Call It A Comeback
Bob Kerrey just pissed me off far more than any lesbian jokes.
Iraq has nothing to do with an unusually tall Sunni Arab who is hiding out in Pakistan. It has a lot to do with a civil war between two sects after one sect being screwed for years by the other.
In Ann Arbor
Gibbs is on Hardball looking like he’s aged about 15 years in two months.
At the same time, Davis, a former Clinton White House official who had been named by President Bush to serve on the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board, sent a letter to the White House and his fellow board members protesting the panel’s lack of independence. In recent months, Davis has had numerous clashes with fellow board members and White House officials over what he saw as administration attempts to control the panel’s agenda and edit its public statements, according to board members who asked not to be identified talking about internal matters. He also cited in his letters criticisms by the former co-chairs of the September 11 commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, that the board had interpreted its mandate too narrowly and was refusing to investigate issues such as the treatment of detainees in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere around the world.
After receiving the Reading First contracts, Best was able to sell his company, Voyager Expanded Learning, for $360 million. According to his critics, the company was valued at only $5 million a few years earlier, a figure Best disputes.
“At the time of the sale, the company that bought the program justified this to their stockholders on the basis that this program had done extremely well under Reading First and was very politically connected,” said Robert Slavin, a leading educator at Johns Hopkins University and critic of the Reading First program.
Slavin, the brother of an ABC News executive, says a program he developed was rejected by the Department of Education despite its record of success.
Best, of Dallas, denied his connections to President Bush helped him win any of the federal reading program contracts.
“I have gotten no help from anyone in the administration, and I’ve given more money to Democrats than Republicans,” Best told ABCNews.com.
But congressional investigators say Reading First contracts were awarded by the administration based on politics and financial ties, not merit.
“They designed it for their friends and cronies, and they ended up not designing the best program for America’s schoolchildren,” said Congressman George Miller, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee.
In a report earlier this year, the inspector general for the Department of Education found repeated instances of conflict of interest in the Reading First program.
And it resulted in more phonics instruction than instead of balanced literacy. Bad for taxpayers, bad for policy, good for Bushies.
He said the inquiry into his conduct “has the potential to do greater long-term damage to the institution than the alleged underlying ethics issue that was, in point of fact, put to rest over a year ago.”
No matter how much a Bushie screws up, they threaten impending doom for those who dare oppose them.
“He lifted his head off the pillow and in very strong terms expressed his view of the matter, rich in both substance and fact, which stunned me,” Comey said. Then, he said, Ashcroft added: “But that doesn’t matter, because I’m not the attorney general. There is the attorney general,” and pointed at Comey, who was appointed acting attorney general when Ashcroft fell ill.
I believe this is where I have sympathy for the devil. More seriously, that Ashcroft was willing to resign along with Mueller is stunning. And yet, the current AG was the enforcer to try and get a heavily sedated man to approve a plan.
If there was ever clear evidence of a position being created to scapegoat someone, this is it.
With all apologies to Eric Zorn:
“It’s not just talking tough, because the truth is nobody’s talked tougher than George Bush over the last six years. Being tough means, first of all, not having to talk about it all the time,” Obama said.
Back–a bit slow early.
Will definitely be back later today–work was hectic since vacation and, yes, yesterday was my birthday.
ArchPundit