Today’s edition of quick hits.
* The Walter Reed scandal is going to stay on the front-burner, especially in Congress. The House Oversight and Government Reform sent subpoenas today to Major General George W. Weightman, former Commander of Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The first hearing is scheduled for Monday.
* NYT: “A majority of Americans say the federal government should guarantee health insurance to every American, especially children, and are willing to pay higher taxes to do it, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.” John Edwards has been gambling the public feels this way, and it looks like he’s right.
* Variety: “Warner Bros. is developing a feature on the lives of Valerie Plame and Ambassador Joseph Wilson, the married couple drawn into a D.C. firestorm. Plame’s status as a CIA agent was revealed by White House officials allegedly out to discredit her husband after he wrote a 2003 New York Times op-ed piece saying that the Bush administration had manipulated intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion of Iraq. The film is a co-production between Weed Road’s Akiva Goldsman and Jerry and Janet Zucker of Zucker Productions.”
* Greg Sargent took a very interesting look at the differences in media coverage between Obama’s “wasted” comment and McCain’s identical comment. For a liberal media, Obama got slammed, while McCain was barely mentioned. Media Matters has a related item.
* This is so heartbreaking I can barely stand reading about it: “Stacy Beardsley, a soldier’s wife released this week from the hospital after a grueling surgery, watched two men in pressed military uniforms walk steadily to her front door. ‘Tell me he’s just hurt,’ the Indiana woman told the pair, according to family friend Marilyn Piersdorf. ‘Well, they couldn’t tell her that,’ Piersdorf said. Her husband, Army Sgt. William ‘B.J.’ Beardsley, who recently lived in Coon Rapids, died Monday in Diwaniyah, Iraq, 80 miles south of Baghdad, after a roadside bomb went off near his vehicle. The 25-year-old soldier had re-enlisted, in part, for the health insurance to cover his wife’s medical bills. He died the day she left the hospital.”
* I noted a few weeks ago that Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons (R), who was a Republican House member up until last year, allegedly accepted unreported gifts or payments from a company that was awarded secret military contracts from Gibbons’ committee. The Wall Street Journal reported two weeks ago that Gibbons is under an FBI investigation. Gibbons initially called the report a “lie.” Yesterday, however, he hired a criminal defense attorney.
* Dan Froomkin did an excellent job today pointing out some of the more glaring problems with Tony Snow’s tenure as White House press secretary.
* Swiss Accidentally Invade Liechtenstein: “What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein. According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers wandered just over a mile across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.”
* It looks like HotSoup.com didn’t work out and Ron Fournier will be returning to the AP next week, in a newly created post of Online Political Editor. That’s probably for the best — he’s too good a reporter to leave the business.
* There’s been an odd right-wing project the past couple of years called “Olbermann Watch,” which sought to discredit the popular MSNBC host. Now that Olbermann has received a lucrative contract extension, “Olbermann Watch” has given up.
* “The government has missed all 34 deadlines set by Congress for requiring energy-efficiency standards on everything from home appliances to power transformers,” the Government Accountability Office reports. “Two-thirds of the deadlines have yet to be met, although many are more than a decade old. Because of the failures, consumers and corporations stand to pay tens of billions of dollars more for energy than they would have if the deadlines had been met.”
* Ed alerted me to an unfortunate picture from the ’70s of a young Tony Blair making “a regrettable hand gesture.”
* And on Jan. 1, 2006, I predicted that Rick Santorum would lose his Senate race and then take a job at Fox News. In November, Santorum lost. Yesterday, he took a job at Fox News. As Stephen Colbert says, “I called it!”
If none of these items are of interest, consider this an end-of-the-day open thread.