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President Bush made a cameo appearance on the NBC game show, Deal or No Deal, and even made fun of his own abysmal approval ratings in a prerecorded message to an Army officer who was a contestant on the show.

"Good evening, Captain Kobes. I'm thrilled to be on Deal or No Deal with you tonight. Come to think of it, I'm thrilled to be anywhere with high ratings these days."

The crowd roared with applause as the worst president in modern history made a complete fool out of himself in front of the world...again. He even invited host Howie Mandel to come to D.C. to play the game Capitol Hill-style:

"Howie, I don't know if you're free to come to Washington anytime soon but I have to reach an agreement with Congress on the federal budget. How'd you like to host a $3 trillion dollar 'Deal or No Deal?'" he joked.

In his victory speech Tuesday night, in addition to lying about what Obama said about gas prices, Newt peddled the Palinesque fantasy that "drill, baby drill" is the answer to all our energy problems and also added (starts around 2:15):

GINGRICH: The price of gasoline when I was Speaker [ed. and Bill Clinton was President] was $1.13. The price of gasoline when Barack Obama became president was $1.89. All of this gigantic increase came from his policies.

Really? Well, from 2001-2009, when we had President Arbusto and Vice President Halliburton in the White House, the price of gas nearly tripled — reaching a high of $4.28 per gallon in May 2008 before crashing with the global economy.

And with the Obama recovery, the price has rebounded, but still isn't as high as it was under the Republican oilmen.

So which of Bush/Cheney's "policies" caused the price of gas to go up so much under their watch? And since Republicans controlled all levers of government for four years, why didn't they enact this brilliant "drill everywhere" plan to lower it?

I blame Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and PETA.

Also, the Chevy Volt.

Part of being a Democrat is acting like you’re losing even when you’re winning. Part of being a Republican is acting like you’re winning even when you’re losing. The phrase “silent majority,” that brilliant bit of Nixonian rhetoric, is a way to augment Republican numbers and voices. “Nearly all people agree with me and they’re not only in my imagination … you just can’t hear them.”

Senator Jim DeMint (SC-R) has an odd obsession with ill-fitting metaphors. He famously proclaimed his only reason to kill the Affordable Care Act was to annihilate the president politically. "If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him,” said the tea-touting Senator. DeMint has a pre-existing condition; he thinks an enemy’s high casualty mêlée is comparable to the inability to pass a sensible, relatively mild, reform bill. Well, at least when he’s talking about Democrats. As the kick-off speaker at this year’s CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) DeMint used a somewhat softer analogy: football. Specifically these two teams DeMint sees have different goals. “We don’t have shared goals with the Democrats…Compromise works well in this world when you have shared goals."

In football the teams are never expected to go in the same direction with the best interests of the fans in mind. Also in football, no team threatens to shut down the country as a strategy to win the game.

But maybe DeMint is correct: It’s really tough to compromise with a group that’s solitary goal is destroying you. Apparently taking the same oath to uphold the same Constitution, in the same country, drawing the same paycheck, in the same office building, in the same city and being of the same religion, sharing the same language and being mostly (85 percent) male, white and wealthy isn’t enough common ground for Republicans to even entertain working with those alien Democrats. It’s even tougher to compromise with a group who you could totally agree with but they retroactively become against their own ideas once you propose them. Like say, the individual mandate every GOP candidate was for before he was against it. (Yes, except Ron Paul, keep your emails.)

Enter the “severely conservative.” This was the description Mitt Romney bestowed upon himself at this year’s CPAC. “I was a severely conservative Republican governor,” said the oft-frontrunner. “Severe” is a word normally associated with pain or really bad weather. With today’s GOP, not only do Republicans refuse to have the same goals – they deny all similarities to their enemy. “The President is not like us.” This is severely conservative.

In the same speech Romney promised to repeal ObamaCare even though it’s nearly identical to the plan Romney signed into law in Massachusetts, dubbed RomneyCare.

Let’s put it this way: If Romney “repealed and replaced” the “job-killing ObamaCare” with RomneyCare, no one would notice. If there were a taste test and you covered the labels – no one could tell the difference. You’d have a 50/50 chance of guessing which reform you were actually enjoying.

But to be a true severe conservative demands suspending disbelief. What must you be willing to accept? The economy buckling while a Republican was in the White House never happened. Bush never bailed out the banks or the auto industry. Deficits suddenly matter. Clint Eastwood is a hippie. And if the country continues to struggle it’ll be great for the GOP.

It reminds me of King Pyrrhus’ quote which sums up the term Pyrrhic victory: "If we are victorious in one more battle, we shall be utterly ruined."

And well, these severe conservatives are acting like they’re winning.

That should tell us something.

Among the predictable Republican reactions to the President's proposed 2013 budget is the refrain that "Obama has failed to keep a 2009 promise to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term." Just days after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told a CPAC audience that President Obama "said he'd cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term," ABC's Jake Tapper dutifully announced "Obama's broken deficit promise." And today, the RNC debuted a new ad in which a supposedly betrayed voter warns, "President Obama, you broke your promise. I'll never forget that."

Of course, what everyone seems to be forgetting is that in 2004 President George W. Bush promised - and failed - to halve the federal budget deficit by 2009. As it turns out, Bush broke his pledge even before the economic cataclysm of 2008 that triggered the TARP bank bailout, sent government revenues plummeting, and required President Obama's rescue programs that saved the U.S. from "Greet Depression 2.0."

As he faced reelection in 2004, George W. Bush famously committed to cut the deficit in half by 2009. As it turned out, the budget Bush bequeathed to Barack Obama didn't even get close to that target. The FY 2009 budget Bush proposed in February 2008 called for a deficit of roughly $400 billion, almost identical to the result in 2004. But that January 2004 promise, as the Washington Post, CNN and The New York Times among others noted at the time, was premised upon two parallel frauds. As Perrspectives explained four years ago:

First, Bush's pompous prediction used as its baseline a wildly inflated White House deficit forecast of $521 billion, well above the CBO's estimate and the actual figure of $413 billion. More importantly, President Bush conveniently chose 2009 as his finish line, the year before his tax cuts were set to expire. Making them permanent (which he and all of the GOP presidential candidates endorse) would blow another $2.2 trillion hole in the federal budget by 2014.

(It's also worth noting, as the Obama administration has this week, that Bush's budget plans always understated the real deficit, because they routinely failed "to account for the costs of the wars in Afghanistan, the cost of preventing cuts to Medicare doctors, and the price of staving off an expansion of the alternative minimum tax.")

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In an interview with ABC News on Wednesday morning, Willard once again rewrote history on his position about the government's rescue of the auto industry. He's been playing this little game for months.

Let's be clear. Willard opposed the bailout, which began under George W. Bush and continued under President Obama. Period.

“My view with regards to the bailout was that, whether it was by President Bush or by President Obama, it was the wrong way to go,” he said, during the event at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, sponsored by CNBC.

The problem is, if there hadn't been a bailout, there would be no auto industry.

“Without the intervention of the Bush and Obama administrations, we would have seen the liquidation of both Chrysler and probably GM,” Cole said in August. “That would have taken the whole industry down. We would have seen a disaster in terms of the job impact.”

Something in the range of one million jobs would've been lost.

Willard wants to take credit for favoring a managed bankruptcy -- which is something the Obama administration proposed early on -- and simultaneously bash the bailout.

This is much like bragging about the fact you opposed using a defibrillator on a patient who's heart had stopped--but were right about the antibiotics he was put on later.

Amazing that he keeps getting away with it.

The violation of the no-fly zone Wednesday led more than 30,000 people to quickly leave the White House complex, the Capitol and the Supreme Court and triggered an eight-minute "red alert" at the White House.

At the time, Bush was riding a bicycle at a wildlife center in suburban Maryland and wasn't told of the alert until after he had completed his ride at 12:50

According to the latest campaign finance report, Wal-Mart has spent more than $280,000 trying to overturn one local ordinance. This makes this little local election the most expensive in Flagstaff's history. The Wal-Mart money is spent on full-page newspaper ads and mailings, both full of vicious Orwellian rhetoric implying that a zoning ordinance that limits store size is somehow the same as burning books. Yeah, go figure.

So, when H. Lee Scott Jr. says that Wal-Mart doesn't do that sort of thing anymore, he's a liar....I'm so surprised.

Although this year's CPAC convention has been strangely void of any formal discussion about the events unfolding in Egypt or jobs for unemployed Americans, Tim Pawlenty did manage to remind us all of what these last three weeks would have looked like if George Bush had been in office. In his speech today, Pawlenty slammed President Obama for allowing Egyptians to determine Egypt's future in their way and their time.

"Bullies respect strength, they don't respect weakness," Pawlenty said in a speech to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. "So when the United States of America projects its national security interests here and around the world, we need to do it with strength. We need to make sure that there is no equivocation, no uncertainty, no daylight between us and our allies around the world."

Pawlenty called it a simple principle that the White House "doesn't seem to understand."

"We undermine Israel, the U.K., Poland, Czech Republic, Colombia, amongst other of our friends," Pawlenty said. "Meanwhile, we appease Iran, Russia, and adversaries in the Middle East, including Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

"Mr. President, with bullies, might makes right. Strength makes them submit. We need to get tough on our enemies, not on our friends. And, Mr. President, stop apologizing for our country," Pawlenty said in one of his speech's biggest applause lines.

"The bullies, terrorists and tyrants of the world have lots to apologize for. America does not."

It's worth contrasting that with President Obama's speech made shortly after TPaw's spew:

(More follows)

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While pro-democracy protesters in Egypt are fighting it out in the streets against armed government thugs, there's another battle taking place in the court of public opinion. For those with a bent toward assuming everything this country does is evil and the same regardless of administration, President Obama has not done enough to support the pro-democracy forces.

But as today's Wikileaks document release shows, the Obama administration's approach to diplomacy and human rights is completely different than the Bush administration. Of course, you should always take these cables with a grain of salt, since they represent the point of view of the writer, but they're still enlightening.

In 2004, Yemen's President Saleh reached out to President Bush via diplomatic channels. This was shortly after Bush's re-election in 2004, the Iraq war was raging away, Afghanistan was languishing, and the term "Islamic extremists" was on the tip of everyone's tongue.

From Embassy Sanaa, December 6, 2004:

President Saleh emphasized his desire to be among the first foreign leaders to personally congratulate President Bush on his reelection, and said he needed to meet with Secretary of State designate Dr. Rice and other newly appointed senior officials to raise new regional developments that can only be discussed "face to face."

[...]

True to form, Saleh launched into a list of what he believes the U.S. owes him. "Where is the money for the Army, and what about my spare (F-5) parts?" Saleh demanded. Ambassador promise to follow up on this matter. (Note: OMC reports difficulties in getting MOD to follow through with the necessary paperwork on parts and equipment in order to spend the 17 million USD in Yemen's FMF account. End Note.)

You might wonder why Yemen's president felt as though he could be so petulant and demanding? I certainly did. The answer seems to be farther down in the cable.

Saleh raised the 28 security detainees, meant to be released in the Ramadan amnesty, who the ROYG has agreed to continue to hold based on USG objections. Saleh told Ambassador that the 28 were arrested under suspicion of AQ membership, having returned to Yemen from Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, but that after investigation there was no evidence they were involved in terrorist acts. "We are waiting for information from you," said Saleh. Ambassador replied that we had already provided all the information currently available. The problem, said Ambassador, is continued ROYG refusal to exchange information. Ambassador reiterated that we have asked repeatedly for the evidence that led the ROYG to conclude these 28 should be released. Surely there must be case files, transcripts of interviews, investigation notes, pressed Ambassador, yet the ROYG maintains it has no information on these suspects.

There's more in there about grey market weapons transactions and the like, but these exchanges seem key. Clearly the Bush administration was trading aid, military funding, and weapons for Yemeni agreement to hold hostages on trumped-up, unprovable charges.

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From Keith Olbermann:

What will Bush do with his Mandate and his Political Capital? He got the highest vote total for a presidential candidate, you know. Did anybody notice who’s second on the list? A Mr. Kerry. Since when was the term "mandate" applied when 56 million people voted against a guy? And by the way, how about that Karl Rove and his Freudian slip on "Fox News Sunday"? Rove was asked if the electoral triumph would be as impactful on the balance of power between the parties as William McKinley’s in 1896 and he forgot his own talking points. The victories were "similarly narrow," Rove began, and then, seemingly aghast at his forthrightness, corrected himself. "Not narrow; similarly structured."

• 10:58 p.m. ET

Points Scoring: The Scorer's Table unenthusiastically reports this bout as going to Senator John Kerry by 12 rounds to 4, with 5 rounds even. On individual points, Senator Kerry is awarded a net total of 19 points, and President Bush a net of 2, having undermined his own effort with no less than eight points subtracted, three of them in a disastrous 12th Round in which the President had to be told time was up, answered a question with, in essence, 'all of the above,' and stumbled by inadvertently criticizing himself by claiming the borders of Texas were tighter than they'd been when he was Governor there. He also lost points for having twice invoked the 2000 election, and for once having given back at least a minute of time when the question hadn't really been answered.