Sympathy For The Devil

Over at The New Republic, Jon Chait argues that Rush Limbaugh is right:(emphasis moi)

Rush Limbaugh is drawing some ridicule for saying, "One thing we can all do is stop assuming that the way to beat [the Democrats] is with better policy ideas." But I think he's basically right. Good ideas are meritorious. But being meritorious isn't what wins elections. Most voters have only the faintest idea what policy ideas candidates advocate when running or implement when in office. External conditions (such as the economy, but war and scandal matter also) have much more influence over which party wins.

A few years ago I made a more extensive argument against the idea that "new ideas" were the key to a Democratic resurgence. It was written in the wake of the 2004 election, when there was near-total agreement on right, left and center that Democratic Party's electoral defeat was a result of its intellectual defeat. My argument drew a lot of ridicule, mostly from people who didn't understand the distinction between the public value of good ideas (high) and the political value of good ideas (low)--see Jonah Goldberg and Kenneth Baer and Andrei Cherny. Baer and Cherny wrote:

Now, it is progressives that have a choice. Most of the voices inside Washington believe that conservative errors and overreaching--along with more effective voter targeting and door-knocking by Democrats, more compelling TV ads and new "frames" for old policies--will yield enough votes so that in a closely divided nation, Democrats might eke out a victory and regain power.

We disagree.

I think it's pretty clear that the Democratic comeback since then has had next-to-nothing to with developing "new ideas" and almost everything to do with Republican failure, the state of the economy, and a really effective presidential nominee. yes, Democratic ideas proved more popular, but they really were the same basic ideas the party had advocated for years.

In other words, the public is misinformed and stupid, policy is useless, and the Republicans lost the election (not that the Democrats won).

This argument fails on two basic points. First of all Clinton was the candidate of the same ideas Democrats had, not Obama. Democrats clearly chose Obama, although it was close. People went out of their way to learn about candidates' positions in 2008. Obama won precisely because he had better ideas. So many people said that issues didn't matter, that a black man could never win an election for President. They were wrong. Issues decided the primary, and in turn they decided the election as well. After eight year where policies were dictated and not debated, Americans were hungry for more, hungry for a process that worked. They got involved. They voted in record numbers. They voted on issues and policies.

Second, it was the Republican policies of the last several years that caused the problems they had. Policies on the markets, policies on Iraq and Afghanistan, policies on science, all the problems with the Republican party were problems with Republican policies. It was those policies that have put us in the mess we're in now. These policies failed, and America rejected them. They also rejected much of Clinton's playbook too. The result was Obama's new ideas and radically different policies.

That's the bottom line. Policies decided 2008 from beginning to end of the campaign.

All Fall Down

Dow closed down nearly 300 points to under 6,800 as AIG's record loss simply crushed the life out of the market. This is not a good sign, folks. I think we're headed down a nasty slope here and we're back into freefall mode. At this point, even Nouriel Roubini is scared.

LAST year, the debate over how long the recession will last was between those in the consensus who argued that it would be V-shaped — only about eight months long like those in 1990 to 1991 and in 2001 — and those like me who argued that it would last at least three times as long, 24 months, and be more than three times as deep as the previous two.

Today, as we enter the 15th month, it’s obvious that we are already in a painful U-shaped recession that has become global and will last at least until the end of the year — 24 months, the longest since the Great Depression. Even if the gross domestic product grows in 2010, it is likely to be no higher than 1 percent. And at that rate, with the unemployment rate rising toward 10 percent, we will still be substantially in a recession.

Even if appropriate aggressive policy actions were undertaken — monetary and fiscal stimulus, bank clean-up and credit restoration, mortgage debt reduction for insolvent households — the growth rate would not rise closer to 2 percent until 2011. So this recession may last 36 months.

And things could get worse. We now face a 1 in 3 chance that, if appropriate policies are not put in place, this ugly U-shaped recession may turn into a more virulent L-shaped near-depression or stag-deflation (a deadly combination of economic stagnation and price deflation) like the one Japan experienced in the 1990s after its real estate and equity bubbles burst.

A 36 month depression, meaning no real recovery until first quarter 2011. That's a terrifying thought, and it should be terrifying. Two more years is enough for the Dow to disintegrate back down to under 4k...levels last seen in 1995...or worse 3k, levels last seen when Clinton was elected in late 1992. We could be looking at 20 years of economic growth reversed in this country. That's a tremendous thing.

If we're really looking now at recession in 2011, it might as well be a depression. It's a word even the AP is throwing around at this point. If housing has another 20% to fall, then anyone who buys now is dooming themselves. If there's no housing stabilization, there will be no US recovery. No US recovery means no global recovery, and the whole thing could come crashing down. Americans are already trading down from steak to chicken. Ask your Great Depression era relatives about chicken sometime...there are some who refuse to eat it even today because they couldn't get beef or pork during the depression and didn't want to be reminded of having to eat a "poor man's food."

If you think it's bad now, just wait.

Marking Territory

How cute. Michael Steele gets all angry when somebody tells him Rush Limbaugh runs the GOP rather than, you know, Michael Steele, Chairman of the RNC.

HUGHLEY: You know what we do, we talk like we’re talking now. You have your view. I have mine. We don’t need incendiary rhetoric.

STEELE: Exactly.

HUGHLEY: Like Rush Limbaugh, who is the de facto leader of the Republican Party.

STEELE: No, he’s not.

HUGHLEY: I will tell you what …

STEELE: I’m the de facto leader of the Republican Party.

Sure you are Mike.

Sure you are.

[UPDATE] And Rush in turn tears Michael Steele a new one for daring to cross El Rushbo. Gotta love it.

Responding to criticism by recently-elected RNC chairman Michael Steele, talk show host Rush Limbaugh tore into the party's leader, contending that Steele is actually "not the head of the Republican Party," cautioning that the chairman is off to a "shaky start."

I'm not sure which is the more laughable proposition, Steele as head of the GOP getting his ass handed to him by a radio host, or that same radio host really being the de facto leader of the party.

"Michael Steele, you are head of the RNC," said Limbaugh. "You are not head of the Republican Party."

"I hope... he realizes he's not a talking head pundit," said Limbaugh on Monday. After telling him to go behind the scenes and do the work he's been hired to do, the radio host added, "He's off to a shaky start."

The first clue that Limbaugh would lampoon the GOP leader came in an e-mail to Politico.

"I’ll handle it on the radio," he wrote.

"Mr. Steele, if you want to lead the Republican party -- as you say you do -- you need to run for and win the presidency," said Limbaugh, adding that Steele isn't going to lead the party by being "cute" on cable news.

Since El Rushbo isn't going to take any crap from any Republican who is not in the White House, I say the GOP should enjoy the monster they have created. They're stuck with him for quite some time now.

The GOP is still taking marching orders from Rush, and they will continue to.

[UPDATE 2] And now, Steele has in fact apologized to Rush Limbaugh.

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele says he has reached out to Rush Limbaugh to tell him he meant no offense when he referred to the popular conservative radio host as an “entertainer” whose show can be “incendiary.”

“My intent was not to go after Rush – I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh,” Steele said in a telephone interview. “I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. … There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.”

As Darth Vader once said, "Now your failure is complete." Rush completely owns you assholes. Both John Cole and Andrew Sullivan think Rush should just run for President himself himself in 2012. And why not? As Cole says, "It's Rush's party now." There's no way this can ever be walked back. The ads for the Dems write themselves for the next four years.

If it wasn't so pathetic, so indicative of the total failure of the Republican Party at this point (and I will argue with my last breath that a solid, intelligent opposition party is necessary for the functioning of America) it would be hysterical.

[UPDATE 3] Josh Marshall has the best line of the year so far:

Dems gloat after Rush awards himself sole custody of Steele's testicles.

The Oxycontinfather runs this town, bitch. You work for him, Mike.

House Of Cards

Over the weekend, Zandardad mentioned to me that he's really, really sick of seeing the stock market tank. In the last 18 months, the market has lost 50% off its October 2007 peak. We both agreed that there's little hope for a recovery until the housing market turns around. Eventually, Pops argues, Americans are going to decide to buy houses again. That's true to a point.

The problem is that it's much harder to get a mortgage these days. It's a reverse "Paradox of Thrift" scenario, call it the "Paradox of Lending." Banks don't want to lend long-term right now in this market. When the housing market is continuing to collapse, making a mortgage loan right now is good for the industry as a whole, but very bad for banks individually. Banks make money long-term on mortgages, and in the short-term they were making even more as home prices went up. If the person couldn't afford the mortgage, the home asset the bank would repossess would still go up in value. It was okay to make zero down payment mortgage loans because the market was going up, up, up.

But now, making a mortgage loan is a huge risk for the bank. They are demanding as much as 15%-20% up front as a down payment now, so the practical upshot is that the home that was out of reach at $300,000 and no down payment is even more out of reach at $200,000 and 30 to 40k up front. That turns into an even worse short term deal for the consumer should that home drop in price. They've sunk tens of thousands into a home up front that will probably lose another 25% or more in value. Good deal for the banks, but in today's job market a suicidal move.

Until the housing market bottoms out, it's not going to turn around. And it won't bottom out until people can buy. Banks want a big down payment now, one that people can't afford, and the irony now is for Americans tapped out in personal debt, and especially having lost a huge chunk of equity in their current home and in the stock market, it's harder to buy a home at these prices then it was in 2006, even though the total price is far less.

Still, home prices do have a ways to go. For the most part they are still too high, which shows you just how out of control the housing bubble got. At this point government intervention is the only thing that will get this housing market out of the death spiral it's in. Obama is at least taking steps to keep people in their homes, but Republicans continue to say keeping Americans in their homes is not the government's business.

Has it occurred to the Republicans that if the government doesn't do this, then the free market is incapable of doing so until home prices fall nationally to Detroit levels?

According to the Chicago Tribune, the median price for a home sold in the month of December 2008 in Motor City is Seven Thousand, Five Hundred dollars.

Let me run that by you again.

You can buy a house in Detroit for less than the cost of a used car. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what is in store for the rest of the country should this death spiral continue. Folks who bought mortgages in the 90's and early 2000's are in real, real trouble nationally. When home prices drop so low that they end up owing more on their house than the house is worth, the banks will jack up their mortgages. They will lose their homes. In turn, this will depress housing prices even more, and more people will leave and lose their homes...depressing housing prices even more until we get the Detroit Scenario all over. It's happening to a lot of other cities in the US right now too.

The country is slowly coming apart at the seams right now, one housing disaster at a time. The housing depression has reached critical mass, folks. We're on the edge of a complete meltdown in this country. Pray Obama can help fix it.

StupidiNews!

• Insurance giant AIG reported a staggering $62 billion loss this morning.
• A new study shows universal health care would cost six times less than the bank bailouts.
• Secretary of State Hillary Clinton takes a crack at Middle East peacemaker.
• Eastern European countries are concerned Obama may backtrack on regional security deals.
• Microsoft is getting into the t-shirt business and calling it "Softwear".

Cramdown Breakdown

Obama's mortgage fix plan revolves around getting Congress to update bankruptcy laws to allow judges to change mortgage rates, but banks and mortgage brokers are virulently against it, and have lobbied Congress hard to kill the measure.

If the so called "cramdown" provision fails, Obama's mortgage fix is sunk. The Blue Dogs and Senate DINOs are strongly against the measure, and the Obama administration just doesn't have the numbers to pass the bill right now. A full-court press is on this week to get the votes, but it's going to be yet another long, hard slog of deal-making for this to pass -- and those objecting in Congress have their sights on deals to be made during budget time.

President Obama is in danger of losing the biggest stick in his foreclosure prevention arsenal.

The administration's plan to stem the housing crisis depends on Congress amending the bankruptcy laws to allow judges to modify mortgages, in particular by reducing principal to make monthly payments more affordable.

The so-called cramdown provision could put pressure on loan servicers to modify mortgages before borrowers file for bankruptcy.

A major critique of the voluntary modification programs is that servicers aren't doing enough to help struggling borrowers. But servicers will likely be more aggressive in working with homeowners if they know that the borrowers can turn to judges for relief.

"Reforming mortgage bankruptcy laws is the only remedy available that will provide the stick to go with the carrots that we have offered lenders to modify mortgages voluntarily," said Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., who worked on the legislation.

But congressional Democrats, who first introduced a bill broadening judges' power two years ago, are running into trouble gathering the support needed to pass the legislation. The House postponed a vote on the measure until early this week after a group of centrist Democrats voiced concerns. And its future in the Senate remains in doubt with many powerful Republicans strongly opposed to the legislation.

This is the real test of Obama's political clout on the Hill. The stimulus had to pass, but cramdown has interests on both sides of the aisle waiting for the opportunity to kill it. If Obama can't get this through, the budget is pretty much DOA, as it will be a much, much harder fight.

Even the nuclear option of sliding this through as a Senate-filibuster proof budget amendement may not work. We'll see.

The Losing Side Didn't Lose Gracefully

Here's a chunk of the HBO documentary film "Right America Feeling Wronged" by filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi. She documented the crowds following McCain/Palin over the end of the campaign, and what she found is pretty disturbing, but shouldn't be surprising to any readers of this blog. The clip here (h/t Pandagon) includes some footage of folks from the part of North Carolina I grew up in and recently still lived in, Concord, NC, the heart of NASCAR country.

Alexandra asks folks at Lowes' Motor Speedway if they're ready for a black President. What do you think they said?



"When did this country get chickenshit?" one guy asks. That's what they see Obama as: the final nail in the coffin for their version of America. They're not too happy about it. They're going to continue to be unhappy about it. They want to be angry about it, as a matter of fact. Believe me when I tell you I can recognize mad-eyed righteous indignation used to justify racism, sexism, homophobia, religious intolerance, what have you from a mile off, and these guys are full of that.

They honestly do not believe they are doing anything wrong. They believe they are being honest about how the way the world has worked for decades. They believe that's how the world should continue to work. But Barack Obama scares the ever-loving crap out of them. He represents the end of the world working the way they have been used to seeing. That's a hard, hard thing for any human being to take, and the more narrow your worldview, the harder it is to see it ripped out and replaced by a new era where the President of the United States doesn't look like them.

So yes, they are easy targets for the kind of hatred and paranoia whipped up by El Rushbo, Coultergeist, Malkinvania, Hannity the Manatee and the rest of the hate radio all-stars. There's a reason why El Rushbo is the voice of the GOP in 2009. They've finally become the reactionary racist nationalist party we see in Europe. Obama represents the end of their power. Naturally, they hate him.

So now we're at a crossroads. The GOP doesn't want just Barack Obama to fail. They are driving a fundamental, elemental hatred for everything he represents. They want to destroy this country as a lesson to punish the majority of Americans who voted for him. It's the only way, after all, those deluded folks who voted for Obama will ever see what Pandora's Box they have opened by putting a black man in the White House.

Obama represents the total destruction of their worldview. Now, their worldview has shifted to the destruction of the worldview that Obama represents. It's not their America anymore. They don't care if it burns, in fact they see it as necessary to purge those who brought it about.

So when you ask yourself "Hey Zandar, are you serious about the GOP wanting to destroy the country?" then remember this clip. See the entire documentary (all 5 bits are on YouTube for now). They have decided that the country needs to be destroyed in order to save it. That's the goal driving everything the GOP does. We're all the enemy to them. We betrayed them because we elected Obama. We deserve the economic calamity as the price paid for it.

The war is just beginning.

Take Two On HHS

Many news outlets this morning are reporting that President Obama has talked Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius into being HHS Secretary.

The officials told CNN that Obama is expected to make the announcement Monday afternoon. The officials asked not to be named because the announcement has not yet been made.

Sebelius, who administration officials say Obama seriously considered to be his vice-presidential nominee, has been rumored to be a top contender for the job for weeks.

The post is still vacant after the first pick, former Sen. Tom Daschle, stepped aside after questions were raised about his failure to pay more than $100,000 in taxes for use of a car and driver.

CNN reported earlier this month that Sebelius met in Washington with senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett about the job, a sign that the administration has been giving her a close look since Daschle dropped out.

She seems to be a strong choice for the position. Sebelius is well-respected by a number of governors and brings that perspective to running a government health care program. I'm hoping she'll get to be a major influence on legislation for Obama's universal health care plans. We'll see.

Last Call

If Rush Limbaugh publicly acts like he's the defining voice of the GOP in 2009, then, Paul Begala argues, Democrats should treat him as such.

Top Democratic operatives are planning a stepped up campaign to promote Rush Limbaugh as the public face of the GOP — an effort that will include recruiting Dem governors to make this case on talk shows, getting elected officials to pen Op eds arguing it, and running more ads pushing it, a senior Democratic operative says.

Key leadership staff in the House and Senate, and in all the political committees, have been encouraged by senior Dem operatives to push this message wherever possible, the operative says.

“I’m encouraging everybody to go out and say this,” Paul Begala, the well-known Dem strategist, just told me by phone. “I’m hot for this. Let’s get this out every way we can.”

Begala is emerging as a major cheerleader and public face for this effort, though he says he’s not formally directing it. He described the effort as “organic” right now, though senior Democrats are discussing ways to formalize it.

Demonizing El Rushbo certainly has the potential to backfire. It's the kind of tactics you'd expect the GOP to use against Obama, and let's face it: demonizing Obama is most certainly the GOP's current strategy. Still, there's a big difference between demonizing Rush Limbaugh and the President: You can simply use Limbaugh's own words to do him in.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

Atrios sez:

One of the bits of wrong conventional wisdom going into 2008 was that at some point the Republican presidential candidate and conservatives generally would break up with Bush somehow. I never believed this because for 8 years the entire identity of the conservative movement was George Bush. There was no way to do it.

I'm not sure why they're bothering to try now.

I'm 100% why they are trying now, and that's that the GOP has fully embraced becoming the Party Of Hoping America Collapses So They Can Rise From The Ashes. The inmates are running the asylum. CPAC is just the tip of the iceberg for these wackos, and I guarantee you that the completely delusional right-wingers are running stuff now, and the Bush/McCain Chamber of Commerce "big tent" wing of the party now only exists to be purged.

This includes guys like Mitt Romney, Charlie Crist, and Ahnold out in Cali, as well as centrists like Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Arlen Specter. They will be driven out of the party by fire here in the next several years as the assault on Obama The Enemy grows into full-fledged insanity.

El Rushbo gave the plan away months ago and continues to reaffirm it almost daily: Obama must fail, and with him America must fail as well, for the GOP message of hate and violence to properly prosper. The rest of the GOP is beginning to publicly admit it. The same folks who screamed that dissent against Bush was tantamount to treason are now openly admitting they want the President to go down in flames and take your country with him.

The storm is coming, folks. It's going to be like nothing we've seen in generations. Obama will be singled out by the GOP as the cause of everything, and they will all but tacitly encourage America to rise up against him. The country is sadly underestimating the extent to which the deposed lunatics in the Republican Party will go.

They will not stop until somebody rids them of this troublesome President.

Obudget Battle

This week's Presidential Address takes on the budget and Obama's efforts to pass it.


The problem is Obama's budget is staggering: $3.55 trillion at last count. Not even I think all of that will be approved. Even with a 78-seat majority in the House, Obama is going to have to fight for every last dollar through Congress, and remember, last year a budget didn't even get passed. It fell to those omnibus spending bills that were extended to the last minute. Some of those bills still haven;t been passed, and the fiscal year ended back in September.

But the honest truth is we're down to the government as spender of last resort. If we don't get the economy going soon, we're facing the Lost Decade scenario. And remember, that suits the GOP just fine. They want a spending freeze and to permanently extend (if not increase) the Bush tax cuts...and throw in MORE tax cuts for corporations. They will do everything they can to block this budget for months and months, causing as much damage to the economy as possible.

Expect Blue Dog Democrats in the House and DINO senators to follow suit. The usual suspects are already whining about the budget, and corporate interests and wealthy Americans are already declaring war on Obama.

We'll see.

This Week's Busted Banks

Another Friday passes, another pair of banks end up dragged out on the pile of bodies by the FDIC.

Banks in Nevada and Illinois were seized by regulators, bringing this year’s tally to 16, as tumbling home prices and surging unemployment caused more borrowers to fall behind on loan payments.

Security Savings Bank of Henderson, Nevada, and Heritage Community Bank of Glenwood, Illinois, with combined assets of $471.2 million, were shut by state regulators and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was named receiver, the FDIC said yesterday. Bank of Nevada in Las Vegas is assuming Security Savings’ $175.2 million in deposits, while Heritage Community’s $218.6 million will go to MB Financial Bank of Chicago.

“Deposits will continue to be insured by the FDIC, so there is no need for customers to change their banking relationship to retain their deposit insurance coverage,” the FDIC said.

As regulators wrap up the busiest month for bank failures since 1993, they’re preparing to replenish the FDIC’s insurance fund, which dwindled by 45 percent in the fourth quarter from the previous three months to $18.9 billion. The FDIC said it will charge U.S. banks a one-time assessment and increase other fees amid estimates that bank closures could cost the fund $65 billion through 2013.

The FDIC shuttered 25 banks in 2008, including Washington Mutual Inc., the biggest U.S. bank to fail last year, and IndyMac Bank Inc., the second-largest. The 10 banks closed in February were in Oregon, California, Florida, Nebraska, Illinois, and Georgia and Nevada as foreclosures rose across the country.

10 banks a month is not exactly a really good thing here. The happy-face financial media says it's no big deal, but the FDIC is raising fees on banks in order to get cash for its emergency bank fund.

Facing a cascade of bank failures depleting the deposit insurance fund, federal regulators on Friday raised the fees paid by U.S. financial institutions and levied an emergency premium in a bid to collect $27 billion this year.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. now expects that bank failures will cost the insurance fund around $65 billion through 2013, up from an earlier estimate of $40 billion. The bank failures, 14 already this year following 25 last year, reflect the ravages of rising unemployment and falling home prices that have sent loan defaults soaring.

The FDIC said the economic crisis, which has caused the insurance fund to drop to its lowest level in nearly a quarter-century, also warranted extending the plan to rebuild the insurance fund from five years to seven.

The emergency premium, to be levied on the roughly 8,500 federally insured institutions on June 30, will be 20 cents for every $100 of their insured deposits. That compares with an average premium of 6.3 cents paid by banks and thrifts last year.

So yes, triple the fees charged to banks to keep customer deposits insured. That doesn't exactly strike me as a sign the FDIC isn't worried. Quite the opposite: the FDIC is expecting many, many more banks to fail in 2009 and well beyond.

We may be on a tad slower pace than two weeks ago, but we're still shooting for 96 bank closings in 2009, 8 banks a month. I honestly think that rate will rise, and it will rise soon.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition

• Controversial evangelical leader James Dobson steps down as head of Focus on the Family.
• A daring heist in Dublin, Ireland netted thieves over 6 million British pounds in cash.
• A Federal appeals court says that a lawsuit against the warrantless wiretap program can proceed.
• Tough times are driving a surge in movie box office receipts across America.
• Amazon's second-generation Kindle may be to books what Apple's iPhone 3G is to cell phones.

Last Call

California's unemployment rate in January? A nasty 10.1 percent. Counting all the underemployed and those who have given up looking for work, I'm betting the "real unemployment rate" is closer to eighteen percent or so...if not twenty. One in six, perhaps even one in five Californians are either out of work, are working only part time, or have given up on finding a job.

California represents 1/7th of the country by itself. It is far over the national average of 7.6% and the tarnished Golden State numbers are dragging it way up. The bad news is that the national average is then well under the actual numbers and will be revised upwards next week when the February numbers come out.

If the February numbers are where I think they are going to be, we'll be well into 8% plus nationally on Thursday, and it's entirely possible the February numbers could hit as high as 8.5% with a strong upwards revision on the January numbers to 8% even.

I don't want to be right on this one. Those revised GDP numbers are f'ckin terrifying. I fully expect 1Q 2009 to be a 7% contraction or so, if not (Flying Spaghetti Monster help us) 8%.

We're honestly getting to the point now where we have to start calling this what it is.

Economic Depression.

Kenneth The Governor Is Done

Bobby Jindal is toast, kids.

Not only did he come in dead last in CNN's 2012 GOP hopeful poll (taken before his disastrous speech), not only has Tom Tancredo pronounced his career DOA, but it turns out he lied about his Hurricane Katrina story in that widely panned speech.

Jindal had described being in the office of Sheriff Harry Lee "during Katrina," and hearing him yelling into the phone at a government bureaucrat who was refusing to let him send volunteer boats out to rescue stranded storm victims, because they didn't have the necessary permits. Jindal said he told Lee, "that's ridiculous," prompting Lee to tell the bureaucrat that the rescue effort would go ahead and he or she could arrest both Lee and Jindal.

But now, a Jindal spokeswoman has admitted to Politico that in reality, Jindal overheard Lee talking about the episode to someone else by phone "days later." The spokeswoman said she thought Lee, who died in 2007, was being interviewed about the incident at the time.

This is no minor difference. Jindal's presence in Lee's office during the crisis itself was a key element of the story's intended appeal, putting him at the center of the action during the maelstrom. Just as important, Jindal implied that his support for the sheriff helped ensure the rescue went ahead. But it turns out Jindal wasn't there at the key moment, and played no role in making the rescue happen.

There's a larger point here, though. The central anecdote of the GOP's prime-time response to President Obama's speech, intended to illustrate the threat of excessive government regulation, turns out to have been made up.

Maybe it's time to rethink the premise.

Sadly, the unemployed of Louisiana still have to deal with him keeping them from getting benefits, and he's taking the rest of the GOP down the road to near-permanent wilderness.