PPP is out with a poll showing that even Republican voters aren't buying the professional GOP's story on Benghazi. Voters trust former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over Congressional Republicans on Benghazi by 10 points, 43% don't know where Benghazi is, only 23% believe Benghazi is the biggest scandal ever, and more people think Congress should be focusing on immigration reform and passing universal background checks on gun purchases than investigating Benghazi.

Respondents who voted for Mitt Romney reject Bengahzi being the biggest scandal ever by 8 points.

Not yet, but it could be when all is said and done.

Jobs

I found a good source for historical job data and was able to compare job growth during the George W. Bush administration to growth during the Barack Obama administration.

To be fair, I'll exclude the early 2000s recession and the late 2000s recession by counting from the end of the 2001-2002 recession to the beginning of the Lesser Depression, and then from the end of that until present. These are net jobs, meaning any month of job loss will count against the total.

In the 68 months between June of 2002 and January of 2008, the economy added 7,622,000 jobs. That's an average of 112,000 jobs per month.

In the 37 months between March of 2010 and March of 2013, the economy added 5,875,000 jobs for an average of 159,000.

Consider the four pillars of conservative economics:

First theory: Expanding the monetary base and engaging in deficit spending will cause interest rates to skyrocket and inflation to increase.

Reality: The Fed has engaged in three rounds of quantitative easing and the current round isn't going to end until after unemployment is back to normal, so they say. I think I've seen estimates that the monetary base has been expanded by more than a trillion dollars already and there's more of that to come for at least four more years. Rather than increasing, interest rates have fallen and core inflation hasn't budged.

Just an awful jobs report, the worst in quite a while. You can pretty much blame the sequester for this one, which means you can pretty much blame John "I got 98% of what I wanted [from it]" Boehner and the GOP:

Austerity may be starting to squeeze the life out of the job market.

U.S. employers hired at the slowest pace in nearly a year in March, adding only 88,000 jobs to non-farm payrolls, with steep job cuts in the retail and government sectors, including 12,000 at the U.S. Postal Service, according to a Labor Department report released Friday.

Economists predicted March's net gain to be somewhere closer to 190,000, according to a Bloomberg survey.

"This is a punch to the gut," Austan Goolsbee, former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Obama, said on CNBC. "This is not a good number."

This is the success of the core Republican Party platform for the last 20 years: savage spending cuts regardless of the consequences to the economy. The GOP promised cuts even larger than their sequester in the 2010 Pledge to America and there's a lot more of that in Paul Ryan's most recent discredited budget proposal.

Here's a quick summary just of recent events in North Carolina, where Republicans won big majorities in the state legislature in 2010 and captured the Governor's mansion last year.

The GOP-dominated North Carolina Senate voted to repeal the Racial Justice Act yesterday, a state law which allows death row inmates to get their sentences converted to life in prison if they can prove that racism influenced the outcome of their trial:

Senate Republicans were spurred in their campaign by a Cumberland County judge's findings last year that jury selection in the cases of four death-row inmates was tainted by conclusive evidence of racism, a ruling that automatically converted their sentences to life in prison without parole. Those were the first four of more than 150 challenges filed under the 2009 version of the law.

Can't get more clear than that. When a judge found "conclusive evidence of racism", the Republican Party's response wasn't to take action to correct that injustice and to prevent it from ever happening again. They immediately set to work to repeal a law which tried to fix that injustice.

Could you have a more in-your-face embrace of racism by Republicans than this in the modern era?

And just as the North Carolina GOP finds a modicum of sanity on voter ID laws, they roll out brand new vote suppression laws aimed squarely at keeping Democrats out of the voting booths:

Chuck Tryon is one of the 57 percent of North Carolinians who cast their ballot before Election Day last year.

He said it was convenient for both him and his wife, who live in the Raleigh suburb of Holly Springs but face a long commute to their jobs in Fayetteville.

"It is incredibly valuable to us," said Tryon, an English professor at Fayetteville State University. "I have always appreciated it.''

But early voting - a practice in North Carolina since 2000 - may soon be sharply restricted if the Republican legislature has its way. The legislature is considering bills that would reduce the early voting period from two and half weeks to one week, and would end Sunday voting. It also would end the practice of allowing persons to register and vote on the same day at early voting sites.

There are three important facts that everyone should know. One, that there's virtually no vote fraud in America according to the five-year Bush-run Department of Justice investigation.

Two, Democrats vote early in larger numbers than Republicans do.

Three, young voters and first time voters in 2008 that supported Barack Obama registered and voted in the same day in massive numbers. Apparently the Republican Party has had enough of all of that and rather than win fair elections with ideas, they're settling for stealing them with undemocratic laws designed to make it harder for Democrats to vote.

House Republicans unveiled their long-awaited voter ID bill Thursday, offering a less restrictive version than the measure that was vetoed by Democratic Gov. Bev. Perdue two years ago. [..]

The bill would accept driver's licenses up to 10 years after their expiration date, student IDs from public universities, state employee IDs, and would allow persons older than 70 years to use old IDs. It would also require the state to provide free photo ID's to those who claim financial hardship.

This bill is much better than the last one. Making the required ID available for free addresses one of the biggest flaws in virtually all voter ID legislation.

But it's still a solution in search of a problem. There is virtually no vote fraud in America. The only people who don't have confidence in our elections are the people pushing these big government bills that restrict freedom, that restrict the most important right of all, the right that makes the second amendment pointless and archaic: the right to vote.

Liberals say conservatives are extremists and conservatives say the same thing about liberals. It's easy enough for anyone to cherry pick rare examples to make the point, but increasingly one side is winning that argument, and it ain't the GOP.

I've argued at least twice that conservatives misunderstand the Constitution and its history. Sometimes willfully and other times accidentally, sometimes broadly and other times narrowly. When it comes to the second amendment I think it's usually broadly and accidentally, followed by willfully once the facts have been explained.

Many people regardless of ideology have a hard time understanding that the Bill of Rights only applied to the federal government, not the states, from the signing of the Constitution until the 1920s. Some people are so incapable of grasping the concept that they'll deny it and argue against it, despite over 130 years of history proving it so.

Paul Ryan is out with another budget that'll never become law, which means it's another document made of smoke and mirrors that he's using to get his face on television, to raise his profile, to further his political career.

Here's Krugman in the Times about Ryan's con game back in 2010:

Mr. Ryan's plan calls for steep cuts in both spending and taxes. He'd have you believe that the combined effect would be much lower budget deficits, and, according to that Washington Post report, he speaks about deficits "in apocalyptic terms." And The Post also tells us that his plan would, indeed, sharply reduce the flow of red ink: "The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that Rep. Paul Ryan's plan would cut the budget deficit in half by 2020."

But the budget office has done no such thing. At Mr. Ryan's request, it produced an estimate of the budget effects of his proposed spending cuts - period. It didn't address the revenue losses from his tax cuts.

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has, however, stepped into the breach. Its numbers indicate that the Ryan plan would reduce revenue by almost $4 trillion over the next decade. If you add these revenue losses to the numbers The Post cites, you get a much larger deficit in 2020, roughly $1.3 trillion.

And that's about the same as the budget office's estimate of the 2020 deficit under the Obama administration's plans.