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How is Gonzales still Attorney General?
Among all the norms that the Bush administration has overturned, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s repeated refusal to answer a direct question in Senate testimony without invoking executive privilege or the Fifth Amendment might be the most outrageous yet. Josh Marshall has the story: In this exchange Sen. Schumer (D) asks Gonzales who sent him and
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Conservative editorials attacking Iraq dissent
In the wake of the attack on Hillary Clinton by Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman, two major conservative editorial pages have published editorials suggesting that supporters of withdrawal from Iraq are treasonous and support genocide. First, the New York Post published an editorial titled “Comforting the enemy” that suggested Clinton’s focus is on “undermining [the]
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David Brooks omits context on economy
David Brooks is pulling out all the conservative pundit tricks in this passage from his column today: If you’ve paid attention to the presidential campaign, you’ve heard the neopopulist story line. C.E.O.’s are seeing their incomes skyrocket while the middle class gets squeezed. The tides of globalization work against average Americans while most of the
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A strangely inept Bush soundbite on SCHIP
President Bush’s soundbite on why he opposes SCHIP expansion is strangely inept: President Bush has threatened to veto what he sees as a huge expansion of the children’s health care program, which he describes as a step “down the path to government-run health care for every American.” It’s funny to denounce your opponents for taking
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Wacky Cindy Sheehan hijinks
Dana Milbank catalogues the wackiness of Cindy Sheehan. How outside the mainstream is Sheehan? Even left-wingers have ostracized her: The left-wing Daily Kos Web site banned her postings because of her challenge to Pelosi. Britain’s Guardian newspaper, which has a large antiwar following, ran an article titled “The epic narcissism of Cindy Sheehan.” How strange
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Romney and the “Obama Osama” sign
Given the long history of Republican attacks on dissent since 9/11, it’s not encouraging to see Mitt Romney posing with an “Obama Osama” sign (via TPM): The best part, though, is the Romney campaign’s claim that the sign was “an alliterative play on words” that wasn’t “equating or comparing anyone” (via Matthew Yglesias). Right. (Note:
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The pro-Obama spammers
The endlessly creative spammers are now using Barack Obama to try to steal your money: If you click through on the email, you get taken to a site (no link for obvious reasons) registered to someone in France that tries to charge you $1-2 to be added to the “petition wall.”
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Fox guest cites “24” as evidence
Media Matters catches former NYPD detective Bo Dietl citing the fictional TV show “24” as evidence of the terrorist threat during a guest appearance on Fox News: The fact of the matter is — I mean, you don’t watch 24 on Fox TV? They’re out there. They’re out there. There are cells out there. We
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Most insipid campaign article yet?
News I can’t use — the New York Times reports on John McCain’s “gay sweater”: When Senator John McCain’s campaign went into a midflight stall last week, it was not only the candidate’s hard-line stance on Iraq or problems with his party’s conservative wing that enthralled the thumb-tapping hordes of the blogosphere. It was leaks
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The crack Bush 41 administration
Here’s a confidence-inspiring anecdote about the current Secretary of Defense from Evan Thomas’s review of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA: Weiner, a reporter for The Times who has covered intelligence for many years, has a good eye for embarrassing detail. High-ranking officials, it appears, were often the last to know. When Iraq