Crystal Pepsi

I won't identify the source, but I heard about a meeting between Arnold Schwarzenegger and a Democratic pol where he exclaimed that he figured out politics, and "it's all marketing." Looks like the rest of the GOP agrees with him.

Coming soon to a battleground state near you: a new effort to revive the image of the Republican Party and to counter President Obama's characterization of Republicans as "the party of 'no.'"

CNN has learned that the new initiative, called the National Council for a New America, will be announced Thursday.

It will involve an outreach by an interesting mix of GOP officials, ranging from 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain to Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor and the younger brother of the man many Republicans blame for the party's battered brand: former President George W. Bush.

Now there's an idea! The failed Presidential candidate and the brother of the guy who destroyed the GOP brand teaming up to remake the party! Does someone want to tell Republicans that "remake" means something new?

But that's not all! They're also bringing on stage the people who have created the failed GOP brand this year.

In addition to Sen. McCain and Gov. Bush, GOP sources familiar with the plans tell CNN others involved in the new group's "National Panel Of Experts" will include:

*Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a former national GOP chairman
*Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal
*Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney

It will report to GOP congressional leaders, and among those signing the announcement that will be made public Thursday are:

*House GOP Leader John Boehner
*House GOP Whip Eric Cantor
*House GOP Conference Chairman Mike Pence
*Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell
*The No. 2 Senate Republican, Jon Kyl
*And the Senate GOP Conference Chairman, Lamar Alexander

It's kind of amusing that Michael Steele, who's, ahem, the leader of the Republican National Committee, doesn't factor into this rebranding effort. Maybe because they've seen his Poochie the radical dog approach to attracting "the kids" to the party.

"You (Brzezinski) wear your hat one way you like to wear it, you know, kind of cocked to the left, you know, 'cause that's cool out West," Steele said. "In the Midwest, you guys (Scarborough) like to wear it a little bit to the right. In the South, you guys (Buchanan) wear the brim straight ahead. Now the Northeast, I wear my hat backwards, you know, 'cause that's how we roll in the Northeast."

I guess they tried to get Sarah Palin aboard as well, but couldn't reach her. When SARAH PALIN is reticent to join you, I mean...

I know that Republicans are never going to believe this, but maybe when they listen on the town hall meetings that will supposedly follow this effort, they can understand that nobody likes them anymore.

Republicans are widely viewed by the public as less competent than Democrats to handle issue ranging from health care to education and energy, according to internal polling presented to top GOP officials in Congress.

The same survey found President Barack Obama holds the support of a significant minority of self-described conservative, independent voters [...]

Democrats were favored by a margin of 61 percent to 29 percent on education; 59 percent to 30 percent on health care and 59 percent to 31 percent on energy. Congress is expected to consider major legislation later this year in all three areas.

Democats were also viewed with more confidence in handling taxes, long a Republican strong suit. The only issue among nine in the survey where the two parties were rated as even was in the war on terror.

Republicans can keep claiming that they "strayed away from their core values" and need to go even more base-crazy in order to win, but the facts don't bear that out.

(Lindsey) Graham scoffed at the notion that the party was suffering because it was not conservative enough.

“Do you really believe that we lost 18-to-34-year-olds by 19 percent, or we lost Hispanic voters, because we are not conservative enough?” he said. “No. This is a ridiculous line of thought. The truth is we lost young people because our Republican brand is tainted.”

And what the party appears to be saying is, let's taint some more!

The Shoe Warning Worked!

Jeb Bush will not be running for US Senate in 2010 to replace one-term Senator Mel Martinez. I guess that means we can all collect our shoes from the Palmetto Expressway. But remember, we can reassemble the shoes in a matter of minutes. Oh yes, we can.

More seriously, Jeb is collateral damage to the worst President in American history. You will not be able to be elected dog catcher with the last name "Bush" for a generation or two. I don't think Reggie Bush could get elected to be a provost at USC in this environment.

As for the Florida Senate seat, it'll be a top target for Democrats in 2010.

The Great Restoration

It's a good thing that the Bush team is working hard with unusual focus and competence on what matters the most right now - making sure that reporters properly spin his legacy.

President Bush’s interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson this week was the “first of several planned ‘exit interviews.’” According to White House press secretary Dana Perino, Bush’s next interview will be with ABC’s Cynthia McFadden on the topic of the faith-based initiative. It will air on Nightline next week. If the first interview with Gibson provides any clue as to what we can expect from these interviews, Bush will paint a rosy picture of his legacy and “refuse to take responsibility for a single thing that went wrong on his watch.” Heather at Crooks and Liars catches the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes revealing that Karl Rove is currently orchestrating the Bush legacy project:

[T]here’s an ongoing Bush legacy project that’s been meeting in the White House, really, with senior advisers, Karl Rove, Karen Hughes has been involved, current senior Bush administration advisers and they are looking at how to sort of roll out the President’s legacy.

Why, there almost seems to be more planning going into restoring the legacy than has gone into prewar planning in Iraq, planning for the TARP program, planning after Katrina, etc., etc. How curious!

By the way, this isn't the "Bush legacy project" at all - I'm sure he's content to go back to Texas and get the hell away from that fake ranch and start getting down to the business of drinking cocktails out of the public spotlight. He could give a damn about his legacy - that's been very clear.

BUSH: I'll be frank with you. I don't spend a lot of time really worrying about short-term history. I guess I don't worry about long-term history, either, since I'm not going to be around to read it -- (laughter) -- but, look, in this job you just do what you can. The thing that's important for me is to get home and look in that mirror and say, I did not compromise my principles. And I didn't. I made tough calls. And some presidencies have got a lot of tough decisions to make--

No, this is the Karl Rove legacy project. He's the one concerned about his place in history. And his future power resides in everyone still considering him a genius and not a complete failure responsible for bringing the worst President in American history to the attention of the country. Similarly, blurring the lines on conservative extremism is the one way to lull the country into forgetting how destructive those policies truly were. So this isn't about making Bush look good in the past, it's about making Republicans look good in the future. This is why he's trying to restore his own credibility by claiming that the United States wouldn't have invaded Iraq if they had known there were no WMD, going much further than the President ever has.

In what was a remarkable admission that contradicted - to a large extent - the past statements from his onetime boss, former Bush strategist Karl Rove said on Tuesday evening that had the President known Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction, the United States would not have gone to war.

"In the aftermath of 9/11 the concern was about a tyrant accused of enormous human rights abuses," but who also possessed weapons of mass destruction, said Rove. "Absent that, I suspect that the administration's course of action would have been to work to find more creative ways to constrain him like in the 90s."

The remarks, delivered at a debate in New York on Bush's legacy, came amidst a vigorous defense by Rove on behalf of the war's purpose and outcome.

Preposterous, yes, but you'll notice that the word "Bush" is absent in Rove's remarks. Having already lied their way into invading - and yes, distorting that intelligence which was apparently so "faulty" that it would have changed the very outcome of the invasion - the spinmeisters are now lying about the events of just five years ago, and making Bush disappear in the process. And it's working with a media that has always been too willing to accept whatever version of history they're spoonfed from on high.

The big news orgs seem eager to help Bush do this. Not a single one of their reports on the interview that we can find bothered to tell readers that there was plenty of good intel -- ignored by the Bush administration -- saying that Saddam wasn't the threat Bush was claiming he was. Nor did any of them bother mentioning that the weapons inspectors in Iraq were saying the same thing -- something that also went ignored.

These facts are absolutely central to understanding Bush's efforts to falsify history in yesterday's interview. Yet they went unmentioned in reports by Reuters, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, CNN, and The New York Times.

Worse, at least one news org pretended that Bush was making some kind of admission or concession here. WaPo hailed Bush's "candor" and said he was being "unusually blunt."

Let's go over this very slowly. For Bush to blame the failure of intel for his decision to invade is not a concession at all, and it is not an admission of failure on his part. Rather, it is the opposite of these things. It is an evasion of responsibility for what happened.

Obama's campaign ran on stepping away from Bush policies and toward change. The whole time there was this assumption that everyone knew what those Bush policies were, and therefore there was no need to delineate very specifically. That was a healthy assumption when 4/5 of the country thinks we're on the wrong track, but with the passage of time, that failure to specifically target Bush and Republicans will lead to convenient amnesia. And with another Bush ready to step in and make everyone forget about ol' W., the whitewash project will be complete.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — the younger brother of the president — is weighing a run for the Senate seat currently held by Republican Mel Martinez.

Martinez announced Tuesday that he will not seek reelection in 2010. Asked whether he was interested in running for the seat then, Bush told Politico by e-mail Tuesday night: “I am considering it.”

Jeb is popular enough in Florida that he could prevail despite the surname, and we've all been told over and over that he's really the smart one and Poppy wanted him to be President first and all that.

When conservative governments get away with their crimes, when they are given sanction to set the terms of their own legacy, the consequences for the future, when the same band of thieves returns to Washington to plunder, are grave.

2010 Begins!

I know, the last election of 2008 is today, with the Georgia runoff between Saxby Chambliss and Jim Martin. But there's news on the next set of elections too! Don't you just love the perpetual campaign?

And the news is bad for Republicans, to boot. First, Mel Martinez is resigning, setting up an open seat in the newly blue state of Florida.

Florida Sen. Mel Martinez (R) has decided against seeking a second term, a decision he will formalize shortly in the Sunshine State, according to an informed party source.

Martinez's decision was based on a desire for more free time and a less scheduled life, said the source. The first term senator also was an almost certain Democratic target in two years time although those familiar with Martinez's political prospects insisted his strengths in South Florida, coupled with his political base along the I-4 corridor, made his path to reelection possible.

The Democrats' favored candidate, State CFO Alex Sink, begged off the race yesterday. I could totally see Jeb Bush trying to rehabilitate the Bush name by running for this, and he'd be a strong favorite, but it's not a slam-dunk.

In Pennsylvania, the biggest news is not Tweety Bird's destined-to-crash-and-burn Democratic campaign, but the fact that wingnut's wingnut Pat Toomey may take on a primary challenge rematch.

Toomey, the president of the conservative Club for Growth, insisted Specter faces more hurdles than he did four years ago.

"He's significantly more vulnerable now than he was in 2004," Toomey said in an interview.

He argued that Specter's core constituency in the GOP, which he called "liberal and moderate Republicans," have since left the party and will be unable to vote in Pennsylvania's closed Republican primary. That will make it more difficult for Specter to prevail against a conservative opponent, Toomey said.

Toomey is absolutely right. It also means that he would have no shot at winning the general election, since all those moderates left the party thanks to nutballs like him.

More Government Failures

Can anything decent come out of this Administration? Anything not half-assed and put together with spit and tape?

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco lashed out at the Army Corps of Engineers on Wednesday for installing defective pumps at three major drainage canals just before the start of last summer's hurricane season.

"This could put a lot of our people in jeopardy," Blanco said. "It begs the question: Are we really safe?"

She called for a congressional investigation into how the Corps allowed it to happen.

Citing internal documents, The Associated Press reported Tuesday that the Corps installed the 34 pumps last year in a rush to fix the city's flood defenses, despite warnings from one of its experts that the machinery was defective and likely to fail in a storm.

At the same time, the Corps, the White House and state officials were telling residents that it was safe to come back to New Orleans, which was devastated in August 2005 when Hurricane Katrina breached the city's floodwalls.

But wait, look at the flooded school buses!

I often hear people say that the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina made them ashamed to be an American. But in truth it was only the most visceral of what has been a common circumstance in this Bush era. The functions of government are not seen as worthy of competence. Government is an enemy and not a tool. So why would anyone be surprised that the Army Corps of Engineers did a crappy job installing pumps in New Orleans, putting lives at potential risk? What's important to this White House is not that anything is done well, it's that it APPEARS like they're doing something.

This DKos diarist traces the failure of the pumps back to, you guessed it, privatization, and it's completely obvious because when there's no accountability for the work there's no incentive to do it properly. You get paid either way.

The company contracted to supply 34 new pumps was Moving Water Industries Corp. of Florida. The contract, for 26.6 million, was awarded after competitive bidding, according to the USACE.

But they weren't without connections.

MWI is owned by J. David Eller and his sons. Eller was once a business partner of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in a venture called Bush-El that marketed MWI pumps. Eller has donated about $128,000 to politicians, the vast majority of it to the Republican Party, since 1996, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Government is only implemented to reward rich friends rather than to help people. It's a signature of this Administration. And it won't change until the leadership changes.