If you can stomach watching, big name Republicans like failed presidential contender Mitt Romney and Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) are some of the headliners of this year's 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference.

The gathering brings Republicans to National Harbor near Washington, D.C., to hear conservative "all-stars" ... *cough* like former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) and Donald Trump speak. The 40th annual conference takes place March 14th to 16th.

Some of the latest highlights from Twitter:

@ singernews : "McConnell says Democratic candidates for 2016 look like "a re-run of the Golden Girls" (Hillary/Biden) #CPAC

@ USATMoore : Mitch McConnell: "Don’t tell me we’re the party of intolerance when ... some pac is sending out racist tweets about my wife." #cpac2013

@ howardfineman : #CPAC, begun decades ago as an earnest effort to mix ideas, policy and grassroots politics, is ending now not in Triumph but in Trump.

@ maggiepolitico : Dead silence for most of Trump's speech. Now getting some applause for Gingrich suggesting he pay for WH tours

A recent article in The New York Times reported on a cost-control exception provided to Amgen, the world’s largest biotechnology firm. According to the report, the sweetheart deal — hidden in the Senate’s final “fiscal cliff” bill — will cost taxpayers half a billion dollars. Bill Moyers talks to U.S. Representative Peter Welch (D-VT) about the bi-partisan bill he recently sponsored to repeal that giveaway, and the political factors that allow such crony capitalism to occur.

“When there is this back room dealing that comes at enormous expense to taxpayers and enormous benefit to a private, well-connected, for-profit company, we’ve got to call it out,” Welch tells Moyers. “Those members of Congress who are concerned about the institution, about our lack of credibility, about the necessity of us doing things that are in the public good as opposed to private gain, we’ve got to call it out.”

A full transcript of the show after the jump.

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The 112th Congress may go down in the history books as the "Do Nothing" Congress, but Lawrence O'Donnell made sure that people will hear about what Senator Harry Reid did accomplish.

In his "Rewrite" segment Wednesday, he praised both Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid and Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for working together–out in the open, with C-Span cameras rolling–to get the fiscal deal passed in a “truly bipartisan vote” to raise income tax rates.

After the fiscal cliff deal came and went, the U.S. Senate quietly did a lot of work with the help of just a few devoted legislators. With McConnell’s support, Reid succeeded in pushing through a slew of nominations on behalf of President Obama.

“Harry Reid, who every day does much more than most people in the news media realize, and definitely accomplishes much more than the news media ever reports, pushed through pages and pages of nominations for President Obama yesterday when everyone was focused on what the House would do on the fiscal cliff vote. And Harry Reid did that with the active but invisible help of Mitch McConnell who did his part to make sure that no Republicans would vote against any of those nominations. And what did the United States Senate do today, that dysfunctional United States Senate? According to the news media, absolutely nothing.”

O’Donnell argued that the Senate leadership deserves far more credit than most people realize:

“So what is the truth? Is the Senate a hopeless dysfunctional place? Does Mitch McConnell hate Harry Reid so much that Vice President Biden had to be brought in to negotiate the final terms of the Senate fiscal cliff deal? The answer is that the truth is complicated, but the news media hates complications. The news media craves personal drama. McConnell hates Reid, or Boehner hates Reid. The news media, like screenwriters, loves the last minute rescue by the improbable hero, in this case, Joe Biden. That’s an easy story to tell. The truth is more complicated.”

I believe O'Donnell on this, but I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around Mitch McConnell as the tough mediator who kicks Republican Senators in the @ss and gets them moving. But it is nice to hear that some of them are getting work done, and that they're aren't out playing golf or swilling drinks at the country club bar.

During an interview on "Moyers & Company" recently, Bill talked with Mike Lofgren, a long-time Republican who describes the modern dysfunction of both the Republican and Democratic parties. In Lofgren’s view, Republicans have become overly obsessed with obstructing President Obama, and the Democrats suffer from political complacency. Lofgren’s new book is "The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted."

Here's a snippet from the transcript:

BILL MOYERS: The Republican Party now has the super rich and its corporate wing funding it and the religious right provides the ground troops. Why are so many everyday folks out there in the pews defending the prerogatives of the rich?

MIKE LOFGREN: That's something of a mystery. The Federal Reserve, in one of their recent reports, found that net household income fell about 40 percent since 2007. That's a tremendous drop. Yet, here we have as the nominee for one of the two major parties, we only have a binary choice in this country, is by all accounts the richest man ever to run for president and was a leverage buyout artist.

The party is really oriented towards the concerns of the rich. It's about cutting their taxes, reducing regulation on business, making things wide open for Wall Street. Now you're not going to get anybody to the polls and consciously pull the lever for the Republicans if they say, "Our agenda is to further entrench the rich and, oh by the way, your pension may take a hit."

So they use the culture wars quite cynically, as essentially rube bait to get people to the polls. And that explains why, for instance, the Koch brothers were early funders of Michele Bachmann, who is a darling of the religious right. They don't care particularly, I would assume, about her religious foibles. What they care about is the bottom line. And these religious right candidates, many of them believing in the health and wealth, name it and claim it prosperity gospel, believe that the rich are sanctified and the poor punished

BILL MOYERS: Many of those people on the right would tell you that the fall in the income of middleclass people and others has been because of Obama's economic policies.

MIKE LOFGREN: I think they're suffering from selective amnesia. They also don't understand that George Bush doubled the national debt, that the original meltdown on Wall Street occurred during George Bush's watch, and by the time Obama became president in 2009, we were already well into the recession. Now I don't defend him in every way. I don't say that everything he's done is right by any means. I have all kinds of issues with him on the health care legislation. For instance, his willingness to play ball with pharma made the bill cost a lot more than it need.

BILL MOYERS: The pharmaceutical industry?

MIKE LOFGREN: Yes. That said, he was legitimately elected. We were in a very, very serious situation in this country. If the economy had fallen any further, it would be comparable to the Great Depression. So what is Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in the Senate, what is his first priority for the country? Is it getting jobs for people? Is it restoring the solvency of the financial system? Is it foreign policy? Is it any of those things? No, it's making sure Obama is a one-term president.

BILL MOYERS: It seems that some of these people are willing to see the government go down in order to win.

MIKE LOFGREN: That would be the case. I grew up in a party that believed in the traditions of Eisenhower, and for that matter, even Reagan. He raised taxes several times when the deficit threatened to get out of control. He pleaded with Congress to send him a clean debt limit extension bill without any extraneous riders on it. He knew what the stakes were.

But now it's basically obstruct. They're no longer a parliamentary loyal opposition. They want to seize up the wheels of government. And to most people that means you don't have federal inspectors of airliners. You don't have federal inspection of food safety. Your national parks will be closed. Federal law enforcement will go home. That's what that means.

BILL MOYERS: Why did you leave the party? You'd been a Republican, what, all your life?

MIKE LOFGREN: I left the party because it was becoming an apocalyptic cult. Because you cannot govern a country of 310 million people that is the greatest economic power on earth and the greatest military power on earth as if it's a banana republic. You can't govern it with people who think that Obama was born overseas or who believe in all manner of nonsense about climate change. They don't even know, apparently, where babies come from, if we're to believe Todd Akin.

Really a great interview, the full transcript is available here.

AFSCME, a union representing over a million public service workers, on Tuesday uploaded a video to YouTube that criticizes Republicans for their opposition to the Affordable Care Act.

The video, based on the opening and theme song of the 1970′s sitcom "The Brady Bunch," claims that “working people don’t matter” to prominent Republicans like House Speaker John Boehner, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Senate Majority Mitch McConnell, and Florida Gov. Rick Scott.

The Republicans in the video have vowed that they will do whatever they can to repeal President Obama’s healthcare reform law.

Via AFSCME's website:

Less than two weeks ago, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) in a landmark ruling, but Speaker John Boehner and corporate-backed politicians in Congress still can’t let it go. This week, the U.S. House is set to vote again — for the 31st time in 18 months — to repeal the health reform law.

They’d rather keep wasting taxpayer time and money refighting old political battles, attacking Obamacare even as polls show support for the law has increased significantly since the Supreme Court ruling. Even some Republicans doubt the wisdom of a political stunt that will only serve to highlight how out of touch Boehner, Mitt Romney and the rest of the GOP bunch are.
...
Congress passed health reform, the President signed it, and the Supreme Court ruled it constitutional. It’s time to move on and fully implement the law so we can ensure all Americans get the health care they need.

And remember, your congress-critters have excellent government-run heathcare, and they don't seem to mind that one bit!