"Now here's your host...Conan Ohhhh Briiiiannnn!"

(Cue overcaffeinated applause. Conan parts the curtain, strides forward, clenches his fists, leaps...then suddenly hops sideways, all the way into his desk chair.)

"Thank you Andy, thank you Max, OWWW! We have a fantastic show for you tonight, so fantastic that we wanted to bring out our featured guest right away. We'll have a special Hollywood celebrity with us in a little while, but first, we got somebody who actually called us and pleaded to come on the show, and we thought, 'hey why not, we've had some fun here lately at his expense, so let's give him a chance to show he's a serious guy who's anxious to get back to the tough business serving the people.' So hey, would you please welcome that besotted son of South Carolina, America's own l-l-l-l-love gov...Mark Sanford!"

(Cue applause and wolf calls. Sanford enters stage right, as the band does a riff from Paul McCartney's "Silly Love Songs.")

»  More Next gig for the love gov

As an occasional guest on Saturday Night Live several decades ago, Al Franken would seemingly morph into Pat Robertson, nailing with eerie precision the religious right leader's smarmy unctuousness - a tour de farce that rivals Tina Fey's take on Sarah Palin in the mimicry hall of fame.

But the comic Franken is gone now, at least for the next six years. Thanks to a long-expected ruling yesterday by the Minnesota Supreme Court, and a swift decision by Norm Coleman to finally wake up to reality and stop wasting Republican money in a futile cause, Franken is now free to don the cloak of senatorial seriousness. He did it yesterday, while addressing the issue of whether he views himself as the 60th Democratic senator and thus the guy who gives Democrats their first potentially filibuster-proof chamber since 1979. Without a glint of amusement, he said that, no, "that's not how I see it. (I am) going to be the second senator from the state of Minnesota, and that's how I'm going to do my job."

But since Franken is likely to be a reliable soldier for Barack Obama - particularly during the impending Senate battles over health care reform, climate change, and the Sotomayor court nomination; and, in all likelihood, during subsequent battles over whether to repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell, to enact path-to-citizenship immigration reform, and to enact reforms making it easier for labor unions to organize - it's worth dwelling briefly on the significance of the Democrats' political victory. They dearly wanted to get 60 Senate seats and put themselves in a position to choke off Republican blockage, thus erasing one of the GOP's few remaining power options...and now they've gotten what they wanted.

But, as the saying goes, be careful what you wish for.

»  More Stakes and expectations

To paraphrase the poet T. S. Eliot, Senate Republican opposition to Sonia Sotomayor basically ended yesterday - not with a bang, but a whimper.

In theory, the U.S. Supreme Court's Monday decree - a 5-4 ruling that favors white New Haven firefighters, and reverses a federal appeals court decision that Sotomayor joined - should be catnip for the GOP. In theory, all the elements of a classically simplistic attack message are ready and waiting.

For starters, Senate Republicans could try to paint the high court ruling as a major embarrassment for Sotomayor; here she is, seeking to ascend to the high court, yet her own prospective colleagues have just reversed her - just as she has been reversed on other cases in the past. Secondly, they could try to argue that Sotomayor's appeals ruling - which slapped down the white firefighters in a mere 134 words - was essentially an endorsement of affirmative action for minorities, at a time when most Americans tell pollsters that they oppose affirmative action. Thirdly, the Republicans could try making the broader case that Sotomayor's affirmative action empathy is typical of how this so-called "wise Latina" would be likely to rule in other cases.

And yet the Republicans have barely uttered a whimper.

»  More "Wind in dry grass"

A blogworthy version of my Sunday print column:

Never before have so many politicians seemed so fixated on their stimulus packages.

Or maybe the tally has risen lately simply because no secret is safe in our transparent culture. Maybe that helps to explain why we know about John Edwards and his videographer, David Vitter and his hookers, Eliot Spitzer as Client Number Nine, Larry Craig and his men’s room footsie, Vito Fossella and his love child, John Ensign and his trysts with a senior aide’s wife, Mark Sanford crying in Argentina on the taxpayer’s dime in violation of his "fiscally conservative" principles...it’s quite a list, even if we leave off Newt Gingrich and Mark Foley and long-ago miscreants like congressman Wilbur Mills, whose gal pal, a stripper known as the Argentine Firecracker, took an imprompu dip in Washington's Tidal Basin back in '74. (Clearly, there's something about these Argentine women.)

They've all done time in penance purgatory. But why did they misbehave, to the point of risking or wrecking their careers? Duh. Because humans are complicated. Because, as a sociologist named Pepper Schwartz told me during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, "politicians live in a highly adrenalized environment." Because a lot of guys in public life are insecure attention junkies who get drunk on themselves. And if we're just talking about the roguish straight guys, there is also the wordly wisdom of Art Hockstader, the fictional president in Gore Vidal's 1964 movie, The Best Man. When informed that one of his would-be successors was in fact a womanizer, Hockstader merely shrugged and said, "Lots of men need lots of women."

»  More Rules for rogues

I'm getting an early start on this first summer weekend, practicing what the French call l'extase langoureuse, which roughly translates as the ecstasy of languishing.

But, before the languor, two quick things:

Today marks the inexplicable farewell of The Washington Post's best political blogger. For five and a half years, Dan Froomkin has tirelessly spoken truth to power - doggedly tracking the incompetent perfidies of the Bush administration, and, lately, holding Barack Obama accountable whenever his actions have failed to jibe with his promises. He deservedly amassed a loyal following, and it remains a mystery why The Post decided to drop him; the official line - that his blog had "run its course" - is self-evidently substance-free.

Froomkin posted his final words this morning; his entire ouevre is worth a look. I'm assuming he'll land somewhere. I'll just note, for now, that his erasure is yet further evidence that the term "liberal media" is a canard. I need only point out that The Post - supposedly a prime "liberal" outpost - has dropped Froomkin while retaining the op-ed services of people like Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol...as well as the editorial page editor who for years indulged the Bush neoconservatives even as Froomkin charted their delusions.

»  More Languor and loss

It is easy to assess the latest sex scandal in political terms. South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's teary confession of an affair yesterday is merely the latest jolt to the GOP's battered image as the self-appointed party of moral rectitude and "family values." That's not just me talking; that's what scads of conservative Republicans are saying today. For instance, here's ex-Reagan strategist Craig Shirley:

"As of today, the GOP cannot get its message heard because too many Americans have turned their backs - or a deaf ear - or are simply laughing too hard at the irony of the party once built upon less government, clean living and family values turned into the sad caricature it has become. It very well might be that, like Lazarus, the GOP must die before it can be reborn. It happened before, in the mid 70’s and may well be happening again. But as Father’s Day has just passed, it is worth noting that the most significant representation of family values - once considered the province of the GOP - in America today is President Barack Obama."

And yet, all the political dimensions notwithstanding (did he finance his travels with the taxpayers' money?), I find that I have a soft spot for Sanford.

Yes, he embarrassed the party that he might have sought to lead in 2012, a party that at this point can ill afford further embarrassment. Yet amidst all the bathos at yesterday's press conference, and in the emails he has exchanged with his lover (more on those emails in a moment), I can see the sincerely love-sick human being who lost his compass for reasons of the heart that have plagued human beings since time immemorial.

»  More Reasons of the heart

President Obama's sales pitch for major health care reform will not be easy. A key exchange at his press conference yesterday underscored the challenge.

Notwithstanding his general popularity (the latest New York Times-CBS poll puts his job approval rating at 63 percent), and notwithstanding strong majority support for the concept of a government-administered health insurance plan that would compete with private insurers (nicknamed the "public option"), Americans are generally wary of expanding government's role. National surveys, during the past week, report that only 34 percent think Washington should do more to tackle national problems, while, in response to a separate question, 69 percent voice "quite a bit" or "a great deal" of concern about an enhanced government role on issues such as health care.

Those stats came to mind as I watched Obama pitch the public option during the press conference. Here's how he framed it early in the hour: "Now, the public plan, I think, is an important tool to discipline insurance companies. What we've said is, under our proposal, let's have a system, the same way that federal employees do, same way that members of Congress do, where we call it an 'exchange,' but you can call it a 'marketplace,' where, essentially, you've got a whole bunch of different plans. If you like your plan and you like your doctor, you won't have to do a thing. You keep your plan; you keep your doctor. If your employer is providing you good health insurance, terrific. We're not going to mess with it."

But later in the hour, Jake Tapper of ABC News spotted the potential flaw in Obama's pitch. What happens, he asked, if an employer who provides good health insurance decides instead to dump that coverage and go with the public option - even if the workers like their private plan and want to keep it?

»  More Obama's (non) response

Here they go again, with their rites of canonization.

One congressional Republican says that President Obama should crusade openly for the Iranian people, because "this is what worked for Ronald Reagan in the Cold War." Another says that "the Iranians would do well to remember the words of Ronald Reagan." Another says, "Ronald Reagan was strong in his rhetoric and forceful in his advocacy." Another says, "Ronald Reagan didn't say to Mr. Gorbachev, 'That wall is none of our business.'" John McCain has been on Fox News reminiscing about Ronald Reagan. And a former Ronald Reagan aide, Jeffrey Lord, writes that, with respect to Iran, "Barack Obama is no Ronald Reagan."

You see where they're going with this. Granted, who else are they going to retroactively canonize - George W. Bush? The guy who mired us in Iraq to the tune of $12 billion a month? Hardly. Every political party needs an icon, and icons tend to grow more sainted with the passage of time. (Witness the Democrats and JFK.)

But what's most striking about the latest outbreak of Reagan canonization is the way his acolytes have willfully succumbed to amnesia. They were all adults during Reagan's reign, yet they choose not to remember what actually happened. For nostalgic Republicans, it's undoubtedly preferable to judge the current president against a standard of perfection that never existed.

»  More Ron and Lenny

Whatever happened to Dawn Johnsen? If you haven't heard of her, I rest my case.

For all the attention being paid to Sonia Sotomayor (who's going to the high court anyway, unless the GOP unearths a smoking gun somewhere), Dawn Johnsen's extended stint in limbo is arguably just as interesting. Indeed, the fact that Johnsen has been left to twist slowly in the wind tells us much about the current political landscape, particularly the reluctance of Democratic leaders - starting with Barack Obama - to go to the mattresses.

Way back in the winter, Obama nominated Johnsen for one of the most important jobs in the U.S. Justice Department. He wants her to run the Office of Legal Counsel - the office that's tasked with giving the White House crucial legal advice on whether its actions are constitutional. Put plainly, the OLC, in its advisory capacity, is supposed to warn away the commander-in-chief from doing anything illegal.

To get a fix on how crucial this office really is, just know this: The OLC is the place where John Yoo (now a law professor and part-time Philadelphia Inquirer columnist) and Jay Bybee (now a federal judge) wrote their notorious memos decreeing that George W. Bush could pretty much do whatever he wanted - such as torture detainees - without running afoul of the Constitution.

»  More Twisting in the wind