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Should Cheney Be Next?
"The White House also has recently barraged the agency with questions about the political affiliations of some of its senior intelligence officers, according to intelligence officials."
Why do they want to know? What are they being told? What do they intend to do with such information? Have we gotten to a point where there are two different kinds of intelligence: Democratic and Republican? So many questions.
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The Nation's David Corn was among several bloggers who read all the way to the end.
Protesters Block Bush
In what was the first time in my recollection that Bush's plans have had to change due to protesters, the San Jose Mercury News reports that on Friday, "President Bush's visit to Stanford University's Hoover Institution was quickly moved to another location after more than 1,000 protesters converged around the Hoover tower."
Amit Arora of the Stanford Daily has all the details.
Learning from Larry, Moe and Curly
Janet Hook writes in the Los Angeles Times: "Just when it looked like the political climate couldn't get worse for President Bush and the Republican Party, more storms have gathered.
"This month's abrupt rise in gas prices is fueling new worries about the party's prospects in the fall elections, which have been roiled by controversy over GOP policies on immigration, the federal budget and Iraq. . . .
"The situation may call for Bush to step in and demand more party unity from Republican lawmakers, who have increasingly kept their distance from the White House as the president's agenda and poll numbers have flagged.
" 'The president has to be like Moe Howard: At some point in every 'Three Stooges' short, Moe slaps both Curly and Larry and says, 'Get to work,' " said Bill Whalen, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. 'There's a window of opportunity to get things done, but the window is getting smaller every day.' "
Into the Belly of the Beast
Bush travels to Orange County in Southern California today to try to build support for his immigration policies.
Orange County famously votes Republican -- but nevertheless may turn out to be a very poor choice of location for a speech on that topic.
Having worked in Orange County as a reporter for six years, I can tell you that it is one of the most deeply polarized counties in America. Forged in large part by white flight from Los Angeles, followed by a huge tide of new immigrants into its urban core, Orange County is home to virulent anti-immigrant feelings on one side and a growing immigration rights movement on the other. That leaves little room for supporters of Bush's compromise stance.
Christopher Goffard and Jean Pasco write in the Los Angeles Times: "Bush's decision to speak here might prove an embarrassing miscalculation, said John J. Pitney, a government professor at Claremont McKenna College who used to live in Orange County and worked for the national GOP.
" 'I'm not sure they had their O.C. antennae up,' he said of White House schedulers. 'They don't realize how complicated this issue is. It's possible this is a Daniel-in-the-lions'-den moment, but that's not really characteristic of this administration.' "
Succeeding McClellan
David E. Sanger writes in the New York Times that "after nearly seven years of covering the White House, stretched over two administrations, four press secretaries, endless hours tinkering with the fractured hinge supporting the New York Times seat in the second row and hundreds of questions that have resulted in artful and artless evasive answers, I have come to a few conclusions.
"One is that the press secretary is not likely to return as a major force on the White House stage anytime soon. The second is that the daily briefings now have less to do with covering the White House than ever, and their value is diminishing every year. At some point between Monica and the missing W.M.D., the sparring came to obscure the imparting of information about how and why decisions were made."
On his CNN media show, Howard Kurtz talked to CNN's John Roberts. "I hope if anything happens in this transition to a new press secretary is that they make a decision to actually tell the media something at the daily briefing," Roberts said.
Kurtz: "[P]ast presidential spokesmen like for example Marlin Fitzwater or Mike McCurry were also very helpful away from the cameras, what people didn't see on television. In my experience, Scott McClellan very polite, always called back, but didn't say much more in background than he would at the podium."
Roberts: "No, no, he never did. And even when you would go in and you would see him in his office, every once in a while you might get a little bit more detail about some of the things that they were talking about, but he was very close held with the information. But I think the reason was is because this president came into the White House with the idea that he didn't want to use the national media. He wanted to talk past the national media. He wanted to reach out directly to the people. All the time forgetting that in order to get to the people, you've got to go through the national media, or at least the local media, you know, in regional markets. So I think that that was all part of their strategy. It's the mushroom principle. It's keep them in the dark and feed them manure."
The Adversarial Press?
David Carr writes in the New York Times about the political message of this year's Pulitzer Prizes.
"Some observers on the press side saw the awards as a recognition that the split between the government and the press, which many thought had been papered over during the first Bush administration, had widened again.
" 'I think that there is a renewed recognition that the relationship with government is fundamentally adversarial,' said William L. Israel, a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. 'I have not seen the kind of unanimity from the Pulitzer board for some time. Over and over, they endorsed work that held the government to account.' . . .
"In the fight over government prerogative versus the people's right to know, there are those who think the current administration may have overplayed its hand. Everyone knows the government needs to keep secrets, but reporters and editors have argued that there are times when that need is superseded by the public's right to know exactly what is going on behind the veil. . . .
"Since the beginning of his presidency, Mr. Bush has made it clear that he does not buy the industry's widely held conceit that it serves as a proxy for the American people. That, he has suggested over the course of his two terms, is his job.
"The national press seems to be saying otherwise."
