The G-Word

Bush, with Tony Blair at his side, finally gets asked about the Downing Street Memo, but most news accounts lead with African aid. Here's part of the Los Angeles Times story:

"Bush flatly rejected the allegations in the so-called Downing Street memo, written in July 2002 by a Blair foreign policy aide. The document alleged that the White House was fixing its intelligence and facts about the threat posed by then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to justify an invasion to oust him.' There's nothing farther from the truth,' Bush said during a brief news conference with Blair in the East Room of the White House. The president suggested that the memo, first reported in the Sunday Times of London and the topic of much discussion on the Internet, had been dropped into the middle of Britain's recent parliamentary elections in an effort to damage Blair and his Labor Party. Blair refuted the memo as well."

So this is how the Bush administration makes environmental policy:

"A White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents," says the New York Times.

"In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.

"The dozens of changes, while sometimes as subtle as the insertion of the phrase 'significant and fundamental' before the word 'uncertainties,' tend to produce an air of doubt about findings that most climate experts say are robust.

"Mr. Cooney is chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the office that helps devise and promote administration policies on environmental issues. Before going to the White House in 2001, he was the 'climate team leader' and a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute."

So much for science.

Wow: I wrote yesterday that some Dems had become uneasy with Dean's rhetoric, from the bad joke about Limbaugh to the premature sentencing of DeLay. Wait till they get a load of this San Francisco Chronicle piece by Carla Marinucci:

"Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, unapologetic in the face of recent criticism that he has been too tough on his political opposition, said in San Francisco this week that Republicans are 'a pretty monolithic party. They all behave the same. They all look the same. It's pretty much a white Christian party.'"

Now that Drudge has bannered the story, I predict a rather strong pushback.

Here's how blogs are changing the nature of political coverage. John Edwards , in a posting picked up by Daily Kos, tries to clarify his remarks about Dean: