Today’s Must Read: what will the ousted U.S. attorneys be telling Congress next week? A rundown.
House Dem leaders nearing compromise of sorts on approach to scaling back American presence in Iraq.
The Politico piece attacking liberal bloggers should have disclosed that author Dan Gerstein is taking fees from Joe Lieberman, says Howard Kurtz.
Point of publisher’s privilege.
The canned US attorney story is now really picking up steam. Two members of Congress — a senator and a representative — are scurrying from office to car and vice versa refusing to confirm or deny whether they tried to interfere with a federal corruption investigation to help save an endangered Republican House seat. But if you’re a regular reader of TPMmuckraker.com you’ve been following this story for almost two months. Here’s Muckraker’s collection of coverage and original reporting going back to January 13th, chronicling it, advancing it, being first on the story.
So this is a shout-out to TPMmuckraker’s Paul Kiel and also former TPMer Justin Rood (now with ABC), who was still with us when we first started on the story. And thanks to the almost 3000 TPM Readers who contributed start up funds, subscribed if you will, to get the site up and off the ground.
More soon on the new stuff we have coming.
Today at TPM HQ we’re watching the CPAC (aka Conservative Political Action Committee’s) annual conference. CPAC’s the big right-wing get together every year. So it’s a big deal. But it’s sort of a sad sack event this year. And here’s a kind of funny example of the scraping the bottom of the barrell. It’s GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway explaining why Obama is toast because you didn’t know who he was before 9/11 …
It’s the best they can do now.
Sad.
It’s war! Joe Klein valiantly battles the “ideological extremists.”
Romney angles for corruption vote, has Grover Norquist introduce him at CPAC.
Late Update: Romney’s pandermonious speech is really turning out to be a laugh riot. After yakking about the press and how they’re out to get him, he bragged that the right-wingers will be around even after the news media is no more. And of course, a scenario like this is something that more than a few of us are worried about.
Half of Romney’s speech turns out to be making fun of Massachusetts, which I think just makes him look cheesy and like a jerk, considering he just spent four years pledged to the state. I guess he didn’t mention to the voters that he thought the state was an embarrassment.
He even flagged his crack about Dorchester, Mass. from his 1994 campaign against Ted Kennedy. Folks who’ve been watching Romney for years like I have will remember that moment which came during one of the debates if I remember correctly. It was a churlish and juvenile moment — making fun of people whose votes he was allegedly campaigning for. It was a small but important turning point in that campaign. And the same part of the guy is coming out now.
Later Update: Watching Romney pander to every line item in the right-wing catechism in this speech is a good window into his character. And the view shows the same shortcomings as the Dorchester comment and the Massachusetts-bashing in this speech. People can think what they want of Massachusetts. It’s a liberal state. It’s on one end of the spectrum of American political culture. But, not long ago, Mitt Romney was running to be the governor of that state, to represent its people. A month or so out of office, now they’re the punchline of his jokes. They’re tossed like a tissue after it’s used. And of course now he’s telling these right-wingers everything they want to hear too even though it contradicts pretty much everything he used to say he believed. He’d drop them in a flash and denigrate them too. That’s a window into who someone is. He’s dangerous.
CNN: “Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey has resigned in the wake of the Walter Reed hospital scandal, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Friday.”
Rudy’s heavily-anticipated speech before the Conservative Political Action Conference wound down just a little while ago. We have some video highlights for you here.
Senator Russ Feingold has an idea: Let Bush keep his war.