The Foxnewsified Bush Interview

"The comments offered the first glimpses of Bush's thinking about his life after he leaves office."

Social Security Watch

According to the polls, the only part of Bush's message about Social Security that the public seems to have embraced is his doomsaying.

Americans are now more pessimistic about Social Security's future ability to pay benefits than before Bush started evangelizing on the topic.

But all that doomsaying appears to have spilled over and smeared his own proposed solution as well.

Richard Morin and Jim VandeHei write in The Washington Post: "President Bush yesterday said his plan to restructure Social Security would improve the program's long-term stability without shrinking the retirement income of older Americans. But a new Washington Post-ABC News survey found a clear majority of the public does not believe that.

"The poll found that 56 percent said the president's plan to couple new personal retirement accounts with a reduction in guaranteed benefits for most Americans would cut the overall retirement income of seniors. About a third -- 32 percent -- said Bush's proposals would result in future retirees receiving more money.

"More troubling for a president who took a political risk by advocating reductions in future guaranteed benefits for all but the poorest Americans is that an even larger majority said the Bush plan would not fix the system's financial problems. More than six in 10 -- 63 percent -- said the proposals would not improve the long-term financial stability of the Social Security system, while 32 percent said it would."

Here are the complete poll results.

The Mastermind Takes Questions

White House economic policy adviser Chuck Blahous, Bush's go-to guy on Social Security, was on Ask the White House yesterday, and took precisely the sort of tough questions from the public that the president won't get near.

Michael from Boston asked: "I noticed on a news site that the President said that the Trust Fund is merely paper IOUs. But aren't they backed by the US Government? Should we be concerned that the Government is going to default on the 'IOUs'?"

Blahous replied: "The question is not whether the government will default on its debt, but rather the meaning of the IOUs in the Trust Fund. The government's credit is sound, but that is a separate matter from the fundamental question of what the Trust Fund really means."

His explanation is worth reading.

Then Dan, from Washington D.C. (not me! I swear!) wrote: "OK, I get that Social Security is pay-as-you-go. So why are people paying more in payroll tax right now than they need to?"

Blahous called that one "a terrific question" -- then dodged it.

Downing Street Memo Watch

On CNN, Jeff Greenfield reflected on the Downing Stret Memo and the coverage it finally got yesterday. (See yesterday's column.)

Richard Wolffe, Newsweek's White House correspondent, tells him: "I think there's a certain amount of Iraq fatigue, at least among the media, which is hard to kind of fathom in some way."

Greenfield himself concludes: "The real power of this memo, then, is its potential to reinforce beliefs that flow from current events. The more worried Americans are about the present, the more pessimistic they become about the future, the more likely they are to have doubts about what really happened in the past."

Salon media critic Eric Boehlert writes: "In an age of instant communications, the American mainstream media has taken an exceedingly long time -- as if news of the memo had traveled by vessel across the Atlantic Ocean -- to report on the leaked document. Nor has it considered its grave implications -- namely, that President Bush lied to the American people and Congress during the run-up to the war with Iraq when he insisted over and over again that war was his administration's last option."

Paul Koring writes in Toronto's Globe and Mail: "A leaked memo that failed to hurt British Prime Minister Tony Blair may yet do some damage to U.S. President George W. Bush -- but not if the U.S. news media continue to ignore it, as they did for weeks."

Bush Ex Tempore

Here's the transcript of Bush's meandering talk yesterday to a meeting of builders and contractors at the Capital Hilton."One of the main jobs we have here in Washington is to protect our country. You see, not only did the attacks help accelerate a recession, the attacks reminded us that we are at war," he said at one point.

Later, he asked the audience: "Do you realize we've got 250 million years of coal?"

The White House stenographers had to give that one a "[sic]" because in fact, the United States has only 250 years of coal reserves, not 250 million years.

On Medical Liability

Off on a tangent, Bush also offered an insight into his precedent-shattering move to establish federal rules in an area historically left to the states: liability law.

"When I first came to Washington I wasn't so sure this was a federal issue. You know, being the former governor of a state, I kind of felt like the states could take care of medical liability issues. But you see, all these lawsuits cause docs to practice what they call defensive medicine. They practice more medicine than necessary just in case they get sued. And all these lawsuits are running up the cost of medicine because premiums go up that they pass on to the bill payer. Well, it just so happened the federal government pays a lot of medical bills. So you were paying Medicare and Medicaid and veterans benefits. It is estimated that these junk lawsuits are costing taxpayers about $27 billion a year.

"And so I decided, well, maybe this wasn't a state issue; maybe this was a federal issue since it's affecting our federal budget so much, and it's a federal issue that requires a federal response."

The Economic Policy Institute, by the way, takes issue with Bush's $27 billion figure.

The Immigration Message

Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes in the New York Times: "With his plan for overhauling immigration law stalled on Capitol Hill, President Bush told Congressional leaders on Wednesday that he had not done a very good job of selling the idea to the American people and would renew his call for the legislation, the White House and Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, said.

"'I don't think I'm betraying a confidence,' Mr. DeLay told reporters. 'He admitted that he hasn't done a very good job in being clear to the American people where he's coming from and he's going to try to do better.'"

Climate Changes

Andrew C. Revken writes in the New York Times, following up on his own story from yesterday: "Bush administration officials said yesterday that revisions to reports on climate change made by Philip A. Cooney, a former oil-industry lobbyist now working at the White House, were part of the normal review before publishing projects that involved many agencies.

"At his morning briefing for reporters, the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, defended Mr. Cooney's participation and said the reports were 'scientifically sound.'"

It was another contentious briefing yesterday.

Pardon Watch

The Associated Press reports: "President Bush granted pardons to seven people Wednesday, including a man court-martialed by the Air Force in 1978. Bush has issued 46 pardons and sentence commutations during 52 months in office. . . .

"Some pardons, like the one President Ford gave Richard Nixon in 1974, protect recipients from going to jail or cut short their sentences. But Bush has granted clemency mainly to allow people who committed relatively minor offenses and long ago served their sentences to clear their names."

Turkey Watch

Jim VandeHei writes in The Washington Post: "President Bush praised Turkey yesterday as a close, democratic ally in the Middle East but stopped short of meeting Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's plea for greater U.S. assistance to defeat a Turkish terrorist group operating out of northern Iraq."

Bush's photo-op with Erdogan (here's the transcript) was a big dud for the press pool. "POTUS responded to a few shouted questions with a quick wink," wrote pooler Mike Soraghan of the Denver Post.

The highlight for the pool, he wrote, was a brief visit from the new White House puppy, Miss Beazley, "who trotted into the West Wing as we waited to show off her summer cut."

Bush Gets His Pick

Charles Babington writes in The Washington Post: "The Senate confirmed Janice Rogers Brown to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit yesterday, handing President Bush and his conservative supporters a long-sought addition to the nation's second most influential court."

Target Practice

Rone Tempest, Greg Krikorian and Lee Romney write in the Los Angeles Times that one of the Northern California men charged with alleged terrorist connections "allegedly told federal agents that he attended a terrorist camp in Pakistan for six months in 2003-04 and was instructed on attacking targets in the United States.

"Included in the training, Hamid Hayat reportedly told agents, was target practice using pictures of President Bush."

Impeachment Watch

In Salon, four constitutional scholars weigh the issue of whether the Downing Street Memo is grounds to debate the impeachment of the president.