Last day to beg until after the Big Feast, pleeeease chip in a few bucks so a certain hellbound atheist activist can get by. My PayPal email is DarkSydOtheMoon-at/aol.com. I wouldn’t ask if the situation wasn’t grim. Thanks for listening!

The Teaparty playbook is simple: it’s the same ugly bullshit that has sustained authoritarian creeps and their well paid henchmen since the dawn of civilization. It worked for post Civil War racists for more than a century, it worked for European fascists in the 1930s, and it works for the conservative wing of the Republican Party today. An important part of the playbook is to call your opponents the worst names you can think of, say for example, baby killer, pervert, wimp, traitor, or rapist, over and over and over. On the latter, take it away RushBo:

TPM — Well, the guy that kept proposing that women be raped finally got tired of it, and he was in the majority and he was one that [said], ‘You know what? We’re going to change the rule. Now all we need is five,'” he continued. “And well, ‘you can’t do that.’ ‘Yes we are. We’re the majority. We’re changing the rule.’ And then they vote. “Can the women be raped? Well, all it would take then is half of the room. You can change the rule to say three,” he said. “You can change the rule to say three people want it, it’s going to happen. There’s no rule. When the majority can change the rules there aren’t any.”

There was a time when Mr Limbaugh didn’t think changing the Senate rules was in the same league as violent assault. Can you guess what was different then?

Media Matters — If the Senate Republicans are not prepared to end the unprecedented use by Senate Democrats of the filibuster rule against the president’s judicial nominees, the president is going to have a real tough time getting these re-nominated candidates — and for that matter — Supreme Court nominees confirmed. This filibuster, as you know, they’re filibustering these nominations which requires essentially 60 votes for a judge to be confirmed. The Constitution says nothing about this. The Constitution says simple majority, 51 votes. But because they’re invoking the filibuster, which, you know, the Senate can make up its own rules but not when they impose on the Constitution and not when they impose on the legislative branch. Separation of powers here. But if nobody stops them, they’re going to keep getting away with it. It’s up to the Senate Republicans to stop them.

He’s right on the last quote, the filibuster is not in the Constitution, the document conservatives claim to adore so much. But the responsibility of the President to appoint judges and a cabinet and the role of the Senate in voting yay or nay on those nominees was clearly spelled out in our founding document from the beginning.

The difference between the first and second quote, the Senate was majority Republican then and it’s not now. Which I guess, if we took the words literally, would mean Limbaugh was for rape before he was against it.