Digby: Grover's Sagging Tent

It's very hard for me to feel any sympathy for Grover Norquist who is being battered by the religious zealots for daring to speak at a Log Cabin Republican meeting. Very hard. After all, he's the main guy responsible for creating bullshit ideas like this:

"If he was a serious economic conservative, Grover Norquist would not have accepted the invitation or the honorarium for speaking at a fund-raiser for a group bent on the destruction of traditional families."

He built a vote machine of ignorant saps who really believe that economic conservatism has something to do with hating gays and traditional families. When you let the nutballs into the tent and give them real electoral power, this is what you get.

Digby: Buying Into The Program

In a sane political world, Press The Meat this Sunday would be a very interesting show. This is because over the past couple of days it's become obvious that Karl Rove is selling the line that he found out about Plame from Libby and that Libby says that his source for the Plame leak was none other than Tim Russert. It's long past time that the King of the Kewl Kids got the kind of treatment that Judy Miller has received. He's up to his neck in this thing.

Digby: It Ain't The Crime It's The You Know What

Apparently lawyers for Rove and Libby have been told that their clients are in serious legal jeopardy. Not much news there. The leaking lawyers seem to be quite sure that Fitz will not indict them under the Toensing statute (I'm sure that Richard "Joey Bishop" Cohen will be shrieking to high heaven if he indicts for the cover-up crimes) but others may not be so lucky (Wurmser, Hannah?)

Since these leaks are obviously coming from Rove and Libby, I take it with a grain of salt. They cannot know yet what (or who) Fitz has up his sleeve so they cannot know that he is planning cover-up indictments. This could be a coordinated "criminalization of politics" shot across the bow. (Which, by the way, should be met with "I know. It's terrible. We really need to get the criminals out of politics." Make them sputter and explain what they mean.)

Digby: Libby's Whale

My oh my, it appears that Libby was stalking Wilson all the way up until April 2004 when the white house finally put a stop to his psychotic obsession:

Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff was so angry about the public statements of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a Bush administration critic married to an undercover CIA officer, that he monitored all of Wilson's television appearances and urged the White House to mount an aggressive public campaign against him, former aides say.

Digby: Focus Pulling

I am with Billmon on this. I find it highly doubtful that Fitzgerald is going to indict on charges unrelated directly to the Plame leak and ensuing cover-up, but I do think he's going to indict. As much as I'd like to believe that he's spent the last 22 months getting to the bottom of the forgeries and Iraq lies and the inner workings of the propaganda campaugn that led us to war, I don't think it's going to happen.

Digby: Lying Accomplices

Kevin makes note of the eery sameness of Novak and Miller's contention that Plame was idly brought up in unrelated casual conversation and asks that these assholes (my paraphrase) stop insulting our intelligence with this nonsense. He points out that someone within the White House spilled those beans long ago when he or she told the Washington Post:

A senior administration official said two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and revealed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife..."Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," the senior official said of the alleged leak.

Digby: The Good Aspen

This article in the Columbia Journalism Review is the first I've seen that comes to the same conclusion I did about Judy Miller's mea culpa:

The more you analyze Miller’s story (I have read it four times now) the less it seems like a straightforward recitation of events and the more it seems like a carefully scripted message to Libby, and perhaps to other sources with whom Miller spoke about Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson.

Billmon: Imperial Candor

I just got finished reading the full transcript of the talk given by Larry Wilkerson (Colin Powell's chief of staff) at the New America Foundation on Wednesday. There is some truly scary stuff in there -- going way beyond the "cabal" comment that's been the soundbite of choice for the corporate media. Like this rather ominous look at the real U.S. energy plan:

We had a discussion in policy planning about actually mounting an operation to take the oilfields in the Middle East, internationalize them, put them under some sort of U.N. trusteeship and administer the revenues and the oil accordingly. That’s how serious we thought about it.

Wilkerson isn't specific about the timing, so he may be referring the contingency planning that was ordered up by Kissinger and DoD Secretary James "cover up" Schlesinger during the 1973 oil embargo. But it sounds a good deal more recent to me -- I don't remember anything in the '73 episode about a U.N. fig leaf . . . I mean, a U.N. trusteeship.

Billmon: Will the Grinch Steal Fitzmas?

John Dean -- who knows something about these things -- has some cautionary words for all the little lefties eagerly counting presents (indictments) under the tree: Don't be entirely surprised if "Santa" leaves a lump of coal in your stocking.

Dean's been extremely prescient about the legal issues raised by the Plame scandal so far -- he was, for example, the first to point out the possible applications of the 1917 Espionage Statute. So when he raises the spectre that national security (the last refuge of executive branch scoundrels) might trump whatever evidence of criminality the special prosecutor has gathered, I give him a respectful hearing, even though I don't agree with this analysis. Here's what he says:

It is difficult to envision Patrick Fitzgerald prosecuting anyone, particularly Vice President Dick Cheney, who believed they were acting for reasons of national security. While hindsight may find their judgment was wrong, and there is no question their tactics were very heavy-handed and dangerous, I am not certain that they were acting from other than what they believed to be reasons of national security. They were selling a war they felt needed to be undertaken.

Steve Gilliard: OH Judy, I have something for you

Ok, I broke down and signed up for Times Select.

Normally, I wouldn't have EVER done so, but this was a manditory exception, like when I paid a locksmith $300 to get into my apartment with a smile.

Was it a brilliant Krugman post?

No. He's brilliant all the time.

Bob Herbert?

Come on.

Obviously, it's MoDo and she's going after Judy Miller in her column.

Dowd can be frustrating, but she's loyal and to the right people, those who pay her to write. I know people jumped on Irish Catholic background over dogging Clinton, but there's a flip side to that, intense loyalty and no problem holding a grudge. This is years of grudge work coming to the fore. One of the things I've always liked about the Irish women that I know is their toughness. They all smile and make jokes, but fuck with them and they will ground you into dirt.

Let me put it this way, if anyone liked me like MoDo says she likes Miller, well, I'd have to check to see if I owed them child support.

I've always liked Judy Miller. I have often wondered what Waugh or Thackeray would have made of the Fourth Estate's Becky Sharp.

The traits she has that drive many reporters at The Times crazy - her tropism toward powerful men, her frantic intensity and her peculiar mixture of hard work and hauteur - have never bothered me. I enjoy operatic types.

Poll shows Iraqis back attacks on UK, US forces

1 hour, 23 minutes ago

LONDON (Reuters) - Forty-five percent of Iraqis believe attacks on U.S. and British troops are justified, according to a secret poll said to have been commissioned by British defense leaders and cited by The Sunday Telegraph.

Less than 1 percent of those polled believed that the forces were responsible for any improvement in security, according to poll figures.

ConWebWatch: Supreme Confusion

Accuracy in Media attacks WorldNetDaily! The Media Research Center bashes NBC for not reporting criticism of President Bush! NewsMax accuses Robert Bork of borking! The Harriet Miers nomination is turning the ConWeb topsy-turvy.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 10/11/2005

How bad does a conservative journalist have to screw up to be criticized by his fellow conservatives?

WorldNetDaily founder and editor Joseph Farah now knows. WND has launched a John Kerry-esque attack -- complete with appearance by Swift Boater and bigot Jerome Corsi -- against Harriet Miers, President Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court.

In a badly written Oct. 3 "news" article, Farah claims that Miers "is on record as supporting the establishment of the International Criminal Court, homosexual adoptions, a major local tax increase and women in combat." Farah's evidence for this is a list of "potential agenda items" from a 1999 American Bar Association meeting purportedly submitted by Miers "that included recommendations to develop and establish an International Criminal Court and the enactment of laws and public policy providing that the sexual orientation of adults be no bar to adoption of children." Miers' name is not in the document, and Farah does not offer any evidence that Miers submitted it. Farah cites (but does not reproduce) a memo accompanying the agenda, purportedly signed by Miers, asking meeting delegates to "review this list for items of interest to their constituencies." Farah does not cite any evidence that Miers endorsed any of the items on the agenda, yet claimed anyway that this somehow proves that Miers "is on record as supporting" them.

Houston oilman charged in oil-for-food probe

By DAVID IVANOVICH
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Legendary Houston oilman Oscar Wyatt and two others have been accused of paying millions of dollars in illegal kickbacks to Saddam Hussein's regime.

Wyatt was arrested at his home in Houston this morning and appeared before a U.S. Magistrate Judge. He is scheduled to be arraigned next week in New York.

In the latest indictments to emerge from the ongoing investigation into the United Nations' oil-for-food program, a New York grand jury has accused Wyatt and two Swiss business executives of funneling cash to front companies and bank accounts controled by the Iraqi government.

The Costs of War at Walter Reed

Inside Walter Reed Army Hospital is the horrible reality of the Iraq War, a reality that few Americans see, and fewer want to see.
By Stewart Nusbaumer

Washington, DC -- In the dining hall is a family of three. The mother’s shirt says “Thank a Soldier,” the father’s hat says “Vietnam Veteran,” and the son’s T-shirt says “Seattle Sonics.” A normal family, except the son has no legs.

The tough talking lions of the Bush Administration proclaimed “shock and awe” would destroy the Iraqi will to fight and then it would be a simple “cakewalk.” So the cocky civilians unleashed the “mother” of all air assaults on Baghdad and then our strutting commander in chief -- decked out in a fine flight suit -- proclaimed, “Mission Accomplished.”

Alternet Blogs: An All-American Army

Posted by Jan Frel on October 20, 2005 at 7:05 PM.

"The military is a proven contributor to foreign policy. Why can’t it make the same contributions to domestic policy?" Yeah.

Yeah! Why not? One intrepid Derek Reveron at the National Review Online wrote a Posse Comitatus, schmomitatus piece that left me wondering where you find these people who want to be ruled by the boys in camo. Are they servile creatures who can only relax in the presence of combined firepower displays on the populace? Do they want a piece of the action? What are they in it for?

WOW! Brent Scowcroft Lets it Rip (Like Larry Wilkerson) in Monday's New Yorker

October 21, 2005

The revered-in-tons-of-corners former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft definitively breaks ranks with the Bush administration in an article by nearly the same name, "Breaking Ranks," appearing in the upcoming Monday issue of The New Yorker.

The article will outline what decisions and events have built up to turn Brent Scowcroft against this Bush administration. Yes, that's right. . ."turned Brent Scowcroft against this Bush administration."

Media Advisory from FAIR

Media Advisory

Miller's Tale
Can the reporter--or the New York Times--be trusted?

10/21/05

The New York Times editorial page told readers over and over again that Times reporter Judith Miller went to jail for 85 days for a noble cause--the protection of confidential sources. But to many outside observers, the principles that Miller went to jail for were far from clear, with many fundamental questions left unanswered. Readers and media watchers were eager to hear Miller's side of the story, and to see the newspaper devote its considerable journalistic energy to investigating a crucial political story that its reporter was in the middle of: the efforts of Bush administration officials to punish a critic by leaking the covert identity of Valerie Plame Wilson to the media.

But neither the October 16 report written by a team of Times reporters, nor the accompanying first-person tale written by Miller herself, answered the questions posed by critics. In fact, those questions have only multiplied.

The first--and arguably the most important--question is how Miller came to know Valerie Wilson's identity. Wilson was a covert CIA employee married to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, whose July 6, 2003 New York Times op-ed called into question the integrity of the Bush administration's handling of intelligence about Iraqi WMDs; when she was outed as a CIA operative by Robert Novak (Washington Post, 7/14/03), seemingly in retaliation for her husband's criticism, it sparked the current investigation into who revealed her identity to journalists.

So where did Miller first hear about Valerie Plame Wilson? She claims she cannot remember. She can only surmise--according to her own vague notes--that the name "Valerie Flame" appeared in her notes based not on her conversations with Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to vice president Dick Cheney, but "from another source" whom she "could not recall." Miller's conversations with Libby are apparently of significant importance to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who had her jailed for contempt when she would not testify about them to a grand jury.

Miller's inability to recall pertinent information extended to her conversations with Libby. One talk occurred on July 8, 2003, two days after Wilson's op-ed had caused significant turmoil for the White House and its allies.

Miller reported that she "almost certainly began this interview by asking about Mr. Wilson's essay, which appeared to have agitated Mr. Libby." Their conversation turned to Wilson's wife, and Miller's notes suggest Libby told her that Wilson worked at the WINPAC unit of the CIA (Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation, and Arms Control). But Miller again drew a blank, this time on the significance of this information: "I said I couldn't be certain whether I had known Ms. Plame's identity before this meeting, and I had no clear memory of the context of our conversation that resulted in this notation."

Miller's inability to remember details of her conversations beyond the words written in her notebook--an unusual memory deficit for a professional journalist, to say the least--is a striking feature of her account. Later in her article, she states: "Mr. Fitzgerald asked if I could recall discussing the Wilson-Plame connection with other sources. I said I had, though I could not recall any by name or when those conversations occurred." Later, she says that after her second conversation with Libby, she "might have called others about Mr. Wilson's wife"--but apparently can't be sure.

The first-person account written by Miller, combined with the Times reporters' own investigation, raises several intriguing questions. Among them:


--Miller was plainly deceptive in her dealings with newsroom colleagues. The Times reported that once it became known at least six Washington journalists had talked to White House officials about Wilson's CIA identity, Washington bureau chief Philip Taubman asked Miller if she was one of those journalists. Miller denied it.

Miller also claimed to have ''made a strong recommendation" to her editor about doing a story about Wilson's CIA role, but was told no. The Times' Washington bureau chief at the time, Jill Abramson, "said Ms. Miller never made any such recommendation." The article does not follow up on this remarkable contradiction, but it seems likely that if any of Miller's editors had received such a suggestion, they would have come forward to back up her story.

Why Miller didn't provide the name of the editor she talked to is another mystery. It's certainly difficult to square the idea that she asked to do a story on Valerie Wilson's identity with the fact that she denied receiving this information.


--In her own account, Miller strongly suggests that she possessed a special security clearance: "During the Iraq war, the Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment 'embedded' with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons."

Miller also suggested that "Libby might have thought I still had security clearance," and that during one of their meetings "I might have expressed frustration to Mr. Libby that I was not permitted to discuss with editors some of the more sensitive information about Iraq. Mr. Fitzgerald asked me if I knew whether I was cleared to discuss classified information at the time of my meetings with Mr. Libby. I said I did not know."

This would be a highly unusual arrangement. NBC Pentagon reporter Jim Miklasziewski was unable to find confirmation of Miller's supposed clearance from Pentagon or CIA sources (MSNBC.com, 10/17/05). Former CBS correspondent Bill Lynch suggested (Poynter.org, 10/16/05) that such a deal would be "as close as one can get to government licensing of journalists, and the New York Times (if it knew) should never have allowed her to become so compromised."

On October 20, the Times was able to get more information from Miller, reporting that she had signed a standard non-disclosure form for embedded reporters "with some modifications, adding that what she had meant to say in her published account was that she had had temporary access to classified information under rules set by her unit."

Why Miller couldn't say what she meant in a first-person account is unclear. When the Times asked her if "she had ever left the impression with sources, including Mr. Libby, that she had access to classified information after leaving her assignment in Iraq, Ms. Miller said she could not recall." As Miller put it, "I don't remember if I ever told him I was disembedded.... I might not have." The term "embedded" is usually used to mean "traveling with a military unit"; Miller seems to be using it in a much broader sense.


--Miller and her defenders have long claimed that that Miller was unwavering on the principle of not revealing a confidential source. But Miller's refusal to testify doesn't in the end seem as principled as either she or her paper originally claimed. As the Times reported, Miller was seeking a suitable waiver from Libby from the start, and eventually based her decision not to testify "in part because she thought that Mr. Libby's lawyer might be signaling to keep her quiet unless she would exonerate his client."

According to Miller, that "signaling" was the suggestion that Libby had testified about their conversations in ways that in Miller's view were false. In other words, she refused to testify because she believed her testimony would expose her source as a perjurer. When your reason for not testifying is a belief that your source has committed a crime, then "journalistic privilege" begins to look more like obstruction of justice.


--During the course of one of her interviews with Libby, Miller revealed that she agreed to change his identification from "senior administration official" to "former Hill staffer." Miller reported that she "agreed to the new ground rules because I knew that Mr. Libby had once worked on Capitol Hill." He did not explain why he made this request, but Miller "assumed Mr. Libby did not want the White House to be seen as attacking Mr. Wilson." This passage is extremely incriminating; not only does she acknowledge that she was willing to cooperate with a source to mislead readers, but she admits that the purpose of this deception was to conceal the White House's attack on a critic. Such partisan attacks, under New York Times ethics rules, are not to be made anonymously at all, let alone with a blatantly misleading identification.


--The Times report raises serious questions about the paper's management of Miller's reporting, and of the reporting about Miller's case. Times executive editor Bill Keller expressed the wish that "it had been a clear-cut whistle-blower case. I wish it had been a reporter who came with less public baggage."

The paper did not spend much time dwelling upon what this might mean, but their readers deserve better. Miller's reporting on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was embarrassingly wrong. Even after the Times had to publicly apologize for several of her articles, Miller moved on to write several misleading or erroneous articles about the investigation into the United Nations' oil-for-food program.

But this should not have come as a surprise, since serious complaints about Miller's work had circulated for years--sometimes within the paper itself. The Washington Post recalled (10/17/05) that in 2000 Times reporter Craig Pyes wrote in a memo:

"I'm not willing to work further on this project with Judy Miller.... I do not trust her work, her judgment, or her conduct. She is an advocate, and her actions threaten the integrity of the enterprise, and of everyone who works with her.... She has turned in a draft of a story of a collective enterprise that is little more than dictation from government sources over several days, filled with unproven assertions and factual inaccuracies... [and] tried to stampede it into the paper."

More recently, a dispute erupted between Miller and then Baghdad bureau chief John Burns, who was angry that Miller was writing stories from Iraq without his oversight. The subject of the reporting was Ahmed Chalabi, who Miller claimed "provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper." Chalabi's information on Iraqi weapons was notoriously flawed.

One would think that a reporter with such a track record would be monitored carefully--presuming they were still employed. But to hear the Times tell it, Miller set her own rules. Though Keller had removed Miller from the Iraq weapons beat, "she kept kind of drifting on her own back into the national security realm." If Keller and the Times editors do not control what their reporters are doing, then who does?

Barbara Crossette, a former U.N. bureau chief at the Times who says she unsuccessfully tried to supervise Miller's oil-for-food reporting, wrote in a letter to Poynter Online (10/17/05) that Miller "had at least one very highly placed friend at the paper, and many Timespeople were afraid to tangle with her because of that." The only person more highly placed at the paper than Keller is publisher Arthur Sulzberger, who reportedly has a friendship with Miller going back to the late '70s, when they were reporters together at the Times' Washington Bureau. As New York magazine noted in a profile of Miller (6/7/04), "Fairly or unfairly, there's a sense that Miller has protection at the absolute top--and that fear reportedly deters some editors from challenging her."

When the Times published a report on how the Jayson Blair fiasco was allowed to happen, much of the article discussed the personal contacts that Blair had developed that allowed him to get away with errors and eventual fabrications. The fact that the piece on Miller did not examine the office culture that allowed her to escape supervision suggests a disturbing double standard.

Once Miller went off to jail, it became clear that Keller and others at the Times were able to exercise control over what was written about Miller and her case. "Some reporters said editors seemed reluctant to publish articles about other aspects of the case as well, like how it was being investigated by Mr. Fitzgerald," the Times reported. When one such article was not published, one Times reporter said, "It was taken pretty clearly among us as a signal that we were cutting too close to the bone, that we were getting into an area that could complicate Judy's situation."

Two other Times reporters were rebuffed after offering potential story ideas about the case. According to Washington bureau chief Philip Taubman, "Mr. Keller did not want them pursued because of the risk of provoking Mr. Fitzgerald or exposing Mr. Libby while Ms. Miller was in jail." The fact that the Times would make journalistic decisions based on how they might affect Miller's legal status--putting her personal interests above the public interest--is unconscionable.

After her release from jail, Miller told CNN's Lou Dobbs (10/4/05), "I didn't want to be in jail, but I knew that the principle of confidentiality was so important that I had to, because if people can't trust us to come to us to tell us the things that government and powerful corporations don't want us to know, we're dead in the water. The public won't know. That's why I was sitting in jail. For the public's right to know."

But neither the Times or Miller has offered the public any explanation of how her conduct lives up to such lofty rhetoric. In this case, Miller seems to have worked to opposite ends--to shield the public from things that a powerful government didn't want us to know.

Editor Says He Missed Miller 'Alarm Bells'

BREAKTHROUGH ADMISSION FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES: Bill Keller Now Says Miller Misled the Paper. Keller refers to Miller's "involvement" with Libby (beyond whatever they did together in Aspen, we presume.) A Milestone in Getting to the Heart of Miller's Complicity with the WHIG deceptions that led us into the Iraq War, Miller's initial deceptive testimony to the Grand Jury, and her desire to protect Scooter Libby from prosecution as a traitor and perjurer. A MUST READ. If the NYT doesn't fire her now, it cannot remain a credible paper. There must be consequences and accountability in journalism.--BUZZFLASH

By JOHN SOLOMON, Associated Press WriterFri Oct 21, 7:54 PM ET

The New York Times' Judith Miller belatedly gave prosecutors her notes of a key meeting in the CIA leak probe only after being shown White House records of it, and her boss declared Friday she appeared to have misled the newspaper about her role.

In a dramatic e-mail, Executive Editor Bill Keller wrote Times' employees he wished he'd more carefully interviewed Miller and had "missed what should have been significant alarm bells" that she had been the recipient of leaked information about the CIA officer at the heart of the case.

"Judy seems to have misled (Times Washington bureau chief) Phil Taubman about the extent of her involvement," Keller wrote in what he described as a lessons-learned e-mail. "This alone should have been enough to make me probe deeper."

From The Nation...On the 'Patriot' Act

After a campaign of deception, the new Patriot Act is about to become law. And, as Chip Pitts writes, we can count on it being used against immigrants, dissidents and many ordinary Americans accused of crimes completely unrelated to terrorism.

How Good is the Economy at Creating Good Jobs?

Center for Economic and Policy Research

How Good is the Economy at Creating Good Jobs? (PDF)
http://www.cepr.net/publications/labor_markets_2005_10.pdf
posted 10/18/05

Only 25.2% of American workers have a job that pays at least $16 per hour and provides health insurance and a pension.

U.S. Military Interpreter Charged As Fraud

Mysterious Moroccan worked in Iraq, had "high-level" clearance

OCTOBER 17--In an embarrassing security breach, an Arabic interpreter who handled classified material while working for the last two years with U.S. military units in Iraq has been arrested after FBI agents discovered that he had so completely fabricated his identity and background that they are still unsure of his true name and have formally charged him as "FNU LNU" (first name unknown, last name unknown). According to a criminal complaint filed (with no fanfare or press release) last Thursday in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, the interpreter, who had been granted a "high-level clearance to access classified information," has been charged with making a variety of false statements to FBI and Department of Defense officials as well as the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Ohio players

Bill Berkowitz
WorkingForChange
10.21.05

Large turnout of Christian evangelical voters in November 2004 sets the stage for the Rev. Russell Johnson and televangelist Rod Parsley to launch the Ohio Restoration Project

Despite the subsequent controversy over widespread abnormalities on Election Day 2004, late in the evening of November 2, Ohio voters had delivered the final dart to the heart of the presidential hopes of Senator John Kerry. Since then, Christian evangelical ministers in Ohio have teamed-up to form a network that will build on their constituency's extensive contribution to President Bush's victory, as well as the passage of Issue 1 -- an amendment to the state constitution banning same-sex marriage. The goal: help Christian conservatives take over the state's Republican Party.

Max Blumenthal - Is Michael Ledeen The Niger Forgery Author?

"Change -- above all violent change -- is the essence of human history."
--Michael Ledeen, "Machiavelli on Modern Leadership

As anyone who has been following the Plamegate investigation online probably knows, the lefty blogs and progressive/liberal electronic media have been scooping the hell out of the mainstream press. One site that deserves special recognition is Raw Story, for breaking the news that John Hannah and David Wurmser are cooperating with Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation. I recommend bookmarking Raw Story and continually hitting the refresh button until indictments are filed.

Until then, the rumor mill will be churning out names of shady figures we haven't heard since the run-up to invading Iraq. One I've been hearing a lot lately is Michael Ledeen, the Machiavellian Mussollini admirer, former Ollie North errand boy, and recent advisor to Karl Rove on Iran issues. The most salient fact about Ledeen -- a longtime associate of right-wing elements in the Italian intelligence service -- is that he was among a group of administration neocons who met with the Italian CIA in Rome just prior to the emergence of the Niger forgeries.

Balkinization: Bush's Ace in the Hole-- The Pardon Power

JB

Rumors are buzzing about who will be indicted in the Plamegate scandal, and what further revelations will develop. Some people have even speculated that the Vice-President may be indicted or named as an unindicted co-conspirator.

But just remember that the President always has the means to stop judicial proceedings of his closest political associates from going any further. He can simply pardon persons indicted for a crime, or even those who have not yet been indicted.

On December 24th, 1992, a month before he left office, President Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, pardoned former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and five other individuals for their conduct related to the Iran-Contra affair. In so doing, Bush not only put an end to the criminal prosecutions arising out of the Iran-Contra affair, he also ensured that he would never be required to testify as a witness in a criminal trial after he left office. The former President was no fool. He knew that for many years critics refused to believe his repeated protestations that he was "out of the loop" on the machinations surrounding Iran-Contra during the Reagan Administration. Once under oath, he would be required to divulge exactly what he knew and when he knew it.

Found Object: DeLay's Mug Shot

Go to the article to see links--Dictynna.

Book him, Dan-o.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Thursday, Oct. 20, 2005, at 2:58 PM PT

Periodically, this column eschews commentary altogether and simply invites readers to savor the negative capability of a certain image found on the Web. Tom DeLay's mug shot, snapped today in Harris County, Texas, where DeLay was booked on conspiracy and money laundering charges, is one such objet trouvé. It dwelleth in a realm that commentary cannot reach.

His arrest warrant is pretty fascinating, too.

Stand Down

Miers signals to the right, uselessly.
By Emily Bazelon
Posted Thursday, Oct. 20, 2005, at 2:08 PM PT

Harriet Miers tried. She tried to reassure conservatives in her written responses to the Senate judiciary committee, and not only by handing over evidence that in the past she supported a near-total constitutional ban on abortion. Miers also signaled that she supports another fond hope of the right—shutting the doors of the federal courthouse to annoying plaintiffs, like the ones who don't like Ten Commandments displays in government buildings or clear-cutting in government forests. On the subject of raising the bar for the sorts of cases to be heard in a court, Miers was tapping out signals as furiously as John Roberts did. Maybe more furiously. But code gets the desired message across only when the receivers trust the sender.

Arctic Map Vanishes, and Oil Area Expands

By FELICITY BARRINGER
Published: October 21, 2005

WASHINGTON, Oct. 20 - Maps matter. They chronicle the struggles of empires and zoning boards. They chart political compromise. So it was natural for Republican Congressional aides, doing due diligence for what may be the last battle in the fight over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to ask for the legally binding 1978 map of the refuge and its coastal plain.

It was gone. No map, no copies, no digitized version.

Concealing The Suburban Nightmare

James Howard Kunstler
October 20, 2005

James Howard Kunstler is the author of The Long Emergency and 12 other books. This article originally appeared in the author's website and appears here by permission.

When the Museum of Bad Ideas is built by Steve Wynn in Las Vegas (designed by Frank Gehry), surely one of its remote galleries will contain this week's cover story in The New York Times Sunday Magazine about the suburban homebuilding racket titled "Chasing Ground ." The story focuses on one of the nation's leading large production builders, the Toll Brothers, based in Philadelphia, and "ground" is their own cute phrase for the parcels of meadow and cornfield that they magically convert into suburban housing subdivisions all over the nation.

Fitzgerald's Historic Opportunity

James Moore
October 21, 2005

James Moore is an Emmy-winning former television news correspondent and the co-author of the bestselling, Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential. He has been writing and reporting from Texas for the past 25 years on the rise of Rove and Bush, and has traveled extensively on every presidential campaign since 1976. This piece originally appeared on HuffingtonPost.com and is reprinted with permission.

If special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald delivers indictments of a few functionaries of the vice president’s office or the White House, we are likely to have on our hands a constitutional crisis. The evidence of widespread wrongdoing and conspiracy is before every American with a cheap laptop and a cable television subscription. And we do not have the same powers of subpoena granted to Fitzgerald.

We know, however, based upon what we have read and seen and heard that someone created fake documents related to Niger and Iraq and used them as a false pretense to launch America into an invasion of Iraq. And when a former diplomat made an honest effort to find out the facts, a plan was hatched to both discredit and punish him by revealing the identity of his undercover CIA agent wife.

U.N. Body Endorses Cultural Protection

U.S. Objections Are Turned Aside

By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, October 21, 2005; Page A14

PARIS, Oct. 20 -- In a vote cast as a battle of global conformity vs. cultural diversity, delegates to a U.N. agency turned aside strong U.S. objections Thursday and overwhelmingly approved the first international treaty designed to protect movies, music and other cultural treasures from foreign competition.

The 148 to 2 vote at the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization emerged as a referendum on the world's love-hate relationship with Hollywood, Big Macs and Coca-Cola.

Michael Kinsley: Whose Speech Is Free?

Friday, October 21, 2005; Page A23

Here in mediaworld, we're all quite cross at the New York Times and its former star reporter, Judith Miller. She is widely believed to have sought her martyrdom as a career move. And then she gave up after a mere couple of months in jail. What a wuss! And the Times: This great institution let a mere reporter lead it around by its nose, with predictable results. What a super-wuss!! But this latest blow to the reputation of the MSM (mainstream media) cannot be pinned on Miller or the Times. It is the result of a sentimental and self-indulgent view of journalism widely shared in mediaworld -- including by many of the journalists and media institutions now distancing themselves from Miller and the Times.

Bush's Faith Plan Faces Judgment

Courts Assess Mission to Give Federal Funds to Religious Charities

By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 20, 2005; Page A25

Chalk up a big legal victory for President Bush's effort to help religious charities get taxpayer funding. And score a symbolic win, too, for those who think Bush's "faith-based initiative" is just pork-barrel politics in disguise.

Bush's big victory came Sept. 30 in New York, where a federal judge threw out most elements of a religious discrimination lawsuit against the Salvation Army. Eighteen employees claimed they were fired or demoted because they refused to pledge support to the Salvation Army's mission of "proclaiming Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord," disclose what church they attended or name gay co-workers.

A Palpable Silence at the White House

Few Ready to Face Effects of Leak Case

By Jim VandeHei and Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, October 21, 2005; Page A01

At 7:30 each morning, President Bush's senior staff gathers to discuss the important issues of the day -- Middle East peace, the Harriet Miers nomination, the latest hurricane bearing down on the coast. Everything, that is, except the issue on everyone's mind.

With special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald driving his CIA leak investigation toward an apparent conclusion, the White House now confronts the looming prospect that no one in the building is eager to address: a Bush presidency without Karl Rove. In a capital consumed by scandal speculation, most White House senior officials are no more privy than outsiders to the prosecutor's intentions. But the surreal silence in the Roosevelt Room each morning belies the nervous discussions racing elsewhere around the West Wing.

Aide Says FEMA Ignored Warnings

Testimony Covers Communication as Levees Breached

By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 21, 2005; Page A01

For 16 critical hours, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials, including former director Michael D. Brown, dismissed urgent eyewitness accounts by FEMA's only staffer in New Orleans that Hurricane Katrina had broken the city's levee system the morning of Aug. 29 and was causing catastrophic flooding, the staffer told the Senate yesterday.

Marty Bahamonde, sent to New Orleans by Brown, said he alerted Brown's assistant shortly after 11 a.m. that Monday with the "worst possible news" for the city: The Category 4 hurricane had carved a 20-foot breach in the 17th Avenue Canal levee.

King of Zembla: Something in the Air

As we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, DHS BioWatch sensors detected trace amounts of the deadly pathogen francisella tularensis near the D.C. mall on September 24 of this year, the same day that hundreds of thousands of protesters marched past the White House in protest of the war in Iraq. Salon reports that federal agencies from Homeland Security to the CDC are still struggling to figure out exactly where the bacteria -- described by government sources as "one of six biological weapons most likely to be used against the United States" -- originated:

The biological-weapons detection system in Washington had never set off any alarms before. There are more than 150 sensors spread across 30 of the most populated cities in America. But this was the first time that six sensors in any one place had detected a toxin at the same time. The sensors are also located miles from one another, suggesting that the pathogen was airborne and probably not limited to a local environmental source.

William Stanhope, associate director for special projects at the St. Louis University School of Public Health's Institute for Biosecurity, has been closely following scattered government and news reports about the incident. He's convinced it was a botched terrorist attack. "I think we were lucky and the terrorists were not good," he says. "I am stunned that this has not been more of a story."

Echidne: Meanwhile, in Sinful Massachusetts...

A piece of news that the so-called liberal media will not overplay: Massachusetts school children score the highest in the country in reading and mathematics. The reasons are actually more complex than what I as a political pundit would like to admit, but nevertheless there the results are.

Digby: Blood Feud

With the Washington Post reporting that Fitzgerald's investigation is focusing on Dick Cheney's long running feud with the CIA, I thought I would reprise this post of mine from a few months back:

I've been thinking a lot about how the Plame affair has brought up an interesting political contradiction: the right is now openly contemptuous of the CIA while the left is a vocal supporter. I think it's probably a good idea to clarify that bit so we don't get confused. The fact is that both sides have always been simultaneously vocal supporters and openly contemptuous of the CIA, but for entirely different reasons.

Digby: Vice President Corleone

Apropros of my earlier post about how the right and left view the CIA, I see (via Jeanne D'Arc) that the Senate is going to water down the anti-torture legislation to exempt the CIA.

Marty Lederer at Balkinization:

It's increasingly clear that the strategy of McCain's opponents -- the Vice President and his congressional supporters -- will be to amend the McCain Amendment in the Conference Committee so as to exempt the CIA from the prohibition on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees.

Digby: Judy's Silver Bullet

Puttering around I came upon this paper (pdf) that Judy Miller delivered to the Aspen Institute's 2003 symposium called "In Search Of An American Grand Strategy For The Middle East" just days before she accidentally met up with Rootin-Tootin' Scooter in Jackson Hole. It's not particularly revealing --- not even one mention of the roots or the turning. It's only notable for its almost embarrassing incoherence, in which she tries to strike a neutral analytical pose but can't seem to help slipping in her belief that those darned weapons just must have existed! Even as she pretends to be skeptical of the Bush Doctrine she says that our mission in Iraq has been successful because we've managed to scare the Mid East and Europe into doing our bidding.(The Tom Friedman "Our Guy's Crazier Than Your Guy" theory.)

Digby: Preznit Enforcer

Finally we have come to the real question. WDTPKAWDHKI?

Considering today's NY Daily News story reporting that Bush knew Rove had taken out a hit on Wilson, (and was angry that he'd been so sloppy about it) it's worthwhile to revisit some of the compassionate conservative's past dealings with the press and those he considers disloyal:

In 1990, he told writer Ann Grimes, "I was the enforcer when I thought things were going wrong. I had the ability to go and lay down some behavioral modification."

Tristero for Digby: The Mind Boggles

As we saw in the marketing of the "new product" - the Bush/Iraq war - success (whatever that meant) rested on the assumption that nearly all steps of the most optimistic scenario would unfold as predicted. Those of us who snorted and said, "that's impossible!" were accused of not realizing that nothing is certain in foreign affairs.

Likewise, those of us who marvel at the wonders of science and read about the extraordinary discoveries and mind-stretching new theories of the last few years with a sense of genuine awe are accused of being close-minded and incurious if we strenuously object to cynical efforts to pollute the teaching of science with blatantly obvious lies.

Billmon: Colin Blow

There's a very detailed but almost certainly very fake e-mail making the rounds in Left Blogstan, purporting to reveal Colin Powell's behind-the-scenes cooperation with the Fitzgerald investigation. Crooks and Liars has linked to a blog that posted it. Sean-Paul Kelly at The Agonist also has posted it. Jeralyn Merritt at Talk Left says she got a copy, too.

Billmon: Buffoon Watch

Tweety, much to my amazement, kinda sorta gets it:

I think the people watching right now who are voters better start paying attention to this issue. It's not just about whether somebody's name was leaked, it's about whether we went to war under false pretenses or not, whether people knew about that or not, and what they did when they were charged against that kind of offense against the United States.

Now if only that grandfather clock of a mind of his could process the implications of the Niger uranium forgeries, the bogus aluminum centrifuge tubes, the disappearing mobile chemical weapons labs, "Curveball," the Office of Special Plans, Ahmed Chalabi, Judy Miller's double super secret security clearance, Michael Ledeen's meetings with SISMI in Rome, and the Downing Street Memos, he might actually get somewhere.

Billmon: Bonfire of the Stupidities

I'm having a hard time deciding if this is more stupid than disgusting, or more disgusting than stupid:

Australian television on Wednesday broadcast footage of what it said was U.S. soldiers burning the corpses of two dead Taliban fighters with their bodies laid out facing Mecca and using the images in a propaganda campaign in southern Afghanistan.

The television report said U.S. soldiers burned the bodies for hygienic reasons but then a U.S. psychological operations unit broadcast a propaganda message on loudspeakers to Taliban fighters, taunting them to retrieve their dead and fight.

And of course, the same liars who told us that stacking Muslims in naked pyramids was just an aberration and smearing menstrual blood on Muslims was just an aberration and forcing Muslims to imitate homosexual acts was just an aberration are telling us that burning their corpses, too, is just an aberration.

Matthew Iglesias at TPM: Moral Clarity

I'm not sure I really understand Jacob Weisberg's contrarian take on the Plame case:

No one disputes that Bush officials negligently and stupidly revealed Valerie Plame's undercover status. But after two years of digging, no evidence has emerged that anyone who worked for Bush and talked to reporters about Plame—namely Rove or Scooter Libby, the vice president's chief of staff—knew she was undercover. And as nasty as they might be, it's not really thinkable that they would have known. You need a pretty low opinion of people in the White House to imagine they would knowingly foster the possible assassination of CIA assets in other countries for the sake of retaliation against someone who wrote an op-ed they didn't like in the New York Times.

Evidence hasn't emerged because Patrick Fitzgerald hasn't made any charges public or revealed what evidence he may or may not have to support those charges.

Senate Fails to Raise Minimum Wage

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: October 19, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Senate proposals to raise the minimum wage were rejected Wednesday, making it unlikely that the lowest allowable wage, $5.15 an hour since 1997, will rise in the foreseeable future.

A labor-backed measure by Sen. Edward Kennedy would have raised the minimum to $6.25 over an 18-month period. A Republican counterproposal would have combined the same $1.10 increase with various breaks and exemptions for small businesses.

Republicans Seek to Widen F.B.I. Powers

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

Published: October 19, 2005

WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 - Senate Republican leaders are pushing once again to expand the Federal Bureau of Investigation's power to demand records in terrorism investigations, as negotiations over the future of the sweeping law known as the USA Patriot Act reach a critical stage, officials said Tuesday.

House and Senate staff members have met behind closed doors four times in the last two weeks to try to iron out differences between bills passed in July extending 16 provisions of the law that expire at the end of the year, the officials said.

When a bonus isn’t a bonus, Murray fires

LES BLUMENTHAL; The News Tribune
Published: October 16th, 2005 12:01 AM

WASHINGTON – The Pentagon has reneged on its offer to pay a $15,000 bonus to members of the National Guard and Army Reserve who agree to extend their enlistments by six years, according to Sen. Patty Murray (D-Seattle).

The bonuses were offered in January to Active Guard and Reserve and military technician soldiers who were serving overseas. In April, the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs ordered the bonuses stopped, Murray said.

No Right Turn

If Americans haven't gotten more conservative why is the GOP in charge?

John Kerry had just barely conceded, and Democrats were still wiping away their tears, when on Nov. 4 of last year The New York Times ran an analysis that argued it was “impossible to read President Bush's re-election with larger Republican majorities in both houses of Congress as anything other than the clearest confirmation yet that this is a center-right country.” The pronouncement seemed uncontroversial, and it reflected the view held by many that Bush's victory was the culmination of a thirty-year swing to the right among the American electorate. Over the last three decades, the base of the Republican Party has veered sharply to the right, with incoming congressmen and senators increasingly far more conservative than the incumbents they replace. Even the Democratic base has moved to the right: An analysis of survey data reveals its own activists are now closer to the views of independent voters than they were 10 years ago. It would seem reasonable to assume that the center of American public opinion has moved in tandem with the government.

Knocking the Vote

Diebold says its voting machines are bulletproof. Hackers say otherwise.
By James Renner

Published: Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Ion Sancho wants to get things right this time. As supervisor of elections for Leon County, Florida, he stood at the epicenter of the election fiasco of 2000. Voter confidence, he realizes, is paramount. That's why he's let a computer hacker have a go at one of his new machines.

The apparatus in question is the Accuvote 2000 Optical Scan, a boxlike computer that reads ballots as they are inserted. The data is collected and stored on a memory card that's later uploaded into a central tabulator. Diebold, the machine's Canton-based manufacturer, claims that the memory cards cannot be altered to influence votes. Sancho figured he'd find out for himself.

In May, he gave Dr. Herbert Thompson access to an Accuvote 2000. As hackers go, Thompson doesn't quite fit the mold of a pasty-faced kid playing Warcraft in Mom's basement: He's the chief strategist at Security Innovation, a Florida tester of online security for IBM, Microsoft, Google, and other large businesses and government agencies. If anyone can uncover a problem, it's this guy.

But not even Thompson could have expected this: He was able to manipulate a memory card using homemade devices. When he inserted it into the Diebold machine, 10,000 votes were awarded to one candidate, and the Accuvote detected no sign of fraud.

Cursor's Media Patrol - 10/19/05

As Fox News is found to be pushing the "criminalization of politics" talking point, Slate's Jacob Weisberg argues that "Rooting for Rove's indictment" is "unseemly" and "unthinking."

An Australian TV program reportedly shot film of U.S. troops burning the bodies of dead Taliban in Afghanistan, along with footage of a psy-ops broadcast taunting villagers for allowing the bodies to be burnt. Plus: 'Rice Wants to Follow Afghan Model in Iraq.'

Stars and Stripes reports that the U.S. Navy and the Marine Corps, citing security concerns, have "blocked all access to commercial e-mail services" for "sailors, Marines and DOD employees and contractors" using overseas government computers.

Pentagon screening finds that "28% of Iraq veterans," about 50,000 this year alone, have returned home with medical or mental health problems, dwarfing the Pentagon's official casualty count.

Harold Meyerson: Gunning for the Poor

Wednesday, October 19, 2005; Page A21

Congress is back in session, and it's gunning for the American poor.

A revolt of House conservatives has persuaded that body's Republican leadership to offset the increased federal spending going to rebuild the Hurricane Katrina-devastated Gulf Coast by reductions in Medicaid, food stamps and other programs for the indigent. If things go according to plan, this week the House will begin to cut $50 billion from those efforts.

Senate Plan to Cut Food Stamps Dies

Associated Press
Wednesday, October 19, 2005; Page A06

Senate Republicans have dropped plans to cut the popular food stamp program, as the chamber's leaders scrambled to assemble a $35 billion spending cut measure to implement the budget plan it adopted in April.

After protests from Agriculture Committee members Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) and James M. Talent (R-Mo.), panel Chairman Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) dropped more than $500 million in food stamp cuts from a farm and food subsidy measure coming to a committee vote today. The cuts could have meant a loss of benefits for 300,000 working families benefiting from more generous eligibility rules in some states.

Rice: U.S. May Still Be in Iraq in 10 Years

By ANNE GEARAN, AP Diplomatic Writer 40 minutes ago

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declined on Wednesday to rule out American forces still being needed in Iraq a decade from now. Senators warned that the Bush administration must play it straight with the public or risk losing public support for the war.

Pushed by senators from both parties to define the limits of U.S. involvement in Iraq and the Middle East, Rice also declined to rule out the use of military force in Iran or Syria, although she said the administration prefers diplomacy.

"I don't think the president ever takes any of his options off the table concerning anything to do with military force," Rice said.

Rice appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations committee for only the second time since members gave her an unexpectedly tepid endorsement to replace Colin Powell in January, and she fielded pointed questions about U.S. intentions and commitment on Iraq from lawmakers who said they are hearing complaints at home.

The Daily Howler - 10/18/05

THE WAY SHE WAS! Arianna fakes about Miller—as she once faked about Gore: // link // print // previous // next //

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2005

THE PLAGUE YEARS (PRESS CORPS VERSION): How hapless is the Post’s Richard Cohen? Today, he offers a “clarification” about last Thursday’s column:

COHEN (10/18/05): A clarification: A number of readers, some of them formerly of the CIA, got the impression from my last column that I don't consider the outing of a covert employee a serious matter. I do.

But if Cohen does think such an outing is serious, his previous column makes no sense at all. Just click here for the gory details. Sic semper mainstream columnists.

Meanwhile, the Times’ John Tierney tells us today that the outing of Plame wasn’t especially serious. Reason? There was little chance it would get her “harmed or killed,” he says. But is it possible that the outing of Plame compromised U.S. security interests? Tierney saves his argument by failing to address this concern.

When Journalists Join the Cover-ups

By Robert Parry
October 18, 2005

As embarrassing as the Judith Miller case is for the New York Times, the fiasco underscores a more troubling development that strikes near the heart of American democracy – the press corps’ gradual retreat from the principle of skepticism on national security issues to career-boosting “patriotism.”

Miller – and many other prominent Washington journalists over the past quarter century – largely built their careers by positioning themselves as defenders of supposed American interests. Instead of tough reporting about national security operations, these reporters often became conduits for government spin and propaganda.

Juan Cole - 10/18/05

Voting Tallies Provoke Investigation
As US Jets Kill 70

The US military launched air strikes around Ramadi on Monday, killing 70 persons. Iraqi police maintained that 20 of them were innocent civilians, including some children. The US military said it had received no such reports. Five US GIs were killed at Ramadi this weekend, and the city largely refused to have anything to do with the constitutional referendum. Whatever the reality, Sunni Arabs, whose nerves are raw from losing in their attempt to stop the constitution, will likely believe the story about the US bombing children. The guerrilla war is set to go on a long time.

Billmon: Trembler

In the spring of 1980, a few weeks before Mt. St. Helens completely blew its top, a swarm of microquakes jostled the Cascade foothills of Western Washington, as the magma chamber deep below the mountain began to empty into the central conduit leading up to the crater. One of these quakes was powerful enough to rock my dorm room about 80 miles north of the volcano. It was just a single, sharp shock in the early hours of the morning -- as if a truck had backed into my bed, with a sound like a couple of boxcars jolting together. By the time I was fully awake, it was over, and I lay there in the darkness -- half stoned, half asleep, wondering what the hell was going on.

Billmon: The Poisoned Memo

Everyone knows how to catch rats -- you either set traps, or you put out poisoned bait. In the case of the White House conspirators who outed Valerie Plame, it looks like Patrick Fitzgerald is making use of both.

The traps we already know about -- Rove, Libby et. al. stuck their heads inside one every time they spoke to an FBI agent or testified before the grand jury. We'll find out in a few days whether the traps snapped shut on their little necks, when Fitzgerald either does or doesn't indict them for perjury, or making false statements, or whatever.

Goodbye, Mr. Goodwrench

by NICHOLAS VON HOFFMAN

[posted online on October 14, 2005]

When Delphi, the nation's largest auto parts supplier, declared bankruptcy a couple of days ago, it was the end of a way of life for American automobile workers, the last large group from the smokestack era.

Until 1999 the company was a subdivision of General Motors. It was, in the lingo of business, spun off as a separate company in hopes it could pick up new customers as an independent entity. But with its high wages, medical benefits and retirement costs, Delphi was being killed by foreign competition. It lost $4.5 billion since 2000 and cannot pay its workers' salaries nor honor its pension obligations--a debt of billions the company does not have.

Money-losing companies are going into bankruptcy courts pleading with judges to break their union contracts before the union contracts break them. Delphi, which has 33,000 union employees, is paying its workers a wage and benefits package worth about $65 an hour. Now it wants to pay them about a third of that, a disaster for a family that has borrowed money for a house, cars and education. As one of Delphi's workers was quoted as saying, under such a new pay scale he would not be able to afford a GM car. Quite a note when you recall that in 1914 Henry Ford made the world come to a stop by announcing that, thanks to the system of "mass production" he had invented, he was raising his workers' pay up to $5 a day so they could buy Ford automobiles.

Cursor's Media Patrol

Although the U.S. military said that it "knew of no civilian deaths" after "an F-15 dropped a bomb on a crowd," the Washington Post reports that "at Ramadi hospital, distraught and grieving families fought over body parts severed by the airstrikes, staking rival claims to what they believed to be pieces of their loved ones."

The Defense Department inspector general "doesn't have a single auditor or accountant in Iraq tracking spending," reports Knight Ridder, having "quietly pulled out of the war zone a year ago - leaving what experts say are gaps in the oversight of how more than $140 billion is being spent."

Eighteen Grandmothers Against the War were arrested for disorderly conduct after they showed up at a military recruiting center in Times Square and said they wanted to enlist, reports the AP. Plus: When movements collide.

Find out who was voted the world's top public intellectual in a poll sponsored by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines.

Mr. Richardson Goes to Pyongyang

Can a New Mexico Democrat make a deal with the North Koreans?
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2005, at 2:36 PM PT

When North Koreans are ready to make a deal on a festering dispute, they often call on a middleman—which is why Bill Richardson's little-noted trip to Pyongyang this week may signal an impending breakthrough in the six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear-weapons program.

When last we left those talks, the six powers signed a "joint statement" in which North Korea pledged to dismantle its nukes while, in exchange, the other five—the United States, China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea—pledged to think about giving Pyongyang two light-water nuclear-power reactors.

Emily's List Celebrates Clout as It Turns 20

Pro-Abortion-Rights Candidates Championed

By Chris Cillizza
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, October 18, 2005; Page A13

Two decades ago, Ellen Malcolm started Emily's List with the single-minded goal of electing more pro-abortion-rights women to state and federal offices.

She had nowhere to go but up. In the halls of Congress, only 12 of the 435 House seats were occupied by Democratic women, and no Democratic woman had been elected to the Senate except to fill an unexpired term. The headquarters of Emily's List was a humble space otherwise known as Malcolm's basement.

Cheney's Office Is A Focus in Leak Case

Sources Cite Role Of Feud With CIA

By Jim VandeHei and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, October 18, 2005; A01

As the investigation into the leak of a CIA agent's name hurtles to an apparent conclusion, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has zeroed in on the role of Vice President Cheney's office, according to lawyers familiar with the case and government officials. The prosecutor has assembled evidence that suggests Cheney's long-standing tensions with the CIA contributed to the unmasking of operative Valerie Plame.

In grand jury sessions, including with New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Fitzgerald has pressed witnesses on what Cheney may have known about the effort to push back against ex-diplomat and Iraq war critic Joseph C. Wilson IV, including the leak of his wife's position at the CIA, Miller and others said. But Fitzgerald has focused more on the role of Cheney's top aides, including Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, lawyers involved in the case said.

U.S. Labor Is in Retreat as Global Forces Squeeze Pay and Benefits

By David Streitfeld, Times Staff Writer

Workers at auto parts maker Delphi Corp. will be asked this week to take a two-thirds pay cut. It's one of the most drastic wage concessions ever sought from unionized employees.

Workers at General Motors Corp., meanwhile, tentatively agreed on Monday to absorb billions of dollars in healthcare costs. Ford Motor Co. and DaimlerChrysler employees are certain to face similar demands.

The forces affecting Delphi and GM workers are extreme versions of what's occurring across the American labor market, where such economic risks as unemployment and health costs once broadly shared by business and government are being shifted directly onto the backs of American working families.

Miller, The Fourth Estate And The Warfare State

Norman Solomon
October 17, 2005

Norman Solomon is the author of the new book War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. For information, go to: www.WarMadeEasy.com

More than any other New York Times reporter, Judith Miller took the lead with stories claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Now, a few years later, she’s facing heightened scrutiny in the aftermath of a pair of articles that appeared in the Times on Sunday—a lengthy investigative piece about Miller plus her own first-person account of how she got entangled in the case of the Bush administration’s “outing” of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent.

It now seems that Miller functioned with more accountability to U.S. military intelligence officials than to New York Times editors. Most of the way through her article , Miller slipped in this sentence, "During the Iraq war, the Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment ‘embedded’ with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons.” And, according to the same article, she ultimately told the grand jury that during a July 8, 2003, meeting with the vice president’s chief of staff, Lewis Libby, “I might have expressed frustration to Mr. Libby that I was not permitted to discuss with editors some of the more sensitive information about Iraq."

Operation On-Your-Own

Earl Hadley
October 18, 2005

Earl Hadley is education coordinator for the Campaign for America's Future.

Conservatives have some nerve. Only a group with a misplaced sense of entitlement would try to push $70 billion in tax cuts through Congress, while cutting anywhere from tens to hundreds of billions in dollars from programs that assist working and middle-class families. The misplaced priorities of conservatives is not news, but their willingness to use the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina as a justification for these program cuts takes their outrageous and calculated behavior to another level.

Before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, conservatives had $70 billion in tax cuts, along with $35 billion in program cuts, lined up for two filibuster-proof votes. After Katrina, to their dismay, conservatives were forced to postpone these votes, as well as a vote on repealing the estate tax. The logic was pretty obvious: With hundreds of thousands of people struggling to find health care, employment, schooling and housing, it wasn’t the best time to push through tax breaks for the wealthy, while cutting health care, nutrition and other forms of assistance. But conservatives were not ready to throw in the towel; they were merely waiting for the right moment to reassert their agenda. They were also growing increasingly angry about the thought of the federal government taking a leadership role, financially, in rebuilding of the Gulf Coast.

Digby: Scandal Central

Referring to the NY Times coverage of the Judy Miller saga, Brit Hume said something today to the effect of, "I don't think the American people care about this and as I was reading it today it occurred to me that I don't care much either."

Well, he wouldn't. Brit's career as the dean of FoxNews was made by covering the important stories, after all:

Quick off the mark on January 21, the day the story broke, FNC had the first photo of Lewinsky on the air at 9 a.m., and, that same day, the first interview with Gennifer Flowers. It began devoting all of its daytime schedule to the crisis, except for brief segments on other news, along with weekend specials attracting hundreds of viewer phone calls. The network even inaugurated a whole new early-evening series, Special Report with Brit Hume, to keep daily tabs on the evolving story "for the duration of the developments."

Digby: Miller's Message

Kevin Drum questions the theory that Bennett didn't come clean with Fitz about Libby being Judy's only "meaningful" source, (or didn't know that Libby wasn't Judy's only meaningful source) when they made the deal that she would only testify about her conversations with Libby. This rests on the fact that Miller now has a phantom source who told her about "Valerie Flame" but she can't remember who it might have been. Kevin says:

This doesn't sound right to me. First of all, surely something like this can't happen in real life, can it? Bennett's representations to Fitzgerald would be considered binding, wouldn't they? If it turned out he misrepresented the evidence, Fitzgerald would no longer be bound by the original agreement. (Someone with experience in federal prosecutions should feel free to step in and tell me I'm wrong, but this sure doesn't sound like something a judge would spend more than a few seconds ruling on.)

Digby: Tightening the Scrunchie

I don't want to hear any more belly aching from liberal pansies about how we aren't getting the terrorists. We are not only smokin 'em out of their caves we are ruthlessly depriving them of their perms and sun-kissed highlighting.

U.S. forces in Iraq said on Saturday that they were holding a man suspected of acting as a barber to senior al Qaeda militants and helping them change their appearance to evade capture.

Digby: Embed Wrangler

Atrios is wondering who got Judy her security clearance. Josh Marshall reports that Jim Micklaszewski says nobody at DOD, DIA or CIA knows anything about it.

Have they called Jim Wilkinson? He is, after all, the guy who was in charge of managing the embeds. From a very handy little rundown on Wilkinson from marureen Farrell, we see this:

"It was a very well-designed, well-executed effort to control the information," New York magazine’s Michael Wolff explained. "Wilkinson was, I think, instrumental. He certainly represented himself as the brains of the operation."

Billmon: The Miller's Tale

I went out Saturday night and yesterday unfortunately was a household chore day, so I'm very late weighing in on the New Pravda's Judy Miller extravaganza. It was, as so many have already pointed out, rather less than the full disclosure the paper's politburo had promised. A whole lot less. In fact, it looks like the Gray Lady and Ms. Run Amok are both sporting a thick stubble on their faces, suspiciously resembling Tricky Dick's old five o'clock shadow. If this were 1973, we'd be talking about the "limited hang out road." But since it's 2005, let's settle for "cover up still in progress."

Billmon: Subpoena City

John Fund has turned into the conservative equivalent of a car bomber -- he's willing to take out everybody if it will help stop the Miers nomination:

On Oct. 3, the day the Miers nomination was announced, Mr. Dobson and other religious conservatives held a conference call to discuss the nomination. One of the people on the call took extensive notes, which I have obtained. According to the notes, two of Ms. Miers's close friends -- both sitting judges -- said during the call that she would vote to overturn Roe.

This is taking the conservative insurgency to a whole new level. Don't be surprised if the White House starts getting threatening communiques from a group calling itself Al Qaeda in the Wall Street Journal.

Billmon: Traditional Values

Checks and e-mails obtained by The Post show that Abramoff recruited [Ralph] Reed to join Sheldon in the effort to pressure members of Congress. Reed had left the Christian Coalition in 1997 and started a political consulting firm in Georgia.

Abramoff asked eLottery to write a check in June 2000 to Sheldon's Traditional Values Coalition (TVC). He also routed eLottery money to a Reed company, using two intermediaries, which had the effect of obscuring the source.

BREAKING: Barber Cancels Ed Schultz’s Debut on Armed Forces Radio

Armed Forces Radio (AFR) is a station that broadcasts to American troops overseas through “over 1,000 outlets in more than 175 countries.” It currently features an hour of programming by right-wing host Rush Limbaugh. There is no comparable progressive program.

Today, that was supposed change. Ed Schultz – the host of the most popular progressive radio show in the country — was supposed to start broadcasting on Armed Forces radio. Jones Radio, the company that syndicates The Ed Shultz Show, received an email on September 29 from an Armed Forces Radio official confirming that one hour of Schultz’s program would begin airing today, October 17.

But this morning at 6AM, the producer of the Ed Schultz show, James Holm, received a call from Pentagon communications aide Allison Barber. She told Holm that she was calling so early to let Schultz know his show would not begin airing on AFR today. You’ll remember Barber as the aide caught coaching troops before a photo-op with President Bush last week.

Senior White House Officials Face Prospect of Life in Prison for Outing of CIA Agent Plame Unless They Testify for Prosecution

I doubt this will happen...look for a blizzard of pardons after the upcoming elections.--Dictynna

10/17/2005 3:00:00 PM

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To: National Desk

Contact: Ilene Proctor, 310-271-5857, for VelvetRevolution.us, Web: http://VelvetRevolution.us

WASHINGTON, Oct. 17 /U.S. Newswire/ -- VelvetRevolution.us, a large coalition of organizations and citizens dedicated to honest government, has done an analysis of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines and its probable effect on the sentencing of any senior White House official convicted in the Valerie Plame affair. By going after Wilson and his wife, those officials apparently committed serious crimes which they then compounded by obstructing justice and committing and suborning perjury. As a result, they have virtually ensured that, if convicted, they could receive a sentence up to life in federal prison under the United States Sentencing Guidelines, which are used to compute sentences based on severity offense levels. The higher the level, the greater the sentence, and federal courts routinely follow the Guidelines in the vast majority of cases.

Cursor's Media Patrol - 10/17/05

Back to Iraq's Chris Allbritton says "color me skeptical" after finding 'Curious numbers in Ninevah' that Juan Cole calls "counter-intuitive," and the Los Angeles Times quotes a Sunni Arab spokesman as saying: "If 95% ... can't stop the constitution, then who can?"

Cole tells the Washington Post that "This thing is an enormous fiasco ... and this result guarantees the guerrilla war will go on," and in a TomDispatch interview, he talks of media coverage that generates "an extremely persistent set of images that almost no actual information is able to make a dent in."

The New York Times finds that President Bush has changed his tone on Iraq, as "he appears to be preparing the country for a struggle of cold war proportions," and Time profiles an insurgent 'Professor of Death' with similar expectations.

'Soldier Propagandist' After discovering that "pro-Bush rhetoric" from one of the U.S. soldiers who appeared in last week's teleconference with the president, "is sprinkled throughout the media in articles dating back to 2003," MediaCitizen asks: "how could one soldier get so much face time?"

Mixter's Mix: Inmates force fed FOX News

Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke is supposed to be a Democrat. He ran as a Democrat, but he was recently listed as a member of the National Black Republican Association. Clarke says he is not a member of this group, but as of this moment, he is still listed on their website as a supporting elected official.

While he denies any affiliation with the Republican party, he has recently ordered that inmates in the Milwaukee County Jail only get their television news from FOX News.

Rove thought facing perjury charge; Will resign if indicted

RAW STORY

New York – Karl Rove has a plan, as always. Even before testifying last week for the fourth time before a grand jury probing the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity, Rove—who as senior adviser and deputy chief of staff runs a vast swath of the West Wing—and others at the White House had concluded he would immediately resign or possibly go on unpaid leave if indicted, several legal and Administration sources familiar with the thinking tell TIME.

Cheney May Be Entangled in CIA Leak Investigation, People Say

Bloomberg.com sounds like Fox...--Dictynna

Oct. 17 (Bloomberg) -- A special counsel is focusing on whether Vice President Dick Cheney played a role in leaking a covert CIA agent's name, according to people familiar with the probe that already threatens top White House aides Karl Rove and Lewis Libby.

The special counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald, has questioned current and former officials of President George W. Bush's administration about whether Cheney was involved in an effort to discredit the agent's husband, Iraq war critic and former U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson, according to the people.

House GOP Leaders Set to Cut Spending

As always, the budget will be balanced on the backs of the poor.--Dicytnna.

Leadership Shake-Up Spurred Policy Shift

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 17, 2005; Page A01

House Republican leaders have moved from balking at big cuts in Medicaid and other programs to embracing them, driven by pent-up anger from fiscal conservatives concerned about runaway spending and the leadership's own weakening hold on power.

Beginning this week, the House GOP lawmakers will take steps to cut as much as $50 billion from the fiscal 2006 budget for health care for the poor, food stamps and farm supports, as well as considering across-the-board cuts in other programs. Only last month, then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Tex.) and other GOP leaders quashed demands within their party for budget cuts to pay for the soaring cost of hurricane relief.

Supreme court rejects govt tobacco appeal

By Peter Kaplan 41 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The US Supreme Court rejected on Monday the government's appeal aimed at reinstating a potential $280 billion penalty in its landmark racketeering case against cigarette makers.

Without comment, the justices denied a request by the Justice Department to review a U.S. appeals court ruling that barred the government from seeking $280 billion in past tobacco profits as a legal remedy for decades of alleged fraud by the tobacco industry.

Bush's Ancestors

By SEAN WILENTZ

Published: October 16, 2005

Ever since Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, the strength of American conservatism has largely confounded historians and intellectuals. Before then, a generation of influential scholars claimed that liberalism was the core of all American political thinking and suggested that it always would be. Well into the 1970's, many observers wondered whether a Republican Party that allied itself with the conservative movement could long survive.

History has, to say the least, disproved these judgments. Yet many prominent liberals continue to see contemporary conservatism as a rhetorical smoke screen intended to deceive the masses - even as conservatives often trace their movement back no farther than William F. Buckley Jr.'s founding of National Review in 1955, fusing religious and pro-business-minded voters. Such thinking, however, slights the coherence and durability of conservative politics in America. The blend of businessmen's aversion to government regulation, down-home cultural populism and Christian moralism that sustains today's Republican Party is a venerable if loosely knit philosophy of government dating back to long before the right-wing upsurge that prepared the way for Reagan's presidency. A few pundits and political insiders have likened the current Republicans to the formidable, corporate-financed political machine behind President William McKinley at the end of the 19th century. The admiration Karl Rove has expressed for the machine strengthens the historical connection. Yet neither conservatives nor liberals have fully recognized that the Bush administration's political and ideological recipe was invented decades before McKinley by a nearly forgotten American institution: the Whig Party of the 1830's and 40's.

A former police chief wants to end a losing war (on drugs)

Let those dopers be

A former police chief wants to end a losing war by legalizing pot, coke, meth and other drugs

By Norm Stamper

Norm Stamper is the former chief of the Seattle Police Department. He is the author of "Breaking Rank: A Top Cop's Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing" (Nation Books, 2005).

SOMETIMES PEOPLE in law enforcement will hear it whispered that I'm a former cop who favors decriminalization of marijuana laws, and they'll approach me the way they might a traitor or snitch. So let me set the record straight.

Yes, I was a cop for 34 years, the last six of which I spent as chief of Seattle's police department.

But no, I don't favor decriminalization. I favor legalization, and not just of pot but of all drugs, including heroin, cocaine, meth, psychotropics, mushrooms and LSD.

Decriminalization, as my colleagues in the drug reform movement hasten to inform me, takes the crime out of using drugs but continues to classify possession and use as a public offense, punishable by fines.