Bush svengali Karl Rove doesn’t make a lot of public speeches, so it was interesting that he delivered his first commencement address of the year at a small school in Lynchburg, Va., called Liberty University. If you’re not familiar with the school, Liberty is the school that Jerry Falwell created and continues to run as […]
I expected Dick Cheney to defend Don Rumsfeld, but his choice of words belies a far more serious problem with this White House. U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney moved to support Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld amid a firestorm over Iraqi prison abuses, with a statement that people should “get off his case” and let Rumsfeld […]
You know the drill. It’s Friday, it’s my last post of the week, and I have some state-by-state polling data to share. As is the case with every Poll Day, these results were released within the last seven days. West Virginia (5 electoral votes) Charleston Daily Mail/WSAZ — Bush 47, Kerry 43, Nader 2 Comment: […]
As expected, the White House has embraced a new round of tough-on-Castro policies, just in time to pander to the (suspected) desires of voters in the king of all swing-states: Florida. The Bush administration said yesterday that it would tighten the 40-year-old U.S. financial squeeze on Cuba and work to prevent President Fidel Castro from […]
On Tuesday, I mentioned how much I liked John Kerry’s new bio ads, which are coming to a TV near you. In particular, I noted how well the ads dealt with the issue of Kerry’s background and how Kerry’s wealth drove him to want to give something back to his country. In this week Correspondents’ […]
If you only read one article today, please make is Jacob Weisberg’s Slate piece on Bush’s intelligence (or lack thereof). It’s excellent. As the best-selling compiler of Bushisms, Weisberg apparently gets asked about this subject a lot. After noting that Bush frequently abuses English grammar, creates ridiculous words, and “habitually says the opposite of what […]
Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) is the kind of Dem that Republicans usually don’t mind too much. He’s a tough moderate, a decorated Vietnam veteran, and he represents a district full of working-class Reagan Democrats. Murtha has a very centrist voting record with one constant: he always backs the military. As one of the biggest hawks […]
Alas, the National Day of Prayer event was largely anticlimactic. I was hoping for a few scandalous or outrageous comments from Bush before a friendly evangelical audience, but like my friend Darrell, who alerted me to the online broadcast, I didn’t hear many fireworks. As expected, Bush put on his evangelist-in-chief hat and preached to […]
The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne devoted much of his excellent column today to chastising Rumsfeld, but he bucked the trend by noting that the buck doesn’t stop at the Pentagon. [D]umping Rumsfeld and Myers is not enough. Ultimately the buck stops with President Bush. No, I don’t think for an instant that Bush knew anything […]
OK, one final word about “web videos” and McCain-Feingold. Yesterday, we talked about the loophole that allows campaigns (specifically the Bush campaign) to create ads that look like TV commercials that are broadcast exclusively online. McCain-Feingold mandates all TV and radio campaign ads feature some kind of “I approve this message” tagline, but because these […]