No quail is safe around Dick Cheney.
Topic: Bush Administraiton

On Saturday, Dick Cheney, "a practiced hunter," managed to shoot a prominent Austin lawyer at a ranch in Texas. Katharine Armstrong the owner of the ranch where the vice-president was hunting said the lawyer, Harry Whittington, was "sprayed---peppered...on his right side, on part of his face, neck, shoulder and rib cage." According to the NYT, Cheney was "shooting a 28-gauge shotgun" at a covey of quail when Whittington appeared about 30 feet in front of him, right in the line of fire. Armstrong explained that "A shotgun sprays a bunch of little bitty pellets; it’s not a bullet involved." Of course, that's what hunting is all about, splattering as many quail as possible with "little bitty pellets." If Cheney had been using bullets he might have missed.

Immediately after gunning down Whittington, Cheney's ran right up to him and, Armstrong says, "made sure his detail was totally focused on him." It's lucky for Whittington that the U.S. secret service was there to make sure he got immediate medical aid and got a helicopter ride, courtesy of the US taxpayer, to the hospital. When all the excitement was over with, "The rest of the party had dinner, and Mr. Cheney, who had flown to Texas on Friday, departed on Sunday." Boy that was a close one; imagine if Darth had actually been a good shot and had killed the guy!

"Today, White House press secretary Scott McClellan declined to comment on the vice-president's killing of a prominent lawyer in a hunting accident in Texas. McClellan said his office 'Didn't comment while investigations were on-going.' NRA president Charlton Heston decried those who are calling for Cheney to resign and defended the vice-president's right to bare arms. Heston said, 'These communists and fellow travelers will not take away our rights to self defense nor will they succeed in taking that gun out of Harry Whittington’s cold dead hands!' GOP lawmakers quickly came to Cheney's defense accusing Democrats of being soft on crime laws and called for investigation into who first reported the story in the press. Kansas Senator Pat Roberts complained that the leaking of information about the whereabouts of the vice-president could have, 'tipped al-Qaeda off to the location of the man who is heartbeat away from the presidency.'"

For some reason no one found out about this for about 24-hours afterwards because Cheney's office didn't bother to tell the press. Cheney's press spokesperson Lea Ann McBride explained, "We deferred to the Armstrongs regarding what had taken place on their ranch." That makes sense, it's only the vice-president of the United States that shot someone, just another hunting accident among many. The liberal media is blowing this all out of proportion and OBL is having a big laugh at our expense.

Bruce Bartlett: Turncoat.

Elisabeth Bumiller writes in the NYT today on an upcoming book written by Bruce Bartlett, a former domestic policy aid in the Reagan administration and assistant treasury secretary under Bush Sr. The book, "Imposter: Why George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy," really rips into Bush accusing him of being a "pretend conservative" and compares him to Nixon "a man who used the right to pursue his agenda." The book due out on Feb. 28, also criticizes Bush & Co. of "an anti-intellectual distrust of facts and analysis" and an obsession with secrecy. Bartlet said in an interview with the Times that, "The Clinton people were vastly more open and easier to deal with and, quite frankly, a lot better on the issues."

Shocking! Up until last October Bartlett was working for a think tank called the NationalCenter for Policy Analysis, but he was let go after one too many anti-administration opinion pieces. You know, think-tanks are those places were real academic integrity emanates, not like today's universities where liberal fascism abounds. Some have said right wing think tanks produce opinions and facts based on how much they get paid, but that could not be further from the truth. Bartlett provided an email sent to him by Jeanette Goodman, the vice president of the think tank that fired him which said, "100K is off the table if you do another 'dump Cheney' column and 65K donor is having a rebuttal done, in a national magazine, to your attack on the fair tax people so that 65K may be gone also. Do you have any idea where I could raise that amount quickly?" See, that's academic integrity if I ever saw it. David Horowitz is right!

In response to Bartlett's criticism that Bush is bankrupting the government, Scott McClellan, the "Oracle," says, "Spending is coming under control. The president put forward the most disciplined non-security discretionary proposal since the Reagan era." Soon, ketchup will become a vegetable once more!

FDA thinks Seniors might be redundant:

One of the 141 non-security related programs on Bush's target list is food for poor seniors. Bush wants to dump the Comodity Supplemental Food Program which costs the government a whopping $111million a year and, if cut, will make a huge dent in that trillion dollar defect. (Hell, $111 million is a weeks worth of body guard money for Ahmad Chalabi.) The program provides boxes of food to churches and senior centers for distribution to "half a million poor people," according to the AP. "Kate Coler, the USDA's deputy undersecretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services, said the department believes it can serve people more efficiently through food stamps and the Woman, Infants and Children program. 'It's really a duplicative program,' she said of CSFP" [AP]

Right, just like the cuts W. called for in last year's budget like the program to get kids to be more physically fit. The WaPo reported Feb 12, 2005:

"Despite the national rise in child obesity, the White House wants to eliminate a $59 million media campaign to encourage children ages 9 to 13 to be more physically active, judging it redundant given similar drives by Nickelodeon and the Disney channel." See, the private sector can do all these things much more efficiently. In fact, just think about all the perfectly good food Burger King and McDonald’s throws out in their dumpsters, couldn't seniors just hang around them at trash time? Or maybe, Cheney and friends could donate some of the quails they kill, grandma can just spit out those little bitty pellets. We are talking about the "greatest generation," after all, they got through one depression and they can get through another. Doesn't anybody understand we're in a war here!

Katrina whitewash?

The all Republican 11-member select committee on Katrina is coming out this Wednesday with thier report on the failures of the government to do anything about the disaster until it was too late. The Senate is still working on their investigation, but the House was tough on everybody, from the local authorities to the federal government. Oddly, even though everybody is to blame but no one should be fired.

Michael Chertoff, who should be #1 on the list to be fired, was only partly to blame for not making timely reports to his superiors. DHS, the draft report says, 'Failed to anticipate the likely consequences of the storm and procure the buses, boats and aircraft that were ultimately necessary to evacuate the flooded city prior to Katrina's landfall." No biggie.

The White House gets off pretty easy, too, but that's not a big surprise since they hardly provided any records of what went on at Crawford during W.'s vacation. For their part, they're ready to move on into the future and continue their good work for the American people. Allen Abney, a White House spokesman, says W. has "full confidence" in his staff at DHS. "The president is less interested in yesterday and more interested with today and tomorrow, so that we can be better prepared for next time." Right, because there's no use in looking too closely at this major screw up to see what went wrong. [Except in the case of not telling the press about Whittington getting shot in which case McClellan says, “I think you can always look back at these issues and look at how to do a better job,”.]

The GAO report on Katrina faulted Chertoff and Brownie for failing to provide a crucial "leadership role during hurricane Katrina." This void, "serves to underscore the immaturity of and weaknesses relating to the current national response framework." [Inquirer]David Walker, the GAO Comptroller General wrote, "no one was designated in advance to lead the overall federal response in anticipation of the event despite clear warning from the National Hurricane Center." James Lee Witt, former FEMA director under Clinton blames Chertoff for marginalizing FEMA within DHS and creating a chain of command that was fragmented. "It was not only leadership, but it was minimizing the capability of FEMA." The report goes on to say Chertoff, "designated Hurricane Katrina as an incident of national significance on August 30, the day after landfall. However, he did not designate the storm as a catastrophic event, which would have triggered additional provisions of the National Response Plan, calling for a more proactive response. As a result, the federal posture generally was to wait for the affected states to request assistance."

See, he really didn't understand what the law said and adding insult to injury he let Michael Brown go over his head to the White House and did nothing about it nor did he even appear to care. I don't know, Michael Chertoff is a slam dunk for a medal pinning from W.