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Rick Sanchez reports on another Republican sex scandal coming out of South Carolina. Gotta' love that party of "family values".

SANCHEZ: Hey, Roge, let's see how good a move we can make over to the Twitter board real quick, because a lot of people are commenting on this. There it is. Start from the bottom if we can.

Hug bug, "What is in the water in South Carolina?" Now, let's go just above that, where it says, "Another politician with a sex scandal, that is so common nowadays and they're supposed to be role models? Ha!"

We get what you're saying, folks

Let's talk about that. Just last week, I asked this question, what's up with South Carolina Republicans? Beginning with Mark Sanford, the famously wayward governor, why can't they seem to be staying out of trouble these days? There's Governor Sanford, there's Congressman Joe "Big Scream You Lie" Wilson. We just had two county chairmen who essentially said Jews are good with money.

And as if on cue now, we have Roland Corning. Who is Roland Corning, you ask? He's a former state legislator, and as of now, his latest performance, former assistant attorney general. Why?

Get this -- a police report obtained by the "Associated Press" is saying that Corning was questioned by an officer after speeding away from a cemetery with a stripper in his car, and with a bag of sex toys. And with some Viagra, Corning, I should tell you, is 66 years old. According to the police: the stripper, 18 years old. She works, by the way, at an establishment known as the Platinum Gentleman's Club.

According to the report, Assistant Attorney General Corning and the 18-year-old stripper gave conflicting accounts as to exactly what they were doing on Corning's lunch hour? In a cemetery? It states that Corning carried the sex toys, just in case.

Neither Corning nor the stripper was charged with anything. But after word reached his boss, Corning was stripped -- pardon the pun -- of the job he'd had since 2000. I mean assistant attorney general, stripper, sex toys, Viagra, cemetery, don't look good. South Carolina -- again?

Update: Michael Duvall has resigned. h/t commenter vorhese.

I've said for years that most politicians are in bed with lobbyists, but in the case of California Republican Michael Duvall, he's actually getting his freak on with one. Duvall gets the Jesse Jackson treatment, getting caught with an open microphone, bragging about making love and spanking his much younger mistress:

"And we had made love Wednesday. A lot."

"So I am getting into spanking her...yeah, I like it."

"I like spanking her. She goes, I know you like spanking me."

This bit of gotcha journalism wouldn't interest me much, but for the fact that Duvall considers himself to be one of those family values Republicans -- who just happens to be having kinky sex outside of his marriage.

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Rachel reports on the lastest information on the John Ensign affair from the Las Vegas Sun: Emails between Ensign NRSC lieutenants, Hamptons show affair was known inside organization more than a year ago. Those emails can be read here and here.

Now, who is responsible for the Republican Party‘s fiasco in the Senate in the 2008 election? Who was in charge of the Republican Party‘s efforts to hold on to its seats in the Senate, efforts that failed so epically?

Hey, it was Sen. John Ensign of Nevada. He was in charge of the National Republican Senatorial Committee for 2007 and 2008. That‘s the campaign arm of the Republican Party responsible for the Senate.

While he was supposedly getting busy then overseeing the run-up to his party‘s 2008 shellacking in the Senate, you may recall he was also getting busy with one of his staffers, putting her son on the NRSC payroll, finding jobs for her husband, and asking his own parents to give financial gifts, lots of them, to his mistress‘s family. That‘s a lot to do while you‘re trying to get folks elected to the U.S. Senate. I wonder if he‘s a good multi-tasker.

Well, tonight there is new evidence that Sen. Ensign was not the only one at the National Republican Senatorial Committee who might have been distracted by his extramarital affair while preparing for that ill-fated election.

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I wonder if the South really appreciates Vitter's defense of them since he's been linked to hookers and diapers. I also have to wonder who had a hand in firebombing the car of Stormy Daniels' political adviser. She's Vitter's opponent for his Senate seat. Mr. Family Values and a regular customer of the D.C. Madam, Sen. David Vitter came out in defense of the south after Sen. Voinovich criticized the Republican Party for being way too Southern-fried.

Sen. George V. Voinovich, Ohio Republican, reignited the debate about the direction of the struggling party when he told a newspaper Monday that the biggest problem for Republicans right now is conservative Southerners, particularly Sens. Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.

"They get on TV and go 'errrr, errrrr . . .' People hear them and say, 'These people, they're Southerners,'" said Mr. Voinovich, who is not seeking re-election in 2010. "The party's being taken over by Southerners. What they hell have they got to do with Ohio?"

The hooker-loving Vitter shot back with this:

"I'm on the side of conservatives getting back to core conservative values," said Mr. Vitter, Louisiana Republican and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "There are a lot of us from the South who hold those values, which I think the party is supposed to be about. We strayed from them in the past few years, and that's why we performed so badly in the national elections."

...Mr. Vitter also criticized Mr. Voinovich for voting last week against a failed amendment sponsored by Mr. Vitter and Sen. John Thune, South Dakota Republican, to expand Americans' ability to carry concealed weapons.

"He's a moderate, really wishy-washy," Mr. Vitter said.

Let's see who has it right---a moderate, or a diaper dandy?

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Here we go again. Another phony pro-life or should I say, anti-choice republican gets exposed in dirty dealings. He's not so much against the idea of sex as wanting the young ones for himself.

We have lift off. The lying liar Rep. Paul Stanley has resigned from his seat after having and affair with an intern and then being blackmailed.

Sen. Paul Stanley, R-Germantown sent a letter of resignation to Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey this afternoon after allegations that a Clarksville man had tried to blackmail the senator with nude photos of an intern taken in Stanley’s Nashville apartment.

Earlier today, Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris told a Memphis TV station that Stanley should “do the right thing for his family’s sake and for the sake of his constituents” and step down so a new election for his seat can be held.Norris said in a statement released Tuesday that Republican leaders have been working behind the scenes for about a week to get Stanley to step down. Stanley told agents from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation that he had a sexual relationship with the intern, McKensie Morrison, a 22-year-old Austin Peay student from Dickson, but has declined to speak publicly about the matter. He may be doing an interview with a Memphis radio station within the hour.

Just another right wing family values creep gets exposed. Sex for him but not for thee. How long will it be until he starts quoting the Bible? Maybe he should email Mark Sanford for some spiritual advice. Unfortunately for him, Sanford already took the ever popular "God is on my side," line. I'm sure he'll find another.

Don Grant is a Baby Boomer, nearly fifty years old, struggling to meet his monthly mortgage while paying off his daughter’s $100,000 in student loans. Last year, like so many other Americans, he lost his job, going months before finding work for less pay at a firm that sell foreclosures.

A month later, to add insult to injury, he found himself being sued by a Delaware County nursing home where his mother – with whom he had been estranged since childhood, having been raised by his grandparents – had racked up a $8,000 bill she refused to pay, the latest of a long string of debts racking up many thousands of dollars Diana Fichera has refused to pay. Under an archaic law dating back to Elizabethan England, the law can force adult children to pay for their parents’ medical care, even if they have the money and simply refuse to pay. Diana Fichera, who with a $1,434 monthly pension in addition a second pension and Social Security benefits, is better off financially than either her son or his half-sister, also dragged into the lawsuit. But pensions and Social Security are exempt from being garnished for debts – so the nursing home’s lawyers went after the children. Don Grant couldn’t afford even the $400 for a lawyer, so tried to represent himself against the full battery of the Blue Bell legal firm. Not surprisingly, he lost.

So now he is faced with a stark choice: Go into even further debt to pay his irresponsible mother’s medical bills, or ignore it, risking total financial collapse. "If I go to buy a car, it's going to affect my credit," he says. "If we try to sell the house, it will come up."

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Yet another gem from the "Party of Family Values":

Arguing to restrict the public funding of abortions within the District of Columbia, Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kans.) suggested on Thursday afternoon that if such "financial incentives" were available some 47 years ago, President Barack Obama himself may never have been born.

"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," said Tiahrt. "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?" Tiahrt asked. "Clarence Thomas, Supreme Court Justice, if those circumstances were in place, is it possible that we would be denied his great mind? The opportunity to have tax-funded abortions, a financial incentive, is something that I think most of us want to oppose in America and it's certainly deserves a clean up or down vote."

So is Tiahrt suggesting that only black babies get aborted? Has Tiahrt been spending time with Bill Bennett? It's a little horrifying to me that more than 45 years after MLK's March on Washington, the GOP still feels no shame in expressing their abject racism so openly. It is a small comfort that Tiahrt was booed by his colleagues.

Tiahrt is running for Sam Brownback's Senate seat in 2010, and given the tenor of his comments, I'd say he's attempting to reach out to the same base.

However, such sickening allusions--can you imagine the GOP uproar if a Congressman had suggested that Barbara Bush might have wanted to consider an abortion?--should not go unchallenged. The Kansas Democratic Party has put together a petition demanding an apology from Tiahrt: Take it back, Todd.

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On Fox News Sunday when asked if John Ensign or Mark Sanford should resign given that their staying in office is making the GOP look like hypocrites for claiming to be the party of family values, Cantor punts and says they're not a party of personalities, but of ideas. Anyone think he'd have given a different answer if he were being asked about Democrats resigning?

He also completely ignores the part of Wallace's question where he mentions the potentially illegal use private or government money. And like the good little Villager, Wallace doesn't press him on it either. I'm surprised he even asked him the question in the first place. Heaven forbid he'd want to come down too hard on the Republicans' new "rising star", as Cantor was introduced for the segment.

WALLACE: Finally, when you’ve got Republican leaders like Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina or Nevada Senator John Ensign admitting to extramarital affairs and staying in office, questionable use of either private funds or state money, in the case of Sanford, doesn’t the GOP, with all its talk of family values, risk looking like a bunch of hypocrites?

CANTOR: Look, I mean, is anyone happy to see all that have happened? No. I mean, it’s not good. But listen. We have our thoughts with their families and they themselves.

However, look. The party is not just about personalities. It’s about ideas. It’s about our ability to go out and prove that yes, we can lead this country again. So we have got a plan. We are talking about the solutions that actually can address some of the problems that working people in this country are facing, and we’re going to do that over the course of the next 16 months.

WALLACE: But if you’re going to talk the talk, why not walk the walk and say, “You know what? They should step down?”

CANTOR: Well, listen. I mean, again, I say in the instance of the people in South Carolina and Nevada, it is up to them, and those are the elected individuals by those states.

And again, it’s not about, necessarily, these personalities. The direction of this country -- and the challenges that we face are enormous. And we ought to be talking about how to go about creating jobs again. We ought to be talking about the things that matter most to people in this country.

WALLACE: Congressman Cantor, we want to thank you. Thanks for coming in today and please come back, sir.

CANTOR: Pleasure. Thank you, Chris.

From my pal Lisa Derrick: Family Values? Red States Lead in Divorce, Teen Pregnancy and Online Porn

What is astounding is the New York Times chart which takes politicians out of the mix and breaks it down into the values that the Right espouses: Anti-divorce, anti-porn and anti-teen sex. Well gosh, even with my admittedly and embarrassingly bad math skills, it's clear that eight out of the ten states with highest rates in the categories of divorce, teen pregnancy and online porn usage were states where McCain came out ahead in the 2008 election.

Ahhhh, help...we need more teabaggers to save us...

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Listening to Republicans Peggy Noonan and Kathleen Parker on the panel of This Week practically swooning over Mark Sanford's emails to his mistress and excusing his behavior was truly a sight to behold. They both looked downright giddy this morning while dismissing his actions because he was in love.

Paul Krugman and Michael Eric Dyson do their best to try to point out that the trouble is not so much the cheating since it is human nature which is not reserved for one party, but the hypocrisy of the Republicans being the party of family values and people like Mark Sanford's words coming back to bite him. Of course Noonan and Parker were having none of that.

Noonan: Ooohh...I never think that when politicians, Democrats and Republicans get in these stories, that the story itself, the sin itself if you will, undermines what the politician stands for necessarily. Mark Sanford's Libertarian/traditional views are right or wrong on their own. Um..I must say I've been thinking about Clinton a lot and it seems to me that in the Clinton era, during that famous story, a new devilishness was unleashed, especially in the media where a new meanness took style.

And I feel like in every one of the scandals of the past few months, and we've had so many of them, the political sex scandals, the level of meanness of the response, publicly, and on cable and the newspapers, gets meaner each time. It seems to me that we are coming, we are reacting as almost as a nation, but certainly in the media as kind of Puritans without faith, which is the worst of both worlds. To be Puritanical and not even have faith.

I'm sorry Peggy, but the treatment any of the Republicans of late have gotten in the press pales in comparison to what the media did to Bill Clinton. And the media are not the ones being Puritans. The Republicans are the ones who have held themselves out there as the party of virtue and family values. The press didn't invent that.

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In the wake of the Mark Sanford revelations, Chris Matthews gets Ken Blackwell to concede that the Republican Party is not morally superior to the Democratic Party. It's nice to see the hypocrisy of the "family values" party being called out for once.

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Bob Beckel manages to get Sean Hannity to admit that anyone who claims to be a family values politician and doesn't live up to that ought to resign, but Hannity feigns stupidity on knowing where John Ensign stands on the subject.

BECKEL: Can I just speak to what you did in this segment here for a second?

HANNITY: You can do whatever you want.

BECKEL: You go to this thing with John Ensign, right, about Harry Reid. He's more popular than -- now, this is a guy -- you're a big family values guy. Here's a guy that cheats on his wife, not just with somebody, but somebody on his staff who's married. Now what do you think? Are you defending John Ensign?

HANNITY: That sounds like a liberal Democrat to me.

BECKEL: That was good.

PRAGER: Wait, wait, wait. What does have it to do with...

BECKEL: Excuse me. Excuse me for a second, Mr. University Prager. I want -- I want him to answer this question.

HANNITY: My answer is, if you're going to be a family-values candidate and a family-values politician, and you don't live up to that, I think you should resign.

BECKEL: Well...

HANNITY: I don't know where he stands.

BECKEL: Oh, he's big.

HANNITY: But with that said, it is interesting that Harry, you know, Prince Pelosi, Prince Harry and Princess Pelosi. His ratings are lower than the guy that had an affair.

BECKEL: All I'm saying is let the record show that that you called for John Ensign to resign.

HANNITY: I don't know where he stands on the issues.

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