Archive for May, 2009
Denial Is The First Step To Admitting You Have A Problem
Looks like the SEC is once again fixing to do what it does best. And that’s not policing our capital markets and protecting investors. It’s explaining to the world how (fill in the blank) could possibly have happened. (First, though, it will need to get around to admitting to itself that it has actually happened.) [...]
Pure Undistilled Garbage Of The First Water
Four years ago, the guy who currently makes the office of Senate Minority Leader a subject of widespread ridicule, Mitch McConnell, was holding forth passionately against filibusters of “any President’s judicial nominees”: Because of the unprecedented obstruction of our Democratic colleagues, the Republican conference intends to restore the principle that, regardless of party, any President’s [...]
Ticking Time Bomb Scenario, Version 2.0
It looks like the ticking time bomb scenario is in need of a little revision. One Monday, Liz Cheney claimed that this is “exactly the situation my daddy these folks were in”: So, if you knew that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had information about an imminent threat on the United States. Information that would result in [...]
The Party Of No And Do Nothing
House Republicans propose to roll up their sleeves and really go to work stalling “Henry Waxman’s ambitious climate change bill” in committee. Working in their favor is the fact that the Energy and Commerce Committee has 59 members, and many Democrats on the committee are “worried about the impact of energy proposals on hometown industries.” [...]
Presidential Prevarication Continues Unabated
(1) More Bald-faced Lies From Barack Obama If Barack Obama sits back and doesn’t “block the court-ordered release of photographs depicting the abuse of detainees held by U.S. authorities abroad … the most direct consequence of releasing them … would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in danger.” Just to [...]
Depends on the Definition of Unlikely
Trump on Prejean: Same as Obama – Politico (5/12/09): President Barack Obama ended up in the middle of an unlikely controversy this morning — the debate over Miss California’s position on gay marriage. At a press conference addressing Carrie Prejean’s disputed title in the Miss USA competition, pageant owner Donald Trump compared Prejean’s stated views [...]
Rampant Republican Resurgence
When moderate Republican Arlen Specter left the Republican party, that was visible evidence of the imminent resurgence of the Republican party: Sen. Arlen Specter’s decision to switch parties and run for reelection as a Democrat foreshadows a Republican landslide in midterm elections, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) argued Wednesday. “This is the first visible evidence that [...]
CIA: Liars, Clowns or Both?
(1) Bob Graham was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2002. Today he weighed in on last week’s controversy over whether Nancy Pelosi was or wasn’t briefed in September 2002 about the use of waterboarding and other torture techniques on Abu Zubaydah. To recap, the CIA made some absurdly half-hearted assertions which essentially [...]
Public Service Display Of The Badly Drug-Addled Brain
It’s a funny world when Premiere Radio Networks (a wholly owned subsidiary of Clear Channel Communications) is willing to pay $50 million a year to put on the air an extended public service message which demonstrates, by example, how badly drug addiction can addle the brain. Of course, it can afford to do so only [...]
So Help Him God?
Yesterday, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Dick Cheney unambiguously declared his willingness to testify before Congress about Bush-era torture policies: SCHIEFFER: Would you go back and talk to the Congress? CHENEY: Certainly. I’ve made it very clear that I feel very strongly that what we did here was exactly the right thing to do. And [...]