Presented, in no particular order, are 10 statements worthy, at least, of an eyeroll.

1. Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana: Torture is funny. A featured speaker on CPAC's main stage, Jindal chose to make light this way of the barrage of political rhetoric CPAC attendees signed up to subject themselves to:

If the choice was to hear 70 political speeches or to gowaterboarding, well, I’d have to think about that.

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It was just a day after Krugman’s debate with MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough on the Charlie Rose show had media, social and otherwise, abuzz, especially after Krugman blogged that he wasn’t quite as sharp as he’d like to have been, unprepared, he said, for “the blizzard of misleading factoids and diversionary stuff” uttered by the cocksure, blown-dry, blustery congressman-turned-TV-host.

While the right has legions of mouthpieces reading from the same economic playbook, Krugman has emerged as the go-to guy for mainstream shows when they seek a progressive voice. So I asked him to assess, as a communicator, what progressives need to do to even up the score. Here’s his reply:

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With its elegant rendering of the liberal agenda before the eyes of the American people, President Barack Obama's second inaugural address was music to the ears of many a progressive. But to the ears of Tea Partiers and the Republican right, this inauguration speech, as well as the ceremony that surrounded it, was war -- not just a war of words, but a war of prayer, a war of poetry and even, perhaps, a war of song.

Driving the message home were the hands of the Fates, who conspired to see the second inauguration of the nation’s first African American president fall on Martin Luther King Day, the national holiday whose very creation was opposed by so many who still today comprise the Republican Party’s right wing.

Here we recount a dozen ways in which the president brought his fight to the right, in no uncertain terms, at his second inauguration.

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Are you talking about the 900 grassroots Tea Party groups in 2010 whose numbers have now dwindled to 600? Or the popularity of the movement among most Americans?

Or do you measure the "Tea Party" as a marketing plan by the right wing in its 50-year quest to bend the Republican Party to its will and bring the nation to its knees?

Miss Uncongeniality

The new year kicked off with a poll that brought a smile to progressive faces: Rasmussen Reports, the Republican-tilting polling firm, found membership in the Tea Party movement among likely voters to have plummeted to a mere 8 percent. That’s a steep drop from 2010 when, just after the passage of the healthcare reform law, Rasmussen reported 24 percent of respondents calling themselves Tea Party members.

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Since the failure of his Plan B proposal for extending the Bush-era tax cuts for all but the riches Americans -- those with an annual income of $1 million or more -- pundits and pols have been raising the spectre of a new speaker of the House come the next Congress. The pundits, for once, appear to be onto something.

At the right-wing Brietbart.com, Matthew Boyle writes of a plan by conservatives to wrest the speaker's gavel from Boehner by changing the rules of the vote to a secret ballot, under the reasoning that, if Boehner was unable to determine who voted against him, he would be unable to visit retribution on those members should his speakership survive the vote.

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Apparently fearful from the moment the story broke that serious gun control -- particularly a ban on sales of the sort of assault rifle used by killer Adam Lanza, and the large-capacity magazines that allowed him to kill so many so quickly -- was in the offing, paranoids and gun enthusiasts rushed sporting goods shops in order to score those very items.

The right has long sold the line that President Barack Obama is coming for the guns of people who fancy themselves to be the "real" Americans, and it now appears that he might at least, after four years of inaction, seek to enact meaningful gun safety laws.

One major gun seller, the Dick's Sporting Goods chain, has suspended sales of types of several rifles, including the model used by Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

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Before the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School took place, two things were predictable: that another mass killing was inevitable, given the increase in their frequency over the past year, and the fact that no measures had been taken to prevent them; and that right-wingers would see in such a dreadful event an opportunity to promote their paranoid vision of a perfect America as one where every citizen is armed to the teeth, and trembling in awe of their vengeful God

The bodies of the 27 people -- most of them children between the ages of six and seven -- killed by Adam Lanza on Friday, December 14,  had yet to be returned to their families when the right-wing noise machine went into gear, blaming public education and a purported dearth of firearms for the tragedy.

Yet, even as right-wing pundits continued to name gun control as a reason that the killer took so many lives, producers at NBC's Meet the Press were unable to get a single pro-gun senator to appear on the show the Sunday after the tragedy. All 31 gun-loving senators who will have seats in the new Congress were invited, according to executive producer Betsy Fischer Martin.

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Perhaps you saw him in the documentary, "Koch Brothers Exposed," pushing back against the billionaire Tea Party funders, and their bankrolling of attempts to roll back voting rights and to resegregate a school system in North Carolina.

Or maybe you saw him on cable television, explaining the NAACP's support for marriage equality, or leading the charge to save the life of Troy Davis, an inmate put to death for a crime many believe he did not commit. Then there's the new NAACP report, co-produced with the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization and the Indigenous Environmental Network, issued on his watch, about the dangers of climate change and coal-fired power plants.

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The president, Romney told a group of campaign donors on a November 14 conference call, won re-election by promising free stuff to his homeboys and women’s libbers and brown people who inconveniently declined to self-deport -- or words to that effect.

“What the president -- president's campaign did was focus on certain members of his base coalition, give them extraordinary financial gifts from the government,” Romney told his fat cats, apparently unaware that reporters were listening in. Soon that particular cat leapt out of the proverbial bag, and it was the 47 percent all over again -- offering a vision of the majority of the electorate that voted for Obama as a bunch of moochers. The one difference, of course, was that no longer the party’s presidential contender, Romney learned that Republicans were free to kick him to the curb, which they did with steel-toed boots.

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“In fact, the Senate has already passed a bill that will do just this,” Obama said. “What we need is action from the House. And I’ve got the pen -- ready to sign the bill right away.” He reached into his pocket, and drew a handsome black pen that he held up for the cameras. “I’m ready to do it,” he said.

While House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, has made conciliatory noises concerning the need to raise revenue, he also said, in an interview on Thursday with ABC News, that any tax increase on anybody -- including the wealthiest two percent of Americans -- is “unacceptable.”

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The message Romney sought to impart as he stood before an enthusiastic crowd of some 8,000 supporters was targeted not so much at the women in attendance at the raucous rally at George Mason University’s Patriot Center, but those who would see footage from the event on their local news that evening, just as they were checking their calendars to see when they could fit in a visit to the polls, maybe on a lunch hour, or in between errands.

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This January, as the Iowa Caucuses were underway, Menards began encouraging employees to take an at-home online "civics" course that characterizes the economic policies of President Barack Obama as a threat to the success of businesses such as Menards, and by extension, to the employees' own well-being.

FBI Investigation

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Even Romney’s running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, held a no-exceptions abortion stance -- at least until Romney, who would allow exceptions for rape and incest, elevated him to the national ticket. As reported by TPM:

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Not only was it a wrong conclusion, but it was one that saw Democrats ignoring a key constituency: the growing numbers of voters with no religious affiliation -- voters whose values tend to fall naturally in line with the party’s professed goals.

Today, a new survey released on Monday by the Public Religion Research Institute confirms just what a mistake that was: Nearly one-fifth -- 19 percent -- of Americans now say they are unaffiliated with any religion, and 63 percent of them lean Democratic. But the survey also shows they’re significantly less likely to turn up at the polls than religious voters. Perhaps that’s because they feel left out of the dialogue, as leaders of the Democratic spent the last eight years trying to show the public that they love Jesus as much as anybody.

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It really was that bad for Romney, who, by the end of the night looked a bit crumpled in spirit, a tad sweaty and hapless at the hands of a youthful but commanding opponent. And Obama successfully painted Romney as maybe a bit over the hill, comparing Romney’s worldview to policies from eras past, ranging from the 1770s to the 1980s, in quips that yielded the night’s social media memes, involving calvary, hair gel, and lots of gifs.

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In a face-to-face showdown, Obama’s apparent discomfort can induce a level of detachment that seems to border on dissociation, as seen in his first debate face-off with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in Denver earlier this month. But in last night’s battle between the two presidential contenders at Hofstra University in New York, Obama was fully present, even if his unease occasionally revealed itself, puncturing Romney’s armor of jovial smugness through a combination of rehearsed rejoinders, on-the-spot quips and deft deflections of Romney’s attacks. And on one subject where Obama was vulnerable -- the administration’s response to the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, the president skillfully used a misstatement by Romney to knock the Republican off his game.

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During one exchange between the candidates over how close Iran was to obtaining a nuclear weapon, Biden took issue with Ryan's claim that Tehran closer to having an operable bomb than it was four years ago. After a tussle over the distinction between having fissile material and an actual bomb, moderator Martha Raddatz of ABC News pushed back on Biden, who then served up what for Obama supporters would become the theme of the night. "But facts matter, Martha ... Facts matter."

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To Romney, it seems, personal morality amounts to a roster of good personal habits (no smoking or drinking, a faithful marriage, generosity and compassion for ailing members of his faith community) that add up to a kind of personal exceptionalism that trumps whatever havoc his business behavior or political policies may wreak on the life of any poor schlub who should should cross his path.

Romney’s sense of morality seems to be based on a kind of fierce individualism, in which he apparently believes himself to be morally superior by dint of his own personal habits, and assumes no responsibility for the fate of those less rigorous in their personal code, should they find an appeal to their baser instincts in the words and actions of the beyond-reproach church leader, dutiful husband and father of five.

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