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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Republicans say he quit a month ago, but it's all over the place today. Moral: Wingnut Republicans are wingnut Republicans, and normal people are normal people, and never the twain shall meet. This guy turned his back on a high-paid, high-profile job and burned his bridges. That's how bad these people are:

When Republicans appointed Pablo Pantoja to State Director of Florida Hispanic Outreach for the Republican National Committee, they hoped he would be able to bridge the sizable gap that only expanded during the 2012 elections, when the state’s 4.7 million Hispanic voters supported Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by a 20 percent margin.

But after months of inaction by Congressional Republicans on comprehensive immigration reform and stiff resistance by Republican-leaning groups like the Heritage Foundation, Pantoja has had enough; on Monday, he announced via email that he was leaving the party and registering as a Democrat:

Friend,
Yes, I have changed my political affiliation to the Democratic Party.

It doesn’t take much to see the culture of intolerance surrounding the Republican Party today. I have wondered before about the seemingly harsh undertones about immigrants and others. Look no further; a well-known organization recently confirms the intolerance of that which seems different or strange to them.

Pantoja goes on to specifically cite last week’s revelation — that an author of Heritage’s false report on the cost of the Gang of Eight’s immigration bill wrote a dissertation in which he suggested that Hispanics are at a permanent disadvantage because they have lower IQs — as the final straw in his political evolution.

Prior to assuming the role of state director, Pantoja served in the National Guard, doing multiple tours abroad in Kuwait and Iraq before returning to the states and getting involved in Republican politics. In 2010 he served as a field director in Florida during the midterm elections.

Oh please let this be true, please let this be true:

Republicans who don’t want to witness GOP-on-GOP primary warfare in 2014 may want to keep their eyes trained on the Lower 48. Alaska could be messy. Joe Miller, the tea party favorite who was backed by Sarah Palin when he roiled GOP politics in the 2010 midterm elections, is seriously considering another bid at an Alaska Senate seat, a campaign that could prompt a bare-knuckled effort against a candidate pushed by the party establishment.

The 45-year-old Miller has been testing the waters in meetings with influential social conservative activists and gun-rights groups in Washington. He’s quietly met with tea party senators, such as Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, as well as former South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, the leader of The Heritage Foundation. Miller also told Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran — the new head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee — that he was weighing a run in 2014.The Miller situation provides an early test for Republicans in Washington, who are trying to avoid the internecine battles of the past two elections that damaged GOP chances of taking back the Senate. Karl Rove and his new spinoff group, the Conservative Victory Project, are now trying to defeat GOP candidates in Senate primaries whom they worry will lose in general election battles.

Is this the first big UFC type match between a new crazy tea party PAC and Karl Rove's Conservative Victory Project? We can only hope so. Joe Miller has some very interesting political ties:

Miller actually hired militia goons to rough up journalists during the 2010 campaign, and had numerous Patriot movement connections, including a long association with Schaeffer Cox, the militiaman just arrested a couple of weeks ago for plotting to kill cops and judges.

Crank vs Crackpot. GOP nut vs GOP shill. See Miller vs Rove face off in the octagon on the Ultimate Fighter --only on FX!

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?

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If you haven't read John Amato and Dave Neiwert's book Over the Cliff: How Obama's Election Drove The American Right Insane, now might be a good time to pick it up and read it.

If you think they went insane in 2008, just wait for it. In a race to see how deeply they can marginalize themselves, you have the Heritage Foundation making scary ads where sweat breaks out on the narrator's lip as he declares the Randian wingnuts "in a war to save this nation's future" and calls all good soldiers to report immediately to the front. It's intended to raise the hackles on the back of your neck and make everyone skeered about what the scary radical in the White House will do next.

You know, like protect Social Security and Medicare, while fully implementing Obamacare. Skeery, skeery things, all.

But that's mild, compared to the ragequitting former Ron Paul aide Eric Dondero, who has declared his own personal war on anyone who dared to stand for Obama and his values. In the span of one blog post, he informs readers that he's done with electoral politics and is now going to promote "outright revolt."

I give him very small credit for doing so in non-violent ways unlike some of his compatriots, but still, this is insane. Here are some of his ideas:

• Time to tell any Democrats you know to f*ck off and die
• Express your hatred, shame, and outright disgust with anyone you know who voted Democrat
• Boycott Business who accept Welfare payments

In his own words:

I strongly urge all other libertarians to do the same. Are you married to someone who voted for Obama, have a girlfriend who voted 'O'. Divorce them. Break up with them without haste. Vow not to attend family functions, Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas for example, if there will be any family members in attendance who are Democrats.

[...]

All family and friends, even close family and friends, who I know to be Democrats are hereby dead to me. I vow never to speak to them again for the rest of my life, or have any communications with them. They are in short, the enemies of liberty. They deserve nothing less than hatred and utter contempt.

This is the equivalent of holding one's breath until one turns blue while stomping feet and screaming "I hate you!" at the top of one's lungs. It's uniquely Randian in its selfishness and hate. It's bad enough that even one person would be serious about doing it, but encouraging your friends and family to do so too, or disowning them for disagreeing about political issues? That's someone who really needs to drop the Peter Pan act and grow up.

Yes. Grow up. Thinking people don't rage about things like this, and they certainly don't call for a hate war on people who disagree with them. That's middle school crap, folks. It's not what adults do.

After Proposition 8 passed in California in 2008, there was a great deal of anger and hurt among its advocates (as you might imagine). After their initial disappointment passed and anger was expressed in private venues, they chose a strategy that paid off for them in 2012. They chose to educate people. They chose to help people understand that same sex marriage did not threaten them or cause harm to their own marriage.

By making their message attractive instead of angry and hateful, they were able to move people past their fears and you saw the results in Maine, Maryland and Washington this week. They won it!

Every single time one of these Randian teenagers starts throwing their selfish tantrums they do more harm to their movement than anything else. They tell observers that whatever else they might believe, to participate with them, one must become a hate-filled troll who resorts to leaving dog piles on neighbors' lawns, disowning family, and calling for outright revolution.

This is not who we are, but it is who they are. This is the libertarian mindset, laid bare. It is xenophobic (note reference to anti-Islam beliefs), it is selfish, and above all, it's immature.

What the teachers in Chicago are fighting is a right-wing agenda that's been in play for a long time, secretly and heavily funded by wealthy extremists and carefully messaged. They're pretty effective, too, since I hear so many "liberals" repeating right-wing talking points about this strike. That's the thing about liberals; we're wired to find common ground, so when someone says, "Bad teachers! Tenure!", we say, "Yeah, I can see your point." But that makes us less likely to see the larger, evil forces at work:

Cato Institute, 1997:

Like most other conservatives and libertarians, we see vouchers as a major step toward the complete privatization of schooling. In fact, after careful study, we have come to the conclusion that they are the only way to dismantle the current socialist regime."

Bast spells out the agenda:

"Vouchers zero in on the government school monopoly's most vulnerable point: the distinction between government financing and government delivery of service. People who accept the notion that schooling is an entitlement will nevertheless vote to allow private schools to compete with one another for public funds. That fact gives us the tool we need to undercut the organizing ability of teachers' unions, and hence their power as a special-interest group.

...Because we know how the government schools perpetuate themselves, we can design a plan to dismantle them."

Right-wing billionaire Dick DeVos speaking at the Heritage Foundation, 2002:

And so while those of us on the national level can give support, we need to encourage the development of these organizations on a state-by-state basis, in order to be able to offer a political consequence, for opposition, and political reward, for support of, education reform issues.

That has got to be the battle. It will not be as visible. And, in fact, to the extent that we on the right, those of us on the conservative side of the aisle, appropriate education choice as our idea, we need to be a little bit cautious about doing that, because we have here an issue that cuts in a very interesting way across our community and can cut, properly communicated, properly constructed, can cut across a lot of historic boundaries, be they partisan, ethnic, or otherwise.

And so we've got a wonderful issue that can work for Americans. But to the extent that it is appropriated or viewed as only a conservative idea it will risk not getting a clear and a fair hearing in the court of public opinion. So we do need to be cautious about that.

We need to be cautious about talking too much about these activities. Many of the activities and the political work that needs to go on will go on at the grass roots. It will go on quietly and it will go on in the form that often politics is done - one person at a time, speaking to another person in privacy. And so these issues will not be, maybe, as visible or as noteworthy, but they will set a framework within states for the possibility of action on education reform issues."

They couldn't be any clearer about their agenda: They want to destroy teachers unions and the public school system. This is what the Chicago strike is about. Stand up for public education. Stop falling for the right-wing spin.

The Republican Study Committee is the group that's even more extreme than Paul Ryan (they thought his proposal didn't cut Medicaid enough). Now they'll be working together with ALEC, even as new groups leave every week:

The Republican Study Committee is laying the groundwork for a new informal partnership with the American Legislative Exchange Council, even as dozens of major corporations cut ties with the conservative nonprofit for its support of controversial voting and gun laws.

The RSC is working quietly with ALEC to host a gathering next Friday at the Heritage Foundation in hopes of establishing an ongoing relationship with the group that would allow federal lawmakers to exchange ideas with state legislators.

The conservative nonprofit has come under fire for promoting voter identification measures like those that have passed in at least eight states and are the subject of dozens of legal challenges in state and federal courts. ALEC has also promoted "Stand Your Ground" laws, which allow a person to use force in self-defense without an obligation to first attempt to flee. Those laws came under increased scrutiny after a neighborhood watch volunteer killed an unarmed teenager in Florida earlier this year.

More than 35 corporations, most recently General Electric Co. and Sprint Nextel Corp., have dropped their memberships with ALEC in the past year, and liberal groups, led by the African-American advocacy group Color of Change, continue to pressure other member companies such as Duke Energy and eBay Inc. to cut ties with the organization.

"It is really telling," said Rashad Robinson, the executive director of Color of Change. "As major corporations disassociate themselves with this organization because it is so outside the mainstream, that Republicans are rushing to them."

Paul Teller, the executive director of the RSC, embraced the nonprofit and said the RSC has long supported the group's agenda.

I'll just bet you do.

Imagine that. The President of the United States notices that the welfare regulations are preventing a lot of impoverished people from getting help during this prolonged recession and, using the discretion at his command, approves some administrative changes that would allow a lot more people to be eligible. This is upsetting a lot of asshats, like Orin Hatch and Mickey Kaus.

Now, there's a reason you don't read about Mickey Kaus on this blog: No one in the progressive world takes him seriously, not even a little bit. In fact, you can tell that a policy change is the right one in inverse proportion to Mickey Kaus's hissy fit. And the fact that he thinks it's political suicide to help desperate people survive is classic Third Way thinking. I would not wish on Mr. Kaus the same fate he so fervently desires for so many others. From Alex Pareene in Salon:

So, lifetime caps and strict work requirements and desperately cash-starved states and a prolonged unemployment crisis have basically all added up to TANF not actually providing any benefits to millions of people who need them. (This, again, is sort of by design!)

And apparently the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services has responded to this by expressing a willingness to grant states waivers for some work requirements, under certain conditions. Which led, of course, to the Heritage Foundation accusing Obama of “gutting welfare reform.” According to their reading of the HHS memo: “The new Obama dictate asserts that because the work requirements, established in section 407, are mentioned as an item that state governments must report about in section 402, all the work requirements can be waived.” But the work requirements were one of the most important parts of the reform law, and they are, supposedly, not supposed to be subject to waivers. Tyranny!

In the past, state bureaucrats have attempted to define activities such as hula dancing, attending Weight Watchers, and bed rest as “work.” These dodges were blocked by the federal work standards. Now that the Obama Administration has abolished those standards, we can expect “work” in the TANF program to mean anything but work.The new welfare dictate issued by the Obama Administration clearly guts the law. The Administration tramples on the actual legislation passed by Congress and seeks to impose its own policy choices — a pattern that has become all too common in this Administration.The result is the end of welfare reform.

(There are obviously no links or citations substantiating any of the claims in the first quoted paragraph.)

So I dunno, I guess the Obama administration is circumventing the law to … make it slightly easier for poor people to receive assistance, which on the whole I think I approve of.

Someone who doesn’t approve of this is Mickey Kaus, the famous Democratic warblogger currently at Tucker Carlson’s “The Daily Caller.” Kaus is one of those Democrats who, from the first paragraph, is on a never-ending crusade for border fences and the elimination of labor unions and so on. He loves welfare reform because it made dumb, lazy, poor people get off their lazy asses and go to work instead of collecting government checks to buy Cadillacs. Obama’s gutting of welfare reform makes him so mad!

He is worried that weakening, or being seen as weakening, the work requirements sends the “wrong signal,” and that the hordes of leeches and parasites that make up the American underclass will hear this signal and flock back on the gravy train. But most important, he can’t figure out why Obama would do this. Welfare reform works super well — the proof is that much fewer people receive welfare now! Why change a program that has worked so perfectly?Especially when there are much better options for helping people, like … doing some different thing.

[...] Finally, in point thirteen, Kaus says, “If this is a political move, I don’t understand it, because as we all know welfare is horribly unpopular, and promising to destroy welfare got both Reagan and Clinton elected.” But maybe — and I’m really just spitballing, here — it’s not a “political move” and it is actually a move designed to address the fact that welfare reform left the program uniquely unsuited to help people in the event of a massive, prolonged unemployment crisis. Or, hell, maybe HHS is correct when it says it’s just trying to let states come up with more effective job prep and placement programs! (Tyranny again!!) Or maybe Obama just did this to piss off the Heritage Foundation and steal the money of hard-working Real Americans to give to shiftless Welfare Queens. Anything is possible! Anything besides poverty-alleviating government programs operating without being vindictively stingy and punitive in the United States, anyway.

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The fear-mongering surrounding the implementation of the Affordable Care Act has officially gone Godwin, people. Because mandating that everyone purchase private health insurance is *exactly* like the German secret police who would round up people deemed unsympathetic to the Nazi government and torture and/or kill them, amirite?

After expressing this breathtaking bit of beyond reprehensible bit of garbage, reporter Paul Heintz of 7Days checked to make sure that the tea party-backed politician had even a semblance of historical knowledge:

“Do you have a sense of what the Gestapo did during World War II?” Heintz asked.

“Yeah,” LePage said. “They killed a lot of people.”

“And the IRS is headed in that direction?”

“Yeah.”

“They’re headed in the direction of killing a lot of people?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you serious?”

“I’m very serious,” LePage said, later adding: “I’m saying the federal government is taking away the freedom of Americans to make choices.”

Okay, I didn't think this needed to be made explicit, Governor, but clearly some people have problems with analogies. The IRS is not going to kill anyone (although I think you ought to expect a very ugly audit in the near future), nor are they taking any freedoms away. You can choose not to purchase health insurance. But the cost to do so is the same "freeloader" penalty that you Republicans cheered when it was introduced by the Heritage Foundation twenty years ago.

To insinuate that there is any kind of apt comparison to be made is an insult not only to critical thinking Americans and IRS agents just trying to do their job, but to the memory of real victims of the actual Gestapo.

LePage's brain apparently caught up with his mouth a little later, and he attempted to walk back his words:

Seeking to douse a fire he started by comparing the IRS to the Gestapo, Maine Gov. Paul LePage issued a formal apology on Friday for his "insensitivity to the word" after a face-to-face meeting with representatives of several Jewish groups that had complained.

LePage hoped his apology in his weekly radio address would bring an end to the weeklong furor that started when he described the Internal Revenue Service as the "new Gestapo" while criticizing President Barack Obama's health care overhaul.

LePage said it was "never my intent to insult or to be hurtful to anyone, but rather express what can happen by overreaching government."

"The acts of the Holocaust were nothing short of horrific. Millions of innocent people were murdered, and I apologize for my insensitivity to the word and the offense some took to my comparison of the IRS and the Gestapo," the governor said.

Calling ObamaCare “socialized medicine” truly lowers the standards on what could be considered socialized medicine. It’s like calling paved roads “government overreach”; a stop light a “government takeover of your commute”; or a neighborhood with speed bumps “a road to communism.” The law is really some regulations to help consumers buy private insurance coupled with a small fee if consumers decide not to buy said insurance.

Is it perfect? No. Could it be improved? Absolutely. However, ObamaCare is the opposite of socialism, it’s a market solution.

The right-wing got a “free” market solution to health care. That was their cause – personal responsibility their mantra – now it’s law. They got an entire reform bill incentivising citizens to buy into private for-profit insurance plans. This is the Republican vision for America: Less government more profits for giant corporations. This core of the Affordable Care Act was an idea floated by President Nixon in 1974, touted by the Heritage Foundation in 1989, introduced by Newt Gingrich in 1993 and implemented by Mitt Romney in 2005. And now? Now it’s a big festering albatross around Obama’s neck.

As former presidential candidate Michele Bachmann said in front of the Supreme Court last week, "We have not waved the white flag of surrender on socialized medicine!”

So the decades-old Republican big idea finally gets Democratic presidential ink and now, if you ask a Republican, it’s an unconstitutional government takeover of health care Stalin would have loved. Mitt Romney wants to repeal ObamaCare and replace it with RomneyCare. Essentially repealing the Affordable Care Act with the Affordable Care Act. Leave it to a Republican frontrunner to vow their first act as president will be to waste time with redundancies while lamenting how ineffective government can be.

Now health care reform has reached the Supreme Court, we will have a ruling on the law in late June. Will it be overturned fully or partially or upheld? It’s anyone’s guess.

Regardless of the outcome, personal responsibility in health care is a Republican pet idea they’ve strapped to the roof of the car.

It makes the case that their ideas should never be law because if partisanship beckons, they’ll rally against them and call any Democrats who signed the bill, Hitler.

Imagine if Obama signed the most recent Paul Ryan Budget plan – a blueprint to cut taxes further for the wealthy and further increase the debt by not taking in enough revenues. If Obama embraced it, Republicans would storm the Capitol calling it a tax hike and a Maoist plot with Wall Street. People in tri-corner hats with signs reading, “Don’t raise my taxes!” and “Stop government takeover of business!” would swarm The Mall. The erosion of Medicare would make Republicans faint on the House floor. “It’s a tenet of Marxism to kill grandma!” They’d gasp.

Just remember, when George W. Bush took office the budget was set to be balanced in a few short years. Social security was actually its namesake – secure. And then he went uber-GOP-with-a-mandate – didn’t pay for any of the wars he started – just showered seniors with unpaid-for Medicare Part D and sent everyone in the country a rebate check. And when this “free market capitalism” failed? He bailed out the banks and the auto industry with taxpayer money, famously saying he “abandoned free market principles to save the free market system.”

Now? Now the Republicans blame the deficit, the debt, the recession, the bailouts and (wait for it) the wars on the Democrat in the Oval Office.

It’s a take on the Pottery Barn rule, “You break it, you buy it.” The Republican version: “We break it, we blame you … and call you a Nazi.”