THREATS AND WARNINGS
First DeLay, now this: where is the backlash against this kind of irresponsible hate-mongering?
http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_04_03_atrios_archive.html#111265373048112355
SENATOR JOHN CORNYN: "I don't know if there is a cause-and-effect connection but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. Certainly nothing new, but we seem to have run through a spate of courthouse violence recently that's been on the news and I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in - engage in violence.
[NB: Isn’t this what the Right, in other contexts, would call “blaming the victim”?]
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/04/breaking-gop-senator-john-cornyn-r-tx.html
[John Aravosis] Senator John Cornyn should resign immediately. . . We now have Republican Senators making excuses for terrorists. Explaining why terrorism is understandable. Why terrorists have legitimate concerns. Justifying why the victims of terrorism are really to blame for these heinous crimes. Wonder what Senator Cornyn thinks of rape victims? . . . This is utterly outrageous. Outrageous. The GOP is now embracing domestic terrorists who are trying to undermine our democracy. And they're doing it so they can take down the judges who "killed" Terri Schiavo, and instead impose some Pat Robertson-like theocracy on our country. This is absolutely utterly beyond contempt. Tell Judge Lefkow in Chicago that her mother and husband are dead because she brought it on herself.
http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2005/04/how_to_do_thing.html
[Matt Yglesias] I can't really say what game John Cornyn thinks he's playing by speculating out loud on the floor of the U.S. Senate that maybe judges wouldn't get killed so often by demented rapists if they were more willing to bow to conservative theories of constitutional exegesis. It's clear, though, that whatever his subjective understanding of his actions is, this is one of those situations where the existence of violent extremists can be a very useful thing to more moderate people. The best example, I think, is the case of the anti-abortion terrorists. There aren't really all that many people out there who've shot doctors or bombed clinics. But there are a few. And there's a much larger group of people who like to protest outside clinics, as is their right as Americans. But the exercise of this right wouldn't do much to actually advance the anti-choice agenda were it not for the existence of your terrorist handful. It's clear if you've ever been to a perpetually-protested clinic that the people who work there and the women who avail themselves of the services under offer operate under a non-trivial climate of fear. . . This stuff makes a difference. I don't say that most pro-lifers approve of anti-abortion terrorism. Clearly, they don't. Nevertheless, their cause benefits from it. In the wake of a killing there may be a backlash of some sort, but such things fade among the general public. They don't fade among the set of medical professionals who, at the margin, decide they'd rather not spend their lives dealing with might-be-terrorist activists harassing them constantly. It makes a difference.
Does Senator Cornyn want more people to go about murdering judges? One doubts it. But it seems that he's happy to try and use such incidents to advance his own agenda. Happy to use them, one notes, even though the recent high-profile cases don't seem to actually have a political agenda. His hope -- along, it seems, though less clearly -- with Tom DeLay's is that judges will begin to operate under a cloud of intimidation. They may not like the idea of buckling under to whatever it is Cornyn wants them to do, but Cornyn is making it clear that he's the judges' friends. He doesn't want to see them killed, or maimed, or assaulted. He's trying to save them. Trying to warn them. Warning them that unless they change their ways someone -- someone who has nothing to do with John Cornyn or the Texas cabal running the country, mind you -- just might decide to do something crazy. . .
Back to Cornyn -- who's kidding whom here? I've already seen some folks on the right try to explain this away. He was just offering an analytic point, noting the existence of anger about some judicial decisions, some anti-judge violence, and offering some speculations. Sure he was. Nevermind that he and his ilk are the ones whipping up the anger. It wouldn't cross his mind to tone down and suggest that his colleagues do likewise. Suggest that in the wake of some murders and some controversial court cases that we all agree that we are a country under law and that despite disagreements we should respect judicial offices and their holders. No. Far better to note that there may be a connection between non-Cornyn-approved court rulings and the murder of judges. He's just trying to be helpful.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_04_03.php#005330
[P]erhaps the Democrats need to introduce a sense of the senate resolution condemning those who threaten violence against judges or offer excuses for those who commit violent acts against members of the bench.
More: http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_04_03.php#005335
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_04_03.php#005332
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_04_03.php#005329
Who is John Cornyn? (thanks to Buzzflash for the link)
http://www.pnionline.com/dnblog/attytood/archives/001680.html
More on “make a threat, call it a warning”
http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2005/04/warnings_threat.html
http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2005/03/issue_a_threat_.html#more
“The war on reality”
http://www.first-draft.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2695
Bill to modify the Patriot Act gains bipartisan support
http://talkleft.com/new_archives/010244.html
WH tries to head off the attack: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-patriot5apr05,1,6573512.story
Iraqi parliament falling apart?
http://www.first-draft.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2683
Iraqi state television said Sunday an unspecified number of legislators have either pulled out or resigned from the National Assembly.
Bush says goodbye to his coalition
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050404/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_yushchenko
U.S. may charge contractors with fleecing the CPA in Iraq – bad news for “Custer Battles”
http://www.first-draft.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2690
More on “Custer Battles” – yet another blazing scandal from before the election that no one bothered to bring to the public’s attention
http://pbd.blogspot.com/2005_02_01_pbd_archive.html#110855746958609382
http://pbd.blogspot.com/2005_02_01_pbd_archive.html#110838529065546634
http://pbd.blogspot.com/2004_10_01_pbd_archive.html#109853989904668519
http://pbd.blogspot.com/2004_10_01_pbd_archive.html#109750270238122786
The CPA mimicked Hussein in at least one respect – their hatred of unions
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_04/006026.php
Berger and Plame
http://www.first-draft.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2684
Bruce Fein, a former Justice Department official under President Reagan, said the criminal charge against Mr. Berger will boost pressure on prosecutors to indict a Bush administration official in connection with the leak of the identity of a CIA officer, Valerie Plame. . . "It was monstrous compared to the triviality of Berger," Mr. Fein said. He said the prosecutor probing the Plame leak, Patrick Fitzgerald, will now be "pushed all the harder to come up with an indictment."
Drawing distinctions within the “culture of life”: Scotty plays philosophy (very badly)
http://www.first-draft.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2691
Q Scott, you mentioned the culture of life. When Pope John Paul II wrote about the culture of life in 1995, he described it also in terms of the death penalty, not just abortion and euthanasia. He said that in these modern times, cases where the death penalty was warranted are rare, if not nonexistent. Now, knowing that the President fully supports the death penalty, used the death penalty, does he see it as a contradiction to use that phrase, "culture of life," and still support the death penalty, which the Pope expressed his opposition to? [Read on!]
Yet another Bolton outrage that we will hear about at Thursday’s hearing
http://suburbanguerrilla.blogspot.com/2005/04/diplomatic-as-hellnewsweek-on-our-new.html
[Newsweek] Bush critics in the Senate are hunting for evidence to derail or delay confirmation of State Department official John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Foreign Relations Committee staffers are looking into charges that Bolton attempted to intimidate or victimize two career intelligence officials for what he viewed as their insufficiently alarmist analyses of intel on purported Cuban biological weapons. Committee investigators have contacted both the State Department and the intel community seeking records and witnesses. But Bolton's opponents are unsure if they will be able to make their case in time for Bolton's confirmation hearing Thursday.
Bolton’s change of heart: http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/04/index.html#005998
That bogus Gaffney letter of support (a list of damn all-stars; one person actually signed twice): http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/04/index.html#005993
http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/04/index.html#005995
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/000429.html
Ten reasons to stop Bolton (you mean, aside from the fact that he’s a thug?)
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_04/006018.php
More: http://www.opensocietypolicycenter.org/resources/publication.php?docId=61
Hilarious: WH announces that now it’s going to get really REALLY serious about pushing its Social Security plan-which-is-not-a-plan. Because, up until now, they haven’t been trying very hard, you know
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_04_03.php#005324
So let's see those senators and reps get up on the floor and announce their support for phase-out. Let's draw the drum tighter. We can't wait.
Looks like Hastert wants to revise and extend his remarks after all
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_04_03.php#005323
Last week Speaker Denny Hastert told National Journal that it might not be possible to get a phase-out bill passed this year.
"Politically," he said, "we probably need to get something done by next spring, a year from now. You can't carry it right up to an election. That's just political dynamite."
Today, Hastert's spokesman Ron Bonjean tells Roll Call they took the Speaker's words out of context: "The Speaker wants to get Social Security done by the end of this year. It’s not like he’s doubtful we can get it done this year.”
Funny: they’ve rewritten the WP article, so now you have this headline and text
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17000-2005Mar31.html
Hastert Doubtful on Social Security Bill
House Speaker Says That Passage of Legislation This Year May Be Unlikely
. . . Hastert added in the interview, conducted Monday, that he feels "cautiously optimistic that we can get this thing done."
Bonus item: How talk radio works
http://slate.msn.com/id/2116177/fr/rss/
***If you enjoy PBD and support what we are doing, you can help by forwarding a copy of this issue to your friends (using the envelope link below) or by sending them a copy of its URL (http://pbd.blogspot.com).
I don't get anything personally out of this project, except the satisfaction of doing it (I don't run ads, etc). The credit really all goes to the people whose material I copy and redistribute. But if I do have a "mission," it is to get this information into the hands of as many people as I can.***
Monday, April 04, 2005
DUBIOUS LEGACIES
Good news/bad news from Iraq
http://www.needlenose.com/node/view/1252
Two months after it was elected, Iraq's new legislative assembly finally got something accomplished besides bickering. . .
[WP] American diplomats renewed discussions with Iraqi political leaders last week. But they came not to nudge the Kurds or the others toward compromise. Embassy officials emphasized instead that nothing should be done to undercut the intelligence and security services of the floundering and transparently corrupt interim regime, headed by CIA favorite Ayad Allawi. . .
http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2005/04/successsort_of.html
Just as the Iraqi Assembly's failure to get its act together was starting to attract notice, they started getting their act together by appointing an Assembly Speaker. It's only a semi-success, however. The idea had been to give the job to a Sunni Arab as part of an attempted outreach to the Sunni civilian population. And the man they've chosen is, indeed, a Sunni Arab. But as a minister in Iyad Allawi's Interim Government and a member of his Iraqi List, this doesn't seem to actually incorporate anyone new into the political process. . .
More: http://www.juancole.com/2005/04/speaker-of-parliament-elected-amid.html
So all the celebratory prose you will read on Monday from Western analysts about how this election of a Sunni Arab speaker is such a great leap forward and a sign of building communal harmony will need to be leavened with a little realism if the development is to be understood in its Iraqi context. Not everything in Iraq can be reduced to the issue of whether it is good or bad for the Bush administration or the Blair government
Brilliant. The conventional wisdom has become that intelligence failures produced policy failures in the Bush administration. Here’s a nice analysis of why it is in fact exactly the opposite
http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/001837.html
Who was “Curveball”?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1451167,00.html
An alcoholic cousin of an aide to Ahmed Chalabi has emerged as the key source in the US rationale for going to war in Iraq. . . According to a US presidential commission looking into pre-war intelligence failures, the basis for pivotal intelligence on Iraq's alleged biological weapons programmes and fleet of mobile labs was a spy described as 'crazy' by his intelligence handlers and a 'congenital liar' by his friends. . . The defector, given the code-name Curveball by the CIA, has emerged as the central figure in the corruption of US intelligence estimates on Iraq. Despite considerable doubts over Curveball's credibility, his claims were included in the administration's case for war without caveat.
More: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/opinion/04dowd.html
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_04/006011.php
Headline: Letter of Support for Bolton
Fine print: A bunch of ideologues organized by Frank Gaffney
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-briefs4.4apr04,1,645269.story
Bush “plan” for Social Security is sinking like a stone, and NOW the opposition ads start coming. It will be fun to watch them fail
http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/4/3/202119/7108
The above story mentions in passing another important point: we're now at the halfway mark of the administration's 60-day push to improve public support for the Bush "plan". (Are we supposed to be calling it a "plan", now? Last I heard they were still denying they had any "plan" at all, because whenever they gave the details the approval numbers went down even further.) The 60-day timeline was the timeline the administration gave Congressional supporters to turn public opinion around, or consider cutting their losses.
http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/4/4/31137/19489
Administration officials say they are undaunted and still expect to win the fight. "We're at the halfway mark of our 60-day tour and well beyond our events goal already," Treasury Secretary John W. Snow said on Friday. "The national dialogue that the president called for in the State of the Union is well under way, and Social Security has been elevated to the top of the national political debate. We're making real progress."
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_04_03.php#005315
Which brings us to the question of Social Security. An orderly retreat is what the White House and its congressional allies are trying to do. . . I get asked a lot just what the White House is thinking. Every day, it seems, they get more bad news on the Social Security front. So just what do they is going to happen?
I wondered about this myself a lot. And I can't say that I really have a good answer. But I have a tentative one. And perhaps that will do since I don't think the White House has more than a tentative answer either. . . Basically, what I think is happening is that the White House is trying to keep up the Bamboozlepalooza thing long enough and monotonously enough that eventually people start forgetting that this was supposed to be a specific piece of legislation the president was going to push through Congress this year, even this spring. . .
More: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/politics/03social.html
The bizarre, fascinating development of true believers within the GOP tightening their links to Tom DeLay at just the time when others in the party see the iceberg ahead and get ready to toss him overboard
And the manner of defending him: by challenging the entire judicial system? Insane
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2005_03_27_digbysblog_archive.html#111256235863046739
This Tom DeLay mess is really getting interesting, isn't it? While I appreciate the "don't fire 'til you see the whites of their eyes" strategy, after some thought I've decided that it's probably a good idea for the Democrats to put pressure on Delay right now. As a matter of fact, I think it will ensure that the wingnuts continue to support him and that he stays in the news and in his post well into the 2006 election cycle. Nothing will make the radicals more vociferously defend their wounded leader than a bunch of Democrats attacking him. And I think that we want the extreme rightwing to be defending Tom DeLay, especially the Randall Terrys and the James Dobsons, as often as possible.
We especially want to see those guys on Fox News. A lot. And here's why. Something happened during the Schiavo circus, I think, and it was something significant. But it wasn't that the nation saw that politicians were all a bunch of craven opportunists. They already knew that. It was that the Republican professional class, the libertarians and some common sense types saw FOX News and talk radio as being full of sh-t for the first time. I have nothing but a handful of anecdotes to back that up, but I think Schiavo may turn out to be the first big tear in the right wing matrix.
http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_04_03_atrios_archive.html#111256389373033149
Piggybacking on top of this Digby post, I think the dynamic that's at play now is interesting. I guess I always sort of believed that the attacks on the judiciary by wingnuttia was simply a ploy to intimidate liberal judges until they could finish stacking the courts with their own. But, lately it seems that either this isn't true or that many of them have forgotten that this was the plan. It seems that they actually want to undermine the judicial branch completely, which I find rather weird.
http://edwardpig.typepad.com/edwardpig/2005/04/run_against_del.html
In 1996, Mr. DeLay argued for using impeachment to police and steer the federal bench. The next year, he said "judges need to be intimidated" to ensure that they uphold the Constitution. In mid-2003, he created the House Working Group on Judicial Accountability, a GOP task force that would scour the work of federal judges and "take no prisoners.". . . The House has impeached a dozen judges, most recently in 1989. The Senate removed seven and another resigned. But not since the republic's early days have political disagreements been used as justification.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/4/3/32823/50890
The following is a summary of the Constitutional Restoration Act proposed by Republicans in the 109th congress that makes it possible for the Congress to charge any judge with a crime who disagrees with the concept that all law, liberty, and government comes only from God. "The Constitution Restoration Act of 2005 - Amends the Federal judicial code to prohibit the U.S. Supreme Court and the Federal district courts from exercising jurisdiction over any matter in which relief is sought against an entity of Federal, State, or local government or an officer or agent of such government concerning that entity's, officer's, or agent's acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.”
http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_04_03_atrios_archive.html#111254784395777956
Gil Smart has a good column about the waning of the conservative movement. I think he's about right - it is probably at its apex, especially if they (and, please please do) keep clinging to Tom DeLay instead of throwing him overboard before he brings them all down. . . The only we we'll get a massive conservative crackup is if they spend the next 18 months pushing Schiavo-esque issues onto the media and the rest of us. But, I think their recent behavior in the Schiavo case, and the probability that DeLay will cling to power for at least a few more months will lead enough people to decide enough is enough.
The “madness” over Terri Schiavo
http://talkleft.com/new_archives/010232.html
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_04/006015.php
Tom DeLay’s in trouble back home: stinging editorials, plummeting poll numbers in his home district
http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/4/3/143528/9077
http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/4/3/143250/4528
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_04_03.php#005311
“Nuclear option” on the horizon
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-filibuster4apr04,1,5240991.story
Mark Kleiman offers some sage advice (which I am about to ignore at my peril)
http://www.markarkleiman.com/archives/_/2005/04/moratorium_ii.php
A note to those who have criticisms to offer of the papacy of John Paul II: Right now would be an excellent time to keep your mouths shut and your keyboards idle.
If your criticisms are true and important -- I can easily think of some that are, and one reader has supplied me with others of which I'd been unaware --they'll still be true and important after the grass is green on his gravesite.
Since no one is paying attention to anything else right now, here is my homage to Pope John Paul II
http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/621.htm
Let us look at some background facts. In the late 1960s many Latin American clerics engaged in a more rigorous interpretation of the Bible. As they read it, it is a call to all Christians to concern themselves actively with the material depression and oppression of the large marginalised sectors of the population in their countries, who do not profit from any "trickle down" of a growing national product. . . This brand of Bible interpretation soon became known - and feared by the powers that be - as "liberation theology." Liberation theology bases its considerations on God's word in the Bible before he led the people out of Egypt: "I have heard the cry of my people." Consequently more priests involved themselves in politically organising the poor and speaking out against what they regarded as imperialist domination by international financial institutions, exploitation by multinationals and the collaboration of their domestic elites with them. The German theologian Dorothee Soelle summarised the underlying rationale of liberation theology the following way: "I think by growing deaf for the cry of the poor we also make ourselves dumb. If we allow the dream that all hungry be fed - an age-old dream, a dream of mankind common to all religions - to be ruled out, we break with God. And I think that our era is aiming precisely at prohibiting the dream that all hungry will be fed."
Soon after the Latin American Catholics started to promote this line of reasoning and exegesis, the Vatican began to counter this new trend which it found far too political. Thus, it installed more conservative clerics, like Cardinal Lopez Trujillo, in influential positions within the Latin American Catholic Church. These clerics re-interpreted the social message in the Bible and the task of their Church as primarily of a pastoral nature concentrating on spiritual and religious welfare. This strategy gained full momentum when the current Pope, John Paul II, assumed office and appointed the arch-conservative Cardinal Josef Ratzinger to the post of chief interpreter of the Vatican's official policy. Since liberation theology's Biblical foundations are too strong to be renounced, Ratzinger did the "second-best" thing. His re-interpretation claimed that liberation theology is good as long as it confines itself to the "genuinely ecclesiastical task, i.e., the pastoral practice, touching on secular, social questions only secondarily. Consequently, liberation theology was tamed by confining God to the spiritual realm, but not involving Him with the structural limits of political economy. On December 21, 1984 John Paul II expressed concern that liberation theology misused the suffering of the poor "as pretext for a new and sometimes even more burdensome oppression."
http://www.cyberie.qc.ca/jpc/haiti/theology.html
In Nicaragua, the Pope called Liberation Theology base communities a schism, siding with a staunch critic of the Sandinista government, Managua Archbishop Miguel de Obando y Bravo, who had referred to them as popular churches. The Pontiff went even further in barring Fathers Ernesto and Fernando Cardenal, respectively ministers of Culture and Education, from performing religious functions. Similar measures were taken against Maryknoll Father Miguel D'Escoto, minister of Foreign Affairs, and Father Edgard Parrales, Nicaraguan ambassador to the Organization of American States. In early 1985, each received a letter ordering him to resign from his post or be suspended from priesthood. The four said they would ignore the Vatican orders. Father Miguel D'Escoto commented by saying that his decision had always been the same, to serve God by serving his people. . . Essentially, the conservative wing of the Catholic Church has formulated two criticism against Liberation Theology. First, the use of marxist analysis and other theories that in the end, it is said, defeat the cause of the poor; Monsignor Ratzinger once stated that one cannot examine injustice in Marxist terms without tacitly endorsing the philosophy's denial of the spiritual world and of God. Second, the questioning of the Church's hierarchy and authority lines. Ratzinger contends that Liberation Theology undermines the Church leaders' influence over the laity.
http://www.catholicculture.org/docs/doc_view.cfm?recnum=643
Few intellectual movements have begun with more immediate, favorable attention than the theology of liberation, developed by Latin American scholars in the 1960s and 1970s. Encomia to the "new way of doing theology" came from North American and European scholars and from many Latin American bishops. At the Second General Conference of the Latin American conference of Bishops (CELAM), held in Medellin in 1968, liberation theology seemed to come into its own even before the English publication of Gustavo Gutierrez's 1973 A Theology of Liberation.
Twenty-five years later, however, liberation theology has been reduced to an intellectual curiosity. While still attractive to many North American and European scholars, it has failed in what the liberationists always said was their main mission, the complete renovation of Latin American Catholicism.
Instead, orthodox Catholic leaders, starting with Pope John Paul II, have reclaimed ideas and positions that the liberationists had claimed for themselves, such as the "preferential option for the poor," and "liberation" itself. In so doing, the opponents of liberation theology have successfully changed the terms of debate over religion and politics in Latin America. At the same time, liberation theology had to face internal philosophical contradictions and vastly altered political and economic circumstances, both in Latin America and elsewhere. Having lost the initiative, liberation theologians are making sweeping reversals in their theology. . .
Liberationists seek to change the object to which theology devotes its attention. They reject, with disdain, the notion that getting people to heaven is more important than getting them tolerable living conditions. Liberation theology is an attempt to change people's minds about what is most decisive and significant in their lives. In other words, liberation theology is a cultural challenge.
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/40/096.html
Liberation Theology was buried a long time ago by the Pope, as it is built on the concepts of materialism and class struggle, said Serrano - a statement well in line with what representatives of the conservative wing of the Church have said in the past.
When visiting Central America in 1996, Pope John Paul II said that "the era of Liberation Theology" ended with the fall of Communism in the world.
But despite these words, some followers of this current are still active within the Latin American Church - for this was the region which first produced Liberation Theology in the sixties, based on the social considerations raised by the Second Vatican Council, a strain which flourished spectacularly in the seventies and eighties. . .
More: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4573066&sourceCode=RSS
[I see that Lindsay Beyerstein is on this too: http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2005/04/john_paul_ii_an.html]
I have not read this piece, but it seems to have some good tidbits on the ill-fated Bernie Kerik nomination, including how Bush Co. views the DHS mess
http://talkleft.com/new_archives/010226.html
Here’s something you didn’t know: the Bush admin is STILL spending money to investigate a Clinton cabinet secretary (Henry Cisneros). Good to know that with minor problems out there like Plame, Franklin, torture policies, corrupt energy plans, and war profiteering, there are still defenders of govt integrity at work (thanks to Best of the Blogs for the link)
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/3112310
Good idea
http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_04_03_atrios_archive.html#111254029435869022
If I were running CNN, once I fired most of the people that worked there and replaced them with decent TV journalists, I'd get rid of their little daily blog show and replace it with the "Fox News F-ckup of the Day." They could just steal it from Media Matters. Then I'd add a "crazy sh-t people are hearing on talk radio which aren't true" segment.
A vision of the news and information universe, circa 2014 (thanks to Jim Levin for the link)
http://oak.psych.gatech.edu/~epic/
Bonus item: why everyone loves Whiskey Bar
http://billmon.org/archives/001806.html
TED: (reading slowly and distinctly into a microphone): And so, as Aristotle once reminded the Peloponnesians, we must be wise in our choices, firm in our commitment to democracy -- and steadfast in our determination to bestow the blessings of personalized investment accounts on ourselves and our posterity . . .
(Ted pauses, and after a few seconds delay, we hear President Bush repeat exactly same words.)
TED: (reading) Furthermore, as Winston Churchill once said . . . Jesus Christ!
BUSH: . . . as Winston Churchill once said Jesus Christ! (He stops, puzzled, and listens for the voice in his ear.)
(Back in the trailer, we hear a loud electronic buzzing sound. Sparks shoot from one of the consoles in front of Ted. He slaps at it with his script while Bill dives for a fire extinguisher. Meanwhile, Bush remains frozen at the podium, waiting for his next line. Prompted by his silence, the animatronic puppets all applaud politely.)
[Read on!]
***If you enjoy PBD and support what we are doing, you can help by forwarding a copy of this issue to your friends (using the envelope link below) or by sending them a copy of its URL (http://pbd.blogspot.com).
I don't get anything personally out of this project, except the satisfaction of doing it (I don't run ads, etc). The credit really all goes to the people whose material I copy and redistribute. But if I do have a "mission," it is to get this information into the hands of as many people as I can.***
Good news/bad news from Iraq
http://www.needlenose.com/node/view/1252
Two months after it was elected, Iraq's new legislative assembly finally got something accomplished besides bickering. . .
[WP] American diplomats renewed discussions with Iraqi political leaders last week. But they came not to nudge the Kurds or the others toward compromise. Embassy officials emphasized instead that nothing should be done to undercut the intelligence and security services of the floundering and transparently corrupt interim regime, headed by CIA favorite Ayad Allawi. . .
http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2005/04/successsort_of.html
Just as the Iraqi Assembly's failure to get its act together was starting to attract notice, they started getting their act together by appointing an Assembly Speaker. It's only a semi-success, however. The idea had been to give the job to a Sunni Arab as part of an attempted outreach to the Sunni civilian population. And the man they've chosen is, indeed, a Sunni Arab. But as a minister in Iyad Allawi's Interim Government and a member of his Iraqi List, this doesn't seem to actually incorporate anyone new into the political process. . .
More: http://www.juancole.com/2005/04/speaker-of-parliament-elected-amid.html
So all the celebratory prose you will read on Monday from Western analysts about how this election of a Sunni Arab speaker is such a great leap forward and a sign of building communal harmony will need to be leavened with a little realism if the development is to be understood in its Iraqi context. Not everything in Iraq can be reduced to the issue of whether it is good or bad for the Bush administration or the Blair government
Brilliant. The conventional wisdom has become that intelligence failures produced policy failures in the Bush administration. Here’s a nice analysis of why it is in fact exactly the opposite
http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/001837.html
Who was “Curveball”?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1451167,00.html
An alcoholic cousin of an aide to Ahmed Chalabi has emerged as the key source in the US rationale for going to war in Iraq. . . According to a US presidential commission looking into pre-war intelligence failures, the basis for pivotal intelligence on Iraq's alleged biological weapons programmes and fleet of mobile labs was a spy described as 'crazy' by his intelligence handlers and a 'congenital liar' by his friends. . . The defector, given the code-name Curveball by the CIA, has emerged as the central figure in the corruption of US intelligence estimates on Iraq. Despite considerable doubts over Curveball's credibility, his claims were included in the administration's case for war without caveat.
More: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/opinion/04dowd.html
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_04/006011.php
Headline: Letter of Support for Bolton
Fine print: A bunch of ideologues organized by Frank Gaffney
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-briefs4.4apr04,1,645269.story
Bush “plan” for Social Security is sinking like a stone, and NOW the opposition ads start coming. It will be fun to watch them fail
http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/4/3/202119/7108
The above story mentions in passing another important point: we're now at the halfway mark of the administration's 60-day push to improve public support for the Bush "plan". (Are we supposed to be calling it a "plan", now? Last I heard they were still denying they had any "plan" at all, because whenever they gave the details the approval numbers went down even further.) The 60-day timeline was the timeline the administration gave Congressional supporters to turn public opinion around, or consider cutting their losses.
http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/4/4/31137/19489
Administration officials say they are undaunted and still expect to win the fight. "We're at the halfway mark of our 60-day tour and well beyond our events goal already," Treasury Secretary John W. Snow said on Friday. "The national dialogue that the president called for in the State of the Union is well under way, and Social Security has been elevated to the top of the national political debate. We're making real progress."
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_04_03.php#005315
Which brings us to the question of Social Security. An orderly retreat is what the White House and its congressional allies are trying to do. . . I get asked a lot just what the White House is thinking. Every day, it seems, they get more bad news on the Social Security front. So just what do they is going to happen?
I wondered about this myself a lot. And I can't say that I really have a good answer. But I have a tentative one. And perhaps that will do since I don't think the White House has more than a tentative answer either. . . Basically, what I think is happening is that the White House is trying to keep up the Bamboozlepalooza thing long enough and monotonously enough that eventually people start forgetting that this was supposed to be a specific piece of legislation the president was going to push through Congress this year, even this spring. . .
More: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/politics/03social.html
The bizarre, fascinating development of true believers within the GOP tightening their links to Tom DeLay at just the time when others in the party see the iceberg ahead and get ready to toss him overboard
And the manner of defending him: by challenging the entire judicial system? Insane
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2005_03_27_digbysblog_archive.html#111256235863046739
This Tom DeLay mess is really getting interesting, isn't it? While I appreciate the "don't fire 'til you see the whites of their eyes" strategy, after some thought I've decided that it's probably a good idea for the Democrats to put pressure on Delay right now. As a matter of fact, I think it will ensure that the wingnuts continue to support him and that he stays in the news and in his post well into the 2006 election cycle. Nothing will make the radicals more vociferously defend their wounded leader than a bunch of Democrats attacking him. And I think that we want the extreme rightwing to be defending Tom DeLay, especially the Randall Terrys and the James Dobsons, as often as possible.
We especially want to see those guys on Fox News. A lot. And here's why. Something happened during the Schiavo circus, I think, and it was something significant. But it wasn't that the nation saw that politicians were all a bunch of craven opportunists. They already knew that. It was that the Republican professional class, the libertarians and some common sense types saw FOX News and talk radio as being full of sh-t for the first time. I have nothing but a handful of anecdotes to back that up, but I think Schiavo may turn out to be the first big tear in the right wing matrix.
http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_04_03_atrios_archive.html#111256389373033149
Piggybacking on top of this Digby post, I think the dynamic that's at play now is interesting. I guess I always sort of believed that the attacks on the judiciary by wingnuttia was simply a ploy to intimidate liberal judges until they could finish stacking the courts with their own. But, lately it seems that either this isn't true or that many of them have forgotten that this was the plan. It seems that they actually want to undermine the judicial branch completely, which I find rather weird.
http://edwardpig.typepad.com/edwardpig/2005/04/run_against_del.html
In 1996, Mr. DeLay argued for using impeachment to police and steer the federal bench. The next year, he said "judges need to be intimidated" to ensure that they uphold the Constitution. In mid-2003, he created the House Working Group on Judicial Accountability, a GOP task force that would scour the work of federal judges and "take no prisoners.". . . The House has impeached a dozen judges, most recently in 1989. The Senate removed seven and another resigned. But not since the republic's early days have political disagreements been used as justification.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/4/3/32823/50890
The following is a summary of the Constitutional Restoration Act proposed by Republicans in the 109th congress that makes it possible for the Congress to charge any judge with a crime who disagrees with the concept that all law, liberty, and government comes only from God. "The Constitution Restoration Act of 2005 - Amends the Federal judicial code to prohibit the U.S. Supreme Court and the Federal district courts from exercising jurisdiction over any matter in which relief is sought against an entity of Federal, State, or local government or an officer or agent of such government concerning that entity's, officer's, or agent's acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.”
http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_04_03_atrios_archive.html#111254784395777956
Gil Smart has a good column about the waning of the conservative movement. I think he's about right - it is probably at its apex, especially if they (and, please please do) keep clinging to Tom DeLay instead of throwing him overboard before he brings them all down. . . The only we we'll get a massive conservative crackup is if they spend the next 18 months pushing Schiavo-esque issues onto the media and the rest of us. But, I think their recent behavior in the Schiavo case, and the probability that DeLay will cling to power for at least a few more months will lead enough people to decide enough is enough.
The “madness” over Terri Schiavo
http://talkleft.com/new_archives/010232.html
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_04/006015.php
Tom DeLay’s in trouble back home: stinging editorials, plummeting poll numbers in his home district
http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/4/3/143528/9077
http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/4/3/143250/4528
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_04_03.php#005311
“Nuclear option” on the horizon
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-filibuster4apr04,1,5240991.story
Mark Kleiman offers some sage advice (which I am about to ignore at my peril)
http://www.markarkleiman.com/archives/_/2005/04/moratorium_ii.php
A note to those who have criticisms to offer of the papacy of John Paul II: Right now would be an excellent time to keep your mouths shut and your keyboards idle.
If your criticisms are true and important -- I can easily think of some that are, and one reader has supplied me with others of which I'd been unaware --they'll still be true and important after the grass is green on his gravesite.
Since no one is paying attention to anything else right now, here is my homage to Pope John Paul II
http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/621.htm
Let us look at some background facts. In the late 1960s many Latin American clerics engaged in a more rigorous interpretation of the Bible. As they read it, it is a call to all Christians to concern themselves actively with the material depression and oppression of the large marginalised sectors of the population in their countries, who do not profit from any "trickle down" of a growing national product. . . This brand of Bible interpretation soon became known - and feared by the powers that be - as "liberation theology." Liberation theology bases its considerations on God's word in the Bible before he led the people out of Egypt: "I have heard the cry of my people." Consequently more priests involved themselves in politically organising the poor and speaking out against what they regarded as imperialist domination by international financial institutions, exploitation by multinationals and the collaboration of their domestic elites with them. The German theologian Dorothee Soelle summarised the underlying rationale of liberation theology the following way: "I think by growing deaf for the cry of the poor we also make ourselves dumb. If we allow the dream that all hungry be fed - an age-old dream, a dream of mankind common to all religions - to be ruled out, we break with God. And I think that our era is aiming precisely at prohibiting the dream that all hungry will be fed."
Soon after the Latin American Catholics started to promote this line of reasoning and exegesis, the Vatican began to counter this new trend which it found far too political. Thus, it installed more conservative clerics, like Cardinal Lopez Trujillo, in influential positions within the Latin American Catholic Church. These clerics re-interpreted the social message in the Bible and the task of their Church as primarily of a pastoral nature concentrating on spiritual and religious welfare. This strategy gained full momentum when the current Pope, John Paul II, assumed office and appointed the arch-conservative Cardinal Josef Ratzinger to the post of chief interpreter of the Vatican's official policy. Since liberation theology's Biblical foundations are too strong to be renounced, Ratzinger did the "second-best" thing. His re-interpretation claimed that liberation theology is good as long as it confines itself to the "genuinely ecclesiastical task, i.e., the pastoral practice, touching on secular, social questions only secondarily. Consequently, liberation theology was tamed by confining God to the spiritual realm, but not involving Him with the structural limits of political economy. On December 21, 1984 John Paul II expressed concern that liberation theology misused the suffering of the poor "as pretext for a new and sometimes even more burdensome oppression."
http://www.cyberie.qc.ca/jpc/haiti/theology.html
In Nicaragua, the Pope called Liberation Theology base communities a schism, siding with a staunch critic of the Sandinista government, Managua Archbishop Miguel de Obando y Bravo, who had referred to them as popular churches. The Pontiff went even further in barring Fathers Ernesto and Fernando Cardenal, respectively ministers of Culture and Education, from performing religious functions. Similar measures were taken against Maryknoll Father Miguel D'Escoto, minister of Foreign Affairs, and Father Edgard Parrales, Nicaraguan ambassador to the Organization of American States. In early 1985, each received a letter ordering him to resign from his post or be suspended from priesthood. The four said they would ignore the Vatican orders. Father Miguel D'Escoto commented by saying that his decision had always been the same, to serve God by serving his people. . . Essentially, the conservative wing of the Catholic Church has formulated two criticism against Liberation Theology. First, the use of marxist analysis and other theories that in the end, it is said, defeat the cause of the poor; Monsignor Ratzinger once stated that one cannot examine injustice in Marxist terms without tacitly endorsing the philosophy's denial of the spiritual world and of God. Second, the questioning of the Church's hierarchy and authority lines. Ratzinger contends that Liberation Theology undermines the Church leaders' influence over the laity.
http://www.catholicculture.org/docs/doc_view.cfm?recnum=643
Few intellectual movements have begun with more immediate, favorable attention than the theology of liberation, developed by Latin American scholars in the 1960s and 1970s. Encomia to the "new way of doing theology" came from North American and European scholars and from many Latin American bishops. At the Second General Conference of the Latin American conference of Bishops (CELAM), held in Medellin in 1968, liberation theology seemed to come into its own even before the English publication of Gustavo Gutierrez's 1973 A Theology of Liberation.
Twenty-five years later, however, liberation theology has been reduced to an intellectual curiosity. While still attractive to many North American and European scholars, it has failed in what the liberationists always said was their main mission, the complete renovation of Latin American Catholicism.
Instead, orthodox Catholic leaders, starting with Pope John Paul II, have reclaimed ideas and positions that the liberationists had claimed for themselves, such as the "preferential option for the poor," and "liberation" itself. In so doing, the opponents of liberation theology have successfully changed the terms of debate over religion and politics in Latin America. At the same time, liberation theology had to face internal philosophical contradictions and vastly altered political and economic circumstances, both in Latin America and elsewhere. Having lost the initiative, liberation theologians are making sweeping reversals in their theology. . .
Liberationists seek to change the object to which theology devotes its attention. They reject, with disdain, the notion that getting people to heaven is more important than getting them tolerable living conditions. Liberation theology is an attempt to change people's minds about what is most decisive and significant in their lives. In other words, liberation theology is a cultural challenge.
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/40/096.html
Liberation Theology was buried a long time ago by the Pope, as it is built on the concepts of materialism and class struggle, said Serrano - a statement well in line with what representatives of the conservative wing of the Church have said in the past.
When visiting Central America in 1996, Pope John Paul II said that "the era of Liberation Theology" ended with the fall of Communism in the world.
But despite these words, some followers of this current are still active within the Latin American Church - for this was the region which first produced Liberation Theology in the sixties, based on the social considerations raised by the Second Vatican Council, a strain which flourished spectacularly in the seventies and eighties. . .
More: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4573066&sourceCode=RSS
[I see that Lindsay Beyerstein is on this too: http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2005/04/john_paul_ii_an.html]
I have not read this piece, but it seems to have some good tidbits on the ill-fated Bernie Kerik nomination, including how Bush Co. views the DHS mess
http://talkleft.com/new_archives/010226.html
Here’s something you didn’t know: the Bush admin is STILL spending money to investigate a Clinton cabinet secretary (Henry Cisneros). Good to know that with minor problems out there like Plame, Franklin, torture policies, corrupt energy plans, and war profiteering, there are still defenders of govt integrity at work (thanks to Best of the Blogs for the link)
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/3112310
Good idea
http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_04_03_atrios_archive.html#111254029435869022
If I were running CNN, once I fired most of the people that worked there and replaced them with decent TV journalists, I'd get rid of their little daily blog show and replace it with the "Fox News F-ckup of the Day." They could just steal it from Media Matters. Then I'd add a "crazy sh-t people are hearing on talk radio which aren't true" segment.
A vision of the news and information universe, circa 2014 (thanks to Jim Levin for the link)
http://oak.psych.gatech.edu/~epic/
Bonus item: why everyone loves Whiskey Bar
http://billmon.org/archives/001806.html
TED: (reading slowly and distinctly into a microphone): And so, as Aristotle once reminded the Peloponnesians, we must be wise in our choices, firm in our commitment to democracy -- and steadfast in our determination to bestow the blessings of personalized investment accounts on ourselves and our posterity . . .
(Ted pauses, and after a few seconds delay, we hear President Bush repeat exactly same words.)
TED: (reading) Furthermore, as Winston Churchill once said . . . Jesus Christ!
BUSH: . . . as Winston Churchill once said Jesus Christ! (He stops, puzzled, and listens for the voice in his ear.)
(Back in the trailer, we hear a loud electronic buzzing sound. Sparks shoot from one of the consoles in front of Ted. He slaps at it with his script while Bill dives for a fire extinguisher. Meanwhile, Bush remains frozen at the podium, waiting for his next line. Prompted by his silence, the animatronic puppets all applaud politely.)
[Read on!]
***If you enjoy PBD and support what we are doing, you can help by forwarding a copy of this issue to your friends (using the envelope link below) or by sending them a copy of its URL (http://pbd.blogspot.com).
I don't get anything personally out of this project, except the satisfaction of doing it (I don't run ads, etc). The credit really all goes to the people whose material I copy and redistribute. But if I do have a "mission," it is to get this information into the hands of as many people as I can.***
Sunday, April 03, 2005
CURVEBALLS
http://dailykos.com/story/2005/4/2/10228/95578
[LAT] A bitter feud erupted Friday over claims by a presidential commission that top CIA officials apparently ignored warnings in late 2002 and early 2003 that an informant code-named "Curveball" -- the chief source of prewar U.S. intelligence about Iraqi germ weapons -- was unreliable.
Former CIA Director George J. Tenet and his chief deputy, John E. McLaughlin, furiously denied that they had been told not to trust Curveball, an Iraqi refugee in Germany who ultimately was proved a fraud.
But the CIA's former operations chief and one of his top lieutenants insisted in interviews that debates had raged inside the CIA about Curveball's credibility, even as then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell vouched for the defector's claims in a crucial address to the United Nations Security Council on the eve of war.
More: http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/001834.html
There's so much astonishing in here, about how a fairly obvious fabricator manages to find a few key defenders in US policy circles, because he provides information they desperately want to hear. . .
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21854-2005Apr2.html
By the time President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein of the deadly weapons he was allegedly trying to build, every piece of fresh evidence had been tested -- and disproved -- by U.N. inspectors, according to a report commissioned by the president and released Thursday. . . The work of the inspectors -- who had extraordinary access during their three months in Iraq between November 2002 and March 2003 -- was routinely dismissed by the Bush administration and the intelligence community in the run-up to the war. . .
From Eric Alterman: a few readily-available quotes that show just how routinely the Bush admin bullied, distorted, or ignored intelligence that didn’t fit their war plans
http://suburbanguerrilla.blogspot.com/2005/04/wooferic-alterman-reminds-us-just-whos.html
An Army intelligence officer quoted in TIME. "Rumsfeld was deeply, almost pathologically distorting the intelligence."
A former defense intelligence official who attended some of the meetings in which Wolfowitz and others pressed for a different approach to the assessments they were receiving, quoted in The Washington Post, "They were the browbeaters…In interagency meetings," he said, "Wolfowitz treated the analysts' work with contempt."
Patrick Lang, a former head of Middle Eastern affairs in the Defense Intelligence Agency, in The New Republic, on conclusions that did not jibe with administration war aims, “They were encouraged to think it over again." Moreover when analysts warned that the Iraqi people might not welcome an invading force and that the Shiite clergy might cause particular problems, "The guys who tried to tell them that came to understand that this advice was not welcome."
A former staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee quoted in The New Republic: "People [kept] telling you first that things weren't right, weird things going on, different people saying, 'There's so much pressure, you know, they keep telling us, go back and find the right answer,' things like that.
A former military intelligence officer quoted in The Washington Post, “It was a foregone conclusion that every photo of a trailer truck would be a `mobile bioweapons lab' and every tanker truck would be `filled with weaponized anthrax.”
A former CIA agent quoted in The New Yorker: who resigned over his “sense that they were using the intelligence from the C.I.A. and other agencies only when it fit their agenda. They didn’t like the intelligence they were getting, and so they brought in people to write the stuff. They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with—to the point of being bizarre. Dogmatic, as if they were on a mission from God.”
A Defense Intelligence Agency quoted in The New York Times, "The American people were manipulated."
Remember all of these quotes have been available for between eighteen months and two years. I found them during the summer of 2003 when I was drafting the book. So could have any writer, reporter, senator, (or Secretary of State) who cared enough to look.
The failure of accountability in the Bush administration
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/000425.html
Tom DeLay continues his assault against an independent judiciary
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/04/delay-ups-his-coup-threat-against.html
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), under fire from Democrats for what they consider threatening remarks about federal judges, plans to ask the Judiciary Committee to undertake a broad review of the courts' handing of the Terri Schiavo case, his office said yesterday.
http://www.mydd.com/story/2005/4/2/181252/7553
DELAY: Well, there's a lot of questions that need to be answered. We need to look at this case. We need to look at the failure of the judiciary in Florida. We need to look at the failure of the judiciary on the federal level. The United States Congress, with the president's signing, sent a bill -- made a law that gave the federal courts jurisdiction to look at this case all anew. And they didn't even follow procedures. . . What I would propose to do is ask the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives to take a good, hard, objective look at this, and what occurred. And then make recommendations to the House as to how to proceed.
DeLay has made clear what one of the goals of the hearing will be:
He said the House already passed a bill now waiting in the Senate that would allow federal review of state cases in instances such as Schiavo's. Also, he said the House Judiciary Committee has announced hearings on the "definition of good behavior" for judges.
[NB: Well, you can see why DeLay is determined to undermine the authority of the courts, since he is about to get hauled in front of one]
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-delay3apr03,1,7718679.story
In a meeting with the heads of several social conservative organizations, DeLay sought support in a fight that he said was aimed at ending the GOP majority in Congress and thwarting the social conservative movement. Some responded immediately.
"The only fire behind all that smoke generated by the leftist attacks is their burning hatred of a good man," wrote Morton C. Blackwell, a prominent conservative, in a posting on the American Conservative Union's website. . .
Democrats are promising to quickly bring up ethical questions surrounding DeLay when Congress returns to work Monday. And the concern among some Republicans is that DeLay may step into a political trap by fiercely responding. . . Democrats, Republicans say, are determined to further raise DeLay's national political profile. And DeLay is not the sort of politician to seek to lower his profile in the face of conflict.
"He draws energy from these fights," said one GOP strategist, speaking on condition of anonymity. "He sees this in terms of good and evil: He is all good and his opponents are all evil."
DeLay says to opponents, “bring it on” (sound familiar?)
http://billmon.org/archives/001802.html
Here’s how out of control DeLay is: Dick Cheney has to call him back in line
http://thinkprogress.org/index.php?p=559
Cheney said he backed efforts to help save Terri Schiavo’s life, but strongly disagreed with House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), who wants retribution against judges who blocked restoration of her feeding tube. . . “I don’t think that’s appropriate . . . There’s a reason why judges get lifetime appointments.”
[NB: If you want an explanation for this, recall that most of the judges who opposed restoring the feeding tube were REPUBLICAN appointees]
The assault on democratic institutions and practices for the sake of ideological hegemony continues. Looks as if Frist has settled on the “nuclear option,” could pull the trigger as soon as this week
http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/4/2/124143/9218
The National Security State
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7361416/
The government requested and won approval for a record number of special warrants last year for secret wiretaps and searches of suspected terrorists and spies, 75 percent more than in 2000, the Bush administration disclosed Friday.
Bush road show, encountering zero enthusiasm for his wretched Social Security plans, will once again shift focus and rhetoric, seeking desperately for some new basis of support
http://www.needlenose.com/node/view/1251
No progress in Iraq: and none in the offing
http://www.needlenose.com/node/view/1242
http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2005/04/about_that_poli.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/international/03baghdad.html
After weeks of factional haggling that have prompted warnings of increasing civil distress, several leading Iraqi politicians have begun saying that flawed measures in the interim constitution are partly to blame for the failure to form a new government. . . The document, which Iraqi officials co-wrote with the Americans, was approved in March 2004 and is the most enduring legacy of the formal American occupation. The document, called the transitional administrative law and commonly known as the TAL, sets the timetable for elections and the rules for installing a government, and it tries to address difficult issues, like the question of property restoration for Kurds exiled from the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. . . Senior politicians, particularly Shiite Arabs, are now attacking the TAL for enshrining a process that they see as contributing to the deadlock. They are especially critical of the measure that requires a two-thirds vote by the national assembly to appoint a president, and they point out that the law fails to set a deadline for the appointment.
The failure of the news to cover soldiers’ opposition to the war
http://suburbanguerrilla.blogspot.com/2005/04/other-voicessome-vets-are-trying-to.html
Sunday talk show lineup
http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/4/2/182145/4949
ABC's "This Week" - Cardinal Bernard Law, former archbishop of Boston; Bishop William S. Skylstad, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops; Marco Politi, Vatican reporter for La Repubblica; Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson, former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican; former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo.
CBS' "Face the Nation" - Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski; Monsignor Brian Ferme, dean, Catholic University School of Canon Law.
NBC's "Meet the Press" - Archbishop John P. Foley, president, Pontifical Council for Social Communications; Rev. Thomas Reese, editor, America; George Weigel, Ethics and Public Policy Center; Margaret Steinfels, Fordham Center on Religion and Culture; Judge Laurence Silberman and former Sen. Charles Robb, D-Va., chairmen of the presidential commission on intelligence.
CNN's "Late Edition" - Sens. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.
"Fox News Sunday" - Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif.
Bonus item: Sean Hannity interviewed three “nurses" who supposedly tended to Terri Schiavo, but. . .
http://www.newshounds.us/2005/04/01/did_hannity_use_fake_nurses.php
According to Florida records only one of these nurses is licensed by the State of Florida, Carla Sauer-Iyer. Two other guest nurses, Heidi Law and Trudy Capone, are not licensed as an RN or CNA in Florida. . .
***If you enjoy PBD and support what we are doing, you can help by forwarding a copy of this issue to your friends (using the envelope link below) or by sending them a copy of its URL (http://pbd.blogspot.com).
I don't get anything personally out of this project, except the satisfaction of doing it (I don't run ads, etc). The credit really all goes to the people whose material I copy and redistribute. But if I do have a "mission," it is to get this information into the hands of as many people as I can.***
http://dailykos.com/story/2005/4/2/10228/95578
[LAT] A bitter feud erupted Friday over claims by a presidential commission that top CIA officials apparently ignored warnings in late 2002 and early 2003 that an informant code-named "Curveball" -- the chief source of prewar U.S. intelligence about Iraqi germ weapons -- was unreliable.
Former CIA Director George J. Tenet and his chief deputy, John E. McLaughlin, furiously denied that they had been told not to trust Curveball, an Iraqi refugee in Germany who ultimately was proved a fraud.
But the CIA's former operations chief and one of his top lieutenants insisted in interviews that debates had raged inside the CIA about Curveball's credibility, even as then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell vouched for the defector's claims in a crucial address to the United Nations Security Council on the eve of war.
More: http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/001834.html
There's so much astonishing in here, about how a fairly obvious fabricator manages to find a few key defenders in US policy circles, because he provides information they desperately want to hear. . .
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21854-2005Apr2.html
By the time President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein of the deadly weapons he was allegedly trying to build, every piece of fresh evidence had been tested -- and disproved -- by U.N. inspectors, according to a report commissioned by the president and released Thursday. . . The work of the inspectors -- who had extraordinary access during their three months in Iraq between November 2002 and March 2003 -- was routinely dismissed by the Bush administration and the intelligence community in the run-up to the war. . .
From Eric Alterman: a few readily-available quotes that show just how routinely the Bush admin bullied, distorted, or ignored intelligence that didn’t fit their war plans
http://suburbanguerrilla.blogspot.com/2005/04/wooferic-alterman-reminds-us-just-whos.html
An Army intelligence officer quoted in TIME. "Rumsfeld was deeply, almost pathologically distorting the intelligence."
A former defense intelligence official who attended some of the meetings in which Wolfowitz and others pressed for a different approach to the assessments they were receiving, quoted in The Washington Post, "They were the browbeaters…In interagency meetings," he said, "Wolfowitz treated the analysts' work with contempt."
Patrick Lang, a former head of Middle Eastern affairs in the Defense Intelligence Agency, in The New Republic, on conclusions that did not jibe with administration war aims, “They were encouraged to think it over again." Moreover when analysts warned that the Iraqi people might not welcome an invading force and that the Shiite clergy might cause particular problems, "The guys who tried to tell them that came to understand that this advice was not welcome."
A former staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee quoted in The New Republic: "People [kept] telling you first that things weren't right, weird things going on, different people saying, 'There's so much pressure, you know, they keep telling us, go back and find the right answer,' things like that.
A former military intelligence officer quoted in The Washington Post, “It was a foregone conclusion that every photo of a trailer truck would be a `mobile bioweapons lab' and every tanker truck would be `filled with weaponized anthrax.”
A former CIA agent quoted in The New Yorker: who resigned over his “sense that they were using the intelligence from the C.I.A. and other agencies only when it fit their agenda. They didn’t like the intelligence they were getting, and so they brought in people to write the stuff. They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with—to the point of being bizarre. Dogmatic, as if they were on a mission from God.”
A Defense Intelligence Agency quoted in The New York Times, "The American people were manipulated."
Remember all of these quotes have been available for between eighteen months and two years. I found them during the summer of 2003 when I was drafting the book. So could have any writer, reporter, senator, (or Secretary of State) who cared enough to look.
The failure of accountability in the Bush administration
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/000425.html
Tom DeLay continues his assault against an independent judiciary
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/04/delay-ups-his-coup-threat-against.html
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), under fire from Democrats for what they consider threatening remarks about federal judges, plans to ask the Judiciary Committee to undertake a broad review of the courts' handing of the Terri Schiavo case, his office said yesterday.
http://www.mydd.com/story/2005/4/2/181252/7553
DELAY: Well, there's a lot of questions that need to be answered. We need to look at this case. We need to look at the failure of the judiciary in Florida. We need to look at the failure of the judiciary on the federal level. The United States Congress, with the president's signing, sent a bill -- made a law that gave the federal courts jurisdiction to look at this case all anew. And they didn't even follow procedures. . . What I would propose to do is ask the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives to take a good, hard, objective look at this, and what occurred. And then make recommendations to the House as to how to proceed.
DeLay has made clear what one of the goals of the hearing will be:
He said the House already passed a bill now waiting in the Senate that would allow federal review of state cases in instances such as Schiavo's. Also, he said the House Judiciary Committee has announced hearings on the "definition of good behavior" for judges.
[NB: Well, you can see why DeLay is determined to undermine the authority of the courts, since he is about to get hauled in front of one]
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-delay3apr03,1,7718679.story
In a meeting with the heads of several social conservative organizations, DeLay sought support in a fight that he said was aimed at ending the GOP majority in Congress and thwarting the social conservative movement. Some responded immediately.
"The only fire behind all that smoke generated by the leftist attacks is their burning hatred of a good man," wrote Morton C. Blackwell, a prominent conservative, in a posting on the American Conservative Union's website. . .
Democrats are promising to quickly bring up ethical questions surrounding DeLay when Congress returns to work Monday. And the concern among some Republicans is that DeLay may step into a political trap by fiercely responding. . . Democrats, Republicans say, are determined to further raise DeLay's national political profile. And DeLay is not the sort of politician to seek to lower his profile in the face of conflict.
"He draws energy from these fights," said one GOP strategist, speaking on condition of anonymity. "He sees this in terms of good and evil: He is all good and his opponents are all evil."
DeLay says to opponents, “bring it on” (sound familiar?)
http://billmon.org/archives/001802.html
Here’s how out of control DeLay is: Dick Cheney has to call him back in line
http://thinkprogress.org/index.php?p=559
Cheney said he backed efforts to help save Terri Schiavo’s life, but strongly disagreed with House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), who wants retribution against judges who blocked restoration of her feeding tube. . . “I don’t think that’s appropriate . . . There’s a reason why judges get lifetime appointments.”
[NB: If you want an explanation for this, recall that most of the judges who opposed restoring the feeding tube were REPUBLICAN appointees]
The assault on democratic institutions and practices for the sake of ideological hegemony continues. Looks as if Frist has settled on the “nuclear option,” could pull the trigger as soon as this week
http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/4/2/124143/9218
The National Security State
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7361416/
The government requested and won approval for a record number of special warrants last year for secret wiretaps and searches of suspected terrorists and spies, 75 percent more than in 2000, the Bush administration disclosed Friday.
Bush road show, encountering zero enthusiasm for his wretched Social Security plans, will once again shift focus and rhetoric, seeking desperately for some new basis of support
http://www.needlenose.com/node/view/1251
No progress in Iraq: and none in the offing
http://www.needlenose.com/node/view/1242
http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2005/04/about_that_poli.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/international/03baghdad.html
After weeks of factional haggling that have prompted warnings of increasing civil distress, several leading Iraqi politicians have begun saying that flawed measures in the interim constitution are partly to blame for the failure to form a new government. . . The document, which Iraqi officials co-wrote with the Americans, was approved in March 2004 and is the most enduring legacy of the formal American occupation. The document, called the transitional administrative law and commonly known as the TAL, sets the timetable for elections and the rules for installing a government, and it tries to address difficult issues, like the question of property restoration for Kurds exiled from the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. . . Senior politicians, particularly Shiite Arabs, are now attacking the TAL for enshrining a process that they see as contributing to the deadlock. They are especially critical of the measure that requires a two-thirds vote by the national assembly to appoint a president, and they point out that the law fails to set a deadline for the appointment.
The failure of the news to cover soldiers’ opposition to the war
http://suburbanguerrilla.blogspot.com/2005/04/other-voicessome-vets-are-trying-to.html
Sunday talk show lineup
http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/4/2/182145/4949
ABC's "This Week" - Cardinal Bernard Law, former archbishop of Boston; Bishop William S. Skylstad, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops; Marco Politi, Vatican reporter for La Repubblica; Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson, former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican; former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo.
CBS' "Face the Nation" - Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski; Monsignor Brian Ferme, dean, Catholic University School of Canon Law.
NBC's "Meet the Press" - Archbishop John P. Foley, president, Pontifical Council for Social Communications; Rev. Thomas Reese, editor, America; George Weigel, Ethics and Public Policy Center; Margaret Steinfels, Fordham Center on Religion and Culture; Judge Laurence Silberman and former Sen. Charles Robb, D-Va., chairmen of the presidential commission on intelligence.
CNN's "Late Edition" - Sens. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.
"Fox News Sunday" - Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif.
Bonus item: Sean Hannity interviewed three “nurses" who supposedly tended to Terri Schiavo, but. . .
http://www.newshounds.us/2005/04/01/did_hannity_use_fake_nurses.php
According to Florida records only one of these nurses is licensed by the State of Florida, Carla Sauer-Iyer. Two other guest nurses, Heidi Law and Trudy Capone, are not licensed as an RN or CNA in Florida. . .
***If you enjoy PBD and support what we are doing, you can help by forwarding a copy of this issue to your friends (using the envelope link below) or by sending them a copy of its URL (http://pbd.blogspot.com).
I don't get anything personally out of this project, except the satisfaction of doing it (I don't run ads, etc). The credit really all goes to the people whose material I copy and redistribute. But if I do have a "mission," it is to get this information into the hands of as many people as I can.***
Saturday, April 02, 2005
NO END IN SIGHT
Denny Hastert (!) blurts out an inadvertent truth: Bush’s Social Security plan is dead – DEAD – morte. But that won’t stop Bush from talking about it
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17000-2005Mar31.html
House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) has acknowledged that President Bush's call for completion of a Social Security bill this year could be unrealistic and that the legislation might have to wait until 2006.
The president's aides immediately responded by saying Bush is committed to winning passage this year. The White House and Republican congressional leaders have said repeatedly that the proposed restructuring of the retirement system is doomed if it does not pass this year, because it will be even more difficult to get Democratic support in 2006, a midterm election year.
GOP lawmakers have also said Bush needs to sign the bill this year because they want close to a full year before the election to explain what they have done, and for retirees to see they are still getting their checks and scheduled increases.
But Hastert, in an interview to be published today by the National Journal, cast doubt on the ability of Congress to deliver on such a rapid schedule. He was asked what his timetable is for completion of a Social Security bill.
"Politically, we probably need to get something done by next spring, a year from now," he said. "You can't carry it right up to an election. That's just political dynamite."
The speaker's assessment reflects the realization by Republican lawmakers that Bush's proposal, featuring individual stock and bond accounts for workers younger than 55, has yet to gain momentum despite weekly barnstorming by Bush.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_04/006001.php
House Speaker Dennis Hastert says Social Security legislation might have to wait until 2006. Bill Frist was forced to back down pretty quickly when he said the same thing a few weeks ago, so we'll have to wait and see if Denny is made of sterner stuff. . . In any case, no matter what he says, 2006 = never. If it doesn't happen this year, it means it's not going to happen.
Bush’s economic miracle: the miracle is that he has any credibility left after ruining the economy, exploding the deficit, and creating a stagnant job market
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/02/business/02econ.html
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005-3_archives/000620.html
U.S. employers created only 110,000 new jobs in March, the smallest gain in eight months, as manufacturers and retailers shed workers, the Labor Department said on Friday. The surprisingly weak March jobs number was barely half the 220,000 that Wall Street economists had forecast and came as a shock to financial markets. The dollar’s value dropped immediately and bond prices shot higher on the prospect that it meant less likelihood of large interest-rate rises ahead. The March weakness was emphasized by the fact that the Labor Department also revised down the two preceding months’ job totals. . .
Oil prices jump to $57 with no end in sight (people are seriously talking about $105 a barrel). Wasn’t that “war for oil” a great idea?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/02/business/02oil.html
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_04/006000.php
Military spending due to skyrocket in coming years (and this is from the administration that proposes to cut the deficit – their self-created deficit – in half)
http://dailykos.com/story/2005/4/1/112135/3519
A new report by the Government Accountability Office warned yesterday that the costs of the Pentagon's arsenal could soar by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade. . . The Pentagon has said it is building more than 70 major weapons systems at a cost of at least $1.3 trillion. But the Pentagon generally understates the time and money spent on weapons programs by 20 to 50 percent, the new report said.
Today the DC press corps ALMOST earned their money
http://www.first-draft.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2675
Follow-ups from earlier stories:
On the Intelligence report
http://www.americanprogressaction.org/site/pp.asp?c=klLWJcP7H&b=100480&lftnav=progressreport
Amazingly, Silberman's report on prewar intelligence does not so much as mention the "Office of Special Plans" (OSP), the shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed by "ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defense Intelligence Agency." State Department officials claimed the OSP pressured them to "shape intelligence to fit policy," particularly with regard to "the al Qaeda connection and nuclear weapons issue[s]." Silberman's report claims to have found "no evidence to dispute that [analysts came to] their own independent judgments." Perhaps they didn't talk to the two State Department officials who told Mother Jones that OSP officials "routinely pushed lower-ranking staff around on intelligence matters." Or former CIA official and intelligence specialist Melvin Goodman, who said, "People were being pulled aside [and being told], 'We saw your last piece and it's not what we're looking for'…It was pretty blatant.". . .
Next week, the Senate will hear testimony from one of the architects of prewar intelligence – unmentioned in the Silberman report – John Bolton. Bolton was an important part of the OSP, with one State Department official saying pressure to distort intelligence came "in particular from [John] Bolton's office." Of course, that kind of fine behavior has earned Bolton a promotion from President Bush, who now wants the former undersecretary of state to be America's ambassador to the U.N. In the run-up to war, Bolton was especially dismissive of U.N. intelligence estimates. In a 2002 Congressional hearing, Bolton called El-Baradei's report "impossible to believe" and disparaged international investigators for failing to find "critical elements of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons program."
More: http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/001832.html
David Ignatius on the WMD panel report and the politics of self-deception. . .
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18833-2005Apr1.html
But some of today's analyses and opinion pieces are suggesting that maybe the report should also be read as an indictment of an administration that has let groupthink run amok.
On the Rand report on military planning
http://www.first-draft.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2672
A study of U.S. military operations in Iraq, prepared for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, sharply criticizes Pentagon attempts to plan for the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion two years ago, saying stabilization and reconstruction issues "were addressed only very generally" and "no planning was undertaken to ensure the security of the Iraqi people.". . .
On the Pentagon’s refusal to let ANYONE take photos of flag-draped coffins
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/archive.html?blog=/politics/war_room/2005/04/01/caskets/index.html
The Bush administration's decision to enforce the ban on media photographs of flag-draped caskets returning from Iraq was widely reported last year -- but even mothers of dead soldiers are being shut out by Pentagon. When Karen Meredith lost her son to a sniper in Iraq, she wanted a photo of his casket at Dover Air Force Base for personal use, but was not permitted to take one, reported Cox News Service. . . "It's bad enough that they won't let the country see the pictures of the caskets, but a grieving mother?" asked Meredith. "It's unforgivable after what I lost."
On the Abu Ghraib photos that were supposed to be made public, but never were
http://talkleft.com/new_archives/010211.html
On Tom DeLay’s threat against judges, Michael Schaivo, and everyone else who opposed him
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/archive.html?blog=/politics/war_room/2005/04/01/threat/index.html
Tom DeLay won't say what he meant when he said Thursday that "the time will come for the men responsible" for the death of Terri Schiavo "to answer for their behavior." But New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg has a pretty good idea of what DeLay meant -- and he says DeLay's threats may have amounted to a felony. . . In a letter sent today to DeLay, Lautenberg said he was "stunned to read the threatening comments" DeLay had directed at "federal judges and our nation's courts of law in general."
"As you are surely aware, the family of Federal Judge Joan H. Lefkow of Illinois was recently murdered in their home," Lautenberg wrote. "And at the state level, Judge Rowland W. Barnes and others in his courtroom were gunned down in Georgia. . . Our nation’s judges must be concerned for their safety and security when they are asked to make difficult decisions every day. That’s why comments like those you made are not only irresponsible, but downright dangerous. To make matters worse, is it appropriate to make threats directed at specific federal and state judges? You should be aware that your comments yesterday may violate a federal criminal statute, 18 U.S.C. Sec. 115 (a)(1)(B). That law states:
Whoever threatens to assault…. or murder, a United States judge… with intent to retaliate against such… judge…. on account of the performance of official duties, shall be punished [by up to six years in prison].”
On DeLay’s imminent departure
http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/04/index.html#005970
A bit of a debate has broken out at RedState.org over what Morton Blackwell's demand that Republicans rally around embattled leader Tom DeLay portends for the Republican Party. Josh Trevino thinks the move will prove disastrous and rips into DeLay from the perspective of a disgruntled conservative:
It appears that the movement is now beholden to the furtherance of the haphazard career of Tom DeLay. Tom DeLay, who in terms of tugging at social conservatives for money and support -- and then stabbing them in the back behind the scenes -- among the worst the United States Congress has to offer. . .
On Bolton’s prospects for confirmation
http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/04/index.html#005968
The committee, divided 10-8 Republican/Democrat, has the only three Republicans that will reliably voice an independent opinion on foreign policy, in Senators Dick Lugar, Chuck Hagel, and Lincoln Chafee. All three are skeptical of Bolton, but all three appear to be leaning towards sending his nomination to the Senate floor. Grassroots pressure could change the direction of their lean, particularly with Chafee. . .
On Republican in-fighting
http://www.justabovesunset.com/id676.html
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_04/005995.php
[Jonathan Chait] I suspect that, behind closed doors, most Washington Republicans take religious conservatives for suckers.
On the dangerous unreliability of e-voting
http://talkleft.com/new_archives/010207.html
Bonus item: the best of the April 1st joke postings
http://dailykos.com/story/2005/4/1/201351/3425
In a website announcement today, bloggers at the conservative website Powerline claim that they have convincing evidence that House Representative Tom DeLay is in fact a Democratic forgery. . .
***If you enjoy PBD and support what we are doing, you can help by forwarding a copy of this issue to your friends (using the envelope link below) or by sending them a copy of its URL (http://pbd.blogspot.com).
I don't get anything personally out of this project, except the satisfaction of doing it (I don't run ads, etc). The credit really all goes to the people whose material I copy and redistribute. But if I do have a "mission," it is to get this information into the hands of as many people as I can.***
Denny Hastert (!) blurts out an inadvertent truth: Bush’s Social Security plan is dead – DEAD – morte. But that won’t stop Bush from talking about it
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17000-2005Mar31.html
House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) has acknowledged that President Bush's call for completion of a Social Security bill this year could be unrealistic and that the legislation might have to wait until 2006.
The president's aides immediately responded by saying Bush is committed to winning passage this year. The White House and Republican congressional leaders have said repeatedly that the proposed restructuring of the retirement system is doomed if it does not pass this year, because it will be even more difficult to get Democratic support in 2006, a midterm election year.
GOP lawmakers have also said Bush needs to sign the bill this year because they want close to a full year before the election to explain what they have done, and for retirees to see they are still getting their checks and scheduled increases.
But Hastert, in an interview to be published today by the National Journal, cast doubt on the ability of Congress to deliver on such a rapid schedule. He was asked what his timetable is for completion of a Social Security bill.
"Politically, we probably need to get something done by next spring, a year from now," he said. "You can't carry it right up to an election. That's just political dynamite."
The speaker's assessment reflects the realization by Republican lawmakers that Bush's proposal, featuring individual stock and bond accounts for workers younger than 55, has yet to gain momentum despite weekly barnstorming by Bush.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_04/006001.php
House Speaker Dennis Hastert says Social Security legislation might have to wait until 2006. Bill Frist was forced to back down pretty quickly when he said the same thing a few weeks ago, so we'll have to wait and see if Denny is made of sterner stuff. . . In any case, no matter what he says, 2006 = never. If it doesn't happen this year, it means it's not going to happen.
Bush’s economic miracle: the miracle is that he has any credibility left after ruining the economy, exploding the deficit, and creating a stagnant job market
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/02/business/02econ.html
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005-3_archives/000620.html
U.S. employers created only 110,000 new jobs in March, the smallest gain in eight months, as manufacturers and retailers shed workers, the Labor Department said on Friday. The surprisingly weak March jobs number was barely half the 220,000 that Wall Street economists had forecast and came as a shock to financial markets. The dollar’s value dropped immediately and bond prices shot higher on the prospect that it meant less likelihood of large interest-rate rises ahead. The March weakness was emphasized by the fact that the Labor Department also revised down the two preceding months’ job totals. . .
Oil prices jump to $57 with no end in sight (people are seriously talking about $105 a barrel). Wasn’t that “war for oil” a great idea?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/02/business/02oil.html
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_04/006000.php
Military spending due to skyrocket in coming years (and this is from the administration that proposes to cut the deficit – their self-created deficit – in half)
http://dailykos.com/story/2005/4/1/112135/3519
A new report by the Government Accountability Office warned yesterday that the costs of the Pentagon's arsenal could soar by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade. . . The Pentagon has said it is building more than 70 major weapons systems at a cost of at least $1.3 trillion. But the Pentagon generally understates the time and money spent on weapons programs by 20 to 50 percent, the new report said.
Today the DC press corps ALMOST earned their money
http://www.first-draft.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2675
Follow-ups from earlier stories:
On the Intelligence report
http://www.americanprogressaction.org/site/pp.asp?c=klLWJcP7H&b=100480&lftnav=progressreport
Amazingly, Silberman's report on prewar intelligence does not so much as mention the "Office of Special Plans" (OSP), the shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed by "ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defense Intelligence Agency." State Department officials claimed the OSP pressured them to "shape intelligence to fit policy," particularly with regard to "the al Qaeda connection and nuclear weapons issue[s]." Silberman's report claims to have found "no evidence to dispute that [analysts came to] their own independent judgments." Perhaps they didn't talk to the two State Department officials who told Mother Jones that OSP officials "routinely pushed lower-ranking staff around on intelligence matters." Or former CIA official and intelligence specialist Melvin Goodman, who said, "People were being pulled aside [and being told], 'We saw your last piece and it's not what we're looking for'…It was pretty blatant.". . .
Next week, the Senate will hear testimony from one of the architects of prewar intelligence – unmentioned in the Silberman report – John Bolton. Bolton was an important part of the OSP, with one State Department official saying pressure to distort intelligence came "in particular from [John] Bolton's office." Of course, that kind of fine behavior has earned Bolton a promotion from President Bush, who now wants the former undersecretary of state to be America's ambassador to the U.N. In the run-up to war, Bolton was especially dismissive of U.N. intelligence estimates. In a 2002 Congressional hearing, Bolton called El-Baradei's report "impossible to believe" and disparaged international investigators for failing to find "critical elements of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons program."
More: http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/001832.html
David Ignatius on the WMD panel report and the politics of self-deception. . .
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18833-2005Apr1.html
But some of today's analyses and opinion pieces are suggesting that maybe the report should also be read as an indictment of an administration that has let groupthink run amok.
On the Rand report on military planning
http://www.first-draft.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2672
A study of U.S. military operations in Iraq, prepared for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, sharply criticizes Pentagon attempts to plan for the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion two years ago, saying stabilization and reconstruction issues "were addressed only very generally" and "no planning was undertaken to ensure the security of the Iraqi people.". . .
On the Pentagon’s refusal to let ANYONE take photos of flag-draped coffins
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/archive.html?blog=/politics/war_room/2005/04/01/caskets/index.html
The Bush administration's decision to enforce the ban on media photographs of flag-draped caskets returning from Iraq was widely reported last year -- but even mothers of dead soldiers are being shut out by Pentagon. When Karen Meredith lost her son to a sniper in Iraq, she wanted a photo of his casket at Dover Air Force Base for personal use, but was not permitted to take one, reported Cox News Service. . . "It's bad enough that they won't let the country see the pictures of the caskets, but a grieving mother?" asked Meredith. "It's unforgivable after what I lost."
On the Abu Ghraib photos that were supposed to be made public, but never were
http://talkleft.com/new_archives/010211.html
On Tom DeLay’s threat against judges, Michael Schaivo, and everyone else who opposed him
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/archive.html?blog=/politics/war_room/2005/04/01/threat/index.html
Tom DeLay won't say what he meant when he said Thursday that "the time will come for the men responsible" for the death of Terri Schiavo "to answer for their behavior." But New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg has a pretty good idea of what DeLay meant -- and he says DeLay's threats may have amounted to a felony. . . In a letter sent today to DeLay, Lautenberg said he was "stunned to read the threatening comments" DeLay had directed at "federal judges and our nation's courts of law in general."
"As you are surely aware, the family of Federal Judge Joan H. Lefkow of Illinois was recently murdered in their home," Lautenberg wrote. "And at the state level, Judge Rowland W. Barnes and others in his courtroom were gunned down in Georgia. . . Our nation’s judges must be concerned for their safety and security when they are asked to make difficult decisions every day. That’s why comments like those you made are not only irresponsible, but downright dangerous. To make matters worse, is it appropriate to make threats directed at specific federal and state judges? You should be aware that your comments yesterday may violate a federal criminal statute, 18 U.S.C. Sec. 115 (a)(1)(B). That law states:
Whoever threatens to assault…. or murder, a United States judge… with intent to retaliate against such… judge…. on account of the performance of official duties, shall be punished [by up to six years in prison].”
On DeLay’s imminent departure
http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/04/index.html#005970
A bit of a debate has broken out at RedState.org over what Morton Blackwell's demand that Republicans rally around embattled leader Tom DeLay portends for the Republican Party. Josh Trevino thinks the move will prove disastrous and rips into DeLay from the perspective of a disgruntled conservative:
It appears that the movement is now beholden to the furtherance of the haphazard career of Tom DeLay. Tom DeLay, who in terms of tugging at social conservatives for money and support -- and then stabbing them in the back behind the scenes -- among the worst the United States Congress has to offer. . .
On Bolton’s prospects for confirmation
http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/04/index.html#005968
The committee, divided 10-8 Republican/Democrat, has the only three Republicans that will reliably voice an independent opinion on foreign policy, in Senators Dick Lugar, Chuck Hagel, and Lincoln Chafee. All three are skeptical of Bolton, but all three appear to be leaning towards sending his nomination to the Senate floor. Grassroots pressure could change the direction of their lean, particularly with Chafee. . .
On Republican in-fighting
http://www.justabovesunset.com/id676.html
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_04/005995.php
[Jonathan Chait] I suspect that, behind closed doors, most Washington Republicans take religious conservatives for suckers.
On the dangerous unreliability of e-voting
http://talkleft.com/new_archives/010207.html
Bonus item: the best of the April 1st joke postings
http://dailykos.com/story/2005/4/1/201351/3425
In a website announcement today, bloggers at the conservative website Powerline claim that they have convincing evidence that House Representative Tom DeLay is in fact a Democratic forgery. . .
***If you enjoy PBD and support what we are doing, you can help by forwarding a copy of this issue to your friends (using the envelope link below) or by sending them a copy of its URL (http://pbd.blogspot.com).
I don't get anything personally out of this project, except the satisfaction of doing it (I don't run ads, etc). The credit really all goes to the people whose material I copy and redistribute. But if I do have a "mission," it is to get this information into the hands of as many people as I can.***
Friday, April 01, 2005
THREAT LEVEL
DeLay goes too far
http://thinkprogress.org/index.php?p=546
DeLay: “Mrs. Schiavo’s death is a moral poverty and a legal tragedy. This loss happened because our legal system did not protect the people who need protection most, and that will change. The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today. Today we grieve, we pray, and we hope to God this fate never befalls another. Our thoughts and prayers are with the Schindlers and with Terri Schiavo’s friends in this time of deep sorrow.”
Make no mistake about it: Tom DeLay, our Majority Leader, is now threatening judges, doctors and Terri Schiavo’s husband.
http://www.first-draft.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2650
And who are the "men responsible for this" DeLay promises will "answer for their behavior"?
Michael Schiavo?
Judge Greer?
The 11th Circuit Court?
The Supreme Court of the United States of America?
[NB: Good point. But beyond this, what happens if tomorrow some vigilante, already whipped into a frenzy by his own extremist views, takes DeLay’s statement as encouragement to go shoot Judge Greer or Michael Schiavo in the head? Of course DeLay will say he never meant THAT. But we know the calculations of political discourse, and we know the intended audience of DeLay’s comments (the abortion clinic bombing crowd, the gay-bashing crowd, etc): he wants them to think he is on their side. And of course, in an objective sense, HE IS]
James Dobson: http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_03_27_atrios_archive.html#111230192398154413
“But the aspect of it that concerns us the most is that all the great moral decisions in this country, whether it's the sanctity of life or the definition of marriage, or what we can do with the Ten Commandments, all of them are made by the courts. Our founding fathers intended that this would be a government of the people, by the people, for the people. But now the final arbiter of every significant moral issue comes down to unelected, unaccountable judges to the judiciary. . . They're totally out of control. And there is, you know, almost a feeling of futility when it comes to the courts handing down decisions that contradict the will of the people. . . You know, we saw it two weeks ago with regard to executing minors. Seventy percent of the people disagree with that. It doesn't matter what the people think and the -- neither the executive nor the legislature will step in.”
[NB: This is borderline insane. Not only does Dobson ignore the fact that in a constitutional democracy it is the JOB of the courts to “go against the will of the people.” But notice that in one absurd sequence he criticizes the courts for allowing the death of Terri Schiavo, poster girl of the “culture of life” – then he also criticizes them for NOT allowing the execution of minors! That is sick]
More on DeLay and Dobson: http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/archive.html?blog=/politics/war_room/2005/03/31/judges/index.html
Bush: http://www.news-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=%2F20050329%2FOPINION%2F503290390%2F1015
[Jonathan Alter] As Texas governor, George W. Bush presided over 152 executions, more than took place in the rest of the country combined. In at least a few of these cases, reasonable doubts were raised about the guilt of the condemned. But Bush cut his personal review time for each case from a half hour to a mere 15 minutes (most other governors spend many hours reviewing each capital case to assure themselves no doubt of guilt exists). His explanation was that he trusted the courts to sort through the life-and-death complexities. That's right: the courts. . . I bring up that story because it's just one of several ironies that have arisen in connection with the Terri Schiavo saga, in which the president said that the government "ought to err on the side of life." Fine, but whose life? The inmate who might not be guilty? The poor people across the country denied organ transplants (and thus life) because Medicaid — increasingly under the Bush budget knife — won't cover them?. . .
How about Sun Hudson? On March 14, Sun, a 6-month-old with a fatal form of dwarfism, was allowed to die in a Texas hospital over his mother Wanda's objections. Under a 1999 law signed by then-governor Bush, cost-conscious hospitals are empowered to decide when care is "futile." The Hudson case is the first time ever that a court has allowed bean counters to override the wishes of parents. "They gave up in six months," Wanda Hudson told the Houston Chronicle. "They made a terrible mistake." Wanda apparently was not "cable ready," as they say in the TV world, and she failed to get Randall Terry and the radical anti-abortionists on her side. Tom DeLay never called.
Some segue: I think this is called “changing the subject”
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/archive.html?blog=/politics/war_room/2005/03/31/bush/index.html
George W. Bush extended his condolences to the family of Terri Schiavo this morning and said a few words about the "culture of life" and society's obligation "to protect the weak.". . . Without a word of transition, Bush switched instantly from his comments about the "presumption of life" to this: "The most solemn duty of the American president is to protect the American people. Since September the 11th, 2001, we've taken bold and vigorous steps to prevent further attacks and overcome emerging threats."
Translation: "Look at me, I'm your wartime president!"
Bush's approval ratings have hit an all-time low as domestic issues -- Social Security, the economy and the Schiavo case -- have knocked the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq out of the news cycle.
More: http://www.juancole.com/2005/04/tragic-death-and-other-tragic-deaths-i.html
Roll the tape
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/talk/050404ta_talk_hertzberg
[Hendrik Hertzberg] Terri Schiavo’s life, as distinct from the life of her unsentient organs, ended fifteen years ago. But that did not prevent her from becoming the star of an unusually morbid kind of reality TV show. The show was made possible by two factors. The first was a bitter struggle between Terri’s husband, Michael Schiavo, who wanted to allow her body to die in accordance with what he said, and what an unbroken series of court decisions has affirmed, was her own expressed wish, and her parents and siblings, who wanted to keep her body alive at all costs. The second factor was a set of video snippets, provided by the Schindler family and broadcast incessantly by the three cable news networks—CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC—which are themselves entangled in a desperate struggle for dominance. Sometimes the snippets are identified by the year of their taping (2001 and 2002); sometimes they are not. Sometimes they are accompanied by inflammatory captions (fighting for her life); sometimes the captions are merely dramatic (schiavo saga). They show Terri’s blinking eyes seeming to follow a balloon waved in front of her; or her mouth agape in a rictus that could be interpreted as a smile; or her face turned toward her mother’s, with her head thrown back, Pietà -like. As neurologists who have examined her have explained, the snippets are profoundly misleading. A few seconds of maximum suggestiveness culled from many hours of tape, they are more in the nature of special effects than of a documentary record. Without them, there would have been no show—and, most likely, no televised vigils outside her hospice, no cries of “murder” from Tom DeLay, the egregious House Majority Leader; no midnight special sessions of the House and Senate; no calling Dr. Frist for a snap video diagnosis; no visuals of President Bush returning from Texas to land on the White House south lawn, striding dramatically across the grass as if it were the deck of an aircraft carrier. . .
As the week progressed, it was harder and harder to deny that the fervor of Terri’s Christianist “supporters” was motivated by dogmas unrelated to her or her rights. If she truly had a “right to life,” if removing her feeding tube was truly tantamount to murder, then neither the disapproval nor the approval of her family (or anyone else) could make the slightest moral difference. If her parents had agreed with her husband that the tube should be removed, would their acquiescence have somehow transubstantiated murder into mercy? And, with or without their acquiescence, if Michael Schiavo had spent the last ten years adhering strictly to the orthodox code of family values—if he had remained faithfully celibate, if he had not taken a mistress and had children with her—then might not some of those now accusing him of murder be demanding that his Biblically ordained husbandly authority be respected?
Finally, the performance of the media through all this: need it be said?
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/03/31/schiavo_media/
Bush: why won’t the Democrats cooperate with me? (Funny how he shifts back and forth between bullying threats and nearly pleading with them)
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/03/dems-approach-on-soc-security-driving.html
President Bush suggested Wednesday that lawmakers who oppose his proposal for a Social Security overhaul could face political problems as a result. . . "To answer the question of the skeptics, we do have a serious problem," Bush said in an interview aired on WMT AM radio here and on WHO NewsRadio in Des Moines. Bush conducted the interview at a local diner, the Spring House Family Restaurant. "Now is the time to fix it, and I think there is a political price for not getting involved in the process.". . . Bush added: "I think there is a political price for saying, `It's not a problem, I'm going to stay away from the table.'"
Looks like the Dems, finally getting clever, ARE going to give Bush an alternative proposal: and, boy, he won’t like it!
http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/03/index.html#005953
Washington Post finally takes its pro-establishment editorial policy too far
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/03/sieg-heil-washington-post.html
A horrifying editorial from the Washington Post about those who criticize the appointment of Paul Wolfowitz to head up the World Bank. "People who care about this institution and its mission -- as many of Mr. Wolfowitz's detractors do -- should think carefully before they damage it by attacking its new boss," the Post opines. . . Think carefully? What is that, a threat?
The Intelligence report: the big picture
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/31/politics/31cnd-intel.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15184-2005Mar31.html
http://dailykos.com/story/2005/3/31/11641/1963
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/archive.html?blog=/politics/war_room/2005/03/31/intel/index.html
GREAT analysis: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15778-2005Mar31.html
[Dan Froomkin] Here, from the full text of the unclassified version of the report released this morning, is Conclusion 26: "The Intelligence Community did not make or change any analytic judgments in response to political pressure to reach a particular conclusion, but the pervasive conventional wisdom that Saddam retained WMD affected the analytic process."
The commission acknowledges this: "Many observers of the Intelligence Community have expressed concern that Intelligence Community judgments concerning Iraq's purported WMD programs may have been warped by inappropriate political pressure."
A footnote helpfully sources some of those concerns, and I have hyperlinked it for your reading pleasure. . .
The report concludes that while "there is no doubt that analysts operated in an environment shaped by intense policymaker interest in Iraq," the blame lies in the distorting power of the "conventional wisdom" that Iraq retained his stockpiles and programs.
The closest the report comes to suggesting that analysts were affected by what their bosses were planning would appear to be this: "The general assumption that Saddam retained WMD and the backdrop of impending war, particularly in the wake of September 11, affected the way analysts approached their task of predicting the threat posed by Iraq's WMD programs. For example, this atmosphere contributed to analysts' use of a worst-case-scenario or heightened-burden-of-proof approach to analysis. This overall climate, we believe, contributed to the too-ready willingness to accept dubious information as supporting the conventional wisdom and to an unwillingness even to consider the possibility that the conventional wisdom was wrong.
"But while some of the poor analytical tradecraft in the pre-war assessments was influenced by this climate of impending war, we have found no evidence to dispute that it was, as the analysts assert, their own independent judgments -- flawed though they were -- that led them to the conclusion that Iraq had active WMD programs."
Well, what about the charge that in the run-up to war in Iraq, Bush and Cheney and others gravely mischaracterized and overstated the intelligence they were given? (See, for instance, the House Democrats Web site, Iraq on the Record.)
Not our purview, says the commission. Here's Footnote 830: "Our review has been limited by our charter to the question of alleged policymaker pressure on the Intelligence Community to shape its conclusions to conform to the policy preferences of the Administration. There is a separate issue of how policymakers used the intelligence they were given and how they reflected it in their presentations to Congress and the public. That issue is not within our charter and we therefore did not consider it nor do we express a view on it."
The details
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15778-2005Mar31.html
I could spend all day on this, but here's a few interesting word counts from the 600-page report:
Iraq: 1,852
CIA: 1,567
Curveball: 355
White House: 8 (mostly in footnotes)
Cheney: 2
Karl Rove: 0
http://dailykos.com/story/2005/3/31/1900/19074
From today's WMD Commission report:
P. 322-23: "We have found that the [Intelligence] Community has difficulty in attracting and retaining people with ... advanced language capabilities."
November 14th, 2002:
Nine Army linguists, including six trained to speak Arabic, have been dismissed from the military because they are gay. . . The soldiers' dismissals come at a time when the military is facing a critical shortage of translators and interpreters for the war on terrorism.
“The most important sentence in the commission report”
http://www.ericumansky.com/2005/03/the_most_import.html
"We were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community," - Page 8.
. . . Now see if you can find that sentence in the NYT's happy-to-get-played take on Monday: "Panel's Report Assails C.I.A. for Failure on Iraq Weapons."
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/03/31/intelligence_report/index.html
It will reportedly include criticism of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, both under the Pentagon's control. But the burden of blame will once more fall on the CIA. . . "I'm told it is going to make the CIA look even worse than before," said Melvin Goodman, a former CIA official. As for top administration officials, Goodman said: "It looks like they're going to escape again."
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_04/005993.php
But if that's the case, why did the Pentagon feel the need to set up an Office of Special Plans in order to look at the raw data independently and construct the hawkish analysis they believed the CIA was too timid to produce?. . . If the CIA was already championing the idea that Iraq had loads of WMD and close ties to al-Qaeda, Donald Rumsfeld wouldn't have needed Special Plans. The fact that he did must have meant that — at least in the early days after 9/11 — the CIA wasn't quite the uncritical cheerleader the commission says it was. At least, not uncritical enough for the rest of the Bush administration.
OK, let’s be fair, the second-day coverage has been better
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/01/politics/01policy.html
It found no evidence that intelligence had been politically twisted to suit preconceptions about Iraq's unconventional weapons programs, and made no formal judgments about how top policy makers had used that intelligence to justify war. Yet in its own way, the presidential commission on intelligence left little doubt that President Bush and his top aides had gotten what they wanted, not what they needed, when they were told that Saddam Hussein had a threatening arsenal of illicit weapons.
"It is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom," the commission said. But that understated indictment is about the extent of the commission's effort to explain the responsibilities of the nation's highest officials for one of the worst intelligence failures of modern times.
So the latest and presumably the last official review of such questions leaves unresolved what may be the biggest question of all: Who was accountable, and will they ever be held to account for letting what amounted to mere assumptions "harden into presumptions," as Judge Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of the commission, put it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17211-2005Mar31.html
As former secretary of state Colin L. Powell worked into the night in a New York hotel room, on the eve of his February 2003 presentation to the U.N. Security Council, CIA officers sent urgent e-mails and cables describing grave doubts about a key charge he was going to make. . . That was one among many examples -- cited over 692 pages in the report -- of fruitless dissent on the accuracy of claims against Iraq. Up until the days before U.S. troops entered Iraqi territory that March, the intelligence community was inundated with evidence that undermined virtually all charges it had made against Iraq, the report said.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-curveball1apr01,1,5255902.story
Prewar claims by the United States that Iraq was producing biological weapons were based almost entirely on accounts from a defector who was described as "crazy" by his intelligence handlers and a "congenital liar" by his friends. . . The defector, code-named "Curveball," spoke with alarming specificity about Iraq's alleged biological weapons programs and fleet of mobile labs. But postwar investigations showed that he wasn't even in the country at times when he claimed to have taken part in illicit weapons work. . . Despite persistent doubts about his credibility, Curveball's claims were included in the Bush administration's case for war without so much as a caveat. And when CIA analysts argued after the war that the agency needed to admit it had been duped, they were forced out of their jobs.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16916-2005Mar31.html
Judge Laurence H. Silberman, co-chairman of the commission that released its report on U.S. intelligence failures yesterday, was given "full and complete access" to whatever information he needed. But when it came to what questions President Bush asked of the CIA, Silberman learned everything he needed to know from Bob Woodward. . . "Actually, if you read the Woodward book, it would appear that the president did ask tough questions," Silberman said in a news conference hosted by the White House.
Why would the commission, with unfettered access to the government's most sensitive documents, rely on a book anybody can buy at Borders?. . . Pressed on this point, Silberman allowed that the commission did not interview Bush or Vice President Cheney during its 14-month inquiry -- although it had a "discussion" about "the nature of our inquiry."
The exchange set the tone for yesterday's session at the White House. Silberman and co-chairman Charles S. Robb flanked a beaming Bush as if they were bodyguards -- and in a sense, they were. . .
The Other Report
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16942-2005Mar31.html
A study of U.S. military operations in Iraq, prepared for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, sharply criticizes Pentagon attempts to plan for the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion two years ago, saying stabilization and reconstruction issues "were addressed only very generally" and "no planning was undertaken to ensure the security of the Iraqi people.". . . The study, done by the Rand Corp., an independent research group that was created by the U.S. government and frequently does analyses for the Pentagon, also says the experience in Iraq has underscored the Pentagon's tendency "not to absorb historical lessons" when battling insurgencies. . .
Funny irony: the U.N. is about to refer the Sudan war crimes case to the International Criminal Court (ICC) – the very body which the U.S. has just withdrawn from. So how will the U.S. vote on the Security Council motion? (Of course, this is why undermining such institutions is so short-sighted: you WANT them in cases like this)
http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/03/index.html#005951
After the vote, expect a member of the Bush administration (probably Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues Pierre-Richard Prosper) to declare that the decision to acquiesce to an ICC referral does not in any way confer any legitimacy to the court. But no matter how hard the Bush administration tries to save face, this vote exposes the intellectual depravity of those like John Bolton who adhere to a strict zero-sum approach to the utility of the ICC; with this Security Council resolution, calmer heads in the Bush administration have tacitly acknowledged the potential for the ICC to fulfill one of the Bush administration’s stated foreign-policy goals -- the prosecution of Sudan’s war criminals.
Bolton’s prospects for confirmation look shakier and shakier
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/000423.html
Iraq makes strange bedfellows: Chalabi and Sadr
http://www.needlenose.com/node/view/1243
It appears that the Republicans have decided to tie themselves to the anchor of Tom DeLay, for better or for worse
http://dailykos.com/story/2005/3/31/19222/3099
Morton Blackwell, Republican National Committee member from Virginia and a member of ACU's board, said Republicans are being told support for Mr. DeLay is mandatory if they want future support from conservatives. . . "Conservative leaders across the country are working now to make sure that any politician who hopes to have conservative support in the future had better be in the forefront as we attack those who attack Tom DeLay," he said.
For worse, I hope: http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/archive.html?blog=/politics/war_room/2005/03/31/delaytexas/index.html
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_03_27.php#005306
http://politicalwire.com/archives/2005/04/01/republicans_mulling_delay_options.html
[WSJ] “Lawmakers ponder leadership change if DeLay is indicted in Texas campaign-finance probe or steps aside. Potential successors: Majority Whip Blunt, Campaign Chief Reynolds and ex-Conference Chair Boehner. . . Top party strategists expect DeLay to hang on at least through 2006, but fret about battering from Democrats and conservative pundits. 'We may be reaching a tipping point," says a White House adviser."
Why the Dems have to be careful about exploiting DeLay’s legal problems – or more precisely, HOW they exploit them
http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/03/index.html#005959
Nepotism runs wild: another key govt post for the Cheney family
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/03/cheney-son-in-law-takes-position-at.html
The strange (not very surprising) bias in who the Bush admin counts as a “security threat”
http://billmon.org/archives/001795.html
The coming oil catastrophe?
http://dailykos.com/story/2005/3/31/173310/193
Bonus item: takes one to know one
http://politicalwire.com/archives/2005/03/31/hannity_caught_on_tape.html
Fox News pundit Sean Hannity was unknowingly recorded calling Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) an "a-shole" and "a jerk." Oliver Willis has the audio.
Double bonus: Michael Schaivo killed the Pope!
[NB: This one is just me wondering: who will be the first religious wacko to suggest that the death of Terri Schaivo somehow accelerated the Pope’s decline?]
***If you enjoy PBD and support what we are doing, you can help by forwarding a copy of this issue to your friends (using the envelope link below) or by sending them a copy of its URL (http://pbd.blogspot.com).
I don't get anything personally out of this project, except the satisfaction of doing it (I don't run ads, etc). The credit really all goes to the people whose material I copy and redistribute. But if I do have a "mission," it is to get this information into the hands of as many people as I can.***
DeLay goes too far
http://thinkprogress.org/index.php?p=546
DeLay: “Mrs. Schiavo’s death is a moral poverty and a legal tragedy. This loss happened because our legal system did not protect the people who need protection most, and that will change. The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today. Today we grieve, we pray, and we hope to God this fate never befalls another. Our thoughts and prayers are with the Schindlers and with Terri Schiavo’s friends in this time of deep sorrow.”
Make no mistake about it: Tom DeLay, our Majority Leader, is now threatening judges, doctors and Terri Schiavo’s husband.
http://www.first-draft.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2650
And who are the "men responsible for this" DeLay promises will "answer for their behavior"?
Michael Schiavo?
Judge Greer?
The 11th Circuit Court?
The Supreme Court of the United States of America?
[NB: Good point. But beyond this, what happens if tomorrow some vigilante, already whipped into a frenzy by his own extremist views, takes DeLay’s statement as encouragement to go shoot Judge Greer or Michael Schiavo in the head? Of course DeLay will say he never meant THAT. But we know the calculations of political discourse, and we know the intended audience of DeLay’s comments (the abortion clinic bombing crowd, the gay-bashing crowd, etc): he wants them to think he is on their side. And of course, in an objective sense, HE IS]
James Dobson: http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_03_27_atrios_archive.html#111230192398154413
“But the aspect of it that concerns us the most is that all the great moral decisions in this country, whether it's the sanctity of life or the definition of marriage, or what we can do with the Ten Commandments, all of them are made by the courts. Our founding fathers intended that this would be a government of the people, by the people, for the people. But now the final arbiter of every significant moral issue comes down to unelected, unaccountable judges to the judiciary. . . They're totally out of control. And there is, you know, almost a feeling of futility when it comes to the courts handing down decisions that contradict the will of the people. . . You know, we saw it two weeks ago with regard to executing minors. Seventy percent of the people disagree with that. It doesn't matter what the people think and the -- neither the executive nor the legislature will step in.”
[NB: This is borderline insane. Not only does Dobson ignore the fact that in a constitutional democracy it is the JOB of the courts to “go against the will of the people.” But notice that in one absurd sequence he criticizes the courts for allowing the death of Terri Schiavo, poster girl of the “culture of life” – then he also criticizes them for NOT allowing the execution of minors! That is sick]
More on DeLay and Dobson: http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/archive.html?blog=/politics/war_room/2005/03/31/judges/index.html
Bush: http://www.news-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=%2F20050329%2FOPINION%2F503290390%2F1015
[Jonathan Alter] As Texas governor, George W. Bush presided over 152 executions, more than took place in the rest of the country combined. In at least a few of these cases, reasonable doubts were raised about the guilt of the condemned. But Bush cut his personal review time for each case from a half hour to a mere 15 minutes (most other governors spend many hours reviewing each capital case to assure themselves no doubt of guilt exists). His explanation was that he trusted the courts to sort through the life-and-death complexities. That's right: the courts. . . I bring up that story because it's just one of several ironies that have arisen in connection with the Terri Schiavo saga, in which the president said that the government "ought to err on the side of life." Fine, but whose life? The inmate who might not be guilty? The poor people across the country denied organ transplants (and thus life) because Medicaid — increasingly under the Bush budget knife — won't cover them?. . .
How about Sun Hudson? On March 14, Sun, a 6-month-old with a fatal form of dwarfism, was allowed to die in a Texas hospital over his mother Wanda's objections. Under a 1999 law signed by then-governor Bush, cost-conscious hospitals are empowered to decide when care is "futile." The Hudson case is the first time ever that a court has allowed bean counters to override the wishes of parents. "They gave up in six months," Wanda Hudson told the Houston Chronicle. "They made a terrible mistake." Wanda apparently was not "cable ready," as they say in the TV world, and she failed to get Randall Terry and the radical anti-abortionists on her side. Tom DeLay never called.
Some segue: I think this is called “changing the subject”
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/archive.html?blog=/politics/war_room/2005/03/31/bush/index.html
George W. Bush extended his condolences to the family of Terri Schiavo this morning and said a few words about the "culture of life" and society's obligation "to protect the weak.". . . Without a word of transition, Bush switched instantly from his comments about the "presumption of life" to this: "The most solemn duty of the American president is to protect the American people. Since September the 11th, 2001, we've taken bold and vigorous steps to prevent further attacks and overcome emerging threats."
Translation: "Look at me, I'm your wartime president!"
Bush's approval ratings have hit an all-time low as domestic issues -- Social Security, the economy and the Schiavo case -- have knocked the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq out of the news cycle.
More: http://www.juancole.com/2005/04/tragic-death-and-other-tragic-deaths-i.html
Roll the tape
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/talk/050404ta_talk_hertzberg
[Hendrik Hertzberg] Terri Schiavo’s life, as distinct from the life of her unsentient organs, ended fifteen years ago. But that did not prevent her from becoming the star of an unusually morbid kind of reality TV show. The show was made possible by two factors. The first was a bitter struggle between Terri’s husband, Michael Schiavo, who wanted to allow her body to die in accordance with what he said, and what an unbroken series of court decisions has affirmed, was her own expressed wish, and her parents and siblings, who wanted to keep her body alive at all costs. The second factor was a set of video snippets, provided by the Schindler family and broadcast incessantly by the three cable news networks—CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC—which are themselves entangled in a desperate struggle for dominance. Sometimes the snippets are identified by the year of their taping (2001 and 2002); sometimes they are not. Sometimes they are accompanied by inflammatory captions (fighting for her life); sometimes the captions are merely dramatic (schiavo saga). They show Terri’s blinking eyes seeming to follow a balloon waved in front of her; or her mouth agape in a rictus that could be interpreted as a smile; or her face turned toward her mother’s, with her head thrown back, Pietà -like. As neurologists who have examined her have explained, the snippets are profoundly misleading. A few seconds of maximum suggestiveness culled from many hours of tape, they are more in the nature of special effects than of a documentary record. Without them, there would have been no show—and, most likely, no televised vigils outside her hospice, no cries of “murder” from Tom DeLay, the egregious House Majority Leader; no midnight special sessions of the House and Senate; no calling Dr. Frist for a snap video diagnosis; no visuals of President Bush returning from Texas to land on the White House south lawn, striding dramatically across the grass as if it were the deck of an aircraft carrier. . .
As the week progressed, it was harder and harder to deny that the fervor of Terri’s Christianist “supporters” was motivated by dogmas unrelated to her or her rights. If she truly had a “right to life,” if removing her feeding tube was truly tantamount to murder, then neither the disapproval nor the approval of her family (or anyone else) could make the slightest moral difference. If her parents had agreed with her husband that the tube should be removed, would their acquiescence have somehow transubstantiated murder into mercy? And, with or without their acquiescence, if Michael Schiavo had spent the last ten years adhering strictly to the orthodox code of family values—if he had remained faithfully celibate, if he had not taken a mistress and had children with her—then might not some of those now accusing him of murder be demanding that his Biblically ordained husbandly authority be respected?
Finally, the performance of the media through all this: need it be said?
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/03/31/schiavo_media/
Bush: why won’t the Democrats cooperate with me? (Funny how he shifts back and forth between bullying threats and nearly pleading with them)
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/03/dems-approach-on-soc-security-driving.html
President Bush suggested Wednesday that lawmakers who oppose his proposal for a Social Security overhaul could face political problems as a result. . . "To answer the question of the skeptics, we do have a serious problem," Bush said in an interview aired on WMT AM radio here and on WHO NewsRadio in Des Moines. Bush conducted the interview at a local diner, the Spring House Family Restaurant. "Now is the time to fix it, and I think there is a political price for not getting involved in the process.". . . Bush added: "I think there is a political price for saying, `It's not a problem, I'm going to stay away from the table.'"
Looks like the Dems, finally getting clever, ARE going to give Bush an alternative proposal: and, boy, he won’t like it!
http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/03/index.html#005953
Washington Post finally takes its pro-establishment editorial policy too far
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/03/sieg-heil-washington-post.html
A horrifying editorial from the Washington Post about those who criticize the appointment of Paul Wolfowitz to head up the World Bank. "People who care about this institution and its mission -- as many of Mr. Wolfowitz's detractors do -- should think carefully before they damage it by attacking its new boss," the Post opines. . . Think carefully? What is that, a threat?
The Intelligence report: the big picture
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/31/politics/31cnd-intel.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15184-2005Mar31.html
http://dailykos.com/story/2005/3/31/11641/1963
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/archive.html?blog=/politics/war_room/2005/03/31/intel/index.html
GREAT analysis: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15778-2005Mar31.html
[Dan Froomkin] Here, from the full text of the unclassified version of the report released this morning, is Conclusion 26: "The Intelligence Community did not make or change any analytic judgments in response to political pressure to reach a particular conclusion, but the pervasive conventional wisdom that Saddam retained WMD affected the analytic process."
The commission acknowledges this: "Many observers of the Intelligence Community have expressed concern that Intelligence Community judgments concerning Iraq's purported WMD programs may have been warped by inappropriate political pressure."
A footnote helpfully sources some of those concerns, and I have hyperlinked it for your reading pleasure. . .
The report concludes that while "there is no doubt that analysts operated in an environment shaped by intense policymaker interest in Iraq," the blame lies in the distorting power of the "conventional wisdom" that Iraq retained his stockpiles and programs.
The closest the report comes to suggesting that analysts were affected by what their bosses were planning would appear to be this: "The general assumption that Saddam retained WMD and the backdrop of impending war, particularly in the wake of September 11, affected the way analysts approached their task of predicting the threat posed by Iraq's WMD programs. For example, this atmosphere contributed to analysts' use of a worst-case-scenario or heightened-burden-of-proof approach to analysis. This overall climate, we believe, contributed to the too-ready willingness to accept dubious information as supporting the conventional wisdom and to an unwillingness even to consider the possibility that the conventional wisdom was wrong.
"But while some of the poor analytical tradecraft in the pre-war assessments was influenced by this climate of impending war, we have found no evidence to dispute that it was, as the analysts assert, their own independent judgments -- flawed though they were -- that led them to the conclusion that Iraq had active WMD programs."
Well, what about the charge that in the run-up to war in Iraq, Bush and Cheney and others gravely mischaracterized and overstated the intelligence they were given? (See, for instance, the House Democrats Web site, Iraq on the Record.)
Not our purview, says the commission. Here's Footnote 830: "Our review has been limited by our charter to the question of alleged policymaker pressure on the Intelligence Community to shape its conclusions to conform to the policy preferences of the Administration. There is a separate issue of how policymakers used the intelligence they were given and how they reflected it in their presentations to Congress and the public. That issue is not within our charter and we therefore did not consider it nor do we express a view on it."
The details
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15778-2005Mar31.html
I could spend all day on this, but here's a few interesting word counts from the 600-page report:
Iraq: 1,852
CIA: 1,567
Curveball: 355
White House: 8 (mostly in footnotes)
Cheney: 2
Karl Rove: 0
http://dailykos.com/story/2005/3/31/1900/19074
From today's WMD Commission report:
P. 322-23: "We have found that the [Intelligence] Community has difficulty in attracting and retaining people with ... advanced language capabilities."
November 14th, 2002:
Nine Army linguists, including six trained to speak Arabic, have been dismissed from the military because they are gay. . . The soldiers' dismissals come at a time when the military is facing a critical shortage of translators and interpreters for the war on terrorism.
“The most important sentence in the commission report”
http://www.ericumansky.com/2005/03/the_most_import.html
"We were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community," - Page 8.
. . . Now see if you can find that sentence in the NYT's happy-to-get-played take on Monday: "Panel's Report Assails C.I.A. for Failure on Iraq Weapons."
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/03/31/intelligence_report/index.html
It will reportedly include criticism of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, both under the Pentagon's control. But the burden of blame will once more fall on the CIA. . . "I'm told it is going to make the CIA look even worse than before," said Melvin Goodman, a former CIA official. As for top administration officials, Goodman said: "It looks like they're going to escape again."
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_04/005993.php
But if that's the case, why did the Pentagon feel the need to set up an Office of Special Plans in order to look at the raw data independently and construct the hawkish analysis they believed the CIA was too timid to produce?. . . If the CIA was already championing the idea that Iraq had loads of WMD and close ties to al-Qaeda, Donald Rumsfeld wouldn't have needed Special Plans. The fact that he did must have meant that — at least in the early days after 9/11 — the CIA wasn't quite the uncritical cheerleader the commission says it was. At least, not uncritical enough for the rest of the Bush administration.
OK, let’s be fair, the second-day coverage has been better
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/01/politics/01policy.html
It found no evidence that intelligence had been politically twisted to suit preconceptions about Iraq's unconventional weapons programs, and made no formal judgments about how top policy makers had used that intelligence to justify war. Yet in its own way, the presidential commission on intelligence left little doubt that President Bush and his top aides had gotten what they wanted, not what they needed, when they were told that Saddam Hussein had a threatening arsenal of illicit weapons.
"It is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom," the commission said. But that understated indictment is about the extent of the commission's effort to explain the responsibilities of the nation's highest officials for one of the worst intelligence failures of modern times.
So the latest and presumably the last official review of such questions leaves unresolved what may be the biggest question of all: Who was accountable, and will they ever be held to account for letting what amounted to mere assumptions "harden into presumptions," as Judge Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of the commission, put it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17211-2005Mar31.html
As former secretary of state Colin L. Powell worked into the night in a New York hotel room, on the eve of his February 2003 presentation to the U.N. Security Council, CIA officers sent urgent e-mails and cables describing grave doubts about a key charge he was going to make. . . That was one among many examples -- cited over 692 pages in the report -- of fruitless dissent on the accuracy of claims against Iraq. Up until the days before U.S. troops entered Iraqi territory that March, the intelligence community was inundated with evidence that undermined virtually all charges it had made against Iraq, the report said.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-curveball1apr01,1,5255902.story
Prewar claims by the United States that Iraq was producing biological weapons were based almost entirely on accounts from a defector who was described as "crazy" by his intelligence handlers and a "congenital liar" by his friends. . . The defector, code-named "Curveball," spoke with alarming specificity about Iraq's alleged biological weapons programs and fleet of mobile labs. But postwar investigations showed that he wasn't even in the country at times when he claimed to have taken part in illicit weapons work. . . Despite persistent doubts about his credibility, Curveball's claims were included in the Bush administration's case for war without so much as a caveat. And when CIA analysts argued after the war that the agency needed to admit it had been duped, they were forced out of their jobs.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16916-2005Mar31.html
Judge Laurence H. Silberman, co-chairman of the commission that released its report on U.S. intelligence failures yesterday, was given "full and complete access" to whatever information he needed. But when it came to what questions President Bush asked of the CIA, Silberman learned everything he needed to know from Bob Woodward. . . "Actually, if you read the Woodward book, it would appear that the president did ask tough questions," Silberman said in a news conference hosted by the White House.
Why would the commission, with unfettered access to the government's most sensitive documents, rely on a book anybody can buy at Borders?. . . Pressed on this point, Silberman allowed that the commission did not interview Bush or Vice President Cheney during its 14-month inquiry -- although it had a "discussion" about "the nature of our inquiry."
The exchange set the tone for yesterday's session at the White House. Silberman and co-chairman Charles S. Robb flanked a beaming Bush as if they were bodyguards -- and in a sense, they were. . .
The Other Report
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16942-2005Mar31.html
A study of U.S. military operations in Iraq, prepared for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, sharply criticizes Pentagon attempts to plan for the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion two years ago, saying stabilization and reconstruction issues "were addressed only very generally" and "no planning was undertaken to ensure the security of the Iraqi people.". . . The study, done by the Rand Corp., an independent research group that was created by the U.S. government and frequently does analyses for the Pentagon, also says the experience in Iraq has underscored the Pentagon's tendency "not to absorb historical lessons" when battling insurgencies. . .
Funny irony: the U.N. is about to refer the Sudan war crimes case to the International Criminal Court (ICC) – the very body which the U.S. has just withdrawn from. So how will the U.S. vote on the Security Council motion? (Of course, this is why undermining such institutions is so short-sighted: you WANT them in cases like this)
http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/03/index.html#005951
After the vote, expect a member of the Bush administration (probably Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues Pierre-Richard Prosper) to declare that the decision to acquiesce to an ICC referral does not in any way confer any legitimacy to the court. But no matter how hard the Bush administration tries to save face, this vote exposes the intellectual depravity of those like John Bolton who adhere to a strict zero-sum approach to the utility of the ICC; with this Security Council resolution, calmer heads in the Bush administration have tacitly acknowledged the potential for the ICC to fulfill one of the Bush administration’s stated foreign-policy goals -- the prosecution of Sudan’s war criminals.
Bolton’s prospects for confirmation look shakier and shakier
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/000423.html
Iraq makes strange bedfellows: Chalabi and Sadr
http://www.needlenose.com/node/view/1243
It appears that the Republicans have decided to tie themselves to the anchor of Tom DeLay, for better or for worse
http://dailykos.com/story/2005/3/31/19222/3099
Morton Blackwell, Republican National Committee member from Virginia and a member of ACU's board, said Republicans are being told support for Mr. DeLay is mandatory if they want future support from conservatives. . . "Conservative leaders across the country are working now to make sure that any politician who hopes to have conservative support in the future had better be in the forefront as we attack those who attack Tom DeLay," he said.
For worse, I hope: http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/archive.html?blog=/politics/war_room/2005/03/31/delaytexas/index.html
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_03_27.php#005306
http://politicalwire.com/archives/2005/04/01/republicans_mulling_delay_options.html
[WSJ] “Lawmakers ponder leadership change if DeLay is indicted in Texas campaign-finance probe or steps aside. Potential successors: Majority Whip Blunt, Campaign Chief Reynolds and ex-Conference Chair Boehner. . . Top party strategists expect DeLay to hang on at least through 2006, but fret about battering from Democrats and conservative pundits. 'We may be reaching a tipping point," says a White House adviser."
Why the Dems have to be careful about exploiting DeLay’s legal problems – or more precisely, HOW they exploit them
http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/03/index.html#005959
Nepotism runs wild: another key govt post for the Cheney family
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/03/cheney-son-in-law-takes-position-at.html
The strange (not very surprising) bias in who the Bush admin counts as a “security threat”
http://billmon.org/archives/001795.html
The coming oil catastrophe?
http://dailykos.com/story/2005/3/31/173310/193
Bonus item: takes one to know one
http://politicalwire.com/archives/2005/03/31/hannity_caught_on_tape.html
Fox News pundit Sean Hannity was unknowingly recorded calling Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) an "a-shole" and "a jerk." Oliver Willis has the audio.
Double bonus: Michael Schaivo killed the Pope!
[NB: This one is just me wondering: who will be the first religious wacko to suggest that the death of Terri Schaivo somehow accelerated the Pope’s decline?]
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