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Credit: SomeECards

A senior vice-president at NBC (yeah) actually said,

[W]e look forward to hosting a substantive and stimulating forum for the candidates to make their case to the voters in this crucial state and the whole country.

Or we could have a drinking game.

Live stream at NBCPolitics.com at 9 pm Eastern. NBC plans to tape delay the debate on the West Coast until 9 Pacific.

Open Debate Thread below...

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Three cheers for Ryan Lizza. On "Morning Joe" on Monday morning, he refuted the conventional Beltway wisdom that "both sides" are to blame for the political gridlock in Washington.

MEACHAM: What does the White House, I should say attribute the polarization to at this point and if the identified the problems can they do something to solve them?

LIZZA: I think two things that aren't that complicated, polarization, two parties moving to the left and right, but it’s not just polarization and I think where a lot of reporters have trouble describing this phenomenon accurately. Frankly, you have one party that has gone much farther to the extreme than the other. The Republican party has been pushed much farther to the right than the Democratic Party. So we don't have polarization, we have asymmetric polarization.

SCARBOROUGH: I just want to state for the record -- let the record reflect, I disagree. Go ahead. This is your time.

LIZZA: I think there’s some pretty, if you look closely at some of the political science behind that – I think you’d have a hard time making the case that the Democrats in Congress have gone as far to the left as the Republicans have gone to the right.

Scarborough lamely tried to refute Lizza’s point by suggesting that what unnamed Democrats said about George W. Bush was just as bad as what Glenn Beck is saying today about Obama. That’s nonsense, of course – there were no elected Democrats comparing George W. Bush to Hitler on the floor of the House or calling him a racist on national television.

But political rhetoric isn’t what Lizza was talking about.

As Nate Silver demonstrated with hard data, the Democratic Party is still a party primarily of moderates, and the GOP is totally dominated by conservatives. And even that doesn’t take into account how far right the scale has been titled over the past 30 years.

Back in the '50s, an era conservatives romanticize, Dwight Eisenhower presided over a 91% marginal rate on the wealthy and launched the biggest public works project in US history -- which was paid for by tax increases.

During the '80s, another favorite decade of the right-wing, Ronald Reagan raised taxes 12 times -- including one of the largest tax increases in U.S. history -- and signed a bill that provided a path to citizenship for immigrants. Both of which would be unthinkable in today’s GOP.

Today, we live in an era in which a 35% tax on the highest earners constitutes tyranny, a $787B emergency measure to stave off a second Great Depression – over a third of which was tax cuts – is characterized as a historically unprecedented spending binge -- and the GOP's answer to immigration is to forcibly deport 12M people. Not to mention the fact that Senate Republicans have used the filibuster more than any other minority in history -- and that now it's commonplace for Republican presidential candidates to argue that the most popular programs of the New Deal and the Great Society should be eliminated.

Lizza should be applauded for getting this right. This “both sides have become equally extreme” stuff is just lazy and uninformed -- and should be throughly refuted every time it comes up.

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Despite the fact as was noted yesterday on Chris Hayes' Saturday show on MSNBC, that Newt Gingrich's national favorability ratings nationwide are absolutely terrible, that didn't stop Sen. Lindsey Graham and former Gov. Haley Barbour from trying to put their best positive spin on his win in the South Carolina Republican primary race.

Gingrich may be winning over Republican primary voters with the race baiting and a repeat of Lee Atwater's Southern Strategy, but that doesn't necessarily translate well to a national election. I'm sure Graham and Barbour are well aware of that, but that didn't stop them from trying to paint South Carolina Republican primary voters as being typical of the mainstream of the rest of the country.

Transcript via CBS.

SCHIEFFER: All right, if you can help me and call Governor Romney, I think we can make this work. Senator Graham, what happened down there? Did-- is-- is South Carolina just too conservative for Mitt Romney or is there a problem here that goes deeper than that with his campaign?

GRAHAM: John McCain won, Bob Dole won. Not the most conservative people in the world but good-- good Americans who impressed South Carolina in sobriety, Newt won. The debate Monday night in Myrtle Beach was probably the best explanation of conservatism in a bold fashion coming from Newt Gingrich I've heard in decades. And Newt not only won the debates. He convinced people that he could beat Barack Obama and electability was the issue before South Carolina primary, during the primary and on voting day. And Newt won. He's the guy that we saw forty percent of us, the best to go into the arena and beat Barack Obama. Governor Romney did fine. Rick Perry did very well. He had some stumbles by Romney. We had six hundred thousand people vote. The largest Republican primary in history occurred yesterday. And people were energized. They were looking close and they picked Newt. This was Newt winning more than anybody else losing.

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Seriously, is it likely that such a murky enterprise was set up without being approved by someone higher up the food chain, like Tenet? Of course not. The question is, did the authorization reach even higher?

The top lawyer at the CIA never approved sending one of its officers to help the New York Police Department create a domestic spying program, raising the possibility that the agency may have violated a ban on domestic spying.

Last August, the Associated Press reported that the CIA had violated that prohibition when it “played a key role in transforming the New York Police Department’s intelligence unit into a cutting edge spy shop dedicated to gathering information on Muslims.”

New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly insisted in October that the arrangement was legal under a 1981 presidential order, which allows the CIA to provide local law enforcement with “specialized equipment, technical knowledge or assistance of expert personnel,” provided the guidelines are spelled out in advance and the agency’s general counsel approves of the arrangement.

The AP is now reporting, however, that according to intelligence officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, neither of those things was done in 2002 when then-CIA director George Tenet sent a veteran officer to set up “spying programs that transformed the NYPD into one of the nation’s most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies.”

An internal CIA investigation launched in September by newly-appointed Director David Petraeus concluded there had been no wrongdoing, but the AP report casts fresh doubt on that conclusion.The AP story points out that the role of CIA officer Lawrence Sanchez — and of a second, unidentified, CIA officer who succeeded him in 2010 — was “murky,” which enabled US officials to claim his presence did not violate the ban because he was never directly instructed to help set up the spying programs.“Officially, he is there on a sabbatical to observe the NYPD’s management,” the AP story notes.

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Via the Washington Post:

Across South Carolina on Saturday, voters had said they liked Gingrich’s aggression in debates — believing it would make him the best Republican to take on President Obama in the fall.

“I think Mitt Romney is a good man,” said Harold Wade, 85, leaving a polling place in this picturesque seaside suburb outside Charleston. “But I think we’ve reached a point where we need someone who’s mean.”

That was Gingrich, he said.

“What we need is someone who’s got some brains,” Wade said, explaining his vote for the former speaker. “And we need someone with some guts.”

In the spirit of Newtie, Rick Santorum's honorary Florida chairman said "Gays make God want to vomit," on Sunday, and another Santorum religious fanatic pastor supporter trashed Mormons at a Santorum rally calling them racist. This may not be untrue, but I'm fairly certain Rick Santorum isn't exactly an open-minded, "love everyone" kind of guy either.

Bottom line? Mr. Wade is going to get his wish. I predict that all candidates' gloves will be off. No more Mr. Nice Mitt. No more meek Ricky. Newtie will swagger onto Monday's debate stage wearing everything but the white hood.

They want mean? I think they're about to get it.

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Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum was greeting supporters after his loss in the South Carolina primary when an activist greeted him with a burst of glitter.

Via:

As Santorum closed his speech focusing on building strong family values, a gay rights activist said: "Except when you're gay" and threw a handful of glitter in the air.

Members of the Occupy Charleston group joined in with chants of "Rick, Rick, Rick, bigot, bigot, bigot" and singing "Santorum, Santorum, you're a bigot." As police escorted the group out, they shouted about Jesus preaching love.

The police escorted many members of the movement off-campus and would not allow them to retreive their vehicles parked there. But there were no arrests or incidents.

This isn’t the first time Santorum was glitter-bombed, he was also targeted during his final campaign event in Iowa late in December.

Santorum is frequently targeted by gay activists because of his never-ending anti-gay rights rhetoric.

Newt really likes the attack-the-media tactic, using it whenever and wherever an uncomfortable question is posed. But I imagine he never thought he'd have to use those tactics against his former employers, Fox News. Unfortunately for him, Roger Ailes' morning memo to his on-air talent was to take on fully the accusation that Newt Gingrich really isn't a conservative (like St. Ronnie himself could stand up to the GOP purity nowadays) and that he's saddled with corruption and ethics violation baggage that will hurt his general election viability. This gang up by the second string Fox & Friends group is more than little Newtie can handle:

He then took a sharp turn to attack the hosts, offended that he had been asked to “take seriously” Romney’s demand. “Even in the news media, you ought to have some sense of balance. As a reporter, don’t you have some sense of balance? Isn’t ‘fair and balanced’ part of Fox News?” Briggs jumped in to defend Morris’s question, explaining that he was giving Gingrich a chance to respond, not legitimizing any claims. He also expanded the question to propose that it was up in the air whether “any of this mattered. Gingrich responded that “if there is something wrong, we deserve to know” with Romney’s taxes only because of the “billion dollar Obama campaign” that would crush him if there was something wrong there– as opposed to Gingrich’s ethics investigation, which had “been covered for 20 years; it’s all out in the open.”

So why did Gingrich blow up at Morris’s question? It felt, at least on Gingrich’s part, somewhat forced, as if he was waiting for any opportunity to bash them. And that wouldn’t be surprising in light of some peripheral evidence that not all the Fox & Friends hosts were 100% on his side during that testy exchange with CNN’s John King– particularly Briggs, who tweeted his support of King (and Fox’s Neil Cavuto in defending him) that his question about Gingrich’s affair with his now-wife Callista was “fair game” (the twist to this is that Morris, who actually got clawed here, seemed fine with Gingrich’s reaction to King’s question while it happened on Thursday). Either that, or Gingrich had a bullet in his barrel for the media today that was ready to land no matter where, since the strategy is clearly working, and the Romney tax issue felt like the right moment to strike.

I have to believe that this tactic is going to wear thin fairly soon. The news media is not exactly an industry of shrinking wallflowers. There are a number of egos in the media that rival Gingrich's and at some point, they may get sick of being attacked for giving Newt the free publicity he craves.

By the way...that assertion that Newt made that all he was exonerated of all ethics charges? Not so much.

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From this Saturday's South Carolina Republican primary coverage on MSNBC, former McCain adviser Steve Schmidt was asked what would happen were Newt Gingrich to win the next primary race in Florida as well and it didn't bode well for the Republican Party and the potential for a bit of a civil war among their ranks.

SCHMIDT: Look, I think, not only are we not moving towards a coalescing of support by the Republican establishment for Newt Gingrich, we're probably moving toward the declaration of war on Newt Gingrich by the Republican establishment. And if Newt Gingrich is able to win the Florida primary, you will see a panic and a meltdown of the Republican establishment that is beyond my ability to articulate in the English language.

People will go crazy and you will have this five week period until the Super Tuesday states which is going to be as unpredictable, tumultuous as any period in modern American politics. It will be a remarkable thing to watch should that happen in Florida.

As Schmidt pointed out Gingrich's negatives are so high with one hundred percent name recognition establishment Republicans are terrified he's not only going to lose them the presidential election should he win their primary race, but he'd potentially cost them the House and the Senate as well. If Schmidt's predictions are true, look for things to get very ugly over the next month or so.

Can you believe this is the same man who got an endorsement from NARAL in 2002, because he said the pro-choice organization needed "a friend like him" in office? Boy, was that a big flip flop from today:

Romney made the following statement on the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade:

“Today marks the 39th anniversary of one of the darkest moments in Supreme Court history, when the court in Roe v. Wade claimed authority over the fundamental question regarding the rights of the unborn. The result is millions of lives since that day have been tragically silenced. Since that day, the pro-life movement has been working tirelessly in an effort to change hearts and minds and protect the weakest and most vulnerable among us. Today, we recommit ourselves to reversing that decision, for in the quiet of conscience, people of both political parties know that more than a million abortions a year cannot be squared with the good heart of America.”

What a load of crap, pardon my French. The "pro-life" movement has done nothing to protect the weakest and most vulnerable, because they do nothing to educate mothers, they do nothing to raise the circumstances of these babies they demand must be born, they offer nothing to help the family. They hold the fetus in higher regard than the mother and ignore the child once it's born.

That is the very opposite of being pro-life. I wonder if any of these Republicans have learned the lessons of what happened in Romania after Nicholas Ceausescu outlawed abortion and all forms of contraception and sex education. Hint: it didn't turn out too well for him.

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I keep hearing this ridiculous canard in Republican debates and now from John Boehner about the alleged jobs bills the Republicans have passed that the "Democrat Senate" refuses to act upon. Since I watched the better part of their activity in real time, I know this is a lie. But most people aren't obsessive-compulsive about government and politics and might not realize just how much of a lie it is. So without further ado, let me debunk this claim made by the disingenuous Speaker of the House.

WALLACE: Question -- how will you counter that line of attack?

BOEHNER: Chris, 30 jobs bills passed over the last year in a Republican House of Representatives that are sitting in the United States Senate -- thirty.

Our focus over the last 12 months has been on jobs. Our focus over the course of the next 12 months is going to be on jobs.

The president asked us to extend the payroll tax credit, to make sure that we extended unemployment insurance with reforms, and make sure that doctors that dealt with Medicare patients were adequately reimbursed. And he asked us to do it for a year. We did it for a year. It was the United States Senate who decided, we're just going to do it for two months and we can't agree on how we're going to offset these costs. And so, we'll just kick the can down the road.

To make sure they back up their public claims with what might appear to be "fact", they've built a page on the House of Representatives site with a list of their so-called jobs bills, which number 27 and not 30 as the Speaker claims. What follows is a list and a brief explanation of why they are not jobs bills. Feel free to share it widely with your friends who might be inclined to believe Mr. Tobacco Lobbyist Check Distributor without questioning it.

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