I’ll delve into Newsweek’s 4,000-word cover story on my favorite subject — “Bush in the Bubble” — in more detail later, but I wanted to do a separate post on one telling anecdote from the article. What Bush actually hears and takes in, however, is not clear. And whether his advisers are quite as frank […]
About three months ago, the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina was an international fiasco. Bush’s handling, in particular, was widely derided, his competence further came into question, and his approval rating fell even further. Time magazine reported a couple of weeks after the storm hit that the Bush gang had crafted a “Three-Part Comeback […]
Now this will be an interesting court case. The Supreme Court said Monday it would consider the constitutionality of a Texas congressional map engineered by Rep. Tom DeLay that helped Republicans gain seats in Congress. The 2003 boundaries helped Republicans win 21 of the state’s 32 seats in Congress in the last election up from […]
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has been the subject of two ongoing investigations — one from the Justice Department, the other from the Securities and Exchange Commission — stemming from his controversial sale of stock in HCA, a hospital corporation owned and operated by his family. Given how long ago these probes began, one would […]
Conservative radio talk-show host Dennis Prager believes the political world is wildly off base when it comes to the truly dangerous religio-political movement. For Prager, it’s not the religious right, it’s the harder-to-find religious left that’s the problem. Unfortunately, it seems Prager’s confused. From the outset, Prager is troubled by the fact that no one […]
The internal conflict between career Justice Department attorneys in the Civil Rights Division and Bush’s political appointees has been getting considerably worse the past few months. When career attorneys reviewed Georgia’s poll-tax law and found that it was discriminatory against minority voters. Bush-appointed higher-ups quickly overruled them. Similarly, attorneys in the Civil Rights Division concluded […]
MSNBC’s Tom Curry had an online column earlier this week suggesting that the time is ripe for a major third party to step up and have a significant impact on the U.S. political system. At a time when opinion polls indicate that Americans hold both major political parties in low esteem, can a third party […]
Just to follow up on yesterday’s post about Bill Clinton “annoying” Bush administration officials by making a surprise, last-minute appearance at a U.N. conference on global warming, there’s a fascinating back story that highlights the child-like behavior of the president’s envoys to the gathering. New York magazine’s Greg Sargent learned that Bush officials “privately threatened” […]
Guest Post by Morbo You know it’s going to be a bad day when a gang of men dressed entirely in black abduct you, give you an enema, pump you full of sleeping drugs and fly you to Macedonia. This happened two years ago to a German citizen named Khaled el-Masri. His crime was — […]
Guest Post by Morbo I continue to have a strange fascination with the Minutemen, the self-appointed border patrol vigilantes whom I’m convinced are just plain, old-fashioned racists who don’t like Hispanics. A short, but amusing piece in the Dec. 12 “New Yorker” by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan only reinforced my beliefs. Kurtz-Phelan attended a Minutemen recruiting drive […]