I’m running late today, probably because I waded into the deep waters of southern culture in my last post. So here are some quick bites right from the pantry:

* If you want to watch grownups make very big mountains out of tiny molehills, check out the tortured attempts of conservative bloggers to turn some desultory Pew findings on social media “blocking” habits to indict liberals for intolerance.

* On a similar note, if liberals are trying to rationalize a couple of bad polls for Obama, conservatives are determined to show they are the final, definitive truth. Might as well just call off the elections, eh?

* Santorum takes quick advantage of attack by Bill Maher. I’m guessing Maher must owe him a favor.

* In other Santorum news, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley says he voted for Rick today, but that it should not be construed as an “endorsement.” Thanks a lot, Guv.

* Mike Huckabee about to compete head-to-head with Rush in new syndicated radio show.

And on the non-political front:

* Jon Hamm disses Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton.

Back to blogging shortly.

I made the argument yesterday that Alabama and Mississippi are places considered to be pretty strange even by fellow-southerners, mainly because they seem to have lingered in the Old South a lot longer than their neighbors. But having said that, it’s somewhat amusing to watch yankee candidates and pundits alike warily circling these crazy crackers trying to figure them out.

Exhibit One is my esteemed TNR colleague Alec MacGillis, who notes the universally observed unease exhibited by the GOP presidential candidates in AL and MS, and tries out some theories for why their finely honed messages might not be going over as brilliantly as they did elsewhere:

Take Santorum’s pitch for home-schooling, which may not resonate as much in a place like Mississippi. In other states, he casts home-schooling as the prerogative of parents who want to remove their children from the secular factories of the state schools. But in the South, white parents started pulling their children out of the public schools long ago—not for home-schooling but for private and parochial schools, and less because of godless teachers than because of Brown vs Board of Education. Or take Romney’s railing against what he calls Obama’s “crony capitalism”—loans for Solyndra and other favored green-tech companies. As TNR contributor Ed Kilgore pointed out during the Rick Perry boomlet, the South has long been enamored of doling out tax breaks and cash to companies who set up shop there, a form of industrial policy that is considered a-ok because it’s done by local Republicans. In this context, ideology matters less than culture and group identity, which is perhaps why both men have been reduced to making such excruciating cultural panders.

Only problem with the “they bailed out of public schools long ago” argument for the poor resonance of Santorum’s anti-public-education rap is that the numbers don’t quite back it up. As of 2007, the percentage of kids in private as opposed to public schools in Alabama and Mississippi was 11%, just under the national average for states. I’m sure the percentage is higher for white folks, and for white Republicans in particular, but that’s true in most states with a significant nonwhite population. It’s also true that public education reforms like charter schools have not been as popular in the Deep South as in other parts of the country, but nor have private school vouchers.

As for the idea that Romney can’t attack Obama on Solyndra because southerners like corporate subsidies—well, they don’t like just any old corporate subsidies, especially if they are aimed at those hippified green industries. And best as I can tell, any attack on Obama is welcome among Alabama and Mississippi Republicans. It’s certainly kosher in such places to accuse your primary rivals of being insufficiently ferocious towards Obama and other liberals—in many respects, that was the key to Newt Gingrich’s victory in South Carolina—and of being insufficiently rigorous in every detail of conservative ideology. I’ve seen GOP primaries in the Deep South fought out over minor details of anti-abortion ideology, and Lord knows there is an appetite for regressive tax schemes such as Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan.

I don’t know exactly why candidates like Romney and Santorum are engaging in what Alec calls “excrutiating cultural panders” unless they are just being poorly advised. Ronald Reagan certainly never had any problem connecting with southern conservatives, and he was as unfamiliar with the region as any of these guys.

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If Mitt Romney wins in Alabama and/or Mississippi tonight, you will hear a lot of talk about GOP elected officials in these two states supporting Mitt, Republicans voting for Mitt because they are unhappy with the extended nominating contest, and the division of the non-Romney vote between Gingrich and Santorum.

All of these could indeed be factors in a Romney win. But let’s don’t forget the role played by Mitt’s best friend, the Almighty Dollar.

The available estimates of ad investments in the two states by the campaigns (very little) and their Super-PACs (a lot) all show that Romney is again dominating the airwaves.

Bloomberg’s Greg Giroux has a roundup based on data from the media tracking outfit CMAG:

Restore Our Future, a super-PAC backing Romney, aired ads 2,098 times in Alabama through March 11, compared with 279 spots from Romney’s campaign, according to CMAG.

Winning Our Future, which supports Gingrich, aired ads 411 times in Alabama, compared with 131 ads by Gingrich’s campaign. Santorum’s campaign hasn’t aired broadcast ads in Alabama; the Red White and Blue Fund that backs him aired ads 282 times.

In Mississippi, Restore Our Future paid for 1,548 ads, compared with 454 for Winning Our Future and 300 for Red White and Blue Fund, CMAG data show. Gingrich, with 89 spots, is the only candidate who has aired broadcast ads in Mississippi.

Restore Our Future aired 65 percent of all ads in Alabama and Mississippi, CMAG data show.

For those keeping score at home, this adds up to a 4-1 pro-Romney ratio over Gingrich in Alabama, and nearly 3-1 in Mississippi. Team Romney outgunned Santorum’s Super-PAC over 7-1 in Alabama and more than 5-1 in Mississippi.

An AP estimate of ad dollars showed Romney’s Restore Our Future spending $1.42 in Alabama (supplemented by $233,000 by the campaign itself) and $973,000 in Mississippi. That compares with a combined pro-Gingrich $538,000 in AL and $250,000 in MS, with Santorum’s Super-PAC spending $275,00 in AL and $235,000 in MS.

Any way you slice it, Mitt’s message is visiting television sets a lot more often than both major opponents combined. So yeah, it wouldn’t be a big shock if he gets a third of the vote and claims victory.

If there is anyone bullish about the airline industry—or the experience of commercial air travel—these days, it’s exceedingly rare. As prices go up, service goes down, and news from the industry is a mismash of bankruptcies and mergers (or attempted mergers) that in turn become excuses for even poorer service.

But as New America Foundation’s Phillip Longman and Lina Khan argue in “Terminal Sickness,” an important new article in the March/April issue of the Monthly, it can and almost certainly will get worse, and already is worse than is generally realized for people and businesses in a variety of cities recently hit by massive merger-driven cutbacks in flights and fare hikes. The problem, they suggest, is inherent to the industry, and the solution is to reconsider the country’s thirty-year experiment in airline deregulation, which has failed.

Longman and Khan’s tale of airline woes will be familiar to most regular travelers, but you probably have to live in one of the cities like Cincinnati, St. Louis, Pittsburgh or Memphis they cite as particularly hard hit to understand how devastating airline instability can become to economic activity not directly connected to the industry. Such cities staked a lot—including vast public subsidies for airport improvements—on hub status and/or convenient and relatively inexpensive access for business travelers, only to become airline backwaters with limited and prohibitively costly flights once the industry’s merger-mania took hold.

St. Louis, for example, has seen “available seat miles”— an industry measure of capacity—fall to a third of their 2000 level, following the American Airlines takeover of TWA and Lambert International Airport’s subsequent downgrading as a mid-continental hub. Two of Lambert’s five concourses are now virtually empty, and another, which housed the TWA hub, is only partially used. A third runway—the building of which required demolishing hundreds of homes and cost local taxpayers a billion dollars to finish in 2006—is now redundant. “This scenario,” notes Alex Marshall, a senior fellow at the Regional Plan Association, “can be likened to states building highways and then having General Motors, Ford, and other auto companies suddenly telling their drivers to use different roads.”

The only beneficiaries of current trends are Wall Street speculators who have driven these structural changes. It’s time, say Longman and Kahn, to start over.

The authors of “Terminal Sickness” consider such commonly cited excuses for airline malaise as rising fuel costs and deem them less important than the built-in disconnect between the fixed costs of airline travel and the inability, without government intervention to manage cross-subsidies, to maintain adequate and affordable routes. But the shortcomings of deregulation were hidden after it was inaugurated in the 1970s by short-term fare cuts that over-sold the new policies:

What both policymakers and the public generally missed, however, was that any positive effects that occurred would be temporary, and that many of them would have occurred without deregulation. The price of energy, for example, cratered in the mid-1980s, making it possible to cut fares and even expand service on many short hauls. But that wasn’t an effect of deregulation; it was the result of a temporary world oil glut. Indeed, after adjusting for changes in energy prices, a 1990 study by the Economic Policy Institute concluded that airline fares fell more rapidly in the ten years before 1978 than they did during the subsequent decade.

A study published in the Journal of the Transportation Research Forum in 2007 confirms that the pattern continued. Except for a period after 9/11, when airlines deeply discounted fares to attract panicked customers, real air prices have fallen more slowly since the elimination of the CAB [Civil Aeoronautics Board] than before. This contrast becomes even starker if one considers the continuous decline in service quality, with more overbooked planes flying to fewer places, long waits in hub airports, the lost ability to make last-minute changes in itineraries without paying exorbitant fares, and the slow strangulation of heartland cities that don’t happen to be hubs. Moreover, most if not all of the post-deregulation price declines have been due to factors that cannot be repeated, such as the busting of airline unions, the termination of pension plans, the delayed replacement of aging aircraft, the elimination of complimentary meals and checked baggage, and, finally, the diminution of seat sizes and legroom to a point approaching the limits of human endurance. (Eliminating seats altogether, however, remains an option.)

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James Fallows, Jonathan Chait and others have done much to open our eyes to the wondrous breadth and diversity of false equivalence in American journalism—that is, the media’s insistent efforts to match any mention of egregious lying by a member of one political party with an example from the other party, no matter how mild or incomparable, in order to avoid charges of “bias.” As someone who has dabbled in this field of press criticism, I fancy myself having a pretty good eye for new varieties of the phenomenon, and, in all modesty, think I’ve discovered one.

It can be found in Richard Cohen’s Washington Post column today, entitled “Sarah Palin’s Foolishness Ruined U.S. Politics,” about the HBO movie “Game Change.” Cohen documents how the aggressive ignorance and petulant truth denial exhibited by John McCain’s 2008 running mate seems to have paved the way for similar candidates in the 2012 race, among them Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, and Rick Perry, with Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich being better informed but similarly prone to truth-defying characterizations aimed at stoking resentments. By the end of the column Cohen raises the (for him, I guess) uncomfortable fact that all of his examples come from the Republican side of the aisle. And it is here, in a feat of remarkable imagination, that Cohen deploys what I believe to be (and professionals in the field, please correct me if I’m wrong) a never-before-seen version of the genre, one that might be called the If-Not-Now-Then-Later False Equivalence:

So far, the Palin effect has been limited to the GOP. Surely, though, there lurks in the Democratic Party potential candidates who have seen Palin and taken note. Experience, knowledge, accomplishment—these no longer may matter. They will come roaring out of the left proclaiming a hatred of all things Washington, including compromise. The movie had it right. Sarah Palin changed the game.

Well played, sir.

At Salon, Steve Kornacki directly asks the question that’s rattling around the chattering classes today: what’s with Obama’s sudden plunge in the polls?

When a poll showing Barack Obama’s approval rating dropping four percent was released Monday morning, it seemed reasonable to dismiss the ensuing commotion as much ado about nothing.

After all, it was just one survey, and the president’s 46 percent approval score, while down from the 50 percent he registered in the same ABC News/Washington Post poll last month, was still basically consistent with his average approval number in other recent polls.

But when the day ended with another reputable survey finding an even more dramatic decline in Obama’s standing, it became harder to deny that something was up. A month ago, the CBS News/New York Times poll gave Obama a 50 percent approval rating - his highest mark in that poll since the spring of 2010 (not counting a one-time surge last May when Osama bin Laden was killed). But now just 41 percent approve of Obama’s job performance, with 47 percent rating it unfavorably.

That this would be happening immediately after a very good jobs report and amidst the continuing saga of the GOP nominating contest certainly seemed surprising. Could it be that Americans really do think gasoline prices are the most important issue on earth, and/or that the president has the power to get up every morning and set the pump prices at the local Chevron or QuickTrip (actually, a lot of them sorta do believe that)? And since Obama’s polling plunge extends to his head-to-head matchups with Republican challengers, do gas prices obliterate concerns about the GOP? I mean, do people think to themselves: You know, I’m so mad about gas prices jumping another ten cents this week that I’m ready to vote for Rick Santorum and build us a theocracy!

Fortunately, Kornacki offers one plausible alternative explanation that is mostly about poll timing:

Each survey began last Wednesday, with the ABC/WaPo calling voters through Saturday and CBS/NYT staying in the field through Sunday. It’s likely that neither fully measured the impact of the jobs report that came out last Friday morning, which provided the strongest evidence yet that a real recovery is afoot, even if the actual jobless rate remained at 8.3 percent. Plus, the middle of last week was filled with ominous news about Iran and the possibility of another Middle East war, highlighted by Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States.

It may be that each poll simply began reaching voters at the worst possible time for Obama, just as the news was dominated by critical commentary of his handling of a potential foreign policy crisis and before a fresh dose of positive economic data was added to the mix.

Kornacki also cites tracking poll data—more favorable to Obama at the moment—as supporting that hypothesis.

In the right-wing blogosphere, of course, Obama’s drop in the big media polls is being celebrated as decisively repudiating every pro-Obama media narrative of recent weeks, including the generally accepted (until now) feeling that Republicans really stepped into it by waging holy war on the administration’s contraception coverage mandate. As always with polls, we’ll know a lot more soon.

Mitt Romney continued his Magic Mystery Tour of the deepest South yesterday, leading into today’s primaries in Alabama and Mississippi. In a bold move, he appeared in front of one of the region’s most important microphones, particularly for the white men who dominate the GOP in these states: Paul Finebaum’s Alabama-based nationally syndicated sports radio show. He did okay initially, working in references to the Ole Miss and Alabama football programs (which not dissing their competitors) and maintaining his air of being an eager and self-deprecating student of southern culture. Then in a discussion of pro football (more particularly the fate of quarterback Peyton Manning), he did it again:

“I’m surprised to hear that Denver’s thinking about him,” Mr. Romney said. “I don’t want him in our neck of the woods, let’s put it that way.”

“I’ve got a lot of good friends, the owner of the Miami Dolphins and the New York Jets, both owners are friends of mine,” he added. “But let’s keep him away from New England.”

This certainly brings back memories of similar comments he made about his friendship with NASCAR owners during his gaffe-filled runup to the Michigan primary last month.

A lot of observers think Mitt may well bring this whole insane nomination contest to a close tonight with upset wins in Alabama and Mississippi. I’m sure that is the fervant hope of whoever is held responsible in the campaign for keeping the man on message and away from gaffes.

Don’t know about you guys, but I’m still suffering from the early time change shift. So everything today ran late, including these final notes:

* WSJ features op-ed by Allysia Finley equating contraception coverage with free coffee and fitness club memberships. Prepare for her to become conservative martyr the minute she receives richly earned mockery.

* Obama uses NCAA bracket challenge to boost campaign contact lists. Can’t see GOPers quite matching that ploy.

* Republican-controlled Virginia can’t pass budget.

* List of we-won’t-sponsor-Rush companies reaches 141.

* Steve Kornacki disputes future meme that Romney nomination will prove Republicans have gone sane.

And in political sort-of-entertainment news: Anthea Butler notes that HBO’s Game Change somehow misses Sarah Palin’s Christian Right celebrity back when godless secularists had never heard of her.

I will continue to be all over tomorrow’s Super-South primaries.

Selah.

Rick Santorum has stirred up a lot of controversy on the campaign trail with various assertions of dubious facts. But if he does managed to get himself elected president, he will have to deal with some overseas collateral damage: the offense he has given to the citizens and leaders of the Netherlands for casually suggesting that country’s liberal laws on assisted suicide have made it a hotbed of self-destruction.

Turns out Rick’s numbers are wrong, by a lot, and the GOP’s terrible image among our NATO allies got a little bit worse—just so Rick could tell conservative voters that those socialist Europeans are killing off people as fast as they can.

Democrats tend to love the idea of an extended GOP nomination contest, but the idea that the US will have to clean up after the xenophobic utterances of Republican candidates is a significant buzzkill.

It won’t get as much attention, obviously, as the presidential primary, but a downballot race in Alabama tomorrow that is of at least symbolic importance is the Republican primary for State Supreme Court Justice.

Before we get to the names and games in this race, it’s worth noting that there is no Democratic candidate for this post, or for the other High Court position on the ballot in Alabma this year. Among other things, that is a reflection of the profound success of Karl Rove’s iconic campaign back in the 1990s, in conjunction with the Big Mules of the Alabama business community, to politicize the state’s judiciary.

That drive helped make Roy Moore Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, but ultimately left him high and dry when he went off the deep end and defied federal court orders demanding that he remove a monument to the Ten Commandments from his courtroom.

A national Christian Right celebrity, Moore managed to get crushed in a 2006 challenge to incumbent GOP governor Bob Riley, and then finished a poor fourth in the 2010 GOP gubernatorial primary.

Now he’s trying to get his old judicial job back against gubernatorial appointee Chuck Malone, and former Democratic attorney general Charlie Graddick. I would guess that Malone is the favorite, but you have to figure that former celebrities Graddick (whose 1986 Democratic gubernatorial primary win, overturned because of his avid encouragenent of crossover voting, made him a Dixiecrat hero) and Moore could pull a lot of votes. And Moore, incurable reactionary that he is, has announced he will go to the polls tomorrow on horseback.

So BuzzFeed has published a batch of Mitt Romney pix that includes several of him bare-chested on various family vacations around the world. None of this is campaign-sanctioned, but you do wonder if someone in Team Romney thinks it might help him among low-information voters of both genders. It’s certainly reminiscent of the 2007 effort by NewsMax writer Ronald Kessler to convince the chattering classes that Mitt’s secret weapon in 2008 was the impression of women that he was “hot.”

You may laugh, but GOP politicians have long believed their macho messages reflected a testosterone-driven image that might achieve cross-gender appeal with some visual images of chest-hair. This weekend I acquired and started reading Greg Mitchell’s fine history of the 1950 California Senate race, entitled Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady, and learned that Nixon’s backers in his early political career were eager to get photos circulating of their hero shirtless on Navy duty in the South Pacific.

If Richard Nixon was “hot,” then cool Mormon Mitt Romney is definitely smokin.’ And I don’t mean tobacco!

I’d be remiss in not taking notice of the reaction of my much-esteemed founding forefather at Poltical Animal, Kevin Drum, to the Monthly’s March-April cover package. If you read his entire post on the subject, it becomes clear Kevin agrees with Paul Glastris’ basic contention that, as his own title indicates, “Barack Obama’s Had a Pretty Damn Good Presidency.” But he gets a little grumpy about the cover art (a scaffolding over an incomplete carving of Obama on Mt. Rushmore) and the “Top 50 accomplishments” list that accompanies Glastris’ cover story.

Personally, I’m agnostic about the cover art. I spent a good part of my life living near a huge mountain sculpture featuring Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, so perhaps I am less astringent in my views of what merits this sort of tribute. I think it would be fabulous if Obama’s image was added to Stone Mountain, a place where the Ku Klux Klan used to hold regular cross-burning ceremonies, though it’s not clear whether the 44th president would ride next to David, Lee, Jackson on a horse or in a Chevy Volt.

As for the Top 50 list—sure, Kevin is right that you make it shorter. Indeed, the Monthly has done that too in a slide show whittling the list down to 25 accomplishments.

But that’s all a bit of a crapshoot. It’s too early to know which successfully enacted initiative will matter a lot and which won’t; indeed, a major theme of Paul’s cover article is that rating Obama’s ultimate accomplishments depends a whole lot on what happens this November.

So the task of figuring out where Obama stands among American presidents, like his presidency itself, remains a work in progress.

As a former (and very occasionally current) political speechwriter, I must protest Rick Santorum’s job-killing, discriminatory remarks against the time-honored craft, as reported by CNN’s Chris Welch:

Republican Rick Santorum has for quite a while taken issue with candidates on the trail who use a teleprompter. It’s a dig on President Barack Obama, and more recently has been used to attack Mitt Romney - a man who’s also been known to use a prompter or two.

But campaigning along the Gulf Coast in the Tuesday primary state of Mississippi, Santorum took it a step further, saying use of the digital word machine should be outlawed.

“See, I always believed that when you run for president of the United States, it should be illegal to read off a teleprompter,” Santorum said at a Gulfport restaurant. “Because all you’re doing is reading someone else’s words to people.”

He continued to elaborate on why he believes prompters should have no place in politics, saying that people should know that a candidate’s words haven’t been “focus-grouped” and that the words are the candidate’s - not those of “pollsters and speechwriters.”

So by this logic, not only teleprompters should be outlawed, but speechwriters and message consultants, too!

Now it would be very surprising if Rick Santorum has never employed the services of a speechwriter (or someone on his staff who contributes to speech copy), or used a poll- or focus-group tested phrase. But beyond the possible hypocrisy, he’s really, really playing with fire here. He should be aware that in criticizing any and all pols who don’t strictly use their own words he is not just dissing Obama (one of the least speechwriter-dependent of recent presidents, it appears to me) and Romney, but most federal and statewide elected officials in both parties, going back for decades. My God, St. Ronald Reagan had his famous index cards, a low-tech version of the ‘prompter! And Rick is implicitly saying that St. Ronald’s celebrity speechwriter, Peggy Noonan, should have been hunted down, arrested and jailed.

Even if you strictly construe Santorum’s words, it will give a major case of the willies to the people who are even now planning the Republican National Convention. As someone who has worked at the last six Democratic conventions, I can tell you that virtually no one (the only exceptions I’m aware of at Democratic events since 1988 have been Jimmy Carter and Al Sharpton) is allowed near the podium at a national convention without speech text being loaded on a teleprompter. It is how message discipline is ensured. I’d be shocked if the same or even stricter rules aren’t employed by the Daddy Party.

Perhaps Rick’s motto in this respect is “Extremism in the Defense of Liberty Is No Vice.” Oops, that line was written for Barry Goldwater by speechwriter Karl Hess! Is nothing sacred?

I know many of you will spend your lunch break beginning to fill out your NCAA brackets, but for everyone else, here are some quick reads:

* Jeff Foxworthy campaigning with Mitt Romney in Mississippi and Alabama today. You might be a Moderate-Mormon-Yankee if you need this, Mitt.

* Justice Department refuses preclearance for Texas voter ID law (as it did with South Carolina’s in December). It all goes to court now.

* Blago goes to the Big House.

* Wish nobody had asked: Gingrich camp denies reports it’s trying to pre-arrange Newt-Perry ticket.

* Quandry for Religious Right Activists: where to focus your outrage? Gary Trudeau’s ultrasound series or GCB?

Back shortly; I’m delaying my brackets until Wednesday.