WaxWorks

2008-01-10T16:48:00.000-05:00

Just Wondering

At the last two Democratic conventions, the main speaker on the first night of the convention has been Bill Clinton making the case for the Democratic nominee. With great success, in my opinion.

If Obama wins the nomination, will the party need to look for a new opening night speaker?

On the other side, Democrats are probably salivating about the prospect of George W. Bush, he with the 30+% approval rating, speaking on behalf of the Republican nominee on the first night of their convention. Maybe the White House will announce an "important" Presidential trip to Afghanistan that leaves August 31, 2008 and returns September 5.

2008-01-07T16:25:00.000-05:00

A Few More Thoughts Before New Hampshire

1) If Hillary does flame out quickly, and Obama runs away with it, I'm wondering if people will question her decision to pass on challenging Bush in 2004. Clearly she felt that an open election with no incumbent would be an easier race for her, as no one could have foreseen the Obama tornado, and certainly running for reelection in New York and serving out her first term as a Senator all had benefits for her, but I think she certainly would have gotten the nomination in 2004 and would have been at least as strong as Kerry (and Kerry nearly won), and, with the nation closer to Bill Clinton's presidency, perhaps that token would have had more power.

2) Hillary has been focusing on the history of making change vs. just talking about change, I couldn't help but think about this classic SNL fake commercial from the late 80s. In any event, Obama has not been focusing on his record, instead trying to emphasize his vision for America. But I was impressed by his record in the Illinois state legislature, as this Washington Post op-ed piece describes. Being able to turn widespread opposition into a 35-0 vote in the Illinois state Senate on an issue like videotaping interrogations and confessions is pretty impressive.

3) Finally, if we still can't decide after New Hampshire, maybe this candidate will get a look too.

2008-01-04T09:50:00.000-05:00

Hope and Change

Four years ago, I blogged enthusiastically about the Iowa caucuses because I felt that the citizens of Iowa had made a wise choice in rejecting Dean and anointing Kerry, reinvigorating my interest in the 2004 presidential race, which I had given up for lost until that point.

But this time, Iowa seems to have meant something quite different. It is quite possible that what American witnessed in Iowa last night was history changing. The degree of Obama's victory, the 3rd place finish by Hillary, and the sweeping, soaring, moving rhetoric of Obama's victory speech certainly could set the tone for a dramatic change in the foundation of American politics.

However, it is, after all, only Iowa. George H.W. Bush did not win the presidency (or even the nomination) in 1980 after winning Iowa. Same for Bob Dole and Dick Gephardt in 1988. But something about Obama's win last night just seemed different. Time will tell, and quickly, as things are on a fast track over the next 45 days. I've been skeptical about Andrew Sullivan's claim that Obama could be a transformational candidate, but he could be right.

On the other hand, poor John Edwards. Two election cycles in a row he finishes a strong 2nd in Iowa, both times with over 30% of the vote, and both times his second place showing is overshadowed not only by who beat him, but also by the third place finisher. It was Dean and the "scream" in 2004, and now Hillary and the media discussion of her candidacy this time. Edwards always seems to get squeezed. Which is also good for Obama.

In any event, it should be very exciting over the next month. I'll be curious to see how Hillary tinkers with her message and if Obama can keep this momentum going.

2007-12-30T22:06:00.000-05:00

Prediction Time

Yes, it's been a while, I admit. But anyone who is loyal enough to still check this blog, here's my bold prediction: John McCain will be the Republican nominee. I've certainly been wrong before, but I think things are shaping up for him, much the way they did for Kerry last year. Romney is counting on winning NH and Iowa, and both seem to be very much in doubt. Giuliani is counting on winning Florida, which is also in doubt, and I'm not convinced Huckabee will have staying power past Iowa. That leaves McCain, who is peaking at the right time.

And I also think he would be the toughest Republican candidate in the general election against the Democratic nominee, whomever that is. I'm not offering a prediction on that today, however. It should be an interesting couple of months.

2007-08-31T10:28:00.000-04:00

Wide Stance

The other big news story is of course Senator Craig's bathroom incident. The audio of his police interview hit the airwaves yesterday. Overall, I thought Craig did pretty well in the interrogation and the cop does come off a bit overly aggressive, although he could just be frustrated about being so blatantly lied too.

However, I picked up on one thing by Craig that I thought was a bit inconsistent. Craig says that he took his wide stance because he didn't want his pants to slide down, presumably to avoid touching the dirty floor of the public bathroom. But then at the same time he claims that the reason the cop saw his fingers was that he was reaching down on the floor to pick up a piece of toilet paper behind him.

Now, if you're concerned about getting your pants on the dirty floor, I can't imagine you'd want to help out the janitor by picking up toilet paper behind your seat. Unless you're stuck in a situation like Elaine on Seinfeld and the cop next to you says he can't spare a square.

But Craig chose not to invoke the Seinfeld defense, adopting the unfortunate "wide stance" argument. Comedians everywhere are happy.

2007-08-31T10:22:00.000-04:00

The Iraq and U.S. Americans

I apologize for the paucity of posts lately, but it has been a very busy summer. I have to admit, however, that I've been drawn to the story over Miss Teen South Carolina and her botched response to the question at the Miss Teen U.S.A. pageant. Amazingly, there have been close to 10 million viewings of this on You Tube and I only account for about 100,000.

After repeated viewings, I've come to some conclusions. It seems to me that she must have been coached going into the pageant, and developed some stock answers to use ("I personally believe," "in our nation," "South Africa," "Iraq," the "Asian Nations," and repeated use of metaphors with "like" and "such as") and under pressure she just unloaded all of them, with no coherent structure. It's a car wreck that I just can't turn away from.

2007-08-13T08:59:00.000-04:00

Quagmire

Here's a devastating 1994 interview with Dick Cheney on C-SPAN when he is asked about whether he agrees that President Bush (Senior) did the right thing when he decided not to go on to Baghdad and take out Saddam Hussein. Cheney predicts that the U.S. would have gotten stuck in a quagmire if they toppled Saddam. And, noting the 146 Americans who died during the first Gulf War, he goes on to ask, "How many additional dead Americans is Saddam Hussein worth?" and answers his own question: "Not very many."

Is it possible to do something, a la Back to the Future, where the 1994 Cheney visits the 2002 Cheney and knocks some sense into him?

2007-07-23T18:28:00.000-04:00

More Fitzgerald

Here's a link to the audio of Fitzgerald's appearance on "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me."

My favorite part is after Peter Sagal, the host, establishes that Fitzgerald lives on the north side of Chicago, but works downtown, he then asks him, "So how do you feel about commuting?"

I also liked when Sagal is describing the rules and says that if Fitzgerald gets 2 of 3 questions right, he'll win a prize, and if he gets one or none right, he'll lose, "but if that seems overly harsh, I'm sure the President will step in."

2007-07-23T12:56:00.000-04:00

Our Short National Nightmare Is Over

I'm happy that the two and one-half hour Cheney Presidency on Saturday morning appeared to be uneventful. I was worried he might invade Iran, or something equally reckless. It also doesn't appear that he pardoned Scooter Libby.

However, I haven't heard anything in the news about Patrick Fitzgerald since this weekend after his appearance on NPR's "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me," which sounded pretty entertaining:

[Thursday], in a “rare public appearance,” U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald
“submitted himself to questions as a guest on Chicago Public Radio’s comedic
quiz show, ‘Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me.’” Although “Fitzgerald flunked the quiz, a
(scripted) appeal overturned the answer of the final question, commuting it to a
win. When asked by host Peter Sagal why such a tight-lipped public official
would come on the show, Fitzgerald said, “Literally, I was trying to get tickets
to the show.”

The Chicago Sun-Times reports that in the Chicago-based show’s segment,
“Not My Job,’ “Fitzgerald submitted to a quiz on scooters — such as the Segway.”
After the quiz, host Peter Sagal awarded Fitzgerald a child’s scooter “engraved
with the words: ‘To Patrick Fitzgerald, USA, This one will stay where you put
it‘.”

I also understand that he was asked questions about "Scooter" from the Muppet Show as well.

Hopefully we'll hear from him soon and he didn't get rounded up by Cheney as an "enemy combatant."

2007-07-21T13:46:00.000-04:00

Just Like the President Says

2007-07-19T13:29:00.000-04:00

Apparently He's Not the "Architect" of Love

So reports the Washington Post:

Poor Margaret Spellings! The secretary of education was ready to talk
student loans, No Child Left Behind, blah, blah, blah, when she came into The
Post for an interview with editors and reporters last week. So maybe she was
taken aback when a reporter (not us, we swear!) asked why she turned down Karl
Rove when he asked her out back in the early '80s. (Rove later joked it took
his ego "decades to recover.")

Spellings paused, reports our colleague Amit Paley, then said: "Have
you met Karl Rove?"

"He was so inept and so inartful," she added. "I mean, I couldn't even
understand."

2007-07-19T11:42:00.000-04:00

Billing Records Redux

Back in the 1990s, conservatives were up in arms over the fact that Hillary Clinton had testified that she didn't recall doing legal work for Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan. In fact, I believe she testified that it was the client of another partner at the Rose Law Firm and she didn't recall working on any matters. The billing records, which turned up in 1996, showed that, in actuality, she had billed 60 hours of work over a 15 month period. Many conservatives, including prosecutors working for Ken Starr's investigation in the Office of the Independent Counsel, argued that Clinton should be indicted based on this testimony and the subsequent records.

Fast-forward to 2007. The Republican primary field is in disarray. The front-runner is pro-choice, pro-gay rights, frequently dressed up in drag during his last job and moved in with gay partners in Manhattan's upper west side when his second wife kicked him out of their home after he publicly admitted to having an affair with the woman soon to be his third wife (And marriage to wife #1, who was a cousin, was annulled after over 10 years of marriage).

There are no true conservatives in the field and Republicans nationwide are being dragged down by Bush and the albatross of his disastrous war in Iraq. Suddenly, Fred Thompson emerges and looks to be a possible saving grace. (Hey, he's an actor and Reagan, why, he was an actor too!) Maybe he's the true conservative!

Then it comes out that Thompson lobbied for Planned Parenthood during the first Bush Administration to try to get the Administration to eliminate the so-called "Abortion Gag Rule." Fearing concern from social conservatives, Thompson comes out and says that he does not recall ever doing any lobbying for the group. Planned Parenthood says we had meetings with him and he was hired to lobby for us. But Thompson insists he has no recollection of doing any work for the group.

Then low and behold, the New York Times obtains the billing records for Thompson when he was a lobbying partner at Arent Fox. And guess what? They show that he billed almost two dozen hours for the group during 1991-92:

Billing records show that former Senator Fred Thompson spent nearly 20
hours working as a lobbyist on behalf of a group seeking to ease restrictive
federal rules on abortion counseling in the 1990s, even though he recently
said he did not recall doing any work for the organization.

According to records from Arent Fox, the law firm based in Washington where
Mr. Thompson worked part-time from 1991 to 1994, he charged the organization,
the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, about $5,000
for work he did in 1991 and 1992. The records show that Mr. Thompson, a probable
Republican candidate for president in 2008, spent much of that time in telephone
conferences with the president of the group, and on three occasions he reported
lobbying administration officials on its behalf.

So presumably conservatives will be just as upset with Thompson as they were with Hillary? Right?

2007-07-06T14:47:00.000-04:00

Like Father, Like Son?

George W. Bush's commutation of Libby's sentence has made me think back to George Herbert Walker Bush's most infamous pardon. Bush Sr. pardoned Casper Weinberger on December 24, 1992, twelve days before Weinberger's trial for, ironically enough, lying to Congress and investigators in connection with the Iran Contra investigation was to begin. It marked the first time that a President pardoned someone in whose trial he might have been a witness.

Here's some background about Bush Sr's involvement in the Iran-Contra affair and how the Weinberger pardon saved him a lot of legal headaches himself, including possibly his own indictment:

As Weinberger's private notes contained references to Bush's endorsement of
the secret shipments to Iran, some believe that Bush's pardon was an effort to
prevent an order for Bush to appear before a grand jury or possibly to
avoid an indictment. Weinberger's indictment stated that Weinberger's notes
contradicted Bush's assertions that he had only peripheral knowledge of the arms
for hostages deal since Weinberger's personal notes.

2007-07-06T11:40:00.000-04:00

A Few Edits

David Corn has posted an entertaining column showing how David Brooks' NYT column on the Libby commutation from earlier this week went to print without incorporating his editor's comments. Here's the memo that apparently never found its way to Mr. Brooks:

MEMORANDUM

From: Copy Desk
To: David Brooks
July 3, 2007

Mr. Brooks, our apologies. There was a snafu yesterday, and we neglected to
send you the edited version of your latest column, which contained several
queries from us. What appeared in today's Times was the copy you initially
filed--with all those queries obviously unaddressed. Again, we apologize for the
error and hope this did not cause you any trouble or embarrassment. For the
record, below is the marked-up version of your column.

By DAVID BROOKS

In retrospect, Plamegate was a farce in five acts. The first four were
scabrous, disgraceful and absurd. Justice only reared its head at the end.
[Powerful opening. Setting the bar high. Must be proved.]

The drama opened, as these dark comedies are wont to do, with a strutting
little peacock who went by the unimaginative name of Joe Wilson. [Pot calling
kettle back, Mr. Brooks? Besides, do most "dark comedies" open with plain-named
birds. Query Mr. Rich?]

Mr. Wilson claimed that his wife had nothing to do with his trip to
investigate Iraqi purchases in Niger, though that seems not to have been the
case. [Chronology problem? Mr. Wilson did not "open" this "comedy" with such a
claim. He began the episode by publishing an op-ed--on the very same page your
column appears--that accused the administration of having "twisted" the prewar
intelligence. The issue of his wife's involvement in his mission to Iraq came
later.] He claimed his trip proved Iraq had made no such attempts, though his
own report said nothing of the kind. [He did not claim his trip had
"proved"--your word--the matter. He wrote that after speaking with past and
present officials of Niger and "people associated with the country's uranium
business," he had concluded that "it was highly doubtful that any such
transaction had ever taken place." (We can forward you a copy of his op-ed.)
And, as you know, columnists of the Times are not fact-checked. But we would
point out that in his Times op-ed, Mr. Wilson did not claim, as you state, that
"his trip proved Iraq had made no such attempts" to purchase uranium. He
maintained that "there's simply too much oversight over too small an industry
for a sale to have transpired." And--not to belabor what might be a
fact-checking issue--according to a Senate intelligence committee investigation,
the report written by the CIA on Mr. Wilson's trip "described how the structure
of Niger's uranium mines would make it difficult, if not impossible, for Niger
to sell uranium to any rogue states."]

In short order, Wilson established himself as the charming P.T. Barnum
of the National Security set, an inveterate huckster who could be counted on to
wrap every actual fact in six layers of embellishment. [An idea: explain the
"actual facts" and then list the "six layers of embellishment."] His small part
in the larger fiasco of the Iraq war would not have registered a micron of
attention had the villain of the epic--the vice president--not exercised his
unfailing talent for vindictive self-destruction. [We suggest you peruse some of
the clips of that time. Mr. Wilson's op-ed and his concurrent appearance on Meet
the Press generated more than a "micron of attention"--and that occurred before
the vice president responded to Mr. Wilson's charges.]

Act Two opened with a cast of thousands crowding the stage, filling the air
with fevered vapors and gleeful rage. Perhaps you can remember those days, when
the Plame story pretended to be about the outing of an undercover C.I.A. agent.
[How can a story pretend to be something? And, if memory serves, there was
indeed an outing of an undercover CIA official.] Perhaps you can remember the
howls of outrage from our liberal friends, about the threat to national
security, the secret White House plot to discredit its enemies. [For the
reader's benefit, you might want to note Ms. Wilson's position at the time of
her outing: operations chief for the Joint Task Force on Iraq, a unit of the
Counterproliferation Division of the CIA's clandestine operations directorate.
And you might want to note that her primary duty was overseeing covert
operations designed to gather intelligence on WMDs in Iraq. Then again, you
might not want to note this. Also, you seem to be suggesting there was no secret
White House action to discredit Mr. Wilson. Are you aware that Mr. Libby met
with Judith Miller, a former employee of this paper, and passed her classified
information that he hoped would discredit Mr. Wilson? Are you aware that Mr.
Libby conveyed classified information about Ms. Wilson to Ari Fleischer, then
the White House press secretary, and Mr. Fleischer says he shared this
information with reporters as part of an effort to undermine Mr. Wilson's
charges?]

Perhaps you remember the media stakeouts of Karl Rove's driveway, the
constant perp-walk photos of Rove on his way to and from the grand jury, the
delirious calls from producers (The indictment is coming today! The indictment
is coming today!). [Our readers might also remember that Mr. Rove leaked to Matt
Cooper, then of Time, classified information regarding Ms. Wilson's covert
employment at the CIA. As Mr. Cooper noted in an email, Mr. Rove did so "on
double super secret background." They might possibly also recall that Mr. Rove
confirmed Ms. Wilson's status as a CIA employee for Robert Novak, the first
journalist to disclose her CIA identity.]

There were media types so eager to get Rove, so artificially appalled at
the thought of somebody actually leaking classified information, they were
willing to forgive prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald for throwing journalists in
jail. [You cite many unnamed characters in this "dark comedy." Perhaps you ought
to consider naming some of these "media types."] It was like watching a city of
Ahabs getting deliriously close to the great white whale. [No one on our desk
has read that classic recently. But a quick question: was Moby Dick ever
suspected of having committed a crime?]

That was back when everybody thought Rove was the key leaker. But then it
turned out he wasn't. Richard Armitage was, as Fitzgerald knew from the start.
[See our note above. Mr. Rove did leak to Mr. Cooper and Mr. Novak. It was only
because Time held its story for several days that Mr. Novak had the "scoop" and
beat out Time. Had that not happened, Mr. Rove might have won the title of chief
leaker.]

By the start of Act Three, nobody cared about the outing of a C.I.A. agent.
[Nobody? We are relatively sure that the Wilsons cared, that CIA officials
cared, that Mr. Fitzgerald cared, that congressional Democrats cared, and that
thousands of Americans who followed this story in the media cared.] That part of
the scandal disappeared. And all that was left of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame
were the creepy photos in Vanity Fair. [You might want to consider describing
the photos. A blonde in a convertible might not come across as "creepy" to
all.]

Act Three was the perjury act, and attention shifted to the unlikely figure
of Scooter Libby. [What is "unlikely" about a White House aide accused of
lying?] As Joe Wilson was an absurd man with a plain name, Scooter Libby was a
plain man with an absurd name. [What's in a name?] And the odder thing was that
Libby was the only normal person in the asylum. [Have you read the sex scenes in
his one novel? A girl with a bear?] People who knew him thought him discreet,
honest and admirable. [We hear he was also a quiet man. Mention that?] And yet
the charges were brought and the storm clouds of idiocy gathered once more.
[We're not lawyers, but we do believe that there are instances when criminal
charges are filed against people who other people consider admirable. You might
want to explain why a special prosecutor should not file obstruction of justice
charges against an official suspected of lying to investigators.]

Republicans who'd worked themselves up into a spittle-spewing rage because
Bill Clinton lied under oath were appalled that anybody would bother with poor
Libby over lying under oath. [Is there a continuity issue here? Above you
contend that the charge was a product of idiocy. Shouldn't that justifiably
cause Republicans to be appalled?] Democrats who were outraged that Bill Clinton
was hounded for something as trivial as perjury were furious that Scooter Libby
might not be ruined for a crime as heinous as perjury. [You seem to be skating
past the case the Democrats made: lying to the FBI during a national security
investigation is different from lying about sex in a civil proceeding.] It was
an orgy of shamelessness. The God of Self-Respect took sabbatical. [Any word on
what the God of Thou Shall Not Lie did at this time?]

The trial and sentencing, Act Four, was, to be honest, somewhat
anticlimactic. Fitzgerald, having lost all perspective, demanded Libby get a
harsh sentence as punishment for crimes he had not been convicted of. [We
realize you were not in the courtroom during the trial, but news reports and
transcripts show that Mr. Fitzgerald argued that committing perjury during a
national security investigation was a serious matter and that a stiff sentence
was warranted for that crime.] The judge, casting himself as David against
Goliath, demonstrated an impressive capacity for talking about himself. [Ditto
the previous remark. Again, we do not fact-check columnists for the Times, but
one of us did call--merely out of curiosity--several reporters who covered the
case, and they told us that Judge Reggie Walton did not cast himself as a
David-type figure, nor did he talk about himself more than the average federal
district court judge. You might want to reconsider a characterization not
supported by actual eyewitnesses.]

And finally, yesterday, came Act Five, and a paradox. Scooter Libby emerged
as the least absurd character in the entire drama, and yet he was the one who
committed a crime. [Another continuity problem? If the chief of staff to the
vice president commits a crime, shouldn't there be a thorough investigation and
even a rigmarole?] President Bush entered the stage like a character from
another world, a world in which things make sense. [A world like Baghdad?]

His decision to commute Libby's sentence but not erase his conviction
was exactly right. It punishes him for his perjury, but not for the
phantasmagorical political farce that grew to surround him. It takes away his
career, but not his family. [Fact: after Mr. Libby was indicted and resigned
from Mr. Cheney's staff, he was named a fellow at the Hudson Institute, a
conservative think tank. The Washington Post reported that his salary is
probably at least $160,000--perhaps more. Most readers would think that with
such a position Mr. Libby's career is not over.]

Of course, the howlers howl. That is their assigned posture in this drama.
They entered howling, they will leave howling and the only thing you can count
on is their anger has been cynically manufactured from start to finish. [Once
again, continuity. If Mr. Libby did commit a crime--which you bravely
acknowledge he did--then shouldn't anger be an appropriate response. Who are the
howlers whose anger was "cynically manufactured"? And who did that
manufacturing? Specifics would help.]

The farce is over. It has no significance. Nobody but Libby's family will
remember it in a few weeks time. Everyone else will have moved on to other
fiascos, other poses, fresher manias. [Good teaser of an ending. It's as if you
expect another Bush aide to be caught lying under oath.]

2007-07-06T00:05:00.001-04:00

Exhibit A in Obstruction of Justice Prosecution of Bush and Cheney

Josh Marshall, as usual, sums up the outrage over the Libby commutation the best:

Setting aside whether Scooter Libby should spend 0 days in jail for what
most people spend from 1 to 3 years in jail, the key here is that it's
inappropriate for the president to pardon or commute a sentence in a case in
which he (i.e., the president) is a party to the same underlying crime. Because
it amounts to obstruction of justice.

It's really not that complicated.

And here's why Bush is involved, shown through Cheney's own handwritten note, introduced as an exhibit in the Libby trial:

Later that fall, as the scandal erupted, Libby asked Cheney to ensure that the
White House spokesperson publicly exonerated him, as he had earlier done for
Karl Rove. To make sure this happened, the Vice President started to write a
note, "Not going to protect one staffer [meaning Rove] and sacrifice the guy the
President..." But then Cheney stopped. He crossed out the first four letters of
the word, "President" and finished the sentence: "...that was asked to stick his
neck in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others." He came close
to writing that President Bush had asked Libby to take the lead on responding to
Wilson. And then, according to some trial testimony, he got Bush to make sure
Libby got his public exoneration, a public claim that Libby had nothing to do
with the leak of Plame's identity.

It would be nice if somebody asked the Vice President why he started to write that "the President" was the one who ordered Libby to take these actions, but I understand that Cheney is not taking too many questions these days. Hopefully, for all of our sakes, this Administration is finally in its "last throes," as the Vice President might say.

2007-07-03T23:22:00.000-04:00

Whoops

One of the arguments that Bush, Tony Snow, et al. have been making in favor of Bush's act to commute the prison sentence of Libby is that Libby still needs to pay a $250,000 fine and he must serve two years probation. Both of these justifications, upon greater strutiny, prove to be paper thin.

First, Libby's legal defense fund has over $5 million. Libby ain't paying a cent.

Second, Judge Walton issued an order today in the Libby case after Bush's act of obstruction of justice. (Walton does not seem amused, either).

Essentially, what Walton says is that although the President expressly stated in his commutation that Libby still serve his supervised release, the statute governing supervised release requires a prison sentence be served prior to having any supervised release. Thus, Walton suggests, it's not possible to serve supervised release without serving some prison time. (And look at footnote one too). So, Libby may not be doing that either.

Nicely done, Mr. President. I guess that's what happens when you ignore the proper legal channels, including the Justice Department and prosecutor. Let's not forget, Bush was rejected by the University of Texas law school before he was accepted into Harvard Business School.

2007-07-03T19:25:00.000-04:00

Obstruction of Justice

On the obstruction of justice point made below, here's an good piece by the excellent Libby blogger Marcy Wheeler (who liveblogged the Libby trial as emptywheel for firedoglake.com). It lays out the obstruction argument by Bush and Cheney quite nicely.

2007-07-03T14:32:00.000-04:00

Libby and Paris

As usual, Josh Marshall has it just right:

Paris Hilton did more time than Scooter Libby.

And it's all due to President Bush. There really can be no serious debate that Libby wasn't lying to protect Vice President Cheney. His lies were too obvious. Cheney was in Fitzgerald's sights and Libby fell on his sword. And Cheney rewarded him.

And the same people who are praising Bush were all over Clinton for how his lies were a stain on American justice. Amazingly, Bush was elected in 2000 by pledging to restore "honesty and integrity" to the Oval Office. Truly stunning. And outrageous. Those who say Bush became part of the obstruction of justice today have a point.

2007-07-02T11:50:00.000-04:00

My Apologies for the Paucity of Posts

I've been off with the family on our summer vacation in Maine. We were in Kennebunkport but we got out before Bush and Putin arrived. I'll try to do better over the rest of the summer.

A few items in the meantime.

First, if you haven't seen it yet, the Washington Post series on Vice President Cheney's power grab is definitely worth a read. Anyone who reads this blog regularly will not be surprised by the revelations but it confirms Cheney's role in determining the course of every decision made the Administration since 2001.

Next, what is wrong with these guys and animals? First it was Bill Frist, who we learned used to adopt cats from the pound when he was in medical school only to then practice dissection once he got them home.

Now it's Mitt Romney's turn, as he apparently went Chevy Chase to Aunt Edna on the family pet, a la National Lampoon's Vacation (and I recall that Clark Griswold didn't have a real good record with Aunt Edna's dog either).

Romney strapped the family dog to the roof of their car for family trips. Nice. According to Romney, his position (this week at least) is that the dog "likes fresh air."

And even more incredibly, he apparently is citing the time that he pulled the car over because his kids noticed a running brown liquid rolling down the side of the car for where the dog was situated as an example in his leadership and crisis management. Shit happens, huh? Animal cruelty happens too.

Unbelievable.

2007-06-05T20:01:00.000-04:00

Giving Candy to a Baby

Before sentencing Scooter Libby to 30 months in prison today, Judge Walton released the letters that were submitted to the Court by people vouching both for and against Libby's character. There were the usual suspects: John Bolton, Don Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. (No Cheney however). You can read the whole collection here.

Mary Matalin submitted a letter that was co-signed by her husband James Carville, but was clearly written by her in which she makes a curious argument as to why the Judge should be lenient on poor ol' Scooter, arguing that because, when Matalin, Libby and her kids were trapped at one of Cheney's "undisclosed locations" on a Halloween, Libby took time away from his work to help the children celebrate Halloween and now her children love him. And, according, to Matalin, since children are the truest judge of character, this shows what kind of person Libby is.

Because he gave some Tootsie Rolls to her kids.

Now, mind you, I think Matalin viewed perjury and obstruction of justice a little bit differently in 1998 and 1999.

2007-05-30T19:01:00.000-04:00

The Speech

It's undeniable that Barack Obama's Keynote Address at the 2004 Democratic Convention launched him into super-stardom, without which he would not be running for president today.

Here's a very interesting article describing how Obama was chosen to give the speech, and how the speech was developed by Obama, who wrote it himself.

2007-05-24T10:43:00.000-04:00

The Godfather Part IV: Fredo's Revenge

In my earlier post about James Comey's dramatic account of the Gonzalez/Card visit to Ashcroft's hospital bed in 2004, I alluded to the similarities between that story and the hospital scene in the Godfather. Now someone has put together the video clips as well. (I like the Wolfowitz reference at the end too).

2007-05-23T18:10:00.000-04:00

What's At Stake in '08

I wanted to draw people's attention to this excellent analysis by Tom Goldstein at his Supreme Court blog about the potential for at least three retirements (all from the left) on the Supreme Court after the '08 election and what it could mean for the future ideological tilt of the Court. Most fascinating (and scary) to me was the prospect of a Souter retirement. I had not heard that Souter was contemplating retirement. It's worth a read.

2007-05-17T11:03:00.000-04:00

Bedside Manner

Jim Comey's testimony this week before the Senate Judiciary Committee was nothing if not riveting, as he detailed the nighttime visit by Alberto Gonzalez and Andy Card to the hospital bed of John Ashcroft in the spring of 2004 to try to get a very ill Ashcroft to sign off on the Administration's warrantless surveillance program after the DOJ, under Acting AG Comey, had refused to sign off on the legality of the program as currently constituted. (Here's some video.)

The episode Comey described reminded me of the hospital scene in the Godfather, where a second attempt on the Don's life is thwarted by Michael when men rush in try to get the striken Don's room. (This would make Comey Michael and Gonzalez and Card Sollozzo and corrupt police officer McCluskey). All we had missing was Card slugging Comey in the eye:

In hair-raising testimony before a Senate committee yesterday, Jim Comey,
the former No. 2 official at the Justice Department, described what might be
called the Wednesday Night Massacre of March 10, 2004. Gonzales, then the White
House counsel, and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card staged a bedside
ambush of Attorney General John Ashcroft while he lay in intensive care. Comey,
serving as acting attorney general during Ashcroft's incapacitation, testified
about how, on a tip from Ashcroft's wife, he intercepted the pair in Ashcroft's
hospital room.

"The door opened and in walked Mr. Gonzales, carrying an envelope, and Mr.
Card," Comey told the spellbound senators. "They came over and stood by the
bed." They wanted Ashcroft to sign off on an eavesdropping plan that Comey and
others at the Justice Department had already called legally
indefensible.

Ashcroft "lifted his head off the pillow and in very strong terms expressed
his view of the matter" -- that Comey was right. "And as he laid back down, he
said, 'But that doesn't matter, because I'm not the attorney general. There is
the attorney general.' And he pointed to me."
Gonzales and Card "did not
acknowledge me," Comey testified. "They turned and walked from the
room."...

Despite public pleas from a "lonely" Specter, the other Republicans on the
committee didn't risk an appearance. Even the White House declined to counter
Comey, who has a reputation for honesty. "You've got somebody who has splashy
testimony on Capitol Hill -- good for him," presidential press secretary Tony
Snow dodged.

In truth, nothing Snow could have said would have matched Comey's
testimony. Comey recounted how, while driving home at 8 p.m. on that day in
2004, he got word that Mrs. Ashcroft had received a call -- possibly from
President Bush himself -- to say Gonzales and Card were coming.

"I told my security detail that I needed to get to George Washington
Hospital immediately. They turned on the emergency equipment and drove very
quickly," Comey testified. "I got out of the car and ran up -- literally ran up
the stairs with my security detail. . . . I raced to the hospital room,
entered." The room was dark, and Ashcroft was "pretty bad off."

In Comey's account, he got FBI Director Robert Mueller to tell his agents
guarding Ashcroft not to let Card and Gonzales evict Comey from the room. A few
minutes after the bedside confrontation, Card called the hospital. He "demanded
that I come to the White House immediately," Comey testified. "I responded that,
after the conduct I had just witnessed, I would not meet with him without a
witness present."

And Card's stunning response?

"He replied, 'What conduct? We were just there to wish him well.' " After Card
demanded to know if Comey was "refusing to come to the White House," Comey, with
the solicitor general, finally arrived at the West Wing at 11 p.m. His narrative
covered the next two days, ending when Bush intervened and avoided a spate of
resignations.

And this response by Comey to a question by Arlen Specter really sums things up:

Specter invoked the firing of the Watergate prosecutor. "It has some
characteristics of the Saturday Night Massacre," he said. And the senator left
little doubt about whom he blamed.

"Can you give us an example of an exercise of good judgment by Alberto
Gonzales?" he asked.

This time, Comey had no narrative. "Let the record show a very long pause,"
Specter said.

2007-05-10T20:48:00.000-04:00

Rudy and the Yanks

The Village Voice has a fascinating article about Rudy Giuliani and his Yankees obsession. It appears that Rudy may have broken multiple laws (laws that he vigilantly prosecuted against other city officials while Mayor) by accepting a litany of gifts from the Yankees over his tenure as Mayor, including four World Series rings valued at over $200,000.

With Giuliani's name inscribed in the 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2000
diamond-and-gold rings, memorabilia and baseball experts say they are
collectively worth a minimum of $200,000. The Yankees say that Giuliani did pay
for his rings—but only $16,000, and years after he had left office. Anyone
paying for the rings is as unusual as a mayor getting one, since neither the
Yankees nor any other recent champion have sold rings to virtually anyone. The
meager payment, however, is less than half of the replacement value of the
rings, and that's a fraction of the market price, especially with the added
value of Giuliani's name.

What's more troubling is that Giuliani's receipt of the rings may be a
serious breach of the law, and one that could still be prosecuted. New York
officials are barred from taking a gift of greater than $50 value from anyone
doing business with the city, and under Giuliani, that statute was enforced
aggressively against others. His administration forced a fire department chief,
for example, to retire, forfeit $93,105 in salary, and pay a $6,000 fine for
taking Broadway tickets to two shows and a free week in a ski condo from a city
vendor. The city's Conflicts of Interest Board (COIB) has applied the gift rule
to discounts as well, unless the cheaper rate "is available generally to all
government employees." When a buildings department deputy commissioner was
indicted in 2000 for taking Mets and Rangers tickets, as well as a family trip
to Florida, from a vendor, an outraged Giuliani denounced his conduct as
"reprehensible," particularly "at high levels in city agencies," and said that
such officials had to be "singled out" and "used as examples."

City officials are also required to disclose gifts from anyone but
relatives on forms filed with the COIB, something Giuliani did not do with any
of the rings. Giuliani certainly used to sound serious about the need for full
public disclosure. In 1989, he denounced his mayoral opponent, David Dinkins,
for failing to disclose frequent-flier tickets to France given to him by a
friend, even though the friend did no business with the city; Giuliani called it
an example of "arrogance and disrespect for legal and ethical obligations."

It also appears that Giuliani received the rings while Mayor, did not pay for them, and then tried to cover up the gifts by making under-valued payments after the fact, including paying for his 1996 ring in... 2004, when he now claims he received it. Not so, say those in the know:

But when did Giuliani get that 1996 ring? Did he, as the Yankee spokeswoman
suggests, receive it only when he made a token payment for it in 2004, after he
was no longer mayor?
Not according to the man who actually made the ring,
William Sandoval.

Sandoval says he's made rings for 26 years. After attending a
stone-setter school, he went to work for L.G. Balfour in Attleboro,
Massachusetts, which manufactured sports and school rings at its plant there for
84 years. "I was a special maker, doing diamond settings and customer repair,"
the Guatemala-born jeweler, now with his own small business in Rhode Island,
tells the Voice. "I did the Yankees, the Celtics, and the Baltimore Orioles.
Balfour liked my work. I did every championship ring." He particularly recalls
the 1996 ring he did for the Yankees. Fifty percent larger than any previous
team ring, the famous interlocking NY at the center was made of 23 diamonds, one
for each title, encircled by the words World Champion. With the Series trophy
and courage and heart on one side, the ring also featured the Yankee Stadium
facade, the Yankees top hat, and the word tradition on the other.

It was easy to remember because it was Sandoval's last championship ring.
Balfour was acquired by a New York investment firm in 1996 and closed its
Attleboro plant to move to Texas in late 1997, laying off hundreds of workers.
Its successor firm, American Achievement, still does Yankee work.

Sandoval distinctly remembers that they made a ring for Giuliani because,
he says, he crafted it himself. Asked if he was certain if the Giuliani ring was
made at the same time as the rest, he says: "It has to be at the same time."
Asked again if he "definitely" remembers making a ring for Rudy Giuliani,
Sandoval replies: "Yes. Oh, yes." His memory is confirmed by a former Balfour
vice president who oversaw sports sales and asked that his name not be used. "I
honestly think that Giuliani did get a ring," he says. "The only people who
could get rings had to have a letter signed by Steinbrenner on Yankee
stationery." Attempts to get the current manufacturer to confirm that rings were
made for Giuliani for the other three championships were unsuccessful; the sales
representative for the firm referred all questions to the Yankees.

Two other sources who asked that they not be named recall the 1996 ring. A
member of Giuliani's police detail remembers attending a barbecue at Gracie
Mansion after the ticker tape parade for the Yankees on October 29, 1996.
Giuliani was so involved in the Yankee celebration, he personally reviewed the
guest lists for the barbecue and an earlier event at City Hall. A photo of him
in Yankee pinstripes appeared on the passes for attendees. His two prime
Democratic opponents for the 1997 campaign had to settle for seats in the crowd
at City Hall, though both were borough presidents, one from the Bronx. "George
and he went into the Green Room at one point," the ex-cop recalls, referring to
a den where Giuliani frequently entertained friends and close associates. "They
were gone for about 15 minutes. He came out and said to us, 'I'm getting a ring.
George is giving me a ring.' " Though the cop can't recall seeing the ring after
that, he says that another Giuliani aide told him that the mayor got it, as well
as other rings.

That aide, who worked in City Hall throughout the Giuliani years, says the
mayor got the ring sometime in 1997, around the time that the players got their
rings in mid May. "The ring was kept in the second or third drawer of Beth
Petrone's cabinet in Rudy's outer office at City Hall," says the aide, referring
to Giuliani's executive assistant, who is currently the office manager for
Bracewell & Giuliani, the Texas-based law firm that Giuliani has joined. "He
actually wore it about once a year. He may have worn it during the playoffs in
1997 as a lucky charm.

"The other three rings came collectively," the aide continues. "I saw them
in wooden boxes with Plexiglas windows. They were either kept in the mayor's
personal office on the main floor or his downstairs office. He didn't get the
1998 and 1999 rings as they were handed out. They were just given to him
sometime in 2001 as a collection." The 2000 ring wasn't presented to players
until late July 2001, so Giuliani's rings would've arrived sometime after that.
Though gifts to mayors are routinely logged on a City Hall list, Giuliani listed
only one Steinbrenner gift among his more than 8,500 gifts bequeathed to the
city: a videotape and booklet from Joe DiMaggio Day.

This aide and other sources close to City Hall recall that Giuliani's name
was misspelled on one of the rings, returned to the Yankees, and replaced. News
accounts of the 1999 ring presentation in 2000 indicated that there were
mistakes on six rings, but the only one specified in the stories was that Roger
Clemens's uniform number was wrong. The sources say that Carmela Piazza, who ran Giuliani's correspondence office at City Hall, oversaw the return of the ring,
another indication that it was given to Giuliani while he was still in office.
Contacted by the Voice, Piazza, who is a current donor to his presidential
campaign, said repeatedly that she couldn't remember anything about the
incident. A Yankee official initially confirmed that there was a spelling
problem with one of the Giuliani rings, but later said he could not definitely
determine if it happened. Spokeswoman McGillion, who was receiving limited
information from the Yankees, acknowledges that "another person" affiliated with
the team "hinted this to us."

However, Rudy's freeloading goes beyond diamond-encrusted World Series rings:

Frequently ensconced in George Steinbrenner's eight-seat 31A box and four
Legends 31AA seats next to the Yankee dugout while he was mayor, Giuliani and
his many guests were also repeatedly given Yankee jackets, caps, autographed
balls, and other gifts. "He would require gifts at every game," says a former
close Giuliani aide, whose account is supported by both a Yankee source and an
ex-cop assigned to the mayor. He even wanted a fitted cap with the World Series
logo and other special caps, and the equipment management had to reach into the
players' uniform case to find one for Giuliani's large head. The Giuliani group
also raided the closet in Steinbrenner's office, even taking DiMaggio jackets
with red piping for the mayor and guests. "They finally turned the spigot off in
2000 and said we just can't do it anymore," the aide recalls. The cop remembers
jackets and balls—some signed by all the Yankees—stuffed in the back of the city
cars they used to drive back from the stadium....

With tickets for Giuliani's box and Legends seats selling for $50 to
$200 for regular-season games, and with Giuliani and an average of eight guests
attending a minimum of 20 games a year, the eight-year price tag for the mayor,
including the far more expensive postseason games he never missed, would have
been an estimated $120,000. That's quite a load on an average salary of
$150,000. Obviously, any substantial tickets and assorted gifts to the mayor or
his city employee guests would also have run afoul of the $50 COIB limit.

At one point, according to the close aide, George Pataki's office asked if
the seats could be "split in half, either horizontally or vertically" so the
governor could get access. "Absolutely not," was Rudy's answer. What about just
two of the seats? Another no. Asked if he'd ever sat in the prized seats, Gene
Budig, who was American League president for most of the Giuliani years, tells
the Voice: "I got to sit in seats a couple of times when he wasn't there, but
never with him. The seats were practically in the dugout." The prominence of the
seats and the success of the team quickly catapulted Giuliani into prime-time
sports hero status. He even managed to get himself interviewed on camera in the
locker-room champagne celebrations of the great victories, running right in
through the dugout after the game. That was in addition to his regular
fifth-inning appearance on the Yankee radio broadcast.

And I found this part to be particularly interesting, given Rudy's strained family relationships with his children and his ex-wife as a result of his extra-marital affairs conducted in open while Mayor:

Giuliani's sense of entitlement about the Yankees was so deep that he frequently
used a police boat to haul himself and his guests to games, using either the
slip near Gracie Mansion or the Wall Street/South Street one near City Hall. In
his own book, Leadership, he revealed that the first Yankee game he ever took
Judi Nathan to was David Cone's perfect game in July 1999, almost a full year
before he announced at a press conference that she was his "very good friend."
Judi and her girlfriends became part of his stadium entourage, just as his
previous very good friend, Cristyne Lategano, had been in the earlier years.
When Giuliani's wife Donna Hanover barred Lategano from the box if her son
Andrew was at the game, the young press aide sequestered herself in
Steinbrenner's suite, extending Giuliani's reach to the home-plate section of
the stadium as well. Judi, too, eventually became a presence in the Steinbrenner
suite.

Just to put the whole thing in context, compare how Rudy's successor, Mayor Bloomberg handles Yankees tickets:

The Yankees say that Mayor Bloomberg has purchased four season tickets in
Section 53, behind the Steinbrenner box that Giuliani still uses, and pays even
when he attends in his official capacity. Bloomberg does not allow anyone on the
city payroll to use his seats because he regards it as granting an improper
benefit to a subordinate. (The Yankee spokeswoman declined to characterize the
difference between how the two mayors dealt with seating at the stadium.)
Giuliani's periodic payments for some of these tickets may also have had a tax
motive. Had he paid nothing for the seats, he would have had to treat the entire
Yankee goodie bag as income.

2007-04-30T21:55:00.000-04:00

Maybe They Can Also Find A Few More McGwire HRs From 1998 To Top 73. Oh, Wait...

Breaking sports news from the Onion:

MLB Credits Hank Aaron With 50 Lost Home Runs

MILWAUKEE—In what Major League Baseball officials are calling a "long
overdue correction of a gross oversight," Commissioner Bud Selig announced
Tuesday the discovery that Hall of Famer Hank Aaron had in fact accumulated 50
previously unaccounted-for home runs during his illustrious 22-year baseball
career, bringing his once record total of 755 to an even higher 805 and putting
the all-time home-run record perhaps forever out of reach.

"Hank Aaron is a hero, an excellent man, and a great ambassador for the
game of baseball," Selig said during a press conference to announce the
findings. "We're proud to have finally set things right, hopefully once and for
all. And I have to tell you, some of the home runs that we discovered were just
monster shots. One was hit off of [Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher] Harvey Haddix
that went 576 feet, and Hank wasn't even that big of a guy. Just naturally
strong and gifted, I guess."

Haddix was unavailable for comment, as he passed away in 1994.

According to Selig, a committee of sports journalists and baseball
historians was set up during the off-season to investigate, with Selig's
oversight, whether there was any substance to a rumor that began circulating
last summer concerning Aaron having hit more homeruns than those credited to him
in the record books. Though Selig said he couldn't recall the date the committee
was established, he believes it was in or around the time he approved the San
Francisco Giants' highly publicized signing of Barry Zito.

The committee's 30-page report points out several key factors that combined
to increase Aaron's home run total. For example, in 1958, home runs hit during
both the first week of spring training and those hit in pre-game batting
practice during away games in the third week of August were added to a player's
career numbers. In addition, home runs hit during the 1971 All-Star Game should
have been tallied.

Aaron, coincidentally, did hit a home run in that game.

"We are here today to the right the wrongs," Selig said. "This is America's
national pastime, and its players, fans, and all citizens deserve to have a
record book in which they can take great pride. So if we didn't count Hank
Aaron's five-homer outing during 1964's famous 'Empty Stadium' game, I wouldn't
be able to live with myself."

Furthermore, the report continued, a third of the home runs hit by players
who participated in the television series Home Run Derby, a show on which Aaron
appeared several times, should have been counted. In addition, during the second
half of the 1962 season, balls that bounced over the outfield fence should have
been counted as home runs, and foul balls that were hit behind the batter but
cleared the netting intended to protect fans seated behind home plate were also
home runs. That being the case, league scorekeepers now say Aaron had his best
year in 1962, hitting 65 home runs—20 more than originally thought.

Though there has been some negative reaction towards the announcement of
Aaron's new record, mostly from fans in northern California, the news has been
received very well nationwide.

"This is the best thing that has happened to baseball in years," said New
York resident Tom Plaitano, 63. "I remember watching Hank Aaron as a kid, and
even though I don't recall a time when all home runs hit off Sandy Koufax
counted for two, I don't really care. This decision just makes sense to
me."

"The number 805 will go down as the most prestigious number in sports,"
said Selig, adding that there is a strong possibility still more of Aaron's home
runs could come to the surface during this season, and maybe even the next
several seasons to come. "It's not out of the question that Hank could have,
say, 900 home runs by the time our investigation is all said and done."

"Either way, the all-time home-run record couldn't be held by a more
dignified and honorable man," Selig added.

The committee's report has caused quite a shakeup to the list of baseball's
all-time home-run leaders. Aaron, while keeping his record, is not even the
biggest benefactor of the findings; as of now Aaron is first with 805, Willie
Mays has jumped to second with 800, Frank Robinson is third with 798, Harmon
Killebrew is fourth with 797, and Reggie Jackson, Mickey Mantle, Ernie Banks,
Ted Williams, and Willie McCovey are tied for fifth at 796.

According to Selig, early results of another investigation may net Babe
Ruth as many as 74 additional home runs, Mike Schmidt an estimated 124, and Ken
Griffey Jr. a possible 200, while players such as Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa,
Rafael Palmeiro, and Barry Bonds will probably be knocked even further down the
list.

2007-04-27T16:28:00.000-04:00

No Law and Order

I saw recently that Fred Thompson said in an interview with Chris Wallace that, if he were president, he would pardon Libby immediately. (No surprise there, I guess, given his involvement in the Libby Defense Trust). Here’s the relevant section of the interview:

WALLACE: And you helped raise millions of dollars for his extraordinary
legal expenses. Would President Thompson — you like the sound of that probably.
Would President Thompson pardon Libby now or would you wait until all of his
legal appeals are exhausted?

THOMPSON: I'd do it now.

WALLACE: Because?

THOMPSON: I'd do it now. This is a trial that never would have been brought
in any other part of the world. This is a miscarriage of justice.

One man and his wife and 14-year-old and 10-year-old children are bearing
the brunt of a political maelstrom here that produced something that never
should have come about.

These people knew in the very beginning — the Justice Department, this
Justice Department and the special counsel knew in the very beginning that the
thing that was creating the controversy, who leaked Valerie Plame's name, did
not constitute a violation of the law.

And then they knew that it — someone did leak the name. And it was Mr.
Armitage. It wasn't Scooter Libby.

But he evidently wasn't a designated bad guy, so they passed over that and
spent the next year drilling in a dry well and finally got some inconsistencies
or some failure to remember out of Mr. Libby and made a prosecution out of it
and went to trial on a he-said, she-said perjury case and faulty memory, when
practically every witness in the trial either had inconsistent statements, told
the FBI one thing, told the grand jury something else, inconsistent between the
witnesses that were presented at the case, and sometimes both.

And yet at the end of the day, the only person that the jury got an
opportunity to pass judgment on was Scooter Libby. It's not fair. And I would do
anything that I could to alleviate that.

But that made me wonder if Thompson felt the same way about things when the shoe was on the other foot, and it was Bill Clinton who had been caught in a lie when there was no underlying crime. And, surprise, surprise, Thompson supported impeachment and here's how his finished his speech on the floor of the Senate:

At a time when all of our institutions are under assault, when the Presidency
has been diminished and the Congress is viewed with skepticism, our Judiciary
and our court system have remarkably maintained the public's confidence. Now the
President's actions are known to every school child in America. And in the midst
of these partisan battles, many people still think this matter is just `lying
about sex.'
But little by little, there will be a growing appreciation that it
is about much more than that. And in years to come, in every court house in
every town in America, juries, judges, and litigants will have the President's
actions as a bench mark against which to measure any attempted subversion of the
judicial process. The notion that anyone, no matter how powerless, can get equal
justice will be seen by some as a farce.
And our rule of law--the principle that many other countries still dream about--the principle that sets us apart, will have been severely damaged. If this does not constitute damage to our government and our society, I cannot imagine what does. And for that he should be convicted.

Rule of law, indeed. But apparently that sacred principle can be applied on a case by case basis. Ah, the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

2007-04-26T21:28:00.000-04:00

Thrown Under the Bus

No surprise that George Tenet is fighting back against the White House (and Dick Cheney and Condi Rice in particular) for making him the scapegoat for the use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq. Here's what he tells 60 Minutes about his infamous "slam dunk" comment:

Ex-CIA Director George Tenet says the way the Bush administration has used
his now famous "slam dunk" comment — which he admits saying in reference to
making the public case for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — is both
disingenuous and dishonorable.

It also ruined his reputation and his career, he tells 60 Minutes Scott
Pelley in his first network television interview. Pelley's report will be
broadcast Sunday, April 29, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

The phrase "slam dunk" didn't refer to whether Saddam Hussein actually had
WMDs, says Tenet; the CIA thought he did. He says he was talking about what
information could be used to make that case when he uttered those words. "We can
put a better case together for a public case. That's what I meant," explains
Tenet.

Months later, when no WMDs were found in Iraq, someone leaked the story to
Washington Post editor Bob Woodward, who then wrote about a Dec. 21, 2002, White House meeting in which the CIA director reportedly "rose up, threw his arms in the air [and said,] 'It's a slam dunk case.' " Tenet says it was a passing
comment, made well after major decisions had already been made to mobilize the
nation for war. The leak effectively made him a scapegoat for the invasion and
ended his career.

"At the end of the day, the only thing you have … is your reputation built
on trust and your personal honor and when you don't have that anymore, well,
there you go," Tenet tells Pelley.

He says he doesn't know who leaked it but says there were only a handful of
people in the room.

"It's the most despicable thing that ever happened to me," Tenet says. "You
don't do this. You don't throw somebody overboard just because it's a
deflection. Is that honorable? It's not honorable to me."

Tenet says to have the president base his entire decision to go to war on
such a remark is unbelievable. "So a whole decision to go to war, when all of
these other things have happened in the run-up to war? You make mobilization
decisions, you've looked at war plans," says Tenet. "I'll never believe that
what happened that day informed the president's view or belief of the legitimacy
or the timing of this war. Never!"

Tenet says what bothers him most is that senior administration officials
like Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continue
using "slam dunk" as a talking point.

"And the hardest part of all this has been just listening to this for
almost three years, listening to the vice president go on 'Meet the Press' on
the fifth year [anniversary] of 9/11 and say, 'Well, George Tenet said slam
dunk' as if he needed me to say 'slam dunk' to go to war with Iraq," he tells
Pelley. "And you listen to that and they never let it go. I mean, I became
campaign talk. I was a talking point. 'Look at the idiot [who] told us and we
decided to go to war.' Well, let's not be so disingenuous … Let's everybody just
get up and tell the truth. Tell the American people what really happened."

The timing on the "slam dunk" leak never made sense. Whoever leaked it Woodward tried to make it seem like Bush was undecided about the war at the time and Tenet's comment pushed him over the line, but the truth is that Bush and Cheney had made up their mind about going to war in Iraq months earlier.

2007-04-16T10:53:00.000-04:00

Slam Dunk?

George Tenet's much awaited book, "At The Center of the Storm," is due out soon (April 29) and if Al Kamen's column in the Washington Post is any indication, it should be the most interesting read by a former administration insider since Richard Clarke:

The drums have begun sounding for the long-awaited book by former CIA
director George Tenet, in which he gives his take on pre-9/11 days and on
Saddam's huge cache of weapons of mass destruction.

And the drums are saying that Tenet is not going to get too many
Christmas cards from Vice President Cheney's office after they read "At the
Center of the Storm." Folks from down the river at the Pentagon, including
former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz-- a guy who's already going
through a rough patch -- and former defense undersecretary Douglas Feith, might
also get some heartburn.

Former secretary of state Colin Powell comes out fine. Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, who was President Bush's key adviser in engineering the Iraq
invasion, doesn't come out so fine. Not fine at all.

The White House definitely won't be overjoyed, we're hearing. Tenet even
takes some shots at himself and for the first time explains his astute assurance
that "it's a slam-dunk case" when Bush asked him how solid the WMD evidence
was.

Tenet has never really explained his views on that comment. The 500-page
book -- or more likely his "60 Minutes" interview on April 29, the day before
the book goes on sale -- will be the first time he goes over that.

Tenet, who ran the CIA from July 1997 to July 2004, did the first of two
days of taping last week at Georgetown University, where he's teaching.

Tenet is a very interesting figure in this administration. A holdover
from the Clinton Administration, it appears that Tenet was overly grateful to
Bush for not firing him after the 9/11 Debacle and thus may have been overly
accomodating to hawks like Cheney in the run-up to the Iraq war.

However, he also took the blame for things that were not his fault (i.e. the 16 words in Bush's SOTU about Niger uranium) and the White House put a shiv in his back with the "slam dunk" comment. Based on his comments in other books like Ron Suskind's "The One Percent Doctrine" and "Hubris" by Michael Isakoff and David Corn, Tenet feels that comment was taken out of context by the White House to provide Bush and Cheney political cover. The White House will not be pleased with this book.

2007-04-14T20:44:00.000-04:00

Quien Es Mas Macho?

I'd really be remiss if I didn't post a link to the recent fight between Geraldo Rivera and Bill O'Reilly. O'Reilly was trying to use a tragic drunk driving accident as an excuse to hammer away at illegal immigrants and Geraldo wouldn't let him get away with it.

O'Reilly really blows his stack and becomes pretty unhinged. Someone should get that man a falafel.

Of course, this reminds me of my favorite Bill O'Reilly smackdown of all time: Al Franken, at the launch of his book, Lies and Lying Liars Who Tell Them, telling a great story about O'Reilly lying and misrepresenting at Book Expo 2003, with O'Reilly sitting next to him with steam coming out of his ears. The whole segment, found under the "Book and Author Luncheon" on May 31 at the link above, is really worth a watch. (Franken's speech, which is fantastic, begins 45 minutes in, but if you want to just see his O'Reilly take-down skip to 58 minutes in). My favorite part is when Franken, after really taking O'Reilly to task, leans over and asks O'Reilly if he could take a sip of his water.

2007-04-13T11:46:00.000-04:00

Is It Any Wonder that The Democrats are Requiring Him to be Under Oath with A Transcript?

The latest news about Karl Rove is that he may have personally deleted all of his e-mails on a RNC account that he used for his political "business," although he knew (at least from the Fitzgerald investigation) that those e-mails should be saved. Kinda makes you wonder how bad those e-mails were, huh?

But what I was really struck with this week about Rove was a speech that he gave a year ago about "voter fraud." "Voter fraud" is a codeword used by Republicans as a justification for voter intimidation and voter suppression schemes, as we've seen in the last few elections. Rove of all people has had a particular interest in this topic.

But what struck me from Rove's speech was his discussion of the 2000 election and the Florida recount in response to a question from the audience. I've commented on this blog before about how some conservatives seem to have a world-view completely divorced from reality. Rove's characterization of what went on in 2000 certainly falls within this too:

Q: But have you thought about using the bully pulpit of the White House to
talk about election reform and an election integrity agenda that would put the
Democrats back on the defensive?

ROVE: Yes, it's an interesting idea. We've got a few more things to do
before the political silly season gets going, really hot and heavy. But yes,
this is a real problem. What is it -- five wards in the city of Milwaukee have
more voters than adults?

With all due respect to the City of Brotherly Love, Norcross Roanblank's
(ph) home turf, I do not believe that 100 percent of the living adults in this
city of Philadelphia are registered, which is what election statistics would
lead you to believe.

I mean, there are parts of Texas where we haven't been able to pull that
thing off.

(LAUGHTER)

And we've been after it for a great many years.

So I mean, this is a growing problem.

The spectacle in Washington state; the attempts, in the aftermath of the
2000 election to disqualify military voters in Florida, or to, in one instance,
disqualify every absentee voter in Seminole county -- I mean, these are pretty
extraordinary measures that should give us all pause.

The efforts in St. Louis to keep the polls opened -- open in selected
precincts -- I mean, I would love to have that happen as long, as I could pick
the precincts.

This is a real problem. And it is not going away.

I mean, Bernalillo County, New Mexico will have a problem after the next
election, just like it has had after the last two elections.

I mean, I remember election night, 2000, when they said, oops, we just made
a little mistake; we failed to count 55,000 ballots in Bernalillo; we'll be back
to you tomorrow.

That is a problem. And I don't care whether you're a Republican or a
Democrat, a vegetarian or a beef-eater, this is an issue that ought to concern
you because, at the heart of it, our democracy depends upon the integrity of the
ballot place. And if you cannot...

I have to admit, too -- look, I'm not a lawyer. So all I've got to rely on
is common sense. But what is the matter? I go to the grocery store and I want to
cash a check to pay for my groceries, I've got to show a little bit of
ID.

Why should it not be reasonable and responsible to say that when people
show up at the voting place, they ought to be able to prove who they are by
showing some form of ID?

We can make arrangements for those who don't have driver's licenses. We can
have provisional ballots, so that if there is a question that arises, we have a
way to check that ballot. But it is fundamentally fair and appropriate to say,
if you're going to show up and claim to be somebody, you better be able to prove
it, when it comes to the most sacred thing we have been a democracy, which is
our right of expression at the ballot.

And if not, let's just not kid ourselves, that elections will not be about
the true expression of the people in electing their government, it will be a
question of who can stuff it the best and most. And that is not
healthy.

QUESTION: I've been reading some articles about different states, notably
in the west, going to mail-in ballots and maybe even toying with the idea of
online ballots. Are you concerned about this, in the sense of a mass potential,
obviously, for voter fraud that this might have in the West?

ROVE: Yes. And I'm really worried about online voting, because we do not
know all the ways that one can jimmy the system. All we know is that there are
many ways to jimmy the system.
I'm also concerned about the increasing problems with mail-in ballots. Having last night cast my mail-in ballot for the April 11 run-off in Texas, in which there was one race left in Kerr County to settle -- but I am worried about it because the mail-in ballots, particularly in the Northwest, strike me as problematic.

I remember in 2000, that we had reports of people -- you know, the practice
in Oregon is everybody gets their ballot mailed to them and then you fill it
out.

And one of the practices is that people will go to political rallies and
turn in their ballots. And we received reports in the 2000 election -- which,
remember we lost Oregon by 5000 votes -- we got reports of people showing up at
Republican rallies and passing around the holder to get your ballot, and then
people not being able to recognize who those people were and not certain that
all those ballots got turned in.

On Election Day, I remember, in the city of Portland, Multnomah County --
I'm going to mispronounce the name -- but there were four of voting places in
the city, for those of you who don't get the ballots, well, we had to put out
100 lawyers that day in Portland, because we had people showing up with library
cards, voting at multiple places.

I mean, why was it that those young people showed up at all four places,
showing their library card from one library in the Portland area? I mean,
there's a problem with this.

And I know we need to make arrangements for those people who don't live in
the community in which they are registered to vote or for people who are going
to be away for Election Day or who are ill or for whom it's a real difficulty to
get to the polls. But we need to have procedures in place that allow us to
monitor it.

And in the city of Portland, we could not monitor. If somebody showed up at
one of those four voting locations, we couldn't monitor whether they had already
cast their mail-in ballot or not.
And we lost the state by 5,000 votes.

I mean, come on. What kind of confidence can you have in that system? So
yes, we've got to do more about it.

No mention of the systematic and improper purging of black voters from the rolls in Florida before the 2000 election, the problems with the voting machines, etc. You would think none of this stuff ever happened. And in Karl's mind, they probably didn't.

And Karl Rove as an advocate for honest, clean elections has a wonderful irony to it.

2007-04-09T20:18:00.000-04:00

Filibuster This

Bush's nominee to become Ambassador to Belgium, Sam Fox, was put in serious jeopardy in the Senate as a result of his $50,000 contribution to the Swift Boat Liars in 2004 and his shaky performance at his confirmation hearing when questioned by Senator Kerry about his assistance to the Swift Boaters. Facing certain defeat in the Senate, Bush pulled Fox's nomination, only to give him a recess appointment once Congress left town for Easter, sticking his fingers in the eyes of Democrats.

Well, Democrats aren't taking this lying down. Several Senators, including Senator Dodd (D-CT), have been looking for options to challenge the appointment. Dodd, Kerry and Senator Casey have written to the GSA seeking clarification on having Fox serve in the position without pay.

But they've also come up with another possible solution which I like much better:

A Senate Democratic aide confirmed to RAW STORY that some Senate Democrats
were pushing to invoke legislation requiring the President to send recess
appointees back to the Senate for an up or down vote within 40 days of the
appointment.

And here's my favorite part:

"If it works out, the nomination would definitely be defeated on the Senate
floor," the Democratic aide told RAW STORY. "The Republicans might not want
to let that pass, and then they'd be in the strange position of filibustering
their own nominee."

Ah, to force Republicans to filibuster Bush's nomination. That would turn their bogus arguments against the judicial filibuster on its head.

2007-04-05T15:40:00.000-04:00

If I Ever Lose My Faith In You

Recently, President Bush's pollster from his 2000 and 2004 campaign had a public break with the administration. In a New York Times article, Matthew Dowd told a reporter that he had parted ways with Bush in part because he was very disappointed that Bush had failed to be the "uniter, not a divider" that he had run as in the 2000 election. Dowd had this to say:

In 1999, Matthew Dowd became a symbol of George W. Bush's
early success at positioning himself as a Republican with Democratic appeal.

A top strategist for the Texas Democrats who was disappointed by the Bill
Clinton years, Mr. Dowd was impressed by the pledge of Mr. Bush, then
governor of Texas, to bring a spirit of cooperation to Washington. He switched
parties, joined Mr. Bush’s political brain trust and dedicated the next six
years to getting him to the Oval Office and keeping him there. In 2004, he was
appointed the president’s chief campaign strategist.

Looking back, Mr. Dowd now says his faith in Mr. Bush was
misplaced.

In a wide-ranging interview here, Mr. Dowd called for a withdrawal from
Iraq and expressed his disappointment in Mr. Bush’s leadership.

He criticized the president as failing to call the nation to a shared sense
of sacrifice at a time of war, failing to reach across the political divide to
build consensus and ignoring the will of the people on Iraq. He said he believed
the president had not moved aggressively enough to hold anyone accountable for
the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and that Mr. Bush still approached
governing with a “my way or the highway” mentality reinforced by a shrinking
circle of trusted aides.

“I really like him, which is probably why I’m so disappointed in things,”
he said. He added, “I think he’s become more, in my view, secluded and bubbled
in.”...

Mr. Dowd said, in retrospect, he was in denial.

“When you fall in love like that,” he said, “and then you notice some
things that don’t exactly go the way you thought, what do you do? Like in a
relationship, you say ‘No no, no, it’ll be different.’ ”

He said he clung to the hope that Mr. Bush would get back to his Texas
style of governing if he won. But he saw no change after the 2004 victory.

Hmm. But as Digby and Bob Somerby have also recently pointed out, why did Bush abandon his middle-of-the-road, bi-partisan, let's work together approach and adopt a political strategy aimed at motivating his base and alienating his opponents? Why, because Matthew Dowd told Karl Rove in December 2000 that was the path to take to win in 2004. Here's an interview Dowd did with PBS for a Frontline special on Karl Rove:

Q: Let me go back to 2000 for just a minute. ... Where did this idea of a base
strategy come from? And was it as revolutionary then as it was reported as being
when we all look back? When did you first hear about it? Is it your idea?

Dowd: Well, it's interesting. Obviously, as you looked at 2000, approached 2000,
motivating Republicans was important, but most of our resources [were] put into
persuading independents in 2000. One of the first things I looked at after 2000
was what was the real Republican vote and what was the real Democratic vote, not
just who said they were Republicans and Democrats, but independents, how they
really voted, whether or not they voted straight ticket or not. And I took a
look at that in 2000, and then I took a look at it, what it was over the last
five elections or six elections.

And what came from that analysis was a graph that I obviously gave
Karl, which showed that independents or persuadable voters in the last 20 years
had gone from 22 percent of the electorate to 7 percent of the electorate in
2000. And so 93 percent of the electorate in 2000, and what we anticipated, 93
or 94 in 2004, just looking forward and forecasting, was going to be already
decided either for us or against us. You obviously had to do fairly well among
the 6 or 7 [percent], but you could lose the 6 or 7 percent and win the
election, which was fairly revolutionary, because everybody up until that time
had said, "Swing voters, swing voters, swing voters, swing voters, swing
voters."

And so when that graph and that first strategic imperative began to drive
how we would think about 2004, nobody had ever approached an election that I've
looked at over the last 50 years, where base motivation was important as swing,
which is how we approached it. We didn't say, "Base motivation is what we're
going to do, and that's all we're doing." We said, "Both are important, but we
shouldn't be putting 80 percent of our resources into persuasion and 20 percent
into base motivation," which is basically what had been happening up until that
point, because of -- look at this graph. Look at the history. Look what's
happened in this country. And obviously that decision influenced everything that
we did. It influenced how we targeted mail, how we targeted phones, how we
targeted media, how we traveled, the travel that the president and the vice
president did to certain areas, how we did organization, where we had staff. All
of that was based off of that, and ultimately, thank goodness, it was the right
decision.

So, despite what Dowd says now to try to improve his own reputation, Bush's base strategy was no surprise to him. Indeed, he advocated it. But for Dowd telling Karl Rove in December 2000 that there were no more swing voters, we might have had a very different Bush Presidency. And Dowd likely recognizes this, so he is trying to preemptively avoid the blame.

2007-04-05T13:32:00.000-04:00

Doonesbury on Romney

Doonesbury is running a great take on the Romney flip-flops and political opportunism this week. It's really interesting to watch Mitt run away from every progressive social position he's ever held.

Here's one:

See the rest of the series here, here, and here.

2007-03-23T09:53:00.000-04:00

The Prophet

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post had a good column yesterday about Al Gore's testimony before Congress on global warming, where Gore showed once again that he is a step ahead of his critics and even displayed a nice wit. Here's a few excerpts:

Gore entered the room with wife Tipper clutching his hand and cowboy boots
gripping his feet. His face was puffier, his body thicker and his hair grayer,
but he retained his inner wonk. "The concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere up
here on Capitol Hill," he announced, "is already 383 parts per million."

He also displayed the passion that made his documentary a hit in Hollywood.
"What we're facing now is a crisis that is by far the most serious that we've
ever faced," he declared. His eyes narrowing to slits, he proposed a series of
questions future generations might ask about the current inaction on greenhouse
gases. "What in God's name were they doing?" he asked. "What was wrong with
them? Were they too blinded and numbed by the busyness of political life or
daily life to take a deep breath and look at the reality of what we're
facing?"

Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) called Gore a "prophet" -- and his Democratic
colleagues treated him as such. Gore got a hearty ovation when he visited the
House floor during a lunchtime vote.

Republicans found all the fuss rather distasteful. A sour Dennis Hastert
(Ill.), the former House speaker, called him "a personality and now a movie
star."

"Rin Tin Tin was a movie star," Gore demurred. "I just have a slide
show."

At one point Rep. Barton (R-TX) took issue with Gore's view, leading to this exchange:

Barton informed Gore that some of his ideas "are just flawed." Under Gore's
plan, Barton said, "we can have no new industry, no new cars and trucks on the
streets, and apparently no new people."

But this was no match for Gore. "The planet has a fever," he lectured
Barton. "If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you
need to intervene here, you don't say, 'Well, I read a science fiction novel
that tells me it's not a problem.' If the crib's on fire, you don't speculate
that the baby is flame-retardant. You take action."

The audience laughed. Barton started reading the newspaper, then discovered
he wasn't getting much support even from his own side. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.)
admitted he paid to see "An Inconvenient Truth." Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.),
implicitly rebuking flat-Earth colleagues, said: "It's possible to be a
conservative without appearing to be an idiot." Barton flashed a grin of
annoyance.

Mixing it up with Senator Inhofe (R-OK), Gore had this to say:

Gore, given ample time to rebut Inhofe, had no shortage of material. "One
of the leading scientific experts said the consensus supporting this view on
global warming is as strong as anything in science -- with the possible
exception of gravity," he said.

The audience laughed. Boxer smiled. Inhofe did not. He left the show
early.

Things got a little testy between Gore and Inhofe, leading Chairperson Boxer to jump in when Inhofe was insisting that Gore respond in writing to his questions, rather than take up Inhofe's time by having the gall to want to -- gasp -- actually orally respond during the hearing. Boxer told Inhofe, while she held up the gavel, "No, you're not making the rules. You used to when you had this. But elections have consequences!"

And, coming off his triumphant appearance at the Academy Awards, Gore apparently ended his appearance on this note:

Evening was approaching when the ordeal ended and the movie star turned to
the committee chairman, Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). "You don't give out any kind
of statue or anything?" he inquired.

2007-03-14T09:23:00.000-04:00

But, But Clinton Did It Too!

Yesterday, Drudge posted a story (which I assume came directly from RNC or the White House) that Clinton had fired all 93 U.S. attorneys who had been appointed by the first President Bush, upon taking office in 1993. (Not surprisingly, this information was factually incorrect, as Clinton, with not a little bit of irony, kept on Michael Chertoff as U.S. Attorney in New Jersey at the request of Bill Bradley). This was somehow supposed to justify the Bush Administration's selective firing of 8 of its own appointees midway through Bush's second term.

However, as precedent goes, the RNC didn't need to look too far, as the New York Times reported on March 15, 2001 that George W. Bush fired all the U.S. attorneys (except for Mary Jo White in the S.D.N.Y) upon taking office himself:

March 15, 2001
Bush Chooses Chief for Federal Prosecutions
By DAVID JOHNSTON

President Bush today named Michael Chertoff, formerly chief Republican
counsel of the Senate's Whitewater inquiry and United States attorney in New
Jersey, to head the Justice Department's criminal division, a powerful post that
would place him in charge of all federal prosecutions.

If confirmed, Mr. Chertoff would oversee a broad portfolio of criminal
cases, including terrorism and bank robbery. He would play a significant role in
decisions relating to official corruption cases, including any prosecution that
might arise from the 177 pardons and commutations that President Bill Clinton
granted on his final day in office.

In recent years, Mr. Chertoff has switched from being a prosecutor to being
a defense lawyer in private practice at the firm of Latham & Watkins in
Newark.

At the same time, Mr. Chertoff has been special counsel to a New Jersey
State Senate committee that has examined inmate release policies of the state's
corrections system and accusations of racial profiling by the New Jersey State
Police.

In 1995, Mr. Chertoff played a major role in Senate hearings into the
Arkansas business dealings of Mr. Clinton and his wife, Hillary.

Mr. Chertoff, 47, the son of a rabbi and a gallery owner, is married with
two children. A former clerk for Justice William J. Brennan of the United States
Supreme Court, Mr. Chertoff graduated from Harvard Law School and spent more
than a decade as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey and New York.

In New York, he was the lead federal prosecutor in 1986 when the government
won convictions against Mafia bosses in a case that some law enforcement
officials described as a Waterloo for the New York Mafia.

Mr. Chertoff successfully prosecuted Mayor Gerald McCann of Jersey City in
1991 for fraud and tax evasion, and a consumer electronics retailer, Eddie
Antar, known as Crazy Eddie, for racketeering and fraud in 1993.

One of Mr. Chertoff's better-known cases was the prosecution of Sol
Wachtler, a chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, who was arrested
in 1992 on charges of harassing and attempting to extort his ex-lover. Mr.
Wachtler pleaded guilty to kidnapping threats.

Attorney General John Ashcroft said today that he had started to
replace the Clinton administration's 93 United States attorneys with Bush appointees, which Mr. Ashcroft said would be completed by June.

Asked about Mary Jo White, the federal prosecutor in New York, Mindy
Tucker, a spokeswoman for Mr. Ashcroft, said Ms. White would remain on the job
indefinitely. The reason, Ms. Tucker said, is ''primarily because of Ms. White's
involvement'' in the case of Osama bin Laden, suspected of orchestrating
terrorist acts, and not because of her office's investigation into the pardons
issued by Mr. Clinton.

Anybody want to guess when we're going to hear about this on Fox News?

2007-03-09T18:19:00.000-05:00

Rudy, Don't Take Your Love to Town

Apologies to Kenny Rogers, but here's an interesting video compilation of some prior statements by Rudy on some hot button issues.

2007-03-08T21:44:00.000-05:00

The White House Book Club

Sidney Blumenthal has an excellent article on Salon.com about the Libby verdict and begins thusly:

As witnesses were trooping to the stand in the federal courthouse in
Washington to testify in the case of United States v. I. Lewis Libby, and the
Washington Post was publishing its series on the squalid conditions that wounded
Iraq war veterans suffer at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center while
thousands more soldiers were surging into Baghdad, President Bush held one of
his private book club sessions that Karl Rove organizes for him at the White
House. Rove picks the book, invites the author and a few neoconservative
intellectual luminaries, and conducts the discussions. For this Bush book club
meeting, the guest was Andrew Roberts, an English conservative historian and
columnist and the author of "The Churchillians" and, most recently, "A History
of the English-Speaking People Since 1900."

The subject of Winston Churchill inspired Bush's self-reflection. The
president confided to Roberts that he believes he has an advantage over
Churchill, a reliable source with access to the conversation told me. He has
faith in God, Bush explained, but Churchill, an agnostic, did not. Because he
believes in God, it is easier for him to make decisions and stick to them than
it was for Churchill. Bush said he doesn't worry, or feel alone, or care if he
is unpopular. He has God.

Even as Scooter Libby sat at the defendant's table silently wearing
his fixed, forced smile, and Vice President Dick Cheney was revealed by
witnesses as the conductor of the smear campaign against former ambassador
Joseph Wilson, Bush and Rove felt free to hold forth in their salon, removed
from anxiety. Rove had narrowly escaped the fate of Libby by changing his
grand jury testimony just before he might have been indicted for perjury. Bush,
who proclaimed that he would fire any leaker found in his administration, is
apparently closer to Rove than ever. The night before the Libby verdict, the
president had dinner at Rove's house, and Rove sent to the reporters shivering
outside a doggie bag filled with sausage and quail wings.

Blumenthal then speculates as to why Libby never went back to the grand jury to "correct" his testimony a la Rove, and put on such a weak defense, by not testifying or calling Cheney as a witness:

But why was Libby virtually passive? If Libby knew he was going to offer
the barest defense, why didn't he do as Rove did, amending his grand jury
testimony to reflect the truth? Why didn't Libby do as former White House press
secretary Ari Fleischer did, turning state's evidence and being granted immunity
in exchange for his testimony? What stopped Libby from risking indictment? What
prevented him from making more than a minimal defense that invited conviction?

Libby could not plead the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. Had
he done so he would not have been able to continue in his position as Cheney's
chief of staff; he would have been compelled to resign. But why didn't he
testify? Why didn't he make the case of Rove's perfidy that his lawyer
suggested?

Libby and Rove's falsehoods in front of the grand jury, in which they
blamed reporters for telling them about Plame, were a cleverly contrived
coverup. They did not believe that the prosecutor would be able to break through
the curtain of the First Amendment or untangle the tale as told by journalists.
Both Libby and Rove relied on the same alibi, hiding behind the press corps that
they had manipulated for years and whose erratic habits they knew well. But
prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was not about to be confounded by this device. He
knew the law was on his side, and he received a judicial decision forcing the
reporters to testify.

Just as Fitzgerald was about to indict Rove for perjury and obstruction of
justice, Rove got a lucky break. A reporter for Time magazine, Viveca Novak, a
colleague of Cooper's and privy to his conversation with Rove, became consumed
with an overwhelming desire to be an important inside dopester, and she rushed
to inform Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, about Cooper's information. Suddenly,
Rove produced an e-mail from Cooper that he had not produced to the prosecutor
for a year, refreshed his memory, altered his testimony, and was off the hook.
(Novak did not tell her editors or Cooper of her freelancing, and she was forced
to resign, in effect sacrificing her career to save Rove by the skin of his
teeth.) Libby was left to take the fall alone.

What bearing might this have on Libby's weak defense? Why didn't Libby and
Cheney testify? Observing the trial as it developed, Cheney may have decided
Libby would lose and that his becoming a witness was beside the point.
Ultimately, did Cheney's self-protective calculation trump loyalty to his
loyalist?

Did something change in the defense after its opening statement about
Rove (Libby "will not be sacrificed so Karl Rove can be protected") that led to
its refusal to follow up during the trial? Did the prosecutor have new
information that has not yet been made public about Libby and Cheney? If so,
that evidence would have been irrelevant to the precise charges against Libby
but might have come into play if Libby and Cheney testified. Their appearances
might have made them vulnerable to additional perjury and obstruction charges if
they were found to have lied on the stand. But who might have proved that?

My view was that Cheney, who was clearly behind the Plame leak and whom Libby was obviously covering up for with his lies, would be destroyed on the witness stand by Fitzgerald (possibly even facing criminal penalties or impeachment as a result) and thus Libby did not call him. Blumenthal has a slightly different, but no less intriguing, take:

The missing piece in the extensive evidence and testimony that detailed the
administration's concerted attack on Wilson, orchestrated by Cheney, is the
conversations among Libby, Cheney -- and Rove. Rove had made a deal with
Fitzgerald. Rove changed his testimony, escaped prosecution and went back for a
fifth time before the grand jury. Fitzgerald owned Rove.

Only if Libby and Cheney appeared could Fitzgerald cross-examine them about
their discussions with Rove, which presumably Rove had already testified about
before the grand jury. Rove was the hostile witness against Cheney whom the
prosecution had waiting in the wings, the witness who was never called. If Libby
had come to the stand in his own defense, and summoned Cheney as well,
Fitzgerald might have been prompted to call Rove from the deep to impeach
Libby's and Cheney's credibility and reveal new incriminating information about
them. Instead, Libby remained silent, Cheney flew off to Afghanistan and Rove
never appeared. Rove was the missing witness for the prosecution.

Now Libby's only hope is a presidential pardon. He has already offended
Rove and perhaps by extension Bush. Libby cannot afford to offend Cheney. His
pardon depends on Cheney's importuning of Bush. Thus Libby's final plea is to
Cheney -- and his coverup continues. Back at the White House, Rove makes the
next selection for the book club.

It appears that Libby decided to lay down. It will now be the test of Cheney's power in the Administration as to whether Bush grants Cheney's trusted Scooter a pardon.

2007-03-08T15:54:00.000-05:00

Scooter's Problem

Conservatives are pushing a pardon for Libby very hard. However, every pardon Bush has given during his presidency have followed strict guidelines, according to Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball. Here's a snippet:

The president has since indicated he intended to go by the book in granting
what few pardons he’d hand out—considering only requests that had first been
reviewed by the Justice Department under a series of publicly available
guidelines.

Those regulations, which are discussed on the Justice Department Web
site at www.usdoj.gov/pardon, would seem to make a Libby pardon a
nonstarter in George W. Bush’s White House. They “require a petitioner to wait a
period of at least five years after conviction or release from confinement
(whichever is later) before filing a pardon application,” according to the
Justice Web site.

Moreover, in weighing whether to recommend a pardon, U.S. attorneys are
supposed to consider whether an applicant is remorseful. “The extent to which a
petitioner has accepted responsibility for his or her criminal conduct and made
restitution to ... victims are important considerations. A petitioner should be
genuinely desirous of forgiveness rather than vindication,” the Justice Web site
states.

That five year thing is a bitch, huh, Scooter? Of course, this Administration has always lived up to its public pronouncements, like firing all of the people involved in the leak and restoring "honesty and integrity to the Oval Office," so I'm sure they won't bend the rules here....

Interesting how Bush made these comments recently too, to box himself in a little bit further:

Of course, there is nothing that requires Bush to follow these guidelines
in reviewing a pardon for Libby (whose lawyer, Ted Wells, stated on the
courthouse steps Tuesday that he intended to push for a retrial, adding that he
has “every confidence that Mr. Libby will be vindicated.”) As Love, the former
pardon attorney, points out, “the president can do whatever he wants.” Both
Clinton and Bush’s father, President George H.W. Bush (who pardoned Casper
Weinberger among other Iran-contra figures), bear that out.

Still, Bush himself publicly reaffirmed his determination to stick to
the Justice pardon guidelines as recently as last month. In a Feb. 1 interview
with Fox News anchor Neal Cavuto, Bush was asked about whether he would pardon
Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, two former U.S. Border Patrol agents convicted
of shooting a Mexican drug dealer who was fleeing across the border into Mexico.
Their case has become a cause celebre for many conservatives and anti-immigrant
activists who believe it symbolizes the federal government’s lack of aggressive
enforcement of border controls. Fueled by CNN immigration critic Lou Dobbs and
Colorado Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo, supporters of the two former agents have
been flooding the White House with e-mails and phone calls seeking pardons for
Ramos and Compean.

Bush’s response in Cavuto’s inquiry was telling. He repeatedly pointed to
the Justice Department pardon process to explain how he would make his
decision.

“You know, I get asked about pardons on a lot of different cases. And
there’s a procedure in place,” he said at first. When Bush added that he
has been telling members of Congress who have contacted him about the matter to
“look at the facts in the case,” Cavuto followed up: “So what are you
saying?”

“I’m saying … there is a process in any case for a president to make a
pardon decisions. In other words, there is a series of steps that are followed,
so that the pardon process is, you know, a rational process,” the president
answered.

Of course, Bush said he wouldn't comment about pending criminal cases when Libby was indicted just weeks after he denounced the DeLay indictment, so that doesn't mean too much.

2007-03-07T19:10:00.000-05:00

Inside the Libby Jury

The Huffington Post has gotten juror #9 (a Washington Post reporter) to write an inside description of the jury's deliberations in the Libby trial. Interesting stuff.

2007-03-06T11:12:00.000-05:00

Rudy's Family Values

I've always thought that it is important to consider the opinions of people who know candidates the best and Rudy Giuliani's son has some insight into Rudy the Man to share with voters:

Rudy Giuliani's son seems to think his dad would make a better President
than he did a father.

"I got my values from my mother," 21-year-old Andrew Giuliani told ABC
in an interview quoted on "Good Morning America" yesterday, the same day the
Daily News spotlighted the rift between the former mayor and his only son.

"She's a strong influence in my life," Andrew Giuliani said of his mother,
Donna Hanover, seemingly drawing a contrast between her and Rudy Giuliani.
"She's a strong woman."
Andrew's outspoken comments came after more than a
year of frosty relations between the Duke University student and his father.
Insiders say Giuliani has increasingly chosen to spend time with third wife
Judith Nathan rather than Andrew and daughter Caroline, 18.

Giuliani has missed some of Andrew's big golf tournaments and Caroline's
school productions, sources told The News, even while Judith is constantly by
his side in his presidential campaign.
"I have problems with my father," Andrew told ABC. "But it doesn't mean he won't make a great President."

While Andrew stressed he still loves his father and said "we are both
working on our relationship," his comments are a sharp reminder of the
outrageous marital soap opera that accompanied Giuliani's estrangement and
divorce from second wife Hanover - which came after he and Nathan made a public
show of their growing love affair.

Let's remember what happened in New York with Guiliani and Hanover, which I think got overshadowed by the Lewinsky scandal. I think this explains what Andrew is feeling.

Rudy carried on an open affair with Nathan, which reached the point where Hanover had to seek a court order to prevent Nathan from being allowed into Gracie Mansion, Hanover's home, as well as Andrew's. Hanover learned of Rudy's plans to divorce her from Rudy's public press conference on the subject. If you're a son, you can't be too happy with your dad treating your mother and your family this way.

And particularly telling about Rudy's character for me is the fact that he has increasingly chosen to spend most of his time with Nathan, rather than with his children. For those of us who lived in New York during Rudy's tenure as Mayor, and remember the pre-9/11 Rudy, none of this is surprising.

But it remains to see how the Republican primary voters will see it.

2007-03-02T13:33:00.000-05:00

Bush v. Gore Redux

Simply outrageous. The Supreme Court is at it again:

Supreme Court Gives Gore’s Oscar to Bush
Stunning Reversal for Former Veep

Just days after former Vice President Al Gore received an Academy Award
for his global warming documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” the United States
Supreme Court handed Mr. Gore a stunning reversal, stripping him of his Oscar
and awarding it to President George W. Bush instead.

For Mr. Gore, who basked in the adulation of his Hollywood audience Sunday
night, the high court’s decision to give his Oscar to President Bush was a cruel
twist of fate, to say the least.

But in a 5-4 decision handed down Tuesday morning, the justices made it
clear that they had taken the unprecedented step of stripping Mr. Gore of his
Oscar because President Bush deserved it more.

“It is true that Al Gore has done a lot of talking about global warming,”
wrote Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority. “But President Bush has
actually helped create global warming.”

In another setback for the former vice president, a group of scientists
meeting in Oslo, Norway today said that Mr. Gore was growing at an unsustainable
rate.

“The polar ice caps may be shrinking, but Al Gore is clearly expanding,”
said Dr. Hiroshi Kyosuke of the University of Tokyo.

The scientists concluded that if Mr. Gore continues to expand at his
current rate, he could cause the earth to spin off its axis by 2010, sending it
hurtling into the sun.

“Here’s an inconvenient truth,” Dr. Kyosuke added. “Al’s got to stay away
from those carbs.”

Elsewhere, after foreigners received a record number of Academy Award
nominations, CNN anchor Lou Dobbs proposed building a 12-foot high fence around
the Kodak Theater.

I heard they also said that, like the original Bush v. Gore, the reasoning only applied to that case, and could not be applied to Marisa Tomei.

2007-03-01T20:18:00.000-05:00

Could You Spell Your Name for the Court Reporter?

I enjoyed this article about a dog that was being summoned into court as a witness because he supposedly had a degree from the same university as the police chief:

An attorney challenging the authority of the city's police chief wants the
department's police dog to appear in court as an exhibit, because he says the
dog and the chief have criminal justice degrees from the same online school.

The issue gives "one pause, if not paws, for concern" about what it takes
to get the degrees from the school based in the Virgin Islands, Gene Murray
wrote in a court document filed Monday.

Murray is seeking to have a drug charge against a client dismissed by
arguing that police Chief John McGuire - who is accused of lying on his job
application - was not legally employed and had no authority as an
officer...

Murray said asking that the police dog, Rocko, show up in court at an
evidence hearing is a key to discrediting McGuire, who took part in a traffic
stop and search in October that resulted in drug possession charges against
Clifford Green of Fostoria.

Both McGuire and Rocko, who is listed as John I. Rocko on his diploma, are
graduates of Concordia College and University, according to copies of diplomas
that are part of Murray's motion.

The court filing did not say how the attorney knows that diploma is for the
dog or how Rocko allegedly managed to enroll in the college.

"My client had absolutely nothing to do with any animal getting a degree
from an institution of higher learning," said McGuire's attorney, Dean Henry.
"The whole thing is bizarre."

He said the dog was with the department before McGuire began working
there.

He also said that the dog rarely went to class and barely graduated, while his client generally excelled in his studies, although he conceded that his client did not finish near the top of his class in fetching. Overall, he said that his client enjoyed his college experience, particularly when he got to move off campus instead of living in the on-campus kennels.

2007-02-28T18:27:00.000-05:00

Too Little, Too Late?

On Tuesday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings on President Bush's new nominee to be Ambassador to Belgium, Sam Fox, a wealthy St. Louis businessman, and big money contributor in 2004 to the Bush campaign as well as the Swift Boat Veterans for "Truth."

Guess who is on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and had a few questions for Mr. Fox? That would be John Kerry. Here's a few tidbits of their exchange:

Kerry got his turn to question Fox and started out politely enough,
praising Fox's up-by-the-bootstraps life story and his generosity with
non-political charities, while also asking him about American foreign policy
vis-à-vis the European community.

The tone then changed sharply when Kerry switched gears and, indicating he
had concerns about Fox's judgment, said "I assume that you believe the truth in
public life is important."

"Yes, sir," answered Fox.

"And might I ask you what your opinion is with respect to the state of
American politics, as regards the politics of personal destruction?" said
Kerry.

This started a lengthy monologue from Fox in which Bush's nominee railed
against how campaigns are funded in the United States, saving most of his bile
for 527 groups, saying " I'm against 527s, I've always been against 527s. I
think, again, they're mean and destructive, I think they've hurt a lot of good,
decent people."

I'm sure some people in the hearing room must have been stifling laughs
hearing something like that coming from a man who was a major contributor to the
scummiest 527 group ever, but the worst was to come in the next few
sentences.

"Senator Kerry, I very much respect your dedicated service to this
country," said Fox. "I know that you were not drafted -- you volunteered. You
went to Vietnam. You were wounded. Highly decorated. Senator, you're a hero. And
there isn’t anybody or anything that's going to take that away from you. But yet
527s tried to."

Here's the exchange that followed:

Kerry: I certainly appreciate the comments you just made, Mr. Fox, and I'm
not looking for anyone to call me a hero. I think that most heroes died, and do
die, and those of us who are lucky enough to get out of there are lucky.But
notwithstanding the comments you made, you did see fit to contribute a very
significant amount of money in October to a group called Swift Boat Veterans for
Truth, correct?

Fox: Correct.

Kerry: Why would you do that given what you just said about how bad they
are?

Fox: Well, Senator, I have to put it in the proper context and bear with
me. Marilyn and I have lived the American dream -- there's no question about it.
My father came here with the clothes on his back and the Fox family and the
Woodman family have truly lived the American dream that's been very, very good
to us.I heard someone mention here that we gave to 250 charities. I also went
back and had my staff count in '05 and '06, we've made more than 1,000
contributions. More than 100 of those were political, 900 and some odd were
charitable and to institutions of learning and so forth. A great deal of those
had to do with basic human needs. I think it was Senator Danforth who mentioned
every time he got a letter that had Harbour Group on it, he shuddered because it
was going to cost him money. Marilyn and I both raise a lot of money from a lot
of people.The point I'm making is this: We ask a lot of people for money and
people ask us for money. And very fortunately, we've been blessed with being
successful financially and when we're asked, we generally give -- particularly
if we know who gave it.

Kerry: So, well, who asked you to give to the SBVT?

Fox: I can't tell you specifically who did because, you know, I don’t
remember. As a matter of fact, if I…

Kerry: You have no recollection of why you gave away $50,000?

Fox: I gave away $50,000 because I was asked to.

Kerry: But you have no recollection of who asked you to give away
$50,000?

Fox: No, sir. I've given away sums much larger than that to a lot of other
places and I can't tell you specifically who asked me, no.

Kerry: Well, you don’t think that's it's important as a citizen, who
doesn’t like 527s to know where your money is going and how it’s going to be
spent?

Fox: Well, I think with most contributors and if you go to the other side
of the political campaigns and we give to individual candidates, we don’t know
how they’re going to use that money and what…

Kerry: Well at least it's accountable to an individual candidate for whom
people have to vote or not vote. 527s as you said are mean, ugly and not
accountable.

Fox: I agree with that. I absolutely agree with that.

As the hearing went on, Kerry asked several times why he would give $50,000 to a 527 group if he thinks 527s are so awful. Fox then replied with several variations on the theme of, Well, the other side was doing it, so we had to also. So Kerry continued:

Kerry: Why would you give $50,000 to a group you have no sense of
accountability for?

Fox: Well, because if 527s were banned, then it's banned for both parties.
And so long as they’re not banned…

Kerry: So two wrongs make a right?

Fox: Well, I don’t know, but if one side is contributing then the other
side…

Kerry: But is that your judgment? Is that your judgment that you would
bring to the ambassadorship? That two wrongs make a right?

Fox: No, I didn’t say that two wrongs make a right, sir.

Kerry: Why would you do it then?

Fox: Well, I did it because politically, it's necessary if the other side
is doing it.

Fox continued to play dum,b, as Kerry pressed him further:

Kerry: My question to you is why? When you say you couldn’t have known --
these were people very publicly condemning it. How could you not have
known?

Fox: I guess, Mr. Senator, when I'm asked I just generally give.

Kerry: So, again, I ask you the question, do you think now that you and
others bear responsibility for thinking about where we put money in American
politics? What we're saying, what we present to the American people -- is truth
important or isn’t it?

Fox: Senator, if I had reason to believe and if I were convinced that the
money was going to be used to, in any untruthful or false way, knowingly, I
would not give.

Kerry: Well, sir, let me ask you this question: Did you or did you not in
any of the public comments being made at the time, which I assume you were
following, hear or read of any of the public statements at that point in time,
with respect to the legitimacy of these charges and these smears?

Fox: Mr. Senator, I can say this…

Kerry: Did you miss this: In September of 2004, Vice Admiral Ruth, with the
Navy Inspector General, wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Navy that was
made public -- the New York Times, the Washington Post, every major newspaper in the country carried, saying their examination found that the existing
documentation regarding my medals was legitimate.Did you miss that too?

Fox: I don’t remember those, but I'm certain at the time I must have read
them.

Here's a full rough transcript. And here's some video. However, it would have been nice if Kerry had had this conversation in August, September or October 2004.

2007-02-27T17:41:00.000-05:00

Even His Own Campaign Doesn't Believe Him

Romney's flip-flops are starting to get a bit of traction in the media, as this AP story shows. However, he's not being criticized harshly enough for clearly taking political positions SOLELY to please the Republican voters in the primaries that are COMPLETELY opposite to what he previously said were strong beliefs of his. Here's a list of some of the reversals from the AP:

In his two previous campaigns, Romney said that regardless of his own
personal beliefs, abortion should be safe and legal. Now, he describes himself
as pro-life and argues that Roe v. Wade should be replaced with state abortion
regulations.

In his Senate race, he wrote a letter promising a gay Republican group
he would be a stronger advocate for gays and their rights than his liberal
opponent, Edward M. Kennedy. Now he emphasizes his opposition to gay marriage
and civil unions.

Then a registered independent, Romney voted in the 1992 Democratic
presidential primary for Paul Tsongas. Two years later, he said he did so
because he favored the Massachusetts senator's ideas over those of Bill Clinton,
and was sure President George H.W. Bush would be renominated. Now, Romney says he backed the candidate he thought might be the weakest opponent for Bush.

In his first two campaigns, Romney emphasized his support of gun-control
measures. In 1994, he said: "I don't line up with the NRA." Now, he is a
card-carrying National Rifle Association member. He joined the organization in
August.

Romney used to distance himself from President Reagan. Now he casts himself
as a conservative in the mold of Reagan.

Now, his own campaign documents, discovered by the Boston Globe, describe the same concerns about flip-flopping. (Why can't these Republicans hold onto their confidential information? Doesn't bode well for their national security bona-fides).

Here are some views of Mitt Romney causing concern inside his campaign: His
hair looks too perfect, he's not a tough war time leader, and he has earned a
reputation as "Slick Dancing Mitt" or "Flip-Flop Mitt."

Romney and his advisers have identified those perceptions as threats to
his bid for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, according to an
exhaustive internal campaign document obtained by the Globe.

When Democrats like Biden make stupid comments or take ridiculously political positions, they are derided and their political chances are written off. Why shouldn't the same happen with Romney?

2007-02-23T19:17:00.000-05:00

Chimps Getting Angry

I don't know quite what to make of this front page story in today's Washington Post, with the headline "For First Time, Chimps Seen Making Weapons for Hunting." Is this a bi-product of a violent society? Or just some evolved chimps? Anyway, here are some quotes from the article:

Chimpanzees living in the West African savannah have been observed
fashioning deadly spears from sticks and using the tools to hunt small mammals
-- the first routine production of deadly weapons ever observed in animals other
than humans.

The multistep spearmaking practice, documented by researchers in Senegal
who spent years gaining the chimpanzees' trust, adds credence to the idea that
human forebears fashioned similar tools millions of years ago.

By researchers "who spent years gaining the chimpanzees' trust?" What does that mean? Were they always there when the chimps needed a few bucks?

And then there's this:

Using their hands and teeth, the chimpanzees were repeatedly seen tearing
the side branches off long, straight sticks, peeling back the bark and
sharpening one end. Then, grasping the weapons in a "power grip," they jabbed
them into tree-branch hollows where bush babies -- small, monkeylike mammals --
sleep during the day.

In one case, after repeated stabs, a chimpanzee removed the injured or dead
animal and ate it, the researchers reported in yesterday's online issue of the
journal Current Biology.

"It was really alarming how forceful it was," said lead researcher Jill D.
Pruetz of Iowa State University, adding that it reminded her of the murderous
shower scene in the Alfred Hitchcock movie "Psycho." "It was kind of
scary."

Like Psycho? I don't really know what else to say about that.

2007-02-23T19:06:00.000-05:00

More Praise for Fitz

Here's some more examples of Patrick Fitzgerald's stellar performance in the Libby trial:

The trial has given Fitzgerald chances to show his well-known mastery of
facts and his expertise at cross-examination.

When Libby's former deputy, John Hannah, testified for the defense on
the overwhelming nature of Libby's job, Hannah said that at the time, Libby was
monitoring al-Qaeda plots, the Iraq war and other national security
threats.

Hannah, who said he was lucky to get a few minutes to talk to Libby, was
supposed to help buttress Libby's argument that he had more important things to
remember when he spoke to investigators than conversations with
reporters.

With two quick questions, Fitzgerald drew Hannah to the week of July 6,
2003, when, the jurors had been told, Libby met for two hours with Times
reporter Judith Miller to complain about Wilson.

"And so, if you look at what was going on . . . if he gave someone an hour
or two during that week, it was something that Mr. Libby thought would be
important, correct?"

Hannah paused, but had to agree: "With regard to me, yes."

Despite his seriousness, Fitzgerald also has shown a sense of humor. He
warned U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton that playing an interview from the
"Imus in the Morning" radio show would be problematic because "there's no Imus
exception to the hearsay rule."

Washington lawyers who have dropped in to watch the case say Fitzgerald's
skills were best demonstrated in the tapes played in court of him questioning
Libby before a grand jury. Under relentless questioning, Libby explained over
nearly an hour that he forgot he learned about Plame from Cheney, then believed
he learned it for the first time from NBC's Tim Russert, but recalled that
Cheney did not share classified information. Libby's voice increasingly faded in
strength, as Fitzgerald made him sound more and more illogical.

"And so when Tim Russert had this conversation with you, you didn't
remember that the vice president told you in June that Wilson's wife works at
the CIA," Fitzgerald said, "but when you remembered what you forgot, you
remembered that you learned it in June not to be classified."

He paused, then asked incredulously: "As you sit here today, is that your
testimony under oath?"

The jury comes back on Monday.

2007-02-23T10:00:00.000-05:00

Madness! Madness! Madness!

Here's a good run-down of several people's thoughts on the closing arguments in the Libby trial, and Patrick Fitzgerald's closing in particular, which, by all accounts, was masterful. It also suggested, in much stronger terms than I would have thought, that Fitzgerald's sight have been, and may still be, on criminal conspiracy and obstruction of justice charges against the Vice President.

Here's Emptywheel, who has been doing some of the extraordinary live-blogging during the Libby trial for Firedoglake.com, and from whom I've borrowed the title of this post.

And Sidney Blumenthal has an excellent summary in his column at Salon.com. Here's Blumenthal's description of the Cheney moment:

Speaking rapidly in order to fit all his facts into the hour allotted to
him, Fitzgerald did not slow his clipped delivery as he came to the most
dramatic statement of the trial. "You just think it's coincidence that Cheney
was writing this?" he asked rhetorically, before answering his own question.
"There is a cloud over the vice president. He wrote on those columns. He had
those meetings. He sent Libby off to the meeting with Judith Miller where Plame
was discussed. That cloud remains because the defendant obstructed justice. That
cloud is there. That cloud is something that we just can't pretend isn't there."

"That cloud" was like the sudden appearance of a thunderhead over the
proceedings and the administration. In no uncertain terms, in his most public
statement, Fitzgerald made clear that he believed that Cheney was the one behind
the crime for which he was prosecuting Libby. It was Cheney who was the boss,
Cheney who gave the orders, and Cheney to whom Libby was the loyal soldier, and
it is Cheney for whom Libby is covering up.

Here's a rundown from Pachacutec, one of the bloggers on Firedoglake, who describes Fitz's closing thusly:

"Madness! Madness! Madness!"

When Pat Fitzgerald got up, thundering those words in mock outrage, he
grabbed all the energy floating about the courtroom like static electricity, and
held it to himself, never to surrender it, save during a brief, late sidebar
we'll get to in a minute. This is not a reflection of my personal
experience: this is my observation of what happened all around me.

I don't quite know how to explain it, other than to say Pat shocked
people. His demeanor throughout the trial had been fairly direct,
occasionaly subtly snarky or self deprecating, but he had not once raised his
voice. . . until that moment. It jarred people. It commanded
attention. Fitzgerald became a one man spontaneous passion machine from
that point on. Yes, there were moments when his voice modulated, but his
intensity never wavered. His command of the details of exhibits, including
exhibit numbers, was unmatched by any other attorney in the case: he
rattled them off like the names of his friends.

All about me, right from the outset of Pat's closing argument, I saw people
begin to look at each other. Furtive, sidelong looks popped out all
over. There I sat just behind the defense table, and I watched the lawyers
sag and share occasional "oh shit" looks. Wells had his forehead resting
on his hand, anchored on the table, remaining virtually immoble
throughout. Junior defense attorneys, unconsciously mirroring his tone,
slumped a bit in their seats the way my fifth grade basketball team used to do
during a serious ass whupping early in the game with three quarters left to
play. Just like my old basketball team, defense attorneys snuck looks at
the clock (when will it be over!?). Libby's brother, who could pass almost
for his doppleganger, put his arm around Scooter's wife. Fitz laid out a
long, proper drubbing, and the jury, most of all, hung on every word and
breath.

I can remember at whiles looking sidelong at Jane or Sidney, and they at
me, especially when Fitz so clearly put Cheney's actions up for all to
see. Whoa. We had not expected Fitz to go that far. No words
passed among us, but we all had that, "Shit, he's really going for it" look in
our eyes. We had all expected Fitzgerald to be the headline maker of the
day, but he exceeded even our expectations, for all the fire and damning content
he laid out.

As well as Marcy kept up with Fitz's rapid fire pace in her live blogging
notes, the notes don't - they can't - capture fully what it was like to be
there, to hear it and see it and see everyone else hearing and seeing it. .
. especially the defense team. This was no Fred Thompson
television lawyer fakery. This was the real deal, immediate, authentic and
vibrant, frankly unlike anything I've ever seen in any film or stage play.
Tonight I'm seeing Richard III at the Shakespeare Theater in DC. I'll let
you know how it compares....

Sometimes Fitz's voice seemed to quaver with righteous fury, other times he
mocked himself, as in the time he went shuffling through his exhibit book and
said to the jury something like, "This is where I pretend to look organized,
shuffling through my papers, and you pretend to believe I actually know what I'm
doing." This got a giggle, not big laughs, but he was not playing for
laughs: he was just being genuine and a bit authentic. The jury was
with him every step of the way, from all I could see.

If you want to read the live blog yourself of Fitzgerald's closing, you can find the first half here, and the second half here.

2007-02-23T09:51:00.000-05:00

The Video Hilliary Clinton Doesn't Want You to See

Josh Marshall at TPM has found a clip of Senator Obama talking about Iraq in November 2002. He comments on what the critical issues will be post-invasion and sets forth his position on the resolution that the Senate voted on the month before.

It's two minutes long, but if I was Obama I would use this as an ad during the Democratic primary.

2007-02-20T22:30:00.000-05:00

Tee Hee

Conan shows clips from a new TV channel, "Meet the Press For Idiots." Brought to you by the "Recovering Alcoholic Jug Band."

2007-02-19T21:35:00.000-05:00

Is Cheney Next?

I've thought from the beginning that Libby's lawyers saying that would testify was a smokescreen, as Cheney had too much to lose by testifying, as he appeared to have just barely avoided prosecution himself. Apparently, he's not out of the woods yet, says the very reliable Murray Waas in his latest on the National Journal website:

If Libby is found guilty, investigators are likely to probe further to determine
if Libby devised what they consider a cover story in an effort to shield Cheney.
They want to know whether Cheney might have known about the leaks ahead of time or had even encouraged Libby to provide information to reporters about Plame's CIA status, the same sources said.

Verrry interesting...

2007-02-14T16:15:00.000-05:00

The Office: Punitive Damages

I've come across a great blog that places a litigation value on the legal violations that Michael Scott commits during each episode of The Office. Here's a few highlights:

Thank god for damage caps. No matter how well intentioned, throwing a
“welcome back” party for your Mexican-American employee by decorating the break room with piñatas, paper sombreros and streamers in the colors of the Mexican flag is not a good idea. Ever. Under no set of circumstances. Sure, Michael (and the party planning committee) meant well, but that is not going to be enough to
get Dunder Mifflin out of this one....

If an executive learns that a regional manager has sponsored a bachelor
party in the warehouse, hired a stripper, offered to “deflower” the bride, taken
an employee to a sex store, received a lap dance, and allowed a pervert dressed
up like Benjamin Franklin to make a lewd statement to the receptionist, she
should fire him. As soon as possible. Anything else and the company is looking
at significant liability. Of course, at Dunder Mifflin, Jan is likely caught in
a Catch-22. As soon as she fires Michael, she could be facing a charge for her
own conduct in having an affair with her subordinate. Ah, what a tangled web we
weave….

My grandmother always said that the road to hell is paved with good
intentions. I never knew exactly what she meant. Until now. Michael’s diversity
training, well intentioned as it may have been, provides ample evidence of
discriminatory bias against employees of Indian descent in general and of Kelly
in particular. Indeed, Michael’s PowerPoint on famous Indians includes only
three people — one of whom is the fictional character Apu from The
Simpsons....

I’d say that Martin (“the Convict”) Nash has a damn good race
discrimination case. First his boss publicly humiliates him by announcing that
he is a convict, and then, during the same speech, asks his co-workers to name
trustworthy people so he can identify an African-American whom he trusts more.
Who does he name? Danny Glover (whom he trusts more than Pam’s dad); Colin
Powell (whom he trusts more than Justin Timberlake) and Apollo Creed (whom he
trusts more than Jesus)....

It would be pretty safe to say that any time a company’s regional manager
asks a female employee to act out a lesbian love scene during its
anti-harassment training you have problems. Expensive problems....

2007-02-13T15:51:00.000-05:00

With Friends Like These...

When the defense began to put on its case in the O.J. Simpson trial, early on it called two witnesses that I can only assume its client insisted testify, as they were incredibly damaging.

The first was a doctor who examined Simpson in the days after the murder for the defense. Simpson wanted to call the doctor to say that Simpson was in such terrible physical condition that he couldn't have committed the murder, which, of course, was ridiculous. Neverthless, the doctor came on the stand and told the jury some pre-written line about Simpson looking like "Tarzan," but really he was physically like "Tarzan's grandfather."

OK. Great. So then the cross begins. Can you tell us what you saw on Simpsons' hands and fingers when you examined him? Uh, yeah, he had these really deep cuts that no one else has testified about before.

And then, as if that wasn't enough, by calling the doctor, then the defense opened the door to the prosecution playing an aerobics exercise video Simpson made in the months before the murder, and get the doctor to admit, based on what Simpson was doing in the video, that he was fit enough to commit the murders. What was Simpson wearing during the video? Uh, a black sweat suit (like the black fibers found on the victims). Did he ever return it after filming was over? Nope . Oh, and did Simpson make any comments while filming the video about his wife? Yeah, he made a strange comment while doing an exercise involving punching in the air, that you should work out with your wife when you do this exercise, so that way when you hit her, you can just blame it on working out. No further questions.

Not a good start for the defense. They obviously recovered, with the help of someone named Mark Fuhrman. But a similar thing happened during day one of the defense's case in the Libby trial, when they called Robert Novak to show that Libby did not leak to him (a point essentially irrelevant to the issues in the case):

When Novak testified, he noted that on July 8, 2003, shortly after Armitage told
him that Valerie Wilson worked at the CIA, he (Novak) called Libby--and Novak's
phone records support this. Libby returned the call that day or the next,
according to Novak, and the two discussed the ongoing controversy concerning
Bush's use of the Niger allegation in his 2003 State of the Union trip. Novak
told the court that he might have asked Libby about Wilson's wife during this
conversation but had no recollection of doing so. Yet during his grand jury
testimony, Libby denied talking to Novak in this period. Libby claimed he had
not had any conversation with Novak at "any time near" Novak's July 14, 2003
leak column--noting he had spoken to Novak "maybe a year and a half" before that
article and then a "week and a half or so" after the column came out.

So Libby calls an essentially irrelevant witness who exposes him to yet another lie under oath. Nicely done. And before Novak, the defense called Walter Pincus, the Washington Post reporter, for the same purpose. But Pincus also had this to say:

According to Pincus, Libby told him that Wilson's trip to Niger had been sparked
by a question about the Niger allegation raised by an aide to the vice
president. But the CIA had dispatched Wilson to Africa after Cheney himself
asked about the Niger allegation. In talking to Pincus, Libby was dissembling to
keep the boss out of the picture.

And Libby himself testified to the grand jury that it was Cheney, not him, who raised the issue about the Niger allegation. So what did the defense do? It called two mostly useless witnesses who exposed two new lies by the defendant in a perjury trial. Well done.

2007-02-08T19:03:00.000-05:00

The Phantom

I've come across this excellent dissection of Dick Cheney by Maureen Dowd, on Meet the Press the weekend after it became public that Cheney had shot a man in the face and delayed in releasing that information to the public. Dowd is explaining to Mary Matalin, who was rather ineptly defending Cheney, why Cheney's handling of the shooting was relevant:

The reason this story has evoked such fascination is because the vice
president is like the phantom. You know, we hear the creak of the door as he
passes, but we don't really know what he's up to. We don't know his schedule. We
don't always know where he is. We don't know what democratic institution he's
blowing off at any given minute, and so this allowed us to see how his behavior
and judgment operated pretty much in real time -- with the delay, but pretty
much in real time. ...

And it covered all the problems of the Bush/Cheney administration: secrecy
and stonewalling, then blowing off the rules that are at the heart of our
democracy, then using a filter to try and put the truth out in a way that would
most suit their political needs, and then bad political judgment in bungling a
crisis. I mean, if there's one thing the Republicans are great at since Reagan,
it's damage control. But he is such a control freak, you know, he doesn't even
care about the damage. ...

Mary, it isn't only the press. He blows off the FISA courts, he blows off
the Geneva Conventions, he blows off the U.N. to go to Iraq. He wants to blow
off everything. He's got a fever about presidential erosion just the way he had
a fever about going into Iraq.

If Cheney testifies for Libby, he won't be able to hide. It will all be out there.

2007-02-08T11:00:00.000-05:00

I Wonder What Kind of Foot Wear Rudy Wears to the Beach?

Apparently the flip-flopping and pandering isn't just reserved to people from Massachusetts. Rudy has been trying to play up his steadfastness and resolve by emphasizing the resoluteness of his views.

However, Rudy's in a bit of box with the conservative base because of his liberal views on some social issues like abortion and gay rights. So watch what he said to Sean Hannity recently about partial birth abortion:

HANNITY: Partial birth?

GIULIANI: Partial birth abortion? I think that's going to be upheld. I
think that ban's gonna be upheld. I think it should be. I think as long as
there's a provision for the life of the mother then that's something that should
be done.

HANNITY: There's a misconception that you support a partial birth
abortion.

GIULIANI: Well, if it doesn't have provision for the mother then I wouldn't
support the legislation. If it has provision for the life of the mother then I
would support. And I do.

Hmm. So Rudy says, his position has been that he would support a ban on partial birth abortion so long as there is a provision for the life of the mother in the ban. Rewind to 1999 and 2000:

Here's what Rudy said about the issue on CNN on December 2, 1999, when
he was preparing a Senate run against Hillary Clinton (via Nexis):

[GARY] TUCHMAN: Giuliani was then asked whether he supports a ban on what
critics call partial-birth abortions, something Bush strongly supports.

GIULIANI: No, I have not supported that, and I don't see my position on
that changing.

Here's what Rudy said on CNN on February 6, 2000 (via
Nexis):

BLITZER: If you were in the Senate and [President Clinton] vetoed, once
again, the [ban on the] so-called partial-birth abortion procedure, you would
vote against sustaining that against the -- in favor of the veto in other words,
you would support the president on that.

GIULIANI: Yes. I said then that I support him, so I have no reason to
change my mind about it.

BLITZER: All right. So the bottom line is that on a lot of these very
sensitive issues whether on guns, abortion, patients' bill of rights, taxes, you
are more in line with the president and by association, with Mrs. Clinton, than
you are against them.

And here's what Rudy said on ABC News on February 6, 2000:

[GEORGE] WILL: Is your support of partial birth abortion firm?

Mayor GIULIANI: All of my positions are firm. I have strong viewpoints. I
express them. And I--I do not think that it makes sense to be changing your position....

Oh, and the ban that Rudy was questioned about in 1999 and 2000 had a provision that allow the procedure when the life of the mother was in question.

It's amazing what running for President can do for a "firm" position.

2007-02-05T23:24:00.000-05:00

Two Questions...

on Romney and Rudy:

1. Why are conservatives who claimed that they couldn't support a flip-flopper from Massachusetts for President to handle something as important as the war on terror now willing to support another flip-flopper from Massachusetts for the same job?

2. People have constantly made a big deal out of a so-called "lack of experience" in foreign policy by Obama and Edwards, but no one ever raises a similar concern about Rudy, even though he has considerably less experience (unless you count trying to get U.N. diplomats to pay parking tickets) in that area than both Senators (one who served on the Intelligence Committee and one who is on the Foreign Relations Committee)?

Just wondering...

2007-02-01T22:07:00.000-05:00

Gore

I agree with Kos on this one: if Gore decides to get in, he's my man in 2008.

And maybe there is some hope, if former Gore campaign manager Donna Brazile is right:

But could former Vice President Al Gore be waiting to make a dramatic
entrance into the 2008 presidential race, especially if he wins an Oscar next
month?

His former campaign manager, Donna Brazile, strongly implied that
possibility while speaking at Moravian College in Bethlehem Tuesday night.

''Wait till Oscar night,'' Brazile told an audience of about 100 people at
Haupert Student Union. ''I tell people: 'I'm dating. I haven't fallen in love
yet.' On Oscar night, if Al Gore has slimmed down 25 or 30 pounds, Lord
knows.''...

Before making her Oscar night comment, she said she was ''so proud'' of
Gore's work to bring attention to global warming.

''I believe [Gore] is ready for this moment,'' Brazile said in an interview
after her speech. ''He is a good leader. I think he can be one of the few
leaders who can bring this country together.''

She acknowledged it will be a tough decision for Gore, noting Kerry's
announcement last week to bow out of the race. Gore believes he is now doing his
life's work, Brazile said. However, she conceded that Gore might be able to do
more about global climate change from inside the Oval Office. He has already
made an impact by forcing President Bush to talk about the issue, she
said.

Brazile's not the only one who's made a comment about Gore slimming down being an indicator of his future intentions. A lot of people have said: see if Gore is svelte by the fall. If so, then he's probably running.

2007-01-29T18:29:00.000-05:00

Straight Talk?

I always thought that one of the things that hurt Bob Dole in 1996 was his comment in the beginning of the primaries to a group of conservative Republicans that "if you want another Ronald Reagan, that's who I'll be." It was an incredibly damaging pander that hurt his credibility from that point forward.

I think a similar thing, on a much broader scale, is happening to John McCain. McCain's approval rating is down to 52%, from 59% in December. McCain's pandering to the right, along with his support for an incredibly unpopular war policy, has derailed the "Straight Talk Express" upon which he built his political strength.

Just take a look here.

2007-01-29T15:51:00.000-05:00

Oh, That'll Help Things

It's fairly well-settled that one of the motivating factors behind Islamic terrorism against the United States is anger over the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War. Indeed, Bin Laden has explictly cited this as one of the things that has motivated his anti-American sentiment.

So I was fairly stunned when I read about Dick Cheney's interview in Newsweek, and the fact that the Veep had this to say:

Vice President Cheney said the deployment this month of a second
aircraft-carrier task force to the Persian Gulf delivered a "strong signal" of
the United States' commitment to confront Iran's growing influence in the
region.

Countries in the Middle East "want us to have a major presence
there," Cheney said in a Newsweek interview published online yesterday.
Referring to the deployment of the carrier USS John C. Stennis, Cheney said,
"That sends a very strong signal to everybody in the region that the
United States is here to stay, that we clearly have significant
capabilities, and that we are working with friends and allies as well as the
international organizations to deal with the Iranian threat."

If I was on the right, I might ask: why does Dick Cheney hate America? Instead, I'll just note this with interest and derision.

2007-01-26T16:50:00.000-05:00

Why Didn't You Tell Them That The Other Two Times?

Here's a great story about a conversation Bush had with Speaker Pelosi (I really like writing that) about Iraq:

In an interview, Pelosi also said she was puzzled by what she considered
the president's minimalist explanation for his confidence in the new surge of
21,500 U.S. troops that he has presented as the crux of a new "way forward" for
U.S. forces in Iraq."

PELOSI: He's tried this two times — it's failed twice. I asked him at the
White House, 'Mr. President, why do you think this time it's going to
work?'

Pelosi then said that Bush's response was, "Because I told them it had to." Pelosi's response to that?

PELOSI: Why didn't you tell them that the other two times?

2007-01-25T20:00:00.000-05:00

"If he does, we will join him. If he does not, we will be showing him the way."

There's been a lot of press about Senator Jim Webb's fantastic response to the SOTU, and if you haven't seen it, here's where you can watch it. I thought Webb's speech was fantastic -- a simple, straight-forward, yet hard-hitting, explanation of the Democrat's position on Iraq and the economy and where Bush has gone so tragically wrong. Although his discussion of Iraq was fanatastic, I also liked his point that Bush has mentioned energy independence in every one of his SOTU addresses, yet nothing was ever done about it by Bush or the Republican Congress.

A couple of Webb's statements stood out for me:

With respect to foreign policy, this country has patiently endured a mismanaged
war for nearly four years. Many, including myself, warned even before the war
began that it was unnecessary, that it would take our energy and attention away
from the larger war against terrorism, and that invading and occupying Iraq
would leave us strategically vulnerable in the most violent and turbulent corner
of the world.

There you go. Doesn't get any more straight-forward than that. Webb then had a very moving section about a picture that he showed to the camera:

I want to share with all of you a picture that I have carried with me for
more than 50 years. This is my father, when he was a young Air Force captain,
flying cargo planes during the Berlin Airlift. He sent us the picture from
Germany, as we waited for him, back here at home. When I was a small boy, I used
to take the picture to bed with me every night, because for more than three
years my father was deployed, unable to live with us full-time, serving overseas
or in bases where there was no family housing. I still keep it, to remind me of
the sacrifices that my mother and others had to make, over and over again, as my
father gladly served our country. I was proud to follow in his footsteps,
serving as a Marine in Vietnam. My brother did as well, serving as a Marine
helicopter pilot. My son has joined the tradition, now serving as an infantry
Marine in Iraq.

And then Webb connects it with what has happened in Iraq and in Washington:

Like so many other Americans, today and throughout our history, we serve
and have served, not for political reasons, but because we love our country. On
the political issues - those matters of war and peace, and in some cases of life
and death - we trusted the judgment of our national leaders. We hoped that they
would be right, that they would measure with accuracy the value of our lives
against the enormity of the national interest that might call upon us to go into
harm's way.

We owed them our loyalty, as Americans, and we gave it. But they owed us -
sound judgment, clear thinking, concern for our welfare, a guarantee that the
threat to our country was equal to the price we might be called upon to pay in
defending it.

And then the final point, summing up the party's position on Iraq better than almost anyone else has done:

The President took us into this war recklessly. He disregarded warnings
from the national security adviser during the first Gulf War, the chief of staff
of the army, two former commanding generals of the Central Command, whose
jurisdiction includes Iraq, the director of operations on the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, and many, many others with great integrity and long experience in
national security affairs. We are now, as a nation, held hostage to the
predictable - and predicted - disarray that has followed.

The war's costs to our nation have been staggering.Financially.The
damage to our reputation around the world.The lost opportunities to defeat the
forces of international terrorism.And especially the precious blood of our
citizens who have stepped forward to serve.

The majority of the nation no longer supports the way this war is being
fought; nor does the majority of our military. We need a new direction. Not one
step back from the war against international terrorism. Not a precipitous
withdrawal that ignores the possibility of further chaos. But an immediate shift
toward strong regionally-based diplomacy, a policy that takes our soldiers off
the streets of Iraq's cities, and a formula that will in short order allow our
combat forces to leave Iraq.

And Webb closed the speech this way:

Regarding the economic imbalance in our country, I am reminded of the
situation President Theodore Roosevelt faced in the early days of the 20th
century. America was then, as now, drifting apart along class lines. The
so-called robber barons were unapologetically raking in a huge percentage of the
national wealth. The dispossessed workers at the bottom were threatening
revolt.

Roosevelt spoke strongly against these divisions. He told his fellow
Republicans that they must set themselves "as resolutely against improper
corporate influence on the one hand as against demagogy and mob rule on the
other." And he did something about it.

As I look at Iraq, I recall the words of former general and soon-to-be
President Dwight Eisenhower during the dark days of the Korean War, which had
fallen into a bloody stalemate. "When comes the end?" asked the General who had
commanded our forces in Europe during World War Two. And as soon as he became
President, he brought the Korean War to an end.
These Presidents took the right kind of action, for the benefit of the American people and for the health of our relations around the world.

Tonight we are calling on this President to take similar action, in both
areas. If he does, we will join him. If he does not, we will be showing him the
way.

Jonathan Alter of Newsweek had similar praise for Webb's speech here. It's hard to disagree with his main point:

Something unprecedented happened tonight, beyond the doorkeeper announcing,
"Madame Speaker." For the first time ever, the response to the State of the
Union Message overshadowed the president's big speech. Virginia Sen. James Webb,
in office only three weeks, managed to convey a muscular liberalism—with
personal touches—that left President Bush's ordinary address in the
dust.

I really like this Jim Webb fella.

2007-01-24T09:28:00.000-05:00

Not Exactly the News That The White House and Cheney Wanted on the Same Day as the SOTU

Michael Isikoff has a good run-down of Day 1 of the Libby Trial. And makes a good point about Libby's "I wasn't going to be the fall-guy for Karl Rove" defense: that it may seriously hurt his chances for a pardon, unless Dick Cheney truly is running the country.

Some people I've talked to thought that Libby's Rove strategy was a shrewd one from a jury perspective, as it puts him on the side from people, like Rove, who are presumably unpopular with a DC jury. However, I see two flaws with this strategy, if that's what it is. First, it aligns Libby with Cheney, who is even more unpopular than Bush. Second, it hurts his chances for a pardon, which many people viewed as the likely outcome in this case, no matter how politically reprehensible that course might be.

It's become clear, however, that not only did Scott McClellan lie to the press corps about the role of Libby and Rove in this matter (whether McClellan did so knowingly is another question), but so did Bush and Cheney back in the fall of 2003, when they both clearly knew about the involvement of their top aides, Rove and Libby, in the Valerie Plame/Joseph Wilson issue. Indeed, Cheney DIRECTED Libby to take the steps that he took with reporters.

Also, if you're interested in some serious inside baseball, the campaign docs that Rudy Giulani's campaign lost are now available online if you want to take a look here.

2007-01-23T12:43:00.000-05:00

Libby Trial Information

I highly recommend the blog Firedoglake, which has been following the Plame/Fitzgerald investigation from the beginning, for information about the Libby trial. They will be blogging daily on the trial goings-on.

Today, they've got summaries of the opening statements. Here's an interesting snippet from a summary of the opening statement by Theodore Wells, Libby's lawyer:

Fitz said Libby may have had a motive to lie, because Scottie said you'd
lose your job if you leaked.

Mr. Libby was not concerned about losing his job. He was concerned
about being set up. He was concerned about being the scapegoat.

Mr. Libby said to the VP, "I think the WH, people are trying to set me up,
people want me to be the scapegoat. people in the WH want me to protect Karl
Rove."

Cheney made notes of what Libby said. Notes show Libby telling VP that he
was not involved in leak. [oops, Wells, accidentally said, "not involved in leak
to Karl Rove.]

Cheney's note: "Not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice
the guy that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder because of the
incompetence of others."

The person who was to be protected was Karl Rove. Karl Rove was President
Bush's right hand person. Karl Rove was the person most responsible for making
sure Bush stayed in office. He had to be protected. The person who was to be
sacrificed....

So Mr. Libby because of the incompetence of th CIA had to go into the meat
grinder.

"They're trying to set me up, they want me to be the sacrificial
lamb."

I demand I will not be sacrificed so Karl Rove can be protected.

Cheney forces the WH to say to the press the same things they had said
about Karl Rove.

But unlike Karl Rove, Libby had not been pushing this story.

Mr. Libby was just a staffer, an important staffer, but Karl Rove was the
lifeblood of the Republican party.

So, Libby is going to argue that the White House was circling wagons around Rove to protect him, and he feared that he was going to get thrown to the wolves. Hmm. Rove is apparently on Libby's witness list. That could be interesting.

2007-01-22T18:54:00.000-05:00

Doubting Thomas

Back in 1991, Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas faced a difficult burden for confirmation. He had to go up against a Democratic-Senate majority, but his entire career up to that point had been defined by taking extreme conservative positions in an effort to distinguish himself as a leading black conservative for just this opportunity.

But the same positions that perfectly situated Thomas to be nominated for the Supreme Court also posed the potential to derail his nomination before the Democratic-controlled Senate. Thomas, or those advising him on his confirmation, apparently decided that there was only one path for confirmation: lie about his beliefs.

Over and over again during his confirmation hearings, Thomas walked away from his prior right-wing positions on a litany of issues. The impression he left with the Senate was that his ideological views were by no means settled and he hadn't made up his mind on a lot of critical issues. He conveyed a sense that he was not an extremist and was open to all points of view as he decided what path to take in his legal jurisprudence and analysis.

And he almost certainly was lying. Repeatedly. Under oath. (And this doesn't even evaluate whether he was truthful about Anita Hill or when he said he had never discussed Roe v. Wade with anyone when it was issued in 1973... when he was in law school!)

Indeed, one powerful example of this is to compare his open-minded statements about Roe during his confirmation hearings with the extreme position he took during his first term on the Court in Casey. Interestingly, Thomas went from an undecided moderate to a extreme right-winger in a matter of months, an amazing transformation!

Now, a new book by ABC News legal analyst Jan Crawford Greenburg provides additional evidence of Thomas' perjury. In this WSJ op-ed that is based on her book, Greenburg tries to argue that, rather than Thomas being a follower of Scalia, in many ways Scalia was following Thomas and the more extreme positions that Thomas chose to take. Ignoring or overlooking the perjury implications of these extreme positions by Thomas, Greenburg cites examples from Thomas' first term on the court:

Immediately upon his arrival at the court, Justice Thomas was savaged by
court-watchers as Antonin Scalia's dutiful apprentice, blindly following his
mentor's lead. It's a grossly inaccurate portrayal, imbued with politically
incorrect innuendo, as documents and notes from Justice Thomas's very first days
on the court conclusively show. Far from being a Scalia lackey, the rookie
jurist made clear to the other justices that he was willing to be the solo
dissenter, sending a strong signal that he would not moderate his opinions for
the sake of comity. By his second week on the bench, he was staking out bold
positions in the private conferences where justices vote on cases. If either
justice changed his mind to side with the other that year, it was Justice Scalia
joining Justice Thomas, not the other way around.

"By his second week on the bench"? Greenburg makes this same point later in the piece as well:

But the forcefulness and clarity of Justice Thomas's views, coupled with
wrongheaded depictions of him doing Justice Scalia's bidding, created an
internal dynamic that caused the court to make an unexpected turn in his first
year.

Just nine months earlier, Thomas had repeatedly told the Judiciary Committee that he hadn't formed any firm views on a number of critical legal issues. Those statements were almost certainly lies. Yet it allowed him to garner the votes of several Democrats willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Immediately upon his 52-48 confirmation, Thomas suddenly veered violently to the right, all pretense of objectivity and fair-mindedness were gone, as he mapped out a path, Greenburg claims, even to the right of Scalia.

The reward for Thomas' perjury: a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.

2007-01-21T21:15:00.000-05:00

You May Want to Sit Back and Bring Some Popcorn For This One

The Libby trial is scheduled to begin Tuesday and it may be live up to the billing in one respect: Vice-President Cheney's appearance as a witness for Libby. The prospect of Fitzgerald cross-examining Cheney has been making Fitzmas fans salivate for weeks. After all, Fitzgerald is the guy who absolutely obliterated Libby's memory "expert" on cross several months back -- he ever got her to say that she never remembered meeting him before.

But the Cheney appearance should live up to expectations. Anyone who thought that Fitzgerald might pull his punches with the sitting Vice-President should mull over this tidbit from voir dire:

Late yesterday, Patrick Fitzgerald asked a juror who expressed admiration for
the office of the vice president whether that potential juror would have any
problems if counsel (Fitzgerald) conducted an aggressive cross examination of
the vice president.

And Fitzgerald may have reason to do just that, judging by these voir questions from Libby's team:

A Libby lawyer, for the second time in this process, asked a potential juror how
they will view Vice President Cheney if his testimony is “contradicted” by
another witness.

Hmm. Sounds to me like Fitzgerald might have some more work cut out for him once this trial is over. Cheney does not have the best record of telling the truth in these kinds of settings -- remember he and Bush appeared together before the 9/11 Commission, NOT under oath, and the Commission raised serious questions about Cheney's veracity concerning whether Bush had ever given the order to shoot down airplanes, or if Cheney had just done that himself. And remember Cheney wasn't under oath during his previous interview with Fitzgerald's investigators in this case. So it should be interesting...

2007-01-12T19:17:00.000-05:00

Did Libby Lie to Cover Up For Cheney?

Scooter Libby's trial begins next week, and Murray Waas has an interesting article out in the National Journal, disclosing that Fitzgerald believed that Libby may have lied in order to cover up Cheney's role in disclosing classified information to reporters.

Here's a couple of interesting snippets, although the whole article is worth a read:

In attempting to determine Libby's motives for allegedly lying to the FBI
and a federal grand jury about his leaking of Plame's CIA identity to
journalists, federal investigators theorized from the very earliest stages of
the case that Libby may have been trying to hide Cheney's own role in
encouraging Libby to discredit Wilson, according to attorneys involved in the
case....

Both Cheney and Libby have repeatedly denied -- both publicly and to
federal investigators -- that Cheney ever encouraged Libby specifically to leak
information to the press about Plame. But since the early days of the leak probe
in fall 2003, even before it was taken over by Special Prosecutor Patrick
Fitzgerald, investigators have maintained that Libby devised an elaborate cover
story even though he must have known that contemporaneous records and the
testimony of others was very likely to show that he was lying. Other than the
motive to protect himself, the only other driving force behind Libby's actions,
federal investigators have theorized, was to protect Cheney or other superiors,
according to attorneys who have been involved in the CIA leak probe....

But the same official confirmed in an interview what has also been said in
federal grand jury testimony and public court filings: that Cheney and Libby
often acted without the knowledge or approval and of other senior White House
staff when it came to their efforts to discredit Wilson -- including leaking
classified information to the press.

Aboard Air Force Two, Cheney, Libby, and Martin discussed a then-still
highly classified CIA document that they believed had information in it that
would undercut Wilson's credibility. The document was a March 8, 2002 debriefing
of Wilson by the CIA's Directorate of Operations after his trip to Niger. The
report did not name Wilson or even describe him as a former U.S. ambassador who
had served time in the region, but rather as a "contact with excellent access
who does not have an established reporting record." The report made no mention
of the fact that his wife was Valerie Plame, or that she may have played a role
in having her husband sent to Niger.

Cheney told Libby that he wanted him to leak the report to the press,
according to people with first-hand knowledge of federal grand jury testimony in
the CIA leak case, and federal court records....

But other senior White House aides -- including Hadley and Bartlett --
later told federal investigators that they were unaware that Cheney had
authorized the disclosure of the CIA report on Wilson's Niger
mission...

What Miller herself did not know during her grand jury testimony was that a
key issue for federal investigators was whether she would testify as to whether
Libby had attempted to leak her anything about the CIA debriefing report of
Wilson after his Niger trip. Prosecutors believed that Miller was perhaps
attempting to protect Libby in her testimony....

Prosecutors did not want to tip Miller as to why it was so
crucial to them to learn whether Libby had ever mentioned the March 2002 Wilson
debriefing report to her or Cooper shortly after he disembarked Air Force Two.

The reason was that Libby's failure to mention the March 2002 debriefing
was one more piece of an ever increasing body of circumstantial evidence that
led prosecutors to believe that Libby had devised a cover story to protect
himself, and perhaps even the Vice President, to conceal the fact that his
agenda was to leak information about Plame from the very start.

In his interviews by the FBI and testimony before the federal grand jury,
Libby testified that it was the reporters who told him, and not the other way
around, that Plame was a CIA officer. Prosecutors are expected to argue during
the trial next week that Libby lied because to tell the truth Libby would have
to admit that he leaked classified information and might politically embarrass
the White House. But the prosecution may very well subtly make the case that
another motive was for Libby to protect his then-boss, Cheney. In private, some
federal investigators have asserted that Libby might have lied from the
beginning to protect Cheney

In a further possible attempt to protect Cheney, Libby also testified to
the grand jury that he did not believe he had discussed that Plame worked for
the CIA with Cheney during the critical period that Libby was leaking such
information to the press -- and didn't discuss it with the vice president until
after syndicated columnist Robert Novak first disclosed on July 14 that Plame
was a CIA "operative."

It would be significant that Cheney and Libby only discussed Plame's CIA
employment after the July 14 Novak column because instead of discussing a highly
classified secret, the information would then have been considered public
information, and not illegal, because Novak had disclosed it in his column.

While questioning Libby during grand jury testimony, prosecutors were
incredulous regarding Libby's claims that he and Cheney had not discussed
Plame's CIA employment during the critical July 6 to July 14 period. They also
expressed skepticism that Libby had supposedly forgotten -- even though Libby's
own written notes indicated otherwise -- that Cheney had told him that Plame
worked for the CIA much earlier, on either June 11 or June 12. They were also
disbelieving of Libby's claims that even though Libby and Cheney met several
times every day after Wilson's July 6 column appeared, the two men did not
discuss Plame during the subsequent eight days, not until Novak's column
appeared. And finally, prosecutors were disbelieving when Libby claimed that he
was simply passing on a rumor to Cheney that he had purportedly learned from Tim
Russert that Plame was a CIA officer.

It will be worth the price of admission to see Fitzgerald cross-examine Cheney, when he testifies. This will not be the story that the Bush Administration needs in the news right now.

At one point there was this exchange before the grand jury between prosecutors and Libby:

In a subsequent grand jury appearance, a skeptical prosecutor indicated
that he found it hard to believe that Cheney would have written the notations he
did in the margins of former Ambassador Wilson's July 6, 2003 New York Times
op-ed only after Robert Novak's July 14, 2003 column appeared saying that
Valerie Plame was a CIA "operative."

"OK," the prosecutor said, before asking, "And can you tell us why it
would be that the Vice President read the Novak column and had questions, some
of which apparently seem to be answered by the Novak column, would go back and
pull out an original July 6th op-ed piece and write on that?"

"I'm not sure...," Libby answered, "He often kept these columns
for awhile and keeps columns and will think on them. And I think what may have
happened here is what he may have -- I don't know if he wrote, he wrote the
points down. He might have pulled out the column to think about the problem and
written on it, but I don't know."

Libby then added: "You'll have to ask him."

I suspect Fitzgerald will do exactly that.

2007-01-11T18:50:00.000-05:00

It's Good to Be Back in the Majority

Barney Frank is a hoot. Here he is presiding as the chair on the House floor and knocks around Patrick McHenry when McHenry was trying to make a stupid point about American Samoa and how Democrats excluded it from the minimum wage increase but not from the stem cell bill (as if they could?!?).

Frank is pretty funny, particularly when he tells McHenry to read the bill to find out what is in the bill. Frank also says, after one Republican claims, ostensibly as a "point of order," that Frank made similar inappropriate inquiries of the chair when Republicans were in charge, that "comments on the past behavior of the speaker might be interesting, but they are not points of order."

Ah, the power of the gavel. Get used to it.

2007-01-09T18:20:00.000-05:00

New Jersey: Whatever State Smelt It, Dealt It

I wasn't sure if I was reading the Onion when I read this headline and corresponding article.

UPDATE: They've changed the headline from "New Jersey Eyed As Source of Stench" on the original post to "Mystery of Stench Lingers." Someone at CNN has no sense of humor. The original title is still on Google.

2007-01-09T18:02:00.000-05:00

Smile!

Here's the picture we all knew existed: President Bush with Jack Abramoff. Kudos to Karl Rove for keeping it under wraps until after November 2006.

Not much good it did, though.

2007-01-04T20:53:00.000-05:00

Did I Fix It?

The profile on John McCain in this month's Vanity Fair is quite interesting and discusses the biggest problem for McCain: appealing to the far-right conservative base without turning off independent and moderate voters, which have represented McCain's strength as a politician.

Indeed, as this campaign goes on, the question will be how far McCain is willing to sell out his principles and valued "Straight Talk" in order to make a brazen appeal to the right-wing base that votes in the Republican presidential primaries. (Bob Dole did a similar act in 1996 and that didn't work out so well for him).

The article begins with a great example of this problem and how McCain has chosen to deal with it:

The audience is just the kind that makes John McCain feel most alive: a
couple of thousand fresh-faced, corn-fed college kids still idealistic enough to
believe an Honest-to-God American Hero who tells them that they can, and should,
strive to serve a cause greater than their own self-interest. The setting is the
Stephens Auditorium at Iowa State University, in Ames, and the questioner is
Chris Matthews of MSNBC's Hardball, who is pitching an hour's worth of
interrogatories to the American media's favorite politician.

It is three weeks before midterm elections that will prove to be a
decidedly mixed bag for McCain. His party will experience the electorate's
repudiation of the war in Iraq, which McCain has always supported, and at the
same time the voters will repudiate the cozy and corrupt Washington culture as a
whole, which McCain has always loathed. Matthews wants to know McCain's views on the prevalence of gay people in all walks of life, a subject whose predicate is
the scandal involving Representative Mark Foley and his come-hither
instant-messaging with congressional pages. "Should gay marriage be allowed?,"
Matthews asks.

"I think that gay marriage should be allowed, if there's a ceremony kind of
thing, if you want to call it that," McCain answers, searching in vain for the
less loaded phrases he knows are out there somewhere, such as "commitment
ceremony" or "civil union." "I don't have any problem with that, but I do
believe in preserving the sanctity of the union between man and woman." It may
not be clear just what McCain is trying to say, but it's easy to see how his
words could be skewed in a direction that the Republican right might not like at
all.

Fast-forward to the next commercial break, during which McCain and Matthews
reposition themselves from the stage to the auditorium floor to take questions
from the students. McCain's longtime political strategist, John Weaver, a lanky,
laconic Texan, moves in to whisper some advice. The next question is about the
pending federal farm bill, and McCain repeats his long-standing opposition to
certain agricultural subsidies.

But then, out of nowhere, he adds, "Could I just mention one other thing?
On the issue of the gay marriage, I believe if people want to have private
ceremonies, that's fine. I do not believe that gay marriages should be legal."
There: he said it, the right words for his right flank. It might seem that this
audience, the sons and daughters of a socially conservative and culturally
traditional bellwether state, would accept, if not approve of, what McCain has
just declared. But they are the Wi-Fi wave of the future, and they can smell a
pander bear as surely as they can a hog lot. They erupt in a chorus of deafening
boos. "Obviously some disagreement with that last comment," McCain says tightly.
"Thank you. It's nice to see you."

Moments later, McCain remounts the stage for the program's final segment,
and he bores into Weaver, standing quietly in the wings, with a cold look that
seems to mingle irritation at Weaver's whispered advice with regret that he took
it, and demands, almost hisses, "Did I fix it? Did I fix it?"

John McCain has spent this whole day, this whole year, these whole last six
years, trying to "fix it," trying to square the circle: that is, trying to make
the maverick, freethinking impulses that first made him into a political star
somehow compatible with the suck-it-up adherence to the orthodoxies required of
a Republican presidential front-runner. McCain opposes a constitutional
amendment to ban gay marriage, but supports a ballot measure that would do just
that in his home state of Arizona. (It would fail in the midterm elections.) His
short-term reward for the Hardball bunt on gay marriage? Boos from the audience
and a headline on the Drudge Report, the right wing's favorite screechy
early-warning system, reading, McCain: Gay Marriage Should Be Allowed? McCain
needs to square that circle, and the hell of it is, he just can't.

The actual clip of what happened that night in Iowa on Hardball is available to watch here and is quite revealing, as McCain clearly looks awkward and uncomfortable as he tries to "correct" his statement.

The article ends with this passage:

At the freshman convocation at Boston College this fall, McCain concluded
his talk with a powerful warning about the costs of compromising one's highest
ideals.

"Very far from here and long ago, I served with men of extraordinary
character, honorable men, strong, principled, wise, compassionate, and loving
men," McCain told the students. "Better men than I, in more ways than I can
number.… Some of them were beaten terribly, and worse. Some were killed.… Most
often, they were tortured to compel them to make statements criticizing our
country and the cause we had been asked to serve. Many times, their captors
would briefly suspend the torture and try to persuade them to make a statement
by promising that no one would hear what they said, or know that they had
sacrificed their convictions. Just say it and we will spare you any more pain,
they promised, and no one, no one, will know. But the men I had the honor of
serving with always had the same response, 'I will know. I will know.'
"I wish that you always hear the voice in your own heart, when you face hard
decisions in your life, to hear it say to you, again and again, until it drowns
out every other thought: 'I will know. I will know. I will know.'"

McCain's own compromises in pursuit of the presidency may be necessary,
even justified. And they may, in fact, pave his way to victory in the Republican
primaries, and perhaps to the White House itself. But even if no one calls him
out, and the public plays along, McCain may pay an awful price. Because,
whatever happens, he will know. He will know. He will know.

The question is: does he care, or will voters?

2007-01-02T14:58:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year

Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks Edwards' use of the phrase "McCain Doctrine" is smart politics. Taegan Goddard's Political Wire has weighed in over Edwards' appearance on This Week.

2006-12-28T19:17:00.000-05:00

McCain Doctrine

I noted one aspect of John Edwards' announcement of his candidacy for the presidency in 2008 that I thought was skillful and something that I'm sure we haven't seen the last of during this campaign, if the Democrats are smart.

When discussing the Iraq war, Edwards said this:

"We need to reject this McCain doctrine of surging troops and escalating the war
in Iraq," he said. "We need to make clear we're going to leave and we need to
start leaving Iraq."

I've thought for some time that McCain was doing a dangerous dance with his support for the war and President Bush on this issue. It certainly helps him with the Republican base, but it could be deadly with independents in the general election (a bloc that is critical to his appeal as a candidate) if Democrats stick to rhetoric like Edwards' comments.

2006-12-28T00:27:00.000-05:00

Eaten By Wolves

I don't what it says about me, but the moment I heard the news about Gerald Ford's passing, I instantly thought of this Saturday Night Live sketch with Dana Carvey playing Tom Brokaw recording segments to be used in case world leaders die during Brokaw's long vacation. Thank goodness Ford didn't go that way. RIP Gerald Ford.

2006-12-27T23:44:00.000-05:00

Hacked

Josh Marshall has a great post about an attempt by the communications director for a Republican Congressman from Montana to hire someone to hack into the server of his alma mater and alter his transcript in order to boost his GPA before he applied for grad school.

The whole string of e-mails has been posted on the site where the young man sought "assistance" and they are definitely worth a read. The highlight are the pictures of the squirrels. Trust me.

2006-12-12T20:36:00.000-05:00

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

I try not to be surprised by anything I read these days, but I have to admit being a little stunned by this incredibly bad article in the Washington Post on Saturday by Charles Babington.

I've generally thought Babington is pretty good, but this article takes the cake. It's about Harry Reid's plan to hold a closed session of all 100 Senators prior to the opening of the new Congress. As is pretty clear, the move is an attempt by Reid to try to show some bipartisanship and cool the partisan environment that has plagued the Senate over the past several years. Essentially, here's a chance for all of the Senators to get together and reach out to each other, rather than divide up by parties.

So you'd think, in an era, where bipartisan gestures are praised by the mainstream media, this effort by Reid would be viewed as a positive step to change the poisonous partisanship environment, right? After all, this is what David Broder writes about every other week and Tim Russert praises every Sunday.

Nope. Babington quotes some "open government" advocate who essentially says this is another attempt to close government to the people and anytime you lose transparency, it's a bad thing. Then Babington goes on to note that Democrats promised more transparency during the fall campaign, implying that this action by Reid is inconsistent with that position. There's no quote from any outside groups about the importance of cooling the partisan bickering. Babington's take seems to equate Reid's magnanimous gesture with the prior Republican Congress having lobbyists write legislation in secret.

Wow. Sometimes you just can't win. The mainstream media acts they crave more bipartisanship, because they go crazy everytime McCain offers a kleenex to a Democrat, but when a Democrat tries offer an olive branch to help repair the partisan divide in Washington, he gets accused of being a hypocrite and adding to the problem in Washington. Glad there's a liberal media.

2006-11-29T19:09:00.000-05:00

How Did They Know?

There's a fascinating interview with Al Gore on GQ.com. Gore is quite funny in it at times. Here's some excerpts:

What kind of freedom do you feel now that you didn’t feel when you were running?
You know my all time favorite Onion headline—you read The Onion?—sometime in the summer of 2001, the lead story on the front page had a picture of Tipper and me, and the headline was, “Gores Enjoying Best Sex of Their Lives.” And she said, “How did they know?”

And some very pointed quips about Bush:

Do you know if President Bush has seen the movie yet?
Well, he claimed that would not see it. That’s why I wrote the book. He’s a reader.

What page do you think he’s on?
I would encourage him to see the movie and read the book. I wish that he would.

Don’t you find it appalling that he won’t?
Well, you know, he’s probably no more objective about me than I am about him....

What’s the nicest thing you can say about George Bush?
He made a terrific appointment of Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Ok, Is there a second best thing?
I can’t think of another one, actually.

He's also got some very direct and pointed comments about how the Bush Administration botched things pre-9/11 and how he might have done things differently:

Okay, on to 9-11. What were you really feeling? Was there a part of you that felt a sense of relief that you weren’t in charge that day?

You mean a sense of relief that I didn’t have to deal with it? Oh no. Not at all. Not for one second. Not for one second. Why would I? I mean, well first of all, it just didn’t occur to me to feel anything like that. What did occur to me was to feel what every American felt, the outrage and anger and righteous anger, and support for the President at a time of danger… And, honestly, I was focused on the reality of the situation. And I wasn’t president, so, you know, it wasn’t about me. Now, I do wish, now that we have some distance from the events, and we have all this knowledge about what this administration did do, I certainly feel that I wish that it had been handled differently, and I do wish that I had somehow been able to prevent some of the catastrophic mistakes that were made.

Do you feel that we would be safer today if you had been president on that day?
Well, no one can say that the 9-11 attack wouldn’t have occurred whoever was president.

And he says this, about the issue I've probably blogger more about than any other issue, and he gets pretty passioniate about it:

Really? How about all the warnings?
That’s a separate question. And it’s almost too easy to say, “I would have heeded the warnings.” In fact, I think I would have, I know I would have. We had several instances when the CIA’s alarm bells went off, and what we did when that happened was, we had emergency meetings and called everybody together and made sure that all systems were go and every agency was hitting on all cylinders, and we made them bring more information, and go into the second and third and fourth level of detail. And made suggestions on how we could respond in a more coordinated, more effective way. It is inconceivable to me that Bush would read a warning as stark and as clear [voice angry now] as the one he received on August 6th of 2001, and, according to some of the new histories, he turned to the briefer and said, “Well, you’ve covered your ass.” And never called a follow up meeting. Never made an inquiry. Never asked a single question. To this day, I don’t understand it. And, I think it’s fair to say that he personally does in fact bear a measure of blame for not doing his job at a time when we really needed him to do his job. And now the Woodward book has this episode that has been confirmed by the record that George Tenet, who was much abused by this administration, went over to the White House for the purpose of calling an emergency meeting and warning as clearly as possible about the extremely dangerous situation with Osama bin Laden, and was brushed off! And I don’t know why—honestly—I mean, I understand how horrible this Congressman Foley situation with the instant messaging is, okay? I understand that. But, why didn’t these kinds of things produce a similar outrage? And you know, I’m even reluctant to talk about it in these terms because it’s so easy for people to hear this or read this as sort of cheap political game-playing. I understand how it could sound that way. [Practically screaming now] But dammit, whatever happened to the concept of accountability for catastrophic failure? This administration has been by far the most incompetent, inept, and with more moral cowardice, and obsequiousness to their wealthy contributors, and obliviousness to the public interest of any administration in modern history, and probably in the entire history of the country!

It would be really interesting if he were to run in 2008.

2006-11-28T21:41:00.000-05:00

Things Are Going to Be Interesting With Webb in the Senate

Apparently, Webb had a testy exchange with the petulant President, when Bush brought up Webb's son, who is serving in Iraq, at a recent reception:

At a private reception held at the White House with newly elected lawmakers
shortly after the election, Bush asked Webb how his son, a Marine lance corporal
serving in Iraq, was doing.
Webb responded that he really wanted to see his
son brought back home, said a person who heard about the exchange from
Webb.

“I didn’t ask you that, I asked how he’s doing,” Bush retorted,
according to the source.
Webb confessed that he was so angered by this that he was tempted to slug the commander-in-chief, reported the source, but of course didn’t. It’s safe to say, however, that Bush and Webb won’t be taking any overseas trips together anytime soon.

“Jim did have a conversation with Bush at that dinner,” said Webb’s
spokeswoman Kristian Denny Todd. “Basically, he asked about Jim’s son, Jim
expressed the fact that he wanted to have him home.” Todd did not want to
escalate matters by commenting on Bush’s response, saying, “It was a private
conversation.”

A White House spokeswoman declined to give Bush’s version of the
conversation.

He was "tempted to slug" Bush? It's going to be an interesting six years with Jim Webb in the Senate.

2006-11-09T16:56:00.000-05:00

If You Thought 2006 Was A Great Year for the Senate, Take a Look at 2008

I'm always the kind of person who likes to look ahead, and I was taking a look at the seats that will be up in the Senate in 2008. And things look really good. We're only defending 12 seats, almost all of which are safe.

2006 was supposed to be the hard year for us in the Senate, since six seats were seen as a tough road, particularly given that some of the seats were in deep red Virginia and Montana. But 2008 looks much different, with great opportunities for pickups in Colorada, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee and Virginia, and some good chances in North Carolina, New Hampshire and Kentucky. I'm probably most nervous about holding Louisiana, post-Katrina, and New Jersey, if Lautenberg retires.

Here's an excellent analysis of the 2008 state of play in the Senate by Markos at Daily Kos.

2006-11-09T16:48:00.000-05:00

What Are We Going to Do Without Her?

An ode to the great Katherine Harris. This is a great piece with clips from her infamous appearance on Hannity and Colmes to vamp, I mean, announce her Senate candidacy.

With the possible exception of George "Macaca" Allen, this country has rarely seen more of a train wreck of a Senate candidate.

We're gonna miss you, Kathy.

2006-11-07T17:06:00.000-05:00

This Is What They've Got Left

The Ehrlich-Steele Republicans in Maryland are at it again, trying to win through voter suppression, manipulation and just plain confusion.

Back in 2002, Republicans circulated this flyer in black neighborhoods in Baltimore, telling voters that they must pay off any outstanding parking tickets, traffic tickets, back rent and outstanding warrants before voting. Oh, and it also put the wrong date (November 6, 2002) for election day, which was November 5, 2002. Voter suppression, plain and simple.

The result: Ehrlich and Steele won, the first Republican governor in Maryland since Spiro Agnew.

Fast forward to 2006, and they're at it again. Steele has been shameless -- this time focusing on voter confusion. He's created a bumper sticker that says "STEELE DEMOCRAT," implying, of course, that he is the Democratic candidate in the race. He claims that it is similar to people saying that they are "a Reagan Democrat." But, of course, it doesn't say, "I'm a Steele Democrat." Equally damning is the fact that Steele has NO bumper stickers that identify him as a Republican.

Bamboozlement #2 came after Michael J. Fox did an ad for Cardin, stating that Steele was opposed to the "most promising type of stem cell research," which, as everyone knows, is embroyonic stem cell research.

So, Steele got his sister, Monica Turner (Mike Tyson's ex-wife), to put out an ad stating that the Fox ad was not accurate because "Michael Steele does support stem cell research." She never states that Steele supports ONLY non-embroyonic stem cell research, which, as far as I can tell, is useless in terms of medical promise.

The kicker of the Turner ad is that she begins by stating the Cardin's ad with Fox is a "deceptive, tasteless ad" and that Cardin is "using the victim of terrible disease to frighten people." As if Cardin forced Fox to make the ad with a gun to his head, a la some terrorist victim videos. Then, after criticizing Cardin for using a disabled person in an ad, Turner concludes the ad by stating, "I have MS."

But, as we should have known, Ehrlich and Steele saved the best for election day. Apparently, they've bused in homeless people from Philadelphia to pass out incredibly deceptive flyers to urban voters suggesting that Ehrlich and Steele are part of the Democratic ticket and endorsed by the Democratic leadership.

Some Republicans might say, "Oh, well, maybe this is just done by some rogue operative." Uh, no. Governor Ehrlich's wife, Kendel, greeted the workers when their buses arrived in Maryland!

After a two-hour bus ride to Maryland, Markle said the workers were greeted
early this morning by first lady Kendel Ehrlich, who thanked them as they were
outfitted in T-shirts and hats with the logo for Ehrlich's reelection campaign.
Nearly all of those recruited, Markle said, are poor and black. Workers traveled
to Maryland in at least seven large buses.

But the most outrageous is Ehrlich's response:

"If folks are here from out of town that's fine with me. That's what the
Democrats have always done. It's legal and it's what the Democrats have done
forever. This is a story?"

"If we've finally caught up with the Democrats that's fine," he added.
"People asked me about ballots and other stuff. That's not my job. I've got
other things to do."

Stunning. These folks do not deserve to win.

2006-10-24T17:44:00.000-04:00

Here We Go Again

Back in July 2005, Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, gave a speech before the NAACP, where he apologized for previous attempts by the Republican party to play the race card and appeal to racial prejudices, and promised that the Republicans would stop:

"Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the
other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here
today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong."

Unfortunately, as is all too often the case, Mehlman was lying through his teeth.

You see, Harold Ford Jr., who happens to be African-American, is running a great campaign in Tennessee for Bill Frist's open Senate seat so the RNC has been forced to get down in the muck again, running this ad against Ford. In the ad, a blonde, scantily slad white actress says she met Ford at "the Playboy party" and tells him to call her.

As if that wasn't enough, the RSCC also issued a press release last week concerning, Julia Allison, a former Georgetown University student (who wrote a sex column for the school paper) who Ford dated several years ago.

Here's the release:

For Immediate Release: Monday, October 16, 2006 Contact: Dan Ronayne(202)
675-[redacted]

More Details Of Ford's Fancy Fling

WASHINGTON--The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) issued
the following release after The Commercial Appeal reported more details of
Congressman Harold Ford, Jr.'s previous "nonexclusive courtship" with a
Georgetown University sophomore:

"It's good to hear Congressman Ford's Georgetown University girlfriend's
spring break planning didn't get in the way of his meetings with the President,"
said Dan Ronayne, NRSC Spokesman. "But the least Fancy Ford could have done was call her back after news broke of their relationship. Not providing closure is
distinctly un-fancy."

The woman, who now writes for New York magazine, said that they went on a ski trip together and that was about all. She said Ford was a terrible skier. She even posts some pictures from their ski trip on her blog. She claims that he broke up with her after the press learned of the relationship. (The reference to spring break and the president is from a recent article where she said, "I mean when I'm talking about spring break, he's talking about meeting with the President.") Overall, she seems pretty annoyed that the Republicans are even interested in her. She writes:

Do I know if Ford would be a good Senator or not? Hell, your guess is
as good as mine. But I'd hate to think that a Republican could gain some
advantage because the Dem was a shitty date. I mean, c'mon. REALLY??

If the GOP has to resort to "But He Never Called Julia Back," they're even
more fucked than Keith Olbermann (and I) would like to believe.
I mean, can't they at least allege that he stiffed me on dinner? Didn't
buy me jewelry? Refused to confirm the Wednesday before a Saturday night
date? SOMETHING!?!? Damnit, where's Rove when you need
him??

I don't think that's where they're going with this, Julia.

Did I mention that she also happens to be white?

So much for Mehlman's promise.

2006-10-23T16:05:00.000-04:00

Do You Think We'd Actually Say Something That Stupid?

Well, I almost fell off my chair when I heard this one:

STEPHANOPOULOS: James Baker says that he’s looking for something between
“cut and run” and “stay the course.”

BUSH: Well, hey, listen, we’ve never been “stay the course,”
George. We have been — we will complete the mission, we will do our
job, and help achieve the goal, but we’re constantly adjusting to tactics.
Constantly.

Never been stay the course? I guess they were for stay the course before they were against it then:

BUSH: We will stay the course. [8/30/06]

BUSH: We will stay the course, we will complete the job in Iraq. [8/4/05]

BUSH: We will stay the course until the job is done, Steve. And the
temptation is to try to get the President or somebody to put a timetable on the
definition of getting the job done. We’re just going to stay the course. [12/15/03]

BUSH: And my message today to those in Iraq is: We’ll stay the course. [4/13/04]

BUSH: And that’s why we’re going to stay the course in Iraq. And that’s why
when we say something in Iraq, we’re going to do it. [4/16/04]

BUSH: And so we’ve got tough action in Iraq. But we will stay the course.
[4/5/04]

As usual, Jon Stewart gets it about right. But this turnabout does have some problems for the lapdogs who followed the Administration's lead previously.

Do they think that little of the intelligence of the American people? After all, who are you going to believe, the Bush Administration or your lying eyes? I guess we'll see who is right on November 7.

2006-10-02T19:35:00.000-04:00

Burned Rice

So we now know, thanks to Bob Woodward's new book, that not only was Condi warned repeatedly about the impending threat of al Qaeda by Richard Clarke throughout 2001, but that George Tenet and Cofer Black specifically met with her on July 10, 2001 to try to impress upon her the seriousness of the threat:

Tenet hoped his abrupt request for an immediate meeting would shake Rice.
He and Black, a veteran covert operator, had two main points when they met with
her. First, al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly in the
United States itself. Black emphasized that this amounted to a strategic
warning, meaning the problem was so serious that it required an overall plan and
strategy. Second, this was a major foreign policy problem that needed to be
addressed immediately. They needed to take action that moment -- covert,
military, whatever -- to thwart bin Laden.

The United States had human and technical sources, and all the
intelligence was consistent, the two men told Rice. Black acknowledged that some
of it was uncertain "voodoo" but said it was often this voodoo that was the best
indicator.

Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite,
but they felt the brush-off. President Bush had said he didn't want to swat at
flies.

She ignored their warnings. She also, apparently, neglected to inform the 9/11 Commission about this meeting, despite being asked about any such meetings under oath.

Faced with clear evidence once again of her (at best) incompetence and dishonesty, Rice had this to say today:

Rice acknowledged Sunday that the White House was receiving a "steady
stream of quite alarmist reports of potential attacks" during daily meetings
from Tenet during that period. But she said the targets were assumed to be in
the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Israel and Jordan. She said no
reports mentioned the United States.

"What I am quite certain of, however, is that I would remember if I was
told -- as this account apparently says -- that there was about to be an attack
in the United States. The idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find
incomprehensible," she told reporters.

Uh, Condi, what about the August 6, 2001 PDB, which was titled, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside US"?

She is simply incapable of telling the truth.

2006-09-28T20:23:00.000-04:00

The White House's History with Iraq Intelligence

In light of the controversy over the Iraq NIE on terrorism and the other "draft" report about the bleak situation in Iraq, I thought that one episode detailed in Ron Suskind's excellent book, "The One Percent Doctrine," deserves more attention.

On page 340-41 of the book, Suskind writes about a request that Vice President Cheney made after a CIA briefing in mid-November 2004, a few weeks after Bush's reelection. Jami Miscik, the CIA's analytical chief, was informed by one of her deputies that Cheney had requested at the briefing that a portion of a particular CIA be declassified and made public. Here's what Suskind writes:

Miscik knew the report - it was about the complex, often catalytic
connections between the war in Iraq and the wider war against terrorism. The
item that the Vice President wanted declassified was a small part that might
lead one to believe that the war was helping the broader campaign against
violent jihadists. The report, she knew, concluded nothing of the sort. Many of
its conclusions flowed in the opposite direction. To release that small segment
would be willfully misleading. She told the briefer to tell Cheney that she
didn't think that was such a good idea.

The Vice President expressed his outrage to Porter Goss. A few days later,
a call came from Goss's office. The call had been placed by one of Goss's
executive assistants -- emblematic, in that Goss did not make the call himself,
of how dysfunctional relations had become at the top of the CIA. The deputy
expressed the DCI's displeasure. He urged Miscik to reconsider. He described
Goss's position succinctly: "Saying no to the Vice President is the wrong
answer."

Language is an improbably powerful thing. It's just words, after all, in a
world full of noise. But certain combinations of words can move mountains and
change lives. This line did that for Miscik, even after all that she, like
others in embattled corners of the government, had gone through trying to
preserve the basics of analysis and due diligence in the face of a one percent
doctrine that could operate without them, if need be - a doctrine that prized
"response" above all.

"Actually," she replied, "sometimes saying no to the Vice President is what
we get paid for."

She hung up and fired off a memo to Goss, saying -- she later recalled --
that "this was just the sort of thing that had gotten us into trouble, time and
again, over the past few years. Telling only half the story, the part that makes
us look good, and keeping the rest classified. Eventually, it comes out and it
looks bad, real bad, and we lose moral capital."

A few days later, Miscik got word, again from a Goss deputy, that the DCI
would reluctantly support her decision. A few weeks after that, she was gone.
"It was only a matter of time at that point," she recalled.

Her memo -- a summation of a long-standing school of thought of which she
is one of countless adherents -- is, of course, classified. That means, by
accepted definitions of such things that its release would compromise the
security of the nation. Indeed.

Something to remember as the Administration begins to leak intelligence to try to support its position in the next month...

2006-09-28T20:08:00.000-04:00

Here's the Pre-9/11 History... In Ten Minutes

Keith Olbermann does it again, this time summarizing the Bush Administration's criminally negligent response to a clear terrorist threat up to 9/11. A transcript of the show is here and you can watch it here. It's quite nicely done, and puts the lie to many of the Administration's talking points, and shows that Condi Rice, in particular, has been incredibly untruthful . One point I had never heard about before:

But while it has become conventional wisdom, although debunked by the 9/11
report, that Mr. Clinton dropped an offer from Sudan to hand over bin Laden, it
is rare to hear anyone discuss whether similar but real feelers were ever
extended to Mr. Bush. And it is, we suspect, even more rare to see this tape of
the Bush White House addressing reports of such feelers in February 2001, after
the government knew al Qaeda had attacked the U.S.S. “Cole.”

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, February 27, 2001)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Taliban in Afghanistan, they have offered that they
are ready to hand over Osama bin Laden to Saudi Arabia if the United States
drops its sanctions, and the—they have a kind of deal that they want to make
with the United States. Do you have any comments (INAUDIBLE)?

ARI FLEISCHER, WHITE HOUSE PRESS Secretary: Let me take that and get back
to you on that.
(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: There is no record of any subsequent discussion on that
matter.

Oops.

2006-09-26T18:35:00.000-04:00

Condi Lies.. Again

After Bill Clinton's smackdown of Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, the Bush Administration sent Condi out again to defend their actions pre-9/11. One of their lines of attack on Clinton has been concerning his statement that Clarke was "demoted" by the Bush Administration. Here's what Condi said on that point:

She also said Clinton's claims that Richard Clarke - the White House
anti-terror guru hyped by Clinton as the country's "best guy" - had been demoted
by Bush were bogus.

"Richard Clarke was the counterterrorism czar when 9/11 happened. And
he left when he did not become deputy director of homeland security, some
several months later," she said.

Now, Condi knows better. But she just can't help it. As Condi well knows, Clinton wasn't referring to Clarke leaving AFTER 9/11. He was referring to what happened to Clarke when Bush and Condi and the crew took office on January 20, 2001. You see, under Clinton, Richard Clarke's position as counterterrorism czar was a cabinet level postion, so Clarke met with the principals directly, showing how important the terrorism issue was for the Clinton Administration.

Yet when Bush took power, he demoted Clarke's position -- it was no longer a Cabinet level position and Clarke was told to meet with the deputies and run things through them before he could deal with the principals, which, as Clarke and the 9/11 Commission detail, was an extremely inefficient and bureacratic process that resulted in Clarke's warnings being ignored by the top Bush officials, including -- GUESS WHO? -- Condi. (Condi was obsessed with missile defense, China and -- surprise, surprise -- Iraq, so Clarke was viewed as chicken little). So, by not continuing the cabinet level status of the top counterterrorism official in the U.S. government, the Bush Administration made crystal clear its view of the importance of the issue of terrorism before 9/11: it simply wasn't important

Condi also had this to say:

The secretary of state also sharply disputed Clinton's claim that he "left
a comprehensive anti-terror strategy" for the incoming Bush team during the
presidential transition in 2001.

"We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda," Rice
responded during the hourlong session.

Oh really? Then what is this?

On January 25, 2001, 5 days after Bush entered office, Clarke sent Condi a detailed memo about Al Qaeda and terrorist concerns. The memorandum attached -- guess what? -- a detailed plan, or "comprehensive strategy", to fight Al Qaeda, written by Clarke in 2000. See it for yourself here.

Condi, I think your pants are on fire again.

BTW, I also recommend Keith Olbermann's commentary about the Clinton Fox interview. You can read it or watch it in its entirety here. But one point, about the allegation made in "Path to 9/11" and by right wingers, that the Lewinsky scandal and Starr investigation, caused Clinton to be distracted, gets Olbermann particularly incensed:

Disney was first to sell-out its corporate reputation, with "The Path to
9/11." Of that company’s crimes against truth one needs to say little. Simply
put: someone there enabled an Authoritarian zealot to belch out Mr. Bush’s new
and improved history.

The basic plot-line was this: because he was distracted by the Monica
Lewinsky scandal, Bill Clinton failed to prevent 9/11.

The most curious and in some ways the most infuriating aspect of this
slapdash theory, is that the Right Wingers who have advocated it—who try to
sneak it into our collective consciousness through entertainment, or who sandbag
Mr. Clinton with it at news interviews—have simply skipped past its most glaring
flaw.

Had it been true that Clinton had been distracted from the hunt for bin
Laden in 1998 because of the Monica Lewinsky nonsense, why did these same people not applaud him for having bombed bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan and Sudan on
Aug. 20, of that year? For mentioning bin Laden by name as he did so?

That day, Republican Senator Grams of Minnesota invoked the movie "Wag The
Dog."

Republican Senator Coats of Indiana questioned Mr. Clinton’s
judgment.

Republican Senator Ashcroft of Missouri—the future attorney general—echoed
Coats.

Even Republican Senator Arlen Specter questioned the timing.

And of course, were it true Clinton had been “distracted” by the Lewinsky
witch-hunt, who on earth conducted the Lewinsky witch-hunt?

Who turned the political discourse of this nation on its head for two
years?

Who corrupted the political media?

Who made it impossible for us to even bring back on the air, the
counter-terrorism analysts like Dr. Richard Haass, and James Dunegan, who had
warned, at this very hour, on this very network, in early 1998, of cells from
the Middle East who sought to attack us, here?
Who preempted them in order to strangle us with the trivia that was, “All Monica All The Time”?

Who distracted whom?

It's a sad state of the current news establishment when it takes a former SportsCenter anchor to be a truthteller.

2006-09-25T21:14:00.000-04:00

Finally

If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend watching Bill Clinton's interview with Chris Wallace on the Fox News Channel concerning the disinformation campaign put out about Clinton's pre-9/11 record on terrorism. Each point Clinton makes is absolutely true and backed up, as he says, by Richard Clarke's book.

I just wish that Clinton had spoken out sooner, rather than let the right-wing revisionists succeed in convincing the public that Clinton hadn't done enough, when it was Bush who was nearly criminally negligent in his neglect of terrorism issues before 9/11.

2006-09-18T18:37:00.000-04:00

Remember Those Tom Ridge Terror Alerts in the Fall of 2004?

Senator Barack Obama has a good line in a recent speech in Iowa about the way the Bush Adminsitration has used the war on terror as a political tool:

I've had enough of using terrorism as a wedge issue," Obama declared
forcefully, before shifting to a lighter tone. "I don't know about you, but the
war against terrorism isn't supposed to crop up just between September and November in even-numbered years. That seems to be the pattern. There is a sudden burst of activity, a sudden urgency, three months before an election."

2006-09-11T17:45:00.000-04:00

Clarke: Clinton Administration Officials Shared a "Common Fixation" With Fighting Terrorism

Richard Clarke has issued a statement slamming ABC's 9/11 movie and defending the Clinton Administration's focus on terrorism. Noting that he is "someone who was directly involved in almost every event depicted in the fictionalized docudrama," Clarke had this to say:

Although I am not one to easily believe in conspiracy theories and have
spent a great deal of time debunking them, it is hard to escape the conclusion
that the errors in this screen play are more than the result of dramatization
and time compression. There is throughout the screenplay a consistent bias and
distortion seeking to portray senior Clinton Administration officials as holding
back the hard charging CIA, FBI, and military officers who would otherwise have
prevented 9-11.

The exact opposite is true. From the President, to all of his White
House team, and NSC Principals (Lake, Berger, Albright, Tenet, Reno) there was a
common fixation with terrorism, al qaeda, and bin Ladin. The President approved
every counter-terrorism operation presented to him, including many that CIA
proved unable or unwilling to implement. He increased counter-terrorism spending
by 400% and initiated the first homeland security program in forty years. Even
though the US had taken relatively few casualties from al qaeda at the time, the
President repeatedly authorized the use of lethal force against bin Ladin and
his deputies and personally requested the US military to develop plans for
"commando operations" againstthem. Even though he knew the timing of an attack
aimed at killing bin Ladin would be labeled by critics as a political diversion,
Clinton decided to follow the advice of his national security team and pay the
price politically.

Again, Clarke is one of the few eyewitnesses to what went on in both the Clinton and Bush Adminsitrations. His opinion should carry a fair amount of weight as to what actually went on.

2006-09-11T14:46:00.000-04:00

Operation Ignore

Al Franken, in a chapter in his excellent book, "Lies and Lying Liars Who Tell Them," nicely summarizes the extreme neglect by the Bush Administration concerning the terrorist threat before 9/11 that I discussed below.

2006-09-08T17:59:00.000-04:00

The Truth About Pre-9/11

For several days, I've been meaning to post about the controversy over ABC's 9/11 "documentary," called "The Path to 9/11," scheduled to air on September 10 and 11. (Unfortunately, as has been the case recently, I've been really busy working so I've had less time to post). However, this is a subject that I've read a lot of about and have a keen interest in, so I thought I would chime in.

What really happened before 9/11, in both the Clinton and Bush II administrations, isn't really that difficult to determine. And it can be found in a few sources, like the 9/11 Commission Report, Richard Clarke's book, etc. The fact of the matter is that what the Bush Administration did (or more aptly, did not do) in the nine months they were in power leading up to 9/11 is nothing less than criminal negligence. And, as shown when Richard Clarke came out with the truth in the spring of 2004, the Bush Administration desperately wants to keep this truth away from the American people, and keep the myth of Bush as terrorist-hunter alive.

Did the Clinton Administration make some mistakes in dealing with Bin Laden and Al Qaeda? Certainly. But there is no doubt at all that catching and killing Bin Laden and stopping his terror network was a top priority of Clinton, particularly during his second term. According to Richard Clarke, there was no greater focus for Clinton than getting Bin Laden. The same absolutely cannot be said of Bush during his first nine months in office. (Indeed, Bush admitted as much to Bob Woodward -- he didn't feel there was a sense of urgency)

Here are the facts about Clinton vs. Bush, which is what this movie attempts to gloss over and rewrite:

Clinton tried to kill Bin Laden in 1998, and was focused on him repeatedly during his second term. When Clinton went after Bin Laden, the Republicans accused him of trying to "Wag the Dog," showing that they didn't understand the threat the way Clinton did. The ABC movie appears to make two contradictory points: that Clinton used the attacks against Bin Laden as a way to distract the county from impeachment and that Clinton was so distracted by impeachment that he wasn't able to focus on Bin Laden. In actuality, Clinton told people like Richard Clarke not to worry about the political ramifications of their actions; he just wanted to get Bin Laden. The real issue is the fact that Ken Starr and his witchhunt became the focus, rather than on catching a terrorist killer who had bombed our embassies in 1998. The Republicans are absolutely to blame for this focus, no question. If they would not support isolated military strikes against Bin Laden, how could they be expected to support a sustained military operation in Afghanistan? The damage that Republicans did to this country with their focus on Clinton's sex life is incalculable.

Moreover, at the end of 1999, as the millennium celebrations approached, Clarke and others learned from the CIA about an increased level of threats, similar to pre-9/11. What did Clinton do about this? He put all agencies on high alert, having daily meetings, "shaking the tree," until the result was that a would-be airport bomber was caught entering the country from Canada.

Let's contrast that with Bush. Immediately after the election, he's told by Clinton in an Oval Office meeting that Bin Laden is one the most important issues he will be dealing with. Bush ignores this advice. Richard Clarke and Sandy Berger tell Condi Rice the same thing. She ignores the advice; indeed, Clarke says that Rice appeared to have never heard of the term "al Qaeda" before. Immediately after Bush was inaugurated, Clarke briefs VP Cheney on the same issues; Cheney does nothing about it. In fact, Cheney's anti-terrorism commission, created early in Bush's first year, does not meet until the week before 9/11. Meanwhile, Cheney is focused on Iraq.

Clarke sends out desperate warnings, including e-mails in all caps and italics to Rice about the threat. She does nothing. The final determination is made that al Qaeda is behind the attack on the U.S. Cole -- the Bush Administration decides not to retaliate because, in Rice's explanation, it might provoke them to attack the U.S. again.

Bush receives the infamous 8/6/01 PDB titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside U.S." What does he do? He tells the CIA briefer, "OK, you've covered your ass now," and goes fishing. He does nothing. Ashcroft tells his briefer during the summer of 2001 that he does not want to hear any more about Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. And then Ashcroft asks Congress, the week before 9/11, to CUT funds for counter-terrorist operations. And on 9/11, Rice was scheduled to give a speech that outlined the Bush policy to address "the threats and problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday." The speech dealt with missile defense. It contained no mention of Bin Laden, terrorism, or Islamic radicals.

So I think the record is pretty clear: the Clinton Administration, despite constant criticism, tried to fight Bin Laden and terrorism, although that effort had limitations. The Bush Administration simply didn't try at all. It's all out there, in the 9/11 Report and other places. If only ABC knew where to look.

2006-09-07T20:07:00.000-04:00

That Could Only Happen in Democratic Senate, Huh

The Republicans have created a website newspaper that they have oh-so-cleverly titled, "America Weakly," which is ostensibly a look into the future if the Democrats take control of Congress this fall.

My favorite part is an article about Bush's supposed nominees to the Supreme Court to replace newly "retired Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, which the evil Democrats have blocked. According to the article, here's what happened to Bush's first nominee to replace Stevens when he was faced with the Democrats controlling the Senate:

The President’s first nominee to replace him never was granted a committee
hearing, and withdrew her name from consideration.

Oh, yeah. That never happened when the Republicans controlled the Senate. Right, Harriet?

2006-08-24T16:32:00.000-04:00

Right About Now Would Be Good

There was talk back in the spring about the Democrats unveiling their national agenda, similar to a "Contract for America." Pundits were criticizing Democratic candidates for only attacking Republicans, rather than offering their own positive, affirmative agenda. I thought the Democrats were right to wait. After all, the "Contract for America" wasn't unveiled until the fall of 1994.

But it's almost September. I know, as Andy Card said about the Iraq war, that you don't introduce new products in August. But it's getting to be that time for the Democrats. Let's hope we see something soon. Given the way the wind is blowing, that could be what they need to push them over the top

2006-08-10T16:19:00.000-04:00

No Go, Joe

I've been meaning to write about the loss of Joe Lieberman in the Democratic Senatorial primary in Connecticut on August 8 for several days now.

I must admit, although I'm not a Lieberman fan, I was pretty torn about who I wanted to win the primary. On the one hand, I thought Lieberman had veered far away from his constituents and showed no desire to change. On the other, I was worried about the effect of a Lamont win on the chances for Democrats to pick up three House seats in Connecticut. (In retrospect, I think that the Lamont win might end up helping Democrats more than hurting Democrats in those races, as more liberal voters will be motivated to turn out to vote for Lamont (and the Democratic House candidate in turn) than they would have been if Lieberman was the Democratic nominee.)

Over the weekend prior to the election, I was put off by the outrageous spin that Lanny Davis and other Lieberman supporters try to pin on Lieberman's infamous statement from last year that "we undermine the President's credibility at our nation's peril." According to Davis, Lieberman was talking not to his fellow Democrats, but to Republicans who politicized the war and used it as a political weapon, specifically citing the attacks against Max Cleland in 2002.

Garbage. Lieberman's statement SPECIFICALLY referred to Democrats. Here's the statement:

It is time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will
be Commander-in-Chief for three more critical years, and that in matters of war
we undermine Presidential credibility at our nation’s peril.

For Lieberman and his cronies to invoke Max Cleland, when Lieberman did NOTHING help Cleland in 2002, even though Lieberman could have defended Cleland by pointing out how Cleland had supported Lieberman's initial bill to create the Homeland Security Department, stuck in my craw pretty bad.

But then on election day, I must admit I felt kinda bad for the guy and I wasn't sure if I wanted him to lose. Then came his speech after he lost, and I no longer felt any mixed feelings over his debate.

For Lieberman to essentially state that 52% of Democrats in Connecticut (including members of my family!) are some fringe element because they don't believe that George Bush should be followed blindly in the mess of Iraq and for other Lieberman misdeeds, showed me that he is unable to place any blame on himself and thus not worthy of serving in the Senate any longer.

He's just an incredibly selfish politician. To run as an independent now is the same as running for the Senate at the same time he was running for Vice President (and I think his independent decision ultimately cost him what turned out to be a very close race).

With all the recent articles about the race, I thought two points were particularly enlightening. The first discussed how Lieberman's basic political philosophy is to act in a bipartisan manner over issues of foreign policy and that explains his actions on Iraq -- essentially adopting a "politics stops at the water's edge" view. But in order for that to work, it takes two to tango. And the Bush Administration didn't go along, but Lieberman never saw that or altered his behavior:

"The stance that, for a senator, politics ought to stop at the water's edge
makes sense if and only if the president isn't playing politics with foreign
policy," said William A. Galston of the Brookings Institution, who has often
sided with Lieberman on intraparty battles but disagrees with him on the
war.

"But this president and this administration manifestly have played
politics with foreign policy, and their chief political adviser has been totally
frank about that," he added. "I think it would have been permissible and even
advisable for Joe Lieberman to conclude at some point that a bipartisan foreign
policy has got to be a two-way street. He really didn't."

I think this, in a nutshell, explains what a lot of Democrats feel about Lieberman. He kept insisting that he wouldn't play politics with foreign policy, while Republicans were using the war on terror as a political club against Democrats. Patsy, I think, is the term probably most appropriate to describe Lieberman in this area.

The second point dealt with the bitterness Lieberman apparently felt after his 2004 Presidential bid was such an absolute disaster, and how that may have moved him away from his party and closer to Bush and his Iraq policy. Apparently, if you compare his statements about Bush and the war prior to his "three way tie for third place" in New Hampshire in January 2004 and afterwards, there was a marked change.

For someone to be that bitter over a disastrous presidential bid that he would give unqualified support to a disastrous foreign policy as a way to thumb his nose at those who shunned deserves what he got.

It's hard to believe he was a butterfly ballot away from being Vice President of the United States.

2006-07-28T18:31:00.000-04:00

The Pig

Sadly, this speaks volumes about President Bush and why we're in the mess we are today. It's hard to believe this is true. Homer Simpson is our President. Wow.

2006-07-24T13:46:00.000-04:00

It's Bad When You Lose Sir Charles

There's been a lot of talk recently about the 2006 elections, and whether the current unpopularity with the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress will be enough to give Democrats control of Congress once the dust settles in November 2006.

I'm not sure where things are going to end up, but I have to say things don't look good for the Republicans when I read a quote like this from Charles Barkley, who for years has said he wanted to run for Governor of his native state of Alabama as a Republican.

Sir Charles was recently quoted as saying, "I was a Republican -- until they lost their minds."

Although I wonder what took Sir Charles so long, I can't argue with his conclusion.

2006-07-21T18:50:00.000-04:00

Joementum

Being from Connecticut, I've been meaning to post on the Lieberman situation for quite some time now. My feelings on Lieberman crystalized many years ago and had nothing to do with Iraq. I think people who have described Lieberman's political problems as stemming solely from his support of Bush's disasterous Iraq policy aren't looking at the whole picture.

I've viewed Lieberman with skepticism for many years, going back to the early nineties. He was viewed, even back then, as a Republican in Democratic clothing. I learned from a Senate staffer in 1993 that supposedly Lieberman had promised Bush Sr. that he would vote for Clarence Thomas if Bush needed his vote to confirm Thomas. Obviously, something like that is pretty hard for a Democrat to forgive.

I think many Democrats also looked at Lieberman's focus in the late nineties, and his alliance with people like Bill Bennett, on the "moral decay" caused by video games and Hollywood violence with skeptcism as well.

However, I was most disappointed with Lieberman during the 2000 campaign. While I thought Gore's pick of Lieberman was shrewd because of the symbolism to voters that Gore was separating himself from Clinton's scandals, I never was excited about Lieberman himself. Lieberman's Don King "Only in America" routine at every public appearance, including his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, got old really fast and didn't advance the campaign, in my view.

But his performance in 2000 against Cheney in the debate was a real touchstone for me. Lieberman let Cheney allow himself to come off as a reasonable, moderate guy (we now know better), playing perfectly into Rove's strategy to falsely paint Bush and Cheney as moderates who wouldn't be like those right-wing nuts controlling Congress (and who would cut your taxes too!). At no point did Lieberman address Cheney's neaderthal voting record while in Congress (voting against Head Start, voting against a resolution supporting the release of Nelson Mandela, voting against MLK Day), leaving that to Edwards in the 2004 Debate after Cheney lied and stated that he had never met Edwards before that night.

Lieberman also let Cheney get away with claiming that the government had "nothing to do" with the enormous wealth he earned at Halliburton, while Halliburton had got fat gorging at the trough of government contracts, etc.

Lieberman was also terrible during the Florida Recount, and his unilateral decision to announce a change in the Gore campaign's position on military absentee ballots was very damaging.

I also thought that Lieberman could have come to the defense of people like Max Cleland in 2002, to defend him against charges that Cleland was against the Homeland Security Bill. Actually, Cleland had supported the bill to create the Homeland Security Department that Lieberman had sponsored and Bush was opposed to (before he was for it). But Lieberman stayed silent as Saxby Chambliss and Bush clobbered and slandered Cleland.

Lieberman's support for the President on Iraq and their "kiss" at the SOTU is simply the last straw, not the first. I think the best way to describe the feeling about Lieberman among political activists on the left is how many political activists on the right felt about McCain before McCain decided to wrap himself around Bush: bipartisanship and attacking your parties' leaders is always going to impress David Broder and Tim Russert, but the die-hard partisans are always going to be turned off by it. And I think that's what's happened with Lieberman.

I think a lot of Lieberman's unqualified support for Bush may come from the fact that his 2004 campaign for President was so unbelievably poorly received by Democrats. I've heard one pundit say that Democrats treated him like a carnival act, and that made Lieberman bitter. All I know is about 4-5 days before the New Hampshire primary, I was watching C-SPAN and they showed Lieberman campaigning at some fair or convention in New Hampshire, and there was no one there, he had no buzz, people were barely stopping to talk to him. Then, suddenly, Lieberman turned a corner and there was a huge crowd. And I'm thinking, wow, this is pretty impressive for Lieberman to turn out all of these people. Only as the cameras moved closer, you saw that the crowd wasn't for Lieberman. They were in front of this big tank of water watching a water-skiing squirrel. The look on Lieberman's face when he realized that a squirrel in a tiny swimsuit was generating infinitely more buzz than his candidacy really said it all.

I personally agree with Ned Lamont's comment after his debate with Lieberman: why is it that Lieberman acts like a lapdog during a debate with a Republican but a bulldog during a debate with a fellow Democrat? That seems like a question that Connecticut Democrats should consider before voting in the primary.

2006-07-13T17:09:00.000-04:00

Wilsonukah?

Okay, it's not Fitzmas. But it's still pretty good. The Wilsons sue Cheney, Libby and Rove. Read the complaint here.

Boy, that Clinton v. Jones precedent is a bitch, isn't it, Dick? (I know, Nixon v. Fitzgerald is actually more on point).

Can't wait for that deposition. Oh, and unlike the 9/11 Commission (where you and Bush got to "meet" with the Commission together so you could get your stories straight about whether Bush ever gave the order to shoot down planes that day or if you acted alone) and before Fitzgerald, you will actually have to testify "under oath."

Okay, Bush Administration: time to set Ken Mehlman loose!

2006-07-07T14:59:00.000-04:00

At What Point Is It No Longer "Spin" and Becomes, Well, You Know, a "Lie?"

Josh Marshall points out yet another untruth from the mouth of Ken Mehlman:

From MSNBC, June 30th, 2006 ...

The [Justice Department IG] report also contained evidence of
Abramoff's strong ties to the Bush White House. One White House political
official, Leonard Rodriguez, told Fine's investigators he kept Abramoff aware of
information relevant to Guam "at the behest of Ken Mehlman, the White House
Political Director," the report said. There was no explanation of why Mehlman
would have wanted the information shared with Abramoff.

Ken Mehlman, quoted in Vanity Fair, May 2006: "Abramoff is someone who we don't know a lot about. We know what we read in the paper."

Look, it's clear by now that intellectual honesty is not Mehlman's strong suit, but this one takes the cake. Mehlman now describes Abramoff as he would describe the Abominable Snowman or the Loch Ness Monster, after having ordered people to keep Abramoff in the loop years earlier. It's kinda like how the Administration described Bush's relationship with "Kenny Boy" Lay after Enron imploded. (Neglecting to mention that the Bush campaign was shuttled to and from Florida during the recount on Enron corporate jets).

So, if this is the degree of honesty that we can come to expect from Mehlman, I wonder what to make of his denial that he knew about the phone jamming plot organized by James Tobin in NH in 2002? I hear that the plaintiffs in the NH civil case are trying to take his deposition. That could be fun.

2006-07-02T21:54:00.001-04:00

Slot It In

Atrios is right. This is truly a classic moment. I love Bennett's reaction to Priest's comment. You won't be disappointed.