In an e-mail message today titled “useful idiot watch,” right-wing talker Laura Ingraham sends a “Memo to Meghan McCain,” claiming that her “plus-sized” attack was just “one satirical line” that the left is now using “to malign outspoken conservatives.” Ingraham claims that “indignation” over her “off-the-cuff remark” is “manufactured and totally phony“:

The left’s indignation in this instance is manufactured and totally phony. If any off-the-cuff remark about a woman’s size was condemnable, then where was the outrage when President Obama made a passing reference to Jessica Simpson’s “weight battle” during his Super Bowl interview with Matt Lauer? And of course they look the other way when obvious personal attacks are levied against conservatives. Remember when Al Franken was the toast of all media for his book “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot”? Last month The View’s Joy Behar called him a “fat guy”; and when I was a guest on The View a few years back she ridiculed Ann Coulter and me as “peroxide” blondes on Fox. I laughed it off. If you can’t stand the heat…get out of the punditry business.

In a nod to ThinkProgress, Ingraham closes her e-mail by encouraging her readers to “click here to listen to the entire segment from March 13th, instead of the version that was edited and sent around by left wing smearmongers.”

As ThinkProgress noted, in February, bailed-out Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit told a House committee that he received only $1 million in salary and “no bonus” in 2008:

PANDIT: My compensation was for the year 2008 was my salary, which was a million dollars. I received no bonus. And as I stated earlier, I plan to take a dollar per year salary and no bonus until we return to profitability.

Watch it:

But Reuters reports today that Citigroup awarded Pandit “$10.82 million of compensation in 2008,” despite the bank accepting $45 billion in TARP funds. The package included a “$958,333 salary, $9.84 million of stock and option awards and $16,193 of other compensation,” according to an SEC filing. As of February, Citigroup still owned or was leasing a private jet.

Last fall, as AIG teetered on the edge of collapse, then-Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) came out against using government resources to rescue the firm. Less than 24 hours later, McCain decided that a bailout was necessary because, as he put it, “there are literally millions of people whose retirement, whose investment, whose insurance were at risk here.” But today — after learning of the AIG’s plans to award $165 million in bonuses to its employees — McCain apparently decided that saving “literally millions of people” from financial ruin wasn’t worth it:

While McCain seems to believe that the only way to deal with AIG’s misuse of its bailout funds is to not to offer such bailouts in the first place, other options exist. As Pat Garofalo explains, nationalizing AIG and giving the Treasury Department “outright control over the hiring and firing of executives and the payment of bonuses and dividends” could be a better strategy.

Earlier today, Huffington Post’s Sam Stein noted that as the guest host of Bill Bennett’s radio show on March 6, RNC Chairman Michael Steele compared President Obama to Richard Nixon. “What you are seeing here, folks, unfold is nothing short of the Nixon administration played out in a different era and a different style,” declared Steele:

“I’m going to tell you something,” Steele replied. “You make such an important point, because I had a conversation earlier this week about the very point you just made about the Nixon administration. What you are seeing here, folks, unfold is nothing short of the Nixon administration played out in a different era and a different style. But the results and the effects are the same. You have H.R. Haldeman and Rahm Emanuel, these guys, the master manipulators, the master controllers in the background, moving and shaking the pieces, creating an enemies list, putting together the targets on our side. The whole strategy of demonizing Rush Limbaugh, which has been exposed now…”

Steele’s comparison of Obama to Nixon is ironic given the fact that just a month earlier Steele enthusiastically compared himself to one of Nixon’s most prominent henchmen, G. Gordon Liddy. During a February 5, 2009 appearance on Liddy’s radio show, Steele told the former political dirty trickster, “I follow the footsteps of guys like you”:

STEELE: So, I, you know, I follow the footsteps of guys like you who, you know, who, you know, set the bar and pushed and pushed and pushed and made sure that we could obtain the results that would benefit people in communities, fighting for the rights of individuals and making sure that, you know, we don’t back down. Our opponents don’t back down. Why do we?

Listen here:

As the Chicago Tribune’s Steve Chapman noted last year, Liddy is truly radical:

Which principles would those be? The ones that told Liddy it was fine to break into the office of the Democratic National Committee to plant bugs and photograph documents? The ones that made him propose to kidnap anti-war activists so they couldn’t disrupt the 1972 Republican National Convention? The ones that inspired him to plan the murder (never carried out) of an unfriendly newspaper columnist?

Carl Bernstein, who along with Bob Woodward uncovered much of the Watergate scandal, pointed out last year that as one of Nixon’s “plumbers,” Liddy once planned “to firebomb a Washington think tank.”

Transcript: Read more

Last week, Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) said he would ask the Obama administration if he could redirect $700 million in federal stimulus money to pay down the state’s debt — instead of for its original purpose of school funding and public safety. The Obama administration today rejected his request, saying that the legislation doesn’t allow Obama to “make an exception for that cash”:

The $787 billion stimulus legislation sets strict rules for the $53.6 billion being sent to help state budgets, Orszag wrote. It calls for 82 percent of the money to be used for public schools and colleges and 18 percent on public safety and other government services. “Congress has not authorized the executive branch to waive any of the above statutory requirements,” Orszag’s one-page letter said.

Sanford has said he will outright reject part of the stimulus money if the administration says no to him. Last week, state Senate Finance Committee Chairman Hugh Leatherman — a Republican — introduced legislation allowing the state to spend the money in spite of Sanford’s opposition.