A blistering comedy “tribute” to President Bush by Comedy Central’s faux talk show host Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondent Dinner Saturday night left George and Laura Bush unsmiling at its close.

Earlier, the president had delivered his talk to the 2700 attendees, including many celebrities and top officials, with the help of a Bush impersonator.

Colbert, who spoke in the guise of his talk show character, who ostensibly supports the president strongly, urged the Bush to ignore his low approval ratings, saying they were based on reality, “and reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

He attacked those in the press who claim that the shake-up at the White House was merely re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. “This administration is soaring, not sinking,” he said. “If anything, they are re-arranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg.”

Colbert told Bush he could end the problem of protests by retired generals by refusing to let them retire. He compared Bush to Rocky Balboa in the “Rocky” movies, always getting punched in the face—“and Apollo Creed is everything else in the world.”

Turning to the war, he declared, “I believe that the government that governs best is a government that governs least, and by these standards we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq.”

…Observing that Bush sticks to his principles, he said, “When the president decides something on Monday, he still believes it on Wednesday – no matter what happened Tuesday.”

Also lampooning the press, Colbert complained that he was “surrounded by the liberal media who are destroying this country, except for Fox News. Fox believes in presenting both sides of the story — the president’s side and the vice president’s side.” He also reflected on the alleged good old days, when the media was still swallowing the WMD story.

But wait, it gets better:

As Colbert walked from the podium, when it was over, the president and First Lady gave him quick nods, unsmiling, and handshakes, and left immediately.

E&P’s Joe Strupp, in the crowd, observed that quite a few sitting near him looked a little uncomfortable at times, perhaps feeling the material was a little too biting–or too much speaking “truthiness” to power.

Read more at Editor & Publisher, or watch a clip at Crooks and Liars.

Update: full transcript at Daily Kos.

The FBI secretly sought information last year on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents from their banks and credit card, telephone and Internet companies without a court’s approval, the Justice Department said Friday.

It was the first time the Bush administration has publicly disclosed how often it uses the administrative subpoena known as a National Security Letter, which allows the executive branch of government to obtain records about people in terrorism and espionage investigations without a judge’s approval or a grand jury subpoena.

Friday’s disclosure was mandated as part of the renewal of the Patriot Act, the administration’s sweeping anti-terror law.

That’s thirty-five hundred times that the administration felt it needed to spy on fellow Americans without going through that whole burdensome checks-and-balances things.

Read on.

It appears that it’s not just movie stars who can cop a deal to avoid drug charges.

Firebrand radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh was charged Friday with fraudulently concealing information to obtain prescription drugs, but prosecutors will drop the charge after 18 months if Limbaugh remains in treatment for drug addiction, his lawyer said.

Limbaugh also agreed to pay the state of Florida $30,000 to help cover the cost of the investigation into the conservative radio personality’s alleged “doctor shopping,” a felony in Florida.

Read on.

“It’s come to my attention that there’s been requests — this is a serious question — to turn these TVs onto a station other than Fox, and that those have been denied,” VandeHei told McClellan…

McClellan said it was the first he had heard such a claim, and that it was not true.

“In fact, I’ve watched other channels on here,” he said.

“I’ve never known anyone that’s raised a complaint about a request from back here to watch a different channel,” McClellan added.

VandeHei replied, “I’m officially raising it, and officially complaining about it.”

McClellan then asked whether VandeHei had tried to have the change made.

“I was told — the quote was, ‘No,’ when I asked for CNN,” the reporter said…

Eighteen minutes after VandeHei raised the issue, McClellan had resolved it.

“We just called up. They’re going to be changing it, at your all’s request, to the channel that you requested, which is CNN — from the press corps.”

Read on at CNN itself.

That’s how many state legislatures have proposals to impeach W.

Representative Yarbrough stumbled on a little known and never utlitized rule of the US House of Representatives, Section 603 of Jefferson’s Manual of the Rules of the United States House of Representatives, which allows federal impeachment proceedings to be initiated by joint resolution of a state legislature. From there, Illinois House Joint Resolution 125 (hereafter to be referred to as HJR0125) was born…

Should HJR0125 be passed by the Illinois General Assembly, the US House will be forced by House Rules to take up the issue of impeachment as a privileged bill, meaning it will take precedence over other House business.

But it’s not just Illinois, but California as well.

Will this go anywhere? Probably not, at least not until November 2006. But you can’t deny this is interesting:

An ABC News/Washington Post Poll Conducted April 6-9 showed that 33% of Americans currently support Impeaching President Bush, coincidentally, only a similar amount supported impeaching Nixon at the start of the Watergate investigation.

And, as a footnote, the rules for impeachment state that

§ 603: “In the House of Representatives there are various methods of setting an impeachment in motion: […] by charges transmitted from the legislature of a State (III, 2469) or Territory (III, 2487) or from a grand jury (III, 2488)…”

(emphasis added)

A state or territory. Wouldn’t it be awesome if Bush was impeached by Guam? Or Samoa?

(links via Metafilter)

…is right here.

(thanks to Julia for the link)

The cover story for Rolling Stone:
“ One of America’s leading historians assesses George W. Bush”.

Koo-koo-ka-choo.

(via the Huffington Post)

USA Today (no, really) has this informative (no, really) state-by-state look at what’s likely togoing to happen oncewhen Roe v Wade falls now that W’s stacked the Court.

Check it out.

Sure am glad I live in a dark-blue zone.

This not-especially-SFW video is totally childish. And yet it has me giggling myself stupid.

Wow, big news. Scooter Libby

told a federal grand jury that President George W. Bush authorized him to leak information from a classified intelligence report to a New York Times reporter. Details of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s testimony were included in a court filing made yesterday by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who is prosecuting Libby for perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements in connection with the probe into the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity. According to Fitzgerald’s filing…Libby, 55, testified in 2003 that he provided reporter Judith Miller with information from a classified National Intelligence Estimate after being told by Cheney that Bush “specifically had authorized” him to “disclose certain information in the NIE.” Libby also testified that Cheney specifically directed him to speak to other reporters about information in the classified NIE (which addressed Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction programs) as well as a cable authored by Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson. The leaking of the classified material was apparently done in an effort to counter claims made by Wilson regarding the White House’s justification for invading Iraq.

Read more at The Smoking Gun, or read the recap at CNN.

Check out this children’s book.

(link via Metafilter)

250 billion dollars.

Something Awful spells out what we could have spent that money on, instead of the Iraq war. Of course, being Something Awful, they don’t list stuff like “health care” or “education grants”. No, no, it’s stuff like this:

…298,412,466 Sony Wega 23″ LCD HDTVs

That number may not seem to clarify the issue, but it is an HDTV for every single person in the United States of America. Man, woman, child. Old or young. Everybody gets an HDTV from Sony courtesy of the government. Even better, the actual cost of doing this is only about 235 billion, leaving another 15 billion to actually ship the things all over the country and probably enough on top of that to buy a DVD player for everyone. Not a good DVD player, but like one of those Acer DVD players you can get out of the soda machine at Wal*Mart. The kind of DVD player that you have to put the DVD in sideways and it always defaults to having French subtitles.

Too bad the Democrats were too busy falling over each other to be the first in line to vote for the Iraq war. They really could have pitched this one to the people. “Guys, look, we could go get misguided revenge and blow up Iraq…or…we have this beautiful 23 inch crystal-clear Sony HDTV for each and every American citizen.” The thing is, this is probably going to cost another 250 billion, so why don’t the Democrats pitch this to the American people now? “We’ll bring the troops home and hey, everybody gets a TV!”

No, not in Iraq. In Texas.

Read on.