the buzz log

There are resignation letters, Dear John letters, thank you letters... but was the White House behind an Iraqi intelligence official's fake letter to Saddam Hussein that linked the former Iraqi leader, the 9/11 hijackers, and weapons of mass destruction?

Radar Online explains that the 2003 letter is "old news," and was quickly sussed out as a forgery. However the White House's involvement is detailed in former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind's "The Way of the World." The book is the latest entry in a long sputtering line of magazine articles, government reports, and tell-alls trying to figure out just what the Bush administration knew before the Iraqi invasion.

The book hit shelves on Tuesday, but the Pulitzer Prize winning author is already making the media rounds, including an interview with NPR. The White House is, as Fox News puts it, "strongly fighting back." The Bush administration will need to have a lot of fight left in them: Fair weather hasn't brought them many friends, what will all the negative memoirs and court decisions they've been getting this summer. One suggestion to avoid any more: Don't open the email.

How Suskind's book will reverberate will be seen in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, here are five White House summer setbacks that provoked a lot of searches.

• Attorney general firings. The ongoing investigation got new life after a Justice Department investigation reported that attorney general's White House liasion Monica Goodling violated hiring laws. Queries peeped up for her boss Alberto Gonzalez, but heated up over that Other Monica and what makes her tick.


• Guantanamo Bay detainee rights. Online lookups for "habeas corpus" got a revival after the Supreme Court ruling in mid-June.


• Scott McClellan memoir. The former press secretary made for unusual beach reading in his disclosures of White House propaganda campaigns.


• Immunity ruling. The court ruled that former White House advisers Joshua Bolten, Harriet Miers, and Karl Rove lacked "absolute immunity" from testifying before Congressional hearings. Miers got some searches and Rove even more, but collateral searches shot up for Valerie Plame in the CIA spy leak case.


• Impeachment hearings. Representative Dennis Kucinich nearly got the buzz of his life for sounding the impeachment gong, and making this one of the most searched Hill stories this summer. "Bush impeachment" queries peaked in early July, but have simmered down since then.

Filed under: Politics, George Bush, Books, Government

Usually a missive with an Internal Revenue Service return address is about as welcome as a dusting of poison ivy.

Offer a little stimulus, however, and taxpayers can't wait. So, understandably, initial reports that 15,000 taxpayers would not be getting an IRS love letter sent the Buzz into a tizzy. Fortunately, that number turned out to be much smaller: Only 1,500 checks have been inadvertently wired to the wrong accounts. (Don't even think of keeping it!) Out of 30 million bits of ... um ... stimuli, that's an error rate of just .005%, give or take a decimal point. At least the IRS didn't toy with taxpayer affections like the agency did back in 2001.

Except there's another small snafu: The IRS also 'fessed up to forgetting to send out 300-dollar child refunds to as many as 350,000 households. Before you ask: The IRS will mail another letter copping to the error, and the checks will follow in July. The upside: The U.S. Post Office must be raking it in from its repeat customer.

By the way, if you did get a check but not your full share, SavvySugar points out that the IRS has kindly deducted back taxes or other debts in advance. 

Despite all this, the government agency should feel swamped with affection. How have people loved the IRS in the past month? Let us count a few of the searches: "2008 tax rebate checks tax return" (+14,579%), "government rebate checks 2008" (+13,085%), "tax stimulus checks" (+5,798%), "federal tax rebate" (+652%), "600 dollar tax refund 2008" (+566%), "bush tax refund 2008" (+300%), and "2008 federal kicker checks rebate checks" (off the charts). The most frequent query? "When will I get my tax rebate check."

The lovefest may not stop. SavvySugar notes that a rebate repeat may be possible next year, in this IRS article found under the section "Not eligible at the current time?" Who says you can't buy love?

Filed under: Taxes, Money, Government

After renewed allegations of military deception and cover-up on Capitol Hill, the sad, complex, and sometimes baffling cases of fallen corporal Pat Tillman and injured private Jessica Lynch returned to the Buzz.

Pat Tillman's death in Afghanistan by accidental fratricide has surfaced in headlines repeatedly over the last three years. And Jessica Lynch, a woman who became an Iraq war hero in a traditionally male arena, has reappeared frequently in the public eye. Both of their stories came together in a committee hearing in the House of Representatives, and we noticed a curious disparity in the Tillman-Lynch buzz. Queries for "jessica lynch" ranked in the top 200 searches. Tillman searches, meanwhile, ranked in the top 1,500.

The shifting accounts of Tillman's death and the effects of Jessica Lynch's media hype shouldn't really be pitted against each other. If true, the allegations of cover-up and deception in both cases are equally serious. Yet, from the Search numbers we can see that Lynch carries more favor in Search than Tillman.

We know from experience that an attractive woman can generate big numbers in the Buzz, but can that really be at play in the Tillman-Lynch saga? Is there something else about either soldier's story that resonates with the public? While we wait to see how far the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform takes the cases of Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch, feel free to voice your opinion. How do you feel about the hearings, the heroics, and what are your hopes for how the investigations unfold?

Filed under: Iraq, Military, Government, Middle East