Jerome Armstrong (founder of MyDD) and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (of DailyKos fame) are bringing their "Crashing the Gate" book tour to my home town of Portland. Their PDX itinerary on April 9th and 10th concludes with an event Monday evening to help Rob Brading unseat Oregon House Speaker Karen Minnis. Earlier this week, I had […]

The Galveston County Daily News is reporting that Tom Delay will resign his seat this spring or summer. Coming just days after the guilty plea of his former aide Tony Rudy in the Abramoff affair, Delay has apparently decided not only to drop out of his reelection race, but to resign altogether. Delay cited troubling […]

Visiting England this week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice delivered a new twis on that staple of Bush administration communications, the faux apology. Speaking to an audience of British foreign policy wonks, Rice offered a seeming mea culpa for the situation in Iraq, "I know we've made tactical errors, thousands of them I'm sure." Any […]

Tom Delay has never been shy about comparing himself to Jesus Christ. In 2001, Delay defended his none-too-subtle campaign to bring his fundamentalism to the United States Congress, "People hate the messenger. That's why they killed Christ." At last weekend's "War on Christians" conference, Delay's American Taliban allies elevated his Christ complex to the level […]

With the July G8 summit approaching in St. Petersburg, President Bush is facing some uncomfortable questions about his close friend and budding Russian autocrat, Vladimir Putin. Speaking to Freedom House this week, Bush brushed aside suggestions that he boycott the summit, saying the two have a "personal relationship such that there is the possibility for […]

Facing dismal poll ratings and the potential loss of both the House and Senate, the Republican National Committee appears set with its 2006 mid-term election strategy. Call it "Brand W." That is the central message in a memo from GOP pollster Jan van Lohuizen to RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman. Acknowledging the GOP's current challenges, van […]

This Friday marks the one-year anniversary of the death of Terri Schiavo. While the battle to respect her wishes is thankfully past, the war over individual autonomy and the protection of private, personal life choices is far from over. As many of the leaders of the religious right convene at VisionAmerica's "War on Christians" conference, […]

The mythic image of Barbara Bush as "America's Grandmother" suffered another body blow this week. The Houston Chronicle revealed that Mrs. Bush directed contributions to the Bush-Clinton Katrina relief fund on the condition that the undisclosed funds be spent on products and services from the company of her ne'er do well son Neil. Of course, […]

Neo-conservative founding father Irving Kristol once famously said, a neoconservative is "a liberal who's been mugged by reality." Now the once-preening adherents of the Bush Doctrine are being beaten and battered by events on the ground. First came the Sharia-influenced constitution and sectarian violence in Iraq and the Hamas government in Palestine. With the possible […]

These may be dark times for President Bush and the GOP, but Republicans are happy. Or at least happier than Democrats. That's the unsurprising conclusion of the annual survey of American happiness ("Are We Happy Yet?") by the Pew Research Center. Just as predictably, conservatives like George Will are happier still about what they see […]