Related to yesterday's brouhaha over my article suggesting a connection between last week's anti-Mormon phone calls and the Romney campaign's pollsters, I would have responded sooner but I was waiting to speak with TargetPoint. I had a few specific questions:

• Are you still working with Western Wats?
• When was the last time they worked for you?
• What kind of work did they do for you?
• Did Western Wats work on any pro-Romney projects with you?
• Why were you involved with a firm that has been repeatedly accused of push polling?
• Why did you not issue a statement clarifying your involvement with the firm right when the story broke?

I asked these questions over the phone, and they refused to comment on any of the specifics beyond the statement they issued yesterday. "We put out a statement yesterday that made it clear we had nothing to do with these calls. We're not going to get into how we run our business," their spokesman said.

But first, a couple of mea culpas with regard to yesterday's article. 1) Though I think the headline "Did Mitt Romney Push Poll Himself?" was enticing as a rhetorical question, it overpromised. 2) In retrospect I should have waited until I contacted TargetPoint before the I ran the story. As a matter of fairness, I apologize to TargetPoint for that. I never set out to exclude their perspective. I called them Monday morning, after the piece was posted early on, to get their side of the story for the follow up. They declined to talk to me.

It would have made the story stronger to include TargetPoint's blanket denial and I would have happily included it. Still, it would have in no way invalidated what I wrote or prevented me from publishing the story. Further, I had already included arguments against Romney's involvement in a substantive way — not in a way that they could be easily dismissed.

While I understand that TargetPoint doesn't want to comment on everything regarding their business relationship with Western Wats to protect the confidentiality of their clients, their statement yesterday refused to even admit they'd done business with the company. Surely by now TargetPoint can come out and denounce the company for engaging in unethical behavior and religious bigotry against their most important client and make it clear they are no longer working with the company. Or at least explain why they do business with a company that has been repeatedly accused of unethical push polling, long before the anti-Mormon calls. They declined to comment on both points.

So it all comes down to whether or not you think that even posing the question about whether the Romney campaign could have been involved in the calls is somehow inappropriate. I don't think it is. The skulduggery of Presidential politics is such that this kind speculation isn't out of bounds for any candidate, including Romney. (As proof of this, one of Mitt's official bloggers Justin Hart at mymanmitt.com admits he was prepared to run with a story headlined "Gage Firm: We Did It. Don't Blame Romney.") And I did not merely speculate — I provided new evidence and I also provided pro-Romney balance as well. I am only invested in determining who made the calls, not in proving Romney was behind them.

UPDATE: Correction — Hart does not work for the Romney campaign.