Disagreeable
Well-known member
you can find good news anywhere. Entire article; link below. :lol:
"A Silver Lining for the GOP
By Rick Horowitz
Question of the Day:
Q. Is Tom DeLay called "The Hammer" for his home-improvement skills?
A. He is not.
The good news for Republicans -- and there's always good news if you look hard enough -- is that Tom DeLay's indictment took the spotlight away from Bill Frist.
Not that the majority leader of the House of Representatives was looking to do something nice for the majority leader of the Senate; the former exterminator and the former surgeon are hardly the best of friends. But DeLay's latest brush with the law grabbed most of the eyeballs in Washington, which meant less attention to Frist's troubles.
After all, it would normally be a big deal to have the majority leader of the Senate under investigation by the SEC and the Justice Department for the curious -- and highly profitable -- timing of certain stock sales from his so-called "blind trust." If it was blind, it made some pretty lucky guesses: "Hey, let's sell the stock just before bad news comes out and the share price tanks." What a coincidence.
Let's just say the authorities are...interested. And under ordinary circumstances (without the DeLay distraction, that is), there'd be plenty of negative publicity about it: a major Republican figure like Frist, a man who's been giving serious thought to a presidential run in 2008, caught up in a possible ethical tangle. But now? No -- there's a bigger story.
Of course, whatever chatter there still was about Bill Frist wasn't a totally bad thing for Republicans either -- it took some of the attention away from Michael Brown.
And no question -- the less attention Michael Brown got, the better the GOP liked it. The former head (and rear end?) of FEMA could only be an embarrassment. For some reason, in times of crisis the public doesn't warm to emergency managers who are a) unqualified, and b) clueless.
So if talking about Bill Frist meant there'd be fewer people talking about Michael Brown, that was a good thing.
Not that people talking about Michael Brown didn't have its upside, too: It kept David Safavian off everyone's radar screen.
David Who? Exactly. How many people stopped staring at Michael Brown even long enough to notice that some guy named David H. Safavian, who until a few days ago was one of the top people in the White House budget office, had been arrested? Arrested, and charged with obstructing a federal investigation into the Republican uber-lobbyist, Jack Abramoff.
Now, generally speaking, the arrest of a top White House official -- even one who had suddenly resigned from his job just days before the feds came after him, and so was technically, at the moment of his arrest, merely a "former top White House official" -- would be major news, right? And this was the guy drawing up the rules for handing out multi-million-dollar post-Katrina reconstruction contracts! But almost nobody noticed. Michael Brown's meltdown meant that most people didn't so much as glance in David Safavian's direction as they took him away.
Which was another lucky break for the GOP, because if people had paid attention to Safavian's arrest, they would have started asking questions about Safavian's long-time buddy, Abramoff. And Abramoff isn't the kind of big-time operator Republicans enjoy hearing questions about anymore. (Do the words "incredibly shady dealings" ring a bell?)
Of course, Abramoff is such a big fish in the Republican pond that anyone focusing on him would have been too busy to pay much attention to Karl Rove, who has -- all together, boys and girls! -- his own problems. Or perhaps you don't consider it a problem to have a special prosecutor on your tail, determined to solve the mystery of "Who outed Valerie Plame?"
Karl Rove is the man who made George Bush possible; every day Rove can spend out of the limelight, pulling the strings, is a good day for Republicans. Rove in trouble would be big trouble, for the president, and for the whole party. Even the possibility of Rove in trouble has started some tongues wagging, the few tongues that aren't busy wagging about Abramoff, or Safavian, or Brown, or Frist, or DeLay.
Which means nobody's talking about Iraq.
See? There's always good news. You just have to look for it."
http://yesrick.com/092905.htm
"A Silver Lining for the GOP
By Rick Horowitz
Question of the Day:
Q. Is Tom DeLay called "The Hammer" for his home-improvement skills?
A. He is not.
The good news for Republicans -- and there's always good news if you look hard enough -- is that Tom DeLay's indictment took the spotlight away from Bill Frist.
Not that the majority leader of the House of Representatives was looking to do something nice for the majority leader of the Senate; the former exterminator and the former surgeon are hardly the best of friends. But DeLay's latest brush with the law grabbed most of the eyeballs in Washington, which meant less attention to Frist's troubles.
After all, it would normally be a big deal to have the majority leader of the Senate under investigation by the SEC and the Justice Department for the curious -- and highly profitable -- timing of certain stock sales from his so-called "blind trust." If it was blind, it made some pretty lucky guesses: "Hey, let's sell the stock just before bad news comes out and the share price tanks." What a coincidence.
Let's just say the authorities are...interested. And under ordinary circumstances (without the DeLay distraction, that is), there'd be plenty of negative publicity about it: a major Republican figure like Frist, a man who's been giving serious thought to a presidential run in 2008, caught up in a possible ethical tangle. But now? No -- there's a bigger story.
Of course, whatever chatter there still was about Bill Frist wasn't a totally bad thing for Republicans either -- it took some of the attention away from Michael Brown.
And no question -- the less attention Michael Brown got, the better the GOP liked it. The former head (and rear end?) of FEMA could only be an embarrassment. For some reason, in times of crisis the public doesn't warm to emergency managers who are a) unqualified, and b) clueless.
So if talking about Bill Frist meant there'd be fewer people talking about Michael Brown, that was a good thing.
Not that people talking about Michael Brown didn't have its upside, too: It kept David Safavian off everyone's radar screen.
David Who? Exactly. How many people stopped staring at Michael Brown even long enough to notice that some guy named David H. Safavian, who until a few days ago was one of the top people in the White House budget office, had been arrested? Arrested, and charged with obstructing a federal investigation into the Republican uber-lobbyist, Jack Abramoff.
Now, generally speaking, the arrest of a top White House official -- even one who had suddenly resigned from his job just days before the feds came after him, and so was technically, at the moment of his arrest, merely a "former top White House official" -- would be major news, right? And this was the guy drawing up the rules for handing out multi-million-dollar post-Katrina reconstruction contracts! But almost nobody noticed. Michael Brown's meltdown meant that most people didn't so much as glance in David Safavian's direction as they took him away.
Which was another lucky break for the GOP, because if people had paid attention to Safavian's arrest, they would have started asking questions about Safavian's long-time buddy, Abramoff. And Abramoff isn't the kind of big-time operator Republicans enjoy hearing questions about anymore. (Do the words "incredibly shady dealings" ring a bell?)
Of course, Abramoff is such a big fish in the Republican pond that anyone focusing on him would have been too busy to pay much attention to Karl Rove, who has -- all together, boys and girls! -- his own problems. Or perhaps you don't consider it a problem to have a special prosecutor on your tail, determined to solve the mystery of "Who outed Valerie Plame?"
Karl Rove is the man who made George Bush possible; every day Rove can spend out of the limelight, pulling the strings, is a good day for Republicans. Rove in trouble would be big trouble, for the president, and for the whole party. Even the possibility of Rove in trouble has started some tongues wagging, the few tongues that aren't busy wagging about Abramoff, or Safavian, or Brown, or Frist, or DeLay.
Which means nobody's talking about Iraq.
See? There's always good news. You just have to look for it."
http://yesrick.com/092905.htm