Congressional Status A Big Negative Among This Year's Gubernatorial Candidates

There are two states with primaries coming up this month: Georgia and Oklahoma. DWT readers know that this coming Tuesday Blue America-backed Regina Thomas goes up against reactionary Blue Dog John Barrow in the 12th CD and the following Tuesday (July 27), late entrant Jim Wilson takes on even worse Blue Dog Dan Boren in eastern Oklahoma's 2nd CD. What we haven't discussed, however is that both states have gubernatorial primaries as well. Taylor Dolven has pointed out in The Hill that members of Congress aspiring to governor's mansions-- as is this case in both Georgia and Oklahoma-- are finding their congressional experience an albatross. These are the members of Congress-- two of whom, Nathan Deal and Neil Abercrombie, have recently resigned from that body-- who decided to leave Capitol Hill for a shot at running the show in their own state's capitals:

Nathan Deal (R)- GA
Mary Fallin (R)- OK
Artur Davis (D)- AL
Gresham Barrett (R)- SC
Pete Hoesksta (R)- MI
Zach Wamp (R)- TN
Neil Abercrombie (D)- HI

Fallin, better known for her times at Lt. Governor than for her short stint as a congressional, backbencher, is considered a lock and so is Abercrombie. The rest have either already lost-- Davis and Barrett-- or look like they will lose.

Once Davis, who represents one of the most overwhelmingly Democratic districts in the South (Obama have thrashed McCain 72-27%) decided to run statewide, his moderate voting record turned sharply right, ignoring his own constituents to make a play for... the KKK? His vote against the healthcare reform legislation was widely seen as the last straw for his cowardly and craven pandering-- and the death knell for an idiotic campaign. He lost to Ron Sparks. He lost 10 of the 12 counties in his own congressional district and only managed 37.6% statewide. Why should Democrats vote for someone who votes with the GOP in their own primary when they have a plausible alternative?

Gresham Barrett didn't change a thing to run. But the South Carolina GOP changed. No one can deny that Barrett has a long career as an ultra-conservative corporate hack, long the ticket to higher office in one of the most historically reactionary states-- going right back to colonial days-- in the U.S. But Barrett, like virtually the whole House Republican hierarchy, including teabagger hero Joe Wilson, I might add, followed the lead of John Boehner and Paul Ryan-- as well as party standard bearers George Bush and John McCain-- to support Bush's 2008 no-strings-attached Wall Street Bail-Out. The same deranged, demented teabaggers in South Carolina who were ready to erect statues of Joe Wilson in their town squares after he screeched "You Lie" at President Obama at the State of the Union, were unwilling to accept Barrett's abject daily apologies for voting the same way as Wilson. No doubt if Barrett would have campaigned on a "platform" of Obama being an Indonesian, Mexican or Kenyan-born Muslim terrorist, he would have won the GOP primary. But he didn't-- and he lost.

Congressional experience has been a boon in the past for lawmakers running in gubernatorial races, according to Jennifer Duffy, an analyst with the Cook Political Report.

“Now that experience is a liability because of Congress’s poor image,” she said.
Georgia Republican Nathan Deal will be the next former lawmaker to test voters’ anti-Washington mood.

A recent Mason-Dixon poll showed Deal, who left the House in March after casting his vote against healthcare reform, locked in a three-way battle for the GOP gubernatorial nomination with state Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine and former Secretary of State Karen Handel. 

Deal this week joined Oxendine in attacking Handel, who is seen as the front-runner after securing the backing of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Observers say he may not make the expected runoff between the top two finishers in next Tuesday’s vote. 

His third-place position in the race comes despite leaving Congress in the hopes of improving his chances in the primary. 

“It was important that he devote 100 percent of his time to the election,” said Brian Robinson, a Deal spokesman.

Being out of Congress also eliminates the chance a candidate will have to make a controversial vote. This cycle, members from both parties who ran for governor were forced to defend tough votes. 

Wamp's membership in the radical right C Street Cult probably isn't hurting him in his primary bid, but just the fact that he's a congressman is. He's trailing the multimillionaire mayor of Knoxville, Bill Haslem. There are so many Republicans running in Michigan-- with no clear front-runner-- that the party nod is completely up for grabs. Aside from the bumbling and lackluster but well-known Hoekstra, Attorney General Mike Cox and Ann Arbor businessman Rick Snyder are contenders, with Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard and state Senator Tom George lagging.

The Fish Rots From The Head: Pete Hoekstra, Pat Toomey

Not your parents' Republican Party

Not all Republicans are identical--but they're all so afraid of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, the Club For Growth and the teabagger psychosis that has taken roots in the GOP activist base, that it's virtually meaningless to parse the public differences. Thursday, when the president was in Michigan, a relatively mainstream conservative, gubernatorial candidate Rep. Pete Hoekstra showed up to try to bask in the presidential glow. It didn't work. Obama was speaking at a high tech battery plant that has benefited from stimulus money and he welcomed Hoekstra during his opening remarks. Later whatever pleasured Hoekstra may have felt, was shattered.

"There are some folks who want to go back, who think we should return to the policies that helped to lead to this recession," Obama said later in his comments honoring an advanced car battery factory being built by the company LG Chem. "Some made the political calculation that it's better to obstruct than lend a hand. They said no to the tax cuts, they said no to small-business loans, they said no to clean-energy projects. It doesn't stop them from coming to ribbon-cuttings -- but that's okay."

Hoekstra felt the shoe fit, wore it and called Obama's remarks "unpresidential." The Democrat seeking to replace him in Congress, Fred Johnson, an author and history professor who doesn't always agree with every Obama policy, came to the President's defense. "The President had every reason under the sun to call out Pete Hoekstra. How many times do we have to watch Republicans cut ribbons on projects they opposed before we say something? Pete said it was 'unpresidential'. Well, it's just plain uncaring to oppose job creation-- especially when you're running for Governor of the state with the second highest unemployment in the country. I'm out here in Pete's district, knocking on doors every day, and I can tell you that his constituents want job creation. So, I applaud the President's honesty, and we all need to follow his lead and expose this brand of hypocrisy."

The President was called worse than "unpresidential" by Republicans this week-- and one of most extreme ones anywhere, Pat Toomey, a tawdry Wall Street derivatives trader running against Joe Sestak for the open Pennsylvania Senate seat, did it out loud. Most political observers in Pennsylvania see Toomey as something of a sociopath so few were genuinely shocked when he stepped over the line yesterday and questioned the President's patriotism.

Speaking to an American Legion convention in Harrisburg, the former Congressman said, "there are some in Washington who don't really believe in American exceptional-ism."

He warned the mindset can lead to "very troubling policies" and deference to other countries.

After the event, Toomey said he was talking about President Obama.

"I think if you look at his quotes and how he has responded to questions about this, President Obama is at best very skeptical about the idea about American exceptionalism."

Toomey later clarified American exceptionalism as "the belief the United States' model of freedom and free enterprise is the best one."

Democrat Joe Sestak disagrees, saying, "falsely accusing the Commander-in-Chief of being less than fully patriotic harms the nation's goals."

I don't know Toomey personally but judging from statements like this, there can be little doubt that the far right former head of the Club For Growth would have been very much at home in the Nazi Party had he been born in Germany a century ago. He would be a catastrophe in the U.S. Senate, easily as bad as Sharron Angle, Ken Buck or any of the other radicals from the Jim DeMint fringe of the GOP. We reached Joe Sestak, a former Admiral and the highest ranking military officer serving in Congress. He was very measured in his response:

You can disagree with the President's policies, but there has always been bipartisan belief that the President of the United States holds high America's ideals. Falsely accusing the Commander-in-Chief of being less than fully patriotic harms the nation's goals and prevents a serious debate on the policies we should be pursuing.

It's the radical nature of remarks by supposedly respectable politicians like Toomey, that give permission to the violent race-baiters and bigots to stir up the kinds of divisiveness and tensions the GOP is hoping to use to ride back into power in November.

In his weekly address this morning, the President laid out the case against Republicans, "a partisan minority in the Senate," for obstructing progress. I bet they'll be screaming their heads off all next week. Of course Obama doesn't mention conservative Democrats like Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln who also obstruct progress. If you want to change the Senate, the best thing we can do-- personally I favor making it a ceremonial office with no veto power-- please go to the Blue America page Senate Candidates Worth Fighting For, where you'll find men and women like Joe Sestak, Elaine Marshall, and Jack Conway. Meanwhile, this is worth watching:

Fred Johnson-- Taking It To The Republicans In Their Michigan Heartland

If you're looking for another petrie dish example of what's at stake in November, take a look at western Michigan's 2nd Congressional District. It's currently "represented" by the Cheney-esque Pete Hoekstra, but he's now engaged in the wingnut sweepstakes that will determine which of six raving lunatics will be the Republican gubernatorial candidate; Hoekstra's coming in second behind "unsure" (at least according to the rarely accurate Rasmussen).
 
The Republican congressional primary is a bell jar of right wing zealots. Two of the most conservative members of the Michigan legislature, Wayne Kuipers and Bill Huizenga (Bill was termed out in 2008), are laying claim to the "next in line" label. Both are actively courting the Tea Party and wave the Constitution around at every opportunity, with the usual exhortation to move policy backwards by decades, at minimum. Both of these candidates lay claim to the Dutch heritage and religious conservatism of the southern part of this Lake Michigan shoreline district, and have the connections to Lansing lobbyists to raise the money to be reasonably competitive. 
 
Bill Cooper, a serial entrepreneur from Muskegon, is the Phil Gramm clone in the race. He's never met a regulation or tax he doesn't want to kill, and can be counted on to oppose any financial reform, even the most tepid. His repeated buying and reselling of medium sized businesses on the lakeshore has produced a personal fortune which will keep him financially competitive throughout the race.
 
And then we come to Jay Riemersma, former tight end with the Buffalo Bills and Washington #%^**#'s. Running as the genial former football player, he is, in fact, the very recent former Midwest Regional Director of the Family Research Council. Writing in the Holland Sentinel on November 6, 2008, he asked Obama voters: "Did your choice honor the infallible truth found in God's word or help discredit it?" He further stated that "Too many Christians shroud their God-given light with misguided intentions and uninformed choices." Riemersma is the leading fundraiser in this race, as of the end of 2009, and has won GOP straw polls in the two biggest counties in the district, both by substantial margins. His Dutch/Christian Reformed credentials, and football player's popularity will make him hard to beat in the primary.
 
These are the "mainstream" choices for Republican primary voters. There are also a couple of Tea Party candidates on the ballot, in case voters want someone even more obviously off the rails and willing to lend himself to centerstage in a freakshow.
 
Fortunately, voters have a terrific choice on the Democratic side. Dr. Fred Johnson, a history professor at Hope College, is making a second run after taking on Twitter Pete Hoekstra in 2008. A genuine progressive, Fred is well positioned to take advantage of the rapidly changing demographics and political identifications in the district. 2008 saw a huge jump in the Democratic vote throughout the district. This was delivered primarily through the top-notch voter registration and GOTV efforts of the Campaign for Change. This district now has a whopping 45,000 first time voters, who can deliver this seat to Fred in November. Despite the fact that conventional wisdom calls this a safe Republican district-- and the most conservative part of Michigan-- it is very much worth noting that Senator Levin won here with 53% of the vote, and President Obama fell just short, at 48.5%. This district is turning purple rapidly, and 2010 can complete the process, something we should all consider helping along.
 
To give you a sense of Fred's priorities, here's a statement he gave me:

There are two interrelated issues that command the attention of any freshman progressive Representative: financial reform and campaign finance reform. The hard fact is that the two are so intertwined as to be inseperable. 
 
The mavens of Wall Street have proven both their incompetence, and their venality. Only the strongest possible financial reform package will stop another catastrophe from hitting our economy.  As a historian, I strongly reject the revisionism currently in vogue on the right, and feel that the reimposition of Glass-Steagall, and a whole host of strong reform measures is now demanded of Congress by the American people. This is one area where I diverge from the President. I believe we need stronger financial reform. Too big to fail is just plain too big.
 
But, how do we get there when the lobbyists and PACs of Wall Street have so much influence? My number one priority upon taking office will be the Fair Elections Now Act. This bill is a great first step in leveling the playing field at election time. But we need to do more. I strongly support the package of legislation being drafted by Rep. Frank and his colleagues in the Banking Committee. We need to take every avenue available to us to undo the destruction of the last vestiges of fairness in our campaign system wrought by the Citizens United decision. Whether it be through statutory restrictions on the political activities of corporations or, at minimum, much greater influence on the part of shareholders, we must strongly address campaign finance in order to have any chance at real reforms in other areas.

The C Street clubhouse: the place for self-absorbed "Christian" pols on the make to do it all -- to fellowship, pray, talk about Jesus, and eat

If Jenny Sanford had been a more traditionally subservient "barefoot and obedient" Christian wife, might her scumbag husband have gotten away with his "Argentine adventure"? True, he was getting idiotically indiscreet, and now he seems to have turned into a babbling buffoon, but maybe that's 'cause he got caught?

"We'd fellowship, we'd pray, we'd talk about Jesus, and we'd eat. In the headiness of Washington, D.C., it's trying to make sure you keep your head screwed on straight."

-- Michigan Rep. "Crazy Pete" Hoekstra, making public

his previously unknown connection with the Family,

which he stressed ended two years ago

"Recently, an unscrupulous author has implied that I am involved in meetings or am even a resident at what is called the C Street House located in Washington, D.C. To be clear, I have never lived at the C Street House nor have I participated in any regular Bible studies or so-called counseling sessions there. Over the past decade, I have attended a few luncheons at the house involving ambassadors and other members of Congress. While there, I had conversations with those in attendance. Other than these few visits at the house, I have had no membership or involvement in meetings at the house."

-- Kansas Rep. Todd Tiahrt, in a statement issued to KWCH Wichita, whose reporter Kim Wilhelm did a report on the Family Sunday

"Their idea is to identify politicians who are in positions of power, placed there not so much by voters but by God. The Family helps polish them up -- become more sophisticated leaders so they can better serve this ‘vision of the kingdom' as they put it. So they can do good things, they can do bad things, it doesn't matter. They're chosen for power. And the Family believes it's their job to help them stay in power."

-- Jeff Sharlet, in KWCH Wichita's report on the Family

by Ken

All of that, plus . . . it's Christian!

When last we visited the now-famous house on C Street that houses the kook Christian power cult called the Family, I believe it was former Mississippi Rep. Chip Pickering's turn at the GOP Adultery Flogging Post. (These days you really have to book ahead.) Our Chip, you'll recall, who left Congress in 2007, ostensibly to spend more time with his actual family, meaning wife Leisha and their five sons, turns out to have been having yet another of these tediously humiliating affairs, this one apparently conducted at least in part within the sacred walls of the Family's C Street clubhouse. And they are sacred, because --

SHH! DON'T MENTION THIS TO THE IRS!

To its best knowledge, the building is in fact a church. Expansive as the IRS traditionally is in interpreting what constitutes a church, given our country's traditional -- not to mention constitutional -- commitment to separation of church and state, in the face of all that we've learned about the Family and the C Street clubhouse, somebody at the IRS could think that at least a few questions might be in order.

Ironically, the type of pol drawn to the Family tends to be publicly, dare I say righteously, scornful of the whole concept of separation of church and state. The Family itself doesn't even pay lip service to the idea.

An interesting wrinkle in the case of Chip Pickering, you'll recall, is that, as Max Blumenthal reported for The Daily Beast, Leisha Pickering's divorce filing revealed that her guy "recorded details of his exploits in a secret diary, including the dates and locations of his adulterous encounters." What's more, Chip's sex diary "reveals the identities of several men who enabled his adulterous trysts and helped him cover his tracks."

OOH, A SEX DIARY? AW-RIGHT! WHERE
IS IT? WE WANNA SEE THE SEX DIARY!

According to Max Blumenthal: "Thanks to heavily politicized local courts and an aggressive damage-control campaign waged by Pickering and his powerful Republican allies, the diary, which is said to contain the answers to these questions, is locked away in a courtroom in Mississippi. And if Pickering has his way, it will stay there indefinitely." Sorry!

Now don't forget about that diary. (Like as if you're thinking about anything else! Except maybe wondering if there's also video.) We're going to come back to it. And while you're remembering, note -- in the "Crazy Pete" Hoekstra quote at the top of this post -- the Crazyman's emphasis on the fact that his association with the Family ended two years ago. It's just possible that these two details could be connected!

Anyway, since our last visit, so much has happened on the C Street front that it's hard to take it all in. To be honest, I've kind of tuned out. We've already learned plenty about the heady mixture of Bible-thumping and power-mongering concocted by Family patriarch Doug Coe and his chip-off-the-old-block son David. In the time since our giddy discovery of the embarrassing and rather alarming links between the Family and the marital follies of putative presidential pretenders Nevada Sen. John Ensign and South Carolina Gov. (and, importantly, former U.S. Rep.) Mark Sanford, it's all had kind of a same-old, same-old ring.

Perhaps the most interesting development has been what we might call "The Flight from the Family," which is to say the growing number of Family-style pols who have suddenly become shy about celebrating their Christianity, something they were once prepared to do anytime they found themselves within range of a camera. Now they either refuse to comment on reputed ties to the Family or deny them outright, sort of. "Outright" denial seems a bit of a reach for them, and so we're getting a fascinating assortment of indignant denials of involvement beyond certain carefully delimited points. Which brings us to the Kansas and Michigan connections.

THE KANSAS AND MICHIGAN CONNECTIONS

Sunday night KWCH-TV Wichita's Kim Wilhelm did a nearly four-minute report on the Family, drawing on Jeff Sharlet's book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, including excerpts from Jeff's appearances with Rachel Maddow and a phone interview of her own. You have to give both the reporter the station credit. It doesn't seem likely that Wichita folk had heard much about the subject. And as the piece makes clear, there are Kansas connections to the Family. The written version of the report (which is similar to but not a trasncript of the TV version) notes:

The group rents out rooms to members of Congress. Kansas Congressman Jerry Moran's staff confirms he stays at C Street. His office refused to answer questions or comment further. Sharlet's book has no mention of Moran, but it does list Senator Sam Brownback and Congressman Todd Tiahrt as members.

Congressman Tiahrt (that's pronounced "Tea-heart," as in "teabag"), as we've already noted up top, could hardly be more vehement in his denial of "membership" or much of any real association with the Family. At the same time, if you were to parse his statement closely, you could find any number of ways in which it could represent careful weaseling, and in the event that documentary evidence should begin turning up, one wonders whether those "few visits" might not grow the way, say, Jack Abramoff's few visits to the White House eventually did.

Our Todd, by the way, is probably most famous for his recent contribution to the House health care debate, shown in the KWCH report, where he made the case against allowing government funding of abortions, which of course his deep religious convictions lead him to oppose, thusly:

If you think of it in human terms, there is a financial incentive that will be put in place, paid for by tax dollars, that will encourage women who are -- single parents, living below the poverty level, to have the opportunity for a free abortion. If you take that scenario and apply it to many of the great minds we have today, who would we have been deprived of? Our president grew up in a similar circumstance. If that financial incentive was in place, is it possible that his mother may have taken advantage of it? Clarence Thomas, Supreme Court Justice, if those circumstances were in place, is it possible that we would be denied his great mind?

Let me just say here that this speech seems to me all-but-irrefutable proof of the non-existence of a god, or at least one with any self-respect, who could hardly fail to respond with a prompt smiting. Working in mysterious ways is all well and good, but surely there are limits.

Now as to the Michigan connection, what most struck Emptywheel's Marcy Wheeler, a veteran watcher of the congressman whom she calls, possibly affectionately, "Crazy Pete" Hoekstra (only she doesn't use quotation marks), was the mere fact that he "preemptively" announced his connection to the Family: "Frankly, I hadn't even realized Crazy Pete was a member of this group, and I could swear I've checked once (he is definitely their 'type.' So it surprises me a bit to see Crazy Pete offering up his ties to the group."

"Crazy Pete," by the way, is probably best remembered for his shockingly inept, dishonest, Bush-abetting performance as a member and then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Actually, Wikipedia reminds us of what's probably the next-most-distinctive aspect of his nine-terms-and-counting career: that it was made possible in good part by beating up on 13-term GOP powerhouse Guy Vander Jagt for having been in Congress so long. That's why primary insurgent Hoekstra pledged to serve no more than six terms, and already-expansive concept of term limits which Congressman Hoekstra seems to have found intolerably restrictive when it came time to run for term number seven.

"Crazy Pete," as you may have heard, is looking seriously at a race for governor of Michigan. Marcy, while acknowledging that it's pure speculation on her part, speculated in that Sunday post about a possible link between his separation from the Family and the famous Chip Pickering sex diary:

Pickering resigned in August 2007, just under two years ago. If the diary precipitated the divorce, then it may end about two years ago.

So if someone like Crazy Pete knew that his involvement in yet another hypocritical affair might become public, he might be able to say that he ended his relationship with the group two years ago, setting up a very convenient story just in case anything became public between now and when he tried to run for Governor.

I have no idea whether Pickering's diary time bomb is the reason for Crazy Pete's pre-emptive admission of ties with C Street. But the timing does make me want to see Pickering's diary all the more.

Before we leave "Crazy Pete," I think we need to pay some sort of tribute to a man who: (a) has shown us, by using it in a sentence, how to use "fellowship" as a verb, and (b) has so tidily summed up the Family agenda as a bunch of good Christian men getting together to keep their heads screwed on straight by means of the Big Four: fellowshiping, praying, talking about Jesus, and eating. Strangely, there is no mention of having affairs and counseling one another on said affairs while keeping them totally secret from everyone else, including spouses.

MORE IMPORTANT THAN SEX???

Notice how we keep coming back to the sex scandals, which always make for the juiciest, not to mention attention-gettingest, copy. It's been clear ever since the Family got dragged into the spotlight in connection with the Ensign and Sanford high jinks, that Jeff Sharlet, in his capacity as reigning outside expert on the Family (at this point he's become Rachel Maddow's virtual cohost, on a broadcast that might be renamed The Rachel Maddow Show, featuring Jeff Sharlet on the Family), thought and thinks there's something more important than sex scandal to the story. While I wouldn't presume to speak for Jeff, I think what he's trying to call attention to is neatly summed up in the quote he gave KWCH, up top. I think it's worth a replay:

Their idea is to identify politicians who are in positions of power, placed there not so much by voters but by God. The Family helps polish them up -- become more sophisticated leaders so they can better serve this ‘vision of the kingdom' as they put it. So they can do good things, they can do bad things, it doesn't matter. They're chosen for power. And the Family believes it's their job to help them stay in power.

I realize it will be a serious comedown for tabloid-trained news consumers if it turns out that the really important story about the family is nothing sexier than a cult master's clever fusion of religion with power, all built on a bedrock of Christian hypocrisy. That's not all that sexy, is it?

Well, there are those who might disagree, like for example Leisha Pickering and Jenny Sanford. I'm a bit surprised myself tp find that in the end this is where my thoughts are gravitating. Because neither Chip Pickering nor Mark Sanford seems to have chosen the traditionally subservient barefoot-and-obedient Christian wife who exists for no purpose greater than to serve her master. Both Leisha and Jenny appear to be seriously bright women who were at least as responsible for their husbands' career successes as the possibly less-bright men.

Here are those old sweethearts Chip and Leisha Pickering. What a handsome couple, no? It's not hard to understand that Chip would have given up his seat in Congress to spend more time with Leisha and their five boys. 

Of course we don't know what went on behind the scenes with the Pickerings all those years. Leisha doesn't seem to have had any insupportable problem with Chip's ambitions when he was a rising star in God's Own Party. At some point, though, she seems to have become noticeably less enthusiastic about Doug Coe's "you can have it all, hornyboy" Family program. The apparently not-very-discreet affair seems to have exhausted such tolerance as she may once have had.

There are marriages that can handle that, and there are marriages that can't. Mrs. Pickering, however, made the unusual choice, for a good Republican wife, of not going quietly.

Poor Mark Sanford seems to have run into a similar sort of wifely uppitiness. A man of his, er, appetites should probably have had a proper wife of the barefoot-obedient sort, the sort who would know her place. (What was it Jimmy Carter was just saying about male religious leaders who have "overwhelmingly chosen" to "subjugate" rather than "exalt" women?)

To his credit, our Mark doesn't seem ever to have been looking for that sort of mate. Oh, Jenny comes from serious money, which would certainly have helped qualify her as a suitable Christian wife for a good Christian pol under the old standards. But she sure seems like someone who knows how to take care of herself -- and, when it came to it, her children. But when she met Mark, she was a player on Wall Street. They met in the Hamptons, you'll recall, not at a church social. She spent six years as a vice president (mergers and acquisitions) at the investment bank Lazard Freres. When the Sanfords moved south and Mark launched his political career, she seems to have worked at it if anything harder than he did. Until recently she was usually described as his top adviser.

Even after the doody hit the fan, Mark, when asked how he was handling his wife's discovery of his affair,, was still burbling stuff like, "This goes into the personal zone. I'd simply say that Jenny has been absolutely magnanimous and gracious as a wonderful Christian woman in this process."

As a matter of fact, Jenny seems to have been prepared to do whatever it took to save the marriage, if only for the sake of the kids. She "knew" for a long time without revealing anything publicly. She had stumbled across a love letter in Mark's files. It was, we're told, quite a shock. ("I didn't think he had it in him.")

If Mark had had the good Christian sense to marry the kind of woman toads of his sort traditionally did, or turned their wimminfolk into, then when it came to crunch time -- you know, when he "went hiking the Appalachian Trail" -- she might have covered for him. Not Jenny, though, who you'll recall helped fan the flames of intrigue by making it absolutely clear that she had no idea where her the father of their four sons was on Fathers' Day.

She had her reasons. It turns out that lovelorn Mark had actually begged her for permission to, um, pop down to Argentina to, er, visit the sights! Astoundingly, unlike that good Christian wife he should have had, Jenny said no! Or as she tells it, "I said absolutely not. It's one thing to forgive adultery. It's another thing to condone it." We can guess that as the drama unfolded, Jenny, being as far as she is from the model of the barefoot-and-obedient wife, didn't respond at all well to the growing inklings that the Atlanta airport, not the Appalachian Trail, was where Mark had headed.

The portrait of Mark that emerges -- and of Chip too, for that matter -- is of a greedy, self-absorbed young pol who knows how to think big, a horny toad on the make in every sense. For the Family, it would appear, Bible-thumping is optional at the outset. If you've got a horny enough young toad who can sling a little "family values" lingo, we can teach him enough Jesus to hornswoggle all those needy folks out there who crave a proper Christian tongue-lashing.

If it's any consolation to Leisha and Jenny, the guys were bums. I feel bad for them, and for their combined nine boys, who you have to hope don't grow up to be bums like their dads.

"Family values" indeed.

#

Politicians And Social Networking Sites Can Be A Dangerous And Telling Mix

King David tangoed but didn't tweet

Many of us have been in shock and awe at how our political class has managed to screw up using social networking tools by diving into the shallow end of the pool head first. Paleolithic Congressman-- and would-be Michigan Governor-- Pete Hoekstra mistakenly betrayed sensitive, even top secret, information because he just couldn't wait to tweet to his office, forgetting that even an al Qaeda operative in a bunker can subscribe to his Twitter account. He soon figured out to stop that kind of stuff and just use his Twitter account to display his rather dense, sick sense of humor.

Even funnier than Hoekstra's run ins with Twitter, was how the hapless Jeff Frederick, then the Virginia Republican Party chairman (since dumped), gave away GOP strategy for how to change the partisan balance in the state Senate, allowing the Democrats to counter their efforts and win the day.

Yesterday's CQPolitics ran a feature on how both political parties are mining Facebook pages for opposition research. Ironically, they start with the story of how Establishment hack Gil Cedillo tried smearing Emanuel Pleitez in the recent special election to replace Hilda Solis in Congress. Cedillo's ugly tactic-- claiming Pleitez, an admirable, albeit studious, policy wonk, was secretly all about women, "hard liquor," dancing on tables and partying all night-- backfired so badly that it was probably the decisive factor in throwing the race to Judy Chu (in a Hispanic-majority district).

Opposition researchers say they couldn’t be happier.

“It’s a godsend for us,” said Jason Stanford, president of Stanford Research. “Most times you have to get someone’s enemies to give you an embarrassing photo. Now, candidates themselves are posting them on the Internet.”... In 2006, Facebook pictures of Tennessee Republican Senate candidate Bob Corker’s daughter kissing a woman and attending an event where people were partially clothed made the rounds on the Internet.

... In 2008, a Facebook controversy involving the son of Colorado Republican Senate candidate Bob Schaffer, made headlines.
Justin Schaffer, 19, issued a public apology after word circulated of his Facebook “bumper stickers” which included “Slavery Gets Shit Done,” an image of Jesus holding a machine gun in front of a Confederate flag and captioned “What Would a Republican Jesus Do?” and others.

One of my neighbors is the daughter of the New York State former chair of the Republican Party, Sandy Treadwell. His daughter drives a Democratic car (a hybrid) with a Treadwell bumper sticker on one side and an Elect Barack Obama sticker on the other side. Her dad was running for Congress against Kirtsen Gillibrand and lost, after spending over $5 million out of his own purse. The daughter never put a picture of her car on the Net but... well, it's a small world and somehow a picture was circulated. Rudy Giuliani's daughter, on the other hand, just up and joined the popular Obama For President Facebook Page.

There are no firm statistics on how many politicians actively use Facebook, but the company says the numbers will only increase as membership continues to rise. Facebook claims 200 million active users, including 60 million in the United States. The site figured prominently in the 2008 elections in which all major presidential candidates used Facebook and other Internet tools.

“Candidates are going to Facebook because that’s where the voters are,” said Adam Conner, Facebook’s D.C. Associate for Privacy and Public Policy.

Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Forum, which covers the intersection of politics and technology, said Internet tools are “the most powerful, least expensive, and effective organizing tool ever invented by man.”

As long as Facebook remains a driving force, candidates need to learn how to use it most effectively, he said.

“Facebook has become the new town square in democracy with all the good things and all the bad things,” he added, “... but if you want to be at the center of a community...  and be heard, there’s no better place in our current day and age than Facebook to amplify your message and to find out what others are saying or thinking about what you’re saying.”

Yesterday the Washington Post featured the story of a civil servant who lost his job because his tweets showed him to be lazy and bigoted. He was fired. Personally, I love tracking GOP extremists on Twitter. One irresistible target is Marco Rubio, the far right candidate for the U.S. Senate seat in Florida, a man of great self-righteousness and verve but with abysmally limited intelligence. For one thing, Rubio doesn't know how to keep his mouth shut and, paying homage to his pals at the NRA the other day, he twittered away about how much better off Iranian protesters would be if that country had a strong Second Amendment, apparently unable to grasp the idea of guns being met by tanks.

Unfortunately, although his e-mails are available for anyone who cares to read them, South Carolina Republican nutcase and typically Republican adultering hypocrite, Mark Sanford, wasn't tweeting his affair with his Argentine mistress. Worse yet, he isn't tweeting the elaborate defense that has seeped out from his inner circle-- stuff like comparing his adultery to that of King David-- the one from the Bible! He is, however, on another powerful social networking site: YouTube. Get a load of this:



Could this actually work-- comparing himself to a Biblical Jewish king? Even in South Carolina?


UPDATE: A Bright Side To The Bizarre Mark Sanford Morality Play?

One especially virulent right-wing propagandist frets that "a sex scandal a week from the Republicans will guarantee us government health care by the fall... And once government health care's in place the game's over: Socialized medicine redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in all the wrong ways, and, if you cross that bridge, it's all but impossible to go back. So, if ever there were a season for GOP philanderers not to unpeel their bananas, this summer is it."

Republicans not unpeeling their bananas-- all the way 'til fall? Not likely. Marco-- suave god of sex and tango; no more self-righteous, Bible-thumping prig? I bet he's still as viciously, hysterically opposed to same sex relationships as he was before he decided to jettison his own traditional marriage. Maureen Dowd points out that the Republican Party will never revive itself until its sanctimonious pantheon-- Sanford, Gingrich, Limbaugh, Palin, Ensign, Vitter and hypocrites yet to be exposed-- stop being two-faced. And that's the pathology captured in Frank Rich's far more substantive column about gay Americans, 40 Years Later, Still Second-Class Americans. Second-class Americans because the Mark Sanfords found a way to make that status work for themselves career wise and second-class Americans because gays haven't mustered the strength or the strategy to make politicians like Barack Obama take their plight seriously enough to spend the political capital necessary to change it.

Who Runs The CIA-- And To What Effect?

Although more Americans say they believe the CIA lied to Pelosi than believe, like Newt Gingrich and the entire Hate Talk Radio/Fox TV propaganda effort, that Pelosi is making it up, the CIA itself has surprisingly positive ratings among Americans. According to Rasmussen, not the most trustworthy polling company, only 24% of Americans view the CIA unfavorably. You can count me in the 24%. I hope you read Dr. Kirk Murphy's brief look-back on the history of the CIA, a history that has informed that unfavorability rating among the 24% of Americans aware of how the organization does its job-- or, more to the point, decides what its job is.

I'll tell you how distrustful I am about the CIA. Even when they appeared to be working against the Bush Regime, I was aghast that they would be interfering in domestic politics. And that was interfering for good! Assassinations and coups, whether abroad (proven and admitted) or domestically (neatly covered up) should never be the realm of the CIA. We're a democracy and they have evolved-- like within 30 seconds of their founding-- into a supremely anti-democratic organization acting independently of any legitimate constitutional restraints.

Did they engineer Watergate to get rid of Nixon? My guess is that not even 24% of the 24% of Americans who distrust the CIA believe that. Russ Baker makes a good case, in his book Family of Secrets, that they did. He summarized some of his findings last year for Raw Story:

One of the fastest ways to raise eyebrows in politically savvy company is to suggest that Richard Nixon was not the villain of Watergate. Everyone knows that Nixon himself set loose the Watergate burglars and then oversaw the attempted cover-up that followed. We know this because the most famous journalists of the last fifty years-- Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein-- made their careers on that story. I thought I knew it too.

Then I began the research that led to my new book, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces That Put it in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America. I had no intention, when I started, of re-opening the Watergate inquiries. But the trail led there, as I sought to answer a question that somehow has escaped careful attention. Why did Richard Nixon repeatedly promote George H.W. Bush (Bush Sr., or Poppy, as he is known) for important political posts despite both his apparent lack of qualifications and Nixon's own privately-expressed doubts about Bush's mettle? Why, even when Nixon became so wary of so many of his appointees that he fired cabinet members en masse, did he continue to be solicitous of Bush Sr.?

Nixon named the obscure Poppy to be UN ambassador in 1970 and then chairman of the national Republican Party in 1972. Even earlier, in 1968, Nixon actually put Bush Sr. on his list of vice presidential running mate prospects-- this not long after Poppy was first elected to the House of Representatives. Similarly, Nixon's replacement, Gerald Ford, sent Poppy off as envoy to China and later made him CIA director, though by most accounts he was an odd choice for both of these sensitive jobs.

In short, in the Nixon era, Poppy Bush was the man who always seemed to be around, yet also managed to stay out of the main story. Digging way back, I came upon evidence that Nixon felt beholden to the Bush family and to the interests it represented. The reason: Bush Sr.'s father, Senator Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush, apparently helped launch Nixon's political career in 1946 as a way of destroying his first opponent, liberal congressman Jerry Voorhis, an outspoken critic of the excesses of bankers and financiers. Given the current Wall Street disasters, and the role of Prescott's grandson in enabling them, this revelation has obvious contemporary relevance.

Once I understood this special Nixon-Bush relationship, which is basically missing from all major Nixon biographies, I began to ask what exactly Poppy had been doing during the Watergate years. This led to the discovery that the Watergate break-in was almost certainly just one of a series of illegal acts that were engineered by people around Nixon, but not by Nixon himself. Far from defending Nixon's interests, these people had been privately frustrated with him on a variety of fronts and were now looking to take him down.

Simply put, once Nixon attained the presidency, he struggled for his independence, and began doing things that displeased his former sponsors.

I explored in particular a little-known matter called the Townhouse Affair. It turns out to be an important precursor to Watergate. Townhouse and Watergate both had earmarks of involvement by CIA figures.

And I looked at something that has barely emerged in public, but which was discussed by Nixon and his advisers: his ongoing struggle with the CIA. Combined with other evidence I developed of Poppy Bush's longstanding involvement with the CIA (back to the 1950s), it becomes apparent that there was more to Watergate than Richard Nixon's paranoia. There is not space here for all the particulars I lay out in Family of Secrets. But a few highlights:

• Townhouse appears in retrospect to be an elaborate effort to frame Nixon for financial wrongdoing, by orchestrating a ridiculously shady-looking fundraising operation (and purported political blackmail scheme) headquartered in a basement office in a D.C. townhouse. The people who conjured up and ran Townhouse were tied to Poppy Bush.

• Wealthy independent oilmen who backed Bush felt anger and distrust toward Nixon, who proved to be less than entirely reliable on their key issues, such as a tax giveaway called the Oil Depletion Allowance.

• Many figures in Nixon's White House had CIA ties, and appear to have been keeping an eye on him, even as they worked for him. (The role of the security services raises suggestive questions as a new president prepares to take office – namely, how free is any president to pursue the agenda he promised the voters? The ghosts of the Bushes and what they represent will hang over a new President Obama in ways we have never imagined.)

• Poppy Bush had extensive secret ties to the intelligence apparatus before he became CIA director in 1976. This connection has not previously been reported, and it provides an answer to a question that puzzled observers at the time – namely, what had Poppy Bush ever done to prepare him to lead the nation's premier spy agency?

• After being named Republican national chairman, Poppy Bush used that position to monitor and help shape the unfolding Watergate affair.

• John Dean was much more than a whistleblower. It appears that he was aware of or even a key figure in the White House covert activities that brought Nixon down, yet encouraged Nixon to take the blame for them.

• There is evidence suggesting a connection between Poppy Bush and Dean. Records show that Bush actually called the then-obscure Dean from his UN office in New York during the earliest days of these events. Why would the UN ambassador be speaking to a White House counsel?

• The rookie reporter Bob Woodward began working at the Washington Post, and on Watergate in particular, with job recommendations from high officials in the White House who knew him from his days in Naval intelligence work.

• A handful of famous Watergate tape excerpts were misconstrued-- or in some cases, misleadingly edited-- by some in academic, media, legislative and judicial arenas to convey a false impression of what Richard Nixon actually knew-- and of how culpable he was.

• Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, a key figure in the ousting of Nixon, was a close Texas friend of Poppy Bush-- and steered clear of evidence that pointed to Poppy's involvement.

• Even the notion of "Deep Throat," purportedly Woodward's main source (identified as the recently-deceased FBI man W. Mark Felt), may have been part of a CIA-style "psyops" scheme to create the impression of Nixon's culpability. Some key figures claim that there was in fact no "Deep Throat" at all.

• Nixon suspected the CIA of surrounding him and then setting him up. From his own days supervising covert operations as vice president, he recognized that the Watergate burglars and their bosses were seasoned CIA hardliners with ties to the Bay of Pigs invasion and events linked to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Nixon battled the CIA for files on what he called the "Bay of Pigs thing," but never could get access to them.

In sum, I found that the very people who created Nixon and used him to advance their own political interests ended up destroying him. Nixon's famous paranoia, in other words, had a basis in reality.

This morning my friend Gort in Pennsylvania reminded me that I hadn't covered an important post by Marcy Wheeler at FDL. What both are trying to get out is that Nancy Pelosi is hardly the only member of Congress who the CIA routinely lies to. While the clownish GOP can think of nothing beyond exploiting anything they can find to exploit to build up their wrecked image-- and is now clamoring for an investigation... of Pelosi!-- many government officials are coming forward and talking about how the CIA has lied and manipulated members of Congress. The posts linked above from Gort and Marcy are about how the CIA persuaded conservative Democrat Paul Kanjorski to support an attack on Iraq by showing him doctored photos taken in Arizona that they claimed were of drones in Iraq that could be used to destroy American cities. John Boehner, who has been leading the Republican Party exploitation efforts, inadvertently admited that the CIA also lied to the ranking Repug on the Intelligence Committee, Pete Hoekstra, a dedicated CIA-apologist and shill. Arlen Specter brought up the CIA's "bad record" of honesty when he came to Pelosi's defense this week. And not even ex-CIA chief and GOP hack, Porter Goss, will give a straight answer about the CIA's meeting with Pelosi (which he was also at).

There, I got through a whole post on the CIA without once mentioning they also killed JFK or infected thousands of Cubans with swine flu. It sure would be nice if someone talked about scrapping the whole outfit and starting over again fresh. It sure won't be the Republicans. Now that the GOP is on a partisan jihad to smear Pelosi, they are ignoring their own experiences with the spy agency. The other day Newt Gingrich, the Republican Party's biggest hypocrite-- think about that scale-- demanded Pelosi step down. He seems to have forgotten what he said about the CIA and their work, in a far rght magazine, Human Events. “[The National Intelligence Estimate] is so professionally unworthy, so intellectually indefensible and so fundamentally misleading that it is damaging to our national security.”

The House overwhelmingly defeated a resolution by deceitful Mormon Representative Rob Bishop to launch a partisan witch-hunt against Nancy Pelosi. Bishop's hypocritical resolution failed 252-172. Only two Republicans were honest enough to vote "no," Ron Paul and Walter Jones. The rest couldn't wait to show their contempt for truth and democracy. Not even the worst or most craven Blue Dog joined them. California pipsqueak hack, Kevin McCarthy, a junior whip, stomped his feet and hissed, "It's not over," promising to interrupt House business in the future with this same kind of political stunt.

UPDATE: The Speeches Today

CNN, always the pathetic hucksters for hemorrhoid creams and shammies, billed it as "the dueling speeches." I started writing about it but then got a reaction from Senator Russ Feingold, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and decided to use his take instead:

The two speeches offered a stark and revealing contrast-- the president wants to protect the country while upholding and strengthening our time-tested constitutional principles, while the former vice president offered the same misleading scare tactics and flawed approach to national security that Americans repudiated in the last election.  I welcome the president’s emphasis on congressional oversight and the need for collaboration with Congress, for which the Bush Administration held such contempt.  The president’s remark on reforming the way the state secrets privilege is used also seems to indicate he is moving in the right direction.  And I am also pleased that the president echoed the same point I recently made regarding claims by the former vice president:  that I had seen nothing to indicate that the torture techniques authorized by the last administration were necessary or the most effective way to get information from detainees. 
 
The president has taken some important steps in his first four months.  He has banned torture, increased transparency, and focused on the crucial threat to our national security emanating from al Qaeda’s safe haven in Pakistan.  And he has pledged to close Guantanamo, which is being used as a recruiting tool by our enemies. But nobody expected the president would be able to undo the eight year assault on the rule of law by the last administration in just four months.  So I look forward to continuing to work with him to restore the rule of law and put in place policies that will keep America safe and reduce the threats to our country that have grown more challenging because of the missteps of the last administration.

If There Is No Effective Oversight, We All Lose-- Get Ready

Who needs any damn oversight anyway?

Under Republicans there was no oversight of the excesses-- and downright blatant criminality-- of the Bush Regime. None. Whatsoever. After the 2006 midterms, Bush still got a pass from the contemptible shills known as the United States Senate, the Democrats having put Lieberman, a Bush ally-- thoroughly indebted to the Regime for his re-election-- in charge of oversight. There was none. But in the House, Henry Waxman took over and did a spectacular job, which, thanks to Nancy Pelosi's "off the table" diktat, led precisely... nowhere.

Now, if you were the Democratic Establishment and had just won control of the White House and Congress, one thing you are absolutely certain of is that oversight is something you neither want nor need. So let's ease Waxman into a "better" job where he can't do any harm, and let's find the stupidest, laziest most inconsequential member of Congress to take over House oversight, and leave the Senate just as it is, just so long as Lieberman knows who he owes his position to now. No one would make a better oversight chairman than Edolphus Towns-- if the purpose is to make sure there's no oversight. And Wednesday the unscrupulous hypocrites in the House Democratic caucus elected him.

The selection formally puts to bed weeks of speculation about who would lead the committee in the next Congress. Waxman’s departure to head the Energy and Commerce Committee set off a brief, largely behind-the-scenes struggle for the gavel....

Towns was next in seniority, but was not seen as the top choice of Democratic leaders. They worked quietly to arrange for someone else to replace Waxman until it became clear that Towns was intent on taking over as chairman.

Sure they did-- because if there's one thing Rahm Emanuel wants now, it's tough oversight for the Executive Branch!

On the other hand, one of the most pusillanimous Republicans serving in Congress, the execrably hypocritical Pete Hoekstra-- who should be dragged before the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague along with Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld for the stunning non-job he did at Intelligence Oversight-- just declared that the "relationship between Congress and the executive must change." Yes, this morning the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, who wants to run for Michigan governor, suddenly woke up, as if out of an eight-year snooze, and wants to keep the country safe. Republicans, he said, will "conduct aggressive oversight of the Obama administration’s intelligence efforts and encourage our Democratic colleagues to do the same.” He said it with a straight face.

Well, at least there's a solid bipartisan effort to hold the Bush Regime's feet to the oversight fire when it comes to the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, right? No, not right. Texas' worst far right extremist, Republican lunatic fringe maniac Jeb Hensarling, claims the oversight is not serious and is trying to politicize the efforts and threatening to quit the committee.

Elizabeth Warren, the panel's chairwoman, told the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday that bailout panel members would investigate how banks are spending the money they have received from the program, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and whether it was helping the "real economy."

The mission of the four-member panel was outlined in a report it issued Wednesday, which Mr. Hensarling voted against. In an interview after the hearing, Ms. Warren appeared to be surprised by Mr. Hensarling's opposition – in part because "he never objected to a single word in the draft," she said.

"I asked for his comments repeatedly and received none," said Ms. Warren, a Harvard professor who was appointed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

Ms. Warren also said Mr. Hensarling had not personally attended meetings with other TARP watchdogs, including the Treasury Department inspector general and the Government Accountability Office. Instead, Mr. Hensarling sent representatives to some, she said.

When told of Ms. Warren's comments, Mr. Hensarling chafed at what he said wasn't a serious attempt to incorporate Republican ideas into the panel's work.

Yep, that's Republican Party oversight melded with Republican Party bipartisanship: give all the money to the banksters, cut their taxes and leave them alone and watch the magic of the free markets keep the Bush Economic Miracle alive. And if the loathsome Hensarling does resign, the panel will have no Republicans. The other GOP appointee, wingnut Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), resigned last week, citing his busy legislative workload, and not mentioning that he's the Republican senator most likely to lose his job in 2010.


FOOTNOTE: ELIZABETH WARREN IS
A GREAT GUEST WITH RACHEL MADDOW

by Ken

Rachel asked Ms. Warren about the astoundingly basic questions her oversight panel is asking, like is there a plan for this bailout? And what might that plan be? Incredibly basic they may be, but they are also the questions that somebody's got to be asking. Ms. Warren pointed out that she's only recently been appointed to chair the oversight committee, but she spoke about the bailout issues with clarity, confidence, and force -- to the point where Rachel expressed the hope that she would be appearing widely to explain these issues, and hoped she would be back on Rachel's show soon.

It would appear that Representative Hensarling's total possible contribution to the commission's work is zero, and the panel will get a lot more accomplished without him. Of course it won't be "bipartisan" anymore. But while we have a president-elect who seems serious in his attachment to "bipartisanship," we also still have a Republican Party that defines the concept, "You're welcome to agree with our ultra-right-wing ideology, as long as you don't attempt to alter it in any way. Otherwise it will be our pleasure to launch crusades of lying smears against you and everyone you've ever come in contact with."

#

GOP HOUSE CAUCUS WANTS TO SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT: THEY'RE MUCH MORE BIGOTED, XENOPHOBIC & CRAZY THAN THE SENATE REPUGS

Michigan's Know Nothing Congressman Pete Hoekstra, an immigrant who favors pulling up the ladder

Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) is probably best known for the abysmal job he did protecting the nation's security as the failed chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He's a right-wing fanatic and total rubber stamp loon, the original kook who annoiunced that weapons of mass destruction had been located in Iraq (after seeing satellite pictures of a pomegranate juice dispenser) and who failed to follow up on the proof that his colleague and close friend, Randy "Duke" Cunningham, a member of his committee, was selling intelligence information to the highest bidders.

Although Cunningham is no longer on the committee and no longer a congressman and in fact, is now rotting in prison, Hoekstra was never charged with any crimes in the case and it was all hushed up. But there's more to Pete Hoekstra than abetting treason. He's also a xenophobic and racist extremist. This morning's Hill carries a story about Hoekstra's latest foray into the kind of viciously divisive politics he is famous for. He introduced a resolution at the House Republican Conference that disapproves of the Senate's action on Bush's immigration bill. Never having veered away from his slavish rubber stamp posture, "Hoekstra said that while he preferred not to break with the president, the language and content of the Senate bill compelled him to vocalize his opposition."

His resolution passed the House Republican Conference by a large margin, despite the fact the Senate bill’s language has yet to be finalized.

A spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said he has very serious concerns about the Senate bill.

During the discussion of the measure yesterday morning, LaHood attempted to block the Hoekstra resolution but was defeated soundly by a vote of about 114-23, according to sources familiar with the meeting.

According to a source, the failure of the LaHood motion prompted Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a supporter of the Senate bill, to say that the Hoekstra resolution “demeans the House.”

Yet Flake is in the minority in his conference in his support for the measure; 100 Republicans have already joined the House Immigration Reform Caucus, a fervent anti-amnesty group.

“There’s growing momentum on the House side to have our voices registered on the Senate immigration bill,” Hoekstra said during a press conference yesterday.

Hoekstra said the amnesty provision, no matter how strict the language, was a deal-breaker for most House Republicans.

“That’s why the fundamental bill has no credibility, and basically what we are saying today is it is dead on arrival in the House, we can’t have secret deals, this has to go through committee, it has to go in pieces,” echoed Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.). “A comprehensive bill will not pass the House.”

“The Z visa is unenforceable,” Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif) said, referring to a provision of the Senate bill that would put those in the country illegally on the path to citizenship.

During a press conference yesterday, Bush did little to help his cause when he told reporters that the bill included amnesty. White House spokesman Tony Snow issued a press release shortly thereafter stating that the president had misspoken.

Nothing confuses and divides Republican officials as much as the immigration issue. The ones perceptive enough-- a tiny minority-- who have understood how the GOP ceded California to the Democrats in order to celebrate their bigotry and hatred, understand that a Know Nothing approach could be the long-term death knell for the party. The Know Nothings themselves, whose spokesmen are the Hate Talk radio hosts the GOP has cultivated and nurtured are clamoring for the rest of America to bring it on. Today's Wall Street Journal, who can always be counted on to put the interests of corporate business above all else, recognizes the "danger for Republicans" if the bill fails. They are not blinded by the commercial potential of stoking the raw rage and racism which has made the GOP radio hosts like Limbaugh, Hannity and O'Reilly at al unable, or unwilling, to understand that "this is a classic case in which pandering to the base will harm the GOP overall."

That's true most immediately for Presidential hopefuls like Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson, who continue to assail the bill as "amnesty." No doubt this gets applause in some Republican precincts. But in the near term, meaning through 2008, Republicans would be far better off helping President Bush and John McCain pass something that takes immigration off the table. If the issue remains central to the 2008 debate, it will divide the GOP and the media will play up the split. Given the passions that immigration evokes on the right in particular, the issue could easily drown out other domestic policy messages the candidates would prefer to run on.

The longer term danger is that the GOP is sending a message to Latinos that it doesn't want them in the party. And if that message sticks, Republicans could put themselves back in minority party status for a generation or more. Hispanics are the largest ethnic minority in the country, and their voting numbers continue to grow. Hispanics were estimated to be 8% of the electorate in 2006, compared with 6% in 2004 and 5.5% in 2000. Census data show that the number of Latino voters could rise to 10% or more by 2008. The demographic reality is that the GOP can't be a majority party with Anglo-Saxon votes alone.