Increasingly desperate, and facing broad public opposition, Bush used his last Iraq speech on Monday to stir up fear with repeated references to September 11 and dark visions of “death and destruction…here in America” if U.S. troops were to withdraw.

Now Bush is taking his show on the road. Bush will speak about Iraq tomorrow at Tippecanoe High School in Tipp City, OH, to “local businessmen and students who take an advanced government class.” On Friday, Bush heads to East Grand Rapids High School in Michigan “to deliver what the White House calls a ‘major policy speech‘ on the War in Iraq.”

His message to teenagers: fear for your lives. The Detroit News reports:

White House spokesman Alex Conant said Bush will tell the audience that “the consequences of failure in Iraq would be death and destruction in the Middle East and here in America.”

Of course, Bush shouldn’t expect a particularly sympathetic audience. Even as far back as 2000, reporters noted, “Most of his high school stops have been larger rallies, shielding Bush from the often-hostile high school audiences. Nobody in the campaign could remember the last time Bush took questions from high schoolers.”

Times haven’t changed. “Some East Grand Rapids students plan to wear black on Friday in their own form of protest.”

mocking VA Tech students for not fighting back: Not that it makes your comments less offensive, but they did fight back.

Center for American Progress senior fellow Ruy Teixeira charts the polling data on American attitudes toward gun control laws:

The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza takes a look at the data and concludes: “Given the fairly entrenched views about gun control and apparent disconnect between tragedy and public opinion, it seems unlikely that the shootings at Virginia Tech will have a lasting impact on the political debate over guns.”

Media Matters catches CNN’s Bill Schneider misrepresenting the polling data.

UPDATE: AmericaBlog’s Joe Sudbay, who has worked extensively on gun control issues, comments on guns and the 2000 presidential election.

Rep. John Doolittle’s (R-CA) statement tonight:

Doolittle Responds to Reports about FBI Search of Wife’s Business

WASHINGTON, DC – Today, Rep. John T. Doolittle (R-Roseville) issued a statement to media questions regarding reports of an FBI search of his wife’s business in Virginia.

Doolittle said, “My wife has been cooperating with the FBI and the Justice Department for almost three years and that cooperation is going to continue in the future. I support my wife 100 percent and fully expect that the truth will prevail.”

Doolittle apparently expects people to believe that he has nothing to do with the investigation of his wife’s business. That’s laughable.

The relationship between John Doolittle and criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff is extensive. Doolittle received $64,500 from Abramoff, his partners and clients between 2001 and 2004. Abramoff let Doolittle hold fundraisers in his sky box for free, and paid to send Doolittle’s top aide to Puerto Rico. Abramoff hired Doolittle’s then-chief of staff, Kevin Ring, who in turn helped hire Doolittle’s wife. Julie Doolittle, who owned a consulting firm, was brought on by Abramoff and his firm, Greenberg Traurig, to do fundraising for Abramoff’s charity.

The fact that investigators raided Julie Doolittle’s business suggests that they are attempting to show how John Doolittle himself — not just his staffers or campaign committee — benefited from Abramoff’s largess. Too bad for the Doolittles, California is a communal-property state:

San Diego attorney Stanley Zubel, who heads Californians for a Cleaner Congress, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said Julie Doolittle’s commissions raise troubling questions about whether the congressman personally benefited from his support of Wilkes’ projects. “For all practical purposes, when someone’s wife earns money, then he earns money, especially in a community-property state like California,” Zubel said. “He can’t separate this out and say, ‘This is my wife’s money.’ If she’s getting a benefit, he’s getting a benefit.”

UPDATE: More from McClatchy: “Rep. Doolittle’s attorney, criminal defense lawyer David Barger, said Wednesday that the raid was in connection with a search warrant for Sierra Dominion records and not anything related to the congressman. He declined to say, however, whether John Doolittle had become a target of investigation in the ongoing probe.”

UPDATE II: The Washington Post story is out with more details on Julie Doolittle’s work with her husband.

In a new letter to the Republican National Committee, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman writes that the RNC has provided only minimal information regarding White House officials’ use of RNC e-mail accounts. The purpose of Waxman’s inquiry was in part to determine the extent that White House staff used “non-governmental e-mail accounts to conduct official government business.”

In the new letter, Waxman reveals that the RNC’s response thus far has been to propose that any Congressional requests for emails be filtered through “eight search terms, such as ‘political briefing,’ ‘Hatch Act,’ and ’2008.’” Waxman notes that these proposed search terms would not have produced the RNC email that transmitted a copy of Karl Rove’s Powerpoint slides that were presented at a General Services Administration meeting. That e-mail read: “Please do not email this out or let people see it. It is a close hold and we’re not supposed to be emailing it around.”

Waxman says that before Congress can agree to the RNC’s proposed “search terms,” the RNC must provide basic information about the extent their email accounts have been used to transact government business:

[T]he Committee needs basic facts about the scope and nature of the e-mails preserved on RNC servers. The Committee staff reasonably requested a meeting tomorrow to discuss these issues, but this request was unreasonably rejected. In fact, the RNC counsel stated that no meeting would occur until the Committee agreed to limiting search terms. This is not an acceptable proposal.

For the reasons outlined above, the Committee requests the following information by noon on Friday, April 20, 2007:

1. The identity of all White House officials who have held RNC e-mail accounts;

2. The total number of e-mails sent by each White House official through an RNC email account during each calendar year;

3. The total number of e-mails received by each White House official through an RNC e-mail account during each calendar year;

4. The total number of e-mails sent by each White House official through an RNC email account to a “.gov” e-mail account during each calendar year; and

5. The total number of e-mails received by each White House official through an RNC e-mail account from a “.gov” e-mail account during each calendar year.

See the full letter here.

At least two people shot at University of Missouri.

UPDATE: “The University of Missouri-Columbia police reports that a shooting earlier this afternoon in Columbia did not occur on campus.”

In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court today upheld a nationwide ban on “partial birth” abortion. The nation’s leading group of professionals providing health care for women, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, opposes this law because the banned procedure is often the best option for women.

Yet the majority — Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito — dismiss the medical community’s opinion and instead adopt political rhetoric intended to appeal to the right-wing base. Some examples:

Abortion methods vary depending to some extent on the preferences of the physician and, of course, on the term of the pregnancy and the resulting stage of the unborn child’s development. (p. 3)

The law need not give abortion doctors unfettered choice in the course of their medical practice, nor should it elevate their status above other physicians in the medical community. (p. 33)

When standard medical options are available, mere convenience does not suffice to displace them. (p. 37)

As Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg explains in her dissent, the majority opinion’s language seems to be based on a deep hostility to women’s rights, rather than on sound scientific evidence or jurisprudence:

The Court’s hostility to the right Roe and Casey secured is not concealed. Throughout, the opinion refers to obstetrician- gynecologists and surgeons who perform abortions not by the titles of their medical specialties, but by the pejorative label “abortion doctor.” A fetus is described as an “”unborn child,”” and as a “”baby,” second-trimester, dissenting previability abortions are referred to as ““late-term,” and the reasoned medical judgments of highly trained doctors are dismissed as “”preferences”” motivated by ““mere convenience.”

The majority “also rejected claims that the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act is so vaguely worded it would force doctors to forgo a commonly used, constitutionally protected abortion technique for fear of prosecution.”

Roll Call reports, “The FBI has raided the Northern Virginia home of Rep. John Doolittle (R-Calif.), according to Congressional sources. No details are publicly available yet about the circumstances of the raid, but Doolittle and his wife, Julie, have been under federal investigation for their ties to the scandal surrounding imprisoned former lobbyist Jack Abramoff.”

UPDATE: The Hill has more details:

The FBI searched the Virginia home of Rep. John Doolittle (R-Calif.) last Friday in its investigation into the ties of the congressman and his wife, Julie, to disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to law enforcement and other Congressional and K Street sources. [...]

Doolittle has been under fire for paying his wife’s company, Sierra Dominion, a 15 percent commission on all contributions that the company raised for Doolittle’s campaign committee and leadership PAC. Her only other clients were Abramoff’s former firm, Greenberg Traurig; Abramoff’s former restaurant Signatures; and the Korea-U.S. Exchange Council, which Ed Buckham, a former chief of staff to ex-Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), created.

The Justice Department previously subpoenaed Julie Doolittle’s files.

Doolittle also received contributions from indicted defense contractor Brent Wilkes and his associates, and investigators are probing whether those contributions are linked to any official action Doolittle took to help Wilkes’s company obtain millions of dollars in government earmarks.

UPDATE II: Lobbyist Kevin Ring, a former aide to Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA), resigned from his law firm last Friday, the same day as the raid on Dolittle’s home. As Politico reported, Ring “often served as an intermediary between Abramoff’s clients and Doolittle’s office, according to news reports, and has remained close to Doolittle and his wife, Julie, who did consulting work for Abramoff.” It’s suspected that Ring may have reached a plea agreement with prosecutors.

UPDATE III: Calitics has news and reaction from Doolittle’s district.

UPDATE IV: Doolittle throws his wife under the bus.

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