Public Policy Polling surveys Tuesday's caucuses in Minnesota and Colorado and finds good news for Rick Santorum:

Last night's results in Nevada were bad news for Newt Gingrich and PPP's first day of polling in Colorado and Minnesota indicates things may only get worse for him in the coming days.

In Colorado Mitt Romney looks primed for another big Western win to match his one in Nevada. He leads with 40% there to 26% for Rick Santorum, 18% for Gingrich, and 12% for Ron Paul.

Minnesota looks like a toss up with any of the four candidates having some shot at winning. Santorum holds a small edge there with 29% to 27% for Romney, 22% for Gingrich, and 19% for Paul.

What both states have in common is that Gingrich has fallen precipitously since our last polls in them. In Colorado Gingrich was in first place with a 19 point lead in early December. His support has declined 19 points since then and his net favorability has dropped 33 points from +41 (64/23) to only +8 (49/41). Gingrich has had a similarly large decline in Minnesota, but there it's much more abrupt. We polled the state only two weeks ago but in that time he's dropped 14 points from 36% to 22%, and his favorability has 26 points from +34 (59/25) to +8 (47/39). That after glow from South Carolina has worn off real fast.

Tuesday has the potential to be a big day for Rick Santorum. In addition to these two polls, a Missouri survey we conducted last weekend found him with 45% to 34% for Romney and 13% for Paul. Given how quickly things have moved in this race I wouldn't assume Santorum still has that lead, especially given the momentum Romney has after big wins in Florida and Nevada. But nevertheless it looks like Santorum has a decent chance at wins in Minnesota and Missouri, and a second place finish in Colorado. 72 hours from now he may have supplanted Gingrich as the top alternative to Romney.

Following the Floriday primary, the boss wrote about Santorum's opportunity to overtake Gingrich in February:   

What if Santorum does as well or better than Gingrich in the Nevada caucuses Saturday, or in the Minnesota and Colorado caucuses next Tuesday? What if Santorum is competitive with Romney in the Missouri beauty contest primary next Tuesday, where Gingrich isn't on the ballot? Couldn't non-Romney voters begin to move nationally from Gingrich to Santorum? Couldn't populist and Tea Party leaders like Sarah Palin do so as well?

In the Gallup tracking poll today, Gingrich is at 28 percent, Romney at 27, and Santorum at 17. Romney will surely move up several points over the next few days--but couldn't Gingrich fall enough and Santorum rise enough that Santorum's number approaches or passes Gingrich? Couldn't Santorum move into second place?

In sum: Could we be heading towards a Romney-Santorum contest on February 28 in Michigan and Arizona, and then in March and beyond? Romney would certainly be a strong favorite in such a contest, given his lead in votes, delegates, money and organization. But wouldn't Santorum ultimately have a better chance than Gingrich to upset Romney, even if it's still a slim one?

Rasmussen's latest tracking poll finds Rick Santorum faring better than Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney against Obama:

In a potential Election 2012 matchup, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum is at 45% while President Obama earns 44%. This is the first time in any poll that Santorum has led the president. Several other GOP challengers have led the president a single time in the polls including Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich. Each man briefly held the lead while they were surging in the polls, only to fall quickly. It remains to be seen what will happen to Santorum’s support. [...]

Only one GOP candidate has led the president in more than one poll and that’s former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. At the moment, however, he is behind. The latest daily numbers show President Obama at 47% and Romney at 43% (see tracking history). These matchup results are updated daily at 9:30 a.m. Eastern (sign up for free daily e-mail update).

Romney leads upcoming primaries in both Michigan and Arizona.

Matchups for other Republican contenders are updated weekly on a rotating basis. The latest numbers show Congressman Ron Paul trails 45% to 42%. However, if former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is the Republican nominee, the president holds an eight point lead, 49% to 41% (see tracking history).

There's been a great deal of sound and fury over the jobs report. Here are two thoughts that come to mind.

Against the bulls: An increase in 245,000 payroll jobs was about 100,000 above expectations (at 150,000). But exactly a year ago, the experts were calling for a January 2011 increase of about 140,000 jobs and the initial number was just 36,000, or about 100,000 below expectations.

A year ago, the bulls dismissed this as a seasonal issue, due mostly to the freakishly bad January weather. And they turned out to be correct – later revisions were upward and the average through the first quarter of the year ended up being close to the 2011 trend.

Well, they need to keep this in mind now. We have had a freakishly good January in terms of weather, which might be giving a boost to the report. And we see particularly in strong gains in restaurant workers and construction workers, the exact kind of jobs that would be salvaged by an unseasonably dry and warm January.

Remember, January is actually a month where the economy sheds jobs – as the holiday surge finally comes to an end. So this print of 245,000 is the government’s effort to see through the holiday effects to divine the underlying trend. But if the holidays had a different effect this year than they normally do, then the number will be off. In particular, it might be the case that businesses kept workers on through January because good weather boosted activity, and the government interpreted fewer seasonal layoffs as an indication of a better underlying trend.

My guess is that just as the bulls were right about the weather last January, one should consider the weather a factor this January. 

Against the bears: Drudge had a headline indicating that 1.2 million people dropped out of the workforce this month alone. Huh?

That’s not what really happened. In fact, the government revises its assumptions about the population every January, but there is a catch: It does not go back to adjust the old unemployment numbers. So, there was not a “drop” in the workforce – because that requires what is essentially an apples-to-oranges comparison between December and January.

My bottom line: This was a good report, no doubt. But we saw some equally bad reports not that long ago – because the monthly jobs report is an inherently bouncy metric. There are the typical problems of sampling error that come with any survey, and on top of that there are non-random errors that can creep up because of issues like the weather.  The average job growth in 2011 was 152,000 per month, but the standard deviation was a whopping 70,000. And we had a few months last winter when things looked as good as today’s number, only to taper off later.

On a political level, call it a kind of sugar high for the Obama administration. The president has been able to tout a drop in the unemployment rate for several months. However, the foundations still suggest a staggeringly large number of people not in the workforce. That is biasing the unemployment rate downwards, suggesting more improvement than there has really been.

Some fear America is about to go protectionist. Others fear it won’t. Where you stand on this issue depends on where you sit. Sit in the chair of the CEO of a major exporter, and you fear protectionism and the ever-rising spiral of retaliations. Sit in the chair of the president of a trade union, and you welcome what others call protectionism and you call fair trade. Sit in the chair of a Wal-Mart customer and you fear anything that will drive up prices, putting pressure on your over-stretched budget. Sit on the sofa of an unemployed worker whose lost job is being filled by a $1-a-day Chinese worker, and protectionism is just what the nation needs—unless you just paid $69 for a made-in-China tire that cost $39 before the US imposed high tariffs on imports of these low-end tires. 

There is little question that the voice of the trade hawk is heard in the land. President Obama used his State of the Union speech to announce plans to increase the tax burden on companies that are “moving jobs and profits overseas,” and “start rewarding companies that create jobs right here in America” by lowering their taxes. He added a boast that his administration has brought trade cases against China “at nearly twice the rate as the last administration,” and a promise to create an Enforcement Task Force to ferret out violations of WTO trade rules by China. Just what the ferrets will do with their discoveries is unclear.

This is more than a broad hint to the trade unions to make some noise when China’s vice president Xi Jinping, heir apparent to the regime’s leadership, and touted as a free(ish) market sort, visits Washington on February 14. A group of top trade union leaders will announce on Tuesday a long-planned campaign to pressure Obama to bring a barrage of trade cases against China. They are emboldened not only by the President’s speech, but by a victory in a WTO case involving China’s curb on exports of some raw materials, the anger aroused by China’s imposition of almost $5 billion in annual tariffs on imports of sports utility vehicles and big cars, and by their congressional allies. “The Chinese have cheated,” says Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat from Ohio; they are currency manipulators, charges Senator Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat.

Throw in the fact that this is an election year, in which Republicans who normally oppose protectionist measures are reluctant to antagonize the blue-collar workers whose defection from the Democrats propelled Ronald Reagan into the White House. Mitt Romney, the Republican most likely to get his party’s nomination, promises to crack down on China on his first day in the Oval Office.

Developments underlying this lurch towards protectionism are unlikely to go away. China remains under pressure to provide millions of jobs for its increasingly urbanized work force, and is being forced to counter social unrest by raising wages. That makes its exports more expensive, and increases pressure on the regime to compensate by maintaining an undervalued currency that keeps Chinese goods cheaper in foreign markets.

Grayson Schmitz is never at a loss for words. According to the New York-based catering chef, "Whatever is in my head I say." So I couldn't resist asking her what went through her mind during the last episode of Top Chef: Texas when the special guest judge turned out to be the one and only Pee-wee Herman (who entered the kitchen set riding his trademark red bicycle). Grayson, who trained under Fabio Trabocchi ("the man taught me how to make pasta") and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, was first amused by the spectacle. "Okay, that's fun," she thought, "but he better not be one of our f—g judges." He was.

"I'm not going to say I felt great about [Pee-wee] as one of our judges," said Grayson. But even Pee-wee seemed to recognize the awkwardness of the situation at judges' table and, as Grayson noticed, actor Paul Reubens went in and out of character. "He wasn't about to say 'Ha-ha!'" while one of us was being eliminated. The New York chef added that Reubens, who was himself off-camera, "was the sweetest, most sincere guy" and a far cry from his darker days.

Not that Pee-wee's appearance was completely random. The elimination challenge took place at the Alamo, where the actor appeared during his film Pee-wee's Big Adventure. (Still, it seems a strange locale to have dinner considering it's the site where hundreds of people were killed. Why not a Hawaiian-themed dinner at the Pearl Harbor memorial with guest judge Ben Affleck?)

As for Tom Colicchio, Grayson was relieved to clear the air with the head judge during the after-show on Bravo. (In a previous episode, Colicchio chastised the chef for not doing something more adventurous than chicken salad. "Like a meatball?" she shot back, referring to a rival's choice of dish. Colicchio seemed stunned while Grayson was horrified she had offended him—he was not offended in the least.) Prior to that incident, Grayson had also bragged to Colicchio that her dish was like "sex in the mouth," leaving all the chefs speechless. "I don't know what possessed me to say that," she now says, although she partly blames it on sleep deprivation.

In Last Chance Kitchen, Grayson competed against Beverly Kim, but the winner, who will return to the competition, will be revealed next Wednesday.

A new poll from PPP shows Mitt Romney with a commanding lead heading into Saturday's caucuses in Nevada. Romney has 50 percent support there, according to the poll of likely caucusgoers. His numbers double those of Newt Gingrich, who only receives 25 percent support, with Ron Paul and Rick Santorum at 15 percent and 8 percent, respectively. That's Romney's best position in Nevada yet, and if the numbers hold or the trend continues, he could look at garnering more than half of the vote for the first time in this primary season.

Romney's impressive numbers are in no small part thanks to the large proportion of Mormon voters in Nevada. According to the poll, Romney leads 78-14 over Paul with Mormons, who will constitute 20 percent of the vote. Read the full results of the poll here.

A number of news outlets reported today that the Susan G. Komen breast cancer charity reversed its decision to end funding from Planned Parenthood. "Komen apologizes for 'recent decisions,' pledges to continue funding Planned Parenthood," read the headline at the Dallas News. But the actual statement from Komen's president made it unclear that Planned Parenthood is going to get funding. Here it is in full: 

We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women's lives.

The events of this week have been deeply unsettling for our supporters, partners and friends and all of us at Susan G. Komen. We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not.

Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.

Our only goal for our granting process is to support women and families in the fight against breast cancer. Amending our criteria will ensure that politics has no place in our grant process. We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.

It is our hope and we believe it is time for everyone involved to pause, slow down and reflect on how grants can most effectively and directly be administered without controversies that hurt the cause of women. We urge everyone who has participated in this conversation across the country over the last few days to help us move past this issue. We do not want our mission marred or affected by politics - anyone's politics.

Starting this afternoon, we will have calls with our network and key supporters to refocus our attention on our mission and get back to doing our work. We ask for the public's understanding and patience as we gather our Komen affiliates from around the country to determine how to move forward in the best interests of the women and people we serve.

We extend our deepest thanks for the outpouring of support we have received from so many in the past few days and we sincerely hope that these changes will be welcomed by those who have expressed their concern.

But Steven Ertelt reports:

Lawrence Kaplan takes the Obama administration to task for prematurely declaring that “the tide of war is receding.” Here's a taste:

“In America, and in Iraq,” Vice President Joe Biden assured an audience in Baghdad last December, “the tide of war is receding.” For its callowness, this observation was noteworthy. (The tide of war was not receding from Iraq; Joe Biden was.) President Obama, introducing his plan to cut defense expenditures a few weeks later, offered up this analysis by way of justification: “The tide of war is receding.”

Opponents of Obama’s foreign policy, unwilling to credit the president with coherence in any enterprise apart from campaigning for reelection, will get nothing from these words. In President Obama’s speeches, after all, peace ranks among several reasons to shrink the military budget. In his Pentagon address, the president added this explanation: “We have to renew our economic strength here at home.” Or, as he put it in an address last year explaining his decision to draw down American forces in Afghanistan, “It is time to focus on nation-building here at home.”

The president’s vision of a receding tide of war may be in response to various domestic policy needs. But those who trivialize it entirely do so at the cost of discounting a worldview that appears to be sincerely held. The most recent application of the “tides” metaphor—a proposal to cut, among other elements of America’s defense establishment, ground forces by 100,000—provides the clearest illustration of this view. “Now, we’re turning the page on a decade of war,” the president explained. “Even as our troops continue to fight in Afghanistan, the tide of war is receding.” As to what this means in practice, the president summarized the logic of the cuts this way: “As we look beyond the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and the end of long-term, nation-building with large military footprints—we’ll be able to ensure our security with smaller conventional ground forces.” Peace, in the president’s telling, is what permits this dividend.

Whole thing here.

It's noteworthy, also, that the president is tried this approach in his State of the Union Address. "The renewal of American leadership can be felt across the globe," President Obama told the joint session of Congress last month. "From the coalitions we’ve built to secure nuclear materials, to the missions we’ve led against hunger and disease; from the blows we’ve dealt to our enemies; to the enduring power of our moral example, America is back. Anyone who tells you otherwise, anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about."

Yet, the president's policies--cutting defense spending, "leading from behind"--do not support his sudden denial of American declinism. 

Newt Gingrich was hardly a perfect speaker of the House, but he did not resign in “disgrace” as has been repeatedly claimed by Mitt Romney. I say this as a former member of Congress who was part of both the “coup attempt” against him and the subsequent successful effort to remove him as speaker after the 1998 election. There is a distinct difference between removing someone from a position because of ineffective management, as, say, Bain Capital regularly does, and resigning in “disgrace.”

The word “disgrace” implies a moral failing. I know this better than most because I failed not legally, electorally, or in doing my job: I failed at a personal moral level, so I resigned. I am thankful for God’s limitless grace. Newt was not a candidate for sainthood, but he wasn't removed because of the ethics report. Rather, his leadership had become indecisive and confused, his anger flared too often, and operationally we House Republicans could no longer function. The proof is that we first sought Bob Livingston as his replacement, and then Dennis Hastert. They were not especially known as idea men or even electoral leaders of our party, but as skilled at management.

Newt Gingrich was certainly the point man in leading us to victory in 1994, the first House Republican majority in 40 years. He is a visionary, about that there is no doubt. We freshmen were the “Newt, Newt” chanters of media fame. The first sign that it wasn’t all worship, however was the victory of Tom DeLay as whip over Bob Walker in December 1994. Bob was an outstanding conservative and wonderful man. When he learned that I was voting for DeLay, though my background and district might have dictated that I would back him, Bob basically hollered into the phone: “Don’t you understand that I am Speaker Gingrich’s choice for whip?” My answer was that yes, I and many others did understand exactly that point, which is why we were voting for DeLay (or Bill McCollum)—because we wanted some independent leadership. The election wasn’t about Bob and Tom.

The first two years our our new majority were rather tumultuous, with the government shutdown and other setbacks, but we managed to hold the majority. The Democrats, thirsting for revenge because Newt wasn’t always the nicest to them (he had led the successful effort to force out former Speaker Jim Wright), went after Gingrich with a vengeance, lodging multiple complaints with the House Ethics Committee. Newt, not exactly a perfectionist for details, certainly left them some openings. As Byron York explained last week in the Washington Examiner, "the center of the controversy was a course Gingrich taught from 1993 to 1995 at two small Georgia colleges. The wide-ranging class, called 'Renewing American Civilization,' was conceived by Gingrich and financed by a tax-exempt organization called the Progress and Freedom Foundation. Gingrich maintained that the course was a legitimate educational enterprise; his critics contended that it had little to do with learning and was in fact a political exercise in which Gingrich abused a tax-exempt foundation to spread his own partisan message."

Today’s jobs report is all good news for the country, and bad news for Republicans who are hoping that a failing economy is all they need in order to unseat President Obama. The economy added 243,000 jobs in January, 257,000 in the private sector, driving the unemployment rate down to a three-year low of 8.3 percent from 8.5 percent in December and 9.1 percent in August. Previous job-creation estimates for November and December were revised upwards by 60,000. Add that average hourly earnings ticked up, and don’t be surprised at more than a little chortling from the White House.

Happy days, however, might not be here again: Almost 24 million Americans continue to look for full-time work, and over 5 million have been unemployed for 27 weeks or longer. But the trend is in the right direction, and if it continues, the president will surely claim credit, and demand more stimulus and whatever else he can tie to the improvement in the jobs market.

I have long felt that Republican strategists who thought they could ride into the White House on the backs of the unemployed were in for a shock. The real issue is not this or that uptick or downtick in some economic indicator. It is the president’s vision of where he wants to take the country, a vision now wrapped in talk of a long-term, sustainable economy to replace the current model that has produced a financial crisis, a recession, rising inequality—you know the rest.

To counter this vision we have Republican attacks on reforms of the financial services sector, a refusal to countenance any increase in any taxes, a grudging attitude towards help for the unemployed, and calls for protectionism that will alienate farm belt voters heavily dependent on exports.

Alone among contenders for the nomination, Newt Gingrich has a coherent view of a response to the president. But he also has what has come to be called “baggage,” which includes personal traits that many voters find off-putting. If Mitt Romney is not only to win the nomination, but compete effectively with the president, who himself cannot be accused of having a lack of a vision of what a “transformed” America should look like, he had better do more than repeat his defense of capitalism and free markets, and put some flesh on those very bare bones. 

At the Herzliya security conference outside Tel Aviv yesterday, former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy suggested that we "Look at Syria and see it as the Achilles heel of Iran." There is "enormous opportunity" in Syria, said Levy. "We should have a main interest in ensuring that the Iranian interest is booted out of Syria."

"In facing Iran, like facing any other threat, we should look at where there is vulnerability and where can we gain maximum effects… not only regionally but internationally," Halevy said.

Today, writing at the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer makes a similar argument:

The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s Syria could be ... ominous for Iran. The alliance with Syria is the centerpiece of Iran’s expanding sphere of influence, a mini-Comintern that includes such clients as Iranian-armed and directed Hezbollah, now the dominant power in Lebanon; and Hamas, which controls Gaza and threatens to take the rest of Palestine (the West Bank) from a feeble Fatah.

Additionally, Iran exerts growing pressure on Afghanistan to the east and growing influence in Iraq to the west. Tehran has even extended its horizon to Latin America, as symbolized by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s solidarity tour through Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Cuba.

Of all these clients, Syria is the most important...

Whole thing here.