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From Real Time Oct. 16, 2009. Bill reminds us that just because George Bush is gone, comedians still have plenty to work with thanks to the crazy that is the Republican Party.

Maher: It turns out there were plenty of ridiculous Republicans behind him that we just couldn't see.

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September 28, 2009 News Corp

Heather: Bobby Jindal recites Frank Luntz's talking points on health care reform.

CAVUTO: Well, the push for the public option is gaining a lot of steam. Two top Democrats are pressing to make sure that the Senate bill includes a government-run plan. The Finance Committee is expected to vote on it tomorrow.

My next guest says that public option will kill lots of private sector jobs, and he`s got a plan that will not.

Bobby Jindal is the Republican governor of Louisiana.

Governor, always good to have you. Thanks for coming.

JINDAL: Neil, thank you for having me.

CAVUTO: All right. Now, a lot of folks are concerned that this public option ultimately becomes the only option and ultimately means the government is running everything.

You have an alternative. What is it?

JINDAL: Absolutely. Well, let`s start first of all -- Neil, across this country, I think the debate`s over. I think the American people have spoken loudly. they have said they don`t want a government- run plan that increases their taxes, that increases government spending.

Across the country, our people are worried that government is spending too much money. Only in Washington, D. C. , would they respond by creating a plan that could spend $900 billion more dollars.

Across the country, people are worried about jobs and the economy, and the greatest recession since the Great Depression. Only in Washington, would they respond by saying let`s raise taxes on employers and families.

Across the country, our people are worried about the rising cost of health care, the inaffordability of health care. Only in Washington would they respond by proposing taxes on health insurance, on medical devices, on -- on medical products.

Look, the reality is, the American people don`t want this big Pelosi plan that government take over our health care. But there is an opportunity to get bipartisan reforms done.

Nobody is defending the status quo. As Republicans, we can`t just be the party of no. There`s several things -- if they would scrap these massive government plans, there`s several things we could agree on in a bipartisan way.

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Remember Howdy Jindal's abysmal response to President Obama? Well, he's back with more hackery.

You thought Bobby Jindal would have given the ACORN bashing a little more thought, but you see, he's a Stepford Republican, so they all are programmed to give similar responses to conservative stimuli.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) is trying to shore up his anti-ACORN bona fides. The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports today that Jindal issued an executive order barring state funds from going to the community organizing group. However, there’s one small kink in Jindal’s plan:

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal issued an executive order to keep any state money from going to the controversy-wracked Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which has its national headquarters in New Orleans.

According to the state’s Division of Administration, no state agencies have existing contracts with ACORN.

Wonkette: Bobby Jindal Also Cuts Off Non-Existent Funding To Those ACORN Blacks

Right wing websites respond in kind. Bobby Jindal Halts Funding Of ACORN

UPDATE: Chad Bower of WWLTV.com contacted me earlier and said that two contracts were just discovered that allegedly would pay state funds to ACORN:

The Department of Social Services has identified two contracts that would allegedly have given ACORN federal and state funds under a tax assistance program, and the Governor's Office has told the department to halt that funding.
{}
The two contracts – one for Southeast Louisiana, lead by Total Community Action, Inc., and the other for Southwest Louisiana, lead by the United Way of Southwest Louisiana – included ACORN as a part of the two groups proposals for the 2009 – 2010 tax season, said Frank Collins, a spokesman with the Governo's Office.

Collins said the proposals included ACORN in the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance Program, and the group would have received federal funds under the program. Because the contract states that state funds would match the federal funds under the program, the program was in violation of Jindal’s recent executive order.

Collins said the DSS will contact the two coalitions Tuesday and tell them that funding would have to be severed to ACORN because of Jindal’s recent executive order.

I want to thank Chad for emailing me so I could update the story. My post was based on the information that was available at the time and since new news has surfaced I've updated the post. He's still not a bright bulb.

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Bobby Jindal continues to refuse to credit the stimulus package for Louisiana's economic recovery even though as Think Progress noted, he was happy to go around the state presenting jumbo sized checks which included money from those funds.

Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) reemerged on the national stage yesterday, penning an op-ed in the Politico to slam efforts to reform health care and declaring the Economic Recovery Act a failure. Jindal declared the Recovery Act “a nearly trillion-dollar stimulus that has not stimulated.” However, less than 24 hours before Jindal published his op-ed, Jindal traveled to Anacoco, Louisiana to present a jumbo-sized check to residents of Vernon Parish. The funds included hundreds of thousands of dollars directly from the Recovery Act — at least $157,848 in Community Block Grant money authorized by the Recovery Act and $138,611 for Byrne/JAG job training programs created by the Recovery Act. Rather than credit the federal government or the Recovery Act he opposed, Jindal printed his own name on the corner of the massive check.

When asked about this on Blitzer's The Situation Room, Jindal refused to acknowledge that the stimulus package has been successful, and instead touted the use of the line item veto and said the stimulus money should have been temporary and targeted, and included more tax cuts. Blitzer didn't ask him about the jumbo sized checks he was using for photo ops.

I thought they weren't going to allow that to happen?

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) has a message for Republican governors hemming and hawing over whether to accept the stimulus money Uncle Sam is mailing to each state: Take it or leave it.

Several GOP governors, including Louisiana's Bobby Jindal and South Carolina's Mark Sanford, have cited ideological differences with the stimulus spending and suggested they may take some parts of it and decline the rest. For Schumer, it's all or nothing.

"No one would dispute that these governors should be given the choice as to whether to accept the funds or not. But it should not be multiple choice," Schumer writes in a letter to Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag.

So why is Jindal being allowed to use the line item veto to block part of the stimulus spending in Louisiana? Full transcript below the fold.

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Boy, somehow you could just see this coming when people started asking where Gov. Mark Sanford had disappeared to:

COLUMBIA, S.C. - During a Wednesday news conference at his office in Columbia, Gov. Mark Sanford admitted to having an extramarital affair — information that surfaced after his recent, secret trip to Argentina.

The married father of four emotionally apologized to his wife and staff, saying, "I've let down a lot of people."

Sanford said he met the woman almost eight years ago, but "about a year ago, it sparked into something more than that."

The governor said his wife and family have known about it for the past five months.

He also announced that he was resigning as chairman of the Republican Governors' Association.

Earlier, the South Carolina governor told a newspaper he was in South America, not hiking the Appalachian Trail as his staff had told the public to explain his sudden absence. He said he "wanted to do something exotic" to unwind after losing a fight over federal stimulus money.

Well, that scratches Sanford from the ranks of GOP possibles for 2012. That leaves Newt Gingrich and Bobby Jindal and Sarah Palin, who've self-inflicted similar but perhaps less egregious wounds, and Mitt Romney, who is looking increasingly like the winner by default.

Oh noes! If you can't hold on to your basic, "queer"-hatin', low-information, unlicensed plumber not really named Joe that you hold up for WAAAAYYYY past his fifteen minutes as the epitome of the Republican Party, who can you hold on to?

Samuel Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber, tells TIME he's so outraged by GOP overspending, he's quitting the party — and he's the bull's-eye of its target audience. But he also said he wouldn't support any cuts in defense, Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid — which, along with debt payments, would put more than two-thirds of the budget off limits. It's no coincidence that many Republicans who voted against the stimulus have claimed credit for stimulus projects in their district — or that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal stopped ridiculing volcano-monitoring programs after a volcano erupted in Alaska. "We can't be the antigovernment party," Snowe says. "That's not what people want."

All this while the Republicans back-pedal off their "listening tour" to find out how real Republicans want their party to move towards because they can't bear the thought of upsetting Rush Limbaugh. Tellingly, the enabling and complicit Time Magazine completely buries the lede deep within the article--fourteen paragraphs down--that the man who owes his entire fame to the Republican Party is now taking his ball and going home.

Oops.

Of all the charges levied during the debate over the economic stimulus package, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) offered one of the most foolish. In a widely-panned national address, Jindal complained bitterly about "wasteful spending," and to prove his point, highlighted "$140 million for something called 'volcano monitoring.'"

Even at the time, it was an unusually foolish thing to say. A month later, Jindal's complaints look even worse.

An erupting Mount Redoubt exploded again at 4:31 this morning -- its fifth and strongest discharge yet -- sending an ash cloud to new heights, the Alaska Volcano Observatory reported.

Ash has now been detected at 60,000 feet above sea level, the National Weather Service reported.

The AP added, "Ash from Alaska's volcanoes is like a rock fragment with jagged edges and has been used as an industrial abrasive. It can injure skin, eyes and breathing passages. The young, the elderly and people with respiratory problems are especially susceptible to ash-related health problems. Ash can also cause damage engines in planes, cars and other vehicles."

A USGS geologist confirmed to Zachary Roth that "a portion of the stimulus spending for volcano monitoring that Jindal lampooned has been slated to go to USGS monitoring Redoubt."

Chris Waythomas, a geologist with the Alaska Volcano Observatory, a branch of the USGS, said that part of the money from the stimulus that Jindal was referring to would have been used to "shore up" monitoring of Redoubt, by adding new monitoring technology like real-time GPS. Redoubt, he said, was "very high on our list" of volcanoes that needed increased scrutiny.

In fact, it's so important that the presumably ash-covered Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, has hedged her bets and indicated that she would be open to saying "No thanks, but THANKS" to federal stimulus money.

Dave N.: I suggest we rename it Mount Jindal. Just so it can stand as a permanent, smoking reminder of the consequences of Republican governance.

In just their latest posturing for the 2012 Republican presidential race, governors Sarah Palin (R-AK) and Mark Sanford (R-SC) joined Texas' Rick Perry, Mississippi's Haley Barbour and Louisiana's Bobby Jindal in announcing they would reject some of the federal stimulus funds allocated to their states. But as the steady one-way flow of tax dollars and earmarks spreading the wealth from Washington to their states shows, de facto red state socialism is alive and well.

As a 2007 analysis (above) of federal spending per tax dollar received by state shows, the reddest states generally reaped the most green. Eight of the top 10 beneficiaries of federal largesse voted for John McCain for President. Unsurprisingly, all 10 states at the bottom of the list - those whose outflow of tax revenue is funding programs elsewhere in the country - all voted for Barack Obama in 2008.

The numbers for Sarah Palin's Alaska are particularly telling. While Palin declared she would reject $288 million (31%) of the $931 million funds allocated for schools, energy assistance and social services, her state led the nation in earmark dollars received per capita in the omnibus spending bill just passed. (Alaskans got almost $210 per person in earmarks, while Californians got $16 and New Yorkers $13 in comparison.) Overall, Alaska ranks third in the federal gravy train, taking in $1.84 from Washington for each dollar sent there.

Bobby Jindal's Louisiana also gets a pretty sweet deal from taxpayers around the United States.

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I don't know who else watched Real Time tonight but in general the show was not too much fun to watch IMO. He brought on Matt Drudge's buddy Andrew Breitbart to bloviate about Rush Limbaugh and the Republicans not being racist and then sit and play the victim after he and Michael Eric Dyson got into it on the subject of racism and the right wing's use of "code words" to drum up racial hatred.

Fortunately next week's panel looks like something I'll enjoy a bit more with Keith Olbermann, Bernie Sanders and Kerry Washington slated as the guests on the ticker when the show ended.

Maher did make up for it with his New Rules segment where he took our sorry ass excuse for news-tainment to task for allowing Bobby Jindal (R-Exorcistland) unfettered air time without ever being asked about this.

Rep. Shelley Berkley went to bat for Las Vegas against the critics who've been singling it out for the stimulus money designated for Nevada.

Ms. BERKLEY. Mr. Speaker, I'm mad and I'm not going to take it anymore. I've had enough of my colleagues bashing my district, my hometown and the community I love, Las Vegas. I've sat back as Las Vegas has been maligned, insulted and lied about for the sole purpose of making political points. I've been waiting for common sense to prevail. But I'm here to say that this nonsense, the bashing and the lies about Las Vegas have got to end, and they've got to end now.

As her full remarks make clear she took dead aim at the braindead republicans who have been trying to make political hay out of this, largely by making shit up.

It started with Senator McConnell's misguided attack on the stimulus bill by singling out a mob museum in Las Vegas as an earmark in the stimulus package. There's only a couple of things wrong with that. There never was an earmark in the stimulus bill. There are none. And there certainly wasn't one for a mob museum. There was never a mention of it in the stimulus package. But the lies continued.

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I don't know why conservatives should be upset that Bobby Jindal's Katrina story told on national television should turn out to have been fake:

Jindal had described being in the office of Sheriff Harry Lee "during Katrina," and hearing him yelling into the phone at a government bureaucrat who was refusing to let him send volunteer boats out to rescue stranded storm victims, because they didn't have the necessary permits. Jindal said he told Lee, "that's ridiculous," prompting Lee to tell the bureaucrat that the rescue effort would go ahead and he or she could arrest both Lee and Jindal.

But now, a Jindal spokeswoman has admitted to Politico that in reality, Jindal overheard Lee talking about the episode to someone else by phone "days later." The spokeswoman said she thought Lee, who died in 2007, was being interviewed about the incident at the time.

Ben Smith at Politico had the "clarification":

A spokeswoman for Bobby Jindal says the Louisiana governor didn't imply that an anecdote about battling bureaucrats during Katrina directly involved the governor or took place during the heat of a fight to release rescue boats.

The spokeswoman, Melissa Sellers, said the story Jindal told in his response to Obama actually took place some days later in Lee's office -- though still in Katrina's chaotic aftermath -- as Lee was "recounting" his frustrations with the bureaucracy to someone else on the telephone.

But really, conservatives can't be too displeased. After all, Jindal was just proving his right-wing street cred. Making stuff up? Man, that's the mark of a truly brazen wingnut -- one worthy of the Rovean Brotherhood.

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Keith Olbermann and Paul Krugman break down some of Bobby Jindal's speech and the distortions and outright lies that were told in it. Krugman pretty well hits the nail on the head here:

Uh, I don't think there was much of an argument there. You really have, you know I've said it was Beavis and Butthead. They find things that sound silly if you don't actually know anything, so gosh, volcano monitoring. Why would you want to monitor a volcano? Because it might erupt and kill a lot of people. Uh, but they're basically reduced to just picking out a few things or in some cases just making stuff up. The salt marsh mouse thing on the stimulus and saying this is stupid. See government is stupid. Cut taxes. It's not much of an argument.

Amen brother. Nate's got more on the volcano monitoring comment. As I already noted in "Bill Adair shot down the mouse nonsense on Morning Joe", much to their dismay. There's a good diary up on the boat story over at Daily Kos.

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Keith breaks down the problems with Bobby Jindal's boat story and that media reports didn't place Jindal in Jefferson Parish at the time and the lashing he took from conservatives over his speech. Well, other than Rush Limbaugh who attacked any Republicans who dared to tell the truth about how bad the speech was. Keith follows up with Richard Wolffe who thinks the entire thing looked desperate and that both Palin and Jindal have now potentially ruined their political futures by not being ready for prime time and allowing themselves to become national jokes.

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From the Cafferty File.

In the Republican response to President Obama’s speech last night, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal called the stimulus package “irresponsible”. He said it will grow government, increase taxes in the future and saddle future generations with debt.

“Who among us would ask our children for a loan, so we could spend money we do not have, on things we do not need? That is precisely what the Democrats in Congress just did,” said Jindal.

Interesting, after the last 8 years, it would seem that Republicans are hardly in a position to lecture anyone about fiscal responsibility. When President Bush took office in 2000, the national debt was about $5.7 trillion dollars, which after two wars and lots of other spending, is now approaching $11 trillion. President Bush ran up more debt for this country than all previous presidents combined.

Jindal acknowledged last night that in recent years, “our party got away from its principles.” No kidding.

Keep in mind, Jindal — who some see as a possible contender for his party’s presidential nominee in 2012 — is one of the Republican governors talking about rejecting stimulus funding for his state. Jindal says he plans to turn down $100 million because it would require his state to change its unemployment laws. I guess when you’re a wealthy state like Louisiana you don’t need no stinking stimulus money.

Here’s my question to you: Are the Republicans in any position to lecture President Obama on fiscal responsibility?

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Looks like we can add Jon Stewart to the list of people who thought Bobby Jindal reminded him of Mr. Rogers during his response speech. Or maybe he was just inspired from watching the video below.