Jerks:

The National Republican Congressional Committee has set up a number of websites that look like they could be a Democratic candidate’s campaign page, unless you read the fine print. They may even violate a Federal Election Commission regulation, Campaign Legal Center expert Paul S. Ryan explained to ThinkProgress. . . .

. . . Ray Bellamy of Florida says he was tricked by the page and accidentally made a donation to the NRCC. “It looked legitimate and had a smiling face of Sink and all the trappings of a legitimate site,” Bellamy told the Tampa Bay Times. The look-alike page uses the same colors as Florida candidate Alex Sink’s campaign, with the URL sinkrocongress2014.com. Once entering information, the person is redirected to an NRCC thank-you page.

They can’t get enough campaign money on their own, so they have to steal it from Democrats? Of course, this might just be one of those “because we can” things.

But Ed Kilgore says the House Republicans appear to be in retreat, generally.

So you have to wonder about last week’s House Republican retreat, which produced more confusion and division than was contained in its baggage from Washington to Cambridge, Maryland. Its much-heralded and heavily telegraped “principles on immigration,” written in codes and near-hieroglyphs, has created the largest and loudest row among Republicans on the subject since Marco Rubio helped Democrats build a super-majority for comprehensive reform in the Senate. The steely focus of Republicans on Obamacare is now being blurred by wrangling over alternatives. And the House GOP conference’s strategic decision on how to deal with an imminent debt limit measure has bogged down into arguments over what empty gesture to offer before surrender.

Immediately after the retreat ended, House Republican Leader Eric Cantor went on Face the Nation, and pressed mildly by Major Garrett on these obvious subjects, collapsed into incoherence.

Brian Beutler explains why he does’t think Chris Christie’s political career will survive Bridgegate. Beutler tends to be more optimistic about things than I am, and I will be hugely surprised if Christie doesn’t serve the rest of his term as governor. I think he can kiss off the White House, though. He doesn’t have broad enough support in the Republican base to ride this out.

Speaking of the Republican base, CNN reports that a conservative group is calling for the GOP leadership in the House and Senate to step aside.

“Time and again, year after year, the Republican leadership in the House and Senate has come to grassroots conservatives, and Tea Party supporters pleading for our money, our volunteers, our time, our energy and our votes,” said ForAmerica Chairman Brent Bozell in a statement to CNN. “In return they have repeatedly promised not just to stop the liberal assault on our freedoms and our national treasury, but to advance our conservative agenda. It’s been years. There is not a single conservative accomplishment this so-called ‘leadership’ can point to.”

Now that the federal insurance exchange website is, I hear, considerably less buggy, the GOP is zeroing in on some state exchanges that are not doing so well —

With the federal online insurance exchange running more smoothly than ever, the biggest laggards in fixing enrollment problems are now state-run exchanges in several states where the governors and legislative leaders have been among the strongest supporters of President Obama’s health care law.

Republicans have seized on the failures of homegrown exchanges in states like Maryland, Minnesota and Oregon — all plagued by technological problems that have kept customers unhappy and enrollment goals unmet — and promise to use the issue against Democratic candidates for governor and legislative seats this fall.

“People see incompetence when they look at this,” said Michael Short, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee. “Everyone that’s associated with it is going to have to deal with the consequences of this terrible law, including the state legislators who created these exchanges and the governors in charge of running them.”

Hmmm. People are frustrated with the sites not working well because they’re trying to buy the bleeping insurance. And Republicans, who oppose the legislation to make buying the insurance possible, think this is an issue that will work for them, because …?

But they’re still trying to make the law look bad. David Weigel tells us about a couple of the women appearing in anti-Obamacare commercials.

Lamb didn’t have private insurance per se. She was on a Tennessee-sponsored health care program that covered 16,000 people, canceled last year because it “had a $25,000 annual limit on benefits” and “the federal health law does not allow yearly expenditure caps.” The state applied for a waiver, and didn’t get it, but nor did it consider accepting the expansion of Medicaid. (Since 2011, the state’s been run completely by Republicans.)

Here’s the other one, a woman whose insurance policy was canceled but refused to use the exhange to get new insurance:

The reason she didn’t visit the Washington state health exchange was basically #OBUMMER. “I wouldn’t go on that Obama website at all,” she said. This didn’t start with her cancellation. This started years ago. Republicans told Bette, and others inclined to distrust Obamacare, that they’d face death panels and rationing boards. That their options would be unaffordable, and irredeemable. That the exchange sites would make their personal information vulnerable to hackers and that creepy Uncle Sam would sexually violate them. They said all this in the hope that people like Bette wouldn’t give the law a fair shake, then turned around and feigned outrage on their behalf when the plan worked.

Finally — I just heard that the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman has died, possibly of a drug overdose. He was only in his 40s. Very sad.

Timothy Egan has a profile of Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who gave the English-language official Republican SOTU response. It turns out she represents a very poor district that is way above the national average in poverty and unemployment.

Given that picture, it would seem surprising that McMorris Rodgers voted to drastically cut food aid last year, and joined her party in resisting emergency benefits to the unemployed. She has been a leading strategist in the unrelenting Republican attempt to kill the Affordable Care Act.

And yet, in her district, people are flocking to Obamacare — well beyond the national average. Though she has been screening town hall meetings to highlight only critics of the new law, her constituents are doing something entirely different in making their personal health decisions.

In Spokane County, the most populous in the Fifth Congressional District with nearly half a million people, the rate of participation in the new health care law is even well above the state average. At the end of December, signups were 102 percent of the state target. That’s saying something, because Washington, with a big range of insurance choices and a well-run exchange, has been one of the nation’s success stories for the Affordable Care Act.

Also in the New York Times, David Firestone compares what Republicans say against what Republicans mean.

Joan Walsh looks at this New York Times story about last year’s gubernatorial race in New Jersey. You might remember that the Democratic challenger, Barbara Buono, accused her fellow Dems of making deals with Christie to not support her. The Times is saying that exactly what happened, and that Christie’s team was pulling every trick in the book to run up Christie’s margin of victory to make him the front runner for 2016.

Apparently this isn’t really news, but I’m just now hearing about it — Neanderthal Man died out about 30,000 years ago, but he left some of his DNA behind, especially in people scientists are delicately calling “non-African.” Neanderthals lived in Europe and Asia, but apparently didn’t get to Africa much. Early humans in Europe and Asia hooked up with the Neanderthals, so to speak, and although these were two different species, they were close enough genetically to have offspring, and some of those offspring (unlike, say, mules) were fertile. So Whites and Asians today have inherited 1 to 3 percent of our genomes from Neanderthals.

According to a news bit at NBC, the Neanderthal DNA is particularly associated with skin and hair — red hair especially.

I am amused.

I guess the State of the Union is tonight, huh? I will be doing something else, but y’all are welcome to comment on it here if you like.

The usually rightie mouthpieces are all excited by a NEW Republican plan to REPLACE OBAMACARE. What did they come up with that’s NEW?

Um, not much. It’s all tweaks of old plans. But let’s look anyway.

It would allow more age rating of insurance. Under Obamacare insurers cannot charge older and sicker people more than three times what the young folks pay. The NEW plan would allow older folks to be charged five times what the young folks pay.

It would not require insurance companies to insure people with pre-existing conditions. They would be required to offer a plan to someone who has had continuo8us coverage — in other words, if they currently have or just lost insurance — but we’re not told what “must offer” might mean. It could be a plan nobody could afford, for all we know.

Everyone the private insurance companies won’t touch would auto-enrolled in high-risk pools, which have been tried before but turned out to be hideously expensive to the point of being unworkable. The GOP plan appears to be a bit fuzzy about how that will be paid for without bankrupting the participants. But, hey, it sounds like a plan.

They’re especially proud of a plan to cap tax exclusion for employee benefit plans and use the difference in revenue to provide subsidies for the very poor. Medicaid would be changed to something like a block grant to states plan, although not exactly.

Basically, it’s a milder form of the same old screw job they’ve been proposing for years. It’s basically a scheme to dig more money out of everyone’s pocket for the benefit of the insurance industry. See Joan McCarter for more.

Update: See GOP offers Obamacare replacement — and it’s a mess

Regarding Mike Huckabee’s recent “libido” remarks, I’m with BooMan — what Huckabee is saying makes no discernible sense. Whether you agree with him or not.

“I think it’s time Republicans no longer accept listening to the Democrats talk about a ‘war on women,’” Huckabee said. “Because the fact is, the Republicans don’t have a war on women. They have a war for women.”

He said Democrats convinced women they were victims, but Republicans wanted to empower them.

“Women I know are outraged that Democrats think that women are nothing more than helpless or hopeless creatures whose only goal in life is to have a government provide for them birth control medication,” Huckabee said. “Women I know are smart, educated, intelligent, capable of doing anything anyone else can do.” …

…“If Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing them for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government, then so be it,” Huckabee said.

Is he saying that smart, educated, and intelligent women can control their reproductive system without birth control? And what does controlling libido have to do with anything? Does he think that only nymphomaniacs need birth control? And, of course, “government” isn’t supplying birth control except to Medicaid patients. The real issue has to do with mandating that private insurance companies cover birth control, which can be expensive if you have to pay the whole cost yourself.

Considering that about 99 percent of American women use birth control at some point in their lives, I’m not sure which women he thinks he is not insulting.

As with Rush Limbaugh’s infamous Sandra Fluke rampage, Huckabee doesn’t seem to understand how birth control works. Are they really that clueless? Paul Waldman writes,

These kinds of statements tend to come from older conservative men who have no idea how ladyparts work, and really don’t want to know. That extends to contraception, which as far as they’re concerned is something that is women’s responsibility and therefore there’s no need to understand it. That accounts for the bizarrely widespread belief that all forms of contraception work like condoms: a one-use kind of thing that is employed whenever sex is desired. Which is why Rush Limbaugh said that Sandra Fluke was obviously a “slut” if she wanted contraception to be covered by the insurance she was paying for, because “She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception.” And Huckabee believes that you only need birth control every month if you have a rampaging libido, while if you were more chaste, it would be something that would sit at the back of the cabinet, seldom brought out but there if necessary, like that little container of tumeric you once bought for a particularly exotic recipe and might some day use again.

Since Mike Huckabee doesn’t have 18 kids, I’m guessing his wife has used contraception throughout their marriage. But a Baptist minister and his wife have a “don’t ask, don’t tell” arrangement when it comes to that sort of thing, just like millions of other couples, which enables him to continue believing that only a fallen woman would need to take a contraceptive pill every doggone day like she was some kind of insatiable sex machine who barely had time to cook his food and do his laundry in between all that rutting.

Seriously, can they really be that clueless? Do they actually not know how birth control pills work? They certainly sound as if they don’t understand it, but it’s mind boggling. Even after all these years of watching wingnuts’ wacky ways, this is out there.