The release of a secretly recorded conversation between Gen. David Petraeus and a Fox News operative has erased all plausible deniability about the fact that Fox News is nothing other than a media and communications vehicle for the Republican Party. In the recording, which was apparently made by Petraeus, Kathleen T. McFarland, a Fox News “security analyst,” is heard asking Petraeus to run for president, an invitation she says she is delivering on behalf Roger Ailes, head of Fox News, and Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Newscorp, the parent company of Fox. The recording was made in Afghanistan in the spring of 2011 a few weeks before Pres. Obama appointed Petreaus as head of the CIA — and more than a year before Petreaus resigned from the CIA in disgrace after revealing he was engaged in an ongoing affair with one of his fans.

Raw Story:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) introduced legislation to raise the debt ceiling on Thursday, apparently with the intent of showing that even Democrats would not support such a bill.

However, McConnell’s plan backfired after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) called for a vote on the legislation, which would have given the president the authority to raise the federal debt ceiling on his own. The top Senate Republican was forced to filibuster his own bill.

“What we have here is a case of Republicans here in the Senate once again not taking ‘yes’ for an answer,” Reid said, after McConnell announced his filibuster. “This morning the Republican leader asked consent to have a vote on this proposal, just now I told everyone we were willing to have that vote — up or down vote. Now the Republican leader objects to his own idea. So I guess we have a filibuster of his own bill, so I object.”

In 2009, not long after Pres. Obama and the Democrats opted to forgo the single-payer option for health-insurance reform and go instead with the conservatives’ option of mandating that individuals must buy insurance from insurance corporations, the right wing abruptly disavowed their own plan, even going so far as to label it “socialism” and demonize it by referring to it as Obamacare.

Few pols and propagandists were more persistent in pushing the false narrative that Obamacare and its individual mandate were jack-booted socialism than the top teabagger in the Senate, Jim DeMint of South Carolina. Now, in one of those ironic turns in politics that you couldn’t possibly make up, DeMint has announced he is resigning from the Senate to run the same right-wing “thimk” tank that invented the individual mandate back in 1993, the Heritage Foundation.

Senate Republicans put their paranoia about the United Nations ahead of party loyalty, common sense and, especially, sanity yesterday — and insulted their former leader and their party’s 1996 presidential nominee, disabled World War II veteran Bob Dole to his face — when they voted down a U.N. treaty on disabilities Dole supports while he was on the Senate floor with them yesterday.

Grover Norquist, the Republicans’ austerity czar, has issued a call to arms. It is time, he suggests, for tea baggers to get their tired old fat asses back up off their couches, dust off their poorly spelled, crypto-racist signs and hit the bricks again. The issue that will drive tea baggers into their patented spittle-spewing rage fits this time, Norquist claims, is Pres. Obama’s plan to raise taxes on the wealthy:

“Tea party two is going to dwarf tea party one if Obama pushes us off the cliff,” Norquist said on one of the Sunday shows last weekend. “Let’s not pretend who’s pushing us over the cliff.”

Meanwhile, in back in Realityville, there is no better evidence that the Koch brothers and other billionaire advocates of American oligarchy are done astroturfing tea baggery than the announcement that Dick Armey abruptly resigned as head of Freedomworks, the billionaires’ lobbying group:

Required reading from Joy Reid, folks:

…Congressional Republicans, and their ostensible leader, John Boehner, can’t make the deal they know they have to in order to avert across-the-board tax increases.

Why can’t they? It’s not because they care about deficits. More than 40 years of GOP history, from Reagan’s deficit-exploding tax cuts to George W. Bush’s, on top of massive defense spending, wars paid for off the books, the budget-shredding “war on terror” and Medicare Part D — which was also not paid for — proves that Dick Cheney wasn’t kidding back in the day when he said that “deficits don’t matter.” Specifically, they don’t matter to Republicans. What matters to Republicans is rich people.

Reid adds that while Democrats keep expanding their base with lots of small donors who give lots of small gifts, Republicans keep concentrating very large gifts from fewer donors. And many of those donors are not…well, people you’d want to hang out with.

Big GOP donors are very, very conservative. In fact, some of them are kooky, conspiracy minded, and radical.

Donald Trump, Sheldon Adelson, the Koch Brothers, the list of freaky, axe-to-grind for being unpopular in junior high donors goes on. Any way you slice it, Republicans have made a deal with the devil. Read the whole column.

Far be it from us to defend Republican Party Chair Reince Priebus. But the way some of his fellow travelers on the road to obstruction are talking about him after the GOP’s sound defeat in 2012, we have to speak up. Listen to what they’re saying.

A postelection civil war is brewing among Republicans, with some conservative activists angry over the party’s poor performance this cycle gunning for party Chairman Reince Priebus and planning demonstrations at the Republican National Committee’s annual winter meeting in Charlotte, N.C…

What’s wrong with the GOP is clearly not all the fault of Reince Priebus but he might be taking the fall

“Republicans want a change. They have had it with Priebus,” said Mike Karem, a Kentucky GOP strategist who has been involved in Republican presidential campaigns since Richard Nixon’s 1972 re-election victory. “We lost the presidency; we lost House seats, Senate seats; we picked up only one governor; and we had 3 million fewer Republicans turn out for Romney and other Republican candidates than turned out in 2008.”

“If [Mr. Priebus] worked for you, would you keep him based on his record?” Mr. Karem added. “The answer is, ‘Hell, no!’”

Actually, the 19 incoming Republican House chairmen have more than one thing in common. Not only are they all men, they are all also white and middle-aged:

Washington Post:

Sixty percent of all Americans back higher taxes on higher incomes in the new Post-ABC data. Earlier this month, an identical 60 percent of voters in the presidential election said income taxes should be raised on income over $250,000, according to the national exit poll.

In the new poll, 73 percent of Democrats support such tax hikes, including a majority, 57 percent, who do so “strongly.” Among political independents, 63 percent back an increase, while 59 percent of Republicans oppose such a move.

Other proposed solutions to shrinking the debt are far less popular with the public. Only 44 percent support new limitations on the deductions people can claim on their federal income taxes — a proposal that former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney put forward during his unsuccessful 2012 presidential campaign.