ABC News is reporting that senior Bush administration officials were intimately involved in planning torture regimens for use against terrorism suspects. The officials include vice president Dick Cheney; CIA director George Tenet and his successor, former CIA agent and Congressman Porter Goss; then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice; former secretary of state Colin Powell; former secretary […]

My own Obama speech moment: as I was walking home late on the night of the speech, I ran across four black teenagers, probably 15 or 16 years old. They started to cross the street as I approached. As we passed in opposite directions I heard one of them say, “You see that Charlie Manson-looking […]

John McCain’s campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express, has officially become a rolling punch line to the joke of the GOP presidential primaries.
There has simply never been a primary for either major party as ridiculous as the 2008 GOP effort. Mitt Romney, who would easily have won the Phil Gramm award for financial futility […]

Colin Powell dropped some hints yesterday in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that he’s looking outside the GOP for a candidate to endorse.
Powell, who served as the closer for the Bush administration’s sale of an Iraq invasion with an astonishingly dishonest speech to the United Nations, the world and, most importantly, credulous Washington pundits, […]

Continuing on my quest to close enough browser tabs for my computer to regain some self-respect and nimbleness, here’s the second installment of stuff I either meant to write but never quite did, or did write but for some reason couldn’t bring myself to part with the web page I used for material. See here […]

Nearly a decade of investigations, a lurid final report and a concerted campaign for impeachment left Bill Clinton among the more popular American presidents, with the majority of Americans unconvinced of any need to impeach or remove him from office. Nearly a decade of no investigations, with no coherent summary of misdeeds and no institutional […]

Former Texas Senator Phil Gramm has long held the record for spending the most money to the least effect in a presidential primary campaign. Gramm raised and spent about $20 million in 1995 and early 1996, more than all but eventual GOP nominee Bob Dole, but dropped out of the race before the New Hampshire […]

Regular readers of BTC News may recall that we were early supporters of Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo’s long-shot bid for the Republican presidential nomination, primarily on the strength of, as we said at the time, his willingness “to demystify the deployment of nuclear weapons against the civilian populations of religiously significant cities.” We later renewed […]

Ronald Reagan killed people, and he killed ideals. He began his campaign for the presidency with a paean to states’ rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where that cause—the right to trample the rights of others—had claimed the lives of three civil rights activists barely more than fifteen years earlier. In Central America, he painted nun-raping, dope […]

This hasn’t been a good week for unity. First the Boren/Nunn Unityfest in Oklahoma disbanded with most of the participants refusing to endorse the concept of a third-party “unity government” presidential bid, and now Unity ‘08, the much-mocked third-party post-partisan movement, is cutting off its head and sending it to a reputable cryogenics facility.
All is […]