Come back for details...very soon.

A couple of years ago, when I wrote the book "Tear Down This Myth" about Ronald Reagan, I noted that a lot of the conservatives who today venerate the Gipper today were highly critical of him when he was president -- especially over the idea that he was racing to "appease" Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Union. I mentioned that one of those critics was a young firebrand in the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich.

Here's some more about that:

The best examples come from a famous floor statement Gingrich made on March 21, 1986. This was right in the middle of the fight over funding for the Nicaraguan contras; the money had been cut off by Congress in 1985, though Reagan got $100 million for this cause in 1986. Here is Gingrich: “Measured against the scale and momentum of the Soviet empire’s challenge, the Reagan administration has failed, is failing, and without a dramatic change in strategy will continue to fail. . . . President Reagan is clearly failing.” Why? This was due partly to “his administration’s weak policies, which are inadequate and will ultimately fail”; partly to CIA, State, and Defense, which “have no strategies to defeat the empire.” But of course “the burden of this failure frankly must be placed first on President Reagan.” Our efforts against the Communists in the Third World were “pathetically incompetent,” so those anti-Communist members of Congress who questioned the $100 million Reagan sought for the Nicaraguan “contra” rebels “are fundamentally right.” Such was Gingrich’s faith in President Reagan that in 1985, he called Reagan’s meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich.”

So of course flash forward 25 years, and now Gingrich is running for president as the only "Reagan Republican" in the race. But that's a myth -- much like the myth of Reagan himself. The bogus version of Reagan that Gingrich would replicate as 45th president would way more militaristic and way more uncompromising, especially on busting the federal budget, than the real Reagan ever would have been, and those of us in the reality-based world would be left holding the bag.

UPDATE: Looks like I'm inadvertantly on the same page with Matt Drudge...and Mitt Romney on this one. How did this happen?

Joseph Maturo, the (regrettably) still mayor of East Haven, Conn.:

Here’s a way not to respond to charges that police officers in your town harassed, abused and brought false charges against Latino residents: by telling a reporter that you might eat tacos to help Latinos out.

Asked this week by WPIX reporter Mario Diaz what he would do for the Latino community, East Haven, Connecticut Mayor Joseph Maturo said he “might have tacos when I go home.”

Four officers in the town were charged by the Justice Department this week with conspiring to violate and violating the civil rights of Latino residents of the city. One officer allegedly said he “likes” harassing people who “have drifted into this county on rafts made of chicken wings.”

Maturo has apologized. It's too late.

The news cycle in the 2012 presidential race seems down to about 2-3 hours. Indeed, harmful as it was to his broader effort, Mitt Romney might have been relieved to issue his tax returns this morning if for no other reason than this: It took the focus off what I thought was a major blunder in the Monday night debate that was televised on NBC.

I'm talking about this:

ROMNEY: Well, the answer is self-deportation, which is people decide they can do better by going home because they can`t find work here because they don`t have legal documentation to allow them to work here. And so we`re not going to round people up.

The way that we have in this society is to say, look, people who have come here legally would, under my plan, be given a transition period and the opportunity during that transition period to work here, but when that transition period was over, they would no longer have the documentation to allow them to work in this country. At that point, they can decide whether to remain or whether to return home and to apply for legal residency in the United States, get in line with everybody else. And I know people think but that`s not fair to those that have come here illegally.

It's a fascinating idea -- the modern GOP's obsession with the sanctity of free markets leading inevitably to "a free-market solution" to immigration. Since he'll make it impossible for undocumented immigrants to get jobs, Romney argues, the marketplace will make them go back to Ecuador or Thailand or wherever. The biggest problem with Romney's idea is that there is nothing in the history of American immigration over the last two centuries to make anyone think this would happen, even if President Romney pulls off his Orwellian coup of a step towards a national ID card.

But in the short term, "self-deportation" is a bigger political problem for Romney.

Why? I think it makes him look weak in the eyes of Tea Party voters, who must be influential in Florida politics or they would not now have a governor as horrific as Rick Scott. The real base of the GOP doesn't want a tidy "free market" solution to immigration issues, even if such a solution actually existed. No, it wants blood. OK, maybe not blood, but pink underwear. That's the tough-guy approach to immigration adopted by the right's hero on this matter, Phoenix-area sheriff Joe Arpaio, who also goes out regularly on raids and wants power to racially profile and make lots and lots of arrests, which isn't "self-deportation" in any sense of the word. So I think Romney's stance makes him look weak going into Tuesday's primary.

And it probably doesn't help him much with a huge bloc of Cuban-Americans in South Florida who tend to vote Republican -- this notion that the only way to deal with people in the United States without papers is simply to drive them away. I could be wrong. We'll see.

The New York Times has a good piece up this afternoon about the immigration issue in the Florida primary. I thought this sums up why "self-deportation" won't work:

But, Ms. Pestana, who owns an assisted living center, said she viewed Mr. Gingrich’s position on immigration — an issue she considers secondary — as more realistic. Her son recently tried to hire American citizens for his roofing company, she said, and found no takers.

“Who will fix our roofs and pick our tomatoes?” asked Ms. Pestana.

                                                                                                                                                                                           So Romney's tax returns seem to poke a few more holes (get it?) in the inevitability of our once-and-no-longer future 45th president. Other than the Swiss bank account, Willard's taxes are what we thought they were, another multi-millionaire paying a lower tax rate than Warren Buffet's secretary. Which nobody in the elites -- GOP or pundit or whatever -- would have thought was a big deal before Sept. 17, the day a bunch of no-names filed into Zuccotti Park.

In an almost unrelated matter, slugger Prince Fielder is signing a $214 million, 9-year (!) deal with the Detroit Tigers. With Mitt and George and now Prince and Cecil, is every kid from the Motor City obsessed with following in Daddy's footsteps?

I've got football on the brain, but I wonder what Attytood readers think of this startling turn of events. Would a Newt Gingrich nomination guarantee the re-election of President Obama? Or will America soon confront the third presidential term of Richard Nixon?

Discuss.

My article today on Joe Paterno, a tragedy worthy of Virgil.

Rich Aregood, the ombudsman for the Daily News, has something important to say today that I hope important people will think about. Here's a snippet:

A total merger would be a terrible idea for plenty of reasons. The Daily News is Philadelphia's local paper. It focuses on the problems of the ordinary Philadelphian, like the Parking Authority and the wretched excesses of City Council. It cares about its neighborhoods and the closing of neighborhood Catholic schools.

More important, from a business standpoint, it is the kind of newspaper that is doing better in the new world of lower newspaper profits. Papers with a strong local focus are doing much better than regionals like the Minneapolis StarTribune or, dare I say it, the Inquirer. They simply have a more compelling reason for being, and for readers to pay for them. If you want to know about business, you need the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times. If you want a feel for Philadelphia, you need the Daily News.

The kind of competition that deepened the coverage of the Conlin story is important. Back when the two papers were among the best in the country (in my view), there was socializing among the staffs, even romances. But there was always the creative sense of competition. Nobody shared exclusives or even talked about what they were working on.

So, some advice to the architect of the new newsrooms. Build a wall between them. Without a door. Let the competition benefit both the business and the readers.

Underneath the eruptions of news from South Carolina to State College, the broader trends that really shape our day-to-day world grind on. The most important story in any paper today is arguably this one in the New York Times, which probes why Apple doesn't manufacture its products in the United States.

It's not a pretty picture:

Then a bid for the work arrived from a Chinese factory.

When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

The Chinese plant got the job.

“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”

The gist is that globalization demolished a century of progress here in America for workers' rights. The solution to the death of manufacturing in this country is not Rick Santorum's no-tax proposal. It would be workers crammed in dormatories and working 12-hour days in a hazardous plant for something well below the current minimum wage.

The 19th Century is victorious, after all.