Bush / GOP

The special committee set-up to look into allegations against Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank has issued its report to the Board of Directors and it's not good for Wolfowitz, who appears pretty disconnected from the rules and reality in his tenure as World Bank President:

The report charged that Mr. Wolfowitz broke bank rules and the ethical obligations in his contract, and that he tried to hide the salary and promotion package awarded to Shaha Ali Riza, his companion and a bank employee, from top legal and ethics officials in the months after he became bank president in 2005.

Citing what it said was the “central theme” of the matter, the report said Mr. Wolfowitz’s assertions that what he did was in response to the requests of others showed that “from the outset” of his tenure he “cast himself in opposition to the established rules of the institution.”

“He did not accept the bank’s policy on conflict of interest, so he sought to negotiate for himself a resolution different from that which would be applied to the staff he was selected to head,” the committee said, adding that this was “a manifestation of an attitude in which Mr. Wolfowitz saw himself as the outsider to whom the established rules and standards did not apply.”

“It evidences questionable judgment and a preoccupation with self-interest over institutional best interest,” it said.

Leading conservative blog www.redstate.com has announced a major campaign to block Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA) from taking Rep. John Doolittle's (R-CA) seat on the House Appropriations Committee.  Doolittle is being investigated by the FBI and Calvert's been accused of similar corruption problems, and Red State has had enough of the House GOP Steering Committee that is filling Doolittle's spot: "The House GOP Steering Committee will either embrace reform or reject it,” he wrote. “And we will encourage them to embrace it."

Way to shoot a segment about voter fraud and only feature black people. H/T to Greg Sargent over at TPM Election Central...

This time it is Paul McNulty, who claims he's quitting "because of the "financial realities" brought on by "college-age children and two decades of public service."" Of course he's also at the center of the scandal that has claimed just about every high-level DOJ official besides Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez. A refresher on why McNulty is in hot water from the WAPO:

McNulty began work as Gonzales's deputy in November 2005. McNulty became a central figure in the furor after he told the Senate Judiciary Committee in February that the White House played only a marginal role in the dismissals -- a characterization that conflicted with documents later released by Justice and with subsequent testimony.

He also said most of the prosecutors were fired for "performance-related" reasons. That statement angered many of the former U.S. attorneys, most of whom had sterling evaluations and had remained largely silent about their departures.

Don's miss the WAPO article, but it boils down to this - if you didn't disenfranchise voters aggressively enough for Karl Rove's taste, your job was in jeopardy.

The new VoteVets ad is up. The second in a three-ad series, it features Major General Paul Eaton urging Congress to listen to Commanders on the ground in Iraq. For the first, click here.

On Iraq, Congress continues to act responsibly, challenging the Administration to offer more than more of the same.  While the bill passed last night may not become law, our country is now in the midst of a large and important debate about an issue of vital national interest, ensuring that whatever the final outcome the process for getting there will be more of the kind imagined by our founders than the "don't worry be happy" approach of the Bush years. 

In a powerful editorial this morning, the Times sums up the events of recent weeks:

The difference between mainstream hawks and mainstream doves on Iraq seems to have boiled down to two months, with House Democrats now demanding visible progress by July while moderate Republicans are willing to give White House policies until September, but no longer, to show results.

Then there is President Bush, who has yet to acknowledge the reality that Congressional Republicans and even administration officials like Defense Secretary Robert Gates now seem to tacitly accept. Three months into Mr. Bush’s troop escalation, there is no real security in Baghdad and no measurable progress toward reconciliation, while American public support for this folly has all but run out.

The really important question now facing Washington is the one Mr. Bush still refuses to address: how, while there is still some time left, to design an exit strategy that contains the chaos in Iraq and minimizes the damage to United States interests when American troops inevitably leave...

VoteVets.org launched the first of its three-ad series challenging President Bush on Iraq. From Vote Vets:

Our ads are airing in states and districts of those Members of Congress who are very close to breaking with the President on Iraq, and joining the troops and American people. They are: Senators Susan Collins, John Sununu, John Warner, and Norm Coleman, and Representatives Mary Bono, Phil English, Randy Kuhl, Jim Walsh, Heather Wilson, Jo Ann Emerson, Tim Johnson, Mike Rogers, Fred Upton, and Mike Castle. Mentioning them by name at the end, the local spots will call on them to "Protect America, Not George Bush."

Next week, we’ll launch another ad with retired Major General Paul Eaton. And, after that, the campaign will wrap up with a powerful ad from former NATO Allied Supreme Commander, General Wesley Clark.

The first ad is strong and features Major General John Batiste, who calls the President out for not listening to Commanders on the ground. Check it out below:

Michael Hirsch at Newsweek takes a look at some of the historic names that are leaving the ever more conservative, outside the mainstream Republican party.

Susan Eisenhower is an accomplished professional, the president of an international consulting firm. She also happens to be Ike's granddaughter—and in that role, she's the humble torchbearer for moderate "Eisenhower Republicans." Increasingly, however, she says that the partisanship and free spending of the Bush presidency—and the takeover of the party by single-issue voters, especially pro-lifers—is driving these pragmatic, fiscally conservative voters out of the GOP. Eisenhower says she could vote Democratic in 2008, but she's still intent on saving her party. "I made a pact with a number of people," she tells NEWSWEEK. "I said, 'Please don't leave the party without calling me first.' For a while, there weren't too many calls. And then suddenly, there was a flurry of them. I found myself watching them slip away one by one."

Eisenhower isn't the only GOP scion debating if the party still feels like home. Theodore Roosevelt IV, an investment banker in New York and an environmental activist like his great-grandfather, Teddy, takes issue with what he says is George W. Bush's inattention to global warming (and Republican presidential contender John McCain's flirtations with the religious right). He's unhappy with the cost of the global war on terror and the record deficits incurred to finance it. Ninety years ago, former president Teddy Roosevelt attacked Woodrow Wilson's pro-democracy idealism, calling it "milk-and-water righteousness"; Roosevelt's great-grandson doesn't like how the current president is promoting values abroad, either. "I come from a tradition of pragmatic Republicanism," he says. "This administration has taken the idea of aggressively exporting democracy à la Woodrow Wilson and gone in a direction even Wilson wouldn't have considered."

The party might even be alien to Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP nominee who jolted the party rightward when he said that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." Goldwater's youngest daughter, Peggy, who is active in GOP politics in Orange County, Calif., says she is a "moderate conservative," just as her firebrand father became later in life, irked by Republicans in Washington who embrace big government. "The government is taking on more than I feel they can handle," she says.

Leading Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney is up on the air, with the first Spanish language radio ads of the '08 cycle.  But here's a few things you won't hear in his ads.  First, Mitt Romney wants to amend the constitution to make English the national language: "English needs to be the language that is spoken in America. We cannot be a bilingual nation like Canada."  And Romney opposes comprehensive immigration reform that would bring millions out of the shadows and provide a path to citizenship for hard-working, tax-paying immigrants who play by the rules and want a better future for their families.  At this month's Conservative Politcal Action Conference Romney said: "McCain-Kennedy [Comprehensive Immigration Reform] isn't the answer. As governor, I took a very different approach. I authorized our state police to enforce immigration laws. I vetoed a tuition break for illegals and said no to driver's licenses. McCain-Kennedy gives benefits to illegals that would cost taxpayers millions. And more importantly, amnesty didn't work 20 years ago, and it won't work today."  This kind of anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic rhetoric is bad policy.  It did not help Republicans win elections in 2006 and it won't help them in 2008.