From Salon, Ronald Reagan and the occultist: Mitch Horowitz on how the Gipper's warm "morning in America" worldview was directly shaped by his reading of occult thinker Manly P. Hall. The Congressman who went off the grid: Roscoe Bartlett spent 20 years on Capitol Hill — now he lives in a remote cabin in the woods, prepping for doomsday. Inside the Right-wing love affair with conspiracy theories: CJ Werleman on explaining how the right-wing echo chamber feeds off of paranoid stories that have no basis in reality. Voucher-mania: Why the right is diseased (and out of ideas). How propaganda can slowly repair the image of an utterly disgraced public figure like George W. Bush. Matthew Brandon Wolfson reviews Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House by Peter Baker. Jim Newell on how New Hampshire Republicans are, in fact, pseudo-libertarian gun nuts. George J. Marlin reviews Tea Party Catholic: The Catholic Case for Limited Government, a Free Economy, and Human Flourishing by Samuel Gregg (and more on why Max Weber was wrong). From The American Conservative, Daniel McCarthy on why the Tea Party can’t govern: A populist spin can’t save purely negative principles. GOP reformers stop being polite to Tea Party, start getting real. Beth Reinhard on the Return of the Welfare Queen: Republicans are launching a class war with racial undertones — and hurting the poor whites they'll need to win in 2014. The Republican Party is not a suicide pact: Just because the numbers currently look bad for a party doesn't mean that they're fixed in stone — parties can react, which, in the long run, is what makes them competitive. Roy Edroso on the 10 dumbest Rightblogger ideas of 2013, part 2.
