Daily Kos

Mark Blumenthal sets up this Iowa poll perfectly:

On New Year's Eve exactly four years ago, the Des Moines Register released its final poll of Iowa caucus-goers and turned the political world upside down.

While the newspaper's final Iowa Caucus poll of 2011, set to be published Saturday night at 7 p.m. Central Time (8 p.m. Eastern Time), may not confound the conventional wisdom this time, it is among the most eagerly anticipated political polls of the season for good reason. The Register has a hard-earned reputation for accuracy grounded in the fundamentals of survey research: Assume as little as possible about the likely caucus-goers, and let the voters speak for themselves.

So here's the topline (MoE  plus/minus 4 for full four day poll , plus/minus 5.6 for last 2 days):

Mitt Romney tops the latest Des Moines Register Iowa Poll in the closing days before the Iowa caucuses, but Ron Paul and Rick Santorum are poised within striking distance.

The poll, conducted Tuesday through Friday, shows support at 24 percent for Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts; 22 percent for Paul, a Texas congressman; and 15 percent for the surging Rick Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania.

But the four-day results don’t reflect just how quickly momentum is shifting in a race that has remained highly fluid for months. If the final two days of polling are considered separately, Santorum rises to second place, with 21 percent, pushing Paul to third, at 18 percent. Romney remains the same, at 24 percent.

“Momentum’s name is Rick Santorum,” said the Register’s pollster, J. Ann Selzer.

And you know what? It's still really close (unless your name is Perry or Gingrich.) Romney's the favorite, but Santorum could win. Why?

Another sign of the race’s volatility: 41 percent of likely caucusgoers say they could still be persuaded to change their minds. That's because they are not sold on Romney, and the 75% non-Romney vote is still looking for a home.

There are three things that make a caucus survey hard to do:

1. getting the voter choices right (basic)
2. figuring out second choices (less relevant for this R caucus, but key for the 2008 D caucus)
3. guesstimating and gaming out who is likely to show - and why

That last one is huge, and with tomorrow's scheduled release of detailed analysis, we might know more.

An AP story earlier today notes this:

This year, polls have consistently shown two dominant themes in the GOP race:

—A tepid response to the GOP field among Republican voters.

Earlier this month, an AP-GfK poll found that amid Gingrich’s rise, Republican dissatisfaction with the lineup of candidates also rose. The wild swings among the anyone-but-Romney crowd have lifted nearly all of the candidates at some point this year, but none has fit the bill exactly.

Republicans don’t actively dislike Romney, with 73 percent saying he’s a strong leader and 81 percent calling him likable. But his best showing in any poll this year remains around 30 percent, and no other candidate has pulled a strong showing among the remaining 70 percent of the party.

—A deep anger among Republicans toward Obama.

Why the deep anger?

Maybe this:

If Romney wins, or if someone else does, it won't change the driving force among Republicans, who are against Obama and not for the nominee.  But ask President Kerry if that's enough to win with.

What's coming up on Sunday Kos ...

• DemFromCT will look thought the details of the Des Moines Register final Iowa poll for clues as to who is likely to actually show up.
• Dante Atkins will speculate about how the third-party group known as Americans Elect could affect the 2012 race.
• In "Arizona Bigotry" Denise Oliver-Velez will discuss the ruling by administrative law judge Lewis Kowal that ethnic studies are illegal.
• Scott Wooledge explains how skyrocketing health care costs became a very personal battle over the holidays.
• After a litany of anti-Romneys have now come and gone, Mitt Romney may well be poised to be the last man standing. Steve Singiser explores the inevitability of Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee, and why the only certainty in the GOP presidential sweepstakes is continued uncertainty.
• Hunter says he's just going to phone something in.
• They all sound the same! Georgia Logothetis will explore the most common political soundbites. Let's hope for some originality from candidates in 2012....
• Mark Sumner begins work on a new novel, and invites you to join in with your own writing project as we spend six months getting to "THE END."

Ezra Klein has a great column, pointing out that finally Republicans have found voting restrictions they don't like. Rick Perry said the laws were “among the most onerous in the nation,” and possibly even unconstitutional. Newt Gingrich compared their impact to Pearl Harbor. Michele Bachmann, Jon Huntsman and Rick Santorum were so intimidated that they simply slunk away without a fight.

Social Security? Obamacare? Dodd-Frank? Nope. Virginia’s ballot-access laws. Of the seven candidates still in serious contention for the Republican nomination for the presidency, only two of them — Mitt Romney and Ron Paul — will be appearing in the Virginia primary on March 6. [...]

But other Republicans — and most of the candidates — have turned their fire on Virginia. Ken Cuccinelli, the state’s attorney general, was particularly unsparing about the access laws. “Virginia won’t be nearly as ‘fought over’ as it should be in the midst of such a wide open nomination contest,” he wrote in an e-mail to supporters. “Our own laws have reduced our relevance. Sad. I hope our new GOP majorities will fix this problem so that neither party confronts it again.”

He hopes, in other words, that Virginia will make it easier for Republican candidates to get on the ballot, so Virginia’s voters are better able to participate in the election. It’s a noble goal, and one many Republicans share. But it runs counter to the efforts Republicans have mounted in dozens of states to make it more difficult for ordinary Americans to participate in the 2012 election.

The point being, of course, that it's not such a noble goal when it's only Republican candidates with ballot access and Republican voters who are eligible to vote for them, as is the case in seven states which have passed strict new voter ID laws, and another 27 states which are trying to pass them.

One of those seven states with new, restrictive laws, is Texas.

The bill, which Perry fast-tracked by designating it as “emergency” legislation, enforces a photo ID requirement that can be met by a concealed handgun permit but not by a student ID from a state university. And under the law, only a Texas citizen who has passed a mandatory training program can register voters.

That would be the same Perry who is now challenging Virginia’s rules. But the differences between the law Perry signed and the law he’s challenging are instructive.

Perry is an experienced politician who has hired a professional staff for the express purpose of navigating the logistical hurdle of ballot access. And he still failed to make the Virginia ballot, despite the fact that the rules were well-known and unchanged since the last election.

In Texas, however, Perry has sharply changed the rules, changed them on people who do not have a staff dedicated to helping them vote, and in fact made it harder for outside groups to send professionals into the state to help potential voters navigate the new law.

Somehow, one suspects Perry wouldn't see the parallel here.

In other news:

• Meteor Blades had this week's must-read take down of Heritage "scholar" Hans Van Spokovsky's assertion that nearly 90,000 disenfranchised voters in South Carolina is an "insignificant" number and calling the Justice Department's blocking of the law that would take away their votes "racial paranoia." The shorter version: Spakovsky's claims are bullshit. Suppression of the votes of vulnerable citizens—the poor, the elderly, students, historically discriminated against people of color—is an ongoing, relentless campaign of right wingers. If one thing doesn't work, they try another. Attorney Gen. Holder has justifiably slipped a stick into their spokes. It's no surprise to hear them squealing about it.
• Last fall, a secret donor stepped in just before the election to bankroll the effort to suppress the vote in Maine, donating $250,000 to fight against the restoration of same-day voter registration to the state. We now know who was behind that donation, and it's the usual suspects. [T]he entire $250,000 worth of late money came from a single source: the American Justice Partnership.

  The AJP is a conservative legal organization based not in Maine, but in Michigan. On their website, the group states they are fighting against “the scheming George Soros money machine” which is “trying to sabotage your right to vote,” a claim apparently made without a hint of irony. Though the AJP doesn’t disclose where its funding comes from, the Bangor Daily News notes that it has partnered with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in the past, a group that has been instrumental in the proliferation of voter ID laws across the country.

• Another elderly woman in Tennessee has lost her vote because of new voter ID restrictions the state has enacted. We've heard about 96-year-old Dorothy Cooper and 91-year-old Virginia Lasater. Now they're joined by 93-year-old Thelma Mitchell, who has no birth certificate, and who had even been accused by a DMV worker of being an illegal immigrant because she couldn't produce it. To really put the cherry on top, Mitchell has an old state employee ID, that the state is now rejecting. She has that ID because she cleaned the state capitol building for 30 years.

President Obama (Wikimedia Commons)

The National Journal reports:

President Obama signed on Saturday the defense authorization bill, formally ending weeks of heated debate in Congress and intense lobbying by the administration to strip controversial provisions requiring the transfer of some terror suspects to military custody.

"I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists," Obama said in a statement accompanying his signature.

Full text of the signing statement below the fold.

No visible frozen donkey wheel in Upolu, Independent Samoa. (Kronocide/Wikicommons)

• Consider purchasing a Daily Kos subscription for yourself or a friend. Learn more about the community and how to subscribe right here.
• Somoa time travels. Samoa crossed the International Dateline. The island-nation skipped December 30, jumping from December 29 straight to December 31. The move brings Samoa onto the same calendar page as its local trading partners.
• The change will necessitate a 49-hour Shabbat for Jews on Somoa.
• Joe King will no longer be selling his homophobic, AIDS-mocking calendar through Amazon and Barnes and Noble sites, GLAAD reports.
• Anu Partanen at The Atlantic tips us off to What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success. The problem facing education in America isn't the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed. More equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive abroad.
• Politics takes a progressive turn in Jamaica, as Portia Simpson Miller leads the People’s National Party to become the new Prime Minister.
• Former GOP City Chair in New Jersey, young naked boys, video camera, arrest, the usual.
• Indiana State Sen. Vaneta Becker, (R-Evansville) wants to fine you $25 if you sing the "Star Spangled Banner" badly in the Hoosier state. No. Really.
• American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson got an nasty earful from fans when she tweeted support for Ron Paul. Her album sales spiked from #38 to #7 on Amazon. Call it a draw.
• Holy censorship! Fan boys and girls are irked that both comic book publishers DC and Marvel support the diabolical SOPA bill. To the Batcave!
• Still no word if the bazillion terabytes of pirated stuff downloaded to Congressional IP addresses included any Kelly Clarkson albums.
• Ron Paul's ascension in Iowa puts the Religious Right into full meltdown mode that a "real traditional values Republican" will not prevail in the Hawkeye state.
  

  Now that Paul's presidential campaign appears to be picking up steam, Religious Right activists are no longer simply dismissing Paul but are actively attacking him, with people like Bryan Fischer saying Paul is a renegade who should not be allowed to participate in GOP debates and Matt Barber writing columns about how "Ron Paul is dangerous."

  Apparently, in Iowa, not just any old crazy will do, you have to be just the right kind of crazy to satisfy this crowd.
• Rick Santorum may be just the right crazy. He explains to the AP how liberals caused (his) Catholic Church's pedophilia scandal and laments the striking down of sodomy laws. "We have laws in states, like the one at the Supreme Court right now, that has sodomy laws and they were there for a purpose." It's Santorum's job creation plan to station more (non-union) sex police in your bedroom.
• Related: add Lawrence vs. Texas to the long list of things Rick Perry can't remember.
• Newt Gingrich convened an emergency conference call with the Kingpins of the Religious Right. The master scheme is to shore up conservative religious support in Iowa for the adulterous candidate who has had as many religions as he's had wives (three).
• Alec MacGillis at The New Republic peeks behind the campaign trail curtain and declares Newt Gingrich, The King of the World. The plan is, in anticipation of the impending Gingrich monarchy, the 112th Congress will to vote to repeal the Affordable Health Care for America Act in the lame duck session of 2011. Also, Dodd-Frank, and Sarbanes-Oxley: And then the day after I'm sworn in, have them brought down, so you can literally sign the veto of ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley on the 21st or 22nd of January. That would set a momentum of change.
  
• The New York Times takes a look at the homes of the 2012 GOP hopefuls. Gingrich's 5,206-square-foot stone mansionette may seem big for a middle class American, but remember, his home must accommodate both Calista's Tiffany jewelry collection and Newt's freakishly large head simultaneously. New York designer Thad Hayes weighs in: “I hate to call them McMansions — it gives McDonald’s a bad name."
• New Hampshire is expected to vote in January on whether to bring the fun and games of Proposition 8 to New England.
• Check this out this stylish infographic chart from The Big Picture that purports to explain why Americans pay through the nose for the same drugs Canadians get cheaper.
• Just nine more hours to add to your favorite cause or candidate's final 2011 quarter fundraising totals.

Below the fold you'll find the nominations for Best Hate Mail of the Year, based on your votes in Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4.

So what was the most deliciously frothy hate mail of 2011? You decide, below the fold!

(click for larger image)

President Obama wraps up 2011 with a look back at momentous events from the year, while noting there's more to be done:

The last year has been a time of great challenge and great progress for our country. We ended one war and began to wind down another. We dealt a crippling blow to al-Qaeda and made America more secure. We stood by our friends and allies around the world through natural disasters and revolutions. And we began to see signs of economic recovery here at home, even as too many Americans are still struggling to get ahead.

Obama hopes for change in 2012 that will "grow our economy, create more jobs, and strengthen the middle class," and hits a theme that will no doubt be revisited frequently in the coming weeks:

I’m hopeful because of what we saw right before Christmas, when Members of Congress came together to prevent a tax hike for 160 million Americans – saving a typical family about $40 in every paycheck. They also made sure Americans looking for work won’t see their unemployment insurance cut off. And I expect Congress to finish the job by extending these provisions through the end of 2012.

In 2012, the president promises to:

... do everything I can to make America a place where hard work and responsibility are rewarded – one where everyone has a fair shot and everyone does their fair share ... (With that last part being a nice reminder about Republicans' protecting tax cuts for the wealthy.)

... and ends by saying:

Thanks for watching, and from Michelle, Malia, Sasha, Bo and myself, Happy New Year.

Complete transcript below the fold.

The planet Saturn shown to scale using the lower 48 states as reference. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL

The best science images of the year, well, that's always a matter of opinion. But in my opinion, it's hard to beat space-porn and this year had plenty. There is the always reliable Astronomy Picture of the Day, images of the asteroid belt object—never seen up close until now—Vesta taken by the Dawn Spacecraft, new stuff from Hubble and plenty of pics of mysterious Martain features. But for sheer beauty and awe, I don't think the Cassini-Saturn homepage can be beat. Lovely, ringed Saturn, the celebrity of our solar system, the super-model of the sun's children, and we got our money's worth out of the cameras aboard Cassini! The probe is still there, even now, snapping pics half a billion miles away, still going strong in the brutal cold of interplanetary space periodically blistered by sizzling radiation after five years!

• Sometimes a finger is just a finger, even one purportedly taken from the corpse of a Yeti. In this case the science of molecular biology gives the finger to believers of mythology and legend.
• There are too many superb science blogs to even begin to name them, let alone pick the best. But if forced to choose one off the top of my head, I found myself spending more and more time at Discover Mag's Bad Astronomy this year. How about you?
• Same goes for science stories, from the hunt for the nanoscopic Higgs Boson to exosolar planet finder Kepler, there are just too many great science stories to choose just one or even the top ten. But seeing a climate change denialist get his clocked cleaned by a study he championed for years was pretty sweet.
• My favorite story of the year does not involve evolution, or space, or even science. And it was all thanks to a tiny group of protestors whose voice grew from a faint whisper into a middle-class roar. Occupy Wall Street compleletely changed U.S. political dynamics, from topics and ground the usual suspects are familiar with, to one they could find no traction on. Our Founding Fathers would be proud of you all, I know I am. The best part about OWS ... Teaparty who?  

Visual source: Newseum

Nate's best and worst, as chosen by him:

With occasional exception, this blog was much too bullish on Rick Perry’s candidacy, skeptical of his initial decline in the polls and then anticipating a rebound that has not yet occurred. Lots of smart people got Perry wrong. Bigger mistakes were not seeing Connecticut coming (basketball) and thinking Derek Jeter was washed up (he hit .300 after that.) Connecticut, for instance, is a very fashionable pick right now, and I wouldn’t necessarily bet my life on the proposition that they only have a 1-in-142 chance of winning the tournament, as our model seems to conclude (in part because they have a very difficult draw). But I would emphatically recommend against picking them, just because everyone else in your pool is liable to.

Unless everyone else in your pool reads FiveThirtyEight, in which case they’re a sweet pick.

But reading Nate is always fun.  And, as always, he got a lot right.

Mark Blumenthal:

Romney's slight edge is not large enough to be statistically significant in the single Marist survey, but it is consistent with the current candidate estimates produced by the HuffPost Pollster chart, which is based on all available public polls. The chart currently shows Romney leading Paul by a percentage point and a half (21.7 to 20.2 percent), followed by Gingrich (14.3 percent) and Santorum (13.1 percent).

CBS:

Santorum is finally experiencing his mini-surge, and he stands to chip away at some of the evangelical Christian voters that represent the overlap in his and Perry's support. Perry has moved swiftly to take down his newly threatening opponent, waiting less than 24 hours after a a CNN/Time/ORC poll showed Santorum at 16 percent to start attacking him on the stump as an "earmarker." (Santorum has defended getting earmarks for his state before congressional Republicans banned the practice.)
Scott Clement/WaPo Behind the Numbers: Republican problems with Hispanic voters larger than ever

The stakes for Republicans are high. The percentage of whites in the electorate dropped from 89 percent in 1972 to 74 percent in 2008, but John McCain received 90 percent of his support from whites. With more than eight in 10 black voters supporting the Democratic nominee in every recent election, Hispanic voters are key to expanding Republican support among the growing non-white population.

Texas on the Potomac lists 2011 political winners (Obama and both Clintons) and, here, losers:

John Boehner
He’s the House Republicans’ leader in name only. The Tea Party tail is wagging the GOP dog.

Rick Scott
How unpopular can a governor be without getting indicted? Ask Florida’s first-term governor.

John Kasich
The freshman governor’s signature accomplishment — a sweeping anti-union measure — was repudiated by Ohio voters at the polls in November.

Rick Perry
As Karl Rove would say, “I know George W. Bush. George W. Bush is a friend of mine. And governor, you’re no George W. Bush.”

Speaking of Rick Perry, here's Dave Helfert in HuffPost: Now that I'm home in Austin for the remainder of the year, I feel a strong duty to step up and do what someone in Texas should have done months ago: apologize for Governor Rick Perry. It seemed presumptuous to do so from Washington, DC, but it definitely needs doing and it just can't wait a moment longer.

So I hereby apologize that the man who constantly talks about the constitutional preeminence of the 50 states over the national government, as if that little disagreement in 1861 had not finally settled the issue; and who promises to make Congress a part-time institution and the federal courts subservient to just about everything, has now found it necessary to file a lawsuit against one of those states, and in one of those federal courts.

LA Times on Democrats for Ron Paul: Voters who helped elect Obama in 2008 are planning to cast Republican ballots Tuesday, and Rep. Ron Paul is perhaps the most likely to benefit from the crossovers. Gail Collins: What a big week coming up! New Year’s Day and then the Iowa caucuses! Doesn’t get any better than that. And, in honor of this double-whammy of exciting events, here’s the End-of-the-Year Republican Presidential Primary Quiz:

Which of the following has Rick Perry not gotten wrong, so far, during his presidential campaign:

A) Number of Supreme Court justices

B) Legal voting age in the United States

C) Date of the election

D) Whether New Hampshire has a primary or caucuses

E) Number of stars on the Texas state flag

F) Name of the late leader of North Korea

G) Century in which the American Revolution was fought

...

Michele Bachmann: “There are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes, who believe”:

A) “In intelligent design.”

B) “That vaccines cause mental retardation.”

C) “That the founding fathers eliminated slavery.”

D) “That I should be president of the United States.”

You can't make this stuff up.

A new survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press indicates that Americans have not much changed their minds  in the past year regarding the terms "socialism" and "capitalism": The American public’s take on capitalism remains mixed, with just slightly more saying they have a positive (50%) than a negative (40%) reaction to the term. That’s largely unchanged from a 52% to 37% balance of opinion in April 2010.

Socialism is a negative for most Americans, but certainly not all. Six-in-ten (60%) say they have a negative reaction to the word; 31% have a positive reaction. Those numbers are little changed from when the question was last asked in April 2010. ...

Both of the ideological descriptions used most frequently in American politics—conservative and liberal—receive more positive than negative reactions from the American public. But the positives for conservative (62%) are higher than for liberal (50%). This gap mainly reflects the balance of what people call themselves; more people consistently call themselves conservative than liberal in public opinion polling. Those who think of themselves as politically “moderate” give similarly positive assessments to both words.

As many Democratic strategists have argued, the term progressive receives a far more positive reaction from the American public than the term liberal (67% vs 50%), though the difference is primarily among Republicans.

The term capitalism elicits more positive (50%) than negative (40%) reactions from the American public, but not by much. And while Americans of different incomes and ideological perspectives offer different opinions on capitalism, the divides are not as wide as on other terms measured.

Given that we are daily immersed in a media bath of pro-capitalist propaganda punctuated with relentless jabs against socialism, it's amazing the latter term still gets a positive rating from nearly a third of the population.

As on so many other issues, both economic and not, there is a distinct difference in the views of white Americans and people of color. For instance, 55 percent of whites see "capitalism" positively, but only 41 percent of blacks do and only 32 percent of Hispanics do. The views regarding "socialism" are similarly skewed by race, and even more sharply: Just 24 percent of whites view "socialisim" positively, but 55 percent of blacks and 44 percent of Hispanics do.

Among the other findings in the poll was a sharp generational difference regarding the term "libertarian." While 38 percent of respondents overall saw it as positive, 50 percent of young Americans (18-29) viewed it that way. The older a respondent was, the less likely s/he was to view the term positively. In the 65+ demographic, only 25 percent did so.

Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2009:

NBC Nightly news reports on the alarming trend of people trying to scrape through tough economic times by cutting back on the medications they need:

As far back as October, the Kaiser Health Foundation found that almost half the people in the country had somebody in their family who was skimping on medical care to save money:

Nearly half (47%) of the public reports someone in their family skipping pills, postponing  or cutting back on medical care they said they needed in the past year due to the cost of care.  For example, just over one-third say they or a family member put off or postponed needed care and three in ten say they skipped a recommended test or treatment – increases of seven percentage points from last April’s tracking poll which asks the same question.

We're now a year into the Bush Recession, and numbers like this are going to get even worse. It's a clear demonstration of the downside of allowing drug manufacturers to charge ever-higher sums for medicine, and it's just another reason why the Obama team is correct to make health care an important component of their stimulus plan.

Tweet of the Day:

High Impact Posts are here. Top Comments are here.

Yesterday, it looked like yet another company was deciding that screwing their customers for a few more bucks would make fine business sense. From CNN: Verizon Wireless will soon make some customers pay for the privilege of paying their bills.

The nation's largest wireless company is instituting a $2 "convenience charge" for those customers who make one-time bill payments either online or by telephone. The fee will go into effect on Jan. 15.

Yep, you'd be paying a two dollar bill-paying fee to pay your Verizon bill. Brilliant!

The rules on what was to count as requiring you to pay that extra two dollars a month, as announced, were a bit complicated, but the short version is that if you sent a check in via the mail, you wouldn't get charged, but if you paid online, you would. Because electronic payments are just so dreadfully hard to process, compared to mailed checks? Not quite, since you also wouldn't get charged if you've signed up for automatic bill payment.

Reading through the rules, they seemed to be primarily designed as a way to screw customers, and especially customers who pay bills via credit card—unless they visited the store or signed up for automatic payments, in which case they could pay with their credit cards just fine. You could make the case that poor, poor Verizon is being charged money by the credit card companies for handling those transactions, and need to make it back somehow, but I don't think anyone credibly believes that those fees cost Verizon two dollars per transaction—or that the credit card fees are more than it costs to sort through mailed checks by hand.

So, as I said, it seemed fairly explicitly to be a Bank of America-style bid to just squeeze customers because they could.

But things look to be turning out differently. According to CNBC, the FCC stated it was "concerned" about the new fee, and is "looking into the matter". I can imagine so: the telecommunications industry is so dominated by a handful of companies that, if those other companies followed suit, consumers would quickly find themselves unable to avoid those pay-to-pay fees.

Now, a mere 24 or so hours after announcing that new fee, Verizon seems to be backing off:

Verizon said Friday that it was scrapping a controversial $2 fee for one-time bill payments announced just a day earlier. The announcement had immediately sparked an uproar online from customers irate about the prospect of incurring further fees simply by paying existing ones.

"At Verizon, we take great care to listen to our customers. Based on their input, we believe the best path forward is to encourage customers to take advantage of the best and most efficient options, eliminating the need to institute the fee at this time," Verizon CEO Dan Mead said in a statement.

Heavens. How very big of them.

While giving a tiny bit of credit to Verizon for quickly recognizing how badly this was going to backfire on them, this may otherwise have been the biggest corporate bungle since the Netflix debacle, or since Bank of America's own attempt to institute new "because we feel like it" fees. Or since GoDaddy decided to support SOPA, only to be met with massive boycott efforts? It's hard to say, there's been so many of them of late.

One lesson here may be that, for the same reasons the Occupy movement took hold, customers are simply too fed up at this point to tolerate these new attempts to screw them. Times are too lean, and people are too tired of it, and people are more and more willing to boycott or otherwise punish companies that try it. Companies looking to make a cheap, crooked buck off their customers are going to have to think a bit harder about it than they used to.

The sure sign that you are a hopeless Daily Kos Elections political addict: if your New Year's Eve plans revolve around the 7 PM (ET) release of the Selzer/Des Moines Register poll in Iowa, you have a problem.

But, trust me, you have lots and lots of company, including presumably the eight candidates still trying to become the Republican nominee for president. Some pollsters got into the mix today, as well, so before we look inside the numbers, let's look at those GOP primary numbers:

NATIONAL (Gallup Tracking): Romney 26, Gingrich 24, Paul 11, Perry 7, Bachmann 5, Santorum 5, Huntsman 2

FLORIDA (Tel Opinion Research): Romney 27, Gingrich 26, Paul 5, Bachmann 4, Perry 4, Huntsman 1, Santorum 1

IOWA (NBC/Marist): Romney 23, Paul 21, Santorum 15, Perry 14, Gingrich 13, Bachmann 6, Huntsman 2

IOWA (We Ask America): Romney 24, Santorum 17, Paul 14, Gingrich 13, Bachmann 12, Perry 10, Huntsman 4

As has been the case all week, the attention is solely on the primary election polling, so (once again) there are no Obama v. GOP matchups to close the week. For a look under the hood on the three primary polls listed above, head past the jump for all the goods.

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE

2011: The Thrilling Conclusion!

It's almost over! It's first and goal! Time to spike the pink slips, food stamps, pepper-spray canisters and foreclosure notices in the end zone. 2011 is about to become an ex-year.

It was, um…oh, let's be charitable and call it a rebuilding year. One thing I know for sure: without all the Republican obstruction and pettiness, we'd be ending the year in noticeably better shape. But…no. Until they control every single lever of power, you'll get no apple pie or white picket fence unless your net worth is in seven figures and your hobby is stuffing and mounting politicians' souls.

But, man, if you point this year at a funhouse mirror, you could die from laughing.  Sometimes I think we're just God's little sea monkeys, scurrying around and bonkin' ourselves on the head for Her amusement. That's cool with me, I guess. Why not? It sure beats being a dust particle on Pluto (at least from what the dust particles on Pluto tell me at night---chatty bunch).

Kurt Vonnegut SPOILER ALERT: "So it goes."

Anyway. Below the fold is the thrilling conclusion---October through five minutes ago---of our flashback series, 2011: Is It 2012 Yet? As we await the descent of the giant ball in Times Square, all the writers, editors, gaffers, key grips, fuzzy critters and caterers at C&J wish you a festive weekend and a tolerable 2012, stuffed with cash, pie, basic sanitation and lots of warm 'n fuzzy gettingalongness.

Cheers and Jeers goes back yonder below the fold... [Swoosh!!] Right now! [Gong!!]

What's coming up on Sunday Kos ...

• DemFromCT will look thought the details of the Des Moines Register final Iowa poll for clues as to who is likely to actually show up.
• Dante Atkins will speculate about how the third-party group known as Americans Elect could affect the 2012 race.
• In "Arizona Bigotry" Denise Oliver-Velez will discuss the ruling by administrative law judge Lewis Kowal that ethnic studies are illegal.
• Scott Wooledge explains how skyrocketing health care costs became a very personal battle over the holidays.
• After a litany of anti-Romneys have now come and gone, Mitt Romney may well be poised to be the last man standing. Steve Singiser explores the inevitability of Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee, and why the only certainty in the GOP presidential sweepstakes is continued uncertainty.
• Hunter says he's just going to phone something in.
• They all sound the same! Georgia Logothetis will explore the most common political soundbites. Let's hope for some originality from candidates in 2012....
• Mark Sumner begins work on a new novel, and invites you to join in with your own writing project as we spend six months getting to "THE END".

Rick Santorum

Rick Santorum may be peaking in Iowa at just the right time, and he wants to be sure we know that whether he's on the top or the bottom of Tuesday's results, he took his time with the people of Iowa:

To some extent, Santorum's rise probably can be attributed to a relentless, face-to-face campaign schedule that included holding hundreds of usually small events where he offers his standard pitch and then hangs around to take questions for as long as folks want to pepper him.

"We've done, as of today, 357 town meetings in Iowa," Santorum crows, adding that he didn't just speak to Iowans, but courted them. "We weren't speed-dating."

Like the guy who was the quarterback of his high school football team and 20 years later is still telling those stories to impress dates, some of Santorum's lines are a little dated:

“The symmetry in my political career in what we’re doing here is pretty amazing,” he mused at his Coralville stop this week. “I ran against the author of Clintoncare in 1994.”

But this race continues to be in search of the right Not-Romney for Iowa's evangelicals, who constituted 60 percent of the state's Republican caucusgoers in 2008. With Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann having squandered their respective moments as the frontrunner for that base, Santorum's surge may be well timed to give us frothy mix material for weeks to come.

Will these tears be the secret sauce that revives Newt Gingrich's campaign?

Newt Gingrich broke down in tears here Friday morning when asked to recall a special memory of his mother, Kit Gingrich, who died from cancer in 2003.

Sure to invoke memories of Hillary Clinton’s tearing up in New Hampshire four years ago, the moment was a drastic departure from Gingrich’s usual image as a stoic, policy-driven candidate. The former House speaker cried more than once — and had to be handed tissues by one of his daughters seated in the front row — as he revealed his human side.

But while Hillary Clinton's tears came in response to a question from a voter, Newt Gingrich choked up after a long preamble from Frank Luntz in which Luntz all but got on his knees, pleading with Newt to show some emotion. And boy did Newt deliver, unleashing a display of waterworks that would have put the mourners of Kim Jong Il to shame. I have to admit, I think it made for some good video. And although Luntz clearly primed the pump, it even seemed genuine-ish—at least to me. But that's just my opinion...and whether it was real or not, the thing I really care about is this: will it be enough to boost Gingrich's chances on Tuesday?

(Larry Downing/Reuters)
Mitt "Groucho" Romney: "These are my principles. And if you don't like them, I have others." When he challenged Ted Kennedy in the 1994 U.S. Senate race, Mitt Romney used polling data to determine that he would run as a pro-choice candidate while remaining personally pro-life, according to a new book by Boston journalist Ronald Scott.

The Washington Examiner revealed the moment in Scott's book:

According to Scott, Romney revealed that polling from Richard Wirthlin, Ronald Reagan's former pollster whom Romney had hired for the '94 campaign, showed it would be impossible for a pro-life candidate to win statewide office in Massachusetts. In light of that, Romney decided to run as a pro-choice candidate, pledging to support Roe v. Wade, while remaining personally pro-life.

Well, that's certainly pragmatic. If your positions will keep you from getting elected, change your positions. Now he's trying to win the primaries, so Mitt's switched his abortion stance back to his original anti-abortion position (or an even more draconian one, I can't keep up) and no doubt during the general election he'll find yet another position to take.

As much as we might scorn Romney for changing his past position purely based on polling numbers, I think I might find this even more shallow, though:

In an October 1994 debate, Romney said he believed that abortion should be "safe and legal" and that Roe v. Wade should stand. He added, "And my personal beliefs, like the personal beliefs of other people, should not be brought into a political campaign."

Sen. Kennedy seized on his stance: "On the question of the choice issue, I have supported the Roe v. Wade. I am pro-choice. My opponent is multiple choice."

Romney responded, "I have my own beliefs and those beliefs are very dear to me. One of them is that I do not impose my beliefs on other people." He then told the story of a family friend who passed away from an illegal abortion.

So at least back then, his justification for changing his position is that he would not impose his beliefs on other people (bringing a family relative into it as an example). Now he'll "impose his beliefs" on you happily, I guess, because the Republican base wants him to.

This is what I find so detestable about Romney. Not any individual positions, or even the more atrocious elements of his corporate past, but his apparent lack of any strong principles whatsoever. Every stance is "whatever it has to be," and tomorrow it might be something else. Both his corporate and his electoral lives have demonstrated a complete lack of personal conviction or morality. Just ambition.

(D-Kuru/Wikimedia Commons)
Massive grassroots opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House is getting big results. Nintendo, Electronic Arts and Sony Electronics—some of the largest video game companies in the world—have all pulled their support for an online bill that could encourage censorship online, according to an updated list of supporters of the bill.

Those three companies all supported the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) when it first entered Congress, according to a report from Joystiq in November.

As the potentially disastrous unintended consequences of the bill have become more apparent, more companies are listening to their customers and withdrawing support.