Huntsman and Huntsboy

From The New York Times:

SALT LAKE CITY — Jon M. Huntsman Jr. was 10 years old when his father packed up their growing family to move east in 1970, leaving behind his fledgling company to work for President Richard M. Nixon.

A driven businessman with deep roots in the Mormon Church, the elder Huntsman found little to like about his experience in the Nixon White House. It was poorly run, in his view — not at all like a business — and he felt terrorized by H. R. Haldeman, the mercurial chief of staff.

“You asked me what I took out,” he told an interviewer years later. “I didn’t take anything but fear out.”
Yet Mr. Huntsman did leave Washington with something that proved valuable when he resettled his family here: a thick Rolodex and a deep understanding of politics. In the years that followed, as he became a billionaire industrialist, a philanthropist, a campaign donor and one of Utah’s most powerful men, his connections and wealth proved critical in carving a path into politics for his namesake and eldest son.

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Ask and Tell

From TALKING POINTS MEMO:

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), who helped shepherd through today’s Senate repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, told reporters after the final vote this afternoon that ending the military’s ban on openly gay servicemembers is a big step for LGBT rights.

“To me, it is a step forward to a larger societal acceptance [of gay rights,]” Lieberman said. “This is a civil rights piece of legislation in my opinion.”

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Welcome to the New G. O. Tea

From THE HILL:

Republican leaders were scrambling Wednesday to unify their party in the wake of a nasty GOP primary in Delaware that knocked Rep. Mike Castle (Del.), their top recruit, out of the race.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told The Hill Wednesday that he will contribute campaign funds to Christine O’Donnell, who in narrowly defeating Castle may have given Democrats an advantage in the general election.

…snip…

McConnell downplayed the notion that contentious GOP primaries have exposed disunity within his party.

Then he grimaced and puked in his Turtle Chow.

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Caucus Clown

From E.J. Dionne at Post Partisan at The Washington Post:

I don’t think Rep. Michele Bachmann, the very right-wing Republican from Minnesota, is doing her party any favors by creating a Tea Party Caucus in the House of Representatives. In fact, I imagine that this is the first thing Bachmann has done in a long time that will make Democrats happy.

Not surprisingly, Bachmann declared herself chair of the caucus, for which she filed paperwork on Thursday.

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Good Time Charlie

From the St. Petersburg Times:

ST. PETERSBURG — Something peculiar is going on with Charlie Crist.

He’s on the cusp of losing public office, his lifelong party is attacking him mercilessly, and some of his closest friends are yanking their support now that he’s running for Senate as a nonpartisan candidate instead of a Republican. And yet even by the relentlessly cheerful standards of Gov. Crist, he seems even more upbeat and relaxed than ever.

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The Wizards of Oil

From The Washington Post:

Three major oil industry executives agreed on one thing in a pair of Senate hearings Tuesday: Someone else was to blame for the drilling rig accident that triggered the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The senior executives from the oil behemoth BP, the offshore oil drilling company Transocean and the oilfield services contractor Halliburton pointed fingers at each other in seeking to explain what caused the accident that set afire and sank the Deepwater Horizon rig, killing 11 people.

…snip…

BP blamed the failure of Transocean’s blowout preventer and raised a new question about whether Transocean disregarded “anomalous pressure test readings” just hours before the explosion. Transocean blamed decisions made by BP and cited possible flaws in the cementing job done by Halliburton. And Halliburton said that it had faithfully followed BP’s instructions and that Transocean had started replacing a heavy drilling mud with seawater before the well was sealed with a cement plug.

To the tune of If I Only Had a Brain, written by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg, as performed by the fabulous Ray Bolger:

Lamar McKay:

I sit here, oh so coyly, don’t know why the gulf’s so oily,
But I’m here to proclaim,
That I couldn’t say for certain,
But I think that Halliburton,
Is the company to blame.

Cantor’s National Council for a New America Meets Its Death Panel

From the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

Rep. Eric Cantor, R-7th, has pulled the plug on a national organization that was launched with much fanfare a year ago.

John Murray, a spokesman for Cantor, confirmed a report from the Washington newspaper Roll Call that Cantor’s National Council for a New America is “in a suspended state.”

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Bennett to Teabaggers: Are Utah-kin’ to me?

From TALKING POINTS MEMO:

Sen. Bob Bennett’s (R-UT) political life is on the line tomorrow, with a state Republican convention that has the power to deny him even any chance to fight for the GOP nomination in a primary — and a party base that has been dissatisfied and sees him as being too settled in Washington after three terms.

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