Thursday Roundup: Lady Bird Johnson

The passing of Lady Bird Johnson at age 94 is leading just about every Texas news outlet, and rightly so. Her soft-spoken strength, her love for the environment, and her respect for other people made her a national as well as a Texas icon. The Houston Chronicle and Austin American-Statesman are both featuring retrospectives honoring Lady Bird Johnson.

If you'll recall, we reported a few days back that U.S. intelligence experts were declaring that the mission in Iraq so far was pretty much an abject failure when measured by the benchmarks set for it. Well, it turns out that the White House disagrees. The administration has sent Congress a report claiming satisfactory progress on half the benchmarks laid out. I suppose if an administration that has proven that it is willing to fudge numbers to bolster its case needed to have a reason for "not recommending a change in course," half of the benchmarks is about a reasonable minimum of fudging. If they'd rolled up with excuses for only a third of the benchmark, the argument would seem substantially weaker. How convenient, then, that "roughly half" were satisfactory. Then again, when you've been doing this sort of creative number-crunching for six years, as the Politico mentions, "Democrats, and even some Republicans, can be expected to dismiss the findings as double talk."

To add insult to injury, the White House has effectively stonewalled an offer by members of the Iraq Study Group to reconvene the panel and update their review to reflect the present day. Independent data is much more peskily difficult to jury-rig, I suppose. The x-factor is former secretary of state Jim Baker, who will not lead another review without President Bush's approval, which he hasn't given.

The domestic side of the war on terror doesn't seem to be going so well either. Investigators from the GAO decided to try to find out how difficult it would be to receive a license to legally buy materials to build a dirty bomb. A few phone calls and faxes went back and forth, and 28 days later, the investigators had the paperwork for material to build a level 3 bomb by the International Atomic Energy Agency's scale (1 being the most lethal). Their report notices that they could've secured contracts to buy far more and make an even more lethal bomb. Senator Norm Coleman, the top Republican on the Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations, was quoted as saying that "it was as easy to get his material as a DVD at Netflix." Ouch.

The Texas Education Agency is shoring up to be the next state agency to get a good cleaning up. After an internal investigation found discrepancies in how the TEA awarded state contracts, the state auditor's office has announced that it will be conducting its own review of the agency. Earlier comments from TEA commissioner Robert Scott were fiery, calling the inspector general's internal report "completely false" and "overstated and without substantiation." But State Auditor John Keel detailed yesterday the brief announcement he made Tuesday about opening an investigation on the TEA, saying that the auditor's office would issue its own findings on the imbroglio as well: "We reviewed the inspector general's report and we reviewed the management response, and we'll proceed from there." Seeing an embattled TEA may seem anticlimactic, particularly considering that one only needs to point to the Texas Youth Commission to note that state agencies have had it rough this year. It makes one wonder: where do all of these problems in the state executive branch stop?

And finally today, if you're one of the many following the U.S. Senate race here in Texas, an important note: Rep. Noriega will not be announcing the launch of his exploratory committee today. I got this from Charles Kuffner before I saw the release: Rep. Noriega has delayed the official launch on the Capitol steps until Monday, July 16, out of respect for Lady Bird Johnson and her family. So if you were planning to go down to the Capitol in support for Rep. Noriega, you may want to wait about four days or so.