cheney's thugs

* murray waas has a new traitorgator article out. i dont think it tells us very much, but people are excited about it... waas' argument is that Rove was fully prepping to defend frances townsend when he had his conversation with bobnovak (R-FNC), and the Plame thing was just a side-issue. my only comment is that if this was true, and if they thought that it had any exculpatory value, we would have been told about it 2 years ago.

the other interesting thing about the waas article is that it paints an internal war between the office of potus and the OVP over townsend - nothing interesting in that, in itself, but these internal, orchestrated wars have apparently been going on forever - its incredible that we havent seen much more of it exposed. the harriet miers thing was a rare episode of public disunity. its no wonder cheney has been able to place so many of his thugs.

* "A senior fellow at the Cato Institute resigned from the libertarian think tank on Dec. 15 after admitting that he had accepted payments from indicted Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff for writing op-ed articles favorable to the positions of some of Abramoff's clients." (link)
he isnt the only writer on the abramoff payroll.

* clemons: "The White House is being handed one defeat after another, but the President and his team despise being beaten. I suspect that we are entering a dangerous period where the White House feels trapped and prone to excess to try and get back in control."
dangerous indeed. who knows what the hell they will do. will they start a new war? their language about iran and syria is as strong as it has always been. and just this week we heard Blinky state that he would have invaded iraq, even given what we know now. that's a pretty low hurdle rate for going to war - and iran and syria could probably be invaded using bush's criteria.

* "The Senate has rejected the Patriot Act renewal legislation by a 52 to 47 vote. Frist said no to a three month extension. Huge defeat for Bush." (link)
yay - although i never get my hopes about this sort of thing. the apparent ban on torture that was announced this week is a similar situation. i simply dont trust the spin on any of these stories - and even if the facts are as they seem, the ShiteHouse always has a plan B. and C.