George W. Bush

Tim Griffin, a controversial figure in the U.S attorney firing scandal, is a source of new optimism among Bush-era Republicans.

Nothing shocking here. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) took to the chamber floor this morning to decry the Democrats’ $848 billion health reform bill, unveiled about 15 hours earlier.
After six weeks of drafting a bill behind closed doors, the Majority has produced a bill that increases premiums, raises taxes, and slashes Medicare by half [...]

“If they had been pulling out all the stops and working as hard as possible to get as many nominations as fast possible,” said former associate counsel in the Bush White House Rachel Brand, “they might have done the same as us.”

There’s growing attention today to the hypocrisy of Senate Republicans planning to filibuster the nomination of Judge David Hamilton to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and to the Obama administration’s failure to make judicial nominations a higher priority.
NPR’s Nina Totenberg this morning had an excellent roundup on the issue, while The New York Times, [...]

Blogger Jordan Carmon catches Marco Rubio’s upstart Senate campaign putting together an ad against Gov. Charlie Crist (R-Fla.) — his opponent in the 2010 GOP primary — that looks and sounds exactly like a hard-hitting ad then-presidential candidate Barack Obama ran against Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2008.
After the jump, check out the ads.

Back in January, TWI’s Spencer Ackerman singled out former Prime Minister Tony Blair as one of the world leaders most damaged by his alliance with former President George W. Bush. According to this fascinating tidbit from the Financial Times, Blair hasn’t recovered yet. Blair, seen just weeks ago as the likely first president of the [...]

Here’s a somewhat surprising result from the new Fox News poll. Asked which president is “more responsible for the current state of the economy,” only 18 percent say President Obama. Fifty-eight percent say former President George W. Bush. Nine percent blame both of them. Republicans are the only subgroup of voters who blame Obama, and [...]

Perhaps I was too quick to dismiss the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board yesterday. The White House just released a new executive order that gives the board a powerful new institutional tool.

Ben Smith, Nick Gillespie, and Byron York are writing up Gallup’s report that Vice President Joe Biden’s favorable ratings have fallen below the 50 percent mark. Gillespie and York both point out that “Biden is less popular at this point in his term than Dick Cheney was in his.”
Now, not disputing that Biden’s [...]

The New York Times’ lead editorial today is a powerful indictment of the Obama administration’s continuation of Bush-era efforts to conceal the facts of U.S.-sponsored torture.
Running through the list of situations that we’ve been reporting on in which the Obama administration continues to conceal evidence of torture — from the efforts of British resident Binyam [...]