Thanks to Allen at the indomitable Angry Black Lady Chronicles for curating this list:

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Credit: AngryBlackLadyChronicles

For those not on the Twitter, it's a little complicated to follow this story, but bear with me. These are the tweets from the National Senate Republican Committee account. Now in Twitter parlance, "RT" refers to "retweet" and is customarily used at the head of someone else's tweet that you wish to amplify to your followers. It does not necessarily connote approval or agreement with the original tweet, but simply a desire to share it with your followers.

Got that?

Well, here's the thing with all those RTs on behalf of the Sen. John Cornyn-headed NRSC: they're all fakes. They wrote them themselves and crafted them to look like they were merely re-tweeting something written by prominent Democrats and Democratic groups. And this goes out to the more than 14,000 followers of the NRSC twitter account.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee’s getting blowback today from both the left and right for a series of fake re-tweets sent from the NRSC’s official @nrsc Twitter account. The bogus RTs each make reference to Democrats failing to produce a budget, and include a link to a webpage, www.demsplanforamerica.com, that is–wait for it–a blank page.[..]

And surprise–nobody’s laughing. Even Andy Levy, who helps bring the funny to Fox News Channel’s overnight Red Eye, was quick to blast the NRSC via Twitter, “@NRSC What the hell is wrong with you? How do you not realize it’s unethical to make up fake tweets from people?”

Klassy with a K, non? The NRSC is willfully impersonating tweets from the President of the United States in order to smear him.

Twitter itself is an interesting phenomena...it's like a cocktail party with a 1000s of conversations taking place simultaneously, and one weaves around, jumping from conversation to conversation, overhearing stories and new items and you choose how much or how little you want to add to the conversations. At its best, Twitter is an incredible platform to broadcast your messages to your self-selected followers. But at its worst, it's a cesspool of sock puppetry, harassment and cyber-bullying. And the Twitter gods simply have not figured out a way to deal with this kind of hackery.

Calls to both Cornyn's office and the NRSC to defend this have as yet not been returned. Allen at ABLC imagines if this kind of behavior is considered fair play what fun could be had retweeting faked tweets from Cornyn's account. They are definitely not safe for work, but hilarious.

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Well, no one should ever accuse Mark Kirk of a lack of confidence.

In fact, he was so confident of his success on this morning's Meet the Press that the NRSC sent out a press release crowing about his performance. Only problem? They sent it out before the show even began:

The National Republican Senatorial Committee--the GOP senate political operation--in an audacious move, declared Illinois Senate GOP candidate Mark Kirk the winner over Democrat Alexi Giannoulias in Sunday's "Meet the Press" debate before it happened.

On Saturday night, the NRSC was running a fund-raising appeal pegged to the Sunday debate, with the time travel headline and opening paragraph:

Giannoulias Fails In Debate

"It was plain to see on Meet the Press. Alexi Giannoulias is wrong for Illinois and should not be elected to the United States Senate. For too long America has been on a similar course of more spending, more debt, and a weakened economic recovery. We are on an unsustainable path and the American people don't like what they see."

It's hard to argue that Kirk doesn't have his GOP talking points down--wailing and gnashing over tax increases (note to reality-based voters: it is the expiration of tax cuts, not a tax increase, and one that the Republicans organized) to the top 2% of income earners. Just those top 2%. But watch how David Gregory--who famously rejected the notion of asking journalistic questions--points out that Kirk was very much talking out of the other side of his mouth not so long ago.

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I'm not sure by whom I am more annoyed in this clip: Cryin' John Boehner, Steny "Bipartisanship Trumps All" Hoyer or Fox "Pravda" News. If it's Fox News and it's a Republican politico, I EXPECT lying and partisanship. In that sense, Boehner doesn't disappoint. But then again, I've come to expect rather milquetoast-y appearance from Dems too, and Hoyer fulfills that expectation nicely as well. So therefore, I fall to my default position that FoxNews framing is ridiculously insulting to the intelligence of any sentient being who happens to be watching.

Like the proverbial toddler deprived of a cookie, host Chris Wallace stamps his feet and whines why isn't everything better RIGHT NOW?!?! Just six months into a presidency that inherited the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression and damn it, that watered down stimulus bill--that HAD to include tax cuts demanded by the GOP that does little to nothing to stimulate--isn't giving us immediate gratification and relief? Amazing!

Never mind that Obama had to deal with governors refusing stimulus money to score cheap points with the base and that some states are using the stimulus money to shore up budget shortfalls. Never mind that economists said it would take 12-18 months to see results, the WATBs of Fox/GOP want our results NOW!!!!

Cryin' John's appearance was so full of lies and half-truths, it's hard to know where to begin:

This was supposed to be about jobs, jobs, and jobs. And the fact is it turned into nothing more than spending, spending, and more spending on a lot of big government bureaucracy.

I know you're not this obtuse, but just playing the partisan game for those of your base not capable of thinking for themselves--but let's try this again: Government projects means hiring people to do those projects.

In Ohio, the infrastructure dollars that were sent there months ago -- there hasn’t been a contract let, to my knowledge. And the fact is -- is I don’t believe it will create jobs.

Is that so? No contracts? And you don't think it will create jobs? Really? Your nose is growing, Boehner.

And, Steny, the real question is where are the jobs. You can’t spend $800 billion of taxpayer money and not create jobs when you say that’s what the goal was. We haven’t seen the jobs yet.

Of course, if you had a shred of intellectual honesty, you'd admit that the White House said we wouldn't really see job creation until 2010. It's much better to play dumb and pout about not seeing immediate results magically.

BOEHNER: If you really want to get the economy going, you have to trust small businesses and the American people to reinvest their own money. So we (inaudible) into this bill and allow them to keep more of what they earn.

HOYER: John’s plan was what they proposed in 2001. Chris, I don’t want to look back.

BOEHNER: It created 5 million new jobs.

Uh huh. Paul Krugman called it correctly:

You can offer various excuses and explanations, but how anyone can suggest that Republicans are more committed to and/or credible about job creation is a mystery

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