Hollow Weenies

From Newsweek/THE DAILY BEAST:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the Republican leadership’s tether to the Tea Party, flutters the hearts of the government-bashing, budget-slicing faithful with his relentless attacks on runaway federal spending. To Cantor, an $8 billion high-speed rail connecting Las Vegas to Disneyland is wasteful “pork-barrel spending.” The Virginia Republican set up the “You Cut” Web site to demonstrate how easy it is to slash government programs. And he made the Department of Housing and Urban Development the poster child for waste when he disclosed that the agency was paying for housing for Ph.D.s.

But away from the cameras, Cantor sometimes pulls right up to the spending trough, including the very stimulus law he panned in public. Letters obtained by Newsweek show him pressing the Transportation Department to spend nearly $3 billion in stimulus money on a high-speed-rail project—not the one he derided in Nevada, but another in his home state. “Virginia … will demonstrate that this historic investment in rail will create jobs, reduce congestion, spur economic growth and improve our environment,” says a letter he signed with other Virginia members in October 2009, cribbing President Obama’s own argument for the stimulus.

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The New New Hampshire, Now Located in Massachusetts

From politicalticker at CNN:

At a time when the former Alaska governor appears to be shrinking from the spotlight, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann is stepping up as yet another favorite daughter of the conservative movement.

In recent television appearances, political activities and speaking engagements, Bachmann has matched Palin’s slams against President Obama and garnered seemingly equal affection from conservative activists.

But it remains to be seen whether embarrassing and highly publicized gaffes will affect her presidential chances.

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Broder, Can You Spare a Slime?

From Jamison Foster at MEDIA MATTERS:

David Broder does not like politicians who lie.  I know this because he said so himself, in an infamous 1998 Sally Quinn article about why the Washington Establishment was so angry at Bill Clinton for lying about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky:

“The judgment is harsher in Washington,” says The Post’s Broder. “We don’t like being lied to.”

That suggestion — that Washington, DC’s elite residents take greater offense at being lied to than the simpletons outside the nation’s capital — is the kind of thing that would draw heaping piles of scorn from the political media had it come from a liberal Democrat.  But it came from David Broder, beloved “dean” of the Washington Press corps, and so nobody said much of anything about his preening moral superiority.

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Sarah Palin, Palm Reader

(ChattahBox)—-[…] After Sarah Palin’s keynote speech last night at the Tea Party Convention, she sat down with the event organizer Judson Phillips for a brief question and answer session. The questions were apparently pre-screened and Palin’s team of handlers had presumably prepped her on the right-wing talking point answers. But the half-term governor of Alaska still needed to look at the crib notes she scribbled on her left hand, to answer basic questions.

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It’s My Party, and I’ll Bail If I Want To

From The Caucus at The New York Times:

Even before the Tea Party’s $549-a-head convention next week, some of the movement’s biggest champions are partied out.

Representatives Michele Bachmann, Republican of Minnesota, and Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, two Tea Party heroines, have canceled their appearances at the National Tea Party Convention, which begins next Thursday in Nashville, Tenn.

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