Those three young women are, from left, Naomi Shah, Shree Bose, and Lauren Hodge, who despite excelling not at football or basketball but at science, got to meet President Obama yesterday. They're the winners of the Google Science Fair, and yeah, their trophies are made of Lego blocks, which makes them the Awesomest Trophies Ever. Their projects (see here) were pretty complicated, but Lauren's involved the word "phenylmethylimidazopyridine." And that was in the age 13-14 category.

That is some serious badass winning the future right there. USA! USA!

Texas Governor Rick Perry’s fall from grace has finally manifested itself in the polls. According to the latest Washington Post/ABC News survey, Perry has seen a precipitous decline in support from Republicans nationwide. In September, Perry topped the GOP presidential field with 29 percent of the vote to Mitt Romney’s 23 percent. As of today, Romney is ahead of the pack with support from 21 percent of Republicans. Perry, on the other hand, has dropped to 14 percent support.

Of the other candidates, Georgia businessman Herman Cain has benefited most from Perry’s disastrous performance over the last month. At 14 percent support, he is now tied with Perry for the second place spot. It’s unclear as to whether this will actually mean anything for the elections next year, but for now, Cain is a focal point for Republicans who don’t want Romney and aren’t happy with Perry, either.

One thing worth noting from the poll is the extent to which Republican voters aren’t as concerned with electability as they are with ideological purity. Among those who lean Republican, only 20 percent favor a candidate who is “most likely to win” – 73 percent want someone who agrees with them on the issues. If anything, this is clear evidence of Romney’s tenuous status as front-runner. If Perry can shape up, reinforce his position as the “real conservative” in the race, and begin to press Romney on his ideological heterodoxy, then he might recover lost ground.

When the Tea Party came into being in 2009, it had a number of things that allowed it to quickly grow and obtain legitimacy. Perhaps the most important was Fox News, which took about three seconds to turn itself into a round-the-clock promotion machine for the new movement. In short order, the Tea Party had funding and practical assistance from some elite Republican players, like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks. Perhaps because of those things, it quickly gained the unequivocal support of virtually the entire Republican Party.

The question now is, could the Occupy Wall Street protests become as influential? There are some obstacles in their way. The first is that the media are inclined to see any left-wing protest as absurd on its face and either ignore it or treat it as not a legitimate expression of Americans' concerns but as a bunch of stupid hippies chanting stupid hippie slogans and having stupid hippie drum circles. The coverage of the protests is increasing in volume and is so far a mixed bag in tone, but that underlying theme -- that these are not serious people -- is still there.

The second problem is that the target of the protesters' ire -- the economic elite in general, Wall Street in particular -- is not something establishment Democrats really want to go after. Sure, they favor raising the top income tax rate a few points and want more oversight, but they also want to raise money from Wall Street and maintain good relations with the investor class. In contrast, the Tea Party's enemy was Barack Obama, which made every Republican eager to embrace it.

That means the movement won't get the legitimacy that comes from having the elite figures to whom the media pay attention validate it and its message. They're already getting labor unions and lefty organizations signing on, which can help, but it's not like you're going to see Obama or Nancy Pelosi go out and address the rallies, with cameras in tow, nor are you going to see members of Congress go on Meet the Press and declare themselves part of this movement, as you did with Republicans and the Tea Party.

Not yet, anyway. But who knows -- if the movement generates enough momentum, maybe the Democratic political leadership might just see it in their own interests to join in. We did see Jay Carney get asked about it at a press briefing, but he answered while managing not to say a word about the protests themselves. Right now, the stance of the White House and congressional Democrats is "I sympathize with their concerns," which is a long way from "I'm one of them."

One of the points I made repeatedly during the 2008 campaign was that Barack Obama had thought long and hard, over a period of many years, about how his race would factor into his political career. You may remember that when he was catching fire, conservatives gushed over him -- my favorite quote was from culture warrior William Bennett, who said that Obama "never brings race into it. He never plays the race card. Talk about the black community—he has taught the black community you don't have to act like Jesse Jackson; you don't have to act like Al Sharpton. You can talk about the issues." I wrote a column that January predicting that they'd get over it pretty darn quick, which didn't take a genius to figure out.

I bring this up because Herman Cain seems to be demonstrating that he didn't think quite as carefully about what his race represents to those in his party. I'll let the folks at New York explain what happened when Cain got asked about Rick Perry's interestingly named hunting ranch:

So far, only one of Perry's GOP rivals has commented on N-WordheadGate: Herman Cain. Asked yesterday about the story, Cain, the only black Republican in the race, lashed out at Perry. "Since Governor Perry has been going there for years to hunt, I think that it shows a lack of sensitivity for a long time of not taking that word off of that rock and renaming the place," Cain said on This Week. On Fox News Sunday, Cain added that there "isn’t a more vile, negative word than the N-word and for him to leave it there as long as he did before, I hear, that they finally painted over it, is just plain insensitive to a lot of black people in this country."

You might find Cain's reaction completely fair, not to mention understandable for someone who grew up in the segregated South and understands whereof he speaks. But if you couldn't see what the reaction from the right would be, you haven't been paying attention to them lately. Conservatives took to blogs and Twitter to blast Cain for abetting in a smear of Perry and helping out the dastardly liberal media (that New York piece has some of the choice tweets).

Cain hasn't been shy about talking about race, and has offered himself as a living rebuke to the idea that black people should automatically support Democrats. But he apparently didn't quite get that he's become Republicans' New Black Friend. A big part of his job is to show the world, just by his presence, that conservatives aren't racists. But that means buying into the prevailing conservative narrative on race, which says that anti-black racism is a thing of the past, and the only racism that exists anymore is racism directed at white people. And the critical corollary is that there is no more vile kind of racism than white people being falsely accused of racism.

So when a candidate gets accused of being racially insensitive at best (I haven't actually seen anyone accuse Perry of harboring bigotry in his heart), Cain's job was supposed to be to attack the media and validate Perry's pure heart, even if they're opponents. The fact that he didn't understand this shows that he doesn't really understand his party. And he just lost a whole lot of potential support.

Glenn Greenwald and Adam Serwer are both highly critical of the Obama administration's extrajudicial killing of alleged terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki, while Ben Wittes rises to its defense. I think the former two have the more persuasive case. I do have one caveat, which is that I don't think the fact that al-Awlaki is an American citizen is the key problem. If an American citizen took up against the American military on a battlefield, nobody would suggest that such a person should be exempt from attack, and on the other side, a terrorist suspect apprehended on American soil is entitled to due process, even if he's not an American citizen.

The real problem, as Adam notes, is the precedent this sets. It's simply very hard to square the ability of the president to order the assassination of individuals, outside a battlefield, based on secret evidence with our constitutional framework. As Amy Davidson wrote last year, if al-Awlaki was had a clear operational involvement with al-Qaeda, it's not clear why he couldn't be indicted in an American court. And nor, as my colleague Robert Farley points out, is there good reason to believe that he couldn't have been taken alive. This was a matter of convenience, not necessity, which is the central problem. Even if we grant that al-Awlaki is as dangerous as the Obama administration asserts, giving presidents the arbitrary power to kill also has the potential to make Americans less safe. Once executive powers have been claimed, they are very difficult to put back in the bag.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the last few days have been terrible for Texas Governor Rick Perry’s presidential aspirations. On Saturday, The Washington Post ran a story on a ranch Perry used to entertain guests in the early days of his political career. Its name? “Niggerhead.” And while Perry insists that the name is an offensive one “that has no place in the modern world,” he has done little to change the title in his decades of ownership. For anyone in public life, owning a “Niggerhead” ranch would be a huge problem for their political future. For Perry -- a white Southerner and governor of a state where vestiges of Jim Crow live on -- it’s potentially disastrous.

As if to add kindling to the fire, the Associated Press has a story today that sheds light Perry’s dealings with mortgage companies as governor. According to the AP, Perry spent $35 million in taxpayer dollars to lure mortgage companies into expanding their business in the state, calling it a national model for creating jobs. “Just as the largest banks began recieving public cash,” the AP writes, “they aggressively ramped up risky lending. Within four years, the banks were out of business and homeowners across Texas faced foreclosure.” Again, a political disaster in a country where millions are underwater on their homes.

And of course, this all comes on top of Perry’s disastrous performance at the Republican presidential debate in Florida two weeks ago, where he took fire from all sides for his outspoken support of a Texas program that allows the children of undocumented immigrants to attend college while paying in-state tuition. In defending his record, he attacked his opponents as “heartless” and alienated the large majority of Republicans who oppose programs for undocumented immigrants. As a result, Perry has seen a precipitous decline in his popularity with Republican presidential voters; in the latest Fox News poll, he draws 19 percent of the vote to Romney’s 23 percent, a 9 percent decline from the last survey.

In short, the once presumptive front-runner has imploded since entering the race two months ago. Once positive GOP elites are fleeing the crash site, and scrambling to find an alternative to Mitt Romney, hence the massive campaign to recruit New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, another candidate with skeletons lurking in his background.

In all likelihood, the search for a credible anti-Romney will go unfulfilled, and Romney will become the Republican nominee for president. After nearly six years of campaigning – including his 2008 bid for the nomination – Romney is the most disciplined and competent of the hopefuls. Yes, Romney doesn’t inspire much enthusiasm in the GOP rank and file, but in the end, he’ll be the one to lead them into battle.

Appearing on Fox News Sunday yesterday, Herman Cain had this exchange with host Chris Wallace about Cain's "9-9-9" tax plan, which involves a 9 percent income tax, a 9 percent sales tax, and a 9 percent corporate tax:

WALLACE: How do you guarantee -- I asked you this in the debate and I'm not sure I got a full answer, how do you guarantee that 9-9-9 down the line doesn't become 12-12-12?

CAIN: In the legislation that I'm going to ask Congress to send me, I want a two-thirds vote required by the Senate in order for them to change it. That will impede cavalierly raising it. Secondly, the fact that the tax rate 9-9-9 is so visible, the American public is going to hold their feet to the fire and two-thirds majority in the Senate will be one of the ways to try to make sure that they don't raise it.

I don't know who's being dumber here. Does Wallace think he's ferreted out some heretofore unknown loophole in Cain's plan? My gosh, it could be changed or reversed by a future Congress! Just like every other law that ever has been passed or ever will be passed.

And as for Cain, this sounds like a great precedent. Why didn't every previous president think of that? Whenever a bill you support is ready to be passed, insert a provision demanding a supermajority to undo it. And why stop at 2/3? Why not have a 9/10 supermajority requirement, or a 99/100, or just go all the way and legislate that changing your legislation will require a 100-0 vote in the Senate and a 435-0 vote in the House?

Federal candidates are scrambling to rake in a few extra dollars because today is the last day to include the amounts in third-quarter fundraising numbers. Official tallies don't have to be reported until the middle of next month, but a handful of the campaigns have already leaked their numbers.

Rick Perry will likely lead the pack. Rumors circulated earlier this week that he had hauled in around $20 million, though campaign aides quickly shot that down. Still, it wouldn't be any surprise if Perry had the most successful quarter given that he is the newest candidate in the field and had the most untapped territory. Mitt Romney, the only other GOP candidate who looks like he has a chance at the nomination, brought in around $11 million to $13 million according to early reports, a significant drop from his $18 million second quarter. But unlike his 2008 run, Romney has not yet relied on his own vast personal wealth, so if in the closing days of the primary things are looking close, he can always infuse his campaign with a few million. Beyond those two, the Ron Paul money machine continues to carry on, collecting $5 million in the quarter. And the other campaigns have kept largely silent -- an indication that they're nowhere near the top two (and whatever you do, don't ask Newt about his numbers).

But as Pema noted in this morning's Balance Sheet, the actual campaign numbers don't tell the full story.

But post Citizens United -- the 2010 Supreme Court case which opened election spending to corporations and unions -- the amount that each campaign raises now matters less. What matters is how much Super Political Action Committees (Super PACs) -- outside groups that raise and spend enormous amounts of money (though where the money comes from is often unclear) -- have already come to dominate the 2012 election infrastructure.

She highlighted the disparity between liberal and conservative Super PACs (shocker: with business on their side conservative groups are outperforming liberals). Those differences won't become fully evident until next fall. Each of the major GOP candidates (even Jon Huntsman) has an independent group that collects unlimited funds. These groups are technically separate from the candidate's campaign but essentially operate as a secondary headquarters. One of Perry's PACs, for example, is headed by his former chief of staff. Mitt Romney's outside PAC brought in $20 million during the first six months of the year. The nomination campaign is just starting to ramp up into full speed, but these new groups could completely restructure the nomination process, much in the way shifts in the primary process and calendar made candidates re-evaluate during the 1970s.

Well lookey here (via Think Progress):

HELENA - Gov. Brian Schweitzer said Wednesday he will ask the U.S. government to let Montana set up its own universal health care program, taking his rhetorical fight over health care to another level.

Like Republicans who object to the federal health care law, the Democratic governor also argues it doesn't do enough to control costs and says his state should have more flexibility than the law allows. But Schweitzer has completely different plans for the Medicare and Medicaid money the federal government gives the state to administer those programs.

The popular second-term Democrat would like to create a state-run system that borrows from the program used in Saskatchewan. He said the Canadian province controls cost by negotiating drug prices and limiting non-emergency procedures such as MRIs.

From the limited information here it sounds like what Schweitzer is proposing is halfway between a public option and a true single-payer system. He wants to fold all Montanans currently getting insurance through the government (Medicare, Medicaid, government employees, etc.) into one program, and -- and this is critical -- let anyone else who wants buy into that program. But unlike a true single-payer plan, people would still be able to get insurance from private insurers. He predicts "It'll be a lonely place over there at Blue Cross/Blue Shield, I'm afraid," since so many people will choose the government's superior insurance.

I guess in a state that borders Canada, noting that there are things one can learn from our neighbors to the north isn't as shocking as it might be elsewhere. And this serves as an important reminder: Yes, there are Republican governors working to undermine the Affordable Care Act and keep the health insurance systems in their states as crappy as possible. But at the same time, there are some bold Democrats doing just the opposite (Vermont is also moving toward a single-payer system, for instance). If some of those efforts are successful, they could spread.

For some reason, until Jon Stewart said it the other night, nobody had mentioned that current GOP savior and soon to be ex-GOP savior Chris Christie is a dead ringer for another colorful New Jersey character, Sopranos capo Bobby Bacala. Bobby was, as you'll recall, big-boned. Michael Kinsley thinks Christie's girth will make it impossible for him to be elected president:

Look, I'm sorry, but New Jersey Governor Chris Christie cannot be president: He is just too fat...

Unfortunately, the symbolism of Christie's weight problem goes way past the issue of obesity itself. It is just a too- perfect symbol of our country at the moment, with appetites out of control and discipline near zilch. And it's not just symbolism. We don't yet know much about Chris Christie. He certainly makes all the right noises about fiscal discipline and seems to have done well so far as governor of New Jersey. Perhaps Christie is the one to help us get our national appetites under control. But it would help if he got his own under control first.

Color me unconvinced. I think there are a lot of reasons Chris Christie won't be president, the most important of which is that as someone who got elected in a blue state, he's not nearly as conservative as the Republican party currently demands. He may hate teachers unions (yay!) but he also thinks Sharia panic is "crap" and "crazy" and he's not inclined to immigrant-bashing (boo!). The reason Republicans are so enamored of him is almost entirely about attitude. They've seen him on YouTube being a jerk to people, and they just love it. But that won't go too far if he becomes an actual candidate. I'm guessing that after a week or two of being the hot new thing, he'd fall to third place.

But back to the weight issue: We haven't had a plus-sized national politician in pretty much forever, so there aren't any examples to guide us. But when Christie ran for governor two years ago, his opponent, Jon Corzine, tried to not-so-subtly make fun of him for being fat, and it just made Corzine look petty and mean. And in an odd way, the weight issue could actually work to Christie's advantage. As I've argued many times, presidential candidates usually get reduced to a single character flaw, the thing late-night comedians can joke about and reporters can remind us of. John Kerry's stiff! John McCain's old! George W. Bush is dumb! And yeah, Chris Christie is fat. But there are a lot of worse things they could be saying about you.

Here's Bobby Bacala getting whacked. If you want to see this as a metaphor for what would happen to Christie once Republicans realize he's not really as conservative as they think, feel free.

Tomorrow night is the third-quarter fundraising deadline and the speculation games have already begun. The New York Times looked at 2008 Obama supporters who are now fed up with Obama and unwilling to sacrifice even $3 because Obama didn’t deliver the change they believed in. This line of thinking will likely frame how the new data is perceived. But comparing Obama’s current fundraising capacity among small donors to his impressive haul in 2008 is the wrong way to analyze the data; in this fundraising cycle the most important numbers to predict Obama’s future success among small donors are those of his rivals, not his own.

Incumbent President Obama cannot raise money in the same way that fresh-faced Senator Obama could, when he was in the same place that Rick Perry and Mitt Romney are in now: in a heavily-covered primary race against Hillary Clinton where his donations were dependent on the sustained thrill of that race. Obama's policy initiatives now, however popular, can’t compete with the horse-race elements of the GOP primary. Obama is also limited by the fact he is running, as all incumbents do, on past policy instead of rhetoric and promises. Yes, Obama has some dissatisfied supporters, but this isn’t some phenomenon limited to him. Elected presidents always lose popularity over the course of their tenure, and at this point, it is too premature to say that the inevitable drop in approval is a bellwether for a drop in donations.

As Cornell University professor Adam Seth Levine points out, Obama’s popularity with small donors didn't surge until 2008 -- between January and September 2007, 60 percent of Obama’s donations came in over-$1,000 increments. The inevitable articles about how Obama is losing support among small donors are forgetting this fact. That the Obama campaign received donations from, according to campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt, 552,000 Americans -- 98 percent less than $250 -- in the second quarter is impressive in this context.

If Perry or Romney’s reporting shows that they have been more successful in collecting small donations than Obama was at this point in 2007, which seems unlikely, that would be more cause for alarm than Obama's small-donor numbers compared to Romney or Perry. In truth, being an incumbent is more boring than being in a primary at this point in the election cycle. And despite the appealing small-donor narrative, what really matters is drawing in the big bucks anyway.

There's a well-traveled saying, generally attributed to social theorist Eric Hoffer, that goes like this: Every great movement starts out as a cause, turns into a business, and eventually devolves into a racket. Well it looks like some folks are finding new and innovative ways to make the Tea Party a part of their business. Consider the story of Gibson Guitars, which was recently raided by the feds as part of an investigation into the illegal importation of endangered woods, and then made itself into a Tea Party hero. John Boehner invited the company's CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz, to sit with him at President Obama's jobs speech, and Juszkiewicz has made his case all over Fox News, in The Wall Street Journal, and on conservative radio programs. Tea Partiers are even planning a rally next month in support of the company, portraying it as an innocent victim of a tyrannical Obama administration.

Over at Grist, Glenn Hurowitz is in the midst of a multi-part series on how Gibson managed to enlist this grassroots help. Here's where the business angle comes in:

What was Juszkiewicz's secret to getting his company's narrow message so quickly and widely amplified? In part, the groundwork had already been laid for him by a series of Tea Party groups that back an agenda closely aligned with that of large Asian timber companies eager to import wood and paper into the United States from legally and environmentally questionable sources.

At the nexus of these organizations is prominent Tea Party operative Andrew Langer, who played a critical role in organizing many of the original anti-Obama Tea Party rallies. In 2009, Langer started diverting members of his organizations (notably the Institute for Liberty and Frontiers of Freedom) away from the standard array of conservative issues and toward ones narrowly affecting the interests of Chinese, Indonesian, and Malaysian logging companies. He also established a new organization, the Orwellian-sounding "Consumer Alliance for Global Prosperity," dedicated primarily to attacking a coalition of environmental groups, unions, and businesses that supports rainforest conservation policies. Chief targets included the Lacey Act, which prohibits imports of illegally logged wood and paper, and which Gibson Guitar is now accused of breaking.

It's a wonder nobody figured this out before. You've got hundreds of thousands of Tea Party activists out there just waiting to be energized. So any company that has a beef with the federal government can hire somebody like Langer to create grassroots pressure to free them of their shackles. It's an even better version of what's come to be known as "astroturf" lobbying, which is when corporations simulate grassroots support. In this case, the roots really are in the grass. Even if the people being used don't really get that they're really just part of a lobbying campaign for one corporation's interests.

Or maybe they do. That's what Juszkiewicz thinks, anyway. He told the L.A. Times, "Sure, I'm being used by the tea party. I'm using them too. It's mutual."

After a meandering debate performance in which Rick Perry dared to show an ounce of humanity, media outlets have been quick to proclaim that he's lost his chances of gaining the GOP nomination. That narrative was backed up by the polls released over the past week, which have shown Perry dropping from his front-runner status.

But just looking at the topline numbers doesn't tell the full story. As Nate Silver points out, Perry's fall in the polls hasn't been matched by increased support for Mitt Romney. Instead, Perry's early backers have switched their allegiance to the fringe conservative candidates who appear to have little shot at gaining the nomination, folks like Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich.

While the slumping numbers are bad for Perry at the moment, it doesn't mean all that much for the eventual nomination. He need only maintain his status as the right-wing challenger to Romney, and hope the far right of the party will turn out in greater numbers than moderate Republicans. As long as Perry stays atop the Tea Party side of the field, he will survive the first few contests and pick up the others' supporters. As the nation's longest-serving governor with deep ties to Republican donors that shouldn't be too challenging, especially when he's up against Michele (Cuban Missile Crisis) Bachmann, Herman (Won't Hire a Muslim) Cain, and Rick (Don't Google Him) Santorum.

Once it gets down to the point of just Romney versus Perry, we'll finally know whether moderates have any say in the GOP, or if it is truly a party that has been hijacked by extremists.