AP - Mitt Romney expects Nevada's caucuses to kick off a month of primary and caucus contests to keep momentum on his side in the race for the GOP presidential nomination.

AP - Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has little hope for an upset in Nevada's caucuses and instead is looking to best rival Ron Paul for second place.

AP - A confident Mitt Romney is looking past his GOP opponents and Nevada's caucuses the day the state votes. Chief rival Newt Gingrich is bracing for defeat in a state the former Massachusetts governor won in 2008.

AP - With its 24-hour casino gambling, legalized prostitution and drive-through wedding chapels, Nevada seems anything but conventional. When it comes to voting in presidential elections, it's as mainstream as it gets.

AP - Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum on Friday backed prominent conservative James Dobson's claim that President Barack Obama's administration would block medical treatment for stroke patients over age 70. Professional medical groups have called such statements bogus.

AP - A political tip sheet for the rest of us outside the Washington Beltway, Friday, Feb. 3, 2012:

AP - Mitt Romney talks about his love for America almost every day. Twice now, the Republican presidential front-runner has even broken into song.

AP - The stronger the economy gets, the more the presidential race comes down to what voters believe: Are things actually getting better? Or is it all still a mess?

AP - The Obama administration has more than doubled, to about 21,000 names, its secret list of suspected terrorists who are banned from flying to or within the United States, including about 500 Americans, the Associated Press has learned. The government lowered the bar for being added to the list, even as it says it's closer than ever to defeating al-Qaida.

SPARKS, Nev. — With Friday’s jobs report punctuating the nation’s steadily improving conditions, Mitt Romney and his advisers are confronting an unexpected economic turnaround that threatens to undercut the central rationale for his candidacy.

A year after storming the Capitol in the vanguard of the tea party revolution, the House Republican freshman class has fallen largely silent on the most pressing issue facing their party at the moment: Who should be the GOP presidential nominee?

LAS VEGAS — Stoney’s Rockin’ Country dance hall is a place that celebrates defiance of long odds: Every night, inebriated non-cowboys climb up on a mechanical bull under the mistaken impression that they can hang on. On Thursday nights, they do it in bikinis.

Changes are coming to the top ranks of the Office of Management and Budget just as the agency prepares to release President Obama’s proposed fiscal 2013 federal budget on Feb. 13.

With OMB Director Jacob J. Lew moving across the street to serve as White House chief of staff and Jeffrey D. Zients sliding into the acting director role, other staffers will be asked to pick up elements of Zients’s previously broad portfolio as deputy director for management.

Mitt Romney’s opponents really never had much of a chance in Nevada.

And it’s largely because of Romney’s Mormon religion.

While Romney’s faith has rightly been described as a liability in previous states — most notably Iowa and South Carolina, where evangelical Christians have balked at supporting Romney — it’s hard to call it anything but a trump card in Nevada (so to speak).

“It’s good to remember that the fact that there were some folks who were willing to let this industry die. Because of folks coming together, we are now back in a place where we can compete with any car company in the world.”

LAS VEGAS — A pair of hand-knit slippers, adorned with a Mormon symbol. Rosary beads. A tiny stack of yard signs. An autographed Ron Paul placard.

Nevada had its strange moment in the political spotlight this week, as stage-managed campaigns roared through with rallies and TV ads. This was faux intimacy, done in a city where faux is a fact of life: The casinos are named after Paris and New York, and the dust-dry streets around them are named, aspirationally, for trees and oceans.

Newt Gingrich goes on the attack, Romney was once a Democrat, Santorum didn’t qualify for the ballot in Indiana and Florida Democrats seem ready to go to court.

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Do you want an offiical Fix t-shirt? Of course you do! And it’s easy.

All you have to do is guess the finish order and vote share of all four GOP presidential candidates in Nevada’s Saturday caucuses. (Okay, maybe not that easy. Those shirts are highly coveted; we can’t just give them away.)

The Nevada caucuses are tomorrow, and that means we need music to listen to while we wait for the results.

Here’s how you can help. Tell us your favorite songs from or about the Silver State with the hashtag #fixplaylist, and we’ll add them to our primary day playlist. Deal?

Donald Trump endorsed Mitt Romney for the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday, a gesture that isn’t likely to have much of an effect on Romney’s support among GOP voters.

A Washington Post-Pew R esearch Center poll taken in January showed that only 13 percent of Republicans said they were more likely to support a candidate who won Trump’s endorsement.

For the second time at a campaign-trail event in recent months, former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) was interrupted Thursday.

But it wasn’t by protesters, or by supporters of a rival campaign.

It was by ABBA.

Celebrity mogul Donald Trump’s announcement Thursday afternoon that he is backing Mitt Romney is a classic “me for me” endorsement, as our colleagues at The Fix have noted – a move that appears to help the endorser more than the endorsee.

It’s time to take back the pink. And pay more attention to the red.

It’s time to declare that the Susan G. Komen Foundation, which just ‘revised its revision of its funding policy,’or something like that, no longer owns that color. And neither, though I myself am a breast-cancer survivor, does the breast cancer cause.

President Obama quoted C.S. Lewis on Thursday morning, and normally that would have made my day. The president is good at talking about his Christian faith, as he did at a National Prayer Breakfast, and ought to do more of it if he wants to relieve Americans of some of their most basic misconceptions about him.

LAS VEGAS — In 2010, as the tea party rose to prominence, the movement splintered in Nevada and helped nominate Republican Sharron Angle in one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country.

About this blog: In their new book “The End of Race? Obama, 2008, and Racial Politics in America,” Donald R. Kinder and Allison Dale-Riddleassert that racism kept Barack Obama from achieving a landslide victory in 2008. The role of race in that election, they argue, was similar to the impact religion had in the 1960 presidential race when many voters rejected John F. Kennedy simply because he was Catholic. The question now becomes: What role will racism play in 2012 election? Have Americans gotten past their biases, or will the same questions linger in the voting booth? Here, Kinder, a political science professor and a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, addresses the issue.

Corporations appear to be embracing, albeit slowly, new campaign rules that allow them to make direct contributions to political groups.

The super PACs that have been playing a significant role this election season are getting more of their funding from corporate coffers — 23 percent, according to an analysis of federal records.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. testified Thursday for more than four hours on Capitol Hill in a showdown with House Republicans, who threatened to hold him in contempt if he does not quickly turn over more documents on a botched gun operation.

The sluggish state of the economic recovery has been at the heart of Republican attacks on President Obama, as he begins to make his case for reelection. Over the past several months, though unemployment began to decline, the White House has maintained a cautious optimism, noting each time that although economic signs were improving, much more work remained to be done.

Reports of a rivalry between the top two House Republicans have been greatly exaggerated.

So says House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).

Asked Thursday about reports of staff-level disagreements between his office and that of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the speaker told reporters at the Capitol that tiffs between staffers are “to be expected” and downplayed any disagreements between himself and his top deputy.

The super-sized hype about this weekend’s annual football playoff always feels like a huge party -- one I am not invited to -- going on in the next apartment.

I’ve never followed the NFL and will not be watching this weekend’s annual national programming and advertising veneration of the league's championship game, either.  It's nothing against football; I am just not much of a TV sports fan in general.  My source for competitive entertainment  has always been politics: More drama and less pain.

Senate Democrats have apparently found a way to generate excitement for what’s usually a dry program focused on messaging and policy: Hold it at a fun locale.

We hear that the Senate Dems’ retreat next week — a regular event typically held in dull conference rooms in less-than-hotels in cities like Baltimore or Williamsburg — will instead likely take place at Nationals Park.

The past few days have seen the release of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s 2010 federal tax return and 2011 estimated 1040 form, former House speaker Newt Gingrich’s 2010 tax return, and Gingrich’s 2006 contract with Freddie Mac.