Mark Sanford, the increasingly embattled Governor of South Carolina, must think that the Associated Press is some sort of licensed therapist. How else can one explain this statement? "I will be able to die knowing that I had met my soul mate," he told the Associated Press. He was referring to his mistress, Maria Belen Chapur of Buenos Aires. That's all fine and good. I'm happy for the Governor but does the world need to know the intimacies of Mark Sanford?

It gets better. Despite his Argentine soul mate, the good Governor insists he can fall back in love with his wife, Jenny Sanford. The Governor should realize that a soul mate is worth more than a mere governorship. Edward VIII, after all, gave up his throne for the American divorcée Wallis Simpson. More from the Associated Press:

The once-promising presidential prospect said he is committed to reconciling with his wife, but professed to The Associated Press his continued love for the Argentine woman at the center of the firestorm that gutted his political future.

In emotional interviews with the AP over two days, he said he would die "knowing that I had met my soul mate."

Sanford also said that he "crossed the lines" with a handful of other women during 20 years of marriage, but not as far as he did with his mistress.

"There were a handful of instances wherein I crossed the lines I shouldn't have crossed as a married man, but never crossed the ultimate line," he said.

Sanford insisted his relationship with Maria Belen Chapur, whom he met at an open air dance spot in Uruguay eight years ago, was more than just sex.

"This was a whole lot more than a simple affair, this was a love story," Sanford said. "A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day."

Even with the latest revelations, Sanford maintains he is fit to govern and has no plans to resign.

"I've been able to do my job and in fact excel at it," Sanford said, while acknowledging he is a spectator at his "own political funeral."

At this point, the wounds are self-inflicted. I'll repeat what I said last week when this story broke. Governor Sanford should resign not because he is having an affair but because he misled his staff as to his whereabouts and breached his duties.

Promoted from the diaries by Jerome.

In the eyes of most Democrats, there still isn't a credible candidate running for governor of Texas. Kinky Friedman, Mark Thompson, and George W. Bush intimate and former Ambassador Tom Schieffer simply don't cut the mustard in a state that brought more than two million Democrats out of the woodwork to vote in the 2008 presidential primary.

Texas Democrats need a credible, progressive, exciting, and qualified candidate to run for Texas governor in 2010.

Texas needs Ronnie Earle. That's why a small group of activists have started DraftRonnie.com.

Most national blog readers probably know Ronnie Earle best as the "DeLay Slayer." He is the only man who, as Travis County District Attorney, held Tom DeLay and his cronies accountable for his actions during the 2002 election cycle in Texas. Ronnie Earle, in fact, is the only one who has ever held Tom DeLay legally accountable for anything he's ever done, especially since federal authorities magically let the investigation of DeLay drop, although nearly everyone in Tom DeLay's debris path ended up doing time in federal prison--like Jack Abramoff.  

There is, however, much more to Ronnie Earle.

Disclosure: I'm proud to be working with the The Ad Hoc Committee of Consumer Victims of GM & Chrysler.

The GM bankruptcy hearing is in its second day today. Here's a summary of what we're looking at:

Under the plan, U.S. taxpayers would end up owning 60% of the new GM, with other stakes held by Canadian governments, bondholders and the United Auto Workers union.

Holders of $27 billion in GM bonds would get stock in the reorganized company, as will a union-controlled trust fund that will take stock rather than the $20 billion in cash it had been owed to pay future retiree health care costs. Those 650,000 retirees will have their coverage reduced.

GM plans to close more than a dozen factories, drop U.S. brands and shut down up to 40% of its network of 6,000 dealerships.

As if that sweet 60% ownership stake in GM isn't enough, U.S. taxpayers are about to have to shoulder 100% of the social costs of the liabilities for the lawsuits due to defective GM and Chrysler cars.

GM agreed, under heavy pressure from consumers and state's Attorneys General, to cover liability from new suits due to defects in old cars, but if the accident has already happened, too bad.

The victims will be stuck without recourse and the rest of us will have to bear the social cost of their untreated health problems resulting from accidents in defective cars.

As if the emergency rooms weren't already overcrowded enough.

Rep. Andre Carson is pushing legislation to fix this, and I predict we'll see broad based consumer anger and activism on this issue.

There's a really good CBS News story on this issue too. There's a news conference in San Francisco featuring several victims of GM and Chrysler cars tomorrow. Details in the full entry.

Enjoy.

• Kansas ACTION: We're Falling Behind, says Mike Nellis, and we can't let that happen.
• The most powerful and wealthy international trophy hunting organization in the world is targeting wolves in Greater Yellowstone writes linfar in Safari Wants to Kill Our Wolves.
• Fundraisers, homophobia, and questions of police brutality in atdleft's CA-50: Fear & Loathing in North San Diego?
• Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: Congratulations, Senator-elect Franken!
• Comprehensive Sexual Education Keeps Our Kids Safe. (The Opportunity Agenda)
• John Garamendi, Lieutenant Governor of California and a candidate for California's 10th Congressional District, explains why "good for the planet" is also "good for labor" in CA-10: I Received the Endorsement of the SEIU CA State Council.
• The Media Consortium examines the divergence between our values and the existing U.S. economic structure in their Weekly Audit: Radical Inequality Fueled the Wall Street Meltdown.

Dispatches from the out-of-power:

Former CIA counter-terrorism expert and bin Laden tracker Michael Scheuer seems to have become unhinged, telling Glenn Beck last night: "The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States."

Video here.

But liberals hate America, right?

The headline from Gallup yesterday reads: "More Americans See Democratic Party as 'Too Liberal'." Indeed, the proportion of Americans saying this has gone up from 39 percent to 46 percent in the last year, at the same time as the proportion of those saying the Democratic Party's views are "about right" has declined from 50 percent to 42 percent. Bad news for the Democrats, right? Not necessarily.

Leaving aside for another time the debate over whether being viewed as liberal is necessarily a bad thing in American politics (or at least as bad as it once might have been), it's worth noting that the Republicans have been seeing a very similar trend in recent years. Currently 43 percent of respondents say that the GOP is too conservative -- not too different from the proportion calling the Democrats too liberal -- a number that has consistently risen for the past six years. The proportion calling the Republicans' views "about right" is actually significantly lower than that of the Democrats, with just 34 percent saying so (down from 51 percent in 2003).

Even more importantly, however, are the views of Independents -- a group that now theoretically should be more Republican-leaning than it once was given the high number of former GOPers who have left their party in recent years. Among Independents, Gallup finds 38 percent calling the Democrats' views "about right" and just 25 percent calling the Republicans' views about right. Again, considering that a significant portion of those now calling themselves Independent were not long ago Republicans, this margin separating the views of the Democrats and the Republicans is quite striking. And in the zero-sum game that is a two-party political system, when one party isn't viewed tremendously well but the other is viewed significantly worse, the former generally has an advantage over the latter.

If you haven't read it yet, it is all the rage. Todd Purdum has written a masterful and entertaining article in Vanity Fair  about the Governor of Alaska, that conservative pin up girl, Sarah Palin. While there are a number of new interesting tidbits, the general gist we already knew. Sarah Palin was a disaster. Even if she got the rabid conservative base to foam at the mouth to the rest of us she was clearly unqualified to be one wink away from the Presidency. He writes:

Palin is unlike any other national figure in modern American life--neither Anna Nicole Smith nor Margaret Chase Smith but a phenomenon all her own. The clouds of tabloid conflict and controversy that swirl around her and her extended clan--the surprise pregnancies, the two-bit blood feuds, the tawdry in-laws and common-law kin caught selling drugs or poaching game--give her family a singular status in the rogues' gallery of political relatives. By comparison, Billy Carter, Donald Nixon, and Roger Clinton seem like avatars of circumspection. Palin's life has sometimes played out like an unholy amalgam of Desperate Housewives and Northern Exposure.

More like at Northern Overexposure at this point. Sarah Palin may drive the conservative base into a frenzy who view her as some sort of female Ronald Reagan but to the politically astute, not to mention the just plain awake, she's just not all there. She's erratic, uncertain of facts and simply just not sufficiently prepared to play a leading role on the national stage. And if she's the last of the red hot conservatives, then truly the conservative brand is in trouble. If the GOP were to nominate her again even as Vice President, I am not sure the Republican Party would live to see another day. In the end, Sarah Palin will be a footnote in American history, the first female Vice Presidential candidate on a Republican ticket and the second overall on a major party ticket. She is as much trivia as trivial.

The National Security Adviser, General James Jones, is certainly a colorful guy. In the Washington Post story, there is this rather amusing anecdote.

The question of the force level for Afghanistan, however, is not settled and will probably be hotly debated over the next year. One senior military officer said privately that the United States would have to deploy a force of more than 100,000 to execute the counterinsurgency strategy of holding areas and towns after clearing out the Taliban insurgents. That is at least 32,000 more than the 68,000 currently authorized.

Nicholson and his senior staff, 20 Marine colonels and lieutenant colonels, sat around a table made of unfinished plywood the size of at least three ping-pong tables in a command headquarters that stands where there had been nothing but desert six months ago. The headquarters is located in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, 370 miles from the capital, Kabul, in a region known as the Desert of Death because of its scorching heat and choking fine, dustlike sand. The province is facing a rising and lethal Taliban insurgency.

During the briefing, Nicholson had told Jones that he was "a little light," more than hinting that he could use more forces, probably thousands more. "We don't have enough force to go everywhere," Nicholson said.

But Jones recalled how Obama had initially decided to deploy additional forces this year. "At a table much like this," Jones said, referring to the polished wood table in the White House Situation Room, "the president's principals met and agreed to recommend 17,000 more troops for Afghanistan." The principals -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; Gates; Mullen; and the director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair -- made this recommendation in February during the first full month of the Obama administration. The president approved the deployments, which included Nicholson's Marines.

Soon after that, Jones said, the principals told the president, "oops," we need an additional 4,000 to help train the Afghan army.

"They then said, 'If you do all that, we think we can turn this around,' " Jones said, reminding the Marines here that the president had quickly approved and publicly announced the additional 4,000.

Now suppose you're the president, Jones told them, and the requests come into the White House for yet more force. How do you think Obama might look at this? Jones asked, casting his eyes around the colonels. How do you think he might feel?

Jones let the question hang in the air-conditioned, fluorescent-lighted room. Nicholson and the colonels said nothing.

Well, Jones went on, after all those additional troops, 17,000 plus 4,000 more, if there were new requests for force now, the president would quite likely have "a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment." Everyone in the room caught the phonetic reference to WTF -- which in the military and elsewhere means "What the [expletive]?"

Point well taken.