Updated at 11:23 p.m.

In winning the Nevada Republican caucuses, Mitt Romney added another victory in a campaign built on organization and momentum.  And the former Massachusetts governor wasted no time in looking ahead to the potential contest with President Obama. 

As expected, Romney won Nevada easily with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Texas Rep. Ron Paul jostling for second place and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum far behind.

The victory for Romney marks his second this week, following a similarly decisive win on Tuesday in Florida's Republican primary. A win in the Nevada caucuses, while expected, gives Romney added momentum for his campaign, and a new piece of evidence to support the sense that Romney is the GOP's emerging front-runner to face off against President Obama in November. 

After the win, Romney quickly turned his attention to Obama (and not his GOP foes) in remarks before an especially boisterous crowd Saturday night in Las Vegas.

"This president began his term by apologizing for America. He should now be apologizing to America!" Romney said. "America needs a president who can fix the economy because he understands the economy. I do, and I will."

In Nevada, Romney won the caucuses convincingly, winning almost every age and income group, and, more importantly, with healthy margins of support from moderate and conservative Republicans alike. 

While last week's Florida's primary results contained some warning signs for Romney — namely, his inability to win over the core, conservative part of the GOP — Saturday's caucus reflect an instance in which Romney was able to rally conservatives to his candidacy. 

Nevada caucus-goers who described themselves as "very conservative" made up almost half of the electorate. Romney won about half of them, while his competitors split the rest. Romney performed even better with caucus-goers who described themselves as "somewhat conservative."

In that sense, Nevada offered Romney his most convincing argument in support of his ability to rally Republicans of all stripes.

 Romney's prime opponent in the race, Gingrich, had campaigned throughout Nevada this week making the argument that Romney was too moderate to unite the GOP and effectively fight Obama. 

Romney was bolstered, as he was when he won the state in 2008, by Nevada's Mormon population. According to entrance poll data, about a quarter of caucus-goers on Saturday identified themselves as Mormon. Those voters broke overwhelmingly — roughly nine in 10 of them — for Romney.

Romney's win in Nevada also carries a degree of symbolic importance. The contest is the first in the West during the GOP primary, and Nevada — like Florida and New Hampshire — is decidedly a swing state in 2012, a state that Obama had won in 2008.

Romney's Florida win helped him reclaim his status as the putative frontrunner in the Republican campaign, a status that had come under threat just 14 days ago in South Carolina, where former House Speaker Newt Gingrich rallied conservatives and scored a major upset victory in that state's primary. 

Gingrich sought to dispel any notion, though, that the primary was anywhere close to over.

"I am a candidate for president of the United States. I will be a candidate for president of the United States. We will go to Tampa," he said at a press conference. 

The former speaker said that he would move on to Colorado and then Minnesota before decamping to Ohio, one of the largest Super Tuesday states. 

"I'm not going to withdraw," Gingrich said, blaming Romney's team for rumors that he would drop out. "I'm actually pretty happy with where we are."

But Romney's bigger organization has left little to chance as the campaign goes on and that was evidenced in Nevada.  Having made frequent visits to the state last year — one in April to tour a foreclosed neighborhood and stoke speculation about his candidacy, and another in May shortly after the Romney campaign had launched to raise over $1 million in a "national call day."

Romney's been equally aggressive in the past few days, too, his campaign pressing the case against Gingrich, and touring Nevada with a number of events. 

But the path between victories in Florida and Nevada have not been the smoothest for Romney. 

The day after winning in Florida, Romney drew intense scrutiny for saying in a CNN interview that he is "not concerned about the very poor" as the focus of his campaign. 

"I misspoke. I've said something that is similar to that but quite acceptable for a long time. And you know when you do I don't know how many thousands of interviews now and then you may get it wrong. And I misspoke. Plain and simple," Romney told Nevada political reporter Jon Ralston later this week in a bid for damage control. 

Romney also appeared publicly with Donald Trump, the bombastic billionaire, to receive an endorsement from the reality TV star that had dubious value in the Republican Party, and had more Democratic tongues wagging than anything else. 

"A man who hasn't worked in 10 years, has his money in the Cayman Islands and in Switzerland, and is talking about the poor people have a safety net?" Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada's top Democrat, said of Romney's comments in an interview to air Sunday on Univision. 

The Democratic National Committee also gleefully pounced, producing a web video about Trump and Romney's appearance together. 

Democrats are particularly mindful that Nevada, a state hard hit by the collapse of the housing market, could be a general election battleground in 2012. President Obama beat Sen. John McCain by about 6 points there in 2008, but Romney, if nominated, is hoping to make a better showing there this November. 

While the primary race goes on for Republicans, new questions have arisen about the future of Gingirch's efforts.

The former speaker is in need of the financial resources needed to wage a full campaign and the New York Times reported in its Sunday edition that Sheldon Adelson, a casino magnate who had donated $10 million to a super PAC that supports Gingrich — sustaining the former speaker's campaign almost by itself — is now open to backing Romney as the GOP nominee.

Gingrich is slated to appear Sunday on "Meet the Press" and other public affairs shows throughout the morning, where he'll almost certainly be forced to answer questions about the viability of his campaign.

Paul and Santorum seemed poised to continue their candidacies, as well. Paul skipped the Florida primary to focus on caucuses like Nevada's, where his enthusiastic, organized corps of supporters tend to make a better showing than in primaries. Nevada's outcome could be a key test of Paul's ability to accrue delegates. 

Santorum, meanwhile, has been busy campaigning in Colorado, which, along with Minnesota, hosts a caucus on Tuesday. Romney is also favored in those states, though their more minor stature in the nominating calendar arguably offers the three other Republicans their best chance of upsetting Romney.

The campaign enters a relatively dead period after Tuesday until the end of February, when Arizona and Michigan host their primaries. Romney, having grown up in Michigan, where his father served as governor, is heavily favored in that contest. 

The biggest test, then, follows on March 6 — this cycle's "Super Tuesday — which features a number of large primaries, including some more Southern and conservative contests in which Gingrich might have his best shot at parrying Romney's march to the nomination.

The millionaires, billionaires and companies giving big sums to political committees supporting Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Barack Obama have important business with the next president. Some are already in trouble with the government. Some are pressing for new laws or regulations that would benefit their interests in energy, mining and high finance.

The Associated Press reviewed financial reports, regulatory filings, court records, public statements and more to identify favors that the biggest donors so far in the presidential campaign might want in return for their contributions worth $100,000 or more. In some cases, these donors have given $1 million or more to help Obama's challengers or the president.

An exhaustive review of their motives is nearly impossible, since new federal rules governing such contributions allow donors to effectively remain anonymous if they funnel cash into the campaign through corporate partnerships or other mechanisms that can frustrate investigation.

The presidential campaigns all have said they do not trade political favors for election money.

Among AP's findings:

—An energy firm run by William Koch, a $1 million donor to the pro-Romney political committee, paid to lobby Congress on mining and safety issues and also over a proposed federal land swap that would enlarge the donor's Colorado ranch.

—The casino company run by Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire whose family has given $11 million to a political committee that supports Gingrich, has acknowledged it's under federal investigation by the Justice Department and a civil probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission for possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The company denies wrongdoing and says the investigation stems from an allegation by a disgruntled employee. Adelson's family has provided nearly all the money that the pro-Gingrich group has received so far.

—A hedge fund run by a New York investor, Paul Singer, who gave the pro-Romney group $1 million, has pushed for federal laws that would give official U.S. backing to the firm's legal efforts to profit from the debt of distressed and Third World nations.

—A board member and former chairman of a prestigious Los Angeles hospital, John C. Law with the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, has given the pro-Obama committee $100,000 as the hospital has lobbied Obama's administration over Medicare and Medicaid funding for teaching hospitals and electronic medical records, the National Institutes of Health and Army research programs.

— A Pennsylvania coal producer, Consol Energy Inc., which donated $150,000 to the pro-Romney group, paid a $5.5 million fine last year for violations of the Clean Water Act at six of its mines. It is lobbying to prohibit the federal government from regulating greenhouse gas emissions. Weeks after the company gave money to support Romney, who previously had agreed that humans are contributing to climate change, the candidate appeared to back off that position and said he would oppose spending high amounts of federal money to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, like those from coal plants.

The high-dollar contributions have flowed into the presidential campaign through so-called super PACs, which can support a specific candidate but can't lawfully coordinate their spending with a candidate's campaign. The groups, given a green light by the Supreme Court in 2010 when it stripped limits on corporate and labor union spending in elections, have already proved to be strategically successful for candidates. The pro-Romney group, Restore Our Future, spent $8.8 million on ads in Florida alone — more than Romney's own campaign — and has already booked TV spots in Arizona, Michigan and Minnesota.

A Romney campaign spokeswoman, Andrea Saul, dismissed any suggestion that wealthy donors are motivated by their private interests to fund the committee's operations.

"To the degree Americans support Mitt Romney," she said, "it's because he can reverse the decline of the Obama economy and get Americans back to work."

Obama so far has fewer big-money donors. He is able to marshal the resources of the Democratic National Committee, and it is typically easier for incumbents to raise money closer to the November election.

Public-interest groups have warned since the Supreme Court ruling that wealthy individuals, corporations, unions and other interests would seek favors in return for unlimited campaign contributions.

"The size of these donations counts for a lot, and the candidates will naturally be grateful to these organizations and their donors," said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics in Washington. "And with greater support, comes increased gratefulness."

Consol, which gave $150,000 to support the pro-Romney group, is the largest producer of coal from underground mines, with operations in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. It also has interests in natural gas, using hydraulic fracturing — known as fracking — to extract gas with high-pressure streams of water, sand and chemicals.

Most of Consol's coal is sold to electric utilities. Such utilities are the dominant source of sulfur and carbon dioxide emissions, and Consol has backed Republican efforts to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency under Obama from issuing greenhouse gas regulations that the company says could increase its costs and affect the market for coal and natural gas.

Consol spent more than $3 million on energy and environmental lobbying last year, including the hiring of a Washington firm, Forscey & Stinson, to support legislation that would prohibit the EPA from issuing the greenhouse gas rules.

Romney once expressed clear concerns about global warming. Last June, he told a New Hampshire town hall that humans have contributed to climate change, although it is not clear by how much. "And so I think it's important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may well be significant contributors to the climate change and global warming that you're seeing," he said.

On Oct. 27, after Consol gave $150,000 to help Romney's presidential campaign, he visited the Consol Energy Center in Pittsburgh, the arena where the National Hockey League's Penguins play. "My view is that we don't know what's causing climate change on this planet," Romney said. "And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce (carbon dioxide) emissions is not the right course for us."

Six days after Romney's remarks, his campaign deposited $1,000 checks from four of Consol's senior executives." Another executive, J. Brett Harvey, the company's chief executive officer, also serves on Romney's 2012 Pennsylvania Finance Committee.

Consul spokeswoman Lynn Seay said it is common practice for the company "to support political candidates that share a similar philosophy as it relates to a domestic energy policy that recognizes the value and importance of coal and natural gas."

Last month, the EPA objected to Consol's proposal for a mountaintop removal mine in southern West Virginia that would be one of Appalachia's biggest. The EPA had first objected to a permit for the mine on the day that Obama was inaugurated.

Among the pro-Obama group's biggest donors, the Service Employees International Union, has given $1 million so far toward his re-election as it fights Republican plans to restrict the National Labor Relations Board's authority to force employers to move or close plants in efforts to avoid unionization.

The Obama super PAC, Priorities USA Action, also received $100,000 from Law, the managing director of Warland Investments, a commercial real estate and investment firm in Santa Monica, Calif. Law is on the board at Cedars-Sinai and was previously the hospital's chairman. The hospital spent $369,000 in 2011 lobbying on federal health policies during Obama's presidency, according to Senate records.

The pro-Gingrich group, Winning Our Future, has been kept running largely with money from casino mogul Adelson. He and his wife, Miriam, gave $5 million each this month. Miriam's eldest daughter gave $500,000, and her other daughter and son-in-law donated $250,000 each.

Adelson's casino, Las Vegas Sands Corp., has been the target of federal investigations, in part over allegations that the company bribed officials in expanding its Chinese business. A spokesman declined to publicly discuss his boss' support for Gingrich. Adelson wrote last month in an email to The Washington Post: "My motivation for helping Newt is simple and should not be mistaken for anything other than the fact that my wife, Miriam, and I hold our friendship with him very dear and are doing what we can as private citizens to support his candidacy."

The head of a New York-based hedge fund, Singer of Renaissance Technologies, gave the Romney super PAC $1 million. Renaissance lobbied Congress last year on proposals that would aid hedge funds in efforts to collect on debts purchased from Argentina and other foreign governments. Renaissance is one of several international hedge funds that have bought debt in distressed and Third World nations at low prices and sometimes have used lawsuits to force the countries to pay restitution.

A spokesman, Peter Truell, declined to discuss Singer's support for Romney but Renaissance officials have said that buying sovereign debt is only one aspect of the company's business.

Singer has also been outspoken in his criticism of some aspects of the massive overhaul of banking and trading regulations brought by the Dodd-Frank Act and other legislation since the recession. Last August, Romney told a New Hampshire audience that he favored repealing the Dodd-Frank law.

Another executive, William Koch, also gave $1 million to the Romney super PAC from his personal funds and corporate accounts. Koch runs Oxbow Carbon LLC, a fossil fuels processor and mining company that wants changes to laws and regulations on mining, safety issues and climate change. Unlike his brothers, Charles and David Koch, who are long-time supporters of conservative causes, Bill Koch has funded both GOP and Democratic candidates in the past.

"Despite the political statements, this administration has done nothing to help the coal industry, and we feel their energy policy is debatable," said Brad Goldstein, an Oxbow spokesman.

Oxbow also pushed for approval of the Central Rockies Land Exchange, a proposed swap of land tracts in Colorado and Utah to enlarge Koch's 4,500-acre Bear Ranch. The proposed deal with the federal government would allow Koch to acquire several adjacent parcels of federal land in exchange for turning other tracts over to the U.S. The proposal, which requires congressional approval, has brought some local opposition but is under consideration.

___

AP Business Writer Daniel Wagner contributed to this report.

Contact the Washington investigative team at DCinvestigations (at) ap.org

Follow Jack Gillum at http://twitter.com/jackgillum

A weeklong firestorm over the Susan G. Komen foundation's decision to cut off -- and, on Friday, restore -- a grant to Planned Parenthood marked one of the high points in a political battle targeting the finances of the nationwide network of reproductive health clinics.

The Komen Foundation, the largest and most visible breast cancer charity in the U.S., announced on Friday that it would honor its six-figure grants to Planned Parenthood after having announced earlier in the week that it had decided to halt its support for the group. Komen had cited the fact that Planned Parenthood faced a congressional investigation -- in this case, led by conservative House Republicans -- as the impetus for its initial decision. 

"We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood," Komen founder and CEO Nancy G. Brinker said in a statement.

Brinker reversed the group's initial decision, and amended Komen's grant criteria to only exclude groups under criminal investigation. Brinker said Komen would honor its existing grants to Planned Parenthood and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants.

Planned Parenthood is a group that provides a number of services to women under the banner of reproductive health. The clinics nationwide provide contraception and health screening, including for breast cancer. Komen's grants are meant to support the cancer screening.

But Planned Parenthood also provides abortions to women, drawing the ire of opponents of abortion rights, including a number of Republican members of Congress.

The reversal was only the culmination of a weeklong battle that intertwined politics and health issues; but the fight over Planned Parenthood's funding was hardly new to the political arena.

House Republicans voted in February of 2011 -- shortly after they had been sworn into office, and retaken the majority in that chamber -- to strip federal funding of Planned Parenthood, acting on a campaign promise they had made during the campaign in 2010.

That vote, on an amendment by Indiana Rep. Mike Pence attached to a government funding bill, evolved into a central sticking point of the April fight between House Republicans and President Obama which almost led to a government shutdown. Republicans, led by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), had pushed the restriction ostensibly as part of a larger effort to cut spending from the federal budget. But President Obama held firm in opposition to the Planned Parenthood cuts, though Republicans were ultimately successful in including an effort to ban the use of federal funds to subsidize abortion procedures in Washington, D.C.

The issue resurfaced in October of 2011, when Florida Rep. Cliff Stearns (R), the chairman of the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, launched an investigation into Planned Parenthood, and whether the group had impermissably used federal funds to pay for abortions.

It was that investigation which the Komen foundation had initially cited in its decision to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood.

Supporters of abortion rights also pointed to Komen's hiring of Karen Handel, a former Republican gubernatorial candidate in Georgia who opposes funding Planned Parenthood, for the breast cancer charity's initial decision this week to cancel its grant.

"Karen did not have anything to do with this decision. This was decided at the board level, and by our mission," Brinker said Thursday on MSNBC.

But for as much the Komen foundation fought off the perception that its decision was politically motivated, its decision led to familiar dividing lines.

"Politics should never come between women and their health care, and I am very glad that Komen did the right thing and reversed their misguided and deeply damaging decision," Washington Sen. Patty Murray, a top Democrat in the Senate, said in reaction to Friday's announcement.

And EMILY's List, a group that works to elect Democratic women who support abortion rights, had rallied its supporters behind the fight against the original Komen decision.

"Our brave women in the Senate are already standing up to Susan G. Komen for the Cure, signing on to a letter urging them to reverse this politically motivated decision and restore their grants to Planned Parenthood," the group's president, Stephanie Schriock, said in a statement. "Weeks like this one just highlight the absolutely critical need for women’s voices to be heard in Congress."

Conservative Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) lauded the decision, which he had originally urged in a letter to Brinker last year.

"This is a welcome, long-overdue decision that will make Komen more effective in the fight against breast cancer," Vitter said in a statement earlier this week. " Komen does tremendous good by supporting education and research to fight breast cancer, and it was clear that their association with Planned Parenthood was unnecessary to advance that core mission."

Vitter said after Friday's announcement: "While Komen now claims that they don’t want their mission to be ‘marred by politics,’ unfortunately it seems that Komen caved to political pressure from the pro-abortion movement and its enforcers in the media."

The signs look hopeful for a short-term accord in Congress on extending the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits.

But right after Election Day, a lame-duck Congress will face a horrific fiscal train wreck: sharp tax increases, combined with automatic spending cuts -- and scanty reserves of political goodwill to help clinch a deal to avert that outcome.

A House-Senate conference committee met Thursday to try to push ahead with a full-year payroll tax cut. The committee will keep working next week as Congress heads to a Feb. 29 deadline.

Also as part of that deal, there’s bipartisan accord on the committee to not allow Medicare spending cuts enacted in 1997 to take effect. The payroll tax cut package will include another in a long series of postponements of the cut in Medicare payments to doctors.

At the same time that the House-Senate conference committee was meeting Thursday, five Republican senators, led by Arizona Sen. John McCain, were vowing they’d block the roughly $100 billion cuts in spending -- called the “sequester”-- mandated by last year’s Budget Control Act and set to occur in January. Half of those cuts would come from defense outlays.

Two of those five senators, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, voted against the Budget Control Act; but three of the five, McCain, John Cornyn of Texas and Jon Kyl of Arizona, voted for it.

Graham painted picture of a Budget Control Act that was beginning to unravel – and not a moment too soon, from his point of view. “I think there will be a lot of bipartisan support to abandon the sequestration provisions” in the Budget Control Act, he said, “because they are unwise and quite frankly dangerous.”

Because the Budget Control Act mostly exempts entitlement spending from automatic cuts, it’s the other big item in the budget, defense, which must bear the brunt of the cuts.

The GOP senators’ proposal was to avert the sequesters for one year by cutting the cost of the federal government elsewhere: hiring only two workers for every three who retire or leave federal employment.

They’d also maintain the freeze on federal employee pay until mid-2014. (The House voted Wednesday night to keep the federal pay freeze for this year and next year.)

McCain said even before the automatic cuts mandated by the Budget Control Act, the Obama administration plans to slice $487 billion from defense outlays over the next ten years. McCain and the other Republicans cited Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s warnings that the additional sequesters on top of the already planned defense cuts would be “devastating.”

While the GOP senators cited Panetta as authority for averting the defense cuts looming in January, they slammed him for the comment he made Wednesday that U.S. forces in Afghanistan would end their combat role as early as mid-2013, the first time that he has pinned a date on the end of combat. American troops are scheduled to be out of Afghanistan by 2014.

But the GOP senators may face a public perception challenge: if the average taxpayer knows that U.S. troops have departed from Iraq and if he hears Panetta’s end-of-combat in Afghanistan forecast for 2013, he might wonder: Why can’t Congress cut defense spending further?

 Graham gave a nod to the presidential politics, saying, “This administration is focused on leaving because of the November elections.” President Obama, he said, “wants to tell the American people ‘I got us out of Iraq and Afghanistan.’”

That might be a more crowd-pleasing campaign message than what Graham sketched out: a U.S. commitment in Afghanistan until 2014, followed by a security agreement with the Kabul government “where you would have three to four airbases left behind… with American airpower, helicopters and Special Forces units, that would be available to Afghan security forces as far as the eye can see….” He estimated this would take 15,000 to 20,000 U.S. forces on the ground “and the Taliban would never come back.” And at that point “then you sit down and negotiate” from a position of strength.

For now, Republican hawks don’t want to talk about tax increases as a way to avert defense cuts.

“Let’s not let a domestic issue such as a tax increase interfere with what could be ‘devastating’ in the words of our secretary of defense to our nation’s security,” McCain said.

“Defending our country is not the cause of our fiscal crisis,” Ayotte said. “The notion that defense spending is the driver of the larger fiscal crisis is not the case. Roughly 60 percent of our spending is entitlements.”

The 2012 figure for the three biggest entitlements (Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) is 44 percent of total federal spending, but the CBO’s annual budget report this week said entitlement spending will nearly double in the next ten years.

The three big entitlements will go from 44 percent of total outlays to 55 percent, while defense outlays slip from 19 percent of federal spending to 13 percent.

But that entitlement growth is significantly understated because the CBO “baseline” forecast assumes that Congress will do exactly what the House-Senate conference committee Thursday had already agreed to not do: cut Medicare’s payments to doctors.

There was a bit of good news in the CBO forecast: revenues are improving. The CBO said that in 2011, individual income tax revenues jumped by $193 billion, or 21 percent. Even with high unemployment those who are working are earning more and paying more in taxes. Overall, revenues were up 6 percent in 2011 and CBO expects them to increase by 9.6 percent in 2012.

And then between 2012 and 2014, revenues are scheduled "shoot up by more than 30 percent," the CBO report said, but that, again, assumes that Congress will do what it’s almost certain to not do: allow the scheduled expirations of the current income tax rates and the scheduled increase in the reach of the alternative minimum tax.

 A Democrat who serves both on the payroll tax conference committee and on the Armed Services Committee, Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, sees room for progress toward averting a fiscal train wreck.

“If we can successfully conclude this (payroll tax) conference,” he said, “that’s a good sign that we can start dealing more constructively, cooperatively and effectively with the whole set of budget issues.” This would, he said, “set a good precedent” for dealing with the looming sequesters.

Democrats and Republicans can agree to at least discuss both spending and additional revenues, he said, “so that we don’t get into austerity measures that are leading to zero or negative growth and making deficit problems worse” in countries such as Greece and Spain.

Brian Snyder / Reuters

Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney takes the stage at a campaign rally in Reno, Nevada February 2, 2012.

Updated at 1:05p.m. ET 

Republican front-runner Mitt Romney seemed poised to pick up another state in the race to challenge President Barack Obama this fall, as candidates made a last push Friday before the caucuses in Nevada this weekend.

While Romney narrows his focus on Obama and the economy — by far the most important election issue this year — the president got welcome news Friday, as the Labor Department said the country's unemployment rate dropped to 8.3 percent from 8.5 percent in December, the lowest in nearly three years.

Lower unemployment is a positive a sign for Obama's hopes for a second term. Still, he's likely to face voters with the highest unemployment rate of any post-war president.

Related: Trump backs Romney: 'He's not going to allow bad things to continue to happen' 

"There are still far too many Americans who need a job ... but the economy is growing stronger. The recovery is speeding up. And we need to do everything in our power to keep it going," Obama said Friday.

In remarks later Friday, Romney said about 24 million Americans are still looking for work. "We're the strongest economy in the world and people have suffered enough, I think unnecessarily," he said.

Romney, a Mormon with close ties to church leaders, is expected to carry an overwhelming majority of votes Saturday from Nevada members of the church. Roughly 7 percent of Nevada's population is Mormon, but they carry more clout than that because they turn out in such high numbers. Nearly a quarter of all 2008 Republican presidential caucus voters in Nevada were Mormon, and roughly nine in 10 backed Romney then.

A final day of campaigning in Nevada for Romney, closest challenger Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul followed a carvival-like day in which real estate mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump stole the spotlight with a surprise endorsement for Romney. The news came after Gingrich's campaign mistakenly leaked word that he, not Romney, would get the backing.

Amid the glitter of Las Vegas casinos, Trump declared that Romney, whom he often criticized in the past, is "not going to allow bad things to continue to happen to this country we all love." The endorsement wasn't expected to have much sway on Republican voters, but it was a shot of publicity for a race that has seen a dizzying range of candidates rise and fall.

Romney said he was glad to get the support, but he seemed almost bemused to be caught up in the drama.

"There are some things you just can't imagine happening. This is one of them," Romney said with a smile.

Romney is already the clear Republican front-runner after a convincing win in the Florida primary this week, pulling 46.4 percent in the state compared with 31.9 percent for Gingrich, a former speaker of the House of Representatives, his closest rival.

The race is now moving to more western states that could be more friendly to Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who has been hit in recent weeks with concerns over his multimillionaire status and his sometimes tone-deaf comments about the poor.

Whereas Romney's faith was widely viewed nationally as a liability in 2008, running as a Mormon in the West guarantees a built-in voting bloc. Nearly 2.9 million members of the church live in Utah, Idaho, Nevada, Colorado, California and Arizona. In contrast, there are barely 206,000 Mormons in the first four Republican voting states of New Hampshire, Iowa, South Carolina and Florida, according to church estimates.

Even Mormon Democrats in Nevada claim Romney as a point of pride.

"The LDS church has the same affinity toward Mitt Romney as African-Americans feel toward President Obama," said Democratic state Sen. John Lee, referring to the church's full name, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "We don't look at him as the governor from Massachusetts. We don't look at him as the leader who saved the Olympics. We look at him as a man who knows what the values of our church are."

The church stresses political engagement, urging its members to "play a role as responsible citizens in their communities, including becoming informed about issues and voting in elections," according to its website.

The libertarian Texas Rep. Paul, who took second in Nevada in 2008, has been courting Mormon voters for months, setting up a "Latter Day Saints for Ron Paul" Facebook page, holding special phone bank hours aimed at registered Republican Mormon voters and sending out frequent campaign emails highlighting his Mormon volunteers.

Gingrich and former Pennsylvania senator Santorum, who only recently launched campaign operations in Nevada, have done little to appeal directly to church members. But their religious values — both are Catholics — could serve as a common ground with some Mormon voters who revere family and faith.

With members of Congress convinced their political survival depends on their image, the House is wasting no time in considering a Senate-passed bill that would ban insider trading by lawmakers and thousands of executive branch officials. Stock trades would have to be posted online within 30 days.

The Senate showed a rare display of bipartisanship Thursday to pass the bill 96-3, and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said it would be before the House next week. President Barack Obama repeated a pledge to sign it immediately.

"With approval ratings of Congress at an all-time low, this bill represents an opportunity to build some trust with the American people," said Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., a chief sponsor of the bill. "The truth is, members of Congress have access to all kinds of sensitive information, and it has to be clear that the information is being used to serve our country, not to make a personal profit."

Congress' approval ratings have been in the teens lately.

Cantor said, "Insider trading at any level of the federal government is unacceptable. We will quickly review the entire bill and the amendments that were added ... to ensure that public servants, whether in the legislative or executive branch, do not personally profit from insider information.

"It is critical that the bill we send to the president guarantees that the same rules apply to those in the federal government as they do to everyone else."

Obama praised the Senate.

"No one should be able to trade stocks based on nonpublic information gleaned on Capitol Hill," the president said. "So I'm pleased the Senate took bipartisan action to pass the STOCK Act. I urge the House of Representatives to pass this bill, and I will sign it right away."

Obama said still more ethics restrictions were needed, "like prohibiting elected officials from owning stocks in industries they impact."

Several amendments were added to the bill before final passage.

Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., won an amendment to include the 28,000 government workers in the executive branch in the bill, saying it would create a level playing field with the requirements for Congress. But the same amendment included conflicting language by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., that would apply to only 2,000 top policymakers — including the president, vice president and members of the Federal Reserve Board. Lieberman disputed Shelby's numbers, saying 300,000 executive branch workers could be affected.

A House-Senate conference will have to reconcile the two versions.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, successfully added language that would require "political intelligence" operatives to register and disclose affiliations, the same as lobbyists. These individuals are hired by stock traders to obtain useful information from members of Congress and their staffs.

Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Senate's ethics committee, and senior committee Republican Johnny Isakson of Georgia won an amendment that would force disclosure of all residential mortgages — by members of Congress, the president, the vice president and most Senate-confirmed appointees. Currently senators are not required to list all mortgages.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said laws prohibiting trading on inside, non-public information clearly cover members of Congress. In 2005, the SEC investigated then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee concerning his divestiture of stock in the family's hospital company days before its price fell on an analyst's forecast. Frist was not charged with wrongdoing.

To a large extent, Congress is reacting to a segment on CBS' "60 Minutes" that raised questions about stock trades by House Speaker John Boehner, the husband of House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., chairman of the Financial Services Committee. All have denied wrongdoing and denounced the network's story.

Republicans insisted on including top government officials outside the Congress in the bill even though they also are covered by insider trading regulations and face tougher conflict-of-interest restrictions than members of Congress. In some cases, executive branch officials are required to divest themselves of stock holdings that pose a conflict. Lawmakers don't have to do that and the Senate bill would not require it.

In addition to the 30-day online reporting requirement, the Senate would have to join the House in posting members' annual financial disclosure statements online instead of making only paper copies available on request.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., proposed wiping out the entire bill and substituting a simple certification by senators each year that they did not participate in insider trading. It was defeated, with 37 senators voting "yes" and 61 opposed.

President Barack Obama is to visit a state-of-the-art fire station in a Washington suburb on Friday.

The president will speak about the economy at Fire Station No. 5 in Arlington, Va. in the late morning.

He's expected to propose a new conservation program that would put veterans to work rebuilding trails, roads and levees on public lands. He's also expected to announce the administration will seek additional grant money for programs that allow local communities to hire more police officers and firefighters.

The Arlington County Fire Department says Station No. 5 is the first in the region to feature individual accommodations to better serve the increasing number of female firefighters. It's also a "green building," with many energy-saving features.

In the afternoon, Obama will attend a campaign event in Washington.

Donald Trump formally endorsed Mitt Romney for president on Thursday, describing the former Massachusetts governor as "tough" and "smart" and the best pick in the GOP primary.

Trump and Romney appeared together in Las Vegas to announce the endorsement, which drew heavy media coverage.

"It is a real honor and privilege to endorse Mitt Romney," Trump said in brief remarks. "Mitt is tough, he's smart, he's sharp. He's not going to allow bad things to continue to happen to this country we all love."

Romney said in response: "There are some things that you just can't imagine in your life. This is one of them," adding that it means a "great deal" to have the billionaire's support.

The endorsement follows a bizarre period of time in which several major news outlets -- including the New York Times and Associated Press -- had initially reported that Trump had been planning to endorse Newt Gingrich. The former House speaker had been one of only two candidates to agree appearing at a debate the "Apprentice" host had planned, but which never came to pass. Romney declined attendance.

RELATED: The quotable Donald Trump

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum (R) said he didn't think the Trump endorsement matters, but added on KDWN radio that if Trump "wants to endorse the person who's most in line with his thinking with respect to the major issue of this economic problem that we're involved in, he should endorse Rick Santorum."

For their part, Democrats seemed to take a degree of joy in the Trump spectacle.

"It really wouldn't be surprising if Donald Trump endorses Mitt Romney, because they both like firing people, and they both made millions doing it" Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, said on msnbc. "Donald Trump is such a cartoon character, no matter who he chooses, it's like Bugs Bunny endorsing ... It's really kind of a non-news event."

It's reflective of the media whirlwind to have surrounded Trump's game of footsie with Republican politics over the past year.

Trump had initially thought about running for the GOP nomination last spring. He talked publicly about the possibility of running and even visited New Hampshire. The flirtation coincided with the broadcast of last spring's season of "The Apprentice" on NBC. (NBC is a co-owner of mnsbc.com, along with Microsoft.) Trump had initially promised to make clear his intentions in the show's season finale, but ultimately demurred, and made the announcement separately.

Trump had additionally been one of the most prominent figures to voice suspicions that President Obama had not actually been born in the United States, and, thusly, was constitutionally ineligible to be president. Obama eventually relented and released his long-form birth certificate on April 27, 2011, verifying he was born in Hawaii. Obama made light of the situation at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner on May 1, deriding the media for giving voice to “carnival barkers” like Trump, only to announce the next day that Osama bin Laden had been killed in a daring raid in Pakistan -- planning of which had been ongoing during the annual dinner.

But the discussion of "birther" theories over the course of last spring appears to have harmed Trump in the eyes of the public; Trump had a 26 percent favorable rating in a February 2011 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, and a 29 percent unfavorable rating. By mid-May, the point at which the real estate magnate announced he wouldn't be running, a Suffolk University poll found that Trump had a 70 percent unfavorable rating, while just 18 percent of Americans had a positive opinion of Trump.

It's also not incredibly clear what, if any, impact the Trump endorsement will have on the trajectory of the race, in Nevada's caucuses on Saturday, or beyond. Romney had already led, at 45 percent, in a poll of likely Nevada caucus-goers released Thursday. He's followed by Gingrich at 25 percent, Santorum at 11 percent and Texas Rep. Ron Paul at 9 percent.

Still, the reality television star continued to play an out-sized role throughout the 2012 cycle. All the Republican candidates visited Trump through the course of last summer with the exception of former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman.

"I think his infusing himself into the dialogue really dumbs down and makes less consequential the very important issues that we must be discussing to get this country back on its feet again," Huntsman said on Fox News in December.

One of the most intensely covered media events of 2011 came when former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin went out for pizza with Trump in Manhattan during a stop on her bus tour of the Northeast, a journey meant to stoke speculation about her own presidential aspirations. When Romney visited Trump, he snuck in and out of the billionaire's headquarters without being captured by staked-out cameras.

More on recent FEC reports on campaign contributions:

• Pro-Ron Paul PAC misses $$$ deadline, blames credit card company
• After TV cameras leave, Romney Super PAC discloses $18 million
• Casino magnate Adelson's family gave early to Gingrich PAC

Pete Marovich / Getty Images

House-Senate Conference Committee Chairman, Rep. Dave Camp listens to U.S. Sen. John Barrasso during a committee meeting to discuss the Temporary Payroll Tax Cut Continuation Act on Capitol Hill Feb. 1, 2012 in Washington.

Updated 12:45pm Thursday

Dozens of American industries and businesses, from biodiesel producers to stock car racing facilities, are urging Congress to quickly revive 60 targeted tax breaks that expired on Dec. 31.

One option would be to include the tax breaks -- called “tax extenders” in Washington lingo – in the bill that continues the payroll tax cut, extends unemployment benefits, and postpones a cut in Medicare payments to doctors. 

At a House-Senate conference committee meeting Thursday to try to figure out how to continue those three provisions, which expire on Feb. 29, Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, D- Mont., made a strong pitch for taking action to revive the tax breaks.

He urged his colleagues to revive the research and development tax credit and the tax provision that allows people living in states with stateincome taxes, such as Florida, to deduct those payments on their federal tax return.

"It's just fairness," Baucus told the conference committee. He did concede that some of the expired tax breaks were "a little shady." But he said most were worthy of being revived.

And Sen. Ben Cardin, D- Md., made an appeal for energy and R&D tax credits, citing a steel company in Baltimore and a planned energy-from-trash facility, also in Baltimore, that depend on the tax incentives.

But House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp, R- Mich., said "My view is these are outside the scope of the conference." Camp got some support from two House Democrats on the committee, Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Sen. Sander Levin of Michigan who said the panel should focus on the big three issues: unemployment insurance, the payroll tax cut, and the Medicare physicians payments. 

If you're an employee of one of the affected industries that lost its tax break on Dec. 31, the congressional inaction could mean that you lose your job. If you’re an investor in one of those industries, your assets could lose their value. But if you're an advocate of a simpler, flatter tax code – as many members of Congress claim to be – then it might be time to let the expired tax breaks rest in peace – or at least make a few of them permanent and let the others remain dead. 

That, at least, was the argument made Tuesday to the Senate Finance Committee by Rutgers University economist Rosanne Altshuler who gave a damning picture of the tax extenders, saying they “create complexity, generate enormous compliance costs, breed perceptions of unfairness, (and) create opportunities for manipulation of rules to avoid tax ... .”  

The fairness question is inevitable. Because one particular industry’s tax burden is made a bit lighter by its tax credit, your tax burden, or your neighbor’s, must be made a bit heavier -- or the national debt must be bit bigger. 

One reason that dozens of tax breaks live for only a year at a time is that under Congress’s budget estimating rules, assuming that tax breaks expire at the end of every year makes projected budget deficits look smaller than they’d otherwise look.

The $38 billion in annual tax revenue that would be lost if all 60 tax extenders were revived is less than the revenue that is lost due to just one of the popular “permanent” tax breaks, the home mortgage interest deduction, which will cost nearly $85 billion in 2012, according to the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation. 

“I think there are too many extenders. I think we should get rid of a good number of them,” said Baucus Tuesday. He noted that the grand total of temporary tax breaks isn’t just the 60 that expired on Dec. 31 but 132 of them, a total that has more than tripled since 1998. (Some last for two years or more.) But Baucus also put in a good word for the small wind turbine tax credit which benefits Pine Ridge Products in Belt, Montana, as well as other wind firms.

Other committee members -- while saying they favored tax reform -- made pitches for their favorite tax breaks. Cardin made an impassioned pitch for the tax benefit for employer-provided transit passes and vanpooling that helps his Maryland constituents in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

When Cardin asked Altshuler for her view of this tax incentive, she candidly said, “It’s all just very depressing. I was depressed about the tax code before coming to this hearing. And in preparing for this hearing, and looking at all the temporary tax provisions that we have, I got even more depressed -- which I thought was impossible.”

She said that she wasn’t convinced there ought to be any commuter tax breaks -- for those who drive and have employer-provided parking, or for those who take the subway or train. “This is not how we do a fair, simple tax code that Americans can understand and have faith in,” she said.

Pressed again a few minutes later by Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., to agree there’s a need for the tax incentive for mass transit commuters, to make them equal to car commuters, Altshuler replied, “I hate to say that, but ... ”  

“Come on, you could,” Schumer interrupted, wryly. “It won’t hurt as much as you think.”

As one listened to the arguments from Schumer, Cardin, and other committee members, it was a reminder of why senators might want to serve on the tax-writing Finance Committee: so that they can create and preserve tax provisions that help their constituents and their states.

In the audience watching the hearing were representatives of some of the affected industries. Ben Evans, spokesman for the National Biodiesel Board, said his industry doesn’t want its $1-per-gallon tax incentive, which took effect in 2005, to be made permanent, but it does want a three-year extension. 

“That will provide the industry enough time and a little more maturity to step back and take a look and see if then the industry can stand on its own without the incentive,” he said. “In three more years, the industry will have grown a lot more, we’ll be a good bit more efficient, and we’ll have economies of scale.”

Producing biodiesel -- gathering up all that beef fat, chicken fat, and used cooking oil -- is more expensive than making diesel from crude oil, but the oil drillers have long enjoyed tax benefits, such as the tax break for drilling costs, so the biodiesel industry sees its tax credit as a matter of equity, leveling the playing field. 

The National Biodiesel Board cites an economic study that showed the industry supported nearly 40,000 jobs and added $3.8 billion to the national income last year.

If the biodiesel credit remains dead, Evans said, “At best, our industry’s production would be flat, and at worst, we would see a significant drop-off, maybe 20 to 25 percent. We had a record year of production last year with the tax incentive in place."

Likewise the motorsports industry-- the people who run the tracks where you can watch Dale Earnhardt Jr. and other NASCAR drivers -- says it needs the provision in tax law that allows it to depreciate assets over seven years, the same period theme parks parts use. In 2000 the Internal Revenue Service questioned whether motorsports facilities should come under that depreciation schedule.

Congress clarified in 2004 and again in 2010 that the seven-year rule applied to the motorsports industry, but its “fix” was temporary and expired on Dec. 31. 

The conventional wisdom among many political pundits is that President Barack Obama faces an uphill re-election battle in large part because unemployment seems stuck at historically high levels. Economists who have studied the impact of the job market on past elections beg to disagree.

It’s true that no president since Franklin Roosevelt has been elected when the unemployment rate was over 7.2 percent. That was where the jobless rate stood in 1984, when Ronald Reagan won a second term, beating Walter Mondale in a landslide, with 59 percent of the popular vote.

The jobless rate stood at 7.4 percent when George H.W. Bush lost his 1992 re-election bid against challenger Bill Clinton; it was at 7.5 percent in November 1980, when Jimmy Carter lost his job to Reagan.

If that were the only statistic that mattered, Obama indeed would have his work cut out for him.

Though the job market began gradually improving in the second half of last year, employment growth remains sluggish. The jobless rate dropped by a sharp 0.5 percentage point in the last three months of 2011 but currently stands at 8.5 percent and is expected to show little or no improvement when the government reports updated January data on Friday. Some forecasters caution the rate might even rise again this year as “discouraged” workers, who are not included in the official "headline" rate, begin looking for work again and raise the count of those considered unemployed.

But a high unemployment rate, by itself, isn’t necessarily a problem for an incumbent president, according to Ray Fair, a Yale University economist who has analyzed the impact of the economy on presidential elections back to 1916.

“What the data show is that it’s the change in the economy, primarily in the year of the election, that matters — not the level,” he said.

So far, the trend is moving in the right direction. But it could easily be derailed by this fall.

Fair’s current forecasts show a very close race. But his models show that Obama still stands a good chance of re-election even with a relatively modest drop in the unemployment rate by November.

“When they go to the booth, voters would see this as a positive sign: Obama’s got the economy growing again,” said Fair. "Even though the unemployment rate is higher than full employment, the trend is good and things are improving.”

Reagan’s 1984 re-election is a good example of that scenario: at 7.2 percent in November, the jobless rate was down more than a full percentage point from a year earlier as the economy continued to shake off the lingering impact of the 1980-1982 recession that sent the jobless rate soaring to 10.8 percent.

To capitalize on the high level of unemployment, GOP presidential hopefuls have hammered Obama's economic record, blaming a variety of White House policies for the weak job market. Front-runner Mitt Romney has tried to make the case that, if elected, the former Massachusetts Republican and Bain Capital president would apply his business experience to do a better job putting Americans back to work.

But for all the money spent on political advertising, the airtime devoted to debates and the miles logged in campaign jets and busses, the GOP attacks and Romney’s 162-page policy proposal may not mean much, say some analysts.

The correlation between economics and presidential elections is so strong, they say, that most of the attention on wider issues and policy differences -- from fiscal matters like taxes and the deficit, to social issues like income inequality and immigration -- have very little impact on voters’ final decision.

“Political scientists don’t tend to think the specifics of the challengers platform matter all that much,” said Brendan Nyhan, a government Professor at Dartmouth College. “Incumbent re-elections are primarily a referendum on the incumbent and specifically on their economic record. If the economy is strong, the challenger may try to shift onto some other issue, but that rarely works.”

Even as the economy continues to muddle through at a relatively weak growth pace, Obama may also be in a position to play a few important cards not available to his Republican challenger.

Incumbents have long used the power of the White House to enact programs and policies that help give the economy a jolt in the months before voters go the polls. Richard Nixon famously pressured then-Federal Reserve Board chairman Arthur Burns to cut interest rates to help spur the economy in the months ahead of his successful 1972 re-election despite widespread opposition to his administration’s Vietnam War policies.  

That’s increased the stakes in the ongoing debate over extending payroll tax cuts and long-term unemployment insurance. Both measures, if enacted, would improve American households' spending power and improve their sense of personal financial well-being. If Republican’s succeed in block or paring down those measures, the impact on consumer spending could create a further drag on the economy just in time for the campaign’s home stretch this fall.

Those two pocketbook helpers, though, may be Obama’s last chance to give the economy the momentum he’ll need to fend off voters’ money malaise, according to Mark Zandi, an economist with Moody’s Analytics and former advisor to 2008 GOP presidential hopeful John McCain.

“It’s going to be difficult to pass any legislation at this point in time for it to flow through to the economy,” he said. “It takes time -- not weeks, but the next quarter or two. So time is running out to make a difference.”

WASHINGTON -- The House on Wednesday passed a bill that would freeze the pay of federal workers, including members of Congress and their staffs, through 2013. The bill needed a two-thirds majority to pass and obtained that, 309-117.

The largely political vote was forced by Republicans to show that there is bipartisan support for the bill, which they had included in their one-year extension of the payroll tax cut extension as a way to pay for the bill. Only two Republicans voted against the bill, and 72 Democrats voted for it.

Republicans hope to use this vote as leverage to include it in a one-year extension of the payroll taxcut now being negotiated between the House and Senate.

The Senate is not expected to take up the pay freeze.

The House also overwhelmingly passed a bill that would restrict welfare funds from being used in strip clubs, casinos and liquor stores. That bill is not expected to be taken up in the Senate, either.