Bill Maher’s New Rules rant after mentioning Jimmy Carter’s passing on the “Worst President Ever” title to George W. Bush:

I mean, who would you rank lower than George W. Bush? Nixon got in trouble for illegally wiretapping Democratic headquarters; Bush is illegally wiretapping the entire country. Nixon opened up relations with the Chinese; Bush let them poison your dog. Herbert Hoover sat on his ass through four years of calamity, but he was an actual engineer. If someone told him about global warming, he would have understood it before the penguins caught on fire. Ulysses Grant was a miserable drunk, but at least he didn’t trade booze for Jesus and embolden the snake handlers — he did the honorable thing and stayed a miserable drunk. Grant let his cronies loot the republic, but he won his civil war.

For some inexplicable reason Republicans have taken to comparing Bush to Harry Truman — a comparison that would make sense only if Harry Truman had A) started World War II and B) lost World War II. Harding sucked, but he once said, “I am not fit for this office and never should have been here.” So at least he knew he sucked.

Tags: worst, president, ever, bush, carter, bill maher, real time

Editorial from The New York Times:

We’ve been interested to hear that the state dirt movement is gaining steam. As The Wall Street Journal pointed out this week, 21 states have now named an official state dirt, and New Jersey is considering adding a sandy loam to the list of honored soils. People have, of course, laughed. Some have suggested that a state legislature facing an $18 billion pension shortfall should have something better to do with its time. That kind of negative thinking misses the point.

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From The Associated Press

CONNECTICUT

SENATE: Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman lost to anti-war challenger Ned Lamont. The three-term senator was criticized by some Democrats for supporting the Iraq war and defending President Bush.

GOVERNOR: New Haven Mayor John DeStefano and Stamford Mayor Dan Malloy competed for the Democratic nomination to run against Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell in November. Rell has a 75 percent approval rating and better than 2-to-1 leads over her challengers.

GEORGIA

HOUSE: Rep. Cynthia McKinney, who made headlines this year for a scuffle with a U.S. Capitol Police officer, was defeated by Hank Johnson, a former county official, in a runoff for the Democratic nomination.

COLORADO

HOUSE: Six GOP candidates competed to succeed retiring Republican Rep. Joel Hefley, a 10-term veteran. The winner faces Democratic Air Force veteran Jay Fawcett. In another race, three Democrats vied to replace Rep. Bob Beauprez, the Republican nominee for governor.

MICHIGAN

CONGRESS: Republican Rep. Joe Schwarz trailed former state lawmaker Tim Walberg.

SENATE: Mike Bouchard, sheriff of Oakland County in suburban Detroit, competed with minister Keith Butler for the GOP nomination. The winner will take on Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow in November.

GOVERNOR: Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm and Republican multimillionaire Dick DeVos faced no opposition in their primaries.

MISSOURI

SENATE: Republican Sen. Jim Talent and Democratic challenger Claire McCaskill, the state auditor, won their party’s primaries.

Tags: primaries, elections, lieberman, vote

Aides put a wrestler in governor’s office;
now they’re in Kinky’s corner

From The Dallas Morning News:

By WAYNE SLATER / The Dallas Morning News

ST. PAUL, Minn. – Lightning struck eight years ago for a group of Minnesota political consultants when it helped an eccentric long shot beat a field of established politicians to become governor.

The same team that surrounded Jesse Ventura then is working for Kinky Friedman in Texas now. And one of the candidates it vanquished in 1998 sees plenty of similarities.

“For Kinky to win, the stars have to align just right,” said Hubert H. Humphrey III, a former state attorney general and namesake of one of Minnesota’s most vaunted political figures.

“My own gut feeling about that election was that people were tired of hearing what the Republicans were saying,” Mr. Humphrey said.

“And, frankly, I was babbling the same kind of traditional Democratic rhetoric to all our small groups.”

This year’s crowded contest for Texas governor offers striking similarities – and some considerable differences – with Mr. Ventura’s upstart victory in Minnesota.

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(From The Boston Globe)

By John W. Dean

CONTEMPORARY CONSERVATISM and its influence on the Republican Party was, until recently, a mystery to me. The practitioners’ bludgeoning style of politics, their self-serving manipulation of the political processes, and their policies that focus narrowly on perceived self-interest — none of this struck me as based on anything related to traditional conservatism. Rather, truth be told, today’s so-called conservatives are quite radical.

For more than 40 years I have considered myself a “Goldwater conservative,” and am thoroughly familiar with the movement’s canon. But I can find nothing conservative about the Bush/Cheney White House, which has created a Nixon “imperial presidency” on steroids, while acting as if being tutored by the best and brightest of the Cosa Nostra.

What true conservative calls for packing the courts to politicize the federal judiciary to the degree that it is now possible to determine the outcome of cases by looking at the prior politics of judges? Where is the conservative precedent for the monocratic leadership style that conservative Republicans imposed on the US House when they took control in 1994, a style that seeks primarily to perfect fund-raising skills while outsourcing the writing of legislation to special interests and freezing Democrats out of the legislative process?

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OK, never mind that American Idol crap, here’s the real scoop… if Libby’s defense is “The devil made me do it,” he’s truly got a star witness now! (Via Associated Press.)

Vice President Dick Cheney could be called to testify in the perjury case against his former chief of staff, a special prosecutor said in a court filing Wednesday.

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald suggested Cheney would be a logical government witness because he could authenticate notes he jotted on a July 6, 2003, New York Times opinion piece by a former U.S. ambassador critical of the Iraq war.

Fitzgerald said Cheney’s “state of mind” is “directly relevant” to whether I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s former top aide, lied to FBI agents and a federal grand jury about how he learned about CIA officer Valerie Plame’s identity and what he subsequently told reporters.

Tags: dick, cheney, scooter, libby, cia, lucifer

Is Al Gore really prepping for the presidency? I hope not, so that he can keep on speaking his mind.

By JOHN TIERNEY
The New York Times

If Al Gore’s new movie weren’t titled An Inconvenient Truth, I wouldn’t have quite so many problems with it.

He should have gone with something closer to Revenge of the Nerd. That’s the heartwarming angle to global warming. A college student is mesmerized by his professor’s bold measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Our hero carries this passion into Congress, where no one listens to him, and then works up a slide show that he inflicts on audiences around the world, to no discernible effect.

But then his slide show becomes a horror movie — and it turns into a cult hit. The nerd becomes the toast of Hollywood, Sundance and Cannes. He is cheered at premieres across America. Audiences sit enraptured through a film starring graphs of CO2 concentrations and close-ups of ice cores. (more…)

And, by the way, The Dixie Chicks are releasing a new album. That doesn’t really matter much since I truly couldn’t name more than one song (the overplayed one about the spaces being wide and open) they ever produced, but I hope someone buys it. In this week’s Time magazine, Chick Natalie Maines apologizes for apologizing about dissing G.W., a move that nearly cost her the group’s career.

Maines has one regret: the apology she offered George W. Bush at the onset of her infamy. “I apologized for disrespecting the office of the President,” says Maines. “But I don’t feel that way anymore. I don’t feel he is owed any respect whatsoever.”

A sizable chunk of their once adoring audience feels the same way about the Dixie Chicks. After Maines’ pronouncement, which was vigorously seconded by bandmates Martie Maguire and Emily Robison, the group received death threats and was banned by thousands of country radio stations, many of which still have informal bans in place. The Dixie Chicks have mass appeal–you can’t sell 10 million copies of two of your three albums without engaging lots of different people–but country radio is an indispensable part of how they reach people. Programmers say that even now a heartfelt apology could help set things right with listeners, but it’s not happening. “If people are going to ask me to apologize based on who I am,” says Maines, “I don’t know what to do about that. I can’t change who I am.”

Good thing is, people don’t have to apologize for buying their new album. You can just buy it right here, and no one will think any less of you.

Tags: bush, dixie chicks, natalie, maines, time, magazine

From The Washington Post:

Hispanic voters, many of whom responded favorably to President Bush’s campaign appeals emphasizing patriotism, family and religious values in Spanish-language media in 2004, are turning away from the administration on immigration and a host of other issues, according to a new survey.

At the same time, separate polls show that conservative white Republicans are the voting group most hostile to the administration’s support for policies that would move toward the legalization of many undocumented immigrants.

Cumulatively, the data underscore the perils for Bush and his party in the immigration debate churning on Capitol Hill, one that threatens to bleed away support simultaneously from the Republican base and from Hispanic swing voters, whom Bush strategists had hoped to make an important new part of the GOP coalition.

Tags: bush, immigration, hispanic, hispanics

By PAUL KRUGMAN
The New York Times

Friday was a bad day for Senator Joseph Lieberman. The Connecticut Democratic Party’s nominating convention endorsed him, but that was a given for an incumbent with a lot of political chips to cash in. The real news was that Ned Lamont, an almost unknown challenger, received a third of the votes. This gave Mr. Lamont the right to run against Mr. Lieberman in a primary, and suggests that Mr. Lamont may even win. What happened to Mr. Lieberman? Some news reports may lead you to believe that he is in trouble solely because of his support for the Iraq war. But there’s much more to it than that. Mr. Lieberman has consistently supported Republican talking points. This has made him a lion of the Sunday talk shows, but has put him out of touch with his constituents — and with reality.

Mr. Lieberman isn’t the only nationally known Democrat who still supports the Iraq war. But he isn’t just an unrepentant hawk, he has joined the Bush administration by insisting on an upbeat picture of the situation in Iraq that is increasingly delusional. (more…)