During an interview that aired on Friday’s CBS Evening News, chief White House correspondent Major Garrett spoke with Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio and wondered aloud if the situation in the House of Representatives concerning the search for the next Speaker of the House signaled the “important historical meltdown of the Republican Party.”

Appearing on Friday’s NBC Today, Bloomberg Politics managing editor John Heilemann saw a rapidly closing window for Joe Biden to enter the presidential race: “...if he's making a calculation on the political landscape, it's more forbidding now than it was a month ago. You've got Hillary Clinton performing well at this debate, the Benghazi Committee now kind of delegitimized. She's teed up to have a great day next week, where it could have been a bad – a moment of peril.”

During the 2012 election the New York Times treated Rep. Paul Ryan, currently a reluctant Speaker-elect, as fearsomely conservative. But now the paper is defending him from the "far-right" on the front page. Reporter Jennifer Steinhauer got to the labeling bias right off the bat: "Far-right media figures, relatively small in number but potent in their influence, have embarked on a furious Internet expedition to cover Representative Paul D. Ryan in political silt."

Is the Republican party actually two parties? In a sense, believes The Washington Monthly's Martin Longman, who contended in a Monday post that the forty or so congressmen who constitute the Freedom Caucus “are best understood in the parliamentary sense as being a party in their own right. In our system, they are still called Republicans, but in any other system they would be a minor party that has allied itself with another larger party to form a majority.”

Longman asserted that this unofficial party is so ideologically bonkers that it doesn’t deserve a role in resolving the central issue facing the House: “As long as the so-called Freedom Caucus of Republicans continues to demand a continuance of government shutdowns and debt ceiling brinksmanship, they do not belong in the majority and should not have any say in who the next Speaker will be…The Freedom Caucus has to be sidelined.”

Esquire’s Charles Pierce seemingly would like a time machine to take him back a quarter-century so he could advise the Tom Foley/George Mitchell-era Democratic party. Failing that, Pierce wishes today’s Dems would at last act on his idea to persuade the American people that the Republican party is “thoroughly, deeply, banana-sandwich loony,” thereby “beat[ing] the crazy out of [the GOP] so the country can get moving again.”

“Republican extremism should have been the most fundamental campaign issue for every Democratic candidate for every elected office since about 1991,” argued Pierce in a Friday post. “The mockery and ridicule should have been loud and relentless. It was the only way to break both the grip of the prion disease, and break through the solid bubble of disinformation, anti-facts, and utter bullshit that has sustained the Republican base over the past 25 years.”