The Republican establishment is still very much in the midst of a serious internal struggle over how to pay for Katrina relief and recovery. Conservatives want to delay the Medicare expansion by a year, but Bush has rejected the idea. Conservatives want the transportation bill back on the table, but Bush isn’t going for that […]
The picture of the president strolling through flower beds while holding hands with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah has been published nearly everywhere, in print and broadcast media. But when an environmental group wanted to use it in a USA Today ad, the newspaper rejected it, saying the photograph was in “bad taste.” Apparently USA Today […]
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: * With just seven weeks until Election Day, New Jersey’s gubernatorial race appears to be getting less competitive, not more. A new Rasmussen poll shows Sen. Jon Corzine (D) increasing his lead over […]
When we last checked in with the constitutional amendment to ban flag burning, proponents were busy but short on votes. As of now, the measure has 58 co-sponsors — a number that’s been unchanged for a couple of months. Observers on both sides of the fight say that the effort is a vote or two […]
Recent history tells us that presidents routinely run into trouble in their second terms, and, particularly once would-be successors hit the campaign trail, incumbents start to feel the pressure of being a “lame duck.” But when the reflexively-right-wing American Spectator says Bush is overseeing a “dead agenda,” one can’t help but hear quacking in the […]
U.S. News reported this week that the White House isn’t “expecting big changes in Bush’s poll numbers soon.” They had relatively high hopes for the reaction to last week’s speech in New Orleans, but it was, in the words of one former Bush aide, a “tourniquet.” Except it wasn’t even that. Since the speech was […]
It may sound like inside-pool for the inside-the-beltway crowd, but the wrangling over the style and composition of the probe of Katrina-related failures has become quite a power struggle. If you’re just joining us, the GOP believes in a Republican-driven probe in which officials will investigate themselves, while Dems want an independent analysis. Dems have […]
Yesterday’s White House press briefing was just sad. One almost gets the impression that Scott McClellan’s heart just isn’t in it anymore. He’s going through the motions, offering weak answers and half-truths not because he necessarily wants to deceive, but because coming up with Fleischer-like lies takes too much effort. At one point, for example, […]
In May, Franklin Foer wrote a good piece for The New Republic explaining that disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff had not only corrupted Republican lawmakers like Tom DeLay and Bob Ney, but the rest of the GOP establishment as well. Foer was more right than he probably realized. Abramoff’s connections to the Bush administration had, […]
Just eight days ago, Time’s Mike Allen summarized what he had heard from administration sources about the Bush gang’s “three-part comeback plan” after the debacle that was the federal response to Hurricane Katrina. Let’s take a moment to revisit the list and see how they’re doing. Step One was to “spend freely, and worry about […]