Gingrich’s large thought was for America to build high-speed magnetic levitation trains, as China has.

“Let’s go ahead and be really bold, and go head to head with the Chinese in developing and implementing maglev trains that move at 280, 300, 320 miles an hour,” Mr. Gingrich said in his speech, which Streetsblog.org, a transportation Web site, wrote about recently. “And you suddenly change all sorts of equations about how this country operates.”

Before the politics of rail was scrambled in recent years, Republican support for high-speed rail was not unusual. As recently as 2004, the Republican Party platform stated that “Republicans support, where economically viable, the development of a high-speed passenger railroad system as an instrument of economic development and enhanced mobility.”

All of this, of course, makes perfect sense. HSR development would create jobs, improve the nation’s energy policy, improve innovation, relieve traffic congestion, and even help the environment. There’s no reason this has to be a partisan issue, and for many years, it wasn’t.

Then President Obama said he agreed with Republicans on this — at which point Republicans decided high-speed rail was a communist plot that must be fought at all costs. Indeed, my favorite sentence in the Times article was this one: “Spokesmen for Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Perry did not respond to e-mails seeking comment about their views on rail.”

After having touted the policy, these guys are no longer even willing to mention the fact that they agree — or at least used to agree — with Democrats on this policy.

And as it turns out, it’s not just rail. Politico reported that the Republican presidential field is completely unwilling to talk about transportation and the nation’s infrastructure needs. Politico “reached out to all seven of the Republican 2012 campaigns; none chose to flesh out infrastructure positions.”

The problem, apparently, is that the issue involves public investments, and Republican voters don’t like public investments, no matter how many jobs this would create, or how much this would strengthen the country.

Ideally, this is what a presidential nominating contest is for: candidates identify areas of public need and discuss what they’d do to address those needs. But the Republican process in 2012 has nothing to do with problem-solving or public policy; it’s about proving fealty to an ideology.

For the last several weeks, Newt Gingrich has gone out of his way to keep a positive message, making it a staple of his campaign strategy. It didn’t work — while Gingrich refused to go negative, Mitt Romney and his cohorts spent $4 million in three weeks to destroy the former Speaker, causing Gingrich’s support in the polls to plummet.

And so now it appears Gingrich is trying a new approach. His appearance on CBS’s “The Early Show” this morning is a must-see video.

The fireworks start about three minutes in, when CBS News chief White House correspondent Norah O’Donnell asked Gingrich about this recent comment: “Someone who will lie to you to get to be president will lie to you when they are president.” It led to this exchange:

“I have to ask you, are you calling Mitt Romney a liar?”

“Yes,” Gingrich replied.

“You’re calling Mitt Romney a liar?”

“Well, you seem shocked by it!” said Gingrich. “Yes.”

O’Donnell and co-host Bob Schieffer did, in fact, seem completely shocked that Gingrich was willing to say this on national television. That, in and of itself, is a shame — Romney has been lying uncontrollably for quite a long while. Paul Krugman a couple of weeks ago highlighted a series of blatant lies from Romney, and noted that the Republican presidential candidate “seems confident that he will pay no price for making stuff up,” in large part because we’ve entered an era of “post-truth politics.”

The question isn’t why Gingrich would say this; the question is why O’Donnell and Schieffer haven’t said the same thing.

In any case, Gingrich followed up on this exchange by launching an aggressive broadside against the likely GOP nominee, noting, among other things, Romney’s support for taxpayer-financed abortions, Romney distancing himself from Reagan, and Romney running to the left against Ted Kennedy.

“Which part of what I just said to you is false?” he asked the surprised hosts. “Why is it that if I’m candid in person and I wanted to be honest in person, that’s shocking? If [Romney’s] PAC buys millions of dollars in ads to say things that are false, that’s somehow the way Washington plays the game. Isn’t that exactly what’s sick about this country right now? Isn’t that what the American people are tired of?”

Oddly enough, those seem like pretty reasonable questions.

I don’t imagine Gingrich is going to do especially well when the dust settles in Iowa tonight, but if he sticks around for a while longer, I get the sense he’ll have plenty of interesting things to say about Romney in the coming weeks.

Four years ago at this time, Mitt Romney was condemning John McCain for inviting corporate lobbyists to help run the senator’s presidential campaign. Now, Romney has begun taking strategic advice from one of those very same corporate lobbyists.

Mitt Romney has added a veteran Washington lobbyist — Charlie Black, a top political aide to Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign — to the circle of informal advisers who are trying to help to guide him to the White House. […]

Mr. Romney’s current presidential campaign is … wary of being linked to the culture of Washington, casting Mr. Romney as an “outsider” and a “businessman” who will clean up the way politics is done in Washington.

But on Monday, aides to Mr. Romney confirmed that Mr. Black, a veteran Washington power broker, is supporting Mr. Romney’s 2012 effort.

It’s not altogether clear how significant a role Black is playing, though the powerful D.C. lobbyist conceded yesterday he offers Romney “occasional” advice.

(Black appears to have settled on Romney, after having encouraged Mitch Daniels to run, not because he thinks the former Massachusetts governor is great, but because Black thinks Romney is better than his rivals. I imagine Romney gets that a lot.)

But for those who’ve forgotten, it’s worth revisiting Black’s interesting lobbying background. The lobbyist served four years ago as McCain’s senior campaign strategist and chief political advisor, but before that, Black put together quite a client list, featuring a motley international crew of thugs and authoritarian tyrants.

In addition to his extensive corporate work, Black’s client list included (but is by no means limited to) Iraq/Iran’s Ahmad Chalabi, Mobutu Sese Seko, Ferdinand Marcos, Somalia’s Mohamed Siad Barre, Nigeria’s Ibrahim Babangida, and Angola’s would-be dictator Jonas Savimbi. In each instance, Black was paid (handsomely) to boost their access, influence, and stature among U.S. policy makers.

MoveOn.org put together this rather brutal video four years ago, when Black was helping run McCain’s campaign.

And now this same Charles Black is offering advice to Mitt Romney. Maybe some enterprising campaign reporter should ask Romney about this.

The focus of the domestic political world will obviously be on Iowa today, and the awaited caucuses will get underway in about 12 hours. Following up on an item Ed Kilgore published last week, I thought it’d be worthwhile to run a primer on how this process will work.

At 8 p.m. eastern, Iowa Republicans — without photo IDs, and with same-day registration — will gather at one of 1,774 caucus sites, usually held in a local school, library, or other public building. If you’ll be 18 or older by Election Day 2012, you’re eligible to participate.

“Voting” (I put voting in quotes because, technically, participants are caucusing, not voting) is pretty straightforward, but slightly different from previous years: there will be paper ballots, which will be tallied at a secret location.

Folks who followed the 2008 Democratic caucuses may recall the viability threshold, which made participants’ second and third choices fairly important. The Republican process doesn’t work the same way:

Republicans don’t have a viability threshold — a Democratic tradition where a candidate’s supporters must choose another campaign unless their preferred candidate has support from at least 15 percent of caucusgoers — which means a GOP caucus has just one round of balloting and no realignment toward second or third choices.

Individual caucus events often feature campaign representatives, making last-minute appeals, though participants generally show up knowing which candidate they intend to support.

By most estimates, the process should be wrapped up by around 9 p.m. eastern, at which point most participants will simply leave, while some party activists stick around to choose delegates to the state Republican convention.

And … that’s it. Then we all wait with bated breath for the results to be announced.

As is always the case with just about every election, turnout will be of great interest. I’ll just quote Ed’s piece:

…Democratic turnout in 2008 broke all records and exceeded everyone’s expectations — other than those of the Obama campaign, which successfully expanded participation by first-time caucus-goers — including a lot of people self-identifying as independents (20% of the total) and a lot of young people (the caucuses for both parties are usually a very geriatric affair). Edwards and Clinton actually hit their “marks” in mobilizing their supporters, but they were aiming at a lower total turnout model.

Estimates of GOP Caucus attendance this year are all over the place, above and below the 120,000 who caucused in 2008 (about half the Democratic totals). And as with Obama in 2008, the biggest unknown variable is whether Ron Paul’s minions will be able to expand participation to overwhelm the field, particularly among college students who normally don’t caucus, and who will not have returned to class by January 3.

And with that, roughly “four hundredths of one percent” of the total U.S. population will have made an enormous impact on who the Republican nominee — and perhaps the next president — will be.

Today’s edition of quick hits:

* Apparent hate crimes in NYC: “A wave of arson attacks spread across eastern Queens on Sunday night, and the police said the firebombings were being investigated as bias crimes — with Muslims as the targets. No one was hurt in the four attacks, in which homemade firebombs were apparently used. In three of the four attacks, the police said, Molotov cocktails were made with Starbucks bottles. “

* That ought to be interesting: “President Obama will fly to Cleveland hours after the Iowa caucuses for an address on the economy, the White House announced Monday. Obama will travel to the Ohio city aboard Air Force One on Wednesday and will deliver remarks on the economy at Shaker Heights High School. His remarks will come shortly after Hawkeye State voters kick off the 2012 presidential nominating race.”

* Austerity doesn’t work: “Europe’s leaders braced their nations for a turbulent year, with their beleaguered economies facing a threat on two fronts: widening deficits that force more borrowing but increasing austerity measures that put growth further out of reach.”

* Good riddance: “A federal tax credit for ethanol expired on Saturday, ending an era in which the federal government provided more than $20 billion in subsidies for use of the product.”

* Adam Serwer has a helpful, detailed look at the signing statement President Obama issued with the NDAA.

* The White House will give congressional Republicans a chance to pound their chests for no particular reason: “President Obama agreed on Friday to delay a request to Congress to expand the government’s borrowing authority by $1.2 trillion, allowing lawmakers time to return from recess and register their views on it.”

* Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has heard the talk about Justices Clarence Thomas and Elena Kagan needing to recuse themselves from the ACA case, but he’s not buying it.

* Matt Yglesias makes a compelling case that the economy is going to improve quite a bit in 2012. Here’s hoping Matt’s right.

* Nintendo, Electronic Arts, and Sony Electronics had all endorsed the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). All three have since changed their minds.

* It’s hard to overstate how tiresome Artur Davis is.

* I wish the right could understand this: “[Y]es, debt matters. But right now, other things matter more. We need more, not less, government spending to get us out of our unemployment trap. And the wrongheaded, ill-informed obsession with debt is standing in the way.”

* I wish the right understood this, too: “[V]ery few who criticize the top one percent want them to stop existing…. We want them to face somewhat tighter regulations and substantially higher taxes. If you want Wall Street to contribute to ‘the public purse,’ you belong on the side of Elizabeth Warren, not Donald Trump.”

* Rick Perry supports the Keystone XL pipeline, though he may not fully understand that Canada is a foreign country: “Every barrel of oil that comes out of those sands in Canada is a barrel of oil that we don’t have to buy from a foreign source.”

Anything to add? Consider this an open thread.