ABC News’ The Note reported this morning that Republicans in Congress “have decided (for now) that their political interests (as in 2002 and 2004) lie in solidarity with the Bush Administration. ‘We shall all hang together’ is the unofficial mantra.” But behind the veneer of unity, is there more discontent than Republicans are letting on? […]
As time goes on, and the public learns more, the reaction to the government’s handling of the Katrina crisis worsens. There’s a new CBS News poll out, for example, with bad news all around for public officials. President George W. Bush’s overall response to Katrina meets with disapproval today – a dramatic change from the […]
There have been so many clueless conservatives making outrageous Katrina-related comments, it’s hard to know which is the worst. Was it Dennis Hastert’s claim that a lot of New Orleans should be “bulldozed“? Or maybe Linda Chavez saying that New Orleans’ problem is its population is made up of people “for whom sitting and waiting […]
Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that wouldn’t generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers: * California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) will reportedly announce his re-election campaign next week, sometime between Friday’s close of the 2005 legislative session and Sept. 16, the opening day of the state GOP’s […]
If you paid careful attention to yesterday’s press briefing with Scott McClellan, you might have picked up on the fact that FEMA Director Mike Brown and/or DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff might not be employed by the Bush administration much longer. It was subtle, but it was there. Consider this surprisingly-tense exchange between McClellan and NBC’s […]
At first blush, yesterday’s reports about a joint bi-partisan investigation into the failures before and after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast sounds like a positive development. Republican Congressional leaders on Wednesday announced a joint House-Senate inquiry into failures surrounding the response to Hurricane Katrina as the Bush administration requested $51.8 billion in new relief […]
At Tuesday’s cabinet meeting, the president denounced the “blame game.” Later that day, at the White House press briefing, Scott McClellan used the phrase seven times. At yesterday’s briefing, he used it eight more. The phrase seems to put some critics on the defensive, but as Jonathan Cohn explains in a helpful New Republic column, […]
That’s what I get for giving the administration the benefit of the doubt. When I first heard about a FEMA request that journalists not photograph dead bodies found in Louisiana, I actually understood the basic reasoning. There are a lot of families with missing loved ones and no one wants to learn of a friend […]
Shortly before breaking for the August recess, Congress approved a sweeping energy bill crafted by the White House. The legislation was hardly a step in the right direction — the bill, by its sponsors own admission, does nothing to address energy prices or reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil. What’s worse, the Bush-backed energy […]
(Editor’s Note: The Carpetbagger Report, as regular readers know, has joined the Coalition for Darfur, a bi-partisan online initiative created to raise awareness and resources to address the crisis. This is the latest in a series of posts from the Coalition.) Two weeks ago, the “Be a Witness” campaign reported that it couldn’t even pay […]