In case readers are interested, I’d like to give everyone a heads-up about a just-posted article at The American Prospect that I wrote. It’s called, “Is our president learning?” Here’s a teaser: In January 2005, George W. Bush sat down with C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb, longtime host of Booknotes. When Lamb asked the president how much […]
The last we heard about the UK terrorist plot to hijack 10 U.S.-bound planes, the story was looking a little shaky. The suspects didn’t have the experience needed to carry out a plot, nor did they have materials or training. The Bush administration pushed the British to move before they wanted to; James Galbraith noted […]
Earlier this year, the Bush administration announced that it no longer saw any reason for the [tag]Census[/tag] Bureau to keep producing its annual report on poverty and income. It may be the only government survey that researchers how income changes affect their poverty status, health coverage, and use of government services, but the Bush gang […]
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: * Since [tag]Ned Lamont[/tag] defeated [tag]Joe Lieberman[/tag] in the Connecticut Dem Senate primary, a handful of Dem senators have said they’d ignore the will of the party’s voters and back Lieberman anyway. Yesterday, […]
Oh, so [tag]John Mark Karr[/tag] didn’t kill [tag]JonBenet Ramsey[/tag]. The [tag]media[/tag] didn’t have to treat this as the biggest story of the year. Now they tell us. Truth be told, if Karr had been guilty of the crime, the media’s breathless coverage would have been excessive to the point of embarrassment. But now that Karr […]
It’s quintessential Washington: Sens. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) introduced legislation that would create a searchable database of government contracts, grants, insurance, loans and financial assistance, worth $2.5 trillion last year. Anyone would be able to search by by agency, recipient, and type of assistance. The point, of course, is adding a layer […]
Dick Cheney addressed the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention in Nevada yesterday — no, the lengths Cheney went to in order to avoid military service didn’t come up — and explained his administration’s amazing success in defeating enemies around the globe. At least as he sees it. Because we’re likely to hear most of […]
Rockey Vaccarella, the Republican activist who drove a “replica” of a FEMA trailer from New Orleans to Washington for a carefully staged photo-op, said victims of Hurricane Katrina should be “happy with what they got.” Looking at the numbers, they didn’t get much. * Less than half of the city’s pre-storm population of 460,000 has […]
For months, the talk in conservative circles has been about the strength of the economy — and the unknown variable that leads Americans to express widespread discontent about the president’s handling of the economy. Growth in the GDP is relatively good, the unemployment rate isn’t awful, interest rates are fairly low, so what’s with all […]
The New York Times reported today that another seven American troops died in Iraq, just in the last two days. Their deaths coincided with 28 deaths in Diwaniya when the Iraqi army clashed for hours with members of a militia loyal to Moktada al-Sadr and an additional 13 people died in Baghdad when a car […]