Dick Cheney Hunts With Big-Time Donor. Cheney Wants Cash. Donor Says He'll Have to Think About It. Donor Gets Shot in the Face.

Well, I was going to write up a blog about seeing Jay McInerney give a reading at the Margaret Mitchell House tonight, but when we got there we discovered the event was cancelled due to his being snowed in by that nor'easter that dumped all the snow on New York. Would have been nice to get an email or something. Oh well.

I did want to mention a couple news items. First, as you've all heard about by now, Cheney shot a guy in the face over the weekend. The official White House version of events has the old-timer Texas attorney and big-time GOP donor Harry Whittington getting a face full of birdshot because he stepped into the wrong place at the wrong time. What's weird (and these days, what isn't weird about most things the Vice-President does?), is that there was an 18-hour gap between when the accident happened, and when the press was informed. Why the delay? And why was the owner of the ranch, another big-time Bush donor named Katherine Armstrong who is, so far, the only eyewitness who's been cleared to speak to the press, the one to actually inform the press (the press in this case being that august paper of record, the Corpus-Christi Caller-Times), and not the Office of the Vice-President? Maybe there's nothing to this, maybe this is what it appears to be and nothing more. But then again, these people lie a lot.

Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo, one of the very few legitimate news blogs, has a link to this tidbit, that has none other than "the architect" himself, Karl Rove, on the phone with Ms. Armstrong within 90 MINUTES OF THE SHOOTING. For the next 16 and a half hours, he sure didn't tell anybody about it. Did they think they might just be able to keep it quiet?

Then, also from Talking Points Memo, former-Crossfire-combatant, America-hurter, Democratic hack, and generally affable Clintonista Paul Begala offers his take on what may have happened. Begala hunts quail in Texas frequently, and finds the macho, back-slapping euphemisms being bandied about by the White House a little misleading. Begala says that when a person is fired on at that range with that sort of gun, they have not been "sprayed" or "peppered" as has oft been reported in the largely administration-friendly press, they have actually been "shot". And though the official line is that even older-man Whittington was at fault and not Cheney, Begala hint that, under the circumstances, Cheney was himself negligent.

Finally, if you click on only one link in this post, click on this one. It's a fun one. The Press Secretary and NBC's David Gregory get into a shouting match during a press conference. Man, I want C-SPAN, and I want it now. Ok. More tomorrow.