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: * We saw the Q1 fundraising totals for the presidential candidates a couple of weeks ago, but those numbers didn’t reflect how much of their coffers the candidates spent and how much cash […]
Three years ago, there were a few interesting studies measuring public awareness when it came to current events. The National Annenberg Election Survey found that those who watched “The Daily Show” were the best informed news consumers, while a study from the Program on International Policy Attitudes found that Fox News viewers were the least […]
With the news developments in the prosecutor purge scandal coming fairly quickly over the last couple of days, let’s not overlook the fascinating insights from Michael Battle, who just so happened to be the hatchet man who fired the eight U.S. Attorneys, and then resigned when the heat arrived. There have been a variety of […]
A month ago today, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Tony Snow if the president might have been directly involved in suggesting the purge of U.S. Attorneys. Snow said, “Anything’s possible … but I don’t think so.” Keep that background in mind when you consider a very interesting item from The Albuquerque Journal that […]
With [tag]Attorney General[/tag] [tag]Alberto Gonzales[/tag] poised to testify under oath tomorrow before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the embattled AG is engaged in a bit of p.r. offensive, publishing a WaPo op-ed and previewing tomorrow’s testimony. It’s hard to offer any real analysis of Gonzales’ previews; he doesn’t exactly say much. (James Brown’s “Talkin’ loud but […]
The presidential campaign process usually includes an odd irony — while being a presidential candidate seems to automatically raise one’s stature, the process also makes the candidates appear small. Flaws become exaggerated, minor gaffes become major news stories, innocuous conduct is spun into controversies by a hungry media, policy positions divide supporters, and microscopic scrutiny […]
The good news is, an outside expert, who works for neither Congress nor the White House, will try to recover some of the Bush gang’s missing emails. The Senate Judiciary Committee requested the independent consultant and today the White House agreed. Of course, there’s a small catch. On Thursday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, […]
At this point, it’s probably a little too easy to highlight the war-related flaws in a Charles Krauthammer column, but Krauthammer’s latest was so entertaining, I can’t myself. By the day, the debate at home about Iraq becomes increasingly disconnected from the realities of the war on the ground. The Democrats in Congress are so […]
I don’t want to alarm anyone, but telling teenagers not to have sex apparently doesn’t stop them from having sex. A long-awaited national study has concluded that abstinence-only sex education, a cornerstone of the Bush administration’s social agenda, does not keep teenagers from having sex. Neither does it increase or decrease the likelihood that if […]
What have we learned over the last half-day or so about the prosecutor purge scandal? Plenty. * We learned a couple of weeks ago that the White House considered a proposal to fire all 93 U.S. Attorneys. Yesterday, NPR explained why: “NPR now has new information about that plan. According to someone who’s had conversations […]