Thomas Mann of Brookings and Norm Ornstein from the American Enterprise Institute published an op-ed in the Washington Post on Friday that was aimed directly at members of Beltway media. Titled “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem,” it is a plea to journalists in the capital to stop their lazy both-sides-do-it reporting and recognize that blame for the political morass facing the country rests predominantly with the GOP:

Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates.

It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

More after the jump »

The GOP’s Romneybot 2000 made headlines on Friday when, at a rally at Otterbein University in Ohio, it encouraged students to hit their parents up for loans. “We’ve always encouraged young people: Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business,” said the robot.

What has not been as widely reported, however, is that the robot appears to have malfunctioned during the speech. Instead of giving a rousing speech laced with references to current pop culture that the students could relate to, the bot apparently experienced an AI synapse misfire and delivered what appeared to be a Powerpoint presentation about office supplies instead.

Cognitive dissonance held the floor in the U.S. House again yesterday. First, the Republican leadership under Speaker John Boehner voted to fund the extenstion of lower rates on student loans by killing programs that provided cancer screening and similar women’s health-care service.

Minutes later, Boehner took to the well of the House to rage against the poisonous partisanship in Congress and deny that his party was engaging in a war on women:

The relative assholeyness of rich folks has been proven in not one, not two, but SEVEN recent experiments. Why there is such interest in proving this topic as the world struggles with economic lassitude and the rise of the 1% might be worth a scientific experiment of its own, but the fact is, we do want to know and social scientists have confirmed our suspicions.

The National Academy of Sciences grouped the studies under the collective heading, “Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior.” Among the key findings:

• “Upper-class drivers were the most likely to cut off other vehicles at the intersection, even when controlling for time of day, driver’s perceived sex and age, and amount of traffic.” Drivers of “high status” cars cut off other vehicles nearly 30% of the time; “low-status” cars cut off other vehicles 7.7% of the time.
• Drivers of “low status” vehicles failed to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk up to 30% of the time, while 46% of “high status” vehicle drivers failed to yield, an increase of more than 50%.
More after the jump »

History will likely record that one of House Speaker John Boehner’s worst mistakes was his decision to allow California Rep. Darrell Issa to head the government oversight committee. It was Chairman Issa, after all, who called an all-male panel to discuss contraceptives earlier this year. The optics of this stupid move instantly became an undeniable symbol that Republicans were engaging in a war on women.

Issa, a one-time accused car thief and arsonist, is best-known in California as the guy who funded the initial effort to recall Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, in 2003, so that Issa himself could become governor, only to break down into sobs, with local news cameras rolling, when action star Arnold Schwarzenegger stepped in and bigfooted him out of the way.

More recently, in the weeks after Boehner appointed Issa to the chairmanship, Issa created a stir by predicting that the Obama administration would become the most corrupt government in history. This week, in an interview with Bloomberg news, Issa doubled down on his prediction:

Like all loyal Republicans, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has noted that Pres. Obama uses a teleprompter when he delivers a speech. The racist implication is that Obama, a black man, could never be so ARTICULATE on his own, and only comes off looking smart because he’s reading his lines. In fact in 2010, Jr. Sen. Full-of-Himself was quoted in the New York Times ridiculing the president as, “the most articulate and talented teleprompter reader in America.”

Is it any wonder that PoliticalWire.com noted the contrast between Rubio then — all smart-ass know-it-all less-than-original-thinker — and now. Now he is staring straight down as reads his notes, which any Toastmaster participant would recognize as a huge no-no, even for amateurs, and then totally loses it when he can’t find the last page of his speech.

Next time, Wonder Boy, do us all a favor and do as modern speakers the world over — use a frickin’ teleprompter.

Political scientists believe you can get a pretty good prediction for a presidential candidate’s election chances based on just three pieces of data.

According to Ezra Klein of the Washington Post:

The final model uses just three pieces of information that have been found to be particularly predictive: economic growth in the year of the election, as measured by the change in gross domestic product during the first three quarters; the president’s approval rating in June; and whether one of the candidates is the incumbent.

That may seem a bit thin. But it calls 12 of the past 16 elections right. The average error in its prediction of the two-party vote share is less than three percentage points.

I used the new economic figures released yesterday (2.3%) and Obama’s latest approval rating from Gallup (50%), and the thing calculated that the incumbent wins 89.5 percent of the time when the economy is growing a 2.2 percent and his approval rating is 50 percent.

So go here, fiddle around with the data and start predicting.

Bryan Fisher, the Republican Party-aligned hate group leader who is an influential voice among members of Mitt Romney’s teavangelical base continued his attacks yesterday on Richard Grenell, the openly gay Republican whom Romney named as his spokesman on international relations:

“Homosexuals are about short-lived relationships and frequent anonymous sexual encounters,” he said on his radio program. “This is very common in the homosexual community. Now whether Grenell indulges in that, I don’t know.”

Fischer said that although Grenell had been in a long-term relationship, he suspected that the relationship was not monogamous.

“There are some homosexuals who will admit — this is not coming from the right-wing, this is homosexuals themselves in surveys — that they have had 500 to as many as 1000 sexual partners over the course of a lifetime,” he continued.

“This is endemic the homosexual community, these random, frequent, and anonymous sexual encounters and that becomes a significant issue when we’re talking about appointing somebody to a post as sensitive as a spokesman for national security and foreign policy.”

Well, this was predictable. The hate-group wing of Mitt Romney’s teavangelical base is not happy that Romney has hired Richard Grenell, who is openly gay, as his campaign spokesman on international relations. Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, which is on the list of hate groups maintained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, responded on Twitter:

Romney picks out & loud gay as a spokesman. If personnel is policy, his message to the pro-family community: drop dead.

Shake, shake, shake.