Blowhard News for Wednesday.

Rove: ‘Policy Won Out’ Over Politics In The Bush White House
Monday night on Hannity and Colmes, Karl Rove vigorously defended his role in the White House as the Bush administration’s political guru. “The politics and policy are constantly banging into each other in decisions that are made inside the White House. That’s just the way it is,” he said. When Colmes asked him if that presented a “conflict of interest,” Rove insisted that, under Bush, “policy won out” over politics:

HOLMES: Is that a conflict of interest though? The intersection of politics and policy? I know you’ve been criticized in the past of combining the two, as if when one conflicts with the other, maybe the country suffers, and it should be about policy regardless of the politics involved.

ROVE: Well, at least in the White House I was in, policy won out, but you had to be aware of the political fallout of what you were going to do in order to contain it and deal with it. You bet. But to — but first and foremost if — the president I worked for, George W. Bush said, you know what, let’s do right, and the politics will take care of itself. It didn’t mean you were blind to it, but it didn’t mean that you needed to focus first and foremost on what you thought was in the right interest of the country.

Beck: States should secede from America to protest bailouts.
Today on his radio show, conservative talker and future Fox News personality Glenn Beck suggested that states should “secede” from the union to protest the recent string of Wall Street bailouts:

BECK: So the question is, do states have the right to secede anymore? Because it was a compact. It’s not perpetual. In fact, in the Declaration of Independence it says it is our right, it is our responsibility to get away from a government who doesn’t listen to us any more.

Do you even have a right to do that as a state any more? Do you have the right to say, “You know what, you guys are going down a path that I don’t even agree with”? Is that even possible?

Norquist: ‘The Economy’s In The Present State’ Because Democrats Took Control Of Congress In 2006
On CNBC this morning, Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist claimed that the current financial crisis facing America is rooted in the fact that Democrats took control of the House and Senate in 2006. “The economy’s in the present state because when the Democrats took the House and Senate in 2006, you knew that those tax increases were going to come in 2010,” said Norquist.
According to Norquist, the stock market collapsed because “we’re in the middle of responding” to tax increases that haven’t actually happened yet:

NORQUIST: Well, the economy’s in the present state because when the Democrats took the House and Senate in 2006, you knew that those tax increases were going to come in 2010. The stock market began to collapse as soon as you recognized that those old tax rates were coming back. So, we’re in the middle of responding to those tax increases.

David Sirota, who was on the CNBC show as well, notes that Norquist’s absurd argument was laughed at and immediately rejected by the host and the other guests on the show. The Financial Times’ Chrystia Freeland pointed out that “the stock market is collapsing because the U.S. and global financial system is in crisis.”