One of the key charges made by Timesmen Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta in their much-talked-about new book on Hillary’s lifelong ambitions is that way back in the early nineties, she and Bill were already plotting two terms in the White House for her, too.
But we’ve just received our copy of legendary reporter Carl Bernstein’s forthcoming book on Hillary — and his reporting appears to directly contradict this key allegation made by Gerth and Van Natta.
Who’s right?
Dan Froomkin provides a helpful close reading of the latest Pat Fitzgerald findings to put the Vice President’s criminal conduct in perspective.
Obama releases his big health care plan — and the reviews are beginning to trickle in. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.
For the last couple weeks TPM Readers have been writing in either to express outrage about or ask us to look into something called Presidential National Security Directive 51. The order, released May 9th, deals with how the executive branch should react in response to an array of catastrophic natural or man-made events. And at least on first blush it can read like it takes a rather broad brush approach to the existence of three branches of government, the constitution, etc. The story has been bubbling around the net. So I had the folks at TPMmuckraker look into it. We talked to folks at several of the major advocacy organizations that follow this sort of thing. And this is what we found.
Yesterday I posted a TPM Reader email that has stuck with me, almost as much as any other email I’ve gotten in the six-plus years I’ve been writing TPM. The email starts by excerpting and then pillorying a quote from Andrew Sullivan’s blog.
This was all from four years ago — July 2003. Sullivan’s position on the war at the time was vastly different. In this case, he was supporting the so-called ‘flypaper’ theory of the Iraq war. But I didn’t publish the letter to revisit an embarrassing quote. I did so only for the purpose of reprinting the email in its entirety — because the email itself is sort of a touchstone for me.
For what it’s worth, Sullivan’s is one of a small handful — perhaps a sub-handful — of blogs I read every day. Not that I agree with every opinion or observation — though we’re certainly much more in sync than we were a few years ago — just that I keep coming back. Make of it what you will. I think it makes me a fan.
Toledo Newspaper Guild ratifies tentative agreement with the Toledo Blade.
Very uncomfortable.
“Enhanced interrogation”, the Bush administration’s preferred newspeak for torture, appears to have been coined by the Nazi Party in 1937.
There are way too many facile comparisons of whatever group or individual we dislike to Nazis. But when the shoe fits.
In case you missed it yesterday: How the Justice Department got caught politicizing immigration judge appointments.
From yesterday’s Nelson Report, why Bob Zoellick may not be a complete safe pick for World Bank chief after all …
There is a potential down side, of course, as with any nomination made in extremis, and in Zoellick’s case it’s the risk that certain personality traits will carry over, and create problems with his Bank colleagues different than the Wolfowitz debacle, but no less damaging, should they occur.
Recall that Zoellick was forced out of his presidency of CSIS here in Washington, with the official reason being his too-overt politicking for then-Republican nominee George Bush. In reality, veterans of CSIS during that period will tell you, Zoellick had by that time made himself very unpopular with both the Board and his colleagues for some of the same problems which cropped up at USTR:
He has a terrible temper, he is “prone to tirades” – a daily dump on Japan generally, and its trade ministers specifically, came to be something of a ritual at USTR – and he has been known to keep “enemies lists”. Probably this Report tonight will get us back on one from which it took us two years to escape. But you do have to wonder the level of joy in Tokyo over his appointment will be tempered by memory of his many public and private condemnations.
It was long a matter of “inside knowledge” that Rice and President Bush respected Zoellick to the point of giving him virtual autonomy in his spheres of operation, but that Zoellick’s penchant to lecture, point by point, with little concern for editorial compression, drove them slightly bonkers. A telling story attributed to Condi Rice by a fellow journalist, “Condi let’s Bob do whatever he wants, so long as she doesn’t have to talk to him about it.”