2/15 - Julianne Moore

• #2 with a Bullet. Vice President Dick Cheney discussed his February 11 hunting incident for the first time publicly in a February 15 interview with Brit Hume of Fox News (transcript on-line here). Cheney was asked who was responsible for the incident. He responded: "ultimately, I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry. And you can talk about all of the other conditions that existed at the time, but that's the bottom line. And there's no -- it was not Harry's fault. You can't blame anybody else. I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend. And I say that is something I'll never forget."
  Cheney has been criticized for the way in which the shooting of Harry Whittingdon was disclosed to the public. Cheney's friend, Katharine Armstrong, on whose property the incident happened, told a local Texas newspaper about the incident on February 12, as opposed to Cheney's office issuing a statement or telling the White House press corps more quickly.

• Writers on the Storm. A House committee investigating the government response to Hurricane Katrina (on-line here) issued its final report on February 15, in which it concluded that Katrina was a "national failure" that was in part due to a failing "at every level – individual, corporate, philanthropic, and governmental." Among other things, the report concluded that Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Ray Nagin delayed ordered a mandatory evacuation after receiving adequate warning before landfall, that Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff should have taken more actions prior to landfall, and that President George W. Bush did not receive adequate advice and counsel.
  A similar Senate investigation is continuing into the response to Hurricane Katrina. As part of that investigation, Michael Brown, former head of the Federal Emergency and Management Agency, testified on February 10, during which he criticized the Bush administration for focusing too much on terrorism and for ignoring initial reports about flooding and levee breaks on August 29, the day that Katrina hit landfall. A partial transcript of the hearing is on-line here.

• Trendspotting. Myspace.com, one of the most popular social networks, is on-line here. A recent study by the Pew Center about how people use the Internet to maintain social networks, though not about sites such as Myspace.com, is on-line here.

posted by Stephen Lee @ 2/16/2006 08:35:00 AM