James Carville, or as I think of him, Mr. Mary Matalin, penned an open letter to Republicans and it’s a doozy. Carville looks back at the lowest high points of the race so far and concludes it’s a “world-class disaster.” Since right now that particular description brings to mind captain-less ships unable to float, it’s not a bad analogy.

But Carville is just getting warmed up.

…most people thought it was kind of a watermark when your Tea Party gang booed the golden rule. You know, I’ve spent some time in Philly and they have always thought they were pretty radical because they actually booed Santa Claus and Willie Mays. Philly, I’ve got news for you — you ain’t got nothing on South Carolina Republicans. They just aren’t buying any of that do-unto-others garbage.

It’s hard to tell from the clip if the audience was booing Jesus or Ron Paul or peace. No matter, they were clearly not interested in anything but kicking Iranian butt.

But Paul, as we know, is not a front-runner. For the two of them, Carville saves his best shots, starting with Mitt Romney.

ABC News:

Although it is not apparent on his financial disclosure form, Mitt Romney has millions of dollars of his personal wealth in investment funds set up in the Cayman Islands, a notorious Caribbean tax haven.

A spokesperson for the Romney campaign says Romney follows all tax laws and he would pay the same in taxes regardless of where the funds are based…

Official documents reviewed by ABC News show that Bain Capital, the private equity partnership Romney once ran, has set up some 138 secretive offshore funds in the Caymans.

Romney campaign officials and those at Bain Capital tell ABC News that the purpose of setting up those accounts in the Cayman Islands is to help attract money from foreign investors, and that the accounts provide no tax advantage to American investors like Romney. Romney, the campaign said, has paid all U.S. taxes on income derived from those investments.

Read more…

Daily Mail:

Newt Gingrich’s ex-wife revealed for the first time today that the GOP presidential hopeful had asked for an open marriage so that he could have a wife and a mistress.

Marianne Gingrich, his second wife, said she wanted American voters to know his true moral character. There have been fears that her explosive television interview could end her former partner’s campaign for the White House.

Regarding the claims, Marianne told ABC: “And I just stared at him and he said, ‘Callista doesn’t care what I do.’ He wanted an open marriage and I refused.”

As of early Thursday morning, ABC News had not announced when it will air the interview, but it will presumably be Thursday or Friday night, on the eve of the South Carolina primary on Saturday.

Marianne Gingrich’s last interview was with Esquire, for an article published in August 2010. What was apparent then was that she has neither forgiven nor forgotten. She has obviously timed this interview so that it will air just before a potentially make or break primary in a state that is hotbed of Republican “values voters.”

In the 2010 interview, Marianne Gingrich confirmed one of the more paradoxical rumors about Newt’s marital history.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Note: The complete transcript of the interview is published below.

Writing in the cover story of the current issue of Newsweek, titled, “Why Are Obama’s Critics So Dumb?” Andrew Sullivan goes after the right wing for its ongoing, deliberate mischaracterizations of the president as a “a radical leftist attempting a ‘fundamental transformation’ of the American way of life.” He writes:

You’d think, listening to the Republican debates, that Obama has raised taxes. Again, this is not true. Not only did he agree not to sunset the Bush tax cuts for his entire first term, he has aggressively lowered taxes on most Americans. A third of the stimulus was tax cuts, affecting 95 percent of taxpayers; he has cut the payroll tax, and recently had to fight to keep it cut against Republican opposition. His spending record is also far better than his predecessor’s. Under Bush, new policies on taxes and spending cost the taxpayer a total of $5.07 trillion. Under Obama’s budgets both past and projected, he will have added $1.4 trillion in two terms. Under Bush and the GOP, nondefense discretionary spending grew by twice as much as under Obama. Again: imagine Bush had been a Democrat and Obama a Republican. You could easily make the case that Obama has been far more fiscally conservative than his predecessor—except, of course, that Obama has had to govern under the worst recession since the 1930s, and Bush, after the 2001 downturn, governed in a period of moderate growth. It takes work to increase the debt in times of growth, as Bush did. It takes much more work to constrain the debt in the deep recession Bush bequeathed Obama.

The great conservative bugaboo, Obamacare, is also far more moderate than its critics have claimed. The Congressional Budget Office has projected it will reduce the deficit, not increase it dramatically, as Bush’s unfunded Medicare Prescription Drug benefit did. It is based on the individual mandate, an idea pioneered by the archconservative Heritage Foundation, Newt Gingrich, and, of course, Mitt Romney, in the past. It does not have a public option; it gives a huge new client base to the drug and insurance companies; its health-insurance exchanges were also pioneered by the right.

But Sullivan, who is a conservative-leaning independent today but was, in the 1990s, as a British citizen living and writing about politics in the United States, a Republican Party sympathizer, also takes on Obama’s critics on the left:

The satirical web site, The Inept Owl, premieres Mitt Romney’s slogan for 2012.

Yes, this video put together by the Newt Gingrich team does show a greatest hits list of Romney bloopers (although there are more that didn’t make this cut, such as when he pretended to be goosed by waitresses in a diner, or when he claimed in front of unemployed people to understand their plight because he is unemployed too, or more, more, more). But the most revealing line in it, to me, is the premise underlying it: that Romney will never win in a debate with the presumably much smarter and better spoken Obama — and that this is what matters most.

I think Gingrich honestly believes that governing is all about what words you choose and the mental abstractions you amuse yourself and those listening in awe with. There is no sound more lovely to Gingrich than that of his own voice, but a president needs traits other than pontification and bloviation. He, or one day, she, needs judgment and sanity and a willingness to be, as we so often think of Obama when the subject of Congress comes up, the adult in the room. Million dollar credit lines at Tiffany and trophy wives and egos that don’t fit through the door equip someone to be president no better than does constantly saying stupid things in public.

So yeah, Mitt’s an idiot. But Gingrich doesn’t even get why he’s no upgrade.

Out with the old, in with the Lew: from left, Lew, Obama, Daley

There was an important development in the 2012 presidential election this week, but it had nothing to do with Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, or Ron Paul. And truthfully, its importance goes far beyond the perpetual campaign.

White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley resigned. Chris Cillizza described Daley’s departure in his Washington Post blog, The Fix.

Brought in to rebuild the White House’s relationship with the business community and Congress, Daley leaves the job as Obama seems to have found his stride by explicitly running against Congress and, to a lesser extent, the business community.

“What he learned was that business refused to make nice regardless of what he did,” said one former White House aide of Daley. “Wall Street was just never going to be there.”

The departure* comes at the same time as the release of a new book, The Obamas, by New York Times reporter Jill Kantor. The book, which I have not read, is said to show that Michelle Obama had philosophical differences with Pres. Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and that the president might have been better off listening to her than him.

Mitt Romney, with one of two teleprompters he used to deliver his victory speech after the New Hampshire primary

One of Sarah Palin’s favorite digs at Pres. Obama is that he often reads speeches from teleprompters.

If you are a liberal or not a political junkie, you probably found Palin’s harping on Obama’s use of teleprompters confusing. “So what?” you may have said to yourself. “So did Reagan, the Bushes and Clinton. They all do it.”

Or, if you were paying close attention to Obama on the campaign trail, you might have noticed that he hosted dozens of town hall events during which he spoke extemporaneously for 90 minutes or more. (For teavangelical types who may be reading this, “extemporaneously” means “without the aid of a teleprompter.”)

What liberals and other regular Americans were missing in Palin’s sneering about Obama and teleprompters was a dog whistle message to the Republican Party’s half-witted racist base. What she was really saying was, “Pssst. See, he’s black, so not smart enough to think up all those big words on his own. He only got where he is because of affirmative action.”

Reality has a left-wing bias, as Stephen Colbert has said, so it did not matter that Palin — who, pssst, really is a dumbass — used teleprompters just about every time she spoke in public during her failed vice presidential run in 2008. (For your convenience — and, we can only hope, to make tea baggers heads explode — we have compiled a photo set of about two dozen different events in which Palin read her speeches from teleprompters and posted it here.)

In the current campaign, after making some seriously stupid gaffes while campaigning in New Hampshire, Mitt Romney took no chances when it came time to read his victory speech last night, according to his hometown paper, the Boston Globe:

“I like being able to fire people,” GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney said during a campaign stop in New Hampshire yesterday.

This assertion certainly aligns with Romney’s record. As head of Bain & Company, he made millions — we don’t know how many millions because he refuses to release his tax returns — by buying businesses, laying off employees and then re-selling the companies at a profit.

Romney’s statement yesterday was, of course, taken out of context. The statement, in full, went like this:

“I want individuals to have their own insurance. That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep you healthy. It also means that if you don’t like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. You know, if someone doesn’t give me the good service I need, I want to say, ‘You know, I’m going to go get someone else to provide that service to me.’ “

Romney appears to be proposing replacing the current employer-based health-insurance system — in which, by the by, the employer not employees, choose insurance providers — with an Ayn-Randian “every man, woman and child for himself or herself” system in which individuals purchase health insurance on the “free” market, the way they buy car or homeowners insurance.

What he’s describing is the failed system we have. Premiums for individual policies are the most expensive on the market. The people who most often need these policies — minimum-wage workers, self-employed creatives, the unemployed — can’t afford them.