Tuesday Merry-Go-Round: Ronnie Earle Links Up With Duke Cunningham?
by Steve
Some quick hits today:
Weeks after we here at TLC said that Bob Woodward had become the court stenographer and biographer of the Bush Administration, guess who else has now said it?
Texas prosecutor Ronnie Earle has now linked the Duke Cunningham bribery case to Tom DeLay’s money laundering and conspiracy cases. I wonder what Duke is telling the prosecutors. Get your popcorn folks.
As Jane over at FireDogLake notes, as well as John at Crooks and Liars and Jeralyn at TalkLeft, it almost looked like Jim VandeHei of the Washington Post and NBC’s Nora O’Donnell dropped a bombshell on Tweety’s Hardball last night, when VandeHei mentioned in passing that Karl Rove heard about Valerie Plame from Steve Hadley in some office chatter. VandeHei subsequently clarified that he misspoke and in fact the spin that Rove heard about Plame from Libby is still intact, which itself hurts the "he heard about Plame from the reporters" spin. In truth, both VandeHei and O’Donnell are part of the spin effort by Rove’s attorney Robert Luskin to get into the public domain whatever Luskin says that can aid his client. There is no real reporting being done here by the likes of VandeHei (whose wife used to work for DeLay) and O’Donnell (who is a GOP hack masquerading as a reporter), or for that matter by many of the other reporters covering this story.
As the Abramoff investigation focuses now on GOP Senator Conrad Burns of Montana, Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan returned $67,000 in tribal contributions today.
Ari Fleischer’s Republican Jewish Coalition will be brought into the White House’s pro-Iraq war campaign. Perhaps Ari can help Bush some more before Fitzgerald ruins his holiday season.
The Iraqi Interior Ministry today basically said that we are liars for suggesting that any of the 625 Sunnis in the custody of the Shiite government were tortured. Yet, our own ambassador was forced to throw this ridiculous suggestion back in the face of the Interior Ministry today when our own investigation found things to be worse than we thought. But these are the lying thugs that the Bush Administration now finds itself propping up in Iraq, with a great assist from Iran.
The Associated Press reports this morning that a Swiss investigator has confirmed that the United States did in fact abduct Europeans, detain them at CIA prisons, and transport them across Europe without any judicial proceedings as suspected terrorists, and possibly without the knowledge of the host countries.
For months now, we here at the Left Coaster have been advocating for the Democrats and their allies to go after vulnerable GOP incumbents next year on the issue of their moral values, evidenced by their pro-business, pro-special interest votes and their GOP budget choices. The AFL-CIO along with progressive ministers is now doing exactly that, starting today, with media buys and other efforts that will make 2006 a very uncomfortable year for the GOP and moral values crowd.
Read Ken Auletta’s great piece in the current New Yorker and you’ll see how a glory-seeking reporter, an inept editor, and a publisher in way over his head have converged to destroy the New York Times.
November retail sales were less than expected.