David Corn

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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