AND he can perform exorcisms!

Yeah, and Barry Bostwick is the new John Wayne.

Jindal, or Palin, or Huckleberry may well be the perfect choice to preside over the detumescing Republican Party (see "Sandford wants a smaller GOP" from yesterday) but how many people really care anymore what a bunch of no-taxers and 6000-year old Earthers think? And can a party that's made, well, racial caution a key part of their strategy whole-heartedly embrace a multiracial candidate? How many nonwhite Republicans are there in Congress today? I believe the number is zero. Nonwhite Republican governors? Strategists (not counting Alan Keyes, because why would you)? Yeah, Schmidt's right about Jindal: he really stands out!

I've been through all my usual sources, and today really is lame day. I suppose we should be grateful. Condolences to the Mumbai survivors, and relatives of the victims.

Sorry, only one D in Sanford. You really have to hand it to the Republicans, though. They shrank the government down so far that THEY disappeared. According to stories of the last two days, seems there are some, including the Pope, who want to take the Catholic Church the same way.

"And can a party that's made, well, racial caution a key part of their strategy whole-heartedly embrace a multiracial candidate?"

I suppose it would be theoretically possible for the GOP to ram Jindal down their voters' throats if the entire establishment rallied around him like they did George W. Bush in 2000. But how he wins a competitive primary when it comes down to him and one or two other legitimate white Republicans is a mystery.

Mike

...the decision to make up the budget shortfall with a mix of 100% service cuts and 0% tax cuts...

I'm pretty sure you meant tax increases, since the Laffer curve has been thoroughly debunked by now.

Jindal/Karras!

http://www.gonemovies.com/WWW/WanadooFilms/Thriller/ExorcistKarras.jpg

Two men of color nominated for president! The wingnuts heads will explode!

Naw, won't happen. Jindal has four years to screw it up. And he won't look very good if he does what he to has as governor in this economy.

Jindal is anti-science. He is also the farthest thing from hip or cool. He is not in Obama's league. He just looks "great" compared to the rest of their bench.

Many also said Edwards would be President for certain, also. That Bostwick joke above was hilarious.

This highlights the reason that Obama's bipartisanism and letting bygones be bygones must include some partisan politics. If he doesn't focus on (subtly) tearing down the Republicans and the philosophy they promote, then Obama will leave office in eight years and everything he accomplishes will be undone by a young, charismatic Republican like Jindal -- or someone else who is not bound by integrity and who will say or do anything to win.

Obama has to make clear that it was the fraud of "supply-side economics" that caused the current economic crisis. He has to lay out for the public the damage that deregulation did to the country when he proposes new regulations. Obama's focus while he is repairing the damage of Republican rule has to be to convince Americans to say, Never again!

The evidence is clear. The United States has been governed under a conservative philosophy for 28 years, and we've endured complete Republican control for the last eight years. And the experiment been a failure.

After Vietnam ended the Democrats endured decades of the popular perception that the party was "weak on defense". Finally the public is beginning to realize that competence and caution make the country more secure than belligerence and dogmatism. But it took a complete fuckup of a Republican to begin changing their minds.

It is good that Obama is willing to work with individual Republicans, and to demonstrate that he puts the interests of the country first. But bipartisanship must have it's limits.

If your house is on fire, you ignore and push aside the guy standing there saying that the smoke and flames aren't anything to worry about. You don't try to find a middle ground with someone who says that the solution is to pour gasoline into your house. What would the middle ground be? Should you pour in only one-third the amount of gasoline the guy is suggesting? Should you add something slightly less flammable like kerosine?

As Dubya discovered in Iraq, it's not enough to merely recapture the territory you lost. You also have to make sure that the people you took the territory away from will never again be able to take it back.

"...the party's own version of Obama."

How incredibly clueless the Republican party is. They probably took an actual color swatch.

One thing will kill Jindal. Not the exorcism, but the fact that he has publicly espoused the conservative Catholic position (that most Catholics have abandoned) that 'outside the Church there is no salvation.'

For the Conservative Protestants that still make up the majority of the 'social base,' this is anathema. People are still fighting the Reformation, and these folks are leery of Catholics to begin with -- see Hagee's more notorious comments on them.

I don't know if InTrade's already running a book on it, but I'd gladly take the money of any Jindal supporters out there.

Mellowjohn, can't Jindal exorcise $1bil in budget deficits?

Jack B. Nimble, Reagan said trees cause pollution. Didn't hurt him getting elected twice.

SteveT. ... fat chance when Robert Rubin's been guarding Obama's economics store.

Jindal needs to stay in Louisiana and fix stuff instead of cavorting around the country.

It shows that he is pretty astute if he actually did turn down a VP offer, or shut it down early.

I don't think his party has a shot with him at the lead against Obama, though. You jettison the core racists and rabid anti-Catholics and there just aren't enough votes to defeat even a terribly unpopular Obama, if all went bad. Instead there would be a third party run like in 1968; probably with the Constitution party winning 5% and getting funded in 2016.

Sounds great to me.

Was there a nonwhite governor of Louisiana before Reconstruction?

going to make it difficult for him to rack up the sort of Record Of Accomplishments that you're usually looking for in a presidential candidate."

Luckily that isn't an requirement for progressive candidates.

How incredibly clueless the Republican party is. They probably took an actual color swatch.

LOL! Yep. Jindal is the next Obama like Palin is the next Hillary.

As has been apparent for quite a while, the GOP's far-right base has exceedingly high hopes for Jindal, and consider him "the party's own version of Obama."

How does someone (Jindal) go from being the Republicans' new Ronald Reagan to being the Republicans' version of Obama? Easy (at least in their minds), when packaging is deemed of greater value than substance. For example:

In 1976, Jimmy Carter picked Walter Mondale as his running mate, saying that their views were compatible. Ronald Reagan, attempting to wrest the nomination from Gerald Ford, announced before the convention that year that his running mate would be Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania, implying that their views were compatible. At that point a couple of organizations compared Mondale's and Schweiker's Senate voting records and found that their views were compatible.

FYI: you meant tax "increases" not "cuts" to make up for the $1 billion shortfall in Louisiana.

Love your work.

Fred

All of this sounds pretty much like the Fred Thompson boomlet of a few months ago. No doubt, it will have longer legs than that but really...isn't this really just a sign of more desperation on the part of some in the Republican party?

If they really can't see that Obama was about a LOT more than identity politics and they think that all they have to do is have their own versions of what the other party has...well, I suppose that's a good thing.

I haven't heard Bobby Jindal say anything terribly inspirational yet. Not that he won't or can't but I think the simplistic point that Republicans are making at the moment is "Look, we're not bad...he's brown."

If they really can't see that Obama was about a LOT more than identity politics [...] -- Monica Wolf, @15:53

How can they? For months and months, they've been saying that Obama's supporters are Obama's cultists, that Obama is an empty suit (and all of us are empty-headed, blind, naifs), etc, etc, etc... After all that time, they managed to convince themselves that that is the truth.

(though the decision to make up the budget shortfall with a mix of 100% service cuts and 0% tax cuts

0% tax increases, you mean?

I figure 0% tax cuts HELPS balance budgets.

We also suggested tax increases were almost as contradictory to Keynesian economics as laying of state employees.

This might be an interesting test to see if Louisiana suffers during this depression more than other states.

A la the GOP style book, shouldn't you be calling him Piyush Jindal?

They are parading Jindal around to see what comes up that they may have to deal with in the future when he runs for president.

It's outrageous to compare this maggot in any way with Obama or Kennedy. A racist to the heart and gets away with it because he is a minority.
Another 'exorcism' trophy for the wingtards, those wanting to run him aren't trying to find the best way to present who he is to the public but rather are already engaged in the best way they can deceive the public, preventing them from seeing what he truly is. A representative of the corporate wealthy 'ruling' (not governing) class that we are in the process of ridding the country of, who besides destroying as many social programs as possible will also try to privatize Social Security and end immigration as we know it. He won't be able to 'deny' global warming but he won't advance policies dealing with it.

I'm so sick of those whose only agenda is profiteering and protecting the wealthy and their holdings. We've seen what their ideas oand policies have done to this country every time they've held office...every single time...yet here they will come again with more Bushies like Palin and Jindal. Hopefully the country is immunized for a few decades at least.

Senate republicans have blocked nearly all legislation and yet their supporters blame dems for not getting things accomplished. Republicans are never reasonable and care only for power and winning but their supporters remain willfully ignorant to their total lack of "good government" policies.

"The self righteous refuse all blindness cures as beneath their dignity"-anonymous me.

If Jindal is to be a serious contender, he probably has to wait until 2016. I mean he will be 41 in 2012 and that will still freak a few people out. Plus, realistically, the only shot someone will have in 2012 is if either a) Obama turns out to be awful and / or b) everything (economy, war, etc.) is still in meltdown. Otherwise, Obama will be a lock in 2012.

I think people here give too much credence to 'racism' from the right to stop Jindal. Where Jindal and Palin differ is that Jindal is actually well spoken, intelligent and, on the surface, apparently sane and even keeled (although any more than superficial scratch of the surface reveals teh crazy in truckloads - but teh crazy has never stopped repubs from voting from one of their own).

In the end the repubs will care about one thing - winning. And if they see Jindal as that vehicle, they will rally around him as if he were Ronald Reagan reincarnate. For the repubs left its about the W and they will deal with a brown dude to get it.

And it would be foolish to think the main stream media is going to vet in any serious way Jindal's utter insanity. They would gleefully keep the wraps on that enough to make sure they had a contest. They see an Obama Jindal match up as heaven - the ratings would make this year look tiny.

So I believe front runner status is now Jindals to lose, but if he is smart, he waits to 2016.

Prup...
it's always different when it's a republican candidate as "money trumps...er... a peace"... er...no...religion...yeah, that's the ticket. A small group of Americans have already been invaded by Paliens and Jindal will only cause them to eat each other alive.

They still can't see it's not the personalities, it's the policies. Conservative policies have all failed and no matter what personality they choose to drive them, they will continue to fail. Otherwise Rush would be president (except for that child sex/viagra thing. But who knows after that male prostitute gay preacher thing we see wingtards are easily fooled).

Jindal is an interesting politician. I'm the kind of guy who would vote for a Republican with a good track record. But Jindal's got a big show stopper for me. He's a Creationist. I couldn't care less about anyone's religion (I don't have any fellow Buddhists to vote for), but the willful rejection of reality is going way too far for me. At least he's not one of those Young Earth Creationists, but I still can't accept it. And that brings up a weird thing. Why is it that when Hindus convert to Christianity, they always seem to keep the worst aspects of Hinduism and combine it with the worst aspects of Christianity? Both religions have real merit, can't the good parts ever get combined?

Obama's already a lame duck. All this waiting around for Obama to assume power has been co-opted by Jindal's inevitable election and swearing in. Media masturbation by the right-wingnuts at its finest.

a mix of 100% service cuts and 0% tax 'increases' reflects the intellectually and morally bankrupt nature of contemporary conservatism

I wonder if a few bridges and/or levees will give out over the next 4 years. Something another governor discovered unhappily could happen when you oppose spending money on infrastructure, as a way of cutting costs, in order to keep the taxes low.

Unfortunately people had to die before reluctantly agreeing to set some money aside for repair. - after receiving huge amounts of FEDERAL money to clean up the mess in the first place.

Jindal/Palin '12.

Yep, this will be the Republican Party ticket in 2012...with Jindal performing exorcisms and Palin's witchdoctor taking on the witches...and when they win, they will choose Monica Goodling to run the Justice Department as their Attorney General...to finish the task began by born-again Bush...the total destruction of the constitutional wall separating church and state.

Woe unto America if this ever comes to pass.

Since I didn't get to my computer yesterday, I'll copy my reply here to yesterday's Sanford comment. It does go with Jindal and the GOP's idea of progress as well..

In regards to:

"...including expanding liberty, encouraging entrepreneurship and limiting the reach of government in people’s everyday lives"

and mentioned earlier by a commenter:

The trouble with "essentials" like this is that you're going to find few people who disagree with them, in principle if not in specific practice. The statement is so vague as to be completely meaningless.

..And that is exactly the point. I agree with all the comments on how the GOP has not lived up to these ideals, etc...

However, when you look at it from the Republican Party faithfuls' perspective, it makes total sense, just like progressives can make total sense of that statement from their perspective...

expanding liberty
Converting the rest of the world into Democracy (Bush brand of Democracy), Christianity (Evangelical brand) and Capitalism (GOP brand of capitalism). Those are the only valid belief systems (according to the Republicans)

encouraging entrepreneurship
Lower Taxes, Less Regulation, Tariffs on competition, subsidies for large exporters, favoritism in awarding no-bid contracts to the 'faithful', etc...

limiting the reach of government in people’s everyday lives
No government interference when it comes to allowing Christians to do pretty much what they feel like whether other people like it or not; no gun control, no limits on development of any kind, no rules or regulations that may interfere with their agenda, etc...

I'm sure there are a lot more topics that will come to mind that would make total sense from a GOP standpoint to fit in those categories.

Here on Steve's blog, we have pretty much expressed what it means to 'us', it would be interesting if an investigative reporter to ask Sanford what he actually has in mind, and to elaborate a little more on his 'essentials'.

Anybody up to that task?

I don't get it, if he didn't cut taxes, isn't that a good thing? How do tax cuts reduce a budget shortfall if trickle-down is a fraud?

Jindal is the GOP Dukakis, right?

Are you all aware of how the new campaign finance laws make it almost impossible for a Governor to run for president? When politicians raise money, they have to put the money in a war chest for their next election. For senators, it's for their next senatorial campaign, for governors it's for their next gubernatorial run. The new campaign finance laws require that money raised for a national campaign (senatorial) can be used for any national campaign (president). Money raised for a state campaign (governor) cannot be used for a national campaign. This has tilted the playing field significantly towards senators. Look at the war chests that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton had John McCain had to blow through to get through the primaries. The only other real contender was a self-funded millionaire.

Short summary: Jindal and Palin won't have the cash needed if they run for president.