Man, Public Policy Polling has poured Mitt Romney a bottomless cup of woe today. In addition to its poll showing Mitt way down in Colorado, PPP has another survey showing him in trouble in what should have been his easiest battleground state, North Carolina:

Obama now leads Romney by 5 points in North Carolina, 49-44. That’s the largest lead we’ve found for him in monthly polling dating back to November of 2010. Obama has a 51-38 advantage with independents and is particularly strong with women (54-39), African Americans (90-7), voters under 30 (61-33), and folks in the Triangle (60-33).

But that’s hardly the worst of it for Romney:

The Republican nomination process has taken a huge toll on Romney’s image in North Carolina. In February of 2011 voters in the state were almost evenly divided on him with 37% rating him favorably to 39% who had a negative opinion of him. Now that spread is a dreadful 29/58. His numbers with GOP voters are about where they’ve been, but he’s seen a considerable drop in his appeal to Democrats and independents.

He was actually popular with independents at 45/36 last winter, now he is incredibly unpopular at 25/62. And what was once a decent amount of crossover appeal to Democrats with 23% seeing him favorably to 52% with a negative opinion is now a 12/77 spread. Romney may see some improvement in his numbers as conservative leaning voters start to unify around him, but for now they’re pretty dreadful.

North Carolina is one of those states whose primary suddenly became irrelevant yesterday when Rick Santorum pulled the plug on his campaign. While that was very good news for Mitt, it does appear he might could have used the extra time gripping and grinning in the Tar Heel State.

This news has not gotten nearly the attention it deserves (via the Christian Science Monitor):

While the loud immigration controversy of recent years - with walls erected and sheriffs planning anti-immigrant armies - got the headlines, the powerful migration shift went on largely unnoticed….

At the macroeconomic level, Douglas Massey, founder of the Mexican Migration Project at Princeton University, has documented what he calls “net zero” migration. The population of undocumented immigrants in the US fell from 12 million to approximately 11 million during the height of the financial crisis (2008-09), he says. And since then, Mexicans without documents aren’t migrating at rates to replace the loss, creating a net zero balance for the first time in 50 years.

Now you can argue back and forth all you want about why this has happened: the U.S. recession, relatively strong economic growth in Mexico, or the discouragement of immigration, legal and illegal, by the United States and the federal government.

But we should be able to agree that it’s time for anti-immigrant hysteria among conservatives to end. We’re not being overrun by undocumented workers and their families. We still have to figure out what to do with those who remain, and ask ourselves if cattle cars or “self-deportation” are superior to assimilation and an earned path to citizenship.

To those who say anti-immigrant animus isn’t the big deal in conservative politics that it used to be, I’d reply: tell that to Rick Perry, whose campaign succumbed to it, or Mitt Romney, who used it to dispose of what in retrospect may have been the most formidable challenge to his nomination.

The whole “Obama’s War on Women” meme that the entire hep conservative world is now grinding away at like cicadas is pretty threadbare. The statistical illusion deployed in claiming that “92.3% of job losses under Obama were lost by women” is extremely easy to expose, as is the underlying reality that unemployment for women is about the same as it was when Obama took office. There’s also the peril in focusing on recent job losses by women that are heavily concentrated in the teaching profession, given the responsibiity of state-level Republicans for a vast number of teacher layoffs, and the congressional GOP’s responsibility for blocking Obama efforts to counteract them with federal funds.

On top of everything else, this hammerheaded effort to hold Obama responsible for every bad thing that’s occurred from the moment he took office cuts against the Romney campaign’s recent efforts to come up with a more nuanced and credible take on a slowly recovering economy.

But I can understand how they’ve wound up deploying this tactic. Polls are indeed showing a major expansion of the gender gap. Conservative efforts to pretend the nationwide GOP drive against reproductive rights, women’s health care options, and equal pay laws isn’t really happening have largely failed. Meanwhile, the most recent monthly jobs report, while disappointing to Democrats, isn’t an easy target, either (“Obama not creating new jobs as fast as economists predicted the day before” won’t fit on anybody’s bumper sticker). If nothing else, the “Obamas war on women” jive is some chum they can throw into the political waters until Republicans figure out what they really want to say and do. Maybe enough right-wing and MSM news outlets will repeat the distorted numbers that they will stick somewhere in the swing-voter subconscience. But above all, Romney and Republicans are going with what they’ve got, and that ain’t much at the moment.

WaPo’s Sari Horwitz is reporting that Florida Special Prosecutor Angela Corey is going to announce, possibly as early as today, that George Zimmerman will face state criminal charges for the killing of Trayvon Martin. It’s not clear yet, however, what the charges will be.

Earlier John Schwarz of the New York Times explained some of the dilemmas facing Corey:

When deciding how to proceed with a criminal case, prosecutors must decide whether to seek the toughest possible charges, said Gabriel J. Chin, a professor at the University of California, Davis, School of Law. “There is a tradition of ‘charging high’ and letting the jury decide,” he said, but that strategy has its risks.

“You don’t want to make an opening statement to the jury where you hurt your credibility,” Professor Chin said, by seeming to impute motives to a defendant without being able to prove them. “If you end up overreaching, you could wind up with nothing.”

There’s a separate federal investigation going on, but one involving not murder or manslaughter, but violation of Martin’s civil rights:

The federal investigation is being run by the department’s civil rights division, and involves the United States attorney’s office for the Middle District of Florida and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. While a separate trial on charges of violating civil rights is a possibility, “the government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a person acted intentionally and with the specific intent to do something which the law forbids,” Ms. Hinojosa said. A prosecution could not be based on a finding that negligence, recklessness, a mistake or an accident was involved.

In any event, pretrial publicity is going to create a nightmare when it comes to jury selection:

If the case does proceed to a state trial, the road ahead will be rough because of the media spotlight, said Craig Watkins, the district attorney for Dallas County, Tex. One of the toughest challenges of prosecuting high-profile cases, he said, is that so many of the early moves show up in public before the trial begins, which can endanger fairness at trial.

Mr. Watkins said: “It’s like the O. J. Simpson case all over again. Where are you going to find a jury pool that is unbiased and hasn’t heard anything about the case?”

“The O.J. Simpson case all over again.” I think that’s what we’ve all been fearing.

Having been hit with a random stomach disorder overnight, I’m off my feed today. But no reason you shouldn’t snack:

* Chris Christie catches a few Zs during Springsteen concert.

* National Review has to drop another writer for racism: this time Robert Weissberg, who’s cozy with white nationalists. Might as well clean out the stables and do a mass dismissal, Rich.

* Boehner and McConnell warn against “midnight regulations” if Obama loses election. Getting a little ahead of ourselves, aren’t we?

* At College Guide, Daniel Luzer looks at closing of National Labor College facility.

* Tennessee “monkey bill” protecting anti-evolution teachers becomes law without signature of Gov. Bill Haslam.

And in non-political news:

* Hunger Games making early mark on baby names.

Back after a brief non-WaMo writing break. No rest for the weary.

At about this time in nearly every presidential cycle, you start hearing that Jews are going to leave the Democratic column in significant numbers either because a Democratic administration is insufficiently supportive of Israel or a Republican administration is all warm and cozy with Israeli leaders. Yes, there have been a couple of fairly recent presidential elections where the Jewish vote moved significantly: the 1980 cycle, when Jewish unhappiness (on both domestic and international issues) with Jimmy Carter held him to an extraordinarily low 45% of the Jewish vote (still more than Ronald Reagan, but with major defections to third-party candidate John Anderson), and the 1992 cycle, when Jewish unhappiness (on both domestic and internation issues) with George H.W. Bush held the incumbent to a mere 11% of that vote. By and large, though, the Jewish vote has been reasonably stable, with Democrats typically winning two-thirds to three-fourths of it.

And that’s how it looks in 2012, notes the distinguished Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg at TAP, drawing from a new survey by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute. PRRI shows 62% of Jewish voters expressing support for President Obama’s re-election as opposed to 30% preferring a “generic” Republican. Generic GOPers have typically done better than actual candidates in polls this cycle, of course, and in addition, PRRI notes this split in sentiment is very similar to what it found at this point in the last cycle, where Obama ultimately won 78% of the Jewish vote.

Aside from the questionable nature of the quadrennial predictions of major Jewish defections to the GOP, related mythmaking involves the belief that American Jews are closely attuned to Israeli attitudes towards U.S. politics, or for that matter, vote primarily on Middle Eastern issues. That’s far from the truth, notes Gorenberg:

If Obama does lose some Jewish support, Israel won’t be the reason. Only 4 percent of PRRI’s respondents listed Israel as the most important issue for them in the election, and only another 5 percent listed it in second place. Some of those were already in the Republican camp, perhaps most. Anyone who is terribly impressed that Mitt Romney and Benjamin Netanyahu are old friends from their days as apprentice robber barons was not a likely an Obama voter to begin with.

Gorenberg does not specifically say this, but my own strong impression is that GOP solidarity with the Israeli Right is designed less to appeal to Jews than to conservative evangelical Christians. And the price Republicans pay for their close attention to that constituency when it comes to Jewish support is palpable:

If the GOP is even less popular among Jews than it was a generation ago, the reason is apparent: The party has become ever more rigid and homogenous in its economic and social conservatism, and its tests of ideological purity send none-too-coded messages to Jewish voters.

The party’s anti-abortion stance is not only an attack on reproductive freedom; it is an obvious demand to base law and policy on the beliefs of conservative Protestants and Catholics about when life begins. It broadcasts disdain for a religion-neutral polity. The party’s nativist orthodoxy toward immigration projects fear of difference, of anyone outside a narrowly defined “us.” Opposition to same-sex marriage encodes both messages at once. These are not messages designed to attract Jewish voters. Jewish comfort and safety in America—unique in Jewish history—rest upon cultural openness and religious neutrality.

Unlike conservative evangelicals and some “traditionalist” Catholics, Jews don’t tend to think of “religious neutrality” as including broad public policy concessions to religious leaders nestled in Christian nationalist rhetoric. Whatever gains Republicans might make among Jewish voters unhappy with the economy, disappointed by Obama, or anxious about Israel are probably capped and at least partially offset by GOP solidarity with the Christian Right, who may be tactical allies in supporting Israel but are ancient enemies in every other respect.

He didn’t say he had a list in his hand, but the man whose name is on many lips as a fine running-mate option for Mitt Romney, Rep. Allen West (R-FL), responded to a question about the number of congressional Democrats who were card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA by allowing as how it was a “really good question,” and that he’s heard there are “70 to 80” of the dirty Reds.

We hope West will be pressed to name names and perhaps find some video or audio of a House Democratic Caucus meeting that begins with this anthem:

One of the key strategic decisions facing the Obama campaign now that Mitt Romney has completely nailed down the GOP nomination is whether to go after him as too conservative for the country, or as a slippery flip-flopper who might do anything. The former is a tried-and-true tactic that exploits the unusual ideological militancy afflicting the GOP this year and takes advantage of Romney’s many efforts to placate “true conservatives.” The latter approach has the advantage of reinforcing conservative doubts about Romney—which are still fresh in everyone’s memory, of course—and also casting doubt on Mitt’s character, like the GOP’s “flip-flop” campaign against John Kerry in 2004.

The first sign from Team Obama squarely takes the “he’s too conservative” tack:

From the Obama campaign, CNN reports:

“Expect us to keep holding Romney accountable for the positions he committed to during the primary. There will be no Etch A Sketch opportunities this year,” Obama campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt said.

This is, of course, just a web video, and distribution of it can be targeted to people most likely to be offended by Romney’s pander-fest to the Right (including potential Obama-Biden donors). It by no means precludes different attack lines later, including the flip-flop charge. But it’s an interesting sign of the Obama campaign’s current thinking.

Two items in the news really do provide for an interesting contrast. On the one hand, Politico’s Alexander Burns reports that it’s a big development that Brian Brown, president of the virulently anti-same-sex-marriage group the National Organization for Marriage, is now signalling the group will endorse Mitt Romney.

Says Burns:

[O]ne of the most urgent tasks facing Romney is consolidating support among social conservatives and somehow getting them excited about his nomination. While he may have a ways to go in terms of firing up the base, it’s a welcome development for Romney that a group like NOM is already prepared to get on board with him publicly, and that an activist like Brown is forcefully making the case that an Obama-Romney race demands intense engagement from cultural conservatives.

The timing of this acquisition of support by Romney may be less than ideal, however. NOM has been in all sorts of hot water over leaked documents revealing a cynical strategy to “wedge” racial minorities from supporters of same-sex marriage. Just today, the NOM web site and Twitter feed started featuring apologetic messages about the strategy and other NOM practices; it could be a sign of internal dissension or just of a hacker. The NOM site is currently “down for maintenance.”

Not sure the U.S.S. Mitt really wants to be boarded by sailors from this plague ship at this particular moment.

Angela Corey, the special prosecutor in the Trayvon Martin case has indicated she’ll be holding a press conference no later than Friday to “release new information” on the case. That is being widely assumed to involve a statement as to whether her plans include the arrest of George Zimmerman. If the press conference turns out to be nothing more than a progress report on the investigation, it could be nearly as dangerous in the tinderbox created by the whole case as a formal decision not to prosecture. I hope Corey understands that.

Team Romney is walking tall today’s after Rick Santorum’s withdrawal from the presidenetial race. But a new Public Policy Polling survey of Colorado, high on everyone’s “battleground state” list, shows the problem Romney faces going forward in dealing with intraparty and general election challenges.

Colorado was one of several swing and even traditionally red states that President Obama flipped in 2008—and if his re-election bid were decided today, there would be no looking back. He would actually defeat likely Republican nominee Mitt Romney by an even larger margin than he did John McCain four years ago. McCain lost by nine points in the Centennial State, and Romney trails by 13 in PPP’s latest poll.

Obama’s 53-40 lead over Romney here is up 11 points from only a two-point edge when PPP last polled the state only four months ago.

The story in Colorado is the same as everywhere: the president has seen his popularity rise in the last few months, while the dragging GOP primary contest has sunk their candidates’ personal numbers. Romney’s favorability rating is still the best of the Republicans’ except Paul’s, but he sits at 31% favorable and 60% unfavorable, down from 35-53 in the previous poll. Meanwhile, 50% approve and 47% disapprove of Obama’s job performance, up eight points on the margin from early December (45-50).

Looking at the crosstabs makes it clear Romney can’t just spend the next few months tending to the tender feelings of party conservatives who supported one of his rivals (Rick Santorum beat him in the CO caucuses in February). Romney’s approval/disapproval ratio among self-identified “very conservative” voters is 45/35, which shows significant room for likely improvement as the general election gets nearer. But his 31/61 ratio among self-identified moderates is a bigger problem that won’t just solve itself. Meanwhile, any efforts to deal with the former group of voters could make it harder to appeal to the other.

Similarly, PPP shows Romney with a mediocre 56/36 favorable/unfavorable ratio among Republicans. That will improve. But he’s at 25/65 among independents, which is, in a word, disastrous.

Mitt’s got his work cut out for him. And he’s not the sort of guy who’s going to make up ground on the sheer force of his personality.

Tuesdays without primaries feel strange. But there was plenty going on, including these final items:

* At College Guide, Daniel Luzer discusses a new Demos study showing long term trend of public disinvestment in public universities, with students and their parents taking up the slack, most through debt.

* Dean Baker, Jared Bernstein, and Paul Krugman all tear Robert Samuelson a new one over latest “entitement reform” op-ed.

* Despite Santorum’s withdrawal, Ron Paul not going anywhere right away.

* George Zimmerman’s lawyers announce they’ve withdrawn from his case, say he’s talking to Sean Hannity.

* Matt Yglesias compares vast size of mortgage interest deduction to low-income housing subsidies.

And in non-political news:

* Sales of Madonna’s new album plunge 88% in a week.

Have to write column tonight summing up greater meaning of Santorum campaign. Wish me luck!

Selah.

Gawker has published an amusing column by someone claiming to be a gen-u-wine mole at Fox News. Well, that should keep the paranoia level nicely high in Fair-and-Balanced Land, eh?

I can pretty much take or leave the mole’s revelations, such as Sean Hannity’s practice of changing ties mid-interview when the network is going to run a piece on two separate days.

But there was one interesting passage in the column, when the mole disclosed what had pushed him or her over the edge into moledom:

The final straw for me came last year. Oddly, it wasn’t anything on TV that turned me rogue, though plenty of things on our air had pushed me in that direction over the years. But what finally broke me was a story on The Fox Nation. If you’re not a frequenter of Fox Nation (and if you’re reading Gawker, it’s a pretty safe bet you’re not) I can describe it for you — it’s like an unholy mashup of the Drudge Report, the Huffington Post and a Klan meeting. Word around the office is that the site was actually the brainchild of Bill O’Reilly’s chief stalker (and Gawker pal) Jesse Watters.

The [Fox] Nation aggregates news stories, gives them provocative headlines, and invites commenters to weigh in. The comments are fascinating actually, if you can detach yourself enough to view them as sort of the id of the conservative movement. Of course, if you can’t detach yourself, then you’re going to come away with a diminished view of human decency, because HOLY MOLY THESE PEOPLE DO NOT LIKE THE BLACK PRESIDENT. I’m not saying they dislike him BECAUSE he’s black, but a lot of the comments, unprompted, mention the fact that he is black, so what would you say, Dr. Freud?….

The post that broke the camel’s back might be familiar to some of you, because it garnered a lot of attention and (well-deserved) ridicule when it hit last August. The item was aggregating several news sources that were reporting innocuously on President Obama’s 50th birthday party, which was attended by the usual mix of White House staffers, DC politicos and Dem-friendly celebs. The Fox Nation, naturally, chose to illustrate the story with a photo montage of Obama, Charles Barkley, Chris Rock, and Jay Z, and the headline “Obama’s Hip Hop BBQ Didn’t Create Jobs.”

The post neatly summed up everything that had been troubling me about my employer: Non sequitur, ad hominem attacks on the president; gleeful race baiting; a willful disregard for facts; and so on.

The mole goes on to describe the Fox Nation site as “the seedy underbelly of the Fox news online empire.” That’s interesting, since you’d think Fox’s main meals would be sufficiently red-meaty to avoid the necessity of a separate greasy spoon for downscale tastes. But then I don’t know how much they fear competition from NewsMax.

So Paul Ryan claims there are “a dozen” Democrats in Congress who secretly support his budget proposals, but fear to say so because they’d get “killed.”

Wonder how many Republicans there are in Congress who secretly oppose Ryan’s budget—if only because it’s so politically risky—but fear to say so because they would most definitely get “killed” by the commissars of conservative orthodoxy? Bet it’s a lot more than a dozen.

But speaking of secrets: Ryan also says he just can’t understand why his “tax reform” ideas can’t draw bipartisan support:

“Why don’t we stop subsidizing the wealthy, why don’t we stop subsidizing corporations, why don’t we stop corporate welfare?” he asked. “There is an area I think we can get consensus on.”

Gee, Paul, if you’d just bother to actually spell out your tax reform ideas in public, that could happen! Or are you afraid you’d get “killed?”