CPAC

• Michael B. Keegan @ Huffington Post: Why Was Rob Portman's Stroke of Empathy So Shocking?
• Tommy Christopher @ Mediaite: Fox News Runs With ‘King Obama’ Royal Food-Taster Smear.
• Evan McMorris-Santoro @ BuzzFeed: Pamela Geller: CPAC's Muslim Board Member Is 'Worse Than Al-Awlaki.'
• Alex Seitz-Wald @ Salon: Bush AG tells CPAC: “The vast majority” of Muslims want to impose Sharia law.
• Steve Benen @ The Maddow Blog: Hillary Clinton announces support for marriage equality.
• Media Matters: Limbaugh Compares Secretary Of Labor Nominee Tom Perez To "Grand Kleagle Of The Ku Klux Klan."

Rep. Michele Bachmann delivered a typically incoherent speech at CPAC this year which revolved around the theme of caring; specifically, conservatives care and liberals do not.

To demonstrate her point, Bachmann claimed that people cared back in the 1950s, which was why Dr. Jonas Salk found a vaccine for polio and then gave it to President Eisenhower who, because he also cared, then gave it to all Americans.

Contrast that to today when the nation is facing the costs associated with treating Alzheimer's Disease when "a much smarter strategy would be to develop a cure. That's caring!"

According to Bachmannm, we could easily find a cure for Alzheimer's within ten years "if we'd only put our mind to it," but we are not even trying to find cures for things like this and cancer and diabetes because there is too much government regulation and taxation.

"That not caring," Bachmann declared, "it's time we cared":

Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, kicked things off at the final day of CPAC by comparing Washington, DC to The Capitol in "The Hunger Games" and declaring that "our country's equivalent to the Hunger Games' tribute will be the patients who die" under health care reform:

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• Jonathan Chait @ New York Magazine: Rob Portman, Gay Marriage, and Selfishness.

• Jillian Rayfield @ Salon: CPAC panel likens Roe v. Wade to 3/5 compromise. 

• Steve Benen @ Maddow Blog: Romney sees ‘jihadists’ as possible global superpower.

• Tim Murphy @ Mother Jones: Climate Denier at CPAC: Trust Me, I’m an Astronaut. 

• Benjy Sarlin @ TPM: CPAC Desperately Tries To Square the GOP’s Circle With Latinos.

• Scott Keyes and Zack Beauchamp @ Think Progress: CPAC Participant Defends Slavery At Minority Outreach Panel: It Gave ‘Food And Shelter’ To Blacks. 

• Stephen C. Webster @ Raw Story: Coulter on Sen. Feinstein: ‘Liberal women should not be able to hold office.’

• Ed Kilgore @ Washington Monthly: The Anti-Choice Olympics.

At CPAC today, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) argued that climate change is a myth and doesn’t need to be addressed, noting that President Obama was cold during the inauguration.

“He talked about global warming at his inauguration, I found it ironic that the President was wearing a trench coat it was so cold but he’s talking about global warming,” Scalise said.

He also noted that a snow storm later cancelled a congressional hearing on climate change, “you can’t make this stuff up.”

Of course, climate change is actually leading to more incidences of blizzards and winter still tends to be cold.

The NRA's Wayne LaPierre spoke at CPAC today, where he was introduced by a video full of clips of people in the media calling him a radical lunatic before launching into a speech where he repeatedly called everyone else crazy for thinking that his positions and views are crazy.

And he proved how reasonable he is by saying that any effort to create a database of gun owners would either be hacked by the Chinese government, handed over to Mexican government, or used by the American government to confiscate them:

• The new "The Bible" miniseries is so important that God was present on the set.
• Ken Cuccinelli will not sign Americans for Tax Reform's pledge not to raise taxes.
• This might be the lamest contest we've ever seen.
• Saying that "adoption in families headed, like Chief [Justice John] Roberts' family is, by a heterosexual couple, is by far the second-best option" is probably not a good way to win support for NOM's anti-marriage equality position.
• Finally, Bryan Fischer and Cliff Kincaid discuss the "homosexual infiltration of CPAC":

Last year we wrote about how CPAC allowed notorious white nationalists to speak on multiple panels but banned the gay conservative group GOProud. This year the CPAC organizers, who aren’t entirely oblivious to the 2012 election, are trying to emphasize diversity. There’s even a panel entitled, “Conservative Inclusion: Promoting the Freedom Message to all Americans,” which boasts a racially diverse lineup of conservative activists.

“Conservative inclusion” is a nice idea, but it doesn’t go very far at CPAC. For the second year in a row, the gay conservative group GOProud has been banned from the conference. So at best, “inclusion” at CPAC means “straights only.”

Even more telling is the roster of sponsors and exhibitors at CPAC. Most troubling is the inclusion of the anti-immigrant group ProEnglish, which is run by longtime white nationalist organizer Bob Vandervoort. The Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights has reported extensively on his activities:

Vandervoort was at the center of white nationalist activity during his time in Illinois. While he was in charge, Chicagoland Friends of American Renaissance often held joint meetings with the local chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens. The group held events featuring numerous white nationalist figures. Vandervoort also made appearances at white nationalist events outside Illinois, for instance participating in the 2009 Preserving Western Civilization Conference.

When CPAC and its organizers at the American Conservative Union were widely criticized last year for allowing Vandervoort and other white nationalists to speak on multiple panels, the conference organizers played dumb:

“This panel was not organized by the ACU,” CPAC spokeswoman Kristy Campbell told The Daily Caller, ”and specific questions on the event, content or speakers should be directed to the sponsoring organization.”

There’s no such excuse this year. CPAC knew all too well about Vandervoort’s white nationalist background and yet they allowed his group to return. Apparently “conservative inclusion” means shunning gays while including racists.

The reality is that CPAC couldn’t open its doors to gay conservatives even if it wanted to. As Brian reported last week, the head of CPAC sponsor Accuracy In Media is not only pleased with the GOProud ban, he wants to see a panel at the conference on “the dangers of the homosexual movement and why some of its members seem prone to violence, terror, and treason.”

Another important sponsor is the Family Research Council, which has been designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-gay hate group. The group’s top policy expert, Peter Sprigg, explicitly supports the criminalization of homosexuality, and readers of this blog are familiar with FRC’s aggressive and dehumanizing advocacy against gays and lesbians. There is no compromising on gays with extremists like these.

As we’ve reported, GOProud isn’t the only group banned this year. Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, co-founders of the Freedom Defense Initiative, are vicious Islamophobes and conspiracy theorists. Had CPAC banned them for spreading lies and fomenting hate against Muslims, it would be a sign of progress. But Geller and Spencer were really banned for having made the mistake of extending their Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy theory to include two American Conservative Union board members, Suhail Khan and Grover Norquist.

In past years, ACU has happily given Geller and company a platform to bash Muslims. And Spencer, who runs the blog “Jihad Watch,” overwhelmingly won this year’s CPAC People’s Choice Blogger Award. But their paranoid rantings hit too close to home this year, so CPAC pulled the plug. Even “conservative inclusion” has its limits.

Former Rep. Allen West was one of the first speakers scheduled to kick off CPAC 2013 and he wasted no time firing up the conservative crowd by proclaiming that "there is nothing on this green earth that a liberal progressive fears more than a black American who wants a better life and a smaller government."

Later, West ran through a litany of obstacles over which this nation has triumphed, including the American Revolution,  the Civil War, the Great Depression, the battle against Nazism in World War II  ... and the presidency of Barack Obama, declaring that just as this nation overcame these previous threats, "when Barack Obama packs his bags and beats a hasty retreat back to Chicago, we will persevere":