Karl Rove tells the Washington Post that he hopes not to go down in history as simply “Bush’s guy.” “I have a chance to create something else. I’m not just going to be typecast as, ‘Oh, that’s the Bush guy,’” Rove said. Wayne Slater, the author of Bush’s Brain, writes, “Et tu, Karl? Distancing Yourself from Bush?”
11 years of ‘fair and balanced’ news.
TVNewser reports, “Today Fox News Channel celebrates 11 years on the air. The launch on October 7, 1996 was to 17 million cable subscribers and joined two existing channels: CNN, the originator, and MSNBC, which went on the air a few months before FNC on July 15, 1996.” Befitting of its anniversary, Newshounds notes that Fox spent the week shifting “attention away from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the possible war with Iran to bring their viewers a round-the-clock defense of Rush Limbaugh.”
UPDATE: Fox News pundit Fred Barnes suggests that Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) opposition to going to war in Iraq at a time when “the entire world believed that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had weapons of mass destruction” means Obama is not “very strong on national security.”
Larry Craig, Hall of Fame inductee.
Sen. Larry Craig has been chosen for induction into the Idaho Hall of Fame. “Some Republicans said the honor is inappropriate now. Kootenai County Republican precinct committeeman Phil Thompson said Idaho Hall of Fame officials should consider at least postponing the induction. ‘Maybe in 10 or 15 years we can think of this hall of fame stuff. Now is not the time,’ he said. ‘It’s a sad day to be a Republican.’”
Rep. Harman Claims She Was Not ‘Fully Briefed’ On Secret Torture Memos
In statements to the press this week, President Bush and White House press secretary Dana Perino claimed that members of Congress had been “fully briefed” on a classified CIA program that sanctioned the use of harsh interrogation techniques. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman John Rockefeller disputed this claim on Friday. This morning, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said that she too was not briefed on the secret memos.
At a town hall meeting with the Democratic Club of Westside Progressives in Los Angeles yesterday afternoon, Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) was asked about her knowledge of the secret “torture memos” revealed this week by the New York Times. Like Rockefeller and Pelosi, Harman said she was not “fully briefed”:
We were not fully briefed. We were told about operational details but not these memos. Jay Rockefeller said the same thing, and I associate myself with his remarks. And we want to see these memos.
At the time of the secret approval to the CIA in 2005, Rep. Harman was the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee and a member of the “Gang of Eight” routinely briefed on intelligence matters.
At the same town hall meeting, Harman revealed that an unidentified Republican member of Congress told her that if President Bush were to attack Iran, then even he would vote for impeachment.
– dday
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UPDATE: dday has more tidbits on the Harman town hall.
Abstinence on My Teevee
Class Warfare
More dispatches from the continuing conservative war on adorable children (as depicted above) as Glenn Reynolds joins with other rightwingers to sputter with rage at the idea of middle class children having health insurance. We’re supposed to believe, I suppose, that whenever Instapundit isn’t apologizing for torture or pimping for destructive wars that he’s a dedicated activist on behalf of working class Americans and that he speaks up against the outrage of a small business owner’s family getting coverage only to further his tireless crusade for the underclass. Or something.
Kevin Drum, meanwhile, thinks we should take Bush seriously when he says he wants poor children to go without health insurance because he fears that Democratic efforts to provide medicine to sick kids will push us down a slippery slope to the dystopian nightmare in which everyone enjoys a universal guarantee of access to health care. I don’t really buy it, though; we started slipping down that slope decades ago with Medicare and Medicaid.
Photo by Flickr user Wurzle used under a Creative Commons license
A New Day
Watch and be astounded as Tom Friedman snarks like a liberal blogger:
Every so often a quote comes out of the Bush administration that leaves you asking: Am I crazy or are they? I had one of those moments last week when Dana Perino, the White House press secretary, was asked about a proposal by some Congressional Democrats to levy a surtax to pay for the Iraq war, and she responded,
Unemployment Versus Poverty
In the ZIP code demographics thread, DivGuy noticed something that I wondered about, too: “The thing that struck me is the huge gap between the ‘% unemployed’ and the ‘% below poverty line.’”
Thinking about this, a few factors occurred to me over and above the obviously real phenomenon of people who have full-time jobs and still find themselves below the poverty line. Basically, children and retired people aren’t counted in the unemployment rate but they can be poor. Indeed, in my neighborhood — like many other gentrifying neighborhoods around the country — the children are overwhelmingly concentrated in the more economically downscale households.
Iftar
Hooman Majd’s account of the Iftar feast president Mahmoud Ahmadenijad threw while in New York for Iranian-Americans to break the Ramadan fast with him is pretty fascinating. Among other things, it drives home the extent to which whatever it is we’re dealing with when it comes to hardline views on the nuclear issue is really basic Iranian nationalism and nothing to do with any religious views or Islamism as such.
An unlikely carbon pioneer
Few industries that understand the realities of doing business in a carbon-constrained world might endorse as radical and visionary a program for change as Herbert Hoover did in 1921.
That’s right, Herbert Hoover, the Neville Chamberlain of U.S. presidents who thought if everyone just appeased the Depression, the economy would stop bothering everyone. In 1921, the future 31st U.S. president was then Warren Harding’s Commerce Secretary. And from that post, he doled out advice that today sounds more like Cradle-to-Cradle guru Bill McDonough than a senior Republican administration official of any era. Hoover prodded industry to stop wasting their waste–the carbon dioxide that might be captured and turned into productive use.
Take this commentary on the wasted gas emitted from the fires of industry, delivered in a 1921 speech before the Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association:
Imagine a U.S. administration of any stripe encouraging an aggressive federal program to make the world more in line with Bill McDonough’s–and Herbert Hoover’s.
– Eric R.
