Pablo Pantoja, who was until recently the State Director of Florida Hispanic Outreach for the Republican National Committee, has an announcement.

Yes, I have changed my political affiliation to the Democratic Party.

It doesn’t take much to see the culture of intolerance surrounding the Republican Party today. I have wondered before about the seemingly harsh undertones about immigrants and others… The complete disregard of those who are in disadvantage is also palpable.

Read on.

Want a quick comparison of Ed Markey vs Stephen Lynch? WBUR has this quick summary.

One thing that requires ongoing vigilance is the reality that the state of Texas is coming under a new 
assault, an assault far more dangerous than what the leader of North Korea threatened when he said he was going to add Austin, Texas, as one of the recipients of his nuclear weapons…

And what is this threat?

The threat that we’re getting is the threat from the Obama administration…

Remember: this is the Attorney General of Texas saying this.

A paper by Harvard University economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff that has been cited by Republican lawmakers to justify eliminating the budget deficit contains “serious errors,” according to a study by a group of University of Massachusetts academics.

The Reinhart-Rogoff paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” argued that countries with public debt in excess of 90 percent of gross domestic product suffered measurably slower economic growth.

The new study — by economists Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin — says that the Harvard economists excluded some data and unconventionally weighted the statistics they included to reach their conclusions.

This led to “serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and growth,” Herndon, Ash and Pollin said in the paper published yesterday.

Tea Party Nation head Judson Phillips has announced that

It is a pretty safe bet right now that this attack was carried out by an Islamist… The reason we will be hit again is because our government is not committed to destroying our enemy. Radical Islam is our enemy.

The Republican Party is experiencing an existential crisis, born of its own misguided incongruity with modern American culture and its insistence on choosing intransigence in a dynamic age of fundamental change. Instead of turning away from obsolescence, it is charging headlong into it, becoming more strident and pushing away more voters whom it could otherwise win.

And too many of those hard-liners have a near-allergic reaction to the truth.

…People like Bachmann represent everything that is wrong with the Republican Party. She and her colleagues are hyperbolic, reactionary, ill-informed and ill-intentioned, and they have become synonymous with the Republican brand. We don’t need all politicians to be Mensa-worthy, but we do expect them to be cogent and competent.

A smug, uncaring, ideologically rigid national Republican Party is turning off the majority of American voters, with stale policies that have changed little in 30 years and an image that alienates minorities and the young, according to an internal GOP study.

Of course, don’t expect the GOP to actually listen:

A just-concluded gathering of conservatives in Washington cheered speaker after speaker who urged the GOP to stick to its guns and, instead, largely blamed the 2012 defeat on Romney or the way he ran his campaign.

Not that the report actually has much to say:

The report notes the party’s problems with women voters, especially unmarried women. But its 10-point plan for appealing to women makes no mention of the GOP stance on any social issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage, that have turned off many of the voters in question.

Let’s start with this one, where the headline really says it all:
House Republicans Meet at a Former Slave Plantation to Practice Talking to Black People

Paying a visit to his Chicago campaign office the day after the election, President Obama choked up at what his staff’s commitment means to him.