The WaPo’s Dana Milbank has a column that was like catnip to a cat for a Bush-watcher like me: For president under duress, body language speaks volumes. It looks at how Bush behaved during the interview he and Laura did with Matt Lauer the other day in connection with the “hammers like a girl” photo op.

The fidgeting clearly corresponded to the questioning. When Lauer asked if Bush, after a slow response to Katrina, was “trying to get a second chance to make a good first impression,” Bush blinked 24 times in his answer. When asked why Gulf Coast residents would have to pay back funds but Iraqis would not, Bush blinked 23 times and hitched his trousers up by the belt.

When the questioning turned to Miers, Bush blinked 37 times in a single answer — along with a lick of the lips, three weight shifts and some serious foot jiggling. Laura Bush, by contrast, delivered only three blinks and stood still through her entire answer about encouraging volunteerism.

I didn’t actually see the interview on the Today show. I’d be curious what people who did think about Milbank’s characterization. Did Bush seem visibly uncomfortable? Did we get a lot of those yeah-he’s-wired pauses?

Interesting discussion by Dan Froomkin of the recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll that showed Bush receiving only 2% (!) support from blacks: A polling free-fall among blacks:

This latest poll included 807 people nationwide, and only 89 blacks. As a result, there is a considerable margin or error — and the findings should not be considered definitive until or unless they are validated by other polls.

David Bositis, a senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, which tracks African American public opinion, told me this morning that it’s clear that Bush’s job approval among blacks “has taken a hit from both the ongoing things in Iraq and what happened with Katrina.”

But down to 2 percent? “I doubt that it’s actually 2,” he said.

“But would I be surprised if it’s 10 or 12? No.” And 10, he said, is typically “about as low as you can go” when it comes to approval ratings.

Jonathan Schwarz of A Tiny Revolution obsesses in depth over the question of what we can and can’t believe about Colin Powell — specifically, about the UN presentation on Iraqi WMD Powell delivered in February, 2003: Wait, I’ve Changed My Mind And Decided Colin Powell Is The Most Honest Man On Earth.

Warning: When I say “obsesses in depth” I mean it.

I thought this item from Slate was fairly thought-provoking: Condi, Hillary, and … Angelina?

There’s certainly a lot of “chatter” on the Bush-hater weblogs about what Patrick Fitzgerald might or might not be getting ready to hand down in the way of indictments. Some of that speculation apparently centers on the activities of the “White House Iraq Group,” or WHIG, a team including Karl Rove and Scooter Libby that was set up in August 2002 to run the PR campaign that (as the Downing Street Memos told us, after the fact) was under way at that time as part of fixing the intelligence around the administration’s Iraq-invasion policy.

Joshua Micah Marshall has some interesting commentary about this: There are certainly a lot of hints…

If Karl Rove goes down in this investigation it’ll be a disaster for the president, both in terms of the damage occasioned by such a high-level White House indictment and, frankly, because he needs the guy like most of us need legs.

But this WHIG thing is a whole ‘nother level of hurt.

This group was the organizational team, the core group behind all the shameless crap that went down in the lead up to the Iraq war — the lies about the cooked up Niger story, everything. If Fitzgerald has lassoed this operation into a criminal conspiracy, the veil of protective secrecy in which the whole operation is still shrouded will be pulled back. Depositions and sworn statements in on-going investigations have a way of doing that. Ask Bill Clinton. Every key person in the White House will be touched by it. And all sorts of ugly tales could spill out.

As I said back in July (Corn, Marshall on Rove/Plame. And I see an elephant.), if Fitzgerald goes for it, the truth will be out there. The reality, I am convinced, is that there was a criminal conspiracy to out Plame, followed by a criminal conspiracy to cover up the outing. But in exposing those relatively limited crimes, Fitzgerald would also be highlighting the Bush administration’s much larger crime of fudging the case for war.

And note the results of this poll: Americans favor Bush’s impeachment if he lied about Iraq.

If Fitzgerald brings indictments, Bush’s lies on Iraq are going to be front-page news for months on end. We’re going to get all kinds of detail on just how those lies were sold to the public. It won’t be the president’s hand-picked commission on Iraqi intelligence, or the kid-gloves inquiry by Pat Roberts’ Senate intelligence committee, with the most-embarrassing-to-Bush parts of the investigation deferred to a hypothetical “phase 2.” It will be an aggressive federal prosecutor making the strongest case he can, working in the high-intensity spotlight of a Watergate-level criminal investigation.

What will Congress do in such a situation? Remember, this stuff will be on television. If the public reacts with the same sort of outrage with which they reacted to Bush’s strumming while New Orleans drowned, there is going to be incredible pressure on Congress to do something. Would a Republican Congress actually impeach Cheney? Would it impeach Bush?

I can’t believe it would. But in the aftermath, would there be a backlash from voters? A year ago I would have said yes, of course. But my faith in the American electorate was shaken by the 2004 presidential election.

My sense is that this stuff is already being fought tooth and nail by the Bush people, just out of sight. They are preparing whatever they can for the PR campaign, and I don’t doubt for a second that if cornered, they’re going to go nucular. If this really does go down, it’s going to get really, really ugly. Rove will have no choice but to try to engineer the Swift-boating of Fitzgerald. And I just don’t see how he could pull that off.

But then, he’s surprised me in that area before.

I wanted to mention the SFGate article by Robert Collier on Pat Tillman that came out a few weeks ago (Family demands the truth: New inquiry may expose events that led to Pat Tillman’s death), and this followup article in the Nation by Dave Zirin is a good opportunity to do so: Pat Tillman, our hero.

Plus, the latter comes with a gratuitous Ann Coulter-bashing.

I liked this one. From Think Progress: Bush’s circular logic on Miers.

…the National Law Journal recognized that Miers benefited from her connections to Bush. Now, Bush uses that designation to argue that she is qualified apart from her relationship with him. It’s the beauty of circular reasoning.

I do sometimes wonder if Bush is aware that he’s full of shit, or if his view of reality is just so skewed that he actually believes that anything he himself says must definitionally be true. I incline toward the latter explanation; my suspicion is that he really doesn’t care whether he’s full of shit or not, because for reasons relating to the emotional damage he suffered during childhood, caring would be too painful.

A photographic record of the time during which I suspect that pattern was established, from the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum at Texas A&M:

As long as I’m posting not-safe-for-whatever links, here’s a fairly low-key pr0n site that delivers exactly what it says it does: Girls & Corpses.

Hurray for truth in advertising!

This is pretty fun. Warning: Makes no sense without audio. And with audio, pretty much not safe for work, or for children who don’t know the seven words you’re not allowed to say on (American broadcast) television. Anyway, as hosted at big-boys.com: Language barrier.

Count me among those sighing loudly at the NY Times’ decision to put their most-interesting content behind a for-pay barrier. I’d be willing to bet they’ve just turned away a large amount of mindshare (and traffic) in return for a relative pittance in online subscriptions.

Anyway, there’s plenty of free and accessible content to go around. But once in a while I really, really want to link to a NYT columnist. Never fear; the net interprets (certain flavors of) capitalism as damage and routes around it. So with Frank Rich’s recent column, “The Faith-Based President Defrocked,” which does a good job of discussing how the Miers nomination is serving as a wake-up call for those on the right who previously believed that Bush really is one of them. Currently available in reposted form from:

• Cyphering: Georgie’s Wild About Harriet.
• Nevada Thunder: The Faith-Based President Defrocked.
• Armwood Editorial and Opinion Blog: The Faith-Based President Defrocked – New York Times.
• Communications and Entertainment Law Blog (heh): The Faith-Based President Defrocked – New York Times.

I could go on (and will, if the Times IP goons actually manage to get to all of those). Or they could come after me, which would be kind of fun; I haven’t had a C&D letter in practically forever.

Dick Cheney likes to point out that he has “gotten rid of all my financial interests” in Halliburton. Damn. Where can I get some of those nonexistent financial interests? As summarized by the Carpetbagger Report (Cheney’s lucrative Halliburton ties), a report from the office of Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) points out the following:

Vice President Cheney’s Halliburton stock options have increased in value 3,281 percent in one year. The stock options, which were worth $241,498 one year ago are now valued at $8,165,489.07.

Update: Per Craig’s helpful update in the comments, FactCheck.org has a nice page dating to the last presidential campaign that gives a truer version of what’s really going on: Kerry ad falsely accuses Cheney on Halliburton.

The gist of this seems to be that Cheney made a binding legal agreement when he became Veep that hires a law firm to exercise his Halliburton (among others) stock options when the time seems right to maximize the resulting profits, deduct fees for the attorneys and taxes owed, and then donate whatever is left over according to the following (as quoted from the Factcheck.org piece):

The agreement specifies that 40% will go to the University of Wyoming (Cheney’s home state), 40% will go to George Washington University’s medical faculty to be used for tax-exempt charitable purposes, and 20% will go to Capital Partners for Education, a charity that provides financial aid for low-income students in Washington, DC to attend private and religious schools.

Most of the griping by Sen. Lautenberg over the years apparently has been about how this arrangement (along with other aspects of Cheney’s financial dealings with Halliburton, like the payment of deferred compensation from when he was the company’s CEO), constitutes a continuing “financial interest” that must be disclosed in official government reporting — but Cheney apparently is doing that.

The PDF of Cheney’s Halliburton-options agreement refers to Schedule A, which is where the options in question are supposed to be listed, but Schedule A is not actually included in the PDF. Instead there’s a placeholder-type page that describes the options generally, and refers one to Cheney’s annual financial disclosure statements, which it says includes the specifics. So I guess it’s conceivable that Cheney might be sneakily concealing some of the options for himself, or something, while claiming to have assigned them all to charity, but if that were the case I’m reasonably certain that people like Sen. Lautenberg would be screaming about it. Since they’re not, I think it’s pretty clear that he’s not doing that, and that the charitable assignment of the options is what it purports to be.

So, my bad. And thanks to Craig for setting me straight. Cheney’s profit from the Halliburton options is not in the form of direct compensation, as I (and the piece I linked to) implied. Instead, he gets to make an $8 million donation to his alma mater, a med school, and a scholarship fund, and (maybe) take a nice tax break for the charitable donation (though Craig says he’s seen something about Cheney having chosen not to take the tax break). I’d be interested in hearing more on that point if anyone has details; given that Cheney is currently estimated to be worth between $30 million and $100 million, largely due to his compensation while at Halliburton, I could see where some tax breaks would be very helpful.

Headline updated.

Via telegraph.co.uk, via BoingBoing: Unicef bombs the Smurfs in fund-raising campaign for ex-child soldiers.

Belgian television viewers were given a preview of the 25-second film earlier this week, when it was shown on the main evening news. The reactions ranged from approval to shock and, in the case of small children who saw the episode by accident, wailing terror.

I’m sure most of us in the Bush-hater community remember the interview that Irish reporter Carole Coleman did with Bush last year. Well, now she’s publishing a book, and an excerpt from it gives more details about the circumstances surrounding the interview: Ireland: I wanted to slap him.

I find myself forgetting how petty the current occupants of the White House are, how much their sense of their mission is limited to “maintaining the illusion that George Bush is qualified to be president,” and then I read something like this.

I know one of jbc’s favoite themes is “Pictures Can / Can’t Lie.” So I couldn’t resist posting these spoof trailers from the folks at PS260 (A video marketing production company)…

• The Shining – A touching family comedy about a young boy looking for a father figure, and a struggling novelist looking for meaning in his life.
• West Side Story – A Suspense film like no other: In the summer of 1961, 14 square blocks of Manhattan were quarantined due to an outbreak of unknown origin. This is the story of those few survivors who managed to escape from The Infected.
• Titanic – Horror on the high seas knows no limits.
• Cabin Fever – A tale of love and loss as a terminally ill girl takes her four best friends on one last summer trip to to say goodbye.

This post from Rogers Cadenhead at Workbench is actually a fairly interesting write-up of recent developments in the Harriet Miers nomination, but I’m linking to it for a different reason: I love the following quote. Anyway, from Harriet Miers, Bush’s stealth bomb:

The president’s so stubborn that were he captain of the Titanic, he would have run the ship into a second iceberg to prove he meant to hit the first one.

I’m not sure why, but I really love it when a high-profile media story is revealed to have a big component of myth. I only wish all the people who swallowed the original version got a chance to see the true one, and to process the resulting cognitive dissonance.

Anyway, the latest example to cross my radar, from Rogers Cadenhead: Everyone who uses must converge.

Remember Ashley Smith? She was kidnapped by a nasty hoodlum, but she prayed with him, and he saw the light, and turned himself in. Well, it turns out that along with praying with him, she also shared her crystal meth with him. Funny, I don’t recall that detail being in the uplifting version of the story featured in our pastor’s sermon that Sunday.

Yet another fantastic speech from Al Gore: Gore on the threat to democracy. He basically makes the case that the rise of television has destroyed the public debate that previously took place via the printing press, and looks to the Internet as the last, best hope of democracy in America.

Interesting concept: A potential president who can actually reason on a high level. We should give that a try sometime.

A couple of fun items about news photos being used in misleading ways.

First up, from Chronwatch’s John Armor: The Face of a Democrat, and a Liar.

Second, from Zombietime.com, which is basically a conservative version of BAGnewsNotes (and about which the Bag actually has some nice things to say): Anatomy of a photograph.

Like many people, I was impressed by Steven J. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s book Freakonomics. By taking a non-ideological, fact-based approach to some burning questions of the day, Levitt is able to make some very interesting discoveries.

The lead story in the book is based on a paper of Levitt’s that shows a strong correlation between legalized abortion and a falling crime rate 15 years later. I encourage you to get the book, but in the meantime, the abortion part of it is well-summarized by sci-fi author, neo-fascist, and amusing semi-wingnut Orson Scott Card: Freakonomics or you have to find the facts before you can face them.

(Side note: Janus/Onan brought this fun Kuro5hin item about Card to my attention: Orson Scott Card has always been an asshat. Makes the interesting case that Card did not actually write, or at least did not write all of, Ender’s Game.)

You’ve probably heard about how former education czar, moral virtues expert, and gambling addict Bill Bennett recently filed the serial numbers off Levitt’s argument and mentioned it in passing in a slightly less-pleasant form, in which he pointed out that you could lower the crime rate in the country by aborting all the black babies. Rogers Cadenhead summarizes some of the aftermath at Workbench: Bill Bennett’s reproducible error. As with the Broussard fact-checking I helped along, it’s an interesting example of how stuff in the real media can resonate with a particular crowd in the blogosphere, then echo back, amplified, into the mainstream consciousness.

Finally, no excursion into wingnuttery would be complete without an Ann Coulter moment. Two of them, in this case.

First, Aaron/Hiro pointed out the other day that with the exception of its occasional gratuitous liberal-bashing, this item by Coulter, in which she attacks Harriet Miers as a legal lightweight (let’s not forget, Coulter owns the category of women using a sketchy background as a legal scholar as a springboard to greatness), is actually more or less sane: This is what ‘advice and consent’ means.

Second, restoring my faith in her essential inability to make a coherent, honest argument twice in a row, Coulter has attacked the aforementioned Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame, as debunked at MediaMatters: Coulter falsely accused Freakonomics co-author of defending Roe v. Wade, claimed that Lott debunked his original study on abortion and crime.

Here’s a scary, but fun, story from 90% True: I am a terrorist. Careful with that “send” button, people.