‘Are you kidding me?’: Reporters slammed for panning Biden’s anti-fascism speech

 David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement from Raw Story

President Joe Biden Thursday night delivered a 23-minute primetime address urging Americans to choose democracy over fascism, while calling out, by name, Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans.

Historians, political scientists, and journalism and extremism experts are praising the President for standing up for American values in the face of rising far-right threats of political violence. President Biden in very clear terms warned Americans they must "defend" and "protect" democracy against the fascism of the far-right – which is not a political speech, but a speech about, as Biden said, the "soul of the nation."

As expected, many Republicans expressed outrage over President Biden calling out the portion of the GOP that identifies as "MAGA," even though he made clear his criticism was not of mainstream Republicans.

One news network's coverage in particular is being highly criticized as several of its reporters took umbrage with President Biden delivering what they wrongly characterized as a "political" speech, while criticizing that two uniformed Marines were standing behind him.

CNN Chief National Affairs Correspondent Jeff Zeleny tweeted a photo of the President in front of the Marines, saying: "There’s nothing unusual or wrong with a President delivering a political speech — it’s inherent in the job description — but doing it against a backdrop of two Marines standing at attention and the Marine Band is a break with White House traditions."

Journalist Jamison Foser observed that "Biden is talking about defending democracy and the rule of law from assault by a fascist movement that staged a deadly insurrection. Marines take an oath to 'support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.' Pretty compatible!"

Former U.S. Senator Claire McCaskil (D-MO) slammed Zeleny.

"Are you kidding me Jeff? The last President did official Republican political events at the White House! And used the National Park Service as political event planners. How about political interview inside the Lincoln Memorial? Those are all examples of demolishing WH traditions," she wrote.

U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) asked, "Didn’t TFG," referring to Donald Trump, "accept his nomination on the White House lawn?"

"I recall a certain president giving a political speech on a damn aircraft carrier," blasted national security attorney Brad Moss. "I recall another president accepting his political nomination at the WHITE HOUSE. Ask me how little I care about the two marines deep in the background."

The former Communications Director for Senator Amy Klobuchar, Tim Hogan, corrected the record with photographic evidence:

Zeleny was not the only CNN journalist to instigate the ire of Americans watching the President's speech.

"Whatever you think of this speech the military is supposed to be apolitical. Positioning Marines in uniform behind President Biden for a political speech flies in the face of that. It’s wrong when Democrats do it. It’s wrong when Republicans do it," tweeted CNN host Brianna Keilar.

University of South Carolina Political Science Professor David Darmofal corrected Keilar, saying: "It was a speech about defending democracy."

Mary Trump, the former President's niece who is a psychologist, added: "I see everyone at CNN got their talking point. This was NOT a political speech (unless you think condemning fascism and encouraging people to vote are political positions in which case--that's what we call a tell).

CNN wasn't the only news outlet with reporters attracting anger.

CBS News' Ed O'Keefe was also criticized for equating a call to fight fascism and defend democracy as a "political" speech.

O'Keefe characterized the fight for civil rights as partisan politics, which it is not.

Marquette University Political Science Professor Julia Azari, who teaches about the American presidency, American political parties, and the politics of the American state blasted O'Keefe: "This frame undermines both democracy and journalism."

White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain graciously challenged O'Keefe:

Dan Froomkin, one of the most credible media critics also slammed O'Keefe.

"Biden is describing a major democratic crisis that actually exists. But political journalists only see a Democrat saying negative things about Republicans and so, you know, both sides," he wrote.

The White House Deputy Press Secretary, Andrew Bates, summed up what many were saying: "Democracy is not a partisan or political issue."

He won’t ‘act like an adult’: CNN’s Ana Navarro explains why the GOP should abandon Trump

SARAH K. BURRIS/Raw Story

Republican strategist Ana Navarro urged her fellow CNN panelists, indeed all Americans, to give up on the idea that President Donald Trump is ever going to behave like a world leader. Instead, all Americans will see is the drama as if it was some sort of fake “reality show.”

“We see this all the time in the Trump White House,” she explained. “The level of intrigue and mellow drama that goes in there. ‘House of Cards’ pales in comparison. One day we hear some folks are about to get fired, the next week they’re on top again. It happens all the time and the Kushner clan has a funny way of disappearing when the votes and issues are controversial. They were skiing during the health care debate. They are celebrating the holiday, with Orthodox Jewish folks today. You know it’s a funny coincidence on the timing.”

She then cautioned against those who frequently urge critics “give Trump a chance.”

“I think that’s less important than the meat of this issue and I think Americans today have got to realize that we can’t depend on this president to act like a globalist, like an adult, like so many of us wish he would, and that we have to take it upon ourselves,” she closed.

Watch the full discussion below:

Ana Navarro schools the GOP we can't count on... by sarahburris

Is The GOP Becoming Gentler And Kinder Ahead Of The 2014 Elections?

BY IGOR VOLSKY/Think Progress

The New York Time suggested Monday that some of the Republicans running for Congress in 2014 have moderated their rhetoric, embracing a gentler, kinder tone “in favor of a narrower focus on the Affordable Care Act.”

Some of these candidates — particularly those who ran in 2012 and lost — have “shelved their incendiary remarks about President Obama and the national debt” and hope to use the health care law to “attract moderate voters from both parties, even in heavily Democratic districts, who are disenchanted with its rollout.” The administration’s troubles in implementing the Affordable Care Act may have actually had the effect of mellowing out Republicans, the piece argues, providing them with a singular issue on which to focus their ire:

The campaigns, if successful, could be an indication of change in some corners of the Republican Party as many former firebrands mellow their messages and people like Mr. [Bob] Dold, who benefited from the Tea Party but was one of the more moderate members of the House, try to capitalize on the center. At the very least, their campaigns show that some people who ran vociferously against Washington appear eager to get back there.

But the shift — however slight — is rhetorical; it doesn’t signal any real change in policy or an effort by Republicans to stop obstructing the implementation of health care reform. Quite the opposite: even as millions of Americans are signing up for coverage — and are preparing to go to doctors and hospitals with their new insurance plans on Jan. 1 — the GOP sees undoing the ACA as the key to electoral success in 2014. That, after all was the impetus behind the short-term budget resolution. As GOP strategist Ford O’Connell put it to the Washington Times, “This was the establishment wing of the party telling the base that elections have consequences. Because Obamacare is the golden goose for 2014, they don’t want to have anything interfere with making as many gains as possible in Congress — particularly in the Senate.” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) agreed, telling Meet The Press on Sunday, “On our side of the aisle, we like the fact for the economy, no shutdowns. We also don’t want to have shutdown drama so we can focus on replacing Obamacare, so we can focus on showing better ideas and what this is coming in.”

Republicans have tried to showcase these “better ideas” in 2010 and 2012 but have failed to rally around anything but repeal — a position that the candidates in the Times story — Bob Dold, Nan Hayworth, Martha McSally — all proudly support.

So yes, some Republicans may try to distance themselves from some of the inflammatory rhetoric that dominated the 2010 Tea Party surge and the ill-orchestrated government shutdown three years later. But the party is still working to deny or take away health care coverage from millions of Americans. And there is nothing “moderate” about that.

The women problem plagues the GOP

GOP Strategist: Republicans Need To ‘Dekookify’ The Party!

 By James Schlarmann/Americans Against The Tea Party

Republican strategist Steve Schmidt usually has a pretty tough assignment when he appears on MSNBC shows as one of their token conservatives. He has to look sane, rational and caring while he counts himself among the party that is trying to gut food stamps, set women’s rights back in this country forty years, and deny the LGBT community equal protection under the law. He has to be a shining beacon of sanity in a sea of crazy so that he has some credibility in the conversation. If he were to go on “The Rachel Maddow Show” and Fox News it up, he’d never be asked back on. Yes, that’s because of MSNBC’s unapologetic left-leaning ideological bent, but the point is that the former chief strategist for the McCain-Palin campaign (good luck living that one down, Steve!) most of the time does a good job of at least saying and articulating the right things.

Last night on Maddow’s show though, his advice for his fellow Republicans wasn’t nearly blunt or specific enough. While discussing the current actions of a party that is recklessly trying to block the country’s forward progress on a number of fronts, Schmidt said that the GOP needs to “dekookify” itself, which is a direct shot at the Louie Gohmerts, Michele Bachmanns and…ahem…Sarah Palins of the right.

My problem with what Steve said is two-fold. First, in choosing a cute term like “dekookify” he dilutes the potency of sociopathy that Republican policies represent now. Secondly, it goes beyond being “kooky.” Republican policies are anti-populist. They are nakedly and aggressively in favor of only the rich and the corporations. They’re cold and unfeeling by policy and they revel in it. Schmidt is right, that there are far too many old, white kooks who think they know how women’s genitalia work in the party. But if people like Steve are going to make an impact in their party and really save it, they have to be blunt, out front and call these people out by name. They need to stop calling them kooks and start calling them what they are, “mean, vile, rude and bigoted people who have no place in our party.”

I won’t hold my breath. Watch Schmidt’s comments below, courtesy of The Rachel Maddow Show

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The GOP "Rebrand" Never Had A Chance

 SIMON MALOY/Media Matters For America

MSNBC political reporter Benjy Sarlin has written a sharp deconstructionof the Republican Party's evolving attitude towards Latino voters. The shock of Mitt Romney's 2012 loss and the resulting calls for Latino outreach from conservatives have given way to old habits: namely, consolidating the white vote and keep hoping that's enough to propel the GOP to electoral victory. Fox News' Sean Hannity, who memorably claimed the day after the election that he'd "evolved" on immigration reform, now rejects reform and the idea that Republicans need Latinos to win.

This shift in attitudes comes just a few months after the Republican National Committee (RNC) unveiled its surprisingly harsh 2012 post-mortem, which endorsed comprehensive immigration reform as a way to expand the party's appeal. "If we want ethnic minority voters to support Republicans, we have to engage them, and show our sincerity," the report counseled. As I wrote at the time, the RNC's ambition for party rebranding, whatever its merits, faced a daunting obstacle: Rush Limbaugh and the coterie of lesser radio hosts who form the rigid spine of the conservative media apparatus. And by all indications, Limbaugh is prevailing.

Even as Hannity and other conservatives (temporarily) fell prey to post-election demography panic, Limbaughnever budged. "I don't know that there's any stopping this," Limbaugh said of immigration reform shortly after Obama's reinauguration. "It's up to me and Fox News, and I don't think Fox News is that invested in this." Funnily enough, Limbaugh was on Fox News just this morning to talk politics, and afterward he disclosed on the radio that he "told the people at Fox that I wanted to talk about" immigration and the GOP, "and they wouldn't do it. They were not interested in bringing this subject up."

The schism among conservatives on how to approach immigration reform and Latino voters in general isn't going away, but the biggest guns are and always have been on the side of the status quo: do nothing policy-wise and continue stoking fears over "illegal immigration" to try and drive sufficient numbers of resentful white voters to the polls. It's worked for Republicans in the past and a big reason behind its success has been the enthusiastic efforts of Rush Limbaugh and right-wing radio. As Sarlin notes, the anti-immigration groups working to kill the reform legislation have the ears of talk radio hosts and are successfully promulgating the message that the Republican Party does not need Latino voters.

It's precisely the sort of closed off, self-reinforcing ideological loop the RNC warned against in its report: "We have become expert in how to provide ideological reinforcement to like-minded people, but devastatingly we have lost the ability to be persuasive with, or welcoming to, those who do not agree with us on every issue." But so long as anti-immigrant demagoguery keeps people tuning in to the AM radio dial, any attempt at Republican "rebranding" won't stand much of a chance.

With victories like these, the GOP will become the Whigs (Who? Exactly.)

by Liberal Librarian/The People's View

What does the Supreme Court's decision gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act mean for the Republican Party? Follow me, if you will. 

Earlier, Spandan wrote an analysis of the decision and how the Democrats should respond to it. Basically, it's an opportunity to do in 2014 what we did in 2012 in the face of voter suppression.

But it's a bit more than that. Much more. To emphasize Spandan's point about demography being destiny: both he and I live in California. Up until Prop 187, the state was more or less reliably Republican, at least in presidential elections. Things were more complex lower down, but the GOP had a lock on our electoral votes. Prop 187 was the galvanizing force which turned a reddish state into pure cerulean blue. How much so? For the first time, Democrats control a two-thirds majority in both houses of the Legislature. And all statewide elected officials are Democrats. The two-thirds majority is big, because that's what you need to pass a budget. No more deals need to be made with the GOP. The governor, Jerry Brown, is from the fiscally conservative wing of the party; but he still supports making needed investments in both physical and human infrastructure, while living within the state's means. And for the first time since the 1990s, the state posted a budget surplus. That's what happens when Democrats run government.

Republicans look at what once was a bulwark and are scared out of their minds that the rest of the country is going that way.California had always been touted as the Shangri-La to which white Midwesterners could retire. In my own city of Los Angeles, we had race-baiting mayor Sam Yorty serving as recently as the late 1960's / early 1970's. Now we've had exactly one Republican mayor in the past 40 years, and he won by being the most moderate of Republicans, and making deals with the Democratic majority on the City Council. Within a generation, with massive foreign immigration, Los Angeles went from being "Indiana on the Pacific" to a true world city, as cosmopolitan and diverse as New York or London.

The Republican brand in California is at an all time low. And, keep in mind, this was down without gerrymandering. California has an independent commission, the California Citizens Redistricting Commission, drawing district lines both on the federal and state levels. So, no gerrymandering means that it will be a wash electorally, right? No. This commission drew the lines which gave Democrats a two-thirds majority in the Legislature, and increased the Democratic representation in the Congressional delegation. Unless Democrats muck it up, Republicans have no future in California. And as goes California, so goes the nation. Our state is the precursor of what the rest of the country will look like. Even Old Confederacy states like Georgia will have a large segment of minority voters, who will likely give their votes to Democrats, and joining with liberal whites will tip the balance of power across the south.


Look at what's happening in TX. Here it was Prop 187; there it will be the attack on women's health and voter ID laws. The mobilization over the abortion bill being filibustered by Democrats, led by Wendy Davis, is something TX hasn't seen in decades. The more white Republicans grasp to preserve their remaining power, the more they will lose. Demography already puts the White House out of their grasp, for the most part. And as in 2012, attempts to suppress the vote for 2014 will propel the Democratic electorate to stand in line for hours and obtain any ID required, especially with OFA as a ready-made organization.

Which brings me to my last point. To all the naysayers who are now wailing that "we will never win another election", I have a few questions: Where have you been for the past 12 years? More specifically, where were you in 2000, when Nader's 3% of the vote was enough to throw Florida into chaos and hand the Presidency to George W. Bush? There is a direct line from November of 2000 to Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. To pretend otherwise is to ignore history. And where were you in 2010, when the 2008 voters stayed home and handed both the House and state governments across the nation to a radical Republican fringe? There is also a direct line from November 2010 to the SCOTUS ruling. To pretend otherwise is to lie to yourself. And where will you be in 2014? Will you donate to Democratic organizations? Will you drive voters to the polls? Will you make calls? Or will you sit at your computers gnashing your teeth and despairing because the mean nasty Republicans are mean and nasty?

A democracy is only as good as we make it. Without participation, the loudest voices will win. We have to be the loudest voices, voices that make the earth shake. Anything less, and we deserve what we get.

The GOP knows it's heading for history's dustbin. It's time for us to sweep them into it.

Republicans get three times more ‘false’ ratings from PolitiFact than Democrats

By Eric W. Dolan/Raw Story

An analysis of PolitiFact ratings suggests Republicans are significantly less credible than Democrats.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University found Republican’s had made three times as many false statements as Democrats this year.

PolitiFact examines a variety of political statements and assigns a “Truth-O-Meter” rating to each one. For their analysis, the researchers examined 100 “Truth-O-Meter” ratings of Republican and Democratic statements between January 20 through May 22.

PolitiFact rated 32 percent of Republican statements as “false” or “pants on fire,” compared to 11 percent of Democratic claims, according to a news release.

“While Republicans see a credibility gap in the Obama administration, PolitiFact rates Republicans as the less credible party,” CMPA President Dr Robert Lichter said.

A similar analysis published by the Center for Media and Public Affairs last year looked at election-related statements and found similar results. PolitiFact rated Republican statements as false roughly twice as often as Democratic statements between June 1, 2012 to September 11, 2012.

Yet another analysis of PolitiFact’s ratings by the University of Minnesota’s Smart Politics blog in 2011 also found Republicans were more likely to have false statements. Examining ratings between January 2010 to January 2011, the Smart Politics blog found Republicans were rated as false about three times more often than Democrats.

Understanding the party of no

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The Republican Autopsy Report

By THOMAS B. EDSALL/New York Times

On Monday a Republican task force released a remarkably hard-headed diagnosis of the party’s many liabilities: its ideological rigidity, its preference for the rich over workers, its alienation of minorities, its reactionary social policies and its institutionalized repression of dissent and innovation.

The 97-page Growth and Opportunity Project report was commissioned in the wake of the 2012 election debacle by Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee. The G.O.P. report is an extraordinary public acknowledgment of internal discord and vulnerability, which has intensified the battle between the deeply committed conservative wing and the more pragmatic, pro-business wing for control of the Republican Party. With just a few exceptions, it does not mince words.

At the federal level, it says, the party is “marginalizing itself,” and, in the absence of major change, “it will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to win a presidential election in the near future.” Young voters are “rolling their eyes at what the party represents.” Voters’ belief that “the G.O.P. does not care about them is doing great harm.” Formerly loyal voters gathered in focus groups describe Republicans as “ ‘scary,’ ‘narrow-minded’ and ‘out of touch’ and that we were a party of ‘stuffy old men.’ ”

In a rare intervention in policy making for a political committee, the R.N.C. report calls for abandonment of the party’s anti-immigration stance, flatly declaring that “we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.” In an equally radical challenge to Republican orthodoxy, the Priebus report states:

We have to blow the whistle at corporate malfeasance and attack corporate welfare. We should speak out when a company liquidates itself and its executives receive bonuses but rank-and-file workers are left unemployed. We should speak out when C.E.O.s receive tens of millions of dollars in retirement packages but middle-class workers have not had a meaningful raise in years.

The report also warns that Republicans need to mute, if not silence, anti-gay rhetoric if they are to have any chance of regaining support among voters under the age of 30.

For the G.O.P. to appeal to younger voters, we do not have to agree on every issue, but we do need to make sure young people do not see the Party as totally intolerant of alternative points of view. Already, there is a generational difference within the conservative movement about issues involving the treatment and the rights of gays — and for many younger voters, these issues are a gateway into whether the Party is a place they want to be. If our Party is not welcoming and inclusive, young people and increasingly other voters will continue to tune us out. The Party should be proud of its conservative principles, but just because someone disagrees with us on 20 percent of the issues, that does not mean we cannot come together on the rest of the issues where we do agree.

This suggests that the issue of same-sex marriage is on course to become a source of significant division within the Republican Party, as social conservatives view the commitment to marriage as a sacrament between a man and woman. Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and former executive director of the Christian Coalition, contended in a phone interview that the Republican Party risked alienating a large block of loyal voters if it moved to the left on same-sex marriage. Reed argues that opposing same-sex marriage is not a liability and that voters are evenly split on the issue, according to exit polls. In fact, in the 2012 exit polls, and in Washington Post polling, a plurality of voters, 49-46, responded affirmatively to the question “Should same-sex marriages be legal in your state?” The issue has shown steady growth in public support.

Priebus and the five authors of the report – Henry Barbour (nephew of former R.N.C. chairman Haley Barbour) of Mississippi, Zori Fonalledas of Puerto Rico, and Glenn McCall of South Carolina, all members of the R.N.C., along with Sally Bradshaw, an adviser to Jeb Bush, and Ari Fleischer, former press secretary to George W. Bush – were far more blunt in their analysis than many expected.

There is at least one crucial problem that the authors, all members of the establishment wing of the party, address only peripherally and with kid gloves: the extreme conservatism of the party’s primary and caucus voters — the people who actually pick nominees. For over three decades, these voters have episodically shown an inclination to go off the deep end and nominate general election losers in House and Senate races — or, in the case of very conservative states and districts, general election winners who push the party in the House and Senate to become an instrument of obstruction.

The highly visible presence of the candidates these voters prefer – recall the party’s Senate nominees in Missouri and Indiana, Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, and their bizarre views on rape and abortion — suggests that the Republican Party has a severe, if not toxic, problem: a septic electorate that, in the words of the Mayo Clinic, “can trigger a cascade of changes that can damage multiple organ systems, causing them to fail.”

If that is the case, then the task of the Priebus commission should not have been to diagnose the party’s problems, but to conduct an autopsy.

Leaving that question aside for a moment, let’s turn to a part of the report that is tough in its implications, but less forcefully put than other sections of the document: the difficulties created by “super PACs” and other independent expenditure “third party” groups that have become a major presence in House and Senate elections. Without naming any super PACs, the five authors take a hard line against the role of these independent expenditure groups active in Republican primaries: “No one has a monopoly on knowing who is the best candidate; the electorate ultimately makes the decision.”

The authors agree with the substance of Karl Rove’s goal in the new Conservative Victory Project — that goal being to weed out marginal candidates in primaries who appeal to the base but alienate swing voters. The authors disagree, however, with the way in which the C.V.P. is going about this task, running negative ads against those likely to carry the party banner down to defeat in November. The Growth and Opportunity report is critical of all independent expenditure groups, including the anti-tax Club for Growth, that try to play kingmaker in the candidate selection process:

Outside groups now play an expanded role affecting federal races and, in some ways, overshadow state parties in primary and general elections. As a result, this environment has caused a splintered Congress with little party cohesion so that gridlock and polarization grow as the political parties lose their ability to rally their elected officeholders around a set of coherent governing policies.

Campaign finance laws and court rulings restrict mega-contributions to the parties while permitting $1 million-plus donations to independent groups, including the two other Rove political committees, American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, which, the report argues, corrupt the political environment:

The current campaign finance environment has led to a handful of friends and allied groups dominating our side’s efforts. This is not healthy. A lot of centralized authority in the hands of a few people at these outside organizations is dangerous for our Party.

In fairness to Rove – a phrase that does not come easily – his agenda does address the issue of a problematic Republican electorate: he aims to prevent ideologically driven voters from committing political suicide, dooming the party’s chances of winning a Senate majority.

I called Jonathan Collegio, spokesman for the three Rove groups (American Crossroads, Crossroads GPS and the Conservative Victory Project) to see how Rove and his allies picture this dynamic playing out. Collegio explained their thinking:

We looked at the last two election cycles and came to the conclusion that we lost from four to seven U.S. Senate seats not because of the party message, in those cases, but because of the party’s messenger.

While claiming that Rove’s new group does not have an anti-Tea Party agenda, Collegio said that in the four to seven Senate races that Republicans lost in 2010 and 2012, primaries produced “candidates who were suboptimal, not necessarily Tea Party candidates, but undisciplined, lacking fund-raising ability and substandard generally.”

Along the same lines as the Priebus report, Collegio cited the 2002 McCain-Feingold law, which prohibits political parties from accepting large “soft money” donations, arguing that it undermines the role of the R.N.C. and other official groups in mediating the political process. The vacuum created by McCain-Feingold served to empower renegade third party groups, one of the many unintended consequences of campaign finance reform. “The campaign finance reforms of the last decade,” Collegio told me

dramatically weakened political parties and artificially constrained the parties’ ability to raise large contributions. That structural change has the effect of empowering outside groups. We are in an era where power is not centralized in the parties because of campaign reforms of 10 years ago. The weakening of the parties, in turn, makes it harder for party leaders to cut deals on big pieces of legislation because they don’t control the electoral pocketbook the way they used to.

A rump group of conservatives disputes the Rove-Collegio analysis of Republican Senate losses, contending that centrist candidates backed by Rove’s American Crossroads fared far worse than those backed by the hard right. Nineteen conservatives, including David Bossie, president of Citizens United; Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; and Richard Viguerie, chairman of Conservative HQ, wrote in a letter to American Crossroads donors (who are publicly listed in campaign finance reports to the Federal Election Commission):

In 2012, the only Senate Republican winners were Jeff Flake (Ariz.), Deb Fischer (Neb.), and Ted Cruz (Tex.) — all of whom enjoyed significant Tea Party and conservative support. Meanwhile, more moderate candidates like Tommy Thompson (Wisc.), Heather Wilson (N. Mex.), Rick Berg (N. Dak.), and Denny Rehberg (Mont.) went down to defeat despite significant support from Crossroads. It was firmly expected that Republicans would capture the Senate in 2012. It is inexcusable that they failed and, in fact, lost two seats. The facts speak for themselves. It was not conservatives. Not one moderate Republican challenger won. According to the Sunlight Foundation, not one Senate challenger supported by Crossroads won. There was another, equally important reason Republicans fared so poorly: Groups like Crossroads squandered hundreds of millions of dollars in what were arguably the most inept campaign advertising efforts ever.

A Republican operative who is a close associate of Rove was more ironic in his criticism of the C.V.P.: “If I was in a Republican primary and Karl Rove came out against me, it would be the single best thing that could happen to my campaign.”

Further fueling suspicions on the right of an anti-conservative vendetta led by Rove and the R.N.C., Rove and party leaders are working together to develop a high-tech digital platform designed to facilitate voter and donor contact and to replicate the major advances in digital campaigning achieved by the Obama campaign.

More broadly, the alliance between Rove and the R.N.C. does substantiate the view that establishment forces are driving the reform movement within the Republican Party, an establishment that includes much of corporate America, including the Chamber of Commerce, the Bush family and its allies, and the more moderate, traditionalist donor community.

Conservative analysts like Timothy P. Carney of the Washington Examiner and Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review quickly spotted the establishment tilt in the Priebus report.Carney wrote:

Republican elites tend to favor mass immigration and be ambivalent or supportive of legal abortion and gay marriage. So, shouldn’t we take it with a grain of salt when the Republican leadership puts out a document saying that the G.O.P. should change only its rhetoric on economic issues, but change its substance on social issues?

Similarly, Ponnuru wrote that the recommendations “come naturally to Republican elites” who “are more likely to favor same-sex marriage and comprehensive immigration reform on principle.” The report reflects “elite conventional wisdom perfectly, just perfectly.”

In January, I pointed out that “If the conservative movement continues on its downward trajectory, the American business community, which has the most to lose from Republican failure, will be the key force arguing for moderation.”

That moment has come. The Priebus report and Rove’s Conservative Victory Project together mark a significant escalation in the battle between the center and the right over the soul of the Republican Party. What has yet to be determined is whether they are fighting over a patient who can be quickly resuscitated or a patient with a chronic but not fatal illness — or a corpse.

The very bluntness of the Growth and Opportunity report reflects the seriousness of the moment the Republican Party faces: increasing difficulty holding on to its House majority; weakening prospects of regaining control of the Senate; and the threat of unending Democratic control of the White House.

Republicans Brag They Won House Majority Because Of Gerrymandering

By Scott Keyes/Think Progress

In a classic Kinsley gaffe, the Republican State Leadership Committee released a report boasting that the only reason the GOP controls the House of Representatives is because they gerrymandered congressional districts in blue states.

The RSLC’s admission came in a shockingly candid report entitled, “How a Strategy of Targeting State Legislative Races in 2010 Led to a Republican U.S. House Majority in 2013″. It details how the group spent $30 million in the 2010 election cycle to sweep up low-cost state legislature races in blue states like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Their efforts were so successful, in fact, that Republicans went from controlling both legislative chambers in 14 states before Election Day to 25 states afterward.

In turn, the new Republican majorities would be tasked with redrawing congressional districts for the 2012 election. “The rationale was straightforward,” the report reads. “Controlling the redistricting process in these states would have the greatest impact on determining how both state legislative and congressional district boundaries would be drawn.”

This effort paid off in spades. As the RSLC’s report concedes (and ThinkProgress hasdocumented extensively), a majority of Americans voted for Democratic congressional candidates on Election Day, but only through the miracle of gerrymandering did Republicans wind up controlling the House. From the report:

Farther down-ballot, aggregated numbers show voters pulled the lever for Republicans only 49 percent of the time in congressional races, suggesting that 2012 could have been a repeat of 2008, when voters gave control of the White House and both chambers of Congress to Democrats.

But, as we see today, that was not the case. Instead, Republicans enjoy a 33-seat margin in the U.S. House seated yesterday in the 113th Congress, having endured Democratic successes atop the ticket and over one million more votes cast for Democratic House candidates than Republicans. The only analogous election in recent political history in which this aberration has taken place was immediately after reapportionment in 1972, when Democrats held a 50 seat majority in the U.S. House of Representatives while losing the presidency and the popular congressional vote by 2.6 million votes.

The report credits gerrymandered maps in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin with allowing Republicans to overcome a 1.1 million popular-vote deficit. In Ohio, for instance, Republicans won 12 out of 16 House races “despite voters casting only 52 percent of their vote for Republican congressional candidates.” The situation was even more egregious to the north. “Michiganders cast over 240,000 more votes for Democratic congressional candidates than Republicans, but still elected a 9-5 Republican delegation to Congress.”

Though party officials typically dance around the unseemly issue of gerrymandering, this report is surprisingly candid and unabashed. The RSLC, after all, is tasked with winning control of state legislatures in large part so they can redraw congressional maps to the GOP’s benefit after redistricting. Because most states allow partisan redistricting, its understandable that the RSLC would release a report boasting of its gerrymandering success that “paved the way to Republicans retaining a U.S. House majority in 2012.”

America's White Male Problem

By Frank Schaeffer/AlterNet

The American political process is being hijacked by a reckless, whining dangerous gang of psychologically damaged white men who are far-right ideologues. I used to be one of them. It's time to tell the truth about our white male problem
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Not everyone who disagrees with the president is a racist. Not even most people who do are. But the continuous attempt by the white far-right in Congress to shut down the government rather than work with our black president has a lot to do with racism. And lurching from manufactured crisis to crisis isn't about politics; it's about pathology. It doesn't make sense politically to take the blame for risking America's future -- and the Republicans know they will take the blame -- so how can we conclude other than something else is going on here?

I’m not talking about the white young male mass murderers we’re afflicted with carrying assault rifles courtesy of the NRA. I’m talking about the white far-right males who hijacked the 112th Congress and are set to destroy the 113th. They have metaphorically done to our country what the killer in Newtown literally did to 20 children, and for the same apparent reason: alienation from the mainstream and retreat to a paranoid delusional fantasy land of -- literal -- mental impairment.

This has less to do with politics and more to do with the fear and mental illness that grips a willfully ignorant minority of white males. But the mainstream media is talking about everything but the underlying racial, cultural and mental health issues afflicting the white male minority of far-right congressmen holding us all hostage. And the extreme insanity of the right-wing rhetoric over the last four years, from "birther" to Obama-is-a-Muslim etc., conclusively points to something other than politics.

The manufactured crisis we face are not about economics. These self-inflicted wounds are about a few people's fear of being marginalized.

It's not considered polite to mention race anymore. But I'm going to mention it anyway. We have a white problem.

I'm a 60-year-old white male father and grandfather. My son served in the Marines. I own a gun. I have handwritten notes from George Bush Sr, Jr, Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford both to me and to my late father expressing gratitude for our contributions to the "fight" for traditional values and the Republican "cause." Been there, done that!

I spent my youth not only as part of the Republican Party but helping to organize the culture wars that have come near to destroying our country. I have worked with the very kind of people who are now the hard-core Republican right. But I have changed my views. I may not be one of them any longer, but I bring an insider's knowledge to the table.

Overlay a map of the states with the safe gerrymandered congressional districts that sent us the Tea Party Republicans hijacking our country and you'll find it's the same map by and large of the former slave states.

Map of slave states

The anxiety of losing white long-held power at the expense of minority and marginalized constituencies like women and gays has metastasized into outright hatred of everything and anything President Obama would suggest. Racism has combined with fear.

The fear is of a world in which white (mostly) evangelical Republicans lose power... forever. The country has moved on, but the safe Republican gerrymandered districts have not. These folks are literally living in a fool's paradise whose time has come and gone.

The white Republican hijackers of our Congress talk about smaller federal government and out-of-control federal spending, states’ rights and the Defense of Marriage Act. These are the defenders of 30-round magazines and personal arsenals, Kevlar-piercing cop-killing bullets, access to unlimited numbers of semiautomatic weapons and lethal handguns carried in public -- all in the name of the Second Amendment.

The mainstream media doesn't have the courage to say it, but the Second Amendment "defense" is nothing to do with today's loud defense of "gun rights." The truth of the matter is that there is a subculture of frightened white Republicans who see their own government as a threat. They've embraced ignorance and a fact-free life that denies evolution, gay-rights, the demographic changes in America, and above all, the fact that their fellow countrymen have rescinded our entire history of racist bigotry and voted for a black man for president. They just can't accept this.

Patterns of red/blue voting show up if you break up the state-by-state vote by sex or race:

(image source New York Times)

The common thread that runs through the Republicans' "issues" of the day has little to do with those issues per se. What it's really about is the fear of a future in which traditional white male power structures dissolve.

The true crux of the friction with the White House and the Democrats and indeed with most Americans -- including most women living in the South and many Southern men as well -- lies in the racial history of Reconstruction, Jim Crow and slavery.

The lies about our federal government -- that somehow they are in league with the United Nations, to the point where we can't even sign an international declaration on the rights of the handicapped! – have nothing to do with the stated objectives. This is like a family argument where an uncle shows up at the dinner table and argues with everyone not because he actually disagrees but because he's feeling alienated from the family.

Simple palpable hatred drives these people to willful ignorance. The white males insisting on carrying guns (in a country where violent crime is way down!) are scared, not of muggers, but of the fact that their imaginary reality is coming unstuck.

They're too smart to believe that Fox News spin on reality is reality. Most of these folks are too smart to believe in their evangelical theology either. I'll bet at heart many are atheists or at least doubters, well aware of the hypocrisies and inanities of evangelical Christianity. But they put on an act of upholding what they believe are the traditional standards we need to live by, which really boils down to little more than white resentment.

These Republicans are from safely gerrymandered districts so they have little to lose and something to gain by “holding the line” against public opinion and the president, even if it continually pushes the country to the brink.

The fact is that many flag-waving American Republican males these days are horribly unpatriotic. Not since the 1960s and the far-left of the Weather Underground have we seen people who hate America so deeply. Some of the Republican "patriots" hate this country so much they join secessionist movements and interpret their "right to bear arms" as a right to build personal arsenals against that day when the federal government comes to "take away our freedoms."

House Republicans like to say that Americans voted for a divided government. They say that “gridlock” is what becomes it. But that’s not true. The Democrats won 50.6% of the votes for president, to 47.8% for the Republicans; 53.6% of the votes for the Senate, to 42.9% for the Republicans.

A state of panic exists because Republican members of Congress demand a state of paralysis. They want to freeze the world as it is because the new world doesn't have room for white male bigots who base their lives on Bronze Age mythology and white, privileged, Jeffersonian-style institutional racism. Their real ideology has nothing to do with gun rights, fighting against abortion or reducing the size of the federal deficit, but has everything to do with their own personal psychological turmoil.

These people are literally ill with fear. And their world is turning lopsided. There is a black man in the White House and he's winning, and worst of all he's self-evidently smarter than they are. He's not even angry!

It is time for the mainstream media to stop playing the Republican extremists' game. Let's talk about racism and white Southern males who can't get with the program. Let's talk about what's really going on with gun rights, which has nothing to do with hunting or home protection or even the Second Amendment, but has everything to do with the delusional paranoia of people who really believe the world is out to get them because it's changing.

Let's talk about the fact that there never was a fiscal cliff, just a dysfunctional Congress hijacked by the white males who turned the Tea Party into their cry of anguish.

The real problem we face is racism, bigotry and willful ignorance in the face of our changing demographics, spiritual beliefs and the challenge that postmodern thought poses to people stuck in Bronze Age thinking. These haters are a minority in the South, but they have  -- through gerrymandering -- given the whole South a black eye. The millions of tolerant Southern white men, women and all the rest of us wherever we're from need to rise up and condemn this charade.

The real problem we face is not economics or gun ownership or what happens to Planned Parenthood, but how we can reintegrate a few hurting marginalized white males in Congress and their most ardent delusional supporters into a better future while stopping them from using self-created political stalemate to burn down the house we all share.