[Peace-discuss] Today's News: Losing by Winning

[Lisa Chason]

This is an amazing blog put out daily by a UIUC prof. You can get on it
by going to his email address.

-----Original Message-----
From: Nick Burbules [mailto:burbules at gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, April 27, 2005 6:31 AM
To: me
Subject: Today's News: Losing by Winning


LOSING BY WINNING

This is quite a collection of stories today. On four different fronts:
Social Security, Bolton, DeLay, and the filibuster, Bush and the GOP
have carved out positions that are wildly unpopular, dropping in
credibility by the day, and opposed by a substantial number of members
of their own party. Yet in every case the public line is "we will win,"
and in every case a decisive win/lose vote is continually being put off
(because right now they would lose), as they work the ropes behind the
scenes to line up support among an increasingly suspicious and reluctant
party. It appears that their only real argument  (since in each case
people really do disagree with them on the merits) is a combination of
brute pressure and/or an appeal that "you can't let us lose on this
one." Bullying or pleading - which is more politically desperate? And
why are we brought to this point? Two simple facts: (1) this is an
administration that never learned how to compromise, and their "my way
or the highway" approach is wearing thin; (2) they have always relied on
the perception of inevitability for driving support for their policies,
and so they are concerned that once they are shown to be vulnerable and
capable of picking the wrong horse they will lose the iron grip of
control they have gotten used to wielding over their own party

I think they will lose on all four of these issues. But most
interesting, to me, is that even if they "won" them: killing Social
Security, sending Bolton to the UN, saving DeLay, and killing the
filibuster, polls show decisively that they would lose even more public
support as a consequence. Or maybe they've stopped caring about that

Of course, the ultimate example of losing by winning has been Iraq. . . 

Frist rejects the Reid compromise on judicial nominations and suffers a
serious defeat (even though he doesn't seem to realize it yet)

http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/04/26/filibuster.fight.ap/index.html
Reacting to a Democratic offer in the fight over filibusters, Republican
leader Bill Frist said Tuesday he isn't interested in any deal that
fails to ensure Senate confirmation for all of President Bush's judicial
nominees.

[NB: Read that again. Bush nominates, and the Senate MUST confirm. Now
we know why the Bush people hand-picked Frist as their boy for Majority
Leader. Do you think he cares if he is destroying the Senate's
traditions and its advise and consent role? He'll be gone in a year to
start his Presidential campaign]

http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/4/26/133311/075
Reid just engaged Frist in a game of chicken, and Frist blinked first.

Reid has been extremely effective in whipping up opposition to the
Nuclear Option, garnering strong grass- and netroots support, editorial
board support, and popular support (as the latest polls show scant
appetite for ending the filibuster).

But in order to avoid looking like obstructionists, Democrats had to
make efforts to "find a compromise", lest the chattering class get the
vapors from such Democratic intransigence.

Had Frist accepted the offers for compromise, Bush would've gotten the
majority of his judges through, and Democrats would've gotten -- who
knows what. . .

So Reid got the Democrats to look conciliatory, forcing Frist and his
Republicans to look even more inflexible than before.

Just in case you have any doubts about who is pulling Frist's strings

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/index.html?blog=/politics/war_roo
m/2005/04/26/rove/index.html
Karl Rove is injecting himself into the Senate's deliberations over
George W. Bush's judicial nominees. In an interview with USAToday, Rove
says he's opposed to any compromise on the "nuclear option" that would
involve anything less than up-or-down floor votes on every one of the
president's judicial nominees.

[NB: What jurisdiction does Rove have to direct Senate policy on its own
procedures? Good question. But read on!]

Rove's point: The president has already compromised. "Rove said Bush
tried to end the stalemate when he renominated just seven of the 10
nominees who had been blocked last year," USAToday reports. Those
obstructionist Democrats didn't reciprocate. "I saw no change in tone,"
Rove said. "The flamethrowers ... came out within moments."

It's a nice story Rove tells about the president's attempt to make peace
with the Democrats; it's just not exactly true. When the White House
announced in December that Bush would re-nominate the seven judges,
White House officials told the New York Times that Bush had offered all
of the stalled judges the chance to be re-nominated. Two of them,
Carolyn Kuhl and Claude Allen, declined. A third, Charles Pickering, who
Bush had placed on the Fifth Circuit through a recess appointment, chose
to retire rather than seek Senate confirmation again.

http://www.first-draft.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2954
Rove also offered further evidence that he has lost his touch by:

. Claiming that Chimpy was making progress with the public in his
efforts to destroy Social Security.

. Predicting that John Bolton would be confirmed by the Senate.

. Predicting that Tom DeLay would keep his job as majority leader

Republican hubris: act like you have the advantage even when you don't

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=
9604
Here we are at another prescribed deadline for Bill Frist's detonation
of the "nuclear option" to end judicial filibusters. And here we are,
watching that deadline get postponed once more.

Early last week, everyone in the know seemed sure that the majority
leader would pull the trigger in the last days before the Senate
begins its weeklong         recessonApril29.Butbyyesterday,April25,
Frist aides had put out word that nuclear action would not, in fact,
occur this week, so lawmakers can focus their energies on the highway
bill and on conference reports for the Iraq War supplemental and the
budget.

This cycle of leaked reports touting nuclear action as imminent,
followed by inevitable postponement, has recurred a few times during the
109th Congress. ("Senate Republican leaders have decided to begin their
use of the 'nuclear option' . about a month from now," wrote Bob Novak
-- on February 5.) There are three reasons why the showdown keeps
receding into the horizon. . .

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/04/index.html#006259
On January 4, [Frist] said in no uncertain terms that the following
month he would bring a nominee to the floor and deploy the nuclear
option if that nominee did not receive an up-or-down vote. But it was
three months before Frist brought the first nominee to the floor. . .

Talk about deadlines receding into the horizon. . .

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/04/index.html#006247
If you're looking for reasons to believe that the Bush political machine
is losing its deft touch then look no further than Bloomberg News'
report that the President will be extending his Social Security
privatization world tour beyond the initial 60-day timeframe. This is an
absolutely baffling thing to do. By all objective standards, the tour
has been a catastrophic failure. He's induced zero new legislators to
back his agenda. Privatization's numbers have sunk further in the polls.
Indeed, the best polling evidence available suggests that the more
people focus on the issue, the less they like the president's ideas. . .
I have trouble believing his team would do anything as dumb as a tour
extension clearly seems to be. Maybe they've got some trick up their
sleeve so brilliant that I can't grasp it. Certainly if there's a trick
here I'm not seeing what it's supposed to be. . .

Don't laugh (okay, laugh)

http://www.first-draft.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2959
Q Scott, what does the President think of polls that show two-thirds of
people disapprove of his handling of Social Security?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I think you have to keep in mind what we're in.
One, we are still in the early phase of our efforts to strengthen Social
Security and get something done this week [sic]. And the goal of the
initial phase has been to educate the American people about the problems
facing Social Security.

[NB: In the "early phase"? Recall that Bush has already  been in
campaign mode on this issue for MORE than 60 days. And, as noted, the
more people know the LESS they like Bush's ideas about Social Security.
So what is gained by putting more time and money into these pointless
road shows? Stubbornness? A plan to turn public opinion? Or
somethingelse?]

As Congressional Republicans try to form an alternative to Bush's
proposal, the issue continues to tear them apart

http://www.thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/News/Frontpage/042605/gop.
html
A Senate Republican leadership aide expressed frustration with
conservative groups' rhetoric. While Bush and GOP congressional leaders
say they are open to many ideas, conservatives have panned the
everything-is-on-the-table approach.

"We should have no conditions before we start talking," the Senate
leadership staffer said. "If you start narrowing the ideas, there's
nothing left to negotiate."

"There is a splinter in the Republican Party on how this should be
addressed," another Senate Republican aide said.

Rep. Clay Shaw (R-Fla.), a senior Ways and Means Committee member, said
he has noticed "some negative stuff coming out" of certain groups, which
he declined to name.

"They don't understand that politics is the art of compromise," he
added.

Shaw's Social Security reform plan proposes "add-on" accounts instead of
"carve-outs" favored by many conservatives. The carve-outs would be
financed from diverting payroll taxes, while add-ons would be paid for
through tax credits.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_04/006193.php
[WP] On the eve of the first congressional hearing on the restructuring
of Social Security, Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee signaled
that they will not insist that personal accounts be part of the
legislation and that they will not seek further details from President
Bush about his plans for the government-run retirement program. . . In
yesterday's briefing, the committee official asserted that the contours
of Bush's plan for Social Security are already well known and that the
panel did not believe the release of further details of the plan would
be helpful.

[Kevin Drum] Am I missing something? Or did this guy basically ask
President Bush to please shut up and stop making things worse?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/26/AR200504
2600213.html
A badly divided Senate Finance Committee yesterday held the first
hearing examining President Bush's efforts to restructure Social
Security. While the Democrats remained united in their opposition, there
were signs of cracks in the Republicans' support for the president.

After months of political positioning, the stakes were high as the
committee took up Bush's signature domestic issue for his second term.
The White House has framed the Social Security debate as a matter of
political courage, challenging both parties to secure the program's
long-term solvency. . . With that highly charged backdrop, Republican
divisions at the hearing had added significance.

One GOP witness repeatedly disparaged the White House's approach to
Social Security changes, bolstering Democratic contentions that it would
lead to politically untenable benefit cuts. Sen. Craig Thomas
(R-Wyo.) questioned the wisdom of adding trillions of dollars in federal
debt in the coming decades to finance the president's plan. And Sen.
Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) seemed to signal intractable opposition to
converting part of the defined Social Security benefit to variable
returns from stock and bond investments.

Bush court nominee lights the "faith war" fuse

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-brown26apr26,1,2263
009.story
Just days after a bitterly divided Senate committee voted along party
lines to approve her nomination as a federal appellate court judge,
California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown told an audience
Sunday that people of faith were embroiled in a "war" against secular
humanists who threatened to divorce America from its religious roots,
according to a newspaper account of the speech.

[NB: This just goes to show her judicious temperament, I suppose]

And get this: Frist's "statesmanlike" statement disavowing the rabid
anti-judicial screeds of DeLay et al. (while appearing before an
audience of people who by and large have fostered such hatred toward
judges) seems to have cost him both ways. Defenders of an independent
judiciary saw it as calculated and disingenuous; the rabid right saw it
as craven and opportunistic

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/04/index.html#006245
This observation set off a torrent of conservative grumbling from fringe
religious leaders and House Republican backbenchers. The Times reports
that it was understood as a veiled swipe at Tom DeLay who "said last
month that judges who denied appeals by Terri Schiavo's relatives who
were trying to keep the brain-damaged Florida woman alive must 'answer
for their behavior.'" It could just as easily be read as a swipe at the
much broader and increasingly demented conservative anti-judge campaign
in its entirety. My colleague Sam Rosenfeld has brought to my attention
the Declaration of Constitutional Restoration put out by the
Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration. It not only
calls on the Senate Republicans to go nuclear, it also demands that
Congress strip the federal courts of jurisdiction over questions of
marriage and establishment clause cases, calls for the impeachment of
judges who make rulings they don't like, and most wackily states that
"where appropriate, Congress should reduce or eliminate the funding of
federal courts, the salaries of judges excepted, that overstep their
constitutional authority."

They want, in other words, retaliation. Social conservatives seem to
have been content to get mild rhetorical support of their agenda and
essentially no policy substance from George W. Bush during the 2000 and
2004 campaigns. But it looks like the 2008 GOP contenders are going to
need to bid pretty high to get this crowd in their corner.

Jaafari forms Cabinet compromise: will it hold?

http://www.juancole.com/2005/04/breaking-news-jaafari-presents-cabinet.h
tml

(Not for long: I didn't even finish composing the blog and the story has
already been reversed!)

http://www.juancole.com/2005/04/unbreaking-news-just-saw-al-jazeerahs.ht
ml

What?! Allawi accused of serving as puppet for U.S. interests? Stop the
presses!

http://www.juancole.com/2005/04/talabani-fears-baath-military-pentagon.h
tml
Al-Hayat also says that the Sadr Movement has charged Iyad Allawi with
implementing "an American game" in attempting to obstruct the formation
of a government. Ahmad al-Qurayshi, head of the higher council for the
Sadrists, told al-Hayat that "the goal of Allawi is to rob the Shiite
alliance in order to make them withdraw the names of cabinet ministers
who are not liked in Washington.". . . A high-ranking member of the
Shiite Dawa Party told the newspaper that he intended to resort to
"demonstrations and a popular uprising to force the formation of a
government if the Americans continued to intervene behind the scenes to
derail the process."

History will judge

http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_04_24_atrios_archive.html#11145314963573
7165
[E&P] Half of Americans, exactly 50%, now say the Bush administration
deliberately misled Americans about whether Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction, the Gallup Poll organization reported this morning.

"This is the highest percentage that Gallup has found on this measure
since the question was first asked in late May 2003," Gallup observed.
"At that time, 31% said the administration deliberately misled
Americans. This sentiment has gradually increased over time, to 39% in
July 2003, 43% in January/February 2004, and 47% in October 2004."

Also, according to the latest poll, more than half of Americans, 54%,
disapprove of the way President George W. Bush is handling the situation
in Iraq, while 43% approve.

More:
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/archive.html?blog=/politics/war_r
oom/2005/04/26/wmd_poll/index.html

Numbers can lie: but no numbers is the finest lie of all

http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/001959.html
Major terrorist attacks tripled worldwide in 2004, according to a new US
government count. That is one reason why Condoleezza Rice has suppressed
further publication of Patterns of Global Terrorism, as reported
originally by Knight Ridder's Jonathan Landay. It's such increasingly
frequent displays by Rice of suppressing the truth that makes one lose
respect for her rather quickly all over again.

Is this how you treat your allies?

http://www.first-draft.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2950
The Bush assministration sends a message to any would-be allies by
claiming that it was the Italians' fault that U.S. soldiers shot them
while they were slowly traveling on the road to the Baghdad Airport.

More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/27/international/europe/27italy.html

Ugly, vicious, mean-spirited. . . no, don't stop me. . . hateful, cruel,
callous. . . I'm not done yet. . . malicious, malevolent, venomous. .
.wait, one more. . .EVIL, pure evil

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/archive.html?blog=/politics/war_r
oom/2005/04/26/spitting/index.html
Debbie Schlussel, a right-wing political "commentator" and
self-proclaimed heiress to Ann Coulter, has a truly nasty piece
appearing in David Horowitz's hysteric Front Page Magazine, in which she
asserts that humanitarian activist Marla Ruzicka deserved to die at the
hands of Iraqi terrorists. . .

"There are plenty of young American men and women Ruzicka's age and
younger who've been brutalized or killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. But
none of them got the wall-to-wall fawning coverage that Ruzicka got --
unless they were anally raped or formerly played pro football," writes
Schlussel. "While it's a sad day when any American gets killed by
Islamic terrorists, it's measurably less sad when that American aided
and abetted them -- and belittled our troops. . . For Marla Ruzicka,"
she concludes, "some might call it poetic justice."

Afghans don't want permanent U.S. bases in their country either

http://www.first-draft.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2958

Starting with Cheney's line the other day, I think we are seeing Phase
Two of the Bolton campaign: hey, he's just a tough boss

http://www.smh.com.au/news/World/Cheney-backs-aggressive-Bolton/2005/04/
24/1114281451180.html
"If being occasionally tough and aggressive were a problem, there are a
lot of members of the US Senate who wouldn't qualify," Mr Cheney said in
a speech, echoing an increasingly common defence of Mr Bolton.

http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2005/04/bolton_whats_it.html
[Bill] Kristol knows perfectly well what the charges against Bolton are.
And yet here's how he sums up the case against: "Bolton disagreed
with--he even disliked!--a couple of bureaucrats. He challenged them."
That's absurd. The relevant point here isn't that Bolton was brusque
with some lower-tier officials. It's that the behavior -- however you
want to characterize it -- was aimed distorting the intelligence
assessments received by the American people and by the President of the
United States. That's not the only charge against Bolton, but it's one
of the very most important ones. If Bolton had some subordinates who
were trying to misrepresent Intelligence Community views on Syrian (and
Cuban, etc.) WMD programs and he got really, really mad at them in an
effort to stop them, nobody would be complaining. But he did the
reverse. At any rate, Kristol knows this, he's just choosing to lie
about it. . .

More on Kristol's lies: 
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_04/006192.php

http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/001956.html
[Laura Rozen] Yesterday I wondered aloud on this site, why the
pro-Bolton pushback had been so curiously silent on the substantive
issues and concerns raised about Bolton, in particular his well
documented manipulation and exaggeration of intelligence, and
retaliation against those intelligence analysts and negotiators whose
professional judgment conflicted with Bolton's ideological views. While
Bolton's supporters accuse his critics of engaging in character
assassination, they studiously avoid answering some of the chief
substantive policy-process concerns raised about Bolton, and they
themselves keep the focus squarely on Bolton's style ("blunt, but
effective") (and the character of his many critics).

So, why won't Bolton's conservative supporters just stand up and say
they wholeheartedly endorse Bolton's record of grossly exaggerating
rogue state proliferation threats far beyond the best professional
judgment of the intelligence community?. . .

Bolton's conservative supporters in and out of the administration are
therefore in the absurd position of blaming the entire pre-war hype and
misjudgment on Iraq's non-existent WMD stockpiles on the US intel
community, hype of which they were the cheerleaders in chief. . . Now,
in the current Bolton nomination debate, out comes - surprise, surprise!
-- a well-documented pattern of John Bolton's exaggeration and
politicization of the WMD threat posed by nations like Cuba and Syria to
the consternation of the US intelligence community. But wait! That's
precisely what Bolton's supporters like about Bolton. He exaggerates and
politicizes the threat for ideological reasons, running up time and
again against the judgment and patience of the professional US
intelligence community. But -- shhhh -- after the Iraq WMD intel fiasco,
the Bush line is, that such hype was (c'mon, you know the chorus) "all
the US intelligence community's fault." Black is white, folks.

Bolton: "the last straw"?

http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/000528.html

Nope, it gets even worse!

http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/000529.html
Trying to find out the U.S. officials named in the NSA intercepts is
going to be complicated and difficult -- particularly because they are
highly classified and also because the State Department and Bush
administration are working over-time to try and prevent Members of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee from seeing them.

There is no more important evidence in the John Bolton nomination than
those transcripts -- and it is my understanding, though I admit to not
having complete information -- that Senator Lugar's staff is now getting
stonewalled by the administration as well.

What I do have from a confidential and highly placed source is at least
one name who appears in the NSA documents, and it is someone I had not
previously considered.

Quite astoundingly, reports are that Governor Bill Richardson -- who
previously served as a Member of the U.S. Congress, as U.S. Ambassador
to the United Nations, and as Secretary of Energy -- was named in the
transcripts dealing with diplomatic efforts he was making with North
Korea.

Senate panel to WIDEN its Bolton probe

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/27/politics/27bolton.html
In a widening of the inquiry into John R. Bolton's nomination to be
ambassador to the United Nations, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
intends to conduct formal interviews in the next 10 days with as many as
two dozen people, Congressional officials said Tuesday. . . The expanded
questioning is an unusual approach for a committee that has already held
confirmation hearings and at one point appeared to be on the verge of
voting to approve the nominee.

Meanwhile, even as the daily details of serious malfeasance continue to
grow, the backroom pressure on Repubs to back Bolton DESPITE EVERYTHING
is, from all appearances, getting brutal

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/27/politics/27strategy.html
Vice President Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief
of staff and the president's powerful political adviser, are playing a
central and aggressive role in trying to salvage Mr. Bolton's prospects.

More: http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/001961.html

Plame: as predicted, the likely defense will be "I leaked her name, but
didn't know she was a covert agent." But that shouldn't get Bush Co. off
the hook. Here's why

http://www.needlenose.com/node/view/1319
[Murray Waas] Although several administration officials admitted to
disseminating negative information about Wilson and Plame, they also
asserted that they did not know that Plame was a clandestine CIA
operative. Federal investigators have been skeptical of those accounts,
according to sources close to the case, but unable to prove them false.

[Swopa] But aren't there any other loose ends Fitzgerald can tug on? In
an interview posted on Daily Kos, Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson,
suggests one:

. . . the leakers were probably not the decision-makers. They just
carried out the decisions of their superiors. . . The intriguing
question is: Who gave the name to the White House in the first place?
Who in the intelligence community offered up my wife's name and why?

This angle is similar to the one I suggested in  mid-October 2003, when
I tried to figure out an overall theory of how the leak happened:

As part of the decision to leak the information about Valerie Wilson,
Libby or whoever passes along some rationale -- correct or not -- by
which the people who do the leaking won't be liable for blowing a CIA
agent's cover. Perhaps he says she isn't covert, or finds some loophole
in the way he got the information.

As I describe in way too much greater detail in that post, the fact that
the calls by Karl Rove and others to reporters stopped as soon as Wilson
explained on TV that "Valerie Plame" was the name under which his wife
had done undercover work

. . . leads me to believe that Karl Rove et al. may have been caught by
surprise by what Wilson said -- they didn't know "Valerie Plame" wasn't
his wife's current name, or that it had greater meaning in terms of
previous covert work (which they also may not have known about). They
just got suckered into it by Lewis Libby, or someone else with a sizable
ax to grind against the CIA.

But, as I also noted, whoever gave Rove and others the name "Valerie
Plame" -- the name under which Wilson's wife had been a covert agent
-- almost certainly did know her true role, and so is guilty of
disclosing classified information. That's the line of investigation
Fitzgerald should be pursuing.

Scotty on Bush's embrace of DeLay

http://www.first-draft.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2959
Q Scott, why -- Tom DeLay is not from Galveston, why is he riding back
with the President today? And what's the signal that the President is
trying to send by inviting him on Air Force One?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, he is from the area. Galveston is near his district
and we typically invite members of Congress to events in their area. . .

Q Does DeLay's district touch on Galveston at all?

MR. McCLELLAN: No

Q Okay.

Q Does this have something to do with his ethics problems?

MR. McCLELLAN: What's that?

Q Is it helping him with his ethics problem?

MR. McCLELLAN: This has to do with an event that is occurring in his
area and the fact that the President appreciates his leadership in the
House and that we work very closely with him, as well as other
congressional leaders, on the agenda for the American people. . .Leader
DeLay, along with other leaders in the House and the Senate, is someone
who is committed to getting things done on our shared priorities. . .

DeLay can't survive this: new disclosures on just how cozy his ties to
Abramoff were

http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_04_24_atrios_archive.html#11145656653173
2467
[Time] Lobbyist Jack Abramoff gave expensive gifts to key members of
then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay's staff, which the aides accepted in
apparent violation of House ethics rules, according to two sources who
worked at Abramoff's law firm at the time Abramoff made the gifts. The
gifts included high-end golf equipment, tickets to sporting events and
concerts and, in the case of one high-ranking DeLay staff member, a
weekend getaway paid for by Abramoff's own frequent flyer and hotel
points, two sources who had direct knowledge of the transactions tell
TIME.

The two sources say that one recipient of the gifts, including the
weekend trip and expensive golf clubs, was Tony C. Rudy, who worked for
DeLay for five years and served at various times as DeLay's press
secretary, policy director, general counsel and deputy chief of staff
when DeLay was House Majority Whip. When Rudy left DeLay's office in
2002, he joined Abramoff at Greenberg Traurig, the firm that hired
Abramoff in December 2000. Rudy now works at Alexander Strategy Group, a
lobbying firm headed by former DeLay Chief of Staff Ed Buckham.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050426/ap_on_go_co/d
elay_lobbyist&e=2
Tom DeLay and his top aides were often in daily contact with lobbyist
Jack Abramoff during the mid-1990s as the lobbyist made campaign
contributions and arranged travel for the House leader while seeking
legislative help for a multimillion-dollar client, according to law firm
records made public for the first time.

DeLay's office kept Abramoff, now under criminal investigation,
routinely apprised of congressional efforts to block new regulations on
his client, the Northern Mariana Islands.

Abramoff's firm reported it drafted legislative materials for DeLay, and
Abramoff boasted to island leaders he could use his close ties to
Republican leaders to block legislation from receiving a House vote.

Chalk about another victory for a united Democratic front

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/04/index.html#006260
[WP] House Republican aides said yesterday for the first time that they
believe they will have to reverse or modify the ethics rules that were
passed on a party-line vote in January and have caused Democrats to
refuse to allow the ethics committee to organize. Republican leaders had
been trying to avoid a new floor vote over the rules, but aides said
they now are convinced that they need to get the committee going so that
Democrats cannot accuse them of squelching an investigation of DeLay.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2117539/fr/rss/
"We fumbled the ball badly," one "senior Republican official" told the
NYT.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-04-26-delay-donations-ethic
s_x.htm
All five Republicans on the House ethics committee have financial links
to Tom DeLay that could raise conflict-of-interest issues should the
panel investigate the GOP majority leader.

Public records show DeLay's leadership political action committee
(PAC) gave $15,000 to the campaign of Rep. Melissa Hart, R-Pa. - $10,000
in 2000 and $5,000 in 2002. Hart would chair a panel to investigate
DeLay if the committee moves forward with a probe.

The same political committee, Americans for a Republican Majority, also
has donated to the campaigns of ethics Chairman Doc Hastings of
Washington, Judy Biggert of Illinois and Tom Cole of Oklahoma. They are
among scores of Republicans DeLay has contributed to. Cole and the
remaining committee Republican, Lamar Smith of Texas, contributed to
DeLay's legal defense fund.

More:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/26/AR200504
2601295.html

Let him stay? Another county heard from

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_04/006195.php

Lou Dobbs!

http://bestoftheblogs.com/2005/04/lets-hear-it-for-lou-dobbs-on-usnews.h
tml
"Compassionate conservatism has been the catchphrase of George W. Bush
since the presidential campaign of 2000, but those two words must now
ring hollow to the more than 100 million Americans who make up our
middle class. There is nothing conservative about our rising record
budget and trade deficits. There is nothing compassionate about the
president's idea of Social Security reform, the rollback of coverage for
ever more costly healthcare for working Americans, or the most recent
assault on the middle class: the new bankruptcy reform bill that Bush
signed into law last week."

What can be done about election fraud?

http://www.crisispapers.org/essays-p/election-fraud.htm

Branding the Democrats

http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/4/26/12465/7926
"Democrats are the party for people who work for a living"

[NB: Like it?}

Bonus item: The Family Research Council on filibusters

http://mediamatters.org/items/200504260005
MSNBC host Keith Olbermann noted that the Family Research Council (FRC),
which is currently campaigning to stop filibusters of President Bush's
judicial nominees by Senate Democrats, was quite vocal in the late 1990s
in defending the right to filibuster another presidential nominee, James
C. Hormel, who was nominated by President Clinton as ambassador to
Luxembourg. . .

OLBERMANN: Yesterday, it was opposed to filibusters. Seven years ago, it
was in favor of them. That's when Clinton and a then-Democratic
plurality in the Senate wanted a man named James Hormel to become the
ambassador to Luxembourg. Hormel, of the Spam-and-other-meats Hormels,
was gay, as the Senate minority bottled up Hormel's nomination with
filibusters and threats of filibusters, minority relative to cloture, to
breaking up a filibuster. . .

The Family Research Council's senior writer, Steven Schwalm, appeared on
National Public Radio at the time and explained the value, even the
necessity, of the filibuster. . . "The Senate," he said, "is not a
majoritarian institution, like the House of Representatives is. It is a
deliberative body, and it's got a number of checks and balances built
into our government. The filibuster is one of those checks in which a
majority cannot just sheerly force its will, even if they have a
majority of votes in some cases. That's why there are things like
filibusters, and other things that give minorities in the Senate some
power to slow things up, to hold things up, and let things be aired
properly."

More: http://talkleft.com/new_archives/010493.html
People For the American Way has developed a chart compiled from
Congressional Research Service data that lists the judicial and
executive branch nominees filibustered prior to the Bush administration.
Twenty-six of the filibusters - more than three-quarters of the total -
were initiated by Senate Republicans. . .

Double bonus: the funniest "nuclear option" locution yet

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_04_24.php#005536
[WSJ] With a vote expected soon on what the Democrats (borrowing a term
from Trent Lott) call the "nuclear option," suddenly they are talking
compromise.

[NB: So, even though we admit that TRENT LOTT invented the term, it's
still the Democrats', see?]