White House Stage Management – Always Overboard – Goes Over the Top

“In a ruined city – still largely without power, stinking with piles of garbage and still 40 percent submerged; where people are foraging in the miasma and muck for food, corpses and the sentimental detritus of their lives; and where unbearably sad stories continue to spill out about hordes of evacuees who lost their homes and patients who died in hospitals without either electricity or rescuers – isn’t it rather tasteless, not to mention a waste of energy, to haul in White House generators just to give the president a burnished skin tone and a prettified background?

Maureen Dowd

Jebby Bush Could Be Serving Uncle’s ‘Noble Cause’ in Iraq – Is Nabbed for Being Drunk Instead

OYE Alert! Jebby Bush Jr., age 21, was picked up for being drunk in Austin, Texas, last night. Instead of carousing, it seems like this young member of President Bush’s family would have something better to do – like serving in the war in Iraq, which the president has called a “noble cause.” Instead:

John Ellis Bush Jr., the youngest son of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and the President’s nephew, was busted in Texas yesterday for public intoxication and resisting arrest.

John (Jebby) Bush, 21, allegedly wobbled up to Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission agents and Austin police on duty in the city’s downtown entertainment district and started questioning them about the earlier arrests of some people he knew.

Bush was drunk and “he was observed to be a danger to himself and others,” said TABC Capt. David Ferrero – so he was arrested too.

An arrest affidavit said Bush continually pushed against a TABC officer who was trying to handcuff him. “Subject further resisted by pushing back with his body as he was restrained at the [Austin PD] transport van,” it said.

Young Bush got a cut on the chin and was treated at a local hospital. He was released on a $2,500 personal recognizance bond.

PA Senate: GOP’s #3 Man Santorum Is Losing Big in Early Polling

A harbinger, perhaps: The number three man in the Republican Party’s leadership in the U.S. Senate is polling very badly in his bid for reelection next year. A new poll shows that a scant 37 percent of Pennsylvania voters plan to vote for GOP Sen. Rick Santorum in 2006, while half say they plan to vote for his opponent, Demoratic State Treasurer William Casey:

In the Senate race, [the survey] showed Casey beating Santorum … by a 50 percent to 37 percent in a hypothetical election, with 13 percent undecided…

A Keystone poll in June showed Casey, the likely Democratic nominee, ahead of Santorum by 44 percent to 37 percent. Recent surveys by other polling organizations also have shown Santorum trailing Casey who, like Scranton, lives in Scranton.

Santorum’s problems are mostly self-inflicted. He tends to make news with frequent bursts of wingnuttery – equating gay sex with bestiality a few years ago, for example. More recently he suggested that disaster victims should be sanctioned if they found themselves unprepared for calamity.

He holds the position of Republican Conference Chair in the Senate leadership.