Monday, July 18, 2005

Quote for the Day, 7/18/2005   "Retreat"   "Looking back, I see how strange it was; You drifting from room to room, getting things straight, Modestly winsome in one of last year's dresses; me with my loveless plans. It seemed that we would never interrupt each other In that round of flawless summer nights."   -David Harsent 9:31:00 PM    comment []

Why Does the President Want Traitors in the White House?   President Bush Sr. has defined exposing a covert source as the most insidious kind of treason.    So to go by the Bush definition, Karl Rove and the Vice President's Chief of Staff Scooter Libby are traitors.  Whatever else you may say about them, they're traitors.  Now, President Bush Jr. is saying that these traitors will remain welcome in his administration as long as the Republican prosecutor on the Plame investigation can't--or won't--indict them.  That's breaking the President's own word, that anyone who was involved in the Plame leak would be summarily fired.  Who knows?  Maybe treason doesn't stop at the Vice President's Chief of Staff and the President's Deputy Chief of Staff.  Maybe it goes farther up. 6:33:19 PM    comment []

A Picture's Worth a Million Dollars   Doug Forrester made a huge mistake scheduling a fundraiser by Dick Cheney for this Friday.  Forrester is the Republican candidate for governor of New Jersey, and evidently he thought that being down double digits in the polls for this November's election wasn't challenge enough; he also needed a picture of himself standing shoulder to shoulder with Dick Cheney, who is widely reviled in New Jersey, in addition to being so mean he's the only person who could play Darth Vader without the mask.  This occurs just days after Congress decided that tens of millions of dollars that could be spent on anti-terrorism efforts in New York and New Jersey would be better spent in Montana and North Dakota.  The Administration has suggested that efforts in places like that are just as important as places that terrorists might actually attack.  Maybe Vice President Cheney can chat about that, and slashing Amtrak funds, and cutting EPA funding so pollution is free to get worse, while he's in the Garden State. A visit by Cheney has got be worth a lot of money to the Forrester campaign.  But I'm sure the next governor of New Jersey, John Corzine, thinks a picture of Forrester with the man behind the curtain is absolutely priceless.  If deliberately associating himself with an administration that's hugely unpopular in New Jersey doesn't satisfy Forrester's masochistic streak, maybe for an encore he can set himself on fire. 2:59:43 PM    comment []

A New Woman on the Court?   Laura Bush wants a woman to replace Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman on the Supreme Court.  Some have interpreted that statement as being a signal from the President that Gonzales is out of the running, which I think is an overly elaborate, and somewhat silly, interpretation.  For one thing, I was unaware that the First Lady was her husband's hand puppet.  But if a woman is to be appointed, in all the discussions over who might be the next Justice, I have heard a grand total of three women mentioned.  One is Janice Rogers Brown, who was recently made an Appeals Court judge.  The President would put much of his legacy at risk if he appointed her, however, as many of the laws he has pushed through Congress would certainly be seen as unconstitutional from Brown's libertarian, states' rights perspective.  There is no way she wouldn't vote to strike down the Patriot Act as an excessive intrusion on civil rights, for instance.   Janice Rogers Brown is certainly conservative, but her conservatism is different from the federal power conservatism that nearly all Bush and Bush and Reagan judicial appointees favor.  She would vote against them much of the time. Only two other women have been mentioned for the available seat:  Edith Clement and Edith Jones.  All I'll say about them is, you're fishing from a mighty small pool of candidates when the women you're considering are both named Edith. 7:17:42 AM    comment []