Between now and Tuesday, Floridians are going to get a heavy dose of TV and radio attack ads from the campaigns and Super-PACs of Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich (plus some anti-Romney ads mishievously placed by the public-sector union AFSCME, not big Newt fans).

But despite Winning Our Future’s fresh $5 million from Dr. Miriam Adelson (wife of Casino Sheldon Adelson), Gingrich is getting badly outgunned in Florida. According to ABC’s Michael Falcone:

So far, Romney has bought $5.6 million worth of airtime and the pro-Romney super PAC, Restore Our Future, has shelled out a whopping $8.2 million, according to a Republican media buyer who is tracking ad spending in the state.

Compare that to $837,000 spent by the Gingrich campaign and the nearly $3 million of airtime bought by Winning Our Future, a super PAC supporting the former House speaker, and it’s easy to understand one reason why Gingrich has slipped in the most recent polls in the Sunshine State.

Jeremy Peters of the New York Times has a slightly different and even more lopsided estimate of Romney’s media advantage in Florida, suggesting that Mitt and company have spent about $15 million on ads while Team Gingrich is at around $2.5 million. But you get the idea. With his poll numbers in the state already slipping, and not at all helped by his performances in the week’s two televised debates, Newt’s on the ropes and running out of time.

Given his financial situation, he’s having to substitute sheer viciousness for ad time. And his Super-PAC’s Florida ads certainly leave little to the imagination in painting Romney as a flip-flopping crypto-liberal who loves him some baby-killers:

Hard to say if it will make much of a dent. But it’s certainly not going to do much for an atmosphere of unity among Florida Republicans going forward. Right now they’d be justified in assuming these two pols would just as soon feed each other to the gators and pythons of the Everglades.

Here’s some items you might find interesting from random news and late developments today:

* Jon Huntsman becomes president of his family’s cancer foundation. No word yet what his campaign’s “genius” strategist, John Weaver is doing now, but there’s a potential future employer for Weaver born every minute.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates usefully details the evolving truth about Ron Paul’s responsibility for those racist newsletters.

* James Vega, interpreting a Times op-ed by Pew’s Andy Kohut, explains crucial difference in public perceptions of “inequality” and “unfairness.”

* Mary Dejevsky examines the consequences of a potential revival of parties of the left in Europe, beginning in France.

* And WaPo’s Paul Farhi warns that data-hogging Siri could mess up your cellphone service.

Unless you live in Florida, it should be a relatively quiet political weekend, although Hotline On Call notes that Pennsylvania’s Republican state committee is meeting to endorse one of three candidates that might ultimately face Sen. Bob Casey this November.

I do not normally plan to blog on weekends, but will be back for temporary duty tomorrow, at which time I will introduce a guest-blogger for Sunday.

Selah.

Two of the internet’s biggest brands are in the news today, and not necessarily in a good way. Google is under scrutiny in Congress—specifically from seven bipartisan members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, over a recent announcement that it is combining privacy policies for various products in a way that will allow large-scale data-sharing.

Forbes’ Kashmir Hill concludes that Google is correct in claiming it is not increasing the amount of data it collects from its customers, but:

By combining information from across all of its services, Google will be able to better target users with ads, offer more innovative features, and, importantly for Google, better compete with Facebook.

Meanwhile, Twitter has provoked growing backlash for its statement, released yesterday, that it will soon begin to selectively censor content in particular countries if it deems it necessary to comply with national laws, while keeping such content available elsewhere.

Whatever you think of this step, it seems ill-timed, at least in terms of U.S. opinion, given the aroused sensitivities to content censorship aroused by the debate over SOPA and PIPA.

Sorry to write so much about Newt Gingrich today, but I don’t know exactly how long we will have him to kick around, and he made some remarks near the end of last night’s debate that really call for a non-Kabuki response.

When an audience member asked the candidates how their religious beliefs would affect the decisions they made as president, Newt’s answer included this:

[O]ne of the reasons I am running is there has been an increasingly aggressive war against religion and in particular against Christianity in this country, largely by…

(APPLAUSE)

… largely by a secular elite and the academic news media and judicial areas. And I frankly believe it’s important to have some leadership that stands up and says, enough; we are truly guaranteed the right of religious freedom, not religious suppression by the state.

Now when a politician says something like this, they are obviously not being literal. No one is keeping Christians from attending church. No one is censoring sermons. No one is being jailed for espousing their faith. This is worth remembering, of course, because there have been more than a few times in history when Christians were persecuted actively for their faith—often by each other—and it is happening today in some parts of the world.

At the other extreme, some religious conservatives seem to feel that anything anyone says or does to offend their sensibilities qualifies as persecution. That is the idiotic essence of the annual “War on Christmas” brouhaha, in which some Christians profess martyrdom at the hands of department stores displaying “Happy Holidays” signs. (Ah, the saints weep!).

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At WaPo’s Plum Line, Greg Sargent is reporting that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse is mustering support among his Democratic colleagues for a direct vote on the “Buffet Rule,” the idea that millionaires should not be paying lower tax rates than their employees. Here’s how Greg describes it:

The bill would ensure that taxpayers who make over $1 million would pay at least a 30 percent tax rate on all their income, Whitehouse aides say. It would do this by requiring millionaires to calculate their overall effective tax rate under the regular system — by taking into account all their sources of income and the various rates they are taxed at.

Those taxpayers whose effective rate is under 30 pecent would be required to pay taxes on all their income at the 30 percent rate. (Charitable contributions that are deductible under the current system would be exempt from income calculations.)

The idea is to offer this pointed and very popular measure as part of a series of Senate votes designed to implement major presidential initiatives from the SOTU address. But it would be a separate vote. It would also presumably require a great deal of sustained publicity to make it clear a filibuster is a vote against the substance of the measure.

If they hurry, Senate Democrats could perhaps get this vote scheduled for the day the Beltway Pundits crown Mitt Romney, who would be a direct party of interest in this initiative, the putative GOP nominee.

After last night’s debate, there was a brief discussion in my Twitter peer group as to whether Newt would respond to his drubbing by going after Mitt with a big clawhammer or by returning to his long-forgotten “positive” posture as part of a strategic retreat towards non-candidacy and book/video sales.

I think we know the answer now, via ABC’s Jonathan Karl:

Newt Gingrich is responding to last night’s debate with a brutal new ad accusing Romney of trying to mislead, deceive, and distort his way to the White House.

Here’s the money line: ”What kind of man would mislead, distort and deceive just to win an election? This man would: Mitt Romney.”

The ad essentially accuses Romney of lying at least twice in the debate last night: 1) about his blind trust and, 2) about his vote for Paul Tsongas in 1992.

Makes sense. Gingrich made his rapid and amazing ascent in the polls after New Hampshire by attacking debate moderators and panelists and the Godless Liberal Media they represented, and by attacking Romney in ads. Now that he’s been skunked in both Florida debates, he’s playing the only hand he has left, until Sheldon Adelson’s dough runs out.

Last year, the Washington Monthly published a special report on “Fighting the Dropout Crisis” that won a best education journalism citation from the Education Writers Association. The report looked at three cities, New York, Philly, and Portland, that all tried to implement roughly the same set of policies to improve high school graduation rates, with NYC showing the best results. One of those policies, heavily promoted by the Gates Foundation, is the strategy of breaking up big, under-performing high schools into smaller schools. Early results of that strategy were so poor that the Gates Foundation throttled back its advocacy of it. But one of the stories in our package, by Thomas Toch, argued that Gates shouldn’t have lost its nerve because the strategy can work if the new small schools are managed right, with real accountability for results.

A new study of New York City high schools, funded by Gates but carried out by the respected nonprofit research group MDRC, shows Toch was right:

The latest findings show that 67.9 percent of the students who entered small high schools in 2005 and 2006 graduated four years later, compared with 59.3 percent of the students who were not admitted and instead went to larger schools. The higher graduation rate at small schools held across the board for all students, regardless of race, family income or scores on the state’s eighth-grade math and reading tests, according to the data.

Here’s hoping the Obama administration, which, from this weeks’s SOTU, seems poised to do something big on high school graduation, is paying attention.

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.