The Big Takeaway From Last Night's GOP Primaries?

That's easy -- if the Republicans want to continue their War on Contraception, they'll do so at their peril:

CBS's exit polls show 37 percent of Catholic voters in Michigan supporting [Santorum] and 43 percent supporting [Romney]. Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul won 8 percent and 9 percent respectively.

Meanwhile, CNN exit polls in Arizona show Romney besting Santorum among Catholic voters by a margin of 41 percent to 35 percent.

Remember -- these were GOP primaries; and even though Michigan was open to members of other parties, six in ten who voted there were Republican. One would think that Santorum, the poster boy for the anti-contraception movement, would have crushed as far as the Republican Catholic vote is concerned.

The fact that he lost the Catholics to Romney in both states should be setting off warning bells in the GOP about their War on Contraception. If it's a losing issue in GOP primaries, then they're going to get killed on this in the General.

I still expect them to drop this issue soon. It's true that Republicans suck at governing and have shitty ideas when it comes to policy, but I doubt the party is going to commit political suicide over The Pill.

Obama's Best Speech In 2012 So Far

Man, if this is a preview of the General Election campaign, I say bring it on:

Isn't Obama Supposed To Be The Elitist In This Race?

From ABC News:

The Democratic National Committee is suggesting that Mitt Romney made another out of touch remark this morning during a tour at the Daytona 500 in which Romney said that while he does not “closely” follow racing he does “have great some friends who are NASCAR team owners. ”

The remark came during a tour of team owner Richard Childress’ facilities, when Romney was asked by an Associated Press reporter whether he follows car racing.

“Not as closely as some of the most ardent fans, but I have some great friends who are NASCAR team owners,” Romney responded.

Santorum: A Flip-Flopper For The Ages

"President Obama wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob. There are good, decent men and women who work hard every day and put their skills to the test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor. That's why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image."

- Rick Santorum, February 25, 2012.

"In addition to Rick’s support of ensuring that primary and secondary schools in Pennsylvania are equipped for success, he is equally committed to ensuring the every Pennsylvanian has access to higher education. Rick Santorum has supported legislative solutions that provide loans, grants, and tax incentives to make higher education more accessible and affordable."

- Rick Santorum's 2006 Senate Campaign Website.

Christ, what's Santorum going to attack next, apple pie?

From Jim Morin

And speaking of Santorum, you can put this one in the "Are You Fucking Kidding Me?" file:

Rick Santorum believes Obama wants to 'indoctrinate' students by encouraging higher college enrollment. The GOP hopeful sat down with Glenn Beck for a wide-ranging interview that aired Thursday, and he warned that higher education leads to secularization.

“I understand why Barack Obama wants to send every kid to college, because of their indoctrination mills, absolutely," he said. "The indoctrination that is going on at the university level is a harm to our country.”

Look, I can understand that Glenn Beck has an interest in keeping Americans uneducated, but I can't believe that a person running for President of the United States would actually say something like that on the record.

Car Czar Calls Out Romney On His Bailout Horseshit

This is pretty great:

The auto czar who led the bailout, Steve Rattner, has a simple challenge to Mitt Romney’s claim that private investors could have rescued Detroit: find me one.

Rattner, writing in the New York Times, wrote on Friday that Romney’s contention that American automakers didn’t need federal loans to move them through a managed bankruptcy intact is ludicrous given that the only financiers big enough to step in were barely hanging on for dear lives themselves.

“I know this because the administration’s auto task force, for which I was the lead adviser, spoke diligently to all conceivable providers of funds, and not one had the slightest interest in financing those companies on any terms,” he wrote. “If Mr. Romney disagrees, he should come forward with specific names of willing investors in place of empty rhetoric. I predict that he won’t be able to, because there aren’t any.”

Romney, who will be the eventual GOP nominee for president, is going to get crushed by Obama on this issue in the General Election. It'll be fun to watch.

And speaking of Romney, one gets the feeling that his campaign expected more people to show up at this rally at Detroit's Ford Field:

Quote of the Week

"They're not against it. If you're not against it, you're for it."

- Indiana state Rep. Bob Morris (R), in response to a request for proof to support his claim that the Girl Scouts support abortion rights.

OK, Let Me See If I Got This Right . . .

Paul Babeu, an Arizona county sheriff and Republican congressional candidate who is stridently opposed to illegal immigration, actually threatened his Mexican ex-lover with deportation when the man refused to promise never to disclose their relationship.

What the fuck is wrong with these people?

A Terri Schiavo Moment . . . On Steroids

After watching Republicans step on their own dicks yesterday on the contraception issue -- and then today watching Senators Boxer and Gillibrand make Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Cal) pay a heavy price for his political malpractice in handing the Democrats this picture:


. . . I'm more convinced now than I was last Sunday that this is indeed a Terri Schiavo Moment for the GOP. In fact, calling it a mere Schiavo Moment may be understating the situation because that particular debacle had little if any effect on presidential politics, or even Mid-Term election politics.

I remember this lack of effect well because I was complaining in early November 2006 that Schiavo was barely registering as an issue in the run-up to the 2006 Mid Terms, even though Howard Dean promised it would be a big issue for Democrats. But the GOP's current contraception disaster is different because it is actually unfolding during an election year.

And the timing couldn't be worse for Republicans. As Greg Sargent noted yesterday from recent polling data: "After unmarried women dropped off for Dems in 2010 and were slow to return to the Dem fold in 2011, Obama is now approaching the 70 percent he won among them in 2008." If Obama is already nearing 70% support in this group, imagine how much support he'll have from unmarried women if the GOP continues to push this issue.

That's why I don't think Republicans will continue their War on Contraception much longer. Darrell Issa got his ass handed to him yesterday, and Rick Santorum is bat-shit crazy when it comes to birth control. He is absolutely opposed to it -- period. Go here if you don't believe me. And if these views get widely circulated, I think this issue could ultimately hurt Santorum even though it is arguably helping him now.

Bottom line: The GOP picked the wrong time to push on what is clearly the weakest position that social conservatives espouse. I still can't believe they think this is a winner for them.

Smart Move By GOP

From TPM:

Lawmakers sealed the deal late Wednesday night on yearlong extensions of the payroll tax cut, unemployment compensation and Medicare physician payment rates. It’s a political victory for President Obama and the conclusion of a no-win situation for Republicans that they were eager to move past.

The agreement was announced by Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) and Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), the two lead negotiators in conference committee. Final votes are expected by the end of this weekend.

The conclusion comes at the end of a grueling series of negotiations that spilled over from last year. That led House Republicans to this week drop their demand that the payroll tax cut be offset with spending cuts elsewhere, paving the way for the agreement as the two sides had been deadlocked on pay-fors.

Although a definite win for Obama, this does help the GOP in the long run because Republicans have never been able to adequately explain why tax cuts for the middle class have to be offset by spending cuts while tax cuts for the rich need not be paid for. I think some folks in the GOP finally saw the Big Picture -- i.e., they realized that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire at the end of the year, and it was therefore probably unwise for them to insist that tax cuts be paid for.

And now back to our regularly-scheduled program about how Republicans are fucking idiots:

I still can't believe that the GOP is trying to make contraception into a wedge issue. That's a losing battle for them, and it doesn't help that morons like Santorum-supporter Foster Friess are out there talking about it.

From Mike Luckovich

Romney Has No Choice Now

He'll have to viciously attack Santorum, even though Republican leaders recently urged Romney to refrain from such attacks:

Two new polls out today show Rick Santorum leading Mitt Romney in Michigan, the state where the former Massachusetts governor was born and believed to have an advantage.

An American Research Group poll shows Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, leading Romney 33% to 27% among likely GOP voters. Santorum's lead over Romney is 15 percentage points in a Michigan survey by Public Policy Polling.

Incredible. Most commentators still believe that Romney is the front-runner; but if he loses Michigan, I have no doubt he'll lose that front-runner status to Santorum.

And with regard to my previous post on the contraception debate, it looks like the trap that Obama set is rapidly closing on the GOP:

While GOP senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has pledged to fight the Obama’s administration’s modified regulation requiring health insurers and busnisses to offer contraception coverage without additional cost sharing, the revised rule “appears to have won over” two of the five Republican women senators.

Sens. Olympia Snowe (ME) and Susan Collins (ME) — both of whom have sponsored legislation requiring insurers to offer contraception benefits in all health plans — are in favor of the new compromise, which would allow religiously affiliated colleges, universities, and hospitals to avoid providing birth control. Their employees will still receive contraception coverage at no additional cost sharing directly from the insurer.

Well-played, Barack.

The Contraception Trap

"If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles."

- Sun Tsu.

I've lost count of how many times I've criticized Obama on something and it turned out that Obama did the right thing. I was certain that this recent "debate" on contraception would hurt the President politically; and when this issue started to gain steam, the last thing I thought was that Obama was setting a trap for the GOP. Moderate Republicans saw this trap coming from a mile away, but I did not.

Andrew Sullivan is the latest political commentator to suggest that Obama did in fact set a trap. Sullivan writes:

The more Machiavellian observer might even suspect this is actually an improved bait and switch by Obama to more firmly identify the religious right with opposition to contraception, its weakest issue by far, and to shore up support among independent women and his more liberal base. I’ve found by observing this president closely for years that what often seem like short-term tactical blunders turn out in the long run to be strategically shrewd. And if this was a trap, the religious right walked right into it.

A friend of mine, Slic[k], stated last week that this was in fact a trap, and the goal was to create a wedge between Republicans given that RomneyCare contained a similar provision with regard to contraception. I was initially skeptical, but now I think Slic[k] was right.

As noted by Sullivan: "Romneycare can now accurately be portrayed as falling to the left of Obamacare on the contraception issue." I have no doubt that Santorum will be all over this in a few days, as will that former Pennsylvania Senator who is currently pursuing the GOP nomination (his name escapes me). Have fun trying to clean up that frothy mess, GOP.

It was certainly an elegant trap, given that it relied in large part on the GOP's refusal to agree with Obama on any issue. He gambled that Republicans would disagree with any compromise no matter how reasonable it was, and the gamble paid off big time. To paraphrase Sun Tsu, Obama knew his enemy.

Obama also successfully framed the issue as one involving contraception, and not freedom of religion like the GOP wanted. When was the last time the Democrats won a framing battle?

This debate reminds me of the Terri Schiavo debacle, the GOP's disastrous attempt to create a wedge issue based upon a wildly distorted view on the sanctity of life. Schiavo was a catastrophe for the GOP because every family in the country has either gone through something similar or knows someone who has.

Birth control presents the same type of problem for the GOP. As Sullivan notes: "Even in conservative Mississippi, a recent ballot initiative to amend the state constitution to ban the morning-after pill failed badly at the polls." In other words, the GOP should have seen this one coming, but did not. And neither did I.

Holy Shit!

This keeps getting better and better:

Riding a wave of momentum from his trio of victories on Tuesday Rick Santorum has opened up a wide lead in PPP's newest national poll. He's at 38% to 23% for Mitt Romney, 17% for Newt Gingrich, and 13% for Ron Paul.

Part of the reason for Santorum's surge is his own high level of popularity. 64% of voters see him favorably to only 22% with a negative one. But the other, and maybe more important, reason is that Republicans are significantly souring on both Romney and Gingrich. Romney's favorability is barely above water at 44/43, representing a 23 point net decline from our December national poll when he was +24 (55/31). Gingrich has fallen even further. A 44% plurality of GOP voters now hold a negative opinion of him to only 42% with a positive one. That's a 34 point drop from 2 months ago when he was at +32 (60/28). * * *

Although I disagree with Santorum on nearly every issue, I always get the feeling from him that he actually believes in what he is saying. I don't get that from either Newt or Mitt.

Want To Know Why There Is No Compromise In Washington?

It's because the GOP has no interest in compromise:

The first major speaker at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference . . . was Republican Sen. Jim DeMint, who had a fundamental message for the base: compromise sucks.

GOPers on Capitol Hill should not be looking to work with Democrats to develop common solutions to the nation's woes, he proclaimed. Not at all. Not ever. And DeMint, with an I'm-so-clever smile, offered what he obviously thought was a killer analogy: the Super Bowl.

Referring to last Sunday's game, he said, "I can guarantee you that coach Tom Coughlin did not tell his Giants to go out on the field and work with those other guys....They weren't cooperating with Tom Brady."

DeMint explained that the New York Giants and the New England Patriots had "different goals." Consequently, compromise would not work. Continuing with this trenchant observation, DeMint noted that "compromise works well in this world when you have shared goals." You can compromise with a wife or with a business colleague. But not with Democrats: "We don't have shared goals with the Democrats."

Of course, there is nothing new here. "No Compromise!" has been the rallying cry for the Tea-Baggers for quite awhile, and the Tea-Baggers control the GOP.

What I find interesting is that members of the so-called liberal media still insist on blaming "both sides" for gridlock in Washington, when it is clear that the Republicans are not only responsible for it, but they're proud of it and openly boast about their refusal to compromise with Obama and the Democrats. It's their fucking policy, for Christ's Sake.

And the above-quoted Jim DeMint, perhaps the biggest asshole ever elected to the Senate, actually supported indivudual health care mandates as recently as 2007.

Maybe Mitt Should Lay Low For Awhile

Some results from a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll:

Overall, 55 percent of those who are closely following the campaign say they disapprove of what the GOP candidates have been saying. By better than 2 to 1, Americans say the more they learn about Romney, the less they like him. Even among Republicans, as many offer negative as positive assessments of him on this question. Judgments about former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who denounced Romney on Saturday night in Nevada, are about 3 to 1 negative.

Great Day For America, But a Horrible Day For the GOP

First, we hear that the U.S. economy added a net of nearly 250,000 jobs in January (exceeding expectation by almost 100,000), and now we find out that Susan G. Komen For the Cure cancelled its plan to cut funding for Planned Parenthood.

It's only 9 am on the West Coast, and the Obama-hating Radical Right is already having its worst day in 2012 so far.

Will the GOP Base Stay At Home in November? (With Update)

What are the three most important things for the Republicans in 2012? That's easy: turnout, turnout, and turnout -- and they're coming up short on all three:

Underneath tonight’s big win for Mitt Romney in the Florida Republican primary, is a statistic that might suggest enthusiasm is flagging among GOP voters in this large and crucial swing state: turnout was actually down significantly from 2008.

In the 2008 Republican primary in Florida, in which John McCain beat Romney by a margin of 36%-31%, a total of nearly 1.95 million votes were cast.

But in tonight’s primary, turnout was actually much lower. At time of writing, with 98% of precincts reporting, the total turnout is only about 1.65 million — a drop-off of 15% in terms of the raw number of voters. * * *

I think it is interesting that South Carolina, which gave Newt a big win, actually had pretty good turnout (i.e., the GOP base showed up at the polls) whereas Florida, a state Mitt won handily, had a low turnout, as did New Hampshire and Iowa.

Republicans just aren't all that excited about Romney, and the numbers are reflecting this lack of enthusiasm. But I think there is something else going on here, namely, I don't believe there is enough hatred for Obama right now. Sure, members of Radical Right hate him (or should I say, hate the Fantasy Version of him), but that's about it.

And that's a problem for Republicans. They don't hate Obama enough. They need to work on that if they want their people to show up at the polls in November, because Romney sure isn't going to bring them in.

UPDATE: Even the Idiot Limbaugh understands this. Here's what he said this morning about Romney's "I'm not concerned about the very poor” comment:

“Everybody knows what he's trying to say but he didn't say it and he makes himself a target with this stuff. He comes across as the prototypical rich Republican. And it's gonna make it harder and harder and harder and harder to go after Obama because this turns around on him. You know, all these Wizards of Smart in the Republican establishment say, ‘We can't have Newt out there! Why, Newt's gonna be the topic. We need Obama to be the topic. We need Obama to be the guy campaign's about. If Newt's out there, it's only gonna be about Newt.’ Well, what evidence is there that it's not gonna be about Romney with these kinds of statements?”