Bobby Jindal is grandstanding in front of television cameras — taking interviews, and walking along shores in hard hats day after day. Oh yeah — he’s busy criticizing everyone else instead of taking his own huge share of the blame.

1.) It turns out Jindal has only bothered to deploy 1,100 out of 6,000 National Guard members to handle LA coastline.

It also was revealed that the state has called up only 1,100 of the 6,000 National Guard members authorized for the spill clean-up efforts, Peterson said.

2.) Also Jindal hasn’t yet dispersed the 25 Million in funds BP provided as a grant to assist LA immediately.

Peterson said that at a meeting Thursday with BP officials, coastal Louisiana legislators and representatives of the Jindal administration, it was disclosed that the state has spent only about $3 million of a $25 million BP grant for spill-related expenses, and that it has not yet issued a contract for BP’s $15 million grant to promote tourism attractions threatened by the spill.

NOLA’s article on what Jindal is really doing

All this time Southern Republicans have been pounding a drumbeat about both “states rights” and “drill baby drill” ; yet, when a direct outcome of those policies causes a massive accident, rather than having a state-level response, there are nothing but complaints.

Jindal himself is uniquely responsible for this current calamity — In 2006, Jindal sponsored the Deep Ocean Energy Resources Act (H.R. 4761), a bill to eliminate the moratorium on offshore oil and gas drilling over the U.S. outer continental shelf.

Unfortunately the biggest loser on the Republican side of the health care debate things is Mitt Romney. In many ways, Romney is to blame by trumpeting his deal in MA as a signature achievement of his term as Governor. During the health care debates Romney had the ability to distinguish his plan from the Federal plan by virtue of the public option. However, now that the public option has been discarded, Romney has only a very nuanced argument about Federalism to distinguish the two plans.

As Greg Sargent at theplumline puts it:

Romney’s line, in a nutshell: Imposing the individual mandate on the state level is rooted in conservative principles of individual responsibility. Imposing it on the Federal level represents a frightening government takeover that conservatives everywhere should resist.

I don’t think that’s going to work in a Republican primary with Robert Gibbs literally bear-hugging RomneyCare with statements like this:

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Monday that the health care overhaul passed by the House Sunday night was similar to the state-based reform plan enacted in Massachusetts in 2006.

The president’s spokesman joked, unprompted: “I’m sure Gov. Romney hates every time I say that.”

The former Massachusetts governor and possible 2012 candidate called for the repeal of the federal health care bill Monday, calling it an “unconscionable abuse of power.”

But Democrats have consistently pointed to the Massachusetts plan Romney signed into law as a forerunner for national legislation. And twisting the knife further, Gibbs argued that the major difference between the two plans is that the White House proposal attempts to tackle health care costs.

“Massachusetts didn’t do that, and it took them a while to get to that curve,” Gibbs said.

h/t politico.com

ThinkProgress.org has an interesting catch, yesterday several GOP congressional members admitted that the Iraq War was a mistake.

It’s pretty amazing.

Watch for yourselves:

ROHRABACHER: Well, now that we know that it cost a trillion dollars and all of these years and all of these lives and all of this blood, uh, I don’t know many…

NORQUIST: Looking for a number. Two-thirds? One-third?

ROHRABACHER: I, I can’t. All I can say is the people, everybody I know thinks it was a mistake to go in now.

NORQUIST: That’s 100 percent.

Norquist then turned to McClintock, asking “what percentage”:

NORQUIST: Of Republicans in Congress, who would agree with the general analysis here that it was a mistake and/or we should go in.

MCCLINTOCK: I think everyone would agree Iraq was a mistake.

NORQUIST: Two hundred percents. Ok, we’re going to average these.

MCCLINTOCK: And, you know, again, I think virtually everyone would agree going into Afghanistan the way we did was a mistake. How many share my, my cynicism over this idea of a resolution of force, which I can’t find anywhere in the Constitution. And how many believe that in those rare cases where we go in, we put all of our resources behind our soldiers, I would say certainly more than half of the Republican caucus probably believe that.

h/t ThinkProgress.Org

I wanted to drop a quick note on the G.O.P. delay of the unemplyment extensions recently.

Don’t think that it is only Jim Bunning from Kentucky, rather Bunning is retiring this term so he is the perfect Republican representative to delay a politically favorable piece of legislation for Democrats by the Republicans.

It seems to have worked, people are blaming Bunning independently as opposed to the GOP Senate obstructionism as a whole.