JustOneMinute

Tidbits From The Libby Filings

The Next Hurrah has the latest Libby filings.  When time permits I will pore through them, but three tidbits grabbed me:

(1) the Cooper-Libby phone call had two other participants (p. 8, footnote):

For example, regardless of whether Mr. Cooper chose to disclose the details of his conversation with Mr. Libby to the government, Mr. Libby could not have assumed that he could falsely represent the details of that conversation with abandon. This is because two other witnesses were present for that call: Cathie Martin, Assistant to the Vice President for Public Affairs, and Jenny Mayfield, Mr. Libby’s personal assistant. Obviously, Mr. Libby could not have expected that either Ms. Martin or Ms. Mayfield would refuse to cooperate with the investigation or testify falsely.

If their versions matched Libby's, presumably we would not be hearing this case.

(2) Unless Maureen Dowd handled the redactions (a possibility), Cheney did not tell Libby much about Plame's status - per the notes (page 6), she was described as "working in a 'functional office'[,] CP".

I have no idea what may have been redacted there, but my understanding was that Cheney told Libby that Ms. Plame was in the CPD.

(3) Confusion at the CIA, or, The Press Flack Is Always The Last To Know:  Bob Novak was adamant that CIA press spokesperson Bill Harlow had not been emphatic in warning him about Ms. Plame's status.  Now we learn this in a footnote also on page 6:

Notes from a July 2003 internal interview of William Harlow... indicate that, at the same time as he was confirming to Mr. Novak that Ms. Wilson worked at the CIA, Mr. Harlow "found out" that Ms. Wilson was "not under cover".

If Novak were on trial this would be great news.

One of the points of one of these filings is that, since Fitzgerald has offered no evidence that anyone actually was aware of Ms. Plame's covert status and has provided only a two page summary of her CIA career indicating that her status was classified, the whole topic should be barred from discussion by the prosecution as inflammatory and irrelevant.

That said - if Bill Harlow could not pin down her status after checking around (and despite a heads-up from Ms. Wilson following the sidewalk encounter between Novak and Wilson's friend in the street), it is easy to believe that Libby did not know her status either.

Kerry For President! (He Supports The Troops AND Served in Vietnam!)

John "I Support the Troops of Ghengis Khan" Kerry reassures Bush voters that they made the right choice in 2004 by delivering this updated support for the troops at a campaign rally for Gubernatorial candidate Angelides in California:

“You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

The Captain wonders whether other Dems will denounce this.  As if!  Michelle Malkin is doing great outrage.

Here is a local paper covering the same event, giving us a bit of crow reax:

Hoping to breathe life into a flagging gubernatorial run, Democrats on Monday turned out a cast of party all-stars for Phil Angelides at a Pasadena City College appearance.

Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, state Assembly Speaker Fabian Nu ez and California Sen. Barbara Boxer all gave the California treasurer ringing endorsements, while telling about 370 PCC students that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger does not have their best interests in mind.

...But while the students showed proper enthusiasm for Angelides by waving his signs and wooing and booing at the right places, the energy in the room clearly belonged to Kerry. He took the stage to roaring applause and left it only to be mobbed by students and reporters.    

Kerry charmed the crowd with tales of surfing at Mission Beach and got laughs for a series of one liners, including telling the crowd he had just returned from Texas, "Where the president used to live - now he lives in a state of denial."

Kerry then told the students that if they were able to navigate the education system, they could get comfortable jobs - "If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq," he said to a mixture of laughter and gasps.

I want to say that having listened carefully to the audio, it is possible that Kerry was misunderstood - he did not say "if you study hard... you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq".  What he said was, unless you study hard "you get stuck with Democrats".

Well, maybe.

MORE:  This may simply be a well-done spoof site, but here is Kerry's "response".  Shorter Kerry - Your mother wears Army boots but you never did.  And Rush Limbaugh is fat.

As Teresa might say, quel clown.  Jiminy, Kerry had a choice: (a) apologize, get beaten for a news cycle, and move on, or (b) try to tough it out and turn this into a multi-day beat down.  Hey, (b) works for me.

Hot Air has more, including a CNN clip - apparently CNN is pushing this hard.

John McCain thinks Kerry owes the troops an apology:

Senator Kerry owes an apology to the many thousands of Americans serving in Iraq, who answered their country’s call because they are patriots and not because of any deficiencies in their education. Americans from all backgrounds, well off and less fortunate, with high school diplomas and graduate degrees, take seriously their duty to our country, and risk their lives today to defend the rest of us in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

They all deserve our respect and deepest gratitude for their service. The suggestion that only the least educated Americans would agree to serve in the military and fight in Iraq, is an insult to every soldier serving in combat, and should deeply offend any American with an ounce of appreciation for what they suffer and risk so that the rest of us can sleep more comfortably at night. Without them, we wouldn’t live in a country where people securely possess all their God-given rights, including the right to express insensitive, ill-considered and uninformed remarks.

KERRY'S SIDE:  From the Huffers we see that Kerry simply can't tell a joke - he meant to deliver a Bush-basher with "You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq" as the punchline.

Fine - Kerry should apologize for not being able to speak English as well as the typical recruit.  But enough already with Kerry delivering "Bush is dumb" jokes.

FROM HOTLINE:  Hotline asks a couple of presumably non-rhethorical questions:

Do Republicans really believe that Kerry wasn't talking about Pres. Bush? (We believe that Kerry was referring to Bush because he's used a similar formulation in our presence before and quite clearly meant to call Bush a dummy.)

Aren't Republicans being a bit intellectually dishonest by taking Kerry out of context?

As to the "context" question, the quote was clear enough and Kerry's non-apology was absurd enough.  Kerry's backdoor explanation - the quip was a Bush-basher that went awry - is probably true, but how would we have known that (Kerry has not used a similar formulation in our presence)?

As to believing that Kerry meant this as a troop-basher - well, it is hard to believe that he would have reflected carefully and said this.  However, Kinsley's definition of a gaffe applies - this appears to be a perfect case of a politician telling the truth.  Let me break it to Hotline gently - I think there are plenty of Republicans who don't believe the Democrats (and particularly the Democrats of Kerry's anti-war generation) have a visceral respect for the military.

Possible data points would include:

(a) Kerry's Winter Soldier testimony - many Swift Vets saw his characterization of the troops in Vietnam as murderous rapists akin to the army of Ghengis Khan as something like the opposite of support.

(b) Charles Rangel's call for a draft.  I understand he had many motivations, but his basic message is that the poor get stuck with serving because "the rich" have better choices.  That is quite consistent with Kerry's message of 'study hard, don't get stuck in Iraq'.

(c) Has Hotline checked the availaibilty of ROTC on Ivy campuses?

(d) Kerry is a liberal Northeasterner.  White Northeasterners are under-represented in military recruiting (Go West, and South, young man!).  I daresay that wealthy white liberal Northeasterners are very under-represented in military recruiting.  In Kerry's milieu, people don't enlist and their sons and daughter don't enlist.  Kerry himself only enlisted after his deferments ran out. [Lots on recruiting here; more in the CS Monitor.]

Look, it may not be fair to characterize Democrats as believing that military service is a last choice rather than a first choice, but I think many Republicans believe that of Dems, and not entirely without reason.  Consequently, I did not read Kerry's remark and immediately think that he could not have meant it.  As an alternative example, if Kerry had been quoted as mocking black people I would have immediately assumed his mouth had disconnected from his brain, as has happened before.

Dems Seeking Victory, Not Mandate

The Times explains that Democrats have recruited gun-wavin', Bible-thumpin' pro-lifers to run for Congress to help them pick up a majority.  Hey, it may work and there is nothing wrong with winning.  However, it will hardly be possible to interpret Democratic success as a mandate for their well-concealed agenda.  From the Times:

In Key House Races, Democrats Run to the Right

By SHAILA DEWAN  and ANNE E. KORNBLUT

ASHEVILLE, N.C., Oct. 28 — In their push to win back control of the House, Democrats have turned to conservative and moderate candidates who fit the profiles of their districts more closely than the profile of the national party.

One such candidate, Heath Shuler, was courted by Republicans to run for office in 2001. Mr. Shuler, 34, is a retired National Football League quarterback who is running in the 11th Congressional District in North Carolina. He is  an evangelical Christian and holds fast to many conservative social views, like opposition to abortion rights.

“My guess is that if Democrats are in the majority, it’s going to be because of these New Democrat, Blue Dog candidates out there winning in these competitive swing districts,” Representative Ron Kind of Wisconsin, co-chairman of a caucus of centrist House Democrats, said in an interview.

Let's pause right here - of course the centrist Dems will claim that Democratic success is due to the efforts of the centrist Dems.  If there is a Dem victory it will have a thousand fathers.  However, just because the claim is inevitable does not mean it is false - the ongoing non-success of Nutroots darling Ned Lamont in Blue Connecticut certainly suggests that the power or the progressives is less than they might have thought.

More from the Times:

But if candidates like Mr. Shuler do help the Democrats gain majority control of Congress, it could come at a political price, which may include tensions in the party between its new centrists and its more liberal political base.

While Democratic leaders have gone to great lengths to promote the views of these candidates, some, like Mr. Shuler, have views on issues like gun control and abortion that are far out of step with the prevailing views of the Democrats who control the party. On some issues, they may even be expected to side with Republicans and the Bush White House.

Democratic officials said they did not set out with the intention of finding moderates to run. Instead, as they searched for candidates with the greatest possibility of winning against Republicans, they said, they wound up with a number who reflected more moderate views.

That was especially true in suburban areas and some rural districts, said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “As a group, they are moderate in temperament and reformers in spirit,” Mr. Emanuel said.

In Indiana, for example, Brad Ellsworth, a Democrat running to unseat Representative John Hostettler, brags about the “A” rating he has received from the National Rifle Association. In Kentucky, Mike Weaver, a Democrat who opposes abortion rights, is running against Representative Ron Lewis, a Republican. Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat running for an open House seat in Arizona, is presenting herself as a fiscal conservative, saying she would oppose Congressional pay increases until the federal budget is balanced.

Whatever.  Over in the Senate, Dem candidate Bob Casey Jr. is also pro-life (ostensibly).  Apparently, the Dems are committed to a woman's right to choose only until that commitment prompts people to choose Republicans.

Folks who still haven't decided which party to support this fall may want to consider this -which party will engage in the more entertaining and spectacular post-defeat recriminations?

Defeated Republicans would surely engage in a bit of finger-pointing but they will remain the pro-life party of lower taxes and a strong defense.  The key lessons they would take from an electoral defeat would be (a) don't start a war without a plan to finish it, and (b) don't nominate George Bush in 2008.

But if the Democrats lose, they will make a defeated George Steinbrenner look like a paragon of patience and restraint.  In fact, the Dems are so eager to blame other factions of their party that the circular firing squad has already begun to assemble - Netroots guru Matt Stoller, embittered by the lack of support offered to Ned Lamont by Democratic Senate bigwigs, tells us that "it's very clear that the Democratic Party leadership is rotten to the core".

Stoller's Fellow MyDD blogger Chris Bowers joins in by bashing centrist House Dems:

The netroots and the progressive movement have as much of an ownership claim to the Democratic Party as anyone else. We follow the rules, and we have provided an absolutely enormous amount of support to the party. As we work to move into the infrastructure of the party, LieberDems and "New Dems" alike do everything they can to distance themselves from they party. ...it is in fact the Lieberman-Tauscher-DLC types view the party, its rules, and its members as a convenience to be easily tossed aside when they interfere with a personal path to power. This is our party as much as it is theirs. Hell, by now it is more our party than it is theirs. Lieberman and his supporters have become the new Naderites in our midst.

That alone means it will be our victory more than it will be theirs. Any Democrat who works to distance himself or herself from the Democratic Party cannot claim responsibility for a Democratic Party victory.

The party, it is me!  Centrist Dem candidates like Heath Shuler (described in the Times article) may wonder just what debt they owe the foaming Netroots.  Oh well - per the Times, that may be a purge for another day:

“I don’t think people like Shuler will be the core of the Democratic Party,” said Mark Bloom, a writer who is a volunteer for MoveOn.org, the liberal advocacy group, at its storefront office in downtown Asheville. “If people like Shuler turn out to not be progressive enough for my tastes, I’ll work to replace him.”

This should be a show.

MORE:  Why do they hate America?  The Times finds the Dems that the Dems would prefer not be found:

When she travels abroad, said Mary Nassif, a school psychologist, “I may not take pride in being American, but I love saying I’m from Seattle.”

Classic.  Elsewhere in the same article is the "China First" viewpoint, as articulated by a mother who has adopted two Chinese babies:

Ms. Peterson has adopted two daughters from China and is working on a third. As Gwen, her eldest, considered whether biting into an apple would dislodge her dangling front teeth, Ms. Peterson acknowledged that her fixation [with budget deficits] was personal.

China gains “so much power and control by carrying so much of our debt,” said Ms. Peterson, who described herself as a Democrat who often crosses party lines. If the United States one day resists repayment, she said, her girls will “never have an ability to have a relationship with their country.”

Clue - their country is the United States.  Oh, well, we know what she means.  We just wish we could get her on camera explaining that she is voting Democratic because that is better for China.  That would put the "bites" in sound bite, all right.

 

The Duke Debacle (ongoing)

ABC News presents yet another facet of the story from the "second dancer" in the Duke lacrosse case:

Oct. 30, 2006 — The second dancer in the Duke rape case has said for the first time that the accuser told her to "go ahead, put marks on me" after the alleged attack.

Dancer Kim Roberts made the new allegation — which she has not shared with authorities — in an interview with Chris Cuomo that aired today on "Good Morning America."

...

As she drove the accuser from the March 2006 Duke lacrosse party, Roberts told ABC News the woman was clearly impaired and "talking crazy."

Roberts said she tried several different times to get the accuser out of her car.

"The trip in that car from the house … went from happy to crazy," Roberts told Cuomo. "I tried all different ways to get through to her."

"I tried to be funny and nice," she said. "Then I tried to, you know, be stern with her. … We're kind of circling around, and as we're doing that, my last-ditch attempt to get her out of the car, I start to kind of, you know, push and prod her, you know."

    Roberts said she told the woman, "Get out of my car. Get out of my car."

"I … push on her leg. I kind of push on her arm," Roberts said. "And clear as a bell, it's the only thing I heard clear as a bell out of her was, she said — she pretty much had her head down, but she said plain as day — 'Go ahead, put marks on me. That's what I want. Go ahead.'"

    Roberts said the comments "chilled me to the bone, and I decided right then and there to go to the authorities."

'Weighing on My Heart'

Roberts was not aware at the time of any rape allegations, which were first made by the accuser after police had arrived and taken the woman to a crisis center.

This case is obviously a mess.  ABC News also interviewed Linda Fairstein:

Fairstein, widely considered a pioneer in the field of sex crimes prosecution, said Roberts' allegations did not bode well for either her own credibility or for the district attorney's office.

"In terms of any prosecution, it's troubling when a witness who has been interviewed many times comes up with a completely new statement," Fairstein told ABC News.

"At some point in a prosecutorial interview, she would have been asked to give them anything she knew, any scrap of information that she had."

    Fairstein told ABC News she was shocked to learn last week that Nifong had yet to interview the accuser.

"That is just against the progress that's been made in this very specialized field," she said.

"It belies anything a prosecutor would do before making charges. There was no need to rush to the charging judgment in this case. … This whole train should have been slowed down and everybody interviewed before charging decisions. To have witnesses appear on a media program revealing information that the prosecutor doesn't know is stunningly inappropriate," she said.

KC Johnson reviews some of the many prosecution problems in this recent post.

 

 

Continue October Sleuthing

A blogger at Stop October Surprises has successfully tracked the fellow who set up the phony "Stop Sex Predators" website that first published some of the Foley emails.  (We had been skepticalof the website from the outset).

The Times and the AP have coverage.

The fellow behind Stop Sex Predators was a Democrat.

Not Loving It In New Jersey

Via Glenn we are directed to a post by Jim Chen insisting on an analogy between the recent NJ Supreme Court decision on gay marriage and the 1967 US Supreme Court decision which overturned anti-miscegenation laws, Loving v. Virginia.

I dispute this from Prof. Chen:

The most obvious analogy supporting legal recognition is Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967). It's such an obvious analogy that it is futile to cite any of the hundreds, thousands of sources that make the connection. But just because an argument is obvious does not make it wrong. In this instance, the Loving analogy is complete.

Well.  As I had noted previously, in "Loving" the Supreme Court followed, rather than led.  Let's argue from authority here:

Loving v. Virginia at Thirty
by Randall Kennedy
Thursday, February 6, 1997

Randall Kennedy is a Professor at Harvard Law School. He is also a Contributing Editor of IntellectualCapital.com.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the most aptly titled case in the history of the United States Supreme Court -- Loving v. Virginia. Loving was the name of a couple that was prosecuted for marrying.

...The way that the Supreme Court approached the ban on interracial marriage is a revealing reminder of the cautious manner that the tribunal typically deals with volatile social controversies. It encouraged other lawgivers to lead the way. In 1948 the Supreme Court of California ruled that that state's ban on interracial marriage violated the federal constitution's Equal Protection Clause. Yet, even after having invalidated de jure segregation in public schooling in Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court was afraid to touch the emotional issue of interracial familial intimacy. In 1955 the Court considered reviewing a conviction under Virginia's ban, but ultimately decided to duck the issue. During the following decade, a dozen states repealed laws prohibiting interracial marriage and the Civil Rights Movement challenged the white supremacist notions from which these prohibitions stemmed. Only near the end of that remarkable era of struggle against racism was the Supreme Court willing to rule on the (un) constitutionality of anti miscegenation laws. In Loving, the Court struck down Virginia's statute on the grounds that it represented merely an "invidious racial discrimination" and that it unjustifiably deprived the defendants of one of the "basic civil rights of man."

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Plan

The Times features Democratic disarray on Iraq back on page A10:

Democrats Are Divided on a Solution for Iraq

By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON, Oct. 26 — If the Nov. 7 election in the United States is a referendum on the Iraq war, what are the choices?

President Bush admitted Wednesday that things were not going as well as he had hoped in Iraq and that he was adjusting tactics on the ground to deal with the continuing military and political problems there. He said his overarching goal — victory — remained unchanged, but he gave no sense of what it would take to achieve it.

Democratic leaders and candidates are virtually unanimous in opposing the president’s conduct of the war, and most advocate American disengagement — either quickly or slowly. But most are not calling for an immediate withdrawal of American forces or offering a vision of what postwar Iraq should look like. They say they stand for change, but the variety of formulations is dizzying.

Nineteen House members sponsored a bill to cut off funds for the war. The Democratic Senate candidate in Pennsylvania opposes a deadline for ending American involvement in Iraq. The Democratic candidate for Senate in Ohio wants all the troops out within two years. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the current minority leader who is likely to be the next speaker of the House if Democrats win back the chamber, is calling for immediate steps to begin to remove American forces, with all of them out of Iraq by the end of 2007.

“We haven’t coalesced around a single plan,” Senator Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat who is up for re-election this year, acknowledged in an interview on Thursday. “But, we’re in general agreement on the basic principles.”

The range of proposals in part reflects the military, political and sectarian maze that Iraq has become. With virtually no one contending that an exit would be easy, no one wants to be responsible for a decision that would leave Iraq a smoldering ruin of civil war.

But the range of proposals also illustrates the state of the Democratic Party, which has not held executive power for six years or controlled the Congress for twice that long. There is no dominant figure in the party to formulate a policy position, so a hundred schools of thought contend. And even if the Democrats win one or both houses of Congress, they will not have the authority to change the course of the war significantly.

“The republic is being offered a choice between muck and murk,” said David R. Gergen, an adviser to Republican and Democratic presidents and now a professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. “Neither party is offering a clear path ahead in Iraq.”

To Be Fair - in a parliamentary system there is the "no-confidence" vote, in which the opposition party does not need to offer alternatives.

Of coure, we don't have a parliamentary system.  Whatever.  The Dems are ready to lead, they just haven't agreed on a direction.  But it will be new!

   

Alcee Hastings Watch - AP Edition

The AP picked up the story that Speaker Nancy Pelosi would not elevate Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat, to the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee; instead she would elevate Alcee Hastings or Silvestre Reyes of Texas.

The AP buries Ms. Pelosi's motivation in the twelfth paragraph; the awkward fact that Mr. Hastings was impeached and removed from his Federal judgeship appears in paragraph fourteen:

Hastings is being promoted for the Intelligence Committee chairmanship by the 42-member Congressional Black Caucus. Choosing him could help Pelosi curry favor with a caucus upset by her decision to kick another black Democrat, Louisiana Rep. William Jefferson, off a committee after the FBI characterized $90,000 found in his freezer as a bribe.

''I don't think the CBC members will look very kindly on Mr. Hastings being passed over, especially since he does have the expertise and he is next in line,'' said Myra Dandridge, the group's spokeswoman.

Hastings, however, has his own baggage: He's an impeached federal judge. Republicans have already cited that in news releases warning voters against giving Democrats control of Congress on Election Day.

Its almost like a news story.

Hillary, Growing

Watch Hillary grow on the gay marriage issue:

Absorbing Gay Pain & Praise, Clinton Says She's Evolved

In an appearance early Wednesday evening in front of roughly three-dozen LGBT leaders, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton indicated that she would not oppose efforts by Eliot Spitzer, the odds-on favorite to become the new governor, to enact a same-sex marriage law in New York.

She also suggested that language she used when she first ran for the Senate in 2000 explaining her opposition to marriage equality based on the institution's moral, religious, and traditional foundations had not reflected the "many long conversations" she's had since with "friends" and others, and that her advocacy on LGBT issues "has certainly evolved."

On Wednesday, Clinton presented her position on marriage equality as more one of pragmatism.

"I believe in full equality of benefits, nothing left out," she said. "From my perspective there is a greater likelihood of us getting to that point in civil unions or domestic partnerships and that is my very considered assessment."

Our future President is especially impressive on the power of leading by hiding:

Allen Roskoff, the president of the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club, worked to hold Clinton's feet to the fire. ...He also criticized the senator for volunteering her support for the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, even if not asked, and for not speaking during the Senate marriage amendment debate in June regardless of the work she did behind the scenes.

...Clinton went on to defend both DOMA and her decision not to speak during the marriage amendment debate this past June, and in fact linked the two. She said that without being able to point to the U.S. law which bars federal recognition of gay marriage and allows states to similarly refuse to acknowledge such unions from other states, many more members of Congress would have voted to amend the Constitution, especially when that effort had its first vote two years ago.

She explained that her choice not to speak on the Senate floor about the amendment this year was strategic.

"Very few Democrats spoke, because maybe you thought one way, which is that you want people out there speaking for us. We thought as-force the Republicans out there, make them look like they're trying to enshrine discrimination in the Constitution. We don't even want to dignify it."

Let's have a Shorter Hillary: "I wasn't going to let the Evil Republicans trick me into publicly opposing gay marriage just because I opposed gay marriage!"

You go, girl.

Jiminy - I happen to be opposed to the Federal gay marriage amendment also, but I would like to pretend that, in some Alternate Universe where I am a US Senator, I would have the confidence to say so.  Sort of like John McCain.

Having Cried "Wolf"...

The NY Times frets about the possibility of diminished black turnout in this election cycle:

For Democrats like these in tight races [in Virginia and Missouri], black voter turnout will be crucial on Election Day. But despite a generally buoyant Democratic Party nationally, there are worries among Democratic strategists in some states that blacks may not turn up at the polls in big enough numbers because of disillusionment over past shenanigans.

“This notion that elections are stolen and that elections are rigged is so common in the public sphere that we’re having to go out of our way to counter them this year,” said Donna Brazile, a Democratic strategist.

This will be the first midterm election in which the Democratic Party is mobilizing teams of lawyers and poll watchers, to check for irregularities including suppression of the black vote, in at least a dozen of the closest districts, Ms. Brazile said.

Democrats’ worries are backed up by a Pew Research Center report that found that blacks were twice as likely now than they were in 2004 to say they had little or no confidence in the voting system, rising to 29 percent from 15 percent.

And more than three times as many blacks as whites — 29 percent versus 8 percent — say they do not believe that their vote will be accurately tallied.

Voting experts say the disillusionment is the cumulative effect of election problems in 2000 and 2004, and a reaction to new identification and voter registration laws.

Last week the Times and AP had coverage of possible voting problems.  Here is the Times:

As dozens of states are enforcing new voter registration laws and switching to paperless electronic voting systems, officials across the country are bracing for an Election Day with long lines and heightened confusion, followed by an increase in the number of contested results.

In Maryland, Mississippi and Pennsylvania, a shortage of technicians has vendors for new machines soliciting applications for technical support workers on job Web sites like Monster.com. Ms. Oakley, who is also facing a shortage, raided the computer science department at the University of California, Davis, hiring 60 graduate students as troubleshooters.

Arizona, California, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania are among the states considered most likely to experience difficulties, according to voting experts who have been tracking the technology and other election changes.

Tell the base their votes wno't be counted, then wonder why they won't vote - I will never be smart enough to be a Dem strategist.

Little Details The Memory Expert Forgot

Per the WaPo, Libby's memory expert had a long day in court during a pre-trial hearing about the possible admissibility of her testimony at trial:

Fitzgerald's target in the witness box was Elizabeth F. Loftus, a professor of criminology and psychology at the University of California at Irvine. For more than an hour of the pretrial hearing, Loftus calmly explained to Judge Reggie B. Walton her three decades of expertise in human memory and witness testimony. Loftus asserted that, after copious scientific research, she has found that many potential jurors do not understand the limits of memory and that Libby should be allowed to call an expert to make that clear to them.

But when Fitzgerald got his chance to cross-examine Loftus about her findings, he had her stuttering to explain her own writings and backpedaling from her earlier assertions. Citing several of her publications, footnotes and the work of her peers, Fitzgerald got Loftus to acknowledge that the methodology she had used at times in her long academic career was not that scientific, that her conclusions about memory were conflicting, and that she had exaggerated a figure and a statement from her survey of D.C. jurors that favored the defense.

...

When Fitzgerald found a line in one of her books that raised doubts about research she had cited on the stand as proof that Libby needs an expert to educate jurors, Loftus said, "I don't know how I let that line slip by."

"I'd need to see that again," Loftus said when Fitzgerald cited a line in her book that overstated her research by saying that "most jurors" consider memory to be equivalent to playing a videotape. Her research, however, found that to be true for traumatic events, and even then, only 46 percent of potential jurors thought memory could be similar to a videotape.

There were several moments when Loftus was completely caught off guard by Fitzgerald, creating some very awkward silences in the courtroom.

One of those moments came when Loftus insisted that she had never met Fitzgerald. He then reminded her that he had cross-examined her before, when she was an expert defense witness and he was a prosecutor in the U.S. attorney's office in New York.

Well, the goal of the defense is not to convince a jury that Ms. Loftus is entirely credible, or even that she has earned her expert fee.

Since the goal of the defense is eventually to persuade the jury that even well-prepared experts can have memory lapses, it sounds like she was aces high.

Now we have to hope that Fitzgerald does not indict her for perjury - was she under oath when she failed to acknowledge their previous meeting?

Google Wars (Ongoing...)

The NY Times picks up on the effort by lefty bloggers to manipulate Google and promote negative stories about Republicans in key races across the country:

If things go as planned for liberal bloggers in the next few weeks, searching Google for “Jon Kyl,” the Republican senator from Arizona now running for re-election, will produce high among the returns a link to an April 13 article from The Phoenix New Times, an alternative weekly.

Mr. Kyl “has spent his time in Washington kowtowing to the Bush administration and the radical right,” the article suggests, “very often to the detriment of Arizonans.”

Searching Google for “Peter King,” the Republican congressman from Long Island, would bring up a link to a Newsday article headlined “King Endorses Ethnic Profiling.”

Fifty or so other Republican candidates have also been made targets in a sophisticated “Google bombing” campaign intended to game the search engine’s ranking algorithms. By flooding the Web with references to the candidates and repeatedly cross-linking to specific articles and sites on the Web, it is possible to take advantage of Google’s formula and force those articles to the top of the list of search results.

So far, so good - per this Google search, the targeted Jon Kyl story (at number six) is the first news story to appear.  However, at number seven we see a TIME profile on Jon Kyl among America's Top Ten Senators, so it is not all gloom and doom for Kyl (not yet, anyway - it's when you are profiled among "America's Top One Hundred Senators" that you have a problem public relations opportunity.)

As for Peter King, good luck to the Google-bombers - apparently Peter King is a writer for Sports Illustrated, a saxophonist, a sculptor, and a database designer, not to mention a Congressman for Long Island.

The first news story is a Scarborough Country transcript which includes King defending Karl Rove in the Plame case.  The second story is a defense of Peter King against slanted coverage from CNN, and opens as follows:

THE media is engaged in a jihad against Rep. Peter King - a jihad in defense of Islamist extremists.

I don't think that is the story the left is pushing.

MORE:  On the Chris Shays front, the first news story is some Salon piece the ad for which I do not intend to endure.  The second news story under "Chris Shays" is this WaPo piece headlined "Shays Urges Iraq Withdrawal". 

Gay Marriage And New Jersey

The NJ Supremes have re-opened the gay marriage debate; here is Times coverage, and here is a .pdf of the 90 page opinion (with a thank-you to Prof. Althouse).

Eugene Volokh is especially cogent with his slippery slope observation:

I did want to note one thing -- this decision, whether you like it or not, seems to be an illustration that the slippery slope is a real phenomenon. Even when there are conceptually quite clear distinctions that could be used to distinguish the first step A from the final step B, A may nonetheless help bring B about. Consider how the decision relies on the enactment of past gay rights laws. The backers of such laws often argue that these laws do not create a slippery slope towards same-sex marriage or civil unions. Thus, for instance, an editorial in the Boston Globe, Oct. 15, 1989, at A30, said "[A proposed antidiscrimination law barring sexual orientation discrimination in credit, employment, insurance, public accommodation and housing] does not legalize 'gay marriage' or confer any right on homosexual, lesbian or unmarried heterosexual couples to 'domestic benefits.' Nor does passage of the bill put Massachusetts on a 'slippery slope' toward such rights."

...

Yet the New Jersey Supreme Court's equal protection argument begins by citing such non-same-sex-marriage, non-civil-union gay rights laws (citations omitted):

In addressing plaintiffs’ claimed interest in equality of treatment, we begin with a retrospective look at the evolving expansion of rights to gays and lesbians in this State. Today, in New Jersey, it is just as unlawful to discriminate against individuals on the basis of sexual orientation as it is to discriminate against them on the basis of race, national origin, age, or sex. Over the last three decades, through judicial decisions and comprehensive legislative enactments, this State, step by step, has protected gay and lesbian individuals from discrimination on account of their sexual orientation.

Just off hand, I would note that slippery slope arguments are frequently offered by both sides in the gun control and abortion debates.

Meanwhile, back on gay marriage, Scott Lemieux of TAPPED is the opposite of cogent:

THE MAJORITARIAN DIFFICULTY.   Glenn Greenwald makes a very important point about yesterday's judicial decision in New Jersey:

The decision today is entirely consistent with the democratic will of New Jersey residents. The New Jersey legislature already enacted a domestic partnership bill two years ago which recognizes, and grants a whole array of marital rights to, same-sex couples. But the way the laws were written, some rights were still assigned only to "married" couples. The court decision today simply requires that those same-sex partnerships have all of the rights which are given to married couples. But New Jersey voters, through their representatives, already approved of recognition of same-sex relationships two years ago.

Huh?  Let me try for a Slightly Shorter Greenwald: Two years ago the NJ State Legislature approved gay domestic partnerships with many but not all of the rights of hetero marriage, thereby demonstrating majority support for recognition of gay domestic partnerships with all of the rights of hetero marriage.  Sure, that makes sense.

It may well be the case that a majority of the good people of the great state of New Jersey support civil unions with rights equal to hetero marriage, but that recent legislation is not supporting evidence.

Mr. Lemieux shoots and misses again:

Whether the decision is right or wrong, it cannot be wrong because it's inconsistent with majority opinion in the state. 

Groan.  My personal opinion is that gay marriage or civil unions is fine if enacted by the state legislature but wrong if crammed down by judicial fiat.  How would pollsters, or Mr. Lemieux, score that?  Surely I am not alone in believing that process counts.

Mr. Lemieux links to this problematic poll from which I will accept this conclusion:

Regardless of the question order, about 65 percent of respondents supported civil unions, and 30 percent opposed them.

The Devil Made Them Do It

Hugo Chavez may have talked Venezuela out of a Security Council seat with his "Bush is the devil" speech at the United Nations:

Developing nations make up a vast majority of the 192 countries in the General Assembly and generally warm to rants against Washington. But they also value the United Nations as a place where their voices can be heard in a dignified setting, and both supporters and detractors here say Mr. Chávez may have miscalculated in turning it into his bully pulpit.

Delegates said they also feared that the performance demonstrated the kind of behavior Venezuela might bring to the orderly confines of the Council chamber.

Poignant quote du jour:

“The speech really hurt his case,” said Enrique Berruga, the ambassador of Mexico. “Most members don’t want this place to be turned into a mockery."

Too late!

The Alcee Hastings Watch

Mickey Kaus speculates on the upcoming Big Media coverage of the election:

ll-Hands-On-Deck MSM Drive for Victory! ABC's The Note has a thorough and knowing outline of "How the (liberal) Old Media plans to cover the last two weeks of the election" to try to ensure the GOPs do not regain any initiative. ...All ABC's Halperin & Co. left out, as far as I can see, is Point #13: Bury the news about the Secure Fence Act (if Bush doesn't bury it first!), Point #14: Do not mention the name "Alcee Hastings," and #15: 'Keep Foley Alive!' (though that may no longer be possible, even on NPR). ... 2:58 P.M.

The NY Times is somewhat on board with that, but there is a subtle problem - Jane Harman, the ranking Dem on the House Intelligence Committee who is marked for replacement by Nancy Pelosi, has been in the news herself for being too friendly with AIPAC.  Awkward!  The Times has plenty of readers who take an interest in Israel so it is tough to duck this. 

On the other hand, Alcee Hastings is the candidate of choice of the Congressional Black Caucus, and from time to time it has been clear that there is a bit of tension between blacks and Jews within the Democratic Party; with that in mind, the Times does not want to report on trouble in paradise two weeks before the ascension of Speaker Pelosi.

The result is some of the more passive "reporting" we are likely to see - here is the Times presenting All The News That Fits Their Storyline:

For a Top Democrat, Further Climb Seems Out

By MARK MAZZETTI

Representative Jane Harman has gained national prominence as the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, but even her supporters now concede that she is unlikely to become chairman if her party wins control of the House.

Standing in her way is another California lawmaker, Representative Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats’ speaker-in-waiting, who would have the power to pick the leader of each committee. The relationship between the two has soured in recent years over political rivalries and policy disputes, and Congressional officials on both sides of the divide say Ms. Pelosi would most likely look elsewhere to fill the Intelligence Committee’s top job.

“To say it is unlikely she will get the job is accurate,” said one Democratic Congressional official with knowledge of the party’s post-election plans.

...Ms. Harman, a moderate from Southern California, has been one of the party’s most outspoken voices on national security matters since the Sept. 11 attacks. But she has also drawn sharp criticism from more liberal Democrats, including Ms. Pelosi, who have privately said that she has not sufficiently used her position to attack the Bush administration for its prewar intelligence failures on Iraq and for its use of secret programs like the domestic eavesdropping carried out without warrants by the National Security Agency.

Fine, Ms. Harman is not enough of a Bush-basher, and what Dem could object?  That said, neither Ms. Pelosi nor the Times may want to advertise that moderate Dems are getting Lieberated from their posts.

Here comes the all-holds-barred Hastings coverage:

Two candidates whom Ms. Pelosi is said to be considering for Intelligence Committee chairman are Representatives Alcee L. Hastings of Florida and Silvestre Reyes of Texas, both of whom currently serve on the panel.

The selection of Mr. Hastings, who is black, would help Ms. Pelosi shore up support from the powerful Congressional Black Caucus. But he has a checkered past, having been impeached and removed from a federal judgeship in 1989 on a bribery charge. Some Democrats fear that installing him in so sensitive a position would only invite Republican charges of weak Democratic leadership on national security matters.

The Times was apparently unable or unwilling to get any comment from Nancy Pelosi's office on this - even a simple "Ms. Pelosi was not available for comment" would have provided an extra chuckle.

And why is the support of the Congressional Black Caucus so important to Ms. Pelosi just now?  The Wash Times reported that she may lack the votes to become Speaker - would the Times care to address that?  Please.

Finally, there is the 'Friend of AIPAC' angle:

Ms. Harman’s efforts to claim the post have even attracted the attention of investigators. Federal officials said Monday that she was the focus of a year-old F.B.I. inquiry related to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac, a powerful pro-Israel lobbying group. The officials, confirming a Time magazine report, said the bureau had been looking into whether she had made improper promises to the group in exchange for its efforts to lobby Ms. Pelosi on her behalf.

But the officials also said that the accusations had not been proved and that although the inquiry remained open, it was no longer being actively pursued.

“Congresswoman Harman does not know what this is all about,” said her lawyer, Theodore B. Olson. “She has no information from the government that she is under an investigation of any sort, and the idea that she should be investigated for being a supporter of Aipac is frightening.”

TIME had more details and drama, but the underlying case appeared to be ridiculous.  However - is Alcee Hastings also a friend of Israel?  Inquiring minds want to know (but not at the Times).  I have read that he is, but surely the Times' readers would like to see that pinned down.

Google Wars - The Next Battlefield

Chris Bowers at the prominent lefty blog MyDD describes an ingenious (yet morally bankrupt) idea that may push a few votes into the Blue:

I have tentatively named [this project] Google Bombing The Election.

What
The utilization of Google Adwords and simultaneous, widespread embedded hyperlinks in order to drive as many voters as possible toward the most damning, non-partisan article written on the Republican candidate in seventy key US Senate and House races. The campaign will run from Tuesday, October 24th until Tuesday, November 7th.

Why
According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the number one way that voters use the Internet for political action is to search for information on candidates. During the final two weeks of the election, it is reasonable to expect that as many as twenty million voters will be searching for information on candidates online. During this key time, this project will help push the most negative article written by a non-partisan media source on all key Republican candidates to the forefront of any search for that candidate. The negative article will appear both high on all Google searches for the candidates, and as an advertisement that appears whenever anyone searches for that candidate. By giving this article two prominent locations on Google searches for the candidate, and because it will come from a non-partisan source, it will increase the likelihood that the article will be seen and trusted by those searching for information on the candidate.

Well, it ought to work - I have no doubt that a group of lefty blogs collectively have a lot more Google-clout than any individual Congressman's web page.

Are earnest righties interested in pushing back?  I will volunteer to help push a few stories for Chris Shays, in my district, although I will be happy to link to anyone else looking for a little (very little) Google-love.

Comments and trackbacks open as usual.

Mid "Stay The Course" Correction

The media mavens at the White House have decided that, to quote White House Counselor Dan Bartlett, "it’s never been a stay-the-course strategy" in Iraq.  Really?

Actually, this is a rhetorical shift meant to emphaisize the ongoing fluidity and adaptability of our strategy and tactics in Iraq.  We aren't simply going to stay the course - we are going to play the course, using every club in the bag!  Here is a longer excerpt:

BARTLETT: Well, Hannah, it’s never been a stay-the-course strategy. Strategically, we think it’s very important that we stay in Iraq and we win in Iraq. And if we were to cut and run and go and leave that country too early it would be a disaster for American policy.

But what we aren’t doing is sitting there with our heads in the sand. We’ve completely changing and making tactical changes on a week-by-week basis as we respond to the enemy’s reactions to our strategies.

Oh, brother.  Put another way, the Administration isn't simply going to keep beating their heads against a wall; they will look around for new walls against which to beat their heads.  And if any trees or rocks appear to be suitable for head-beating, they may also be pressed into service.  As part of our ongoing yet newly-announced flexibility, obviously.

With any luck, this rhetorical shift will be ignored rather than mocked and derided.  But somehow, I'm not feeling lucky.

Times Public Editor - SWIFT Disclosure Was Wrong

Byron Calame, NY Times Public Editor, has changed his mind and now believes that the disclosure of the SWIFT international funds transfer program by the NY Times was a mistake.  So why did he defend it a few months ago?  Well, that was Bush's fault - the critics were so nasty that Calame reflexively defended the Times.

This is all buried as an afterthought to his Sunday column provocatively headlined - "Can ‘Magazines’ of The Times Subsidize News Coverage?".  Some excerpts:

Banking Data: A Mea Culpa

Since the job of public editor requires me to probe and question the published work and wisdom of Times journalists, there’s a special responsibility for me to acknowledge my own flawed assessments.

My July 2 column strongly supported The Times’s decision to publish its June 23 article on a once-secret banking-data surveillance program. After pondering for several months, I have decided I was off base. There were reasons to publish the controversial article, but they were slightly outweighed by two factors to which I gave too little emphasis. While it’s a close call now, as it was then, I don’t think the article should have been published.

Those two factors are really what bring me to this corrective commentary: the apparent legality of the program in the United States, and the absence of any evidence that anyone’s private data had actually been misused. I had mentioned both as being part of “the most substantial argument against running the story,” but that reference was relegated to the bottom of my column.

...

I haven’t found any evidence in the intervening months that the surveillance program was illegal under United States laws. Although data-protection authorities in Europe have complained that the formerly secret program violated their rules on privacy, there have been no Times reports of legal action being taken. Data-protection rules are often stricter in Europe than in America, and have been a frequent source of friction.

Also, there still haven’t been any abuses of private data linked to the program, which apparently has continued to function. That, plus the legality issue, has left me wondering what harm actually was avoided when The Times and two other newspapers disclosed the program. The lack of appropriate oversight — to catch any abuses in the absence of media attention — was a key reason I originally supported publication. I think, however, that I gave it too much weight.

In addition, I became embarrassed by the how-secret-is-it issue, although that isn’t a cause of my altered conclusion. My original support for the article rested heavily on the fact that so many people already knew about the program that serious terrorists also must have been aware of it. But critical, and clever, readers were quick to point to a contradiction: the Times article and headline had both emphasized that a “secret” program was being exposed.

...What kept me from seeing these matters more clearly earlier in what admittedly was a close call? I fear I allowed the vicious criticism of The Times by the Bush administration to trigger my instinctive affinity for the underdog and enduring faith in a free press — two traits that I warned readers about in my first column.

Toothpaste, meet tube.

For background, here is the original story and my first post on it.  My theme was that publicizing this program would force European banking executives to end their cooperation with the program (although there have been grumblings from Europe, I don't believe that has happened as yet.)

Here are my thoughts on Calame's first column supporting the Times coverage; here is a post explaining the benefits of keeping secrets - let me reprise this Times reporting:

But Mr. Wechsler said the disclosure might nonetheless hamper intelligence collection by making financial institutions resistant to requests for access to records.

"I wouldn't be surprised if these recent articles have made it more difficult to get cooperation from our friends in Europe, since it may make their cooperation with the U.S. less politically palatable," Mr. Wechsler said.

Though privacy advocates have denounced the examination of banking transactions, the Swift consortium has defended its cooperation with the counterterrorism program and has not indicated any intention to stop cooperating with the broad administrative subpoenas issued to obtain its data.

Bah.  Well, I suppose we should acknowledge Mr. Calame's grace in admitting his error, and before the election to boot.  And keep in mind, the decsion to publish was not his to make.

That said, this flip-flop will annoy folks on the other side of this debate without mollifying cranks such as me.  I would guess that Mr. Calame's lonely job just got a little lonelier.

P.S.  There continues to be zero probability of the Times addressing their other comical Swift coverage.  Ms. Zernike's "hail of fire" stands uncorrected and unsupported.

I SHOULD'A SAID IT (So I'll steal it): "Calame's calumny".  Sara has commentary and lots of links.

But There Are No Witches!

Andrew Sullivan speaks out on the left's crusade to out gay Republicans and makes good points while irking Eugene Volokh (I have no doubt) with this:

The outing crusade gains momentum. Look: I loathe the closet. I despise the hypocrisy in the Republican party. But a witch-hunt is a witch-hunt. If the gay left thinks it will advance gay dignity by using tactics that depend on homophobia to work, that violate privacy, that demonizes gay people, then all I can say is: they are wrong. They will regret it. It will come back to haunt them. And they should cut it out.

Prof. Volokh was adamant:

I've long been quite troubled by the casual use of the term "witch-hunt." First, the most obvious thing that's wrong with witch-hunts is that there are no witches.

Well, it's just an expression.  And I hope it's obvious that I endorse Sully's position here, since I was anti-outing a few weeks back when David Corn had his list.

Maybe we can call this the October non-surprise - the energized intolerant left is on display.  Yike.

Takin' It To The Streets

Sister Toldjah is good on the assertion by the wife of producer Norman Lear that

If for whatever reason we don’t win back Congress in November the only real answer will be to take to the streets.

However, the Blue Crabs are funnier.

I can only contribute this - if you take it to the streets this November, walk carefully.

Happy October! (Surprised Yet?)

My goodness - yesterday the Republican Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee suspended a Dem staffer for having requested a look at the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq a few days before it was leaked.  Of course, the report had been widely circulated and the Times claimed many sources, but that doesn't mean this staffer (Larry Hanauer) was *not* a source.  Accusation first, evidence (if any) to follow.

As a second surprise, a book is now out claiming that a once-secret Soviet memo from 1983 documented an attempt by Sen. Ted Kennedy to enlist the head if the USSR in an anti-Reagan public relations effort.  Whoa!  Who are these people that claim to be our leaders and hope to regain the Senate majority?  (Well, at least no one drowned when that memo was written...)

And TIME is reporting more comedy from the "Democratic House Intelligence" side - the ranking Dem, Jane Harman, may be under investigation for engaging in politics.  No, seriously:

Did a Democratic member of Congress improperly enlist the support of a major pro-Israel lobbying group to try to win a top committee assignment? That's the question at the heart of an ongoing investigation by the FBI and Justice Department prosecutors, who are examining whether Rep. Jane Harman of California and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) may have violated the law in a scheme to get Harman reappointed as the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, according to knowledgeable sources in and out of the U.S. government.

The sources tell TIME that the investigation by Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has simmered out of sight since about the middle of last year, is examining whether Harman and AIPAC arranged for wealthy supporters to lobby House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi on Harman's behalf. Harman said Thursday in a voicemail message that any investigation of — or allegation of improper conduct by — her would be "irresponsible, laughable and scurrilous." On Friday, Washington GOP super lawyer Ted Olson left voicemail messages underscoring that Harman has no knowledge of any investigation. "Congresswoman Harman has asked me to follow up on calls you've had," Olson said. "She is not aware of any such investigation, does not believe that it is occurring, and wanted to make sure that you and your editors knew that as far as she knows, that's not true... . No one from the Justice Department has contacted her." It is not, however, a given that Harman would know that she is under investigation. In a follow-up phone call from California, Olson said Harman hired him this morning because she takes seriously the possibility of a media report about an investigation of her, even though she does not believe it herself.

The criminal is always the last to know!  The investigation centers around Harman's effort to save her seniority and derail the appointment of Alcee Hastings as Chairman as part of a Nancy Pelosi deal:

Around mid-2005, the [AIPAC-Larry Franklin] investigation expanded to cover aspects of Harman's quiet but aggressive campaign to persuade House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to reappoint her to the prestigious position on the House intel panel. The alleged campaign to support Harman for the leadership post came amid media reports that Pelosi had soured on her California colleague and might name Rep. Alcee Hastings of Florida, himself a major supporter of Israel, to succeed Harman.

The sources say the probe also involves whether, in exchange for the help from AIPAC, Harman agreed to help try to persuade the Administration to go lighter on the AIPAC officials caught up in the ongoing investigation. If that happened, it might be construed as an illegal quid pro quo, depending on the context of the situation. But the sources caution that there has been no decision to charge anyone and that it is unclear whether Harman and AIPAC acted on the idea.

Unless a lot more comes out, I have no doubt that on Nov 8 I will deplore this leak of an ongoing non-investigation.  But right now, this is not scoring that high on my Wilson-Fitzgerald Meter.

Democratic House Intelligence - The New Oxymoron

A Democratic staffer has had his access to classified info restricted while an investigation unfolds into whether he was a source of the leak of parts of a National Intelligence Estimate to the NY Times last September.

From the Times itself:

The Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Peter Hoekstra, has banned a Democratic staff member from access to classified information because he suspects the staff member may have leaked a national intelligence estimate to The New York Times last month, a committee spokesman said Thursday night.

The spokesman, Jamal D. Ware, said the staff member had requested a copy of the intelligence estimate, on terrorism, from the office of the director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte.

He received the document on Sept. 21, two days before the Sept. 23 article in The Times.

Mr. Ware said that while there was no evidence that the staff member had leaked the document, the “coincidence” of timing led to the suspension.

He said that while an internal investigation was conducted the staff member, whom he declined to name, was not permitted to enter the committee’s secure space or review classified documents.

Democrats on the committe are outraged, as well they might be:

Democrats say the Republican head of the House Intelligence Committee had no grounds to suspend a staff member who's come under scrutiny for the leak of a secret intelligence assessment.

...The Intelligence Committee's top Democrat, Jane Harman of California, wrote to Hoekstra that she was "appalled" by his action, which was "without basis." She has demanded that Hoekstra "immediately reinstate the staffer's access to classified information."

Yeah, yeah, Jane Harman - she is the ranking Democrat now, but it has been reported that Nancy Pelosi, en route to her own position a while back, cut a deal with the Congressional Black Caucus to move Alcee Hastings up to the Chairmanship.  And why not?  It's only national security we are talking about.  Michael Barone is cogent on Ms. Harman's problems (and did you know she was a self-financing Dem because of her hubby?  I hear that now.)

Of course, Pelosi may not have the votes to pull this off, if we can believe the Wash Times.  Dems in but Pelosi out?  That would brighten a grim November.

MORE:  Here is what ought to be a permalink into the NY Times archive for the original article.  The sourcing is mentioned as follows:

More than a dozen United States government officials and outside experts were interviewed for this article, and all spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a classified intelligence document. The officials included employees of several government agencies, and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration. All of those interviewed had either seen the final version of the document or participated in the creation of earlier drafts. These officials discussed some of the document’s general conclusions but not details, which remain highly classified.

The Times makes the same point in their follow-up, which identifies the staffer as Larry Hanauer and tells us this:

Mr. Hanauer, who joined the committee staff last year after working for the Defense Department and the Booz Allen Hamilton, the consulting firm, remains on the panel payroll and retains his security clearance.

We knew all that, and more.

STILL MORE:  TIME reports that Jane Harman is being investigated for engaging in politics while trying to save her seniority. 

Winner Takes Most - Is There A Structural Republican Advantage?

Bob Somerby has continued to pursue an absurd point offered by Paul Krugman and debunked by Kevin Drum.  Here is Krugman's exposition of the situation:

The key point is that African-Americans, who overwhelmingly vote Democratic, are highly concentrated in a few districts. This means that in close elections many Democratic votes are, as political analysts say, wasted — they simply add to huge majorities in a small number of districts, while the more widely spread Republican vote allows the G.O.P. to win by narrower margins in a larger number of districts.

My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that because of this ''geographic gerrymander,'' even a substantial turnaround in total Congressional votes — say, from the three-percentage-point Republican lead in 2004 to a five-point Democratic lead this year — would leave the House narrowly in Republican hands. It looks as if the Democrats need as much as a seven-point lead in the overall vote to take control.

Kevin Drum ground through the Congressional results from 1992 on and concluded that the Democratic share of the two party vote in House races tracks reasonably well with their actual share of  House seats.  For example, in 2004 the Dems got 48.6% of the total votes for House member and ended up with 46.6% of the seats - hardly the seven percent disadvantage touted by Krugman.

But Bob reopens the discussion by linking to an Eric Alterman post which includes this analysis:

[Bush] actually won 255 districts in 2004, or almost 59 percent, while winning around 51 percent of the vote (slightly higher if the calculation excludes Ralph Nader's 1 percent). In other words, House districts are now drawn so that an evenly divided country can produce surprisingly lopsided GOP victories.

Well, 59% versus 51% is 8%, so that settles it, right?  Republicans have an 8% structural advantage!  Left unanswered - how does Bush find time to serve as the Congressman for 255 districts, especially since only 232 districts were won by Republicans in 2004?

Look, not to seem pedestrian and unimaginative, but the Democrats are trying to win individual House races with different candidates in each race.  Is there any reason at all to think that one data point reflecting the Presidential result from 2004 is a more useful predictor of a structural disadvantage than the actual Democratic results from House races in 2004, or from other years past?

But I have an idea - let's see how the Dem "disadvantage" played out in other years, based on this odd notion that ticket splitting does not happen and that the Presidential vote somehow reflects the appeal of individual Congressional candidates.

In 1992, Bill Clinton received 42.9 percent of the popular vote to 37.1 percent for George Bush (most of the balance went to Ross Perot).  On a two-party basis, Clinton won 53.6 percent of the vote.  And, per this Rhodes Cook report, Clinton won 58.9 percent of the nation's Congressional districts.  No structural disadvantage there.

Lets try for a table:

                Popular Vote                   Congressional Districts
         Dem    Rep     Pct (Dem)   Dem    Rep    Pct (Dem)  Dem Gap
1992   42.9   37.1     53.6          256     179      58.9        +5.3
1996   49.2   40.7     54.7          280     155      64.4         +9.7
2000   48.4   47.9     50.3          207     228      47.6         -2.7
2004   48.3   50.7     48.8          180     255      41.4         -7.4

If memory serves, Democrats did not sweep 280 House seats when Clinton beat Dole in 1996.  My impression is that this "analysis" offered by Alterman reflects the amplification caused by sub-dividing the vote into "winner take all" by Congressional district and is hopelessly muddled by the reality of ticket-splitting

In any case, the notion that the Democrats need to collect 57% of the popular vote in order to carry 50% of the House is not supported by this data.  The 2000 result might suggest that the Dems face roughly a 2.7% gap.  However, the 1992 and 1996 years certainly suggest that if the Dems can get to 55% they will carry the House easily.  I can't imagine what Krugman has on the back of his envelope but these numbers don't back it.

Let's toss in another bit of data - the premise of the problem as presented by Krugman is that Democratic votes are "wasted" in Democratic strongholds.  Well, fine, but there are Republican strongholds as well - let's check the helpful NY Times Election Guide, which tells us that  in 2004, the Dems had 58 seats which they carried by more than 50% and another 97 seats carried by 25%-50%.  That is a total of 155 seats that the Dems carried by more than 25%, which presumably represents a lot of wasted votes.

And for the Republicans?  35 seats with a 50% margin, another 118 seats with a 25%-50% margin, and a total of 153 "wasted vote" seats.

According to Kevin, "The number of majority-minority districts increased from 27 to 56 after the 1990 round of redistricting"; these 56 seats are the source of Krugman's concern.  Well, at a minimum I would argue that the net number of problem seats is 58 less 35, or 23 - that would be the Democratic surplus of super-safe 50% margin seats.  In a feistier mood I would pound the table and insist that a 25% margin represents a pretty solid seat, in which case the structural advantage of either party is roughly nil.

I am going to append a couple of other academic papers which come to a similar conclusion.  As much as I welcome the defeatist whining from Krugman, the evidence is against him here.

MORE:  Speaking of defeatist whining, we are getting very close to Billy Wagner time in this Mets game.  It is merely the NLCS seventh game, so no worries.  Ahhhh!  (Every time I see Wagner I am reminded of how great Mariano is.)

Self-Awareness Check

The NY Sun has an article about the cell-phone security of jihadists which includes this tidbit:

An English translation obtained by The New York Sun and whose authenticity was confirmed by a senior intelligence official gives an insight into what America's Islamist enemies believe they know about the CIA and the National Security Agency. It also underscores the paranoid mind at the heart of the international jihad movement, devoting paragraphs to how South Korean intelligence influences America's national security through a newspaper controlled by the Unification Church, the Washington Times.

Rev. Moon and the Moonie Times influencing American policy?  Do tell.

[That link is to "Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Buying the Right" by Robert Parry, who I presume is not a jihadist.  More non-jihadist speculation anout Moon's influence here.]

The New 'Tet'

ABC News reports that "Bush Accepts Iraq-Vietnam Comparison".  OMG - it's a quagmire!

Groan.  Here is what Bush actually said:

Stephanopoulos asked whether the president agreed with the opinion of columnist Tom Friedman, who wrote in The New York Times today that the situation in Iraq may be equivalent to the Tet offensive in Vietnam almost 40 years ago.

"He could be right," the president said, before adding, "There's certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we're heading into an election."

"George, my gut tells me that they have all along been trying to inflict enough damage that we'd leave," Bush said. "And the leaders of al Qaeda have made that very clear. Look, here's how I view it. First of all, al Qaeda is still very active in Iraq. They are dangerous. They are lethal. They are trying to not only kill American troops, but they're trying to foment sectarian violence. They believe that if they can create enough chaos, the American people will grow sick and tired of the Iraqi effort and will cause government to withdraw."

Million Man March

Anne Applebaum of the WaPo declares North Korea to be China's problem and gives me an excuse to dust off one of my wilder more imaginative ideas from three and a half years ago.  Ms. Applebaum first:

...the problem of a nuclear North Korea is not actually insoluble, provided a certain very large superpower wants to solve it. There is one significant country, after all, that has the military, economic and political power not only to pressure North Korea to discard its bomb but also to topple its regime altogether.

That very large superpower is, of course, China. Despite its recent expressions of shock and horror -- the Chinese government claimed last week to be "totally opposed" to the North Korean bomb -- China still has more ways to influence North Korea than any other member of the U.N. Security Council. For that matter, China has more ways to influence North Korea than all of the members of the Security Council (and indeed the General Assembly) put together. Should China's leaders want to see the North Korean regime fall, they don't need to play around with sanctions or blockades. They could just cut off energy supplies to Pyongyang. Or food deliveries to Pyongyang. Or end all trade with Pyongyang.

Or, to make things even quicker and simpler, China could employ the same tactic that once upon a time led to the collapse of East Germany: Instead of closing the 800-mile Chinese-North Korean border to goods, the Chinese could open it, to people. According to U.S. government estimates , 10,000 to 30,000 North Korean refugees have slipped across the border in recent years and live illegally in China. According to some independent estimates , that number is closer to 300,000. Whatever the correct figure, it's clear that a lot more would join them if the Chinese weren't so vigilant about catching North Korean refugees and sending them back across the border to face torture and prison. Just this past week, while no one was paying much attention, China increased that vigilance, adding new barbed-wire fences and even deporting some residents from the border region. One Chinese official apparently told a Hong Kong newspaper that the regime is girding itself to repulse a possible influx of 500,000 refugees. Were such a number really to flee, it could provoke the collapse of Kim Jong Il's regime.

Well then, Ms. Applebaum has opened the bidding at half a million - my original idea, also revisited here, was that the US should offer a million green cards to North Korean refugees (presumably in coordination with China and South Korea).  Obviously there would be huge logistical and financial issues, but the net benefit of cratering the Kim Jung-Il regime peacefully would also be enormous.

In a related story the NY Times finds that the NoKo border has become a bit more porous following North Korea's shift to a more market-oriented (and bribe-oriented) economy. 

John Henry Was A Man...

John Henry, the steel-drivin' man, may very well have been a Jersey guy - sort of a Max Sawicky of the 1870's:

In the American mythic pantheon, John Henry stands right at the top, alongside Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill. Virtually every schoolchild knows the tale, transmitted through song, story or animated cartoon, about the doomed railroad worker who bests a mechanical drill only to die at the moment of victory.

In “Steel Drivin’ Man,” Scott Reynolds Nelson argues that the John Henry story was no tall tale, and Henry himself no myth. Historians have long speculated that the John Henry ballads, which began circulating in the 1870’s, referred to a real railroad worker, but Mr. Nelson, with extensive documentation in hand, proposes a candidate. His John Henry is a former Union soldier, imprisoned for theft while on a work assignment in Richmond, Va., and leased out with other inmates to blast tunnels through the Allegheny Mountains for the new Chesapeake & Ohio Railway.

Do the facts add up? Maybe. Mr. Nelson, an associate professor of history at the College of William and Mary, stumbled on his evidence while writing “Iron Confederacies,” a study of Southern railroads during Reconstruction. In the early 1870’s, he found, large numbers of convicts from the Virginia State Penitentiary died while working on the C&O Railway. Recalling a version of the John Henry ballad with the lines, “They took John Henry to the white house, and buried him in the san’,” he made a connection: the main building of the penitentiary was white. Nearby, in 1992, workers demolishing the prison had dug up about 300 skeletons. Mr. Nelson ransacked state archives and came up with the name of a prisoner: John William Henry.

The historical record is sketchy, but most of the verifiable facts about Mr. Nelson’s John Henry make him plausible as the real steel-driving man. First, of course, is the name. In addition, Henry worked on the team assigned to drill the Lewis Tunnel in West Virginia, where steam drills were put to the test against workers with hammers. By 1874 he has disappeared from prison records, with no mention of pardon, parole or release, strongly suggesting that he died while working on the railroads and not inside the prison, where his death would have been recorded.

So who was John Henry? Mr. Nelson can do no more than offer a tantalizingly incomplete biography. He was from New Jersey and, in some capacity, worked for the Union Army at City Point, a landing near Petersburg, Va., in 1866, when he was 18. In April of that year he was arrested for stealing from a grocery store and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was sent to the Virginia State Penitentiary, where the warden, desperate to raise revenue, had begun leasing prisoners to the railroad for 25 cents a day. John Henry was one.

...How John Henry, a small man even for the time, became the muscled superman of legend remains mysterious. After carefully laying out the historical record and recreating, in the book’s most absorbing chapters, the world of the railroad workers, Mr. Nelson simply takes his leave of John William Henry, without comment. The rest of the book recounts the history of the John Henry ballads, and their hero’s transformation from man to myth. Mr. Nelson tells this part of the story mechanically, and often repetitively, with annoying first-person digressions.

That must have been quite an exciting find for the historian. 

Here are a couple of links to the legend.

Shake This!

Via Glenn I see that both the always astute Ann Althouse and the NY Times were intrigued by Bush's use of hand sanitizer.  This is from the Times:

Reporters and politicians continually use the word authenticity to describe Mr. Obama, pointing to his ability to come across to voters as a regular person, not a prepackaged pol. And in these pages he often speaks to the reader as if he were an old friend from back in the day, salting policy recommendations with colorful asides about the absurdities of political life.

He recalls a meet-and-greet encounter at the White House with George W. Bush, who warmly shook his hand, then “turned to an aide nearby, who squirted a big dollop of hand sanitizer in the president’s hand.” (“Good stuff,” he quotes the president as saying, as he offered his guest some. “Keeps you from getting colds.”) And he recounts a trip he took through Illinois with an aide, who scolded him for asking for Dijon mustard at a T.G.I. Friday’s, worried the senator would come across as an elitist; the confused waitress, he adds, simply said: “We got Dijon if you want it.”

I am not sure from that extended excerpt just where either the Times or Mr. Obama thought they were headed - is that Bush-bashing, or just "Ain't life peculiar"?  Ms. Althouse excerpted only the bolded portion, which some people did take as Bush-bashing.

Well.  Bush's predilection for Purell has been well documented.  However, Mr. Obama has also caught the bug, ar at least, had advice for Stephen Colbert on how to avoid that:

  Celebrity Illinois junior senator, Barack who,  the man of moi, tells famous comic that Colbert troublemaker, to use hand sanitizer after shaking hands with Knox College students! How rude!!!!!!  

I had to read to the end to realize the letter from Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) to comic Stephen Colbert was self-mocking schtick.

The full letter to Colbert very well done and is excerpted after the break.

MORE:  We don't know the meaning of the word "overkill" - Wild Bill Clinton used hand wipes.  After shaking hands, of course.

Captain Ed On Harry REIT

The Captain fires away at the Senate Minority Leader's latest disclosures about real estate shenanigans and prepares to board.

MORE:  NO, I meant "Harry REIT"

Far From Over! (The Re-energized Report)

The straws in the wind today favor the continuation of Republican hegemony and oppression sensible governance:

1.  Arianna Huffington is writing Ned Lamont's concession speech - it is not fair to say the darling of the left is out of ideas - let's say that he never actually had any idea other than to run as a mainstream, bowl-of-oatmeal anti-war Democrat, which certainly seemed like a plausible approach in Blue Connecticut.  [More on Ned's woes from the WaPo.]

2.  Matt Yglesias (probably not temperamentally a glass-half-full guy anyway), is fretting about the Republican cash advantage.

3.  Dick Cheney is feeling the love. (I have a feeling he's not in Washington anymore...)

4.  As Mickey Kaus noted, the Faster Failure Philosophy tells us that the 24/7 media slice. dice and digest one scandal and move on the next more quickly than ever.  Iraq?  Last week! (see Ned Lamont).  mark Foley and Dennis Hastert?  Sooo five minute ago!  The media must be fed and write now they are pawing at Senate Minority Leader Harry REIT.  By the end of October every thumbsucking pundit worth his salt will be pondering the possibilities of Speaker Pelosi - Happy Halloween!

Far from over.

The De-energized Report

Fred Barnes warns righties to brace themselves for electoral disaster:

REPUBLICANS and conservatives, brace yourselves! Strategists and consultants of both parties now believe the House is lost and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi will become speaker. At best, Republicans will cling to control of the Senate by a single seat, two at most.

Why?  Blame Bush, blame Iraq, blame a lack of enthusiasm:

Presidential approval correlates with how the president's party fares in midterm elections. It's simple: High approval is linked to election success, low approval to defeat. In October 2002, with Bush's approval at 62 percent in the Gallup Poll, Republicans won six seats in the House and two in the Senate. Now Bush is at 37 percent in Gallup. The inescapable conclusion is that Bush lacks the clout with the public he had four years ago.  To make matters worse, presidents associated with unpopular wars are historically a drag on their parties (Truman, LBJ).

And here is the bit to which I can personally attest:

The most overlooked election indicator is the level of voter enthusiasm. In every election from 1994 through 2004, Republicans were more enthusiastic than Democrats. That was a decade of Republican growth. This year Democrats are more excited. And it's measurable. In 2002, 42 percent of Republicans said they were more enthusiastic than usual about the election. Thirty-eight percent of Democrats said the same. In 2006, the numbers have flipped. Republican enthusiasm has dipped to 39 percent and Democratic enthusiasm has jumped to 48 percent. Enthusiasm affects turnout. Gloomy voters are less inclined to vote.

Oh, I'll trudge to the polls and vote, all right.  But don't anyone dare send me a fundraising appeal.

Glenn has a useful accounting of what went wrong; I'll just pick out the issues, but read his analysis:

1.  The Terri Schiavo affair; 2.  The Harriet Miers debacle; 3. The Dubai Ports disaster; 4.  Immigration; 5.  William Jefferson; 6.  Foleygate: 

To which I would add the Social Security debacle and of course, the ongoing debacle in Iraq.

Yes, there were some bright moments - I liked the Roberts and Alito nominations and do hope we can keep the Senate to go for a trifecta.

Otherwise, although I could spend the afternoon (and early evening, and late evening) making the case against the Democrats, I am a bit fed up with being a lesser of two evils voter.

All that said, the latest NY Times Election Guide breaks down the House races as follows:

Safe Dem - 191; Leaning Dem - 19; Toss-up - 16; Leaning Rep - 22; Safe Rep - 187

The Senate is estimated as follows:

Safe Dem - 40; Leaning Dem - 8; Toss-up - 3; Leaning Rep - 2; Safe Rep - 47

Just for fun (or something), let's flashback to Sept 27 - the Senate had just passed the torture bill, Dem bloggers were bemoaning the gutless wonders they call "leaders", the Senate was on the verge of passing the fence, and Mark Foley was just a gleam in in the eye of ABC reporter Brian Ross.

Here is how the NY Times saw the races then:

House:
Safe Dems - 190; Leaning Dem - 17; toss-up - 15; leaning Rep - 22; Safe Rep - 191.

Senate
Safe Dem - 39; Leaning Dem - 7; Toss-up - 4; Leaning Rep - 8; Safe Rep - 42

SO, changes since Sept:

House
Safe Dems: +1; Leaning Dem: +2; toss-up: +1; leaning Rep: 0 Safe Rep: -4

Senate:
Safe Dems: +1; Leaning Dem: +1; toss-up: -1; leaning Rep: -6 Safe Rep: +7

Stripper's Story Refuted - So What?

CBS will break something resembling news when they air their coverage of the Duke lacrosse case this Sunday:

Duke Dancers Give Different  Accounts

 The dancing partner of the woman who accuses three Duke University lacrosse players of raping her refutes a key part of her partner's account of the alleged crime.

Kim Roberts, who danced at the same party where the alleged rape took place, makes the revelation in an interview with 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley this Sunday, Oct. 15, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

Roberts' answer to Bradley's question directly contradicts a crucial statement the accuser gave to police. Bradley asks whether she, Roberts, who goes by the stage name "Nikki" when she performs, was holding onto the accuser at the beginning of the alleged crime.

Says Bradley, "In the police statement, [accuser] describes the rape in this way: 'Three guys grabbed Nikki,' 'That's you,'" says Bradley, "'Brett, Adam and Matt grabbed me. They separated us at the master bedroom door while we tried to hold on to each other. Bret, Adam and Matt took me into the bathroom.' Were you holding on to each other? Were you pulled apart?"

"Nope," replies Roberts, who says she was hearing this account for the first time.

Roberts also denies the accuser's statement to the police that after the alleged rape, Roberts came into the bathroom and helped one of the rapists dress her.

When pressed by Bradley about whether she saw signs of rape from the accuser, such as complaining about pain or a mention of an assault, Roberts says, "She obviously wasn't hurt ... because she was fine."

This is all interesting and newsworthy to inhabitants of this space-time continuum.  However, District Attorney Nifong has already explained to the judge and the defense that the normal rules of space and time won't apply in this case:

        Three Duke lacrosse players took five to 10 minutes to sexually assault a woman hired to perform as a stripper at a team party, and not the 30 minutes she originally described to investigators, a prosecutor said Friday.

"When something happens to you that is really awful, it can seem like it takes place longer than it actually takes," District Attorney Mike Nifong said.

Nifong's comments came as Superior Court Judge W. Osmond Smith III denied a defense request that prosecutors provide a detailed accounting of the alleged assault, including the exact time, place and type of sexual act the accuser said each defendant committed.

...

Kirk Osborn, who represents Seligmann, said the defense needed the "bill of particulars" because the accuser has told several different versions of the alleged assault, and his client has a right to know which version prosecutors will present at trial. In search and arrest warrants issued early in the investigation, police stated the accuser told investigators she was assaulted for 30 minutes.

Nifong said he is not required to state the exact time of the alleged attack, but offered that authorities believe it took place between 11:30 p.m. on March 13, when the accuser arrived at the party, and 12:55 a.m. on March 14, when police arrived and found no one at the house.

The basic prosecution position seems to be, hey, it happened - where, when, who and how don't matter.

Columnist Ruth Sheehan of the Durham News Observer is pretty unhappy with the "choices" on the ballot for District Attorney this November:

Next month, Durham voters choose between the following:

* The sitting district attorney, Mike Nifong, who won a tight primary in a Democratic town just as criticism of his handling of the Duke lacrosse mess was starting to heat up.

* County Commissioner Lewis Cheek, a fellow Democrat whose supporters gathered a mountain of petitions to get him on the ballot -- but who later announced that, if elected, he would not serve. Cheek is endorsed by the Anybody But Nifong and Recall Nifong-Vote Cheek campaigns, which recommend electing Cheek and letting the governor pick his stand-in.

* Write-in candidate and local Republican Party Chairman Steve Monks, who would do everyone a favor by quitting his campaign, which is destined to further muddle an already murky situation. Sure to siphon off some of the "anybody-but" vote, Monks' biggest secret supporter might be Nifong.

What a choice. Or should I say, nonchoice?

It is possible this runaway Nifong train will be stopped come November.

And yes, if this "60 Minutes" piece counts as an October surpsise, I am all for it.

Victory Is Not An Option

The normally roght-leaning NY Sun delivers a gloomy scoop on the work product of James Baker's Iraq Study Group:

Baker's Panel Rules Out Iraq Victory

By ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
October 12, 2006

WASHINGTON — A commission formed to assess the Iraq war and recommend a new course has ruled out the prospect of victory for America, according to draft policy options shared with The New York Sun by commission officials.

Currently, the 10-member commission — headed by a secretary of state for President George H.W. Bush, James Baker — is considering two option papers, "Stability First" and "Redeploy and Contain," both of which rule out any prospect of making Iraq a stable democracy in the near term.

More telling, however, is the ruling out of two options last month. One advocated minor fixes to the current war plan but kept intact the long-term vision of democracy in Iraq with regular elections. The second proposed that coalition forces focus their attacks only on Al Qaeda and not the wider insurgency.

Instead, the commission is headed toward presenting President Bush with two clear policy choices that contradict his rhetoric of establishing democracy in Iraq. The more palatable of the two choices for the White House, "Stability First," argues that the military should focus on stabilizing Baghdad while the American Embassy should work toward political accommodation with insurgents. The goal of nurturing a democracy in Iraq is dropped.

The option papers, which sources inside the commission have stressed are still being amended and revised as the panel wraps up its work, give a clearer picture of what Mr. Baker meant in recent interviews when he called for a course adjustment.

The spinners will no doubt want to dress this up a bit first.

I Can Be A Big Man, Too

It takes a big man to admit his mistakes - Tall John Kerry steps up to his at the Huffers:

Four years ago today, the United States Senate voted to give President Bush the authority to use force in Iraq.

There's nothing - nothing - in my life in public service I regret more, nothing even close. We should all be willing to say: I was wrong, I should not have voted for the Iraq War Resolution.

Fine, I am willing to say it - John Kerry was wrong to vote for the Iraq War Resolution; for him it was an utterly unprincipled vote that had nothing to do with his views towards disarming Saddam and everything to do with positioning himself for a 2004 Presidential run.

Foley's Follies (Cont.)

Jonathan Weisman of the WaPo provides his daily must-read on the Foley debacle.  Today the focus is on House Speaker Dennis Hastert's three top aides - what did they know, when did they know it, how did they manage to not tell Hastert?

Prove There Was A Man On The Moon

Ned Lamont belly-flops as his negative, purposeless campaign grinds down to its inevitable conclusion:

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman angrily disputed a black leader's unsubstantiated accusation Wednesday that Lieberman lied about his civil rights work in Mississippi 43 years ago.

"Now, that's really outrageous and, of course, it is a lie," Lieberman said at a hastily called press conference, where he blamed the episode on his opponent, Ned Lamont.

Hours earlier, former state Treasurer Henry E. Parker had questioned Lieberman's oft-cited civil rights history as he and other black leaders endorsed Lamont.

"I'm saying that my view is there's no evidence of what he's done. Let him prove that he's been there," Parker said at a press conference attended by Lamont.

Lamont's campaign, which immediately seemed to grasp the political misstep, disavowed Parker's claim even before Lieberman produced news clippings placing him in Mississippi.

"We have no doubt that Sen. Lieberman was active in a variety of causes prior to his career as an elected official. We have not looked into his involvement in the civil rights movement and will not question Joe's involvement," the Lamont campaign said.

But the damage was done. The episode gave Lieberman an opportunity to reinforce a constant theme of his campaign - that Lamont has relentlessly distorted Lieberman's record in the contest for the U.S. Senate.

"Don't put this on Hank Parker. This is an open letter to me at a press conference for Ned Lamont," Lieberman said. "Ned Lamont was right there. He can't disown this."

Lamont stood with Parker and other members of the Connecticut Federation of Black Democratic Clubs as they endorsed Lamont and released an open letter to Lieberman. The letter disputed a television ad that recounts his civil rights involvement.

The Lamont campaign paid for 300 to 400 copies of the open letter in which the federation said that it was "offended by your television ad which claims you were an advocate for African Americans' first class citizenship and as such you marched for our civil rights."

The letter was a sharp attack on Lieberman, accusing him of exploiting the civil rights movement for political gain, but it stopped short of Parker's claim that Lieberman lied.

"Our research indicates that there is no evidence of you taking any action that could be described as initiative to remove the shackles of second class citizenship from African Americans," the letter said.

Although the letter contained some ambiguity, as it seemed to address the value of Lieberman's contribution to the movement, Parker flatly shared his belief that Lieberman lied about marching with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and going to Mississippi.

"I suspect that he was not there, and the reason I suspect that is because he's a guy who says anything to win," Parker said.

Ned, we hardly knew ye, but the Ned we are getting to know is desperate and unappealing.

C'mon, Democrats Can Be Conservative Stooges, Too

The WaPo report that Fox News' Chris Wallace is a registered Democrat is pretty funny:

In Sunday's New York Times Magazine, reporter Deborah Solomon asked "Fox News Sunday" anchor Chris Wallace what political party he belonged to. His answer: "None of your business."

Oh, please. Ever heard of a little thing called public records? After five minutes of exhaustive research, we found that Wallace is a registered Democrat and has been for more than two decades.

Wallace's political leanings were called into question by a red-faced Bill Clinton, who accused him of a "nice conservative little hit job" after Wallace asked a probing question about his administration's pursuit of Osama bin Laden . Clinton exploded in -- depending on your politics -- (a) a fit of righteous anger or (b) a premeditated display of Democratic mau-mauing.

The WaPo On Source Of Foley Emails

The WaPo tries to track the Foley emails and IMs back to their sources.

Jimmy Carter - Don't Know Much About History...

Jimmy Carter delivers a NY Times op-ed recounting the history of the North Korean nuclear program and blaming everything on Bush.  Here is the report from our correspondent on Planet Jimmah:

Responding to an invitation from President Kim Il-sung of North Korea, and with the approval of President Bill Clinton, I went to Pyongyang and negotiated an agreement under which North Korea would cease its nuclear program at Yongbyon and permit inspectors from the atomic agency to return to the site to assure that the spent fuel was not reprocessed. It was also agreed that direct talks would be held between the two Koreas.

The spent fuel (estimated to be adequate for a half-dozen bombs) continued to be monitored, and extensive bilateral discussions were held. The United States assured the North Koreans that there would be no military threat to them, that it would supply fuel oil to replace the lost nuclear power and that it would help build two modern atomic power plants, with their fuel rods and operation to be monitored by international inspectors. The summit talks resulted in South Korean President Kim Dae-jung earning the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize for his successful efforts to ease tensions on the peninsula.

But beginning in 2002, the United States branded North Korea as part of an axis of evil, threatened military action, ended the shipments of fuel oil and the construction of nuclear power plants and refused to consider further bilateral talks. In their discussions with me at this time, North Korean spokesmen seemed convinced that the American positions posed a serious danger to their country and to its political regime.

Responding in its ill-advised but predictable way, Pyongyang withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, expelled atomic energy agency inspectors, resumed processing fuel rods and began developing nuclear explosive devices.

Yet by uncanny coincidence the NY Times presents this history in a different story:

Under an agreement Mr. Clinton struck with North Korea in 1994, the North agreed to “freeze” its production of plutonium at its main nuclear plant at Yongbyon, in return for energy aid. North Korea abided by the freeze.

But starting around 1997, the North Koreans took steps to start a second, secret nuclear program, one based on enriching uranium. South Korean and American intelligence agencies did not find conclusive evidence of that program until the summer of 2002, and that fall the Bush administration confronted the North Koreans with its evidence.

I wonder if anyone has mentioned to Mr. Peanut that the agreement of which he was so proud went almost immediately into the NoKo shredder.

Lots more at QandO.

NoKo Nuclear Test

The WaPo stakes out a bold position:

North Korea's apparent nuclear test last night may well be regarded as a failure of the Bush administration's nuclear nonproliferation policy.

No!

However, the ongoing quest for the silver lining turns up this:

Yet a number of senior U.S. officials have said privately that they would welcome a North Korean test, regarding it as a clarifying event that would forever end the debate within the Bush administration about whether to solve the problem through diplomacy or through tough actions designed to destabilize North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's grip on power.

Now U.S. officials will push for tough sanctions at the U.N. Security Council, and are considering a raft of largely unilateral measures, including stopping and inspecting every ship that goes in and out of North Korea.

"This fundamentally changes the landscape now," one U.S. official said last night.

Spoken like a Yankees fan.  (My idea - fire Joe Torre and have him join the State Dept., where he can exert his calming influence on Kim Jong-Il - is not yet fully formulated.)

Paul Krugman Continues Hunting For Paranoids

Paul Krugman was apparently stung by David Brooks' two columns noting that the Democrats are the heirs to the Paranoid Style in American politics - he has picked up that theme before with the goal of removing the paranoid tail from the Democratic Donkey and pinning it on the Republican Pachyderm. 

The results are comical.  Here is a snippet from his latest:

As a result, political paranoia — the “sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” Hofstadter described — has gone mainstream. To read Hofstadter’s essay today is to be struck by the extent to which he seems to be describing the state of mind not of a lunatic fringe, but of key figures in our political and media establishment.

The “paranoid spokesman,” wrote Hofstadter, sees things “in apocalyptic terms. ... He is always manning the barricades of civilization.” Sure enough, Dick Cheney says that “the war on terror is a battle for the future of civilization.”

Apocalypse now!  Here is the always calm Paul Krugman on Cheney's energy plan and Osama bin Ladin:

But because the administration continues to listen only to the usual suspects [on global warming], that window of opportunity is closing fast. And bear this in mind: Whatever he imagines, Osama bin Laden can't destroy Western civilization. Carbon dioxide can.

James Baker And The Iraq Study Group

The Times reports on the work-in-progress of the Iraq Study Group led by James Baker III, whose goal seems to be to give Bush political cover for some strategy other than "stay the course" in Iraq:

G.O.P.’s Baker Hints Iraq Plan Needs Change

By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Oct. 8 — James A. Baker III, the Republican co-chairman of a bipartisan panel reassessing Iraq strategy for President Bush, said Sunday that he expected the panel would depart from Mr. Bush’s repeated calls to “stay the course,” and he strongly suggested that the White House enter direct talks with countries it had so far kept at arm’s length, including Iran and Syria.

...

But the “Iraq Study Group,” created by Mr. Baker last March with the encouragement of some members of Congress to come up with new ideas on Iraq strategy, has already talked to some representatives of Iran and Syria about Iraq’s future, he said.

His comments Sunday offered the first glimmer of what other members of his study group, in interviews over the past two weeks, have described as an effort to find a politically face-saving way for Mr. Bush slowly to extract the United States from the war. “I think it’s fair to say our commission believes that there are alternatives between the stated alternatives, the ones that are out there in the political debate, of ‘stay the course’ and ‘cut and run,’ ” Mr. Baker said.

Possible alternatives include "Play the course", i.e, finish the eighteen holes and leave, and "jog the course", which is not nearly as quick or dramatic as cutting and running but has a similar end result.

This next bit would be fascinating if true:

The Iraq Study Group, created with the reluctant blessing of the White House, includes notable Republicans and Democrats, among them William J. Perry, a former defense secretary under President Clinton; former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York; the former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor; and Vernon E. Jordan Jr., a longtime civil rights leader. Mr. Baker’s Democratic co-chairman is Lee H. Hamilton, the former Congressman who once served as the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and was co-chairman of the 9/11 commission.

For Giuliani to be associated with a credible bipartisan solution in Iraq would be a boon to his Presidential candidacy.  However, although he was initially a member he resigned from the Iraq Study Group last May, citing time commitments.

 

Of Interest To Whom?

The latest Times coverage by Carl Hulse and Jeff Zeleny of the Foley Follies includes this odd clue:

One person emerging as a subject of interest is Christy Surprenant, the former director of administration in the speaker’s office, who was Mr. Palmer’s assistant. Ms. Surprenant, who later worked for President Bush’s campaign in her native Minnesota, could not be reached for comment on Saturday.

Ms. Surprenant has been emerging quietly - this is the first mention I have seen of her in the news.

The background is this:

A former senior aide to Mark Foley expects to go before the House ethics committee next week and testify under oath that he alerted the speaker’s office as early as 2003 to inappropriate contact with teenage pages by Mr. Foley, his lawyer said Saturday.

The former aide, Kirk Fordham, will also tell the panel that Scott Palmer, the longtime chief of staff to Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, later met with Mr. Foley to talk about his troubling interest in pages, though Mr. Fordham did not attend that meeting, said Timothy J. Heaphy, Mr. Fordham’s lawyer.

“He continues to stand by his claim that he alerted Scott Palmer to this incident with Foley, and he knows there was a subsequent meeting with Foley and Palmer,” said Mr. Heaphy, who contacted the ethics committee on Friday to offer Mr. Fordham as a witness. “Kirk is confident and ready to go under oath.”

Mr. Palmer has denied having such a discussion with Mr. Fordham, who was a top aide to Mr. Foley, a Florida Republican, until January 2004. The speaker’s office has said it had no inkling of Mr. Foley’s contact with pages until the family of a former page in Louisiana complained about a communication to their son from Mr. Foley in the fall of 2005.

A chronology assembled by the speaker’s office said that neither Mr. Hastert nor Mr. Palmer were ever made aware of that e-mail message, which led to a warning to Mr. Foley to cease communication with the youth but no other action. Mr. Hastert said he had no knowledge of Mr. Foley’s activities until just before the lawmaker resigned on Sept. 29 after the disclosure of other, sexually explicit electronic messages to former pages. The resulting political and legal uproar is overshadowing the final weeks of campaigning for the midterm elections.

Bold New Dem Approach - Run As Republican!

The NY Times Magazine lauds Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer as the new model of Democratic prairie populist that can reclaim the West for the Dems, and they even ruminate about his national aspirations.  But get a load of his positions:

The Big-Sky Dem
Schweitzer’s “Montana miracle,” in which Democrats took back the governor’s seat after 16 years and ended 12 years of Republican majorities in both state chambers, has been cited as evidence that the Republican bastions in the Western states are losing ground to a new, Democratic brand of libertarian-tinged prairie populism. No fewer than four recent books by Democratic strategists have mentioned Schweitzer as the kind of guy Democrats need to win back rural America. A fifth book, Tom Schaller’s “Whistling Past Dixie,” published earlier this month, also singles out Schweitzer and makes the previously heretical claim that the Democrats’ future lies in ignoring the South and embracing the West and Midwest, where voters are less evangelical and more independent.

...Schweitzer veers right on many economic and social issues: he opposes gun control, favors the death penalty and preaches about lowering taxes and balancing budgets. At the same time, he leans left on some issues that matter to progressives: championing energy conservation and environmental regulation, opposing governmental restrictions on

abortion

and criticizing free-trade deals. “He’s as much a prairie centrist as he is a prairie populist,” Bruce Reed of the Democratic Leadership Council told me.

The Times did not have the heart to wonder, but I did - where is Schweitzer on the question of gay marriage?  This is from an interview in Salon:

        But what about the political issues that go along with religion?       

Gays and choice, you mean? When you simply say, like I do, "I'm pro-choice -- I just think that's an       intensely private decision that every woman and her physician can and should be able to make, period" -- what       else is there? That's certainly not someplace for government to be sticking its nose.

When it comes to gay marriage, folks in Montana, they're pretty traditional about who ought to be marrying       who. They're not thinking that men ought to be marrying men and women ought to be marrying women. I think that's       pretty consistent across the country, except for a few enclaves on the East and West Coast.

That is a bit waffly, but he is certainly not a table-thumping advocate.  OK, John Kerry is also opposed, as is Hillary Clinton, as are most national Dems, but the real question is, what does Schweizter really believe?  Kerry, just to pick an example, almost certainly supports gay marriage but lacks the guts to say so.

Oh, well - a low taxes, pro-gun, pro-death penalty, pro-military (I'm guessing...) conservationist could run very easily as a Republican.  Believe it or not, I have met very few Republicans who are emotionally committed to poisoning our air and water.

But could such a creature could run as a national Democrat?  Only in a party that really does not know what it believes or is afraid to run for what it stands for.

Possibly Buried Lead

The WaPo delivers a story that puts Hastert's chief of staff on the hot seat in the Foley debacle:

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert's chief of staff confronted then-Rep. Mark Foley about his inappropriate social contact with male pages well before the speaker said aides in his office took any action, a current congressional staff member with personal knowledge of Foley and his behavior with pages said yesterday.

The staff member said Hastert's chief of staff, Scott Palmer, met with the Florida Republican at the Capitol to discuss complaints about Foley's behavior toward pages. The alleged meeting occurred long before Hastert says aides in his office dispatched Rep. John M. Shimkus (R-Ill.) and the clerk of the House in November 2005 to confront Foley about troubling e-mails he had sent to a Louisiana boy.

The staff member's account buttresses the position of Foley's onetime chief of staff, Kirk Fordham, who said earlier this week that he had appealed to Palmer in 2003 or earlier to intervene, after Fordham's own efforts to stop Foley's behavior had failed. Fordham said Foley and Palmer, one of the most powerful figures in the House of Representatives, met within days to discuss the allegations.

Palmer said this week that the meeting Fordham described "did not happen." Timothy J. Heaphy, Fordham's attorney, said yesterday that Fordham is prepared to testify under oath that he had arranged the meeting and that both Foley and Palmer told him the meeting had taken place. Fordham spent more than three hours with the FBI on Thursday, and Heaphy said that on Friday he contacted the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct to offer his client's cooperation.

However, let's have a little fun with the buried lead - this is from the end of the story:

The divergent accounts have highlighted the holes in the public's understanding of Foley's undoing. And they are sure to ratchet up the pressure on Trandahl to come forward with his knowledge of events. As House clerk between January 1999 and November 2005, Trandahl had direct control over the page program.

...

Trandahl's departure came within days of his confrontation with Foley over e-mails that the congressman had sent a former page. House aides say the circumstances of Trandahl's exit were oddly quiet. The departure of a staff member of long standing, especially one as important as the House clerk, is usually marked with considerable fanfare, said Scott Lilly, a former Democratic staff director of the House Appropriations Committee. Debate is suspended in mid-afternoon to accommodate a stream of testimonials from lawmakers.

Trandahl's departure was marked by a one-minute salute from Shimkus and a brief insert into the Congressional Record.

"My one-hour Special Order changed to a five-minute Special Order, now to a one-minute," Shimkus said. "I just want to say thank you for the work you have done."

Lilly said: "He seemed to suddenly disappear in a puff of smoke."

Trandahl, now the executive director of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, has not returned repeated phone calls and e-mails.

Congressional aides point to another factor that links Trandahl to the Foley matter. A member of the board of the national gay rights group Human Rights Campaign, Trandahl is openly homosexual and personally close to the now-disgraced former lawmaker, who announced through his lawyer this week that he is gay.

So let's see - the head of the clerk's program was gay and personally close to Foley, and he has not told his story.  What did he know and when did he know it, indeed?  And whom did he alert, and how emphatically?

[Based on this paragraph, he certainly knew there was a problem, but it appears that he only went to Foley's chief of staff with it:

Sources close to Fordham say Trandahl repeatedly urged the longtime aide and close family friend to confront Foley about his inappropriate advances on pages. Each time, Foley pledged to no longer socialize with the teenagers, but, weeks later, Trandahl would again alert Fordham about more contacts. Out of frustration, the sources said, Fordham contacted Palmer, hoping that an intervention from such a powerful figure in the House would persuade Foley to stop.

If Trandahl did not warn Shimkus, head of the page board, until 2005 he earned his dismissal.

For bonus hilarity, check out Josh Marshall, who excerpts the WaPo's discussion of Trandahl and reiterates his belief that Trandahl's story is important but somehow neglects to include in his excerpt the tidbit about Trandahl's sexuality and relationship to Foley.

I guess the reality-based community likes to digest their reality in small bites.

MORE: Jeff Trandahl is a lifelong Republican, by the way, but he might well be an Andrew Sullivan "conservative".  How many Republicans are on the Human Rights Campaign?

Let's also clip this from the Times:

Meanwhile, some Republican staff members worried that several gay men caught up in the scandal would be treated unfairly.

They include Kirk Fordham, Mr. Foley’s onetime chief of staff who resigned Wednesday as an aide to Representative Thomas M. Reynolds, Republican of New York, and Jeff Trandahl, formerly the clerk of the House of Representatives, a powerful post with oversight of hundreds of staffers and the page program. The two men were among the first to learn of Mr. Foley’s inappropriate communications. Along with the Republican leadership, they have been criticized for failing to act more aggressively to stop the congressman’s behavior, and possibly covering up for Mr. Foley.

The criticism appears to be well deserved, if the WaPo story is accurate and complete.

More Libby Filings

There are more filings in the Libby case.  From the Defense (7 page .pdf), we like this the news (page 6) that in the days following Joe Wilson's July 6, 2003 op-ed, there were extensive discussions amongst the White House, the OVP and the CIA in attempt to formulate a rebuttal (culminating in Tenet's July 11, 2003 statement) but no mention of Mrs. Wilson appears in Libby's notes.

Presumably the folks who beleive that Cheney was orchestrating the "Get Joe" conspiracy will also believe that Libby was ordered to avoid including her in his notes.

A bit more seriously, one wonders about other dates when Ms. Plame does appear in Libby's notes - it has famously been revealed that the June disclosure of Ms. Plame's CIA affiliation by Dick Cheney to Libby was documented in Libby's notes, but was that her only appearance?

Prosecution brief (8 page .pdf) is here.  Help Wanted in finding bombshells - time did not permit a detailed reading, but a quick perusal showed nothing.

More On "The List"

The National Journal has an interesting article on the reaction of gay Republican staffers to the Foley debacle.  How much is true I cannot say, but here we go:

As he straddled the threshold of the closet, Foley created a welcoming atmosphere for gay staffers. "He made a great spot for gay Republicans to find a place to work," said a former Foley aide.

Several gay Republicans who worked for other lawmakers found his suite of offices to be a safe zone and would drop by to kibitz. Others benefited from his advice. He counseled one in his dealings with blogger Mike Rogers, who publicly disclosed the identities of a dozen gay Republican staff members.

Foley's friends ruefully speak of knowing that Foley was friendly with congressional pages. One recalls jokingly telling Foley to be careful not to confirm a stereotype about sexual predators. Foley laughed, a friend says.

But then, in the fall of 2005, a page sponsored by Rep. Rodney Alexander of Louisiana, complained. After Foley had furtive discussions with House officials, his friends warned him to police himself. And one former Foley staffer recalls asking the lawmaker directly whether there was anything more serious floating around. Foley, according to the former aide, said no.

The debate about what happened next consumed the Capitol this week. One senior Republican official sympathetic to Speaker Dennis Hastert said that Foley's former chief of staff, Kirk Fordham, last spring promised both Rep. John Shimkus, the chairman of the page board, and a top assistant to Hastert that he would make sure Foley behaved himself. At that time, Fordham was the chief aide to Rep. Tom Reynolds of New York, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. Fordham's assurances, according to this account, apparently were enough to persuade Hastert's staff not to recommend further action.

But Fordham this week strongly disputed the charge that he interceded on Foley's behalf. Fordham instead contends that he was frustrated that his efforts to rein in Foley's questionable behavior had failed and that he subsequently sought help.

Fordham told ABC News that in 2003 he warned Hastert's powerful chief of staff, Scott Palmer, that he was worried about Foley's penchant for doting on male pages. Palmer, according to Fordham, subsequently notified Hastert. Palmer responded that Fordham's version of events is untrue. And a House leadership aide wondered aloud why Fordham, who professed to be surprised by Foley's conduct on Monday, was saying two days later that he remembered having long-standing anxieties.

This would tie in nicely to the Open Secret notion that Foley's dispositions were a bipartisan talking point.

That said, the real laugher is here:

Robert Traynham, the communications director for conservative Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, is openly gay.

And indeed he is, based on this 2005 story.

So (here comes the punchline), let's cut back to David Corn on "The List" of gay Republican staffers:

What's interesting about The List--which includes nine chiefs of staffs, two press secretaries, and two directors of communications--is that (if it's acucurate) it shows that some of the religious right's favorite representatives and senators have gay staffers helping them advance their political careers and agendas. These include Representative Katherine Harris and Henry Hyde and Senators Bill Frist, George Allen, Mitch McConnell and Rick Santorum. Should we salute these legislators for being open-minded enough to have such tolerant hiring practices? After all, Santorum in a 2003 AP interview compared homosexuality to bestiality, incest and polygamy. It would be rather big of Santorum to employ a fellow who engages in activity akin to such horrors. That is, if Santorum knows about his orientation.

Investigative journalism's finest moment.  Jiminy - I didn't even need to look at a list of names to see that Corn was misdirecting his fire when he singled out Santorum - somebody buy the guy a subscription to 'Google'.

I have more on "The List" below, so don't get stalled here.

Corn - "The List" Circulates

David Corn has more on "The List", discussed and denounced below.  From Corn:

Copies of The List (see below) have been sent by gay politicos to a variety of social conservative groups that look to the Republican Party to make their religious right dreams come true. The recipients include the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, the Alliance for Marriage, Concerned Women of America, the Eagle Forum, and the Southern Baptist Convention. Officials at most of these groups have had something to say about homosexuality and gay rights in the wake of the Mark Foley scandal.

What's the point? The senders--gay people of a non-Republican bent--seem to be hoping to set off a civil war within the GOP, to turn the anti-gay social cons against the GOP's Velvet Mafia.

I hope someone can call this to Mark Kleiman's attention - he very reasonably denounced the idea of outing gay Republicans but had a bit of a struggle with the idea that a Democrat might actually contemplate such a thing (actually, he said it was my "fantasy", which impugns both his real world awareness and my fantasy life.)

For a bit of background here is BlogActive, run by gay activist Mike Rogers.  Mr. Rogers appeared with Tucker Carlson and, after asking him whether he could spell "h-y-p-o-c-r-i-t-e", explained his 'outing' philosophy, which amounts to protecting the privacy rights of people with whom he agrees.:

CARLSON:  But doesn‘t—I mean, look, don‘t the people have a right, A, to lead private lives of their own choosing, and B, to have their own political opinions without being harassed about their private lives by other people?

ROGERS: Absolutely, Tucker.  And the only thing that I come into in terms of my reporting on hypocrisy is when those private lives are in direct conflict with the public lives and the public persona that they lead. 

For example, if you are a gay man and you vote for the Defense of Marriage Act and refuse to support a repeal of Don‘t Ask Don‘t Tell, and serve as a Boy Scout leader—this has not been known, that Mark Foley is listed on the Boy Scouts Web site as a Boy Scout leader. And when that happens, you have to realize that these closets are just—they‘re perpetuating all of this.

Of course, gay staffers don't vote, and we have no idea what issues they work on or positions they argue in private, but there it it - gay activists want to out them, and they are hoping to use the Foley scandal to do so without leaving any fingerprints.

Mr. Corn's first journalistic effort on this topic essentially blamed the Evil Republicans and struck me as an attempt to provide covering fire, as did the work of Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum.

So let me help them out by re-stating their apparent position more clearly - if the lefty gays can get a right wing group to pass this list to the NY Times, it will have been a reprehensible Republican dirty trick to have outed these people.

If they have a different view - if, for example, they think this would be reprehensible even if it originated from the left - I hope they will clarify their presentation.

Well, we will see what happens.  Mark Kleiman has found the main point, which is that this sexual McCarthyism is deplorable.  Perhaps we will see whether other lefties are prepared to denounce this even though it is originating from the left (a point Mr. Kleiman may yet acknowledge).  And of course, we welcome denunciations from the right, just in case the various right-wing groups cited above by David Corn need some assistance in gauging the issues here.

MORE:  The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force said this:

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force today condemned emerging attempts to shift responsibility for the Foley scandal by blaming gay Republican congressional staffers for supposedly covering up prior reports of predatory behavior by former Rep. Mark Foley. Discussions of a supposed network of closeted gay Republicans working on Capitol Hill have swept the blogs and been raised on MSNBC and CBS.

“The parallels to McCarthyism are chilling. Here it is gays, not communists, ‘operating at the highest levels of government.’

“There is no doubt that allegations of Foley’s misconduct were brought directly to the attention of the Republican leadership of the House. They chose to look the other way. They alone are to blame.

“While many Democrats may be taking real pleasure in watching the GOP twist and turn, it’s long past time for them –– and other leaders –– to denounce these shameful, gay-baiting, responsibility-evading tactics.”

I interpret that as opposition to the publication of The List.

Here was The Prowler:

"We're getting into very dangerous territory, and I've warned my colleagues to be careful." That's what a Democrat leadership aide was saying on Wednesday, as word circulated about David Corn's blog posting that revealed that a list of gay Republicans congressional staffers was circulating through emails.

Such a list has been talked about for months, if not years, by more militant homosexual activists, who have threatened to out Republican congressional staffers or even congressmen if they take positions counter to their gay lifestyle.

Now, in the wake of the Rep. Mark Foley scandal, a form of "the list" is again circulating among journalists and any other interested third parties.

"If that list is made public, all of the political gains we've made in the past 96 hours get flushed down the toilet," says the leadership aide.

I interpret that as a Democrat being worried that his party's fingerprints will be all over this.

Well, the media will want to protect their sources, no doubt, but I think that the commentariat will have no trouble tracking "The List" back to its headwaters.

UPDATE:  Byron York is pretty funny:

DAVID CORN'S BLINDING INSIGHT [Byron York]
The Nation's David Corn seems to have figured out that it is not Republicans who are pushing the "list" of supposedly gay GOP lawmakers and staff.  Rather, Corn has realized that the "list" is instead being distributed by "gay politicos" who are sending it to social conservative groups like Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council...

Matt Yglesias is in the "go for it" camp, although he does not note a lefty source:

I've always found there to be something of a generation gap among liberals in this town on "outings" with younger people saying go for it, and our elders being more hesitant. Certainly, I'm all for disclosre. The Republicans don't just "welcome[] the support of those who demonize same-sexers," they've made gay-bashing (along with terrorism) one of the primary emotional foci of conservative politics in America.

(Note to Mark Kleiman - Matt Y is not my fantasy).

Chomsky Lives!

The NY Times delivered the grins a few weeks back when, in covering Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's UN and NYC appearances, they reported that

...Mr. Chávez was just more colorful. He brandished a copy of Noam Chomsky’s “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance” and recommended it to members of the General Assembly to read. Later, he told a news conference that one of his greatest regrets was not getting to meet Mr. Chomsky before he died. (Mr. Chomsky, 77, is still alive.)

The Times has finally figured out what went wrong and ran this Editor's Note on Friday, Oct 6:

An article on Sept. 21 about criticism of President Bush at the United Nations by President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran reported that Mr. Chavez praised a book by Noam Chomsky, the linguist and social critic. It reported that later, at a news conference, Mr. Chavez said that he regretted not having met Mr. Chomsky before he died. The article noted that in fact, Mr. Chomsky is alive. The assertion that Mr. Chavez had made this misstatement was repeated in a Times interview with Mr. Chomsky the next day.

In fact, what Mr. Chavez said was, “I am an avid reader of Noam Chomsky, as I am of an American professor who died some time ago.” Two sentences later Mr. Chavez named John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist who died last April, calling both him and Mr. Chomsky great intellectual figures.

Mr. Chavez was speaking in Spanish at the news conference, but the simultaneous English translation by the United Nations left out the reference to Mr. Galbraith and made it sound as if the man who died was Mr. Chomsky.

Readers pointed out the error in e-mails to The Times soon after the first article was published. Reporters reviewed the recordings of the news conference in English and Spanish, but not carefully enough to detect the discrepancy, until after the Venezuelan government complained publicly on Wednesday.

Editors and reporters should have been more thorough earlier in checking the accuracy of the simultaneous translation. (Go to Article)

Note:  Until the Times techies make access to their corrections archive a bit more user-friendly, that link will die tonight because the Times provides a generic link to the current days correction page.  Past corrections pages are time-stamped and available in their archives, but the only way to find them of which I am aware is to use the Times search engine and do a date-word search.

Bill Clinton Expects That "Establishment Old Media Organizations Are De Facto Allies"

Bill Clinton joins in the media-bias debate, by way of the old-media WaPo:

...[Bill Clinton] said Democrats of his generation tend to be naive about new media realities. There is an expectation among Democrats that establishment old media organizations are de facto allies -- and will rebut political accusations and serve as referees on new-media excesses.

"We're all that way, and I think a part of it is we grew up in the '60s and the press led us against the war and the press led us on civil rights and the press led us on Watergate," Clinton said. "Those of us of a certain age grew up with this almost unrealistic set of expectations."

"Almost" unrealistic.

Let's flash back to former Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent's column about whether he worked at a liberal newspaper:

THE PUBLIC EDITOR; Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?
By DANIEL OKRENT

OF course it is.

...it's one thing to make the paper's pages a congenial home for editorial polemicists, conceptual artists, the fashion-forward or other like-minded souls (European papers, aligned with specific political parties, have been doing it for centuries), and quite another to tell only the side of the story your co-religionists wish to hear. I don't think it's intentional when The Times does this. But negligence doesn't have to be intentional.

The gay marriage issue provides a perfect example. Set aside the editorial page, the columnists or the lengthy article in the magazine (''Toward a More Perfect Union,'' by David J. Garrow, May 9) that compared the lawyers who won the Massachusetts same-sex marriage lawsuit to Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King. That's all fine, especially for those of us who believe that homosexual couples should have precisely the same civil rights as heterosexuals.

But for those who also believe the news pages cannot retain their credibility unless all aspects of an issue are subject to robust examination, it's disappointing to see The Times present the social and cultural aspects of same-sex marriage in a tone that approaches cheerleading. So far this year, front-page headlines have told me that ''For Children of Gays, Marriage Brings Joy'' (March 19); that the family of ''Two Fathers, With One Happy to Stay at Home'' (Jan. 12) is a new archetype; and that ''Gay Couples Seek Unions in God's Eyes'' (Jan. 30). I've learned where gay couples go to celebrate their marriages; I've met gay couples picking out bridal dresses; I've been introduced to couples who have been together for decades and have now sanctified their vows in Canada, couples who have successfully integrated the world of competitive ballroom dancing, couples whose lives are the platonic model of suburban stability.

Every one of these articles was perfectly legitimate. Cumulatively, though, they would make a very effective ad campaign for the gay marriage cause. You wouldn't even need the articles: run the headlines over the invariably sunny pictures of invariably happy people that ran with most of these pieces, and you'd have the makings of a life insurance commercial.

This implicit advocacy is underscored by what hasn't appeared. Apart from one excursion into the legal ramifications of custody battles (''Split Gay Couples Face Custody Hurdles,'' by Adam Liptak and Pam Belluck, March 24), potentially nettlesome effects of gay marriage have been virtually absent from The Times since the issue exploded last winter.

The San Francisco Chronicle runs an uninflected article about Congressional testimony from a Stanford scholar making the case that gay marriage in the Netherlands has had a deleterious effect on heterosexual marriage. The Boston Globe explores the potential impact of same-sex marriage on tax revenues, and the paucity of reliable research on child-rearing in gay families. But in The Times, I have learned next to nothing about these issues, nor about partner abuse in the gay community, about any social difficulties that might be encountered by children of gay couples or about divorce rates (or causes, or consequences) among the 7,000 couples legally joined in Vermont since civil union was established there four years ago.

On a topic that has produced one of the defining debates of our time, Times editors have failed to provide the three-dimensional perspective balanced journalism requires. This has not occurred because of management fiat, but because getting outside one's own value system takes a great deal of self-questioning. Six years ago, the ownership of this sophisticated New York institution decided to make it a truly national paper. Today, only 50 percent of The Times's readership resides in metropolitan New York, but the paper's heart, mind and habits remain embedded here. You can take the paper out of the city, but without an effort to take the city and all its attendant provocations, experiments and attitudes out of the paper, readers with a different worldview will find The Times an alien beast.

Or we could pick a different topic, since the WaPo article mentions the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry.  I believe that any review of the Times coverage of Kerry's Vietnam service and the Swift Boat accusations would conclude that the Times coverage was scant, ill-informed, and slanted towards John Kerry.

Well, enough Times-bashing (for now!).  It's nice to see Wild Bill acknowledge his expectations about the role of the old media in promoting the Dem agenda.