In honor of today’s Republican Party, whose idea of progress is to return to the (18)50′s, The Boss covering one of the greatest songs of all time.

Listen up, Republicans.  He’s talking to you.

Headed up to Canada, where their citizens’ freedom to go bankrupt due to an unexpected illness is curtailed by the iron fist of the state. But it’s Canada, so they’re very polite about it.

Anyway, that means very little posting until next week.  Enjoy the holiday weekend.

I have refrained, so far, from making 2012 general election prognostications. (I have suggested that Mitt Romney is almost certainly the GOP nominee, and I’ll stand by that, because God doesn’t love me enough to put Rick Santorum at the top of the GOP ticket this fall.)  I have felt, for the past few months, that if Europe can keep from imploding over the next nine months, Barack Obama will probably be re-elected.  And I think that’s still pretty much the case.  Unemployment claims are trending down, job growth and the stock market are trending up, and Obama is still the guy who killed bin Laden, pulled us out of Iraq and is getting us out (too slowly for my taste, but still) of Afghanistan.

But nothing has helped him so much as the tawdry reality show that is GOP Primary: 2012.

The chart above is the trend of aggregated polls (excluding Rasmussen) over the last nine months.  Notice anything happening around, say, early January?

And then there’s this: Mitt Romney’s favorability:

I think the technical term for this is “grim.”

And then there’s this quaint idea that the GOP path to victory is paved with the crushed reproductive rights of women everywhere. (Case in point: Virginia voted today to require a vaginal ultrasound before a woman may have an abortion, although the law doesn’t require that the woman actually look at the images provided. As the Great Orange Satan noted, that is actually, um, rape. I’m sure that the kindly men behind this bill wouldn’t consider it “forcible.”)

I have a Republican friend who rationalizes her votes for people who disagree with her on virtually every social issue (she’s pro-choice, pro gay marriage, pro contraception) by saying that Republicans won’t be able to actually enact the restrictions they forth about continually.  And while that may work for her, people who want a job might be interested to see Republicans talk about stuff that creates jobs that aren’t on the vagina police.

I know I shouldn’t be giving the GOP advice, but I can’t help myself (and they won’t listen, anyway): this is not the path to an electoral majority.

Meanwhile, Ron Brownstein kindly notes that while pundits were fretting about the decline in Obama’s support among left-handed hispanics who live in exurban areas, the coalition that elected him has come all the way home:

Whether the electorate is viewed by race, gender, partisanship or ideology (or combinations of the above), Obama’s numbers against Romney now closely align with his support against McCain, according to the 2008 exit polls. Overall, the Pew survey put Obama ahead of Romney by 52 percent to 44 percent, close to his actual 53 percent to 46 percent victory over McCain.

On the broadest measure, Pew found Obama attracting 44 percent of whites (compared to 43 percent in 2008) and 79 percent of non-whites (compared to 80 percent in 2008). In the Pew survey, Obama attracted 49 percent of whites with at least a four year college degree (compared to 47 percent against McCain) and 41 percent of whites without one (compared to 40 percent in 2008).

Looking at ideology, the reversion to 2008 is almost exact. Against Romney, Pew finds Obama attracting 89 percent of liberals, 20 percent of conservatives (each exactly his share against McCain), and 61 percent of moderates (compared to 60 percent in 2008.) On partisanship, the story is similar: against Romney, Pew finds Obama attracting 9 percent of Republicans (exactly his 2008 share), 51 percent of independents (compared to 52 percent last time) and 94 percent of Democrats (up from 89 percent in 2008). In the Pew survey, Obama wins 46 percent of white independents (compared to the 47 percent he drew against McCain).

There’s only slightly more variation by gender. In 2008, Obama won 49 percent of men; Pew finds him with 45 percent against Romney. Against McCain, Obama won 56 percent of women; Pew finds him drawing 59 percent against Romney. Among white men, Pew finds Obama’s support slipping from 41 percent in 2008 to 36 percent now (with all of the decline coming among white men without a college degree, the toughest audience throughout his presidency.) Among white women, though, Pew finds Obama rising from 46 percent in 2008 to 52 percent against Romney-and recording gains among both college-plus women (whom he carried last time) and the working-class “waitress moms” who strongly preferred McCain.

I’m sure three more months of Romney, Santorum, and the increasingly irrelevant Newt Gingrich arguing over who is best at controlling our nation’s ladyparts will bring those women right back to the GOP.

It is, as they say, an eternity to election day.  But I’m going to put it out there: Obama’s going to get re-elected come November 6.  I’m far more sure of that than of whom he’ll be beating.

UPDATE: Yahoo has jumped on my bandwagon.

From the golden days of The West Wing.  As President Bartlett prepares for his final debate with Florida Governor (and scarily Rick Perry-like) Rob Ritchie, his staff are looking for a soundbite on families.  Josh turns to Amy Gardner (played by the always luminous Mary Louise Parker), who comes up with the quote above.

To which, I am sure she would add today, with respect to the Catholic Bishops’ vaginal purity jihad, “…and you don’t know jack shit about pregnancy, so lay off the contraceptive crap.”

…to confirm what I wrote a week and a half ago.

I get it, Mitt Romney was a management consultant. Peter Suderman, in Reason, devotes an entire article to Mitt as potential consultant-in-chief.  And, to be fair, I actually don’t object to people who look at actual data and try to base their decisions on said data.

If only that were what Mitt Romney were doing.  Suderman:

Those who have worked with Romney cite his flexibility as a virtue. “He’s spent his entire life in a world that’s constantly changing, where he has had to modify his thinking in order to address problems,” says Scott Meadow, his friend and former business partner. “I think it demonstrates something that I’ve always seen: an ability to adapt and change, and a willingness to accept that his thinking evolves. And not being afraid to change his mind and go in a different direction because that seems like the appropriate thing to do.” Meadow says Romney is “loyal to success,” whatever form it takes. “He’s flexible because he’s had to be,” Meadow says.

And why has he “had to be” flexible? Why, because his audiences were looking for different positions:

He tangled with President Obama last week over whether religiously affiliated hospitals should be required to provide free contraceptives — “abortive pills,” Mr. Romney called them. And when a breast cancer group pulled its financing from Planned Parenthood, Mr. Romney called on the federal government to follow suit, saying, “The idea that we’re subsidizing an institution that provides abortion, in my view, is wrong.”

The comments reflect Mr. Romney’s evolution from abortion rights advocate to abortion foe; gone was any trace of the candidate for governor who, 10 years ago, answered a Planned Parenthood questionnaire by saying he backed “state funding of abortion services” underMedicaid.

Today Mr. Romney is working hard to convince his party’s skeptical right wing that he is “adamantly pro-life,” especially in the wake of his embarrassing loss in three states last week to Rick Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania and a stalwart of the anti-abortion movement. Yet the more Mr. Romney courts social conservatives, the more two of his Republican rivals, Mr. Santorum and Newt Gingrich, dredge up his past to attack him as a flip-flopper.

The Times is kind when it calls Romney’s change on reproductive rights an “evolution”, but then again, “cynical repositioning” is probably not going to pass muster with the editors.

More problematic, for Romney, is health care, where he opposes on a national level essentially what he implemented on a state level while suggesting it would be a good national model.

But that was so 2008.

It’ sad, almost: Romney’s greatest strengths, which are were his pragmatism and openness to fact-based solutions, are anathema to the GOP primary electorate.  And the problem with his contortionist-level flexibility isn’t that people don’t know what he really believes – it’s that it’s not clear even he knows anymore.

Remember when people were concerned that John F. Kennedy would take orders from the Pope? I think that might have looked like this:

But stepping away from the particulars, we note that today’s proposal continues to involve needless government intrusion in the internal governance of religious institutions, and to threaten government coercion of religious people and groups to violate their most deeply held convictions. In a nation dedicated to religious liberty as its first and founding principle, we should not be limited to negotiating within these parameters. The only complete solution to this religious liberty problem is for HHS to rescind the mandate of these objectionable services.

Of course, someone saying the following would be garroted by today’s GOP for waging a secular war on religion:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute–where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote–where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference–and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish–where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source–where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials–and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all. [Emphasis mine.]

We have so failed on so many of these counts it is hard to keep track.

Can’t think of another song, off the top of my head, that mentions any sort of contraception…

I admit…this morning, as I heard that the Obama Administration would propose an “accommodation” on its contraception mandate as it related to religious organizations, I feared the worst.

No so.

The “accommodation” is that women still get access to contraceptive coverage with no copay, and the cost wioll be picked up by the insurance companies, who are happy to do this because, well, contraception is cheaper than pregnancy taken to term or abortion.

Meanwhile, virtually the entire Republican party has gone on record, in one form or another, against access to contraception – access which north of 98% of women take advantage of, no matter what their faith.  Or, as ABL says at Balloon Juice:

[Republicans demonstrated] to Democratic and Republican women alike (as well as those crucial independents) that what Republicans really want to do is install a tiny government in to every women’s vagina and arrogate complete control over women’s sexuality and health.

(Which reminds me of the West Wing episode where Josh Lyman scolds a gay GOP Representative for wanting to shrink government so it’s …”just small enough to fit in our bedrooms.”)

Amanda Marcotte thinks the GOP got punked.

He drew this out for two weeks, letting Republicans work themselves into a frenzy of anti-contraception rhetoric, all thinly disguised as concern for religious liberty, and then created a compromise that addressed their purported concerns but without actually reducing women’s access to contraception, which is what this has always been about. (As Dana Goldstein reported in 2010, before the religious liberty gambit was brought up, the Catholic bishops were just demanding that women be denied access and told to abstain from sex instead.) With the fig leaf of religious liberty removed, Republicans are in a bad situation. They can either drop this and slink away knowing they’ve been punked, or they can double down. But in order to do so, they’ll have to be more blatantly anti-contraception, a politically toxic move in a country where 99% of women have used contraception.

Marcotte thinks the GOP will fold, but I’m not sure their survival instincts on this count are that good.*

At the end of the clip above, a reporter shouts out, “What did Archbishop Dolan say, sir?”, but Obama walked off without answering.  Probably the best move; I’d have been tempted to say “I don’t give a flying fuck what Archbishop Dolan says, because we’ve addressed his concern and it’s none of his business what women choose to do with respect to their reproductive health.  He can keep complaining, if he likes, but we’re done here.”

Which is just one of several million reasons I am not, and never will be, President of these United States.

UPDATE: ThinkProgress points out that the vast majority of those bloviating about this on the teevee weren’t going to be, you know, affected at all by whatever the President decided to do.  I’m sure that’s because women would be biased, and only straight white men can pass judgment on matters that might affect them.

*UPDATE II: The GOP is, as TPM says, going all-in on this fight.

I’ve gotten two messages in my top-secret marxist-soshulist e-mail account about the hyper-inflated contraception mandate brouhaha. One wants me to sign a petition to Congress, the other to President Obama, supporting the new mandate which is actually not that new at all.  Because I follow orders from my liberal overseers, I signed them both.

In the meantime, GOP great latino hope Marco Rubio wants to roll the mandate all the way back, so that any employer can opt out based on personal religious belief.

Do these folks actually know any, you know, women?

And John Cole goes on a righteous rant about the lack of moral standing of certain Catholic leaders on, well, any issue:

…it is important to remember who we are looking to for moral leadership- Folks like this guy (via):

In 2002, at the height of the outcry over the sexual abuse of minors by Roman Catholic priests, the Archbishop of New York, Edward M. Egan, issued a letter to be read at Mass. In it, he offered an apology about the church’s handling of sex-abuse cases in New York and in Bridgeport, Conn., where he was previously posted.

“It is clear that today we have a much better understanding of this problem,” he wrote. “If in hindsight we also discover that mistakes may have been made as regards prompt removal of priests and assistance to victims, I am deeply sorry.”

Now, 10 years later and in retirement, Cardinal Egan has taken back his apology.

In a interview with Connecticut magazine published on the magazine’s Web site last week, a surprisingly frank Cardinal Egan said of the apology, “I never should have said that,” and added, “I don’t think we did anything wrong.”

I am so sick and tired of these moralizing religious blowhards. I don’t care how important he may be to millions of people and I don’t care if he speaks latin, likes incense, and wears a funny hat, that guy is an asshole.

Or, as Atrios put it:

Keep punishing the women for unapproved sexytime, or the country gets it.

Can’t the GOP just go back to their call girls and leave the rest of American women alone?

And shouldn’t the Catholic Church have some small element of humility for a massive conspiracy to obstruct justice related to child rape?

I mean, the Los Angeles Unified School District just transferred every breathing employee from Miramonte Elementary school because two teachers have been arrested for lewd conduct, even though I’m pretty sure the custodial staff, for example, wasn’t involved in teacher staffing decisions.

The Catholic Church, time and again, shuffled priests who had committed child sexual abuse to different parishes where they acted again.

But heaven forbid a woman have sex in ways that offend their delicate sensibilities.