Stop me if you’ve heard this one: incompetent chief executive who can’t win policy debates on the substance, uses public funds to create fake news videos. This time, it isn’t President Bush; it’s Schwarzenegger. Using taxpayer money, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s administration has sent television stations statewide a mock news story extolling a proposal that would […]
Last month, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the new chair of the DCCC, started raising a fuss over the Bush administration’s disparate standards for importation of Canadian prescription medication and Canadian beef. The safe one can’t come in to the U.S., while the suspect one can. Emanuel wrote to Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman and HHS Secretary Tommy […]
That the Bush administration opposes needle-exchange programs, despite their success in stemming the AIDS epidemic, is not a surprise. It’s the way the administration is opposing the programs that’s interesting. The administration claims that the evidence for the effectiveness of needle exchange is shaky. An official who requested anonymity directed us to a number of […]
David Broder got an advance look at the latest report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and, for reasons that are unclear, seemed shocked to discover that the Bush White House seems anxious to turn its back on the nation’s poorest families. By studying the spending caps Bush proposed for the 57 broad […]
I sometimes get the impression that people believe today’s politicians are scandal-ridden scoundrels while our leaders of yesteryear were paragons of virtue. The reality is generally the exact opposite. I was reminded of this point while reading Georgetown’s Michael Kazin’s terrific review in the New York Times yesterday on Ted Widmer’s new biography on Martin […]
Not content with one venture into Mess O’ Potamia, at least one Republican lawmaker seems anxious to start another — this time, with nukes. Now we know where Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Texas) thinks the weapons of mass destruction are buried: in Syria, which he said he’d like to nuke to smithereens. Speaking at a veterans’ […]
I don’t know or care about the Oscars, but there’s just something amusing about Robin Williams’ plan to lampoon James Dobson last night, and the decision to clamp down on the ridicule. ABC executives have forced Robin Williams to drop a comic song from the Oscars show that might well have proved one of the […]