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There's something about prostitutes and a greasy publicity-chasing pimp being registered Republicans that feels like vindication. This makes it seem like the Grand Old Party is finally being candid about what they do...and why they do it. Finally a Republican owns up to my characterizations of them! Hooray.

Happy Nevada caucus day!

Open thread below...

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Well, isn't this cozy? Justice Scalia has 'graciously' agreed to set the tone for each Congressional week by coaching the Tea Party caucus on the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.

Lou Dobbs is all tingly over it too:

Dobbs: You've got a terrific idea that you're going to implement with the new Congress: a course on the Constitution for incoming Congressmen and women. Tell us about that.

Bachmann: We're going to do what the NFL does and what the baseball teams do: we're going to practice every week, if you will, our craft, which is studying and learning the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

Justice Scalia has graciously agreed to kick off our class. The hour before we cast our first vote in congress, we'll meet in the Capitol, we'll have a seminar on some segment of the Constitution, we'll have a speaker, we'll have questions and answers, we'll wrap our minds around this magnificent document [and] that'll set the tone for the week while we're in Washington.

I think it's great and I'm hoping all the members of Congress will partake; it's bipartisan.

I wonder which week will be the one where they discuss separation of powers and impartial justice. Just sayin'.

If my count is right, a coalition of House members aligned with the Tea Party and Progressive caucuses could cause any bill sent to the House from the Senate to fail. Michele Bachmann came out with a statement yesterday afternoon signalling probable opposition to any deal that ties unemployment extensions to tax cut extensions.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), the chairwoman of the House Tea Party Caucus, said Republicans could balk at voting to extend all the tax cuts for two years if it's tied to a long-term extension of jobless benefits.

"I don't know that Republicans would necessarily go along with that vote. That would be a very hard vote to take," Bachmann said on conservative talker Sean Hannity's radio show on Monday.

Assuming Bachmann has the ability to hold the caucus together, that's 52 House members. The progressive caucus has 83 members. If both joined in opposition, that would leave any bill sent from the Senate short 8 votes in the House.

That conclusion assumes such a bill ever leaves the Senate, of course. It's possible it won't, depending on how much power Jim DeMint wields. If DeMint, Inhofe, Barasso, Coburn, Bunning, Voinovich, Sanders and Feingold can put together 41 opposing votes between the ultra conservatives and the ultra progressives, it could get stuck there, as well.

Ah, we live in interesting times. Those tax cuts may still expire December 31st, and if they do it will be because a coalition of natural enemies joined against a compromise coming from the center.

This debate has been a test of everyone's resolve. There are still lots of plays left before the clock runs out. Stay tuned.

I almost missed Jim Hightower's checklist of big oil's most recent tax write-offs:

• BP can write off 70 percent of the rent it paid to TransOcean for the oil rig "rental." - $225,000 per day
• TransOcean moves its offices to Switzerland and avoids paying $1.8 billion in U.S. taxes.
• Exxon Mobil raked in $19 billion in profit, but thanks to available subsidies, it got a $156-million tax refund.

Benefits for the unemployed are subject to "debate" but corporate welfare gets the backing of the Congressional oil whore caucus until forever.

But where are the jobs, Neil?

After whipping his caucus into uniformly opposing the stimulus, Cantor has been the lead spokesman decrying the program as a failure. Ignoring evidence that that the stimulus is helping to turn around the economy, Cantor repeatedly says that it is “failing” to “create jobs.”

As ThinkProgress reported last year, despite his withering attacks on the stimulus, Cantor hosted two job fairs filled with employers hiring directly because of stimulus grants and programs. Tomorrow, Cantor intends to again host a job fair stimulated by jobs made possible through the Recovery Act.

Nothing like a little two-faced hypocrisy to keep one in office, huh? According to ThinkProgress, the employers scheduled to be at Cantor's job fair have collected more than $50,000,000 in stimulus funds. And this puts the lie to whole "the stimulus hasn't worked--where are the jobs?" meme. Anyone with an ounce of sense (or honesty) understands that employment is a lagging indicator and that the early part of this recovery would appear to be "jobless". But that doesn't get you on the air at Fox News, does it, Cantor?

Let's add Cantor with the other 113 lawmakers who wanted to kill the stimulus and yet try to take credit for it too. (h/t ThinkProgress)

Minority Rules LiberalOasis

Perhaps the most stunning part of the intel reform debacle is that the Speaker of the House admitted he had the votes to pass it.

Just not enough GOP votes to avoid making the Dems look good.

From the NY Times:

[Speaker Dennis] Hastert did not want to split his caucus and did not want the bill to pass with less than "a majority of the majority," said his spokesman, John Feehery.

"What good is it to pass something," Mr. Feehery said, "where most of our members don't like it?"

Well, there is a little thing called "the public good."

But that requires putting governing ahead of politics.

And that's not how the GOP got to where it is, so why start now?

Of course, saying the bill doesn't have support of the "majority of the majority" is a fancy, self-serving way to say a loud minority is opposed.

And that when a loud minority is opposed, it's important to wait -- as Senate Majority Leader Frist said -- until we "get it right".

Hmm. Does Frist apply the same logic to, say, judicial nominations?

Not exactly. As he said on CBS' Face The Nation this Sunday:

...let's take a nominee from the president, who has majority support in the Senate, and let's deny senators the opportunity to vote. It's wrong.

Any attempt to claim simple majority rule is a consistent principle of the GOP is now shot to hell.

So when the GOP tries to use it later, it should be quickly shoved down their throat.

We all know the Framers wanted the minority to have rights, to prevent a tyranny of the majority.

The question for the public to judge, both with today's intelligence reform and tomorrow's judges, is not if the minority has a right to object. Of course they do.

Instead the question is, what is the quality of the minority's objections?

Is the Pentagon's loss of turf, and lack of unrelated provisions on undocumented immigrant workers enough to warrant delay on the intelligence reform the 9/11 Commission says is "essential"?

And should the Senate roll over for activist right-wing judges who want to turn the clock back on equal rights, labor protections and environmental protections?

So Much For Moral Values Molly Ivins

My, my, gonna be a long four years. House Republicans have rewritten the ethics rules so Tom DeLay won't have to resign if indicted after all. Let's hear it for moral values. DeLay is one of the leading forces in making "Republican ethics" into an oxymoron.

The rule was passed in 1993, when Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, was being investigated for ethics violations. And who helped lead the floor fight to force him to resign his powerful position? Why, Tom DeLay, of course. (Actually, it's sort of a funny story. The D's already had a caucus rule that you had to resign from any leadership position if indicted. The R's changed their rules to match the D's, except they deliberately did not make their rule retroactive, so the highly indicted Rep. Joseph McDade, senior Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, could, unlike Rostenkowski, retain his seat.)

DeLay has already been admonished by the House ethics committee three times on separate violations of ethics rules. Please note, that is the Republican-dominated ethics committee. The hilarious rationale offered by the R's for the new rule to exempt DeLay is that no one can accuse them of taking the moral low road here because, "That line of reasoning accepts that exercise of the prosecutor in Texas is legitimate." Uh, that would Ronnie Earle of Austin, who is a known Democrat. One the other hand, Earle is quite noted for having indicted more Democratic officeholders than Republicans, so it's a little hard to argue that this is a partisan political probe. Or it would be, if facts made any difference these days to talk-show screamers...

That's Nancy Pelosi walking up the steps of the Capitol building, carrying the same gavel used when Congress passed Medicare in 1965. The rule debate is beginning now. Twitter users can follow along here. Or watch streaming video of the debate via C-Span. Huff Po:

At Pelosi's side were Georgia congressman and civil rights-era leader John Lewis and her close friend Rep. David Obey (D-Wisc.).

Speaking to HuffPost's Arthur Delaney, Rep. Dingell expressed confidence that reform would pass when asked if he thought Democrats had the votes.

"I wouldn't be walking this way if I didn't," said the Michigan Democrat, who ambled into the meeting on crutches instead of in a wheelchair. The caucus could be heard applauding him when he entered the room.

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) told HuffPost that Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) and his anti-abortion bloc of Democrats were not discussed during a last-minute morning meeting of Democrats. He echoed Speaker Pelosi in saying he expected the bill would pass. Asked whether Stupak would be a 'yes' vote, Rep. Sandy Levin said, "I think so."

Final vote on the Senate bill: 219-212

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Nicole already weighed in on that mind-blowing piece of legislation about to become law in Utah that would make pregnant women criminally liable for "reckless behavior" that results in a miscarriage.

The man behind the law, Utah Republican legislator Carl Wimmer, appeared on CNN yesterday to defend his bill, which he claims will only be usable in the worst of circumstances.

Right. He never does explain why it treats women as presumptive criminals, and expands the definition of "illegal abortion" to include miscarriages. Nor does he explain why 93 percent of the women in Utah don't have legal abortions available within their home counties.

But that's par for the course. You see, Carl Wimmer isn't just your run-of-the-mill Utah Republican (see, e.g., Orrin Hatch). He's a flaming Tea Party fan (as his Facebook testimonial makes clear: "I am involved in the Tea Party and 912 movements."

He's not just involved in Glenn Beck's "912" teabagging movement -- he made an appearance on Beck's special "town hall" show last May promoting not just the "912ers," but Beck's wholesale embrace of the "Tenther" theories from the militia movement of the '90s.

Ironically, here's what Wimmer ranted about back then:

Wimmer: The Patrick Henry Caucus, we formed it in Utah, and the way I look at it is, it brings teeth to what the 912ers are doing. I'm a 912er. And the citizens are frustrated. The citizens are sick and tired of liberties and freedoms being destroyed, all the time. And the government doing it.

So what I decided to do, I'm sick of it, I know some of my fellow legislators were sick of it, and I know there's other legislators around the country who are sick of it. So I decided to form the Patrick Henry Caucus, which is state legislators from throughout the country who are going to unify and join together to push forward the agenda that the 912 group supports, and we're gonna do this together. The citizens can't do it together -- they can write letters, and they can organize. But they need the lawmakers, who can help repeal some of these laws, and fight back against a tyrannical federal government.

I dunno about you, but "freedoms being destroyed" and "tyrannical" seem to me like pretty apt descriptions for laws that invade women's wombs. Just sayin'.

None of this is particularly surprising. But it's interesting to see how Glenn Beck's version of "freedom" plays out on the ground when his minions put into action, isn't it?

Will women's rights will get thrown under the bus -- again -- along with poor people? I sure hope Nancy Pelosi refuses to go along with this blackmail, but I'm not hopeful:

WASHINGTON — The future of President Obama’s health care overhaul now rests largely with two blocs of swing Democrats in the House of Representatives — abortion opponents and fiscal conservatives — whose indecision signals the difficulties Speaker Nancy Pelosi faces in securing the votes necessary to pass the bill.

With Republicans unified in their opposition, Democrats are drafting plans to try on their own to pass a bill based on one Mr. Obama unveiled before his bipartisan health forum last week. His measure hews closely to the one passed by the Senate in December, but differs markedly from the one passed by the House.

That leaves Ms. Pelosi in the tough spot of trying to keep wavering members of her caucus on board, while persuading some who voted no to switch their votes to yes — all at a time when Democrats are worried about their prospects for re-election.