Inside the conservative movement, the Tea Party has displaced evangelical activists as the dynamic force, pushing economic issues ahead of social ones, while voters affirmed their support for gay rights and punished candidates with restrictionist views on abortion in 2012. In their "autopsy report," the Republican National Committee essentially suggested abandoning social conservatives -- despite leaning on them heavily just a few years ago to elect and reelect George W. Bush -- and even the movement conservatives at CPAC had little appetite for the Christian-right causes of yore.

Needless to say, social conservatives who are not happy about this state of affairs are lashing out against their friends, threatening to leave the GOP if it doesn't join them on the wrong side of history.

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AAN's Pete Meachum told the Examiner that Cater America head Rob Jennings said, "See what it would take to get Gaga instead of Dolly."

From the Examiner:

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"We all want to make America strong economically and militarily and every other way but you can't do that if you're not in office," he told The Hill. "We've got a socialist in office right now — how's that working for us?"

When pressed on his choice of words, Barbour said: "I don't care. I mean, look, I think he's a socialist. I'm not saying he doesn't love our country," he said. "No, I don't care."

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From the National Review Online:

“I think [the RNC] should pretty much ignore him,” says Phyllis Schlafly, a longtime conservative activist, in an interview with National Review Online. “I think he has made a mistake, and he probably won’t get reelected.”

Ralph Reed, the founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, says the party has to be careful. “If the Republican party tries to retreat from being a pro-marriage, pro-family party, the big tent is going to become a pup tent very fast,” he says. “I am concerned that some in the party are going wobbly on this issue.”

Brian Brown, of the National Organization for Marriage, told NRO that Portman will now likely get a challenger in the primary. “This is a critical issue, and to act like it’s just no big deal is just wrong."

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The report says "we have to engage" minority voters "and show our sincerity.” A first test of that strategy approached them almost instantly, with President Obama’s nomination today of Tom Perez to serve as labor secretary. And so far, they don't seem to be implementing it very deftly.

Perez, who is currently the head of the Department of Justice’ Civil Rights Division, has had his name dragged through the mud over factually inaccurate, race-baiting charges of impropriety. Some conservatives claim that Perez, a Latino working under the first black president and first black attorney general in history, dismissed a case against a handful of New Black Panther activists in some kind gesture of racial solidarity.

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"Question about CPAC last week, where a panel on African-American voters dissolved into a shouting match with at least one activist saying that -- talking about voters being systematically disenfranchised. How, given that sort of backdrop in the party, do you plan to overcome those challenges in your role at the RNC?" said National Press Club president Angela Greiling Keane, reading from a written question, during a press conference with Priebus at the National Press Club.

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"The Republicans are just getting totally bamboozled right now. And they are entirely lacking in confidence. Which is what happens to every political party after an election in which they think they got shellacked," the influential conservative radio host told his listeners this morning. "They think they got landslided, but they didn't."

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But Republicans have one very big problem when it comes to recruiting the talent needed to modernize the party's digital infrastructure: its hostility towards gay people.

That's according to Liz Mair, who was the RNC's online communications director in 2008 before leaving to start her own political consulting firm. Since then, she's worked with Carly Fiorina on her 2010 California Senate bid, with Rick Perry’s 2012 presidential campaign, and with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s successful reelection effort after a recall attempt last year.

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The report, which analyzed the GOP's losses in the 2012 elections, said that many of those surveyed described the party as "narrow minded" and a party of "stuff old men."

"Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country," the report says. "When someone rolls their eyes at us, they are not likely to open their ears to us."

The report recommends that the GOP "stop talking to itself" and that "If we want ethnic minority voters to support Republicans, we have to engage them, and show our sincerity." On social issues, the RNC concludes that Republicans need to be more "inclusive and welcoming."

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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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The RNC raised $6.9 million in January and ended the month with $7.1 million in cash — along with no debt.

The Democratic National Committee brought in $4.3 million in January and ended the month with $4.7 million in cash.

But the DNC is carrying a large debt of $20.7 million, down slightly from the end of the year. Democrats racked up the debt while helping President Barack Obama hold onto the White House.

Party committees filed monthly financial reports Wednesday with the Federal Election Commission.

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Ahead of the presidential inauguration in Washington Monday, an NSSE that will draw 3,000 law enforcement officers and some 13,000 military troops to the area, the National Lawyers Guild has released  a report based on last year's Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., and Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., highlighting First and Fourth Amendment violations imported with this sort of event policing. The report notes:

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The justices did not comment Monday in rejecting an appeal of lower court decisions that left the order in place at least until 2017.

The order stems from a lawsuit filed by Democrats in New Jersey in 1981 that objected to a "ballot security" program the RNC ran in minority neighborhoods.

Republicans said the order hampers efforts to combat voter fraud, but U.S. District Judge Dickinson Debevoise said voter intimidation remains a threat and preventing it outweighs the potential danger of fraud.

The court action is unrelated to legal challenges to Republican-inspired voter identification laws in the 2012 campaign.

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In one incident ruled improper, over 200 antiwar and anti-capitalist demonstrators were kettled by police in lower Manhattan and mass arrested. The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday's ruling relating to the police response:

City attorneys argued that officers had "group probable cause" to make the arrests, meaning the crowd was acting as one. On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Sullivan in Manhattan rejected the city's theory and ruled the arrests on Fulton Street illegal.

"Based on the undisputed facts, and particularly the video of the Fulton Street march and arrests, the court finds that there was not even arguable probable cause to make those arrests," the judge ruled.

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June 2004: Lincoln Strategies, a group headed by Nathan Sproul, attempted to siphon votes away from John Kerry by pushing to get Ralph Nader on the ballot, while also under the employ of the national Republican Party.

October 2004: In Nevada and Oregon, former employees of the group Voters Outreach of America allege that they saw the company's staff members shredding registration forms from Democrats.  VOA, another Sproul-run group, was paid $500,000 by the Republican National Committee for voter outreach. In Nevada, one former employee said in a lawsuit that he was told to ask prospective voters, "Who would you vote for in the next election?" and then to only register those who said they would vote for Bush. The employee added that he believes his pay was also docked because he registered members of both parties. In Minnesota in the same year, VOA was accused of firing employees who brought back Democratic voter registration forms. Other employees in West Virginia and Pennsylvania made similar allegations.

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Four years later, ACORN is dead, and a Republican firm contracted by the Republican National Committee has adopted its shady tactics. But, so far at least, there’s been hardly a peep from the same conservatives who seized on ACORN about one of their own engaging in almost identical fraudulent tactics.

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The organization, Engage, compared Twitter data (via Topsy) against polling data from Gallup, Rasmussen and Reuters-Ipsos from the DNC and RNC to determine if real-time tweets at all correlated with polls. The study isn't perfect -- for example, Engage assumed that the daily polls fluctuate based solely on the performance of the speakers, and that words like “awesome" and “wow" in tweets signal interest in speakers -- but for the most part, the study showed that tweets matched up with the polls:

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Watch the rest of the clip here:

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