Catching Up

Even though it's August, there was still a little bit happening in the news over the weekend. You've probably heard about most of this stuff already, but here are a couple of things that caught my eye.

I don't want to get anybody's hopes up, but it looks like Robert Novak just might be starting to get what's coming to him. In an exchange that looked like a bunch of nothing to those of us on the outside, James Carville ran Novak off the set of CNN's Inside Politics on Thursday (Crooks & Liars has the video) and was consequently suspended by the cable network. In several posts at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall speculates about exactly what happened. Novak himself blamed Carville. Marshall later scored an interview with Carville, who also didn't quite know what to make of it all.

Poll numbers for the Prez continue to slide. An AP-Ipsos poll found that his approval rating has dropped to 42 percent--55 percent disapprove of his job performance. Half of the respondents--right at 50 percent--feel that Bush is not honest. A separate Newsweek poll found 61 percent don't like how W is conducting the war in Iraq, with only 34 percent approving. His overall job rating was better in this poll, but not by much. The same number, 42 percent, approved, but only 51 percent disapproved. The fact that the undecideds were higher is good news for the administration, but it's a very sad excuse for good news. If all this isn't off-putting enough, Think Progress notices a number of ways in which August 2005 is like August 2001.

Peter Jennings died over the weekend, and there are tributes and remembrances all over the Internets. Not surprisingly, ABC has a good one. Jennings accomplished the Canadian dream: He left Canada and made it big in the States.

Going from above America's northern border to below its southern one, Ibrahim Ferrer also died this weekend. A musician in the '50s and '60s, he had modest success in Cuba but had retired from the music business and was shining shoes when Ry Cooder approached him to join the project that became the Buena Vista Social Club. That CD, along with the film that followed it, made Ferrer an international star at age 70.