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During his New Rules segment this Friday evening, Bill Maher wrapped things up by taking both Bob Dole and President Obama to task for their praise of the one who shall never be spoken badly about in Republican circles, St. Ronnie Reagan.

As Maher rightfully pointed out, former Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole's claim on Fox News Sunday last month that Reagan could not have survived in today's Republican party doesn't exactly hold water if you actually bother to take a look at how Reagan behaved when he was in office.

MAHER: This has become a kind of conventional wisdom, that the Republican party has gone so far right, Reagan himself wouldn't fit in. But I'm here tonight to call bullshit on that.

Ronald Reagan was an anti-government, union busting, race baiting, anti-abortion and anti-gay, anti-intellectual, who cut rich people's taxes in half, had an incurable case of the military industrial complex, and said Medicare was socialism, that would destroy our freedom.

Sounds to me like he would fit in just fine. [...]

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Former Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole is telling Republicans to put a "closed for repair" sign on the door until 2014 so that the party can develop a "positive agenda."

In an interview that aired on Sunday, Dole told Fox News host Chris Wallace that "there was no doubt about it" that Republicans were abusing the filibuster because motions for cloture had increased from seven in 1969-1970 to 115 in last year's 112th Congress.

"There's some cases where it's probably justified," the war veteran explained. "But not many."

"I think they ought to put a sign on the national committee doors that says closed for repairs until New Year's Day next year," he added. "And spend that time going over ideas and positive agendas."

Dole said that he doubted that he and even former President Ronald Reagan could survive in today's Republican Party.

"Reagan couldn't have made it. Certainly, Nixon couldn't have made it because he had ideas," he pointed out. "I just consider myself a Republican, none of this hyphenated stuff. I was a mainstream conservative Republican."

The former presidential nominee also damned President Barack Obama with faint praise.

"What do you think of Barack Obama," Wallace wondered.

"Great golfer," Dole quipped. "Very articulate. I think, as a president, he lacks communications skills with his own party, let alone the Republican Party. And he's on the road too much."

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It's clear that Rep. Steve King is no fan of immigration reform, or amnesty as he calls it. It's also clear that he and other wingnuts in congress should be really leery of using foreign concepts to them such as "statistical analysis" when they're speaking, as evidenced by the bewildered expressions in the room to King's theory.

via The Hill

The Iowa Republican said immigrants that Ronald Reagan legalized by signing a 1986 "amnesty" bill were responsible for Obama's election.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said Thursday that President Obama would not be president if it weren't for the 1986 amnesty bill that Ronald Reagan signed into law.

King is a leading GOP critic of efforts to pass an immigration reform bill, and has often said on the House floor that Republicans are overreacting to the 2012 election, which some Republicans saw as a sign that the GOP needs to get behind a reform bill.

In an effort to dissuade Republicans, King argued that the 1986 immigration bill that Reagan signed into law is estimated to have brought amnesty to three million illegal immigrants.

He said conservative estimates show that, on average, each of these people brought in five others, leading to 15 million more people in the country, most of whom voted for Obama.

"[T]hey have to admit that Ronald Reagan's signature on the '86 amnesty act brought about Barack Obama's election," King concluded on the House floor.

"[I]t's clear to anybody that can do any kind of statistical analysis that Barack Obama wouldn't be President of the United States without Ronald Reagan's 1986 amnesty act."

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The Daily Show's Jon Stewart ripped former Reagan speech writer and fan girl Peggy Noonan for her selective memory on Meet the Press this past Sunday where she seemed to forget all about her former boss St. Ronnie and his problem called Iran-Contra.

STEWART: Now, think hard Peggy Noonan. Never in your lifetime have you seen a scandal this bad? What if the president secretely sold weapons to Iran in return for American hostages and then used the proceeds to illegally fund a bunch of coked up right-wing jungle rapists in Nicaragua? Ring a bell? Here's a hint. You worked in his White House as a high profile speech writer.

Stewart followed up by playing some old footage of her from back in 2001, where she was making excuses for The Gipper and claiming that he "wanted to help the hostages" "but it spun out of control and Reagan by the end was surprised at some of the things that had happened." And of course it was also just "bad luck."

STEWART: Bad luck! Reagan was just on the wrong place at the wrong time. Specifically the White House during his own administration. This Iran-Contra wasn't a ahhmmm... it wasn't a scandal.

NOONAN from 2002: It was a mistake. It wasn't a disaster, but it was a mistake.

STEWART: Mistake! It's like writing the wrong date on a check... or writing the wrong address on a box marked weapons. Oops...

So how about Obama? Is he off the hook then for his mistakes?

Of course it goes without saying that those two aren't held the same standard in Noonan-world. After reading some of her book about her imaginary boyfriend, Stewart wrapped things up by noting:

STEWART: But here's the deal. You can't really get so upset about Obama if you've written the book, Fifty Shades of Greygan.

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So just how overblown does your scandal mongering and false equivalencies have to get before they're even too much for NBC's David Gregory to stomach without some push back? Peggy Noonan found out this Sunday on Meet the Press, after writing an op-ed this week which called these trumped up "scandals" the media has been fixating on "the worst Washington scandal since Watergate."

As Gregory pointed out to Noonan, the administration she worked for well after the Watergate scandal had that pesky little problem called Iran-Contra that she somehow forgot to mention in her article. Of course, reminding her about St. Ronnie's problems didn't seem to faze her one bit:

GREGORY: Peggy Noonan, you wrote something this week that really struck me in your column on Friday. And I want to put it up on the screen and ask you about it. “We are in the midst,” you write, “Of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one likes what they’re seeing. [The IRS and AP scandals] have left the administration’s credibility deeply, probably irretrievably damaged. They don’t look jerky now, they look dirty. The patina of high-mindedness the president enjoyed is gone.”

I have to say, Peggy, what you don’t talk about here is an administration for a man that you worked for who led the Iran-Catra-- Contra scandal where they ran a secret war and lied to Congress and all the rest. Over-- overstatement here?

PEGGY NOONAN: I don’t think so. I think this is-- what is going on now is all three of these scandals makes a cluster that implies some very bad things about the forthcomingness of the administration and about its ability to at certain dramatic points do the right thing. And I got to tell you, the-- you-- everyone can argue about which of these things is most upsetting, but this IRS thing is something I’ve never seen in my lifetime. It is the revenue gathering arm of the U.S. government…

GREGORY: Peggy-- Peggy, wait a second.

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As Esquire's Charlie Pierce relayed to Stephanie Miller this Tuesday morning, between Benghazi, Benghazi!, BENGHAZI!, the IRS and now the Associated Press phone records, get ready for a really long summer of scandal mongering from Republicans the the beltway Villagers.

We're going to be in for one hearing after another and as Pierce wrote in his column, none of this is going away any time soon: Washington's Political Circus Is Not An Accident:

Want to know why the Benghazi, Benghazi!, BENGHAZI! mummery isn't going away, and why the marginally more serious accusations concerning the IRS aren't going away, either? Read what Howard Fineman, a very reasonable fellow, writes today about the singularly futile press conference the president held. [...]

We are now entering the we're-all-just-feathers-in-the-wind period of scandal coverage in Washington. The courtier press has decided that Washington "has turned into" a political circus, as if the process were a passing thunderstorm or an implacable seismic event. [...]

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Retired professional boxer Mike Tyson on Monday briefly shocked Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade by saying that he was "looking forward" to paying taxes to the federal government, but hoped to save money with "Obamacare."

The former heavyweight champion told Kilmeade that he was hoping to pay off millions in back taxes with a one-man show about his life.

"I'm so proud to be in this," Tyson explained. "I look forward to paying off my taxes and paying off my country, because that's my duty. I know they say that's legal extortion, but listen, I'm living in this country and if I got to pay taxes, that's the money that I paid for my life on Earth."

As Tyson was speaking, Kilmeade appeared momentarily dumbstruck, eyes wide and mouth open.

"I've got the biggest liberal family in the world," Tyson continued. "But I had the more money when Bush and Reagan was president! Oh I shouldn't -- my wife's going to kill me for that."

"Bush and Reagan had this idea that you should keep your money," Kilmeade said.

"Yeah, I'd like that to work for me," Tyson replied. "I'm going to work on that one to with this Obama administration, see can this Obamacare help us keep some money."

(h/t: Twitter/@igorvolsky)

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Former budget director David Stockman says that a "huge cultural problem" concerning defense cuts and higher taxes is linked to a massive alleged conspiracy to cheat on standardized tests in Atlanta Public Schools.

Last week, former Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent Beverly Hall was among 35 educators who were indicted for conspiring to rig standardized test scores between 2005 and 2009.

During a Sunday panel on ABC News, conservative columnist George Will pointed to the No Child Left Behind law passed under President George W. Bush and said that it had been a mistake to tie teacher pay to student test scores.

"We've put in all kinds of perverse incentives all linked to standardized testing," Will explained.

"Cheating is symptomatic of a huge cultural problem we have," Stockman opined. "The cheating that's going on in Washington today, in terms of not being honest about the real choices: higher taxes for you, Social Security cuts for the affluent, big declines in defense not there. The cheating that's going on in terms of the financial system that's totally out of kilter and really needs to be fixed in Wall Street is not even being addressed."

"So, that is symptomatic of a huge national problem."

As Reagan's budget director from 1981 to 1985, Stockman helped pushed through massive tax cuts under the theory that wealth would "trickle down" from richer Americans.

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Even though host Bob Schieffer admitted that he has not read conservative author and columnist Amity Shlaes' recent book, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, he and his producers were more than willing to allow her to come on Face the Nation this Sunday and give their viewers a big heaping helping of the right-wing revisionist version of just what Coolidge's economic policies brought to the country.

It's shameful that someone like this right wing hack is still being allowed time on our airways, but not surprising, since I'm sure the bile she's spewing here, dressed up as an intellectual, high-minded conversation about political biographies, fits in perfectly with the economic policies favored by the 1 percent running the network she's appearing on. They don't seem to be concerned one iota if there's nothing but rich and poor left in America, and as long as their pockets continue to be lined.

Here's more on Coolidge that Shlaes and her ilk are doing their best to make sure never makes its way into the history books: What the right forgets about labor history:

Busting unions gave Calvin Coolidge the White House, but it gave America the Great Depression

For years, American workers’ wages have stagnated, even as they produced more. Since 2008, they have been socked with staggering new bills for bank bailouts and hammered by a Great Recession brought on by the very same banks. Now public sector workers are confronted by a new crop of Republican governors who want to put an end to unions. Union workers in Wisconsin have already conceded all of Governor Walker’s draconian demands. But they want to hold onto their right to bargain so that they won’t be at the mercy of the whims of political appointees or rogue school boards. Tens of thousands have swarmed Madison to show their support for the working people of Wisconsin.

Conservatives are tasked with coming up with a narrative that makes villains out of these working folks and heroes out of the powerful people who aim to squeeze them for what’s left of their economic security.

This is not easy. And you have to admire their ingenuity. Amity Shlaes, ever the eager revisionist, has whipped up a widely parroted narrative that contains just enough truth to give it the ring of plausibility.

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You can add Liz Cheney's name to the list of Republicans that aren't in any mood to help poor old Reince and the rest of them out with their latest farce of a "rebranding" effort. As Steve Benen noted, Cheney's op-ed in Rupert Murdoch's rag this week is laughably delusional. I'd qualify that by saying it would be were it not for the fact that this woman is actually taken seriously by so many: Cheney slips further down the rabbit hole:

The point of Liz Cheney's Wall Street Journal op-ed today is fairly predictable and not altogether uncommon among far-right activists -- she wants the Republican Party to resist the urge to become more mainstream, and instead "fight" harder against the GOP's real and imagined enemies. But in execution, Cheney's piece is a rather extraordinary work of delusion.

Jon Chait highlights some of the more glaring problems with the op-ed -- he uses it to argue, persuasively, that Cheney is "obviously stark raving mad" -- which reads like a bizarre rant from a partisan so filled with rage towards President Obama that reason was thrown out the window when the writer made a right-hand turn into Crazy Town. Cheney is certain, for reasons that remain mysterious, that Obama has "launched a war on Americans' Second Amendment rights," is deliberately sabotaging capitalism, and wants to destroy the nation's global standing on purpose.

It's a truly ridiculous tirade with all the sophistication and accuracy of a Breitbart comments section. But there's also an unintentionally amusing part -- Cheney's unhinged rant includes this Ronald Reagan quote from 1961:

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it and then hand it to them with the well-taught lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free."

This is, to be sure, a popular quote on the right, and if it seems familiar to long-time readers, it's because I've written about it several times before.

In this case, however, Cheney forgot to look up the context in which Reagan made these comments before relying on it. Indeed, note that at one point in the quote, Reagan said, "And if you and I don't do this," although in Cheney's piece, there's no frame of reference to tell the reader what "this" is.

And what was Reagan referring to at the time? I'm glad you asked. "This" was referring to preventing the creation of Medicare. [...]

And so, freedom-loving Americans had to stop Medicare or we "may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free."

Yes, that evil Medicare that's going to enslave everyone, just like, as Steve also noted, Social Security, and now "Obamacare." Chait's column which Steve referenced is worth a full read as well which you can find here: Liz Cheney Is Even More Bonkers Than We Suspected.

Emily Arrowood and Simon Maloy also took the op-ed apart over at Media Matters: Liz Cheney: Get Over 2012 And Start Embracing Romneyism :

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