So during a meeting between GOP senators and President Obama yesterday, Senator Bob Corker said the President has not been genuinely bipartisan and was using the Republicans as props.

“I felt like there was a degree of audacity in him being there today, after passing his third large partisan bill,” Corker told me, insisting Republicans had been stiff-armed by the Whte House on financial reform, health care, and the stimulus.

“I told him I felt like a prop afer the actions they had taken regarding bipartisanship,” Corker said. “It hit a nerve.”

Yet the President did not punch Corker out. Restraint of a saint, I say.

Sen. Pat Roberts told the media that the President should have taken a Valium before meeting with Republicans. But how do we know he didn’t? Very few men would not have jumped over the table to choke somebody under the same circumstances. The President either has the discipline of Gandhi, or he was heavily medicated.

Last night at a San Francisco fundraiser for Sen. Barbara Boxer, the President hinted he was done playing Charlie Brown to the GOP’s Lucy with the football.

“The day has passed when I expected this to be a full partnership.” There is hardly any “room for cooperation” in the Republican Party, Obama said.

Do tell.

Exhibiting the keen intellect of a petrified dodo egg — I think an adult stuffed dodo would outsmart him, actually — Jonah Goldberg confuses free-wheeling corruption and dysfunction with constitutional checks and balances.

Apparently Tom Friedman said this on Meet the Press yesterday:

MR. FRIEDMAN: Well, David, it’s been decimated. It’s been decimated by everything from the gerrymandering of political districts to cable television to an Internet where I can create a digital lynch mob against you from the left or right if I don’t like where you’re going, to the fact that money and politics is so out of control—really our Congress is a forum for legalized bribery. You know, that’s really what, what it’s come down to. So I don’t—I, I—I’m worried about this, it’s why I have fantasized—don’t get me wrong—but that what if we could just be China for a day? I mean, just, just, just one day. You know, I mean, where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions, and I do think there is a sense of that, on, on everything from the economy to environment. I don’t want to be China for a second, OK, I want my democracy to work with the same authority, focus and stick-to-itiveness. But right now we have a system that can only produce suboptimal solutions.

To which Goldberg responded ina blog post titled “It’s Like He Does it On Purpose“:

All of those checks and balances aren’t a bug of the system, they’re a feature!

The word for the day, boys and girls, is non sequitur. It’s like he does it on purpose.

Unfortunately, Goldberg is not the only idiot writing for the Web. At the Catholic site First Things, The Anchoress turns Friedman’s words into a hysterical rant about a leftist totalitarian takeover.

Sarah Palin says that Rand Paul is learning what it’s like to be her. Resentful and whiny?

I want to go back to something I read yesterday. Rand Son of Ron wants to eliminate the Americans With Disabilities Act, which he said is burdensome to small business. He gave the example of a small business in a two-story office building forced to install an elevator for one employee. John Cook of Yahoo News writes that Rand doesn’t seem to understand what the ADA actually says, and that most small businesses are exempt.

But here’s the interesting part:

Trouble is, we searched far and wide for a single instance in which a private employer was successfully sued under the ADA for failing to provide an elevator, or was compelled by a lawsuit to do so, and we came up empty. We searched the case law, contacted ADA experts — both proponents and opponents of the law — the Justice Department, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Not one of them knew of any case involving the government-ordered installation of an elevator. It looks like Rand Paul is either peddling a myth or spinning some vanishingly small number of elevator installations we’ve yet to hear of into an epidemic big-government overreach.

So, essentially, Rand Son of Ron is screaming about an alleged injustice that isn’t actually happening and therefore doesn’t need addressing.

It hasn’t happened lately, but in decades past Republicans in Washington liked to introduce laws or constitutional amendments banning flag burning. And they’d go on and on about how awful it was that those hippies burned flags, but research always failed to turn up any epidemic of flag burning.

And then yesterday we were blessed with the comment from “Liberty Dawn” —

Only the dumbed-down media can try to make a racist bash out of individual and states’ rights. Point being the federal government has shoved its fist down our throat — and Americans aren’t going to take it anymore.

And, of course, one hears this stuff all the time, but I’ve yet to see anyone screaming about government fists down throats who appears to have a genuine grievance. Not in the U.S., anyway. Exactly what is the government doing to these people that is so oppressive? And if you push them for an answer, if you get an answer at all it’s usually something about using their tax money for something they don’t like. This was L.D.’s second point —

No national heathcare, no more spending of billions of dollars that aren’t theirs to give away.

Never mind that if the health care reform bill goes into effect as written as works as planned, it will save L.D. and the rest of us money in the long run. We all pay taxes for all kinds of stuff we don’t use personally. My taxes have paid for roads I will never drive on, bridges I will never cross, schools my children will never attend, wars that are a damnfool waste of everyone’s money. And it’s perfectly normal, and reasonable, for us citizens to disagree with each other how our tax dollars are spent.

But that’s not oppression. That’s not government fists down throats. That’s just the normal kind of stuff citizens disagree about. Because the disagreement here is not between “the government” and “citizens.” It’s between “citizens who favor health care reform” and “citizens who don’t favor health care reform.” And because the former group did a better job getting their politicians elected during the last couple of election cycles, now there’s a health care reform law. This is how republican representative government is supposed to work.

BTW, if you want to see what real government fists down throats look like, catch the documentary Burma VJ sometime. HBO has been showing it lately.

The tea partiers are marching around saying they want to take their country back, but from whom? and for whom? and by repealing the 17th Amendment? Frank Rich wrote of Rand’s acceptance speech,

Paul said the voters’ message was to “get rid of the power people, the people who run the show, the people who think they’re above everybody else” — or, as he put it on an earlier occasion, the establishment who “from their high-rise penthouse” look down on and laugh at the “American rabble.”

That Paul gave his victory speech in a “members only” country club is no contradiction to white Tea Partiers.

And repealing the 17th Amendment will rectify this?

The pundits keep trying to analyze the teabaggers as if they had some kind of coherent agenda that is just laying there waiting to be uncovered. I don’t think so.

A few days ago there was a nice essay by Paul Rosenberg at Open Left called “America’s Delusional Politics.” The real key to understanding the teabaggers is in here —

Conservatives believe that they should rule the world. Liberals, not so much. Liberals tend to believe much more in process-that whoever wins elections should rule, and that ideally whoever’s ideas are best should prevail. As long as there are processes in place protecting basic rights, liberals tend to trust the political process-or at, to trust its legitimacy. Conservatives, OTOH, tend to regard any loss of power as somehow illegitimate.

They are not in charge; therefore, they are oppressed. It’s not about issues. The entire tea party movement is about a bunch of aged children throwing a tantrum because they’ve been told they have to play nice with other kids. They don’t have real grievances, so they make some up.

At The Atlantic — which really does have some good writers, Megan McArdle notwithstanding — Joshua Green has a post called “Explaining the Rand Paul Disaster” that’s worth a read.

Green says that the Rand Paul we’ve been watching in national media this week has an entirely different persona than the Rand Paul who campaigned for the Kentucky primary.

What Paul spoke about on the stump was mostly the size of the deficit, his desire for a balanced budget and term limits, and his belief that a lot of what Congress does has no basis in the Constitution. Paul’s favorite example was health care, not civil rights. But the interesting thing to me, as I wrote on Monday, is that he took care to emphasize those parts of the Tea Party agenda that appeal (he claimed) to independents and moderates. There was no talk of race, civil rights, secession, birtherism and general Fox News lunacy. “The Tea Party is not about extremism,” Paul said again and again. The impression in the broader media, including the liberal blogosphere, that Paul is an angry, unlikeable nut was not borne out by my experience on the campaign trail.

The other part of the equation is that Kentucky newspapers and other news outlets have been decimated by job cuts, reducing the ability of the press corps to run the candidates through the gauntlet, as it were. So Kentucky journalists have been letting Paul slide by. I’m not sure I buy the last explanation entirely, but Kentucky media did seem to let him slide for some reason.

So he was not at all prepared to be in the glare of national media attention, which focused on him after his appearance on Rachel Maddow’s show Wednesday night. So now he’s canceled a scheduled appearance onSunday’s “Meet the Press,” which I think was cowardly — I mean, if you can’t face David Gregory, who can you face?

See also Steve Benen, “When Extremism and Ignorance Collide.”

First, I want you to know that I came up with the title of this blog post before I saw that Domenico Montanaro at MSNBC beat me to it.

Until this week national news media was only mildly interested in Rand Paul, but now that he won a blowout primary election and is the front-runner (so far) in a Senate race, he’s getting closer scrutiny. And it appears he wasn’t ready for prime time. Yesterday he wanted to uphold the right of businesses to exercise racial discrimination, and today he said the Obama Administration was being “un-American” to criticize BP Oil.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you don’t want to get rid of the EPA?

PAUL: No, the thing is is that drilling right now and the problem we’re having now is in international waters and I think there needs to be regulation of that and always has been regulation. What I don’t like from the president’s administration is this sort of, you know, “I’ll put my boot heel on the throat of BP.” I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business. I’ve heard nothing from BP about not paying for the spill. And I think it’s part of this sort of blame game society in the sense that it’s always got to be someone’s fault. Instead of the fact that maybe sometimes accidents happen. I mean, we had a mining accident that was very tragic and I’ve met a lot of these miners and their families. They’re very brave people to do a dangerous job. But then we come in and it’s always someone’s fault. Maybe sometimes accidents happen.

And there are reports Rand whined that he wasn’t getting a “honeymoon” with the press. As a great man once said, if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

Yesterday the Senate passed what is being touted as “the most comprehensive regulation of the financial industry since the Great Depression.” Next up: Conference committee. It may not be long before there’s a bill President Obama can sign into law.

Republicans are still trying to get auto dealers excluded from the bill’s consumer protection provisions. I can’t think of any reason why Republicans would do this except that they’re being paid under the table to do it.

This morning the credit card industry is howling about an amendment introduced by Senator Durbin that was tacked onto the Senate bill at the last minute. I take it the amendment limits the fees Visa, Mastercard et al. charge merchants for debit card transactions, but so far most of the information I’m getting is from press releases being put out by Visa, Mastercard et al. So it’s a little murky. Another amendment introduced by Sen. Whitehouse of Rhode Island that would have allowed states to cap consumer credit card fees failed, however.

To me, the most interesting political story coming out of yesterday’s vote is that Scott Brown, the new Republican senator from Massachusetts, provided the 60th vote to cut off debate on the measure and also voted with the Dems to pass the bill. Already Brown has gone from being the fair-haired child to being persona non grata on the Right.

Last January some leftie bloggers analyzed Brown’s record as “liberal Republican,” meaning he’s progressive on some issues and conservative on others. Brown is “more liberal than Olympia Snowe,” said one.

Rightie bloggers hooted at this at the time. Today Little Lulu’s first commenter said, “Hmm, a Republican who’s even more liberal than Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins. Stranger species keep getting discovered.” Maybe the Rockefeller Republican isn’t extinct after all. But whatever Brown is, it appears he’s not stupid enough to think he can rack up a far-right record and win re-election in Massachusetts.

If you missed the Rachel Maddow interview of Rand Paul last night, here it is:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

A few days ago I argued with a gun-rights extremist that one person’s rights, respected absolutely, turn into other people’s oppression. And here’s a good example. Rand doesn’t think that civil rights laws should apply to private business, because such laws restrict a business owner’s “rights.” So Rand is just fine with going back to the days when restaurants could refuse to serve African Americans, because that’s what freedom is all about.

Rand Paul said this in an interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal:

PAUL: I would not go to that Woolworths, and I would stand up in my community and say that it is abhorrent, um, but, the hard part—and this is the hard part about believing in freedom—is, if you believe in the First Amendment, for example—you have too, for example, most good defenders of the First Amendment will believe in abhorrent groups standing up and saying awful things. . . . It’s the same way with other behaviors. In a free society, we will tolerate boorish people, who have abhorrent behavior.

In a free society, we have to draw lines between “boorish” and “dangerous” or “oppressive.” Words are one thing — sticks and stones, etc. — but discrimination that limits peoples’ opportunities and access to goods and services that other people enjoy, not to mention housing and jobs, goes beyond “boorish.”

One of Rand’s arguments on Maddows’ show last night was that if restaurant owners can be forced to serve people because of race, neither can restaurant owners bar customers carrying firearms. However, I never heard of melanin posing a safety hazard. And, y’know, guns are not intrinsic to your person in the same way race is. So there’s no parallel.

The story is that Rand refused to take his opponent’s concession phone call on Tuesday night. It’s not clear if that’s exactly what happened. It may have been more of an amateurish blunder than an intended snub.

Josh Marshall wrote of Rand’s acceptance speech that “he came off to me as arrogant, bellicose and even a little messianic in his demeanor. To put it baldly, he sounded like a jerk.” But someone pointed out to Josh that “arrogant, bellicose and messianic” is standard tea-party style; it’s what the baggers want from their “leaders.”

I don’t know where the polls are right now with Paul and his Democratic opponent, Jack Conway, but I hope the Dems make a fight of it, at least.

I don’t have a lot of time to write something long and insightful, but here are some random thoughts —

First, I got a kick out of this headline at Real Clear Politics yesterday — “2010: Anti-Incumbent, Anti-Liberal, or Anti-Democrat?” Biased, much? Yesterday, this guy was predicting a 50-seat loss in the House for Dems in November. He hasn’t yet commented today.

I didn’t watch much of the television coverage, but when I did flip to MSNBC I saw that even as results were coming in Howard Fineman was still expecting the Dems to be flattened by a Republican tsunami in November. Fineman is something of a weather vane of the conventional wisdom of Beltway Insiders, so it’ll be fun to see if he changes his position in the next few days.

As usual, the most informative analysis comes from Nate Silver, who discusses why most of the conventional wisdom about yesterday’s results are off-base. In short, much of the national significance many are trying to see in the results is an illusion, a parallax effect, if you will. Most of the winners ran localized races and appealed to their voters for many local reasons.

In some ways, the biggest loser yesterday may have been Tim Burns, the Republican who lost to Mark Critz in the special election for the Pennsylvania 12sth district House seat. Polling numbers had made it a close race, and there were all kinds of indicators that the district was ready to vote for a Republican. The voters there are culturally conservative and voted for McCain in 2008. The NRCC dumped a bunch of money into the election, thinking they could pick off a Dem seat. Yet the Dem won by almost 10 points. The NRCC is perplexed.

“If you can’t win a seat that is trending Republican in a year like this, then where is the wave?” asked Tom Davis, a former Republican congressman from Virginia, who said Republicans will need to examine what went wrong.

I believe the lesson here, if the GOP can accept it, is that even conservative voters (with the exception of the teabaggers) are getting tired of the Republican Clown Show. I’ve read that Burns’s campaign was highly nationalized and featured many silly cartoons of Nancy Pelosi. Joan Walsh notes that it made Burns look as if he had mommy issues. It’s also about the fifth time that the GOP has run against Nancy Pelosi and lost.

I postulate that if Burns had presented himself as a serious grown-up and addressed genuine local issues, the election would at least have been closer. And I propose that most voters, people who are not that into politics, don’t give a hoo-haw one way or another about Nancy Pelosi.

Steven Benen writes,

For those keeping score, there have been seven special elections for U.S. House seats since the president’s inauguration 16 months ago: NY20, IL5, CA32, CA10, NY23, FL19, and PA12. Democrats have won all seven.

Right now, I’d say the safest bet is that Republicans will pick up some seats in the House and Senate in November, but not enough to gain majorities. But a lot depends on whether the GOP learns some lessons and changes campaign strategies for November.