The poll asked the following,

Do you think the health care reform plan being considered by President Obama and Congress creates "death panels" which have the authority to subjectively determine whether or not a gravely ill or injured person should receive health care based on their "level of productivity in society"?

43% don't believe this, which we guess is encouraging. But 26% do (interestingly, about the same percentage who believe Obama isn't a real American citizen). And 31% aren't sure, meaning a majority — 57% — of Republicans can't say for sure whether our President plans to hold their parents and children up to Nazi-style productivity standards before allowing them to waste away. Of course, what we have now is a system where the sick and injured often can't get coverage, but those who deal in "death panel" fear-mongering don't have much regard for the facts, or for people who can't afford health insurance. In today's Washington Post, Richard Cohen compares Sarah Palin, major proponent of "death panel" lunacy, with Sen. Joseph McCarthy. "With Palin," he writes, "the subject is health care, which in many ways is the Red Menace of our day and lends itself to a kind of political pornography." He continues,

The most depressing aspects of McCarthy's career were not just the excesses of the man himself but the refusal of others — mainly his fellow Republicans — to either rein him in or defend his victims. Now we are seeing something similar with Palin. Say what you will about any of the health-care proposals, not one of them suggests a "death panel" empowered to withhold medical services from the aged or those with disabilities. [...] Yet, you can beat the bushes to a fine powder and find only two Republicans of note — Sens. Johnny Isakson and Lisa Murkowski — who had the courage or the decency to tell Palin that she doesn't know what she's talking about. Certainly, this was not the case with Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, who in fact virtually seconded Palin's charge. This is not just because Gingrich himself can be casual with the facts but also because his urge to be politically expedient often overwhelms his convictions.

Cohen calls out not just Gingrich, but also Sens. Charles Grassley and John McCain, both of whom have failed to challenge her obviously false rhetoric. It may be true that, as Cohen says, Palin "rarely knows her facts" — but not every Republican in Congress is so blind to basic truth, and their failure to criticize her ridiculous assertions likely has more to do with what is "politically expedient" than with what is right. Sadly, Palin and her ilk have been successful, killing not only harmless and optional end-of-life counseling, but now the public option as well.

Despite his influence over the culture of 1950s America, Sen. McCarthy's "career was mercifully short," reminds Cohen. Perhaps the same will be true of Palin, whose approval rating has dropped from 57% when she joined the McCain campaign to 39% now. Unfortunately, crazy abhors a vacuum, and there will be more to rush in and fill her place. Like Michele Bachmann (pictured, right behind Palin), who previously informed us of liberal "reeducation camps" for young people and internment camps based on US Census data. In a disturbing McCarthyite parallel, she also called for a media investigation into anti-Americanism in Congress, and she shares enough awesome traits with our favorite lipsticked pit bull that one Minnesota State Senator called Palin "Alaska's Michele Bachmann." Bachmann says she'll run for President — if God tells her to. Specifically, she says,

If I felt that's what the Lord was calling me to do, I would do it. When I have sensed that the Lord is calling me to do something, I've said yes to it. But I will not seek a higher office if God is not calling me to do it. That's really my standard.

If I am called to serve in that realm I would serve but if I am not called, I wouldn't do it.

Apparently the Lord has repeatedly called her to mislead her constituents with baseless accusations against the government. Let's hope He keeps quiet about the Presidency.

Michele Bachmann: Many Are Called, Few Are Chosen [La Figa]
Palin's Red Menace [Washington Post]
Exclusive: New Poll Finds Majority Of Republicans Either Believes Or Isn't Sure About "Death Panel" Claim [The Plum Line]
This Is Reform? [NYT]
Bachmann Election Challenger: Sarah Palin Was Alaska's Michele Bachmann [Huffington Post]
Birthers And Deathers — The Same People? [Talking Points Memo]

Earlier: Palin "Wins", Or, The Power Of Misinformation On Health Care Reform
Sarah Palin Claims "Death Panels" Will Kill Son; Gingrich Agrees

For those of you not yet familiar with this particular bit of Paliniana, on Friday, Palin wrote on her Facebook page,

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Says Time's Karen Tumulty, "Yes, such a system would indeed be downright evil. Which is why no one is proposing anything like it." Palin appears to be basing this latest bit of batshittery on a Republican-backed (and AARP-endorsed) portion of the health care reform bill that would require Medicare to pay for seniors to receive counseling on such issues as living wills. According to the bill, these optional counseling sessions would include,

An explanation by the practitioner of advance care planning, including key questions and considerations, important steps, and suggested people to talk to; an explanation by the practitioner of advance directives, including living wills and durable powers of attorney, and their uses; an explanation by the practitioner of the role and responsibilities of a health care proxy.

They would not include, say, death by firing squad, or the forced euthanasia of kids with Down's Syndrome. CNN's David Balz implies that Palin's claims are simply stupid, saying, "It's not the way to debate this bill, and it's another example of Sarah Palin having difficulty figuring out how to enter into a serious debate about issues." But Palin may well know exactly what she's doing. Here's her oh-so-sober message (also via Facebook) to followers to quit disrupting town hall meetings on health care:

There are many disturbing details in the current bill that Washington is trying to rush through Congress, but we must stick to a discussion of the issues and not get sidetracked by tactics that can be accused of leading to intimidation or harassment. Such tactics diminish our nation's civil discourse which we need now more than ever because the fine print in this outrageous health care proposal must be understood clearly and not get lost in conscientious voters' passion to want to make elected officials hear what we are saying. Let's not give the proponents of nationalized health care any reason to criticize us.

This makes her sound like a wise statesman, not a lie-spreading demagogue, but Timothy Egan at the Times asks,

is it any wonder that some are moved to violent threats, given the level of misinformation being injected into the system? If you really believed that Obama was going to kill your baby and euthanize your parents, well - why not act in self defense?

Dropping an incredibly disturbing and baseless allegation into the national discourse, then urging your supporters not to get too mad about it, sounds a lot like the tactics the McCain campaign used when it darkly hinted that Obama "palled around with terrorists" — then acted all shocked when people said he was a Muslim terrorist himself. Inflaming your base and then pulling back isn't stupid politics, it's smart — as long as you only care about spreading misinformation, and not about debating the actual issues.

Palin's even getting some help with her lies from none other than Newt Gingrich, who had the following conversation on ABC with George Stephanopoulos yesterday:

GINGRICH: I think people are very concerned, when you start talking about cost controls, that a bureaucracy — we don't — you're asking us to trust the government. Now, I'm not talking about the Obama administration. I'm talking about the government. You're asking us to decide that we believe that the government is to be trusted.

We know people who have said routinely, well, you're going to have to make decisions. You're going to have to decide. Communal standards historically is a very dangerous concept.

STEPHANOPOULOS: It's not in the bill.

GINGRICH: But the bill's — the bill's 1,000 pages of setting up mechanisms. It sets up 45 different agencies. It has all sorts of panels. You're asking us to trust turning power over to the government, when there clearly are people in America who believe in — in establishing euthanasia, including selective standards.

Gingrich brilliantly uses both vagueness and fear-mongering here, threatening innocent Americans with "all sorts of panels." One of these has to be a death panel, right? The strangest part of the exchange is when he reiterates the danger of trusting the government, but then references "people in America" who believe in euthanasia. This actually makes it sound like it's voters we shouldn't trust — and after all, they do elect the government, so clearly they're suspect. Clearly, we should put our trust where it belongs — with health care companies.

It shouldn't really be a surprise, though, that Gingrich has hopped on the Palin bandwagon. Nor is it surprising that town halls have turned nasty, "forcing" Palin to calm everybody down with her well-known consensus-building skills. That's kind of what happens when the Republican party plants people to, oh, turn town halls nasty, and keep any actual debate on the issues from taking place.

Sarah, Sarah, Sarah... [Time]
Palin Urges Restraint At Town Halls [Politico]
Palin's Poison [NYT]
GOP Rep. Kingston Separates Himself From Palin: There Are ‘No Death Panels' [ThinkProgress]

• Sarah Palin didn't like David Letterman's crack Monday night about her "slutty flight attendant look" (neither did we); she calls it "pretty pathetic." If her make-up is the only thing he can find to mock, we agree. [Politico]

• A new poll shows that more than half of Republicans can't identify who leads their party, and those that can are split between Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and John McCain — only one of whom actually holds a position within the party. [USA Today]
• The problem that rank-and-file Republicans have in identifying a leader might stem from the fact that the Republicans who have actually been elected think that government debt will bring down the Obama Administration. Just like it did Reagan's Administration, guys, amirite? [Politico, NY Times]
• Senator Pat Leahy has chosen July 13th to start confirmation hearings for Judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court, and Republicans are whining about having homework during the week long break they get for July 4th. [NY Times]
• Obama is dropping his plan to cap salaries at bailed-out firms and let them deal with Congressional caps on bonuses, which Congress passed thinking there would also be salary caps. [Wall Street Journal]
• We've decided to pay the impoverished island nation of Palau — which we normally ignore and let the Aussies take care of — $20 million in aid to take the 17 Chinese Uighurs we falsely imprisoned at the behest of the Chinese government and can't figure out what to do with. [NY Times]
• Also, we swear we're not going to invade North Korea the way we did Iraq and Afghanistan. [CNN]
• The Kenyan government is angry that the Obama Administration isn't blowing sunshine up its ass despite its human rights record, unwillingness to reform and political instability. [LA Times]
• Rod Blagojevich, in yet another effort to launch his official career as A Celebrity, will appear in a comedy routine about Rod Blagojevich with Second City in Chicago. [Associated Press]
• Former DNC Chairman and Clintonite Terry McAuliffe lost the 3-way Democratic primary in the Virginia Governor's race to some guy named Creigh that you've never heard of. [MSNBC]

• Last night, Sarah Palin ended up stopping by a Republican fundraiser that she was scheduled to headline, dropped out of and tried to get back into when her 2012 rival, Newt Gingrich, took her slot. [Washington Post]

• Newt Gingrich did plenty of talking, however, offering that he's "happy" Dick Cheney and Colin Powell are Republicans and that he thinks internal debates about policy and ideology should be saved until the party is in the majority again. You know, 'cause that worked so well for moderate Republicans before. [Associated Press]
• One place the GOP has asserted dominance is New York State, where two Democrats with legal problems (Pedro Espada Jr. of the Bronx and Hiram Monserrate of Queens) re-installed the Republican majority in the Senate. Espada is in line to become governor if David Paterson is incapacitated, so it worked out rather nicely for him, if not for the state's LGBT population. [NY Times]
• Former New York Senator Hillary Clinton has told Israel that since the Bush Administration didn't turn over any evidence of their so-called secret arrangement by which Israel would say it had stopped settlement expansion while expanding settlements, there is no such arrangement. [Washington Independent]
• Morgan Tsvangirai, the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe under a power-sharing arrangement with its dictator, Robert Mugabe, will visit with President Obama today. It'll be unseemly to be caught wishing for Mugabe to die already but... [Washington Post]
• South Korea has beaten us in imposing unilateral sanctions on North Korea for all the crazy shit Kim Jong Il's been pulling lately to prove that he hasn't had a stroke and is totally right in the head. [NY Times]
• Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's constituents have finally heard about all the crazy shit he says about being surrounded by light from Allah and whatnot, thanks to a political rival. Unsurprisingly, some people in Iran thinks he sounds batshit. [Huffington Post]
• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has decided to fuck over the Senate (retribution for all the times it has done the same to her?) and strip out Senator Joe Lieberman's provision that would prevent the release of the rest of the torture photos the ACLU wants. [Politico]
• The Supreme Court plans on reviewing the sale of Chrysler to Fiat, and Congress has decided to try to force Obama to force GM and Chrysler to keep dealerships open despite the fact that the car companies are shuttering entire automobile lines and the dealer networks are increasingly unpopular. You know what the dealers do have? Lots and lots and lots of money to lobby Congress, since they're not bankrupt. [The Hill]

• Stephen Colbert taped his first show from Baghdad yesterday, allowing General Ray Odierno to shave his head, declaring victory and not watering his act down in some insincere effort at sincerity. [NY Times]

• Sarah Palin, while introducing professional conservative Michael Reagan at an event in Alaska, may have paraphrased from a paper written by Newt Gingrich about Ronald Reagan, according to Geoffrey Dunn (who is writing what everyone expects will be an unflattering book about the Alaska Governor). Her lawyers say — correctly — that she actually cited the paper when giving the speech, and some day we'll all realize that specious attacks against Palin sap credibility from the good ones. [CBS, Huffington Post]
• Newt Gingrich isn't calling Judge Sonia Sotomayor a "racist" anymore. He's decided that he'll get in less trouble by just implying she's a racist because the actual racists in America will understand his code. Unfortunately for Newt, so do the rest of us. [Politico]
• He then completed his 180 degree flip-flop by stating that Republicans should "shrug off" ideological purists, by which he means "other ideological purists." [Politico]
• Former First Lady Laura Bush likes Sotomayor, so Rush Limbaugh is preparing a full-throated takedown of her for being uppity and speaking out of turn. Or not. [Associated Press]
• We're apparently about to start stopping North Korean weapons shipments. Umm, I'm not sure that "better late than never" really applies here. [CBS News]
• Hillary Clinton is trying to warn Iran against behaving like North Korea, which will likely be entirely effective. [UPI]
• She now says Obama has passed her "3 a.m." test, and admitted she initially turned down the role of Secretary of State but changed her mind after Obama kept after her. He's one charming motherfucker. [CNN]

• Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum suggests that Barack Obama, as an example to "African-American males," not take Michelle out on any more fancy dates, but just head to a local bar, throw back a beer, and head home. [Salon]

• Sarah Palin is gearing up for a trip to (honest!) Auburn, New York to celebrate the birth of William Seward, who bought Alaska from those pesky Russians she keeps seeing from her back porch. [Newser]
• Newt Gingrich feels bad for calling Judge Sonia Sotomayor a racist when he just meant to describe every thing she's ever said as racist. [Time]
• In unrelated news, 54 percent of Americans — some of whose votes Gingrich would need to win the Presidency in 2012 — think Sotomayor should be confirmed. Another 19 percent don't care about either Sotomayor or Newt. [LA Times]
• More depressingly, thanks to Dick Cheney, half of Americans think torture is justified. Why be an exception when we can just be as bad as every country, legal system, government and ideology we used to want not to emulate? [MSNBC]
• Both al Qaeda deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden issued statements about how much Barack Obama sucks upon his arrival in Saudi Arabia earlier today. [UPI, Washington Post]
• Unlike his immediate predecessor, Obama has not held hands with anyone in the Middle East nation. [Washington Post]
• Obama, taking a page from John McCain's erstwhile health care plan, has said he's open to taxing employer-sponsored health insurance. [MSNBC]
• He nominated Republican Congressman John McHugh to be Secretary of the Army, apparently as part of his plan to isolate Republicans and make them seem even crazier. I doubt they need the help! [NY Times, Politico]
• And, with Tim Pawlenty announcing he won't seek a third term as governor of Minnesota, you have to wonder how far up Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's ass he plans to crawl after the Minnesota Supreme Court rules that Norm Coleman still isn't the Senator. [Talking Points Memo]

• Wow: there are apparently conservatives suggesting that Judge Sonia Sotomayor's enjoyment of traditional Puerto Rican food will impact her ability to be a mouth-breathing, lock-step conservative justice in the grand school of Clarence "Oral Arguments Are Nap Times" Thomas. [TalkingPointsMemo]

• And a bunch of racist Republicans, including Newt "Who Needs Latino Voters" Gingrich and Tom "I See Brown People" Tancredo, swear they know one when they see one... and that Sotomayor fits the bill. [Politico, ThinkProgress]
• Pat "The Nazis Weren't That Bad" Buchanan thinks Sotomayor got the nomination because of Affirmative Action, because all white men are obviously more qualified than a Princeton-and-Yale educated appeals court judge! [ThinkProgress]
• Mark Krikorian thinks Sotomayor's a racist for insisting people pronounce her name correctly, and feels discriminated against because he's not allowed to Anglicize it. As someone who refuses to completely Anglicize her name for the likes of anyone — particularly with a name like Krikorian — Mark Corker can go fuck himself. [ThinkProgress]
• Unrelated to fucking: Barack Obama stayed in a really nice luxury suite in Vegas. [People]
• In actually important news, we weren't just torturing prisoners in Iraq, our soldiers were raping them. [Newser]
• Oh, and we're on high alert in South Korea because the North Koreans have threatened to re-start hostilities in the decades-old war. [Washington Post]
• Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has warned Israel to stop building new settlements, and Israel really doesn't care. [NY Times]
• But, hey, Roland Burris is crazy! [LA Times]
• And, Michelle Bachmann's starring in her own comic book, so that's way more important. [TalkingPointsMemo]

• Barack Obama shot some hoops with the women of the NCAA champion Huskies and won. (Pic at left is from early April.) The jersey they gave him, though, was a bit too small. [The Swamp]

• He then had Rahm Emanuel rip a new asshole for the guy that approved the Air Force One photo op over New York City yesterday that scared the bejesus out of everyone. [ABC News, Politico]
• About two-thirds of Americans continue to think Obama's doing a good job, and another third are Republicans and tea-baggers. [Real Clear Politics]
• White people still think black people have it pretty good in America, and a lot of black people know that, just because we have an African-American President, it doesn't mean that racism doesn't exist. [NY Times]
• In other poll news, most Americans don't want some big series of hearings on torture because they would rather our government focus on fixing the fucking economy. [CBS News]
• Republicans want to prove that the Democrats didn't care about it in 2002 any more than a lot of Americans do now. [Politico]
• Newt Gingrich wasn't a fan of torture before Republicans took the White House. Apparently, Newt's moral compass points in the direction of whatever gets him elected when it's not pointing in the direction of a new piece of ass. [Huffington Post]
• More people will continue to crap their pants because of pigs. [Time]
• Obama is there, though, to hold the nation's hair out of the toilet. [NY Times]
• Mostly because Republicans are still pissed that a Democratic nominee for the Secretary of Health and Human Services doesn't plan to try to reverse Roe v. Wade and thus they don't want her confirmed. [Plum Line]
• Please take a minute to note that abortion politics weren't remotely part of the debate when a man was the nominee. Just sayin'.
• According to official talking points of wing-nuttery, Obama imported the piggie disease just to ram through the Sebelius nomination. [Washington Independent]
• Five members of Congress were arrested at the Sudanese embassy in a protest over Darfur because no one's paying attention to it anymore. [Politico]
• GM released its restructuring plan and it calls for the elimination of 21,000 jobs, 2,600 dealers, Pontiac, Hummer, Saturn and Saab. [LA Times]
• The universe of gun-owners — including Ducks Unlimited — is pissed at Rush Limbaugh for doing commercials for the Humane Society. Normally, I'd say not to piss off dudes with guns, but I'm sort of fine with Limbaugh pissing off dudes with guns. [Washington Times]

• If you have been hiding under a rock this weekend, the Obamas got their Portuguese Water Dog, Bo, from the Kennedys, and tons of awwws erupted around the blogosphere. [Washington Post]

• Newt Gingrich thinks you're sorta stupid for caring. [CNN]
• In other news you can't escape, Obama is being congratulated on his first foreign policy victory for the Navy's ability to shoot 3 dudes on a boat because "foreign policy victory" is always equivalent to "dead bodies of non-Americans" and not, say, "getting Iran to agree to nuclear talks" which is what he did last week. [Huffington Post, BBC]
• Rick Warren cancelled his Sunday morning show appearances because he was exhausted from all his lying. [Politico]
• Barack Obama's half-brother, Samson, was denied a visa to Britain because he was charged with sexual assault and fled the country. [Reuters]
• Arizona State University is happy to have the President give its commencement address this year but, like John McCain, has dubbed him too inexperienced to be awarded an honorary degree. Guess John McCain has a few friends at ASU, huh? [Washington Post]
• Obama turned down throwing out the first pitch at today's Washington Nationals home-opener. [Washington Post]
• Ari Fleischer is sick of poor people all being too poor to pay their damn taxes. Pay up, assholes! [Wall Street Journal]
• Republicans are pushing legislation to make sure that people who inherit up to $10 million from their families don't have to keep paying taxes on it. [NY Times]
• Like Democrats, they probably don't care that the banks that got your tax dollars are also raising interest rates and fees because they all use the Congressional Federal Credit Union. [Wall Street Journal]
• Goldman Sachs is using your tax dollars to try to shut down a blogger who is critical of their company. [Telegraph]
• Paul Krugman thinks it's mean to make fun of crazy people, and Republicans are crazy. Paul Krugman obviously wants me to lose my job. [NY Times]
• And not even Rahm Emanuel is mean enough to save it anymore. [Washington Post]
• Today is the White House's annual Easter Egg Roll. Images to come!

• Barack Obama gave yet another prime time press conference to beat back critics of his budget, his tax plans and the deficit those things might or might not create. [Politico, Washington Post]

• Oh, look, Obama finally got himself a confirmed Commerce Secretary. Guess he buried those bodies really deep. [NY Times]
• Everybody loves Hillary Clinton these days. [CNN]
• Little-loved Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal doesn't want everything Obama does to fail, just most things. That's the only way he can win in 2012, after all. [Huffington Post]
• A bunch of conservative Catholics are complaining about the President of the United States giving a commencement speech and getting an honorary degree from Notre Dame because apparently to get a degree from a Catholic university is to agree to agree with everything the Pope ever says on everything. Makes me really not regret my decision to go to BC. [Washington Post]
• One of the people complaining is the twice-divorced and about-to-be-Catholic Newt Gingrich, because while telling your cancer-ridden wife that you want to marry your mistress at your wife's hospital bedside is a Catholic value, striving to reduce the incidence of abortion through education and economic empowerment while keeping it legal is not. [Media Matters]
• Arlen Specter hasn't yet decided to run for re-election as an Independent, so he's bowing to business interests and fucking over the labor unions that endorsed him over the Democratic candidate in 2004 by opposing the Employee Free Choice Act, known to conservative interests at "card check." It's so hard being the swing vote, you know, he can't just do what he thinks is right every time. [The Hill]
• He's already trailing in primary polling against the more conservative Republican that took him on in 2004. [Huffington Post]
• Health insurance companies promise to stop fucking you over if Barack Obama promises to make you buy their insurance. [LA Times]
• Under the Bush Administration, if your boss refused to pay you, you were on your own, asshole. Luckily for us, the people that felt that way were career bureaucrats who can't be fired. [NY Times]

• The Republican Governor's Association meeting (supposedly starring Sarah Palin) kicked off today with a comedy routine from Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, who was once considered for the VP slot. Pawlenty said that the Republican Party "needs more than a comb-over" and that "Drill, baby, drill, by itself, is not an energy policy." [Time, Politico]
• Former GOP pollster/strategist Frank Luntz took his turn shitting on the party and McCain today, too, saying, among other things, that "Stevie Wonder reads a teleprompter better than John McCain." Luntz, who was a GOP star in 1994, is so far up Newt Gringrich's ass that he knows what donor's cock Gincrich just finished sucking to fund his campaign in 2012 from the taste alone. [Politico]
• Sarah Palin thinks they should put a woman on the GOP ticket in 2012, because there's no way all the PUMAs can die by then. [Huffington Post]

• Joe and Jill Biden are going to meet with the Cheneys. No word on whether Cheney's man-safe comes with a re-sizing clause. [Politico]
• Henry Paulson enjoys spending your money buying stocks since it reminds him so much of the days at Goldman Sachs but, much like those days, he doesn't plan to spend a dime of it on bailing out the auto companies. [Huffington Post]
• In case you thought who Obama would choose to send to the G-20 summit in D.C. would be a Cabinet preview, he's sending Madeline Albright and former Republican Congressman Jim Leach just to fuck with you. [The Hill]
• Despite the Bush Administration's best efforts to deregulate under the radar and tie Obama's hands next year, it turns out even they don't know the rules that well and the Democrats in the House can just pass a bill next year and tell the Bush Administration to fuck off. [Politico]
• Obama might cut a deal with Congress on executive privilege, the subpoenas of Bush officials and classified documents to preserve his right to claim executive privilege in the future. [Huffington Post]
• Former Republican Congressman Mark Foley feels really bad that sex-IMing with teenagers cost the Republican Party the 2006 election and him a post office in name. He is, however, sporting a wedding ring that matches the one his boyfriend wears. [Huffington Post]
• Bribe-loving Congressman William Jefferson (D-Louisiana) may, finally, go to trial on corruption charges. How is he still around, Speaker? Please remind me. [The Hill]
• Oh, and Montana Senator and Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus has already started shanking Obama — and ailing Congressmen and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chair Ted Kennedy — on health care reform. I guess it's not just Republicans who love their circular firing squads these days. [Politico]

SPENCER: Steve Schmidt, the Bush-Cheney 04 veteran managing McCain's campaign, is a man of subtle tastes, according to Newsweek's Holly Bailey:

In GOP circles, Schmidt's nickname is "The Bullet," both for his gleaming shaved head and the way he relentlessly seeks out his target. (When he can, he lets off steam at the gym by practicing Ultimate Fighting techniques.)

MEGAN: I shudder at that. You know he asks women to call him that in bed. Or men. Either way. "Oh, God, Bullet, yes, pierce me! Fire it into me! Explode in me like you're a hollow point!"

SPENCER: No word on whether he practices his moves outside the locker room. But we have the verdict on Schmidt's "message control... specialty," about a week-plus after the launch of the Hate Talk Express, and here it is:

Overall, Obama is leading 53 percent to 43 percent among likely voters, and for the first time in the general-election campaign, voters gave the Democrat a clear edge on tax policy and providing strong leadership.

It gets so, so, so much better from there.

McCain has made little headway in his attempts to convince voters that Obama is too "risky" or too "liberal." Rather, recent strategic shifts may have hurt the Republican nominee, who now has higher negative ratings than his rival and is seen as mostly attacking his opponent rather than addressing the issues that voters care about. Even McCain's supporters are now less enthusiastic about his candidacy, returning to levels not seen since before the Republican National Convention.

MEGAN: You know you are the worst Republican strategist in the history of the universe when you make voters believe that your candidate is worse on taxes and the economy than the Democrat.

nearly as many said they think their taxes would go up under a McCain administration as under an Obama presidency, and more see their burdens easing with the Democrat in the White House.

SPENCER: So great fucking job, Steve Schmidt. You've erased McCain's convention bounce, entrenched Obama's margin, and tarnished, forever, McCain's brand. Let's go back to Holly's piece for one second:

MEGAN: I really think that he's Mark Penn levels of terrible.

SPENCER:

Schmidt never wanted to get back into presidential politics. But he admired McCain's willingness to buck convention and go up against his own party, and joined the Arizona senator as an unpaid adviser.

MEGAN: Do you know Holly? Is she always so naive? Schmidt was just so taken with his little Maverick that he couldn't resist doing something he never wanted to do again?

SPENCER: It certainly is bucking convention to accuse the likely next president of the United States of "palling around" with terrorists who blew up the World Trade Center and use a line — "Who is Barack Obama?" — that comes out of the imagination of an anti-semite. I don't know Holly and didn't think her Schmidt profile was naive. It read to me like she wrote it deliberately flat in order to give Schmidt the rope to hang himself.

MEGAN: Well, that last quote was giving more credibility to Schmidt's personal mythology than it deserved, in my opinion.

SPENCER: And he's not just hung himself, he's hung the entire GOP. After a week of "turning the page" — a Bartlett's-level classic line from campaign director Rick Davis — from the economy to AYERSTERRORISTARABN*****, downballot Republicans in blood-red states think McCain is taking them down instead of Obama:

Rep. Mark Souder, an Indiana Republican, said he was looking at an "Obama tide" in his district and wondering about his own reelection: "Can I withstand a firestorm?"

"The impression of McCain on the economy is that he wanted more deregulation than Bush" at a time that voters are demanding more help from the government, he said. "I'm not sure right now that McCain can carry seven states," added Souder, whose home state has not picked a Democrat for president since 1964. "In the end I think McCain will carry Indiana. But if you are fighting for Indiana, you are in trouble."

Here's my question for you: isn't it preferable for the GOP to have nominated McCain, the Deviationist, in a year when it was all but destined to lose, so that it has an alibi for conservatism? "If only we had nominated a real conservative, a Rock of the True Church, this calamity would have never befallen us..." etc etc?

MEGAN: I mean, I think the problem with that narrative now is twofold, which is not to say they won't try it out. First, he was pretty well enthusiastically embraced by the conservative machinery after he swore fealty to the elimination of my reproductive rights and played the hell out of his conservative record on other issues. Two, he was beloved for choosing Sarah Palin, who is even further to his right and there's plenty of evidence that her nomination did him no favors. I am sure that the party will do some soul-searching in November — hopefully without the violence some of us fear, but they should have done that after 2006 and didn't. Instead, you got Boehner and Cantor and Blunt and DeMint and Coburn stepping up the partisanship, swinging to the right and generally echoing their already-failed tactics. Tom Davis said six months ago ago that if the GOP brand was dog food, they'd pull it from the shelves and I think that holds. Also, every time I hear "the party of staying out of people's lives" I yell back at the TV "unless you have a uterus." That's the fundamental conflict, and it's not resolve-able. Either they go back to being small-government and fiscally conservative, or they embrace the big-government interfere-y mentality of the culture wars on things like abortion, same-sex marriage and abstinence-only education. But I think they're seeing they can't have it both ways.

SPENCER: Well, there is a third option, one that defers a moment of conservative reckoning, and that's to establish a narrative that "thugs" and "poverty pimps" — you know, those people — stole the election. Tom Mattzie:

n the event that campaigning, purging and intimidating voters doesn't work, the Right is creating a myth like they did in 1960. They are creating the myth of a stolen election. Conservatives plan to claim that ACORN and Barack Obama stole the election. Their hope is to steal the legitimacy of what is looking like a massive repudiation of Bush, conservatives and the Republican Party. The Right plans to steal the election by trying to steal the legitimate defeat of them by progressive forces.

And why wouldn't they? The entire Republican coalition could be shattered with this election. White suburban voters who once voted Republican on tax issues are running away from Republicans on a host of issues—including taxes. Independent are looking more and more like Democratic voters.

More than anything else, I think that's what's behind the Hate Talk Express. Schmidt probably recognizes that they've lost, and he and Rick Davis are setting up a strategy to tear down President Obama through charges of illegitimacy.

MEGAN: Republicans have been gunning for ACORN for a damn long time. I think the problem is that attacking them only plays to the base.

SPENCER: But that's only a problem if your strategy is to play beyond the base, and at this point that's doubtful. The McCain campaign's last big push to win the election came with the failed attempt at "suspending" the campaign. Everything since has been to generate the result of preparing for the 2012 campaign. Or, perhaps, something far more sinister. I can't post images, but this is something that got banned from Say Anything, a right-wing Pajamas Media blog: an image of Obama and a noose, with the caption, "The Fucking Solution."

MEGAN: Oh, I can post images (and a shout-out to Jill Filipovic for alerting me to this in the first place). I mean, how stupid do you have to be, honestly? That's the shit that makes me believe in the reverse Bradley effect. Like, I wouldn't want to tell people like him that I was voting for Obama, but I sure as shit wouldn't want that guy's candidate fucking elected. I wouldn't want to be associated with that, even if I were a Republican.

SPENCER: Let's also not forget this model citizen who held up a stuffed monkey with an Obama sticker and, smiling, told a cameraman "This is Little Hussein."

MEGAN: I feel like I owe someone a beer or something.

SPENCER: The last thing I'll say here: Last night I watched Dodgers-Phils game 3 — shitty game — with a friend who has great sources on the right, and he reported that this isn't a cynical push. The right has convinced itself that Obama is in fact a threat to the country, and not in any policy-minded sense.

MEGAN: Oh, I have evidence of that on my Facebook page alone.

SPENCER: My question: at what point does this actually become a long-term electoral liability for the GOP? Or am I searching for a theory of political gravity that doesn't exist?

MEGAN: I think that the GOP has set back a good decade of outreach to minority communities, including the Latino community. Between the foaming-at-the-mouth for a big fence and this kind of shit coming out of Republicans about the Scary Black Man That Will End This Country, that's the end of it.

SPENCER: But what's the end, really? Doesn't it actually come when whites stop buying the GOP dog food? As James Baker once memorably said, "Fuck the Jews, they don't vote for us anyway." You know?

MEGAN: And I think a lot of people on the margins — the people who were already registering as independents, the people who were leaning libertarian, the people for whom this kind of race baiting in an anaethma, the people who remember the party of small government — for this, this will be the end. McCain the Maverick was supposed to be their guy, the Republican for Republicans disenchanted with Bush and Gingrich. And, instead, he's worse than either in the end for the party. I had a piece of RNC memorabilia for my ex's dad, who worked every convention except this one for the last 30+ years. He turned it down yesterday. That's not a good sign

SPENCER: Ironic: the conservative 2008 strategy is like al-Qaeda in Anbar Province. Its natural constituencies reject the severity of its rule, renounce its appeal, and — at least transactionally — turn to their ostensible enemy.

MEGAN: On the other hand, who knew the libertarians might end up as a credible third party?

• McCain suggested he might suspend his campaign again so that he can really broker a bailout plan to save the country and be a hero... and we all know how well that worked out the last time. [The Nation]
• An actuarial company has predicted that McCain has a 25 percent chance of dying in office his second term, which is why Sarah Palin is cracking jokes about Joe Biden's age and asked people whether they want "the new energy, the new face, the new ideas" in the White House in her new interview with Katie Couric. [MSNBC, Politico]
• By the way, despite the fact that Republican leaders initially claimed it was Pelosi's partisan speech that caused Republicans to vote against the bailout plan — a stance mocked by no less than Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann and Rush Limbaugh — it turns out that it was actually Newt Gingrich's fault! He ginned up opposition to the bill to test the waters for a 2012 Presidential run before releasing a tepid statement of support while the Members he conned voted his will in the floor. Dick. [Huffington Post, Huffington Post, Politico, Huffington Post]
• The Republican strategy to win in Ohio — as in Michigan before that — remains to disenfranchise new, poor and minority voters. For real. It's easier than winning based on your candidate or the issues, apparently. [MSNBC, Michigan Messenger]

• Palin's former aides admit that she's a little ADD about debate prep but usually pulls it out in the end because she's all charming and shit. [LA Times, Andrew Sullivan]
• Palin gave her first newspaper interview — via e-mail, naturally — and managed not to stick her foot in it. Her staff managed to do little more than reiterate talking points in e-mail format, but it's a start. [Mat-Su Frontiersman]
• Gwen Ifill broke her ankle this week (Steve Schmidt has nothing to do with it, he swears) but neither rain nor snow nor dark of night will keep her from asking Sarah Palin about foreign policy. [Fishbowl LA]
• Bill Clinton plans to suck it up and do a couple of Obama rallies in Florida so people will stop saying he's bitter and not really keen on an Obama presidency. Now if only he can keep the passive-aggressive slights to himself while doing them! [The Guardian]

1. He wrote a book that begins:

There is no attack on American culture more deadly and more historically dishonest than the secular effort to drive God out of America's public life.

and

2. He is probably running for president.

After the jump, the results of an extensive Nexis search on the loves and — remember this word?? — pecadilloes — of Naughty Newt, the essence of which can be boiled down to: He makes Giuliani look so, so classy. And unfortch, he also hearts Obama!

Discounting that GOPers generally use the term "therapy" as code for "faggotry," Newt practically endorsed Barack Obama last week - "If the country wants therapy, it will vote for Obama" - just cause it gave him a cool excuse to knock Hil. Oh, Hil...

"You can't beat them tactically . . . They're too relentless, they're too well-organized, they have too big a machine and they'll just grind you down," he said.

"If they think [Obama] is a real threat, they'll just grind him up."

Newt called the Contract With America "the first step toward renewing American civilization"

Newt and Callista met once a week for breakfast at the supreme court cafteria.

Kit Gingrich told the Wash Post of Callista: "I liked her from the first time I saw her. This is the first time I can ever remember seeing that Newty is in love." Awwwww!

In 1996 Ted Haggard told Michael Lewis he didn't understand the Gay Pride Parade that under way in Denver. "It's like a Murderers' Pride Parade."

Focus On The Family's James Dobson thinks Ted Haggard can be cured of his faggotry.

Newt Gingrich is a Top 500 Reviewer on Amazon.com, having penned several hundred book reviews for free on the site.

Newt's request to the Archdiocese of Atlanta to annul his SECOND marriage to Marianne Gingrich was made on the grounds that SHE had been married before.

Of the unpopular impeachment trials, Newt told the NYT Mag: "I realized I was out of sync with the culture. This is a culture that is much more open, and has gone through many more experiences, than a person of my age and my background understood." Until Callista bestowed upon him a BJ underneath the Supreme Court cafeteria table!

Vanity Fair's Gail Sheehy has known all about Callista, Newt's fave breakfast companion, for twelve years, since she profiled Newty in a story in which Gingrich BFF Kip Carter also told her Newt would have won a 1974 congressional race "if we could have kept him out of the office, screwing her (volunteer Dot Crews) on the desk."

Jesus fucking Christ.

Just a warning: we are not going to be able to contain this news to one post, or even seven. We sort of thought this kind of temerity went out of style with Henry VIII, but no! Newt Gingrich, the whole time he was leading the charge to bring down Clinton for splooging on Monica's dress, was cheating on his second wife — the one he was fucking while his first wife was too busy swallowing radioactive juice to fend off cancer to swallow, ugh... you get the point. The Other Woman, former Congressional aide/apparent eye job recipient Callista Bisek, is Wife #3 now, natch — though Newt couldn't well call himself a crusader for Jesus if he hadn't tried to get the church to annul the marriage to Wife #2 on the basis — and maybe we should just rename this entire saga Newt: Natch! — that it should never have happened in the first place, since he was already married BEFORE!

We don't know the details, and we doubt Focus On The Family chief James Dobson, whose aggressive interviewing style elicited this little chronicle in the Awesome Powers of God's Forgiveness, will want to rub salt in this clearly remorse-wracked man's open wounds. But we'll be sure to keep you updated between praying to our lord and savior for this poor man's tormented soul. By which we mean, barfing.

Gingrich Had Affair During Clinton Probe [AP]