2004 Presidential Transition
J. Stephen Grilles, a pro-development Deputy Secretary of Interior, resigned Wednesday, according to the Denver Post [December 8, 2004, "Controversial Interior deputy leaving post"]. From the article, "J. Steven Griles, the Interior Department's controversial deputy secretary who favored aggressive energy development in the West and became the subject of an ethics probe, submitted his resignation Tuesday. A former energy industry lobbyist, Griles underscored in his letter to President Bush his philosophy of considering business interests when regulating use of 507 million acres of national parkland."
Matthew Gross has this to say of Grilles departure, "Good riddance. One only hopes the coins falling out of his pockets don't jam the revolving door between industry and government." Ouch.
Blogs for Bush: "We hold it a self-evident truth, as Americans, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed - that the government may do nothing that we do not ultimately empower them to do. I don't recall any agreement from we Americans that we had assigned the right to decide contentious issues to un-elected judges - yet this, essentially, is what a great many judges have done over the past 50 years. The Roe decision is just the most bald usurpation of the rights of Americans to determine their own laws - but there have been literally hundreds of cases, great and small, which have chipped away at our rights to determine for ourselves what laws we shall live under."
Taegan Goddard: "It was the issue virtually ignored during the election campaign. Now the New York Times says 'the Washington establishment is gearing up for the battle over the Supreme Court. Justice Rehnquist has not announced plans to retire, but advocacy groups on both sides are already raising money and plotting strategy either to support or to oppose whoever is nominated to be his replacement. The result is an awkward wait for a conflict that both sides expect will be as bitter and divisive as the presidential election itself.'"
Wired: "A study by Berkeley grad students and a professor showing anomalies with electronic-voting machines in Florida has been debunked by numerous academics who say the students used a faulty equation to reach their results and should never have released the study before getting it peer-reviewed. The study, released three weeks ago by seven graduate students from the University of California, Berkeley's Quantitative Methods Research Team and sociology professor Michael Hout, presented analysis showing a discrepancy in the number of votes Bush received in counties that used touch-screen voting machines versus counties that used other types of voting equipment."
Update: It looks like John Snow will be hanging with the President for a while yet.
Update: Josh Marshall: "Principi out at VA."
Update: Here's the transcript of Howard Dean's speech given at The George Washington University on December 8, 2004. Dean's strategy? "Our challenge today is not to re-hash what has happened, but to look forward, to make the Democratic Party a 50-state party again, and, most importantly, to win."
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