Time to tie on the feedbag, thoroughbreds. Here’s some quality oats:

* At Economix, Annie Lowery documents the economic value of contraception to women, and to the country.

* An Israeli source claims Bibi has already decided to attack Iran, and that U.S. intelligence services know it.

* CNN provides useful summary of economic conditions in Super Tuesday states.

* Amanda Marcotte notes that Rush might have an easier time getting his apology accepted if he actually apologized.

* Remember all the talk a while back about pro-choice Americans being too complacent to rival the passions of anti-choicers? That’s sure changing now, notes Irin Carmon.

* TNR’s Molly Redden visits Rick Santorum’s Opus Dei-aligned church.

Back to blogging after a brief break.

We have a new data point today on the impact of the GOP nominating contest on the general electorate, and if I were a Republican, I’d be worried, per ABC pollster Gary Langer:

All four Republican contenders remain underwater in overall favorability in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, marking the difficulties the survivor may face against Barack Obama. More Americans hold negative than positive views of Romney by a 10-point margin, Rick Santorum by 8 points, Ron Paul by 9 points and Newt Gingrich by a whopping 33 points.

Among customarily swing-voting independents, moreover, all but Paul is seen more unfavorably than favorably in this poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates. And Paul’s got trouble, as does Gingrich, within the GOP itself.

Mitt Romney, responding to immediate market pressures like any good corporate consultant would do, has managed to boost his ratings among conservatives without improving his overall general election standing:

Romney has improved among both “very” and “somewhat” conservative Americans, as well as among conservative Republicans in particular - up by 12, 10 and 11 points in these groups, respectively, versus a week ago. His gain among very conservatives comes from the ranks of the undecided in this group; among somewhat conservatives, by contrast, negative views moved to positive ones.

Indeed Romney, after falling to new lows among conservatives before the Michigan and Arizona contests, has moved back to parity with Santorum among some conservative groups, notably conservative Republicans. In this group, 67 percent now see Romney favorably; Santorum, 68 percent.

As has been increasingly apparent throughout the contest, Ron Paul has been firmly rejected by actual Republicans:

He’s at 38-35 percent among independents, better than his rivals; but, at 38-44 percent among Republicans, numerically the worst of the lot within the GOP.

And Newt, as might well have been predicted, has spent an awful lot of Sheldon Adelson’s money in order to achieve pretty much the same national pariah status he earned in the mid-to-late 1990s:

Deepest into the sea is Gingrich - 23 percent of Americans see him favorably, a new low this election cycle; 56 percent unfavorably, a new high. Republicans essentially divide on Gingrich, but independents see him negatively by a vast 58-21 percent.

Democrats, of course, deeply regret that Newt’s return to his familiar public standing didn’t occur much later—say, after he won the GOP nomination. But donkeys hold out hope that Mitt Romney will succumb to the same force of gravity—and the same tradeoff of “swing” for “base” voters—that’s already evident in the numbers.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) voted last week for the unsuccessful Blunt Amendment that would have repealed any contraception coverage mandate for any employer who claimed to object to it on religious or moral grounds. Now she says she regrets that vote, because, it appears, it sent the wrong “message,”as she told Anchorage Daily News columnist Julie O’Malley:

She’d meant to make a statement about religious freedom, she said, but voters read it as a vote against contraception coverage for women….

She called the Blunt Amendment a “messaging amendment” that “both sides know is not going to pass.”

Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid saw the public debate shifting away from religious freedom, which would have been a winning issue for Republicans, she said. Reid recognized contraceptive rights as a winning issue for Democrats and pushed for a vote.

“The wind had shifted, and Republicans didn’t have enough sense to get off of it,” she said.

So she was voting for a “message,” not an actual amendment that would have actual consequences for actual women.

This reasoning is also how Republicans got themselves into the situation which eventually led to Rush Limbaugh bellowing insults at a Georgetown law student for a couple of days until even he figured out—or had it figured out for him by his sponsors—he had gone too far. Most of us would have never heard of Sandra Fluke had not U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) decided his hearing on the contraception coverage mandate was “about religious freedom,” not, you know, contraception. Fluke, not being a conservative religious leader, had no standing in Issa’s mind to address the “message” he was trying to send.

Look, I understand the concept of political messaging quite well; I have, in fact, conducted hundreds of “message training” events over the years. But one of the fundamentals of message training is that you can send inadvertant as well as deliberate messages, and you do not get to choose which ones are heard by listeners, even if you are a powerful House committee chairman, or a powerful bishop, or a powerful U.S. Senator. Announcing that this hearing, or that vote, or that radio tirade, is “about” one subject and not another does not magically absolve one from the consequences of how such actions appear to others, or in the case of a proposed law, how it actually affects others.

read more »

I don’t know how many of you are Twitter followers and/or enthusiasts. I resisted the medium until just a few months ago, and then happily succumbed, greeting the task of constructing those little 140-character nuggets as a brain-stretching exercise similar to haiku.

In any event, Washington Monthly is trying something a bit different beginning today. Virtually all magazines have twitter feeds, but they are usually automated or churned out by some poor intern who would prefer to write on his or her own feed, and typically just promote magazine content. From now on @washmonthly will be a genuine collective feed from our editors and staff that not only promotes content in our print and online universe, but also supplies commentary on events of the day.

If you’re a fan of the Monthly, please follow @washmonthly. This is a bit of an experiment, and if it doesn’t add value we won’t just keep it going. But I think it will be useful—and fun.

So as he tries to nail down the GOP presidential nomination with victories in ten states today, Team Romney pulled the trigger on a WaPo op-ed on the foreign policy issue most discussed on the campaign trail, Iran.

Whatever you think of it as an analysis of the Middle East or of nonproliferation policy or of U.S. foreign policy generally (comparing it to Paul Pillar’s new Washington Monthly piece on U.S.-Iran relations is kind of like comparing a comic book to a college text), it certainly hits the right political notes for the audience he cares about most, conservative “base” voters.

It opens with the perfect analogy from Romney’s point of view: Jimmy Carter, cowering in the White House, wringing his hands in impotent frustration at the taking of U.S. hostages by Islamic fanatics. This crisis, says Mitt’s ghostwriter, was instantly dispelled by the election of Ronald Reagan, whose strength and courage terrified the mullahs into ending their cruel game.

And so, the op-ed says, we are in a “strikingly similar situation” today: same Islamic fanatics, same liberal wusses in the White House, same need for a real man to resolve the crisis with a steely glance, some nuclear brinkmanship, and maybe a few trillion dollars in otherwise useless new defense spending.

The need for Romney to identify with Reagan is so strong that the op-ed not only insists today’s Iranian regime is “the same Islamic fanatics” that Ronnie stared down, but identifies Iran with the Cold War Era Soviet Union as well. Thus, just as Reagan won the Cold War by pushing for his Strategic Defense Initiative, Mitt will face down the equally threatening Iranian and North Korean regimes with a new ballistic missile system, that much-derided sugar plum fairy of defense contractors.

Most of all, President Romney will be tough like Reagan, getting right into grills of those bearded Islamic Fanatics by an early trip to Jersusalem, support for an Iranian insurgency, and most of all, demands for a build-down of the Iranian nuclear program backed by a credible threat of war.

If this all sounds a bit like foreign policy as it would be conducted by a seventeen-year-old boy with an addiction to energy drinks, that is almost certainly intentional. If the chronic liberal vice in foreign policy is excessive faith in international organizations, the chronic conservative vice is the belief that America must perpetually prove its willingness to kill instantly and remoselessly. Romney’s handlers want to make sure conservatives are reassured he fully shares that vice.

Let us profoundly hope that this and earlier expressions of Romney’s foreign policy views are as insincere as what he has said about his own past domestic policy positions. Yes, it’s tiresome and a bit alarming to have to wish that a major-party presidential candidate is routinely lying through his teeth to the very people he calls his supporters. But in the case of foreign policy, there are contingencies much worse than presidential mendacity. There are ruinous and unnecessary wars of the kind that Romney very much wants primary voters to think he is eager to wage the minute he’s in Ronnie’s shoes.

This time tomorrow we could be discussing exactly how and when, not whether, Mitt Romney can wrap up the GOP presidential nomination. For the first time, this discussion would not be one prominently involving proponents of some Iron Law whereby Mitt actually won a year or eighteen months or four years ago (though these proponents will soon be gloating they were right all along), but people counting delegates and ruling out every other reasonable outcome.

This morning Nate Silver usefully explores the plausible Super Tuesday scenarios. For Romney, two of them lead pretty briskly to a Romney nomination; only a third, in which Romney manages to lose six states (including Ohio) and finish third in a couple, would cause him serious problems. Moreover, anyone else having a particularly good night is unlikely. Even if Santorum wins in OH, TN, OK, and say, ND, the road ahead, which features several southern primaries, is difficult unless Newt Gingrich also does poorly and drops out. Short of direct orders from Sheldon Adelson to quit, that doesn’t look to be in the cards so long as Newt wins in GA, which seems virtually certain.

The most interesting question is how quickly conservative opinion-leaders coalesce around Romney if the results fall into that most plausible area between total victory and a genuine setback. There’s a long, passionate piece up at Red State today by Dan McClaughlin retailing the case against Romney that sure sounds like the death rattle of conservative resistance. But we’ve thought we heard it before.

If the circus does begin to fold its tents and prepares to leave town, I’ll certainly miss it as as writer. How about you? Are you tired of watching conservatives push each other constantly to the Right, unintentionally rattling hobgoblins at any swing voter who is paying attention? Is the GOP nomination process the gift that keeps on giving to progressives? Now’s as good a time as any to discuss it, because the calliope music, the barkers’ cries, and the vaguely menacing laughter of clowns may soon fade into memory.

If you are a Rush Limbaugh sponsor, you have only minutes to make today’s final list of “former sponsors.” Here’s what else is going on:

* In one of those signs he might be hitting bottom, Rush suffered the ignominy of being called a “fat, gutless, pill-popping loser” by Don Imus.

* New report from Progressive Policy Institute by Steven Nyce and Sylvester Schieber on rising health care costs as a factor in slow wage growth.

* County GOP organization in SC requires primary candidates to sign 28-point pledge, including commitment to give up porn.

* Abby Rapoport has final report on Kucinich-Kaptur primary in Ohio, which has gotten steadily more negative.

* Likud pols in Israel mock Obama’s AIPAC speech, despite mild praise from Bibi.

And in non-political news:

* Rocker Ronnie Montrose dies at 64.

* Back-to-back quakes shake Bay area in CA. You get used to it.

Tomorrow’s Super Tuesday, of course, and I’ll be following the ten events with some trepidation that I won’t have a never-ending GOP nomination contest to kick around much longer.

Selah.

In an update to his Super Tuesday projections, 538’s Nate Silver discussed Rick Santorum’s sagging position in many polls (aside from Romney’s gains against him in Ohio and elsewhere, Newt Gingrich, who’s having yet another final spasm of momentum, could skunk him in Georgia and knock him out of the top spot in Tennesse) and made this rather interesting observation:

Mr. Santorum’s campaign — unlike Mr. Romney’s and to a lesser extent Mr. Gingrich’s — has lacked the muscle to turn the narrative around after some rough patches. This would have been a good week for Mr. Santorum to roll out endorsements, or to focus a line of attack upon Mr. Romney, but little of that has been apparent.

Instead, the past week has been relatively light for horse-race coverage, with much of the political world instead focused on the Rush Limbaugh controversy. With no debates — and Mr. Santorum’s loss in Washington representing the major story — there has been nothing to stop his downward trajectory.

It would be ironic if Limbaugh, who has on occasion channeled conservative mistrust of Romney, managed to help him win crucial Super Tuesday victories by hogging the attention of the chattering classes. For all we know, Mitt’s made a few more gaffes about his personal wealth or dissed conservative legislation, and nobody noticed. If so, no wonder Romney’s gone so easy on the old bully in his hour of need.

The Blaze is Glenn Beck’s website so I’m not too surprised at anything that appears there. Still, there’s a leading article up (which has drawn well over 500 comments) by Billy Hallowell that’s rather a sad reflection of how the contemporary Right has lost all sense of history or perspective. It’s about some relatively banal comments by the Rev. Jim Wallis—an exceptionally well-known religio-political figure who is simultaneously a symbol of the “Christian Left” and a source of chronic irritation to religious liberals who don’t share his conservative leanings on cultural issues like abortion and same-sex marriage or much appreciate his constant efforts to encourage the president to compromise on them.

But here’s what upsets Halloway and his readers:

In an interview that will air nationwide at Lifetree Café locations in the coming days, Wallis made some startling statements about America’s history and heritage….

“It’s not a Christian nation. It’s never been a Christian nation,” Wallis boldly proclaimed while speaking about America. “We set this up so that it would not be a Christian nation for any religious framework.”

But Wallis wasn’t done there. In a preview clip, he goes on to claim that America isn’t mentioned in the Bible as having a “special” or unique place.

“Where in the Bible is there a special place for America?,” he asks. “Where do we get that that’s bad theology…just bad theology.”

For Wallis, who considers himself part of the Anabaptist tradition which has for five centures rejected any contamination of Christianity by official sanction, this is about as predictable a comment as he could make. But beyond Wallis himself, it’s just bizarre that anyone, whether or not they agree with strict church-state separation, would find advocacy of this position by an evangelical minister “startling.” In the days of the Founders, it was evangelicals who most strongly urged Jefferson and Madison to take a hard line against any religious establishment, and indeed, it was in a letter to a group of Connecticut Baptists that Jefferson coined the phrase “wall of separation” to describe the ideal relationship of church and state.

One can only speculate why Halloway or anyone else would be shocked by Wallis’ truism—relevant or not—that there is no biblical sanction for “American exceptionalism.”

read more »

This morning I mentioned PPP’s three-state battery of primary polls from OH, TN and GA in the contest of the presidential nominating contest. But PPP also asked some other questions of interest. The answers to one indicated that “birtherism” remains exceptionally strong among GOP primary voters, as a sort of Rorschach Test of their perception of Barack Obama as The Other; the other indicated that Rush Limbaugh’s slut-shaming exercise aimed at Sandra Fluke may have cost him more than some advertisers.

On this latter point, here is Tom Jensen’s summary:

Our numbers suggest that Rush Limbaugh has seen significant erosion in his popularity with Republican voters over the last week. The last time we polled on him nationally he was at 80/12 with GOPers. But now we find him below 50% in all three of these states: he’s at 45/28 in Ohio, 46/29 in Tennessee, and 44/30 in Georgia.

Republican women in particular have become very skeptical about Limbaugh in the states holding tomorrow’s 2 most competitive contests. He’s at only 39/28 with them in Ohio and 36/30 in Tennessee.

Digging a little deeper in the crosstabs, however, some pretty big splits appear on both subjects, beyond the relatively modest gender gap on Rush.

The most startling, to me at least, is the extraordinary support for both birtherism and Rush among self-ID’d Tea Party members in all three states. They reject Obama’s U.S. nativity by margins of 56/25 in OH, 62/22 in TN, and 54/24 in GA. Tea Folk also do not seem to share the issues with Limbaugh’s slut-shaming, approving of him by margins of 73/11 in OH, 72/12 in TN, and 69/14 in GA. Evangelicals are just as likely as Tea Folk (with whom, of course, they overlap greatly) to be birthers (50/25 in OH, 53/24 in TN, and 50/25 in GA); but do support Rush a bit less (54/23 in OH, 51/26 in TN, and 53/25 in GA). Indeed, it’s probable the varying sizes of the evangelical segment of the electorate (43% in OH, 66% in TN and 55% in GA) largely explain the statewide variations on these questions.

The other number that jumps out from the crosstabs are pretty notable generational splits. 18-45 year-olds reject birtherism by 54/27 in OH and 48/28 in GA, though in heavily evangelical TN they favor it 46/37. Over-65 voters are big birtherists everywhere: 44/34 in OH, 52/28 in TN and 47/30 in GA. Younger voters only narrowly approve of Rush in all three states, while over-65s give him near-majority support.

Even in the relatively monolithic GOP, some issues produce real divisions. But to the extent that the noisy “activist base” is older, more evangelical, and more pro-Tea Party than the party as a whole, it’s no wonder there’s incessant pressure on GOP pols to lean hard and sometimes crazy right.

I didn’t post about the death of Andrew Breitbart, or the post-death-of-Andrew-Breibart blogospheric flame war, for a number of reasons. Yes, perhaps because I am a fogie, or perhaps because I am a Christian, I do tend to find the immediate heaping of hot coals on the cooling body of the recently deceased distasteful. And yes, I’m generally leery of making definitive moral judgments—the kind that are so often made in obituaries, positive or negative—about total strangers. Truth be told, the things about Breitbart’s highly dubious contributions to journalism, if you want to call it that, which outraged his enemies and thrilled his friends all struck me as stuff that was pretty much ephemeral.

But the case for letting Breitbart rest in peace would be stronger if he had left the rest of us in peace in exchange. Instead, from the grave, he is still trying to make headlines, and succeeding at least with his brethren on the Breathless Right. His apparently-long-in-the-planning new website, which seems merely to combine his old websites, is now featuring the alleged dynamite so powerful in its impact on the World As We Know It that conspiracy theories about his death are at large in the fever swamps.

So what’s the direction of Breitbart’s last big epochal project? Yet more splashing around in the right-wing kiddie pool of Barack Obama’s community organizer days in Chicago. It appears then-state-senator Obama attended, and participated in a panel discussion about, a play on Saul Alinsky in 1998.

Needless to say, this is a smoking gun only to people who (a) have anything more than the vaguest idea of who Saul Alinsky was; (b) subscribe to the idea that talking positively about the ideas and contributions of a writer/activist means slavish subscription to every word he or she ever uttered; and (c) have come to belief that Chicago in the 1990s or even more recently was a hellish rehearsal ground for the enslavement of America by Alinsky-inspired secular-socialists primarily operating through the marginal organizing group ACORN, which even then was planning the destruction of the U.S. housing market, the collapse of the global financial system, and the theft of the 2008 elections.

In other words, even if future installments of Breitbart’s sadly threadbare yet immensely self-important last will and testament have even more breathtaking revelations, they will be of interest only to people whose worldview is precisely the same as Andrew Breitbart’s. So by virtue of the wingnut feeback loop which lifted this man into celebrity to begin with, nothing he says from the grave will have any impact at all beyond confirming what these people already think.

Hope they enjoy their seance with Breitbart, for however long it lasts.

ThinkProgress has been able to confirm only two advertisers that are still sticking with Rush Limbaugh. One is Lear Capital, one of those peddlers of gold coins common on talk radio. The other is an identity theft protection company called Lifelock. Turns out Lifelock has a rap sheet with the FTC, having paid $12 million in 2010 to settle false claims charges. As Wired reported at the time:

The CEO of Lifelock, Todd Davis, became famous for advertising his Social Security number on television ads and billboards promising his $10 monthly service would protect consumers from identity theft.

The company also offered a $1 million guarantee to compensate customers for losses incurred if they became a victim of identity theft after signing up for the service.

But the Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday that the claims were bogus (.pdf) and accused Lifelock, based in Arizona, of operating a scam and con operation. The commission announced, along with 35 state attorneys general, that it had levied a fine of $12 million against the company for deceptive business practices and for failing to secure sensitive customer data. Of that amount, $11 million will go to refund customers who subscribed to the service. Consumers will receive a letter from the FTC and their attorney general explaining how to take part in the settlement.

The FTC said that Lifelock, which advertises itself as “#1 In Identity Theft Protection,” engaged in false advertising by promising customers that if they signed up with its service their personal information would become useless to thieves.

“In truth, the protection they provided left such a large hole … that you could drive that truck through it,” said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, referring to a Lifelock TV ad showing a truck painted with the CEO’s Social Security number driving around city streets.

While the big political feeding-frenzy will occur tomorrow, there’s plenty of chum in the water right now:

* AOL becomes eighth sponsor to pull ads from Rush Limbaugh’s show.

* Q-pac releases latest poll showing trend towards Mitt (now up 3) in Ohio.

* Krugman notes expanded government spending helped fuel recovery during St. Ronald Reagan’s first term.

* Erick Erickson sides firmly with Kochs against Ed Crane in struggle for control of Cato Institute. Surprise, surprise.

* Putin creates “paid flash-mob” of 100,000 in Red Square to celebrate his victory at polls.

* Andrew Levison comprehensively compares Rick Santorum’s views on church-state relations to Thomas Jefferson’s.

Back in just a few.

Last week brought a couple of high-prestige but conflicting national polls about the current status of the two parties heading towards the presidential general election, with Politico/GWU/Battleground confirming the conventional wisdom that Barack Obama’s maintaining or even expanding a solid margin over the GOP field but Gallup/USAToday showing Rick Santorum actually leading the incumbent.

Today brings a NBC/WSJ survey that strenghtens the case the USAT/Gallup numbers are an outlier, showing Obama leading Romney by 6 points and Santorum by 14. But what’s most interesting about this poll is its measurement of perceptions about the GOP nomination contest, as described by NBC’s Mark Murray:

Four in 10 of all adults say the GOP nominating process has given them a less favorable impression of the Republican Party, versus just slightly more than one in 10 with a more favorable opinion.

Additionally, when asked to describe the GOP nominating battle in a word or phrase, nearly 70 percent of respondents - including six in 10 independents and even more than half of Republicans - answered with a negative comment.

Some examples of these negative comments from Republicans: “Unenthusiastic,” “discouraged,” “lesser of two evils,” “painful,” “disappointed,” “poor choices,” “concerned,” “underwhelmed,” “uninspiring” and “depressed.”

You will note that “too extreme” is not one of the words that pops up (the published data as of the moment does not indicate what words were offered by non-Republicans).

read more »