Texas GOP Promises To Stop Committing Crimes

The Texas Republican Party has struck what might be the sweetest deal in the criminal justice system since Al Capone went to jail for income tax evasion:

The Republican Party of Texas avoided prosecution Thursday by agreeing to stop using corporate money in several ways being investigated by Travis County Attorney David Escamilla.

Escamilla's investigation, which is similar to allegations being pursued by Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle against U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay and the Texas Association of Business, is put on hold through March 31, 2007. In return, the Republican Party agrees to stop using corporate money the way it did during the 2002 election. The party's administrative expenses spiked five-fold to about $5.6 million that year.

State law generally prohibits corporate money being spent in connection with campaigns. The law allows political parities to spend corporate money to run their conventions and on administrative overhead. Escamilla had studied some 27,000 GOP documents, but his investigation in the end focused on three instances of using corporate money. [Austin American Statesman

Here's how this works: If the Republicans promise to stop breaking the laws they broke in 2002, the DA won't prosecute them for the 2002 infractions until after the 2006 elections.
By Lindsay Beyerstein of

Hell has officially frozen over. After more than a decade of hyper-partisanship and knee-jerk, reactionary opposition to the other, the entire political spectrum of Meet the Press's roundtable panel--Markos Moulitsas, Joe Scarborough, Ed Gillespie and Tavis Smiley--all agree on one thing: the health-care reform bill sucks. There's the vaunted bipartisanship Obama sought.

Laughing off Whiter House adviser David Axelrod's spin of the historic (and not-as-bad-as-it-seems) nature of the bill, Markos points out that all this bill does is expand an already broken system, a proven failed program in Massachusetts. Scarborough adds that for all the White House talk that the insurance companies hate the bill, there is no regulation that Congress didn't capitulate on after pushback from the insurance lobbies and if they hate it so much, why has the value of their stock gone up so much recently? Former RNC Chair Ed Gillespie can barely contain his glee at the thought of the seats the GOP will pick up, because of this bill, and Smiley notes that Candidate Obama's rhetoric doesn't measure up to President Obama's actions and bemoans the incrementalism mentality:

I do believe that you have to stand on your principle. With all due respect to the White House and the President, who deserves who deserves great credit for taking this issue on and pushing further down the field than any other seven Presidents have done, you still have to ask, where is the principle that we started out with, and how firm have we stood on that principle? I thnk the danger for this White House is this: that the President and his team appear to be incrementalists. I warned the last time I was on this program, quoting Dr. King, about taking “the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.”

I love that line, and it resonates as much today as it did when Dr. King tried dissuade those who wanted to take an incremental approach to civil rights and segregation.

The sad thing is how clear this is to us here outside the Beltway, and how badly calculated this was to those inside the White House. And I don't think this was some malevolent intent on their part, but just a triangulating, DLC/Centrist move that completely didn't take into account that we now inhabit the post-Clinton/Bush era. I don't think there's any question that the White House must accept responsibility for the lameness of the bill--although they'll never do it publicly and risk giving more fodder to the GOP media--Feingold and Webb are already pointing fingers.

And at this point, I don't know what can be done to make this better. Tempting as it might be to thrown in the towel, the ramifications of that politically (you throw a bone like that to the GOP and nothing will get through Congress next session) will be a nightmare, and besides which, there's no guarantee they'd be able to achieve anything, much less anything better on a second go-round. So all in all, I have to agree with Joe Scarborough, as much as it deeply pains me to do so: we've been screwed.

Absolute shocker tonight as the special election in MS-01, one of the reddest districts on the map, has been won by Democrat Travis Childers. Russert, Matthews, Olbermann, and even Huckabee all agree: this is very, very bad news for the GOP.

Download | play Download | play (h/t Heather)

Both Darth Cheney (Russert's words) and Mike Huckabee campaigned for Childers' opponent. Maybe it's not a good idea to have the least popular guy in America promoting you. Just a thought.

The Democrats are now 3-for-3 in these red district special elections: Along with Childers' win tonight, Bill Foster took Denny Hastert's old IL seat, and Dan Cazayoux took the solidly red 6th district in LA.

Another bit of good news comes out of Nebraska tonight, where true Democrat Scott Kleeb beat out fake Democrat Tony Raimondo by a wide margin for the right to take a run at Chuck Hagel's open seat. Congrats, Scott.

alicublog: Bush I parties with Sun Myung Moon, Bush II goes to Bob Jones University, John McCain seeks and accepts the endorsement of John Hagee, and it slides. Barack Obama renounces Rev. Wright, and we are told that the taint is indelible. The trouble starts when pols ignore this and do this. TBogg has more on the subject...

The Left Coaster: All of the above is Hillary's fault.

The Newshoggers: Enlisting opinions.

Connecting.the.Dots: The ultimate triumph of George W. Bush. The Chimperor and the rest of our dysfunctional ruling class are always wrong about everything.

JURIST: Torture Doctors

Sunday Bookchat: Three decades of rebel-rousing by a reggae poet! A handbook for liberals in the era post-Bush! A Travis McGee novel for Eliot Spitzer! When is a blurb more than a blurb? When is wit only half of what it seeks? These and other questions answered in The Opinion Mill's Sunday Bookchat.

(Photo of hands warming up on a cuppa hot coffee via di+mars.)

The Sunday Talking Head thread is up and ready for perusal this morning.  It's a whole lotta Iraq and bloviating, and not much else, frankly.  But there could be some interesting sparks on CNN's Late Edition if Rep. Tom Lantos gets asked about why Rush Limbaugh is an ill-informed, bloviating moron.  (Here's hoping Blitzer gives him the chance...but I'm not exactly holding my breath.)   I wanted to highlight a story from Nova Scotia that one of my readers (Audrey -- thanks!) linked up in my comments.  It makes for much better Sunday morning contemplation.  Via the Chronicle Herald:

Two students at Central Kings Rural High School fought back against bullying recently, unleashing a sea of pink after a new student was harassed and threatened when he showed up wearing a pink shirt.

The Grade 9 student arrived for the first day of school last Wednesday and was set upon by a group of six to 10 older students who mocked him, called him a homosexual for wearing pink and threatened to beat him up.

The next day, Grade 12 students David Shepherd and Travis Price decided something had to be done about bullying.

"It’s my last year. I’ve stood around too long and I wanted to do something," said David.

They used the Internet to encourage people to wear pink and bought 75 pink tank tops for male students to wear. They handed out the shirts in the lobby before class last Friday — even the bullied student had one.

"I made sure there was a shirt for him," David said....

So, what's catching your eye in the news and on the blogs this morning?

via ctx3

"... On NPR this morning I was listening to his interview with Diane Rehm and he was discussing his bankruptcy bill that is being debated in the House. He was drawing a comparison between credit card companies and alcoholic drink companies. His line of comparison was that we do not blame the company that made the alcohol when a person is weak and becomes an alcoholic while a credit card company can get blamed for the misuse of credit when a person is weak and uses their credit card too much."

Memo to Grassler, in 1956 the American Medical Association declares alcoholism an illness. In Physician's News Digest they talk about handling that disease. If Sen.Grassely draws the analogy of credit card debt to alcoholism, then aren't these people suffering from a disease? Shouldn't they be treated like people with an illness, and not a weakness? I can't go a day without getting a credit card offer in the mail with a huge credit line, low interest rate, and those cute, preprinted checks with my name plastered across them. (a huge cause of identity theft) Isn't that like sending an alocholic a bottle of hooch in the mail every day and expect that person not to drink it? Of course this bill does not address the credit card companies culpability in credit card abuse.

Our overall concern is that this isn't a balanced bill," said Travis Plunkett, spokesman for the Consumer Federation of America, a nonprofit consumer research and advocacy group. "There isn't a single curb on abusive lending practices by credit card companies in these bills."

via Norbizness

Anyone else get the feeling that the national GOP leadership is Travis Bickle and he's just found his Iris (Jodie Foster). Except in this version of Taxi Driver, he ends up killing everybody, including Iris, and thereafter receives a Presidential pardon for having participated in the My Lai massacre. In other, obviously less important, news:... read on