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On a conference call with House Republicans, Speaker John Boehner gave them some much-needed medicine as he tells them to fall in line.

On a conference call with House Republicans a day after the party’s electoral battering last week, Speaker John A. Boehner dished out some bitter medicine, and for the first time in the 112th Congress, most members took their dose.
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It was a striking contrast to a similar call last year, when Mr. Boehner tried to persuade members to compromise with Democrats on a deal to extend a temporary cut in payroll taxes, only to have them loudly revolt.
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“To have a voice at the bargaining table, John Boehner has to be strong,” said Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, one of the speaker’s lieutenants. “Most members were just taught a lesson that you’re not going to get everything that you want. It was that kind of election.”

Tea Partiers like Jennifer Stefano (who works for Koch's Americans For Prosperity group) were terribly upset by Boehner's words. Now when you're watching this clip, just imagine you lived in a far-off land where we didn't have a two-year election.

Cavuto: Tea Partiers made Boehner Speaker, and he better watch how and to who he is speaking. Jenn, you didn't like that?

Stefano: Well look, here's what I'd like everyone to say. Why don't we all talk about instead of who's getting in line and who's cooperating with who? What is the best thing for our country? Wouldn't it be nice if we had a leader in Washington who said hey, it's not about just working together for show, it's about what is best for our country. And Neil, there are some very hard decisions to be made and I don't think we should compromise on things that are not good for all of us as Americans.

Not only is she delegitimizing Obama's reelection, but she's saying NO to f*&king reality. Do these people come from the conservative section of Storybrooke?
Here's more lunacy as this short interview continues:

Cavuto: But the president's going to claim that elections have consequences and it was close, but I won and I won despite this call for higher taxes and maybe because of it and the rich just have to deal -- you say what?

Stefano: I say number one, just because you win an election doesn't mean you get to go of the rails and do what is NOT good for America because you have some weird ideological agenda. Number two, let's talk seriously about what tax cuts are and what they're going to do. You can take all of the wealth --100% of the wealth in this country, Neil, and from everyone making over $250,000 and you are not going to solve the problems we have in this country.

Hey Stefano, regarding your first point: Over 62,000,000 people voted for this "weird agenda", in your words, so in reality it's not weird at all. As for her second point: As I said before, we've just completed a long, serious and arduous process of picking the type of person we wanted to be in charge of the executive branch, and we've decided what we want to do.

Maybe not in Tea Party Nation, a world many light years away. But here in America. That's how democracy works.

But Stefano's not a fan of that system. She then refuses to say she's open to compromise and instead calls the problems with entitlements 'immoral.' She doesn't want to compromise, period. End of story. The message from many Tea Party groups is clear: Don't compromise, don't negotiate and become more conservative.

Cavuto: Jennifer says no, she's not going to budge on anything.

Stefano: I, I, I... it's not that I'm not going to budge. I want a serious conversation with this president outside, I won't compromise my child's future. And I won't throw the poor and the weak under the bus by hurting charities. Are you afraid I'm going to leap through and grab you?

Here's how the conversation would go. Obama: Jenn, let's have a serious conversation about fixing our problem. Why won't you compromise? Jenn: Because I hate you and your radical agenda. Obama: I understand that, but I won the election so America has chosen. Jenn: No they haven't because we never had a serious conversation about this. Obama: Yes we did. Jenn: No we didn't and you can't make me...etc...

We had A SERIOUS CONVERSATION!

Argh. Never mind. Transcribing this has turned my frontal lobe mushy. The stupid, it burns.

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Jesus, this guy Dennis Michael Lynch is batty, but he's a regular guest you'll see on Fox News. Neil Cavuto is happy to trot out this racist garbage.

Cavuto invited the aptly-named Lynch on so he could promote his vicious, Latino-bashing "documentary", and first on the menu was a discussion of a prison escape in Mexico near the border, and the Fox-fed fears that the escapees are on their way to the U.S.

CAVUTO: But Dennis, you probably think these guys are on their way here, right?

LYNCH: Oh, they're gonna come to vote, and then they'll get a work permit -- if Obama has his way.

... I was down there. Places with no fence, no lights. No Border Patrol. They're finding Korans and they're finding prayer rugs in the desert.

Not everybody's coming here to cut your lawn. Some people are coming here to cut your throat.

This is the biggest problem we have facing our nation.

Lynch then launches into a prolonged whine because no one wants to show his sucky film. He's crying about being rejected by theater owners everywhere, including Texas and Arizona. What a shock.

From Media Matters: On Fox, Filmmaker Michael Lynch Says Not All Immigrants Are "Coming Here To Cut Your Lawn" -- Some Are Coming To "Cut Your Throat"

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This is very significant. In fact, it's downright historic: The politician sticking his neck out to buck the NRA about states having the right to ban guns is... Rick Perry. This is a real "Nixon goes to China" moment, because a conservative Republican (from rootin', tootin' Texas, no less) carries a lot more weight with NRA supporters. It's a damned shame that neither presidential candidate has, to date, had that kind of political courage, but maybe Perry's statement will open the door to an adult discussion:

In an interview concerning the tragic shooting on Texas A&M campus on Monday, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) took a surprisingly moderate position on gun regulation. Although Perry rejected the suggestion that the shooting — the third high profile shooting in just one month — justified gun regulation in Texas, he also indicated that each state should be able to decide on its own whether or not to ban guns:

PERRY: When it gets back to this issue of taking guns away from law abiding citizens and somehow know this will make our country safer, I don’t agree with that. I think most people in Texas don’t agree with that, and that is a state by state issue frankly that should be decided in the states and not again a rush to Washington, D.C. to centralize the decision making, and them to decide what is in the best interest for the citizens and the people of Florida and Texas. That’s for the people of these states to decide.

Perry’s position, that each state should get to decide whether to “tak[e] guns away” from its citizens places him well to the left of the Supreme Court and the nation’s largest gun lobby. InMcDonald v. Chicago, the five conservative justices held that the Second Amendment applies equally to the federal government and to state governments, so an absolute ban on guns would not be constitutional if enacted at the state level (although bans on “dangerous and unusual” weapons would remain valid).

The National Rifle Association was the plaintiff in a sister case toMcDonald.Allowing each state to set its own gun policy, the position that Perry seems to embrace today, closely tracks the views expressed by dissenting Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer and Sotomayor in McDonald.

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40 years after Archie Bunker, the Reagan Revolution, the Gingrich Revolution, welfare reform and the Bush/Cheney years, conservatives are still convinced that the real problem with this country is that the poor have it too damn easy. And as Ronald Reagan did with his "Cadillac-driving Welfare Queen" and "Strapping Young Bucks buying steaks" -- right-wingers are still lying to make their case.

Cavuto claims it's unfair that half the country pays no federal income taxes when Ronald Reagan signed the Earned Income Tax Credit into law. He also claims "half the country doesn't pay any taxes at all" -- and that's a lie.

Cavuto bemoans the loss of the US's triple-A credit rating, when it was the hostage-taking by Republicans that led to it.

Cavuto claims "90 percent" of Americans have health insurance. It's more like 80%. He claims "10 percent" of Americans don't have health insurance -- it's much closer to 20%. He also calls the US health system "the world's envy" -- even though Mitt Romney just admitted that we pay far too much for a system that produces mediocre results.

Cavuto says "you used to have to work for welfare, now you just take it" -- but the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act championed by Gingrich and signed into law by Clinton requires work and leaves welfare recipients to the tender mercies of the states. So the opposite is true.

Cavuto says he doesn't recognize the country, and on that score he's right. The gap between the very rich and everyone else has no precedent except for the 1920s. The number of union households in America is at an all-time low. Also at historic lows are taxes -- especially on the rich. And social mobility in the US has collapsed.

This segment is telling, however, because no matter how low taxes are, no matter how much wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, no matter how high corporate profits are, no matter how degraded the safety net is -- for right-wingers, the problem will always be that the "moochers" are dragging down the "producers."

Shorter Cavuto: Mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.

We already know that the minimum wage doesn't pay enough to get a two-bedroom apartment in the vast majority of the country. Yet conservatives continue to push the same old lie: that raising the minimum wage causes unemployment. Now, a group of Democratic Congress members are trying to raise the issue:

If today’s minimum wage workers earned the same as their counterparts in 1968, they would receive $10 per hour. That, unfortunately, is $2.75 more than the current federal minimum wage.This would be a serious problem at any time, but it’s particularly relevant now, as the awful economy has forced millions of workers into minimum-wage jobs. (And they’re the lucky ones).

To that end, Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. has introduced the “Catching Up To 1968 Act of 2012.” Within sixty days of being enacted, it would raise the federal minimum wage to $10 per hour, and beginning one year after that, would index it to the Consumer Price Index. For workers that rely on tips, the bill would mandate the cash wage to be 70 percent of the minimum wage and never less than $5.50 per hour.

“We’ve bailed out banks, we’ve bailed out corporations, we’ve bailed out Wall Street, we’ve tried to create sound fundamentals in the economy—now it’s time to bail out working people who work hard every day and they still only make $7.25,” Jackson said this morning at a news conference outside the US Capitol. “The only way to do that is to raise the minimum wage.”

Ralph Nader and Representatives Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers also attended the news conference—a roster of liberal stars if there ever was one. But it’s important to note that raising the minimum wage has often found bipartisan support. Rick Santorum, for example, wrote legislation to increase it, and until recently even Mitt Romney supported tying it to the CPI.

And with 30 million workers receiving minimum wage, it should certainly be a viable political issue. “These are not just liberal workers or progressive workers or conservative workers or libertarian workers,” said Nader. “This is a unifying issue in our country at a time when there are few declared unifying political issues.“

What is missing is a unified drive by elected members of Congress to provide the requisite courage to challenge the merciless oligarchy, which includes the big-box stores like Walmart and McDonalds, and compel them to adjust their pay.

Kucinich added that it was a tough sell inside the Beltway, but an easy sell outside of it. “We live in a bubble here in Washington, DC. This place is dripping with wealth. Wealth is just cascading into the capital to buy elections,” he said. “But when you get outside Washington, DC, and you get to the cities and the townships and the villages of America, there are people struggling to survive. There are people who can’t make it on $7.25 an hour if they even have a job.”

The federal minimum wage increased in 2007, from $5.15 an hour. There hasn’t been any evidence that it caused businesses to hire less workers, and in fact research has shown that an increase in the minimum wage doesn’t create an increase in unemployment.

And for a preview of the type of propaganda we're going to see by the right on the legislation, here's Neil Cavuto attacking the proposal as an assault on small businesses during his show on Fox this Thursday.

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Despite a mountain of data and the overwhelming consensus of economists to the contrary, Republican leaders including House Speaker John Boehner and would-be President Mitt Romney continue to falsely claim "Obama made the economy worse." But another tried and untrue GOP talking point about the supposed "Obama bear market" has largely vanished. Of course, with the Dow Jones now at 13,000 and the NASDAQ at 3,000, Republicans should be silent. After all, with the indexes at four year highs, Barack Obama is just the latest to show that the stock market almost always does better under Democratic presidents.

The conservative propaganda machine began perpetuating the "Obama bear market" myth long before the 44th President even took the oath of office. The first installment of the Republicans' "previsionist" history unsurprisingly came from CNBC host and former Reagan advisor Larry Kudlow. That right-wing water carrier, who in April 2008 compared the deepening recession to an enema (calling it "an economic cleansing" and crowing that "recessions are therapeutic"), blamed a one-day 242-point drop on the Democratic Convention:

"Are the Denver Dems downing the stock market today? The Dow is off 230 points, starting right from the get-go. So-called market analysts are blaming financials and the credit crunch as they always do. But there's more.

Obama and Biden gave us plenty of class warfare in their Springfield, Ill., get together on Saturday. Tax the rich. Redistribute income and wealth. Go after all those corporate meanies. Trade protection...

...With the Denver Dems strutting their stuff, this could be a bumpy week for stocks. Did anyone say free-market capitalism is the best path to prosperity?"

With Obama's election on November 4th, that warning shot turned into a barrage. Within 48 hours, the mullahs of right-wingistan didn't merely blame Obama for two days of market declines; they traveled back in time to lay the entire Bush recession at his feet.

Echoing CNBC's Kudlow, Dick Morris claimed the markets will "continue to tank...not just because he's a radical, not just because he's a Democrat, but because he's going to raise the capital gains tax. While Fox News' Gretchen Carlson announced, "there's a lot of feeling in the market not reacting very well to the election of Barack Obama," Fred Barnes proclaimed, "There is great uncertainty out there about [Obama's] policies." And that Thursday, the always execrable Rush Limbaugh on November 6, 2008 laid it all at Obama's feet:

"The Obama recession is in full swing, ladies and gentlemen. Stocks are dying, which is a precursor of things to come. This is an Obama recession. Might turn into a depression. He hasn't done anything yet but his ideas are killing the economy. His ideas are killing Wall Street...

...The market's down today because of the jobless numbers. That's how the Drive-Bys see it. Uhhhhh, we have the largest market plunge after an election in history. Thank you, man-child Barack Obama."

As the Dow Jones continued its slide below 7,000 in March, 2009, the conservative catcalls become a chorus. CNN's Lou Dobbs, the self-proclaimed "Mr. Independent," announced on March 9, 2009, "This is now the Obama bear market." That same day, the Wall Street Journal declared, "The dismaying message here is that President Obama's policies have become part of the economy's problem." House Minority Leader John Boehner was among the Republican leaders bemoaning "the Obama economy" and insisted that since Obama's inauguration six weeks earlier, "Certainly the stock market hasn't acted very well." Later that month, the Journal's Daniel Henninger blasted Obama's "radical presidency":

"A Democratic Party that was always anti-Wall Street is becoming anti- Main Street."

The drumbeat hardly ended there. On March 8, 2009, Fox News host Chris Wallace asked an uncomfortable John McCain, "Can this now fairly be called the Obama bear market?" That propaganda only echoed the Republican talking points regurgitated two days earlier by Bloomberg in an article titled, "'Obama Bear Market' Punishes Investors as Dow Slumps" and the Wall Street Journal rant, "Obama's Radicalism is Killing the Dow." On March 6th, Sean Hannity was nearly orgasmic as he trumpeted the declines on Wall Street:

And our headline this Friday night: Welcome to Day Number 46 of "Obama's Bear Market." Now, that's what some news organizations are calling it tonight as the Dow Jones industrial average actually finished up about 30 points today at the end of a disastrous week.

According to Bloomberg News, the Dow has now dropped faster during the first six weeks of the Obama administration than any other administration in at least 90 years. But is that a surprise after weeks of talking down the economy?

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Mitt Romney has a big problem. Between Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, he may not be able to capture enough delegates to seal the nomination after the primaries end. To that end, Santorum's delegate counter put out a memo (PDF) outlining the pathway to a brokered convention. It's a two-pronged approach, involving a similar strategy to Ron Paul's, which is to be involved in the election of delegates at state conventions.

The Daily Beast explains:

"The state conventions will ultimately determine the outcome of this race," wrote John Yob, who was hired by Santorum this month to oversee his delegate operation.

Yob, who was deputy political director for Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) 2008 presidential campaign, wrote a more than 2,000 word memo to lay out the Santorum campaign's view that time is on their side, rather than running out. The Santorum campaign first released the memo to Politico's Mike Allen early Monday morning.

Yob's messaging memo is intended in some part to relieve any pressure on Santorum to win both Mississippi and Alabama's primaries on Tuesday. But Yob's memo also lays out a case for how the process of electing delegates to the national convention in Tampa, Fla., this August could reduce the lead Romney currently has in the race to reach the magic number: 1,144.

The whole Republican primary race has been a study in mixed narratives. We hear over and over again from Republicans about how a protracted primary did not hurt Barack Obama in 2008, since he went on to win the election. I disagree. The divisions that existed after that primary battle exist today. They are, in my opinion, part of the reason the 2010 midterms were such a disaster.

But even if you disagree with me and think it was a good thing for Democrats to have gone through that battle, there are distinct differences between the Republicans of 2012 and Democrats of 2008. For starters, Democrats did not get as personal with each other. Yes, Hillary's campaign originated the smear points that still exist in today's politics -- Bill Ayers, the "madrassa" accusation, and others. But fundamentally, the two candidates were in agreement on policy, with very little daylight between them, even with regard to Iraq. The same is not true of the current GOP field. Also, Obama stayed far away from using Bill Clinton's womanizing ways to hit Hillary. If he had done that, I think the Democratic party would have lost and likely would not have recovered from it.

The remaining Republicans divide sharply into three camps. There is the Magic Morph Romney camp, where he morphs into whatever he needs to be that day without regard to the past, present or future. There is the Nasty Newt camp, where he just oozes nastiness and unwarranted certitude with every lie that comes out of his mouth, and focuses most on fiscal conservatism. Finally, there's the Sanctimonious Santorum camp, where women are chattel to be used as wedges against his opponents, where he praises Jesus while stomping on those Jesus ministered to, and where the only thing thing that matters is absolute fealty to God, guns and bitterness.

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In all of the smoke and mirrors and true protests and political posturing over the Keystone XL Pipeline, one of the least-reported issues has been the conflict between the state of Nebraska and the United States government.

That debate has not yet been settled, as Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer patiently explains to an incredulous, disbelieving Neil Cavuto.

Back in October, Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman called a special session of the state legislature. The purpose of the session was to discuss the Keystone XL Pipeline route through the state and whether the state should exercise its right to withhold approval of the route through Nebraska, since it seemed apparent at that time that the State Department was moving toward approval before the end of 2011. Since Heineman couldn't be certain that the Obama Adminstration would delay their decision, Nebraska chose to exercise their rights to block, or at the very least, delay, approval of the pipeline.

Two bills were passed as a result of that special session. The first is the Major Pipeline Siting Act, which requires pipeline owners to submit their plan to the state for approval. From the Nebraska legislature, this explanation:

LB 1 adopts the Major Oil Pipeline Siting Act, which sets out a procedure for pipeline carriers to follow. An application must be approved by the Public Service Commission prior to beginning construction of a major oil pipeline in Nebraska. One or more public hearings would be held. In making the decision as to whether the pipeline is in the public interest, the Commission can evaluate evidence of the impact due to intrusion upon natural resources, including evidence regarding the irreversible and irretrievable commitments of land areas and connected natural resources and the depletion of beneficial uses of the natural resources. The Commission can also evaluate the reports submitted by related agencies, as well as the views of the governing bodies of the counties and cities in the area of the proposed route. The Commission is preempted by federal law from looking at safety issues when making their decision. Furthermore, LB 1 requires the approval of an application prior to the use of eminent domain.

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Meet Kris Kobach, author of the horrible Arizona immigration law and xenophobe, extraordinaire. Kobach is currently the Secretary of State in Kansas, and has a long history of extreme views with regard to immigration.

In this segment, he expands those views, explaining that the purpose of draconian anti-immigration laws like SB 1070 and the Alabama immigration law which is currently killing their economy is really simply a way to force illegal immigrants to "self-deport." If they have family here legally, well, so what?

Kobach comes across as being a reasonable person, but he's really one of the most extreme right-wingers in public life today. While his bios mention his time in South Africa, they don't really expand on what he did while he was there.

Here's an excerpt from the Southern Poverty Law Center on Kobach's stint in South Africa:

He served as president of the Harvard Republican Club and found a mentor in the late Samuel Huntington, an influential political science professor who came to see Latino immigrants as a scourge on American culture.

With Huntington as his advisor, Kobach earned the Harvard prize for the best student thesis in 1989. He analyzed how the South African business community functioned within apartheid and took the unpopular position that investors should not divest their holdings in that country but rather remain as agents of change. A year later, he published the thesis as a book.

On Monday, Kobach will be appearing with Mitt Romney, who he has endorsed for President. In classic Romney-esque fashion, it's difficult to tell where Mitt Romney stands on illegal immigration, since he is running ads in South Carolina which are anti-immigrant, anti-Latino ads, while running Spanish-language ads in Florida talking up his Latino endorsements there. He's flipping at the very same time he's flopping.

With a public appearance in South Carolina with Kobach, I'm sure Mittens plans to sew up the xenophobe vote there, but it's hard for me to believe this will play well with Latino voters nationwide.

Never underestimate the conservative cynicism. It seems they're closing ranks around a candidate who is, as usual, inconsistent about what he believes on immigration. At least, in public. All indications are that Mr. Romney is at least as extreme in his views as his friend Mr. Kobach.

I wonder if Mitt Romney will try and use his Mexican cousins as a bridge to the Latino community. It's hard to imagine that working, since his debate gaffe more or less exposes his utter lack of regard for anyone besides Mitt Romney.

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Memo to Politifact: This is why your stupid characterization of the truth as a lie drives me crazy. You bent over to appease the whacked-out, crazy right-wing and guess what! Fox News took that and ran with it.

Neil Cavuto just could not wait to crow today over it, and in the process, take a few pot shots at Democrats' framing of other issues. In Fox News-land, a Satan sandwich is a tasty morsel meant to be savored.

CAVUTO: Well it's official. It's a lie. And apparently a whopper of a lie. I am talking “Lie of the Year” whopper of a lie. PolitiFact, the nonpartisan source, every politician, Democrat and Republican, trusts, has just released its choice for the lie of 2011, the ad about granny's a big time doozie.

They know it and I've warned you about it.

(Video May 18, 2011)

CAVUTO: This is why we're not moving the ball. Big government fans are having a ball, by lying and exaggerating and insisting everything's fine, while folks who want to reign in these entitlements are not.

Let's just establish that Politifact is no longer nonpartisan nor trustworthy. Now that we agree on that, let's move on to the next Cavuto Crazy moment: Democrats cast the guy in the wheelchair commercial to look like Paul Ryan. Now I don't know if they did or they didn't. But if they did, they should have.

The intellectual dishonesty of Cavuto's take on this commercial really emerges when he starts going on about how granny wasn't going to be thrown off the cliff, because maybe today's granny wasn't, but the one who turns 65 in 10 years surely was.

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