GOP cripples Federal Election Commission; bring on the ‘dirty tricks.”

Politicizing the Justice Department wasn’t enough. Crippling regulatory agencies like the FDA wasn’t enough. Now we learn that, in a holdover from the Karl Rove era, the Republican Party has declared our election laws null and void by roadblocking any investigations or enforcement by the Federal Election Commission.
From TPM:

the three Republicans on the commission — led by Tom DeLay’s former ethics lawyer — have voted as a block against enforcement, preventing the commission from carrying out its basic regulatory function. As the normally mild-mannered Washington Post editorial board wrote recently: “The three Republican appointees are turning the commission into The Little Agency That Wouldn’t: wouldn’t launch investigations, wouldn’t bring cases, wouldn’t even accept settlements that the staff had already negotiated.”

Craig Holman of Public Citizen told TPMmuckraker the commission is currently “defunct.”

FEC watchers say the commission’s three Republicans — Donald McGahn, Matthew Petersen, and Caroline Hunter, each nominated by President Bush — are acting out of philosophical opposition to the very idea of regulating campaign money. “It’s the Republican caucus that actually believes there shouldn’t be campaign-finance regulation,” said Holman. “It is ideologic….”

American Psycho Sanford trumpets tea parties: “tipping point of American psyche.”

On Fox News SC Gov. Mark Sanford endorsed the radical, astroturfed “tea parties”, calling them a “tipping point of American psyche.” Here’s a guy who ought to know about psyche tipping points

The unspooling of S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford continued unabated today, as South Carolina’s embattled and increasingly erratic chief executive painted himself into a corner with additional admissions that contradicted previous confessions about his affair with Argentine lover Maria Belen Chapur – and cast a wider net of women he has engaged in inappropriate conduct with.

Specifically, the governor admitted that he had “crossed lines” with other women, but did not name those women and did not elaborate on what he meant by that, other than to say Chapur was the only woman with whom he had crossed “the ultimate line.”

Sanford’s confessions also netted him an investigation by S.C. Attorney General Henry McMaster, who seized on inconsistencies in the governor’s statements as a basis for requesting a criminal probe.

Aside from the legal nuts and bolts of the implosion, the galling inadvisability of the governor’s comments has Palmetto political observers – and national observers – wondering if the governor has the mental fitness to remain in office.

Among the head-scratching offerings, Sanford told the Associated Press that Chapur was his soul mate but that he was trying to fall back in love with his wife..

oh, yes….American Psycho.