As Sarah Turns: The Palin soap opera continues

Some claim Sarah Palin -- the now out-going governor of Alaska -- is quitting her post to concentrate on running for president, but I don't see it. At the very least, she looks flaky to not even complete one term as governor. Wouldn't she be better served by showing how great she is as a chief executive? What is really going on here, or am I just too politically naive? Also, what a strange time to make this announcement if she wants to increase her political profile. Most folks have already started their 4th of July holiday. This is take-out-the-garbage time, not throw-your-hat-in-the-ring time.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Story of the Day: We see you, GOP

Anybody remember who stripped the stimulus bill of funding to prepare for a flu pandemic? The liberal blogosphere points to the elephants in the room and the Democrats who went along with them.

John Nichols

Daily Kos

AmericaBlog

Lessons from Denver & St. Paul

Karl Rove is alive and well; the Log Cabin Republicans made a bold, but costly move; and other lessons from the political conventions are revealed in my latest Lesbian Notions column.

The economy does better under Democrats

Michael Kinsley isn't the first writer to argue that the economy does better under Democrats than Republicans, but he does have the latest statistics.

Today's Must Reads: The Republican assault on truth

There are two great entries today in the must-read category.

Leonard Pitts:

Yes, we’re all intellectually dishonest on occasion. But no one does it like Republican conservatives. They are to intellectual dishonesty what Michael Jordan was to basketball or the Temptations to harmony: the avatar, the exemplar, the paradigm. They have elevated it beyond hypocrisy and political expedience. They have made it ... art.

Joe Klein:

Maybe I'm getting old, maybe it's that I've seen this act so often before, maybe it's that the people I talk to when I go out on the road really are having a harder time paying for things like health care, gasoline and college tuition, but I'm finding the Republican attempts to derail the conversation from the actual state of the country really depressing and disgraceful this year. They practice Orwellian politics of the crudest sort.

The crumbling Republican Party: What's next after loyalty committees?

By Diane Silver

Karl Rove's dream of turning the United States into a GOP monopoly has become a nightmare for his once seemingly all-powerful party. Signs of weakness are everywhere. Today's case in point has popped up in Kansas, which was once the reddest of red states, where the GOP has just created a loyalty committee.

I'm not kidding, although any sane person would think this was a joke.

At a mid-year convention this weekend, the state party changed it's constitution, no less, to create the committee. The body will strip GOP officials of their party titles if they help a Democrat get elected. New Republican Party Chairman Kris Kobach sought the change and will chair the committee.

Kobach is best known as a failed Congressional candidate of far, far right, anti-abortion, anti-immigrant views.

I have to agree with Andy Wollen, chairman of the Kansas Traditional Republican Majority, an organization of moderate Republicans.

“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” Wollen said. “It’s just the latest demonstration that these people just flat don’t understand people.”

It's also the latest demonstration of why the Republican Party is in trouble. If you have to keep people in line by clubbing them, you've already lost.

What Kobach and gang can't seem to realize is that people are running from the Republican Party because of the radical right's ideas and their love of bullying. I suspect the new loyalty committee will do nothing than drive more people from the state GOP.

Kobach and gang are the best thing that have ever happened to Democrats.

Here's more on the loyalty committee and on the state GOP's attempt to oust it's own representative to the Republican National Committee. Apparently, he isn't radical enough.