If there’s one point that the White House has made clear of late, it’s that questioning the administration during the war is, using Bush logic, to undermine the country. The enemy thrives of dissension from within, the theory goes, so our troops are literally in greater danger if critics of the administration, especially those in […]
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: * Rick Santorum’s re-election campaign suffered another setback late last week when the Pennsylvania House voted 175 to 24 to restrict eligibility for education payments to families who don’t live in the state. […]
The Supreme Court issued two rulings today on public support for the Ten Commandments. They came to two different conclusions about where the church-state line rests. Context, in these cases, was everything. The first case was McCreary County v. ACLU, which dealt with a controversy out of Kentucky in which county officials displayed the religious […]
It should be a no-brainer. If the First Amendment means anything, it means public officials cannot use the power of the government to endorse one religion’s sacred text and promote that text in official settings. Obvious though this may be, it was a 5-to-4 ruling that preserved church-state separation today. “The touchstone for our analysis […]
The ongoing criminal investigation of the Bush White House (Plame Game) took an important turn this morning when the Supreme Court rejected appeals from Matt Cooper and Judith Miller. The Supreme Court rejected appeals Monday from two journalists who have refused to testify before a grand jury about the leak of an undercover CIA officer’s […]
We learned on Friday that Bush’s Department of Veterans Affairs has come up $1 billion short in meeting the current health care needs for veterans. Today we learn that this is but one of the VA’s many priorities. “As you know,” Deputy Undersecretary [at the Veterans Health Administration] Laura Miller said on the May 27 […]
House Ethics Committee Chairman Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) has not exactly impressed his colleagues with stellar work. The committee stood at a standstill for most of the year until Hastings agreed to reverse ethics rules that had been manipulated to benefit Tom DeLay. Since then, Hastings’ committee has conducted no work because he insists on […]
Some of have you asked for an update on our friends in the Denver Three (Alex Young, Karen Bauer, and Leslie Weise), whom, you’ll recall, were removed from a public presidential event because a Republican staffer didn’t like their anti-war bumper sticker. The three have been remarkably successful in keeping their story alive, White House […]
Baseball in Washington seems to be something of a success right now. The Nationals are winning, merchandise is selling, and the stadium is full. But Republicans are unhappy about the team’s ownership prospects. Since the team moved from Montreal, the Nationals have technically been owned they Major League Baseball until new ownership can be put […]
There were any number of entertaining moments during Donald Rumsfeld’s appearance on Meet the Press yesterday, but one stood out for me. Tim Russert noted that Dick Cheney, just days before our invasion of Iraq began, dismissed the idea of long, costly and bloody battle with significant American casualties. Russert asked Rumsfeld if that was […]