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Boy, the Tea Partiers sure threw Harry Reid a gift by making Sharron Angle the GOP nominee in his Senate race this fall. Indeed, though Angle has been mostly sequestered since winning the nomination, she's proving to be one of those gifts that keeps on giving.

She finally emerged from her Cave of Media Silence and went on TV in Vegas, interviewed by Jon Ralston in his excellent "Face to Face" program. And it wasn't pretty:

Only once did she flatly admit her pre-primary language was too strong, when asked to explain her comments that the citizenry will resort to “Second Amendment remedies” — referring to the right to bear arms — if conservatives didn’t win this election.

“I admit it was a little strong to say,” she said. “That’s why I changed my rhetoric to ‘defeat Harry Reid.’ ”

... She said the separation of church and state is a doctrine meant to “protect the church” and that elected officials should “bring our values to the political system.” She sidestepped her comments from the 1990s that the separation of church and state is an “unconstitutional doctrine.”

Actually, what she said was this:

Ralston: The separation of church and state arises out of the Constitution.

Angle: No, it doesn't, John.

Ralston: Oh it doesn't? Oh, the Founding Fathers didn't believe in the separation of church and state, the Establishment Clause, the First Amendment?

Angle: Actually, Thomas Jefferson has been misquoted, like I've been misquoted out of context. Thomas Jefferson was actually addressing a church and telling them through his address that there had been a wall of separation put up between the church and the state precisely to protect the church.

Ralston: So there should be no separation.

Angle: To protect the church from being taken over by a state religion. And that's what they meant by that.

This is just plain weird. In the space of mere seconds, Angle shifts from denying that the Constitution enumerates the separation of church and state to describing how it works. And yes, it is intended to protect religious freedom -- which is precisely why the separation is so absolute. After all, a "state religion" is enforced precisely by people who use the power of state to enforce their religious beliefs.

Which is also what Angle does when explaining her position on abortion:

When Ralston challenged her comments to a Reno conservative talk show host that abortion should not be available even in the case of rape or incest, Angle said she values life.

“You want government to go and tell a 13-year-old child who’s been raped by her father she has to have that baby?” Ralston asked.

“I didn’t say that,” she said. “I always say that I value life.”

She went further to say she believes government should stay out of the issue of abortion, but it decided to insert its control after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

“The government decided to get involved in this, not me,” she said. “I’m just defending my position.”

To say that this is incoherent is gross understatement. Angle is a perfect example of how the Republican Right in this country has gone over the cliff: there is nothing coherent or rational about her positions, except that they are those of a typical right-wing extremist.

I'm sure wondering how all those smug conservatives like Sean Hannity and Dick Morris who were reading Harry Reid's poll numbers a few months back and boldly predicting he would be gone as Majority Leader come November are feeling these days.

They can thank their beloved Tea Party movement, if they like.

Oh, look. Another phony scandal! And another case of amnesia, as Republicans block all the cases in which they did the same thing from their memories.

Yes, Republicans are gleefully insisting this is a pattern of improper behavior and calling for a special prosecutor. But then again, if President Obama knocked a piece of White House china off the table and broke it, the Republicans would be calling for an investigation to see if he really sold it on eBay and pocketed the cash:

First, Joe Sestak. Now, Andrew Romanoff.

In an emailed statement, Romanoff, the former Colorado House speaker, said that in September, “shortly after the news media first reported my plans to run for the Senate, I received a call from Jim Messina, the President’s deputy chief of staff. Mr. Messina informed me that the White House would support Sen. Bennet. I informed Mr. Messina that I had made my decision to run.

”Mr. Messina also suggested three positions that might be available to me were I not pursuing the Senate race. He added that he could not guarantee my appointment to any of these positions. At no time was I promised a job, nor did I request Mr. Messina’s assistance in obtaining one.”

Romanoff also attached an email from Messina outlining the posts, and said he later left Messina “a voicemail informing him that I would not change course.” He said he hadn’t spoken with Messina or anyone else in the White House since then.

[...] Before Romanoff issued his statement, Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith on Wednesday responded to the Romanoff reports by reiterating his call for the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate both the Sestak and Romanoff discussions with the White House.

“I am concerned that the Obama Administration has engaged in a habit of attempting to manipulate the democratic election process to benefit the Democratic Party,” Smith said in a statement. “Such actions are certainly unethical and may very well be criminal. And it makes the recent White House report attempting to downplay allegations even less believable.”

Lamar, you're a lying sack o'fertilizer. Shameless, shameless, shameless!

Having learned their lesson with the Sestak story, the White House responds quickly:

Both sides insist no concrete job offer was made, but Romanoff’s announcement made it look as though the White House and come up with the idea all on its own. The part he apparently left out was that he applied for the jobs at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“Andrew Romanoff applied for a position at USAID during the Presidential transition. He filed this application through the Transition on-line process. After the new administration took office, he followed up by phone with White House personnel,” said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs in an e-mail statement sent before 6:30 a.m.

“Jim Messina called and e-mailed Romanoff last September to see if he was still interested in a position at USAID, or if, as had been reported, he was running for the US Senate,” Gibbs said. “Months earlier, the President had endorsed Sen. Michael Bennet for the Colorado seat, and Messina wanted to determine if it was possible to avoid a costly battle between two supporters.

“But Romanoff said that he was committed to the Senate race and no longer interested in working for the Administration, and that ended the discussion. As Mr. Romanoff has stated, there was no offer of a job,” Gibbs said.

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Teabaggers must really believe they are the majority in America and John McCain won the election, but Obama is just keeping the Oval office warm because McCain has to win his Senate race against JD Hayworth first before he can be sworn in. It's just a formality. That's teabagger logic.

Amanda's post rocks!.

Digby is amused/disgusted at conservatives who simply will not accept that having a majority in both houses of Congress and having the Presidency means that Democrats get to pass legislation.

--

Well, it’s simple, really. They assume, if they don’t state it outright, that large numbers of American voters shouldn’t have the right to vote. That’s the implicit argument when Sarah Palin praises white rural voters as “Real Americans”, when Birthers obsess over the idea that the first black President simply can’t be eligible for office, when tea baggers yell racist and homophobic slurs at politicians, and when they insist that you eliminate black voters from the count if you want to find out how popular a politician “really” is. When Bart Stupak laughed out loud at the very idea that nuns have opinions worth listening to---and listed a bunch of men whose opinions were the ones that counted---you had a similar sentiment being expressed. Universal suffrage seems like a fundamental part of democracy to liberals, but it appears that conservatives think it de-legitimizes the results of elections. And that if you do something without Republicans on board, you’re eliminating those who represent the only people who count.

The irony here is that Republicans are already way overrepresented in Congress. Because of the constitutional rules that give every state two Senators, no matter how underpopulated the state, you see rural, white-dominated areas having way more representation than they deserve. For instance, South Dakota has a little over 800,000 residents, but New York has almost 20 million. New York City has over 8 million people alone, which means that if the Senate had a representational system like the House, just the city of New York would be owed 20 Senators to compete with South Dakota’s two. Think about how irrelevant the Republican party would be---at least the current wingnutty Republican party, since it’s obvious New York can elect Republicans---if representation was actually fair...read on

I've been meaning to post this for a few days.

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I've been writing a lot about the role Fox News and the right wing noise machine played in getting Scott Brown elected in Massachusetts. Margery Eagan, a Boston Herald reporter (who supported Coakley) told Howard Kurtz that right-wing talk radio and sports talk radio demonized Martha Coakley endlessly. This was a big part of her fall after she held a 31-point lead in MA.

CNN's Reliable Sources:

On Boston newspapers’ coverage of the Massachusetts Senate race

EAGAN: Well, she got very good press from "The Boston Globe," not from my paper, "The Boston Herald." But you know something? People don't like -- TV journalists and newspaper journalists do not like to talk about the influence of talk radio. Let me tell you something. There was a nonstop hammering of Martha Coakley on the AM stations here, on the huge sports stations here. She was the evil incarnate and Scott Brown was the next coming. And, you know, the New England Patriots in the playoffs lost early on. It was as if there was this transference from Tom "Terrific" Brady, the quarterback of the Patriots, to Scott "Terrific" Brown. You look at the rallies for Scott Brown, they were very white, they were very suburban, they were Gillette Stadium fans, and there was almost this...

KURTZ: But just briefly, did you mean to say earlier that "The Boston Globe" tilted towards Democratic candidate Martha Coakley, and your paper, "The Boston Herald," tilted towards Scott Brown in the news coverage?

EAGAN: Well, I would say my paper was pretty much cheerleading for Scott Brown. We're the conservative paper in town, and The Globe, I think, was -- they were evenhanded somewhat, but I think that they were definitely cheerleading for Martha Coakley, absolutely. They're the liberal paper in town. That's the way it always is.

I cover the sports media on C&L all the time because I think it's important to show how they act like the Beltway media elite -- they have their own Village. And their political reach is greater than people think, because the sports talkers are uniformly right-wing and they love to bash liberals, just like their "opinion show" counterparts. Locally, AM right wing hate talk radio does play a major role in the GOP propaganda battles and it worked very well for them in Massachusetts.

Eagan names what the media elites will dare not: the actual influence right-wing talkers have in America. Good for her.

The Blame Game has begun over the Kennedy special election in Massachusetts yesterday. The Atlantic has a list of what's being said.

Many Democrats are operating under the assumption that Democrat Martha Coakley will lose today's election in Massachusetts to fill Ted Kennedy's Senate seat. In the debate over how Democrats could possibly lose the race--which has major repercussions for President Obama's agenda--Coakley herself is taking more and more of the blame. Some Democrats and liberals aren't waiting for the polls to close to turn against Coakley and her campaign. Here's a taste of what they're saying...read on

Digby:

According to Chuck Todd, the trouble in Massachusetts comes down to two words: Health Care.

Andrea Mitchell say's the two words are: Big Government

I say: Bad Economy (and Political Malpractice)

And despite the media having written off Coakley's campaign (after all, there's nothing they like better than "explaining" an election means the Democrats are "too liberal"), I got a report from the field saying the volunteers are pouring into Coakley headquarters this weekend for GOTV efforts:

"Vols are flooding the place. People are fighting for chairs at coakley hq. Folks are sitting on boxes and backpacks and whatever is around. There are no phones left in the phone bank here. Vols have stopped telling me to shut up as I yell at reporters on the phone because they can no longer hear me over the din of everyone else working the phones. The CW is wrong and the national narrative is a week behind. Energy level is high on our side. We've got a populist argument, we are on offense, we know the stakes, we are galvanized by the influx of tea party money and Republican bloviations. That story needs to be told."

If you want to help, register here to make calls from home this weekend.

In the meantime, the class acts over at RedState are trying to jam the Coakley phone banks. (Uh, guys? It's still illegal. I know that never stops you, of course.) And rumor has it that Holy Joe Lieberman will endorse Brown, the former Cosmo nude model. (Think about that.)

UPDATE: (Nicole) Just caught this on the Twitter:

@democratsdotorg: BROWN BULLYING TACTICS WATCH: Report of Coakley signs burned in Hyannis…hearing arrests made—send photos/accounts #MASen

coakley's put up an alert button on her site.

Scarce did a nice post on Harold Ford called : The many lies of Harold Ford Jr

And now Ford is using the odious NY Post to disseminate more fabrications on his record and the type of Democratic politician he would be.

It's true: I am strongly considering running for the United States Senate.

I do so because our best as a nation has always come when we test our ideas and ourselves, and when we trust competition to refine the steel of our convictions and the truth of our arguments.

Some have already questioned whether I should be running.

Others are falsifying my record in public life.

New Yorkers deserve a free election....read on

Adam Bink has a few thoughts about him.

Harold Ford, Jr. thinks New York Democrats are stupid. Like, you want a Democrat who says he's liberal? Here's one on paper! That they'll just read a checklist of progressive issues in his stupid op-ed, read that he is suddenly in favor of marriage equality after flip-flopping on the Federal Marriage Amendment, voting twice for it, and then not announcing his newfound position in 2007, 2008, 2009 or early this year, and fall in love.

As usual, Media Matters has a great rundown of his bullshit.

Harold Ford Gets It Wrong On Harold Ford

If Harold Ford runs, there will be a big uprising in the blogosphere to defeat this jackass. Being a former New Yorker, I get really pissed off when frauds like Ford think they can waltz into the state and lie about their record. DLC Democrats are a dying breed anyway. The sooner they're altogether extinct, the better.

Republicans on Capitol Hill are notorious for voting their party line, and since Obama's election, they have made no bones about it -- they simply want to destroy his presidency no matter the cost to the country. There is, however, a glitch in the borg. After the disaster that was NY-23 earlier this month, when the Palin/Limbaugh/Beck wing of the party took over, the GOP is once again reaching back in time and dragging Ronald Reagan out of his grave to bring the party back together:

First Read has obtained a resoultion being e-mailed around to Republican National Committee members for comments that proposes a conservative litmus test of sorts.

This comes on the heels of a rift in the party that was exposed in the once-obscure special election in Upstate New York's 23rd Congressional District, in which national conservative leaders, including Sarah Palin, clashed with national establishment Republicans. The so-called GOP civil war threatens to derail moderate Republican candidacies in heated 2010 Republican primaries already underway. Florida's Senate race is perhaps the best and most prominent example.

"President Ronald Reagan believed, as a result, that someone who agreed with him 8 out of 10 times was his friend, not his opponent," the resolution states.

But if a candidate disagrees with three of the above, then the group wants the RNC to withhold financial assistance and an endorsement from that candidate. Read on...

The GOP has a huge problem to face. The rabid right has taken over the party and there is virtually no wiggle room left for reasonable moderates. (You can read the full resolution (PDF) here courtesy of MSNBC) This resolution calls for the status quo on health care as well as standing against cap and trade, just to name a few. Any candidate who doesn't bow to the Palin/Beck ticket is going to be tarred, feathered and run out of town.

The resolution also calls for lower deficits, but as Jon Perr adds, smaller deficits are hardly "Reaganesque."

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