FRC lauds Walsh for his "unwavering support of the family," by which they don't mean his family, because obviously his support for them has been known to waver. But supporting one's actual children is less important, to Tony Perkins and his organization, than Walsh's steadfast belief that the government's sole responsibility is to ensure that life is as difficult and miserable as possible for women and gay people.

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The president had called Boehner to congratulate him on passing those pointless trade agreements. But Boehner wanted to talk about how Obama had accused the GOP of not having a jobs plan. That won't fly with hard-charging House Speaker John Boehner! According to Boehner's summary of how cool and in control he was on the phone, Boehner had no time for these congratulations. "I want to make sure you have all the facts," Boehner said, according to Boehner:

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Among many Americans, especially wealthy rich white political pundits who live in gated communities in Maryland, it is considered "folksy" and charming to explicitly remind people of and seemingly endorse America's ugly history of lynch mobs doling out "frontier justice," but even among those who see nothing wrong with whitewashed nostalgia for gruesome, lawless vigilantism, Perry's comments were thought to have gone a bit too far. (Accusing the Republican-appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve of "treason" was a "serious unforced error," according to John Podhoretz.) New York Times Washington correspondent Binyamin Appelbaum summed up one strand of establishment response to the comments by calling Perry's remarks "horrifying."

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The Chicago Sun-Times has a big story on the Tea Party Freshman -- who is on TV 100 times a day shouting about how we need to balance the budget -- and the $117,437 he owes his ex-wife, which she has been attempting to collect for years.

You know how bad pundits and annoying politicians like to pretend the Federal government is like a household when they talk about how we need to balance our books? If we take that flawed analogy seriously, it does not really make a lot of sense to trust the budget to someone Joe Walsh, a private sector failure who is hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, whose condo was foreclosed on, and who is unable to make his child support payments. On a six-figure salary! And he's dumb enough to pay for his health insurance out of pocket instead of getting it through his workplace -- with a wife with a preexisting condition -- to prove some inane point. Meanwhile, while he was semi-employed and not paying his ex-wife for his children's expenses, he was apparently going on multiple foreign vacations. And he loaned his congressional campaign $35,000. This guy's horrible at budgets and living within his means! He should not be allowed anywhere near debt ceiling negotiations! (The Joe Walsh Balanced Budget Act: Don't pay any of your creditors and spend most of your time arguing with Chris Matthews.)

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House Republicans pinned the blame for Friday's disappointing jobs report squarely on the White House, saying the Obama administration's "over-taxing, over-regulating and over-spending" has stifled economic growth.

"One look at the jobs report should be enough to show the White House it's time to get serious about cutting spending and dealing with our ailing economy," Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said.

How many blatant untruths can a Republican speaker of the House stuff into one sentence? Quite a few!

1) President Obama has cut taxes. His stimulus bill included tax cuts for 95 percent of all American working families. He signed off on the extension of the Bush tax cuts, while throwing in a new payroll tax cut for good measure.

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McHenry has been one of the most completely shameless of House Republicans since his arrival in Congress, in 2005, when he immediately and publicly endorsed Tom DeLay's brilliant plan to exempt himself from ethics rules as his connections to Jack Abramoff began to end his career. But he was born to be cheerfully corrupt: He's a product of the College Republicans, an organization that trains little Lee Atwaters, Karl Roves and Grover Norquists in the arts of scorched-earth campaigning and wholly irresponsible "governing" on behalf of the monied interests that bought you your job. The ethos is win by any means necessary, legal or quasi-legal (or worse, as long as you never get caught), and McHenry was very good at that, according to Benjamin Wallace-Wells' memorable profile of the then-freshman in the Washington Monthly.

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That was then. Now Florida is governed by  Republican super-majorities in both the House and Senate and an arch-conservative in the state house and the developers are fighting back. The growth management law is about to be gutted -- along with just about every other currently existing hindrance to the corporate freedom to gouge as much cash as possible out of the Sunshine state

The Orlando Sentinel has the deeply depressing, but essential story. An overwhelming flood of corporate campaign donations to Republicans in Florida has achieved an astonishing capitalist makeover. It's pay-off day!

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Politico and NBC postponed their planned first debate of the campaign because of the poor quality of candidates, but the South Carolina GOP is just going to allow Rick Santorum to be on national television in the year 2011.

Mitt Romney's not coming -- he does not have a formal exploratory committee yet. So the front-runner -- in many respects the sole serious candidate -- will not attend (because it would drag down his seriousness to be seen with the circus freaks, I guess). Michele Bachmann, the Palin stand-in with a shot at maybe winning a delegate or two, hasn't been confirmed, either.

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When Beck's show made its debut on Fox News Channel in January 2009, the nation was in the throes of an economic collapse the likes of which had not been seen since the 1930s. Beck's angry broadcasts about the nation's imminent doom perfectly rode the wave of fear that had washed across the nation, and the relatively unknown entertainer suddenly had 3 million viewers a night...

But as the recession began to ease, Beck's apocalyptic forecasts and ominous conspiracies became less persuasive, and his audience began to drift away. Beck responded with a doubling-down that ultimately brought about his demise on Fox.

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So documentarian Alex Gibney writes today of Boehner's recently hired policy director, Brett Loper. Before joining team Boehner, Loper was, naturally, a medical device lobbyist, whose job was to protect the profits of the medical device industry at the expense of, among other things, the federal deficit. And before that, he worked for the gloriously amoral Tom DeLay.

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Last week, the Florida House of Representatives passed a bill banning the automatic deduction of union dues from government paychecks. During debate on the issue, state representative Scott Randolph, D-Orlando, used his floor time, reported the St. Petersberg Times, to make a point about how Republicans "are against regulations -- except when it comes to the little guys, or serves their specific interests."

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According to ABC, "at least 23 current members of congress or their families have received government money for their farms." Some of them received a lot of money:

The biggest recipient was Rep. Stephen Fincher, a Republican from Frog Jump, Tenn.

While the self-described Tea Party patriot lists his occupation as "farmer" and "gospel singer" in the Congressional Directory, he doesn't mention that his family has received more than $3 million in farm subsidies from 1995 to 2009, according to the Environmental Working Group.

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The protests drew wide attention and prompted the hasty passage of a joint resolution declaring that "It appears that these students are being indoctrinated with Communistic and other subversive theories contrary to our free systems of representative government." A public investigation of whether University of Chicago professors were responsible for such indoctrination followed, but mostly fizzled out after a bravura performance by University of Chicago chancellor Robert Hutchins.

Hutchins later reflected on his experience.

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The posturing is unseemly, but is also a sign that negotiations are getting serious -- there are no easy deals left. The wise thing to do would be to simply ignore the rancor, and wait for the end game. But I can't resist commenting on one broadside from the Republican camp.

From Roll Call:

Boehner spokesman Michael Steel retorted that Democrats are desperately trying to divert attention from their own divisions and continue to back "essentially" status quo spending levels.

"Discussions with Senate Democrats and the White House over a long-term funding bill are ongoing and will continue, but the facts remain the same. The House passed a bill to fund the government while cutting spending, and -- nearly 40 days later -- the Senate has not," Steel said.

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A week ago, I had never heard of Cronon. This is embarrassing, since it doesn't take much digging around to discover that he is one of the most highly regarded historians in the United States (not to mention president-elect of the American Historical Association).

But that was before Cronon's fascinating opinion piece in Monday's New York Times detailing how Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's political agenda flies in the face of "civic traditions that for more than a century have been among the most celebrated achievements not just of their state, but of their own party as well." A devastating new broadside in the battle for Wisconsin, Cronon's Op-Ed deservedly went viral.

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(3) STRIKING WORKERS INELIGIBLE- Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no member of a family unit shall participate in the food stamp program at any time that any able-bodied work eligible adult member of such household is on strike as defined in the Labor Management Relations Act, 1947 (29 U.S.C. 142(2)), because of a labor dispute (other than a lockout) as defined in section 2(9) of the National Labor Relations Act (29 U.S.C. 152(9)):

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We're not just talking good old-fashioned budget-balancing mandated cuts in public services. The grandiose ambitions of Wisconsin's Walker have been well chronicled. But Michigan's Rick Snyder has been equally aggressive. Snyder is proposing to cut corporate taxes in Michigan by 60 percent while simultaneously hiking the percentage of state revenues raised from individual income taxes from 31 percent to 41 percent. He just signed a "financial emergency law" giving him the right to appoint emergency managers -- with the legal power to arbitrarily cancel union contracts -- to replace locally elected government authorities. In Ohio, Kasich plans to gut public education spending, end collective bargaining by public sector workers, sell prisons to the private sector and push through a voucher plan for charter schools.

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