To heck with the constitution!

The WSJ says the Senate may force a floor vote on Bolton whether the committee recommends his nomination or not.

I found that through Talking Points Memo, where Josh Marshall also has this to say:

... the Republican party is becoming an anti-constitutional party. They're not comfortable with the rule of law -- inside the Capitol or out.

Sounds about right to me. Those people have gotten so carried away with their own paranoia and their own giddiness at actually being in power, I think, that they don't care what the public thinks, what the constitution says, anything. They're going to push their scary agenda as far as they possibly can.

Luckily, from the left's point of view this might be the best thing that could happen. If they'd reined things in a little they could have been in power for a long time. As it is, I think the American public is starting to sit up and notice what's going on, and (somewhat to my surprise) they don't like it.

Press conference Thursday

I was talking about the 2006 governor's race the other day - well, former Houston City Councilman Chris Bell is officially in the "exploratory" phase, but his Chris Bell for Governor website is already up. 'Nuff said.


Molly Ivins on the filibuster rules.

The problem with Bush's economic policies.


And a couple of things from the press conference:

First of all, how many prime-time press conferences has Bush had? Four, counting this one? My, this is an event.

Bush's 4 steps to solve the energy crisis:
-- conserve
-- make the most of existing resources
-- develop new technologies
-- work to reduce global demand

Now, I was with him until he got to #4. But we are the biggest consumers of energy in the world (at least per capita; I'm not 100% sure about the raw numbers) so who the hell are we to be telling everybody else what to do? On the other hand, that kind of thinking is pretty typical of Bush so I don't know why I'm surprised.

DeLaying tactics

(Sorry, the DeLay puns are just too hard to resist.)

Bush takes Risk with Show of Support for DeLay. And meanwhile, Speaker Hastert backs off on ethics rule changes.

One potential Democratic challenger to DeLay has already withdrawn.

And I didn't expect to find out that Jack Abramoff was secretly a good guy, but my god.

My home state and beyond

Texas politicians are gearing up for a big fight next year, when the governor is up for reelection. He is expected to have serious Republican opposition - most likely Senator Kaye Bailey Hutchinson, who is said to be tired of trying to raise her children from Washington. In preparation for this, we have a fight over campaign financing brewing in the state legislature.

Journalist David Corn has some interesting things to say about Ann Coulter's reliability and DeLay's influence at NASA. (The DeLay stuff is at the bottom, but it's worth hanging in there for.)

Rainy day

(Or, more to the point, rainy day and new camera!)

Odds & ends for the weekend

Who's exploiting Terri Schiavo? (uh... Everybody?)

I didn't know that Dr. Frist was a Presbyterian. I mean, I don't exactly think of Presbyterians as being right-wing nuts, in general. And I'm glad to see that the Presbyterians aren't really happy about Frist aligning himself with the aforesaid nuts.

Bush can't do anything about gasoline prices
(and more to the point, why should he want to? His family is in the oil business, aren't they?)

The Houston Chronicle thinks DeLay may well survive.

He has a little bit of an odor of a rotting fish right now, but no one can throw him out.

-- Marshall Wittmann, of the Democratic Leadership Council


And in case you missed it, the woman who claimed to have found a finger in her chili? Under arrest for attempted grand larceny.

News of the day

The Washington Post says Congress isn't worrying enough about the economy. (Like this is news to anybody except possibly Congress.) Also from the DUH! department of the Post: there were irregularities in the voting last November!

(I'm being wildly sarcastic, of course, but honestly, I'm happy just to see these things in the mainstream media. Because so much of the time they seem to get ignored.)


Newsweek has a good piece on the war on judges.


And I tend to wander around the internets and forget where I originally got things from, but I definitely have been getting lots of good links lately from twistedchick's Livejournal. For example, she didn't link directly to that Newsweek piece, but I got that link from somewhere else that she linked to.

On the new pope

From the Wall St. Journal:

After a relatively brief conclave, Roman Catholic cardinals selected German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, 78 years old, as the church's 265th pope, succeeding the late John Paul II. He chose the papal name Benedict XVI. He is the oldest pope selected in 275 years and the first German since the year 1055. Though Cardinal Ratzinger will likely be a transitional pope, he is controversial because of his 23-year role as the church's strict enforcer of conservative doctrine. At a time when the church is sharply divided on such matters as married priests, contraception and the role of women in the church, with a waning priesthood and slumping membership in North America and Europe, some Catholics had hoped for a more conciliatory figure. Tom Bethell, editor of the conservative American Spectator, praised Cardinal Ratzinger earlier this week, telling religion website Beliefnet.com that he wouldn't turn the church into "a Truth-of-the-Month Club." But conservative author Andrew Sullivan, a gay Catholic, today called the choice "radical" and warned of a "civil war within Catholicism." Some said the pope's choice of the name Benedict could hint at a willingness to keep the peace; Benedict XV, who ruled the church from 1914-1922, helped heal a divide between traditionalists and reformers.

Stay off the internets!

This one made me laugh. DeLay is criticizing judges again (no big surprise there). This time the target is Justice Kennedy, who, among other things, has made the foul mistake of doing his own research on the internet.

Has the Internet become the devil's workshop? Is it some infernal machine now that needs to be avoided by all right-thinking Americans?

--Senator Dick Durbin, D-Illinois

(I am assuming the answer from the DeLay camp would be yes, actually. Or at least, that it should be avoided unless you're looking at such god-approved websites as anncoulter.com or southernbaptists.com. Assuming, of course, that those two websites exist, since I just totally made them up. I refuse to look to see, particularly for the former; that woman gives me hives.)

Mandatory Kate Smith

Did you know you can't leave Yankee Stadium during the singing of "God Bless America"? isn't that unlawful restraint or something?

John Doe

I'm fascinated by this story on Sarah Weinman's weblog about a dead man who might or might not be the Zodiac Killer.

Fun with Tom

More on DeLay:
The Christian Science Monitor
Capitol Hill Blue ("How DeLay Sells His Votes")
The Washington Post: A Rethinking Of Capital's Conventional Wisdom and DeLay's Backers Launch Offense

Hitting it in the gap

From the Wall St. Journal:

The U.S. trade gap with the world in February was the biggest in history and will likely keep growing. Few economists believe it can widen forever; the only question is how painful the correction will be.

On a much lighter note, MSN has some very nice things to say about the Astros, which is a little bit of a surprise to me, even though they've played pretty well the first week. And on ESPN.com, Astros broadcaster Jim Deshaies suggests that there might be a need for a Houston counterpart to the Red Sox Nation. Astros Planet, anybody?

Incidentally, when we got back to our $10 parking space at the baseball game Saturday night, there was a slip of paper on the car advertising boobeltran.com, which amused me. I'm not pissed off enough about the departure of our former center fielder to be very interested in the t-shirts they're hawking, but I do like their slogan: "Letting America know how you feel about over paid athletes since 2005."

Monday misc.

I was very glad to see the Houston Chronicle repudiating Senator Cornyn's ridiculous statement from last week. (Found via Available Light. I really do need to start reading the Chronicle more.) (Off to see if they have an RSS feed...)

The New York Times had a bit to say about that, too.


On gay marriage: a good round-up of the options in the grey area.

The culture of robber barons

Has this been linked everywhere already and I just missed it? Because it's good. One of George Bush's professors on his famous pupil:

In those days, Bush belonged to a minority of MBA students who were seriously disconnected from taking the moral and social responsibility for their actions. Today, he would fit in comfortably with an overwhelming majority of business students and teachers whose role models are celebrated captains of piracy. Since the 1980s, as neo-conservatives have captured the Republican Party, America’s business education has also increasingly become contaminated by the robber baron culture of the pre-Great Depression era.

Bush is the first president of the United States with a Master’s of Business Administration (MBA). Yet, he epitomizes the worst aspects of America’s business education.

(And sorry for the long absence; I've been a tad busy lately. Hopefully things will calm down soon.)