Gingrich is right

Gingrich is right in saying that immersion English is a better solution than the current bilingual mess. Ballot papers should be in English, as should everything else in our lives. Bilingual education should be seen as a barrier to the advancement of Spanish speaking students not a way for them to get ahead. You can be a liberal and still understand that "soft" solutions to social issues aren't always the best way to advance society. Here's a tip when you do a search on Monster and the job says "excellent written and verbal comunication skills required", the company usually isn't look for great Spanish speakers...

MC Rove

And how many US soldiers were fighting for their lives while Rove perfomed this bullshit?

Rove's Mini Me

I wonder who Sampson wants to be when he grows up...

Now You Know

This is the number 3 video on Pixau this morning. It's really an awesome piece that everyone should take the time to watch. Truly scary.

Tony Snow

Although I don't agree with anything that comes out of his mouth I feel really bad for Tony Snow and his family. He has a really tough job in a really bad government and I'm sure the stress hasn't helped his situation. Laura Ingraham was on the Today show this morning empathizing with Elizabeth Edwards. Here's a women not far removed from Ann Coulter putting her political differences aside. I wonder whether these events will help with some of the political healing this country needs...

Bush Alone

By Robert Novak - Washington Post

Two weeks earlier on Capitol Hill, there was a groundswell of Republican demands -- public and private -- that President Bush pardon the convicted Scooter Libby. Last week, as Alberto Gonzales came under withering Democratic fire, there were no public GOP declarations of support amid private predictions of the attorney general's demise.

Republican leaders in Congress (asking not to be quoted by name) early last week predicted Gonzales would fall because the Justice Department botched firing eight U.S. attorneys. By week's end, they stipulated that the president would not sack his longtime aide and that Gonzales would leave only on his own initiative. But there was still an ominous lack of congressional support for the attorney general.

"Gonzales never has developed a base of support for himself up here," a House Republican leader told me. But this is less a Gonzales problem than a Bush problem. With nearly two years remaining in his presidency, George W. Bush is alone. In half a century, I have not seen a president so isolated from his own party in Congress -- not Jimmy Carter, not even Richard Nixon as he faced impeachment.
Republicans in Congress do not trust their president to protect them. That alone is sufficient reason to withhold statements of support for Gonzales, when such a gesture could be quickly followed by his resignation under pressure. Rep. Adam Putnam, the highly regarded young chairman of the House Republican Conference, praised Donald Rumsfeld last November, only to find him sacked shortly thereafter.

But not many Republican lawmakers would speak up for Gonzales even if they were sure Bush would stick with him. He is the least popular Cabinet member on Capitol Hill, even more disliked than Rumsfeld had been. The word most often used by Republicans in describing the management of the Justice Department under Gonzales is "incompetent."

Attorneys general in recent years have ranged from skilled political operatives close to the president (most notably Bobby Kennedy under John F. Kennedy) to non-political lawyers detached from the president (such as Ed Levi under Gerald Ford). Gonzales is surely close to Bush, but nobody has accused him of being skilled at politics. He puzzled and alarmed conservatives with a January public speech in which he claimed that he would take over from the White House the selection of future federal nominees.

The saving grace that some Republicans find in the dispute over U.S. attorneys is that, at least temporarily, it blurs debate over an unpopular war. But the overriding feeling in the Republican cloakroom is that the Justice Department and the White House could not have been more inept in dealing with the president's unquestioned right to appoint -- and replace -- federal prosecutors.

The I-word (for incompetence) is used by Republicans in describing the Bush administration generally. Several of them I talked to described a trifecta of incompetence: the Walter Reed hospital scandal, the FBI's misuse of the Patriot Act and the U.S. attorneys firing fiasco. "We always have claimed that we were the party of better management," one House leader told me. "How can we claim that anymore?"

The reconstruction of his government after Bush's re-election in 2004, though a year late, clearly improved the president's team. Yet the addition of extraordinary public servants Josh Bolten, Tony Snow and Rob Portman has not changed the image of incompetence.

A few Republicans blame incessant attack from the new Democratic majority in Congress for that image. Many more say today's problems by the administration derive from yesterday's mistakes, whose impact persists. The answer that is not entertained by the president's most severe GOP critics, even when not speaking for quotation, is that this is just the governing style of George W. Bush and never will change while he is in the Oval Office.

Regarding the Libby-Gonzales equation, unofficial word from the White House is not reassuring. One credible source says the president never -- not even on the way out of the Oval Office in January 2009 -- will pardon Libby. Another equally good source says the president never will ask Gonzales to resign. That exactly reverses the prevailing Republican opinion in Congress. Bush is alone.

Fat chance

Hagel mentioning that Bush's impeachment is a possibility is a step in the right direction for a Republican senator. Unfortunately impeachment is not going to happen any time soon. The reality is that despite the continuing civil war in Iraq, the justice department scandal and growing public discontent, the wheels of congress turn slowly. On Meet the Press this morning Arlen Specter indicated that if the administration goes to court to fight subpoenas then it could be 2 years before a decision is reached on whether Rove et al should testify. By that time, Bush will be back to sipping Margarita's and doing lines of coke in Crawford.

Bush the comedian

Bush in reference to Karl Rove testifying in front of congress:
"We will not go along with a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honorable public servants."

Rove is a lot of things, an honorable public servant he is not. Maybe it was meant to be a joke. Just like "Brownie you're doing a hell of a job", while thousands of people were dieing at his feet.

Is it surprising that the public doesn't trust these guys when they won't testify under oath or allow a transcript of the proceedings? Do you think maybe they have something to hide? The arrogance is starting to turn to blind stupidity.

Justice department scandal

This whole thing reeks of Karl Rove. It makes a lot of sense to fire prosecutors not sympathetic with the Administrations goal of investigating Democratic law makers. Turning the whole corruption scandal wave back against the Democrats was a good political strategy, even if legally dubious. That's the Rove way.

The Coulterization of the American right

Partial by Gary Kamiya (salon.com)

The John Edwards "faggot" episode "isn't really about Coulter at all. This is about a pact the American right made with the devil, a pact the devil is now coming to collect on. American conservatism sold its soul to the Coulters and Limbaughs of the world to gain power, and now that its ideology has been exposed as empty and its leadership incompetent and corrupt, free-floating hatred is the only thing it has to offer. The problem, for the GOP, is that this isn't a winning political strategy anymore -- but they're stuck with it. They're trapped. They need the bigoted and reactionary base they helped create, but the very fanaticism that made the True Believers such potent shock troops will prevent the Republicans from achieving Karl Rove's dream of long-term GOP domination."

PIXAU Updated

Check out the video page. We have automated the indexing, worked on the search algorithm and changed the interface.

In Memoriam

I'm not a big fan of George Stephanopoulos' This Week show on ABC. It is a substandard rip off of Meet the Press, and George is really nauseating. However, without fail his In Memoriam Lives of Note section gets me in tears each week as he reads off the names of soldiers killed in Iraq. I'm always struck by the number and age of the men a women dieing each week. Can anyone in the Administration or Congress watch this without feeling a deep sense of guilt? I hope not. After years of being told they should start a diplomatic dialog to end the war, the Administration is now reluctantly coming to the table. It's too little too late, if the President was a Democrat the White House would have already been over run with civilian militias demanding change.

A parallel universe...

Partial from David Remnick (New Yorker)

"Saturday Night Live is erratic in middle age but rarely cruel. An exception came late last spring, when, at the stroke of eleven-thirty, an NBC announcer gravely told the American people to stand by for a “message from the President of the United States,” and Al Gore, surrounded by Oval Office knickknacks, came into focus to deliver what could best be described as an interim report from a parallel, and happier, galaxy. President Gore reviewed some of his actions and their unintended consequences:

In the last six years we have been able to stop global warming. No one could have predicted the negative results of this. Glaciers that once were melting are now on the attack. As you know, these renegade glaciers have already captured parts of upper Michigan and northern Maine. But I assure you: we will not let the glaciers win.

Nor was this the only problem. Although Social Security had been repaired, the cost had been high: the budget surplus was down to a perilously low eleven trillion dollars. The price of gas had dropped to nineteen cents a gallon, and the oil companies were hurting. (“I know that I am partly to blame by insisting that cars run on trash.”) After winning the plaudits of a grateful world—and turning Afghanistan into a premier “spring-break destination”—Americans could no longer risk travelling abroad, for fear of “getting hugged.” Even the national pastime was in danger. 'But,' Gore added hopefully, 'I have faith in baseball commissioner George W. Bush when he says, 'We will find the steroid users if we have to tap every phone in America!'

The cruelty here was not to Gore, who probably requires no prompting to brood now and then about what might have been, but to the audience. It is worse than painful to reflect on how much better off the United States and the world would be today if the outcome of the 2000 election had been permitted to correspond with the wishes of the electorate.

Libby

The only unfortunate thing about Lewis "Scooter" Libby's guilty verdict is that we didn't get to see Cheney perjure himself in court. They would make great cell mates. Although Libby is probably tired of being Cheney's bitch...

Hmmm

WSJ AND SALON.COM: "President Bush said he intends to nominate Michael Baroody, a lobbyist for the National Association of Manufacturers, to be chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission."

Crazy Coulter

If there's one thing to be said for Ann Coulter, she isn't afraid to wear her bigotry on her sleeve. I'm not sure what's more disturbing; that she thinks it's OK to use the word "faggot" during a public speech or that it was followed by applause from the CPAC audience. Ideally Coulter and her followers would disavow the Republican party for becoming too "liberal" and establish a right wing party similar to Jean-Marie LePen's Front National in France. That way Republicans who agree with her could "come out" and freely air their intolerances.