MSNBC reports that, as promised, President George Bush has just vetoed the bipartisan stem cell research bill.

Pushing back against the Democratic-led Congress, Bush plans to veto a bill Wednesday that would have eased restraints on federally funded embryonic stem cell research, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said. In his veto threat, the president accused Democrats of recycling an old measure that he already vetoed and argued that the bill would mean American taxpayers would — for the first time — be compelled to support the deliberate destruction of human embryos.

The bill passed with significant Republican support. Does Bush have anything to say about them? I am sure the Beltway Pundits will be decrying this Bush rejection of bipartisanship. Riiiight. I won't hold my breath.

Bob Geiger discovered that Fred Thompson writes a column at the ABC Radio web site. Bob spots this gem from the Washington lawyer-lobbyist turned Hollywood actor:

Harry Reid, though, has taken a different route. He made his statement about General Pace on a conference call with fringe elements of the blogosphere who think we're the bad guys. This is a place where even those who think the 9/11 attacks were an inside job find a home."

(Emphasis supplied.) As usual, Fast Freddie is fact-free. 3 of the callers were daily kos Contributing Editors. And at daily kos, in a policy I helped formulate in 2005, 9/11 conspiracy diaries are prohibited. It is a controversial policy in some parts of the Left blogs.

So sorry Frederick of Dollywood, but you can't apply your GOP/Hollywood game of changing the facts to suit your demagoguery. And you are fact-free yet again.

Army Specialist Alex Jimenez has been missing since May 12, when his unit in Iraq was attacked by insurgents. As if his wife doesn't have enough to worry about, she's left to wonder whether she'll be deported.

"I can't imagine a bigger injustice than that, to be deporting someone's wife who is fighting and possibly dying for our country," [her attorney, Matthew] Kolken told [WBZ-TV].

Yaderlin Jimenez came to the United States from the Dominican Republic. She entered the country illegally, but after they were married, Alex thought she might be eligible for a green card and legal residence status. His efforts on her behalf only alerted the authorities that she was here illegally, triggering deportation proceedings that, fortunately, were stayed after she learned of her husband's disappearance. Kolken hopes she'll be granted a hardship waiver.

Kevin Drum makes a great point about Michael Moore:

It's true that I wish Michael Moore were a wee bit more scrupulous with the facts in his films, but I sometimes wonder if he doesn't insert random distortions into his movies deliberately. . . . [T]he end result is the kind of publicity money can't buy, and it's the sweetest kind of publicity of all: the kind that's subsidized by his enemies, who helpfully boost ticket sales by furiously denouncing his films for weeks on end. . . . Which, of course, explains why he shot part of SiCKO in Cuba. Sweden or Canada would have worked just as well, but probably no other country in the world could have produced the kind of howling denunciations from the National Review set that Cuba has produced. . . .

That makes total sense.

Q poll for New York:

In a hypothetical all-New York presidential race, Sen. Hillary Clinton wins with 43 percent of voters statewide, followed by former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani with 29 percent and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg with 16 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.
In a head-to-head matchup, Sen. Clinton tops Giuliani 52 - 37 percent, the independent Quinnipiac University poll finds.

Can we stop the silliness now? These are three pols everybody in New York knows. Bloomie would get 16%. The idea of Bloomberg running for President is a non-starter.

I'll be honest. The Democratic Strategist has not been a must read for me in the past. But now it will be as my friend Ed Kilgore, formerly of New Donkey, is the new Managing Editor. And Ed starts out with a bang, with a article discussing John Judis and Ruy Texeira's new the Re-Emerging Democratic Majority. Ed writes:

It's the indies, and to some extent professionals, they suggest, who make the "emerging Democratic majority" a potentially unstable coalition rather than a mass movement. And their article ends on a cautionary note. While enactment of some popular, landmark domestic legislation (e.g., universal health insurance) could solidify the Democratic majority, the dynamics of the Democratic coalition, along with built-in resistance to change in Washington's governing institutions, could make that difficult or even impossible. And without such transformative, "realigning reforms," the Democratic majority may turn out to somewhat fragile, and beset by the kinds of intraparty tensions that tend to divide the Left from the Center. The 2008 election, they suggest, could provide a critical test of Democrats' ability to manage their coalition, particularly since presidential elections inherently make it harder to accomodate the sort of state and regional customization of campaigns that worked well for Democrats in 2006.

I'll write my thoughts on all this in a later post.

As if we needed further evidence that the Bush administration is inept --

Since January – and until the rule was suspended two weeks ago – Americans have been required to present a passport when flying within the Western Hemisphere, a rule Congress created as part of its response to the Sept. 11 attacks. ... In the weeks before the rule went into effect, hundreds of thousands of Americans without passports requested them; a backlog that now numbers 2 million started to develop as early as last fall.

The fiasco happened because (as in Iraq, New Orleans, and fill in the blank) the administration didn't anticipate the problem.

Federal officials in Washington acknowledge that they failed to anticipate just how much the post-Sept. 11 travel regulations would fuel demand for passports; did not hire enough workers to handle the increase; and neglected to notice or react to signs early this spring of a burgeoning problem. ...

For nearly two years, federal officials knew the revised rules were coming, along with a crush of applications. And Tuesday, during a packed subcommittee hearing on the passport backlog, senators assailed Maura Harty, assistant secretary of State for consular affairs. ... Acknowledging the department's miscalculation, Harty said that employees had been swamped by "a record-setting demand in a compressed period of time."

So Michael Bloomberg is contemplating an independent unaffiliated run for the Presidency. The question is why. He has no chance, absolutely none, of even carrying one state, much less winning. So what is Bloomberg up to? Is he starved for attention? Has he lost his mind? Is there some big issue that draws him in?

Let's first state the obvious - Michael Bloomberg has the political charisma of a potato. Even worse for us, he has no entertainment value. Saturday Night Live can't do a funny parody of him. He is fairly nondescript. Indeed, I wager that not 10% of the country knows who he is. This is not the bombastic Rudy we're talking about.

So the question must be, after all the guy made 5 billion dollars or some such obscene amount, what's in it for him?

Whoops. The Treasurer of South Carolina, a 44 year old millionaire and the Chair of Rudy Giuliani's South Carolina presidential campaign, has been indicted on cocaine distribution charges.

Thomas Ravenel, a former real estate developer who became a rising political star after his election last year, is accused of buying less than 500 grams of the drug to share with other people in late 2005, said United States Attorney Reggie Lloyd. Mr. Ravenel, a 44-year-old millionaire, is charged with distribution of cocaine, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

Mr. Ravenel, a Republican, is also the state chairman for Rudolph W. Giuliani’s presidential campaign.

Mr. Ravenel is innocent unless and until proven guilty. Still, a federal indictment on drug charges is hardly what the Rudy campaign needs right now.

Honored at the Take Back America conference.

She makes us proud.

Another ordinance designed to drive undocumented aliens out of town has been enjoined.

The [Farmers Branch, TX] ordinance would have required apartment managers to verify that renters are U.S. citizens or legal immigrants before leasing to them, with a few exceptions. Landlords would have faced fines of up to $500 for violating the measure with each day considered as a separate violation.

The mean-spirited idea seems to be that undocumented aliens should be forced to join sex offenders who, in the absence of legal housing alternatives, are forced to live under a bridge.

A similar ordinance in Hazleton, PA met a similar fate.

"Around the nation, every judge who has reviewed these local anti-immigrant ordinances has put a stop to them," said Nina Perales, the regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund who argued for the preliminary injunction. "Immigration reform is a federal responsibility and local anti-immigrant ordinances only hurt city economies and community relations."

I have seen none of the speeches, but the wonkosphere loved John Edwards, and especially, Barack Obama. Adele Stan writes:

I found myself weeping during Barack Obama's levitational address, during which I found myself embodying a veritable panoply of cliches, including goosebumps and smeared mascara. It's not that the junior senator from Illinois said anything that I hadn't already heard him say: it was the way he made use of the energy that was in the room. He took what the crowd so eagerly wanted to give him, channeled it through, and gave it back to them. He became more preacher than politician -- no, make that faith healer -- as he delivered his standard lines about how hope is the reason he is standing here before us, meaning the hope that the civil rights activists had that they could indeed prevail against racism.

On Edwards, Ezra Klein writes: