From Roll Call …

The National Republican Congressional Committee said Friday that it has contacted the FBI about possible financial improprieties at the committee. Without providing details, the NRCC released a statement from Chairman Tom Cole (Okla.) that said:

“As part of our ongoing efforts to institute and strengthen financial controls at the National Republican Congressional Committee, we learned earlier this week of irregularities in our financial audit process. Since these irregularities may include fraud, we have notified the appropriate law enforcement authorities. We are aggressively and thoroughly investigating the matter and, while we determine the details, we have terminated our relationship with a former employee who was engaged as an outside vendor.”

Over $50 million for a single delegate.

As the LA Times notes, that’s the worst dollar for delegate record in American presidential history. The previous winner was John Connally who spent $11 million for a single delegate in 1980.

And at that rate Rudy would have needed $60 billion to win the nomination.

On the other hand, 9/11 did change everything.

The Horse’s Mouth: Was bogus Tapper/ABC piece saying Bill wants to “slow” the economy really the fault of the blogosphere?

The deadline for our Spring internship is just one week away. If you’re interested (and remember, Friday pizza on TPM is one of the many perks) click here for more details on how to apply.

I’m trying to come to terms with the fact that I won’t have Mitt to kick around much longer. So in today’s episode we savor some of Mitt’s finest moments of the weeks, as well as a couple choice Rudy ones …

We’re just three days away from Super Tuesday. So I wanted to run down the latest polls out this weekend.

On the Republican side the picture is coming pretty quickly into focus: John McCain looks poised to crush Mitt Romney on Tuesday. If you look at the results of the Gallup daily tracking poll, virtually all of Giuliani’s support nationally has gone to McCain, pushing him up into the mid-forties. Put that apparent break-out together with the fact that the Republican side is dominated by winner-take-all primaries, and it seems more than likely McCain will take Tuesday in a blow out. Probably enough to effectively end the Republican race. (For more, here’s our look at the state by state breakdown as of yesterday.)

The Democratic side is far less clear, both because of the proportional delegate allotment and because of the volatility of the polls. The big story over the last ten days has been Barack Obama steady gains against Hillary Clinton nationwide. On January 20th, Obama was 20 points behind Clinton. On Feb. 1st, he was 3 points behind, both according to the Gallup daily tracking poll. But then today, in the same poll, Hillary popped back to a 7 point margin.

Any political or public opinion professional will tell you that it’s very difficult to draw very much from a single day of a tracking poll. And weekend night’s are notoriously unpredictable for getting good samples. But the only other publicly released tracking poll now being conducted, by Rasmussen, also showed a similar, albeit milder, Hillary blip in today’s results — Clinton 45%, Obama 37%, that’s her up two points from the day before. The fact that this was the first night of polling after the Democratic debate provides some possible explanation for the change.

Obviously this is not quite a national primary on Tuesday, about half the country will be voting. But national polls mix in populations that are being actively contested with phone-banking and tv ad runs and those that aren’t. And the state by state polls aren’t coming in great enough numbers to give us a clear read of the trends, especially anything that might have happened in the last couple days. Tomorrow’s tracking poll results and especially those released Monday will give us a better sense of whether today’s numbers were just noise or the beginning of a new direction in the race.

Having gone over these numbers with Election Central’s Eric Kleefeld, it seems clear that both Clinton and Obama will rack up a respectable number of state victories. But with the proportional allotment of delegates and the close margins, it doesn’t seem like either is likely to come away with substantially more delegates than the other.

Assuming the final delegate numbers aren’t too far apart (and by that i mean, say, closer than a 60%-40% split) a lot of the press coming out of Super Tuesday could be about who ‘won’ California, even though like the other states, it’s proportional rather than winner take all.

What my gut tells me is that this all comes down to whether that blip in Hillary’s margin from today turns out to be the first sign of something real. He’s been moving so quickly in so many different states and nationwide that if his momentum continued through Tuesday I think he’d be set for a very good night. But perhaps that debate solidified Hillary’s position and stopped him cold. I’ll be very interested to see tomorrow’s numbers.

To see our analysis of the outlook in each of the Super Tuesday states as of Jan. 31st, click here. For all the polls released yesterday and today, click here.

John Zogby has his first set of rolling numbers out of the Super Tuesday states he’s tracking. And it’s very good news for Barack Obama. Zogby has Obama up by 4 points in California, down by one in Missouri, up by 20 in Georgia, and down by one in New Jersey.

Meanwhile, on the Republican side, like pretty much everyone else, has John McCain set for big wins across the country, with the exception weirdly enough of California, the biggest prize of the night. Zogby has Mitt up by 3.

The Pew poll has it’s pre-Super Tuesday poll out. And for the Democrats it’s continuing gains for Obama but still an 8 point margin. Clinton 46%, Obama 38%. Clinton has had the exact same number in the previous polls taken at the end of December and mid-January while Obama has gone from 26% to 31%.

On the Republican side, it’s all McCain: McCain 42%, Romney 22%, Huckabee 20%.

Today’s Rasmussen national tracking poll is out. And it has another bump up for Hillary. Clinton 49%, Obama 38%. Two days ago it was 43% to 37%.

Late Update: Gallup track swings in the other direction. A two point race. Clinton 46%, Obama 44%.

Late Update: Meanwhile, USAToday/Gallup has a one point race: Clinton 45%, Obama 44%. Obviously, this sounds kind of weird since it’s two polls by the Gallup organization. But this is one conventional poll sponsored by USAToday. And a separate tracking poll by the Gallup organization. IN other words, this is not two different slicings and dicings of the same survey.

The LA Times Top of the Ticket blog finds evidence of what appears to be Clinton push-polling against Obama in California. The Clinton camp is yet to respond.

Late Update: A closer review suggests some skepticism about this story. The ‘push-poll’ reportedly was 20 minutes long, which is much longer than is ever cost-effective for a push-poll. And the Times seemed to go with this with a single person who claimed to have gotten the call. I should have scrutinized the LAT post more closely.