During the press conference today, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow blindly defended the President’s “surge strategy” and inexplicably argued that Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) supports the policy. “If you look at what Senator Lugar has said about the surge so far, he says that it’s working,” said Snow. “His comments indicate that he thinks it’s working.” Watch it:

In reality, two weeks ago, Lugar issued a sharp rebuke of the President’s “surge strategy.” On the floor of the U.S. Senate he specifically stated that the Bush administration’s “surge” is failing:

In my judgment, the current surge strategy is not an effective means of protecting [U.S.] interests. Its prospects for success are too dependent on the actions of others who do not share our agenda. It relies on military power to achieve goals that it cannot achieve. It distances allies that we will need for any regional diplomatic effort. Its failure, without a careful transition to a back-up policy would intensify our loss of credibility. It uses tremendous amounts of resources that cannot be employed in other ways to secure our objectives. And it lacks domestic support that is necessary to sustain a policy of this type.

While Lugar has yet to agree to act on his rhetoric, it is laughable for the White House to suggest that Lugar’s comments — and the comments of several other prominent conservatives — are any sort of endorsement of the President’s policies in Iraq.

– Ryan Powers

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The FBI is currently questioning Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) as part of “a public corruption investigation that has led to charges against state lawmakers and contractors.” The AP reports today that Stevens, who is 83 years old, is worried that it may hamper his re-election efforts:

The worst thing about this investigation is that it does change your life in terms of employment potential. It doesn’t matter what anyone says, it does shake you up. If this is still hanging around a year from November, it could cause me some trouble.

National Hurricane Center director Bill Proenza stepped down today after roughly half of his staff signed a petition calling for his ouster last week. The staff claimed Proenza’s working environment “of closed doors and the public airing of dirty laundry” put the “effective functioning” of the organization at risk as the hurricane season heads towards its peak.

Bloomberg notes, “Four thousand U.S. service members have died in U.S. President George W. Bush’s ‘war on terror’ in Iraq and Afghanistan 5 1/2 years after American forces ousted the Taliban in December 2001.” AP adds, “All told, Congress has appropriated $610 billion in war-related money since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror assaults, roughly the same as the war in Vietnam. Iraq alone has cost $450 billion.” The wars cost approximately $12 billion a month, according to a new Congressional Research Service report.

An aide to Condoleezza Rice said that the Secretary of State has “got the bug” for golf. She “even carries her clubs on diplomatic trips to Asia so that she can get in a few holes during long layovers in Hawaii.” Her aide added that Rice “would very much like to do what she can to raise awareness of golf as a sport.”

This weekend at the Aspen Ideas Festival, President Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove seemed incapable of uttering a single honest statement.

Facing a chilly reception from the audience, who “shook their heads and groaned in unison” during the speech, Rove grossly distorted administration’s policies, on everything from Guantanamo to Iraq to the leak case:

On Guantanamo:

“Our principal health problem down there is gain of weight, we feed them so well.” In fact, Guantanamo prisoners are facing a mental health crisis, with over 40 suicide attempts since its opening, including one suicide in May. Some have been so severely tortured that they were treated by “experts in treating torture victims.”

On Iraq:

“80-90 percent of violence in Iraq is due to al Qaeda.” As former Secretary of State Colin Powell noted earlier in the conference, only 10 percent of violence in Iraq is due to al Qaeda. As the Carpetbagger noted, “by all indications, Powell was rounding up.” Now, the mainstream media is buying into the al Qaeda fearmongering, as Glenn Greenwald reported.

“We all thought [Saddam Hussein] had weapons of mass destruction. The whole world did.” U.N.weapons inspectors and prominent members of the international community strongly disagreed with this assessment before the invasion. One weapons inspector referred to pre-war U.S. intelligence as “garbage after garbage after garbage.”

On the CIA leak case:

“My contribution to this was to say to a reporter, which is a lesson about talking to reporters, the words ‘I heard that, too.’” Rove leaked Valerie Plame’s identity not only to Novak, but to Time’s Matthew Cooper. Cooper said his conversation with Rove was the first time he heard anything about Plame.

Despite participating in egregious and illegal wrongdoings, Rove expressed unwaivering confidence in his boss’s decisions. “Look, I make no apologies,” he said.

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The Bush administration has repeatedly changed its excuses for why David Iglesias was ousted as U.S. attorney. Justice officials called him an “absentee landlord, even though his time away from the office was spent serving in the Navy Reserve. They also claimed that he didn’t pursue voter fraud investigations aggressively enough, even though he had been “heralded for his expertise in that area by the Justice Department.”

Yesterday on Fox News Sunday, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) pointed out that Iglesias, like many of the other prosecutors, exercised “independent judgment” and refused to follow the Bush administration’s political agenda. “And as a result, he was fired,” said Van Hollen. Rep. Chris Cannon (R-UT) then shouted out his reason for why the Bush administration fired Iglesias: “No, no. He was fired because he’s an idiot.” Watch it:

Today, ThinkProgress spoke with Cannon spokesman Fred Piccolo, who explained Cannon’s “off-the-cuff” remark referenced the fact that when Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) and Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM) contacted Iglesias and pressured him to pursue a case against Democrats:

It was more in regards to the fact that Iglesias was initially contacted by [Sen. Pete] Domenici and [Rep. Heather] Wilson. Instead of informing main Justice, he decided to inform the public and Justice…by holding several press conferences and tantalizingly releasing those names to the press, and has subsequently been the only fired us attorney to beat this drum of ‘this is a Karl-Rovian plot to obstruct justice and the prosecution of Republicans’ — after all these hearings, to any impartial observers it doesn’t play out.

Iglesias has admitted that not reporting the calls from Domenici and Wilson was a mistake. But he publicly revealed those calls only after he was fired. Similarly, he began speaking out about Rove’s role after he was fired. Therefore, Cannon’s criticisms of Iglesias’s post-firing behavior still don’t explain why he was ousted in the first place. It also doesn’t make Iglesias an “idiot.”

Raw Story and TPM have more on Cannon’s remarks.

UPDATE: Cannon’s office tells Raw Story’s Michael Roston that “Mr. Iglesias demonstrated, both during his time before the committee and his subsequent riding of the talk show circuit parroting outrageous assertions, that he did not possess the temperament for the position he held.”

UPDATE II: The Utah Daily Herald reports, “After the show, Cannon and Chief of Staff Joe Hunter discussed the quote. Cannon said that he was trying to figure out how to make sure that the ‘he was an idiot’ quote didn’t end up as the headline in the newspaper.”

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