The New York Times has written a good explanation of the core legal question in the John Edwards case. Was money paid to support his mistress a political contribution? If not, it could open to the door to all kinds of monetary support to candidates from wealthy people. If so, on the other hand, it could potentially criminalize legitimate behavior.

The jury is in its fourth day of deliberation and continues to ask to review more exhibits.

How ugly will the presidential campaign get? You can't imagine. Check out this story on a billionaire's plan to go after President Obama with Jeremiah Wright and every other race-baiting trick he can think of to take down the "metrosexual Abraham Lincoln."

If there's money to be spent on such as this, can putative "nice guy" Mike Huckabee be far behind? Of course not.

Here is the Huckster, doing a testimonial for Citizens United, a letter talking about the "morally repugnant political whores" surrounding President Obama. Nice guy. Later, Huckabee denied the letter — a copy of which is available on his letterhead — was his, but, as you can see, this is one smelly kettle of fish. Huckabee DOES work with Citizens United and its repugnant leader David Bossie, whose dirty tricks in the Clinton era are legendary (and who worked side-by-side in dirty tricksterdom on a congressional committee with future Congressman Tim Griffin. More about that later.) Huckabee deserves to scratch for lying down with these dogs.

After his defeat yesterday by a Tea Party candidate, Republican U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar issued a statement defining the state of politics nationally. The Republican Party is increasingly dominated by a my-way-or-highway orthodoxy. Compromise means only that others accede to the very specific and rigid ideology dictated for the party by message masters, Kochs and "religious" conservative lobbies. It provides an instant definition of the party and the candidates.

I'd still like to believe that this agenda is too extreme for swing voters, but the combined appeal of a fruit basket full of cherry-picked issues designed to motivate this or that niche voter may prove a national winning strategy. Gov. Mike Beebe's cautious moderation — heavily dosed with populism but with plenty of solicitude for corporate lobbies — is the model for the other side, but few Democratic politicians and precincts have mastered it as he did. From Talking Points Memo's report on Lugar's statement about the man who beat him, Richard Mourdock (emphasis supplied):

He and I share many positions, but his embrace of an unrelenting partisan mindset is irreconcilable with my philosophy of governance and my experience of what brings results for Hoosiers in the Senate. In effect, what he has promised in this campaign is reflexive votes for a rejectionist orthodoxy and rigid opposition to the actions and proposals of the other party. His answer to the inevitable roadblocks he will encounter in Congress is merely to campaign for more Republicans who embrace the same partisan outlook. He has pledged his support to groups whose prime mission is to cleanse the Republican party of those who stray from orthodoxy as they see it.

The statement specifically namechecked FreedomWorks and the Club For Growth, the conservative groups that paid for negative ads tearing down Lugar in the closing weeks of the primary.

This is at work in some Republican primary legislative races in Arkansas, particularly in Northwest Arkansas.

The Republican budget choppers in the House — fully supported by the Arkansas congressional Republicans, particularly Rep. Tim Griffin of Little Rock — are set to return to war on the American people.. Says Reuters:

Republicans in the House of Representatives on Monday will fire their first shots of the next deficit-reduction battle, advancing legislation to cut nearly $380 billion largely from social programs while protecting defense spending.

The cuts to food stamps, child tax credits and Medicaid healthcare for the poor [and elderly in nursing homes], among others, are certain to stall in the Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate.

Elections. Consequences.

Yes, absolutely. The New York Times editorializes today in favor of a national database on political ad spending. Federal law now requests stations to open books on spending, but it is a laborious process.

A national database would make all the spending instantly available and searchable.

Anyone could know, by hitting their home computer, which groups were spending how much for which candidates.

I'm reminded again of the little-known fact that a fellow from Arkansas who went on later to a new residence in federal prison pumped $145,000 into ads in the South Carolina presidential primary in 2008 in support of favorite son Mike Huckabee. It came to light last week by utter happenstance.

The databases would shed more sunlight sooner where it sometimes doesn't penetrate at all.

Major media companies are howling about the supposed burden of this proposed rule from the Federal Communications Commission, which will vote today.

But why stop at the federal level? Let's require this in state races, too. What say Republican Party? Here's another good government idea — such as the Regnat Populus 2012 campaign — to which you could devote your growing strength and convince some people that you really do care about more than lower taxes and a litany of conservative religion social issues. (OK, there could be obstacles to state-mandated reporting, as opposed to FCC mandates, but we sure could have better on-line and searchable databases than are currently available in Arkansas for both candidates and issues.)

• FEWER LIKE HIM: Rep. Mike Ross laments decline of Blue Dogs.

Expert witness in the NY Times article: U.S. Rep. Mike Ross, who's fleeing Congress, perhaps to run for governor (where he'll lose the Democratic primary) if he can't first get a high-dollar job as a lobbyist catering to DINOs like himself.

“In civics class in high school, you learn there are 435 members of Congress, and every one of them could lose in the next election. Now we’re down to less than 100 who can ever get beat in a general election,” lamented Representative Mike Ross of Arkansas, a Blue Dog co-chairman who is retiring from Congress this year. “So the Democrats run to their corner. The Republicans run to their corner, and as a result the country is being run by the extremes.”

“Redistricting,” he added, “has been bad for the country.”

With the defeat of Mr. Altmire and Mr. Holden, a Blue Dog coalition of conservative Democrats that peaked in 2010 at 54 dipped prospectively to 23. To advocates for Mr. Critz and Mr. Cartwright, the election showed that Democratic voters are in a fighting mood, and that progressive views are again at the leading edge of the party.

Mr. Cartwright pummeled Mr. Holden for his votes against the health care law. The League of Conservation Voters joined in, highlighting the veteran’s support for Bush-era energy policies that favored oil and gas extraction, and his opposition to Mr. Obama’s effort to cap greenhouse gas emissions.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has joined Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Kraft and Intuit in dropping financial support of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). This is the corporate lobby which masquerades as a state legislative educational organization. In fact, it gins out template legislation to achieve anti-tax, anti-regulation, anti-public school, pro-gun and similar marching orders for state legislators like the rising Republican claque in Arkansas.

Not to worry Rep. Bell and Sen. Irvin. The Koch brothers will pay the whole bill if need be to keep feeding y'all instructions and sending down "expert" witnesses to testify in your behalf.

• The House-passed budget.

The New York Times' Paul Krugman calls slime slime — pink slime, in fact — in his column about the Republican move last week to turn the U.S. into a feudal nation by passing Rep. Paul Ryan's budget.

The trouble with the budget devised by Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, isn’t just its almost inconceivably cruel priorities, the way it slashes taxes for corporations and the rich while drastically cutting food and medical aid to the needy. Even aside from all that, the Ryan budget purports to reduce the deficit — but the alleged deficit reduction depends on the completely unsupported assertion that trillions of dollars in revenue can be found by closing tax loopholes.

We're talking about moderate Republicans, of course. That doesn't mean they're welcomed these days in their own party, though.

Out in California, a former Arkansan and Marine Corps war hero named Nathan Fletcher ran for the state house and won a few years back, and has since distinguished himself by being a moderate Republican willing to work with Democrats in the statehouse and Governor's office (see his speech against "Don't Ask Don't Tell").

Now he's running for Mayor of San Diego, and has received such a drubbing from the local GOP — including their decision to endorse a candidate whose politics are more in line with Right Wing dogma — that he's decided to leave the party and run as an Independent. In the video announcing his decision (seen above), Fletcher says he believes he could win as a Republican, but is leaving the party because it's clear to him that partisan politics is "an environment that thrives on playing the game."

David Brooks with the New York Times comments on Fletcher's decision to bail on red and blue.

I'm always happy to see when government ethics laws have some teeth. Today's story is from South Carolina, where the Republican lieutenant governor has resigned following an investigation of his use of campaign money for personal expenses.

Arkansas law also prohibits use of campaign money for personal expenses and I'm quite sure no Arkansas politician has ever strayed from the straight and narrow, not even that Republican legislator who paid himself rent out of campaign cash for supposed use of his bakery as an office (while he was billing the state for expenses).

Because of the split between the 'baggers and the marginally sane in the Republican Party, there's now some question whether House Republicans can come together to pass a budget.

This would be a touch ironic since one of the major talking points of the last few months — a Republican shouted it triumphantly at me during a recent El Dorado appearance — is that President Obama has been operating without a budget. Republicans blame it on the majority-Democratic Senate, always failing to note that the Democrats do not have the 60 votes necessary to pass anything in that body and the House has been sending over 'bagger budgets. It may become a bicameral failing.

The white working class is becoming more and more Republican, right? Everybody knows that.

Oops. The facts don't seem to bear that out (South being an exception. Wonder why?)

Local filmmaker and regular contributor to the Times Gabe Gentry is raising money Kickstarter-style for a low-budget version of a reality show that he came close to getting made on PBS last year. It's sort of like "Road Rules" meets CSPAN.

Directing Democracy is a documentary film project that will chronicle an experiment in open source governance. We want the online community to elect three citizen representatives: a centrist, a progressive, and a conservative, to become investigators and eventual editors of a crowd sourced bill aimed at revitalizing the middle class.

Your elected representatives will travel the country meeting with policy experts and concerned citizens to seek their input. During their two-week journey, you and others will have access to an online Wiki bill. It is here that the various debates and drafts of the crowd-sourced legislation will take form.

The edited bill will be hand delivered to each House Congressional office in Washington, D.C. The entire process will be filmed for a feature length documentary to be released in 2012.

Will Congress act on the crowd-sourced legislation? I'm guessing no. But that doesn't mean this won't be compelling viewing.

Speaking of crowd-sourcing, a friend of a friend is behind ioby.org, a site that helps folks "crowd-fund" local environmental projects. It's just finished its NYC pilot and is now accepting projects from around the country. I suspect someone in these parts has one.

Polling on such the issues most dear to Texans — issues as politics and sports — found some Texas-sized disdain for Cowboys' owner Jerry Jones. Public Policy Polling's "Odds and Ends" says only 14 percent of Texans polled rating him favorably, and 48 percent unfavorably. "I'm pretty sure that -34 spread represents the worst poll numbers we've ever found for someone in Texas," PPP director Tom Jensen's news release said.

Not sure that it matters, since Jones isn't running for anything. Gov. Rick Perry, however, won't be happy with the poll: It shows that 64 percent of Texans would vote for someone other than Perry in the next gubernatorial election. From a news release on the poll:

“Texans’ esteem for Rick Perry has dropped considerably in the aftermath of his
disastrous presidential bid,” said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling.
“He’s got some work to do if he plans on running for office again in Texas.”