The massive amounts of money America’s rich spend to keep from paying taxes seems as irrational as it is obsessively ideological. There’s something creepily cultish about it. This week’s massive leak of corporate-written model legislation from the Koch brothers-financed American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has further exposed the depth and breadth of the corporate capture of what was once billed as government of, by, and for the people.

In the last decade, I've become more than accustomed to being lied to. What's more entertaining is watching the GOP lie to itself about its voting proposals. Vote suppression? No! Never! We're, uh ... we're protecting the integrity of the vote. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Kevin Drum and E.J. Dionne weighed in last week on the GOP's efforts to suppress the vote. Drum first:

Well, look: we'll probably never find smoking gun proof that voter fraud laws are aimed at suppressing the black and youth votes. After all, you'd have to be a monumental moron to actually admit this in any kind of written or otherwise permanent form.

Chris Fitzsimon of NC Policy Watch takes NC Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger to task over claims that cuts to the education budget will not harm classrooms and that NC's low high school graduation rate proves that the system is broken. With teachers and assistants losing their jobs to budget cuts every day, Fitzsimon writes, "... any superintendent or principal can tell him that his talking point about protecting teachers is off base." Furthermore [links added],

Rachel Maddow gives a lesson in messaging in 30 seconds.

Hoover Dam speak for itself.

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)