The newly announced plan still mandates coverage of contraception, but will shift the provision to insurers, rather than employers.

The White House said on Friday that it will require insurance companies to pick up the tab for women's contraceptives, exempting religious employers from the rule, in what it called an "accommodation" on the hotly contested issue of paying for birth control.

The White House said it would post a proposed rule that requires insurance companies to offer contraception coverage directly to women.

The much-awaited compromise is meant to appease religious institutions that say federal rules on contraception violate their religious beliefs.

"Insurance companies will be required to provide contraception coverage to these women free of charge," the White House said in a statement. "Religious organizations will not have to provide contraceptive coverage or refer their employees to organizations that provide contraception," it added. "Religious organizations will not be required to subsidize the cost of contraception."

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A senior administration official said that the plan was not a compromise. "This is an accommodation," the official said. "We have been working on this policy for some time." Republicans in Congress have been piling on the administration for days, denouncing the plan to ensure that women get health insurance coverage for contraception free of charge. The administration had offered an exemption to purely religious employers and gave religious-affiliated groups, such as Catholic hospitals, a year to come up with ways to provide the coverage to employees.

The administration official said that Friday's announcement was one way for these employers to do this. The official said the administration had consulted stakeholders but did not give details of who these stakeholders were.

The proposed rule may put pressure on insurance companies.

Senior administration officials argued that because contraceptives can prevent costly, unwanted pregnancies -- one birth alone can cost $12,000, said a White House staffer -- that having insurance companies pick up the tab would be cost-neutral.

Insurance companies are sure to complain about the new rule, however, especially during the comment period to the Health and Human Services Department. But most voters don't love their insurance companies, and those complaints might fall on deaf ears.

It is unclear how religious organizations will accept the news. Under the proposed rule, they will still be paying a piece of employee premiums to an insurance plan that does in fact cover contraception. It's just that their premium dollars cannot be used to cover the cost of the birth control.

The ACLU and some women's groups immediately approved the plan. "We know that Catholics in the pews support this position, as 98 percent of Catholic women use contraception and 58 percent of Catholics support insurance coverage for contraception," the ACLU's Louise Melling said in a statement. "The ACLU will defend the health and religious liberty needs of employees and hopes the intense recent debate is now be behind us."

Judy Waxman, the vice president for health and reproductive rights at the National Women's Law Center, said that her organization is pleased with the outcome. "There are a number of open questions, but we are very hopeful," she said.

Republican Study Committee Chairman Jim Jordan emitted the first blowback against the new contraception rule, signaling that Republicans will not find the changes acceptable. "This 'Obamacare' rule still tramples on Americans' First Amendment right to freedom of religion. It's a fig leaf, not a compromise. Whether they are affiliated with a church or not, employers will still be forced to pay an insurance company for coverage that includes abortion-inducing drugs," Jordan said in a statement.

Margot Sanger-Katz contributed

Image: Shutterstock

He may be caricatured as a far-right culture warrior, but Santorum has made headway in the race by contrasting his authentic conservatism with Romney's record.

Rick Santorum is back. After his stunning three-state sweep in Tuesday's Republican balloting, the former Pennsylvania senator has single-handedly revived a GOP race that seemed to be on the verge of wrapping up. How seriously has his new wave of successes reordered the landscape? A forthcoming national poll will show him in first place, the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling tweeted Thursday night.

To those who had written him off as a social-conservative niche candidate or a one-hit wonder after his Iowa surprise, this is a bit jarring, if not plain laughable. The guy who once equated homosexuality to "man on dog," prompting a sex columnist to turn his name into an obscenity? The guy who lost his last race for reelection by 18 percentage points? The dweeb in the sweater vest? Why is this guy being taken seriously by Republican voters?

His latest resurgence may be as much about Mitt Romney as it is about Santorum. But there are three key attributes that endear Santorum to conservatives -- and they're all things Romney lacks: an appealing personal story, a refusal to back down and a set of impeccable culture-war credentials.

1. His Appealing Personal Story. Santorum is a first-generation American -- as a child, his father was brought to the U.S. by his grandfather, an Italian who worked as a coal miner in western Pennsylvania. Those are some serious blue-collar credentials, and Santorum references them frequently on the stump, whether it's describing how his ancestors' sacrifices match up with the sacrifices of immigrants today, or pitching an economic plan that he says would bring back manufacturing for the good of the working class. Santorum also lives his pro-life beliefs. A Catholic who personally opposes contraception, he has seven living children (another died after just hours of life), including one, Bella, who is now three years old, despite having a Down Syndrome-like condition, Trisomy 18, that few children survive. Santorum speaks movingly of her situation, too, giving his professed belief in the sanctity of all life an intensely, sometimes painfully personal cast. Recently, he took a few days off the campaign trail when Bella was hospitalized. In his victory speech in Missouri on Tuesday, one of the first things Santorum said was this: "I just want a particular little note to my Bella, who I know is watching me and looking at her daddy. So I love you, sweetie. Thank you so much for getting healthy."

2. His Refusal to Back Down. The most telling moment I witnessed with Santorum on the campaign trail was in Marshalltown, Iowa, before the caucuses when a questioner at a town hall asked him what he would do to bring back the good old days when polarization was not so severe and the two parties could get together and compromise -- when Bob Dole and Tip O'Neill could put their differences aside and solve problems. There's an easy non-answer to this question, and politicians give it all the time: I'll reach across the aisle, they say, and common sense will prevail. Instead, Santorum argued against his questioner's premise. Those weren't the good old days at all, he said. In those days, Democrats got to keep expanding government, and Republicans' idea of "compromise" was to get them to spend a little less, or to get some money for Republican districts. Santorum praised the current Congress -- unpopular as it is -- for having drawn lines in the sand on things like the debt ceiling, rather than going along to get along. He does this on other issues, too. Conservatives hate that he wholeheartedly supported his liberal colleague Arlen Specter's 2004 reelection against a more conservative primary challenger, but Santorum defends it, saying Specter's votes guaranteed the confirmation of George W. Bush's Supreme Court nominees. Likewise, Santorum refuses to apologize for having avidly sought earmarks while in Congress, saying elected representatives know better how federal money ought to be spent than bureaucrats do -- though he concedes pork-barrel spending has now gotten out of hand. Santorum's refusal to compromise his principles, and his ability to articulately defend his stances, are attractive qualities for conservatives who find Romney squishy. They also make Santorum a consistently excellent debater, the only candidate who's successfully prosecuted the case against Romney on health care.

3. His Culture-War Cred. With the economy thawing, conservatives are suddenly concerned that they won't be able to beat Obama on that issue alone, and they worry that Romney doesn't have any other case to make. Meanwhile, and perhaps not coincidentally, cultural issues are having a flare-up -- from the federal court decision affirming gay marriage in California, to the battle between Susan G. Komen for the Cure and Planned Parenthood, to the Obama administration's decision to require some religious employers to pay for insurance plans that cover birth control. This latter issue was by far the hottest topic at the Conservative Political Action Conference that kicked off Thursday in Washington, with speakers and participants alike seeing it as an attack on religious freedom and the First Amendment. (Santorum, Romney and Newt Gingrich are the star speakers at the confab today.) With his long history as a culture warrior, this is a hot button Santorum -- who led the charge for congressional intervention on the Terri Schiavo case and authored the partial-birth abortion ban -- is uniquely qualified to push.

Image credit: Getty Images/Whitney Curtis

Occupiers meet attendees at the conservative gathering, and chaos ensues.

Behold: the day's dumbest political confrontation. (If you're listening in an office, it's probably mildly NSFW without headphones due to an F-bomb.)

The Daily Caller's Matt Lewis uploaded this video. After dire warnings for days that members of the Occupy movement would try to disrupt the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington -- conservative activists reportedly infiltrated Occupy meetings to learn what was planned -- the showdown finally arrived today. Let's just say that as far as memorable and worthy battles in history go, it's not exactly the Shootout at the OK Corral. The form of the protest: Occupiers entered the overflow room for attendees watching Mitt Romney's address, then stood silently in front of the screen relaying the speech. Those who actually wanted to see Romney's speech were understandably annoyed, and a bit of a donnybrook broke out.

It's tough to make out exactly what's going on, but choice quotes include the nonsensical "You're not the 99 percent, I'm the 99 percent;" the straightforward "you're a left-wing bastard" (UPDATED: he might be saying fascist); and the playground-quality insult, "why don't you go hang out with Mussolini?" It's not really a good look for anyone involved, although the young woman concerned her father will come to blows with a protester is somewhat endearing.

There's something that needs to be said no matter how uncomfortable it makes some people listening to us. There is a strain of bigotry -- and that's the word I want to use -- running through conservative America. That doesn't mean all conservatives are bigots, or even that most conservative are bigots. That's not what I'm saying. But there is a strain of bigotry. And it goes against gay people, for instance. Ellen DeGeneres did nothing wrong. She's gay, right. Reasonable people may disagree on gay marriage. That's fine. But to call on somebody to be fired, to lose her job because she's gay, is bigotry, and I don't care how many people listening to us right now don't like that. It's bigotry.

Let me say one more thing, Bill. In the middle of the last century, in the 1950s and the 1960s, there was another strain of bigotry on the right, and it was against black people. That has to leave the conservative movement. I used to be a liberal. I became a conservative because liberals were a little too crazy for me. A lot too crazy for me, actually. But you know what? I am immensely uncomfortable with the bigotry on the right. And I don't care how many people don't like it. I am sick of it.

Bill O'Reilly: It's not Ellen DeGeneres's sexuality that they object to, Bernie. It's how she presents it to the public. They believe, the Million Moms believe, that she flaunts it, she puts it in their face.

Bernie Goldberg: She flaunts it? I flaunt my heterosexuality.

Bill O'Reilly: No you don't. We don't know about your personal life. You don't walk around and all of that.

Bernie Goldberg: What do you mean she flaunts it?

Bill O'Reilly: She makes it a cause. She makes it a cause celebre. And that's what they object to.

Bernie Goldberg: They're a minority that in many places are under attack. She has every right to make it a cause. And there's no agenda. She's just gay. She wants to live her life as a gay person. I'm telling you, I'm sick of this.

Bill O'Reilly: Now the bigotry against pro-life people, I think, is way more than the bigotry against gay people, particularly in the media, because the media supports gay people, generally speaking.

Bernie Goldberg: (unenthusiastically) Right.

Santorum and Gingrich also spoke on the second day of the Conservative Political Action Conference, trying to show solidarity with the GOP base crowd.

Mitt Romney's much-hyped task at the Conservative Political Action Conference: convince this exotic tribe that he was one of them. And so, in his 26-minute speech Friday, the word "conservative" appeared 24 times.

But when Romney went off script, with a single adverb, he described conservatism as if it were a disease.

"I was a severely conservative governor," he said of his time as chief executive of Massachusetts.

That one sour note did much to undermine the goal of the speech, which was -- aside from repetitive subliminal word-association with "conservative" -- to paint Romney as no arriviste to the conservative cause.

Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich all spoke on Day 2 of CPAC, each hoping to win the affections of the party base that has behaved in such a fickle manner this campaign season.

Santorum, for his part, made the most of his status as the man of the moment, seeming comfortable and at ease in his speech earlier in the day. Gingrich, speaking last of the three, gave an unremarkable, overlong recitation of his stump speech.

Santorum was introduced, jarringly, by the man bankrolling his supposedly uncoordinated "super PAC," billionaire Foster Friess, who, unlike the candidate, wore a sweater vest. "A conservative, a moderate and a liberal walk into a bar," Friess joked. "And the bartender says, 'Hi, Mitt!'"

Santorum said conservatives had "learned our lesson" and knew better than to "abandon and apologize for the principles that made this country great" to achieve "a hollow victory in November."

The election, he said, would be about "really big things, more than just the economy -- foundational principles." He pitched an economic policy that would, he said, help even those who don't vote for conservatives, such as the "very poor" -- a cutting jab that implied that Romney's profession of non-concern for the very poor was based on pandering rather than merely class blindness.

Santorum argued that a less-than-enthusiastic GOP base would never win, and that Romney's supposed organizational advantage was no message to take to a general election.

"We're not going to win this election because the Republican candidate has the most money to beat up on their opponent," he said, adding, "Why would an undecided voter vote for a candidate of a party who the party's not excited about?"

Much of the appeal of Romney's candidacy is predicated on the idea that beating Obama will be difficult, and compromises required to achieve it. But Romney, perhaps recognizing that voters have grown weary and suspicious of that message, tried to convince the crowd that it's governing he's interested in, not power.

"Of course we can defeat Barack Obama! That's the easy part!" Romney said. The hard part, the important part, he said, would come later -- changing the country.

Romney distinguished himself from the college kids in attendance who, he speculated, were learning conservatism by reading Burke and Hayek; when he was their age, he said, he would have thought those were infielders for the Tigers.

Rather, he said, "I know conservatism because I have lived conservatism" -- growing up in a rags-to-riches family, being married to the same woman for 42 years and making lots of money in business.

Romney also got in a shot at Santorum and Gingrich, saying he was "the only candidate in this race, Republican or Democrat, who has never worked a day in Washington. I don't have old scores to settle or decades of cloakroom deals to defend."

Voters, Romney said, should be "skeptical" of "any politician who tries to convince you that they hated Washington so much that they just couldn't leave."

The ballroom was packed for all three candidates, but there was clearly less energy in the room for Gingrich, whose candidacy has swooned in recent weeks. He was introduced by his wife, Callista, who told some awkward, overprogrammed jokes about her beloved husband. Newt, she said, "golfs the way he does everything" -- "he's willing to learn and he never gives up."

Taking the stage, Gingrich clarified that he was "a very bad golfer."

Image credit: Reuters/Jim Bourg

Attendees at the annual conservative confab who want to take home more than just memories have plenty of ways to accessorize.

If you're one of the thousands of conservatives assembled in Washington this week for the Conservative Political Action Conference, you're going to have some great memories. But what about more tangible souvenirs? For that, you'll want to hit the exhibition hall in the basement, where dozens of conservative groups are offering party favors at their booths. From rubber fetuses to Santorum sweater vests, you'll go home proudly accessorized with the hottest right-wing gear.