"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"...

10.15.2005 The New York Times finally reports on Judith Miller.

Arianna's take on it, and Jane Hamsher's and David Corn's

and

The Anymous Liberal: So what does all this have to do with the June conversation between Judith Miller and Scooter Libby? Well, if these press reports are accurate, Libby's substantive defense to charges that he violated the IIPA or Espionage Act is that he first learned about Plame from Russert (or some other journalist) and therefore he could not knowingly have been peddling classified information when he spoke to other journalists about Plame. His conversation with Russert is known to have taken place in July 2003. Murray Waas reports, however, that Libby spoke to Miller on June 23 about Plame.

The "Horse's Head" theory is much nastier. On this account, since Joseph Wilson had made trouble it became Administration policy to damage him in every way possible, and wrecking his wife's career and destroying her life's work was as good a way as any. As Kevin Drum puts it, "outing Plame might very well have been deliberate, a way of sending a very strong message that this administration was not to be [mess]ed with."
...
So -- putting aside the possibility that the White House shared the pathological hatred of the CIA as an institution that characterized the extreme parts of Red Blogistan -- it seems to me that the Keystone Kops theory is the least hypothesis: a hideous mistake in the course of petty political infighting, compounded by a cover-up.

ANDREA MITCHELL: Well, I think that there is also the dog that hasn't barked, if you will. There was a CIA-NSC connection here, because it was the CIA that was telling the NSC, for instance, all the way back before the State of the Union: “Don't let the president say this about the Niger uranium in the Cincinnati speech.” And then, again, “Don't say it in the State of the Union speech.”
...
So I think that there are other potential players here. And while we focus on Scooter Libby and, appropriately, on the people like Karl Rove who are going to testify again tomorrow, there are still unseen hands that may play a role in the final results of this investigation.

Meet the Press 10.16.2005:

MR. RUSSERT: Let me ask you a couple of questions, domestic questions. Have you testified under oath in the CIA leak investigation?
SEC'Y RICE: Tim, I'm not going to talk about an ongoing investigation. I've cooperated in any way that I've been asked to cooperate.

10.13.2005 "President Bush's job-approval rating among African Americans has dropped to 2 percent, according to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll" and, as Keith Olberman just pointed out, there is a 3% margin of error.

10.13.2005 Curb the Avian Flu: Lose the American Handshake

I soon learned that “Namaste” doesn’t really mean “Peace” as I thought it did. The gesture symbolizes the belief that there is a divine spark within each of us and it literally translates to “I bow to you” or figuratively, “The Divine within me honors The Divine within you.” In light of the world’s of persistent religious friction, I’ll take “Namaste” over the dueling guys-in-the-sky (Jesus, Allah, etc.) any day.

The War on Terror permitted the administration to put an end to the concept that everyone is equal before the law.

I would like to take this occasion, my first appearance on the Huffington Post, to offer the first official Fog Facts Challenge!

Give us $2,000,000,000 (two hundred billion dollars) and we will deliver to you Osama bin Laden, and any ten others to be named later, or double your money back!

10.12.2005 The General:

Dear Mr. Ailes,

I can't tell you how dissappointed I was to hear Fox News Channel being scooped by its own consultant and talent. That's what happened last Friday when Fox News Intelligence Consultant, Wayne Simmons, dropped a bombshell during Alan Colmes's radio show and identified liberal columnist David Corn as the person who betrayed Valerie Plame Wilson (MP3 file).
...
Heterosexually yours,
Gen. JC Christian, patriot

10.12.2005 "Simply Not Good Enough" by Andrew Cohen

10.12.2005 WSJ:

The John Roberts era began this week at the Supreme Court, and one of the first cases on the docket stands to tell us a good deal about the new Chief Justice's view on federal power. On Wednesday the Court heard oral arguments in Gonzales v. Oregon, in which the Justice Department is challenging Oregon's so-called assisted-suicide law, using the federal Controlled Substances Act as a club.
...
A finding for the Attorney General in the Oregon case would repeat that mistake on the question of assisted suicide. We have never been proponents of physician-assisted suicide as a matter of public policy, but as Rehnquist noted in Glucksberg, that's a question that should be settled democratically, not by judicial or regulatory diktat.

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you, you just raised a curtain-raiser for me. I didn‘t even know this.

You believe that the fight between those who may be headed toward indictment, the vice president‘s chief of staff, Karl Rove, there is a war between them and the people who are going to survive them, Andy Card, etcetera.

FINEMAN: Yes.

"Mr. Fitzgerald's pursuit now suggests he might be investigating not a narrow case on the leaking of the agent's name, but perhaps a broader conspiracy.
...
Lawyers familiar with the investigation believe that at least part of the outcome likely hangs on the inner workings of what has been dubbed the White House Iraq Group. Formed in August 2002, the group, which included Messrs. Rove and Libby, worked on setting strategy for selling the war in Iraq to the public in the months leading up to the March 2003 invasion. The group likely would have played a significant role in responding to Mr. Wilson's claims.
...
Given that the grand jury is set to expire on Oct. 28, it is possible charges in this case could come as early as next week. Former federal prosecutors say it is traditional not to wait for the last minute and run the risk of not having enough jurors to reach a quorum. There are 23 members of a grand jury, and 16 are needed for a quorum before any indictments could be voted on. This grand jury has traditionally met on Wednesdays and Fridays

This group was the organizational team, the core group behind all the shameless crap that went down in the lead up to the Iraq war -- the lies about the cooked up Niger story, everything. If Fitzgerald has lassoed this operation into a criminal conspiracy, the veil of protective secrecy in which the whole operation is still shrouded will be pulled back

Digby: WHIGging Out

Read this (pdf) report called "Truth from These Podia: Summary of a Study of Strategic Influence, Perception Management, Strategic Information Warfare and Strategic Psychological Operations in Gulf II," written by Colonel Sam Gardiner who identified 50 false news stories created and leaked by a secretive White House propaganda apparatus. Here's a news story about it

10.11.2005 "AP: Frist Accumulated Stock Outside Trusts"

Outside the blind trusts he created to avoid a conflict of interest, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist earned tens of thousands of dollars from stock in a family-founded hospital chain largely controlled by his brother, documents show.

Has Rummy been using drummed up charges of sexual misconduct to silence his military critics? Scott Horton at Balkinization examines the evidence -- beginning with the railroad job done on Guantanamo whisteblower John Yee, and continuing with the cases of three generals who, in one way or another, questioned Rumsfeld's official actions and ended up publicly disgraced and/or chased into retirement for allegedly engaging in consensual sexual relationships:

Beware of leaders who drink their own Kool-Aid. The most distressing aspect of Mr. Bush's press conference last week was less his lies and half-truths than the abundant evidence that he is as out of touch as Custer was on the way to Little Bighorn. The president seemed genuinely shocked that anyone could doubt his claim that his friend is the best-qualified candidate for the highest court. Mr. Bush also seemed unaware that it was Republicans who were leading the attack on Ms. Miers. "The decision as to whether or not there will be a fight is up to the Democrats," he said, confusing his antagonists this time much as he has Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
...
Oct. 15 is the day that Iraqis vote on their constitution and the day that the president set as a deadline for all hurricane victims to be moved out of shelters. Chances are that the number of Americans who still have faith that the light is at the end of either of these tunnels is identical to the number who believe Harriet Miers is the second coming of Antonin Scalia and that Tom Cruise has found true love.

Mr. Dobson, the influential founder of the conservative evangelical group Focus on the Family,
( and America's foremost analyst of the gay subtext of SpongeBob SquarePants )
has said he is supporting Ms. Miers's nomination in part because of something he has been told but cannot divulge. He has not disclosed the source of the information, but he has acknowledged speaking with Karl Rove, President Bush's top political adviser, about the president's pick before it was announced.On his radio program last Wednesday, Mr. Dobson said, "When you know some of the things that I know - that I probably shouldn't know - you will understand why I have said, with fear and trepidation, that I believe Harriet Miers will be a good justice."

The supreme irony is that Plame’s now-compromised network was reporting on the priority-one issue of US intelligence—weapons of mass destruction. Thus, it was made clear to all, including active and potential intelligence sources abroad, that even when high-priority intelligence targets are involved, Bush administration officials do not shrink from exposing such sources for petty political purpose. The harm to CIA and its efforts to recruit spies instinctively wary of the risks in providing intelligence information is immense.

Bush cited 10 "serious al Qaeda terrorist plots," but offered no details, whetting reporters' appetites. Asked for support materials, the White House said initially that it couldn't prove any. The Bush gang, in the words of the WaPo, "scrambl[ed] all day."

What did they come up with? Nothing that helped their case.

The White House later issued a list of the foiled plots, citing potential Sept. 11-style airliner attacks on both coasts, a plan to blow up apartment buildings and surveillance of gas stations, bridges and tourist sites nationwide. But several senior law enforcement officials interviewed later questioned whether many of the incidents on the list constituted an imminent threat to public safety and said that authorities had not disrupted any operational terrorist plot within the United States since the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. (emphasis added)

It's breathtaking to think anyone still finds Bush's claims credible at all. Anyone who trusts this president's word just isn't paying attention.

"[A]bstinence only" advocates love HPV. That's because the virus can be spread by skin-to-skin contact other than intercourse, meaning that condoms are less effective at preventing HPV infection than blocking the spread of other STDs. Abstinence groups don't want a vaccine to eliminate this fear factor. "Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex," says Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council, a Christian lobby that plans to fight a Merck campaign to make HPV vaccination mandatory for all girls by the time they enter junior high. Of course, absolutely no evidence supports Maher's claim. But there's plenty of evidence that an HPV vaccine will prevent thousands of needless deaths.

10.9.2005 Mark Kleiman: "Patrick Fitzgerald's Mousetrap"

10.9.2005 Sydney H. Schanberg:

Since her release, Miller has gone on television to defend her actions, but has not cleared up any of the mysteries. In these appearances, she has said repeatedly that if sources' identities were not protected, many of them would not come forward and tell reporters what shenanigans the government and major corporations were really up to, and the public would suffer. "The public's right to know" is at stake, she says again and again. And she's right. That's why I believe, since she is a major part of the story, that she now has to take the uncommon step of telling us her whole story. She has to do it for the public she says she is responsible to, for her colleagues, and for the Times, whose reputation is also at stake here.

Senior White House aide Karl Rove denied to US President George W. Bush that he engaged in an effort to disclose the identity of a covert CIA operative to discredit her husband's criticism of the administration's Iraq policy, according to people familiar with Rove's statements in a criminal investigation.

Fitzgerald has also summoned New York Times reporter Judith Miller back for questioning this week: a notebook was discovered in the paper's Washington bureau, reflecting a late June 2003 conversation with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, about Wilson and his trip to Africa, says one of the lawyers. The notebook may also be significant because Wilson's identity was not yet public. A lawyer for the Times declined to comment.

"However, there was an additional sign that Fitzgerald continued to investigate aggressively. He phoned Wilson on Sept. 29, the same day Miller, the New York Times reporter jailed for refusing to divulge her confidential source, was released from jail after agreeing to testify in the case. She testified the next day."
Wilson declined in an interview to discuss the nature of their conversation, but confirmed that it occurred.

Only for those Americans in the top 1 percent, the nearly 1.3 million taxpayers who made at least $327,000, did incomes increase significantly more in 2003 than the rate of inflation. And this increase was concentrated within the top tenth of 1 percent. The income of that group grew by 9.5 percent in 2003 over the previous year while the rest of the top 1 percent had a gain of 3.7 percent.

For the bottom 99 percent of taxpayers, income rose by slightly less than 2 percent, which was below the inflation rate of 2.3 percent.

10.7.2005 Suicide bombing in Oaklahoma under reported.

10.7.2005 Deepak Chopra: "If indeed her flaw is rigid loyalty to the right wing, we are no worse off than if the President had nominated another Scalia. But if Miers grows to the left, which is to say, if she begins to empathize with America's vast, diverse population instead of the rich white males who have determined her fate so far, the country will be well served by her."

10.7.2005 " Terrorists Seize Headlines As Bush Poll Numbers Fall"

10.7.2005 "CO - (where the CO stands for COncentration camp.)"

10.6.2005 "CO-7 Why you should care about Colorado" That's my boy!

10.6.2005 "God told me to invade Iraq, Bush tells Palestinian ministers"

10.6.2005 "Court Rules in Favor of Anonymous Blogger"

Steele described the Internet as a "unique democratizing medium unlike anything that has come before," and said anonymous speech in blogs and chat rooms in some instances can become the modern equivalent of political pamphleteering. Accordingly, a plaintiff claiming defamation should be required to provide sufficient evidence to overcome a defendant's motion for summary judgment before a court orders the disclosure of a blogger's identity.
...
"Given the context, no reasonable person could have interpreted these statements as being anything other than opinion. ... The statements are, therefore, incapable of a defamatory meaning," he wrote."

10.6.2005 Gadflyer: "Did we just listen/watch yet another Bush speech full of generalities, platitudes, stock phrases, and categorical exhortations without one whit of detail about how he plans to accomplish all the inevitable victories of which he speaks?"

10.6.2005 "Senate sets standards on detainees -- Lawmakers defy Bush to overwhelmingly OK McCain bill in response to Abu Ghraib"

But McCain struck an emotional chord with his colleagues as he recalled his more than five years in a POW camp.

"Our enemies didn't adhere to the Geneva Conventions," he said, referring to the international agreement on the treatment of prisoners of war. "Many of my comrades were subjected to very cruel, very inhumane and degrading treatment, a few of them even unto death.

"But every one of us -- every single one of us -- knew and took great strength from the belief that we were different from our enemies, that we were better than them, that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or countenancing such mistreatment of them."

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a retired four-star Army general, endorsed McCain's effort.
...
"The military generally employs the Army Field Manual but has deviated from it at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere, using interrogation techniques such as sleep deprivation and other methods to wear down detainees' resistance." (fearless reporting)

Billmon: The U.S. Senators who voted for torture:

• Allard (R-CO)
• Bond (R-MO)
• Coburn (R-OK)
• Cochran (R-MS)
• Cornyn (R-TX)
• Inhofe (R-OK)
• Roberts (R-KS)
• Sessions (R-AL)
• Stevens (R-AK)

"Ask not for whom the war crimes tribunal asks, it asks for you."

He finally then discussed why he is supporting Miers, saying "I can't reveal it all, because I do know things that I'm privy to that I can't describe, because of confidentiality." He then states that Miers "is a deeply committed Christian" and that people who know her have all told him that "she will not be a disappointment."

10.5.2005 George Will:

It is important that Miers not be confirmed unless, in her 61st year, she suddenly and unexpectedly is found to have hitherto undisclosed interests and talents pertinent to the court's role. Otherwise the sound principle of substantial deference to a president's choice of judicial nominees will dissolve into a rationalization for senatorial abdication of the duty to hold presidents to some standards of seriousness that will prevent them from reducing the Supreme Court to a private plaything useful for fulfilling whims on behalf of friends.

10.3.2005 Wiki Legislation

Has anyone at a news organization tried this yet? It's an intriguing idea.

My Poynter colleague, Larry Larsen, wonders if it might be an interesting experiment to publish a piece of pending legislation as a wiki, inviting the public to edit and improve the bill. At the end of the process, run the two bills side by side, with a reporter analyzing the differences.

10.3.2005 Frank Rich:

Mr. DeLay's latest plight is only a tiny detail within this vast Boschian canvas of depravity. If this were Watergate - and Watergate itself increasingly looks like a relatively contained epidemic of corruption - the Texas grand jury's indictment of the congressman and his associates would be a sideshow tantamount to the initial 1973 California grand jury indictment of the Nixon aide John Ehrlichman and his pals in the break-in at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office; Watergate's real legal fireworks were still in the wings. So forget about all those details down in Texas that make your teeth hurt; don't bother to learn the difference between Trmpac and Armpac. Fasten your seat belt instead for the roller coaster of other revelations and possible indictments that's about to roar through the Beltway.

AP: Although Miers' personal view of abortion was not explicit in 1993, Leonard Leo, a White House adviser on Supreme Court nominations highlighted her efforts as part of the reason that "conservatives should be very happy with this selection."
As a leader of the bar, Harriet Miers was a fearless and very strong proponent of conservative legal views. She led a campaign to have the American Bar Association end its practice of supporting abortion-on- demand and taxpayer-funded abortions," Leo said a memo on the Miers nomination.

Patrick Buchanan: "Miers' Qualifications Are 'Non-Existent'

William Kristol: "But her selection will unavoidably be judged as reflecting a combination of cronyism and capitulation on the part of the president."

What is depressing here is not what the nomination tells us of her, but what it tells us of the president who appointed her. For in selecting her, Bush capitulated to the diversity-mongers, used a critical Supreme Court seat to reward a crony, and revealed that he lacks the desire to engage the Senate in fierce combat to carry out his now-suspect commitment to remake the court in the image of Scalia and Thomas. In picking her, Bush ran from a fight. The conservative movement has been had -- and not for the first time by a president by the name of Bush

"She rose to her present position by her absolute devotion to George Bush. I mentioned last week that she told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met. To flatter on such a scale a person must either be an unscrupulous dissembler, which Miers most certainly is not, or a natural follower. And natural followers do not belong on the Supreme Court of the United States."

Q. Will the Medicare benefit keep drug costs down?

A. Not likely. Pharmaceutical companies spend millions lobbying Congress, and it paid off in a provision in the law that prohibits federal officials from negotiating lower prices with drug companies. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., last week said he had secured enough votes to pass a bill allowing the government to negotiate for a better deal. Opposition from the Bush administration, GOP leaders and the pharmaceutical companies will ensure it will never win House approval.

While the essential facts required to prove that the Vice president's office are coming to light (after having been discussed on-line for years), the juiciest bits of this meal remain hidden in plain sight. Ask yourselves the question: "Why go after Ms. Plame?" Whereas the conventional wisdom answers "in order to discredit Mr. Wilson", this is not the only reason. What was Ms. Plame working on? Who would be implicated if she were to uncover the vast network of nuclear proliferation? Perhaps Mr. A Q Khan's name comes to mind. Next step - who was Mr. Khan dealing with?...and who knew about it?

10.2.2005 Billmon:

"But in light of everything I've learned about Fitzgerald, I trust him to play it straight. So I'll say this ahead of time: If Fitzgerald concludes no crimes were committed -- or, more likely, that insufficient evidence exists to indict -- I'll take his word for it. We'll just have to find other scandals to chase. It's not like there's any shortage of them."

Mr. Bush's father had the courage to veto 44 bills in four years, and President Ronald Reagan once vetoed a transportation bill because it contained about 150 pork projects. But the bill that Mr. Bush just signed contained at least 6,000 pork projects.
...
But while Mr. Bush cares fervently, and scandalously, about the imperative of keeping inhumane practices legal, he does not care as much about waste of taxpayers' money.

10.2.2005 Jonathan Alter: "Congress has always had its share of extremists. But the DeLay era is the first time the fringe has ever been in charge."

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."

• Baghdad Burning
• Billmon
• Carpetbagger
• Christian Coalition Ratings
• Steven C. Clemons
• DAOU (Subscription)
• Digby
• Maureen Dowd
• Drudge
• Gen. JC Christian, patriot
• The Huffington Post
• Headingleft, Sander and Aaron
• Memeorandum
• No More Mister Nice Blog
• Publius
• Wikipedia
• Farid Zakaria

Guantanamo ... Social Security ... Wilson/Plame Timeline ... Judicial Nominations

The U.S. Constitution
See also

Civil Disobedience, by Henry David Thoreau

Kos: Katrina Timeline

US Code, Section 793 Espionage and Censorship

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