Bumpity Bump

Just wanted to bring a couple stories up. First, this one:

"They may try and recover deleted email files for certain dates..."

"The White house asked for and got permission earlier this week to wait a day before issuing a directive to preserve all documents and logs which led one seasoned federal prosecutor to wonder why they wanted to wait a day, and who at the justice department told them they could do that, and why?"

-Nina Totenberg, on NPR last night.

And, Bob Novak's source-revealing past:

WASHINGTON -- Three and half-years ago, I reported that a veteran FBI agent resigned and retired after refusing a demand by Attorney General Janet Reno to give the Justice Department the names of top secret sources in China. My primary source was FBI agent Robert Hanssen.
Disclosing confidential sources is unthinkable for a reporter seeking to probe behind the scenes in official Washington, but the circumstances here are obviously extraordinary. The same traitor who delivered American spies into the Kremlin's hands was expressing concern about the fate of intelligence assets in China.
When my source was revealed as a spy, my first fear was that I had been the victim of disinformation by a truly evil man. I wrote my column of Nov. 24, 1997 only after other officials confirmed Hanssen's account. Nevertheless, I now wanted to make doubly sure and rechecked my report's validity. I did so, and several sources -- including one FBI agent who would not speak to me in 1997 -- totally confirmed what I had written. I am absolutely convinced that Hanssen told me the truth.
Then, why break a reporter's responsibility to keep his sources secret? I wrestled with this question for months and finally decided that my experience with Hanssen contributes to the portrait of this most contradictory of all spies. Furthermore, to be honest to my readers, I must reveal it."

Spill it Cliff

Go over to Unqualified Offerings for some fascinating stuff about Cliff May.

Feel the Love

You know, the Boy Scouts is a private organization and they can do whatever the hell they want assuming it's legal. So, when I heard that they were inviting Ollie North and Ann Coulter to speak I just thought "how embarrassing for them." But, would you really want your child going to hear this crap?

“Let’s just say that this was a war just for oil,” Coulter told the crowd of about 300. “Why not go to war for oil? We need oil. What do Hollywood celebrities think fuels their jets? How do they think their cocaine is delivered?

Liberal Media Quiet

So, CNN has talked a lot about Limbaugh and ESPN, but not a peep about his alleged drug use...

One could credit them for being responsible and not running with it until they can confirm it, but they usually don't hesitate to report any horseshit that pops up on Drudge's site.


...CNN has now confirmed.

Thursday is New Jobless Day

Congratulations to the 399K new jobless, and to the 5 thousand we missed last week...

Sept. employment report is on Friday. I predict it'll be basically flat with a small uptick in unemploment. Slightly bigger uptick in October, then a bad November.

But, what do I know...

MoDo

Heh.

The men who won the 2000 election by promising to restore honor and integrity to the White House spent yesterday doing a pretty good imitation of O. J. Simpson, looking for the culprit. You could just picture President Bush with his Sherlock Holmes deerstalker, magnifying glass and bloodhound Barney. Silly. The White House knows who did it. All Mr. Bush has to do is roll heads.

Slime and Defend

CYA more important than national security:

The Bush administration pursued a two-track political strategy on Wednesday to minimize the damage from the criminal investigation into the disclosure of a C.I.A. officer's identity.

The White House encouraged Republicans to portray the former diplomat at the center of the case, Joseph C. Wilson IV, as a partisan Democrat with an agenda and the Democratic Party as scandalmongering. At the same time, the administration and the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill worked to ensure that no Republicans in Congress break ranks and call for an independent inquiry outside the direct control of the Justice Department.

"It's slime and defend," said one Republican aide on Capitol Hill, describing the White House's effort to raise questions about Mr. Wilson's motivations and its simultaneous effort to shore up support in the Republican ranks.

Look, at this point it doesn't matter if Joe Wilson rapes babies. He is almost entirely irrelevant to this story.

...Josh Marshall makes a similar point.

Arnold the Groper

LA Times has the story.

Six women who came into contact with Arnold Schwarzenegger on movie sets, in studio offices and in other settings over the last three decades say he touched them in a sexual manner without their consent.

In interviews with The Times, three of the women described their surprise and discomfort when Schwarzenegger grabbed their breasts. A fourth said he reached under her skirt and gripped her buttocks.

A fifth woman said Schwarzenegger groped her and tried to remove her bathing suit in a hotel elevator. A sixth said Schwarzenegger pulled her onto his lap and asked whether a certain sexual act had ever been performed on her.

According to the women's accounts, one of the incidents occurred in the 1970s, two in the 1980s, two in the 1990s and one in 2000.

Steve G. says:

So Oprah, are you gonna have your friend Arnold back to explain his sexual harassment of women? Groping, grabbing, normal men get sued for this. How blind is Maria? And god knows, what has he done to women too scared to talk?

Indeed.

Holy Crap II

Rush is in town for a speech, and local news is already on the drug abuse thing...

developing

Here's the story... Hillbilly heroin!


...and Rush resigns.

...and Scoobie is a happy man.

Holy Crap

I mean, holy crap.


The faux philo-semites will ignore this, but....


Holy Crap!

Republican political consultant Frank Luntz says: “Americans don’t want to hear about the Holocaust anymore, and they particularly don’t want to hear it from the Jewish community.”

UPDATE: some people wonder why I commented on this. If someone on the Left had said something like that they'd be pilloried for it regardless of context or meaning. I wasn't trying to accuse Luntz of anti-Semitism, just rather surprised he actually said it.

Six Hundred Million

WTF?

WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 - The Bush administration is seeking more than $600 million from Congress to continue the hunt for conclusive evidence that Saddam Hussein's government had an illegal weapons program, officials said Wednesday.

The money, part of the White House's request for $87 billion in supplemental spending on Iraq and Afghanistan, comes on top of at least $300 million that has already been spent on the weapons search, the officials said.


The budget figures for the weapons search are included in the classified part of the administration's supplemental appropriations request, and have not been made public. The size of the request suggests the White House is determined to keep searching for unconventional weapons or evidence that they were being developed under Mr. Hussein. The
search so far has turned up no solid evidence that Iraq had chemical, biological or nuclear weapons when the American invasion began in March, according to administration officials.

Look, let's say you need to provide $300,000 per inspector, including expenses and insurance. That's 2000 inspectors.

John Ashcroft Flashback

From Liberal Oasis:

October 4, 1997
CNN’s “Evans & Novak"

JOHN ASHCROFT: The truth of the matter is that if the law's been violated, we should be able to ascertain that.

We can, if we have an independent person without a conflict of interest…

ROWLAND EVANS: …The attorney general has shaved down all the allegations that Vice President Gore apparently down to one single allegation -- which telephone he used to make these fundraising calls from.

Do you really think that alone is worthy of a special prosecutor?

ASHCROFT: …you know, a single allegation can be most worthy of a special prosecutor.

If you're abusing government property, if you're abusing your status in office, it can be a single fact that makes the difference on that.

So my own view is that there are plenty of things which should have caused [Attorney General Janet Reno], a long time ago, to appoint a special prosecutor, an independent investigator.

We asked for that on March the 13th of this year in letters from Republican members on the Judiciary Committee. And she's in a bad position…

…The man who signs her check is the man that she's investigating, and she hasn't been very aggressive about it.

oof

Just go look at Drudge. This should be amusing.

Scandal

"They may try and recover deleted email files for certain dates..."

"The White house asked for and got permission earlier this week to wait a day before issuing a directive to preserve all documents and logs which led one seasoned federal prosecutor to wonder why they wanted to wait a day, and who at the justice department told them they could do that, and why?"

Nina Totenberg, on NPR this evening.

This really is absolutely unbelievable. Where is the outrage? We need some answers to those questions.

UPDATE: Digby adds:

One would have thought that the Commander in Chief would have personally ordered his staff to preserve all e-mails and documents relating to a possible felony and breach of national security during wartime on the morning after the leak was revealed in Robert Novak's column.

That's what a leader does. He doesn't depend upon legal technicalities and partisan firestorms to make him do the right thing. He takes the bull by the horns and demands that anyone under his watch who commits such an act, or knows who committed such an act, comes forward or he'll know the reason why. He would make it crystal clear that there will be zero tolerance for political games with national security. He would immediately put in place safeguards to ensure that it never happens again. He would fire the perpetrator and send all evidence to the proper authorities.

Of course, strutting around in a fighter pilot costume is good, too.

Kleiman Speaks

Here:

When Bush says there are too many leaks, he means that too many reporters have access to evidence that makes him look bad. That is not, I submit, a problem that the nation needs to worry about. It would be horribly ironic if the result of this particular White House dirty trick were to tighten the administration's grip over what the citizens are, and are not, allowed to know.

No, this isn't about leaking. It's about exposing the name of an intelligence officer. That's a specific crime, covered by a specific statute. Let's not let Bush and his minions change the subject.

Scooter With the Candlestick?

A bunch of people have informed me that Larry Johnson just pointed his finger in the general direction of, if not directly at, Scooter Libby on Buchanan and Press just now.


Okay, I didn't see it but from what I can glean without a transcript I think he pointed his finger at the EOB, said the person was involved with past scandals, and said that the first person they should question was Libby.

Honor and Dignitude

Wow, check this out.

According to The Washington Post, in early 2002 Wolfowitz ordered a CIA report on Blix. When the report didn't contain damning details, Wolfowitz reportedly "hit the ceiling."

Haley Hanging with the CCC

Oh yes, there are no more racists in the Republican party.

Barbour wears a lapel pin with the U.S. and state flags and he is in a photograph on the Web site of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a neo-Confederate group accused of racist views. Barbour says he doesn't know anything about the council. The picture was taken at a council-sponsored barbecue in July used to raise money for private academy school buses.

You can find the picture here, with the caption:

The election year Mississippi Black Hawk Barbecue and Political Rally held on July 19 drew dozens of political candidates and was attended by a crowd of over 500. The Black Hawk Barbecue is sponsored by the Council of Conservative Citizens to raise money for private academy school buses. (Pictured L-R: Chip Reynolds, State Senator Bucky Huggins, Ray Martin, GOP gubernatorial nominee Haley Barbour, John Thompson, and Black Hawk Rally emcee and C of CC Field Director Bill Lord.)

Lying about it doesn't help.

Here's the ADL on the CCC.

Here's the SPLC.

What will emerge will be just be a slimy brown mass of glop," Millard wrote. "The genocide being carried out against white people hasn’t come with marching armies; instead, it has come with propaganda that is calculated to brainwash whites into happily and willingly jumping into the Neo-Melting Pot, and to their destruction. ... Genocide via the bedroom chamber is just as long-lasting as genocide via the gas chamber."

Look, there is no way in hell that Barbour "knows nothing about the council." None.

Haley Barbour flashback:

NYT, October 20, 1982, Wednesday, Late City Final Edition.


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

The People Speak

68% want independent investigation. 72% think someone in the WH leaked.

Step up to the Plate

In comments, anonymous writes:

Its time for the other journalists to come out and tell us who it is. They are protecting a criminal that has damaged national security. Would they protect a pederast? Why would they protect someone that, if this story is true, could cause a national security disaster and end the lives of Plame's contacts.

There is no loss of credibility for a journalist to expose a treasonist leaker and if they continue they are guilty of aiding and abetting. They know who it is according to Wilson. They can nip it in the bud and save the taxpayers millions of dollars and keep this country focused on the war on terrorism instead of chasing ghosts.

Come on, be a hero.

Jack Shafer finally says something reasonable:

The hard-and-fast rules that govern confidential sourcing leave a half-dozen news organizations in a position where they know the leakers' identities as institutions but can't force individual reporters to reveal their names without violating the journalistic taboo of "burning" a confidential source. If the journalists in the know were to surrender the names of their White House sources, they'd be shunned by their peers and (more important) frozen out by future confidential sources because they're untrustworthy. They might as well move their butts over to the obit desk. (One state court has even found that a confidentiality agreement with a reporter is contractual, enforceable by law.)

But it's not like Washington journalists like to play "get the leaker" in the first place. They don't even like to examine the motives of the confidential sources who appear in their own newspapers or the pages of the competition. It's considered poor form in Washington to uncover another reporter's confidential sources, but not because it's bad journalism. Confidential sources are the grease that makes the wheels of Washington journalism turn, and anybody who disturbs the cloak of anonymity undermines what 80 percent of the reporters in town do. Because Washington reporters outnumber worthwhile confidential sources by a ratio of 10 to 1 (or greater), confidential sources can usually pick the most advantageous (to them) terms for dispensing information. For that reason alone, most Washington reporters would rather acquire the other guy's confidential sources than expose them.

This may explain why none of the reporters who talked to the White House sources filed the more newsworthy story: namely, that the normally leak-free administration was attempting to put Ambassador Wilson in an unflattering light by connecting his Niger mission in some nepotistic fashion to his wife's position as a CIA employee, and damage her cover in the process. Any of the reporters could have published a story about how an administration source was talking trash about Wilson without naming Valerie Plame or violating their confidentiality agreements. So, why didn't they? I can only assume that the reporters calculated that with confidential administration sources being so rare these days, they shouldn't do anything that would deter a future leak. So, they ignored the tip and declined to expose the leakers' skulduggery in hopes of getting a different—and perhaps less dicey—story leaked to them later.

The Novak-Wilson-Plame story illustrates in creepy fashion what happens when reporters, especially Washington reporters, become too beholden to their sources. They forget that they're supposed to answer to their readers, not their sources. And when they're obsessed with keeping their confidential sources happy, they end up missing the story.

For shame.