I noted this in my June Congressional races roundup, but it deserves a little more attention.

Mary Bono Mack has in her career adeptly threaded the needle, voting mostly with the right but surprising on just enough bills every year to appear moderate to her district, which went for Barack Obama in 2008 and has a PVI of only R+3.  But her yes vote on the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill has incensed conservatives, so much so that they are waging jihad against not only Bono Mack but her Congressman husband, who by the way voted against Waxman-Markey.

So it was probably a bit of a shock to her when she saw the headline above that I captured in a screen shot from the Republican Party blog, Red State: Mary Bono Mack Should Be Burned In Effigy And Voted out Of Office. It was written by Georgia Republican Party operative Erick Erickson and something tells me Erickson isn’t about to endorse Palm Springs Mayor Steve Pougnet, who’s not just gay, but married (to another man) and happily raising their two children! Too far a stretch for Republicans who seem to always be involved with “opposite marriages,” or whatever they call the degrading situations traditional marriage sanctity defenders like Mark Sanford, David Diapers Vitter, Larry Craig and John Ensign are in.

Erickson and the fringe loons on the furthest reaches of the non-criminal right are so upset with Bono Mack that they are threatening to not just defeat her but to go after the right-wing extremist husband to boot! He demands that she vote against health care reform and against the energy bill when it comes back from the Senate– where it will probably be watered down and look more acceptable to mainstream conservatives!!!– or face the consequences.

“Otherwise, we beat her and her husband at the polls.

Yes, you heard me. We can get at Mary Bono Mack in two ways– her district and that of her husband. He should feel the heat just as much as her.”

Now, Erickson is a silly person.  And his frothing at the mouth is unlikely to result in any change in CA-45.  However, I wonder if they can entice some far-right activist to run in the primary.  Gary Jeandron, who lost to Manuel Perez convincingly in 2008, is supposedly preparing for a rematch.  But AD-80 is far less cordial to Republicans than CA-45 is.  And maybe enough foot-stomping tea partiers can persuade him – or some other teabagger – to challenge Bono Mack in the primary.  As one of only 8 Republicans to vote for the Waxman-Markey bill (and one of them, John McHugh, is about to become Barack Obama’s Secretary of the Army), the wingnuts don’t have many targets.  Bono Mack may have poked her head up on the wrong bill.

This could be a good time to check out Steve Pougnet.

Chuck DeVore discussed his senate campaign with Erick Erickson of RedState prior to his announcement. If you read between the lines, DeVore’s plan (loosely based on the plot of the movie Superman) is to have the left half of the state fall into the ocean. But instead of nuking the San Andreas, DeVore’s scheme is to drill enough offshore and throw enough red meat to the base inland to create an unnatural imbalance in California that results in a devastating earthquake.

“A plurality also favor offshore drilling,” he tells me, again pointing out Barbara Boxer disagrees. Boxer, he emphasizes, “is an unreconstructed extremist liberal.” That’s red meat rhetoric that will play well to the Republican base.

Devore is committed to picking off Boxer. In 2010, an political earthquake is coming to California. He is taking advantage of it.

Actually, DeVore as an evil mastermind is far more Dr. Evil than Lex Luthor, thinking he can win with minorities.

Devore and the conservatives in California are much more in line with Latino voters and black voters than Barbara Boxer and the urban white elites whose policies have made it even more difficult for poorer families to survive.

Clearly, DeVore resonates with the right-wing bloggers to the point they make even less sense than normal. He is their type of candidate and I fully expect them to Palinate DeVore through the primary and bring him to within 20 pts of Boxer when all of the voters are counted.

Barbara Boxer

This is pretty hilarious.  Ken Calvert got an earmark inserted last year that would put a transit center within walking distance of seven properties that he owned.  This would obviously boost the value of those properties.  But the House Ethics Committee said he did nothing wrong because:

“any benefit to Calvert would be shared by other similarly situated landowners.”

So because other people would get as rich as him, it’s not unethical for him to write his own laws that get him rich.

Brilliant.

OK, so let’s just say that I’m a property-rich lawmaker who wants to push the boundaries and play the earmark game for all its worth. What would it take for me to get into trouble? Just how self-serving of a project would actually garner the House ethics committee’s disapproval?

“You’d have to be remodeling your kitchen,” Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense told me.

Meanwhile, in the continuing Calvert/Red State saga… over…

They’re still going after him, and they think they’ve found proof that he lied to the GOP caucus by saying that he was not being investigated.  The Hill has an update.  Unfortunately, the Steering Committee isn’t taking their phone calls:

According to House staffers, Boehner’s staff is out putting pressure on Steering Committee members to not say how they voted on Calvert.

Two different people tell me the deck is so stacked in Boehner’s favor that even if a majority of the Steering Committee voted against Calvert, he could still get on Appropriations. But, that would look terrible to have a majority vote against Calvert and him still getting on Appropriations.

So, Boehner is pressuring the Steering Committee to totally ignore us.

Pretty funny that these guys are solely focusing on Calvert when even his replacement is under investigation for corruption.  If corruption was a disqualifying event for Republicans, we’d have a 9/10 majority in the House.