Washington Babylon

Earlier this year I described my night at the Capitol Hill Club, the exclusive private watering hole for Republican elected officials and their supporters, primarily lobbyists. The club boasts a…

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Exxon Mobil is quietly commemorating the biggest operating profit in U.S. corporate history, announcing last week that it had earned $11.7 billion during the second quarter. Here’s something else that…

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In his Washington Post column today–one of thousands he has written over his career that end with a cry to end “partisan gridlock”–David Broder gets misty-eyed over the indictment of…

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From Taxpayers for Common Sense: Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) earned his status as longest-serving member of the U.S. Senate by keeping not only his home renovator well-fed from the pork…

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From the New York Post: Warning of an approaching economic calamity, Gov. Paterson yesterday called an emergency session of the state Legislature – and raised the specter that New York…

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You can read all you want elsewhere about today’s indictment of Senator Ted Stevens. The only thing I want to note here is the news in the indictment that Stevens…

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From TPMMuckraker: It’s kind of astonishing that McCain continues to be taken seriously on Iraq when his closest adviser has a track record on the issue as atrocious as [Randy]…

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From the Wall Street Journal: Influential former Pentagon official Richard Perle has been exploring going into the oil business in Iraq and Kazakhstan, according to people with knowledge of the…

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Much has been made of Barack Obama’s success in raising large sums of money from many small donors. But when you’ve already raised at least $340 million (well above the…

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“Peter Lowy, the son of Australian billionaire Frank Lowy, appeared early Friday before a U.S. Senate subcommittee investigating ways the ultra-wealthy use tax havens to avoid paying taxes,” Forbes reported…

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According to one extremely reputable source, things are even worse at the Times than previously thought: For the 23rd time in 18 months, the Los Angeles Times is losing its…

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Congressman Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland hates taxes. A few years back, he signed on to a Republican Liberty Caucus Position Statement that called for a total overhaul of the tax…

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Today the Washington Post published its annual survey of executive compensation, and reported that while the Washington, D.C., area’s “growing financial sector was one of the first to feel the…

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From the Washington Post, in a story about Michael S. Carona, who during his glory days “appeared to personify the righteous virtue of Orange County, the famously conservative bastion that…

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A picture really is, sometimes, worth a thousand words.

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From the Philadelphia Inquirer: A close friend of former U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon pleaded guilty today to destroying records soon after the FBI interviewed her about the congressman. Cecelia M.…

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Reader William Young comments: Regarding your article about the Dow, the more relevant numbers to quote would be from about 9 months later when the peak of the tech stock…

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James Glassman and Kevin Hassett published Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market on September 20, 1999, an event which almost immediately…

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Slate has produced a very handy interactive guide for people trying to keep track of Bush Administration scandals and potential future prosecutions: What kind of lawbreaking has happened on President…

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From Jim Sleeper: Brooks, a self-described conservative and sometime practitioner of “comic sociology,” author of On Paradise Drive and inventor of the all-American working-class type “patio man,” knows he has…

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If you missed it Monday night, check out Stephen Colbert’s interview with Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope. Pope really does hug trees — and talk to polar bears. And…

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Via Laura Rozen: A link to Radovan Karadzic’s website, under his alias of Dragan Dabic. After Russia, Dr. Dabic travelled around India and Japan, after which he settled in China…

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From Portfolio: Trevor Foltz was six months old last fall, fresh off a visit to Disney World in Orlando, when the spasms first began. Healthy until that point in his…

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The Wall Street Journal has been running a terrific series of articles about corruption and human rights abuses in Kazakhstan, which the newspaper describes as “a strategic U.S. friend and…

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From the Project on Government Oversight (POGO): While elements of the Air Force brass were bickering about color coordination for their new comfort capsules, troops have sat for hours on…

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From a reader: “This might be the sickest, slickest thing to come out of Congress since the Dems took over, and, I think, something that Henry Waxman is losing a…

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The Washington Post is running a 12-part series on the unsolved 2001 murder of Chandra Levy. Then-Congressman Gary Condit became a suspect in the case, in part because after she…

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Leon Wieseltier on Hitchens and waterboarding: Just some weeks ago Christopher Hitchens and his camera-ready conscience went and got themselves waterboarded for the pages of Vanity Fair, which are anyway…

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