Quotes of the Morning: Political Bias

“The Pentagon told Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton that her questions about how the U.S. plans to eventually withdraw from Iraq boosts enemy propaganda.
In a stinging rebuke to a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman responded to questions Clinton raised in May in which she urged the Pentagon to start planning now for the withdrawal of American forces.
A copy of Edelman's response, dated July 16, was obtained Thursday by The Associated Press.
‘Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia,’ Edelman wrote.”
-Associated Press, July 19, 2007

“Shame on Hillary! She should know better than to criticize the President and his Eternal War on Terra! Criticizing the government is not an option! She needs to be more patriotic.”
-Skippy

"Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does NOT mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country."
-President Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt

“Oh come on.. I’m not talking about the President, I’m talking about the Administration. They are here to serve in an unbiased way. The Pentagon exists to support the military, not to drive a political agenda.”
-Skippy

“[T]he Pentagon’s public affairs division has become a dumping ground for administration cronies…seek[ing] to bypass the traditional media and work directly with talk radio and bloggers, mostly those with a heavily conservative tilt.”
-Harper’s Magazine, July 16, 2007-07-20

“None of the branches of the Administration have been twisted by Fearless Leader’s bold guidance.. Not the Department of Defense..”
-Skippy

“The Defense Department…has stepped up intelligence collection inside this country since 9/11, which now includes the monitoring of peaceful anti-war and counter-military recruitment groups.”
-MSNBC, September 14, 2005

“The Department of Justice…”
-Skippy

“After the 2004 election, administration officials quietly began drawing up a list of US attorneys to replace. Considerations included their perceived loyalty to Bush and a desire by White House political adviser Karl Rove to increase voter fraud prosecutions, documents and testimony have shown. Most of the proposed firings were for US attorneys in states with closely divided elections. Among those later fired was David Iglesias, from the battleground state of New Mexico, where many of his fellow Republicans had demanded more aggressive voter fraud probes.”
-Boston Globe, May 6, 2007

“Unlike federal judges, immigration judges are civil service employees, to be appointed by the attorney general based on professional qualifications, not their politics. [During Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s aide Monica Goodling’s] tenure, vacancies were apparently not always posted and she selected lawyers to be considered for interviews based in part on their loyalty to the Republican Party and the Bush administration.”
-New York Times, May 25, 2007

“NASA…”
-Skippy

“The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming…officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard [Institute for Space Studies] Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.”
-New York Times, January 29, 2006

“The Food and Drug Administration…”
-Skippy

“The top Food and Drug Administration official in charge of women’s health issues…resigned in protest against the agency’s decision to further delay a final ruling on whether the ‘morning-after pill’ should be made more easily accessible. ‘I can no longer serve as staff when scientific and clinical evidence, fully evaluated and recommended for approval by the professional staff here, has been overruled,’ she wrote in an e-mail to her staff and FDA colleagues.”
-Washington Post, September 1, 2005

“Health and Human Services…”
-Skippy

“An internal investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services confirms that the top Medicare official threatened to fire the program’s chief actuary if he told Congress that drug benefits would probably cost much more than the White House acknowledged.”
-New York Times, July 7, 2004

“The Office of the Surgeon General…”
-Skippy

“The first U.S. surgeon general appointed by President George W. Bush accused the administration on Tuesday of political interference and muzzling him on key issues like embryonic stem cell research.”
-Reuters, July 10, 2007

According to President George W. Bush's first surgeon general, scientific information he wanted to share with the nation was regularly distorted, ignored or buried by White House officials in service to their political agenda. Similar complaints have come from the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
[…]
‘Anything that doesn't fit into the political appointees' ideological, theological or political agenda is ignored, marginalized or simply buried,’ Dr. Richard H. Carmona said Tuesday in testimony before a House committee. During his 2002 to 2006 stint as surgeon general, Carmona said he was also ordered to mention Bush at least three times on every page of his speeches.”
-Newsday, July 14, 2007

“The Office of National Drug Control Policy…”
-Skippy

“At the request of Sara Taylor, the former White House Director of Political Affairs, John Walters, the nation’s drug czar, and his deputies traveled to 20 events with vulnerable Republican members of Congress in the months prior to the 2006 elections. The trips were paid for by federal taxpayers and several were combined with the announcement of federal grants or actions that benefited the districts of the Republican members.”
-House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, June 17, 2007-07-20

“The Corporation for Public Broadcasting…”
-Skippy

“Kenneth Tomlinson, the chairman of the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, has said on several occasions that the Bush administration does not interfere with how the CPB operates.
On several matters over the past year, however, the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has pursued policies and the appointment of executives at the behest of the White House, according to Tomlinson's own e-mails.”
-NPR, June 20, 2005

“The EPA…”
-Skippy

“At issue is next week's huge government report on the state of the environment. Under heavy editing pressure from the White House, a lengthy chapter on climate change has been gutted.
In a draft of the report – obtained by CBS News – strong language that ‘climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment" was stricken by the White House; as was government research that suggests recent climate change is "likely mostly due to human activities.’
An edited version said that climate change ‘may have potentially profound consequences’ but, ‘The complexity of the earth system and the interconnections among its components make it a scientific challenge to document change, document its cause and develop useful projections on how natural variability and human actions may affect the global environment in the future.’
The revised draft removed a reference to a 1999 study showing global temperatures had risen sharply in the past decade compared to the previous 1,000 years. But it did cite another study, partly paid for by the oil industry, challenging the uniqueness of recent temperature increases.
And it deleted a National Research Council finding that various studies have suggested that recent warming was unusual and likely due to human activities. The 2001 NRC report had been commissioned by the White House and cited in the past by President Bush.”
-CBS/AP, June 19, 2003

“The Interior Department…”
-Skippy

“The Washington Post concluded an amazingly detailed series on Vice President Dick Cheney this week with a disturbing revelation involving Oregon and California.
Cheney, the paper said, played a key role in events leading to the 2002 die-off of more than 70,000 salmon in the Klamath River near the border of the two states. He reportedly did it by getting Interior Department bureaucrats to override government biologists and divert water from the river to irrigate farms, dooming the protected fish. “
-The Oregonian, June 30, 2007

“The Office of Faith-Based Initiatives…”
-Skippy

“More than five years after President Bush created the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, the former second-in-command of that office is going public with an insider’s tell-all account that portrays an office used almost exclusively to win political points with both evangelical Christians and traditionally Democratic minorities.
The office’s primary mission, providing financial support to charities that serve the poor, never got the presidential support it needed to succeed, according to the book.”
-MSNBC, October 13, 2006

“Really.. This Administration is just like Fox news.. Fair and balanced.”
-Skippy

"The Scooter Libby decision was, I thought, a fair and balanced decision,"
-George ‘Dubya’ Bush, July 12, 2007