Rep. Paul Ryan faces some of his constituents in Wisconsin –

Whatever he’s selling, I don’t think they’re buying it. Transcript at Think Progress.

Newt’s PAC is struggling to raise “hard money” donations, Politico reports. He has money from other sources, notably a 527 organization called American Solutions for Winning the Future that apparently rakes in big donations from deep pocket supporters. But he can’t use the 527 money directly for a presidential campaign, and there seems to be little interest among ordinary donors to back Newt.

This doesn’t surprise me. Although Newt is polling around fifth in the overstuffed Republican field (after Huckabee, Trump, Romney, and Palin), I suspect that’s mostly from name recognition. The baggers don’t seem to be all that interested in Newt, no matter how hard he panders to them. And the Beltway establishment isn’t supporting him either, according to Nate Silver.

Nate calls the establishment candidates the Fairfax Five — Barbour, Daniels, Huntsman, Pawlenty and Romney. The bagger candidates are the Factional Five — Bachmann, Gingrich, Palin, Ron Paul, and Trump. Other candidates polling in the top ten are Huckabee, Giuliani and Santorum. Yeah, what a pack of mutts.

I think the Republicans’ biggest problem is that it’s unlikely they can take back the White House without the bagger vote. But candidates that appeal to baggers are likely to scare the stuffing out of the rest of the electorate. None of the Factional Five could come even close to winning a general election, IMO. The candidates favored by the establishment may seem safer, but they also tend to be hopelessly boring. Romney and Pawlenty are all vanilla frosting, no cake. And have you seen Huntsman? He looks like the generic white guy from central casting. I don’t think the electorate will be in the mood for bland and safe in 2012.

Establishment guys Barbour, Daniels and Huntsman are not in the top ten in the polls, btw. Of those three I think only Daniels has a shot at the nomination and might possibly appeal to both the establishment and the baggers. At MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell keeps predicting that Pawlenty will get the nomination, but I don’t see the baggers getting all that enthusiastic about Pawlenty. I mean, his first name is “Tim.” Please.

Given his history as a lobbyist one wonders if the baggers will take to Barbour, although Barbour’s history of, um, racial insensitivity might work in his favor. I don’t think Barbour has general election appeal, though. I keep seeing Barbour in the Charles Durning role in “Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” except (I assume) Durning can sing and dance better.

Romney might do well in a general election, but his Mormonism will make it difficult for him to be nominated. Romney always strikes me as soulless, though. I don’t sense anything behind the facade. If you were to assign political consultants to create a Standard Generic Presidential Candidate, what they’d come up with is something like Romney, except they’d make him Episcopalian.

Overall, Mike Huckabee is polling better than anyone else, which is surprising considering he hasn’t been in the national news much. Huckabee is dangerous because he is personable and likable. He’s a guy many voters would like to invite over for a backyard cookout, and they might be more comfortable with him than with Barack Obama. But I think Huckabee is vulnerable on issues.

For example, Huckabee has a long history of supporting “Fair Tax,” which would eliminate the IRS and replace income tax with sales taxes, which seems to me would suppress consumer spending and kill what’s left of our economy. Baggers would no doubt fall for the Fair Tax, but would the rest of the electorate?

Also, someone as right-wing as Huckabee on social issues has never won a general election. He’s way to the right of the norm on gay marriage and abortion, for example, and unlike some prior conservative candidates (Reagan and Bush II come to mind) he is likely to make social issues a priority, not something he pays lip service to when running for office.

Both Bush II and Reagan were able to get votes from people who disagreed with their positions on social issues, because there was an assumption that they wouldn’t really take any action on those issues. I remember reading an article about women voters supporting Bush II who said that they sincerely believed he was just pandering to the anti-abortion crowd to get elected, and they didn’t think he was really anti-abortion, so they were going to vote for him anyway in spite of being pro-choice. Huckabee is not going to be able to pull that off.

Santorum and Giuliani are yesterday’s news. If they couldn’t pull off a nomination when they were at the peaks of their careers, they’re not going to do it now. I’d say the same for Newt, and Palin is just about ready for the clearance sale shelf as well. Palin has a core of supporters who will love her as long as they all live, but to everyone else she becomes more irrelevant by the hour.

Bachmann is too stupid to even fake being a credible candidate, although she is rapidly sewing up the not insubstantial Idiot Vote.

Donald Trump either is just trying to pull up his television ratings and will stop pretending to be a candidate when his show is renewed, or else he’s in the early stages of dementia. Or both.

People are talking about Chris Christie as a dark horse candidate, but Christie’s approval ratings (finally) are dropping in New Jersey. And if he’s looking like a one-term governor in 2012 he’s unlikely to get much backing as a presidential candidate.

Look for some faction of the establishment to promote Jeb Bush as a dark horse. This might have some viability if Jeb can keep his older brother locked in the basement for several months. If Dubya insists on “helping” Jeb’s campaign, though, Jeb is in trouble, especially in the general election.

I think a lot will ride on what the economy is doing and whether Dems can keep the Ryan budget alive as an issue into 2012. And I think the fight for the nomination will be among Daniels, Pawlenty, Romney, and Huckabee.

New DCCC ad –

– is running in 25 targeted districts, Steve Benen says.

Republicans in Congress are up in arms over the Justice Department’s decision to not defend the blatantly unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act. To justify opposition to same-sex marriage, Lamar Smith said, “No one can seriously believe that the constitution’s authors intended to create a right to same-sex marriage.”

And he’s right about that. I’m sure same-sex marriage was something that never even crossed their minds. The whole issue of sexual preference as we understand it today wasn’t on anyone’s radar for at least another century, I don’t believe.

Of course, the Founders certainly didn’t intend for women to have the right to vote or for African Americans to have a right to not be kept in involuntary servitude, either. There are all kinds of issues we face today that 18th century people either never imagined, or saw entirely differently, from the way they are viewed today.

But according to Wingnut logic, the perspectives of a handful of white guys who lived 200 years ago cancel out all the ways society has changed in all those years, keeping us locked in a kind of anachronistic tyranny. All the more weird, since the tyrants at this point are just projections of what the Right imagines them to have been. It’s government by ghost.

I might point out that abortion was legal in Britain and former British colonies in the late 18th century, and it never occurred to any of the Founders to do anything about it. I don’t believe any of them ever even expressed an opinion on abortion, which was openly going on all around them. What does that tell us about wingnut priorities?

However I’m sure criminalizing abortion and gay marriage will create lots of jobs. (/sarcasm)

Orange Julius is threatening to cut funds to the Department of Justice to punish them for not defending DOMA. See also Steve Benen.

George Lakoff praises President Obama’s budget speech. Meanwhile, the President will be on the road this week to sell his plans for the budget, including tax increases for the rich.

Standard & Poor has issued a “negative” credit rating outlook on the U.S., which means the S&P thinks there is a 33 percent chance it’s going to have to downgrade the U.S. credit score in the next couple of years. (Would a subscription to one of those credit report sites help?) Paul Krugman comments.

Obama is mean.

Update: Krugman: Democracy is not always civil.

Is Rand Paul an arrogant blowhard, or what?

To reach a deal in Congress over the national debt, Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said both political parties need to make concessions, excluding higher tax rates.

Some concession.

“The compromise is for conservatives to admit that the military budget’s going to have to be cut,” Paul said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “Liberals will have to compromise and will have to cut domestic welfare.”

“The compromise is where we cut, not where we raise taxes,” he added.

Maybe Son of Ron doesn’t know what the word concession means.

While the baggers are pushing to eliminate environmental protection at both the federal and state level, we read what happens when the environment is not regulated –

Oil and gas companies injected hundreds of millions of gallons of hazardous or carcinogenic chemicals into wells in more than 13 states from 2005 to 2009, according to an investigation by Congressional Democrats.

I take it the contamination came about because of a relatively new process, not specifically covered by regulations, for extracting natural gas out of the ground.

Among other things, the process is injecting huge amounts of benzene — nasty stuff — into groundwater and rivers. The article even mentions radioactive material.

A Republican bobblehead I saw on television last night kept repeating the mantra that “The CBO says Medicare will go broke in nine years.” I googled for this, and all I got were a bunch of quotes from Republicans saying the CBO says Medicare will go broke in nine years, with no links to a source at the CBO. It’s an unsourced talking point, in other words.

I assume that some worker drone in the right-wing think tanks was able to extract a claim that Medicare will go broke in nine years from some CBO document, but whether that’s what the CBO actually thinks is, of course, another matter.

I went to the Congressional Budget Office site and found no document explicitly saying that Medicare will go broke in nine years. I did find the “March 2011 Medicare Baseline” analysis, which to me might as well be written in Greek. If anyone can explain what these numbers are saying, I’d appreciate it. But I’m not seeing anything that jumps out at me and says Medicare will be broke after 2020 on this chart.

It’s obvious the “broke in nine years” claim is going to be a big factor in the Republicans’ defense for destroying Medicare. I wish someone with the time and expertise to follow up on this would figure out how and where they are getting this claim and what the CBO actually says.

So now it’s official; all but four Republicans in the House are on record as having voted to end the Medicare program by voting for Paul Ryan’s budget proposal. The four dissenting Republicans were Reps. Ron Paul of Texas, Walter Jones of North Carolina, David McKinley of West Virginia, and Denny Rehberg of Montana. No Democrats voted in favor of Ryan’s plan, which is now the Republican plan.

There is no chance it will pass in the Senate. So, in one sense, it was a symbolic victory for the House Republicans.

But, WTF are they thinking?

I’ve heard the talking points already. They are not destroying Medicare, they say; they are saving it. It’s going to go broke anyway, so we have to scrap it and do something else that will be just as good. They seem to think that since people already aged 55 and over won’t be affected, no one is going to care.

One group that might care is private insurers. Ryan cooked this thing up without consulting them, one suspects, and they may not like it. As Josh Marshall says, “How much money do you think there is in insuring 75 year olds?” With Medicare gone, who is going to pick up the tab for the indigent seniors who can’t afford their own health care? There is real concern in the health care and health insurance industries that Ryan’s plan could end up costing them more, too.

But beyond that, I have a hard time believing the American people can be talked into accepting this, especially when it’s made plain to them that their hardships are necessary to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy.

Amazing. See also “Crossing the Rubicon” and “The Grief the GOP Just Brought on Itself.”