Department Of The Obvious

Tim Pawlenty walked back his tentherism today. I think it's dangerous to advance the idea that states can nullify federal laws based on a misreading of the Tenth Amendment - Civil Wars have been started over essentially that - but this brand of Republican hypocrites wouldn't dare go through with it. In fact, they're far more likely to parade around their states taking credit for expanding health care access based on the same exact policy they condemned when Obama was trying to pass it through Congress.

...Here's lead teabagger in Congress Jim DeMint with pretty much the same kind of statement:

Asked whether states should use the 10th Amendment to prevent health care reform from taking effect, he replied that an assertion of states’ rights was “probably the only way we’re going to stop this reckless spending.” He continued, “There’s no constitutional authority for the government to actually do [the reform proposed by Democrats], but whether the courts take it up is a different matter.”

The rules change, however, when it comes to Medicare.

DeMint expressed doubts as to the legality of Medicare under the Constitution, but said, “Regardless of constitutionality, it is a promise that we have to keep. … I think Medicare and Social Security have to be protected.”

Tenthers aren't just hypocrites, they're cowards, afraid of the consequences of their own nutty ideas.

Buzzards Circle Over Mark Sanford

Despite having some of the best timing in the history of politics, it really appears that South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford will be forced into resigning after revealing his walk down the Appalachian Trail with an Argentine woman. The Speaker of the South Carolina House has asked Sanford to resign, and 60 other Republicans in the House hand-delivered Sanford a letter with the same message.

I won't cry for Mark Sanford, who should resign for his disgraceful record as Governor more than anything. But this is starting to feel like a witch hunt to me. There are grounds for dismissal - his abandoning the state for two weeks back in June, for example, or his use of state travel resources for personal business. And surely, given how Jim McGreevey and Eliot Spitzer were run right out of town, it might feel rewarding to a Democrat to see someone like Sanford run out of his office. But personal trysts should not form the basis of an assault on someone's public life. There's a public record that should be sufficient for that.

That said, Sanford does look to have abused his privileges as Governor on numerous occasions, and that ought to be enough for an investigation. I'm happy to have him sit there as a national embarrassment and a walking symbol of Republican hypocrisy on family values, however.

Here's another one.

IOKIYAR

Van Jones was kicked out of the Administration, the story goes, because he was a Truther. The Congressman giving the GOP response to the President's health care speech tonight, Charles Boustany, is a Birther.

BOUSTANY: Well, it's certainly being looked at.

STARK: What do you personally believe, I mean -- do you think there's a question here?

BOUSTANY: I think there are questions, we'll have to see.

OK, queue the feeding frenzy, then. Obviously, we won't have a double standard on conspiracy theorists based on political ideology, right?

Um, never mind.

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.

The Full Jindal

Arnold Schwarzenegger got a lot of good press from going on ABC and saying that he would take the stimulus money of any GOP governor who refused a portion of it.

"Well, Governor Sanford says that he does not want to take the federal stimulus package money. And I'll say to him, I'll take it," Schwarzenegger said. "I'm more than happy to take his money or any other governor in this country that doesn't want to take this money. I'll take it, because we in California need it. I think it's a terrific package. I think if you ask a thousand people for their opinion, what is their ideal stimulus package, you will have a thousand different answers. So everyone's is a little different. I think he's done a great job and I think California benefits tremendously from that $80 billion of tax benefits there, for around $35 billion. There are other advantages: $45 billion of money that go to transportation, to education, to health care, all those different areas. There's even some money that could benefit our revenues or, I should say, our budget itself...."

As you may know, what Sanford and Bobby Jindal and Haley Barbour and these Southern Republican Governors were objecting to is changing their unemployment eligibility statutes so they could accept millions in additional funding through the stimulus to give to the jobless. It's the best kind of stimulus there is and would probably keep some of the retail sector in business, but these Governors feel that once the federal money to fund the new eligibles ran out, it would be too burdensome on business to raise the funds. So they have, rhetorically at least, sided with the corporate community in rejecting the funds.

Which is exactly what the Governor appears to be doing.

At a hearing of the Assembly Insurance Committee Wednesday, Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's representative, Labor and Workforce Development Agency Undersecretary Steffanie Watkins, refused to support AB 3x 23, legislation that makes California eligible for $839 million in one-time federal unemployment insurance funds available at part of the President's economic stimulus package.

This from the same Governor who just last week was all over the national media circuit criticizing Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and other Republican Governors who were spurning economic stimulus funds.

What a difference a week makes.

In the end, the bill made it out of committee by an 8-2 vote with members of the Yacht Party crossing the aisle, suggesting that the legislature would have the 2/3 vote necessary to override Schwarzenegger, if it came to that. But take note of the extreme hypocrisy here. Mr. Governor-by-Magazine-Cover, the media darling, goes on national TV and wags his finger at fellow Republicans who won't take stimulus money. Then he signals that he won't take stimulus money FOR THE EXACT SAME REASON as those governors he criticized.

Incredible.

"We have to all share the burden"

This was the frequent mantra of Arnold Schwarzenegger during the budget crisis, as he set out to fill the shortfall with a combination of taxes and cuts so that everyone has to sacrifice. We've already seen how the tax increases were tilted toward the poor and the middle class, with more of the burden falling on them. Now Michael Rothfield at the LA Times has discovered that the sacrifice has not extended to Arnold's cabinet officials:

John Cruz, the appointments secretary for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, lives hundreds of miles from the state Capitol, where his staff scrutinizes candidates for California's many boards and commissions.

When Cruz works there, he goes by plane. He has charged taxpayers for his flights and for hotel bills of up to $382 a night on regular trips between his Orange County home and Sacramento, records show.

Carrie Lopez, director of the Department of Consumer Affairs, charged taxpayers to fly from Sacramento, where she works, to Los Angeles, where she lives, to attend a Justin Timberlake concert with her daughter. She listed the trip on her expense report as a meeting with the energy company that paid for the concert tickets. Lopez also billed the state for meals on days she received those meals for free from corporations, according to state records.

Rosario Marin, head of the State and Consumer Services Agency, blamed a miscommunication for her failure to repay $582 the state spent to fly her to Washington in July to speak at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, an appearance for which she received $1,000. She reimbursed the state for the airfare after The Times inquired about the trip last month.

Over the last two years, as California has slashed services and scrambled to pay bills, top administration officials have made free use of government expense accounts with little oversight and, in some cases, no documentation, The Times has found.

Together, they have spent tens of thousands of dollars on state-funded trips between Sacramento and the areas where they live, justifying the travel as necessary for state business. Some built weekend trips around one short meeting, and some charged the state to attend events with no apparent connection to their jobs.

This is the kind of expense-report diving that local news outlets often use as a stand-in for real accountability while right-wing frames on substantive issues are preserved. However, it remains laughable for the Governor to try and act as an independent voice railing against corruption in Sacramento when his staff is so enmeshed in it. In one example in the article, Carrie Lopez, who mind you is the director of the department of Consumer Affairs, listed a $51 lunch from Bank of America as a gift on the same day she collected a per diem for lunch.

The double dipping and runaway expense accounts point to a lack of oversight more than anything, and on this point I'd say the fish rots from the head down. Anyone who has lived in Brentwood or anywhere on the Westside knows that Arnold Schwarzenegger has a sense of entitlement to the point that he expects free services as a result of his exalted status. Ask any merchant who has interacted with him. And yet this is the guy who thinks he can have an ounce of credibility criticizing the salary or benefits of any legislator in Sacramento, or any state employee for that matter. How much of this money could have gone into avoiding furloughs?

It's a scandal, but not a surprising one. Arnold and his staff feel they deserve the best. They must feel that the people of California deserve something less.

Gov. Jindal, I Believe Your Pants Are On Fire

The centerpiece of Kenneth from 30 Rock's Bobby Jindal's not-the-State of the Union rebuttal the other night was an anecdote about Hurricane Katrina. That a Republican would reference Katrina to say anything positive about their party is bad enough, but as it turns out, the story is not true, which was clear from the night he said it.

In the last few days, first Daily Kos, and then TPMmuckraker, raised serious questions about the story, based in part on the fact that no news reports we could find place Jindal in the affected area at the specific time at issue.

Jindal had described being in the office of Sheriff Harry Lee "during Katrina," and hearing him yelling into the phone at a government bureaucrat who was refusing to let him send volunteer boats out to rescue stranded storm victims, because they didn't have the necessary permits. Jindal said he told Lee, "that's ridiculous," prompting Lee to tell the bureaucrat that the rescue effort would go ahead and he or she could arrest both Lee and Jindal.

But now, a Jindal spokeswoman has admitted to Politico that in reality, Jindal overheard Lee talking about the episode to someone else by phone "days later." The spokeswoman said she thought Lee, who died in 2007, was being interviewed about the incident at the time.

This is no minor difference. Jindal's presence in Lee's office during the crisis itself was a key element of the story's intended appeal, putting him at the center of the action during the maelstrom. Just as important, Jindal implied that his support for the sheriff helped ensure the rescue went ahead. But it turns out Jindal wasn't there at the key moment, and played no role in making the rescue happen.

Boy, this rollout is making Sarah Palin look like George Washington, isn't it?

...here's some more lies, the "conservative Senator steers defense contracts to his home state to benefit personal real estate deals" edition...

That Guy On The Sunday Talk Shows Sounds Like A Good Governor, We Should Get Someone Like That

When Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't governing by magazine cover, he's governing by Sunday talk show. This is a good venue for him, because nobody asking him questions has any idea what Arnold's actually done to California, and he can spout off one-liners and talk the Beltway language of post-partisanship without rebuttal. These kinds of interviews are never given to reporters in his home state, because they might actually have experience with his tenure and thus would be in position to know a lie when they see one.

For example, the Governor is getting a lot of ink for the line about how he'd be willing to take any stimulus money from any governor in the country who rejects it. Less discussed is the essential falsehood present in this comment:

STEPHANOPOULOS: So when you -- we're looking at a similar budget crisis in the coming years here in the United States. Does the Republican Party have to re-think its absolute opposition to tax increases of any kind?

SCHWARZENEGGER: Well, no, I think that the Republican Party or any party has to always think, when you make a decision, "Do I want to make a decision that's based -- that's best for the party? Or am I a public servant and have to serve the people, what is best for the people?"

And in this particular case, in order to solve a $42 billion deficit, the only way you can do that is a combination of making severe cuts and also having some revenue increases.

Really? Arnold was "listening to the people" when he helped ram through a massive corporate tax cut, in a time of deficits, for large multinational corporations? Show me the poll where the public was clamoring for a multinational corporate tax cut. How about the poll where the public was desperate for waiving environmental laws regarding public works projects and delaying implementation of laws regulating diesel emissions? Actually, the California public has spoken pretty profoundly that they want a serious reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

I mean please. This is a guy who campaigned almost entirely in 2003 on cutting the vehicle license fee, costing the state almost enough to fill this entire budget gap over 6 years, and now he's raised it after admitting defeat. Arnold Schwarzenegger is a born liar. He has the interests of the California Chamber of Commerce and anything but the people of California. That's why he refuses to engage with them or their elected representatives, preferring to float above it all and run to the national media with false tropes about "serving the people." Forget just apologizing to Gray Davis, he should abdicate to him.

This last but from John Myers was amusing:

And in non-governor news, he confirmed an interest in a cameo appearance in an upcoming Sylvester Stallone flick, picked Mickey Rourke to win an Oscar, and said The Candidate was his favorite political flick. That movie is an interesting choice, given it's about a candidate who's so focused on winning -- rather than governing-- that after his victory famously says: "What do we do now?"

Exactly.

No With One Hand, Yes With The Other

You've seen these reports of Republicans touting projects in the stimulus that they voted against, as if we all wouldn't notice. I'm looking forward to Josh Marshall's hypocrimap, which will provide a convenient graphical listing of all these charlatans.

Perhaps more annoying is the habit of Republican governors to yowl about rejecting stimulus money, and then resigning them themselves to just having to take it. Here's South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, the closest thing to Herbert Hoover in the party, backing down:

The final wall of resistance against stimulus spending has now crumbled: South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, perhaps the most vocal critic of the bill outside of Capitol Hill, now says he'll spend the money that his state receives -- at least some of it, anyway.

This is definitely a change. Sanford previously said he had his staff looking at the plan, but "for a different reason" than other governors -- that is, to figure out what was wrong with it. And South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn, the House Dem Whip, had been exploring ways to force Sanford's hands.

And Governor Goodhair, as Molly Ivins used to call him:

Yet another anti-stimulus GOP governor, who had been hinting previously that his state would be turning down cash, is now accepting the money.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who co-wrote an op-ed piece with South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford about all the things that were wrong with the bill, has now informed the White House that he'll accept the money. (By the way, Sanford is taking some of the money, too.)

Part of this is that Clyburn also put in a provision to give aid directly at the local level if the state governors rejected it, which is smart of him (Clyburn is from Sanford's state of South Carolina). But was there any doubt that these losers would cave? I want to find the Republican whose ideals stand strong in the face of free money. It was completely obvious, and annoying that they would even presume to have anyone believe they were making a principled stand.

The Unbearable Lightness Of Glenn

Practically all I know about Glenn Beck is that he once famously said "It took me about a year to start hating the 9-11 victims' families."

Beck: You know, it took me about a year to start hating the 9/11 victims' families. It took me about a year. Um, and I had such compassion for them and I really, you know, I wanted to help them, and I was behind -- let's give them money, let's get them started, and all of this stuff. And I really didn't -- all the 3,000 victims' families, I don't hate all of them, I hate about, probably about ten of them. But when I see 9/11 victim family, you know, on television, or whatever, I'm just like, 'Oh, shut up.' I'm so sick of them. Because they're always complaining. And we did our best for them. And again, it's only about ten.

So to see him tear up over the death of 9-11 widow Beverly Eckert, who died in that terrible Buffalo plane crash, is an act of hypocrisy by which all future hypocrisy can be judged. These guys wrap themselves in 9-11 so easily that they don't even know when they're contradicting themselves.

Country First

The lack of representation for the nearly 600,000 residents of Washington, DC is an enduring scandal and shame, a very real betrayal of the principles that led to the American Revolution. Yesterday, the Congress moved closer to erasing this blot when a Senate Committee approved the compromise plan that would give a voting member to DC and an extra voting member to Utah until the next apportionment after the 2010 Census. The vote had only one dissenter - John McCain.

McCain was the only one of them who voted nay, and he gave two reasons. The first was that the proposed compromise that would give D.C. voting rights while giving Utah a fourth seat in Congress was unfair to other fast-growing states. The second was that McCain didn’t want to pass a bill that constitutional scholars are still tussling over “and then have the Supreme Court decide whether or not it’s constitutional.”

This is a problem. What would happen if — a totally random example here — a senator introduced a campaign finance law that, according to many constitutional scholars and the president of the United States, violated the First Amendment? What if the Supreme Court had to decide whether or not the law was constitutional? That would be crazy.

Dave Weigel is a libertarian and I don't necessarily agree with him about McCain-Feingold, but the core idea that Congress can't make a law because the Supreme Court might overturn it would essentially end all lawmaking entirely, wouldn't it?

Because of this technical and entirely bullshitty reason, John McCain told the residents of DC, people he's walked among for 26 years, to go stuff it. What a man of the people.

The Double Bind Of Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric

Despite failure at the polls in 2006 and 2007, the Republicans think they have a magic bullet headed into the next election year with the issue of immigration. If they can only demagogue the issue enough, the theory goes, they can tap into nativist fears of a brown horde sweeping across the nation and eke out a victory. It doesn't matter to them that immigrants actually underuse the health care system instead of "stealing health care" away from real Muricans, or that children of immigrants actually grow fluent in English in the second generation, because they understand that learning the language is the key to economic success. They would rather demonize the other, despite the historical blunder of alienating the record numbers of immigrants entering the country (One in eight people living in this country is an immigrant, the highest percentage since the 1920s).

Most Republican candidates, even the so-called revolutionary ones, are banking on this strategy (Paul is actually much further to the right than the rest of the field, seeking to abolish birthright citizenship - some Constitutionalist). I'm not so sure. I think Republican immigrant-bashers are in a double bind. Their first problem is that the immigrant experience is too tied to America for candidates to wall themselves off from it. And so we get the stories that Tom Tancredo loves Mexican food, and had illegal immigrants renovate his house:

When Tancredo hired a construction crew to transform his drab basement into a high-tech pleasure den in October 2001, however, he did not express concern that only two of its members spoke English. Nor did he bother to check the workers’ documentation to see if they were legal residents of the United States. Had Tancredo done so, he would have learned that most of the crew consisted of undocumented immigrants, or “criminal aliens” as he likes to call them.

Instead, Tancredo paid the crew $60,000 for its labor and waited innocently for the completion of his elaborate entertainment complex.During the renovation process, two illegal workers hired by Tancredo were alerted to his reputation for immigrant bashing. They went straight to the Denver Post to complain. Tancredo “doesn't want us here, but he'll take advantage of our sweat and our labor,” one of the workers complained to the Post on September 19, 2002. “It's just not right.”

There's little way to avoid the immigrant experience, and so these kinds of hypocritical stances are unavoidable. Romney's been caught up in this as well. The other trap the Mittster has fallen into is favoring one set of immigrants over another, which is a political necessity in certain parts of the country, and again raises the charge of hypocrisy.

“I can tell you my inclination would be to say as many Cubans as want to come here should come in,” Romney said in an interview Tuesday with The Tampa Tribune editorial board. […]Romney replied that Cuban Americans are exemplary citizens who have brought “great vitality, skills and energy to the American experience.”

“In my opinion, the more the merrier,” he said.

The problem for these candidates is that, if they take a pure line on immigration, they end up attracting the ugly bigotry of white supremacy.

Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) has attracted a primary challenge from former RNC member Buddy Witherspoon, who is running to Graham's right on illegal immigration. As it turns out — and despite Witherspoon's recent denials — he has been a proud member of a white supremacist organization, the Palmetto Scoop has uncovered.

Witherspoon recently said claims that he had been a member of the segregationist Council of Conservative Citizens were "totally absurd" and that he had only ever been to one meeting. But in 1999, he told the Washington Post that he was a member, and that "Everything to me is fine from what I see and hear." Furthermore, this was at the same time as he was a Republican National Committeeman in good standing.

The truth is that voters appear to recoil when these politicians cross the fine line between the so-called "rule of law" and open racism. This is even true on the Republican side.

I was a little bit surprised that both Huckabee and McCain got applause with their relatively human responses on the interminable immigration questions. The debate was in Florida, which probably explains it, but I think it shows once again that even the Republicans are not monolithic on this question [...]It seems to me that if you can get applause (and no boos) for a comment like that on immigration at a GOP debate then Democratic consultants should relax just a tiny bit about the breathless responses they are getting in their focus groups and tell their candidates to sound reasonable too. They aren't going to be able to out-hate the Tancredo wing of the party so there's no margin in helping the Republicans set the political agenda by pushing bad legislation and even worse rhetoric.

That's the key. Democrats have to understand that a little compassion and a little sensibility will win the hearts of what I feel is a silent majority in favor of comprehensive and respectful immigration solutions. Most Republicans are either coming off as liars or racists on this question; those like Huckabee and McCain who sound like rational human beings are rising in the polls. The Lou Dobbs wing of the country is very vocal and very shallow. There's no need to give in to the nativism it promotes.

Oh Dear

Four men come out saying they, too, had sex with Larry Craig, or were subject to sexual advances from him.

This is just sad, and I'm starting to feel sorry for Craig now. Someone that closeted and that much in denial is living a tragic life.

BOISE, IDAHO - David Phillips. Mike Jones. Greg Ruth. Tom Russell.

Four gay men, willing to put their names in print, have come forward since news of U.S. Sen. Larry Craig's guilty plea. Two said they had sex with Craig, one said he made a sexual advance and the fourth said he paid him unusual attention.

They are telling their stories now because they are offended by Craig's denials, including his now famous statement, "I am not gay, I never have been gay."

Sad.

Watch Your Back Around Mitt

There's obviously a lot to talk about in the aftermath of "WideStance" Sen. Larry Craig's indiscretions, and certainly the Republican Party is throwing him overboard as fast as they can (probably because they know Idaho's governor is a Republican and they can keep the seat if Craig is dumped). But it's a bit shocking how quickly and mechanically Mitt Romney knifed the guy who was his former Senate co-liaison (no double entendre intended). We know that his campaign tried to scrub any mention of Craig within hours of the initial revelation. And we know that Romney was the first Republican candidate to trash Craig publicly. Add all of this up and it's an unsavory picture, as John Dickerson notes for Slate.

After hearing about Larry Craig's arrest, Mitt Romney ran from his former Idaho campaign chairman as if he'd been in the next stall. "Once again, we've found people in Washington have not lived up to the level of respect and dignity that we would expect for somebody that gets elected to a position of high influence," the former Massachusetts governor told Larry Kudlow on Tuesday. "He's no longer associated with my campaign, as you can imagine." When asked similar questions after the news broke, most of Craig's Senate colleagues demurred, saying they wanted to see all the facts before commenting. They might have been acting out of loyalty or might have wanted to avoid the topic of bathroom sex altogether. But Romney showed no such reticence, linking Craig—who denies he did anything improper—to Bill Clinton and Mark Foley, and the larger culture of corruption in Washington [...]

Candidates treat endorsers-gone-bad the way Soviet leaders handled purged rivals: erase them from photos and never speak of them again. John McCain did this when the Florida co-chairman of his campaign was also arrested for soliciting sex in a bathroom (if Democrats do this, too, they're better at hiding it). So did Rudy Giuliani when his South Carolina chairman was indicted for selling coke. Romney's spokesman said they yanked the video because they didn't want Craig's troubles to become a "distraction." But when Romney later sermonized against Craig to make a sweeping judgment about Washington, he was hardly avoiding the subject.

Dickerson links this to a similar incident in 1964, when an aide to LBJ was arrested on a "morals charge" in a bathroom, and Barry Goldwater insisted that they not use the information. Not that the GOP has been the part of Goldwater for a long time, but the speed with which Romney dropped Craig like a rock shows you how much they've changed. Hemmed in by an over-moralizing base, these candidates must simply be ruthless. Whether or not they figure out that their associates are hypocrites BEFOREHAND is apparently immaterial.

We've spent nearly two terms watching a President who values loyalty above almost everything else. Obviously Mitt Romney doesn't share that trait. Of course we knew that; he's not even particularly loyal to his own beliefs.

The Craig Witch Hunt

I'm coming around to the notion that Larry Craig didn't really commit a crime in Minneapolis. Yet he did plead guilty, which I think is a firing offense. Now the Senate GOP is coming around to that opinion. Sadly, while their statements reflect the position that they're calling for his resignation because he plead guilty, somehow I think it has more to do with him pleading guilty to possibly being gay.

UPDATE: Let me revise and extend. The act of pleading guilty to something is not the firing offense; Paul Begala just correctly observed on CNN that Bush and Cheney have pleaded guilty to the much more serious crime of drunk driving in the past. It's about Larry Craig claiming that he did nothing wrong, and yet pleading guilty to "get it out of the way," it's that stupidity that signals the end of his career. A lawmaker should have some slight sense of the law.

UPDATE II: Colorado Confidential has more.

Quote Of The Day

Tim Russert, on the Republican wish for Sen. Craig "to exit, to leave":

Republicans understand, Brian, the issue of hypocrisy.

Sure they do, they have enough practice:

Bob Allen
Claude "stole stuff from Target" Allen
Mark Foley
Jeff Gannon
Dr. W. David Hager
Eric Keroack
David Vitter

More here.

Shorter David Vitter

From yesterday's news conference:

I only saw prostitutes in DC and never in New Orleans, and the people making up these lies will have to answer to their Lord by praying on it. My marriage is Sacred and I wouldn't sully it by seeing prostitutes in two different places.