Sen. Daniel Thatcher, R-West Valley City, was absent during the vote. But he said later that he opposes the resolution taking effect this year, fearing many will see it as a move to help former state Sen. Dan Liljenquist, R-Bountiful, in his race against incumbent U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. “I think people may see it as us trying to help a buddy, and the importance of what happened with the 17th Amendment may be lost,” he said.

WALSH: If I were the Speaker, starting last year, every month we would have voted to repeal ObamaCare. I would have pulled ObamaCare up on the floor of the House yesterday.

Watch it:

Walsh’s scheme is an exercise in both redundancy and futility several times over, because no matter how many times the House passes a repeal (it only takes one time to matter), the Senate, controlled by Democrats, is not going to do the same. And even if they did, President Obama would certainly veto a bill killing his signature legislative accomplishment.

Meanwhile, Walsh would continue to enjoy his government healthcare while wasting everyone else’s time.

While it’s unclear if Nickless is calling for literal violence in opposition to the mandate — something that’s difficult to square with Jesus Christ’s teaching that “if someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other” — or merely calling for strong resistance, his comment underscores the extreme rhetoric with which some religious conservatives have responded to the Obama Administration’s effort to ensure that all women have access to contraception. Some recently told Sean Hannity they’d be willing to die before complying with the law.

GINGRICH: First of all, I don’t know that he made a big shift. It’s a clever maneuver that may actually be worse, not better. I want to explore it carefully. A number of leading Catholic intellectuals believe this is actually worse. It’s certainly worse as a matter of conscience.

Watch it:

Gingrich’s position that the accommodation is even “worse” than the original plan seems to put him even farther to the right that his fellow Republican presidential candidates on the issue who have characterized the change as “another deception.” And it’s an especially bold claim considering that Gingrich doesn’t explain why he think the new policy is worse, as it will require insurance companies, instead of religiously-affiliated employers, to provide an option for contraception coverage

The “Catholic intellectuals” Gingrich mentions is likely a reference a group who signed onto an open letter opposing the mandate. One of the letter’s top signers, Robert George, is a prominent anti-gay Catholic activist associated with the National Organization for Marriage. Another top signer, Mary Ann Glendon, is a Mitt Romney supporter who has gone to so far as to contest the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV. “The Holy See in no way endorses contraception or the use of condoms, either as a family planning measure or in HIV/AIDS prevention programs,” she said.

But Gingrich seems to be putting himself even farther to the right than the signers of the letter, as even they don’t seem to think the accommodation is worse than the original decision, though they are opposed to both.

Ready for the bighouse

Rich Land of the Southern Baptist Convention hit the two poles of overly emphatic rhetoric in one breath, first invoking the Holocaust by reciting Martin Niemöller famous poem “First they came…,” before comparing himself to Martin Luther King Jr. by saying he was ready to “follow in the footsteps” of the civil rights giant by dispatching letters from jail, if need be.

Hannity responded by asking the baker’s dozen religious leader, “how many of you would be willing to go to jail over this?” — all but three or four raised their hands.

But Father Jonathan Morris, a Fox News contributor and Catholic priest in New York City, one upped Land, saying he was ready to put his life on the line. “It’s very clear, people have died for those things that are absolutely essential for their faith. It’s not a question of are you willing to go to jail, it’s if I’m asked to do something that goes against my conscious, I’d better be willing to die for that.” He continued, “If I’m not willing to die for that, what am I standing up for?” Watch it:

Conservative commentator Michele Malkin also reached for the Holocaust invocation on this issue, and pastor Rick Warren, who spoke at Obama’s inauguration said he would be willing to go to jail.

But this is a silly offer of self-sacrifice, as there is no actual threat of jail time. While the final regulations have yet to be written, the penalty will be financial — not criminal — and regulated by the IRS, likely about $1,000 per violation, according to an expect contacted by ThinkProgress. As Andrew Sullivan notes, by their, Rick Warren should already be in jail, as he’s a resident of California, which has a stricter contraception mandate than the new federal one.

Frank Gaffney and John Bolton, who condemned Gaffney in a unanimous ACU resolution

Gaffney’s attacks on conservative stalwarts like Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, and Suhail Khan, a Bush administration offical, as agents of the Muslim Brotherhood has made him a bit of a pariah among conservatives. David Keene, the then-chairman of the American Conservative Union (ACU), which puts on CPAC, and the current head of the NRA, told ThinkProgress last year that Gaffney “has become personally and tiresomely obsessed with his weird belief that anyone who doesn’t agree with him…[must be] dupes of the nation’s enemies.”

This year, the ban on Gaffney’s official participation remained in effect, but he was able to purchase a side room at the conference through TeaParty.net, giving him unofficial but proximate access to the conference. Conservatives are hesitant to speak ill about each other in public, but a source close to CPAC told ThinkProgress that Gaffney, already on thin ice, made CPAC leadership “livid” by attacking Norquist during his panel Saturday.

The degree to which conservative leaders have tried to distance themselves from Gaffney and his Sharia conspiracy theories is especially apparent given two documents obtained exclusively by ThinkProgress.

Last September, the board of the ACU unanimously passed a resolution (read it here) condemning the “false and unfounded” attacks Gaffney had made against Norquist and Khan, both board members, after having another board member, Cleta Mitchell, look into Gaffney’s serious charges of sedition and abetting an enemy.

In a letter to the ACU board (read it here), Mitchell, a prominent and very conservative attorney, said she reviewed the “evidence” Gaffney presented (including a lengthy PowerPoiint presentation and DVDs smearing Norquist and Khan), and found Gaffney’s “ceaseless war” to be “reprehensible.” She wrote in the conclusion:

I have tried to talk Mr.Gaffney into ceasing these attacks – but to no avail. I have done everything I know to do to try and bring this to a halt, including private conversations and public appearances saying essentially what I have said in this letter. I have taken whatever official actions in my capacity as a board member of various organizations to vote against any motion that would support Mr. Gaffney’s allegations and will continue to do so.

Further, I will work to ensure that any organization with which I am involved will not b eallowed to be used as a platform to spread Mr. Gaffney’s baseless attacks.

The unanimous ACU board — which includes neoconservatives like U.N. ambassador John Bolton — endorsed the letter and resolved that Gaffney’s claims against Kahn and Norquist were “false and unfounded,” writing that the board “profoundly regrets and rejects as unwarranted the past and on-going attacks upon their patriotism and character.”

The board includes some of the most prominent conservative operatives and activists in the country (view a full list here, though Asa Hutchison and Carly Fiorina were not members at the time of the letter).

Gaffney is increasingly isolated by his fellow conservatives, yet his organization continues to receive funding from major mainstream conservative donors like the Bradley Foundation.

View the letter and resolution.

SANTORUM: It was a secular revolution on which we relied on the goodness of each other. This is the left’s view of where America should go. And of course where did France go? To the guillotine. To tyranny. If there are no rights that government needs to respect, then what we see with ObamaCare is just the beginning of what government will do to you.

Watch it:

But missed in this debate is the fact Boehner and McConnell’s own health insurance plans covers contraception, something they now want to deny to others.

Since 1998, every insurer participating in the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program (FEHBP) — including members of Congress — has had access to comprehensive contraceptive coverage, including emergency contraception, such as the morning after pill. Republican lawmakers now want to prevent access to the coverage they enjoy to employees of religious organizations who may not be of that religion or who disagree with anti-contraception doctrine (89 percent of Catholics say contraception decision should be theirs, not the church’s).

But there is even more troubling news for Romney. As ThinkProgress has noted, Republican turnout has been down in virtually every primary so far, suggesting a lack of enthusiasm for Romney and the rest of the GOP field. But last night’s results are far more severe. Turnout was not just down but down tremendously, and in many places, Romney was unable to capture anywhere close to as many votes as he won in 2008.

Romney won Colorado with 60 percent of the vote four years ago, and its demographics favored the candidate, but this year, Romney won just 34.9 percent of the vote, coming 6 points shy of Santorum. In Minnesota, which Romney won with 41 percent of the vote in 2008, he won just 16.9 percent last night — coming in third behind Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX). And in Missouri, Romney was down slightly, from 29 percent in 2008 to 25.3 percent last night.

Looking at the vote totals, instead of percentages, which takes into account voter turnout, the numbers are even worse for Romney, as this graphic produced by ThinkProgress’ Adam Peck shows:

In some places, Romney’s collapse was even more stunning. As the New York Times’ Nate Silver noted, “Romney’s stronger areas in [Colorado] were associated with turnout declines of about 20 percent. But turnout was steady or slightly up in places where Rick Santorum did well.” For instance, in Pueblo County, where turnout was actually up, Romney took just 27 percent of the vote — a huge drop from the 62 percent he won in 2008. And in the Denver suburbs, which Romney won, he was still way down from 2008. In Douglas County, Romney went from 72 percent in 2008 to 46 percent; in Arapaho County, he went from 66 percent to 45 percent; and in Jeffferson County, he went from 65 percent to 39 percent.

Romney won comfortably in earlier primaries in Florida and Nevada, but only after drowning his competitors in millions of dollars of negative advertising. Romney’s campaign did not invest heavily in last night’s primaries, suggesting the candidate may have hard time winning on his own, without spending huge amounts to destory his competition in every state.

The results also seem to confirm the findings of a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, which showed that the more people learn about Mitt Romney, the less they like him.

Of course, Romney’s past support for the right to choose has been well documented, but Romney’s connection to Planned Parenthood has been largely overlooked.

Mitt and Ann Romney attended a Planned Parenthood fundraiser in Cohasset, Massachusetts in 1994, and Ann wrote a $150 check to the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, various news outlets reported. “They were both there, and I remember very well chatting with both of them, and talking about his support for the pro-choice agenda,” Nicki Nichols Gamble, the president of the League told ABC News in 2007.

That year, the Boston Globe published this photo, which purportedly shows Romney at the fundraiser:

During his successful race for Governor of Massachusetts 2002, Romney also signed a pro-choice pledge organized by Planned Parenthood.

See Think Progress’ full rundown of Mitt Romney’s evolving attitudes towards abortion.

Gingrich has already been caught vastly inflating his Twitter following with phony accounts, and now CNN now reports that the campaign’s communications director, Joe DeSantis, has been aggressively making dozens of edits of Gingrich’s Wikipedia page. DeSantis has attempted to scrub or embellish embarrassing information about Gingrich’s marital troubles, House ethics investigation, and $500,000 Tiffany credit line:

Wikipedia records show DeSantis has made over 60 adjustments to entries in the online, publicly-edited encyclopedia to the biographical entry on Gingrich, the similar page on his wife, Callista, and a separate page on one of their books, Rediscovering Good in America. [...]

DeSantis’ edits, which began in October of 2008, included rewriting, removing, and editing lines, including several edits to references of Gingrich’s marriages, according to Wikipedia edit records, which are published and publicly viewable on the site.

While it’s common for campaigns to monitor and request edits to their candidates’ Wikipedia pages, what’s surprising is the degree to which DeSantis, a senior campaign official, has personally gone to great lengths to micromanage his boss’s entry.

The poll also showed that Komen’s brand took a big hit in the controversy. A majority of all Americans, 53 percent, opposed Komen’s decision, while just 38 percent supported it. 49 percent said it made them less likely to support Komen financially in the future.

Hosts Eric Bolling, Steve Doocy, and Gretchen Carlson went beyond merely downplaying the numbers to contriving a conspiracy theory to explain them away:

BOLLING: So are they playing around with the numbers? Look, it’s the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it’s supposed to be non-partisan, but that’s the Department of Labor. Hilda Solis heads the Department of Labor, Hilda Solis works directly to Obama. I’m — you know.

DOOCY: Are you saying they’re cooking the books?

BOLLING: I’m saying there’s room for error. There’s room — when you’re talking about 4 million people, how do you know?

DOOCY: How do you know?

CARLSON: I don’t think anyone should surprised that in an election year — [...] So it’s interpretation, I think is the way in which we’d describe it.

Watch it, via Media Matters:

If it weren’t improper to psychologically analyse strangers, one might think the Fox hosts are displaying a textbook example of cognitive dissonance here, a psychological phenomena in which people who hold a strong belief about something invent (sometimes far fetched) explanations for new evidence that conflicts with their existing views. Obama is bad for the economy, the jobs numbers show the economy is doing better, so there must be something wrong with the jobs numbers. Needless to say, this is hardly the behavior one expects from fair and balanced journalists Fox hosts claim to be.

Meanwhile, some conservatives have developed a more sophisticated excuse for the jobs report, saying the drop in unemployment rate is only due to decreasing participation in the jobs market. Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman and others have refuted this claim.

Meanwhile, on air, the network has largely avoided the jobs news. A ThinkProgress analysis of the cable networks (via Critical Mention) shows that Fox only mentioned the new unemployment rate 9 times through 2:30 this afternoon, far less often than its competitors. Notably, Fox’s less-ideological sister network Fox Business mentioned the rate three times more often:

Fox News — 9 mentions
MSNBC –18 mentions
CNN –17 mentions
CNBC –12 mentions
Fox Business — 27 mentions

In December, after another good jobs report, Fox displayed a misleading and inaccurate graph that downplayed the drop in the jobless rate.