Death Wish

The Hillary-and-Obama-obsessed press has done little on Bill Richardson's record in New Mexico--I did notice a nice NYT piece last week--but the Weekly Standard finds something to like, in this piece by Jennifer Rubin:

"The former U.N. ambassador and secretary of energy stands out as the only Democratic presidential candidate who has successfully enacted tax cuts and other pro-growth economic policies. When asked about the importance of tax cuts, Richardson says: 'Cutting taxes and creating tax credits can be essential to creating jobs and a strong economy.' One of his first measures after he was elected governor in 2002 was to cut New Mexico's top income tax rate from 8.2 percent to 4.9 percent over five years."

Responding to a critical letter on Maureen Dowd after her David Geffen column, Andrew Sullivan says:

"I've had my ups and downs with MoDo, but this must be said, I think. She was dead right about the Clintons, and was dead right about Bush and Cheney - long before I was. In the heat of the post-9/11 crisis, I couldn't forgive her for ridiculing the president in wartime. But she was much more perceptive than me. She is no shill for either side. She can grate, and she barely manages any coherent political philosophy. But as an observer of human nature and its centrality in politics, she's remarkably acute."

Has the military solved its PR problem at Walter Reed? The latest, from Army Times:

"Soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center's Medical Hold Unit say they have been told they will wake up at 6 a.m. every morning and have their rooms ready for inspection at 7 a.m., and that they must not speak to the media.

" 'Some soldiers believe this is a form of punishment for the trouble soldiers caused by talking to the media,' one Medical Hold Unit soldier said, speaking on the condition of anonymity . . .

"The Pentagon also clamped down on media coverage of any and all Defense Department medical facilities, to include suspending planned projects by CNN and the Discovery Channel, saying in an e-mail to spokespeople: 'It will be in most cases not appropriate to engage the media while this review takes place,' referring to an investigation of the problems at Walter Reed."

At Talking Points, Greg Sargent has been taking on a longtime Lieberman adviser:

"Dan Gerstein has responded to my post -- he says there's no problem at all with the fact that The Politico published a piece by him attacking some of Joe Lieberman's high-profile foes at the same time that he was collecting money from Lieberman:

"[ W]hether I am a paid, unpaid, or former advisor to Lieberman was not relevant to my column. I was not writing in any Lieberman capacity or on his behalf -- I was expressing my own opinions. And the content of the column was not about Lieberman -- it barely mentioned him -- but about the blindness and irresponsibility of many liberal bloggers. (I will leave it to readers to decide whether Sargent's process point undercut my arguments or unwittingly reinforced them.)

"The question that I keep coming back to is what would have been gained by highlighting my current status as a paid adviser in this particular context. The reason for disclosing that kind of information is to avoid hiding conflicts of interest or presenting interested opinions as independent ones. As I noted above, that was not at issue here -- both the column itself and the tagline at the bottom made clear my Lieberman affiliation. So what would have been the point?"