by Mark Silva

By a margin of nearly two-to-one, Americans surveyed say the federal government is doing the right thing in intervening in the financial market credit crunch, and by a double-digit margin most voters say that Democrat Barack Obama is better-suited than Republican John McCain to deal with the crisis at hand.

In the first full look at the public's reaction to the bailout that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson unveiled over the weekend, 57 percent of those surveyed by the Pew Research Center in Washington on Friday through Monday said the government was doing the right thing -- and just 30 percent called the intervention the wrong thing.

"Support for the administration's plan to bailout many of the nation's troubled financial institutions is largely bipartisan,'' Pew President Andrew Kohut reports.

The Sept. 19-22 survey of 1,003 adults also found that more voters view Obama as the presdential candidate best able to address the financial crisis :47 percent favoring Obama on that count, 35 percent McCain. Among independent voters, it's Obama 44, McCain 30 on that question.

For more on public attitudes toward the bailout and Obama and McCain, see the Pew Center poll.

by Mark Silva

Tough news for Dick Cheney - and word of interest to Todd Palin as well -- from the federal court in Washington, courtesy of our court-watching Countdown to Crawford friends.

The Bush administration has attempted to expand access for snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park, after first President Nixon and then President Carter imposed limits on off-road vehicles in the national parks.

But now, as President Bush prepares to leave office, Countdown's Jim Gerstenzang reports on a Washington Post report, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan has tossed a National Park Service plan crafted in 2007. It would have allowed 540 recreational snowmobiles and 83 snow coaches a day to enter Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks and the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Memorial Parkway.

The Grand Tetons tower above Jackson Hole, where the soon-retiring Cheney maintains a secluded home deep in a heavily forested spread, Countdown notes.

The plan developed by the Bush administration "is arbitrary and capricious, unsupported by the record, and contrary to law," opined Sullivan, nominated to the federal court by President Clinton, after serving in District of Columbia superior and appeals courts to which he was named by Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush. The plan "clearly elevates use over conservation of park resources and values and fails to articulate why the Plan's 'major adverse impacts' are 'necessary and appropriate to fulfill the purposes of the park.''

Appeal, vows Ed Klim, president of the International Snowmobile Manufacturers Association, telling the New York Times: "This is not the end of the issue.''

Gerstenzang notes that a certain "First Dude'' - Alaska's - also may be watching this court case. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's husband Todd, husband of the Republican Party's vice presidential nominee, is a champion snowmobile racer.

(Todd and Sarah Palin at the start of the Iron Dog snowmobile race in 2007. Al Grillo / Associated Press.)

by Laura Olson

Additional international support will be necessary to establish a lasting peace along the Georgian-Russian border, former Speaker of the Georgian Parliament Nino Burjanadze said Thursday.

Burjanadze spoke on the conflict at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney began his visit to Georgia's capital.

Her talk comes after an announcement Wednesday of $1 billion in U.S. aid to help Georgia rebuild its infrastructure.

by Mark Silva

Dick Cheney dropped in at the Georgian embassy in Washington to declare his "solidarity'' with the Georgian people.

Our colleague, Jim Gerstenzang, who is recording the closing days of the Bush administration at the L.A. Times' Countdown to Crawford, also drew pool duty for the vice president's embassy stop Monday, and he delivered this account:

"The vice president spent two minutes 20 seconds at the Georgian embassy at 2209 Massachusetts Avenue. He walked up the cement steps and was greeted in the foyer at 4:31 p.m. by Ambassador Vasil Sikharulidze; Maj. Malkhaz Jamureli, identified by the vice president's press office as the Defense, Military, Navy and Air Attaché, and Tamta Kupradze, identified as the Second Secretary at the embassy.

"Twenty seconds after he walked through the doorway, he sat down at a wooden table, took from his Navy blue coat a pen and blue note card, and began to write on a lined, cream-colored blank page of a leather-bound remembrance book.

"He looked at his note card three times as he wrote, writing, pausing to look at the card and then writing again. He spent 75 seconds at the task, talked for 45 seconds with the hosts, speaking so quietly that your pooler, perhaps five feet away, could catch only a few words, and then departed.''

(The ambassador could be heard saying: "Thank you very much for your support.")

The vice president wrote in large hand covering more than half of the page in the guest book: "To the people of Georgia...In this hour of sorrow I offer the respect, condolences and solidarity of the United States of America."

And beneath that: "Dick Cheney.''

by Johanna Neuman

Vice President Dick Cheney got carded.

Not for drinking, but for voting.

It happened at the Teton County clerk's office yesterday in Wyoming, as reported in the L.A. Times' Countdown to Crawford, when the vice president, accompanied by his wife and a Secret Service detail, dropped in unexpectedly to cast an absentee ballot in next Tuesday's primary election.

An election worker, Mike Farady, asked the vice president for his driver's license.

"The reason is we are supposed to confirm identity with a photo ID and it also helps confirm residency and that was the easiest way to do it," Farady told the Jackson Hole News & Guide. "I know he is the vice president and I know he can vote, but I wanted to make sure he can vote here and now."

Others hanging around the clerk's office were delighted at the exchange.

"I was sitting here and saw the Secret Service come in," said fellow voter Bob Grady. "Isn't that a great thing about the United States of America that you can be filling in your ballot and the vice president comes in and votes next to you?"

by Mark Silva and updated with followup.

Stephen Payne, a significant fundraiser for President Bush's election and reelection campaigns, certainly didn't know he was being videotaped when he suggested that he could arrange some meetings with Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the Bush administration with a big donation to the Bush presidential library.

And Payne, a Houston-based lobbyist and longtime Bush-backer who has served as a volunteer travel-advance planner for White House trips abroad, later told the Sunday Times of London, which today reported on the videotaped meeting between Payne and a Kazakh exile in London purportedly seeking some high-level contact with the Bush administration for a friend back home, that he certainly intended no "quid pro quo.''

For its part, the vice president's office says today that the lobbyist certainly does not arrange meetings for the vice president - though Payne did take part in advance travel planning for the vice president's trip to Kazakhstan in May 2006. And a spokesman for the Bush presidential library says today that the library certainly does not condone any contributions in exchange for anything, and Payne was not making any solicitations or representations on the library's behalf.

"It would be like, maybe a couple of hundred thousand dollars, or something like that, not a huge amount but enough to show that they're serious,'' Payne suggested of the library donation in the meeting videotaped by the newspaper.

Payne, who told the newspaper that he intended nothing untoward, maintained today in a statement delivered to the Tribune that he has been the victim of a "confidence game'' played by the British newspaper, which has taken his comments out of context in a bid to "entrap'' him.

In his discussions with the Kazakh exile, Payne said in his statement today: "I did mention that they might be able to make donations to think tanks, foundations, and/ or President Bush's library because the first President Bush accepted foreign donations -- but I was clear that much ground work would have to be done to make a... donation acceptable to the library foundation. Indeed, I noted that to the best of my knowledge, the decision even to accept any foreign contributions for the library was still unknown.''

He said he had also made it clear "in this conversation and in subsequent e-mails that any donations would need to be completely transparent and open to public scrutiny.

"It is clear that the Times attempted to entrap me into alleging that an illegal relationship could be established,'' Dos says in his statement, maintaining that the e-mails show that it was Dos who attempted "to establish a quid pro quo and my consistent responses that there could be no quid pro quo.''

Payne has provided a copy of his e-mail correspondence here: Payne emails.pdf

And his full statement is available here: Payne statement.pdf

The story starts in London, where the Sunday Times surreptitiously took part in a hotel meeting with Payne, who proudly displayed some photographs on his personal organizer: Pictures of Payne uprooting dead trees side by side with President Bush at his ranch in Texas, skeet- shooting next to Dick Cheney and mugging for the cameras with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

by Mark Silva

In an homage to Tony Snow, who had not always agreed with President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney says he too has not always agreed with the president - but that he and Snow, the late former press secretary of the president - "the best'' he has known - were part of a team.

"He was a major player in the conservative movement,'' Cheney said of Snow, who succumbed to a battle with cancer on Saturday at the age of 53. Cheney was interviewed by Chris Wallace for FOX News Sunday, a show that Snow had started hosting in 1996. "The way I think of Tony is he's unique in terms of the extent to which he knew the news side of the business; then as a commentator and -- but also somebody who worked as part of the White House staff as a speechwriter and of course as press secretary.

"There are very, very few people that have had as much experience on both sides of the divide, if you will,'' Cheney said of Snow, who had worked as an editorial writer before becoming lead speechwriter for former President George H.W. Bush and who served as a FOX commentator before going to work for this president and had returned to the air on CNN after leaving the White House in September.

"I don't know anybody who had as much experience on both sides,'' Cheney told Wallace, in the interview airing today. "You can think of people like Rush Limbaugh, obviously, who are giants in the profession, but always on the commentary side. And there aren't many who've done what Tony did.''

Asked about Snow's "brand of conservativism,'' Cheney said: "I frankly agreed with him on nearly everything, and I'm generally viewed as pretty conservative.

Cheney speaks in April at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in Washington. (AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

by Frank James

You might think Vice President Cheney, after getting so badly burned by bad intelligence and his own faulty assumptions before the Iraq War would be a lot more careful about his use of "facts."

No such luck. The vice president, arguing for oil and gas drilling off the Florida coast on Wednesday tried to justify such drilling by saying that the Cubans were allowing the Chinese to drill in the ocean waters just 60 miles from the Florida at a time when Congress refused to permit U.S. companies to drill as close as that to the coast.

But the Chinese aren't drilling in Cuban waters 60 miles off Florida's coast.

According to the Associated Press:

Vice President Dick Cheney's office acknowledged on Thursday that he was mistaken when he asserted that China, at Cuba's behest, is drilling for oil in waters 60 miles from the Florida coast.

"It is our understanding that, although Cuba has leased out exploration blocks 60 miles off the coast of southern Florida, which is closer than American firms are allowed to operate in that area, no Chinese firm is drilling there," according to the statement.

by Mark Silva

We knew that Vice President Dick Cheney had left Yale under less than honorable terms - "by mutual agreement,'' as he put it today -- but maybe we had forgotten, until today, that he also was kicked out of Kindergarten.

That's what the vice president told radio's Chaz and A.J. in the Morning Show, in an interview with the Connecticut broadcasters conducted today in the Senate office of Sen. Joe Lieberman (notice how Lieberman, the Democratic candidate for vice president in 2000, keeps showing up with Republicans such as Sen. John McCain and Dick Cheney these days?)

Cheney had returned to Lincoln, Nebraska, his birthplace, a couple years ago and "the candidate I was there to speak for arranged for my two Kindergarten teachers to come visit me... Of course, I was a lot older than I had been when I was in Kindergarten. But they found them both. They were both still alive, and you might ask why I had two kindergarten teachers...

"I got kicked out of one school and had to go to the other one,'' he said, to which his interviewer suggested: "Well, you showed them, huh?''

Cheney likes to talk about his experience at Yale during college commencement addresses that he delivers. "I did two years at Yale and then left by mutual agreement,'' he noted today, with Lieberman interrupting to say that, 'This is an encouragement for anybody who's ever been kicked out of college.''

"The president went up there right after we were elected,'' Cheney said. "Of course he was a graduate of Yale, I think, with a 'C' average, and he said to the student body that day, the graduating class, he said, "You know, if you graduate from Yale with a 'C' average you can be president of the United States.' He said, of course, 'If you (get) kicked out, you can be vice president.' So he reminds me of that periodically.''

And Cheney, of course, wasn't supposed to be the vice president in the first place. He was in charge of Bush's search for a running mate.

"The way it actually worked was, they talked to me about whether or not I was interested in the job originally, and I said, 'No, definitely not interested.' and then they came back and said, 'Would you help us find somebody?' and I said, "Sure, I'd be happy to do that.' We got through doing the search. It took a couple of months, and at the end of the day, the president, after we reviewed all the candidates, looked at me and said, you know, you're the solution to my problem. I took that as a threat and redoubled my efforts... (But) it's been well worth the efforts.''

See excerpts of that radio interview here, courtesy of the White House:

by Mark Silva

Near the end of his tenure, the most powerful vice president in the history of the United States pauses to assess "the most important achievements of the administration and any disappointments.''

That was the question put to Vice President Dick Cheny at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

"Most important achievements of our administration, well, I would point to what we've done with respect to the global war on terror,'' said Cheney, calling all that the Bush administration has done in response to the terrorist attacks of 2001 the most significant achievement - and counting the administration's tough interrogation of suspected terrorists among those achievements.

There were not, however, any "disappointments'' enumerated in the vice president's response.

"I would put foremost among what we accomplished as an administration the president's judgment and then decision that we then acted upon and have implemented,'' Cheney said of the terrorism of 9/11. "Since it was a strategic threat... we needed to martial all of the elements of strategic power to deal with it and try to defeat it....

"I mean, when we ran in 2000 and I remember signing on with the [resident, we had a number of issues we were focused on,'' the vice president said. "We wanted to strengthen national defense. We wanted to improve our educational system, No Child Left Behind. We wanted to cut taxes. We thought it was important to reduce the overall tax burden on the American people. We had budget surpluses at that point and we didn't want government to take any more money than it needed.

"That's sort of the basis upon which we ran and I think we were able to deliver on most of those. We got the education program passed; the tax package passed finally in '03, for example; and put in place a lot of those cuts that I talked about here today. So I feel good about that.

"What we did not anticipate when we ran, obviously, was 9/11,'' Cheney said in reply to the question at the U.S. chamber yesterday, across the park from the White House. "And what 9/11 represented was, sort of, the culmination, if you will, of a series of attacks on Americans and American interests that went back a good 10 years.

by Matthew Hay Brown

Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who introduced legislation last year to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney, is now aiming higher.

On the House floor this evening, the Ohio Democrat proposed impeaching President Bush. In language similar to that in the articles of impeachment he raised against Cheney, Kucinich sought support for a 35-count indictment charging Bush with misleading Congress and the American people into war with tales of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Democratic House leaders have opposed impeaching Bush or Cheney as an unhelpful distraction. They were nearly embarrassed last year when Republicans voted to take up Kucinich's effort against Cheney in order to force a debate; they are unlikely to let the matter get so far this time.

Bob Fertik, president of Democrats.com, one of the groups pushing for impeachment congratulated Kucinich on his "historic leadership."

"We've waited seven years to find one Member of Congress brave enough to stand up for our Constitution, for which generations of Americans have fought and died," Fertik said. "We are thrilled and honored that Dennis Kucinich has chosen to be that one genuine patriot."

by Katie Fretland and updated

West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin has called on Dick Cheney to apologize for remarks he made about the state today at the National Press Club.

And indeed the vice president has apologized.

Cheney had spoken of his family history and said he had Cheneys from both sides of his family. "And we don't even live in West Virginia," Cheney said. "You can say those things when you're not running for re-election."

Cheney's words sparked this response from Manchin, who defended the state:

"I truly cannot believe that any vice president of the United States, regardless of their political affiliation, would make such a derogatory statement about my state or any state for that matter," Manchin said in a statement on his Web site.

"West Virginia is home to some of the most patriotic people in the nation and our sons and daughters have answered the call to duty every time a president has needed their service. They deserve better from the vice president, and so I would simply ask for his apology."

And this evening, the vice president's office said no offense was intended.

"The vice president's off-hand comment was not meant to hurt anyone,'' said Lea Anne McBride, spokeswoman for Cheney. "On reflection, he concluded that it was an inappropriate attempt at humor that he should not have made. The vice president apologizes to the people of West Virginia for the inappropriate remark."

by Mark Silva

Vice President Dick Cheney, who has served four presidents in his time, looks at the controversy surrounding this administration and suggests, this is nothing.

Cheney, who spoke at the National Press Club today, was asked about the new book by the former White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, who has written of the Bush White House and Washington's "culture of deception.''

"I haven't read Scott McClellan's book,'' Cheney said. "I don't plan to read Scott McClellan's book any time soon.

"There's a lot made of how difficult it is to operate in Washington, how partisan it gets at times, how tough the battles get,'' said the vice president, who made his first White House tour of duty with President Richard Nixon.

"One of the things... if you go back and you look, have the perspective of time and have the benefit of being a student of history, as difficult as it may be now in terms of a partisan standpoint... I can remember the Watergate years... Certainly I would say, in terms of trying to match up the degree of partisan dialog and disputes we have now with that period in time, this doesn't look nearly as tough.''

by Mark Silva

Vice President Dick Cheney - the "magic man'' of the Bush administration, in the words of the now-renowned Scott McClellan - stirred up the Republican faithful last night in New York, scene of the party convention that nominated President Bush and Cheney for a second term in 2004.

"New York certainly knows how to throw a party,'' Cheney said at a $1,000-per-plate dinner of the New York Republican State Committee in Manhattan attended by the former mayor and erstwhile GOP presidential candidate, Rudy Giulianii. "We have fond memories of that week -- the great hospitality, the superb convention, and the momentum that brought us to an historic re-election victory.

"Now, of course, we've begun to focus on another big election,'' Cheney said. "And if we all put our shoulders to the wheel between now and November, I'm confident we'll see John McCain as the next president of the United States.''

Cheney has held extraordinary sway in the administration that McClellan, the former press secretary, accused this week of waging a "political propaganda machine'' for the promotion of the war in Iraq. But Cheney made no mention of the McClellan book which so many in and around the administration have been ready to criticize this week. And here Cheney, stirring the party for the 2008 contest, was returning to the themes that he and Bush pushed in 2004 - tax cuts and national security.

"President Bush and I look forward to helping our candidates, up and down the ticket, throughout the important election year,'' he said last night in New York. "And the stakes are very high. Whether the issue is