June 22, 2007 – Capitol Hill Blue

Friends don’t let friends discuss politics

June 22, 2007

Met an old friend for lunch the other day. We worked together in GOP politics in the 80s, helping elect Republicans to Congress and state offices.

Back in the day, he was the true believer, a supporter of the policies of Ronald Reagan and the GOP principles of less government, fiscal responsibility and states’ rights.

I didn’t believe. I was a political whore, in it for the money and the experience. Politics was, and is, a heady business. I could have worked for either party. Republicans paid better in those days and, as a general rule, their checks didn’t bounce.

Many more Americans will die in Iraq

June 22, 2007

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday US forces face more tough fighting in Iraq and his top military adviser said the rising level of violence was the “wrong metric” for judging the surge.

The comments by Gates and General Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, came as the US military reported 14 US soldiers killed in three days of fighting in Iraq.

Hillary courts the libs

June 22, 2007

Trying to win over her party’s liberal activists, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday accused President Bush of disregarding the Constitution and promised to bring a new progressive vision to the White House.

Bush’s government has “a stunning record of secrecy and corruption, of cronyism run amok,” she said in one of the more partisan speeches of her campaign. “It is everything our founders were afraid of, everything our Constitution was designed to prevent.”

Edwards used non-profit for self-promotion

June 22, 2007

When John Edwards pursued his crusade against poverty in 2005, he created a nonprofit center that allowed him to maintain a high profile â€” and avoid the legal scrutiny aimed at presidential candidates.

Not that Edwards was running for the White House at that point. Fresh from his loss as Democratic nominee John Kerry’s running mate in 2004, he would not declare himself a candidate for president until late in 2006.

Our poor, underpaid federal judges

June 22, 2007

Recently, Chief Justice John Roberts devoted his entire annual report on the federal judiciary to complaining about how little federal judges are paid. (Trial court judges are paid $165,000 per year, while appellate court judges and Supreme Court justices subsist on annual salaries of $175,000 and $203,000, respectively).

Where’s the smoking gun?

June 22, 2007

Chairman John Conyers of the House Judiciary Committee in justifying the subpoenaing of two former top White House aides said that this was not just a request but a “demand” by the American people, who are burning for answers about the firings of nine U.S. attorneys, who, it seems necessary to mention once again, serve at the pleasure of the president of the United States.

A failure in beliefs

June 22, 2007

Bit by bit, without publicly admitting any mistakes, the Bush administration is changing policies on key issues that have defined the president’s tenure in office.

President Bush, known for his adamant beliefs but beleaguered by dismal polls, an unpopular war and positions on many fronts that have failed to work, is reluctantly nodding assent to change. In many of the policy changes, the neoconservative or aggressive nationalistic point of view that prevailed from the day Bush took office is being modified, massaged or outright reversed.