You know those meme questionnaires that sometimes make their way around the blogosphere? I rarely partake in them — in large part because I’m rarely tagged. But a relatively new seven-question quiz is making the rounds, and my friend Tim at Balloon Juice has tagged me. And without further ado… 1. Name a book that […]
Guest Post by Morbo Like a lot of state legislatures, Indiana’s House of Representatives opens its sessions with a prayer by a guest religious leader. The problem is, the prayers were almost always Christian and included references to Jesus Christ. This annoyed some people, who got the American Civil Liberties Union to sue. The ACLU […]
Guest Post by Morbo This post doesn’t deal with politics but might strike a chord in those of you of a certain age. This week, Iwao Takamoto, the animator who created Scooby-Doo, died of a heart attack in Los Angeles. He was 81. I watched Scooby-Doo regularly when I was kid, yet I had never […]
Guest Post by Morbo I remember once hearing Dick Armey address an adoring audience of Christian conservatives. He told them how much he loves Jesus and hates legal abortion. His delivery was very unimpressive — he tended to mumble — but the crowd loved him. As he prepared to leave Congress in 2002, the Christian […]
Today’s edition of quick hits. * The good news is the House passed a measure today to let Medicare negotiate lower prescription drug prices for seniors. The bad news is, it passed 255 to 170, which is short of the two-thirds majority needed to override a presidential veto (which is likely). * Olbermann. Special Comment. […]
For those of you who don’t peruse the right side of the blogosphere, you may not realize that a surprising number of conservatives are apoplectic about an exchange between Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice over personal investment in the war in Iraq. This piece in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post […]
I noted earlier this week that the president went from being adamantly opposed to a troop escalation in Iraq to being adamantly supportive of a troop escalation in Iraq. Given the circumstances, it was imperative that Bush explain how and why he came to change his mind. In remarks to troops at Fort Benning yesterday, […]
Bush administration lawyers have suffered a variety of embarrassing legal setbacks in their handling of Guantanamo detainees, in large part because the president’s team has tortured them and denied them due process rights. As Michael Froomkin noted, the administration is now poised to lose in court, so one of Bush’s lawyers has decided to take […]
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas) has been generally right about the war in Iraq from the beginning. Unlike many of his fellow Dems on the committee, for example, it was Reyes who opposed the original war resolution in 2002, saying the president hadn’t convinced him that Iraq was a threat or connected to […]
This is sadly typical of the Bush administration. (via my friend Mark Gisleson) Top officials at the Internal Revenue Service are pushing agents to prematurely close audits of big companies with agreements to have them pay only a fraction of the additional taxes that could be collected, according to dozens of I.R.S. employees who say […]