Far be it for me to criticize the campaign arm of the White House/DNC, Organizing For America, seeing as they have successfully gotten one more president elected to office than I have. But I have to think that if you want to maintain this reputation of being awesomely granular sorters of voter data and skilled messaging micro-targeters who can quickly and effectively align voter support for key priorities, then the emails you send out to constituents ought to demonstrate that you have a functioning understanding of how... say, the U.S. House Of Representatives works. That way, you avoid sending voters perplexingly useless missives, like the one that Mitch Stewart, Director of OFA, blasted out to residents of the District of Columbia:

[NAME REMOVED] --

This is it -- the House of Representatives will vote on health insurance reform tomorrow. All signs point to it being incredibly close, possibly even coming down to a single vote.

With the clock ticking, insurance company lobbyists are going all out to stop reform. Please call Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton at 202-225-8050 now.

Today, President Obama is visiting the House to call for reform, and I hope you'll add your voice to his. If you haven't called before, now is the time. And if you have recently called, thank you -- now please ask friends, family members, and co-workers in your district to join you.

http://my.barackobama.com/HouseVote

Everything we're fighting for comes down to moments like this -- and every second counts.

Thanks for stepping up,

Mitch

Well, I have to say, if the House health reform bill does come down to a single vote, reform proponents better hope like hell that single vote doesn't have to come from Eleanor Holmes Norton! This is not because Norton isn't an awesome lady -- she is, as evidenced by her many appearances on the Colbert Report. But while Norton is an ally of the White House and supports the larger effort to expand health care coverage, as the duly sworn representative of the District, she does not enjoy voting privileges. So, as far as her vote goes, she would vote if she could vote but she can't vote so she won't vote.

Anyway, thanks, Mitch Stewart, for reminding the residents of the District of Columbia that they enjoy second-class status and their hopes are largely tied to other people's representatives.

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On last night's Daily Show, Jon Stewart laid out his take on the terrifying Glenn Beck Appendectomy Conspiracy, RAISING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS over how maybe it was all "a plot by Hitler to steal Glenn Beck from all of us internal organ by internal organ by internal organ and then reprogram him to use as a weapon." But maybe Stewart was only scratching the surface of this conspiracy! Let's all RAISE SOME QUESTIONS over whether or not actual Marxists were, in fact, rooting around inside Glenn Beck's body and mind.

Yesterday morning, Glenn Beck communicated with the world, in his patented Pidgin Twitter, saying:

Nvr a gdnight sleep in the hospital but always easier w/family, prayers and AMAZING drs/nurses. They didn't even cut off my feet!!

Amazing nurses, eh? Amazingly anti-American, maybe! Alexander Zaitchik is RAISING SUSPICIONS:

The quality of care he is receiving should not have come as a surprise. When Beck complained of acute abdominal pain during his radio program on Wednesday, he was rushed to a nearby hospital. The security-conscious Beck has not disclosed the name of the facility, but it's a safe bet that it is staffed by proud members of a storied union: New York's Local 1199, aka United Healthcare Workers East, which belongs to the Service Employees International Union. The SEIU has organized all of Manhattan's major hospitals, including every facility to which Beck could have conceivably been sent.

It probably has not occurred to Beck to link his kind, efficient nurses to something as dastardly as the SEIU. As recently as Wednesday, he was busy smearing the union with his usual verbal feces. For the past several months, on radio and television, Beck has cast the SEIU, the country's largest union, as a Toxic Avenger-looking bogeyman in his conspiratorial fantasyland. In the progressive plot of Beck's imagination, the "radical, Marxist" SEIU is conspiring with ACORN "thugs" to destroy the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and turn this country into North Korea--or worse.

Now, I don't know if the "amazing nurses" that tended to Glenn Beck were SEIU members or not. But the following infotaining factoid simply can not be ignored! No one has been inside the Obama White House more than SEIU prexy Andy Stern. Now, Andy Stern has, through Marxist nurse proxies, gained access inside Glenn Beck's body! WHAT DOES ACORN WANT WITH GLENN BECK'S PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS?

Later that same morning, Beck tweeted: "I just realized my tonsils are missing. Man, I wish I were as rich as M. Moore i could've had some of that sweet Castro Care he loves." But, Glenn Beck is as rich as Michael Moore! Or at least he was, before he received sweet Castro Care, from Maoist nurses that he now refers to as -- AND I QUOTE -- "AMAZING."

All right, here's the kicker. Do you know the name of the planet on which all of this occurred? Give up? IT WAS EARTH!!

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On this morning's Fox And Friends, hosts Brian Kilmeade and Gretchen Carlson were all a-whip with Salem Witch Trial panic over the thought that Nidal Hasan represented some sort of vanguard of deadly Islamist shootings to come.

Kilmeade began the nonsense thusly:

KILMEADE: Do you think it's time for the military to have special debriefings of Muslim Army officers -- anybody enlisted?...Because if I'm going to be deployed in a foxhole, if I'm going to be sticking in an outpost, I got to know the guy next to me is not going to want to kill me.

First of all, as someone who's been unfortunate enough to catch Brian "The Brown Haired One" Kilmeade revealing his personality on the air, my judgment on the matter is that the only foxhole in which Kilmeade is not likely to encounter someone who harbors the desire to do him harm is one in which he is the sole occupant. And even then, who knows? I give even odds!

But it fell to Geraldo Rivera to point out the obvious:

RIVERA: But isn't this the headline, Brian, that there are four or five million American Muslims and how scant and few and far between these horrifying incidents are? It's the same thing in the military. Believe me, I've been in Afghanistan with these guys,in Iraq with these guys. They are treasured for their bilingualism, their multiculturalism, the fact that they can bridge and understand and translate for us.

But then, Gretchen Carlson became concerned with "political correctness," saying, "Could it be that out military was also exercising political correctness -- even though he had a poor performance report, even though he spoke openly about being a radical and had those supposed postings online -- could it be that the military was exercising political correctness in not approaching as seriously as they would have if he had not been a Muslim."

Rivera agreed though he went on to cite government bureaucracy, not political correctness, as the reason those warning signs went unheeded.

WATCH:

By the way, here's a fun fact:

Motorcycle and street gang members have joined the U.S. military and served in Iraq, a new FBI report says.

[...]

The Defense Department does not track gang membership in the military. But FBI investigators believe the reduction in enlistment standards -- due to recruitment pressure related to the Iraq War -- has brought more gang members in.

Recruiters are not trained to look for signs of gang membership, the report said. Others ignore criminal records of willing volunteers -- such as the recruiter who concealed the fact that a member of the Latin Kings was awaiting trial for a razor assault on a New York police officer.

So, I'm not sure, exactly how or where "political correctness" enters into this.

RELATED:
Fox hosts want 'special screenings' for Muslims in military [Raw Story]
Kilmeade, Johnson want to know if it's time for "special debriefings," "special screenings" of Muslim officers [Media Matters]

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Well, if you were wondering what paranoiac smear artist would be the first to step out and attempt to name President Barack Obama as the man who guided Nidal Malik Hasan to his murderous rampage at Fort Hood yesterday, the answer -- naturally! -- is Jerome Corsi. Corsi has a long history of lunatic, fact-averse ravings and he fails to disappoint on that regard on the pages of World Net Daily, today, in a piece entitled "Shooter advised Obama transition." Except, of course, he didn't do any such thing.

Corsi hangs his entire allegation on a document produced on May 19, 2009 by The George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute entitled "Thinking Anew, Security Priorities For The Next Administration." In that document, Nidal Hasan is listed, on page 29, as a "Task Force Event Participant." He was one of hundreds of people listed as a "participant." Significantly, Nidal was not the author of the document. He was not a member of the HSPI's "Presidential Transition Task Force." Nor was he a member of the HSPI's "Task Force Staff." He was not a member of the HSPI's Steering Committee or a briefer to the task force.

Also, the activities of the HSPI here do not in anyway constitute official transition advice to the White House, despite the fact that a committee got named the "Presidential Transition Task Force" and the HSPI's activities involved identifying homeland security priorities and offering advice. Here is what the HSPI does:

Founded in 2003, The George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute (HSPI) is a nonpartisan "think and do" tank whose mission is to build bridges between theory and practice to advance homeland security through an interdisciplinary approach. By convening domestic and international policymakers and practitioners at all levels of government, the private and non-profit sectors, and academia, HSPI creates innovative strategies and solutions to current and future threats to the nation.

The task force gave itself the following mission: "to further policy discussions of the top strategic priorities in the area of security in order to generate actionable recommendations, for the Administration taking office in January 2009, designed to effectively meet the most vexing challenges the United States faces today."

Essentially, what the HSPI did (and all of this is spelled out explicitly in this document's executive summary) is convene a giant group of security wonks and academics, heard some briefings, made some "internal deliberations," and generated a set of priorities and recommendations. Then those recommendations got published, and maybe someone at the White House read them, but it's more likely that the content ended up as material to cite in the middle of further security-wonk discussions.

And at some point in the process, Nidal Hasan might have sat in a room while this was happening, with a few hundred other people.

But none of this constitutes formal advice given to the president on homeland security during the transition of power. This was a university panel that has sod all to do with the White House, generating ideas, and calling it "advice" for the president. If two or three of you wanted to meet up with me at the Au Bon Pain on Pennsylvania Avenue this afternoon and chat today, we will have accomplished basically the same thing.

Corsi, in fact, knows this. He writes:

While the GWU task force participants included several members of government, including representatives of the Department of Justice and the U.S Department of Homeland Security, there is no indication in the document that the group played any formal role in the official Obama transition, other than to serve in a university-based advisory capacity.

In short, the facts Corsi obtained torpedo the premise of his piece, which, I remind you, is that the "shooter advised [the] Obama transition." Were this being written for a responsible journalistic entity, some creature called an "editor" would have stepped in and said, "Hey, Jerome, you realize that by your own findings, you article is complete horseshit, right?" But this is World Net Daily, written by and for complete charlatans.

UPDATE: I contacted Frank Cilluffo, the director of the HSPI at George Washington University, who tells me that Nidal Hasan has no affiliation with the HSPI or with George Washington University, at all. "[Hasan] has no role on the task force, other than the fact that he attended these meetings as an audience member, as did hundreds of others." Hasan's name appears on the list of participants only because he provided the HSPI with an RSVP, indicating his attendance. Cilluffo told me, "We always record RSVPs and publish them as a matter of transparency, and will continue to do so."

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Remember Election Night 2009? The big takeaway from the 23rd District of New York -- where Democrat Bill Owens prevailed as the first Democrat to win that Congressional seat since the Ice Age -- was that conservatives were at war with each other. Brother against brother! Establishment against fringe! Well, as it turns out, that battle is being waged most bloodily inside the Imaginarium Of Michael Steele.

Yesterday, Michael Steele was defending Delicate Flower of Center-Right Moderation Olympia Snowe from the stern rhetoric of Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, telling the Morning Joe coffee-klatsch:

"I say, Welcome. Welcome. Each member of this party has a unique footprint. And it's different from region to region. I can't win in the Northeast with a candidate best suited for the South and vice-versa."

But that was yesterday, when the largest looming concern was the NY23-FAIL. Today, Capitol Hill is ramped up into Bachmann Tea Party Overdrive, and Michael Steele is suddenly drawing down on anyone who thinks they're gonna bring their "unique footprint" into his "big tent":

"So candidates who live in moderate to slightly liberal districts have got to walk a little bit carefully here, because you do not want to put yourself in a position where you're crossing that line on conservative principles, fiscal principles, because we'll come after you," Steele continued.

"You're gonna find yourself in a very tough hole if you're arguing for the president's stimulus plan or Nancy Pelosi's health plan. There's no justification for growing the size of government the way this administration and this Congress wants to do it."

So there you have it: Michael Steele is sort of riding a wave of confusing emotions.

UPDATE: Wow. Michael Steele is just spinning like a pinwheel, trying to decide what sort of Republicans he likes and what sort he doesn't. Via Sam Stein:

Hours after Michael Steele warned moderate Republicans that they woud be targeted if they didn't support conservative principles, the RNC Chairman called discussion of intra-party feuding "stupid" and insisted that the GOP would lose if "we play politics amongst our own."

More from Sam, here.

RELATED:
Meet The New, Very Violent Michael Steele [Wonkette]
Hitching Wagon to Tea Partiers, Steele Threatens to 'Come After' GOP Moderates [The Washington Independent]

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Via Amanda Terkel at Think Progress, here's video of representative Todd Akin (R-MO) treating today's Teabachle to the Pledge of Allegiance. Akin led off with a brief oration on the importance of the words "under God" in the pledge, because someone has to stop Nancy Pelosi from killing God, with death panels. Perhaps the overemphasis on that mid-20th century drop-in was what led Akin to leave out another important word of the pledge: "indivisible." Though the setting strongly suggests that this may have been a Freudian slip.

[WATCH]

The upshot is that now Chief Justice John Roberts will have to get everybody together later to say the pledge again, you know...so it counts.

UPDATE:
Today's rally isn't exactly going down as the most coherent gathering of patriotic Americans ever assembled! Via Politico's Glenn Thrush, here's video of John Boehner getting the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence mixed up:

Boehner only had several days to prepare for this! But, then, if you recall, he doesn't go in for a lot of that readin' stuff.

Boehner's spokesman Michael Steel responded by saying: "Both texts are vital to the liberty beloved by every American." Very true. So vital, that many actually learn them!

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Bloomberg's Yalman Onaran takes a glance at the state of play on the consumer protection front, and sizes up the influence that the banking lobby has been able to exert on ongoing efforts to reign in the excesses that caused the 2008 economic meltdown. Overall, it's a bit of the ol' good news/bad news:

Banks and securities firms spent $193 million to fund political campaigns for the 2008 elections and raise even more money through events that their trade groups organize. They have successfully fought the administration's efforts to limit executive pay and are battling against draft legislation governing the $592 trillion market for derivatives.

When it comes to consumer banking, the industry's lobbyists are no longer all-powerful. Banks lost their bid to squelch new credit card rules that Obama signed into law in May. They lobbied for months before a bill that would have forced them to renegotiate mortgages failed in the Senate.

Now the banks and their trade associations are lobbying furiously to kill Obama's plan to create the new financial protection agency, which was approved by the House Financial Services Committee in late October and is likely to face a full House vote by the end of 2009.

Onaran goes on to attribute some of the waning influence on the overwhelming public sentiment against the banking industry, the "weakened position" of major players post-bailout, and the difficulty that varied interest groups are having coalescing around "how they want the bill rewritten."

Nevertheless, the lobbyists have not surrendered, and that revolving door remains a-spin:

JPMorgan Chase & Co., the second-biggest U.S. bank, got 48 percent of its revenue from consumer lending in the first nine months of 2009. The bank, which was one of the least scathed by the crisis, has stepped up its lobbying. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon now visits the capital twice a month, meeting with administration officials and congressional leaders, up from twice a year in 2006.

"JPMorgan also added two lobbyists to its Washington staff, which includes former Commerce Secretary William Daley. Jill Blickstein, who was previously chief of staff at the Office of Management and Budget in the Obama administration, was one of the new hires."

RELATED:
Banks Discover Consumer Protection Too Big to Fail [Bloomberg]

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Over at Foreign Policy's blog, Joshua Keating reports that President George W. Bush was in Japan yesterday, throwing out the first pitch at game three of Japan's World Series and doing what he could to finally teach the Japanese to GET MOTIVATED! Along the way, he addressed a group of students, and offered them advice on how to run a major world-power a baseball franchise. Bush was the managing general partner of the Texas Rangers from 1989 until his ascension to the Texas governorship in 1994.

Bush's irony-rich advice included this tidbit:

Bush also said it was important to take responsibility for decisions, including bad ones - and referred to what he has acknowledged was one of his biggest mistakes with the Rangers: approving the 1989 trade that sent future home-run slugger Sammy Sosa to the Chicago White Sox for designated hitter Harold Baines.

Ahh, the memories:

At any rate, of course you wouldn't make that trade today! 9/11 changed everything.

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All right, the "Superbowl of Freedom" is yet to begin, but, via ABC News' The Note, we already have our first word of small-scale protester-on-legislator action. In this case, the pro-health care reform faction has struck first:

First out of the gate - 8 Protesters backing a universal health care system briefly occupied Sen. Joe Lieberman's office this morning.

Protesters were arrested, one by one, and dragged out of his office amid chants of "Everyone in and noone out, universal healthcare now!" and "Represent Connecticut, not AETNA!"

The whole affair, from occupation to final arrest, lasted 40 minutes.

Lieberman, who has pledged to play a role in derailing the health care effort but could be merely holding out in the hopes that Harry Reid will brown-nose him to the point of toxic shock, is likely to be a key focus of protesters today, as health care advocates protest his opposition and Bachmannites urge his continued antagonism to reform

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Over at True/Slant, Neal Ungerleider tells us that al Qaeda, apparently heedless of the recessionary downturn that's felled so many publications in the freedom-loving world, is currently publishing a pair of magazines. If print media doesn't die, it could kill you!

Sada al-Malahim (The Echo of Battle) and Sada al-Jihad (The Echo of Jihad) are two magazines produced by Al-Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula. Available on various jihadist Internet outposts, these publications are disseminated as print-to-read PDFs. Ungerleider reports that "Issue 11 of Sada al-Malahim," which is shown in the picture below, is a "dense little bastard of a magazine, clocking in at 73 pages of text, graphics and basic-Pagemaker design. As one might expect; al-Qaeda magazines don't include such kuffar innovations as advertising." It's pretty Conde Nasty, largely featuring a flattering profile of the bomber who attempted the August 2009 assassination of Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, extolling the violence as an example for future terrorists to follow.

Charming.

According to Ungerleider, the magazine "devotes a fair amount of space to arguing internal politics within the movement and justifying the latest public statements of leaders." As Alex Balk quips: "So it's kind of like the Weekly Standard!"

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On this evening's edition of Hardball, Chris Matthews hosted Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele, and the two men proceeded to have the following preposterous conversation:

STEELE: Excuse me. What about the left wingnuts who won't let the President get his agenda through? What about all the left wingnuts that are the reason we don't have health care right now? You have 60 votes in the Senate. You have a 78-seat majority in the House and I don't see anyone talking about the left wingnuts who are stifling the health care for my mother, my family and my community. Don't give me the name calling. That was a political process. Now we are talking real things here when you talk about the Democratic Party the division is real because we don't have health care. The division is real because we have --

MATTHEWS: Interesting. The President would be better off if he didn't have a left and he could push a more moderate health care bill.

STEELE: I don't know. That is the choice the Democrats have to make. I'm embracing my party, I'm embracing--

MATTHEWS: You are making it for me. You are saying something smart. That the President of the United States has to make a tough discerning decision to find the kind of bill that will pass and pass it instead of being hung up by his far left?

Yeah. Not only is that not "something smart" to say, it is a rivetingly dumb thing to say and Matthews has nary a fact on hand to support his cosigning of Steele's contention.

I'll concede Steele's point that the significant majorities the Democrats enjoy in both the House and the Senate make the Republicans irrelevant to the health care discussion. But there's a reason you don't hear "anyone talking about the left wingnuts who are stifling the health care." It's because there are no left wingnuts stifling the health care bill!

Just as an example, here, once again, are the Senators who are doing more than anyone else to stifle the health care reform bill. They include such luminaries as Joe Lieberman, Olympia Snowe, Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, Kent Conrad, and Blanche Lincoln, and there's nary a "left wingnut" among them! The facts are these: the progressive membership of both houses have been nothing but accommodating to the health care process. From Jump Street, the legislators to Obama's left willingly bargained away the single-payer health care system they favored in order to lend unified support behind a reform package that was more sellable to moderate Democrats and Republicans. They ended up uniting behind the "public option," only to discover that President Obama wasn't willing to say much in praise of that idea other than to say, "Yeah, sure, that public option thingy would be neat, I guess?"

The sum total of progressive obstructionism came when a progressive bloc in the House of Representatives briefly let it be known that they would not support a bill that did not contain a public option. Did health care reform get "stifled" in the House as a result? No! The bill that will be sent forth for a vote contains a public option! So, what has the "left" stopped from happening, exactly? Meanwhile, the Senate's reform bill waters down the public option still further, into the "opt out" version. So, once again, progressives have given ground, have done nothing but accommodate the process, and in the end they may be asked to give still more ground, to get a watered down version of the health care bill that Obama sometimes says he wants, depending on which way the wind is blowing.

And really, having given ground on the matter three or four times already, how could anyone object to "the left" refusing to bargain away anything further? Let's remember, public option supporters are reflecting the will of a vast majority of the American people. You really cannot pretend that 55-75% of the country is a "wingnut fringe."

Chris Matthews is supposed to be some sort of shrewd and meticulous chronicler of political reality, but if he really thinks Steele is offering a smart idea, he needs to have his head examined. There is not one single shred of reality to back up Matthews' contention that the "left" is gumming up the health care reform process. That is what we call a "nimrod fantasia." But let's call the ball where it lies: Chris Matthews doesn't really care about reporting political fact, he cares about pleasing Michael Steele with enough adequacy so that he'll return to his show to share more of his so-called wisdom.

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Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten took the time at the end of his "Chatalogical Humor" chat yesterday to weigh in on the recent newsroom dust-up between Henry Allen and Manuel Roig-Franzia. The big takeaway? Gene Weingarten is awesome, for reals:

The first thing I want to say is, hooray. Hooray that there is still enough passion left somewhere in a newsroom in America for violence to break out between colorful characters in disagreement over the quality of a story. (Obligatory mature qualification: I of course decry any breakdown in comity and collegiality and civil discourse in the workplace, and urge all young people to maintain decorum and respect others, to be tolerant of opposing viewpoints, to seek compromise, and to not punch each other out in spit-flying scrums.)

Still, hooray. Newsrooms used to be places filled with interesting eccentrics driven by unreasonable passions -- a situation thought of as "creative tension" and often encouraged by management in eras when profits were high and arrogance was seen not as a flaw but a perquisite of being smart and right. Sadly, over the years newsrooms have come to resemble insurance offices peopled by the blanched and the pinched and the beetle-browed; lately, with layoffs thought to be on the horizon, everyone also behaves extra nicely to please the boss. In the face of potential ruin, journalists have been forced to reach accommodations with themselves: New strictures, new styles, new protocols, new limitations on what is possible are now meekly swallowed. In the frantic scramble for new "revenue streams," ethical boundaries are more likely to be pushed than is the proverbial envelope. Some of all this has leached out into the product. We all feel it. You do, too.

Weingarten goes on at length to praise both pugilists, especially Allen, who Weingarten suspects "doesn't like me very much, I think," but for whom he nevertheless feels "pure hero worship." Then he picks up his critique of the news industry again:

I don't know the ultimate precipitating factor in what led to blows between these two guys on Friday -- for all I know, Manuel strangled Henry's cat. But I do know what I read, that the proximate cause was the quality of written word -- what we put in the paper. It doesn't surprise me. "What we put in the paper," used to be a sacred term in most newsrooms, back before things began to change and some mediocre stuff began to appear with regularity. Back then, the meaning of "the paper" was completely different, too.

The news about the news, for the most part, has stunk for some time: There's been cowardly and crappy decision-making in scary times; ethics, at times, have been mislaid; lousy things have found their way into print, and worthy things -- killed for unworthy reasons -- have not. I am not shocked that tempers boiled over, nor am I shocked that they boiled over between two people who know what has been happening, and care.

Weingarten adds, "I hope Henry is invited and welcomed back to the newsroom; if anyone deserves a little slack, it's him. I hope he and Manuel bury the hatchet. I hope neither of them loses one ounce of passion and I hope each of them remains privately convinced he was right."

Oh! And then you get to the part where he challenges Sally Quinn to fisticuffs, sort of, over The Worst Style Story of All Time. Like I said, Gene Weingarten is awesome.

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Karl Rove wasn't too happy about the way the White House dismissed the Most Important Off-Off-Year Elections In United States History, and amid a weird counterfactual analysis in which he reverse-extrapolated a few races in three states and applied them to the 2008 election results, he let Fox News viewers know it, saying:

ROVE: Actually, it was almost contemptuous of the process. And who's kidding themselves? I've been inside the West Wing. Every president on every election night is watching the returns. And so, [White House Press Secretary Robert] Gibbs, by going out there and saying, 'Well, it may have mattered to the American people and the people in Pennsylvania and Virginia and New Jersey, but it didn't matter to President Obama,' left a...well it was tone deaf. It would have been better if the president's spokesman had gone out there and said, 'We got the message, we understand the concerns of Americans and we're going to work to assuage their concerns. And instead it was a dismissive and I thought it was almost a contemptuous gesture.

WATCH:

Oh, well, then! Let's take a trip back to the year 2007, where we'll find Rove being dismissive, and -- I guess? -- contemptuous!

Rove downplayed the significance of the 2006 elections, where the Republicans lost both the House and Senate. He cited Republicans' corruption scandals and excessive federal spending and earmarks.

He said it was a "normal off-year election" and had little to do with the unpopularity of President Bush and then-GOP majority Congress.

"If you look at the sweep of American history, the White House party has lost an average of 28 seats in the House and five in the Senate. We lost 30 in the House and six in the Senate," Rove said on Fox. "We lost. There's no doubt about it, but it was a close loss."

So, if and when that sweep of American history returns to reduce Democratic congressional majorities in 2010, will it be "contemptuous" to dismiss it, or will it merely be "Rovian?" And is there really a lot of daylight between those two terms?

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So, if you happen to have read a recent study by the Center for Responsive Politics and OMB Watch entitled "Lobbyists Terminating Their Federal Registrations at Accelerated Rate", you might be under the impression that finally, lobbyists are being run out of town, in droves. WOO-HAH, BARACK OBAMA'S GOT YOU ALL IN CHECK, maybe? And also, according to the Wall Street Journal, there's this thing called "the recession," which is bringing down lobbyist firms at a slightly slower rate than its bringing everybody else down. Yeah, uhm...woo!

But, as the report points out, it's best not to get ahead of ourselves and form cheering crowds on the sidewalk as your beloved K Street whores scuttle away. That's because lobbyists are reinventing themselves under new names, and sticking around to stick up for various well-monied interests. Back when we reported on this study, our own Jenna Staul noted:

The decline in registered lobbyists, however, doesn't necessarily translate into fewer people working to influence policy. At the federal level, many lobbyists avert disclosure requirements under the Lobbying Disclosure Act by working under titles such as "senior adviser."

Over at TAPPED, Suzy Khimm gets confirmation that this is happening:

As OMB Watch and CRP note, many lobbyists who appear to have left have come back as unregistered lobbyists with executive titles like "senior adviser" or "consultant" to avoid having to comply with federal lobbying restrictions. One lobbyist I contacted confirmed this trend in an e-mail today:

For people wanting to reenter government, or who interact with "covered officials" not having to register as a lobbyist makes a job more attractive. At our firm we have brought attorneys who are not registered and used them to meet with officials who refuse to see lobbyists... I don't think many people have left the profession, in fact I'd bet the business of influencing government has actually grown over the last year - registrations not withstanding.

If the Obama administration really wanted to crack down on the influence of lobbying, it could force anyone who met with officials "covered" under the current lobbying restrictions to register -- and cut down on the legislative earmarks that still abound. Moreover, OMB Watch's Lee Mason told me, the White House (as well as Congress) could decide to disclose the meetings and communications it has with all the lobbyists and advocates it courts.

Ahh, but if they did that, the White House would have to caveat all of the great advice on healthcare it receives from vital "resource" Tom Daschle!

Khimm's anonymous lobbyist concludes that this current oversight arrangement "basically disadvantages the people who play by the rules while creating a whole new underground influence game that flouts a law that can't be enforced." So, hey, yeah, pop Cristal!

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Hey kids! Remember that time when South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford disappeared off the face of the earth, leaving his perplexed staff behind to guess that he was hiking the Appalachian Trail, except that actually he was off having an affair with his Latin American soul mate? Good times. And the media responded to the news with extensive offers to give Sanford some help during his time of need, the crowning example coming from David Gregory, who was all: Hey, Mark Sanford, why don't you use Meet The Press as a venue for you to "frame the conversation how you really want to... and then move on?"

Well, taking inspiration from those revelations, Gawker's John Cook has gone back to the future, obtaining the emails between the flacks at the New York governor's office and various New York Times reporters during the reporting of Eliot Spitzer's "Client #9" story, and the results are basically MARK SANFORD x 1,300 pages:

You'd think that, with blood in the water, the traditional coziness that develops between official flacks and the beat reporters who have to talk to them every day would break down into some kind of last-man-standing slugfest. But in the Spitzer case, the opposite happened. The revelations upended the worlds of both reporter and flack alike, and the uncertainty, long hours, and breakneck pace of the scandal actually seemed to throw them together as they worked toward what seems, if you read the e-mail exchanges, like a common goal of getting the news out and behind them.

Which makes sense on a human level. But sometimes good reporting--especially of the government watchdog variety--requires an inhuman suspension of compassion. The infractions documented in these e-mails are misdemeanors, but--in addition to being an unvarnished peek inside the media machinery--they're indicative of the creeping social and professional alliances that inevitably develop between PR handlers and their overworked, easily manipulated charges in the press corps. And they give the lie to the myth of the vigilant watchdog press that keeps the government on its toes. Next time you hear New York Times editor Bill Keller claim that newspapers are uniquely situated to do the "hard, expensive, sometimes dangerous work [of] quality journalism," remember that his reporter broke the story of Spitzer's dalliances with prostitutes. But also remember the time his reporter e-mailed Gov. Paterson's flack to request permission to call Paterson's former mistress.

Oh, hie thee hence for a taste of some of the extreme deference from various reporters, ranging from "could you flacks maybe just tell me what to say" to "shucks, I'm even sorry I have to break this mean old news on your bosses!" At one point, a Times reporter even asks for permission to speak to Paterson's mistress. My favorite moment comes when Lieutenant Governor David Paterson's flack demonstrates more concern for newspaper consumers than the reporter writing the story. Also? From now on, I'm checking into the Mayflower Hotel under the name Errol Cockfield.

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]