Wednesday Morning

PROBING ROVE
Yesterday's front-page story in the Washington Post (see below) about political briefings (Hatch Act violations) given to top diplomats and diplomatic agencies such as the Peace Corps (did Rove REALLY think the Peace Corps was available as a tool for Republican partisan gain, or is he actually more delusional than genius?) provided an extra bounty for those on the left and right who see Karl Rove as the political mastermind behind all things in this White House. In documents provided to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the State Department included a more than 20-chart PowerPoint (Hatch Act violation) presentation given by Sara M. Taylor, then the director of the White House's political affairs office, to a group of ambassadors in early January during a meeting the diplomats had with Rove in the West Wing. The PowerPoint is the summation of Rove's thinking about the 2006 elections, in which Republicans lost 30 seats in the House and six in the Senate. Here's the link to those (Hatch Act violation) documents. The ambassadors, on Jan. 4, received a slightly more detailed briefing than the one given to senior officials at the General Services Administration a few weeks later, including a list of the top 36 House Democratic incumbents being targeted for 2008. (GSA officials only got a glimpse of the top 20 targets, (Hatch Act violation) but they did get a listing of top House Republican incumbents the White House is trying to protect.) Claiming that the 2006 elections did "not yet [show] an ideological shift," the Rove-Taylor presentation again placed most of the blame for the losses on lawmakers, in a highlighted box at the bottom of one of the charts summing up the White House belief about the 2006 losses: "More about rejecting Republican conduct than about supporting Democrat ideology." (transpose "ideology" and "conduct" here and Karl might have actually been accurate...)
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/capitol-briefing/2007/07/rovetaylor_powerpoint_gop_cond.html