At Business Week yesterday, Joshua Green made this unconventional but salient point, supported by a rather fascinating chart:

Yesterday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average briefly peaked above 13,000 before dipping at the close. Like all Dow milestones, this one touched off the usual celebration. It may be no coincidence that the market is rising under a Democratic president. In a Bloomberg Government article out this morning, Bob Drummond examines the historical record and finds that the stock market (the S&P 500, in this case) performs much, much better under Democrats than Republicans.

So for job-killing, class-warfare-obsessed socialists, Democrats aren’t too hard on capitalists.

As part of a larger effort to claim that their candidate is being persecuted for his religion, Rick Santorum’s staff is pointing towards Mitt Romney’s religion via the Washington Examiner’s Byron York:

Santorum’s aides believe it is unfair that reporters are asking questions about aspects of Santorum’s faith and not asking similar questions about Mitt Romney’s. Of course, Santorum has spoken more publicly about the details of his religious beliefs than Romney has, and that is why some of the questions are popping up now. On the other hand, some in the Santorum camp are pointing to a 2007 interview Romney did with Iowa radio talk show host Jan Mickelson in which Mickelson essentially goaded Romney into discussing, off-air but on-camera, a few details of Mormon beliefs. (“The Church says that Christ appears and splits the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem,” Romney told Mickelson. “That’s what the Church says. And then, over a thousand years of the millennium, that the world is reigned in two places, Jerusalem and Missouri… . The law will come from Missouri, and the other will be from Jerusalem.”)

But specifically religious questioning of Romney is as rare as specific Romney statements about Mormon beliefs. Given the current grilling of Santorum, that is a source of growing frustration to Santorum’s advisers. “Why is Mormonism off limits?” asks one. “I’m not saying it’s a seminal issue in the campaign, but we’re having to spend days answering questions about Rick’s faith, which he has been open about. Romney will turn on a dime when you talk about religion. We’re getting asked about specific tenets of Rick’s faith, and when Romney says, ‘I want to focus on the economy,’ they say, OK, we’ll focus on the economy.”

The answer, of course, is that Mitt Romney is not on record suggesting that his campaign is part of God’s Own Resistance to the takeover of America by Satan, or that 45 million mainline Protestants have gone over to Satan’s side in that battle, or that the President of the United States is trying to abolish Christianity in the pursuit of a secularist “phony theology.”

If Rick Santorum believes what he says and says what he believes, he should stand up and be counted instead of whining about alleged persecution or pointing fingers at other candidates. If he wants to go after the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints as representing still another “phony theology,” he’s welcome to do that as well, at his peril. But he shouldn’t expect the news media to do it for him.

In a long, circuitous, and characteristically haughty column for the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto makes the interesting claim that Rick Santorum is “ahead of his time” in warning that feminism and contraception are destroying the traditional family, and thus America itself.

I do not have the time or patience to unpack Taranto’s rant—full of psychobabble, pseudo-social-science, and sheer venom—in detail, and only mention it because he makes one assertion, in the context of an extended ad hominem attack on Paul Krugman and Jonathan Alter, which is so mind-bogglingly patriarchal that it represents something of a gold standard of the entire genre:

[W]hile feminism and the sexual revolution have been great for high-status men like Krugman and Alter (full disclosure: and this columnist), and for those women who place a high value on professional careers, things have not worked out so well for those who are less privileged.

That is a truth so undeniable that it can even slip past the editorial filters at the New York Times. Over the weekend the paper published a news story with the shocking statistic that “more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.” The article cites “the pill” as one of “the forces rearranging the family.” When Rick Santorum makes the same common-sense observation, the cultural left (which includes some on the center-right, as we noted Thursday) falsely denounces him as a religious nut looking to snatch your prophylactics.

So “the pill” is responsible for an explosion of out-of-wedlock pregnancies—that’s the “undeniable truth” that is supposed to make “the cultural left” cringe in shame!

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In discussing Mitt Romney’s decision to offer some new tax cut proposals yesterday, I wondered whether Mitt would have the guts or deficit-hawk mojo to offer offsets by way of specific proposals to end tax expenditures, or would instead rely on supply-side pixie dust to make it all magically work out in the end.

It appears Romney is not explicitly opting for pixie dust, but nor is he going to get pinned down on any specific offsets. He is calling for “revenue neutrality” and insisting he won’t shift the tax burden down the income ladder—but he won’t tell us exactly what he’d do to to redeem either of those pledges.

Here’s how John Harwood describes Romney’s political calculation:

Mr. Romney’s plan aims to balance two competing priorities of different Republican factions. By proposing to cut the top rate, he is seeking support among supply-side conservatives who contend that lower marginal rates are the key ingredient for producing economic growth.

But by vowing to offset the loss of revenue by eliminating some deductions, he is addressing concerns among deficit hawks about expanding the tide of red ink that has the federal government spending an estimated $1.3 trillion more than it takes in this year.

And by insisting that those unspecified reductions will fall most heavily on the affluent, he is seeking to limit a line of attack that portrays him as a wealthy former financial industry executive who himself has paid taxes at only around the 15 percent rate because most of his income comes from capital gains. Mr. Romney would maintain the current 15 percent rate on dividends and capital gains.

Yeah, that all makes sense, particularly from the point of view of a candidate who seems to view public policy as a series of political obstacles to negotiate rather than as a reflection of any particular convictions. But by failing to identify specific offsets, other than hinting that maybe the mortgage interest or charitable deductions might be limited for the very wealthy, Romney is in effect offering the dessert of tax cuts up front, with the less palatable solid nutrition that makes the plan work to be identified manana.

Is this approach ultimately any more honest than supply-side pixie dust? Hard to say, but it’s worth noting that Mitt Romney is not exactly a guy whose promises on any subject can be taken to the bank.

At Pew’s very useful Stateline site, Will Wilson has an article that sent me hunting for my blood pressure meds:

Of the nine film productions up for best picture at Sunday’s Academy Awards, five received financial incentives from state governments. But if you want to find out exactly how much help the films got, only some of the states will come forward with the answer.

This happens to be a real pet peeve of mine. Of all the nefarious corporate subsidies that state governments shower on the un-needy in order to screw each other in a mindless race-to-the-bottom competition, few are as unworthy yet lavish as those offered to the film industry. It’s become a true craze in recent years, as popular with Democratic as with Republican pols, probably because it seems to fall into that public policy netherworld between “economic development” and “tourism promotion,” and also lets elected officials rub elbows with Hollywood celebrities while voters get to jostle for unpaid “extra” work.

As Robert Tannenwald of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities explained in a 2010 report, state film subsidies tend to produce little in the way of tangible benefits despite unusually large costs (an estimated $1.5 billion in 2010). The subsidies don’t just involve garden-variety tax abatements or technical assistance, either:

States incorporate one of two rare features into their film tax credits — refundability or transferability— that makes them especially generous and therefore costly to sponsoring states. If a producer lacks sufficient tax liability to use all of a refundable film tax credit, the state pays the producer the whole credit anyway, in effect giving the producer an outright cash grant….

Transferable tax credits are also lucrative deals for film producers and in the long run just as costly to the state. Producers can sell such credits to other companies that owe taxes to the state, regardless of their line of business. The sale is usually undertaken with the assistance of the state itself and/or a financial intermediary that packages purchased film tax credits from multiple states to make them more attractive to potential purchasers.

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Here’s today’s mid-day snacks:

* Gov. Bob McDonnell now hedging on immediate signature of VA ultrasound bill. His old buddies at Regents University must be livid.

* Another poll, this one from Marist, shows Romney and Santorum very close in Michigan. But Mitt has big lead among those who have already voted via absentee ballot.

* Sudden Obama announcement that he favors lower corporate tax rates in exchange for loophole closing presumably an effort to preempt big Romney tax plan rollout.

* Obama campaign also announces 35—that’s right, 35—co-chairs. If you can’t find some point of identity with one or more of these folks, then you are not a targeted voter.

* Byron York reports 70% of Americans believe in the existence of Satan, which is what Santorum’s friends and some ignorant pundits would have us believe all the controversy is about.

And on the nonpolitical front:

* If you aren’t into Ash Wednesday, it’s also National Margarita Day!

I’ll be back shortly, with a grey smear on my forehead.

It’s not likely that anything fundamental will change, but it’s worth noting that the U.S. Supreme Court has just been given a chance to reconsider the empirical (or perhaps it’s better to say “nonempirical”) basis for its fateful decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The occasion is a stay granted by the Court in enforcement of a Montana Supreme Court decision involving a state anticorruption statute that is a direct challenge to Citizens United. Here’s what Justice Ginsburg had to say in supporting the stay:

Montana’s experience, and experience elsewhere since this Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Comm’n, 558 U. S. ___ (2010), make it exceedingly difficult to maintain that independent expenditures by corporations “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” Id., at ___ (slip op., at 42). A petition for certiorari will give the Court an opportunity to consider whether, in light of the huge sums currently deployed to buy candidates’ allegiance, Citizens United should continue to hold sway. Because lower courts are bound to follow this Court’s decisions until they are withdrawn or modified, however, Rodriguez de Quijas v. Shearson/American Express, Inc., 490 U. S. 477, 484 (1989), I vote to grant the stay.

Ginsburg is alluding to Justice Kennedy’s flat statement in the majority opinion in Citizens United that unlimited corporate or union contributions would not have a corrupting effect.

As the Editors of the New York Times commented today:

The Montana state court ruling rests on a careful review of the political corruption that led the state to pass its Corrupt Practices Act. The Citizens United ruling, by contrast, is based on no evidentiary record at all. The Supreme Court, on its own initiative, took up the broad question of corporate and union spending when the controversy in the case was much narrower. The court’s conservative majority essentially used the Citizens United case to overturn a century of established federal law by imposing its own legal theory, without relying on facts.

If facts actually matter to Justice Kennedy, there’s a clear basis for a second look at what the 5-4 Court majority has done to our system of financing campaigns.

It’s not often you can point to an article as “definitive,” but I suspect that is how William Saletan’s long, vastly-documented piece for Slate on Mitt Romney and abortion policy will be treated by just about everybody outside Romney’s own campaign.

Saletan’s key argument is that Romney’s history on abortion and such closely-related issues as stem cell research and contraception does not really involve a simple flip-flop or an “evolution” or (Mitt’s own preferred term) a “conversion,” but rather a perpetual effort at refining his identity to suit political convenience. What’s really jarring is how long Romney’s incoherence on all these issues persisted, and how much effort he put into evading a firm position:

In an interview published in USA Today on May 23, 2005, he again called himself “personally pro-life” but refused to clarify those words. “I don’t want to be confusing to people in my state,” he pleaded. At a press conference on May 27, Romney continued to duck questions. “My personal philosophical views about this issue,” he said, would only “distract from what I think is a more critical agenda” on jobs and education….

Romney’s media adviser, Mike Murphy, had a blunt explanation for the governor’s reticence. “He’s been a pro-life Mormon faking it as a pro-choice friendly,” Murphy told National Review in an interview published June 2. Murphy issued a pseudo-retraction, and the next day, Romney said his position hadn’t changed. When reporters asked Romney to lay out his views on abortion and Roe, the governor refused, saying, “I don’t want to get into a philosophical discussion of a federal law and a case that’s been in the books for 30 years and that is distracting from my agenda.”

Seven months after Romney’s purported epiphany, that’s how he saw abortion: as a distraction.

It was really only during the 2008 campaign, when Romney was seeking a critical endorsement from Jim DeMint, that he settled on his current anti-choice position, after many, many years of prevarication and self-contradiction.

Now politicians trim their sails to catch the prevailing winds all the time, and if that’s all Romney had done—tacked pro-choice when running for office in Massachusetts, and then tacked anti-choice when running or president—it wouldn’t be that shocking. But what comes across in Saletan’s account is a constant pattern of incremental self-reinvention—and perhaps even of self-deception—whereby Romney changed not just his position, but his story. It’s all more than a little creepy, and anyone who wants to understand this man and how he might govern should take the time to check it out.

Ah, you just gotta love the MSM and its blinders!

Thanks to a handful of obscure researchers and bloggers (I first noticed the story at People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch, but others may have gotten there first), and to the subsequent efforts of a handful of us interested in such exotic topics (including Rick Santorum himself, who can’t seem to criticize the president without bringing up “theology”), it’s come to the attention of the MSM that the current front-runner in the GOP presidential nominating contest, at least as measured by national polls, delivered remarks in 2008 that seem a mite peculiar.

But the “story” as it is being retailed currently seems to be that Rick Santorum believes in the existence of Satan. So, too, I strongly suspect, do a significant majority of Americans.

Largely missing in the discussion of Santorum’s subscription to a supernatural cosmology is the fact that he views American history as essentially a struggle between “true Christians” like himself on the one hand, and Beelzebub on the other, in which the latter has already conquered academia and mainline Protestantism, and is by inference exercising his infernal control via the policies of that noted former academic and mainline Protestant, the President of the United States. Much of what Santorum has to say about current events is heavily colored by this “worldview,” most notably the belief that the president and his devilish supporters are laboring to wipe out “true” Christianity by forcing its staunch defenders, from the U.S. Conference of Bishops to innocent job-creators, to become complicit in such idolatrous practices as the slaughter of zygotes and the worship of the false idols of reproductive rights and the Environmental Earth-Goddess.

By ignoring all this and simply mocking Santorum as someone too unsophisticated to understand the supernatural as a fairy tale for rubes, his MSM tormenters are not only letting him off the hook for his sinister interpretation of politics as holy war, but are doing him the signal service of reinforcing his manichean vision of America torn between humble believers and derisive, self-satisfied elites.

Perhaps Santorum’s political standing is fragile enough that making him a figure of fun will be enough, in combination with the Romney Death Star’s descriptions of him as a big spender and felon-coddler, to derail his presidential campaign. But it would be far better if those pundits chortling over Santorum’s “Satan Warning” today took the trouble to understand it.

The package of “extenders” that was just enacted by Congress and that will soon be happily forgotten by most observers actually represented a bit more than the act of legislative throat-clearing it seemed to be. Yes, the extension of the payroll tax cut, of Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits, and the Medicare provider reimbursement rate “doc fix” were thrown together as must-pass items that neither party in Congress wanted the blame for obstructing. There was not a lot of public talk about substance, beyond conservative grumbling about the “dependency” involved in UI and the need for bigger changes in Medicare.

But as Annie Lowery of the New York Times usefully explains, the UI provisions of the package actually include some interesting reforms in a very old system:

The bill, which passed Congress on Friday and President Obama has said he will sign, allows states to use unemployment insurance money for programs that help move the jobless back into the work force. Such programs, like Georgia Works, often offer employers wage subsidies for taking on and retraining jobless workers.

The bill also requires states to reassess the eligibility of workers for their unemployment insurance — confirming, for instance, that a person receiving long-term benefits is actively searching for a job. That reassessment provides an opportunity to tailor career counseling and other re-employment services to the long-term jobless.

The bill additionally expands “work sharing” programs that can help reduce layoffs at big businesses. In effect, businesses would have the option of cutting the hours of five workers by 20 percent each, say, rather than laying off one worker. The business could then use unemployment insurance money to help supplement the workers’ wages to make up for the lost hours.

Though it seems a bit like a return to the policy debates of the late 1990s, when the economy was strong enough to make it useful to dwell on adjustments of skill levels to a fast-changing opportunities rather than simply maintaining a minimal safety net, the UI reforms in the extender package sound sensible. UI has not in any significant way operated as a “reemployment services” program, and it should. And wrinkles like “work sharing,” which is common in other countries, could have prevented unemployment from reaching and remaining at its current levels.

It’s obvious why none of us expect significant legislative activity, much less policy innovations, much less policy innovations supported by people in both parties, in the current climate in Washington. But the UI changes represent a small ripple of hope in a sea indifference, cynicism and obstruction. Pretty much anything beyond that will require big changes in the political configuration of forces.

Public Policy Polling, as is its habit, has a cool, unconventional poll up on its site right now, measuring the favorable/unfavorable ratios of the 50 American states.

Overall, it shows (in order) Hawaii, Colorado, Tennessee, South Dakota, and Virginia on top, and (in reverse order) California, Illinois, New Jersey, Mississippi and Utah at the bottom. The last five states are the only ones with net negative ratios (though Louisiana is close with a tie).

I have to say, some of these findings are surprising. Certainly Hawaii and Colorado are popular tourism destinations, but so, too, are California (dead last) and Utah, and sixth-from-the-bottom Louisiana. I have no clue why South Dakota ranks so high, unless Mount Rushmore is way cooler than I’ve imagined and Americans really like extreme weather.

You have to wonder, of course, what respondents think of when they are asked their opinion of a particular state. Is it a specific city they might have visited? A historic event that happened there? A cultural stereotype? A political association? Is South Carolina (ranked 31st) “about” Charleston, Spartanburg, or Ft. Sumter? When people think of “California,” is it “about” Bakersfield or Berkeley (two places about as different as Seattle and Sylacauga)? (For that matter, Monterey and Salinas, separated by just 17 miles across the Lettuce Curtain, are vastly different in demography, culture, politics, economics, and often even weather). Is California Ronald Reagan or Jerry Brown? Hollywood or Redwoods? Summer of Love or Winter of Perpetual Political Discontent?

You can wander around PPP’s crosstabs from this survey for many hours, but the factor that does jump out is political ideology. California’s dismal ranking is basically driven by its heavily negative ratings from people self-identifying as “very conservative” (10/74) and “somewhat conservative” (12/65). Texas, ranking 38th, draws ratings nearly that dismal from self-identified liberals (22/56 among “very liberal” folk, and 17/59 among “somewhat liberal” respondents), but that’s offset by the ecstatic opinion of the Lone Star State among conservatives (62/9 for the “somewhat conservative;” 68/7 for the “very conservative”). Basically, conservatives love TX and hate CA more intensely than liberals feel about either.

Those of you with the early-morning time and energy to do so are invited to look at the survey, and tell the rest of us your impressions—or for that matter, your own prejudices about the states—in the comment thread

Really didn’t intend for this whole day to be about the GOP presidential candidates, but sometimes that’s how the news cycle, well, cycles. Some other odds and ends:

* PPP poll tests exact text of the Blunt Amendment GOPers are backing to overturn administration’s contraception coverage mandate. It gets a thumbs-down by a 25/67 margin.

* Kevin Drum explains why wages stagnate while profits continue to go up.

* Dennis Ross, hardly a Middle Eastern dove, tells Israelis to chill since economic sanctions aganst Iran are working.

* Sunday was 70th anniversary of executive order authorizing internment of Japanese-Americans. Bill Ong Hing urges Americans not to make same mistake with terrorism “suspects.”

* Politico’s Vogel and Phillip offer everything you’d ever want to know and more about campaign “burn rates.”

* Mike Tomasky says what GOP needs is not new candidates, but a new “base.”

Have a happy and safe Mardi Gras, everyone. I plan to wish I were in New Orleans (something I do often), but then get a good night’s sleep before Ash Wednesday.

Selah.

In an earlier post today, I quoted Steve Waldman’s report from Beliefnet on Rick Santorum’s 2008 remarks about Barack Obama and those un-Christian “liberal Christians.” But in the comment thread, “nitpicker” came up with a link to an actual transcript of Santorum’s answers to questions posed by sponsors of the conference (the Oxford Centre for Religion & Public Life) that Santorum and Steve were attending. Here’s the Q&A related to Obama:

QUESTION: What would your opinion be of this stance: Obama has been very honest in the past about his faith. He said he was attracted to the church because of its non-literal approach to the Bible. Now that’s coming through Wright. His speech before the United Church of Christ, he very much embraced the basic theological approach of the United Church of Christ. So you could say that he is a very sincere, liberal Christian, with a non-literal approach to Scripture, who would argue that, voicing Niebuhr, that the primary application of the Gospel is in issues of economic, social justice. And that he accepts his church’s teaching on sexuality, in the same way that you accept your church’s teachings on sexuality. So in that case he is a sincere liberal Christian. Would you buy that?

ANSWER: I could buy that. Again, yes, it goes to the larger question of whether I could buy that overall from that point of view. But is there such thing as a sincere liberal Christian, which says that we basically take this document and re-write it ourselves? Is that really Christian? That’s a bigger question for me. And the answer is, no, it’s not. I don’t think there is such a thing. To take what is plainly written and say that I don’t agree with that, therefore, I don’t have to pay attention to it, means you’re not what you say you are. You’re a liberal something, but you’re not a Christian. That’s sort of how I look at it.

When you go so far afield of that and take what is a salvation story and turn it into a liberation theology story, which is done in the Catholic world as well as in the evangelical world, you have abandoned Christendom, in my opinion. And you don’t have a right to claim it.

But as they say on the late-night commercials: Wait, there’s more!

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It’s been an implicit part of the rules of engagement in the GOP presidential race that no candidate can be criticized for being too conservative, particularly by Mitt Romney. Thus Rick Perry drew fire not for flirting with secession and nullification theories, or for complaining about “lucky ducky” poor folks who didn’t pay taxes—but for expressing sympathy for the children of undocumented workers. Similarly, Newt Gingrich never got attacked for his anti-Muslim demagoguery or his regular descriptions of the president as a “secular-socialist”—but for once professing belief in the climate change “hoax” and criticizing Ronald Reagan.

The game has continued up until now with Rick Santorum, whose wacky views on cultural issues have never drawn a breath of complaint from Romney or other Republicans. No, instead they want to talk about Rick’s fiscal “liberalism.”

That’s why it’s very interesting today that two of Mitt’s highest-profile enablers, Matt Drudge and Jennifer Rubin, seem to have broken the seal on a whole new line of attack—on Santorum’s faith-based zaniness.

As I write this, the top of the Drudge Report has one of those screaming headline “stories” about Santorum’s “Satan Warning”—along with excerpts from the 2008 Ave Maria speech that us liberals have been discussing for the last several days. Drudge very specifically includes a quote from Santorum’s disparagement of mainline Protestants as having left “the world of Christianity.”

Meanwhile, WaPo blogger Rubin has a long, inflammatory post calling Santorum a “reactionary”—not a term you hear often in the Right Blogosphere these days—for talking about theology and contraception and in general “seeking to obliterate the national consensus on a range of issues beyond gay marriage and abortion.”

Now perhaps these are unrelated developments, and Drudge and Rubin are not acting as surrogates for Romney in this case. But I really doubt either of them would launch this particular type of attack on Santorum if they thought Team Mitt would disapprove. Could be that Romney is rattled enough by the Santorum Surge, and concerned enough about what might happen in MI and AZ next Tuesday, that he’s approved a Second Front designed to undermine support for Rick in those segments of the Republican electorate where loose talk about Satan and “un-Christian” mainline Protestants and contraception really isn’t that welcome.