Not sure what is wrong with the site, but I have written three posts about the same damned thing (oil prices), and they have all been eaten.
To hell with it. It is Friday and beautiful outside. You can just guess what I as going to say.
by John Cole| 81 Comments
This post is in: Previous Site Maintenance
Not sure what is wrong with the site, but I have written three posts about the same damned thing (oil prices), and they have all been eaten.
To hell with it. It is Friday and beautiful outside. You can just guess what I as going to say.
by Tim F| 34 Comments
This post is in: Politics
Attorney General Gonzales tagged the White House back today. As Clinton might tell you, it gets hard to strategize effectively in the middle of late-scandal lockdown mode. The grand playbook with which the administration started this scandal read something like, throw out a bunch of chaff and hope that it blows over. The principal actors expected to avoid a brouhaha and they clearly took Condi’s rhetoric about not having a plan B more literally than they should.
The chaff failed (“performance reasons,” “Rove not involved,” “we never meant to use the PATRIOT clause”) and now the principals are just making it up as they go along. Future historians will propose intricate three-wall bank shots that might save everyone’s hide and made this story go away, but right now Rove, Goodling, Gonzales, Sampson and Bush are just chasing that minor relief that comes from having the shotgun pointed at someone else for a few hours.
by Tim F| 20 Comments
This post is in: Media, Republican Stupidity
Some days it gets hard to believe how rapidly the Giuliani campaign has become a weird self-caricature.
Greg Sargent thinks that the major media outlets will find it interesting that the Giuliani campaign jilted an Iowa farm couple when it found out that they didn’t have enough money to qualify for the Estate Tax. I could be wrong, but that strikes me as unlikely. After all, Sargent is a partisan source and one of those crazy blogger people. John Harris’s fishwrap will only go into full alert when they hear about it from one of their Republican staffer friends or see it on Drudge.
If only we knew what Rudy spent on his hair…
***Update***
Side note to Greg: the word is jilted, not snubbed. The word both fits better and better conveys the rudeness involved.
This post is in: Media, Popular Culture
I thought I would talk about something else, because I am afraid that Tim is perilously close to the first diagnosed case of a Schadenfreude overdose. At any rate, I tried to watch some tv last night, and there was NOTHING on.
So I popped in Firefly, watched an episode, and got so upset I went to bed. Firefly was killed after one partial season, but there are multiple versions of CSI after 5 years?
We deserve this administration.
by Tim F| 40 Comments
This post is in: Republican Stupidity
Funny spring. Usually as the weather warms up rain and the occasional hail will drop from the sky. This year we get shoes.
The Bush administration has withheld a series of e-mails from Congress showing that senior White House and Justice Department officials worked together to conceal the role of Karl Rove in installing Timothy Griffin, a protégé of Rove’s, as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas.
The withheld records show that D. Kyle Sampson, who was then-chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, consulted with White House officials in drafting two letters to Congress that appear to have misrepresented the circumstances of Griffin’s appointment as U.S. attorney and of Rove’s role in supporting Griffin.
[…] Several of the e-mails that the Bush administration is withholding from Congress, as well as papers from the White House counsel’s office describing other withheld documents, were made available to National Journal by a senior executive branch official, who said that the administration has inappropriately kept many of them from Congress.
Damn, that will leave a mark.
***Update***
The story has so many gems that it is almost impossible not to quote it in full. Waas catches the White House flat-footed:
White House spokesman Tony Fratto denied that the White House was withholding records in the Justice Department’s possession, and he said that Gonzales could make many of them public at any time. “The White House is neither guiding nor directing the Justice Department’s decisions on privileged documents,” Fratto said. “They make those decisions on their own.”
It would have been subtler if the White House tacked a target on Gonzo’s back and cried, Duck season! Although I suppose that the alternative, admitting their own role in obstructing justice, would bridge that shrinking gap between public scandal and indictable behavior. The perps don’t have any good options right now.
***Update 2***
John begged me to keep the title, but in the end I decided to go with something a bit less hair-raising.
***Update 3***
Good analysis by Paul Kiel at TPM.
Peak Schadenfreude: Major New Reserves Discovered in Karl Rove’s OfficePost + Comments (40)
by John Cole| 21 Comments
This is cute:
Moderate Republicans gave President Bush a blunt warning on his Iraq policy at a private White House meeting this week, telling the president that conditions needed to improve markedly by fall or more Republicans would desert him on the war.
The White House session demonstrated the grave unease many Republicans are feeling about the war, even as they continue to stand with the president against Democratic efforts to force a withdrawal of forces through a spending measure that has been a flash point for weeks.
Participants in the Tuesday meeting between Mr. Bush, senior administration officials and 11 members of a moderate bloc of House Republicans said the lawmakers were unusually candid with the president, telling him that public support for the war was crumbling in their swing districts.
One told Mr. Bush that voters back home favored a withdrawal even if it meant the war was judged a loss. Representative Tom Davis told Mr. Bush that the president’s approval rating was at 5 percent in one section of his northern Virginia district.
“It was a tough meeting in terms of people being as frank as they possibly could about their districts and their feelings about where the American people are on the war,” said Representative Ray LaHood of Illinois, who took part in the session, which lasted more than an hour in the residential section of the White House. “It was a no-holds-barred meeting.”
Several of the Republican moderates who visited the White House have already come under political attack at home for their support of Mr. Bush and survived serious Democratic challenges in November.
While I am glad members of the GOP are finally beginning to come to terms with the fact that we are in a bloody version of Groundhog Day in Iraq, it is a little infuriating that it took political pressure in their home districts to drive home the point. Have they not been watching the news, reading the briefings, and, you know, paying attention?
Regardless, let me be the first second to tell the poor dears: BUSH DOES NOT CARE.
He doesn’t care about your plight. Loyalty, to this administration, is a one way street. You simply need to understand that we are going to be in Iraq until the Decider/Commander Guy and his folks can figure out a way to blame the Democrats prior to the 2008 election.
by John Cole| 39 Comments
This post is in: Politics, General Stupidity
You have to admit, from the standpoint of someone whose opinion of the impact of religion on politics sours more every year, this is a virtual jackpot:
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and civil rights activist Al Sharpton traded angry, racially charged accusations yesterday, with Romney alleging that Sharpton had uttered “bigoted” comments about Mormonism.
On the campaign trail in Iowa, Romney was asked about Sharpton’s comment during a debate Monday that “those of us who believe in God” will defeat Romney. The former Massachusetts governor told reporters that such a comment “shows that bigotry still exists in some corners.”
Sharpton angrily denied Romney’s charge in a telephone interview yesterday, and he accused Romney of stoking a verbal war with him to gain support among conservatives.
I am so sick and tired of the role of religion in elections and politicvs. The role of religion in our national decision making should be simple- there shouldn’t be one. Religion is for the individual, and God should be celebrated/worshipped in the home, and in the church, and in the heart. Not in the middle of a national campaign, not as the centerpiece of legislation.
At any rate, I am not sure what all the fuss is about, anyway. Given the way Romney has flip-flopped on virtually every issue to try to get himself elected, by November 2008 he will have declared that he is Baptist.
My Faith in the Spaghetti Monster is STRONGER THAN YOURSPost + Comments (39)