At one time, Chris Cannon was my Congressional Representative in Moab, Utah, before redistricting sent him off to torment other small towns with his insufferable representation.

Yet for over a decade, he was a fixture not just of Utah politics, but increasingly in the Intermountain West as a whole. He is currently the Chairman of the Congressional Western Caucus, a group that, tomorrow, will introduce its latest bill seeking to plunder and pillage the public lands under the guise of "energy security" -- a worn out and delusional rhetorical trope that too many Democrats, including our nominee, unfortunately still embrace.

Nonetheless: last night, in a small primary in the 3rd District of Utah, Chris Cannon got an astounding 20 point kick to the door from voters who overwhelmingly supported former Gov. Hunstman aide Jason Chaffetz's right-wing challenge to Cannon.

If you know anything about Chris Cannon, you know that a right-wing challenge to Cannon has to be far, far to the right. And since Chaffetz is virtually guaranteed to defeat his Democratic opponent in November, the seat will stay Republican, and one right-wing kook will be replaced by another right-wing kook in the congressional delegation of Utah.

As John McCain would say, that's not change.

Still, it's good to see Chris Cannon go, and his crushing defeat is further indication that the Republican party is officially in a political wilderness, and that the disillusionment of its base may soon turn to a fury that radically transforms the face of the party.

And that disarray will make it awfully difficult for them to win national elections anytime in the near future.

Of all the idiotic ideas to come out of Washington, this has got to be one of the stupidest I have ever heard:

House passes bill to sue OPEC over oil prices

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The House of Representatives approved legislation on Tuesday allowing the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies and working to set crude prices, but the White House has threatened to veto the measure.

The bill would subject OPEC oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, to the same antitrust laws that U.S. companies must follow. The legislation also creates a Justice Department task force to aggressively investigate gasoline price gouging and energy market manipulation.

Forget, for a moment, the trillions of dollars in debt that the U.S. government sold to finance nearly eight years of defense boondoggle, and what all those dollars flying around the world mean to the value of the much-vaunted petrodollar.

Forget, for a moment, the likelihood that global oil reserves have peaked, or the fact that oil consumption in developing nations recently surpassed oil consumption here in the U.S. of A for the first time in history.

Forget, for a moment, the incredible growth of hedge funds over the last decade, and how, now that they've been spooked by the utter crapola of CDOs and SPVs, they are desperately looking for somewhere else to place their dirty little bets.

Forget all that -- and all that it implies about Congress' own malfeasance for the past decade -- and then you, like Congress, can choose the scapegoat that is always handy whenever energy is the topic du jour.

Blame the Arabs! [And the Venezuelans, too -- Ed.]

Tony Snow, today:

"Now we have a situation where there is an attempt to do something that's never been done in American history, which is to assail the concept of executive privilege which hails back to the administration of George Washington and in particular to use criminal contempt charges against the White House chief of staff and the White House legal counsel," said White House Spokesman Tony Snow.

Perhaps no White House chief of staff and no White House legal counsel have ever faced contempt of congress charges simply because never before in American history have the chief of staff and the legal counsel been so contemptuous of congress or the constitution.

As to "assailing the concept of executive privilege" -- also known as checks and balances -- Booman reminds us:

The last time a full chamber of Congress voted on a contempt citation was 1983. The House voted 413-0 to cite former Environmental Protection Agency official Rita Lavelle for contempt of Congress for refusing to appear before a House committee.

Booman goes on:

This demonstrates an appalling erosion of principle among GOP lawmakers. Ronald Reagan was not only a Republican president, unlike Bush he was a popular president. Nevertheless, in 1983, not a single Republican member of congress was willing to let him stonewall a congressional committee. Today, not a single Republican on the Judiciary Committee was willing to say the same.

What happened in the interim?

What happened indeed?

At long last, have they no shame? (Er, that's obviously rhetorical):

The White House has refused to give Congress documents about the death of former NFL player Pat Tillman, with White House counsel Fred Fielding saying that certain papers relating to discussion of the friendly-fire shooting “implicate Executive Branch confidentiality interests.”

Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Tom Davis R-Va., the leading members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, objected to the refusal Friday in letters to the White House and the Defense Department.

White House and Pentagon officials have turned over about 10,000 pages of material, but Waxman and Davis said those papers lack critical documents that would show communications between senior administration officials and top military officers shortly after Tillman was killed in Afghanistan in 2004.

Forget for a moment how specious the legal argument or how craven the implications, and ask yourself: at what point (and over whom) will the Congress stand up to this administration's continuous flaunting of legislative oversight? Taylor? Miers? Tillman? Gonzales? And what more will it take than an administration claiming executive privilege over the release of a soldier's records before the Congress finally stands up and says, Enough?

Maybe those questions are rhetorical, too.