Tuesday Roundup - Truly All About The Dollars

I will openly admit it: I was wrong about McCain's money. I asserted here that he would break $20 million and he didn't even get to $13 million. That's my B. If you had something serious riding on it, you can send complaints directly to me, although I would be remiss if I didn't remind you that wagering on the fortunes of others is unwise and sinful.

Much of the hand-wringing on the GOP side seems to be about how the money shows that everything is crazy and upside down. McCain's list of 60,000 donors didn't work out so hot for him, presumably because he had no bundling plan ready to go. Romney is some sort of dollars juggernaut that may have maxed out his network already, but who knows what the second quarter will bring. We're still waiting for Obama's numbers.

Continuing with the money theme, TXU just announced that no one has made them a better offer than the $32 billion offered by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. I guess it doesn't hurt to leave the door open to the possibility of someone giving you more than $32 billion. I will be curious to see if they cut the deal and get out before the Lege can impose its oversight on the whole affair.

Where Mitt Romney and TXU seemingly have too much money, Bush doesn't have enough. He's on the press warpath again today, and the Washington Post details how he accuses Congressional Democrats of "being more interested in fighting political battles in Washington than providing our troops what they need." I'm just happy that someone, anyone, is fighting the political battle. It seems as if the literal implication by his statement is that he should get to do more or less whatever he wants, just like the first six years. It is an unhappy realization for him that he can't.

And it's things like this which have contributed to Bush's loss of juice. We all know by now that there were serious intelligence problems with the data that was used as a justification for war with Iraq, and this excellent bit of reporting by Peter Eisner essentially reinforces the point that the intelligence on the famous African uranium was shaky from the beginning and disproved by several sources before it ever got into the State of the Union address, and lots and lots of people knew it.

House Speaker Pelosi is in Syria today, much to the chagrin of everyone. Bush is actually right when he says that lots of people have gone to see President Assad to little result, but diplomacy is diplomacy, and I guess Pelosi has less of a chance of being poisoned by nuclear junk than if she went to Moscow to see Dr. Strangepremier Putin. That being said, if my car flies off a cliff in the next few days, please check to see if the KGB cut my brakelines.

Finally today, reporters are encountering a hilarious problem in Dallas County — apparently there's no good way to view campaign finance reports online. Sure, there's scanned images of the reports, but they aren't searchable. And candidates are experiencing a similar problem in that there's no way to submit finance reports electronically: they literally have to haul the goodies down to City Hall and hand them in. The Dallas Morning News editorial page has more.