Are RINOS (what GOPers call Republican In Name Only) becoming extinct? And should they be?

They are addicted to pork and reject all attempts to curtail their addiction….even when some things defy logic….

Is Harriet Miers’ Supreme Court nomination politically dead on arrival yet? No one assigning it to the morgue of political conventional wisdom…not just yet. But this much is sure: seldom in recent memory has a Supreme Court nominee left so many so cold, unimpressed or revolted by what seemingly smacks of cronyism — and that’s just referring to Republicans. Read this account in the National Review Online, a piece hardly likely to fire up the partisan troops to put their necks...

A UN report has come out with a bombshell: YES, it says, the assassination of Lebanon’s former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was indeed a conspiracy — a terrorist act scripted by Syrian and Lebanese intelligence services. Now, the question becomes: what will be the political consequences of this finding? But, for now, the findings are explosive enough as this New York Times report notes: The report by the chief United Nations investigator, Detlev Mehlis, said, “The assassination of...

The Moderate Voice applauds all weblogs that run ORIGINAL reporting on their sites, versus the traditional op-ed style commentaries we all do (yours truly included). John Amato has interviewed Lawrence O’Donnell and, as the Crooks And Liars creator explains: Mr. O’Donnell was the first person to say that Karl Rove was Matt Cooper’s source and he was kind enough to come on the blog to do an interview. He was very revealing to C&L about the reasons why he leaked Karl Rove’s...

Former military man and Democrat Wes Clark has launched an email campaign to try and get progressive talk show host Ed Schultz on Armed Forces radio. On his website he recaps: Last year, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) introduced a resolution that was unanimously passed by the Senate, urging Secretary Rumsfeld and Armed Forces Radio to ensure more political balance in programming. It looked like progress was being made when the Pentagon agreed to air the first hour of Ed Schultz’s daily radio show...

They say if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. Howard Stern “fixed” something that wasn’t broken (the kind of show he did) and is looking a bit now like the broadcasting equivalent of damaged goods. The Washington Post reports: The Howard Stern exodus has begun. Unfortunately for Stern, it’s his audience that’s leaving, not him. The shock jock won’t jump to satellite radio until January, but in the meantime, his listeners in the Washington area seem to...

From the Toledo Blade: FINALLY, it’s settled. No, not Iraq. Not FEMA. Not Harriet Miers’ Supreme Court nomination. Not Israel-Palestine. The noodle. Finally it can be told where that internationally beloved food, the noodle, comes from. Maybe it hasn’t kept you up nights, but this is an issue long in dispute. At last, the Italians, Arabs, Japanese, Koreans, French, and Germans can lay down their arms, or at least their noodles, because the credit belongs to – drum roll,...

More on the debacle from the right: Professor Bainbridge, one of the more interesting conservatives out in the blogosphere (and to whom Joe also links — see below), addresses Miers’s “views” on abortion — whatever they are, whatever they happen to be at the moment. I don’t agree that a judge should always “adhere to the triad of originalism, textualism, and traditionalism that should properly constrain judicial decision making,” but he’s right...

Conservative columnist Robert Novak is predicting that the hearings on Harriet Miers’ Supreme Court nomination will be ugly, indeed — and he blasts the White House for “incompetence,” predicting in the end she might not be confirmed. First, a word about Novak. He is generally acknowledged to have good sources among conservatives so if he writes about their continued dissatisfaction and grumbling over Miers, it’s reflecting some informed opinion. And what he’s saying...

Perhaps Pentagon (or high administration) officials felt that pulling the plug on progressive talk show host Ed Schultz’s debut on Armed Forces Radio literally hours before his show was to be broadcast would make it just go away. If so, they badly miscalculated. The reasons: On his show, Schultz is reminding his listeners of the agreement his show had to be broadcast, the controversy has gathered traction in terms of the mainstream news media, gotten attention on cable, and Democratic Senators...

Diageo and The Hotline are the latest organizations to release polling for the month of October, and their survey finds the following: The new Diageo/Hotline Poll of 500 registered voters, conducted by Financial Dynamics with analysis by Ed Reilly (D) and Ed Rollins (R), found 60% of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction, with only 26% saying the country is headed in the right direction. Bush’s job approval also fell to 41%, an eightpoint drop since July and the lowest...

Is President George Bush starting to put some distance between himself and Karl Rove? If this article in the New York Daily News is any indication, it sure sounds that way: WASHINGTON – An angry President Bush rebuked chief political guru Karl Rove two years ago for his role in the Valerie Plame affair, sources told the Daily News. “He made his displeasure known to Karl,” a presidential counselor told The News. “He made his life miserable about this.” Bush has nevertheless...

REQUIRED READING We’ve all seen the images in grainy black and white — images of skeleton-like human beings, images of “showers” that turned out to be gas extermination chambers for what the Nazis considered vermin (human beings), images of the ovens that busily cremated the bodies of murdered prisoners who had even been stripped of gold in their teeth. Images of men, women and tiny children caught up in a nightmare that none of us can even imagine. But they didn’t see...

A story is making the blogosphere rounds regarding a High School’s decision to drop “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” after being criticized by a local community member. The man argued that: A high school band director would be fired for playing ‘Amazing Grace’ but no one bats an eye for the playing of a song about the devil … [H]ow can one mention the devil, and not be able to mention a Christian God?” I can’t speak for everyone of course, but consider...

Via Ann Althouse, we get this story about Cindy Sheehan’s dramatic fall off of the national stage. Good riddance, I say. And, to add insult to injury, the article was published in that powerhouse of opinion making, The Tri-Valley Herald (in the “local news” section, to boot).

And you thought progressive talk show host Ed Schultz was the only one? It turns out that those who loudly question the Bush administration line are in for traumatic experiences — even at Bush-friendly conservative groups: WASHINGTON, Oct. 17 – In the latest sign of the deepening split among conservatives over how far to go in challenging President Bush, Bruce Bartlett, a Republican commentator who has been increasingly critical of the White House, was dismissed on Monday as a senior...

The latest USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll finds President George Bush with the lowest poll ratings of his presidency, with very little Democratic and independent support but FIRM support from his base. The poll now puts his job approval rating at 39 percent, “the first time he has fallen below 40%, a level that until now had been his floor, ” USA Today reports. USA Today then offers analysts’ views on WHY this is happening — a combination of factors that can be boiled down into...

IMPORTANT NOTE TO READERS: At 2 a.m. this morning we posted a version of this post below with the headline that progressive talker Ed Schultz would begin to be carried today on Armed Forces Radio. The peg to our post was that his debut on Armed Forces Radio mean that there would be a countervailing voice to Rush Limbaugh, who is basically the main political talk show host people in the military get to hear on that network. We learned a few hours later that the show had been told that the debut would...

This time he’s HELPING someone in the water: HYANNIS, Mass. — U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy attempted to rescue six men who had become trapped by high tide on a jetty off Hyannisport on Sunday. The Massachusetts Democrat eventually left the rescue to Hyannis firefighters, The Cape Cod Times reported Monday. Kennedy was walking his two dogs on the shore at 11:15 a.m. when he spotted the men cut off from shore by the rising waters. They had been fishing on a jetty that begins at the tip of the...

(Cross-posted at The Reaction.) Yes, yet more on Harriet Miers. Bear with me. Time is reporting that the White House will re-spin the Miers nomination by re-marketing Harriet Miers herself: Get ready for a whole new Harriet. After a disastrous two weeks, White House officials say they hope to relaunch the nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court by moving from what they call a “biographical phase” to an “accomplishment phase.” In other words, stop debating her religion...

I wonder who Jim Carrey plays in this?

A ton of columns and posts have been written on the controversial nomination of President Bush’s decision to nominate his lawyer Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court — but there is one that stands out. First, we admit: we were negligent. We read the column in the post linked below and bookmarked it, and never did a post on it. Perhaps it’s because we find this commentator often tiresome, predictable and not exactly (ahem) solution- or consensus-oriented and simply didn’t get...

Here’s an interesting take on the (likely soon to be former) New Times’ Judith Miller and Plamegate from The All Spin Zone: Back in the summer of 2003, a month before Joe Wilson publicly debunked the Niger yellowcake claim made by the Bush administration in the New York Times, the Scottish Sunday Herald published an expose on Operation Rockingham. It was the UK equivalent of the US’s Office of Special Plans, whose function was selective use of intelligence to elicit public support...

By DAVID YONKE, BLADE RELIGION EDITOR It’s the end of the world, take three. The third in a series of apocalyptic films based on Tim LaHaye’s and Jerry B. Jenkins’ blockbuster novels, Left Behind: World at War, will bypass Hollywood’s standard operating procedures when it opens Friday in more than 3,000 churches instead of movie theaters… [snip] There are 127 churches in Ohio signed up to show the movie and more than 3,000 churches nationwide. Locations and times of...