Day: June 18, 2008

Obama’s Facebook Group Hits 1,000,000

Trish

Barack Obama’s Facebook profile hit the one million mark on supporters tonight, and then blew past it. As of this writing, there are 1,007,643 members in his group, and by hitting the reload button, you can add to that total with each passing minute. The campaign claims this number makes it the most popular place on Facebook.

The Obama page has by far more supporters than any other page – whether it’s a politician, celebrity, or band – on all of Facebook.

While Obama’s group is considerably bigger than John McCain’s, which claims only 147,666 supporters, it’s not the biggest ever — or even recently. That honor would go to another.

The first million-strong group to actually reach its goal was the anti-Hillary Facebook group One Million Against Hillary Clinton, which crossed one million two months ago.

House Oversight Committee Issues Subpoenas to DOJ on Plame

Jon Ponder

Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee have subpoenaed notes of an FBI interview with George Bush and Dick Cheney in the Oval Office on June 24, 2004, about their role in the unmasking of the CIA’s ant-WMD program administered by Valerie Plame:

The subpoena follows a June 3 letter from committee chairman Rep. Henry Waxman to Attorney General Mukasey, asking for the documents and a June 11 response from Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Keith B. Nelson [who declined the request due to “separation of powers” issues.

The instigation for the request is information in What Happened, the memoir by former White House Press Sec. Scott McClellan:

Waxman requested the transcripts of the FBI interviews earlier this month, after publication of Scott McClellan’s tell all memoir revealing Bush administration deception. A transcript of Cheney’s interview would be of particular interest because his former aide, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was the only official convicted of a crime in relation to the Plame probe.

Libby told the FBI that it was “possible” Cheney instructed him to leak Plame’s name, Waxman wrote in his initial letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

The question appears to be, if Bush and Cheney lied to McClellan, did they also lie to the FBI that June morning. Lying to the FBI is illegal, even if the subjects are not under oath.

The Hot Item at the Texas Republican Convention

Trish

The amazing part isn’t that the recent Texas Republican Convention featured a vendor selling a pin that said, “If Obama is President…will we still call it The White House?” No, the amazing thing is that someone had to explain to them why this wasn’t a good idea.

“It’s just been crazy,” said Jonathan Alcox, who runs republicanmarket.com and had buttons and other items for sale at the GOP gathering. “The point is we made a mistake. I realize that now. And I apologize.”

Well alrighty then. As long as he didn’t mean any harm, what’s the problem?

In a telephone interview from Florida, Mr. Alcox acknowledged the controversy but said it was unintentional…

Mr. Alcox said he made 12 of the pins after seeing a comic strip where Barack Obama was standing in front of a sign saying “The White House,” with the building behind him. Mr. Obama is depicted thinking, “That’s the first thing we’ll change.”

“We just changed it around a little bit and everyone went crazy. I was shocked,” Mr. Alcox said.

He said after having a conversation with a black man who called him about the blog post, he came to understand more about the nerve he had hit.

I’m glad Alcox was able to find an actual black person who could explain to him what the possible problem might be. Big “Oh-ey” there, Jonathan.

The Dallas Morning News, which broke the story and whose reporter bought the pin so the world would know, also has a blog. One commenter said, “If I were a republican I would be ashamed. As it is I am merely disgusted.”

H/T to my friend Ray

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

I am perfectly convinced that these decennial economic crises do depend on meteorological variations of like period, which again depend, in all probability, upon cosmic variations of which we have evidence in the frequency of sun-spots, auroras and magnetic perturbations.

— W. Stanley Jevons (1835-1882), English economist and logician