Hush-hush, keep it down-down, voices carry

Always gotta love a good "moral family values" Republican story:

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Sept. 9) - A Republican state lawmaker from Southern California resigned Wednesday amid growing outrage over a videotape that caught him bragging in graphic detail about having sex with a female lobbyist and another woman.
Assemblyman Mike Duvall, whose votes on family-oriented legislation received high marks from conservative groups, said in a statement the furor over his comments had begun to divert attention from the work his fellow lawmakers were trying to finish during the final week of their session.
Duvall is married and has two adult children.
In a recording of a legislative hearing, Duvall can be heard talking about a recent sexual escapade with a woman he says is 18 years younger.
"I'm getting into spanking her," Duvall is heard to say on the videotape.
The other man asks if she likes it, too. Duvall responds: "She goes, 'I know you like spanking me.' I said, 'Yeah, that's 'cause you're such a bad girl.'"
The 54-year-old lawmaker made the comments about the affairs to another lawmaker during a break in a committee meeting at the Capitol over the summer, and they were caught on a microphone at his desk.
The lawmaker then brags about an affair he is having with another woman.
"Oh, she is hot! I talked to her yesterday. She goes, 'So are we finished?' I go, 'No, we're not finished.' I go, 'You know about the other one, but she doesn't know about you!'" Duvall can be heard saying in an apparent reference to his affair with the lobbyist.
Duvall received a 100 percent rating from Capitol Resource Institute, a conservative advocacy group, for his votes on legislation considered pro-family during the 2007-08 legislative session. The institute did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Duvall's Assembly office was locked Wednesday afternoon.
Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles, asked the Assembly Ethics committee to investigate. She also removed Duvall from the Assembly Utilities and Commerce Committee, which considers utility regulations, and the Assembly Rules Committee.
Duvall was elected in 2006 to represent an Orange County district that includes Fullerton, Anaheim, Placentia, Orange, Brea and Yorba Linda. Before that, he served six years on the Yorba Linda City Council. He also owns an insurance agency.
The lawmaker was vice chairman of the utilities committee, which had been considering one of the more hotly contested bills in the current legislative session. The bill, which is still being debated, would require utilities to generate 33 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020.
Many utilities oppose it.
On July 6, Duvall was one of five Republicans to vote against the legislation, which is sponsored by Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto.

It should be pointed out that the lobbyist involved has been reported to be a woman named Heidi Dejong Barsuglia (also married), who works for Sempra Energy, one of the utilities opposed to the legislation. Ironically, on her California access lobbyist web page it says she passed an Ethics Course in 2008.

It must be the same one the "family values" Republicans take.

How many more years, have I got to let you dog me around

Our house has always been Keith Olbermann friendly since he started hosting his MSNBC show. As many have pointed out, we're not sure of his actual politics, but very sure of his disdain for virtually everything the Right has done for the last umpteen years.

And we've always enjoyed Richard Wolffe's appearances on the show. Labelled as an "MSNBC political analyst", he seemed, like Olbermann, to dislike the same people we did. In other words, the 'enemy of my enemy'.

But that was before Glenn Greenwald said this:

On a very related note: this week, former Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe was a guest-host on MSNBC's Countdown while Keith Olbermann is on vacation. When Olbermann is there, Wolffe is a very frequent guest on Countdown, where he is called an "MSNBC political analyst" and comments on political news. All of this, despite the fact that Wolffe left Newsweek last March in order to join "Public Strategies, Inc.," the corporate communications firm run by former Bush White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett, its President and CEO. According to the Press Release they issued to announce Wolffe's joining the company:

Wolffe, most recently Newsweek's senior White House correspondent, officially assumes his new position as a senior strategist on April 13, 2009. He will be based in the firm's Washington office, where he will advise several of its top clients. . . .

Public Strategies, Inc. is a business advisory firm that serves a diverse clientele including some of the world's largest and best-known corporations, nonprofit organizations, associations and professional firms. Public Strategies helps forward-thinking organizations assess public opinion and risk, and develops strategies for managing corporate reputation and uncertainty. Much of its practice involves managing high-stakes campaigns for corporate clients, anticipating and responding to crises.

Having Richard Wolffe host an MSNBC program -- or serving as an almost daily "political analyst" -- is exactly tantamount to MSNBC's just turning over an hour every night to a corporate lobbyist. Wolffe's role in life is to advance the P.R. interests of the corporations that pay him, including corporations with substantial interests in virtually every political issue that MSNBC and Countdown cover. Yet MSNBC is putting him on as a guest-host and "political analyst" on one of its prime-time political shows. What makes that even more appalling is that, as Ana Marie Cox first noted, neither MSNBC nor Wolffe even disclose any of this.

Dang. So even if you agree with them, they can't be trusted.

And indeed, that's the point. Liberal media indeed.

And tonight, an update from Glennzilla:

UPDATE III: Mediaite notes that Olbermann has decided that Richard Wolffe will no longer be on Countdown. At Daily Kos today, Olbermann wrote:

As to Richard Wolffe I can offer far less insight. I honor Mr. Greenwald's insight into the coverage of GE/NewsCorp talks, and his reporting on Richard's other jobs. I must confess I was caught flat-footed. I do not know what the truth is; my executive producer and I have spent the last two months dealing with other things (see above) but what appears to be the truth here is certainly not what Richard told us about his non-news job.

I am confident his commentary to this point has not been compromised - he has been an insightful analyst and a great friend to this show - but until we can clarify what else he is doing, he will not be appearing with us. I apologize for not being able to prevent this unhappy set of circumstances from developing.

Good for Olbermann for doing the right thing there, at least provisionally. As for the comments Olbermann made tonight on Countdown -- in which he denied that GE barred him from mentioning O'Reilly and even mocked O'Reilly for working at a place (Fox) where corporate pressures restrict editorial freedom (claiming that such a thing would never, ever happen at MSNBC) -- for the moment, I will simply note what I wrote on Twitter: "Really surprised by the Olbermann denial -- there's lots and lots of evidence that the NYT's description about what GE did is 100% accurate."

Indeed.

Frank Rich

Assures us the Democrats are not unraveling over the silliness of flag pins, Pastor Wright, nor bittergate, and that McBush should be careful not to get complacent:

Mr. McCain is not only burdened with the most despised president in his own 71-year lifetime, but he’s getting none of the seasoning that he, no less than the Democrats, needs to compete in the fall. Age is as much an issue as race and gender in this campaign. Mr. McCain will have to prove not merely that he can keep to the physical rigors of his schedule and fend off investigations of his ties to lobbyists and developers. He also must show he can think and speak fluently about the domestic issues that are gripping the country. Picture him debating either Democrat about health care, the mortgage crisis, stagnant middle-class wages, rice rationing at Costco. It’s not pretty.

Last week found Mr. McCain visiting economically stricken and “forgotten” communities (forgotten by Republicans, that is) in what his campaign bills as the “It’s Time for Action Tour.” It kicked off in Selma, Ala., a predominantly black town where he confirmed his maverick image by drawing an almost exclusively white audience.

The “action” the candidate outlined in the text of his speeches may strike many voters as running the gamut from inaction to inertia. Mr. McCain vowed that he would not “roll out a long list of policy initiatives.” (He can’t, given his long list of tax cuts.) He said he would not bring back lost jobs, lost wages or lost houses. But, as The Birmingham News reported, this stand against government bailouts for struggling Americans didn’t prevent his campaign from helping itself to free labor underwritten by taxpayers: inmates from a local jail were recruited to set up tables and chairs for a private fund-raiser.

The Democrats’ unending brawl may be supplying prime time with a goodly share of melodrama right now, but there will be laughter aplenty once the Republican campaign that’s not ready for prime time emerges from the wings.

I'm ready to laugh!













crossposted at Rants from the Rookery