Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has been the subject of two ongoing investigations — one from the Justice Department, the other from the Securities and Exchange Commission — stemming from his controversial sale of stock in HCA, a hospital corporation owned and operated by his family. Given how long ago these probes began, one would […]
Conservative radio talk-show host Dennis Prager believes the political world is wildly off base when it comes to the truly dangerous religio-political movement. For Prager, it’s not the religious right, it’s the harder-to-find religious left that’s the problem. Unfortunately, it seems Prager’s confused. From the outset, Prager is troubled by the fact that no one […]
The internal conflict between career Justice Department attorneys in the Civil Rights Division and Bush’s political appointees has been getting considerably worse the past few months. When career attorneys reviewed Georgia’s poll-tax law and found that it was discriminatory against minority voters. Bush-appointed higher-ups quickly overruled them. Similarly, attorneys in the Civil Rights Division concluded […]
MSNBC’s Tom Curry had an online column earlier this week suggesting that the time is ripe for a major third party to step up and have a significant impact on the U.S. political system. At a time when opinion polls indicate that Americans hold both major political parties in low esteem, can a third party […]
Just to follow up on yesterday’s post about Bill Clinton “annoying” Bush administration officials by making a surprise, last-minute appearance at a U.N. conference on global warming, there’s a fascinating back story that highlights the child-like behavior of the president’s envoys to the gathering. New York magazine’s Greg Sargent learned that Bush officials “privately threatened” […]
Guest Post by Morbo You know it’s going to be a bad day when a gang of men dressed entirely in black abduct you, give you an enema, pump you full of sleeping drugs and fly you to Macedonia. This happened two years ago to a German citizen named Khaled el-Masri. His crime was — […]
Guest Post by Morbo I continue to have a strange fascination with the Minutemen, the self-appointed border patrol vigilantes whom I’m convinced are just plain, old-fashioned racists who don’t like Hispanics. A short, but amusing piece in the Dec. 12 “New Yorker” by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan only reinforced my beliefs. Kurtz-Phelan attended a Minutemen recruiting drive […]
Guest Post by Morbo For the smartest woman in the world, Marilyn vos Savant sure says some dumb things. In case you’re not familiar with her, vos Savant pens a regular column in “Parade,” a free magazine distributed with many Sunday papers. Because she’s a super genius — the Guinness Book of World Records says […]
Guest Post by Morbo I won’t be in line waiting to see “The Chronicles of Narnia” this weekend. Because I have kids, I’ve read a lot of kid-lit. Some of it is quite good. Lemony Snicket’s books make me laugh out loud. He loads them up with allusions that he must know only parents will […]
I’ve marveled, on more than one occasion, about the series of scandals tied the Bush administration. But we’ve reached an interesting point in Bush’s presidency in which serious controversies, some of which point to possible crimes, have become so common, they hardly cause any excitement at all. It’s become routine to see a half-dozen stories […]