Politics

I suppose I’m surprised he didn’t just pardon him. He’ll probably do that on January 20, 2009.

Just keep pullin’ down your poll numbers, brother.

In case you hadn’t heard, Democrats took back the House and the Senate on Tuesday. Also, we got back to a majority in the Governorships.

Holla!

I hadn’t come up with a post about this, but I was browsing the archive and came across this gem: My post on election night 2004. The last four sentences:

We don’t have the house, we don’t have the senate, and we sure as hell don’t have the Presidency. We’re outnumbered 5-4 on the Supreme Court. Most of the Governors are Republicans. Things have to change.

Well, things have changed. Two out of the four things I mentioned have changed. Isn’t that awesome? On Wednesday I felt like it was the first day of Summer vacation. After 12 years of shit, we’re looking at two years of — at the very least — checks and balances. I’m hoping we get another thirty, or fifty, or hundred years of Democrat control of Congress. While we’re at it, how about the next Presidential election, too. (John Edwards and Wes Clark — get out there.)

Vote tomorrow!  And vote Democrat for your US Congressional race.

Google Sidebar’s News plugin showed me the SFGate.com post of a San Francisco Chronicle headline below. I don’t know how it figured I would want to read this article, but I did want to read it, and it’s so dead-on that I thought I’d link to it.

Not to judge, but 16 kids? Stop already.

Since George W. Bush was sworn into office as the President of the United States, Republicans have had nearly five years with control of the Executive Branch, the House of Representatives, and the Senate. So what are they doing with that mandate, that political capital, that overwhelming support from voters?

They’re appointing unqualified friends to critical, life-or-death-matter positions.

They’re dabbling in insider trading and pulling the curtain back on blind trusts.

They’re making their own interpretion of political fundraising laws.

Someone must have come up with this one by now: Got vote?

In case you didn’t hear, Robert Novak cursed on-air and then stormed off the set of CNN’s Inside Politics during Thursday’s show.

If you watch the clip (here on iFilm.com), it looks like Bob got pissed at James Carville’s zingers. But if you’ve ever seen CNN’s kaput Crossfire, you figure that Bob has taken — and dished — a lot worse. So why did Novak drop a BS-bomb and walk off? I suspected that it had something to do with the Valerie Plame business.

But it still didn’t explain why Bob chose that moment to flip out. Then I read an article in yesterday’s USA Today, which seems to wrap everything up in a neat little bow.

Last week in his column, Novak wrote of the outed CIA operative that “she could be identified as ‘Valerie Plame’ by reading her husband’s entry in ‘Who’s Who in America.’” Again, if you watch the clip, you’ll see a large book sitting on the desk. It’s a copy of “Who’s Who in America.” The theory here is that Ed Henry, host of Inside Politics, planned on questioning Novak about his column, his involvement in the Valerie Plame mess, etc. Novak saw the book and decided he wasn’t going to deal with the Plame story. He decided he wasn’t even going to give Ed Henry the chance to ask him about it. So during discussion about Katherine Harris’s Senate bid, Bob decided to get huffy and walk out.

I wrote about Karl Rove a few weeks ago, and ultimately I believe that Rove leaked Plame’s identity to Novak, who was more than happy to do the White House’s dirty work. I don’t know if Novak will ever face jail time for this, or be forced to give up his source. I don’t know if Karl Rove will lose his job over this. But it would be poetic justice if jailed New York Times reporter Judith Miller gets out of jail to see her career flourish based on her integrity, while Novak gets drummed out of television. On the other side of coin, a reporter doing time to protect her source strengthens the freedom of the press and more importantly, the notion that we live in a free and open democracy — while a talking head like Novak proves once again (see: Armstrong Williams) that getting in bed with subject matter you’re supposed to cover objectively can cost you your credibility.

It looks like Karl Rove has made President Bush look like an idiot. There are stories all over the place about this, but I picked this one to link.

Under normal circumstances, under a normal administration, I’d expect Rove to resign tomorrow or the next day. But hey, I expected Donald Rumsfeld to resign about thirteen months ago, and that didn’t happen. As the story goes, Don submitted his resignation to Bush twice, and Bush refused it twice.

So, honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised by a similar turn of events this time around.