For my money, this is the best part of Sen. Gordon’s defense of Trent Lott’s Strom Thurmond homage:

“We knew what he meant.”

Who’s we? And what did he mean?

Gordon Smith’s warm embrace of Trent Lott’s warm embrace of Strom Thurmond’s segregationist past:

Here’s Orrin Hatch (R-UT) today on the Senate floor, delivering his own impassioned defense of Trent Lott’s Strom Thurmond debacle:

According to Arlen Specter (R-PA), “what Senator Lott said was in no means out of line.” Take a look:

M.J. Rosenberg: Was Bob Kerrey intentionally Muslim-baiting Obama?

The maverick Republican polls the same as Alan Keyes–3% nationally–in the latest Gallup poll.

We were working the story of Rep. Don Young’s Coconut Road earmark pretty hard earlier this year at TPMmuckraker. For those who weren’t following along, in 2005 the Alaska Republican managed to get an earmark inserted for a highway interchange in Florida after the bill had passed both houses but before it went to the President for signature. It was, basically, an extra-constitutional bit of pork barrel legislation for a developer who gave generously to Young’s re-election campaign.

But even with those startling facts, the story pretty much died there. Until perhaps today.

Anti-earmark crusader Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) is now calling for the creation of a select committee of both representatives and senators to investigate the circumstances surrounding the virgin birth of the Coconut Road earmark. And until Coburn gets the investigation he wants, he will object to unanimous consent on the bill working its way through Congress now that would essentially fix the 2005 bill.

Paul Kiel has more, including a copy of Coburn’s letter to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Late Update: If you’re late to the Coconut Road story, this August TPMtv episode will catch you up:

At TPMCafe’s Table for One, Jonathan Stevenson and Steven Simon are deconstructing President Bush’s revisionist history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, as applied to the war in Iraq.

Longtime readers of this site know that the history of TPM is rather intertwined with the history of the 2002 New Hampshire phone-jamming scandal. In case you don’t remember, that’s the case where the state Republican party (almost certainly with the knowledge and probably with the cooperation of the national party) hired a phone bank to jam the phones of the Dems’ and the local firefighters’ GOTV phone banks.

The guy close to the center of the whole scam was the media operative/consultant hired to run the operation, Allen Raymond. And he’s written a new tell-all book, How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative.

Now, as you probably know, most tell-all books are more like tell-little or tell-nothing books. We’ve still got one reader still sulking because he was hounding us for days about why we weren’t giving more attention to the Scott McClellan memoir non-bombshell. But I got word yesterday that Raymond’s offering is the real deal. Our copy arrived at the office today. And upon a limited initial perusal the normally low-key and laconic Paul Kiel concludes that it is “awesome.” So that’s saying a lot.

As it happens, this is not surprising from what we’ve seen thus far of Raymond. Of all the phone-jam scammers, he was the only one who not only took his criminal justice lumps but seemed genuinely to want to wash his hands of the whole rotten business. The rest, as you’d expect, are back on the GOP payroll in most cases after a short pitstop in the can.

Raymond on his sojourn in the slammer: “After 10 full years inside the GOP, 90 days among honest criminals wasn’t really any great ordeal.”

Anyway, check out the book and we’re working on getting Mr. Raymond over here to TPM to discuss the book and perhaps answer your questions.

The White House is refusing to answer any questions about the CIA torture tapes–and sidesteps the chance to respond to Mike Huckabee’s description of the President’s “bunker mentality”–in today’s White House press briefing: