The financial firepower that fueled the rise of a network of conservative advocacy groups now pummeling Democrats with television ads can be traced, in part, to Box 72465 in the Boulder Hills post office, on a desert road on the northern outskirts of Phoenix.

That’s the address for the Center to Protect Patient Rights, an organization with ties to Charles and David H. Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankroll a number of conservative organizations.

During the 2010 midterm election, the center sent more than $55 million to 26 GOP-allied groups, tax filings show, funding opaque outfits such as American Future Fund, 60 Plus and Americans for Job Security that were behind a coordinated campaign against Democratic congressional candidates.

Actually, before I get to that, let me take a moment to debunk a fairy tale that we’ve been hearing a lot from Wall Street and its reliable defenders — a tale in which the incredible damage runaway finance inflicted on the U.S. economy gets flushed down the memory hole, and financiers instead become the heroes who saved America.

Once upon a time, this fairy tale tells us, America was a land of lazy managers and slacker workers. Productivity languished, and American industry was fading away in the face of foreign competition.

Then square-jawed, tough-minded buyout kings like Mitt Romney and the fictional Gordon Gekko came to the rescue, imposing financial and work discipline. Sure, some people didn’t like it, and, sure, they made a lot of money for themselves along the way. But the result was a great economic revival, whose benefits trickled down to everyone.

You can see why Wall Street likes this story. But none of it — except the bit about the Gekkos and the Romneys making lots of money — is true.

For the alleged productivity surge never actually happened. In fact, overall business productivity in America grew faster in the postwar generation, an era in which banks were tightly regulated and private equity barely existed, than it has since our political system decided that greed was good.

What about international competition? We now think of America as a nation doomed to perpetual trade deficits, but it was not always thus. From the 1950s through the 1970s, we generally had more or less balanced trade, exporting about as much as we imported. The big trade deficits only started in the Reagan years, that is, during the era of runaway finance.

And what about that trickle-down? It never took place. There have been significant productivity gains these past three decades, although not on the scale that Wall Street’s self-serving legend would have you believe. However, only a small part of those gains got passed on to American workers.

So, no, financial wheeling and dealing did not do wonders for the American economy, and there are real questions about why, exactly, the wheeler-dealers have made so much money while generating such dubious results.

House Minority Leader, responding to an expected acceleration of John Boehner’s timeline on the Bush tax cuts, fired off a letter to the Speaker asking for immediate consideration of an extension of just the “low end” tax cuts – which include the Bush-era marginal rates for households making up to $1 million. This represents a shift in the dividing line for the Bush tax cuts, which has traditionally been at $250,000.

The Bush tax cuts at every level up to $1 million in annual income, in other words, are now framed as “middle-income tax cuts.” She says it right here in the letter:

Without further delay, the Majority Leadership should schedule a vote on extension of the middle-income tax cuts, as early as next week, to increase certainty for millions of American taxpayers and for the economy. We should not delay passing this legislation that will help afford all Americans the opportunity to reach their goals and realize the promise of the American Dream.

We must ask the very wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share. Democrats believe that tax cuts for those earning over a million dollars a year should expire and that we should use the resulting revenues to pay down the deficit.

First of all, if you make the dividing line at $1 million a year in annual income, there simply won’t be all that many revenues generated to pay down that deficit. When the dividing line was $250,000 a year, the revenue was around $800 billion over a ten-year period. I don’t have a strong grasp of what the numbers would be at $1 million, but my guess would be half that, if not more. So from a deficit reduction standpoint, this makes pretty much no sense.

Second of all, because of our marginal tax rate system, high-income earners at the $1 million
level would still benefit from all the tax cuts on the first $1 million of their income, which are substantial. In fact, you’d be giving hundreds of billions of dollars – whatever the difference is between letting the tax cuts expire at the $250,000 level and the $1 million level – entirely to well-off people.

Democrats have enjoyed trying to keep Republicans on the defensive about women’s issues, and on Tuesday, they tried to keep the debate going by reintroducing a wage gap measure that failed in the Senate in 2010.

Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, with other female senators and a number of advocacy groups, planned a news conference on Wednesday urging Congress to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. The legislation, which builds on the Equal Pay Act of 1963, is designed to help close the wage gap between women and men working equivalent jobs.

Ms. Mikulski made the preliminary announcement with a stream of Twitter posts on Tuesday, calling the measure a “down-payment” for ending the pay gap. “It’s outrageous that 49 yrs after Equal Pay Act, women still earn 77 cents to every $1 men make,” she wrote. “Wage gap is real – costing women & families thousands over their career. Women deserve #EqualPay 4 equal work.”

In 2010, when the Paycheck Fairness Act came up for a procedural vote in the Senate, no Republican supported it.

The Paycheck Fairness Act would require employers to demonstrate that wage gaps between men and women doing the same work have a business justification, and it would prohibit employers from retaliating against employees who shared salary information with their co-workers. The measure would also create a competitive grant program to provide training in negotiation for girls and women.

Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader, is expected to file a motion on Thursday that would end debate on the bill and bring it up for a vote.

Despite the persistent gender gap in opinion polls and mounting criticism of their hostility to women’s rights, Republicans are not backing off their assault on women’s equality and well-being. New laws in some states could mean a death sentence for a pregnant woman who suffers a life-threatening condition. But the attack goes well beyond abortion, into birth control, access to health care, equal pay and domestic violence.

Republicans seem immune to criticism. In an angry speech last month, John Boehner, the House speaker, said claims that his party was damaging the welfare of women were “entirely created” by Democrats. Earlier, the Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus, sneered that any suggestion of a G.O.P. “war on women” was as big a fiction as a “war on caterpillars.”

But just last Wednesday, Mr. Boehner refuted his own argument by ramming through the House a bill that seriously weakens the Violence Against Women Act. That followed the Republican push in Virginia and elsewhere to require medically unnecessary and physically invasive sonograms before an abortion, and Senate Republicans’ persistent blocking of a measure to better address the entrenched problem of sex-based wage discrimination.

On Capitol Hill and in state legislatures, Republicans are attacking women’s rights in four broad areas.

The chart above is from the invaluable people at Voteview, who use data on Congressional voting to measure political positions and polarizations. What it shows is what should be obvious, but much of the Beltway chattering class still refuses to acknowledge: there has been a huge increase in polarization, and it’s because Republicans have moved right, not because Democrats have moved left. (You want to look at the Northern Democrat line; the southern Democrats disappeared or became Republicans).

As I said, this is obvious; yet people who try to say this get frozen out of the discourse, even when — like Mann and Ornstein — they have heretofore been pundits in good standing. Instead, you’re supposed to wring your hands over partisanship in the abstract.

And when the attempt to turn this hand-wringing into actual political effort flops, you blame it on the false equivalency police!

The facts have a well-known anti-centrist bias.

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Thursday confirmed two nominees chosen by President Obama for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, overcoming Republican objections and bringing the seven-member board to full strength for the first time since 2006, before the economic crisis.

US Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul is to end active campaigning, a statement says, and will not campaign in states yet to hold primaries.

Battling on would require millions of dollars that the Ron Paul operation does not have, his campaign said.

But the Texas congressman will continue to try to win delegates awarded at forthcoming state conventions.

Mr Paul has 104 delegates, behind Mitt Romney’s 966, with 1,144 delegates needed to secure the nomination.

“We will no longer spend resources campaigning in primaries in states that have not yet voted. Doing so with any hope of success would take many tens of millions of dollars we simply do not have,” he said in a statement.

“In the coming days, my campaign leadership will lay out to you our delegate strategy and what you can do to help.”

Mr Paul is a libertarian-leaning Republican who has opposed the US Federal Reserve monetary system and US military engagement abroad.

The 76-year-old, a former obstetrician-gynaecologist, has a small base of staunch supporters and enjoys popularity among many younger voters.

In the 2012 election campaign, Mr Paul was consistently ranked in the middle of the pack, neither rising to challenge Mr Romney’s front-runner status nor trailing at the bottom of opinion polls.

Democrats were casting the general election fight as a referendum on whether moderates should still have a place in Washington, while Tea Party organizers said it would be seen as a national test of the movement’s enduring strength.

Democratic leaders, who had doubted their odds against Mr. Lugar, a Republican so moderate that even the leaders admitted that plenty of Democrats liked him, sounded giddy about their November opponent: Richard E. Mourdock, a Tea Party-supported Republican who seized a remarkable 61 percent of the vote in part by denouncing bipartisanship and pledging to an unwavering conservative approach.

“Democratic donors across the country are going to see this as a prime pickup opportunity,” said Matt Canter, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, who added that the Indiana seat would fall among five top Republican-held seats being targeted in the fight for control of the Senate.

Labor leaders, too, said they saw an opportunity now in Indiana. “We’re all ramping up our plans as we speak,” said Nancy J. Guyott, president of the Indiana A.F.L.-C.I.O.

National conservative groups, some of which had poured more than $3 million to benefit Mr. Mourdock in the primary, were poised to send still more if needed. The number of such outside groups also appeared likely to grow if the contest here, against Representative Joe Donnelly, a Democrat, appears truly competitive — a notion some conservative leaders remained skeptical about, given Indiana’s Republican leanings.

“It’s a big race because a lot hinges on our success,” said Brendan Steinhauser, director of federal and state campaigns at FreedomWorks, which trains Tea Party members and which spent about $850,000 in Mr. Mourdock’s victory and plans to be similarly involved in the general election.

“If Mourdock were not to win,” Mr. Steinhauser said, the gloating would come not just from Democrats but establishment Republicans, pointing to the Tea Party. “They would want to blame that on us — ‘See, we told you so,’ ” he said.

By Wednesday, the outlines of a new political battle were emerging, with Democrats trying to paint Mr. Mourdock as a far-right candidate with little appeal for independents or moderate Republicans, and conservatives portraying Mr. Donnelly as a typical Democrat.

The Club for Growth, which had spent money on television and radio commercials against Mr. Lugar in the primary and said it would contribute more, if needed, in the general election, said Mr. Donnelly was “an economic liberal who votes in lock-step” with Democratic leaders.

WASHINGTON — Congressional ethics investigators concluded in a report released Wednesday that Representative Vern Buchanan, a Florida lawmaker who leads House Republican fund-raising operations nationwide, appeared to have tried to illegally influence the testimony of an ex-business partner regarding allegations of campaign finance violations in his own race.

With the financial sector sure to summon massive amounts of money and resources to battle any criminal or civil prosecutions over its role in the 2008 crisis, a key is how much resources authorities will have at their disposal to battle back.

When New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman appeared before the Congressional Progressive Caucus in late April, he asked the members to help him obtain funding for the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities working group, which he co-chairs. “If you want to help me badger everybody, that’s good,” he said. “I’m a good badger by myself but I know there are some experts in this room.”

Yesterday, Representative Maxine Waters, a member of the caucus, made the first attempt to get the RMBS group funding—and it didn’t work.

She offered an amendment to a large appropriations bill, created by Republicans, that would fund, in part, the Department of Justice. The bill provided only a fraction of the $55 million the DoJ asked for in its budget request for “investigating and prosecuting financial and mortgage fraud.” Waters proposed re-appropriating some money in the bill from the NASA program to fully fund the $55 million request.

“Considering the retirement of the space shuttle program and a shift in NASA’s priorities, I believe we should use the funds in these accounts to help bring justice to defrauded investors, homeowners, and consumers,” she said on the House floor.

Representative Brad Miller also rose in support of Waters’ amendment. Though Miller was turned down for the job of executive director—because, he believes, the working group was afraid of industry blowback—Waters has been circulating a letter, signed by forty members of Congress, asking the working group to hire him anyway.

Miller strongly urged members to fully fund the RMBS investigation. “Every [Wall Street] defendant would have a defense team that would make the O.J. defense team look like a public defender, two years out of law school, handling 100 other cases,” he said. “We would be swamped by the opposition.

“But that is certainly no reason not to pursue those charges,” Miller continued. “In fact it’s all the more reason to go forward and pursue criminal fraud—to assure Americans that you…do not get a get out of jail free card because you are rich and powerful.”

I wrote earlier about the electoral implications of the defeat of longtime Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana in the Republican primary on Tuesday. It should make the seat much more competitive and will increase Democrats’ odds of retaining the Senate, although the nominee that Republicans chose instead, Richard E. Mourdock, the state treasurer, is perhaps a very slight favorite over the Democratic nominee Joe Donnelly.

The bigger story here, however, is that Mr. Lugar is the latest in a long line of relatively moderate Republican senators to meet an electoral demise. In fact, most moderate Republicans who served in the Senate just a few years ago will no longer be in the Congress when it meets again 2013. This is quite simple to illustrate.

I took the 55 Republican senators that served in the 109th Congress from 2005 through 2007 and divided them into two groups, moderates and conservatives, according to their voting records as analyzed by the statistical system DW-Nominate. Because there were an odd number of Republican senators in that year, I could not divide them exactly evenly, but I put 27 in the moderate group and 28 in the conservative group, with the dividing line falling between Senator John McCain of Arizona and Senator John Thune of South Dakota.

Of the 27 moderates, at most six will return to the Congress in 2013: Mr. McCain, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Thad Cochran of Mississippi, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Charles E. Grassley of Iowa.

Republicans took to the Senate floor Tuesday to denounce a bill proposed by Democrats that would freeze student loan rates by closing a loophole that allows wealthy individuals to avoid paying Social Security and Medicare taxes on some of their income, in anticipation of a procedural vote on the measure Tuesday afternoon. Democrats have referred to the bill as the Edwards bill, as it targets the tax strategy former presidential candidate John Edwards was criticized for using.

But in the past, many conservatives have dinged the same tax loop hole Democrats now seek to close.

Republicans have denounced the bill — which would pay for the $5.9 billion loan rate freeze by preventing individuals with incomes exceeding $250,000 who file their taxes as a small business to avoid paying Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes on some of their income – as punishing wealthy individuals at a high cost.

“Sadly the misguided government solution we will vote on today will be counter productive for our job creators,” said Senator Mike Johanns, Republican of Nebraska, on the Senate floor.

But conservatives have often had a dim view of this loop hole. In 2004, the Wall Street Journal editorial page lamented:

“Senator Edwards talks about the need to provide health care for all, but that didn’t stop him from using a clever tax dodge to avoid paying $591,000 into the Medicare system. While making his fortune as a trial lawyer in 1995, he formed what is known as a ‘subchapter S’ corporation, with himself as the sole shareholder. Instead of taking his $26.9 million in earnings directly in the following four years, he paid himself a salary of $360,000 a year and took the rest as corporate dividends.”

The conservative columnist Robert Novak, that same year, wrote, “It is one of the last loopholes left in the Internal Revenue Code, and it is a big one.” Even Sean Hannity of Fox News got in on the act that year saying: “Hey, John Edwards is worth, what, $30 million to $40 million, set up a sub-S corporation to keep him from paying Medicare taxes on 90 percent of his income, and then he lectures the rest of us how Medicare is going broke.”

The House has passed its own version of a bill to that would keep rates on subsidized undergraduate loans from reverting from its current 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent by stripping $5.9 billion from a program within the health care law to pay for the freeze.

Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader from Kentucky, said Monday: “For Republicans, well, we don’t think young people should have to suffer any more than they already are as a result of this President’s failure to turn the economy around. We just disagree that we should pay for a fix by diverting $6 billion from Medicare and raising taxes on the very businesses we’re counting on to hire these young people.”

Richard G. Lugar , a six-term Republican senator from Indiana, lost his bid to stay in office after his Tea Party -backed rival questioned his conservative credentials and accused Mr. Lugar of losing touch with Indiana and its voters.

Richard E. Mourdock, the state’s treasurer, defeated Mr. Lugar in the Republican primary on Tuesday, according to networks and The Associated Press. Mr. Mourdock will face Joe Donnelly, a Democratic member of the House, in November.

The results of the primary end the career of one of the longest-serving members of the Senate and provide a new trophy for the Tea Party movement. Mr. Lugar, 80, leaves after three decades as one of the chamber’s leading foreign policy experts and with a reputation as a voice of moderation in his party.

That reputation — and a sense among his constituents that he had long ago become a creature of Washington — doomed Mr. Lugar, who had not faced a primary challenger in more than a quarter-century.

Mr. Mourdock repeatedly accused Mr. Lugar of not being conservative enough for Indiana. He pointed to Mr. Lugar’s votes to confirm President Obama ’s Supreme Court nominees, support for immigration legislation known as the Dream Act and his backing of bank bailouts during the economic crisis.

Conservative organizations with connections to the Tea Party movement flocked to Mr. Mourdock, hoping to add to the list of moderate senators they had helped to oust over the past several years. (Bob Bennett, Republican of Utah, and Lisa Murkowski , Republican of Alaska, both lost primary battles to Tea Party candidates, though Ms. Murkowski ran as an independent and kept her seat.)

But Mr. Mourdock also benefited from the perception that Mr. Lugar had long ago abandoned Indiana for a life in Washington. The senator and his wife live in suburban Washington, having sold their house in Indiana years ago.

Rick Santorum told his supporters in an e-mail Monday night that he was endorsing Mitt Romney as the Republican presidential candidate and that “all hands on deck” would be needed to defeat President Obama in the fall.

Mr. Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania who dropped his bid for the Republican presidential nomination last month after making a strong showing in multiple states, said he met privately with Mr. Romney in Pittsburgh last Friday.

During that hour-long meeting, Mr. Santorum said that he felt a responsibility to assess Mr. Romney’s commitment to issues that are important to social conservatives and tea party supporters, among others. He said he also wanted a commitment from Mr. Romney, assuring him that there would be “appropriate representation” of conservatives in a Romney administration.

He said they also discussed the role of the family in the country’s economic success. “I was impressed with the Governor’s deep understanding of this connection and his commitment to economic policies that preserve and strengthen families,” Mr. Santorum said.

Mr. Santorum noted that he had repeatedly raised concerns during the Republican primary fight over whether Mr. Romney would take on Mr. Obama’s health care policy. However, in the e-mail, he told his supporters that he had no doubt that Mr. Romney would work with a Republican Congress to repeal it and replace it.

“Above all else, we both agree that President Obama must be defeated,” Mr. Santorum said. “The task will not be easy. It will require all hands on deck if our nominee is to be victorious. Governor Romney will be that nominee and he has my endorsement and support to win this the most critical election of our lifetime.”

He closed by saying that while his conversation with Mr. Romney was productive, he intended to keep the lines of “communication open with him and his campaign.”

Despite Mr. Santorum’s praise for Mr. Romney in his endorsement, the Democratic National Committee was trying to make sure that people did not forget all the unkind things he said about his fellow Republican during the campaign that were captured on video.

The House Budget Committee is set to meet today on a new GOP plan to stave off further cuts in military spending that are mandated by the Budget Control Act’s sequestration trigger. The Pentagon will be required to trim $55 billion from its budget next year and House Republicans think they’ve figured out a way to prevent that: cut programs for the poor, the AP reports:

The Republicans who control the House are using cuts to food aid, health care and social services like Meals on Wheels to protect the Pentagon from a wave of budget cuts come January. […]

Fully one-fourth of the House GOP spending cuts come from programs directly benefiting the poor, such as Medicaid, food stamps, the Social Services Block Grant, and a child tax credit claimed by working immigrants.

As CAP’s Melissa Boteach, Lawrence Korb and Max Hoffman noted in a report last month, with the cuts they are calling for, House Republicans will be protecting “largely useless” weapons systems, preserving funding for unnecessary programs like the V-22 Osprey, and adding two nuclear submarines to the U.S. military’s already “overwhelming preponderance of sea power.”

At the same time, the GOP plan would, for example, cut food stamps for 2 million people and reduce the same benefits for 44 million others. Nearly 300,000 school children would lose free school meals and hundreds of thousands could lose their Medicaid or CHIP coverage.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops last month criticized the GOP’s cuts to food stamps, tax credits for immigrant families, and other safety net programs as “unjustified and wrong.”

And while the AP notes that the GOP plan “will be dead on arrival” in the Democrat-controlled Senate, “they’re likely just a sample of what’s in store next year from Republicans if Mitt Romney wins the White House and the GOP takes back the Senate.”

According to sources familiar with the situation, Grenell decided to resign after being kept under wraps during a time when national security issues, including the president’s ad concerning Osama bin Laden, had emerged front and center in the campaign.

Pieces in two conservative publications, the National Review and Daily Caller , reflected the uproar by some social conservatives over the appointment.

In the National Review, Matthew J. Franck wrote late last week: “Suppose Barack Obama comes out — as Grenell wishes he would — in favor of same-sex marriage in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. How fast and how publicly will Richard Grenell decamp from Romney to Obama?”

The argument that Grenell could essentially not be openly gay and serve on a GOP presidential campaign was belied by the fact that Grenell has been a loyal Republican for many years, working for esteemed foreign policy figures including former Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton.

The ongoing pressure from social conservatives over his appointment and the reluctance of the Romney campaign to send Grenell out as a spokesman while controversy swirled left Grenell essentially with no job. The Romney camp has not responded to my request for comment.

“We are disappointed that Ric decided to resign from the campaign for his own personal reasons,” Matt Rhoades, the Romney campaign manager, said in a statement. “We wanted him to stay because he had superior qualifications for the position he was hired to fill.”

Mr. Grenell served four American ambassadors to the United Nations during the presidency of George W. Bush. But his selection had been sharply criticized by some social conservatives soon after he was named less than two weeks ago as Mr. Romney’s campaign spokesman for national security issues. In addition to concerns from some in the party about his sexual orientation, Mr. Grenell had been criticized for sometimes caustic Twitter posts about women including Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC host, and Callista Gingrich, the wife of Newt Gingrich.

In a statement to Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post columnist who first reported the resignation, Mr. Grenell said: “While I welcomed the challenge to confront President Obama’s foreign policy failures and weak leadership on the world stage, my ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyperpartisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign. I want to thank Governor Romney for his belief in me and my abilities and his clear message to me that being openly gay was a non-issue for him and his team.”

A openly gay spokesman for presidential candidate Mitt Romney has resigned on his first official day of work, amid criticism by anti-gay conservatives.

Richard Grenell, recently hired to speak on foreign affairs for the presumptive Republican nominee, announced his departure on Tuesday.

In a statement, Mr Grenell thanked Mr Romney for “his belief in me”.

The spokesman had previously deleted about 800 tweets and took down his personal website.

According to the Washington Post Mr Grenell had come under fire for statements about Callista Gingrich and Michelle Obama.

The Romney campaign said it was “disappointed” that Mr Grenell had resigned.

“We wanted him to stay because he had superior qualifications for the position he was hired to fill,” Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades said in a statement.

Jonathan Chait has an excellent piece on Paul Ryan, which shows not just that he’s a fake deficit hawk now, but that he always was — he was an enthusiastic supporter of all of Bush’s budget-busters, spending as well as taxes.

Yet, as Chait also says, Ryan is still — still — beloved by “centrists”, who get very annoyed when someone (i.e., me) points out the fraudulence. How can this be?

Chait’s main answer is that reporters don’t know policy, so they’re easily taken in by image. But I don’t buy that. For one thing, they do generally love the “gotcha” style of journalism — you say A, but you used to say B — and as Chait has just demonstrated, you can have a field day doing that on Ryan.

Also, what about the Very Serious deficit-hawk groups that gave Ryan an award for fiscal responsibility? They can crunch numbers; they can surely see as clearly as I can that Ryan’s plans are fake, that when you strip out the implausible and unspecified they amount to a deficit-increasing plan to take from the poor and give to the rich.

The real story here isn’t so much about Ryan as it is about the fundamental unseriousness of the Very Serious, who are in their own way just as much about striking a pose unrelated to their real actions as Ryan himself.

For the Romney campaign, however, a paucity of small-dollar donations is inauspicious not because it means that it will have trouble raising enough money (it probably won’t, and if it does, Mr. Romney has considerable personal wealth at his disposal). Rather, a lack of small-dollar donors could indicate tepid support for Mr. Romney among the Republican base.

Research by Adam Bonica of the political science department at Stanford University suggests that small donations tend to come from the wings of the ideological spectrum. For Mr. Romney, donations of less than $200 would most likely come from the most conservative camp in the Republican Party, a group that resisted his candidacy throughout the nominating process.

“In the primaries, there were a lot of small donors, but they weren’t giving to Romney,” Professor Bonica said. “I think it does have something to do with Romney being perceived to be more moderate.”

The Romney campaign’s continuing dearth of small-dollar contributions suggests that very conservative voters, like those who supported Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, have yet to warm completely to Mr. Romney, which could potentially mean not only less money but also fewer lawn signs and bumper stickers, fewer volunteers and, ultimately, fewer votes.

It is too early to call the problem chronic. The Republican primary was only recently resolved. Mr. Gingrich is expected to drop out of the race officially on Wednesday. Mr. Gingrich, as well as Mr. Santorum and Michele Bachmann, who appealed to more conservative voters, will presumably endorse Mr. Romney eventually. And at that point, conservative Republicans may begin coalescing around Mr. Romney in earnest, enabling his campaign to construct a robust small-donor network.

As Republicans rally to unify behind the presumptive nominee Mitt Romney, the campaign’s allies are working to heal old wounds from the bruising primary fight. In the latest example, the pro-Romney “super PAC” Restore Our Future has scrubbed its YouTube account of all negative ads against Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.

As noticed by Politico, the group’s YouTube account now just has two advertisements: an attack on President Obama’s job-creating credentials and a rehashing of a 2008 ad about Mr. Romney saving a young girl gone missing in New York City. The former negative videos have been scrubbed from the group’s channel and made private on individual ad pages.

The super PAC had been one of the main attack dogs of the Romney primary campaign, critcizing Mr. Gingrich heavily in Iowa and Florida. The group then shifted its attacks to Mr. Santorum following his post-Iowa surge in the polls.

Mr. Romney’s campaign is expected to meet with Mr. Santorum this week to discuss a possible endorsement and ways in which the two former rivals can work together. Mr. Gingrich is expected to formally withdraw from the race this week.

I was just watching Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC and had the pleasure of seeing the always lovely Haley Barbour. Barbour went through a list of attacks the Obama campaign is allegedly making against Mitt Romney. When he said the Obama campaign was attacking Romney for being Mormon, Mitchell had to but in and remind Barbour that they had made no anti-Mormon statements whatsoever. So, Barbour, always quick on his feet, brought up Elie Wiesel as an Obama surrogate who is anti-Mormon and wants Mormons to “stop certain practices.” Mitchell basically told Barbour that if he wants to play the surrogate game, it goes both ways. But, the bigger point is that Barbour is basically saying that opposing the posthumous baptisms of Jews, including Anne Frank, is somehow anti-Mormon. Because that is the practice that the Holocaust survivor and writer was against. Well, Haley, by that logic, and if Wiesel, and Obama, by extension, is anti-Mormon, then you, and Romney, by extension, support baptizing Anne Frank. So, please, keep speaking for Mitt!

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science ; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization . Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.

It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. Its once-legendary moderate and center-right legislators in the House and the Senate — think Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards, John Danforth, Chuck Hagel — are virtually extinct.

The post-McGovern Democratic Party, by contrast, while losing the bulk of its conservative Dixiecrat contingent in the decades after the civil rights revolution, has retained a more diverse base. Since the Clinton presidency, it has hewed to the center-left on issues from welfare reform to fiscal policy. While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post.

What happened? Of course, there were larger forces at work beyond the realignment of the South. They included the mobilization of social conservatives after the 1973Roe v. Wade decision, the anti-tax movement launched in 1978 by California’s Proposition 13, the rise of conservative talk radio after a congressional pay raise in 1989, and the emergence of Fox News and right-wing blogs. But the real move to the bedrock right starts with two names: Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist .

In many ways Tucker Carlson’s a better symbol of the pathetic state of what passes for conservative journalism than even Glenn Beck or the late Andrew Breitbart, to name two of his contemporaries with a much larger following. Glenn Beck started as a no-account shock jock and is now a no-account Internet show host. Breitbart at least went from Drudge lackey to successful right-wing media mogul. Carlson, though, began his career in the most respectable fashion possible and has spent the ensuing decades gradually lowering himself into the gutter. His story illustrates why we can’t have a responsible or at least slightly less hysterical conservative media.

The Republican National Committee officially embraced Mitt Romney as the party’s presumptive nominee on Wednesday morning after Mr. Romney claimed his new title in an energetic speech Tuesday night.

Reince R. Priebus, the chairman of the committee, said in a statement sent out early Wednesday morning that the party organization and its resources were now at the disposal of Mr. Romney’s campaign.

“Governor Romney’s strong performance and delegate count at this stage of the primary process has made him our party’s presumptive nominee,” Mr. Priebus said. “In order to maximize our efforts I have directed my staff at the R.N.C. to open lines of communication with the Romney campaign.”

The statement ends the committee’s neutral role in the Republican primaries despite the fact that Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, and Representative Ron Paul of Texas, are still, technically, in the race to be the nominee.

But officials at the committee said that it became clear — if not technically official — that Mr. Romney would be the nominee after he swept five large primaries Tuesday night.

Officials said the shift, which was planned with top aides in Mr. Romney’s Boston headquarters, will lead to what they called a “full synchronization of both operations,” with the goal of making the most of the resources in both places.

Brian Jones, a veteran Republican strategist who has worked on several presidential campaigns, will be the chief liaison between the campaign and the committee and will split his time between Washington and Boston, said Sean Spicer, a spokesman for the committee. Mr. Jones, a former committee staff member, is very close to Matt Rhoades, Mr. Romney’s campaign manager, and has been advising the campaign for several months.

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is expected to suspend his campaign next week, US media report.

The former House Speaker said on Wednesday that he expected Mitt Romney, who won five primaries on Tuesday, to be the Republican nominee.

The Gingrich campaign had said it would reassess its future if he did not win the contest in Delaware.

He has won only two primaries - South Carolina and Georgia - since the election season began in January.

Mr Gingrich will reportedly hold his last campaign event on 1 May in Washington DC.

Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant (R), in defending his decision to sign a bill that could shut down Mississippi’s only abortion clinic, told conservative radio host Tony Perkins on Tuesday that Democrats’ “one mission in life is to abortion children.”

“Even if you believe in abortion, the hypocrisy of the left that now tried to kill this bill, that says that I should have never signed it, the true hypocrisy is that their one mission in life is to abort children, is to kill children in the womb,” he said. “It doesn’t really matter, they don’t care if the mother’s life is in jeopardy, that if something goes wrong that a doctor can’t admit them to a local hospital, that he’s not even board certified.”

“We passed that bill and I think you’ll see other states follow, and when that happens, at least these fly-in abortionists are going to be regulated under the state laws of the Medical Procedures Act here in the state of Mississippi as they should be across the nation,” he said.

The bill in question, HB 1390, requires that all physicians who perform abortions in Mississippi have admitting privileges at the local hospital and be board certified in obstetrics and gynecology.

While all of the physicians at the one clinic in the state are currently board certified OB-GYNs, only one of them has admitting privileges at a local hospital. The other two physicians can’t get privileges because they live out of state, and the owner of the clinic has said it can’t operate with only one doctor on staff.

Following Bryant’s comments on the bill, Perkins took a dig at the Democrats who opposed it.

“Well, the driving factor is profit for many of them,” he said.

Odds are, in other words, that if Obama wins, he will still be negotiating with Republican leaders in Congress. But the same can’t be said for Mitt Romney.

If Romney wins the election, it’s almost a sure bet that Republicans win control of both the House and the Senate. And that matters. Right now, the GOP’s agenda is the Ryan budget, and that’s entirely fiscal: It’s a premium support plan for Medicare, and tax cuts, and deep cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and other domestic programs. All that can be passed through budget reconciliation — which is to say, all that can be made immune to the filibuster.

So if Romney wins and the Republicans take control, they could accomplish quite a lot on party-line votes, even if their majorities are slim, and Democrats are opposed. Indeed, Romney could end up being a fairly transformational president for conservatives so long as he’s paired with a Republican Congress.

Mitt Romney vowed to oust Barack Obama and build “a better America”

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has vowed to take the White House from President Barack Obama and end four years of “disappointments”.

Speaking while racking up a series of primary night victories, he said a “new campaign” was beginning.

“Hold on a little longer. A better America begins tonight,” he said.

The presumptive Republican nominee easily won primaries in Connecticut, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

As the results began to come in on a night with the most electoral delegates at stake since Super Tuesday, Mr Romney took the stage in New Hampshire, the site of his first primary win of the year.

He focused on the forthcoming general election campaign, saying America needed a new direction and a renewal of its greatness.

“Tonight is the start of a new campaign to unite every American who knows in their heart that we can do better,” he said.

Mitt Romney circled back at the end of a brief news conference Monday afternoon to clarify an issue he had failed to mention before: his support of a temporary extension of a low interest rate on federal student loans, which President Obama also favors .

“There’s one thing I want to mention that I forgot to mention at the very beginning, and that was that particularly with the mention of the number of college graduates that can’t find work or that can only find work well beneath their skill level, I fully support the effort to extend the low interest rate on student loans,” Mr. Romney said. “There was some concern that that would expire halfway through the year, and I support extending the temporary relief on interest rates for students as a result of – as a result of student loans, obviously – in part because of the extraordinarily poor conditions in the job market.”

Though House Republicans oppose such an extension, Mr. Obama has been urging Congress to extend the existing interest rate on federal student loans. If Congress fails to act, the interest rate on the loans, which are taken out by nearly eight million students each year, will double on July 1, to 6.8 percent.

During an interview last week on The Fernando Espuelas Show, Alexandra Franceschi, Specialty Media Press Secretary of the Republican National Committee, said that the Republican party’s economic platform in 2012 is going to be the same as it was during the Bush years, “just updated”:
ESPUELAS: What do you mean by economic security? Regardless of who the ultimate nominee is, what’s the general idea that the RNC, or the Republican party in general, has in terms of this message?

FRANCESCHI: Well, it’s a message of being able to attain the American dream. It’s less government spending, which a Tarrance Group poll, came out last week actually, shows that the majority of Hispanics believe that less government spending is the way out of this deficit crisis. It’s lowering taxes so small businesses can grow and they can employ more people, because we understand that the private sector is the engine of the economy. It’s not the government. […]

ESPUELAS: Now, how different is that concept from what were the policies of the Bush administration? And the reason I ask that is because there’s some analysis now that is being published talking about the Bush years being the slowest period of job creation since those statistics were created. Is this a different program or is this that program just updated?

FRANCESCHI: I think it’s that program, just updated.

Listen here:

As a result of the Bush economic platform, “growth in investment, GDP, and employment all posted their worst performance of any post-war expansion,” while “overall monthly job growth was the worst of any cycle since at least February 1945, and household income growth was negative for the first cycle since tracking began in 1967.” Meanwhile, the deficit and debt exploded. It would have to be quite the update for the GOP to make anything better happen this time around.

Former Republican candidate Jon Huntsman took a battle axe to his own party, comparing it to China's Communist Party and criticizing it's standard bearer in a wide-ranging interview at the 92nd Street Y Sunday night.
Recounting his first experience on the presidential debate stage in Iowa last August, Huntsman says he was struck by the question "Is this the best we could do?"
Huntsman, the former Utah governor and once President Barack Obama's Ambassador to China, expressed disappointment that the Republican Party disinvited him from a Florida fundraiser in March after he publicly called for a third party.
"This is what they do in China on party matters if you talk off script," he said.
Huntsman said he regrets his decision to oppose a 10-to-1 spending cuts to tax increase deal to cut the deficit at the Iowa debate lamenting: “if you can only do certain things over again in life.”
"What went through my head was if I veer at all from my pledge not to raise any taxes…then I’m going to have to do a lot of explaining," he explained. "What was going through my mind was 'don't I just want to get through this?'"
That decision, Huntsman said, "has caused me a lot of heartburn.”
Huntsman jokingly blamed his failed candidacy in part on his wife, Mary Kaye, who told him she'd leave him if he abandoned his principles.
“She said if you pandered, if you sign any of those damn pledges, I’ll leave you,” Huntsman recounted.
"So I had to say I believe in science — and people on stage look at you quizzically as though you're was an oddball," Huntsman said, explaining why he was "toast" in Iowa.
Asked by journalist Jeff Greenfield if he could win the nomination of the Republican Party in Utah today, Huntsman said he could not, saying later that Ronald Reagan would "likely not" be able to win the GOP nomination nationally in this political climate.
On foreign policy, Huntsman questioned his former Republican opponents' hard-line positions on China. "I don’t know what world these people are living in," he said, not naming Mitt Romney by name.
Though he categorically ruled out being Romney's running mate, Huntsman stood by his tepid endorsement of Romney, saying he would manage legislation through Congress more effectively.
But Huntsman said Romney has to campaign on more than fear, and provide a positive alternative to Obama.
“He’ll have to work hard on making sure that happens,” he said.

9:28 p.m. | Updated A new joint fund-raising initiative between Mitt Romney and the Republican National Committee will aim to raise $800 million by November, part of what Mr. Romney’s campaign estimates will be a total of $1 billion spent to defeat President Obama and elect Mr. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor.

Senate Republicans have blocked the Buffett Rule, President Barack Obama’s proposal to raise tax rates for top earners to at least 30%.

Senators largely voted on party lines and failed to win the 60 votes to move the bill forward for a full debate.

Republicans have resolutely opposed the measure, saying it is a political gimmick that will not create jobs.

The bill is named after tycoon Warren Buffett, who complained his secretary paid a higher rate of tax than he does.

Asking the wealthy to pay their “fair share” is viewed as a core theme of Mr Obama’s re-election campaign.

The Democratic president has argued that raising taxes on Americans earning more than $1m (£628,772) per year would help reduce the deficit and make the US tax code fairer.

After the bill was blocked, Mr Obama said in a statement that Senate Republicans chose “once again to protect tax breaks for the wealthiest few Americans at the expense of the middle class”.

Correspondents say Mr Obama will use this vote to attack Republicans in the upcoming November election.

While Democrats control the majority of the Senate, they were nine votes short of moving the debate forward, at a final tally of 51-45.

So long, flip-flopper. Hello, right-wing extremist.

Mitt Romney may be inclined to start moving to the political center now that he’s practically got the Republican nomination won and done, but the Obama campaign would much rather keep him right where he’s been for the past few months: in the conservative territory he staked out while battling for Republican primary voters.

After months of depicting Mr. Romney as the ultimate squishy, double-talking, no-core soul, Team Obama is shifting gears. Senior administration officials, along with Democratic and campaign officials, all say their strategy now will be to tell the world that Mr. Romney has a core after all — and it’s deep red.

Mr. Romney’s overheard remarks at a fund-raiser in Florida on Sunday night that, if elected, he planned to slash government programs (though he has not spelled that out for the voters) gave Obama backers the perfect opening, and they jumped on it. “Mitt Romney Tells Rich Voters His Secret Plan to Cut Housing Assistance,” said a headline from ThinkProgress , a blog put out by the left-leaning Center for American Progress. Democratic officials followed that up with a call to reporters on Thursday charging that Mr. Romney’s proposal would “cut critical funds for homeless veterans.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama’s advisers saw another chance, and they were all over that, too. Hours after Mr. Romney accepted the endorsement of Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, the Democratic National Committee was out with an ad “Mitt Romney and Tom Corbett: Too Extreme for Women.” The traditional spooky music accompanies video of Mr. Corbett defending his advocacy of a proposal that could make women undergo ultrasounds before receiving abortions, and saying women could “close their eyes” if they didn’t want to see what was on the screen.

“Did Mitt Romney close his eyes to accept this endorsement?” the D.N.C. said in an e-mail it helpfully sent to reporters trumpeting the advertisement. “Probably not, since Mitt Romney’s positions mirror those of the extreme elements of his party,” the e-mail continued, going on to list a host of conservative Romney positions that Democrats hope will alienate women.

For Mr. Obama, the decision to start going after Mr. Romney from the left is as much a logical evolution as is any attempt by Mr. Romney to move to the center, in particular Mr. Romney’s effort now to try to woo Hispanic and female voters who may have been alienated by some of the talk coming out of the Republican primary.

As the general election heats up, a central battlefield promises to be the fights for suburban women in crucial swing states like Florida, Ohio and Colorado, and both camps are now trying to prove their bona fides with that population. When added to recent data that shows an increase in Hispanic voters in key states, the Obama campaign sees an opening to paint Mr. Romney as out of touch among both women and Hispanics.

Tony Rudy, who served as deputy chief of staff to Tom DeLay , a former House majority leader, was sentenced on Friday to five months in a halfway house. Mr. Rudy, 45, pleaded guilty six years ago to conspiring with Jack Abramoff , a powerful Republican lobbyist, and others to accept gifts as a Congressional staff member and later to offering gifts to public officials as a lobbyist in exchange for legislative favors. His cooperation with prosecutors has led to 18 convictions.

The Utah Republican convention is going to a second ballot, to determine whether six-term Sen. Orrin Hatch will be renominated outright today, or if he will face a primary in June against former state Sen. Liljenquist.

Out of over 3,900 delegates in attendance on Saturday, Hatch received 57.2 percent of the vote on the first ballot, the state GOP announced, to Liljenquist’s 28.8 percent. All eight other candidates have been eliminated — even if their supporters combined together, they would not be able to overtake Liljenquist.

Hatch and Liljenquist will now compete again on a second ballot, in a one-on-one match. The level of support needed to win outright is 60 percent of the vote, at which point there would not be a primary.

At the state GOP convention two years ago, incumbent Sen. Bob Bennett came in third place, and was eliminated without the chance to compete in a primary.

The No. 2 House Republican said that if Congress doles out additional money to assist in the aftermath of natural disasters across the country, the spending may need to be offset. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said “if there is support for a supplemental, it would be accompanied by support for having pay-fors to that supplemental.” Finding ways to offset disaster relief funds could be a significant challenge for House Republicans and would put their promise to cut spending to a true test. Roughly 100 people have died in Joplin, Mo., in the last few days after a tornado cut through the town. Joplin, a southwestern Missouri town of roughly 50,000 people, is represented by Rep. Billy Long, a freshman Republican who replaced Roy Blunt when he went to the Senate. Missouri’s Congressional delegation has six Republicans — two were elected in 2010.

An exhaustive new study by media watchdog Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting shows that the Sunday morning talk shows have been dominated over the last eight months by white, Republican men.

Between June 2011 and February of this year, 70 percent of all one-on-one interviewees on the four biggest political talk shows — NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday — were Republicans. The numbers were even more lopsided in favor of men and white guests:

Members of the Republican National Committee considered — and rejected — changes to their presidential nominating process for 2016 after a contest this year that some members say was too long and drawn out.

At a meeting here of the R.N.C.’s rules committee, members debated whether to abandon the proportional voting that gave Mitt Romney’s rivals the ability to try and accumulate delegates even as they failed to win the nominating contests.

Sue Everhart, a committee member from Georgia, proposed the change, citing concerns about the length of the competition. She suggested changes that would have allowed states to hold winner-take-all contests in 2016, potentially bringing the contest to a close more quickly.

But several members spoke in opposition to her proposal, saying the current process gives more voters an opportunity to participate in the nomination by creating a lengthier process.

“The thought has been for 20 years to try to create a process which keeps us from having a one-day primary in which you have the man on the white horse winning and then you wake up with buyer’s remorse,” said John Ryder, a committee member from Tennessee.

Morton Blackwell, a member from Virginia, also opposed the change. He said that the longer process, made possible by proportional voting, made it possible for more states to consider the candidates.

“We have had a full vetting as a result of the rules,” Mr. Blackwell said.

A change in the rules at Thursday’s meeting would have been a recommendation only; the power to change the presidential selection process for 2016 rests with the Republican National Convention in Tampa later this year.

But the quick rejection of the proposed change suggests that many in the party are happy with a process that offered many Republican candidates a shot at being the front-runner during a months-long competition.

Mitt Romney will deliver the commencement address at Liberty University, the evangelical institution founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell in Lynchburg, Va.

Mr. Romney’s campaign said the university invited him to speak to the approximately 48,000 people expected to attend the graduation ceremony on May 12.

Virginia is a swing state, but for Mr. Romney, this invitation offers a chance to shore up one of his weaknesses within his base, as many evangelicals remain wary of his Mormon faith.

Jerry Falwell Jr., the university’s chancellor, said in a statement that “we are delighted” that Mr. Romney would be speaking, and he compared the visit to those of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the elder George Bush in 1990. However, the decision has already sparked controversy among students and alumni of Liberty University, with nearly 300 people commenting on the institution’s Facebook announcement within two hours of its posting.

“I am so disappointed in my university for their choice in commencement speaker Romney. You have lost a potential grad student,” wrote Paige Farmer. “It is shameful that you would allow him a stage for political gain. What could a Mormon possibly have to share with Christians?”

Others, like Josh Phares, who is graduating this year, took a different view: “All of us can learn something from this man, regardless of his faith. In life you are going to be surrounded by different people from different backgrounds and religions. Learn to embrace it!”

Students at Regent University, founded by the Rev. Pat Robertson, reacted similarly to news that Mr. Romney would deliver the commencement address in 2007. He spoke about conservative ideas, but not his faith.

Mitt Romney has made Afghanistan a showcase for his attacks on President Obama’s foreign policy. He says Mr. Obama has undercut American interests by setting timetables for withdrawing troops, providing the Taliban — who displayed their resilience with attacks over the weekend — further reason to wait things out. He called Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta “misguided and so naïve” for announcing plans to hand over primary combat responsibilities to Afghan forces next year and leave American troops mainly in training and other roles.

But despite the tough critique, Mr. Romney has loosely embraced the main thrust of White House policy for troop levels after the election: a timetable for pulling out nearly all troops by the end of 2014.

Now that Mr. Romney has emerged as the likely Republican nominee and Afghanistan is again being tested by a Taliban offensive, his position on the war is likely to come under more scrutiny after a primary fight that gave him few opportunities to offer nuanced national security positions. Even so, analysts say he has reasons to be less than precise on Afghanistan: The war’s declining support among voters means there is little space for him to stake out a policy that provides both a sharp political contrast with Mr. Obama and keeps the war’s unpopularity at a distance.

“He doesn’t want to own this war in the event he gets elected, but by the same token he can’t look like he’s advocating a precipitous withdrawal for all sorts of reasons, including alienating the Republican base, and yet he cannot take the same position as the president,” said Stephen Biddle, a military expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s difficult to square the circle and meet all those constraints at the same time.”

And domestic politics are only one tricky element. There are serious doubts that the broadly hoped-for exit strategy of both parties — that Afghan forces can progress to where they can keep the Taliban at bay with limited assistance by 2014 — will materialize that quickly, if at all.

But critics have argued that the benefits would disproportionately land in the pockets of wealthy individuals and businesses such as sports franchises, financial firms and celebrities. Congress’ revenue estimators, the Joint Committee on Taxation, has calculated that the top 11 percent of small businesses would grab 64 percent of the break, while the 125,000 firms with $1 million a year in adjusted gross income would snag 18.3 percent. The 9.2 million small businesses at the bottom of the income heap would share about 15 percent of the break.

The bill “is not focused on cutting taxes for small businesses, but instead would provide tax cuts to the most fortunate,” the Obama administration noted in a statement. “Under the bill’s definition of income, many of the ‘small businesses’ that would receive the largest tax breaks are law partners, consultants, and other wealthy individuals and corporations with the biggest profits. The proposal is a giveaway that will cost $46 billion and could, in fact, lead to delays and reductions in investment and hiring.”

House Republicans are finding that their embrace of Roman Catholic bishops can have a political downside.

Ever since the Obama administration ran afoul of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops over mandated contraception coverage, Republican lawmakers have used Catholic leaders as a cudgel in their efforts to paint the Obama administration as waging a war on religious freedom. But the group recently sent letters to chairmen of two House committees lambasting Republican efforts to cut government spending.

In particular, the bishops spoke out loudly against the budget blueprint passed by the House last month, as well as legislation passing through committees that would turn spending cuts into reality through changes to social welfare programs.

“Major reductions at this time of economic turmoil and rising poverty will hurt hungry, poor and vulnerable people in our nation and around the world,” the Rev. Stephen Blaire, bishop of Stockton, Calif., and the Rev. Richard E. Pates, bishop of Des Moines, wrote for the conference. “A just spending bill cannot rely on disproportionate cuts in essential services to the poor and vulnerable persons; it requires shared sacrifice by all.”

For House leaders, the letters could sting. Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio is Catholic. Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and the architect of the House spending plan, has said that his Catholic faith informed his decisions.

“I want them to take a bigger look,” Mr. Boehner said on Wednesday of the bishops. “The bigger look is that if we don’t make these decisions, these programs won’t exist. And then they’ll really have something to worry about.”

But the call for shared sacrifice dovetails with Democratic talking points, amplified almost daily by President Obama. Along with the cuts in spending, the budget plan calls for significant reductions in corporate and personal income tax rates. Those tax cuts are supposed to be paid for by equal cuts to tax deductions and credits, a prescription some tax writers think will be impossible. But no matter what, Republicans oppose any increase in overall tax revenues.

In their letters, the bishops laid out “moral criteria to guide these difficult budget decisions: protect human life and dignity.” They wrote that “the needs of those who are hungry and homeless, without work or in poverty, should come first,” and that “government and other institutions have a shared responsibility to promote the common good of all, especially ordinary workers and families who struggle to live in dignity in difficult economic times.”

On Wednesday morning, the House Agriculture Committee approved legislation to restrict eligibility to food stamps, cut nutrition aid to the states, and trim nutrition and obesity education grants. The action helps it meet its obligation under the budget to cut $33 billion in spending over 10 years.

The Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday was set to pass legislation requiring a Social Security number to claim the refundable child tax credit and eliminating the Social Services Block Grant, which helps state programs like child care, Meals on Wheels for older people, and child protective services. The committee must produce $53 billion in savings over 10 years to help prevent across-the-board defense cuts set to take place in January.

“The House-passed budget reflects the tough choices necessary to get this country back on course,” said Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. “Republicans have made a commitment to reform Washington to strengthen our economy, create jobs and get our fiscal house in order.”

Attorney General Eric Holder today called it “inconceivable” that Congress has not yet reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act. “For the life of me, I cannot begin to understand why this is something that is a debate within Congress,” he said, “It is inconceivable to me now that we are in the process of a debate about something that has proven so effective and is clearly so needed for the future. It must be passed, and it must be passed soon,” Holder said

House Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio formally endorsed Mitt Romney as the Republican presidential nominee on Tuesday, throwing the weight of his office behind Mr. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, roughly a month before the candidate can amass the delegates necessary to make it official.

“It is clear now that Mitt Romney is going to be our nominee,” Mr. Boehner said at a news conference that followed his weekly meeting with the House Republican Conference. “I think Mitt Romney has a set of economic policies that can put Americans back to work and, frankly, contrast sharply with the failed economic policies of President Obama.”

Mr. Boehner promised to do “everything I can to help him win.”

What does Rick Santorum want?

On Monday night he held a conference call that was billed as a chance for him to discuss the presidential campaign and his future. But during the half-hour discussion, with more than 4,000 supporters listening in, he raised more questions than he answered about his intentions between now and November. And the uncertainty about his intentions highlights the challenges that Mitt Romney faces in revving up Mr. Santorum and his conservative followers for the fall campaign.

Mr. Santorum refrained from endorsing Mr. Romney during the conference call, but John Brabender, his top strategist, said Tuesday that he expected such an endorsement to take place in the next two or three weeks. Mr. Brabender said that he and his counterparts in the Romney campaign had simply not had a chance to coordinate their schedules.

Still, this period before an endorsement is a delicate time in which Mr. Santorum is likely to try to leverage what he can out of Mr. Romney while also presenting a constant political threat to him.

Mr. Santorum did make clear that he was eager to pay off his campaign debt. He asked for donations during the conference call and on Tuesday followed up with yet another e-mail solicitation to supporters, telling them that he must retire his debt before he gets involved in anything else.

He was less clear about his long-range goals, but friends and aides said that he wanted to establish himself as the leader of the conservative base of the Republican Party . Any such plans would be seen as laying the groundwork for another presidential run, in either 2016 or 2020, depending on whether Mr. Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, is elected this fall.

During the call, Mr. Santorum suggested he would be putting a structure and organization in place in the next few weeks to promote the conservative values he advocated during his campaign, which he suspended last week. He could form a political action committee or some type of foundation through which he could continue to raise money and prepare for a later presidential run.

But the whole-hearted support of evangelicals, who accounted for nearly one-fourth of all ballots cast in recent presidential elections, will not come without conditions, some leaders warned. During the bitterly fought Republican primary campaign, many conservatives questioned the depth of Mr. Romney’s opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage and government spending. They say that to win the presidency, Mr. Romney may need a fired-up base to produce a large evangelical turnout in swing states like Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia.

If Mr. Romney is to generate more excitement and sacrifice from Christian conservatives, he must “demonstrate a genuine and solid commitment to the core values issues,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian advocacy group. Mr. Perkins said Mr. Santorum had vaulted into conservative favor because “he passionately articulated the connection between America’s financial greatness and its moral and cultural wholeness” and recognized that “the economy and the family are indivisible.”

“Intensity is going to be a big problem for Mitt Romney,” Mr. Perkins said in an interview, comparing an obligatory vote for Mr. Romney, to avoid the alternative of Mr. Obama, to “eating your vegetables.”

Mr. Romney, a range of evangelical leaders said, must not waver in his support for conservative principles if he hopes to tap the energies of Christian conservatives in the general campaign.

On Thursday, President Obama’s allies in organized labor are to announce an Internet-based effort to rally workers to the president’s corner using what they say will be the latest social media tools.

In an event at the Washington headquarters of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., organizers are scheduled to unveil a new Web site, workersvoice.org, along with ambitious plans to energize union and nonunion workers to participate in the presidential and Congressional elections.

“The labor movement is the original social network,” said Eddie Vale, the communications director for the new group. “Workers’ Voice will be revolutionizing it for today’s world by taking our traditional field and organizing knowledge and applying it to the digital era and making it available to all workers.”

In the last six months, Mr. Obama has increasingly focused his campaign for re-election on a populist argument that the policies of the Republicans would benefit the wealthiest in the country, leaving most workers behind.

This week, Mr. Obama is pushing Congress to pass what Democrats call the “Buffett Rule,” which would require anyone making over $1 million a year to pay at least 30 percent in taxes.

“Tell them to stop giving tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans who don’t need them and aren’t asking for them,” Mr. Obama said during an event on Wednesday. “Tell them to start asking everybody to do their fair share and play by the same rules.”

The new labor group describes itself as a counter to those allied behind Mitt Romney, Mr. Obama’s likely opponent in the fall. They include American Crossroads and other “super PACs” that have pledged to support Mr. Romney with advertising and voter mobilization efforts.

In fact, Mr. Romney has made clear in recent weeks that he intends to prosecute the same populist case against Mr. Obama, describing the sitting president as out of touch with the plight of everyday Americans and unable to develop solutions that will help them weather the economic turmoil.

Newt Gingrich became the latest Republican candidate to lash out at the cable news network, accusing it on Wednesday of dooming his flagging campaign by slanting its political coverage to Mitt Romney‘s benefit.

Mr. Gingrich quickly found that Fox News’s tenacity is a match for his own. The network shot back on Thursday, calling the former House speaker bitter.

The sniping started when Mr. Gingrich, a former Fox News commentator, told a gathering of Tea Party supporters in Delaware that Fox News had distorted its coverage of him. And he accused Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the network’s parent company, News Corporation, of pulling the strings behind the scenes. His comments were reported on Thursday morning by Real Clear Politics, which gained access to the Delaware event.

“I assume it’s because Murdoch at some point said, ‘I want Romney,’ and so ‘fair and balanced’ became ‘Romney,’ ” Gingrich was quoted as saying. “And there’s no question that Fox had a lot to do with stopping my campaign because such a high percentage of our base watches Fox.”

He went on to add: “In our experience, Callista and I both believe CNN is less biased than Fox this year. We are more likely to get neutral coverage out of CNN than we are of Fox, and we’re more likely to get distortion out of Fox. That’s just a fact.”

In a prepared statement, Fox News said Thursday that Mr. Gingrich appeared to have other motives: “This is nothing more than Newt auditioning for a windfall of a gig at CNN. That’s the kind of man he is. Not to mention, he’s still bitter over the termination of his contributor contract.”

Mr. Gingrich, like Rick Santorum, found his Fox News contract terminated last year after the network suspended the two men while they pursued a run for the presidency. Mr. Santorum, who ended his campaign on Tuesday, had also accused Fox News of favoring other candidates in its coverage.

But if Fox News covered other candidates — namely Mr. Romney — more often, they weren’t the only ones. The Pew Research Center, which conducts regular studies on the amount of media coverage the candidates receive, has found repeatedly that Mr. Romney is covered the most.

When American Life League put out an ad a few months ago declaring that Planned Parenthood turns kids into “sex addicts” through the use of “gateway drugs” like masturbation, progressives collectively howled with laughter through the video and passed it along so that our friends could howl along, as well. “Who thinks this stuff up?,” we thought, figuring it must be some weirdo fringe right-wing characters. Sadly for us, however, this belief that people who enjoy recreational sex are “addicts” is not a fringe right-wing belief. It’s a mainstream belief in the anti-choice right. That’s why the state legislature of Tennessee has signed off on this ridiculous belief by using the “gateway” language to describe any kind of sexual activity that falls short of intercourse. As Erin Gloria Ryan at Jezebel points out, the way the law is written, even activities like hand-holding and kissing without tongue could fall under the banner of “gateway” activities that supposedly trick kids into thinking sex is fun. Only one state senator voted against the bill, demonstrating how mainstream this kind of thinking is on the right.

The push for a broad overhaul of the federal tax code will begin in earnest next week with a series of meetings between Representative Dave Camp, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and the Republican rank-and-file.

Republicans and Democrats have said for years that Congress would have to make real progress on a broad rewriting of the tax code before next year, when the Bush-era tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 expire. The budget plan that passed the House last month is forcing the issue.

That plan called for a new tax code with just two personal tax rates – 25 percent and 10 percent – and a 25 percent corporate income tax rate. Mr. Camp had proposed those rates in a letter to the House Budget Committee chairman, Paul D. Ryan, earlier this year.

Those sharp cuts in tax rates – at a cost of $4.5 trillion over 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center – are supposed to be paid for by ending or curtailing tax deductions and credits. Democrats, and some tax experts, say that cannot be done, unless Republicans plan to gut tax programs for the working poor, like the earned income credit.

But Sage Eastman, a spokesman for the Ways and Means Committee, said Mr. Camp was eager to prove them wrong.

“The chairman would not have written that letter, and every Republican member of the committee would not have signed that letter, and the budget committee chairman would not have put it in the budget if there was not a way to do it,” Mr. Eastman said. “I’ll say emphatically we can do it.”

Mr. Camp will hold a series of planning sessions next week in the leadership office of Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the majority whip. The idea is to lay out the magnitude of the challenge, Mr. Eastman said. Not only are the Bush tax cuts expiring, but Congress has yet to renew dozens of routine tax breaks for businesses that expired last year, or pass a measure to stave off expansion of the alternative minimum tax into the middle class, another usually routine measure. If nothing is done, tax increases on Jan. 1 would total $309 billion in 2013 alone – and $5.4 trillion through 2022.

The House budget assumes that the federal government would collect as much revenue as it would if all the tax cuts were renewed, but it mandates a dramatically simpler tax code. It also prescribes eliminating the alternative minimum tax. Mr. Camp says the goal is not to create a tax code overhaul that can pass the Republican House but one that can get through the Democratic Senate and be enacted.

Mr. Camp and Mr. Ryan have taken heat from the left and budget watchdogs for the budget’s failure to specify a single tax loophole to close, much less the changes necessary to keep the tax rate reductions “revenue neutral.” Mr. Eastman said that was intentional.

“We’re going through a concerted effort to have this conversation, not only with the various stakeholders in Congress but with the American people as well,” he said. “This is not ‘We know best. Now you take your medicine.’ That’s what happened in the health care law.”

The Ways and Means Committee will also hold a hearing next week on tax-favored defined contribution retirement plans, like 401(k)’s and individual retirement accounts, with an eye on trimming the tax benefits.

Aides and leading donors to Mitt Romney are preparing a major expansion of the campaign’s fund-raising efforts to prepare for a general election contest against President Obama , with the goal of raising up to $600 million, according to several people involved in the discussions.

Republican-leaning outside groups and Democratic-leaning unions are planning to spend hundreds of millions more.

And Mr. Obama, who raised $750 million in 2008, is likely to meet or exceed that this year, according to people involved in his fund-raising operation.

Those goals make it virtually certain that neither party’s nominee will accept public funds for the general election or the spending limits that come with them — the likely death knell for a cornerstone of the post-Watergate campaign finance reforms intended to limit the influence of money in federal elections.

Mr. Obama opted out of the public financing program in 2008, breaking a campaign pledge, and went on to outspend the Republican nominee, John McCain, by four to one.

“This is going to be the most moneyed election in the history of the United States,” said Bob Edgar, the president of Common Cause, a group that favors greater restrictions on campaign spending. Mr. Edgar, a former congressman who was among the Democratic “Watergate babies” elected in the wake of the scandal, added, “There is a sense of coming full circle, of forgetting our history — the reason we installed a system for financing campaigns that didn’t rely on corporate or wealthy money.”

Mr. Obama has already held over a hundred major fund-raisers for his campaign, jointly raising large amounts with the Democratic National Committee , and Mr. Romney is moving quickly to catch up. His campaign is planning dozens of fund-raisers through the end of June, high-dollar events that will feature Mr. Romney as well as the campaign’s top allies and other elected officials.

The campaign is setting a goal of raising at least $1 million for most events featuring Mr. Romney personally.

Rep. Dan Benishek’s (R-MI) embrace of the Republican Party’s platform ran into stiff opposition at a town hall meeting in Saulte Sainte Marie, Michigan when at least a dozen constituents, many of them senior citizens, pushed back against Benishek’s claims on Medicare, Social Security, oil subsides and health care reform.
Benishek couldn’t even get through his opening remarks before attendees began criticizing his support for Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) proposed budget that would increase the cost of health care for seniors by providing “premium support” vouchers to eligible senior citizens.

“If you have a better idea as how to keep Medicare sustainable over the long term, I’d be happy to hear it,” offered Benishek.

He may have regretted those words after the event, because for half an hour, Benishek fielded several suggestions on how to increase funding for Medicare, ranging from ending oil subsidies to increasing taxes on the wealthiest two percent, suggestions that Benishek summarily dismissed.

Benishek also displayed a shocking lack of self-awareness about his level of knowledge of some key facts. “There are no government subsidies for oil,” he told one woman who suggested ending the very real subsidies given to oil corporations to help defray the cost of Medicare.

Mitt Romney’s campaign scrambled Wednesday afternoon to clarify his support for the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act after top aides were caught flat-footed by the question.

In a statement, Amanda Hennenberg, a campaign spokeswoman, said Mr. Romney “supports pay equity and is not looking to change current law.”

That came after top policy aides to the former Massachusetts governor seemed uncertain how to respond when a reporter asked about Mr. Romney’s position on it during a campaign conference call.

“We’ll get back to you on that,” the adviser told reporters.

The stumble comes as Mr. Romney’s campaign is searching for ways to address the large lead that President Obama holds among female voters. That lead developed during the last several months, as Mr. Romney expressed positions that have angered many women.

The fumble on the Lilly Ledbetter law is not likely to help his case.

The law, which makes it easier for women to sue in equal pay cases, was the first bill that Mr. Obama signed into law, just nine days after taking office. It is despised by conservatives who claim it is leading to a flurry of unnecessary and frivolous lawsuits.

But the law is hailed by many women’s organizations as a step forward toward rectifying discriminatory salary situations. Democrats immediately jumped on the campaign’s hesitance to support the law, quickly distributing audio of the conference call.

“If he is truly concerned about women in this economy, he wouldn’t have to take time to ‘think’ about whether he supports the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act,” Ms. Ledbetter said in a statement distributed by Mr. Obama’s campaign. “This act not only ensures women have the tools to get equal pay for equal work, but it means their families will be better served also.”

Mr. Romney’s campaign reacted quickly, putting out statements from women attacking the impact of Mr. Obama’s policies on women.

“Barack Obama talks a good game on women in the economy, but the facts don’t back him up,” Representative Mary Bono Mack, Republican of California, said in a statement. “Women in the Obama economy are facing hardships of historical proportions.”

The Democratic National Convention quickly noted that Ms. Bono Mack voted against the Ledbetter Act when it passed in Congress in 2009.

As Mitt Romney begins to pivot to the general election, President Obama’s campaign is working to remind voters of the things Mr. Romney said during the primary.

In a new “greatest hits” video, the Obama campaign highlights what it calls “memories to last a lifetime” from the campaign trail. They include some of Mr. Romney’s most oft-cited comments on issues that may come back to haunt him as he tries to attract swing voters, including:

“Corporations are people, my friend.”

“I like being able to fire people that provide services to me.”

“I was a severely conservative Republican governor.”

The video by Mr. Obama’s “Truth Team” makes no effort to put any of Mr. Romney’s statements into context. For example, the comment about liking to fire people was really said about being able to change health insurance providers.

But as the campaigns begin to engage each other more directly, it is clear that the competing narratives are set.

Mr. Obama and his advisers are hoping to portray Mr. Romney as an out-of-touch, wealthy conservative whose statements about a number of issues — immigration, women’s health, the budget — appear too extreme to moderate and independent voters.

As part of its bizarre strategy of blaming President Obama for the GOP’s “war on women,” the Romney campaign released statements today from two Republican Congresswomen, Reps. Mary Bono Mack (R-CA) and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA). The statements correctly note that women have been hit particularly hard by job losses in recent years, but misleadingly lay the blame for those losses on Obama, just as Romney himself has been doing recently .

“Mitt Romney supports pay equity for women and, as president, will do what President Obama has not — implement pro-growth economic policies that will allow women and all Americans to finally get back to work,” wrote McMorris Rodgers. “Women in the Obama economy are facing hardships of historical proportions,” added Bono Mack. “Simply put, women cannot afford four more years of Barack Obama.”

But their concern for pay equity and women in the workplace must be a recent development. Both congresswomen voted against the landmark Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 — which empowers women to seek restitution for pay discrimination — and both voted against the proposed Paycheck Fairness Act , which would have made it easier for women to fight pay inequality.

This morning, the Romney campaign refused to say during a conference call whether Romney supports the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the first law that President Obama signed. The campaign later scrambled to assert that Romney “supports pay equity ” and “is not looking to change current law.”

A $500 (£314) cheque issued by the cash-strapped campaign of Republican candidate Newt Gingrich bounced, it has emerged.

Election officials in Utah told US media they contacted the Gingrich campaign over the unpaid filing fee for the state’s primary in June.

Mr Gingrich has vowed to stay in the contest following Tuesday’s exit of Republican rival Rick Santorum.

But front-runner Mitt Romney is expected to wrap up the race by June.

Utah election officials say the cheque bounced on 27 March. The fee must be paid by 20 April if Mr Gingrich is to qualify for the ballot.

It’s “class warfare!” they claim. Because, you see, closing corporate tax loopholes and raising the marginal tax rate would only raise a meager $700 billion over 10 years, Stewart said. And as one conservative commentator noted, that’s only a small fraction of the federal deficit.

“I assume these folks have the same ‘why bother’ attitude towards low-level spending cuts,” Stewart said.

Not really. Programs like the National Endowment for the Arts, National Public Radio and free parking for federal employees? That all definitely has to go.

“Oh, so when you cut it, it’s $1 million, but when you tax it it’s, oh, $700 billion,” he said. “All we would have to do to raise $700 billion is cut 700,000 NPRs. It’s almost too easy.”

So if you’re looking to raise revenue, Stewart said, why not go elsewhere? Like to the poor. It makes perfect sense.

The Republican primary has reached an endgame. Mitt Romney has turned his attention to President Obama and the general election. Rick Santorum is trying to remain relevant. And Newt Gingrich has downsized his campaign.

Ron Paul remains mostly an afterthought, electorally – a candidate pushing a message more than a candidacy. By at least one metric – his chance of occupying the Oval Office – Mr. Paul is doing no better than he did in 2008. But by most other yardsticks, Mr. Paul this year has far exceeded the accomplishments of his 2008 campaign, reflecting, perhaps, how much the mood of the country has shifted.

A year ago, when word emerged that Republicans in Wisconsin were encouraging less-than-genuine candidates to run in Democratic primary elections as a strategy, some Wisconsin residents voiced shock. This was not the way politics traditionally had been done around here, they said.

But as candidates in recall elections for Wisconsin governor, lieutenant governor, and four Republican-held State Senate seats filed petitions by a state deadline on Tuesday, no one seemed particularly surprised to see more of the same — what Democrats were calling “fake Democrats” and Republicans were openly describing as “protest candidates.” After more than a year of division and tumult in the state’s political doings, little seems left to surprise anyone.

State Republican Party leaders acknowledge that they helped guide and collect signatures for at least six Republican-leaning Wisconsin residents to run as Democratic candidates in recall elections this spring.

The point, according to the Republicans: To ensure that all of these efforts to recall Republicans require primary elections (on May 8), then go on to general elections (on June 5). If no primary was needed, the thinking went, some recalled Republicans would be forced into general elections on May 8, when more Democratic-leaning voters would presumably be out casting votes in the (very real) statewide Democratic primary for a nominee to run against Gov. Scott Walker, the Republican who is the chief target of the recall push in the first place.

“We’re running placeholder candidates to ensure that there is one primary date and one general election date,” said Ben Sparks, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Republican Party. “This is about election fairness. Obviously it’s a new thing, but look, this is something that’s absolutely necessary. This entire recall effort is a political game in and of itself.”

Democrats, who have yet to settle on a candidate (a real one) to take on Mr. Walker, saw it differently.

Rick Santorum’s days as a paid Fox News commentator are long gone.

But that doesn’t have anything to do with the disparaging remarks he made about the network over the course of his now defunct presidential campaign — comments that angered Fox News executives and will make it difficult for him to return even if he wants to.

Mr. Santorum, in fact, was terminated about a year ago, a person with knowledge of the parameters of his contract said Tuesday. Under the terms of his three-year deal with Fox — which the person said was actually in the range of five-figures per year and not the higher six-figure amounts that had been widely reported — Mr. Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator, had 60 days after the network suspended him in March 2011 to confirm that he was not running for president. He never confirmed, so his contract was canceled.

Fox placed both Mr. Santorum and Mr. Gingrich, who were paid contributors at the time, on suspension because their continued employment would have presented a conflict of interest for the network.

Mr. Santorum complicated matters for himself further by attacking Fox News for what he deemed their biased and imbalanced coverage of him. In September, when he barely registered in most polls, he blasted the network’s coverage of Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, then a top contender. “Fox News is a dog following the squirrel,” he told Politico at the time.

Then just last month he complained of Mitt Romney ‘s advantages in the race for the Republican nomination, saying, “He has Fox News shilling for him every day.” (The Romney campaign has never had the warmest of relationships with Fox News either. They most notably soured after Mr. Romney objected on camera to a line of questioning from Bret Baier.)

Now if Mr. Santorum wants to return to Fox News as a commentator, he would have to negotiate a new contract. The likelihood of that happening seems slim now, given his public hostility toward the network and sentiments running high among executives there that he has burned that bridge.

Still, there have certainly been stranger television pairings lately. Katie Couric and Good Morning America, anyone?

Nein, nein, nein, Herman Cain.
Erstwhile Newt Gingrich–backer Herman Cain announced this morning that he is now “ready to get behind the nominee ,” Mitt Romney. And in one of his first acts as an official Romney supporter, Cain, in an interview with Fox News , offered his take on the trouble Romney is having with women (President Obama leads by 19 percent among female voters , according to a new Washington Post poll):

“Yes, President Obama is very likable to most people, if you just look at him and his family. But if you look at his policies, which is what most people disagree with, it’s a different story. And I think many men are much more familiar with the failed policies than a lot of other people, as well as the general public.”

Ha. Other people . Cain realized halfway through that last sentence that he was about to say something really sexist, so at the last second, he tried to subtly replace “women” with “other people,” hoping nobody would notice. Other options considered by Cain in that moment included “non-men” and “phallus-challenged.”

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has bowed out of the race, leaving former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney as the presumptive nominee.

The former Pennsylvania senator made the announcement at a news conference in Gettysburg in his home state.

“While this presidential race is over for me, we are not done fighting,” said Mr Santorum.

The social conservative had been campaigning ahead of Pennsylvania’s primary on 24 April.

But he was far behind Mr Romney in terms of funding and the number of delegates needed to seal the nomination at the Republican convention in Tampa, Florida, in late August.

It was a powerful concept, but Santorum could not manage to execute it. He fused one gimmick (a concessionary tax rate for manufacturing industry) to the generic Republican platform that favors the old and the wealthy over the young and the striving.

To some degree, Santorum was constrained by inner factors: his own strong ideological commitments.

But even more, he was constrained by the Republican campaign map. The activist economic program needed to accomplish what Santorum declared he wished to accomplish—stabilize working-class employment and thus working-class families—is simply anathema to the donors, media institutions, and activists who sway Republican primaries.

Santorum dwindled into the candidate of ideological purity. It’s a strange kind of working-class champion who also sees eye-to-eye with the Club for Growth and the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Yet the need Santorum identified remains a genuine need indeed. Is there some way for the party of markets and enterprise to speak for the economic aspirations of a larger segment of the population than Santorum’s party speaks for today? For that matter, than Santorum himself was ever able to speak to?

The person who finds that way will be the next Republican president. And I greatly fear that we won’t see another Republican president until that way is found.

Now that Rick Santorum has suspended his campaign, and Newt Gingrich is focusing his efforts on the convention , Mitt Romney still faces one opponent with money: Representative Ron Paul . And on Tuesday, Mr. Paul was campaigning in Texas, his home state, which votes on May 29, to show that the Republican contest was still registering a slight pulse.

Mr. Paul was visiting Texas A & M University as part of a three-day swing through the state, which also included stops in Fort Worth and San Antonio. And showing how much the campaign is focused on collecting delegates in Texas, it produced a video before Mr. Santorum’s suspension that employs a Texas twang to take swipes at Mr. Santorum (labeling him a “big spending, debt-ceiling raising fiscal liberal”), Newt Gingrich (“the moon colony guy”) and Mitt Romney (“the moderate from Massachusetts”).

Of course, at this stage Mr. Paul is little more than a distraction to Mr. Romney, and the two candidates are said to be quite fond of each other. Until now, Mr. Santorum had also been pinning some of his hopes on Texas, which, with its 155 delegates, has the most delegates of any contest to date.

After Rick Santorum suspended his presidential campaign, speculation turned to Newt Gingrich, whose candidacy continued despite long odds.

But Mr. Gingrich was quick to squelch any notions that he, too, would exit the Republican race.

“I am committed to staying in this race all the way to Tampa so that the conservative movement has a real choice,” Mr. Gingrich said in a statement shortly after Mr. Santorum stepped down. “I humbly ask Senator Santorum’s supporters to visit Newt.org to review my conservative record and join us as we bring these values to Tampa.”

Mr. Gingrich said Sunday on Fox News that Mr. Romney was “far and away” the likely nominee. But he also said he would remain in the race to influence the party’s platform, citing his positions on oil drilling and personal retirement accounts as an alternative to Social Security.

For more than a month, the Gingrich and Santorum campaigns traded calls for the other to withdraw so conservatives could unite behind a single alternative to Mr. Romney.

Once teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and irrelevance, the Republican National Committee has raised more than $110 million over the past 15 months and retired more than half its debt, accumulating large cash reserves that could give Mitt Romney a critical boost later this spring as he intensifies his campaign against President Obama.

With the divisive and drawn-out Republican primary season moving toward a close, the committee reported more money in the bank at the start of last month than the Democratic National Committee, which raised about $137 million during the same period but also spent far more.

Party officials said the Republican committee would report more than $30 million in cash on hand in filings due with the Federal Election Commission this month, including a $22 million “presidential trust” that would be available to Mr. Romney should he become the party’s nominee.

The committee’s unexpected turnaround is a case study in how Republicans are chipping away at Mr. Obama’s advantage in traditional fund-raising — and of the rapid evolution of old-fashioned party institutions in the post-Citizens United landscape of “super PACs” and the unlimited money they can raise and spend.

One role that the committee has filled in the past when the party was out of power — pounding the president with early television advertising — has been taken up by outside groups like American Crossroads, founded by Karl Rove. That has allowed the committee and its chairman, Reince Priebus, to focus on rebuilding the party’s network of large donors.

The committee’s major-donor fund-raising in 2011 exceeded that of 2003, officials said, the year when President George W. Bush was preparing to run for re-election. Its small-donor program routinely brings in more than the Democratic committee’s, though far less than Mr. Obama’s campaign.

The party has already begun preparing for joint fund-raising operations with Mr. Romney, who has secured pledges from some of his donors to write large checks to the Republican committee if he becomes the nominee.

Today, the Obama campaign put out the second video that directly attacks Mitt Romney’s lies about President Obama using President Obama’s own words. It’s a strong political commercial:

There’s nothing better in a political advertisement than when you catch your opponent in a lie, and these videos do that over and over again. (You can find the first video here.) The trick will be in getting these videos seen by the right people. Democrats will love them, of course, because they play to their interests. Far-left progressives will see them as more evidence that President Obama is leaning rightward on all the wrong issues. Republicans will do a step-by-step fisking of the points to prove that Romney was right all along. But these commercials need to be seen by independents and moderates, and hopefully the DNC is working on building a reliable framework for getting their materials out there. It sounds like they’re building a network to do just exactly that.

Representative Timothy V. Johnson of Illinois will not continue his re-election bid, despite winning the Republican Party nomination in a primary last month.

Mr. Johnson, a six-term congressman who was running in Illinois’s newly drawn 13th District, made the surprise announcement at a news conference on Thursday that he would instead retire at the end of his current term.

Republican leaders believe that a party victory is still probable in the central Illinois district, as they now scramble to find a new candidate before the November general election.

“This is a seat that favors Republicans, and Democrats are stuck with an incredibly flawed candidate who is attempting his fourth futile campaign for Congress,” said Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, in a statement on Thursday.

Mr. Johnson, 65, cited a “strained” schedule and family obligations for his decision. He is a father of 9 children, 11 grandchildren and 2 great-grandchildren.

“One of my grandsons is 2 years old; I have seen him for a total of about 10 minutes,” Mr. Johnson said in a statement. “I have another grandson who asked me not long ago if I was ever going to come to one of his ballgames. I didn’t have an answer.”

That essentially is the situation for Rick Santorum. He is all suited up and ready to go. “The clock starts tonight,” he told supporters here Tuesday night, hoping to start fresh after losses in Wisconsin, Maryland and the District of Columbia.

But as far as supporters of Mitt Romney are concerned that clock has run out.

“Whether Rick Santorum stays in or not, it’s now basically irrelevant,” Senator John McCain said Wednesday morning on CNN. Mr. Romney has already moved to a different track and is running a different race against a different opponent — President Obama.

“Mitt has a lot of ground to make up,” Mr. McCain said. “It’s been a very nasty primary. His unfavorables are high. I’m confident that he will do very well. But the fact is that every day that goes by without being in the general election campaign mode is a day lost. He realizes that and I think you’re going to see — already you’re seeing the opening shots in a very spirited campaign.”

The question now is the degree to which Mr. Romney bothers to compete with Mr. Santorum here in Pennsylvania, Mr. Santorum’s former home state, which votes on April 24. A few other states, including New York, vote on that date too, and are expected to back Mr. Romney. But Pennsylvania will be the focal point over the next three weeks, in part because Mr. Santorum, who represented the state for 16 years in Washington, has declared it to be his firewall.

At this point, both sides are trying to manage expectations.

Mitch McConnell incorrectly claimed that oil production is “up 96 percent on state-owned land and private land,” which isn’t close to being true. Production rose 11 percent on those lands in fiscal year 2011, the period to which McConnell alluded. Even over the last five fiscal years, the rise has been 15 percent — not even one-sixth as large as he claimed.

In an online town-hall-style meeting last week, Mr. Romney accused Mr. Obama of having a presidential policy intended to “see energy prices rise,” and he mocked the president for once saying that he would like gasoline prices to “change gradually.”

“They have put in place policies that are designed to reduce our production of fossil-based fuels and drive up the cost of energy and therefore encourage people to move towards wind and solar which are of course much higher cost,” Mr. Romney said in the Google hangout .

But Mr. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, has in the past appeared much more open to the notion that rising energy costs could be good for the American economy. In his 2010 book, “No Apology,” Mr. Romney described a gradual increase in the cost of energy as the kind of market-based incentive that conservatives could embrace.

While not suggesting particular policies that might lead to higher prices — like an increase in the gas tax , a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade plan — Mr. Romney praised the benefits that would flow from a slowly increasing cost of energy.

“Higher energy prices would encourage energy efficiency across the full array of American businesses and citizens,” Mr. Romney wrote. “It would provide industries of all kinds with a predictable outlook for energy costs, allowing them to confidently invest in growth.”

In the book, Mr. Romney called for greater domestic exploration and drilling. And he expressed concern about the collateral damage from higher energy prices on people who drive great distances, businesses that consume a lot of energy and people on fixed incomes.

But he acknowledged that allowing the price for gas and oil to rise could be the centerpiece of “game-changing incentives” that would alter consumer behavior when it came to buying cars and using electricity. That, he wrote, could help the country wean itself off an overreliance on foreign oil.

President Obama has emerged with an impressive lead in swing states around the country — thanks to women voters abandoning the GOP in droves, according to a new USA Today/Gallup poll showing President Obama leading among women voters in the top dozen battleground states by a whopping 18 points — greater than the 12-point gender gap he won with in 2008.

One month ago, the same poll showed Mitt Romney leading the president by 2 percentage points; but Sunday, the newest poll gave Obama a 9-point lead, 51 percent to 42 percent. The change, the poll indicates, comes from women:

“The biggest change came among women under 50. In mid-February, just under half of those voters supported Obama. Now more than six in 10 do while Romney’s support among them has dropped by 14 points, to 30%. The president leads him 2-1 in this group.”
Both Democrats and Republicans point to the battles over contraception coverage as a reason for the shift. Republican strategist Sara Taylor Fagen, a former political adviser to President George W. Bush, told USA Today that “The focus on contraception has not been a good one for us … and Republicans have unfairly taken on water on this issue.”

By the end of April we may have a Republican nominee for president. Republicans are coalescing around Romney, as he has picked up recent endorsements from party leaders past (George H.W. Bush), present (Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan) and future (Marco Rubio). Meanwhile the primary calendar is set to give the frontrunner a boost this week.

The widespread perception is that Romney has had the steady backing of the GOP establishment. In fact, it appeared that way only because his opponents were so unappealing, or even unserious, in the eyes of most influential Republicans, that they received even fewer endorsements. By historical standards Romney has actually lagged behind past favorites. As BuzzFeed’s Zeke Miller notes, “George W. Bush locked up 44 Senate endorsements before the South Carolina primary, and had more than half of the House’s 222 Republicans backing him by May of 1999—well over a year before the election. But to date, Mitt Romney has only gathered the endorsements of 91 Republican members of Congress—including just 17 senators.”

On Tuesday Maryland, Wisconsin and Washington, D.C., will hold their primaries. Washington is considered such friendly territory for Romney that Santorum’s campaign claims he will be no worse off for not having even gotten onto the ballot. Maryland, being a liberal Northern state, is also Romney country. The Washington Post reports, “the often overlooked and bulging moderate middle of the Maryland GOP will be relevant—at least for a day. In the state’s first competitive presidential primary in a generation, polls and interviews suggest an overwhelming number of Republicans will vote for Mitt Romney.”

Santorum’s only chance at slowing Romney’s momentum will be in Wisconsin. Santorum has been competitive in industrial MidWest, but he has yet to score a decisive win there. MidWestern states have competing characteristics, some of which favor Romney and some Santorum. They tend to have lower education and income levels than the Northeast. That helps Santorum, who does better with less wealthy and educated voters. But they have fewer evangelicals than the South, Great Plains and Rocky Mountain West. Generally, Santorum only wins in states where evangelical or born again Christians are a majority of Republican primary voters.

Romney is following his standard playbook in Wisconsin and massively outspending his opponents. His Super PAC, Restore Our Future, has spent $2,687,938, compared to $735,093 from Santorum’s Red White and Blue Fund.

Polls show Romney leading Santorum by an average of seven or eight points in Wisconsin. The New York Times’ statistical guru Nate Silver gives Romney a 91 percent chance of victory.

After Tuesday Santorum’s last stand will be the April 24 Pennsylvania primary. The other states to vote on April 23—Delaware, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut—are likely to favor Romney. Santorum has conceded that he must win his home state to stay viable. If Romney is able to win Pennsylvania and sweep the April primaries, the nomination could be settled and pundit fantasies of a brokered convention in Tampa would be an ancient memory by August.

Whether he’s refusing to pay his child support so he can afford to fund his campaign and go on luxury vacations, lying about not being able to afford it, calling President Obama a liar, or yelling at constituents, Illinois congressman and Tea Party darling Joe Walsh knows how to keep it classy. So, I shouldn’t be surprised by his most recent disgusting comments about Tammy Duckworth, who is running against him in Illinois’s 8th congressional district. Duckworth served as Assistant Operations Officer and a Black Hawk helicopter pilot in Iraq. After her helicopter was ambushed and hit by a grenade, she successfully landed the helicopter, but lost her legs and her right arm in the blast.

In an interview with Politico, Walsh reflected on Duckworth’s achievements:

“I have so much respect for what she did in the fact that she sacrificed her body for this country,” said Walsh, simultaneously lowering his voice as he leaned forward before pausing for dramatic effect. “Ehhh. Now let’s move on.What else has she done? Female, wounded veteran … ehhh,” he continued. “She is nothing more than a handpicked Washington bureaucrat. David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel just picked her up and dropped her into this district.”

Joe really knows how to pay his respects! What is more respectful than trivializing a person’s gender, and traumatic injuries? Oh, I know: dismissing the person as worthless. But before we “eh, move on,” let’s review what else Duckworth has done.

After becoming a “wounded veteran,” Duckworth served as the Assistant Secretary for Public and Intergovernmental Affairs in the United States Department of Veterans Affairs.
Before that, she was the director of the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs.
Duckworth declined her Army medical retirement and continues her service in the National Guard
and has written on the health risks of environmental radon and lung cancer.
Thanks to her advocacy for veterans and health care, Duckworth won the Hubert H. Humphrey Civil Rights Award,
was named the 2008 Disabled Veteran of the Year by the Disabled American Veterans,
was selected by Candidate Obama to deliver the presidential campaign’s key address on Veterans’ rights at the Democratic National Convention,
received an American Veterans (AMVETS) Silver Helmet award
and The George Washington University’s Colin Powell Public Service Award.
Vote Vets has released a press release which states “New Low: Deadbeat Congressman Joe Walsh Insults Veterans’ Sacrifice.” Iraq War Veteran and Chairman of VoteVets.org PAC Jon Soltz stated,

“Just when you think Congressman Joe Walsh couldn’t sink any lower, he insults the service and sacrifice of our Veterans, particularly one like Tammy who lost her limbs in the line of duty. Congressman Walsh owes Tammy Duckworth and all Veterans an apology for his outrageous disrespect for their service…. But it’s not just that. If you think working for America’s veterans at the VA both in Washington and Illinois is nothing, if you think working to improve the economic lives of veterans is nothing, then Joe Walsh’s record is below nothing. He represents the do-nothing, obstructionist, extreme Tea Party wing of the GOP, not the values that Tammy stood up for.”

And writer Carol Felsenthal was right on the money when she wrote of Walsh’s statements, “the last line, especially, with its image of the legless Duckworth being dropped from the air “into [the] district” struck me as beyond tasteless.”

WASHINGTON — Sen. Rick Santorum, who has sponsored legislation to limit the information that the National Weather Service can provide to the public, told radio reporters this week that Congress should investigate whether the federal agency’s initial warnings on the severity of Hurricane Katrina were adequate.

The Pennsylvania Republican’s remarks drew fire from a union representing employees of the National Weather Service, which is a subsidiary of the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration. They also were closely scrutinized by Democrats, who have contended that his legislation is intended to benefit private weather companies, at least one of which has contributed to his campaign.

During a conference call that Santorum conducted with Pennsylvania radio reporters Thursday, a public radio correspondent asked him about the weather service’s performance in preparing Gulf Coast residents for Hurricane Katrina and whether the rescue and recovery response could have been improved if his legislation had been law.

Santorum said he didn’t think the weather service had given “sufficient warning” initially about the hurricane’s path or what its impact would be when it hit Florida. He said he was “not going to suggest there were any major errors,” but that the adequacy of the warnings should to be investigated along with other aspects of how government agencies have dealt with Katrina.

“The expectation was that [the hurricane] was not going to hit Florida with much fury, and it ended up being a Category 1 hurricane and did a lot more damage than I think was ever anticipated,” Santorum said in the recorded radio interview.

Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., who heads the Senate Commerce Committee’s Disaster Prediction and Prevention Subcommittee, yesterday praised the National Weather Service. “After reviewing the actions taken by the National Weather Service, I am convinced that this was one of the most accurate hurricane predictions we have ever seen,” he said in a statement.

APPLETON, Wis. — Refusing to concede the inevitability of Mitt Romney‘s candidacy, Rick Santorum said a contested Republican convention in August would be “energizing” for the party.

“People say going to the convention would be dangerous – no,” he told reporters on Monday, the day before Wisconsin, Maryland and Washington, D.C., go to the polls. Behind in voter surveys in all three contests, Mr. Santorum offered a view very different than that of a rising number of Republican leaders who have called for the party to unify behind Mr. Romney and pivot to take on President Obama.

And Mr. Santorum maintained that a contested convention would fire up voters and, moreover, the shortest possible head-to-head matchup with Mr. Obama before the November vote would favor Republicans.

“I would argue even if it ends up in a convention, that’s a positive thing for the Republican Party,” he said. “That’s a positive thing for activating and energizing our folks heading into this fall election.”

Rather than sundering the party, a contested convention in Tampa “would be a fascinating display of open democracy,” Mr. Santorum said, adding, “I think it would be an energizing thing for our party to have a candidate emerge who isn’t the blessed candidate of the Republican establishment. It makes this election a short election, the shorter this election in the fall, the better off we are, not the worse.”

US President Barack Obama is hosting three-way talks at the White House with the leaders of Canada and Mexico.

Talks usually centre on border issues and the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).

This year the summit could also touch on a disputed US-Canada oil pipeline.

President Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon are meeting weeks before a broader regional summit to be held in Colombia.

The Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, is to be held in two weeks’ time.

No major agreements are expected to be signed at Monday’s summit, which will see the three leaders hold a joint news conference.

The meeting was originally planned to take place in Hawaii in November, but had to be rescheduled after a top Mexican official was killed in a helicopter crash.