Update: Hatch & Limbaugh Lam-inaters, Inc.

Via Avedon Carol, Hilzoy has an update on where Hatch and Limbaugh may have gotten their coordinatied talking points about fired U.S. attorney, and fellow republican, Carol Lam:

However: in the course of researching this, I think I have figured out what accounts for this bizarre set of obvious factual errors. Everything that Hatch says about Lam is in fact true of one of her predecessors, Alan Bersin. In an article on Carol Lam in the National Review, published a couple of days before Hatch went on MTP, Byron York writes this (while discussing how Lam was chosen for the US Attorney's job):

"It wasn’t an easy job; the position of U.S. attorney for the Southern District had been wracked by politics in the previous decade. In 1993, Bill Clinton replaced the Republican U.S. attorney, a career prosecutor and veteran of 20 years in the Justice Department, with Alan Bersin, a law professor who had no prosecutorial experience but who had been a classmate of Clinton’s at Yale and head of the Clinton campaign in San Diego. (Bersin pledged to vigorously pursue Clinton priorities like environmental law.) In March 1998, Bersin resigned to become head of the San Diego school system. "

Gives a glimpse of the mechanism by which talking points fly around the Republican back room. NRO to Limbaugh to your U.S. Senate. Beautiful.