corrente

Job creation stalled surprisingly in the U.S. Midwest in March, a report showed on Wednesday, tempering optimism that Friday's national employment report will show hiring at last picking up.
(via Reuters)

Citing executive privilege, the White House refused to allow President Bush's chief health-policy adviser, Douglas Badger, to testify Thursday before the House Ways and Means Committee about early administration estimates that the new Medicare prescription-drug benefit would be far more costly than many lawmakers believed when they voted for it.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy said the decision not to let Badger testify was justified by the longstanding principle that exempts assistants to the president from testifying before Congress.

Executive privilege, while not mentioned specifically in the Constitution, has been recognized by the Supreme Court as necessary to, as Duffy put it, "preserve the White House's ability to get the best information possible and to speak candidly."

Knight Ridder reported on March 11 that former Medicare administrator Thomas Scully threatened to fire his chief actuary, Richard Foster, if Foster shared the far higher estimate with members of Congress. The alleged firing threat, which Scully contends was not serious, sparked sharp bipartisan criticism from lawmakers, editorial writers and interest groups, as did the administration's effort to keep the higher cost figure out of the congressional debate. Lawmakers in prior years had free access to Foster's estimates.
(via the San JoseMercury News)

An emotional former President George H.W. Bush on Tuesday defended his son's Iraq war and lashed out at White House critics.

It is "deeply offensive and contemptible" to hear "elites and intellectuals on the campaign trail" dismiss progress in Iraq since last year's overthrow of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein the elder Bush said in a speech to the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association annual convention.

"There is something ignorant in the way they dismiss the overthrow of a brutal dictator and the sowing of the seeds of basic human freedom in that troubled part of the world," he said.

The former president appeared to fight back tears as he complained about media coverage of the younger Bush that he called "something short of fair and balanced."

"It hurts an awful lot more when it's your son that is being criticized than when they used to get all over my case," said Bush, who has often complained about media coverage of both Bush presidencies.

(edit)

The former president, who waged the first Gulf War (news - web sites) against Saddam in 1991, described progress in Iraq as "a miracle."

"Iraq is moving forward in hope and not sliding back into despair and terrorism," he said.

At precisely 5 p.m., yesterday afternoon, my mother suddenly announced that we were going to go visit a friend of hers who had recently had a minor operation.

(edit)

Just as we were settling down, a figure sitting at the other end of the living room rose in a hurry. "Where are you going?!" cried out my mother's friend, Umm Hassen. She then turned to us and made a hasty introduction, "This is M.- she's a friend of the family… she's here to see Abu Hassen…"

(edit)

"How old are you,M. ?" My mother asked kindly. "Nineteen." Came the reply. "And are you studying? Which college are you in?" The girl blushed furiously as she explained that she was studying Arabic literature but postponed the year because… "Because she was detained by the Americans." Umm Hassen finished angrily, shaking her head. "She's here to see Abu Hassen because her mother and three brothers are still in prison."

By the end of her tale, M. was crying silently and my mother and Umm Hassen were hastily wiping away tears. All I could do was repeat, "I'm so sorry... I'm really sorry..." and a lot of other useless words. She shook her head and waved away my words of sympathy, "It's ok- really- I'm one of the lucky ones... all they did was beat me."

All in the (Profiteering) First Family
By Margie Burns

St. Louis-based Engineered Support Systems Inc. (EASI), where William H.T. Bush, an uncle of George W. Bush, joined the board of directors in 2000, is a major military contractor. Following the 2000 election and 9/11, the company, which declined to comment for this article, has seen its federal contracts, revenues, and stock price increase.

Engineered Support Systems receives contracts from all branches of the military. The Defense Department listed EASI in its top 100 contractors in 2001, with $330 million in contracts; and in 2002, with $380 million in contracts. Estimates for 2003 are over $380 million.

As luck would have it, company products include "Field Deployable Environmental Control Units" (FDECUs) to deal with weapons of mass destruction. On Jan. 17, 2003, the company announced orders from the Air Force and the Marines for these units, complete with Nuclear Biological Chemical Kits, in preparation for secret arsenals of WMDs hidden, the White House insisted, by Saddam Hussein.

Receives $16.3 Million Contract for Up-Armoring of Military Vehicles - 03/02/2004

ST. LOUIS, March 2, 2004 -- Radian Inc. (Radian), a subsidiary of Engineered Support Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: EASI), has been awarded a $16.3 million, firm-fixed-price redetermination contract to provide 272 armor protection kits for the U.S. Army's Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles (FMTV). The U.S. Army Program Executive Office, Combat Support and Combat Services Support (PEO, CS&CSS) awarded the contract through the Tank-automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM) in Warren, Michigan, for Operational Unit Force Protection.

[...]

The current order is expected to be completed by June 2004. The Company's Systems & Electronics Inc. facility at West Plains, Missouri, will be providing packaging for and shipment of the kits.

[1] The first -- and most generous -- explanation is that this is simply another way to further dilute the Commission's ability to ask questions.

[2] Explanation number two would be that this is a fairly elementary -- and, one imagines, pretty effective -- way to keep the two of them from giving contradictory answers to the Commission's questions. It helps them keep their stories straight.

(It's a basic part of any criminal investigation -- which, of course, this isn't -- to interview everyone separately, precisely so that people can't jigger their stories into consistency on the fly.)

[3] The third explanation is that the White House does not trust the president to be alone with the Commission members for any great length of time without getting himself into trouble, either by contradicting what his staff says, or getting some key point wrong, or letting some key fact slip. And Cheney's there to make sure nothing goes wrong.

Hey, when he went on Russert he screwed up and promised to release all his Guard records. They can't trust him alone and unscripted.

Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty, may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries," James Madison argued in 1784. "A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate" liberty, "needs them not." This future drafter of the Constitution wrote with some urgency. Patrick Henry was pushing a bill in the Virginia legislature that would dip into tax revenues to employ ministers from a variety of churches. The long struggle to determine the place of religion in American politics had begun.
(via Michael Kazin in The Times)

Air America Radio, the new liberal talk-radio network, which, according to our promotional materials, "combines cutting-edge commentary with laugh-out-loud funny political satire."

The 45 most powerful radio stations owned by the top five station owners broadcast more than 300 hours of conservative talk radio each weekday. They broadcast only five hours of liberal talk. Right-wing talk-radio hosts lie, distort, and bloviate, and nobody calls them on it. Not even Alan Colmes, who provides the aforementioned five hours.

Today, we will not merely call them on it. We will use their words against them, holding them up to the scorn and ridicule they deserve. My show, co-hosted by Katherine Lanpher, will be called the "The O'Franken Factor," a name chosen for a single reason: to annoy and bait Bill O'Reilly. "The O'Franken Factor" will run from noon to 3 p.m., opposite Rush Limbaugh. It will not only be factual, it will be drug-free.

Republicans are accusing us liberals of being angry. Yeah, we're angry. It's one thing for a president to lie about sex. It's another thing for a president to lie about why we are sending our young men and women into harm's way. And to dismantle our environmental protections. And to expose a CIA agent as an act of political retaliation. And to shift taxes from the children of the very rich to the children of the middle class. And … oh, there's so many other reasons to be mad. Listen to my show for a more complete accounting of them. Plus jokes.

Yes, we're angry. And yes, we're fighting back. But we're not going to do it like they do. We will be a flaming sword of justice, cutting through the turgid cacophony of right-wing talk with a blade of burnished truth. And celebrity interviews. All on a crisp, clear AM signal.

The battle begins today at noon on KBLA, 1580 on your AM dial. Before we go to Mars, we must retake our own planet.
(via the LA Times)

Air America will be on WLIB-AM in New York, KBLA-AM in Los Angeles, WNTD-AM in Chicago, KPOJ-AM in Portland and KCAA-AM in San Bernardino, California.
(via the Bloomberg)

As a presidential candidate four years ago, George W. Bush pledged to use his political influence and "jawbone OPEC" to keep oil prices in check. On Wednesday, when OPEC decided to cut production by 4 percent, the White House said Bush was concerned about rising prices.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the administration would "stay in close contact with major producers from around the world to discuss these issues and make sure our views are known." He said that oil prices should be set by the market [i.e., by big energy at home and abroad].

Asked if Bush had made any telephone calls, McClellan said, "We keep you posted on his world leader calls."

In 2000, candidate Bush had pledged a get-tough response to get OPEC to retreat when it hiked oil prices.
(via AP)

The burst of violence in Iraq on Wednesday assured that March will be the second-deadliest month for U.S. troops since President Bush declared an end to major combat on May 1.
(via AP)

The words attributed to John Quincy Adams appear on page XXIX. None of these words are placed in quotation marks. Rather, the sentence reads as if Thornton is making his own conclusion about what John Quincy Adams believed. Thornton's sentence reads as follows:

The highest glory of the American Revolution, said John Quincy Adams, was this: it connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the principle of Christianity (italics in the original). No footnote for these words is given. Nor are the words attached to a date. Hence, if these words are a quotation from Adams, it is impossible to trace them back from Thornton's book to an original source. Elsewhere in the book Adams' father (John Adams) is quoted properly, i.e., with footnotes and quotation marks.

Did you hear the one about the guy at Starbucks? No? Okay. A guy walks into the Starbucks at Connecticut Avenue and R Street NW on Sunday to get his favorite latte, and sits down at a table.

On the table, he spots four pieces of paper. One is stationery with the heading "Office of the Secretary of Defense," and right under that "The Special Assistant."

It has a penciled map of directions from the Pentagon to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's house in Northwest Washington. Another sheet says, "Eric's Telephone Log." Someone has written "Conf. call" at the top and some notes, some in partial shorthand, on one side. These apparently were taken by Eric.

The notes say: "Took threat v seriously and then segue to wh we have been doing. Rise above [ Richard A.] Clarke.

"Emphasize importance of 9/11 commission and come back to what we have been doing.

"[Commission member Jamie] Gorelick pitting Condi [ Condoleezza Rice] v. [Deputy Secretary of State Richard] Armitage

"Our plan had military plans to attack Al Q -- called on def to draw up targets in Afg -- develop mil options."

There's an underlined notation "DR" in the margin and a quotation, apparently from DR, perhaps Rumsfeld, to "Stay inside the line -- we dont need 2 ruff [or puff] this at all. we need 2b careful as hell about it. This thing will go away soon and what will keep it alive will be one of us going over the line."

A third sheet is dated Saturday, 4:30 p.m., and headed "Possible Q's for Sunday Talk Shows," but there are no answers.

A fourth sheet describes actions taken to change a policy of treating terrorism as a law enforcement matter to treating it as war.

Our good citizen, no dummy he, concluded these were significant papers and should be turned over to the appropriate people. So that would be the Pentagon or the White House?

Oh, no. He turned them over to none other than that most left-leaning think tank, Center for American Progress, headed by none other than former Clinton chief of staff John D. Podesta.
(via Al Kamen WaPo)

The Repuglican National Commissariat is pressuring the Federal Election Commission to adopt new rules that would have the effect of redefining many nonprofit groups as political committees, thereby forcing these groups to meet significantly more stringent financial and reporting requirements or to forego many of the advocacy and civic engagement activities at the core of their missions. From all accounts, they are motivated solely by the desire to protect the Dear Leader from any picayune criticism of his divinely inspired policies. [~ more discussion via: Musings musings]

"On March 4, 2004, the FEC voted 5-1 to consider new rules that would have the effect of redefining many nonprofit groups as political committees, thereby forcing these groups to meet vastly more stringent financial and reporting requirements or to forego many of the advocacy and civic engagement activities at the core of their missions." PFAW

Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2004
From: Wes Boyd, MoveOn.org
Subject: Republicans trying to gag nonprofits

Dear MoveOn member,
Are you involved in a local or national non-profit or public interest organization? As a leader or board director or member? Please read this message carefully, because your organization could be facing a serious threat.

The Republican National Committee is pressing the Federal Election Commission ("FEC") to issue new rules that would shut down groups that dare to communicate with the public in any way critical of President Bush or members of Congress. Incredibly, the FEC has just issued -- for public comment -- proposed rules that would do just that. Any kind of non-profit -- conservative, progressive, labor, religious, secular, social service, charitable, educational, civic participation, issue-oriented, large, and small -- could be affected by these rules.

Operatives in Washington are displaying a terrifying disregard for the values of free speech and openness which underlie our democracy. Essentially, they are willing to pay any price to stop criticism of Bush administration policy.

We've attached materials below to help you make a public comment to the FEC before the comment period ends on APRIL 9th. Your comment could be very important, because normally the FEC doesn't get much public feedback.[source: MoveOn.org]

Fit of conniption: I hear that "Plan of Attack," supersleuth Bob Woodward's still-secret study of President Bush's war on terrorism, will be very bad for the Bush reelection [sic] campaign - which is still reeling from gun-toting former terrorism chief Richard A. Clarke's critique of Bush, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and other administration figures in "Against All Enemies."

Woodward's book, to be released next month, will receive not only a multipart series in The Washington Post, but also the Mike Wallace treatment on "60 Minutes" April 18 - when I am absolutely confident that the common corporate ownership of CBS and Woodward's publisher, Simon & Schuster, will be mentioned.
(from Llyod Grove in the NY Daily News, via Melanie Node 707 )

The things that pop out are not surprising:

1. The head and life lines are joined for the longest I have ever seen. This indicates the inability to break away from home.

2. The set of the thumb is high. This indicates an inability to deal with changing circumstances or think on his feet (no wonder he hates to travel).

3. The most prominent planet is Mars, again no surprise - see the big bulge on the side of the hand - bullies like making a fist to show this feature off.

4. Low set of the pinky is common (pinky is Mercury - business & communications - no surprise he did poorly at Arbusto).

5. Bent thumb (also common) shows that he not exactly a man of iron will.

Surprising are

1. The thinness of the first joint of the fingers, especially Saturn (middle finger - duty & obligation) and Apollo (ring finger - arts& finer things in life). This indicates a spartan, no-indulgence regime.

2. The redness (energy) in luna (imagination) that is lowered (bottom of palm under pinkie). Probably a rich fantasy life?

I cannot see the lines or dermaglyphs at all - so unfortunately no deeper reading (the lines and glyphs gives me the most material to work with. The shape just gives the general outlines).

As far as the strange color - well, I wouldn't want to shake hands with the guy!

• Scott "Sucka MC" McClellan


• David "I'm Writing as Bad as I Can" Brooks (another tribute to Spy)


• Tom "Frenchy" DéLay

• Dick "Dick" Cheney

• George "W.M.D." Bush

[Dave Lesar, Halliburton's chairman] also told the conference increased oil and gas drilling activity in the United States appeared to be near the point that it would allow Halliburton's energy services arm to raise prices for the drilling rigs it leases to oil companies.

"We are about 50 to 75 rigs away from being totally sold out in this segment," he said.

"As the rig count continues to creep up, our ability to put prices up in this important part of our business will begin to manifest itself", he added.

The total number of rigs operating in the United States rose to 1,150 last week, according to oil services company Baker Hughes, up 22 from the previous week and 188 from a year earlier.
(via Reuters)

"It's obvious to me that this country is rapidly dividing itself into two camps - the wimps and the warriors," Miller said. "The ones who want to argue and assess and appease, and the ones who want to carry this fight to our enemies and kill them before they kill us."
(via AP)

"Worse Than Watergate," the title of a new book by John Dean, Richard Nixon's White House counsel, is a depressingly accurate measure of the chicanery of the Bush/Cheney cabal. According to Dean, who began his political life at the age of 29 as the Republican counsel on the House Judiciary Committee before being recruited by Nixon, "This administration is truly scary and, given the times we live in, frighteningly dangerous." And when it comes to lies and cover-up, the Bush crowd makes the Nixon administration look like amateurs. As Dean writes, they "have created the most secretive presidency of my lifetime … far worse than during Watergate."

He also said he didn't want anything sent to him. He'd rather you guys spend money on defeating Republicans or donating to the Native American Rights Fund (his favorite cause).

I would also like to take this occasion to offer an accommodation on another issue on which we have not yet reached an agreement - commission access to the president and vice president. I am authorized to advise you that the president and vice president have agreed to one joint private session with all 10 commissioners, with one commission staff member present to take notes of the session.

A week of hearings on Capitol Hill and criticism from a former counterterrorism aide have eroded President Bush's poll standing on fighting terrorism. But that's nothing compared to the damage that Bush's campaign ads may have done to Democratic candidate John Kerry.

A USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll shows a remarkable turnaround in 17 battleground states where polls and historic trends indicate the race will be close, and where the Bush campaign has aired TV ads. Those ads say Bush has provided "steady leadership in times of change" while portraying Kerry as a tax-hiking, flip-flopping liberal.
(via USA Today)

Bowing to pressure, the White House will allow National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to testify in public under oath before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
(via AP)

The necessary conditions are as follows. First, the commission must agree in writing that Dr. Rice's testimony before the commission does not set any precedent for future commission requests, or requests in any other context, for testimony by a national security adviser or any other White House official.

Second, the commission must agree in writing that it will not request additional public testimony from any White House official, including Dr. Rice.

Throughout the time that I've been a member of the council, most of our debates were defined by the Cold War. When America's great enemy [Soviet Union] suddenly disappeared, many wondered what new direction our foreign policy would take. We spoke, as always, of long-term problems and regional crises throughout the world, but there was no single immediate, global threat that any roomful of experts could agree upon.

All of that changed five months ago. [9/11] The threat is known and our role is clear now. ~ Vice President Dick Cheney speaking to a Council of Foreign Relations benefit in February 2002. Source: CFR transcript

President Bush and Vice President Cheney's counterterrorism task force, which was created in May, never convened one single meeting. The President himself admitted that "I didn't feel the sense of urgency" about terrorism before 9/11. [Washington Post, 1/20/02; Bob Woodward's "Bush at War"]

"did not recall any particular terrorism issue that engaged his attention before 9/11 other than the development of the Predator unmanned aircraft system for possible use against bin Laden." [source: Denver Post]

SCHIEFFER: Well, let me go back to what you said, that first briefing you had. Did he [Richard Clarke] express a sense of urgency about this growing threat at that point? Because now he says he did and nobody was listening.

POWELL: What does he mean, nobody was listening? I was sitting there listening to him. The CIA, Mr. Cofer Black, who is now a counterterrorism expert at the State Department -- I even brought the fellow who did it from the CIA over to the State Department to now do it for me.

We were listening. We did respond.

SCHIEFFER: But did he say it was an urgent threat that had to be dealt with...

POWELL: I can't remember.

SCHIEFFER: ... immediately?

POWELL: It was a threat. We all knew it was a threat. We didn't need just Dick Clarke to tell us that terrorism was a threat. The Cole had been blown up three months earlier. I became secretary of state knowing that two of our embassies had been blown up in 1998.

[...]

SCHIEFFER: What would you say, Mr. Secretary, is the most serious inconsistency that you have found?

POWELL: In my judgment, it is the charge that somehow the administration that was leaving office, which focused on law enforcement and diplomatic activities, was dealing with this problem with greater energy and urgency and immediacy than the new administration coming in. WaPo/Face the Nation

Correction: Gorilla Break-Up Story: In a March 28 story about a pair of gorillas being split up at the Philadelphia Zoo, The Associated Press reported erroneously that Chaka, a 19-year-old male, will be going to live with two female gorillas. Instead, his female partner, Demba, will be living with two females.
(via AP)

Karen Hughes and her actions have fallen under the scrutiny of the prosecutor. The Plame grand jury has subpoenaed records created by the White House Iraq Group in July 2003, the same month Plame was outed in the Novak column. Hughes was a member of the White House Iraq Group, an internal body that coordinated strategy for, among other things, selling the war here at home. Other members of the group were Karl Rove, Mary Matalin, James Wilkinson, legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio and policy advisers including Condoleezza Rice, her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, and I. Lewis Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff.

On her media tour, there are many relevant questions Hughes might be asked: Were Plame or Wilson's names ever mentioned at the meetings of the White House Iraq Group? By whom? What is the relation of that group to any damage control group involving Plame and Wilson? Since Hughes wasn't officially on the White House payroll, did the order by the White House counsel not to destroy records in the Plame case apply to her? Has Hughes retained counsel in this matter? Has she testified before the grand jury or been interviewed by the FBI? Has she discussed Valerie Plame or Joe Wilson with anyone in the White House Iraq Group -- or any other White House officials -- at any time, before or after the publication of the Novak column? With whom has she ever discussed Plame or Wilson? Rove? "Scooter" Libby? Cheney? The President?

Discounting the possibility that the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, is secretly a publicist for the Free Press, one must assume that the Bush administration really is angry at its former counterterrorism czar, and isn't simply trying to help him sell more books. But if President Bush and his advisers were hoping that their loud pre-emptive attacks on ''Against All Enemies'' would make this book go away, they were sadly mistaken. Richard A. Clarke knows too much, and ''Against All Enemies'' is too good to be ignored.

The explosive details about President Bush's obsession with Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks captured the headlines in the days after the book's release, but ''Against All Enemies'' offers more. It is a rarity among Washington-insider memoirs - it's a thumping good read.
And, finally, someone at the World's Greatest Newspaper got what the book is all about:

But the key allegation in the book - that the Bush team was obsessed with Iraq even when faced with overwhelming evidence that it was Al Qaeda that was attacking the United States - can't be dismissed by assertions that he was out of the loop. During those early days, Richard Clarke was the loop.

(via Times)

The White House looked for a deal on Monday with the Sept. 11, 2001, commission under which national security adviser Condoleezza Rice would appear in private before the panel, but it refused to budge in the face of demands she testify in public and under oath.
(via Reuters)

Chicken hawks with Rice

Watching as the days go by the folks all swear to testify
to just the truth or pay a price.
Swearing once, swearing twice, all except for Dr. Rice.

[more]

The White House is attempting to rebut accusations by former presidential adviser Richard Clarke that the Bush administration failed to make fighting terrorism an urgent priority prior to Sept. 11. The independent commission, created by an act of Congress, has been pressing the president to allow Rice to testify on the administration's anti-terrorism actions at a public hearing.
(via Bloomberg)

WASHINGTON The White House may have mishandled accusations leveled by their former counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke by attacking his credibility, keeping the controversy firmly in the headlines into a second week, political analysts said.

Clarke's charge that the Bush administration did not regard the threat posed by the al Qaeda organization as an urgent matter in the run-up to Sept. 11, 2001, has been superseded by a secondary issue of whether National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice should testify under oath before the national commission investigating that day's attacks.

"The administration's attempts to discredit Clarke have backfired. They have merely given the story legs and hurt the administration. The issue of whether Rice should testify should keep the story alive for several more news cycles," said University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape.

"The Bush administration and its allies have certainly not helped the story go away," said Howard Opinsky, a Republican operative who ran media relations for Arizona Sen. John McCain during his 2000 presidential bid.

Opinsky said the White House needed to change the subject and begin talking about what it has done since September 2001 and what it is doing now to make Americans safer.

"There isn't a good way for them to spin this story. They need to get beyond it," he said.
(via Reuters)

This summer, Maine will begin enrolling people in its health care program, called Dirigo - the state motto and Latin for "I lead." It is aimed at ensuring access to health care for all 1.3 million residents.
(via AP)

Several hundred people stormed the small yard of President Bush's chief political strategist, Karl Rove, yesterday afternoon, pounding on his windows, shoving signs at others and challenging Rove to talk to them about a bill that deals with educational opportunities for immigrants.


Protesters poured out of one school bus after another, piercing an otherwise quiet, peaceful Sunday in Rove's Palisades neighborhood in Northwest, chanting, "Karl, Karl, come on out! See what the DREAM Act is all about!"

Rove obliged their first request and opened his door long enough to say, "Get off my property."

"Seems like he doesn't want to invite us in for tea," Emira Palacios quipped to the crowd.

Others chanted, "Karl Rove ain't got no soul."

The crowd then grew more aggressive, fanning around the three accessible sides of Rove's house, tracking him through the many windows, waving signs that read "Say Yes to DREAM" and pounding on the glass. At one point, Rove rushed to a window, pointed a finger and yelled something inaudible.

Shortly thereafter, sirens shot through the neighborhood and Secret Service agents and D.C. police joined the crowd on the lawn. Rove opened his door long enough to talk to an officer, and the crowd serenaded them with a stanza of "America the Beautiful."

The protest was organized by National People's Action, a coalition of neighborhood advocacy groups based in Chicago
(via WaPo)

"[FARAMIR:]....I broke off our speech together...not only because time pressed, ...but also because we were drawing near to matters that were better not debated openly before many men.....You were not wholly frank with me, Frodo."

[BAGGINS:] I told no lies, and all of the truth that I could.

[FARAMIR:] I do not blame you. You spoke with skill in a hard place, and wisely, it seemed to me."

Soldiers headed for Iraq are still buying their own body armor — and in many cases, their families are buying it for them — despite assurances from the military that the gear will be in hand before they're in harm's way.

Body armor distributors have received steady inquiries from soldiers and families about purchasing the gear, which can cost several thousand dollars. Though the military has advised them not to rely on third-party suppliers, many soldiers say they want it before they deploy.

Last October, it was reported that nearly one-quarter of American troops serving in Iraq did not have ceramic plated body armor, which can stop bullets fired from assault rifles and shrapnel.

The military says the shortfall is over and soldiers who do not yet have the armor soon will. But many want to avoid the risk.

"What we hear from soldiers is that they are told that they are going to get body armor just before they leave or just after they get there. But they don't want to take a chance," said Nick Taylor, owner of Bulletproofme.com, an online distributor of body armor in Austin, Texas.

(edit)

Reliance Armor in Cincinnati, which makes armored vests for soldiers and police, has nearly doubled in size as a result of the shortage.

"We're getting people locally who are deployed National Guard and parents, specifically, coming in and buying," said Don Budke, the company's vice president of sales. "The military people don't want to advertise the fact that there are people doing this on their own."

Dan Britt paid about $1,400 for body armor for his son, a medic stationed in Kuwait who had orders to move into Baghdad. He recently heard his son received it.

(edit)

Those that need the armor most are already certain to have it, said Army spokesman Maj. Gary Tallman, and families should not buy the equipment.

"What we have told family members who have contacted us is that the Army cannot attest to the safety or the level of protection of body armor purchased rather than issued for a soldier," Tallman said.

(edit)

Nancy Durst recently learned that her husband, a soldier with an Army reserve unit from Maine serving in Iraq, spent four months without body armor. She said she would have bought armor for her husband had vests not been cycled into his unit.

Even if her husband now has body armor, Durst said she was angry he was without it at any time. Her husband also has told her that reservists have not been given the same equipment as active duty soldiers. "They're so sick of being treated as second-class soldiers," she said.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who serves on the Armed Services subcommittee, said she knows soldiers who were told by the military to buy body armor before leaving, rather than risk arriving with nothing but their shirts.

"We lagged far behind in making sure that our soldiers who are performing very difficult and dangerous missions had protective equipment," she said.

A bill being considered in Congress would reimburse families who bought body armor before the Army asked for increased production to bridge the gap between soldiers who had armor and those that did not.

Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who has talked with hundreds of families who bought body armor for soldiers in Iraq, said the military lost the trust of soldiers' families.

In that regard, it is not surprising that families bought body armor in spite of what military advised, he said.

"There still is a lingering level of mistrust with some families as to whether there are people thinking about the best equipment and needs of their loved ones," Turley said. "No one that I know of has been truly held accountable."

They are paying attention to us!
Across the nation and across most of our concerns, election supervisisors are in fact listening. Now let's be realistic. We've pissed a lot of these people off. What many of them perhaps initially saw optimisticly as merely a great infusion of federal cash to their operations, they now see as a royal headache. Because we are watching. Because you are watching. And not a one of them wants to be the next "hanging chad" election supervisor.Black Box Notes

MR. CLARKE: [I]t's not inconsistent. Let me explain. I was asked by Condi Rice, by the White House press secretary, by the White House chief of staff, to give a press background. Why? Because Time magazine had come out--and this was almost a year after September 11. Time magazine had come out with a cover story, after extensive research, and the cover story was devastating. The cover story of Time magazine was that the White House had been given a plan by me on January 25 and had taken the entire nine months to get around to looking at it, at the principals level, that there had been over 100 meetings of Dr. Rice's committee on subjects involving Iraq, Star Wars, China, but only one on terrorism and that one was on September 4.

Now, the White House naturally wanted someone to say that things had been going on during that summer. I said, "Well, you know, it's true. Things had been going on. But the plan wasn't approved until September 4." And I was told, "But you can say that it was approved by the deputies. You can say that things were approved in principle." I was told to spin it in a positive way.

Now, the question is: Why do you do that? I thought Pat Buchanan, a conservative Republican, former White House aide, put it pretty well last night when he was asked the same question. He said, "When you're in the White House, you may disagree with policy." But when you're asked to defend that policy, you defend it, if you're a special assistant to the president, as Pat Buchanan was and as I was. ... And so there's no inconsistency. I said the things that I was told to say. They're true. We did consider these things but no decisions were taken. And that's the point. It was an important issue for them but not an urgent issue. They had a hundred meetings before they got around to having one on terrorism.

MR. RUSSERT: But if you were willing to go forward, and, as you say, "spin" on behalf of the president, then why shouldn't people now think that this book is also spin? Why should people believe you?

MR. CLARKE: Because I have no obligation anymore to spin. When you're in the White House, you spin.

This is [Bush's] writing. This is the president of the United States' writing. And when they're engaged in character assassination of me, let's just remember that on January 31, 2003: "Dear Dick, you will be missed. You served our nation with distinction and honor. You have left a positive mark on our government." This is not the normal typewritten letter that everybody gets. This is the president's handwriting. He thinks I served with distinction and honor. The rest of his staff is out there trying to destroy my professional life, trying to destroy my reputation, because I had the temerity to suggest that a policy issue should be discussed. What is the role of the war on terror vis-a-vis the war in Iraq? Did the war in Iraq really hurt the war on terror? Because I suggest we should have a debate on that, I am now being the victim of a taxpayer-paid--because all these people work for the government-- character assassination campaign.

MR. RUSSERT: We'll get to that particular debate, but let me go back to September 11 and what led up to it.

MR. RUSSERT: Why do you think the Iraq war has undermined the war on terrorism?

MR. CLARKE: Well, I think it's obvious, but there are three major reasons. Who are we fighting in the war on terrorism? We're fighting Islamic radicals and they are drawing people from the youth of the Islamic world into hating us. Now, after September 11, people in the Islamic world said, "Wait a minute. Maybe we've gone too far here. Maybe this Islamic movement, this radical movement, has to be suppressed," and we had a moment, we had a window of opportunity, where we could change the ideology in the Islamic world. Instead, we've inflamed the ideology. We've played right into the hands of al-Qaeda and others. We've done what Osama bin Laden said we would do. ... We can kill them. But as Don Rumsfeld said in the memo that leaked from the Pentagon, I'm afraid that they're generating more ideological radicals against us than we are arresting them and killing them. They're producing more faster than we are.

We're going to catch bin Laden. I have no doubt about that. In the next few months, he'll be found dead or alive. But it's two years too late because during those two years, al-Qaeda has morphed into a hydra-headed organization, independent cells like the organization that did the attack in Madrid.

And that's the second reason. The attack in Madrid showed the vulnerabilities of the rails in Spain. We have all sorts of vulnerabilities in our country, chemical plants, railroads. We've done a very good job on passenger aircraft now, but there are all these other vulnerabilities that require enormous amount of money to reduce those vulnerabilities, and we're not doing that.

MR. RUSSERT: And three?

MR. CLARKE: And three is that we actually diverted military resources and intelligence resources from Afghanistan and from the hunt for bin Laden to the war in Iraq.

MR. RUSSERT: But Saddam is gone and that's a good thing?

MR. CLARKE: Saddam is gone is a good thing. If Fidel were gone, it would be a good thing. If Kim Il Sung were gone, it would be a good thing. And let's just make clear, our military performed admirably and they are heroes, but what price are we paying for this war on Iraq?

Readers looking for West Wing intrigue will be disappointed by the [Karen] Hughes book; when the subject is the President or Hughes' colleagues in the Administration, Ten Minutes from Normal is all kiss and no tell. Bush is presented as "humble," "wonderful," "tough-minded," "decent and thoughtful," with a "laserlike ability to distill an issue to its core" and "a knack for provoking discussion." Even his tendency to mangle words is a sign, to Hughes, of a "highly intelligent" mind outpacing a sluggish tongue.
(via Time)

On whether an apology for failing to prevent Sept. 11 is necessary:
Without question, we would have liked to be able to prevent that attack. Maybe we'll know after [the 9/11 commissioners] get through with all of their work. They'll come up with some ideas and recommendations about how that might have been done. It's hard at this point to see ... There are clearly some things that could have been done to be more effective. Whether or not there was a way to forecast what was going on here and head it off, I just don't know. Obviously, I think everybody feels bad about the loss of life. If you were at the White House that day, as many of us were, you know it's a moment you'll never forget.
(via Time)

(Copies of asterixed profiles are on disk )
Via: Univ. Texas

Former U.S. counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke Sunday called on the White House to make public his own testimony to Congress as well as other statements, e-mails and documents about how the Bush administration handled the threat of terror.

Clarke, center of a firestorm over the level of engagement of President Bush in the issue before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was responding to Republican allegations that his earlier testimony to Congress contradicted statements he made last week that criticized Bush.

"I would welcome it being declassified, but not just a little line here or there. Let's declassify all six hours of my testimony", he said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
(via WaPo)

Sharpening his criticism, former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke said President Clinton was more aggressive than Bush in trying to confront al-Qaida, Osama bin-Laden's organization.

"He did something, and President Bush did nothing prior to September 11," Clarke told NBC's "Meet the Press."

"I think they deserve a failing grade for what they did before" Sept. 11, Clarke said of the Bush's administration. "They never got around to doing anything."

Clarke said a sweeping declassification of documents would prove that the Bush administration neglected the threat of terrorism in the nine months leading up to the attacks.
(via AP)

Gerald Nicosia, who spent more than a decade collecting the information, said three of 14 boxes of documents plus a number of loose folders containing hundreds of pages were stolen from his home Thursday afternoon.

Nicosia reported the theft Friday to the Twin Cities Police Department, which covers Larkspur and Corte Madera in Marin County, where he lives. The police report found no sign of forced entry.

"It was a very clean burglary. They didn't break any glass. They didn't take anything like cameras sitting by. It was a very professional job," Nicosia said.

"Was it a thrill-seeker who wanted a piece of history? It could be," Nicosia said. "You'd think there was a very strong political motivation for taking those files. The odds are in favor of that."

Nicosia, author of "Home At War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans Movement," had obtained about 20,000 pages of FBI documents through Freedom of Information Act requests.

The documents center on FBI surveillance of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), which Kerry represented as national spokesman.

Nicosia estimated that 20 percent of his documents [4,000 pages] are missing.

Nicosia showed about 50 pages of the documents to CNN last week.

Kerry, who obtained his personal FBI files years ago, knew of the surveillance, but the VVAW files obtained by Nicosia detail more extensive surveillance than the senator from Massachusetts might have realized.

"It is almost surreal to learn the extent to which I was followed by the FBI," Kerry said in a written statement earlier this week. "The experience of having been spied on for the act of engaging in peaceful patriotic protest makes you respect civil rights and the Constitution even more."
(via CNN)

If anyone knows how the new Prescott presidential politics might be eclipsing the old, it's Larry Bowser.

On Saturday, the retired salesman wore his usual American-flag vest, tie and 15-gallon hat on the town square in an effort to attract voter registration. From what he's seen recently, the Bush supporter says, he's becoming part of a dying breed around here.

"Most people I talk to are critical of the president," he said. "I think Bush is in for a real battle for reelection, even in a conservative place like Prescott. I've had people change from the Republican Party because they don't like the job he's doing.

"My stack of conservative voters is getting thin while the Democratic pile is thicker than ever," Bowser said.
(via LA Times)

The commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks feels unanimously that White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice should testify in public, [Thomas Kean,] the panel's head said on Sunday.
(via Reuters)

We know Saddam HAD WMDs, there's no question of that. If you do question that, just do a Google search and find out you're wrong.
(via here)

Two-thirds of Americans say the testimony of Richard Clarke, the former terrorism adviser who has been critical of the Bush administration, hasn't affected their view of the president, says a poll released Saturday.

However, public views supporting President Bush's handling of terrorism have dipped from 65 percent to 57 percent in the last month, according to the Newsweek poll. (via AP)

To the surprise of those who predicted that Ms. Hughes's influence would wane in proportion to her distance from the Oval Office — and that Mr. Rove would grow all the more powerful — the reality is that she is returning more powerful than ever. Despite giving up her official capacity as counselor to the president, Ms. Hughes continued to advise Mr. Bush from Austin. They talk several times a week, and the president regularly asks in meetings, the Bush adviser said, "Has anybody asked Karen about this?"

"GOP donors double dipping with Nader. Contributors deny that financial support is designed to hurt Kerry"

A top Shiite cleric on Saturday urged Kuwait to let Mel Gibson's controversial film "The Passion of the Christ," be shown in this conservative Muslim state because it "reveals crimes committed by Jews against Christ."

"We have called on the information minister to show this movie," Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al-Mehri told The Associated Press. He heads the congregation of Shiite clerics in Kuwait.
(via AP)

The attack on former counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke escalated yesterday as Republican leaders in Congress said they would seek to declassify testimony he gave two years ago, in an effort to show he might have lied.

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said Clarke's testimony and book "raised very serious questions" and challenged the administration to act on its words.

"If Clarke is not believable and they have reason to show it, then prosecute him for perjury, because he is under oath," Kerry told CBS MarketWatch.

What Republicans seek to declassify involves almost six hours of testimony, filling about 190 pages, that Clarke gave to the congressional investigation June 11, 2002.

Republicans said the testimony, similar to a briefing Clarke gave reporters in August 2002, included a positive assessment of the Bush administration's efforts against terrorism in 2001.

Two congressional staffers said yesterday that Clarke, in his closed-door testimony in 2002, recounted a history of al-Qaeda attacks and U.S. responses with detailed time lines and sensitive information.

One staffer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: "There were details, sources and methods in there that would make this very difficult to declassify. I think this GOP attack is outrageous, because they know it won't be declassified."
(via our own Inky)

A few hours after accusing Clarke of perjury [on the Senate floor], [Frist, on MSNBC, ] admits that he has no idea -- not just no idea whether he perjured himself, which is a fairly technical question, but no idea whether there were any inconsistencies at all.
(And lots more here)

The U.S. Army has charged Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia of North Miami -- who extended a two-week leave into a five-month absence -- with desertion from the war in Iraq, authorities said Friday.

Mejia, 28, was the first soldier to refuse to go back to the war and publicly declare himself a conscientious objector.

He was absent without leave for five months before surfacing and returning last week to his unit in Fort Stewart, Ga.

The Florida National Guardsman -- in hiding since Oct. 15, when he was supposed to return to the Sunni triangle -- is seeking an honorable discharge as a conscientious objector.

He said he decided not to return from his leave in October because it was an ''immoral war'' for the purpose of oil and money.
(via The Miami Herald)

[Florida National Guard Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia], a squad leader charged with deserting his unit on Oct. 16 after he didn't return to Iraq following a 15-day home leave, has filed for conscientious objector status with the Pentagon. He is seeking an honorable discharge and dismissal of any charges, according to his civilian attorney, Louis Font, of Brookline, Mass., and GI advocate Tod Ensign of the group Citizen Soldier in New York.

[Mejia] has accused his commanders of using U.S. soldiers as "bait" to draw out Iraqi fighters and engage in excessive firefights to kill the enemy and accumulate combat badges and Purple Hearts, sometimes putting Iraqi civilians in harm's way.

His commanders have vehemently denied those accusations. Mejia said his opposition to war gradually solidified after his 124th Infantry Regiment arrived in Iraq last April and he has accused the Bush administration of invading Iraq for its lucrative oil reserves.
(via Knight Ridder Kansas City Star)

Sometimes, we can both spot an article so certain to provoke response that we may as well stop reading the rest of the paper that day and use our commuting time to start preparing answers to mail we haven’t even seen yet.

This was the case Monday, March 22, when we separately encountered "Former Terrorism Official Faults White House on 9/11," by Judith Miller, on page A18. It was a volatile combination of subject (Richard A. Clarke’s book attacking the Bush administration’s anti-terror policies and practices), writer (Miller was a lead writer on last year’s reporting on weapons of mass destruction, and had often written about Clarke or used him as a quoted source), and placement.

By early afternoon, more than 100 readers — so far as we could tell, not motivated by any organized Web effort — ...

... had written to protest how The Times had underplayed the story. Among them were several present and former members of The Times’s editorial staff.

Wrote one, "A bunch of editors were asleep at the switch."

I asked managing editor Jill Abramson how and why the decision was made. In an e-mail message, she noted that "the core of Clarke’s allegations" had featured prominently in a front page, above-the-fold article by Philip Shenon on Saturday, March 20.

She also said that The Times is "conservative about being part of book publicity roll-outs,"....

.... as the paper had been in January when former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s revelations about his experience in the Bush administration were first released. "We’d rather be in on the front end, with our own enterprise, than be manipulated into helping sell a book," Abramson concluded. "And we hardly buried the news in the book."

I disagree, both in principle and on the specifics.

When I wrote about The Times’s treatment of the O’Neill book in my Public Editor column on Feb. 1 ("All the News That's Fit to Print? Or Just Our News?"), I argued that if it’s consequential, it shouldn’t matter where it comes from; whether or not you’re promoting a book is less important than whether you’re serving your readers. As The Times’s subsequent coverage of the story demonstrates, this one was hugely important.

Tuesday’s paper presented a front page, above-the-fold report on Clarke’s charges and the White House’s defense; inside, a lengthy news analysis contextualized the controversy, and a boxed sidebar ...

quoted verbatim excerpts from Clarke’s book. (It was good coverage, and in some respects — including giving full exposure to the book — it almost seemed designed to compensate for the weak first-day effort.)

As I write (Tuesday afternoon, around 5) The Times's Web site has five additional items on the unfolding story.

That’s all good news, and so is a not-so-peripheral lesson that can be derived from all of this. However deeply buried some readers considered the Clarke story (leave alone whether or not anything not on Page One is ipso facto “buried” [Thanks!—Lambert] ), it nonetheless surfaced and survived. Conspiratorialists who think The Times can stick a fork in a piece of breaking news by underplaying it should note that a truly important story will develop a life of its own, driven by events and public demand.

The Times may be playing catch up on this one, but at least there’s still a story to catch up to.

BAGHDAD—In a private meeting with Mohammed Bahr al-Ulloum, President Bush urged the Iraqi Governing Council president to amend the recently ratified Iraqi constitution to protect the sanctity of heterosexual marriage. "The Iraqi constitution, signed just a few short weeks ago, will usher in a new era of democratic freedom in Iraq," Bush said. "But there are some unlawful and unholy acts that the constitution's original drafters could not have possibly intended to protect." Bush then told al-Ulloum he must act quickly and decisively to preserve his country's most sacred tradition.
(via here)

As she spoke, federal officials from the immigration, foreign relations and military agencies were grilling 13 British citizens, several of them members of a military caving club [hey, maybe Condi can join?], about their activities at the vast Alpazat caverns in the Cuetzalan area.

The group was detained after six of them were rescued Thursday after more than a week trapped in an underground cavern.

Lies lies lies lies lies
Lies lies lies lies lies lies lies
Lies lies lies lies lies

Chicken hawks with Rice

Watching as the days go by the folks all swear to testify
to just the truth or pay a price.
Swearing once, swearing twice, all except for Dr. Rice.

[more]

A Bay Area historian on Friday reported the theft of three boxes of confidential FBI documents, some detailing government surveillance of presidential hopeful John F. Kerry when he was a spokesman for a 1970s veterans group protesting the Vietnam War.

Gerald Nicosia told police that the theft occurred sometime Thursday from his home in Corte Madera, a Marin County suburb of San Francisco, said Sgt. Chuck Lovenguth of the Twin Cities Police Department.

Nicosia said he suspected that the thieves were specifically in pursuit of the files because a camera and other expensive items in the home were left untouched. He added that he did not know exactly what material was taken because it was not cataloged or marked. Three of 14 boxes of files that had been stacked in his kitchen are missing. He said he was moving the remaining documents to a secure location Friday afternoon.
(via LA Times)

Condi Goes Ballistic

Thru the beauty of the Barbara
George was born upon the sheets,
Not like his poor old Condi
Who was surely born a breech;
As George cried for his mommy:
'Lean down closer to my reach';
'Tis a shame she did respond!
Gory, gory, life will fool 'ya
Gory, gory, life will fool 'ya
Wipe my mouth, I have some droolya',
The Truth's a bloody con!

Mine eyes have seen the whorey
Clusterfuck of memes gone bad;
They have squinted into sunshine
That glared out from old Baghdad,
They have even spied a cockpit
Sans the cock my girlfriend had:
The Truth's a fucking pawn!
Gory, gory, life will fool 'ya
Gory, gory, life will fool 'ya
Gory, gory, life will fool 'ya
'Tis a shame he ever spawned!

I have seen the slacker napping
As his wife complains of cramps,
They have builded him a war-chest
Making proud old Prescott/Gramps;
I can guess his frightful penance
Is to lick all his own stamps:
This cipher stumbles on.
Gory, gory, life will fool 'ya
Gory, gory, life will fool 'ya
Wipe my mouth, I have some droolya',
The Truth's a bloody con!

I have read the Daily Howler
Eschaton, Corrente's zeal:
"As I surf out all the bloggers,
Cuz' most media's unreal!"
Let the Heroes born of concern
Bring to light what's under heel,
God's silence is the song:
Gory, gory, life will fool 'ya
Gory, gory, life will fool 'ya
Wipe my mouth, I have some droolya',
The Truth's a bloody con!

He has called forth his own Novak
To sound out some racist cant;
He is sorting out his gonads
For his next walk up a ramp.
Oh, be swift to sweep the poop deck
'Cuz his shit is always damp!
Our George is smirking on!
Gory, gory, life will fool 'ya
Gory, gory, life will fool 'ya
Gory, gory, life will fool 'ya
'Tis a shame he ever spawned!

Late at night the WhiteWash House gets lonely
I guess ev’ry form of refuge has it’s price
And it breaks her heart to think her love is
Only given to a man with hands as cold as ice

You can’t hide your lyin’ eyes
And your smile is a thin disguise
I thought by now you’d realize
There ain’t no way to hide your lyin eyes

Richard Ben-Veniste, Commissioner
Well, let’s start for example with September 12th, 1994. [1] A Cessna 150L crashed into the south lawn of the White House barely missing the building and killing the pilot. Similarly, in December of 1994, an Algerian armed Islamic group in Paris hijacked [2] an Air France flight in Algiers and threatened to crash it into the Eiffel Tower. In October of 1996, the Intelligence community obtained information regarding [3] an Iranian plot to hijack a Japanese plane over Israel and crash it into Tel Aviv. In August of 1998, the Intelligence community obtained information that [4] a group of unidentified Arabs planned to fly an explosive-laden plane from a foreign country into the World Trade Center. The information was passed on to the FBI and the FAA. In September of 1998, the Intelligence community obtained information that [5] Osama bin Laden’s next operation could possibly involve flying an aircraft loaded with explosives into a U.S. airport and detonating it. In August 2001, the Intelligence Community obtained information regarding [6] a plot to either bomb the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi from an airplane or crash an airplane into it. In addition, in the Atlanta Olympics, the United States government and the Dept. of Justice and my colleague Jamie Gorelick were involved in planning against possible terrorist attacks at the Olympics, which included [7] the potential of an aircraft flying into the [Olympic] stadium. In July 2001, [8] the G8 Summit in Genoa, attended by our President - among the measures that were taken, were positioning surface-to-air missiles, ringing Genoa, closing the Genoa airport and restricting all airspace over Genoa.
(via Bill St. Clair)

Faced with damaging charges this week by former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard A. Clarke, Republican leaders in Congress are seeking to declassify previous testimony Clarke gave to the House and Senate intelligence committees to determine whether he committed perjury.
(via WaPo)

The government's reaction to questions about the human reliability regs [back] merits attention. The White House gave no comment to a Spokesman-Review reporter, referring questions to the Defense Department. The National Guard Bureau, now run by a Bush pick from Texas, said it was under orders not to discuss the story. The bureau's chief historian also told the Spokane paper he was under orders not to discuss the topic. The freedom of information officer at the bureau said her people stopped taking requests on Bush's military service last month and now refer all questions regarding it to the Pentagon.
(via Village Voice)

Rosacea generally involves the cheeks, nose, chin, and forehead, with a predilection for the nose in men

A survey by the National Rosacea Society reported that 75% of rosacea patients felt low self-esteem, 70% felt embarrassment, 69% report frustration, 56% felt that they had been "robbed of pleasure or happiness," 60% felt the disorder negatively affected their professional interactions, and 57% believed that it adversely affected their social lives. Much of this suffering is unnecessary, however, because rosacea is a condition that can be easily diagnosed and effectively treated in most patients.

The most important first step in the treatment of rosacea is the avoidance of triggers. Triggers are both exposures and situations that can cause a flare-up of the flushing and skin changes in rosacea. Principal among these is sun exposure. Rosacea patients must be advised always to apply a nonirritating facial sun block when outdoors. Stress, through autonomic activation, can also increase the flushing. Alcohol consumption, while not a cause in itself, can aggravate this condition through peripheral vasodilation. Spicy foods can also aggravate the symptoms of rosacea through autonomic stimulation.

Rosacea responds well to oral antibiotics. Recalcitrant rosacea can respond to oral isotretinoin therapy. Although the exact cause of rosacea is unknown, its progression, signs, and symptoms can be readily alleviated by the primary care physician.

If you use self tanner, which I think Bush does, and don't wash your hands after applying it, it leaves stains like those in the picture.

After a marked decline in U.S. troop deaths in Iraq in February, the toll is again escalating. So far this month 37 U.S. troops and two Department of the Army civilians have died, according to the Pentagon's count. Mid-March saw the heaviest death toll for any 10-day period since November, which was the deadliest month of the war so far. Even though February showed improvement, it was one of the deadliest months for Iraqi civilians.
(via the Boston Glob, AP)

"Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to strike America, to attack us, I would have used every resource, every asset, every power of the government, to protect the American people," Bush said, appearing with Cheryl McGinnis, the wife of a pilot killed in the attacks.
(via the Boston Glob, Reuters)

"When we remove them there will be less conflict with the neighboring communities and the habitat will get a chance to rejuvenate," [said Edward Indakwa, Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) communication officer.]
(via Reuters)

FBI translator, Sibel Edmonds, was offered a substantial raise and a full time job in order to not go public that she had been asked by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to retranslate and adjust the translations of [terrorist] subject intercepts that had been received before September 11, 2001 by the FBI and CIA.

[...]

In a 50 reporter scrum in front of some 12 news cameras, Edmonds said "Attorney General John Ashcroft told me 'he was invoking State Secret Privilage [sic] and National Security' when I told the FBI I wanted to go public with what I had translated from the pre 9-11 intercepts".

[...]

Edmonds said "My translations of the pre 9-11 intercepts included [terrorist] money laundering, detailed and date specific information enough to alert the American people, and other issues dating back to 1999 which I won't go into right now."

Incredibly, Edmonds said "The Senate Judiciary Committee, and the 911 Commission have heard me testify for lengthy periods of time time (3 hours) about very specific plots, dates, airplanes used as weopons, and specific idividuals and activities."

This explosive information has been kept under wraps by the White House, CIA, FBI, and DOJ since Edmond's 60 Minutes interview segment.[*]

[...]

"This whole situation is outrageous and I am going public," said Edmonds, adding "I am currently being advised by counsel. Thank you."

Kristen Breitweiser, 9-11 family member and also one of the nick-named Jersey girls, arranged to have Ms. Edmonds address the gathered media right after Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet testified.

[Tom Flocco | March 24, 2004]

Bear in mind that top White House aides have told the press that the president personally initiated and is directing this campaign against Clarke. Not outside rabble-rousers, not nefarious aides operating on their own account, but the president himself. This is all his doing, according to his own staffers.

In Cognitive Therapy of Personality Disorders, Aaron T. Beck, Arthur Freeman, and associates list typical beliefs associated with each specific personality disorder. Here are some of the typical beliefs that they have listed (pp. 361-362) for Narcissistic Personality Disorder:

• Since I am so superior, I am entitled to special treatment and privileges.
  
• I don't have to be bound by the rules that apply to other people.
  
• Other people should satisfy my needs.
  
• Other people should recognize how special I am.
  
• Since I am so talented, people should go out of their way to promote my career.
  
• No one's needs should interfere with my own.
  
• If others don't respect my status, they should be punished.

Democratic commission member Richard Ben-Veniste disclosed this week that Rice had asked, in her private meetings with the commission, to revise a statement she made publicly that "I don't think anybody could have predicted that those people could have taken an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center . . . that they would try to use an airplane as a missile." Rice told the commission that she misspoke; the commission has received information that prior to Sept. 11, U.S. intelligence agencies and Clarke had talked about terrorists using airplanes as missiles.
(via WaPo)

I've long wondered whether or not Rice is familiar with the Japanese aerial tactics employed during the battle of Okinawa.

A former FBI translator told the 9/11 commission that the bureau had detailed information well before Sept. 11, 2001, that terrorists were likely to attack the U.S. with airplanes.

By Eric Boehlert
March 26, 2004 |

A former FBI wiretap translator with top-secret security clearance, who has been called "very credible" by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has told Salon she recently testified to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States that the FBI had detailed information prior to Sept. 11, 2001, that a terrorist attack involving airplanes was being plotted.

Referring to the Homeland Security Department's color-coded warnings instituted in the wake of 9/11, the former translator, Sibel Edmonds, told Salon, "We should have had orange or red-type of alert in June or July of 2001. There was that much information available." Edmonds is offended by the Bush White House claim that it lacked foreknowledge of the kind of attacks made by al-Qaida on 9/11. "Especially after reading National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice [Washington Post Op-Ed on March 22] where she said, we had no specific information whatsoever of domestic threat or that they might use airplanes. That's an outrageous lie. And documents can prove it's a lie."

Soldiers headed for Iraq are still buying their own body armor -- and in many cases, their families are buying it for them -- despite assurances from the military that the gear will be in hand before they're in harm's way.
(via CNN)

Asked about Bush's personal reaction to the criticism from a former White House aide, McClellan said, "Any time someone takes a serious issue like this and revises history it's disappointing."
(via AP)

New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney, chair of the House Democratic Task Force on Homeland Security, said the problem will hamper efforts to prevent terrorists entering the country.

"This administration has spared no expense to open new firehouses in Iraq but won't even keep our Department of Homeland Security solvent," Maloney said in a statement.
(via AP)

Lieberman laughing
while aWol is aping,
People of conscience
Yet no mouths are gaping,
Dark coffins buried ‘neath
Patriots’ dreams
These are a few of my favorite things…

Blood splattered camels
And orphaned Iraqis
Pundits on TV
All paid-off Bush lackeys
Sunnis and Shiites who dance and who sing
These are a few of my favorite things

Jokes in the White House
Ah, laughter so cleansing
Hire more armed guards and raise up the fencing
Blood spackled winters
That bleed into spring
These are a few of my favorite things

When the maimed cry
When the kids die
When I’m feeling sad
I call up some writers—they toss me some zings
And then I don’t feel so bad...

But an awful you're-all-alone moment came during George W. Bush's comments that followed the sit-down dinner. The current president is often the honored guest at this annual affair, and the audience toasts him in what is supposed to be a sign of communal and nonpartisan spirit. And, the tradition is, that the president has to be funny. It's standard fare humor. ... But at one point, Bush showed a photo of himself looking for something out a window in the Oval Office, and he said, "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere."

The audience laughed. I grimaced. But that wasn't the end of it. After a few more slides, there was a shot of Bush looking under furniture in the Oval Office. "Nope," he said. "No weapons over there." More laughter. Then another picture of Bush searching in his office: "Maybe under here." Laughter again.

Disapproval must have registered upon my face, for one of my tablemates said, "Come on, David, this is funny." I wanted to reply, Over 500 Americans and literally countless Iraqis are dead because of a war that was supposedly fought to find weapons of mass destruction, and Bush is joking about it. Instead, I took a long drink of the lovely white wine that had come with our dinner. It's not as if I was in the middle of a talk-show debate and had to respond. This was certainly one of those occasions in which you either get it or don't. And I wasn't getting it. Or maybe my neighbor wasn't.

So what's wrong with this picture? Bush was somber about the sacrifice being made by U.S. troops overseas. But he obviously considered it fine to make fun of the reason he cited for sending Americans to war and to death. What an act of audacious spin. ...
As the crowd was digesting the delicious surf-and-turf meal, Bush was transforming serious scandal into rim-shot comedy.

Few seemed to mind. His WMD gags did not prompt a how-can-you silence from the gathering. ...

Even if Bush does not believe he lied to or misled the public, how can he make fun of the rationale for a war that has killed and maimed thousands? Imagine if Lyndon Johnson had joked about the trumped-up Gulf of Tonkin incident that he deceitfully used as a rationale for U.S. military action in Vietnam: "Who knew that fish had torpedoes?" Or if Ronald Reagan appeared at a correspondents event following the truck-bombing at the Marines barracks in Beirut--which killed over 200 American servicemen--and said, "Guess we forgot to put in a stop light." Or if Clinton had come out after the bombing of Serbia--during which U.S. bombs errantly destroyed the Chinese embassy and killed several people there--and said, "The problem is, those embassies--they all look alike."

Yet there was Bush--apparently having a laugh at his own expense, but actually doing so on the graves of thousands. This was a callous and arrogant display. For Bush, the misinformation--or disinformation--he peddled before the war was no more than material for yucks. As the audience laughed along, he smiled. The false statements (or lies) that had launched a war had become merely another punchline in the nation's capital.
(David Corn via The Nation)

The following is a listing of our non-negotiable terms for allowing you to continue in your position at Waldron.

Both you and Vickie go to a Christian counselor. These sessions will probably need to be weekly or at least semimonthly. Yes, it costs money. Spend it. Make the commitment. Regardless, be sure you are seeing a Christian counselor. There are all kinds of wacko "counselors" out there.

Attend church weekly. Without fail. No excuses.

[...] You and Vickie must go to bed with each other every night without fail. If she likes to go to sleep early and you like to stay up late, compromise where she stays up a little later with you and you go to bed a little earlier. But go to bed together. Besides saying good night to each other, the last thing you should do each night is say a prayer out loud together. And start each morning the same, with a prayer out loud together.

[...] We want a short written report from you faxed to us every Monday morning and on our desk here by 8 a.m. In this report should be your triumphs and tragedies of the past week, the high points and the low points you hit. Business and personal. Tell us about a successful promo you all did. Tell us how the press broke down in Mena. Tell us about a good Scripture passage you found. Tell us about the time you got so mad you had to go for a walk. Tell us about Adam's curveball. Tell us about Adam's curveball breaking the window on the house.

We want you and Vickie to succeed in all personal and business areas of your lives — in that order. You are accountable to us; do not forget this. You must comply completely.

Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere. (Laughter and applause.) ... Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere. (Laughter and applause.) ...
(via Drudge via Atrios)

To honor those who died on September the 11th, and to make a statement of their own commitment to this country's security, these Americans buried a piece of the World Trade Center in a place in Afghanistan where the al Qaeda once ran free.

Bush feels—rightly—that he can get away with this disgusting behavior in front of 1,500 members of the press.

America's buoyant economic recovery could largely be a statistical illusion, according to research released this weekend.

Last year's growth may be half the official figure, which would explain the lack of job creation which is damaging President Bush's re-election chances.

A growing number of discrepancies are emerging in America's economic numbers, including a dramatic over-estimation of manufacturing output. The latest analysis from Goldman Sachs suggests that the US economy may have grown by only about 2.2 percent in the year to the fourth quarter of 2003, considerably less than the official 4.3 percent.

Jan Hatzius, a senior economist at Goldman Sachs, has added his voice to a growing band who believe that the growth figures are overstating the true recovery of the US economy. Errors in calculating manufacturing output and income growth explain why unemployment, on all measures, has consistently disappointed the markets in recent months, the research claims.

Hatzius said: "Over the last year, the official data show real gross domestic product (GDP) growing a sturdy 4.3 percent. Yet, non-farm payrolls are up only 0.1 percent. It is hard to overemphasise how unusual this combination is."

The results of the alternative, survey-based method have also been weak, recording a 1.5 percent rise in household employment since November 2001, the smallest gain of any post-war business cycle, despite the dramatic rebound in US economic growth on the official figures.

Big flaws in the manufacturing data are responsible, according to the Goldman research. Real GDP for goods, which accounts for 33 percent of total GDP, has surged by 8 percent over the past year, the official figures say, more than double its 3.6 percent long-term trend. But these figures are in complete contradiction with the standard data for industrial production, a closely-related and far more reliable measure calculated using separate data.
(Knight Ridder via The Miami Herald)

Rice now claims about terrorism that "we were at battle stations". But Bush is quoted by Bob Woodward in Bush At War as saying that before September 11 "I was not on point ... I didn't feel that sense of urgency".

Cheney alleges that Clarke was "out of the loop". But if he was, then the administration was either running a rogue operation or doing nothing, as Clarke testifies.

Bush protests now: "And had my administration had any information that terrorists were going to attack New York City on September 11, we would have acted." But he had plenty of information. The former deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, the only member of the 9/11 commission to read the president's daily brief, revealed in the hearings that the documents "would set your hair on fire" and that the intelligence warnings of al-Qaida attacks "plateaued at a spike level for months" before September 11. Bush is fighting public release of these PDBs, which would show whether he had marked them up and demanded action.

The administration's furious response to Clarke only underscores his book. Rice is vague, forgetful and dissembling. Cheney is belligerent, certain and bluffing. In Clarke's account, as in the memoir of former secretary of the treasury Paul O'Neill, Bush is disengaged, incurious, manipulated by those in the circle around him; he adopts ill-conceived strategies that he has played little or no part in preparing. Bush is the Oz behind the curtain, but unlike the wizard, the special effects are performed by others. Especially on terrorism and September 11, his White House is at "battle stations" to prevent the curtain from being pulled open.
(Sidney Blumenthal via The Guardian)

Releasing the PDBs would tell us what Dubya knew and when he knew it. That's the real reason you won't see them anytime soon.

John T. Korsmo has resigned as chairman of the Federal Housing Finance Board, saying that "speculation concerning my private affairs has become a distraction" for the panel that regulates the nation's 12 home loan banks.

In an e-mail to colleagues Friday, Korsmo said he had regretfully concluded he should step aside while Congress debates the future oversight of the home loan bank system. White House spokesman Erin Healy said yesterday that the White House accepted but did not request Korsmo's resignation.

Korsmo did not describe the speculation he cited and has not responded to repeated requests for comment. But last month, Dow Jones reported that the Justice Department was conducting a criminal probe of Korsmo's political fundraising in 2002, the year after President Bush appointed him to head the regulatory agency.
(via WaPo)

Gonzales also sought to set the record straight about the obligation of a presidential aide to testify publicly. He said that statements that other national security advisers have testified before Congress in open sessions were wrong.

Previous testimony from national security advisers have either been in closed session or involved potential criminal wrongdoing, making those situations markedly different from the current one, Gonzales said.
(via AP)

WASHINGTON - Richard Clarke’s testimony to the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks was considered so damaging that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice planned to ask the panel for a private interview to answer his allegations, a senior White House official told NBC News on Thursday.

During his appearance before the committee Wednesday, Clarke, the former counterterrorism coordinator in the Bush and Clinton White Houses, placed the bulk of the blame for the attacks on President Bush and apologized to the families of the approximately 3,000 victims, saying, “Your government failed you.”

Clarke, the star witness at the two days of hearings by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, accused Rice and Bush of ignoring Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terrorist network before the attacks. He said his access to senior officials was cut off by the new Bush administration, which he said did not consider terrorism to be an “urgent problem.” In contrast, he said, the Clinton administration gave the terrorist threat its “highest priority.”

In interviews to promote his new book this week, Clarke alleged that Rice appeared not to even have heard of al-Qaida when he first broached the subject with her. He portrayed Bush as being obsessed with Iraq and its president, Saddam Hussein, saying Bush asked him directly almost immediately after the attacks to find out whether Iraq was involved.

The senior administration official told NBC News that Rice would ask the commission sometime Thursday for a private meeting as soon as possible to rebut Clarke’s testimony, which was widely praised by commission members. She was said to be concerned that his presentation would disproportionately influence the commission’s final report, which is expected in July, just four months before the presidential election.

Rice, who has met privately with the commission once before, may not get her wish, however, because the commission could insist that any new appearance, even if in private, be conducted under oath. A source familiar with the commission’s operations told NBC News that the panel has consistently required anyone rebutting sworn testimony to be similarly under oath.

Rice has come under heavy criticism for refusing to testify before the commission under oath or in public. She said Wednesday in an interview on “NBC Nightly News” that she had a responsibility to protect the president’s constitutional guarantee of executive privilege, arguing that the president could not rely on his advisers to speak to him openly if they could be questioned about their advice to him.

Please ask the people around you to stop the character attacks they are waging against Richard Clarke. Ask them to stop their attempts to conceal information and confuse facts. Ask them to stop the long effort that has made the 9-11 Commission's work more difficult than it should be.

Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with Mr. Clarke's facts, he set an eloquent example for all of us yesterday. He acknowledged to the families of the victims of September 11 that their government had failed them. He accepted responsibility for September 11. He made himself accountable and he tried, in my view, to help us understand what happened in the months and years before September 11.

I couldn't be more disappointed in the White House's response. They have known for months what Mr. Clarke was going to say. Instead of dealing with it factually, they've launched a shrill attack to destroy Mr. Clarke's credibility.
(via Senate Democrats site

Former Democratic Party front-runner Howard Dean endorsed the party’s nominee, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, Thursday at a rally at Washington, D.C.'s George Washington University. Amid spirited chants of "Kerry, Kerry, Kerry" led by Dean himself, the former Vermont governor pledged his support for Kerry, once his arch-rival on the campaign trail.

"Who would you rather have in charge of the defense of the United States of America," Dean asked the eager crowd, "a group of people who never served a day overseas in their life, or a guy who served his country honorably and has three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star from the battlefields of Vietnam?"

"If this is what Governor Dean feels is best to bring the party together, that's fantastic," said Becca Doten, the Southern California Generation Dean organizer and a University of Southern California film production grad. "It feels right to offer a unified front to beat George Bush."
(via MTV (!) )

"It feels right to offer a unified front to beat George Bush."

Wrong answer.

"It feels right to offer a unified front to beat George Bush AGAIN."

Buffeted by charges that he failed to fully grasp the terrorist threat before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, President Bush said Thursday he would have employed "every resource, every asset, every power of this government" had he known the attacks were coming.

His remarks came as part of a speech here on his plans for retraining laid-off workers.

"[BUSH]There's a commission going on in Washington, DC. It's a very important commission," Bush said.

"This commission is determined to look at the eight months of my administration and the eight years of the previous administration to determine what we can learn, what we can do to make sure we uphold our solemn duty."

The president said there are "a lot of good folks working to keep us safe."

"We overcame Sept. the 11th because this nation refused to be intimidated," he said. "We weren't going to let killers and assassins determine our course of life."

"Had I known the enemy was going to use airplanes to strike America, to attack us, I would have used every resource, every asset, every power of this government to protect the American people," [Bush] said as a loud cheer erupted from the [hand-picked—Lambert] audience.
(via Portsmouth Herald)

The president rubbed elbows Wednesday night with 1,500 guests at the 60th annual dinner of the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association.

Bush's speech featured a slide show which he called the "White House Election-Year Album." One photo showed the president looking under furniture. He captioned it: "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere."
(Channel 5 in Champlain via Buzzflash.

Yet nearly 12 months after "victory" in Iraq, oil prices are at an eye-popping $38 a barrel, or about $15 above the two-decade average, and some forecasters are now offering a far less sanguine prognosis: Not only will oil stay high through 2005, but the days of cheap crude are history. These aren't exactly glad tidings for a global economy designed to run on low-priced oil, nor for a White House that gambled it could deliver low oil prices with a mix of diplomatic muscle and market liberalization.

What happened? In simplest terms, what we're seeing are the final months of a 25-year oil boom.

Many motorists and some opportunistic politicians will reflexively point the finger at greedy oil companies and nefarious "foreigners." But eventually, all of us, from the man in the Oval Office on down, may be forced to concede that the days of cheap oil are over and that the U.S. really does need an entirely new approach to energy.
(Paul Robers, "Say Goodbye to Cheap Oil via the LA Times)

In other economic news, new claims for unemployment benefits rose last week by a seasonally adjusted 1,000 to 339,000, the Labor Department said.
(via AP from LA Times)

DELAY TO STEP DOWN?....Could it be? From Roll Call (subscription only):
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) has begun quiet discussions with a handful of colleagues about the possibility that he will have to step down from his leadership post temporarily if he is indicted by a Texas grand jury investigating alleged campaign finance abuses.

...Republican Conference rules state that a member of the elected leadership who has been indicted on a felony carrying a penalty of at least two years in prison must temporarily step down from the post.
(via CalPundit via Atrios)

THOMPSON: So you believed that your conference with the press in August of 2002 is consistent with what you've said in your book and what you've said in press interviews the last five days about your book?

CLARKE: I do. I think the think that's obviously bothering you is the tenor and the tone. And I've tried to explain to you, sir, that when you're on the staff of the president of the United States, you try to make his policies look as good as possible.
(transcript via Times)

Okay, students of the White House, what did we learn yesterday?

1) Senior administration officials can make remarks on a not-for-attribution basis to the press -- but the White House can later decide to make the attribution public if it can help discredit said senior administration official-turned-whistle-blower.

2) When you're a special assistant to the president, your job is to tell the press the truth -- but only the parts that reflect well on the president.

3) When you're the national security adviser, it's really important for the public to understand your position so you give lots of interviews to the press -- but you can't answer questions under oath before a legislatively-chartered body because that would be a violation of the Constitution.

4) It's not okay to suggest the president has credibility problems -- unless you're the president, and you're at a black-tie correspondents dinner, and you're being really, really funny.
(via WaPo)

span class="highlight">IWe need Condoleezza Rice, who seems to have time to appear on every television show, to make time to appear publicly before the 9-11 Commission. She is not constrained by precedent from doing that, as the White House has argued. As the Congressional Research Service documented, two of her predecessors have given testimony in open session on matters much less important than September 11. I've reluctantly reached the conclusion that what really constrains Ms. Rice's full cooperation is political considerations.
(via Senate Democratic site.)

In an interview Wednesday on CNN's "Larry King Live," Clarke said that "we'll never know" if the 9/11 terrorist attacks were preventable.

But he said the Clinton administration's approach to a similar threat before the turn of the millennium -- in which top officials held daily interagency meetings and actively sought out information from within their agencies -- shows that a similar approach might have worked.

He said that people within the FBI knew that two of the 19 hijackers were in the country before September 11, but that information never made its way up the chain of command.

"If Condi Rice had been doing her job and holding those daily meetings the way Sandy Berger did, if she had a hands-on attitude to being national security adviser when she had information that there was a threat against the United States ... [the information] would have been shaken out in the summer of 2001," he told King.
(via CNN)

Q. 6. Our nation experiences eight years of unparalleled prosperity and international good will. Then, come election time, 50 percent of our country decides to vote out the party that brought us our good times. Now, on the combined domestic and international fronts we are at an unprecedented low, yet all the pundits are expecting a tight race. What the hell is wrong with us?!

A. [FRANKEN]: I think Clinton made it look too easy. Here he was a successful president with one hand tied behind his back, always under assault by a hostile Congress and the nutcase right. Americans just assumed it wasn't that hard to be president so they took a flyer on Bush. Gore paid for Clinton's sins, and Bush pretended to be something he's not. As far as this year? I believe the mainstream media's been cowed and not doing their job, leaving the right-wing media free to present a distorted view of this administration. I think this is the most radically conservative administration in history and, if we don't get these guys out of there, the deck will be stacked for decades.
(via Times)

Chocoholics seeking to indulge their passion this Easter will appreciate a British hotel chain's diet-busting chocolate sandwich, which boasts the added attraction of being dipped in batter and deep-fried.
(via Reuters)

U.S. Senate Democrats vowed on Wednesday to press ahead to stop the Bush administration's planned changes in rules on overtime pay after Republicans blocked a vote on the election-year jobs issue.

In a critical 51-47 vote Republicans failed to win the 60 votes necessary to block a vote on the Democratic overtime proposal and move on to passing the bill.
(via Reuters)

"Who cares what you think?" (See here for context).

KERREY: And let me also say this document of Fox News earlier, this transcript that they had, this is a background briefing. And all of us that have provided background briefings for the press before should beware. I mean, Fox should say occasionally fair and balanced after putting something like this out.

KERREY:(LAUGHTER) Because they violated a serious trust.

KERREY:(APPLAUSE) All of us that come into this kind of an environment and provide background briefings for the press I think will always have this as a reminder that sometimes it isn't going to happen, that it's background. Sometimes, if it suits their interest, they're going to go back, pull the tape, convert it into transcript and send it out in the public arena and try to embarrass us or discredit us. So I object to what they've done, and I think it's an unfortunate thing they did.
(transscript via the Times)

Vice President Cheney told Rush Limbaugh that you were not "in the loop," and that you're angry because you were passed over by Condi Rice for greater authority. And in fact you were dropped from Cabinet-level position to something less than that. How do you respond to what the Vice President said?

The vice president is becoming an attack dog, on a personal level, which should be beneath him but evidently is not.
(via Salon)

Dr. Rice now says that your plans to "roll back" al-Qaida were not aggressive enough for the Bush administration. How do you answer that, in light of what we know about what they did and didn't do?

I just think it's funny that they can engage in this sort of "big lie" approach to things. The plan that they adopted after Sept. 11 was the plan that I had proposed in January [2001}. If my plan wasn't aggressive enough, I suppose theirs wasn't either.

[CLARKE:] So let me say here as I am under oath, that I will not accept any position in the Kerry administration, should there be one -- on the record, under oath.
(transcript Times)

GORELICK: You have talked about a plan that you presented to Dr. Rice immediately upon her becoming national security adviser, and ... you said elements of that plan, which were developed by you and your staff at the end of 2000 -- many elements -- became part of what was then called NSPD-9, or what ultimately became NSPD-9. When Dr. Rice writes in the Washington Post, No Al Qaida plan was turned over to the new administration, is that true?

CLARKE: No. I think what is true is what your staff found by going through the documents and what your staff briefing says, which is that early in the administration, within days of the Bush administration coming into office, that we gave them two documents. In fact, I briefed Dr. Rice on this even before they came into office.
(the transcript Times)

BEN-VENISTE: I just wanted to say that having sat in on two days of debriefings with you, Mr. Clarke, and having seen excerpts from your book, other than questions you weren't asked, I have not perceived any substantive differences between what you have said to us and what has been quoted from your published work. Having said that, I'll cede my time to Congressman Roemer, if he'll give me his time with Condoleezza Rice. (LAUGHTER)

CLARKE: That may not be a good deal. (LAUGHTER)
(the transcript via the Times)

We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed. And for that failure, I would ask -- once all the facts are out -- for your understanding and for your forgiveness.
(Richard Clarke, via Times transcript)

BEN-VENISTE: And before I get to that and before I forget doing so, I want to express my appreciation for the fact that you have come before this commission and state in front of the world your apology for what went wrong. To my knowledge, you are the first to do that. (APPLAUSE)
(transcript via Times)

Liebling was an indifferent stenographer. He had no future at the Times.
(via The New Yorker)

The Bush-Cheney campaign Wednesday unleashed its most famous Democratic booster, Georgia Sen. Zell Miller, to make the case that presidential candidate John Kerry (news - web sites) advocates policies inconsistent with some of history's most popular Democratic presidents.

Miller, a Georgian who is the lone Democratic senator to back publicly President Bush (news - web sites)'s re-election bid, criticized Kerry in a speech announcing his leadership of a national "Democrats for Bush" effort. He was joined by a handful of lesser-known Democrats, but the campaign said it would release a more comprehensive list in the coming weeks.

The popular former governor cited the policies of Democratic Presidents John F. Kennedy and Harry S. Truman while contending that Kerry, not Bush, is outside the mainstream on issues ranging from tax cuts to war.

"John F. Kerry has the same initials as John F. Kennedy," Miller said, "but he has a far, far different view of what the government can do to help families prosper. John Kerry's spending and tax plan would stifle our economy and stall our recovery at the worst possible time."

(via AP)

Notwithstanding any other provision of this chapter, the Supreme Court shall not have jurisdiction to review, by appeal, writ of certiorari, or otherwise, any matter to the extent that relief is sought against an element of Federal, State, or local government, or against an officer of Federal, State, or local government (whether or not acting in official personal capacity), by reason of that element's or officer's acknowledgement of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.

9/11 commission member John Lehman challenged former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke's credibility in hearings today, pointing out that Clarke's statements about the Bush administration in his new book differ from his testimony. Clarke responded that he hadn't been asked about the U.S. invasion of Iraq and that by invading Iraq, the president "has greatly undermined the war on terrorism."
(via CNN)

European Union (news - web sites) regulators ordered U.S. computer software giant Microsoft Corp on Wednesday to pay a record $606 million fine for violating EU antitrust law and change its business model fundamentally to stop crushing rivals.
(via Reuters)

President Bush asked us soon after September 11 for cards or charts of the "senior AQ managers," as though dealing with them would be like a Harvard Business School exercise in a hostile takeover. He announced his intentions to measure progress in the war on terrorism by crossing through the pictures of those caught or killed. I have a disturbing image of [Bush] sitting by a warm White House fireplace drawing a dozen red Xs on the faces of the former AQ corporate board, and soon perhaps on OBL, while the new clones of AQ are working the back alleys and dark warrens of Baghdad, Cairo, Jakarta, Karachi, Detroit, and Newark, using the scenes from Iraq to stoke the hatred of America even further, recruiting thousands whose names we will never know, whose faces will never be on President Bush's little charts, not until it is again too late
(print version of Against All Enemies, page 287, with Corrente AQ and OBL abbreviations)

The widow of Martin Luther King Jr. called gay marriage a civil rights issue, denouncing a proposed constitutional amendment that would ban it.

Constitutional amendments should be used to expand freedom, not restrict it, Coretta Scott King said Tuesday.

(via AP)

Clarke's distinction, of course, is that he was the ultimate insider—as highly and deeply inside, on this issue, as anyone could imagine. And so his charges are more credible, potent, and dangerous. So, how has Team Bush gone after Clarke? Badly.

To an unusual degree, the Bush people can't get their story straight. On the one hand, Condi Rice has said that Bush did almost everything that Clarke recommended he do. On the other hand, Vice President Dick Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's show, acted as if Clarke were a lowly, eccentric clerk: "He wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff." This is laughably absurd. Clarke wasn't just in the loop, he was the loop.
(via Slate)

MR. McCLELLAN: I don't know anything about replacing. One, Dr. Rice was pleased to sit down and visit with the 9/11 Commission and answer all the questions that they wanted to bring up. The meeting went for well over four hours, even though it was scheduled, I think, for maybe half that time. And she looked forward to visiting with them. And if they want to visit further, then we'll be glad to talk to them about that.
(via WhiteWash House)

According to one of the two leading sources for such data -- the current employment statistics, also known as the payroll survey -- the number of wage and salary workers on employer payrolls fell by more than 620,000. But according to the other leading source -- the current population survey of households -- employment in the nation increased by nearly 2.3 million over the same period. Not only do these numbers -- both of which are drawn from monthly surveys -- move in opposite directions, they represent a staggering gap of 3 million jobs, a gap between the two surveys that is 10 times greater than that observed after the previous five recessions.

When properly interpreted, the two surveys together reveal the real emerging story line: Unable to find regular payroll employment, many workers are accepting second choice self-employment, contract labor, or off-the-books work arrangements. In other words, the growth in nonformal payroll employment over the past two years has acted as a labor market safety valve. American workers are finding that for now, their best and maybe only alternative lies somewhere between a regular wage and salary job and unemployment.

Maybe this is their choice. Or maybe state and federal wage and hour law enforcement has become so lax that employers flout payroll requirements. Or maybe the reason is that firms are able to take advantage of short-term excess labor supply conditions.

We don't really know, which is why we need a more informed understanding of what is taking place in US labor markets.

(via the Boston Glob)

The purpose of the unnamed intelligence unit, often described as a Pentagon "cell," was to scour reports from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and other agencies to find nuggets of information linking Iraq, Al Qaeda, terrorism, and the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In a controversial press briefing in October 2002, a year after Wurmser's unit was established, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged that a primary purpose of the unit was to cull factoids, which were then used to disparage, undermine, and contradict the CIA's reporting, which was far more cautious and nuanced than Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith wanted.

Daniel Benjamin, co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror, was director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council in the late 1990s. "In 1998, we went through every piece of intelligence we could find to see if there was a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq," he says. "We came to the conclusion that our intelligence agencies had it right: There was no noteworthy relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq. I know that for a fact." Indeed, that was the consensus among virtually all anti-terrorism specialists.

Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence‚ -- it was propaganda," she says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together."

Edward Luttwak, a neoconservative scholar and author, says flatly that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence it had because it was afraid to go to the American people and say that the war was simply about getting rid of Saddam Hussein.

Julian Borger: If there had been meetings on terrorism in that first eight months, do you think it would have made a difference?

Richard Clarke: Well let me ask you: Contrast December '99 with June and July and August 2001. In December '99 we get similar kinds of evidence that al-Qaida was planning a similar kind of attack. President Clinton asks the national security advisor to hold daily meetings with attorney-general, the CIA, FBI. They go back to their departments from the White House and shake the departments out to the field offices to find out everything they can find. It becomes the number one priority of those agencies. When the head of the FBI and CIA have to go to the White House every day, things happen and by the way, we prevented the attack. Contrast that with June, July, August 2001 when [Bush] is being briefed virtually every day in his morning intelligence briefing that something is about to happen, and he never chairs a meeting and he never asks Condi rice to chair a meeting about what we're doing about stopping the attacks. She didn't hold one meeting during all those three months. Now, it turns out that buried in the FBI and CIA, there was information about two of these al-Qaida terrorists who turned out to be hijackers [Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi]. We didn't know that. The leadership of the FBI didn't know that, but if the leadership had to report on a daily basis to the White House, he would have shaken the trees and he would have found out those two guys were there. We would have put their pictures on the front page of every newspaper and we probably would have caught them. Now would that have stopped 9/11? I don't know. It would have stopped those two guys, and knowing the FBI the way they can take a thread and pull on it, they would probably have found others.

JB: So might they have stopped the September 11 attacks?

RC: I don't want to say they could have stopped the attacks. But there was a chance.

JB: A reasonable chance? A good chance?

RC: There was a chance, and whatever the probability was, they didn't take it.

Sharon has done nothing for the US effort in Iraq. Has Israel offered any monetary aid to the US for the effort? The Israeli per capita income, at $17,000 a year, is higher than that of Spain, but the Spanish managed to contribute. Actually what I remember is that when the Israelis heard there was going to be a war, they came trooping to Washington with their hands out, asking for an extra $4 billion. Yes, folks, the US taxpayer was asked to fork over $4 billion to Ariel Sharon. Why? Because US men and women from Nebraska and Missouri and the other states were being put in harm's way in part to protect Israeli interests in the Middle East? We had to tax ourselves for the privilege of contributing to Israeli security?

(via Juan Cole)

It didn't take much research to turn up a seemingly innocuous fact about the McCains: John and his wife, Cindy, have an adopted daughter named Bridget. Cindy found Bridget at Mother Theresa's orphanage in Bangladesh, brought her to the United States for medical treatment, and the family ultimately adopted her. Bridget has dark skin.

Anonymous opponents used "push polling" to suggest that McCain's Bangladeshi born daughter was his own, illegitimate black child. In push polling, a voter gets a call, ostensibly from a polling company, asking which candidate the voter supports. In this case, if the "pollster" determined that the person was a McCain supporter, he made statements designed to create doubt about the senator.

Thus, the "pollsters" asked McCain supporters if they would be more or less likely to vote for McCain if they knew he had fathered an illegitimate child who was black. In the conservative, race-conscious South, that's not a minor charge. We had no idea who made the phone calls, who paid for them, or how many calls were made. Effective and anonymous: the perfect smear campaign.
(Richard Davis in The Glob)

[In wrestling,] I need to hit [my opponent] where he's weak, not attempt to beat him where he's strong. It was the former strategy that people seemed to yearn for in my post about political civility. The Republicans are vicious and dirty and low and ruthless and we can beat them by being dirtier and lower and ruthless squared and vicious cubed. And though I exaggerate, that has been a recurrent theme in the election so far (see Dean, Howard). Democrats want someone who can fight really hard, someone who won't wimp out. But we've got that. Now it's time to start figuring out what style they should use.

Sun Tzu says:

- It is best to thwart people by intelligent planning.

This would favor Ezra' approach. He also says:

- In battle, confrontation is done directly; victory is gained by surprise.

This might be construed to point to Lambert's style.

But I like this best:

- It is not advantageous to attack an enemy on a ground of contention; what is advantageous is to get there first.

Stake out the territory, ruthlessly frame the debate - that will help Kerry win.

One more to think about:

- Victory is not repetitious, but adapts its form endlessly

Mars had a shallow pool of briny water on its surface long ago, NASA said Tuesday in announcing what could be the strongest evidence yet that the now-dry Red Planet was once hospitable to life.
(via AP)

Pity poor George Bush. For some reason, he has been beset by delusional aides who, once they leave the White House, write books containing lies, exaggerations and -- this is the lowest blow of all -- do not take into account the president's genius and all-around wisdom. The latest White House aide to betray the president is Richard Clarke, who was in charge of counterterrorism before and after the attacks of 9/11. He says Bush ``failed to act prior to September 11 on the threat from Al-Qaida.''

As with former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, another fool who had somehow risen to become chairman of Alcoa, Clarke's account of his more than two years in the Bush White House was immediately denounced by a host of administration aides, some of whom -- and this is just the sheerest of coincidences -- had once assured us that Iraq was armed to the teeth with nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Among them was Condoleezza Rice, who insists in a commentary on this page that Bush not only did everything just right, but so, really, did Bill Clinton.
(via the San Francisco Chronicle)

"[CHENEY]: The question that has to be asked is, 'What were they doing in those days when he was in charge of counter-terrorism efforts?'"

Clarke answered Cheney's question Tuesday. During the Clinton administration, he said, al Qaeda was responsible for the deaths of "fewer than 50 Americans," and Clinton responded with military action, covert CIA action and by supporting United Nations sanctions.

"They stopped al Qaeda in Bosnia," Clarke said, "They stopped al Qaeda from blowing up embassies around the world." (Clarke transcript)

"Contrast that with Ronald Reagan, where 300 [U.S. soldiers] were killed in [a bombing attack in Beirut,] Lebanon, and there was no retaliation," Clarke said. "Contrast that with the first Bush administration where 260 Americans were killed [in the bombing of] Pan Am [Flight] 103, and there was no retaliation."

"I would argue that for what had actually happened prior to 9/11, the Clinton administration was doing a great deal," Clarke said. "In fact, so much that when the Bush people came into office, they thought I was a little crazy, a little obsessed with this little terrorist bin Laden. Why wasn't I focused on Iraqi-sponsored terrorism?"
(via CNN)

Earlier, a commission report said the Bush administration had agreed on a plan one day before the attacks to combat bin Laden, which moved only gradually from diplomatic pressure to military action.
(via Reuters)

"We wanted to move beyond the roll-back policy of containment, criminal prosecution and limited retaliation for specific terrorist attacks. We wanted to destroy al Qaeda," Powell said.
(via CNN)

Clarke, a 30-year White House veteran who served under Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Clinton before the current president, referred to Bush's own comments to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, author of "Bush at War," in which the president said he "didn't have a sense of urgency" about Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda.

"He is saying that," Clarke said. "President Bush said that to Bob Woodward. I'm not the first one to say this."
(via CNN)

"The administration can huff and puff but if there are enough bricks in the structure, they can't blow the house down any more," said American University historian Allan Lichtman.

"Right now, you have quite a number of bricks. It's not just scaffolding any more," he said.

The administration response has usually been to try to destroy the reputations of its critics. It suggested O'Neill had illegally used classified documents and said he was motivated by sour grapes after having been forced to resign from the Cabinet. A Treasury probe has cleared him of misusing documents.

Similarly, White House aides said Clarke was bitter about having been denied a promotion and "out of the loop" in the administration. They also said he was a closet Democrat working as a proxy for Bush's presidential opponent, John Kerry.

"This administration has shown a tremendous ability to demonize its opponents. But at some point, people start to ask themselves, could all these people be pathological liars? At some point, they can't all be liars," said Democratic consultant Michael Goldman.
(via Reuters)

Half a dozen top White House officials, departing from their policy of ignoring such criticism, took to the airwaves to denounce Clarke as a disgruntled former colleague and a Democratic partisan. In addition to Cheney's radio appearance, Rice was a guest on all five network morning shows, and by 11 a.m. the White House had booked more than 15 interviews on cable news channels, as well as numerous talk-radio appearances, over the next nine hours.
(via WaPo)

The hallmark of the Roundtable's efforts to protect and defend America is the development of CEO COM LINK(SM), a secure telecommunications bridge that helps top government and business leaders exchange information in the event of a threat or crisis. CEO COM LINK(SM) enables companies to mobilize private resources as part of the national response and has been expanded to include the banking, chemicals and water industry sectors.
(via PRNewswire)

A law firm filed ethics violation charges Monday against three federal judges who sit on the governing board of an organization that favors business-based solutions to environmental issues.

Community Rights Counsel, or CRC, alleged that the judges' service on the board of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment created an appearance of impropriety.

The judges include Douglas Ginsburg, chief judge of the Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, who served on the board with Edward Warren, an oil industry lawyer fighting an air pollution case being considered by Ginsburg's court. Ginsburg eventually co-wrote the 1999 ruling striking down a portion of the Clean Air Act.

"Participating on FREE's board gave Warren the opportunity to spend days at a time with Chief Judge Ginsburg at Montana resorts with a very small group of other board members," CRC wrote.

Warren also lectured to judges at FREE seminars while the case was pending.

Ginsburg knew that his service with Warren on the FREE board would raise questions about his impartiality, but he did not recuse himself, CRC said. The Supreme Court reversed the appeals court ruling in American Trucking Associations v. EPA.

Ginsburg's co-author in that case, Circuit Judge Stephen Williams, participated with Ginsburg in a FREE seminar while the case was pending, CRC said in a report that used judges' financial disclosure forms and tax records from FREE.

A call to Ginsburg's chambers was referred to the court clerk's office, where Deputy Clerk Marilyn Sargeant declined to comment.

Ginsburg is a Republican appointee, as are the other two jurists on the FREE board, 6th Circuit Chief Judge Danny Boggs and 3rd Circuit Judge Jane Roth.
(via the San Jose Mercury News)

I can't verify Bush's presence in Alabama, but as a dental professional I am intrigued with his dental records. Generally, an individual with a large bank account doesn't have any missing permanent molars without receiving a fixed bridge (#3 is missing, yet no bridge is placed between #2-4, #2 has a crown, but #4 only has a three surface restoration). The American public needs to see his posterior bitewings from 1973 and a current series of bitewings to better judge the authenticity of the information provided.
-- Barbara Vanderveen, Galt, CA

Her voice trembling with anger, the normally calm and collected Rice vehemently denied Clarke's assertion that she had seemed unaware of the al Qaeda threat. ...

Rice said she had implemented some of Clarke's ideas - such as preparing an unmanned drone for an attack on bin Laden and providing money to the Northern Alliance, an anti-Taliban rebel group in Afghanistan. But she said other ideas were rejected because they were old proposals that President Bill Clinton's team had rejected.
(via Scripps Howard)

"We should have put U.S. special forces in immediately, not many weeks later," Clark told ABC. "U.S. special forces didn't get into the area where bin Laden was for two months, and we tried to have the Afghans do it. You know, basically the president botched the response to 9/11. He should have gone right after Afghanistan, right after bin Laden. And then he made the whole war on terrorism so much worse by invading Iraq."

Clarke added: "U.S. soldiers went to their deaths in Iraq thinking that they were avenging 9/11, when Iraq had nothing to do with it. . . . They died for the president's own agenda, which had nothing to do with the war on terrorism. And in fact, by going into Iraq, the president has made the war on terrorism that much harder. He's diverted resources from protecting our vulnerabilities here at home, like our railroads. He's inflamed the Arab world and created a whole new generation of al Qaeda terrorists."
(via FT)

At one point, a college reporter asked Sulzberger a pointed question about one of his newspaper's star writers, Judith Miller, who has been widely criticized for misleading coverage of alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq last year. The publisher defended Miller, saying he had known her "for decades," adding that she "has fabulous sources."

Then he added: "Were her sources wrong? Absolutely. Her sources were wrong. And you know something? The administration was wrong. And when you're covering it from the inside like that you're going to get things wrong sometimes. So I don't blame Judy Miller for the lack of finding weapons of mass destruction." This produced a few laughs from audience members. "I blame the administration for believing its own story line," he continued, "to such a point that they weren't prepared to question the authenticity of what they were told." [see: Sulzberger on Blair, Miller, Getting a Job at the 'Times']

As we consider the intelligence failures in Iraq, Chalabi's role in those failures and his relationship with senior Iranian officials of all factions, a question needs to be raised: Who was whose stooge?

Opportunity has encountered previous problems with slippage inside the crater but never as severe as those that stymied it Sunday, Cook said.
(via AP)

I have not seen a significant factual challenge to the content of Clarke's book.
(via WaPo)

[Clarke's] criticisms of Clinton are milder, mainly that Clinton stopped short of maximum effort. He generally describes that as a product of constraints Clinton couldn't overcome, including his political weakness in the last two years of the presidency.

He says Clinton did make terrorism a top priority, and it's clear that Clinton's national security cabinet was deeply, even consumingly, engaged in the problem. The Bush administration had different priorities, and the issue worked over eight months through middle and upper middle levels of the bureaucracy.

"Okay then," he said, letting her go. "Prove it."

She smiled, looking dreamily out on the shifty landscape. She had seduced him without even making up her mind to try. "How?" she asked, feeling that he should be delayed a little.

He leaned over and put his lips to her ear. "Show me where your wooden leg joins on," he whispered. ...

Very gently, he began to roll the slack leg up. The artificial limb, in a white sock and brown flat shoe, was bound in a heavy material like canvas and ended in an ugly jointure where it was attached to the stump. The boy's face and his voice were entirely reverent as he uncovered it and said, "Now show me how to take it off and on."

"Put it back on," she said. She was thinking that she would run away with him and that every night he would take the leg off and every morning put it back on again. "Put it back on," she said.

"Not yet," he murmured, setting it on its foot out of her reach. "Leave it off for awhile. You got me instead."

She gave a little cry of alarm but he pushed her down and began to kiss her again. ...

Her voice when she spoke had an almost pleading sound. "Aren't you," she murmured, "aren't you just good country people?"

The boy cocked his head. He looked as if he were just beginning to understand that she might be trying to insult him. "Yeah," he said, curling his lip slightly, "but it ain't held me back none. I'm as good as you any day in the week."

"Give me my leg," she said.

He pushed it farther away with his foot. "Come on now, let's begin to have us a good time," he said coaxingly. "We ain't got to know one another good yet."

"Give me my leg!" she screamed and tried to lunge for it but he pushed her down easily.

"What's the matter with you all of a sudden?" he asked, frowning as he screwed the top on the flask and put it quickly back inside the Bible. "You just a while ago said you didn't believe in nothing. I thought you was some girl!"

Her face was almost purple. "You're a Christian!" she hissed. "You're a fine Christian! You're just like them all - say one thing and do another. You're a perfect Christian, you're..."

The boy's mouth was set angrily. "I hope you don't think," he said in a lofty indignant tone, "that I believe in that crap! I may sell Bibles but I know which end is up and I wasn't born yesterday and I know where I'm going!"

The White House is in massive damage control mode today after another searing, book-length indictment from a former insider.

Richard A. Clarke, Bush's former counterterrorism director, says that the Bush White House failed to take the al Qaeda threat seriously before Sept. 11, 2001, and by Sept. 12 was trying to pin the attack on Iraq.

The charges go right to the heart of Bush's reelection campaign as a war president whose vision and leadership have made the country safer.
(Dan Froomkin in WaPo)

[CLARKE:] "Well, the president wanted us to look to see if Iraq was involved," Clarke said. "Now, the White House is trying to say he very calmly asked me to do due diligence and see who might have done it, to look at all the possibilities. That wasn't it. And the White House is also saying maybe the meeting didn't take place. And there are witnesses who have said the meeting took place," Clarke said.

"[CLARKE:] The president in a very intimidating way left us, me and my staff, with the clear indication that he wanted us to come back with the word there was an Iraqi hand behind 9/11 because they had been planning to do something about Iraq from before the time they came into office."

The release of Clarke's memoir comes just a day before public testimony begins before the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.

White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, who famously whispered in the president's ear, "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack," has previously said that Bush left the Florida classroom he was sitting in within seconds.

"But uncut videotape of the classroom visit obtained from the local cable-TV station director who shot it, and interviews with the teacher and principal, show that Mr. Bush remained in the classroom not for mere seconds, but for at least seven additional minutes. He followed along for five minutes as children read aloud a story about a pet goat. Then he stayed for at least another two minutes, asking the children questions and explaining to Ms. Rigell that he would have to leave more quickly than planned."

The panel's investigators are looking at questions such as the timeliness of presidential orders about intercepting the jet that at 9:37 a.m. plowed into the Pentagon."

Paltrow also writes that Bush could not have been telling the truth when he told a town-hall meeting in December, 2001: "I was sitting outside the classroom, waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower -- the TV was obviously on. And I used to fly myself, and I said, 'Well, there's one terrible pilot.' "

There was no such video until late that night, and the TV wasn't even plugged in, Paltrow writes.

As Talleyrand said of the restored Bourbons, they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing during their time in exile. So too with the foreign policy coterie President Bush brought back from the cold in January 2001.

One chilling note in this passage is that Paul Wolfowitz, the prime architect and idea man of the second Iraq war, spent the early months of the Bush administration focused on "Iraqi terrorism against the United States", something that demonstrably did not even exist. A rather bad sign.

The bigger point, however, is this.

The first months of the Bush administration were based on a fundamental strategic miscalcuation about the source of the greatest threats to the United States. They were, as Clark suggests, stuck in a Cold War mindset, focused on Cold War problems, though the terms of debate were superficially reordered to make them appear to address a post-Cold War world.

That screw up is a reality -- their inability to come clean about it is, I suspect, at the root of all the covering up and stonewalling of the 9/11 commission. And Democrats are both right and within their rights to call the White House on it. But screw-ups happen; mistakes happen. What is inexcusable is the inability, indeed the refusal, to learn from them.

Rather than adjust to this different reality, on September 12th, the Bush war cabinet set about using 9/11 -- exploiting it, really -- to advance an agenda which had, in fact, been largely discredited by 9/11. They shoe-horned everything they'd been trying to do before the attacks into the new boots of 9/11. And the fit was so bad they had to deceive the public and themselves to do it.

As the international relations expert John Ikenberry noted aptly in a recent essay, the Bush hardliners "fancy themselves tough-minded thinkers. But they didn't have the courage of their convictions to level with the American people on what this geopolitical adventure in Iraq was really about and what it would cost."

To revert again to paraphrases of Talleyrandian wisdom, this was worse than a crime. It was a mistake -- though I suspect that when the full story is told, we'll see that it was both.

Judith Miller!

1. Condi downgraded the position of counter-terrorism adviser and seemed not to know what AQ was


2. Rummy advised bombing Iraq instead of Afghanistan on 9/12 "because there were no decent targets in Afghanistan"—even though AQ was in Afghanistan


3. Wolfie "belittled" the AQ threat, and thought 9/11 was "too sophisticated and complicated" for AQ to have pulled off by itself


4. Tom Ridge must clear all statements with White House operative Andy Card


5. Tom Ridge opposed the creation of his own department on the grounds that it would be too costly to integrate with other agencies.

[CLARKE] Bush ignored terrorism for months"

The Bush administration ignored intelligence "chatter" in 2001 about possible terror attacks.

1. "Delivery delays hurt US effort to equip Iraqis"


2. "As Europe Hunts for Terrorists, the Hunted Press Advantage"


3. "Official Killed as Strife Grows in Afghanistan"


4. "Detective in Corruption Inquiry Was Scrutinized in 1996 Case"

CEO COM LINK [is] a secure, exclusive telephone system established in November 2001 that allows chief executives to speak directly with Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge and other officials during a terrorist attack.

The exclusive communications network was created by the [Business] Roundtable for use by its members, 150 CEOs from Fortune 500 companies... (The Roundtable's chairman, Henry A. McKinnell, is the CEO of Pfizer, Inc., and recently was named a Bush Pioneer.)

CEO COM LINK has already been activated four times, all at Ridge's request.

Even in an administration notorious for its catering to corporate interests, CEO COM LINK affords the Business Roundtable an astonishing status. No other organization, public or private, has such a secure and open line to the top tier of government during a national disaster. ... No dedicated hot line like CEO COM LINK exists for any other group: not governors, mayors, firefighters, hospitals, or police.

When I asked John Castellani, the Roundtable President, whether CEO's profit motives might conflict with the government's interest in national security, he shot back that the two "were absolutely tied together with the same purpose."

CEO COM LINK is the only system of its kind in America, and as such is could, during a national emergency, allow for a kind of ad hoc governance by the Roundtable and its unelected CEOs.

Secretiveness on such matters seems to suit the DHS, the first U.S. government agency in history that has a separate division dedicated to serving the private sector.

Will the conversations that take place over CEO COM LINK be exempt from FOIA requests? I put the question to [a DHS spokesman], but he wouldn't say.

(via Tim Shorrock in Harper's magazine print edition, pages 81-3, not available online)

Sen. Joe Lieberman, D [sic] -Conn., said Sunday he doesn't believe Clarke's charge that the Bush administration was focused more on Iraq than al-Qaida during the days after the terror attacks.

"I see no basis for it," Lieberman said on Fox News [sic] Sunday. "I think we've got to be careful to speak facts and not rhetoric."
(via AP)

[SPECTOR:] The Bush administration never made any claim that there was a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda.
(via CNN)

Statement by President George W. Bush
"And I also mentioned the fact that there is a connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein."
Source: President Condems Attack in Bali, White House (10/14/2002).
Explanation: This statement was misleading because it suggested that Iraq was linked to al Qaeda. In fact, the U.S. intelligence community had conflicting evidence on this issue and was divided regarding whether there was an operational relationship.

If Richard Clarke is right, and there is every reason to think he is, the US was days, if not hours, away from letting Osama Bin Laden get away with murder.

It seems Rumsfeld wanted to bomb Iraq for 9/11, despite ample evidence Al Qaeda was responsible for the deaths of 3,000 Americans. To a rational person, this would have been a war crime. Bombing the innocent for something we knew they didn't do.

Perle and Wolfwowitz, despite all available evidence, would have let Osama sit in Afghanistan untouched just to get Saddam. The fact that no state would have ever launched a 9/11 attack and not expect a B-2 response was beyond them.

Let's keep this in mind, and it's really simple: the Bush response to 9/11 would have let Osama get away with murder, killing thousands of innocent people. Only the professionals of the CIA and FBI prevented this insanity. When Bush was told that "you'll lose the whole world", was he prevented from attacking Iraq.

Their obsession with Iraq is frightening, just as their incompetence in dealing with Iraq is striking. And of course, the White House is trying to smear Clarke as just another Democrat. Of course, anyone who attacks this White House gets smeared. It's all they can do. They accuse him of making of meetings, being too close to Kerry, all manner of nonsense.

The excuses from this White House sounds like a drunk excusing away his failures. If Clarke is telling the truth, Rumsfeld, who claimed Iraq had "better targets" should resign immediately.

"I don't bake cookies," Laura Bush says now, after three years of wrestling with how she will define and be defined by the mantle of first lady, a job with pressures but no instructions and a title she says she detests.

"There's a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some blame, too. But on January 24th, 2001, I wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice asking for, urgently -- underlined urgently -- a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al Qaeda attack. And that urgent memo-- wasn't acted on.

"I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War issues when they back in power in 2001. It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They came back. They wanted to work on the same issues right away: Iraq, Star Wars. Not new issues, the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years."

Clarke finally got his meeting about al Qaeda in April, three months after his urgent request. But it wasn't with the president or cabinet. It was with the second-in-command in each relevant department.

For the Pentagon, it was Paul Wolfowitz.

Clarke relates, "I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with al Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.'

"And I said, 'Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States in eight years!' And I turned to the deputy director of the CIA and said, 'Isn't that right?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's right. There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States."

Clarke went on to add, "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever."

When Stahl pointed out that some administration officials say it's still an open issue, Clarke responded, "Well, they'll say that until hell freezes over."

Osama bin Laden's terror network claims to have bought ready-made nuclear weapons on the black market in central Asia, [Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir], the biographer of al-Qaida's No. 2 leader, was quoted as telling an Australian television station.

In the interview with Australian Broadcasting Corp. television, parts of which were released Sunday, Mir recalled telling al-Zawahri it was difficult to believe that al-Qaida had nuclear weapons when the terror network didn't have the equipment to maintain or use them.

"Dr Ayman al-Zawahri laughed and he said `Mr. Mir, if you have $30 million, go to the black market in central Asia, contact any disgruntled Soviet scientist, and a lot of ... smart briefcase bombs are available,'" Mir said in the interview.

"They have contacted us, we sent our people to Moscow, to Tashkent, to other central Asian states and they negotiated, and we purchased some suitcase bombs," Mir quoted al-Zawahri as saying.
(via AP)

Transcribing on the bus in Florida, and again on the plane ride to  Tampa, I heard "foreign leaders" rather than "more leaders." Listening  to the audio recorder now, in the quiet of my house, I hear "more  leaders" and I am certian that "more leaders" is what Senator Kerry  said. I am very sorry for this screw-up, and please feel free to hold me  accountable to your editors and higher-ups.
(via Kos)

Yet by the time Kerry flew to Idaho Wednesday, he had inflicted more bruises on his own candidacy than his Democratic rivals had during the months-long primary season. Republicans demanded that he back up his statements that overseas government leaders wanted him to beat Bush,...

When the terrorists stuck, it was thought the White House would be the next target, so it was evacuated. Clarke was one of only a handful of people who stayed behind. He ran the government's response to the attacks from the Situation Room in the West Wing.(via CBS.)

After the president returned to the White House on Sept. 11, he and his top advisers, including Clarke, began holding meetings about how to respond and retaliate. As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. He says he was surprised that the talk quickly turned to Iraq.

"I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection, but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying we've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection."

Clarke then tells Stahl of being pressured by Mr. Bush.

"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.

"I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.'

"[Bush] came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report."

Clarke continued, "It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. ... Do it again.'

"I have no idea, to this day, if the president saw it, because after we did it again, it came to the same conclusion. And frankly, I don't think the people around the president show him memos like that. I don't think [Bush] sees memos that he doesn't-- wouldn't like the answer."

By June 2001, there still hadn't been a Cabinet-level meeting on terrorism, even though U.S. intelligence was picking up an unprecedented level of ominous chatter.

The CIA director warned the White House, Clarke points out. "George Tenet was saying to the White House, saying to the president - because he briefed him every morning - a major al Qaeda attack is going to happen against the United States somewhere in the world in the weeks and months ahead. He said that in June, July, August.

Clarke says the last time the CIA had picked up a similar level of chatter was in December, 1999, when Clarke was the terrorism czar in the Clinton White House.

Clarke says Mr. Clinton ordered his Cabinet to go to battle stations-- meaning, they went on high alert, holding meetings nearly every day.

That, Clarke says, helped thwart a major attack on Los Angeles International Airport, when an al Qaeda operative was stopped at the border with Canada, driving a car full of explosives.

Clarke harshly criticizes President Bush for not going to battle stations when the CIA warned him of a comparable threat in the months before Sept. 11: "He never thought it was important enough for him to hold a meeting on the subject, or for him to order his National Security Adviser to hold a Cabinet-level meeting on the subject."

Finally, says Clarke, "The cabinet meeting I asked for right after the inauguration took place-- one week prior to 9/11."

In that meeting, Clarke proposed a plan to bomb al Qaeda's sanctuary in Afghanistan, and to kill bin Laden.

Sociopolitical events within the last year provide worrisome evidence confirming the existence of stockpiles of WMD. Most recently, the chief actuary of the Medicare program, Richard S. Foster, claimed that he was instructed to withhold his forecast of a significantly higher cost for the new Medicare drug bill prior to its passage.

According to reports in the New York Times, Foster said that Thomas A. Scully, the administrator of the program, threatened him with dismissal if he provided Congress with the higher price tag -- a $500 to $600 billion cost over the first 10 years. Foster's higher estimate was later conceded by the Bush administration, but only after the drug bill had passed, based on a premised cost of "just" $400 billion. Several Republican and Democrat lawmakers who voted for the bill have subsequently declared that they would not have supported it had they known the truth.

The problem remains, however, that we are already set in the crosshairs of this WMD. If Foster's allegations are verified, Scully will have played a major role in destabilizing Medicare, upon which most of us who live to 65 years of age will depend during our most medically vulnerable years.

One wonders about the ability of Thompson's office to investigate the charges against Scully in a fair and objective manner. Looking to May of last year, when a federal ethics law interfered with Mr. Scully's desire to job-seek in the private sector -- all the while that he was designing the Medicare drug law -- Thompson easily solved the problem by approving a waiver exempting Scully from the ethics rule.

Scully resigned from his position on Dec. 15, just seven days following Bush's signing of the drug law. He announced that was joining a private law firm, one that represented drug manufacturers.
(via Kate Scannel, MD in the Alameda Times-Star)

As for Bush himself, there are only two possibilities, both bad. The first is that he never learned the true cost of one of the major policy initiatives of his presidency. If so, he was incompetent. The second, more plausible, alternative is that he simply chose the lower, more convenient number and didn't have any problem with the honest figures produced by the bureaucracy's getting "deep-sixed," as they used to say during Watergate.

You might think this is standard operating procedure in Washington. It is not. Every White House sends the press secretary out to spin the numbers that emerge on a weekly or monthly basis from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other agencies. But applying political pressure to cook the numbers themselves is a true scandal.

The Bush administration now has an old-fashioned credibility gap. If numbers are released saying that the economy is perking up, why should anyone believe them? After all, it counts hamburger flippers as manufacturing jobs. The context of the election only magnifies the issue. New Bush ads charge that Kerry wants to raise taxes by $900 billion. This is a made-up number; Kerry has no such proposal. But even if he did, voters would not be able to take the Bush campaign's word on it, because its word is no longer good. The challenge for the Democrats is to resist the temptation to make their own phony claims, or to hype the usual petty distortions of politics into "lies." The truth is damaging enough. (Jonathan Alter in Newsweek)

As media becomes more specialized and readers better able to filter out contrary voices, we're becoming trapped in echo chambers of our own making. If all you read is Pandagon, Atrios, Kos, Oliver Willis, and few of the people on our blogrolls, all you get are the stories and rhetoric that attempt to set fire to these officials. Conversely, the Right traffics in its own filth and anger, relating tales of liberal media bias and Clinton's abiding love for Bin Laden.

The end result is that we dehumanize those across the aisle. No longer do they merely disagree with us on policy, now they're evil, there's no good left in them. All their actions are cynical moves designed to maximize profits and human pain. Racism, genocide, election fixing, racketeering; nothing's beyond the pale for these guys, they're terrors. It reminds me of nothing so much as the Right's treatment of Bill Clinton. Forget adultery, this guy was capable of drug trafficking, espionage and flat-out murder. But why? Why did they believe that and we didn't? How could they be so certain while the country simply laughed at their allegations?

Simple. They never heard anything but what supported their arguments and reflected their venom. There were no dissenting voices in their chorus, no reality checks that could pull them out of this spiral of hatred. And I fear some of us are doing the same thing.
(via Pandagon)

I've always managed to maintain a substantial number of conservative friends (not to mention all those members of my extended family who are conservative). These are people I go hunting, fishing and camping with; people whose weddings I attend, and whose children I babysit and tend, people I stay with while on vacation. ... And of course, I always voted a split ticket, looking usually to reward moderate and progressive Republicans -- though this has become increasingly difficult in recent years.

But in the past three years, even that has begun to change.

There were two crucial turning points: December 12, 2000, and September 11, 2001.

When the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Bush v. Gore, it became clear to me that not only had the conservative movement grown into a dogmatic ideology, it had metastasized into a power-hungry, devouring claque of ideologues for whom winning was all that mattered.

I remember rather vividly, like the day JFK was shot, where I was and what I was doing, the evening the ruling came down. I was in a small harbor town in western Washington, staying with the parents of some close friends (who are themselves good friends) while I covered a manslaughter trial in a nearby town. He is an accountant, she a homemaker, good moderate churchgoing Democrats. We all sat together and watched the bulletins come over the newscasts (I think we were tuned to MSNBC).

And I remember she turned to me and said: "I feel sad. Because I can't vote a mixed ticket anymore." He nodded.

What seems to have really ripped things apart, though, was the aftermath of September 11. And this came down not so much to my feelings, but to theirs.

[In painting dissent as treason] the president, his administration and the accompanying pundits (or rather, the choir of sycophants) all have affected us all personally, and badly. Because that view has become the worldview of mainstream conservatives in all walks of life. It's manifested itself not just in nationally prominent scenarios like the attacks on the Dixie Chicks and other entertainment folk, but in other smaller and lesser-known ways, too, like the way conservative officers are driving liberal soldiers out of the military. The clear message in these cases: Dissent is disloyalty.

How is any kind of normative political discourse possible in this environment? How is it possible to be civil to people who constantly are placing you under assault? How can there be dialogue when the normative rules of give and take and fair play have not only been flushed down the drain, but chopped into bits and swept out with the tide? Do the advocates of civility place any onus on the nonstop verbal abuse, and absolutely ruthless, win-at-all-costs politics emanating from the conservative quadrant? And do they really expect liberals to refuse to defend themselves, when even doing so gets them accused of further incivility?

It grieves me to see old friendships and relationships actually damaged by this war. But it was not a fight I or other liberals chose. It was thrust upon us. And until that aggression comes to a stop, I will not stop fighting back. Civilly, of course, but with all the blunt force and passion I can muster.

Because, yes, it is political -- but it's also become personal.

In Rummy's pocket
Next to me is lint and a
lucky human foot

Lying is so good
Machiavelli told me
And Jesus agreed

who cares what you think?
Scalia and Diebold can
make you disappear

You lookin’ at me?
I’ll teach you how to be tough!
Once I clean my briefs.

Autumn colors, mist,
Birdsongs, Diebold-counted votes.
So much is fleeting.

Hidden enemy,
Hard to find, so frustrating.
Let's just bomb someone.

Lies lies lies lies lies
Lies lies lies lies lies lies lies
Lies lies lies lies lies

i like my bubble
everybody likes me here
it's so nice in here.

"[Kerry] wanted you to pay all that money at the pump and wouldn't even throw in a free car wash," Bush declared.
(via AP)

"The other day, here in Florida, [Kerry] claimed some important endorsements. He won't tell us the name of the foreign admirers. That's OK. Either way, I'm not too worried, because I'm going to keep my campaign right here in America."
(via CNN)

There were a few voices both inside and outside the convention center to counter the support Bush received. A half-dozen anti-Bush college students were escorted from the hall before the president arrived despite holding tickets for the event and three more people were forced out after chanting "No more Bush" as the president made his way across the stage. About 80 protesters demonstrated outside, many gripping red balloons pointing out the expanding national debt under Bush's watch.
(via AP)

Is the Waxman list complete? Not entirely. Comments made by Ari Fleischer, Paul Wolfowitz and other significant administration figures are not included in the database.

Five weeks after being appointed, the group has not met, and it is unclear when it will.

A gay employee who is fired or demoted for attending a gay pride rally would receive protection from the Office of Special Counsel. But the same employee would have no recourse at OSC if he was fired or demoted simply for being gay.

This is new Special Counsel Scott Bloch’s initial reading of a 1978 law intended to protect employees and job applicants from adverse personnel actions taken against them for reasons unrelated to their job performance. In his interpretation, Bloch is making a distinction between one’s conduct as a gay or lesbian and one’s status as a gay or lesbian.

Before he was nominated as special counsel, Bloch was deputy director of the Justice Department’s Task Force for Faith-based and Community Initiatives.
(via Federal Times)

Administration sources tell TIME that employees at the Department of Homeland Security have been asked to keep their eyes open for opportunities to pose the President in settings that might highlight the Administration's efforts to make the nation safer. The goal, they are being told, is to provide Bush with one homeland-security photo-op a month.
(Time via Pandagon)

Bush and the Republicans are using the threat of terrorism much the same way the terrorist are. "If you want to be safe, and really fight terrorism you must vote for Bush...". In my opinion this makes them no better than the terrorist of Al Qaida. In fact it makes them worse, because at least the terrorist admit they are using terror to manipulate people.
I for one won't be held hostage by fear or intimidated by Bush and his own personal little Taliban. I don't think I stand alone.

Bush flashed three fingers, to form a "W," which he did often in the 2000 campaign.
(via Reuters)

The White House counter-terrorism coordinator at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks said it's ``outrageous'' that U.S. President George W. Bush is running for re-election based on his record in fighting terror.

Richard A. Clarke said in a television interview airing Sunday that Bush ``ignored terrorism for months'' before the 2001 attacks, then looked to attack Iraq rather than Afghanistan, the nation harboring the terrorist group al-Qaeda, which launched the attacks.

``I find it outrageous that the president is running for re- election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism,'' Clarke said in an interview with CBS' ``60 Minutes.''

Clarke is the second former high-ranking administration official to say the Bush team was determined to attack Iraq before terrorists struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

In a book about his tenure in the administration, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said Bush's advisers began planning to oust Saddam Hussein from Iraq months before the 2001 terrorist attacks.

(via Bloomberg)

What will be left of society, when the gays are done transforming it?

I wonder, though. Do we need a new system for decided which views to print, and which not to print, as there are always much more opinions on any topic than a reporter can possibly fit in a story.

Airport security agents at Boston's Logan International Airport stopped a biologist after discovering the severed head of a harbor seal in his luggage. Federal wildlife laws make it illegal to disrupt or remove body parts from a dead mammal, or to transport any illegal fish or wildlife product.
(via CNN)

[Jeremy Greenstock], Britain's top official in Iraq said Saturday he remained convinced that Saddam Hussein had been "hiding something," but he acknowledged that Iraq's security situation was bad a year after the start of the U.S.-led war.
(via AP)

Before Bush appeared, small U.S. flags were handed out, and an officer gave instructions to the troops on how to receive the commander in chief. "We're going to show him a lot of love by waving flags," the officer said. Telling the troops not to salute, he added: "You're going to wave and clap and make a lot of noise. . . . You must smile. We are happy campers here."
(via WaPo)

Richard Clarke, the president's counterterrorism coordinator at the time of the attacks, said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld complained on Sept. 12 - after the administration was convinced with certainty that al-Qaida was to blame - that, "there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good targets in Iraq."

"I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection" between Iraq and the al-Qaida attacks in the United States, Clarke said in an interview segment CBS broadcast Friday evening. "There's just no connection. There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al-Qaida."

Clarke retired early in 2003 after 30 years in government service. He was among the country's longest-serving White House staffers, hired in 1992 from the State Department to deal with threats from terrorism and narcotics.

He previously led the government's secretive Counterterrorism and Security Group, made up of senior officials from the FBI, CIA, Justice Department and armed services, who met several times each week to discuss foreign threats.
(via AP)

In an interview on PBS television Thursday, Wolfowitz said [newly elected Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez] Zapatero's withdrawal plan didn't seem very Spanish.

"The Spaniards are courageous people. I mean, we know it from their whole culture of bullfighting," Wolfowitz said. "I don't think they run in the face of an enemy. They haven't run in the face of the Basque terrorists. I hope they don't run in the face of these people."

"This is an ignorant comment," snapped Madrid firefighter Juan Carlos Yunquera, sitting on a bench outside his firehouse. "For a top official, it shows he doesn't know what he's talking about."

Yunquera, who heard the American official's remarks on the radio, pointed out that Spaniards overwhelmingly opposed the war in Iraq, even as Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar joined President Bush's "coalition of the willing" a year ago and later contributed troops for the occupation.

Prime Minister-designate Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, elected in the aftermath of the devastating bombings, has pledged to withdraw his country's 1,300 troops from Iraq unless the United Nations takes charge.

Carlota Duce, a waitress at the Retinto Bar, where a bullfighting sword, lance and hat hung on a wall above patrons sipping beer and eating tapas, said she had no use for such comments.

"It's drivel," she said above the strumming of flamenco guitar on the stereo. "There is absolutely no comparison between bullfighting and Spain pulling out of Iraq."

Zapatero, who won Spain's elections last Sunday, pledged repeatedly while campaigning to withdraw Spain's troops from Iraq unless the United Nations takes charge.

Bartender Oliver Iglesias said there was a kernel of truth in Wolfowitz's words.

"We are indeed very brave," he said. "But no one here likes the war in Iraq. And there's a big difference between killing a bull and killing a person."

Gustavo de Aristegui, a legislator and spokesman in parliament for Aznar's Popular Party, also criticized Wolfowitz, saying: "A top-ranking politician should be more careful about the remarks he makes, and that's all I'm going to say about Mr. Wolfowitz."

Yunquera, the fireman, said he was annoyed that Wolfowitz even mentioned bullfighting.

"I've never liked bullfighting," he said. "If I was to describe Spain, I would say Spain is a tolerant and joyful country and not even mention bullfighting."
(via AP)

Rove's strategy ensures that there will be a Republican lawyer assigned to each contested precinct on election day. Thus positioned, they can explain ballots to loyal voters, confront potentially ineligible voters, and challenge the legality of election conduct. It is this element of the strategy, Rove and the RNC believe, that may win them the 2004 election.

Soon after Florida, Democrats, like Republicans, figured they had to act. The DNC put together and funded the Voting Rights Initiative, run by former Gore campaign manager Donna Brazile and dedicated to matching the Republican ferocity in contesting the election results. It was a good idea. Unfortunately, and somewhat typical of recent Democratic operations, the project has died. Eight months before the election, while the VRI has no staff, the DNC is overwhelmed with trying to close the fundraising gap and keep up the rhetorical attacks on President Bush, the top Democratic organizational talent is scattered among the various campaigns contesting the primaries, and the new liberal 527s, non-profits designed to take over many of the DNC's traditional responsibilities, don't see this legal electioneering as part of their job.
(via Washington Monthly)

So, here's the question to the Bush campaign: What possible legitimate use do you have for a firm that specializes in high-tech surveillance, personal investigations, and paramilitary protection?

If you want a quick picture of the difference between Germany in the '30s and the United States of today, imagine that both Republicans and Democrats had paramilitary wings; overt ones, with uniforms and offices, and that they battled in the streets on a daily basis (This is one reason why the "bourgeois riot" while the votes were being counted in Florida 2000 had an unpleasant resonance for some.)

CBS News's John Roberts was right in the middle of an interview with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice when she first got the news of the possible surrounding of Osama bin Laden's chief deputy, Ayman Zawahiri.
(via WaPo)

The journalists on the panels at the University of California at Berkeley this week blamed the Bush administration for leaking faulty information, but said the media also has itself to blame for not being more skeptical about the case for war.

"The press did not do their job," said Michael Massing, who wrote an article in the New York Review of Books that found The New York Times and The Washington Post particularly at fault.

Journalists fear they will be seen as unpatriotic if they challenge White House statements, said Robert Sheer, a syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

"There is no doubt that there is an atmosphere of fear in the media of being out of sync with the punitive government," Sheer said.

Much of the criticism focused on a Sept. 8, 2002, New York Times article by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, which said Iraq was importing aluminum tubes that could be used in centrifuges to enrich uranium, a critical step in making an atomic bomb.

Massing said nuclear experts or weapons inspectors would have refuted the evidence had the Times consulted them. Experts later verified the tubes were not used for nuclear weapons, but The New York Times and other papers buried that news in their inside pages, he said.

Massing noted that a phrase from the article - "The first sign of a smoking gun may be a mushroom cloud" - made it into President Bush's State of the Union address last year, as well as speeches by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell to justify the war.

A call to the Times for comment was not immediately returned on Friday.
(via AP)

No Surprise That Media Briefing on Iraq Costs Was Cancelled. Meanwhile, the number of soldier suicides keeps climbing, as the army dutifully updates journalists who call. - by Wayne F Smith

For me, the army's suicide data and the tragic homecoming narratives of some Iraq war soldiers are beginning to impugn the administration's apparent cost-benefit ratio. Postponing the release of the Army's long awaited suicide report because it conflicts with the administration's anniversary "take" on the war may alter perception but it doesn't change the indicators that suggest thousands of OIF soldiers could be suffering from the burden of that war.

Wayne F. Smith is a former combat medic in Vietnam and former therapist/counselor at the Veteran's Administration's Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Counseling Program. Currently, he is a special assistant to the president of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation.

Fear and Favor at the PBS NewsHour | March 18, 2004 FAIR.org

According to the Voice report, producers for the show suggest that Parenti's mistake was referring to the Halliburton contracts. The Voice quoted NewsHour senior producer Michael Mosettig saying: "This was not reportage, this was giving his opinion, and that's not why we brought him on." Mossetig's deputy, Dan Sagalyn, told the Voice that Parenti's comments lacked "balance."

The remarks seem to have gotten Parenti virtually blacklisted from the show. "I would have liked to have him on again... but because of this it would be very hard," Sagalyn told Cotts. "When you have a loose-cannon experience with somebody, you're going to be wary," Mossetig said.

It would be understandable for the NewsHour to be concerned with the accuracy of comments made by any guest; that would be responsible journalism. But the show is not claiming Parenti said anything inaccurate. Instead, the show seems to be saying that journalists shouldn't give opinions on the show.

[...]

In September 2002 (9/20/02), Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed in an interview with Lehrer that Iraq "threw the [U.N.] inspectors out" in 1998, and that in 1990 Iraq had plans for "invading Saudi Arabia, which they were ready to do." Both assertions are false, and neither was challenged by Lehrer. Despite the fact that hundreds of FAIR activists wrote to the NewsHour to point out Rumsfeld's distortions (see FAIR action alert, 9/20/02), Lehrer made no attempt to correct the record.

Elizabeth Cheney, Deferment Baby: How Dick Cheney dodged the Vietnam draft By Timothy Noah | Mar 18, 2004

They made a deal with Kaplan[*] and now all teachers have these cute little scripted lesson plans that they must teach verbatim and on the scheduled time frame so that our students have the basic skills to pass standardized tests. There is no literature or discussion to be had in the classroom. When I asked my principals, at the beginning of the year, when this new script would allow time for discussion, I was told "discussion has no place in the classroom." Eh??? The scary thing is that my students share this sentiment because this is how they have been taught for years."

Richard S. Foster, the government's chief analyst of Medicare costs who was threatened with firing last year if he disclosed too much information to Congress, said last night that he believes the White House participated in the decision to withhold analyses that Medicare legislation President Bush sought would be far more expensive than lawmakers knew.

Foster has said publicly in recent days that he was warned repeatedly by his former boss, Thomas A. Scully, the Medicare administrator for three years, that he would be dismissed if he replied directly to legislative requests for information about prescription drug bills pending in Congress. In an interview last night, Foster went further, saying that he understood Scully to be acting at times on White House instructions, probably coming from Bush's senior health policy adviser.

Foster said that he did not have concrete proof of a White House role, but that his inference was based on the nature of several conversations he had with Scully over data that Congress had asked for and that Foster wanted to release. "I just remember Tom being upset, saying he was caught in the middle. It was like he was getting dumped on," Foster said.

Foster added that he believed, but did not know for certain, that Scully had been referring to Doug Badger, the senior health policy analyst. He said that he concluded that Badger probably was involved because he was the White House official most steeped in the administration's negotiations with Congress over Medicare legislation enacted late last year and because Badger was intimately familiar with the analyses his office produced.

The account by Foster, a longtime civil servant who has been the Medicare program's chief actuary for nine years, diverges sharply from the explanations of why cost estimates were withheld that were given this week by White House spokesmen and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson. They suggested that Scully, who left for jobs with law and investment firms four months ago, had acted unilaterally and that he was chastised by his superiors when they learned of the blocked information and the threat.

Two days ago, Thompson told reporters: "Tom Scully was running this. Tom Scully was making those decisions." Thompson said the administration did not have final cost estimates until late December predicting that the law would cost $534 billion over 10 years, $139 billion more than the Congressional Budget Office's prediction. Foster has said his own analyses as early as last spring showed that the legislation's cost would exceed $500 billion.

The Gallup report above provides further analysis of their latest poll. In the report, they break down states into red (Bush won by 5 percent or more), blue (Gore won by 5 percent or more), and purple (the margin of victory for Gore or Bush was less than 5 percent; this includes of course almost all the swing states the current campaigns are likely to focus on). In blue states, Kerry is ahead of Bush 55 percent to 42 percent among likely voters. Not unexpected. But in purple, swing states, he is ahead of Bush by even more, 55 percent to 39 percent.

In 2000, Gore lost the Gallup red states by 57 percent to 41 percent, carried the Gallup blue states by 55 percent to 40 percent, and the purple states (Florida, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Wisconsin) were a dead heat, at 48 percent to 48 percent. Today, the Gallup data (using likely voters and throwing in Nader to make the comparison more exact) show Kerry also losing in the red states, though by less (51 percent to 45 percent), running about the same in the blue states as Gore did in 2000 (55 percent to 42 percent), and doing much better than Gore did in the purple states (52 percent to 39 percent).

What this means is that Kerry's overall lead in the Gallup poll is in no way traceable to running up the vote in the blue states; he's simply holding the Gore lead in those states. Instead, Kerry's lead over Bush is driven by exactly what the Kerry campaign would want: strongly improved performance, relative to Gore, in swing states and whittling down Bush's lead in the red states.

In light of this analysis, it's interesting to look at a Barron's analysis by John Zogby of state-by-state polling (both his own and others) that shows Kerry holding 85 percent of the blue state (defined here in the traditional way as states Gore carried, no matter how small the margin) electoral votes plus New Hampshire, Bush holding only 63 percent of the red state electoral votes, and 136 electoral votes in play. The electoral votes in play, in Zogby's analysis, are distributed over twelve states (Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin), eight of which were carried by Bush in 2000 and only four by Gore, meaning that the Republicans have much more turf to defend than the Democrats.

That turf may be very difficult to defend if the Gallup purple state calculations are any indication of how voters in this very similar group of in play swing states are leaning. Its a long way to November, I'll grant you, but the Kerry campaign has got to be happy with how this election campaign is starting out.

Bush's chief Republican rival in 2000, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said Thursday he does not believe Kerry is weak on defense even though they disagree on some issues. McCain, who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee and is a friend of the Massachusetts senator, said a discussion of Medicare and other issues should replace negative campaigning.

"He's responsible for his voting record, as we all are responsible for our records, and he'll have to explain it," McCain said of Kerry on "Today" on NBC. "But, no, I do not believe that he is necessarily weak on defense.

Wed Mar 17 [Associated Press]


WASHINGTON - White House political chief Karl Rove said Wednesday that President Bush had just begun to demonstrate the kind of targeted, multi-front campaign he plans against Democratic rival John Kerry. [...]

[...] He also said the gay marriage issue is beginning to help Bush, because polls are starting to shift in Bush's direction, with more people opposed to same-sex unions. But Rove implored the activists to add their voices to Bush's call for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage to ensure that Bush is not perceived as standing alone on the issue.

And he expressed irritation that some disgruntled Republicans in Congress and elsewhere have increasingly chosen to go to the news media to air their complaints, rather than bringing them directly to the White House.

Rove headlines one of the last announced Bush-Cheney fund-raisers, an event in Alexandria, Va., on Thursday. The campaign also has announced a March 26 fund-raiser starring Vice President Dick Cheney in Dayton, Ohio.

Two Republican officials said Bush plans a "last-hurrah"-style fund raiser March 31 in Washington.

Which brings me to my Google Bomb. From now on, in any post I write on SSM, I will use the term "homophobic bigots" and will link it to the DMC web site. I hope you'll join me in endeavor.

The usually-conservative movie star-director said he had been having "doubts" about President George W Bush.

"It's all to do with these weapons (of mass destruction) that we can't seem to find, and why did we go over there?" he asked.

Posted on Wed, Mar. 17, 2004
Gibson Planning to Make Movie on Jewish Holiday

Mar. 17 - He has portrayed the Crucifixion -- now Mel Gibson has his sights set on the tale that led to Chanukah.

"The Passion of the Christ" director told WABC's Sean Hannity yesterday that he's planning a movie based on a Jewish rebellion nearly 200 years before the birth of Christ.

"The story that's always fired my imagination ... is the Book of Maccabees," Gibson said in the radio interview. "It's about Antiochus, the king who set up his religion in the Temple, and forced them all to deny the true God and worship at his feet and worship false gods.

"The Maccabees family stood up, and they made war, they stuck by their guns, and they came out winning," he continued. "It's like a Western."