Access for Sale

Fickle GOP?

Peter Baker writes in The Washington Post: "With elections barely four months away and their majorities at risk, Republicans on Capitol Hill say they are making calculations based on survival, not loyalty. President Bush has convinced them that sticking with him on Iraq and casting critics as soft on terrorism is a winning strategy despite public unease. But he has failed to convince them that his approach to immigration is good politics.

"The result may be a third election campaign in a row focused on national security, yet it also may mean a second year in a row without a signature victory for the president in domestic policy. Just as Bush invested much of 2005 in pushing a Social Security plan that went nowhere, he has thrown his weight in 2006 behind an immigration proposal that increasingly appears doomed for the year."

Adam Nagourney, Carl Hulse and Jim Rutenberg have a lengthy post-mortem on Bush's immigration push in the New York Times.

"An account of the administration's push for the initiative, based on interviews with members of Congress and senior White House and Congressional officials, shows that Mr. Bush's immigration measure was derailed by an overly optimistic assessment by the White House of the prospects for building a bipartisan coalition in support of the bill. It was also hurt by a fundamental misreading of the depth of hostility to the measure among House Republicans."

Wiretap Watch

Bryan Bender writes in the Boston Globe: "The White House and key congressional committees have begun crafting legislation that would try to overcome legal objections to the Bush administration's controversial domestic surveillance program and subject it to review by a secret intelligence court, government officials said yesterday."

Contraception: For or Against?

As seen on The Washington Post's Federal Page on Friday: President Bush's official position on birth control. It states: "This Administration supports the availability of safe and effective products and services to assist responsible adults in making decisions about preventing or delaying conception."

Joerg Dreweke, a spokesman for the nonprofit Guttmacher Institute, which studies sexual health, writes in an e-mail to reporters that the statement is "noteworthy for the strange way it talks about birth control. It's mostly code-speak to avoid offending the president's base, but it raises more questions than it answers. For example, why does the president believe birth control is only for 'responsible adults'? what about irresponsible adults? and what about adolescents?"

As for why this is even an issue, see Russell Shorto 's article in the New York Times Magazine in May, which describes a growing anti-birth-control campaign that is "part of the evolution of the conservative movement."

Briefing Follies

Here's the transcript of Friday's press briefing by White House spokesman Tony Snow, who was being unavailing and argumentative even by his own standards. (See my June 16 column for more about those standards.)

A major topic, not surprisingly, was the report in the morning papers that the executive branch had unilaterally gained sweeping access to banking records from the international system known as Swift.

Snow pushed back against repeated queries about the banking records with this inexplicable and inapplicable question of his own:

"MR. SNOW: Well, I'll tell you what, does CNN disclose what it does with the financial information or personal information of the people who log onto its website? Does The New York Times? Does The L.A. Times? Your organizations all collect personal data on people who use your services."