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This little snippet from last night's Iowa caucus coverage is just a taste of what Fox News served last night. Ed Rollins summed up their praise for SuperPACs quite well here. I only have one remaining question: Why is Karl Rove still employed by Fox?

Key point by Rollins:

BAIER: We were talking tonight about SuperPACS and how much they're going to play. If there is a lot of support that coalesces around Santorum as the conservative alternative, SuperPACs could play in places like New Hampshire or South Carolina.

ROLLINS: SuperPACs can play anywhere at this point in time and the master, obviously, is my friend Mr. Rove, who has basically put together a better campaign of SuperPACs than anybody's ever done in history for a Presidential campaign.

Rove, of course, spent his evening working very, very hard to convince Fox viewers that Romney should and ultimately would win by hook or by crook.

No one is more upset about SuperPACs right now than Newt Gingrich, given the Romney campaigns judicious use of them in Iowa to pull Gingrich down to the second tier with a barrage of negative ads. Content and justification for it notwithstanding, there is no question that Romney has the support of the party faithful and original architects of the SuperPAC structure, born out of the Citizens United ruling in January, 2010.

PRWatch has a post today with the details, many of which I've written about here and elsewhere. The original FEC requests for SuperPACs (or what I call "Swiftboat Networks") Even though Baier was asking about Santorum's possibilities, Rollins made it clear where the party power structure was: Lined up right behind Mitt Romney, which is what PRWatch confirms.

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(h/t Heather of VC)

Ed Rollins, who has run many a Republican campaign, crushed Sarah Palin's decision to quit her job as Alaska's governor on CNN's State of The Union yesterday. He called it a disaster and went as far as saying that he was insulted by it.

I guess she wants to go on the TV and the book tour circuit instead of helping Alaskans who voted her into office. Times are tough right now and she'd rather leave them all behind than try to help them get through this economic meltdown. Rollins didn't pull any punches.

ED ROLLINS, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: I think yesterday was a disaster, Friday was a disaster for her both in the sense that she was very incoherent in articulating why she was quitting and what she wanted to do with it.

And as I always say, you call press conferences to answer questions, not to basically raise questions. I think the serious thing here is 311 days ago, very few people in America, very few Republicans outside of Alaska knew who this woman was. She had a tremendous first few weeks as a campaigner, but she got super imposed on top of the Republican establishment. It's sort of like taking a helicopter and putting her on top of Mt. Everest, which John McCain was flying it.

Everybody else climbed up that ladder, and all of the sudden she's on top of the mountain. She didn't like it -- or she did like the top of the mountain. What she didn't like was coming back to Earth, flying back to Alaska to her job as governor.

I think the reality here is her biggest mistake is walking away from the job as governor. She would have at least had a record to run on. She is going to have a partial record today that's going to be very incomplete. I found her very insulting to other governors. We have 22 other Republican governors, 19 of whom are basically going to be out of this office after running in two years. Nine are term limited and many others have to run. And she basically said in the last year you run around and do all kinds of things, and I would predict to you every single Republican governor like most Democratic governors are at their desk trying to figure out how to get through the economic crisis. I think she insulted them. I think to a certain extent it showed a naivete and I think she basically left a big, big void in her resume.

(Cafe au lait photo via Bizzy Girl. Looks good this morning...)

The Sunday Talking Head Thread is up and ready for your perusal. It's a mixed line-up -- some old pros, some of the usual Sunday hot air crowd, a few celebrities thrown in for flavor.

The line-up says to me: immigration, the Middle East, Wolf Blitzer scored an exclusive with the leader of VietNam and perhaps a bit of disgust with the DOJ and Vice President Cheney, all rolled into one morning package and spread out over several shows. Oh, and Ed Koch and Ed Rollins will talk about how their political wisdom is better than anyone else’s.

What’s catching your eye on the blogs or in the news this morning?

Russert smears Arianna: Remind you of anyone?

I seem to remember FOX news running to the NY Post to try and smear Andrea Mackris before they finally settled the O'Reilly sexual harassment lawsuit for millions of dollars.

FDL spotted this last night:

"Big white bwana man went whimpering to Lloyd Grove at the New York Daily News this morning, resurrecting his rather phantasmagorical 1996 claim that Arianna hired a private detective to follow his wife around. An assertion for which he has no proof other than something he read in an Ed Rollins book...read on

Arianna's response:

"Somebody's feeling the heat...How else to explain the widely-off-the-mark responses from NBC's PR department in Lloyd Grove's column to our reporting on Russert's multitude of journalistic ethical conflicts. Instead of dealing with the charges head on, the media giant and its Washington bureau chief Tim Russert have astonishingly decided to get down and dirty, dredging up and faxing to at least one reporter a 12-year-old false claim that I hired a private detective to snoop on Russert's wife Maureen Orth while she was preparing a hit piece on me for Vanity Fair in 1994. ...read on

The Moderate Voice: These news operations have huge investments in the images of these news personalities. Both, at this point, are damaged goods. Can the damage be repaired?

Sure sounds like a swiftboating of Arianna to me.

Richard Bradley:

"Well, maybe NBC knows something I don't--but I doubt it. (Full discloure: I know Arianna a little and blog for her website--not that I get paid for it.) After all, consider the source of that charge: a ten-year-old memoir by Republican political consultant Ed Rollins which has been discredited by one of its own ghostwriters...read on"

In a land far, far away...Tim would have Arianna on his show and answer a few qustions for a change.