Not even cold in her grave, the Republican slime machine starts to desecrate Coretta Scott King’s funeral.
Yes, any time the opposition congregates it’s time to bring out virtual fire hoses. Uppity folk don’t know their place.
Given that the gloss on the sound machine has started to crack a little, it will be interesting to see how far this latest lunatic Rovian meme seeps out of cable and into so-called respectable journalism.
Indian Programs Cut to Pay Lawyers (alt link).
Which circle of hell best befits these people?
Update:As Ann Bartow noted in the first comment, the good folks at Wampum have figured out that there seems to be a connection between the BIA scandal and the Abramoff scandal. It seems Abramoff ran a slush fund to obstruct the accounting of the Bureau of Indian Affairs mishandling of Indian funds.
Amazingly, we haven’t hit bottom yet with this crowd.
We knew that John Boehner, the new GOP leader in the House, was a sleazy guy (he famously handed out tobacco lobbyists’ checks on the house floor).
I admit, though, that I didn’t know Boehner wanted to undermine the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. It seems he supports state-sponsored prayer in the public school, was for allowing federal funding of poverty programs that require aid recipients to join in religious activities, supports the state-sponsored display of protestant Christian translations of religious texts, opposed criticism of proselytizing at the Air Force Academy, and that he enthusiastically pushed for legal requirements that “Intelligent Design” be taught in Ohio schools. Yes, all this (and more) seems to be true.
Of course, it’s hardly surprising — I’d bet these views are far more characteristic of GOP House members than of the population at large.
If it’s true that it’s the cover up that gets you and not the crime, then things don’t look good for the folks in the Veep’s office, who seem to have been doing some digital shredding.
Update: georgia10 at Daily Kos connects some dots and speculates as to why this could be a really big deal.
It’s good to think that someone in the Senate remembers a little history. Truman became Vice President because he got famous for chairing an investigatory committee, the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program (aka “the Truman committee”).
Harry Truman remembered the ‘war profiteering’ from WW I and determined to try to root it out from the war effort in WW II. The effort made him a popular hero, even as the Washington elites turned up their noses.
Comes now Senator Byron Dorgan, taking aim at “waste, fraud and mismanagement” in the GOP crony capitalist management of the government. Unlike Truman, he hasn’t got a committee to chair, which makes running an investigation much more difficult. The Blogging of the President suggests Dorgan will use a media strategy instead.
I’d like to believe that can work. But it’s very hard to break through. (I expect some white women will go missing in the event this sort of thing gets any traction.)
It used to be that having the NSA spy domestically was one of the unthinkable acts that one believed administrations understood were out of bounds. Sort of like the indefinite detention of US citizens in military prisons, or the torturing and killing of prisoners, or ‘rendering’ them to countries that torture.
Well, all bets, gloves, illusions are off.
It is time, therefore, to start asking if this administration is doing other things that were previously ‘unthinkable’.
Today brings suggestions that the administration spied on one or more journalists, and perhaps also on an occasional Democratic candidate and party operative. But don’t stop there. For example, someone should ask whether the new ‘anything goes without a warrant if it’s important enough’ standard for snooping extends to tax returns and to census data. It’s hard, after all, to imagine a legal theory that would allow the NSA to ignore FISA that would not also apply to all that delicious data just sitting there, even if it is hedged with statutory protections. That’s just Congress, after all, nothing serious.
Suggestions for other previously unthinkable questions that should be asked — not that we can trust any statement we get from this administration — painfully welcomed.
Jotwell Blenderlaw