Yes. . .Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush have had their starring roles in the subversion of our system of checks and balances that makes American democracy work — but they are all in the Executive Branch. Chief executives try to be monarchs; they can’t help it.
Timelines — good ones — just undo ANY spin that Bill Frist’s team want to give to the Frist HCA scandal. Check out this sequence of events and information on HCA Stock courtesy of Think Progress. Compelling.
I can’t understand what the White House hoped to achieve with the President’s press conference today on America’s oil refinery problems in the Gulf. The President is right that we probably have too little refinery capacity fueling the U.S. market, but the “alternative fuels” strategy he is suggesting is ad hoc and isn’t serious.
More later. — Steve Clemons & Oakley the Amazing Weimaraner Ed. Note: Blogger Matt Stoller gets all the credit for the photo — and here is his post about Oakley’s puppishness.
This cartoon by Mike Luckovich at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution gets it just right.
Atrios pummels Senator Frist with some great material documenting Frist’s past comments about his holdings in HCA and undermining his credibility. Via Atrios, some excerpts from an ABC Report: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.
Major hypocrisy at the top of the Vatican hierarchy. . . The effort to ban gay-conceptualizers rather than gay-actualizers from the Catholic priesthood is just outright hypocritical and a violation of the rights of those who want to work in established Catholocism as a priest.
Yesterday TWN gave Vice President Cheney some credit for focusing on the aftermath of Katrina and the coming onslaught from Rita — while Karl Rove politicked at big fundraisers in North Dakota.
Senator Bill Frist’s holdings in HCA, a hospital holding firm that his family helped build, has been a conflict-of-interest for him during his entire time as a Senator — but he seems to have only just realized this as he readies himself to make a run for the White House.
Ted Widmer is the kind of historian who makes everything yesterday seem like it is happening now. He is also politically connected. He journeyed these last couple of years every month from his home in Chestertown, Maryland to New York to serve as Bill Clinton’s intellectual ‘foil’ as the former president sorted out his memoirs….
