The Carpetbagger Report

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: * Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (R) announced yesterday that his administration was moving forward with a plan to abandon touch-screen electronic voting machines altogether. The controversial machines, installed after the 2000 debacle, proved […]

So, what are we going to call the new compromise resolution in the Senate criticizing the president’s strategy in Iraq? The far-right Washington Times has a suggestion. A bipartisan majority in the Senate yesterday united behind a firm “stay the course” resolution on the war in Iraq, despite searing public criticism from both sides in […]

Back in September, it appeared that ExxonMobil was beginning to turn a corner. The “Competitive Enterprise Institute,” a propaganda machine for Big Oil that created some unintentionally hilarious ad campaigns, would no longer be funded by the energy behemoth. What’s more, ExxonMobil told the Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific academy, that the company would “not […]

The good news is the Senate, after moving past a recent Republican filibuster, finally passed a long-overdue increase in the minimum wage with minimal opposition. The bad news is it wasn’t even close to a “clean” bill, like the one that passed the House. The Senate voted overwhelmingly yesterday to increase the federal minimum wage […]

The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq was such a thorough undertaking, it couldn’t even be completed in time for the president to launch a new escalation policy (which, presumably, would be based in part on the NIE). Given the six months of painstaking work from the entire intelligence community, this would finally be a complete […]

Today’s edition of quick hits. * Many of you spoke about Molly Ivins’ death in yesterday’s Mini-Report, but I wanted to add what a loss this is to the American discourse. Ivins was nothing short of a national treasure. Her combination of wit, strength, and intelligence was unrivaled in the national media. To say that […]

After weeks of fairly intense wrangling, it looked as if the Senate was ready to approve a bi-partisan, non-binding resolution in opposition to the president’s escalation strategy in Iraq. Dems wanted a more assertive resolution with stronger language; Republican war skeptics preferred a watered down measure; and a compromise measure landed somewhere in between. As […]

The political world made Sen. Joe Biden’s (D-Del.) life a little miserable yesterday. On the day he kicked off his presidential campaign, Biden referred to Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) as, among other qualities, “clean.” His choice of words could have been better, and I don’t want to pile on. But in the extensive media coverage […]

He’s not nearly as well known as Dobson, Falwell, and Robertson, but D. James Kennedy is a major religious right player — and a bit of a nut. As Kennedy told his supporters a few years ago, “How much more forcefully can I say it? The time has come, and it is long overdue, when […]

To hear the White House tell it, the president’s latest escalation plan includes sending 21,500 additional U.S. troops into Iraq. For many military and policy experts, that’s far too many, and the number should be going down, not up. In an added twist, however, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the administration has vastly underestimated […]