“We live in an era that seems to discover new rights every day,”

-Cardinal  Timothy Dolan,   (NYT 3/2/12)

And he says that like it’s a bad thing. Some of us, on the other hand, find it refreshing that government and society are coming around to a more inclusive and expansive view of human liberty.

So in case you haven’t heard, ol Mitt Romney is in a bit of a tizzy over what’s happening in Michigan. As Nate Silver has noted, polls that until recently seemed to suggest that Romney would likely carry his home state have swung suddenly and violently in the direction of his principal rival for the GOP nomination, and now the race between Romney and Rick Santorum is too close to call.

A frustrating development for Romney, moreover, is a sudden bout of Democratic enthusiasm for his opponent, with the Santorum Campaign and UAW officials hoping to mobilize a large Union turnout in favor of the onetime Senator from Pennsylvannia and present day candidate for Pope of America. The Romney campaign is alleging that this mob of temporary turncoats is little more than a dirty trick designed to weaken Romney and ensure that the least electable GOP candidate gets the Republican nomination:

“It’s outrageous to see Rick Santorum team up with the Obama people and go out after union labor in Detroit and try and get them to vote against me,” Mr. Romney said.

Is it a dirty trick, as Romney alleges?

Maybe, maybe not. OK, probably. But before vociferously accusing his opponents of dirty tricks, Mittens might want to re-visit an interview he gave to ABC News back in 2007:

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If you’ve been paying attention to the politics surrounding women’s issues for very long, then congressman Darrel Issa’s controversial hearing on contraception yesterday may have had an oddly familiar ring to it. You may have experienced a sense of deja vu, a feeling that somehow we’ve all been here before, that none of this was particularly new. But maybe you just can’t quite put your finger on what it is about Issa’s Inqusition that makes you feel this way. Was it the way that women’s voices were systematically excluded from the hearings? Was it the way that Democrats were not permitted to offer any witnesses of their own? Was it the singular arrogance and patronizing tone of the hearings? Perhaps.

Or maybe it was something else entirely… perhaps it was something distinctly visual.  Permit me to jog your memory a bit. The sense of the uncanny you are experiencing is probably motivated by that photo that’s spread across the internets like a virus, you know the one I’m talking about: the one showing a row of five male witnesses invited to stand before the People’s House and pontificate on the evils of providing contraception to women, with nary a female witness in sight. The reason it seems so familiar may be that it has a political doppleganger, a virtual twin from the year 2003. That was the year that a Republican president signed a bill that, with no medical justification, criminalized a medical procedure known as “intact dilation and extraction” or as opponents refer to it: partial birth abortion.

Reproduced below the fold (to allow you a few moments to put down any breakable heirlooms you may be holding, or to ask an impressionable child to leave the room) is an image of the signing of that bill: Read more »

So , in case you haven’t heard already, Rick Santorum ran away with three primary contests last night. I’ve been struggling hard to think of an analogy that might help illustrate what this means for the GOP going forward, and do so in a way that is easy for people without political science degrees to understand*. Finally after hours of struggling with it, I think I’ve come up with a good one:

Imagine the GOP is a sailor adrift at sea, holding a cup full of warm piss. The sea represents mainstream political opinion, the cup represents the GOP nomination race and the warm piss represents Mitt Romney. GOP voters can’t drink the salty seawater because… well, they’re crazy Teabaggers and they’ll die of dehydration if they try to drink mainstream seawater. Less toxic to them, is the warm piss. They can drink it, of course, and it will keep them alive, and they were pretty much resigned to it for while there, but that doesn’t mean they have to like it. Then came along Newt Gingrich. Gingrich is like an ugly, gnarled, twisted spoon that’s been caught in the disposal a few times, but somehow managed to stay in the silverware drawer nonetheless. Well, Gingrich drops into the race (the cup) and really starts stirring things up, getting the Teabaggers all hot and bothered. But then after Florida, he’s pretty much out. The spoon is tossed into the sink (and will probably fall into the disposall one more time). And then, just as Teabaggers were lifting the cup to their lips, something that no one expected happens. Absent a gnarled spoon to stirr it, the piss begins to settle and a frothy foam rises to the top. That would be Rick Santorum. He’s the foam.

So the question is this: will Rick Santorum run away with this thing? Will GOP voters lick the frothy foam off the top of the cup and pour the piss into the moderate ocean where they think it (Romney) belongs? Or will they come to their senses and realize that the head of a cup of warm piss that is Rick Santorum stands about as much chance of beating Barack Obama in November as a literal head of foam off a cup of warm piss.

Stay tuned!

*Full disclosure: I do not have a poly sci degree either.

Newt Gingrich: why do people take such an instant dislike to me?

Bob Dole: because it saves them time.

Andrew Sullivan labels this exchange “a quote too good to check.” Mark Shields refers to the exchange as “apocryphal.” I’d say, rather, that the short conversation excerpted above conveys a deeper truth that transcends such crude and unhelpful categories as “factuality” or “historicity.” Asking whether Bob Dole “really said that” is akin to putting a conch shell to a child’s ear and answering “no” when he asks you if that’s really the ocean he is hearing. Of course that’s the ocean the child hears, and of of course Bob Dole actually said that. How do I know? Because it couldn’t possibly have been otherwise.

Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich is on TV reminding us why it is we despise him so. Speaking to This Week host Jake Tapper on Sunday, the man who insisted that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae paid him 1.6 million dollars to act, not as a lobbyist for the mortgage giants, but as a historian, explained his poor debate performance on the most recent Florida GOP debate by noting:

“I don’t know how you can debate someone with civility if they’re prepared to say things that are factually false.”

There’s nothing so unseemely as a bully who’s finally been beaten up by a foe who chose to fight back, licking his wounds and complaining how unfair it was to be matched against an opponent who didn’t “fight fair.”

What, no live blog? Let’s get one rolling!

8:00 Debate opens with a question about Newt Gingrich’s infidelity. Newt responds by attacking the press. None of the others want to touch the issue. Santorum comes the closest, but ultimately shy’s away by alluding to God’s forgiveness and such nonsense. The crowd eats up Gingrich’s attack on the press. If there’s anytthing that Republican crowds hate nearly as much as a black president, it’s the press.

8:20 Romney calls Obama a crony capitalist for not allowing GM to fail. GM just reported that it has regained its place as the most successful automaker in the world. It doesn’t matter. UAW. Obama should have let GM fail just to stick it to the unions.

8:25 So Ron Paul’s never heard of the G.I. bill. That’s interesting.

8:30 OMG… Newt Gingrich is channeling… ME? Excuse me while I go to shoot myself.

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Americans For A Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Stephen Colbert’s SuperPAC (Now run by Jon Stewart), has released an Atom Bomb of an Attack AD against Mitt Romney. The Premise? Reductio ad absurdum:

[ Comedy Central Flash video not available. ]