Archive for March, 2006

Andy Card Resigns

reports CNN. White House chief of staff Andy Card has resigned his post and will be replaced by Josh Bolten, who served as White House deputy chief of staff before becoming director of the Office of Management and Budget.

A post by Matthew Slutsky

Got Luffa?

Bring that hairdo to the “no spin zone”.

A post by Matthew Slutsky

Katherine Harris: Flip-Flop

Katherine Harris has gone mad. Really, she has. First, she went on Fox News’ Hannity and that other dude and declared (awkwardly to camera) that she will stay in the race for U.S. Senate in Florida. She promised that she would spend her recent inheritance to fund her campaign.

And why would she want to spend millions of dollars to run for U.S Senate? That’s simple, God wants her to get elected. Now that’s an endorsement!

Harris, who told a national television audience Wednesday that she would be spending $10 million to win Florida’s U.S. Senate race, said she never would have entered politics if she did not believe that God wanted her to make public service part of her life.

Wait for it…wait for it…OK, go…

FLIP-FLOP. Now Harris says she actually won’t be spending her inheritance but will rely instead on money she already has in the bank.

In an effort to jump-start her sputtering Senate campaign, Rep. Katherine Harris went on national television invoking the memory of her late father and saying the money he left her will form the financial foundation of her challenge to Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson.

Now the Harris campaign says that’s not the case.

Campaign spokeswoman Morgan Dobbs said Thursday that Harris will sell her existing assets rather than rely on money from her father, a bank executive who died in January.

“It is my understanding from her statements that she does not plan to use inherited money on the campaign — rather, money from liquidating her personal assets, which she says total $10 million,” Dobbs wrote in an e-mail to the Orlando Sentinel.

“I think I am being pretty clear.”

Yes Katherine, you’re being extremely clear. I hope God doesn’t get cold feet on the aforementioned endorsement.

A post by Peter Slutsky

Cheney Can’t Sing

Dick Cheney

Oh…Dick:

With that sorry record, the leaders of the Democratic Party have decided to run on the theme of competence. If they’re competent to fight this war, then I ought to be singing on American Idol.

A post by Joshua Skaroff

Bush or Middle School?

Check out Teddy Wayne’s list over at McSweeney’s:
Parallels Between My Living Through Two Years of Middle School and the Two Terms of the Bush Presidency

A choice few:

The radical changes going on around me make me uncomfortable.

I am unhappy about the way things are, but feel helpless to do anything about it.

Shame is my dominant emotion.

Flying is much more terrifying than it should be.

When I talk to friends on the phone, I’m afraid someone is listening in.

I constantly think the world is going to end.

I really dislike the arrogant popular guy elected as my president.

French is considered lame.

Thanks kottke.

Clinton Opponent Fluffs Resume

Since Jeanine Pirro lost the US Senate race to Hillary Clinton a good nine months before election day, her replacement, KT McFarland, is trying a different strategy. She’s been touting her national security credentials–specifically, that she wrote President Reagan’s 1983 Star Wars speech and was once the highest ranking woman in the Defense Department. The only problem, according to the New York Times, is neither claim is true.

But, it gets better…

Ms. McFarland’s biography has already emerged as an issue in the Republican primary. Her rival, John Spencer, a former mayor of Yonkers, has asserted that she inflated her position by claiming that she held the equivalent civilian rank of a three-star general while in the Pentagon. Ms. McFarland’s campaign said that she had claimed only to be the civilian equivalent of “a two-and-a-half-star general.”

Impressive, if there was such a thing. Those NY Republicans really know how to pick a winner.

A post by Peter Slutsky

Retire!

Donald Rumsfeld

Come on Don…You’re in the prime of your life…do America a big favor:

Step-Down!

Your lack of leadership is bumming us out. Really, it is!

A post by Matthew Slutsky

Dick Cheney: #1 Diva

This is great! Check out the list of amenities that Dick Cheney Requires wherever he travels. You thought Elton John was a diva!!??

Thanks to Politicalwire for this one…

A post by Joshua Skaroff

Poll: More Bad News For GOP (in the South)

Conservative columnist Matt Towery is reporting on an as-of-yet unreleased poll that shows bad news for President Bush and the Republican party in the South, their last bastion of stubborn support.

[I]n the populous states of Florida and Georgia, more respondents want the Democrats to control Congress next year than they do the Republicans.

President George W. Bush won both states in 2004, and yet he now has higher disapproval ratings than approval ratings. In Georgia, his disapproval rate approaches 50 percent. In Florida, it’s 55 percent.

It gets worse for Republicans. Initial polling results seem to show that the disapproval of Washington Republicans is starting to translate into possible votes against GOP candidates this fall in statewide races back home. Most of these are races in which Republicans would expect to hold obvious upper hands.

And despite this President Bush thinks he still has “political capital” to spend.

Hat tip: RawStory.

A post by Joshua Skaroff

All Your Data Belongs To Us

We all know that there is nothing holier to the Republican ideology than the supremacy of the market and the ensuing desire to privatize everything. Despite evidence to the contrary, the corporate GOP thinks it would be better if its donors controlled everything in our lives. And since BushCo have decided to rewrite all the rules, they’ve found another once-protected portion of American information that can be handed over.

The IRS has just announced a new plan to allow your tax preparers or accountants to sell your personal data, or even your entire tax return, to private marketing companies.

The Internal Revenue Service is quietly moving to loosen the once-inviolable privacy of federal income-tax returns.

If it succeeds, accountants and other tax-return preparers for the first time would be able to sell information from individual returns — or even entire returns — to marketers and data brokers.

The change is in a set of proposed rules the Treasury Department and the IRS published in the Dec. 8 Federal Register, where the official notice labeled them “not a significant regulatory action.”

Why can’t the Republican party play by the rules?

UPDATE: Sean-Paul Kelley at The Agonist has the information about who to get in contact with to protest this abuse of power:

If you have a comment on the proposed IRS rule that would allow sale of tax return information, contact:

Dillon Taylor, Office of Associate Chief Counsel (Procedure and Administration), Administrative Provisions and Judicial Practice Division.

Phone: 202-622-7752 or 202-622-4940

E-mail: dillon.j.taylor@irs.counsel.treas.gov