The State of the Union speech is normally just a big kabuki theatre exercise. On both sides of the aisle, political parties make clear what they value and show their support or lack thereof for the President's agenda.

No news there. But I think in these days where the political spectrum has been so skewed that tea-baggers actually think Hitler was a liberal, it's a good idea to know just what the GOP does not support, like:

Assistance and tax credits for small businesses to create new jobs:

Or ending tax breaks for companies that send American jobs overseas:

Student loans and helping Americans get higher education:

Prohibiting foreign money from influencing our elections:

Nice to see where small business, education and oligarchy play into the GOP's values, isn't it?

This can't be legal, can it, impersonating a federal document that all Americans are mandated to fill out?

The Republican Party is seeking input and money from GOP voters - seemingly under the guise of the U.S. Census Bureau.

"Strengthening our Party for the 2010 elections is going to take a massive grass-roots effort all across America. That is why I have authorized a Census to be conducted of every Congressional District in the country," GOP Chairman Michael Steele says in a letter mailed nationwide.

The letter was sent in plain white envelopes marked "Do Not Destroy, Official Document." Labeled "2010 Congressional District Census," the letter uses a capital "C," the same as the Census Bureau. It also includes a "Census Tracking Code."

The letter makes a plea for money and accompanies a form asking voters to identify their political leanings and issues important to them. There are no disclaimers that participation in the GOP effort is voluntary; participation in the government census is required by law. Failure to participate carries a $5,000 fine, though it is rarely enforced.

The GOP, of course, deny that their fundraiser was intended to mislead anyone. But it's laughable, at best, with their hugely partisan leading questions ("Do you think the record trillion dollar federal deficit the Democrats are creating with their out-of-control spending is going to have disastrous consequences for our nation?") and the mimicking of the Census form (copy courtesy of the Politico), who are they trying to kid? Some Republican operative emailed Ben Smith at the Politico and unabashedly admitted it was intentionally misleading:

A knowledgeable Republican operative emails: "Of course duping people is the point...that's one of the reasons why it works so well. The others: low per piece cost -- they drop hundreds of thousands of pieces at a time, and will likely mail millions this year. And incredible targeting."

All's fair in love and politics, eh, GOP? The Census Bureau has officially not decided what steps to take, but the US Postal Service declined to investigate.

In the wake of Scott Brown's landscape changing win in Massachusetts, the clear message to Republicans is "keep on truckin'." As the Boston Globe reports, the green GMC Canyon truck - what the paper deemed Brown's "regular-guy-mobile" featured so prominently in his campaign - is experiencing "a surge of interest" at Bay State dealerships. All of which suggests that with his pickup truck Scott Brown like Fred Thompson before him has perfected the Republican art of ersatz authenticity.

The Senate's first former nude model may own five properties and be married to a Boston television news anchor, but the lasting image for voters of the Wall Street-funded working stiff is that truck:

"My name is Scott Brown and I'm running for the United States Senate. This is my truck. I put a lot of miles on it during this campaign.

Wherever I go people tell me they're concerned about the path our country is on. Spending is out of control. Government keeps getting bigger and bigger. It's time for a new direction.

"I love this old truck. It's brought me closer to the people of this state. And I want to speak for them as their next United States Senator."

If that road to office sounds familiar, it should. After all, actor and long-time lobbyist Fred Thompson used it to drive his leased red pickup into the Senate in 1994.

As the New Republic recalled in 2007 while musing about a potential Thompson run for the White House:

By the time Fred Thompson decides whether or not to join the presidential fray, you will have heard the story of his red pickup truck at least a dozen times. The truck in question is a 1990 Chevy, which the famed statesman-thespian rented during his maiden Senate campaign in 1994. The idea was that Thompson would dress up in blue jeans and shabby boots and drive himself to campaign events around Tennessee. Upon arriving, he'd mount the bed of the truck and launch into a homespun riff on the virtues of citizen-legislators and the perils of Washington insider-ism. For good measure, he'd refer to himself as "Ol' Fred" and the Chevy as "this ol' baby."

There was no real reason to think the tactic would work. Thompson's own campaign manager dismissed it as "gimmicky and hokey." Thompson, after all, had spent the previous two decades as a well-paid Washington lobbyist and sometime screen actor. He was about as close to being a salt-of-the-earth Southerner as Truman Capote, and it was a stretch to think average Tennesseans wouldn't pick up on the dissonance. Yet the gambit proved wildly successful. Thompson was down big to Democrat Jim Cooper when he initialed his car-rental agreement. He went on to win the race with more than 60 percent of the vote.

In 1996, the Washington Monthly's Michelle Cottle ("Another Beltway Bubba?") concluded that "with his pickup truck, his blue jeans, and his deep, friendly drawl, Thompson has cultivated the perfect political image for today's anti-Washington climate."

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If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then Barack Obama has been in the fast lane when it comes to bipartisanship. Now one year into his presidency, his near-pathological obsession with consensus has only served to resurrect a moribund GOP while leaving his agenda and his own party teetering on the brink.

It didn't have to be this way. Not if Barack Obama had understood Krugman's Law and heeded the lessons of Dick Cheney.

Listened to Cheney, that is, not on national security, but on domestic politics.

Following the disputed 2000 election, the Bush-Cheney transition team prepared to assume the White House without either a popular vote mandate or dominant majorities in Congress. But while the mainstream media consensus concluded that a "weakened" President Bush would have to govern from the center and "build bridges to the opposition," Dick Cheney had a different idea. Especially when it came to the Republican ticket's radical plan of tax cuts for the economy, Cheney insisted:

"We don't negotiate with ourselves."

As Barton Gellman details in his book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, Dick Cheney made it abundantly clear that the Bush administration would put pedal to the metal in pursuit of its radical agenda. In a series of media appearances that December, Cheney proceeded as if the Florida recount and Bush v. Gore had never happened.

His December 3, 2000 exchange with the late Tim Russert on Meet the Press is particularly telling:

RUSSERT: Governor Bush and you campaigned on a platform of a $1.3 trillion tax cut. Now that the Senate is 50-50, Democrats-Republicans, and the Republicans control the House by eight or nine votes, won't you have to scale down your tax cut in order to pass it? [...] But, in reality, with a 50-50 Senate and a close, close, small majority in the House, you're going to have to have a moderate, mainstream, centrist governance, aren't you?

CHENEY: Oh, I think so. [...] But I think there's no reason in the world why we can't do exactly what Governor Bush campaigned on.

Two weeks later, following the controversial Supreme Court decision which made George W. Bush the 43rd President, Cheney made his case even more forcefully on Face the Nation:

"As President-elect Bush has made very clear, he ran on a particular platform that was very carefully developed. It's his program, it's his agenda, and we have no intention at all of backing off of it. It's why we got elected.

So we're going to aggressively pursue tax changes, tax reform, tax cuts, because it's important to do so. [...] The suggestion that somehow, because this was a close election, we should fundamentally change our beliefs, I just think is silly."

When Gloria Borger interrupted to object that "with all due respect, the Democrats are saying that this administration cannot proceed as the Reagan administration did, for example, with a large tax bill, because you don't have the mandate that a Ronald Reagan.," Cheney fired back:

"There is no reason in the world, and I simply don't buy the notion, that somehow we come to office now as a, quote, 'weakened president.' [...] We've got a good program, and we're going to pursue it."

Which is exactly what transpired. By May 2001, President Bush and Vice President Cheney had their $1.35 trillion tax cut, courtesy of precisely the strategy Borger ridiculed as " cherry pick[ing] one or two Democrats here and there and get them to sign on to whatever tax bill you have."

But eight years later, Barack Obama did not follow the Bush-Cheney example.

As it turned out, the deadly combination of Obama's hands-off approach to legislation and unending appeasement of Republicans determined to destroy him was both futile and counterproductive.

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The first Republican, Abraham Lincoln, famously proclaimed, "My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side." Sadly, as Sarah Palin and RNC Chairman Michael Steele revealed again this week, Honest Abe's successors believe the GOP truly is God's Own Party. As it turns out, Palin and Steele joined George W. Bush, Mike Huckabee, Michele Bachmann, Mark Sanford and others on the long and growing list of Republican leaders who claim they have been chosen by God.

On 60 Minutes Sunday, McCain-Palin campaign chief Steve Schmitt disclosed to Anderson Cooper that the Quitta from Wasilla viewed her selection as John McCain's running mate as part of God's plan:

COOPER: After Senator McCain asked her to be his vice president, how did she respond?

SCHMITT: She was very calm, nonplussed. I said, "You don't seem nervous at all about this," and she said, "No, it's God's plan."

(For more on Palin's belief in the "natural progression" of a grand divine plan for her, continue reading below.)

Echoing Arizona Governor Jan Brewer's announcement in September that "God has placed me in this powerful position," Michael Steele claimed he, too, was tapped by the Almighty in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). Under siege by fellow Republicans for his endless series of gaffes and shameless self-promotion, Steele announced:

"I'm not defined by this job. When this job is over I will go back to doing something else. But God, I really believe, has placed me here for a reason because who else and why else would you do this unless there's something inside of you that says right now you need to be here to do this?"

Of course, Steele is far from alone among God's chosen Republicans, as George W. Bush and his amen corner long ago made clear.

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Only after both chambers of Congress had already voted on the health care reform bills which will cut the deficit, AP on Saturday belatedly looked back at the deeply flawed and unfunded Medicare prescription drug program Republicans jammed through Congress in 2003. 24 hours later, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell appeared on ABC's This Week to add his to the chorus of Republican voices protesting that was then and this is now.

As Reagan Treasury official Bruce Bartlett told the AP, "As far as I am concerned, any Republican who voted for the Medicare drug benefit has no right to criticize anything the Democrats have done in terms of adding to the national debt." In response, Orrin Hatch, who promised a "holy war" to block Democratic success on health care, explained Republican behavior during the Bush years, "it was standard practice not to pay for things." And Olympia Snowe (R-ME), the GOP Senator courted in vain by President Obama, suggested the tale of the 2003 Medicare Rx benefit should be swept under the rug, "dredging up history is not the way to move forward."

But it was Mitch McConnell, who along with his lieutenants Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN) backed President Bush's Medicare giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry, who turned to misdirection to explain it all away to ABC's Jake Tapper:

TAPPER: Senator, you voted for that Medicare prescription drug benefit, which some say will cost $1 trillion over 10 years and was not offset by revenue or spending cuts.

MCCONNELL: Well, the first thing, you should notice that it came in 30 percent underbudget because of the competitive mechanisms that are involving in extending a prescription drug benefit to seniors. The Democrats criticized it at the time because it was not generous enough. And look, they have gone far beyond any deficit spending discretions -- indiscretions that Republicans might have had. In their first year alone, they ran the deficit up more than the last four years of the Bush administration combined.

As an act of political fraud, McConnell's statement was impressive, if only because of the off-the-charts ratio of deceptions delivered per word spoken. For starters, while this year's projected $1.4 trillion deficit dwarfs the figures from Bush's tenure, McConnell conveniently omitted mentioning that the budget Barack Obama inherited was already $1.2 trillion in the red when he took office in January. But more cynical still is McConnell's whitewashing of the scandal regarding the original estimate of the cost of Medicare drug plan, a forecast the Bush White House withheld from Congress in order to secure its passage.

Here's a look back at the fuzzy math and the dirty politics Mitch McConnell and friends don't want to talk about.

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Apparently, David Vitter doesn't think the Senate should be able to go home at a reasonable hour to spend Christmas Eve with their families, and Tom Harkin wants everyone to know just whose stocking deserves a lump of coal.

SEN. HARKIN (D-Iowa): So Mr. President, I know one senator whose family is with their in-laws - their husband's from England and their kids are over there - can't make it for Christmas dinner tomorrow night. I know other person who has to get out to the west because - and there's a lot of storms out there - if they can get that early flight, they can make two legs and get home. If they have to go later in the day, they have to do three legs and they may not make it. There's a lot of people around here that are having a lot of problems with that. We're all here. There's no -- really no reason to hold over the vote. So I'm going to ask unanimous consent that the vote on the passage of the bill and the -- and the vote on the debt limit bill -- occur at 6pm this evening.

PRESIDENT OF THE SENATE: Is there objection?

SEN. VITTER (R-Lousiana): Mr. President?

PRESIDENT OF THE SENATE: Senator Vitter.

SEN. VITTER (R-Lousiana): That request has not been cleared on this side, so on behalf of my colleagues, I will object. And if the senator would like to talk to all of his colleagues about it, that would be fine. But in the meantime, I would object.

PRESIDENT OF THE SENATE: Objection is heard.

SEN. HARKIN (D-Iowa): Mr. President, then I would further ask unanimous consent that the votes that are going to occur at 7am tomorrow occur at 12:15am in the morning.

SEN. VITTER (R-Lousiana): Mr. President?

PRESIDENT OF THE SENATE: Is there objection?

SEN. VITTER (R-Lousiana): Mr. President, my response would be the same and I would object in the same vein.

PRESIDENT OF THE SENATE: Objection is heard.

SEN. HARKIN (D-Iowa): Well I just want people to know who's keeping us here.

Gotta love those "Family Values" types, doncha? David Vitter, true to Republican obstructionism form, if not his wife.

Bad enough when terrorists bluff about their intent to obtain nuclear weapons to frighten the general populace - now we have Republican politicians doing the terrorists' work for them. From Talking Points Memo:

Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC) was troubled by what might happen when waterboarding and the American right to a fair trial met in a U.S. courtroom. She worried what might happen if terror suspects argued they'd been given "cruel and unusual" punishment at Gitmo.

"This is what scares me because they're in a U.S. court now and the rights are different," she said. "What will they say [about their detention] and what could happen and could they be out among the people again? It's very frightening."

How frightening? Mushroom cloud frightening, according to [Rep. Trent] Franks [R-AZ]. He said that a federal trial would give the suspects "a megaphone to speak to the planet," which he said "only hastens the danger" of, literally, a nuclear terrorist attack.

Yes, we certainly don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud, do we? The only thing we need to fear are the fearmongers themselves. Better to dig a nice deep hole at Gitmo, and throw all these Republicans terrorists into it and forget about them. Also present at the Dec 10 event were Rep. Michelle "Kill the Socialists" Bachman (R-MN) and Frank "Crazy Eyes" Gaffney (Center for Security Policy).

I'm going to create a new variant of Godwin's Law.

• Sigger's Law: "As any discussion on terrorism grows longer, the probability of attributing terrorists with nuclear weapons (or similar destructive capabilities) approaches 1."
• Corrolary to Sigger's Law: "Once such an observation is made, the discussion is finished and whoever mentioned terrorist possession of nuclear weapons has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress."

(h/t Jamie)

Founder of the blog Little Green Footballs, Charles Johnson has seen the light and decided he can no longer support the right wing of his party and makes no bones about why:

1. Support for fascists, both in America (see: Pat Buchanan, Robert Stacy McCain, etc.) and in Europe (see: Vlaams Belang, BNP, SIOE, Pat Buchanan, etc.)

2. Support for bigotry, hatred, and white supremacism (see: Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Robert Stacy McCain, Lew Rockwell, etc.)

3. Support for throwing women back into the Dark Ages, and general religious fanaticism (see: Operation Rescue, anti-abortion groups, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, the entire religious right, etc.)

4. Support for anti-science bad craziness (see: creationism, climate change denialism, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, James Inhofe, etc.) Read on...

Conservatives like Kathleen Parker and Christopher Buckley found out that leaving the GOP fight club isn't easy -- and Johnson will undoubtedly suffer the same fate. Johnson is taking major heat for his defection, which comes as no surprise, and comments like these at Politico merely prove his point.

I don't expect to see Charles Johnson showing up with Code Pink at any war protests any time soon, but this post covers much of what C&L and other progressive blogs have been saying about the GOP for some time now. It is a dying party that has been taken over by religious extremists, bigots, conspiracy theorists and worse.

Johnson's observations about his party mirror those of my conservative friends and family...well, most of them. They wonder what happened to their party and where they belong in the political spectrum.

I agree with Nicole Belle who wrote backstage - "I don't want him on the left. But it's nice to see someone on the right injecting a little sanity into the discussion."

There literally is no end to the extent by which Republican politicians will lie, distort, and manufacture statements in their efforts to disrupt, deny, and destroy the Obama administration's attempts to govern. At today's Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on 9/11 trial, the Fort Hood shooter, and terrorism, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) decided to flip-flop on the designation of the Gitmo detainees. Are they "unlawful enemy combatants" or are they "prisoners of war"?

SESSIONS: The enemy, who could of been obliterated on the battlefield on one day, but was captured instead does not then become a common American criminal. They are first a prisoner of war, once they're captured. The laws of war say, as did Lincoln and Grant, that the prisoners will not be released when the war - until the war ends. How absurb is it to say that we will release people who plan to attack us again?

Sessions seems to be saying that because these detainees were captured by the military, they have become prisoners of war and should not be released - even if found not guilty or after serving a prison term (assuming less than a life sentence) - until the "war on terror" is over (which, under a Republican point of view, will never be over). But on the other hand, SecDef Don Rumsfeld and the other fun-loving bunch of Bushites were very firm about NOT calling them "prisoners of war" because they were not supposed to get rights under the Geneva Convention (or any other form of legal writs - see waterboarding, justification of).

In fact, as one of the commenters at the TPM post notes, there was public law developed to explicitly designate any non-US citizen who was accused of supporting terrorism or acting against the United States as a terrorist as being eligible for military commissions.

I thought like you until I read this, from the Military Commissions Act: "‘(e) Geneva Conventions Not Establishing Private Right of Action- No alien unprivileged enemy belligerent subject to trial by military commission under this chapter may invoke the Geneva Conventions as a basis for a private right of action."

See: here.

This discussion becomes quickly complex with legal passages as a debate over whether the military tribunals should take KSM or if the federal court system has adequate jurisdiction. But it's just so interesting how Republican politicians adroitly jump back and forth as to the question of the detainees' status to how it best fits their argument of the day - are we talking about Geneva convention rights, or are we talking about the process of legal courts?

And because I want to give credit to the interesting comments over at TPM, I will close with the following observations by the commenters:

"I guess when the Right/GOP can say, print (Palin's myth filled book), promote anything without any accountability by the Beltway Press, the GOP has no need for intellectually honest consistency in their claims."

"When did Sessions stop playing the banjo?"

UPDATE: Clarified the guilt point.