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Remember back in 2010 when the Republican mantra on Obamacare was "repeal and replace"? Well, if the SCOTUS does strike down the law, the GOP will have nothing left to say on the matter.

WALLACE: If the whole bill is struck down, Republicans talk about 'repeal and replace,' -- what are you going to replace that with?

BARBOUR: I think it will be pretty interesting if former constitutional law professor President Obama's signature law gets kicked out because it's unconstitutional...The fact of the matter is that the law is very unpopular. Unlike most entitlements, it has continued to stay unpopular after it was enacted.

Barbour then goes on to babble about how 35 states already have risk pools, and so the Affordable Care Act was really unnecessary, blah blah blah.

In other words: Republicans will replace Obamacare with nothing. Zip. Zero. So the 50M people in this country who don't have health insurance can pretty much suck it.

Thanks for clarifying that, Haley!

(h/t David)

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Sunday's Meet the Press was supposed to be a "serious" discussion about race in the context of the Trayvon Martin case. What it felt like to me was David Gregory trying to flog the idea that President Obama hasn't led us into some "meaningful" national discussion about race while at the same time trying to minimize the impact race had on how the Trayvon Martin case has been handled.

Let's begin with David Brooks' statement at the very beginning of this particular segment, where he opines that racism is a "natural sin"; that is, it's inherent in all of us, and not learned. Without climbing deep down into the weeds about whether it is racism or tribalism that's natural, I think we can safely say that the hateful parts of racist behavior are learned and reinforced rather than genetic. It is one thing to gravitate toward others who look the same and another to shoot them. Or believe one is justified in shooting them, so making a statement like:

I would say it means that racism isn't a disease, it's a natural sin that we're born into. And therefore, we have to fight it through civilization and through artifice. And by the way, it's one of the reasons, when you have somebody with the gun in a neighborhood, it has to be someone trained--

See, I think it's a disease. And even if it is a natural inclination, what makes Brooks think training would somehow erase a person's racist inclinations? I think that even if it is natural, it is a disease and one that has been incubated and gone viral in this country, unleashed in 2008 with the full blessing of the right-wing politicians in our country.

Speaking of right-wing politicians, let's shift right on over to Haley Barbour, who says Newt Gingrich's comments are wrong but oh, so right.

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Boss Hawg rides again. In what can only be described as an inexplicable act, Haley Barbour granted unconditional pardons to 214 prisoners just before leaving office on Tuesday. Included in that motley group? Brett Favre's brother, a few prison trustees who worked in his office, 14 murderers, and others who just happen to be violent criminals.

As you might imagine, the victims' families are outraged by this. It's one thing to give full pardons to people who might have been wrongly convicted, and another entirely just to use the sweep of a pen to release people who present a danger to their victims and victims' families.

Recognizing this, a judge has blocked the release of a few of the prisoners, stating that Barbour violated the Mississippi State Constitution by not publishing their release date 30 days in advance. While that release may stop a few for a short time, it's doubtful that they will be able to defend keeping them in prison if the pardon holds.

According to this report on Megyn Kelly's show (yes, I know, but it's what I was recording), Mississippi Attorney General is attending to the victims' families' complaints. Well, maybe. Honestly, I was a bit chilled to hear him say this:

So I think, they're gonna be fine. Just be careful.

Ya think? I'm not sure what possessed Haley Barbour to grant these pardons, to be honest. It strikes me as a cynical and self-serving move. Maybe he wanted his own posse?

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, who has the highest unemployment rate in the country tried to pull the usual conservative victim card on Andrea Mitchell. She questioned him about Rick Perry's over the top rhetoric. Immediately Barbour played the librul media card. See, you all, he's a right wing Christian conservative so the liberal media will pick apart every single word he says. He needs to be more careful and get used to that treacherous treatment and uncalled for scrutiny, the poor man. Andrea Mitchell corrected him and said it wasn't the liberal media attacking him, but Karl Rove and other conservatives, he didn't bat an eye.

MITCHELL: Do you think that Rick Perry has to clean up his language? Karl Rove said that what he said about Ben Bernanke is not presidential. Others and also Bob McDonnell, who succeeded Rick Perry as head of the Republican Governors Association, was on with me this week and he doesn`t agree that President Obama may not love his country. He said that he thinks that President Obama is a patriot. What about Rick Perry refusing to say that he believes President Obama loves the country?

BARBOUR: I think Rick Perry has to get prepared for the fact that he`s going to be nitpicked by the liberal media league for everything that he says and that he has to be very careful because anything that he says that can be taken out of context will be taken out of context. When you are a conservative, Christian, southerner Republican, you have to expect that.

MITCHELL: Governor, with all due respect, it isn`t the liberal media that`s taken on Rick Perry. We`re talking about Karl Rove, we`re talking about Bob McDonnell, we`re talking about a lot of mainstream and conservative Republicans, John Podhoretz, who say that what he said about the Fed and Ben Bernanke and the president`s patriotism was not appropriate, was not presidential.

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I guess Boss Hawg Haley Barbour realized he had about a snowball's chance in hell of winning the GOP nomination, much less the 2012 election, since he just announced he will not be a candidate in 2012.

Not that this should surprise you. I never expected him to run, because there are probably far too many skeletons in his closet and he's one of the best fundraisers the GOP has. He's set up a state network that was very effective in 2010, and will be best utilized by Republicans continuing to raise money behind the scenes.

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On Sunday, House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) previewed his party's 2012 budget proposal due out Tuesday. Needless to say, its target of $4 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade won't be met by simply letting the Bush tax cuts expire. Instead, Ryan as widely expected will propose the "voucherization" and inevitable rationing of Medicare. But in a less discussed development, Republicans also hope to slash Medicaid funding by $1 trillion over 10 years while sending the remaining dollars as block grants to the states. As it turns out, that gambit would not only gut the 2010 Affordable Care Act law, but guarantee than millions of low income Americans are deprived of health care.

The Medicaid program for the poor serves roughly 60 million Americans and costs taxpayers about $300 billion a year. While the elderly and the disabled combined account for only 25% of its recipients, the costs of their care constitutes two-thirds of its spending on benefits. But as McClatchy recently explained, the expansion of Medicaid is central pillar of the health care reform law designed to bring health insurance to millions more Americans:

The 2010 law requires that state Medicaid programs in 2014 begin covering all non-elderly people who earn up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level, which would comprise people with incomes of up to $29,400 for a family of four this year.

By 2019, that expansion is expected to add 16 million people to Medicaid, which now provides health coverage for about 60 million low-income Americans. Childless adults and parents who previously earned too much to qualify for the program will make up the bulk of the new enrollees.

Currently, the federal government pays about 57 percent of Medicaid costs on average, while states pay the rest. Under the new law, the federal government will pay the entire cost of the new enrollees for the first three years, after which it will scale down gradually to 90 percent in 2020 and thereafter.

The future implications of the rumored Republican bloodletting are clear. While the Congressional Budget Office estimated the expanded Medicaid program under the ACA would provide coverage for more than 15 million Americans, a Commonwealth Fund analysis projected that almost half of the 52 million people who went without insurance in 2010 could gain it under the new Medicaid provisions in the Affordable Care Act.

But you don't need a crystal ball to see what leaving Medicaid entirely to the states will produce. In states like Mississippi, Texas, Arizona and Florida, that dismal future is now.

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Credit: National Journal

Republicans have seen the future and it's in Mississippi.

On the same day Wisconsin Republicans turned to unprecedented and possibly illegal maneuvers to strip public workers of collective bargaining rights, the Michigan legislature blessed emergency powers for Governor Rick Snyder to terminate municipal contracts across the state. As Idaho joined Tennessee in seeking to curb teachers' unions, Ohio and other states pushed ahead with even tighter handcuffs on government employees. And while Republicans in Maine, Missouri and New Hampshire have introduced virtually identical legislation targeting private sector unions, back in Washington GOP Senators introduced a national "right-to-work" bill designed to make today's draconian red state restrictions on union organizing the law of the land tomorrow.

Sadly, the numbers show that incomes, working conditions, educational performance and health care are worst where union protections are weakest and Republicans poll best. And by almost any measure of social dysfunction, it is Mississippi - the most conservative state in the nation - where the GOP race to the bottom leads.

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Credit: American Rights at Work

To make their case during the stand-off in Madison, conservatives took aim at Wisconsin's teachers. Unfortunately for their GOP echo chamber, the right-wing blogosphere made the mistake of complaining that Wisconsin received millions of dollars in federal education aid when solidly Republican red states get much, much more. Then, the would-be Republican union busters are whining that Badger state students can't read. As it turns out, Wisconsin students outperform their counterparts in those reddest of states where collective bargaining rights are few - or non-existent.

Like in Mississippi.

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How many times can Haley Barbour stick his foot in his mouth when it comes to race in America? Recently he said he was proud of being a lobbyist and earlier has been exposed as a lover of the ol' White Citizens Councils, which made him go into serious damage-control mode.

Both Mr. Mott and Mr. Kelly had told me that Yazoo City was perhaps the only municipality in Mississippi that managed to integrate the schools without violence. I asked Haley Barbour why he thought that was so.

“Because the business community wouldn’t stand for it,” he said. “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”

In interviews Barbour doesn’t have much to say about growing up in the midst of the civil rights revolution. “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” he said. “I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in ’62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white.”

Just to stipulate: In reality, the Ku Klux Klan in the South, both immediately after the Civil War and in its post-1915 reincarnation, in fact always was an organization of town leaders -- but secretly. The White Citizens Councils were merely their public face.

So I don't really understand this one. Haley Barbour in KKK plate uproar

In the latest racially charged incident in his home state, Haley Barbour on Tuesday drew fire when he refused to condemn a proposal honoring a Ku Klux Klan leader and Confederate general on a state license plate.

"I don't go around denouncing people. That's not going to happen," Barbour, who is considering a run for the White House in 2012, said when asked about the plate, the Associated Press reported. "I know there's not a chance it'll become law." The state NAACP has denounced the proposal from the Mississippi Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans to honor Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who went on to become an early leader of the KKK.

Forrest , a Tennessee native, is revered by some as a military genius and despised by others for leading an 1864 massacre of black Union troops at Fort Pillow, Tenn. Forrest was a Ku Klux Klan grand wizard in Tennessee after the war.

Derrick Johnson, president of the Mississippi NAACP, ripped the planned license plate "absurd," blasted Forrest as a "racially divisive figure," and has called on Barbour to denounce the plan.

"I find it curious that the governor won't come out and clearly denounce the efforts of the Sons of Confederate Veterans to honor Nathan Bedford Forrest," he said Tuesday. "As the head of the state, he shouldn't tap dance around the question."

This is actually Barbour's MO whenever the issue of his coddling his state's racists comes up. When he pussyfooted around with the descendants of the WCC, the Council of Conservative Citizens, he again refused to make clear his disapproval of their racism. And when a number of Southern states, including Mississippi, held Confederacy commemorations without any mention of slavery, he ardently defended it.

I wonder how he'll do with the African American vote if he runs for president? I guess the saying that "a leopard can't change its spots" fits ol' Haley to a tee.

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[h/t Heather]

Sometimes there are simply no words to describe the behaviour of Mitch McConnell’s band of merry misanthropes - also known as much of the US Senate Republican Caucus. The level of pathological callousness, a nihilistic streak that would make Friedrich Nietzsche blush, the willingness to put an AR-15 to the head of the nearest vulnerable group if they don’t get every last dime of the mud-bath tax credit for the likes of Kim Kardashian.

You’ve seen these clowns in action. You know what I’m talking about.

They diagnose patients via Youtube. They block votes on everything that doesn’t involve water boarding someone or gutting mine safety standards. They turn bathroom stalls in Minnesota airports into tourist destinations.

Yet, this latest stunt, well, this one even shocked me. Senator McConnell’s boisterous brood decided that it was too expensive to fund healthcare for 9/11 first responders. That’s right, the guys and gals who ran into cascading buildings, brick bonfires and smoldering ash, many of whom - the ones lucky enough to get out alive - developed respiratory illness and cancer for their troubles.

Sicknesses no doubt brought about by their sloth, atheism and at least occasional voting for Democrats.

So "offsets" had to be found to pay for $6 to $7 bn in life-saving funds. Yes, we just added $858 bn in red ink to our budget because somewhere a campaign contributor needed pocket change for the latest yacht shoe, but those in need of less than 1 per cent of that amount for the deleterious results of heroism?

Get in bloody line, guys!

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Writing in Salon, Rick Perlstein examines "what Haley Barbour's amnesia tells us" about Southern conservatives' historical revisionism. But largely lost in the imbroglio over Barbour's literal white-washing of the Jim Crow era is that the Mississippi Governor and would-have-been 2012 White House hopeful has plenty of company among the leading lights of the Republican Party. From flying the Confederate flag to talking up secession and nullification, Republicans for years have been casually trafficking in antebellum nostalgia.

In May, Texas conservatives approved an overhaul of the state's textbooks which would remove the word "slave" from the term "slave trade." Of course, that omission was in keeping with two others, as Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and Mississippi's Barbour celebrated Confederate History Month in their respective states, each without mentioning slavery. As Barbour put it:

"To me it's a sort of feeling that it's just a nit. That it is not significant. It's trying to make a big deal out of something that doesn't matter for diddly."

As for Michael Steele and the Republican National Committee, they apparently considered "nits" like the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to Constitution unnecessary, at least judging from the RNC's May memo attacking Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan:

"Does Kagan Still View Constitution 'As Originally Drafted And Conceived' As 'Defective'?"

As the health care reform debate reached its climax in March, Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia was among those longing for the days of the ante bellum South. Missing the irony that health care is worst in those reddest of Southern states where Republicans poll best, Broun took to the House floor to show that he was still fighting the Civil War:

"If ObamaCare passes, that free insurance card that's in people's pockets is gonna be as worthless as a Confederate dollar after the War Between The States -- the Great War of Yankee Aggression."

If you thought you had heard that outdated term of Dixie revisionist history recently, you did. In February 2009, Missouri Republican Bryan Stevenson took exception to President Obama's support for the Freedom of Choice Act, legislation which would codify the reproductive rights protections of Roe v. Wade nationwide:

"What we are dealing with today is the greatest power grab by the federal government since the war of northern aggression."

That expression was also a favorite of former Senate Majority Leader and later Minority Whip (really, you can't make this up) Trent Lott. Lott was a speaker in 1992 at an event of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a successor to the White Citizens' Councils of Jim Crow days. Among its offerings in seething racial hatred is a "Wanted" poster of Abraham Lincoln. Lott's also offered his rebel yell in the virulently neo-Confederate Southern Partisan, where in 1984 he called the Civil War "the war of aggression." That was years before he lauded the legendary racist and 1948 Dixiecrat presidential candidate, Strom Thurmond:

"I want to say this about my state: when Strom Thurmond ran for President, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."

As Americans learned this week, Trent Lott is not the only Mississippi Republican to support groups like the CCC and honor the Confederate flag. Former Republican National Committee Chairman and now Governor Haley Barbour wore a lapel pin with the image during his 2002 campaigns for the state house - and to keep the CSA emblem flying over it. And as the photographs show, Barbour literally broke bread with CCC racists at a barbeque in 2003.

Another neocon (that is, neo-Confederate) is former Attorney General John Ashcroft.

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