The GOP Culture of Corruption Grand Jury target is Ray Sansom, Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives. He’s accused of funnelling money to Northwest Florida State College while he held a $110,000 job at the same institution. The original story broke on January 7th in Florida Today, and we reported about it then. But there’s new developments today, as the Grand Jury has decided to investigate. From the Miami Herald:

A grand jury decided Monday to look into allegations that House Speaker Ray Sansom abused his position by taking a six-figure job at his hometown college.

“From this point on, we’ll be calling witnesses,” State Attorney Willie Meggs said at the Leon County Courthouse. “I don’t know what we’re going to find until we look. We will get the people who have this information and present it to the grand jury.”

Sansom, R-Destin, took the unadvertised $110,000 a year job at Northwest Florida State College on the same day he became speaker of the House two months ago.

Sansom, though he denies all charges, has lawyered up, according to the Miami Herald Blog. Florida tends to be a pretty corrupt state, so maybe he won’t be charged or convicted, but this is going to play badly for the Republicans as they prepare to take the Senate seat abandoned by Mel Martinez.

Surely it should have dawned on Senator John Cornyn Tuesday that there’s a new regime in town and that Barack Hussein Obama will not tolerate torture. Surely he hard this section in Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address:

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.

Maybe Cornyn didn’t understand the Inaugural address, and that’s why he’s holding up Attorney General nominee Eric Holder’s confirmation? Well, if Senator Cornyn did not understand Barack Obama’s stand on torture, then the executive orders Barack Obama signed today just might get through Cornyn’s thick skull. Heck, maybe Cornyn needs some help from George Bush to understand this, after all, Cornyn is thought to be one of the stupidest Senators in the Senate. But back to Obama’s executive orders today. He is closing Gitmo within a year, forming a commission to figure out what to do with the inmates at Gitmo, some of whom are dangerous, eliminate torture by US personnel by requiring the strict adherence to the US Army Field Manual, and special circumstances concerning Ali al-Marri. Sounds to me like there’s a new sheriff in town.

But Senator Cornyn wants to leave that sheriff without his chief officer, the Attorney General. Why does Cornyn oppose Eric Holder’s nomination? Holder has yet to say whether he will or will not prosecute cases of torture perpetrated by US personnel. Cornyn is defending those who have tortured on the floor of the Senate. He’s taking up the cause Bush didn’t have the stones to do when he failed to give a blanket pardon to all who tortured in Bush’s name.

Senator Cornyn isn’t the only one who wants the torturers and those who ordered them to go scot free. Here’s a bit from the Washington Post report:

But even as Cornyn was getting out of the way of one appointee to President Obama’s Cabinet, he raised new questions about another. The Senate Judiciary Committee decided yesterday morning to delay a vote to send Holder’s nomination to the full Senate while lawmakers attended the morning National Prayer Service with Obama. The hearing was rescheduled for yesterday, but Republicans then requested a one-week delay on the nomination that Democrats were required to grant under committee rules.

. . .

Holder has generated more controversy than any other Obama nominee and was sharply questioned in an appearance before the committee last week. Many senators, including some Democrats, said they were troubled by his role in the pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich in the final days of the Clinton administration.

Led by the ranking Republican on the committee, Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.), GOP lawmakers also said they had more questions for Holder about whether he would favor prosecuting Bush administration officials for their involvement in warrantless wiretapping and harsh detainee interrogation practices. Cornyn said he would press for Holder to take a stand on the Military Commissions Act, which the Texas Republican described as providing interrogators with immunity from prosecution if they believed they were acting legally.

So Snarlin’ Arlen is right there with his buddy John Cornyn. I’m sick of Arlen Specter. He may have a reputation for bipartisanship, but Arlen Specter failed to protect us from Bush’s authorization of the use of torture, he failed to protect us from Bush’s politicization of the Justice Department, he failed to prevent domestic spying, and he now looks to be a failure in tracking down just how the Bush Administration instituted its regime of lawlessness. Maybe he’s got a magic waterboarding theory or something that makes everybody immune.

OK, I’m angry at Arlen Specter once again. If there is any man in the US Senate who knows his own complicity in allowing the Bush Administration destruction of the Department of Justice, it should be Specter. And if Specter has a hope in Hell of negotiating his way to victory in 2010 against Allyson Schwartz or Pat Murphy or Joe Sestak, then he needs to show that he understands that the rule of law is important. Murphy and Sestak, at least, will pound him on the issue, and they’ve both got battlefield cred. Any of those candidates will use this opposition to Eric Holder as Specter trying to give one last bone to Bush, who abused the constitution far worse than any President we have had in years. For Specter’s own sake he needs to get behind Holder immediately.

I know someone who is having lunch with Mr. Specter tomorrow. OK, I know several someones, and I just might pass along a question and see if one of the folks, Specter donors all, will ask it. Give me some suggestions, please, but make them politic, something that can be asked in a roomful of people who know the constitution well and are dedicated to defending it.

The petition to impeach Barack Obama from the Senate has reached 10,000 signatures. The whack jobs may not have noticed that Obama has resigned from the Senate already. Oh, we can make fun of these whack jobs, and they mightily deserve it, but it is disturbing to me to imagine what the thinking processes of people such as this are like. Here’s the petition, which includes all the crimes they identify against Obama, and here is the list of signatories. (The end of the list is the best part.)

This is all about leadership, of course. Whack jobs are not generally going to be led to sanity, of course, but leadership in the Republican Party is lacking, either in sanity or in numbers. For instance, as I noted a couple days ago, the Republicans are going to have to try and replace George Voinovich seen, according to the latest reports. Chris Cillizza speculates on who will succeed Voinovich, and notes that the Republican bench in Ohio is strong, as opposed to the Democrats, but Cillizza doesn’t note that the radical religious right has a stranglehold on the Ohio Republican Party, and that will spell serious trouble in their selection of a more moderate candidate, and also in getting their candidate elected. The prediction here is they will opt for a whack job for their leadership.

Like Norm Coleman. These whack jobs will evidently defend Norm Coleman at all costs, even to the end of displaying their inability to read. This is the leadership of the GOP thinking 37% is a majority, not some lone whack job with a petition. I’m beginning to think the severe hatred of Al Franken has brought out the inner whack job in the Republican Party leaders, not that that inner whack job was hiding very effectively. Hey, Norm Coleman himself is such a whack job that he claims he loves Minnesota at the same time he wants to deny their representation in the Senate. Sure, losing can unhinge a candidate, but this guy’s hinges were barely hanging on in the first place.

The question is not about who is leading the whack jobs and their insane conspiracy theories, but whether the leaders of the Republican Party will ever wake up and recognize that they are being led by the whack job wing of their party so much that the term “whack job” has become an intimate part of the Republican brand. Sure, one reads the phrase “failed Obama Presidency” in the latest P. J. O’Rourke column and if one is a Democrat one giggles a little, just before thinking that there likely are many whack job Republicans, both in the leadership and the ignorant rank and file, for whom the phrase “failed Obama Presidency” is historically accurate, even though it refers to something in the future.

Hey, Haley Barbour, this problem you’ve got with the Republican Party repairing its brand is far worse and far different than what you report to the Wall Street Journal. Here’s one commentator who doesn’t think you’re going to figure out the enormity of your task for a very long time. Indeed, here’s one commentator who can’t tell whether there are any Republicans left who are NOT whack jobs.