Rich asshole Mitt Romney released his 2010 tax returns and an estimated return for 2011 this morning. Together they total more than 500 pages, because purposefully structuring your wealth so as to maximally exploit the massive tax loopholes you have lobbied for over the decades is very complicated. The topline: Romney made $45 million in 2010 and 2011, almost exclusively from sitting there and watching his investments belch out money. He paid a tax rate of 13.9%. According the IRS, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid an average tax rate of 16% in 2008. Way to shave off those pennies, Mitt!

Mitt Romney is in trouble — he's losing to Newt Gingrich, the worst presidential candidate in history who isn't named Mitt Romney. What sort of indignant attacks will he pull on Gingrich tonight, now that he's vowed to stop being such a baby? Let's watch and discuss, together, in this Open Thread. The debate starts now at 9:00, on NBC.

The Austin American Statesman and Houston Chronicle are reporting today that a major factor leading to the failure of Rick Perry's presidential campaign was friction between its two very different teams: the "loyalists" like Rob Johnson and Dave Carney, who had worked with Perry throughout much of his 12 years in Texas politics, and the "nationally known veterans," one of whom was former G.W. campaign manager Joe Allbaugh.

Newt Gingrich is going to win the South Carolina presidential primary tomorrow. Not just because he yelled at two debate moderators for asking him debate questions this week, which brought him up about 20 percentage points in the polls. That wasn't enough to close the deal. But now that television survivalist Chuck Norris has endorsed him in a meditative World Net Daily piece, Romney's got no chance.

The Ron Paul people resorted to firing up a big ol' hot air balloon in "the middle of the frontage road" right out there off of I-85 in upstate South Carolina yesterday as a means of getting any attention whatsoever in the state. It worked: Palmetto State motorists, transfixed by the aircraft's radiance of Liberty, sat in traffic for four miles. The highway cops eventually issued the balloonists a warning for "improper lane use" and got them to pack up.

This has already been the best day of shallow political horserace infotainment in the election cycle, and the evening bill of events hasn't even begun. There's a Republican debate between four candidates in South Carolina on CNN right now. It's going to be filthy and nasty and an embarrassment to humanity, hooray. At 11:30, ABC's interview with Newt Gingrich's second ex-wife, Marianne, will air and you perverts will love it. Here's your open thread, which we're trying out instead of a liveblog because why the hell not? Enjoy.

The Iowa Republican party has a minor update to the results of this year's caucuses, something it discovered while going through the formality of certifying Mitt Romney's 8-vote victory: Someone else won. Eh, don't sweat it, Iowa Republican officials. We all change the course of a major party's presidential nominating process out of sheer incompetence from time to time.

ABC News is out with this preview and some excerpts from its hotly anticipated interview with Newt Gingrich's (second) ex-wife, Marianne, that's set to air tonight. It's catastrophic.

Escaped Frontierland animatronic cowboy Rick Perry is dropping out of the Republican primary at an 11 AM press conference today, reports Politico. He'll be endorsing Newt Gingrich. Last chance to get your Perry gaffe jokes in!

World class scumbag Newt Gingrich is somehow still in the presidential race despite scandal after scandal. Recent polls even show him gaining on Romney. He's essentially the teflon don of GOP candidates. Nothing sticks to this guy.

The calls on Mitt Romney to release his tax returns at first seemed to be just another desperate last-ditch move from all of the candidates who were trailing him by 50 percentage points in every poll. But, thanks to his unusually ill-prepared responses, the story isn't going away. Are we learning anything about his rich-person accounting tricks, though, that couldn't be predicted by simply looking at a picture of him for half a second?

President Obama will visit Walt Disney World tomorrow. The plan is to "unveil a strategy that will significantly help boost tourism and travel," according to the White House, which informs us that this is "an important sector in the U.S. economy." All well and good, but let's skip to the important part: What delicious Republican wisecracks that we'll hear ten million times over the next year will emerge from this?

It must be that Rick Perry's too scared to go home and face the constant howling mockery of every person in Texas for the rest of his life, because there's no reason for him to be in this presidential race anymore. That is, unless he wants to ruin whatever political stature he has left with increasingly desperate and insane comments? If so, that's his business. Our (every other human's) business, though, is to avoid a World War III or nuclear winter anytime soon, and Rick Perry wingin' it at debates with maniacal jingoistic death talk is detrimental to this end.

Like any plutocrat worth his salt, Mitt Romney makes sure to get all painted up in portrait form every few years.

Check out Newt Gingrich on Saturday, gabbing with some nice old ladies after a most uncomfortable church service. Who are these women — church elders, pillars of the community, something along those lines? Let's check the AP photo caption: "Republican presidential candidate former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, accompanied by his wife Callista, meets with prisoners during an event at the Jones Memorial AME Zion Church, Saturday, Jan. 14, 2012, in Columbia, S.C." Hmm. What gives the AP the impression that these elderly ladies have run afoul of the law?

There are so many excellent ways that the Associated Press could investigate Ron Paul, given his long congressional record and status as a competitive major party presidential candidate with views radically outside the mainstream, something you don't see too often. He's a character, a real life political character. But what the AP has chosen to go with today is a report about how he frequently flies first-class between Washington and his Texas district, making him the worst sort of hypocrite who has no values and loves Big Government deficits, secretly.

America's aging class of socially conservative evangelical leaders finally gathered this weekend to pick a presidential candidate to rally around, and, crucially, to make each other feel important again. The 150 or so big-time fundies, including representatives from the Family Research Council, American Family Association, and Focus on the Family, ultimately chose Rick Santorum but came nowhere near a unanimous decision. Let's all congratulate these once-important gatekeepers: For the second straight presidential election, they've swooped in just in time to render themselves useless.

It's a tearful day in the world of cosmopolitan magazines and television studios, as the infamously sane Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman has dropped out of the race, due to a near-total void of interest in his campaign among Republican primary voters. How did this relatively competent-seeming person lose his support so dramatically? Well, he didn't; he never had any support. So let's remember his anemic campaign with a gallery of some funny photos and ludicrous screen shots.

Jon Huntsman, America's number one Captain Beefheart fan, is dropping out of the presidential race. He finished sixth in the Iowa caucus and third in New Hampshire. He is expected to endorse Mitt Romney.

Touché to Michael, a.ka. commenter MichaelX, for his quick response to our Republican Primary Bounty List. He sent us several photos of Republican candidates getting makeup applied, and will be duly rewarded with a check for $22.75. But now that this loophole has been exploited once, we'll clarify the rules for all future submissions: We want your original photos of candidates in the compromising, humiliating positions listed, not professional photos that you might find on a simple Google Image search.