For a week now, dozens of House Republicans have been staging fake sessions on domestic drilling. The hearings haven't gotten far beyond twitter battles for the most part, except for Rep. David Davis losing his GOP primary because of ties to big oil. This apparently has not served as a lesson to anyone in this cabal though, and last night Minority Leader Boehner co-signed a fundraising email that proves the GOP can't get halfway through a basic email without embarrassing itself or through an entire email without flat out lying.

The first part is just fun in a dance-on-their-grave sort of way. Boehner and RNC Chair Mike Duncan declare "We need to fight back and help elect Republican candidates who are committed to real reform." Kinda like in Tennessee where big oil sellout Davis went down for opposing meaningful reform? Yeah, kinda like that.

House Republicans are making much adeu about demanding that Nancy Pelosi allow a vote to "drill here, drill now". They try to link Democrats with the rising price of gasoline, and say that blocking the vote is causing Americans to pay more at the pump. In a hypocritical move, they are staying at the capital giving speeches to try and support their Big Oil donors, in giving more Corporate Welfare to those who have gouged the American Consumer producing record profits in a time of distress and war.

As a young Democrat I am deeply conserned by what's been happening in the walls of Congress. In case you don't know what i'm talking about last week right after Congress voted to adjourn for the month, House Republicans (most from the far right of the base) revolted after the lights and TV cameras were turned off because our Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California didn't schedule the vote on off shore drilling before the recess.

F.O.O., I need to warn you that Senator Clinton brings out the worst in me, so some of tonight's diary may seem a little "harsh." I apologize in advance for that. Between her and the news about Mr. Hamdan's sentence and hearing a couple of more interviews with Ron Suskind today, I've been keyed up most of the day. I finally had to turn off NPR and listen to Enya to save what little sanity I had.

It’s 89 days until the election. 89 was a good year. I’m talking 1989 – not 1889; I’m not talking Senator McCentury years here! I graduated from high school in 1989 – on my 18th birthday no less!

Let's count down tonight's Countdown!

So did you hear the one about how the House Republicans are using the latest online tools to spread the word about their hippie sit-in?

Yeah, Twitter, Qik streaming video, YouTube, all that crap.

And a whole bunch of Republican Members left their mom's basements and their Cheetos behind, put on their suits, and came out to play Model Congress again this week. Because, well, they don't actually have any other jobs.

So there they were, busting their humps for their Sugar Daddies in the oil biz, but noticeably absent from the barricades was Republican Leader, Melanin Johnny Boehner.

Where was Boehner while his troops were Tweeting, streaming, blogging, IMing, and uploading?

Why, he was on the links, of course!

No, not the hyperlinks. The golf links.

Boehner was around for the start of the fake House session Friday but then left town and hasn't been back since. Even former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) showed up today to rally with his GOP comrades, but the current party leader was nowhere to be seen.

What's Boehner been up to? His office says he's been in Ohio raising money for his political action committee, the Freedom Project, and that he should be back in D.C. later this week. He's also doing 18 events in August for GOP candidates across the country.

But Boehner also has found time to squeeze in a couple rounds of golf. Scores reported by Boehner himself to a United States Golf Association site show that he posted an 85 sometime this week at his home course, Wetherington Golf & Country Club in West Chester, Ohio.

Ah, the marvels of the modern online life! (Good thing he has nothing to hide, eh?)

"Thks 4 ur support boss! Hope ur b-lo par!"

It's no secret that the Republican brand has been sufficiently tarnished over the last 8 years. It's also news to no one that the GOP has endured demonstrable difficulty gaining traction on any issue with the voters thus far.

However, they may have found their political saving grace with the idea of continental oil drilling. The notion of obtaining the oil the country needs from offshore rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, instead of from the underground wells of ARAMCO has captivated a majority of the public, irrespective of the ineffectiveness of the continental drilling as a whole.

That the public can be so duped into buying these sophistry from the GOP is indicative of a greater problem plaguing the politics of our country. I'll explain what that is below.

Today Michael Carmichael wrote about problems the Democratic Party has encountered in August in the past.  I love history, and I immediately liked most of the article.  I thought the idea of Colin Powell as Vice President was interesting, although I question the logic that dictates how much Powell would bring to the ticket.  I am not qualified to judge Carmichael's statements, however.

Unfortunately Carmichael also discussed the daily popular voting polls in his article.  He referred to the General Election campaign as a "dead even horse race."  This struck me as irresponsible, and not just because today's polls have Obama coming in at five to six points ahead of Mr. Wrinkly.  More significantly I just read an article seconds before called "Electoral Math Charts Updated" by Chris Weigant.  Electoral votes, the ones that count, show Obama with a big lead right now.  ChrisWeigant.com provides daily updates on this.

More after the flip

You have got to be kidding me.

I just got wind of a report from noted birder Ken Kaufman about how John Bohner will lead a delegation of members of Congress to investigate ANWR:

Birders who hear about this trip are likely to respond with envy when we think about all the amazing species that the lawmakers will see, the abundance of nesting sandpipers, plovers, phalaropes, jaegers, Arctic Terns, Snowy Owls, Long-tailed Ducks, Steller's Eiders, Spectacled Eiders, and so many other beautiful birds.  We might quibble about the timing of the trip -- after all, many of the Arctic-breeding shorebirds have already started to migrate south, with Pectoral Sandpipers and others already appearing in my area of Ohio on their way to South America.  But still, most of us would jump at the chance to go along.  I've been to the North Slope about a dozen times as a leader of birding tours, and it was always an amazing experience.

Can we, however, expect that to happen?  

Not a chance.  More, below the jump.

Faiz Shakir debunks three of the most common Bush administration myths about drilling:

MYTH #1 -- 'DRILL HERE, DRILL NOW, PAY LESS'

While this may be a short-term solution to our problems (oil dropped $10 a barrel today), what evidence is there that drilling will provide a long-term solution to our problems? And  why not use the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and pass laws improving oversight of the petroleum markets?

UPDATED DIARY - beginning now with Mark Klein, the AT&T whistleblower, explaining why there should be no retroactive immunity.

On the flip, Russ Feingold, Chris Dodd & others speak FOR and against retroactive immunity -- and on the dangerous flaws of the various versions of the revisions to the FISA law.

I am taking a break from discussing wind power and just how much it will save for each of us, in order to talk about another topic which has hit the news recently.  Of course, based on my pocketbook, dropping every American's electrical rates is very important.  But it pales far less than whether or not we have a country left, or more appropriately, whether like Humpty Dumpty, the pieces are splintered too tiny to even bother picking them up and patching them back together.

As you know, Dennis Kucinich proffered the Articles of Impeachment on the floor of the House and they are now in the Congressional Record for every historian to read.....  There is some question where my Congressman Mike Castle stands on the issue, which of course is what brought that topic into the arena of the local blogosphere.

Minority Leader John Boehner, the guy we all love around here. He supported pollution of the Earth, stood with the GOP House Caucus when Foley did bad, and supported sweatshop labor in his own country. What a lovable guy.

And today he supports immunity for illegal wiretapping.

But John Boehner didn't when he got wiretapped, and he believed in a right to sue. And did file lawsuit.

Lets flashback 10 years to 1998.

More of this sort of bluntness, please:

GOP claim about Chinese oil drilling off Cuba is untrue
Erika Bolstad and Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: June 11, 2008 08:31:54 PM

WASHINGTON — As Congress has debated energy policy over the past several days, an unusual argument keeps surfacing in support of drilling off the U.S. coastline and in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Why, ask some Republicans, should the United States be thwarted from drilling in its own territory when just 50 miles off the Florida coastline the Chinese government is drilling for oil under Cuban leases?

Yet no one can prove that the Chinese are drilling anywhere off Cuba's shoreline. The China-Cuba connection is "akin to urban legend," said Sen. Mel Martinez, a Republican from Florida who opposes drilling off the coast of his state but who backs exploration in ANWR.

"China is not drilling in Cuba's Gulf of Mexico waters, period," said Jorge Pinon, an energy fellow with the Center for Hemispheric Policy at the University of Miami and an expert in oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. Martinez cited Pinon's research when he took to the Senate floor Wednesday to set the record straight.

Who's guilty of spouting this particular line of bull?

Vice President Dick Cheney, in a speech Wednesday to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, picked up the refrain.

Surprise!

But guess what? It wasn't a lie, it was "faulty intelligence!"

Cheney quoted a column by George Will, who wrote last week that "drilling is under way 60 miles off Florida. The drilling is being done by China, in cooperation with Cuba, which is drilling closer to South Florida than U.S. companies are."

The article also catches House Minority Leader John Boehner -- whose otherworldly tan is itself rumored to be of offshore Chinese manufacture -- repeating this crap, as well as relative nobody Rep. George Radanovich (R-CA). It also reportedly appeared in an Investor's Business Daily editorial earlier this week. Boehner and his tan, for their part, blame... The New York Times:

The office of House Minority Leader John Boehner defended the GOP drilling claims. "A 2006 New York Times story highlights lease agreements negotiated between Cuba and China and the fact that China was planning to drill in the Florida Strait off the coast of Cuba," said spokesman Michael Steel.

Boehner's tan had no comment, but was allegedly later sold for $136.38 a barrel.

Moral of the story: These guys will lie about absolutely anything. WMD. War and peace. POW rescues. The combat records of actual war heroes. Whether or not they marched with Martin Luther King. Everything.

And you can't "work out bipartisan compromise" with liars. Compromise requires at least two genuine positions to start with.

Hypocrisy rarely crystallizes this purely, so be sure to savor it:

Before the House override vote [on the farm bill] Wednesday night, lawmakers discovered that the version sent to the White House last week was missing a part. The discovery raises questions about whether that section of the bill, which dealt with authorized trade and food aid, would become law.

The discovery of the missing section, "Title III," prompted concerns from House Republicans that the override vote was improper.

House Republican Minority Leader John Boehner immediately began sobbing:

"What's happened here raises serious constitutional questions -- very serious," said Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio. "I don't see how we can proceed with the override as it occurred."

Where were the Bronzed Boehner's famed crocodile tears in 2005, when a $2 billion "clerical error" cropped up in the so-called "Deficit Reduction Act?"

I don't recall any rending of garments over those serious constitutional questions by Captain Suntan. Do you?

By the way, if you're wondering what happened with that situation in 2005, John Conyers, then the Judiciary Committee's Ranking Member, filed suit to challenge the law's validity. The case (Conyers v. Bush) was decided in favor of the president by federal judge John D. Bates.

Does Bates' name ring a bell? I mentioned him yesterday. He's the judge (and former Whitewater prosecutor) who dismissed Valerie Plame's lawsuit, dismissed the Cheney Energy Task Force suit, dismissed the DNC's suit seeking to force the FEC to rule on McCain's public financing flip-flop, and yes, he's the judge assigned to Conyers' latest suit against the Bush "administration," seeking to enforce contempt of Congress citations against Harrier Miers and Josh Bolten.

Move along, citizens. And do not stare directly at the "subpoena power."

In the New York Times today, Bill Kristol elevated Republicans' wishful thinking into the GOP's presidential election strategy this fall.  Dragged down by President Bush's record-setting unpopularity and a brand one of its own leaders likened to tainted dog food, the GOP's last best hope, according to Kristol, lies in the "exceptionalism" of John McCain.  That is, the GOP can maintain its grip on the White House precisely because John McCain is a different kind of Republican animal able to distance himself from his moribund president and his fading party.  Sadly for Kristol, the record shows that John McCain is utterly the same.

"I left my heart in San Francisco..." OK, I have to admit being a little disappointed that the decision concerning the constitutionality of "gay marriage" in California wasn't covered tonight, but I know only so much can be discussed in one hour - especially considering the fact that the "shenanigans" of GWB in Israel today and the great Dem response had to be addressed. Let the Countdown diary discussion fun begin!

The more things change.....

In an increasingly complex world, many people find it difficult to cope with the stresses of day to day life. The strain of caring for a family, paying the mortgage, job insecurity, and terrorists lurking at the Dairy Queen, can result in crushing anxiety and fear. But now, from the makers of The War in Iraq™ and Katrina Neglect™ comes a breakthrough in the treatment of depression caused by incompetent and dishonest national leadership. Now there is an alternative to the endless years of suffering brought on by deficient representation.

In his Recommended diary today, Senator John Kerry relates yet another chapter of Republicans behaving badly.  

Rep. John Boehner and Rep. Eric Cantor – senior leadership in the House GOP -- decided to ignore the actual meaning of English words and simply invent something Barack Obama didn’t say.

snip

These statements by Representatives Boehner and Cantor are so bad they rise to the level of a danger to our foreign policy.

Thankfully, there is a way to show Reps Boehner and Cantor how much we appreciate their lying, smearing, fearmongering ways.

there's more