"I'm confident in my management style. I'm a delegator because I trust the people I've asked to join the team. I'm willing to delegate. That makes it easier to be president."
G.W. Bush, December 16, 2003

"And to the extent that the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility. I want to know what went right and what went wrong,"
G.W. Bush. September 13, 2005

Bill Maher: "On Your Watch, We've Lost Almost All Of Our Allies, The Surplus, Four Airliners, Two Trade Centers, A Piece Of The Pentagon And The City Of New Orleans"...

10.1.2005 Arianna: "Proclamations of principle are like unwanted pets. Even after you dump them on the side of the road, they have a way of finding their way back home and biting you on the butt."

9.30.2005 Digby:

The question is what Fitzgerald got in return for agreeing not to ask Judy about her lovers ..er sources. And don't think he didn't get something in return.

In case anyone's wondering if Fitzgerald is really the tough guy everyone thinks he is, check out this story from last week about the Governor George Ryan trial in Illinois. You'll notice that he flipped Ryans "political son" by arresting his mistress and squeezing her until she convinced him to testify:

And so we don’t forget what this story is really about, and given that the aluminum tubes crap that Miller put on the front page of the New York Times was being heavily promoted by Cheney, how much of that bogus information came to Miller via Libby?

And here are a few questions for the Times:

Had a Plame/Wilson story been assigned to Miller or not?

What, if anything, did she say about the story to anyone at the paper at the time… and what did they say back?
...
the big question remains: What is she hiding?

In a written statement today, Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said that Fitzgerald had assured Miller's lawyer that "he intended to limit his grand jury interrogation so that it would not implicate other sources of hers."

NYT: "Tate said that he and Bennett then asked Fitzgerald whether their clients could talk without fear of being accused of obstructing the investigation, and were assured that Fitzgerald would not oppose them doing so."

"Statements by Sulzberger, Keller, and Miller on Her Release" E&P: "A Times story late on Thursday revealed that as part of Miller's agreement, one of her attorneys, Robert Bennett, gave Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the federal prosecutor, edited versions of notes taken by Miller about her conversations with I. Lewis Libby."

Statement of Bill Keller, Miller's attorney:

Judy refused to testify in this case because she gave her professional word that she would keep her interview with her source confidential. At the outset, she had only a generic waiver of this obligation, and she believed she had ample reason to doubt it had been freely given. In recent days, several important things have changed that convinced Judy that she was released from her obligation.

9.29.2005 Our new majority leader

In Missouri, the Blunt organization is a family affair. Son Matt, 34, is governor, and son Andrew, 29, is a top state-government lobbyist whose client list is studded with major donors to his father.

As majority whip, Blunt, even more than DeLay before him, has created a formal alliance with K Street lobbyists, empowering corporate representatives and trade association executives to assist the House leadership in counting votes and negotiating amendments to bring holdouts into the fold.

We need to ensure that those who lead the GOP understand that we elected them to cut the pork, not just shift it around to benefit Republicans. They seem to have forgotten that it's not their money -- it's ours. We only want it spent on items of national importance, and the rest of it should come back to us. If Tom DeLay can't find any waste in a federal budget that now eats up 20% of our gross domestic product, then he's obviously the wrong man to lead the party.

At stake in 2002 was control of the Texas legislature, which was to redraw congressional district lines. Corporate contributions to legislative candidates are illegal in Texas. The DeLay aides stand accused of violating that prohibition, along with eight companies like Sears Roebuck that provided the funds. The corporate money, however, never went to the candidates. Instead, it went to a much larger fund for state elections controlled by the Republican National Committee in Washington. That committee made contributions to Texas legislative candidates, constituting what Earle now charges is "money laundering."

The only problem is that similar transactions are conducted by both parties in many states, including Texas. In fact, on October 31, 2002, the Texas Democratic Party sent the Democratic National Committee (DNC) $75,000, and on the same day, the DNC sent the Texas Democratic Party $75,000. On July 19, 2001, the Texas Democratic Party sent the DNC $50,000 and, again on the same day, the DNC sent the Texas Democratic Party $60,000. On June 8, 2001, the Texas Democratic Party sent the DNC $50,000. That very same day, the DNC sent the Texas Democratic Party $60,000.

9.29.2005 "Turks Challenge Hughes On Iraq -- Female Activists Decry U.S. Policy"

9.29.2005 "SEC Upgrades Frist Inquiry To “Formal" Status"

9.29.2005 NYT "Republicans See Signs That Pentagon Is Evading Oversight"

Republican members of Congress say there are signs that the Defense Department may be carrying out new intelligence activities through programs intended to escape oversight from Congress and the new director of national intelligence.
...
The report said the committee believed that "individual services may have intelligence or intelligence-related programs such as science and technology projects or information operations programs related to defense intelligence that are embedded in other service budget line items, precluding sufficient visibility for program oversight."
...
A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Christopher Conway, declined to comment on the issue, referring questions to Mr. Negroponte's office. A spokesman for Mr. Negroponte, Carl Kropf, described coordination between Mr. Negroponte's office and the Pentagon as "excellent" on budget issues.
"Successfully integrating D.O.D.-unique intelligence programs and missions into the National Intelligence Program requires full transparency," Mr. Kropf said. "Such transparency exists today."

9.27.2005 Carpetbagger:

With Crawford gone, the administration finally had a chance to set the FDA on the right track, right? Well, they may have had a chance, but they decided to stick to the standard game plan. As Nico at Think Progress noted today, Bush is replacing one FDA commissioner with a reputation for rigid adherence to an ideological agenda with another

9.27.2005 "Breaking News: Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Two Campaign Finance Cases; A New Era in the Court's Jurisprudence?"

9.27.2005 "Three arrested in gangland-style murder of Suncruz founder 'Gus' Boulis" via Josh Marshall

Josh Marshall:

Unmentioned in today's AP story are the quarter million dollars in unexplained payments Abramoff business partner Adam Kidan made to Moscatiello, Ferrari and their family members around the time of Boulis' death.

The Justice Department's inspector general and the F.B.I. are looking into the demotion of a veteran federal prosecutor whose reassignment nearly three years ago shut down a criminal investigation of the Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff, current and former department officials report.
...
Mr. Abramoff's internal e-mail messages show that he boasted to clients about what he described as his close ties to John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, and others at the department.

Carpetbagger: "So, let's wrap this one up, shall we? A respected US Attorney opens an investigation into Jack Abramoff. The investigator is then promptly demoted and the investigation ends. The new US Attorney gets the job, thanks in large part to Karl Rove, who happens to be Abramoff's buddy."

9.26.2005 Craig Crawford:

Journalists caught in the widening war against insurgents are one thing, but those possibly killed in political reprisals launched by Western-supported officials and their thugs is worth a lot more attention. Surely, one of the first rules for a budding democracy is that you don't murder reporters you don't like.

9.24.2005 Truthout: "This is what happens when voters choose a president because he seems like a nice guy, like someone who'd be fun at a barbecue or a ballgame. You'd never use that criterion when choosing a surgeon, or a pilot to fly your family across the country."

9.24.2005 Mark Kleiman: David Brooks finally gets it

Republicans have in their minds we are the anti-government party. We came to shrink government. So they say that out on the campaign trail. But when you are the majority party actually governing, it doesn't work. People want the problem solved. So instead of having a governing philosophy that will tell them I'm going to spend it here but not there, they have a governing philosophy that is irrelevant to actually governing.

9.25.2005 Brooks on Meet the Press re Bush: And sometimes in my dark moments, I think he's "The Manchurian Candidate" designed to discredit all the ideas I believe in

There was a time when I would have argued that the American people couldn't stomach that kind of butchery -- not for long anyway -- even if their political leaders were willing to inflict it. But now I'm not so sure. As a nation, we may be so desensitized to violence, and so inured to mechanized carnage on a grand scale, that we're psychologically capable of tolerating genocidal warfare against any one who can successfully be labeled as a "terrorist." Or at least, a sizable enough fraction of the America public may be willing to tolerate it, or applaud it, to make the costs politically bearable.

I don't know this for a fact, but after a stroll through nowthatsfuckedup.com, or reading the genocidal lunacy routinely on display at Little Green Footballs or freerepublic.com - or your average redneck watering hole for that matter -- I'm not willing to rule it out.

Which means I should have gone to Washington today after all. Because we really do need to get the troops out of Iraq -- before hell is the consequence.

See also Jonathan Weiler:

These proposals are all subject to debate. But, that's the point. The argument that we must stay to prevent calamity needs to be subjected to much greater scrutiny than is currently the case - it should be a matter of the most intensive discussion at this point, not a cause for dismissal by elite consensus. As Geary points out "[g]asoline lines in Iraq are hours long, despite the country's great oil resources…[e]lectricity is at an all-time low, as is clean water, health care, security, the economy and every other thing Iraqis care about." The past two weeks have witnessed a blood bath on a scale more horrifying that anything that has preceded it in this awful two-year long bloodbath. We are failing in almost every way in Iraq, while dramatically undermining our capacity to serve our own citizens at home in the bargain.

The great Juan Cole (a former professor of mine at Michigan) argues adamantly that to leave altogether could lead to slaughter on a scale far larger than we are currently witnessing. He points to the post-1989 vacuum created in Afghanistan and the maelstrom that was created there as an example we do not want to repeat. He contends that the US should maintain a couple of air bases in the area, as a bulwark against a civil war that could greatly increase the scale of violence. But, Cole says, "I can associate myself with a call for US ground troops out now."

9.24.2005 "Leader of the F.D.A. Steps Down After a Short, Turbulent Tenure"

9.20.2005 "Mad-Cow Related Ban to Be Tightened", perhaps.

The United States will close a gap in its defense against mad cow disease by changing feed regulations to mirror those in Canada, FDA Commissioner Lester M. Crawford said Monday.

In remarks to a food policy conference hosted by the Consumer Federation of America, Crawford said the new regulations would be coming soon. But he did not say when.
...
The Food and Drug Administration promised to tighten the rules after the nation's first case of mad cow disease was confirmed in December 2003. FDA said it would ban blood, poultry litter and restaurant plate waste _ all potential pathways for the mad cow protein to be fed back to cattle.

FDA scrapped those restrictions last July.

That was the month that Crawford was confirmed to be FDA Commissioner. Bio here.

"President Bush, after a lengthy search, on Monday nominated acting Commissioner Lester M. Crawford to head the Food and Drug Administration, despite drug safety problems on Crawford's watch that have undermined the agency's reputation and credibility." Here

He is the same guy who blocked "Plan B"

9.24.2005 Josh Marshall:

Just for the sake of discussion, and I'd be particularly eager to hear from TPM's right-leaning readers on this one, isn't the idea of giving rent vouchers to refugees rather than stacking them up in mobile housing projects something that folks on both sides of the aisle should be able to agree on?

On the other hand, who gets to build and fit out the gazillion standard issue mobile homes? Halliburton residential? I guess that's the answer

• 1. Designate a strong leader with unquestioned integrity to oversee the rebuilding process and the huge sums of taxpayer money going to it....
• 2. Reduce funding and troop levels in Iraq so we can focus more resources on defending and rebuilding our own country. ...
• 3. Equip first responders across the country with compatible equipment that operates on the same wavelength and allows them to communicate with one another in emergency situations. ...
• 4. An Apollo project-level commitment to using American know-how to develop and produce alternative energy sources to achieve energy independence within ten years.

"The First Amendment has not repealed the ancient rule of life, that he who pays the piper calls the tune," Scalia said
...
The justice, who limited his discussion to art issues, said he wasn't suggesting that government stop funding the arts, but that if it does fund artwork, it is entitled to have a say in the content, just like when it runs a school system.

Three former members of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division say soldiers in their battalion in Iraq routinely beat and abused prisoners in 2003 and 2004 to help gather intelligence on the insurgency and to amuse themselves.
...
Even after the Abu Ghraib scandal became public, one of the sergeants said, the abuses continued. "We still did it, but we were careful," he told the human rights group

"I'm convinced this is going in a direction that's not consistent with why we came forward," Captain Fishback said in a telephone interview from Fort Bragg, N.C., where he is going through Army Special Forces training. "We came forward because of the larger issue that prisoner abuse is systemic in the Army. I'm concerned this will take a new twist, and they'll try to scapegoat some of the younger soldiers. This is a leadership problem."

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., was updated several times about his investments in blind trusts during 2002, the last time two weeks before he publicly denied any knowledge of what was in the accounts, documents show.
...
Frist, asked in a television interview in January 2003 whether he should sell his HCA stock, responded: "Well, I think really for our viewers it should be understood that I put this into a blind trust. So as far as I know, I own no HCA stock"

He also said: "I have no control. It is illegal right now for me to know what the composition of those trusts are. So I have no idea."

Steve Clemons: "Now we need to watch carefully for any meddling at all by Bill Frist buddy and new SEC boss Christopher Cox."

President Bush decided Wednesday to waive any financial sanctions on Saudi Arabia, Washington's closest Arab ally in the war on terrorism, for failing to do enough to stop the modern-day slave trade in prostitutes, child sex workers and forced laborers.

And Here:

The more I think about it, the more I think this idea of a Darwinian philosophy to governance holds total explanatory power. It really is the moral framework within which America's political rulers now work. The attacks on the poor; the cronyism; the loyalty to one's own; the efforts to concentrate presidential power; the profligate spending; the lack of concern for the environment -- all flow from a belief system fundamentally at odds with the one that gave rise to America's best governing innovations, based as they were on Enlightenment reasoning. This is not about being conservative, either fiscally or morally. It is about a survivalist ethos on the part of the governing class that has given rise to a slash-and-burn politics, a group that seeks only to take what it can for its own and hold and maintain power. The new Darwinians hold only two core beliefs. First, since power is its own justification, the strong should have dominion over the weak. To them that hath, they shall be given. Secondly, they believe that loyalty to self, family, and one's own small group (tribe) is central, while loyalty to those who are not kin, broadly considered, is irrelevant.

9.23.2005

David Sirota: "Protecting tax cuts, GOP proposes cuts to military health care" As you may recall, it was Tom DeLay who said before the Iraq invasion "Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes." Apparently to the Republicans, nothing is more important in the face of a war AND massive destruction to the homefront than cutting taxes either.

Carpetbagger: This, in essence, is the right laying its cards on the table. There's a massive deficit, hurricane relief and reconstruction efforts will be exceedingly expensive, and there's at least talk about keeping the budget from spiraling completely out of control. The Republican Study Committee stepped up to explain what conservative Republicans think is the appropriate solution: slash Medicare and Medicaid; cut military quality-of-life programs, including health care; and rely on arithmetic mistakes to find savings that don't exist.

Matthew Yglesias: WASTE, FRAUD, AND KILLING POOR PEOPLE.

The frightening -- and possibly illegal -- presence of heavily armed private forces in New Orleans only demonstrates what everyone already feared: the utter breakdown of the government.

Once a full investigation into the response to Katrina is under way, these differences may turn out to have had significant effects. For instance, during the Clinton administration, Vice President Al Gore, who ran the federal government’s management-reform efforts -- or “reinventing government,” as it was called -- constantly emphasized empowering front-line federal employees so that they could do their jobs with a minimum of red tape. This philosophy was not very popular with their bosses in the civil service, nor with their political ones, but it was frequently reinforced by the vice president himself and by the reinventing-government team. It involved, among other things, working with the federal unions that represent many front-line workers in order to get them to help us figure out what was really taking place on the ground.

In contrast, the Bush administration has centralized its reform efforts and pushed unions to the side. In so doing, it sent a powerful message to its front-line workers: Don’t take any initiative or you might end up in trouble.

National Budget Simulation

Use the pop-up menus to increase or decrease as many of the budget items as you'd like. When you're finished, click the button at the end of the document.

The Pentagon has decided to play games with the Able Danger story, virtually confirming the worst suspicions of just about everybody by first acknowledging that five of its team members recall identifying Mohammed Atta as a potential AQ terrorist a year prior to the attacks, and then forbidding these five witnesses from telling the Senate Judiciary Committee about the program. The only thing that Donald Rumsfeld has accomplished with this strategy is to introduce real bipartisanship to the Judiciary Committee,
...
What the Committee and the rest of us want is open testimony about what they found in relation to 9/11 and the known hijackers, who they identified, what they did with that information -- and who insisted on covering it up, both at the Pentagon and on the 9/11 Commission.

None of that comes under the heading of national security -- it falls into the category of covering some high-ranking ass.
...
The American people suffered the worst attack on our soil four years ago. We deserve answers about how that attack could have been prevented. The Pentagon has five witnesses that speak directly to that issue who have been prevented from speaking to the representatives of the people. Arlen Specter needs to subpoena those five witnesses, all of the senior officers in the chain of command for Able Danger, and Donald Rumsfeld himself to answer for why the Pentagon will not cooperate. Four years of hiding Able Danger is long enough.

I have long been persuaded that the news media collectively will be sent to hell not for our sins of commission, but our sins of omission. The real scandal in the media is not bias, it is laziness. Laziness and bad news judgment. Our failure is what we miss, what we fail to cover, what we let slip by, what we don't give enough attention to -- because, after all, we have to cover Jennifer and Brad, and Scott and Laci, and Whosit who disappeared in Aruba without whom the world can scarce carry on.

Happily, the perfect news peg, as we say in the biz, for Media Accountability Day already exists -- it's Project Censored's annual release of the 10 biggest stories ignored or under-covered by mainstream media. Project Censored is based at Sonoma State University, with both faculty and students involved in its preparation.

9.21.2005

Wapo: "Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a potential presidential candidate in 2008, sold all his stock in his family's hospital corporation about two weeks before it issued a disappointing earnings report and the price fell nearly 15 percent."

Josh Marshall: "There's a lot of discussion and detail in Thursday's Post story about the Frist stock sale. But this passage at the end sticks out like a sore thumb ..."

According to Thomson Financial, a reporting service, seven senior HCA executives sold 574,882 shares worth $19,942,610 between May 17 and June 10

The number of deep connections between prominent Republican players and individuals and groups who have since been connected with terrorism-related activities is one of the underexplored and underdiscussed topics of the last few years.

The Department of Defense forbade a military intelligence officer to testify Wednesday about the work of a secret military unit that identified four 9/11 hijackers more than a year before the Sept. 11 terrorists attacks, according to the man's attorney.
In written testimony prepared for the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, attorney Mark Zaid, who represents Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, said the Pentagon also refused to permit testimony there by a defense contractor that he also represents.
...
On three occasions, Able Danger personnel attempted to provide the FBI with information, but Department of Defense attorneys stopped them because of legal concerns about military-run investigations on U.S. soil, Zaid said in his prepared remarks, encouraging the panel to locate a legal memorandum that he said Defense Department attorneys used to justify stopping the meetings.
Zaid also charged that records associated with the unit were destroyed during 2000 and March 2001, and copies were destroyed in spring 2004.

Jack Balkin: Many readers no doubt will disagree with some of what Prof. Merrill has to say. But I think most will agree that this is the most formidable, and most important, defense of Kelo yet available.

9.20.2005 Dan Eggen and Spencer S. Hsu: Washington Post

The Bush administration is seeking to appoint a lawyer with little immigration or customs experience to head the troubled law enforcement agency that handles those issues, prompting sharp criticism from some employee groups, immigration advocates and homeland security experts.
...
Her uncle is Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, the departing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She married Chertoff's current chief of staff, John F. Wood, on Saturday.

9.20.2005 "Stem cells aid spinal cord injured-mice"

9.20.2005 "New York - Police cut short a speech by anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, arresting a rally organiser accused of failing to obtain audio permits for the event, according to published reports."

9.19.2005 Carpetbagger: Bush approaches Katrina as he does everything else

The White House, in other words, is treating this disaster just as it has treated everything else — as an opportunity to pick a fight, advance its agenda, divide the nation along ideological lines, and Swiftboat anyone who gets in the way. Considering the speed with which the Bush gang moved on these items, it apparently never even occurred to them to put politics aside and rally the nation behind the idea of working together to address the crisis. We're talking about a political operation that only knows one move.

There was a time in American politics when it was accepted that there were some things you just don't do. I wonder if anyone still believes such a standard even exists anymore.

"Tax cuts are always popular," Clinton said. "But about half of these tax cuts since 2001 have gone to people in my income group, the top 1 percent. I've gotten four tax cuts.

"Now, what Americans need to understand is that that means every single day of the year, our government goes into the market and borrows money from other countries to finance Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina and our tax cuts," Clinton added. "We depend on Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia and Korea primarily to basically loan us money every day of the year to cover my tax cut and these conflicts and Katrina. I don't think it makes any sense. I think it's wrong."

So, the guy who oversees federal contracts gets arrested. Turns out he's a good buddy of Jack "Love Me Some Tom DeLay" Abramoff.

No More Mister Nice Blog: "By the way, don't forget that young women in the North Marianas Islands -- a U.S. territory -- were apparently forced into sex slavery, and required to have abortions, while fine folks such as Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, and newly indicted White House aide-until-just-a-few-days-ago David Safavian worked to keep the Marianas exempt from various U.S. laws relating to human trafficking, sexual abuse, and civil rights, not to mention the minimum wage. Over at Sisyphus Shrugged, Julia has a roundup of the relevant news stories."

Julia: "Ponder the fact that the guy Our Fearless Leader chose to head procurement for OMB, who had no experience in procurement, was given his job because he did such a great job protecting sex slavery and forced abortion."

"An email sent by Safavian appears to indicate that the powerful Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) lied when he said he was "duped" by Abramoff and lied again on financial disclosure forms when he said that a nonprofit had paid for the trip, RAW STORY has found."

Paul Sperry: (article has disappeared) But Safavian's not just tied to a dirty lobbyist. He's also tied to a convicted terrorist and a suspected terrorist supporter. Lobbying disclosure forms revealed last year that he has been in the employ of Abdurahman Alamoudi, an avowed supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah. Prosecutors have discovered evidence that he has links to al-Qaeda. At the time, Safavian waved aside any affiliation to Alamoudi. He insisted that he was really lobbying for a client named Jamal al Barzinji. That revelation did little to clear Safavian’s name: A federal affidavit identifies Barzinji as the ringleader of a group suspected of aiding terrorists.
...
His ouster from the White House certainly comes as good news. But question remains, how did he ever get promoted there in the first place? Why did the Senate give him a pass regarding his apparent ties to Alamoudi and his failure to disclose his admitted ties to Barzinji? His powerful patron Norquist holds the key to these questions. He has the ear of his old pal Karl Rove, who happens to be the president's closest political adviser. And he has successfully recommended other Islamic Institute alumni for high-ranking jobs.

9.19.2005 A Diebold Insider Speaks Out"

Your electoral system in America -- theoretically the world's greatest democracy -- has been sold to the corporate interests. It's gone. It's been sold. Your Republican and Democratic elected leaders watched it happen.

9.20.2005 "FEMA: A LEGACY OF WASTE" Sun-Sentinel Investigaion

9.19.2005 "GOP Uses Katrina to Gut Environmental Laws" 9.19.2005 Jeanne: Poisoned

Brad Plumer wonders if the economic interest in rebuilding New Orleans quickly will create pressure on the EPA to downplay health issues. Following the dizzying speed with which we moved from warnings about "toxic soup" to assurances that everything was going to be all right, and then plunging back in the soup, I had the same thought. But also, weirdly enough, the opposite one: Were health concerns overplayed to force out people who didn't want to leave?

Does it make any sense to have both concerns? Probably not, but I think it's an understandable consequence of living with an administration for which science is just something to be spun for political benefit: No matter what they say, it's impossible to trust them.

It's not just the atmosphere in Louisiana that's been poisoned.

Calling talk among Republican senators of proceeding with a plan to repeal the estate tax "mind-boggling," Sen. Barak Obama, D-Ill., said the country could not fight a war in Iraq, rebuild the Gulf region and deal with other domestic needs while cutting taxes for the wealthy.

"We need some adult supervision of the budget process. And we need to take responsibility for this process. That's something that we need from the president as well as our congressional leaders," Obama told "Face the Nation" on CBS

Whatever his other accomplishments, Bush will go down in history as the most fiscally irresponsible chief executive in American history.
...
Today's Republicans believe in pork, but they don't believe in government. So we have the largest government in history but one that is weak and dysfunctional. Public spending is a cynical game of buying votes or campaign contributions, an utterly corrupt process run by lobbyists and special interests with no concern for the national interest. So we shovel out billions on "Homeland Security" to stave off nonexistent threats to Wisconsin, Wyoming and Montana while New York and Los Angeles remain unprotected. We mismanage crises with a crazy-quilt patchwork of federal, local and state authorities—and sing paeans to federalism to explain our incompetence. We denounce sensible leadership and pragmatism because they mean compromise and loss of ideological purity. Better to be right than to get Iraq right.

The U.S. Defense Department is taking another run at law schools that have refused to let military recruiters visit their campuses because of the Pentagon’s stance on gay servicemen and women. But so far, the only institutions the department has singled out for possible loss of federal funds are three independent law schools. One other law school that has barred military recruiters — Yale’s — is shielded from Pentagon retribution by a court’s injunction, while Harvard’s law school, which last fall declared its intention to bar military recruiters, seems to have been left alone so far.

Stabilizing Iraq is a political as well as a military challenge. The administration is taking a huge gamble by going forward with a referendum for a constitution that is more likely to divide Iraq than to unite it.
...
The consequences for U.S. interests could be devastating. Sectarian violence might escalate into a full-blown civil war, drawing in Syria, Iran and Turkey and turning Iraq into a new Lebanon. Even worse, Iraqi Sunnis could forge stronger alliances with foreign jihadists, turning a swath of Iraq into a pre-Sept. 11 Afghanistan for a new generation of terrorists.
...
Successfully involving moderate Sunnis, sharing the burden with the key international players, getting support from the region, setting concrete goals with timelines and insisting on regular accountability from the administration would bring our troops home sooner and safer. It's also the best way to leave Iraq with our most fundamental security interests intact.

By the end, the baseball metaphors of the early hearing had given way to gambling analogies. Schumer one-upped Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), who had declared that senators were "rolling the dice with you, Judge." Schumer said Thursday: "This isn't just rolling the dice. It's betting the whole house."

That's right, and it's why as many senators as possible should vote no on Roberts -- by way of saying no to this charade. A majority of "no's," very unlikely to be sure, need not mean the end of his nomination. It would constitute a just demand for Roberts (and whoever Bush names next) to answer more questions in a more forthcoming way and for the administration to provide information that the public, and not just the Senate, deserves.

How many senators will have the guts to make that statement?

"Five minutes into the telecast, I expected Bush to pull a wad of bills out of his pocket and start running around laughing hysterically, handing the cash to anyone and everyone. I couldn't hear his words anymore. All I could see was his hand reaching into my wallet. It's like he drove me to my bank, walked me up to the ATM machine, put my debit card in and started punching in the pin number. Really! I'm thinking..."Hey, how does he know my pin number?" And then he starts emptying my checking AND savings account while I stand there dumbfounded."

Billmon: "The differences between market-based solutions that encourage entrepreneurship and self sufficiency, and bureaucratic programs that breed dependency and social pathology, may be obvious to the cubicle dwellers at the American Enterprise Institute, but I seriously doubt they'll impress the fuck you boys -- or their more upscale cousins, who look at Bush emoting for the TV cameras and only see a grasping hand reaching for their wallets."
...
Peeling off at least a sliver of the black Democratic vote appears to have become a strategic GOP priority, if not a necessity.
The New Orleans fiasco, of course, pushed that outreach effort right into the toxic soup. If pissing off the Afrikaner right is the price that has to be paid for getting it back on track, the Rovians may be willing to accept it, on the assumption they can always get the fuck you boys back later. Where are they going to go, the Democrats?

The President suspended wage standards for workers on the Gulf Coast before he declared a national emergency. That means he was so focused on cutting the wages of people who'd be returning to the Gulf Coast to rebuild their lives and their communities that, in order to hasten the suspension, he failed to follow the law. And at the same time the White House was cutting workers' wages, it was busy awarding no-bid contracts. The President has proven once again that he's more interested in governing for the few than in governing for all of us.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove personally called the Texas secretary of state about a newspaper story quoting a staff lawyer about whether Mr. Rove was eligible to vote in the state.
The lawyer was subsequently fired.
Secretary of State Roger Williams said that he decided to dismiss the lawyer after talking with Mr. Rove but that the White House adviser didn't request that he do so.
...
Texas law provides that residents may continue to claim property in the state as a voting residence if their intent is to return. Mr. Rove owns a house in Washington and recently built a home in Florida.
The cottages in Texas were part of the River Oaks Lodge that Mr. Rove and his wife, Darby, once owned on the Guadalupe River near Ingram. They sold the lodge in 2003 but kept the two cottages, which the bed-and-breakfast rents to guests.
Mr. Williams, a Weatherford car dealer, raised at least $100,000 for George W. Bush's 2000 presidential campaign and in 2004 was among the elite tier of Bush Rangers, who each raised at least $200,000 for the president's re-election.

Josh Marshall: "But for the morons among us, Williams would like to make clear that Rove's call had nothing to do with it."

Frank Rich: Katrina Exposed All Bush's Failings: “The Rampant Cronyism, The Empty Sloganeering...The Lack Of Concern For The 'Underprivileged', The Reckless Lack Of Planning...The Use Of Spin And Photo-Ops To Camouflage Failure And To Substitute For Action”…

9.17.2005 Fox News: "Sources: Pentagon Wants 'Able Danger' Hearings Closed"

The Pentagon has changed its position on this story, from originally questioning the very existence of Able Danger (search ) to now confirming that the Defense Department has identified five former members of the unit who all say they remember Atta's picture or name, on a chart in 2000.
...
the Pentagon confirmed this month that documents associated with Able Danger were destroyed because of strict regulations governing the collection of data on foreign visitors in the United States

NYT: "FEMA, Slow to the Rescue, Now Stumbles in Aid Effort"

Atrios: "FEMA -- Still screwing up everything. At some point it has to be deliberate. No one is this incompetent."

Arianna: "Katrina Relief: It's Iraq Déjà vu All Over Again"

"Our goal is to get the work done quickly. And taxpayers expect this work to be done honestly and wisely -- so we'll have a team of inspectors general reviewing all expenditures" George W. Bush -- "President Discusses Hurricane Relief. September 15, 2005"

Billmon reports the more interesting of the recent scandals involving Bush's Inspectors General.

Who will be the first and who will be the last to broach the subject of whether the president's chief political operative should be in charge of the largest domestic reconstruction effort since the Civil War.

Let's list off some of the worthies ... Russert, Brian Williams, Times editorial page, Post editorial page, Stephanopoulos, Schiefer, Hume, Matthews, Wallace, Juan Williams, Will, Mitchell.

We'll make a list and put it up on a separate page. Let us know who broaches the subject and when. And we'll see who's the last one standing.

If Cheney had his way, there wouldn't be any government left to disinvent -- just a service desk for the pipeline companies to call when they need to get the power back on. And Halliburton could easily handle that.
...
Schmitt argues that the real problem isn't the quality of the political appointees, but the fact that the Rovians apparently believe that controlling even the most minute bureaucratic functions directly from the White House is an adequate substitute for competent management at the agency level.
...
In a sense, what the Rovians have created is a parallel government, in which the real channels of power run through the party apparatus, not the organizational charts of the various departments and agencies. This, says Schmitt, is the real story -- not the creative resume writing skills of guys like Mike Brown:

That's why it's so important to . . . focus some attention on the system that made it all possible -- a radical, unprecedented system of centralized, politicized control that is guaranteed to fail.

9.16.2005

"Bush: One of the worst disasters to hit the United States."
See also: Bush Presidential Speech List

Hours after Hurricane Katrina passed New Orleans on Aug. 29, (Monday) as the scale of the catastrophe became clear, Michael D. Brown recalls, he placed frantic calls to his boss, Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, and to the office of the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr.
...
... Mr. Brown's account, in which he described making "a blur of calls" all week to Mr. Chertoff, Mr. Card and Mr. Hagin, suggested that Mr. Bush, or at least his top aides, were informed early and repeatedly by the top federal official at the scene that state and local authorities were overwhelmed and that the overall response was going badly.

9.15.2005 "Cheney orders rural electric crews to work on oil pipeline from Texas"

That order -- to restart two power substations in Collins that serve Colonial Pipeline Co. -- delayed efforts by at least 24 hours to restore power to two rural hospitals and a number of water systems in the Pine Belt.
...
Callahan said he feared supplying power to the Colonial Pipeline could have endangered the entire rural electric system that had been repaired so far -- including power to Wesley Medical Center in Hattiesburg.
...
"In the future, the federal government needs to give us guidelines if this is such a national emergency so that I can work that in my plans."

9.16.2005 "Weldon: Atta Papers Destroyed on Orders"

A Pentagon employee was ordered to destroy documents that identified Mohamed Atta as a terrorist two years before the 2001 attacks, a congressman said Thursday.
The employee is prepared to testify next week before the Senate Judiciary Committee and was expected to name the person who ordered him to destroy the large volume of documents, said Rep. Curt Weldon (news, bio, voting record), R-Pa.

9.16.2005 "G.O.P. Split Over Big Plans for Storm Spending"

9.16.2005 Tucker Carlson:

But the most interesting line in the whole thing to me was his line that racism causes poverty and that federal spending is the result—is the solution to that. Now, that may be right, it may be wrong. It‘s not conservative. Conservatives don‘t believe that. And to hear a purportedly conservative president to say that is unreal.
...
And the conservatives watching this speech tonight who noticed that line are sitting bolt upright right now, thinking, did I just hear him say that? It's a big deal. Trust me.
...
This guy is a bigger spender than Bill Clinton. That may be good, it may be bad. It‘s not conservative.

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