Joy Reid at The Grio:

In a letter to members of Congress, which was obtained by NBC News, Heritage Action for America, the lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation (which recently found itself in hot water over the racial IQ theories of the co-author of their widely panned immigration reform study, Jason Richwine, who resigned from the think tank last Friday), urged Republicans on Capitol Hill not to govern, and instead, to focus on the would-be “scandals” plaguing the Obama administration.

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I wonder how much input the Heritage Foundation had on Reince Preibus' GOP 'autopsy', that recommended that the GOP lighten up on the anti-gay rhetoric to keep from alienating the younger voters. Former senator Jim DeMint--who stepped down from the Senate to become president of the Heritage Foundation--certainly took the advice to heart and sounded decidedly un-DeMintlike during a panel discussion of Jason Collins on This Week:

MATALIN: It's all political. I grew up with the Bears and the Black Hawks and the Bulls, the last bastion of political correctness-free fun and entertainment. Now the liberals have politically invaded the last bastion of politics-free zone. We don't care who, as a sports fan, we don't care who you make out with, we just want you to make your shot. Make your shot.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Amen to that.

(CROSSTALK)

DEMINT: I'm just grateful we live in a country where people can love who they want and live the way they want.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Move on. Okay.

\
Wait, wha-whut? Is this the same Jim DeMint that said openly gay people shouldn't be allowed to teach in schools? The same man, when called out for that, defended himself by saying he didn't think unmarried pregnant women should be allowed to teach either? The same man who said that opposing gay marriage was necessary because same sex marriage hurt limited government? The same man who warned that Obamacare was turning America into Iran?

Could Jim DeMint be getting more liberal in his retirement, or is this just yet another cynical political ploy to fool more voters?

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[H/t Heather]

While I'm not sure there is any replacement for Senator Jim DeMint that I'd consider particularly good, the one Governor Nikki Haley chose is especially bad, I'm afraid.

Representative Tim Scott has a compelling story to tell, which I'm sure contributed to Haley's decision to elevate him to replace DeMint. Via the New York Times:

Mr. Scott, who served on the Charleston County Council for 13 years and in the South Carolina House for two years before he was elected to Congress, noted that he has a different background than many of his future Senate colleagues. Raised by a single mother, he described himself as a lost child who struggled with school and life until a Chick-fil-A franchise owner embraced him as a protégé and taught him conservative principles.

Governor Haley praised Scott for his accomplishments, saying he had "earned" his appointment:

“It is very important to me, as a minority female, that Congressman Scott earned this seat,” Ms. Haley said. “He earned this seat for the person that he is. He earned this seat for the results he has shown.”

Yes, well. Here are some of those results, via ThinkProgress:

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This is interesting news, particularly riding on Dick Armey's acrimonious split from FreedomWorks. It would appear that the TeaBirchers have opted for the public relations route since the electoral one isn't working out so well for them. Via CNN:

Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina will resign from his Senate seat as of Dec. 31 to take over as head of the Heritage Foundation, his office announced Thursday.

"I honestly believe that I can do a lot more on the outside than I can on the inside," DeMint told reporters at Heritage Thursday.

I'll just bet he believes that, too. He has been nothing but a force for evil in the Senate, and swore he'd only serve two terms anyway. Cutting him off now is just an early exit to lay a foundation for The Great Tea Party Takeover of 2016. (Laugh. That's a joke.)

Esquire's Charles Pierce holds nothing back:

Nobody better personifies the casual cruelty, the reckless disregard for the general welfare, the heedless contempt for the idea of a general political commonwealth, and the deep fealty to the rising power of oligarchy in this country than does DeMint, who first rode into the Senate by arguing, among other things, that gay people should not teach in the public schools. And no institution embodies those same qualities, which fairly define modern movement conservatism, than does The Heritage Foundation, which is little more than a talking-points mill at which the primary intellectual debates seem to center on who will write this week's crapola of the op-ed page of The Washington Post, and who will be appearing with Piers Morgan that night. Heritage's claim that it is a font of serious policy ideas dies with the fact that it is now going to be run by the biggest loon in the pond. This is a match made on a plane somewhat lower than heaven.

At any rate, DeMint will head off to the Heritage family, leaving a hole for Nikki Haley to fill in the Senate. The choices look as loco as DeMint. ThinkProgress has a cast of characters that might make us all wish DeMint was back in the saddle. Rep. Joe "You Lie" Wilson is probably the most well-known, but the more likely pick is Rep. Tim Scott, who may possibly be even more insane than DeMint.

Several reports are identifying Scott as DeMint’s preferred choice to replace him, and for good reason: the freshman congressman has already proven to be nearly as extreme as DeMint himself. In 2011, he voted to extend billions of dollars in subsidies to big oil companies, arguing that taxpayer-funded money going to companies that reap billions in profits was “fair.” And during the last fight over the debt ceiling, Scott floated the possibility of introducing articles of impeachment against President Obama. While a State Senator, Scott helped to defund South Carolina’s entire HIV/AIDS programs, including the elimination of the state’s AIDs Drug Assistance Program.

Choose your favorite popcorn flavor, sit back, and watch the fun. What's in the water there in South Carolina, anyway?

Part of being a Democrat is acting like you’re losing even when you’re winning. Part of being a Republican is acting like you’re winning even when you’re losing. The phrase “silent majority,” that brilliant bit of Nixonian rhetoric, is a way to augment Republican numbers and voices. “Nearly all people agree with me and they’re not only in my imagination … you just can’t hear them.”

Senator Jim DeMint (SC-R) has an odd obsession with ill-fitting metaphors. He famously proclaimed his only reason to kill the Affordable Care Act was to annihilate the president politically. "If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him,” said the tea-touting Senator. DeMint has a pre-existing condition; he thinks an enemy’s high casualty mêlée is comparable to the inability to pass a sensible, relatively mild, reform bill. Well, at least when he’s talking about Democrats. As the kick-off speaker at this year’s CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) DeMint used a somewhat softer analogy: football. Specifically these two teams DeMint sees have different goals. “We don’t have shared goals with the Democrats…Compromise works well in this world when you have shared goals."

In football the teams are never expected to go in the same direction with the best interests of the fans in mind. Also in football, no team threatens to shut down the country as a strategy to win the game.

But maybe DeMint is correct: It’s really tough to compromise with a group that’s solitary goal is destroying you. Apparently taking the same oath to uphold the same Constitution, in the same country, drawing the same paycheck, in the same office building, in the same city and being of the same religion, sharing the same language and being mostly (85 percent) male, white and wealthy isn’t enough common ground for Republicans to even entertain working with those alien Democrats. It’s even tougher to compromise with a group who you could totally agree with but they retroactively become against their own ideas once you propose them. Like say, the individual mandate every GOP candidate was for before he was against it. (Yes, except Ron Paul, keep your emails.)

Enter the “severely conservative.” This was the description Mitt Romney bestowed upon himself at this year’s CPAC. “I was a severely conservative Republican governor,” said the oft-frontrunner. “Severe” is a word normally associated with pain or really bad weather. With today’s GOP, not only do Republicans refuse to have the same goals – they deny all similarities to their enemy. “The President is not like us.” This is severely conservative.

In the same speech Romney promised to repeal ObamaCare even though it’s nearly identical to the plan Romney signed into law in Massachusetts, dubbed RomneyCare.

Let’s put it this way: If Romney “repealed and replaced” the “job-killing ObamaCare” with RomneyCare, no one would notice. If there were a taste test and you covered the labels – no one could tell the difference. You’d have a 50/50 chance of guessing which reform you were actually enjoying.

But to be a true severe conservative demands suspending disbelief. What must you be willing to accept? The economy buckling while a Republican was in the White House never happened. Bush never bailed out the banks or the auto industry. Deficits suddenly matter. Clint Eastwood is a hippie. And if the country continues to struggle it’ll be great for the GOP.

It reminds me of King Pyrrhus’ quote which sums up the term Pyrrhic victory: "If we are victorious in one more battle, we shall be utterly ruined."

And well, these severe conservatives are acting like they’re winning.

That should tell us something.

On Thursday morning, Jim DeMint went on "Morning Joe" to pimp his new book -- Now or Never: Saving America from Slightly Higher Taxes on Rich People Economic Collapse -- and peddled a bunch of lies. All of which went completely unchallenged by the panel, of course.

It all started with Scarborough serving up a nice, fat softball to DeMint.

SCARBOROUGH: We were just saying earlier in the show one of the big problems over the past ten years has been the fact that you had a Republican president who doubled the national debt, with a Republican Congress for six years. Now you have a Democratic president who is going to double the debt again...what do we do to stop the bleeding?

DEMINT: Well, that's what the book's all about. 2012 could be our last chance to turn this thing around. The only way the Republicans in the House now can stop the bleeding is if they shut the government down.

Great plan!

And notice: there's absolutely no mention of the fact that taxes are currently at historic lows, and were cut under the previous administration before the country launched two wars, created a massive new domestic security agency -- and fell into the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

None of that has contributed to the deficit at all. Nope, it's just "spending" that's the problem. Amazing.

And it just got worse.

DEMINT: Now we've got the tension between those who want centralized power, government control of education, health care, transportation, energy -- and Republicans who I think finding their footing around their core principles of we need to devolve power out of Washington, we need to decentralize, because that's what makes America work. [...]

The Democrats are there to beat us. Every policy that they introduce is to centralize power. They are completely incapable of cutting spending because their constiuency is based on dependency on government and those who want more government.

Nice racist dogwhistle at the end there. But how many lies can DeMint cram into two paragraphs?

First, you think someone on the panel would point out to DeMint that government payrolls have dropped by 500,000 jobs under Obama. Isn't that what Teabaggers want? Smaller government?

Also, someone may have pointed out that energy companies and the health care industry are making record profits. Again, kind of an odd thing to happen under a bunch of socialists who want to nationalize everything.

Hey, Brokaw and Meacham. You call yourselves journalists? How can these two let this BS go unchallenged? Awful.

I'm still scratching my head over why Jim DeMint is even the tiniest bit concerned about women discussing -- yes, talking about -- abortion with their health professionals. But DeMint is not only concerned, he's going to do something about it, which is why he introduced a bill banning it.

Via Think Progress:

Now Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), one of the most die-hard anti-choice lawmakers, has jumped on the bandwagon by sneaking a radical anti-abortion amendment onto a completely unrelated piece of legislation. DeMint’s amendment would ban women and their doctors from discussing abortion over the Internet:

Anti-choice Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) just filed an anti-choice amendment to a bill related to agriculture, transportation, housing, and other programs. The DeMint amendment could bar discussion of abortion over the Internet and through videoconferencing, even if a woman’s health is at risk and if this kind of communication with her doctor is her best option to receive care.

Under this amendment, women would need a separate, segregated Internet just for talking about abortion care with their doctors.

Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said DeMint is essentially mandating “an abortion-only version of Skype.” She points out that a woman with high-risk pregnancy talking to her doctor through video conferencing would have to somehow switch to a separate communications system if abortion came up at all. “It is impractical, ridiculous, and, most importantly, bad for women in rural or remote areas who would not be able to discuss the full set of options with their doctor,” Keenan said.

Basically, if this stupid bill were to actually have a prayer of passing, which it doesn't, women could not use ordinary online channels to communicate with their doctor about their reproductive health. To me that raises all kinds of problems. Who owns the Internet? Who owns the pipes? If a woman communicated via her iPhone to her doctor's iPhone, how would the government have any right to know what they discussed, given that AT&T, Verizon and soon, Sprint, own that air? Moreover, how does a small government conservative reconcile this with big government insertion into women's lives?

I realize that Big Government attitudes arise around the abortion debate from social conservatives, but the construction of this particular measure exceeds even the usual lunatic levels. Is DeMint just wasting time with this bill, or does he plan to use it as some kind of leverage to do other harm to women?

I wonder if DeMint has read The Handmaid's Tale. It would explain his vision for the world he wants to live in.

"Reagan proved," Vice President Dick Cheney famously said in 2002, "deficits don't matter." Not, that is, when a Republican is sitting in the White House. After all, Republicans were silent as the national debt tripled under Ronald Reagan and doubled again under George W. Bush. As it turns out, the same hypocrisy of the GOP's born-again deficit hawks extends to the U.S. debt ceiling as well. After voting seven times to raise the debt ceiling under Bush, Republicans are now promising to just say no to Democrat Barack Obama. And for their political posturing, they risk not only a shutdown of the federal government, but a global economic crisis as well.

In early 2011, the U.S. debt ceiling will have to be bumped up from it current $14.3 trillion level. But for the first time in the nation's history, the emboldened GOP leadership is threatening to block the needed increase and so trigger a default by the government of the United States.

That was the word from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Within hours of Tuesday's midterm voting, McConnell signaled the GOP would oppose boosting the debt ceiling needed to avoid a global economic panic unless there were "strings attached." Appearing on Meet the Press Sunday, South Carolina Senator Jim Demint made clear what strings he had in mind. Asked if he'll support raising the debt ceiling, Demint responded:

"No, I won't. Not unless this debt ceiling is combined with some path to balancing our budget, returning to 2008 spending levels, repealing Obamacare. We have got to demonstrate that we have the resolve to cut spending ... we cannot allow that to go through the Congress without showing the American people that we are going to balance the budget, and we're not going to continue to raise the debt in America."

Meanwhile in the House, Eric Cantor (R-VA), who joined the ranks of Republican spending cut cowards refusing to say how they'd slash the budget, insisted the looming government shutdown and worldwide economic calamity would be all President Obama's fault:

"The chief executive, the president, is as responsible as any in terms of running this government. The president has a responsibility, as much or more so than Congress, to make sure that we are continuing to function in a way that the people want."

Of course, it wasn't always this way with Congressional Republicans. Not when they were taking orders from George W. Bush.

As OpenCongress detailed after January's party-line vote to add $1.9 trillion to the debt ceiling, Republican intransigence began in earnest when Bush left the White House for good. As Donny Shaw documented:

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Sen. Jim DeMint, the crazy leader of the Teabirchers, once again put his stamp on the insane thinking that now dominates the conservative movement. It's Anita Bryant all over again. The hate of teh Gay and single moms isn't nothing new for conservatives (remember Dan Quayle attacking Murphy Brown?) and with their increased media presence, there is no end to their transmitting of far-right fringe ideas, trying to turn them into the mainstream thought of America.

Here's what DeMint had to say:

At a 2004 debate, DeMint declared that openly gay people should not be teaching public school. "We need the folks that are teaching in schools to represent our values," he said. DeMint later added that he "would have given the same answer when asked if a single woman, who was pregnant and living with her boyfriend, should be hired to teach my third grade children."

At the time, the Senate candidate apologized: "[S]ometimes my heart disengages from my head and I say something I shouldn't - and that's what happened yesterday. I clearly said something as a dad that I just shouldn't have said. And I apologize." His campaign manager added that DeMint was raised by a single mother and was not opposed to unwed mothers teaching.

But last week, DeMint said that he had been privately encouraged by reaction to his words.

"[N]o one came to my defense," he said at at a rally. "But everyone would come to me and whisper that I shouldn't back down. They don't want government purging their rights and their freedom to religion."

Jimmy LaSalvia of the gay Republican group GOProud told CBS News that he saw DeMint's comment as a reaffirmation of his original statement -- that gays and unwed mothers should not be allowed to teach children. "I don't know anybody in 2010 who thinks that," he said.

"Sexist bigots like Sen. Jim DeMint don't belong in the United States Congress," said National Organization for Women President Terry O'Neill. "He thinks gay women and men and sexually active single women should be banned from teaching, but he said nothing about sexually active, single straight men."

"It is salt in the wound in our community," said Rea Carey, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. "It's irresponsible for Sen. DeMint to reassert this position in this day and age. I would ask him to apologize."

On Lawrence O'Donnell's new show, GOPROUD chairman Andrew Barron, who was once a big supporter of DeMint, now is abandoning him, calling DeMint's remarks morally reprehensible.

Barron:..the reason why this is it for us, and quite honestly should be for anyone in the conservative movement is because these comments are not only outrageous and bizarre, they're morally reprehensible and I think Sen. DeMint has given up the ability to lead on any of the issues that conservatives care about.

Conservatives have been trying to leave social issues in their rear view mirror so they can attack any form of government and taxes on the rich. Unfortunately for Barron, the religious right in this country are not yet willing to give up their gay bashing and their assault on a woman's right to choose. And make no mistake about it, the extreme Christian right do make up a large segment of the Teabirchers. Conservatives like Barron understand that their anti-government, free market messaging gets compromised when this type of hatred spills out into the airwaves and as much as Barron wants to delude himself that DeMint is now a fringer, he is nothing of the kind. He's a perfect example of the Teabirchers in action.

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Sigh. Remember the tea bagger fear that Sharia law was coming to the US? Remind me again, how are the religious right of this country different? Okay, maybe Jim DeMint isn't recommending stoning...but really, how much longer do you think that will take?

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) attempted to convince pastors that economic issues are moral issues at the Greater Freedom Rally at a church in Spartanburg, South Carolina yesterday, imploring them to help conservatives retake Congress in November.

In addition to reiterating anti-choice talking points on abortion and backing "traditional marriage," according to the Spartanburg Herald-Journal, the senator went further and "said if someone is openly homosexual, they shouldn't be teaching in the classroom and he holds the same position on an unmarried woman who's sleeping with her boyfriend -- she shouldn't be in the classroom."

Controversy over DeMint's position on this issue first arose in 2004 during a Senate debate, when he was asked whether he agreed with the state party's platform that said openly gay teachers should be barred from teaching public school. DeMint said he agreed with that position because government shouldn't be endorsing certain behaviors.

Interesting that DeMint feels that women should be forced to have their rapist's baby but also thinks she should not be able to teach, because she is a bad role model. Yet more proof that Senator Jackass simply does not think about the ramifications of his righteous bumper sticker mentality at all.