John Cole over at Balloon-Juice has been doing some good blogging on the arbitrary line in the sand Southern Senators have been drawing with respect to giving money to the auto industry so it doesn’t collapse. Here is one of the entries.

Some themes: these Senators appear to be going to bat for foreign automakers in their own districts. They appear to be willing to let the American auto industry collapse if they can’t do some union busting. If the U.S. picks up the health care costs of its workers, the difference in compensation between the Big 3 union workers and their non-union Japanese company counterparts becomes almost negligible. The Southern Senators are willing to pay Iraqis not to shoot at us; are willing to pay bankers and their bonuses; but aren’t willing to pay American workers who actually make stuff.

Again, hard telling whether the auto bailout would actually succeed. But, the priorities are telling. When it comes to providing money to American workers who actually build stuff, some of our politicians just can’t stomach the thought.

(H/t Josh Gillespie) I think the proclamation of death for the GOP is premature, but it certainly isn’t inspiring fear the way it used to. (Though, there are plenty of Democrats out there who seem to have a political equivalent of battered spouse syndrome; cringing at the thought that Republicans might do something mean to them and acting timidly as a result.)

In any event, Jim VandeHei and Alexander Burns have an article entitled “Why the GOP fell so far, so fast.” I don’t think it so much tells us why as tells us what. The GOP’s think tanks are weakening, low dollar fund raising has diminished, and embrace of the Internet has been relatively slow.

I don’t know that it’s all that complicated. The Republican leadership got corrupt and the conservative ideals it did implement, by and large, didn’t work very well. The grass roots activists don’t like them very well, and the independents who used to settle a tie in favor of the GOP are now breaking the other way.

I suspect the Democrats will come in, get a couple of things done, then get mired down in the minutiae of governing and getting reelected. Meanwhile, the GOP will reinvent itself to some degree, and the circle will repeat — thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

It’s been all over the Internets today, but President Bush has set a new record for citizen disapproval. With a 69% disapproval rating, he beat Harry Truman’s previous high of 67% during the Korean War. The polls only go back as far as FDR. I don’t think we’ll be seeing a Truman-esque revival of Bush. I think he’ll be hanging out with Harding in the Presidential polls.

I haven’t had the time to read the John Yoo memo or its critiques, but I’m flagging the issue here in the hopes I’ll get back to it. Yoo was a Department of Justice official who was basically promoted because he’d write indefensible legal memoranda that even John Ashcroft and his second and command would not. The memoranda seem to stand for the proposition that the Constitution doesn’t impose much in the way of limits on the President. From what I’ve seen of him in other places, Yoo offends me more than your average Bush toady. He’s a smart guy and a lawyer and, in my opinion, has a higher duty to the Constitution than the average citizen.

Via David Lightman at the McClatchy Washington Bureau Bush is the biggest spender since LBJ, and arguably a bigger spender than LBJ.

George W. Bush, despite all his recent bravado about being an apostle of small government and budget-slashing, is the biggest spending president since Lyndon B. Johnson. In fact, he’s arguably an even bigger spender than LBJ.

“He’s a big government guy,” said Stephen Slivinski, the director of budget studies at Cato Institute, a libertarian research group.

The numbers are clear, credible and conclusive, added David Keating, the executive director of the Club for Growth, a budget-watchdog group.

“He’s a big spender,” Keating said. “No question about it.”

Take almost any yardstick and Bush generally exceeds the spending of his predecessors.

Discretionary spending — i.e. spending Congress and the President can control, not entitlements like Social Security and Medicare — shot up 5.3% per year for Bush’s first 6 years. Prior to Bush, Johnson had the highest increases at 4.6% per year. It was 3% under Ford, 2.4% under Carter, and 1.9% under Reagan. Clinton is not listed, meaning that discretionary spending went up less under his administration than under Reagan’s.

Now, near the end of the seventh year of his presidency, Bush is positioning himself as a tough fiscal conservative.

He says Congress is proposing to spend $22 billion more in fiscal 2008 than the $933 billion he requested for discretionary programs — and that the $22 billion extra would swell over five years to $205 billion.

Eventually, Bush said, “they’re going to have to raise taxes to pay for it.”

And so, the president told an Arkansas audience earlier this month, people should brace for “what they call a fiscal showdown in Washington.

. . .

Bush is getting tough on fiscal policy — after running up a record as the most profligate spender in at least 40 years.