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Karl Rove has always been a con artist. This year, it seems to have finally caught up to him.

We all saw it on election night, when Rove tried to pull a Florida in Ohio on the air on Fox News. As we also noted, you could see the sweat on Rove's brow and upper lip -- in part, doubtlessly, because his predictions of an easy win for Romney were beginning to reveal his actual incompetence.

Now the performance is raising all kinds of ethical and other questions about Rove's role and his behavior. Imagine our surprise.

But even more noteworthy is that the billions of dollars spent by his plutocratic "job creator" donors on the election was washed down the drain in the night's results:

A study Wednesday by the Sunlight Foundation, which tracks political spending, concluded that Rove's super PAC, American Crossroads, had a success rate of just 1 percent on $103 million in attack ads -- one of the lowest "returns on investment" (ROIs) of any outside spending group in this year's elections.

American Crossroads spent heavily, not just on Romney, but on attack ads on behalf of GOP Senate candidates in eight states -- thanks to mega contributions from conservative donors like metals magnate Harold Simmons ($19.5 million), Texas homebuilder Bob Perry ($7.5 million) and Omni hotel chief Robert Rowling ($5 million.)

The super donors didn't get much for their money. Six of the eight GOP Senate candidates that American Crossroads spent money to try to elect – Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin, George Allen in Virginia, Josh Mandel in Ohio, Richard Mourdock in Indiana, Denny Rehberg in Montana and Todd Akin in Missouri – lost their races, along with Romney. The group did, on the other hand, help to elect Deb Fischer in Nebraska and Dean Heller in Nevada.

(The Sunlight Foundation calculation of "return on investment" was based on the percentage of money it spent on individual races-- and since Crossroads spent the most on the races it lost on, the group earned its low 1 percent "return on investment" or ROI. A sister group, Crossroads GPS, which operates out of the same offices as American Crossroads but does not disclose its donors, fared little better, netting a return on investment of only 13 percent, according to the Sunlight Foundation report.)

In some ways, it makes you wish this level of incompetence would stick around for a few more years and waste billions more dollars on going-nowhere-fast right-wing campaigns. Which, no doubt, it will.

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It was pretty hard this weekend to find anything but warm, gushing encomiums to Ronald Reagan on his 100th birthday anywhere on the teevee -- particularly at Fox, where the fawning coverage doubled as an opportunity to bash President Obama. The one exception was this brief report from ABC News' Jake Tapper.

While far from complete, it at least covers some of the more significant differences between the real president that Ronald Reagan was and the fake myths about him that have become enmeshed in right-wing conventional wisdom since -- and thus embedded as truth for mainstream media.

But really, this only points to the larger truth about this whole weekend's worth of praise for Reagan, which included a special halftime program at the Super Bowl, fergawdsake. As Charles Pierce adroitly observes:

By way of historical comparison, the centennial of Franklin D. Roosevelt's birth took place in 1982. The halftime entertainment at that year's Super Bowl -- the telecast not yet having been blown up to 96.5 hours -- consisted of Up With People singing a medley of Motown hits. Somewhere between those two events is something that says a great deal about this nation, not much of it encouraging. Maybe the NFLPA should change its acronym to PATCO and eliminate all confusion.

Much as Reagan himself was during his presidency, his image is now functionally just a stand-in for conservative-movement ideology. Whatever conservatives need him to be now, that's what the Reagan Myth stands for -- even though, as Jon Perr points out, today's Tea Partiers would call Reagan a RINO.

And that's why, as Will Bunch explores at length in his great book, Tear Down This Myth, there has evolved in fact a cottage industry around the mythologization of Ronald Reagan -- naming airports and boulevards and buildings after him, constantly burnishing his achievements, constantly celebrating various Reagan anniversaries, including slightly odd ones like his 100th birthday. This industry exists not to much to celebrate Reagan the actual president, but to embed conservative mythology in the nation's political landscape -- even after its disastrous consequences are made manifest:

There has always been a place for mythology in American democracy – the hulking granite edifices of the Capitol Mall in Washington are a powerful testament to that – but this nation has arguably never seen the kind of bold, crudely calculated and ideologically driven legend-manufacturing as has taken place with Ronald Reagan. It is a myth machine that has been spectacularly successful, launched in the mid-1990s when the conservative brand was at low ebb.The docudrama version of the Gipper’s life story, successfully sold to the American public, helped to keep united and refuel a right-wing movement that consolidated power while citing Reaganism – as separate and apart from the flesh-and-blood Reagan – for misguided policies from lowering taxes in the time of war in Iraq to maintaining that unpopular conflict in a time of increasing bloodshed and questionable gains.

As Bunch recently observed, in recalling the way the so-called liberal media attended to Reagan's funeral on bended knee:

The death of Reagan some six-and-a-half years ago, and the remarkable tenor – not to mention the depth -- of the news coverage, especially on cable TV news channels, marked something of a turning point. It showed the extent to which a vast content-hungry media world – much more extensive than when Reagan was president in the 1980s, when their main concern was the half-hour evening network newscast -- was eager to swallow the manufactured myths about Ronald Reagan, and thus honor what the unnamed TV executive told Hoagland, that “today history is what we say it is.” Any chance for an honest portrayal of Reagan and his presidency – the dangerous overreach of the Iran-contra scandal, the growing embrace of deficit spending (both in Washington and for credit-card-laden consumers), or even the positive idea that his greatest contribution to history was a heartfelt desire to rid the world of nuclear weapons (an idea out of step with modern conservative thinking) – has been tossed down the memory hole for the last decade.

What the American people have been news-fed instead has been an ideology loosely based on Reagan, called Reaganism – a notion that has led to the Tea Party’s hatred of anything involving government and the bogus ideas that taxes can only be cut or that diplomacy with America’s rivals is for wimps. With each passing election, more and more of the electorate is too young to have remembered or experienced the real Ronald Reagan, yet are searching for an idealized president based on these right-wing perpetrated fallacies. Many of the worst aspects of the George W. Bush presidency – more tax cuts for the rich, soaring deficits, and “axis of evil” bluster – were rooted in this legend of a man who wasn’t there.

My own recollection of Reagan was that he destroyed the Republican Party for moderate Republicans such as I was at the time, especially by empowering the Religious Right. It drove people like me out of the GOP, and we've never looked back.

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As someone born during LBJ's burgeoning "Great Society" who came of age during Reagan's style-over-substance "Morning in America" conservative rebirth, it's a little hard to take all of the deification of Ronald Reagan and the willful ignoring of the darker aspects of his legacy. LBJ's legacy--for which we heard nary a peep on the centennial of his birth--was of true democratization of the United States: of eliminating economic and racial disparities, of fostering arts and culture, of being stewards of the environment. Reagan, on the other hand, offered up a rosy optimism that ignored his disdain for legislation of social justice. The reality of Reagan rarely lived up to his glossy coverage, as historian Richard Norton Smith writes:

Before he became an icon, Ronald Reagan was a paradox: a complex man who appeared simple, at once a genial fundamentalist and a conservative innovator. As America's oldest President, he found his most fervent supporters among the young. The only divorced man to occupy the Oval Office, Reagan as President rarely attended church. He enjoyed a relationship with his own children best described as intermittent. Yet his name was synonymous with traditional values, and he inspired millions of the faithful to become politically active for the first time. During eight years in the White House, Reagan never submitted a balanced budget or ceased to blame Congress for excessive spending. He presided over the highest unemployment rate since World War II and one of the longest peacetime booms ever.

Smith, a former director of the Reagan Presidential Library (and four others) also wrote of Reagan in Time Magazine this week:

If the Age of Reagan is anywhere consigned to the history books, it is among those who claim his mantle while practicing little of their hero's sunny optimism and even less of his inclusiveness. Reagan, after all, excelled at the politics of multiplication. Too many of his professed admirers on talk radio and cable gabfests appear to prefer division.

It's interesting but not surprising that this meme comes from a white man on the (presumably) higher end of the socio-economic scale. Because speaking as a woman, I certainly didn't find Reagan inclusive. In fact, Reagan's use of coded bigotry lent itself directly to the open ignorance of today's tea partiers.

Reagan was more skillful than most when it came to spoken language, and he was no dummy. He knew about code language and how to use it to his advantage.

He could, for example, use an incendiary phrase like "states' rights" in a place like Philadelphia, Miss., where racial hatred and violence made a mockery of the "city of brotherly love" meaning of the name that is found in its native Greek — and get away with it.

Reagan's assertion was still a source of controversy more than a quarter of a century after he made it.

He spoke of the urgency of spending money on defense but rarely, if ever, spoke of spending money on things that improve and enrich lives. In the interest of saving a few dollars, he could play games with school nutrition, suggesting that ketchup was a vegetable. He could ignore the growing AIDS crisis until a friend like Rock Hudson was afflicted with it and died, then he grudgingly approved limited funding for research.

Reagan's invocation of the mythical "Welfare Queen", the use of the terms "reverse discrimination," "welfare reform," and "quotas" were all arguably code words meant to make uneasy white voters feel that the strides in civil rights made during the LBJ years were the result of their own privilege being taken away from them by undeserving minorities. Not exactly an inclusive concept.

And Smith puts it in perfect highlight:

You could make the case that the last forty years of American political history is in many ways a response to LBJ and “The Great Society”. When you think of what Johnson—what we take for granted – HeadStart, Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act, the National Endowment for the Arts, PBS, clean water and air legislation, all sorts of environmental legislation, and on and on and on… More legislation than FDR passed. And most of it is still on the books. And it’s a very interesting thing, one of the really fascinating tests lies ahead: is to what degree modern-day conservatives want to undo elements of The Great Society? Because so far, I haven’t heard a lot of people calling for the repeal of HeadStart, for example.

I suspect that Smith isn't listening very hard. Eliminating federal funding for education (and by extension, HeadStart) has been a rallying cry at the tea parties.

But that's the point, isn't it? Conservatives DO want to rid us of The Great Society. For them, things are only great when others don't have as much as they do.

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As Susie reported earlier, it seems right-wingers have brains with overdeveloped fear centers.

And what are they REALLY scared of? Why, Teh Gay, of course:

Two of the nation's premier moral issues organizations, the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America, are refusing to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference in February because a homosexual activist group, GOProud, has been invited.

"We've been very involved in CPAC for over a decade and have managed a couple of popular sessions. However, we will no longer be involved with CPAC because of the organization's financial mismanagement and movement away from conservative principles," said Tom McClusky, senior vice president for FRC Action.

"CWA has decided not to participate in part because of GOProud," CWA President Penny Nance told WND.

FRC and CWA join the American Principles Project, American Values, Capital Research Center, the Center for Military Readiness, Liberty Counsel, and the National Organization for Marriage in withdrawing from CPAC. In November, APP organized a boycott of CPAC over the participation of GOProud.

As Steve Benen observes, they must be scared of getting cooties or something. Mustang Bobby at Shakesville has more.

You'll also note that many of the groups listed as stepping out from CPAC are groups newly listed as hate groups by the SPLC. They may be bitching and moaning about that, but then they keep proving its accuracy on a daily basis.

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Just when you thought Glenn Beck couldn't make himself into more of a complete cartoon figure, he goes and tops himself.

This is one for the ages. Dana Carvey couldn't have done a better Church Lady impression.

No wonder so many conservatives are penning pieces about how embarrassing it is to be a conservative these days.

This guy is the Face of the Conservative Movement in 2010. Watch 'im and weep, kiddies.

I write about the need for journalists and bloggers and even average working class families to read books about the history of our country. Doing research for our new book, Over the Cliff, I was reminded of how long the conservative movement took to finally hatch their plans to treat the working class of America as one big cash register so Big Business could reap whirlwind profits, leaving most families to scurry along, begging for scraps.

That was what Barry Goldwater and his ideologues began after McCarthy and his reign of terror. Then Grover Norquist and his ilk built upon that foundation of oligarchy their ruinous ideology. I'm hearing naive stuff like progressives shouldn't vote in the 2010 or even in the 2012 elections floating around so we can teach those bad Democrats a really, really important lesson. Who cares if Michele Bachmann and Darryl Issa get subpoena power and Mitt Romney destroys whatever is left of the country? Do you?

Here's the crazy WND's fearless leader and conman Joseph Farrah calling his troops to arms.

Heck, by 2016, those same Democrats will realize that we mean business. Some of the comments I read seem like they are coming from people who were playing with their toy Tonka trucks in a sandbox during the 2000 election. Do we have to remind people of what happened when a third party was involved in the 2000 election, yet again? And what lesson would the Democrats take from being out of power until 2016? I know you know it.

And if we look at a little recent history on our economy then we'll all agree with Paul Krugman when he says:

Now, the guys who got it all wrong are winning the political argument, in large part because the Obama administration went for half-measures, and is now being punished for a weak economy — which people like me predicted would happen.

But never forget that as far as the facts go, the Keynesians won this, hands down.

What do you know? Krugman and his graphs tell the story. Facts are very important, but not in the Conservative universe. It took them over fifty years for them to control the media and to develop a totally insane version of America where the rich get richer and the poor go to hell.

David and I cover the long journey the Conservative movement has taken in Over the Cliff. Please support the liberal blogosphere and grab yourself a great summer read too!

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Conservative pundit Terry Savage went on MSNBC to try and justify her idiotic column called There is no 'free' in which she accosted a few young girls because they dared to show compassion and give away lemonade instead of selling it for profit on a fourth of July day. Tamrin Hall of MSNBC gives her a soft ball platform to perform on. Even with the hands off treatment, Terry comes off like so many conservative pundits do. She makes about as much sense as Rand Paul. You just scratch your head and say, huh? Did I actually see and hear what I just saw?

Hall: So many people people are talking about this...OK, you drove up on these kids with your brother, you get out and the lemonade is free. What's the big deal that it was free?

Savage: I love the furor this is causing as if there was some incompatibility between being an entrepreneur and being generous. These little girls just never had a lesson on what a lemonade stand is supposed to be...

Savage has no idea who these kids are, what these children have been learning from their families and what motivated them in their being so generous in the first place. I guess it's a crime that they wanted to be engage in the act of caring and giving and not selfishness on a national holiday and for Terry, it was up to her to set them all straight about how things are done. I mean, what a conceited and arrogant conservative fool. What Terry is actually doing is trying to indoctrinate these kids into being conservatives, who bow down to the almighty free market GOD, so they can become as heartless as she is.

I'm glad my post about Terry's column caused such an outrage. Here's what the conservative buffoon wrote in her column:

The three young girls -- under the watchful eye of a nanny, sitting on the grass with them -- explained that they had regular lemonade, raspberry lemonade, and small chocolate candy bars. Then my brother asked how much each item cost.

"Oh, no," they replied in unison, "they're all free!" I sat in the back seat in shock. Free? My brother questioned them again: "But you have to charge something? What should I pay for a lemonade? I'm really thirsty!"

His fiancee smiled and commented, "Isn't that cute. They have the spirit of giving." That really set me off, as my regular readers can imagine. "No!" I exclaimed from the back seat. "That's not the spirit of giving. You can only really give when you give something you own. They're giving away their parents' things -- the lemonade, cups, candy. It's not theirs to give."

I pushed the button to roll down the window and stuck my head out to set them straight.

"You must charge something for the lemonade," I explained. "That's the whole point of a lemonade stand. You figure out your costs -- how much the lemonade costs, and the cups -- and then you charge a little more than what it costs you, so you can make money. Then you can buy more stuff, and make more lemonade, and sell it and make more money." I was confident I had explained it clearly. Until my brother, breaking the tension, ordered a raspberry lemonade. As they handed it to him, he again asked: "So how much is it?"

And the girls once again replied: "It's free!" And the nanny looked on contentedly. No wonder America is getting it all wrong when it comes to government, and taxes, and policy. We all act as if the "lemonade" or benefits we're "giving away" is free.

Her behavior to these young girls was truly outrageous.
(h/t Heather)

Rick Santelli, the CNBC talking head who helped launch the Tea Party/John Bircher/Angry Conservative movement, was at it again on CNBC on Monday. We credit his rant against homeowners as playing a major role in originating the Tea Partiers in our new book, Over The Cliff.

He's like a lot of these free-market religious freaks who believe that tax cuts magically pay for themselves, even when Ronald Reagan proved that a fallacy. For anyone to deny the First Commandment of Conservatism was too much for him to handle and he stormed off the set.

Think Progress:

Contributor Steve Liesman rebutted, asking Santelli, “Unaffected how? Unaffected by being much higher if more teachers and policemen were laid off?” Liesman also challenged the familiar conservative tax refrain, stating, “In general, I would say the rule is this, is that lower taxes generally do not pay for themselves.”

Liesman’s points threw Santelli into a mental breakdown. When prompted on whether tax cuts would truly help address the deficit, he and fellow right-wing economist Jeff Nielson launched into a childish tirade against government spending and the capital gains tax:

LIESMAN: Let me get this straight, all you guys wanna cut taxes en route to bringing down the deficit,

SANTELLI: No I didn’t say anything about taxes Steve. I want the government to stop spending! Stop spending! Stop spending! Stop spending! Stop spending! That’s what we want! Stop spending!

NIELSON: And cut capital gains spending! Cut capital gains. Cut capital..make it zero percent and see what happens. [...]

LIESMAN: You know, you know I just — I just keep saying what the data show and the data show that the tax cuts don’t pay for themselves. By the way –

SANTELLI: Oh you wouldn’t know data if it bit you on the nose.

NIELSON: Boo.

SANTELLI: Go read some Austrian economist instead of the funny pages!

Liesman tried one more time to question how “we are going to cut taxes and deficit spending at the same time.” Santelli yelled in reply: “Go back to Russia where you understand the state and the citizen” and walked off the set.

Santelli and Nielson are just flatly wrong on their stance on federal spending and taxes. As Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman recently noted, “[P]enny-pinching at a time like this isn’t just cruel; it endangers the nation’s future” and “doesn’t even do much to reduce our future debt burden, because stinting on spending now threatens the economic recovery, and with it the hope for rising revenues.”

Santelli acts just like your typical WATB conservative when confronted. I had a similar situation with Andrew Breitbart at a panel we were on together in Los Angeles. He's a typical bully and he didn't like it very much when I got into his face after he picked up my notebook when I wasn't looking and began reading my notes. Santelli doesn't appear to be drunk, as did Breitbart, but a hissy fit is still a hissy fit. It tells us everything we need to know about them.

I started this series using Doughy Pantload as the first example of how the conservative movement supports their authors. They make sure that even if they write pure fantasy accounts devoid of reality that it sells as non-fiction, the better to persuade the less-engaged out there of their warped point of view.

Is there a bigger recipient of wingnut welfare out there than Dinesh D'Souza? He's been at the trough of wingnut welfare his entire life, writing book after book for Regnery Publications blaming everything under the sun on liberals, secularism or godlessness, and gays. At least Beck isn't trying to make believe his new book is covering historical events. Okay....maybe HE is. Bad example.

Dinesh wrote a book that blames Liberals for 9/11 and claims that Bin Laden and I have the same agenda.

Timothy Noah makes Dinesh look like fool in Slate, if you need more. Dinesh D'Souza's Mullah Envy: A leading conservative thinker blames 9/11 on liberalism.

David Neiwert and I have written a book that isn't guided by the arrogance that we are part of a superior religion guiding us into the grace of Heaven and all you non-believing gays are destroying the culture of the world. Unlike Dinesh, we prefer to write a book based on facts.

Just a few other reasons out of a gazillion to support real authors...

And buy this book.

Utah Senator Bob Bennett's bid for a fourth term was summarily dismissed today at the Utah Republican Party convention. Bennett was a distant third to financier Tim Bridgewater and teabagger Tea Party darling Mike Lee.

Bennett's unforgivable Senate sins were, according to local party hacks officials, daring to consider any form of health care reform, his TARP vote and other ideological votes around constitutional issues like the flag burning amendment. Despite Mitt Romney's endorsement, party purists coalesced around the money and the tea party take-no-prisoners doctrine, respectively.

The winners

Mike Lee is the former head of Ron Paul's Utah operation, Glenn Beck darling, and Tea Party faithful. Along those lines, Lee had received FreedomWorks' endorsement along with Tea Party creator Dick Armey's personal endorsement. That PR move was further augmented with the endorsements of Mark Levin, Erick Erickson, and far-right conservative state legislators.

Yet, Mike Lee still lost to Tim Bridgewater in round two, even with all that Tea Party mojo. Who is Tim Bridgewater, other than a guy with a whole lot of money?

Tim Bridgewater is chairman and founder of Interlink Capital Strategies, a businessman and venture capitalist with ties to Neil Bush and the more mainstream faction of the Republican party. He received the highest number of votes in the second round of voting, but did not receive Tea Party endorsements.

The Utah convention exposes a deep rift slicing right down the center of the Republican Party between the hard-core Ron Paul/Tea Party group and the more traditional pro-business anti-tax group. While it appears that the more traditional conservative values are ahead by a small percentage of the party faithful, there is an unmasked canyon of differences threatening to divide the Republican Party and drive it farther to the right than it already is.

Stay tuned for the primary on June 22nd. It's probably a good idea not to count Bob Bennett out, either. He hasn't ruled out the idea of a write-in campaign, which could make things even more interesting, given the poll numbers pointing to a Bennett win in an open primary.

Update: Senator Jim DeMint has now endorsed Mike Lee, completing the Tea Party Triumvirate. Why did he wait until after Bennett had been eliminated?