Given how edgy blog writing is (some more than others), it seems inevitable that bloggers who go to work for campaigns will get their past writings scrutinized and then have their employers dogged to fire them. If there’s anything that surprises me about this dust-up with the Edwards campaign, it’s this. Is it really possible that they hadn’t figured out who they were hiring, figured something like this would happen and planned for how they would react if and when it did?

That said, the ‘incendiary’ quotes I just heard referenced on CNN didn’t really strike me as all that incendiary. And second, Bill Donohue? Chief rabblerouser and bullyboy of the ‘Catholic League’? Please. I think he gave up his ‘incendiary’ language complaint rights when he said that ” “Hollywood likes anal sex” or that “Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular.” I can’t wait till he comes with the dig that gets Jews, Christians and anal sex all into one long smoldering sentence.

Please. Please. Please. Let’s get someone on the right to complain who’s not a complete nutball and Jew-basher and then we can talk.

Guess who’s subbing on the campaign trail for Hillary in New York this weekend? The answer is…

TPM Reader AG on Edwards, et al.: “I’m sad to see that this whole “controversy” over John Edwards’ bloggers is yet another example of what you’ve termed the “bitch-slap theory” of politics. If the Edwards campaign buckles under the “pressure” of some as petty as Michelle Malkin and Bill Donahue, then the meta-message is that he’s even more of a wimp that John Kerry. I can understand the campaign not wanting this to become a distracting “issue”, but I think the way to effectuate that is to basically laugh off the entire “controversy” rather than buckle under.”

And TPM Reader NG (no relaton) …

My husband and I would likely be described as “liberal” Catholics by the rest of the world. Maybe we are. I do read TPM. I don’t like William Donahoe either. He’s way into victimhood. Yes people make remarks about the Catholic Church that they would never make about other religions. The criticism is often uninformed or ignorant. But Roman Catholics are not persecuted in the U.S. We are free to practice our religion. I’ve read Pandagon in the past. I read it because I wanted to read a feminist blog. I thought they spent too much time cruising the right-wing blogosphere. I also found their criticisms of the church to be rather redundant. Yes I really have read it all before. It’s fine if you want to make them but don’t pretend to be original or cutting-edge.

There is another aspect of this case that has received little mention but I find it interesting. Marcotte made another controversial post about the Duke Lacrosse sexual assault case that received some attention. (I’m a criminal defense attorney and have been following the case.) The blog entry parroted the conventional feminist prosecutorial spin on the case with no real thought as to how the later developments have changed the case. Marcotte is never going to change her mind about this one. The problem is that John Edwards old law partner, Wade Smith, is representing one of the defendants in that case. Smith and at least one other defense lawyer have also contributed to Edwards’s past campaigns. I do not know how close Smith and Edwards are. But I might be annoyed if my former law partner hired somebody to work for him that trashed my high profile client in a public forum. The situation may have made Edwards uncomfortable.

I do feel bad for almost anybody who loses their job. But I wonder why Marcotte was a good fit for a political campaign. She may be witty but she is terribly predictable and seems to have trouble adjusting to new information. I think that would be a problem for someone running for office. But I’m just a lawyer and what do I know.

Then there’s TPM Reader GN …

Normally I’d agree with you regarding Donohue’s waiver of credibility, but even a broken watch is right twice a day.

The comment regarding the Church forcing women to give birth so as to provide “tithing” Catholics smacked of (what I had hoped) was long-gone 19th century biases against Catholics– that they are a slavish people in thrall to an all powerful hierarchy employing superstition to keep people in line, and that the Church itself is an organized racket to take advantage of such people.

Look, there’s more than enough legitimate reason to criticize the Church’s position on birth control without resorting to ad hominem (or ad institutionem!) attacks. Obviously Edwards can hire who he wants– but how can one be surprised that he’d fire people showing such cavalier disrespect towards an important traditional Democratic voting base?

Or TPM Reader DF …

Edwards has staked out some pretty strong positions on healthcare, the war in Iraq, and although I can’t remember him saying so, I’m pretty sure he’s in favor of decisive action vis a vis climate change. Great.
These are all issues that have reached a crisis point of one kind or another. So today the righties put a little heat on his bloggers (over the kind of nontroversy that they are so adept at exploiting)- and he
cuts them loose. Can we expect him to stay strong on those important issues that are not yet crises?

Edwards campaign in bunker mode over blogger controversy.

An army investigation finds no evidence of detainee abuse at Gitmo. And oddly enough, the investigator managed an absolutely thorough inquiry without speaking to any detainees.

ABC picks up the bogus Pelosi-airplane story. Give it a read and see how they work their way around discussing whether the story has any merit.

How silly did the Pelosi-airplane story get today in the CNN retelling? Some choice squibs.

Chatting it up with Wolf Blitzer on The Situation Room Carol Costello noted that protestations to the contrary, “both planes are capable of flying coast to coast without refueling under optimal conditions.”

Blitzer also noted that “In theory, [both plane] could fly coast to coast without refueling, but that would also depend on multiple factors, including winds, payloads and reserve fuel requirements.”

Note, the plane the GOP says Pelosi must fly on “in theory” could make it to her district. That is, assuming good prevailing winds. Adverse wind conditions or a back up on the runway in San Francisco and it might fall out of the sky. But under “optimal conditions” it could well make it all the way there.

Go see the rest of the transcript to see if CNN asked any of Pelosi’s accusers any adverse questions.

Late Update: TPM Reader JT from the airline industry writes in to say: “I work with aircraft logistics situations all the time. Having a plane that can make it to a destination non-stop (but only if conditions are right) is a nightmare for planning. It means you don’t know if you need to plan for another hour on the ground for the fuelstop until a few hours before the flight. And the weather looked good yesterday but doesn’t look good today. And (as you noted), if there’s a lengthy ground hold before the flight, you’ll make the stop regardless of weather. You would almost rather have a plane that definitely needed a fuel stop so you could at least plan around it.”

Later Update: TPM Reader JT checks in again …

In reading further about the planes…

Hastert had a “C-20”… another name for a Gulfstream business jet. Assuming Hastert has the C-20A version, this would be like a Gulfstream II (able to make Illinois non-stop… but sometimes may not make it nonstop to California.

Pelosi wants a non-stop to California plane. Terrific… upgrade her to the C-20H. This is the Gulfstream IV equivalent. It’s basically the same size plane but has the range she wants.

Republicans are accusing her (per ABC article) that she wants the C-32. This is equivalent to a Boeing 757 which holds as many as 200+ passengers in all coach configuration. If this is what she truly requested, this is indeed a giant step up from what Hastert had been using.

Point #3 is the kicker. If she wants to go from Gulfstream to Boeing 757, that is quite a leap. If she just wants nonstop, give her the Gulfstream IV equivalent and be done with it.

Seven Republican senators have written Reid, McConnell, Dubin and Lott decrying the political gamesmanship that preventing a debate and vote on the ‘surge’. I have a hard time buying their line. It was the Republicans who scuttled this debate. I have a hard time seeing this as a matter of equal blame on both sides. But read the details and see what you think.

I think Reid’s words on this will carry the day. You can’t escape this one. Iraq is the issue of the day. They can’t get away from it. The debate’s coming.

Yet another article from ABC — this one on the front page of their website — on the Pelosi-airplane bamboozle. I find it almost dazzling how nauseating and disingenuous this latest article happens to be. The new news, according to ABC’s Jake Tapper, is that the Pentagon has rejected Pelosi’s request for a military aircraft that can fly from Washington to her district in California without stopping to refuel.

We have here a pretty nice illustration of the iron triangle of right-wing sludge slopping. Queued up by the Moonie press, fed by congressional Republicans and orchestrated by Bush administration officials and then spread far and wide by the gelded mainstream press.

Here’s something that jumped out at me though in the ABC News piece. Tapper provides a list he got from the Pentagon on the strict rules Pelosi must abide by with her US government plane.

Among those is this …

Members of Congress cannot fly on the plane unless their travel has been cleared with the House Committee on Standards (the Ethics committee);

Now, first of all, do military regulations really pull in the okay of the House Ethics committee? That sounds a bit more like a House rule. More importantly, though, did the ABC reporters on this story give a close a look to whether this purported rule was ever enforced with Speaker Hastert? Did he routinely ferry fellow members of Congress around on his plane?

TPM Reader BL reminded me of an incident from back in the Foley scandal in which Hastert was trying to clean up the mess created by his congressional lickspittle Rep. Shimkus (R-IL), a close Hastert ‘ally’ from a nearby district who the Speaker installed to run the House page board.

Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times on October 9th, Lynn Sweet wrote …

A week ago Sunday, about 8 p.m., Shimkus arrived at Scott Air Force Base near Belleville to pick up his ride back to Washington. As speaker, Hastert flies on U.S. aircraft. The government plane picked up Shimkus and then headed to Aurora to board Hastert, who spent the weekend at his Plano home.

So in the midst of the exploding Foley scandal, which the Ethics Committee would eventually whitewash, the esteemed Speaker Hastert had his buddy Shimkus get a separate pick up to fly back to DC with him on his military jet so both could head back to Washington to deal with FoleyGate.

The ABC piece merely quotes an Air Force spokesman saying that Hastert would use the plane only for “himself … one to three staff members and two security staff — members of the Capitol police force. His wife would sometimes fly.” No mention of other members of Congress.

Has anybody asked Hastert’s office how often he shuttled other members of Congress on his military plane?

If there’s no ancient proverb stating that the victories of wounded and unpopular presidents don’t last long, then there should be.

Here at Newsweek, Richard Wolffe and Holly Bailey note what they call President Bush’s “notable triumph” in shutting down the debate about Iraq in the senate.

Yet now we see that seven Republican senators, five of whom voted with their party caucus to shut down the debate on Monday, have now written an open letter to the leaders of the body pledging to “We respectfully advise you, our leaders, that we intend to take S. Con. Res 7 and offer it, where possible under the Standing Rules of the Senate, to bills coming before the Senate” and “explore all of our options under the Senate procedures and practices to ensure a full and open debate.”

I’ll wait to see how aggressively they push this. But as a general matter the writing is on the wall. The president can no more plug the dike against the on-rush of reality in the senate than he can talk or bamboozle his way out of the mess he’s made in Iraq.