Time for some more funk metal: here’s Living Colour performing “Cult of Personality” on Arsenio Hall’s show circa 1989.

Have to confess I am still angry about Romney’s welfare ad and the mendacity and hatefulness it reflects, but two posts a day on this one topic are probably enough, so I’ll await the next development. Here are some remains of the day:

* I knew Romney was aligning himself with the Israeli Right, but this is ridiculous: Buzzfeed’s Zeke Miller reports Mitt attacked the Kibbutz movement at a Chicago fundraiser.

* If the Georgia transportation sales tax referenda I wrote about briefly here interests you, I’ve got a long take up at the TNR site, emphasizing the national implications.

* At Ten Miles Square, Aaron Carroll demolishes bad-faith attacks on Medicaid.

* At College Guide, Daniel Luzer mulls the demise of Summer Pell Grants.

* PPP has new polling showing Obama still ahead in NC and CO.

And in non-political news:

* Some thoughts on the relationship of college football and television, via my favorite sports blogger.

We’ll have Missouri Primary results in the morning, along with whatever fresh horror the campaign advertising world offers.

Selah.

For what it is worth, Fox News’ Chris Stirewalt makes a very convincing case for the proposition that Mitt Romney will wait until the last possible moment to announce his running-mate:

Mitt Romney has 18 days in which to announce his choice of his running mate, and you can bet he’s going to milk as much from the topic as is humanly possible. So what’s the advantage in stopping the fun early?

Romney is prepared to tantalize the press pool with another round of house calls on top-tier contenders starting Saturday as he takes bus tours through Virginia (Gov. Bob McDonnell), Florida (Sen. Marco Rubio) and Ohio (Sen. Rob Portman).

The idea here is to ramp up the speculation to the most furious levels possible - to get reporters and Republicans totally immersed in the quadrennial parlor game of running-mate speculation.

For months, Team Romney has hinted that the running mate announcement would come early so as to create more buzz and give the duo more time to campaign ahead of the convention. But does that really make sense?

Nope. As is often the case, the value of Veep speculation exceeds the value of an actual Veep, particularly if you are Mitt Romney and you are likely to settle on someone very unexciting, and particularly if your media coverage has been a mite negative lately:

If Romney were to announce that he were picking McDonnell at a rally in Manassas, Va. on Saturday, that would leave more than two weeks before Republicans convene in Tampa. That’s plenty of time in the modern media blender for the excitement to be all gone and the discussion be back on Romney’s 1040 forms or a media dissection of Romney’s handling of the media.

Plus, it would give the press corps and the Obama campaign more than two weeks to splurp out all of the juicy tidbits for any running mate’s past. By the time he took the stage on Aug. 29, the story could be about McDonnell’s graduate dissertation on gender roles in the family, rather than the speech itself.

Translating Stirewalt’s analysis from the original Foxspeak, Mitt’s on the defensive, has nothing much positive to offer, and is unlikely to choose a running-mate who creates a buzz or defies criticism and scrutiny. So why not milk the distractions involved in the Veep guessing-game as long as possible, and then bury the inevitable letdown and any negative press about The Choice in the deep sands of Convention Coverage?

Makes sense to me.

In case any Republicans are talking themselves to sleep at night with the hope that no matter what happens in the next few weeks, Team Romney will sail to victory on a sea of Super-PAc New Yorker’s John Cassidy offers a good reminder of past moneybags that eventually poured vast sums down the rathole of bitter defeat:

Rove and Stuart Stevens, the sometime novelist and bon vivant who is Romney’s campaign manager, may be hoping that they can spend their way to victory, burying President Obama under an avalanche of negative ads, but in their heart of hearts they know they can’t. In today’s politics, money is a necessary condition for success, but it’s by no means sufficient. From Steve Forbes in 1996 to Meg Whitman in 2010 and Rick Perry last year, the political landscape is littered with the detritus of well-funded campaigns that self-destructed because the candidate wasn’t up to it, the opposition was too strong, or the objective conditions were unfavorable.

That’s even more to the point given the political-science consensus that paid media probably have less impact on presidential general elections than most any other contests (thanks to the vast quantity of “earned media” on the table, and the universal name recognition already achieved by any major-party nominee).

After recommending some highly unlikely game-changing running-mates, Cassidy argues it all boils down to Mitt finding some way to “establish some sort of bond with the public.” Consider all the unusual aspects of Romney’s life and personality, and the rather alarming fact that he doesn’t want to talk about his own record of governing or his agenda for the future, and you have to say: Good luck with that! It’s all the more reason we can count on Romney and his moneyed backers to go negative with a true vengeance down the stretch.
They don’t have much of a positive story to tell, even with the best and most expensive ads. The fact that history shows that usually doesn’t work doesn’t much matter: you play the hand you are dealt.

Sarah Palin may wax and wane as a significant figure in national politics. But there’s no one quite like her to rouse the passions of The Base, so it’s with interest that I read about her appearances in Missouri leading up today’s primary.

Palin’s candidate in the three-way I’m-more-conservative-than-you slugfest of a GOP Senate primary is, unsurprisingly, Sarah Steelman, the fellow-Mama-Grizzly and former State Treasurer who has been lagging a bit in late polls.

This account at WaPo from Missouri-based freelance journalist Diana Reese of an appearance by Palin over the weekend hits a lot of old familiar notes for aficionados of La Pasionaria of the Permafrost:

Palin started her speech with a comment about the Missouri’s state flag, which does indeed feature three grizzly bears, representing the strength and bravery of the state’s citizens. Whether any of the grizzly bears is female, however, is open to debate.

But when Palin talked about Steelman, at age 18, working on Ronald Reagan’s campaign in 1976, the former Alaska governor turned to her and said, “You couldn’t have been 18, you must’ve been 2…what a hot mama grizzly you have!”….

Later, referring again to Reagan’s 1976 campaign, Palin said, “Back when Sarah and I were itty bitty babies.”

Ursine shout-outs and dubiously tasteful references to “hotness” aside, Palin’s redundant references to the spirit of 1976 was a big nod to the inside-baseball belief of movement conservative types that people who didn’t back Reagan for president until 1980 were front-runners and parvenus. ‘76 was the good, pure, raw ideological campaign against a sitting Republican president. So Steelman was on board back before hard-core conservatism was cool.

Here’s more from Reese:

The tea party’s mantra of cutting spending and limiting the power of the federal government struck a chord with the audience, but never did the subject of jobs and job creation (my personal obsession) come up.

Instead, Palin reiterated Steelman’s slogan: “The status quo has got to go.”

She said Steelman was not heading to Washington to get invited to “frou-frou chi-chi D.C. cocktail parties.” Instead, she wants to “save our country’s economy and God-given freedoms” while protecting “the sanctity of human life.”

Stands to reason. People like Palin may exploit a poor economy or budgetary red-ink to make their case, but it’s never really about some ephemeral issue like job creation or the budget: it’s the Eternal Cause of getting rid of the New Deal and Great Society and such horrors as legalized abortion that makes the heart race.

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I have to admit, if not admire, the superficial cleverness of the Romney attack on Obama’s welfare policies. Republicans may have very well set the administration up for this by asking for more state flexibility in administering work requirements with every intention of blasting them if they granted it (as Alec Macgillis suggested in a tweet today). It’s a complex law that’s incredibly easy to demagogue.

Most importantly, it places the Meta-Message of the entire conservative assault on Barack Obama—that he wants to loot good virtuous working folk of their hard-earned tax dollars to pay those people—you know who they are—loaf and steal and make babies and even take out mortgages they have zero attention of paying—on a stronger footing. Up until now Republicans were basically using the old “welfare queen” meme on the working poor, the “lucky duckies” who were receiving refundable EITC credits and would benefit from the Affordable Care Act because they don’t currently qualify for Medicaid. But because they were working (or at least trying to work), they were more sympathetic figures than the old pre-1996 “welfare class.” The purpose of the ad and the highly contrived argument it makes is to bring back the good old days of blatant race-baiting aimed at people who often don’t even vote.

The other meme the ad reinforces is that Obama is stealthily unraveling the “centrist” policies of Bill Clinton, and dragging the Democratic Party back to the bad old days of unreconstructed paleoliberalism. It’s no mistake it features a photo of Clinton signing the 1996 welfare reform law.

But Team Romney is leaving itself a bit vulnerable by going there, because Bill Clinton is very much alive and well and has a somewhat better idea of what he was trying to accomplish in 1996 and throughout his presidency than members of the party who tried to force him out of office and hated him almost as much as they hate Obama.

So if I were advising the president, I’d get the 42d occupant of the White House out there post-haste to rebut the lies and expose their intent. Nobody, but nobody knows the details of welfare policy quite like Bill Clinton (I still have a copy of a PPI policy paper on the subject that he marked up acutely). Nobody remembers quite like him how uninterested most Republicans actually were in encouraging work—as opposed to punishing the poor and saving the federal government and the states money (he described one of the GOP welfare reform bills as “tough on kids, weak on work” before he vetoed it). If nothing else, it would discourage Romney’s campaign from ever again pretending he’s more like Clinton than Clinton’s Democratic successor.

I need to apologize for the late start today. I got a new phone day before yesterday, and have clearly failed to master its alarm clock function (I did select the alarm tone that plays the first chords of Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man,” but did not succeed in turning it on). Gotta say it’s strange to have a job where you feel like a total slacker for sleeping until 6:30 a.m., but that’s the price to pay for my glorious California surroundings, eh?

In any event, I think we’re caught up (with some fine help from Blue Girl), so here are some midday treats:

* Speaking of slackers: WaPo’s Richard Cohen, fresh from going nuclear on Harry Reid, backs up Mitt on “cultural differences” claim re Israelis and Palestinians.

* Sandra Fluke to introduce Obama at campaign stop in Denver. Colorado wingnuts will go wild over this one.

* Fact-checker solidarity: WaPo’s Kessler gives Harry Reid four Pinnochios for tax attack on Mitt.

* Rafalca fails to make Olympics dressage finals. So Romneys officially leave London without any laurels for sports or politics.

* “Romney Hood” rolls off tongue a little easier than “ObamneyCare,” wouldn’t you say?

* And in non-political news:

* Amish population in North America expected to reach a million by 2050. Who knew?

Back shortly. But since I’m mentioned it….

It must be interesting to be Matt Drudge, with the power and the amorality to create big media “stories” at the flick of a mouse, and with no limitations other than serving the ultimate aims of his corporate and partisan overlords.

You may recall that its was Drudge who launched the “Condi Boom” a while back when the Romney campaign needed a major distraction from its Bain-and-tax problems. It was, of course, total BS. But it looks downright Delphic compared to Matt’s latest number: the claim that a boom is a-borning for the Veep selection of David Petraeus. What makes this particular skinless-trial-balloon fascinating is that Drudge attributes the rumor to none other than Barack Obama! No, seriously:

President Obama whispered to a top fundraiser this week that he believes GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney wants to name Gen. David Petraeus to the VP slot!

“The president wasn’t joking,” the insider explains to the DRUDGE REPORT.

A Petraeus drama has been quietly building behind the scenes.

Romney is believed to have secretly met with the four-star general in New Hampshire.

The pick could be a shrewd Romney choice. A cross-party pull. The Obama administration hailed Petraeus as one of history’s greatest military strategists. Petraeus was unanimously confirmed as the Director of the CIA by the US Senate 94-0.

But Petraeus has categorically asserted that he has NO political ambitions. And Team Obama stands prepared to tie one of their own to “Bush wars.” A Petraeus pick could been seen as simply shuffling the decks of power in DC.

“He’s a serious man, for seriously dangerous times,” notes a top Republican.

A DRUDGE POLL on Tuesday morning showed readers split on if Romney should give it a go.

I just love it that the man throws out this preposterous claim, debates it, and then polls readers on it, all in a brisk morning’s work.

I have no particular idea why Drudge’s masters in Boston are encouraging this speculation, other than to keep interest lively in a decision that will likely settle on such vanilla acceptable-to-wingnuts placeholders as TPaw, Portman or Thune. Do they think it’s some sort of clever feint to suggest that a campaign psychotically focused on the proposition that voters should only think about the economy (and in cases of undecided white voters, maybe about those people Obama wants to reward with welfare money) would add someone to the ticket with zero experience in domestic government or “job-creating” either? Beats me. Maybe Drudge has finally descended to self-parody.

At first it was just a buzz from right-wing think tanks (particularly Heritage’s Robert Rector, who has long been the Darth Vader of poverty policy) and blogs, and a few conservative pols, but it’s sure gone Big-Time now: the claim that the Obama administration is “gutting” the 1996 welfare reform law is the subject of Mitt Romney’s latest ad, and looks like it will be featured in his speeches as well.

This is kind of personal with me. I worked on welfare policy back in the 90s at the Progressive Policy Institute, which was the absolute hotbed of “work first” approaches to welfare reform. Indeed, we were about the only people in the non-technical chattering classes who seemed to understand the distinction between the Clinton administration’s philosophy of welfare reform (aimed at getting welfare recipients into private-sector jobs, not just through work requirements but with robust “making work pay” supports like an expanded EITC, which was enacted at Clinton’s insistence well before welfare reform) and that of congressional Republicans (House Republicans were mainly concerned about punishing illegitimacy and denying assistance to legal immigrants, while Senate Republicans enacted a bill that was just a straight block grant that let states do whatever they wanted so long as they saved the feds money).

I mention this ancient history to point out the rich irony of conservatives now attacking Obama for an alleged hostility to the private-sector job placement emphasis they never gave a damn about, and for giving states more flexibility in administering the federal cash assistance program, which GOPers at every level of government (including Mitt Romney) were clamoring for loudly before, during and after the 1996 debate.

In terms of the “merits,” such as they are, of the Republican critique, (1) you cannot technically speaking “gut” a law by exercising waiver authority the law itself provides; (2) the administration is emphatically not abolishing work requirements, time limits, or any of the other basic architecture of the 1996 law; and (3) announcing an intention to entertain waiver applications from the states is not the same as granting them, much less granting them for the pernicious reasons Romney and company are claiming. The Romney ad’s claim that the administration has abolished work and training requirements and will simply mail checks (meager as they are, particularly in Republican-governed states) to everyone is a bold-faced lie.

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As you probably know, Harry Reid has been taunting Mitt Romney for refusing to release his tax returns, claiming he has a reliable source who’s informed him Mitt hadn’t been paying taxes at all for a decade. Republicans and quite a few MSM types (most vociferously WaPo’s Richard Cohen) have freaked out about Reid’s “McCarthyism,” and were rewarded with that national political equivalent of a high school debate tournament trophy: a favorable PolitiFact ruling!

Yes, one of the handful of “fact-checking services” that gets national attention, the Tampa Bay Times’ PoltiFact gave Reid a “pants-on-fire” judgement for his claims about Romney’s tax liabilities. As Scott Lemieux quickly noted at Lawyers, Guns & Money, PolitiFact seems to be struggling with the definition of the word “lie:”

This does not, in fact, constitute a “lie.” If it is, then Romney has told “pants on fire” lies about what he’s paid in taxes as well. And PolitiFact is double-pants-on-fire-with-an-additional-Pinocchio lying, since they haven’t provided the slightest evidence that Reid wasn’t told by someone that Romney hasn’t paid taxes. As always, PolitiFact simply doesn’t understand what facts and lies are, which is kind of a problem when you purport to be a fact-checker.

If you want to say that Reid is engaging in dishonorable tactics, you can. For the reasons SEK and Jonathan Zasloff have stated, I don’t agree — Reid didn’t breach any actually existing standard of civility in American politics, and highlighting the embarrassing information that must be hidden in Romney’s past returns if Romney refuses to follow the existing norms and release them is Politics 101. A specific charge that can be refuted by releasing information that every other presidential candidate has released for decades isn’t McCarthyism. But all this is a matter of judgement; if PolitiFact wants to refuse to award Reid the David Broder Award for Adhering to Standards of Civility That Have Never Existed that’s fine. But it can’t call Reid a liar without providing some evidence that he’s actually lied.

Snark aside, Scott is exactly right: however you look at Reid’s tactics (and I’m not a big fan of this “secret-source” stuff myself), the central assertion isn’t a “lie” unless (a) Reid actually does not have any source for his assertions, and is just making it up, or (b) Romney did in fact pay taxes, which he’s asserted himself but refuses to document.

This is of a piece with PolitiFact’s notorious assignment of a “Lie of the Year” designation for the Democratic claim that a vote for the Ryan Budget was a vote to “end Medicare.” Aside from the fact that most Democrats qualified that attack line (“ending Medicare as we know it” is Obama’s typical description of the Ryan Budget proposal, which is entirely accurate), PolitiFact seems to think it’s a good idea to register its maximum disapproval or exaggerations and innuendoes by calling them “lies.” And that’s what seems to be going on with the Reid “ruling,” aside from the false equivalency temptation to which virtually all media “fact-checkers” are exceptionally prone.

And that, in my opinion, is a bigger problem than any one ruling. “Fact-checking” has emerged as a major part of American politics because of the polarization of “news” sources and (in my opinion) the self-liberating decision of conservative media to create their own “facts.” But when the fact-checkers start playing fast and loose with terms like “lie” and “pants-on-fire lie” and the various highly subjective “Pinnochio” ratings, fact-checking itself undermines its credibility, perhaps fatally.

I’m reminded of an old story, perhaps apocryphal, about 1960s-era Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, who followed the then-common southern practice of staffing his own office with very cheap prison-work-release labor—people known as “trusties.” One day he sent a “trusty” out to bring back some coffee, and he never returned. Quoth Barnett: “If you can’t trust a trusty, who can you trust?” That’s where we are today with fact-checkers, and it’s a damn shame.

Should have figured: at least one conservative gabber (Media Research Center’s Matt Hadro) is objecting to the MSM’s characterization of Wisconsin temple massacre perpetrator Wade Michael Page as a member of the political “far right,” calling it a “smear” of the “political right.”

Hadro seems to consider the justice of his complaint self-evident, so I don’t know if he’s one of those libertarians who insists that anyone favoring a strong state is of “the left,” against the universal practice of historians and political scientists. Yes, I know, we are not sitting in the French Parliament, so the whole left/right framework is somewhat artificial, but the purpose of these words is not to assign virtue or vice but to provide information on whether someone is likely to favor a nationalist, culturally exclusivist/ traditionalist, and corporatist (in the sense of a hierarchical organization of the economy) perspective or one that is (relatively) more universalistic, egalitarian, secularist, and redistributist. I certainly object to communists, probably as much as Hadro objects to neo-Nazis, but have no objection to communists being referred to as the “far left.”

This is one “smear” that conservatives will just have to learn to deal with.

Missouri holds its primary today, and we are very pleased to have Political Animal’s great friend Blue Girl offer a Primary Preview. Blue Girl blogs about Missouri politics at Show Me Progress. You can also follow her on Twitter where her handle is @BGinKC.

Missouri voters will head to the polls today in a closely-watched primary. We lost a congressional seat in the last census, and as a result, we have two sitting Democratic Representatives — Lacy Clay and Russ Carnahan — facing off against one another in the newly-redrawn Missouri Third. The winner of the primary will hold the seat. That is just a given because the district is strongly Democratic and has a lot of organized labor support.

The best chance for Democrats to pick up the seat lost to reapportionment is in the Missouri Fourth where Cass County Prosecuting Attorney Teresa Hensley (full disclosure, she and I are friends outside of politics as well as allies in it) is unopposed in today’s primary for the right to square off against Rep. Vickie Hartzler in November. Two years ago Hartzler rode the Tea Party wave to a victory over the powerful and seemingly-invulnerable House Armed Services Committee chairman Ike Skelton. The district is populated with rural Republicans and conservative-leaning Democrats in the Kansas City exurbs. It is also the home to Whiteman AFB and a lot of retired military personnel — a voting bloc that has been on the receiving end of a rude awakening since Hartzler fell in line with the ultra-conservative wing that has wreaked havoc in the House and failed to protect the interests of the base like Skelton always had. Farmers are another important constituency in the Fourth, and they are steamed that no Farm Bill has been passed and no drought relief has been forthcoming as they watch their crops wither in the record heat and worst drought in decades. Their anger is compounded by the fact that many of them helped make Vickie Hartzler a millionaire by buying their farm equipment from her family’s farm implement dealership. Long story short: In the Missouri Fourth, voters will have a choice between a Republican who has failed key constituencies in the name of ideological purity and fealty to the tea-folk, and a Democrat who checks all the right boxes: she’s a tough-on-crime prosecutor who has lived her entire life in the district, is active in her church and is strong on the Second Amendment.

Senator Claire McCaskill is defending her Class I seat and will face off against either Rep. Todd Akin, St. Louis businessman John Brunner or Sarah Palin’s pick, Sarah Steelman, who many people (okay, snarky lefty bloggers) consider the prototype for the better-known Sister Sarah, Patron Saint of the Perpetually and Professionally Aggrieved. All three are flawed, and they have done a tremendous amount of damage to one another, as is reflected in Claire McCaskill’s slow but steady climb in the polls and gradual closing of the gap. Where she had been as much as ten points down in some polls against the three Republicans, she is now within striking distance of the margin of error. Democrats are crossing their fingers and hoping for an Akin victory because they think he will be the easiest for Claire to vanquish in November. He has a long record that independents will recoil from in horror.

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For no particular reason, here’s Marvin Gaye live at Montreaux in 1980.

Sorry, sort of, that I got so wound up in that last post, but technically speaking, I was on my own time well before I finished it. Here are some final news items for the day:

* Just hilarious: Dick Morris dismisses public polls, says private data shows disastrous slide by Obama. Good thing he’s so trustworthy, eh?

* Per AP, Justice Department investigating Sheldon Adelson’s Sands Corporation in connection with possible money-laundering. Guess I can report that without getting threatening letter from Sheldon’s attorneys.

* NY Post claims Team Obama “terrified” at possibility of empty seats at acceptance speech event in Charlotte. Even if true, it’s nothing a quick game of HORSE involving the president and UNC Tar Heels couldn’t take care of.

* Oh God: Pat Roberston suggests Wisconsin massacre work of “atheists.”

* Republican senators lobbying IRS to protect highly dubious tax status of Crossroads GPS.

* At College Guide, Daniel Luzer reports college students strongly dislike digital textbooks.

And in non-political news:

* Second fire in just over a month burns Missouri mosque to the ground. Earlier fire already adjudged to be act of arson.

And speaking of Missouri: our great friend Blue Girl will be in the house tomorrow morning with a expert preview of the Show-Me State’s primary.

Selah.