Bill O’Reilly has once again appointed himself national charity policeman and has set his sights on an upcoming NBC tsunami relief telethon. Per Bloggermann, George Clooney has apparently had enough:

Clooney, whom O’Reilly had also attacked after a similar celebrity telethon for 9/11 victims, released a letter he wrote to the bizarre Fox host. “So all right, Mr. Journalist… come on in. I’m booking the talent for the Tsunami event… and you, Mr. O’Reilly, are now officially invited to be a presenter… either you ante up and help out AND be that watch dog that you feel we clearly need… or you simply stand on the sidelines and cast stones… This is your chance to put your considerable money where your considerable mouth is.”

“Considerable mouth.” Heh. It’s about time someone stood up and fired back.

Yeah, that looked kind of bad. Yesterday Howard Dean announces his candidacy for DNC chair; hours later Joe Trippi endorses Simon Rosenberg on Hardball. Party politics are heating up.

A job well done:

The man who insisted that President Bush make the claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium for nuclear weapons in Africa is poised to assume a top State Department job that would make him the lead US arms negotiator with Iran and North Korea, according to administration officials.
Robert G. Joseph, a special assistant for national security to President Bush until a few months ago, is on the short list to become undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, the nation’s senior diplomat in charge of negotiating arms control treaties, said the officials, who spoke on the condition they not be named.

In a related story:

The hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein. The top CIA weapons hunter is home, and analysts are back at Langley.
. . .
Four months after Charles A. Duelfer, who led the weapons hunt in 2004, submitted an interim report to Congress that contradicted nearly every prewar assertion about Iraq made by top Bush administration officials, a senior intelligence official said the findings will stand as the ISG’s final conclusions and will be published this spring.

Mission accomplished! We took care of those weapons threatening America. Good job, guys. Promotions all around. Never mind those stretchers and transfer tubes returning from Iraq. That’s a small price for achieving a war.

Part of an interview with Clark Kent Ervin, former Inspector General (watchdog) at the Department of Homeland Security. Mr. Ervin wrote a number very critical reports about DHS:

ZAHN: At any point during your two years of service as inspector general, did anybody try to silence you or mute your criticism?
ERVIN: Happened all the time, and I resisted it very, very fiercely.
ZAHN: Clark, can you explain to me how pressure was put on you to mute your criticism along the way?
ERVIN: There were times I was urged not to release reports.
ZAHN: By whom? Would these be members of Congress?
ERVIN: Not by members of Congress but by senior members of the department. It happened on a number of occasions. And I resisted each time. The good news is that the law gave me the authority to do just that.
ZAHN: So you say you felt pressure from high-ranking members of the Department of Homeland Security?
ERVIN: Yes.
ZAHN: Did Tom Ridge ever come to you personally and say, “You can’t do this, Clark. This is making us look bad”?
ERVIN: To his credit, the secretary never did that. He did not. There’s no question that on a number of occasions, there were hard-hitting reports about very, very sensitive topics that the senior leadership in the department — I don’t want to personalize this or name names — would just as soon had not been released publicly or to the Congress.

Upper-tier Bush administration officials attempting to silence realistic assessments of how effectively government policy is working? I’m shocked.
Mr. Ervin is doing interviews now because the administration refused to reappoint him; apparently he was doing his job too well.

Interesting comparison:

Specialist Charles Graner Jr is the first soldier to go on trial on charges related to the Abu Ghraib jail scandal, which came to light last year with the release of demeaning photographs of prisoners, including pictures of naked inmates apparently being paraded on leashes and being stacked in piles.
The lawyer defending him at the court martial in Texas, Guy Womack, said: “Don’t cheerleaders all over America make pyramids every day?” He added: “It’s not torture.”

Yeah, pretty close. Except the inmates at Abu Ghraib were stripped naked. And imprisoned. And probably threatened with deadly weapons if they didn’t pile on. Other than that, they are about the same.