The piece is largely an attempt to add a patina of respectability to the ancient, brainless comment thread talking point about how Robert Byrd was in the Klan, but lots of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act, so therefore Democrats are the real racists. (In this respect, the piece is an homage to Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism," which attempted to expand "Nazi stands for National Socialist" to book length, without pictures.) The only problem is that the "lie" he's arguing against is 100 percent true, except when he states it in such a way that it no longer resembles what anyone has ever actually claimed.

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For those of us who believe that there’s something seriously wrong with the Republican Party (and see Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein’s new book; see also my argument that the problem is not about how “conservative” they are, but about their radical style), the big question is whether anything can be done about it. American democracy needs two strong, solid political parties, but currently one of the parties is just a mess – incapable of making coherent policy when it’s in office, and dangerously obstructionist when it’s out of office.

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The most recent evidence that the current incarnation of the Republican Party just can't handle the truth arrived this month when House Republicans voted to get rid of the American Community Survey. The ACS is an annual information-gathering effort that's part of the U.S. Census. Every year, a randomized sample of 3 million Americans is surveyed for data on "demographic, housing, social and economic characteristics." In one form or another, the U.S. government has been carrying out similar surveys since 1850 -- the current version is the fourth major iteration.

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In the last week, Colorado was the testing ground for this talking point. At the presidential level, Republican nominee Mitt Romney criticized a Denver television reporter for daring to ask about his position on, among other issues, same-sex marriage. Before restating his opposition, he scoffed at the question, asking: “Aren’t there issues of significance that you’d like to talk about [like] the economy? The growth of jobs? The need to put people back to work?”

At the same time, Colorado's Republican House Speaker Frank McNulty twice blocked a vote on a bill to legalize civil unions. His rationale? “We should not be spending time on divisive social issues when unemployment remains far too high and [when] far too many Coloradans remain out of work,” he said. Echoing that sentiment, the shadowy Republican front group Compass Colorado financed an automated telephone call telling thousands of voters that the push for civil unions was unacceptable because it is “promoting [a] divisive social agenda over Colorado job creation.”

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Now, there is no evidence that Jon Huntsman is planning for run for mayor of New York City, but one of his annoying daughters tossed this one out there last night:

Trying to convince dad @JonHuntsman to run for mayor of NYC. Thoughts? #whynot?

— Abby Huntsman (@HuntsmanAbby) May 17, 2012

Why not? I mean sure he has never lived in New York and has no connection to the city, but why not?

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When congressional scholars Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein say “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” – the title of their book – they’re being serious (subtitle: “How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism”). Mann, the W. Averell Harriman chair and senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, and Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, began the Congress Project in the midst of the 1978 midterm campaign to track the institution as it evolved. What they’ve found since hasn’t been encouraging.

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Ryan and his fellow Republicans (and a not inconsiderable number of Democrats) are desperate to find a way to avoid the dreaded  "sequester" -- a package of around $600 billion in defense spending cuts that are scheduled to start kicking in at the end of this year. Never mind the holy grail of deficit reduction: When the beggar with his hand stuck out is the Pentagon, "entitlement" isn't such a dirty word, after all.

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Research suggests that conservatives are, on average, more susceptible to fear than those who identify themselves as liberals. Looking at MRIs of a large sample of young adults last year, researchers at University College London discovered that “greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala” ($$). The amygdala is an ancient brain structure that's activated during states of fear and anxiety. (The researchers also found that “greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex” – a region in the brain that is believed to help people manage complexity.)

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It’s almost as if the GOP can’t help itself.

Start with Hispanic voters, whose electoral heft keeps growing as they comprise an ever-larger portion of the electorate. Hispanics now favor President Obama over Romney by more than two to one, according to a recent Pew poll.

The movement of Hispanics into the Democratic camp has been going on for decades. What are Republicans doing to woo them back? Replicating California Republican Governor Pete Wilson’s disastrous support almost twenty years ago for Proposition 187 – which would have screened out undocumented immigrants from public schools, health care, and other social services, and required law-enforcement officials to report any “suspected” illegals. (Wilson, you may remember, lost that year’s election, and California’s Republican Party has never recovered.)

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Saltsman trots out the old canards against the minimum wage, claiming that research indicates that a minimum wage increase "simply doesn’t help the poor — in fact, it hurts them." He cites studies which showed that states with their minimum wages between 2003 and 2007 found no associated decline in state poverty rates. Saltsman gives three reasons for this:

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• “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.”
• "You know you’ve arrived in politics when you have an urban legend about you, and this one is mine,” chuckles Representative Paul Ryan, the Budget Committee chairman, as we discuss his purported obsession with author and philosopher Ayn Rand."
• "I give out 'Atlas Shrugged' as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it. Well... I try to make my interns read it."
• "Ayn Rand, more than anybody else, did a fantastic job explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism, and that, to me, is what matters most."
• “I reject her philosophy.... It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. "

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A Republican and Tea Party favorite, he was asked at a local gathering how many of his fellow members of Congress are “card-carrying Marxists or International Socialists.”

He replied, “I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party. It’s called the Congressional Progressive Caucus.”

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With just 32 more votes out of the 3,908 cast, he would have cleared the magic 60 percent threshold and secured the nomination for a seventh Senate term on the spot. Instead, Hatch now has a date in the June 26 primary with Dan Liljenquist, a Tea Party activist and former state senator.

This marks the first time since he won his seat in 1976 that Hatch will face a primary, and he enters the race as the favorite. But the convention results point to a restive and volatile Republican electorate. Hatch spent more than $5 million in the run-up to Saturday’s vote, and yet the little-known Liljenquist still ended up with 41 percent. It’s absolutely possible that Hatch’s career will come to an end in June.

His struggle for survival is, in part, a reflection of the risk any politician takes in staying around too long. Hatch is 78 years old and has been in office since 1977. A simple desire for something new and different surely accounts for some of resistance he’s confronting.

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Lately gay and LGBT-friendly Republicans have taken a major role in bankrolling and organizing the marriage campaign nationwide, as part of a fairly sudden and welcome shift in public attitude toward same-sex marriage and full legal equality for gays and lesbians. Some of the conservatives donating to equality causes have also donated to and fundraised for Romney. They are attempting to justify this fact in a few ways.

First, that Romney and Obama both oppose gay marriage. Which is true!

“Mitt Romney is where President Obama is on this issue,” a Republican backer of the likely nominee said.

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“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” -- Matthew 6:24 (NIV)

As Rick Santorum exits and Newt Gingrich fades out, who would have imagined that the Gospel of St. Matthew would provide the best handle on the GOP primaries this year?

Even in 2009, it was obvious that the Republican Establishment and many of America’s richest citizens were busy laying the groundwork for a very special effort to take back the White House in 2012. After the 2010 congressional elections produced the second largest swing in the two-party vote against the Democrats since 1826, the focus on 2012 became ferocious. The road, though, was bumpy. But by late last year, as one candidate after another flamed out, the hopes of most Obama opponents were settling, sometimes ruefully, on Mitt Romney.

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Canceling the long-planned Access to the Region's Core rail tunnel project was likely the most high-profile decision Christie made in his first months as governor of New Jersey. The press generally treated it as a tough-but-necessary decision from a no-nonsense politician who was getting serious about the budget. It was actually just an incredibly short-sighted way of getting around a promise not to raise New Jersey's (very low) gas tax. And Christie lied about the reason he canceled the project, according to a study from the Government Accountability Office.

The New York Times has the details of the report today, and in classic Times fashion it is repeatedly calling Christie a liar without using the word. Instead, Christie "exaggerated" and "misstated" his rationales for canceling the project.

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Stewart’s statement was factually accurate, as we’ll see. The next day, however, the fact-checking site PolitiFact weighed in and rated it “false.”In claiming to check Stewart’s “facts,” PolitiFact ironically committed a serious error—and later, doubly ironically, failed to correct it. How’s that for the power of fact checking?

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