Said with a straight face.

Fr. Frank Pavone, National Director of Priests for Life, stated this morning that the voting records of members of Congress on the Stupak-Pitts amendment to HR 3962 (and other abortion-related votes) will be distributed to every Catholic parish in America, with instructions to each pastor on how to make clear to his congregation the implications of how that congregation's representative voted. "Whatever one's position on abortion itself," Fr. Pavone commented, "the vast majority of Americans have always opposed the idea that taxpayers should fund it. Our plan to inform pastors of these voting records is phase one of a year-long effort to activate Churches as never before regarding what they can legally do in preparation for next year's midterm elections. Publishing voting records in a non-partisan fashion is certainly one of those activities."

Republican Priorities: give God health care first

You haven't lived until you've sat through hours of House debate on anything. Waldo sat through the health care debate today and was struck by how overwhelmingly, on the GOP side, it was just an endless succession of old, paunchy white guys saying, "no, no, no no, no, and "hell no."

Americablog captured a video sequence where the Old White Paunchy Guys tried to keep women members from speaking.

Now that's democracy, keep your women barefoot, pregnant, and out on the Capitol lawn.

History, schmistory

Here's a sample of the Big New Ideas members of the Big Bachmann White People's Party brought to Congress. The other side of the banner calls Speaker Pelosi a "McCarthyite."

Never mind that it was the McCarthyites who were trying to root out the un-Americans. Click here to see the whole Hate Sideshow that had the Republicans skipping important votes on the Patriot Act to show their asses to the masses.

SC's congressional members are pretty much no smarter than anyone else here when it come to making money

The Center for Responsive Politics has mined the Congresscritters' financial statements for 2008. Of course you can't read too much into them because members can estimate their vastness on scales ranging from pocket change to eleventy kabillion dollars.


But within their closed world, you can still make some comparisons. And what's interesting about the SC Congressional delegation is they are as poor- compared to their congressional peers- as South Carolinians are to the rest of the country.


The rankings in the House (of 435):


John Spratt: 17th
Henry Brown: 47th
J. Gresham Barrett: 98th
Bob Inglis: 231st
James Clyburn: 265th
Joe Wilson: 375th


Senate rankings (of 100):


Lindsey Graham : 72nd
Jim DeMint: 96th


You gotta wonder, if that many Republicans can't get fat when the trough is right in front of them, year after year, how stupid must they be?

It's the content that counts

The UK's version of the South Carolina Republican Party has pulled off a nice trick: copping Obama's whole campaign website.

Burning the village, not to save it, but just because it looked pretty aflame.

Anaconda's jumping up and down over job losses at The Post & Courier.

We thought only RINOs and Nazi Liberal Socialist Fascists Obamamanians wanted to crash the economy.

So far, it's hard to see how Anaconda and his imaginary friend Mande can take the place of a newsroom. Unless that's what he wants.

When you're a political campaign hack pretending to be a news site, maybe the decline of real news sites serves a purpose. Serving the public ain't it, though.

Magical Thinking: complaining that people the majority have barred from marriage won't marry.

A Facebook pal notes the predictable blowback in Washington State, where voters broke the "NO, you can't marry, NO, you can't have civil unions, NO, you can't have domestic partnerships, NO, you can't have anything, ever" lobby: straight, unmarried people complaining, on blogs and in letters to newspapers, that they don't get "special rights" for not being married. Our friend notes,

Look buddy, you and your girlfriend can get married any time you get off your butt and cough up 30 bucks for a marriage license. Of course, that means a rack less beer for the week...

It's my party and I'll lie if I want to.

Iowa congressman Steve King, apparently fearing he is losing place in the House Republican Lunatic Caucus to Michelle Bachmann, has called his own Tea Party Day on Capitol Hill this weekend.

Addison Graves Wilson, populist.

Congressman Joe Wilson slums with the wetbacks.

Annals of South Carolina Justice.

Boy Fogle joins Anaconda in tittering over sending a mentally ill man to prison for three years for having sex with an animal They both think it's hilarious.


Moral of the story? It's way better to beat gay men to death than to fuck horses.

DeMint to Spartanburg County conservatives wanting faster download speeds: Drop dead. I'm gonna get re-elected no matter what so I can enact laws to keep myself from getting re-elected.

Back in July Gary Coates at The Conservativist (that's Spartanburg) complained:

And one last thing.  DSL 6.0 in Spartanburg SUCKS!  What has taken me several hours to upload at home I was able to upload in 20 minutes here in Indianapolis.

Get used to the suck, Gar- it's all Jim DeMint wants  you to have. He thinks it'd be socialism if you could spend 12.5 minutes uploading a video of Dr Alan Keyes spewing hate if you were in Japan, versus 2.5 hours here at home.


He thinks it's just fine for the US to be 28th in the world in net access speeds.

This week with Congressman Bob Inglis.

This week 4th District Congressman Bob Inglis was a good Republican Party-liner. Of health care reform, he said:

“The American people deserve better,” Inglis said. “We could have offered solutions that work.”


But, of course, he didn't. He and the rest of the Nancy Reagan Caucus just said no. And no. And no. And to say now that what we need is to just scrap the bill and start over in an election year, is, well, the sort of boiled-down, ultrapure bullshit only a man who's being challenged by an Alan Keyes hag will say to hang onto office. Yesterday Inglis he announced he's onto the Joe Wilson bandwagon to require members of Congress to join the public option if it passes. Which, since all the Republicans intend to vote against it anyway, what's the point? It's just an old white-guy GOP circle-jerk: makes them feel good for a few, but otherwise accomplishes nothing (no homo).


In the last week Inglis has pumped out half a dozen press releases that all say the same thing: he's against "Pelosi Health Care."


How do Republicans decide when to call it Pelosi Health Care and not Obamacare?

Boy Fogle, wanting more special rights, sucks up to the Democrats again.

The Palmetto Scoop has an item up about how a giant insurance company, in order to screw over one really expensive policy holder, eliminated a whole category of policyholders so they could say it wasn't just the one:

As the national battle over health care rages in Washington, the rights of patients to receive health insurance regardless of pre-existing conditions is slowly coming to the forefront of the debate.

That’s thanks in large part to one man, 37-year-old Ian Pearl of Florida.

CNN profiled Pearl, who suffers from muscular dystrophy, after he learned that the Guardian insurance company was dropping his coverage because it was too expensive. Pearl said losing his health care coverage would have been a death sentence.

In a Guardian company e-mail, one employee referred to those in Pearl’s high-cost class of policies like as “the few dogs” because their policies each cost more than $1 million per year. Guardian used a legal loophole to drop the entire line of policies, including Pearl.

Shortly after Pearl’s story ran, Guardian restored his policy.

But, more importantly, the New York State Senate introduced “Ian’s Law” — a bill that would close the loophole and make it illegal to terminate an an insurance policy line as a pretext to dropping coverage for individuals who need it most.

“My great hope is that Ian’s Law will end up protecting more people than I will ever know, who will never have to go through any sort of battle again because of this bill,” an elated Pearl said upon hearing of the bill’s introduction.

My great hope, as someone with a disease very similar to — but fortunately much milder to — Pearl, is that we can irradiate the practice of disqualifying or terminating individuals based on pre-existing health conditions.

Listen up lawmakers: Ian’s Law should be everywhere.

Waldo agrees. Emphatically. Keith Olbermann had an interview with the New York Legislator who introduced Ian's Law this evening:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The state senator sponsoring the bill has also written an article that features the same CNN video The Palmetto Scoop used.

Back in May, The Palmetto Scoop rightly praised SC state senator Vincent Sheheen for three years' work it took to get an effective handicapped parking law passed:

Three years of hard work for Sen. Vincent Sheheen (D-Kershaw) has finally paid off. A bill to reform the current handicapped parking system is only one signature away from becoming law.

The South Carolina Senate and House approved S. 126 Thursday to crack down on illegal handicapped parking in the state.

In January The Palmetto Scoop said much the same thing, only more expansively- and threateningly:

The easiest way to score beaucoup bonus points with me is to become a crusader for those who need handicapped parking. For far too long my people have suffered the injustices of lazy ass Wal Mart shoppers while South Carolina officials looked the other way on a system rampant with abuse and lax law enforcement.

So State Sen. Vincent Sheheen (D – Kershaw) has basically become my hero after teaming up with Sen. Dick Elliott (D – Horry) on a bill that would not only call for stronger enforcement of the law, but also create more accountability in the process of acquiring a placard.

People use handicap placards that don’t belong to them. Drivers park in the striped access aisles next to designated spaces. And confusion abounds over who is responsible for catching violators.

“There’s a continual problem of people abusing handicap placards, parking in spaces without a placard or having a placard they’re not entitled to,” said Sen. Vincent Sheheen of Camden. [...]

A Watchdog report earlier this year found the Department of Motor Vehicles does not record physicians’ information, leaving no way to check whether a physician actually filled out the form. The bill would connect those dots with a form that will stay on file with the DMV.

The proposed law also would redefine a person with a disability. [...]

And finally, the legislation would connect the person and the placard with an identification card, which law enforcement personnel could look at and match. [Charleston Post and Courier]

I can’t even begin to tell you how amazing it would be if this law were passed.

And anyone who votes against will suffer my wrath. Not only does that include me writing bad things about them on TPS, but also the possibility that I may “accidentally” run over their foot. Many times.

After seeing how inspired the black community has become over President Barack Obama, I think it’s time for my people to do the same.

Let us rise up! Rise up my handicapped brethren!

Well, umm… maybe not literally “rise up.” But definitely in the metaphorical sense.

“Too many people are abusing the current decal system,” Sheheen said. “This new law puts safeguards in place for folks who are truly in need of the easy access they deserve. It helps keep truly handicapped citizens from circling a parking lot searching for a parking space.”

The bill calls for stronger enforcement of the law and creates more accountability in the process of acquiring a placard.

And as someone who has spent plenty of time circling the parking lot trying to find a handicapped space only to see some 20-year-old jackass with grandma’s placard sprint from their illegally-parked car into the store, I can vouch for the fact that this law is sorely needed.

The legislation now heads to Gov. Mark Sanford, who is expected to sign it into law.

What connects these stories?

The hypocrisy and opportunism of The Palmetto Scoop.

He's a bright young fellow who works for a very conservative SC political consulting firm, Richard Quinn & Associates. Before that he worked for Erick Erickson, one of the most reactionary Republicans in the blogdom.

The Palmetto Scoop shills for his paymasters' candidate clients. He has called lots of people communists, socialists, and the like. As you will note from his January post, he's not above threatening you if he doesn't get his way. He has done it to Waldo, too. He  lionizes the Republican Party for a living, and runs down Democrats.

The Republican Party, of course, doesn't care about people like The Scoop. Their 11th hour version of health care reform preserves the right of big insurers to not cover people like The Scoop on preexisting conditions. 

And the legislators who got him his parking pass law, and who are pushing Ian's law that he so badly wants to see enacted by every state?

Democrats.

Under the Republican House health care plan, even if South Carolina adopted Ian's law, insurers in this state could just move to a state that doesn't require it, and drop The Palmetto Scoop.

Just like they can today. Just like they did in New York.

His party. The people who sign his paychecks. And, who, apparently, don't offer much in the way of health care coverage.

It's not a special right if you're a conservative.

Priorities

TPM: a bunch of the Golden Pond Loons of the GOP blew off votes on amending the Patriot Act to be at Michelle Bachmann's "press conference" that didn't take notice of the Fort Hood Massacre even as Savonarola complains the President wasn't "sensitive enough" in his initial response.

Roused from slumber.

It's nice to see Not Very Bright back in the blogdom, even if he's chosen to set up shop at Wal-Mart.

Mark Sanford wants to be a born-again virgin

The Luv Guv's setting himself up as a political essayist. Reviewing some new books about Ayn Rand, he finds her philosophy of personal philandering and political dogmatism a nice fit. He just wishes he left a little more room for forgiveness when people like him get caught.


His conclusion? 

Men and women are imperfect, or "fallen," which is why I believe there is a role for limited government in making sure that my rights end where yours begin. There is a role for a limited government in thwarting man's more selfish instincts that might limit the freedoms or opportunities of others.

It sounds like Sanford's been on the phone with Eliot Spitzer and David Vitter. The Luv Guv's laying the groundwork for a comeback as a kindler, gentler, Randite. Or, to borrow a concept from the Southern Baptists, there is such a thing as secondary political virginity.


So, Governor, care to explain how you and your party obsessively work to limit the "freedoms or opportunities" of gay Americans to be left alone by you and your party?

Trying to earn some more media.

Boy Fogle's shilling for Glenn Beck. Did he get a book out of the deal, or other consideration? He doesn't say.

"Oh, the horror! Oh, the Germanity!"

Anaconda's abandoning its usual cheerful, dumb frat boy pose to Opine Seriously on how the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago is a sign of how the United States has lost its way:

The wall stood for twenty-eight years, with both its erection and its crumbling serving as enduring reminders of the fundamental value of freedom and the fundamental wisdom of free markets.

Which begs the question … when in the hell did we decide to forget these lessons here in America?  And when did we decide that the ideology of the “other side” of that wall was something we wanted to implement here in the heart of America, which more than any other nation was responsibly for tearing that wall down?

And how did it happen so fast, too?

Seriously, people.  Our nation was conceived in the basic principles of freedom and free markets, and in the intervening 240 years we’ve sent millions of our boys (and more recently, girls) all over the world to protect those principles – both for us and for others.

Why are we giving them up now?

Incidentally, Irish rock band U2 played a free concert at the wall to mark the anniversary – selecting the power ballad “One” as their opener.

One could argue Anaconda's America was happy to cheer on the wholesale abandonment of freedom to a government that wiretaps without warrants, and intercepts emails, and captures people to take them to points unknown and torture them...as for the wisdom of unfettered markets, well, tell it to Lehman Brothers, or Bear Stearns, or AIG....

Anaconda also missed- or ignored- the nice irony of the fact that MTV built a six and a half foot tall wall around the former Berlin Wall site where it held a free concert-lasting for six songs and thirty minutes (only one song made it to MTV's European Music Awards show) to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall. Its purpose was to prevent people without tickets from seeing the show. Which is why Anaconda had to post up a 2001 video of a U2 song performed at the event. 10,000 people got in. The free crowd outside the free concert was more like 100,000.

What it looked like on the outside:

Gero Breloer / AP

Spectators try to take a look at Brandenburg Gate from behind a fence prior to the beginning of a concert by U2 in Berlin on Thursday.

What it looked like on the inside:

On the other hand, it shows big American entertainment corporations have well and truly learned the fundamental wisdom of free markets.

This is the future SC's GOP embraces.

David Corn: When John Boehner, the Republican leader of the House, appeared at the Tea Party rally at the Capitol on Thursday afternoon, it was a dramatic signal: The wing-nuts have taken over the GOP.

Think I'm being harsh? The angry folks at the protest -- which attracted several thousand conservatives -- held up signs with messages of hate: "Get the Red Out of the White House," "Waterboard Congress," "Ken-ya Trust Obama?" One called the president a "Traitor to the U.S. Constitution." Another sign showed pictures of dead bodies at the Dachau concentration camp and compared health care reform to the Holocaust. A different placard depicted Obama as Sambo. Yes, Sambo. Another read, "Obama takes his orders from the Rothchilds" -- a reference to the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory holding that one evil Jewish family has manipulated events around the globe for decades.

All of this extremism was on display -- proudly -- at an event that was officially sponsored by the House Republicans. After Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) invited tea partiers to the Capitol to rail against the emerging health care bill, the GOP leadership -- somewhat blindsided by Bachmann -- jumped on board, providing speakers and logistical support for the event. Certainly, the crowd was not made up entirely of bigots; I'm not smearing all the protesters who oppose Obama's health care reform effort. But it cannot be denied: Racism and anti-Semitism were part of an official Republican action.

Extremism was also flowing from the podium, where Republican House members were eager for microphone time. Boehner, for one, declared that the health care bill is the "greatest threat to freedom that I have seen." That's some statement. A greater threat than Hitler's Nazism or Soviet communism? About the same time he was speaking, Obama was making a surprise appearance at the White House daily press briefing to tout the fact that the American Medical Association and AARP, the powerful seniors lobby, have each endorsed the health care reform bill. Here's a question for Boehner: Are these two groups opposed to freedom? And at one point during the rally -- call it a Bachmannalia -- when John Ratzenberger, a.k.a Cliff Clavin from "Cheers," claimed that the Democrats were turning the United States into a land of European socialism, the audience shouted, "Nazis, Nazis." No Republican legislator left the stage in protest. Boehner and his fellow GOP leaders should be asked how they feel about mounting a rally that attracted intense hate-mongering...

Bless his heart, he just can't help himself.

For Anaconda, gay-bashing is like breathing:

You can read our two exclusive reports here and here, but the bottom line is that a bunch of uber-leftist environmentalist cash is being funneled through some of America’s most left-leaning organizations – all to bring you a RINO State Senator’s consultant-driven drivel aimed at shoring up support for South Carolina’s new RINO king (or queen, if you believe the rumor mill).

Somebody was bound to start it.

Voting Under the Influence wisely says, "We are all Army today."

Would that his conservative compadres in the SC blogdom would heed the admonition.

Garnet Spy is right out of the box calling for witch hunts, starting in The White House, but then expanding out to the other, usual, suspects:

...Our president is kissing the nasty ass of the Muslim world that has declared war on the United States, the congressional leadership is trying to establish a socialist government and the Hispanic Caucus wants to give illegals rights and privileges in the United States for Americans to people who are not citizens.

TRAIDORES! 

...DHS– if you’re really interested in protecting the homeland, you’ll start with putting every Muslim in the country on a watchlist and then, WATCH THEM!

When will our government stop protecting those who have openly called for the demise of our nation?  When will our “president” honor his oath to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution of the United States?

Instead, he allocates millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to Muslim nations for the Global Technology and Innovation Fund to ‘catalyse and facilitate private sector investments’ throughout Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Eligible projects would advance economic opportunity and create jobs in areas like technology, education, telecom, media, business services and clean technology, the White House said. [The Nation]

Earlier this year, he increased aid to such Muslim countries as Jordan ($513M in 2009), Egypt ($310M), the Palestinian Authority ($600M) and for Hamas – yes, Hama – $300 million.

That would pay for a lot of health care.  And it encourages a lot of Malik Nadal Hasans

Maybe Barack Obama IS living up to an oath.  Just not the one we expect.

Meantime, Frank Schaeffer sets the groundwork for how we got to this world of revenge-driven fantasy on the Right:

Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series of sixteen novels (so far!) represents everything that is most deranged about religion. If I had to choose companions to take my chances with in a lifeboat, and the choice boiled down to picking Tim LaHaye, Jerry Jenkins, or Christopher Hitchens, I’d pick Hitchens in a heartbeat. At least he wouldn’t try to sink our boat so that Jesus would come back sooner. He might even bring along a case of wine.

The Left Behind novels have sold tens of millions of copies while spawning an “End Times” cult, or rather egging it on. Such products as Left Behind wall paper, screen savers, children’s books, and video games have become part of the ubiquitous American background noise. Less innocuous symptoms include people stocking up on assault rifles and ammunition, adopting “Christ-centered” home school curricula, fearing higher education, embracing rumor as fact, and learning to love hatred for the “other,” as exemplified by a revived anti-immigrant racism, the murder of doctors who do abortions, and even a killing in the Holocaust Museum...

..The key to understanding the popularity of this series (and the whole host of other End Times “ministries” from the ever weirder Jack-the-Rapture-is-coming!-Van-Impe to the smoother but no less bizarre pages of Christianity Today magazine) isn’t some new or sudden interest in prophecy, but the deepening inferiority complex suffered by the evangelical/fundamentalist community.

The words left behind are ironically what the books are about, but not in the way their authors intended. The evangelical/fundamentalists, from their crudest egocentric celebrities to their “intellectuals” touring college campuses trying to make evangelicalism respectable, have been left behind by modernity. They won’t change their literalistic anti-science, anti-education, anti-everything superstitions, so now they nurse a deep grievance against “the world.” This has led to a profound fear of the “other.”

Jenkins and LaHaye provide the ultimate revenge fantasy for the culturally left behind against the “elite.” The Left Behind franchise holds out hope for the self-disenfranchised that at last soon everyone will know “we” were right and “they” were wrong. They’ll knowbecause Spaceship Jesus will come back and whisk us away, leaving everyone else to ponder just how very lost they are because they refused to say the words, “I accept Jesus as my personal savior” and join our side while there was still time! Even better: Jesus will kill all those smart-ass Democrat-voting, overeducated fags who have been mocking us!

It sounded good, so he posted it.

State Senator Kevin Bryant has struck again, this time copying a Canadian story Savonarola ran three weeks ago about The First Lady's staff.


Bryant adds:

I haven’t verified this information, so if anyone finds it not to be true, LMK.

What an intellectual slug.


When he wanted to make a partisan point, or one on the merits, Senator Bryant was too lazy to take a minute and a half to Google the question and find, for example, that FactCheck.org covered this issue last August 5:

Q: Does First Lady Michelle Obama have an "unprecedented" number of staffers?

A: A spokeswoman for the first lady says that Michelle Obama currently has a staff of 24. That may indeed be the largest of any first lady, but Hillary Clinton, with 19 staffers, and Laura Bush with at least 18 and perhaps more, weren’t far behind. 

FULL QUESTION:

Is this accurate? And how does it compare to prior first ladies’ staffs?

First Lady Requires More Than Twenty Attendants

⬐ Click to expand/collapse the full text ⬏

FULL ANSWER:

The White House published the 2009 Annual Report to Congress on White House Staff on itsofficial blog on July 1, listing the title and salary of many White House office employees. A few days later, a fuss began online over the number of people who are assigned to work for the Office of First Lady and how much they earn per year.

A blog post from Chicago Sun-Times reporter Lynn Sweet on July 6 put the spotlight on "What Michelle Obama’s Staffers Earn." The staff of TheLastCrusade.org, a Web site that describes itself as a place "where you can engage in the life and death struggle against the forces of Islam, apostasy, moral complacency, cultural relativity, and the New World Order," then took the information and posted a piece claiming that the first lady had hired an "unprecedented number of staffers" to "cater to her every whim and to satisfy her every request in the midst of the Great Recession." That piece was also posted on the conservative Web site CanadaFreePress.com under the byline of Dr. Paul L. Williams, who runs TheLastCrusade.org. That post has become part of a chain e-mail that some of our readers have passed on to us, and the e-mail expands upon Williams’ post, falsely claiming that some recent first ladies have had only one or three staffers.

How Many?

According to the 2009 White House report to Congress, there are 16 people with a title specifically indicating they work for Michelle Obama’s office. In other words, there are 16 people with "first lady" somewhere in their title, such as Jocelyn Frye, deputy assistant to the president and director of policy and projects for the first lady.

The list reported by Sweet and The Last Crusade, however, includes six other staffers who do not have "first lady" in their title but are a part of the first lady’s office staff, such as Desiree Rogers, special assistant to the president and White House social secretary, and Natalie Bookey, staff assistant.

We contacted Katie McCormick Lelyveld, Michelle Obama’s press secretary, to check the list’s accuracy. Lelyveld told us in an e-mail that the first lady’s current staff size is actually 24, not 22, as the chain e-mail claims. Lelyveld couldn’t provide a list of the staffers at that time.

First Ladies Past

The chain e-mail’s author claims that "[t]here has never been anyone in the White House at any time that has created such an army of staffers whose sole duties are the facilitation of the First Lady’s social life." The author claims that "even Hillary, only had three; Jackie Kennedy one; Laura Bush one." But the counts for those first ladies are incorrect – and they’re way off.

Stephen Plotkin, reference archivist for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, told us in an e-mail that Jacqueline Kennedy’s office was "headed" by one person, but said that there were "at least 9 people working for Mrs. Kennedy, with the promise of a great many more" during her time at the White House.

Kim Coryat, an archives technician at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library, told us it can be difficult to nail down a precise count of staff considering "White House staffing for all offices ebbs and flows with time." But she said in an e-mail that White House telephone directory records indicate that Hillary Clinton had at least a staff of 13 as of October 1993; 18 as of April 1997; and 19 as of March 2000.

Lelyveld said that Michelle Obama’s staff was actually no different than that of her predecessor, Laura Bush. "[W]e have exactly the same staff number as Mrs. Bush and our office organization reflects a similar staffing model, so insinuations otherwise are wrong," she said. Lelyveld said that the White House’s "personnel records indicate" that there were 24 staffers for Laura Bush at some point. We were able to verify at least 18 staffers for Laura Bush, as of June 30, 2008, via the 2008 White House staff list published in The Washington Post’s White House Watch column. Sixteen people were specifically referred to as a "first lady" staffer, and Amy Zantzinger and Dorothy Thornton served as White House social secretary and deputy social secretary, respectively. It’s possible that someone with the title of "staff assistant" was assigned to the Office of First Lady as well, as is the case with Michelle Obama’s staff.

The combined annual salaries for the 22 staffers we can specifically identify as working for Michelle Obama come to $1.6 million. For the 18 we could identify as working for Laura Bush in 2008, the total is $1.4 million.

Dr. Myra Gutin, a professor of communications at Rider University and a first ladies historian, says that the first lady’s role has certainly "grown and evolved" since the 1960s, but generally speaking, the first lady’s "staff numbers about 14-16." Gutin told us she recalled "some first ladies have had staffs of more than that."

–D’Angelo Gore

Sources

Executive Office of the President. "Annual Report on White House Staff to Congress." WhiteHouse.gov. 1 Jul 2009, accessed 30 Jul 2009.

Sweet, Lynn. "What Michelle Obama’s Staffers Earn." PoliticsDaily.com. 6 Jul 2009, accessed 30 Jul 2009.

Sweet, Lynn. "More Michelle Obama staff appointments." SunTimes.com. 16 Jan 2009, accessed 30 Jul 2009.

"First Lady Requires More than 20 Attendants." TheLastCrusade.org. 6 Jul 2009, accessed 30 Jul 2009.

Froomkin, Dan. "2008 White House Office Staff List." Washington Post White House Watch Column. 24 Jul 2008, accessed 30 Jul 2009.

Gutin, Myra. E-mail sent to FactCheck.org. 30 Jul 2009.

Plotkin, Stephen. E-mail sent to FactCheck.org. 31 Jul 2009.

Coryat, Kim. E-mail sent to FactCheck.org. 31 Jul 2009.

The GOP health care plan: if you're already insured, great. If you're not, you must deserve being uninsured.

NYT:

House Republican leaders have produced their own health care reform bill. Here is the first thing you need to know: It would do almost nothing to reduce the scandalously high number of Americans who have no insurance. And it makes only a token stab at slowing the relentlessly rising costs of medical care.

Despite that, the Republicans are pitching their bill as far more affordable than the Democrats’ approach. And you are sure to hear a lot in coming days about how it could reduce health insurance premiums. How it compares in that respect with the Democratic proposal is not yet clear. But a lot of the Republicans’ savings on premiums come from reduced coverage. Pay less and get less.

Bless their hearts, white male Republicans just can't help themselves.

Voting Under the Influence picks up and runs with The Palmetto Scoop's meme about how African-American politicians in South Carolina can't speak proper English:

There was also some debate among the staff on who was more colorful, Robert Ford with his broken English, or Henry McMaster with his exaggerated "Foghorn-Leghorn" accent.

-but at least nobody's gonna be leering at a buncha slobs in the shower. Obesity and unit cohesion march hand in- well, never mind.

The kid in the ball cap's the draft-age one.

The Daily Dish:

The Not So Best And Brightest

Andrea Stone reports:

The latest Army statistics show a stunning 75 percent of military-age youth are ineligible to join the military because they are overweight, can't pass entrance exams, have dropped out of high school or had run-ins with the law.

So many young people between the prime recruiting ages of 17 and 24 cannot meet minimum standards that a group of retired military leaders is calling for more investment in early childhood education to combat the insidious effects of junk food and inadequate education. "We've never had this problem of young people being obese like we have today," said Gen. John Shalikashvili, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Meanwhile, we're throwing out qualified West Point Arab linguists - because they are gay. Insane. 

Garnet Spy says, "And did I mention he's an uppity nigra?"

Obama happened.  When campaigning for President, Obama was the man behind the curtain.  Someone we really didn’t know who pulled levers to project an entirely contrived image.  In the year since the election, Barack Obama has been exposed as someone who not only does not have the executive credentials to be President of the United States, he doesn’t have the intellectual capacity, the attention span or the American heart to be president.

Never mind those exit polls that said people weren't voting against the President.

Fabulousness will always out

Wowser! Charleston Daily Photo's Joan Perry (whom we adored already) has won a statewide award for photography!

Only white people are patriots nowadays.

The Really White People's Party had their rally in Washington today. They were really white. Really.


Anaconda was all over the white thing, even noting that, among SC's congressional delegation, "Democratic Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, who represents South Carolina’s minority-majority Sixth Congressional District, is expected to vote in favor of the bill."

All the photos he featured are reliably white, and avoid the more tasteless posters like the one that featured stacks of naked, dead, Jews at Dachau in 1945. You can catch that one here.

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Annals of Public Service Technology

Thanks to Notions Capitol, there's a new device out to help SC's conservative consultant/bloggers over those tough spots when, in fact, they have absolutely nothing to say:

Bless her heart, conservatives just have to let that teeming id act out somehow

TMZ:

Before you Opposite-Marry, you get to be a complete slut:

Carrie Prejean demanded more than a million dollars during her settlement negotiations with Miss California USA Pageant officials -- that is, until the lawyer for the Pageant showed Carrie an XXX home video of her handiwork.

The video the lawyer showed Carrie is extremely graphic and has never been released publicly. We know that, because TMZ obtained the video months ago but decided not to post it because it was so racy. Let's just say, Carrie has a promising solo career.

We're told it took about 15 seconds for Carrie to jettison her demand and essentially walk away with nothing. As we first reported, the Pageant is paying around $100,000 to her lawyers and publicist -- a fraction of her bills. She pockets nothing in the settlement.

Read more: http://www.tmz.com/2009/11/04/carrie-prejean-sex-tape-settlement-miss-california-usa-pagneat/#ixzz0W1y1EYVi

Heroes with a sense of humor

Waldo's happy to join the attributional daisy chain on this item:

This week with Congressman J. Gresham Barrett.

So it's been Gitmo week for Congressman J. Gresham Barrett, who is running for SC governor. The Third District congressman has little but press releases and recapitulations of press releases about his brainwave that all the candidates for SC governor should join him in signing a letter calling on the President not to transfer any Gitmo terror suspects to the Charleston Navy Yard Brig in anticipation of trial.


Ina  simple-minded way, it's a sensible political move: invite all your opponents to either proclaim you their leader, or to cut their heads off themselves as liberal, socialist, communist, nazi, islamist, muslim symps.


So far it hasn't played well. Nikki Haley, Governor Sanford's successor-babe wannabe, tried to have it both ways. She said she'd sign it but that Barrett was grandstanding.





Actor Aaron Eckhart, who, between movies, is running for governor as Democrat Mullins McLeod, wrote Barrett to tell him to show the letter up his capacious anal cavity.





Attorney General Henry McMaster, in a reverse double-axel Haley, said he wouldn't sign it but agreed they should be kept at Gitmo and that Congress should do something.


So yesterday Barrett released his letter, signed by the state's new Coastal Terrorism Caucus: Barrett; First District Congressman Henry ("It'll be bad for shellfish") Brown; Second District Congressman Joe ("I'm easy, but I'm not cheap") Wilson; and Senator Jim ("Bury me in a Y-shaped coffin") DeMint.


Warthen opines that Barrett is a lot like General Grant, who, William McFeely argued in his bio, ran for president because he had nothing better to do:

As I mentioned before in one of my last columns for the paper, Rep. Barrett didn’t seem to have a reason for running for governor. He could clearly state what he wanted to do, or anything special that he brought to the job (which is probably why he dodged talking to me for a couple of weeks, until I got really insufferable with one of his staffers — avoiding free media is just bizarre behavior in a gubernatorial candidate, and it really stood out), which was not good.

Now, he’s apparently decided he wants to grab attention and break out of the pack in the worst way — which is exactly what he’s done.

In the playbook of the kind of politician who has a very low opinion of the electorate, he’s doing everything right: He’s appealing to xenophobia, to the Not In My Backyard mentality, to insecurity, and sticking it to the administration that happens to be of the other party. He accomplishes all that by griping loudly and obnoxiously about the idea of the Obama administration bringing “detainees” from Guantanamo to the Navy Brig in Charleston.

The United States of Goldman Sachs

Wall Street financial firms are getting their own shipments of H1N1 vaccine for "high risk" employees.

Waldo agrees it's not Wilson's ad, but that still doesn't prove he's not an idiot.

Congressman Joe Wilson is peeved that someone has put up an ad that says the President is a Communist.

But Wilson doesn't deny the premise.

Meantime, Wilson was out pandering to the Teabaggers' remarkably underwhelming descent upon the Capitol.

And then he made the matinee show:

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It's still a big tent, there's just new entrance requirements.

Chairman Toby kicks off the Republican Renaissance with...what else? A purge.

Alone in his Portland mansion, Bishop Malone is saying, "Uh...Calvinism? As if?"

Notes from the Resistance in the People's Theocracy of Maine:

As much as the Haters tried to keep their funding sources secret, the information is seeping out. Bishop Malone appears to have transferred upwards of $263,000 from the diocesan general treasury to the anti-marriage campaign, and other Catholic districts and leaders coughed up another $300,000 more (including $2000 from the bankrupt Archdiocese of Oregon).

A blogger's dad posts his reaction to a personal campaign:

During the campaign I made a practice of stopping at homes where Yes on 1 signs were posted and performed a small act of ‘bearing witness.’ I would ring the doorbell, excuse the interruption, and make the point that I wanted to see what a voter in contemporary America looked like who would publicly announce that they thought neither my son nor my god-daughter was equal to them in civil terms. The responses were as telling as the nastiness and smugness of so many of the comments posted here. Some people were simply stunned that I would perform such an act of conscience on their doorstep. Some cited Romans I to me. Others smiled their broad, born-again smiles seemingly treating me like a little child who didn’t know any better and could therefore be forgiven, or facilely informed me that God loved the sinner but not the sin. Given the work of the Catholic (oxymoron!) Church and all the other so-called christians in Maine and elsewhere who would seek to impose their personal religious views on members of my immediate family by denying them civil rights most of the rest of us enjoy, I take this first opportunity to renounce my Calvinist baptism. It won’t stop me from working to achieve the end of equality for all, but I can continue to do it without a designation that has, in recent years, become deeply objectionable to me because of the decidedly un-christian attitudes and acts of those similarly designated.

Somewhere, Eric Sevareid (aka "Severalsides") is laughing.

KausFiles notes the restoration of a long-honored standard in DC punditry:

Hugh ("only time will tell") Sidey has a worthy successor: Eugene Robinson in this morning's WaPo:

Reading too much into Tuesday's off-off-year election results would be a mistake, but reading too little into them would be wrong as well.

[Thanks to reader J] 12:08 P.M.

Somewhere, The Great Combover is sputtering, "Wait a minute..."

The Senate health reform bill requires insurers to consider covering Christian Science prayer treatments.

Annals of South Carolina Justice.

A South Carolina court has sentenced a mentally ill man to three years in prison for having sex with a horse.

Anaconda thinks it's hilarious.

The horse's owner thinks the sentence was too short.

Bishop Malone's 411

Just as California voters demanded more humane cages for chickens as they turned down equal marriage rights, Maine voters doing Bishop Malone's bidding on equal marriage rights flocked to make it easier for Mainers to get stoned.

This week with Congressman Joe Wilson

This week, a guest contributor, Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC:

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