Author: KcM

More! More!

Like a junkie looking for another fix, Ashcroft takes time away from putting down gay pride events to beg Congress for increased powers in fighting terrorism. If the death penalty doesn’t even work as a deterrent in “normal” crime, why would it stop terrorists?

The “Browbeaters.”

Is Paul Wolfowitz in a 12-step program? A week after confiding to America about the “bureaucratic” thinking that motivated the WMD casus belli, Wolfowitz opens up to an audience in Singapore, telling them “we had no choice” in our Iraq policy because “the country swims on a sea of oil.” (Via High Industrial.) And now it turns out Cheney and co. were leaning hard on the CIA to come up with the “right” intelligence about Iraq’s WMD capabilities (and an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection.) Hmm…looks like it’s getting grim at WMD Search Central. Update: Jake Tapper of Salon points out that Wolfowitz’s alleged Singapore statement is based on a misquote – Wolfowitz was talking about the efficacy of sanctions, not the reasons for war.

The Recycle Bin of History.

Fred Kaplan wonders aloud about the perils of writing history in the e-mail era. I see what he’s getting at, but this argument cuts both ways. If in fact someone is saving administration e-mail correspondence (a big if, I know, but consider folks like Harold Ickes and Sidney Blumenthal in the Clinton White House), then there should be plenty of e-mails of conversations that would have been held on the phone throughout most of the twentieth century. Plus, so much more of government (at the highest levels, at least) is televised now, from subcommittee hearings on C-SPAN2 to Dubya’s 4pm photo-op with the Boy Scouts. Historians of the future should have their hands full.

Credit Denied.

Despite growing GOP support in the Senate, Tom De Lay refuses to consider an increased low-income child tax credit in the House unless it includes more schwag for the filthy rich, such as an estate tax repeal. Speaking of which, new analyses of the Dubya debacle suggest that the middle class will end up footing the bill while the wealthy frolic. So much for “trickle-down.”