Entries by emptywheel

Some Questions

Paul Kiel has an important post on vote caging that raises one big question for me.

Kiel’s post quotes the RNC spokesperson as connecting the vote caging activities in Florida with allegations about ACORN registration drives.

In response to Palast’s story, the Republican spokeswoman denied ina statement that the list had been generated in order to challengevoters.

Well Then, We’ll Take Away Executive Privilege for Everyone Else

David Shuster (and to a lesser degree Chris Matthews) is the one person in the MSM who recognized Dick Cheney for what he was early on. Which is why Shuster’s interview of Cheney-hack Ron Christie is so good. Shuster uses the Libby case to expose the problems with Cheney’s method of working around other cabinet members and he smacks Christie down, just as I would have done, by pointing out that

The Liz Cheney Presidency

desertwind was the first to point me to Sally Quinn’s column on a GOP Plan to Oust Cheney. And like desertwind, my first thoughts when I read Quinn’s prediction that Cheney would step down with heart trouble and Fred Thompson would replace him–if Quinn is right, this is really an attempt to install another figurehead president controlled by someone named Cheney.

Loonies and BRICs

As most of you know, I live in SE Michigan, night clubs drive distance (if that’s your thing) from Canada. I didn’t go to my favorite Canadian ultimate tournament this year, so haven’t been in Canada for a while. So I was pretty darn shocked to hear this news:

The Canadian dollar breached 94 U.S.

Cheney’s “Policies”

The third installment in the WaPo’s Cheney series is a bit of a hodgepodge. It includes items that appear to have been thrown into this installment as part of a generic domestic policy article. But what the article is really about is how Cheney has pushed trickle down policies that have been proven failures in the past, once again by serving as a gatekeeper for advice that gets to the President,

Cravenly Groveling

Remember that superb article on foreign lobbying I described a while back? Well, apparently the two PR/Lobbying firms that got so badly taken by Ken Silverstein are now accusing him of being unethical.

My story in the July issue of the magazine details how two beltwaylobby shops I approached, on the pretense that I represented a shadyLondon-based energy firm with a stake in Turkmenistan, proposed towhitewash the image of that country’s

It’s Called R-E-C-U-S-A-L

Tom Maguire usually takes himself more seriously than this. After reading the WaPo’s series on Dick, he chose to ignore the widespread criticism on the part of hardcore conservatives of OVP’s dismantling of the Constitution and instead claim that the WaPo article was proof–proof at last!!!–that “Fitzgerald’s prosecution of Libby may have been politically motivated.”

To prove that “Fitzgerald’s prosecution of Libby may have been politically motivated,” Maguire ferrets out the abundant

More Classification Games

Nico at TP links to this story about the Senate’s thus far unsuccessful attempt to declassify two of SSCI’s reports on WMD. The basic story is that the White House is trying to prevent an effort, supported by both our too-genteel SSCI Chair Jay Rockefeller and by the partisan Pat Roberts, to declassify last fall’s Phase II SSCI reports, the one that compared pre-war assessments and the one that showed the

Sources: Or, Tedious Kremlinology

I’ve talked about Cheney’s and Addington’s Methods. Now I’d like to inventory the sources that Gellman and Becker used for their articles, as a way to understand where the shifting loyalties of the Administration lie. One thing that becomes clear by mapping this out is the centrality of Josh Bolten to many of the more damning accusations against Cheney.

Addington’s Methods

Before I get too deep in the detail of today’s installment of WaPo’s series on Cheney, I’d like to remind you of a point I made in my Take Back America speech. While David Addington’s theories on executive power are tremendously dangerous, Addington does believe in the rule of law. He admitted in his Libby trial testimony, for example, that the “Treated as Top Secret/SCI” stamp that OVP had used with

image_print