Another guilty Bush administration official...

AP - "Former Deputy Interior Secretary Steven Griles will plead guilty to one count of obstruction of justice in the Jack Abramoff corruption investigation, The Associated Press has learned. Griles, an oil and gas lobbyist who became an architect of President Bush's energy policies while at the Interior Department between July 2001 and July 2005, is the highest ranking Bush administration official implicated in the Washington lobbying scandal."

J. McCutchen

NPR, LAT...You guyz have a future as CNN spokesmodels *joke

I know it is a well-worn topic, but someone oughta take a look at Iraq. The Sunni Dept PM just got blown up at Friday prayer but that's not the worst of it....

The Mother of All Civil Wars...

Tensions in Oil Rich Kirkuk Near Boiling Point

Surge on guyz!!!

Vis this morning's alarming news about UK Marines being held by Iran, how many TPM folks surmised that the cassus belli for a strike on Iran might be something like this?

Boats. Why does it always have to be boats.

Clem

J. McCutchen

August 31, 2008

Pelosi Scores!

House just beat back Republcian opposition passing supplemental appropriation providing funds for the troops..

Filibuster? Veto? Bring it on

And this week's developments in Congress are the complete opposite of what Democratic voters thought they were achieving by helping to put a Democratic Congress in place last fall. The effort to use the war spending bill to push for a change in Iraq policy has thoroughly collapsed, and the bill itself has become a vehicle for business-as-usual Dem pork barrel projects.

Meanwhile, the online Democratic community has seemingly been almost completely distracted from global affairs, and has been totally consumed by electoral politics, the minutiae of the nominating process and relatively meaningless early campaign squabbling, and the latest scandelgate partisan warfare.

I am coming to think that the Democratic party is simply structurally incapable of sustained and intelligent leadership in global affairs. It is apparently a party built almost entirely for domestic affairs and the omnipresent electoral struggle. Democrats managed to focus on the outside world for a few months when it was an electoral wedge to help them win the election. But now that they are in power, they have reverted to their more comfortable posture of domestic policy and national introversion.

The pattern on TPM Cafe is perhaps emblematic of the whole. Except for the all-consuming daily travails of our 51st state, and the endless and repetitive debates about that state's lobby, the outside world has almost completely diappeared from Cafe discussion. At a time when the country needed the blogosphere to push hard on US foreign policy and national security issues in the Middle East, to dig up new stories and revelations about administration plans and actions, and to help focus the nation's attention on what should have been the dominant national debate, most of the major blogs decided to back-page or disregard the whole matter, and shifted their attention elsewhere.

The result: humiliating and ignominious failure, continued legislative corruption and cupidity - and passive, ambivalent Democratic acquiescence in the White House agenda of death. Perhaps the worst result is the self-infliction of another blow to the reputation of the Democratic party on national security and foreign policy. It is hard to escape the impression that a party that was full of so much sound and fury about Iraq before the election, and has settled into such passivity and carelessness after the election is just profoundly unserious about playing any serious part in directing the US role in the world.

The Attorney-gate affair, as reported on NPR, shows how much the blogosphere - and even a single blog - can accomplish when it puts its mind to it. I guess in the case of the daily butchery in Iraq and continued US casualties, TPM Cafe and others decided it wans't worth the effort.

We're in the midst of a redesign of the main page, at which point HM will have a prominent link.