Today’s edition of quick hits. * Time reported last night that U.S. Sgt. Santos Cardona, a military dog handler convicted for his role in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, was ordered back to Iraq to help train Iraqi security forces. It was one of those decisions that seemed to defy any notion of common sense […]
I certainly don’t envy the vaunted White House communications operation today. I mean, really — how does one explain carelessly publishing classified nuclear secrets online, over the advice of intelligence experts, to make some right-wing congressmen and blogs happy? Indeed, this is, surprisingly enough, becoming a fairly big story today. Not Kerry-misses-a-word-in-a-joke big, but thanks […]
[tag]Ted Haggard[/tag] hasn’t had a great 24 hours. He’s accused of having sex with a gay male prostitute and using methamphetamine, which forces him to give up his post with his ministry. Later, he acknowledges that “some” of the accusations are true, but he won’t say which. This morning, Haggard’s accuser takes a polygraph test […]
The president was campaigning today in one of the few places where he’s still welcome — a 35% approval rating will do that to a guy — and Mr. “Politics Has Gotten Ugly” rolled out his final campaign pitch of the season. Bush said Democrats calling for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq aren’t unpatriotic, just […]
The NYT’s Thomas Friedman is not known for being “shrill” — that’s Paul Krugman’s job — but reading his columns lately, one gets the sense that Friedman has just been worn down. He seemed to want to give the Bush gang the benefit of the doubt, so much so that when it came to the […]
We learned in August that all was not well in Fox News Land, at least as far as the Republicans’ network’s ratings were concerned. Apparently, matters have not improved since. Fox News is showing serious signs of aging, led by steep audience declines. Fox News’s total audience fell 24 percent in the past year, to […]
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: * In the race Republicans consider their best chance to pick up a Senate seat this year, New Jersey remains close, but several new polls this week show Sen. Bob Menendez (D) clinging […]
Following up on my earlier post on the subject, I foolishly believed that the fact that the Bush administration, at the request of right-wing blogs, magazines, and lawmakers, accidentally published nuclear secrets on the Internet would have been humiliating to conservatives. They wanted classified materials online so they could prove non-existent WMD were in Iraq, […]
Just to follow up briefly on yesterday’s news, Ted Haggard’s defense changed rather dramatically over night. Accused of paying for gay sex and using illegal drugs, the evangelical leader initially denied wrongdoing. Then the story changed a bit. After Pastor Ted Haggard went public Wednesday night denying allegations of a homosexual affair, senior church officials […]
In the Twilight Zone of Bush administration priorities, those who fail get rewarded, while those who succeed get fired. The fate of Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction [tag]Stuart Bowen[/tag] is one of the more disheartening examples. Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials […]