American political observers just getting to know casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who has given millions of dollars to Newt Gingrich Super PAC and offered strategic advice to Mitt Romney, may be interested to learn that Adelson’s much-discussed interest in U.S.-Israel relations extends to a very specific interest in right-wing Israeli politics.

Here’s an interesting report via Salon from Noga Tarnopolsky:

It was in order to help a future Netanyahu candidacy that Adelson, in 2007, established Israel Hayom (Israel Today) a daily tabloid newspaper that quickly rose to have the widest circulation in the country. The newspaper was founded on the conviction, widespread among the Israeli right-wing since Netanyahu’s first term in office in the mid-90s, that the media held a deep-seated antipathy to Netanyahu.

A much-repeated rumor, impossible to verify, has it that Adelson has told Israeli friends he is happy to lose even $150 or $200 million dollars on the venture.

Conservative estimates hold that for now, he has lost at least several tens of millions of dollars. The paper boasts an extensive and expensive list of journalists and analysts, it is printed in massive quantities and distributed widely and for free, yet it does not display advertising in sufficient quantities to offset significant costs. It is a rich man’s luxury.

Israelis uncomfortable with the paper’s big shadow have bestowed it with a jokey moniker, Bibiton, a play on Netanyahu’s nickname, Bibi, and on the Hebrew word for newspaper, Iton.

Two playing fields, two different sets of rules, but one fortune to help run up the score. Interesting.

As a whole, libertarians are not renowned for tactical thinking. Right is right and wrong is wrong, and pretty much everyone willing to compromise on a routine basis is contributing to the perpetual rule of the Slavedrivers of Collectivism.

So it was interesting to read the Cato Institute’s John Samples making the case that a Rick Santorum nomination would be quite good for the Cause.

It’s not that Samples is fond of Ricky. Au contraire:

By his own account, Santorum is anti-libertarian, describing the philosophy as “radical individualism” and a source of cultural decay. He opposes moral pluralism in favor of a society and government that recognizes and acts on Christian virtues. Santorum speaks of free markets, but his cultural commitments are bound to require limits on economic liberty. He also indulges in an economic populism that implies protectionist policies that favor the manufacturing sector. Like many Republicans these days, Santorum also seeks salvation for the Middle East through American military power.

So why would it be good for Santorum, a sturdy advocate for the mysticism of both mind and muscle, to carry the GOP flag against Obama? Easy: he’d descredit his ideology!

Since the early 1990s, Christian conservatives have formed an ever larger portion of the GOP. In Santorum, they would have what they have long sought: a candidate embodying their commitments to a politics of faith. Neoconservatives would also have a candidate committed to transforming the world through foreign policy and military action. The Obama-Santorum race would be more than just a struggle for power between two men. It would be a referendum on ideas and policies that have dominated the GOP for more than decade….

A ten-point Republican loss in a year when economic weakness suggested a close race would be a political disaster not just for the candidate and his party but also for the ideas they embody. Rick Santorum could be the George McGovern of his party.

Such a disaster might open the door for a different kind of GOP along lines indicated earlier, a party of free markets, moral pluralism, and realism in foreign affairs.

This is what Marxists used to call “dialectical thinking.” Ricky would “heighten the contradictions” in the current system and blow up the GOP, presumably making it supine for Ron Paul or his successor (likely his son).

I doubt too many libertarians will be convinced by Samples to start thumping the tubs for Ricky, but if I were one of his backers, I’d keep an eye out for Fifth Columnists.

As you probably know, the big news today was the announcement of an agreement between 49 state attorneys general (all but Oklahoma’s, who doesn’t think banks should have any liability for the mortgage crisis) and the nation’s five largest mortgage lenders that will insulate the banks from state prosecution for foreclosure fraud, in exchange for $26 billion in “relief.”

I’ll just quote David Dayen’s description of the payout from FDL:

$3 billion will go toward refinancing for current borrowers who are underwater on their loans, as well as short sales. $5 billion will go as a hard cash penalty to the states, which can use them for legal aid services, foreclosure mitigation programs, and ongoing fraud investigations in other areas (one official close to the talks feared that much of that hard cash payout will go in some Republican states toward filling their budget holes). The federal government will get a cash penalty as well. Out of that $5 billion, up to 750,000 borrowers wrongfully foreclosed upon will get a $1,800-$2,000 check if they sign up for it, the equivalent of saying to them “sorry we stole your home, here’s two months rent.”

The bulk of the money, around $17 billion, will go to principal reduction credits for troubled borrowers. The banks will not get dollar-for-dollar credit for every write-down; reductions on loans bundled in private-label mortgage-backed securities, for example, will be under 50 cents on the dollar, and write-downs for second liens (mostly home equity lines of credit) will be more like 10 cents. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan believes that they will be able to get between $35-$40 billion in principal reduction in real dollars out of the settlement.

The settlement is being generally evaluated as “a lot better than nothing,” but hardly a triumph of justice, since it will address a small percentage of the $750 billion of “negative equity” in the housing market, while getting the banks off the hook for potential criminal liability (though investigations and potential prosecutions can proceed on misdeeds not covered in the settlement).

Given the enormity of the problem—both for individuals and for the country—Mark Gongloff’s conclusion about the settlement seems apt:

If you were explaining this to fifth graders, you’d say that you were turning a hole that was ‘two infinities’ deep into a hole that was ‘one infinity’ deep. It’s still an infinity for most homeowners and gives them little reason not to just walk away from the hole.

Ugh.

A chronic flaw in political analysis is the tendency to forget that yesterday’s demographic cleavages and political allegiances have not been frozen in amber. The periodic talk of putting the “New Deal Coalition” back together always makes me wonder where and how we are going to get the white ethnic urban bosses and southern segregationists who were important parts of that coalition. For many years after the turbulent days of the 1960s and 1970s, you’d hear references to the “Wallace vote” in discussions of southern politics, long after many actual “Wallace voters” were dead and buried. The same is even more true of “Reagan Democrats,” still around to many writers even though Ronnie has long since passed into hagiographical status.

That’s why I found it interesting to read AEI vice president Henry Olsen’s essay (at National Review, of all places, where Rickyphilia is rampant) suggesting that Rick Santorum’s appeals to white-working-class voters represent a doomed effort to revive a sort of ghost vote, based on “Reagan Democrat” stereotypes that are at least two decades out of date.

Today’s white working class, says Olsen, is no longer characterized by stay-at-home moms and fathers working in stable factory jobs, attending neighborhood churches and embracing sturdy folk virtues. Their lives are often chaotic and surrounded by intense economic pressures, and they are as likely to look to government as anywhere else for relief. Here’s the nut graph:

A political strategy for today’s working class would address its current mindset. To begin with, it would recognize that Reagan Democrats are no longer Democrats. Those who are not already Republicans are likely to be independents convinced that big government is not the answer to their problems. But they do not support Republican economic policy, because they think that an unfettered market is not the answer, either.

Interestingly, Olsen thinks the economic nationalist themes the president hit in his State of the Union Address are a lot more in touch with white-working-class sentiments than anything Santorum and other Republicans are talking about.

You can read the whole thing, but I will warn you: Olsen veers off into discussion of the trucking industry and truckers as voters about every third paragraph. I found myself humming “Six Days on the Road” at one point. I don’t know if the dude made his bones in Washington doing transportation policy, or just never got over a childhood Tonka obsession, but it’s a little distracting. Still, it’s interesting to read the occasional conservative who doesn’t seem to believe laissez-faire economics is the answer to every political question.

Sometimes a widely disliked public figure will get an itch to run for political office, and even people who care nothing about politics will join in a festival of schadenfreude watching the legend-in-his-or-her-own-mind go predictably down the tubes. There was some of that in 2010 with California senatorial and gubernatorial candidates Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman, who made a lot of enemies in their business careers, though in eMeg’s case, it was her mind-numbing overkill in TV advertising that made even apolitical Californians look forward eagerly to her concession speech.

But I’ve never quite seen anything like the growing national interest in the likely crushing defeat of former NFL player and ESPN “personality” Craig James, who is running for the Republican nomination for the Senate in Texas this year. It’s not like James is a big threat to win or anything. As the Houston Chronicle noted after publication of a PPP poll on the race last month:

James, who formally launched his campaign last week, draws 4 percent support. The former SMU Mustang and New England Patriot running back is struggling to overcome two liabilities: he’s largely unknown and he’s unpopular among those who know him.

Yet the campaign of this going-nowhere-man is getting some pretty serious national coverage. The Boston Globe, which does not normally follow Texas politics closely, published a long profile of the candidate that featured James’ remarkable storehouse of cliches. And just yesterday the American Prospect put up a report on James’ race by Abby Rapoport. Beyond that, a vast array of college football blogs around the country are occasionally writing about James’ downward spiral with ill-disguised glee.

Why all the hate? Well, some people are probably troubled by James’ admitted (though minor, he claims) role in one of the great play-for-pay scandals of the 20th century, which uniquely earned SMU’s football program the “death penalty” from the NCAA. But James is best known by college football fans for his body of work as a sportscaster and “analyst” for ESPN, where he has routinely been described as the worst in the business, a guy who can actually ruin a game for viewers. And that was before he got very, very involved in a successful effort to get cult-figure coach Mike Leach fired from his job at Texas Tech for alleged mistreatment of his (James’) son. The general feeling of college football fans is that ESPN kept James around and overtly took his side in the Leach affair in order to demonstrate their power to do whatever they want.

So as James’ Senate candidacy circles the toilet bowl, there are a lot more people (at least outside Texas) cheering his demise than cheering any of his Republican or Democratic rivals. It’s a shame he can’t turn his national notoriety into a few more points of name recognition in the state where he is actually running.

Antibiotics are doing major number on my appetite, but hope yours is good. Here are a few condiments:

* A Mississippi legislator has introduced a bill to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” It appears he got the idea from Stephen Colbert.

* Mark Schmitt pens very informative review of a new book on moderate Republicans.

* Ben Adler reports that first morning of CPAC was a Rubio-Fest.

* FBI releases background investigation report on the late Steve Jobs, which it prepared in 1991 when he was up for appointment to the President’s Export Council.

* NY Times publishes yet another profile of Santorum Super PAC benefactor Foster Friess.

* George Will gives Mitt Romney a good thrashing over his defense rhetoric.

* Michael Sean Winters uses phrase “punch in the nose” about twenty times in angry piece about administration’s alleged insults to Catholics. Guess “slap in the face” wasn’t visceral enough.

Back shortly.

There are a fair number of mixed signals coming from the White House on the contraceptive coverage mandate dispute. The President reportedly told a closed session of Senate Democrats that he had no intention of backing down from the mandate. But reports continue to proliferate of “uneasiness” in the White House (particularly among its Catholic men) and of interest in some sort of compromise.

But the Catholic bishops, who have squarely placed themselves at the head of the parade of people denouncing the mandate, in close alliance with Republican congressional leaders and presidential candidates, don’t seem particularly interested in a compromise, even if one becomes available. USA Today reports Anthony Picarello, general counsel for the Bishops, as saying nothing less than total repeal of the mandate, not just expansion of the “conscience clause” to include church-affiliated hospitals and charities, will suffice:

“There has been a lot of talk in the last couple days about compromise, but it sounds to us like a way to turn down the heat, to placate people without doing anything in particular,” Picarello said. “We’re not going to do anything until this is fixed.”

That means removing the provision from the health care law altogether, he said, not simply changing it for Catholic employers and their insurers. He cited the problem that would create for “good Catholic business people who can’t in good conscience cooperate with this.”

“If I quit this job and opened a Taco Bell, I’d be covered by the mandate,” Picarello said.

Now as it happens, the bill being sponsored by Sen. Marco Rubio, which is widely being described as intended to “reverse” the administration’s decision for a relatively narrow “conscience clause,” appears to widen the clause to the point where it would deal with the “Taco Bell” issue, since it enables any individual employer citing religious objections to contraceptives coverage to evade the mandate.

But it’s entirely possible the Bishops have rejected half-measures and are determine to overturn the mandate for everybody. If so, as Alec MacGillis notes at TNR, the Bishops will be accepting the exact framing of the issue that defenders of the mandate prefer: it’s a matter of guaranteeing access to contraceptives, not a matter of “religious liberty.” Looks like an over-reach to me.

Oh, brother. With the end of football season, I thought Denver Broncos QB Tim Tebow might have a slight chance of reducing his massive over-exposure, and thereby reduce the number of Americans who are driven to irrational hatred at the very mention of his name.

But no:

Virginia Del. Robert Bell celebrated his bill passing the state House on Wednesday by taking a knee and Tebowing.

The legislation — dubbed the “Tebow bill” for the Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow — would allow the state’s homeschooled students the chance to play sports at their local high school like the NFL star did in Florida. Bell, a Republican, said he’s pleased the new nickname has brought the legislation more fans. “We’re happy with whatever help there is,” he said.

“The name became a shorthand, and now all the homeschool kids call it that,” he told POLITICO. “After we passed it, I did the Tebow on the floor.”

Now I understand the connection between this bill and Tebow’s autobiography, but I fear this practice will spread to every occasion where a conservative legislator somewhere thinks he or she has done the Lord’s Work. At that point, we may have to seek court injunctions to stop it.

ANOTHER NOTE TO THE HUMOR-IMPAIRED: The reference to “court injunctions” was a joke, as the careful reader might have deduced from the tone of the entire post.

Yesterday I said it, you said it, pretty much everybody said it: after the unpleasant surprise of losing the Minnesota and Colorado caucuses to Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney and his Super PAC would methodically begin to unleash the advertising equivalent of the Firebombing of Dresden on poor Ricky in upcoming primary states like Arizona, Michigan and Ohio. It sure worked to cut Newt Gingrich down to size in Iowa and Florida, and it appears Mitt will maintain the kind of financial advantage over Santorum and Gingrich needed to achieve command of the airways wherever he chooses.

But interestingly, there are a few Republican voices out there suggesting that Mitt does not truly have the freedom to treat Santorum like he treated Newt. Why? Because conservatives opinion-leaders tend to like Ricky, and they don’t much like Newt, who has been honking them off one at a time for decades. Moreover, Gingrich’s serial surges in the polls frightened some conservatives into thinking he might romp to the nomination and then lead the party to a defeat of biblical proportions. At a minimum, conservative leaders will not cooperate with a trash-Ricky effort, and they might even push back, suggests columnist Matt Lewis:

One appealing attribute is that Santorum is somewhat of a wonkish intellectual type. This appeals to conservative pundits who fear the tea part set might nominate someone who would make them look like a rube to their cosmopolitan friends. As the Washington Post’s in-house Romney cheerleader, Jennifer Rubin, wrote, Santorum “is a well-educated man who cites (without pretense) everyone from John Adams to C.S. Lewis. He’s someone who thinks it important to know things — and know them in detail if you’re going to run for the presidency.”

And consider National Review’s infamous editorial, tearing down Gingrich (and Bachmann and Perry). That same piece praised Santorum as “an effective legislator” and included him among the candidates who “deserve serious consideration….”

Romney must tread lightly when attacking Santorum. And he won’t be able to count on the help of his willing accomplices in the conservative media this time around…

Additionally, there’s pretty strong anecdotal evidence that Mitt (and for that matter, Gingrich) have been overdoing the visigothic attacks on each other, benefitting Santorum, who personal favorability ratings have remained high even as Mitt’s and Newt’s have sagged. Mitt gets a pretty strong hint today from the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal:

The former Massachusetts Governor also isn’t winning friends with his relentlessly negative campaign. He first chopped up Rick Perry by running hard to the right on immigration. Then his attack ads tore apart Newt Gingrich in Iowa and Florida—in part because they revealed truths about Mr. Gingrich’s prodigal politics on Freddie Mac and other things.

Now his political team’s instinct will be to dig into its oppo research and savage Mr. Santorum. This may get Mr. Romney to 50.1% of the GOP delegates, but he’d be a weaker nominee for it. The low GOP turnout in early primary states is one sign of his weakness. What Mr. Romney needs is to make a better, positive case for his candidacy beyond his business resume.

In any event, even if Santorum gets relatively kind treatment from Romney, it’s unlikely the same will be true of Gingrich, for whom Ricky’s sudden burst of success is an existential threat. You can expect to hear a lot from Newt and his Super PAC about earmarks, Medicare Rx, the national right-to-work bill, and other of Ricky’s heresies. So long as Adelson’s still writing checks, Gingrich has little or nothing to lose.

We all talk a lot about the implications of unemployment rates, new jobs, GDP growth, etc., on the 2012 presidential race. But as Ezra Klein reminds us today, you get elected by winning individual states, and there are a wide variety of economies in different parts of the country:

The five largest swing states — Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and North Carolina — control more than a third of the electoral votes necessary to win the presidency. In December, they had a collective unemployment rate of more than 9 percent, half a percentage point higher than the national unemployment rate. (State-by- state numbers for January haven’t been released yet.)

Similarly, an analysis conducted in January by the Progressive Policy Institute looked at the housing market in 16 battleground states (adding Arizona, Indiana, Minnesota and Missouri to Gallup’s list). It found that since October 2008, battleground states have experienced an average drop in home prices of 16 percent. In three states — Florida, Arizona and Nevada — the drop was more than 30 percent. Nationally, the drop has been 11 percent.

Ezra goes on to point out that trends rather than absolute economic conditions tend to matter most politically, so voters in states making up ground later this year might be in a better mood than the raw numbers would indicate. But it’s certainly important to remember that the idea of a “national economy” is a bit artificial, and you’re not going to get excited about a good national jobs report if you’re unemployed in Florida with a mortgage as underwater as the Everglades.

The American Conservative Union’s annual CPAC conference kicks off today in Washington, so you can expect three days of incendiary headlines as pols throw big chunks of red meat to a large and ravenous crowd. Even boring old Mitch McConnell, not known as an oratorical wizard, is reportedly planning to tear the President a new one and complain about “liberal thugs.”

Indeed, on a speaker’s agenda that begins with Jim DeMint today and ends with Sarah Palin on Saturday, it won’t be easy to stand out. That’s a problem for Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, who will be angling for a good showing in the presidential straw poll that is traditionally held on the last day (Ron Paul won the last two years, and Mitt Romney, in his “movement conservative” phase, won the two years before that). Strangely enough, Ron Paul won’t be there, citing a scheduling conflict; in recent years, a sizable percentage of the CPAC attendees have been Paulites, many of them students from Washington-area colleges. But Ron’s son Rand is speaking, so maybe the Paulite hordes will turn out for him.

Scanning today’s agenda, my personal favorite events are a couple of movies. There’s Fire From the Heartland: The Awakening of Conservative Women, “Starring the Honorable Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Ann Coulter, and an all-star cast.” But for sheer cinematic excitement, I don’t think that can top another flick later in the day: Nullification: The Rightful Remedy.

Even at a deadly serious conference aimed at taking back America from secular-socialists, there has to be some socializing. Fortunately, for the single set, TheTeaParty.net is hosting a presentation on “Conservative Dating.” Check out this description:

Learn everything from how to avoid scaring away your own personal Dagny Taggart in the first five minutes of the conversation, to whether Tea Partiers and Occupiers can share something more than a dislike for bailouts.

I can just feel the excitement.

Man, what a difficult day! But here are some good reads you might enjoy while your blogger gets his act together:

* Igor Volsky outs Snowe and Collins (along with four retired GOP senators) as having supported a federal contraceptive services mandate.

* Matthew Bowman explores the well-known LDS tradition of private-sector social welfare activism that might make Romney care about the “very poor,” but not via public programs.

* E.J. Graff digs into the backstory of the 9th Circuit Prop 8 decision, and why many marriage equality advocates consider it a sideshow.

* Doubling down on the “war on religion” meme, Ricky Santorum claims Obama wants to force Catholic Church to ordain women as priests. Wish it was that easy, Rick!

* Newt heads to Golden State to raise cash. Guess Adelson’s checkbook has limits.

* QPac poll, usually not very favorable to Obama, shows POTUS leading Mitt in VA despite negative job approval ratings.

And, in case politics isn’t absurd enough for you:

* HuffPost Celebrity commemorates five-year anniversary of the death of Anna Nicole Smith.

Other than monitoring polls and jibber-jabber, I’m not expecting much overnight. But don’t expect issues with Thursday blogging!

Selah.

It appears a likely collision with Occupy DC members will not be the only source of controversy for the activists gathering to beat the drums and vet the candidates at CPAC ‘12, the American Conservative Union’s annual gathering of the wingnut tribes in Washington that kicks off tomorrow. Via the vigilent folk at People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch, we learn that this year’s CPAC will include in the Big Tent an interesting array of people who may be clinically questionable:

Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, along with several Republican senators and congressmen, are set to appear at the American Conservative Union’s Conservative Political Action Conference, but the GOP brass aren’t the only ones set to be at CPAC. As we’ve previously reported, CPAC will play host to anti-gay groups such as the Family Research Council, the birther leader of WorldNetDaily, and the Apartheid-nostalgic Youth for Western Civilization.

But that isn’t all.

Following speeches from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Rep. Michele Bachmann, CPAC is hosting the panel “The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the pursuit of diversity is weakening the American Identity” with Peter Brimelow, the founder and head of VDARE.com.

Oh my. RWW calls Brimelow’s group “white nationalist,” but even if you lean over backwards to doubt that term, it’s reasonably clear VDARE has a pretty unwholesome preoccupation with the declining honkitude of American demography, culture and politics.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for CPAC sponsors and attendees to get defensive about VDARE. Best I can recall, the biggest recent controversies about the inclusiveness of CPAC involve heartburn about gays and Muslims being in the house. Maybe that will change, but on the other hand, this is a time when movement conservatives continue to fret that their presidential field is feeling insufficient pressure from the starboard flank. Besides, when pressed, CPAC attendees can always change the subject to their horrible persecution by the dirty hippies of Occupy.

UPDATE: Should have probably explained that the title of this post is a play on the old Popular Front slogan: “Pas d’ennemi a gauche!” (No enemies to the left!). Sorry for getting pointy-headed on you, particularly in French. Don’t worry, I’m hardly fluent.

A lot of the discussion of “enthusiasm” in the lead-up to elections has always struck me as suspect. Certainly a lot of the endless talk of a pro-Republican “enthusiasm gap” in 2010—attributed variously to the Tea Party movement, or to Obama’s “socialism,” or to Obama’s base-deflating “centrism”—conflated “enthusiasm” with the eternal tendency of older white voters to cast ballots in midterm elections in significantly higher percentages than younger and non-white voters.

Since we are now in a presidential cycle with an eternally different set of demographic turnout tendencies, it’s not surprising that, all other things being equal, the pro-GOP “enthusiasm gap” seems to be declining. But turnout patterns aside, even direct measurements of “enthusiasm”—based not just on likelihood to vote, but on, you know, actual enthusiasm—seem to be changing as well. That’s implicitly apparent in the relatively low turnout (outside of South Carolina) being generated by this year’s flawed GOP presidential field. But it’s more explicitly apparent in a new PPP survey of actual excitement about voting:

Our last national survey for Daily Kos found that 58% of Democrats were ‘very excited’ about voting this fall, compared to 54% of Republicans. Six months ago the figures were 48% of Democrats ‘very excited’ and Republicans at the same 54%. Generally you would expect voters to get more excited as the election gets nearer. That trend is occurring on the Democratic side, but not for the GOP.

Going deeper inside the numbers:

-25% of conservatives are not at all excited to vote this fall, compared to only 16% of liberals.

-The percentage of Tea Party voters ‘very excited’ about voting in November has declined from 73% to 62% since late July.

And here’s something from this survey that we haven’t heard lately:

-The single group of voters most enthused about turning out this year are African Americans, 72% of whom say they’re ‘very excited’ to cast their ballots.

The CW has long been that the huge 2008 African-American vote for Obama was a unique phenomenon based on the historic nature of his candidacy, and given the poor objective conditions of life for African-Americans right now, this vote was very likely to decline. Maybe not.

Now direct measurements of “enthusiasm” can obviously change, and are obviously limited in their significance, since even the most “enthusiastic” voters only get one ballot. I also think Democrats would be foolish to think that current “base” disgruntlement with the GOP presidential field can be translated into low turnout assumptions. But it is increasingly clear that a right-bent GOP can no longer pretend it will be able to ignore swing voters and cruise to victory on the power of wildly energized Tea Party folk snake-dancing to the polls to evict the hated Obama.