House and Senate Republicans have become so extreme in their ideology, so far beyond the comprehension of anyone who thinks rationally, that we've recently observed many surprising voices speaking out:

"In short, this is quite possibly the stupidest constitutional amendment I think I have ever seen. It looks like it was drafted by a couple of interns on the back of a napkin. Every senator cosponsoring this POS should be ashamed of themselves." -- Former Reagan official Bruce Bartlett, commenting on the Republican's balance budget amendment.

"It's very dismaying to see that 30-year descent into the kind of nihilism, know-nothingism that is represented by the Republican Party today." -- Former Reagan official David Stockman

"Of the 400 richest people in America, they pay a 16-percent average income tax rate. Grover Norquist, in another couple of years, is going to be irrelevant. You can’t save America without some kind of revenue. You can’t fight two wars and not have something to support it. You can’t run a country that way.... I remind him that Ronald Reagan raised taxes 11 times.” -- Former Republican Senator Alan Simpson

“I think that the Republicans ought to identify a very significant amount of so-called tax expenditures which in fact are misclassified. They are expenditures. They are outlays, and many of them are subsidies. And subsidies are not the type of thing that you want for an efficient market system. There are a lot of them. My view is that I was in favor of the Bush tax cuts on the grounds that it was the dissipation of a surplus. As soon as it became obvious that the surplus disappeared, I no longer supported that." -- Alan Greenspan

Finally, and to me most shocking to the point where I still think he's joking:

"I am in favor of greatly raising the taxes on very wealthy people, millionaires and billionaires. I wouldn't raise the taxes on people making $250,000 a year. Look, it's a basic arithmetic thing; it's not an ideological thing. We are spending an enormous amount of money that we're not covering with tax revenue; we're borrowing it. At some point we're going to have so much debt that there's going to be a crisis and there will have to be austerity measures here just as they were in Greece. A simpler way would be tax people who have a great deal of money, tax them more, let them help pay down the debt." -- Ben Stein