Under Siege

It must be a trend, there are two more in the Boston Globe. First, this one : "With crucial midterm elections less than nine months away, Republicans are expressing deep skepticism about President Bush's plans to cut social programs while promoting the extension of his tax cuts, saying the juxtaposition of the two GOP priorities could spur an election-year backlash."

And this one :

"The Republican family feud was laid bare in public last week at the Conservative Political Action Committee's annual confab. CPAC activists are a notoriously cranky bunch, quick to pounce on politician friends who stray toward the center. But this year the spears aimed at George W. Bush were especially sharp.

"It can't be a good sign for a White House hoping to maintain control of Congress next November when its one-time allies lump in the president with two of their perpetual bogeymen: John McCain and Ted Kennedy.

"Bush's budget-busting spending was a big reason for the foul mood. But two other issues captured the growing split between the president and a powerful conservative movement that twice helped him capture the Oval Office: immigration and the Medicare prescription drug plan."

One pro-military Iraq blogger is getting plenty of attention, says the LAT :

"More than one U.S. senator endorsed him. So did retired Lt. Col. Oliver North and platoons of American fighting men and women. Actor Bruce Willis called him the only correspondent 'telling the truth about what's happening in the war in Iraq.'

" Michael Yon may not be a household name, but he emerged last year as the reporter of choice for many conservatives and supporters of the war. His blog inspired so much buzz that by last month only 83 other blogs, out of about 26 million on the Internet, received more links from other websites.

"Yon's emergence from obscurity is emblematic of Internet-age journalism, in which a lone writer with little experience can build a significant following by deeply mining a specialized niche. In the blogosphere, opinions fly with abandon. Unconventional characters thrive who would make the mainstream media blanch. What big newspaper or television network, after all, would have taken a chance on a self-taught war correspondent who once killed a man in a barroom fight, and whose last venture had him pursuing an American cannibal around the globe?"

Sounds like a natural for cable news.

Peggy Noonan wasn't offended by the political criticism at Coretta Scott King's funeral:

"There was nothing prissy, nothing sissy about it. A former president, a softly gray-haired and chronically dyspeptic gentleman who seems to have judged the world to be just barely deserving of his presence, pointedly insulted a sitting president who was, in fact, sitting right behind him. The Clintons unveiled their 2008 campaign. A rhyming preacher, one of the old lions, a man of warmth and stature, freely used the occasion to verbally bop the sitting president on the head.