Mark Kleiman connects Rick Perry's federalism flip to the GOP's larger problems:
[N]ow that its fringe has become its base, it’s almost impossible for anyone to get the Republican nomination without saying things that make it impossible for him to win in November.
In the long run, it would be better to have two nationally competitive parties. But what the country needs right now is a series of punishing electoral defeats for the Republicans that will either force the party back toward sanity (though it’s hard to imagine the mechanism for such a transition) or send it the way of the Federalists and the Whigs and allow for the emergence of a new conservative party, one whose leadership wants to repeal the Great Society but not the New Deal, the Enlightenment, or the rules of logic and arithmetic.
The Dish 