Think Progress

I perusal of the Think Progress site brought to light the following:

- 32%: President Bush’s approval rating in a new CNN poll have sunk to a new personal low.

- With little more than a month left until hurricane season begins, the levees in New Orleans remain “flawed.” “Flood walls are too weak in some places; earthen levees are too short in others. Locals say the only thing that will save the low-lying region from more flooding this summer is not getting hit with a strong storm.”

- Powerline’s Paul Mirengoff has declared:

Public officials must be judged by the totality of their work not by one event, particularly an event like Abu Ghraib that cannot reasonably be attributed to anything the official did or didn’t do.

Even Rumsfeld himself acknowledges this isn’t true. As the Defense Secretary testifed in May 2004 before the House Armed Services Committee:

There has been a good deal of discussion about who bears responsibility for the terrible activities that took place at Abu Ghraib. These events occurred on my watch. As Secretary of Defense, I am accountable for them. I take full responsibility.

- A review of “at least six joint U.S.-Iraqi inspections of detention centers, most of them run by Iraq’s Shiite Muslim-dominated Interior Ministry,” found evidence of prisoner abuse at all of them. Some of the abuse was “severe,” including cigarette burns and missing toenails, but unlike in the past, abused detainees were not removed from the centers, “prompting concerns that they could be victims again.”

-SCHWARZENEGGER: Well, we have to buy vehicles that are fuel-efficient…We want to inspire people to buy cars that are fuel-efficient, and also drive less, do more carpooling and so on. Because remember, the oil price is all based on supply and demand.

It was a curious argument from the man who literally brought the Humvee, the most fuel inefficient civilian vehicle on earth, to the roadways:

The partnership of Schwarzenegger with the Hummer brand is like no other celebrity/manufacturer relationship. The muscle man is a legitimate player in a game that paid off with the actualization of the Hummer product line. While filming “Kindergarten Cop” about a decade ago, Schwarzenegger saw a fleet of military HMMWV/Humvee vehicles rolling down the street. He had to have one. Since the Humvee was a military-only vehicle, Schwarzenegger initiated talks with the manufacturer, AM General Corp., and the U.S. Army. Those discussions resulted in the civilian Hummer.

Arnold owns five gas powered Humvees and is still driving them.


- 169: Number of days that elapsed between Dana Priest’s article on secret prisons and the firing of the supposed leaker. 1,014 and counting: Number of days that have elapsed since Valerie Plame’s identity was published without anyone having been fired.