I have a friend who is a lawyer for a government agency that is moving to the Department of Homeland Security. We were talking, and he said that they are busy writing regulations that have to do with the move. The hard part, I think, is not writing the regs, it's translating them into German.

A Small Way...

...To Avoid Being An Idiot

Hell, I don't tip hookers this much.

Lott Is Unfit To Run the Senate

Lott Is Unfit To Run the SenateSo Mr. Lott is a liar as well as a racist. But again, that has been obvious for a long time. To quell the outrage over his remarks at the Thurmond event, his spokesman finally emitted a brief statement ludicrously claiming that the problem was "a poor choice of words." That wasn’t the problem. The problem was the meaning of the words spoken by the Republican leader.

Trent Lott is not fit to lead the United States Senate. His "apology" is unacceptable. The pusillanimous response to his latest misconduct of most Democrats—including their Senate leader, Tom Daschle, but with the admirable exception of former Vice President Al Gore—has been awful. But deposing Mr. Lott is a Republican responsibility. Republican Senators must either vote for him again in January or choose an untainted leader. We will then learn the content of their character.

When the man is right, he's right.

Yahoo! News - Lott No Stranger to Racial Controversy Trent Lott led the fight to restore Jefferson Davis' U.S. citizenship and once suggested the Confederate leader would support the Republican Party if alive today.

Some of my best friends...

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall In the department of quotes that just make you cringe, see this graf from the Associated Press article which reports Trent Lott's 'apology'.

Kevin L. Martin, government and political affairs director of the African American Republican Leadership Council, said people were overreacting to the remarks. "By no means was he endorsing segregation or anything like that. It was lighthearted, it was humorous." Martin said Lott captures 25 percent of the black vote in Mississippi, which he said couldn't happen if Lott were a racist.

Ugh ...

Maybe he's not apologizing for racist statements because he's a narrow-minded bigot.

Why won't Lott praise desegregation? Where on earth is liberal bias when the answer to this isn't clear? To Josh, Lott’s reticence is a “mystery.” But we can solve this puzzle quite easily. Why hasn’t Lott offered a stronger retraction/apology/clarification/restatement? Almost surely, it’s because he has powerful constituent groups he just doesn’t want to offend. Marshall wanted Lott to say, “Everyone should know that I believe segregation was wrong. And I’m very proud of the progress our nation has made in guaranteeing civil rights and voting rights of all Americans, regardless of race, creed or color.” Why hasn’t Lott said something like that? Almost surely, he doesn’t want to offend key supporters. You may be surprised to think that Lott has supporters who would find that offensive. But if the sky is still blue and the grass is still green, that is almost surely why he has stayed away from such a statement. And why didn’t this obvious explanation occur to Josh? Perhaps it’s because we so rarely see frank discussions of race and GOP party politics. What ever happened to liberal bias when the groups to whom Lott wants to appeal are so rarely discussed in the press.

Show me, show you!

This is genuinely funny.

This should reassure you.

Snowstorm Snarls Traffic, Closes Schools (washingtonpost.com)
"It takes more than five inches of snow to shut down the federal government," Hatch said.

Excerpts from the Esquire article on the Rove White House

Esquire * "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," DiIulio tells Esquire. "What you've got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

* A current senior White House official: "Many of us feel it's our duty—our obligation as Americans—to get the word out that, certainly in domestic policy, there has been almost no meaningful consideration of any real issues. It's just kids on Big Wheels, who talk politics and know nothing. It's depressing. DPC [Domestic Policy Council] meetings are a farce."

* Senior White House official: "Don't you understand?…We got into the White House and forfeited the game. You're supposed to stand for something . . . to generate sound ideas, support them with real evidence, and present them to Congress and the people. We didn't do any of that. We just danced this way and that on minute political calculations and whatever was needed for a few paragraphs of a speech."

* DiIulio: "Besides the tax cut…. the administration has not done much, either in absolute terms or in comparison to previous administrations at this stage, on domestic policy. There is a virtual absence as yet of any policy accomplishments that might, to a fair-minded non-partisan, count as the flesh on the bones of so-called compassionate conservatism."

* Another senior White House official: "The view of many people [in the White House] is that the best government can do is simply do no harm, that it never is an agent for positive change. If that's your position, why bother to understand what programs actually do?"

* DiIulio: "Karl is enormously powerful, maybe the single most powerful person in the modern, post-Hoover era ever to occupy a political advisor post near the Oval Office."

* DiIulio: "When policy analysis is just backfill, to back up a political maneuver, you'll get a lot of ooops."

Is this something people actually buy?

Maureen Dowd on the evil Dr. K!

He's Ba-a-ack! Only someone as pathologically opaque as the vice president could appreciate the sublime translucency of Henry Kissinger. And only someone intent on recreating the glory days of the Ford and Nixon White Houses could have hungered to add the 79-year-old Dr. Strange?? I mean, Dr. Kissinger to the Bush team.

There will be naysayers who quibble that the president's choice to lead the 9/11 commission is not so much a realist as an opportunist, not so much Metternich as Machiavelli.

They will look askance at Mr. Kissinger's resume: keeping the Vietnam War going for years after he realized it might be unwinnable; encouraging the illegal bombing of Cambodia; backing Chile's murderous Pinochet; playing Iago to President Richard Nixon, telling him he'd be "a weakling" if he did not prosecute newspapers running the Pentagon Papers; wiretapping journalists and his own colleagues to track down leaks on the Cambodia bombing.

If you look for the words "Kissinger" and "secret" in the same sentence in Nexis, the search cannot be completed; there are too many results. When he was dating Jill St. John and Liv Ullmann and preaching that power is an aphrodisiac, he even coyly called himself "a secret swinger."

In Walter Isaacson's biography, "Kissinger," the same words cascade: "deceitful," "disingenuous," "paranoid," "insecure," "temper tantrum," "flatterer," "two-faced" and "secretive." The uber-diplomat has even been criticized for dissembling in his own memoirs. But secretiveness is not a disqualification for jobs in this White House. Quite the contrary: only the clandestine and the conspiratorial need apply.