This morning’s papers brought glad tidings: Tom (the Hammer) DeLay, after a long consultation with his pollsters and lawyers, has decided to resign from Congress, apparently next month. And in order to allow Texas GOPers to hand-pick a replacement (he has already won the primary for the November General Election), he is abandoning his Texas residency, which legally disqualifies him from the ballot, and formally becoming a resident of Alexandria, Virginia.It’s hard to exaggerate the power this unpleasant and ruthless man has wielded in Washington until recently, and hard to believe the lack of even minimal contrition he is exhibiting now that he’s been all but forced to resign. Just last week, he delivered a fiery speech to a Christian conservative gathering that implied he was a victim of discrimination for his faith. Indeed, his need to wallow in self-pity and invite his last-ditch supporters to do the same led him perilously close to expressing hatred of America: “We are, after all, a society that provides abortion on demand, has killed millions of innocent children, degrades the institution of marriage and all but treats Christianity like some second-rate superstition.” No wonder, then, that our infidel nation would contrive to find fault with DeLay’s crass and chronic money-hustling and power-muscling behavior in Washington and in Texas, eh?DeLay’s invincible arrogance was nicely illustrated by a couple of comments he’s made after disclosing his intention to resign. As Think Progress reports, he told Time Magazine that his proudest accomplishment in office was in skewing K Street campaign contributions to the GOP. And this morning, appearing on Fox News, he luridly suggested that the Republican-controlled Texas legislature would soon act to strip Travis County prosecutor Ronnie Earle of jurisdiction to pursue cases like the corporate campaign violations for which DeLay was indicted last year.The timing of DeLay’s announcement is pretty easy to figure out: as the Republican nominee for the General Election, he’s been able to amass a little over $1.2 million in campaign contributions.Now he can convert that money to his already-depleted legal defense fund, essentially tricking his contributors into banking his efforts to stay out of the hoosegow, as TPMMuckraker explained today. No wonder the Rev. Rick Scarborough, host of the pity party where DeLay made his Blame America First remarks last week, said of the Hammer: “This is a man, I believe, God has appointed … to represent righteousness in government.”The Bugman’s next move will apparently be to hook up with some conservative organization in his new home turf of Northern Virginia. Don’t be too surprised if he lands some lucrative consulting and lobbying contracts as well: After all, the Republican-controlled House remains largely his creature, even if he’s no longer directly pulling the strings.

A brutal day-job schedule, followed by a business trip to an area of Florida with very unreliable internet service, has stilled the bray of the New Donkey the last few days, but I’ll try to make up for it this week.Speaking of Florida, the political buzz down there is all about the death spiral of Katherine Harris’ Senate campaign. Check out these lines from an AP story today:

Representative Katherine Harris’s Senate campaign lost what was left of its core team when a top adviser, her campaign manager and her communications director resigned this weekend….Ms. Harris’s candidacy, which had received lukewarm support from Republican leaders in Washington, has struggled since she announced plans to challenge Mr. Nelson last summer. Fund-raising was slow from the start. Turnover has been a problem. She also lost a pollster, a national financial director, a treasurer and a media consultant in recent months.

Advisers urged Ms. Harris to leave the race. She refused and announced last month that she would spend $10 million of her own money to compete with Mr. Nelson, whom she has trailed in the polls.”This is a campaign that is spiraling downward by the minute,” said Jim Dornan, who resigned as campaign manager in November.

In a supreme testament to the power of denial, Harris’ comment on the latest series of defections was inexclicably upbeat:

Ms. Harris, a Republican who is challenging Senator Bill Nelson, the Democratic incumbent, said Saturday that the campaign had already lined up people who believed in her candidacy and that she would introduce them in the coming week.”We are stronger as a campaign today than we were yesterday,” Ms. Harris said in a news release. She did not return a call for comment.

Word is Harris is turning her campaign into an explicit Christian Right crusade. This, along with her heroine status among hard-core Republicans for helping George W. Bush hijack Florida’s electoral votes in 2000, will probably get her over any last-minute primary challenge. But for all her invocations of divine favor, her campaign continues to represent a God-given burst of sunshine on the fortunes of Bill Nelson, and Florida Democrats.

With most of the vote in, the Israeli elections appear to have confirmed the much-expected mandate for Ariel Sharon’s creation, the Kadima Party, to lead the next government, though with fewer Knesset seats than expected. The real shocker, however, was the collapse of Likud under Bibi Netanyahu, who wrested control of the party from Sharon: it will apparently be the fifth-ranking party in the next Knesset, behind Kadima, Labor, the Sephardic party Shas, and the Russian-immigrant dominated Yisreal Beiteinu. Indeed, Likud, the dominant right-wing party in Israel for decades, barely finished ahead of the Pensioner’s Party, a purely domestic- oriented political group that surprised everybody with its straightforward representation of the interests of the elderly.The scattered partisan results, and the remaining uncertainty regarding the imminent negotiations over the shape and size of a Kadima-led governing coalition, make all sorts of interpretations of the election possible, as evidenced by insta-reactions in the Israeli press and the blogosphere. Some will emphasize Kadima’s emergence, and note the vindication of Ariel Sharon, who, as Haaretz’s Robert Rosenberg noted, spent his last night as Prime Minister of Israel in a coma. Others will focus on Labor’s relatively strong showing under its new leader Amir Peretz, an Algerian-born union leader who represents a break with his party’s long identification with an Ashkenazi, kibbutz-centered elite. Still others will send up alarms about the rise of Yisreal Beiteinu’s Avigdor Lieberman, who could wind up being the leader of the official opposition. And the Pensioner’s Party, whose performance was so unexpected in a country long obsessed with security issues, will get attention as well.But the most compelling analysis I’ve read was actually written yesterday, by The New Republic’s Yossi Klein Halevi, which predicted low turnout and an inconclusive result, and suggested it was “Israel’s saddest election,” based on widespread despair. The “Greater Israel” ideology that once enlivened Likud and other right-wing parties is dead, said Halevi; it’s really an academic question as to whether Sharon was a lot or just slightly ahead of the curve in recognizing that and adjusting his policies accordingly. And just as importantly, the Hamas victory in the recent Palestinian elections confirmed the experience of the Second Intifada in largely extinguishing the “peace party” in Labor and on the Israeli left generally. Nearly all Israelis, said Halevi, have endorsed Sharon’s “separation strategy,” with the arguments being over time, place and manner of that separation. Even Lieberman’s right-wing party has distinguished itself by arguing for a strictly ethnic-based “separation” in which Jewish settlements would remain in Israel while Israeli Arab enclaves would be ceded to the proto-Palestinian state. Invidious as that idea is, it’s a far cry from “Greater Israel” and a permanent occupation of Palestine as a whole.Halevi’s hypothesis helps explain the historically low turnout in today’s elections (63 percent, which is robust by American standards, but is well below the traditional Israeli benchmark of 80 percent), and also the emergence of domestic-policy-only focused parties like the Pensioners. But he’s right: it’s very sad. Israelis are largely united on a “separation strategy” that every major faction in Palestinian politics rejects, most notably the hyper-rejectionist Hamas, which can’t bring itself to even accept the legitimacy of Israel according to any configuration. Perhaps the most important question about today’s Israeli elections is whether anyone on the Palestinian side recognizes and acts upon the challenge and the opportunity of the new Israeli consensus for a two-state solution, which is becoming a reality beyond all the past rhetoric on both sides.

Andy Card’s resignation today does not, as my colleague The Moose has noted, mean much of anything in terms of the direction, or lack thereof, of the White House or the Bush administration. The official explanation will likely be that Card is simply tired after five years as chief of staff. This raises a question that I thought about while staring at a recent Washington Post article that essentially blamed some of the blunders being committed by the administration on systemic fatigue among key White House staffers. Fatigue from what, exactly? I mean, it’s not like this administration has been terribly active in terms of meeting the big domestic or national security challenges facing the country, right? It has horribly mismanaged the war in Iraq; is frightenenly sloppy in terms of securing the country against terrorism; botched Katrina; refuses to do anything about the burgeoning fiscal crisis; and can’t find its collective butt with both hands on much any other issue. Moreover, as we know from a variety of sources, most notably the famous DiIlulio disclosures, this is a White House whose burdens do not include any particular interest in policy development. I guess we have to assume that bad government is, to use the president’s own favorite phrase, “hard work.” And 24-7 spinning of bad government is really hard work.

There was a light, funny article in yesterday’s Washington Post about the growing phenomenon of church marquees sporting nuggets of folksy wisdom and spiritual encouragement. (Examples included: “Prayer is the best wireless connection,” and “Pessimists need a kick in the can’ts.”)It prompted me to recall my personal favorite in this genre, spotted in South Georgia some years ago: “Read the Bible daily. It will scare the hell out of you.”But the marquee wisdom, while growing, is not universal, particularly in my own Episcopal Church, whose typically traditional and often gorgeous church architecture does not alway lend itself to bright signs with therapeutic messages. I remember a parish meeting I attended a few years back at an Anglo-Catholic Episcopal Church, in which one parishoner suggested a welcoming message on the wooden mass-schedule board outside. When another parishoner objected, she said: “Look, I’m not asking for much. Just that the first thing a passerby sees isn’t ‘Confessions Available On Request.'”

As those of you who read a lot of blogs undoubtedly know by now, there’s been a firestorm in every corner of the blogosphere this week over the hiring by washingtonpost.com of a prominent young conservative blogger, Ben Domenech, one of the founders of redstate.org (where his handle has been Augustine), to do a new blog called Red America. At first the furor was over (1) why the Post site (independent of the newspaper, BTW) felt the need to set up an abrasive conservative blog, without at least creating a progressive counterpart, (2) various aspects of Domenech’s background as the scion of a well-connected conservative family, and (3) several dumb and offensive things he’s said, such as calling Coretta Scott King “a communist” the day after her death. In this early phase of the controversy, it was a classic left-right battle. But almost effortlessly, several progressive bloggers came up with an ever-escalating series of examples of plagiarism by Domenech going back to college newspaper work, but continuing with pieces for professional organizations like National Review Online. Conservative bloggers quickly split between some who defended Domenech, and others who distanced themselves. And the fracas ended today with Domenech’s resignation from washingtonpost.com, and a statement by the site’s managing editor wishing him good riddance and apologizing for the fiasco. Considering how long it took for earlier plagiarism scandals at major newspapers to come to light and bite the perpetrators and enablers in the butt, the lightning speed of the whole affair was impressive. To the extent you care about exposing plagiarists, it’s a good argument for the value of a wide-open blogosphere that can often serve as the enforcer of journalistic ethics, not just as a rules-free zone. As for Domenech’s underlying sin, I generally dislike getting too self-righteous about other people’s destructive habits, especially after they are exposed, since the Good Lord has a strong tendency to punish first-stone-throwers. But I have to say, plagiarism–like, say, upper-class kleptomania–is one sin I really have a hard time accepting. It combines sloth, avarice, and pride–three of the Seven Deadly Sins, no less–and is especially incomprehensible for someone who, like Mr. Domenech, does not seem to have been under any kind of extreme deadline pressure. Plagiarism, of course, is a lot easier than it was back in the day. For Old Folks like me who learned the writing craft on a Selectric II typewriter, and had to go to an actual library to do research, plagiarism would have been entirely too much work. Why not just write the thing yourself? (The parallel sin Old Folks tend to commit is self-plagiarism, which is the literary equivalent of telling your friends, family and colleagues the same damn stories over and over again). The ease of cutting-and-pasting, and the vast candy-store of online stuff to steal, has to increase the temptation. But technology giveth, and technology taketh away, and as Ben Domenech has now discovered, it’s real easy to search your online writing, pick out a few passages, google the words, and see if anything identical or very similar pops up. If it does, and it was published earlier–kaboom!Whatever it means for Domenech, for washingtonpost.com, or for a large number of disappointed and embarassed conservatives, this fiasco will probably result in a sharp drop in new incidents of plagiarism, at least among those bloggers and/or journalists who invite scrutiny.

An apology to faithful readers for the dearth of posts this week. In part, it’s because I’ve been blogging around on you. I’m participating in a TPMCafe Book Club discussion on Kevin Phillips’ latest provocative tome, American Theocracy. As my post indicates, I was certainly provoked by Phillips’ hypothesis that the “southernization of politics and religion” is largely responsible not just for the Bush Era, but for its most egregious excesses: huge public and private debt, an oil-focused energy policy, and the bungled war in Iraq. I probably pulled my punches in commenting on this hypothesis; one of the interesting features of TPMCafe Book Club is that it involves a direct discussion with book authors. It’s a useful structure, but one that inhibits me (unlike the brave Kevin Drum) a bit. No matter what he’s writing now, I will always esteem Kevin Phillips for his very first book, The Emerging Republican Majority, which did for political analysis what Bill James did for baseball analysis: create a statistical foundation for a truly comprehensive understanding of trends over many, many decades. In particular, Phillips consolidated an enormous amount of data on the non-economic determinants of voting behavior, especially religion, ethnicity, and amazingly persistant regional patterns based on large, traumatic events (most famously the Civil War). To this day, whenever I encounter one of those neo-populist Democrats who assume that today’s cultural politics represent an aberration from “natural” class-based politics, I direct them to Phillips book for a decisive rebuttal. Though The Emerging Republican Majority is generally regarded as a true classic, its influence took quite a while to develop. It was published in 1969, based in part on Phillips’ work in the 1968 Nixon campaign. Nixon’s subsequent re-election in 1972 seemed to confirm the title of the book, but the ’72 landslide was so enormous and national–and Republican non-presidential performance that year was so weak–that it didn’t do much to validate Phillips’ analysis. And then, of course, came Watergate, the Agnew and Nixon resignations, the Democratic landslide of1974, and the election of a Democratic president from the very region stipulated by Phillips as the hinge of the Republican majority. By the time of Reagan’s election in 1980–which really did validate his hypothesis–Kevin Phillips was largely a forgotten prophet. There’s another book that suffered a similar initial fate–one that in fact was explicitly modeled on Phillips’ classic. John Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s The Emerging Democratic Majority had the misfortune of being published just before the decisive Republican midterm victory of 2002, followed by Bush’s re-election. It will be interesting to see if they turn out ultimately to be prophets as well. I certainly hope they are.

I’m sure Ezra Klein’s cover story on the “reborn” Al Gore will get a lot of attention in the blogosphere and perhaps well beyond it. In case you don’t have time to read it, Ezra’s basic take is that Gore’s post-2000 political career has represented a thoughtful and integrity-filled repudiation of the Veep’s own cautious, centrist past; of the failed strategy of his 2000 campaign; and most especially, of the “old media” mindset that did him so much damage in 2000. I obviously don’t share Ezra’s characterization of Gore’s New Democrat heritage as one of “equivocating” and playing the mainstream media’s game. (I sometimes despair of convincing bloggers that people like me support what we support and oppose what we oppose for reasons of principle). Nor do I think it’s a particular badge of honor if Ezra’s right in saying that Gore has evolved from the 1990s cool-kids prefererence for New Democrats to the contemporary cool-kids attachment to the Dean Campaign legacy.But there’s no question Ezra is right about one thing: whether or not he’s campaigning for president (we should probably take him at his word that he’s not), Al Gore is clearly campaigning against his own past, about as systematically as anyone could do. Unlike Ezra, I think that reversal began during, not after, the 2000 campaign, when Gore could not bring himself to consistently campaign on the successful record of his own administration (his real blunder, IMO, not his occasional “populism,” which if a bit disembodied was fine). And that, not his previous loyalty to Clinton and his policies, was his real moment of “equivocation.”

Like, well, a fourth of the U.S. adult/adolescent population, I participated in a NCAA tournament pool in my office, and like a lot of people, my brackets were completely busted on the first two days. Actually, I participated in a second pool in which four of us “drafted” teams, on a seed times round basis, and I’ve completely bombed in that one as well.I’ll get over it within the next few hours, but for the record, my fate is a good example of how stupid the Conventional Wisdom is in any sport, including politics.The principles that guided my picks included:1) Don’t be a homer. My beloved Georgia Bulldogs were not in the tournament, so I had to be wary of the temptation to irrationally favor the teams from my work-place home of Washington, D.C. I picked the three “Georges”–Georgetown, George Washington, and George Mason–to lose in the first round. All three won, and the Hoyas and Patriots actually advanced to the Sweet 16. I wish this result could be noted by the various people who email me now and then to accuse me of being a Washington Insider.2) Go for the hot young teams. Everybody’s Hot Young Teams were Kansas and North Carolina. The former lost in the first round; the latter in the second.3) Don’t pay attention to irrelevant traditions. Alabama has a great basketball tradition, but had a lousy, underachieving season. All the cool kids had them losing in the first round, while all the ignorant pickers chose them to beat Marquette, whose own tradition was too remote to be of interest to those ignorant pickers. Alabama won, of course. Same thing happened with Indiana and San Diego State and N.C. State and Cal: “smart guys” picked SDSU and Cal; dumb guys rightly picked IU and N.C. State.4) Pick judicious upsets: Most pools give bonuses for picking first-round upsets. Three years ago I was briefly in the running in my office poll for picking lots of those upsets. The last two years, I bombed by picking just as many upsets. This year was supposed to be another Year of the Upset, and it was, but I generally picked them wrong, going with San Diego State, Northern Iowa, Marquette, Seton Hall, UNCW, UAB, instead of Bradley, George Mason, Northwestern State, Montana or N.C. State.5) Focus on coaches’ tournament records: Tom Izzo has an incredible tournament record at Michigan State; I picked them to go to the Elite Eight, and the Spartans lost in the first round. Same scene with Kansas and North Carolina: their coaches never underachieve, except when they do, as in this year.The bottom line at this point is that people who filled out their brackets intuitively, or even ignorantly, are doing a lot better than us pseudo-sophisticates. Next year I’m probably going with the system of “whose mascot would win in a fight,” which at least presents some interesting metaphysical issues of how a Blue Devil would fare against a Bruin.

As you may have heard by now, Florida Congresswoman Katherine Harris spent a good part of last week leading (relieved) Republicans to believe that she was going to withdraw from her can’t-lose-the-primary, can’t-win-the-general race against Sen. Bill Nelson. She would make a “major announcement” this Tuesday, she said. But instead of getting out of the race and giving Florida GOPers a prayer against Nelson, she went on Hannity and Colmes and announced she was about to dump $10 million in money inherited from her father into her campaign.Leave it to Harris to think that a lack of money was her main problem–and, for that matter, to think that her difficulty in attracting other people’s money might not be a indication of a deeper set of problems.But if she had to do what she had to do, then she should have probably gone to the trouble to pay some hush money to her top political strategist (prior to this week), the ol’ vote-suppressor Ed Rollins, who proceeded to tell the Orlando Sentinel that he and everybody else around the campaign had urged her to withdraw.

Harris’ chief strategist, Ed Rollins, gave a sober assessment of her chances a day after her television appearance, revealing that he and other key advisers concluded it probably would be best if she abandoned the race against Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson.Rollins said they worried about Harris’ sluggish fundraising, her inability to generate excitement among top Republicans and future fallout from illegal campaign contributions she took from a defense contractor who has since pleaded guilty to bribing a California lawmaker.

And that wasn’t the only less-than-enthused reaction to the Harris announcement. Quoth Gov. Jeb Bush: “I think for Congresswoman Harris to win, this has to stop being about her and has to start being about Senator Nelson and about the future of our country and the future of the state.”

I think Jeb should save his breath. For America’s most notorious political Drama Queen, it will never “stop being about her.”