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As David Atkins over at Digby's place noted in regard to this wingnut, "Republicans are reaping what they sowed. They rode this circus to power for 30 years using the Southern Strategy and now they get to live with it. Try as they might, the RNC isn't going to get away from this anytime soon. They can run Marco Rubio for President all they'd like, but countless politicians like this guy will be making headlines for years and years to come, wiping away Republican support from decent-minded communities everywhere.

Here's more from Lee Fang's article Rachel mentioned in the clip above: Meet Jason Rapert, the Koch-Backed Evangelical Steering Arkansas's Radical Abortion-Restriction Effort:

On Wednesday, the Arkansas legislature lurched forward with a radical measure to ban most abortions if a fetal heartbeat is detected within six weeks of a pregnancy, a requirement experts say will force the state to insert a probe into a woman’s vagina to detect.

The bill also penalizes doctors who perform abortions after the arbitrary cut-off date with a Class D felony, carrying up to six years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000. The chief sponsor of the measure is Republican State Senator Jason Rapert, a fiddle-playing financial planner with his own evangelical outreach center that hosts mission trips to Uganda, Ghana and the Philippines. He has been among the loudest anti-abortion politicians in the state, and has sponsored a number of other radical bills, including a very strange effort to organize a constitutional convention to give state legislatures power over the national debt limit.

Here he is at a Tea Party rally from 2011, not only complaining about Obama’s Ramadan event but also warning the president that his people have had enough of “minorities” running the country (emphasis added):

RAPERT: I hear you loud and clear, Barack Obama. You don’t represent the country that I grew up with. And your values is not going to save us. We’re going to take this country back for the Lord. We’re going to try to take this country back for conservatism. And we’re not going to allow minorities to run roughshod over what you people believe in!

[...]

In another part of the same speech, Rapert proudly declares himself a birther and attacks the state Supreme Court for knocking down a ban on gay adoptions as example of “minority interests running roughshod over you and me.”

While Rapert certainly enjoys wide support in many corners of the evangelical movement (here he is Rev. John Hagee), what interests me is how many white-shoe corporations stepped in to support his candidacy last year. A look at his final campaign finance report reveals direct corporate dollars and corporate political action committees sponsored by companies supposedly friendly to women:

Here are some examples: Southwestern Energy Company PAC gave $2,000; ARCH PAC, of Arch Coal, gave $1,000; Eli Lilly and Company gave $500; Lisa Allen, an executive with Cox Communications, gave $1,000; Nucor Corp PAC of AR gave $500; AT&T Arkansas PAC gave $2,000; Verizon gave $1,000; and American Electric Power PAC gave $500. Read on...

Go read the rest for more on his donors, including as the title of the piece notes, the Koch brothers. Here's more on him from Think Progress:

Rapert’s other proposals include amending the U.S. Constitution to give state legislatures control of the federal debt limit and for the absolute elimination of all parole for state prisoners.

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Christine O'Donnell appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher this Friday evening during the segment immediately following his opening monologue and blamed her witch ad debacle on her advisers and wanted to get into it with Maher over whether it's fair or not to continue to blame Bush for the troubles with the economy we're still having today. Thankfully, her time was cut short since she was not a member of the panel on the show - or at least she wasn't until the Internet only Overtime segment.

As with all of his shows, Bill Maher always brings all of the guests back in for the on-line version only end of his show and listening to the stupidity that came out of Christine O'Donnell's mouth during this segment was just truly astounding. She was asked how she rectified her supposed "small government conservatism" with the intrusion into people's lives with her social beliefs, and she pretty much spent the entire rest of the segment tying herself in knots, not being able to explain the differences between or need for states' rights and when the federal government needs to step in, revising history, and just making crap up when it suited her.

The other guests who were uselessly trying to reason with her, which was pretty much impossible since you can't reason with someone who's head is thick as a brick, mainly looked like they were all just ready to bang their own heads on the desk by the time this thing was over.

I can honestly say I pity David Simon, Steve Schmidt, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Jim VandeHei, well, maybe not VandeHei, but the rest of them for having to sit through this debacle and try to argue with this know nothing teabagger.

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This is the type of segment where CNN shows itself to be every bit as bad as Fox, where we're constantly treated to the false equivalency game when talking about crazy Republican members of Congress who've gone off the rails, as Rep. Allen West does just about every time the man opens his mouth.

Host Wolf Blitzer asks RNC Chair Reince Priebus about Allen West's statements at a campaign rally where he was bashing the Affordable Care Act and the Supreme Court's ruling on the matter and made the outrageous statement that President Obama would "rather have you be his slave" for possibly allowing taxes to go up and made the ridiculous analogy that everyone should possibly have to purchase a Glock 9mm handgun if you're going to make them purchase health insurance.

And of course rather than admit or say out loud that it is the Republican Party that is the problem and won't control the flame throwing mouthbreathers within their ranks, here's Blitzer pretending there's anyone on the Democratic side of the aisle acting the same way:

BLITZER: You're not going to defend that kind of language. And I deplore that kind of language when a Democrat says it or a Republican says it.

Note to Wolf Blitzer -- there is no equivalent on the Democratic side of the aisle to Allen West's insanity. We don't have anyone acting like McCarthy and calling members of the other party Communists. But Republicans have a whole bunch of them in their ranks, a few of which were actually running for president during this primary season.

And how pathetic is it that Reince Priebus can't dare renounce West here? Is he so afraid of the racists in the Republican base that he can't refute this kind of talk? It's really just shameful, but Republicans have proven they're incapable of feeling shame, so getting them to change their ways out of any sense of decency isn't going to happen, because they don't have any.

Transcript of their exchange below the fold.

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During a call-in session asking viewers what they think the federal government should cut from the budget, here is what a caller from Texas told C-SPAN Washington Journal host Steve Scully this Sunday. This is what happens to your brain after listening to too much right-wing radio and watching Fox.

SCULLY: Next is John from San Antonio. Good morning.

CALLER JOHN: Good morning. How we doing today?

SCULLY: Fine thank you.

CALLER JOHN: I missed a lot. I don't think half the people calling in understand anything about government and how the rich get rich. The rich don't get rich because of government. They get rich because of themselves and when they put a product on the line that the people buy.

Government on the other hand, does not create wealth. They only create debt. Every time you hire one of these suckers, that's one of me too. Every time you hire one somebody in the private sector's got to pay a debt. Think about what we do for government. They are very, very rich and because of the private sector.

They have a generous retirement pay. They have a generous health care pay and because of the private sector, not because of government. Government is like, like old Egypt, when they had the Pharaohs, and everybody else and the serfs had to go out in the field and give 90% of what they earned to government, just like we do in America here during the slave trade, during slavery time.

Those guys are out in the field giving all of this stuff to the slave owner and that is exactly what we're doing right now. We've got the ruling class, government, taking all of the riches of America unto themselves. And then got you believing the problem we have is the rich man who got up off his rear end and went to work and earned what he got today.

I want to be rich one day and I darn sure don't want government telling me when I can be rich and how long it's going to take me to become rich as a result. Now in these budgets they've got, if they're not cutting the costs, the labor costs of government, moving it down to the private sector area, then they're blowing smoke and lying to us all.

SCULLY: Okay.

There are a lot of arguments you could make about how ridiculous and wrong every single thing this man had to say was, including being completely backwards when it comes to large corporations and people getting rich off of our tax dollars. But that aside, I wish someone would also ask this man to read or listen to this (the video is at the original post).

Thom Hartmann: Day in the Life of Joe Middle-Class Republican:

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Somebody got on Tweety's bad side tonight... the Tea Party Express' Sal Russo. Joan Walsh didn't get a chance to say much during the segment but she has more here at Salon -- The skewering of Sal Russo:

Live by the Tea Party, die by the Tea Party. The GOP flack falls apart defending Michele Bachmann's slavery history

Poor Sal Russo. The Tea Party Express leader had a rough day. Booked on MSNBC's "Hardball" to discuss Michele Bachmann's upcoming State of the Union rebuttal, instead he found himself confronted by Bachmann's idiotic whitewash of American history in a speech in Iowa over the weekend.

Go read the rest for more on Bachmann's nonsense he was trying to defend, but I thought I'd share one more point she made during the interview and in her article about these astroturf teabaggers and who they really are.

It was hard to feel sorry for Russo, though: He's a mainstream Republican campaign consultant who's worked for everyone from Ronald Reagan to Christine Todd Whitman. He saw a future in the Tea Party, so he hitched his wagon to its "Express." His firm Russo Marsh and Associates paid itself millions for promoting the candidacies of Christine O'Donnell, Sharron Angle and Joe Miller -- three seats Republicans should have won but lost because Russo's candidates were crackpots. (Russo insists his firm does it for love, not money.) Now he's hyping Bachmann; it's the Tea Party Express that's sponsoring her speech opposite official GOP rebutter, Rising Star™ Paul Ryan. Maybe Russo is secretly working for the Democrats?

On "Hardball," I tried to meet Russo on his own terms and talk about the deficit. His former boss, Ronald Reagan, built up the largest peacetime budget deficit in history back in the day, and also signed the largest peacetime tax increase. Republican George W. Bush took over a $200 billion annual budget surplus left by Democrat Bill Clinton, and handed President Obama a $1.2 trillion annual deficit. Where was Russo's Tea Party movement when Republicans were looting the Treasury?

Nowhere to be found. Russo and his buddy Dick Armey and the rest of them didn't have a reason to be busing them to town halls when Republicans were busting the budget.

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Looks like someone is afraid of the wingnuts in his own party -- Cantor Repeatedly Refuses To Call Birtherism Crazy: ‘I Don’t Think It’s Nice To Call Anyone Crazy’:

This morning on NBC’s Meet the Press, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) repeatedly refused host David Gregory’s invitation to call questions about President Obama’s citizenship illegitimate, and he also declined to call such rhetoric “crazy,” saying “I don’t think it’s nice to call anyone crazy, ok?” After several prompts from Gregory, Cantor eventually said he believes the president “is a citizen of the United States”:

GREGORY: This is a leadership moment here. There are elements of this country who question the president’s citizenship, who think that his birth certificate is inauthentic. Will you call that what it is, which is crazy talk?

CANTOR: [laughs] David, you know, a lot of that has been an issue sort of generated by not only the media but others in the country. Most Americans really are beyond that and they want us to focus —

GREGORY: Is somebody who brings that up engaging in crazy talk?

CANTOR: David I don’t think it’s nice to call anyone crazy, OK?

GREGORY: Alright. Is it a legitimate or illegitimate issue?

CANTOR: I don’t think it’s an issue that we need to address at all. I think we need to focus on trying –

GREGORY: His citizenship should never be questioned in your judgment, is that what you’re saying?

CANTOR: It’s not an issue that even needs to be on the policymaking table right now.

GREGORY: Because it’s illegitimate? Why won’t you just call it what it is? Because I feel like there are a lot of Republican leaders who don’t want to go as far as to criticize those who –

CANTOR: I think the president is a citizen of the United States.

As Think Progress noted, it's not just these tea partiers spouting this birther nonsense, but members of the House of Representatives as well. His reluctance to lead on this matter is more than just unfortunate, it's shameful.

Bill Maher was back on the air this weekend with the 2011 premier of Real Time and he had a few things to say about what the Founding Fathers might have thought of this anti-intellectual teabagger movement in his New Rules segment.

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CNN's John King asked Sen. John McCain if he had any advice for the incoming Congressional freshmen. Even after all the angry unhinged tirades we've seen from McCain on the Senate floor this year, they can't stop treating him like he's some kind of elder statesman instead of someone who's been scaring the hell out of his colleagues lately instead.

Of course like the rest of them, McCain mentioned cuts to entitlement spending. Heaven forbid he and Cindy might not be able to afford to keep all of their mansions if they were asked to pay more in taxes. Shared sacrifice don't ya' know... as long as it's the underclass that's sharing it.

McCain also said they'd better be ready to give into the demands of the teabaggers or possibly face primaries, something he'd know all about. We can't expect them to let down those Koch brothers, even though the majority of the public wants them to raise taxes on the rich and cut defense spending.

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Anyone want to take a guess how many of these "Tea Party" rallies this woman has been attending? That or how much Fox News she's sitting around watching every day. She's reading straight from the Dick Armey/Glenn Beck I've got mine and the hell with everyone else script.

From the Oct. 10, 2010 edition of The Washington Journal.

SCULLY: Michelle is joining us, last call Flat Rock, NC. Good morning.

CALLER: Good morning. My comment is about people’s attitude of entitlement, not only the Congressmen but the average American. I realize there are a lot of good hard working American people who are out of work with no fault of their own. But I still see a lot of people with this extending unemployment and that where they aren’t really looking for a job.

Now here are possibly the five best sentences you’ll ever read. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity, by legislating the wealth out of prosperity. What one person receives without working for, another person must for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them. And when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they worked for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it. I do not understand that we’re going to punish the wealthy. I am not wealthy by any means, but I am very middle class. But, what is the incentive of working hard and making more money if you’re just going to have less of it.

SCULLY: Thank you Michelle.

Oh good grief. The cognitive dissonance here is just astounding. Here's some of the footage Sam Seder was talking about yesterday with Cenk Uygur on Ratigan's show from Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally. Head spinning, truly.