In this installment of the Congress-administration ongoing subpoena drama, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) says that the White House hasn’t responded to his committee’s subpoena for documents relating to the warrantless surveillance program, and that if that doesn’t change by September, then a contempt of Congress citation may be coming their way.
Arch-‘Vote Fraud’ bamboozler Bradley Schlozman is out at DOJ.
Who’ll be left to turn out the lights?
When members of the Kontogiannis family go to war about who’s more crooked, it’s bound to be an ugly affair.
On Friday, Thomas Kontogiannis’ nephew, John Michael, accused of laundering money in the Duke Cunningham scandal, urged that Judge Larry Burns either dismiss charges against him or exclude testimony from his uncle — whom he called “nothing short of a remorseless and manipulative sociopath.” Among the allegations made by Michael’s motion: the federal government allowed Kontogiannis, who in February pleaded guilty to a money-laundering charge, to profit from illicit financing schemes in exchange for testimony against Michael — among them the purchase of a home of one of the uncles of a federal prosecutor on the case.
It doesn’t stop there. Michael’s motion accuses Kontogiannis of committing identity theft for small-time profit while on probation for a visa-fraud conviction. And it takes a look back to that visa-fraud case to highlight a constant of Tommy K’s numerous convictions: when caught, start snitching to avoid getting locked up.
Connecticut 2006 redux? Ned Lamont goes to Maine to campaign for Tom Allen, the Dem foe of GOP Senator and Lieberman ally Susan Collins. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.
When you’re stuck down at 30% approval and down to your last 18 months in office, an administration really has to pick and choose its battles. Only real matters of principle are worth a fight. And the Bush administration has found one — resisting state efforts to expand the Children’s Health Insurance Program to more middle income families.
Prostitute-patron and Senator David Vitter has 66% approval rating in home state of Louisiana. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Morning Roundup.
With President Bush these days, often there’s nothing left to do but laugh. As when we learn that in a conversation with Egyptian democracy activist Saad Ibrahim, the president said, “You’re not the only dissident. I too am a dissident in Washington.” As Eric Kleefeld told me yesterday, President Bush seems confused. Dissidents are the ones who get tortured and wiretapped. Not the ones who do it. I guess that’s one of those sentence structure mistakes.
In any case, it’s not a simple matter disentangling the president’s vainglory from his narcissism. So for today let me just focus on the former.
As in the Post article from which that quote above comes, we are today frequently called on to see the president’s wrecked ‘democracy promotion agenda’ as an example of some sort of failed though laudable, even tragic, idealism. The president appears to think his plans have been sabotaged by an army of mediocrities running the State Department. If only he could steamroll them like the intelligence community!
But the whole story, like so much else from the Bush White House, is press and pomp with no substance. What’s remarkable is how little questioning there’s been about whether such an agenda ever existed at all — even from many who are normally the president’s critics. If the president wants kudos for speaking up for democracy at the level of rhetoric and looking the other way when it’s in the United States’ strategic interests, he can get in line — behind Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Jack Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt, Bill Clinton and actually pretty much every other president of the post-war era. Indeed, pretty much every president in American history.
As many critics have argued, the substance of America’s role as a democracy-promoter may be debatable, but surely the claim or the conceit is nothing that began with this president. Indeed, the claim contrasted with the reality — sometimes sizing up well and other times not so well — is also beyond a cliche in the post-World War II era. Had the president taken any steps to push for democratization in Egypt, Saudi Arabia or anywhere in Central Asia, perhaps there’d be something to discuss. But of course nothing like that has happened.
Yes, there’ve been a number of elections in Afghanistan and Iraq. But that’s only because this administration has overthrown more governments on its watch. In recent decades pushing for anything short of some level of popular sovereignty has just been deemed unacceptable. Just the same happened in Central America and the Balkans, indeed, by most measures more successfully in the Balkans.
So let’s just stop the talk about what’s happened to the president’s ‘freedom agenda’. There just never was one. It’s really that simple.
Join us as we take a fearless look behind the scenes of Rudy’s illegal immigration flip-flop in today’s episode of TPMtv. Not for the faint of heart. But if you’re man enough and Rudy enough, take a look …
Election law and FEC regs are so routinely flouted these days that it’s hard to imagine anyone actually getting in serious trouble over them. But might Fred Thompson’s ‘I’m not running even though I’m already running and have even run through three campaign managers’ bamboozle actually land him in some trouble? Maybe so.