Blackburn would seem to be an odd choice to help Republicans improve their popularity with women. On “Meet the Press” just two weeks ago she made headlines by insisting women “don’t want” equal pay laws (she of course voted against the Lilly Ledbetter fair pay act.) Now she’s insisting that the House GOP’s anti-abortion bill is meant to help women, too. While it now includes an exception for victims of rape and incest, it will only apply to women who have reported those crimes to police, when a majority of survivors do not.

On MSNBC Tuesday morning, Blackburn tried to explain to an incredulous Craig Melvin that the measure is designed to help women, because it will “rid our society of these perpetrators who carry out these crimes, many times repeatedly.”

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The White House would prefer, if we are in a cutting mood, to cut direct subsidies to farmers and crop insurance, two longtime mainstays of the farm bill that have basically totally fucked up our entire food system for decades but that also have made a few giant food companies quite rich. Here is how House Republicans made their bill:

The bill, which costs nearly $100 billion a year, would save a total of about $4 billion annually, including the food stamp cuts. It would eliminate some subsidies while creating others, raising subsidy levels for several crops. It would expand the current crop insurance program and also create a new type of crop insurance that would kick in sooner than the paid insurance farmers have now.

Good one, guys. Good policy, good attempt at deficit reduction, good governing.

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Luckily or not, Rubio’s wimpy reply was overshadowed by reaction to a deeply reported New Yorker piece by Ryan Lizza that placed the Florida Republican at the center of the "Gang of Eight" negotiations. It featured a choice quote dissing American workers from an anonymous Rubio aide, explaining why his boss backed the Chamber of Commerce over the AFL-CIO when it came to a guest worker agreement (they eventually compromised): “There are American workers who, for lack of a better term, can’t cut it. There shouldn’t be a presumption that every American worker is a star performer. There are people who just can’t get it, can’t do it, don’t want to do it. And so you can’t obviously discuss that publicly.”

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Abortion has to be made funny, the thinking goes, because funny sells on social media, and that's where one goes to court young people. "You can engage with sarcasm, it's hard with the abortion issue, but you have to," said Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins at a breakout panel at the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference in Washington today on how to win millennial voters. "Unfortunately we have to, because this is the generation that we've been dealt."

As the Republican Party tries to remake itself after the 2012 election to better appeal to young people and minorities, there's been a movement to jettison issues social conservatives hold dear, especially support for "traditional marriage." But the activists at Ralph Reed's confab said absolutely not. "You've got to be pro-life, you've got be pro-marriage, or else you're not going to get our money," Hawkins said firmly.

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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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Actually, it’s not just because a lot of elite reporters appear to worship the guy. Politics, like nature, isn’t all that comfortable with vacuums, and the post-policy Republican Party has plenty of enormous empty spaces when it comes to questions of public policy. John McCain’s knee-jerk invade-everyone responses may be shallow, ill-informed, and often proved wrong…but it’s something, and something almost always beats nothing.

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The best thing the bill has going for it is that Mitch McConnell is going to actually allow it to come to the floor. (Minority Leader McConnell has veto power over most Senate business, because many  senators have convinced themselves that the founders wanted him to.) The "Gang" has four Republican members, meaning only a few more are needed in order to reach 60 votes and beat a potential filibuster. Kelly Ayotte is one Republican who's publicly announced her support for the bill.

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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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Hugging Barack Obama was maybe the best political decision New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has ever made, and he's made some very canny ones. I'm not saying his embrace of the president following Hurricane Sandy was entirely cynical, but it was very boisterous, and it continued through last week, when Obama visited the Jersey Shore and once again made nice with Christie before the national TV news cameras.

Here's what's odd about this Republican governor who currently seems much more popular with Democrats than national Republicans: He's quite conservative. Especially for the Northeast. That was, in fact, his original appeal, back when conservatives were thrilled about him: He's the most conservative possible successful statewide officeholder for a blue state like New Jersey.

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The state voted for Obama in 2012 and 2008, and has two Democratic senators, so it should be a pretty easy pickup for Democrats, right? Not so fast. Instead, it's just a slim Democratic lead, with the big joke in Richmond being that this is a contest between two guys who cannot win. On the Republican side, this makes some sense, as they nominated Attorney General Ken Cuccinnelli, one of the most extreme conservatives in the country, in an increasingly Democratic-leaning state. So why aren't the Democrats running away with it? Is it something about Virginia, or Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe?

"Nobody likes either of them," said Norman Leahy, a conservative analyst and the editor of the Virginia political blog BearingDrift, referring to both nominees. "If the election were held today, I think you could make a strong case for 'none of the above' doing pretty well as a write-in candidate."

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The report, according to Politico's summary, covers much of the same ground as the Reince Priebus-ordered RNC report on the troubles of the Republican Party released earlier this year. Politico sums up the findings with the following bullet points:

Gay marriage: “On the ‘open-minded’ issue … [w]e will face serious difficulty so long as the issue of gay marriage remains on the table.”

Hispanics: “Latino voters … tend to think the GOP couldn’t care less about them.”

Perception of the party’s economic stance: “We’ve become the party that will pat you on your back when you make it, but won’t offer you a hand to help you get there.”

Big reason for the image problem: The “outrageous statements made by errant Republican voices.”

Words that up-for-grabs voters associate with the GOP: “The responses were brutal: closed-minded, racist, rigid, old-fashioned.”

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When asked who they wanted to send to the House of Representatives in next year’s midterm elections, the GOP and Democratic candidate tied at 38 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday. Twenty percent of those surveyed said they didn’t know or didn’t have an answer for who they would vote for. In Quinnipiac’s last two polls, released May 1 and April 3, Democrats had been leading Republicans 41-37 and 43-35, respectively.

The unmentioned fun part is that if an equal number of votes are cast, in November 2014, for Democrats and for Republicans, that means that Republicans will win a massive wave election, easily retaining control of the House of Representatives and possibly retaking the Senate. And if that does happen no one will consider it odd or scandalous or anything.

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“While Republicans see a credibility gap in the Obama administration, PolitiFact rates Republicans as the less credible party," said CMPA president  Robert Lichter in a press release. An earlier study from the CMPA found the website rated the Romney campaign worse than the Obama campaign during the 2012 election. Not surprisingly, Michele Bachmann is one of the most poorly rated politicians on PolitiFact.

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In case you’re unfamiliar, the right to be free from criticism is the core idea behind what used to be complaints about “political correctness” and which have now morphed into the conviction that some accusations are too terrible to be made. See, for example, former Heritage immigration expert (or is that race-and-intelligence obsessive?) Jason Richwine. As he told conservative reporter Byron York:

The accusation of racism is one of the worst things that anyone can call you in public life … Once that word is out there, it's very difficult to recover from it, even when it is completely untrue.

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But with the easing of scandal fever on the Potomac, Republicans are back to fighting one another, and the week-long Senate clash between freshman Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. John McCain over the budget is exposing the yawning gulf within the party once again.

Now that the GOP-dominated House and Democratic-led Senate have passed very different budgets, McCain has tried to argue for the formation of a conference committee that would try to reconcile the two. That might be a thankless, impossible task nowadays, but it’s nonetheless the way Congress has always worked. Democrats agree with McCain, and so do most Republicans.

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Later in his remarks, Corbett noted that Pennsylvania is home to 800,000 Latino residents (none of whom work for him, of course), who represent about 6.8 percent of the state's total population.

Matt Ortega, the man behind some of the most beloved Mitt Romney memes of the 2012 election, was quick to lampoon Corbett's remarks with a satirical website, "Latinos for Corbett."

Video via Al Dia:

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We've been aware of Jackson for some years and while it's difficult to pick so few, here are 10 quotes from the conservative bishop to give you a sense of how he views the world.

1. On gay people: "Their minds are perverted, they’re frankly very sick people psychologically, mentally and emotionally and they see everything through the lens of homosexuality. When they talk about love they’re not talking about love, they’re talking about homosexual sex."

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The dog whistle quote came via NBC's “Meet the Press” Sunday from Peggy Noonan, who can no longer be taken seriously as a writer or pundit. When host David Gregory pressed her on the lack of evidence for her claims that the IRS scandal was worse than Watergate, Noonan insisted that the president “was giving a dog whistle to people who could launch this thing." The former Reagan-Bush speechwriter vividly summed up, in her thousand points of crazy style, where the IRS “scandal” went over the last few days: Obama didn’t need to order the tax agency to harass Tea Party groups (and his critics don’t need proof that he did so): his criticizing the group during the 2012 campaign, as well as blasting the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, represented an implicit order to do so.

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