The Italian job: In a follow-up to Jon’s earlier posting, the rapidly deteriorating relationship between George Bush and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi seems to be accelerating. As reported by the Christian Science Monitor, Berlusconi, in a “behind the scenes effort” to convince Bush not to go to war he even asked Libyan leader Muammar […]

Political seppuku? In every profile of Scooter Libby - and they are legion these days - friends and co-workers express shock that anyone so meticulous and bureaucratically sure-footed could have made such dumb mistakes and told such easily debunked lies to a federal grand jury.
One easily drawn conclusion is that Libby assumed that because the […]

The United Press International said Saturday, Oct. 29, 2005, that Iraqi medical sources have reported the first case of bird flu in the northern Iraqi Kurdish city of Erbil.
However, a moderator of an international scientific and medical organization cautioned against taking the report at face value:
This piece of information, lacking elementary clinical and epidemiological […]

Political misdirection: What better way to deflect attention away from the Scooter than to nominate another Italian wingnut to the Supreme Court? Hail, Scalito! But the Libby indictment goes to the ethics question, and most people just aren’t buying the “cleaning up government and bringing morality back to the White House” load of malarkey.
Nearly two-thirds […]

Gotta be more to this: This is the last minute development that Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff says saved Karl Rove from being indicted last week:
Two sources close to Rove who asked not to be identified because the probe is ongoing said Luskin presented evidence that gave the prosecutor “pause.” One small item was a July 11, […]

JUAN WILLIAMS: You can try to minimize it, but the fact that you have Scooter Libby, so involved in justifying going to war, and in the posture of trying to smear a critic of that justification. I think is pretty revealing and pretty damaging to the Bush White House. I think they’re going to have […]

Lying, Italian-style: In the run-up to the Iraq war, President Bush had so few supporters among European leaders that it’s hard not to remember who they were: Tony Blair in the U.K. and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
But now, on the eve of his visit to Washington - and with his poll numbers […]

Associated Press:
President Bush, stung by the rejection of his first choice, nominated longtime judge Samuel Alito Monday in a bid to reshape the Supreme Court and mollify his conservative allies. Democrats said that Alito may be “too radical for the American people.
“Judge Alito has served with distinction on that court for 15 years, and now […]

Election dysfunction: In yet another of his growing list of quirky electoral decisions, Fla. Gov. Jeb Bush has ignored the suggestions of local elections officials and the company that supplies our touch-screen voting machines, and called for county and city elections to go forward. He allowed Miami-Dade and Broward counties two weeks’ reprieve, but called […]