Republicans are always standing with things. They “stand with Israel.” The “stand with” each other. They “stand with” themselves. Sarah Palin even once said America should “stand with our North Korean allies.” Suffice it to say, they got this standing thing down. If you like Ronald Reagan, lower taxes and Pat Boone, chances are you know how to stand.

But can they skip? Not as well. In fact, as Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman have been showing us, skipping tends to make Republicans look bad.

The circus Roger Ailes created at Fox News made his network $900 million last year. But it may have lost him something more important: the next election.

Last Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, Newt Gingrich offered a carefully-conceived, triangulating strategy of attacking Obama’s health reform plan as well as the Republican plan proposed by Paul Ryan that privatizes Medicare. “I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering,” he said.

When the right-wing base predictably flipped out at Gingrich’s criticism of Ryan, Gingrich quickly folded, calling Ryan to personally apologize while stating on Fox News on Tuesday night that his comments were an “unfortunate…mistake.” But by Thursday, Gingrich offered a new formulation to Rush Limbaugh, arguing that his original comments about “right-wing social engineering” were not a reference to Paul Ryan.

America, the Tea Party GOP is coming for your kids. Mike Huckabee, Republican front runner and presumptive 2012 presidential nominee is getting into the education business.

If there’s one constant in the elite national discourse of the moment, it is the claim that America was founded as a capitalist country and that socialism is a dangerous foreign import that, despite our unwarranted faith in free trade, must be barred at the border. This most conventional “wisdom”—increasingly accepted at least until the recent grassroots mobilizations in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and Maine—has held that everything public is inferior to everything private, that corporations are always good and unions always bad, that progressive taxation is inherently evil and that the best economic model is the one that allows the wealthy to gobble up as much of the Republic as they choose before anything trickles down to the great mass of Americans. Rush Limbaugh informs us regularly that proposals to tax people as rich as he is for the purpose of providing healthcare for kids and jobs for the unemployed are “antithetical” to the nation’s original intent and that Barack Obama’s reforms are “destroying this country as it was founded.”

I'm thinking Newt may finally have to respond to this one.

"Welfare has destroyed the African-American family by telling young black women that husbands and fathers are unnecessary and obsolete. Welfare has subsidized illegitimacy by offering financial rewards to women who have more children out of wedlock. We have incentivized fornication rather than marriage, and it's no wonder we are now awash in the disastrous social consequences of people who rut like rabbits." - American Family Association spokesbigot Bryan Fischer, earning his hate group stripes every day. And all of the GOP presidential candidates continue to appear on his radio show.

Rut is the mating season of certain animals.

A new survey released by Public Policy Polling suggests self-described regular Fox News viewers favor former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee over other big Republican names believed to be mulling presidential campaigns for the next election cycle.

Republicans support impeachment by a 48-31 margin, a number which Tom Jensen, our pollster, points out is almost identical to the 51% of Republicans (PDF) who think Obama was not born in the United States. Says Tom, "The lunatic fringe of the GOP is basically half of the party's voters" - in which case, it's really not a "fringe," is it?

So, Dean and Newt had a debate last night at George Washington University, and this was pretty awesome, too.

Last year, five potential Republican presidential candidates (Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, John Bolton, and Rick Santorum) who also serve as Fox News contributors or hosts appeared on the network for more than 85 hours. Media Matters for America estimates this time to be worth approximately $54.7 million in free advertising.

According to one school of thought, the fashion cycle -- society's evolving sense of what's hip and trendy -- lasts roughly two decades, explaining why shoulder pads and floral dresses have come back with a vengeance in recent months. And it seems our nation's politicians have taken a page from the fashion playbook to stage their own unpleasant '90s revival: the return of the culture war against public broadcasting.

Newt Gingrich appeared on Fox News Sunday today and, when asked about his plans for 2012, indicated that he's quite likely to run for president. Gingrich also gave a preview of what kind of platform he'd run on: largesse for the rich, cutbacks for the poor.

On one side is "Obama's America." The president has sought to invigorate national unity across ethnic boundaries. Obama's America centers on a unifying civic nationalism that embraces citizens of every background. From his recognition of the slaves who helped build the White House, to his defense of the right of Muslims to build a mosque in lower Manhattan, to his reference to families with two dads in his Father's Day Address, to his acknowledgment of religious non-believers in his Inaugural Address, to his belief that every American deserves access to health care, Obama places inclusiveness at the core of his vision of Americanness. This is the basis of much anti-Obama sentiment.

Another American nationalism is out there, one that is ethnic rather than civic. Its advocates see Obama's America as an existential threat to their exclusionary understanding of Americanness. Many on the right play on cultural, religious, and ethnic grievances to divide Americans from one another.

One (in a long, interconnected chain) of Newt's PACs, 527s and non-profit organizations, American Solutions for Winning the Future, has not once but twice "accidentally" invited sex industry mavens to receive his oh-so-selective "Entrepreneur of the Year" awards.

The two selections were indeed "accidents" in the sense that Gingrich likely had no idea the two businesses, "Pink Visual" and "The Lodge" were a porn film production company and a strip club. In hindsight it seems kind of obvious, but the thing is, there was no kind of "sight" at all, fore or hind.

That's because what Gingrich is running here is a scam from top to bottom, and an old and hackneyed one at that.

In an interview with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell on Wednesday, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice took aim at incendiary comments made by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich about President Obama last month.

Speaking with the National Review, Gingrich asked, "What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?" He added, "That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior."

Whether you think Christine O'Donnell is a virgin sex witch or not, can we at least all agree that this so-called "anti-establishment conservative movement" is nothing more than Scaring the @!$%# out of White America, which is the same strategy that has been used for 1,000 years? You know how it works: Frighten the dingbats with stories of half-Muslin bogeymen kidnapping America's fragile white women and forcing them to gay-marry the Koran, and.......

As for the underlying D'Souza article that inspired Gingrich, what is there to be said? When last was there such a brazen outburst of race-baiting in the service of partisan politics at the national level? George Wallace took more care to sound race-neutral.

Welcome to the summer of hate: First came a harsh new immigration law and calls of white racism; then we turned up the heat with an "n-word" flap and the ground zero mosque hysteria. It is worth noting that you hardly ever hear Gingrich or any high-profile Republican complaining about racism in America unless they are accusing a black or brown person of doing something racist to a white person.

These dog days have brought a veritable festival of racial demagoguery, from a phony "New Black Panther" controversy to Arizona's draconian illegal-immigrant crackdown to the most recent "ground zero mosque" hysteria.

This morning, Fox News reporter Carl Cameron touted a recent survey by Public Policy Polling that found several prominent Republicans essentially tied with President Obama in theoretical 2012 match-ups.

Open letter to Sen. Bob Menedes Chairman Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee & Gov. Tim Kaine chairman of the Democratic National Committee Dear Sen. Menendez & Gov. Kaine,

Anyone with a limited understanding of American history understands that the constitution guarantees majority rule with respect to minority rights -- the majority cannot take away inherent rights of liberty and freedom from the minority.

Holy cow, Auntie Em. Stockman and Greenspan committing heresy on the same day. What's going on?

Well, basically, the Republicans have boxed themselves in. For all but true believers like Stockman and Greenspan, cutting taxes was never really about supply side economics, it was a stealth way to gut and cut government -- to shrink it until they could "drown it in a bathtub."

They needed a stealth approach for two reasons.

First, while people supported the general notion of tax cuts, they didn't like most of the specifics, when it came to cutting services to fund those cuts. When Newt Gingrich laid out his Contract on America, complete with hits, and then began to implement it, they lost support. And Bush ran into a buzz saw when he tried to cut Social Security.

The other reason was they couldn't be honest about their real motives.

The right-wing controversy du jour? Construction of several mosques throughout the U.S. -- perhaps most notably, a Muslim community center near Ground Zero in New York City. In many cases, the right-wing fear-mongering has fed a shrill campaign warning against Muslims inevitably using their places of worship to conspire to implant sharia law in the lives of unsuspecting Americans.

So which right-wingers are most afraid of the big bad mosques? TPM rounds up the worst offenders.

Has political news got you down? Are the same old arguments not giving you the political motivation you need?

As you've probably known since childhood, 234 years ago today we declared our independence from England.

But until this week, none of us could have known that:

In October 2001, then-Illinois State Senator/current first female President of the United States Barack Obama took us to war in Afghanistan; and

Thurgood Marshall will never be confirmed to serve on the Supreme Court. Jerry Seinfeld will.