Simon Johnson on confusion, tunneling and looting in the on-going bank bailout.
Rove: Every administration politicizes DOJ — even RFK did!
Republican senators put secret hold on David Ogden, Obama’s nominee as deputy attorney general.
Oh, this is getting good. A RNC national
committeeperson is calling on Michael Steele to step down. But it’s better than that.
It’s a black supporter of the crypto-segregationist RNC candidate Katon Dawson. But wait, it’s better than that too.
Remember BMW Direct? The GOP direct mail firm that raises tons of money for hopeless candidates but ends up getting little or none of it to candidates in question? Well, the committeeperson is one of those candidates, Ada Fisher of North Carolina.
Are you or were you at the Prop 8 protests outside the Supreme Court in San Francisco today? If so and you took pictures, send them to us for inclusion in a slide show we’re putting together. Send them to tpmphotos (at) talkingpointsmemo.com. Help us share what happened with our readers.
A cover letter from Gregory Craig and a compromise on revealing the contents of a key memo from the Bush White House Counsel’s office both suggest the Obama White House took a very active role in negotiating a resolution to the standoff over Karl Rove’s and Harriet Miers’ testimony before Congress.
Following up on yesterday’s post, the initial round of resistance to the Obama budget from senate Democratic centrists suggests to me that their opposition is rooted in optics and positioning rather than actual policy disagreements about how we should be running the federal government during the worst economic downturn in eighty years. The key tell so far I think is that they’ve decided to go on record saying they have serious disagreements but they apparently haven’t decided yet what they disagree with, or are not willing to disclose what that might be.
That may be an arch way to put it. And maybe they haven’t seen the granular details that will come out in January.
But still, for me that suggests a certain logical disconnect.
Remember, as a number of commentators noted during the Stimulus Bill debate, the ‘moderates’ who hash out the final deal complained that one of their big beefs was that a lot of spending was insufficiently stimulative — and then they proceeded to cut out a lot of the spending that would have had the most immediate stimulative effect. Like I said, optics, not policy.
According to the new Fox News poll, Obama is more popular than Reagan.