Today’s edition of quick hits. * A front-page WaPo report yesterday suggested Dems were poised to give in entirely on the president’s demands on war funding, but today, the caucuses appeared to be standing relatively firm: “Congressional Democrats have signaled they’re not ready to back down in their confrontation with President Bush on Iraq, spurring […]
House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have been going back and forth in an increasingly interesting feud for several weeks now. Today, it got a little more interesting. The exchanges have been about whether Rice will show up for a hearing about the administration’s pre-war intelligence failures, specifically […]
Earlier this week, after the president vetoed Congress’ war-funding bill, Democratic leaders posed a challenge to the president and other war supporters: come up with a policy. “If the president thinks by vetoing this bill he will stop us from working to change the direction of the war in Iraq, he is mistaken,” Senate Majority […]
Charles Krauthammer, today: The decision to go to war was made by a war cabinet consisting of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld. No one in that room could even remotely be considered a neoconservative. Key participants in the Project for the New American Century and their positions in the […]
ABC News’ The Note suggested this morning that Mitt Romney “looked presidential” during last night’s debate, but he also appeared “a smidge too pat in listing obscure terrorist groups.” As a substantive matter, it’s considerably worse than The Note made it sound. Chris Matthews asked Romney about his recent comments that it’s not worth the […]
Rudy Giuliani repeated Ronald Reagan’s name more than any of his rivals last night, but one of the references went a little too far. Chris Matthews had raised a plausible hypothetical: The prime minister of Israel calls the White House to alert the president that Israel is about to strike Iran’s nuclear sites and he […]
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: * Florida has thrown a huge monkey wrench into the presidential nominating schedule by moving its primary up to Jan. 29, a week ahead of the Feb. 5 primaries that make up a […]
For Justice Department officials, testifying before Congress should be fairly easy, even when it comes to a scandal like the prosecutor purge. A witness has plenty of time to prepare, go over his or her notes, and review relevant documents. In fact, committees let witnesses know in advance lawmakers’ areas of interest, so they’ll be […]
Ideally, every presidential debate would be filled with substantive, policy-oriented questions about the most pressing issues of the day. There is, of course, a downside to this: candidates are prepped with rehearsed and predictable soundbites to these questions, and for the most part, in a primary debate they’ll all say the same thing. To actually […]
James Comey was deputy attorney general from 2003 until August 2005, and is one of the few Bush administration officials who still maintains credibility and stature within the political establishment. So when Comey appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to testify on the prosecutor purge scandal, his perspective mattered. And as the LA Times put […]