You might well share my surprise today in learning that the Senate immigration reform “compromise” announced yesterday afternoon had fallen apart by this morning. I followed this pretty obsessively over the last few weeks, and after watching Frist, Specter, McCain, Reid, Leahy and Kennedy high-five each other over the “deal” at a press conference yesterday, I pounded out a New Dem Dispatch praising the compromise as a “one sane step” towards immigration reform, while warning that the Troglodyte House GOP position on the subject might well make the whole thing meaningless.Turns out that Frist, who reportedly told Harry Reid he could definitely corral a majority of Senate Republicans into voting for the compromise, was talking through his hat, or worse. Republicans insisted on the right to provide for votes on a vast menu of Troglodyte amendents to the “deal,” and Reid quite appropriately said “Hell, no.” A deal subject to unlimited amendments is no deal at all. And so, the motion to move to a vote on the compromise went down hard.So basically, here’s what happened this week: Senate Republicans killed a bipartisan proposal reported by the Judiciary Committee they controlled. Senate Republicans then unveiled a face-saving compromise, got Dems on board, and then proved they couldn’t muster support for their own proposal. Now, incredibly, they’re pretending Democrats are at fault for sticking to the compromise and not agreeing to let it get unraveled through hundreds of amendments on the Senate floor. And let’s not forget that throughout this fiasco the President of the United States, who supported both the Judiciary Committee bill and the discarded compromise, sat on the sidelines, unwilling or unable to sway his partisan troops.It’s increasingly, abundantly clear that Washington’s paralysis on the immigration issue is an intramural Republican problem more than anything else. It would be very helpful if the news media, which typically described today’s developments as some sort of bipartisan breakdown, would figure out the GOP’s singular responsibility for this mess, and report it accordingly.

Aside from the Delayniac hijinks mentioned in my last post, there’s a far more serious example of House Republican misbehavior on display in Pennsylvania. Rep. Curt Weldon has launched a series of attacks on Democratic rival Joe Sestak that began with a Swift-Boat-style attack on the service record of the 31-year-Navy-veteran and retired three-star admiral, and quickly strayed over every conceivable line of decency by questioning the Sistak family’s choice of treatment for their daughter’s potentially fatal brain tumor. Jonathan Kaplan of The Hill has the whole outrageous story today, but here’s a precis: Weldon is retailing charges that Sestak, a Clinton administration National Security Council staffer, and more recently director of the Navy’s internal think tank, Deep Blue, made his subordinates and superiors unhappy with his hard-driving style. You can read the back-and-forth on this subject in Kaplan’s article, but it sure looks to me like Sestak was a tree-shaker who discomfited the notoriously change-averse Navy establishment, which is a good thing. But whatever the facts on this case, it’s incredible that Weldon would have the chutzpah to attack Sestak’s service record, while continuing to support the policies of George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. After all, the former Texas Air National Guard veteran Bush spent much of the Vietnam War running an Alabama Senate race. And his hireling, the current Secretary of Defense, has caused a lot more unhappiness in the armed forces than any one figure in recent history, while compiling a disastrous record of incompetence. How can Weldon possibly suggest that Sestak’s service actually disqualifies him from serving in Congress? It gets, unfortunately, a lot worse. Weldon also attacked Sestak for merely renting a home back in Pennsylvania, while living in suburban Washington (a criticism which I am sure Weldon would not make of Leesburg, Virginia resident Rick Santorum). When Sestak explained that he lingered in Washington because his daughter was undergoing chemotherapy and various surgeries in a local hospital, Weldon breezily suggested that Sestak should have relocated his daughter to a hospital in Pennsylvania or nearby Delaware. This is beyond disgusting. My first impulse on reading Kaplan’s story was to propose that Weldon be horse-whipped. My second impulse was to demand that every other Republican repudiate Weldon’s tactics. And that’s why it’s especially troubling to me that Sen. John McCain, proud Navy veteran and war hero, and the victim of Weldon-style scurrilous attacks on his family by the Bush campaign of 2000, headlined a fundraiser for the Pennylvania Republican just last Saturday. Fine, support your party’s candidates. Fine, praise Weldon’s legislative record. And fine, maybe you didn’t know what Weldon was saying about his opponent. But please, don’t lend your name to a man willing to smear the record and family of Joe Sestak. There are some things that cannot be justified by partisan politics, and if this doesn’t qualify, I don’t know what ever would.

I have to tell you, Tom DeLay’s staff and supporters reflect his allegedly deep Christian values about as well as the Hammer himself. Aside from the fact that two of his former top aides are up to their necks in the dreck of the Abramoff scandal, and the additional fact that DeLay himself and a couple of close Texas associates are one trial away from a possible trip to the hoosegow, there’s the chronic habit of Delayniacs of engaging in some rather un-Christlike physical intimidation tactics. Remember the infamous Brooks Brothers’ Riot of 2000, wherein a bunch of pasty Young Republican types, including a DeLay staffer and a DeLay fundraiser, shut down a South Florida presidential recount effort? A group of Houston DeLay supporters brought back memories today by organizing a disruption of a press conference by Nick Lampson, the Democratic candidate for DeLay’s seat. It’s all of a piece with DeLay’s own snarling, unrepentatent attitude towards the behavior that has cost him his leadership position and his seat in the House.Somebody needs to tell DeLay and his friends they should stop while they’re behind.

Given all the well-deserved attention being paid to Tom DeLay’s resignation from the House, you might have missed an important new story in the L.A. Times, by Tom Hamburger and Ken Silverstein, about the latest stomach-churning tale involving Jack Abramoff. In 2001, the story goes, Abramoff proposed a $16-18 million lobbying contract to the Sudanese ambassador to the United States, offering to help dampen down Christian conservative hostility to the pariah state, partly through his connection to Ralph Reed. He made this pitch in his favorite site for such transactions, his Fed-Ex Field skybox, during a Redskins game. The allegation comes from the Sudanese ambassador, Kidir Haroun Ahmed. Through a flack, Abramoff denied the claim, and said he actually took the occasion to lecture the ambassador on his regime’s terrible treatment of Sudanese Christians during the long-raging North-South civil war. But the Times reporters obtained a second (by-request anonymous) eyewitness account of the exchange, from a “former associate” of Abramoff, that confirms the ambassador’s story. Abramoff’s protestations of innocence–yea, of righteousness–certainly smell to high heaven. Who would choose to coddle and feed a high-level foreign official in a posh skybox in order to deliver an objection to his government’s policies? And why would any Sudanese official pay any particular attention to Casino Jack’s personal point of view? Moreover, it’s certainly not as though Abramoff was above taking money from people he should have deplored. After all, he solicited and accepted $1.2 million for setting up a meeting between the anti-semitic president of Malaysia and George W. Bush. What really strikes me about this story are two things: First, the continuing importance of the Ralph Reed/Christian Right connection to Abramoff’s various shakedowns; and second, the bottomless avarice of this man beloved of the conservative movement and on very friendly relations with a wide variety of leading Republican officials in the executive and legislative branches in Washington. In that meeting at Fed-Ex Field, it’s clear both Abramoff and his prey were dealing with the devil. Just when you think there cannot possibly be more to the Jack Abramoff saga, yet another bad apple turns up, and you have to wonder what’s at the bottom of the rotten barrel.

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.