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The chairman of the Republican Party on Sunday explained that he had a plan to turn around his party's recent losing streak by having less debates, earlier conventions, "hackathons" and more "marketing" -- cosmetic changes that give candidates fewer chances to damage themselves without any serious policy changes.

In an interview with RNC Chairman Reince Priebus on Face the Nation, CBS host Bob Schieffer noted that the GOP had recently completed a study after conducting focus groups and polling thousands of people about Republican losses in 2012.

"What did the focus groups -- what did they tell you about what people think about the Republican Party?" the CBS host wondered.

"They told us what you would think that they would think," Priebus sighed. "Number one, we're a little too math focused and not focused on people's hearts, so that we don't relate to average Americans more than we should -- stuffy old guys too much."

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South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Rep. Tim Scott appeared on Greta Van Susteren's show on Fox to discuss Haley's decision to appoint Scott to take Sen. Jim DeMint's place, who is off to collect his wingnut welfare over at The Heritage Foundation after his retirement.

Right out of the gate we had Scott promising to focus on getting that government spending, that they all hate when there's a Democratic in the White House so much under control and advocating for a flat tax. Haley heaped praise on Scott and said that "he earned" this appointment. I guess that's true if anyone thinks there's merit in being even more of an extremist than his predecessor and so far, that seems to be the case.

Here's more on that from Think Progress: Meet Sen. Tim Scott: The Tea Party Lawmaker Who Wanted To Impeach President Obama And Kick Kids Off Food Stamps:

Though DeMint left big, controversial shoes to fill for Republicans, few conservatives will be disappointed with Scott’s record. Elected to Congress just two years ago in the Tea Party wave, Scott has already garnered headlines for his plan to impeach President Obama, his legislation to cut off union members’ children from food stamps, and his defense of Big Oil.

Here’s a quick look at Scott’s record:

• Floated impeaching Obama over the debt ceiling. As the debt ceiling debate raged in the summer of 2011 because of the intransigence of Tea Party freshmen like Scott, the nation inched perilously close to defaulting on its obligations. One option discussed by some officials to avoid that scenario was for the president to assert that the debt ceiling itself was an unconstitutional infringement on the 14th Amendment. However, Tim Scott told a South Carolina Tea Party group that if Obama were to go this route, it would be an “impeachable act.”
• Proposed a bill to cut off food stamps for entire families if one member went on strike. One of the most anti-union members of Congress, Scott proposed a bill two months after entering Congress in 2011 to kick families off food stamps if one adult were participating in a strike. Scott’s legislation made no exception for children or other dependents.
• Wanted to spend an unlimited amount of money to display Ten Commandments outside county building. When Scott was on the Charleston County Council, one of his primary issues was displaying the Ten Commandments outside the Council building. According to the Augusta Chronicle, Scott said the display “would remind council members and speakers the moral absolutes they should follow.” When he was sued for violating the Constitution and a Circuit Judge’s orders, Scott was nonplussed: “Whatever it costs in the pursuit of this goal (of displaying the Commandments) is worth it.”
• Defended fairness of giving billions in subsidies to Big Oil. Scott and his Republican allies in Congress voted repeatedly last year to protect more than $50 billion in taxpayer subsidies for Big Oil corporations. When ThinkProgress asked Scott whether it was fair to do that, especially at a time when oil companies are earning tens of billions in profit every quarter, the Tea Party freshman defended the industry: “fair is a relative word,” said Scott.
• Helped slash South Carolina’s HIV/AIDS budget. As a state representative, Scott backed a proposal to cut the state’s entire HIV/AIDS budget, despite the fact that South Carolina ranks in the top-third of reported AIDS cases. The cuts were ultimately included in the state’s budget, impacting more than 2,000 HIV-positive South Carolinians who needed help paying for their medication.

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Last week, I said that Stephen Colbert was the one candidate I could support to replace reting wingnut South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint. It seems the voters there agree: Colbert is top pick to replace DeMint:

Talk-show host Stephen Colbert is South Carolina voters' preferred candidate to replace Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), according to a new poll by the Democratic Public Policy Polling.

The Comedy Central host, who's openly lobbied for the seat, leads a field where the rest of the names are Republicans: 20 percent of voters want South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) to appoint him to DeMint's seat when the senator resigns from Congress.

Haley has publicly ruled him out, however, because he didn't know the official state drink is milk.

"Stephen, thank you for your interest in South Carolina's U.S. Senate seat and for the thousands of tweets you and your fans sent me," she wrote on her Facebook page on Friday. "But you forget one thing, my friend. You didn't know our state drink. Big, big mistake." Read on...

UPDATE: To no one's surprise, Colbert responded to the Governor's rejection on his show this Monday evening and Stephen and his Super PAC money are determined not to give up. After some ribbing about Haley not knowing that South Carolina's state amphibian is the spotted salamander, Colbert urged his viewers to continue to tweet Haley with the hashtag #spottedsalamander and ask her to name him as DeMint's replacement.

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Now here's a potential Senator from South Carolina I could support: Stephen Colbert to America: I'm "Honored" and Ready to Serve in the US Senate:

Stephen Colbert has his opening. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), the tea party icon, announced Thursday that he will retire from the US Senate in January, leaving Republican Gov. Nikki Haley the task of handpicking DeMint's immediate successor. A Colbert for Senate Twitter account, @ColbertforSC, sprung up almost immediately, and fans have called for Colbert, the author of such classics as I Am America (And So Can You!) and America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren't, to replace DeMint in the hallowed halls of Congress.

Brace yourselves, Colbert Report fans: Colbert, who has made no secret of his desire to hold higher office, says through his publicist that he's ready and willing to step up for his home state. "Stephen is honored by the groundswell of support from the Palmetto State and looks forward to Governor Haley's call," his personal publicist, Carrie Byalick, writes in an email to Mother Jones.

Colbert asked his viewers this Thursday evening to tweet @nikkihaley with the hashtag #SenatorColbert and let her know why she should appoint him to replace wingnut Sen. Jim DeMint. It sure would be nice if he were serious, but I can't imagine Colbert wanting to actually subject himself to the putting up with the idiocy he mocks on a daily basis.

And if anyone wasn't sure what was up with the foot, it's "Hobbit Week" on the Colbert Report.

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I thought one of President Obama's better moments during the debate this week was when he pointed out that access to affordable contraception was not only a health issue for women, but an economic issue as well. During some of that exchange, Mitt Romney once again attempted to obscure his opposition to the Affordable Care Act's contraception coverage mandate and the following day, had one of his surrogates out there claiming that women don't really care about access to affordable contraception and calling it a "peripheral" issue."

As Steve Benen noted, we've seen this act before back in April when Gov. Nikki Haley was out there claiming that women don't care about contraception as well, and this Wednesday, we were treated to round two of this nonsense -- Birth control is not a 'hypothetical situation':

Kerry Healey, Romney's lieutenant governor in Massachusetts, fresh off her borderline-comical turn in the post-debate spin room last night, sat down with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell today, and the host asked questions Healey presumably expected, noting Romney's support for the Blunt Amendment, for example.

Inexplicably, the Romney surrogate described the consequences of the candidate's own proposals as "some hypothetical situation." Healey added that even having a discussion about women being able to afford contraception is a "peripheral" issue.

This arrogant attitude is extraordinary. Under Romney's preferred agenda, employers can end contraception coverage for their women employees, and millions of Americans would no longer be able to afford birth control.

Asked to defend this right-wing nonsense, the Romney campaign's defense is that the question is irrelevant -- as if the issue is so trivial, it's not even worth their time.

If this is Team Romney's attempt to appear in touch with the needs of working families, it's likely to backfire.

Postscript: On a related note, Ed Gillespie said he was "wrong" last night to explain that Romney opposed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. For those keeping score at home, the Romney campaign, over the course of less than a day, has had no position on the law, been opposed to the law, and then supportive of the law.

As Nicole noted in her post about Nikki Haley:

And if by some chance I ignored all good sense and did the things above, when asked to proffer up proof that there isn't a war on women's rights within the GOP, I sure as hell wouldn't be stupid enough to say, "Well, women don't care about contraception."

The Romney campaign doesn't seem to have learned any lessons from what this did to them in the polls with women earlier this year.

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I thought Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers was about as bad as you can get with Republican women getting out there and trying to defend their presidential candidate Mitt Romney and why women don't like him, or Republicans in general for that matter. I was wrong.

After discussing the fact that S.C. Gov Nikki Haley was awarded a speaking spot at the Republican National Convention this year, and what her message would be, Fox host Greta Van Susteren asked Haley about Romney's problem with not doing so well in polling with women. What we got as a response was a whole lot of blather that didn't have a thing to do with women's issues.

Unlike her cohort in the House, Gov. Haley didn't even have a good lie ready for why Republicans really aren't against women having control over their own reproductive rights. In Haley's deluded little brain, it's supposedly all those evil Democrats' fault anyone thinks -- heaven forbid -- there's a "war on women" by the GOP. Just as McMorris Rodgers had previously tried to do, Haley decided to change the subject completely away from why women might not want to vote for Mitt Romney instead of answering Van Susteren's question.

HALEY: I think we have to educate more, you know and the more I get out, the more other people get out, we're starting to see the momentum. It will get down to those last thirty days. It will get down to have gas prices gone up or down? It's going to get down to what people are feeling in their wallets and their pocketbooks.

And I'll give you an example. I was stumping for Romney in Michigan and I was at a rally and an independent came up to me and said, you know, I don't know that much about Gov. Romney, but what I do know is that we deserve better. That's what this is going to come down to is, don't settle for what's not working.

They know that they deserve better. The American people know that they deserve better. They deserve jobs. They don't deserve increased taxes. They want to decrease taxes. They don't deserve seeing their military not taken care of and weakened. They deserve a strong military. They don't deserve watching their credit rating fall as a country. They deserve to see it's credit rating go up.

All of these things will change when we get a President Romney in office.

Yes, that's what's most important to women. Sorry, but I don't think military spending in the direction Mitt Romney wants to take it and gas prices, which the President doesn't necessarily have a lot of control over are on the top of the list as to how most women are going to vote.

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At a campaign stop in South Carolina yesterday, Senator John McCain refers to Mitt Romney as President Obama. Friday morning he said Santorum and Romney (instead of Gingrich) don't share his views on eliminating earmarks.

And we're reminded again with these frequent 'senior moments' why it's fortunate he lost in 2008.

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Gov. Nikki Haley (R) told the Lexington Rotary Club Thursday that she wants South Carolinians to undergo drug screenings before they can receive unemployment benefits.

"I so want drug testing," she said. "I so want it."

"The problem is that I've got to make sure the numbers work... It's certainly not off the table for me. It's something that I've been wanting since the first day I walked into office, but we do have not make sure it's not politically popular, it's actually a good feasible thing to do."

The South Carolina Republican recalled a story about the high rate of drug test failures at the U.S. Department of Energy's Savannah River National Laboratory.

"Down on River Site, they were hiring a few hundred people, and when we sat down and talked to them -- this was back before the campaign -- when we sat down and talked to them, they said of everybody they interviewed, half of them failed a drug test, and of the half that was left, of that 50 percent, the other half couldn't read and write properly," Haley explained.

But Department of Energy spokesman Jim Giusti told The Huffington Post's Arthur Delaney that the failure rate was far lower than Haley had claimed.

"Half the people who applied for a job last year or year 2009 did not fail the drug test," Giusti said. "At the peak of hiring under the Recovery Act, we had less than 1 percent of those hired test positive."

He added that job applicants are not even tested at the River Site until after they have been hired.

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The cast of Morning Joe which included Chris Matthews had themselves a little love fest with Sarah Palin's and touted her chances of winning the 2012 Republican nomination for President. They praised her as some sort of king maker while failing to acknowledge that most of the people she supported were ahead in the polls already while ignoring anyone she supported that lost, and they also refused to address what is really her biggest problem if she would ever want to be taken seriously as a candidate.

You should not be allowed to be considered a serious candidate for anything if you cannot survive even the most basic questions from any media organizations besides Fox "News" or right wing radio hosts, and you can't run for President from your Facebook and Twitter pages.

As long as the media keeps allowing the Sarah Palins, and now the Sharron Angles and the Rand Pauls of the world to be taken seriously as candidates without having to face the same scrutiny anyone should be forced to go through if they want to represent this country, this is a huge problem. They're basically giving all of them permission to throw out their extreme rhetoric to their base without having to explain what they said or answer any questions on actual policy matters or how they'd govern if elected.

Sarah Palin should not be allowed to be a part of the media at Fox, and then spit at the rest of the media and have her flame throwing treated as something the public should pay attention to or take seriously. They need to be putting her on ignore mode until she's willing to go on the air with someone besides Fox and quit giving her more credibility than she deserves.

She'll never survive a Republican primary unless the media continues to give her the same pass they are now. What's frightening is listening to this type of debate from those who would enable her to continue doing what she is now with avoiding any real scrutiny by the media and who should know better. If Matthews thinks she's actually a viable candidate for President in 2012 he's been drinking a bit too much wingnut Kool Aid.

From The Daily Show June 7, 2010:

Helen Thomas retires after her Israel comment, and Larry Marchant announces his inappropriate relationship with Nikki Haley.