From Novak to Santorum...

From American Progress:

Think Fast

Bob Novak writes, “With nearly two years remaining in his presidency, George W. Bush is alone.
In half a century, I have not seen a president so isolated from his own party in Congress. … The saving grace that some Republicans find in the dispute over U.S. attorneys is that, at least temporarily, it draws attention away from debate over an unpopular war.”

Despite President Bush’s recent change in rhetoric, top White House economic officials stilll don’t consider today’s income inequality “an inherently bad thing. … The administration hasn’t yet offered any sweeping proposals to resist the market forces producing inequality — and probably won’t.”

Five U.S. soldiers were killed Sunday in roadside bombings, four of them in the Diyala province east of the capital — a religiously-mixed area where insurgents fleeing the Baghdad crackdown are believed to have sought refuge. Diyala has seen “fierce fighting in recent months.”

Lawyers for New York City are rejecting calls to release police records of spying activities conducted on progressive activist groups in the lead-up to the 2004 Republican National Convention. The lawyers say “the documents should remain secret because the news media will ‘fixate upon and sensationalize them.’”

Former Sen. John Edwards (D-NC) said last night during an interview on 60 Minutes, “There’s not a single person in America that should vote for me because Elizabeth has cancer… Do not vote for us because you feel some sympathy or compassion for us. That would be an enormous mistake.”

“Is CNN building bridges to the longtime Fox News-friendly Bush administration? That’s the message one could take from CNN’s guests at the Radio and TV Correspondents Dinner at the Washington Hilton this Wednesday. CNN is hosting top Bush adviser Karl Rove, as well as Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

The LA Times writes, “[N]early all the major 2008 presidential candidates — both announced and presumed — are wrestling with the technology that has made such successes of MySpace, Facebook, MeetUp and other social networking sites.” To see which tools the candidates are using and how they stack up to one another, check out NetTrends ‘08.

“The senior American envoy in Iraq, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, held talks last year with men he believed represented major insurgent groups in a drive to bring militant Sunni Arabs into politics,” the New York Times repots. “He is the first American official to publicly acknowledge holding such talks.”

And finally: Get your tickets early. Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) “is getting into the documentary filmmaking business and he’s out to tell "the other side of the story." Santorum said last week “that he is planning two film projects in part to counter what he characterized as the stream of left-wing documentaries coming from Hollywood and independent filmmakers.”

Wrap...