Mitt Romney: "We are the party of the revolutionaries, they [Democrats] are the party of the monarchists."

Jack Kemp has died.

It used to be that when you saw two men and one woman under a chuppah, everyone's assigned role was clear. Not any more.

The GOP is already gearing up to make political hay out of the Supreme Court vacancy -- and conservative groups are already preparing to raise some money. That and other political news in today's TPMDC Saturday Roundup.

Tomorrow's Sunday show line-up.

We have some more tentatively encouraging news emerging about the Swine Flu virus.

Yesterday, we noted that the Mexican government had substantially revised downward the number of deaths attributed to the Swine Flu, from 159 to 84, after tests had ruled out many of the suspected cases.

Now comes word from the Times that Mexican officials have now reported that of the 908 suspected cases that have now been tested, only 397 turned out to have suffered from the Swine Flu.

Finally, there appears to be some clinical evidence suggesting that people over 60 may have some immunity to the virus.

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

Who can tell me the names of some good, up-and-coming political comics in New York City?

Any apocalypses next week?

You've probably seen some version of this data in numerical form. But it's still eye-popping in a graph ...

The graph on the left charts party identification over the last six years. Democrats held steady, then surged in the 2008 campaign and finally came down off those highs after the election. Republicans have been steadily down -- from just under 1/3 or the electorate in 2004 to just under a quarter now.

The graph to the right shows just this year. The lines look fairly similar -- but much less so when you see them in the context of the larger trend. That is, the Dems were coming off an extremely high 39% party affiliation and a build up into the election. For Republicans it's just a continuation of the same 5 year trend.

Just as noticeable -- independent affiliation is the biggest 'winner'. But for the moment at least, actual elections are zero sum games between the two major political parties. The Democratic 'brand' (we've got to understanding the world in something beside marketing terms) is holding up nicely. The GOP brand remains in steep decline.

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

More connections emerge in the broadening array of pay-to-play state pension fund scams. As Andrew Cuomo, who's investigating the case, puts it: "This is sort of like when you pull a thread on the sweater and that one thread starts to unravel the entire fabric. We're pulling threads and it turns out the other end of the thread is in New Mexico or Connecticut or Illinois or in California."

We pull some of the threads here.

Which Republican had the most whacked reaction to Arlen Specter's party switch? Let's review the contenders ...

On my previous post, TPM Reader MO says the following ...

Perhaps I'm only fairly sane as well, but I do think the GOP has a point. If you take Goldwater and Reagan as the baseline for conservatism, and perhaps H.W Bush as a reformed conservative, it's pretty easy to see why people like Sullivan, etc. don't consider the Bush years as conservative ones.

My earlier post was more assertion than argument, so let me expand on the point. There are many flavors of conservatism. And among them are many people who can look at President Bush's eight years in office and point to policies they didn't like. But that's not the standard. Or in any case it's a foolish one. The question is just how President Bush's actual tenure in office differs from previous Republican leaders who remain firmly in the pantheon.

I would start by casting off Goldwater because you really cannot compare candidacies, which are inherently aspirational and since they have no power can combine all sorts of totally contradictory impulses and be all things to all people. Along the same lines, political philosophies aren't based in pundits or really good books. They're a matter of political movements -- parties, records in office, political institutions, all of which exist in the fallen world of constrained options in the real world. So let's focus on the obvious counter-example, Ronald Reagan.

My sense is that for the vast majority of Republicans, their current and alleged beef with President Bush is that he espoused some sort of 'big government conservatism'. He was profligate with the nation's finances and left the country settled with huge structural deficits.

How is this different from Reagan's time in office exactly? They're actually surprisingly similar.

Both presidents pushed through big tax cuts, squeezed domestic discretionary spending, though never as much as opponents feared or supporters professed to hope for, and spent lavishly on defense. Having two big wars gave President Bush more to spend on. But the broad pattern is very similar. And both ended up leaving the country with really big deficits, though Reagan did a bit in the latter years of his administration to even the balance. Again, very, very similar. So either Bush is well within the conservative tradition or Reagan is another phony.

Perhaps you could argue that President Bush was too big government on the civil liberties and state power front. But it's the rump GOP which has staked its reputation on a principled embrace of torture, warrantless wiretapping and various other kinds of extra- and unconstitutional actions. So that doesn't strike me as credible. How else did President Bush's Republican party get away from its conservative roots.

Late Update: TPM Reader MS adds some snark ...

It's even more amazing that there were precious few voices on the right pointing out Bush's conservative heresy.

If only the right-wing had some sort of mass media outlets at their disposal - you know, a book publisher or wonkish magazines or a cable TV news channel, just to pull three totally hypothetical examples out of thin air - to get the word out during Bush's time in office - when something could have been done about this heresy, in real time - that he was betraying conservatism.

It's truly amazing how much it has become an accepted truism, even among fairly sane people, that under George W. Bush the Republican party got away from its conservative roots.

Debt collectors take cyber-stalking to boffo new lengths. In this case the debt collectors set up a website with a url version of the debtors name advertising the fact that she was behind on her car payments. JaneSmithIsn'tPayingHerBills.com, etc.

Playing chicken with Obama.

There have been all sorts of confusing and contradictory numbers coming out of Mexico over the last few days relating to cases of Swine Flu and deaths attributed to it. What caught our eye was that the Mexican government actually announced that tests have now shown that a substantial number of the deaths (about half of them) originally attributed to Swine Flu were actually caused by different ailments. And only a very few have been confirmed as swine flu cases.

Dealing with statistics in a climate such as this is a tricky business because you don't want to inspire panic or sow complacency. What's more it's important to remember that the number of confirmed or suspected deaths in Mexico is just one variable of many in trying to find out how virulent the virus is. But we've been getting a lot of questions from readers about what these numbers mean and why they seem to be changing. So we've put together a post explaining the latest numbers and what's led to the changes.

(ed.note: To understand the bigger picture, here's a good piece from the LAT from yesterday which argues that there's a growing consensus that this mutation of swine flu is not as virulent as once feared. And here's a blog post by an infectious disease expert explaining why even if swine flu is very mild it would likely be hugely disruptive and a much bigger deal than the seasonal flu. The gist is that even if swine flu is no worse for each individual than the normal seasonal flu, so many more people could get it that it could put a massive strain on our health care system.)

Halperin finally goes for the full Helms ...