America is going into a really critical presidential election with two big problems. You may have heard about one of them -- the laggard economy -- and the sort-of good news is that the November election should give voters a real choice between a candidate, Mitt Romney, committed to beating back "envy" and defending the interests of the 1 Percent, and a candidate, President Obama, who at least understands how unfairness and inequality is ripping after the fabric of America.

The very bad news is that there'll be no debate on the other key issue that eats away at our national soul: An ever-expanding national security state that concentrates too much power in the White House while destroying the commitment to basic rights that once fueled a bona fide American exceptionalism. Whoever wins the 2012 election is on board with expanding the government's power to kill American citizens or detain them indefinitely or spy on them in the name of an Orwellian permanent "war on terror."

The legal guru Jonathan Turley has done a remarkable job today of spelling it all out:

Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree, Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must include their own — the land of free. Yet, the laws and practices of the land should shake that confidence. In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state. The most recent example of this was the National Defense Authorization Act, signed Dec. 31, which allows for the indefinite detention of citizens. At what point does the reduction of individual rights in our country change how we define ourselves?

While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don’t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of “free,” but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit.

It's so frustrating, but those of us hoping to restore true American exceptionalism have to be in it for the long haul. That means constant pressure on President Romney or President Obama -- probably in the best Occupy style -- to roust the silent majority on civil rights and, more importantly, working to elect a Congress in 2014 and a president in 2016 who will pledge to repeal the more odious aspects of laws like the National Defense Authorization Act and to close Guantanamo. I truly believe America will reverse these odious trends some day. I'm just less confident that day will come in my lifetime.

Attytood's coverage of the Penn State alumni "town hall" in King of Prussia:

There was no unruly throng flowing through the wide parking lots of King of Prussia last night, just a orderly single-file line of well-dressed Penn State alums filing into a carpeted hotel meeting room with a stage decked out in soothing flowers and tall potted plants. Despite an air of hostility toward a news media that one questioner accused of “McCarthyism,” there was never a thought of flipping over any of the news vans lined up on the outskirts of the Radisson Valley Forge.

Yet in kinder and gentler way, the more than 650 Penn State alumni who packed a so-called “town hall” meeting with already embattled new president Rodney Erickson were animated by the same basic instincts that caused some students to riot in the streets of State College two months earlier:  Anger focused much more on the firing of football legend Joe Paterno than on the child-sex-abuse scandal and cover-up that provoked it, and shock and despair over the implosion of a campus football culture with quasi-religious overtones.

And so the first two questions tossed at Erickson from the floor of largely disaffected Penn State alums – and many of those that followed – dwelled on how the university could ever make things right with Paterno and why the university board of trustees was so quick to fire the winningest coach in major college history.

“He (Paterno) is the most single important Penn Stater in the history of the university,” declared the first questioner, who said he was a 1973 graduate and the son of a faculty member, causing the room to burst out in applause.

“Our overall thing is the lack of due process for Joe Paterno – he was a scapegoat,” said Steve Tross, a 1974 Penn State grad who lives in Paoli and works in marketing, one of last night’s early arrivals. “Everybody else is getting due process except Joe…I think there was a rush to judgment.”

if last night’s town hall – the second in a series of three confabs that started in Pittsburgh on Wednesday and ends tonight in New York – showed anything, it was how difficult it will be for Penn State to come to terms with November’s indictment of Paterno’s former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky on charges of molesting at least 10 boys going as far back as 1994 and the deepening questions over the university’s handling of the matter.

No one seemed to embody the conflict – and a stunningly persistent sense of denial – than Erickson, the genteel white haired former provost at center stage. Erickson, signed on to guide Penn State through 2014, repeatedly said his goal was “the guiding principle of openness and communication” – but those communications last night ignored the overwhelming failures of Penn State’s leaders in the Sandusky case.

“It grieves me very much when I hear people say that this is the Penn State scandal,” Erickson told one questioner last night. “This is the Sandusky scandal. This is not Penn State.”

Never once did Erickson, or anyone else, even mention that two former top Penn State officials – then-vice president Gary Schultz and athletic director Tim Curley – face criminal charges for allegedly lying about their handling of Sandusky. And for all the talk last night about Paterno, concerns that the football coach should have done more when learning in 2002 about a locker room allegation against Sandusky were never mentioned.

Indeed, for Erickson and Penn State, the new and belated drive for transparency still feels like what Richard Nixon’s Watergate-era White House famously called a “modified limited hangout” – and that may be giving this tour too much credit. Just this week, Erickson revealed that trustees and top officials were briefed on the Sandusky probe months before the indictment, raising new questions about what Penn State’s leaders knew and when did they know it. Many alumni asked, and rightfully so, why top trustees are not at these town halls, or why the minutes of the Nov. 9 board meeting at which Paterno and then-president Graham Spanier were ousted have not been made public. Others, including the Penn State faculty. still seek a real independent probe conducted by outsiders.

They shouldn’t hold their breath. Not when the No. 1 man in Happy Valley is still clinging to the fantasy that this is only “a Jerry Sandusky scandal.”

Earlier this week, I promised a megapost on Mitt Romney, which would have focused on the facts that a) his campaign for president was based largely on lies and b) no one seems to be mentioning this. That post won't be coming, as I've been ordered to cover Penn State tonight and then start my furlough to write the 1948 Eagles project.

Instead, I will note that Romney's lies have caught the attention of the public editor of the New York Times. How should the paper handle the problem? He has not a clue.

Another example: on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches “apologizing for America,” a phrase to which Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the “post-truth” stage.

As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news reporters do the same?

If so, then perhaps the next time Mr. Romney says the president has a habit of apologizing for his country, the reporter should insert a paragraph saying, more or less:

“The president has never used the word ‘apologize’ in a speech about U.S. policy or history. Any assertion that he has apologized for U.S. actions rests on a misleading interpretation of the president’s words.”

Many folks on the Internet say it's pathetic that the New York Times even had to ask this question, and personally I think it's beyond pathetic. When journalists find its easier to repeat provable lies rather than  challenge them, it's time to ask ourselves why we even bothered to become journalists. In recent days, Romney has made himself a little more available to reporters. I find it hard to believe that no one has yet asked him for a) specific examples of when Obama has apologized for America and b) specific examples of European-style socialism the president is imposing (um, does he mean the health care plan that was modelled after Romney's health care plan?...). If journalists can't force Mitt Romney to handle the truth, that's pathetic, too.

When Rick Santorum virtually tied for first in the Iowa caucus, I watched his "victory" speech and -- don't fall out of your chair -- I thought it was the most positive moment of the GOP race so far. Although I don't agree with Santorum's policy solutions, his meditation on his father fleeing Mussolini's Italy in the 1920s and pursuing his dreams in America was moving and uplifting.

It's interesting that there's more to the story:

On the campaign trail, Santorum often touts his grandfather’s flight from Italy “to escape fascism,” but he has neglected to publicly mention their close ties with the Italian Communist Party. “Rick’s grandfather Pietro was a liberal man and he understood right away what was happening in Italy,” Mrs. Santorum told Oggi. “He was anti-fascist to the extreme, and the political climate in 1925 was stifling so he left for America. After a few years he returned to Italy with his wife and children, including Aldo, Rick’s father, who passed away late last year. It’s a shame he won’t have the joy to see his son’s success in his bid for the White House.” She goes on to explain how the family then became pillars of the Communist Party in Italy.

The only person who could rally to stop Mitt Romney (pictured above with some extras from "The Lawrence Welk Show") from getting the GOP nomination would be Tim Tebow, but I don't think he's entering the race. Here's why, from our running feature this week called tomorrow's news today:

In past years, New Hampshire primary voters have had something in common with Mitt Romney: They‘ve liked being able to fire overconfident presidential frontrunners-- and shake up the conventional wisdom.

But tonight the flinty-eyed electorate of 2012’s first-in-the-nation primary – the same folks who ended the presidency of Lyndon Johnson and stuck out their icy tongues at George W. Bush and Barack Obama --- came up with a new way to stick it to the pundit man.

They voted for inevitability.

New Hampshire’s overwhelming victory for its New England neighbor – despite increasingly pointed attacks from GOP rivals against his role in laying off workers as a venture capitalist and his moderate record as Massachusetts governor in the 2000s – didn’t guarantee Romney’s nomination, but it made him very hard to stop.

The clear message from voters in the Granite State – both Republicans and thousands of independent who are disaffected from President Obama and voted in the GOP contest – is that they are looking for the candidate with the best chance of winning.  Network exit polls showed that one-third of New Hampshire voters cited “electability” as their No. 1 factor and only one-in-seven said they were seeking a “true conservative,” a big drop-off from Iowa where evangelicals propelled Rick Santorum to a virtual tie with Romney.

“They want a candidate they believe can match up with President Obama,” said G. Terry Madonna, the Franklin and Marshall College political scientist and pollster, who said last night’s win moved Romney well down the path toward the nomination. “There’s an old saying that in the primaries you vote your heart and in the general you vote your mind – but these Republicans have become realists about beating Obama.”

At a packed Romney rally on Monday afternoon at a metal fabricating plant in Hudson, N.H., well-coiffed retirees and Republican regulars repeatedly cited his business experience as founder of Bain Capital as a huge positive, as well as familiarity with his record in neighboring Massachusetts and a sense that no one else was more likely to beat Obama.

 “He can get this country back to work again,” said Ray Hayes, a retiree and Vietnam veteran from Milford, N.H., after a brief Romney speech that was long on patriotic applause lines and short on policy specifics.

Tonight, a confident Romney launched into a victory speech less than a half-hour after the last polls closed at 8 p.m., and lashed back at critics of his jobs record at Bain Capital. “I stand ready to lead us down a different path,” he said, “where we’re lifted up by our desire to succeed, not dragged down by resentment of success.”

The New Hampshire win – although just short of the high expectations of some pundits who thought Romney could pull in 40 percent – should have his chief rivals resenting his political success, if not his wealth.  Indeed, Romney could have things close to wrapped up after the next primary, on January 21 in South Carolina. Here’s why:

-- Ron Paul, who finished a strong second, may have peaked. The libertarian congressman from Texas placed a surprisingly strong second-place in New Hampshire, thanks to his support from under-30 voters and independents. Indeed, Paul roughly tied with Romney among the large number of independents in the Granite State – but South Carolina and other upcoming key states are closed to Republicans, and party stalwarts generally reject Paul’s isolationist and anti-war foreign policy.

-- The schedule is also cruel for Jon Huntsman, who placed a solid third in New Hampshire after shunning Iowa and betting the farm on independent-minded voters here. It’s hard to see how the self-styled GOP moderate keeps any mild momentum going into ultra-conservative South Carolina, a tea party hotbed where primary voters in 2010 rejected an incumbent GOP congressman after he told voters to “turn off Glenn Beck.”

-- The Rick Santorum surge didn’t live free in New Hampshire…it died. The former Pennsylvania senator had hoped his strong showing in Iowa would propel him as the leading conservative alternative to Romney – but that push faltered amid a lack of money, poor logistics, and head-scratching over Santorum’s views on social issues like gay marriage. Last night, Santorum was in fourth just slightly ahead of his right-wing rival Newt Gingrich – a result that makes his mission in South Carolina all but impossible, especially with a pro-Gingrich billionaire committed to spending $5 million in the Palmetto State.

The bottom line after last night is that Romney is the only non-incumbent Republican ever to win both Iowa and New Hampshire, and a deeply divided right wing may guarantee a South Carolina victory as well. Said the Pennsylvania pundit Madonna: “This is an ideal scenario for Romney.”

UPDATE: Forgot to mention I'm talking a well-deserved (not really) comp day tomorrow, but I'll be back Thursday and hopefully will have more to say about the unbearable lightness of Mitt.

One of these qoutes is from Rick Perry. The other is from Mao Zedong. Can you identify which is which?

1. "They’re vultures that are sitting out there on the tree limb, waiting for the company to get sick, and then they sweep in, they eat the carcass, they leave with that, and they leave the skeleton...Instead of trying to work with them to find a way to keep the jobs and to get them back on their feet, it’s all about how much money can we make, how quick can we make it, and then get out of town and find the next carcass to feed upon.”

2. "The ruthless economic exploitation and political oppression of the peasants by the landlord class forced them into numerous uprisings against its rule.... It was the class struggles of the peasants, the peasant uprisings and peasant wars that constituted the real motive force of historical development..."

Answer to come later. I want to make sure I give you some time on this. Anyway, it's good to see that Comrade Perry is finally carrying out the assignment that his masters in the Politburo assigned him after the failure of his first secret mission, Operation Gore back in 1988.

...we get this load of pious baloney from Gov. Corbett. What is this world coming to?

Traditional (i.e., bad) blogging resumes now.

Tomorrow's news today:

NASHUA,  N.H – Rick Santorum was more than halfway through his 20-minute pep talk at an outdoor rally here when the 2012 GOP presidential hopeful heard something for the first time – applause, or, more accurately, the muffled noise of a few dozen pairs of gloves thudding together on a bracing cold January morning.

“You can keep your hands inside your big pockets to stay warm,” the bemused former Pennsylvania senator told a crowd of roughly 100 people – half of them journalists and many of the rest undecided voters curious to see the candidate who shocked pundits by nearly winning last week’s Iowa caucuses.  And so it wasn’t until Santorum finished that the crowd – which easily fit into the small area between the goal mouth and the penalty-kick stripe on the Rivier College soccer field – pounded its thick gloves one more time.

Yet again, one week has seemed like a geological era in the topsy-turvy world of the 2012 Republican race for the presidential nomination.  The smallish crowd and its mostly tepid response – coupled with the seeming gaffe of scheduling an outdoor rally at 9 a.m. on a seasonably frigid morning – summed up how hard it’s suddenly become for Santorum to build on his Iowa success. Yesterday, it certainly felt like his political headwind from the American Heartland has died here in the foothills of the White Mountains.

Indeed, daily tracking polls and other surveys seem to confirm that Santorum’s Iowa bounce has already nearly stalled. The Suffolk University two-day tracking poll released yesterday showed the stalwart of social conservatism stuck at just 10 percent and falling back to 5^th place. If Santorum finishes tonight behind his chief rival for conservative votes, Newt Gingrich, it could make his mission to emerge on January 21 in South Carolina as chief right-wing rival to moderate frontrunner Mitt Romney all but impossible.

The tone of  yesterday’s outdoor rally seemed in part an acknowledgement by Santorum that he’d been too slow to pivot away from the social concerns like opposing gay marriage that had won over evangelical caucus-goers in Iowa, and toward the No. 1 issue here, the economy.  He chose to devote his entire speech to his tax and pro-manufacturing policies – completely avoiding any mention of his signature issues like abortion and family values. Instead, he made a blatant pitch for working class votes.

“Imagine, the president of the United States standing up and saying everybody should go to college in America,” Santorum said of President Obama at one point  “What intellectual snobbery is that?! Not every person wants or needs to go to college or should have to go to college. Hard work, getting skills, getting training, whether it’s at a trade school or whatever, is good work and important work.” He then claimed that Obama instead wants to “redistribute wealth” to those who don’t get into college.

But Santorum – whose blue jean and navy-blue windbreaker attire seemed to symbolize his casual approach to wooing New Hampshire voters – is trying to do in just three or four whirlwind days what took an entire year to accomplish in Iowa, where he practically moved in. It didn’t help when his first night in the Granite State was dominated by a lengthy argument with college students over gay marriage, or when he left the state for most of Sunday to bolster his support for his apparent last stand in South Carolina.

Most of the voters who did brave the elements on the Nashua soccer field came there undecided, like Roy Bouchard, a retired worker from the defense contractor Raytheon who lives in Nashua and said he was trying to make up his mind between Santorum and Gingrich.  “I like substance – a guy who really knows the history and has done it,” he said, adding that Santorum “is well-rounded for his age – he looks young and untested but on the other hand Obama was too.”

After the speech, Bouchard said Santorum hadn’t closed the deal for him. “He’s a little verbose,” He explained. “I wish he had been a little concise in his remarks. I know you can’t bring out everything in a 30-second soundbite, but…”

There seemed to be very few dyed-in-the wool Santorum supporters in the crowd. One of them was Nancy Charron, a dollmaker from Nashua who showed by with a ponytailed, lacey red doll she wanted to give to Santorum for his youngest daughter, Bella, 3, who struggles with a serious genetic disorder. Charron said moral values are critical for her.

“One of our cardinals said that abortion is called the primordial evil, the greatest evil in the world,” she explained. “If a person cannot support the life of a child that is helpless in the mother’s womb, how can he support anything else that is morally right?” But Santorum’s speech – while admirably long on substance such as specific tax policy ideas – included few red meet applause lines for partisans like Charron.

It was a different story one town over in Hudson, N.H., where a couple of hours later Romney showed up at a metal fabricating plant for a slickly produced rally – indoors, of course – with all the trimmings and stagecraft of giant American flags and an endless tape loop of crowd-pleasers like “Eye of the Tiger.” A crowd larded with retirees and military veterans festooned in Romney gear waited well over an hour for a speech and short Q-and-A that lasted just 20 minutes and was as light on specifics as New England’s non-existent snow.

That didn’t matter to supporters like Tom Keene, a retired book editor who lives in Nashua and who praised Romney’s business ties and his chances of defeating Obama in November. Keene said he was sold by “seeing him today and hearing him emphasize his private sector experience – the part of his life that is outside of politics …”

Romney’s big lead here – driven by his wide support from the GOP establishment and a huge edge in campaign cash, including so-called “Super PACs’ funded by wealthy supporters – is also a reminder of how hard it is for an underfunded upstart like Santorum to build on the success of his personal retail campaigning in Iowa. This week’s news that rival Gingrich is getting a $5 million infusion from a Las Vegas casino magnate to fund anti-Romney ads made life even harder for Santorum, frantically trying to raise just $1 million from his small donors.

Santorum’s closing words in Nashua could have described his bitter week in New Hampshire as much as yesterday’s weather miscalculation.  “We’ve been having such balmy weather in New Hampshire, I thought I’d just take a chance but it’s a little chilly today.”

(Photo by Slate's Dave Weigel)

As promised, a preview of my first report from the Granite State for tomorrow's Daily News:

MANCHESTER, N.H.  – Pastor Max Darbouze, a U.S. citizen born in Haiti and now a pastor at Grace of God Church amid the three-story working-class duplexes on the east side of New Hampshire’s largest city, showed up an hour early for the Newt Gingrich town hall yesterday because he wanted to learn one thing.

It had been a rough Christmas at Darbouze’s church, with more toys doled out to poverty-stricken families than ever before, and even non-members walking in off the street begging for donations of cash. So the minister had high hopes that the former House speaker and 2012 GOP presidential candidate would use this event billed as a “Latino town hall” to explain how he’d tackle joblessness and the weak economy.

“The biggest issue right now is jobs, so we want to find out how he’s going to bring jobs to our community and how he can help,” the pastor said. He said is hoping government will invest more in job training for the underprivileged.

Then Gingrich arrived at the Don Quijote Mexican and Caribbean Restaurant, where his political jabs on jobs were about as realistic as tilting at windmills. After an opening pronouncement that the economy is indeed the No. 1 issue in 2012, he rarely returned to the subject in a loping speech and Q-and-A session that did manage to mention everything from the Monroe Doctrine to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge’s 1964 primary win here.

Darbouze left the restaurant frustrated. “I’m still not making my mind yet,” he said afterwards. “There was no job talking. I want to know how we are going to survive, because that’s the main thing in our community is the jobs.”

There is something very off about the nation’s first primary election in this critical 2012 race – and it’s not just the mild days and lack of snow in a storied state where presidential ambitions have long been won or lost, from Ed Muskie’s frigid tears to Ronald Reagan paying for the microphone to Bill Clinton’s doughnut-fueled comeback.

In a contest that was supposed to hinge on the sluggish state of the economy and the millions of long-term unemployed Americans, concrete talk about solving the jobs crisis has proved almost as elusive as the snowflakes in this unseasonable warm January.  With the now-trailing candidates like Gingrich and former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum eager to prove their conservative bona fides as an alternative to frontrunner Mitt Romney, the rivals find it easier to talk about how they’d blow up Iran than how they’d demolish the current unemployment rate of 8.5 percent.

And so, it seems, does the news media. In a move that seemed an exclamation point on a primary going off the rails, a two-hour ABC News debate here on Saturday night included no questions on the economy in the first hour but did feature a 15-minute moderator-provoked argument on banning birth control, something that not even activists on the far right have been clamoring for in the last several decades.

Several undecided independent voters at yesterday’s Gingrich event left it just like Darbouze – still undecided. One of them is Jon Hopwood, an editor from Manchester who’s been unemployed for most of the last five years; he voted for Obama in 2008 but is shopping around in 2012. No one has closed the deal although he’s looking at moderate Republican Jon Huntsman.

“There’s a lot of hidden unemployed people, and there’s a great deal of anxiety over jobs,” Hopwood said. “Nobody I know is a social conservative.” But he said Gingrich frustrated him yesterday with a statement that “I don’t want to pay people to do nothing for 99 weeks,” a jab at long-term unemployment compensation. Gingrich said the 99 weeks could be used to retrain the jobless; Hopwood noted that he’s eligible for veteran re-training in health care but people he knows in that field have been laid off too.

Why the jobs disconnect?  One part of the problem may be that the 2012 presidential race started in two states with among the lowest unemployment rates in the nation. Here in New Hampshire, the official jobless number is just 5.2 percent, fourth-lowest in the nation and a tribute to both its move from textile mills to high-tech a generation ago as well as conservative lending practices during the housing bubble of the 2000s.

But economic angst hasn’t declined to pre-recession levels. The Granite State has still lost 14,000 manufacturing jobs since 2005, and one survey found that 42 percent of the new jobs created here in the last year were in bars and restaurants, which tend to offer lower pay. And not every restaurant is thriving

“It’s been terrible,” said Luis Sepulveda, the Dominican-born owner of the seven-year-old Don Quijote restaurant, who invested heavily in flashy murals and brightly painted walls just as the economy tanked. “That wasn’t the right time to do that.” A Democrat-turned-independent, Sepulveda wants to hear the candidates say more about freeing up loans for small businesses, and lowering fuel costs as well.

But there lies the real crux of the Republican primary contest. While middle-class voters like Darbouze or Sepulveda want to hear what politicians can do directly for them with training or aid, such talk is anathema to the GOP base after its tea-party fueled revolt against any significant role for government. So instead, the White House hopefuls talk about slashing more regulations and lowering back taxes for corporations – even though corporations are sitting on records amounts of cash yet still for the most part are not hiring.

Here is the economic plan that Gingrich described at his Latino town hall:

“We also, as part of our tax programs, have zero capital gains so that hundreds of billions of dollars would pour back into the U.S.  Reduce the corporate tax rate to 12 and a half percent, which would probably liberate $700 billion coming back to the U.S. to create jobs. And we also eliminate the death tax, because it’s wrong to punish people who work hard and succeed…” Of course, capital gains and estate taxes now fall heavily on the wealthiest Americans.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In a dose of extreme irony, about a dozen Occupy Wall Street protestors – seeking to put income inequality on the top of the national agenda – pounded on windows and banged a drum just outside Don Quijote, their muffled message difficult to hear inside.

No wonder so many New Hampshire voters remain undecided – and confused.  “The problem with the Republicans – I find it even with Jon Huntsman – is that they really don’t offer you a solution,” said Hopwood, the unemployed editor. “They’re just going to offer you this blue sky, that by cutting taxes or going back to the Bill of Rights – no, the Declaration of Independence –suddenly there’s going to be all this money!”