JustOneMinute

Shopping For Bombshells

I have received, by email, an excerpt from a column which appeared in the Wednesday Wall Street Journal.   Gabriel Schoenfeld was reviewing a new book by BBC security reporter Gordon Corera, Shopping For Bombs, which is about the nuclear network put together by Pakistan's A.Q. Khan.  The excerpt:

By the close of the 1990s, the CIA started to scrutinize [A. Q.] Khan's activities and travels, still without realizing their full importance. One of the more curious details in Mr. Corera's book is that the agency turned to Joe Wilson, the husband of CIA officer Valerie Plame, to investigate some of Khan's African visits. To this end, Mr. Wilson traveled to uranium-rich Niger in 1999, a full three years before he went there to investigate Saddam Hussein's possible attempts to buy "yellowcake" uranium. Mr. Wilson found nothing worrisome in Niger either time.

There is news here, for me anyway - the SSCI told us that the CIA sent Joe Wilson to Niger in 1999 (at his wife's suggestion) but found nothing to report.  This is from p. 49 (of 521) of the .pdf SSCI report, with redactions:

The former ambassador had traveled previously to Niger on the CIA's behalf |xxxxxxx|.  The former ambassador was selected for the 1999 trip after his wife mentioned to her supervisors that her husband was planning a business trip to Niger in the near future and might be willing to use his contacts in the region |^ ^ ^ ^ | . Because the former ambassador did not uncover any information about |xxxxx| during this visit to Niger, CPD did not distribute an intelligence report on the visit.

Christoper Hitchens recently pounded the table with the news that Saddam sent a nuclear ambassador to Niger in 1999.  And the story of Khan going to Niger came out in 2000.  However, the notion that Wilson was sent to Niger in 1999 to investigate a Khan connection is news to me.

The SSCI is redacted but may have addressed this (p. 48):

Several analysts interviewed by Committee staff also pointed out that information in the second intelligence report matched ^ ^ ^ H ^ ^ m ^ ^ l B H ^ ^ H H I ^ ^ ^ I • m ^ l reporting from 1999 which showed that an Algerian businessman, Baraka, was arranging a trip for the Iraqi Ambassador to the Vatican, Wissam al-Zahawi, to visit Niger and other African countries in early February 1999.

The Baraka visit was in February; Joe Wilson noted a June 1999 contact in his report (p. 53):

[Former Nigerien Prime Minister Ibrahim] Mayaki said, however, that in June 1999, | ^ ^ ^ H ^ H | ^ m ^ | ^ | businessman, approached him and insisted that Mayaki meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" between Niger and Iraq. The intelligence report said that Mayaki interpreted "expanding commercial relations" to mean that the delegation wanted to discuss uranium yellowcake sales. The intelligence report also said that "although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to the UN sanctions on Iraq."

What does it mean?  I would like to start by getting a bootleg copy of the Gabriel Schoenfeld piece before I hazard a guess.

Some Silly Reaction To The Armitage Story

A couple of reactions to the Armitage story have lit my fuse.

First up is Investor's Business Daily:

Did Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald Lie?

Plamegate: Patrick Fitzgerald's three-year manhunt to track down who blew Valerie Plame's CIA "cover" has been exposed as a costly sham. He apparently knew all along that his man was not Scooter Libby.

...

The latest revelations raise a question of far more gravity: Did Fitzgerald publicly lie? Let's look at the facts:

• The indictment of Libby that Fitzgerald extracted from the grand jury states that "on or about June 23, 2003, Libby met with New York Times reporter Judith Miller. . . . In discussing the CIA's handling of Wilson's trip to Niger, Libby informed her that Wilson's wife might work at a bureau of the CIA."

• In the Oct. 28 press conference announcing Libby's indictment, Fitzgerald claimed that "in fact, Mr. Libby was the first official known to have told a reporter when he talked to Judith Miller in June of 2003 about Valerie Wilson."

• That assertion is apparently false. A soon-to-be-released book, "Hubris," by Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and The Nation magazine's David Corn, finds that Armitage revealed Plame's identity in a meeting with The Washington Post's Bob Woodward a week before the Libby-Miller meeting in June 2003. In a Newsweek preview of the book, Isikoff cites "three government officials, a lawyer familiar with the case and an Armitage confidant" as sources for when the Armitage-Woodward conversation took place.

...

• Isikoff notes that "Armitage himself was aggressively investigated" by Fitzgerald. So Armitage fessed up at the outset. Fitzgerald long ago knew whom Armitage talked to and when. And he knew it was Armitage, not Libby, who was responsible for outing Plame (whose status as a secret CIA operative was dubious at best).

• Fitzgerald's contention in October that Libby was "the first official known to have told a reporter . . . about Valerie Wilson" may therefore have been a lie.

However - although he was wrong, and singularly slack in his investigation, as of Oct 2005 Libby was the first official known to Fitzgerald to have leaked, just as Fitzgerald said.

Oh, stop.  I yield to no one in my enthusiasm for belittling the investigatory ineptitude that allowed Fitzgerald to overlook the leak to Bob Woodward by Richard Armitage. (And I want to copyright "What else did Fitzgerald not know, and when did he not know it?")

I suppose that is a "lie" in the "Bush lied" sense, but I don't think anyone can argue that Fitzgerald knew the statemetn was false when he made it, or intended to deceive others, or made it with reckless disregard for the truth.  Fitzgerald was wrong, but it was not a lie.

The other post that caught my eye was by Christy Hardin Smith; since Byron York has embraced the concept of "the firedoglake theory of the case", it is probably worth seeing how that bellwether of the left is covering this.  Not well, but the errors are predictable.  Here are two:

Armitage realized he was the source of the initial leak, and he immediately went to the State Department’s offices of legal and intelligence affairs, owned up to what had occurred, and discusssed his errors with the FBI before Patrick Fitzgerald was even appointed as Special Prosecutor.

...as a prosecutor, I can honestly tell you that when you have a genuinely contrite person in front of you, who has owned up to all their activity, put everything out on the table, and you have all the facts to look at — both the prosecutor and the criminal investigators are more likely to work with that person in terms of using them as a witness against others, cutting a deal, everything.

Well, now that we have her general opinion,what does she think of Armitage, who sat on the news about his leak to Woodward (despite reported prodding from Woodward) until the grand jury expired in October 2005?  Is that "contrite"?  Is that what it takes to "own up"?  What would concealment and obstruction look like?

And this "Keep Anger Alive" passage seems to be nonsense:

Back in October of 2005, I had this to say — and I still feel the same today:

Why has your cover been blown? Because you work as a CIA colleague of the wife of a man who dared to question the veracity of the President of the United States on a matter of national security, a matter of an exaggerated claim that was inserted in his State of the Union address to bolster his case for war in Iraq. And the President’s cronies and hatchet men decided to out this man’s wife for political payback, as a lesson to anyone else who would dare to question their decisions and as a means to staunch the bleeding from this initial salvo of criticism. Damn the consequences.

Again, does Ms. Hardin Smith want to attempt to relate her feelings to the facts of the Armitage situation?  Armitage did not "own up" to his full involvement, but he was not a crony or hatchet man engaging in political payback, either.

Please - write a new script.

Economic Populism At The Times

Readers of the Dead Tree Times get a special front-page "looks like she didn't get the memo" treat today.

From a front-pager on some economic news:

Census Reports Slight Increase in ’05 Incomes 

The nation’s median household income rose slightly faster than inflation last year for the first time in six years, the Census Bureau reported yesterday.

The rise, however, had little to do with bigger paychecks — in fact, both men and women earned less in 2005 than 2004. Rather, census officials said, more family members were taking jobs to make ends meet, and some people made more money from investments and other sources beyond wages.

...

That figure fell 5.9 percent between the 2000 census and 2005, to $46,242 from $49,133, according to an analysis of the data conducted for The New York Times by the sociology department of Queens College. The difference was so sharp, in part, because the 2000 census measured 1999 income, which was at the height of the dot-com bubble.

   

Emphasis added.  Elsewhere on the front page we find memo-misser Linda Greenhouse, filling a slow news day with ruminations about hiring practices at the Supreme Court:

...While their pay is a modest $63,335 for their year of service, a Supreme Court clerkship is money in the bank: the clerks are considered such a catch that law firms are currently paying each one they hire a signing bonus of $200,000.

Modest?  I bet that in comparison to other lawyers (and Times readers!), $63K is modest.

MORE:  The Greenhouse article cites this Volokh Conspiracy post from July.  Ms. Greenhouse also puts a puzzle before the statisticians in the house:

In interviews, two of the justices, David H. Souter and Stephen G. Breyer, suggested that the sharp drop in women among the clerkship ranks reflected a random variation in the applicant pool.

From the story, I glean that there are 37 clerkships, and "normally" about 1/3 go to women.

My coffee-table attempt to apply the normal approximation to the binomial distribution left me with a standard deviation equal to the square root of [(2/9) / 36], which became [(1.4/3)/6], which became .5/6, or .08.

From that, I conclude that 95% of outcomes should show 33% +/- 16%, or 1/3 +/- 1/6; call it a range of 16% to 50%.

Seven clerks out of thirty-seven is at the bottom of (but within) the random range.  But I only had one cup of coffee and no calculator when I did that (No, I have no current excuse for the lack of a calculator; obviously, I am at my computer now...)

Greg Mankiw had thoughts on the earlier Times article about lagging wages.

The Times On Armitage - BS

The NY Times finally covers the news that Richard Armitage was "the initial and primary source" for Robert Novak's column outing Valerie Plame.  However, they get some details wrong and present a bit of rubbish.  Attack!

The identification of Mr. Armitage as the original leaker to Mr. Novak ends what has been a tantalizing mystery. In recent months, however, Mr. Armitage’s role had become clear to many, and it was recently reported by Newsweek magazine and The Washington Post.

"Clear to many"?  Well, yes, certainly the blogosphere has been buzzing about this.  In recent months, however, the Times only wrote about Armitage in connection with the CIA leak on Aug 23 - the topic apparently lost news-worthiness after the March 15, 2006 story telling us that Bob Woodward's former editor thought Armitage was the "likely" source.

Now on to the fantasizing:

In the accounts by the lawyer and associates, Mr. Armitage disclosed casually to Mr. Novak that Ms. Wilson worked for the C.I.A. at the end of an interview in his State Department office. Mr. Armitage knew that, the accounts continue, because he had seen a written memorandum by Under Secretary of State Marc Grossman.

Close - Carl Ford, head of the State Department's INR, wrote a memo on June 10 to Marc Grossman; on July 7 a cover sheet was attached and it became a memo from Ford to "The Secretary" - c'mon, the NY Sun printed this, why can't the Times find it?  (The WaPo at least found an accurate description and the Times had this right a year ago.)

Mr. Grossman had taken up the task of finding out about Ms. Wilson after an inquiry from I. Lewis Libby Jr., chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Libby’s inquiry was prompted by an Op-Ed article on May 6, 2003, in The New York Times by Nicholas D. Kristof and an article on June 12, 2003, in The Washington Post by Walter Pincus.

Emphasis added - who said Grossman was trying to learn about Ms. Wilson?  If so, he did a miserable job - he got a three page memo with six attachments, and Ms. Wilson is only mentioned as an aside in one sentence:

In a February 19, 2002 meeting convened by Valerie Wilson, a CIA WMD manager, and the wife of Joe Wilson, he previewed his plans and rationale for going to Niger...

Let me offer some assistance - the purpose of the memo was to establish the circumstances under which Mr. Wilson, the former Ambassador, was sent to Niger.  Based on the leaks in the Kristof column, it was not even clear whether he had been sent by the CIA or the INR - however, the CYA tone of the opening paragraphs makes it clear that the State Department wanted to push the whole Wilson story back onto the CIA.

As a bonus detail, the Pincus story was not published until June 12 (although folks surely knew he was asking questions before then).  Thus, it is a bit misleading for the Times to report that the June 10 memo was prepared in response to the June 12 story.

More from the Times:

Neither article identified the ambassador, but it was known inside the government that he was Joseph C. Wilson IV, Ms. Wilson’s husband. White House officials wanted to know how much of a role she had in selecting him for the assignment.

Emphasis added, and says who?  White House officials certainly wanted to know who got Mr. Wilson involved with this Niger trip, what he reported, and how that report was circulated; his wife did have the incidental, one-sentence involvement noted above.  But to suggest that White House inquiries were centered on Ms. Wilson is not supported by the evidence.  In fact, although his recollection is certainly in dispute, Libby claims that Marc Grossman never mentioned Ms. Wilson in the meeting where the June 10 memo was discussed (see p. 5 of 29).

More, with emphasis added:

Ms. Wilson was a covert employee, and after Mr. Novak printed her identity, the agency requested an investigation to see whether her name had been leaked illegally.

Look, I understand that this is a complicated story, but can we please expect the Paper of Record to master the important details?

Ms. Wilson's employment status at the CIA was classified, based on Special Counsel Fitzgerald's press conference and his indictment of Libby, and we have no reason to doubt him.  However, a "covert employee", the status attributed to Ms. Wilson by the Times, is actually a legal concept established by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, and it has a fairly specific definition.  With respect to Ms. Wilson, skeptics (including James Taranto and the NY Times editors) have wondered whether she in fact meets the definition - a problematic point is the requirement that an agent must have served abroad in the last five years.

Libby's defense team has also tussled about Ms. Wilson's employment situation with Special Counsel Fitzgerald, who has only been willing to defend the point that her status was classified.

So - if the Times want to break news with an assurance that Ms. Plame is "covert", fine; otherwise, her status was classified and the Times is merely breaking wind.

Some administration critics said her name had been made public in a campaign to punish Mr. Wilson, who had written in a commentary in The Times that his investigation in Africa him to believe that the Bush administration had twisted intelligence to justify an attack on Iraq.

Other critics say that at dusk large, diseased vampire bats fly out of Dick Cheney's... oh, never mind.  Wouldn't this be an appropriate moment for the Times offer a bit of space to an opposing view?  Even David Corn, who helped launch this scandal, admitted that Richard Armitage was not well cast in the "Punish Joe" story line:

The Plame leak in Novak's column has long been cited by Bush administration critics as a deliberate act of payback, orchestrated to punish and/or discredit Joe Wilson after he charged that the Bush administration had misled the American public about the prewar intelligence. The Armitage news does not fit neatly into that framework.

And for folks to whom Armitage is just another sinister Republican Newsweek offered this explanation:

...the initial leak, seized on by administration critics as evidence of how far the White House was willing to go to smear an opponent, came from a man who had no apparent intention of harming anyone.

Indeed, Armitage was a member of the administration's small moderate wing. Along with his boss and good friend, Powell, he had deep misgivings about President George W. Bush's march to war.

None of that appears in the Times.  For purposes of benchmarking, let's see how the WaPo covered this - they had a few paragraphs near the bottom:

Armitage's involvement in the matter does not fit neatly into the assertions of Bush administration critics that Plame's employment was disclosed as part of a White House conspiracy to besmirch Wilson by suggesting his Niger trip stemmed from nepotism at the CIA. Wilson and Plame have sued top administration officials, alleging that the leak was meant as retaliation.

But Armitage, the source Novak had described obliquely as someone who is "not a political gunslinger," was by all accounts hardly a tool of White House political operatives. As the No. 2 official at the State Department from March 2001 to February 2005, Armitage was a prominent Republican appointee. But he also privately disagreed with the tone and style of White House policymaking on Iraq and other matters.

The fact that Armitage was not considered to be part of the neocon cabal or a tool of Dick Cheney was an important part of this story, except in the Times.

Last bit - waaay down at the bottom we find this:

Mr. Grossman’s memorandum did not mention that Ms. Wilson had undercover status.

Uh huh - yet this was the memo which, in Times world, was devoted to exploring Ms. Wilson's role in the Niger trip - that is quite an oversight.  Whatever.

But having come this far with the Times, let's go a bit farther - based on his court filings and arguments, Special Counsel Fitzgerald can not prove that Libby was aware of Ms. Wilson's classified status prior to the publication of the Novak column - apparently, the best he can find is a warning from a CIA officer about the dangers of disclosing CIA employees, delivered after the Novak column.

Sure, maybe Libby knew Ms. Wilson's status was classified, and maybe he outed her as punishment and revenge.  But after two years of investigation, that theory remains a poignant faith-based initiative.

MORE:  Well, did Cheney know her classified status, and could he have told Libby?  Good question!  Apparently Cheney learned of Ms. Wilson from George Tenet, who has reportedly forgotten the conversation.  Dick Cheney - he'd rather be lucky than good.

Deconstructing Duke And The Times

Stuart Taylor, writing in Slate, pummels the recent NY Times coverage of the Duke debacle and gives a plug to

KC Johnson, an obscure but brilliant New York City history professor of centrist political views. Johnson alone has produced more insightful (if sometimes one-sided) analysis and commentary on the Duke case—about 60,000 words—than all the nation's newspapers combined.

As the Times struggles to abandon its prefferred story line, summarized by Taylor as "a fable of evil, rich white men running amok and abusing poor black women", let's turn to the New Yorker.  They have decided to sidle up to the issues through the frame of a beleageured college President trying to find the right balance between academics and athletics.  While doing so, they engage in some delightful Nifong-bashing:

Last year, when Hardin was appointed to a judgeship, Governor Mike Easley appointed Nifong to finish his term. Nifong, who was just a few years short of reaching his thirty-year mark, subsequently announced that he would run for a full term in the spring. As a Democrat, he needed only to win the Party’s nomination in a May primary to be virtually assured of election. Polls taken by Nifong’s opponent, a former assistant D.A. named Freda Black, showed Nifong, whose name recognition was marginal, running considerably behind her. Black was well known, because in 2003, while Nifong was negotiating traffic cases, she had been Hardin’s chief courtroom assistant on a notorious socialite-murder case that had been carried live on Court TV. In his first week on the job as Hardin’s replacement, Nifong had fired her. She says he gave no explanation. (He has since hinted that it had something to do with conflict of interest.)

On March 27th, after the weekend of protests, Nifong declared that he was personally taking over the lacrosse case, and he began an extraordinary blitz of public appearances, being interviewed upward of fifty times. He repeated the charges of a conspiracy of silence among the players, and suggested that those who failed to come forward might face charges of aiding and abetting the crime. He repeatedly declared his belief that a crime had occurred, and said, “My guess is that some of this stone wall of silence that we have seen may tend to crumble once charges begin to come out.”

He publicly emphasized the racial implications of the incident, telling the Times, “The reason I decided to take it over myself was the combination gang-like rape activity accompanied by the racial slurs and general racial hostility. . . . There are three people who went into the bathroom with the young lady, and whether the other people there knew what was going on at the time, they do now and have not come forward. I’m disappointed that no one has been enough of a man to come forward.”

Nifong also demonstrated on television how he imagined the alleged victim was grabbed and held by her attackers. He suggested that the woman might have been given a date-rape drug, and even held the students’ decision to hire attorneys against them. “One would wonder why one needs an attorney if one was not charged and had not done anything wrong,” he said. He referred to the athletes as “a bunch of hooligans,” and played upon presumed resentment of Durhamites toward the school, which some still called the Plantation. “There’s been a feeling in the past that Duke students are treated differently by the court system,” Nifong said. “There was a feeling that Duke students’ daddies could buy them expensive lawyers and that they knew the right people.”

Mission Accomplished!

Mike Nifong, its vocal prosecutor, won the Democratic primary race on May 2nd. Nifong had denied any political motivation in the lacrosse prosecution (“I didn’t pick the crime, I didn’t pick the time,” he told one campaign audience), but the case plainly helped him. After the election, a precinct-by-precinct study by the Vanderbilt professor Christian Grose showed that black voters helped secure Nifong’s victory.

Excerpts of coverage of the Grose analysis are here and here.

                    

Hubris? Chutzpah!

David Corn, co-author of "Hubris", is evidently a master at typing with a straight face - here he is, commenting on the Armitage/Plame story at his blog:

White House defenders are chortling. For some reason, they believe that the news from HUBRIS that Richard Armitage was the original leaker means there was nothing to the CIA leak case.

On the National Review site, Byron York writes

Whatever Armitage's motives, the fact that he was the Novak leaker undermines--destroys, actually--the conspiracy theory of the CIA-leak case.

He notes that the Newsweek story based on HUBRIS says that Armitage had "no apparent intention of harming anyone" and comments:

It's an extraordinary admission coming from Isikoff's co-author Corn, one of the leading conspiracy theorists of the CIA-leak case. "The Plame leak in Novak's column has long been cited by Bush administration critics as a deliberate act of payback, orchestrated to punish and/or discredit Joe Wilson after he charged that the Bush administration had misled the American public about the prewar intelligence," Corn and Isikoff write. "The Armitage news does not fit neatly into that framework." [Note: Actually, I wrote those lines on my blog; they were not part of the Newsweek story.]

Conspiracy theorist--moi? Where have I proposed a conspiracy theory? I have noted from the first that the leak might be evidence of a White House crime.

"Where have I proposed a conspiracy theory?"  Where indeed?  Let's start with his July 16 2003 article that launched this scandal, with comic emphasis added:

Did senior Bush officials blow the cover of a US intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital importance to national security--and break the law--in order to strike at a Bush administration critic and intimidate others?

It sure looks that way, if conservative journalist Bob Novak can be trusted.

...

Soon after Wilson disclosed his trip in the media and made the White House look bad. the payback came. Novak's July 14, 2003, column presented the back-story on Wilson's mission and contained the following sentences: "Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate" the allegation.

Wilson caused problems for the White House, and his wife was outed as an undercover CIA officer.  Wilson says, "I will not answer questions about my wife. This is not about me and less so about my wife. It has always been about the facts underpinning the President's statement in the state of the union speech."

So he will neither confirm nor deny that his wife--who is the mother of three-year-old twins--works for the CIA. But let's assume she does. That would seem to mean that the Bush administration has screwed one of its own top-secret operatives in order to punish Wilson or to send a message to others who might challenge it.

... "Stories like this," Wilson says, "are not intended to intimidate me, since I've already told my story. But it's pretty clear it is intended to intimidate others who might come forward. You need only look at the stories of intelligence analysts who say they have been pressured. They may have kids in college, they may be vulnerable to these types of smears."

The Wilson smear was a thuggish act. Bush and his crew abused and misused intelligence to make their case for war. Now there is evidence Bushies used classified information and put the nation's counter-proliferation efforts at risk merely to settle a score. It is a sign that with this gang politics trumps national security.

Or then again, maybe it was just chit-chat.  Well, who ever could have guessed that in the heady days of 2003, when there were crimes and conspiracies to allege?

Mr. Corn's current insistence that he only alleged a possible crime is beside the point - a deliberate scheme to smear Wilson and intimidate critics could certainly be characterized as a "conspiracy" regardless of its technical criminality.

Let's close with the view of WaPo reporter Walter Pincus:

Pincus believes that the Bush administration acted obnoxiously when it leaked Valerie Plame’s identity, but he has never been convinced by the argument that the leaks violated the law. “I don’t think it was a crime,” he says. “I think it got turned into a crime by the press, by Joe” — Wilson — “by the Democrats. The New York Times kept running editorials saying that it’s got to be investigated — never thinking that it was going to turn around and bite them.” The entire Plame investigation, he says, has been a distraction from a more fundamental conversation about how the White House handled evidence before the war.

Hat tip and screen credit to Patrick Sullivan.

UPDATE:  Byron York is very funny on his attempt to discuss this with David Corn:

Corn mentioned that I had referred to him as a "conspiracy theorist" of the CIA-leak case. He didn't like that, but when I pointed to some of the stories he had written about the case — for example, his articles entitled "Rove Scandal: A Conspiracy Charge for the White House?" and "The Cheney Conspiracy?" — he declined to talk about that, too.

Although Corn and his publicist are clamming up, none dare call it a conspiracy of silence.

Beep Beep

Tim Worstall, reviewing one chapter of a forthcoming Economic Policy Institute book on Sweden, plays Wile E. Coyote; Miracle Max Sawicky plays the Road Runner.

The topic is a graph comparing incomes of the rich and poor in the United States and abroad.  Here are dueling soundbites:

Tim Worstall:

In the USA the poor get 39% of the US median income and in Finland (and Sweden) the poor get 38% of the US median income. It's not worth quibbling over 1% so let's take it as read that the poor in America have exactly the same standard of living as the poor in Finland (and Sweden). Which is really a rather revealing number don't you think? All those punitive tax rates, all that redistribution, that blessed egalitarianism, the flatter distribution of income, leads to a change in the living standards of the poor of precisely ... nothing.

Max Sawicky, slyly quoting the book:

"To the extent that these countries provide more social and economic support to their citizens than the United States, these numbers provide a somewhat incomplete comparison regarding the living standards of low-income people."

Troubling - since the book pretty clearly states that a direct comparison of after-transfers income can not be made from this chart, we have to score this one for Max.

MORE:  If I were to tackle this chapter, I would attack right here - the topic is labor market flexibility and "Euro-sclerosis" (p. 15 of 36):

Table 8.12 assesses an important claim about the causes of higher unemployment rates in some European countries; specifically, the claim by some economists that Europe’s labor market institutions—such as strong unions, high minimum wages, and generous benefits— have priced less-skilled workers out of jobs. If this were the case, one would expect the unemployment rates of less-educated workers and better-educated workers to be relatively close to one another in the United States, where relatively weak unions, low minimum wages, and poor benefits would have less of an effect on the employment prospects of less-educated workers (in other words, where compensation can fall so as to promote more jobs for the
less-skilled). Conversely, one would expect the unemployment rates of less-educated and better-educated workers to be relatively farther apart in Europe, where labor market institutions would, by conventional thinking, disproportionately hurt job creation for less-educated workers. Yet the data in Table 8.12 run completely counter to this expectation.

Is that what we would expect?  Well, we might expect that - if we figured that (a) there has not been any international migration of labor to the US that is large by European standards, (b) the welfare reform in the US did not produce an influx of unskilled workers, and (c) the current job market conditions are so new that no one here or in Europe has adjusted to them.

But who believes any of these propositions?  As part of the immigration debate, it has been widely publicized that (don't hold your breath for this) the US has been a bit of a magnet for legal and illegal unskilled immigrants.  One might expect that to push up unemployment and push down wages amongst folks at the lower end of the educational spectrum.  George Borjas says so, anyway - let me quote Krugman quoting him:

The most authoritative recent study of this effect, by George Borjas and Lawrence Katz of Harvard, estimates that U.S. high school dropouts would earn as much as 8 percent more if it weren't for Mexican immigration.

That study also noted that workers can attract capital, so it is possible that the availability of more workers simply prompts employers to scale up.  Still, if the EPI folks want to play hunches, I will play mine - welfare reform and an influx of legal and illegal unskilled workers into the US in the 90's have depressed wages and increased unemployment among the unskilled, relative to what it might otherwise have been in the flexible US labor market.

And abroad, folks have been muttering about the inability of Europe to create jobs for at least twenty years.  One might think that, in all that time, that Euros would have figured out the importance of going to college and honing the old skill set.  And if they have made that adjustment, then the ratio of college grads to high school grads will be rising in Europe compared to the US, given the relatively better employability of a high school grad in the US.

On the other hand, there are some pretty obvious caveats to that - the flexible US labor market provides plenty of low-paying jobs but also a wider range of outcomes.  If incomes (across jobs and after taxes and transfers) are more equal in Europe, the financial incentive to go to college will be reduced.  On the third hand, college may be less expensive in Europe, thus promoting attendance.

So on balance, what do we expect?  Will the proposed EPI measure of labor market flexibility - the ratio of unemployment of high school versus college grads - make any sense?  I have no idea!  But this EPI chapter is not providing enlightenment on these seemingly-obvious objections, so I am going to have to say I am utterly unconvinced by their charts and graphs telling me that Euro-sclerosis is not a problem.  A better starting point might be something simpler, like jobs created and work-force participation by country.

The WaPo Covers The Armitage Story

The WaPo gets some dish from a "former Armitage colleague at the [State] department" and rehashes the Newsweek story, giving us an excuse to engage in some unseemly gloating:

The leak of information about an undercover CIA employee that provoked a special prosecutor's investigation of senior White House officials came from then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, according to a former Armitage colleague at the department.

Armitage told newspaper columnist Robert D. Novak in the summer of 2003 that Valerie Plame, the wife of a prominent critic of the Iraq war, worked for the CIA, the colleague said. In October of that year, Armitage admitted to senior State Department officials that he had made the remark, which was based on a classified report he had read.

Let me toss in one belated "They told you so", based on this - although the report Armitage read was classified, "Armitage did not know at the time that Plame's identity was considered secret information...".

At the time when the story of the INR memo first broke, many folks were adamant that anyone reading the report had to know that the Plame info was classified.  As a reminder, here is a WSJ description of the document - their lead:

Memo Underscored Issue of Shielding Plame's Identity

By ANNE MARIE SQUEO and JOHN D. MCKINNON
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
July 19, 2005; Page A3

A classified State Department memo that may be pivotal to the CIA leak case made clear that information identifying an agent and her role in her husband's intelligence-gathering mission was sensitive and shouldn't be shared, according to a person familiar with the document.

...The memo's details are significant because they will make it harder for officials who saw the document to claim that they didn't realize the identity of the CIA officer was a sensitive matter. Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, may also be looking at whether other crimes -- such as perjury, obstruction of justice or leaking classified information -- were committed.

...The paragraph in the memo discussing Ms. Wilson's involvement in her husband's trip is marked at the beginning with a letter designation in brackets to indicate the information shouldn't be shared, according to the person familiar with the memo. Such a designation would indicate to a reader that the information was sensitive. The memo, though, doesn't specifically describe Ms. Wilson as an undercover agent, the person familiar with the memo said.

And here is a link to the memo in question, thanks to Josh Gerstein and the NY Sun.

Cecil Turner, Captain Ed, and many others were quick to draw on their own experience, or that of their readers, in handling classified documents, and made the following point (from the Captain):

In any classified document, each paragraph has to carry a label indicating the level of classification for the information contained within. Later in the article by Walter Pincus and Jim VandeHei, we find out that the paragraph contains seven sentences, and that Plame only gets mentioned in two of them. That doesn't establish that her identity was classified, although it could. It could just as easily mean that other information in the same paragraph carried that classification.

In other words, each paragraph (in this case, a block of seven sentences) carries the classification of the most classified sentence in the group.  If one of the sentences in a Top Secret paragraph notes that Albany is the capitol of New York, well, that tidbit does not become Top Secret.  Cecil Turner made the further point that no one in their right mind would ever bandy the name of a NOC about so casually - unless the person's "NOC" status was unknown to them.
If I had a truly dark and vengeful heart I would go back and hunt down examples of bloggers who mocked that argument (and the day is young!).  Evidently, it persuaded Fitzgerald and helped to get Armitage (who has surely seen one or two classified documents in his time) off the hook.

And as a reminder - based on what he has released so far, Fitzgerald can not prove that Libby was aware of Ms. Plame's classified status prior to July 14, 2003.  However, at some point after the Novak column appeared Libby was in a meeting where a CIA official warned folks about something, although it is not clear the word "classified" was used:

To support his case, Fitzgerald disclosed that at some time after Robert D. Novak's July 14, 2003, column identified Plame as a CIA "operative," Libby was part of a conversation with a CIA official and one other Cheney employee who is not identified in court papers. The CIA official discussed "the dangers posed by disclosure of the CIA affiliation of one of its employees," according to a May 12 court filing by the government.

I happen to think that, given the world-wide popularity of the CIA, there may be a danger in publicly identifying anyone as a CIA employee, covert or not.  But I am not a Special Counsel.

MORE:  Once the Sun published the actual memo, a very detailed analysis was done by some enterprising bloger who pulled out the rules on classification and a guide to acronyms and discovered the following: Per the classification rules, memos should include a "Classification Authority".  This tells archivists what department to go back to to check whether, years later, a particular documwent can be de-classified.

And just as each paragraph can have a separate security classification, each paragraph (or sentence) can have a separate classification authority.  Very logical, yes?

But here is the punchline - the *only* classification authority for the INR memo was Carl Ford, head of the INR.  Which could not have been right if the memo author wanted to communicate that Ms. Plame's identity was classified - the classifying authority for that tidbit ought to have been the CIA, since that was originally a CIA secret (and there may have come a time when the CIA would have been comfortable de-classifying that, but for an archivist to go back and ask the INR wouldn't really have been helpful, would it?)

So by that argument, only offered after the INR memo was produced, an experienced reader of the memo should have been confident that Ms. Plame's identity was not the information which made that paragraph classified.  [Just to be clear - a reader drawing that conclusion would have been wrong, since Plame's staus was in fact classified, per Fitzgerald; however, it would have been a very reasonable conclusion reflecting an error made by the drafter of the memo.]

Sorry, I can't find the link to that - it was quite ingenious, and the blogger with the original idea was a teenager (IIRC, but I am highly confident; a mere youngster, anyway [who helpfully posts as "Real Teen"; thanks, Rocco]).  Well, as noted, the day is young.  [And props to Patton, who made the same point in a comment.]

Indiana Wants Him

The NY Times has a scary front-page headline about Congressman Mike Pence, (R) of Indiana, but the story doesn't quite match up:

Star of the Right Loses His Base at the Border

By JASON DePARLE

MUNCIE, Ind. — He supports tax cuts and the war in Iraq. He opposes stem cell research and the Medicare drug plan. He is a master of his movement’s medium, talk radio. Jesus Christ is his personal savior and Ronald Reagan his political idol.

Conjure what might be called the perfect conservative, and chances are he would look a lot like Representative Mike Pence, the Indiana Republican who in just three terms has turned 100 House allies into a vanguard and himself into one of his party’s rising stars.

Or that was the case until this spring when he sought compromise in the rancorous immigration debate. His complicated plan would strengthen border security and send illegal immigrants home, but let most of them quickly return. Since then, Mr. Pence — named last year’s Man of the Year by the conservative weekly Human Events — has looked to some conservatives like this year’s Benedict Arnold. They say he has lent his conservative prestige to a form of liberal amnesty.

Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum called his plan “a sick joke.” Richard A. Viguerie, the direct-mail pioneer, threatened to punish politicians who supported it. Pat Buchanan, editor of The American Conservative, likened the betrayal to a scene from “The Godfather.”

Perpetually genial, prematurely gray, Mr. Pence, 47, said, “I was taken aback by the level of invective.”

Most of what follows is a puffer on Pence, but folks who soldier on to the last few paragraphs learn that not all of "the base" is lost:

The [immigration proposal], at best, faces an uphill fight when Congress reconvenes next week. But Tamar Jacoby, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute who sees promise in Mr. Pence’s approach, said that without him, “the issue would be dead.”

So his critics fear. Team America, a conservative political action committee, now has a feature on its Web site called “Pence Watch.” Representative Tom Tancredo, Republican of Colorado, said the plan would encourage more illegal immigration and undermine cultural cohesion. But David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, credits Mr. Pence’s “courage to think outside the box.”

And at the Times Elcetion Guide Mr. Pence is still scored as a safe-seat Republican in Indiana's Sixth District (Let's see if this link works.)

Would that all House Reps had so lost their base.

SINCE YOU ASK:  Per the Times website, the Senate races look like this:  39 safe Dems, 8 leaning Dem, 2 undecided, 4 leaning Rep, and 47 safe Rep.

Dems need to get every Dem leaner, the two undecideds, and two Rep leaners to keep Dick Cheney out of the tie-breaker and control the Senate.  TradeSport gives them roughly a 21% chance of doing so.

Over in the House, the Times prognosticators see 189 safe Dem seats, 13 leaning Dem, 14 undecided, 27 leaning Rep, and 192 safe Rep.

Since 218 is the magic number, the Dems need their safe seats, their leaners, all 14 undecideds, and 2 seats currently leaning Rep.  Tradesports bettors make that a 53% probability.

Just for perspective, a Bloomberg story yesterday gave us a vocabulary lesson from "Dem insiders":

Democratic insiders, who months ago thought their chances of winning a majority in the House were no better than even, and that the Senate was a lost cause, have become far more optimistic. Now, they say, winning the House is a lock, and the Senate is within reach.

53% is "a lock"; 21% is "within reach".  Fine; let's call the Red Sox "a sure thing" to make the playoffs.

The Secret Hold

Who is applying the "secret hold" to S. 2590, the Federal Funding  Accountability and Transparency Act?  The Washington Times and Fox News are in on the act.  From the Wash Times:

t's a sign of just how hot an issue pork-barrel spending has become that the biggest game in political Washington this summer is trying to smoke out the senator who is blocking a bill to create a searchable database of federal contracts and grants.

The bill has the support of the Bush administration and activists on widely divergent sides of the political spectrum. It also passed a Senate committee without any objections, so the unknown senator is annoying many people.

Sponsored by Sens. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, and Barack Obama, Illinois Democrat, the bill would require the administration to create a searchable Web site that would list the name and amount of any federal grant, contract or other award of money amounting to $25,000 or more.

Glenn Reynolds has been leading the charge from Porkbusters and now Josh Marshall and the TPM Muckrakers have opened fire from the opposite flank.  The scorecards as compiled by the MuckMen (and Women!) is here.

This has not yet reached the "All The News That's Fit To Print" threshold yet, but who knows?  (Actually, I am wondering whether they will discover that Richard Armitage has been tagged in the Plame investigation - nothing so far.)

What's missing is a proper betting pool  - my money would be on Robert Byrd as the secret holder, mainly because he is a traditionalist and the King of Pork.

That said, my guess is the hold will be mysteriously lifted and we will never know who placed it, or why.  The World's Greatest Deliberative Body, indeed.

There's A Shocker!

Karr's DNA does not match in the JonBenet Ramsey case.  Be still my heart.

The 'Hubris' Of Richard Armitage

Newsweek sneak previews an upcoming Isikoff/Corn book confirming the non-news that then-deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was Bob Novak's primary source for the Plame leak.  We certainly believe Armitgae was Novak's primary source for the Plame leak; the rest of his story we are taking with multiple grains of salt:

In the early morning of Oct. 1, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell received an urgent phone call from his No. 2 at the State Department. Richard Armitage was clearly agitated. As recounted in a new book, "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War" Armitage had been at home reading the newspaper and had come across a column by journalist Robert Novak. Months earlier, Novak had caused a huge stir when he revealed that Valerie Plame, wife of Iraq-war critic Joseph Wilson, was a CIA officer. Ever since, Washington had been trying to find out who leaked the information to Novak. The columnist himself had kept quiet. But now, in a second column, Novak provided a tantalizing clue: his primary source, he wrote, was a "senior administration official" who was "not a partisan gunslinger." Armitage was shaken. After reading the column, he knew immediately who the leaker was. On the phone with Powell that morning, Armitage was "in deep distress," says a source directly familiar with the conversation who asked not to be identified because of legal sensitivities. "I'm sure he's talking about me."

David Corn has more at his blog:

One mystery solved.

It was Richard Armitage, when he was deputy secretary of state in July 2003, who first disclosed to conservative columnist Robert Novak that the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson was a CIA employee.

A Newsweek article--based on the new book I cowrote with Newsweek correspondent Michael Isikoff, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War--discloses that Armitage passed this classified information to Novak during a July 8, 2003 interview. Though Armitage's role as Novak's primary source has been a subject of speculation, the case is now closed. Our sources for this are three government officials who spoke to us confidentially and who had direct knowledge of Armitage's conversation with Novak. Carl Ford Jr., who was head of the State Department's intelligence branch at the time, told us--on the record--that after Armitage testified before the grand jury investigating the leak case, he told Ford, "I'm afraid I may be the guy that caused the whole thing."

Well - one mystery solved, other mysteries unresolved.

First, let's note that the outline of Armitage's story (he had no idea he was Novak's source until he read an Oct 1 Novak column, after which he huddled with Colin Powell and the State Department counsel and then called the FBI to apprise them of his role) merits a bit of skepticism.

Keep in mind - Armitage "forgot" to tell Special Counsel Fitzgerald about his leak to Bob Woodward until after the Libby indictment in Oct 2005, even though Woodward asked him for permission to move with a story during 2004.

Can anyone think of a motive for that?  Well, by waiting until after the indictment, Armitage got a pretty good idea of the evidence gathered by Fitzgerald and the testimony provided by other reporters.  And why might he care?  *MAYBE* there were other reporters also protecting Armitage. 

Just for example, Judy Miller spent months in jail resisting her subpoena from Fitzgerald until she had assurance that Fitzgerald would only grill her about her interactions with I. Lewis Libby.  Having received that assurance, Ms. Miller then produced notebooks strongly suggesting she had discussed "Valerie Flame" with other; alas, her memory failed as to who that might have been.

However, Ms. Miller has plenty of by-lined stories with State Department sources, and both she and Mr. Armitage were members of the Aspen Institute (he is still with the Aspen Strategy Group).  Is it possible that Mr. Armitage has *still* forgotten to mention to Special Counsel Fitzgerald that he leaked to Ms. Miller?

Or from another tack - per the Newsweek story, Armitage learned about Ms. Plame from the famous INR memo, which did not mention her undercover background and named her as Valerie Wilson.

But Armitages's biography strongly suggest an intel background, so it seems fair to guess he had contacts in the intel community.

And by uncanny coincidence, Robert Grenier, a top CIA official who was heading the Iraq Issue group at the time, had a chat with Lewis Libby.  This is from the indictment:

7. On or about June 11, 2003, LIBBY spoke with a senior officer of the CIA [later revealed to be Grenier] to ask about the origin and circumstances of Wilson's trip, and was advised by the CIA officer that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and was believed to be responsible for sending Wilson on the trip.

I don't think that Grenier was relying on the INR memo for the news that "Wilson's wife... was believed to be responsible for sending Wilson on the trip".  But I do think that Grenier, as a top CIA guy, was a bureaucratically appropriate contact for a chap like Armitage.  As a bonus, since he had been with the CIA forever I bet that Grenier met Ms. Plame back when she *was* Ms. Plame, and remembered her by that name rather than her more recent married name.

Just speculation, of course.  But I bet that the Armitage story on display here is only the first fallback - at no other point in this story has he been candid or forthcoming about his role and I doubt he was in October 2003 (did he mention his Woodward chat to Powell, and did Powell urge a cover-up of that?  I doubt it.)

Last bit of speculation - if (I say *IF*) the "Plame" name came to Novak via Armitage and Grenier, where did "Operative" come from in Novak's famous column?

Good question, and let me ask another - where did Andrea Mitchell get "operative" in her July 8, 2003 report?  She attributes it to CIA sources in a story about who might get blamed for allowing the "16 Words" into the State of the union address:

MITCHELL: Well, people at the CIA say that it's not going to be George Tenet; and, in fact, that high-level people at the CIA did not really know that it was false, never even looked at Joe Wilson's verbal report or notes from that report, didn't even know that it was he who had made this report, because he was sent over by some of the covert operatives in the CIA at a very low level, not, in fact, tasked by the vice president.

That jibes with Tenet's official statement a few days later:

In an effort to inquire about certain reports involving Niger, CIA's counter-proliferation experts, on their own initiative, asked an individual with ties to the region to make a visit to see what he could learn.

Emphasis added, or, in other words, don't blame us top guys for that Wilson trip - we had no idea what the underlings were up to.

So where did "operative" come from?  Andrea Mitchell cites CIA sources, and her report certainly reads like high level CYA from the CIA.  Reuters had something similar the same day:

A U.S. intelligence official said [Joseph] Wilson was sent to investigate the Niger reports by mid-level CIA officers, not by top-level Bush administration officials. There is no record of his report being flagged to top level officials, the intelligence official said.

Was Reuter's "intelligence official" with the CIA, as per Andrea Mitchell, or did Reuters have a different source?  Did Novak share a source with Andrea Mitchell, or catch her on the news, or via Lexis?  My impression is that reporters are not avid users of footnotes.

Well.  Bob Novak has not convinced us yet, although his latest story was that he got the "Plame" name from Who's Who.  Maybe Armitage will have some answers.

MORE:  Links to follow, sorry.  And I want to rattle on about the One x Two x Six link eventually.

BUTTER WOULDN'T MELT IN HIS MOUTH: I love this from David Corn:

When Armitage testified before the Iran-contra grand jury many years earlier, he had described himself as "a terrible gossip." Iran-contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh subsequently accused him of providing "false testimony" to investigators but said that he could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Armitage's misstatements had been "deliberate."

I believe Armitage leaked to Novak, all right; I just don't believe a whole lot else about his story.

I NEED SOME HELP HERE:  David Corn tries to rationalize the notion that the Armitage leak reflects White House machinations.  OK, it is a stretch, but I think he also advances his case by making stuff up:

The Armitage leak was not directly a part of the White House's fierce anti-Wilson crusade. But as Hubris notes, it was, in a way, linked to the White House effort, for Amitage had been sent a key memo about Wilson's trip that referred to his wife and her CIA connection, and this memo had been written, according to special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, at the request of I. Lewis Scooter Libby, the vice president's chief of staff. Libby had asked for the memo because he was looking to protect his boss from the mounting criticism that Bush and Cheney had misrepresented the WMD intelligence to garner public support for the invasion of Iraq.

The memo included information on Valerie Wilson's role in a meeting at the CIA that led to her husband's trip. This critical memo was--as Hubris discloses--based on notes that were not accurate. (You're going to have to read the book for more on this.) But because of Libby's request, a memo did circulate among State Department officials, including Armitage, that briefly mentioned Wilson's wife.

Is Corn trying to tell us that there are *two* memos, the one requested by Libby and the famous INR memo (.pdf) that circulated within State?

And what does Corn mean by "this memo had been written, according to special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, at the request of I. Lewis Scooter Libby"?  What is the source for that?  Per the indictment, Libby was advised orally about the memo, but apparently did not get a copy:

6. On or about June 11 or 12, 2003, the Under Secretary of State orally advised LIBBY in the White House that, in sum and substance, Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and that State Department personnel were saying that Wilson's wife was involved in the planning of his trip.

And although that was in the indictment, Libby disputed (p. 5 of 29) that the conversation occurred:

During his grand jury appearances, Mr. Libby testified that he did not recall any conversations with Mr. Grossman about Mr. Wilson’s wife. The defense is absolutely entitled to investigate whether the conversation alleged by Mr. Grossman actually occurred and to test Mr. Grossman’s memory and credibility about what he did or did not say to Mr. Libby at trial. Like every fact alleged in the indictment, the facts surrounding Mr. Grossman’s alleged conversation with Mr. Libby have not yet been established – they are in dispute.

Surely if the prosecution had a memo addressed to Libby on this topic, the defense would not be going down this road.  What am I missing here, or what is Corn going on about?  [TS9 opines that Corn is telling us that Marc Grossman of State asked for a memo because he needed answers for Libby; that is 'almost' like Libby asking for a memo, then, right?  Uh huh.

Let's summarize - Libby asked a lot of questions, thereby triggering a leak from Armitage.  Hmm, why not blame the inquiring press, or Joe Wilson himself for chatting with Pincus and Kristof?  Seems like there were lots of folks other than Libby that set Armitage in motion.]

KEEP HOPE ALIVE!  Corn is pretty funny here:

The outing of Armitage does change the contours of the leak case. The initial leaker was not plotting vengeance. He and Powell had not been gung-ho supporters of the war. Yet Bush backers cannot claim the leak was merely an innocent slip. Rove confirmed the classified information to Novak and then leaked it himself as part of an effort to undermine a White House critic.

"Rove confirmed the classified information to Novak"!  Well, yes, but did he know it was classified?  If so, how did he learn that?  C'mon, it's over - if Corn or Fitzgerald had any evidence that Rove knew of Ms. Plame's classified status, we would have heard it by now.

LET'S ASK AGAIN: Can Armitage keep his seat on McCain's Straight Talk Express?  Clarice Feldman notes that Sir Richard Armitage kept quiet and protected his own sorry situation while the Special Counsel probed hither and yon for two years.  Armitage could have let a lot of air out of the political balloon a long time ago.

Bob Novak was right on "Meet The Press" today when he said that "I believe that the time has way passed for my source to identify himself".

WHAT DID COLIN POWELL KNOW and when did he know it?  One of the requests by the Libby defense team (p. 19 of 39) was for

Any notes from the September 2003 meeting in the Situation Room at which Colin Powell is reported to have said that (a) everyone knows that Mr. Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA and that (b) it was Mr. Wilson’s wife who suggested that the CIA send her husband on a mission to Niger.

September still precedes October, yes?  And Colin Powell was asking about the Plame question in the Situation Room, if this is accurate.  But he never asked Armitage about her before October 1?

Or if Powell did discuss the Plame leak with Armitage, what did Armitage tell him, back in September before his memory was jogged?

Let me hat tip TS9 for a very good question.  Now, IIRC, the prosecution had no notes that were responsive to this request, but I welcome clarification and a memory jog of my own.

BYRON YORK WONDERS WHAT AN "AGGRESSIVE" INVESTIGATION LOOKS LIKE:

And Fitzgerald "aggressively investigated" Armitage?  Did he have the Armitage calendars from June 2003, recently obtained via the Freedom of Information Act by the Associated Press, showing that Armitage had met with Bob Woodward during that time?  If so, why was the aggressive investigator surprised when Woodward came forward to reveal that he, too, had been told about Plame?

Prospective New House Chairman

The NY Times looks at the roster of Democrats who would chair the various House committees *if* the Dems reclaim the House this November and follow their past practice of elevating members on the basis of seniority.  After noting the Dems that scare Republicans, they eventually get to He Who Must Not be Named, the Dem that scares even the Dems (Spoiler - it is Alcee Hastings of Florida, who would chair, no kidding, Intelligence).  Here is the second paragraph:

In fund-raising appeals, on the Internet and in stump speeches, Republicans raise the specter of a Judiciary Committee headed by Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, a banking committee steered by Barney Frank of Massachusetts, a tax-writing committee led by Charles B. Rangel of New York, and an energy panel under the leadership of John D. Dingell of Michigan.

Alcee finally appears in paragraph sixteen:

Other positions are more problematic. At the Intelligence Committee, Representative Alcee L. Hastings of Florida, who was removed from the federal bench in the 1980’s, is in line to take over, although that decision would be the responsibility of Ms. Pelosi and could prove explosive.

"Removed from the federal bench"?  He was impeached by the House for corruption and perjury and "became only the sixth Judge in the history of impeachment in the United States to be removed from office by the United States Senate."  However, the good people of the great state of Florida have sent him to Washington, so here we are.

And what is happening to Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat who gained national prominence when the NSA warrantless wiretapping story broke?  Per the operation of term limits within the Democratic Caucus, she is slated to be moved aside as ranking Dem in favor of Alcee (she is also in a primary tussle).  Steve Clemons attributes this to internal Dem politicking by Nancy Pelosi and the Congressional Black Caucus.

Paragraph seventeen gives us a whiff of the Conyers problem:

And some Democrats are nervous about the prospect of a Judiciary Committee led by Mr. Conyers, who has raised the prospect of impeaching President Bush, a notion that Ms. Pelosi has sought to bat down.

Not only has Ms. Pelosi sought to bat it down, but someone has exhorted Mr. Conyers to clean up his campaign website - the "Before", currently available in Google-cache, highlights the prospect of a Bush impeachment on the main page; the "After" has been revised to soft-pedal that goal.

At this point, Tradesports has the Reps with a 47% probability of retaining control of the House; the Iowa Electronic Markets seem to be at 54%.  Anyone who can explain that apparent gap, feel free (and if I am reading on of these two sites backwards, well, it's a weekend in the summertime...)

MORE:  My favorite Conyers moment came when he and Rep. Louise Slaughter bit on a Daily Kos misdirection play and put out a press release alerting the world that "reporter" Jeff Gannon/James Guckert had special access to the CIA / Plame scoop.

The Times believed the Kos Crowd as well, but eventually got to the truth - Guckert had simply been reading the Wall Street Journal.  Guckert eventually as much as said so in a Times interview:

Mr. Guckert denied seeing a Central Intelligence Agency memorandum disclosing the identity of Valerie Plame, a C.I.A. operative, even though he had strongly insinuated as much in an interview with her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, the transcript of which he posted on the Internet.

Mr. Guckert's phrasing in that interview so strongly suggested he had seen the classified memorandum that it brought F.B.I. officials to his house as part of the Plame leak investigation, he said. But he said referring to the memorandum as though he had seen it was merely an interview technique. ''What I said was no more than what was reported in The Wall Street Journal a week before,'' he said.

Having Fun Now...

Ve haf vays of making you talk... about books.

Nothing New Under The Sun

Although the Times front-paged a new embryonic stem-cell technique yesterday as a breakthrough, the President's Council on bioethics had already considered, in detail the merits of such an approach for a White Paper delivered in May 2005.  See Section II titled "II. Pluripotent Stem Cells via Blastomere Extraction from Living Embryos".

They cover objections I had not even imagined  - here they are on the fruits of the poisoned tree question:

If embryo biopsy is to be embraced as a morally uncontroversial way to derive stem cells, the research needed to test the proposal and perfect the technique would have to avoid killing or harming human embryos. It is far from clear that the necessary research can be accomplished with this restriction in place. Even if a perfected technique could someday derive stem cells from single blastomeres harmlessly obtained, the failure to satisfy this testing-stage ethical requirement could render this option ethically little better than the currently controversial methods for deriving embryonic stem cells.

I would say that the research before us came nowhere near being morally uncontroversial, since it relied on the destruction of embryos (they had to destroy the embryo in order to save it...)

The Corner has more - Mona Charen quotes Robby George on the latest research result:

First, the study did not involve the removal of one cell from an embryo that then continued to develop. Instead, researchers disaggregated 16 living embryos, killing them all, and took an average of six cells from each. The 91 resulting embryonic cells were then placed near one another in dishes and allowed to divide. Some divided, while others died, and from the cells that divided researchers were able to produce two lines of embryonic stem cells. In other words, this study does essentially nothing to prove the point that Advanced Cell Technology (the company that carried out the experiments) has argued in the press: that single cells removed from an early embryo and cultured by themselves can produce lines of embryonic stem cells.

Well, the study demonstrated part of the concept, apparently.

Here is an NRO editorial:

A third paper, about a different method of producing stem cells, leaves important ethical concerns unmet and would not result in stem cells genetically matched to anyone.

My question - having had a moment to reflect, do folks think this is the sort of breakthrough that will either be acceptable to President Bush, or induce enough Republican defections that a Presidential veto (of subsequent legislation) could be overidden?

And another question - where is the righty blogospheric buzz on this?  Or has the end of summer caught up with us all?

Here is a quick poll:

(1)  Did you support/oppose Bush's 2001 ban on Federal financing of research except for apoproved stem-cell lines?

(2)  Did you support/oppose Bush's 2006 veto of a bill expanding the opportunities for federal financing?  (FWIW, that bill obviously had Republican support).

(3) Does this latest research change your position?

Comments and trackbacks are open (unlike, for example, my mind...).

UPDATE:  This MSNBC article by Arthur Caplan, Ph.D. is clear and cogent:

First, it is not at all certain that the cells grown from embryos at the eight-cell stage of development are exactly the same and just as potent as those taken from a two-day old embryo. If not, they won’t be as useful to medical researchers.

Second, in pulling off a cell this early in embryonic development, some critics of research on embryos are going to oppose Lanza’s idea either because you are putting an embryo at risk or because it is still possible that twinning could have occurred and so each of the blastomere cells need to be treated as potential people and thus not destroyed.

Hilzoy was also clear and cogent on one of the ethical issues, namely, the prospective "viability" of the single blastomere.

Chris Shays: Time To Cut And Run

Chris Shays, the notional R from CT, updates his view on Iraq:

Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), once an ardent supporter of the war in Iraq, said yesterday that the Bush administration should set a time frame for withdrawing U.S. troops. He added that most of the withdrawal could take place next year.

Shays, who faces a tough reelection campaign because of his previous support for President Bush's war policies, made his comments after completing his 14th trip to Iraq this week.

He said he found a "noticeable lack of political will" among Iraqis "to move in what I would call a timely fashion" and concluded that Iraqi officials would act with greater urgency if the United States this fall set a timetable for withdrawal.

"My view is that it may be that the only way we are able to encourage some political will on the part of Iraqis is to have a timeline for troop withdrawal," Shays said from London in a conference call with reporters. "A timeline of when the bulk of heavy lifting is in the hands of the Iraqis."

This is not new news - here is the WaPo from Aug 19:

Reflecting these pressures, Republicans in swing districts are beginning to waver. In an interview from Israel yesterday, Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) said the political will of the United States is being stretched to the limit. He promised to offer a time frame for troop withdrawals when he returns next week from his 14th trip to Iraq.

"We have got to find a way to come to some kind of consensus, so we can do what's right for our country and what's right for the Iraqis," said Shays, an ardent supporter of the war who is in a political dogfight with his antiwar Democratic opponent. "We have to say 'This is the latest we will leave' and be able to live with that."

Shays plans to hold three hearings next month to explore whether Iraq is heading toward democracy or civil war, a state parts of the country are already in, he said. "I am more pessimistic, clearly," he said.

Well, Chris Shays is not exactly a hero to conservatives - surely folks remember that the mcCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill was also known (to Chris Shays, anyway) as "Shays-Meehan".

And of course Shays was one of the few House Reps to vote against the impeachment of Bill Clinton.  But that is water under the bridge - I thought he was pretty good on his sub-committee, and he took an interest in the Oil for Food probe.

I probably ought to have a point, or at least a Big Finish.  Actually, about the only reason I care is that, for reasons of personal geography, Shays is My Guy in the race against Dem Diane Farrell.  And the Shays-Farrell race is one of the races the Dems have targetted in an attempt to reclaim the House, so maybe the rest of you ought to care, too.

The Times On The Duke Debacle

The NY Times gains access to the prosecutor's file in the Duke lacrosse case.  The Times acknowledges the possibility that we are looking at fraud by the Durham police and DA, but tell us this:

Whether the woman was in fact raped is the question at the center of a case that has become a national cause célèbre, yet another painful chapter in the tangled American opera of race, sex and privilege. Defense lawyers, amplified by Duke alumni and a group of bloggers who have closely followed the case, have portrayed it as a national scandal — that there is only the flimsiest physical evidence of rape, that the accuser is an unstable fabricator, and that Mr. Nifong, in the middle of a tight primary campaign, was summoning racial ghosts for political gain.

By disclosing pieces of evidence favorable to the defendants, the defense has created an image of a case heading for the rocks. But an examination of the entire 1,850 pages of evidence gathered by the prosecution in the four months after the accusation yields a more ambiguous picture. It shows that while there are big weaknesses in Mr. Nifong’s case, there is also a body of evidence to support his decision to take the matter to a jury.

Crucial to that portrait of the case are Sergeant Gottlieb’s 33 pages of typed notes and 3 pages of handwritten notes, which have not previously been revealed. His file was delivered to the defense on July 17, making it the last of three batches of investigators’ notes, medical reports, statements and other evidence shared with the defense under North Carolina’s pretrial discovery rules.

Emphasis added.

In several important areas, the full files, reviewed by The New York Times, contain evidence stronger than that highlighted by the defense:

Defense lawyers have argued that the written medical reports do not support the charge of rape. But in addition to the nurse’s oral description of injuries consistent with the allegation, Sergeant Gottlieb writes that the accuser appeared to be in extreme pain when he interviewed her two and a half days after the incident, and that signs of bruises emerged then as well.

The defense has argued that the accuser gave many divergent versions of events that night, and she did in fact give differing accounts of who did what at the party. But the files show that aside from two brief early conversations with the police, she gave largely consistent accounts of being raped by three men in a bathroom.

As recounted in one investigator’s notes, one of the indicted players does not match the accuser’s initial physical descriptions of her attackers: she said all three were chubby or heavyset, but one is tall and skinny. In Sergeant Gottlieb’s version of the same conversation, however, her descriptions closely correspond to the defendants.

Let's just cut to the details of those physical descriptions:

The accounts of this accuser’s first description of the suspects, however, are ambiguous: the two investigators who interviewed her at home recorded the conversation differently.

In Officer Himan’s handwritten notes, the woman described all three as chubby or heavy. Adam: “white male, short, red cheeks fluffy hair chubby face, brn.” Matt: “Heavy set short haircut 260-270.” Bret: “Chubby.” The descriptions in Sergeant Gottlieb’s notes are more detailed and correspond more closely to the men later arrested: Collin Finnerty, 20, a slender 6-foot-3 and 175 pounds with light hair; Mr. Evans, 23, 5-foot-10, 190 pounds and with dark hair; and Mr. Seligmann, 20, who is 6-foot-1 and 215 pounds with dark hair.

Sergeant Gottlieb wrote: “She described the three men as 1) W/M, young, blonde hair, baby faced, tall and lean, 2) W/M, medium height (5’8”+ with Himan’s build), dark hair medium build, and had red (rose colored) cheeks, and the third suspect as being a W/M, 6+ feet, large build with dark hair.”

The difference in the police accounts could not be explained.

No, that difference in descriptions could not be explained - alcohol, flexeril, other drugs, and/or rape trauma had left the woman so confused that she appeared to be intoxicated shortly after the alleged rape, yet she was able to deliver three detailed descriptions strangely audible to only one of the two investigators.  One defense attorney took a stab at an explanation:

The sergeant’s notes are drawing intense scrutiny from defense lawyers both because they appear to strengthen Mr. Nifong’s case and because they were not turned over by the prosecution until after the defense had made much of the gaps in the earlier evidence.

Joseph B. Cheshire, a lawyer for David Evans, one of the defendants, called Sergeant Gottlieb’s report a “make-up document.” He said Sergeant Gottlieb had told defense lawyers that he took few handwritten notes, relying instead on his memory and other officers’ notes to write entries in his chronological report of the investigation.

Mr. Cheshire said the sergeant’s report was “transparently written to try to make up for holes in the prosecution’s case.” He added, “It smacks of almost desperation.”

Sergeant Gottlieb did not return phone calls yesterday seeking comment.

Who knows?  But let's come back to this bit:

Sergeant Gottlieb writes that the accuser appeared to be in extreme pain when he interviewed her two and a half days after the incident, and that signs of bruises emerged then as well.

Here is a bit more detail on her appearance of extreme pain:

The next day, March 16, Sergeant Gottlieb and the lead investigator under his supervision, Officer Benjamin W. Himan, went to the woman’s house.

“The victim was at home alone with her two young children,” the sergeant wrote, noting she walked slowly and in obvious pain. “Her facial expressions conveyed her pain as she ambulated.” She sat so neither hip touched the sofa. “Anytime her bottom touched the sofa cushion while repositioning during our interview, she groaned and had a facial expression consistent with pain.”

During that interview, the woman, who is dark skinned, said bruises were beginning to show from the attack. A female officer took photographs and confirmed that “she had the onset of new bruises present,” Sergeant Gottlieb wrote. (The female officer’s report does not mention bruises.)

Let's flashback for a bit of history - does this ring a bell?

On Tuesday, December 1, 1987, Ms. Brawley was examined by a gynecologist from a nearby city. Before her examination, Ms. Brawley's aunt informed the doctor that her niece was unable to walk or talk. The physical examination was restricted because Ms. Brawley "appeared to be in pain," according to the gynecologist's testimony. She grimaced when the gynecologist attempted to move her head, appeared to be in pain when attempting to position herself in the stirrups and would not cooperate with the cervical examination because of the pain. However, the gynecologist did not observe any black or blue marks or swelling on Ms. Brawley's legs and found no physical reason for her inability to walk. The gynecologist also concluded that Ms. Brawley did not have any gynecological problem, and there was no need to admit her to a hospital as a gynecological patient.

Faking it?  No!

One bit of evidence in this story that was new to me (but not to others) was this:

The police recovered semen from beside the toilet — about the same spot where the woman said she had spat out semen from someone who orally raped her. It matched the DNA of Matt Zash, a team captain who lived in the house and has not been charged. His lawyer said the semen had come from other, innocent sexual activity.

Investigators also found a towel in the hallway near Mr. Evans’s bedroom with semen matching his DNA. The woman had told the sexual assault nurse that someone had wiped her vagina with a rag. Mr. Evans’s lawyer said that this towel had nothing to do with her accusation, and that the semen came from other activity.

The News Observer had this:

Another specimen matched to Evans was recovered from a towel found in a hallway near Evans' room and the second bathroom in the house. The towel also contained DNA from another person, and SBI testing has conclusively determined that the second specimen did not match the accuser or the 46 members of the lacrosse team who submitted DNA samples, Sutton said.

"It seems to me that the state of North Carolina has spent thousands of dollars to prove that a young college man's DNA is in his house," said Brad Bannon, one of Evans' attorneys.

This Times story has not exactly left me wondering if maybe there is a real case here; I wonder if Dan Abrams and Greta van Susteren have changed their minds?

UPDATE:  Jeralyn Merritt is not impressed by the Times effort either.

White House - New Embryonic Stem Cell Technique "Certainly Encouraging"

The NY Times reports on a new technique for creating embryonic stem cells without destroying the embryo (but see "WAIT A MINUTE" below):

Biologists have developed a technique for establishing colonies of human embryonic stem cells from an early human embryo without destroying it. This method, if confirmed in other laboratories, would seem to remove the principal objection to the research.

It could also redirect and intensify the emotional political debate over current limits on federal financing for research on human embryonic stem cells, which give rise to the cells and tissues of the body and which scientists and patient advocate groups see as a potential source for treatments for diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and diabetes.

But the new method, reported yesterday by researchers at Advanced Cell Technology on the Web site of the journal Nature, had little immediate effect on longstanding objections of the White House and some Congressional leaders yesterday. It also brought objections from critics who warned of possible risk to the embryo and the in vitro fertilization procedure itself, in which embryos are generated from a couple’s egg and sperm.

The new technique would be performed on a two-day-old embryo, after the fertilized egg has divided into eight cells, known as blastomeres. In fertility clinics, where the embryo is available outside the woman in the normal course of in vitro fertilization, one of these blastomeres can be removed for diagnostic tests, like for Down syndrome.

The embryo, now with seven cells, can be implanted in the woman if no defect is found. Many such embryos have grown into apparently healthy babies over the 10 years or so the diagnostic tests have been used.

Up to now, human embryonic stem cells have been derived at a later stage of development, when the embryo consists of about 150 cells. Both this stage, called the blastocyst, and the earlier eight-cell stage, occur before the embryo implants in the wall of the womb. Harvesting the blastocyst-stage cells kills the embryo, a principal objection of those who oppose the research.

“There is no rational reason left to oppose this research,” Dr. Robert Lanza, vice president of Advanced Cell Technology and leader of the research team, said in an interview.

Here is the Advanced Cell Technology website, with their press release.

So what is the objection? 

Congressional Republicans who led the resistance to the embryonic stem cell legislation that had bipartisan support in the House and Senate also said the new technique did not ease their opposition. Brian Hart, a spokesman for Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas and a prominent opponent of federal financing for embryonic stem cell research, said Mr. Brownback’s moral objection remained.

“You are creating a twin and then killing that twin,” Mr. Hart said.

Dr. Lanza said, however, that twinning is a phenomenon that occurs at a later stage of embryonic development and that there was no evidence that a single blastomere could develop into a person.

Troubling.  As a practical matter, I seriously doubt whether either Mr. Hart or Dr. Lanza have performed the experiments that would determine the circumstances under which a single human blastomere might be viable; furthermore, since such an attempt would arguably be an attempt at human cloning, I do not anticipate such experimentation on human embryos.

However!  Researchers have apparently studied this sort of thing with mice.  I do not claim to have the expertise to evaluate this research paper, but the title certainly suggests that there are scenarios under which a single mouse blastomere can go on to become a viable embryo and then mouse:

Identical triplets and twins developed from isolated blastomeres of 8- and 16-cell mouse embryos supported with tetraploid blastomeres

Well.  I have no doubt that there will be ardent pro-lifers who will object to this new procedure.  However, the real political question is, how may fence-sitters and straddlers will accept this new approach (assuming it pans out) as an ethically acceptable compromise?

My guess is that President Bush will have a difficult time opposing this.  Here is the money quote from his August 2001 address announcing his stem cell compromise:

I have concluded that we should allow federal funds to be used for research on these existing stem cell lines, where the life and death decision has already been made.

Leading scientists tell me research on these 60 lines has great promise that could lead to breakthrough therapies and cures.  This allows us to explore the promise and potential of stem cell research without crossing a fundamental moral line, by providing taxpayer funding that would sanction or encourage further destruction of human embryos that have at least the potential for life.

Or here is Bush in his recent veto message of a stem cell bill:

This bill would support the taking of innocent human life in the hope of finding medical benefits for others.

I think people understood that guideline, whether they embraced it or not.  However, an  argument about whether a single blastomere represents a new and independent "life" at the moment it is separated (see cool pic) is awfully abstract; the inescapable fact is that the embryos Bush committed to protect remain viable under this procedure.

And what is the White House position?  Nicholas Wade of the Times did find, on a lazy day in late August, a White House B-teamer high-achiever (Clemson '02) who was willing to tread water but no more:

But Emily Lawrimore, a White House spokeswoman, suggested that the new procedure would not satisfy the objections of Mr. Bush, who vetoed legislation in July that would have expanded federally financed embryonic stem cell research. Though Ms. Lawrimore called it encouraging that scientists were moving away from destroying embryos, she said: “Any use of human embryos for research purposes raises serious ethical questions. This technique does not resolve those concerns.”

However, in a Thursday press gaggle another second-stringer was more positive:

Q    Any decision to perhaps revisit the President's position on federal funding for stem cell research, in light of this new development that was published yesterday in the journal Nature?

MS. PERINO:  Hold on a second, Roz.  The President is the first President to ever provide federal funding for stem cell research.  Yes, he drew a line, an ethical line, in terms of taxpayer dollars to spend money on research that would use the destruction of a human embryo.  He has been an aggressive supporter of other forms of stem cell research like adult stem cell and cord blood research.

This study today reported in Nature Magazine has not been reviewed by scientists and bio-ethicists yet, but it is one that the President believes deserves a good look. He is encouraged that there are scientists who are continuing to look for innovative ways to do stem cell research that would not involve the destruction of embryos.  And so he is going to listen to folks after they have a chance to review the study, but it does hold some promise that they would be able to do that type of research without destruction of a human embryo.

Q    -- this before the President makes any decision, he needs to see what the entire community thinks about this particular development?

MS. PERINO:  Well, I think it would not be prudent for anyone to make a snap decision about a major policy before being able to actually read a report. So let's give it some time, but it's certainly encouraging.

I have no doubt there will be folks urging the President to oppose this procedure, but in my view his primary objection has been satisfied.  I hereby call upon the President to fold up like a cheap suitcase stand by his commitment to the protection of embryos while promoting the advancement of science by removing the obstacles to Federal funding of stem cell research using this technique.  (Shorter - can I get off the bus now?)

I do find Leon Kass to be annoying:

Dr. Leon Kass, former chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, said, “I do not think that this is the sought-for, morally unproblematic and practically useful approach we need.”

Gee, it's not perfect - I agree, and thanks for sharing.  Yes, we may be skating near some line relevant to human cloning, but I don't think we are any near to crossing that line.  Of course and as noted, I am hardly an expert, but I am a voter.

Amongst Bush supporters, Captain Ed and Hugh Hewitt seem to be supportive of this new research.  That said, they were both looking at a Times of London article that was much lighter in its coverage of the opposing view.

[Hilzoy is clear and succinct, for folks interested in alternaive writing styles].

CUI BONO:  Advanced Cell Technology announced this on August 23; on August 22, they announced that they were raising $11 million, with terms yet to be negotiated.  Certainly the research paper was peer-reviewed, certainly they have an obligation to announce material events, and certainly it makes sense to time a fundraising to follow good news.  Consequently, I am not making a big deal out of this - but I bet others will! 

And really, it is worth keeping in mind, as one reads the quotes from Dr. Lanza telling us the path of stem cell research has been cleared, that he has a financial stake in seeing this technique embraced by Congress:

“Our policy will be to work together with the scientific community to make new lines widely available for research,” stated William M. Caldwell IV, CEO of ACT. “Our ability to create human embryonic cell lines and therapies without harming the embryo should assuage the ethical concerns of many Americans. We look forward to potentially working with partners to produce significant medical benefit through the use of this technique.”

I'm a big fan of the private sector, but that does not mean I believe everything they tell me.

WAIT A MINUTE:  With props to a couple of commenters, I am wondering of the Times reported the answer to the wrong question:

The embryo, now with seven cells, can be implanted in the woman if no defect is found. Many such embryos have grown into apparently healthy babies over the 10 years or so the diagnostic tests have been used.

Good to know, but... do all the embryos subjected to this test actually survive it?  Mightn't it be the case that an In Vitro Fertilization clinc tests, for example, five embryos with the idea that three will survive the test procedure and two will test as disease free and be suitable for implanation?

I don't know the answer, but I am confident it is a godd question.  Based on eMedicine or Wikipedia, the test itself certainly sounds medically stressful to the embryo.  From eMedicine:

The removal of the blastomere is a technically challenging procedure. The embryologist's goal, accomplished using a special microscope and micromanipulators, is to remove an intact cell with minimal trauma to the remaining embryo (see Image 3).

For a couple at high risk of conceiving a child with chromsomal disorders, ethicists could balance the potential loss of an embryo at the testing stage against the likelihood of a later miscarriage.  And (per a different article), only about 20% of these implanted embryos result in a pregnancy anyway.

But telling me that embryos that survive the testing procedure can grow up to be normal humans is not quite answering the question George Bush will want to put on the table.  And does anyone think that embryos will show a 100% survival rate for this testing procedure?

Groan.

STILL MORE:  Here is the number I was looking for, which we all knew would not be zero:

What are the risks and limitations of PGD?

The risks of PGD include damage to the embryo during the biopsy procedure. Embryo damage is an “all or none” phenomena. If an embryo is damaged, it will stop growing. Embryos that continue to grow after the biopsy do not become abnormal as a result of the biopsy. The risk of embryo damage at our center is currently 0.9%

Over 99% of embryos survive the testing process.  I'll bet that works for the public at large, but the hard-liners will hang their hat right here on the point that the testing is life-threatening, or anyway, embryo-threatening.

NOW THEY TELL ME:  The WaPo was better at identifying the problem areas (emphasis added:

Although the safety of the cell-removal process is still under study, there is no evidence that the procedure puts embryos at significant risk or that babies born from such "biopsied" embryos are abnormal in any way.

Or a bit later:

But some experts raised more daunting concerns. Several questioned whether using an embryo's single biopsied cell for stem cell cultivation before doing the genetic testing -- a kind of testing that always destroys the cell, so it cannot be done first -- might put that cell at risk of dying before the crucial gene test is done.

The assumption seems to be that the isolation of a single blastomere would not be performed for its own sake - instead, one blastomere woul dbe isolated, then encouraged to reproduce, after which a the relevant genetic test could be performed on just one cell of the stem cell line.  OK, but that would require a pretty high conversion rate - if, for example, only two-thirds of the isolated blastomeres grow successfully, then one-third of the time that test can not be performed.

The WaPo has this on the viability of the blastomere:

Others expressed concern that the single cell removed from an eight-cell embryo might, under certain conditions, itself be capable of becoming an embryo and eventually a baby. If so, the destruction of the cell might violate the president's insistence that scientists not take what some consider a life to save a life.

Experiments have shown that some mammals can develop from a single cell taken from a four-cell embryo. But several scientists yesterday said no mammal has ever been grown from a single cell taken from an eight-cell embryo -- a more advanced stage of development in which each cell has already become somewhat specialized.

The LA Times also identifies the "safety of testing" issue:

Critics are already saying that the new technique falls short. They said the method injured nascent embryos, and they questioned whether the cell that's removed could itself develop into an embryo.

Ann Althouse Thumps The NSA Opinion

Ann Althouse has a guest piece in the NY Times walloping the District Court opinion declaring the NSA warrantless surveillance program to be illegal:

So often, we’ve heard complaints about “activist” judges. They’re suspected of deciding what outcome they want, based on their own personal or ideological preferences, and then writing a legalistic, neutral-sounding opinion to cover up what they’ve done. That carefully composed legal opinion makes it somewhat hard for a judge’s critics to convince people — especially anyone who likes the outcome — that the judge did not decide the case according to an unbiased legal method of analysis.

So perhaps the oddest thing about Judge Taylor’s opinion in the eavesdropping case is that she didn’t bother to come up with the verbiage that normally cushions us from these suspicions.

...For those who approve of the outcome , the judge’s opinion is counterproductive. It will be harder to defend upon appeal than a more careful decision. It suggests that there are no good legal arguments against the program, just petulance and outrage and antipathy toward President Bush. It helps those who have been arguing for years about result-oriented, activist judges.

With friendly judges like this, maybe libs would benefit from a few more Bush judicial appointments.

Anyway - this Althouse piece marks a quick Times climbdown from the Times editorial mocked so effectively by James Taranto:

Two Papers in One!--III

"With a careful, thoroughly grounded opinion, one judge in Michigan has done what 535 members of Congress have so abysmally failed to do. She has reasserted the rule of law over a lawless administration."--editorial,     New York Times, Aug. 18

"Even legal experts who agreed with a federal judge's conclusion on Thursday that a National Security Agency surveillance program is unlawful were distancing themselves from the decision's reasoning and rhetoric yesterday. They said the opinion overlooked important precedents, failed to engage the government's major arguments, used circular reasoning, substituted passion for analysis and did not even offer the best reasons for its own conclusions. Discomfort with the quality of the decision is almost universal, said Howard J. Bashman . . ."--news story, New York Times, Aug. 19

COMPOUNDING THE CLOWN SHOW:  Gee, the judge is a trustee for an organization that is a big contributer to the ACLU, in whose favor she ruled?

According to her 2003 and 2004 financial disclosure statements, Judge Diggs Taylor served as Secretary and Trustee for the Community Foundation for Southeastern Michigan (CFSEM).  She was reelected to this position in June 2005.  The official CFSEM website states that the foundation made a “recent grant” of $45,000 over two years to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan, a plaintiff in the wiretapping case.  Judge Diggs Taylor sided with the ACLU of Michigan in her recent decision.

 

According to the CFSEM website, “The Foundation’s trustees make all funding decisions at meetings held on a quarterly basis.”

My respect for the judicial process is teetering in the balance.  Or should that be "tittering"?

UPDATE:  Now Lichtblau of the Times picks up on the conflict of interest theme.  The consensus seems to be that the judge would not have been disqualfied from this case but that she should have disclosed the apparent conflict.

 

Fear And Loathing In Connecticut

The ARG Poll has Lieberman leading Lamont in Connecticut, but Brad DeLong is not worried if the current incarnation of Earnest Joe "eeks out a victory".

"Aargh" and "eek" will be some of the milder language used if Lieberman wins.

McCain On Iraq

John McCain gets quoted on the situation in Iraq:

Republican Sen. John McCain, a staunch defender of the Iraq war, on Tuesday faulted the Bush administration for misleading Americans into believing the conflict would be "some kind of day at the beach."

The potential 2008 presidential candidate, who a day earlier had rejected calls for withdrawing U.S. forces, said the administration had failed to make clear the challenges facing the military.

"I think one of the biggest mistakes we made was underestimating the size of the task and the sacrifices that would be required," McCain said. "Stuff happens, mission accomplished, last throes, a few dead-enders. I'm just more familiar with those statements than anyone else because it grieves me so much that we had not told the American people how tough and difficult this task would be."

Those phrases are closely associated with top members of the Bush administration, including the president.

Well, yes, but... John McCain is a great American, but does he have a great memory?  Perhaps he remembers who said this on March 18, 2003, on the eve of war:

O'REILLY: All right. Now you are confident it's going to be a quick military knockout, correct?

MCCAIN: I am reasonably confident of that. There is such a thing as the fog of war, there is such a thing of Saddam Hussein complicating the problem. But I am confident our technological capabilities are overwhelming and the men and women in the military are superb. We can count on them.

To be fair, McCain was presumably referring to the initial liberation, and he was correct that it was a quick knockout.  However, he certainly did not emphasize the possibility of a long and problematic occupation in this appearance.

Whatever - at least the man is educable.  His website presents his views; by November 2003 a certain concern about news management, candor, and our nation's political will can be detected.  His Dec 2005 appearance on Meet The Press is also enlightening:

MR. RUSSERT:  Some say not--it was not tied to his resignation.  But the fact is on whether we were greeted as liberators, on troop levels, on the cost of the war--three fundamental misjudgments by the administration.  Is that fair?

SEN. McCAIN:  I think it's fair.  I would point out that there was a period of time after the initial military success where things were pretty quiet in Iraq, where we sort of had a hiatus period where the Iraqi people were going to see what happens.  They allowed looting to take place, and they allowed almost a chaotic situation in some parts of the country, which--people first of all want security.  That's their first requirement.

...MR. RUSSERT:  March 30, 2003, you were on MEET THE PRESS...

SEN. McCAIN:  Yeah.

MR. RUSSERT:  ...and said, "I believe that this conflict is still going to be relatively short."

SEN. McCAIN:  Yeah.

MR. RUSSERT:  That was overly optimistic.

SEN. McCAIN:  That was overly optimistic, and I believe that the--by the way, I do believe we were greeted as liberators in many respects in many parts of Iraq.  We really were.  I remember the statue coming down and people being freed from prisons, etc.  But it was not only overly optimistic; it was wrong.

MR. RUSSERT:  You also said that "the American people are strong and steadfast in support, and I think it will remain that way."  That has not happened.

SEN. McCAIN:  No, but I think the American people still don't want premature withdrawals, and I understand their frustration.  I also believe that we still did the right thing by going there, because I believe that Saddam Hussein, if he were still in power, with the sanctions not holding, that he would be attempting to acquire and eventually use weapons of mass destruction.

It might be interesting to guess at McCain's response to the CNN poll question asking "Do you favor or oppose the war in Iraq?"  I infer that he favors the objectives but is opposed to the way the Administration has executed the strategy; does that count as "yes", or "no"?

CUE THE LAUGHTRACK:  Here is Sunny Dick Cheney, apprising the prospects for war in his March 16, 2003 appearance with Tim Russert.  The "greeted as liberators" line made this famous, but there is more.  Enough troops?

MR. RUSSERT: The army’s top general said that we would have to have several   hundred thousand troops there for several years in order to maintain stability.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I disagree. We need, obviously, a large force and we’ve   deployed a large force. To prevail, from a military standpoint, to achieve our   objectives, we will need a significant presence there until such time as we   can turn things over to the Iraqis themselves. But to suggest that we need several   hundred thousand troops there after military operations cease, after the conflict   ends, I don’t think is accurate. I think that’s an overstatement.

Potential cost?

MR. RUSSERT: Every analysis said this war itself would cost about $80 billion,   recovery of Baghdad, perhaps of Iraq, about $10 billion per year. We should   expect as American citizens that this would cost at least $100 billion for a   two-year involvement.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I can’t say that, Tim. There are estimates out there.   It’s important, though, to recognize that we’ve got a different set   of circumstances than we’ve had in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan you’ve   got a nation without significant resources. In Iraq you’ve got a nation   that’s got the second-largest oil reserves in the world, second only to   Saudi Arabia. It will generate billions of dollars a year in cash flow if they   get back to their production of roughly three million barrels of oil a day,   in the relatively near future. And that flow of resources, obviously, belongs   to the Iraqi people, needs to be put to use by the Iraqi people for the Iraqi   people and that will be one of our major objectives.

Well, Cheney won't be a candidate in 2008.

Richard Armitage - Still The One

The AP uses the Freedom of Information Act to get ahold of the appointment calendar for then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, and learns this:

Then-deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage met with Washington Post
reporter Bob Woodward in mid-June 2003, the same time the reporter has testified an administration official talked to him about CIA employee Valerie Plame. Armitage's official State Department calendars, provided to the Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act, show a one-hour meeting marked ``private appointment" with Woodward on June 13, 2003.

...A person familiar with the information prosecutors have gathered, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because the material remains sealed, said Woodward's meeting with the confidential source was June 13, 2003.

I don't think this news is exactly a shocker - even Chris Matthews had speculated that Armitage might be the original source for both Woodward and Novak.  The proceedings had made it pretty clear that Woodward and Novak shared a source - here is a WaPo story and an old post on that specific legal tussle; here is an old post with background  on Armitage as a candidate to have been Woodward's source, and in this post I tried to track Novak's use of Armitage as a source (guess what - they were pretty friendly).

LEST YOU HAVE TROUBLE CARING:  Before your eyes glaze over completely, consider this, from the Times story telling us that John McCain's Straight Talk 2008 bus is getting ready to leave the station:

But as he has tried to claim the mantle of Mr. Bush’s natural successor, Mr. McCain has expanded his orbit to encompass supporters who have been part of Mr. Bush’s circle, and others who have not previously backed the senator.

His still-informal network includes Richard L. Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state;

If Armitage's likely role in the Plame case emerges in a trial beginning early next year, that may be a (tiny) speed bump for McCain. 

JonBenet Ramsey Thread

Does anyone think that John Mark Karr is actually the killer?  Tell us why.

I found this old CBS News report to packed with background and suspects, although I assume that much more detail is available elsewhere.

The two theories about Karr's confession that make sense to me are:

(1)  The Thai authorities were investigating him for pedophilia, so he confessed to the JonBenet killing in order to get a first-class ticket home and escape the short arm of Thai law.  (I did not realize that it was possible to commit a sex crime in Bangkok, but that was another era.)

(2)  Karr has decided (for reasons unknown) to help promote a new book coming out from his Colorado confidante.

Why Can't We All Just Get Along?

I have been looking at highlights of the Yankees 5 game sweep of the Red Sox but I have been seeing a recreation of the Rodney King beat-down.

Whether the Sox can creep into the playoffs with just two aging starters and one reliever is a puzzle that will be resolved in the next five weeks, but the Yankees certainly hinted at the answer over the weekend.

Yet Another...

Here we go again - another open thread.

The Blackout Continues

These delayed postings on TYPEPAD are cool, in their own way.  If you are reading this, then I still have not gotten to a computer.  Do check the poll question on the upper right.

A Pattern Develops

I am on vacation and my internet access may be limited.  But please pick a topic of interest.

If I'm Not Back By Now...

If I'm not back from vacation by now, send lawyers, guns and money!  Or at least, commence another open thread.

Rambling Man

A Sunday open thread.

On Vacation!

I am heading to a land of uncertain ISP service, but I rely on you folks to find some topic if interest.

Or if all else fails, check ther poll on the upper right.

TIME On Terror Plot

TIME has some details.  NSA surveillance is promoted, and it's all about Kashmir (as we say from time to time):

In the two or three days before the arrests, the cell was going operational, and authorities were pressed into action. MI5 and Scotland Yard agents tracked the plotters from the ground, while a knowledgeable American official says U.S. intelligence provided London authorities with intercepts of the group's communications. Most of the suspects are second or third generation British citizens of Pakistani descent whose families hailed from war-torn Kashmir.

Do we believe the NSA promotion?  Victory has a thousand fathers.

Ned Lamont - "Why Do I Have To Say Anything?"

The NY Times chats with the Empty Suit after United States Senator Joe Lieberman reacts to the terror plot in London:

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman seized on the terror arrests in Britain today to attack his Democratic rival, Ned Lamont, saying that Mr. Lamont’s goals for ending the war in Iraq would constitute a “victory” for extremists, including those accused of plotting to blow up airliners traveling between Britain and the United States.

“If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England,” Mr. Lieberman said at a campaign event at lunchtime in Waterbury, Conn. “It will strengthen them and they will strike again.”

Mr. Lamont, who rode an antiwar message to beat Mr. Lieberman in the Connecticut Democratic primary on Tuesday, has called for a firm deadline to remove front-line American troops from Iraq, and he endorsed a Democratic-sponsored amendment in the Senate to set that deadline for next July. Mr. Lieberman opposed setting a deadline.

In a telephone interview from his vacation home in Maine, Mr. Lamont said he was disappointed with the personal tone Mr. Lieberman’s remarks, and questioned the connection between the Iraq war and the new terrorist plot. He also continued his strategy of trying to link Mr. Lieberman’s views with those of the Bush administration, whose approach the senator has tended to support in the fight against terrorism.

“Wow,” Mr. Lamont said, after asking a reporter to read Mr. Lieberman’s remark about him. “That comment sounds an awful lot like Vice President Cheney’s comment on Wednesday. Both of them believe our invasion of Iraq has a lot to do with 9/11. That’s a false premise.”

...

Mr. Lamont hesitated when he was asked if Mr. Lieberman’s criticisms were beyond the bounds of acceptable political combat.

“To try to score political points on every international issues...” Mr. Lamont said, before pausing and stopping himself. Then he added, “Why do I have to say anything?”

Gee - did "Rape Gurney Joe" go beyond the bounds of acceptable political combat?  Mr. Lamont would be shocked to hear what is said about Senator Lieberman (if he knew anything about the blogs).

As to Mr. Lamont's recycling of the anti-war talking point that there was no link between Saddam and Al Qaeda when we invaded in 2003 - it's time to move on, sir.  Regardless of the situation then, I don't think serious observers doubt that as of 2006, Al Qaeda would be emboldened by an American collapse in Iraq - certainly Osama bin Ladin, based on his own rhetoric, was emboldened by apparent American weakness in Lebanon and Somalia.

The Dems have nominated an Empty Suit in a time of war. 

The Times On Testosterone - Huh?

The Times fashion and Style section presents an article on testosterone and steroids in athletics; this quote left me wondering whether the author, Natasha Singer, ever reads the sports pages:

But do bigger, steroid-enhanced muscles generate big winners?

“We assume that, if you are stronger, you will perform better, but that might not necessarily be true,” said Michael S. Bahrke, a steroids researcher in Ellison Bay, Wis., and co-editor of a book called “Performance-Enhancing Substances in Sport and Exercise.” “For football and baseball players, explosive muscle mass might relate to more power, but it is difficult to document that it leads to better performance.”

Larger muscles might even be detrimental for certain athletes. For marathoners, enhanced muscles could put more weight on joints than they can handle, leading to injuries, Dr. Bahrke said.

I am taking for granted that Dr. Bahrke is being quoted out of context here; maybe he is trying to say that not all athletes will benefit from using steroids.  But is he seriously doubting whether some athletes have benefitted from steroid use?  Is he saying we would struggle to document an improvement in Barry Bonds' stats late in his career?  No way.

Ms. Singer does present some other plausible caveats:

Some athletes illegally use anabolic steroids, the muscle-promoting drugs or hormonal substances that are chemically related to testosterone, in the form of injections, skin patches, creams or pills. These steroids can stimulate muscle building. But they will not transform couch potatoes into pole-vaulters.

“Steroids are not going to take someone without athletic ability and turn them into a star athlete, or teach you how to swing a bat and connect with the ball,” said Douglas A. Granger, the director of the behavioral endocrinology laboratory at Pennsylvania State University. “But if you have a certain athletic presence, testosterone could take you to the next level.”

Well, yes - steroids represent an oddly virtuous form of cheating since they only help if you put in the hard work of hitting the gym.

We also get this quote, just before the jaw-dropper which caught my eye:

“Synthetic steroids take you from being a natural normal male to being a supermale with muscles that are bigger and stronger,” said Dr. Donald H. Catlin, the director of the Olympic Analytical Laboratory, a drug-testing facility, at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Athletes love to take steroids because they work.”

"Because they work".  Duh.

Justin Rood On The Lieberman Web Site Crash

Justin Rood of TPM Muckrakers has two more articles on the crashed Lieberman web site.  To his credit, he does not waste his time or ours with input from the various lefty bloggers; instead, he talks to real web hosting pros, who seem to be relatively agenda-free.

The bottom line, as I read it - Lieberman could have spent more and gotten more, but he had a reasonable system and something mysterious happened.

Let me reassure TPM Muckraker fans, however - the headline writers know what their audience wants, and are proud to deliver.  The second story is billed "Experts Agree: Lieberman's Net Service Could Have Been Better", and who among us can not say the same about our own software, car, house, and baseball team?

Oh, well - this was also funny, in a picayune way:

...some said the software used by the consultants was nonstandard and indicitave (sic) of less-than-expert personnel...

Uh huh.  Well, I think this is indicative of TPM Muckraker's unwillingness to put the standard effort into their editing process; experts agree their spell check software "could have been better".

Bomb Plot In Britain

Brendan Loy has extensive coverage; I have house guests.

A friend remarked to me that Karl Rove's arm has grown long indeed, if he can get the Brits to announce this a day after the Dems go with Lamont in Connecticut.  Mike Allen of TIME explains my friend's elation [as does Jacob Weisberg].

UPDATE:  Staying with the Lieberman angle, here is the Times' coverage of the Lieberman-Lamont reaction.  One senses that the Times is amused by the inexperience of their creation.

Lieberman first:

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman seized on the terror arrests in Britain today to attack his Democratic rival, Ned Lamont, saying that Mr. Lamont’s goals for ending the war in Iraq would constitute a “victory” for extremists, including those accused of plotting to blow up airliners traveling between Britain and the United States.

“If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England,” Mr. Lieberman said at a campaign event at lunchtime in Waterbury, Conn. “It will strengthen them and they will strike again.”

Over to Ned,with the Times tossing darts:

In a telephone interview from his vacation home in Maine, Mr. Lamont said he was disappointed with the personal tone Mr. Lieberman’s remarks, and questioned the connection between the Iraq war and the new terrorist plot. He also continued his strategy of trying to link Mr. Lieberman’s views with those of the Bush administration, whose approach the senator has tended to support in the fight against terrorism.

“Wow,” Mr. Lamont said, after asking a reporter to read Mr. Lieberman’s remark about him. “That comment sounds an awful lot like Vice President Cheney’s comment on Wednesday. Both of them believe our invasion of Iraq has a lot to do with 9/11. That’s a false premise.”

...

Mr. Lamont hesitated when he was asked if Mr. Lieberman’s criticisms were beyond the bounds of acceptable political combat.

“To try to score political points on every international issues...” Mr. Lamont said, before pausing and stopping himself. Then he added, “Why do I have to say anything?”

Good question.  It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt.

The hired help did a better job with the Lamont response:

Mr. Lamont’s campaign manager, Tom Swan, said in an interview that Mr. Lieberman would pay a political price with Connecticut voters for aligning himself with the Bush administration on homeland security strategy.

“Did Karl Rove write this attack line for Joe?” Mr. Swan said, referring to the president’s senior adviser. Mr. Rove told reporters this morning that he had called Mr. Lieberman, whom he described as “a personal friend,” on the primary day on Tuesday to wish him luck against Mr. Lamont.

And dare we address the "substance" of the vacationing Mr. Lamont's remarks?  9/11 is now ancient history (so ancient we forget the year!).  Regardless of whether there was a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda back then, the issue before the nation is whether terrorists will be emboldened *TODAY* if we abandon Iraq to its fate.

I do hope Mr. Lamont manages to get beyond a mere parroting of anti-war talking points and actually finds time to focus on the issues here.  He is on the path to becoming a US Senator, after all.

MORE:  Bush used the phrase "Islamic fascists" today; that, and "Islamo-fascists" have come out of the White House before, but not often.

Joementum

Stray thoughts on Connecticut:

Lieberman loses, files the paperwork to run as an independent.  But what will his party do?  Here is the Times:

Mr. Lieberman’s determination to remain in the race may soon collide with the will of many Democratic leaders in Washington and Connecticut. The Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, and Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, who is leading the effort to elect more Democrats in November, were expected to announce this morning that they were supporting Mr. Lamont and that the party should unite around the nominee, according to Democrats close to both men. A spokesman for Mr. Schumer said a statement would be forthcoming, but declined further comment.

“Reid and Schumer will back Lamont, but the big question is if they will approach Joe about dropping out, because they don’t want to get his back up against the wall,” said a senior Senate Democratic aide who was involved in the Reid-Schumer discussions but was not authorized to discuss them publicly.

"[T]hey don’t want to get his back up against the wall" - when you ain't got nothing, you've got nothing to lose, and right now, all Lieberman has is a Senate seat, a shot at an independent run (with tacit Republican support), and an alternative life on the speaking/book tour circuit.  He has promised, like Jeffords, to vote as a Dem on Senate organizational issues such as majority leader and chairmanships, but maybe Joe is looking for love (and money, and senior committee assignments) on the other side of the aisle.

Meanwhile, Kos displays his skill as a political strategist with the suggestion that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid should be pushed to "strip Lieberman of all committee assignments."  Uh huh.  If that forced Joe to switch parties [presumably *after* the election], the guy who is "all about winning" would have managed to tilt the Connecticut Senate seat from Automatic Blue to highly competitive.

More from Kos in a "winners and losers" analysis:

LOSERS: Republicans... If they really thought Lieberman losing was such a bad thing for the Democratic Party they wouldn't have gone out of their way to prop him up. Instead, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, the wingnutosphere, several Republican congresscritters, and the GOP's Big Money all rallied around their man. This is not a happy day for them.

Really?  Speaking only for myself, I am always deeply concerned when a businessmen worth a quarter-billion rises to power and prominence as a champion of the progressives.  But I may be a minority; "Machiavel" at Red State explained (and I agreed) a few days back that regardless of the Lamont-Lieberman outcome it was all good for BushCo:

Up until now, I was genuinely undecided on who I wanted to win the CT-SEN primary. A Lieberman loss would be great for us nationally, pushing the Democrats even further off a cliff. However, a Lieberman win would be a huge netroots defeat in a race they've thrown everything at. And that could quite possibly spark the mainstream meme that Kos is a has-been on the decline.

After weighing all these factors, I have tentatively come to the conclusion that Ned Lamont and the netroots need to be victorious next Tuesday.

I should add that Machiavel and I do not score any bonus points for creativity - Hotline's round-up features a number of happy righties.

On this point, Micky Kaus notes the "waddya gonna do" response from Markos, to wit, "The DSCC and the DCCC will have to deal with the fact that this race will continue to suck oxygen from great pickup opportunities."

(Editorial aside to Mickey - the "suck oxygen" quote comes from the Kos post titled  "Lieberman to go indy"; his "Winners and Losers" post, which you describe as non-meglomaniacal, includes this gem as the second winner (after Lamont himself):

Winners: People-powered politics... Tonight we saw that people-power is not just a Montana phenomenon but a national one, and it can move mountains.

And Kos predicted it!  Any meglomania there?)

In addition to "Winners and Losers", let me suggest "Easy Marks" for this bit of gullibility:

Winners

Hillary, Bayh, and Edwards, who moved most aggressively to embrace Lamont after the winner was called.

What did Hillary do to win Kos' love?  Per this post, she sent Lamont's campaign $5,000, as if either his campaign or hers needed the money.  Well, if that is all it takes to buy off the dogs, it was money well spent, but I am going to wait to see whether Ms. Clinton puts her mouth where her money is.  (Aside - one never knows with these activist blogs.  Is Kos that credulous, or does he simply hope to promote the illusion that Hillary is on board and the "Sink Joe" ship is sailing?  Who can tell?)

Last thought, on the possible hacking of Lieberman's website - Brandon Loy had thoughts here and here, and I will extract this:

Anyway, here is Lamont’s official statement:

If Senator Lieberman’s website was indeed hacked, we had absolutely no part in it, denounce the action, and urge whoever is responsible cease and desist immediately. It is our sincerest wish that everyone planning to vote for Ned Lamont or Joe Lieberman does so today.

Can’t argue with that. Now if only Kos had the same degree of integrity, and would apologize for his totally unsubstantiated and unjustifiable smear against the Lieberman campaign, claiming that their whole DoS story is a lie and that really they just didn’t pay their bills. For shame, Kos.

Lamont, who doesn't know anything about the blogs, at least had a reasonable idea - denounce the action, complete with an "IF" to encompass the possibility that the real cause may lie elsewhere.

By contrast, the netroots, born at the intersection of internet technology and activist politics, can't even imagine that this might be a tech-savvy dirty trick.

Folks like Kos and Armstong ought to denounce this behavior on a hypothetical basis, as their candidate did.  However, having lain down with dogs, Lamont is thoroughly flea-bitten - he won't be exerting any control or providing any leadership for his "supporters" on this point, and they are clearly unable or unwilling to do so themselves.

FWIW, the obvious predictions are (1) we will see a lot more of this come November, since hack attacks seem to carry zero consequences within the community that *might* be the source of the behavior.  The only consequence so far has been some unfavorable press; my impression is that the FBI has a hard time cracking these cases, so I am not expecting much from the investigation.

And (2) if the Kos site, or the site of some Dem candidate gets hacked this fall (which I herewith deplore in advance), Kos and Company will have forfeited any and all moral authority to complain.  Not that an absence of credibility has ever kept them quiet before.

MORE:  Justin Rood of TPM Muckrakers is actually covering this, but would he follow the trail to a bitter end?

Apparently, the web folks working for Lieberman were involved with Kerry's 2004 site, and the claim to be paying about $150/month for hosting, not the $15/mo being bandied about by the "say-anything" crowd.

Doctor My Eyes

Props to Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, who gets coverage in USA Today, the WaPo, and the NY Times for busting some phony Reuters photos over the weekend [and Mr. Johnson responds].

Let's flag a Self-Awareness Alert and excerpt some Times coverage:

[Reuters] has tightened its procedures so all photos from the Mideast are now reviewed by senior editors.

Other news outlets have also tightened their procedures after learning the hard way about the heightened risk of photo manipulation. Last month, The Charlotte Observer fired a photographer who enhanced the color of the sky in a local photo to make it more dramatic. The Los Angeles Times fired a photographer in 2003 after he altered an Iraq photo that it ran on the front page.

Santiago Lyon, director of photography for The Associated Press, said his agency fired a photographer “in the last year” for changing a picture; he gave no further details.

  The volume of photos that cross news desks and the speed with which they must be handled adds to worries of photo editors.

Any day now the Times reporters can update their coverage with a quote from the NY Times photo editors and a discussion of revisions in the Times policy - this "Dead Man Walking" photo montage makes a pretty compelling case that a young man in cut-off jeans and a cap shown participating in a rescue effort inexplicably became a bombing victim himself in photo 6 of a Times report from July 27 - here is the caption originally accompanying the Times website version:

The mayor of Tyre said that in the worst hit areas, bodies were still buried under the rubble, and he appealed to the Israelis to allow government authorities time to pull them out. (Photo Tyler Hicks The New York Times)

But wait!  Now we have a correction in the Times:

A picture caption with an audio slide show on July 27 about an Israeli attack on a building in Tyre, Lebanon, imprecisely described the situtation in the picture. The man pictured, who had been seen in previous images appearing to assist with the rescue effort, was injured during that rescue effort, not during the initial attack, and was not killed.

The correct description was this one, which appeared with that picture in the printed edition of The Times: After an Israeli airstrike destroyed a building in Tyre, Lebanon, yesterday, one man helped another who had fallen and was hurt.

He's fallen and he can't get up.

MORE:  A suggested Times' caption.  And an unlucky Lebanese homeowner.

   

In Which I Dispute The Times And Drift Towards A Defense Of Mel Gibson...

The Times tackles the issue of alcohol-fueled truth-telling with Mel Gibson as the story hook.  In doing so they offer an assertion I find so absurd that it actualy suggests a defense of Mel Gibson.  Here we go:

Science, as it happens, has been hard at work trying to understand the how and the why of what everyone at a college mixer learns: alcohol can make people do, and say, stupid things. But does it make people say things that they do not believe at all, that are, as Mr. Gibson insisted in his statements, antithetical to one’s own views and faith?

Experts generally suggest that the answer is “Nope.”

When asked where those vicious words came from, Dr. Kevin J. Corcoran, a psychology researcher who has studied the effects of alcohol on perception and judgment, replied, simply, “his mouth.”

Dr. Corcoran said comments do not spring from nothing; for example, Dr. Corcoran said, he himself would not make anti-Semitic statements under the influence of alcohol.

“I say other outrageous things when I’m drunk,” he said.

Hmm.  I sometimes say outrageous things when I am drunk, and sometimes I don't even need to be drunk.  But I'll tell you this - if I were trying to outrage an Irishman, I would probably dredge up some Mick jokes from my youth (having heard a few - go figure).  If I were trying to nettle a Frenchman, I would probably inquire as to why the Champs Elysses is lined with trees (Suggested answer - the German Army likes to march in the shade).

And I don't supose I am alone in being able to come up with a few buttons to push that might irritate a Brit, a black person, a Jew, a Southern redneck, or what have you.  However!  That does not mean that I endorse these sterotypes; it just means that, having paid a bit of attention, I am familiar with them.

But (and here is where we drift towards a Mel Gibson defense) I would not mix and match - I very much doubt that I would attempt to offend a Brit by urging him to go back to his trailer park, watch a few laps of NASCAR, and get back into bed with his sister. You have to target your audience.

And in the Mel Gibson incident, the arresting officer was Jewish.  So maybe Mel Gibson picked up on that somehow (some Jewish folks do look Jewish, after all) and said some things he figured would be offensive to a Jew.  Mission accomplished.  And if the arresting office had been Irish, maybe we could have gleaned some insight into the drunken Mel Gibson's Mick repertoire.  Another time, perhaps.

Now, the defense I am tossing up is not intended to be particularly convincing (Hey, I'm not buying it!) - there are still the issues of Mel Gibson's father, the Passion, and Mel Gibson's own history.  That said, I found the passage in the Times to be utterly unconvincing - in my view, awareness of an offensive sterotype and the invocation of that sterotype to offend someone can easily be separated from belief in that stereotype.

UPDATE:  Well, either I'm wrong, or Ann Althouse and Ezra Klein are.  I know where the smart money ought to go, but I am standing by my post - use of an offensive sterotype with the goal of angering someone does not equate to belief in that sterotype.  I wonder why ivory-towered academics and mere kids don't get that (and I wonder if they get my ever-so-subtle illustrative use of other sterotypes...)

A Pox On Both Houses

The NY Times editors denounce both Republican and Democratic posturing on Iraq and call for a push to drag our allies into a solution.

As America’s military experience in Iraq grows ever more nightmarish, it is becoming clear that President Bush’s strategy comes down to this: Keep holding to a failing course for the next 29 months and leave it to the next administration to clean up the mess.

That abdication of responsibility cannot be allowed to continue at the expense of American lives, military readiness and international influence. With the Republican majority in Congress moving in perpetual lock step behind the White House, the job of pressing the issue has been dumped in the laps of the Democrats. Unfortunately, they have their own version of reality avoidance. It involves pretending that the nightmare can be ended by adopting a timetable for a phased withdrawal of American troops.

Mr. Bush’s cheerleading encourages the illusion that it is just a matter of time and American support before Iraq evolves into a stable democracy. The Democratic timetable spins a different fantasy: that if the Iraqis are told that American troops will be leaving in stages, at specific dates, their government will rise to the occasion and create its own security forces to maintain order.

The Iraqi government has not failed to develop adequate police and military forces of its own because it lacks the incentive. It has failed to do so because it is weak and divided, because its people are frightened and because the strongest leaders in the country are the men who control sectarian militias. A phased withdrawal by itself would simply leave the American soldiers who remain behind in graver danger, and hasten what looks like an inevitable descent into civil war.

Democrats are embracing the withdrawal option because it sounds good on the surface and allows them to avoid a more far-reaching discussion that might expose their party’s own foreign policy divisions. Most of all, they want an election-year position that maximizes the president’s weakness without exposing their candidates to criticism. But they are doing nothing to help the public understand the grim options we face.

The only responsible way out of Iraq involves all the things President Bush refused to consider on the way in. That means enlisting help from some of the same Arab neighbors and European allies whose opinions and suggestions were scornfully ignored before the invasion. Getting their assistance would be a humbling experience. Americans may feel the war is going badly, but they have not been prepared to acknowledge failure.

America’s allies have an interest in not seeing Iraq turn into a hive of terrorists and a font of regional instability. However, before other nations become involved they would certainly insist on a laundry list of American concessions, from a share in war-related business for their contractors to an all-out United States push for a renewed peace process among Israel, the Palestinians and their neighbors.

A serious plan for disengagement from Iraq is not well tailored to the campaign trail. Real withdrawal will be messy and unpleasant. Even under the best of circumstances, it could well end in disaster. But the country cannot afford another election cycle of bipartisan evasions.

My Creative Excerpter is in the shop, sorry.

STRAW IN WIND:  David Brooks talks about Lebanon with a "Policy Maker" - if "Policy Maker" is an Administration official, this bit is intriguing:

Policy Maker: Israel began this war with an almost unprecedented level of legitimacy. Unfortunately, that was forfeited during the first days with the bombing campaign, which seemed to punish all of Lebanon instead of just Hezbollah. If Sharon were still functioning, perhaps he would have insisted on a better plan, but this may be another case of a just war poorly executed.

"Another case" - I am straining to imagine what other example of a "just war poorly executed" the "Policy Maker" may have had in mind.  And can we guess that the PM is not Rumsfeld?

Chaos In Baghdad

Dexter Filkins of the Times on chaos in Baghdad.

Baghdad’s Chaos Raises Questions on U.S. Plan

 

By DEXTER FILKINS

 

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 5 —Over the past year, as American commanders pushed Iraqi forces to take over responsibility for this violent capital, Baghdad became a markedly more dangerous place.

Now the Americans are being forced to call in more of their own troops to bring the city under control.

The failure of the Iraqis to halt the slide into chaos in Baghdad undercuts the central premise of the American project here: that Iraqi forces can be trained and equipped to secure their own country, allowing the Americans to go home.

A review of previously unreleased statistics on American and Iraqi patrols suggests that as Americans handed over responsibilities to the Iraqis, violence in Baghdad increased.

 

And the Floyd Landis B-test came back as a failure - how is your Saturday going?

A Peace Plan!

The US and France have agreed on a peace plan!  Now all we need to do is get Hezbollah and Israel on board, and away we go!

Very late in the story the Times says this:

Israel has said it wants to keep fighting for two weeks or more to degrade Hezbollah’s military strength and its ability to launch rockets over the border. Hezbollah says it will not agree to a cease-fire until all Israeli troops pull out. Each is desperately seeking to claim victory.

Originally, the United States was widely seen as publicly stalling any diplomatic efforts at a cease-fire to give Israel more time to weaken Hezbollah.

But that appears to have changed as Hezbollah has proved a determined enemy, emerging as heroes in the Arab and Muslim worlds, and as Israel’s destruction of Lebanon’s infrastructure and the mounting civilian casualties here have brought increased international criticism.

I'm stumped - since a clear Israeli "victory" looks increasingly unlikely, is the US offering Israel a face-saving way out - Israel quit fighting because we pressured them, not because they wanted to?

And which nations will be providing peacekeepers peacemakers?

Ned Lamont Fails First Test Of Character

Say it with me - it's not the crime, it's the coverup!  Jane Hamsher is a major blog supporter of Ned Lamont who has raised money and directed commercials for his campaign on a volunteer basis.  Ms. Hamsher caused a flap for her candidate by posting an offensive photo of Joe Lieberman in blackface.  The Lieberman campaign denounced the ad and called upon Lamont to sever his ties with Jane Hamsher, thereby creating a test of Lamont's political skills and personal character.

And since Ned Lamont is a virtual unknown, this test may reveal some interesting aspects of his character and personality. 

So far, he is failing that test.  Ned Lamont has elected to brazenly lie about his association with bloggers in general and Ms. Hamsher in particular.  The WaPo quotes him:

"I don't know anything about the blogs. I'm not responsible for those. I have no comment on them."

And here is his press spokesperson via CNN:

Lamont's spokesperson, Liz Dupont-Diehl, said that the campaign has condemned the blackface image and asked for it to be removed from the site. She said Lamont will not sever connections with Hamsher, however.

"This is a distraction," she said. "This did not come from our campaign. Bloggers are independent entities, covering campaigns. Like reporters, they travel with campaigns and cover campaigns."

Responding to Lamont's quote about his knowledge of blogs, Dupont-Diehl added: "Of course the campaign knows about blogs."

Asked if it was fair to say the Lamont campaign has actively reached out to bloggers, she said, "No."

They have not reached out to bloggers?  The Lieberman team was all over that:

"That is a shameless lie," said Dan Gerstein, a spokesman for the Senator. "Reporters don't raise money for campaigns ... There are some gray areas with reporters, but this is not one of them."

The NY Observer provides the fact sheet put out by the Lieberman campaign documenting the many ties between the Lamont campaign and the liberal blogs.  We have shamelessly stolen that and run it in the continuation, and let's just add that the Lamont campaign specifically hired Tim Tagaris to liaise with the blogging community.  And this YouTube video of Lamont praising Kos and Armstrong at a book signing is a classic - just one gem is at 3:09, with Lamont saying "I'd just like to say a little bit if I could for a minute about how important the netroots and the blogs have been to this campaign...".

Lamont also ducked and weaved on the question of accountability.  From the Times:

Mr. Lamont described Ms. Hamsher as one of dozens of independent bloggers who support his campaign, saying, “I can’t be held accountable for each and every post and everything that goes on.” But he also said he disavowed the altered photograph. “I think it’s wrong,” he said. “I think it has no place in the political discourse.”

Fine, we can't expect Lamont to be responsible for everything written about him.  But we can expect him to demand a bit of accountability from the folks who direct his commercials, hang out with the senior campaign staff, and raise money for him.

I suggest two essentially symbolic steps:

1.  Throw Jane Hamsher off the bus, or under it.

Obviously Ms. Hamsher can't be kept out of public events.  But she does not need to be in the private meetings, or directing commercials, or conducting softball interviews.

This particular sanction will only be as effective as the Lamont campaign staff want it to be; no one will be monitoring their emails or telephone calls, so I expect the only practical impact will be that Ms. Hamsher won't be able to write about her campaign access on her blog.

2.  Give back the $58,000 raised by ActBlue through the firedoglake.com blog

Again, this is purely symbolic - since that $58,000 comes mostly from small individual donors (I assume), those donors will be free to recycle their checks right back to Ned Lamont's campaign through a different contact point.  And I have no doubt that the net wizards of the left will be able to quietly track the cash raised through the exhortations of the firedogs, even if it is washed through some other site (For example, and IIRC, Atrios once asked each donor to add $0.11 to their contribution to a general fund so that it could be tracked separately and noted as coming in response to an Atrios effort).

Both these steps are symbolic, but it will be interesting to see if either one is taken.  Frankly, taking this step now, when its summertime and no one cares, could be a lot better for the Dems than waiting to see what embarrassment some member of the rabid left will inflict on them come October.

Meanwhile, I wonder whether some enterprising political hitman will track the ActBlue contributions from firedoglake to Ned Lamont, and just let Lamont's embarrassment rise with the total contributions.  I'm picturing a daily or weekly "ActBlackface" report with a copy of the offensive graphic, some great quotes from Lamont claiming ignorance of the blog phenomenon, and some taunting along the lines of "Ned, have you figured out who these people are yet, and why are you taking their money?"

OK, I'm quite the visionary.

MORE:  John Dickerson of Slate makes a similar point about this incident as a test of Lamont's character:

If Lamont wants to get to Washington, he's going to need to learn one of the most important senatorial clichés: "I'd like to revise and extend my remarks." He can't run from the bloggers. And he can't run from Hamsher, who has raised money for him, boosted him tirelessly, and even helped him shoot a video blog. He's their guy. He put Markos Moulitsas, the founder of DailyKos, in a campaign ad. Bloggers are integrated into his Web site. One contributor to a Connecticut blog designed a fabulous float depicting the Bush-Lieberman kiss. It has been used to lampoon Lieberman across the state and is used in this Lamont ad. He can't say the bloggers aren't his problem now.

Tom Bevan discusses the flyer that started it all:

The front side of the flyer shows the picture of Clinton and Lieberman to which Hamsher added her "progressive stylings" and also bullet points detailing Lieberman's record on civil rights. The back side of the flyer asks the question, "What Is Ned Lamont's Civil Rights Record?' and then quotes two paragraphs from a New York Times article on Lamont's recent decision to resign his longtime membership at the nearly all white Round Hill Country Club in Greenwich.

Why quoting a New York Times article is considered a "racist smear" against Lamont is beyond me. As far as campaign tactics go, this isn't even PG-rated....

THE SUN ALSO RISES (IN THE EAST):  The NY Times goes totally into the tank for Lamont, who they sort of endorsed last week - as I recall, their op-ed read "In Connecticut's Senate Primary we endorse the Anti-Bush, Anti-War Not Joe, whose name escapes us right now".  OK, I may be mis-remembering.)

Anyway, the Times delivers a long puffer by Mike McIntire and Jennifer Medina about the role liberal bloggers have played in Connecticut.  But is there any coverage of the blackface incident, the potential political problem for Lamont, or his evasive response?  Check out this hard-hitting journalism, which begins (after the break) in paragraph five:

But the results for Mr. Lamont have not always been what his campaign would have wanted. This week, the blogger who broke the news of Mr. Lieberman’s Halliburton stock posted a doctored image of the senator in blackface on The Huffington Post, stirring an outcry and prompting an embarrassed Lamont campaign to ask her to remove it. Lieberman supporters seized on the image, pointing out that the blogger, Jane Hamsher, has been closely involved in the Lamont campaign, even driving the campaign manager on Monday to New York for Mr. Lamont’s appearance on “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central.

This blogging exemplified the risks posed by what has become the new frontier in campaign warfare. Yesterday, the Daily Kos blog, which supports Mr. Lamont, contained numerous comments about the blackface incident, including a complaint about how well-intentioned bloggers can disrupt a campaign.

The message said: “We need folks to talk, on message, to voters. It’s not glamorous, but it’s important. Unfortunately, blogging is sort of becoming a way for these somewhat lazy people to think they can join in on defining a campaign’s message.”

A bit light on the details, yes?  The Lieberman fact sheet (below) seized on a lot more than one car ride, and the Lamont side did more than simply ask that the photo be removed - they also lied about Ms. Hamsher's involvement with the campaign.

But perhaps you think the Times covered this in their daily report on the campaign, this time by Ms. Medina and Nick Confessore?  Think again:

On Thursday, Mr. Lieberman’s campaign continued to denounce an altered picture, posted on a blog on Wednesday by a Lamont supporter, that depicted Mr. Lieberman in blackface. The Lieberman campaign said that Mr. Lamont should “sever all ties” with the blogger, Jane Hamsher. She took the photo down a few hours after posting it. “The fact is she is a key force in his campaign, and it’s time for him to take responsibility for her disgusting tactics,” Sean Smith, the Lieberman campaign manager, said in a statement.

Mr. Lamont described Ms. Hamsher as one of dozens of independent bloggers who support his campaign, saying, “I can’t be held accountable for each and every post and everything that goes on.” But he also said he disavowed the altered photograph. “I think it’s wrong,” he said. “I think it has no place in the political discourse.”

The Lieberman side says that Ms. Hamsher is "a key force" in the Lamont campaign; the Lamont side denies it.  Do the "All The News" people want to sort out the truth for their readers?  No they do not!  But thanks for asking.

It's not the Times endorsement that matters so much as the absurdly slanted coverage that accompanies it.

MY GOODNESS:  CBS News finds a story where the Times could not.

Good Job By The Peking Duck

The leftward leaning Peking Duck does not like blackface.  That is apparently a pretty lonely position on the left, in the current context anyway.

MORE:  Here is a weird response by TBogg - apparently the use of blackface is not outrageous if Michelle Malkin says it is - we infer she is an easily ouraged hatemonger so her opinion does not count.  Wow.

Messr. Bogg illustrates his logic by reprising a Malkin-Matthews exchange from 2004 (the Summer of Love?  Nooo, the Summer of Swift Boats).  Let's flashback together with an excerpt from the excerpt:

BROWN: He volunteered twice. He volunteered twice in Vietnam. He literally got shot. There‘s no question about any of those things. So what else is there to discuss? How much he got shot, how deep, how much shrapnel?

MALKIN: Well, yes. Why don‘t people ask him more specific questions about the shrapnel in his leg. They are legitimate questions about whether or not it was a self-inflicted wound.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS:  What do you mean by self-inflicted?  Are you saying he shot himself on purpose?  Is that what you‘re saying?

MALKIN:  Did you read the book...

MATTHEWS:  I‘m asking a simple question.  Are you saying that he shot himself on purpose.

MALKIN:  I‘m saying some of these soldiers...

MATTHEWS:  And I‘m asking question.

MALKIN:  And I‘m answering it.

MATTHEWS:  Did he shoot himself on purpose.

MALKIN:  Some of the soldiers have made allegations that these were self-inflicted wounds.

MATTHEWS:  No one has ever accused him of shooting himself on purpose.

Out two cents - Ms. Malkin is wrong in suggesting that serios critics alleged that the shrapnel in Kerry's leg was not legit - that ocurred with his second Purple Heart and has not, as best I know, been seriously questioned.

However, Chris Matthews is wrong in thinking that self-inflicted wounds must be intentional; in fact, it is widely alleged that two of Kerry's Purple Hearts involved an element of accidental self-inflicted wounds.

Here is the WaPo on Kerry's third Purple Heart:

    

As they were heading back to the boat, Kerry and Rassmann decided to blow up a five-ton rice bin to deny food to the Vietcong. In an interview last week, Rassmann recalled that they climbed on top of the huge pile and dug a hole in the rice. On the count of three, they tossed their grenades into the hole and ran.

Evidently, Kerry did not run fast enough. "He got some frags and pieces of rice in his rear end," Rassmann said with a laugh. "It was more embarrassing than painful." At the time, the incident did not seem significant, and Kerry did not mention it to anyone when he got back on the boat. An unsigned "personnel casualty report," however, erroneously implies that Kerry suffered "shrapnel wounds in his left buttocks" later in the day, following the mine explosion incident, when he also received "contusions to his right forearm."

However, since Ms. Malkin mentioned Zaledonis and Runyon to Chris Matthews, we presume she was referring to the enduring mystery of Kerry's first Purple Heart.  Briefly, neither Zaledonis nor Runyon, both Kerry supporters during the 2004 campaign, reported seeing any incoming enemy fire.  Since Kerry was wounded after firing his own grenade launcher, critics argue that the most likely explanation for Kerry's minor shrapnel wound is that he took a hit from his own grenade.  That too would be an accidentally self-inflicted wound.

I offered a bit of a lonely dissent on that point a few years back:

As I noted when puzzling over the Purple Heart regs a few weeks ago, being fired upon is not a requirement; it is simply impressive evidence in satisfaction of the actual requirement, which is that the wound must have occurred while engaging the enemy.

The folks who beat that down regularly are normally patient enough to explain that, in a gray area where it is not clear whether Kerry was engaging the enemy or just shadows, the fact that Kerry's commanding officers were initially opposed to the Purple Heart ought to be the final word.

Well, we have wandered quite far afield, but there is no word yet from TBogg on the suitability of blackface imagery in American political campaigns.

PROFILES IN COURAGE:  From the MahaBlog:

Without seeing the context I can’t comment on the Hamsher graphic specifically. Context is all.

Oh, please - here is a link to the photo; here is the text; the photo appeared partway down on, I believe, the right.  I have seen a screen capture of the original page, but can't find it now - if the photo appeared on the left, I hope that does not invalidate whatever analysis Ms. Obrien delivers.  That said, she musters the courage to offer this:

When Steve Gilliard puts Michael Steele in blackface, he’s saying that Steele is still shackled by the racism that blackface has come to personify. And I suspect that’s what Jane Hamsher was saying about Mr. Lieberman.

Is that what sher "suspects"?  Earlier in the post she explains that, since liberals aren't racist, it is OK when they use imagery like this.  Later she links to posts explaining that since the criticism is coming from Ms. Malkin, it does not count.

Uh huh. 

A few clues - Ms. Malkin is not the only person to criticize this use of blackface; both the Lieberman and Lamont campaigns criticized it as well.  Can any of these moral titans of the left address that?

HELP ME OUT:  I don't even know who Stephen Spruiell is, either.

Can we start a "Sergeant Schultz for Senator campaign"?

 

 

Ned Lamont On Jane Hamsher - Cut And Run

Ned Lamont may make a great politico after all, since he seems to have already mastered a key part of the job - when in trouble, lie.  Here he is in the WaPo ducking the Lieberman-blackface debacle caused by blogger Jane Hamsher:

Lamont brushed past reporters Wednesday night in Bridgeport, saying: "I don't know anything about the blogs. I'm not responsible for those. I have no comment on them."

Michelle Malkin hangs a No Sale on this - here is a Hartford Courant story about Jane and Ned's excellent adventure with the Steve Colbert show:

Lamont arrived with an entourage: His wife, Annie; their campaign driver, Marc Bradley; a blogger, Jane Hamsher; and Bill Hillsman, the creator of his offbeat ads, one of which was played weeks earlier on `The Colbert Report.'

Not a large entourage at all - one might think Ned would have had a chance to chat with Jane on the ride to the studio and learn about blogs.  Or perhaps, since Ms. Hamsher is a Hollywood producer, he was getting the benefit of her media experience.

If you would prefer something visual that is not too abysmal, here is Jane putting those Hollywood skills to work by directing Ned in a commercial.  Gee, did she introduce herself and mention what she was doing for the campaign, or just start ordering him around?

Look, Lamont knows darn well who Jane Hamsher is, and has been working with her closely.  One wonders whether the press will give him a pass on that little fib.

Lamont spokeswoman Liz Dupont-Diehl  was not exactly Ms. Credibility either:

But Dupont-Diehl said the campaign will not bow to the Lieberman campaign's demand that Lamont cut any ties with Hamsher. "She's not part of the campaign staff," Dupont-Diehl said. "She's an independent blogger covering the race."

"Covering" the race?  How was directing a commercial "covering" the race?  Try running that past the reporters who are really covering the race, and let's see the result.

MORE:  Can anyone forget Lamont's first ad, with the Mighty Kos himself peering through the Lamont's living room window before bursting inside to meet the candidate himself?  Good news - apparently, it can be forgotten, since Ned Lamont now knows nothing about the blogs.

Tim Blair has what might be a transcription of the ad.

Let me help the lefty bloggers spin the fact that Lamont is now pitching them under the bus - it just shows his comittment to a "cut and run" strategy, right?

PILING ON:  If Ned Lamont really doesn't "know anything about the blogs", maybe he could make a few minutes for Tim Tagaris, who is on his own staff:

Lamont's staffers recognized the value of the blogs early. They realized they can't control them, but they can feed them information and make use of their energy and independent video reporting and commentary. The campaign's full-time blog coordinator, Tim Tagaris, the young guy who was speeding behind us in his own car up I-91, works the bloggers the way traditional press staffers work the pencil and camera reporters.

"Nobody," Hamsher declared, more than once, "interfaces with the blogs like the Lamont people."

You have to love these Libs: blackface - someone else's problem; lying about his relationship with the blogs - waddya gonna do?  Hey, they're against the war, so their hearts are pure.

I CAN STOP ANYTIME (But not now...):  We are blogging on tape delay from inside the head of Ned Lamont, who was wondering, "Who is this woman and why is she waving a microphone in my face?" -   Jane Hamsher plays softball with Ned Lamont.  Metaphorically.

TNR JOINS IN:  Jason Zengerle (who has his own quarrel with the Nutroots) adds another piece of the puzzle and makes an excellent point about the possible long-range implications of this.

The puzzle-piece - Lamont sure knew about the blogs when he agreed to match, dollar for dollar, any funds raised for him on Blogosphere Day.

And his analysis - Ned's image as calm and likeable may be tarnished if he is judged by the company he has been keeping:

After all, the secret of Lamont's success, in my opinion, is that he appears to be an eminently reasonable, moderate, likable guy. In other words, while he may not excite voters, he's also not likely to turn them off enough to prevent them from casting an anti-Lieberman vote for him (and according to the same Quinnipiac poll, 65 percent of Lamont's supporters say their vote is mainly against Lieberman). But some of Lamont's online supporters aren't nearly so benign. And I wonder what will happen if Connecticut's voters--many of whom presumably don't read blogs--start to get a better sense of Lamont's online supporters via the mainstream media. Will voting for Lamont in order to register displeasure with Lieberman still seem "safe"?

OVERLOAD:  The firedoglake site seems to be down.  Excessive traffic, or is it the heat?  And how does one overheat a firedog?  More mysteries...

Avoiding Dementia

The Times tells us how to avoid dementia:

The main risk factors identified by Kivipelto and colleagues virtually mirror those already known for cardio-vascular disease: obesity, hypertension and high cholesterol levels. Having any one of these risk factors doubles a person's chance of developing dementia--and having all three increases their chances by six times, said Kivipelto.

The study was performed in Finland so there is no useful data addressing Bush Derangement Syndrome.

"Beyond The Pale"

Jane Hamsher, apparently intent on becoming the left's answer to Ann Coulter, put up a Huffington Post with a graphic of Joe Lieberman in blackface.  [Well, well - what started as a blog spat now is covered in the WaPo, the Times, and the Sun.]

But where is the commitment to artistic integrity and free expression?  The offensive graphic is now gone (but not forgotten), with no explanation [Aha - an explanation arrives!], but not before Lamont's campaign manager said this:

Lamont's campaign manager Tom Swan condemned this, calling it very offensive and said he requested that it be removed. He also said that while blogger Jane Hamsher is a supporter,  she is not on the campaign pay-roll.

Well, what kind of a cover-up is this, anyway?  The comments section at that Huffington Post make it clear that most readers found the graphic to be offensive and inappropriate.  But there is hidden gold!  The graphic designer, "DarkBlack" (I am as serious as the day is warm), put in an appearance at 2:42 PM to defend his work.  I can't manage a permalink directly to the comment, so here we go:

As the composer of the work in question, allow me to make some broader points clearer. This will be my last word on the subject, but all are free to debate further, of course.

Lieberman has attempted to activate a voting demographic that his strategists believe will aid him in his quest.

To this end, he has imported a figure, Bill Clinton, who has standing with the American black community, and has repeatedly asserted his personal credentials as one who has worked on behalf of that community.

Yet Lieberman has engaged in race baiting (with the Lamont flyer) as a cynical attempt to game this demographic, and he has engaged in other activities which cast doubtful shadows upon this allegiance.

Thus, in my opinion, Lieberman is pretending to be something that he is not for personal gain, exactly like the vile caucasian minstrel show performers of Vaudeville.
And so my artist's impression stands.

If we as a people run from controversial imagery, we will never stop running. Better to unearth and deal with the unpleasant than to live in fear.

Don't you just love Libs to death?  I know I do.

Well, at this point, since the graphic has been removed it seems that Ms. Hamsher is living in fear like the rest of us.  Oh, dear.

Lots of reax at Memeorandum but guess what?  I only see righties that posted criticism of this weird use of blackface.  Well, maybe we can have a little fun - back during the Debbie Frish debacle when various righties were moaning about the near-total silence of the left, Barbara O'Brien of the Mahablog explained that "I’d like to establish a “blogroll” rule. If someone on my blogroll writes something inexcusably nasty, then you can lump me together with or expect me to apologize for what that blogger wrote. Otherwise — go to hell.

Oh, I don't need to go to hell - that would be a coals to Newcastle exercise today, thank you.  But since both firedoglake and the Huffington Post are on her blogroll, perhaps we can lure Ms. O'Brien into the fray.  Her defense of Ms. Hamsher (what, do you think she is going to condemn this?) ought to be interesting - she defended Steve Gilliard's use of blackface last November as follows:

...“blackface” has long symbolized African-American acquiescence to racial oppression. If you understand the symbolism, you appreciate that Steve’s imagery is making a statement in opposition to racism.

Well, that is not the explanation offered by the artist - DarkBlack was not attempting to expose Lieberman's racism, but rather to depict that "Lieberman is pretending to be something that he is not for personal gain."

No worries - I have no doubt Ms. O'Brien will think of something; I certainly can't imagine she would break her own rule less than a month after announcing it.  And I am strangely confident that she won't be following the easy lead of the Sundog at TPM Cafe, who wrote this unequivocal piece:

This morning Jane Hamsher of firedoglake.com published a completely despicable Photoshopped picture of Joe Lieberman in blackface in her column at HuffPo.

You know, I can't identify with anyone on the left OR center any more. This is the left whose principles I have supported for more years that Jane Hamsher's been alive? You mean it's become as full of haters, idiot blog commenters and idiot bloggers as the right?

Color me depressed.

Jane? We have enough problems getting Lamont elected, could you please shut up? You've done enough. Really you have.

Ouch.

Moving on a bit, the Greenwich Times discussed the flyer that started this:

Lamont faces fallout over country club membership

By Brian Lockhart / Staff Writer / August 2, 2006

It has been impossible for Ned Lamont to avoid talking about his wealth during his Democratic primary race against Sen. Joe Lieberman.

If it's not his opponent reminding voters that Lamont is a Greenwich multimillionaire or demanding he release his tax returns, it's Lamont himself when he dips into his fortune to pay for his own campaign.

Now an aspect of Lamont's lifestyle he tried to prevent from becoming an issue -- his membership in Greenwich's exclusive Round Hill Club -- is being mocked on fliers circulated around the state by the Lieberman camp.

One side of the flier touts Lieberman's "lifetime É fighting against discrimination and injustice." The other side reads: "What is Ned Lamont's Civil Rights Record?" It also reprints Lamont's explanation to The New York Times that he resigned after 16 years from the club before challenging Lieberman because it didn't have enough minority members.

"He's trying to be someone he's not," said Marion Steinfels, Lieberman's communications director. "How politically calculated is that?"

Harvey Bellin of Weston, who attended Yale University with Lieberman and his helping in the campaign, said Lamont's membership at Round Hill is "iconic of what he is."

"When you're born into privilege like that and put into clubs, you make connections with rulers of the universe and it can become difficult to understand how regular people's lives work," Bellin said.

Lieberman's campaign insists it is not trying to portray Lamont as racist but simply compare their records.

But Lamont, in a brief phone interview last night, called the fliers dirty politics.

Lamont campaign manager Tom Swan, in an e-mail exchange late last week with Greenwich Time/The Advocate, said he advised his candidate to leave Round Hill. Swan said he was concerned Lieberman would "run a dirty campaign" and "try to make an issue of membership in a club that might not be considered to have an adequately diverse membership."

Club management did not return phone calls but a member, Republican state Rep. Livvy Floren, defended the institution as "very family oriented" and ethnically diverse.

And they go on, with only the briefest allusion to the possible anti-semitism angle I noted earlier:

Greenwich's country clubs gained national notoriety in the early 1990s when Lawrence Otis Graham, a high-powered corporate attorney, who is black, fudged his resume to work for a week at Greenwich Country Club on Doubling Road as a busboy. His subsequent expose, published in the Aug. 17, 1992, issue of New York magazine, portrayed the club's members as racists and anti-Semites.

Please keep in mind that the New York magazine article referred to a different country club.

And as we build to a mad crescendo here - in order to paper over his "black" problem, Lamont will be making campaign appearances with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, neither of whom could possibly know anything about Lamont except that he is the Anti-War Anti-Bush Not Joe.  But that is all they need to know, so have a great rally!

But riddle me this - are Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton the go-to guys that will reassure the Jewish community about the "real" Ned Lamont?  Let me pull this on Sharpton:

There was a consensus about one thing: that he is not an anti-Semite. "I have been with him on numerous times over 15 years, and I have never heard him engage in anti-Semitic actions or words," says civil libertarian Norman Siegel, who ran for public advocate with Sharpton's blessing. Even Dov Hikind, a leader of the Orthodox community and a longstanding Sharpton nemesis, prefers to call him a "racist" who has "indulged in anti-Semitism." Moderate Jewish leaders made this point more decorously. "Having talked to him and looked into his eyes, I feel that he is not an anti-Semite," says William Rapfogel, executive director of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty. "But I think he has used anti-Semitism."

MORE:  Jane Hamsher made the news - fun for the "Better looking than Coulter AND more outrageous" campaign, but troubling for Lamont:

This campaign has apparently hit a new low today with something offensive, and that is putting it mildly. The popular Huffington Post blog, which has strongly supported Lamont's candidacy, posted a picture today depicting President Clinton and Joe Lieberman in an Amos n Andy-type doctored picture obviously taken from the Waterbury rally last Monday. In the picture, Lieberman is drawn in blackface and Clinton is wearing dark sunglasses.

Lamont's campaign manager Tom Swan condemned this, calling it very offensive and said he requested that it be removed. He also said that while blogger Jane Hamsher is a supporter,  she is not on the campaign pay-roll.

"It's extremely offensive," Lieberman said. "I have been the target of the 'blogs' on a lot of really offensive stuff, stuff I consider lies and smears, but this picture of me with Bill Clinton and me having my face blackened is offensive to people of all races and colors and just doesn't belong."

I am still eager to hear Ms. O'Brien's defense of this (what, do you think I am having doubts about which side she will take?  I am!  With Lamont's campaign manager having condemned it the road is so well paved at this point she may surprise me and walk down it.)

BY ODD COINCIDENCE:  Just last weekend the NY Times Book Review "Editors' Choice" included "Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imitation in American Popular Culture".  Let's clip a snippet of their book review:

Still, John Strausbaugh argues in the persuasive, provocative "Black Like You," blackface continues to hold an especially vilified place in American culture. "The swastika, the 'N-word' and blackface, because of their special historical significance, are the ne plus ultra of hate speech," he writes.

Uh huh.  Well, the Times might cover this, since it gives them an opportunity to whack bloggers.  But I bet they give the Hamsher story a miss, since it reflects badly on their guy Lamont.

The Times Loses On Another Judy Miller Case

The NY Times lost an appeal by a 2-1 decision in a case involving an investigation into some Islamic charities.  Here is the WaPo:

The New York Times may not withhold reporters' phone records from a federal grand jury investigating an alleged leak of a pending government raid on two Islamic charities suspected of supporting terrorism, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday.

A three-judge panel of the New York-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled 2 to 1 that the Times has no First Amendment or other legal right to refuse a demand for the records from the grand jury in Chicago, which was empaneled by U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

Since this case involves both Patrick Fitzgerald and Judy Miller, both of whom are deeply involved with the Valerie Plame investigation, the Times coverage is especially intriguing and provokes this question - can they still say "Valerie Plame"?  Here we go with the Times treatment of the Fitzgerald/Miller backstory:

In an unrelated case last year, a federal appeals court in Washington ordered Ms. Miller and Matthew Cooper, then of Time magazine, to testify before a grand jury about conversations with their sources. They did so after receiving their sources’ permission, though not before Ms. Miller spent 85 days in jail.

Patrick J. Fitzgerald was the prosecutor in both cases, though he acted as United States attorney in Chicago in the charities case and as special counsel in the Washington case. His spokesman, Randall Samborn, declined to comment yesterday.

...

In seeming to acknowledge the existence of privilege, though one subject to a balancing test, the decision differed from the one issued by the federal appeals court in Washington last year that sent Ms. Miller to jail.

“There is a lot more to be heard from the courts before this issue is resolved one way or the other,” said Floyd Abrams, who represented The Times in both cases.

Why so coy at the Times?  The WaPo was not shy about using the Plame name.  If I had to guess, I would say that the Times would prefer that its readers forgot the whole Plame debacle, from the phony Joe Wilson op-ed (shouldn't the Times have mentioned it was written by a member of the Kerry campaign?) to their calls for a special prosecutor, to their calls for a special prosecutor who wouldn't actually subpoena reporters, to their vigorous defense of Judy Miller's right to protect Libby and Evil BushCo...  Ahhh!

Well - maybe we will find out that Nick Kristof was in on the Plame secret back in May of 2003; in TimesWorld, things can always get worse.

RIDDLE ME THIS:  Howard Bashman provides a link to the ruling, which provides the ammo to take on this vigorous defense of the Times by its assistant general counsel:

Mr. Freeman added: “The move against the charities was not a surprise. No one has ever alleged that any federal agent was hindered or hurt or didn’t succeed.”

Huh?  This is in the majority opinion:

The government alleges that, “[i]n both cases, the investigations -- as well as the safety of FBI agents participating in the actions -- were compromised when representatives of HLF and GRF were contacted prior to the searches by New York Times reporters Philip Shenon and Judith Miller, respectively, who advised of imminent adverse action by the government.”

And a bit later:

In a similar occurrence, on December 13, 2001, Shenon “contact[ed] GRF for the purposes of seeking comment on the government’s apparent intent to freeze its assets.” The following day, the government searched GRF offices. The government has since stated that “GRF reacted with alarm to the tip from [Shenon], and took certain action in advance of the FBI search.” It has claimed that “when federal agents entered the premises to conduct the search, the persons present at Global Relief Foundation were expecting them and already had a significant opportunity to remove items.”

I'll accept that no one is alleging that any FBI agents were actually hurt, although the government does allege their safety was compromised.  But this certainly seems to allege that the effectiveness of the search was hindered, if GRF had "a significant opportunity to remove items" - at a minimum, the FBI had to investigate whether or not GRF had actually availed itself of that opportunity, which may have been time-consuming.

Try To Remember...

Jeralyn Merritt delivers court filings and her thoughts on Libby's memory expert.  She also links to a NY Sun article by Josh Gerstein.

Briefly - memories about conversations are no more reliable than notoriously unreliable eyewitness testimony.  As a bonus, people tend to tailor their memories to fit their "memories, expectations, schemas and goals", which may explain why Libby's memory lapses mostly seem to break his way - it would hardly have suited Libby's "schemas and goals" to remember Cheney ordering him to out Ms. Plame.

MORE:  Below are some articles on memory research.  The Sun mentions a fascinating case study involving John Dean and Richard Nixon - Dean gave detailed Senate testimony to the Watergate Comittee in which he recounted, with great detail, a number of Oval Office conversations.  Later, we all learned that the Oval Office was taped, and eventually a researcher used the Dean recollections as a case study.  A soundbite about his conclusion:

Dean's recall = accurate recollection of what he wished had happened, but not that faithful to gist of conversation nor to verbatim record.

In general, Dean was very confident about his memory for these conversations.  But, his memory turned out to be quite self-centered.  His memory was distorted in such a way as to make him look better, wiser, more appreciated by the President.  Nevertheless

"Yet even when he was wrong, there was a sense in which he was telling the truth; even when he was right, it was not necessarily because he remembered a particular conversation well."

What he did, was remember certain themes, and sprinkle them liberally about the details of specific conversations, even when they hadn't happened in those conversations.  He got the individual episodes wrong (and often completely wrong), but nevertheless he got the themes correct.

Tricked by Memory / Elizabeth F. Loftus

Memory, Autobiography, History / John F. Kihlstrom