Friday, March 09, 2007

Another Supreme Court outrage

When will the madness end??

Just days after former Vice President Al Gore received an Academy Award for his global warming documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” the United States Supreme Court handed Mr. Gore a stunning reversal, stripping him of his Oscar and awarding it to President George W. Bush instead.

For Mr. Gore, who basked in the adulation of his Hollywood audience Sunday night, the high court’s decision to give his Oscar to President Bush was a cruel twist of fate, to say the least.
But in a 5-4 decision handed down Tuesday morning, the justices made it clear that they had taken the unprecedented step of stripping Mr. Gore of his Oscar because President Bush deserved it more.

“It is true that Al Gore has done a lot of talking about global warming,” wrote Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority. “But President Bush has actually helped create global warming.”


Heh!

Thursday, March 08, 2007

A surprising rebuke

Did Michael Barone really say that?

Lawmaker's Intervention in Law Enforcement Crosses Line
The emerging scandal surrounding the dismissals of eight former U.S. attorney should signify to American voters the depth, breadth, and permeation of corruptio in the Bush administration
When a U.S. senator (to wit, Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican) feels free to call a prosecutor at home and hang up on him for resisting political pressure in the course of executing his prosecutorial duties, the line between politics and law enforcement has been so thoroughly violated that it no longer exists.
As was revealed in Tuesday's congressional hearings on the scandal, David Iglesias described the phone call from Domenici as follows:
"He wanted to know if the [indictments] would be filed before November. ... I gave an answer to the effect of I didn't think so. ... He said, "I'm very sorry to hear that," and the line went dead, the telephone line went dead. I thought to myself, did he just hang up on me? ... He didn't call back; I didn't call back. I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that something bad had happened, and within six weeks I got a call from [senior Justice Department official] Mike Battle saying that it was time for me to move on."
Domenici would not have made that call had either a Democrat or a law-abiding Republican been in the White House. He would not have had the temerity to throw his weight around to such an outrageous extent.
What's going on in Washington is not sufficiently removed from the routine doings of a tawdry Third World dictatorship to give any American comfort.


When normally staid, conservative lumps like Barone start sounding this shrill, something must be up!

Update
It looks like Barone really didn't say that. Somebody hacked into his web site and planted the above post.
I should have known that it would be totally out of character for a "conservative without a conscience" like Barone to suddenly be bothered by anything a Republican administration would do. Next time I hear of a conservative like Barone making sense, I'll know better than to assume that it is true.

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Rightwing meltdown

It hasn’t been a very good day for “conservatives,” that’s for sure.
It started with Iraq war cheerleaders touting how “the surge” has managed to stem violence in Baghdad, only to have the story literally blow up in their faces.
Then there was all the follow-up coverage on the Walter Reed hearings. The scandal is how our injured war veterans have had to pay the price for the Bush administration’s refusal to take responsibility for adequately funding their war of choice. If you want to know what it means to try and run a war on the cheap, without raising taxes, here it is in the starkest of terms.
Next, we have the first day of hearings in the fired federal prosecutors story that I mentioned yesterday with yet more revelations of Republican lawmakers trying to pressure attorneys for partisan political advantage.
And then, of course, there is the BIG news of the day with the guilty verdict handed down against V.P. Cheney’s chief of staff in the Valerie Plame CIA Leak scandal.
And as if this wasn’t bad enough, conservatives were left with the rank day-old smell of Ann Coulter’s juvenile antics at the CPAC convention which some are trying to excise through a petition.