Two stories today illustrate how political calculations drive everything in the Bush White House.
In the first, administration officials all but admit that they scheduled the State of the Union speech to divert attention from the Iowa caucus outcome:

[The] State of the Union address, which White House officials scheduled for Tuesday night, only 24 hours after Iowa, to draw attention from the Democratic victor, a Republican close to the Bush campaign said.
“Was it planned?” the Republican said. “Yes. The fact that the Iowa caucus was going to be held on a certain date was not unknown to people in the White House.”
The underlying strategy, the Republican said, was not to steal all the thunder from the Democrats, which even another “axis of evil” State of the Union address was unlikely to do, but rather to change the subject.

This type of maneuver, though revealing, isn’t that big a deal. In the grand scheme of things, the Iowa caucus results won’t have much shelf life anyway. As soon as it’s over the focus shifts to New Hampshire. Moreover the move is largely a trade off because it comes at the expense of more State of the Union publicity.
In contrast, this move is outrageous:

President Bush and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) have decided to oppose granting more time to an independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, virtually guaranteeing that the panel will have to complete its work by the end of May, officials said last week.
A growing number of commission members had concluded that the panel needs more time to prepare a thorough and credible accounting of missteps leading to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But the White House and leading Republicans have informed the panel that they oppose any delay, which raises the possibility that Sept. 11-related controversies could emerge during the heat of the presidential campaign, sources said.

The administration has deliberately obstructed and delayed the 9/11 investigative effort since its inception, and now that the commission is running up against its deadline, Republicans refuse to allow it the time necessary to complete a through investigation.
Why? Because rather than getting to the truth of what lead to 9/11 so it won’t be repeated, Republicans want to get that dirty laundry out of the public consciousness as soon as possible so they can hold a rousing political party just up the street from ground zero. That’s order of the Republican party’s priorities.
Disgusting.

Pat Buchanan on Bush’s proposed marriage promotion initiative:

Where in the Constitution is the U.S. government empowered to take money from citizens to teach other citizens how to have “healthy marriages”? Why is the White House dreaming up new social programs when we’re running a $500 billion deficit?
What, exactly, is the difference between the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush and the Great Society liberalism of Lyndon Johnson, against which Mr. Conservative, Barry Goldwater, broke his lance in 1964? What do the Beltway conservatives stand for anymore, other than getting their snouts in the trough, too?
. . .
This $1.5 billion is nothing but faith-based pork, cooked up in the kitchen of Karl Rove to bribe the Religious Right not to scream too loud if the White House decides to go into the tank on gay marriage in 2004.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

. . . by hearkening back to 1918:

As the United States scrambles to end a dispute with Shia leaders over plans to elect an interim government in Iraq before July, it has emerged that American commanders are seeking to reach out to tribal leaders by relying on a report devised in 1918 by Britain, the country’s then ruler.
Lieutenant-Colonel Alan King, head of the Tribal Affairs Bureau set up by the US-led coalition last month, admitted last week that he had been referring to the pages of the British report to fathom Iraq’s network of tribal sheikhs – regardless of the fact that it dates back to the First World War.
The revelation is not likely to improve confidence in the ability of the US to sort out the deepening muddle over how it means to relinquish political power to the Iraqi people by this summer. The plan to create an interim government before a 30 June deadline has been in doubt since objections were raised last week by the powerful Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani. His words set off mass demonstrations against the proposal in southern Iraq on Thursday.

This, coupled with coalition head Paul Bremer’s “urgent mission” to the once-“irrelevant” U.N. to solicit international help tomorrow, are but more evidence that the Bush administration didn’t have a viable plan to rebuild Iraq when U.S. troops rolled into Baghdad.

Billmon compares and contrasts the comments of past also-rans against the greatest American human rights champion of all time.

I don’t devote much attention to the state of hockey. In fact, this is my first hockey post. But the Washington Post has a good piece on the ailing financial health of the NHL:

According to the league’s figures, NHL teams could lose an estimated $300 million this season. Twenty clubs are losing money, according to the latest Forbes magazine analysis. Two teams filed for bankruptcy last season before new owners were found, and at least one franchise, the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, has been for sale for years without finding a buyer even though the team came within one game of winning the Stanley Cup last spring.

The article covers some of the NHL’s well-documented problems: (over?) expansion into sunbelt markets, limited T.V. appeal and revenue, but the thing that gets me is the giant leap in player salaries:

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman says the sport’s business model is broken, and he has staked the health of the league on achieving a labor agreement that he believes will be an economic cure-all by capping player salaries. Salaries have tripled from an average of $558,000 in 1993-94 to $1.79 million last season, overwhelming the growth in league revenues, which will reach about $2 billion this season.

Inevitably, this gets passed on to the fans:

The lack of big television money has always forced the NHL to rely more heavily on arena-generated revenue than the other leagues, all of which have a greater amount of revenue sharing among teams than hockey. But with the NHL’s average ticket price at $43.57, or about as much as an NBA game, NHL teams are hard-pressed to squeeze new money out of ticket sales.

Yeah, I know, that’s the free market and people will pay to see a winning product, be it hockey, baseball, or any other sport. But it seems that sooner or later people would say enough’s enough and stop feeding the professional sports monstrosity.
As I said, it seems like that should happen.