It seems, Katharine Armstrong – the “star witness” to Cheney’s hunting accident – can’t keep her story straight:

Scripps Howard News Service, 2/13/06:

None in the hunting party was drinking alcohol, said the owner, Katharine Armstrong. “No, zero, zippo and I don’t drink at all,” she said. “No one was drinking.”

LA Times, 2/14/06:

The party of 11 hunters set out in two trucks Saturday morning, driving around the mesquite-dotted property and shooting quail until about 12:30 p.m., said Anne Armstrong, co-owner of the ranch. Then they broke for a lunch of antelope, jicama salad and camp bread, washed down with Dr. Pepper.

MSNBC, 2/14/06:

“If someone wants to help themselves to a beer,” she said, “they may, but I did not see anyone do that,” Armstrong says. She says she was not sure if there were beers in the coolers but wasn’t ready to rule it out: “There may be a beer or two in there, but remember not everyone in the party was shooting,” she told NBC News.

Editor and Publisher, 2/15/06:

CNN today reports that Armstrong had told CNN she never saw Cheney or Whittington “drink at all on the day of the shooting until after the accident occurred, when the vice president fixed himself a cocktail back at the house.”

Now, Cheney said he drank “a beer” before hunting. Fox News, 2/15/06:

HUME: He said he had a beer at lunch and that had been many hours earlier. And it was dusk, around 5:00 p.m., when this incident happened. And he said that, you know, they had lunch out in the field, a barbecue, and he had a beer.

Can we still trust Katherine Armstrong? To this point, her version of the events has been viewed as definitive.

UPDATE: The second quote is by Anne Armstrong, Katherine’s mother, who was also at the lunch.

Last night, MSNBC scrubbed a paragraph about alcohol from an online article about Cheney’s hunting accident:

Now, they’ve restored the paragraph, slightly reworked:

In a recorded, on-the-record phone call with NBC News, Armstrong said that beer may have been available at lunch that day. “If someone wants to help themselves to a beer,” she said, “they may, but I did not see anyone do that,” Armstrong says. She says she was not sure if there were beers in the coolers but wasn’t ready to rule it out: “There may be a beer or two in there, but remember not everyone in the party was shooting,” she told NBC News.

The story also now suggests that the White House misled MSNBC about whether Cheney had consumed alcohol. A new paragraph from the revised article:

NBC News called the vice president’s office for comment four times Tuesday and Wednesday and asked whether the vice president or anyone in the hunting party had consumed any alcohol on Saturday prior to the accident. In an e-mail statement Wednesday to NBC News, the vice president’s press secretary referred NBC News to the Kenedy County Sheriff’s Department report on the incident.

The sheriff’s report says “there was no alcohol…involved in the incident.” Cheney told Brit Hume that he drank beer prior to the accident.

Question: Did the White House pressure MSNBC to remove the paragraph last night?

In his interview with Fox News this afteroon, Vice President Dick Cheney confirmed to reporter Brit Hume that he consumed alcohol prior to the shooting incident. Hume reported that Cheney admitted to having at least “a beer at lunch.” Watch it:

(Quicktime Video)

Transcript:

QUESTION: You asked him about alcohol being consumed on premises.

HUME: I did.

QUESTION: And what did he say about that?

HUME: He said he had a beer at lunch and that had been many hours earlier. And it was dusk, around 5:00 p.m., when this incident happened. And he said that, you know, they had lunch out in the field, a barbecue, and he had a beer. But you said you don’t hunt with people who have been drinking. He said no one was drinking. He said they went back to the ranch afterwards, took a break after that, and went out about 3:00 and so you’re four or five hours distanced from the last alcohol that he consumed. And he said no one was drinking, not he nor anyone else.

This morning, ThinkProgress posed some questions the media should ask about the role of alcohol in the accident.

UPDATE: Mr. Whittington’s doctors “had no comment on whether Whittington’s blood alcohol level had been tested after the accident.”

UPDATE II: On Tuesday, Ms. Armstrong told the LA Times that the hunters drank “Dr. Pepper” at lunch: Read more

“Bush To Discuss Health Care During Visit To Wendy’s,” Cincinnati’s WCPO-TV reported. Their headline wasn’t a joke – Bush really picked the headquarters of the nation’s third-largest burger chain as the place to sell his health care schemes to the American people.

President Bush has talked about how curbing obesity is essential to reducing health care costs. From his 6/22/02 radio address:

Americans who are obese spend approximately 36 percent more on health care services than the general population. They spend 77 percent more on medications.

The problem is especially pronounced among young people. Obesity rates among America’s children have doubled since the 1970s, and childhood obesity has been shown to increase the risk of asthma, type 2 diabetes, and high blood pressure.

Wendy’s is part of the problem. Last week, the fast food joint announced it “will focus more attention on younger consumers as it tries to turn around the trend at its hamburger restaurants.” Research shows children are susceptible to the types of advertising Wendy’s will use to convince children they need 960 calorie kids’ meals. “Research indicates that the ads children are exposed to do influence their choice of foods,” the Kaiser Family Foundation found.

Vice President Cheney will make his first public statements on the hunting accident during an interview with Brit Hume later today. Last night, we received a preview of the hard-hitting questions Cheney is likely to face. FOX News anchor Neil Cavuto and his guest, former Cheney staffer Ron Christie, criticized the media for focusing too much on Whittington’s condition and not enough on how Cheney is feeling.

Watch it:

CAVUTO: This is a Fox News alert. The lawyer accidentally hit by Vice President Dick Cheney suffering a mild heart attack this morning. Doctors say he’s doing just fine and could be released in a week. Meanwhile, the White House press corps again beating a dead horse as it tries to find out why they were not told right away about the Vice President’s hunting accident. Not one person bothering to ask, in the meantime, how Dick Cheney’s feeling about all this. After all, he’s a human being and injuring someone else in an accident can take a huge toll. With us now someone who knows the Vice President pretty well. Ron Christie is a former Cheney advisor and author of Black in the White House. Good to have you back my friend.

Vice President Cheney remains in our thoughts and prayers.

Transcript continues below: Read more

at 6 PM ET, Fox News reports. (Reuters report here.)

NBC’s First Read: “[A] bipartisan call is growing for him to publicly address the incident. Such remarks are in the works, NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell reports. Cheney is scheduled to address the Wyoming legislature’s budget session on Friday, and sources indicate that he will ‘certainly’ speak to the issue then. That said, sources also caution that ‘we’re at Wednesday’ and suggest that progress made by Whittington will play a role in how any public comment is handled.”

“A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll shows 49% of adults think Pres. Bush definitely/probably broke the law wiretapping without a court order and 47% think he did not.” (Via Hotline, sub req’d)