Six More Years [*]
The Freepers are wailing and gnashing their teeth and rending their garments: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) is reported to have decided to run for reelection. New York gets Sen. Clinton and Sen. Charles Schumer (D). God hates Pennsylvania.

Green Tea [*]
The right wing -- and CNN, but why be redundant? -- had a great big hee-haw upon learning Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) once ordered green tea instead of coffee early in the campaign. As a Digby reader at Hullabaloo points out, it's not elitism, it's cancer. Nice work, Ms. Crowley. A tempest in a . . . No, I won't say it.

R.I.P. [*]
Requiescat in pacem: Margaret Hassan, humanitarian, Care International: 1945-2004.

They're Back [*]
For at least two years neoconservatives have denied there is any such thing as "neoconservatism" and accused almost everyone who asserted otherwise of anti-Semitism. And yet today a leading member of the crowd, Jacob Heilbrunn, is crowing about their influence in the Los Angeles Times.

Missing the Obvious [*]
Marc Lacey of the New York Times reports today that the U.N.'s Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria is vastly underfunded, leading the Bush administration to pony up some extra bucks call for a moratorium on grants to countries ravaged by these diseases. ("U.S. Suggests AIDS Fund Delay Grants.") For reasons unknown, Lacey doesn't ask or address the question of which countries have contributed what to the fund.

Specter's Sycophancy
Watch Arlen grovel. It's fun. The Washington Post reports ("Specter Seeks, Gets Support," by Helen Dewar) Sen. Arlen "Flat-Out Perjury" Specter (R-Pa.) is likely to gain the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee:

The predictions followed an extraordinary, nearly two-week-long campaign by Specter to firm up his shaky grip on the chairmanship. It culminated yesterday in personal appeals by Specter to GOP leaders and committee colleagues to trust his assurances that he will do all within his power to win speedy approval for President Bush's judicial nominees.

Specter still plans to plead his case before the full Senate GOP caucus today, and will not face an official vote of committee Republicans and the whole caucus until January. Some senators were pushing for a formal statement reflecting Specter's commitments on the handling of judicial nominations. But several senators said Specter had mostly allayed concerns about his performance as Judiciary chairman and is likely to prevail.

Make him beg.

He Promised Otherwise
Porter J. Goss, the new and very Republican head of the Central Intelligence Agency, has sent a memo to employees to remind them to "support the administration and its policies in [their] work." What was that about not bringing politics to the CIA?

George F. Will, Jock
George Will is cracking me up today. The adulterous right-wing pundit shifts his girly throwing "skills" to basketball, and the results are no more effective than when the big jock talks baseball. "Condoleezza Rice, a sports buff, knows that, as a professional basketball player has said, 'It's not going to be peaches and gravy all the time.' Herewith some hard questions senators might ask in her confirmation hearings[.]" That's Will's lead graph. Oddly, he doesn't return to the basketball theme, and signs off with this preciousism: "Such questions are difficult, but there will also be peaches and gravy." (Somewhat related slice of my life: "B------, my boyfriend throws like a girl." B: "Yeah, I noticed that, but I wasn't going to say anything.")

Alive and Well
Sexual discrimination is still with us. Read the news from the United Farm Workers and sign the petition.

Readers in Chappaqua
More than one recent glance at this site's referral log reveals The Rittenhouse Review is being read by one or more residents of Chappaqua, N.Y. If it's you, and it probably isn't, but if it is, please send me a message.

[Note: Additional items may be posted to “Political Notes” after initial publication but only on the day of publication, excluding post-publication addenda. Such items, when posted, are designated by an asterisk.]

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