Speaking on Laura Ingraham's radio show, Politico reports, Bachmann was responding to Rove's criticism after she announced she would not run for reelection in 2014, which he said was a good thing. “Michele Bachmann was the chairman of the congressional Tea Party caucus and in that position did nothing,” Rove said.

“The base of our party is not where Karl Rove is, to be honest with you,” Bachmann said Tuesday. “I think that perhaps he wants to be the conscience of the Republican Party.”

“It is bizarre,” Bachmann added. “On one hand, the Tea Party was doing too much. And now they’re saying they’re not doing enough.”

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So the question is not so much whether the GOP should change but, rather, how? Two options commonly proffered are as follows: Republicans could follow the lead of Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and push for even smaller government (I call this the “more cowbell” school of thought). Or they could look instead to the small but influential group of right-wing intellectuals claiming to offer a new path: the “conservative reformers.” The decision looks so simple. Either one step forward, or two steps back.

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About two months after Romney’s loss, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, channeling John Stuart Mill, admonished Republicans to stop being “the stupid party.” Karl Rove, whose bona fides as a political moderate had been fairly well hidden, announced that he would form a super-PAC dedicated to the proposition that only electable -- that is, mainstream -- candidates could emerge from Republican senatorial primaries. (No second amendment solutions, witches, or divinely ordained rapes need apply.) And John Huntsman, erstwhile Governor of Utah, Ambassador to China, and 2012 Republican Presidential candidate, went so far as to endorse the formation of a third party. “Someone’s going to step up at some point and say we’ve had enough of this,” he intoned. A third party might not win, but “[it] can certainly influence the debate.”

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Case in point: Its hilarious “D.C. turns on Obama” piece last week, which marked the crest of Scandalmania and also helped explain polls that show Americans trust President Obama’s version of events when it comes to the Benghazi and IRS controversies. I expected polls to show people believe the president on these issues, but I’ll admit I was surprised to see his approval rating actually ticked up a bit despite the constant drumbeat of scandal. But it did -- and that should force the media to look in the mirror, though it probably won’t.

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David Camp has it wrong. There has been a “systematic” abuse of power, but it’s not what Camp has in mind. The real scandal is that:

The IRS has interpreted our tax laws to allow big corporations and wealthy individuals to make unlimited secret campaign donations through sham political fronts called “social welfare organizations,” like Karl Rove’s “Crossroads,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and “Priorites USA.”

This campaign money has been used to bribe Congress to keep in place tax loopholes like the “carried interest” rule that allows the managers of hedge funds and private equity funds to treat their income as capital gains, subject only to low capital gains taxes rather than ordinary income taxes, and other loopholes that allow CEOs to get special tax treatment on giant compensation packages that now average $10 million a year.

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The Cincinnati incident, which has already cost the job of Acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller (who was not the commissioner when the scandal occurred – this would be like the State Department reacting to the tragedy at the Libyan consulate by firing a low-level bureaucrat coincidentally named Ben Ghazi), is definitely scandalous in its own right. As the Treasury Inspector General report details, it’s completely inappropriate for the IRS to burden any subset with invasive information requests based merely on keywords or policy positions.

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Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Kristol added that people should “pull the partisanship back. It’s a genuine outrage what happened in Benghazi, it’s a genuine outrage what the IRS did," so "I wish the Republicans would just be quiet for while — I mean, the partisan Republican groups that are fundraising off of this — would be quiet on both issues for a while, and let’s find out what really happened.”

Watch, via Raw Story:

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Watch:

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"What I'm doing is I've been traveling the state for the last four months. We are trying to grow a movement of people in Illinois to tell their politicians - they want to grow up, keep more of what we've make... We already have 2,000 members," Walsh told the Chicago Sun-Times.

Walsh, who lost his race to Democrat Tammy Duckworth in 2012, said that he's mostly focused on candidates in Illinois, though would like to expand so that the Super PAC can support national candidates as well.

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To appreciate how that single radical jurisprudential theory of Too Big to Fail connects issues as disparate as financial regulation and same-sex marriage, remember that the last few weeks has seen America's normally opaque government for the first time articulate that theory in public. As you may recall, the attorney general, the assistant attorney general and President Obama's nominee to head the Securities and Exchange have all admitted that prosecutors take into account external factors (macroeconomic effects, shareholder losses, etc.) when deciding whether to charge lawbreaking financial institutions with serious crimes.

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But let’s start with then. It’s April 8, 2004, to be exact, and I’m inside a makeshift medical center in the heart of Fallujah while that predominantly Sunni city is under siege by American forces. I’m alternating between scribbling brief observations in my notebook and taking photographs of the wounded and dying women and children being brought into the clinic.

A woman suddenly arrives, slapping her chest and face in grief, wailing hysterically as her husband carries in the limp body of their little boy. Blood is trickling down one of his dangling arms. In a few minutes, he’ll be dead.  This sort of thing happens again and again.

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Rove had responded to "Ham Rove," the "dearly digested" ham version of himself, who served as Colbert's chief strategist for his Super PAC - and who Colbert stabbed to death last year.

“I don’t know whether that was working out his inner feelings, or encouraging maybe someone to maybe mimic him or just sort of being funny. But there was a little bit of anxiety in his stabs there," Rove said in an interview with ABC News on Sunday.

"Karl, there is no need for anxiety," Colbert said Monday. "I am in no way encouraging anybody to stab Karl Rove. There is a big different between Karl Rove and Ham Rove." But, he added, Easter is coming up, so "Karl, to avoid any confusion with Ham Rove, for the next week or so please avoid the urge to cover your face with pineapple rings."

Watch:

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There were Karl Rove and Peggy Noonan on "This Week" on Sunday, gleefully seizing on Ginsburg’s prior statements about Roe to make an argument against Supreme Court recognition of minority rights in general. “Americans don't take it well and don't accept it as a resolution when their black-robed masters in Washington decide to put on them what they decide is the right thing,” said Noonan. “One of the great sins of Roe versus Wade, the abortion decision of 40 years ago, was that it decided everyone has to do it one way, instead of leaving it to the states. May I note, by the way, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a famous court liberal, her acknowledging very recently was in I think the Times today, that the Rove versus Wade decision, the abortion decision, had gone too far and was an overreach. That is an epic statement from an American liberal left jurist.”

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"He’s an entertainer, so he gets to be funny and exaggerate things and so forth," Rove said. "Though I have to admit, when he took out the knife and started stabbing it, I think he might need a little bit of professional counseling on his anger management issues."

He added: "I don’t know whether that was working out his inner feelings, or encouraging maybe someone to maybe mimic him or just sort of being funny. But there was a little bit of anxiety in his stabs there.”

Watch:

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“Can you imagine the next presidential campaign a Republican candidate saying flat out ‘I am for gay marriage,’” host George Stephanopoulos asked Rove.

"I could," he replied.

Watch:

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" I didn't run on jobs and the economy," King told CPAC, adding that he "stood on life and stood on marriage," unlike some of his colleagues in the House. "A bunch of people who have backed away from these challenges don't realize that I'm still here standing."

"Our job is to step up and defend our values and the full spectrum of constitutional conservatism," he said.

King is thinking about a run in 2014 to replace retiring Sen. Tom Harkin.

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From Reuters:

The confrontational strategy flies in the face of post-election Republican efforts to become a more accommodating and less ideological party, and is certain to deepen the rift between the party's conservative warriors and more pragmatic establishment wing.

It also is certain to cement the Club's reputation, earned over more than a decade of sometimes brutal primary battles, as the outside group most likely to frustrate party bosses.

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From earlier:

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said that Karl Rove's plan to target far-right conservatives in the primaries, like potential Iowa Senate candidate Rep. Steve King, is "a fool's game because you can’t actually predict some of the things that go on.”

“Listen, I don’t think our platform is the issue,” Priebus said, Radio Iowa reports. “I think a lot of times it’s some of these biologically stupid things that people say, you know, that I believe caused a lot of the problems.”

He continued: "Personally, as an RNC [Chair], I don’t believe in that. I don’t believe the party should pick winners and losers in primaries and I think it’s, historically, if you look at it, it’s a bit of a fool’s game because you can’t actually predict some of the things that go on.”

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During the past two cycles, flawed candidates such as Akin, the former Missouri congressman who lost a targeted Senate race, helped derail the GOP’s hopes of winning a Senate majority. Costly primaries produced ineffective general-election nominees, costing the NRSC five otherwise-winnable races since 2010.

While candidate control is often beyond the NRSC’s abilities, the committee will ultimately be judged on whether the party can avoid such troubles and pick up the six seats needed for a majority in 2014.

“The campaigns that jumped off message not only infected themselves, they infected all the rest of the campaigns,” Rob Collins, the new executive director of the NRSC, told Roll Call. “So in this age of fractured but continuous, three-dimensional communication, we have to constantly plan for that and train for that and build for that.”

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Club For Growth launched the initiative through a website, "Primary My Congressman!", which will regularly feature Congressmen with low ratings from the group. The idea is to target moderates in districts that are safely Republican, so conservative primary challengers will have a good shot at winning in the general election.

The first batch members targeted by Club For Growth are Reps. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho,  Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., Rick Crawford, R-Ark., Frank Lucas, R-Okla., Steve Palazzo, R-Miss., Martha Roby, R-Ala., Larry Bucshon, R-Ind., Renee Elmers, R-N.C., and Aaron Schock, R-Ill.

“Big government liberals inhabit the Democratic Party, but they are far too common within the Republican Party as well,” Chris Chocola, Club For Growth's president, said in a statement.

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