No need for the dog warden when Bachmann barks

With FDR, there was his "little dog Fala". With Richard Nixon, we learned of his dog Checkers.  With Michele Bachmann, there is her fantasy that President Obama spends taxpayers' dollars on dog-walkers for his family pet.  Even Bill O'Reilly is aghast at her fictions, declaring her latest one is not true. But the more things change, they more they stay the same for Michele, who has been walking around on her knuckles ever since she arrived on Capitol Hill as a Minnesota congresswoman.

You may recall that a couple of years ago she accused Obama of running  up a bill of $200 million a day for his official visit to India. That's eight zeroes after the two, folks.

FDR handled folks like Michele with cool panache.  When FDR's critics accused him of wasting $20 million by sending a destroyer to the Aleutian Islands to get his dog, the president wryly complained that Fala, who was Scotch, resented the spurious tale of loose spending.   "I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself,"  FDR  declared with staged indignation.  "But I have  a right to object to libelous statements about my dog."

When U.S. Supreme Court justices come to dinner...

AFTER THE SUPREME COURT handed the 2000 election to George Bush, and after its game-changing Citizens United decision that turned over elections to the highest corporate bidders, I had hoped that the conservative-majority guys would finally behave themselves and get back to serving us as apolitical justices. I missed that one by a mile. Indeed, they aren't even bashful these days about their narrow political interests as guests at right-wing fundraisers - places the robed strict constructionists oughtn't to be."

There have been numerous reports of three of the justices making their rounds at these mega-cash registers for sympathetic candidates. Interestingly, the three - Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas - didn't show up at President Obama's State of the Union speech, dismissing these annual rituals as political events. On the other hand, Scalia and Thomas found time to speak at a political fund-raiser organized by Koch Industries - a leading Tea party contributor. Alito made it to an event sponsored by the Manhattan Institute, an honored think tank in the conservative pantheon.

And now, it's discovered that Thomas failed to report his wife's previous job, even though he is required to do so by law. (Until 2007 she had been on the payroll of the conservative Heritage

Foundation, earning $686,589.) Thomas said his failure to list the job - actual earnings not required - was inadvertent for several years because of a misunderstanding and more or less promised he would do better in the future. Maybe he needs better law clerks to explain the complicated forms to him.

Legal experts say, yeah, he broke the law, but nothing would likely come of it, Thomas being a Supreme Court Justice and all that.

Does anybody recall what President Nixon said when David Frost challenged him to explain why he approved of clearly illegal wiretapping? OK, I'll remind you:

"When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."

Should we now add Clarence Thomas to the untouchables?

y ougers.