MEANTIME ...

Three news stories this morning lend more ammunition to the powder keg we hope will explode what's left of W Ltd.'s credibility.

One is the top front-page story in The New York Times, headlined in the print edition: "BUSH AIDES KEPT CLINTON'S PAPERS FROM 9/11 PANEL." The subheads summarize the rest of the story: "AN EXPLANATION IS SOUGHT" and "Aides to Ex-President Say Documents Could Help Commission's Work." (Go read. You may notice the website's headline doesn't do the article justice.)

Another, headlined "2 Decline To Testify On Drug Cost," is buried deep within the paper. It reports that the White House, citing executive privilege, has "refused to send Doug Badger, special assistant to the president for health policy, to testify before the House Ways and Means Committee."

The refusal naturally irked the Democrats on the committee. One of them called Badger "the Condoleezza Rice for health care." An excellent metaphor, doncha think?

The article also reports that the former Medicare administrator, Thomas A. Scully, who threatened to fire the chief Medicare actuary, Richard S. Foster, if he shared his prescription-cost estimates with Congress last year, has written the committee a letter "saying he had been busy traveling and would be 'unable to appear.'"

As every sentient citizen should know by now: "Mr. Foster's figures are important because he calculated that the cost of the prescription drug bill would exceed by about a third the $400 billion that Congress was assuming in preparing the legislation for passage. Had his calculations been widely known at the time, it is possible the measure would have failed, or at least been significantly altered."

The third article begins: "A federal judge ruled Thursday that the Bush administration must release thousands of pages of documents related to a White House task force that met behind closed doors to develop a national energy policy.

"The ruling," it continued, "was a victory for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental lobbying group, and Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group. The two organizations have been trying to find out whether the task force, headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, was heavily influenced by energy executives and lobbyists."

How many more strikes do we need to dump these guys?

April 2, 2004 10:18 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
more picks

Sites to See

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by CriticalMASS published on April 2, 2004 10:18 AM.

AN APOLOGY was the previous entry in this blog.

THE WHITE HOUSE, CNN AND LETTERMAN is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Creative Commons License
This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.