Former White House national security adviser Sandy Berger gives a lesson in slapstick humor. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.
Missing Atrios? Here’s his temporary URL until the main one gets fixed.
Late Update: He’s back to his normal URL.
New poll: two-thirds of registered voters got a robo call this past election.
Finally, Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) to hit the air today about his anti-Muslim comments.
Okay, a key update on the battle in Florida’s 13th District. The voting machine company’s own expert says that voting problems cost Democrat Christine Jennings the election — he just says the company itself is not at fault.
For you New Hampshire phone-jamming fanatics, here’s the final mystery of what happened, absolutely, positively, conclusively and forever solved: Did Abramoff pay for the scam?
There’s been a debate on the progressive blogs about whether we should be eschew the administration’s favored word “surge” in favor of the more appropriate and (let’s be honest) more charged term ‘escalation’. The new member of TPMCafe’s America Abroad blog, political Islam scholar Vali Nasr, now weighs in on why ‘escalation’ is the only appropriate word for what we’re discussing. The new troops aren’t going there to quell the violence; they’re being sent to go to war with and destroy al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.
Good policy or bad, the only word for that is escalation. Take a look.
Mitt Romney’s efforts to prove his die-hard conservatism took a couple of pretty major hits today.
First we learn that back in 1994 Romney said that he hoped “moderates of both parties” would control the Senate, “not the Jesse Helmses.”
Now it’s emerged that Romney voted for liberal Dem Paul Tsongas in 1992.
Last week, we discovered that the Bush administration was refusing to declassify data on violence in Iraq. Soon after that the Pentagon released a report which cut the data in its own ways but didn’t provide raw numbers. Unfortunately, the violence is so bad there’s no way to hide it. Still, we know that numbers showing the real levels of violence in Iraq aren’t available.
It made us wonder: how many times has the administration attempted to suppress government studies, statistics or other forms of once-public information that don’t jibe with its policy? We put out the call — and readers responded.
We’ve tallied over 20 examples so far from the past six years, and we’ll likely break two dozen by the end of the day. Suggestions keep coming in. In areas as diverse as unemployment, health, climate change and the Iraq war, the administration has defunded, classified, or otherwise killed the release of facts that run contrary to its endorsed policies.
Do you know of others? Let us know.