sfarber

Senator Arlen Spector, fresh off of a not necessarily masterful but nonetheless effective job of managing to obfuscate the President’s brazenly illegal wiretapping and other eavesdropping on American citizens in direct violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) now proposes a means of commencing the whitewash of the President’s deliberate instructions to leak extremely sensitive classified information to ex-Times reporter Judith Miller via her boyfriend Administration contact, ex-Vice-Presidential chief of staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby… by “demanding” that the President and Vice-President “publicly speak” and tell the American people what happened. Here’s the problem with the “fair and balanced” paradigm,...

And so we come to the third leg of the iron triangle of the great GOP Big Tent coalition, the “corporatist” wing (the other two being the “law and order” and “religious right” wings), as epitomized by the corporatist paradigm, in his own case, frequently as a consultant (which, as you know, begins with “con”), Dogbert, purportedly the pet but actually the master of Scott Adams’ comic strip’s title character, Dilbert. Originally named “Dildog”, a high risk name vis a vis the religious right wing, Dogbert, like many in the corporatist wing of the GOP, is obsessed with his own...

Apparently, the rumor mill that surrounds the very, very secretive Plame-gate special prosecutor Patrick FitzGerald was hinting that something big was coming; many expected an imminent Rove indictment (which may yet happen.) But nobody (I don’t think) saw this coming: a revelation that the President himself authorized Lewis “Scooter” Libby to disclose some of the most closely guarded secrets of government (so secret the President refused to turn them over to Congress), to wit, parts of the National Intelligence Estimate, which Libby disclosed to Judith Miller as part of the campaign to justify the Iraq war. Obviously, this is a...

Deputy press secretary for the Department of Not Doing Anything At All to Help in the Event of a Crisis Homeland Security Brian Doyle was indicted in Polk County, Florida and awaits extradition on charges that he attempted to seduce what he believed to be a 14-year old girl over the internet. Obviously, he didn’t have enough to do as deputy press secretary to Michael Chertoff’s… department. We already had domestic policy advisor Claude Allen resign after shop-lifting charges, the Vice-President’s chief of staff Scooter Libby, of course, resigned for Plamegate after indictment by the special prosecutor (who may not...

The Bug-man goeth… Former House Majority Leader DeLay will not be seeking reelection to his House seat. Who says Justice DeLay’ed is justice denied? While there’s little good we can say about Mr. DeLay, we can all wish him a hearty, “Good riddance, Tom.” You’ve spent your life bringing the level of discourse in Washington from bad down to the level of your other career killing the cockroaches. Moussaoui to frieth… somebody’s got to pay for 9-11, right? A federal jury found Zaccarias Moussaoui death-penalty-eligible. Moussaoui of course is the buffoonish French national who was nabbed in Minnesota and was...

You’ll recall that last week we focused on the law and order branch of the great big tent ruling Republican coalition. This week, we will focus on the religious extremist branch of the ruling party. Pictured above are two of the iconic images of the American Christianist movement, Davey and Goliath, in the image above, shown testing a home-made improvised explosive device. Originally inocuous, the Lutheran Church produced a series of stop-action clay-mation animated shows featuring Davey Hansen and his family (sister Sally, parents John and Elaine), and the family leader, the all-powerful talking family dog, Goliath. The episodes seemed...

I’m afraid the prognosis for the reconstruction of New Orleans got a tad bleeker… oh, I can think of something like 10 billion reasons for that… $9.5, maybe 10 billion, or about three times previous estimates, being the newly announced estimated cost of reconstructing the New Orleans levee system. My guess is that the previous figure, in the $3 billion range, is probably what will be allocated for the project, as its probable political cost limit. Best we put hundreds of thousands of people (and hundreds of billions of dollars worth or more of property) at mortal risk than dare...

I don’t know who pays for nonsense like this (the article indicates, at least, that it’s largely a private foundation rather than the taxpayers) but in a story sure to bring a smile to our former co-blogger the Raving Atheist, it seems that a (long-awaited!) scientific study of heart patients has shown that the power of other people’s prayer is… wait for it… of no help whatsoever, and in some cases, there were worse results than for people for whom others didn’t receive any prayers from others. (This is entirely distinct from people praying on their own for their own...

Freelance journalist Jill Carroll, who was kidnapped while working in Iraq some three months ago, has been released, unharmed. She appeared on Iraqi t.v. pleading for her life; demands were made (and unheeded) that all women prisoners in Iraq be released. Nonetheless, despite deadlines for her murder passing, she was released to American authorities, unharmed, not knowing herself why she was kidnapped. I will speculate that there appears to be some version of chivalry (or maybe it’s just machismo or sexism) at play, among some sectors in Iraq, that just will not permit them to murder a woman (“it’s unmanly”)...