In Tuesday’s press briefing, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Tony Snow whether he believes the American public would support President Bush’s potential plan to send more U.S. troops to Iraq. Snow said that Bush’s “way forward” will “address a lot of the concerns that the American public have,” and called on Congress to endorse whatever it will be:

The other thing is that there is an opportunity here, also, for Democrats and Republicans to work together; whatever the discontent may be with the President, the level of confidence in Congress is even lower. And what you have is a sense of crisis of confidence in government. And this is an opportunity for…the legislative branch and executive branch to work together

Snow is wrong, according to a new Washington Post-ABC poll:

– 57 percent trust the incoming Congress “to do a better job coping with the main problems the nation faces.” Just 31 percent trust Bush.

– 56 percent trust the incoming Congress to better deal with the situation in Iraq, compared to just 32 percent for Bush.

– 50 percent trust the incoming Congress to better fight the war on terrorism, compared to just 41 percent for Bush.

Snow is right that the legislative and executive branches have an opportunity to work together. But it the public’s confidence is much more with the Congress than the President.

In late October, Bush told a group of conservative journalists that the administration had made a decision not to report the number of Iraqis killed by the U.S. military. The publication of those figures was widely seen as a counter-productive strategy during the Vietnam War. Byron York reported for the National Review:

“We have made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team,” Bush said, in a clear reference to the tabulations of enemy killed that became a hallmark of the Vietnam War. And that, in turn, “gives you the impression that [U.S. troops] are just there — kind of moving around, directing traffic, and somebody takes a shot at them and they’re down.”

Today, Tony Snow announced that the administration had reversed course and would be publicizing body counts to disabuse people of the notion that “our people aren’t doing anything” in Iraq. Watch it:

Snow said he couldn’t explain “why the president said what he said” previously about body counts “because I can’t put him on the couch right now.”

Full transcript: Read more

and is recovering well from yesterday’s emergency brain surgery, doctors say. “I saw him, he looked great. To me, he looked very good,” incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said today.

Best-selling novelist Michael Crichton is a vocal critic of global warming science. His 2004 novel State of Fear depicts global warming as a hoax concocted by environmentalists to raise money. In January 2005, Crichton spent an hour talking with President Bush; the two were “in near-total agreement,” according to Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes.

Last March, New Republic senior editor Michael Crowley wrote a cover story called “Jurassic President: Michael Crichton’s Scariest Creation.” It highlighted Crichton’s junk science and the danger posed by President Bush adopting it.

Crichton’s response was to smear Crowley in his latest novel, Next, by writing in a character named “Mick Crowley” who rapes a two-year-old boy. The following is a graphic excerpt from Crichton’s novel (reader beware):

Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers. Crowley was a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. …

It turned out Crowley’s taste in love objects was well known in Washington, but [his lawyer]–as was his custom–tried the case vigorously in the press months before the trial, repeatedly characterizing Alex and the child’s mother as “fantasizing feminist fundamentalists” who had made up the whole thing from “their sick, twisted imaginations.” This, despite a well-documented hospital examination of the child. (Crowley’s penis was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler’s rectum.)

The real-life Michael Crowley is also a Washington journalist and also graduated from Yale.

The New York Times reports, “Mr. Crichton could not be reached yesterday for comment, and a publicist at his publisher, HarperCollins, did not return calls.” In an article posted today, Crowley says he is “strangely flattered” by the reference: “If someone offers substantive criticism of an author, and the author responds by hitting below the belt, as it were, then he’s conceding that the critic has won.”

TPM Muckraker has more.

The 109th Congress set a record for the fewest number of days worked – 218 between the House and Senate combined. As of last October, only 16 percent of Americans approved of the job Congress was doing. 85 percent of Americans wish Congress had accomplished more this year. And last week, lawmakers left town without passing “nine out of 11 appropriations bills needed to fully fund federal activity for the 2007 fiscal year.”

The reason? Conservatives are supposed to be lazy. At least that’s what Tom DeLay told The Hill in an interview yesterday:

Conservatives don’t go to pass laws. Only in this town do you count the number of bills you pass and are signed by the president as a success. I count the fewer bills the best and those bills ought to be repealed instead of passing.

By DeLay’s logic, the 109th must have been the most conservative Congress in history.

but we’d love to win. ThinkProgress has been nominated Best Liberal Blog in the 2006 Weblog Awards, and voting ends tomorrow. Cast your ballot HERE.

On MSNBC this morning, Norah O’Donnell asked Laura Bush about a new poll that found “only 2 in 10 Americans approve of the job that the president is doing on Iraq.”

Mrs. Bush placed the blame squarely on the media. She said, “I do know that there are a lot of good things that are happening that aren’t covered. And I think that the drum beat in the country from the media, from the only way people know what is happening…is discouraging.”

Mrs. Bush added that she hopes there is “more balanced coverage by the media” in the future. Watch it:

The truth is that the Bush administration is systematically underreporting the amount of violence in Iraq. From the Iraq Study Group report, pg. 94-95:

In addition, there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq. The standard for recording attacks acts as a filter to keep events out of reports and databases…For example, on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.

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Transcript: Read more

“Gunmen in military uniforms kidnapped dozens of people Thursday from a major commercial area in Baghdad, the second mass abduction in the capital in a month, and nearly 30 people were killed or found dead elsewhere in Iraq.”