One of the few positive things that can be said of President Bush’s 2009 budget is that it reveals the outrageous priorities of the Republican Party as America dashes through the high-stakes 2008 campaign.

The GOP candidate(s) are going to have to decide whether to use the dead-on-arrival Bush budget as a punching bag or an embarrassing political imprecation from which they should run at full speed.

The Bush budget is devoid of commitment to the public welfare, revealing an ideologue’s mind-set to slash at anything that collectively advances human concerns.

From today’s NYT:

Via Harper's Political Prosecutions.

You may have caught Rory Kennedy's Ghosts of Abu Ghraib on HBO.

Prominently featured is Scott Horton, a human rights attorney, of Harper's magazine. Horton never got the memo that human rights no longer matter in America.

Horton has been all over the DoJ scandals the last year or so.

Today's post, Political Prosecutions, is killer:

In the last two weeks, two sources, one of them inside of the Justice Department, have told me that a scheme was hatched in the upper echelons of the Bush Administration shortly after it took office in 2001 or early in 2002.

The project identified John Edwards and Hilary Clinton as likely Democratic challengers to President Bush, and identified prominent trial lawyers around the United States as the likely financial vehicle for his rise. It directed that their campaign finance records be fly-specked, and that offenses not be treated as administrative matters but rather as serious criminal offenses.