Sometimes, these guys make it too easy. White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, today: “No, benchmarks were something that Congress wanted to use as a metric. And we’re going to produce a report. But the fact is that the situation is bigger and more complex, and you need to look at the whole picture.” Reality, […]
Media Matters took on a fascinating task, researching which newspaper columnists have the widest reach, and the most readers, in the country. It appears to be the first time anyone has amassed this data on every daily newspaper in the country, with MM contacting each paper individually to ask which syndicated columnists are published on […]
The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals is now one-third empty: there are five vacancies on the 15-member bench. The Senate wants to fill those vacancies, but the president’s nominees have proven to be so controversial that he’s been forced to pull a few who couldn’t even pass an up-or-down vote. To help Bush out, Virginia’s […]
Two short weeks ago, it looked as if the White House wanted to play nice when it came to replacing Alberto Gonzales. The NYT reported that the Bush gang had even gone so far as to ask Dems on the Senate Judiciary Committee for input on the next Attorney General nominee. “In the past,” Chuck […]
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: * AP: “Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is calling for the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. combat brigades from Iraq, with the pullout being completed by the end of next year…. ‘The best […]
I’ve been assuming for months that Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign would start to falter, as more Americans heard about his tarnished 9/11 halo, his megalomaniacal tendencies, his shameless exaggerations, and for GOP primary voters, his beliefs on practically every social issue they care about (abortion, gays, immigration, guns, and stem-cell research). And yet, where’s the […]
This just hurts. Six years after the 9/11 terror attacks on the U.S., it seems the media still have some educational work to do. A new CBS/New York Times poll reveals that even today, 1 in 3 Americans believe that “Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11th, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World […]
About a month ago, the NYT published an op-ed from seven infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division. The piece, “The War as We Saw It,” was a sweeping condemnation of everything we’ve heard of late from the Kristol-McCain-Lieberman-O’Hanlon-Pollack crowd. As these seven troops explained, U.S. forces are an unwelcome occupying force, the […]
It looks like the White House has settled on its new p.r. strategy. The Bush gang is going to boast that their tactics in Iraq have been so successful, the president has graciously decided to end the surge. White House aides said they are working on a 20-minute prime-time speech that Bush will give tomorrow […]
It seems absurd, but after four-and-a-half years of combat, yesterday was the most substantive policy discussion about Iraq policy in the Senate to date. Indeed, Slate’s Fred Kaplan said yesterday’s grillings of Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker were “remarkably, the first real hearings about this war,” which put “substantive issues, and useful words, […]