Midday open thread

• Come on, Sarah, you can do it. Run, baby, run:

  Sarah Palin’s unfavorable rating is off the charts.

  The former Alaska governor’s numbers are astonishingly upside-down, according to a new Bloomberg poll showing a 32 percentage point spread between those who have an unfavorable rating of Palin and those who view her favorably.

  Of the 60 percent in the poll who have an unfavorable opinion of Palin, more than half of them – 38 percent among the whole survey – said they have a “very” unfavorable view of Palin.

• Please dump full-of-shit jokes here:

  Senator Rand Paul’s toilets don’t work, and he blames the Department of Energy.

  At a hearing of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on Thursday, Mr. Paul lambasted Kathleen Hogan, deputy assistant secretary for energy efficiency at the Energy Department, telling her that the department’s “hypocrisy” and “busybody nature” has “restricted choices” for consumers rather than made life better for them.

  “You don’t care about the consumer really,” Mr. Paul said. “Frankly, my toilets don’t work in my house, and I blame you.”

• Politics make strange bedfellows:

  The big spending group founded by Karl Rove has succeeded in uniting unions and fiscal hawks -- in criticism of the group's new TV ad.

  On Wednesday, Crossroads GPS launched a nationwide TV ad attacking the relationship between unions and Democratic politicians.

  By the end of the day they had succeeded in putting the National Education Association and the anti-public sector union libertarian think-tank Cato on the same page: the ad, both said, is at best a stretch and at worse untrue. Crossroads disputes the claims and stands by its commercial.

  Of course they do. Repeat a lie often enough ...
• I wonder how many Republicans will be campaigning on this in 2012:

  The House GOP’s budget, which passed last month, takes a hatchet to programs for disabled kids and Special Olympics athletes. The proposed cuts could force the closure of at least one Special Olympics program, which is funded through the Department of Education. Dubbed Project UNIFY, the program serves more than 750,000 students in 43 states and draws from techniques used in Special Olympics training for activities in public schools.

  The program includes sports teams that pair disabled athletes with nondisabled athletes; developmental activities for young children with disabilities; and anti-discrimination programs to combat bullying in schools. Special Olympics president and CEO Tim Shriver has said the program is at the forefront of a national movement to fight bias against the disabled and, in a recent interview on MSNBC, he denounced the GOP cuts: “It wasn’t a haircut—it was a guillotine job for the programs for health and education for children with special needs.”

• And in related news:

  A majority of Americans prefer cutting defense spending to reduce the federal deficit rather than taking money from public retirement and health programs, a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday showed.

  The poll found 51 percent of Americans support reducing defense spending, and only 28 percent want to cut Medicare and Medicaid health programs for the elderly and poor. A mere 18 percent back cuts in the Social Security retirement program.
  

• How is Newt Gingrich's, "I'm so patriotic, I screw around on all my wives" playing?
• Which congressional freshmen are rich and which are just hoping?
• This will hack off the so-called establishment Republicans:
  

  Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) is already building an aggressive campaign machine for the 2012 Senate elections, promising to push his party further to the right, despite angering many in the GOP establishment with his political activities last year.

• How refreshing ... no "to spend more time with family" excuse:

  The Dalai Lama announced on Thursday that he was stepping down as political leader of the Tibetan government in exile.

  "As early as the 1960s, I have repeatedly stressed that Tibetans need a leader, elected freely by the Tibetan people, to whom I can devolve power," the Dalai Lama said in a prepared speech. "Now, we have clearly reached the time to put this into effect."

• In case you missed it, Jared Loughner pled not guilty in federal court yesterday to the 49 counts against him for the January shooting spree in Arizona that woundered Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), and killed six others.
• From Afghanistan:
  

  A 60-year-old cousin of President Hamid Karzai was killed during a night raid by NATO and Afghan forces in the southern province of Kandahar.