Month: October 2005

Last year, then Deputy Chief of Staff Harriet Miers hosted four sessions of Ask the White House — “an online interactive forum where you can submit questions to Administration officials and friends of the White House.”  Miers’ responses suggested some characteristics that one might not necessarily associate with a prospective Supreme Court justice:

• She appeared to be comfortable with allowing blocks of text borrowed from other authors to be published under her name without any acknowledgement or formal attribution.
• She did not seem to feel obligated to ensure that her writings published at the official White House Web Site were proofread to identify and correct glaring errors.
• She appeared willing to continue to recite partisan political talking points after they had been largely dismissed as inaccurate or misleading to the public.

Miers’ Ask the White House responses also include some statements that may serve as the basis for a few provocative confirmation hearing questions.

I returned from D.C. on the 24th all fired up to end the war.  I wrote about it.  And then I ruminated for a week or so, before our local anti-war group finally had their next meeting.  I’m still fairly charged about ending things in Iraq.  Somehow.  Through the collective power of the millions of us who want our government to stop the war.

But the actual mechanics of going to the anti-war group.  Well – to be honest – they bring me down a little.  I’ll tell you what I mean, if you join me, after the flip.

It’s been awhile since I did a Rays of Hope Diary, but today in honor of George , ‘I never thought I would see the day’, Wills I decided  to make this a rays of hope cafe.
Add to that Ann Coulter last night on Hannity and Combs, was just as outspoken and derivative of this choice of Meirs as was Wills.
Bush is going down, it’s in the air, it’s in the air.
So lets list all the rays of hope that we can think of.

Welcome to the FBC, afternoon and Happy Hour Edition.  If you are new to the site or even fairly new and you haven’t ‘told us about you’please take this opportunity to do so.  

Two news stories I noticed–each of them also flagged by a prominent southpaw blogger–contribute to a disquieting trend in recent proposals from the Bushcorps White House.

Put together they suggest the possibility of a military dictatorship in the making.

The first was Bush’s own suggestion, made at his press conference Tuesday. It was significant enough for an AP report to lead with it. He was speaking to the concerns of a possible global pandemic if something like the Asian bird flu mutates, which the UN estimated could kill as many as 150 million people worldwide. Bush chose to talk about a new role for the military in such an outbreak.

Last Sunday, the theoretically “moderate” Congressman Christopher Shays (R-CT) appeared on Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer.

You may remember Shays from his brutal excoriation of failed former FEMA head Mike Brown:

While Shays collected accolades from the local media, those of us who had heard this faux-moderate song-and-dance before waited for the music to stop.