MSNBC has called the race in New York’s district 26 for Democrat Kathy Hochul. The votes are still being counted, but apparently it’s not that close.

I’m watching a monster tornado eat Oklahoma on television. The front of volatile weather could move through Kansas and into Missouri tonight. Keep your heads up out there.

This has got to be one of the worst tornado seasons on record. They’re still finding bodies in Joplin.

Update: Eric Cantor is saying the House won’t approve disaster relief for Joplin unless other programs are cut. Unbelievable.

Somebody tell all those good Republican voters in Missouri that they’re on their own after a tornado disaster because it is more important to give tax cuts to millionaires. The Midwest could get a tad bluer.

Today is the special election in New York’s 26th district that is being billed as a kind of litmus test on public reaction to the Ryan budget. Nate Silver makes no predictions and urges caution when interpreting results. A close win by either the Republican or the Democrat shouldn’t be taken as a predictor of anything, Nate says.

Of course, a narrow win for the Republican will be interpreted by Republicans as a mandate to go ahead and dismantle Medicare. A narrow win for the Democrat will be interpreted by Republicans as a fluke.

More doubling down — Eric Cantor actually thinks Paul Ryan should run for president.

Wooly mammoth sighting — will Rudy Giuliani get in the race?

The GOP’s embrace of Paul Ryan’s Medicare-killing budget must be one of the greatest political miscalculations of all time. I have assumed (a) the decision to go all-in on Ryan’s budget was the result of the Beltway GOP’s isolation from voters, and (b) that they would quietly let it drop once they realized how badly the idea was bombing.

As for the second second — right after Easter recess it seemed some among the GOP establishment were trying to make Ryan’s budget go away. But the hysterical reaction to Newt Gingrich’s criticism of it revealed the Republicans are, indeed, married to Ryan’s budget. Maybe they didn’t intend to be married to Ryan’s budget. Maybe they woke up in a Las Vegas motel room with the Ryan plan, a marriage license and a hangover. But they are married to it. For better or worse.

As for the first assumption — according to Glenn Thrush and Jake Sherman at Politico, Beltway Republicans were given all kinds of warnings that their plans for Medicare would blow up in their faces. According to Thrush and Sherman, the Republicans’ nearly unanimous House vote for the budget was the result of “colliding principles and power politics” and came about only after days of fierce, behind-closed-door infighting.

GOP pollsters, political consultants and House and NRCC staffers vividly reminded leadership that their members were being forced to walk the plank for a piece of quixotic legislation. They described for leadership the horrors that might be visited on the party during the next campaign, comparing it time and again with former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to ram through a cap-and-trade bill despite the risks it posed to Democratic incumbents.

Are they kidding? The cap-and-trade bill might have hurt some Dems in conservative House districts, but the Ryan vote is going to hurt Republicans across the board. No way is cap-and-trade a vital issue to most voters on the same level as Medicare.

Anyway, the short story is that even Republicans with misgivings voted for the plan for fear of being accused of not being pure enough on the deficit issue.

“The feeling among leadership was, we have to be true to the people who put us here. We don’t know what to do, but it has to be bold.”

Another GOP insider involved to the process was more morbid: “Jumping off a bridge is bold, too.”

It’s like they’ve been playing some version of Truth or Dare — either embarrass yourselves to the Tea Party or to the general public.

Update: Rupert Murdoch The Wall Street Journal tells its readers that they must choose between “ObamaCare” and Paul Ryan’s version of “entitlement reform.” The Right is married to the Ryan plan, I tell you.

Related — “The Elephant in the Green Room.”

I want to direct your attention to Josh Marshall’s post, “A Proud Day for Obama.” I think most of you will appreciate it.

Netanyahu is sputtering, AIPAC is sputtering, righties are sputtering. Heh.

Mitch Daniels has declared he is not running for president next year. This is significant, because IMO of all the Republican possibilities he has the most potential to appeal to independents. Now their most viable candidate is named Tim.

Jacob Weisberg, possibly still smarting from the public flogging he took for praising Paul Ryan’s budget, is making amends in a column about those crazy Republicans.

One party, the Democrats, suffers from the usual range of institutional blind spots, historical foibles, and constituency-driven evasions. The other, the Republicans, has moved to a mental Shangri-La, where unwanted problems (climate change, the need to pay the costs of running the government) can be wished away, prejudice trumps fact (Obama might just be Kenyan-born or a Muslim), expertise is evidence of error, and reality itself comes to be regarded as some kind of elitist plot.

Like the White Queen in her youth, the contemporary Republican politician must be capable of believing as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Foremost among these is the claim that it is possible to balance the federal budget without raising taxes.

Of course, Republicans have been either crazy or flirting with crazy for many years, as John Quiggin notes. What has changed is that some elements of mainstream media are finally admitting this, Quiggin says.

Quiggen argues that recent events, notably the timing of the release of the President’s long-form birth certificate (just as birtherism was reaching a genuine frenzy) and the killing of Osama bin Laden (followed by Republican insistence that torture had made that possible) has caused the political press to create a new narrative frame in which Republican = crazy. And, of course, once they begin to view events through that frame, suddenly they see evidence everywhere.

Quiggin also notes that the press itself is finally dividing between the “pro-reality” press and the “anti-reality” press, a.k.a. the “Murdoch press.” And open admission that a chunk of the political mainstream is, actually, nuts, changes the very nature of political reporting.

The real problem is that such a shift will mean the end of what has been a united front of the journalism profession against everyone else (most obviously bloggers and other outside competitors). This front was seen in operation when the Obama Administration tried, early on, to take a stand against Fox and was threatened with a general boycott. Objections to Fox lies were seen as a political attack on the press as an institution. Of course, the political right has long had it both ways, exploiting mainstream adherence to conventions of balance and ‘objectivity’ (not to be confused with willingness to state objective facts as such), while disregarding these conventions.

Quiggin thinks the pro-reality press will inevitably gain the upper hand, and we’ll see about that. He continues,

A pro-reality journalism will inevitably be hostile to the Republican party and its intellectual apparatus, but that doesn’t mean it should fall into the trap of reflexive support for the Democrats. The point is to report the truth, and report lies as lies, without falling into the equal and opposite traps of ‘balance’ and partisan loyalty. …

… Nevertheless, the political consequences of a shift to reality-based journalism won’t be entirely beneficial. The delusions on which the Republicans rely are a cover for the class interests of the very rich, and for the tribal loyalties and hatreds of their base. Blowing the cover may well produce an even cruder politics of interests and tribalism.

We’ll see.

Not even Michelle Bachmann could draw a crowd in South Carolina. I’d say the Tea Party movement doesn’t even qualify as astroturf any more. It’s a media fiction at this point.

Other stuff —

What’s really driving the debt? A chart to clip & save.

Nate Silver thinks Texas Gov. Rick Perry would have a good shot at the Republican nomination if he chooses to run. Bring him on, I say.

Update: This review of Newt’s week is very much worth reading. It not only underscores the point that Newt is a colossal A-hole, it also makes clear that the attacks on Newt were coming entirely from the Republican establishment. The “lame-stream media” didn’t realize Newt had said anything controversial until Republicans turned it into a controversy.

Also, don’t miss this comic strip version of The Press Statement of the Century. The panel showing the sheep unloading their entire clip is priceless.

When Republicans picked up a bunch of state governor seats from Democrats in 2010, the pundits were quick to say this would help the GOP in the 2012 presidential elections.

Or, maybe not.

John Avlon writes for The Daily Beast that voters are turning on some of those governors, big time. Gov. Rick Scott rapidly is becoming the most hated man in Florida, closely followed by Republicans in the legislature. Ohio’s John Kasich also is becoming more unpopular by the minute.

And note that both Florida and Ohio have been, um, critical in recent presidential election history. I also went back about a hundred years in electoral college history and never found an election in which a candidate won both Ohio and Florida but not the White House. And as Avlon says, no Republican ever won the White House without Ohio. (I assume that’s true; I didn’t check.)

Avlon also mentions growing ill will toward Paul LePage of Maine and our ol’ buddy Scott Walker of Wisconsin.

I don’t agree with all of Avlon’s comments and conclusions, but I do agree that animosity toward Republicans in state government could swing independents back toward the Dems next year. Heh.

Elsewhere — popularity for New Jersey’s Chris Christie is not in free fall à la Rick Scott, but his negative numbers are slowly but gradually going up. Women in particular are deciding they can’t stand him, although the tough-guy act still wins him points among a lot of men. Sometimes it doesn’t seem to take much to impress men, huh?

Christie won’t be up for re-election until 2014, I believe, but I still say that he could be a one-term governor. However, the Dems will have to find someone to run against him who is not a complete dork, and in New Jersey that’s not something you can count on.

Weekly Standard writer Jay Cost notices that over the past century or so, the base of the Republican Party has shifted from the North and Midwest to the South and South and Southwest. Do tell.

What’s remarkable about this is that in his analysis, Cost utterly ignores the two main reasons for this. Which are (you guys know this; I’m just explaining it in case any righties drop by):

!. White Flight. During Reconstruction and for decades afterward, the old “party of Lincoln” was pretty much shut out of the South. “Solid South” used to refer to the fact that the southern states were a reliable block of votes for Democrats. Beginning in the early 1950s, however, a new generation of Democrats embraced desegregation, civil rights and equal opportunity for African Americans. The old southern Dixiecrats began to shift out of the party, a trend much accelerated by the Southern Strategy. Southern white supremacists and segregationists stampeded out of the Democratic Party and into the loving arms of Republicans.

2. The party is getting older, and retired voters often move to warmer states.

But neither of these factors is even mentioned by Cost. Here is his explanation for the shift:

The booming postwar economy sent voters South and West, and eventually transformed all of the Sunbelt states into either swing states or safely Republican enclaves (with California having now swung back to the Democrats).

That doesn’t tell us how the North and Midwest became less Republican. Of course, record numbers of African Americans moved North in the mid-20th century, but until the 1960s or so I believe most African Americans voted for Republicans. Party of Lincoln, and all that. But yes, migrations of voters probably were a factor, but IMO not the most significant factor.

Anyway, Colt goes on to speculate that the reason Republican voters are not terribly happy with the field of potential presidential candidates is that the southerners have all dropped out. Yeah, that must be the reason. Can’t think of any other ones. (/sarcasm)

Other Stuff to Read:

World Will End Tomorrow. Party on!

Huntsmania! Doesn’t seem voters are catching it, though; just media.

The Gingrich implosion continues. Newt may be wishing the world will end tomorrow.

Hey, if believers are raptured tomorrow, wouldn’t that sew up the election for President Obama? And maybe we can take back the House!

I haven’t had time to digest the speech President Obama made about the Middle East today, but I’d love to know what y’all think.