It's Friday...you know what that means...

It's time for the weekly "wants to spend more time with the family" announcement. (I'm curious - does anyone ever follow up and ask the families how they feel about that prospect?)

This week, it is a hat trick.

The Washington Times, in their appropriately-named "Fishwrap" feature, tells us about the first two. Bush is losing both his head speechwriter and his director of Legislative Affairs.

William McGurn is a former Wall Street Journal columnist, and has served as head speechwriter since 2005, when he replaced Michael Gerson. His resignation will be effective once he finishes Bush's final State of the Union address, to be delivered next month.

Candida Wolff has been in her position for three years, following three years in Dick Cheney's legislative affairs office. She plans to leave by the end of the month. The abrupt departure of such a loyalist, holding a key position like Director of Legislative Affairs makes me tingly all over. (Yeah, I know. I'm hopelessly wonkish.)

The third departure is embattled Justice Department official John Tanner. He sent out an email this morning with the subject line "Moving On" and his resignation is effective immediately. In case you have forgotten, John Tanner was part of the Justice Department cabal that set about to suppress minority votes to tilt the scales in favor of Republicans. (What does that say about their politics if they can only hope to win by cheating?)

Will anyone mourn the resignation of the man who abused his position as chief of the Civil Rights Division's voting section to suppress the votes of the very people he was supposed to make sure received parity?

Maybe.

But I shall not be one of them.

Palmer packs it in

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about David Palmer, Bush’s nominee to head up the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He was tapped by aWol to head up a section of the Justice Department that had found him in violation of the essential tenets of that department.

Well, over the weekend the hapless and unconfirmed Palmer packed it in and withdrew his name from consideration. "I have received what can only be called a crash course in how bitterly partisan the nomination process has become," he wrote in his withdrawal letter to Bush. He went on to complain that congressional staffers had (*Gasp!!! Horrors!!!*)…probed his background! Every aspect of it!

"Many of the questions I was asked were troubling," he wrote. "Most disturbingly, one question explicitly suggested that I chose to ignore discrimination against Latinos, a question I found particularly offensive in light of the fact that I myself am the son of Latino immigrants."

The poor little Loyal Bushie just doesn’t understand why he might be scrutinized, and held to account (don’t the hoi polloi on the Democratic side of the aisle realize everything is okay so long as you are a republican???)

Well Dave, (you don’t mind if I call you Dave, do you?) maybe they asked that sublimely impertinent question because the litigation section has filed almost as many cases alleging discrimination against whites as it has against blacks and Latinos combined, even while Palmer acknowledges that minorities tend to be the targets of more discrimination.

Just hazarding a guess, here, Sport, but I would wager that little statistical gem was at least a factor. And probably a bigger one than “Democrats are meanies.”

Kick-Ass Cartoon Alert

I know Mike Judge is going to catch holy hell for this cartoon...But I fucking love it.

It's kinda cool to have a grade-A political cartoonist at your local paper, especially if he takes an almost perverse sense of pleasure in skewering the fucktards. It's like he knows he's going to hell, so he's sure as fuck gonna enjoy the ride.