Tuesday, April 03, 2007
A Little Bit of This, A Little Bit of That
While I am writing this piece, the temperature seems to drop five degrees with each line I complete. I had shorts on and have moved to long pants and I anticipate in another hour or so turning my furnace on. And yet I push on...
It is an outrage that we taxpayers pay over "$100 million a year" to produce the Congressional Research Service reports, yet we are denied access to them. Critics used to beat the Republicans up over this issue when they were in the leadership, yet we have had a leadership change and no change in the policy to "democratize" the publications. In fact, there is movement to clamp down on those that make it into the wild. It is a disgrace. The "Federation of American Scientists" has long housed the CRS reports, and I am happy to learn--and pass on to you--another site that is making the reports available along with a searchable database. I recommend that you visit the OpenCRS website and download as many of these reports as you can given how quickly things can change, and access to the reports shut off.
The second subject is President Bush's press conference today to condemn the Congress and the bill placing timelines and deadlines on US involvement in Iraq. He took the opportunity to condemn pork that was loaded into the bill--an important reason why some Senators decided to sign on--yet he was surprisingly mum the previous 6 years when bill after bill passed his desk wheezing with fat. But that is politics and what we can expect. I believe that the Democrats may actually be trying to rehabilitate his presidency with the action by the current Speaker to upstage the President by going to the Middle East to see if she can bring about regional peace. She needs to go back and look at what happened the last time a Speaker of the House tried to upstage the President on a contentious foreign policy issue. That was Speaker Jim Wright (D. TX), who went to Central America during the 1980s to snub the Reagan presidency only to lose his job shortly after. So Madam Speaker...come home and concentrate on domestic issues. You may be able to drive President Bush's domestic opinion numbers so low that we get regime change at home, and thus foreign policy change abroad. Your current course of action won't achieve your desired results--trust me.
But during the press conference, there was an interesting exchange that I am not quite sure how to take it. Initially, while listening to it on the radio, I though that it was a question from typical ambush journalism in an attempt to portray President Bush as "out of touch," much the way they did in 1992 when his father was running for re-election, when a reporter asked if Bush 41 knew how much the typical family paid for a gallon of milk (which he didn't), and much the way they did in 1999 when a reporter from a Boston television station ambushed Governor Bush, then a candidate for the Republican nomination, with a foreign policy quiz that he failed miserably in answering.
But now that I am thinking about it, President Bush didn't pause when answering it. Not an "um" or "er" or even a guess. He was surprisingly precise in his answer, and this from a guy not known for precision. You decide--
The question came from Ken Herman--White House correspondent for the Cox News Service--who asked:
Mr. President, are you aware of the current price of a gallon of gas?
And President Bush didn't miss a beat:
About $2.60 plus.
When reporters groaned (since it costs much more inside the beltway), President Bush said:
Nationwide average. The price of gasoline, obviously, varies from region to region for a variety of reasons. Some has to do with the amount of taxation at the pump; some of it has to do with the boutique fuels that have been mandated on a state-by-state basis. But a lot of the price of gasoline depends on the price of crude oil.
And lo and behold, the price, on average, is about $2.60 plus, on average. Given that the administration has had plants in the past to ask softball questions, it isn't out of the norm for them to have another, particularly when they are desperate to show that the President understands our pain. Cynical, but not impossible to imagine, yes?
In closing, stay dry and warm. And while the temperature may feel like winter, it will only be a short period of time when winter will be a distant memory.
|
It is an outrage that we taxpayers pay over "$100 million a year" to produce the Congressional Research Service reports, yet we are denied access to them. Critics used to beat the Republicans up over this issue when they were in the leadership, yet we have had a leadership change and no change in the policy to "democratize" the publications. In fact, there is movement to clamp down on those that make it into the wild. It is a disgrace. The "Federation of American Scientists" has long housed the CRS reports, and I am happy to learn--and pass on to you--another site that is making the reports available along with a searchable database. I recommend that you visit the OpenCRS website and download as many of these reports as you can given how quickly things can change, and access to the reports shut off.
The second subject is President Bush's press conference today to condemn the Congress and the bill placing timelines and deadlines on US involvement in Iraq. He took the opportunity to condemn pork that was loaded into the bill--an important reason why some Senators decided to sign on--yet he was surprisingly mum the previous 6 years when bill after bill passed his desk wheezing with fat. But that is politics and what we can expect. I believe that the Democrats may actually be trying to rehabilitate his presidency with the action by the current Speaker to upstage the President by going to the Middle East to see if she can bring about regional peace. She needs to go back and look at what happened the last time a Speaker of the House tried to upstage the President on a contentious foreign policy issue. That was Speaker Jim Wright (D. TX), who went to Central America during the 1980s to snub the Reagan presidency only to lose his job shortly after. So Madam Speaker...come home and concentrate on domestic issues. You may be able to drive President Bush's domestic opinion numbers so low that we get regime change at home, and thus foreign policy change abroad. Your current course of action won't achieve your desired results--trust me.
But during the press conference, there was an interesting exchange that I am not quite sure how to take it. Initially, while listening to it on the radio, I though that it was a question from typical ambush journalism in an attempt to portray President Bush as "out of touch," much the way they did in 1992 when his father was running for re-election, when a reporter asked if Bush 41 knew how much the typical family paid for a gallon of milk (which he didn't), and much the way they did in 1999 when a reporter from a Boston television station ambushed Governor Bush, then a candidate for the Republican nomination, with a foreign policy quiz that he failed miserably in answering.
But now that I am thinking about it, President Bush didn't pause when answering it. Not an "um" or "er" or even a guess. He was surprisingly precise in his answer, and this from a guy not known for precision. You decide--
The question came from Ken Herman--White House correspondent for the Cox News Service--who asked:
Mr. President, are you aware of the current price of a gallon of gas?
And President Bush didn't miss a beat:
About $2.60 plus.
When reporters groaned (since it costs much more inside the beltway), President Bush said:
Nationwide average. The price of gasoline, obviously, varies from region to region for a variety of reasons. Some has to do with the amount of taxation at the pump; some of it has to do with the boutique fuels that have been mandated on a state-by-state basis. But a lot of the price of gasoline depends on the price of crude oil.
And lo and behold, the price, on average, is about $2.60 plus, on average. Given that the administration has had plants in the past to ask softball questions, it isn't out of the norm for them to have another, particularly when they are desperate to show that the President understands our pain. Cynical, but not impossible to imagine, yes?
In closing, stay dry and warm. And while the temperature may feel like winter, it will only be a short period of time when winter will be a distant memory.
