I’m sorry to keep gushing over Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid all the time, but he continues to impress me more and more every day. This week, in particular, has offered sterling examples of why the Senate Dems clearly picked the right man for the job. National Journal’s Congress Daily noted today, for example, that […]
First, Republicans in the U.S. House thought it would be a great idea to help Tom DeLay by changing the rule forbidding House leaders to serve despite being under indictment. Second, those same lawmakers saw no problem in gutting the power of the House Ethics Committee, all because it had the temerity to admonish DeLay […]
It’s been heartening to see congressional Dems having a field day, hammering the Bush administration for deceiving Congress over the cost of the president’s Medicare scheme. Democratic lawmakers seized on news yesterday that the Medicare prescription drug benefit will cost much more than first projected, blasting the Bush administration and saying it cannot be trusted […]
For the better part of four years, there have been accounts from Clinton-era White House aides explaining how they tried to warn Bush aides about the looming al Queda threat in 2001, but those warnings went unheeded. In particular, Newsweek published a devastating critique of the administration’s intelligence breakdowns in May 2002, noting that Clinton’s […]
Considering that she’s replacing Rod Paige, Bush’s most fatuous cabinet secretary, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is already suffering from the soft bigotry of low expectations. Nevertheless, she’s managing to be unimpressive anyway. Literally a day after getting sworn in, Spellings’ first step as the nation’s top educator was to warn PBS about “Postcards from Buster,” […]
Dick Cheney sure did create a powerful, well-managed company, didn’t he? His Halliburton is clearly deserving of lucrative, no-bid contracts. It’s not as if Halliburton has lost track of nuclear material for months without telling anyone, right? Oh wait. A Halliburton Co. shipment of radioactive material went missing in October but the company didn’t alert […]
South Carolina’s Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) has developed something of a reputation, which is not altogether unearned, for trying to play in straight when it comes to Social Security privatization, particularly when it comes to the plan’s price tag. To his credit, Graham, at least when compared to his some of his GOP colleagues, usually […]
There were a few interesting angles to yesterday’s news that the Bush administration was warned, despite remarks to the contrary, about al Queda hijacking airplanes before 9/11. The first and obvious one, of course, is how this… In the months before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal aviation officials reviewed dozens of intelligence reports that warned […]
A Washington Post poll on Social Security this week offered Dems yet another hint about how best to criticize the White House scheme: the public doesn’t much care for sticker shock. [L]ike nearly half of those surveyed, [Jerry Traylor, 58, a retired government worker who lives in Newell, Ala.] wrongly believed that the costs of […]
The president entered 2005 with the lowest approval ratings of any president starting his second term since the dawn of modern polling. The inauguration certainly didn’t give Bush a boost, which meant the State of the Union address was a chance for the White House to finally improve the president’s standing with the public. That […]