So What The Hell Was That All About?

Last week, David Hayes was refused confirmation to the position of Deputy Interior Secretary, a job he held in the last Clinton Administration, because Bob Bennett (R-UT) might face a primary and wanted to look tough. A week later, Hayes was confirmed by voice vote. I guess the difference was that Hayes promised to "review" the cancellation of oil and gas leases in Utah that got Bennett all flustered.

Man, these Republicans are whiny ass titty babies.

Senate Passes Omnibus Spending Bill

Good. Let's get this the hell out of the way and move forward. The earmark debate is so side-splittingly misinformed I can hardly stand it. Even Eric Boehlert couldn't hold off the stupid today. It's not just that earmarks are a small percentage of the bill, maybe 1-2%. It's that their inclusion in a spending bill DOESN'T CHANGE THE OVERALL AMOUNT OF SPENDING. Earmarks are a technical term of art whereby representatives of the people direct small pieces of funding instead of government bureaucrats. It kills me that it takes Bob Frickin' Bennett to point out this fact, which kind of makes the whole debate completely pointless.

BENNETT: First, let me make several things clear that you perhaps don't understand. Number one, if the money were not earmarked for this purpose it would still be spent. That is, the Department of Agriculture would be spending it somewhere else. And you would not be saving a dime if you eliminate these earmarks.

Is that so damn hard? Why can't one Democratic lawmaker, or anyone from the Obama Administration, make this simple point. After that, all you're arguing about is the size of the spending. And given that the economy is falling off a cliff and no other sector is creating demand, you simply don't get far with an argument that government should be tightening its belt at this juncture. That would fall under things the willfully ignorant say, or to be redundant, things cable television news anchors say.

(By the way, I agree with exceedingly little in BoBo Brooks' article other than these sentences: "The House minority leader, John Boehner, has called for a federal spending freeze for the rest of the year. In other words, after a decade of profligacy, the Republicans have decided to demand a rigid fiscal straitjacket at the one moment in the past 70 years when it is completely inappropriate." Brooks is so thick he actually contradicts himself on this later in the column.)

This whole debate has been a perfect example of the dumbing down of America.

Filthy Lucre

The McCain campaign is using the Iseman and Maverick story as a fundraising tool. Which is to be expected. But the optics are terrible. The fundraising appeal is attributed to John McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis. He's a well-connected lobbyist trying to knock down a story about John McCain's relationship with a lobbyist.

-- Rick Davis arranged a cocktail meet and greet with McCain and a Russian businessman, Oleg Deripaska, so controversial that the US has revoked his visa -- at an economic conference in Switzerland. Davis' lobbying firm was trying to secure business with the Russian at the time, while the firm was already representing a competing political interest in Ukraine [...]

-- Mr. Davis, while working with the McCain 2008 campaign, also managed to procure a fat internet services contract from the campaign and kept lobbying for clients whose interests were opposed to McCain's own policy pronouncements.

Not only that, but there's a paragraph in the email that talks about how "objective observers" have dismissed the article as a smear job, and one of those "objective observers" they cite is... Bob Bennett, MCCAIN'S LAWYER in this case!

This is just sloppy pushback, and it doesn't add up.

A couple of things John McCain said at his press conference this morning didn't pass the smell test.

The first was when he said that the then-chairman of the FCC "said that was more than an appropriate" for McCain to have sent a letter to the Commission about a pending matter, one that involved a lobbying client of Vicki Iseman's. Paul Kiel tackles that one at TPMmuckraker.

The other comment from McCain that rang as false was when he said that he had not tried to get The Times to spike the story. He personally may not have, but his campaign staff certainly did, according to a number of reports, including the latest from The New Republic.

As a look at how the McCain camp responds in a crisis, well, it's a pretty good indicator. The right is rallying around them and trying to frame the story as "all about sex" and a spawn of the hated liberal machine as personified by the New York Times. Neither are true. But maybe he'll solidify the right but that was bound to happen. It's just a bloody shirt to wave so they can delude themselves into thinking that they don't have substantive disagreements with McCain. The point here, however, is that the bloom among independents, of this straight-talking maverick, is coming off the rose.