Outrage overload Friday

Get it while it's hot!

Item: The Bernie Sanders amendment to curtail the government's right to demand citizens' library records whenever they feel the whim passed the House by a vote of 238-187. Then Sensenbrenner and his Judiciary Committe thugs took over.

But now the Republican majority on the House Judiciary Committee has stripped that amendment from the PATRIOT Act legislation, and the stooges in the Rules Committee have written a closed rule so that the bill cannot be amended on the House floor.

Item: George "Gerbil-on-a-Wheel" Bush has just the tiniest little exercise compulsion. A harmless personal peccadillo? Maybe no, if that is the standard he uses to vet Supreme Court nominees.

Item: No transcript yet, but at the end of today's Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the Karen Hughes nomination Richard Lugar merrily admitted that he had convened the meeting on a Friday to "expedite the process"; i.e. so no dems would be present to ask inconvenient questions. The giant elephant in the room? Hughes testified before the Plame grand jury.