Here’s some brain food for your mid-day meal:

* The ever-resourceful Sarah Posner of Religion Dispatches explains the connection of Gingrich Super-PAC sugar daddy and casino mogul Sheldon Adelson to an outfit producing the anti-Muslim conspiracy theory films being used to “train” NYPD officers in counter-terrorism efforts.

* Erick Erickson pitches a fit, blames Bob Dole for losing the Republican Revolution.

* Today’s best dog-bites-man headline, from Politico: “Voters polarized by Barack Obama, poll finds.” Do tell!

* From the Prospect, a reminder of everything GDP does not tell you about the economy.

And directly from the instant dustbin of history:

* My brilliant analysis of why Newt’s fans think he’s electable, published a day too late.

Enjoy!

In a world full of doubt and contention, there are a few things, other than the proverbial items of death and taxes, you can count on to be completely reliable. And one of those is the ideological mendacity of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

Today the Journal offers up a sort of climate-change deniers’ greatest-hits edition: a compilation of every data point and rhetorical tactic available to urge that this phenomenon does not exist and cannot in any event be addressed.

In these turgid lines can be found a treasure trove of prevarications. You’ve got your impressive-sounding list of scientists agreeing with the Journal (with no corresponding list of those who disagree; the newsprint or bandwith necessary to publish those would bankrupt even the WSJ). You’ve got your quote marks around the term global warming. You’ve got your allusions to the silly “Climategate” kerfuffle. And you’ve got your unsubstantiated allegations of “persecution” of the brave “heretics” who dare stand with poor, puny Industry against the awesome power of academics.

But best of all, this editorial asks a perfectly good question that it answers in an extraordinarily myopic way:

Why is there so much passion about global warming, and why has the issue become so vexing that the American Physical Society, from which Dr. Giaever resigned a few months ago, refused the seemingly reasonable request by many of its members to remove the word “incontrovertible” from its description of a scientific issue? There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question “cui bono?” Or the modern update, “Follow the money.”

Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. Lysenko and his team lived very well, and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them.

Gee, you’d think in all this tough-minded truth-telling about those with a financial stake in the climate change debate the Journal might have noted in passing that the most powerful economic interests on the planet have an interest in doing nothing about it.

But then that’s the Journal’s core constituency, and I suppose it is predictable its editors remain willing to threaten the credibility of its usually solid news-gathering operation to tell those who would melt the ice caps without a moment’s hesitation exactly what they want to hear.

The headline at WaPo was upbeat: “U.S. economy in fourth quarter 2011 grew at fastest pace in 1.5 years.” But the new economic growth data released by the Commerce Department are decidedly mixed, and more importantly, assessments of what happens next are all over the map among those venturing a prediction.

Yes, the 2.8% GDP growth level for the quarter was the highest since the spring of 2010. But total GDP growth for 2011 was down to 1.7% from 3% in 2010. More importantly, with unemployment still so high, the economy is not even close to the growth levels that would represent a broad-based recovery. As Matt Yglesias noted, real disposable personal income increased only 0.8%; non-residential construction continued to decline; and once again, cuts in government spending continued to operate as a drag on growth (state and local government expenditures dropped even more than in the third quarter, reflecting the final expiration of federal stimulus aid, and federal defense cuts took their first real bite out of public sector spending).

As always, the reaction to economic news is as important to the economy as the news itself, so close monitoring of the attitudes of economists and the markets is a very good idea at present. Sometimes an understanding of psychology is as helpful as any advanced degree in economics.

As I post this, President Obama is making a speech in Michigan unveiling a new “college affordability” initiative. In a preview for the New York Times, Tamar Lewin notes that the plan will include both carrots and sticks: a new competitive grant program modeled on “Race to the Top” that will reward states making efforts to hold down college costs, but also conditions on existing federal aid to college tied to assessments of the educational value of an institution’s offerings.

In the current budgetary climate, and given Republican control of the House, the carrot side of this equation is not likely to go very far. But it’s the stick the President is proposing to wield that’s new and interesting. As Amy Laitinen of Education Sector notes, the administration appears determined to go beyond past proposals to tie federal aid to mechanical measurements of college costs to focus on the relative bargain offered to students and their families—and more indirectly, to the federal and state governments that subsidize higher education.

Regular readers of the Washington Monthly know that this publication has devoted a lot of time and energy to encouraging better understanding of the overall value—to students and to the community and the country—of a college education, not just generally but with respect to specific institutions. So we will be watching the president’s speech and the subsequent debate with great interest.

Every progressive blogger knows that if you are stuck finding material to feed the hungry maw, you can always troll around advocacy sites or regional newspapers and come up a story of some conservative state legislator doing or saying something absolutely crazy.

Yesterday it was Oklahoma state senator Ralph Shortey, who introduced legislation to ban the marketing of food containing aborted human fetal matter. Today it’s Tennessee state senator Stacy Campfield, an unusually uninhibited homophobe who has made opposition to anti-bullying initiatives his main purpose in public life. There are entire areas of state legislative activity scattered across the country that are based on hallucinatory threats, most notably the struggle against the imminent imposition of Shariah Law.

It’s easy to make fun of this stuff, and also easy to exaggerate its importance. But craziness does indeed come in waves. It’s no accident that not one but two extremist loners in Congress, Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul, were able to launch credible presidential campaigns this year. And it should be clear by now that the Class of 2010 is already rivalling the Class of 1994 as a cohort of state lawmakers drawn to an unusual degree from people with views previously considered outside the mainstream. Worse yet, these new solons were immediately thrown into a redistricting cycle that will enable many of them to draw themselves more favorable districts and stick around longer than you might have originally imagined.

So to keep it all in perspective, it’s helpful to develop the knack of distinguising the isolated cranks from the broader trends that make their crankiness relevant as something other than entertainment material. Once this election cycle is over and a least a few extremist legislators are either purged by their embarassed colleagues or repudiated by the buyer’s remorse of constituents—and keeping in mind that presidential election years elicit an electorate that is inherently less hospitable to right-wing candidates—it will be interesting and valuable to see how much of the craziness has endured to become part of the political landscape.

Foreign policy has not been a particularly important topic in the 2012 presidential cycle to much of anyone other than Ron Paul. But there was an interesting moment in last night’s GOP candidate debate when Mitt Romney said something that just seemed jarring in the context of his and hs party’s commitment to an ideology of American Exceptionalism and rhetoric of truculent unilateralism. Asked (by an audience member identifying himself as Palenstinian-American) about U.S. Middle Eastern policy, Romney replied:

The best way to have peace in the Middle East is not for us to vacillate and to appease, but is to say we stand with our friend Israel; we are committed to a Jewish state in Israel; we will not have an inch of difference between ourselves and our ally Israel.

Newt Gingrich promptly said “Governor Romney is exactly right.”

Now forget about the first two clauses of Romney’s statement, and in fact—please, I am not, repeat not, trying to start a debate about what the U.S. should and shouldn’t do in the Middle East—forget about the merits of the entire Middle East dispute. Isn’t it a bit odd, even somewhat unprecedented, for a prospective U.S. president to announce in advance that he is giving an ally a blank check to control U.S. policy in a major region of the world? It’s certainly not the kind of unconditional support the current government of Israel would reciprocate, and nor should they. Even the closest allies maintain some freedom of maneuver once the terms of explicit diplomatic agreements are discharged, and given its power, the U.S. is in the habit of insisting on an independent course as a matter of both principle and expediency.

There are obviously a lot of reasons that most Republican leaders, and for that matter a lot of Democrats, have abandoned the “honest broker” posture towards the Middle East that was taken for granted when George W. Bush and Al Gore debated this subject during the 2000 election cycle. Still, it’s one thing to suggest that the U.S. will naturally favor its historic ally in intractable disputes. It’s another thing altogether to outsource your policies unconditionally to a foreign government whose positions on matters of war and peace are more than a little controversial to its own people, particularly if your represent the supposedly hard-core U.S. nationalist party that claims it doesn’t trust anybody or anything other than naked self-interest and military power. Perhaps the refusal of contemporary conservatives to see allies anywhere else in the world—certainly not among those debt-ridden socialists of Europe—has made them hold Israel all the closer. But an awful lot of Israelis would tell you that giving this sort of total leverage over the United States to Bibi Netanyahu is not an act to be taken lightly. He will not hesitate to use it.

Last night’s presidential candidate debate in Jacksonville, cosponsored by CNN and the Hispanic Leadership Network, was Newt Gingrich’s best and perhaps last chance to get his mojo back against a confluence of negative pressures—from sustained attacks to his left and right by GOP opinion-leaders to a cascade of Romney-sponsored attack ads—that were undermining his support in Florida.

By virtually everyone’s account, he just plain blew it.

Earlier in the day, shortly after his old rival Bob Dole went completely medieval on him, Gingrich had delivered a podium-pounding speech in Florida that accused Romney of conspiring with Establishment figures to take him out as a threat to their power. He must have burned himself out, because that fiery Newt Gingrich was not apparent during the debate. He sounded bad, he looked bad, and generally came across like a weasel who had finally been cornered by Animal Control.

For very, very long minutes, Romney beat him up on the immigration issue, managing simultaenously to appeal to nativists and to suck up to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who had already done him the enormous favor of criticizing Gingrich’s ads accusing Mitt of being “anti-immigrant.”

Here’s how Ron Brownstein put it:

By luck of the draw, the debate’s first two questions allowed Romney to conspicuously position himself to Gingrich’s right-and in so doing may have sealed Romney’s advantage in the state. Gingrich’s resurgence in South Carolina was fueled by the Republican coalition’s most populist and conservative elements. But in the debate’s first half-hour, it was Romney who identified both with conservative and populist causes through an extended discussion about illegal immigration and then housing (which again allowed him to criticize Gingrich for his work for Freddie Mac). That placed Romney on a high ground from which Gingrich never dislodged him; in fact, Gingrich seemed to lose heart for the fight as the evening progressed, leaving Santorum to deliver the most effective conservative case against Romney.

If losing virtually every direct exchange with Romney was the bad news for Newt, the worse news is that the debate may have added a few points, and some hope, to Rick Santorum’s campaign. At this point, nearly every vote Santorum wins in Florida diminishes Gingrich’s chances. And those chances were already beginning to fade, as all of the most recent Florida polls have shown Romney retaking the lead.

At this point, Gingrich needs to work some magic with the $6 million Florida ad campaign the Adelson family bought for him, and hope for big errors by Romney. The road gets a lot easier for Mitt, and harder for Newt, after Tuesday. Not for the first time in his long, strange career, Gingrich was at his worst when he looked to have done his best. A third resurrection of his campaign in this cycle is not impossible, but if it happens yet again, I’d recommend we all start looking for signs of the End Times.

A few final items for the day, if you please:

* As many of you probably noticed, the New York Times published another large chunk of reportage from Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher on the production of iPhones and iPads in Asia, as a follow-on to its much-discussed piece last weekend examining the scope and nature of Apple’s overseas production and supply facilities. The sequel focuses on highly questionable treatment of workers in these facilities, which often violate Apple’s own codes of conduct. I recommend you read both pieces in conjunction with Matt Yglesias’ provocative Slate column from earlier this week on what he perceives as Obama’s, and America’s, retreat into “mercantalist” thinking.

* Rep. Barney Frank, who has already announced plans to retire from Congress at the end of this term, is planning to marry his long-time partner, Jim Ready. Best wishes to them both.

* The Tea Party Express is setting up its own Super-PAC. Leave it these guys to try to give Super-PACs a bad name.

* Towards the end of a day of big-time conservative attacks on Newt Gingrich, the man who uneasily shared power with him during the Republican Revolution, former Sen. Bob Dole, really unloaded on ol’ Newt, in a jeremiad that suggested his nomination would take the whole party down.

Speaking of warring Republicans, tonight, of course, will feature another GOP candidate debate, this one from Jacksonville, sponsored by CNN, which has announced it will allow audience applause, the mother’s milk of Newt Gingrich’s debate appearances.

One of the nice things about being a West Coast blogger is that I will be in a position on occasion to publish a post well into the night if events warrant it. If anything big happens in Jax, I may toss up a post, but may otherwise hold my thoughts until the morrow.

Truth be told, after a near-sleepless night following a root canal, leading into blog posts beginning at 5:00 a.m. PST, I may set up the DVR to tape the debate, and go directly into a sleep-coma.

It’s been a fun first day here, and I greatly appreciate the many kind thoughts sent my way in comments, Twitter, and elsewhere.

Selah.

There’s lots of jabbering going on today about conservative opinion-leaders going after Newt Gingrich with hammers and tongs. And I must say, it’s worth jabbering about, if only because of the spectacle of these folks trying to put the genie back in the bottle and convince The Troops to re-adopt conventional views about candidate electability (viz. a National Review editorial pointing to Newt’s perpetual unpopularity).

But the most vicious attack on Gingrich was from Washington Examiner columnist Philip Klein, who seriously (at least I think he’s serious) makes the case that Newt’s political tactics are right out of the Gospel According To Saul Alinsky.

It’s almost enough to make me feel sorry for the wiggy former Speaker, even though I suggested earlier today that he privately imagines himself some sort of inter-galactic Warrior-King. As a token of limited solidarity with my fellow sort-of-Georgian, I’ll mention something I omitted from my self-introduction post: I was a teenage school janitor. The job paid a booming $1.30 an hour, but it did help me finance my secular-socialist college education, which ultimately enabled me to become a member of the Liberal Media.

Funny how it all works out.

Over at Grist, David Roberts has an interesting piece that argues the Solyndra brouhaha and general defensiveness have blinded Democrats to the strong public support, across party lines, for “clean energy” and government efforts to promote it. Citing both Stan Greenberg’s focus-group findings during the SOTU address, and more general polling data, Roberts suggests this could actually become a “wedge issue” for Democrats:

Americans know that clean energy is the future. They want to embrace the future. They want to, well, win it. They certainly don’t want to fend it off for the sake of oil companies. Americans hate oil companies! (Almost as much as they hate congressional Republicans.) They don’t want to subsidize oil companies any more. Even Republicans support ending oil subsidies by a 2-to-1 margin.

The underlying point I’d make about David’s argument is that people in politics, and especially Democrats, have long had an unfortunate tendency to avoid whole topics that they perceive as “enemy territory” or “the other party’s issues.” That may be happening with Democrats on energy and the environment right now. It’s true that some sub-issues in this area remain tough —there’s no question progressives have lost ground with the public on dealing with global climate change during the last few years, and will always have trouble with policy prescriptions that deliberately aim at raising energy prices.

But while it’s always appropriate to emphasize or de-emphasize this or that issue on strategic or tactical grounds at some particular moment, there’s something fundamentally wrong about an ideology or a political party that is unwilling to offer its own distinctive “take” on subjects the public cares about. David’s right there is a progressive opportunity on “clean energy” that ought to be fully exploited. Even if he was wrong, though, it’s a terrible habit to shut down thinking and talking about major national challenges just because “the other side” seems to have an advantage.

It’s every reporter’s dream to ask a presidential candidate a question that packs multidimensional dynamite. Univision’s Jorge Ramos had that opportunity yesterday when he asked Mitt Romney if he considered his own self a “Mexican-American,” since his father, George Romney, was born in that country.

Romney sheepishly allowed as how he didn’t think that sort of self-identification would be terribly credible. But it was a tricky question nonetheless, not only because Romney is frantically prospecting for Hispanic voters in Florida right now, but also because it served as a reminder that Mitt’s great-grandparents were polygamists who fled to Mexico (reportedly at the instruction of none other than Brigham Young) shortly before the LDS church officially renounced plural marriage, and the new state of Utah banned it altogether.

Turns out Mitt still has some distant cousins in Mexico, although most of those early Mormon immigrants to that country (including George and his parents and grandparents) fled during the Mexican Revolution of 1912 and never came back.

So it’s not surprising Mitt turned down the chance to claim his own little bit of Hispanic heritage.

Polygamy aside, Ramos’ question was probably as welcome to the candidate as a basket of vipers. It’s hard enough for pols to navigate the treacherous waters of Florida’s various Hispanic groups, including the Cuban-Americans who tend to participate in large numbers in Republican primaries, and people (and their children and grand-children) from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean who now outweigh them as factors in Florida general elections, which the eventual GOP nominee badly needs to win.

More to the immediate point, Romney is in danger of paying a price for the rightward tilt on immigration policy that he so usefully deployed to crush Rick Perry earlier in this cycle, and also to buttress his shaky movement-conservative street cred. As a new Latino Decisions poll for Univision illustrates, Romney’s ability to win the Florida primary depends heavily on relatively favorable opinions of him among Hispanics in the state. But Newt Gingrich is pounding away at that support, drawing particular attention to Mitt’s praise for strategies to encourage “self-deportation” of undocumented workers. Meanwhile, none of the GOP candidates are looking particularly strong among Florida Hispanic voters in trial heats against Barack Obama (Latino Decisions has the President beating Romney 50-40 in FL and 67-25 nationally, and beating Gingrich 52-38 in FL and 70-22 nationally).

So Romney needs to tread lightly on Hispanic attitudes in the run-up to next Tuesday’s primary, and also keep the focus off those cousins in Mexico and how they got there.

UPDATE: A commenter pointed out that my inclusion of Puerto Ricans as “immigrants” in a list of Hispanic-American groups is inaccurate, since Puerto Ricans are American citizens by birth. That’s entirely correct. So I changed the noun describing the entire list from “immigrants” to “people,” which is probably a good habit anyway.

At the risk of conveying the impression I read every single comment on every single post (can’t quite square that with Benen-like productivity, folks!), I’ll note another commenter asked if Cuban-Americans considered themselves “Latinos” rather than “Hispanics.” This is a very tangled subject. By-and-large, the term “Hispanic” is more common in the East and “Latinos” in the West, so that’s generally how I use the terms unless there is some specific reason to do otherwise.

And finally, while I’m at it, I will report once and for all that the whole issue of CAPTCHA is simply above my pay grade. I’m pretty sure management knows how you feel about it, though.

And now back to our regularly scheduled blogging!

[Note to readers: I’m still toying with a number of ideas for regular features that will give the blog the kind of daily rhythm Steve brought to it, so bear with me. For today, here are a few items from my morning reading that might provide a good accompaniment to your mid-day repast:]

Jon Chait meditates on the extraordinary power of Sheldon Adelson (and his wife) to keep Newt Gingrich in the presidential race, and asks us to “Imagine a sitting President trying to make a fair judgment about a policy decision impacting the businessman who single-handedly financed his entire election.”

WaPo has a sizable report on a big new study of DC schools commissioned by mayor Vincent Gray which will likely upset defenders of “traditional public schools” and enthuse boosters of charter public schools.

WaPo’s also got results of a survey ranking Our Nation’s Capital as America’s third-rudest city, after New York and Miami. Imagine that.

E.J. Graff has a very good summary of the background and implications of the new HHS policy expanding insurance coverage of contraceptives as preventive services.

It turns out that President John Tyler, who was born in the eighteenth century and made his last major appearance on the national scene as a member of the Confederate House of Representatives, still has two living grandchildren.

And for dessert, since I did a post earlier mentioning the South’s obsession with college football recruiting, here’s a link to Spencer Hall’s hilarious “beginner’s guide” to the subject.

Enjoy.

It’s always fascinating if often unsettling to shine a flashlight into the shadows of campaign financing and see what kinds of people made spontaneous, totally coincidental decisions to give big money to candidates and causes.

The always-insightful Lee Drutman provides some enlightening data on this issue for the Sunlight Foundation:

In the last two decades, finance, insurance, and real estate have made many individuals quite rich, propelling them to stratospheric levels of wealth.

It’s also propelled these individuals into stratospheric levels of political giving….

An analysis of campaign contribution records by the Sunlight Foundation reveals that the number of donors in the FIRE sector giving at least $10,000 (in 2010 dollars) per cycle to political candidates, parties, and independent expenditure groups has increased from 1,091 in 1990 to 5,510 in 2010 (a 405% increase). These elite FIRE sector donors’ combined contributions have increased even more dramatically, growing by $162.8 million (a 700% increase, controlling for inflation) to $178.2 million in 2010.

The next largest source of $10k-plus donations, lawyers and law firms, are really struggling to keep up, throwing in only $59.6 million in 2010.

It’s really nice these growing sectors just happen to have so many civic-minded folk in their ranks. If the United States ever emulates other advanced democracies by adopting a robust system of publicly financed campaigns, we sure could help today’s big donors channel their dollars into something more productive and less, ah, aromatic.

With college costs continuing to soar, and the bad economy ravaging lives up and down the educational staircase, it’s easy to get cynical, or even angry, about President Obama’s insistent rhetoric on increasing college attendance and completion. Is he just another “New Democrat” who can’t stop talking about improving education and skills because he can’t start doing anything to protect jobs in the first place? Is our national habit of valuing college becoming a vice?

Not really, notes Jamie Merisotis at College Guide today. College-doesn’t-matter talk is vastly oversold:

Two recent analyses from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce describe what is happening. The first is that roughly 60 percent of American jobs will require some level of education beyond high school by 2018. Unfortunately, only about 40 percent of American adults have a two- or four year college degree, and around 5 percent more have a certificate or other credential of high value in the workplace. That’s a big gap.

But what about all those unemployed college graduates? The other analysis by the Georgetown Center found that 22 to 26 year olds with a bachelor’s degree have an unemployment rate of 8.9 percent. That’s high by any measure, but the unemployment rate for young adults with only a high school diploma is 22.9 percent, and it’s a staggering 31.5 percent for high school dropouts. And it is almost certain that those college graduates will be the first one hired as the economy recovers.

College is no automatic panacea for Americans individually or America as a country, and too many students have to assume too much debt to pay too much tuition. As Merisotis argues, there are many steps that can and should be taken to make colleges more efficient and less costly. But it really is worth the effort.