This year, of all years, the Democrats cannot afford to form their usual circular firing squad. They should compete on positive core values and on dragging Bush and his gang screaming to the duck pit.
Reagan's 11th commandment was: "Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican." It worked pretty well, didn't it? The Dems should learn from it.
Robust discourse is all well and good, but as I recall, it was Bradley who tagged Gore first with the -- false! -- liar meme that clung to Gore all through election 2000, when the SCLM picked up on it.
As Benjamin Franklin once said: "Gentleman! We must all hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately."
The Bush administration has known all along that the evidence of the imminent threat of Saddam's weapons and the Al Qaeda connections were pumped up. They were manning the air hose.
Mr. Tenet, in his continuing effort to ingratiate himself to his bosses, agreed to take the fall, trying to minimize a year's worth of war-causing warping of intelligence as a slip of the keyboard. "These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president," he said, in 15 words that were clearly written for him on behalf of the president. But it won't fly.
It was Ms. Rice's responsibility to vet the intelligence facts in the president's speech and take note of the red alert the tentative Tenet was raising. Colin Powell did when he set up camp at the C.I.A. for a week before his U.N. speech, double-checking what he considered unsubstantiated charges that the Cheney chief of staff, Scooter Libby, and other hawks wanted to sluice into his talk.
When the president attributed the information about Iraq trying to get Niger yellowcake to British intelligence, it was a Clintonian bit of flim-flam. Americans did not know what top Bush officials knew: that this "evidence" could not be attributed to American intelligence because the C.I.A. had already debunked it.
Ms. Rice did not throw out the line, even though the C.I.A. had warned her office that it was sketchy. Clearly, a higher power wanted it in. And that had to be Dick Cheney's office.
Dick Cheney as a "Higher Power"... Now that is a truly frightening concept.
bogosity: /boh·go´s@·tee/, n.
1. [orig. CMU, now very common] The degree to which something is bogus. Bogosity is measured with a bogometer; in a seminar, when a speaker says something bogus, a listener might raise his hand and say “My bogometer just triggered”. More extremely, “You just pinned my bogometer” means you just said or did something so outrageously bogus that it is off the scale, pinning the bogometer needle at the highest possible reading (one might also say “You just redlined my bogometer”). The agreed-upon unit of bogosity is the microLenat.
2. The potential field generated by a bogon flux; see quantum bogodynamics. See also bogon flux, bogon.
We've learned some new words today! Let's see if we can use them in some sentences!
UPDATE: Alert reader artful dodger points to another entry in the Jargon file:
Here:
SNAFU principle: /sna´foo prin´si·pl/, n.
[from a WWII Army acronym for ‘Situation Normal, All Fucked Up’] “True communication is possible only between equals, because inferiors are more consistently rewarded for telling their superiors pleasant lies than for telling the truth.:” — a central tenet of Discordianism, often invoked by hackers to explain why authoritarian hierarchies screw up so reliably and systematically. The effect of the SNAFU principle is a progressive disconnection of decision-makers from reality. ...
Seems pretty close to what's happening with The Smoking Sentence -- the "progressive disconnection of decision-makers from reality." Assuming Bush and his gang ever had any such thing.
Here's a "captured documents" story from the Daily Tennessean, now being flogged by the Weekly Standard via Glenn Reynolds.
Gosh, captured enemy documents.... Brings back those Viet Nam memories...
Anyhow, the captured document purports to be a list of the 600 closest people in Iraq to Saddam Hussein, published by Saddam's crazy son Uday and showing -- wait for it! -- the long-sought-for-but-never available AQ link. Nice timing!
The story is by a 67-year old judge, not a journalist, so we can't really hold him responsible for his credulousness regarding the "unusual set of circumstances" that caused him to be the recipient of the list.
Interesting if true, but it doesn't let Bush off the hook for the 5 words of dubious provenance in the SOTU on AQ.
"Faith-based intelligence," once again. Whether the faith is justified in retrospect or not is no reason to send hundreds of our soldiers and thousands of Iraqis to their deaths. Especially now, since after The Tenet Affair the intelligence agencies are now 100% politicized.
Here's another poll, this from Newsweek, probably from next week's issue:
More than half of those polled, 53 percent, said the Bush administration did not purposely mislead the public about evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in order to build support for the war, while 38 percent said the administration had misled the public.
And in an indication of how the controversy over an incorrect assertion by Bush in his January State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium from Africa was playing to the public, 72 percent said they had not heard about it.
No, I don't mean too excited, upset, I mean too excited, hopeful.
Because in spite of the knowledge gap expressed by that 72 % of those polled:
Bush's approval rating for his handling of the military operation in Iraq fell to 53 percent among those surveyed on July 10-11, from 65 percent in a May 29-30 poll, and a high of 74 percent in an April 10-11 poll taken just after Saddam Hussein was ousted from power in Iraq, Newsweek said.
And astonishingly:
The president's overall rating slipped to 55 percent from 61 percent in the May poll.
(edit)
Among registered voters, 50 percent said issues of the economy and jobs would be more important than terrorism and homeland security in determining their vote in next year's presidential elections. Twenty-two percent said terrorism and homeland security would be more important issues.
The registered voters surveyed were split on whether they wanted Bush to serve another term, with 47 percent saying they would like to see Bush re-elected and 46 percent saying they would not, while 7 percent were undecided.
Okay, it's just one poll, although others seem to be "trending" in the same direction. I'm generally skeptical of polls, but I've reluctantly come to accept that quite aside from any value they have in telling you accurately where the rest of America stands, they influence the opinions of the opinion-makers. In Eric Alterman's priceless trop, polls are another way to "work the refs."
Anyone with a more nuanced understanding of statistics is invited to comment.
Probably a worse threat than Iraq, right? Then again, after what we know now about Iraq, maybe not. Anyhow, here's the money paragraph:
Sources said this month that American surveillance satellites identified a North Korean site about 25 miles (40 kilometers) northwest of the Yongbyon complex that "may or may not" be a testing facility for the development of a nuclear weapon small enough to be put atop a missile.
Well, there you have it! "May or may not be..."
Now that's an evaluation any intelligence professional can get behind. And after what Bush did to George "Plank Boy" Tenet, the analysts are going to be in CYA mode 24/7. Our intelligence process is now 100% politicized.
Too bad Bush sunk half our troops in the Iraqi quagmire, stiffed the UN, and alienated our allies. Do these guys know how to do anything with our assets but loot them and trash them?
Ever had a boss like that? I have. It's not a pretty sight . (Click through for detail.)
Where does the buck really stop?
Former White House advisor David Gergen, who was a major player in crafting State of the Union adresses under Presidents Reagan and Clinton, told CBS News Correspondent Jim Acosta it's not enough for Tenet to take the blame.
"Somebody in the administration, not in the agency, not at the CIA, wanted to put this in the speech and got the CIA to sign off on it, even though everybody knew within the U.S. government that there were real doubts about the validity of the report. And that's what constitutes the misleading quality of it."
I can understand the President's desire to "move on" -- I sure would, if I'd used false statements in making the case for war to the American people -- but wouldn't be best to find out where the buck stops before we do that?
MOYERS: What do you see that we journalists don't see?
STEWART: I think we see exactly what you do see but for some reason don't analyze it in that manner or put it on the air in that manner. I can't tell ya how many times we'll run into a journalist who will go, "Boy I wish we could be saying that. That's exactly the way we see it and that's exactly the way we'd like to be saying that."
And I always think, well, why don't you?....
MOYERS: Which is funnier? CROSSFIRE or HARD BALL?
STEWART: CROSSFIRE or HARDBALL? Which is funnier? Which is more soul-crushing, you mean? Both are equally dispiriting in their the whole idea that political discourse has degenerated into shows that have to be entitled Crossfire and Hardball. ...
Crossfire, especially, is completely an apropos name. It's what innocent bystanders are caught in when gangs are fighting. And it just boggles my mind that that's given a half hour, an hour a day to-- I don't understand how issues can be dissected-- from the left and from the right as though-- even cartoon characters have more than left and right. They have up and down....
These years are upsetting because I feel like we're being gas lit as a country in that what we see going on is just being described as the opposite relentlessly by you know the administration. ...
MOYERS: Friday, front page headline: War's Cost Bring Democratic Anger. I mean these are the guys who voted for the war.
STEWART: You don't want to get the Democrats angry, because then they'll maybe meet in private....
MOYERS: And what is the media doing to help us sort us out?
STEWART: Oh. they're not. They sat this one out. Yeah, they're not getting involved. It's very tiring. And they have weather reports to give....
MOYERS: Why is it that President Bush has to go to South Africa to be asked a critical question about nuclear weapons of mass destruction?
STEWART: Because in the United States he doesn't see anybody in the press. He's in a small room, with a treadmill, that he runs on. And a little "brush-to-clear" diorama. He is not exposed in any way.
You know what's great? Watch a Bush press conference, and then turn on Tony Blair and Parliament. Where he literally has to sit in front of his most vociferous critic. And that critic will say, "Sir, on the 13th, the dossier of the French, not the nuclear. You were hiding things. How do you answer, sir?"
"The distinguished gentleman is wrong. I can prove it in this way." Contrast that with the press conference that Bush had on the eve of war [Dull, robotic voice]: "Uh, okay, the next question is-- Jim. Is there a Jim here? Yeah. You got the next one. [Pause.] That is not the agreed-upon question. We're gonna move on. Ralph, you got something?"
It an incredibly managed, theatrical farce. And it's incredible to me that people are playing along with it. And they say that they're playing along with it because they're afraid of losing access. You don't have any access! There's nothing to lose!...
What the representatives have done over 200 years is set up a periphery, I think they call it the Beltway-- that is obtuse enough that we can't penetrate it anymore, unless we spend all of our time. This is the way that it's been set up purposefully by both sides. And the financial industry, as well.
They don't want average people to easily penetrate the workings. Because then we call them on it.
As we all know but probably wouldn't have, were it not for the heroic work of people like David Horowitz, Pat Buchanan, Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom, to name but a few, it's minorities who've been getting all the real breaks in this society, tragically, whether qualified or not, none more so than African-Americans.
One more example:
Blacks Lose Better Jobs Faster as Middle-Class Work Drops
Unemployment among blacks is rising at a faster pace than in any similar period since the mid-1970's, and the jobs lost have been mostly in manufacturing, where the pay for blacks has historically been higher than in many other fields.
Nearly 2.6 million jobs have disappeared over all during the last 28 months, which began with a brief recession that has faded into a weak recovery. Nearly 90 percent of those lost jobs were in manufacturing, according to government data, with blacks hit disproportionately harder than whites.
Because of having been crippled by all those preferences, no doubt. They're been made incompetent by liberal condescension, and now expect everything handed to them on a silver plater. Oh, wait a minute, maybe not.
At the same time, jobless black Americans have been unusually persistent about staying in the labor force. Having landed millions of jobs in the booming 1990's, they have continued to look for new ones in the soft economy, and so are counted now as unemployed; if they gave up trying to find work, they would not be counted.
Forgive me, but some things bear repeating.
At the same time, jobless black Americans have been unusually persistent about staying in the labor force. Having landed millions of jobs in the booming 1990's, they have continued to look for new ones in the soft economy, and so are counted now as unemployed; if they gave up trying to find work, they would not be counted.
And repeating and repeating; but don't worry, I'm not going to.
Here's where you can read the rest of this disturbing article.
Looks like that sword Tenet fell on was made of rubber.
President Asserts He Still Has Faith in Tenet and C.I.A.
A day after the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, took responsibility for approving the use of unsubstantiated information about Iraq's nuclear program in the State of the Union address, President Bush said today that he retained confidence in Mr. Tenet and that he considered the matter closed.
Another example of compassionate conservatism.
Is it going to work? Will the matter stay closed? Perhaps not. From the same NYTimes story:
Mr. Bush's comments followed a strikingly open effort by the White House on Friday to place the blame on Mr. Tenet for not stripping from the State of the Union speech a line, later found to be based on unreliable intelligence, asserting that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium in Africa for a nuclear weapons program.
Speaking to reporters here at the conclusion of a five-nation tour of Africa, Mr. Bush said he "absolutely" had faith in Mr. Tenet and in the Central Intelligence Agency generally.
(edit)
Mr. Fleischer said that the White House had corrected the statement in March, when the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded that documents that had provided much of the basis for the claim about Iraq's attempts to purchase uranium were forged. But White House officials had said throughout the spring that there was other evidence to back up the claim.
(edit)
The White House acknowledged only this week that the evidence that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium in Africa was not solid enough to have justified citing it in the State of the Union address.
Even today, the administration continued to suggest that the information about Iraq's activities in Africa might ultimately be proved correct.
Huh? Let me try that again:
Even today, the administration continued to suggest that the information about Iraq's activities in Africa might ultimately be proved correct.
Well, I guess that does take cojones of a sort.
It's just possible that this President's simple, direct, visceral inability to admit not merely error, but even the need to rethink one's position based on new evidence, may be his undoing.
Can't you just hear Howard Fineman saying, "the irony is that it's this President's greatest personal and policy strength that may turn out to be his biggest political liability. Hey, I'll settle for that.
Kinda like clockwork, though a lot messier than usual...
The media manipulation Benjamin Healey of Slate has good press coverage of the carefully orchestrated frenzy, as does Daily Kos, and our own alert reader tECHNIDA (Republican tactics 201: Extinguish your own arson. Advanced stuff -- maybe even a graduate-level course.)
Anyhow, tying a few posts together --
Even "16" is a lie There are 19* additional words of, well, equally dubious provenance in the speech: the long-debunked aluminum tubes. Who didn't take those words out? More importantly, who put them in?
* Or twenty, if you count "high-strength" as two.
UPDATE: The Bush Fiction Index has now reached 16 + 19 + 5. And I'm bullish!
Bush, Condi, and Cheney knew, not just Tenet aWol's flacks and the usual suspects in MWdom are now busy propagating the 16 words lie and chanting "case closed" since George "Plank Boy" Tenet issued a mea culpa for a mistake that wasn't his responsibility. But Condi had known about since the previous October. Cheney knew too, through Ambassador Wilson. And so did Bush himself. (One notes that CBS has changed the headline from "False" to "Dubious", no doubt because Unka Karl threatened to put a horse's head in some executive's bed.)
Tenet's basic story makes no sense The idea that it's all the fault of The Tenis™ doesn't hold water.
The Niger uranium "intelligence" that lit the fuse on all this was an easily detectable, crude forgery. Really, really crude. So, after the only intelligence professionals on the game are beaten about the head and ears for a year by neo-cons, Rummy's own parallel intelligence arm, and the White House itself, we're supposed to believe that the CIA bears the brunt of the blame? Feels like a story concocted after the fact to me.
Where does the buck stop? We know -- or at least we've been told -- who didn't take the Niger uranium lie out. But who put it in? Our CEO president declines to answer. Surprise! The Times editorializes today:
Now the American people need to know how the accusation got into the speech in the first place, and whether it was put there with an intent to deceive the nation. The White House has a lot of explaining to do.
aWol, you got a lot of 'splainin' to do... What did you knoW and When did you knoW it? (The Times also has a nice new synonym for lie: "fiction.")
A pattern of deceit Despite all the Republican efforts at damage control, let's remember to put "The Smoking Sentences" into the big picture: it's the pattern of deceit that matters, not the "16 words."
So this is a serious credibility problem, and it's a lot deeper than just the Iraq-Niger deal, it has to do with assertions by the secretary of defense that he knew where weapons were that turned out not to be there, it has to do with assertions by the vice president there was a nuclear program that turned out not to exist, and assertions made by the president himself, not just about the acquisition of uranium, but also about the ability of [deposed Iraqi President] Saddam [Hussein] to use chemical weapons on the United States.
Give 'em hell, Howard!
"Rise to the level of certainty..." Bush's gang wants to have you believe that the issue is whether the 16 words were a lie. The real issue is whether the administration hyped the war with every piece of dubious intelligence they could lay their hands on.
So this quote, from Tenet's mea culpa is key to the debate:
"This did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for presidential speeches, and the CIA should have ensured that it was removed."
Did the 16 words on Niger uranium "rise to the level of certainty"? No. The 19 on the aluminum tubes? No. The 5 on AQ? No.
Bush should have made the case to the American people for war based on what was known, not on what he thought he could get away with.
NOTE: Sorry, readers, I botched something in blogger on this one.
Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda.
Let's not parse the "aid and protect" weasel words, eh? After all Bush is no Clinton.... The clear implication is that Saddam and AQ were working together. That was dubious then, and it's dubious now.
Matt Kelley of the AP gives lots of good detail here:
Before the war, Bush and members of his cabinet said Saddam was harboring top al-Qaida operatives and suggested Iraq could slip the terrorist network chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons.
Critics attacked those assertions from the beginning for being counter to the ideologies of Saddam and al-Qaida and short on corroborating evidence. Now, two former Bush administration intelligence officials say the evidence linking Saddam to the group responsible for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was never more than sketchy at best.
"There was no significant pattern of cooperation between Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist operation," former State Department intelligence official Greg Thielmann said this week.
Another former Bush administration intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, agreed there was no clear link between Saddam and al-Qaida.
The administration's key evidence of a link was an operative named Abu Musab Zarqawi, who got medical care in Baghdad in May 2002 after being wounded in Afghanistan. In his Feb. 5 presentation to the United Nations, Powell called Zarqawi "an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida lieutenants."
Current and former intelligence officials now say Zarqawi's links to al-Qaida are more tenuous - the CIA now says Zarqawi considers himself independent of al-Qaida, for example. And while Zarqawi spent time in Iraq, it's unclear whether Saddam's regime simply allowed him to be there or actively tried to work with him.
"There was scant evidence there had been any other contacts between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden," Graham said in an interview Friday.
The administration's case apparently was persuasive. In a poll conducted last month by Knowledge Networks, 52 percent of those questioned said they thought the United States found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam was working closely with al-Qaida - although no such evidence has been found.
Of course, it's the pattern of deceit that matters, but 16 + 19 + 5 is starting to look like a pattern... and in only one speech! (Granted, speech that sent hundreds of our soldiers and 1000s of Iraqi civilians to their deaths.)
UPDATE: Of course, the dubious character of the link to AQ was knwon at the time, too. (Thanks to alert reader Jennifer.)
I think I know how Unka Karl's going to knock the 9/11 report off the front pages...
(It's at the printer -- why hasn't some patriot leaked it? Like the Pentagon Papers.... Daniel Ellsberg, thou should'st be with us at this hour... If the Times in the state it is today would actually print such a thing...)
The Bush administration is finally facing tough questions about its selective use of intelligence in selling war with Iraq. But Americans shouldn't just be skeptical of what the president says about WMD. They should be skeptical of what he says about GDP. In economic policy even more than in war policy, the Bushies have successfully suppressed, manipulated, and withheld evidence to serve their policy purposes.
Of course every administration likes to trumpet its good news and hide its bad, but what's remarkable about the Bush team is its willingness to stifle data that had been widely released and to politicize data that used to be nonpartisan.
[T]o heighten the impression that Social Security is running out of money (thereby strengthening the case for allowing workers to divert money from the system into private retirement accounts), the administration has predicted shortfalls far in the future by relying on preposterously long forecast periods.
(Thanks to alert reader creeper.)
They lie so much they don't even know when they're lying anymore!
Here's a serendipitous hit about 24/7 Korean Go club in LA. I'm posting it for a couple of reasons --
First, what a great country this is. We are so rich and, yes, open in culture and experience. (And let's remember the Constitutional framework that set us on the right road.)
Second, Go is a game of "perfect information." All possible information about the game is known to both players at the board. Wouldn't it be nice if our political system were more like that? That "What did he know and when did he know it?" was a rare question, not a frequent one?
UPDATE: The Korean for "Jeebus" is pronounced Ai-goo cham-nah.
Links in HaloScan comments are not reliable. HaloScan seems to accept links of the following form:
<a href="http://www.google.com/foo"> ... </a>
but that's it. IOW, everything after a "?" or a "#" just gets truncated.
So until HaloScan fixes this bug, it would probably be best for the blog if readers just did URLs in the form of straight text, right in the comment:
http://www.google.com/foo?id=XXXXXX
The convenience of being able to click on some links is far outweighed by the frustration of clicking other links and having them turn out to be broken -- and we do like to track down those links!
Many thanks for your comments!
UPDATE: Alert reader Beth adds:
If it's a very long link, it would be better to avoid screwing up the width of the comments page by inserting a space in the middle like this:
Ya blow 16 words and what do you get?
A long walk off a short plank on the deck.
St. Peter don't you call me, cuz I can't go,
I sold my soul like a Company ho'.
We told 'em thirty times that the claim was a lie
but no matter what we did the sucker just wouldn't die.
I should have done the right thing when I first had the chance
But I thought I might avoid that ugly gallows dance.
Ya blow 16 words, and what do you get?
A chance to take an oval office boot in the neck.
St. Peter don't you call me, cuz I can't go,
I sold my people's honor like a two-dollar ho'.
They knew it down at State and in the OVP,
They knew it at the White House through the NSC,
But when I said remember this is plainly a scam,
They told me to go out and get a rectal exam.
Ya blow 16 words and what do you get?
A civil service pension; not a bad safety net.
I sold my soul and I look pretty bent
but when I hit the private sector gonna make me a mint.
Democrats argued that a minimum wage increase, last approved by Congress seven years ago, is long overdue and complained that Republicans were refusing to allow the Senate even to consider the issue.
In a speech to the Senate, Kennedy said that minimum wage employees working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, earn $10,700 a year, or $4,500 below the poverty line for a family of three. The value of the increase that Congress approved seven years ago has eroded to the point that their wages are worth less now than they were before the last increase, he added.
$10,700 a year .... That's about 5 hotdogs at a Bush campaign loot fest.
A U.S. House of Representatives panel on Friday slashed funding for the Amtrak passenger railroad and transportation alternatives like bicycle routes to boost highway construction spending.
After subsidizing SUVs in the tax bill! Shameless....
Bush's overall job approval rating dropped to 59 percent, down nine points in the past 18 days. That decline exactly mirrored the slide in public support for Bush's handling of the situation in Iraq, which now stands at 58 percent.
And for the first time, slightly more than half the country -- 52 percent -- believes there has been an "unacceptable" level of U.S. casualties in Iraq, up eight points in less than three weeks.
On the other hand:
The poll found that seven in 10 Americans believe the United States should continue to keep troops in Iraq, even if it means additional casualties. That view was shared by majorities of Republicans, Democrats and political independents.
A majority of the country -- 57 percent -- still consider the war with Iraq to have been worth the sacrifice. That's down 7 percentage points from a Post-ABC News poll in late June, and 13 points since the war ended 10 weeks ago.
Take a look at the raw data here; it gives you a more detailed look at questions asked, and more nuance in the answers, here.
And don't miss the uggabugga take on George W's take on another George W.
Back in September 2002, which was the year, you will remember, when the SOTU contained that magical phrase, "the axis of evil," and the months since had been filled with Bush doctrine-we don't need no stinking allies-war with Iraq talk, Quiddity considered all, and I do mean all the possible consequences of such a war, from "world-wide recession" to "Richard Perle happy."
Looking back at those expectations from a post-war perspective, what strikes me first is how many of the questions that made war doubters doubtful, have turned out to be the very ones the Bush administration neither asked nor answered, and should have.
It's also quite true that many of the items on the war doubters' lists of bad consequences didn't happen, as Bush supporters have been pointing out with great relish. Fair enough say I. Except when they pretend that all anti-war opinion maintained the same list, and universally predicted that each and every item on the list was bound to happen, which is not true.
But let's take a closer look at the predicted bad outcomes that didn't happen. Saddam didn't use any of those WMD, or attack Israel; there were no massive movements of refugees, Iraqis were loyal to their homes if not to their government; Iran and Syria stayed out; the Iraqi armed forces, including the Republican guard, despite sporadic intense fighting, readily collapsed, deserting rather than defending Baghdad.
Now ask yourself, which of those dogs that didn't bark is really an argument that Saddam's hold on power was so secure that a massive land and air invasion, whose objective was for our armed forces to take over their country, call it liberation if you must, was really the only way to help the Iraqi people to rid themselves of Saddam?
The Niger intelligence was first raised by Italian agencies in November 2001 and shared with the CIA. It was based on four letters, including one purportedly from the Nigerian President, Tandja Mamadou, and two from another cabinet minister, relating to an Iraqi uranium deal.
Mr Mamadou had proved the one supposedly from him carried a childlike signature bearing no resemblance to his own. Two more documents were written on paper from a 1980s military government in Niger, yet bore an October 2000 date and carried the signature of a foreign minister who had not held office for 14 years.
Despite protestations from the CIA, British intelligence included the claims in a September 2002 dossier that became the first rhetorical strike in Prime Minister Tony Blair's case for war
How could this crude forgery ever have been taken seriously by anyone? Or -- Gosh! -- maybe the CIA took one look at it, wanted no part of it, and the neo-cons and the White House hacks rammed it through anyhow? Since they had to have their war? My goodness!
"And up through the ground came a bubblin' crude." Forgeries, that is. Yellow cake. Erroneous allegations. Misstatements. Exaggerations. Lies, Texas-sized....
President Bush will meet British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the White House July 17 for dinner and talks on a wide range of issues.
It's surprising Blair feels it's safe to leave home. The Guardian's leader:
The government's insistence in the run-up to the war that Saddam Hussein was "continuing to work on developing nuclear weapons" was a crucial part of its case that Iraq should be disarmed, if necessary, by force. And the most striking evidence was its claim put forward in the September 24 dossier that Iraq was seeking "significant quantities of uranium from Africa". The prime minister told the house then that "if he (Saddam) were able to purchase fissile materiel illegally, it would only be a year or two (before Iraq acquired a 'usable nuclear weapon')". This image of the Iraqi tyrant shopping around for uranium was a compelling one: "Saddam 'could have nuclear bomb in year'", the Times headlined its defence editor's story the next day. The Sun summed it up more bluntly: "He's got'em ... Let's get him." The British assertion then received the ultimate accolade: it was quoted by President Bush in January in his state of the union address.
Nine months later, this claim has now come unstuck to the extent that, far more seriously than the famous "45 minutes" prediction or the much later dodgy dossier, it threatens to become a real smoking gun - not for Saddam Hussein but for Tony Blair.
The White House has now admitted that Mr Bush's information (which he sourced directly to the British) was wrong and should not have been used.
The British response, reiterated yesterday by Downing Street, is to insist that their evidence is based not on the forged documents but on entirely separate material from a foreign intelligence agency. If so, why has Britain been unable to convince Washington that the claim is genuine? Whitehall's answer that it cannot reveal the identity of its source - even to its US intelligence "cousins" - is simply unbelievable.
The whole business is, in the words of the foreign affairs committee, "very odd indeed"...
"Very odd indeed!" Love that British understatement.
The Brits say they have other evidence besides the forgeries, but can't produce it, and won't give a source... And the administration says it had other evidence too, and doesn't produce it, and won't give a source...
Maybe the source of the British "other evidence" is the administration, which in fact has got nothing; and the source of of the administration's "other evidence" is the Brits, and in fact they've got nothing. The doubles version of playing both ends against the middle...
Naah... It's too late at night... Just let me go now and wrap some tape round my skull ...
... another day older, and deeper in the Iraqi qWagmire.
I should be able to write a better headline than that, but seeing that the administration was even lying about their own lies ... It's just too over the top.
Now I know why Atrios moved to an even-more-undisclosed location. How I wish I could too. Like to another planet. I'd move to that new gas giant except I can meet Rush without travelling 600 light years.
And things are going to get even uglier, since we know the Bushes turn brutally vicious when cornered -- witness 43 stomping McCain in South Carolina 2000 or 41 Willie-Horton-izing Mike Dukakis. Or Jebbie any day of the year. So brace yourselves...
Anyhow, Dean has been standing up on Iraq for some time -- and he does late night interviews on CNN too. And alert reader Thumb came up with a headline:
Give 'em hell, Howard!
So this is a serious credibility problem, and it's a lot deeper than just the Iraq-Niger deal, it has to do with assertions by the secretary of defense that he knew where weapons were that turned out not to be there, it has to do with assertions by the vice president there was a nuclear program that turned out not to exist, and assertions made by the president himself, not just about the acquisition of uranium, but also about the ability of [deposed Iraqi President] Saddam [Hussein] to use chemical weapons on the United States.
The big deal is not so much that we went to war over a deal between Iraq and Niger which didn't exist and that the administration knew ahead of time it didn't exist. The big deal is the credibility of the United States of America and the credibility of the president in telling the American people the truth and the rest of the world the truth. That's a very big deal.
Yes, give 'em hell Howard. I don't care if the veins in your neck do pop, as Evelyn Neives's sleazy little piece of character assassination has it in WaPo. Nothing wrong with a little righteous anger, now that the age of irony is dead. Me, the stuff these guys pull, I'm amazed the top of my skull doesn't blow off.
An anonymous but alert reader points out that Tenet's statement itself contains a lie. Let's compare what Bush actually said to what Tenet says that Bush said:
the text in the speech was factually correct – i.e. that the British government report said that Iraq sought uranium from Africa."
So, first, Tenet's own statement is a lie. Bush did not say the British "said"; Bush said the British "learned." The difference? Consider:
I say to you: "He said 1 + 1 = 3." No problem; I'm not implying 1 + 1 = 3.
But then I say to you: "He learned 1 + 1 = 3." A problem; I am implying 1 + 1 = 3 (which you know, of course, is wrong).
So, the use of "learn" -- which Tenet conceals through his own lie -- shows the intent to deceive. By saying the British "learned" of the Niger uranium, Bush implied that this was true. It was not true, and whoever crafted those 16 weasel words knew it was not true.
So, who signed off on the speech? Whose responsibility was it? What did he know and when did he know it?
A nice long report from Jonathon Landa and Warren Strobel of the Miami Herald here:
The small circle of senior civilians in the Defense Department who dominated planning for postwar Iraq failed to prepare for the setbacks that have erupted over the past two months. ...
The officials didn't develop any real postwar plans because they believed that Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops with open arms and Washington could install a favored Iraqi exile leader as the country's leader. The Pentagon civilians ignored CIA and State Department experts who disputed them, resisted White House pressure to back off from their favored exile leader and when their scenario collapsed amid increasing violence and disorder, they had no backup plan.
"There was no real planning for postwar Iraq," said a former senior U.S. official who left government recently.
In contrast, years before World War II ended, American planners plotted extraordinarily detailed blueprints for administering postwar Germany and Japan, designing everything from rebuilt economies to law enforcement and democratic governments.
Ultimately, however, the responsibility for ensuring that post-Saddam planning anticipated all possible complications lay with Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, current and former officials said.
What a mess. The LA Times paints a great word picture of American soldiers in a humvee caught in traffic -- potentially deadly for them, of course -- since there are no traffic cops and no traffic lights.
As Casey Stengel used to say of the Amazin' Mets: "Can't anyone here play this game?"
The Republican-led House on Thursday narrowly upheld proposed labor rules that the Bush administration acknowledged could bump more than 600,000 workers from the ranks of those eligible for overtime pay.
Though the malAdministration admits 600,000 other estimates put the total as high as 8 million.
HINT: The scam the Republicans are working is the old exempt employees dodge.
U.S. officials told NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell that Tenet himself advised Rice’s top deputy, Steven Hadley, to remove a reference to the uranium report from a speech Bush delivered Oct. 7 in Cincinnati, establishing that the nation’s top intelligence officials suspected that the allegation was false more than three months before they approved Bush’s repeating it in his nationally televised address on Jan. 28.
(Thanks to alert reader RG)
So let me get this straight:
It wasn't OK to use Niger uranium in Cincinnati before the SOTU (when Condi had to know), it wasn't OK to use Niger uranium at the UN a week after the SOTU (when Colin knew), but it was OK to use it in the SOTU ... Oh heck, aWol was only talking to Congress, then! I guess he just figured he could say whatever he wanted to those guys...
"Some of the language was changed. From what we know now, agency officials in the end concurred that the text in the speech was factually correct that the British government report said that Iraq sought uranium from Africa.''
Now I understand! I get it! It's all clear!
Lie: "Iraq said sought uranium from Africa."
"Truth": "A British government report said that Iraq sought uranium in Africa."
And Tenet grovels some more:
''This should not have been the test for clearing a presidential address,'' the statement continued. ''This did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for presidential speeches, and CIA should have ensured that it was removed.''
Yes, but no. Nice try, though.
It's clear that the White House had editorial control of writing the SOTU all the way, down to each and every word -- and who can believe that this White House, famous for control, would want it any other way? (Thanks to alert reader Hunter for making this point.)
The White House figured out how to tweak the wording so a lie was, technically, the truth.
That's the White House responsibility, Mr. Tenet. Not yours. Don't blame yourself for letting them get away with it. And sleep easy tonight.
"It's very clear that it may be George Tenet's responsibility, but that information also existed in the State Department and it also existed in the vice president's office, so they will not get away with simply throwing George Tenet over the side."
NOTE: And remember the big picture: It's the pattern of deceit that matters, not playing Gotcha! with each and every lie.
"First, CIA approved the President's State of the Union address before it was delivered. Second, I am responsible for the approval process in my Agency. And third, the President had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound. These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the President. "
"The President had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound"? No. Since Cheney had to know.
Cheney had to know How can Tenet the fall when Cheney had to know too? Newsweek:
Claiming that Iraq tried to buy uranium from the African country of Niger wasn’t a judgment call. By the White House’s own admission, it was a fraud, a lie. The envoy sent to investigate the intelligence in February 2002, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, sought out the information and informed the administration. The only question is how high up the food chain his report got. Did it stop at low-level officials as the White House claims, or did it go all the way to the president and vice president?
CIA director George Tenet sent Wilson to Niger after Vice President Cheney asked for an investigation. Wilson asks why Cheney’s office would demand this inquiry and not want to know the result. If Bush really was misled, wouldn’t he want to know who embarrassed him? Who made him a liar? In a White House as obsessed with loyalty as this one, the fact that no heads rolled strongly indicates this could go all the way to Cheney, if not to Bush himself. Who knows how much Cheney tells the boss. Bush is not a detail guy. He may not have wanted to know.
16 words Seems like the "only one sentence" meme is rapidly mutating into the "16 words" meme. AP:
''These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president,'' Tenet said in a statement released after Bush and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, blamed the miscue on the CIA and members of Congress called for someone to be held accountable.
Count in the aluminum tubes. More than 16...
Who signed off? Who signed off on the speech? Tenet, like everyone else in this story uses the passive voice -- "should never have been included."
OK, they shouldn't have "been included." Who signed off on the speech? What was the paper trail.
Honestly, it's like dealing with a six-year-old.
"It broke!" (passive voice)
"Well, who broke it?"
"It got included..."
Well, who included it? Where does the buck stop?
NOTE: And remember the big picture: It's the pattern of deceit that matters, not playing Gotcha! with each and every lie. Just like with a six-year-old.
While the malAdministration engages in furious fingerpointing and waits for someone to take responsibility for including the Niger uranium falsehood in aWol's constitutionally mandated State of the Union speech, there's a curious silence on the other "Smoking Sentence" in the speech for war:
"Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. "
One example of misinformation, according to physicist and former weapons inspector David Albright, was the Bush administration’s leak to the media in September about Iraq’s attempt to import aluminum tubes which administration officials claimed were headed for Iraq’s nuclear program.
“I think it was very misleading,” says Albright, who directs the Institute for Science and International Security. Albright says the tubes could be possibly used for a nuclear program, but were more suited to conventional weapons production. Government experts thought that too, Albright tells Simon, but administration officials “were selectively picking information to bolster a case that the Iraqi nuclear threat was more imminent than it is, and, in essence, scare people.”
The bottom line: We're talking more than onesies, twosies, here.
It's good clean fun to play "Gotcha!" with aWol's gang -- it's easy to do, and any number can play, even the SCLM -- but the bottom line is not one lie, two lies, three lies, but the persistent pattern of deceit from this administration.
Not just on Iraq (here, here) but on all the issues they handle.
They lie so much, they don't even know they're lying any more.
President Bush is thousands of miles away from Washington, yet even here, he cannot escape the long shadow of his predecessor ... the Clinton Imperial Suite... the nearby Clinton Pavilion... Bill Clinton highway ...
Even as the Pentagon asserts that it had the perfect strategy, it has also quietly moved to amend its plans for administering the peace. Just two months ago, the Pentagon was backing a plan to reduce the number of American troops to little more than one division by September, down from the 145,000 troops or so there now to perhaps one-third or fewer than that. This was based on the assumption that the situation in Iraq would quickly stabilize and that other allied nations would quickly contribute forces — neither of which has panned out. So that troop-reduction plan has been put aside.
As Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who headed the Central Command during the Iraq war, told Congress this week, the new plan is to maintain current troop levels in Iraq for the foreseeable future. That is a major change in the projected postwar force plan. As a result of the increased force levels, cost estimates of the Iraq occupation have roughly doubled, to almost $4 billion a month.
A cake walk... Right....
Unless, of course, the qWagmire is not the result of bad planning, but actually ... The Plan.
Looks like aWol's hiding behind Condi, not Colin. Anyhow, from the AP via the Times here:
"If the CIA -- the director of central intelligence -- had said 'Take this out of the speech,' it would have been gone," Rice said. "We have a high standard for the president's speeches."
Asked whether Bush still had confidence in the intelligence agency, Rice replied, "Absolutely."
When queried on reports that the CIA expressed concern to the White House about the allegation, she suggested that Tenet should be asked directly. "I'm not blaming anyone here," Rice said.
Let's parse Condi!
"If the CIA -- the director of central intelligence" -- Notice how the acrobatic Condi re-spins in mid-sentence: it wouldn't have been just the CIA who needed to say "Take this out" (sounds like they said to, actually) but George Tenet himself. Right
"Absolutely" -- Bush has confidence... in Tenet to take the bullet for him!
"I'm not blaming anyone here" -- LOL!
"It would have been gone" -- Condi is very careful to use the passive voice. All the reporting about how The Smoking Sentence got into the State of the Union speech does that too.
Condi! Try some honesty! Instead of "It would have been gone" say "X would have taken it out." Who is X? Who had the responsibility? Where does the buck stop? What did he know, and when did he know it?
The Bush administration is engaged in frantic fingerpointing as it tries to explain how its handling of faulty intelligence on allegations of Iraqi nuclear smuggling produced so few red flags.
As we all know and endlessly kvetch about, that's what the SCLM failed utterly to do during the 2000 campaign, and thereby deprived voters of any sense of who George W. Bush might be other than a picture based exclusively on his own self-presentation. All of you could answer in your sleep the question of which areas of his life and his record as Governor went "un" to "underinvestigated," from his "military" record, to the quality and quantity of justice meted out to the citizens of Texas.
Let's hope what this Boston.com writer does here is the start of a trend.
Using that Atlantic article about those Gonzales clemency memos, he relates what they imply about Governor Bush directly to the currently hot topic of Bush's relationship to his own spoken words in something like, say, the SOTU.
AN ARTICLE in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly should further inform and inflame the debate over the honesty of President Bush.
(edit)
When Bush ran for president, other states, most notably Illinois, were examining themselves for tragic flaws in the death penalty. Bush remained proud of his system in which he took a mere 15 to 30 minutes to review final pleas. He remained proud even after several newspaper investigations and a Columbia University study found massive evidence of legal, medical, and law enforcement incompetence or lying in Texas death penalty cases as well as racial and class disparities in sentencing.
''I'm absolutely confident that everybody that has been put to death ... are guilty of the crime charged, and, secondly, they had full access to our courts,'' Bush said.
Sound familiar? It does to Derrick Jackson, too. Check it out.
Of course "should" and "will" are not interchangable.
Here's something to think about. In the coming 2004 campaign, since so little of this Texas material was ever looked at closely by the mainstream media, isn't it still fair game (as a better predictor of the long-range impact of Bush policies than his barely four Presidential years are), and if done right, isn't it a damn good way to undercut Rove's genuis for what should rightly be called triangulation, more so, seems to me, than that concept was ever genuinely Clintonian.
As Florida's presidential recount raged in December 2000, a newly created political group spent $150,000 attacking three pro-Democratic state Supreme Court justices who threatened George W. Bush's hopes for victory.
The Florida Elections Commission now says the "Committee to Take Back Our Judiciary" was a front group for unidentified donors trying to ensure Bush's election. The panel is weighing a possible $450,000 fine against the committee's chairwoman, Republican Mary McCarty, a Palm Beach County commissioner.
But the committee's real organizer, the election commission said, was veteran GOP political consultant Roger Stone, who has been involved in major campaigns dating to Richard M. Nixon's administration. The election commission wanted to question Stone, who owns a home in Florida, but it couldn't locate him to serve a subpoena.
The letter to 350,000 people, Hooper's report said, was prepared "at the direction of Mr. Stone" and was paid for with $150,000, the source of which Hooper could not trace. Unique Graphics and Design of Alexandria produced and mailed the letter, but the company owner could remember only that she was paid $150,000 by wire transfer, according to the report. The money could not have come from the Committee to Take Back Our Judiciary, Hooper said, because the committee had not opened a bank account at that time.
Hmmm... I wonder if there were any other mysterious wire transfers in Florida 2000? Say, for the "spontaneous demonstrations"?
Remember when Rummy told us that large portions of Iraq are stable? Turns out he was talking "large" as in square miles, not in population.
From the LA Times:
Gen. Tommy Franks appeared Thursday before the House Armed Services Committee with a large map showing the trouble spots in Iraq. He pointed to a small triangle and a few dots indicating where troops were coming under attack, with the vast rest of Iraq shaded safely green. A quick-witted Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher (D-Pleasanton) pointed out that the triangle and spots "represent 70% of the Iraqi population." And most of the green-colored area was unpopulated desert. Oh.
Right.
Maybe the unpopulated desert is where the oil is. Which doesn't have anything to do with anything, of course.
The left is now up in arms about one sentence in George Bush's last State of the Union speech.
The "one sentence" -- in the President's constitutionally mandated State of the Union speech -- was the one that implied Saddam Hussein was threatening us with nuclear weapons.
You're at a wedding -- the groom says "I don't" instead of "I do" ... "It's just one sentence!"
(See the incomparable Howler on this truly lame spin too.)
But to think that somehow we went out of our way to insert this single sentence into the State of the Union address for the purpose of deceiving and misleading the American people is an overdrawn, overblown, overwrought conclusion.
It's a non-denial denial!
"...went out of our way" -- Who said the Bush administration ever needed to go out of its way to lie?
"...this single sentence..." -- Right, the one that implied that Saddam was threatening us with nuclear weapons?
"...for the purpose of deceiving the American people..." -- But for some other purpose it would be OK?
"...overdrawn, overblown, overwrought..." -- Every "un" but "untrue"!
A good lawyer must have crafted that sentence, eh?
Finally it looks like the SCLM are starting to connect the dots on this administration. Dick Meyer of CBS writes:
before we became experts on nonexistent uranium from Niger and the kinds of aluminum tubes needed to make nukes, our intelligence wizards faced a much simpler and scarier question: Could 9/11 have been prevented?
The White House never wanted an independent commission established to answer that question. Calls for a heavyweight inquest came from both parties. The administration fought the bad fight and eventually lost. Thankfully.
More broadly, the report said “the Administration underestimated the scale of the Commission’s work and the full breadth of support required.” Translation: without the White House cracking the whip of cooperation, agencies will cover their political posteriors.
This bodes badly for an independent examination of the intelligence and political marketing used to sell the war in Iraq to the public – and to the world.
The White House has successfully fought that battle so far. Congressional intelligence committees have launched narrowly focused investigations – in closed sessions only. If no further smoking-gun evidence of WMD’s turns up in Iraq in the next few months, perhaps then there will be a major congressional or independent accounting. Perhaps. General Stonewall Bush hasn’t lost many battles.
This week, President Bush petulantly declared that excavations into pre-war intelligence were “attempts to rewrite history.” Actually, they are the first attempts to write history.
MB of the blog called Wampum, whose interests are a rare mix, organic farming, progressive politics, Indian issues, and Autism, all of them approached from a highly original and personal perspective, is participating in a 24 hour Blogathon on July 26th, whose highly worthy purpose is the raising of money to find a cure for Autism.
She's looking for sponsors, all small contributions welcome, as she explains here and in more detail here.
Good cause, good lady, good fun. Easy clicks sign you up; I just did and already I feel good.
And just in case you haven't been there before, check out her posts on John Edwards here and here, and her post on the child tax credit here.
Well, I´m off to an even more undisclosed location for the weekend. I´m not sure if I´ll have any access ´till Monday so I´ll leave you all in the more than capable hands of my guest bloggers.
I know some people get annoyed at the annoying crass commercialism on this site, but when I´m promoting books I´m 95% doing it for the sake of promoting them and only 5% doing it for the few nickles I get if you click the Amazon link. I think it´s extraordinarily important to demonstrate to publishers that books from the evil commie librul side of the political spectrum sell.
On that note, our good friend Tom Tomorrow has a new book out. Let´s help to put this puppy at the top of the bestseller lists. You can order it here or purchase it at your favorite bookseller such as Powell´s or the Tattered Cover.
One day I´ll have my dream date - drinking champagne in the hot tub with Molly, Ann Richards, and Ann Lewis . But, until then I´ll have to settle for reading this interview and buying her new book.
Week after week couples show up to church, children in tow, flaunting their heterosexuality. I get really tired of media reports which continue to propogate the idea that it´s okay to be gay as long as you don´t "flaunt it," whatever the hell that means.
ROCKFORD -- The new choir director was one of the best things that ever happened to Holy Family Catholic Church. Everyone said so.
He brought together businessmen and blue-collar workers, students and senior citizens to make music that lifted the whole parish--until last month, when church officials learned he is gay.
A lawyer and two priests confronted Bill Stein on June 17 and asked him to renounce his partner of 10 years, Stein said. When he refused, they fired him.
His dismissal has divided the flock at Holy Family, setting the choir against other members of this parish of 2,760 families, the largest Roman Catholic parish in the city.
Stein, 35, considers himself a devoted Catholic and said he has never flaunted his homosexuality or his relationship with his partner, Manny Ahorrio, 37.
I know that Stein himself is supposed to have expressed this idea, but whether it was elicited in response to a question or he just said it unprompted it should never be an issue.
Also, last I checked adultery was still a sin. As is using any form of contraception. How many straight choir directors are asked to take a vow of celibacy? What about all of those other sins? Why is that HOT GAY SEX is the only goddamn sin church leaders seem to give a crap about anymore?
Church leadership told him he could keep the full-time choir job he had held for five years if he took a vow of chastity, Stein said. But for him, the vow would be a lie, something he could not do as a Christian.
Here (but nowhere else that I can find; when is someone going to leak the 9/11 report before Unka Karl finds a way to drive it off the front page?)
And, if true, it would make (amazingly enough) the "Bush Knew Iraq Info Was False" story a classic case of Republican Tactics 101: Use bad news to bury worse news. (Thanks to alert reader Jack).
So who's Deep Throat, Junior, anyhow? Maybe aWol was talking in front of the servants?
Your guess on DTJr is as good as mine. Maybe someone aWol wanted to take a bullet for him? (Metaphorically, of course. Not like the real bullets our soldiers are taking.)
Gosh, when you think about, there are quite a number of people who wouldn't mind seeing the "likeable," "popular" aWol take the fall ... And these are people on the guy's own team!
As Drudge would say -- "developing." (Don't give Drudge any hits, though -- it's just the CBS report.)
A CIA spokesman declined comment on the [exclusive] CBS report, which was sourced to senior Bush administration officials. A White House spokesman could not be immediately reached for comment.
"Stop staring at those elephants, George! We've got a statement to prepare!"
UPDATE: Let's parse a little text. The CBS story uses the passive voice, saying that the lie on Niger yellowcake "was included" in the speech, and only in the headline says "Bush knew" -- did the senior administration official say that? Pincus's WaPo story says only that Bush "used the charge" in the SOTUS -- not that Bush isn't responsible for his own words, of course. AP (finally) says "was left in" (passive voice again).
UPDATE: "And up through the ground came a ' bubblin' crude." Forgeries, that is. Yellow cake. Serial exaggeration. Premature declaration of success. Lies, Texas-style...
Divertimento:
I'm assuming that aWol, if he is deemed medically fit to do so, will need to deliver some sort of speech on all this. Therefore, for the edification of our readers (and as a form of innoculation against noxious memes) I present perhaps the classic example of Republican deceit, hypocrisy, and maudlin sentimentality. Ladies and gentleman, I give you the legendary "Checkers Speech" from Richard M. Nixon (scroll down). Can aWol top this? Follow along at home! Give it up for aWol!
UPDATE: Above, we mentioned the curious use of the passive voice in the CBS story -- "was included." Interestingly, Colin "Playing-both-ends-against-the-middle?" Powell's defense of aWol's, uh, misstatement also uses the passive voice: "a judgment was made that that was an appropriate statement for the President to make." (Thanks to Adam in MA for the transcript reference.)
So, now it becomes a matter of very simple sentences! George: Just use the active voice! "X included it." "X made the judgment."
George. Please. You're our CEO President! If X is you, well, check here. And if X is not you, well, who is it? What did you know and when did you know it? Does the buck ever stop anywhere?
Officials contacted by The Associated Press declined to discuss the nature of discussions between the White House and CIA just before the speech. But they noted the CIA's own assessment before the Iraq war about Saddam Hussein's alleged efforts to make weapons of mass destruction did not give strong credence to the British report, noting skepticism by some analysts.
The officials further noted that a speech Secretary of State Collin Powell gave just a week after the president's address also did not repeat the African uranium allegations.
Secretary of State Colin Powell defended the Bush administration Thursday against intensifying criticism of the use of bogus intelligence to help make the case for war on Iraq. But he was pressed to explain how the tainted evidence made it into President Bush's State of the Union address.
Powell followed an emerging White House strategy of suggesting that the CIA, which was shown Iraq-related portions of Bush's draft speech, could have objected to the inclusion of the uranium charge. A CIA spokesman declined to comment.
UPDATE: Looks like the AP headline ("Doubt Brits"), not the CBS headline ("Bush knew"), is taking hold on this one, at least in the papers that just print what they rip off the wire.
"Pride goeth before a fall and a haughty spirit before destruction." (Prov. 16:18)
Michael Janofksy of The Newspaper of Record (not!) burbles:
Mr. Nader has run three times for president, faring best in 2000, when he won 2.7 percent of the overall vote and 1.6 percent in Florida, where George W. Bush's official 537-vote margin over Mr. Gore decided the election.
Uh, Mike? "Decided"? There was this little matter of the Supreme Court's special good-for-this-one-election-only decision in Bush v. Gore...
And don't get me started on Nader -- though, granted, if Gore had won Tennesee and/or Arkansas, and Jebbie hadn't purged the legitimate Black voters from the Florida rolls, Nader's contribution would not have been as decisive as turned out to be.
"I learned a long time ago in Vietnam what happens when pride gets in the way of making honest decisions," Kerry, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, told a Capitol Hill news conference. "We carried that war on for too many years because of pride. And I refuse to see us now put American soldiers in risk because we are unprepared to say, 'Where the world is prepared to be part of this, winning the peace in Iraq is not just an American interest, it's a global interest.'"
Kerry's campaign strategy in the next few weeks will be to focus on what he contends is a pattern of deception by the administration on several issues beyond Iraq and the war, a campaign official said.
Hurry home, George! Hurry home! And stop staring at those elephants!
UPDATE: Latest CBS poll on Iraq, thanks to alert reader Hank Essay.
Lambert's done yeoman work posting particulars of this new Medicare bill. Now, I'd like to apply a narrative perspective to the issue of what Democrats are and ought to be doing.
What's the story here; what do we want the story to be?
As the President's men and women will be telling you at nauseous length, the addition of a prescription drug benefit to Medicare would be the largest expansion of this vital social insurance program for decades. If you have the feeling that there is a whirlwind quality to this Republican enthrallment with the benefit itself, rather than with their decades' long efforts to reform, privatize, modernize (they all really mean privatize, i.e., destroy) Medicare, you're right.
What seems to have happened, Karl Rove decided the President was vulnerable to charges of being less compassionate than advertised, and as with the Homeland Security Bill, met the challenge by quietly shifting the White House position on what had been a make or break issue, tying the benefit to some form of privatizing.
The shift worked in the Senate, where Republicans can't pass anything like this without Democrats. Ted Kennedy was the key figure here. But please understand, this is not a bash Kennedy, or a bash the Democrats piece. First, because they don't deserve it on this one; second, because that gets us nowhere fast.
Once the Pres gave up the either or choice of HMO with drug benefit, traditional fee for service, no drug benefit, Kennedy decided a compromise was in the long-range interests of us citizens.
Here's how Molly set it up in a June column:
Kennedy is supporting the Senate version because (A) it's marginally better than what we have now, and (B) in one of the hoariest cliches of political debate, this gets the head of the camel into the tent. In other words, it's a start, and a better program can be built later -- in fact, it pretty much will have to be.
The White House's logic is (A) Republicans promised a prescription drug benefit, and (B) they can pass this in time for the 2004 election and take credit for it, but it doesn't go into effect until 2006 (a clever ploy), so no one will have time to figure out it's a fraud.
That might make you think Molly was agin it. She wasn't.
Bottom line, Kennedy's right: The Senate version is incrementally better, and in politics, you should always take half a loaf, or even 22 percent of a loaf, if you can get it.
And here's the message Max was speaking in late June.
There's a lot of argument whether to support either of these bills. Some don't want to give the President credit for a crappy, misleading drug benefit.
(edit)
Others, including the estimable Senator Ted Kennedy, argue that the first step is getting the new program. It can be expanded more easily later than starting from scratch.
As a devotee of salami tactics in legislation, I tend to agree with Teddy. The contrary argument tends to put Democrats' electoral fortunes ahead of their constituents. So I conclude, this benefit sucks; let's take it. Give people a taste of it, and on the strength of the arbitrary benefit schedule, they will oblige Congress to fill in the blank spots.
Luckily, Tom DeLay and Bill Thomas are such arrogant turds, they stiffed the White House and produced a bill that is the beginning of the end of Medicare as we've come to know and love it. Jim McDermott, Frank Palone, Marcy Kaptur and other Dems have been spelling out just how outrageous is this bill in "Special Orders" colloquies. That's pretty much all they can do. The House is a majoritarian institution; life for the minority is meant to be lived in purgatory, if not the actual hell the Republicans have carefully fashioned, since they took over.
A lively Democratic discussion of all this was going on last night on C-Span. Marcy Kaptur had the charts to prove that the only decent prescription drug bill was the Democratic House alternate. The knock against The Dems bill was that it's too expensive; a possible 600 billion cost, according to Repubs, as opposed to their 400 billion. But that higher estimated cost does not factor in the potential savings from a key provision of the Democratic bill, which would give Tommy Thompson's Democratic successor the power to engage in that fundamental free enterprise practice of negotiating the best competitive price from those who make and market prescription drugs.
Remarkably, or perhaps one should say, insanely, both the House and Senate bill prohibit the government from doing that. Count on the Republicans to protect large corporate interests from the unfair power of the government to do what the majority of its citizens want it to do. There are so many awful provisions in the House bill, one doesn't know where to begin, so I won't; this is already a long post that may be telling you what you already know. Patience please. There's an important point to all this.
Who's right about what progressive's should be doing? Would Democrats holding firm to a defense of Medicare against any inroad of privatization be putting their electoral interests against constituent well-being?
Here's the best argument I've seen that they should, all the more interesting because it's by a self-described liberal centrist. .
Bush and Karl Rove are counting on two "achievements" to sell the compassion hoax. The first was the No Child Left Behind Act, passed with Democratic support in 2001. No honest observer can say this law did anything serious for America's most troubled schools. But it has given Bush the credibility on education he shrewdly craves.
If Bush can go to voters in 2004 and also say he's the one who added prescription drugs to Medicare, this seals the deal on "compassion." You only need these two "talking points" in a stump speech (not to mention a record-breaking $200 million advertising campaign) to convince independents you're a caring kind of guy, and trump Democratic complaints to the contrary.
(edit)
Thinking this way isn't pretty, I know. But in a world in which power matters, there's no avoiding it. Republicans know this and play for keeps.
Matt gives an example from the William Kristol led opposition to Hillary's health reform initiative and suggests it's a model for Democrats.
Stopping Bush's Medicare plan without being successfully blamed by Bush for obstructionism would call for a political dexterity that (to put it mildly) Democrats haven't shown in recent years.
But Democrats have a reservoir of public goodwill on health care that Republicans don't. And that means this political feat should be possible, though the line of attack would have to be chosen and demagogued -- I mean, communicated -- very carefully.
When it comes to morality and public policy, it's now common to ask "what Jesus would do." Before Democrats hand Bush his prescription drug victory, they ought to at least debate what Bill Kristol would do.
Why Matt is so hard on Democrats when his own ambivalence is on such conspicuous display, political strategy equated with demagoguery, is a discussion for another day. And a lot's changed since Matt wrote his piece in early June. You can tell from Dean Broder's piece that Lambert links you to.
Notice that Broder isn't selling the usual CW, which would have been an exclusive warning to Democrats not to play politics and get something done for a change. Instead, you get the Dean's own ambivalent caution that it's not a done deal, and that maybe that's not such a bad idea, sorta, maybe, doyathink, huh? For all of it's fuzziness, the Broder column is good news for our side.
Democrats are rethinking their commitment to any compromise that tilts the bill towards the House version. Here's what I think their position should be, spelled out loudly and clearly, starting yesterday.
No compromise, except in their direction. None of the privatizing features of the House bill are acceptable, no legislative protection for big pharm against the risks of free market economics is acceptable. The Democrats aren't going to pass a bill that is essentially a Corporate Welfare Protection Act.
If the President wants to get a subscription drug benefit to Seniors, let him compromise; let him show real leadership and get Tom DeLay to follow him.
Molly, being the darling, funny, genuis that she is, had it right back in June:
But if the Senate version is even slightly weakened by the repulsive House version, fuhgeddaboutit.
Too many of those who belong to what was once referred to as the power elite think of citizenship as being a member of an audience; we get to express our approval or our disapproval, and we can decide to buy or not to buy a ticket to the show, but what the choice of repertory is going to be? Forgetaboutit.
Naturally, the Dems could use our help, in a variety of ways. That's the ultimate point of this post. No, I'm not sending you off into the wilderness with not so much as a telephone number to copy or a link to click. I've been in touch with several congressional offices who are aiding me in preparing another post that will facilitate some grassroots input into all of us.
Before I do, though, I want to know what you think? About the issue. About what we should do. About what I can do to make it easier for you to do it
A propos Atrios's earlier post, the explosive 9/11 report is being sent to the printers sometime this week, and being printed and released sometime next week.
Since we citizens paid for and own the report, it would be really helpful if some kind soul would get the report to the press sooner rather than later. You see, that way Rove and his gang will find it less easy to devise some ploy to knock it off the front pages (Republican tactics 101: Change the subject).
Greg Thielmann, who held a high post in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, one of four critics at a session held by the private Arms Control Association, said the Bush administration had formed a ``faith-based'' policy on Iraq and took the approach that ``we know the answers; give us the intelligence to support those answers.''
Thielmann said the administration had distorted intelligence to fit its policy purposes. He said Iraq had no active nuclear weapons program and that while Tenet told Congress Iraq had Scud missiles, the intelligence finding actually was that the missiles could not be accounted for.
Gosh! Good thing this information made it into the State of the Union speech! Oh, wait...
And by the way, it looks like the troops are going to be there for two to four years. "Mission accomplished," my Aunt Fanny.
An American soldier attached to the 101st Airborne Division died Monday in another non-hostile gunshot incident near Balad, 55 miles north of the capital. Soldiers at an air base near Balad said on condition of anonymity that the soldier had taken his own life.
The report will show that top Bush administration officials were warned in the summer of 2001 that the al Qaeda terrorist network had plans to hijack aircraft and launch a ``spectacular attack.''
[J]ust as the president's "mission accomplished" speech on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln last May 1 now seems a premature declaration of success...
Love the circumlocution! "Premature declaration of success","exaggeration" ...
... in Iraq, he may be minimizing both the political and policy obstacles to a Medicare victory worth celebrating.
The most contentious issue for the conferees may well be the role of private insurers. House Republicans want to move seniors from Medicare into private plans. They propose heavy subsidies to lure insurers into a marketplace whose costs seem risky to many actuaries.
aWol's corporatist administration, of course, only believes in taking on risk for corporations. It's entirely acceptable to them to force your grandmother to take the risk of moving into an HMO to get the prescription drugs that keep her alive.
Key Senate Democrats are prepared to fight -- perhaps even to filibuster -- ...
Good for them! With the Republicans, we either get nothing, or worse than nothing. So why conduct business as usual?
... provisions that go much further than the modest incentives to insurers in the Senate bill.
Why even a little privatization? Are the Beltway Dems believers in secondary virginity?
Robert Blendon of Harvard, who polls on health care politics, said he expects that by 2006, when both bills would begin drug benefits, "it will become very clear" to seniors that "this is inadequate."
First (before 2004) the bait, then (in 2006) the switch. Republican tactics 101.
UPDATE: Polling on Medicare (thanks to alert reader MB). Looks like the seniors aren't taking aWol's bait. They don't accept the overall goal of the Republican plan, which is to drive as many seniors as possible into managed care by providing a government subsidy for it.
Only 37% of Americans say they favor [a manged care] proposal, while 59% oppose it. Opposition to a managed care plan is greater among Americans aged 50 and older. ...
Americans age 65 and older are dubious that they will personally benefit from the changes to Medicare. Just 20% say the changes will improve their situations, while 18% say they will be made worse. A majority, 51%, says the changes will have no effect on them, personally.
It's your mother, your father, your grandmother, your grandfather we're talking about here....
WASHINGTON (AP) The agency created to combat terrorism now is targeting those who prey on children.
Homeland Security Department Secretary Tom Ridge announced ''Operation Predator'' on Wednesday. The initiative seeks to crack down on crimes by child predators by pulling together once-fragmented investigative and intelligence resources.
Not that I have anything against protecting children from predators.
But is this what the DHS was created to do? When it isn't ready to protect our airports or our ports?
And at a time when the DHS has already become highly politicized (searching for Democratic state legislators in Texas at the behest of Texas state Republicans and, some say, Tom DéLay), do we really want to expand its mission beyond statute?
It looks like hitchhiking to me. The DHS has vast, centralized powers that many will seek to use. If "Operation Predator" goes through, look for many more, and much less worthy, hitchhikers to follow. "Operation Republican Convention 2004," for example.
NOTE: Don't you just hate these blowhard "Operation" names? They spell out White House political "operation" in letters a mile high. Look for anyone opposing this sleazy move to be labelled as being in favor of sexual predation. And let's see if any Beltway Dems stand up to oppose it.
You know, the one where you don't get over-time for your eighty-hour week because you're "exempt." Naturally, aWol's corporatist administration wants to make easy for employers to categorize many more people as exempt. Though the meaning of the regulations is going to be fought out in court, the scam seems to be here:
The biggest change might be under the administrative category of employees. A bookkeeper must now ''exercise discretion and independent judgment'' to be exempt. Under the new rule, he would have to hold ''a position of responsibility,'' defined as work of ''substantial importance'' or requiring ``a high level of skill or training.''
So, give the "resources" a little training, or get them to sign a letter saying their work is "important" (whose isn't?) and Presto! No overtime!
NOTE: I'm leaving out the "fig leaves" (as Leah would say) of clarifying statutory language from the '40s (FDR...) and increasing OT for some lower wage workers. This last is good, but why not increase it for everyone? In this economy?
"we've just got to deal with it person to person. "
As opposed to operator assisted?
Meanwhile, Rummy doubles the cost:
Gen. Tommy R. Franks said today that violence and uncertainty in Iraq made it unlikely that troop levels would be reduced "for the foreseeable future," and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld nearly doubled the estimated military costs there to $3.9 billion a month.
So first they tell us a division is coming home, then they tell us the cost is going to double, and troop levels are staying constant, so another division is coming in. Oh well...
The Labor Department reported Thursday that for the work week ending July 5, new claims filed for unemployment insurance rose by a seasonally adjusted 5,000 to 439,000, the highest level since the week ending May 31.
The increase surprised economists who were forecasting a decline in jobless claims.
For 21 weeks in a row, the level of claims has been above the 400,000 mark, a level associated with a sluggish job market.
The more stable-four week moving average of claims, which smooths out weekly fluctuations, edged up by 1,000 to 426,750 last week, representing the highest level since June 21.
The number of out-of-work Americans continuing to draw jobless benefits jumped by 87,000 to 3.8 million for the work week ending June 28, the most recent period for which that information is available. That represented the highest level since Feb. 26, 1983, and suggested that not a lot of hiring is taking place.
"I believe the Bush administration did not provide an accurate picture to the American people of the military threat posed by Iraq," said Greg Thielmann, who retired in September from his post of director of the strategic, proliferation and military affairs office in the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research.
"Some of the fault lies with the performance of the intelligence community, but most of it lies with the way senior officials misused the information they were provided," he said at a press conference held by the Arms Control Association.
President Bush justified going to war based on the threat from Iraq's alleged biological and chemical weapons and nuclear weapons program.
"As of March 2003, when we began military operations, Iraq posed no imminent threat to either its neighbors or to the United States," Thielmann said.
Gosh! Given all the changing stories, it almost seems as Bush decided to have the war with Iraq first, and then started looking for reasons later (and didn't do too good a job of that, either). You think? Did our troops know that?
The idea of federal subsidies for private health insurance emerged yesterday as a key obstacle in lawmakers' quest to resolve House and Senate differences and add prescription drug coverage to Medicare.
But... But... If there's no federal subsidy, how will aWol's malAdministration be able to loot Medicare by steering taxpayer dollars to politically wired firms? (And if it takes a subsidy to get the private companies involved, why not just have the government do it in the first place?)
36 Democratic Senators write:
"The bill cannot give seniors false choices that coerce them into leaving conventional Medicare to enroll in HMOs and private plans," the Democrats wrote. "It is wrong to provide greater resources to enrich private plans while starving Medicare in the bargain. It is wrong to legislate a vast social experiment that would raise premiums for Medicare and victimize the oldest and sickest senior citizens."
But... But... If the already federally subsidized firms can't cherrypick, how are their CEOs going to get rich and fund more think tanks and MWs to generate the memes that will make even richer when they privatize the whole Medicare program?
"The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass murder," Rumsfeld said while testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee. "We acted because we saw the existing evidence in a new light through the prism of our experience on Sept. 11."
Rumsfeld was asked about President Bush's prewar claim, now known to be based on faulty evidence, that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa before the war. Rumsfeld said one erroneous report does not invalidate the body of intelligence used to justify going to war.
Oh, but wait. I thought Wolfie said "for bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue – weapons of mass destruction – because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.". I guess the Pentagon isn't part of the bureaucracy?
Teams of UN weapons inspectors were sent to Iraq before the war Senior figures inside Whitehall no longer believe weapons of mass destruction are likely to turn up in Iraq, the BBC has learned. BBC political editor Andrew Marr says "very senior sources" have virtually ruled out the possibility of finding weapons in Iraq.
The development "is of important political significance", he adds.
Not to mention constitutional significance (in this country).
Andrew Marr told the BBC's Ten o'Clock News on Wednesday: "Right at the top of Whitehall, they no longer believe that weapons of mass destruction are likely to turn up in Iraq. ...
"[T]he actual weapons, the tubs of the evil stuff, the rusting missiles, no, belief that that will actually be available, can be shown to cameras, that is trickling away very fast at the top of government."
"But as time has gone on, those weapons don't seem to be there and the best explanation going around at the moment ...
Our ever-changing stories!
... is that some time shortly before the war Saddam Hussein destroyed them or hid them beyond discovery."
Right, then. "Hid them beyond discovery." Maybe under a very, very big rosebush?
Looks like even Pravd -- WaPo's Terry Neal is beginning to get it:
So the administration made national security its strongest case for launching an exceedingly rare, historically discouraged, internationally frowned-upon preemptive war.
Fast forward to the present: The administration that had 100 percent certainty that there were weapons of mass destruction has zero percent certainty as to where they are now. The White House and the president's defenders have reverted to their fall-back humanitarian position -- that the removal of Hussein was justification enough for the war.
Whatever the case, the argument that it is a good thing that Hussein is gone and the argument that the Bush administration may have lied to or misled the public on the issue of weapons of mass destruction are not mutually exclusive. Both could be true. And if they are, the former fact won't exonerate the president if the latter is true as well.
So, what did he know and when did he know it?
And did our soldiers know they were going to war for a "fallback position"?
There's really only one Bush family value: You're with us or against us. This time, Jebbie goes "stark raving pig-headed". More here.
I'm sure glad I don't live in Florida. Even if it is the home of the next member of the Bush dynasty (2008, here we come). Thanks to alert reader Creeper.
AS US President George W Bush proclaims his commitment to Africa during this week's five-day trip, his Republicans in Congress are planning on cutting back the money allocated to his much-vaunted plans to tackle HIV/Aids and encourage development.
It's not like we've never seen this before. Fool me once...
David Rosenzweig of the Loss Angeles Times writes an entire story on accused Chinese double-agent Katrina Leung without once mentioning, that in addition to having an affair with her FBI handler, she was a Republican activist.
That darn SCLM...
"I have been, and I am, a very proud and loyal American," Leung told a crowd of reporters
The Bush administration, long allergic to the idea of investigating the government's failure to prevent the Sept. 11 terror attacks, is now doing its best to bury the national commission that was created to review Washington's conduct.
Too polite to use the word "stonewalling," the bipartisan commission nevertheless warned the nation that thus far the administration had "underestimated the scale of the commission's work and the full breadth of support required."
"They didn't have to make a comment which in any way injured me," Savage said. "They put the leper bells around me. I'm dead in the water on television. "
"The Presidency is an office of trust. Every public office is a public trust, but the Office of President is a very special public trust. The President is the trustee of the national conscience. No one owns the office of President, the people do. The President is elected by the people and their representatives in the electoral college. And in accepting the burdens of that great office, the President, in his inaugural oath, enters into a covenant—a binding agreement of mutual trust and obligation—with the American people."
"No greater harm can be done than breaking the covenant of trust between the President and the people; between the three branches of our government; and between the country and the world.
For to break that covenant of trust is to dissolve the mortar that binds the foundation stones of our freedom into a secure and solid edifice. And to break that covenant of trust by violating one's oath is to do grave damage to the rule of law among us."
-Congressman Henry Hyde
In a case with national political implications, the Florida Elections Commission has ruled that Palm Beach County Commissioner Mary McCarty violated state campaign finance rules in working to oust three Florida Supreme Court justices. It will decide next month whether to impose up to $450,000 in fines against her.
On May 21, the FEC voted 7-0 to adopt an administrative law judge’s findings that McCarty violated state election laws in the collection, expenditure and reporting of tens of thousands in political action committee (PAC) funds.
The commission will determine any fine and finalize a final written order in the case at its next meeting Aug. 13-14 in Tallahassee. She has the right to contest the final order before a state appellate court.
But state administrative law judge Harry L. Hooper, who presided over McCarty’s hearing in February on the campaign finance charges, concluded on May 1 that the former Palm Beach County Republican Party chairwoman was little more than a front for a Washington, D.C.-based campaign against the justices, which was organized during the 2000 presidential election recount battle.
That campaign, Judge Hooper found, was orchestrated by Roger J. Stone Jr., a Republican lobbyist and political operative who has said he worked for President Richard Nixon’s Watergate-era re-election committee and served as a campaign strategist for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Stone, who owns a $2.2 million bayfront mansion in Surfside, received $1.8 million from the Miami-Dade County Commission last year for political work he did for the county.
The recent news accounts of the dehumanizing conditions under which juveniles are held in the Los Angeles County Jail confirm what we saw this year when we were part of a delegation that visited the Men's Central Jail: The youths are on lockdown up to 23 1/2 hours a day in windowless 4-by-8-foot cells, in conditions much worse than those experienced by some adult inmates on death row. Recent suicide attempts by two youths are the latest symptom of a problem that could end tragically if juveniles continue to be housed in the adult jail.
L.A. is one of the few jurisdictions in the state that holds youth in its adult jail — either because they are being tried as adults or because the prosecutor has requested their transfer based on the alleged offense. Most of the 30 to 40 minors held in the jail under the current law have not been found guilty of anything. Ultimately, many of them will be found guilty of less serious offenses, and some cases may be dismissed. Legislation to limit such transfers is pending in Sacramento.
Michael N. Anton, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said today, "The documents alleging a transaction between Iraq and Niger were not the sole basis for the line in the president's State of the Union speech that referred to recent Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium from Africa."
OK. Now all we need is the rest of the "basis" -- the other evidence.
[Anton] said that at the time a "national intelligence estimate" cited "attempts by Iraq to acquire uranium from several countries in Africa," adding, "We now know that documents alleging a transaction between Iraq and Niger had been forged."
Right. But the issue is that the malAdministration could and should have known about Niger before the State of the Union speech, since that's when Ambassador Wilson told you there was no basis for it.
And the malAdministration could and should have immediately detected that the Niger documents were forged, since the forgeries were "crude." (Why on earth did they pass them to the UN? Oh well...)
So now all the malAdministration has to do is show the evidence on the other countries to make the case and save aWol's credibility, yes? We could start by naming the other African countries.... But no, not so simple.
Mr. Anton noted today that "other reporting that suggested that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Africa is not detailed or specific enough for us to be certain that such attempts were in fact made.
"Because of this lack of specificity," [Anton] continued, "this reporting alone did not rise to the level of inclusion in a presidential speech. "
In other words, without the forged Niger documents, this reporting didn't make the grade.
That said, the issue of Iraq's attempts to acquire uranium from abroad was not an element underpinning the judgment reached by most intelligence agencies ...
Most? Not all?
...that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program."
OK, so Anton's now thrown the idea that Iraq has trying to acquire uranium abroad over the side.
So what's the evidence now? Over in Britain, they keep peddling the same line, and even Blair's poodle commission says it's very odd indeed that they haven't been able to produce it.
Is it the aluminum tubes? The centrifuge parts under the rosebush? Is all the other evidence as politicized and worthless as the evidence we already know about? What a tangled web we weave....
He also had (and still seems to have) a weakness for gossip. This was often entertaining, though once when Andrew Sullivan joined us for drinks, the gossip took a swift dive into the bowels of The New Republic, a loathsome mag personified by Sullivan, who remains one of the most arrogant, pretentious jerks I've ever met. I wondered then how Hitch could stomach his type, but overlooked it in favor of the access I enjoyed.
...
Currently, Hitch is pushing the line, in language that echoes the reactionary Paul Johnson, that the U.S. can be a "superpower for democracy," and that Toms Jefferson and Paine would approve. He's also slammed the "slut" Dixie Chicks as "fucking fat slags" for their rather mild critique of our Dear Leader. He favors Bush over Kerry, and doesn't like it that Kerry "exploits" his Vietnam combat experience (as opposed to, say, re-election campaign stunts on aircraft carriers).
Sweet Jesus. What next? I'm afraid my old mentor is not the truth-telling Orwell he fancies himself to be. He's becoming a coarser version of Norman Podhoretz.
No less than the Moonie Times is reporting that the Army is actually going to release a report debunking Steno Sue´s original reporting about the Jessica Lynch story.
Steno Sue´s government sources lied to her, and as a journalist she is obligated to tell us who those sources were.
Calling the column a "tirade," Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Victoria Clarke wrote in a letter to The Times that "Scheer's claims are outrageous, patently false and unsupported by the facts."
"Official spokespeople in Qatar and in Washington, as well as the footage released, reflected the events accurately," the Pentagon letter continued. "To suggest otherwise is an insult and does a grave disservice to the brave men and women involved."
I´m anonymous and I´m always mean to him, so I don´t expect Howie "Not a whore, really!" Kurtz to pay any attention to me, but since he frequently quotes (conservative only, natch) bloggers I think it´s time he starts paying attention to that Kos guy.
FORT STEWART, GA. – On his first weekend home from Iraq, Sgt. 1st Class Michael Gilmartin was driving down a sunny highway in Kissimee, Fla., when something suddenly felt very wrong.
In a panic, Sergeant Gilmartin stepped on the brakes of his black Dodge Dakota pickup, jumped out in the middle of the six-lane road and started searching around the truck. Then it registered: He was looking for his M-16 rifle.
"I had basically an anxiety attack," Gilmartin recalled. "I was missing something and needed to do something." A policeman who had served in Vietnam approached Gilmartin and took him to the side of the road to sit for a while.
Give away the oil fields at bargain prices before there is even a sovereign government in place that would even have the remotest amount of legitimate authority to cut such a deal.
U.S. civilian ruler Paul Bremer said on Tuesday Iraq should consider privatising its state-owned sectors and foreign investment in its oil industry before a permanent sovereign government takes over.
Bremer said that a soon-to-be-appointed governing council of Iraqis needed to give clear backing to the entry of foreign capital to reassure private investors.
"Privatisation is obviously something we have been giving a lot of thought to," Bremer told reporters.
"When we sit down with the governing council...it is going to be on the table," he said.
Although Bremer would have the authority to change Iraq's legal code, in place since the toppling of Saddam Hussein in April, foreign investors need some assurance any legal changes could survive once an elected Iraqi government takes over, he said.
The recent nonsense about them has inspired some concern about media consolidation:
Cumulus Media Inc. became a target for critics of media consolidation on Capitol Hill Tuesday.
Senators sharply questioned the free speech implications of a decision by the nation's second-largest radio broadcaster to temporarily ban the Dixie Chicks from its 42 country music stations' airwaves in March. The ban came following the band's criticism of President Bush as he was preparing to go to war in Iraq.
It's not a problem if an individual station makes that decision, said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing he convened on radio ownership issues. But to make the decision for its 42 country stations at Cumulus' corporate headquarters "is an incredible act."
To "restrain their trade because they exercised their right of free speech is a strong argument about what media concentration has the possibility of doing," McCain told Cumulus Chairman and Chief Executive Lewis W. Dickey, who had been called to testify. "Because if someone else in another format offends you and you decide to censor those people, the erosion of the First Amendment in America is in progress."
By a plan known only to providence, the stolen sons and daughters of Africa helped to awaken the conscience of America...the very people traded into slavery helped to set America free.
Okay, my spin may be a little harsh but what the hell is he saying here, really? According to God´s plan, people were slaves and then America (I guess, non-black or non-slave America) got a conscience and was set free? Set free from what? Slavery?
NEW YORK (AP) School administrators in Washington Heights forced several eighth-graders to be tested for pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases after they attended a ''hooky party'' last spring, the New York Civil Liberties Union charged in a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday.
''What they did is completely unheard of,'' said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the NYCLU. ''It violates their right to privacy. It violated their right to go to school. It violated their right not to be subjected to summary punishment.''
Dr. David Bell, a specialist in adolescent medicine at New York Presbyterian Hospital's family planning clinic who saw two of the girls, said he was ''outraged'' that Intermediate School 164 demanded confidential medical information from the students.
...
The civil liberties union is representing two of approximately 11 girls who cut school on April 11 and attended a ''hooky party'' where there reportedly was sexual activity, Lieberman said.
''The next school day when they went back to school they were summoned to the principal's office and effectively suspended,'' Lieberman said.
She said the girls were told they had to be tested for pregnancy, HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases and could not return to school without a doctor's note that included the test results.
One male student also attended the party, but he was not required to be tested for diseases, Lieberman said.
As is always the case, it´s important to buy these books (though feel free to buy them from your favorite independent bookseller) to demonstrate to publishers that there is a market for them.
Why does Scalia hate our founding fathers so much? Wyeth Wire gives us this quote from Alexander Hamilton (Federalist 82).
"The judiciary power of every government looks beyond its own local or municipal laws, and in civil cases lays hold of all subjects of litigation between parties within its jurisdiction, though the causes of dispute are relative to the laws of the most distant part of the globe. Those of Japan, not less than of New York, may furnish the objects of legal discussion to our courts."
As Wyeth says:
So Antonin Scalia, strong proponent of originalism, disagrees with a practice that the Founders explicitly endorsed.
Bev Harris steps through the Diebold electronic voting machine software here.
At first glance, it looks like it's got a lot of the classic kinds of security flaws:
The manual, also available on the ftp site, tells that the default password in a new installation is "GEMSUSER."
Well, uh...
And the "host computer" software, to which the voting totals are transmitted by modem, is written using Microsoft Access. Sigh...
Do we have any alert readers who know Access well enough to evaluate the claims Bev makes?
Because if she's right, this software enables even the most hog-stupid Thug to steal an election without leaving any evidence at all ...
P.S. How hard can it be to write a database system that counts votes? Where the heck is open source software system using MySQL? Any hackers out there who care about saving democracy?
UPDATE: Thanks, alert readers, for the detailed, thorough comments. Now I know what time of night to post the technical questions.
UPDATE: I removed the word "server" and replaced it with "host computer" (per Bev's article). I don't think the system uses a client/server architecture, though alert readers may correct me on this.
Can this stuff possibly be the real software?! It's not some cheesy demo?
Problems with the Department of Defense "are becoming particularly serious." The commission has received no responses to requests related to national air defenses among other topics.
Hmmm.... And what was the reason those jets weren't scrambled, again?
A former Upstate radio personality says she was fired for opposing the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a lawsuit filed Monday.
WMYI, its parent company Clear Channel Communications, Bill McMartin, the company's regional vice president and general manager and Greg McKinney, station program director, are all named as defendants in the suit.
Cordonier alleges in the suit that some of the Clear Channel officers and directors have financial ties and are loyal to President Bush and his policies. It alleges that Cordonier was forced to participate in a pro-war rally.
The suit cites a state law that declares a person cannot be fired because of political opinions.
One more reason to roll back media concentration, yes? As Leah suggests today.
TAPPED gets the credit. Better than even the name, TAPPED tells us the issue doesn't seem to be fading, at least as fast as one might have feared; actually, they sense some kind of momentum building. I say, wait and see. Dashed hopes are terribly enervating.
They do point to what they see as a telllingly tough David Sanger piece in todays NYT; TAPPED says it was Sanger who was giving Ari such a hard time in that transcript Josh put up at TPM I linked to yesterday.
I sometimes have the feeling that Bush is profitting from, in what must surely be the unfairest of ironies, the disgust of most Americans at the way Clinton was picked at, almost unto death.
Finally, the real story on the Niger Yellow Cake uranium
Hey, why didn't I get one of these!
Dear Mister Gaorge Bush:
Please keep this in the strictest confidense. You do not know me, but my name is Umbuto Johnson, and I am the grandson of Ashtari P. Johnson, in charge of the nuclear programme of the African country of Niger.
For severale years, my grandfather had been secretly selling radoactiv materiels to the little known country of Iraqe. He was given the sum of twenty million dollars by Saddem Hussan, of Iraqe, for this materiels. When my grandfather was discovered, two years ago, he was shot by the government. The money from those sales however remained hidden to all.
Before he was caoght, my grandfather shared with me his secret, and gave me instructions on how to move the moneys out of the country. In order to do this, I need the help of a trustworthy American friend and this is why I am seeking to write to you today.
In order to recieve the moneys I must pay a fee bribe of twenty thousand American dollars. I do not have this moneys. If you can send to me these moneys, I will split my grandfathers moneys with you.
Please tell nobody of this message, for I fear I will be in grave danger if it is known. I am relying on you, George Bush, to keep my secret. Respond to me and I will tell you how to send the moneys to me.
Your frend,
Umbuto Johnson
Many thanks to alert reader Hunter for clearing this up.
Have you heard of Elycia Fine? She's one of our troops in Iraq. Her mother, Andrea, has fourth stage terminal breast cancer.
Elycia was in the midst of getting a compassionate transfer from Ft. Benning in Georgia, to Fort Carson in Colorado, her mother's home state. But a war got in the way.
"We were going to start the paperwork to get her transferred, but then her orders came," said Andrea.
Elycia's battalion went to Kuwait in January with the 3rd Division and was part of the first wave of American troops to enter Iraq in March.
Now she's stationed in Fallujah, where American soldiers have been killed and wounded by Iraqi gunmen.
Andrea's been given a six month survival prediction. Elycia put in for a compassionate transfer, but was refused.
Don't worry, this one's going to be taken care of; Ben Nighthorse Campbells involved; Andrea's going to be testifying in front of Congress.
It's just worth taking a moment to shake your head and ask, what were they thinking of, whoever made that crazy initial decision?
And while you're at it, take a look at this WaPo article, to get a feeling for what it's like right now, for our troops, on the ground.
Here's what I found most wrenching and worrying:
Many soldiers say they are not surprised by the increasing attacks or the displays of anger among Iraqis.
"They're getting tired of us," said Spec. James McNeely, 48, a member of the D.C. National Guard's 547th Transportation Company. "Wouldn't you be mad if they invaded your country?"
McNeely said his unit has had little chance to interact with Iraqis or play a part in the nation-building operations that Washington hopes will win the support of Iraqis.
"We're just trying to survive, trying to make our lives a little more pleasant," he said during a stop at a roadside vendor to buy soft drinks for the men on his truck before heading into the military compound at Baghdad's international airport.
For others, the attacks have become not only frightening, but disheartening.
"We get so much resistance, we hear so much about different military people getting killed, it seems like people don't want to be helped," said Spec. Julian Snelling, 21, of Fredericksburg, Va., a member of the 307th Military Police Company. "Many Iraqis love us, but the bad apples alter your thinking."
Here:
"Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education, free medical care, free whatever? It comes from Moscow, from Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell."
-- Texas State Rep. Debbie Riddle, R-Houston.
NOTE: For those who read the Loot, Repeat discussion, Riddle is playing the role of a "useful idiot," paving the way for large corporations to loot the government funds that go to pay for the public education she is acting to destroy.
Thanks to Leah for reminding me of Riddle's beautiful sentiment.
A constitutional amendment to allow a President to be recalled, if impeachment looks out of reach? Okay, probably not.
But never underestimate that combination of ingenuity and ruthless disregard of any prececent that doesn't favor your party that's become the hallmark of post-Reagan Republicanism.
A case on point:
Texas House Approves Redistricting Map That Hands Victory to Republicans
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - The Texas House approved a map that redraws the state's congressional districts in favor of Republicans by a vote of 83-62 after more than nine hours of debate late Monday evening.
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Democrats hope to block it in the Senate where measures require a two-thirds vote before debate is allowed.
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The GOP is gunning for a grip on the 32-member Texas delegation in Congress. Democrats currently hold a 17-15 advantage, but Republicans - urged on by U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay - say existing congressional boundaries don't allow for the election of Congress members who reflect the state's increasingly GOP voting patterns.
Molly Ivins puts it in context for you here, and shows how this isn't just government as usual, although it may be business as usual.
We need to start now organizing, state by state, a grassroots capacity to mobilize instant opposition to each and every trick this new GOP might have up its sleeve to keep votes from being cast, counted, or certified. Start remembering Florida, now.
On that little matter of the FCC versus democracy. (easy link to previous post)
Here's another way to be heard; Consumer's Union has a petition you can sign online in support of H.R. 2052 and S. 1046, the two bills that will undo what Michael Powell and just two other Republican members of the FCC managed to pull off, in the face of massive grassroots opposition.
That opposition got us this opportunity to overturn the FCC ruling by law.
But it's going to be uphill all the way.
Remember that it was sometimes populist John McCain who signed off on that loopohole in the original 1996 media deregulation bill (yes, which Clinton signed) about the FCC needing to defend any regulations that limit big media's purchasing power to get even bigger, that allowed three people, who'd been unashamedly wined and dined by, and had multiple meetings with that same big media, to ignore the views some million citizens took the time to express to the commission.
Conservatives' lack of interest in the WMD question takes an even more ominous turn when combined with general support for presidential warmaking.
Thus, [in the view of Republican presidents, legislators, and conservative intellectuals], once someone is elected president, he or she faces no legal or political constraint. The president doesn't need congressional authority; Washington doesn't need UN authority. Allied support is irrelevant. The president needn't offer the public a justification for going to war that holds up after the conflict ends. The president may not even be questioned about the legitimacy of his professed justification. Accept his word and let him do whatever he wants, irrespective of circumstances.
This is not the government created by the Founders. This is not the government that any believer in liberty should favor.
It is foolish to turn the Iraq war, a prudential political question, into a philosophical test for conservatism. It is even worse to demand unthinking support for Bush. He should be pressed on the issue of WMD - by conservatives. Fidelity to the Constitution and republican government demands no less.
The death penalty is undoubtedly wrong unless one accords to the state a scope of moral action that goes beyond what is permitted to the individual. In my view, the major impetus behind modern aversion to the death penalty is the equation of private morality with governmental morality. This is a predictable (though I believe erroneous and regrettable) reaction to modern, democratic self–government.
Few doubted the morality of the death penalty in the age that believed in the divine right of kings. Or even in earlier times. St. Paul had this to say (I am quoting, as you might expect, the King James version):
Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: for he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil. Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake. (Romans 13:1–5)
This is not the Old Testament, I emphasize, but St. Paul. One can understand his words as referring only to lawfully constituted authority, or even only to lawfully constituted authority that rules justly. But the core of his message is that government—however you want to limit that concept—derives its moral authority from God. It is the “minister of God” with powers to “revenge,” to “execute wrath,” including even wrath by the sword (which is unmistakably a reference to the death penalty). Paul of course did not believe that the individual possessed any such powers. Only a few lines before this passage, he wrote, “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” And in this world the Lord repaid—did justice—through His minister, the state.
These passages from Romans represent the consensus of Western thought until very recent times. Not just of Christian or religious thought, but of secular thought regarding the powers of the state. That consensus has been upset, I think, by the emergence of democracy. It is easy to see the hand of the Almighty behind rulers whose forebears, in the dim mists of history, were supposedly anointed by God, or who at least obtained their thrones in awful and unpredictable battles whose outcome was determined by the Lord of Hosts, that is, the Lord of Armies. It is much more difficult to see the hand of God—or any higher moral authority—behind the fools and rogues (as the losers would have it) whom we ourselves elect to do our own will. How can their power to avenge—to vindicate the “public order”—be any greater than our own?
WASHINGTON - The White House on Friday stood by President Bush's assertion that Iraq has sought uranium in Africa in recent years, saying that his allegation in January was supported by more evidence than a series of letters now known to have been forged.
Those letters, obtained by European intelligence agencies and later by the United States, were a purported exchange between officials in Iraq and the African country of Niger concerning the possible purchase of uranium. The United Nations later determined they were forgeries.
"Those documents were only one piece of evidence in a larger body of evidence suggesting that Iraq attempted to purchase uranium from Africa," said Sean McCormack, a spokesman for the National Security Council. "The issue of Iraq's pursuit of uranium in Africa is supported by multiple sources of intelligence. The other sources of evidence did and do support the president's statement."
MS. MITCHELL: ... But do you think that there was simply a train going down the track here, that we needed to find enough evidence or at least claim it was evidence in order to justify a war?
AMB. WILSON: Well, I think that’s a question that we need to ask. Had we decided upon going to war, and were we using the grave and gathering danger argument, the imminent threat to our national security posed by Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction programs, as justification for a war that we had already decided to go to. And I would add that that is a trivialization of the weapons of mass destruction problem.
There is no greater threat that we face as a nation going forward than the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of non-state actors or international terrorists. And if we’ve prosecuted a war for reasons other than that, using weapons of mass destruction as cover for that, then I think we’ve done a grave disservice to the weapons of mass destruction threat. The bar will be set much, much higher internationally, and in Congress, when the next administration, or another administration, has a true WMD problem, and has to go to get that sort of authority.
IOW, it's not in the long-term strategic interest of the United States for our President to lie about WMDs, because people might not believe us when we tell the truth. How hard can this be to understand?
Here´s McPaper on the fact that Kennedy´s opinion in Lawrence actually referred to a foreign court:
Never before had the Supreme Court's majority cited a foreign legal precedent in such a big case.
Ah, but they´ve done it in not-so-big cases?
As Jack Balkin explains, this is nothing new or important. The previous Bowers decision had referred to a general concept of "Western Values," so actually providing some context with respect to what constitutes these values isn´t exactly radical.
Bonus points for anyone who goes through Scalia´s judicial opinions and find any references to furriners.
I didn't know I was going to have to master first order predicate logic in order to parse aWol's lies on Iraq. But it's true! A little ooze from Ari:
The president's statement in the state of the union was incorrect because it was based on forged documents from the African nation of Niger, White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer said yesterday.
"The president's statement was based on the predicate of the yellow cake" uranium "from Niger," Fleischer told reporters. "So given the fact that the report on the yellow cake did not turn out to be accurate, that is reflective of the president's broader statement."
Well, let's parse this.
Suppose Bush's "broader statement" is "It rained." And Bush's statement is predicated on evidence that "the streets are wet." Of course, knowing Bush as I do, I look out the window and see that the streets are not wet. But Bush still insists -- in the absence, now, of any evidence -- that his statement is still true. "Who you gonna believe? Me or your lyin' eyes?"
So, now that we know that Bush's State of The Union speech contained, well, "broader statements" made in the absence of evidence (ha ha ha), our question becomes: What did he know and when did he know it? Did Bush make these "incorrect" "broader statements" knowing they were not true? And if someone other than our CEO president is to blame, who is it?
"And up through the ground came a 'bubblin' crude." Forgeries, that is. Broader statements...
This is not some minor dispute over a footnote to history but rather raises the possibility of one of the most egregious misrepresentations by a U.S. administration. What could be more cynical and impeachable than fabricating a threat of rogue nations or terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons and using that to sell a war?
You remember: in this corner, the FCC and a few media friends; in the opposite corner, everybody else.
Some attention needs to be paid today.
Today, Tuesday, July 8, regular citizens and media activists - people just like you - are taking a few minutes out of the day to phone up their Congressional representatives. They want to make sure these politicians have not forgotten the public's outrage. They're looking for action, because you see, talk is cheap and we not only want that bill out of committee - we want the darn thing passed in both the Senate and the House. If we don't act, all of our hard work will have been for nothing.
That's the indefatigable and delightful Lisa English of Ruminate This speaking.
And she makes it supremely easy for you to do what needs to be done here.
Lisa did all this for all of us while she was also moving. Think back to the last time you had to move your household to a new place. To be able to think about any higher purpose than getting your books unpacked and not sitting on the toothpaste is the mark of a true activist. Without such people, no good changes to the world would ever get made.
I always feel better after a visit to her site.
You'll feel so good after you call your Senators and Congressperson.
The high rollers are betting in the end Democracy's going to lose this one, to Billy Tauzin, yet. If we can get a bill through Congress undoing what three Republican appointees and their assorted media friends did by turning the regulartory process inside out, then we, the people, could start to be a contender again.
A last thought: One of the best things about MoveOn, they are always able to tell you how many calls they generated, how much money they raised. If you have the time, why not let us know in the comments here, or in Lisa's that you got through, to someone. Then we can report back. Good idea? Bad idea? Let me know.
Another Day, Another Fig Leaf That Needs A Fig Leaf
That's what this President's turbocharged whirlwind trip to Africa is, isn't it?
An humanitarian fig leaf, meant to soften the hard edges of the Bush Doctrine with some of that glamor of Clintonian internationalism - a five day five country photo op that will position Bush for the coming election, as having gone Clinton 15 billion dollars better in the humanitarian concern department?
As ever with this administration, the actual policy is something less than advertised. Back in May, Jeanne at Body & Soul told us what the deceptions are in the Aids initiative.
WASHINGTON - US President George W Bush's "surprise" choice of a former top executive of a major US pharmaceutical company and major Republican contributor as his global AIDS coordinator has drawn expressions of concern and even outrage among Africa and AIDS activists here.
Bush's choice of former Eli Lilly & Co boss Randall Tobias was announced on Tuesday at the White House, just four days before Bush's first trip as president to Africa. The nomination must be confirmed by the US Senate.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs, head of Columbia University's Earth Institute and a special advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on the AIDS crisis, called the appointment "surreal". "This is an emergency that requires someone who's worked in the field and knows it thoroughly. We don't need someone who raises all sorts of questions about commitment and agenda," he said.
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A corporate executive throughout his career, Tobias has no background in public health and little or no experience of working in poor countries. In short remarks at the White House on Tuesday, he described the statistics of the AIDS toll taken in Africa - where almost 20 million people have been killed by the disease - as "really nearly incomprehensible".
At the same time, Tobias is known as a no-nonsense businessman who is particularly close to the recently departed director of the administration's Office of Management and Budget (OMB), a bureaucracy that could play a key role in securing the money to actually fund Bush's 15-billion-dollar program.
Being the good reporter he is, Jim Lobe stacks no decks, and includes a possible scenario in which Tobias uses his cache, as a major player in Corporate Circles, pretty much the only circles our CEO President respects, to get something real done.
Tristero brings us this story of Justice ethics lawyer who left the department after clashing over John Walker Lindh.
Anyway, click the link and come back to save me the trouble of redoing the summary there.
One thing jumps out at me which isn´t particularly emphasized in the article. It appears that the JD somehow obtained the phone records of Spikey Mikey Isikoff. Isn´t the press supposed to get a bit upset when the government starts poking its nose into their investigations?
Contrary to what many might think, I´m actually not that big of a fan of the Guardian newspaper. When I lived in the UK for awhile I enjoyed reading it, but my preferred paper for hard news actually eventually became the Telegraph. Sure, you had to read it with the appropriate ideological filter and ignore the planted right wing nonsense stories about American politics and certain foreign policy issues, but an analagous statement would be true about every Brit paper.
I agree with Kevin Drum that an American Guardian weekly would be a Good Thing if it was designed to compete with Time, Newsweek, and the Economist, and not such a good thing if it´s more a political opinion journal. But, I assume it´ll be the former.
Tonight, after Air Force One had departed, White House officials issued a statement in Mr. Fleischer's name that made clear that they no longer stood behind Mr. Bush's statement.
(Via Tbogg, who should be read by all true patriots).
reader space reminds us:
Democrats need to remember that the House Judiciary committee voted to send an article of impeachment to the house floor based solely on Clinton's alleged refusal to completely answer questions posed by the committee.
Now, Bush can fake factually bogus statements to Congress in his State of the Union speech with impunity.
In other words, an alleged failure to be completely forthcoming to Congress has apparently moved from an impeachable offense to trifiling "error" in a few short years. I suppose this is what Bush meant when he said he wanted to "change the tone" in Washington.
Unlike some in my party who continue to question our use of force in Iraq, I have not wavered in my belief in the justness of the war we fought. In this, I know I am following in the proud tradition of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Clinton, all of whom were ready and willing to apply our military might when necessary to protect our security.
But those great Democratic leaders also recognized that force alone could not keep us safe. The same holds true today. If we are to win the wider war against terrorism, we must do more than throw Saddam Hussein out of power. We must lift up the moderate Muslim majority around the world and give them the tools to take down the radicals who want an endless holy war.
The best way to do that is by demonstrating -- through words and deeds alike -- that we are democracy-builders, not empire-builders; peacekeepers, not profiteers. If the Bush administration continues behaving as though "to the victor go the spoils," to the victor will also go all the responsibility, all the risks, all the wreckage -- and all the blame for what happened in Iraq after Hussein was gone.
Since the future lies ahead, and "we broke it, we bought it," let's bypass the issue of whether Iraq was a just war. (I left that material in because they were important to express Lieberman's views, not because I agree with them.)
I think Lieberman's got the right take in the right words on "democracy-builders, not empire-builders" -- and that the Bush regime is all about empire. It takes courage to use the word "empire" and call Bush on this. And Lieberman's got some reasonable policy proposals too.
So I give Lieberman credit for "standing up" on this issue. Sorta. Thoughts?
I don't know what's gotten into the sleepy old Inky, but they have started giving the Bush malAdministration a little reality therapy. The Philadelphia Inquirer editorializes:
President Bush is playing Whack-a-Mole with scientific reports that he doesn't like:
Uncomfortable facts about global warming pop up in an environmental report card. Whack!
Yellowstone National Park staffers tell a world treasures watchdog that the park is in trouble. Whack!
The Environmental Protection Agency discovers a senator's clean air bill is more effective than the President's. Whack!
But the moles are popping up faster than the Bush team can beat them back. Information is leaking out. A pattern of deception is emerging.
Despite their constant talk about "sound science," Bush administration officials keep manipulating or suppressing scientific information for political reasons. This censorship limits the ability of Congress and the American people to make informed public-policy choices. It needs to stop.
The latest flap involves the EPA's withholding of a key comparison of air pollution bills. EPA is acting as little more than the White House's propaganda puppet, churning out Clear Skies press releases. Before debating power-plant cleanup, the Senate will need to turn elsewhere for factual analysis of pending bills.
Two weeks ago, the EPA had to omit the entire global-warming section from its "Draft Report on the Environment," a 30-year statistical snapshot of the U.S. environment, after the administration tried to replace solid findings with "pabulum," according to outgoing EPA administrator Christie Whitman. As a partial substitute, the White House wanted to insert a reference to a study partly financed by the petroleum industry. Whitman rightly said no. But the administration has edited global warming out of numerous other reports. That's ignorant.
President Bush talks a good deal about "sound science." Apparently, his definition of the term is: science that supports his political agenda.
It seems like hot stuff, only because the rest of the SCLM is so lazy and flaccid.
Go Inky!
NOTE: We saw the same thing in Iraq, where the Bush malAdministration removed people with technical qualifications in favor of Self-Identified Christian activists who didn't know the country or the language. Whack!
In the continuing discussion of how to use the Internet as an organizing tool, many readers have made the point that the goal is electoral success (ie, any Democrat winning). For electoral success it's necessary to, well, actually talk to people face to face, not just on the net. And it's also necessary to talk to people from all walks of life about why they should be registered to vote, why they should vote, and who they should vote for.
In a word: Organize! This goes especially for all the political newbies drawn into the Democratic primary process through the Internet and MeetUp.
Alice Marie Marshall writes about the nuts and bolts of organizing a precinct (I guess the smallest unit of granularity in our political system). It's definitely worth a read.
"The abuse of stock options that are hidden from balance sheets have been central to the corporate scandals," Edwards said in prepared remarks provided to The Associated Press. "This is about honest accounting. It is a fundamental tenet of economic reform. If we're going to restore values to our economy, we need to do the right thing here."
The spectacle of Enron executives and others cashing out millions of dollars worth of stock before their companies collapsed has renewed the debate over counting stock options. A board that sets standards for corporate accounting favors reforms, but business interests, especially high-tech companies, have been vocal opponents.
Edwards said his proposal would help restore integrity to corporate America and boost the economy by reviving investor confidence.
"I don't believe our values are a luxury of economic growth. I believe they are the engine of economic growth," he said. "Books that are honest, executives who are responsible and employees who work hard for fair wages are essential to our economy.
None of what Edwards says should need saying, of course, except the spectacle of the Republicans looting while the looting is good is so spectacular.
And Edwards is right that values are the engine of growth. Why would any investor want to join a game that's grossly and obviously rigged for the insiders? (Say, is "Kenny Boy" in jail yet? Thought not.)
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