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Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said on Sunday that he favored former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-FL) as a 2016 presidential candidate, but no Republican could win unless comprehensive immigration reform was passed because the party was in a "demographic death spiral."

"I think we're going to have a political breakthrough, the Congress is going to pass immigration reform," Graham told NBC host David Gregory. "I think we're going to get plus 70 [votes in the Senate], I've never been more optimistic about it."

Gregory wondered if Graham thought that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's (R) meeting last week with former President Bill Clinton (D) would boost his prospects for a 2016 presidential run.

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So much for that Republican rebranding effort. As Rachel Maddow reminded us this Thursday evening, the GOP's social conservative problem is "worse than it's ever been." And the Republicans running for state wide office at the top of the ticket in Virginia don't look like they've got any interest in "taking it a little easy on the fire and brimstone hot sauce" any time soon.

And it's not just Virginia and wingnuts like E.W. Jackson and crazy comments about yoga and voodoo. We've got the Wisconsin Republicans and presidential hopeful Scott Walker with another forced ultrasound bill. The U.S. House is about to vote on a nationwide abortion ban. And then there's Rep. Trent Franks, who decided to do his best job channeling Todd Akin this week.

And last but not least we've got these "tea party" GOP senators and just about every Republican presidential hopeful showing up at the Ralph Reed's Faith & Freedom Coalition conference.

The first question that always comes to mind for me whenever I hear Ralph Reed's name is "Why in the hell isn't that guy in jail instead of having Republican politicians sucking up to him to this day?"

Steve Benen has more on the GOP's rebranding problems, which include Reed here: Three months later, GOP rebranding falls off the rails:

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Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said on Sunday that by passing Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-WI) budget to slash the size of government and shift Medicare into a voucher system, the party had proved that it was not grandstanding or obstructing President Barack Obama.

At a fundraiser in Chicago last week, the president explained to supporters that electing a Democratic Congress was the best way to "work around" GOP obstructionism.

But Priebus told Fox News host Chris Wallace that Obama was working to defeat Republicans "so he can be even further unchecked."

"I hesitate to ask this because it sounds like a softball," the Fox News host noted. "But do you think this president is serious about trying to deal, to negotiate, to compromise?"

Wallace pointed out that The New York Times had recently accused Republicans of "grandstanding" with congressional hearings and investigations into the president.

"I just don't see that," Priebus insisted. "I see one of my best friends in Paul Ryan, that offers up year after year after year, a serious position and legislation on tackling our 10-year debt window, getting our economy under control long term, doing it at his own political peril. But yet, he stands there in the House and passes it every time, and it goes nowhere."

Wallace noted that Democrats had also recently passed a budget and Republicans in the Senate were now refusing to allow a conference committee to reconcile the two budgets.

Priebus, however, dodged that question, saying only that "big things can happen in this country. I think that trust is an issue. I think this president says one thing and does another."

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Former Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan (R-WI) on Sunday used the news that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had scrutinized tea party groups to slam the agency's connection to President Barack Obama's heath care reform law.

Host Chris Wallace pointed out to Ryan on Fox News Sunday that the Treasury inspector general had suggested that a recent IRS scandal had been a "bureaucratic snafu" because tea party groups only represented 96 of the 298 groups that received special scrutiny about their tax-exempt status.

Ryan, however, insisted that the IRS had targeted conservative groups based on their political beliefs and "to suggest that this is some bureaucratic snafu, that's already been disproven."

"The other point I'd say is that as bad as this is, the person in charge of this bureaucratic snafu is now been put in charge of implementing Obamacare," he continued. "I mean, the IRS is now going to be granted huge amounts of unprecedented power over our health care in the implementation of Obamacare."

"And so this is just rotten to the core. This is arrogance. This is big government cronyism. And this is not what hard-working taxpayers deserve."

CBS News observed last week that there was no evidence that Sarah Hall Ingram, who headed the IRS office overseeing tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012, "sanctioned or was even aware of the targeting practices."

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Who would have thought a study that wasn't peer reviewed could have caused so much misery for so many? Stephen Colbert did a great job of taking down the deficit hawks who relied on the flawed Reinhart-Rogoff study, as only he can on his show this Tuesday evening.

Now if we could just get our President and Congressional leaders to quit listening to the likes of Simpson and Bowles, who are still out there pushing a new plan for austerity, even after it was revealed that theirs relied on the discredited research.

Colbert got in a lot of good shots during the segment, but I think this was my favorite, other than what he did with Reinhart and Rogoff's names.

Colbert: Of course they didn't share their data. If they can't use Excel, I doubt they can send an email attachment.

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Who didn't see this cynical move coming? President Obama offers up cuts to Social Security benefits that Republicans want and they immediately turn around and attack him for it. They've done it before, so there's no reason to believe they weren't going to do it again.

It's terrible policy and as this so clearly illustrates, terrible politics as well: Fiscal frauds:

Okay, if this isn’t the clarifying moment we’ve been waiting for, nothing will ever be.

This afternoon on CNN, GOP Rep. Greg Walden, the chairman of the NRCC, opened fire on Obama’s budget by claiming it is an assault on seniors:

“I’ll tell you when you’re going after seniors the way he’s already done on Obamacare, taken $700 billion out of Medicare to put into Obamacare and now coming back at seniors again, I think you’re crossing that line very quickly here in terms of denying access to seniors for health care in districts like mine certainly and around the country,” he said on CNN Wednesday afternoon.

This makes it all but certain that Republicans will use Obama’s Chained CPI proposal to attack Democrats in the 2014 elections for cutting Social Security. Brian Beutler points out that this vindicates the warnings of those on the left who predicted this would happen. [...]

But I wanted to focus on another aspect of what this attack from Walden tells us.

For one thing, it directly contradicts what GOP leaders themselves said earlier today. Remember, John Boehner and Eric Cantor effectively endorsed Chained CPI by claiming we should proceed with those cuts while not raising taxes. Boehner said Obama “deserves some credit” for embracing it. But now the NRCC chair is calling it an assault on seniors?

You could not illustrate the farcical nature of the GOP position on all this more perfectly.

This is what happens when you try to negotiate with hypocrites who don't care if they're talking out of both sides of their mouth at the same time.

Full transcript below the fold.

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Bill Maher wound up his New Rules segment on this Friday evening's Real Time by going after today's crop of Ayn Rand worshiping Libertarians in a rant where Maher basically said he didn't leave Libertarianism, it left him. As he noted, even though he's expressed support for the philosophy in the past, it was because it "meant he didn't want big government my bedroom, or my medicine chest and especially not on the second drawer of the nightstand on the left side of my bed."

I'm sure he'll have all of the Ron and Rand Paul supporters mad at him after he lumped them in with their fellow Ayn Rand fan, Paul Ryan, for basically taking the movement and turning it into a “creepy obsession with free market capitalism.”

Maher thinks the movement has basically lost its collective mind these days, and I would argue you could say the same for the Republican party as well, which as a whole has adopted these very same "principles" if you want to be generous enough to call them that.

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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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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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After the release of Paul Ryan's new budget -- which looked a whole lot like his old budget -- despite the fact that the public rejected their policies when he and Mitt Romney lost the last election -- the panel members on MSNBC's Now with Alex Wagner this Tuesday were asked to weigh in on Ryan's proposal and this latest round of budget negotiations.

There were a lot of good points made about Ryan's ridiculous op-ed in The Wall Street Journal and the fact that he just wants to go after programs that help the poor, the elderly and the most vulnerable in our society and that his "budget" has a lot of numbers that don't add up. Ari Melber then made this point on how Ryan is regarded in political circles:

MELBER: I think Joy is hitting on something really important, which is those are the twin falsehoods, even apart from the hypocrisy of his record. One is, that just because it has numbers in it, doesn't make it a budget, right? My lottery ticket is not a budget. It's just a bunch of numbers on the page. And this thing [...] has a lot of numbers and as everyone has said, doesn't add up. It's more like fan fiction for Ayn Rand than it is a budget. And he's not a deficit hawk. To Joy's point, he's a health care hawk. He is interested in going after every health care program that's basically on the books from Obamacare, as you just articulated, to Medicaid, the program that is the most important for poor people, who need help and also for our society, because when we use medicine, preventative care for poor people, it actually saves all of us money, so it's good on both moral and efficiency terms and that's what's so frustrating here. I think Washington has called him serious for so long, they're over invested in treating this fake charade like it's a budget.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel followed up very nicely on Melber's points just a little bit later in the segment.

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