“If you look at attitudes today and where they are headed, it’s clear to me that supporting equal rights, including the rights to civil marriage, is a net positive for winning elections, as well as the right thing to do,” Mehlman said in an interview. “By contrast, opposing equal rights is a net negative that gets problematic to more voters each year.”

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On Thursday morning, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush joined the conversation with a Washington Post Op-Ed in which he suggested four ways the GOP can lure back Latino voters, including a recommendation that the party cast immigration as “an economic issue, not just a border security issue.” That afternoon Michelle Obama raised the stakes in the electoral fight for Latino votes with a “Let’s Move” national fitness agenda stop at Tampa’s Goya food processing plant, where the first lady touted the USDA’s new “Mi Plato” program, lamented the shortage of supermarkets in Latino neighborhoods, and applauded the National Hispanic Medical Association, the National Council of La Raza, and the League of United Latin American Citizens for their community nutrition efforts.

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Obama enjoys the three advantages any incumbent president seeking reelection does: four full years to raise money for his own campaign or the national party committees; the political leverage of the office he holds to raise it; and, like incumbents in most cycles, the absence of a primary challenger who might draw down his coffers. Sure enough, and despite a crowded Republican field, by the midpoint of 2011 Obama had already raised more money ($48.7 million) than all of the GOP presidential hopefuls combined ($36.7 million). His campaign has since raised $42 million in both the third and fourth quarters of 2011, with the Democratic National Committee hauling in an additional $51 million during the final six months of last year.

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A tip for McCain, front-runner Mitt Romney and other Republicans: drop the “the” in front of references to Hispanics. Use of the definite article sounds a bit too much like the cringe-worthy “that one” line McCain dropped on Barack Obama during their October 2008 presidential debate in Nashville, and smacks of the sort of “these/those people” phrases that only turn away the groups described. This week, Romney smartly released his first Spanish-language campaign ad, a positive sign. But language is only a small part of the GOP’s problems with minorities, and Latino voters in particular.

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This is the moment he and his presidency promised to deliver. The fight over the payroll tax cut extension gives Obama a chance — perhaps one, final chance — to elevate the more pinched, listing and frequently uninspired policy agenda he prosecuted from the White House these past three years toward his lofty rhetoric of 2008.

The payroll tax fight provides the president a rare opportunity to pull together so many of the loose threads of his presidency. This is the opportunity for the former law professor to be an educator-in-chief about the growing disparities between those who derived incomes from wealth and those who derive them from work. It is an  opportunity to prove that he can stare down and unmask the rump Republican national minority that pretends its House majority represents the public will. It is a chance to prove that Washington’s rigged game need not always result in the spoils of political victory going automatically, or at least disproportionately, to the economically spoiled. This is, in short, a moment  for the president to demonstrate the resolve that earned his hopeful believers’ support three years ago, and it comes as he begins asking the electorate for another four-year lease on the Oval Office.

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National and state polls suggest Gingrich is now in the driver’s seat for the nomination, and as Talking Points Memo’s Eric Kleefeld argues, the primary calendar in January favors Gingrich. Accordingly, some are already comparing Romney to Hillary Clinton in 2008—the inevitable candidate whose candidacy became, in campaign lingo, "evitable."

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I am one. I live in a 700-square-foot condo in downtown Washington, DC. Divorced and childless, it's plenty of space for me. In fact, I have extra room in my closets, drawers, cabinets and cupboards for more stuff, were I inclined to start compiling and aggregating.

But that's the point: I don't want more stuff. I'm no Zen Buddhist, I don't practice Feng Shui, I have no plans to uproot and join the small house movement, nor do I suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder. I wasn't forced to scale down to a smaller residence because of a mortgage default, nor did I hawk all my possessions in service to a meth habit. It's just that in life, like at the airport, I like to travel light. One carry-on is fine by me, thankyouverymuch.

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Because the nomination isn't worth winning, however, doesn't mean it is ill-advised for Republican hopefuls to run in 2012. In fact, if three historical patterns tell us anything, the smart play for any Republican who hopes someday to sit behind the desk in the Oval Office is to run in 2012 -- but to lose the nomination.

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In the wake of the back-to-back-to-back announced retirements of Sens. Byron Dorgan and Chris Dodd, and Gov. Bill Ritter of Colorado -- all Democrats -- we've asked some of the country's top electoral analysts to talk about what the political environment looks like 10 months out from the 2010 midterms.

Nathan Gonzalez is political editor of the Rothenberg Political Report and a contributing writer for Roll Call. Amy Walter is with us; she's the editor in chief of the Hotline, Washington's premier daily briefing on American politics, and she writes her "On the Trail" column for the National Journal. And Isaac Wood is associate communications director for University of Virginia Center for American Politics, where he specializes in U.S. House race analysis. Thanks all for being here.

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This morning I wondered how long it would take the Democrats to use the Senate Republicans' blockage of troop funding as a way to stall healthcare reform. Not even a full day.

It's not great, but it's simple and does what it's supposed to do. Here's the new ad already running on the cable nets calling Mitch McConnell and pals to the carpet: 

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Describing them as institutions "in need of continuing infusions that make them look increasingly like long-term wards of the state," Williams Walsh essentially reports that the institutions will be needing to borrow future monies to pay off their existing obligations to the government:

Like the big banks, these four companies would no doubt prefer to be free of government assistance, which comes with pay and other restrictions on their executives. But they appear at risk of getting onto a debt merry-go-round, where they have to draw new money from the government just to keep up with their existing government debts.

Fannie Mae recently warned, for example, that it could not pay the dividends it owes the Treasury, so “future dividend payments will be effectively funded with equity drawn from the Treasury.”

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Of the top 10 happiest states, all but two -- Montana and Maine -- are in the Sun Belt. The top 10, in order, are: Louisiana, Hawaii, Florida, Tennessee, Arizona, Mississippi, Montana, South Carolina, Alabama and Maine.

Ah,  but as LiveScience notes, these results contradict another recent study that suggests that wealthier, better educated and more tolerant states are home to the happiest Americans. The top 10 states in that study are:  Utah, Hawaii, Wyoming, Colorado, Minnesota, Maryland, Washington, Massachusetts, California and Arizona.

That makes Hawaii and Arizona the only two states to make the top 10 in both.

Smart, tolerant, wealthy and tanned. Not a bad combination. Aloha!

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Yglesias' words are best left unaltered:

Providing prenatal services to pregnant women is a pro-life gesture by any stretch of the imagination. As is providing health insurance to young children. As we saw the other day, uninsured children are over three times more likely to die from their trauma-related injuries than are commercially insured children, even after adjustment for other factors such as age, gender, race, injury severity and injury type.

But Nelson won’t let those lives be saved unless the bill is modified in an insulting and discriminatory way. And part of the insanity of it is that the actual impact on the number of abortions in America is going to be tiny. Middle-class women will be able to pay for abortions out of pocket, and the “Hyde Amendment” status quo already screws poor women. But it’s a nice symbolic dig at pro-choice America, and a further means of stigmatizing reproductive health services as somehow not real health care. And Nelson, Bart Stupack, and various bishops love the idea of holding the whole package hostage to this point, since I guess the dead kids with trauma injuries will go to heaven anyway or something.

Nice.

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Short summary: Wood and the Crystal Ball rate 21, or fewer than half the 52, as safe incumbents running for re-election. In the other 31 cases there is a mix of members retiring (3), running for other office (1), plus 27 who are running for re-election in districts where the underlying demographics have Republicans licking their chops. "In fact, over a third of Blue Dogs hail from districts Obama won last November," writes Wood. 'While the coalition is often portrayed as a group of Southern congressmen who must vote conservatively or risk losing reelection, nineteen members represent districts Obama carried, with seven representing districts in which Obama won over 60 percent of the vote."

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Senate Republicans said Thursday that they would try to filibuster a massive Pentagon bill that funds the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an unusual move that several acknowledged was an effort to delay President Obama's health-care legislation....

"I don't want health care," Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) said in explaining his support of a filibuster. He is a member of the Appropriations Committee, which crafted the Pentagon funding bill.

Republican Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Richard C. Shelby (Ala.) and Christopher "Kit" Bond (Mo.) admitted they support the spending bill but acknowledged they were considering opposing it because of the health-care debate.

Democrats were furious. They believed they had a deal with Sen. Thad Cochran (Miss.), the top Republican on the Appropriations Committee, to support the bill, but by Thursday night Cochran was saying he was unsure how he would vote.

"They are prepared to jeopardize funding for troops at war," Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) said Thursday evening. "If Democrats did that, there would be cries of treason."

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I want a pony! Good stuff....

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After allegedly killing Darlene Haynes by some combination of blunt head trauma and strangulation, Corey showed up at a homeless shelter in New Hampshire claiming to be the excised baby's mother. Corey had apparently been telling friends she was pregnant, but wasn't. It took a few days before authorities finally found Haynes' body in her apartment.

Haynes already had three other children, the eldest two of whom already were living with her mother. Her then-18-month-old and the abducted baby are in custody of Massachusetts childrens services.

It's just such a sad case all the way around--a woman dead, two kids orphaned, and an alleged killer who most likely suffers from some form of mental illness.

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Our only responsible choice is the path of action. Does this bill read exactly how I would write it? No. Does it contain everything everyone wants? Of course not. But America can't afford to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Full statement over at TPM.

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Nelson told KLIN/Lincoln radio hosts Jack Mitchell and John Bishop that he knows who started the rumors and when it comes to light it will be "embarrassing for the other side of the aisle," presumably meaning a Republican senator or senators is behind it.

The bad news for Majority Leader Harry Reid and President Obama is that Nelson continues to have problems with the abortion provisions in the bill, and although overtures have been made toward him, he continues to hold firm in his resistance until the abortions provisions he disapproves are stripped away.

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