Mike DeWine: The line forms on the RIGHT

STOP THE PRESSES! Focus the TV cameras. Yep, that's Ohio Atty. Gen. Mike DeWine, a pol for all seasons, who endorsed Rick Santorum as they male-bonded in Columbus. DeWine, who had been a Romney man after being a Pawlenty man, decided it was time for a new winner's circle now that it's clear that the Tea Partiers have little use for McMitt. Besides, DeWine and Santorum have long shared their roles as custodians of The Faithful.

This will doubtless mean more for DeWine's ego than for Santorum's success or failure. Such out-of-the-blue (red?) but politically convenient conversions mean very little or anything on the morning-after. (Is DeWine aiming for a veep spot on the Santorum national ticket? Or maybe U.S. attorney general?)

You might ask Donald Trump about endorsements. 'Twas an odd moment when The Donald stood with McMitt before the cameras and tweaked Romney's candidacy with a magisterial endorsement. Today, Trump is puzzling over the numbers and muttering "I just don't understand it." (Not that he ever did.)

All of which is a reminder that DeWine had belabored his campaign promise to end Obamacare on the first morning he entered the AG office. That was in 2010, a nightmarish year for Democrats all-around when DeWine fluked out a win over one of the most competent fellows to rise in Ohio, Richard Cordray. If that sounds like an exaggeration, recall that the same Mike DeWine was, as an incumbent Republican senator, thrashed in a landslide by current Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in 2006.

Need more? Is it nothing more than a coincidence that DeWine's about-face occurred just before Santorum's appearance at the Summit County Republican Lincoln Day dinner Saturday night? DeWine will be on the dais with him and Mike's buddy, Alex Arshinkoff, who used to do errands for him in Northern Ohio. The icing on the after-dinner sweets will be doubly sugary.

If the sky is clear, you might even see a halo over the city.

Pawlenty turns up on a slow news day

THE USELESS political news today is that former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty has endorsed Mitt Romney. And the former Massachusetts governor has happily reciprocated by naming Pawlenty the co-chairman of his presidential campaign.

Aside from the immediate political families, it's not unfair to ask, 'Who cares?' As I vaguely recall, Pawlenty was a candidate for the job himself until he discovered not that many people cared about that either. He only has a $500,000 campaign debt to show for it.

We now await Rick Perry's fellow Texan, Kinky Friedman, to step up with an endorsement of anybody else in the field that might be a tad more thrilling.

UPDATE: Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal endorsed Perry. It's a whole new ballgame between Pawlenty and Jindal, if nothing else.

Arshinkoff: Searching for a presidential speaker?

THE SUMMIT COUNTY Republican Finance Dinner, the premier fund-raising event for the locals, still hasn't been scheduled even though it has usually been set much earlier. According to a source at Party Headquarters, it could be held in late September or later. My hunch is that Chairman Alex Arshinkoff is still turning up his Tarot cards to determine which magnetic presidential candidate might be lured to Akron as the star attraction who satisfies the

Tea Party and his big donors.

Arshinkoff always aspires to being a player in the national arena but his list of recent speakers as potential presidential nominees has not paid off. Among them: Mississippi Gov. Haley

Barbour , former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, and Lincoln Day speaker Mike Huckabee - all of whom gave nice Republican pep talks in Akron and then decided against a presidential bid.

Anybody wanna guess? The winner will be awarded a GOP tea mug.

Minnesota: a state in a state of chaos

JUST ANOTHER day of political infamy.

This one shut down the government in Minnesota as Republicans again drew a line in the concrete separating reality and taxes. But what are the anti-taxers to do when it is their only ideological weapon to prove their worth as pathetic single-passion political leaders?

Meantime:

Every summer camper in a state park was forced to pack up and leave as the parks closed.

All highway construction projects were abruptly shut down, laying off a lot of people and suspending their wages.

Twenty thousand state workers were laid off.

The state's hotline for senior citizens, which assisted 30,00 people last year, was turned off.

There was dislocation and instability throughout the state.

The Republican-controlled legislature rejected Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton's proposal to raise taxes on the state's top one percent of the wealthy. The St. Paul Pioneer Press noted that it would have only affected Minnesota's 7,700 millionaires. They won't be expected to miss a single meal during this chaos.

And unsurprisingly, the presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty, the former governor, showed up to stand tall with his GOP brethren in this hour of political depravity as the lights were turned off on social services that were created for humane reasons.

The Republicans are flashing sharp swords in their anti-tax romp. Eventually they may be forced to fall on them.

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Pawlenty casts himself as the truth candidate

THE NEW YORK TIMES reports that Republican Tim Pawlenty mentioned the word "truth" 16 times in his 20-minute announcement that he was officially running president. It was left to our imagination what he might have been thinking the other four minutes.

Pawlenty is revving up his conservative credentials

Tim Pawlenty, the Republican governor of Minnesota who appears to be fantasizing about running for president, is doing a Whirling Dervish around the availability of federal funds. This is a relatively new phenomenon among GOP officeholders in the Obama Era. Briefly, he will accept $263 million in Medicaid money but oppose any dough under the new health care reform law, calling Obamacare "some stupid policy agenda." He has even gone to Iowa to tell the voters something along those lines to prove his conservative credentials. You may recall that Pawlenty was the speaker for Summit County Republican Chairman Alex Arshinkoff's prime-time finance dinner in 2008, when Pawlenty was being mentioned as a presidential candidate. It was a fizzle. Even now, a new Minnesota poll said that 53 pct. of Republicans in his state probably wouldn't vote for him if he should decide to run , most likely with a "pro-growth, pro jobs" agenda. (Jeez. Is anybody against jobs? Trouble is, nobody knows how to do it.) He's also zealously pro-life and wants students in all public schools to be required to repeat the Pledge of Allegiance. I'd say more, but you already know where this is going with Pawlenty.

Even Teddy Roosevelt wasn't spared at CPAC meeting

BY NOW, MOST of the hybrid conservative-Tea Partiers have gone back to wherever they went after their Dionysian festival in Washington the past couple of days. From all reports, nobody to the left of the Washington monument was spared a nasty slam or two. But as crowds go, we did learn a few things from their angry behavior, none of which is pleasant for the few hangers-on who still dream of a political process that begins with sanity and ends with social progress.

At least, we saw the wannabes who project their future in the Oval Office and their enablers who insist that America's only salvation is a tax-less society that will somehow encourage all of us to own un-mortgaged homes, assure that everyone is physically fit without health insurance and never have to step outside without a howitzer.

Among the things that I gathered from all of this:

Based on his comments, Massachusetts superman Scott Brown , the GOP's latest hood ornament, is just one more hack to enter the halls of Congress. I mean, would a sensible man mention public anger and frustration over taxes in the same breath with the pilot who flew his plane into the IRS building? It was chilling, too, to hear others find humor in the crash.

While we're in the Massachusetts mode, it seems that Mitt Romney still has some homework to do to win the hearts of right-wing voters who refused to name him their first choice in the CPAC straw vote polls. Such pulse-checking is meaningless, of course, but not to the few like

Romney who wanted to come away with bragging rights. He tried so hard to please the crowd that he added a new description to the Obama Administration: "liberal neo-monarchists." Can you imagine a bunch of people who hardly understand the meaning of socialism trying to digest this mouthful?

We also learned that homophobia is alive and well within the ranks of those conferees. There was a skirmish between a Republican gay rights leader and a sassy kid from the California Young Republicans, and boos on both sides.

The ideological victory parade to the podium included Newt Gingrich, the plodding old warrior who is still trying to work out an uphill slalom for himself. Teddy Roosevelt took his lumps, perhaps by people who mistook him for FDR. Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, a presidential candidate on a mission from God (Get in line, Guv!), showed everybody that he was up to speed on current events by arguing that somebody should emulate Tiger Woods' wife and break some windows in big government with a 9-iron. Jeez.

Sarah Palin wasn't there. She may have had the audience's best interests at heart, particularly those older fellows whose tickers couldn't endure much more excitement.

As usual, the final act was reserved for Glenn Beck, who wanted everybody to know that he was a recovering alcoholic - which we already knew. He used a blackboard and no teleprompter

to demonstrate that anyone who is pure can be redeemed, as he was.

The only downer, it seems, was Dick Cheney's rejection of the chants that cried out: "Run, Dick Run." You'd think that somebody would tell them that he's already running, not for president, but from the pursuers that are calling for his hide for his primal role in the torture culture.

P:S: A few posts ago I mentioned how the Tea Party Movement is generically linked to the old Birchers of Robert Welch. Update: I now read that the Birch Society was one of the co-sponsors of the CPAC conference. Hmmm....

Anti-health reform mobs: Nullification next?

THE WORD FROM OTHERS:

The New York Review of Books has an essay by Michael Tomasky, the editor of Democracy: a Journal of Ideas, that has a sobering look at the growing clout of the Tea Party mentality that is partly fueled by racism. Saying that it's unlikely that the reaction would be as hatefully demonstrated if the Democrats had elected a white president. He writes:

"We can't measure this, and I'm not sure what good it would do us to know even if we could. What we do know is that this movement is backed by corporate millions, powerful media organizations, such as Fox News, and votes in Congress, and that it will be around for some time, advancing new scandals and lies. The next phase in all this, if health care passes, might well be 'nullification' lawsuits or resolutions in states that don't want to have to implement Obama's reform."

Tomasky notes that South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty have "intimated" that nullification would be the best course of action. (Sounds to me like the kind of stuff that was going around in South Carolina in the years leading up to the Civil War.)

THE BONUS ONUS remains very much alive, no matter where you look today. Even the Tribune Company, the mega-media owner of the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and TV stations, is arguing in bankruptcy court that its $66 billion in bonuses were important to

"incentivize"(God, how I hate the word!) its management. David Carr takes up this silliness in his The Media Equation column in the New York Times.

"Let's say that a group of corporate executives uses scads of debt to take over a struggling company, sells off some profitable assets, lays off thousands of employees while achieving miserable results. And then less than a year after saddling the company with $8 billion in debt, they opt for bankruptcy.

"You'd expect them to walk the plank, or at the least, spend a good stretch of time in the naughty corner. but you wouldn't expect the top 700 managers to collect $86 million in bonuses. But that's just what might happen at the Tribune Co.

(By the way the guy defending incentivization (!) is the Tribune Co.'s chief financial officer, Chandler Bigelow III. That's not the sort of name that would head a Laborers Union.)

Thanks to Talking Points Memo for alerting us to the judicial setback for the wacky California dentist/lawyer Orly Taitz, who has been one of the national ringleaders in challenging President Obama's birthplace. Taitz is a birther who has been challenging Obama's legitimacy wherever she could park her lawsuits. But U.S. District Judge Clay Land (Georgia Middle District) decided he had had enough of her nonsense and fined her $20,000 for misconduct. Should you question the logic behind the fine, here is, in part what he wrote:

When a lawyer files complaints and motions without a reasonable basis for believing that they are supported by existing law or a modification or extension of existing law, that lawyer abuses her privilege to practice law. When a lawyer uses the courts as a platform for a political agenda disconnected from any legitimate legal cause of action, that lawyer abuses her privilege to practice law. When a lawyer personally attacks opposing parties and disrespects the integrity of the judiciary, that lawyer abuses her privilege to practice law. When a lawyer recklessly accuses a judge of violating the Judicial Code of Conduct with no supporting evidence beyond her dissatisfaction with the judge's rulings, that lawyer abuses her privilege to practice law. When a lawyer abuses her privilege to practice law, that lawyer ceases to advance her cause or the ends of justice.

When politics becomes a religious experience

THE OCTOBER ISSUE of Church and State has a detailed account of the 2009 Values

Voter Summit in Washington, a sort of fun-filled, let's-show-those-godless socialists event sponsored by a number of right-wing politico-religious organizations. If that's how they want to spend a couple of days in the shadows of the Lincoln Memorial, that's fine with me. Besides, we've all heard it before.

But the annual haloed conference of true believers is also an enormous magnet for the Republican Party's worst and dimmest who would doubtless be expelled from the rolls of Judeo-Christian (mostly Christian) safe passage to the next election if they didn't turn up with bless-you smiles.

I mean, this isn't a case where a GOP pol with a few battle stripes is invited to be the keynoter that would provide the big photo-op for Fox News. Rather, they eagerly arrive en masse to see and be seen. All leaves are cancelled, even if it means giving up a brother-in-law's funeral or a day at the races to be counted at the conference. In return, their pictures are posted in the program and can be quite heartwarming for those who are deeply attached to these sorts of family reunions.

Check them out: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader John Boehner, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, ex-presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, ex-presidential-candidate Mitt Romney, ex-Ohio gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell, ex Miss California candidate Carrie Prejean, Bill O'Reilly and, of course, Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota. There were many more, but you get the point. All of these folks have bags and will travel without much encouragement. There was one glaring exception: Sarah Palin, who tentatively agreed to come, was a no-show.

When you hear the damning comments from these speakers, it only gets worse. I've picked out a few from the magazine's report. (The magazne is published by Americans United for Separation of Church and State.)

Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota: "Keep the faith, and have heart, because remember, God is the God of all. He's the God of the White House, of the Congress, of state capitols, of school board meetings, city council meetings, all of it." (Does anybody doubt that Pawlenty is running for president on the God ticket?)

Blackwell: Calling upon his audience to convert Americans to fundamentalism, he declared: "If we don't do it, America in its third century will be redefined." (And I thought we were fighting religious fundamentalists in the Middle East!)

Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey: Calling Obama the "abortion president," Smith complained: "I believe Obamacare represents the greatest threat since Roe Vs. Wade itself."

Ok, so we have the issues laid out for the 2012 presidential race - and sooner: Anti health care reform, anti stimulus package, anti abortion, anti moderate-to-left politicians and pro-fear of "socialism" and Big Brother.

As Frank Rich aptly pointed out in his Sunday New York Times essay, the war in Afghanistan is now costing us $2.6 billion a month. Let us pray that the religious conservatives will take note of that when they complain about the financial burdens that we are placing on the next generation.