White House: Bush’s AG pick
Posted: Monday, September 17, 2007 9:03 AM by Domenico Montanaro
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White House
Cheney travels to Kansas City today to raise money for Rep. Sam Graves (R). “[I]t’s the first time Cheney has publicly raised money for a House member this year. He’s also appeared for at least four senators, so far raising just $1 million to $2 million, according to unofficial estimates.”
The Washington Post: President Bush has selected retired federal judge Michael B. Mukasey as his new attorney general, sources said yesterday, moving to install a law-and-order conservative at the Justice Department while hoping to avoid a confirmation fight with Senate Democrats… Senate Democrats and their allies signaled yesterday that they were likely to accept Mukasey without a big fight and said they saw the pick as a conciliatory gesture from Bush.”
The Wall Street Journal, which got its hands on a copy of former Fed chief Alan Greenspan’s new book, writes: “In a withering critique of his fellow Republicans … Greenspan says in his memoir that the party to which he has belonged all his life deserved to lose power last year for forsaking its small-government principles… Mr. Greenspan, who calls himself a ‘lifelong libertarian Republican,’ writes that he advised the White House to veto some bills to curb ‘out-of-control’ spending while the Republicans controlled Congress. He says President Bush's failure to do so ‘was a major mistake.’ Republicans in Congress, he writes, ‘swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose.’”
The New York Times adds that Greenspan critics “are likely to weigh in as soon as the book is published. Though he publicly disagreed with Mr. Bush’s supply-side approach to tax cuts, urging Congress to offset the cost with savings elsewhere, he refrained from public criticism that could have shifted the debate. His willingness to criticize now, 18 months after leaving office, may open him to the charge of failing to speak out when it could have affected policy.”
Bloomberg News calls the book a "gift for Democrats." "Alan Greenspan, a conservative central banker, has tossed a political grenade into the 2008 elections and it exploded right under his Republican Party."
