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Tuesday night was big for Rick Santorum. He won the Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri primaries handily, leaving Mitt Romney to pick up second place in two contests and a distant third in Minnesota. You'd think it was possibly an opportunity for Santorum to use his time in the spotlight to highlight his differences with Romney.

Alas, no. Rick deluded himself into thinking he might actually be running against President Obama, and delivered a speech that was full of dog whistles and resentment toward our current President. Here are some select quotes:

He's someone who -- well, let's just go look at the record. If you look at when it came to the -- the Wall Street bailouts, did the president of the United States listen to you when it came to bailing out the big banks?

So here we have the same old tired trope about bank bailouts, with absolutely no acknowledgement that they originated with George W. Bush, who signed TARP into law before Barack Obama was ever elected to the Presidency after the House and Senate voted for it by overwhelming majorities. When have facts ever stopped zealots, though?

But Rick was just getting warmed up.

When it came to the problems that were being confronted on Obamacare, when the health care system in this country, did President Obama, when he was pushing forward his radical health care ideas, listen to the American people?

Why? Because he thinks he knows better how to run your lives and manage your health care.

I imagine that if he and the Congress had listened closer to the American people we might have a public option or better yet, single payer. That fact nothwithstanding, this rather sweeping pronouncement comes from a man who has absolutely no problem looking people in the eye and telling them it's just too bad they don't have access to affordable health care because they were unfortunate enough to be born with a pre-existing condition.

The crowd is being worked into a frenzy -- all 100 of them -- over this rising proclamation of the President's "otherness", however. And so he plays the next card.

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Until now, Ann Coulter has been one of the purity trolls of the Republican Party. It was only a year or so ago that she claimed if Chris Christie didn't run, Romney would get the nomination and Obama would win. Remember that? Not that I'm a huge Ann Coulter fan, but she has at least been consistent about getting her Mittens hate on.

That is, until Saturday evening. One of two things has happened. Either Ann has had an epiphany in the form of a lightning bolt to the brain, or else her evil twin Skippy has taken over her body and is inhabiting it as a moderate.

When the American Spectator wonders who castrated her, you know something is amiss.

Which brings us to the latest evidence that Coulter has been somehow altered. Her inexplicable support for Romney has led her beyond being merely wrong about his chances in the general election to writing things that are either deliberately disingenuous or genuinely ignorant. The latest example of this tragic development is a column titled, "Three Cheers for RomneyCare." As its title suggests, this piece actually defends the Massachusetts "universal" health law. When I first read it, I could hardly believe such horse manure had emanated from Coulter's keyboard. The column opens with this howler: "If only the Democrats had decided to socialize the food industry or housing, RomneyCare would probably still be viewed as a massive triumph for conservative free-market principles -- as it was at the time."

It seems Republicans have a little problem with intellectual honesty. It's either that, or evil twins. You be the judge. In this clip, she throws everyone but the kitchen sink under the bus, and I do mean everyone. Goldwater Republicans, the Tea Party, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich. Everybody. She has thrown them all over for Mittens, or MRMoney, if I switch two letters.

Transcript below the fold.

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Last week, when the candidates were still in Florida, trying to drum up primary votes, there was a little...how do you say it?...incident between a Ron Paul supporter and Newt Gingrich's security detail. Things got a little heated:

Yahoo!’s Chris Moody reports that [Eddie] Dillard, decked out in a “Ron Paul Rocks America” T-shirt and wielding a “Ron Paul 2012″ sign, became a target for Gingrich’s security personnel when he refused to move from one of Gingrich’s Primary Day campaign stops.

Dillard’s opposing signage was, apparently, too close to Gingrich and his wife Callista, so security attempted to nudge Dillard out of the way. Dillard held his ground until security decided to take action. Moody writes:

Gingrich aides and security personnel swarmed Dillard, trying to intimidate him into moving. One of Gingrich’s security agents stepped in front of him. When Dillard didn’t budge, the agent lifted his heeled shoe over Dillard’s bare foot and dug the back of it into his skin, twisting it side-to-side like he was stomping out a cigarette

Dillard attempted to photograph the action but his phone was knocked out of his hand. One Gingrich campaign aide shouted, “Just block him! …Everyone step on his toes!”

You know, I find these Ron Paul supporters annoying myself, but there's no call for that kind of behavior. Maybe simple humanity is too much to expect from a Gingrich staffer. You can bet money talks to them, though. And Dillard is making sure to hit them where they hurt, having filed a lawsuit against Gingrich and his security team for assault and battery, seeking an unspecified amount of damages.

Wonder if Sheldon Adelson is willing to bankroll Newt for that too.

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Credit: Mother Jones

Federal Election Commission filings released this week showed that conservatives groups are amassing an ocean of cash for the 2012 presidential campaign. Thanks to the likes of the Koch brothers, the Walton clan and other of the usual suspects on the right, in 2011 conservative SuperPAC's outraised their liberal counterparts by more than seven to one. But if they win, rich Republican donors could more than get back the millions they invested. As it turns, just one law they are trying to buy - the elimination of the estate tax - could put billions of dollars back into their families' bank accounts. Of course, that gaping hole would have to be filled by all other American taxpayers.

As Mother Jones reported, as of December 31, 2011 conservative SuperPAC's reaped $60 million of now-unlimited contributions, compared to just $8 million for liberal groups. That tidal wave of corporate cash and play money from the wealthy has filled the coffers of Karl Rove's American Crossroads, Mitt Romney's Restore the Future, Newt Gingrich's Winning the Future and a litany of other right-wing SuperPACs. And as Amanda Terkel detailed, at a secret conclave last week, the Koch brothers pledged to raise much more to defeat President Obama:

At a private three-day retreat in California last weekend, conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch and about 250 to 300 other individuals pledged approximately $100 million to defeat President Obama in the 2012 elections.

A source who was in the room when the pledges were made told The Huffington Post that, specifically, Charles Koch pledged $40 million and David pledged $20 million.

But that figure is chump change compared to the eye-popping return on investment the Kochs can expect if their side wins in November. Ending the estate tax, a policy endorsed by Mitt Romney and every other Republican presidential candidate, would literally be worth billions of dollars to the heirs of Charles and David Koch. As ThinkProgress explained last year:

According to a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, the Koch brothers' heirs' would save a combined $17.4 billion in estate taxes thanks to Romney's plan.

Each of the Koch brothers -- Charles and David -- is worth about $25 billion. They are each married, so they would receive an exemption on the first $10 million that they pass down, and then theirs heirs would pay a 35 percent tax, or $8.7 billion, on the rest of their vast fortunes.

Now, this is an exceedingly rough calculation, as it's almost certain that the Koch's have engaged in extensive estate planning and would pay nowhere near that amount. But 35 percent is the rate on the books, and Romney's plan to eliminate the estate tax entirely would undeniably save the Kochs a boatload of money.

Here's why. Despite Republican mythology about family farms and businesses being lost to the so-called "death tax," by 2009 only 0.24 percent of estates even paid the levy. And that was before the December 2010 compromise President Obama inked with Congressional Republicans extending the Bush tax cuts further slashed the estate tax. The reduced 35 percent tax is now applied only to couples with estates greater than $10 million, a change which will cost Uncle Sam roughly $15 billion a year. Now, the Tax Policy Center calculated, only 0.1 percent of estates are impacted. Only 50 family farms and small businesses will be affected, and they contribute "less than one tenth of 1 percent point of the total revenue the tax will collect." Who pays the estate tax?

TPC estimates that 8,600 individuals dying in 2011 will leave estates large enough to require filing an estate tax return (estates with a gross value under $5 million need not file a return in 2011). After allowing for deductions and credits, an estimated 3,270 estates will owe tax. Roughly 90 percent of these taxable estates will come from the top ten percent of income earners and nearly half will come from the top one percent alone./em>

Estate tax liability will total an estimated $10.6 billion in 2011. The top ten percent of income earners will pay 98 percent of this total. The richest 1 in 1,000 will pay $5.4 billion or 51 percent of the total.

Among that richest 1 in 1,000 are the Koch brothers and the family behind Walmart, the Walton clan.

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Via The Church Report:

Featuring the "USS Obamaboat," the animated ad urges voters to “turn this ship around” and criticizes Obama's levels of government spending, including bank bailouts, healthcare and a loan to the failed solar company Solyndra.

Children rowing the USS Obamaboat are told to “Earn! Earn! Earn! Don’t you care about the banks? Don’t you care about the 99 percent?”

A woman in a bathtub on deck says, “This ship stimulated my husband’s solar company” and is then handed money by a man in an adjacent bathtub.

This ticked me off enough to make a donation to Alan Grayson's campaign. Join me?

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..." - Thomas Jefferson, July 4, 1776

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." - Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 19, 1863

"When was America all about everyone being equal?” - Florida contractor and Gingrich fundraiser Mary Forristall, quoted in the Washington Post on Jan. 28, 2012

There you have it: America's great political debate summarized in three quotes. Forristall is not the first conservative, and definitely won't be the last, to dislike equality. Our history is littered with a surprising number of quotes just like it. Most of us think the ideas of Jefferson and Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. firmly planted equality in American soil and made it as apple-pie all-American as you could imagine, but the debate goes on. From Alexander Hamilton to John C. Calhoun to the Social Darwinists of the 1880s to Ayn Rand, William Buckley, and Jesse Helms of the last century and the tea partiers of this, there has been a long line of conservatives who are appalled and terrified by the idea of equality. There are a lot of remarkably blunt quotes on how absurd the idea of equality is from all kinds of conservatives which I featured in my book, "The Progressive Revolution: How the Best of America Came To Be."

When conservatives want to be a little less overt about their disdain for the notion of equality, they will say that, of course they believe in equality of opportunity, they just oppose equality of results. Besides being a ridiculous straw man (no one I have ever met has argued for absolute "equality of results,” or the idea that it isn't fine for people to get rewarded when they build and sell great products), they almost always immediately undercut their own argument by proposing cuts in student grants and loans, public education, Head Start and child health programs that get kids off to a better start in life. They are all for equality, they say, but never want to extend equal protections under the law to new classes of people being discriminated against. They support equality but don’t care if people with illnesses or pre-existing conditions can’t get health care coverage. They are for equal rights under the law but support eliminating funding for legal services, and allowing bankers who commit financial fraud to skate by without ever being investigated. They think equality is wonderful, but are indignant that progressives ask that millionaires and billionaires pay at least as high a tax rate as their secretaries.

Conservatives are on the defensive on equality issues to a degree they haven’t been in at least four decades, and they are flailing around pretty badly trying to defend their patrons in the 1 percent. More straw men are being created than in the Land of Oz. The Washington Post has had two big pieces in their editorial pages the last two days with conservative writers desperately trying to defend wealthy people from having to pay a fair share of taxes.

First up, with the lead editorial on the front page of The Washington Post Sunday Outlook section, was a piece by James Q. Wilson with the monster-sized headline “Don’t Blame the Rich.” The Post’s sub-headline was “Scholar James Q. Wilson argues that taxing the wealthy won’t end poverty.” Straw man number one: I’d be hard pressed to ascertain what progressives were blaming “the rich” for. I, appropriately, blame a lot of the big Wall Street bankers for crashing the economy through financial fraud, forcing the rest of us to bail them out, and then whining because we don’t love them anymore. Likewise, I blame oil and coal companies for polluting the air and threatening the earth with catastrophic climate change. I blame health insurance companies for dropping millions of people out of coverage when they get sick. I blame big business execs who outsource jobs from America so they can pay slave wages in China and Third World countries. But I have nothing against rich people generally.

If you are a manufacturer who has created a great product and employs a lot of people to make it while paying them a decent wage and making sure they have health benefits, and gets rich as a result, I have nothing but love for you. If you are a small business owner that provides amazing service for your community and gets rich as a result, that is tremendous. If you are a community banker who gives small business and home and auto loans to the people in your community, and make great money, God bless you. If you run a website that produces great content with a huge audience, and you reap the rewards, wonderful. I blame entrepreneurs like that for nothing, and am thrilled for their success. But I still want to see them, and everyone with the ability to, pay their fair share of taxes.

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State: Florida

Type of election: Primary

How it works: Florida is a closed primary. Only Republicans will be voting in the primary today and the deadline for registration changes was 30 days prior to the election.

Official election results: Florida Division of Elections

Republican candidates: Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum (all others have dropped out or are polling at less than 1 percent)

Democratic candidates: Barack Obama

Previous performance: In 2008, Romney finished second in the Republican primary to John McCain, receiving 31 percent of the vote. Paul finished fifth with 3.2 percent. Obama finished second to Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary with 33 percent.

Newspapers: Florida Today, Miami Herald, Tallahassee Democrat, Tampa Bay Times, Tampa Tribune, full list

Television stations: Full list

Progressive blogs: Bark Bark Woof Woof, Beach Peanuts, Eye on Miami, FLA Politics, Florida Progressive Coalition, Pensito Review, Progress Florida, The Reid Report, SaintPetersBlog, The Spencerian

Progressives on Twitter: Full list

Media blogs: The Buzz, The Fine Print, Fresh Squeezed Politics, Naked Politics, Post on Politics

Latest polling: Most recent from each polling organization:

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It's a sign of a self-actualized, mature adult to accept responsibility for one's failings, attempt to correct them and to acknowledge the lessons learned.

Then there's Newt Gingrich.

Never to be mistaken as a self-actualized, mature adult, Newt Gingrich has already blamed his philandering on his great love for his country. So is it little wonder that when he flops in his one purported skill that will allow him to beat Obama--debating--it is someone else's fault?

[Guest host Jake] Tapper noted that both of Gingrich’s surges in the polls were thanks to his powerful debate performances, and asked him what happened during both debates last week, where many analysts thought Romney came out much stronger and helped himself get back into the lead in Florida. Gingrich conceded he did not do his best at the debates, but had an explanation all ready.

“I was amazed. I’m standing next to a guy who has the most blatantly dishonest answers I can remember in any presidential race in my lifetime… I don’t know how you can debate someone with civility if they’re prepared to say things that are factually false.”

Gimme a break. You can dish it out but you can't take it, Newt. Like all big bullies, Gingrich is bluster with nothing behind it, folding like a house of cards when someone is able to push back.

*This* is the GOP's last, great hope for besting Obama in a debate? Hehehehehe...thanks, GOP.

With just three days before the Florida primaries, Mitt Romney has unleashed a new attack ad against his chief rival, Newt Gingrich.

The ad, which uses a 1997 clip from the day Mr. Gingrich was found guilty by the House of ethics violations, prompted a terse statement from Mr. Brokaw on Saturday in which he expressed concern that his work was being used for political purposes he never intended.

“I am extremely uncomfortable with the extended use of my personal image in this political ad,” he said. “I do not want my role as a journalist compromised for political gain by any campaign.”

NBC’s lawyers have requested that the Romney campaign remove the NBC footage from the ad.

Gingrich, who paid a $300,000 reimbursement fee for the penalty, has emphasized that the ethics inquiry was unfairly partisan. "Whether it was an unprecedented ethics reprimand, his erratic leadership style, or his resignation in disgrace at the hands of his own party, it is understandable why Speaker Gingrich would want to re-write history," Romney spokesman Ryan Williams said in a statement released with the ad.

Romney's campaign said they had received NBC's letter by Saturday afternoon. "We just received the letter; we are reviewing it, but we believe it falls within fair use," senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom said.

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Republican Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum really dropped a load on CNN last Friday night when he said rape victims should accept their babies as gifts from God.

In an interview with Piers Morgan, the most socially backward conservative candidate in the GOP field remained unyielding in his opposition to abortion, even in cases where rape is involved.

Morgan pressed Santorum on the issue and asked how he would feel if his own daughter came to him begging for an abortion after being raped. Santorum said, “I think the right approach is to accept this horribly created - in the sense of rape - but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you.”

He added that rape victims ought to “make the best of a bad situation.”

That's right, Lil' Ricky wants the government to force pregnant rape victims to accept the "horribly created," because "God" gave you this "horribly created"...um, "gift" via a brutal attack against your will.

Because he's a "compassionate conservative." Cough.
Transcript of the segment follows.

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