The Stench of Torture

"'I understand the need to take advantage of the president, but it's just bad timing for me,' said Montgomery County Commissioner Jim Matthews, a Republican running for reelection whom Democrats have targeted with mailings that picture him with Bush. 'Maybe it would have been better if he was in Delaware or Chester,' Matthews said. . . .

"'It was like the Democrats scripted it,' one top suburban Republican said of the timing, speaking on condition of anonymity out of deference to the White House."

The Associated Press reports that in Bryn Mawr, and then later in the day at a Cincinnati fundraiser, the president "was under wraps the whole time. Bush went first to one large home in a well-manicured neighborhood and then another, for gripping-and-grinning with wealthy GOP supporters out of sight of the media and without a single public utterance. The media that normally sticks close by the president, even when he is in closed events, was kept at buildings far from the fundraisers."

FEMA Watch

Spencer S. Hsu writes in The Washington Post: "The Federal Emergency Management Agency's director of external communications was denied a post as senior spokesman for Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell yesterday, becoming the highest-ranking casualty of a fake news conference staged by FEMA last week to publicize its response to California's devastating wildfires.

"The flap is not the first time FEMA or its parent Department of Homeland Security has been on the wrong end of a public relations move that backfired. Rather, it fits a pattern in which domestic security officials have mismanaged the public presentation of their efforts, whether those efforts are going well or poorly.

"Public relations is an obsession of senior department leaders, who say that public safety and counterterrorism efforts depend on their credibility. But DHS has repeatedly stumbled, most devastatingly when its leaders' reassuring words clashed with chaotic television images of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005."

The Washington Post editorial board writes: "Since its disgraceful performance during Hurricane Katrina and the shake-up that followed, the folks at the Federal Emergency Management Agency have adopted a mantra: We are a new FEMA. But the old, bumbling agency capable of breathtaking lapses in judgment reemerged last week during a 'press conference' to update the 'media' on FEMA's response to the wildfires in Southern California."

Federal Government Incompetence Watch

Stephen Labaton writes in the New York Times: "The nation's top official for consumer product safety has asked Congress in recent days to reject legislation intended to strengthen the agency, which polices thousands of consumer goods, from toys to tools...

"The measure is an effort to buttress an agency that has been under siege because of a raft of tainted and dangerous products manufactured both domestically and abroad. In the last two months alone, more than 13 million toys have been recalled after tests indicated lead levels that sometimes reached almost 200 times the safety limit."

Labaton notes that the opposition from Nancy A. Nord, the acting chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, "is consistent with the broadly deregulatory approach of the Bush administration over the last seven years."

Medals of Freedom

The Associated Press reports on Bush's picks for this year's Medal of Freedom. They're considerably less controversial than in 2004, when Bush presented the medal to supposed heroes of the Iraq war: Former CIA Director George Tenet, former U.S. Proconsul in Iraq Paul Bremer, and retired Army Gen. Tommy Franks.

Possibly the biggest poke in the eye to administration critics this time around: The medal going to Henry Hyde, an Illinois Republican who served for 32 years in the House, where he was known for his battles against abortion rights and his leading role in the impeachment of President Clinton.