“If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.”

Outgoing Securities and Exchange Commission chairman William Donaldson was regarded as heavy-handed and overreactive by business groups and Republican SEC commissioners, according to a story in today’s New York Times. His successor will be Republican representative Chris Cox, whose industry experience includes and appears to be limited to being on the receiving end of a [...]

So, no. We’ll call it whatever we want to call it, which is and shall remain “the Downing Street Memo.” And we suggest that anyone so heavily invested in the issue as to wax apopletic about the description of it could probably better spend their energies lobbying for an investigation than going all language cop-ish on us. If you want a paradigm for why Republicans are in power, you probably couldn’t do better than the fact that they’ve gotten away with running a scam war and liberals are arguing among themselves about what to call the evdence of it.

Pondering how our government could have so completely, dramatically failed to secure the sites whose potential insecurity they said compelled us to war creates a sensation akin to what it must be like to hike through an Escher print. Perhaps that’s among the reasons the administration have suffered so little for what they’ve done: the failures are so immense that it’s difficult to wrap one’s mind around them for more than a minute at a time.

Eric Brewer, our White House writer, will be a guest on Brad Friedman’s satellite radio show, The Brad Show, tomorrow (Saturday) at about 10pm EST. The show is available via an internet feed as well as through the IBC Satellite Radio Network. Eric will be talking about his forays into the White House press room [...]

Associated Press is reporting that the Bush administration’s nominee to the post of UN ambassador, John Bolton, flew to Europe early in 2002 to orchestrate the firing of Jose Bustani, the director of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, “because the Brazilian was trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Baghdad,” according to [...]

White House press secretary Scott McClellan tried today to distance the White House from a Pentagon report tying White House personnel to a scandal that has already seen a former Pentagon procurement officer sent to prison in connection with fixing a contract award to aircraft manufacturing giant Boeing.
Meanwhile, Vice president Dick Cheney told CNN’s Larry [...]

Today, Tony Blair came to visit George Bush at the White House. After their private meeting, they spoke briefly to the press. They each gave a short speech (Bush playing Sonny Liston—plodding, belligerent, aggrieved—to Blair’s Cassius Clay—happy, dancing, glittering), then each of them took two questions from the gathering of over 100 reporters in the [...]

The Washington Post reports that Justice Department attornies concluded their civil racketeering case against tobacco companies by requesting penalty payments less than 1/10th as large as had been anticipated by almost everyone involved in the case, including the tobacco companies. Instead of the expected $130 billion penalty, the government without explanation dropped its request to [...]

Mr. Robin Niblett, Executive Vice President of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, is a Briton who thinks that Americans are upset about the Downing Street memo because they have a mistaken idea of what British people mean when they say that something is “fixed around” something else. Today, according to this Mark [...]

I wanted to point everyone to an interesting conversation between Garance Frank-Ruta and Matt Yglesias at Tapped. Yglesias argues that complaints about the entertainment industry are misguided. People might not like the effect it has, but it is inappropriate for a liberal society to regulate such matters. Just because people believe something is a [...]

More than two years after George W. Bush proclaimed an end to major combat operations in Iraq, the US military acknowledge that of the 170,000 Iraqi security forces they say (this week) they have trained, only three battallions are ready to operate independently of US forces.

Michael Kinsley, Editorial Page Editor
The Los Angeles Times
Dear Mike,
I read in the L.A. Times today that you were dragged kicking and screaming to your desk and forced by “200 emails from strangers” to write about the Downing Street Memo. I could tell you weren’t too happy about it from the way you describe your [...]

Keeping in mind that Christians all over the world explain God’s Will in their belief that all Arabs are descended from Ishmael, elder son of Abraham, the Middle Eastern conflicts can be described as extreme sibling rivalries that are also egged on by distant cousins. Crusading Christians have thus widened the scope of Middle Eastern divisions. The prevalent din of opposing divine interpretations consequently allows suppressive brutality to emerge as the clearest and most consistent truth in most parts of the Middle East, proving divinity’s inadequacy for temporal governance.

One of the basic conservative smears of American liberalism is to tar it with the supposed failures of Europe’s Social Democratic left. Essentially they look at Europe’s social welfare system, with its higher unemployment and lower growth rates, and assert that if Democrats had it their way, America would be a similar sort of hellhole. [...]

A (London) Times story about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s lecture yesterday The Media: Public Interest and Common Good exposes much that is flawed in daily news reporting.
“Archbishop Hits out at web-based nonsense” screams the headline. Followed by the thrusting:
THE Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has criticised the new web-based media for “paranoid fantasy, self-indulgent [...]

Florida Governor Jeb Bush has requested an investigation into what he said was an unexplained delay between the time recently the late Terri Schiavo collapsed and the time her husband, Michael Schiavo, called emergency services.
The long-running court battle waged by Mr. Schivao to have his brain-dead wife’s feeding tube removed was at the [...]

BTC News White House correspondent Eric Brewer, the first correspondent to introduce the Downing Street Memo at a White House briefing, has been following the number of results returned by a Google search for the phrase, “Downing Street Memo.” On May 1, the number was near zero. On June 18, the number had reached 1,320,000 in a search for the exact phrase and 1,510,000 for the three words.

A couple of weeks ago I made a brief aside on home schooling which generated a lot of negative comments. I thought this was kind of neat, since I am a very tiny blogger and enjoy getting comments of any kind. I thought: These people sure are sensitive!Maybe if I write a whole post [...]

Washington Note proprietor Steve Clemons has been at the forefront of the fight against Bolton’s nomination, and has probably done more than any other single individual to raise the nomination’s profile both inside and outside Washington.

So while the administration looked upon Iraq as the lead domino in the democratization of the Middle East, the war may well have made it the lead domino in the destabilization of the region. It’s this sort of demonically brilliant stupidity that once brought out the villagers with their pitchforks and torches. In our time, we settle for exasperated sighs and headlines like, “We Knew It Was A Monster All Along.”

No more needs to be said about the motives of Republicans. Karl Rove is the soul of the their party, and that soul is lying, dark and corrupt. Any Republican who supports or even tolerates his words deserves not an ounce of respect nor a moment of quarter because Americans have to be better than that. The democratic process has to better than that.

I think it is a big mistake to fire Karl. We want Bush to keep Karl, because Karl represents everything repulsive about the Republican party. To fire him or demand an apology would be to say that Karl is an outlier within the Republican party, when in fact he is the party. This is what [...]

Motivations for moving toward self-learning and abandonment of traditional public schooling are many. Perhaps the most prevalent is parental concern about the loss of control of the learning of young children. Many families want to take direct responsibility for their curriculum, approach to learning, and the principles and values upon which these are based. Some parents believe that the public school system instills values which run contrary to those of their family. Some are explicitly guided by their religious beliefs to direct the education of their children. Others have had disturbing experiences with schoolyard bullies, unfeeling teachers, or misdirected bureaucracies. A few hold that government support is inherently controlling, and that their tax dollars are binding families to a failing system.

Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.
–Eric Hoffer
In the wake of a compromise cut by the Senate moderates and the Minority leader that curiously cut out majority leader Frist, the House passed legislation to expand federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Bush, for his part, [...]

Although the damage to US interests from the spectacle of a baker’s dozen CIA agents arrested by a staunch ally and standing trial for kidnapping a foreign national off the streets of Milan and delivering him to Egypt for torture may be somewhat less than that done by Senator Dick Durbin’s insistence that the US hold itself to a higher standard than the worst despots and totalitarians of the twentieth century … it isn’t going to help.

Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist, scam artist and political fixer who is about to die for the sins of a corrupt Congress, is the victim of a wicked parody in the neoconservative flagship magazine, The Weekly Standard.
Among the Abramoff documents that surfaced this week is an email from Abramoff to to Rabbi Daniel Lapin [...]

The wingers are having a very hard time trying to make up their minds.
On the one hand, political hate speech is bad. What Democrats say about George Bush etc. is just reprehensible and antithetical to a well-functioning democacy. Just look what they did to poor Dick Durbin.
On the other hand, liberals are all appeasing [...]

Whether he meant to or not, senior Bush advisor Karl Rove challenged Americans to pick a side when he accused Democrats, and in particular Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, of deliberately endangering the lives of US troops. On one side is Rove and the White House he speaks for, with a dark vision of a [...]

We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don’t it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions.
–Jessamyn West
I watch with increasing dismay the way that we consistently see the triumph of style over substance on the issues. The thing that bothers me the most about this is that [...]