Monday night Rachel Maddow expanded on her Friday report about the weird ad running in opposition to Chuck Hagel's nomination. The group running the ad calls themselves "Use Your Mandate" and claims to be a group of liberals -- gay liberals, even -- who are afraid to come out into the light for fear of White House retribution.

Because this White House has been so bitterly retributive, don't you know? When I first heard about it I thought it was bull too, because liberals tend to oppose nominations loudly and without any guise of secrecy. In fact, I can't think of a time where any liberal group I've had contact with has been secretive about who they are and why they're running an ad. That seems to be the province of the US Chamber of Commerce and Koch-funded front groups..

Rachel's instinct seems to be right on the money. As she reports, "Use Your Mandate" used a media buyer in San Diego to place the ad by the name of Del Cielo Media, LLC*. Del Cielo Media is the company name for Sarah Linden, who is the west coast media director for Smart Media Group.

On Smart Media Group's resumé: Official media buyers for the McCain-Palin campaign, Republican National Committee, NRSC, and the US Chamber of Commerce, among others.

DelCielo Media's website is a splash page and a link to a map now, but as Rachel reports, one of Linden's clients is the Emergency Committee for Israel, a relatively new neocon group whose directors include Bill Kristol, Gary Bauer, and Michael Goldfarb. Michael Goldfarb is an advisor to Liz Cheney's neocon message machine, Keep America Safe, where Kristol also serves as a director.

The other firm Rachel mentions is Tusk Strategies. Michael Tusk was Michael Bloomberg's campaign director in 2009 and now has his own New York PR firm. Tusk's client list boasts of relationships with Michelle Rhee's StudentsFirst and Education Reform Now, two groups which call themselves liberal but which are not, by any stretch of the imagination, liberal.

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On Friday November 30th, Charles Krauthammer got so frustrated with Bill Kristol's appearance on the All-Star Panel of Fox News Special Report that during the last segment of the show he called Kristol a socialist.

KRISTOL: I'm continuing my class warfare theme here. The winners I think are the 19 top executives at Hostess brand who may get bonuses worth up to almost $2 million as the company goes out of business, for managing, going out of business – while the workers', of course, pension funds haven't been filled up for, a year.

And the losers, uh, the workers of America, because you know, in this budget deal everyone's talking about, the one tax that everyone agrees should go up, apparently on the Democratic and Republican sides, with a couple of outliers, is the payroll tax – Social Security payroll tax – so there's going to be a two percent, there is going to be tax increases January, unless someone steps up and says, “Wait a second, we're giving everyone else a tax break and everyone's Social Security taxes go up.”

BAIER: Winners and losers.

KRAUTHAMMER: Kristol's turning into a Socialist... He's the Secretary of the Treasury sitting right over there. Worker's champion.

Kristol has been standing by his position that conservatives should not look like the party of the 2% and fight for millionaires and instead acquiesce over raising tax rates, but the nail in the coffin came when Kristol then defended workers yet again.

What chapped Dr. Strangehammer was that he attacked the Twinkified executives of Hostess for getting a $2 million bonus for destroying the company, and then called the workers the real losers because ownership pillaged their pension benefits along the way. Good on you, BIll. Even if it is but a fleeting moment, I'm enjoying Conservatives carving each other up. (h/t Heather for coming up with a great video clip for me)

Drudge still rules their world.

So the news for Romney of late has not been so good. At minimum, he's been exposed as a liar and the Republican Party has been exposed as incompetent vetters; at worst, he's committed a felony and may be subjected to a SEC investigation.

So what's the Etch-a-sketch candidate to do to distract the media with a shiny object?

Leak a non-story to Drudge, of course. And a more pathetic attempt you will never see.

Late Thursday evening, Mitt Romney's presidential campaign launched a new fundraising drive, 'Meet The VP' -- just as Romney himself has narrowed the field of candidates to a handful, sources reveal.

And a surprise name is now near the top of the list: Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice!

The timing of the announcement is now set for 'coming weeks'.

The timing was actually announced as "some time between now and the Republican convention", which is when, typically, VP choices are announced. So it's breaking news that a Veep choice will be made in the next six weeks? Seriously?

As to the hinted selection of former Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, well, that's all Bill Kristol, doncha know, who is the brain trust behind the selection of Sarah Palin as well. And as we have documented very well over the years, Kristol is *always* wrong. (As an aside to Drudge, blogger to blogger: if you think this is important and good news to push, why do you use a picture of Rice that looks grim and almost like a mug-shot? Old habits die hard?) But it's not helping the Romney campaign push this meme when the subject herself rejects it totally. And that doesn't begin to take into account the larger party's reaction:

This has all the makings of a classic, time-worn political ploy. The candidate openly flirts with several supposed veep contenders, each of whom fits a demographic that the candidate needs to woo. Midwesterners? Hispanics? Southerners? And now, in a week when Romney’s in trouble with the NAACP, the Condi rumors resurface.

It’s too cute by half, though.

Floating Condi has now roused the pro-life wing to action. Instead of Romney getting plusses for considering a black woman, the story could soon turn to how conservatives are beating up on a black woman. That’s not the best way to do damage control after being booed at the NAACP convention.

Rice is too smart to play this political game. A loyal Republican, she has said that she will help the GOP ticket with fundraising. But she says that’s as far as she goes.

After all, Rice is a cool, calm woman who has tackled conniving, evil international dictators. She chooses her words carefully. In 2008, she knew her remarks would never pass GOP muster during a vice presidential vetting process. In that way, she has solidly guaranteed that she will never be asked to be on a Republican ticket – not as long as abortion is a central issue.

That's right! Condoleezza Rice is pro-choice. Yeah, that's not going to play well with the extremists that now control the Republican Party. In fact, Tea Party Nation could hardly contain their disgust:

Is the Romney plan to try and lose?

The social conservatives will not come out for her, like they did for Palin, because Rice is pro-abortion. Social conservatives don’t really believe Romney when he claims he is pro-life, but to add a pro-abortion VP would really sink him with the social conservatives.

Rice is a consigliore of the Bush family. She worked for both of the Bushes. She is associated very closely with the Iraq war, which in case anyone has forgotten is one of the main reasons why the Republicans lost the House and Senate in 2006.

We do not need anyone else named Bush leading the Republican Party and we don’t need one of the Bush team players as a part of the future of the GOP.

Condi Rice is a RINO establishment Republican. She is as clueless about the middle class as Romney is.

Wow. Let's just chalk this up to yet another inept and transparently pandering move by the Romney campaign.

With the backing of the the overwhelming consensus of legal scholars regarding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, the United States Supreme Court on Thursday largely upheld President Obama's signature health care reform law. And with that stroke of a pen, Justice Roberts and the Court’s majority prevented the culmination of a decades-long conservative campaign to stop universal coverage at all costs.

For GOP leaders like Mitch McConnell the battle to "kill it and start over" wasn't merely about ensuring that "the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." For twenty years, Republicans have feared not that health care reform would fail the American people, but that it would succeed. To put it another way, the GOP was never really concerned about a "government takeover of health care", "rationing", "the doctor-patient relationship" or mythical "death panels," but that an American public grateful for access to health care could provide Democrats with an enduring majority for years to come.

But what Utah Senator Orrin Hatch called a "holy war" to block health care reform didn't start when Barack Obama took the oath of office in January 2009, but instead when Bill Clinton was inaugurated in 1993. It was then that former Quayle chief of staff and Republican strategist William Kristol warned his GOP allies that a Clinton victory on health care could guarantee Democratic majorities for the foreseeable future. "The Clinton proposal is also a serious political threat to the Republican Party," Kristol wrote in his infamous December 3, 1993 memo titled "Defeating President Clinton's Health Care Proposal," adding:

"Its passage in the short run will do nothing to hurt (and everything to help) Democratic electoral prospects in 1996. But the long-term political effects of a successful Clinton health care bill will be even worse--much worse. It will relegitimize middle-class dependence for 'security' on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government."

And that, for Kristol, meant it had to be stopped at all costs:

"The first step in that process must be the unqualified political defeat of the Clinton health care proposal. Its rejection by Congress and the public would be a monumental setback for the president; and an incontestable piece of evidence that Democratic welfare-state liberalism remains firmly in retreat."

As the American Prospect recalled, Kristol's war plan:

Darkly warned that a Democratic victory would save Clinton's political career, revive the politics of the welfare state, and ensure Democratic majorities far into the future. "Any Republican urge to negotiate a 'least bad' compromise with the Democrats, and thereby gain momentary public credit for helping the president 'do something' about health care, should be resisted," wrote Kristol. Republican pollster Bill McInturff advised Congressional Republicans that success in the 1994 midterm elections required "not having health care pass."

So, Republicans and their media water carriers followed Kristol's advice to the letter. In the Senate, long-time health care reform supporter Bob Dole adopted Kristol's mantra, declaring "Our country has health care problems, but no health care crisis." Long before she introduced the easily debunked "death panels" fraud, Betsy McCaughey almost single-handedly undid the Clinton health care reform effort with the false claim that "the law will prevent you from going outside the system to buy basic health coverage you think is better." In 1993, GOP Senators Hatch and Chuck Grassley, among those who would 16 years later call the ACA's individual mandate unconstitutional, joined 19 other Republican Senators in proposing their own bill that "would have required everyone to buy coverage, capped awards for medical malpractice lawsuits, established minimum benefit packages and invested in comparative effectiveness research." (As Hatch later justified his turnabout, "We were fighting Hillarycare at that time.")

The rest, as they say, was history. At least, that is, until history began repeating itself with the election of Barack Obama.

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It's rare that a criminal publicly announces his intent to commit a felony. But when it came to their scorched-earth campaign of obstructionism to destroy the Obama presidency, GOP leaders weren't shy about their plans. While 15 top Republicans schemed in private on the night of Obama's inauguration to "challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign," conservative mouthpieces like Bill Kristol and Rush Limbaugh promised gridlock at every turn.

Three years later, as Congressional scholars Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann suggest in their new book, the Republicans' foul deed is done. From its record-setting use of the filibuster and its united front against Obama's legislative agenda to blocking judicial nominees and its unprecedented (and repeated) threats to trigger a U.S. default, the most conservative Congress in over 100 years has stopped Washington dead in its tracks. But judging from the muted reaction from the press and a public evenly split in its Congressional preference, Republicans are getting away with their crime.

You don't need to work for CSI to identify the guilty party in the death of Washington.

Even before Barack Obama took the oath office, Republicans leaders, conservative think-tanks and right-wing pundits were calling for total obstruction of the new president's agenda. Bill Kristol, who helped block Bill Clinton's health care reform attempt in 1993, called for history to repeat on the Obama stimulus - and everything else. Pointing with pride to the Clinton economic program which received exactly zero GOP votes in either House, Kristol in January 2009 advised:

"That it made, that it made it so much easier to then defeat his health care initiative. So, it's very important for Republicans who think they're going to have to fight later on health care, fight later on maybe on some of the bank bailout legislation, fight later on on all kinds of issues."

And so, as the chart below reveals, it came to pass.

Time after time, President Obama could count the votes he received from Congressional Republicans on the fingers (usually the middle one) of one hand. The expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) to four million more American kids earned the backing of a whopping eight GOP Senators. (One of them, Arlen Specter, later became a Democrat.) Badly needed Wall Street reform eventually overcame GOP filibusters to pass with the support of just three Republicans in the House and Senate, respectively. Last summer, it took 50 days for President Obama to get past Republican filibusters of extended unemployment benefits and the Small Business Jobs Act. As for the DISCLOSE Act, legislation designed to limit the torrent of secret campaign cash unleashed by the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, in September Republican Senators prevented it from ever coming to a vote.

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For two decades, Republican opponents of health care reform have turned to a tried if untrue talking point. In 1994, GOP strategist Bill Kristol warned that "the Clinton Plan is damaging to the quality of American medicine and to the relationship between the patient and the doctor." Twelve years later, President George W. Bush proclaimed, "Ours is a party that understands the best health care system is when the doctor-patient relationship is central to decision-making." Then in 2009, GOP spinmeister Frank Luntz told Republican obstructionists in Congress to "call for the 'protection of the personalized doctor-patient relationship.'"

Now with their ever-more aggressive nationwide crusade against Americans' reproductive rights, Republicans are determined to undermine the very doctor-patient relationship they pretend to cherish. Across the country, GOP anti-choice leaders are requiring procedures women don't need and their physicians don't want. And now in states like Arizona and Kansas, Republicans seeking to prevent abortion services are demanding doctors lie about them.

This week, the Arizona Senate voted 29 to 9 for a "wrongful birth bill" that would shield physicians from malpractice claims if they withhold vital information from their patients. As the AP explained:

Those are lawsuits that can arise if physicians don't inform pregnant women of prenatal problems that could lead to the decision to have an abortion.

But if Arizona Republicans want their state to join 9 others in encouraging that sin of omission, in Kansas anti-choice GOP legislators want doctors to participate in a sin of commission.

There, Governor Sam Brownback and his GOP allies don't merely want to raise taxes on women seeking abortions, even in cases involving sexual assault or a life-threatening pregnancy. Now, Republican legislators want state law to require that physicians mislead their patients about the non-existent link between abortion and breast cancer:

Kansas state lawmakers heard testimony this week saying there is a link between abortion and breast cancer. The testimony in front of the committee on Federal and state affairs came from Dr. Angela Lanfranchi, an oncologist specializing in breast cancer. The committee did not hear any other testimony before drafting H.B. 2598.

That link has been firmly rejected by organizations including the American Cancer Association and the National Cancer Institute, which concluded that "abortion is not associated with an increase in breast cancer." (Nonetheless, the Bush administration repeatedly claimed otherwise on federal government web sites aimed at teenagers and pregnant women. As a 2006 Congressional investigation found, 20 of 23 federally-funded "pregnancy resource centers"—facilities often affiliated with antiabortion religious groups—incorrectly told women "that abortion results in an increased risk of breast cancer, infertility and deep psychological trauma.")

But Republican governors and state legislatures aren't just requiring doctors to lie to their patients about real birth defects, bogus cancer risks and unproven claims about "fetal pain." (In Idaho, Jennie Linn McCormack was briefly charged with having an illegal abortion under that state's fetal pain law barring the procedure after 20 weeks.) Now, Texas, Virginia, Alabama, and other states are demanding that women seeking abortions undergo and pay for medically unnecessary ultra-sound tests their physicians oppose.

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I hate to break this to Bill Kristol, but there are Democratic caucuses in Iowa tonight, and Democrats will be there for them. While he may think it's "cheesy" for the Democratic candidate for President to speak to his supporters, his nasty little diatribe speaks more to his own fears that there's not one single candidate running for the GOP nomination that's electable.

You know what's cheesy? Fox News telling viewers there's no caucuses for Democrats tonight. Not that many Democrats would necessarily be watching Fox News, even in Iowa, but still. That's cheesy. Offensive. And extremely political, all adjectives used to describe President Obama in this small segment.

Shameless. But we knew that.

Liberals, as the tired conservative slander goes, hate America. This, of course, is nonsense. Liberals simply want to deliver on the national promise of a more perfect union, to shorten the distance, as Bruce Springsteen aptly put it, "between American ideals and American reality."

But if the past three Republican presidential debates are any indicator, it would appear that conservatives hate Americans. Or more precisely, some Americans. As audiences of the faithful booed an active duty U.S. soldier because he is gay and cheered the deaths of executed prisoners and the uninsured alike, the GOP White House hopefuls on stage remained silent. All because, it seems, they had to. Sadly, that complicity is apparently now a requirement to lead a Republican Party in which demonizing gays, minorities, immigrants and Muslims - that is, hating Americans - is increasingly a centerpiece of its politics.

For his part, Weekly Standard editor and conservative strategist Bill Kristol summed up Thursday night's GOP debate debacle in a single word - "Yikes":

Reading the reactions of thoughtful commentators after the stage emptied, talking with conservative policy types and GOP political operatives later last evening and this morning, we know we're not alone. Most won't express publicly just how horrified--or at least how demoralized--they are...

The e-mails flooding into our inbox during the evening were less guarded. Early on, we received this missive from a bright young conservative: "I'm watching my first GOP debate...and WE SOUND LIKE CRAZY PEOPLE!!!!" As the evening went on, the craziness receded, and the demoralized comments we received stressed the mediocrity of the field rather than its wackiness.

But Kristol's discomfort was with his party's messengers, not its message. And for years, that message has been unchanged. On this Republican Animal Farm, some Americans are more equal than others.

That was clear during the 2008 election. Before Rep. Robin Hayes (R-NC) said - and then denied saying - "liberals hate real Americans," the sound bite was firmly established as a GOP talking point. A few days before, McCain spokeswoman Nancy Pfotenhauer explained that northern Virginia was not the "real Virginia." GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin amplified on the point during an event in North Carolina:

"We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation."

To be sure, the Republicans' real Americans aren't Muslims. Long before Mitt Romney and Herman Cain first announced they would not appoint Muslim Americans to their cabinet, Republican leaders and their amen corner were calling for their profiling, internment and worse.

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(h/t Dave at VideoCafe)

Decade after decade, year after year, month after month, week after week, day after day, hour after hour we hear Republicans channelling Grover Norquist and claiming that taxes are too high, we must lower taxes for corporations and raising taxes is always forbidden. George Bush didn't raise any taxes to finance his two wars and instead borrowed money from China to pay for them with not a whisper of complaint from deficit hawks while even going as far as keeping Iraq and Afghanistan out of his budgets and onto unprecedented emergency supplementals. The major talking point of the GOP is that we can't raise taxes in a depression and we also have to cut spending. Some ConservaDems have adopted these ideas as well unfortunately. And even when taxes are as low as they have been under Obama's administration, the media doesn't report on it in any way that gets through to the American people.

On FOX News Sunday, Bill Kristol broke the line from his GOP buddies and admitted that corporations have plenty of money and corporate tax rates aren't hurting anyone.

Kristol: Republicans are making a mistake if they focus on big businesses and corporate tax rates. Corporations have a ton of cash. The corporate tax rate is not killing big business in America.

Wow, Kristol actually states the obvious which has been nearly impossible for Republicans to do because it breaks with the narrative that they have created ever since Obama took office even after Conservative policies trashed the global financial economy.

Think Progress:

Kristol is not right about much, but he is on the money here. Corporations are sitting on trillions in cash reserves and corporate profits have rebounded to record highs. In fact, “the Fortune 500 generated nearly $10.8 trillion in total revenues last year, up 10.5%. Total profits soared 81%.”

But none of that has translated into sustainable job growth. The only economic indicator that has been going up is CEO pay.

Republicans are not only looking to cut the corporate tax rate, but they have been pushing to open a permanent tax loophole by switching to what’s known as a “territorial” corporate tax system, which would mean that corporations could permanently park money offshore and never pay taxes on it. The Republicans have also endorsed a misguided push to give corporations a tax windfall worth tens of billions of dollars through a tax repatriation holiday.

Parking money to offshore accounts is something you see mafia-type gangs do to hide money from the government. Republicans have adopted the Vito Corleone Tax policy. Both parties have been talking up lowering the corporate tax rates so Digby asks the right question, why?

Lowering corporate tax rates seems to be a given. The best we can hope for is that the two parties agree to close some loopholes and end some subsidies (at least until the lobbyists can get them re-instituted.)
If Bill Kristol is suddenly antagonistic to this perfect bipartisan agreement I have to wonder why.

Kristol is focusing on "regulatory matters' which always has been a big problem.

Kristol: Small business creates most of the jobs, that's a regulatory matter, that's a individual tax rate matter I think

Kristol doesn't define what constitutes a small business. With less regulations we'll see more collapses throughout the system like we did with the mortgage scandal. Next time it'll be the air we breath or the food we eat. But even if it's not revealed why he said what he said, he helped kill a Republican tax myth. I can see this quote being used in ads as we move forward into election season against the GOP.

One of the many depressing aspects of Obama's horrific decision to start a third simultaneous war with a Muslim-majority nation is that it's providing endless pangs of pleasure to Bill Kristol. After all, America's Chickenhawk-in-Chief hasn't been able to watch other people risk their asses invading a sovereign country since 2003 and he's just as thrilled and excited about this latest adventure as you'd expect him to be:

And so, despite his doubts and dithering, President Obama is taking us to war in another Muslim country. Good for him.

No, seriously. That's how Kristol actually starts out his column. Read it again:

And so, despite his doubts and dithering, President Obama is taking us to war in another Muslim country. Good for him.

It's hard for most of us to comprehend the sort of vile vampiric scumbag who relishes the thought of having his country go to war in three different countries at the same time, but that's pretty much how Bill Kristol rolls. I wonder what would happen if America successfully invaded the entire world -- whatever would Kristol do to pleasure himself? Perhaps he'd recommend sending our entire army into the depths of the Pacific Ocean to launch a long-overdue war against the lost city of Atlantis. Those shifty Mermen have had it coming for a long time, after all.

More:

The president didn’t want this. He’s been so unhappy about such a possibility—so fearful of such an eventuality—that first he tied himself in knots trying to do nothing. Then he decided that, if he had to act, it would be good to boast that he was merely following the Arab League and subordinating American action to the U.N. Security Council. After all, nothing—nothing!—could be worse than the perception that the United States was “invading” another Muslim country.

Yeah, where the hell did we get this stigma about "invading" Muslim countries from? It's not like anyone's ever died from such "invasions" before. Why, you'd think it was as bad as trying to give people health insurance!

In all seriousness, Kristol is just happy to be starting another war, since apparently the Afghanistan conflict has gotten so BOE-RING! The one downer for him is that Obama bothered to get the UN's permission to attack Libya rather than going all in and giving other countries the finger like Bush did. Kristol is at his absolute happiest when our country is both at war and defying the will of the international community. But he'll happily take the war all the same.

Rubbish. Our “invasions” have in fact been liberations.

They have liberated many people from their lives, yes.

We have shed blood and expended treasure in Kuwait in 1991, in the Balkans later in the 1990s, and in Afghanistan and Iraq—in our own national interest, of course, but also to protect Muslim peoples and help them free themselves. Libya will be America’s fifth war of Muslim liberation.

It's amazing that after five glorious wars, the Middle East isn't yet a mecca of sunshine, lollipops, rainbows and everything that's wonderful that I feel when we're together. But of course, there's always the option of starting a sixth war, which I'm sure will make everything better.

[T]he Reagan tradition—indeed, the Reagan-Bush-Dole-Bush-McCain tradition—in foreign policy isn’t a burden to be borne. It’s a tradition to be proud of. It’s rare that a political party gets to stand for more than a partial interest, for more than a limited point of view. It’s rare that a political party gets to stand for the national interest, for national greatness, for the exceptional American role in the liberation of peoples around the globe.

I'm amazed that Kristol can't type this crap without God coming down from the heavens, striking Kristol down with all manner of lightning and saying, "I didst err when I made thee, vile spawn of darkness!" In case Bill hasn't noticed, we're facing massive cuts to public education, to social safety net programs and even to services as basic as public street lights. And yet Kristol thinks we should sacrifice all of these things on his bloody altar of permanent warfare.

Thanks for aiding his agenda, Obama!