CNN says Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius is Obama's pick for HHS.

Gov. Schweitzer just sent out a press release, in his role as head of the Democratic Governors Association, praising the pick. So pretty clear it's an accurate report.

Well, it just gets better and better. As you know, we've been tracking the debunking of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's tall tale about being right there on the front lines fighting government bureaucracy with Sheriff Harry Lee while the boat rescues were still taking place in the aftermath of Katrina. Well, today, the New Orleans Times-Picayune has a gentle but pretty clear run-down of what happened.

In so many words, in Jindal's speech Tuesday night he said he was there and part of the story as it unfolded -- Sheriff Lee was trying to mobilize civilian boats for roof-rescues and government bureaucrats wouldn't let them head out without proof of insurance and registration. Lee put his foot down and dared the bureaucrats to come arrest him. And when Jindal put his foot down too Lee said they should come arrest Jindal too.

Only, Jindal's staff now admits that that actually didn't happen. Instead of being there and being part of the story, Jindal's reps now admit that days later Jindal overheard Lee telling the story to someone else. And Jindal retold the story he'd been told while inserting himself into it as part of the story.

It's not really any different from a lot of tall tales we've probably all heard at one point or another when someone takes a fun story they've heard and retells it making themselves one of the central characters.

Now, Jindal's reps are still in high dudgeon over this, saying Jindal was totally on the level, claiming some mix of it not making any difference whether Jindal made up his role in the story or not or that what Jindal actually said was never meant to imply that he was part of the story rather than someone who heard about it later. But that's pretty preposterous if you look at what Jindal actually said.

But now there's this. TPM Reader EA just flagged this youtube video that appears to show Jindal telling the same story last year, only with even more embroidery about his own part in the drama ..

It's hardly a capital offense. Jindal's not the first gubernatorial fibber or pol with a fish story. But, c'mon, even more in this earlier version, it's clear he made up a version of the story where he was in it.

Late Update: A little addenda on this sorry tale. The good governor's defenders have been going like gangbusters over this video that Jindal's office released. It's from a political rally in 2007, a few months before Sheriff Lee died. He's praising and endorsing Jindal and in the course of his comments he says, "That when Hurricane Katrina ... the day after, Bobby was in my office saying, what do you need?" So Lee said that Jindal was in his office "the day after." Now, you could go back and forth about just what that meant or observe ungenerously that Lee was talking up Jindal at a political rally. But there's no getting around the fact that on its own, this is a strong piece of evidence in Jindal's favor.

Unfortunately for Jindal, though, it's not on its own. And this is where the story gets a little funny. Before Camp Jindal found the video, they admitted that rather than being there during the incident, as he claimed, Jindal had only heard about it later. (You can actually see the progression of the spinning in Ben Smith's real-time blogging of their evolving claims.) The lack of press reports that he was there at the time was one (though not the only) reason that we and others were suspicious. And it's pretty obvious that if Jindal's crew had found this tape earlier they would have felt that they were on strong enough ground that they didn't have to admit anything. But once they admitted that Jindal hadn't been there during the incident in question but only heard it later and then cooked up his own fictionalized account with himself in it, it really doesn't matter whether Lee or a hundred other people say he was on the scene a day after Katrina or doing scuba rescues or tucking Lee into bed or anything else. All of which proves once again that if you're a politician who's going to make stuff up you really need to invest in some quality press representation. Because otherwise you can end up in an epic goof like this where a better press secretary probably could have kept the fib under wraps rather than becoming the fact witness against you. Oh well ...

Still Jindalriffic Update: Here's a post with a trajectory of Jindal's evolving story. It's a good list, though it doesn't seem to include the version included in the video above.

The conservative activists at the CPAC conference will grant tonight the high honor of their "Defender of the Constitution Award" to Rush Limbaugh. That and other political news in today's TPMDC Saturday Roundup.

Matt Cooper talked to Tom DeLay yesterday at CPAC. If you're over 30 or maybe 35 there's just something deeply weird about listening to Tom DeLay say that the right has to learn how to organize and raise money and build a movement infrastructure like the left. But there you have it ...

Just out from the Times-Picayune ...

Louisiana's transportation department plans to request federal dollars for a New Orleans to Baton Rouge passenger rail service from the same pot of railroad money in the president's economic stimulus package that Gov. Bobby Jindal criticized as unnecessary pork on national television Tuesday night.

With Jindal and Steele heading up the GOP, how long can Obama hope to remain president?

Highlights from President Obama's speech today at Camp Lejeune, N.C., announcing his plans to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq:

Bobby Jindal's people have been spinning the Katrina story very hard all day. It's been pretty amusing to watch. Zack Roth deciphers the up-is-downism emanating from Camp Jindal.

California's unemployment rate hits 10.1%.

As a rule, I try to avoid link war nonsense and getting into spats with other sites. But I'll make a small exception because it illustrates a point. Yesterday, we published a post by Zack Roth noting a number of reasons to question whether the main anecdote in Bobby Jindal's GOP response talk on Tuesday night ever really happened. And I should mention that the first people to raise the key issues were diarists at Kos, who Zack links to in the post.

Not long after the piece ran we heard from Ben Domenech, a young conservative writer, pointing to what he claimed were problems with the piece. And then this morning he followed up by sending in a post on the topic at Redstate.com, the conservative website where he's on the board and where I believe he was also a founder. The post is by Erick Erickson, the site's Editor-in-Chief.

Now, when I wrote the first draft of this post, Jindal had not yet admitted that the story was in fact false, which further clarifies the matter. So, as usual when I get an email from someone saying we got something wrong, I went to read the post with a tight knot in my stomach. But when I read the post it was all what lawyers would call 'non-responsive' -- a lot of claims and facts and noise, none which addressed the points we actually made. What there was a lot of was trash talk and insults. Zack Roth as a "leftist activist pseudo-journalists" and a "leftist activist posing as a journalist" -- there are many permutations, as you can see -- and a lot more.

All of which is to say, as I referenced in the title, a very low ratio of facts to rage -- F/R ratio. I don't pretend that low F/R ratios are limited to the right. Far from it. And solid facts, if they undergird substantial allegations, can merit some outrage. But I do think this is one of the reasons why the second generation of web-based conservative news and politics sites have had some difficulty getting traction on key news stories, rather than the reasons they imagine.

Matt Cooper talks with former House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-TX) at the CPAC conference about what conservatives need to do to regain power:

Bob Reich on what today's economic numbers mean why Obama will probably have to come back for more Stimulus.

Matt Cooper just talked to David Keene, head of CPAC, the sponsor of the big conservative confab down in DC this weekend (and a very big player in movement conservative circles) about whether we should be writing the obit of the GOP ...

Having observed this game for a long time, I still wonder why people go there. That Bobby Jindal story about being there in the office of the sheriff when he was busting through the red tape, even telling the goofball government authorities that they could come arrest Bobby too ... well, turns out Jindal didn't mean it in the sense of its actually being true. He meant it more in the very loose sense in which you say something happened when it didn't happen because you heard much later that something kind of like that had happened when you weren't there.

Late Update: Sort of funny to watch again in light of today's revelation.--DK

Just when the election court in Minnesota had given Norm Coleman's legal team a break by reversing itself on a decision to strike a witness' testimony because Norm's lawyers withheld evidence from the Franken team, it turns out there's more evidence related to Coleman's lawyers' contact with this same witness that they still hadn't divulged until Franken's lawyer brought it out this morning on cross examination of the witness.

At issue: secret emails between Coleman's lawyers and the witness informing her that they were going to put off disclosing her name and statements to the other side. Happily, Coleman's lead lawyer threw his fellow lawyers under the bus in explaining the "mistake." But how much of this was a mistake and how much of this was deliberate litigation strategy is not immediately clear. Let's just say it smells a bit.

It's pretty clear the three-judge panel has had it with Coleman's lawyers. It'll be interesting to see whether this latest episode exhausts any remaining benefit of the doubt they have in favor of Norm's team.

We're here at TPM HQ watching the CPAC conference. And Wayne LaPierre is discussing discrimination against certain classes of assault rifles.