Are things really starting to look up in Washington? Today, all the House Democrats together with 22 moderate Republicans handed a stunning defeat to the Republican leadership, actually voting down a spending bill that would have cut education, cut health care programs, cut the budget of the Centers for Disease Control, and frozen a program that helps poor people pay their heating bills – at the beginning of a winter featuring record prices for heating oil. Oh, the bill also would have cut out $8 billion that was planned for avian flu preparedness. A nice touch. The Republicans haven’t lost a vote like this since 1995.
In other news, the Jack Abramoff scandal continues to gather strength. This is going to be a Category 5 scandal before long, with more and more hapless Republicans getting swept in. And speaking of Category 5 scandals, yesterday’s revelation that Bob Woodward was in on Novak-Plame-Rove-Libby-gate all along seems to have reinvigorated Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation – he’s apparently going in front a grand jury again, which would seem to mean more subpoenas, more grand jury appearances, and possibly more indictments of senior administration officials.
Terrific as all of this news is, let’s not get too excited – we’ve got three more years of BushCo, we still don’t control either house of Congress, and the 2006 elections are a long way off. So the skies are still cloudy. But maybe, just maybe, the sun is starting to peek through …
The thing about the Abramoff scandal that worries me most is that it is not just a Republican scandal. An article I read yesterday said there is plenty of evidence to implicated members of BOTH parties. True the scandal is the worst for Repubs, particularly Delay, but we will have a hard time pinning it on them if some of our members are involved as well. And Bob Woodward just pisses me off. His new “revelation” is making Fitzgerald look like an idiot and it significantly weakens the indictment of Libby because the indictment specifically said Libby was the first to know. Grrrr.
Andy, re the Libby indictment: be careful of your facts! Fitzgerald never said that Libby WAS the first to talk to a reporter. He said that Libby was the first one KNOWN to have done so. Armando at Kos has done a nice job of debunking how thoroughly the MSM has mis-reported this. Fitzgerald has always been clear that this is still an investigation in progress, and he’s now got one more piece of the puzzle. He’s not worried, and you shouldn’t be either.