OK. Any effort to top South Carolina in the political hall of shame will fall to this one.

Before you can join the Laurens County Republican Party in South Carolina and get on the primary ballot, they ask that you pledge that you’ve never ever had pre-marital sex — and that you will never ever look at porn again.

Last Tuesday, the LCGOP unanimously adopted a resolution that would ask all candidates who want to get on the primary ballot to sign a pledge with 28 principles, because the party “does not want to associate with candidates who do not act and speak in a manner that is consistent with the SC Republican Party Platform.”

Adultery is also a no-no.

Legal considerations prevented the county party from making the pledge an ironclad requirement for the ballot, but failure to sign the pledge would presumably be as damaging as failure to answer the Arkansas Family Council's do-you-hate-gays-enough? political questionnaire.

PS — This as good a place as any to provide more of Rush Limbaugh's non-apology apology. In short: "Rappers are worse."

But when they are right, by golly, they are right.

Several have forwarded me the latest Secure Arkansas alert to followers about the Jason Rapert-led charge to enlist Arkansas in the fight to put a majority of state legislatures in charge of the federal budget. His proposal, if enough state legislatures pass it, would set in motion the first state-called constitutional convention in U.S. history to amend the Constitution to allow their terrible idea. A majority of state legislatures (not a majority of the American people, even) would be required to approve increases in the federal debt.

Secure Arkansas is less worried about putting yahoos in charge of national defense spending than it is in who's behind the movement, their motives and unintended consequences.

The Koch brothers and their proxies, the American Legislative Exchange Council and Americans for Prosperity, are among those shilling this plan, which would merely cut the knees out from under federal government and its services to U.S. citizens on the whim of people like, well, Jason Rapert. Read on the jump for the Secure Arkansas e-mail missive on the point. Here's a recent link to their website on the issue.

Unintended consequences? The backers of this nutty idea assure all that convened delegates would stick to budget matters if a convention was called. That's bad enough. But there'd also be no limitation to subject matter and this group, particularly given its roots, could cause some great mischief to the U.S. Constitution. Do you think for a minute that religionists like Jason Rapert and Jerry Cox wouldn't seize this moment to correct all the ills imposed by judicial interpretation of our founding document? Do you think for a minute some little ol' add-ons wouldn't be added to agenda? Rapert, for one, would surely be happy to allow religioius proselytizing with public dollars; criminalization of homosexuality; bans on not just abortion but also contraception. Trans-vaginal probes for all women! Check the list of Arkansas sponsors if you think I exaggerate.

Rapert may get a hearing in the Senate on this terrible idea next week. Sad to report that three Democrats are on the list of Senate sponsors, so it could pass that end of the Capitol, unless some of the tiny GOP Sanity Caucus declines to go along. Gene Jeffress and Jerry Brown Taylor are not too surprising as sponsors, neither particularly inclined toward the Democratic Party's principles or common sense. David Wyatt is a slightly more disappointing addition to the loony list. PLEASE NOTE MY CORRECTON: I goofed and wrote Jerry Brown when I meant Jerry Taylor in original post.

For your study: Ernie Dumas' explanation of Rapert's Folly.

So there it is. Debbie Pelley, Jeannie Burlsworth and me. Together at last. They do occasionally make sense. See some good, factual stuff on the Kochs and ALEC in Secure Arkansas's e-mail blast:

• finecooking.com
• MORE VEGETABLES PLEASE: One man's sauce is a Republican's vegetable.

The Republicans love to talk about the "nanny state" — by which they mean government regulation aimed at improving the health and safety of American citizens.

That could be a principled position — to hold a hand up against regulation — except when they stick out the other hand for enormous taxpayer subsidies under legislation rigged for their favored corporate backers.

Earlier this year, the USDA made an attempt to bolster the nutrition guidelines for the federal school lunch program. Under the new guidelines, for instance, school lunches would be limited to one cup of starchy vegetables a week and the ability of schools to count tomato sauce on pizza towards their fruit and vegetables requirement would be scaled back. But House Republicans, in a new spending plan unveiled yesterday, have done away with those changes:

The spending bill also would allow tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable, as it is now. The department’s proposed guidelines would have attempted to prevent that.

The changes had been requested by food companies that produce frozen pizzas, the salt industry and potato growers.

Republicans, as ever, invoked the evils of regulation. Think Progress translated the Republican legislation differently:

What they will actually do is ensure that a steady flow of dollars continues toward certain favored food manufacturers, at the expense of children’s health.

Can ketchup be back as a vegetable soon?

• MOVE THOSE TREES: Growers want a fee to produce marketing fund for Christmas trees. Wingnuts have turned it into a Barack Obama War on Christmas.

A Republican friend sent a link from the Fox Noise machine where the wingnuts are busily stirring up a war on Christmas charge against Barack Obama over an Agriculture Deaprtment plan to impose a 15-cent-a-tree charge on large sellers of Christmas trees.

You don't need to know the facts to know this is a slogan campaign tailormade for Fox, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Hannity and friends. But I also intuited instantly that this sounded less like a presidential declaration of war on Christians than a marketing fee just like those paid by soybean farmers, dairy farmers, cattle ranchers and others to pay for programs to support promotion of the things they produce.

Who could think Christmas trees need image work, everyone from Limbaugh to the Kochhead stooges at the Arkansas chapter of Americans for Prosperity parroted — as if they'd invented the wheel?

Easy answer: tree farmers and retailers of their product who've seen a big share of tree business go to fake Christmas trees, reusable year after year.

It didn't take a genius to figure this out if I did. But Talking Points Memo did the legwork. The drive for this fee began before Obama took office and came straight from tree farmers.

“It has absolutely nothing to do with Obama, it’s not a tax,” National Christmas Tree Association spokesman Rick Dungey told TPM. “I’m slowly but surely narrowing down who the culprits are who put out that sinister little statement for whatever reasons there were.”

“Growers have been working on this for three and a half years,” Dungey added. “It’s just sort of interesting timing, and unfortunately somebody decided to smear it. It’s growers pooling their money to promote the crop that they grow on their farms.”

I need not tell you that the facts don't matter when it comes to right-wing memes. You CAN fool most of the people most of the time. Obama is stealing Christmas with a confiscatory tax (can 15 cents buy ANYTHING anymore?) on a symbol all Americans hold dear (though many fewer buy it in the raw.) This will be Twittered, Facebooked and e-mailed a zillion times today by the fruitcakes and wackjobs who'll pin any lie, from small to monstrous, on Barack Obama. There's no reeling it back in.

PS — Don't expect the Obama administration to stand tall even when the truth is on its side. It's delaying the fee.

When televangelist Pat Robertson says a political party has become too extreme .....

As Right Wing Watch reports, on his 700 Club broadcast on Monday Robertson — the founder of the Christian Coalition — said the following of the Republican party’s lurch to the far right.

“Those people in the Republican primary have got to lay off of this stuff. They’re forcing their leaders, the frontrunners, into positions that will mean they lose the general election.”

He concludes, “if they want to lose, well this is the game for losers.”

Nobody cheered for the death of a terminally ill uninsured person during the televised Republican presidential debate last night. But some in the audience booed a gay soldier who posed a question from Iraq. Spinners said afterward the boos were "unfortunate," but offered no explanation for why candidates stood mute.

• MAYOR CARNEY: No 9/11 if her sons had been on planes.

I don't think any commentary is necessary. Just a quote from Sunday's Hot Springs Sentinel-Record, quoting Mayor Ruth Carney:

“ If my sons had been on those two planes there would not have been 9/11.”

Speaking of 9/11: Republican congressional candidate Tom Cotton appears to be making it a cornerstone of his campaign — his enlistment in military in response and service, his intention to "keep fighting" for constituents, etc.

The Tea Party Republican state Rep. Jon Hubbard's head might explode if he saw the page for food and other assistance for Michigan residents. Information is offered in English, Spanish AND Arabic.

Renegade right-wing undercover filmmaker James O'Keefe, who's had a disproportionate impact with his dishonestly edited and generally empty work, has descended into self-parody with his latest, Talking Points Memo reports.

In addition to this video, he has another in which purported Russian drug dealers talk to a human services worker about Medicaid for their father. Sounds bad at first blush. But it's meaningless. Among other flaws in this scenario, it doesn't matter how rich or criminal a person's kid is — that person is still entitled to Medicaid if poor enough. Stupid stuff.

• HATEFUL JON HUBBARD: He gets a blistering from attorney general.

Attorney General Dustin McDaniel seems to unerringly choose a bad political direction from my point of view as he draws closer to a gubernatorial race in 2014. I guess that makes a certain amount of sense except that he does have a Democratic primary for starters.

But I have nothing but agreement with McDaniel's fierce "ef yourself" to Republican Rep. Jon Hubbard, one of the nuttiest members of the GOP delegation and a dark and dangerous soul when it comes to our Latino friends.

Hubbard went ballistic when McDaniel's office announced a new Spanish-language version of the office website. It occurs not to Hateful Hubbard that there are American citizens and legal residents who could use this service. Wrote McDaniel, in part:

We have legal citizens of this state who pay taxes and serve in the military and also speak Spanish. Our website has been updated to include Spanish sections to better serve those citizens. It cost the taxpayers not one dime to include this service, for two reasons: 1. We have had a Spanish version of our website for many years; and 2. Updating the translation and making the website more user friendly was done by my exisitng staff, including a natuarlized US Citizen who speaks Spanish fluently. In short, I find tour tone insulting and your premise to be without merit. I will refrain from characterizing your motivation, but one could easily infer that you are simply an angry, misguided person. I was proud to represent Jonesboro in The House seat you now occupy. Your lack of civility and substance, not limited to publishing my personal e mail address and blind copying the press on your e mail, make me embarassed that you represent our community. No further comment on this issue is warranted, and your future angry emails will be forwarded to the press and will go unanswered.

Full correspondence on the jump, including a rejoinder whine from Hubbard.

Is there really any doubt now that Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser, the darling of the teabaggers, has an anger problem. He once called another justice a bitch. Another female judge's throat assaulted his hands. Yesterday, he grabbed a microphone away from an inquiring TV reporter (from a Fox channel at that) before thinking better of it.

Evidence builds of a control-happy abuser who shouldn't be on the bench.

Most detailed story yet about right-wing Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser who argues that, as Eschaton put it, a female justice "attacked his hands with her neck." This is, by way of context, the same justice who said another female justice's "bullying" had made him call her a bitch.

If the justice has ever read any domestic abuse cases, he'd recognize his use of the classic abuser's defense — "she made me do it."