Tuesday’s Mini-Report

March 6, 2007

Today’s edition of quick hits.

* Ambassador Joseph Wilson responded to the Scooter Libby conviction by calling for further accountability. “Now that this trial is over,” Wilson said, “the president and the vice president owe the country a much broader explanation of their own actions.” Wilson called on them both to release the transcripts of their discussions with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, and called on Bush specifically to apologize for overseeing the outing of his wife.

* Howard Dean was asked about the verdict today. He didn’t hold back.

* CNN reported, “Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York, called the dire conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center ‘the Katrina of 2007’ Tuesday, hours after President Bush announced a bipartisan commission to investigate the matter. ‘Make no mistake about it, this is the Katrina of 2007,’ Schumer said in a Capitol Hill news conference. ‘Now some of you will say, ‘well they responded more quickly than Katrina,’ yes, but the chickens have come home to roost just like they did in Katrina. When you under-fund, when you put in incompetent people, when you don’t really care about governing and making government work, you’re never going to get a good policy result.'” Good analogy.

* Apparently, CNN wasn’t particularly interested in the story about Hillary Clinton’s “drawl” from the weekend until Drudge convinced the network it is was newsworthy. That’s not an encouraging sign.

* The White House originally asked Congress for $5.6 billion for Bush’s escalation strategy. Everyone insisted that the number was too low, but the administration dismissed the concerns. Two months later, the White House is going back to Congress, asking for an additional $2 billion. Yes, when it comes to Iraq, the White House is always wrong.

* In an interview with NPR today, American Legion National Commander Paul Morin, usually a political ally of the White House, blasted Bush for skimping on veterans funding. “We are not pleased with the budget for the military and for the VA hospitals for our veterans,” Morin said. “I blame the President and Congress for insufficient funding of the VA health care system.”

* GovExec had a good piece today about the role of outsourcing and privatization in creating the massive problems at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

* Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) waited patiently for Condoleezza Rice to answer his question about whether the Bush administration believes it already has the authority to launch combat operations against Iran. Yesterday, Webb said he’d waited long enough and introduced a measure to force the president to seek congressional approval before any use of force against Iran. “This presidency has shot from the hip too many times for us to be able to trust it to act on its own,” Webb said. “We need the Congress to be involved in any decision to commence military activities absent an attack from the other side or a direct threat.”

* Ann Coulter has lost another customer: “The daily Lancaster (Pa.) New Era, in a note to readers, said it ‘halted publication of Ann Coulter’s syndicated column following her crude characterization of presidential candidate John Edwards as a homosexual at a public appearance on Friday. Coulter’s use of name-calling, sarcasm, and overstatement in her columns too often detracts from the arguments she seeks to make…. Lancaster County residents of whatever political view — conservative, moderate, or liberal — deserve intelligent discussion of issues. Ann Coulter no longer provides that.'”

* Congrats to our very own Tom Cleaver, who had a great piece in the LA Times this week about a subject he knows well: the movie industry.

* The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence has an interesting item on the conservative backlash against hunting writer Jim Zumbo, who posted a blog item for Outdoor Life Magazine, where he has worked since 1962, criticizing assault rifles. It’s a fascinating controversy.

* Interesting podcast featuring a debate on Iraq between neocons and their critics — moderated by Alton Frye (former President of the Council on Foreign Relations), and with panelists Ted Galen Carpenter (VP for Defense and Foreign Policy at CATO), Helle Dale (former editor of the Washington Times Op-ed page and now at Heritage), Col. Doug Macgregor (Ret.), Frank Gaffney (President of the Center for Security Studies), and Frank Anderson (former CIA, was chief of the near east division and had served three tours as station chief in the middle east). Check it out.

* And finally, before we leave the day in which Libby was finally convicted, it’s worth asking one last question: Who’s more disappointed by the results, Fox News or the National Review? Tough call.

If these items aren’t of any interest, consider this an end-of-the-day open thread.

Has everybody forgotton that Hillary lived and worked in Little Rock for twenty years or so? Last I checked it was in the South and they’s lotsa cotton mouths there.
She comes by it honestly.

  • Boy, that’s the Howard Dean I love.

    Thank god he’s the DNC chair instead of some apologist.

    I love to see it when the right wing has no coherent talking points and the Democrats are ready to blast away, linking all of the various high crimes and misdemeanors with today’s convictions and outrages.

    All in all, feels like the dark side of the force felt a shudder today.

  • * Congrats to our very own Tom Cleaver, who had a great piece in the LA Times this week about a subject he knows well: the movie industry.

    Good job, Cleaver!

    So you’ve been writing about Terror for a long time. In fact, you wrote the movie. The Terror Within is a perfect description of Cheney’s role in the War on Terror. And, he might actually be an alien.

    Tarantino is doing a 7weekend Grindhouse Festival showing all those Corman-style movies from the past

  • OK, press corpse, time to ask Bush if he intends to pardon everyone like Reagan did, or fire the leaker (Rove) as he promised.

    Or, just lay there like a corpse.

  • I want to see Bush have to beg for his $2B. I want to see Congress finally tell him, “You said the first amount was enough. You haven’t even fully deployed, and you want more? The answer is no. You may leave now.” I want to see him throw one of his “deciderer” tantrums, and then get thrown out of the building by the Capitol Police Department.

    I’ll vouch for their right to use force, if need be….

  • Here’s a rightwing pundit saying that Ann Coulter’s books shouldn’t be promoted, and at the bottom of the page you will see… an ad for an Ann Coulter book.

    …AIM has announced that it will be discontinuing sales of books by or merchandise promoting Ann Coulter. We hope that other conservative groups follow our lead…

    http://www.gopusa.com/commentary/ckincaid/2007/ck_03051.shtml

  • Thanks Dale (#3). Nah, the “Terrorist Clot” proves that Cheney has blood. Of course, if he is an alien, then wishing to see him dead isn’t the same as wanting to see a bad thing happen to a fellow member of the human race, eh??

  • Ann Coulter has lost another customer: “The daily Lancaster (Pa.) New Era, in a note to readers, said it ‘halted publication of Ann Coulter’s syndicated column following her crude characterization of presidential candidate John Edwards as a homosexual at a public appearance on Friday…’

    woo-hooo!

    wait, Libby was convicted today? /YES!/ (this is what happens when you only read a few pol sites a night, having cut down from 200+ per day).

  • Of course, if he is an alien, then wishing to see him dead isn’t the same as wanting to see a bad thing happen to a fellow member of the human race, eh??

    Comment by Tom Cleaver

    Well you probably wouldn’t want to ask Cheney if there’s anything he wants to get off his chest.

  • Apparently, CNN wasn’t particularly interested in the story about Hillary Clinton’s “drawl” from the weekend until Drudge convinced the network it is was newsworthy. That’s not an encouraging sign.

    Maybe it’s an excuse, and the responsible CNN employee is blaming this on Drudge- kind of claiming that a hot blogger told them to cover the story and so it’s not bias to cover it.

    Has everybody forgotton that Hillary lived and worked in Little Rock for twenty years or so? Last I checked it was in the South and they’s lotsa cotton mouths there.
    She comes by it honestly.

    Yo, she was reading a Southern hymn and spoke that way because it was written in Southern English. She doesn’t speak like that.

  • American Legion National Commander Paul Morin and the American Legion have been kissing Bus’s ass since he stole the 2000 election Sorry, had it stolen for him, that was Jeb & Kathy Harris. I notice that he blamed “Congress” rather than the REPUBLICAN Congress that had been in power since 1992.
    Asshole.

    And as far ar non-assholes, (as far as I know), Congrats Tom Cleaver.
    And I don’t even have a “treatment” to hawk.

  • That’s great Tom. It’s great to have our own insider’s perspective on the cultural blender which is L.A. Good luck writing that “bazillion dollar” hit one of these days.

  • Just when I was going to congratulate Tom for his notoriety, along comes a troll posting more nazi stuff in our comments section. Maybe Tom’s next “Terror from Within” script can be about trolls befouling our comments section.

    The Jim Zumbo story is really disheartening. The NRA and its just-like-Karl-Rove scorched earth tactics hunted down and killed one of the best outdors writers in this nation — just because he said something true. There’s a reason hunting rifles are called hunting rifles and assault rifles are called assault rifles. One has the ballistics and power to drop a large animal with one ethical shot, the other is for putting large amounts of lead into the air at close range to mortally wound anything unlucky enough to be in a combat zone. Fishing with dynamite could technically be called fishing and hunting with an assault rifle could technically be called hunting, but only the ethically impaired would do either. And that explains why the NRA took such a brutal and immoral route to proving its point.

    If I were the leader of Iran or North Korea, I’d get an NRA membership and put their decals along the borders. Because the NRA will do whatever it can to protect the weapons of its membership. You’d have to pry Iran’s or North Korea’s nukes from the NRA’s cold, dead hands. Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Amedinejad just need to say they’re going to use the nukes for hunting. Sound stupid? Just as stupid as hunting with an assault rifle.

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