The Carpetbagger Report

Harold Meyerson’s assessment of the U.S. role in Iraq is one of the smarter things I’ve read on the war in a while. In just a few hundred words, Meyerson makes clear a reality that seems to elude far too many war supporters: “We are fighting to defend that which is not there.” (via Brian […]

This certainly doesn’t seem kosher. A lawyer for Vice President Dick Cheney told the Secret Service in September to eliminate data on who visited Cheney at his official residence, a newly disclosed letter states. The Sept. 13, 2006, letter from Cheney’s lawyer says logs for Cheney’s residence on the grounds of the Naval Observatory are […]

Usually when a sitting U.S. Senator is caught up in a corruption scandal, it quickly becomes big news. In Sen. Ted Stevens’ (R-Alaska) case, the story is still just below the surface, but if the initial reports are any indication of where this is going, Stevens may soon be going down “the tubes.” TPMM explained […]

I had to read this one several times to make sure I wasn’t confused. At first, it seemed as if the Bush administration would fight voluntary tests on food safety. I thought, “That can’t be right.” And yet, it is. The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their […]

Last week, Al Gore told CNN that one of the problems with our discourse is the media’s obsession with “trivialities.” As Gore sees it, the “line between entertainment and news is now very blurred…. And so we get a lot more of Anna Nicole Smith’s funeral arrangements and Paris Hilton’s legal battles on her jail […]

At various times, administration officials and their allies have offered a variety of historical comparisons for the war in Iraq. To hear war supporters tell it, the conflict is like the Revolutionary War, WWI, the U.S. Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II. Today, the White House has a new historical model […]

Can we stop considering this an open question now? An unclassified summary of outed CIA officer Valerie Plame’s employment history at the spy agency, disclosed for the first time today in a court filing by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, indicates that Plame was “covert” when her name became public in July 2003. […] While assigned […]

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: * Several news outlets report this morning that Fred Thompson will enter the presidential race soon. Thompson apparently dropped the pretenses during a conference call with supporters yesterday, urging 100 potential donors to […]

Whenever the “debate” over U.S. torture policies (that there even is a debate sends a chill down my spine) comes up, it’s generally unhelpful to focus the discussion on efficacy. We know torture is morally indefensible, which is why advocates prefer to move the goalposts — if we know whether torture works in acquiring valuable […]

CNN’s Lou Dobbs seems to have a problem with leprosy. It’s not that he’s contracted the disease, but his reporting on the subject keeps dogging him. In 2005, Dobbs reported that Mexican immigration, in addition to all of its other perceived problems, had generated an outbreak of leprosy in this country over the previous three […]