I’ve come full circle — a couple of times — about John Edwards. As of today, I’d be more than pleased to see him join John Kerry’s ticket. But he may want to be careful in the way he’s playing the game. If Cincinnatus taught us anything, it’s that people are more likely to give […]
We haven’t been hearing too much lately about Richard Clarke, Bush’s former counterterrorism czar who threw Washington into turmoil a few months ago by explaining that the White House was asleep at the wheel before 9/11, ignoring imminent threats and downplaying the significance of terrorism in general. Clarke’s name may have disappeared from the front […]
They were on top of the world. The neocons dominated the Bush administration’s foreign policy team, they successfully put Iraq at the forefront of the U.S. agenda, and their man Ahmad Chalabi was a driving force for the future of Iraq. You could almost hear champaign bottles popping when Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” — the […]
As if I weren’t already embarrassed about having been born and raised in Florida, the state continues to make things worse. For example, four years after the multifaceted election debacle, the Sunshine State continues to purge the voter rolls of eligible Floridians. For the second straight presidential election, Florida’s law against former felons voting, a […]
I was afraid reporters were going to start running out of angles to this story. Thankfully, the LA Times’ David Savage and Richard Schmitt thought of a new one. We’ve heard all about the Bush administration’s belief that the president is above the law in using torture in the war on terror. We know the […]
On Day Three of the fight over a GOP plan to let churches work with and for political campaigns of their choosing without penalty, a funny thing happened: the right started hating it. Almost immediately after the idea became public, Dems and the left criticized the plan, recognizing it as a thinly-veiled response to the […]
It sounded, at the time, like good news. In late April, the State Department released a report insisting that international terrorist attacks had dropped in 2003 to historic lows, which Republicans and Bush’s conservative allies pointed to as proof that the president’s war on terror was working wonders. There was just one problem with the […]
Yesterday, a Washington Post article noted that Bush is beginning to reach out to one-time allies, but only on his terms. Bush bonds with leaders who see the world as he does, who in his view “get” the war on terrorism, who talk simply and straightforwardly and do not break any private commitments and understandings, […]
I return to this issue only once in a great while, so I hope you’ll forgive a brief (or maybe not so brief) tirade on an issue that doesn’t get a lot of attention. A bipartisan pair of senators — Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and George Voinovich (R-Ohio) — told the FDA yesterday that the federal […]
The Senate Judiciary Committee hosted an unusually vapid hearing yesterday on “hostility” toward religious expression. It’s a serious topic, but it wasn’t something the committee was approaching with any sincerity. It was pretty obvious — they invited Roy Moore to testify. I realize why this happened. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), one of Moore’s best buddies, […]