Georgia re-redistricting on its way to governor’s desk

As Ed Kilgore first reported yesterday afternoon, Georgia Republicans, as expected, passed a measure to redraw the state’s congressional boundaries as part of the GOP’s latest re-redistricting stunt. Georgia state legislators completed action on a mid-decade redistricting effort Tuesday, sending their proposed Congressional boundaries to Gov. Sonny Perdue (R). The state House passed the remapping […]

Humanitarian Workers at Risk

(Editor’s Note: The Carpetbagger Report, as I’ve mentioned in recent weeks, joined the Coalition for Darfur, a bi-partisan online initiative created to raise awareness and resources to address the crisis. This is the third in a series of posts from the Coalition.) Last week, the United Nations was forced to withdraw its staff from parts […]

Bubble Boy starts getting the wrong kind of attention

In theory, the idea sounded pretty good. As part of its drive to privatize Social Security, the Bush White House decided it would circumvent the national media and start engaging local and regional media. National reporters, apparently, stopped seeing anything newsworthy about the president answering scripted questions from pre-screened sycophants, so local news outlets offered […]

DeLay Unplugged

People say different things when they’re among friends than they do when everyone’s watching. It’s only human nature; we’re more inclined to let our guard down and speak our minds when we’re confident that no one will use our words against us later. Which is exactly why Tom DeLay’s remarks to the Family Research Council […]

Hiding failure — again

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Bush administration looks at an issue, finds inconvenient facts, then hides the facts and pretends they don’t exist. Sound familiar? It’s happened again. U.S. law enforcement agents working at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, concluded that controversial interrogation practices used there by the Defense Department produced […]

Tuesday’s political round-up

My new daily feature about campaign-related news items that wouldn’t generate a post of their own, but may nevertheless be of interest to political observers: * In Pennsylvania, a new poll shows state Treasurer Bob Casey Jr. (D) leading Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum (R) by the narrowest of margins — 44% to 43%. * […]

Who is William Hammesfahr?

There’s this name that keeps popping up in stories relating to Terri Schiavo: Dr. William Hammesfahr. He’s been quoted in thousands of publications and programs over the last week or so, primarily in conservative outlets (such as TV preacher Pat Robertson’s 700 Club), but also in mainstream publications such as the Miami Herald, LA Times, […]

The Patriot Act’s organized opposition

There’s always been a rather eccentric group of opponents for Bush’s Patriot Act, particularly among old-school conservatives who are uncomfortable with sweeping new powers for the federal government. With this in mind, I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that the opponents are creating a new organizational network with an interesting membership list. Chaired by […]

Inconvenient evidence is to be ignored, not embraced

As if Bush’s EPA needed another black eye in its handling of mercury pollution rules, it has one. When the Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a rule last week to limit mercury emissions from U.S. power plants, officials emphasized that the controls could not be more aggressive because the cost to industry already far exceeded the […]

A lesson in spending political capital

After the election, talk of Bush’s “political capital” was all the rage. We finally had a new political buzz phrase, which according to Karl Rove and the rest of the “strategery” team, would be key to the debate over privatizing Social Security. The basic premise behind all of the “political capital” talk was the notion […]