photo by HoboElvisI thought we would announce the winner of the Joke Line Joe Klein mental midgetry award tonight but I fear that the varying amounts of traffic/participation we have had on each night make a cumulative vote total a bit skewed, so we find ourselves in the interest of fairness conducting a runoff.

Margot has found the perfect job for Amy Ridenour (no, not Dennis Hastert impersonator). Angie lets us know she was a real piece of work during her testimony before the Indian Affairs Committee. Valley Girl gives us this link to an article about the NCPPR entitled "Tom DeLay's Right Arm" and quotes from The Hill, June 23, 2005:The Center's chief executive officer, Amy Ridenour, a friend of Abramoff's from their time as College

In January, 2005 Raw Story published a letter sent by Amy Ridenour of The National Center for Public Policy Research to elderly people under the pretense that they were "saving" their endangered Social Security benefits:"Should we put most of our time and effort into fighting to prevent liberal big-spenders from draining an estimated $100 billion from the trust fund?" Ridenour asks.

I didn't expect my post about Michael Brown to cause as much controversy as it did. But it got a conversation going that I think is actually quite interesting so I'd like to carry it a bit further. Josh Marshall is right -- the release of the new tapes show simply that Brown cared about what was going on, was aware of the potential danger of Katrina and tried to do something

Shorter Harry's Reid, in his response to Bill Frist on Friday: "Have you no shame?" Here is the pertinent part of Reid's response in full: “I agree with Senator Frist, the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee has been bogged down by partisanship. The only way we can restore this important committee’s non-partisan tradition is for Leader Frist and Chairman Roberts to stop bowing to the pressure of the Bush White House and permit the

Bill Frist on November 7, 2003, on the floor of the Senate: The [Intelligence] Committee’s nonpartisan tradition has been carefully cultivated over the years by its members. The tradition is part and parcel of the Committee’s rules, which extend prerogatives to the Minority that are not found in other committee rule books.

Since its creation in 1976, the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has purposely been a bi-partisan, non-political committee. It was specifically designed to minimize the partisanship among Republicans and Democrats, to function as a check on the executive branch's substantial powers of surveillance and intelligence gathering, and to ensure that consideration of the national security of this nation was not done in a politicized atmosphere -- but, rather, with