The Full Clinton

Via Alan Colmes this morning:

Republican Congressman Walter Jones wants to impeach President Obama over his actions in Libya. House Concurrent Resolution 107 is his bill, which begins:

Expressing the sense of Congress that the use of offensive military force by a President without prior and clear authorization of an Act of Congress constitutes an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor under article II, section 4 of the Constitution.

And so it begins.  Perhaps the resolution should be called the Sad Attempt To Get Republican Turnout Act.  Obama Derangement Syndrome, America’s greatest untapped unnatural resource.

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When I marry Mrs. Snowe

This is pathetic, even for Frank Bruni (who I believe has the potential to be the Richard Cohen of his generation):

BACK in 1999, when I covered Congress, I had a kind of crush on Olympia Snowe. Many of us in the Senate press gallery did.

She moved, dressed and treated people — even reporters, and even when we hounded her through the hallways of the Capitol — with an unforced, uncommon graciousness. She spoke with intelligence and almost never with vitriol.

But those weren’t the main reasons we had such soft spots for her. We liked her best for her disobedience. Unlike the majority of her colleagues in the Senate, be they Democrats or, like her, Republicans, she dared to disagree with her party. Often. And she did it publicly, with her votes and her forthright explanations of them.

Even then, in times that were a bit less harshly partisan, this was unusual, and she had limited company, though it included Susan Collins, Maine’s other senator, also a Republican and also one of our heroes. Snowe and Collins offered proof and reassurance: just because you identified yourself principally with one side in the ceaseless fight, wearing an R or a D, it didn’t mean you signed on automatically to everything it championed, to each plank in its sprawling (and often suffocating) platform. These two senators validated the fact that a person’s values, philosophy and priorities are more complex than a political tribe’s often tyrannical orthodoxy. And that the tribe’s package of positions isn’t necessarily coherent, each fitting naturally with the others. Snowe and Collins made human sense. Their peers usually didn’t. Those dutiful foot soldiers marched in dreary lock step with their given generals, infrequently demonstrating any real individuality, any rebel spunk.

Snowe and Collins are moderate-to-liberal people who did what a bunch of right-wing crackpots told them to do 90% of the time, offering futile-but-self-dramatizing resistance the other 10% of the time. If that’s what passes for courage in our society, I hope that meteor gets here sooner rather than later.

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Pulling One Snowe-ver On Us

Jon Chait argues this morning that Sen. Olympia Snowe’s surprise announcement that she’s quitting the 2012 race is really nothing the Dems should be cheering, because all indications are that the real reason behind her bowing out is that Americans Elect and their Sensible Centrist shenanigans are afoot, judging from her outro statement.

This sounds exactly like the kind of rhetoric emanating from Americans Elect, the third-party group that believes that both parties should put aside partisanship and come together to enact an ever-so-slightly more conservative version of Barack Obama’s agenda. Moderate retiring senators often deliver lofty, vacuous paeans to bipartisanship on their way to a lucrative lobbying career. But Snowe’s statement seems unusually specific (“unique opportunities to build support for that change from outside the United States Senate”) about her intent to do something.

I suspect it may not be coincidental that David Boren, the former Democratic senator from Oklahoma and oil industry lickspittle, came out for Americans Elect today. The group is set up so that its presidential and vice-presidential candidates need to come from opposing parties. The process is set up to, at least putatively, allow the voters to choose the ticket. But Americans Elect and its well-heeled funders have maintained tight control over the proceedings to ensure their envisioned ticket pairing establishmentarian insiders can prevail over candidates like , say, Ron Paul who might be able to actually win an open vote.

Snowe and Boren would make for the kind of ticket Americans Elect is looking for. Is that the plan?

Americans Elect is definitely designed to take votes away from one candidate and give a “less than 50% popular vote but 270+ electoral vote” situation, which will faithfully be interpreted by the Village as a “you don’t have a mandate so you’d better listen to us” win.  That would be more effective if used against Barack Obama, but I’m not entirely convinced that the Americans Elect ticket would hurt only the President, especially given Romney as the GOP nominee.

On the other hand if you believe that there’s going to be a brokered convention leading to a crackpot wingnut non-Romney nominee however, Americans Elect is exactly the vehicle that could give that nominee the win in November.

On the gripping hand, Romney keeps winning the GOP primary voters whose motivation is solely defeating Barack Obama.  It’s also very possible that the anti-Obama vote will line up behind Romney, and with Americans Elect in the mix, it could be enough to put Mitt in the White House even with an otherwise depressed GOP base.

And yes, Snowe would have won re-election easily, unlike Arlen Specter or Evan F’ckin Bayh or Joe Lieberman.  She bailed for a reason, and Cohn’s argument as to why makes sense.

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That Whole Respectful Disagreement Thing

Digby is dead right when she raises all kinds of alarm bells about the Dems’ number 2 guy in the House, Steny Hoyer, talking to Our Centrist Third Way Betters about deficit reduction legislation.

In a speech hosted Monday morning by Third Way, Hoyer revealed that he and other lawmakers are looking for the right moment to introduce a bill that would achieve the sorts of deficit reduction goals that have eluded Congress and the White House thus far.

“Members of both parties, and on both sides of the Capitol, are working to ensure that the next time we find ourselves at an impasse — which could be sooner, rather than later — we will be ready, with a legislative package in hand to address our debt and deficit in a comprehensive, long-term way,” Hoyer said.

Hoyer declined to discuss the specifics of this bill, but suggested it would deal with spending and tax policies of all kinds. He and his colleagues face one key problem: there’s a lot of white space on the legislative calendar this year, and that means they’ll have a hard time leveraging unwilling members into action.

If, however, he can get members of both parties to vote in significant numbers for this bill — including broad Republican support for higher taxes — it would have significant implications for both Congressional elections, and the ultimate policy direction the government takes when it ultimately does lock in a deficit reduction plan.

Yeah, I trust Steny Hoyer about as far as he can throw me.  He serves a useful purpose as long as Nancy Pelosi is the one calling the shots, but if Hoyer had his druthers, we’d be up to our necks in Blue Dog crap with no pooper scooper in sight.   My issue is with Digby’s characterization at the end:

I’m beginning to think we should elect the most crazed Tea Partiers we can find and encourage them to hold fast and never pass any bill that President Obama might sign. With Democrats like Hoyer around, it’s probably our only hope.

Ironically if that’s Colbertian satire, it’s not funny, because that’s basically what 2010 proved when voters did exactly that in the House and in state legislatures across the country in a redistricting year (hindsight and all.)  If she’s being truthful, it’s even less funny and for the same reason.  Yeah, we need better Democrats than Hoyer, and the bar for that is “breathing and recognizes President Obama as the leader of the party and will not piss on him repeatedly in public” and all, but c’mon.

First of all, there’s no way Hoyer’s deficit reduction foolishness means he’s going to get anything done that the President can sign as bi-partisan anything during an election year.  Republicans aren’t serious about deficit reduction at all (see the payroll tax cut) and if anything, they want to increase the deficit in order to push up a debt ceiling fight from 2013 to as close to October as they can (again, see the payroll tax cut).

Secondly, giving the President something the centrists will get tingles over in an election year is not something the GOP is going to allow, period.

And finally, the irony this is that “electing the most crazed Tea Partiers we can find” is how we got into this entire mess we’re in right now.  No matter what President Obama signs, it has to go through Congress and the Sausage-Making Process™ first.  The key there is getting more and better Dems.

I know, I’m reading way too much into this, but it’s not like the stakes aren’t Mt. Everest high.  So far, the joke’s been on us for the last fifteen months, or do we really think that having birth control, affirmative action, and separation of church and state reviewed is a good idea or something?  Maybe there’s more pressing issues than what Steny Hoyer might “give away at the table” right now, people.  Just an observation.

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There are no big secrets, you can’t believe what you read

In a few months, establishment media will cease all serious criticism of Mitt Romney. He will be seen as a serious, resolute, Burkean moderate and anyone who disagrees will be cast as a highly partisan liberal. So let’s enjoy this while we can:

The most consistent note in Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign is attacking his rivals for their ideological inconsistency. It’s a nervy strategy for a candidate whose own greatest vulnerability is the sense, especially among conservatives, that he has serially reconsidered his positions for political advantage on issues from abortion to gay rights to immigration.

[....]

In 2004, Republican strategist Karl Rove made famous the tactic of attacking an opponent’s greatest strength by directly assaulting Democrat John Kerry’s credentials on national security. Romney seems to be taking that idea one step further by attacking his opponents on a front that is perceived to be his own greatest weakness. Or maybe Romney is just validating the old belief that the best defense is a good offense.

Greg Sargent asks the obvious question:

Fun thought experiment: Imagine the wall-to-wall media mockery that John Kerry or Al Gore would have endured if they’d tried even a fraction of the shenanigans Romney has resorted to so far.

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Suck on this, Tommy

A pretty awesome put-down of Friedman’s relentless pimping for Americans Elect by Harold Meyerson:

If Mitt Romney manages to squeak through with the GOP nomination, there won’t be much political space that Americans Elect could occupy: Wall Street will already have a candidate of its own. But if Santorum is the GOP nominee, Americans Elect could offer an alternative for moderate Republicans and sundry independents.

This is why it took Americans Elect’s champions about a nanosecond after Santorum’s surge began to start promoting a candidate. The group’s foremost advocate, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, penned a column on Sunday introducing his readers to David Walker, the U.S. comptroller general from 1998 to 2008, and for two years thereafter the head of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, an organization established by the billionaire co-founder of the Blackstone Group to preach the gospel of cutting Social Security, Medicare and other government spending.

In his column, Friedman acknowledged that he wasn’t sure that a Walker presidential candidacy would positively affect the outcome of the election, but he stated that he’d “pay good money” to see such a candidate raising his points in the presidential debates. (Those who remember Friedman’s columns on the eve of the Iraq War, expressing doubts about the Bush administration’s ability to wage that war but supporting it nonetheless because it might just make things better, may see a pattern here.)

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Civility sells, but who’s buying

Fuck this:

Peter Gleick violated a principle rule of the global-warming debate: Climate scientists must be better than their opponents.

[...]

Taking the high road is not easy or fun. But Gleick and the rest of us who favor decarbonizing the world economy have to be, and should want to be, the adults in the debate. Gleick’s confession and apology Monday are more than climate scientists ever got from deniers for the overblown “Climategate” e-mail scandal. But it would have been far better if he hadn’t needed to provide either.

Why? They won’t get credit for being “better” even if they are. Politifact will rate the deniers’ claims as mostly true, Tom Friedman and Fred Hiatt will tell us the truth is in the middle, that Extremist Scientists are as bad as flat-earthers, etc. etc.

What’s the point of civiling while American burns? What does it accomplish?

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The very serious Glenn Beck

I’ve come around to thinking that the Global War On Birth Control is a bad issue for the right. It’s amazing how much establishment media is flogging the winger perspective on it, though. Kaplan today:

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It’s A Done Deal, Dude

Congress has Done Something, which in and of itself would qualify as news, but this time it’s passage of the various sausage-making implements involving extending the payroll tax cut, extended federal unemployment insurance, and the Medicare “doc fix” through the end of the year.

The bill cleared the Senate in a 60-36 vote less than an hour after the House approved it by a 293-132 margin.

A majority of House Republicans and Democrats voted in favor of the bill, though 91 Republicans and 41 Democrats in the chamber voted no. Senate Democrats voted overwhelmingly for the bill while Senate Republicans largely opposed it.

President Barack Obama has promised to sign the legislation as soon as he ends his current trip to the West Coast, ending debate on the politically sensitive measures at least for the duration of the election.

“This is a big deal,” the president told an audience in Washington state. “It is amazing what happens when Congress focuses on doing the right thing instead of just playing politics.”

And while the GOP did drop the payroll tax cut pay-for, paying for the other two required some…sacrifices.

Funding sources to pay for the benefits extension and the doc fix include savings from broadband spectrum sales, increased pension contributions by new federal employees, and cuts to Medicare hospital and specialist fees that will not affect patients, according to the House Ways and Means Committee.

Several Democrats from Maryland and Virginia—near Washington—voted against the package because, they argued, it treats federal employees unfairly by requiring new government hires to contribute more to their pension.

Under the terms of the deal, in states with unemployment rates higher than the national average of 8.3%, the maximum time an unemployed person can receive benefits will drop from 99 to 73 weeks. The maximum length of benefits for people in states with an average unemployment rate or lower will drop to 63 weeks or as far down as 40 weeks.

That part of the deal is not going to be pretty down the road, but this…

In addition, states will be allowed to perform drug tests on individuals applying for unemployment benefits if those people lost their previous job because they either failed or refused an employer’s drug test. Individuals receiving unemployment assistance could also be tested if they are seeking a job that generally requires a drug test.

Also, welfare beneficiaries will be banned from accessing public assistance funds at ATMs in strip clubs, liquor stores, and casinos.

...this is just stupid GOP douchebaggery.

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The Onion as Real News, part 4,391; Update to Why We Fight

Once again, The Onion has a story that might as well have come from an actual, real news source, if such had still existed in the US:

New Breeding Program Aimed At Keeping Moderate Republicans From Going Extinct

Some choice tidbits:

Though hopes for the captive breeding program remain high, many leading political conservationists note the number of optimal habitats for moderate, freethinking Republicans across the country has shrunk drastically, with studies showing the species may never again be able to recover in areas where it has been totally eradicated, such as the South and the GOP caucus in the House of Representatives.As they continue to search for nonextremist conservatives with the vaguest ability to compromise on social issues like abortion in cases of rape and incest, IPPM officials acknowledged they may be fighting a race against time.

“The most difficult task we have is preserving members of this disappearing breed before the desperate need for votes forces them to begin parroting borderline racist anti-immigration ideologies and accusing their opponents of being socialists,” tracker Phil Gandelman said. “We thought we had captured and tagged a truly exemplary specimen a few weeks ago, but when we studied the creature more closely, we realized it was just John McCain.”

So far, the subspecies Western Moderate-looking Republican (Homo Sapiens Huntsmanus) has not been seen in the wild recently, and may in fact be either extinct or in deep hiding in its native habitat in the Wasatch Mountain range.

 

Open thread

UPDATE—Again, thanks to Charles Johnson, who is truly doing yeoman’s work over at Little Green Footballs, we learn that Fox News has scrubbed the comments thread on Whitney Houston’s death in its entirety.   There was just too much sewage to clean it up.  They had to tear it down completely.  Shining a light on these “people” and getting them to scurry for the dark like roaches is one thing, but we need to make dealing with the far right wing as toxic as possible, and we do that  by exposing their words and their attitudes to the rest of the world.  For those that never read the original thread over at Fox, just suffice it to say that it was too embarrassing for the network that used to pay Falafel Bill O’Reilly.  It was too toxic for the network that questioned whether or not then-Senator Obama and his wife shared a ‘terrorist fist bump.’

Our post and thread on the original Foxatrocity can be found here.

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Number Crunchers And Green Eyeshades

The President unveiled his 2013 budget plan today, and the details and priorities are very interesting, to say the least.

President Barack Obama would almost double spending on the U.S. infrastructure over the next six years and would pour $350 billion into a jobs plan while shrinking the budgets of most other domestic agencies.

The blueprint for the fiscal 2013 budget released today would spend $476 billion through 2018 on highway, bridge and mass transit projects, funded in part by winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It cuts some energy programs, farm subsidies and federal workers’ retirement plans, while bulking up the Securities and Exchange Commission and creating a new panel to investigate unfair foreign trade practices.

Investing in the nation’s transportation grid is a fresh attempt to create jobs for a president facing re-election this year amid voter concern about the economy and unemployment at 8.3 percent in January. In addition to gasoline tax revenue, transportation spending would come from a $38.5 billion-a-year transfer from the fund that now goes to war spending.

“Most Americans understand that a crumbling infrastructure is not the way to build an economy that can last,” White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “We need to make sure we have a manufacturing base in this country” and workers with appropriate skills, said Lew, the former White House budget director.

Obama’s proposals for discretionary spending must adhere to August’s Budget Control Act, which imposed spending caps that the administration estimates will generate about $1 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade.

Less bombs, more bridges.  Makes sense to me.

With a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, the document has little chance of becoming law. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said “no,” when asked yesterday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” if Obama’s budget had any change of passage in that chamber.

Please note that this was technically saying no the day before the plan came out.   We need MOAR CRAZY HOSTAGE TAKING if we’re going to have a real budget.  Issue one is the GOP most likely attaching the Blount Amendment to exempt all employers from covering any icky woman part maintenance things in insurance to the payroll tax cut extension sometime this week.

Won’t that be a fun fight.  Republicans pitting workers vs. women and expecting to win, either, or, or both.

[UPDATE] I stand humbly corrected on the GOP attaching the Blount Amendment to the payroll tax cut, as Orange Julius folded his cards and now wants a clean extension for the rest of the year.  What the Blount Amendment will now get attached to, I don’t know.  It can’t possibly pass a stand-alone vote.

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Clearly We Need Laws To Protect Us From Republican Voter Fraud

Next time somebody says DEMOCRAT VOTER FRUAD ACORN BLAH BLOOGITY BLAH please calmly direct them to Indiana’s GOP Secretary of State Charlie White being convicted on six of seven voting fraud felony counts while being the state’s top election official.

Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White was convicted of six felonies early this morning, and consequently lost his job.

But the Republican could get it back soon.

White, 42, Fishers, plans to ask a judge to reduce his convictions – all class D felonies – to misdemeanors at sentencing. It’s uncertain whether that move would allow him to reclaim his job.

“We don’t know the right answer to that,” White said. “This is all very new.”

Shortly after White’s verdict was read, Gov. Mitch Daniels announced in a news release shortly before 3 a.m. that he has appointed Jerry Bonnet, White’s chief deputy, as interim secretary of state.

“I have chosen not to make a permanent appointment today out of respect for the judge’s authority to lessen the verdict to a misdemeanor and reinstate the elected office holder,” the Republican governor said in the news release. “If the felony convictions are not altered, I anticipate making a permanent appointment quickly.”

Now, if all of these players were Democrats, what would your reaction to this be, conservatives?  And what is “law and order moderate” Mitch Daniels thinking, allowing to keep a man convicted of voting fraud as the state’s top election official if the charges get reduced to misdemeanors?  If any Democratic party governor tried that, it would be national news about the “corrupt Dem voting fraud machine”.   What it means is Daniels is just as corrupt as the rest of them and always has been.

But reports on the actually corrupt Republican voting fraud machine that exists to the point of a Secretary of State being convicted on voting fraud crimes?  Doesn’t count.  Meanwhile, New Black Panther Party BLAAAAAAAAAARGH!

It’s Okay If You’re A Republican™.

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Tampa Bay GOP Debate Thread

(Ted Rall’s website)

WaPo reports that “the debate at the University of South Florida in Tampa, will air on NBC at 9 p.m. ET in the place of “Rock Center”. Tampa is also the site of the GOP convention in August, which I suspect will be mentioned once or twice. Livestreaming via NBC.com or the Tampa Bay Times.

Richard Adams’ Guardian liveblog (actually) here.

(NBC feed just crashed my desktop—twice)

**********
Balloon Juice is loading really, really slowly for me. And since Brian Williams, to his credit, is keeping the audience in line & the freak-show factor down, we are able to discern that stripped of easy applause lines for the bigots and xenophobes, the standing Republican candidates are really, really boring.

From the Guardian:

9:33pm: It’s on to Newt Gingrich’s contract with Freddie Mac. Here’s one thing Gingrich wants to get across: he did not do any lobbying for Freddie Mac. But did you peddle influence? asks Williams? “I think it’s pretty clear to say I never did any lobbying,” says Gingrich.

Romney jumps in to ridicule Gingrich’s previous nonsense claim to have been hired as an historian. Gingrich is putting on his “judging face”.

“I offered strategic advice, based on my knowedge of history,” he responds . Oh do come on.

9.30pm: “I’m proud of the fact that I paid a lot of taxes,” says Mitt Romney, and goes on to say he’s “paid all the taxes legally required,” which is still not a great answer. He still hasn’t got on top of this an issue. His well-paid consultants just aren’t coming up with the goods.

John Podhoretz @jpodhoretz
So on stage—a one-term governor; a guy who quit the speakership; a guy who lost by 18 points; and a lunatic.

For some reason – a cock-up it seems – Rick Santorum is given free reign to defend Mitt Romney and capitalism.

Yeah, Santorum’s running for Willard’s VP.

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Comment of the night:

MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson – January 23, 2012 | 10:17 pm

You know, take away the enraged racist mob from Newt Gingrich and you end up with a short, fat, ignorant and incredibly boring asshole.

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You my winger? (It certainly appears so.)

I don’t know if you know anyone like this, but I have an adult relative who regularly stages temper tantrums to get what he wants. It always annoys me, because my attitude has always been “scream all you want, I don’t care”, but not everyone in my family feels this way.

So it is with the the right’s anti-media tirades. They’re welcome to it all they want, it fires up their base, and that’s all good…until the media starts taking the kabuki sturm und drang too seriously. Jay Rosen:

Here we have one of the most under-covered stories of the 2012 campaign. If the Republican candidates believed the culture war wing of their own party, if they credited it with any genuine insight, if they respected its critique of the journalistic profession, if they thought there was a solid core of truth there, they would not have agreed to participate in debates where the questions are asked by such ideological opponents as Wolf Blitzer and Jon King of CNN, Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos of ABC, David Gregory and Brian Williams of NBC, John Harwood of CNBC and the New York Times and on and on. As Hewitt said: Hey, these guys are left wing! It doesn’t make any sense!

Unless… the candidates see the culture war wing of their party as a useful idiot– wrong about what journalists are up to, but valuable for keeping the press in line.

[....]

My view: even Newsbusters knows their critique is a joke. They’re just working the refs, and raising money off their Agnewisms. And it’s a pretty sweet gig. Brent Bozell’s 2010 salary: $423,000. He should be raging at the Republican candidates for legitimizing the David Gregorys and John Harwoods of the world.

And of course the ref-working works! The Kaplan ombudsman today:

“See, you liberal media nincompoops, this is all your fault, you treated Obama like a saint when he was running in 2007 and 2008 and you didn’t vet him, investigate him, report on him skeptically. You were so fawning (and adoring of his blackness), you missed that he was a (pick your adjective), radical, socialist, Muslim, inexperienced, dangerous, corrupt, weak Chicago politician with no track record of accomplishment, whose only talent is giving speeches.”

Those e-mails usually employ much harsher language, and some are filled with expletives.

[...]

Deborah Howell, Post ombudsman from 2005 through 2008, said at the end of her tenure that “some of the conservatives’ complaints about a liberal tilt [at The Post] are valid.”

I won’t quibble with her conclusion. I think she was right.

[....]

And that’s what The Post needs to do in covering his reelection campaign this year: be hard-hitting on his record…

I guess if I were a Kaplan employee I would ask the wingers who write pissy emails to papers, just as I would ask my rageaholic uncle, what the fuck are you gonna do about it? Why are the people at Kaplan so scared of a few angry emails from wingers?

I understand that most national-level journalists are careerist sociopaths who have made a career out of betraying journalistic principles in order to seem “fair and balanced”. I understand that they know they will be fired—a la Ashleigh Banfield and Phil Donohue—if they don’t tilt right.

But that’s all at the level of pleasing their bosses and sponsors. I can’t see why they bend so easily to a few tirade-writing wingnuts.

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Jeb Bush Is Grifter-Curious

Sweet suffering national polity, I honestly thought “the smart brother” would have the sense of self-preservation (decency not being part of the Bush geneset) to lie low until more of us had the chance to forget the horrors of the Dubya Regency. But it looks like we are never going to be rid of these people:

Jeb Bush, the popular former Florida governor, said he will “stay neutral” in the state’s Republican presidential primary while warning his party’s candidates to leave the “circular firing squad” of their debates behind and start appealing to a broader audience.

Bush’s remarks, in an exclusive interview, establish a challenge for his party’s candidates as the contest advances to Florida, where the Jan. 31 primary will take the race into its biggest and most diverse arena yet. The winner will be awarded all of the state’s 50 presidential convention delegates…

The younger Bush described both Romney and Gingrich as “credible” candidates in a November contest with President Barack Obama. “I intend to help whoever wins the nomination,” the former governor said in the interview yesterday… At the same time, Bush said his party’s candidates should adjust the “tone” of their debate on issues such as illegal immigration to start appealing to independent-minded voters in “swing states” such as Florida with a history of voting for either major party. These voters are likely to decide the outcome of the 2012 presidential election…

The year before the 2008 Florida primary, Bush introduced Romney to advisers and friends as a worthy candidate but stopped short of endorsing anyone. In this year’s primary “I’m going to stay neutral,” he said. “I have a lot of friends supporting all the varying candidates, but more importantly I think the voters ought to make the determination.” ...

DON’T BE STINKING ME UP W/UR LUZER COOTIES WILLARD U LUZER…

... The debate within the Republican primary over Romney’s success at Bain Capital LLC has made Bush “kind of dizzy,” he said. Romney should disclose his tax returns, as Gingrich has, and should be “talking about his successes” as he campaigns in Florida, according to the state’s former governor.

“He is clearly uncomfortable talking about his own success, which is natural,” Bush said of Romney, a multi- millionaire. “At the same time, I don’t think he has anything to be ashamed of. What a wonderful success story. It should stand as an example of American exceptionalism.”

Not included in the article: Whether Jeb immediately added ‘Bless his heart’ in the best Southern tradition.

Newt/Jeb 2012—the Doughy White Boys dream ticket!

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