Stick A Fork In Him

The South Carolina GOP just abandoned Mark Sanford.

The tide of support from his own Republican Party officially turned against disgraced Gov. Mark Sanford Thursday as the South Carolina GOP called for his resignation.

South Carolina Republican Chairman Karen Floyd and the state party’s executive committee held a 5 p.m. conference call before announcing that they had decided it was time for Sanford to go.

SCGOP spokesman Ryan Meerstein said over two-thirds of those voting favored the governor’s resignation. He added that a letter from Floyd to the governor would be released later in the evening.

That's pretty much it. They say that in politics, if you're explaining, you're losing, and I would say this ridiculously long letter from Sanford's website represents a whole lot of explaining, including the measuring of hours logged on state planed by past Governors. He held a companion press conference today, too. The funniest part of all this is that Sanford, the ultimate conservative's conservative, is being taken down for profligate personal spending, and his facts and figured thrown up to defend himself just don't cut it. That's of course because the forced resignation on these uses of state travel expenses are a sideshow, cover for the SC GOP to just dump him because they fear a backlash from their "family values" base.

Moral Superiority

Given the Sanford affair today, for some reason I view this standing ovation for John Ensign in a new context. Again, his personal life is none of my concern, but the same people who stand on a soapbox made out of Bibles really look like ridiculous moralizers right now. Everyone shut up about everyone else's sex life and get your nose out of my bedroom.

Anything Happen While I Was Away?

I was out this morning until now, anything up?

Anything at all?

After going AWOL for seven days, Gov. Mark Sanford admitted Wednesday that he had secretly flown to Argentina to visit a woman with whom he was having an affair. Wiping away tears, he apologized to his wife and four sons and said he will resign as head of the Republican Governors Association.

"I've been unfaithful to my wife," he said in a bombshell news conference in which the 49-year-old governor ruminated aloud with remarkable frankness on God's law, moral absolutes and following one's heart. He said he spent the last five days "crying in Argentina."

Sanford, who in recent months had been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate in 2012, ignored questions about whether he would step down as governor.

At least one state lawmaker called for his resignation. As a congressman, Sanford voted in favor of three of four articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton, citing the need for "moral legitimacy."

Oh, that. Anything else? Slow news day.

OK, a few things. First, powerful men thinking they're invulnerable? Go figure. These things are actually not widespread; despite the anecdotal evidence, a small percentage of politicians have affairs on their spouses. But to the extent that they are, they are internal matters between these people and their families. Nobody really knows what goes on in someone else's marriage, and I really don't care about my representatives' faithfulness. In fact, none of us should. But where this breaks down is when these sanctimonious "family values" types want to police personal behavior of their constituents when they cannot keep it in their pants themselves.

That's the usual disclaimer. But this Sanford case is much, much different. He left his state, in fact he left the country, for seven days without telling anybody. Setting aside the fact that going to Argentina to "say goodbye" for seven days doesn't make any kind of sense, and if he got away with this I'm sure there would be additional hikes on the Appalachian trail, so to speak, in the future, leaving the country with no proper explanation is a severe dereliction of duty. He apparently lied to his own staff, lied to the Lieutenant Governor, and left his state in the lurch, despite the unpredictability of events (aren't we in hurricane season?). That's probably a firing offense. If I was a South Carolinian, it would be to me, regardless of party.

The larger story is the complete ineptitude of this crop of Republicans to capitalize on what could actually be a treacherous road for Barack Obama in 2012. Sanford has an affair. John Ensign has an affair. Bobby Jindal does an impression of Kenneth the Page from 30 Rock in his coming-out party. Newt Gingrich calls Sonia Sotomayor a racist. And on and on and on. If the economy fails to improve, and if health care fails to pass, Obama is actually vulnerable. That is, if there was a second political party in this country.

The Gingrich Faction

Adding John Ensign to Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, in all likelihood John McCain given the timing, etc., we're getting close to a MAJORITY of the Presidential candidates from the "family values" party, Republicans, having extramarital affairs. Plenty of Democrats have them, too - but there's a difference in sanctimony here. Republicans have this self-delusion that they are somehow pristine and pure, and the hypocrisy is staggering.

...In case I didn't make my point clear, I'm saying that what goes on inside one's marriage is the business of that couple and only that couple, period, and we all should generally stay the hell out of making value judgments because we're all imperfect people (ESPECIALLY politicians with a lot of power). My perception is that Republicans continue to stick their noses in people's bedrooms, despite the fact that they have proven themselves to be just as fallen. I don't think they'll take the right message from Ensign's troubles, either.

Crips And Bloods: The Manifestation of a Failed Prison Policy

The Stacy Peralta-directed documentary Crips And Bloods: Made In America looks at the history of gangs in South Los Angeles over the last 50 years, and the violent civil war on the streets that has raged for the past 30, killing as many as 15,000 residents, three times as many as in the Unionist/Catholic war in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 80s. Anywhere else in the world, UN peace negotiators would be brought in and Security Council resolutions passed to stop the violence. In South Central, the battles continue, and children growing up among the chaos, according to a recent RAND Corporation study, have higher rates of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) than children growing up in Baghdad.

One of the more amazing things about the documentary is that, despite unparalleled access to the gang-bangers surviving on the streets over the past 30 years, there is precious little about the actual feud between the Crips and Bloods. Most of the history of why they fight and why they kill has been lost in the minds of the young leaders on both sides who suffered an early death. Crips and Bloods shoot and get shot largely because they are supposed to oppose one another. Wearing the wrong colors in the wrong neighborhood is a death sentence, but it's unclear why. At one point, one of the original gang leaders, Masuka, says that "one of the ways the oppressor state functions is by turning the subjects against one another."

The story traces gang culture from the earliest days, through the Watts riots of 1965, the Black Power movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the rise of the Crips and Bloods, as South Los Angeles fell into a self-perpetuating cycle of decay and despair. After the major factory jobs left in the early 1960s, residents were without opportunity and without hope. Crack cocaine and other drugs eventually became the only economic salvation. And it led to violence and warfare in the streets.

The most revealing sequence in the film comes when every current gang member is asked about their childhood, and they all - to a man - respond that they were products of a broken home, without fathers, with the family members who raised them selling drugs out of the house, caught at an early age without positive role models or figures to enable their own empowerment. Those living in South LA with strong family units had mothers and fathers who kept them off the streets and away from the gangs. Those without had little hope. And this is a very direct consequence of an insane prison policy that locks up nonviolent offenders, particularly in the black community, at absurdly high rates. One out of every four black men will be imprisoned at some point in his life, and particularly in California, the inability of the system to handle all the warehousing of inmates leads to a lack of rehabilitation and an expanded recidivism rate. In fact, the explosion of gang activity inside the prisons ensures an increase outside the jail. This revolving door in and out of prison rips apart families and leads to a sustained cycle of gang activity and violence. The "war on drugs" is unquestionably a war on people of color and the lower classes.

That is the faillure we are talking about when we look at California prison policy, a failure that will now lead to mass release in the absence of leadership in Sacramento. Policymakers would rather lock away the problem instead of facing the terrible blight in the black community. Indeed, they have locked up these people inside AND outside of prison, confining them to the few miles in South Central that is their turf; there are stories in the film of young gang members who have spent their entire lives in a 10-block radius. The border between South Central and suburbs like Lynwood and South Gate has been a virtual pen for black youth for 50 years, with anyone crossing the border risking a beating or even their lives. We built communities that are prisons, through restrictive housing covenants and police directives to "maintain order". This is what created gang life, out of mutual protection from whites. And what now sustains it is not only the locking up of parents from sons and daughters, not only the locking up of blacks inside ghettos and away from opportunity, but the locking up of minds, the locking in of self-loathing and the snuffing out of the flame of hope.

While South LA is now as Latino as it is black, the difficulties for residents and the ravages of gang life remain. While violent crime has decreased since 1992 it remains unspeakably high. As we look at prison policy in California, and in particular the efforts by elites in Sacramento to block any meaningful reform, despite bending over backwards from federal receivers to work out agreements that allow for inmates to retain their Constitutional rights to be free from cruel and unusual punishment, we need to think about the Crips and the Bloods, about why they persist, about why they fight, and about why we made them.

How Many Half-Sisters Are Going To Come Out Of The Woodwork?

This is like an episode of Dallas.

When Cindy McCain talks about growing up, she usually refers to herself as an "only child" -- a phrase that ignores the existence of her half sisters.

"It's terribly painful," Kathleen Hensley Portalski said yesterday. "It is as if she is the 'real' daughter. I am also a real daughter."

Portalski and McCain are both children of the late Jim Hensley, the Arizona businessman who founded one of the largest beer distributorships in the nation. Kathleen, 65, is the product of Hensley's first marriage in the 1930s to Mary Jeanne Parks. Hensley divorced Parks for Marguerite "Smitty" Johnson, whom he met at a West Virginia hospital in World War II and married in 1945. Cindy was born nine years later [...]

But there's more: Cindy McCain has another half sister. Before her marriage to Hensley, Johnson had a daughter, Dixie Burd, by a previous relationship. Burd, who is much older than Cindy, could not be reached for comment.

The McCain campaign has been tight-lipped about the expanded family tree: "Mrs. McCain was raised as the only child of Jim and Marguerite Hensley, and there was no familiar relationship with any other sibling," it said in a statement.

The question is whether the public thinks this messiness makes the McCains more "authentic."

Guiding Light Would Reject This Script

It looked like the Vito Fossella story was pretty standard - a politician has an affair with a woman while in Washington, and has a kid with her. This has been happening since Washington became Washington. But there were a few notable twists in this tale.

First of all, not only did the wife not know about the mistress, but the mistress didn't know about the wife:

Vito Fossella's admission that he fathered a love child exposed another of his lies: He had told his girlfriend he was separated from his wife, the Daily News learned Friday.

Retired Air Force Col. Laura Fay told those around her recently that the Staten Island congressman had split with his wife, Mary Pat, one source said.

"Fay thought - up until the release of the statement - that Fossella was separated," said the source, who is familiar with the relationship.

The source said Fay learned of the lie when a friend who saw a draft of Fossella's statement realized it didn't say he was separated.

So the wife might leave him AND the mistress might leave him. One person that isn't leaving is ... Vito Fossella.

Reports that Rep. Vito Fossella’s (R-N.Y.) resignation is imminent are incorrect, according to the lawmaker’s public relations firm.

A spokesperson at O'Reilly Strategic Communications told The Hill that Fossella has no public appearances planned this weekend and that he spent Friday with his family on Staten Island.

I know I'll go big-time when my own public relations firm talks to the media to deny rumors.

Meanwhile, it turns out that this guy is 31 flavors of hypocrite:

Vito Fossella built a career as a staunch "family values" pol, polishing his image in his predominantly Catholic district with a string of anti-gay votes.

He even shuns his gay sister, Victoria Fossella, refusing to go to family events if she and her partner attend, a source close to the family said [...]

As congressman, Fossella voted to prohibit any funding for joint adoptions by gay couples.

He has voted for the Marriage Protection Amendment, a federal prohibition on gay marriage.

He also demanded housing funds be held back from San Francisco unless it repealed its domestic partnership law.

Victoria Fossella is openly gay and marched in Staten Island's gay pride parade with her partner, according to an article published in Gay City News.

She adopted twins who were delivered by her partner, according to the story.

"She is known in the gay community and she is known in the gay community as an out lesbian," Adrian said.

The guy's so into the family values thing that he shuns his own sister, and yet he goes ahead and lies to everyone in his life and believes so much in the sanctity of marriage that he holds down two families (that makes him TWICE the marriage defender!).

Wow, what an a-hole.

I'm With Freddie

So the big news really is that Freddie Thompson (yes, his legal name is Freddie) is running for President. That's big news? He's been essentially running since the spring, and only hasn't announced officially so he could keep his "Law & Order" episodes on the air and reel in those residual checks. But I guess this is a big deal. Well, OK, let's give him some scrutiny.

First of all, give it up for the NYT for actually putting this in the article, albeit in the middle:

It is perhaps no coincidence that several of Mr. Thompson’s main communications strategists also worked on Mr. Schwarzenegger’s campaign, similarly re-introducing an actor as a serious political contender. The talk-show setting in Los Angeles allowed Mr. Thompson to capitalize on his pop-cultural appeal as an actor and simultaneously reinforce his contention that he is a Washington outsider — although he lives in a suburb of the capital and worked extensively there as a lobbyist when not in the Senate.

However, I think it is a coincidence that Thompson's communication people are from Arnold's campaign, since they were about the only people left he hadn't fired. By the way, this is the team, Todd Harris and Karen Hanretty, that engineered the lowlight of Arnold's political career, the 2005 special election where he got spanked and almost lost his re-election as a result, before firing them and hiring Matthew Dowd and Steve Schmidt to get him back on track.

So just what is supposed to be the conservative appeal here? The idea is that he will appeal to real conservatives. Well, let's see, he's worked as an abortion rights lobbyist, he has a trophy wife who's seven years younger than his oldest kid (the age range between his kids is 46 years), his record on immigration doesn't satisfy the crazies, and he's a Hollywood actor. Is it because he talks all slow and folksy-like, is that supposed to be the appeal?

Well, so does George Bush. And he seems to have caught the Administration's I don't recall disease.

"I don't even remember the details of his plan."

-- Fred Thompson, quoted by Bloomberg, when asked how his ideas for overhauling the social security system differ from those of President Bush.

In case you were wondering, his position is not different at all on Social Security privatization, he's all for it, just like he's for private health accounts as the only reform to health care. In fact, he has drab and unimaginative conservative proposals for just about everything.

So what's the excitement all about? Is it because you've seen him at the movies? Is it because he was a "hero of Watergate," even though he was actually a mole for the Nixon White House? Is it because he's lazy, just like us? Or is it really because Freddie is a cipher, something dissastisfied Republicans can project all their hopes of a decent 2008 candidate onto? I think that's pretty much it. And like with most actors, the view through a lens from far away is a whole lot more attractive than the view up close.

UPDATE: That's gonna leave a mark:

Huckabee's criticism of Thompson got more severe from there, discussing Thompson's Washington experience. "I've never been a Washington lobbyist," said. "I've never lobbied for an abortion rights group."