April 26, 2006

September:   Sept. 29, 2006   Sept. 28, 2006   Sept. 27, 2006   Sept. 26, 2006   Sept. 21, 2006   Sept. 20, 2006   Sept. 19, 2006   Sept. 14, 2006   Sept. 13, 2006   Sept. 12, 2006   Sept. 07, 2006   Sept. 06, 2006 JULY:   Jul. 28, 2006   Jul. 27, 2006   Jul. 26, 2006   Jul. 25, 2006   Jul. 24, 2006   Jul. 20, 2006   Jul. 19, 2006   Jul. 18, 2006   Jul. 17, 2006   Jul. 13, 2006   Jul. 12, 2006   Jul. 11, 2006   Jul. 10, 2006 JUNE:   Jun. 29, 2006   Jun. 28, 2006   Jun. 27, 2006   Jun. 26, 2006   Jun. 22, 2006   Jun. 21, 2006   Jun. 20, 2006   Jun. 19, 2006   Jun. 16, 2006   Jun. 15, 2006   Jun. 14, 2006   Jun. 13, 2006   Jun. 12, 2006   Jun. 9, 2006   Jun. 8, 2006   Jun. 7, 2006   Jun. 6, 2006 MAY:   May 25, 2006   May 24, 2006   May 23, 2006   May 22, 2006   May 19, 2006   May 18, 2006   May 17, 2006   May 11, 2006   May 10, 2006   May 4, 2006   May 3, 2006   May 2, 2006 APRIL:   Apr. 27, 2006   Apr. 26, 2006   Apr. 25, 2006   Apr. 6, 2006   Apr. 5, 2006   Apr. 4, 2006 MARCH:   Mar. 30, 2006   Mar. 29, 2006   Mar. 28, 2006   Mar. 16, 2006   Mar. 15, 2006   Mar. 14, 2006   Mar. 9, 2006   Mar. 8, 2006   Mar. 7, 2006   Mar. 2, 2006   Mar. 1, 2006 FEBRUARY:   Feb. 28, 2006   Feb. 16, 2006   Feb. 15, 2006   Feb. 14, 2006   Feb. 8, 2006   Feb. 1, 2006 JANUARY:   Jan. 31, 2006 DECEMBER:   Dec. 16, 2005   Dec. 15, 2005   Dec. 14, 2005   Dec. 13, 2005   Dec. 8, 2005   Dec. 7, 2005   Dec. 6, 2005 Archives

Don’t get caught flat-footed in front of the press!  Below is a quick rundown of today’s “must reads.” – John T. Doolittle, House Republican Conference Secretary

The Morning Murmur – Wednesday, April 26, 2006

1. Rice Joins Rumsfeld on Surprise Trip to Back New Iraqi Leaders - Bloomberg News
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice today joined Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in Baghdad on an unscheduled visit to support the country's new government.

2. Bush Threatens to Use Veto over Spending Bill - Financial Times
President George W. Bush yesterday threatened to use the first veto of his five-year presidency if the Senate refuses to cut back spending in an emergency bill to fund the war in Iraq and rebuilding from Hurricane Katrina.

3. Home Sales, Consumer Confidence on Rise - New York Daily News
Sales of homes unexpectedly rose and consumer confidence reached a four-year high, allaying concerns about a collapse in housing and pointing to sustained economic growth.

4. Conservative Pundit Tony Snow to be Named White House Press Secretary, Republican Officials Say - Associated Press
Conservative pundit Tony Snow will be named White House press secretary in the latest move in President Bush's effort to remake his troubled White House.

5. Loose Lips Win Pulitzers - Los Angeles Times Op-ed
Four of the prizes honored Bush-bashing and leaking secrets. How is that good? I want journalists to cover the present struggle as a fight between good and evil. And when the good guys - that would be U.S. officials - say that certain revelations would help the bad guys, I want them to be given the benefit of the doubt. So, I suspect, do most Americans.

For previous issues of the Morning Murmur, go to www.GOPsecretary.gov

FULL ARTICLES BELOW:

1.  Rice Joins Rumsfeld on Surprise Trip to Back New Iraqi Leaders - Bloomberg News

April 26 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice today joined Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in Baghdad on an unscheduled visit to support the country's new government.

Rice and Rumsfeld will meet with Jawad al-Maliki, the Shiite Muslim was chosen last week to lead the first permanent government since Saddam Hussein's ouster. Al-Maliki's selection is seen by the Bush administration as a step toward quelling sectarian attacks to allow a reduction in U.S. troops.

Rice told reporters aboard her plane today she wanted ``to talk with those who are about to become the government of Iraq about their views on what needs to be done to support their government in these initial stages.''

Hours before the U.S. Cabinet members arrived in the Iraqi capital, al-Qaeda's leader in the country was seen in a video message urging Iraqis to reject the new government. Abu Musab al- Zarqawi accused the U.S. of waging a ``crusader'' offensive and said the insurgency is standing firm against it.

At least seven retired U.S. generals, including some who led troops in Iraq, this month have added to criticism from Democrats and some Republicans over what they say was Rumsfeld's failure to anticipate the instability in Iraq after Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled three years ago. President George W. Bush rejected the calls for Rumsfeld to leave the job.

General George Casey, the top U.S. military leader in Iraq, today said the country's progress in forming a new government is a ``major step'' toward the U.S. implementing a planned reduction in troops this year, the Associated Press reported.

``I'm still on my general timeline'' for withdrawing some troops, AP cited Casey as telling reporters today in Baghdad, where he met with Rumsfeld.

Division of Responsibilities

The defense secretary said his meeting with Casey included a discussion of the need to hold talks with the new Iraqi leadership on the future of military bases and the division of responsibilities between U.S. and Iraqi forces, AP reported.

``There is no question but that as the new government is formed and the ministers are in place, that it's appropriate for us to begin discussions with the new government about the conditions on the ground and the pace at which we'll be able to turn over responsibility in the provinces,'' Rumsfeld was cited as saying by AP.

The insurgents in Iraq include Jordanian-born al-Zarqawi's group and Iraqis loyal to the Hussein regime, which was dominated by members of the country's Sunni Muslim minority.

``Your mujahedeen sons were able to confront the most ferocious of crusader campaigns on a Muslim state,'' al-Zarqawi said in the video, which U.S. officials consider to be authentic. ``They have stood in the face of this onslaught for three years.''

Seen Without Mask

The images show the 39-year-old fugitive speaking, training recruits, firing a machinegun and appearing for the first time without a mask. An accompanying statement by a group called the Mujahedeen Shura Council says the video is the ``first visual issue'' of the ``Emir of al-Qaeda in Iraq.'' He is clad in black and has a mustache and a beard.

The tape was issued a day after bombings in the Egyptian resort of Dahab killed at least 18 people and injured as many as 87. Egyptian authorities said they are trying to determine whether the attackers are linked to al-Qaeda.

On April 23, an audiotape attributed to the group's global leader, Osama bin Laden, was televised by al-Jazeera. In it, bin Laden called for Muslims to join his war against Western nations.

``I don't think the two videos are coordinated,'' Moqtedar Khan, author of ``Beyond Jihad and Crusade: Rethinking U.S. Policy in the Islamic World'' said yesterday. ``Bin Laden was talking in his tape to the rest of the world whereas Zarqawi is talking in this video only to the people in Iraq.''

``This tape is Zarqawi's way of reasserting himself, of trying to reconstruct his own importance,'' said Khan, who is also a political science professor at the University of Delaware.

Earlier this month al-Zarqawi was shunted aside as the leader of a coalition of Iraqi fighters by fighters who disliked Zarqawi's brutal tactics and his tendency to speak for the insurgency as a whole, the British Broadcasting Corp. reported, citing Huthaifa Azzam, whose father was a mentor to bin Laden.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=avgRWNqmjjmY&refer=top_world_news#
 

2. Bush Threatens to Use Veto over Spending Bill - Financial Times

By Holly Yeager and Edward Alden in Washington
Updated: 2:12 a.m. ET April 26, 2006

President George W. Bush yesterday threatened to use the first veto of his five-year presidency if the Senate refuses to cut back spending in an emergency bill to fund the war in Iraq and rebuilding from Hurricane Katrina.

In a statement issued on Tuesday night, the White House said Mr Bush would not approve the legislation if it exceeds $92.2bn, a target that would require the Senate to cut some $14bn from the bill.

The veto threat came following pressure from conservative activists, who warned on Tuesday that failure to rein in federal spending could keep frustrated Republican voters away from the polls in November's elections.

"The policies that are being pursued here are not only economically destructive, they're politically destructive, and ultimately there's going to be a political as well as an economic price paid by the folks who are engaged in this activity," said David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union.

The $106bn Senate emergency spending bill is $15bn larger than legislation already approved by the House of Representatives. It includes many items that opponents say should not be included in emergency legislation, such as $4bn in farm subsidies and $700m for what has been dubbed Mississippi's "Road to Nowhere", a project favoured by the state's senators to relocate a recently repaired railroad line.

"This sort of nonsense is going to hurt Republicans," said David Keating, executive director of the Club for Growth, which supports Republican candidates who are fiscally conservative.

Backers of the additional money are "exploiting human tragedy", Mr Keene said, using it "as an opportunity for more special-interest spending".

Tom Coburn, Republican senator from Oklahoma, has vowed to try to remove the Mississippi project from the spending bill, and Bill Frist, Senate majority leader, told members of his party this week that the measure "should not be bogged down with extraneous amendments and unrelated provisions".

Mr Bush could find himself in an awkward position if the Senate does not relent, because a veto would threaten funding needed for US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it underscored the depth of concern among some Republicans that voters think they have failed to control government spending.

At the same time, some Republican lawmakers see changes to the earmarks process - including more transparency and the ability to remove individual projects - as a central piece of lobbying and ethics reform measures. The power of lobbyists has grown, they argue, as lawmakers have increasingly submitted spending for the pet projects, with little scrutiny, into larger bills.

A proposal to reform the earmarks process is scheduled to be debated in the House on Thursday, as part of a lobbying reform effort.

But members of the House appropriations committee have objected, angry that such a move would dilute their power over government spending.

"They want to keep the ability to hide earmarks," Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican and critic of the pet projects, said of his colleagues who sit on the appropriations committee. "They don't want the scrutiny."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12484675/
 

3. Home Sales, Consumer Confidence on Rise - New York Daily News
Sales of homes unexpectedly rose and consumer confidence reached a four-year high, allaying concerns about a collapse in housing and pointing to sustained economic growth.

Purchases of previously owned homes increased 0.3% nationwide in March to an annual rate of 6.92 million, the National Association of Realtors said.

The Conference Board's confidence index climbed to 109.6 in April, higher than the most optimistic forecasts.

On Wall Street, the Dow dropped 53.07 to 11,283.25. The S&P 500 was down 6.37 at 1,301.74, while the Nasdaq slipped 3.08 to 2,330.30.

"The economy is clearly strong right now," said Stephen Stanley, chief economist at RBS Greenwich Capital in Greenwich, Conn. "In the short-term, there's a risk people will pull back on spending, but that depends on how long gas prices stay high and so far there's not much evidence the consumer is slowing down."

The median price of an existing home rose 7.4% in March from a year ago to $218,000, the Realtors group said.

"We're going to have what they call a soft landing," said Sean Shallis, who runs the RE/MAX Villa Realtors office in Jersey City, N.J. "You're going to see that landing in the next three to six months."

Resales of single-family homes rose 0.3% to an annual rate of 6.07 million. Sales of condos and co-ops rose 0.2% to an 854,000 rate. Purchases rose 1.7% in the Northeast and 1.2% in the Midwest. They fell 0.7% in both the South and West.

The National Association of Realtors forecast earlier this month that 2006 sales of previously owned homes will slow to 6.65 million, down 6% from last year's record 7.075 million.

Consumer confidence has been on an upswing since November in the aftermath of the Gulf hurricanes, except for a sharp dip in February when short-lived pessimism over the labor market soured sentiment.

"Recent improvements in the labor market have been a major driver behind the rise in confidence in early 2006. Looking ahead, consumers are not as pessimistic as they were last month," said Lynn Franco, director of The Conference Board's Consumer Research Center.

http://www.nydailynews.com/business/story/411966p-348436c.html
 

4. Conservative Pundit Tony Snow to be Named White House Press Secretary, Republican Officials Say - Associated Press

By TERENCE HUNT
AP White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Conservative pundit Tony Snow will be named White House press secretary, Republican officials said Tuesday night, in the latest move in President Bush's effort to remake his troubled White House.

Snow is expected to be named on Wednesday.

He will replace Scott McClellan, who is stepping down in a White House personnel shuffle intended to re-energize Bush's presidency, bring in new faces and lift the president's record-low approval ratings. McClellan had served as Bush's chief spokesman - the most prominent public figure in the White House after Bush - for nearly three years.

Snow, a Fox News commentator and speech-writer in the White House under Bush's father, has written and spoken frequently about the current president - not always in a complimentary way. While Snow is an experienced Washington hand, he is an outsider when it comes to Bush's tight core of advisers.

The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, circulated unflattering observations by Snow about Bush.

"His (Bush's) wavering conservatism has become an active concern among Republicans, who wish he would stop cowering under the bed and start fighting back against the likes of Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Wilson," Snow wrote last November after Republicans failed to win the governor's race in Virginia. "The newly passive George Bush has become something of an embarrassment."

Last month, Snow wrote that Bush and the Republican Congress had "lost control of the federal budget and cannot resist the temptation to stop raiding the public fisc. (treasury)"

Snow, in an Associated Press interview on Tuesday, said: "It's public record. I've written some critical stuff. When you're a columnist, you're going to criticize and you're going to praise."

Unofficially, the White House tried to put the best face on Snow's criticism, suggesting it showed that the administration listens to different voices and noting that Snow's job called for him to be opinionated.

Snow declined to say whether he had been offered the White House job. Republicans close to the White House said the press secretary's job had been offered to Snow and that he had accepted. They spoke on condition of anonymity because of Bush's dislike of news leaks.

One factor in Snow's decision was that he had his colon removed last year and underwent six months of chemotherapy after being diagnosed with cancer. He had a CAT scan last week and delayed a decision while he consulted with his doctors.

Snow is the host of the "Tony Snow Show" on Fox News Radio and "Weekend Live with Tony Snow on the Fox News Channel. He served in the administration of President George H.W. Bush as White House speechwriting director and later as a deputy assistant to the president for media affairs.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/W/WHITE_HOUSE_SNOW?SITE=CAFRA&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&SECTION=HOME
 

5.  Loose Lips Win Pulitzers - Los Angeles Times Op-ed

Four of the prizes honored Bush-bashing and leaking secrets. How is that good?

April 26, 2006

ON JUNE 7, 1942, shortly after the Battle of Midway, the Chicago Tribune carried a scoop: "Navy Had Word of Jap Plan to Strike at Sea." The story, written by a correspondent who had seen intelligence reports left in an officer's cabin, reported that the U.S. knew in advance the composition of the Japanese fleet. It didn't say where this information came from, but senior officers privy to the U.S. success in breaking Japanese codes were apoplectic at this security breach. The Justice Department convened a grand jury to consider whether to charge the Tribune and its flamboyant owner, editor and publisher, Col. Robert McCormick, with a violation of the Espionage Act of 1917.

No charges were brought, in part because military officials were unwilling to share classified information about intelligence gathering. But the Chicago Tribune was reviled by other journalists for betraying national security, and no other publication followed up its revelation.

Poor Col. McCormick. He was a man before his time. Today, he would have been hailed as a 1st Amendment hero, and his newspaper would have been showered with accolades. That, at least, is the only conclusion one can draw from this year's Pulitzer Prizes, which reflect a startling degree of animus toward the commander in chief in wartime.

It is hard to see how media apologists can deny their political bias when no fewer than four prizes were given at least in part for Bush-bashing. These included awards to Mike Luckovich, the left-wing cartoonist of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who routinely portrays President Bush as a malevolent dolt, and Robin Givhan, the catty fashion critic of the Washington Post, who devoted an entire column to ridiculing Vice President Dick Cheney's attire at an Auschwitz ceremony.

There's nothing wrong with caustic criticism, but two of the award winners went further, into areas that may hamper our battle against Islamist terrorism. The Washington Post's Dana Priest won a prize for revealing the existence of secret CIA-operated prisons in Eastern Europe, and the New York Times' James Risen and Eric Lichtblau won for revealing the existence of a secret program to intercept communications between terrorists abroad and their domestic contacts.

The full repercussions of these security breaches remain unknown because, just as in 1942, intelligence officers are loath to publicly reveal the harm done to their activities. But there is no doubt that these were among the government's most tightly held secrets and that, despite personal pleas from Bush, both newspapers decided to publish them anyway - to the approbation of their peers.

This would seem to lend support to the more overwrought critics on the right who imagine that the media are dominated by an anti-American cabal. Having written for major newspapers for years, I have never found any Al Qaeda moles in the newsroom. What I have found is that journalists feel more bound by their duty to their profession than to their country and that their highest professional calling, as they see it, is to preserve a halo of "objectivity" by not choosing sides in any controversy.

No one working for the mainstream media today would refer, as Ernie Pyle did during World War II, to "our soldiers," "our offensive," "our predicament." Today it's "American soldiers," "the military offensive" and (most damning of all) "the president's predicament" - as if this were Bush's war, not ours. Just as newsies no longer identify in print with our troops, so they are careful to use impartial language about our enemies. Reuters has gone so far as to all but ban the use of "terrorist," which is considered too judgmental.

An unwillingness to play favorites makes sense when reporting on most topics. Mainstream reporters shouldn't choose between Republicans and Democrats or Microsoft and its critics (though in practice they usually do). But is studied neutrality really the right posture when covering a battle against monsters who fly hijacked aircraft into office buildings?

Los Angeles Times media columnist Tim Rutten, in defending the Pulitzers, claimed that critics "don't want an unbiased news media, they want a press that reflects their bias."

Right. I want journalists to cover the present struggle as a fight between good and evil. And when the good guys - that would be U.S. officials - say that certain revelations would help the bad guys, I want them to be given the benefit of the doubt. So, I suspect, do most Americans.

The problem with the mainstream media - and a big part of why their audience is declining - is that this is seen as a "bias" to be resisted at all costs.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-boot26apr26,0,5898580.column?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

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