Waxman to Mukasey: stop the White House’s stonewalling on Plame investigation documents.
On the Sunday shows it was wall-to-wall, double-ply Shag. We bring you the choicest moments in today’s Sunday Show (Special Shag Fund Edititon) Roundup …
Robert Reich takes Hillary to the woodshed for her attacks on Obama:
I just donât get it. If thereâs anyone in the race whose history shows unique courage and character, it’s Barack Obama. HRCâs campaign, by contrast, is singularly lacking in conviction about anything. Her pollster, Mark Penn, has advised her to take no bold positions and continuously seek the political center, which is exactly what sheâs been doing.
As we’ve been telling you, TPM is ending up 2007 with a big, exciting, super-well Muck-O-Rama Extravaganza contest, honoring the great acts of venal corruption, outstanding self-inflicted losses of dignity, crimes against the republic, bribery, exposed hypocrisy and general muckiness.
And we’ve named the award the Golden Duke in honor of the now-incarcerated Randy “Duke” Cunningham. It’s been a heady few years for Muckraking, what with the meta-Abramoff scandal and so much more. But here at TPM we still believe that Duke is the iconic modern scandal. Duke ushered the recent storm of muck. And few so well combine outlandish venal corruption, national security, sex, and sheer cartoonish ridiculousness.
On Friday we introduced a esteemed panel of outside judges who will judge the nominees and today we announce the categories in which we’ll award prizes.
They are …
Best Testimonial Trainwreck
Outstanding Achievement in Improbable Forgetfulness
Outstanding Achievement in Corruption-based Chutzpah
Best Scandal — Local Venue
Best Scandal — Sex and Generalized Carnality
Best Scandal — General Interest
The deadline for nominations is December 14th. And we’ll be handing out exciting prizes both for the winners and also to the readers whose nominations we choose as finalists.
So here’s how it works. If you want to nominate some evil-doer for one of our awards, send us a nomination identifying the person you’re nominating and a description/argument of no more than 250 words explaining their achievements, bad acts or generally scandalous behavior that you believe entitles them to the award. All awards are to individual mucksters and evil-doers. So for example, you may believe Alberto Gonzales should win for the US Attorney scandal. But the nomination has to be for Gonzales, not the scandal itself.
On December 18th we’ll announce the nominees, which then then go to our panel of distinguished judges. And the awards will be announced on the last day of the year, December 31st, new year’s even, since, as we can see with Shag Fund, you really don’t know what the best scandals will be until the year is really definitively over.
At least one of the awards, for best Testimonial Trainwreck, requires video. So you can pick from our TPMtv videos as illustrations of the behavior you believe win. But you can also include video for the other nominations if it seems appropriate.
Winning TPM Reader Nominators will win special limited edition TPM 2007 Golden Duke Awards mugs as well as more prizes to be announced shortly.
Kevin Drum thinks it was congressional pressure that forced the administration to do an about-face on their recently announced policy of no NIE releases and put out the key findings of the Iran NIE which completely undermines their entire push for war on Iran.
Late Update: Did Congress force their hand? Probably not says Spencer at TPMmuckraker.com.
In a TPMmuckraker interview, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) says it’s high time the courts adjudicated the scope of executive privilege. In other words, he’s ready to go forward with contempt proceedings against the White House.
This week at TPMCafe’s Table for One, we are joined by Brian McLaren, author, founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church, and one of Time magazine’s “25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America.”
He’s here this week to discuss a growing community of Evangelicals who are fed up with:
… [everything] from Evangelicals backing unjust and unwise wars to Catholics covering up priestly abuse, from Prosperity Gospel televangelists getting rich by ripping off the poor to institutional religious bureaucracies fiddling around in carpet-color-committee meetings while the world is burning, or at least warming dangerously.
I haven’t had a chance yet to weigh in on today’s news about the IC’s apparent conclusion that the Iranians shuttered their nuclear program in 2003. But it’s awfully big news. There’s a secondary, though still very interesting question, of just why the NIE findings were released at all, and what intra-administration in-fighting might be behind it. But it shows us once again, for anyone who needed showing, that everything this administration says on national security matters should be considered presumptively not only false, but actually the opposite of what is in fact true, until clear evidence to the contrary becomes available. They’re big liars. And actually being serious about the country’s security means doing everything possible to limit the amount of damage they can do over the next fourteen months while they still control the US military and the rest of the nation’s foreign policy apparatus.
Guess it had to happen eventually. A Democrat involved in a sex sting — one normally thinks of it as an exclusively Republican occupation. Well, not an elected official. But a staffer in Sen. Cantwell’s (D-WA) office (sub.req.).
Apparently it went down like on that TV. The guy, Cantwell scheduler Mike McHaney, was in an AOL chat room and thought he was arranging a tryst with a thirteen year old boy.
(ed.note: All joking aside, it’s worth noting that Vitter, Craig, Allen, Haggard et al. were all caught having or trying to have sex with consenting adults. This of course falls in a very different category. Foley, I guess is a bit of a grey area.)
We’re starting to get our first nominations in for our end of the year muck awards, the Golden Dukes (how to enter the contest here). And one thing I’m looking forward to is revisiting all the various scandals and sundry muck of 2007. Because there’s been so much of it, a lot of choice material gets lost in the heap.
So I thought I’d run through some of the strongest contenders in our various categories.
For Best Testimonial Trainwreck, the one that really sticks with me was the performance of Bradley Schlozman, key voting rights bamboozler who got himself a Patriot Act US Attorney appointment in Kansas City and used it, among other things to try to influence the 2006 mid-term with a few gamed indictments. For sheer embarrassment and weaselliness, there’s wasn’t much to compare to him.
Also in strong contention have to be Lurita Doan, disgraced head of the Government Services Administration.
And of course, you can’t forget the more recent blow-out with State Department Inspector General “Cookie” Krongard, who had to a change his testimony and recuse himself from the Blackwater investigation while on the witness stand …
Who am I forgetting in this category? And remember, if you to nominate some crook or evildoer and put yourself in running to win one of the exciting prizes, check out the rules here.
Next up, category II.