Chief of Staff Andy Card

I try to avoid mentioning incidental events of the day. They are too transitiory. I hate those blogs that parse people's utterances and focus on individual word choice. Those things are all meaningless. However, I did find this funny and maybe a little telling.

In an article in the Washington Post about how tired the folks in the Bush administration are and how that's leading to mistakes, the reporter writes:

"Card retains enormous respect inside and outside the White House, but some Republicans whisper about his judgment in the ill-fated selection of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court and the handling of Hurricane Katrina, to name two examples. Card declined to be interviewed, but has publicly dismissed concerns that his schedule has sapped his energy.

'All my life I have worked kind of this schedule,' he told C-SPAN last fall. 'When I was in college, I delivered newspapers early in the morning and worked at McDonald's late at night. So even when I was in high school, I would get up in the morning and get the newspapers ready for the paper boys early in the morning. So I've had this kind of lifestyle of early-to-bed and early-to-rise -- and so far seem to be doing pretty well.'

I guess what he really meant was 'late-to-bed,' since that's the whole point of him having that late night McDonald's job. Maybe he was too tired to know what he was saying.

Source: Baker, P. (2006, March 13). Senior White House staff may be wearing down. Washington Post. Retrieved March 13, 2006, from http://www.washingtonpost.com

Ted Koppel

Ted Koppel recently had a column in the New York Times. Here are three quotes from it:

"Their [television journalists] daily preoccupation with the trivial and the banal has accumulated large audiences, which, in turn, has encouraged a descent into the search for items of even greater banality."

"The goal for the traditional broadcast networks now is to identify those segments of the audience considered most desirable by the advertising community and then cater to them."

"It is not partisanship but profitability that shapes what you see."

Mr. Koppel worked at ABC News for 42 years.