Good sum-up from the Senate Majority Project. The RNC and the NH GOP have spent almost $6 million on lawyers in the phone-jamming case. I guess just out of the goodness of their hearts.
--Josh Marshall
The grand ole daddy of special interest giveaways -- Congress to give away the Internet. This is serious. Find out more here.
--Josh Marshall
Katherine Harris explains the misunderstanding ...
"At the time I had a meal with Mitchell Wade, I thought that my campaign would be reimbursing my share of the cost. I later discovered that somehow this was not done. I then discussed with my staff the best way to correct this oversight. Neither I nor my advisors ever thought it would be appropriate to reimburse Mr.Wade in the midst of the government investigations into his conduct. Just to resolve any questions, I have donated to a local Florida charity $100 which will more than adequately compensate for the cost of my beverage and appetizers."The night of our dinner, Mr. Wade purchased several expensive bottles of wine which he took home with him uncorked -- this is apparently the reason the bill was so high."
"I take full responsibility for this oversight and continue to operate under a policy of openness, transparency, and accountability to the people of my district and the state of Florida. While the rules are complicated, as a member of Congress, it is my responsibility to know and obey them. It has always been my intent to conduct myself in an ethical manner, and I regret this oversight."
Uncorked.
--Josh Marshall
Paul mentioned this below, in the context of another job Sen. Conrad Burns did for Ed Buckham in his role as go-to earmark lackey. But the underlying issue is really just too rich. It turns out that Buckham was a part owner of this company Map Roi, which I guess could have eventually put Buckham out of business, or still might have if the law hadn't caught up with Ed first.
The company was put together by some Abramoff/Buckham cronies in Guam. And they had a piece of software called GForce, which they billed as "Your complete system for winning government contracts."
(I think the Mighty-Morphing Power Rangers may use GForce or may be related to it in some way. But I'm not sure.)
So Buckham was getting earmarks for GForce through his man Burns. And GForce is a special piece of software that helps you bag more governments contracts. The whole thing I guess amounted to a sort of perpetual motion machine of earmark pork and insider scams.
We could just send the whole government home and let GForce send the tax dollars directly to Ed and Jack's sweatshop pals in the Marianas. Or more likely Neil Bush's company.
Of course, maybe Ed knew he couldn't keep ahead of the law forever so he invested in Map ROI to carry on his work after he become a ward of the state he had made so much money fleecing.
--Josh Marshall
Conrad Burns is a veritable champion of the earmark, but this had to make even him feel a little uncomfortable.
--Paul Kiel
Should we be grateful there were no pics of the Harris-Wade dinner? I'm not even sure how to blurb this, other than to ask if this kid got her number.
--Josh Marshall
NYT: "On another front, Republicans said that Tony Snow, a commentator for Fox News and a former speechwriter for Mr. Bush's father, was in negotiations for the job of White House press secretary. Mr. Snow would replace Scott McClellan, who announced Wednesday that he was resigning."
Why not just have Hannity do it?
--Josh Marshall
California GOPers line up behind Rep. John Doolittle's (R-CA) right to be sleazy. That and other news of the day in today's Daily Muck.
--Paul Kiel
In the Orlando Sentinel article below Katherine Harris dealt with her $2800 meal with felon Mitch Wade by giving a hundred bucks to Global Dominion Impact Ministries, an outfit which, as TPM Reader JG puts it, sounds like Bush administration foreign policy in a nutshell. Maybe that's next up after Global War on Terror.
It sounds like that money may go to good use since, as their website explains, the Ministries' "Pastor Sandra has an inspiring testimony of her deliverance from being sold to devils as an infant. She also shares her miraculous healing from her breast cancer as well as being raised from the dead. "
Cool.
Late Update: The Ministries' Pastor Lourdes also brought someone back from the dead.
--Josh Marshall
I really don't think I've ever seen a political train wreck quite like the Harris for Senate campaign. And in the political metaphor world these have been a rough few years in rail safety. So that's really saying something.
Anyway, during the last run of news about the implosion of the Harris campaign, I heard that one of the big reasons so many of Harris' top advisors were jumping ship was that they'd found out that she'd lied about some key points about her interactions with our old pal Mitch Wade. One of those things was whether he'd bought her a really fancy meal while he was wining and dining her.
This morning the Orlando Sentinel reports that meal may have cost "may have cost as much as $2,800."
And catch this passage ...
In her interview Wednesday, Harris acknowledged for the first time that Wade had paid for the dinner at Citronelle, reversing a statement from her congressional spokeswoman earlier this year.But in the interview, Harris also said her campaign had, at some point, "reimbursed" the restaurant.
When asked how she could have reimbursed a business that was owed no money -- Wade paid the bill that evening -- she abruptly ended the interview and walked off.
Her spokesman called back an hour later and asked a reporter not to publish anything Harris had said Wednesday night about the dinner.
On Thursday, Harris' campaign released a two-paragraph statement that differed from her explanation a day earlier. It stated that Harris thought her "campaign would be reimbursing" her share of the meal but later found out that hadn't happened.
To resolve any questions, the statement said, "I have donated to a local Florida charity $100 which will more than adequately compensate for the cost of my beverage and appetizer."
Harris spokesman Chris Ingram said the donation was made Thursday to Global Dominion Impact Ministries. He would not answer any other questions about the dinner -- including the cost of the meal.
In case anyone's wondering, if any of you would like to take me out for a $3000 dinner, I'll be happy to defray the cost of the meal by giving a hundred bucks to the charity of my choice.
Also, I hear there's another Harris lie still waiting to bubble to the surface.
--Josh Marshall
Is Bob Ney (R-OH) running for Congress or just running from the law?
Last quarter (Jan-March '06) his reelection campaign spent $250,000.
$96,500 went to his Abramoff case lawyer at Vinson & Elkins. More details here.
--Josh Marshall
Of all the laughable attempts we've seen in the past months of lawmakers trying to distance themselves from Jack Abramoff, Rep. Charles Taylor's (R-N.C.) latest may take the cake.
--Paul Kiel
Does it strike anyone else as odd that the White House tossed McClellan out the window without having a replacement ready to announce?
--Josh Marshall
Bush legacy epitaph?
From TPM Reader MR ...
I'm no fan of dubya, but the 'do not call' list is still very popular. does it count as a policy decision, and can he claim credit for it?
--Josh Marshall
We've gotten a number of interesting and insightful responses to the question below about how President Bush's record has stood up over time. In general, it's a deafening silence in terms of coming up with many actions that have stood up well. But several readers have brought up one good catch -- the invasion of Afghanistan.
Attacking Afghanistan had overwhelming support in the US just after 9/11. So as a policy decision it was a gimme. However, at the time, particularly during the early weeks of the campaign, there was a great deal of criticism that the President had undermanned the effort, particularly that he and his Defense Secretary had relied too much on precision airpower and too little on boots on the ground. I was one of those critics. And we were wrong -- at least in the short term.
Suddenly, or so it appeared at the time, the Taliban regime just collapsed. Coming in with a vast ground army just wasn't necessary.
However, this is also a debate or instance of decision-making from the past that I think you can argue had very negative follow-on effects.
The decision not to rely on a heavy ground troop component in the invasion of Afghanistan is very hard to separate from the post-invasion problems we've had in the country, which stem to a great degree from our not having the troops in the country to insure basic law and order and prevent the reemergence of the warlordism that dominated the country in the early and mid-1990s.
Even more important, this chapter of the Afghan War was a critical backdrop to the debate over the mechanics of the Iraq War. Setting aside the question of whether it was a good idea to invade Iraq at all, there's really no question that we made reconstruction and stablization of the country almost infinitely more difficult by trying to occupy the Iraq with far, far too small a force. No one who hasn't taken the Bush omerta doesn't concede this point. And the upshot of the Afghan War had a profound effect on empowering the Rumsfeldites in the Pentagon and silencing or appearing to discredit Rumsfeld's critics both inside and outside the Pentagon.
Late Update: Leave it to me to give President Bush too much credit. A number of readers have touched on an aspect of the Afghan War I neglected above. Outsourcing the ground component of the Afghan War not only affected out ability to 'win the peace' in Afghanistan, it also played a very direct role in our failure to bag bin Laden himself in the mountains of Tora Bora. And that, of course, was like the main reason we were there in the first place. So maybe, after all, it was classic Bush. Great on day one, great pictures, but in the end a dismal failure.
--Josh Marshall
Here's another question I've been tossing 
around in my head.
Can you think of any policy-decision or action President Bush has taken in his five-plus years in office that didn't enjoy its greatest popularity on day one and then become more or less consistently less popular over time?
It's true that we're in the nadir of the Bush presidency. So now probably isn't the best time to lay down the marker. But pick any other dates -- 2001 to 2005, 2002 to 2004.
The other way to frame the question is this: Can you think of a policy-decision the president has made or an action that he took that wasn't popular when he took it, or was deemed ill-advised at the outset, but has become more popular with time or is now generally regarded as a good decision?
Some examples spring to my mind. Gerald Ford's decision to pardon Richard Nixon did him great damage at the time. I 
think history has viewed it much more positively. Bill Clinton's 1993 tax hike -- really, really unpopular at the time, but became much more popular in retrospect. There are numerous other examples. But can you think of one for President Bush?
What I think is meaningless -- I'm a consistent critic. But to the extent we can ascertain such things as public opinion judged by polls or elite consensus opinion judged through other means, is there anything from President Bush that falls into this category?
This isn't a rhetorical question -- though I think I have a good sense of the answer. Let me know. And again, don't just go by your personal opinions. Think about public opinion in general or consensus establishment opinion, and try to come up with something from President Bush that has worn well, rather than poorly, over time.
--Josh Marshall
Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO) tells a constituent just what she thinks of him. That and other news of the day in today's Daily Muck.
--Paul Kiel
In his front page piece in Thursday's Post, Dan Balz writes: "Realigning the White House staff and bringing in new faces appear central to [the] effort ... to revitalize this presidency quickly enough to avoid crippling GOP losses in November that could thrust Bush into instant lame-duck status."
But I can't get past this point of, where are the new faces?
It's like they cannot take on anyone who hasn't a) already taken the Bush omerta or b) works currently for Fox News.
--Josh Marshall
You may have heard of Robert Wright's new site Bloggingheads.tv. You get two bloggers who talk over or debate the issues of the day. And then viewers can watch the video and audio of the discussion on the web -- in a pretty high quality feed. I'm not sure that's the best explanation of it. But you can watch and see what it looks like here.
Today, The Nation's David Corn and I did a bloggingheads segment where we talked about investigative journalism, the defenestration of Scott McClellan, Niger, the 2006 election and of course Iran and Iraq. I was still getting a handle of how the technology worked. So I probably screwed things up a bit since it was a bit hard to keep my focus. (You can probably notice my on-going inability to figure out how to get the volume control to work on my headset.) I think I'll do better next time. But you can check it out for yourself.
--Josh Marshall
Turns out Rove's replacement as policy czar had a hand in the "recount riot" that shut down the vote counting in Florida back in 2000.
--Josh Marshall
Okay, this is pretty hilarious. Did Trent Duffy really expect his pal John Roberts was going to read this on the air? And who knew there was an official certified short-list?
This from this morning on CNN. We start with host Miles O'Brien speaking to CNN's John Roberts ...
Let's get back to Scott McClellan, John. Reading the tea leaves on what you just talked about, I gather he's leaving under his own steam. But by the same token, Josh Bolten was very vocal in leaving the door open and suggesting if you're high ranking and you're thinking of leaving, do it now, or there might about few nudges. Was is a combination of him wanting to leave and him, perhaps, expecting to be nudged out?ROBERTS: I expect that Scott was part of the overall changeover. I really don't think he wanted to go. He really enjoyed the job, and I don't think it really was in his heart of heart's of desires to leave the White House.
I think Josh Bolten -- and this is just speculation on my part -- but I think Josh Bolten probably came to him and said, Scott, we've got to make changes. Bolten has said to various Republicans that we've talked to that communications was big problem at the White House, and that the communication shop was probably going to have to be revamped some.
In terms, by the way, Miles, of who could possibly take over for Scott, just got an e-mail from my old friend Trent Duffy, who was one of the deputies, saying, thanks a lot, man. Please include me in the...
M. O'BRIEN: Don't forget me!
ROBERTS: Don't forget me. Please include me in the list of people as "The Washington Post" and others are. So, yes, Trent Duffy is a name that's under consideration there, though we're not sure at this point who's going to get the nod on that one.
M. O'BRIEN: Obviously, Trent doesn't need his own press secretary. He's doing his own work behind the scenes in realtime.
ROBERTS: Well, if he could do as good a job for President Bush as he's doing for himself right now, maybe he gets the job.
M. O'BRIEN: He might have just gotten the job, I don't know.
ROBERTS: Sorry, Trent. Didn't mean to embarrass you so much.
Somehow I don't think Duffy did himself any favors. But he is sure is eager.
--Josh Marshall
You've probably seen the reports that the FBI is trying to get access to the late and legendary muckraker Jack Anderson's papers and to confiscate any classified documents contained in them. Apparently the FBI agents on the case even stooped to going behind the back of Anderson's son, who's an attorney and official custodian of the papers, to trick Anderson's elderly widow into signing a release allowing them free rein to the papers.
--Josh Marshall
I'm still trying to get my head around whether or not taking the policy portfolio from Karl Rove really means anything. But unless I'm missing something, this 'shake-up' has yet to see anyone actually penetrate the Bush White House bubble. Isn't that right? I have to imagine they'll pick someone from the outside for press secretary. But two of the three mentioned for the job are former administration press secretaries -- Dan Senor and Victoria Clark. The third, Tony Snow, is also a White House communications hand, only he's seconded to Fox News.
In all seriousness, I think the real story here continues to be that things are so bad at the White House, the level of denial and secrets to be kept, the self-bamboozlement and bad-faith so profound, that they just can't manage to bring in any new blood.
With Rumsfeld, or any other cabinet secretary, there's a related problem -- the importance of which has, I think, not been fully appreciated or aired. If Rumsfeld goes, you need to nominate someone else and get them through a senate confirmation. That means an open airing of the disaster of this administration's national security policy. Every particular; all about Iraq. Think how much they don't want that ...
Finally, can they find anyone on the outside who wants in? This, remember, seems to be the problem with Treasury Secretary Snow. He has already, in essence, been fired. But they can't come up with anyone crazy enough to take the job.
--Josh Marshall
Giuliani reaches out to the corruption wing of the GOP, headlines fundraiser for Ralph Reed. That and other news of the day in today's Daily Muck.
--Josh Marshall
Okay, this is pretty funny.
Fox is reporting that Fox's own Tony Snow may be Scott McClellan's replacement as White House press secretary.
Isn't that more like an interdepartmental transfer than a job change?
--Josh Marshall
Curt Weldon, who's yer daddy?
Watching
the explanation for this one should be entertaining.
Over at TPMmuckraker.com, Paul Kiel has been walking you through the Russian energy/'security services' thread of the Abramoff scandal.
In short, two executives for the energy company Naftasib (Alexander Koulakovsky and Marina Nevskaya) were spreading money around Washington in the late 1990s looking for friends and favors. They hired Jack Abramoff. Abramoff then acted as the pass through by which Koulakovsky and Nevskaya bankrolled the sham nonprofit, the US Family Network, Tom DeLay's then-Chief of Staff Ed Buckahm set up while he was still on the government payroll. Buckham later used the US Family Network to kick start his lobbying firm Alexander Strategy Group. To make this all a little more complicated the Russian money was funnelled through front outfits in the UK and the Netherlands.
I know the trail of money and the details are rather byzantine. But suffice it to say that these foreign energy executives with what newspapers usually delicately refer to as 'close ties' to Russian security services were pumping millions of dollars into the Abramoff-Buckham-DeLay syndicate. And they were getting a lot in return.
You'll also remember that one of the quids Rep. Bob Ney (R-Toast) was trading for Jack Abramoff's quos were encomiums and hatchet-jobs slipped into the congressional record, for Abramoff's pals and enemies, respectively.
So with all that as background, here are remarks Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) inserted into the Congressional Record back on February 4th, 1999 ...
Now, Weldon does fancy himself something of a Russia hand. Indeed, his daughter, when she was only in her late 20s, set up a lobbying firm that seemed to specialize in getting fat contracts from Russian and Serbian interests which ended up getting favors from her dad. Indeed, one of them was Itera International Energy Corp, another Russian energy outfit with ties of various sorts to Russian government officials.
But I digress.
Whatever the deal with Itera, what was Weldon's thing with Koulakovsky? This guy was funnelling millions of dollars into the DeLay machine. His shenanigans and deals with DeLay, Abramoff and Buckham are a central part of the on-going federal corruption probe. Weldon seems to have thought he was a really, really great guy.
Why?
--Josh Marshall
Safavian to Abramoff, April 30th, 2002: "My gut is telling me to take the GSA job before joining up with you and your band of merry men." More of the courtship here.
--Josh Marshall
Let me tell you 
about a new project we're working on and will have up online sometime next month.
If you were reading TPM a year or more ago, you know that we did very granular and detailed tracking of where key members of Congress were on the Social Security issue. Most political news outlets were focused on that debate in late 2004 and early 2005. But we focused on a slice of the debate that we had unique access to because of our readers in different districts. We heard what the members were sending in constituent emails; we got reports from town meetings; details that were showing up in the local press, and more.
We're going to employ that model to follow this year's mid-term elections. We'll be picking thirty to forty House and Senate races. Mainly, we'll choose the ones that seem genuinely in play, though we'll also probably feature a few that are just inherently interesting, even if the eventual outcome appears fairly clear.
We're setting up a special tabbed blog at TPMCafe, which will run live right through the November election. And there we'll provide wall-to-wall coverage of every race we're tracking -- every poll, every detail about fundraising, who's getting paid what, what's getting said at town meetings, who's running away from their old positions, bamboozling the press and so on. Everything you, the political junkie, need to keep your finger on the pulse of all these races.
The site will be run by our in-house staff and our crop of summer interns. But mainly we'll need you -- folks in the districts, reading the papers, attending the meetings, letting us know about mailings, telling us what you hear. A lot of it we'll do like I did the Social Security stuff, getting your emails, passing on key details to readers. But we'll also be posting reader reports as well.
Are you watching a race you think we should follow? Let us know. Are you in a district or state with a closely-watched race and interested in sending regular reports? Let us know that too.
Like each of our projects, it's an experiment. We're excited about this one. Stay tuned.
--Josh Marshall
It's sad the state we've gotten to where, apparently, even firing incompetent executive branch appointees amounts to a win for the terrorists. Back in '04 we were still enough of a superpower that only turning out a president amounted to a win for the terrorists. That suggests that the terrorists truly have us over a barrel. We are so intimidated by them that we have to hold on to a failed defense secretary presumeably forever. Or until there are no more Muslims with a beef with us. Whichever comes first. It's cool that we're standing so tall.
--Josh Marshall
Mark Schmitt takes on the 'partisanship' question at TPMCafe Book Club. He says Juliet's book promotes a false symmetry between Dems and Republicans.
--Josh Marshall
America in good hands.
Pres. Bush: "I'm the decider, and I decide what's best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense."
--Josh Marshall
K Street beckons for Tom DeLay if prison opportunity falls through. That and other news of the day in today's Daily Muck.
--Josh Marshall
Cunningham felon Mitchell Wade spends a quality moment at MZM headquarters with Reps. Virgil Goode (R-VA) and Eric Cantor (R-VA) back in better days in early 2003.
This is from a fundraiser Wade hosted for Goode at MZM's DC headquarters.
--Josh Marshall
Unless I'm misreading his post, what the Council on Foreign Relations' Michael Levi is telling us is that the core problem in the Iran nuclear situation is Iran's objective need for nuclear weapons.
That's maybe a cheeky interpretation of what he's saying. But I think it gets to the nub of it. Take a look and tell me what you think.
--Josh Marshall
Did Rep. Doolittle lawyer up?
Late Update: Well, you heard here at TPMmuckraker first. Now the Sacramento Bee has followed with confirmation from Doolittle's office and the name of the lawyer. It's David G. Barger, the guy who prosecuted Web Hubbell.
--Josh Marshall
Wait!
Stop the presses!
Time magazine wins the Ryan-Republican 'party affiliation that dare not speak its name' award, knocking the AP back into a distant second.
As we mentioned earlier, the AP really, really didn't seem to want to mention that George Ryan, the former Illinois governor convicted of corruption today, is a Republican. The AP waited until the very end of the article to note that Ryan is from the GOP.
Time never got around to mentioning it. But that alone didn't get them so clearly into the winner's circle.
While failing to mention the party affiliation of the guy who got indicted, they did manage to have this as the second sentence of the article ...
On Monday, former Governor George Ryan, 72, became the third of the state's last six governors to be convicted of political misdeeds, and the current administration of Democrat Rod Blagojevich is also being investigated.
It's almost a tour de force of party ID bamboozlement. Time, we salute you!
(ed.note: Special note of thanks to TPM Reader SS for the tip.)
--Josh Marshall
Excellent: San Diego Union-Tribune (with special props for Marcus Stern and Jerry Kammer) bags a Pulitzer for breaking and covering the Duke Cunningham scandal.
--Josh Marshall
I've been waiting for some time for someone to give us a good, quote-rich run-down on just how little reason there is to put any credence in the administration's claims that an attack on Iran is "fantasy" or "wild speculation." Greg Djerejian gives us a good run-down.
--Josh Marshall
A possible bright side on Iran's recent uranium enrichment announcement?
--Josh Marshall
Okay, this demands some mention.
As you've probably already heard by now, former Gov. George Ryan of Illinois was convicted on all charges today in his long-running federal corruption case.
Ryan's been out of office since 2003; and he's become almost as well known for instituting a moratorium on the death penalty in his state as he is for these corruption charges. Some have even suggested that the former was a way to burnish a legacy tainted by the latter.
But in the piece out today from the AP (the source of most newspaper coverage of the story) you have to go all the way down to the bottom of the lengthy article to find out that Ryan is a Republican. And then it comes up only in reference to his declaring the moratorium.
The Times puts it in graf two; Bloomberg is graf three.
I'd say that's about right. It's a secondary aspect of the story, not the lede. But it's also not a tenth order factoid, which is the billing the AP gives it.
I wouldn't have mentioned this. But it seems like a habit with the AP. Dems get in trouble under their party ID; Republicans seem to do it all by their lonesome.
Needless to say, the data set of the latter is rather larger than the former. But that's another matter entirely.
--Josh Marshall
Is partisanship destroying the House of Representatives? We're discussing that this week in TPMCafe bookclub.
--Josh Marshall
I had meant to write about this this weekend. And in the intervening time a number of others have touched on several of the key points. So let me just touch on one point about Post Ombudsman Deborah Howell's piece this week on the Post's "good leak" editorial.
The point of Howell's column, you'll remember, was to explain the night and day contradiction between a post editorial and news article on the Libby leaks story, which appeared on the same day. Were Libby's leaks 'good leaks' meant to inform the public about key facts leading up to the beginning of the Iraq war or were they intentionally misleading leaks intended to damage and silence a critic?
Much of Howell's piece focused on the standard explanation that most legitimate papers keep a high wall of separation between their news and opinion pages. Neither side tries to force its head on the other, etc. That's correct. Most everyone who's familiar with the newspaper business knows that. And, in this case, it's largely beside the point.
The issue with this startling juxtaposition of what appeared on the Post's news and editorial pages was not that the two disagreed with each other. From different directions we've been seeing that on foreign policy in the Post and the Times for three or four years. The problem was that the Post's editorial page seemed to be contradicting the facts as clearly as they can possibly be known. The fact that the Post's news pages published the contradictory information on the very same day highlighted the problem -- but it was not in itself the problem.
There's one passage in Howell's column which seems to highlight the flawed thinking.
"Editorials and news stories have different purposes," she wrote. "News stories are to inform; editorials are to influence."
Out of context we might figure this was just sloppiness of phrasing. But I think it demonstrates misunderstanding. The point of an editorial is to influence WITH FACTS. Connecting readers up with actual facts, what's actually happening isn't something the editorial pages leave in the hands of the news department. It's their job too. This is what opinion journalism is about -- whether on editorial pages or magazines of opinion or blogs. It's what opinion journalists do. They argue for what the facts mean, how differents facts relate to each other, how some don't.
This is all another way of saying that editorial writers come to the canvass with much of the paint already applied. They can't make up their own facts just because they're helpful to the storyline.
That of course is not to say that editorialists and opinion columnists don't make up their own facts all the time. But that's not how it's supposed to work. And that's why people were upset with what they saw.
--Josh Marshall
In his column today, the LA Times' Ron Brownstein nicely sums up what we discussed last week on the Republicans' immigration bamboozle. The Republicans' effort to blame the 'felony provision' on the Democrats is no more than a flat out lie. "Contrary to the description from Hastert and Frist, Democrats and immigrant groups opposed this [felony] proposal from the start."
Actually, it's worse than this. Republicans are floundering so badly now they can't even keep their wedge issues straight from one week to the next. Their big issue one week is the one that they're running against a bit later in the month. They even want to blame their ideas on the Democrats when anybody watching can see they're lying through their teeth. They're the desperate party.
Everybody can see it.
It's the congress's version of the president being too afraid to appear in front of non-hand-picked audiences.
--Josh Marshall
The Muckers take a toke of the NH phone jamming "conspiracy weed." That and other news of the day in today's Daily Muck.
--Josh Marshall
You probably remember that Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA) and his wife have a special arrangement, of dubious legality, in which they get to personally pocket 15% of the campaign contributions to John's reelection campaign and leadership committee. So far this political cycle the Doolittles have bagged just over $82,000 as their personal cut. Since some of the fattest months of the fundraising cycle are still to come, I guess it's conceiveable that the Doolittles could stash away more from this de facto bribe system than John's congressional salary.
Good work if you can get it.
--Josh Marshall
