THE OH-SO-TOLERANT MIKE HUCKABEE

Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, has criticized fellow party members who (in his words) have made "idiotic statements" and said "biologically stupid things," but he has kind words for one Republican:

Priebus cited former governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas as an example of someone who could be "a model for a lot of people in our party" in terms of discussing issues like marriage and abortion. "I always tell people: Listen to Governor Mike Huckabee," he said. "I don't know anyone that talks about them any better."

Yeah, that Mike Huckabee sure knows how to do outreach -- like the time he blamed the Sandy Hook massacre on gay people and abortion:

First, on Friday, mere hours after the shooting, Huckabee appeared on Fox to muse, "We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"

... over the weekend, on his own [radio] show, he took on "the predictable left" ... "It's the fact that people sue a city so we aren't confronted with a manger scene or Christmas carol ... Churches and Christian-owned businesses are told to surrender their values under the edict of government orders to provide tax-funded abortion pills." On his Web page, he ... wrote, "We dismiss the notion of natural law and the notion that there are moral absolutes and seemed amazed when some kids make it their own morality to kill innocent children. We diminish and even hold in contempt the natural family of a father and mother creating and then responsibly raising the next generation and then express dismay that kids feel no real connection to their families or even the concept of a family."

Or the time he went on Judge Andrew Napolitano's TV show and compared gay marriage to slavery:

Discussing the legalization of same-sex marriage, Napolitano pressed Huckabee on the federal government's role in protecting "traditional marriage":

NAPOLITANO: But that's not an issue for the President or the federal government, that's an issue for the states, right? Massachusetts goes one way, Texas goes another.

HUCKABEE: I think when it comes to some issues, human life for example, that's like saying "slavery is okay in Mississippi but it's not okay in Massachusetts." There are some things that rise above the legislation of states.

Or the time he compared legal abortion to the Holocaust:

Huckabee recalled that Oskar Schindler, a Nazi businessman, saved roughly 1,200 Jews from the Holocaust by employing them in his factories....

"And now we are called into this incredible Holocaust of our own in America," Huckabee continued. "Fifty-five million babies. Fifty-five million babies since 1973 have died in what ought to be the safest place in the world, their mother's womb. It has become one of the most dangerous places for a baby to be....”

Or the time he compared gay marriage to drug addiction and incest:

Huckabee ... told college journalists last week that gay couples should not be permitted to adopt. "Children are not puppies," he said....

Huckabee told [an] interviewer that not every group's interests deserve to be accommodated, if their lifestyle is outside of what he called "the ideal."

"That would be like saying, well there's there are a lot of people who like to use drugs so let's go ahead and accommodate those who want to use drugs. There are some people who believe in incest, so we should accommodate them. There are people who believe in polygamy, should we accommodate them?" he said, according to a transcript of the interview.

Yeah, that's the model for Republicans to emulate! That'll win over the unpersuaded! You're so right, Reince!

THAT REALLY WOULD HAVE BEEN THE DEATH OF THE GOP ... RIGHT?

Regular readers know that I think the Republican Party is doing just fine these days, thank you very much, given its current stranglehold on Congress, the Supreme Court, and the states. But when I read that Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum seriously considered forming a unity ticket in order to defeat Mitt Romney in last year's GOP primaries, my first reaction was: wow, the results in that general election contest really would have justified a GOP "autopsy."

At least I hope so. The linked story, from Businessweek, says that Newt and Rick couldn't finalize the plan because they couldn't agree which one of them would top the ticket. I would have loved to see Gingrich on top, because of his endless self-regard and the sheer creativity of his carefully thought-out gaffes, which are remarkable for their ability to offend a broad range of Americans. (Poor schoolchildren should work as janitors? Women shouldn't be in combat "because they get infections"?) Before pollsters stopped polling this particular head-to-head, President Obama was leading Gingrich by 13.2 points, according to the Real Clear Politics poll aggregation.

But Obama's lead over Santorum, according to RCP, was only 7.8 points, and he was within shouting distance in a few surveys. My fear is that the mainstream press -- desperate as always to enable the GOP and perpetually in denial about the depths of its craziness -- would decide that, well, Santorum wasn't one of the crazies, like Cain or Trump, he was a serious, thoughtful guy who'd spent years in the Senate and had won his election victories in a swing state ... oh, and, yes, he does oppose not only gay marriage and abortion but also contraception, but really, isn't it Obama who's the radical here, with his embrace of Sandra Fluke and his insistence on forcing a contraceptive mandate down the throats of those nice Catholics?

I know, I know -- the latter didn't work for the GOP in the race we actually had (even though the mainstream media pushed the line that Obama was going too far on reproductive rights). But Santorum had that developmentally disabled daughter, whose condition he milked for all it was worth, to the delight of right-wingers, especially right-wing women (as The New York Times noted during the campaign). If he'd won the nomination under those conditions, even with Gingrich in tow as his running mate, wouldn't the members of the MSM have thoughtfully scratched their chins and said that he was clearly touching a cultural nerve, unlike that elitist Obama?

Oh, and neither Gingrich nor Santorum was an Ivy Leaguer, unlike that hoity-toity snob Obama. Who's the real American now?

I write all this and then I think: what am I talking about? It's Santorum. It's Gingrich. They're really, really unlikable. (Especially Gingrich.)

So, yeah, even though I think the press would have given Rick 'n' Newt much more credibility as candidates than they deserved, it would have been a blowout. And I hope everyone would have recognized that a party that would endorse this ticket had really serious problems.

Or perhaps it just would have been a cue for the Village to say, "None of this would have happened if Jeb Bush/Mitch Daniels/Chris Christie had run...."

ANOTHER WHITE GUY TELLS AFRICAN-AMERICANS THAT THEY'RE DOING THIS BLACK THING WRONG

This is Nolan Finley, editorial-page editor of The Detroit News.





Mr. Finley has written an op-ed about right-wingers' new flavor of the month -- Dr. Benjamin Carson, an African-American who's retiring as the head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, and who gave a wingnut-delighting speech at the National Prayer Breakfast this year. Carsongrew up in Detroit, and Finley thinks Carson would be an interesting candidate for the U.S. Senate seat that's opening up in Michigan in 2014 ... that is, if fascist black people didn't brutally crush him underfoot with their jackboots:

Dr. Ben Carson is a Black History month staple. Each February, schoolchildren hear the story of the impoverished African-American boy from Detroit, a struggling student whose mother made him read two books a week until he bloomed into a scholar.

Leaving Detroit for Yale, Carson eventually found his way to John Hopkins, where he became one of the world's most preeminent neurosurgeons, gaining international acclaim in 1987 for performing the first separation of twins conjoined at the head. He is held as an African-American hero.

But some are calling him a token, an Uncle Tom, a traitor to his race. Why?

Because he came out of the closet. As a conservative. Maybe even a Republican. And African Americans aren't allowed to be Republican and keep full membership in their race.

Now that you've declared yourself as an expert on other people's racial membership requirements, please proceed, Mr. Finley.

The furor over Carson's politics began in February, when he was invited to speak at the National Prayer Breakfast.

The doctor told an audience that included President Barack Obama that the president's policies are hindering economic growth and opportunity in America.

Liberals screamed that Carson was parroting right-wing talking points and disrespecting the president.

That's because he was parroting right-wing talking points and disrespecting the president. He denounced "PC." He advocated a flat tax. He railed against Obamacare. Not talking-points-y enough for you, Nolan? And he did it at the National Prayer Breakfast, where, a year before, the president himself was denounced for allegedly politicizing the event -- one congressman walked out, and he was attacked by Orrin Hatch on the Senate floor -- merely because he advocated closing certain tax loopholes, invoking Christian principles. (But of course there's a double standard for disrespect in this country, and it runs along ideological, not racial, lines.)

But back to Nolan Finley's notions of black fascism:

Carson said at the prayer breakfast that "in this country, one of the founding principles was freedom of thought and freedom of expression."

Blacks have never fully enjoyed that freedom, first because of slavery, then Jim Crow, and now due to self-imposed sanctions on what African Americans can think and say politically and still keep their street cred.

Yes, Finley actually wrote that. He actually compared black criticism of black right-wingers to slavery and Jim Crow.

And finally:

If he got in the Michigan Senate race as a conservative Republican, Carson would test whether blacks are willing to extend to an African-American icon the freedom to think for himself.

You know what, Nolan? Dr. Carson has the freedom to think for himself. (Or, for that matter, to let Fox News and talk radio do his thinking for him, like most of his fellow right-wingers in America.) He has freedom of speech -- why, I believe the event that put him on the political map was a speech, that very National Prayer Breakfast speech to which you alluded, which did not result in his arrest and imprisonment. As I recall, he followed that up with another speech at CPAC, which also did not result in the deprivation of his liberty. He has the freedom to write -- he's published quite a few books, one of which, America the Beautiful, was recently on the New York Times hardcover and paperback bestseller lists simultaneously, and none of which, as far as I know, has been legally removed from bookstore shelves by either the fascist Obama government or roving gangs of fascist brownshirt black people.

What Carson does not have is the right to be exempt from criticism if he makes controversial public statements. That is not the same thing as freedom of speech. If you think it is, Mr. Finley, you obviously went to the Sarah Palin School of Constitutional Law.

BUT ... BUT ... BUT I THOUGHT THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WAS DEAD!

If the GOP has one foot and four toes in the grave, apparently no one told K Street:

Democrats control the White House and the Senate, but you wouldn’t know it by looking down K Street.

Republicans hold more than 30 of the 50 highest-profile, in-house lobbying jobs in town, a POLITICO analysis found. That doesn't even include lobbying shops and law firms, which have long been Republican-dominated.

That means the biggest special influence players in Washington are relying more and spending big on a party that's more on the outs than in, to make their case in the halls of Congress and to the White House....

The trend has been on full display in many of the most recent big hires....

The article, from Politico, offers several theories -- that firms thought Romney would win (though the trend continued after November), that fewer Democrats want to go into lobbying, that businesses are just more pro-Republican.

The fact is, the folks who employ lots of lobbyists don't think they're at risk of losing clout as a result of hiring and retaining top people from this supposedly struggling, aimless, moribund party.

Now, maybe our system is so wired for the rich and powerful that it doesn't matter who gets hired for these jobs, because the rich and powerful will always win.

Or maybe it's less important to lobby Democrats with Democrats because Democratic politicians and staffers don't think Republicans are the Antichrist, whereas Republican pols and staffers don't concede the same point about Democrats.

But it looks to me as if these firms know that reports of the death of the GOP -- the party that, after all, still controls the House and, effectively, the Senate -- are greatly exaggerated.

WHEN ONE TRIBE GOES TO WAR, THERE'S NO WAY THAT YOU CAN SCORE

Yesterday, Charlie Pierce took note of a new Gallup poll that shows solid support for government proposals to create jobs:

That's 77 percent of the respondents who want some sort of WPA 2.0 to make sure the bridges don't fall down while we're driving to work. That's 75 percent who want a federal jobs creation program. These two numbers include, respectively, 63 percent and 56 percent of Republican respondents.

Of course, none of this can happen, nor can other policy changes that have overwhelming public support:

It is helpful to look at these numbers in comparison to what's going on as regards sensible gun control. There are 60 percent of Americans who would back an assault-weapons ban similar to the one that Harry Reid threw over the side yesterday. As for background checks on all gun purchases, as proposed by the president, that scores 91 percent.... Does sensible gun control have a chance of passing? Even the background checks are 50-50.

How do Republicans get away with this? Pierce has a theory:

You would think that, in a democratic republic, a party dedicated to frustrating the expressed will of a huge majority of the people would find itself in deep political peril. But there's no indication that either the public, or the political elites, see this current state of affairs as anything beyond ordinary politics and business as usual. Who's up? Who's down? Will Joe Manchin have a tough re-election fight? When you divorce politics from policy as thoroughly as we have done in this country -- whether this has occurred through a feckless courtier media, or through a political class insulated by the power of money, or by the steady, parallel drumbeats of empty centrism and government-as-the-problem, or by all of those combined -- then you ask for exactly what we have today -- a nation of paralyzed, impotent majorities, speaking a language that the political elites no longer choose to learn. We have majorities that can be safely ignored.

Ahhh, but right-wingers haven't divorced politics from policy. That's obvious if you pay any attention whatsoever to conservative media. Right-wingers aren't obsessed with who's-up-who's-down to the exclusion of all else. Right-wingers don't look at every bad situation and think, "Both sides do it." When bad things occur, Fox and talk radio tell their shared audience that one side "does it." Fox and talk radio get their audience riled up about policy all the time. Right-wingers have highly developed views on guns and immigration and taxes and gay marriage and Iran and just about any other issue you can name.

And right-wingers passionately back their tribe -- they may tell pollsters they're profoundly disappointed in the GOP, but it's only because they think the GOP isn't conservative enough. They always want it to win.

There are the twin problems that allow Republicans to get away with obstructionism on issues on which their positions have laughably little support: the people in the crazy GOP base are actively, incessantly focused on seeing to it that their specific policy provisions prevail, and most of America isn't; and they really care about victory for their tribe, whereas most of the rest of us, even a hell of a lot of people who regard themselves as more or less liberal, will shrug and vote for Chris Christie or Rudy Giuliani or Susan Collins if these folks toss us a moderate bone or two, or keep Scott Walker in office because using a recall election to dump a guy who's kicking labor in the teeth with custom-made steel-toed Koch boots just isn't nice.

If as many liberals (and, hell, even moderates) were as politicized and focused as conservatives are, we'd respond to this obstructionism by pushing back -- hard. But we're not at DefCon 1. They are.

FREEPERS THINK IT'S PERFECTLY UNDERSTANDABLE THAT SOME FREEDOM-LOVING PATRIOT WOULD ASSASSINATE THE COLORADO PRISON CHIEF

As you probably know, Tom Clements, the head of Colorado's prisons, was shot and killed at his own front door Tuesday night. The folks over at Free Republic haven't settled on a theory regarding who killed Clements -- some suspect Mexican drug gangs (this comes in a lament about "the Mexification of America"); others worry about Muslims ("I think I’ve become more paranoid over the last year. The last 3 deliveries that were made to my home and required the delivery men to be in my home ... were all immigrants from Muslim countries"); others suspect Saudi involvement (a notion authorities are actually looking into, because Clements recently refused to allow a Saudi national to be returned to Saudi Arabia to finish out his sentence for kidnapping and sexually enslaving an employee).

But most of the Freepers think that if a True American Patriot were Clements's killer, that would be perfectly understandable, because government officials who support gun control -- Clements backed the recently passed gun laws in Colorado -- are "oathbreakers":

At some point, I expect this sort of thing to be quite common.

****

And yet, these oathbreaking tyrants continue to act as if they can trample people's Constitutional rights with impunity, and remain unscathed.

The only thing that protects oathbreakers, in reality, is the longsuffering of the American people, and our reticence to take life while abuses can still be suffered. But there will come a point when that will no longer be enough to protect the oathbreakers, and they will lose their lives as surely as this man did.

****

But there will come a point when that will no longer be enough to protect the oathbreakers, and they will lose their lives as surely as this man did.


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Bureaucratic fragging?

Sadly, it may well come to that. Don't know that this guy "deserved" it, or why he got it.

But when the oppressed finally decide that the oppressors are never going to let up, just get worse and worse, they might well make it open season on elected officials and executive/administrative bureaucrats.

As the US (should have) learned in Nam & the Soviets in Afghanistan, guerrilla warfare is nearly impossible to beat. It's like playing Smack a Mole. Something DHS, with all of its hubris, is going to discover when it clamps down on the general populace. And it will. When, not if.


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Sorry to hear this but NOT surprised.
The surprising thing to me is that more gub mint types aren’t offed.
Or their families.
Specially when they continue to f with peoples lives.

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Law enforcement had better have some serious discussions with the gun grabbing politicians. LE wants law abiding gun owners on their side.

Oh, and there's this exchange:

Anyone seen Henry Bowman lately?

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...or Ranya Bardiwell ?

Henry Bowman is the hero of a gun-culture cult novel called Unintended Consequences; a gun collector, he's targeted by the ATF, and he goes on to murder several ATF agents until, ultimately, "the President of the United States is forced to give an address to the nation relating his intent to repeal the unconstitutional laws including the National Firearms Act of 1934 and Gun Control Act of 1968."

Ranya Badiwell? Oh, the novel she's featured in sounds like a real trip:

... Now, courtesy of former Navy SEAL Matthew Bracken, comes ... a portrait of the apocalypse Bracken fears will overtake America thanks to undocumented immigration from the south. The book is a fictionalized version of the Aztlan conspiracy theory -- the idea that Mexico is secretly planning a "reconquista" (reconquering) of the seven states of the Southwest....

...Bracken's curvaceous 27-year-old heroine, Ranya Bardiwell, tends the fields under the supervision of gun-toting "Internal Security Agency" guards, monitored all the while by a Radio Frequency Identification Device implanted in her shoulder. Through flashbacks, we learn that Bardiwell gave birth to a son five years ago in federal prison. He was taken from her just minutes out of the womb. The action begins as Bardiwell is summoned to the office of a female warden who attempts to seduce her. They take a bubble bath together, during which the warden reveals that Bardiwell's son is living in Albuquerque, N.M., and has been adopted by FBI agent Alex Garabanda and his IRS agent wife.

Enraged at the thought of her child being raised by federal agents, Bardiwell straddles the naked warden and chokes her to death in the tub. She escapes, intent on recovering her son....

Bardiwell is captured by the militia in Albuquerque. But, entranced by her curves and her marksmanship -- demonstrated when she shoots a hippie -- the dashing Comandante Basilo Ramos orders Bardiwell to conduct weapons training for his troops and makes her his mistress, holding her captive in his mansion. In a bizarre scene, Bardiwell drugs Ramos, photographs him sodomizing a communist professor whom he strangles during sex, then escapes out a second-story window, climbing down a rope made from the comandante's silk ties. Bardiwell then hooks up with her child's disillusioned adoptive father, Alex Garabanda, who is suicidal after losing custody of the boy to his ex-wife the IRS agent and her lesbian lover.

Bardiwell and Garabanda set out to rescue the boy from his "two mommies," but first stop to conduct surveillance at a secret meeting of traitorous politicians and "billionaire globalists" drafting a new Constitution to turn America socialist....

Go to the link (it's at the site of the Southern Poverty Law Center) to read the whole plot summary. It's amazing. I don't know if the fact that this is violent-treason-as-porn is frightening or reassuring. But this is what a disturbing number of your fellow citizens are reading in their leisure time.

THANKS TO OUR WONDERFUL GUN CULTURE, NO ONE EVER SCREWS THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ECONOMICALLY!

A genius theory from Fox's Greg Gutfeld (source: Daily Caller via Fox Nation):

On Monday’s edition of Fox News Channel's "The Five," co-host Greg Gutfeld said the Cyprus bailout plan, which would result in the confiscatory taxation of deposits in banks at varying rates, is only a possibility because the country lacks a strong gun culture....

"While Cypriots can own guns, it's a bear to get them," Gutfeld said. "There is no gun culture there, which then allows the government to wonder of its docile populace, 'What are they going to do, shoot us?' Well, in America -- yes, we will shoot you." ...

Yeah, thank God we have all these guns, because when the economic meltdown happened in 2008, we sure showed 'em! The bankers were getting away with murder, while the government forced us to pick up the tab, and we took our guns and we said ... um, what did we say again? What did we do?

Well, I don't remember exactly, but thanks to our guns, nobody can push us around in America! I mean, they do push us around -- but they can't! I mean, they wouldn't dare! Because whenever they even think about pulling any funny stuff, we ... um ...

(And FYI, Greg, Cyprus has either the world's 6th- or the 5th-highest rate of firearm ownership per 100,000 people.)

LET'S EXAMINE THAT ASSERTION, JOHN YOO

Today, at the right-wing site Ricochet, John Yoo o ffers a defense of the Iraq War. Among Yoo's arguments is this:

In law, we often come upon a situation after an event -- a crime, an accident, etc. -- and we must decide what to do based on the knowledge we have now. Courts award damages based on the harm to the victim and the harm to society. Suppose you thought that the Iraq war was a mistake. If so, isn't the proper remedy to restore Saddam Hussein's family and the Baath Party to power in Iraq? If you are unwilling to consider that remedy, aren't you conceding that on balance, the benefits of the war outweigh the costs?

When I read that, I was reminded of this, which strikes me as a roughly analogous situation:

Gerri Bostic lost all her material possessions [in 1985] when police dropped a bomb on her block, killing five children and six adult members of the militant group MOVE and incinerating 61 row homes....

Her West Philadelphia neighborhood - now nearly vacant and eerily quiet - never recovered from the city's horrific botched attempt to arrest the MOVE members on May 13, 1985....

The revolutionary back-to-nature group came to the city's Cobbs Creek section after a 1978 shootout with police at its previous home. One officer died in the firefight; nine MOVE members went to prison, and others moved to Osage Avenue.

They soon turned their middle-class row house into a fortified compound, with a bunker on the roof and wooden slats over the windows. Reeking garbage attracted vermin, and loudspeakers blared obscene daily rants against authorities for jailing their peers....

Police decided to move on MOVE in mid-May 1985, obtaining arrest and search warrants on the belief the group's house contained illegal weapons and explosives. Authorities evacuated the block on May 12, telling residents there would be a police action the next day.

When they were refused entry to serve the warrants on May 13, police began an hours-long siege using water cannons, tear gas and bullets. A state police helicopter flew overhead carrying Philadelphia officers and a canvas satchel loaded with explosives.

The bomb ignited a gasoline-fueled conflagration that killed the MOVE militants and children and obliterated two blocks of homes. Ramona Africa, then 29, and Birdie Africa, then 13, escaped with major burns.

Residents, who had been told to take just a change of clothes with them, came home to find ruins....

After 14 years of unending repairs, then-Mayor John Street decided in 2000 that the houses were beyond salvage....

If I'm following John Yoo's logic correctly, he'd argue that if you think the bombing of Osage Avenue was a mistake, then you believe it would be acceptable for the MOVE group (or its ideological descendants, since all but one adult MOVE member died in the bombing) to be a 24-hour-a-day nuisance to Osage Avenue or wherever else its residents may have moved. By Yoo's logic, those are your only two choices: either you think the original situation was just swell, or you have to accept the government's remedy no matter how it was carried out.

Forgive me if I don't accept that logic.

THE PROPER RESPONSE

... to people who were wrong about the Iraq War:

JOE THE PLUMBER WANTS MARRIAGE POLICY TO BE DETERMINED BY PREADOLESCENT BOYS, NOT CRACKHEAD STRIPPERS LIVING IN LUXURY
(or something like that)

The first thing that will probably catch your eye if you go to Joe "the Plumber" Wurzelbacher's Joe for America site is that he's giving away an AR-15. (But these days, who isn't?) That might be all you care to know about JTP (well, that and the fact that he'll be pissed off at you if you call the AR-15 an "assault weapon"), but you really should stay for the incisive commentary.

Like "Tolerance for Everything (Except God)," which also appears in Joe's RedState member diary, and which explains that if we truly want to understand the gay marriage debate, we should look to the wisdom of children:

While being gay has been around forever, (here I go) it’s not a normal thing for a man to look upon another man with lust in his eyes. Acceptance is one thing, but to label it as normal is where things begin to go south. A little background.

30 years ago we use to play a game called "smear the queer;" a game where whoever had the football got gang tackled. It was a normal. If you had the ball, you were the queer, because no one else had the ball, and having the ball made you odd or "queer" in that respect. Of course, you could throw the ball to another player and the pack would quickly turn to smear that queer, without regard to his or her sexuality, I might add. Queer, gay, homo, fag meant nothing having to do with what you were attracted to and no one committed suicide, got beat up or even called names in that regard. That was my experience.

Then, about ten years later, the media and the ever-tolerant Hollywood (not), began portraying homosexual (men) on television and film as the "Funny" one or the one you felt sorry for - just to get us used to the idea. C'mon - who didn't laugh at Paul Lynde or Charles Nelson Reilly? And not until Ellen demanded her character come out of the closet (which she was summarily fired for) did gay characters litter the big and small screen alike, whether it was important or not. ( Just to go a little further with this point, Hollywood will put "gay" characters in tv show/movies that are not relevant to the plot. They try to portray this as "Normal" America. I can tell you right now, when I'm tossing the football with my son in front of the house, I have never seen 2 men hand in hand prancing down the street. You?)

Tightly reasoned!

From this, Joe turns nimbly to other burning social issues:

Policies from our meddling Federal Government have done everything they can do to destroy the family structure in America and squelch Christian's values. Welfare, in the form of food stamps and monthly checks issued with no responsibility whatsoever, not only encourage single parenting – actually requires there be no man involved. We know this to be true, but will liberals admit it and help to change it? Of course not, because crack-heads, strippers and government dependents tend to vote Democrat. I need more stuff – give me more stuff.

The final destruction and/or perversion of the definition of marriage is next.

Marriage is the cornerstone for a solid society and destroying it destroys us all. You don't have to look at crime rates and stats about strippers who come from families without a father and mother to know what's going on. Just look around you – who's doing better, the people who grew up in traditional families or the ones breaking into your house, smoking crack or taking dollar bills from strangers, gawking at their nude body?

So to sum up: crackhead strippers are living much higher on the hog than you and I are, so we should abolish welfare, and we should also ban gay marriage, which, as every eleven-year-old boy knows, is not "normal."

Got it?

Oh, and here's the promo video for Joe's AR-15 giveaway -- which is scored to Kid Rock's "Bawitdaba," a song that's largely a shout-out to sex workers, criminals, and drug addicts:

IT WOULD TAKE SIXTY MASSACRES

No, I don't think Michael Moore went too far on Piers Morgan's show last night:

Too Far? Michael Moore: If Gunman Killed Harry Reid's Grandkids, He Wouldn't Drop Assault Weapons Ban

... Morgan brought up Rob Portman's gay marriage reversal coming from his own son being gay, and couldn't help but wonder how much the [gun] debate would change if there were members of Congress whose children were victims of gun violence. Moore was a lot more graphic in his assessment.

"If a man with an assault weapon goes in to the school where Harry Reid's grandchildren go to school tomorrow and kills his grandchildren, would he go in front of his microphone at 5:00 and say, 'I know how Dianne [Feinstein] had to witness the mayor getting murdered, and I just--my grandchildren just got killed today, but, you know, we can't get it passed 'cause we just don't have the votes."

That point may have been made tastelessly, but it's valid. If that happened, this issue would matter a hell of a lot more to Harry Reid than it does now.

But he still wouldn't be able to get sixty votes for the assault weapons ban. And sooner or later -- probably sooner -- he'd acknowledge that.

It would take sixty massacres affecting senators' children and grandchildren to get cloture for a vote on an assault weapons ban. Or, well, maybe not sixty -- Harry Reid says the ban has fewer than forty votes. So it would take more than twenty massacres involving senators' families to get the ban through the Senate.

Or, of course (as I said last night), it would take a genuine change in public opinion. The number of one-issue pro-gun-control voters would need to rival the number of pro-gun voters. I still don't know how we get to that point. I don't know how we increase the number of committed gun-control voters. I don't know how we reduce the number of committed NRA voters -- polls say the NRA is out of step even with gun owners on many issues relating to guns, so where are the waves of disgusted gun owners forgoing their membership?

Any ideas for how to change this? I'm all ears.

EVERY TIME I THINK I'M OVERDOING THE PESSIMISM, LIFE REMINDS ME THAT I'M A LIBERAL

As I've watched gun control advocates at work in Washington since the Sandy Hook shootings, I've sometimes asked myself, "Are the optimists right? Is it really different this time? When I express skepticism about the potential for a real turnaround on the gun issue in D.C., am I just reverting to knee-jerk gloom?"

I think I have my answer:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Tuesday he will not include a renewal of the federal assault weapons ban in a Senate gun control bill because it could not win even 40 votes on the Senate floor.

"Right now her amendment using the most optimistic numbers has less than 40 votes," Reid told reporters on Tuesday. "That's not 60. I have to get something on the floor so we can have votes on that issue and the other issues we talked about." ...

Feinstein will apparently get to offer the ban as an amendment to the main gun control bill, but it won't pass. Politico says that bill will probably include a tightening of background checks, but it's not clear whether even the Senate can pass a background check provision that isn't toothless (if background checks are required for private sales but no records are required to be kept for the sales, how can the bill possibly work?). Oh, and Senate minority leader John Cornyn opposes any change in the law on background checks, much less an assault weapons ban.

I said it in December and I was right: we're not going to get real change at the national level until the NRA is ACORN -- an organization so discredited that no politician ever wants to be associated with it. Years ago, even pols like John McCain supported ACORN; the NRA needed to suffer that level of decrease in its credibility. At the very least, it needed to become like the ACLU post-Dukakis -- a group you're not allowed to affiliate yourself with if you seek credibility in Middle America.

After all of Wayne LaPierre's paranoid ranting and raving -- which I told you was not discrediting him -- 48% of Americans still saw the NRA in a positive light, according to one poll; 46% said the NRA better reflected their views on guns, as opposed to 41% who said President Obama did, according to another poll; yet another poll said that 44% of Americans trust Republicans on gun policy, vs. 42% for the president.

And yes, this was even as poll after poll showed overwhelming support for universal background checks, and broad support for other gun control measures.

I'm not angry at Harry Reid because he can read a poll -- as, presumably, can the seven Democratic senators running for reelection in 2014 in Romney states.

Once again, liberals spiked the football yards and yards from the goal line. We thought Wayne LaPierre looked crazy, so we assumed everyone did; we had a renewed determination to deal seriously with the availability of guns post-Sandy Hook, so we assumed everyone did.

Embracing blatantly liberal ideas still seems strange and unnatural to heartlanders. We still haven't figured out how to change that fact. Much of the liberal world still hasn't figured out that it's even a problem.

But it's our biggest problem, and we underestimated it again.

CHASTENED? ABASHED? NAHHH -- REPUBLICANS JUST KEEP ACTING REPUBLICAN

I keep hearing that Republicans know they've screwed up. I keep hearing that they're licking their wounds and trying to retool their message.

So why am I seeing so many Republicans responding to the election loss of 2012 by being more Republican than they were then? Why do I see Paul Ryan responding to the rejection of a draconian budget that balanced in 28 years by issuing an even more draconian budget that balances in ten years? And why do I see Congressman (and quite possibly future Senator) Paul Broun of Georgia trying to make Ryan look like the good cop to his own bad cop with a New York Times op-ed that says the Ryan budget doesn't cut enough?

THE latest budget proposal by Representative Paul D. Ryan, called "The Path to Prosperity," is anything but. It fails to seriously address runaway government spending, the most pressing problem facing our nation. I cannot vote for something that would trick the American people into thinking that Congress is fixing Washington's spending problem, when in actuality we'd just be allowing it to continue without end.

... We have to dig deeper and make profound cuts now....

We ought to get rid of certain federal departments and agencies, stopping only to shift the role of governing back to the states, where it belongs. The Departments of Education and Energy, for example, are two bloated bureaucracies that we don't need....

Constitutionally speaking, the federal government should not have a role in K-12 public education anyway....

... we should also phase out the federal highway financing system....

... We must repeal Obamacare....

To cap all this off -- literally -- I have proposed a balanced-budget [constitutional] amendment....

Republicans still believe in their own ability to move the Overton window very, very far to the right. And why shouldn't they? Broun and his fellow balanced budget believers have persuaded Politico's Jake Sherman that this issue is a political winner:

... the message of bringing the federal government's books into balance ... was quietly tested in 18 competitive House races in a late-February poll by the National Republican Congressional Committee. It was a winning argument across a broad swath of politically moderate -- and nearly split -- districts.

... Republicans will incessantly pound home the theme of balancing the budget, GOP leaders say. When talking about the Democrats' plan, Republicans criticize it for attempting to raise taxes and the fact that it doesn't balance the budget.

...It's not only the broad idea of balancing the budget that's a winner, but how Republicans want to do it also polls well. Seventy percent of voters in districts Republicans are targeting, and 67 percent of swing district voters support balancing the budget by reforming entitlements and cutting spending.

"Reforming entitlements and cutting spending" -- yeah, that's really specific.

Many, many paragraphs into Sherman's story, he acknowledges that he may be falling for a bit of spin:

Polls like this are always taken with a grain of salt. It's a Republican poll, so the questions are worded to yield results the GOP is seeking. Just 1,200 voters were surveyed. Plus, it's easy to support balancing the budget, but the proposition becomes far less popular when voters hear what’s involved with shrinking the nation's budget deficit.

But that's after he's made clear that he's pretty much sold on the notion that this is going to be a powerful Republican message going forward.

And it might be -- after all, Democrats have never made the slightest effort to try to explain, in plain language, why mandatory balanced budgets aren't good for the country. Dems never explain that we've had a lot of good years since World War II despite (mostly highly manageable) deficits and debt in most of those years. Dems never point out that Ronald Reagan never came close to balancing a budget. Dems never point out that plenty of successful companies have lots of debt on their books. Dems never point out that if you have a mortgage or car payments, you have debt, and you may be managing it just fine. Dems never point out that, historically, no government debt means no New Deal, no interstate highway program, no GI Bill, no Medicare.

I'd add "no U.S. war against Hitler," but Paul Broun's balanced budget proposal allows deficit spending in the case of war -- but only a congressionally declared war. We haven't had one of those since World War II. (We'll start having them now if a balanced budget amendment ever makes its way into the Constitution -- don't you think liberal war skeptics will be more inclined to sign on to wars if doing so can save social programs from being gutted?)

This is what Republicans do: they keep coming and coming with worse and worse ideas, and inevitably they do drag the debate to the right. I think it's only a matter of time before the priests of centrist High Broderism are agreeing that a balanced budget amendment is just what America needs. I fully expect Democrats, in desperation, to concoct some "lite" version of the balanced budget amendment, possibly with a capital budget that would allow at least some deficit spending -- a version that will then become the radical left idea as far as our opinion-molders are concerned.

THE PATRICK BATEMAN PARTY

You may have already read that Ted Cruz has gone beyond provocatively extremist ideological posturing and is now just being a dick:

In an unusual move, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) objected last week to a routine Senate resolution commemorating Multiple Sclerosis Awareness Week.

Congress passes hundreds of resolutions, meant to commemorate everything from a special awareness week or Little League champions. The resolutions lack any real power of law and are predominantly ceremonial....

In order to keep business moving and not clog the Senate floor, they are normally passed in bulk through a "unanimous consent agreement"....

But last week, Cruz objected to including the MS Awareness resolution. He was unhappy with a clause in the resolution describing the purpose of the Multiple Sclerosis Coalition, according to a Democratic staffer.

Cruz’s staff said the problem was timing.

"The Senator, like many of his colleagues, will not grant consent to call up and pass a resolution or bill at the last minute without time for review," spokesman Sean Rushton said in a statement....

Did he really object to the clause describing the Multiple Sclerosis Coalition? You mean this?

Whereas the Multiple Sclerosis Coalition's mission is to increase opportunities for cooperation and provide greater opportunity to leverage the effective use of resources for the benefit of the multiple sclerosis community

I assume that's what it was -- that's from the House version of the bill. I couldn't find the Senate version, but I assume it's identical, because why would you want to have wording differences in House and Senate versions of a bill that PASSES WITHOUT OBJECTION EVERY FREAKING YEAR?

Well, it was that or not getting to read the bill -- which, by the way, is a whopping 579 words, including the word "RESOLUTION" at the top. Still, it should have been treated just the wauy the Obamacare bill should have been treated! Seventy-two hours to READ THE BILL! (That allows a reading speed of approximately eight words an hour, or one word every seven and a half minutes.)

When I read American Psycho twenty years ago, it seemed to me that the pointwas "How blatant and outrageous do the crimes of Patrick Bateman before a numbed-out society will actually notice that he's committing them?" Tha's how the GOP appears to operate, at least at the Ted Cruz extremes. It's as if the ones in deep-red districts and states know that they can get away with anything, and not only will they delight their base, they'll never alienate enough voters in their district or outside to do serious harm to the conservative movement.

And given how much power the GOP still has, in D.C. and in the states, I'd say Bateman is still getting away with murder.

AUTOPSY FOR THE UNDEAD

I had a hard time coming up with anything to say about this GOP "autopsy." I can see that the Republican Party is struggling to connect with voters who aren't old, white, and cranky. I know that parts of the GOP coalition really hate the Reince Priebus recommendations. I ought to heat up a big batch o' popcorn and sit back to watch Republicans tear apart what's left of their party. Right?

Except that's not how it works. Republicans may change or may not (my guess is they won't); they may learn to live with one another or may keep fighting (my guess is arrested-development cases like Sarah Palin will still want to fight with other Republicans, but most of these squabbles won't amount to much).

But it doesn't matter: the GOP can screw up forever and the press will still treat the party as a respectable organization that's serious about governing. Voters may recoil in horror at certain Republicans, but the GOP will still dominate in heartland America -- non-coastal whites will still overwhelmingly vote for Republican governors and state legislators and members of Congress, because the party label still doesn't inspire revulsion.

Oh, and the 2016 presidential election? The country is hardly averse to voting Republican again. (In a recent Quinnipiac poll of the blue-but-swingy state of Pennsylvania, Chris Christie crushed Joe Biden and Andrew Cuomo, and Paul Ryan beats Biden, while Marco Rubio is competitive with Biden and Cuomo, and only Hillary Clinton beats Rubio, Ryan, and Christie.) And the press is just itching to write the GOP comeback story. (The press has never like the Democratic Party very much and is so over Obama.) And while I expect self-sabotage on the party's part -- once again, crazy fellow candidates will probably drive the semi-sane, electable winner too far to the right -- it's not guaranteed to happen.

Republicans control the majority of our states, one House of Congress overtly and one through the filibuster, and our Supreme Court. I'll say what I said over the weekend: why so glum?

IT'S YOUR PARTY'S BASE VOTERS, STUPID

Jennifer Rubin has written a post imagining the GOP's future, The post gets good marks even from BooMan, who calls it "thoughtful"; it does avoid Rubin's usual shrieking Demophobia.

But her vision of the future leaves something to be desired:

So where does this lead the party? I believe it will sort itself out in the primary itself, which becomes more akin to constructing a parliamentary majority (alliances, concessions, truces, compromises of convenience).... The candidate who can both win the biggest share of and recruit more supporters to the GOP is the winner, and at the end factions agree to disagree on some items in common cause against an opponent devoted to the domineering welfare state....

Imagine a debate in which candidate X says, "I don't care much about gay marriage. But if you vote for me I will go to the mat on replacing Obamacare and here's how I will do it." Another will say, "I don't want to replace Obamacare with anything. And I don't want much of a military either." No one strains to abide by principles he does not hold dear; the voters figure out which formulation is, while not ideal, most appealing and most likely to appeal outside the party.

Rather than conformity, heterogeneity is prized and special interest factions lose their sway....

That could be pretty exciting and unpredictable....

I have no idea why she believes that can work out in 2016 any more than it did in 2012 or 2008. In those years, the party had all that, to some extent. Maybe it didn't exactly have anyone who said, "I don't care much about gay marriage. But if you vote for me I will go to the mat on replacing Obamacare," or "I don't want to replace Obamacare with anything. And I don't want much of a military either" -- but it did have a candidate favoring a drastic cutback in military adventurism (Ron Paul in '08 and '12) -- and he was loathed by everyone who didn't adore him. It had an Iraq War skeptic in '08 (Paul again) -- and that was heresy. It had a supporter of abortion rights and some gay rights in 2008 (Rudy Giuliani) -- and he was forced to make a quick exit from the primaries. In 2012 it had a candidate who actually believes the scientific consensus on evolution and climate change (Jon Huntsman) -- and he was forced to make a quick exit from the primaries. It had a candidate in 2012 who supported HPV vaccination and in-state tuition breaks at state colleges for children of undocumented immigrants (Rick Perry) -- and he went from front-runner to also-ran (for this and other reasons) within weeks.

The problem with Rubin's "let a hundred flowers bloom" fantasy is that GOP base voters don't want to let a hundred flowers bloom -- they still imagine that the ideal combination of electability and purity is out there somewhere.

I still think Republicans could win the White House back in 2016 if they find someone who can thread this needle, especially if the Supreme Court gives the GOP a boost by allowing a broad range of vote-suppression techniques, and if the party learns to use technology and Citizens United money more effectively. But the party's core voters aren't going to make it easy. They're going to want a pure candidate next time as much as they did this time. The GOP needs a Sister Souljah moment, but its Sister Souljah is its own voter base.

IS THIS WHACKJOB GOING TO BEAT LINDSEY GRAHAM IN THE 2014 SOUTH CAROLINA GOP SENATE PRIMARY?

Politico reports:

A likely primary opponent of Lindsey Graham wants the South Carolina Republican senator to join John McCain in apologizing for criticizing Rand Paul’s filibuster.

State Sen. Lee Bright said he is "leaning heavily toward" making a formal announcement of his candidacy not long after the April 2 runoff for the House race to succeed Tim Scott. He is interviewing paid staff. And he's counting on those who, like him, supported Ron Paul in last year's South Carolina primary to give him a base of support....

"He deliberately went out there and cut out the legs out from under a new senator who was trying to lead," Bright told POLITICO late Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference. "Maybe, there was some kind of guilty conscience, the fact that he hasn't led in the right direction. Maybe that's why he did that. But it was unacceptable."

...Graham, who appeared at the conservative confab on Thursday, remains the solid favorite to survive a primary. He has more than $6 million cash on hand and remains pretty popular....

Yeah, Public Policy Polling says Graham has a 66% approval rating among South Carolina Republicans -- but when you ask them whether they'd support him against "someone more conservative," his support slips to 51% (against 40% for the unnamed conservative and 9% unsure). So I think he's vulnerable.

Bright introduced a bill in 2010 that would exempt firearms made in South Carolina from federal gun laws -- and then reintroduced it after the Sandy Hook massacre. He wants to exempt virtually all adult residents of the state from new federal gun laws because these people are deemed to be members of a state militia:

... a quartet of tea-party state senators in South Carolina introduced a bill Wednesday claiming to offer pro-gun citizens a different way around the federal rules: exempt the state's unorganized militia from federal gun regulations.

The unorganized militia consists of all able-bodied people over the age of 17 who are U.S. citizens residing in South Carolina and legally allowed to purchase a firearm, according to current state law....

The bill, sponsored by state Sens. Tom Corbin, Tom Davis, Kevin Bryant and Lee Bright, excludes members of the militia -- essentially all state citizens who are at least 18 years old -- from any federal gun rules passed after New Year’s Day....

Bright, who has been named a "Taxpayer Hero" by the Club for Growth, once introduced legislation to study the notion that South Carolina should create its own currency. He likes this sort of thing, and makes extremely funny jokes on the subject:

During the 2010 session, Bright sponsored legislation passed by the state Senate that in addition to affirming South Carolina's Second-, Ninth- and 10th-amendment rights, also targeted federal health care legislation by saying state residents are not subject to any law that interferes with patients' rights to choose their own health care provider or pay for medical services directly.

"If at first you don't secede, try again," Bright said with a laugh after the legislation passed last year.

He invited people reading his campaign Web site to sign a fetal personhood pledge. He's on the board of directors of the Palmetto Family Council, which opposes "militant homosexual advocacy." Oh, and he was the South Carolina chairman of Michele Bachmann's presidential campaign.

Lindsey, you may have met your match.

FIRST, HE CRIES

Stray thoughts about the media story everyone's been talking about since yesterday:

CNN broke the news on Sunday of a guilty verdict in a rape case in Steubenville, Ohio by lamenting that the "promising" lives of the rapists had been ruined, but spent very little time focusing on how the 16-year-old victim would have to live with what was done to her....

CNN's Candy Crowley began her breaking news report by showing [Judge Thomas] Lipps handing down the sentence and telling CNN reporter Poppy Harlow that she "cannot imagine" how emotional the sentencing must have been.

Harlow explained that it had been "incredibly difficult" to watch "as these two young men -- who had such promising futures, star football players, very good students -- literally watched as they believed their life fell apart.”

"One of the young men, Ma'lik Richmond, as that sentence came down, he collapsed," the CNN reporter recalled, adding that the convicted rapist told his attorney that "my life is over, no one is going to want me now."

At that point, CNN played video of Richmond crying and hugging his lawyer in the courtroom.

"I was sitting about three feet from Ma'lik when he gave that statement,” Harlow said. "It was very difficult to watch."

Crowley is getting the most blame for this, but I was appalled by Harlow's reaction to the emotions on display on the courtroom. She began her report by saying,

I've never experienced anything like it, Candy. It was incredibly emotional -- incredibly difficult even for an outsider like me to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believe their life fell apart.

I see that she's spent much of her professional correct doing business reporting -- but what does she think? Does she think that run-of-the-mill young people who are convicted of crimes every day in this country, crimes that don't get on CNN, invariably respond the news with stony silence? Does she think "real" criminals are cold-eyed psychopaths, so the fact that these kids had human feelings means they couldn't have done anything wrong?

This tone pervaded the reporting -- Crowley went on to lament "the lasting effect though on two young men being found guilty juvenile court of rape essentially" in an exchange with a CNN legal reporter (they were discussing the fact that the two young men will now be registered sex offenders). The sympathetic tone extended to a later segment involving Harlow and anchor Fredericka Whitfield.

Kia Makarechi of the Huffington Post explains what seemed to be taking place at CNN:

CNN appears to have bet on the emotions of those it could show on camera -- for obvious reasons, the victim's identity has been protected, and the victim's family was not shown weeping in court. Networks know that people crying make for great TV.

So reporters and analysts at CNN seem to have let the watchability of a new piece of video drive their moral and factual conclusions about the entire case. Look, I understand making the commercial decision to show an emotionally jarring clip, even repeatedly -- but the clip isn't the whole story; it shouldn't dictate the judgments of CNN's on-air personalities. In this case, that's what seems to have happened.

The alternative explanation is that Harlow, Crowley, et al. absorbed all the details of the case and concluded that these guys are victims because, as football players, they're our finest citizens, so when they cry because they got caught, it's tragic. I don't know which would be worse.

RAND PAUL CAN'T WIN IN 2016 -- AT LEAST NOT AS A PAULITE

Memeorandum and Power Line are flagging this new Gallup poll:

Americans' Sympathies for Israel Match All-Time High

... Americans' sympathies lean heavily toward the Israelis over the Palestinians, 64% vs. 12%. Americans' partiality for Israel has consistently exceeded 60% since 2010; however, today's 64% ties the highest Gallup has recorded in a quarter century, last seen in 1991 during the Gulf War....

Support for Israel has increased among all three party groups since 2001, but particularly among Republicans and independents. The percentage sympathizing more with the Israelis has increased by 18 percentage points among Republicans (from 60% to 78%) and by 21 points among independents (from 42% to 63%). By comparison, Democrats' support has increased four points (from 51% to 55%)....

This tells me that, a certain recent filibuster notwithstanding, Republicans and (presumably) Republican-leaning independents want the U.S. to remain bellicose in the foreign policy sphere -- and no, the right's hawks aren't dying off and being replaced by small-government peaceniks. It tells me that the Glenn Greenwalds and Conor Friedersdorfs and David Sirotas of the world are naive if they think Rand Paul is going to lead America away from militarism on his way to winning the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

I'm sure he's going to run -- but he's going to lose if he runs as a Paulite.

And he knows that, as he made clear in January:

In a recent interview with Breitbart News, Paul offered a surprising viewpoint regarding Israel, saying, "We should announce to the world ... that any attack on Israel will be treated as an attack on the United States."

This was, to say the least, quite a turnaround:

The comments by Paul, who recently returned from a trip to Israel, are surprising. During his trip to Israel, Paul called on the U.S. to reduce its foreign aid to Israel, which amounts to around $3 billion per year for military purposes.

Paul told the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies that "borrowing from one country to give to another," only serves to put more pressure on the US and to burden it with more debt, adding, "It will be harder to be a friend of Israel if we are out of money. It will be harder to defend Israel if we destroy our country in the process...I think there will be significant repercussions of running massive deficits ... you destroy your currency by spending money you don't have."

... Paul added that cutting aid forces Israel to become more sovereign and less reliant on the U.S., citing a 1996 speech by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in which he laid out plans to wean the country off American aid.

Paul is also one of only two GOP senators who recently withheld their signatures from a letter by 11 GOP senators who have vowed continued financial support for Israel.

True Paulism is going to remain a boutique taste in the GOP for the foreseeable future.

MARCO RUBIO WINS CPAC STRAW POLL!

No, I didn't choose that headline because I misread the CPAC straw poll results. Yes, I know Rand Paul got the most votes -- but it wasn't much of a win:

Sen. Rand Paul won the 2013 Washington Times-CPAC presidential preference straw poll Saturday, and Sen. Marco Rubio was a close second....

Mr. Paul won 25 percent of the vote, and Mr. Rubio collected 23 percent....

What?! Rubio came that close to the filibuster hero of the GOP? A guy named Paul almost lost despite the straw poll's voter demographics?

The annual conservative convention is popular with college students: Of the 2,930 voters, more than half were aged 18-25 and two-thirds were men.

When Rand's dad won the straw poll in 2010, he crushed Mitt Romney, 31%-22%; a year later, his margin over Romney was 30%-23%. If Rand can't utterly dominate in this demographic, then maybe we've overestimated his bro-mantic appeal to the right.

Oh, well -- maybe he'll score a blowout win at Netroots Nation. (Um, that was sarcasm.)