What were Republicans thinking when they gave Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, who served as George W. Bush’s first budget czar, the job of rebutting Pres. Obama’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday? During Daniels’ tenure as head of the Office of Management and Budget, the U.S. annual surplus of $236 billion was turned into a deficit of $400 billion.

This man has no credibility on any topic. If there ever were accountability on the right, he would be working in the mail room at a conservative “thimk” tank, not running one of the 50 states.

The paradox is that, as recently as last week, Bill Kristol, formerly Dan Quayle’s brain and now the editor of the neocon propaganda sheet, The Weekly Standard, was beseeching Daniels to make a late entry into the presidential race. This provides yet more evidence, though none is needed, that Bill Kristol is seriously delusional.

Great job on this video from MoveOn.org — except that guy’s makeup is a little wonky. Oh well, he still captures Mitt’s alien-like awkwardness with actual humans.

The 18 debates among the Republican presidential wannabes have been such horrific clown shows that both Sen. John McCain, the GOP 2008 nominee, and Bush’s propaganda czar Karl Rove have expressed concern that they are harming the party.

The debates have also been veritable blizzards of lies, particularly about Pres. Obama’s record. None of the candidates is a smoother or more practiced liar than Mitt Romney, who has made his political career out of changing his positions in order to get votes.

In his State of the Union speech last night, the president addressed one of Romney’s often-repeated lies — that no jobs have been created since Obama took office.

Pres. Obama: In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005. American manufacturers are hiring again, creating jobs for the first time since the late 1990s.

Factcheck.org confirms the president’s statement even while griping a little about what he didn’t say — and in doing so puts the lie to Romney’s oft-repeated claim that no jobs have been created since the Obama took office in the depths of the Bush recession:

Conservative columnist and neocon Bush II speechwriter David Frum wrote recently that he is tired of being surrounded by dumb people. At least, that was basically the point of his article, “When Did the GOP Lose Touch with Reality?” in the November New York magazine.

On a recent CNN appearance, Frum tried to expand on the harmful affect of FOX News on American discourse although CNN’s Howard Kurtz seemed determine to err on the side of championing FOX.

Note: We wrote last year about the example Frum cites, a story that first surfaced broadly on the Drudge Report web site and was then taken up with fervor by FOX.

In this cycle, the Republican Party’s ever-dwindling tea bagger base demands a candidate for president who is an angry, practiced liar who will go to any rhetorical extreme to smear Pres. Obama.

Rick Santorum is doing his best to prove that he is their guy. Case in point is this episode, played out in the two videos above, from a Santorum campaign stop in Lady Lake, Fla., yesterday.

His performance in these two videos shows, once and for all, that he lacks the intelligence, decorum and stature to be president, and that, were he to become the Republican Party’s nominee, he could never get the votes of moderates and independents that are required to win the presidency.

Transcript for video on the left:

During the impeachment-driven midterm elections in 1998, then-Speaker Newt Gingrich commissioned a series of ads designed to try to reverse growing public support for his nemesis, Pres. Bill Clinton, whom Gingrich and congressional Republicans were trying to hound out of office because he had been caught lying during a lawsuit deposition about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

One of the ads, titled “What Did you Tell Your Kids,” specifically targeted suburban women who might be wavering in their support for the GOP by referencing the ickier parts of the scandal — the “not sex” sex, stained blue dress, etc. — without mentioning them outright. The ads don’t appear to be available online today — 1998 was well before the YouTube era — but writing for Slate.com in October 1998, William Saletan, supplied this review:

It features one young suburban mother talking to another. “What did you tell your kids?” asks the first woman. “I didn’t know what to say,” answers the second. The first woman replies: “It’s wrong. For seven months he lied to us.” Like the finger-wagging scene in One Person, this ad reminds viewers not of what Clinton did to [Paula] Jones or [Ken] Starr but of what he did to us. It doesn’t say his lies were criminal; it merely says they were wrong. This isn’t an abstract matter of law, the ad suggests. It’s about your kids.

This ad, and the theme of explaining a politician’s sexual misdeeds to children, has renewed salience now, in light of Gingrich’s surprise victory in the South Carolina primary over the weekend. As a caller into C-SPAN’s phone-in show, “Washington Journal”, put it in a rhetorical question to women Republican voters last week: Have you considered the fact that if you elect Newt Gingrich president, his first lady will be this homewrecker who broke up his marriage?

What will you tell your kids, indeed.

James Carville, or as I think of him, Mr. Mary Matalin, penned an open letter to Republicans and it’s a doozy. Carville looks back at the lowest high points of the race so far and concludes it’s a “world-class disaster.” Since right now that particular description brings to mind captain-less ships unable to float, it’s not a bad analogy.

But Carville is just getting warmed up.

…most people thought it was kind of a watermark when your Tea Party gang booed the golden rule. You know, I’ve spent some time in Philly and they have always thought they were pretty radical because they actually booed Santa Claus and Willie Mays. Philly, I’ve got news for you — you ain’t got nothing on South Carolina Republicans. They just aren’t buying any of that do-unto-others garbage.

It’s hard to tell from the clip if the audience was booing Jesus or Ron Paul or peace. No matter, they were clearly not interested in anything but kicking Iranian butt.

But Paul, as we know, is not a front-runner. For the two of them, Carville saves his best shots, starting with Mitt Romney.

ABC News:

Although it is not apparent on his financial disclosure form, Mitt Romney has millions of dollars of his personal wealth in investment funds set up in the Cayman Islands, a notorious Caribbean tax haven.

A spokesperson for the Romney campaign says Romney follows all tax laws and he would pay the same in taxes regardless of where the funds are based…

Official documents reviewed by ABC News show that Bain Capital, the private equity partnership Romney once ran, has set up some 138 secretive offshore funds in the Caymans.

Romney campaign officials and those at Bain Capital tell ABC News that the purpose of setting up those accounts in the Cayman Islands is to help attract money from foreign investors, and that the accounts provide no tax advantage to American investors like Romney. Romney, the campaign said, has paid all U.S. taxes on income derived from those investments.

Read more…

Daily Mail:

Newt Gingrich’s ex-wife revealed for the first time today that the GOP presidential hopeful had asked for an open marriage so that he could have a wife and a mistress.

Marianne Gingrich, his second wife, said she wanted American voters to know his true moral character. There have been fears that her explosive television interview could end her former partner’s campaign for the White House.

Regarding the claims, Marianne told ABC: “And I just stared at him and he said, ‘Callista doesn’t care what I do.’ He wanted an open marriage and I refused.”

As of early Thursday morning, ABC News had not announced when it will air the interview, but it will presumably be Thursday or Friday night, on the eve of the South Carolina primary on Saturday.

Marianne Gingrich’s last interview was with Esquire, for an article published in August 2010. What was apparent then was that she has neither forgiven nor forgotten. She has obviously timed this interview so that it will air just before a potentially make or break primary in a state that is hotbed of Republican “values voters.”

In the 2010 interview, Marianne Gingrich confirmed one of the more paradoxical rumors about Newt’s marital history.