Columnist Peggy Noonan speculates in today’s Wall Street Journal that the White House is secretly wishing it could replace Dick Cheney. The reason, she suggests, is that Cheney has become too much of a hate magnet and that Bush may want to give a handpicked successor a running start on the next election. “This is a White House that likes to hit refresh when the screen freezes,” she wrote. “Right now the screen is stuck, with poll numbers in the low 40s, or high 30s.” She also notes that “all this is exactly like the sort of thing people blue-skied about in 1992, when George H.W. Bush was in trouble and a lot of people urged him to hit refresh by dumping Dan Quayle. He didn’t. George W. Bush loves to do what his father didn’t.” I’ll believe that when I see it.
Also: Conservative media are making hay about how the liberal, mainstream press has gone into a feeding frenzy over a nonstory — even though Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and others have talked on and on about the hunting accident. Here is Noonan’s take: “Can media bias be detected in the endless coverage? Sure, always. But it’s also a great story. A vice president of the United States shot a guy in a hunting accident, and no one on his staff told the press. That’s a story.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Along with Mozart and Lynn Swann, among others, Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline was singled out at National Review Online this week as "men we love." Janice Shaw Crouse of the think tank Concerned Women for America rhapsodized over Kline’s “clear-eyed passion.” She concluded: “You have to love a man who is willing to take a strong stand for truth at great risk to himself and his family. It brings renewed hope for the future when you recognize the transforming potential of a real hero taking center stage in the national debates over the values that will shape America’s future.” True, when you’re in the presence of Kline, you can practically warm your hands on his passion. But for many Kansans, he inspires more suspicion than love.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Kathleen Parker has a column on today’s Opinion pages using Al Gore’s speech in Saudi Arabia last weekend as an example of free but foolish speech. Gore criticized the United States for “terrible abuses” in detaining about 1,200 Arabs living in the United States immediately after Sept. 11, and for clamping down on Saudi visa applications. “The same free speech that permits dissent — and controversial cartoons — also allows fools to out themselves,” she wrote.
Meanwhile, Glen Reynolds joked on his instapundit.com blog that “only Al Gore could come up with the idea of criticizing Bush for not sucking up to the Saudis enough.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
Congress apparently is unlikely to launch an investigation into President Bush’s wiretapping program after all, The Washington Post reported. The Senate Intelligence Committee is scheduled to vote today on whether to start an inquiry, and as of last week, a majority of its members appeared to support it. But after the closed briefing last week about the program, and an all-out lobbying blitz by the White House, moderate Republicans are backing off. Instead of an inquiry, they are now leaning toward a bill by Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, that would specifically authorize the wiretapping program by excluding it from the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
An Ohio Board of Education member predicted that his board’s decision Tuesday to remove language criticizing evolution from Ohio’s science standards would affect other state science standards. He doesn’t know the Kansas State Board of Education.
Our state board’s majority members have shown that they don’t really care what others think, or at least not the views of the overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists, national science organizations, a federal judge in Pennsylvania, or the Kansas Association of Teachers of Science — which complained this week that the state board is “promoting intelligent design tenets that purport supernatural explanations as valid scientific theories.” No, the only way to get our board to follow Ohio’s lead is to elect new board members this November.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
On NBC’s "Meet the Press" on Sunday, Tim Russert asked Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan.: “Do you believe that the Constitution gives the president of the United States the authority to do anything he believes is necessary to protect the country?”
To which Roberts answered, “Yes, but I wouldn’t say ‘anything he believes.’ I think you go at it very, very carefully, and that’s been done by every president that I know of.”
But think about what Roberts is saying — the president has the authority to do anything. Really?
And as conservative pundit George Will said the same morning on ABC’s “This Week”: “Under this president’s sweeping assertion, not to say monarchical assertion, of executive powers . . . at least 24 provisions of the Patriot Act are superfluous. Why do they need that legislation?”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
ON FOX TV, CHENEY DEFENDS HIMSELF WITH ‘STAND YOUR GROUND’ LAW; Says Hunter He Shot Made Vaguely Threatening Movements With Thermos
PAKISTANI MOBS TRASH, BURN KFC RESTAURANT; Mistake Col. Sanders for Insulting Image of Muhammad
NBC ADDS MORE EXCRUCIATING COVERAGE OF WINTER OLYMPICS; Expanded Coverage Includes 1,500-Meter Snowblower Races, Nude Curling and Still More Half-pipe Snowboarding
Posted by Randy Scholfield
