Wednesday Morning Quick Hits

by Steve

A couple of quick pieces today:

First, my understanding of Fitzgerald’s grand jury scheduling is that this grand jury convenes on Wednesday and Fridays. This would explain why Miller is coming back before them today, and Rove will be back before them in his final encore and high-pressure appearance on Friday. This tells me that Fitzgerald would convene them again next Wednesday to review the evidence they have accumulated and then determine from them either at that Wednesday session or next Friday’s session what indictments he can obtain from them.

Second, a new poll commissioned by AfterDowningStreet.org and conducted Ipsos Public Affairs finds that 50% of those polled would want Congress to consider the impeachment of George W. Bush if he lied to get us into the Iraq war. This is up from the results of a Zogby poll in June, which found that support for impeachment proceedings registered at 42% in response to a similar question.

Third, as we have commented on here before in the last several days, check out the observations of Newsweek’s Howard Fineman on Monday night’s “Hardball”, wherein he stated that he believes there is an open war going on in the Bush White House.
(Hat tip to both John Aravosis at AmericaBlog and John over at Crooks and Liars.)

Fourth, the issue of Bush's shifting eyes, lip-licking, blinking, and other body language while under stress has now made the mainstream media in a piece by Dana Milbank of the Post this morning.

Fifth, the White House is digging even a deeper hole for itself on the opposition to the Miers nomination by having Laura "Prozac" Bush now allege that sexism is behind the opposition to Miers. Since the opposition at this point has been almost totally from conservatives as Democrats have smartly stayed relatively quiet to this point, in essence the First Lady is calling her husband's political base sexist, leading William Kristol to tag Laura's criticism as "obviously ridiculous." What Laura and Ed Gillespie intentionally ignore is that had Bush nominated someone like Edith Clement instead of the unqualified and hero-worshipping Miers, we wouldn't even be having this issue discussed. But Bush screwed that option up when he said that Miers was the best person he could find (right down the hall).

Lastly, remember all that rhetoric from Bush and others about how local businesses would be first in line to benefit from Katrina recovery funds? As usual, it was lies. According to a piece in today's USA Today, only 2 of the 140 major contracts awarded by FEMA so far went to local businesses as of October 3rd, leading a federal official tasked with helping local businesses to quit.