October 2003

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Scary stuff

by Mark Gisleson

Not a lot new in this Salon story just posted about electronic voting machines, but if you didn't click on all those links I posted the other day (Diebold, Diebold, Diebold, etc.), this Robert Tanner article provides a solid overview of the issues.

"I'm deeply concerned about this whole idea of election integrity," said Warren Slocum, chief election officer in California's San Mateo County. His doubts were so grave that he delayed purchasing new voting machines and is sticking with the old ones for now.

He's not alone. While the Florida recount created momentum for revamping the way Americans vote, slow progress on funding and federal oversight means few people will see changes when they cast ballots next week. And new doubts could further slow things.

In Florida's Broward County -- scene of a Bush-Gore recount of punch-card ballots -- officials spent $17.2 million on new touchscreen equipment. Lately, they've expressed doubts about the machines' accuracy, and have discussed purchasing an older technology for 1,000 more machines they need....

"The computer science community has pretty much rallied against electronic voting," said Stephen Ansolabahere, a voting expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "A disproportionate number of computer scientists who have weighed in on this issue are opposed to it."

.... This week, a federal appeals court in California threw out a lawsuit that challenged computerized voting without paper trails, finding that no voting system can eliminate all electoral fraud.
That didn't satisfy doubters.

John Rodstrom Jr., a Broward County (Fla.) commissioner said local officials there wanted to upgrade to optical scan machines, but were pressured into buying more than 5,000 touchscreens.

"We were forced by the Legislature to be a trailblazer," he said. "The vendors ... they're going to tell you it's perfect and wonderful. (But) there are a lot of issues out there that haven't been answered. It's a scary thing."

As partial atonement for lifting so much of Tanner's article, I'd like to take a moment to pitch Salon membership. Since going online in 1994, I have seen just about every "big thing" to come along, Internetwise. Over the years no website has been as valuable to me, or as consistently entertaining as Salon's. Click here if you're ready to part with a few dollars in exchange for complete access to the number one left-leaning political/cultural publication online today.

* *

As long as we're doing some following up on earlier stories (and isn't that pretty much what 98% of political reporting is about?), Salon also has a nice story from Tim Grieve about that Romenesko letter from Charlie Reina.

Reina is out of journalism for the moment -- he's running his own woodworking business in suburban New York -- and he realizes that going public about his experience at Fox won't improve his career prospects. He says he doesn't care.

Fox did not respond to calls or a faxed letter from Salon seeking comment on Reina's tenure at the network or his comments about news values there. But Reina has plainly hit a nerve. Late Thursday, Romenesko posted a response to Reina's note that appeared to be from Sharri Berg, a vice president for news operations at Fox. The response called Reina a "disgruntled employee" with "an ax to grind." And Berg included comments she attributed to an unnamed Fox staffer who described Reina as one "any number of clueless feature producers" who made inane calls to the news desk, "the kind of calls where after you hung up you say to the phone, 'go f?k yourself.'" Berg quoted the newsroom employee as saying, "[I]t's not editorial policy that pisses off newsroom grunts -- it's people like Charlie."

If you care to watch the commercial (or if you decide to subscribe), you can read Grieve's interview with Reina, which includes background on Fox's decision to turn against Trent Lott. PressThink also has quite a bit more on this story, as well as some interesting comments from readers.

* *

Atrios and some other serious political bloggers have convinced me to bookmark Juan Cole's weblog. A bit depressing (he tends to focus on body counts), but interesting. Unsurprisingly, Coles linked to Mark Clayton's story about Cole's insights into the 9/11 terrorists in the Christian Science Monitor ("Reading into the mind of a terrorist"). A good serious read.

While I was at the CSM, I noticed this intriguing article: "Secret 9/11 case before high court." OK, I'm a sucker for words like "secret," especially when they're right next to "9/11." I think I may have heard about this case, but for the most part, this is one of those really important stories that no one's covering — but in this case, not for the usual reasons:

This is among the first of the post-Sept. 11 terrorism cases to wend its way to the nation's highest tribunal. There was no public record of its existence, however, until the appeal was filed with the clerk of the US Supreme Court.

A federal judge and a three-judge federal appeals-court panel have conducted hearings and issued rulings. Yet lawyers and court personnel have been ordered to remain silent.

"The entire dockets for this case and appeal, every entry on them, are maintained privately, under seal, unavailable to the public," says a partially censored 27-page petition asking the high court to hear the case. "In the court of appeals, not just the filed documents and docket sheet are sealed from public view, but also hidden is the essential fact that a legal proceeding exists."

* *

If you're absolutely determined not to do any more work this afternoon, or if you're settled in for a long night in front of your monitor, here's three more good reads:

Michael Tomasky on Wesley Clark in The American Prospect

Daniel Gross on why the new economic numbers aren't that important, in Slate

and an AP article, "Report Links Iraq Deals to Bush Donations," in the New York Times

And, if you're still looking for more reading, you can always check out my daily (7/52) blog on Babelogue's front page.

 

 

Posted by Mark Gisleson at October 31, 2003 01:23 PM

 

"Roger's Revenge"

by Mark Gisleson

Jim Romenesko's webpage is pretty much a haunt for newspaper people. I was a bit surprised then to see how quickly one of his letters page items has gotten around. Charlie Reina, a former Fox News producer has some interesting things to say about his former employer.

[A]t Fox, if my boss wasn't warning me to "be careful" how I handled the writing of a special about Ronald Reagan ("You know how Roger [Fox News Chairman Ailes] feels about him."), he was telling me how the environmental special I was to produce should lean ("You can give both sides, but make sure the pro-environmentalists don't get the last word.")

Editorially, the FNC newsroom is under the constant control and vigilance of management. The pressure ranges from subtle to direct. First of all, it's a news network run by one of the most high-profile political operatives of recent times. Everyone there understands that FNC is, to a large extent, "Roger's Revenge" - against what he considers a liberal, pro-Democrat media establishment that has shunned him for decades. For the staffers, many of whom are too young to have come up through the ranks of objective journalism, and all of whom are non-union, with no protections regarding what they can be made to do, there is undue motivation to please the big boss.

Sometimes, this eagerness to serve Fox's ideological interests goes even beyond what management expects. For example, in June of last year, when a California judge ruled the Pledge of Allegiance's "Under God" wording unconstitutional, FNC's newsroom chief ordered the judge's mailing address and phone number put on the screen. The anchor, reading from the Teleprompter, found himself explaining that Fox was taking this unusual step so viewers could go directly to the judge and get "as much information as possible" about his decision. To their credit, the big bosses recognized that their underling's transparent attempt to serve their political interests might well threaten the judge's physical safety and ordered the offending information removed from the screen as soon as they saw it. A few months later, this same eager-to-please newsroom chief ordered the removal of a graphic quoting UN weapons inspector Hans Blix as saying his team had not yet found WMDs in Iraq. Fortunately, the electronic equipment was quicker on the uptake (and less susceptible to office politics) than the toady and displayed the graphic before his order could be obeyed.

Fair and balanced, indeed.

* *

Josh Marshall continues to closely watch the goings on in Congress. His latest column in the Hill News has some regarding recent Republican efforts to blame the CIA for the mess in Iraq.

Why was the NIE so rushed and why was it produced when it was? An NIE is put together to assemble all the information in the intelligence community on a given topic. Normally, the point is to assist the executive — as well as the Congress — in the process of fashioning policy.

But that’s not what happened here.

We know that the Bush administration specifically resisted calling for an NIE until very late in the game because it didn’t want the results and findings getting in the way of the policy the administration had already decided on. The reason an NIE was finally pulled together is that Senate Democrats wanted some sense of what the evidence was for all the White House’s claims about Iraqi WMD and ties to international terrorism.

In other words, the NIE was only put together when the policy was being sold, not when it was being put together. So the administration could not have been misled or ill-served by it because it was never used to formulate policy. The administration only used it to sell the policy to a skeptical Congress.

The timing of the NIE points to another important conclusion. If you’re wondering why the document seemed so slanted in favor of alarmist judgments about Iraq’s WMD, it’s probably because it was produced for a White House that already had a policy in place. With the policy already decided upon, it was, shall we say, pretty clear how the White House wanted the report to turn out. And, unfortunately, the agency obliged.

[more]

* *

Lost in all the shuffle over Iraq has been Haley Barbour's recent Trent Lott like moment in the sun. Derrick Z. Jackson updates the record. I'll give Jackson credit. It's hard to follow Barbour's story without coming to the obvious conclusion that he's little more than a racist jerk, but Jackson contents himself with just present the facts. I think you'll find it hard not to agree with my assessment, however.

Barbour has blatantly appealed to the most racist elements in Mississippi by defiantly refusing to ask the Council of Conservative Citizens to remove his photograph from its website home page. The photo shows Barbour at a CCC-sponsored barbecue with five other men, including CCC field director Bill Lord.

The CCC grew out of the racist white citizens councils that fought integration during the civil rights movement. In yet another example of its hatred, the CCC home page features an article titled "The Racial Compact." The article proposes a South African-style apartheid in most of the United States reserved for the "Nordish-American population." African-Americans, who are referred to as "Congoid," would be shoved into what is now Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and north Texas. Latinos would be consigned to south Texas and New Mexico....

Barbour tried to play it both ways last week, saying merely that some of the CCC's views are "indefensible." Unfortunately, some African-Americans in the Republican Party, too timid to criticize the pandering, have afforded him some racial cover. But there is no defending in any way a group whose sole purpose is to glorify the most poisonous aspects of American history, from the traitorous Confederacy to calling immigrants of color "trash" to denunciations of Jewish Americans. Perhaps the problem is that it is unrealistic to expect Barbour to fully renounce the CCC if he has not fully renounced his own past. When he ran for the Senate in 1982, a New York Times report said:

"The racial sensitivity at Barbour headquarters was suggested by an exchange between the candidate and an aide who complained that there would be `coons' at a campaign stop at the state fair. Embarrassed that a reporter heard this, Mr. Barbour warned that if the aide persisted in racist remarks, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks."

* *

Via Atrios, this AP story presents a side to the war in Iraq you probably haven't heard much about: mercenaries, or, as they're now called, private contractors.

For over twenty years the military has been trending Republican. George W. is single-handedly reversing that trend. Benjamin Wallace-Wells reports on "Corps Voters" at the Washington Monthly.

Steve Gilliard has transcribed some recent comments by Robert Fisk, who was interviewed by Pacifica's Amy Goodman. "Well, I can tell you there are at least 200,000 foreign fighters in Iraq and 146,000 of them are wearing American uniform. You know, Americans in Iraq did not grow up in Tikrit eating dates for breakfast. The largest number of foreign fighters in Iraq, a thousand times over anything Al Qaeda can do, are western soldiers. And we need to realize that we're maintaining an occupation there."

Retired Colonel David H. Hackworth has more on the Army's shameful treatment of our wounded troops.

And for those who've been wondering, Moja Vera is back in the States and doing fine. Updating his blog has taken a backseat to finding a civilian job. Drop me an e-mail if you know of any suitable opportunities in the Arizona area for former military satellite communications experts.

UPDATE: Gaius Publius sends us this link to an Aussie article, "Cheney's hawks 'hijacking policy.'" Good read.

For future reference, if you e-mail me about anything in this weblog, try to remember to slap a few ###'s at the front of your subject line. I'm getting over 600 spam a day, and this makes it a lot easier to spot your e-mail. And, for what it's worth, I think the "re:" tag is now worthless thanks to our "creative" spam corps.

 

Posted by Mark Gisleson at October 30, 2003 10:49 AM

 

D-D-D-D-Dieb-b-b-b-old (now that's scary!)

by Mark Gisleson

All together now:

Diebold

Diebold

Diebold

Diebold

Diebold

Diebold

Diebold

Diebold

Diebold

Diebold

Diebold

So where's our "cease and desist" letter?

* *

Are the Republicans beginning to fracture? Maybe just a little? Geoff Earle at The Hill thinks so.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who recently compared aspects of the conflict to Vietnam, yesterday said U.S. forces need to be more proactive....

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he was concerned that U.S. forces were unable to anticipate many of the attacks in a situation he described as tantamount to a guerrilla war in which the enemy is able to strike and then quickly retreat into the population....

“Honestly, it’s a little tougher than I thought it was going to be,”[Trent] Lott said. In a sign of frustration, he offered an unorthodox military solution: “If we have to, we just mow the whole place down, see what happens. You’re dealing with insane suicide bombers who are killing our people, and we need to be very aggressive in taking them out.”

* *

A shout out to Daily Kos for the definitive slam dunk put down of Bush's attempt to blame the USS Abraham Lincoln's crew for the "mission accomplished" sign. For someone who looked unbeatable, George W., more and more, looks like one of life's bigger losers. For what it's worth, here's my winning debate strategy for the first 2004 Bush-?? debate. The Democratic nominee should make their opening statement, then turn over the rest of their time (save closing remarks) to Bush with the invitation to spend that time outlining his plans for the next four years. That would make for a pretty tortured and unconvincing hour of incoherent babbling.

Some folks are pondering whether Howard Dean is more like George McGovern or Jimmy Carter. I'd like to know what in the hell is wrong with being compared to McGovern?

 

* *

From the front page blog, here's an interesting pair of links about working for Microsoft: what he did, what happened.

Rightwingnews compiled an unscientific list of rightwing bloggers' favorite books. "All bloggers were allowed to make anywhere from 1-20 selections. Rank was determined simply by the number of votes received. I think you'll find that more than a few surprises made this incredibly diffuse list." Actually, I don't think you'll be very surprised at all, unless you forget the obvious and are expecting "Atlas Shrugged" to come in first. [link]

And here's a pair of good non-rightwing reads from the New York Observer, one by Joe Conason, the other from Nicholas von Hoffman.

 

 

Posted by Mark Gisleson at October 29, 2003 12:25 PM

 

Counting it up

by Mark Gisleson

George W. Bush just held his first press conference since late July. I dunno, is it just me, or does the president sound like he's taking dictation from a little voice in his ear? I kept watching to see if he was wearing his "hearing aid," but the camera angle didn't really let you see into his ear at all.

Here are some highlights:

[W]hat they're trying to do is cause people to run. They want to kill and create chaos. That's the nature of a terrorist. That's what terrorists do: They commit suicide acts against innocent people and then expect people to say, "Well, gosh, we better not try to fight you anymore."

We're trying to determine the nature of who these people were. But I will tell you, I would assume that they're either/or and probably both Baathists and foreign terrorists.

The Baathists try to create chaos and fear because they realize that a free Iraq will deny them the excessive privileges they had under Saddam Hussein. The foreign terrorists are trying to create conditions of fear and retreat because they fear a free and peaceful state in the midst of a part of the world where terror has found recruits — that freedom is exactly what terrorists fear the most.

* *

[In reference to his landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln] I think you ought to look at my speech. I said Iraq's a dangerous place, got hard work to do, there's still more to be done.

And we had just come off a very successful military operation. I was there to thank the troops.

The "Mission Accomplished" sign, of course, was put up by the members of the USS Abraham Lincoln saying that their mission was accomplished. I know it was attributed somehow to some ingenious advance man from staff. They weren't that ingenious, by the way.

* *

What I was saying is, there's more than just the terrorist attacks that are taking place in Iraq. There's schools opening, there are hospitals opening, the electricity — the capacity to deliver electricity to the Iraqi people is back up to prewar levels, where nearly 2 million barrels of oil a day being produced for the Iraqi people.

So I was just saying we've got to look at the whole picture, that what the terrorists would like is for people to focus only on the conditions which create fear, and that is the death and the toll being taken....

The strategy remains the same. The tactics to respond to, you know, more suiciders driving cars, will alter on the ground.

* *

As a matter of fact, military action is the very last resort for us. And a reminder, when you mention Saddam Hussein, I just want to remind you that the Saddam Hussein military action took place after innumerable United Security Council resolutions were passed. Not one, two or three, but a lot.

And so this nation is very reluctant to use military force. We try to enforce doctrines peacefully or through alliances or multi- national forums. And we will continue to do so.

* *

Q: You have said that you are eager to find out whether somebody in the White House leaked the identity of an undercover CIA agent. Many experts in such investigations say you could find out if there was a leaker in the White House within hours if you asked all staff members to sign affidavits denying involvement. Why not take that step?

Bush: Well, the best person to do that so that the -- or the best group of people to do that so that you believe the answer is the professionals at the Justice Department. And they're moving forward with the investigation. It's a criminal investigation. It is an important investigation.

* *

We must never forget the lessons of September the 11th. The terrorists will strike and they will kill innocent life, not only in front of a Red Cross headquarters, they will strike and kill in America, too. We are at war.

I said right after September the 11th, this would be a different kind of war. Sometimes you'd see action and sometimes you wouldn't. But it's a different kind of war than what we're used to.

And Iraq is a front on the war on terror. And we will win this particular battle in the war on terror.

* *

[O]ne of the things that [David Kay] first found was that there was clear violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, material breach they call it in the diplomatic circles. Causes belie (ph), it means that would have been a cause for war. In other words, he said it's dangerous.

And we were right to enforce U.N. resolutions as well. It's important for the U.N. to be a credible organization. You're not credible if you issue resolutions and then nothing happens. Credibility comes when you say something is going to happen and then it does happen.

And in order to keep the peace, it's important for there to be credibility in this world, credibility on the side of freedom and hope.

In case you're wondering, the finally tally on actual words coming out of the president's mouth was:

terrorists - 29 mentions

terror - 17 mentions

terrorism - 1 mention

"September the 11th" - 4 mentions

Saddam Hussein – 14 mentions

Taliban - 1 mention

Osama bin Laden - zero mentions

accountability - zero mentions

87 billion dollars - zero mentions

Donald Rumsfeld - zero mentions

Iraq/Iraqis - 60 mentions

America/American/Americans - 23 mentions, mostly in his opening remarks

 

Posted by Mark Gisleson at October 28, 2003 12:47 PM

 

Getting "it"

by Mark Gisleson

We're at a point in Iraq and with the war on terror where it's fairly interesting to look around to see who gets "it," and who doesn't. As part of a discussion on Krugman's latest book that will be largely familiar to regular Bush Wars readers, I did some digging to see what the conservative columnists are writing about. Iraq's not high on their list, and many are clutching at some highly irrelevant topics (e.g., missing Sudanese penises, breast implants, "intelligent design," etc.) — anything to avoid talking about the elephant in their ideological living rooms.

Jimmy Breslin, not surprisingly, is one of the columnists who gets "it." His October 23rd column, "Bin Laden, Cop Killer," spells out for New York's finest the nitty gritty details of how George W. Bush and his administration have betrayed cops everywhere by failing to deal with the world's biggest cop killer, Osama bin Laden.

George Bush stood in the World Trade Center ruins and said he would get bin Laden. Get bin Laden as a sheriff would, smoke him out, shoot him cold dead. All the poor cops cheered. What a thrill to have a good tough guy as president! That was over two years ago. Now you never hear bin Laden mentioned.

And the cops who have lost their own do nothing. They are the most extraordinarily gullible of people. They support with all fervor the idea of our president sending troops to Iraq and not where they could capture bin Laden. The cops say nothing about their dead. They are afraid to demand that their government honor the tradition of the 1013 and catch this common cop killer, bin Laden. They are afraid of anybody in authority. They have their dead bodies and they don't have the guts to shout. If they yelled with the emotion used when pushing around a peace demonstration, or anything made up of blacks, their prep school hero, Bush, would quiver and I say he makes bin Laden the goal again.

What is this, bin Laden has killed cops and we don't even catch him, but now we have to listen to tapes of bin Laden threatening to attack us again? Why do we put up with this?

Ben Smith, in the New York Observer, writes about Jim Wilkinson, and offers him as exhibit A in the case against the Republican party having a clue as to how to handle things. As Gen. Tommy Franks director of strategic communications, Wilkinson managed to piss off the entire assembled press corps with his arrogant "no news" press briefings. His reward? Wilkinson will be handling the media for the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City.

"What’s clear is, it won’t look like any other convention we’ve ever seen. We’re looking to provide as much access to reporters as possible," Mr. Wilkinson said, taking the war’s key lesson to the convention.

But that, as many reporters would remind him, is what he said in Qatar....

Plenty of reporters seethed at him during the war, and not covertly. Reporters there barked and protested—many are still brutally angry—at the "No comment" after "No comment" they received in Doha as their embedded colleagues broke news in the field and Mr. Rumsfeld gave press conferences at the Pentagon. Doha was, to them, a kind of biosphere of non-news.

"We were basically a studio audience to make it look like a real press conference," said Kevin Diaz of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "They were talking—literally—directly over our heads to the television cameras."

The President, at least, is still on topic. In the aftermath of the horrendous Baghdad bombings, he made the following comments this morning, as reported by Fox News:

"The more progress we make on the ground, the more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity that's available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become," Bush told reporters at the White House.

He said those who are continuing to engage in violence "can't stand the thought of a free society. They hate freedom. They love terror. They love to try to create fear and chaos."

[more]

Oh yes, those freedom-hating Iraqis...

* *

A quick Diebold footnote. Swarthmore College, responding to Diebold's flurry of legal action in their efforts to suppress stories about electronic voting machine errors, has initiated a policy of "terminating the internet connection of any student who links to the Why War? website."

It's not quite as bad as that sounds. Swarthmore will let you spell out the URL, but warns students against actual links.

* *

Saw Beyond Borders Sunday afternoon with a friend. The horrific scenes from the refugee camps in Ethiopia, Cambodia and Chechnya will stay with me for a long time, even though the love story that runs through the movie was almost unbearably sketchy and clichéd.

Something else will stay with me as well: the nine consecutive commercials we sat through before the previews started. The first was perhaps the most grating, a teaser for Fox's season premier of "24" brought to us by Ford. Ford wanted to make sure that we knew that the season opener would be broadcast uninterrupted by commercials! Having just paid to see a first-run movie, we weren't terribly amused by Ford's logic of punishing a paying audience by bragging about not interrupting a free television show with commercials.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at October 27, 2003 10:23 AM

 

The "Friday" Report

by Mark Gisleson

REALLY LATE UPDATE: Apparently late Friday night wasn't good enough for the Caspar Milquetoasts over at the 9/11 commission. They waited until today to issue a subpoena threat for "several highly classified intelligence documents" from the White House. Here's the link, but the bottom line is that former Republican Governor Thomas Keane still hasn't issued any subpoenas, and he saved his "fiery" bluster for Saturday, making sure the administration wouldn't be overly embarrassed.

And, as usual when the New York Times decides to "slow walk" a story they can't otherwise ignore, some of the best quotes come at the very end of the article:

Slade Gorton, a Republican member of the panel who served in the Senate from Washington from 1982 to 2000, said that he was startled by the "indifference" of some executive branch agencies in making material available to the commission. "This lack of cooperation, if it extends anywhere else, is going to make it very difficult" for the commission to finish its work by next May, he said.

Timothy J. Roemer, president of the Center for National Policy in Washington and a former Democratic member of the House from Indiana, said that "our May deadline may, in fact, be jeopardized — many of us are frustrated that we're still dealing with questions about document access when we should be sinking our teeth into hearings and to making recommendations for the future."

Congress would need to approve an extension if the panel requested one, a potentially difficult proposition given the reluctance of the White House and many senior Republican lawmakers to see the commission created in the first place.

"If the families of the victims weighed in — and heavily, as they did before — then we'd have a chance of succeeding," said Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who was an important sponsor of the legislation creating the commission. He said that, given the "obfuscation" of the administration in meeting document requests, he was ready to pursue an extension "if the commission feels it can't get its work done."

UPDATE: Another Blackhawk down.

* *

Mark A.R. Kleiman has the two best links for explaining the Republicans' current efforts to blame this war on the CIA. Click here for the Washington Post story of record, and here for the CNN spin cycle dissection (courtesy of Sen. Jay Rockefeller, who's doing a great job of monitoring Sen. Pat Roberts' yeoman-like disinformation efforts). Josh Marshall is following this story closely, and speculates on what's really going on (here and here). [The Globe and Mail, The Age, Al-Jazeera, NYTimes, Voice of America]

Marshall also wrote recently about Grover Norquist's incredibly extensive ties to radical Muslims:

My sense has always been that Norquist got into the Islam business back in the late 1990s when it looked like a growth industry for the Republican coalition.

He had a lot of ideas about Muslims being natural cultural conservatives and free marketeers, and so forth. This three-cheers for Muslim capitalism! conference in Doha is a prime example.

His 'Islamic Institute' is run out the offices of his main operation, 'Americans for Tax Reform.' (I just checked the website and apparently it's now 'The Islamic Free Market Institute.' So, you know, Mohamed von Hayek.)

In any case, after 9/11 came along he probably realized that he might have gotten tied up with at least a few questionable characters. But he was too proud to admit he'd been naive and then just dug himself deeper.

That's always been my sense. But when people start getting arrested, maybe it's time to give the whole thing a closer look.

Via Atrios, Body and Soul reports that the Eastern European undocumented workers nabbed in those Wal-Mart raids were making as little as two dollars a day. ???!!! Seems to me that an aggressive federal prosecutor could go after Wal-Mart and the subcontractor for enslaving these hapless immigrants. This is more than a labor law violation. Two dollars a day might buy the groceries in parts of Bangladesh, but in the United States prison workers make that much an hour (there is no other legal comparison).

Also courtesy of Atrios, here's Dwight Meredith on why school vouchers are unconstitutional in thirty states. Ironically, the root cause of all these state constitutional amendments was virulent anti-Catholicism.

Billmon nails down the details on just how failed the Madrid "fundraiser" for Iraq really was. It's my tax dollars too, but it's hard to blame other countries for not wanting to chip in to bail us out of this unholy and totally unnecessary mess.

Steve Gilliard spotted this Courier-Journal article on the GOP's decision to put "Election Day challengers" into 59, mostly black, voting places in the Louisville area. Gilliard accurately assesses the situation:

Hmmm, yet another case of nigger vote suppression.

It didn't work in 1965, it won't work now. But the Dems should pick the richest, whitest counties in the state and do the same. See how quickly this plans dies.

In the real world, most of these people are long time, regular voters and know the people at the polling stations. This is just legal intimidation.

[link — scroll down to "GOP to put challengers in black voting precincts"]

If you didn't read yesterday's Mark Crispin Miller Diebold story, here's a link to Black Box Voting and the original story on how Diebold's voting machines may have provided the catalyst for the television network's decision to "uncall" Florida for Gore. More and more and more the bits and pieces come out. Florida was stolen, the Supreme Court anointed a cheater, and tens of thousands have died as a result. Is Ashcroft's DOJ investigating? Are bears Catholic? Does the Pope . . . well, you get the idea.

Here in Minnesota, and at dozens of locations around the country, it's Wellstone World Music Day. Skip a game or two and listen to some music and think about the Wellstone legacy. It's also the 74th anniversary of the first recording of "Happy Days Are Here Again."

 

 

Posted by Steve Perry at October 25, 2003 11:39 AM

 

Holy shit!

by Mark Gisleson

Whether you care about the Diebold story or not, CLICK ON THIS LINK NOW!

 

Posted by Steve Perry at October 24, 2003 11:37 AM

 

For a few oil wells more

by Mark Gisleson

I missed a really hot show last night. Wynton Marsalis and his band were playing a tiny club in downtown St. Paul when Itzhak Perlman walked in fresh from a performance at the Ordway Center. Needless to say, the resulting jam was, by all accounts, pretty amazing.

Then my thoughts turned to Jack Kennedy's presidency. JFK was renown for routinely inviting great minds to dine with him at the White House. If you have no pretensions to being an intellectual, it may be hard to understand why talking with a great poet about Walt Whitman can help you to better understand complex issues pertaining to breaking developments in the Congo, but trust me, it's all in having your mental switches in the "on" position.

How comforting then to read a Reuters report that appears to indicate that President Bush likened Australia's role in the Asia-Pacific region to that of a "sheriff." True, it is the mark of a great mind to be able to reduce complex issues to simple equations, but somehow I don't think that's what Bush was doing. In his inimitable fashion, he was yet again creating a garbled Wild West scenario, and not a hard-scrabble one in which most settlers couldn't afford a gun, but the Hollywood kind with white hats and dark-skinned natives.

Ted Rall has a somewhat more irreverent take on a similar theme.

* *

Josh Marshall is looking for a smoking gun. The vast rightwing you know what is cackling that there's no money quote of George W. Bush saying, in exactly so many words, that Saddam was an "imminent threat."

im·mi·nent, adj. About to occur at any moment:IMPENDING.

"Our wingerly friends have made a lot of the rarity of occurrences in which the phrase ‘imminent threat’ was used. But they rather ignore all the instances in which administration officials told the public we had to depose Saddam right now before he could use his nuclear weapons and smallpox on us. Any quotation which conveys the imminent threat message is acceptable even it doesn't contain the phrase 'imminent threat.'"

So there you have it: Josh has a contest going. Feel free to peruse through Steve Perry's compendium of Bush's Lies to find your winning entry.

* *

Via Atrios, Dennis Kucinich has taken the high road and refused to appear on Hardball. Good for him.

You'll have to scroll down a ways, but if you're into the environment, be sure to read Tom Dispatch's post, "Notes from the colonial era." I know you'd rather read an excerpt, but if you follow the link, you can also read some selected quotes from General Jerry Boykin that are well worth the click.

Media Whores Online interviews Gene Lyons about Wesley Clark. Hot.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at October 24, 2003 11:29 AM

 

Bush story

by Mark Gisleson

Our sojourning President got off a lot easier than I had hope during his Australian visit. Here are some highlights from the Reuters report:

The U.S. president was on a whirlwind visit to Australia to reward conservative Prime Minister John Howard, whom he dubbed "a man of steel" for sending troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, despite public protests.

His 20-hour visit triggered a massive security operation in the usually sleepy capital with armed air force jets escorting Bush into Canberra late Wednesday night and patrolling the city's skies until he flew out on Thursday evening.

Authorities took the unprecedented step of barring the public from the parliament where Bush spoke on Thursday, backing a special security role for Australia in the Asia-Pacific region that has raised concerns among Asian neighbors.

REGIONAL SHERIFF

"Security in the Asia-Pacific region will always depend on the willingness of nations to take responsibility for their neighborhood, as Australia is doing," Bush told parliament....

"We are not a sheriff," shouted Greens leader Bob Brown who ignored an order to leave the house.

The heckling did not rattle Bush, who is on his first trip to Australia. The last US president to visit Australia was Bill Clinton in 1996 -- who was also heckled by Brown....

The 18-year-old son of Mamdouh Habib, one of two Australians held at a US military prison in Cuba for two years without charge after the Afghan invasion, was dragged out, arms pinned behind his back, after yelling: "Hey Bush, what about my Dad?"

* *

Michelle Goldberg writes about Wesley Clark at Salon [paid subscription req., or watch the commercial], and picks up on the wishful thinking regarding Republicans for Clark.

On Oct. 14, Harold Bloom, the venerable Yale humanities professor, cultural conservative and defender of the Western canon, published a remarkable encomium to Clark in the Wall Street Journal's ordinarily right-wing editorial page with the portentous title "Cometh the Hour." In it, he references Edward Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," and writes, "It is not at all clear whether we are already in decline: bread is still available for most and circuses for all. Still, there are troubling omens, economic and diplomatic, and a hint or two from Gibbon may be of considerable use ... We need, at just this time, a military personage as president, one who is more in the mode of Dwight Eisenhower than of Ulysses Grant. In Wesley Clark, we have a four-star general and former NATO commander who is a diplomatic unifier, an authentic hero, wise and compassionate. That Gen. Clark saved tens of thousands of Muslim lives in Bosnia and Kosovo is irrefutable, despite current deprecations by worried supporters of the president."

....Nicomodos Sy Herrera, a 31-year-old Republican lawyer in a well-tailored suit, seemed almost surprised to find himself at a Democratic event. A pro-life hawk who'd been "a big Bush supporter" in 2000, he'd grown alarmed by Bush's inability to "balance the hard and soft power of the US" Now, he was considering changing his party affiliation in order to vote for Clark in the primary. "Bush was seduced too much by the hard right's insistence that it had to go alone," he says. "He made that bed, he has to sleep in it." Still, while he says he doesn't think Bush could win him back, he also says Clark is the only Democrat he would support.

"Those are exactly the kind of people you want," [Ruy] Teixeira says of these Clark fans. "The people who hate Bush 24/7, those voters are not the Democrats' problem. The Democrats' problem are the people who say, 'Goddamn it, he did a pretty good job after 9/11, but he's really doing a lousy job now.' That's the sweet spot. Those are the voters you're going to need to get in droves."

Clark's ability to appeal to these voters is, in turn, attracting pragmatic Democrats who are looking for a winner, not a hero. "The kind of people I tend to talk to by and large tend to have been skeptical of the Dean candidacy while respecting its energy," says Teixeira. "They're worried to death about whether Dean can actually beat Bush. These people are very interested in Clark. We need the guy who's best able to beat Bush. I think he's probably the guy."

[more]

Is the notion of "Republicans for Clark" far fetched? Google pulls up 466 responses, including www.RepublicansforClark.com. There are Young Republicans for Clark, Independents for Clark, Environmentalists for Clark, Kansas Republicans for Clark, Hispanics for Clark, Students for Clark, Women for Clark, etc.

Obviously, a candidate who appeals to such a broad center-right coalition is not going to be appealing to many liberals. So why am I still leaning Clark? As I've said before, thirty years of poisonous disinformation from the hard right (cum neo-Trotskyite neoconservatives) has made this country all but ungovernable from the left. We're going to need a grace period to clean up the mess, and some time to re-educate our young on the meaning of democracy, as opposed to demagoguery.

Clark might be the person to do that.

We'll see soon enough.

* *

One link led to another, and found myself reading Keith Burgess-Jackson's "The Natural History of Bush-Hating" yesterday. Burgess-Jackson is a prof at the U-TX Arlington, and purports to be a Ralph Nader voter. He picks up on Paul Krugman's track record of trashing Bush's economic record, and makes the oft-heard rightwing claim that Krugman hates Bush.

I think that claim is dead wrong, and that it would be impossible for Krugman to be consistent and find favor with any Bush economic policies. Wrong is wrong.

I wrote Burgess-Jackson to suggest that if Bush's policies are consistent, and if they are wrong, then Krugman's opposition does not necessarily imply dislike or hatred of Bush, just disagreement. I suggested that if he were right, he should be able to name a Bush economic policy that has worked, and been well received.

Burgess-Jackson dodged the request, giving a bizarre list of Fox News style quotes regarding Bush. I'd love to pass them on, but I don't have permission so we won't go there. I dogged him for an example nonetheless, but finally gave up when he wrote, "I'm not giving the answers you want, that's all."

Yeah, that's one way of putting it. My bottom line is that he refused to offer one example of a Bush economic policy that makes sense. I don't question Burgess-Jackson's Nader vote, but I do feel compelled to point out that this Nader voter has never encountered another Nader supporter who was so compliant to RNC talking points. Or who viewed Bush as having legitimately won Florida, but that quote's off limits as well.

Read his article for yourself. I think Professor Burgess-Jackson's logic is a bit circular, and strangely in lockstep with established Republican disinformation.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at October 23, 2003 11:50 AM

 

Denial of service attacks on pro-war blogs

by Mark Gisleson

Living so close to Chicago (seven hours by Interstate), you'd think I'd read the Chicago Tribune a little more often. That rarest of media creatures, a Republican newspaper that's ideologically consistent (i.e., anti-Bush at times), the ChiTrib is one of the great American dailies. Thanks to Jim Romenesko, here's a link to Emily Nunn's fantastic write-up on a recent Al Franken book signing in Skokie.

[Franken] calls his wife several times a day ("To ... Franni," he wrote in the book's dedication, "who's been screaming about this stuff for years and believed in the book. I love you so much. And even more importantly, you love me"). And he has two kids whom he obviously adores. One teaches grade school in the Bronx; the other has just started his first year at Princeton.

When I pointed out that he was becoming the mouthpiece of the left, he demurred.

"There are plenty of other voices. ... There's Paul Krugman, who been out there from the very beginning, God bless him, he is a blessing, and there's Molly Ivins who is wonderful, and Joe Conason [from Salon.com]. ... people keep saying you're the one, but it's just because I'm the No. 1 best seller. The book is funny and says the same that they're saying but says it in a way that [makes you laugh]."

Another Romenesko link took me to Al Kamen's "Nothing Negative, See?" from today's WaPost. Not quite as funny, but reeking of irony, Kamen sums up Ashcroft's latest assault on open government.

The Justice Department, after stonewalling media requests for more than a year, has finally posted an outside consultant's study of the agency's efforts to ensure diversity in the workplace.

Reporters, who had filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act for the 186-page report by KPMG Consulting -- a report that mostly likely cost taxpayers a few hundred grand -- at last got a chance to see it.
And there it was, in stark black and white: half white, the other half blacked out by department officials, who noted the law permits concealing "pre-decisional deliberative information."

The cuts were made, we are told, by a career "senior department FOIA officer" using that legal interpretation. Officials say this exemption allows them to receive critical reports without worrying about negative publicity.

"The bureaucracy run amok," one stunned political appointee said yesterday of the nifty rationale for cutting such a mundane report.

So in the contents section, under "Recommendations," we find . . . nothing.

How about under "the key findings of the study"? The first five are blacked out. But the sixth paragraph says, "The department's attorney workforce is more diverse than the U.S. legal workforce." Somehow, that critical "pre-decisional deliberative information" was left in.

Thanks to Counterspin I had a chance to read this Winds of Change post about denial of service attacks on pro-war blogs. Is there anything quite so tired and clichéd as rightwingers huffing about freedom of speech? Losing a few hours of access is hardly a major 1st Amendment issue, while hacking a bunch of tools who parrot pro-war propaganda is, credibly, a blow against empire building. Now if the hackers managed to shut down some of these windbags they might have a case, but seeing as how I read about it on one of their blogs, you gotta wonder how much damage was done? Hell, I'm just a liberal weenie and I've got to cut them some slack: with Rush in treatment, life's got to be tough for the hard right. No more denial of service attacks, OK guys? If you keep interrupting these pro-war circle jerks, these bloggers might have to leave their rumpus rooms and start interacting with normal Americans, and then we'd all suffer. 'Nuff said.

UPDATE: As with the Terri Schiavo case (see yesterday's post), nothing is ever quite exactly what it seems. Turns out that denial of service attack also shut down TalkLeft and Calpundit, two prominent lefty blogs. So while it may have been about the shutting down of pro-war blogs, it might have been just the opposite, or possibly just apolitical hacking.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at October 22, 2003 10:37 AM

 

Vegetative or comatose?

by Mark Gisleson

Got a second wind, you know, the kind where you're too tired to work, but have enough energy to surf and blog. In any event, I just spotted this story at Google News and felt compelled to post it.

I think this story involves both the differences and the common ground between the right and the left in this country. If you're not familiar with the Terri Schiavo case in Florida, you may be shocked to hear that the heroes (or villains) in this story are rightwing talk radio and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. The Weekly Standard has the whole story, and you'll be glad you read it. How tough a right-to-die case is this? Here's the official statement from the Catholic Diocese of St. Petersburg:

Roman Catholic moral theology suggests that the removal of food and hydration from a patient, even though that person may be comatose, is justifiable only if the natural projected path of the individual's medical condition will lead inevitably to death, sooner rather than later. Some of the members of Terri's family believe that her condition is irreversible and inevitably deteriorating towards death, while others do not. As there is significant disagreement among the family of Terri Schiavo, the Catholic Church would prefer to see all parties take the safer path. The Church, however, will refrain from passing judgement on the actions of anyone in this tragic moment.

The other side, the side I'd normally expect to be on, is pretty invisible on the web. That only makes sense since the motivation to allow for the right to die is not usually eager to get caught up in family disputes, and this case, ultimately, appears to be about the right of the husband to pull the plug, vs. the right of Schiavo's parents to keep her on life support. Here's a lukewarm post at Health Law Blog in support of the husband's position, and a CNN story from a week ago when the court issued its latest ruling.

You can vote on this issue by clicking here.

The issue here appears to be the belief, held by many not close to the case, that Schiavo would have benefited from rehabilitation services that were not provided. The question is, can we really trust doctors to know who might recover from serious injuries, who most certainly will not?

The older I get, the more I believe in the right to die, but at the same time, my confidence in doctors declines with each passing year, as well. In my resume business, I had one client who was hounded out of an advanced residency program by doctor-professors with severe cases of God almighty complex. The notion that any of those doctors might be called upon to testify in a case like this is not encouraging to me, as I find their judgment to sometimes be troubling and arbitrary. Sadly, they are exactly the kinds of doctors who grab lucrative fees to testify in such cases.

But none of this changes my personal preferences. If I'm in a coma and not likely to come out of it, shove a pillow in my face. To hell with anyone who tries to stop that from happening. And that gives me pause, because I'm not sure Terry Schiavo wanted to spend the last ten years in a coma while people argued back and forth about comatose vs. vegetative states.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at October 21, 2003 04:05 PM

 

Familiar themes emerge

by Mark Gisleson

 

The Washington Times is frequently a good place to get the real dope on this administration's foul ups. Mark Benjamin has a solid story on the treatment of injured and ill Guard members and Reservists at Fort Stewart. Buried towards the end is a particularly damning graf:

The soldiers estimate that around 40 percent of the nearly 600 personnel in medical hold were deployed to Iraq. Of those who went, many described clusters of strange ailments, like heart and lung problems, among previously healthy troops. They said the Army has tried to refuse them benefits, claiming the injuries and illnesses were due to a "pre-existing condition," prior to military service, a charge the Army denied.

[more]

Gee, that almost sounds like they're taking their cue from private insurance carriers.

* *

Juan Cole reports on the third attack agains US forces in two days in the Fallujah area. The latest attack resulted in one dead and five wounded. Let's hope none of the wounded end up at Fort Stewart.

Thanks to the flu I'm not sure how big a play this Toledo Blade series is getting, but judging by how slow (i.e., not at all) the story loads, I'm guessing more than a few people are still interested in reading about American atrocities in Vietnam. Here's the link to the paper. You'll have to find the story on your own, but meanwhile, here's some feedback:

Biloxi Sun Herald: Vietnam responds to rampage allegations

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Buried secrets, brutal truths: Vietnam inquiry yielded no justice

Tri-Valley Herald: Massacre haunts man

* *

Kos unloads on the GOP budget deficit, Mother Jones lists the Top 10 campuses for political activism [via TalkLeft], and Josh Marshall on Sy Hersh's new article in The New Yorker.

* *

Take the time to scroll down Steve Gilliard's blog to find "Why David Brooks is an idiot."

You do understand that the children of todays CEO's are of course going to live lives of unparalleled luxury off of your dad's retirement money. Ken Lay's grandkids will have nothing denied them, while your dad, who froze his ass off in Korea, worked as a gas line repairman for 30 years and then had his money stolen, will be fueling their latest binge. So while some CEO's spawn is snorting coke and slamming Dutch hookers, you can meditate on the snobbery of the Democratic party.

So while your son is playing dodge the RPG in his Humvee in Iraq, because his only way to college was through Baghdad, you can read about Jenna and Babs buying $250 bottles of Absolute in a bottle club and how the Secret Service has to ignore their "escapades." So remember, it's the Democratic Party, with all those union members and working people, who are the real snobs and the GOP represents you, as their kids spend your dad's retirement money on whores and coke.

Now that's my notion of a red blooded, fully American political screed. I sincerely hope someone shows it to David Brooks.

* *

Still battling the flu but should be able to post from here on out. Just be sure to wash your hands after reading. And, in the meantime, read Mark Hand's "Democrats Seek to Disappear Chomsky and Nader."

 

Posted by Steve Perry at October 21, 2003 11:17 AM

 

Sick day

by Mark Gisleson

No post today — sniffle, cough, hack.

 

 

Posted by Steve Perry at October 20, 2003 10:02 AM

 

The "Friday" Report

by Mark Gisleson

UPDATE: Courtesy of David Niewert's Orcinus, here's a wonderful story about rightwing family values, NRA style. So far it's only appeared in a local Michigan paper, but, as Niewert wonders, how big a story would it be had the principal been Arab or liberal?

"[F]ollowing the bloodiest day of attacks against American forces in a month," US forces and Iraqi police conducted raids in Baghdad today. In "good" news, they got the main oil pipeline running...for almost two hours. In not so good news, the death total from combat injuries is up to 211 (those are in "Bush numbers," the actual number of dead US troops is 336, including many accidents and illnesses that may be war related). [USA Today] [more from Billmon]

The administration is hoping that the General Boykin story will fade and disappear over the weekend. The Council on American-Islamic Relations is working to make sure that doesn't happen. [CNN.com]

This hardly counts as news, but it still didn't make the wires until last night that a reporter had obtained previously classified documents showing that George W.'s grandpa Preston was a director of a bank seized by the feds during WWII for helping to finance the Nazis' rise to power in Germany. [Yahoo] [more from Counterspin]

Oregon conservative Becky Miller, who has worked for Oregon Taxpayers United, thinks Al Franken's book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," is right on the money.

I read the book in one sitting. It is an amazing book, and -- if you're a decent, honest, hard-working, patriotic, true-blue conservative who listens to Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly and watches Fox News -- an earth-shattering book....

Until I read this book, I believed the Bill Sizemore/Oregon Taxpayers United mess was a bit of a fluke. (In 2002 I testified against him in a civil trial in which a Multnomah County jury found that his charitable foundation and political action committee had committed fraud and forgery, and that Oregon Taxpayers United had engaged in a pattern of racketeering to obtain signatures on initiative petitions for tax measures drafted by Sizemore.) The spin, the lies, the greed, the disregard for the everyday person -- I thought it was all just a fluke and really limited to this one little pustule of filth that had festered in a little storefront in Clackamas, Oregon. Boy, was I wrong.

I believe Franken is telling the truth in his book because it meshes perfectly with what I personally have observed. And I think every decent, honest, hardworking, patriotic, true-blue conservative owes it to himself to read it. Hold your nose if you must -- Franken is as foul-mouthed and crass as his reputation would lead you to believe (and quite mistakenly believes Christians love Israel because it is the center of prophecies that include the fiery deaths of all Jews) -- but read it anyway.

[The Oregonian, via Atrios]

Spinning the war, part LXVII: "If you're saying it's actually worse than being reported, could it also be better than what's being reported also, if you consider that these reporters, many of them tell us they want to go cover the new school opening, but they can't because there's another bombing or shooting and that prevents them from sending that story?" [CNN Anchor Bill Hemmer as quoted by Billmon]

More from Josh Marshall on the slowly unfolding contracting scandals in Iraq. A reader writes to point out that labor in the Middle East is dirt cheap, but the preferred imported labor from India is practically free. [Talking Points Memo]

If you scroll down past the pitch for a used laptop, Steve Gilliard has some interesting stuff about our great allies, the Uzbekistanis. "The terrible case of Avazoz and Alimov apparently tortured to death by boiling water, has evoked great international concern. But all of us know that this is not an isolated incident. Brutality is inherent in a system where convictions habitually rely on signed confessions rather than on forensic or material evidence. In the Uzbek criminal justice system the conviction rate is almost 100%. It is difficult not to conclude that once accused by the Prokurator there is no effective possibility of fair trial in the sense we understand it." [Steve Gilliard]

 

* *

Truth

by Sam Gardiner, Col. USAF (ret.)

 

Summary

• Clearly, the assumption of some in the government is the people of the United States and the United Kingdom will come to a wrong decision if they are given the truth.
  
  
• We probably have taken "Information Warfare" too far.
  
  
• We allowed strategic psychological operations to become part of public affairs.
  
  
• We failed to make adequate distinctions between strategic influence stuff and intelligence.
  
  
• Message became more important than performance.

[More (.pdf)]

--

This is definitely worth passing on to your pro-war friends. [download free Adobe Acrobat Reader]

 

Posted by Steve Perry at October 18, 2003 10:54 AM

 

Lies, death, torture, and more death

by Mark Gisleson

Not the cheeriest of reading selections, but if you check out today's This day in history at my regular blog, you might get a feel for the really weird vibes associated with October 16. It was on this day that Mao's Long March began, ten Nazis were hanged at Nuremberg, Enver Hoxha was born, and George Jo Hennard killed 23 of his fellow Texans before committing suicide. And people think that the Cubs blowing it yet again is tragic.

For starters, Jay Bookman unloads in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Lies beget more lies; a policy built on deception will always require further deception to sustain itself." And speaking of Dick Cheney:

"Another criticism we hear is that the United States, when its security is threatened, may not act without unanimous international consent. Under this view, even in the face of a specific agreed-upon danger, the mere objection of even one foreign government would be sufficient to prevent us from acting."

With that statement, Cheney abandons deception and traipses merrily into the Land of the Completely Absurd. Nobody -- not the Democrats, not the United Nations, not even the French -- makes the argument that he describes. It would be insane to do so.

Cheney invents that argument to support his larger point: After Sept. 11, the Bush administration at least did something, while its less-than-manly critics would have done nothing.

And that is the ultimate falsehood.

[read the rest]

The consequences of this administration's deceit are both obvious and subtle, depending on where you look first. Billmon, the man who provides "Free Thinking in a Dirty Glass" at his Whiskey Bar blog, connects the wars and finds that the most likely culprit in the recent Gaza Strip bombing was "Al Qaeda itself. If correct, this would suggest the organization has been able to establish a base of operations in Gaza -- either working alone, or, as mentioned above, in conjunction with homegrown Palestinian resistance organizations."

Erasing any remaining distinction between the Palestinian intifada and the global war on terrorism would help advance the neocon/Likud strategy of drawing America into another round of "regime changes" in Syria and Iran — steps which the Sharon government apparently hopes would finally squeeze the life out of the Palestinian resistance and bring an end to the suicide bombings. Sharon could then impose his own peace terms (bantustan classic as opposed to the road map's bantustan light) on the Palestinian Authority, with minimal, if any, interference from the Bush Administration.

Al Qaeda, on the other hand, has a more straightforward objective: It simply wants to spread the conflict as wide and far as possible, ultimately converting the War on Terrorism into a War on Islam — in hopes the backlash eventually will destablize shaky regimes in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

The tactical goal -- a unified war -- is easily within reach for both parties. But their strategic objectives both seem pretty far fetched. Regime change in Syria and/or Iran appears to be beyond the Bush Administration's present capabilities, while regime destabilization in Saudia Arabia and Pakistan is probably beyond Al Qaeda's.

So it seems we've got all the ingredients here for a proper stalemate, with U.S. troops and diplomats taking rising casualties in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Palestine, while Al Qaeda uses the breathing space provided by the neocons' Iraq miscalcuations to recover gradually from its losses in the first phase of the war.

[more]

City Pages' David Schimke contacted Douglas A. Johnson, the executive director of the Center for Victims of Torture, to get his response to Mark Bowden's recent The Atlantic Monthly cover story, "The Art of Interrogation: A Survey of the Landscape of Persuasion."

Bowden describes the various methods of psychological "coercion" carried out by the US military. There is "sleep deprivation, exposure to heat or cold, the use of drugs to cause confusion, rough treatment (slapping, shoving, or shaking), forcing a prisoner to stand for days at a time or sit in uncomfortable positions, and playing on his fear for himself and his family."

What's most alarming to Johnson and his colleagues is Bowden's recurring assertion that these tactics, "although excruciating" for the victim, "generally leave no permanent marks and do no lasting physical harm."

"In fact, they are forms of torture that our clients have reported to us as being much more difficult for them to recover from than the physical pain," Johnson told the Commonwealth Club in a speech CVT's communications director hoped would be on National Public Radio. (It was pre-empted by the now infamous gubernatorial debate in California.) "We know that these do present lasting harm, and can lead to a lifetime of nightmares, depression, and suicidality."

[More]

Dept. of Unlikely Places

Even the NRA occasionally does good things. [via TBogg]

* *

Truth

by Sam Gardiner, Col. USAF (ret.)

 

Truth from These Podia

It was not bad intelligence. It was much more. It was an orchestrated effort. It began before the war, was a major effort during the war and continues as post-conflict distortions....

In the most basic sense, Washington and London did not trust the peoples of their democracies to come to right decisions. Truth became a casualty. When truth is a casualty, democracy receives collateral damage.

My plea is for truth. I believe we have to find ways to restore truth as currency of government in matters as serious as war....it appears as if the issues of this war will become even more important for future wars. We have reason to be concerned.

[More (.pdf)]

--

I'm planning to run a lot of quotes from Col. Gardiner's book. You can read them piecemeal, or you can give in, click on the link, and get a .pdf file of the entire 56-page document. This is must reading if you care about this country and are concerned about what's going on. A lot of effort went into this research and the only payment Gardiner is seeking is a more aware electorate. The fact is, this has been out for a week now and I feel guilty for having been so slow to pick up on the importance of this document. This is definitely worth passing on to your pro-war friends. [download free Adobe Acrobat Reader]

Oh, and Atrios links to another military guy today. Click here for the other (messianic) side of this argument from General William Boykin.

 

Posted by Mark Gisleson at October 16, 2003 11:12 AM

 

Vote fraud in Georgia?

by Mark Gisleson

Finally sat down and read Andrew Gumbel's "All the President's votes?" in the Independent. This Diebold thing is much more serious than I had realized.

Something very odd happened in the mid-term elections in Georgia last November. On the eve of the vote, opinion polls showed Roy Barnes, the incumbent Democratic governor, leading by between nine and 11 points. In a somewhat closer, keenly watched Senate race, polls indicated that Max Cleland, the popular Democrat up for re-election, was ahead by two to five points against his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss....

But then the results came in, and all of Georgia appeared to have been turned upside down. Barnes lost the governorship to the Republican, Sonny Perdue, 46 per cent to 51 per cent, a swing of as much as 16 percentage points from the last opinion polls. Cleland lost to Chambliss 46 per cent to 53, a last-minute swing of 9 to 12 points....

Political analysts credited the upset - part of a pattern of Republican successes around the country - to a huge campaigning push by President Bush in the final days of the race. They also said that Roy Barnes had lost because of a surge of "angry white men" punishing him for eradicating all but a vestige of the old confederate symbol from the state flag.

But something about these explanations did not make sense, and they have made even less sense over time. When the Georgia secretary of state's office published its demographic breakdown of the election earlier this year, it turned out there was no surge of angry white men; in fact, the only subgroup showing even a modest increase in turnout was black women.

There were also big, puzzling swings in partisan loyalties in different parts of the state. In 58 counties, the vote was broadly in line with the primary election. In 27 counties in Republican-dominated north Georgia, however, Max Cleland unaccountably scored 14 percentage points higher than he had in the primaries. And in 74 counties in the Democrat south, Saxby Chambliss garnered a whopping 22 points more for the Republicans than the party as a whole had won less than three months earlier....

Georgia was not the only state last November to see big last-minute swings in voting patterns. There were others in Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois and New Hampshire - all in races that had been flagged as key partisan battlegrounds, and all won by the Republican Party. Again, this was widely attributed to the campaigning efforts of President Bush and the demoralisation of a Democratic Party too timid to speak out against the looming war in Iraq.

[more]

There's a lot more on this and other related stories at the Independent Media Center, Wired, Mark Crispin Miller, and The Beacon Journal.

* *

Media Whores Online is back from vacation, and has this hot link to a Seattle Times story about a Clark meetup attended by some sailors from the USS Abraham Lincoln.

The big headline at BuzzFlash right now is a link to Reuters' "Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says." And thanks to Buzz for the link to our "Bush Revolutionaries" post from the other day.

If you haven't visited Margaret Cho's blog recently, current posts include "Snipers," "Happy Columbus Day," and "Not for the Faint of Heart." Funny stuff.

 

 

 

Posted by Mark Gisleson at October 15, 2003 01:27 PM

 

Finding a boyfriend for Condi

by Mark Gisleson

Over at sister publication The Village Voice, Sidney H. Schanberg has a new major article up on "The Widening Crusade."

The Israeli bombing raid on Syria October 5 was an expansion of the Bush policy, carried out by the Sharon government but with the implicit approval of Washington. The government in Iran, said to be seeking to develop a nuclear weapon, reportedly expects to be the next target....

I have experienced wars—in India and Indochina—and have measured their results. And most of the men and women who are advocating the Bush Doctrine have not. You will find few generals among them. They are, instead, academics and think-tank people and born-again missionaries. One must not entertain any illusion that they are only opportunists in search of power, for most of them truly believe in their vision of a world crusade under the American flag. They are serious, and they now have power at the top.

I believe that last week's blitz of aggressive speeches and spin by the president and his chief counselors removed all doubt of his intentions.

"As long as George W. Bush is president of the United States," Vice President Cheney told the friendly Heritage Foundation, "this country will not permit gathering threats to become certain tragedies."

....In effect, George Bush says, believe in me and I will lead you out of darkness. But he doesn't tell us any details. And it's in the details where the true costs are buried—human costs and the cost to our notion of ourselves as helpers and sharers, not slayers. No one seems to be asking themselves: If in the end the crusade is victorious, what is it we will have won? The White House never asked that question in Vietnam either.

[more]

The US Army has stepped in and put an end to astroturfed letters to hometown newspapers from troops in Iraq. By some accounts, as many as 500 of these letters were sent out thanks to an overzealous commander. Once upon a time, career officers were expected to be apolitical, but now it seems that fervent Republicanism is a part of the retention and promotion process.

Also in the Boston Globe, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards has come out against Bush's $87 billion request for Iraq. This is turning into a real disaster for Bush as even Republicans in Congress are balking at the high price tag. If you haven't heard it yet, here's a recent Marketplace sound clip on the business opportunities in Iraq that really does have to be heard to be believed. Lots of sources on this one, but all of them seem to originate with Josh Marshall, who's been doing bang-up work lately.

Marshall has a new piece up at The Hill on the Valerie Plame affair and Robert Novak. No new developments but if you enjoy a good round of Novak bashing as much as I do, it's worth the click. And for even more on Novak, check out the new David Corn post up at The Nation.

Thomas Penfield Jackson, the Republican judge who gave Microsoft fits, is back in the news. He's ordered five journalists to cough up their government sources for Wen Ho Lee stories.

If upheld on appeal, the decision by U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson could also play into the furor surrounding allegations that the Bush administration leaked the name of a CIA operative to journalists to retaliate against her husband, a critic of the administration's Iraq policy.

The CIA employee and her husband, former State Department envoy Joseph C. Wilson IV, are considering legal action against the government, alleging that the leak invaded their privacy and caused emotional and other distress.

An attorney for the Wilsons, Christopher Wolf, said Jackson's ruling in the Lee case could strengthen the family's hand in any civil suit in trying to pinpoint the person who unmasked Wilson's wife.

[more]

Tonight's 60 Minutes II will feature damning testimony from Greg Thielmann about the lies Colin Powell has told in support of the build up for the war in Iraq. Even Drudge is linking to this CBS News article that pretty much drives the last nail into Colin's political prospects.

Thielmann also tells Pelley that he believes the decision to go to war was made first and then the intelligence was interpreted to fit that conclusion. “…The main problem was that the senior administration officials have what I call faith-based intelligence,” says Thielmann.

“They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show. They were really blind and deaf to any kind of countervailing information the intelligence community would produce. I would assign some blame to the intelligence community and most of the blame to the senior administration officials.”

His candidacy may be doomed, but Congressman Dennis Kucinich spoke before over 1,200 enthusiastic supporters during a campaign stop in Minneapolis last night. He also picked up the endorsement of Senate Majority Leader John Hottinger. Minnesota, of course, is not much of a player in the nominating process, so this is probably the last good news you'll hear about Kucinich for a while.

The headline writer for today's WaPost Politics page pretty much tells you all you need to know about what's going on:

Bush Campaign Raises $49.5M

President Rallying Support in Polls

Battle Over Iraq Budget Begins

If you get your Boondocks fix from the Washington Post, you're missing this week's strips on Condi Rice. This link will take you to the missing 'toons. For the missing news, be sure to read Bush Wars every day!

 

Posted by Mark Gisleson at October 15, 2003 10:27 AM

 

Confronting the Bush revolutionaries

by Mark Gisleson

Despite the best efforts of the blogging right to explain it away, a culprit has been found in the Army astroturf story, and it's not some grunt laureate. It was the Battalion Commander in his tent with a keyboard. ABC has the details [via Drudge]. If you're new to this story, USA Today has a recap.

As a figurative child of Orwell, I've always been fascinated by disinformation. Their prize-winning news staff not withstanding, the Wall Street Journal has become an American Pravda of sorts. The Opinion Journal, the WSJ's "free" Internet pages (editorial content only — you've got to pay for the quality content) has a Joel Mowbray op-ed piece on why the State Department is behind all those shady dealings with the Saudis. More specifically:

The date was April 24, 2002. Standing on the runway at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston, the cadre of FBI, Secret Service and Customs agents had just been informed by law-enforcement officials that there was a "snag" with Crown Prince Abdullah's oversized entourage, which was arriving with the prince for a visit to George W. Bush's Western White House in Crawford, Texas. The flight manifest of the eight-plane delegation accompanying the Saudi would-be king had a problem. Three problems, to be exact: One person on the list was wanted by U.S. law enforcement authorities, and two others were on a terrorist watch list.

This had the potential to be what folks in Washington like to refer to as an "international incident." But the State Department was not about to let an "international incident" happen. Which is why this story has never been written--until now.

Upon hearing that there was someone who was wanted and two suspected terrorists in Abdullah's entourage, the FBI was ready to "storm the plane and pull those guys off," explains an informed source. But given the "international" component, State was informed of the FBI's intentions before any action could be taken. When word reached the Near Eastern Affairs bureau, its reaction was classic State Department: "What are we going to do about those poor people trapped on the plane?" To which at least one law-enforcement official on the ground responded, "Shoot them"--not exactly the answer State was looking for.

Let's call this for what it is: lying bullshit. Oh, there may well have been some folks at State who aided and abetted in this scandal, but, despite what Mowbray goes on to imply, they weren't Clinton appointees, they were Bushies left over from that wonderful 12-year reign of diplomatic terror when Reagan-Bush had the CIA meddling in Nicaragua, Iraq, Africa and god only knows where else. We won't know the full truth until this scandalous administration is ousted, and the FBI's had a few years to reconstruct all the shredded documents.

One of the many perks I get for filling in for Steve Perry was a copy of Paul Krugman's "The Great Unraveling." Calpundit has already blogged about Krugman's brilliant introduction [interview], but I think it's well worth quoting from at length. I'm typing this, not cutting and pasting, so please take the time to read the following — it's that good and it's just plain damn insightful:

Back in 1957, Henry Kissinger — then a brilliant, iconoclastic young Harvard scholar, with his eventual career as cynical political manipulator and, later, as crony capitalist still far in the future — published this doctoral dissertation, A World Restored. One wouldn't think that a book about the diplomatic efforts of Metternich and Castlereagh is relevant to US politics in the twenty-first century. But the first three pages of Kissinger's book sent chills down my spine, because they seem all too relevant to current events.

In those first few pages, Kissinger describes the problems confronting a heretofore stable diplomatic system when it is faced with a "revolutionary power" — a power that does not accept that system's legitimacy....It seems clear to me that one should regard America's right-wing movement — which now in effect controls the administration, both houses of Congress, much of the judiciary, and a good slice of the media — as a revolutionary power in Kissinger's sense. That is, it is a movement whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system....

If you read the literature emanating from the Heritage Foundation, which drives the Bush administration's economic ideology, you discover a very radical agenda: Heritage doesn't just want to scale back New Deal and Great Society programs, it regards the very existence of those programs as a violation of basic principles.

Or consider foreign policy. Since World War II the United States has built its foreign policy around international institutions, and has tried to make it clear that it is not an old-fashioned imperialist power, which uses military force as it sees fit. But if you follow the foreign policy views of the neo-conservative intellectuals who fomented the war with Iraq, you learn that they have contempt for all that — Richard Perle, chairman of a key Pentagon advisory board, dismissed the "liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions." They aren't hesitant about the use of force; one prominent thinker close to the administration, Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, declared that "we are a warlike people and we love war." The idea that war in Iraq is just a pilot project for a series of splendid little wars seemed, at first, a leftist fantasy — but many people close to the administration have made it clear that they regard this war as only a beginning, and a senior State Department official, John Bolton, told Israeli officials that after Iraq the United States would "deal with" Syria, Iran, and North Korea.

Nor is even that the whole story. The separation of church and state is one of the fundamental principles of the US Constitution. But Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, has told constituents that he is in office to promote a "biblical worldview" — and that his relentless pursuit of Bill Clinton was motivated by Clinton's failure to share that view. (Delay has also denounced the teaching of evolution in schools, going so far as to blame that teaching for the Columbine school shootings).

There's even some question about whether the people running the country accept the idea that legitimacy flows from the democratic process. Paul Gigot of The Wall Street Journal famously praised the "bourgeois riot" in which violent protestors shut down a vote recount in Miami. (The rioters, it was later revealed, weren't angry citizens; they were paid political operatives.) Meanwhile, according to his close friend Don Evans, now the secretary of commerce, George W. Bush believes that he was called by God to lead the nation. Perhaps this explains why the disputed election of 2000 didn't seem to inspire any caution or humility on the part of the victors. Consider Justice Antonin Scalia's response to a student who asked how he felt making the Supreme Court decision that threw the election to Bush. Was it agonizing? Did Scalia worry about the consequence? No: "It was a wonderful feeling," he declared.

This isn't left vs. right or Democrats vs. Republicans anymore. A gang of hard right radicals has seized power, and is aggressively wielding it in defiance of our laws and Constitution. Winning in 2004 won't be enough. The time has come for Congressional investigations and show trials. It is not enough to defeat the new right. We have to get about the business of educating ourselves on the exact nature of their very real treason.

Over the past few months I've been amused to discover that I've acquired some right wing stalkers of my own (as opposed to those I've inherited from Steve). I'm sure I've written a number of words today that could be ripped out of context and sent to the Department of Justice as proof of my "revolutionary" tendencies. Krugman covers that in his introduction as well:

Yet those who take the hard-line rightists now in power at their word, and suggest they may really attempt to realize such a radical goal, are usually accused of being "shrill," of going over the top. Surely, says the conventional wisdom, we should discount the rhetoric: the goals of the right are more limited than this picture suggests. Or are they?

Krugman's book is about the steps we need to take to save our nation:

Study the tax cuts and the war.

Establish rules for reporting:

1. Don't assume that policy proposals make sense in terms of their stated goals
   
   
2. Do some homework to discover the real goals.
   
   
3. Don't assume that the usual rules of politics apply.
   
   
4. Expect a revolutionary power to respond to criticism by attacking.
   
   
5. Don't think that there's a limit to a revolutionary power's objectives.
   

Be revolted by what you learn.

My hat's off to Krugman. He angered me frequently with his writings during the '90s, but in this new century he has emerged as our most important administration critic.

 

Posted by Mark Gisleson at October 14, 2003 10:05 AM

 

It's never too late to execute someone

by Mark Gisleson

Wow — a veritable avalanche of email in support of The "Friday" Report. That would be three, to be precise, and counting. Saturday posts were always a good idea, but we're still in beta here at Babelogue and we're not quite ramped all the way up for 24/7 content (take what we got and we'll try to get you more content later ;).

John Ashcroft, however, has the proverbial elephant's memory when it comes to matters of retribution and revenge. TalkLeft has the story of Richard Taylor, who, by all accounts, is pretty much crazy. Thanks to a recent Supreme Court ruling, he can now be tried for the death of a prison guard in 1981. I've probably watched too many sci-fi movies, but if we ever figure out how to bring the dead back to life, Ashcroft strikes me as the kind of person who reanimate capital offenders just so he could fry them again.

Josh Marshall has a good time parsing Richard Lugar's Meet the Press comments regarding the administration. The senior Republican Senator from Indiana says what the Democrats don't have to balls to say: Bush isn't in charge of his own administration. Sadly, that was one of Karl Rove's better selling points in the 2000 campaign (remember the promises that only top people would join the Bush administration, and that the "adults" would be in charge?).

If you didn't read Saturday's post and you're still curious about that Army astroturf campaign (or if you just want another perspective on it), Mark Crispin Miller has a good post up at his blog, and Capitol Hill Blue has a great follow up.

Over at FindLaw's Legal Commentary, John Dean weighs in again on the Valerie Plame affair. Mostly Dean just rehashes the legal issues involved.

Billmon has withdrawn his endorsement of Howard Dean following Dean's support for Israel's raid on Syria. As I've noted before, Wesley Clark is also a strong supporter of Israel. Hell, all the Democrats are. So on that one front, I find myself in agreement with Billmon when he says of the eventual nominee, "and may the least worst man or woman win."

Russia's not buying our latest Iraq resolution.

Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds is possibly James Lileks' biggest fan. The occasion for his latest cheering is a Lileks' "fisking" of Colleen Rowley's recent Star Tribune guest editorial on Ashcroft's America. I guess it only makes sense that Reynold's tired blogging would still find Lileks' tired "humor" to still be appealing.

Atrios continues to put together the pieces, and today he shares the story of Rhonda Miller, the stuntwoman groped by Schwarzenegger, and how the good ol' boys smeared her with another person's criminal record.

Schadenfreude addicts should be sure to read Evan Thomas' "I Am Addicted to Prescription Pain Medication."

And, if all this news affects you like it does me, here's some timely info from the American College of Gastroenterology.

Posted by Mark Gisleson at October 13, 2003 01:07 PM

 

The "Friday" Report

by Mark Gisleson

Any journalist can tell you that late Friday afternoons and evenings are when many important stories break. That's because powerful people like to air their dirty laundry in the Saturday newspapers, traditionally the lowest circulation day of the week by a considerable margin. So, I've decided to start doing Saturday posts summarizing all the news that was fit to hold until late on Friday.

The administration took its public relations campaign on the road this weekend. Dick Cheney traveled all the way from his undisclosed location to the DC-based Heritage Foundation where he outlined — for a very friendly crowd — the administration's new talking points on Iraq.

Charges against Capt. James Yee, the Army chaplain who was accused of treason in the media, have finally been filed. Pretty petty stuff apparently — nothing as serious as the initial "leaks" indicated.

A bit of unintended Friday news as the blogosphere goes into propagation mode. Atrios, Yankee Doodle, Counterspin and countless others have posted this link that spills the beans on the Army's incursion into astroturfing. Essentially, several smaller newspapers have been suckered into running letters from servicemen in Iraq touting the war as a good thing. The only problem is, none of the letter writers ever saw the letters until after they were published.

The fact that the top execs at the New York Stock Exchange are due $133 million in extra compensation made some of the Saturday newspapers.

President Bush made some strong statements about Cuba on Friday. Why Friday? Florida Cubans got the message, but why taint the purity of administration pandering by unnecessarily exposing other Americans to this display of electoral pandering to a small, politically connected ethnic group. Does anyone think that Iowa farmers or Idaho loggers give a shit about Castro?

The Texas Republicans have voted on their redistricting plan. Steve Gilliard explains what's going on for latecomers to this tale of political venality.

And, of course, the Cubs rallying to take a 2-1 lead in the NLCS championship series was buried in the Saturday papers.

The Cubs? Well, maybe that last item isn't an example of PR spin. In fact, if it weren't for Friday night sports, it's possible nobody would even bother to put out a newspaper on Saturdays.

I'll try this out again next Saturday. Not sure yet, but if this has legs (i.e., if you like it), the "Friday Report" might become a Babelogue feature after our early 2004 redesign launches.

 

Posted by Mark Gisleson at October 11, 2003 10:22 AM

 

California's Diebold problem

by Mark Gisleson

Jim Romensko has a host of links regarding Jay Leno's decision to become a political player. My buddy Vick Mickunas was on the phone last night after the Red Sox-Yankees game and we were both surprised when we started flipping channels looking for sports highlights and discovered Jay greeting the new governor instead. Is this appropriate? According to Romensko, Tom Rosenstiel (WaPost), Nikki Finke (LA Weekly), and Greg Braxton (LA Times), the answer to that question is an unqualified no.

If you listened to Vick Mickunas's interview with David Corn yesterday, you might find this LA Weekly article interesting. Vick interviews Joe Conason today. Joe's "Big Lies" is a great read and I expect him to have all the latest gossip when he chats up Vick at 1:05 pm CDT today. [Windows Media Player]

Back in the real world where they count votes instead of reading polls, Mark Crispin Miller has some interesting reader comments about California vote tallies from the Diebold counties:

I ran a number crunch of CA counties that use Diebold machines to cast/count votes and found some weird figures that show a skim of votes from top candidates to people who were unlikely to affect the outcome. I did my hand calculator work on the California election results (from the secretary of state's site) when 96% of precincts had reported.

Based on the very unlikely distribution of votes for some candidates (a meteor hit my car twice this week sort of odds) a hand count of the affected counties to compare with the machine reported count should be done. This would show that the machines had been tampered with to alter the results. As we already know, it is not possible to audit touchscreen machines because Diebold refuse to allow printing of a ballot to be placed in a box as a back up for use in just such an apparent tampering with votes.

[more]

Steve Gilliard found some speculative content in a recent Tina Brown article in Salon. The former New Yorker capo thinks that Karl Rove would like to dump Dick Cheney while the dumping's good, and replace him with Rudy Giuliani. Sounds like Rove just wants to trade scandals (or, as Gilliard puts it: "41 shots, to start with").

The truth is that Republicans aren't like the rest of us. Think that's overstating things? Kevin "Calpundit" Drum has a pretty compelling post up about the Texas Republican party, and how they've foisted their Old Testament-based worldview onto the rest of the party. This isn't scare stuff — it's the gospel of St. Reagan expanded and codified by true believers with a hard core Christian fundamentalist agenda that's been widely repudiated, even amongst fundamentalists (a majority of whom voted for Bill Clinton in '92).

If this were just a lunatic fringe we could all have a good laugh over their manifesto and then go out for a beer. But you can't dismiss it so easily. Texas-style conservatism has already put George Bush, Tom DeLay, and Karl Rove in charge of the country, and it is very much the future of the Republican party. And for all the conservatives reading this: I know this doesn't necessarily represent what you believe. But whether you like it or not, this kind of thinking does represent a very strong, very fast growing segment of the leadership of your party, and this is why liberals think the Republican party is just plain scary these days. We know that this is their agenda, we know that they really truly want to do this stuff, and we know that they are steadily gaining influence.

Billmon yields the floor to let reader Kenneth Fair explain why the White House Counsel's Office decision to review documents before turning them over to the DOJ makes for good reading:

Note well what Scott McClellan kept saying: He kept saying that the WHC would review the documents for "relevance" and "responsiveness." This is how lawyers play the game; by reading the document request as narrowly as possible, they'll try to withhold as many documents as possible by claiming they're not relevant to the request. You'd better believe that they'll think of excuses why every unsavory document that turns up is somehow not relevant to the request. I suspect that unless "Novak," "Wilson," or "Plame" appears on the document's face, it'll drop into the "non-responsive" category.

[More]

Mark A.R. Kleiman has a great rebuttal to the Newsweek speculation I posted yesterday. The buzz continues that this "affair" will see a major breakthrough by next week. Readers are welcome to nominate their favorite culpable suspects.

David Niewert also takes a hard look at that Newsweek article and Isikoff's history of parroting RNC talking points. Niewert also examines the possibility of "executive privilege" being used to protect the White House from the DOJ probe, and in so doing dredges up a name that has been conspicuously absent from the news in recent months:

Ted Olson is at heart an old Nixonian: he first became involved in Republican politics in the early '70s and the Nixon campaigns, and much of his tenure at the Reagan Justice Department (he was a high-ranking attorney in the Office of Legal Counsel) in the 1980s was devoted to overturning what he saw as the unconstitutional encroachments of congressional powers on executive powers that resulted from the post-Watergate reforms. Chief among these were the limits on asserting "executive privilege."

[more]

Over at The American Prospect, Amy Sullivan and Jake Rosenfeld take a look at "Why Clark could be the candidate who wins over black voters." I've been laying low on the General for a while, but I'm still convinced that the Republicans have sown so much discord and disinformation that only a world-class four-star leader has a prayer of reuniting this fractured nation. A candidate who appeals to both blacks and southern white men would be pretty near ideal.

As with so many aspects of his nascent candidacy, it is unclear whether Clark will be able to turn potential assets with black voters into real support in primary states. But the ingredients are there. Clark hails from Arkansas and, like Clinton, can tell tales of living through the integration of schools in that state. He is comfortable with religious language, another skill that Clinton was able to use to great effect in black churches. And he has made clear that he enthusiastically supports affirmative action. Perhaps most significantly, Clark has spent most of his adult life in the armed forces, probably the most integrated working environment in the United States. Blacks occupy more management positions in the military than in any other sector of American society. And there are by far more black officers in the Army -- where Clark made his name and his home -- than in any other branch of the services.

When he talks about domestic policy, Clark tends to place issues like health care, education and job training within the context of his military experience, arguing that if we invest in those areas in our military, we should do the same in civilian society. Such arguments should resonate among blacks, who are more likely than whites to have had personal contact with the military -- either themselves or through family members. While blacks constitute 12 percent of the general population, they make up 21 percent of the armed forces.

[More]

 

Posted by Mark Gisleson at October 09, 2003 10:43 AM

 

Damage control on Plamegate

by Mark Gisleson

True confessions time. Ever since I heard Nina Totenberg refer to Valerie Plame on NPR last week, I've been mispronouncing her name as Plah-may. This new WaPost article by Richard Leiby and Dana Priest says Plame rhymes with name. My trust in NPR has been forever shattered.

You might also wish to read this Dana Milbank article on the likelihood of anyone ever being punished:

But McClellan and Bush did not rebut reports that White House officials were spreading damaging information about Wilson and his wife. Wilson has said that was done to retaliate against him for continuing to publicize his conclusion, after a 2002 mission for the CIA, that there was little evidence Iraq had sought uranium in Africa to develop nuclear weapons.

Newsweek, in its current issue, reported that Rove referred to Plame as "fair game" in a discussion with Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's "Hardball." Bush, asked about the "fair game" comment, replied by discussing the leak investigation. McClellan, in his briefing, also sidestepped several questions about the "fair game" remarks.

A legal source close to the case said White House officials are not panicked because they believe that even if officials revealed Plame's name and occupation to reporters, they may not have known she was undercover or may not have intended to expose that fact.

"Someone probably did screw up," the source said. "But in terms of a violation of criminal law that could lead to a criminal indictment, that seems pretty far-fetched."

At least that's the game plan. Somehow I don't think the CIA's going to let it go at that. Josh Marshall has a mini-transcript up from a Paula Zahn interview with a former undercover CIA case officer that suggests otherwise. Josh also thinks Scott McClellan's wording denials a bit strangely of late — it's an "is" thing. Meanwhile, over at Newsweek, the Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball article cited by Milbank works to laboriously set up the scenario for a soft-but-embarrassing landing:

No matter how voluminous the evidence to the contrary, the Bush White House likes to convey the impression of unflagging infallibility. But the prospect that a “senior administration official” goofed big time is gaining fast currency among those familiar with the events in the current Washington leak controversy, sources close to the case tell NEWSWEEK. [more]

That's the tease, and the rest of the article busily establishes a very carefully laid out scenario that makes this out to be petty stupidity and not treason. Personally, I don't trust Isikoff. He burned Julie Hiatt Steele during the Clinton wars, and the story he's telling here is just too complicated and hypothetical to have been pieced together. I think it was fed to him, and I also think that if this is the best the White House can come up with, we'll be seeing 2-3 resignations at a minimum. My guess is Scooter Libby goes first, and the subsequent shitstorm will drag down Rove and Cheney as well.

Yep, I'm an optimist. Truth is Bush's boys will brazen this out and we'll be lucky to see Libby's hide nailed to David Corn's webpage. But the fact that they obviously floated this to the major media means that there is no good way out for the White House on this one. Schwarzenegger was a pyrrhic victory for W's team. Incumbents aren't any too popular anymore, and the scandals and potential scandals keep building up — not to mention that 171,599 square mile occupation zone we're babysitting.

* *

Atrios just posted a link to a Josh Marshall post about Grover Norquist's recent outrageous comments on Terry Gross's Fresh Air. The comments were, shall we say, outrageous? You be the judge, and if you have a weblog, throw something up about this — it'd be nice to see some "real" press coverage as a result of blagging (blog + nagging . . . nevermind):

NORQUIST: The argument that some who play to the politics of hate and envy and class division will say is, "Well, that's only 2 percent -- or, as people get richer, 5 percent, in the near future -- of Americans likely to have to pay [the estate tax]." I mean, that's the morality of the Holocaust: "Oh, it's only a small percentage. It's not you; it's somebody else." And [in] this country, people who may not make earning a lot of money the centerpiece of their lives -- they may have other things to focus on -- they just say it's not just. If you've paid taxes on your income, government should leave you alone, not tax you again.

GROSS: Excuse me one second. Did you just compare the estate tax with the Holocaust?

NORQUIST: No, the morality that says it's okay to do something to a group because they're a small percentage of the population is the morality that says that the Holocaust is okay because they didn't target everybody. "It's just a small percentage, what are you worried about? It's not you. It's not you. It's them." And arguing that it's okay to loot some group because it's them, or kill some group because it's them -- and because it's a small number -- has no place in a democratic society that treats people equally. The government's going to do something to or for us; it should treat us all equally. And the argument that Bill Clinton used when he wanted to raise taxes in 1993 is "I'm only going to tax the top 2 percent, so this doesn't affect the rest of you. I'm only going to get some of these guys, not you, others."

 

Posted by Mark Gisleson at October 08, 2003 07:57 PM

 

The Lies of George W. Bush

by Mark Gisleson

My bad. I almost forgot to pass along Vick Mickunas's URL for today's interview with David Corn on Book Nook. You need Windows Media Player for the stream, and it's best to launch between 1:00 pm and 1:05 pm CDT since the station has the stream set up to automatically cut off after one hour.

Corn's new book, "The Lies of George W. Bush" continues on in the tradition of Steve Perry's coverage of Bush's lies from this summer:

Wolfowitz of Arabia's Fever Dreams (June 4)

How to Beat Bush, Part 1 (June 9)

DHS: As Big a Planning Snafu as Iraq? (June 11)

The Bush Lies Marathon, Day 2 (June 16)

The Bush Lies Marathon, Day 3 (June 17)

The Bush Lies Marathon, Day 4 (June 18)

The Bush Lies Marathon, Day 5 (June 19)

The Bush Lies Marathon: Closing Ceremonies (June 20)

All the President's Lies (July 23)

All the President's Lies, Part II (July 30)

But I think I speak for Steve as well as myself when I say, it's not just the lies, it's the sheer incompetence of it all.

Oh, and if you're the kind of person who plans ahead, that Mickunas link in the first paragraph is good every weekday. Vick's guest on Thursday will be my favorite reporter, Joe Conason, talking about his book, "Big Lies."

Posted by Mark Gisleson at October 08, 2003 12:35 PM

 

A Minnesota perspective on the "California experiment"

by Mark Gisleson

The front page of the LA Times has all the election news you need. Click here for their coverage. The voters have spoken, and in a moment of supreme Rovian cognitive dissonance, they've punished Gray Davis for the sins of a lobbyist-duped Congress that created California's mess with the insanely stupid deregulation of energy derivatives.

It's a little late, but I thought I'd mention a few things about celebrity governors to our brothers and sisters in California. What worked for us may not work for you.

1. When Minnesotans elected Jesse, we also elected a Republican House and a Democratic Senate, giving us tri-partite government. California's legislature is controlled by Democrats. We had checks and balances; you'll have name calling and veto overrides.
   
   
2. Minnesota's problems grew out of major party collusion with business interests (e.g., the NWA bailout, subsidized sports arenas, lobbyist controlled legislation, etc.). It was getting harder and harder to see the difference between the Democrats and Republicans on key issues. This has never been a problem in California where voters have consistently voted down their fringe-dominated Republican party.
   
   
3. We knew Jesse pretty well, and had a pretty good idea what we were doing when we voted a monkey wrench into the process. More and more it appears Californians don't know Arnold at all, and the learning curve may be painful. He's not a Republican in the normal sense of the word, and Democrats are sure to rally against him now that he's ousted Gray Davis.
   
   
4. Minnesota's in fairly good shape compared to other states. California is a major disaster area, and their deficit is stunning. More to the point, their deficit was wholly created by an unholy Republican/Enron joint venture, and sooner or later Arnold will have to deal with his personal conflict of interest in this matter. Will he try to collect from Enron? I doubt it, and that leaves the question, how does California crawl out of their financial hole without raising taxes?

What does Jesse think about all this? Here are some of his comments from a recent MSNBC interview:

MIKE BARNICLE, GUEST HOST: Governor Ventura, that was a shock when you won. But let me ask you, would it be a shock if Arnold Schwarzenegger won this thing?

VENTURA: No, not at all, Mike. First of all, I like to beg to differ on the comparison here. I ran in a regular election, a regular scheduled election against Democratic and Republican opponent. I participated in probably over a dozen statewide debates. So there was time and effort to get my message out there.

Can Arnold win? Absolutely he can. I’m not opposed to Arnold running for office, Mike. I am opposed to this recall because I think this recall is wrong, because it’s being misused right now to take someone out of office. I believe it’s like a contract between the state and the candidate. When the candidate runs you expect them to get a full four-year term out of it unless they’ve committed an act of malfeasance or a crime to be recalled for.

BARNICLE: What does he do with the legislature? What did you do with the Minnesota legislature? What does he do with the California assembly?

VENTURA: Well, he’s going have a difficult time. And that’s another point, Mike. How come on this budget, the legislature isn’t being blamed? People need to remember, a governor can’t pass one law. A governor cannot pass a budget. The legislature has to do it.

In Arnold’s case, he’s facing a Democratic legislature with vengeance on their mind. If they want to put vengeance prior to doing the people’s work, he could be in very serious trouble. And you know what happened to me? Imagine this in Minnesota.

I had the far left get in bed with the far right to take on the moderate governor in the middle? See, you know what that stems from? These two parties, their main priority is to team up and destroy any third Party movement.

 

 

Posted by Mark Gisleson at October 08, 2003 10:31 AM

 

Is Baiji burning?

by Mark Gisleson

Newsweek's Evan Thomas and Michael Isikoff aren't letting go of the "so-called leak investigations."

The administration is showing defiance, but not its characteristic cockiness. Appearing angry at times, Bush last week criticized press treatment of an interim report by David Kay, the former U.N. arms inspector sent by the Bush administration to look for WMD in Iraq. The headlines reported that Kay’s team had found none. But Bush testily noted that the press glossed over what Kay’s team did find during its still-incomplete search: signs of a nascent biological-weapons program, including a vial of a deadly toxin, and a surprisingly ambitious effort by Saddam Hussein to build a long-range missile....

[Note: even when they're being aggressive, Newsweek isn't in the business of fact checking. Countless blogs have noted that what Kay reported was botulinum bacteria, something you can find in any backyard anywhere in the world.]

Wilson’s comments clearly implied that he knew that Rove was the leaker, but last week Wilson backtracked, saying only that he knew that Rove had “condoned” the leak. Whoever initially leaked Plame’s name, the White House clearly had a hand in fanning the flames. Wilson told NEWSWEEK that in the days after the Novak story appeared, he got calls from several well-connected Washington reporters. One was NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell. She told NEWSWEEK that she said to Wilson: “I heard in the White House that people were touting the Novak column and that that was the real story.” The next day Wilson got a call from Chris Matthews, host of the MSNBC show “Hardball.” According to a source close to Wilson, Matthews said, “I just got off the phone with Karl Rove, who said your wife was fair game.” (Matthews told NEWSWEEK: “I’m not going to talk about off-the-record conversations.”)....

This may be just the beginning of a grander inquisition. Officials in the intelligence community have been talking for some time about whether there should be a leak investigation into Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward’s book “Bush at War.” The book brims with classified information—most of it leaked by administration officials.

Or, as Eleanor Clift recently commented in Newsweek: "The zeitgeist is shifting. Liberal books are moving up the best-seller list. Rush Limbaugh is getting disparaged for racial insensitivity and allegedly buying illegal drugs. And the controversy over administration officials leaking the identity of an undercover CIA operative has put conservatives in the indefensible position of condoning treason."

Someone should mention that to Scott McClellan:

Q Newsweek is reporting this week that Karl Rove told "Hardball" host Chris Matthews that Wilson's wife was, "fair game."

MR. McCLELLAN: I think there is a different response in that article, as well. But, look, the subject of this investigation --

Q Did he say that?

MR. McCLELLAN: Let's talk about this. The subject of this investigation is whether someone leaked classified information. That's what this is about. And there are some that are trying -- some that see this as a political opportunity to attack the White House, and so they're talking about all sorts of other issues. The issue here is a very serious matter, and it needs to be pursued to the fullest, and we want to get to the bottom of it. The President expects everyone in his administration to adhere to the highest standards of conduct. That is the tone he has set in his administration. That is the tone he has set here in Washington, D.C. And if someone leaked classified information, we want to know, and appropriate action should be taken against that person.

Q Okay, but did Karl Rove tell Chris Matthews --

MR. McCLELLAN: Again, no --

Q -- it was fair game?

MR. McCLELLAN: Now we're trying to talk about other issues. The subject of this investigation --
Q Why can't we talk about --

MR. McCLELLAN: -- the subject of this investigation is, did someone leak classified information? And I addressed this very issue, it came up. If people differ with our views, that's fine, let's have a debate about that, let's have a good, honest debate about it. But the subject of this investigation -- no one wants to get to the bottom of it more than the President of the United States. And that's why we're pushing -- that's why we're making it very clear to the White House that we want to cooperate fully in this investigation. And the President --

Q On that subject, are investigators from the Department of Justice coming here to interview White House aides today, tomorrow?

MR. McCLELLAN: I think that -- I want to do everything I can to provide you with the information you need to do your job. But at the same time, let's recognize that this is an ongoing investigation. And I don't want to conduct that investigation from this podium. There are career prosecutors and investigators that are moving forward on this matter. And I want to make sure that we preserve the integrity of this --

Q But are --

MR. McCLELLAN: -- let me finish -- preserve the integrity of this investigation. I don't want to do anything that would hinder, slow down or harm their work. And if those investigators want information known, I'm sure that you can talk to them and they will provide you that information. But we may not know everything that they're doing. Obviously, they are pursuing the investigation, and they're doing it independently, as they should.

Q I'm not asking about the content of those conversations, by any means. I'm asking, do you know whether investigators are here this afternoon or tomorrow?

MR. McCLELLAN: But sometimes there are situations where investigators may want certain information to remain private as they move forward on the investigation. I'm not suggesting anything one way or the other, I'm just saying that I will provide you -- and I don't have anything to update you on with right now -- but if I can provide you that information in way that will help the investigation move forward, I will do so. But I think that those questions are properly directed to the career investigators at the Department of Justice. And if they want information known, I'm sure that they will share that information with you.

Q Scott, has the President asked his advisors how much or whether there was damage done to national security by this leak?

MR. McCLELLAN: I think that, one, there are certain things assumed in that question. The investigation is ongoing at this point. And I think that the CIA is the one that will look at those matters. Where we are right now is, we want to move forward on this investigation and get to the bottom of this, and we want to do everything we can to cooperate in that investigation. If anyone has information, either inside or outside the administration, they should report it to the Department of Justice. But I think that, again, you should talk to the CIA about more specifics about that issue.

Q Did it first come to his attention in July?

Q You said a moment ago that the President expects all members of his staff to be held to the highest standards. Well, Ambassador Wilson yesterday, on "Meet the Press," said that even if Karl Rove did not actually originate this information, he condoned it by depicting Virginia Plame as "fair game."

MR. McCLELLAN: No, no, let's --

Q Do you believe that Karl Rove is upholding the highest ethical standards in doing that?

MR. McCLELLAN: Let's get something clear here about this investigation. Again, the subject of this investigation is whether someone leaked classified information. As I pointed out --

Q (Inaudible.)

MR. McCLELLAN: Can I finish, please? As I pointed out, there are some that are seeing this as a political opportunity to attack the White House, to try and bring down the White House. That's unfortunate. There is a difference between setting the record straight and doing something to punish someone for speaking out. We welcome a good, honest, straightforward debate. We welcome those who differ with our views. We welcome their views, those who differ with us. Freedom of speech is certainly a cornerstone of our democracy.
But there is a difference between setting the record straight when someone with differing views says something that is not backed up by the facts, as opposed to what some have suggested, that there was an effort to punish someone for speaking out against the administration. I think that's absurd.
Again, the subject of the investigation is whether or not someone leaked classified information. But if someone is talking about someone pointing out that a statement they made was not based on the facts and that it was wrong, that's simply setting the record state. And I think we should understand the differences there. But what you have now is some in this town -- and it all too often happens during an investigation like this -- some are now using this a political opportunity to seek partisan political gain.

Q Again, I'm sorry, I'm just following up on what the ambassador, himself, said, which was, there were two waves. The first wave was the original leak. The second wave was contacting six journalists and basically inviting them to go after --

MR. McCLELLAN: These are unsubstantiated accusations, let me remind you. But let me go back to the time period that we talked about. There were some statements made, and those statements were not based on facts. And we pointed out that it was not the Vice President's Office that sent Mr. Wilson to Niger. Director Tenet made it very clear in his statement that it was people in the counterproliferation area that made that decision on their own initiative.

There were also statements made that were portrayed as contradicting what the President said in the State of the Union address, when, in fact, Director Tenet also in that statement made it very clear that those findings were inconclusive. So that's what I'm talking about here. You have some people that are trying to move the goal post. Because there is a very serious investigation going on, some people are now seeing that as a political opportunity to attack the White House. And they're moving the goal post and talking about issues that are not the subject of this investigation.

* *

Did you know about the big firefight in Baiji? Yeah, incredible how focused and in-depth our mega-media corporations are when it comes to delivering bad news (for Bush). Steve Gilliard has some eye-opening details:

Iraqis shouting pro-Saddam Hussein slogans have staged an uprising in the important oil refining city of Baiji, burning down the mayor's office, fighting with American troops and forcing local police to flee....

The crowds were chanting: "With our blood, with our spirit, we are ready to die for you Saddam.''

Keep reading. Gilliard's next most recent post ponders the Ponzi scam of the '90s stock market bubble, and then asks why Congress decided to reduce the tax obligations for the people running the scam. It sucks to know that future historians will openly mock us as being too stupid to handle democracy.

* *

And, if you only read one article about Arnold today, make it a salacious one!

 

Posted by Mark Gisleson at October 07, 2003 09:44 AM

 

Schwarzengrüper

by Mark Gisleson

Numerous blogs are not posting until sundown in honor of Yom Kippur, but irreverence seems to be the order of the day elsewhere.

Eric Hananoki, aka The Hamster, has some great one liners from the late night talk show hosts up on his site:

"Welcome to the "Late Show"! Tonight our entire balcony is full of exposed CIA agents. Welcome!" — Letterman

"Apparently Rush Limbaugh is a drug freak. Apparently, he was able to lose the 'big fat' part but not the 'idiot' part." — Jon Stewart

"It was reported today that former Governor Howard Dean raised $14 million dollars in campaign funds mostly over the Internet. Of course, Dean's success could be contributed to his Web site: www.wetboobies." — Conan O'Brien

"The president's popularity took a nose dive lately. It's at 49 percent, the lowest point ever. He says he is not down-hearted about it, he says 'Look the election is just a year away and remember I only need one less vote than the other guy.'" — Bill Maher

"[General Wesley Clark] participated in the debate with the Democrats. He was the new star. And he had to answer the question 'Why is he suddenly a Democrat?' He said he did not fit in with the Republicans because he is pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, and once when he was young and impressionable, he fought in a war." — Bill Maher

More one-liners, these from notorious 'net cut-up Bartcop:

"The Bush operation reminds me of North Korea. You have a group of insanely loyal, fiercely committed lunatics, devoting their lives to slavish devotion of a moron whose only claim to power is that his father used to run the country. George W. Bush is Kim Jong II with better hair." — Paul Begala

"The Kennedy's know he's guilty, why else would they hire Roy Black?" Rush Limbaugh as recalled by Bartcop

"The story in Florida is - it really is - an emerging situation. I watched what's being reported on television, and it changes from morning to morning, hour to hour, day to day. I don't yet know what I'm dealing with there, folks." — Rush Limbaugh on his Friday show as quoted by Bartcop

"Hey, it's not like this has been a nine-month campaign, and now at the last minute, they spring this last-minute, October Surprise on the voters. It seems to me that one reason Arnie played cat-and-mouse with his short candidacy was to minimize the number of women coming forward. Will Maria be sporting a new, 4 carat diamond on her hand next week? Is that her reward for sticking with The Austrian Mauler for the duration of the campaign?" — 100% Bartcop, except for the spelling and punctuation editing on my part

A link to the "Rush Limbaugh Hearing Loss Timeline."

 

 

Posted by Mark Gisleson at October 06, 2003 11:20 AM

 

[more]

by Mark Gisleson

"It's amazing how quickly people can get thrown off the scent." So opens Josh Marshall's latest post on the Wilson/Plame scandal, and I think Josh hits it right on the head. The ball is in Ashcroft's court now, and all the media chatter amounts to little more than smears of Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame. There won't be any new news on this one until Bush decides who to throw overboard. My guess? If it's Cheney or Libby, look for it to happen soon, by Thanksgiving at the latest. If it's Rove, we won't hear the final verdict until mid-November 2004 (unless, of course, Karen Hughes returns, in which case Rove is toast). [more] [more] [more]

Katha Pollit [via Atrios] unloads on Arnold in a Saturday New York Times op-ed piece. Frankly, all of this would end in a second if some enterprising talk show guest would just wait for one of Arnold's many female supporters to say that none of this is any big deal, and then reach over and tweak one of the commentator's breasts. I think that would put an immediate end to the current "blame the messenger" line of defense (and it would certainly freak out any male commentator who got his nipple shizzled). [more] [more] [more, and related links]

I didn't read Steve Gilliard before writing my usual front page blog post this morning. The fact that we both used "California über Alles" as a headline is simply a tribute to the lasting influence of Jello Biafra's Dead Kennedys. Alan Dershowitz, now he's a real plagiarist.

Kevin Bourassa and Joe Varnell turned around at the border when U.S. Customs refused to acknowledge their their status as a legally married couple. Natalie Davis spells out the legal situation and the background on this intentional bigotry at Open Source Politics.

Can't wait for City Pages' print edition to come out on Wednesday? Get your Tom Tomorrow fix now, courtesy of Salon (must watch commercial).

 

Posted by Mark Gisleson at October 06, 2003 10:48 AM

 

Weekend reading

by Mark Gisleson

Looking for weekend reading? Three words:

CounterPunch

Cursor

BuzzFlash

 

Posted by Mark Gisleson at October 03, 2003 04:24 PM

 

Springtime for Arnold

by Mark Gisleson

Wow. Arnold loves Adolf, Novak is now irrelevant, Krugman on "slime," and Larry Klayman for the U.S. Senate? I don't remember the tabloid psychics predicting any of this in their New Year's predictions.

First of all, here are all the new Valerie Plame affair links:

John Dean in Salon [must watch commercial or be a member]: "More vicious than Tricky Dick."

I believe that Ambassador Wilson and his wife -- like the DNC official once did -- should file a civil lawsuit, both to address the harm inflicted on them, and, equally important, to obtain the necessary tools (subpoena power and sworn testimony) to get to the bottom of this matter.

Buzzflash interviews David Corn:

[T]his is a campaign of blaming the victim. The strategic point here -- and there is one -- is for the GOP'ers to make this scandal look like another one of those nasty partisan mud-wrestles that the public never likes. Turn it into a political controversy, not a criminal one.

Slate's Jack Shafer with more on the leaks and counter-leaks.

Mark A.R. Kleiman says Novak must go, and updates his Open Source Plame summary.

* *

Minnesota’s new US Senator, Norm Coleman, is delighting a lot of people by taking the point on resisting the RIAA regarding their steel-toed enforcement of copyrights. Nice, but not necessary. RIAA’s dead as soon as they get some cases into court and the appeals start flying. But opposing RIAA did give a lot of us the warm fuzzies. Then Norm announced he was cutting a deal to get biomass money for Minnesota, and in exchange he’d vote for ANWAR. [scroll to end of article]

Score another one for Karl Rove. Not that Norm’s not sleazy enough to work a deal like this on his own, but Karl blessed Norm in typical Bush clan fashion by threatening to break the legs of anyone that ran against Coleman in the primary. Given that level of support, I think it’s reasonable to view Coleman’s strategy as a product of Rove’s hyperpartisan “W”eltanschauung.

* *

Via Atrios, why what Rush said on ESPN still matters: "Why a local hospital gave in to a racist demand."

Here in Minnesota, the AP is reporting that Ron Eibensteiner, state Republican chair, has been indicted by a grand jury for taking illegal contributions from American Bankers Insurance Co.

* *

OK, Bartcop is not a “legit” political site. Lots of rants, over-the-top/lewd/crude phototoons, cartoons and media files. BC is what BC is, and because I enjoy his site, I find it pretty easy to dodge the Rush Limbaugh question on First Amendment grounds — not that I think the two are equivalents. Bartcop is partisan, Rush is propaganda and disinformation. That’s a Republican thing. Who knows, maybe they learned it from former Black Panther supporters like David Horowitz, but any objective person tracking political dialogue would see a clear imbalance regarding humor that crosses over into hate speech. Thus endeth the caveat.

Bartcop just posted a classic “schtick.” See it for yourself at BC’s page (I’ll try to update this link just as soon as he updates and it gets a permalink) but be forewarned that there is far rougher stuff there (if I were posting in real time, I’d expect to hear the distant clatter of mouse clicks about now).

If you don’t want to be exposed to lefty populist humor, here’s a summary of the schtick:

Bart’s ranting about the GOP not wanting a special prosecutor now, and he seques into a series of pictures of Osama bin Laden with the following captions:

•  Thank you, Orrin Hatch, for sending those FBI agents to Akansas.

•  Thank you, Henry Hyde, for looking for me inside Clinton's zipper.

•  Thank you, Trent Lott, for keeping America's attention on Monica, not terrorism.

•  Thank you, Newt Gingrich, for keeping impeaching Clinton while you were banging your secretary.

•  Thank you, Tom Delay, for the partisan bickering that gave us our chance to attack.

•  Thank you, Supreme Court, for installing a lazy and stupid president that we could outwit.

OK, I should probably tsk or something at the crudeness (and typos), but mostly I just appreciate the sentiment, and the not so humorous underlying truth that if Clinton’s administration did slack off on Osama, the Republican-fueled impeachment chicanery quite likely had a lot to do with that.

As excuses go, it’s not a bad one, and it certainly resonates with the issues of the day, albeit in a most peculiar way. Distracting this administration from its agenda is probably one of the best things that could happen. These people are up to no good.

Enjoy your weekend, but from here on out, be sure to read the Saturday morning newspapers very carefully. We're entering into that kind of news cycle.

 

Posted by Mark Gisleson at October 03, 2003 10:09 AM

 

Shades of Spiro

by Mark Gisleson

While the Washington Post's reporters have been doing an outstanding job on the Valerie Plame scandal, the op-ed page has been quick to apologize on the administration's behalf. Richard Cohen finally gets one right this morning: "The identity of the CIA employee was disclosed not really to inform the public of something it should know, but as a way to send a dead fish to anyone in the administration who might question that Iraq was a major and imminent menace."

Keep reading Steve Gilliard. His blog doesn't link to posts so you'll have to scroll a bit to get past the humiliation of public moralist Rush Limbaugh and boy-toy Ahnold Schwarzenegger until you see "Beyond Plame." Gilliard's got some great insights into Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby's possible roles in d'affair Plame, and reveals why this may be a much bigger deal than anyone seems to realize.

[L]et's connect the dots. Plame's work at the Non-proliferation Center (NPC), shows two things, no evidence of Saddam trading or selling weapons to terrorists, and no evidence of any serious Iraqi effort to build the structure of a WMD program. They are being told before the war this is the case. Team B then quash every ounce of information which suggests this, keeping it in a very tight circle and not letting the analysts connect the dots. Instead, they push the few sources they do have to hammer home their version of the truth.

Now, the analysts are blocked from getting a complete picture because Team B and their allies start playing games. Critical pieces suddenly wind up in SCI (Secure compartmentalized intelligence-code word) programs which they don't have access to. A picture they don't like - SCI. Intercept-SCI. The pieces of the puzzle are shunted aside so no one can get a clear picture of Iraq. The Mossad then help the picture by feeding more info about Saddam to the Americans. They're allies of the Team B people, and they want Saddam gone. No one, except for Chalabi, actually lies, but they only show the pictures and evidence they want.

Mark A.R. Kleiman reports that Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) is suggesting that Bush sit down with Cheney to talk about the outing of Valerie Plame.

Josh Marshall continues to be a must-read (1 million page views last month). In addition to a Wesley Clark article and related links, Marshall has more on the Cheney connection:

A mountain of rumor doesn't amount to a single fact. But two respected ex-CIA officers have now publicly pointed to the vice president's office -- a good sign, I think, that that's what they're hearing from ex-colleagues at CIA. An increasing range of circumstantial evidence points in that direction. And now a United States Senator of the president's own party has suggested the same.

If true, Libby's involvement would mean much more than a rapid escalation in his attorneys' billable hours. Much more.

MWO provides an interesting Crossfire transcript.

On a more or less unrelated front, Salon's Eric Boehlert takes a look at the rapidly deteriorating morale issue: troops are pissed at George, and there will be consequences. [Boehlert is always worth watching the commercial for.]

"[Bush] pats us on the back with his speeches and stabs us in the back with his actions," Charles Carter, a retired Navy senior chief petty officer, recently told a Knight-Ridder reporter. "I will vote non-Republican in a heartbeat if it continues as is."

A recent posting on a Military.com chat room bulletin board is not atypical: "It is likely a lot of Active and Retired Military who supported this President will find 'staying home' a strong option at the next election. We put our trust in President Bush and he has let us down."

Even more stinging was this first-person Army account: "For the past six months, I have been participating in what I believe to be the great modern lie: Operation Iraqi Freedom."

Boehlert's links include Colonel David Hackworth's sites where I found yet another scandal, "Medalgate."

Recently in Iraq, an Army two-star general put himself in for the Silver Star, a gallantry award, for just being there, and for the Combat Infantryman Badge, an award designed for infantry grunts far below the rank of this division commander. 
            
During the war, members of an Air Force bomber crew were all awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for lobbing a smart bomb from 30,000 feet onto a house where Saddam was rumored to be breaking bread – even though Saddam’s still out there somewhere sucking desert air. In 1944, the only way a bomber crew might have gotten the DFC would have been if it had wobbled back from Berlin on one wing and a prayer after a dozen-plus missions of wall-to-wall flak.

Salon also has a decent piece on what life is like for a nine-year-old girl when her reservist mom's stuck in Kuwait for the duration: "Do you know what 'powerless' means?"

Kos underscores the bottom line with the latest stats.

 

Posted by Mark Gisleson at October 02, 2003 10:38 AM

 

More Plame links

by Mark Gisleson

OK, I'm breaking down and doing updates the way they should be done. According to Google, recent new visitors have been coming for the Plame links buffet, and there's certainly no shortage of those. Here's a new batch — enjoy!

Howie Kurtz, the WaPost's notorious Bush apologist, can't resist the smell of blood in the water. "Wilsongate is not Watergate. But at the moment, if you're breathing the autumnal air inside the Beltway, it sure feels like it." Kurtz goes on to repeat every bit of White House spin (Wilson was partisan, Novak is surprised by the flap, everything is routine, no big deal, etc.). Worth the read if for no other reason than the links to other Plamegate stories.

Steve Gilliard is, as usual, thoughtful and right on top of the Valerie Plame story. His analysis of Karl Rove's mindset is, I think, right on, and he has a devastating quote from the WaPost about the kind of man Joseph Wilson is.

Salon has a Noah Schactman piece on how Matt Drudge has been taking on the Bush administration over a number of issues. Schactman even notes (correctly) that Drudge was slow to pick up on Plamegate, waiting until the story was thoroughly broken before piling on. I've argued with Steve Perry on numerous occasions about Drudge and Fox being a little more independent than people give them credit for. Profoundly biased, to be sure, but not the complete lapdogs some on the left make them out to be. (For a real lapdog, check out Howie Kurtz, Sue Schmitt, or the New York Times' Judith Miller).

If you're still clucking your tongue over today's previous post in which I use the F-word to describe our current administration, this Google link demonstrates that I'm hardly the only one who thinks that way.

For those of you who read Joe Conason's daily blog at Salon, be sure to bookmark the New York Observer and check it out every Wednesday when they publish Joe's weekly column. Today's is entitled "Agent's 'Outing' A National Outrage." This one's a rehash, but Joe's a must-read when you're trying to make sense of American politics. He'll be on my buddy Vick's interview show next Thursday at 1 pm (CDT). Next Wednesday's guest will be David Corn, so this might not be a bad time to download Windows Media Player.

That's it for today. Thanks for dropping by, and remember — only you can prevent Karl Rove.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at October 01, 2003 02:14 PM

 

Aprés W, clarité du soleil

by Mark Gisleson

My, my. Let's summarize what we have here. An update at the Washington Post. David Corn has a new and enlightening report on the FBI's investigation of the White House. Josh Marshall has seemingly oodles of White House memos and Plamegate gossip. Via Atrios, a revealing Newshour transcript. Mark A.R. Kleiman has updates to his summaries. Cascading links and editorializing at Buzzflash. More editorializing at the Star Tribune. Media Whores Online has a snippet of a Chris Matthews' interview in which Ed Gillespie, chairman of the RNC, says that if this is true, it would be worse than Watergate.

Please forgive me but I feel compelled to use an emoticon here :) I remember Watergate. I wallowed in Watergate. I made a shrine of one of my living room walls and filled it with official government portraits of Nixon, shrinkwrapped newspapers with big headlines, shelves of books (I think I still have over sixty), buttons, records and even t-shirts. My wall and I were on WHO-TV on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of Nixon’s resignation.

I was the sole Iowa concessionaire for Don’t Buy Books from Crooks t-shirts. One of the Nixon portraits (a particularly infamous glossy B&W;) ended up being auctioned off at a Democratic county fundraiser. A labor guy bought it for $100 and then burned it on stage. (We should have seen that one coming.)

Karl Rove should have seen this one coming, as well. It is somewhat amazing to me that a White House that promotes a dress code and has strict rules of conduct would tolerate a foul-mouthed dirty trickster like Rove.* It's all a part of the beleaguered Republican mindset. I know that mindset. I grew up in a Republican household and had Barry Goldwater's picture taped to my sixth grade desk, and a Nelson Rockefeller poster on my wall in high school (right about now real Republicans are nodding their heads, uh huh, even then he was a lost cause).

Nixon and Kissinger and Vietnam drove me from the party, but I still remember that when I was a Republican in Lyndon Johnson's America, life seemed very unfair. Conservatives never got a say in how things were run. More specifically, Democrats were cheating, lying SOBs who were working night and day to drive this great country into a totalitarian swamp of liberal-socialist horrors.

Like everyone else in my generation, I read Alex Haley's "Autobiography of Malcolm X" and was radicalized by the notion of "any means necessary." I think that what we are seeing in this White House is the maturation of thirty years of "necessary" dirty tricks, disinformation and political strategies that have walked the tightrope between aggressive politics and treason. I also think that George W[allenda] Bush is the guy in the skintight flightsuit who finished that tightrope walk and now stands on the platform at the other end of the rope. Needless to say, he only completed the last six inches of that journey, but just the same, he is the man on the platform, and all that's left to do is descend the ladder and formally establish a fascist government. All we have left is a few checks and balances between us and government by corporation. (Look it up in the dictionary — I'm not talking Nazi, I'm talking lower case fascism and John Aschroft is aggressively laying all the necessary groundwork.)

There are many ways out of this unholy mess, and I haven't been shy about expressing my support for Wesley Clark as the best of those options. Candor forces me to post this link to a new Rolling Stone interview that contains some information that dampened my enthusiasm for a "Wes Wing," but at the same time, my enthusiasm was somewhat revived by this outstanding review of the Iraq War by Clark in the New York Review of Books. [thanks to Steve P. for the NYRB link]

Clark may not be the solution, but a solution is needed. What we got now just ain't working.

 

* From Ron Suskind's "Why Are These Men Laughing?": Inside, Rove was talking to an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had gone awry and a political operative who had displeased him. I paid it no mind and reviewed a jotted list of questions I hoped to ask. But after a moment, it was like ignoring a tornado flinging parked cars. "We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!" As a reporter, you get around—curse words, anger, passionate intensity are not notable events—but the ferocity, the bellicosity, the violent imputations were, well, shocking. This went on without a break for a minute or two. Then the aide slipped out looking a bit ashen, and Rove, his face ruddy from the exertions of the past few moments, looked at me and smiled a gentle, Clarence-the-Angel smile. "Come on in."

Posted by Steve Perry at October 01, 2003 10:27 AM

 

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