The high, in terms of reason and clarity, came from famed attorney David Boies on MSNBC's "The Last Word." Lawrence O'Donnell has let male "liberal" pundits like Mark Shields wax a little shrill on his show, but to his credit, he offered the best rebuttal to all the shrieking I've seen so far: Boies calmly and clearly explaining the new regulations as an issue of labor law, and the government's regulation  of employers (relatively minimal, compared to other countries) on issues of health, safety and non-discrimination.

I've tried to make the same points: What if Catholics didn't believe in child labor laws? Would we let church-run agencies flout them? Boies used the example of a religion that believed people shouldn't work after age 60: Could they legally ban older people from employment? Of course, they could do neither. This is indeed an issue of religious freedom: the freedom of non-Catholics not to be bound by the dictates of the Catholic Church in the workplace.

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Predictably, the GOP presidential candidates are whacking Obama on the issue; fittingly, Rick Santorum is surging again, as this latest battle in the culture war rages. As always, the biggest hypocrite is  Mitt Romney, who is attacking the president's decision even though he went along with the same regulations in Massachusetts. And when the state enacted the universal health insurance law he used to be proud of, it covered the same "family planning services" as the new HHS regulations.

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But after those trials, we all rallied around what was right, and acted as one. Because that’s what we do. We find a way through tough times, and if we can’t find a way, then we’ll make one...

This country can’t be knocked out with one punch. We get right back up again and when we do the world is going to hear the roar of our engines. Yeah, it’s halftime America. And, our second half is about to begin.

Karl Rove heard echoes of Obama's rhetoric too, and implicit optimism about the direction of the country, and cried foul.

"I was, frankly, offended by it,” Rove said on Fox News Monday. “I'm a huge fan of Clint Eastwood, I thought it was an extremely well-done ad, but it is a sign of what happens when you have Chicago-style politics, and the president of the United States and his political minions are, in essence, using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising."

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Practically since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, reproductive rights activists have been left to play stilted defense against ideological opponents who grabbed the language of morality, life, love and family as their own, always deploying it with reference to the fetus. The rhetoric around reproductive rights, which has more recently begun to creep into arguments over contraception, has become suffocating in its emotional self-righteousness, but too muscular, too ubiquitous to effectively combat.

But the overreach by the Komen foundation, while surely intended to strike yet another blow on the side of antiabortion activism, succeeded instead in waking a powerful constituency -- armed with precisely the language and emotional heft they’ve been lacking for too long.

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No one expected women's lives to be an unbroken series of pregnancies and births anymore. It was better for women that way – but also for children. (Not to mention for husbands, who no longer had to confine sex to the times of the month when women weren't ovulating if they wanted sexual pleasure without a special bonus nine months later.) The church was a wonderful institution, my parents said, but it was very old, and it sometimes took a while to catch up with the times. Kind of like the way Grandma still said "icebox" for "refrigerator."

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Well, not only will Romney not repair the safety net, he is likely to shred it further. Romney supports Paul Ryan's budget plan, which would cut funding for virtually all the federal programs that help the poor. In fact, Romney's own budget proposals would make even deeper cuts, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: "Governor Romney's budget proposals would require far deeper cuts in nondefense programs than the House-passed budget resolution authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan: $94 billion to $219 billion deeper in 2016 and $303 billion to $819 billion deeper in 2021."

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The Republican Party is split between its two personalities: Predatory finance capital and angry white male faux-populism. That's trouble enough. Add to that Gingrich's fury at Romney's bottomless pockets full of nasty ads, and this is a party headed for a crack-up.

November's still a long way away, but it's hard to imagine President Obama losing Florida after the slime-fest we've just witnessed. Both Gingrich and Romney are seeing their negatives go up as the campaign goes on, while Obama's approval rating continues to climb. I think the president is largely responsible for his ratings rise, because he's brought the fight to the GOP since the debt-ceiling debacle.

But one thing Romney clearly had going for him when the race began, in the face of Tea Party suspicion about his conservative credentials, was that voters viewed him benignly. Between revelations about his tax rate plus his Bain Capital work, and Gingrich's relentless attacks, Romney's losing the main thing he had going for him, his generic affability. In November, polls showed Romney beating Obama by 13 points in Florida; recent polls give Obama the edge, 44 to 36 percent. If the hate-off continues, it will hurt him in November, and not just in Florida.

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Maddow asked Tyler about some of Gingrich's racially coded attacks on President Obama, and Tyler went off. He began by comparing the Republican and Democratic platforms of 1856 and finding the Democratic platform was racist, and that was about the last true thing he said. From claiming Democrats "abort [black] babies" to charging that African-Americans need the movie "Red Tails" because they don't have any positive role models, it was the GOP id unleashed. Watch at your peril.

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That's why David Axelrod hit a nerve -- or a funny bone -- when he sent the photo that graces this story to his Twitter followers Monday, with the quip: "How loving owners transport their dogs." Total cheap shot, playing on the most nagging though politically debatable hit on Romney: That he strapped his Irish setter Seamus to the roof of the family station wagon, in a regulation dog travel crate, for a long ride, and when the dog didn't do well, merely hosed off the car as well as Seamus, then put him back in his crate on top of the car and got back on the road. The increasingly timid and fussy Politifact has dinged Gail Collins for her frequent references to the story, but it dogs Romney (sorry) because of the animatronic ambition it symbolizes.

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I argued a few weeks ago that Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum might be able to believe they're not singling out black people, or "blah" people, when they rail against food stamps and government "dependency" on the campaign trail. Yes, Republicans have long used not just dog whistles but foghorns to tell white working- and middle-class voters that welfare programs only support lazy, undeserving African-Americans. Ronald Reagan gave us those iconic Cadillac-driving "welfare queens" and "young bucks" using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks. Gingrich is certainly playing on that long history with his remarks. (It's funny how our first "food stamp president" also happens to be black.)

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I had a chance to be on MSNBC's "Hardball" with the PAC's director, Rick Tyler, who blithely asserted he doesn't need to coordinate with Gingrich because they worked together for so long, he can essentially channel him. "Things work out pretty well," Tyler told me and Chris Matthews. "I've been with Newt a long time and I can dance with this campaign without coordinating." I thought it was a wonderful admission that puts the lie to the notion that super PACs are utterly independent of the candidates they support. You can watch below.

Tyler also made hard-to-follow allegations that Romney may have done something illegal in his tax returns, which would of course matter if true. I took a moment to note that Gingrich would cut Romney's scandalously low tax rate to zero, because he wants to eliminate the capital gains tax entirely. If anything, Gingrich's tax plan favors the wealthy even more than Romney's.

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He didn't, of course. After his moment of kindness, Gingrich pivoted back to viciousness, attacking Obama and Democrats as not really American. "The fact is," he told his cheering audience, "we want to run not a Republican campaign, we want to run an American campaign." He pledged allegiance to "American exceptionalism … the American Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, the American Federalist Papers." Get the point yet? Newt's an American, and the other guy isn't.

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But he failed. Presidents don't pout. A sulky Gingrich complained the GOP campaign had become "unnecessarily personal and nasty, and that's sad." Gingrich objecting to "personal and nasty" is as believable as Romney pretending he does his own laundry. That's really sad. But Romney had the better night, hitting Gingrich early and often for having to resign the House speakership "in disgrace" due to ethics charges. And when Gingrich tried to claim he left his leadership post voluntarily, Ron Paul double-teamed him with Romney. "He didn't have the votes, that was what the problem was," Gingrich's former House colleague told the crowd.

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But Thursday we saw a different Mitt Romney, a man apparently rattled by Newt Gingrich's rise in the South Carolina polls. Romney's troubles have partly to do with Gingrich's nonpareil race-baiting, but they're also about an unfolding story line that depicts the man from Bain Capital, destroyer of jobs, dodger of taxes, as the perfect frontman for the top 1 percent in a time of rising (and long overdue) national concern with economic inequality. So when a man on a rope line outside Romney headquarters in Charleston asked him today, "What will you do to support the 99 percent even though you are part of the 1 percent?" Mitt snapped. He sounded a little more Chris Christie than Richie Rich, which is what so many of his GOP friends have been urging, but I'm not sure it's going to play well. Here's what he said, his face getting redder as he closed:

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I know I'm supposed to get excited at this latest twist in the road to nominating Romney in Tampa, Fla., this summer. But why are we surprised that Gingrich is gaining ground? The real surprise has been that the man who finished fourth in South Carolina in 2008, with only 15 percent of the vote, has been leading in the polls since he narrowly won Iowa. Romney's still on pace to win South Carolina Saturday, which would be his third win in a row, almost guaranteeing him the nomination.

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As I said last week, one likely reason Romney balks at releasing his tax returns is that he pays a much lower rate than most of the rest of us, because most of his income comes from investments, which are taxed the capital gains rate of 15 percent. And indeed, today Romney acknowledged that his rate is probably around 15 percent because most of his income is investment income, meaning that his money makes money for him, rather than his labor.

It looks like Romney's trying a strategy of softening up the public by previewing some of the disturbing details of his tax returns before releasing the documents themselves. It's also worth noting that April is not merely tax month, but a point at which the GOP primaries are likely going to be already decided, meaning primary voters aren't going to be able to do anything about it if they don't like what the returns reveal.

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Williams asked for it, of course. What was he thinking making tough racial queries at a GOP debate in Myrtle Beach, S.C.? First, he asked Romney how he squared his harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric with his own family's story of moving to and then from Mexico seeking religious freedom. He asked Rick Santorum, who purports to care about poverty, what he would do about high African American poverty rates. He asked Ron Paul whether he thought the nation's harsh drug laws were bad for black people. Then he made the mistake of asking Newt Gingrich about his comments that poor urban children came from communities that lacked a "work ethic," and his calling Barack Obama "the food stamp president."

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Family Research Council Tony Perkins has been touting the Saturday endorsement as representing "a clear majority of support for a single conservative candidate" -- sometimes he calls it a "supermajority" -- and that candidate, he says, is Santorum. But supporters of Gingrich, who came in second, say Santorum backers rigged the vote. The group decided they would not endorse unless a candidate won at least 75 percent of the votes present, and although he came in first, Santorum came in far below that threshold in two tries. After that, some Gingrich supporters told Karen Tumulty, people began leaving to catch planes, believing that the group had failed to reach a consensus behind a candidate. Then Santorum backers scheduled a third vote with the smaller crowd, and he beat Gingrich 80 to 25.

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We don't live in that unspoiled world, however, so the book has become a flashpoint, with right-wingers seizing on tiny unflattering tidbits and Michelle Obama herself telling tell Gayle King that it fosters "an image that people have tried to paint of me since the day that Barack announced, that I'm an angry black woman." I'm on record (on "Hardball" Wednesday) saying I wish the First Lady hadn't felt the need to defend herself; she's one of the most admired women in America, just behind Hillary Clinton and Oprah Winfrey, a multiracial feminist troika that itself shows how far we've come. Especially when it comes to her right-wing critics, she shouldn't fight down.

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