1) Romney Says Obama Has ‘Secular Agenda’ (or Wait a minute! Isn’t the US of Amurica SUPPOSED to be a secular nation?) - ”You expect the president of the United States to be sensitive to that freedom and protect it and, unfortunately, perhaps because of the people the president hangs around with, and their agenda, their secular agenda, they have fought against religion. I can assure you, as someone who has understood very personally the significance of religious tolerance and religious freedom and the right to one’s own conscience, I will make sure that we never again attack religious liberty in the United States of America.” || Note: I wonder if Santorum thinks Romney, as a Mormon, is a true “Christian”?

image: mcbrewster

2) Romney makes no apologies for his cars (warning: Washington Times article) - Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, criticized by some for his unprompted comments Friday on the number of cars his family owns, said Sunday he can’t please everyone on the campaign trail. “I can’t be perfect. If people think there’s something wrong with being successful, then they ought to vote for the other guy, because I’ve been extraordinarily successful,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” Mr. Romney, campaigning in Michigan on Friday ahead of Tuesday’s primary, told an audience that his wife, Ann, “drives a couple of Cadillacs.”

3) Santorum: Romney and Paul in ‘coordination’ against me (or the calculated alliance between Romney and Paul to vote Santorum off the island) - “I felt like, you know, messages were being slipped behind my chair,” he added. Santorum’s remarks, which came in response to a question from a member of the audience, reflect growing attention on a theory about an unlikely political partnership. “It is pretty remarkable in 20 debates that Ron Paul has never attacked Mitt Romney,” Santorum said. Calling him Romney’s “wingman,” Santorum said of Paul, “he is no conservative,” adding, “we don’t need the Ron Paul faction and the moderate establishment teamed up to attack the real conservative in this race.”

4) Michigan Tea Partiers Share Rick Santorum’s Fears Over Obama’s College Push (Teabaggers are equating college with Communism now) - But for the tea party crowd gathered here as part of an Americans For Prosperity rally, Santorum’s words about higher education were right on point. “President Obama wants everybody in America to go to college,” Santorum said. “What a snob!” Santorum started by saying some people don’t need to go to college: “Not all folks are gifted the same way. Some people have incredible gifts with their hands.” He then suggested there was an sinister motive behind Obama’s push to get more Americans in college classrooms. [...] So I set out into the crowded ballroom to find out just what the people the AFP crowd thought of Santorum’s attack line. Turns out they quite liked it…

Ayatollah Santorum’s Bluecollar Pandering Fail - Today at an Americans For Prosperity rally in Michigan, Rick Santorum called President Obama a “snob” for wanting to send more Americans to college. “There are good, decent men and women who work hard every day and put their skills to the test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor,” Santorum declared. But back in his 2006 Senate re-election campaign, Santorum was touting his plan to send every Pennsylvanian to college. Evan McMorris-Santoro reports from Michigan.

Also at this rally: Santorum Again Relates Food Stamps to Minorities (except this time he didn’t say “BLAH people”) - Rick Santorum on Saturday resuscitated one of his more controversial remarks from the past few months of campaigning for president, connecting food stamps with “minority communities.” Speaking to a large crowd at the conservative Americans for Prosperity Presidential forum here, Santorum said he planned to “talk to minority communities, not about giving them food stamps and government dependency, but about creating jobs so that they can participate in the rise of this country.”

5) America’s last hope: A strong labor movement - Instead of being fundamentally discredited, the oligarchs and plutocrats who crashed our economy are raking in record profits and acting even more aggressively to bury the American labor movement once and for all. Over the last year, several labor leaders have told me that they believe unions have only about five more years left if they don’t figure out some kind of breakthrough strategy. The complete collapse of unions would have devastating consequences. The labor movement has played a crucial role in advancing economic justice in the workplace and in politics. Union membership raises median weekly earnings and reduces race- and gender-based income gaps, and union workers are much more likely to receive health care and pension benefits than workers who are not members of a labor union. The decline of organized labor is directly linked to the rise in economic inequality over the last 40 years and the onset of a “Second Gilded Age.” The decline in union density coupled with the decline in the real value of the minimum wage explains one-third of the dramatic growth in wage inequality since the early 1970s.

6) Practically Frothing For War - The redemption of Rick Santorum as Serious Foreign Policy Thinker(tm) comes courtesy of Michael Ledeen in the WSJ.  And so it goes. Clearly the Murdoch machine is hedging their bets when it comes to the very real possibility that the man who will carry the GOP’s standard into battle against President Obama is going to be a know-nothing fundamentalist dipstick. So like Bush 43 before him, the same “scholars” who told us that it didn’t really matter that the Republican candidate is a moron because he would be surrounded by a brain trust of great minds led by the necessary vision and will to “win” are hard at work constructing the exact same fantasy with Iran as their target.

7) Last week the Christianity police (Rick Santorum and Franklin Graham) came forward to discredit the president’s religious beliefs - According to a 2008 poll by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, more than half of American Christians believe there are many paths to heaven. The data say it best: No matter what exclusivist doctrines pastors preach from the pulpit, Americans are more open-minded. Last year, an evangelical pastor from Michigan named Rob Bell roused the ire of his colleagues by suggesting, in a book called “Love Wins,” that mostly everybody goes to heaven. It was a massive bestseller. America was founded by people who hoped that by allowing religious diversity to flourish, they might discourage extremism from growing. Counter to the claims of so many Christian conservatives, the intent of the First Amendment is not to protect any particular brand of Christianity from government encroachments, but to allow all kinds of believers to practice freely.

8) What Happens At A Brokered Convention? - The last time Americans saw a full-on major party brawl was when Teddy Kennedy decided to push his liberal economic vision at the 1980 New York City Democratic convention. Kennedy attempted to overcome sitting president Jimmy Carter’s nomination by fighting a rule change that would compel delegates to vote on their first ballot for the candidates to whom they had pledged their votes during the primaries. He lost this challenge, along with the nomination, but fought hard to have his pro-workers’ rights views incorporated into the party platform. Kennedy’s impassioned speech to convention delegates led to 40 minutes of floor demonstration, proving once and for all the power of quivering, patrician timbre, and straight-up audacity. Jamelle Bouie believes that “Republican leaders would have a serious problem on their hands if they tried to buck the voters and install a candidate of their own.”

9) OPERATION HILARITY: How Serious Is The Democratic Crossover Vote Threat In Michigan? - Are clever Democratic activists really going to cost Mitt Romney his home state on Tuesday? Or is the grassroots plan to use Michigan’s open primary as a means to humiliate the candidate most see as the biggest threat to President Obama in the fall just a red herring? Romney’s allies aren’t worried. Democrats and Obama’s campaign aren’t getting involved. And yet, activists think they just might pull this thing off. Welcome to the Michigan primary sideshow that just might play a part in the main event.