The showdown over war funding between Congress and the White House is already ugly. Dems have passed a spending bill with a withdrawal timeline, while Bush prefers an open-ended commitment to fighting in Iraq’s civil war indefinitely. Because lawmakers refused to go along with the president’s demand for condition-free money, a veto is now all […]
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: * I was going to report here on Q1 fundraising totals for the presidential candidates, but I think there’s enough interest to warrant a full post. It’ll be up soon. * Former Wisconsin […]
The latest Newsweek poll included a variety of interesting questions about Americans and religious matters, including the not-surprising fact that 91% of the public say they believe in God and almost as many (87 percent) say they identify with a specific religion. Although one in ten (10%) of Americans identify themselves as having “no religion,” […]
The Bush administration’s purge-scandal strategy took an odd turn over the weekend, when White House officials pushed Senate Democrats to let Attorney General Alberto Gonzales move up his sworn testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The White House scrambled Sunday to move up [tag]Attorney General[/tag] [tag]Alberto Gonzales[/tag]’ planned testimony to Congress about his involvement in […]
NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell appeared on the Chris Matthews Show yesterday and mentioned a series of fascinating revelations, not the least of which was that Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, recently sat down for an exclusive chat with Senate Republicans to discuss strategy on Iraq legislation. “Petraeus went to the Republican […]
Sen. [tag]John McCain[/tag] (R-Ariz.) obviously thinks Americans are idiots. There’s no other explanation for his recent foolishness on Iraq, topped off yesterday by a fascinating [tag]shopping[/tag] trip to a [tag]Baghdad[/tag] market. As you probably recall, a week ago McCain appeared on Bill Bennett’s radio program, toeing the right-wing line on “progress” in Iraq. “There are […]
[tag]Matthew Dowd[/tag] has traveled a strange and circuitous political journey. A top strategist for Texas Democrats in the 1990s, Dowd left the party in 1999 to join [tag]George W. Bush[/tag]’s campaign team. He bought into the “uniter-not-divider” rhetoric and became a key [tag]Bush[/tag] insider, eventually becoming the president’s chief campaign strategist for the 2004 campaign. […]
Speaker Pelosi’s planned visit to Syria next week seems to have generated some over-the-top outrage from our friends on the right, spurred on by the White House. The Bush administration has resisted significant contact with the Syrian government, accusing it of meddling in Lebanon, supporting terrorism and being unhelpful on Iraq. “We don’t think it’s […]
To his credit, the president showed up at Walter Reed Army Medical Center yesterday and said the words a lot of recuperating troops and their families wanted to hear: “I apologize for what they went through, and we’re going to fix the problem.” That’s the good news. The bad news is, Bush may not have […]
You may have heard about this elsewhere, but Matt Stoller sparked an interesting debate the other day by noting what appears to be a journalistic ethics problem posed by James Carville’s political commentary on CNN. On Wednesday’s Situation Room, for example, Carville, a contracted CNN political commentator, offered some relatively mild criticism of Barack Obama. […]