He sees the tragedy, but can’t stop being a Senator from Alaska. While the rest of us are paying our taxes, Alaskan citizens look forward to fat government checks derived from oil royalties; curtailing offshore exploration and drilling would spell an end to a major source of revenue for his state.

Before the camera rolled, I gave him the chance to back out of the interview, saying that his position was “the Republican view, or at least a Senator from Alaska’s view.” To his credit, he gave me a few minutes on the topic.

It pains me to have a Democrat agreeing with Sarah Palin on any topic, but the truth is that in this economy all Alaska has is oil, fish, and wilderness. Turning away from oil may be extremely difficult for Alaska.

As with Sessions, I’m trying to figure out how these guys can tell us they “lost their way and made some mistakes toward the end of the Bush administration,” but now, they’ve “learned their lesson and can be trusted to govern again,” at the same time they are supporting Marco Rubio in Florida.

Rubio is, of course, the guy that used his Republican Party of Florida credit cards to purchase groceries, mp3s, electronics equipment, and other personal items. The IRS is investigating him to find out if he claimed all these “perks” as income; the FBI is investigating the entire scheme to see if there was any other illegality involved (like fraud or embezzlement, I presume).

Anyway, Americans aren’t stupid. A lot of folks have company credit cards and wouldn’t even begin to think about using them for personal purchases. Under what circumstances would an honest guy reach into his wallet and use the corporate card for personal expenses?

When Republicans line up behind Rubio, they put the lie to everything else they say about turning over a new leaf.

The refrain is a common one: “We lost our way and broke the trust with the American people. We’ve learned our lesson and can be trusted to govern again.”

You’ll hear it from virtually every Republican running for national office. Their losses in 2006 and 2008 didn’t come about because conservativism is a failed ideology that attracts sundry incompetents, snake-oil salesman, and common criminals (Tom Delay, Jack Abramoff, Mark Foley, Bob Ney, Larry Craig, Ed Schrock, David Vitter, John Sweeney, Vito Fosella, Rick Renzi, John Doolittle, Duke Cunningham, Scooter Libbey… and now, Mark Rubio); nay, Republicans failed conservativism. And they promise it won’t happen again.

Except, it’s already happening. One high-profile Republican after another has lined up to endorse Mark Rubio. It’s almost as if Republican expect their candidates to bilk donors by purchasing grocieries, music and electronics with the Party’s credit card. And then not declare the ill-gotten wealth as income, thus introducing tax evasion to the mix.

I asked Senator Session about this yesterday…

When I saw the Senator upon my return to the Capitol yesterday, I asked him about the dismal quarterly fundraising report he recently filed. One donor, $50. A truly amazing (for all the wrong reasons) showing for a United States Senator…

As soon as I mentioned it, he volunteered that the number was so low simply because he hadn’t done any kind of fundraising at all since the scandal broke. Fair enough. But that leads to another question, doesn’t it?

If you aren’t fundraising, does that mean you won’t be running again?

His reply: “I haven’t made any decisions. I won’t make any for quite a while.”

I’ve been on assignment in Florida for a while. Apologies for the absence.

While in the Sunshine State, I spent a good bit of time with Tea Party movement leaders. They sure do get their hate on fro illegal immigration. I wasn’t able to ask any of them about the new Arizona law because it hadn’t passed yet when I was researching my story, but I feel confident that they’d stand and applaud Jan Brewer if their paths were to cross.

And that sets up an interesting dynamic. Mark Rubio, the “chosen one” amongst Florida conservatives and Tea Partiers, criticised the Arizona law. And below, Senator George LeMieux says he doesn’t like it either.

I haven’t heard anything about Tea Party rallies outside Rubio or LeMieux’s offices, have you?

What a mystery!

A couple of weeks ago Senator Judd Gregg was one of the more vocal Republican Senators objecting to the Democratic majority’s planned use of reconciliation to pass health care reform. It didn’t take long for Senate Democrats to pull this video from the C-Span archives:

The internet’s an amazing thing, eh?

Anyway, once this video surfaced, Gregg took hits from all over… Rachel Maddow and the liberal blogosphere simply eviscerated him. The Senator has always been approachable and amenable to questions when I had them, and since I hadn’t seen any kind of response from his office re: the hypocrisy charge, I thought I’d ask him what his thoughts were. Here’s his response:

The Miller Center invited infamous torture memo author John Yoo to speak. I documented the atrocities (no pun intended).

The crowd was mixed. If I had to guess, I’d suggest that 15-20% of the audience was there to protest his presence. About 50-60% seemed to be “big fans”. The rest seemed ambivalent or just plain curious.

My impression of Yoo was that he is probably quite brilliant, he harbors a deep contempt for the drecks of society (many of which adore him) that is matched only by his loathing of those that take issue with his “work,” and he is triumphant that his pedigree and station in life have earned him legal immunity (at least here in the US) for his war crimes. Moreover, he really doesn’t care about strange people in far-away places.

His was there to talk about his book. The problem was, a lot of people were there to talk about morality vs. his justification for torture. His fan-boys didn’t care what he came to talk about; they just wanted his critics to shut the hell up.

Yoo promised to spend a significant amount of time answering questions. Well, he did that, but ultimately, he ended up answering very few. Instead, he filibustered and evaded the tough questions he was asked and seemed to enjoy doing it. For those of us waiting for something of substance, it was pretty tiresome, then frustrating and ultimately, infuriating.

I left the conference feeling like I had just spent hours with a rich-kid rapist who knows he’s going to get away with it. “Smarmy” doesn’t seem to be a sufficient descriptor of Yoo’s demeanor when you realize that his torture victims provided much of the false intelligence that Cheney and crew used to push the country into the war in Iraq. If you’ve seen Inglorious Basterds, call to mind the German Jew-Hunter’s disposition. That’s John Yoo. No shame, no regrets, and a sick way of reveling in his immunity from judgment. It’s cliche, but after sitting across from him and watching him answer questions, the thought that kept repeating in my head was, “the banality of evil”.

Here are the videos I recorded from the event. For the most part, I’ve skipped over his whimsical speech about strong Presidents and their seizing of executive power; the argument falls apart when you realize that that kind of power in the hands of an incompetent President like George Bush is the greatest existential threat to the well-being of the Republic. The founders provided a strong system of checks and balances for some pretty damned good reasons.

One thing that isn’t found in the videos below is Yoo’s treatment of Jon Stewart. He ridiculed Stewart’s (young) audience for getting their news from a comedy show and, with a wink and a nod to the elders in the crowd, all-but suggested that the liberal streak running through today’s foolish youth (that voted for Obama) can be attributed to their less than serious approach to informing themselves. Of course, he doesn’t mention that Stewart’s viewers are better informed than Fox News viewers (that filled his audience) or most other news consumers.

Anyway, here are the videos:

I didn’t do much with Republicans. It just wasn’t their day.

But…

I had heard a rumor that since the world was coming to an end if health care passed, Republicans were going to try to avoid all the drama by holding a mass-suicide event immediately after the vote. I asked Jason Chaffetz about that.

A while later, I was standing near the tunnel that leads from Cannon to the Capitol when Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver, a very liberal Democrat and (former?) pastor, walked by. He ran into Rep. Hensarling, a conservative’s conservative. I witnessed them speak for about 3-4 minutes and wondered if they were talking about the spitting incident (Cleaver had been spat upon by a tea-partier the day before). I decided to ask about it:

Everybody knows by now that the House passed health care yesterday. I spent the evening, beginning at around 8 PM, speaking with a number of Reps from both sides of the aisle. Here are the Democrats in the order I interviewed them:

Jerry Nadler, a leader amongst progressives:

Donna Edwards (a rising star in the progressive caucus):

Kathy Castor, from Tampa Bay, Fl:

John Garamendi, former insurance commissioner, energy expert and strong progressive from California. When I was stringing for FDL, Garamendi made a point to stop and thank me for the work FDL was doing to whip on health care.

Tom Perriello: widely percieved to be one of the most threatened Democrats in the country; his distinction is his strong claim to “conviction politics”. A few months ago he told his supporters and opponents alike that he didn’t run for office to be re-elected. Instead, he’s there to make a difference by doing the right thing. His district is one of the “reddest” House seats held by a Democrat, but don’t tell him that!

BTW, that’s a cheering crowd you hear in the background – they weren’t protesters!

Immediately after I spoke with Congressman Perriello, we walked back to the House office buildings. Earlier, the Congressman told me that he had taken a lot of heat from protesters and it wasn’t much fun. So when I heard a crowd chanting, I assumed it was more protesters and tried to walk the Congressman to the other side of the street. But then I heard what they were saying: “Yes we did! Yes we did!” Hundreds of people were cheering the passage of health care! We ended up crossing the street again and walking through the folks whose support was so crucial throughout the process. For once, Congressman Perriello (and other Democrats, including Alan Grayson!) got to hear a lot of “Thank You”s and “You Rock”s:

Yesterday I wrote about the procedural obstruction in th Senate as it pertains to the confirmation of judges. In a nutshell, I pointed out that forming a new “Gang of 14″ would be useless; that the only thing that would help get Obama’s nominees confirmed in a timely manner would be to deploy the nuclear option.

That’s because one Senator, as we saw with Jim Bunning, can shut down the entire chamber for almost a full week if they oppose a vote. The Senator refuses to join a “unanimous consent” motion and triggers a thirty hour period of debate before the Senate can vote to have a vote. Once that hurdle is cleared, there’s another 30 hours of debate before the final up or down vote can occur. So one judge, not counting committee hearings, etc, can take up 60 hours of Senate floor time. And since Republicans have been in the minority, that has been the norm.

Well, after nearly a year of this, Democrats are growing pretty tired of it. For a while now, we’ve been hearing things about filibuster reform, but for the most part, the calls have come from more liberal Senators like Harkin, Durbin and Schumer.

Well… Filibuster reform is not just for “radicals” anymore. Kent Conrad, a conservative Democrat by any measure, joins the chorus: