Michael Tomasky's Blog, page 47

Anita Hill's message for Virginia Thomas | Michael Tomasky

Ginni's bizarre voicemail call for an apology only highlights the credibility of Hill's testimony against Clarence Thomas

I was surprised to read that Ginni Thomas – the "nonpolitical" wife of "Silent" Clarence Thomas, the supreme court justice who, in 19 years, has still asked very few questions from the high bench – made her bizarre phone call to Anita Hill at 7:30 last Saturday morning.

That's usually the sort of call one makes after knocking back a few drinks. Thomas may be a teetotaller for all I know. Or she may have been a nursing a hangover. Yes – she's clearly been nursing one for 19 years, ever since (by her interpretation) her husband was the "victim" of a "high-tech lynching" at the senate judiciary committee.

The facts, for that dwindling number who care about them, continue to suggest otherwise. True, there is no proof that Thomas lied on the stand about his reported penchant for pornography or his alleged sexual harassment of Hill and other women in his employ at the time. But in their book Strange Justice, Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, then with the Wall Street Journal, found, let us say, lots of spent ammunition lying on the floor. They concluded that the "preponderance" of evidence suggested that Hill was telling the truth.

Many people forget now that the Democrats had a second woman ready to testify, but who did not end up appearing before the committee. She was ready to go but was not called. Angela Wright, who also worked for Thomas, told NPR in 2007 that Thomas had "perjured his way onto the court" and, by the bye, had this to say:

I always knew him to be a mean-spirited, nasty, fairly unstable person. It was enlightening to read his account of his childhood, because that did put it in perspective. Actually, my heart went out to the young child Clarence once I understood he was a child whose father was absent, whose mother sent them away, who was raised by an unemotional grandfather. I finally understood where all his anger and mean-spiritedness came from. I knew it was there. And also, his self-loathing and his hatred for anything black or civil rights-oriented or affirmative action.

Wright also said Thomas had made offensive sexual comments in her presence and pressured her to date him.

Yet, 19 years later, here comes Ginni Thomas to stand by her man.

Clarence ThomasUS midterm elections 2010Anita HillUS supreme courtUnited StatesUS CongressMichael Tomasky
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Juan Williams, axed | Michael Tomasky

It looks like America has just witnessed its first high-level media firing over remarks about Muslims. Juan Williams of NPR was appearing on Fox News, chatting with Bill O'Reilly, when he made some remarks that caught the ear of the ever-nervous standards and practices people over at "the system," as I'm told they call NPR internally.

Here, according to the New York Times, is what happened. Billo was launching into his 133,819th explication of the "cold truth" that Muslim jihad is the biggest threat to the world, after which:

Mr. Williams said he concurred with Mr. O'Reilly.

He continued: "I mean, look, Bill, I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous."

Mr. Williams also made reference to the Pakistani immigrant who pleaded guilty this month to trying to plant a car bomb in Times Square. "He said the war with Muslims, America's war is just beginning, first drop of blood. I don't think there's any way to get away from these facts," Mr. Williams said.

Williams, I should point out, has been a Fox News contributor for more than a decade, going back to the channel's beginnings in the mid-90s. So it's not unusual that he should have appeared on Fox. I had thought he mostly did the Sunday roundtable, but then again I don't watch.

Williams once had a distinguished career. He spent nearly a quarter-century at the Washington Post, and I remember him, back when I was in college, as a guy on television panels sometimes with a winning presence and decent insights. He rose quickly and seemed to deserve to.

He then wrote the companion book to the amazing early 90s PBS documentary series on the civil rights movement, Eyes on the Prize. He was a big deal.

As I think back over my adult lifetime as a frequent consumer of Juan Williams news segments, I really can't decide which of us changed more. I certainly changed: I grew my antennae for reflexive and frankly kind of lazy Beltway conventional wisdom, and I came to believe that Williams did a lot of that.

But maybe he changed too. Because what sort of non-conservative - one perceives Williams to be some degree of liberal; he'd probably protest that he's just a reporter; in either case, he's not a conservative - agreed to be an in-house flunky at Fox? I'm sure they offered him nice money, and money is money, and I can't say with certainty that I'd have turned it down if Rupert had waved it under my nose.

But if you're any kind of liberal at all, even in the softest and most non-political possible sense, it's basically an indefensible thing to do. Fox News wants liberalism to perish from the face of the earth. Going on their air on a regular basis and lending your name and reputation to their ideological razzle-dazzle is kind of like agreeing to be the regular kulak guest columnist at Pravda in 1929. For "balance."

It may be the case that those nervous nellies at NPR overreacted a bit. If they had been phrased another way, his comments might have been completely unremarkable. Even as they stand, they don't strike me on paper as being that far outside our established parameters (which may say something about our parameters, I guess). I doubt very much that they'd rank in the top 10 or even top 20 of the most revolting statements made on Fox that day. We are oversensitive about these things as a culture, as I was pointing out yesterday.

But in the final analysis, it's not surprising, from a psychological point of view, that after all these years of going on their air and drinking their green-room coffee, Williams should choose to ingratiate himself to O'Reilly and his viewers with that Foxy rhetoric. In a sense Williams got what was coming to him. Sleep with dogs, get fleas.

US politicsFox NewsMichael Tomasky
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

And then there's this sort of thing | Michael Tomasky

The pc language police may overdo it sometimes, but then it's worth remembering that there's this, too. From TPM:

A group trying to register voters in Houston received threats and emails containing racist slurs after being targeted by a local tea party group accusing it of "voter fraud."

In emails obtained by TPM, the group Houston Votes was accused of being "a bunch of white guilt ridden assholes, NIGGERS and greasy mexican spics," "fraudulent Marxist pigs," and "American hating A-holes."

The, uh, enthographic email is particularly interesting and worth reproducing in full:

"You liberial scumbags should be hung by the neck in public ! We are on to your voter fraud. Keep it up you MOTHER FUCKERS and you will soon be put down for a long dirt nap! Your nothing but a bunch of white guilt ridden assholes, NIGGERS and greasy mexican spics! The WAR is comming and we are going to dispose of each and every one of you while we take OUR (White) nation back."

What makes people think they can write things like that to total strangers? I've received my share of these over the years, and they've long since quit hurting, but I still always do wonder.

The real issue here, of course, is voter intimidation, which is our American euphemism for Republican efforts to suppress the black vote (and recently the Latino vote) by doing things like sending out anonymous fliers around black communities before election day warning that if you have any unpaid parking tickets or are behind on your gas bill, you can't vote. And more ominous things. There will likely be more of this than usual this election day, charged as it with racial politics.

And I was too nice to Sharron Angle in the previous post. Commenter LonB nailed it:

She is not having problems because she used the wrong term for an ethnic group. She is in trouble because her response to hispanic children challenging an ad fear mongering using hispanic actors was to question whether they were being honest about their ethnicity. It is hard to think of a good explanation of why her thought processes ran in that direction.

It's a reasonable guess that she doesn't really know any actual Latinos or Asians. Here are two pages of photos from the official web site of her campaign, of her posing with potential constituents. Find the black or Latin or Asian face. Hint: that was ironic.

That is not me being pc. In a state that is 35% nonwhite, her photo choices are a clear and straightforward statement about whom she plans to represent.

US midterm elections 2010TexasMichael Tomasky
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

On Latinos and Asians | Michael Tomasky

It appears that Harry Reid is really sticking it to Sharron Angle for her now famous and ill-advised remark to Latino schoolchildren that some of them looked Asian to her.

Well, whatever it takes, I suppose. But I would agree, or acknowledge or whatever, that one lamentable outgrowth of liberalism in these last 15 or so years is overly aggressive pc language policing.

True, Angle should know better in the climate we live in not to say something that stupid. And I think it's probably true that she is in fact "insensitive" to most Latinos, but not because she makes a stupid language slip-up. Rather, because most Latinos in this country are working- to (at best) middle-class and in need of certain federal emoluments, and she supports hard-right social Darwinian policies (no unemployment insurance and the like) that would leave a lot of people, of all hues but in particular minorities, foundering.

I think she's anti-human, in essence, or if that sounds a bit harsh, which it does even to my beleaguered ear, at least anti-all humans who aren't like her. Or I should say, who aren't like she perceives herself to be, by which I mean: she thinks she is independent and doesn't need government, while in fact she lives a life in which she daily takes advantage of many things the federal government provides for her, as we all do.

It's not as if her stated positions have not been controversial; they have been. But I find it odd and a little depressing about our political culture, and about contemporary liberalism, that it's something like this generates the really big headlines. I doubt she meant any harm. In point of fact, it seems to me possible to make a completely innocent error along these lines.

I think moments like these because hubbubs mostly because they're really low-hanging fruit for the media. There's always an aggrieved nonprofit leader to call and get a quote demanding an apology, and in a campaign context especially, a reporter can be certain that an opponent will carry on about it, and that reporter's stories will get nice play in the paper for two or three days running.

Of course, in Angle's case, there is the context of her anti-immigrant ad, which ends with the tagline "Harry Reid: The Best Friend an Illegal Alien Ever Had." She has preposterously tried to say that the ad isn't about Latinos. Last I looked, undocumented aliens aren't typically from Denmark.

Oh what the hell, let her sweat.

US midterm elections 2010NevadaMichael Tomasky
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

A lesson from 1943 | Michael Tomasky

The other night I happened across the 1943 film The Tender Comrade, and in watching it I was reminded why liberalism has such a hard time in the US today.

The film is set during the war, and the story line involves four women who work in a munitions plant: Ginger Rogers, Patricia Collinge (Theresa Wright's mother in Hitchcock's incredible Shadow of a Doubt, which came out the same year), Ruth Hussey, and a very young Kim Hunter. For reasons of economy, the four decide to move in together into a house they share, until their husbands come home from the big one.

It was, to say the least, an interesting melange politically. The director was Edward Dmytryk, one of the Hollywood Ten and a CP member briefly (according to Wikipedia) in 1945. It was written by Dalton Trumbo, another party member, probably at the time of writing (he left the CP in 1948 and was also hauled before HUAC). La Rogers, of course, was a right-winger down to the soles of her shoes, although probably not really conservative yet at that point in her career. The film also starred Robert Ryan, not a communist ever, but certainly a man of the left, who had the interesting habit of usually playing right-wingers and racists and various other he-man misanthropes.

In any case: I write in awareness that there was without question some Popular Front propaganda going out in this film, but having said that, I will also note that if you see it someday, you'll see that there's certainly nothing overtly political in it. There's nothing about Russia or anything. No geopolitics. Just basic Popular Front-type stuff. Oh, and by the way, the phrase "tender comrade," while undoubtedly an in-joke on the set, is actually from a Robert Louis Stevenson poem about wives as helpmeets.

So there's one scene where one of the four comes home from the butcher with an extra pound of bacon. Ruth Hussey thinks this is grand, and on the surface it does just seem like the butcher is being a nice guy to four women living on their own.

But Ginger Rogers (of all people!) gives her what-for. No, she insists, this isn't right. This pound of bacon belongs to someone else. It might even belong to one of our soldiers. We can't accept this. We must take it back. We should even - here's where the communist part creeps in! - report this butcher to the proper authorities.

Well, they stop short of that, but they do return the tainted slab. And it got me thinking. We Americans today are so infinitely far removed from that kind of communal experience of having to think of others and sacrifice that it's small wonder our politics is in the shape it's in. I got mine jack is this country's slogan.

One might have thought, and one briefly hoped, that 9-11 might have changed that. But instead 9-11 was used to divide this country (I needn't say by whom) even more bitterly than it already had been. One might have thought and hoped that the great recession would have maybe pulled us together a little bit. Instead, it unleashed the tea party: anger at "freeloaders" who couldn't pay their mortgages even more (far more) than at the banks who, we learn recently, were making employees process up to 400 mortgage defaults a day so that they could go resell the properties, and absolute rage at the government for trying to help some of these people.

Obviously I don't wish calamity on my country. But I do sometimes wish we (me and my family included) had to make do with less, had to sacrifice something, had to contribute to some larger national cause. It's a good thing for people to have to pull together, and historically (at least in modern history, since the 1850s or so), a normal thing.

But I think that's all over. The changes in the economy over the last 30 years or so have ensured that some people can buy their way out of anything, and these happen to be by and large the people who pump billions into the political system to keep it the way it is. It's no wonder that liberalism flourished in soil like that, back in those days, and it's often a minor miracle to me that it even stays in the game today, given how far away from civic community we've gotten.

US politicsMichael Tomasky
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The first individual mandate | Michael Tomasky

I mentioned yesterday that I had a little nugget for our friend LHB (and for all of you) regarding the debate about the individual mandate, i.e., whether the US government can make citizens buy a good from a private source, as the healthcare bill prescribes.

The mandate is being challenged in court. Most legal scholars say precedent is clear that Congress has this ability under the commerce clause. Some say it's clearly unconstitutional. What the Supreme Court might do probably depends on what Anthony Kennedy thinks that morning.

In any case, the following is the work of Bradley Latino, a third-year student at Seton Hall University law school, who unearthed an individual mandate way back in 1792. He writes:

The Militia Acts of 1792, passed by the Second Congress and signed into law by President Washington, required every able-bodied white male citizen to enroll in his state's militia and mandated that he "provide himself" with various goods for the common weal:

[E]ach and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States . . . shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia . . . .provid[ing] himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch, with a box therein . . . and shall appear so armed, accoutred and provided, when called out to exercise or into service
This was the law of the land until the establishment of the National Guard in 1903. For many American families, compliance meant purchasing-and eventually re-purchasing-multiple muskets from a private party.

This was no small thing. Although anywhere from 40 to 79% of American households owned a firearm of some kind, the Militia Act specifically required a military-grade musket. That particular kind of gun was useful for traditional, line-up-and-shoot 18th century warfare, but clumsy and inaccurate compared to the single-barrel shotguns and rifles Americans were using to hunt game. A new musket, alone, could cost anywhere from $250 to $500 in today's money. Some congressmen estimated it would cost £20 to completely outfit a man for militia service-about $2,000 today.

Latino goes on to note that this was mostly uncontroversial. The only criticism of it he reports is that some noted that it placed an undo burden on the poor, for whom muskets cost the same, after all, as they did for the better-off. No subsidies were ever established, as we have with the current health bill, but eventually militia men received little stipends. The establishment of the National Guard, a voluntary association to which the government supplied the arms, rendered the Militia Act obsolete, but it appears never to have been challenged, in 111 active years.

I would call that precedent. It lasted more than a century, and George Washington himself signed it into law.

That won't matter to Scalia-Thomas-Roberts-Alito, of course, and maybe not to Kennedy. I suppose we'll find out. Meanwhile, on the healthcare topic, if you're curious, Google "health care and severability." That's a word you might want to learn, and something we might well be discussing in the coming weeks.

US healthcareMichael Tomasky
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

About polls, and the point of this blog | Michael Tomasky

I see that on my previous post about Kentucky, Delaware and Alaska, a lot of the comments are from some of our conservative regulars saying go ahead, Tomasky, chatter on about Christine O'Donnell, the polls are showing that your boy Obama and the D's generally are going to get hammered.

A few points. First: believe it or not, everything isn't about who wins. I doubt very much, for example, that Rand Paul is going to lose. I also do not perform my labors here under the impression that one word from Tomasky will send the good voters of Lexington and Paducah running away from Paul like the plague. So I don't write about Rand Paul thinking anything I'm going to say will hurt him, or improve Jack Conway's chances.

I write about the things I write about because I am trying, over the length of dozens and hundreds of posts over many months, to paint a certain kind of picture of American politics in 2010 for the (hopefully) entertainment and edification of readers across quite literally the globe. The Joe Miller Stasi fetish: that, to me, and evidently to many of you, said something interesting about the state of our politics. Miller may win, he may lose. Other people write blogs trying to influence outcomes. When I was a columnist at New York magazine and was one of a small handful of important political columnists on the New York scene, and I knew that every insider in New York read me, I did more of that. Now, I'm less trying to do that than to explain and interpret things, make provocations, get you thinking or agreeing or disagreeing or laughing.

I don't go in much for handicapping and never have. Even if things looked rosy for the D's and terrible for the R's, I wouldn't be spending post after post saying, Wow, it looks like the Dem may win in Arizona-3. Those of you who want that stuff can get it from Real Clear Politics and pollster.com and Nate Silver. Some handicapping is fun, when it's noteworthy. I just did some in the video below. And there, it was all about how the Reps might steal seven House seats in Pennsylvania, so that's certainly a dispassionate and objective accounting, from my point of view. (I actually choose Arizona-3 for a reason, because a poll just came out showing Republican Ben Quayle, thought a shoo-in, trailing his Democratic opponent, in a district that has been GOP for a quarter-century or more).

Particularly today, polls are all over the lot. The D in North Carolina Senate is gaining ground. Sestak, the D in Pennsylvania Senate, is tied with Pat Toomey. A West Virginia poll shows John Raese ahead, bucking recent trends. Russ Feingold might be back in the hunt in Wisconsin. We can all haul out polls showing what we want.

Of course, I'm on a side. It's not that I think the D's are so great, but that I think many of these R's are either dangerous or empirically unconnected to the planet on which I reside or in many cases both.

I'm just saying that the arguments raised on this blog are in no sense settled by the introduction of a poll, especially a Rasmussen poll, that shows where things stand today. Today doesn't matter. November 2 matters. I've seen candidates lose 12 points in a week. The Democrats are probably going to get drubbed. But there are occasional signs that things might not be as bad as everyone thinks. In either case, many, many races are essentially within the margin of error. Talking about politics and campaigns shouldn't always mean talking about polls, and whether development X means so-and-so is going to win or lose. Sometimes, development X is of interest in and of itself, irrespective of what it means for so-and-so's chances.

The Miller-security goons story is one such. By the way, something just came into my in-box making that story a lot more interesting. It seems his security squad included moonlighting active-duty US soldiers, and it seems that Miller lied on national television when he said the school required him to provide security. From an excellent report in the Anchorage Daily News:

Miller gave interviews to Fox and CNN on Monday. He told Fox, "I might also note that the middle school itself required us by a contract for a campaign, required us to have a security team." He told CNN, "There was a -- a private security team that was required. We had to hire them because the school required that as a term in their lease."

But district spokeswoman Heidi Embley said that wasn't true.

"We do not require users to hire security," she said. Renters must only have a security plan to protect users and the school itself, she said, and can resolve the issues with "monitors."

Maybe he misunderstood. Or maybe a guy who thinks the Stasi are to be emulated thinks "monitors" means US soldiers who cuff a journalist.

And lefthalfback, my friend, I have to say respectfully that I can tell you're a liberal by the way you take the other guy's side in an argument. Fine, maybe for the two hours that the Miller campaign rented that school, it was a private facility. But you can't really be comfortable with what happened there, and I have to say I bet that if Obama's campaign security team had a Fox News reporter placed under citizen's arrest in similar circumstances, you'd howl about how tone-deaf he was. And properly so. I also have a little nugget to share with you regarding history and individual mandate, but we'll save that one for another time. It doesn't necessarily prove you wrong, but you'll find it interesting.

US midterm elections 2010Michael Tomasky
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Video | Tomasky Talk: US midterms 2010: Pennsylvania

Michael Tomasky looks at the midterm races in a state that, with seven Democrat incumbents under fire, could turn Republican at every level

Michael Tomasky

Senate updates from all around | Michael Tomasky

We start with Kentucky. The woman who was the victim of the Rand Paul Aqua Buddha prank has spoken to Greg Sargent. She does say the thing was a prank and it being portrayed overly-ominously by the Conway campaign. However, says the woman, now a clinical psychologist:

"My whole point in sharing [the episode] was that Randy used to be a different person with different views that have radically changed, and he's not acknowledging that," she told me. "That is why I shared it in the first place."

She added that his college years and views should raise questions "as to how genuine he is about his beliefs now. I have a hard time seeing how someone who espouses beliefs that he used to would turn around and become a conservative Christian."

She confirmed the ad's accuracy, and wondered aloud why Paul doesn't just admit what occured and move on.

"Yes, he was in a secret society, yes, he mocked religion, yes, the whole Aqua Buddha thing happened," she said. "There was a different side to him at one time and he's pretending that it never existed. If he would just acknowledge it, it would all go away and it wouldn't matter anymore."

I think the truth is that Paul was a devoted Ayn Rand acolyte in college (though he is not named after her). See this Jonathan Chait post on that. Ayn Rand had seething, flesh-burning contempt for all forms of religion. Ed Kilgore wrote in Democracy (the journal I edit):

Rand's disdain for religion was as integral to her philosophy as her disdain for anything that remotely smacked of socialism. That's made very clear in what she regarded as the most important writing of her life, Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged: "[T]here are two kinds of teachers of the Morality of Death: the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle, whom you call the spiritualists and the materialists, those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence without consciousness. Both demand the surrender of your mind."

To Rand, those who accepted "enslavement" to God–or for that matter, such conservative totems as family or tradition–had no moral standing to pose as fighters against socialism.

A guy who was a devoted Randian in college was very likely not any sort of Christian, but indeed possibly an Aqua Buddhist. I still have no real idea of the political fallout, but now this is close to having three-day legs, and any story with three-day legs hurts a candidate a little.

Next up, Delaware. Christine O'Donnell said in this morning's debate that the separation of church and state isn't a constitutional matter:

In a debate with Democrat Chris Coons this morning, Delaware's Republican nominee for Senate, Christine O'Donnell, suggested the way she reads the Constitution, there's no ban on the government establishing or influencing organized religion.

"Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?" O'Donnell said, according to the AP.

The question came as part of a discussion over science education in public schools. O'Donnell "criticized Democratic nominee Chris Coons' position that teaching creationism in public school would violate the First Amendment by promoting religious doctrine." She also seemed unclear about what's in the Constitution itself.

"You're telling me that's in the First Amendment?" she asked, when Coons brought up the fact that the very First Amendment to the Constitution "bars Congress from making laws respecting the establishment of religion."

Conservatives often say that there's no separation of church and state in the Constitution. Tom DeLay used to say it. But it seems here that O'Donnell may have, uh, forgotten. Or perhaps it adds weight to my theory that she took those "Oxford" postmodernism classes more to heart than anyone thinks, and she really is a situationist-type pomo philosopher trying to subvert order.

Finally, we return to Alaska. This morning in his Playbook email, Mike Allen linked to a headline saying "Prosecutor mulling charges in editor, Miller flap."

Oh, that's good, I reflexively thought. Joe Miller's goon squad, or some member of it, is going to be arrested and at least inconvenienced for disorderly conduct or something for "arresting" a journalist asking questions of a candidate for public office at a public forum in a public school. A little piece of sanity.

But just before I clicked, I thought, hmmm...and sure enough, the charges being mulled would be filed not against the Miller people, but against the journalist. For trespassing! A local police lieutenant named Parker:

Parker said the Miller campaign rented the school at which the event was held and was entitled to decide who was allowed there.

"If the press is invited, they have every right to be there," he said. "But if they say to a particular member, 'We don't want you here,' then that person is persona non grata and can't stay."

What? If you say fine to this, then you must also consider it fine when Obama, at an event at a building we otherwise consider public, kicks out the Fox News correspondent. This is the 8,479th what-country-am-I-living-in-again moment of this campaign.

US midterm elections 2010KentuckyDelawareAlaskaMichael Tomasky
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

That failed stimulus | Michael Tomasky

You will be dismayed yet unsurprised, I'm sure, by this, from a fascinating new report from the Center for Public Integrity:

The founder of the House Tea Party Caucus, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, is among scores of Republicans and conservative Democrats who criticized the $787 billion economic stimulus law while privately asking Obama administration officials for stimulus money to pay for local projects.

Copies of lawmakers' letters are posted as part of the Center for Public Interest's Stimulating Hypocrisy story and they were also shared with members of the Investigative News Network.

INN member MinnPost reports that Bachman — who has campaigned saying the stimulus law was a "failure" and that it did not create any jobs — quietly wrote at least six letters to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood to seek stimulus funding for Minnesota projects. In one letter, she sought $300 million for a replacement bridge on the St. Croix River and cited a state estimate that the project would create nearly 3,000 jobs.

Another INN member, The Texas Watchdog, says at least a dozen Texas lawmakers who voted against the 2009 bill to stimulate the U.S. economy but then quietly asked Obama administration officials for funding for various projects.

Republican Rep. Ron Paul was won of several Texas lawmakers who asked the U.S. Transportation Department to fund the Gulf Coast Freight Rail District. The request was rejected. Another Republican, Rep. Pete Sessions did obtain funding for a Dallas streetcar program, one of just two grants totaling $43 million that went to Texas under DOT's $1.5 billion Transportation Investments Generating Economic Recovery program.

On her NPR report of this matter, Audie Kornish mentioned Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, who evidently wrote five different letters - this, she reported, is called "letter-marking," to distinguish it from earmarking, so these people can write these letters but still say they're against earmarks - to the Department of Transportation requesting stimulus money, including one $20 million project to replace a bridge across the Ohio River in Milton, Ky.

Kornish singled out McConnell and two other lawmakers, one Democrat and one Republican. In keeping with the media-ducking theme of my previous post: Those two refused to talk to NPR, but did at least send along written statements. McConnell's office evidently just completely stonewalled the network. When it's inconvenient, just don't answer. You can count on it to go away.

Here's the thing, though. I don't doubt for a minute that Milton, Ky. could use that new bridge and that $20 million. I don't begrudge it. If I were in a position to do so, I'd happily take the check down there myself and present it to the mayor. In my speech, I'd even thank McConnell for his good work in helping to secure the funds.

What is terrible is the hypocrisy around the issue. Because if people like McConnell acknowledged that federal spending was a useful thing, they would undercut their own shameless, artificial rhetoric; their entire rhetorical and political posture, in fact, would be null and void. So they go out and say that "we can fairly safely declare [the stimulus bill] now a failure," as McConnell did last year, and behind everyone's backs do this. And Bachmann - $300 million!

I'm not outraged that we are surrounded by such charlatans. That's life. I'm outraged that something like this is not itself a cause of outrage, and that the bulk of our political media are far more interested in questions like Obama's "failure to connect" to "regular" voters, which is to some extent true but is not a problem for the republic in the same way something like this is.

US CongressMichael Tomasky
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds