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A contributing writer for The Nation, Ari Berman is the author of Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics. He writes:

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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2009:

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High Impact Posts are here. Top Comments are here. The Overnight News Digest is here.

Reposted from Daily Kos Elections by Steve Singiser

Yesterday evening, my beloved laptop appears to have finally bit the dust, courtesy of a computer virus (as my friends with Macs smirk knowingly). That explains the absence of the Polling Wrap on Wednesday night.

Based on the numbers from the last two days, you might think that Mitt Romney's presidential ambitions might be about to bite the dust, as well.

To be clear, his polling numbers right now, both in the Republican primary and in a potential general election matchup with the president, are sagging badly. If you believe the data coming out over the past several days, Romney will not win Michigan, and his once-formidable lead over the field in Arizona is all but gone. What's more--his national numbers are perhaps even worse. Meanwhile, Barack Obama has solid leads over the entire field, and Romney's once clear "electability" edge (as it relates to how he fares against Obama versus the other Republicans) is gone.

But if you only rely on certain media outlets for your political news, you might not know that. Indeed, one of the bigger polling stories today was a small kerfluffle over polling itself. It is a debate which we here at Daily Kos have a clear interest in, given the pollster that has been our partner for quite some time.

My thoughts on that debate will follow. But, first, we have two days of data to peruse. With that in mind, let's take a crack at the Republican primary data first:

That metric ton of polling dutifully consumed, let's now turn our attention to an equally heavy dose of general election polling, which includes new looks at a couple of states that haven't seen a ton of polling recently: New Mexico and Washington.
Now, follow me past the jump, as I look at the tale of the tape in the battle between a college professor and one of the better known voices and faces in the political media.

Reposted from Daily Kos Labor by Laura Clawson Mitt Romney's Detroit News op-ed about how President Obama saved the auto industry the wrong way and therefore sucks has drawn a significant critique: Romney doesn't know what he's talking about. First off, let's not forget that the Bush administration had made loans to GM and Chrysler before Obama was even in office. We can see why Romney would gloss over that, but more interesting is the widely held view explained by the New York Times' Michael Shear:
Steven Rattner, who headed up Obama's auto industry task force, is still more blunt, saying that Romney's claims about how the auto companies could have been saved "would get somebody a C-grade at best at the Harvard Business School" and that, in the 2009 search for private financing for the industry, "We took every phone call, we made as many outgoing calls as we could think of."

Rep. Gary Peters (D-MI), too, makes this point, writing that "in early 2009 I met with Bob Nardelli, who was at the time the Chairman and CEO of Chrysler, and he told me that if the government did not act as the 'lender of last resort' the company was three weeks away from liquidation."

A central part of Romney's insistence on his way of doing things, though, is that he doesn't think unionized auto workers suffered enough; he would have made sure the beating they took was fatal, to their unions at least. But as Peters continues,

Romney's false claims about bailouts and union bosses and crony capitalism may play well in the Republican primary he's currently fighting to win. But if he makes it to the general election, the strength of the auto industry and the jobs resurgence it's bringing with it will speak for the president who made it possible, not the candidate who wanted none of it.

Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) says reducing the U.S. nuclear force by 80 percent is “reckless lunacy." Rush Limbaugh admits he doesn't know how many nuclear warheads the Russians have, but he knows Barack Obama plans to shift the balance of power in Moscow's favor. "And this, I'm here to tell you, is by design," he says.

The country's 38-million-dollar-a-year blowhard has been joined by others of the right-wing media and GOP contingent on Capitol Hill in lambasting the president after the Associated Press reported Monday that the administration is considering a reduction in the U.S. nuclear arsenal that might go as low as 300 warheads.

Emphasis on might.

Anybody who has followed disarmament negotiations since the 1980s when noted peacenik Ronald Reagan proposed a vast mutual reduction in the U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenal knows that there's a whole bunch of talking to be done first. The reduction written into the first START treaty that Reagan initiated was, by the way, 80 percent. Now the Pentagon is actually looking at three reduction proposals: 1,000 to 1,100 warheads; 700 to 800 warheads; 300 to 400 warheads, according to the AP. So far, the brass has not presented any of these detailed options to the White House.

(Continue reading below the fold)

If Rick Santorum really doesn't want to be seen as a one trick pony of evangelical social conservatism, he's got a funny way of showing it. A recent Idaho appearance came off closer to a tent revival than a political rally:
Well, he certainly does get lively crowds, I'll grant him that. But even when Santorum pretends to talk about issues, he can't help himself from seeing every damn little thing as a battle between the true God-fearers and the atheists and/or heathens and/or Muslims:
Yeah, what's next? First they demand that just because you run a hospital or college you shouldn't be able to impose your religious beliefs on your non-religious employees, now they're going to demand women priests! Wait, they're not demanding that? Oh, well, screw that. Let's just say it's true anyway, because when you lie for Jesus it's not a sin.
Well, but that is true of a hell of a lot of extremist Christians as well, right? I've lost track of all the various supposedly Christian groups whose primary interest in Israel revolves around shipping enough Jews there to trigger a good Christian apocalypse, or honest efforts to breed pure red heifers because when someone breeds a pure red heifer the world is supposed to end. (Yay, destruction! Come for us, Jesus! Don't spare the hellfire!)

So if Rick Santorum doesn't want to be seen as the guy who's all about being anti-sex and pro-theocracy (as long as it's the right kind of theocracy, not that bad kind over there), he's apparently got his work cut out for him. Maybe he could try spending just a little time a day not telling people what God wants, or not immediately supposing that anyone who disagrees with his various pronouncements hates Jesus? Try 10 minutes at a time and work up from there?

Of course, then he'd apparently lose nine tenths of his audience, so maybe that's not such a hot idea. Meh, just smile and give 'em what they want, Elmer Gantry. Just smile and give 'em what they want.

GOP Sanctimony: Comeuppance Department

As we learned last November, House Energy Committee and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI), a ferocious critic of the Obama administration's energy policies, lobbied the Department of Energy in 2009 to provide loan guarantees for United Solar Ovonic. The company is a subsidiary of Michigan-based Energy Conversion Devices, a maker of rooftop solar panels. In a move that surprised no one after months of notices about lay-offs and a suspension of operations, ECD filed for bankruptcy Tuesday and said it will sell off USO. The Club for Growth, the anti-tax group that is pondering support for a primary challenge against Upton, has already chastised Upton for seeking DOE backing for the company.

Together with 13 of the other 16 members of the Michigan congressional delegation, Upton sent a letter in December 2009 to DOE Secretary Steven Chu seeking loan guarantees for several companies, including USO.

The request would be nothing out of the ordinary except the Republican congressman is engaged in a long-running investigation of the guarantee for Solyndra, a California-based company that received a $535-million guarantee to great fanfare, including a visit from Obama. It went bankrupt in September 2011. Upton and other Republicans have been hounding the administration about it every since.

Just days after Solyndra's bankruptcy announcement. Upton said in a statement: “It is not the role of government to pick winners and losers. Let’s learn the lessons of Solyndra before another dollar goes out the door.†During a hearing in November, Upton excoriated Chu: "The number of red flags about Solyndra that were raised along the way—many from within DOE—and either ignored or minimized by senior officials is astonishing."

Red flags apparently weren't on Upton's mind two years ago. USO's troubles were clearly visible well before the congressman signed onto the letter seeking DOE backing. In fact, just two weeks before the letter was sent, USO had announced 425 lay-offs. The DOE did not provide ECD with a loan guarantee.

Club for Growth spokesman Barney Keller said Thursday: "Every Republican supports an investigation of Solyndra—the question is, where were you before? Fred Upton has a long record of supporting market-distorting energy subsidies."

The club's fat wallet may be a problem if it decides to open it for former state Rep. Jack Hoogendyk, the tea party-backed candidate who is challenging Upton in Michigan's 6th District for the second time. In 2010, Hoogendhyk lost by 11,000 votes, a margin of 14 points. To Hoogendyk's $64,000, Upton spent nearly $1.5 million on the primary that year. Upton already has $1.7 million in the bank ready for the 2012 contest.

On the Democratic side, John Waltz, a disabled veteran of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, has filed to run against whoever emerges from the Republican primary.

Rep. Darrell Issa's "religious freedom" hearing, at which no women were allowed to speak to talk about the potential impact on their lives allowing religious institutions to dictate their health care, was, well, as ridiculous as you would imagine.

Exhibit 1:

And exhibit 2, in which Rep. Rosa DeLauro D-N.Y. spoke about surviving ovarian cancer and how taking birth control reduces the risks of cancer.
I wonder who the other panelists were?

Here's exhibit 3, from the testimony of Bishop William E. Lori of Bridgeport, CT.

You can only imagine where it goes from there. But you dont have to imagine the reaction of Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown student who the Democrats on the committee had invited to testify, but whom Issa refused to hear from.
Here's some of what she would have said had she been allowed to testify:

It's officially the end of an era for MSNBC and Pat Buchanan. How ... anticlimactic:
Pat then goes on to blame loudmouthed Obama supporters, homosexuals, Jews, and I don't know, maybe werewolves. Yeah, let's say werewolves.

Buchanan's recent book may have been MSNBC's excuse for finally taking him off the air for good, but it seems mostly to be a "final straw" sort of thing. Buchanan has been mourning the downfall of white America for a considerable time now, so this latest book was hardly new ground for him. He has been accused of anti-Semitism even by such conservative stalwarts as William F. Buckley, and got in hot water a few years ago for a bizarre column proposing that Hitler was misunderstood. No, his pissy statement sells himself rather short on the number of ridiculously bigoted things that would regularly come from his mouth. No matter what he said on air or off, though, the network would always prop him up in front of the television cameras.

Well, it's not like he died or anything. We'll still be hearing from him. Maybe Fox News will give him a home, since that seems to be where discredited pundits who have otherwise worn out their welcome in polite company go to ply their trade.

Rick Santorum likes to stress his working-class roots, of having grown up in public housing as the grandson of an immigrant coal miner. “It’s a story that resonates, and I have policies to fit the story,†he says.

He's been more resistant to telling the story of being a coal company "consultant," who in 2010 and 2011 took home $142,500 from Consol Energy, one of the biggest coal-mining companies in the United States. As shown by the tax returns Santorum finally released Wednesday after much delay, that haul was just a fraction of the income he reported in the past four years. He's a freshly minted millionaire.

If you'd like to check out Santorum's tax returns for yourself, you can see them here: 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. What you'll find, as reported by Maggie Haberman, is that his adjusted gross income was $659,000 in 2007, $952,000 in 2008, $1.1 million in 2009 and $923,000 in 2010. Not exactly in the same league as Mitt Romney, who reported income of $27 million in 2010.

But Santorum paid a higher tax rate than Romney, more than 28 percent compared with the 13.9 percent the former Massachusetts governor paid in 2010.

That four-bedroom house in northern Virginia sits on five acres and was assessed at $1.4 million in 2010.

Santorum contributed $16,289 to charity in 2010, 1.8 percent of his income.

Among other sources of income:

• Five rental properties in Pennsylvania worth $1.75 million
• $400,000 in compensation and stock options for serving on the board at Universal Health Services
• $230,000 for appearances on Fox News
• $65,000 from American Continental Group, a D.C. lobbying firm
• $125,000 from the Clapham Group, a Burke, Virginia firm "committed to promoting the good, true and beautiful in the public arenas of politics, policy and pop culture." The client list is made up mostly of religious rights organizations.

His ties to the 99 percent are purely ancestral.

The takeaway from this story seems to be that conservative pundits don't feel loved by Mitt Romney, and they're pouting about it. Apparently it's not enough that Mitt meet with them and listen to their carping: He also has to pretend more sincerely that he gives a damn.
The article goes on to portray Romney as conspicuously distanced from the conservative pundit corps, and notes that while the Romney 2008 campaign was quick to register complaints with conservative pundits that badmouthed him, this year they're not doing that. Apparently they're bitter about that too.

I'm not sure any of that is surprising, though it does string together nearly all of the core criticisms of Romney from the right. He is not a part of the movement; he has no particular devotion to conservative ideas; his interactions with them are robotic at best, etc. They are afraid that as president they would not have the ear of the White House, which is the only thing they care about, and that makes them exceedingly nervous. Now, I'm not sure why they think they can hammer Romney all day, every day and still expect Romney to be all flowers-n-candy at them, but I think that, too, is part of the natural pundit ego. The president exists to take their advice, not the other way around.

It's interesting that they have such skepticism of Romney, however, while at the same time Grover Norquist is trying to shore up at least begrudging Romney support by assuring audiences that as president Romney would definitely do what they say. What's the difference? I think it's the difference in focus. Grover Norquist is about one thing and one thing only: Cutting taxes on filthy rich people. As a filthy rich person himself, Mitt is already quite committed to that agenda, and in fact it is the only agenda Romney can regularly articulate. Other conservative powerbrokers, however, the ones that dwell on social conservative issues, hardline militarism, and the like, have much less evidence that Romney would really be in their camp.

It's yet another symptom of the larger divide, in other words. The corporate conservatives want one sort of candidate, and as a pliable and very corporate type himself, Romney fits that bill perfectly. The social conservatives (and more importantly, the base) want a true believer, and nothing less; their support has shuffled to and from each not-Romney candidate in turn, looking desperately for someone who is both an absolutely, 100-percent-pure true believer and who won't shoot their own foot off the first time they're given a microphone. This has been a harder thing to accomplish. That they're down to Rick Santorum as their last standing not-Mitt should tell you all you need to know on that front.

We've mentioned the pining for a brokered convention coming from dissatisfied Republicans before, but at this point I think they're just trying to get our hopes up. From a Fox Business interview with Sarah Palin:
All right, what do we have to do to make this happen? I want this. No—I demand it. A brokered convention, mass chaos, but then America's Favorite Quitter leaps into the spotlight, ready to do her civic duty, ringin' those bells and warning, um, whoever needs warning. We've had Michele Bachmann, and Herman Cain, and Rick Perry (Lord, that was a fun one), and professional historian Newt Three-Wives, and now even poor Rick Santorum is getting a turn in the spotlight, but none of them can hold a candle to Palin. She combines Bachmann's conspiracy-theorizing, Cain's penchant for the bizarre, Rick Perry's eloquence and Newt's oblivious sense of personal entitlement.

The only possibility for a "brokered" convention is if the not-Romney's hang on. Specifically, Rick Santorum, at this point. The odds are still pretty remote that it'd really come to that. The odds are even more remote that some new GOP savior (like Palin! Sarah Palin!) would waltz in and be officially appointed Republican Savior in Chief, but hey—stranger things have happened. Dare we dream?

Taping of The Colbert Coalition has been suspended temporarily—possibly because of an illness in his family—so in the hopes that he is able to return to the air early, here's a classic flashback—his April, 2009 ad mocking NOM's anti-gay marriage campaign.