Richard Clarke, among others, has made it clear that Bush was negligent before 9/11 and careless after 9/11. But what about on 9/11? I realize in some circles this topic is more than taboo; it’s practically heresy. But a report in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal offered a detailed critique about a day that “remains shrouded […]
Just to follow up for a moment on the last post about the Medicare cost cover-up, there’s one other thing that doesn’t make sense to me. Doug Badger, Bush’s senior health policy adviser, seems anxious to paint himself as completely out of the loop when Scully and Foster were disagreeing about what to do with […]
I mentioned last week that I thought the Dems on Capitol Hill were taking their collective eye off the ball a bit in expressing their pleasure with an HHS internal investigation into the Medicare cost cover-up. Dems were demanding Tommy Thompson launch a probe, Thompson did, and the Dems sounded happy. This struck me as […]
The Gadflyer’s Amy Sullivan, whom I usually really like, seems to have kicked off a bit of a firestorm with her provocative essay last week on progressive constituencies. As Amy herself noted over the weekend, she apparently “touched a nerve.” There were plenty of things in her original column that I think were fair and […]
I think it’s fascinating that the political abuses of science, which has reached a level in the U.S. unseen in recent memory, is receiving surprisingly strong attention. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and his staff have done yeomen’s work on the issue, culminating with a detailed study — Politics and Science in the Bush administration — […]
The fine folks at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have prepared a great new report on the demonstrably stupid argument that tax cuts pay for themselves. What apparently set the CBPP off was House Budget Committee Chairman Jim Nussle (R-Iowa), announcing last week, “Tax cuts don’t need to be paid for [with offsets] […]
Joe Lieberman isn’t quite in the same league as Zell Miller, but he’s getting close. If the former VP candidate is still having trouble figuring out why his “Joementum” couldn’t produce a single primary where his support broke double digits, he shouldn’t have to look further than some of today’s headlines. Lieberman has managed to […]
Let me see if I get this straight. In 1995, John Kerry recommended cutting $1.5 billion from the intelligence budget over a five-year period. The cut equaled about 1 percent of the overall intelligence budget for those years and targeted money the National Reconnaissance Office received but didn’t spend. Despite the fact that congressional Republicans […]
Just FYI, the list of GOP scandals that have been the subject of formal investigation has been updated. Due to an outpouring of assistance from a variety of readers, there are four more incidents, bringing the total to 16. A sincere thanks to everyone who helped out with this.
In the wake of Richard Clarke’s revelatations about the Bush White House’s handling (or in this case, mishandling) of the war on terror, many are drawing comparisons between Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill. That makes sense, of course. It was O’Neill, a former member of Bush’s National Security Council, who said that the […]