Thirteen social conservatives, representing various influential groups, wrote Priebus ahead of the RNC's quarterly meeting this week in Los Angeles to sternly rebuke the conclusions of a post-election report that advised Republican elected officials to adopt a softer tone toward social issues.

"We respectfully warn GOP Leadership that an abandonment of its principles will necessarily result in the abandonment of our constituents to their support," concludes the letter, which was obtained by and independently verified by NBC News in advance of the meeting this week.

The letter further asks GOP committeemen to pass a resolution at their meeting this week re-affirming the party's 2012 national platform, which includes language calling for bans on abortion and same-sex marriage

The gaping wound in the middle of the Republican party is opening wider and wider. Where will these "constituents" go?

More ironically, the letter claims the religious community has never, ever been mean to gays.

The conservatives additionally expressed their anger at what they said was an insinuation that they had treated gays and lesbians unkindly.

"The fact that the party is strongly committed to traditional marriage has not prevented their involvement through GOProud or Log Cabin Republicans," they wrote. "We deeply resent the insinuation that we have treated homosexuals unkindly personally."

They can resent it all they want, but a quick visit to RightWingWatch says otherwise. This group may not have been a signatory, but I guarantee you they align with those who did sign. It's not mean at all to say that gays on TV will bring down the hard, wrathful hand of God on the country. Not in the least. Gary Bauer's group is a signatory, though I'm sure they don't think there's anything mean about suggesting that supporting gay rights is waging "cultural jihad" on the country. Yeah, no meanness there.

Those were just two examples from today. I don't really want to imagine what they think unkindness is if they imagine hateful remarks like that to be somehow "kind."

(Sung to the tune of "The Twelve Days of Christmas")

On the first day of Christmas
Republicans told me
Obama's born in another country.

On the second day of Christmas
Republicans told me
Gay marriage is like box turtle love and
Obama's born in another country

On the third day of Christmas
Republicans told me
Thank the one percent
Gay marriage is like box turtle love and
Obama's born in another country

On the fourth day of Christmas
Republicans told me
We don't torture
Thank the one percent
Gay marriage is like box turtle love and
Obama's born in another country

On the fifth day of Christmas
Republicans told me
Tax cuts more revenues bring
We don't torture
Thank the one percent
Gay marriage is like box turtle love and
Obama's born in another country

On the sixth day of Christmas
Republicans told me
Half the people no taxes paying
Tax cuts more revenues bring
We don't torture
Thank the one percent
Gay marriage is like box turtle love and
Obama's born in another country

On the seventh day of Christmas
Republicans told me
Government Reagan was trimming
Half the people no taxes paying
Tax cuts more revenues bring
We don't torture
Thank the one percent
Gay marriage is like box turtle love and
Obama's born in another country

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Megyn Kelly went there on her show Wednesday, but you knew this was the goal all along, right? Republicans have wet dreams every night of a special prosecutor so they can harass Barack Obama through the last three and a half years of his presidency and make sure they don't get anything done. From Benghazi to Fast and Furious, they're practically squirming with anticipation.

For the recipe to work, they have to distort the facts in order to suggest something happened that didn't. Via Media Matters:

Fox News ignored President Obama's explicit demand for accountability in the wake of news that the Internal Revenue Service applied extra scrutiny to conservative groups. The network's omission gave it cover to accuse Obama of not taking the IRS's actions seriously and to call for a special prosecutor.

They also ignored the fact that the IG's report clearly stated that targeting was not exclusively limited to conservatives, because of course, that would be too much like the truth. Instead, they tried to pretend the president wasn't taking the scandal seriously, and went even farther into fantasyland in order to gin up their audience for only one thing.

Kelly and Stirewalt used their mischaracterization of Obama's response to call for a special prosecutor into the IRS's actions. Stirewalt told Kelly that if he were the president, he would "find a Republican of good standing" to appoint as an independent investigator. Kelly responded with the charge, "Where is the harm to this administration, if as these IRS employees state, no one outside of the IRS had anything to do with this, this was just IRS employees deciding to target conservatives. So if the White House and no one else had anything to do with it, where is the harm? Why doesn't the president just say 'absolutely'?"

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How mature of them! As we noted yesterday, on the day where Gina McCarthy's nomination for EPA head was to have been voted on in committee, Republicans decided a boycott was in order instead.

But not just any boycott. No, at least some of them decided it would be better to hang out with lobbyists at a nice lunch than do their damn jobs.

Weakening the EPA and obstructing its authority is a major priority for the polluting industries that fill many senators’ campaign war chests. At least three of the boycotting Republicans—Sens. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), and Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.)—won’t have to wait to hear the appreciation of their benefactors, since they’re raising money from the special interests impacted by EPA’s decisions on the same day as McCarthy’s vote.

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After last week's insanity with regard to the political end-run around the Affordable Care Act and subsequent withdrawal of what could have been a horrible political quandary for Democrats, Republican freshmen are making loud whining noises over the fact that they haven't yet had their chance to vote to repeal it.

Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) urged leadership to hold a repeal vote so freshman members can serve up the same anti-Obamacare talking points for their conservative constituents that more senior Republicans enjoy.

“If you’re a freshman — the guys who’ve been up here the last year, we can go home and say listen, we voted 36 different times to repeal or replace Obamacare. Tell me what the new guys are supposed to say,” he said. “We haven’t had a repeal or replace vote this year.”

“We have not had a chance as freshmen to do that,” said first-term Rep. Trey Radel (R-FL). “Even if it’s just symbolic — and even if we understand that process-wise we are not going to be able to say, okay we want repeal, it’s done, and it’s over. But this is the issue that so many people around the country who love the Republican Party are frustrated with.”

Poor babies. It breaks my heart that they're frustrated over not being able to brag about denying sick people access to health care. I know I will lose sleep over it every single night, won't you?

Of course, the reason they want the vote is because they're stupid enough to think that 2014 is going to be 2010 all over again, which it will not be. Evidently they didn't learn that in 2012, when people did not vote for full repeal of the ACA, and wholeheartedly embraced the principle that pre-existing conditions should not exclude people from getting health care.

They were able to get traction in 2010 because no one actually benefitted from the reforms passed at that time. It is three years later now, and many young people have access to health care because of the ACA, and many, many more people will be able to get health insurance and access to health care on January 1, 2014.

But hey -- let them have their vote, Speaker Boehner. I welcome such a vote, so that every nutcase Republican who voted for it can be ousted from office on 2014 by angry voters yelling at them not to touch their Obamacare.

Michigan Republicans, desperate for something -- anything -- to make themselves look good, have now resorted to bullying Democratic legislators in order to steal their legislative proposals.

Eclectablog:

But even Republicans don’t think that EVERY idea that Democrats have is a bad one. It’s just not something they want the rest of Michigan to believe. So, in order to deny Democrats any legislative victories in the current session, Republicans have begun using an approach that I haven’t heard of before: introducing legislation that is identical to a bill that was introduced by a Democrat and then supporting that legislation instead.

Oh, I see. In some circles which are not legislative, we might call that plagiarism. Then again, when you're a legislator used to having all of your legislation written by ALEC, I suppose it's not a far stretch to reach across the aisle and swipe whatever might make you look good. Their tactics are downright thuggish, as usual. After a freshman Democrat introduced legislation to give returning veterans resident status for college tuition, this happened:

It’s a great idea. With his background as a two-time Iraqi veteran with the Marine Corp, Knezek knows a little bit about the challenges that face returning vets. In fact, Knezek told me that he had a number of Republicans approach him after he introduced HJR L on February 28th to tell him they thought it was a great piece of legislation. Then, in early March, Republican State Rep. Jim Stamas (R-Midland) came to him and told him he’d have to pull HJR L.

“Why?” asked Knezek.

“Because I’m taking it,” Stamas told the dumbfounded freshman lawmaker.

And take it he did. Just a week after Knezek had introduced HJR L, Stamas introduced House Joint Resolution N (pdf). You might think that with such a blatant theft Stamas would have added his own spin to the resolution. You would be wrong. HJR L and HJR N are identical, word-for-word.

Well, then. Knezek was about as generous as he could be about it, saying he was glad to see it passed even if it wasn't his bill. I suppose that's true, but someone ought to put the bully in the corner.

When is scholarship not scholarship? When it's not carefully reviewed for every aspect, including the integrity of the underlying data used to draw conclusions.

For several years now, we've been hearing conservatives around the world insist austerity is the road back to prosperity -- because the smart guys in the think tanks say so. Now it turns out those smart guys aren't as smart as they thought.

Republicans based their austerity claims on a study known as Reinhart-Rogoff, which drew the conclusion that debt exceeding 90 percent of GDP leads to economic slowdowns. Other researchers sought to challenge the conclusions and were given access to Reinhart-Rogoff's raw data, contained in spreadsheets.

Their conclusions:

In a new paper, "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff," Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst successfully replicate the results. After trying to replicate the Reinhart-Rogoff results and failing, they reached out to Reinhart and Rogoff and they were willing to share their data spreadhseet. This allowed Herndon et al. to see how how Reinhart and Rogoff's data was constructed.

They find that three main issues stand out. First, Reinhart and Rogoff selectively exclude years of high debt and average growth. Second, they use a debatable method to weight the countries. Third, there also appears to be a coding error that excludes high-debt and average-growth countries. All three bias in favor of their result, and without them you don't get their controversial result.

The coding error might be forgivable, but not when combined with the other two factors, and especially not when the combination of the three yields a false result.

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Last fall, voters across North Carolina made their choices at the ballot box. In the next general election we will see whether they still like those they chose.

I recently read a post from state Sen. Thom Goolsby, R-New Hanover. He explains why he and Sen. Buck Newton, R-Wilson, introduced a bill taking away our choice to vote a straight ticket. Republicans like more choice in theory. Because freedom. But they insist on taking away this choice. Plus a few others.

See, straight-ticket voting indicates "voter laziness," says Goolsby. Meaning, 56 percent of North Carolina's straight-ticket voters choose the other party, and that's just wrong, as he sees it.

Or "You're doing it all wrong, son," as Foghorn Leghorn might see it. "Now a smart, I say, a smart voter...."

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Via ThinkProgress:

The real surprise came almost accidentally, when studying the content of the tweets members of the dataset sent out, with a substantial amount of it linked to the conservative movement in the United States and the Republican Party. Among the most popular hashtags used by those included in the dataset included “#tcot,” or top conservatives on Twitter; “#teaparty,” and “#gop.” The study also looked at the links these users sent out, categorized into mainstream, content-neutral, alternative, and extremist categories. More than half of the alternative links these users sent out were also to conservative websites, such as World Net Daily and Brietbart.com.

The authors of the study determined that the usage seemed to be “driven more by white nationalists feeling an affinity for conservatism than by conservatives feeling an affinity for white nationalism.” They were also quick to note that the data were pulled during a period of time surrounding the Republican National Convention, potentially providing a boost in references to the GOP. However, a comparison group — composed of left-wing anarchists — did not yield similar results linking them to progressive ideals or the Democratic Party.

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I'm guessing that Paul Ryan thinks those manly biceps are just going to dazzle the media so much that they'll just glide right over the most truthful Freudian slip to ever cross those PX90-lovin' lips:

"This is something we will not give up on because we are not going to give up on destroying the health care system for the American people."

There you go, people. When a politician tells you what he is, believe him.