PUBLIC MARKS from jasontromm with tags new & bush

Some of Barbra Streisand's fans have some advice for the diva as she makes a rare U.S. tour -- shut up and sing. Not all members of her audience, who paid up to $250 (134 pounds) for a ticket, have appreciated her politics. During a performance at New York's Madison Square Garden this week, one concertgoer yelled out, asking if the concert was a fundraiser. Streisand replied: "Shut the f*** up!" ()() I couldn't agree more. Actors and singers don't have a right to push their views on people who pay to see them perform, not preach.

When Judge Anna Diggs Taylor was given the job of deciding whether the Bush administration’s wiretapping program was unconstitutional, she certainly understood that she would be ruling on one of the most politically charged cases in recent history. So it would have been prudent for her to disclose any activity that might conceivably raise questions about her ability to be impartial. Regrettably, it was left to a conservative group, Judicial Watch, to point out her role as a trustee to a foundation that had given grants to a branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, a plaintiff in the case.

In a special televised address last night, President Bush addressed the nation on the immigration crisis. Unless a total indifference to the wishes of the American people can be counted as a kind of political boldness, anyone hoping for a bold new approach from the White House last night on immigration was likely disappointed. The president is in bad shape. His approval rating with voters is approaching Saddam Hussein territory—his handling of the immigration issue a major reason for the plummet.

President Bush has lost his momentum, Americans' support for the Iraq war is dwindling, and opposition to Bush policies is hardening. That's according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll being covered as if it were a real news story.

Last week, I published a new book, Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. A lot of my friends are not happy with me for writing it and I have been embraced by a number of people on the left whom I would ordinarily consider my political enemies. Both are mistaken about why I wrote the book and what I hope to accomplish with it.

Critics of the Bush administration have promoted video of an Aug. 28, 2005, teleconference between emergency management officials and the president as proof that the White House was warned that levees around New Orleans would likely fail against Hurricane Katrina. But a closer examination of the recording and transcript shows no mention that the Crescent City's levees would be breached.

But reporters still ignore free market advocates who predicted it. Media coverage of problems facing the new Medicare prescription drug plan focused on elderly patients left in the lurch by bureaucracy, producing what CBS’s Bill Plante called a “political headache” for the Bush administration. But in the Jan. 16 reports on the “Evening News” and “World News Tonight,” both networks ignored conservative critics who had argued the plan was doomed to fail because it was a typical big government solution that ignored the free market.

A combative Michael Brown blamed the Louisiana governor, the New Orleans mayor and even the Bush White House that appointed him for the dismal response to Hurricane Katrina in a fiery appearance Tuesday before Congress. In response, lawmakers alternately lambasted and mocked the former FEMA director.