I’ve noticed that in the nominations readers are sending in for the Golden Duke awards (nomination instructions and details here) not a lot of people are stepping up to make nominations for the signature prize — Best Scandal — General Interest. Lots of good nominations for best sex scandal, best local scandal, best testimonial trainwreck, etc. But it seems there’s a little reluctance to try to climb this one mountain.
To some I guess the US Attorney scandal is too much of a shoo-in for the Best Scandal Dukey. But remember, the Dukey in each category has to be awarded to an individual person. And there were so many crooks and bamboozlers in the US Attorney scandal that a lot of honor gets spread around.
On the other hand you’ve got solo scandals like Sen. Ted Stevens, the senate’s maestro of pork getting caught with miscellaneous sweetheart bribes, freebie home renovation and the like. So, just speaking for myself, I think Sen. Stevens is a strong contender?
Who else do you think should be in the running?
What ever happened to the Krongard v. Krongard showdown that was supposed to happen in front of Henry Waxman’s committee?
Let’s be honest. You don’t want to suffer through all the bamboozling ads the GOP presidential candidates are pasting the airwaves with. But you still want to be up on the latest bamboozlement and schmalz. So here, prepared specially for you the TPM Reader, is the whole GOP field boiled to a tight, licketysplit and almost tolerable 3:30.
Watch, if you’re man person enough to face the bamboozlement!
Here are the first two grafs of an article in today’s Los Angeles Times …
One-third of Americans want to deny social services, including public schooling and emergency room healthcare, to illegal immigrants, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found.
Still, in a sign of ambivalence among voters about the emotionally charged issue, a strong bipartisan majority — 60% — favors allowing illegal immigrants who have not committed crimes to become citizens if they pay fines, learn English and meet other requirements.
That second number is a pretty striking statistic when you think of all the media we see about how everybody’s fed up with illegals, wants them all marched back out of the country and then have the whole place surrounded by a hundred foot fence.
What I think says pretty clearly is that the kind of rabid hostility to illegal immigration and illegal immigrants — which is in most cases, I believe, just a fig leaf for hostility to all immigrants in generall — just isn’t a majority position in this country.
It’s definitely an issue which creates tensions and conflicts within the Democratic coalition. But fundamentally the anti-immigrant rage of the GOP is a minority position. And it’s one that I suspect will do the GOP vast damage over the coming years as hispanics swing heavily back toward the Democratic party.
Dana Perino takes a beating on the new Iran NIE in today’s White House press briefing:
McClatchy’s Warren Strobel reports:
A State Department project manager banished from Iraq by the U.S. ambassador and under scrutiny by the Justice Department continues to oversee the construction of the much-delayed new American embassy in Baghdad from nearby Kuwait, State Department officials disclosed Thursday.
James L. Golden, a contract employee, is still managing the $740 million project, said Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy, the department’s top management official.
If you’re curious why Mike Huckabee even got on the topic of pardoning, commuting the sentence of, paroling — whatever — serial rapist and murderer Wayne Dumond, you have to understand that during the 90s the right-wing whackjobosphere had managed to convince themselves that DuMond was some sort of Ozarks Ruben Carter — a victim of Bill Clinton and the corrupt regime he ran in Arkansas in the 1980s.
Most of our staff at TPM are in their twenties. And we had a moment today when it occurred to me that if you weren’t politically aware in the 1990s, it’s difficult to get a sense of how much a series of seriously deranged conspiracy theories became almost mainstream.
In any case, there’s actually a book, Unequal Justice, that seems to be the bible of DuMond lionization and hagiography. What’s so damning about Huckabee is that whatever version of events you believe, it seems undisputed that Huckabee either bought into this craziness or pushed for the release of a serial rapist to pander to those who did.
Let’s be honest. You don’t want to suffer through all the bamboozling ads the GOP presidential candidates are pasting the airwaves with. But you still want to be up on the latest bamboozlement and schmalz. So here, prepared specially for you the TPM Reader, is the whole GOP field boiled to a tight, licketysplit and almost tolerable 3:30.
Watch, if you’re man person enough to face the bamboozlement!
Imagine that. Rudy’s caught in another lie about the tax-payer funded valet service he had New York City provide for Judi Nathan while she was still his mistress. Up until yesterday Team Rudy had claimed that the NYPD only started providing Nathan with an around-the-clock security detail after December 2000, after their adulterous relationship became public. This was in response to a never-disclosed “threat” Nathan received on a street corner near her home. There’s never been any details or evidence that the threat existed. But then-Police commissioner Bernie Kerik said it checked out. So please stop asking any more questions.
Here’s Rudy, shortly after the security/valet story broke back in 2001 telling reporters that anyone who asked about it should be “ashamed of themselves.”
Kerik and Giuliani have previously insisted that there was no security detail or valet service prior to December 2000.
But now it turns out that that’s not true. Yesterday Giuliani aides conceded that in fact Nathan had been received the valet service and security detail “sporadically” from early 2000 in response to yet more undisclosed, undetailed and unconfirmed “threats”.
“Sporadically” is Team Rudy’s word. Witnesses and a law enforcement source now say she got a full-time NYPD valet service for months before the affair went public.
Bear in mind, this is now well before anyone knew anyone knew the two were having an affair and thus before anyone knew who Judi Nathan was. So why would she be receiving ‘threats’ at all?