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Reince Priebus and the RNC's recent efforts to work on the GOP's messaging and their ridiculous minority outreach program were mocked roundly on this Tuesday evening's The Daily Show by host Jon Stewart, who was, to put it mildly, not impressed with their post-election plan:

“Holy shit, let me break this strategy down, if I may,” Stewart said after running a clip of RNC Chair Reince Priebus discussing the report. “Let me break this strategy down. After pretending minorities didn’t exist proved a loser, the Republican Party has decided to physically go into these areas and engage, person to person, or, as that is known on the streets, talking. But of course, as the saying goes talk is not cheap.”

That’s where the additional paid staff come in.

“So there you go,” Stewart said. “You’re going to go into minority neighborhoods, do a little market research, then send paid spokespeople back into the minority communities with a new retargeted message. Hey, it worked for Kool cigarettes, why not, why not for another organization that has seemed indifferent to the overall health of minorities?”

Stewart followed up with some highlights from this year's CPAC 2013 and after showing the audience some of The Donald, the Wasilla Snowbilly and their new "rising star" and Fox favorite Ben Carson's speeches, wished the Republicans "good luck in 2020."

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It would be nice to see the Republicans called out like this more often for being willing to sabotage their own government if they don't get their way or like the results of the last election. Chris Matthews called them out for just that during his "let me finish" segment on this Tuesday's Hardball: Obama, not the GOP, wants to keep government working:

Let me finish tonight with this.

I think the difference between the Democrats and Republicans is getting as wide as the Grand Canyon.

Watch how they do it:

President Obama wants to keep the government running. Republicans threaten to stop it. It’s relentless. The fiscal “abyss,” the “debt ceiling,” the “sequester,” the end of the “continuing resolution.” Different words, different deadlines, all detonate the same explosion. Threaten to crash the government if you don’t like the way it’s doing something if you don’t like who the American voter has elected.

Isn’t this what the Republicans did back in the old days? If you don’t like government—Guatemala, Iran, the Dominican Republic, Chile—just bring it down.

Guess what? The Republicans are now using that tactic here at home. If they don’t like who’s been elected, they find some way to undermine it, discredit its leaders, whatever it takes to destroy it. We’re using the ways of the old Cold War CIA to destabilize our own country.

Look at the impact these constant threats to shutdown the government are having on public confidence. It’s undermining it, making people forever nervous about the basic ability of America to even have a government.

Is that patriotic? I don’t think so.

Now if we could just get his producers to spare us from the sort of "fair and balanced" discussion he had on the same topic earlier in the program with Michael Steele laughing at the notion that his party behaves this way even though it's obvious he knows full well it's true, and freaking "Fix the Debt" Ed Rendell supposedly representing the left -- maybe we'd be getting somewhere.

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Chris Hayes and his Story of the Week on the predicament for Republican party and conservatives who are "creating their own electoral enemies" with "its visceral appeal to anxieties and fears of white Christians."

After listening to Republicans discussing their some of their losses after this last election, I'd say they're more than aware that they've got a problem, but are unwilling to admit they need to do more than put a little nicer window dressing on their policies. And I don't see them giving up on the fearmongering any time soon. It's all they've got left.

White identity politics doomed 2012 Republican effort:

Of all the surprising and revealing results from Tuesday night, there is one relatively small bit of exit polling data that I think is the key to understanding the entire evening.

You’ve probably heard by now that Mitt Romney won white voters by a sizable margin, while Barack Obama ran up huge margins among African-Americans and Latinos.

In fact, he won Latinos by 71% to 27%, an even wider margin than in 2008 when he won them 67% to 31%. But almost no one has noticed what to me is the most shocking result, and that’s how the two candidates did with Asian-American voters.

Now, Asian-Americans made up a very small sliver of the electorate, just 3%, so a presidential candidate’s performance within that group doesn’t necessarily carry with it massive electoral consequences.

But Asian-Americans are also, according to the latest census, the fastest growing racial sub category in America. In fact, the census projects that by mid-century they will make up 9% of the country. And as it happens, Asian-Americans are also the nation’s highest earning ethnicity, with median incomes even higher than those of whites.

So you might have predicted that Mitt Romney would do well with them, since he won among voters making more than $100,000 a year.

But he did not. He got creamed, losing Asian-American voters 73% to 26%. This is a shocking result not only because just 20 years ago George HW Bush carried Asian-Americans comfortably, or because the margin is so wide,but because the entire category of Asian-American is so obviously a construction there’s little reason to suspect members of the group would vote with each other in any discernible pattern.

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More fearmongering from one of the guys who helped break the bank under Bush: Portman: ‘We Need To Face Facts, We’re Going Broke’:

Sen. Rob Portman delivered the Republican weekly address, saying, “We need to face facts: we’re going broke.” Portman is considered by many to be near the top of Mitt Romney’s list of potential running mates. CNN reports that Portman on Saturday will appear at the opening of a Romney campaign office in Ohio.

As Ben Adler at The Nation wrote last month, here's why the Romney campaign might want to avoid choosing Portman as their pick for vice president: Meet Rob Portman, Bush Republican:

If Mitt Romney is looking for a running mate to completely undermine his argument that his campaign represents the outsider-businessman, fiscally responsible alternative, he would be hard-pressed to find a better choice than Senator Rob Portman (R-OH). And yet the freshman senator and Washington insider is reportedly high on Romney’s vice-presidential short list. (This past weekend he was one of the chosen few attendees at Romney’s mysterious confab with big donors and nominal outside organizers such as Karl Rove.)

Portman’s pedigree is that of a generic establishment Republican career politician. Born in Cincinnati, Portman graduated from a private high school, Dartmouth and the University of Michigan Law School. After law school he moved to Washington, DC, where he worked for the paradigmatic lobbying firm Patton Boggs. Portman registered as a foreign agent, because he represented repressive foreign autocracies such as the Sultanate of Oman and the Republic of Haiti (ruled at the time by infamous dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier). In 1989 Portman joined President George H.W. Bush’s administration as assistant White House counsel, later serving as White House director of legislative affairs.

In 1993 Portman entered a special Congressional election back in Ohio. Portman’s Congressional career was hardly that of a legislative powerhouse. His signature accomplishments include authoring laws to eliminate capital gains taxes on most home sales and drug prevention efforts.

While lobbying for dictators would usually be a prospective running mate’s biggest liability, it is not Portman’s. By far the biggest risk in choosing Portman would be his role in the failed policies of President George W. Bush’s administration. Portman served during Bush’s second term as US Trade Representative and then as director of the Office of Management and Budget. Read on...

Transcript of Portman's remarks below the fold.

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In a discussion of whether Republicans actually believe their anti-debt at all costs rhetoric, Ezra Klein reminds the panel that if Romney wins the Presidential Election, that indicates a toppling of the electorate that assumes a Republican House and Senate as well. Klein asserts that with both houses of Congress and the White House under their control, the Republicans have too much invested in the Ryan Budget not to pass it.

Transcript via Lexis-Nexis:

Here`s a provocative idea that Joe Wiesenthal at "Business Insider" wrote about. He basically said, "Look, we have a jobs deficit in this country. We`re mired in sluggish growth. We need expansionary fiscal policy. The Fed isn`t providing what they should be providing."
Karl you`ve written eloquently on that point.
If you believe an expansionary policy, if you think that`s the way out of the mess, if that`s what you`re voting on, you have a better chance of getting expansionary policy, out of Mitt Romney, despite the noises he`s making about austerity, than you do out of President Barack Obama. The reason being all of a sudden the Republican House would be willing to engage in expansionary policy as soon as they had a Republican president. Do you think that`s true?
SMITH: I don`t know. Like I was just saying before --
HAYES: You can`t say that, we`re on cable news.
SMITH: If I firmly believe they were lying and cynical, I would go for that and I would be happy with that. People say all sorts of things to get elected. But what matters in the end is what happens to real people.
I would support Romney and support the House by thinking they would do expansionary policy. But more and more, I get slightly convinced they`re believing their own B.S. and that worries me, right? Once you really start to believe that we need to cut the debt, then you`re dangerous. I mean, as long as it`s just a lie, you`re OK.
HAYES: Yes, this is a great question. Are they bad -- how bad is the faith on this conversation? Because it actually really does matter. Is this completely disingenuous? Or do they now believe it?
KLEIN: Not only do I think they believe it. I think it`s important to, we have a problem. We say Mitt Romney will get elected. What happens if Mitt Romney gets elected, is a Republican Senate and a Republican House. What they`re going to do, I firmly believe this for better or worse --
HAYES: Wait, stop right there, you say if Mitt Romney is elected, Republican Senate and Republican House, you`re saying because the conditions --
(CROSSTALK)
KLEIN: Yes, it tips that way. I think through budget reconciliation there will not be a filibuster, because it will just be a budget bill. They`re going to pass the Paul Ryan budget. I means, the House and the Senate spent two years taking vote after vote preparing to pass the Paul Ryan budget, dealing with the political consequences. He`s not going to come in and saying, oh, ha, ha, we`re going Keynesian.
SMITH: Right.
KLEIN: Conversely with Obama, I do know they think about this when we come to the sort of the tax-megadon, the debt ceiling and tax cut expiration, they do think a lot about how to get the infrastructure into that package. They do think about how to get tax cuts in there.
There is a Keynesian divide in American politics today. And while in another world you might see Romney go to short-term tax hits. I do think that congressional Republicans truly believe that the key think they need to do, the one thing to expend political capital on is the Ryan budget. And they will.
HAYES: They`ve convinced themselves that the political case they`ve been making is that debt stands for a symbolic token of the way we`ve lost our way, the way we lost our virtue, the thing that`s accelerating our decline --
KLEIN: They don`t think it`s symbolic.
HAYES: No, no, I know. But they now believe what they`ve been saying.

Anyone who thinks the Tea Party Caucus will walk back their rhetoric to save the economy (or the Republic) isn't paying attention. The House Republicans voted to a person in favor of ending Medicare and turning it into a voucher program. This election is a referendum on whether that should happen.

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Jon Stewart took a shot at Republicans and the talking heads over at Fox for their latest round of feigned outrage for the week -- whether it be Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Mitch McConnell now suddenly upset that President Obama dared to say something about judicial activism by the Supreme Court -- or the likes of Judith Miller and Brent Bozell decrying NBC playing an edited recording of the George Zimmerman 911 call the night of the Trayvon Martin shooting.

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Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich on Sunday said that Rush Limbaugh was right to apologize for calling a Georgetown University law student a slut, adding that it was "silly" to say the conservative radio host speaks for Republicans.

Last week, Limbaugh labeled the Sandra Fluke a “prostitute” and a “slut” because of her testimony in Congress that her friend, a lesbian, could not afford the oral contraception she needed to prevent ovarian cysts from forming because her university refused to pay for them on religious grounds.

After advertisers threatened to pull out of his show, Limbaugh offered an apology to Fluke on Saturday.

"I think he's indicated himself he made a mistake and I think he did the right thing," Gingrich told CNN's Candy Crowley Sunday. "He did the right thing. I'm glad he did it. That issue ought to be behind us."

Crowley noted that "as kind of spokesman for the Republican Party," Limbaugh had hurt GOP candidates.

"I know that everybody in the media is desperate to protect Barack Obama, that's silly," Gingrich replied. "The Republican Party has four people running for president, none of whom are Rush Limbaugh."

Earlier in the interview, the former House Speaker also blasted President Barack Obama for "taking on blame" by apologizing after U.S. troops allegedly burned Qurans in Afghanistan.

But Gingrich insisted to Crowley that Limbaugh's apology was not the same thing.

"Let me draw the distinction, [Limbaugh] isn't commander-in-chief," he explained. "His apology didn't do anything worldwide, it didn't put any blame on the United States."

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We've been down this road before and it only took a week for TPM's Sahil Kapur's prediction to be correct that this trial balloon for Republican governors trying to take credit for the economy improving being one of their talking points we're going to hear more of, this time with Virginia's wingnut Gov. Bob McDonnell repeating it during their weekly Republican response to President Obama's weekly address.

For a reminder of why McDonnell is just as full of it this week as he was last week, I'll refer back to my post from here -- Gov. Bob McDonnell: Economy is Recovering Because of What Republican Governors Are Doing, Not the President.

I didn't see McDonnell on the list of Sunday show hackery this weekend, but I believe he agreed to make an appearance on Rachel Maddow's show this week. I look forward to seeing whether she calls him out for the fact that these Republican governors he's touting here have done nothing but do their best to destroy, weaken and sabotage our economy with the help of their cohorts in the Senate and House in order to make President Obama a one term president, which is their political goal, if he actually shows up for the interview.

Transcript below the fold.

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With the upcoming primary in Florida next week, the Republicans decided to trot out their "golden boy" Marco Rubio for a good bit of projection on who it was that tanked our economy and to rattle off their usual list of grievances about President Obama not magically fixing the mess he inherited from George W. Bush in the face of unprecedented obstruction by the Republicans in the Congress.

What Rubio dished out here was more of their upside down definition of "class warfare" where they obviously think most Americans are too stupid to know what the actual definition of class warfare is and that it's their wealthy political donors who are winning that war right now with record income disparity in the United States.

Rubio also repeated the zombie lie that we've been hearing from Mitt Romney on the campaign trail, that "Obama made the economy worse." Jon Perr debunked that lie already for C&L in his post here -- Romney's Big Lie on the Economy Gets Bigger. And for a little reminder about that economic mess the Obama administration was left and who caused our current deficit, I'll just remind everyone again about this chart -- The Bush Deficit.

Rubio again says that the stimulus bill didn't work even though we know that Republicans have been talking out of both sides of their mouth on the issue since we know they were all clamoring for that money for their individual states and districts as we documented here, and here, and here, and here, and here. And we have more where those came from but I'll stop there.

Rubio pretends that the Republicans care about upward mobility and everyday Americans being able to get ahead, but their policies of trickle-down economics and tax breaks for the richest among us have led to nothing but record income disparity the likes of which we haven't seen since The Gilded Age, and their solutions are for more of the same that we saw under George W. Bush, but put on steroids. If this is really the message they want to carry into the general election, it's going to be interesting to see how the public responds once they all start trying to campaign on this around the country and try to sell this snake oil to someone besides Republican primary voters.

If the reactions from my coworkers, friends and family that I've spoken to so far are any indication, I don't think it's going to go well for them. I've gotten nothing but completely negative reaction from anyone who has been even remotely paying attention on their messaging, their "class warfare" rhetoric and even my lifelong Republican father has called the current crop of GOP presidential candidates "a bunch of clowns" after watching some of their debates.

Transcript via Real Clear Politics below the fold -- Rubio Gives GOP Weekly Address: Obama Has "Made Everything Worse":

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In Monday night's debate, this exchange immediately followed the audience booing Ron Paul for invoking the Golden Rule as part of foreign policy.

I wonder if Mitt Romney really understands the Taliban. I wonder if he understands that there are different factions of the Taliban in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere. But mostly, I wonder if he understands that no matter how hard he might try, he cannot truly challenge the current Administration's successful foreign policy, even when that foreign policy includes negotiations with the Taliban.

Romney practically oozes testosterone as he swears that negotiation with the Taliban is absolutely off-limits to a President Romney. He reiterates the neocon line that Iraq was necessary and the only way to avoid such "necessary conflicts" would be to build the "strongest military in the world." Because of course, spending all that money on weapons of world destruction surely endears us to the rest of the world.

This is the official Republican party line. It wouldn't matter if it was Romney or Santorum. These men are one hundred percent committed to Empire writ large all over the world. They have no compunction about our young people being sent off to die for no apparent reason beyond revenge in foreign lands, nor would they lose even a little bit of sleep at night.

Also? I'd like to correct one thing Mr. Romney said. No Iraqi killed Americans. No Iraqi declared war on us. No Iraqi did harm to us. But we invaded and occupied their country anyway, based on a lie. I also appreciate his endorsement of our current President's foreign policy.

Transcript below the fold.

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