Dick Cheney, once again demonstrating that he’s a man who will not be cowed by the reality-based community:

Tony Fratto, Mr. Bush’s deputy press secretary, said Mr. Cheney and others hoped to reassure the critics that the proposal is an emergency response to a critical problem, and not an “abandonment of the belief that our markets work and our free market system works.’’

From the NYT:

“I fear the government has passed the point of no return,” said Ron Chernow, a leading American financial historian. “We have the irony of a free-market administration doing things that the most liberal Democratic administration would never have been doing in its wildest dreams.”

Today’s edition of the New York Times includes a half-page ad by the National Italian American Foundation that’s mostly about A. Kenneth Ciongoli doing his best William Donohoe/Abe Foxman impression. (He’s worried, it seems, that some NBC announcer has slurred Rocco Mediate’s “unsurpassed ethnic heritage” by saying he looks like Tiger Woods’s pool cleaner.) Dumb, but it includes these priceless sentences, retyped here for your electronic viewing pleasure:

[Johnny] Miller seems not to know that in his professional lifetime, the presidents of Georgetown, Harvard, Tufts, and Yale universities as well as sundry other American institutions are cultural and ethnic cousins of men named Rocco. In addition, the recent CEOs of IBM, Intel, McDonald’s, Brooks Brothers, the New York Stock Exchange, the NASDAQ, the New York Mercantile Exchange, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade have been Italian Americans with relatives named Rocco.

An article by James Risen in today’s New York Times confirms something we’ve long suspected: the single most important reason why the military’s dependence on private contractors is a bad idea is that such dependence effectively allows the contractors to extort the federal government.

That seems to be just what happened in the case of Charles M Smith, a senior civilian Army official, and the $20+ billion KBR contract he was responsible for overseeing during 2004. As Risen tells it, Army auditors

had determined that KBR lacked credible data or records for more than $1 billion in spending…Mr. Smith refused to sign off on the payments to the company. “They had a gigantic amount of costs they couldn’t justify,” he said in an interview.

The fact–if it is a fact–that an outfit like KBR would try to shaft the federal government out of $1 billion dollars would surprise exactly no one, I expect. But what comes next is the really outrageous part: two days after Smith notified KBR of his decision, he discovered that he’d been unceremoniously replaced in his oversight position. The billion dollars in payments and performance bonuses were approved, and KBR got its money.

For the Army, the decision was apparently an easy one. According to Risen,

[Army officials] said that KBR had warned that if it was not paid, it would reduce payments to subcontractors, which in turn would cut back on services.

There it is, pure extortion. (more…)

It’s no secret around here that I have a pretty high opinion of Barack Obama, but this bit, from today’s profile in the New York Times, bumped my admiration for the man a notch higher still:

Mr. Obama was not thrilled with a campaign slogan, “Change We Can Believe In,” that was unveiled last September. And he did not initially like the campaign’s blue and white logo—intended to appear like a horizon, symbolizing hope and opportunity—saying he found it too polished and corporate.

The German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, quoted in today’s New York Times, on the lack of visible protests against George Bush’s visit to Germany Tuesday:

Bush is not even popular in the role of the enemy anymore.