In February, the Washington Post’s Dana Priest and Anne Hull literally stunned the nation with an investigation of the outpatient services at Walter Reed. Americans simply couldn’t believe the treatment veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were receiving. The ensuing scandal led to three major resignations among top Army officials. Today, Priest and […]
Given what we’ve seen and learned over the last several months, one might assume that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would go out of his way to avoid anything that even came close to politicizing U.S. Attorneys’ offices. But Gonzales is apparently incapable of restraint. Knowing that there is literally nothing he could do to get […]
Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was interviewed the other day and asked for his opinion about former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R), who, of course, is a leading Republican presidential candidate. “The real Romney is clearly an extraordinarily ambitious man with no perceivable political principle whatsoever,” Frank said. “He is the most intellectually dishonest human being […]
Just two weeks ago, Condi Rice insisted that the entire Bush administration is absolutely united behind a single policy when it comes to Iran. Never mind all those rumors about Cheney’s team actively circumventing the president’s team in order to instigate a U.S. conflict with Iran, Rice said, everyone is on the same team: “The […]
In April, the Office of Special Counsel launched what the LA Times described as a “broad investigation into key elements of the White House political operations that for more than six years have been headed by chief strategist Karl Rove.” The OSC, generally a fairly obscure federal investigative unit that reviews Hatch Act violations and […]
I honestly wonder sometimes which country these guys are living in. Hannity: I think the Democrats have gone further left than anybody would have anticipated. I think these bloggers have really gotten to them. I think they’re really positioning themselves that they’re gonna have a very difficult time moving center. Do you see that? Russert: […]
In an excellent front-page WaPo piece, Steve Fainaru highlights today one of the most important stories of the war in Iraq that gets a fraction of the attention it deserves: private contractors from companies like Blackwater, which have been engaged in parallel “surges” of their own. Private security companies, funded by billions of dollars in […]
Tony Snow stuck to the White House line on March 15 when describing the U.S. Attorney purge: “[W]hat the President has — the Department of Justice has made recommendations, they’ve been approved. And it’s pretty clear that these things are based on performance and not on sort of attempts to do political retaliation, if you […]
It was late on a Friday afternoon, so I suppose an key Bush administration resignation was pretty much inevitable. A fifth senior Justice Department official announced his resignation yesterday in the wake of the controversy over the firings of nine U.S. attorneys last year. Michael J. Elston, chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul […]
First up from The God Machine this week is a story about one of the glaring problems with rewarding religious ministries through faith-based federal appropriations. In theory, it was simple: Congress gave two decommissioned Coast Guard cutters to a faith-based group in California, directing that the ships be used only to provide medical services to […]