A California Republican family values legislator who was arrested early Wednesday morning for drunk driving had recently left a gay club, sources tell a local news channel.
State senator Roy Ashburn was pulled over by the California Highway Patrol on Wednesday at 2am in Sacramento, after police saw the car he was driving swerving erratically. An unidentified male passenger was in the car with Ashburn.
The sources told CBS13 that Ashburn, a father of four, had that night been at Faces, which touts itself as …

Sen. Jim Bunning, the Kentucky Republican who single handedly delayed unemployment benefits for 400,000 desperate Americans and forced an unnecessary furlough of another 2,000, should be a figure regarded with wonderment.
The awesome power he held in his hands! The utter disregard for vulnerable Americans he exhibited while wielding it!
Bunning is a Republican superhero. He personifies the mean-spirited, hypocritical, wealthy-serving, obstructionist Republican Party. As a result, his fellow GOP senators championed him. South Carolina Republican Jim DeMint said, “He’s my hero this week.” Alabama Republican …

In Liz Cheney’s worldview, Rudy Giuliani is a disloyal al Qaeda sympathizer.
Let us explain.
Yesterday, Cheney’s outfit, a group called Keep America Safe, went up with a blistering ad that attacked Justice Department lawyers who previously represented Guantanamo detainees and are now working on detainee issues. The ad dubbed the lawyers “the Al Qaeda Seven” and asked “whose values do they share?” while flashing an image of Osama bin Laden.
It turns out that among the many high-profile lawyers who have represented so-called “terrorist detainees” is …

An attack on Justice Department officials who previously represented detainees at Guantanamo was spawned by Sen. Chuck Grassley at a hearing last November, ricocheted around the right-wing media, and culminated today in a video release by Liz Cheney’s group that all but accuses the lawyers of being terrorists.
The campaign-style ad from Cheney’s Keep America Safe dubs the lawyers “the Al Qaeda Seven” and asks, “Whose values do they share?” while flashing a picture of Osama bin Laden.
At issue are DOJ lawyers who, before they …

Prominent Tea Party Leader, Tom Tancredo, does an interview with the Dutch paper Handelsblad — which treats him, credulously, as a “Tea Party prominent” — and drops the hammer on his co-Tea Party Convention speaker Sarah Palin.
“I really don’t have this feeling about her as being presidential,” Tancredo said. “I don’t know what it is exactly. I don’t know if the issues really are that difficult for her or not.”
He questions if she has what it takes, and whether she really …

Most of the Republicans have relied upon scripted talking points and generalized denunciations of big government and a “government takeover.” Numerous Democrats in the room have explained why it’s not possible to ban insurance companies from discriminating against those with preexisting conditions without also covering everybody and subsidizing those who can’t afford it. (Short answer: people would just game the system, going without insurance until they get sick.) Obama has spoken at enormous length today about why letting insurance companies sell policies across state …

There’s plenty of criticism being directed today at Sen. Jim Bunning, the Kentucky Republican who single-handedly prevented the Democrats from extending the filing deadline for unemployment benefits, which arrives Sunday.
Bunning says that he wants the $10 billion cost to be paid for with cuts elsewhere, and, despite his past support for much larger unfunded bills, we’ll take him at his word. But there’s another good reason that Republicans want to prolong the debate over the unemployment benefits bill: Namely, it keeps all other Democratic …

The National Archives has written to the Justice Department, looking for answers on the question of John Yoo’s missing emails — and has given the department 30 days to respond.
In a letter to Jeannette Plant, the director of DOJ’s Office of Records Management Policy, NARA director Paul Wester wrote:
In accordance with 36 CFR 1230.16(b), the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is writing to the Department of Justice (DOJ) with a request for a response within 30 days of the date of this letter. …

Jonathan Rauch — one of the few libertarian/conservatives, like Bruce Bartlett and David Frum, who has remained more hopeful than partisan in the Obama era — pens a compelling essay about the roots of modern GOP populism. It’s all about the legacy of former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, argues Rauch. (Wallace, a Democrat and independent, gave his final presidential endorsement to Bob Dole in 1996.)
Supporters of Sarah Palin won’t like this passage — to say nothing of neoconfederate Wallace-lovers:

The hottest ticket in the Republican …

It is almost a cliché that layoffs lead to higher mortality rates, but now there is science to back up some of the anecdotes. Michael Luo of The New York Times reports on the three men laid off from a Lackawanna steel plant who suffered heart attacks in the wake of the announcement, and how they fit into broader research on the topic of economic stress and personal health.
One 2006 study by a group of epidemiologists at Yale found that layoffs more than doubled …