Thursday Open Thread [10.24.13]

It looks like the teabaggers are dropping all pretense now. They used to pretend that they were not racist. Now they embrace it. Teabagger Chris McDaniel is challenging Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran (R) in a GOP primary. Last summer, according to Mother Jones, he addressed a neo-Confederate conference.

Two months ago, the tea party-backed Mississippi Senate candidate addressed a neo-Confederate conference and costume ball hosted by a group that promotes the work of present-day secessionists and contends the wrong side won the “war of southern independence.” Other speakers at the event included a historian who believes Lincoln was a Marxist and Ryan Walters, a PhD candidate who worked on McDaniel’s first political campaign and wrote recently that the “controversy” over President Barack Obama’s birth certificate “hasn’t really been solved.” […]

With their endorsements of McDaniel, the Senate Conservatives Fund and the Club for Growth have shown just how far they are willing to go in terms of embracing the far right to prosecute their war for the soul of the party. In August, McDaniel addressed a neo-Confederate conference in Laurel, Miss., near his hometown of Ellisville. A local chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), the Jones County Rosin Heels, hosted the two-day event, which the group described in invitations as a “Southern Heritage Conference” for “politically incorrect folks.” […]

The Rosin Heels does more than regret the outcome of the Civil War. Its monthly newsletter routinely features articles and essays advocating for present-day secession. Its August newsletter highlighted the seven-year-old “Burlington Declaration” from the First North American Secession Convention, which stated that the right of secession was a “[truth] of natural law and the human experience.”

Regretting the outcome of the Civil War is the same as regretting the abolition of slavery.

ARKANSAS–US SENATE–University of Arkansas: Rep. Tom Cotton (R) 37, Sen. Mark Pryor 36.

A conservative is sounding the alarm: Ross Douthat:

[W]hile conservatives think the Obamacare exchanges are overregulated and oversubsidized, they are actually closer to the right-of-center vision for health care reform than the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, which is happening no matter what transpires with Healthcare.gov. So if the exchanges fail and the Medicaid expansion takes effect (and, inevitably, becomes difficult to roll back), we’ll be left with an individual market that’s completely dysfunctional and a more socialized system over all.

In that scenario, the Democratic Party would probably end up pushing, not for the pipe dream of true single payer, but for a further bottom-up/top-down socialization, in which Medicare is offered to 55- to 65-year-olds and Medicaid is eventually expanded even more.

Meanwhile, the task for serious conservative reformers — already not the most politically effective bunch — might actually become harder, because they would have to explain how their plan to build an effective, exchange-based marketplace differed from the Obama White House’s exchange fiasco.

Well, when you call a former Heritage Foundation idea of establishing a private market place for health insurance “socialism,” what are you going to call actual socialism? LOL. Poor Republicans. They are just the petulant temper tantrum throwing boys who cried wolf. Brian Beutler agrees, though he is harsher:

Republicans see healthcare.gov’s failure as their big chance to pour some sugar into the vat of lemon juice they’ve squeezed for themselves over the past few weeks. And it might have worked, but for the GOP’s four-year-long fire hose of bad faith with respect to all matters of healthcare reform. Their efforts to sabotage the law have been so unconcealed that support for Obamacare actually increased during the shutdown — tepid liberals came home despite the website’s troubles. And now that Democrats are grappling with what to do if the federally facilitated marketplaces in 34 states don’t become functional soon, Republicans want to retroactively reassign blame for the shutdown to them.

Here’s a spoiler: Nobody’s going to buy it.

But this isn’t a Boy Who Cried Wolf problem for the GOP. In that charming fable, the very thing the unsuspecting child protagonist had been lying about actually materialized and ate him to death. Republicans deserve no such sympathy. They’re still lying.