Last week I mentioned North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley (D) as a possible ’08 presidential candidate that you might want to watch in the next couple of years. Today, I’d like to highlight another southern, moderate, Dem governor: Virginia’s Mark Warner. The Wall Street Journal’s Gerald Seib profiled Warner today in a largely flattering piece […]
Bush boasted during the 2000 transition process that he’d acknowledge the closely divided nation by having a bi-partisan cabinet. This led to one Democrat — Norman Mineta — getting one post (Transportation). With Mineta reportedly planning to resign fairly soon, Bush may be looking for another token Dem that he can ignore. Taegan Goddard noted […]
Some might look at this as an opportunity after a dodged bullet. The president let crazed, reality-denying neocons drive his foreign policy for a term, leading to near-constant disaster. The neocon agenda (indeed, their entire worldview) has been discredited and exposed as a fraud. Bush won a second term anyway, giving him a chance to […]
Maybe the Senate Republican caucus decided the religious right wouldn’t really punish them, maybe Arlen Specter gave up every shred of independence he had left, or more likely some combination thereof. Regardless, Specter’s ascension to Judiciary Committee chairman seems secure. Key Republicans said yesterday they believe that Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) will be approved by […]
If the Bush was anxious to keep his first-term team largely intact, there’s some wide-spread disappointment at the White House this week. Six cabinet officials have resigned since the election, and there’s indications that three more are about to do the same. Tom Ridge, for example, who’s been hinting at a resignation for several months, […]
Particularly towards the end of the campaign, Bush said he looked forward to a radical revamp of the federal tax system. He refused to tell anyone what he’d actually do with the tax code — we were just supposed to vote for him and take his word for it — but possibilities included a flat […]
It’s not that House Republicans are willing to go over-the-top once in a while; it’s that they just don’t care anymore whether their conduct is ethical or not. Tom DeLay, a criminally corrupt leader who’s been admonished four times for violating congressional ethics rules, is about to be indicted for a criminal fundraising scheme in […]
You’ll no doubt be pleased to know that congressional Republicans, without telling anyone, quietly inserted a provision in an intelligence bill to make conflict-of-interest problems harder to detect. Tucked within the House’s 497-page version of the “9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act” is a provision to repeal the requirement that senior-level officials report their personal financial assets […]
The presidents of the three major TV network news divisions (ABC, CBS, NBC) got together this week for a joint forum on their role in American journalism. It is, to be sure, a conversation worth having. More specifically, however, it was encouraging to hear the news heads admit a dramatic mistake. On Iraq, the three […]
It’s probably a little soon before we know who’s going to take on Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum in Pennsylvania’s Senate race in 2006, but this seems like an issue that’s likely to come up. A suburban Pittsburgh school district is reviewing whether it should be paying for U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum’s children to use […]