Gawker has published an amusing column by someone claiming to be a gen-u-wine mole at Fox News. Well, that should keep the paranoia level nicely high in Fair-and-Balanced Land, eh?

I can pretty much take or leave the mole’s revelations, such as Sean Hannity’s practice of changing ties mid-interview when the network is going to run a piece on two separate days.

But there was one interesting passage in the column, when the mole disclosed what had pushed him or her over the edge into moledom:

The final straw for me came last year. Oddly, it wasn’t anything on TV that turned me rogue, though plenty of things on our air had pushed me in that direction over the years. But what finally broke me was a story on The Fox Nation. If you’re not a frequenter of Fox Nation (and if you’re reading Gawker, it’s a pretty safe bet you’re not) I can describe it for you — it’s like an unholy mashup of the Drudge Report, the Huffington Post and a Klan meeting. Word around the office is that the site was actually the brainchild of Bill O’Reilly’s chief stalker (and Gawker pal) Jesse Watters.

The [Fox] Nation aggregates news stories, gives them provocative headlines, and invites commenters to weigh in. The comments are fascinating actually, if you can detach yourself enough to view them as sort of the id of the conservative movement. Of course, if you can’t detach yourself, then you’re going to come away with a diminished view of human decency, because HOLY MOLY THESE PEOPLE DO NOT LIKE THE BLACK PRESIDENT. I’m not saying they dislike him BECAUSE he’s black, but a lot of the comments, unprompted, mention the fact that he is black, so what would you say, Dr. Freud?….

The post that broke the camel’s back might be familiar to some of you, because it garnered a lot of attention and (well-deserved) ridicule when it hit last August. The item was aggregating several news sources that were reporting innocuously on President Obama’s 50th birthday party, which was attended by the usual mix of White House staffers, DC politicos and Dem-friendly celebs. The Fox Nation, naturally, chose to illustrate the story with a photo montage of Obama, Charles Barkley, Chris Rock, and Jay Z, and the headline “Obama’s Hip Hop BBQ Didn’t Create Jobs.”

The post neatly summed up everything that had been troubling me about my employer: Non sequitur, ad hominem attacks on the president; gleeful race baiting; a willful disregard for facts; and so on.

The mole goes on to describe the Fox Nation site as “the seedy underbelly of the Fox news online empire.” That’s interesting, since you’d think Fox’s main meals would be sufficiently red-meaty to avoid the necessity of a separate greasy spoon for downscale tastes. But then I don’t know how much they fear competition from NewsMax.

So Paul Ryan claims there are “a dozen” Democrats in Congress who secretly support his budget proposals, but fear to say so because they’d get “killed.”

Wonder how many Republicans there are in Congress who secretly oppose Ryan’s budget—if only because it’s so politically risky—but fear to say so because they would most definitely get “killed” by the commissars of conservative orthodoxy? Bet it’s a lot more than a dozen.

But speaking of secrets: Ryan also says he just can’t understand why his “tax reform” ideas can’t draw bipartisan support:

“Why don’t we stop subsidizing the wealthy, why don’t we stop subsidizing corporations, why don’t we stop corporate welfare?” he asked. “There is an area I think we can get consensus on.”

Gee, Paul, if you’d just bother to actually spell out your tax reform ideas in public, that could happen! Or are you afraid you’d get “killed?”

It is entirely unsurprising that Paul Ryan and his many supporters have been advertising the massive safety net cuts and wholesale abandonments of the poor that make the bulk of the spending “savings” in his budget proposal as the greatest thing since the Clinton-era welfare reform legislation. What is surprising is that some progressives seem to be going along with the characterization in order to grind some old axes about the 1996 act.

There was a big Sunday New York Times piece by Jason DeParle conflating the plight of “the poor” with those of the single unwed mothers affected by state-level reductions in cash assistance under the TANF program (the post-1996 name for the old Aid to Families With Dependent Children program, a.k.a. “welfare”). DeParle does indeed document some dreadful state practices (notably in Arizona), even as he acknowledges that despite the recession more single unwed mothers are able to work than before 1996, and have lower poverty rates. But by overstating the importance of TANF in the post-reform safety net scheme, and giving critics of the original law a new soapbox for claiming vindication, DeParle’s piece is not only misleading, but understates the potential damage Ryan’s proposal could inflict.

Indeed, the biggest problem with the “welfare reform has failed” narrative, and with treating the Ryan budget as a logical extension of welfare reform, is that it ignores one of the main purposes of the 1996 act was to make other elements of the safety net, some work-conditional and others simply much better targeted, more central, even as they were significantly strengthened. As Elaine Kamarck explained at Ten Miles Square back in September of 2011:

[T]he intent of welfare reform was to move as many Americans as possible off the welfare rolls, which, by supporting mothers only if they weren’t working and weren’t married, created lamentable behavioral incentives. The goal was to see them then move into either the work world or the arms of other government programs that offer more targeted forms of assistance. In both respects, the law has been a success. No doubt the safety net needs shoring up. But even in these tough economic times, it is providing much more of a cushion for the kinds of families that once relied on welfare than its critics seem to realize.

In today’s WaPo, Ezra Klein takes a different tack in suggesting that welfare reform’s record is an accurate yardstick for how the Ryan budget might work out: since Ryan (and for that matter, in his own proposal, Mitt Romney) wants to turn Medicaid, food stamps and other safety-net programs into state-run block grants, it’s important to look at how states have cut TANF to see how they might handle these other programs.

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You might have seen a headline in the Washington Post today, or a link to the Lori MontgomeryWaPo story at any number of conservative sites, touting a “new study” showing that ObamaCare would “add $340 billion to deficit.”

Jonathan Chait helpfully says pretty much everything that needs to be said to debunk the idea that this is anything particularly new or worth worrying about. I won’t quote the whole thing or go through his reasoning, but basically the “new study” is just another GOP effort (authored by Republican Medicare trustee Charles Blahous) uaimed at “proving” that ACA adds rather than detracts from the federal budget deficit, in this case by pretending much of its Medicare savings would have been achieved anyway, thus denying them a spot on the positive side of the ledger. Here’s Jon’s bottom line:

Blahous is the Republican trustee for Medicare, so that title offers the hook for a paper he writes that, by adopting some mighty odd hypothetical scenarios, says that Obamacare will boost the deficit. Blahous’s government position gives the claim enough juice that it can be pitched as a “study” by a government official, as opposed to just another Republican-authored polemic, which would never receive such prominent or relatively credulous coverage. The next step is for conservatives to adopt Blahous’s figure as the “true” figure — but of course never to apply his strange assumptions to the GOP budget or to any other proposal — and browbeat the media into citing that alongside the CBO figure, for “balance.”

Since GOPers have been making all sorts of wild claims about ObamaCare’s cost since well before it was ever enacted, the only thing newsworthy about this a la carte bit of agitprop is that the Washington Post reported it as credible. Thanks a lot, Lori.

As he just announced, Rick Santorum is “suspending” his presidential campaign, which is pol-speak for folding. He didn’t attribute it to his daughter’s illness, and also didn’t come right out and say he had been beaten. But he was, certaintly by the time he lost Ohio, and perhaps earlier—say, when Foster Friess proved unable or unwilling to give his Super-PAC twenty or thirty million bucks to achieve parity with the Mitt Machine.

It has to be frustrating to Team Santorum that he fell just short of making it to the oasis of May primaries in southern and Great Plains states that might have given him some late wins and even perhaps some leverage with Romney going into the convention, the general election campaign, and a hypothetical Romney administration—not to mention some 2016 street cred if there is no Romney administration. It’s also entirely possible, of course, that if Santorum had hung in there until April 24, he would have gotten waxed in Pennsylvania, which might have made some May Flowers renaissance unlikely, while giving him the prospect of potentially ending his political career with two consecutive rebukes from the home folks.

In any event, this saves Romney and his friends a lot of money, and in theory at least, moves up his timetable for placating his intraparty foes, planning a convention, and getting the etch-a-sketch fired up for the main event.

There will be some what-ifs expressed about Santorum, particularly from those who think he self-destructed by getting a little too theocratic. I’m personally already on record as disagreeing. He danced with the ones that brung him: the people who think legalized abortion is a Holocaust, that same-sex relationships are a sign of moral collapse, that “traditionalist” Catholics and evangelical conservatives represent the only line of resistance against a Satanic takeover of the West, that a Middle Eastern Holy War is America’s destiny. It was enough to make him the winner of the much-contested subprimary to become the Conservative Alternative To Mitt Romney, but not enough to give someone with his many limitations the nomination.

I’ll miss him for the blogging material he so richly supplied, and do wish he had stuck around long enough to provoke a few more Romney gaffes and perhaps Romney defeats. But I’m glad I can go back to wearing sweater vests without fear of misunderstanding.

Now we get to see if Newt Gingrich tries to pretend he’s the last True Conservative Standing, or will just let us all have a break from the Great Republican Race to the Right of 2012.

Getting in those carbs before it’s too late in the day! Here are a few extras:

* Acknowledging that he’s not the most popular ex-president around, George W. Bush says the “Bush tax cuts” would be less vulnerable if they didn’t bear his name. And people wonder why Jeb didn’t think it was his year!

* LA Times’ Michael Memoli has good update on campaign to endorse marriage equality in the Democratic platform.

* Nate Silver shows that Ron Paul got a lot more bang for buck in this campaign than in 2008.

* At TAP, Stephen Lerner argues that progressives need to fight for rights of 11 million Americans with underwater mortgages.

* Salon’s Andrew Leonard defends JOBS Act against lefty criticism; says it’s “not all bad.”

And in non-political news:

* At the Daily Beast, Ashley Judd blasts “The Conversation about women’s bodies.”

Back in a jif or two.

Mike Gerson’s latest WaPo column will get some attention because he is one of the few conservatives anywhere to acknowledge that Mitt Romney and the GOP do indeed have a problem with women, and not one that can just be blamed on Obama or the liberal media.

Not that anyone familiar with Gerson would have imagined for a moment that he’d suggest a recalibration of the GOP message on reproductive rights issues, but he does dismiss that avenue in the third graph. Instead, he attributes his party’s weakness among women to general meanness:

Women and independent voters have seen a party enthusiastically confirming its most damaging stereotypes. The composite Republican candidate — reflecting the party’s ideological mean — has been harsh on immigration, confrontational on social issues, simplistic in condemning government and silent on the struggles of the poor. How many women would find this profile appealing on eHarmony?

This is the hidden curse of the Republican congressional triumph of 2010. Republican activists came to believe that purity is all that is necessary for victory. But a presidential candidate, it turns out, requires a broader ideological attraction than your average tea party House freshman.

For Gerson, the answer, unsurprisingly, is to go back to his own archetypal moment, George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign and its proclamation of a new, warm-and-fuzzy “compassionate conservatism”:

In 2000, George W. Bush campaigned — in both the primaries and the general election — on increasing the quality of education for poor children, on humane immigration reform and on expanding care by faith-based organizations for the addicted and homeless. These issues were personally important to Bush. They also signaled to independents and women that he could think beyond normal ideological boundaries.

Well, Bush also campaigned on a big fat tax cut for the wealthy, and outlawing abortion, and a lot of other things that did not strike many voters as “compassionate.” Moreover, in office, his “compassionate conservative” agenda, beyond the big vote-buying commitments to Medicare Rx Drugs and immigration reform, didn’t amount to much more than subsidies for conservative ministers. But never mind: the bigger problem, as Gerson acknowledges, is that Bush’s “compassionate conservative” rhetoric and the policies that were supposed to redeem it are now “broadly reviled among conservatives.” That’s putting it mildly.

Somehow or other, perhaps because he believes all that stuff about Romney being an unprincipled flip-flopper, Gerson seems to think Mitt will figure this out and defy the overwhelming, litmus-test-enforced disgust towards “compassionate conservatism” exhibited by today’s Republicans. Truth is, Romney is probably the least capable of any available GOP presidential nominee to do that. When Bush first launched “compassionate conservatism,” he was the hand-picked and universal favorite of the entire conservative movement; he had plenty of credibility to burn on the Right. Romney? Not so much. His poor favorability ratings among self-identified conservatives may not matter in November thanks to the party’s unifying Obama-hatred, but the one thing that could lead to a genuine revolt would be for Romney to defy the psychologically critical belief on the Right that Bush’s heresies against ideological orthodoxy are the only reason the GOP lost power in 2006 and 2008.

So Gerson’s anachronistic plea that Romney “show some humanity” is very likely to fall on deaf ears. And I suspect this column is mainly intended to enable its author to say after Election Day, “I told you so.”

I hope it’s not the case, but it sure looks like George Zimmerman and/or his family is headed in the direction of making him the poster boy for the proposition that racism in this country is mainly generated by liberals and African-Americans. As you may have heard, Zimmerman has launched a website initially designed to raise money for his legal costs and living expenses; now it’s sporting signs of solidarity with “supporters” who spraypainted “Long Live Zimmerman” on the wall of an African-American cultural center in Ohio.

Meanwhile, Zimmerman’s family has fished in with the long-standing right-wing hysteria over the New Black Panther Party, which furthered its joint effort with Fox News and the wingnutosphere to pretend it’s a big bad menace by announcing a “bounty” for Zimmerman’s killing.

You can expect fever-swamp coverage of the whole saga, which is already pretty inflammatory (with the Daily Caller leading the pack), to metastasize.

I’d say it’s a pretty solid—and by that I mean not only widely shared, but logical—part of the political CW that once Mitt Romney’s gets out of the primary season, he’ll want to leave any discussion of the intersection of politics and religion far, far behind. After all, that seems to be his basic inclination, as reflected in his I’ll-address-this-once-and-for-all speech on the subject in 2007. He’s had to tightrope his way through a religion-laden primary season in which Christian Right poohbahs conspired against him endlessly (but could never really got behind one rival until it was too late). He knows conservative evangelicals—and not only conservative evangelicals—are less than happy about his own LDS faith, and he certainly doesn’t want to go down the rabbit hole of a public discussion of Mormon doctrine or history. So he’ll encourage a relatively Godless general election, right?

Maybe, but maybe not at all. It didn’t get a great deal of distinct attention outside conservative circles, but when other Republicans linked arms with the Catholic bishops back in February to accuse the Obama administration of waging a “war on religion” via its contraception coverage mandate, Romney was bellowing with the best of them, authoring an op-ed in the Washington Examiner that made this inflammatory charge:

Liberals and conservatives have made common cause to defend the rights of religious minorities in the past. But somehow, today, when it comes to the agenda of the left-wing of the Democratic Party—those who brought us abortion on demand and who fight against the teaching of abstinence education in our children’s schools—their devotion to religious freedom goes out the window. They would force Catholics and others who have beliefs rooted in their faith to sacrifice the teachings of their faith to the mandate of federal bureaucrats.

Romney’s line on the subject goes well beyond selective pandering to conservative Catholics and other culture-warriors, and goes right to the heart of the Christian Nationalist belief that separating church and state actually means a First-Amendment-violating Religious Establishment of “secularism,” as he made plain in a recent speech in Wisconsin:

At an event in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a supporter asked the candidate what the Obama administration’s motive was for mandating that the health insurance provided by all religious institutions cover contraceptives for women.

“I think there is in this country a war on religion,” Romney replied. “I think there is a desire to establish a religion in America known as secularism.”

“They gave it a lot of thought and they decided to say that in this country that a church — in this case, the Catholic Church — would be required to violate its principles and its conscience and be required to provide contraceptives, sterilization and morning after pills to the employees of the church. … We are now all Catholics. Those of us who are people of faith recognize this is — an attack on one religion is an attack on all religion.”

It’s reasonably clear from this pattern of rhetoric that Romney’s way of dealing with conservative evangelical mistrust of his LDS faith is to talk more, not less, about religion and cultural issues, which is exactly what Christian Right leaders expect and demand of him. It’s significant that the best-known and most aggressive evangelical critic of Romney’s religious outlook, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, has repeatedly followed the line that Mitt is “not Mormon enough” in his commitment to the culture wars, and can only bury concerns about LDS doctrine by doubling-down on political points of agreement with the Christian Right.

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Scanning the new ABC/WaPo poll for something unexpected, I did run across an item that made me say “Huh!”

Considering that the entire Republican presidential nominating contest has basically been an extended discussion of conservatives’ relative degree of unhappiness about Mitt Romney’s ideological reliability, it’s not surprising that 13% of poll respondents say his views on the issues are “too liberal” for their tastes (as compared to 33% who say they are “too conservative,” 42% who say they are “about right,” and 12% who have no opinion).

But when the same question is asked of Obama, he hits double digits himself in terms of the percentage of all Americans considering his views “too conservative” (10%), while 40% say he’s “too liberal,” 44% “about right,” and a mere 6% having no opinion.

Obama’s “too conservative” number is at an all-time high dating back to the first time they asked this question in early 2008. Just prior to the 2008 election, it was at 3%. The “too liberal” number has ranged from a low of 29% around the time of the Inauguration to a high of 45% in September of 2010, but has mostly bounced around the high 30s.

Considering that Obama’s current job approval rating (from Gallup) among self-identified liberals is at 80%, and among liberal Democrats is 87%, I’d say he’s done a lot better job attracting support from people who wish he was more ideologically sound than has Romney so far.

We don’t have decent crosstabs from the new WaPo/ABC poll, but everything we can see or are told in the Balz/Cohen story on the survey shows an electorate that sure looks like it is settling into the patterns set in 2008. Obama’s up by seven points (among RVs), benefitting from a big advantage among women, minorities, and young voters, and a slight advantage among independents. He’s struggling most among non-college educated white men. I’m guessing he’s doing better among young unmarried women and not as well among Hispanics as in 2008. But all in all, considering everything that’s gone down since then—the full financial collapse, the recession, the war over the stimulus package, the Tea Party Movement, health reform, the death of Osama bin Laden, the vicious and right-bent GOP presidential nomination contest—it’s pretty amazing, and a sign of deeply entrenched partisan divisions, that the numbers look so similar.

Or perhaps it’s just an April mirage We’ll see soon enough.

Is a week without a Republican presidential primary a week without a Romney gaffe? We’ll see. In the meantime, some leftovers from the day’s virtual clips:

* Wisconsin Republican state senator defends repeal of equal pay laws on grounds that “money is more important to men” than to women.

* At College Guide, Daniel Luzer draws attention to Chicago State University’s unprecedented demand that faculty and staff secure prior approval for all public communications, including use of social media.

* At Ten Miles Square, Harold Pollack deplores Paul Ryan’s efforts to depict his shredding of the social safety net as the next phase of welfare reform.

* Shape-shifting alert: Mitt Romney to address NRA later this week.

* American Crossroads Super-PAC about to initiate what will likely be a $200 million barrage of anti-Obama ads.

And in non-political news:

* Georgia Bulldogs celebrate Bubba Watson Masters win.

Time to compensate for late-night pondering of latest Mad Men episode. See you early tomorrow.

Selah.

I don’t know if Ben Smith’s anonymous “conservative lawyer” quoted at BuzzFeed today is a reliable source, but his argument for what a 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court might do to invalidate ObamaCare is hair-raisingly plausible:

“The court is going to find a spurious exception to a spurious doctrine,” he said. Then he offered a version of the rationale the Supreme Court majority will, he predicts, use to overturn not just the mandate, but the entire bill:

“You have built an imaginary mansion, with thousands of rooms, on the foundation of Wickard v. Filburn — the 1942 ruling that broadened the understanding of how the Commerce Clause could be used to regulate economic activity.

“We aren’t being asked to radically revise the Commerce Clause and throw out seven decades of law, and we won’t. But we know the founders never intended the Commerce Clause to allow the Federal Government to regulate everything on the planet. So we are going to accept Randy Barnett’s basically spurious exception to that basically spurious idea, and throw out the Affordable Care Act on the grounds that the Commerce Clause regulates “activity” (which we don’t really believe), but not “inactivity” (because, why not draw the line somewhere?).

“This is to say: You have built a fantasy mansion on the Commerce Clause. You can hardly blame us if, in one wing of this mansion, down a dusty corridor, we build a fantasy room called “inactivity,” lock the door, and don’t let you in.

Under this construction, of course, the Court wouldn’t admit what it was actually doing, but would embrace the “spurious exception” in order to avoid a direct reversal of the “spurious doctrine.” But it would definitely burrow into the foundations of the “fantasy mansion” in a way that would make it relatively easy for a future, more radically conservative Court—say, the kind that might exist after eight years of a Romney administration—to “throw out seven decades of law,” and with it, the underpinnings of seven decades of social progress, including such minor items as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Matt Zeitlin commented this weekend on the firing (if that is what you can call the termination of an informal agreement with a freelance contributor) of John Derbyshire by National Review for a pretty blatantly racist column published elsewhere. As Matt said, this is a chronic issue for movement conservative journalism, and perhaps movement conservative journalists should spend some time reflecting on why that is so.

I have a more limited observation to make, which has to do with Rich Lowry’s post at NRO announcing “Derb’s” excommunication. It describes the offending publication as having “lurche[d] from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible.”

It would have been helpful if Lowry had drawn the line a bit more clearly. But I’m glad to see the line was drawn. At some point during the last few years, the term “politically incorrect” has become an all-purpose defense for any racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise bigoted remark from conservatives, as though racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry are only objectionable because over-sensitive souls or political monitors find them “incorrect” or it proves inconvenient or embarrassing to the conservative cause. It seems NR is willing to acknowledge some right-wing utterances are inherently immoral and worthy of condemnation, irrespective of “politics.” It’s a start.