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Despite having a total wingnut for a governor, Florida is a purple state. So I always thought Newt would have a hard time pulling it out there, and it looks like in the wake of last night's debate, he's in big trouble.

Just four days before the nation's first big-state presidential primary, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney opens up a 38 - 29 percent lead over former House Speaker Newt Gingrich among Republican likely voters in Florida, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today. Only 6 percent are undecided, but 32 percent say they might change their mind by Tuesday.

This compares to results of a January 25 survey by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN- uh-pe-ack) University, showing Romney with 36 percent of likely primary voters to Gingrich's 34 percent. Wednesday's survey showed Gingrich ahead 40 - 34 percent among voters surveyed after the South Carolina primary.

It appears that the all-out war waged against Newt by the likes of Ann Coulter, Bob Dole, Elliot Abrams, George Will, Marco Rubio and Tom DeLay is having some effect.

After Bob Dole's remarks on CNN, Mr Marshall had this to say:

Today Bob Dole suggested that one or more of John Kerry's Purple Hearts may have been fraudulent in some way because they were for "superficial wounds."

Dole knows better.

In a 1988 campaign-trail autobiography, here's how Dole described the incident that earned him his first Purple Heart: "As we approached the enemy, there was a brief exchange of gunfire. I took a grenade in hand, pulled the pin, and tossed it in the direction of the farmhouse. It wasn't a very good pitch (remember, I was used to catching passes, not throwing them). In the darkness, the grenade must have struck a tree and bounced off. It exploded nearby, sending a sliver of metal into my leg--the sort of injury the Army patched up with Mercurochrome and a Purple Heart."

Mandate Indeed

Geez. The way these conservatives talk, you'd think they won by 30 points instead of 3.

Even Bush himself has been telling the press that he has "the people at my back" (or is that backside?) -- in the process of making clear to everyone considering crossing those bridges they say they're building what the reality is: It's "my way or the highway."

But the entire press corps has bought into the myth of Bush's "mandate." Indeed, it's all any of them can seem to talk about.

Now, just as an experiment, I went back and checked, because I thought I remembered that Bill Clinton cleaned Bob Dole's clock in 1996 by a substanitally wider margin. Sure enough, the final figures were:

Bill Clinton 47,402,357 49%
Bob Dole 39,198,755 41%

Ross Perot 8,085,402 8%

In other words, Clinton won by a margin of of 8 percent of the popular vote -- 8.2 million.
Did the "liberal media" declare that Clinton had a clear mandate from the people?

Well, no.

The mainstream press instead proclaimed that Clinton had been given "a message, not a mandate".

Bob Dole was told to keep his trap shut by non other than the odious Mitch McConnell, the man who has as an approval rating as low as Dick Cheney's.

The GOP’s 1996 candidate for president said he was asked by current Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., not to issue a bipartisan statement calling for passage of health care reform legislation.

“We’re already hearing from some high-ranking Republicans that we shouldn’t do that — that’s helping the president,” Dole said. He later specified that the people he referred to included one “very prominent Republican, who happens to be the Republican leader of the Senate,” according to The Kansas City Star .Dole was also quoted as saying that partisanship by his own GOP was behind the delay in reaching agreement on a final health care bill..

I don't expect Dole to suddenly go on the air and rip into his party, but the fact that this much got out says a lot. The republicans have no plan for health care reform so any words that come from older republicans on the hot topic carries a sting to it.

Mitch will be on Face the Nation today and I wonder if Bob Schieffer will bring it up or read a David Brooks column. Maybe they'll just want to talk about the Nobel Peace prize. What do you think?

Midwest Voices: Bob Dole outs naysayer Mitch McConnell

TalkLeft: Sully: It's Hillary's Fault

Blue Gal: Halliburton Rape

evilslutopia: Getting to the point of #nestlefamily

Wall St. Cheat Sheet: The Treasury Department endorses lying to the public

William K. Wolfrum Chronicles: I'm heterosexual - and wow, do I have a lot of rights

Anything You Can Do from Annie, Get Your Gun (1950)

It's the closest approximation of the Sunday shows I can think of right now: Annie Oakley and Frank Butler trying to one-up each other, screaming face to face and fighting about nothing of substance. Although I can't complain this week that the Democrats are non-existent or out-numbered (and hooray! the Obama administration has figured out they need to be out there too), my feeling is that the discussion will not be any more substantive than Annie and Frank's. WH Spokesperson Robert Gibbs will be on This Week, Senior Adviser David Axelrod will be on Meet the Press and Education Secretary Arne Duncan will be on Face the Nation, presumably to discuss the latest GOP hissy fit du jour of Obama's planned speech to students. But we'll also get lots of health care jabs as well, with Dr. Thomas Frieden of CDC on State of the Union and Howard Dean and Newt Gingrich on Fox News Sunday.

ABC's "This Week" - White House press secretary Robert Gibbs; former Sens. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and Bob Dole, R-Kan.; Reps. Mike Pence, R-Ind., and Maxine Waters, D-Calif.

CBS' "Face the Nation" - Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

NBC's "Meet the Press" - David Axelrod, White House senior adviser; Rudy Giuliani, former New York City mayor; Harold Ford Jr., Democratic Leadership Council chairman.

NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" - Panel: Eugene Robinson, Katty Kay, Gloria Borger and Michael Duffy. Topics: How does President Obama need to reset the health care debate? Should Ted Kennedy have shown more public penance for Chappaquiddick? Meter Questions: Will outspoken fringe players dominate GOP for the rest of Obama's term? YES: 9 NO: 3;

If unemployment is still high next year, will Obama revise his tax proposals? YES: 11 No: 1.

CNN's "State of the Union" - Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Gov. Tim Pawlenty, R-Minn.; Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Ben Nelson, D-Neb.

CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" - Some of our greatest hits: First, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on the limits of American power. Then former New York State governor Elliot Spitzer's unique perspective on the financial crisis and the Dalai Lama's perspective on the world.

"Fox News Sunday" - Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.; Howard Dean, former national Democratic Party chairman; John Podesta, head of the Center for American Progress; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga.

So, what's catching your eye this morning?

So they're rolling out the heavy guns, hiding behind yet another astroturf front. I wonder why they're always hiding behind these fake grassroots organizations? Could it be they don't want people to know the kind of money the massive financial interests against health care reform are spending to stop it?

The new anti-health reform front group known as the Coalition to Protect Patients’ Rights, is being managed by the lobbying firm known as the DCI Group. After being contacted by ThinkProgress this afternoon about its sponsorship of CPPR’s press conference last week, DCI Group staffers acknowledged that they coordinate PR for the front group. Not be confused with Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, another front group opposing health reform, CPPR has been organizing lobbying efforts against health reform and publishing op-eds across the country with misinformation about the public option.

Tom Synhorst, a former staffer to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Bob Dole, joined fellow right-wing operatives Doug Goodyear and Tim Hyde to form DCI Group in 1996. The firm quickly flourished working for the tobacco industry, coordinating a sophisticated astroturf campaign to build public opposition to tobacco regulations. Ironically, before helping to manage this “patients’ rights” campaign, DCI founded “Smokers’ Rights” groups across the country for the tobacco lobby. Indeed, DCI has specialized in manufacturing “grassroots” support — using telemarketers, PR events, and letter writing campaigns — to achieve policy results for narrow corporate interests:

– The DCI Group was retained by the pharmaceutical industry to whip up public opposition against House legislation that would permit the reimportation of FDA-approved drugs from Canada and elsewhere. [Washington Monthly, December/2003]

– The DCI Group worked with Republicans to form various “grassroots” front-groups to amplify President Bush’s call to privatize Social Security. [Center for Media and Democracy, 3/18/05]

– Chris LaCivita, a former DCI Group staffer, took a lead role in organizing the Swift Boat Veterans campaign to smear John Kerry and his war record. [CommonDreams, 8/31/04]

– The DCI Group was behind spoof videos mocking Al Gore and global warming. The firm has been retained by ExxonMobil to lobby. [Wall Street Journal, 8/3/06; Exxon Secrets, accessed 7/28/09

While it is unclear who is funding this latest CPPR front group, DCI has in the past worked for health insurance companies. In 2002, the American Prospect reported that DCI had been hired by the Health Benefits Coalition, a trade association of for-profit HMOs trying to “thwart congressional action on the patients’ bill of rights."

Bozell on Whoopi Goldberg: "[D]og muzzles, for people's mouths, sometimes are a very good thing"

http://mediamatters.org/items/200408090003 As a guest on the August 5 edition of CNN's Crossfire, the founder and president of the conservative Media Research Center, L. Brent Bozell III, said, "[W]hen I think of the people like Whoopi Goldberg and the kind of things they say. I'm reminded that muzzles, dog muzzles, for people's mouths, sometimes are a very good thing."

This isn't the first time that a conservative has mentioned muzzles in reference to a woman expressing her political views. Two days earlier, as Media Matters for America noted, as a guest on MSNBC Live, former Republican presidential candidate and regular CNN contributor Bob Dole said of Senator John Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, "There's not a muzzle big enough out there, I don't think."

In a weird juxtaposition of images, FOX News was interviewing Bob Dole to push the meme that the media isn't reporting any good news out of Iraq with their FOX Fact saying " Iraq: A New Era"-while showing video of violence right next to "good old" Bob.
Download | play -WMP Download | play -QT (David Edwards)

You would figure that FOX would have footage of schools being built to turn to instead of car bombs, and wild fires. Who knew they were part of the evil-liberal media.

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President Obama walked into the lion's den -- aka the House Republican caucus -- today for a blunt conversation about how to proceed with bipartisanship. Responding to a question from Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., he lashed into them for the nutty and outrageous rhetoric so many of them have indulged in the past year:

Obama: Let me say this about health care and the health care debate, because I think it also bears on a whole lot of other issues. If you look at the health care package that we've presented ... But at its core, if you look at the basic proposal that we put forward, that has an exchange so that businesses and the self-employed can buy into a pool, and can get bargaining power the same way that big companies do, the insurance reforms that I've already discussed, making sure that there's choice in competition for those that don't have health insurance -- the component parts of this thing are pretty similar to what Howard Baker, Bob Dole, and Tom Daschle proposed at the beginning of this debate last year. Now, you may not agree with Bob Dole and Howard Baker, and certainly you don't agree with Tom Daschle on much, but that's not a radical bunch.

But if you were to listen to the debate -- and frankly, how some of you went after this bill, you'd think that this thing was some Bolshevik plot! No, I mean, that's how you guys, that's how you guys presented it. And so I'm thinking to myself, 'Well, how is it that a plan that is pretty centrist' -- no, look, I'm just sayin', I know you guys disagree, but if you look at the facts of this bill, most independent observers would say this is actually what many Republicans -- it's similar to what many Republicans proposed to Bill Clinton when he was doing his debate on health care.

So all I'm saying is, we've got to close the gap between the rhetoric and the reality. I'm not suggesting that we're going to agree on everything, whether it's on health care or energy or what have you. But if the way these issues are being presented by the Republicans is that this is some wild-eyed plot to impose huge government in every aspect of our lives, what happens is you guys then don't have a lot of room to negotiate with me.

I mean, the fact of the matter is that many of you, if you voted with the administration on something, are politically vulnerable in your home base, in your own party. You've given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion, because what you've been telling your constituents is. 'This guy's doin' all kinds of crazy stuff that's going to destroy America!'

No doubt he was thinking of, among others, Blackburn herself. Her question to Obama was fairly straightforward and non-nutty, but when she's been out in the public, this is a woman who has defended the notion that the health-care bill contained "death panels," claimed the bill was "sacrificing our children's future," and joined the Tea Partiers in demanding "we want our country back."

But it's not just House Republicans who need to hear this. Some media folks need to be getting this message too.