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Democratic strategist James Carville on Sunday praised tea party-backed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) as "the most talented and fearless Republican politician" in the last 30 years.

In a panel discussion on Sunday, ABC News host George Stephanopoulos noted that recent news reports indicated that Cruz had been examining a possible run for president in 2016.

"The people love Ted Cruz because he's taking on his own party, his own leadership, he's taking on the other party," former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) opined. "He's trying to rock the boat to get us to stop moving towards this cliff that we're headed for as a country. So I've been in about 25 cities in the last few months, all you have to do is mention Ted Cruz and people get on their feet."

"I think he is the most talented and fearless Republican politician I've seen the last 30 years," Carville agreed. "I further think that he's going to run for president and he's going to create something. I'm not sitting here saying that he's going to win. And I think Sen. DeMint is right. I've listened to excerpts of his speech in South Carolina, he touches every button, and this guy has no fear. He just keeps ploughing ahead, and he is going to be something to watch."

"And a lot of Republicans feel this way," he continued. "You hear this a lot, 'If we only got someone who is articulate and was for what we were for, we would win elections. And we get these John McCains and these Mitt Romneys these squishy guys that can't do anything.' Well, there's one thing this guy is not: He ain't squishy, not in the least."

"We're anti-squishy men," Republican strategist Mary Matalin, who is married to Carville, volunteered. "We like really hard men."

(h/t: Mediaite)

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What is it with these Republicans who just can't stop themselves from coming just a hair shy of calling the President of the United States "uppity?" Last week, Bill-O was calling him "cocky" during his Talking Points Memo segment on Fox. Now we've got Lady McCheney Mary Matalin on Mrs. Greenspan's show calling him too "self-reverential" and "self-righteous" and that he wants Republicans to go along with him and pretend they care about doing their jobs and legislating, he'd better start acting nicer to them.

Andrea Mitchell reminded her that he didn't exactly have much good will from the other side, what with them immediately plotting on how to obstruct everything he tried to do from the day he got elected --during that now-famous meeting with Frank Luntz and Newt Gingrich. We also had Mitch McConnell out there just stating openly that his "single most important" goal was to make Barack Obama a one-term president. Matalin feigned ignorance and pretended she had no idea what Mitchell was talking about. She said the GOP leadership didn't attend meetings and the last time she checked, neither Luntz nor Gingrich were in office at the time of that meeting.

Thankfully, Mitchell did remind her that a good deal of the leadership was there, but that didn't stop her from going right back after President Obama and complaining that he wasn't talking nicely enough to those poor sensitive Republicans.

Here's a little reminder of just what went on during that meeting from James Wolcott: The Conspiracy to Commit Legislative Constipation:

In a scene reminiscent of the summit meeting of mob bosses in The Godfather, Republican House leaders were summoned by evil marshmallow and message-crafter Frank Luntz to hash out a strategy to cope with the defeat of their party in 2008 and the election of the newly inaugurated President Obama, according to Robert Draper's just published book Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives.

From a report on Draper's revelation by Ewen MacAskill in the Guardian UK (the bolding is mine):

During a lengthy discussion, the senior GOP members worked out a plan to repeatedly block Obama over the coming four years to try to ensure he would not be re-elected.

In his book, Draper opens with the heady atmosphere in Washington on the days running up to the inauguration and the day itself, which attracted 1.8 million to the mall to witness Obama being sworn in as America's first black president.

Those numbers contributed to a growing sense of unease among Republicans as much the defeat in the White House race the previous November. The 15 Republicans were in a sombre mood as they gathered at the Caucus Room in Washington, an upscale restaurant where a New York strip steak costs $51.

Attending the dinner were House members Eric Cantor, Jeb Hensarling, Pete Hoekstra, Dan Lungren, Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan and Pete Sessions. From the Senate were Tom Coburn, Bob Corker, Jim DeMint, John Ensign and Jon Kyl. Others present were former House Speaker and future – and failed – presidential candidate Newt Gingrich and the Republican strategist Frank Luntz, who organised the dinner and sent out the invitations.

The dinner table was set in a square at Luntz's request so everyone could see one another and talk freely. The session lasted four hours and by the end the sombre mood had lifted: they had conceived a plan. They would take back the House in November 2010, which they did, and use it as a spear to mortally wound Obama in 2011 and take back the Senate and White House in 2012, Draper writes.

"If you act like you're the minority, you're going to stay in the minority," said Keven McCarthy, quoted by Draper. "We've gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign."

The Republicans have done that, bringing Washington to a near standstill several times during Obama's first term over debt and other issues.

Their locked-shut buttocks will unclench of course should Mitt Romney be elected, at which point they'll be passing legislation like street hawkers handing out strip-club flyers. Every bill will be named after Reagan or some other sentimental favorite.

I don't know about anyone else, but I've about had it up to here with these Republicans and their supposed hurt feelings as an excuse for obstruction when they've disrespected President Obama and called him every name in the book for years. Matalin's pearl clutching is growing tiresome --to put it mildly.

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Conservative columnist George Will suspects that the Supreme Court could support equal rights for LGBT people because "quite literally the opposition to gay marriage is dying... it's old people."

On Friday, the Supreme Court announced that it would take up cases on California's Prop 8 same sex marriage ban and the federal government's Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which denies benefits to gay and lesbian spouses.

Will on Sunday suggested that it was not a coincidence that the court decided to hear the cases just a month after voters in Maine, Maryland and Washington backed marriage equality.

"It could make them say, 'It's not necessary for us to go here,'" Will explained. "They don't want to do what they did with abortion. The country was having a constructive accommodation on abortion, liberalizing abortion laws. The court yanked the subject out of democratic discourse and embittered the argument."

He continued: "On the other hand, they can say it's now safe to look at this because there is something like an emerging consensus. Quite literally, the opposition to gay marriage is dying... it's old people."

Republican strategist Mary Matalin, who has previously said that marriage equality is not a civil right, asserted that polls now show Americans support same sex marriage because they know it's not a "threat to the civil order."

"Well, because Americans have common sense," she explained. "There are important constitutional, biological, theological, ontological questions relative to homosexual marriage. People who live in the real world say, the greater threat to the civil order are the heterosexuals who don’t get married and are making babies. That’s an epidemic in crisis proportions. That is irrefutably more problematic for our culture than homosexuals getting married."

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Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman says that Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) is taking "the think out of the think tank" and turning the Heritage Foundation into a "purely political institution" by accepting a job as its president.

The tea party-backed lawmaker announced last week that he would be resigning from the Senate to head the Heritage Foundation because "the conservative movement needs strong leadership in the battle of ideas."

During a Sunday panel discussion on ABC, Republican strategist Mary Matalin sarcastically noted that her "hero," British economist John Maynard Keynes, had said that "ideas drive history, ideas drive progress and Heritage has long been the fount of so many great ideas."

"As a conservative, as a constitutionalist, that was a brilliant move -- a good move for us, a brilliant move for him," she insisted.

"The actual Keynes quote was he said, it's ideas 'which are dangerous for good or evil,'" Krugman pointed out. "I guess I've got a view in this case."

"I'm more interested in what does this do to Heritage?" the liberal economist continued. "I mean, this is somebody who has no sense that he's a researcher or an academic, anything like that. This is sort of taking the think out of the think tank, right? This is turning into a purely political institution."

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I've heard Lady-Mc-Cheney, Mary Matalin say a lot of ridiculous things in her defense of Mitt Romney, but this segment from Anderson Cooper's show on CNN this Thursday evening may have set a new low, even for Matalin's standards, which generally range from low to non-existent. Apparently labor unions, paying people minimum wage instead of slave wages and poverty programs that keep people from starving when times are tough are harming upward mobility in America.

And in this idiot's world, women being allowed to control their own reproductive health and having access to birth control is not one of the primary economic factors in most women's lives, but instead something that has no affect on whether they get "upward mobility opportunities" as well. Really astounding from someone who I assume was alive and cognizant during the last half a century or so and who has been around long enough to maybe remember the days when women were discriminated against because they might not be able to remain at a job, because heaven forbid they might end up pregnant.

Who needs misogynistic men around when you've got women like Matalin doing as much or more damage to her own gender as her male counterparts could ever hope to do.

As to the rest of the segment on CNN, I was glad to see The New York Times' Charles Blow call out Matalin for presuming to know what's best for African-American voters and the fact that you can't separate the issues she was discussing from the economic impact on the lives of average American workers, no matter what their race or gender.

Transcript via CNN below the fold.

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I don't know about anyone else, but I think poor Paul Krugman should have gotten hazard pay for having to appear on the set with Mary Matalin and Peggy Noonan and being tag teamed by their hackery at the same time. ABC's George Stephanopoulos called it a "great round table" when this debacle was over. I've got news for you George. There are a lot of words you could use for this panel segment, most of which I can't use here because we like to keep the site safe for work, but "great" isn't one of them.

Book-ended around the portion of the segment where Mary Matalin was raging on and calling Paul Krugman a liar, we were also treated to Peggy Noonan attempting to do a rewrite on Mitt Romney's policies after he flip flopped again during the first debate and her pretending he worked well with the other side of the aisle as Governor of Massachusetts. She ran up against both Krugman and ABC's Johnathan Karl calling her out for her nonsense, but when Karl brought up the fact that he set a record for the number of vetoes, she just shrugged it off.

Heaven forbid any reality is allowed to be acknowledged if it gets in the way of their talking points.

Transcript below the fold of Noonan doing her best to get the Etch-a-Sketch out for Mitt Romney and his debate performance.

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Republican strategist Mary Matalin on Sunday attempted to lecture Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, saying he had "lied" by claiming Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan's wanted to turn Medicare into a voucher system.

During panel discussion on ABC's This Week, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan asserted that Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney had held himself during last week's debate by appearing to be "a completely moderate, centrist figure."

"Except that everything he used to claim his centrism wasn't true," Krugman pointed out. "So, this is a question. Does that start to take its toll over the next few months... When you say my plan covers pre-existing conditions when it doesn't and when your own campaign has admitted in the past that it doesn't, what do you say? That's amazing."

"You have mischaracterized and you have lied about every position and every particular of the Ryan plan on Medicare," Matalin interrupted, "from the efficiency of the Medicare administration to calling it a voucher plan."

"It is a voucher plan," Krugman replied.

"You are hardly credible on calling somebody else a liar," Matalin quipped.

Krugman quickly returned to Romney's claim during the debate, that his health care plan covered pre-existing conditions.

"I just think that pre-existing thing was a defining moment," he observed. "It was saying this guy believes -- not only did he say something that isn't true, but something that his own campaign has admitted isn't true. And he can say it in front of 70 million people. That's amazing."

As Think Progress noted, Ryan himself has described his plan as "converting Medicare into defined contribution sort of voucher system."

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The Romney campaign needs to get themselves some better spokespeople if they're going to continue to say things like this: Mary Matalin: Thanks To Romney, We Can Single Out ‘Parasites’:

Conservative commentator Mary Matalin hailed Mitt Romney's "47 percent" line on CNN as good news for Republicans.

"There are makers and takers, there are producers and there are parasites," she said. "Americans can distinguish between those who have produced and paid in through no fault of their own and because of Obama's horrible polices who cannot get a job or are underemployed. That's what the campaign is about."

Matalin really needs to put down the Ayn Rand novels and find somewhere else to get her talking points if she wants to stop alienating everyone in the country other than the extreme right-wing, libertarian leaning Republican base. Most people don't believe poor are causing our problems in the United States, or that they don't pay enough in taxes. Quite the opposite, in fact. But if you listen to Lady McCheney here, it's those lazy, mooching, welfare recipients that refuse to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps that are destroying America.

As Hilary Rosen reminded her, it's not the 1960's any more.

Full transcript below the fold.

(John Amato: This reminds me of the time that Glenn Beck called me a parasite.)

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Here we go again with yet another Republican trying to pretend there's an ounce of daylight between what Paul Ryan believes and what Todd Akin believes when it comes to what exemptions there ought to be allowed on abortions. Matalin wants people to believe that there's no harm done by pulling taxpayer funding for women's reproductive services, even though anyone paying an ounce of attention knows that means you're telling poor women they're on their own for a service they can't afford to pay for.

Matalin also pulled out their tired talking point on how cheap and widely available birth control is, claiming that it only costs "$9 a month" and you can "get it anywhere." You can't just go "get it anywhere" and need to go see a doctor and pay for a visit, something Republicans would like to make women start paying out of pocket for again if they have health insurance, since they want to repeal the Affordable Care Act. And unless you're getting a discounted price from Planned Parenthood, which Republicans wish didn't exist, or you have health insurance with prescription drug coverage, I don't know of any place you can buy birth control for under $10 a month. And once again, she's touting something that Democrats made free with no co-pay under the Affordable Care Act, which Republicans have vowed to repeal. So again, if Republicans had their way, women would be paying for all of this out of their own pockets and spending a lot more than a few dollars a month.

The Republicans can pretend all day long that no one cares about any of this, but they're wrong. Women's reproductive issues are tied directly to their economic issues and you can't separate the two. If you can't control your health care costs and your own reproduction, you can't control your own economic situation. Whether you have a choice about having children and when makes all the difference in the world to women being able to go to school and to find a job. Matalin seems to think that somehow those things are not intertwined, or she at least hopes she can convince the CNN viewers to believe it.

As Cornell Belcher explained, the Republicans have got a huge gender gap right now and rhetoric like we heard out of Akin is not going to help them. Matalin knows that full well along with the rest of them, or they wouldn't be so quick to throw Akin under the bus for daring to tell the truth about what most of them actually believe.

Transcript below the fold.

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I seem to remember a time not long ago when this woman's boss was running the country that talk like this would have had the right wingers screaming to the hills that you're an unpatriotic American who doesn't love their country and is on the side of the terrorists. Now, it's apparently perfectly acceptable to bet against America if you're running for president, or so says Lady McCheney, Mary Matalin.

She's not alone either. Here's McCain BFF and Romney supporter, Sen. Lindsey Graham saying the same thing: Lindsey Graham: 'It's Really American' To Avoid Taxes Like Mitt Romney Does .

Good luck with that to both of them with trying to get that to resonate with the general public. And good luck to Mary Matalin with trying to make the argument that people are going to care more about what Romney donated to the Mormon church than him hiding his money overseas so he doesn't have to pay taxes on it.

Transcript of Matalin's hackery on Anderson Cooper's show below the fold.

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