The God machine was busier than usual this week trying to keep up with Ted Haggard’s “indiscretions,” but now that his career is left in tatters, it’s worth taking a moment to get to know his replacement. Meet Rod Parsley, perhaps best known for his role in Ohio’s right-wing Restoration Project, and his desire to […]
Guest Post by Morbo A few months ago, I wrote a smart-alecky post about pharmacists who refuse to fill birth-control prescriptions because of their religious beliefs. I asserted that we should support them and then find similarly bogus reasons for refusing to do our jobs while still getting paid. I should have realized that in […]
Guest Post by Morbo Scott L. Rolle is a Republican running for attorney general in Maryland. His candidacy is faltering, and polls show that Democrat Douglas F. Gansler is cruising to an easy victory. How is Rolle reacting? Is he working overtime to connect with voters or retooling his campaign? Nope. He’s quietly pushing a […]
Today’s edition of quick hits. * Time reported last night that U.S. Sgt. Santos Cardona, a military dog handler convicted for his role in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, was ordered back to Iraq to help train Iraqi security forces. It was one of those decisions that seemed to defy any notion of common sense […]
I certainly don’t envy the vaunted White House communications operation today. I mean, really — how does one explain carelessly publishing classified nuclear secrets online, over the advice of intelligence experts, to make some right-wing congressmen and blogs happy? Indeed, this is, surprisingly enough, becoming a fairly big story today. Not Kerry-misses-a-word-in-a-joke big, but thanks […]
[tag]Ted Haggard[/tag] hasn’t had a great 24 hours. He’s accused of having sex with a gay male prostitute and using methamphetamine, which forces him to give up his post with his ministry. Later, he acknowledges that “some” of the accusations are true, but he won’t say which. This morning, Haggard’s accuser takes a polygraph test […]
The president was campaigning today in one of the few places where he’s still welcome — a 35% approval rating will do that to a guy — and Mr. “Politics Has Gotten Ugly” rolled out his final campaign pitch of the season. Bush said Democrats calling for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq aren’t unpatriotic, just […]
The NYT’s Thomas Friedman is not known for being “shrill” — that’s Paul Krugman’s job — but reading his columns lately, one gets the sense that Friedman has just been worn down. He seemed to want to give the Bush gang the benefit of the doubt, so much so that when it came to the […]
We learned in August that all was not well in Fox News Land, at least as far as the Republicans’ network’s ratings were concerned. Apparently, matters have not improved since. Fox News is showing serious signs of aging, led by steep audience declines. Fox News’s total audience fell 24 percent in the past year, to […]
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: * In the race Republicans consider their best chance to pick up a Senate seat this year, New Jersey remains close, but several new polls this week show Sen. Bob Menendez (D) clinging […]