Anti-masturbation activist, witchcraft-dabbler, and GOP senate candidate Christine O’Donnell dodged her Sunday show appearances in order to attend a partisan fundraising picnic in Delaware today. She used the opportunity to try to laugh off the revelation that she “dabbled into witchcraft” when she was younger:

Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell is making light of comments she made more than a decade ago about having dabbled in witchcraft when she was in high school.

“How many of you didn’t hang out with questionable folks in high school?” she asked fellow Republicans at a GOP picnic in southern Delaware on Sunday.

“There’s been no witchcraft since. If there was, Karl Rove would be a supporter now,” O’Donnell jokingly assured the crowd.

O’Donnell’s strategy for the time being appears to be a concerted effort to avoid answering tough questions about her background by simply offering unchallengeable statements in public appearances at which media are present.

Discussing the firestorm around Christine O’Donnell’s surprise victory in Delaware’s U.S. Senate GOP primary last week, Bill Kristol insisted on Fox News Sunday today that he had no problem with where O’Donnell stood on the issues. He explained that as a “fellow wing-nut” he would “agree with all the votes she would cast in the Senate” and he therefore would be inclined to vote for her if he lived in Delaware. But Kristol’s praise was fleeting. He noted that he would have voted for her establishment-picked opponent Rep. Mike Castle (R-DE) in the primary because “Christine O’Donnell is a bit of a flake I think… or has been in the past.” Watch it:

Retired General and former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell criticized the Tea Party movement’s inflammatory attacks against President Obama this morning during an appearance on NBC’s Meet The Press, singling out the rhetoric of Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. Powell said that while “there’s nothing wrong” with people like Sarah Palin “going out there, presenting her views and animating American political life,” “one of the problems that I’m having with all of this right now is that there is a certain undercurrent of thought that is not helpful.” “When people want to attack the President, attack him. Presidents are used to being attacked. But let’s not go down low,” Powell said.

Pressed by host David Gregory to respond to Newt Gingrich’s recent suggestion that Obama was displaying anti-colonial Kenyan behavior, Powell warned Americans to “think carefully” about Gingrich’s accusations and went on to debunk some of the right-wing’s conspiracy theories:

POWELL: I would just tell my fellow Americans, think carefully about what was just said. Think carefully about some of the stuff that is coming across the blogs and airwaves. Let’s make a couple of points. One, the President was born in the United States of America. Let’s get rid of that one, let’s get rid of the birther thing. Let’s attack him on policy, not nonsense. Next, he is a Christian, he is not a Muslim…And I think we have to be careful when we take things like Dinesh D’Souza’s book, which is the source of all of this, and suggest that somehow the President of the United States is channeling his dead father through some Kenyan spirits. This doesn’t make any sense. Mr. Gingrich does these things from time to time with a big, bold statement. He did it with Sotomayor, she is a “reverse racist.” He did it with Elena Kagan, she ought to be taken off the nomination for Supreme Court justice. And he does it occasionally to make news and also to stir up dust.

Watch it:

Powell said that this kind of rhetoric “may appeal to the fringe elements of the party,” but won’t appeal “to all Republicans” or “the whole country.” He also suggested “it might be good for the President to have the Republicans owning one of the two bodies of our Congress, because then they have responsibility.” “You can’t just say ‘no’ to everything. You can’t just sit around beating up the President,” he added.

It’s unlikely, however, that Gingrich will take Powell’s advice and stop stirring up dust. At yesterday’s Values Voter Summit in Washington D.C., Gingrich accused HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius of “Soviet tyranny” and suggested that the Congress should pass a law “that says sharia law cannot be recognized by any court in the United States.”

Yesterday, Delaware GOP U.S. Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell canceled her scheduled interviews for this morning on Fox News Sunday and CBS’s Face the Nation after a video from 1999 surfaced in which she said she had “dabbled into witchcraft.” The AP reported that “O’Donnell canceled so that she could attend a Republican campaign event Sunday in Delaware’s Sussex County.” But today on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace said that O’Donnell’s campaign and O’Donnell herself gave conflicting reasons for the cancellation:

WALLACE: This is not the program we were planning to bring you. Christine O’Donnell, the surprise winner of the Republican Senate primary in Delaware, agreed to come here live in Washington today to take our questions, however late Friday night, her campaign canceled saying O’Donnell was “exhausted” and had to return to Delaware. Saturday morning O’Donnell called me and said this: “I got triple-booked. I had been invited to go to church and then a picnic. I have to keep my priorities to Delaware voters.”

Watch it:

Talking with Wallace today, Karl Rove — who has been engaged in a battle with the right and O’Donnell over whether she’s the best GOP candidate in Delaware — said that O’Donnell “made a smart decision by not getting on the Sunday shows this week,” adding, “she shouldn’t have accepted in the first place.”

Later on Face the Nation, host Bob Schieffer said he wasn’t aware of O’Donnell’s “witchcraft” comment when her campaign canceled the interview. “After we became aware of this,” Schieffer said, “we emailed the campaign again and asked them if in fact that was the reason that she decided to cancel the the appearance. We got back an email that said, ‘No, that is not the reason. We weren’t aware that [Bill Maher] had released this tape until yesterday afternoon.’”

O’Donnell did find time to travel to Washington, D.C. to speak at the conservative so-called “Values Voters” summit on Friday. O’Donnell’s campaign was seemingly able to avoid any scheduling conflicts for her to attend.

This morning, Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace asked Alaska Republican senatorial candidate Joe Miller about recent data from the Census Bureau which found that a stagering one in seven or 43.6 million Americans are living in poverty, the highest level since 1994. Noting that Miller had previously claimed that unemployment benefits were unconstitutional Wallace asked, “without unemployment benefits, a lot more, millions more would be living in poverty — what would you do for them?” Miller initially ducked the question, but when Wallace persisted, Miller accused Americans of suffering from an “entitlement mentality” and argued that providing unemployment benefits was not among Congress’ enumerated powers:

MILLER: I think the question is what is the role of the federal government? Right now, we’ve grown the federal government to such a size that we have what, I think in absolute terms now, $13.4 trillion in debt if you look at the future unfunded obligations, which a lot of those are the entitlement programs, by some estimates $130 trillion. That’s unsustainable. That’s just the facts. [...]

WALLACE: But Mr. Miller, if I may, I’m not sure you answered my question. Why are unemployment benefits unconstitutional and in a time of a tough economy, a recession, a now a kind of jobless economy, what are you going to do for the 44 million people who are living in poverty?

MILLER: I think what you need to look at is the context. We have an extension of unemployment benefits several weeks ago, which is beyond what we had in the past in this country. What we have in this country is an entitlement mentality. It’s an entitlement, not just as individual but even at the state level… everything that fails the government should be involved in bailing out. And the constitution provides enumerated powers. And I guess my challenge is to anybody that ask, show me the enumerated power. And then look at what the tenth amendment that says if it’s not in the constitution, it’s a power that belongs to the state and the people.

Watch it:

Miller’s radical tenther views aside, unemployment benefits have become essential in today’s economic climate and have kept millions of American families out of poverty. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities’s (CBPP) Arloc Sherman has analyzed the latest Census numbers and found that unemployment insurance kept 3.3 million Americans out of poverty in 2009. “In other words, there were 43.6 million Americans whose families were below the poverty line in 2009, according to the official poverty statistics, which count jobless benefits as part of families’ income. But if you don’t count jobless benefits, 46.9 million Americans were poor,” the Center concluded.

Miller may have the most extreme views on unemployment benefits but as Zaid Jilani notes, he’s not the only conservative to strongly oppose extending the benefit. Republicans in the Senate have repeatedly locked arms to block extending the benefits for unemployed Americans, putting the wellbeing of jobless people in peril. And as the Wonk Room’s Pat Garofalo notes, a major chunk of 2009’s unemployment benefits were funded by the stimulus bill, which “House Republicans unanimously opposed.”