Today’s edition of quick hits.
* AP: “Two suicide car bombers targeted a local police chief and a prominent Sunni sheik working with U.S. forces against al-Qaida in Iraq in a northern city on Tuesday, killing at least 19 people, authorities said.”
* The September leak of the Osama bin Laden video will continue to reverberate: “The director of a group that monitors Islamic militant Web sites said the government leaked an Osama bin Laden video that was passed along to senior U.S. officials on condition that they keep it secret. She claimed the leak rendered certain intelligence-gathering capabilities ineffective. The White House said it was not responsible for the leak, and a senior official said the director of national intelligence should investigate the allegation.”
* AFP: “The US Army will need three or four years to recover from the strains of repeated deployments to Iraq even with a planned drawdown of US forces next year, the service’s chief said Monday. General George Casey said the army is ‘out of balance’ after six years of warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq, and facing unpredictable demands in an era of ‘persistent conflict.'”
* Dan Bartlett, Bush’s former advisor, doesn’t think highly of the Republican presidential field. Here he is on Fred Thompson: “The biggest liability was whether he had the fire in the belly to run for office in the first place and be president. So what does he do? He waits four months, fires a bunch of staff, has a big staff turnover, has a lot of backbiting, comes out with his big campaign launch and gives a very incoherent and not very concise stump speech for why he’s running for president.”
* It’s odd that so many conservatives struggle with the difference between reality and fictional television shows: “On the October 8 edition of his CNN Headline News show, Glenn Beck began a segment on Iran by asserting, ‘War with Iran is no longer a question of ‘if,’ I believe it’s a question of ‘when.’ ‘ Beck went on to state: ‘Iran has long been the puppet master in the Middle East. You don’t have to take my word for it. Just watch any episode of Law & Order.'”
* For a Congress that’s perceived as being slow and ineffective, there sure have been a lot of roll-call votes.
* According to the WaPo’s Howard Kurtz, on 9/11, NBC anchor Brian Williams found relief in Bush’s advisors: “For Williams, it all went back to Sept. 11, 2001. As a citizen, he thought on that fateful day, thank God that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell were on the team.” I have no idea what Williams might have been thinking, but if the quote is accurate, it’s quite an embarrassment.
* If a private school voucher scheme was going to pass anywhere, Utah would seem to be the place. Fortunately, it looks like it’s going to lose there, too.
* Stephen Colbert was in rare form last night: “Hey, Media Matters, you want to end offensive speech? Then stop recording it for people who would be offended. Because the Constitution gives us broadcasters the right to say anything we want but that doesn’t mean that just anyone has the right to listen.”
* And speaking of Colbert: “He claims he doesn’t read books or respect those who do mess around with these potentially dangerous bearers of actual facts or vital analysis. Yet faux-pundit Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central’s ‘Colbert Report’ has gone out and written something that appears between hard covers and looks suspiciously like a … book? So how does he explain the arrival this week of ‘I Am America (and So Can You!)’? Take a look at the excerpts.
* Cheney may be the architect of this White House’s power-grab, but the idea didn’t just come to him all of a sudden — he’s been working on it for decades.
* I am, as I type, listening to the Republican debate in Michigan. I’ll have a full report in the morning.
* Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) just isn’t very bright: “[Blackwater CEO Erik] Prince is on his way to being an American hero just like Ollie North was.”
* On a related note, is there another U.S. security contractor poised to face a similar investigation?
* And finally, Conan O’Brien: “During a recent speech, President Bush said, this is a quote, ‘My job is a decision-making job. As a result, I have made a lot of decisions.’ Apparently, Bush’s decision that day was to write his own speech.”
Anything to add? Consider this an end-of-the-day open thread.