I've been busy with a piece on Sarah Palin we at Mother Jones posted on Thursday afternoon. Bottom line: Palin, who ran as a scourge of earmarks, sought and received earmarks that are in the omnibus spending bill just passed by Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama on Wednesday. Yes, you're shocked by her hypocrisy. On the campaign, she vowed that if she were elected veep she would go after Congress' abuse of the corrupt practice of slipping earmarks into spending bills--echoing John McCain's crusade against earmarks. And GOPers--including McCain--have howled about the earmarks in this bill.

Yet Palin's chief spokesperson told us that this spending legislation does contain earmarks she requested. He just wouldn't say which earmarks are hers or how many she obtained. By the way, Alaska will receive more money, per capita, from the bill's earmarks than any other state.

You can read the full piece here.

OBAMA OVERLOAD? On Wednesday, I posted my latest Bloggingheads.tv face-off with Jim Pinkerton, in which he advanced the latest GOP talking point: Barack Obama is doing too much and not focusing sufficiently on the economy. This is an attack-line that has been picked up within the media. When the White House held a health care reform summit last week, several MSM reporters in the press room grilled Robert Gibbs on whether Obama was ill-serving the nation by both working to fix the economy and by taking on the big task of remaking the health care system. Gibbs has batted down that meme by noting that health care is a big piece of our in-crisis economy. Still, Pinkerton pressed the case against overtime for Obama.

My pal Matt Cooper has weighed in. And he's cast several good points into this supposed debate:

First, distraction is a two-way street. Congress is constantly deviating from the economic emergency to deal with other stuff. I watched a fulsome debate on the transportation of chimpanzees and other primates the other day on C-SPAN. The House was taking up a bill in the wake of that chimp attack. It's not reasonable to focus just on one branch of government.

Second, Obama is talking about a lot of things but he's not sending up a torrent of legislation. There was the stimulus bill but everyone agreed there needed to be some kind of stimulus. He's encouraged Congress to come up with a health care plan but he hasn't forced a bill on them to consider. And besides is health care really a distraction? The facts show that you can't get entitlement reform or any control over future red ink without it. Why wait?

Third, Congress is a much bigger institution than it was in 1933 or even 1977....Staffs are bigger, there's more capacity to deal with more issues. If we have more of a logjam these days, it's owing to the partisan redrawing of districts, the culture of lobbying and so on but not an innate inability of Congress to handle more than a few things at a time.

As I said originally, if Obama suddenly decides to immerse himself in an obscure border dispute or something truly far afield, he ought to be called out on it. But green energy, health care, education, and other things he's pursuing all seem germane to the economy. You can disagree with them individually but it's hard to chide their relevance to the crisis at hand.

How reasonable.

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Is Barack Obama trying to do too much at once? Should Timothy Geithner go? Jim Pinkerton and I ponder all this and more in our latest Bloggingheads.tv diavlog. And, once again, we argue over global warming because Pinkerton continues to insist that it ain't happening and that all those scientists who say it is are part of some politically-driven plot. Yes, he does. Really.

By the way, this was filmed hour before Chas Freeman withdrew his name from consideration as head of the National Intelligence Council. In the diavlog, I said that Freeman might survive and that the issue was only at Defcon 4 or so. So once again we learn, beware making predictions. By the way, in the above diavlog, Pinkerton predicted that Obama will serve no more than one term, and I was forced--practically against my will!--to remind him (oh so gently) that he had predicted that Obama would lose about 40 states in the November election. A lesson to us all.

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That's what Jim Pinkerton and I take on in our latest Bloggingheads.tv diavlog. Pinkerton thinks the stimulus and the Geithner bailout are going to lead the country to hell (even faster!). I contend that these are both good-faith efforts (though I'm less kind about the bailout), and we better damn well hope for the best. And we discuss the mess in Afghanistan. We also debate the Reagan years. Anyone remember those dead nuns in El Salvador?

It's already entertaining to watch how Republicans and conservatives are responding to the triumph of Barack Obama and the near-collapse of the GOP in Congress. Yesterday, I pointed out one extreme reaction: a letter sent to conservatives by Michael Reagan, talk show host and son of Ronald Reagan, who complained that a "new 'Evil Empire'...called Socialism" has "taken over our once-free nation." Reagan announced he was starting a new organization that would, among other things, expose the sexual "flings" of Democratic leaders.

I can't wait. That's exactly the sort of politics that independents and moderate Republicans want to see, right?

Not all conservatives are pulling out their hair in this fashion. My Bloggingheads.tv vlog-mate, Jim Pinkerton, reporting from the Republican Governors Association meeting, says all is well in GOPGov-land:

Here at the Republican Governors Association winter meeting, there is no great sense of defeat, but rather a sense of positive anticipation--and for good reason.

Despite the general GOP wipeout of 2008, no incumbent Republican governor was defeated for re-election this year; indeed, two Republican incumbents, Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Jim Douglas of Vermont, hung on, even as their states went for Obama. Indeed, the case of Vermont's Douglas is particularly striking: he won a fourth term with nearly 55 percent of the vote, while Obama was winning the Green Mountain State by more than 2:1.

So while the Grand Old Party's presidential candidate, and its Congressional wing, were both soundly repudiated at the polls earlier this month, Republican governors did well. Indeed, Republicans still have 21 governors--including a certifiably hot political property for the future, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who speaks here this afternoon.

Driving to work (late) this morning, I was listening to The Diane Rehm Show on NPR (plug: I'll be on Friday morning), and I heard a comment that almost caused me to strike a pothole. The topic of the day was the financial crisis and the under-construction bailout, and Simon Johnson, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and former IMF economic counselor, commenting on the $700 billion package being thrown together on Capitol Hill, said, We're more in the realm of "chaos theory than economic theory."

Wow. And whoa. This rush to save Wall Street's backside is not only unseemly but perhaps perilous. Yesterday, Peter Orszag, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, testifed that the bailout could worsen the ongoing economic crisis. And even if the Democrats succeed in crafting a package that includes necessary provisions regarding accountability and transparency, CEO compensation, bankruptcy reform, and mortgage protection for homeowners, there are still plenty of questions about the overall approach of this bailout: the feds using taxpayer dollars to buy lousy assets from poorly-run companies to keep these poorly-run companies afloat. There are alternatives. The federal government could lend money to needy financial institutions instead of buying their crappy assets. Or it could buy better assets and pump money into the financial system that way. My Bloggingheads.tv sparring partner Jim Pinkerton advocates restructuring the entire financial sector to make sure none of its major players get too big to fail. Economist James Galbraith (a regular Mother Jones contributor) proposes pouring half a trillion dollars into the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (to preserve depositors' confidence in banks and prevent a run), putting $200 billion in reserve so the Treasury, if necessary, can buy preferred stock in banks to recapitalize these institutions, and waiting to see what happens. That is, let the folks who screwed up do what they can with their bad paper. Galbraith notes that serious economic problems will remain, but the threat of systemic collapse would be abated.

The point is that the Paulson path is not the only one. In fact, it may be the wrong one. Certainly, a few days--or a week or two--of debate and discussion before committing $700 billion would not be unwarranted. "We need more than three days to sort this out," Simon Johnson said. And he's right. The Democrats in Congress ought not be force to quick, decisive and misguided action by the we-must-act-today pronouncements from George W. Bush and others in his administration. On Thursday, John McCain said "time is short" and that a deal must be completed before the financial markets open on Monday. Barack Obama should reply: not if it's a bad deal.

Obama certainly wants to--and needs to--come across responsibly. (Who wants to be blamed for the crash of an entire sector?) But this train is probably moving too fast for the public. Slowing it down to get the response right could be a twofer: good policy and good politics.

Over the past few months, Jim Pinkerton, my regular sparring partner on Bloggingheads.tv, has regularly rushed to the defense of Mike Huckabee. When I wondered aloud whether Huckabee really does believe that angels intervened when he was in a hunting contest (to help him kill an elk), Pinkerton pooh-poohed my secularistic skepticism. When I uncovered a little-known 1998 book in which Huckabee lumped together environmentalism and pornography, seemingly compared homosexuality with necrophila, and insisted that people who "do not walk in faith" tend to be "immoral, impure and improvident," Pinkerton claimed I was taking the former Arkansas governor's comments out of context. (I begged to differ.)

So it did not come as a shock when I heard that Pinkerton, who was a domestic policy adviser for the first President Bush, had suspended his career as pundit to go to work for Huckabee's presidential campaign.

Pinkerton is a quirky, independent-minded, and affable conservative, which is why I have enjoyed working with him on bhTV. He proudly wears the paleocon badge, and he has been against the Iraq war from the start, blasting away at the neocons and their imperial ambitions. He's a fierce hawk on immigration. No fence is too big or too large for him. He has railed repeatedly on bhTV that elites (I guess that includes me) just don't get it--the "it" being the supposed widespread and deep popular anger about illegal immigrants. He's also a utopian advocate of space exploration. He wants off Planet Earth. Matt Yglesias recently poked at Pinkerton's way-out notions.

I wonder whether Huckabee and his campaign realize what they're getting with Pinkerton. Perhaps they're comfortable with his blistering attacks on George W. Bush and the neocons--even though Huckabee stands with Bush and the hawks on the Iraq war. I doubt Huckabee would take personal offense at Pinkerton's argument that the defense of "Christendom" (against creeping Muslimization) ought to be the organizing principle of U.S. policy. But does Huckabee need more attention drawn toward his fundamentalism?

In vetting Pinkerton, did the Huckabee-ites consider one of his proposals for domestic security: put a cop in front of every mosque in America. Yes, that's what he said during a recent Bloggingheads.tv match-up. He was serious. Quite serious. You can see for yourself right here:

If you watched the clip, you saw that when I questioned his idea, Pinkerton said that "we can have some elections on this issue." So is Pinkerton now advising Huckabee to call for police surveillance of every mosque in the nation? I'd sure like to be the fly on the wall for that meeting. Or when Pinkerton says to Huckabee that he ought to unfurl the flag of "Christendom." Or when he tells Huckabee that space is the place.

As I said, I do like Pinkerton. He is engaging and possesses (as you can tell) an unorthodox mind. I wish him well, though not success, for a Pinkertonian Huckabee is a rather daunting (if not frightening) prospect to consider.