JustOneMinute

The Continuing Education Of Kevin Drum

Kevin Drum has apparently just discovered that some folks see a link between eugenics, abortion, and stem cell research.  Ross Douthat tries to bring him up to speed, but even a moment with Google might have been helpful in establishing that this is hardly a new debate.

And let me comment on the calm and thoughtful responses to this, such as:

The idea that progressives in any way support "eugenics" is so stupid that it should never get mentioned more than once...

Fine, let's not mention it.  However let's mention the actual argument - progressives support particular policies and programs, such as unrestricted abortion rights or stem cell research, that may have consequences upon which a supporter of eugenics would smile.  Selective abortion of Down's syndrome babies is the example cited by Mr. Douthat, but the controversial crime-abortion link might belong in the mix as well.

Now, one might argue that this eugenics debate is similar in spirit to the frequent insistence from the left that opponents of affirmative action are racist, since it is well known (or at least, well-presumed) that racists oppose affirmative action.  One might also argue that opponents of affirmative action are implicitly racist in that they are not willing to support a program meant to reduce racism.  Obviously, this argument founders if the premise - affirmative action does more to relieve than inflame racial tensions - is false.

Similarly, the eugenics-abortion link would founder if no one could point to eugenics-type outcomes as a result of unrestrictive abortion policies, but the links above suggest that that harbor is closed.

But on a simpler question - who really believes Kevin Drum is that ignorant?  Put another way - is he that stupid, does he think we are that stupid, or is he correct that his readers really that stupid?

Yes, we tackle the toughies here.

And A Sustainably Stable Morning To You As Well

Writing in the Times, Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack present an upbeat report on American prospects in Iraq:

VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated — many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work.

Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.

Wow.  Combine that with the NY Times poll results and one might infer that the Dems need to pin down Bush's defeat before it slips away from them.  WILLisms has more on this.

More reax at Memeorandum including this rebuttal from Joe Klein:

I agree with many, but not all, of the conclusions Ken Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon reach in this NY Times column, but you really can't write a piece about the wae in Iraq and devote only two sentences to the political situation, which is disastrous and, as Petraeus has said, will determine the success or failure of the overall effort.

MORE BAFFLERS:  NewsBusters was stunned to hear Chris Matthews and a panel of lib newsies discuss the problems with withdrawal and the benefits of standing and fighting in Iraq.

Maybe the CW has been to declare a US defeat for so long that folks are casting about for a new CW.

STILL MORE:  In "The Seven Deadly Sins of Failure in Iraq: A Retrospective Analysis of the Reconstruction" Ken Pollack wrote in Dec 2006 that the war was winnable at the outset but mismanaged in reconstruction.

And file this under "Must Be Easy To Be A Lefty Blogger" - both Greg Sargent and Glenn Greenwald tell their trusitng readers that O'Hanlon and Pollack supported this war.  Depends on what one means by "support", I guess - Pollack famously back-pedaled during the run-up, and is not shy about saying so:

...let me start with the necessary disclaimer that while I believed a war would be necessary to depose Saddam, I opposed both the timing and manner of the actual war as the Bush administration pursued it.

That said, if he had back-pedaled by Feb 21, 2003 it is hard to see it in "A Last Chance To Stop Iraq", which appeared in the Times.

As to Mr. O'Hanlon, he seems to have supported the disarmament of Saddam but wanted more troops for post-liberation reconstruction.  One might say his judgment on what it would take to win this war was untested; his judgment to support Bush and Rumsfeld was flawed.

Nerd Patrol

The NY Times magazine asks the age-old question:

Who’s a Nerd, Anyway?

What is a nerd? Mary Bucholtz, a linguist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been working on the question for the last 12 years.

Hmm - if you have been wondering who's a nerd for twelve years, your research might well be conducted with a bathroom mirror (works for me!).

She has gone to high schools and colleges, mainly in California, and asked students from different crowds to think about the idea of nerdiness and who among their peers should be considered a nerd; students have also “reported” themselves.  Nerdiness, she has concluded, is largely a matter of racially tinged behavior. People who are considered nerds tend to act in ways that are, as she puts it, “hyperwhite.”

There are no Asian nerds?  If anyone in this household would ever wake up I would conduct some field research of my own by interviewing a few teenagers.  Humph.

While the word “nerd” has been used since the 1950s, its origin remains elusive. Nerds, however, are easy to find everywhere. Being a nerd has become a widely accepted and even proud identity, and nerds have carved out a comfortable niche in popular culture; “nerdcore” rappers, who wear pocket protectors and write paeans to computer routing devices, are in vogue, and TV networks continue to run shows with titles like “Beauty and the Geek.” As a linguist, Bucholtz understands nerdiness first and foremost as a way of using language. In a 2001 paper, “The Whiteness of Nerds: Superstandard English and Racial Markedness,” and other works, including a book in progress, Bucholtz notes that the “hegemonic” “cool white” kids use a limited amount of African-American vernacular English; they may say “blood” in lieu of “friend,” or drop the “g” in “playing.” But the nerds she has interviewed, mostly white kids, punctiliously adhere to Standard English.

...Though Bucholtz uses the term “hyperwhite” to describe nerd language in particular, she claims that the “symbolic resources of an extreme whiteness” can be used elsewhere. After all, “trends in music, dance, fashion, sports and language in a variety of youth subcultures are often traceable to an African-American source,” but “unlike the styles of cool European American students, in nerdiness, African-American culture and language [do] not play even a covert role.” Certainly, “hyperwhite” seems a good word for the sartorial choices of paradigmatic nerds.

Had enough?  I got plenty more where that came from:

By cultivating an identity perceived as white to the point of excess, nerds deny themselves the aura of normality that is usually one of the perks of being white. Bucholtz sees something to admire here. In declining to appropriate African-American youth culture, thereby “refusing to exercise the racial privilege upon which white youth cultures are founded,” she writes, nerds may even be viewed as “traitors to whiteness.” You might say they know that a culture based on theft is a culture not worth having.

So young white nerds today are traitors to their whiteness by not pretending to be hip-hop gangstas?  Could someone please just cap me with a nine right now?  But quietly - people are sleeping...

Lots Of The Polls That Are Fit To Print

Janet Elder of the "All The News" paper has a laugh-out-loud story about what happens when the Times doesn't like a poll result - they bury it:

Same Old Question, Different Answer. Hmmm.

By Janet Elder

THE war in Iraq is the single most important continuing news issue right now. Public opinion about the war is a critical part of that story. That’s why when a finding about the war in a New York Times poll could not be easily explained, the paper went back and did another poll on the very same subject. It turns out the poll had gotten it right. Support for the initial invasion of Iraq, as measured by a question The New York Times/CBS News Poll has asked since December 2003, increased modestly compared with two months ago.

Well, I was duly shocked the second time around, when the Times finally reported it.  But let's press on:

The Times and CBS News conducted a poll from July 9 to July 17 with 1,554 adults, mostly about Hillary Clinton. There were a few questions about the other presidential candidates, about President Bush and about the war, but most of the poll was about Mrs. Clinton.

The polling took place during a week when there was no shortage of news about the war. Congress was debating the war; the Bush administration issued a report saying the Iraqi government had failed to meet many of the benchmarks it was supposed to meet; and prominent Republicans were distancing themselves from Mr. Bush on Iraq. 

In the poll, The Times and CBS News posed a standard question that asks respondents to think back to the invasion. Specifically, the poll asked: “Looking back, do you think the United States did the right thing in taking military action against Iraq, or should the United States have stayed out?”

Forty-two percent of those polled said the United States did the right thing, and 54 percent said the United States should have stayed out of Iraq. The last time the question was asked, in May, 35 percent said taking military action against Iraq was the right thing and 61 percent said the United States should have stayed out.

The July numbers represented a change. It was counterintuitive. None of the other war-related questions showed change. Mr. Bush’s approval rating had not changed. Nor had approval of his handling of Iraq. The level of support for Mr. Bush’s decision to send more troops to Iraq — the “surge” — was about the same as it had been in past polls. Support for the decision to go to war had risen modestly and nothing else in the poll could explain it.

A Newsweek poll conducted July 11-12 had a similar finding for the same question. But the magazine had not asked its question since December, so it is hard to know whether its current reading measured any recent change.

Once in a while a poll finding doesn’t make sense. Sometimes The Times will wait to publish the results until another poll is taken asking the question again. But such a shift happens rarely with questions like this one, which the paper has asked many times over a long period.

What could explain the change? Perhaps, the answers about the war had inadvertently been influenced by placing them a few questions away from one about Mrs. Clinton’s not having repudiated her decision in 2002 to vote to authorize the war.

It was just a hunch, but it was all there was. Along with CBS News, The Times decided to poll again, to ask the war trend question without the possible influence of the question about Mrs. Clinton.

So let's see - this was interesting enough to justify a re-poll, even though a contemporaneous Newsweek poll offered support.  But did they print the initial result as a news-making item of interest?

Please.  In the latest reporting, the only two poll results mentioned are from May 18-23 and July 20-22; the earlier July result is unreported.

And might diligent readers of the initial "complete" Hillary poll have noted the eye-catching result?  Again, don't be daft - the questions skip from number 97, about Hillary, to number 101, about Iraq.  And question 101 is, paraphrased, "How are things going in the attempt to bring stability to Iraq?".  That question is number 7 in the July 23 poll (ands shows a result for July 9-17); the "was invasion the right thing" query is number 6 in the July 23 poll.

So in their latest polling sequence, the "right thing" question immediately precedes the
"bring stability" question; in the July 19 poll, the numbers are out of sequence and the "right thing" is nowhere to be found.

Just as Ms. Elder has reported, the Times really did flush that first result down the memory hole.

Well.  To be fair, the Times has featured the Janet Elder revelation on the front of the Week in Review, and apparently also ran it on July 25, so I suspect they have a sense that they will be catching flak for this.  And there is a "damned if you do" factor here as well - publishing a curious poll result and then rebutting it in a new special poll would also have prompted howls of outrage.

But isn't it good to know that the Times will carefully suppress and doublecheck good news for Bush as it emerges?  i know none of us want them to print good news for Bush only to have to run a correction (or confirmation!) a few days later.

And do any amongst us doubt that the Times would be equally diligent about sitting on good news for the Dems until it could be verified?  I am sure they have done so many times, but just never called it to our attention, and of course there is really no way to monitor them - puzzling results seem to be pretty much fully suppressed, with only the question numbers available to indicate a missing question.

But really - where is the trust?

As to the underlying question - the latest Iraq film the Times is promoting seems to support the notion that the war in Iraq was winnable at the outset but lost due to ghastly mistakes in the initial post-liberation reconstruction phase (too few troops for security, de-B'aathification, disbanding the Iraqi army and breaking up the Iraqi leadership council spring to mind).

So maybe the idea that the invasion was plausible but the reconstruction was bungled is taking hold.

I Guess He Should Have Just Burned A Flag

This will make for a fascinating prosecution:

Hate-crime arrests in Quran desecrations at Pace University
July 27, 2007, 8:33 PM EDT

   NEW YORK (AP) _ A 23-year-old man was arrested Friday on hate-crime charges after he threw a Quran in a toilet at Pace University on two separate occasions, police said.

Stanislav Shmulevich of Brooklyn was arrested on charges of criminal mischief and aggravated harassment, both hate crimes, police said. It was unclear if he was a student at the school. A message left at the Shmulevich home was not immediately returned.

The Islamic holy book was found in a toilet at Pace's lower Manhattan campus by a teacher on Oct. 13. A student discovered another book in a toilet on Nov. 21, police said.

Muslim activists had called on Pace University to crack down on hate crimes after the incidents. As a result, the university said it would offer sensitivity training to its students.   

Well, if had burned an American flag the issues would be clear.  If he had put a crucifix in a glass of urine, it would have been art.

On the other hand, a book in a toilet, regardless of the book, can damage the toilet and cause property damage, so there may be a fairly simple cause of action on that basis.

Or if the Quran was not his own, well, then, Mr. Shmulevich is on his own.

The good news - with a name like that, tracking this case via Google should not be difficult.

MORE:  Dan Riehl and the Daily News tell us the Quran did not belong to Mr. Shmulevich:

He was busted after cops discovered a surveillance camera that filmed him leaving the meditation room where the Korans had been kept before the vandalism.

Allahpundit at Hot Air tries to sort out the relevant statutes.

Parsing Gonzales And Prepping For Greymail

The Captain does a good job presenting the White House talking points in defense of embattled AG Gonzales.  And as he points out to his critics, he is reporting, not evaluating - attorneys, feel free to chime in.

And the NY Times shines a new light on the issue broached by Jane Harman, to wit, when is a program not one program, but two.  I have added emphasis to the greymail puzzle:

Mining of Data Prompted Fight Over Spying
By SCOTT SHANE AND DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, July 28 — A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former officials briefed on the program.

It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate. But such databases contain records of the phone calls and e-mail messages of millions of Americans, and their examination by the government would raise privacy issues.

The N.S.A.’s data mining has previously been reported. But the disclosure that concerns about it figured in the March 2004 debate helps to clarify the clash this week between Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and senators who accused him of misleading Congress and called for a perjury investigation.

The confrontation in 2004 led to a showdown in the hospital room of then Attorney General John Ashcroft, where Mr. Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time, and Andrew H. Card Jr., then the White House chief of staff,  tried to get the ailing Mr. Ashcroft to reauthorize  the N.S.A. program.

Mr. Gonzales insisted before the Senate this week that the 2004 dispute did not involve the Terrorist Surveillance Program “confirmed” by President Bush, who has acknowledged eavesdropping without warrants but has never acknowledged the data mining.

If the dispute chiefly involved data mining, rather than eavesdropping, Mr. Gonzales’ defenders may maintain that his narrowly crafted answers, while legalistic, were technically correct.

But members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who have been briefed on the program, called the testimony deceptive.

“I’ve had the opportunity to review the classified matters at issue here, and I believe that his testimony was misleading at best,” said Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, joining three other Democrats in calling Thursday for a perjury investigation of Mr. Gonzales.

“This has gone on long enough,” Mr. Feingold said. “It is time for a special counsel to investigate whether criminal charges should be brought.”

Let me ask an obvious question that seems to have eluded some of our Senators and is not broached by the Times - how in the world is a perjury prosecution going to proceed without a massive declassification of these classified and presumably ongoing programs?  Will the jury and the public see what Sen. Feingold saw?

The greymail issue was reported by the Times in the context of the Libby trial, so let's use their definition (if not their spelling):

Graymail is the practice of discouraging a prosecution from proceeding by contending that a defendant may need to disclose classified or sensitive information as part of a full defense. Such an approach can force the government to choose between dropping the prosecution or allowing the information to be disclosed at a trial.

In the Libby case the classified issues were somewhat tangential to the question of whether Libby lied about his interaction with various reporters, but in the Gonzales situation, I can't imagine how a jury could rule on whether this reasonably be characterized as more than one program without a fair amount of information about the underlying activities.

And a bonus complication - as Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald eventually realized, there are limits to the power that can be delegated to a special counsel (if we ever reach that point).  The Classified Information Procedures Act requires the Attorney General or specific underlings to resolve disputes on what information can be declassified; this does not appear to be a power that could be delegated to a special counsel:

Sec. 14. Functions of Attorney General

The functions and duties of the Attorney General under this Act may be exercised by the Deputy Attorney General, the Associate Attorney General, or by an Assistant Attorney General designated by the Attorney General for such purpose and may not be delegated to any other official.

This would all be deeply problematic if a perjury prosecution of Gonzales on the basis of his characterization of these activities as more than one program were to be attempted.  And the possible procedures for a Senate trial under their inherent contempt authority would be even more baffling - would Gonzales still be the one to sign off on the evidence against him?

I don't want to be tagged as defending Gonzales here - even I, a small government guy, had in mind more of a defunding of the NEA than the de facto elimination of the Attorney General as a credible Cabinet officer - but the classified information hurdle looks like a major barrier to a prosecution.

MORE:  John Hinderaker of Powerline backs the "two programs" interpretation and claims vindication for Gonzales.

The Anon Lib has extended excerpts from the controversial Gonzales testimony in a Friday post rebutting the notion that Gonzales was aiming for a temporal distinction between one program from 2001 to 2004 and a second program thereafter.  However, this post did not fully anticipate the latest data-mining info, so let me tweak the Anon one with this timeline:

Dec 16, 2005 - NY Times breaks story about warrantless eavesdropping

Dec 17 - President confirms program in radio address; this, we are now told, is what Gonzales had in mind when he told the Senate "there has not been any serious disagreement about the program that the president has confirmed. There have been disagreements about other matters regarding operations which I cannot get into."

Dec 24 - NY Times writes about data mining as part of "the program":

WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 - The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

For folks scoring at home, one might say Gonzales has a point about two programs, since they were revealed separately and the President only confirmed the first.  But wait!  Here is Gonzales with General Hayden at a Dec 19 press conference following the President's radio address:

ATTORNEY GENERAL GONZALES:  Thanks, Scott.

The President confirmed the existence of a highly classified program on Saturday.  The program remains highly classified; there are many operational aspects of the program that have still not been disclosed and we want to protect that because those aspects of the program are very, very important to protect the national security of this country.  So I'm only going to be talking about the legal underpinnings for what has been disclosed by the President.

Ouch - it would have been helpful to his current argument if Gonzales had chosen that moment to note the existence of other programs, rather than referring to one over-arching program of which the President had confirmed a part.

Oh, well - an AG can change his mind, right?  Hmm... I guess Senators are always the last to know.

ERRATA:  This Hayden presser from Jan 2006 may be worth a re-read.

IMPEACH GONZALES:  Oddly enough, on Saturday I had double-checked the Constitution to verify that Cabinet officers are subject to impeachment.  Now the NY Times is calling for impeachemnt of Gonzales if a special counsel is not appointed, and Josh Marshall is providing a history lesson in Cabinet impeachments.

As discussed above I don't think a special counsel can handle the perjury allegation on this eavesdropping program, but a Senate impeachment trial ought to be a possibility since they can make up their own rules of evidence.  From a PR perspective, however, do the Dems want to take evidence in a closed session and then vote to remove Gonzales?  Maybe Nancy Pelosi can be one of the House impeachment managers and appear in a red dress, just to play the Red Queen in this Gonzo In Wonderland scenario.

ASHCROFT v. CHENEY:  The relationship between Ashcroft and Cheney was, we infer, frosty in late 2003/early 2004:

Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, was astonished to learn that the draft gave the Justice Department no role in choosing which alleged terrorists would be tried in military commissions. Over Veterans Day weekend, on Nov. 10, he took his objections to the White House.

The attorney general found Cheney, not Bush, at the broad conference table in the Roosevelt Room. According to participants, Ashcroft said that he was the president's senior law enforcement officer, supervised the FBI and oversaw terrorism prosecutions nationwide. The Justice Department, he said, had to have a voice in the tribunal process. He was enraged to discover that Yoo, his subordinate, had recommended otherwise -- as part of a strategy to deny jurisdiction to U.S. courts.

Raising his voice, participants said, Ashcroft talked over Addington and brushed aside interjections from Cheney. "The thing I remember about it is how rude, there's no other word for it, the attorney general was to the vice president," said one of those in the room. Asked recently about the confrontation, Ashcroft replied curtly: "I'm just not prepared to comment on that."

According to Yoo and three other officials, Ashcroft did not persuade Cheney and got no audience with Bush. Bolten, in an October 2006 interview after becoming Bush's chief of staff, did not deny that account. He signaled an intention to operate differently in the second term.

Add it up - in that time frame the DoJ was revising their view on detainees and enhanced interrogation, revising their view on warrantless eavesdropping, and Fitzgerald had just been appointed to investigate Libby and (we presume) Cheney.

Even Paranoids Have Real Supporters

John Edwards alerts his followers that "they" want to "shut me up".

But who is "they"?  Not George Soros' Billionaire Boy's Club, surely.  Not the Phoneix Group.  Baffling.

Oh, well - file it under "Unsolved Mysteries".  But John Edwards knows his audience - he was comfortable pandering to a 9/11 'Truther', so why shouldn't he reach out to the many other conspiracists of the left?  The Paranoid Style is a slice of Americana.

ALL THAT SAID: I agree with Edwards - I want him to shut up.

Parsing Gonzales

Messrs Johnston and Shane of the NY Times continues to puzzle over Attorney General Gonzales' controversial Senate testimony:

WASHINGTON, July 26 — The director of the F.B.I.  offered testimony Thursday  that sharply conflicted with Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales’s sworn statements about a 2004 confrontation in which top Justice Department officials threatened to resign over a secret intelligence operation.

The director, Robert S. Mueller III, told the House Judiciary Committee that the confrontation was about the National Security Agency’s counterterrorist eavesdropping program, describing it as “an N.S.A. program that has been much discussed.” His testimony was a serious blow to Mr. Gonzales, who insisted at a Senate hearing on Tuesday that there were no disagreements inside the Bush administration about the program at the time of those discussions or at any other time.

However! 

In a four-hour appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Mr. Gonzales denied that the dispute arose over the Terrorist Surveillance Program, whose existence was confirmed by President Bush in December 2005 after it had been disclosed by The New York Times. Mr. Gonzales said it centered on “other intelligence activities.”

Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said Thursday night that Mr. Gonzales had testified truthfully, saying “confusion is inevitable when complicated classified activities are discussed in a public forum where the greatest care must be used not to compromise sensitive intelligence operations.”

The spokesman said that when Mr. Gonzales had said there had been no controversy about the eavesdropping operation, he was referring only to the program to intercept international communications that Mr. Bush publicly confirmed.

“The disagreement that occurred in March 2004 concerned the legal basis for intelligence activities that have not been publicly disclosed and that remain highly classified,” Mr. Roehrkasse said.

So, when is a program not a program?  Geez, couldn't you ask me about doors?  Anyway, yesterday we highlighted this cryptic comment from Rep. Jane Harman (D, CA). formerly the ranking member of the House Intel Committee:

“The program had different parts, but there was only one program,” Ms. Harman said, adding that Mr. Gonzales was “selectively declassifying information to defend his own conduct,” which she called improper.

One starts to suspect that Mr. Gonzales has a different view as to whether the different parts constitute one program or not.  As to whether his interpretation is sufficiently plausible to avoid an inquiry, I have no idea.  OK, I have some idea - with all this howling, I bet reasonable minds (if any are left in Washington) will agree that he was being awfully cute, at a minimum, and was lying, at a maximum.

It's still puzzling.  Gonzales is describing an intelligence briefing attended by four Democrats - how could he expect to lie about this and get away with it?

When Did We Lose Iraq?

The Times has two articles on political scientist / dot.com millionaire / film director Charles Ferguson and his new movie about Iraq, "No End In Sight".

From the first article:

Mr. Ferguson was explaining how he came to write, direct, produce and finance “No End in Sight,” a sharply critical documentary about the planning and execution of the American occupation of Iraq that opens tomorrow in New York and Washington.

...

But unlike many of the earlier Iraq films, which tell their stories through the eyes of soldiers, “No End in Sight,” examines the planning of the American occupation through interviews with some of its principal players like Richard L. Armitage, the deputy secretary of state under Colin L. Powell, and Barbara K. Bodine, the former ambassador to Yemen who ran central Iraq immediately after the fall of Baghdad in early 2003.

The end product is a mathematically precise indictment of the Bush administration’s strategy for stabilizing postwar Iraq. Mr. Ferguson, a San Francisco native who describes himself as socially liberal but a centrist on issues of military policy, said he was initially “very, very sympathetic” to invading Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Compared with other administration officials depicted in the film, President Bush gets off fairly easy. Mr. Ferguson reserves his harshest judgment for Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time; Paul D. Wolfowitz, his deputy; and L. Paul Bremer III, the former administrator in Iraq. Mr. Ferguson zeroes in on their decisions during the first few months of the occupation, which he asserts was a make-or-break moment that the Americans ultimately bungled.

Mr. Ferguson said all three men declined his requests for interviews.

The same ground is covered in the movie review:

Mr. Ferguson, a former Brookings Institution scholar with a doctorate in political science, presents familiar material with impressive concision and impact, offering a clear, temperate and devastating account of high-level arrogance and incompetence.

If failure, as the saying goes, is an orphan, then “No End in Sight” can be thought of as a brief in a paternity suit, offering an emphatic, well- supported answer to a question that has already begun to be mooted on television talk shows and in journals of opinion: Who lost Iraq? On Mr. Ferguson’s short list are Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and L. Paul Bremer III. None of them agreed to be interviewed for the film. Perhaps they will watch it.

...Mr. Ferguson’s focus turns out to be fairly narrow. He does not dwell on the period between Sept. 11, 2001, and the beginning of the invasion that overthrew Saddam Hussein, nor does he spend a lot of time chronicling the violence that has so far taken the lives of more than 3,000 American soldiers and marines and tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of Iraqis. Instead, most of the movie deals with a period of a few months in the spring and summer of 2003, when a series of decisions were made that did much to determine the terrible course of subsequent events.

It is important to note that Mr. Ferguson’s principal interlocutors were not, at the time, critics of the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq but rather people who had, often at considerable professional cost and personal risk, committed themselves to fulfilling those policies. They include Barbara Bodine, a diplomat with long experience in the Middle East; Paul Eaton, an Army major general; Seth Moulton, a lieutenant in the Marine Corps; and Jay Garner, the retired lieutenant general who served as head of the Organization of Recovery and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq.

That agency, set up to rebuild and stabilize Iraq after the invasion, soon gave way to the Coalition Provisional Authority, directed by Mr. Bremer, who took over in May 2003. Already, according to the eyewitnesses interviewed in “No End in Sight,” terrible mistakes had been made. Looting and other early manifestations of disorder were more likely to be met with Rumsfeldian aphorisms — “Stuff happens”; freedom is “untidy” — than with appropriate tactical responses. And then, once the provisional authority assumed control, orders came down to purge the bureaucracy and the civil service of all members of the Baath Party and to dismantle the Iraqi military. As Mr. Eaton and Mr. Garner tell it, the last policy was especially disastrous and was arrived at and carried out precipitously and without discussion.

Mr. Ferguson seems to have taken a side in a great divide - was the initial invasion realistic in the sense that the long term goal of a stable and democratic Iraq was achievable, and was it only mismanagement of the post-liberation reconstruction of Iraq that was botched?  Put another way, has this been a failure of conception or execution?  I had links to some discussion of this last January but I am certain historians will debate this for decades.

And for today's purposes, let's recall the recent Times/CBS poll showing rising public support for the concept of the initial invasion.  That might suggest growing support for the notion that the key errors were made in the reconstruction.

I assume the political implications are obvious - if the war was never winnable, we may as well stop beating our head against a wall.  On the other hand, if the war was winnable at the outset, then maybe the errors can be fixed and the war still "won".

Obviously, one might argue that whether or not the war was winnable in May of 2003, the cumulative errors have made victory impossible now.  However - if the war was never winnable, then the war supporters were complete idiots (or at least, wrong - I still don't feel completely idiotic).  If the war was winnable at one time, then, well, it was someone else's fault.

And on that point - I am not sure why Bush gets a pass in this movie.  It was Bush's job to know whether the reconstruction planing was getting the proper attention, focus and coordination; if Rumsfeld was putting too much effort into the invasion planning and not enough into the reconstruction phase, Bush should have re-directed his effort.

MORE:  Let's hear from the well-regarded Phillip Carter of Intel Dump:

[The movie] presents the history of the Iraq war in clear, sober, and vivid footage, and makes a compelling argument that we are past the point of "winnability" (whatever that means) today in Iraq.

...Dr. Ferguson clearly makes an artistic judgment to focus roughly 2/3 of his film on the run-up to the war and its early aftermath in 2003. This reflects his political judgment, as explained afterwards during Q&A, that the events and decisions during that timeframe set the stage for what would come. His movie barely covers the 2004 assaults on Fallujah and the Abu Ghraib scandal, and omits mention of the 2005 elections, the Maliki government, and the 2006 Samarra mosque bombing. I'm not so sure that I agree with this; I think the window of opportunity in Iraq stretched into 2004, and that it really didn't slam shut until the disastrous response to the sectarian violence incited by the February 2006 bombing of the Al-Askari mosque in Samarra. But the movie does a good job of explaining the early sins of the occupation, and arguing that these put us on the wrong path from the start.

So, in his view failure was of execution rather than conception.  I'm glad to hear it.

Mapmaker, Mapmaker, Make Me A Map

The Times tells you more than you could care to know about the ways in which e-maps are the new frontier.

However, I read the article and show tunes were going off in my head, so here we are.

Gonzo Blogging

Let's have a Gonzales commemorative open thread.  I'll tee it off with two posts from the Captain - the first wonders whether Albert ought to be spending time with his family, and the second wonders who was lying to whom about a briefing on some secret program or other. 

Let me toss in the Times dance on this.  I have added emphasis to Jane Harman's circle-squaring comment, to wit, "The program had different parts, but there was only one program":

But some Congressional Democrats disputed Mr. Gonzales’s account of the White House meeting, and Justice Department aides acknowledged in a background briefing for reporters after the hearing that his “linguistic parsing” had caused confusion.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, who attended the 2004 meeting as the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, called Mr. Gonzales’s account “untruthful.” Mr. Rockefeller said he believed Mr. Gonzales was deliberately misleading Congress about the showdown over the N.S.A. program inside the Bush administration.

...

Mr. Gonzales’s account added fresh detail to what was previously known about the hospital confrontation in which Mr. Ashcroft, who had had gallbladder surgery, and other senior Justice Department officials had threatened to resign until President Bush agreed to modify the program.

His account also contrasted sharply with the recollection of James B. Comey, a former deputy attorney general who worked under both Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Gonzales. Mr. Comey testified before the committee in May that he had been “very angry” during the hospital encounter because “I thought I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man.”

Mr. Comey said he and Mr. Ashcroft had serious reservations about renewing the surveillance authorization based on a legal review by the Justice Department. The intelligence-gathering operation was later modified, in ways that are still not clear, to overcome Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Comey’s main objections.

At the hearing, several senators attacked Mr. Gonzales’s assertions under oath in testimony last year that there had been no disagreement inside the Bush administration over the N.S.A. surveillance program.

Mr. Specter asked Mr. Gonzales, “What credibility is left for you when you say there’s no disagreement?”

In answers that seemed to perplex and further exasperate senators, Mr. Gonzales said his past testimony about the program was correct. He said there was no debate about the N.S.A. program whose existence was confirmed by Mr. Bush in December 2005, after it was disclosed by The New York Times.

He insisted, however, that there were other “intelligence activities” that prompted the dispute in 2004 in which Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Comey and other Justice Department officials had threatened to quit.

Some senators expressed disbelief at the distinction Mr. Gonzales was seeking to make. “You’re not being straightforward with this committee,” Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said. “You’re deceiving us.”

Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, a Judiciary Committee member who also sits on the Intelligence Committee and has been briefed on the classified N.S.A. activities, said he was “appalled” by Mr. Gonzales’s testimony. “I believe your testimony is misleading at best,” Mr. Feingold said. He said he could not elaborate in an unclassified hearing.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, who also sits on both the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees said he agreed with Mr. Feingold, stating, “I have exactly the same perception.”

Other lawmakers who were not at the hearing but who attended the meeting on March 10, 2004 at the White House, also challenged Mr. Gonzales’s account. Mr. Rockefeller and Representative Jane Harman of California, who in 2004 was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, insisted that there was only one N.S.A. program, making Mr. Gonzales’s assertions inaccurate.

“The program had different parts, but there was only one program,” Ms. Harman said, adding that Mr. Gonzales was “selectively declassifying information to defend his own conduct,” which she called improper.

But another member of the Gang of Eight — the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate and House and of the two Intelligence Committees _— supported Mr. Gonzales’s version. Speaking on condition of anonymity, he confirmed the attorney general’s testimony that the group reached a “consensus” that the disputed intelligence activity should continue and that passing emergency legislation would risk revealing secrets.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, who attended the 2004 White House meeting as House Democratic minority leader, said through a spokesman that she did not dispute that the majority of those present supported continuing the intelligence activity. But Ms. Pelosi said she dissented and supported Mr. Comey’s objections at the meeting, said the spokesman, Brendan Daly.

I think it is astonishing that a Cabinet officer can come in and display such low regard for Congress - astonishing and yes, in a way, inspiring.  In fact, I think Congress ought to call Gonzales back and invite him to make balloon animals, or perhaps tell a few flatulence jokes.  Why not?

 

The Spitzer Situation

Let me recap the Eliot Spitzer situation as described by the Times:

Governor Spitzer and his top aides were thumped by State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo for their use of the State Police to dig up potentially embarrassing travel information on Republican State Senate leader and political rival Joseph Bruno.

However (and here you might want to start humming "That's What Friends Are For"), there was a little bit of criticism directed at the force and focus of the Cuomo investigation - two of Spitzer's top aides were allowed to avoid any vexing questions and simply submit depositions.

The Times also added this, late in a story about the newly-disgraced Darren Dopp:

Mr. Dopp, who did not respond to requests for comment, has a long connection to the Cuomo family. Governor Cuomo gave him his start in politics, recruiting him away from The Associated Press in 1988. Mr. Dopp was a favorite of Mr. Cuomo’s and, by some accounts, was friendly with his son too.

“Andrew, I think, understood that Darren served Mario very well,” Mr. Lapetina said. “Darren had a rapport with Andrew as well.”

...

After several years as a press aide to Mr. Cuomo, Mr. Dopp became the governor’s liaison to the Southern Tier, a move that took him close to his boyhood home. After Mr. Cuomo left office in 1994, Mr. Dopp served as spokesman for Michael J. Bragman, the majority leader of the State Assembly, before he joined the staff of Mr. Spitzer, then the attorney general, in 1999.

Now Republicans are calling for the State Senate to probe this; Spitzer plans to continue to stonewall, and good luck to him.

Here is a bit of hand-wringing from the Times editors. 

The NY Post has led the charge on this (a quick 1, 2, 3), but we bet the Wall Street Journal will join in with vigor - their law blog provided a reminder of the powerful enemies Spitzer has made over the years and they editorialized about the "The Spitzer Method" on Wednesday.

Let me cite this from the Post since in my experience all their links go bad quickly:

THE EDITORS

July 24, 2007 -- YESTERDAY, Gov. Spitzer insisted he'd known nothing about his aides' abuse of the power of his office in their effort to "get" Sen. Joe Bruno.

Funny - when did he stop reading The Post?

Back on July 5, Post State Editor Fred Dicker blew this scandal open with a scoop headlined "GOV'S TROOPER SNOOP JOB ON BRUNO / ORDERED POLICE TO TRACK GOP FOE'S MOVEMENTS." Dicker noted that "Gov. Spitzer targeted state Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno for an unprecedented State Police surveillance program."

The headline of that day's Post editorial asked, "An Abuse of Power?" We warned, "If, in fact, Spitzer sicced troopers on Bruno, the governor's effectiveness will be significantly constrained. . . . If Spitzer wants to avoid spending the coming months - if not years - attempting to govern under such a cloud, he would do well to commission an independent investigation of the facts already on the record, and of those which might come later."

                        

Slate had a round-up as well, and Forbes waxes nostalgic about Spitzer's past employment of similar press tactics.

The key see-saw - New York was a Democratic state before Eliot Spitzer came along and it will be a Democratic state after he leaves.  The question is how much pain State Dems will be willing to endure aiding Spitzer in his improbable cover-up before they pull the plug and move on.

And Andrew Cuomo is both the fellow who investigated Spitzer and his likely heir - what an odd situation.  Oh, well - what kind of a country are we living in where the son of a popular ex-governor has to wait awhile before ascending to the family throne?

If Jim Ronca Is So Staunch A Republican...

I have been chuckling for days at the discomfiture of Chicago Sun-Times columnist Jennifer Hunter, who just won't fold her losing hand and admit that she was snookered by Jim Ronca, a trial lawyer who claimed to be a staunch Republican who was (surprise!) going to back a Dem candidate for President.

Well, I know she won't ask Mr. Ronca this, so allow me - in his letter defending his switch of allegiance, Mr. Ronca wrote this:

Even though I am a long-term Republican I am not a fool. Naturally I opposed candidates like George W. Bush and Rick Santorum who have vilified plaintiffs trial lawyers. (Santorum was a particularly vicious hypocrite. His wife collected on a medical malpractice case much more than the limits he supported on other citizens.) I am proud of what I do and there is no way I would be stupid enough to support people who subscribe to the Karl Rove practice of shooting at the trial lawyers every chance they get.

Well, then - why has Mr. Ronca pre-emptively turned his back on Fred Thompson, a likely Rep candidate about whom the WaPo wrote this:

His work representing white-collar criminals, drug defendants and lawsuit victims has given Thompson an affinity with one of the Republican Party's perennial targets, trial lawyers, and he carries that connection with him even today as he prepares to seek the GOP presidential nomination. It also helped shape a view on lawsuit reform that has frequently put him at odds with his own party.

"We viewed him as someone we could work with, particularly given he had been an advocate in court for individuals and corporations, and had an innate understanding of what went on in a civil jury," explained Linda Lipsen, the chief lobbyist for the American trial lawyers lobby group that Republicans often pilloried for opposing tort reform during the 1990s.

Unlike many Republicans during the 1990s, Thompson easily collected large sums of political donations from lawyers during his Senate career -- more than $1.5 million over eight years. The trial lobby's political action committee gave him maximum $10,000 donations during each of his two Senate campaigns.

Sounds like a staunch Republican trial lawyer's dream candidate; we will keep an eye on the FEC database and hope to see Mr. Ronca's check.

Surging Support For The Invasion

The Times offers a real head-scratcher:

Support for Initial Invasion Has Risen, Poll Shows

Americans’ support for the initial invasion of Iraq has risen somewhat as the White House has continued to ask the public to reserve judgment about the war until at least the fall. In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted over the weekend, 42 percent of Americans said that looking back, taking military action in Iraq was the right thing to do, while 51 percent said the United States should have stayed out of Iraq.

But two-thirds of those polled said the United States should reduce its forces in Iraq, or remove them altogether. Support for the invasion had been at an all-time low in May, when only 35 percent of Americans said the invasion of Iraq was the right thing and 61 percent said the United States should have stayed out. The latest poll made clear that a two-thirds majority of Americans continue to say the war is going badly.

However, the number of people who say the war is going “very badly” has fallen from 45 percent earlier in July to a current reading of 35 percent, and of those who say it is going well, 29 percent now describe it as “somewhat well” compared with 23 percent just last week.

The story provides this link to the poll itself.

I am baffled - does the Bush Administration actually have enough credibility to move public opinion?  I'll be back with more, but dream with me for a moment - it is the summer of 2008, support for the initial invasion has risen back above 50% and Dem nominee Hillary Clinton is boasting to a roaring convention that she never apologized for her war vote and never wavered in her belief that we could achieve a stable and democratic Iraq.

Well.  Here is the bookend Times story on the latest classified plans:

U.S. Is Seen in Iraq Until at Least ’09

By MICHAEL R. GORDON

 

BAGHDAD, July 23 — While Washington is mired in political debate over the future of Iraq, the American command here has prepared a detailed plan that foresees a significant American role for the next two years.

The classified plan, which represents the coordinated strategy of the top American commander and the American ambassador, calls for restoring security in local areas, including Baghdad, by the summer of 2008. “Sustainable security” is to be established on a nationwide basis by the summer of 2009, according to American officials familiar with the document.

The detailed document, known as the Joint Campaign Plan, is an elaboration of the new strategy President Bush signaled in January when he decided to send five additional American combat brigades and other units to Iraq. That signaled a shift from the previous strategy, which emphasized transferring to Iraqis the responsibility for safeguarding their security.

That new approach put a premium on protecting the Iraqi population in Baghdad, on the theory that improved security would provide Iraqi political leaders with the breathing space they needed to try political reconciliation.

The latest plan, which covers a two-year period, does not explicitly address troop levels or withdrawal schedules. It anticipates a decline in American forces as the “surge” in troops runs its course later this year or in early 2008. But it nonetheless assumes continued American involvement to train soldiers, act as partners with Iraqi forces and fight terrorist groups in Iraq, American officials said.

Although these plans are supposed to be classified I infer from the "added emphasis" bit that this is an Administration leak; presumably it it part of their eerily effective effort to rally public support. 

MORE TO FOLLOW...

MORE: AllahPundit at Hot Air opines on the political motivation behind this leak:

...Petraeus and his team can’t seriously believe they’ll have a chance to put [this plan]t into action with Republicans already itching for September to roll around so they can abandon ship. Mitch McConnell has all but promised to push Baker-Hamilton when it does, and once he heads for the lifeboats he’ll take plenty of others with him. So either they’re leaking this now for political leverage, to make it harder for Congress to withdraw as many troops as it would like after Petraeus’s progress report (”but there’s already a plan in place!”) or it’s an insurance policy to which Bush can point after they pull the plug to claim that Congress abandoned the mission before the new strategy had a chance to work (”but there was a plan in place!”).

Well, OK.

Where Was Bill?

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson really is running for President and really did appear at the Democratic debate last night but NY Times readers can be forgiven if they are confused - two stories produced zero mentions of his effort last night.

Bah - an empty car pulled up to the curb and Richardson stepped out.  Even if I want to bury the Times, it is still the Governor's challenge to make himself stand out.

Timing Is Everything

Who among us has not sought the occasional do-over?

The Politico tells us that, based on the dismal performance of "Commander in Chief" and Katie Couric, that "Television Provides A Poor Signal For Hillary".

Yet in related news we learn that "24" is anointing Cherry Jones as Jack Bauer's next President.

Will this provide Hillary any kind of a tailwind?  "24" has already made Barack Obama President twice, yet he trails Hillary in current polls.

Mad About Harry

I am emerging from my news exile after 48 hours of avoiding any possible exposure to Potter plot spoilers and can report back the following:

The two teenage daughters had about a dozen friends over for a midnight run to Barnes and Noble followed by a sleep- and read-over.   I read until about 2:30, then hit the hay; my wife promised me she was going to turn out the light soon, but since she was still reading when I re-awakened at 6:30, I put on some coffee and resumed the quest.  As an aside I am forming a theory that this is the only way to read these books - the fatigue and eye-strain induce a near-hallucinogenic state and a day later you wonder how much of what you think you read was actually a dream.  I will be re-reading the book shortly because I am still shocked that Voldemort was killed by Darth Vader - did anyone else see that coming?

But seriously - the earliest finisher was done by 8:30 Saturday, but she admitted (without shame!) that she skimmed a bit and zipped though the last hundred pages in about twenty minutes.

Another young lady known to be a quick reader was done by 10:30; my even more maniacal daughter was done around lunchtime, but she explained that she took pauses for sobs and reflection.  I should say that I was reading in a separate room but at various plot points would predict to myself that my daughter surely lost it right here.  OK, a careful observer would have wondered whether I was misting up a bit myself, but that was undoubtedly the eyestrain to which I referred earlier.

My wife and I both finished up around dinnertime, but since not everyone in the house has checked in, all discussions of the book are conducted in whispers, behind closed door.

In a word - loved it.  There were things I didn't like, but I was also vividly aware of the possibility of disaster (think "Pirates of the Caribbean III, or any of the last three Star Wars flicks, or the Matrix debacles).  But this was way better than non-disastrous!

MORE:  Bruce gives it a bravo and flags the spoilers.

And there may be spoilers in my own comment thread - I may even put some there myself.  Tread carefully.

I Guess He Had Collected His Medals And Gone Home By Then...

John Kerry prepares for an Iraq abandonment by re-imagining the Vietnam abandonment.  This would be troubling if anyone actually took Kerry seriously.

Geez, Did Anybody See That Coming?

Wilson/Plame civil suit dismissed. [Opinion]

Let me stagger down memory lane and revisit my coverage of this; maybe there will be some mortifying links to folks predicting great things from this suit, or astute commenters  ridiculing it. 

Here we go - unaware of a statute of limitations for their alleged causes of action, I predicted in June 2006 that we would not see a suit at all (OK, that didn't work out), mainly because of the many problems including the reason the judge dismissed this:

(2)  Rove apparently won't be charged with a crime for leaking about Ms. Plame.  Doesn't that suggest his first defense against any civil action will be to assert that he is a public official engaged in the performance of his duties?  Since Libby was charged with perjury and obstruction rather than criminal leaking, doesn't he have the same defense?

In July 2006 the suit was announced, and I still pooh-poohed it, although I predicted that Dems had more upside than Reps if the thing ever took off:

For the Democrats, this civil suit represents an opportunity to depose Bush Administration officials and maybe strike gold with some embarrassing or even illegal tidbit (think Paula Jones).  On the Republican side, there is a sense that Joe Wilson may be humiliated in discovery, along with the media and the anti-Administration CIA cabal alluded to recently by Rep. Peter Hoekstra.

Advantage - Democrats!  Neither Joe Wilson, Tim Russert, nor George Tenet are candidates for anything; Bush won't be either, but he is the leader of his party, notionally at least.  The Dems have a puncher's chance of scoring a big win; the Reps are more likely to "win" this suit, but what is victory - humiliating Joe Wilson?  Been there, done that, and John Kerry cut him loose to ice the cake. 

Within the confines of his base on the far left, Joe Wilson is a teflon legend and no discovery can shame him.

In September 2006 we had a link to the amended complaint.

And in May 2007 we had a post on the civil suit hearing, which prominently featured the immunity argument.

I certainly hope the timing of this dismissal doesn't hurt any of the Wilson's book and media deals.

Fred Thompson's Billing Records Found

Patterico has lots on Fred Thompson's billing records.  I'm just wondering what kind of a President Thompson would make if his controversial billing records can only be hidden for a week - why not the best?

Rudy's Colleagues For Non-Rudy

The Daily News does a little work and has a little fun:

With partners like these, who needs enemies?

Rudy Giuliani is a named partner at Bracewell & Giuliani, but that hasn't stopped some of the law firm's attorneys from backing his rivals for President.

Nearly one-third of the firm's attorneys who made a personal contribution to a presidential campaign during the past three months picked a candidate whose name is not on their paychecks, Federal Election Commission records reveal.

Four gave to Bill Richardson, three to Barack Obama and one to Christopher Dodd, all Democrats. One backed Giuliani GOP rival Mitt Romney.

While none donated to Hillary Clinton, one gave to Emily's List, a group that has endorsed her.

Twenty of the firm's roughly 400 attorneys contributed to Giuliani during the last quarter.

So in the last three months twenty gave to Rudy, eight gave to Democrats, one gave to Romney, and one gave to Emily's List.  Roughly 370 took a pass.  Ahh, who cares?

But with a bit more work maybe we can have a bit more fun.  Here is the FEC database - I did an advanced search with BRACEWELL & GIULIANI as the employer for all contributions after Sept 1, 2006.  Here we go:

Giuliani 54; Romney 1; Richardson 3; Obama 3; Dodd 1; Edwards 1; Hillary! 1.

We diverge on the Richardson figure and I am not going to wrestle that down.  But lots of Giuliani's colleagues gave in the first quarter, and lots gave max money.

MORE:  Here is the Hillary! donor. 

John Edwards Makes My Day

The Edwards campaign might want to tweak their phrasing a bit:

Edwards ad touts him as a tough guy

CONCORD, N.H. - Elizabeth Edwards tells voters her husband, Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards, is a tough guy "who can stare the worst in the face and not blink" in an ad set to start airing Wednesday in New Hampshire.

Groan.  John Edwards stared unblinkingly into the face of a special type of danger in this immortal video.

And is having the devoted wife rave about your toughness really how John Wayne and Clint Eastwood established their macho cred?  Was that McCain's secret, or Giuliani's?

I can see the bumper sticker: John Edwards, Tough but Tender.  Kill me now.  With kindness, of course.

Snooze 'Til We Lose

The Captain has fun with Harry Reid's Big Night Out (final fizzle here).

And the Times offered this:

Only three Republican senators have said publicly that they intend to support the measure. Others who have gone public with their complaints about the war strategy said they were worried that the plan was ill-advised, and was being driven ahead by the Democrats mainly for partisan reasons.

“You wonder if they are more interested in politics than dealing with the substance of this,” said Senator George V. Voinovich, Republican of Ohio.

Playing politics with this?  Geez, do they mean to suggest that the same party that gave us Clinton, Kerry and Edwards supporting the war resolution in 2002 in order to burnish their "tough on security" credentials is still playing politics?

David Brooks had an interesting take on the Washington dynamic a few days ago:

In the Senate, for example, there are several major factions, but there’s no prospect that these factions are going to merge to form a majority that will change policy.

To simplify a bit, roughly 20 senators, led by John McCain and Joe Lieberman, believe in Gen. David Petraeus and the surge. There are roughly 30 Republicans, led by Dick Lugar, John Warner and Lamar Alexander, who believe that the U.S. should scale back its mission and adopt the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations. There are roughly 30 Democrats, led by Carl Levin and Jack Reed, who also want to scale back and adopt the study group’s approach. And finally, there are roughly 20 Democrats, led by Ted Kennedy and Russ Feingold, who just want to get out as quickly as possible.

In theory, it should be possible to get the 30 Republicans and the 30 Democrats who support the study group’s framework together to embrace a common plan. But Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, is doing everything he can to prevent a bipartisan consensus. It’s much better politically for the Democrats to stay united and force the Republicans to vote with the president.

And even if Reid were to allow bipartisanship, in practice it’s hard to write a single piece of legislation that can get you 60 votes. Senior staffers are finding that if they tweak the language to get four more Republicans, they wind up losing seven Democrats. It’s a bit like immigration reform: In theory there is a centrist majority; in practice, it’s hard to put it together.

A Plame Day

Joe Wilson is in the news with his endorsement of Hillary Clinton.  The announcement and left blogger reaction are actually kind of funny - this is Taylor Marsh:

A conference call announcing the endorsement of Hillary Clinton by Joseph Wilson was just   held with bloggers to hear the breaking news. This is a huge deal for Candidate   Clinton and a big endorsement for her candidacy. That it was broken on the blogs   sends a powerful signal. I'll provide the transcript as soon as it is available.

...The '08 selection season is not over by a long shot and I am staying neutral in the primary. But the endorsement of Clinton by Joseph Wilson is a big step for her campaign. That Clinton offered the scoop to a group of bloggers shows just how far she's come and how far she's willing to engage a community, which on the whole is very critical of her on all fronts.

Well, yes, but... the decision to give the scoop to left bloggers is a nice double play - frankly, only lefty bloggers would care; the major media would either yawn or reprise Wilson's troubled relationship with the truth and with the Kerry campaign in 2004.  Wilson was sort of laughed off the stage  in the summer of 2004, following the SSCI report.

And Wilson alluded to that in his endorsement of Hilary, saying that "one thing that bonds the two is their mutual experience with the "meat grinder" -- a.k.a., the right wing slime machine."

Well, just in an off sort of curiousity sort of fashion, why did Joe Wilson talk about his media coverage as "the meat grinder"?  Is he a Secret Stooge of Dick Cheney?

And speaking of speaking of truth to power, maybe this time around it will be Valerie that takes a bit of a thumping - Robert Novak marks an anniversary of his own by writing this in his July 14 2007 column:

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Tom Davis, ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is puzzled by the House Intelligence Committee's claim that Valerie Plame Wilson has been consistent in her sworn testimony. He is asking the Intelligence Committee for documents to back up their contention.

Davis last month noted that Mrs. Wilson had testified to his committee that she, as a CIA employee, had not suggested the fact-finding mission to Niger by her husband, former Amb. Joseph Wilson. She earlier had told the Senate Intelligence Committee staff that she did not recall whether she made such a proposal. Davis also cited an internal CIA e-mail by her saying Wilson "may be in a position to assist."

By way of Sen. Bond (Kit Bond) and Byron York we have the email in question.

Now, I don't for a moment think Ms. Wilson is in any real jeopardy here - I take for granted that the Dems will protect her and the semi-cover-up will hold.  However, Reps will exact their price in other ways.

Cecil Turner has a piece at The American Thinker thumping Judge Walton.  I am wondering whether he let Armitage off easy with this:

At the time, Mr Fitzgerald was still contending Mr Libby was the first government leaker, and "at the beginning of the chain of phone calls" . . . even though he knew Armitage found out about Ms. Wilson two days before Libby got it from the Vice President.

Presumably this refers to the June 10 INR memo and the June 12 note of Cheney and Libby.

But do we really have any good evidence as to what Armitage told Fitzgerald? There was a repeat INR memo with a new cover sheet dated July 7; mightn't Armitage have vaguely remembered that as his first encounter with the Plame info when he first came forward in 2003?  Maybe it was only in Nov 2005, following the Libby indictment, that Armitage "remembered" the June 10 memo when he remembered his June 13 chat with Bob Woodward.

These two recently released less-redacted affidavits from Fitzgerald (Aug 2004; Sept 2004) were filed in pursuit of the Miler and Cooper subpoenas and describe the case as of that time.  Useful details about Armitage might be there.  However...

In reading the Sept 2004 affidavit I am slack-jawed about the Cooper testimony - Cooper apparently testified that he had heard about Plame from one government source (presumably Rove) and one reporter prior to talking with Libby on July 12.  The affidavit also says that "it appears likely" that the reporter in question was John Dickerson, since Ari claimed to have leaked to him and David Gregory on July 11.

But Dickerson denied that, and I don't recall Cooper contradicting Dickerson at the trial.

Developing...

 

Harry Potter Divination - All Aboard

In anticipation of the grand finale to the Harry Potter series let me tell you right now how some major plot points will turn out.  And just so you know - I am so right about some of these things that you may as well call them spoiler alerts.  And my credentials?  I have not one but two high schoolers who have memorized the six books and are reigning trivia champs at their respective schools; I merely pass along their distilled wisdom.

First, who among the major characters dies?  The Soccer Dad rounded up the Dead Pool a month ago, but you can bank on this - Hagrid is a goner.  He is Harry's last father figure and his death will complete the Black (Sirius) White (Albus Albino Dumbledore) Red (Rubeus Hagrid) color scheme which signified transformation or death in alchemy, or tarot reading, or some such.

Does Dumbledore make it back?  I don't know but I am betting he does - Aslan and Gandalf did, Obi Wan Kenobi not so much (and in Movie Five we find out that Voldemort is a Star wars fan when he whispers "Use the the force, Luke; give in to the Dark Side" "Use the curse, Harry" in the climactic battle scene; who knew?  BTW, Dumbledore has a brother who make make a Deus ex Machina appearance of his own - something about the goat-like smell of one of the Hogsmeade innkeepers is critical here.

Will Harry die?  The case can be made and there may have been a time when Ms. Rowling had that in mind for the story arc.  But do keep in mind - this is a children's series, and one might wonder how many parents will introduce their kids to it if if ends badly for the hero.  And beyond that, there are movie rights, and beyond that - if I were the publisher and Ms. Rowling presented a manuscript where the hero died a glorious death which was somehow spun as an appropriate ending, I would blanche - in this big old world, what if some troubled kid somewhere leaves a suicide note citing Harry's glorious passage as inspiration for his own misguided act?  (Hey, I'm a worrier...).  Too risky.  IMHO.  The same argument spares Ron, Hermione, Ginny, Fred, George, and (I think) Neville.

And what about Neville?  He has a new wand and a new attitude and may be the lad who whacks Bellatrix, who is sooo going to look good dying.  However... my current guess is that none of these kids are actually killers, so Neville may have a different fate - maybe he is simply the agent of Bellatrix's demise in some fashion; one of her killing spells rebounds off him and kills her, or some such.  Down the road, Neville's extraordinary aptitude for Herbology takes him to the Houses of Healing where he finds the plants that cure his parents, but no worries - folks who hate Big Pharma can still do so.

Snape, we will discover, had a huge and unrequited crush on Lily Evans (his worst day was the day he called her a mudblood, severing the tenuous bond between the two finest potioners in the history of Hogwarts).  When Voldemort killed Lily, Snape's lfe work was before him, and he has sought his vengeance ever since.  Hence, Snape is not really on Dumbledore's side or Voldemort's - he is a free agent looking to kill Voldemort by any means fair or foul.  Naturally, Snape has to protect Lily's son, but he loathes James Potter's child - awkward.  And might Snape die?  He well might, but he will live free or die hard and take a few baddies with him.

Draco Malfoy will provide a useful story of redemption and show us that a child can overcome their upbringing and dubious parenting.  What, you want the opposite message, that bad parents always produce bad kids?  Go away and come back when you have a manuscript suitable for children.  Just how Draco manifests his latent good-guyness I can't say, but the Deatheaters are rotting from within and Voldemort's rule by fear is coming to an end which will be hastened by betrayal.

DEVELOPING, I EXPECT...

ROCK SOLID:  Dumbledore took Harry as his sidekick to find the fatal horcrux in Book Six because it was a two man misison but the special wizarding boat would only hold one adult.

So who accompanied the mysterious "RAB"?  Ah, well - Regulus Black went with Kreacher, and we will hear a lot more about this in Book Seven.  Count on it.   

The Populism That Dare Not Speak Its Name

The Times "covers" the new populism in the Democratic Party:

New Populism Is Spurring Democrats on the Economy

By Robin Toner

WASHINGTON, July 15 — On Capitol Hill and on the presidential campaign trail, Democrats are increasingly moving toward a full-throated populist critique of the current economy.

Clearly influenced by some of their most successful candidates in last year’s Congressional elections, Democrats are talking more and more about the anemic growth in American wages and the negative effects of trade and a globalized economy on American jobs and communities. They deplore what they call a growing gap between the middle class, which is struggling to adjust to a changing job market, and the affluent elites who have prospered in the new economy. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, calls it “trickle-down economics without the trickle.”

Populism is hardly new in the Democratic Party. Al Gore vowed to fight for “the people versus the powerful” in his presidential campaign seven years ago, and Republicans have long accused the Democrats of practicing “class warfare.”

But the latest populist resurgence is deeply rooted in a view that current economic conditions are difficult and deteriorating for many people, analysts say, and it is now framing debates over tax policy, education, trade, energy and health care. Last week, Senate Democrats held hearings on proposals to raise taxes on some of the highest fliers on Wall Street, the people at the top of private equity and hedge fund firms...

Let's see, I am trying to think of a recent topic that dominated the headlines and related to jobs, stagnant wages, changing communities, and globalization.... gosh this is tough.

Oh, here we go - Ms. Toner finally mentions immigration reform in the 18th paragraph and really makes the key points:

Democratic leaders say that unless Congress restores the confidence of the middle class, it will be hard to sell Americans on more trade or even an immigration overhaul.

“I don’t think we’ll be able to do trade agreements, immigration reforms or any of these other kinds of reforms,” Ms. Pelosi said, “until we present a positive, aggressive economic agenda to the American people — until they know where they stand, now and in the future.”

Nobody covers the issues like the Times.  Oh, well - in their world it was racists and xenophobes that opposed the immigration reform; the notions that populist Dems had trouble with the guest worker program, or that waving in unskilled workers might actually depress the wages of the native unskilled rattles their coffee cups on an otherwise pleasant Monday morning.

And the Pelosi position amounts to "Don't send the unskilled jobs abroad; bring the unskilled voters workers here".  Great.

 

Read Closely

Let me see - a careful reading suggests that the significance of the Osama video is that he is dead?  The notion is that he is praising martyrdom now so that his wish-fulfillment (and Eerie Prescience!)  can be announced in a few months.  Ingenious, but I question the timing - this really throws a monkey wrench into the betting pools that hinged on whether it would be Osama or Lord Voldemort that dies first.

We'll see.  Voldemort has until Saturday.

BECAUSE IT'S NOT *ALL* HARRY POTTER:  From the post:

Yes, it is possible that Al-Qaeda wants to take the pressure off OBL by *suggesting* that OBL is dead so he can continue master-minding in relative peace.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

I Like Ike (And I've Heard OF FDR!)

Matt Bai (bio) has a discussion of the experience of the Presidential candidates that is silly and brings out the sillies.  From Mr. Bai, writing in the Times:

Of all the campaign themes that will emerge leading up to the 2008 primaries, one you probably won’t hear a lot about is experience. That’s because the candidates who are at the moment best positioned for the nominations of their parties have surprisingly little of it. At a time when the nation looks for a leader to meet profound challenges to its decades-long dominance as an economic and military power, the five candidates who lead in state and national polls — Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney — have won a grand total of five statewide elections in their cumulative political careers and have served a combined 20 years in statewide office.

Please - if Mr. Bai's yardstick is telling him that Obama, Clinton, and Giuliani have about the same level of (in)experience, I would urge him to get a new yardstick.  Although it is not a statewide office, eight years as NYC Mayor is surely as significant an executive experience as a similar stint as a small state Governor.  Arkansas, to pick a state almost at random, has an annual state budget of about $5 billion; the greatest city in the world has an annual budget of $59 billion (not to mention Jerek Deter!). 

As to Obama versus the Boss's Wife - well, First Spouse is not an elected office but it surely helped enlighten Hillary to the ways of Washington.  And let's not forget her triumph as leader of health care reform during Clinton I. 

As to the sillies induced by Mr. Bai, we love this from Matt Yglesias:

If Obama is elected to the White House, he will have served eight years in the Illinois State Senate and four years in the United States Senate. In the twentieth century, I count Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan as all having served fewer than 12 years in public office before assuming the Presidency and I count exactly twelve for Warren Harding.

Hmm, dare we add Eisenhower to that list?  He had never held elective office prior to being elected President, although folks were impressed by his military background (as they were with Wesley Clark, until he opened his mouth).

And because I know there are some Dems supporting Mr. Obama, I exhort them to dig deep into their collective memories and try to remember Franklin Roosevelt, who served two years in the NY State House and four years as NY Governor before being elected President.  Roosevelt also had a stint as Assistant Secretary to the Navy under Wilson and was a losing Vice Presidential candidate in 1920 (hmm - maybe Edwards can claim the FDR mantle...).  But this vaguely recognizable Dem ought to be penciled in among the inexperienced, at least by this absurd measure.

Historical deficiencies notwithstanding, Mr. Yglesias reached a comic crescendo with the news that the rest of us should weigh seriously Mr. Obama's eight full years in the Illinois State House.  What, no mention of his student council positions?

Mr. Bai theorizes on why we are turning away from experience:

George W. Bush’s legion of critics would probably assert that he alone lowered the bar for presidential preparedness, and this theory has some merit; having served just one full term as governor of a huge state before he ran in 2000, Bush was the least experienced nominee in 24 years. But American politics can never be viewed in isolation from the rest of society, and something deeper has been happening out there. The emergence of the Internet age has been accompanied, in general, by a steady devaluing of expertise. A generation ago, you went to the doctor to find out about the pain in your knee; now you go to WebMD, diagnose it yourself and tell him what medicines you want. People used to trust stockbrokers and insurance agents; now they buy and sell at E*Trade and compare policies online. American voters who once looked to newspaper columnists for guidance on politics now blog their own idle punditry. Suddenly, experience is downright suspect — it’s the barrier that so-called professionals use to wall themselves off from everyone else. Americans now belong to what the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Keen calls “the cult of the amateur,” and, in this new world, the ideal president may be one who hasn’t governed, or at least not for long.

Oh, stop.  In 1992 we chose amongst a governor of a backwater, a businessman who announced, then renounced, the re-announced on Larry King Live, and a President with an endless resume; in 1976 we pick a governor of a backwater over a long-time Washington insider.  Let's not pretend this trend is a product of the internet age.

Back in 2003 Brad Delong was much more colorful on why the nation seems to elect outsiders and fresh faces and his gist is this:

...to spend time in Washington is to have to make choices about national political issues. And to make choices is to make enemies. And enemies have long memories.

It is much, much better to have spent one's previous political career completely outside Washington. Then each national-political faction can imagine that you have their interests at heart (especially because you will make friendly noises to them). They will project their hopes onto the blank screen which is their lack of knowledge about what went on back in your home state.

To which I would add, Dems are always hoping to nominate the next John Kennedy, so they gravitate to youthful unknowns (think Jimmeh, or Gary Hartpence, or Wild Bill, or John Edwards, or, dare I say it, Barack Obama).

Reps are normally a bit less delirious.  We want to nominate Ike or Reagan, so older and wiser can work for us - think Bob Dole.  OK, stop thinking about Bob Dole, I distrust that smile you are forming.  And don't think about George W; he was a brand name aberration.  That said, Fred Thompson, our next nominee, is the Republican Mirror of Desire and fits the DeLong template well.

Enough near-history.  Time to track down this Deter fellow.

From The Glass Half Full Department

The WaPo, writing on the economic impact of a major push on carbon emissions and wondering about the public will for higher taxes and massive projects, includes this:

Many projections for 2030 include... enough solar panels to cover half of New Jersey...

Only half?  I think the public will still support it.

Why I Need New Eye Glasses

What I thought I read at Glenn Reynolds:

A NEW OBAMA VIDEO: "It seems to be from a video shot in 2001 or 2002. If that is correct, then I would draw two conclusions: first, that it is additional confirmation that he is dead. (If he were alive, they could do a new one, right?) And second, that this is a sign of panic, a poorly manufactured pseudo-blockbuster appearance designed to rally the troops, who must be getting fairly discouraged these days."

Huh?  Politically dead?  And why would Obama's supporters be discouraged?  McCain, maybe?

Oh, wait...

Could be a long election season.  But good luck to Barack Hussein Il-Jong Obama.

Economic Diversity As A Proxy For Racial Diversity

Last May the Times told us that some "elite colleges" were promoting their use of economic diversity as an alternative to a direct focus on racial diversity.  Although Google utterly contradicts me I have a clear memory of mocking the article at the time - it seemed to me that the example cited by the Times reflected a back-door attempt to promote racial diversity, and that if the Times really wanted to find elite colleges promoting socioeconomic diversity they ought to be able to conjure an example of a coal-miner's daughter being enrolled at Harvard, rather than telling us about the hard-working son of a hard-working single black woman. 

I also have a distinct memory of noting somewhere (presumably, someone else's comments section) that, although a higher percentage of black children than white children live in poverty, in absolute numbers there are more poor white kids than black kids, so substituting income for race won't help colleges in their quest for racial diversity as much as they might have hoped.

Whatever.  Having enjoyed my Lewis Libby moment, let me bash on.  Today the Times presents a new data point from the San Francisco public schools:

SAN FRANCISCO — When San Francisco started trying to promote socioeconomic diversity in its public schools, officials hoped racial diversity would result as well.

It has not worked out that way.

Abraham Lincoln High School, for example, with its stellar reputation and Advanced Placement courses, has drawn a mix of rich and poor students. More than 50 percent of those students are of Chinese descent.

“If you look at diversity based on race, the school hasn’t been as integrated,” Lincoln’s principal, Ronald J. K. Pang, said. “If you don’t look at race, the school has become much more diverse.”

Later in the story we learn a bit about the various tensions (but I bet you can guess):

At Willie L. Brown Jr. College Preparatory Academy, a fourth- through sixth-grade school in the predominantly black neighborhood of Bayview, 75 percent of the students are black. Most are poor.

Tareyton D. Russ, the principal, said students from other neighborhoods did not seek to go there so the diversity index did not even apply. “Poor Chinese kids don’t want to go to school with poor black kids,” Mr. Russ said flatly.

Conversely, one white parent interviewed as she dropped her child off at summer school said some white parents avoided schools with a heavy Chinese concentration, like Lincoln, believing they would be too high-pressure for their children. She declined to be quoted by name.

 

The Lightly Annotated Greg Mankiw On Taxes

Economist (and blogger) Gregory Mankiw has a NY Times article tackling the perception that the rich don't pay their "fair share" of taxes:

DO the rich pay their fair share in taxes? This is likely to become a defining question during the  presidential campaign.

Likely to become a defining question?  We are unlikely to give Mr. Mankiw a Nostradamus Award for that prediction, since tax policy has been a key part of every recent Presidential election.  On the other hand, Times editor like their articles to have an introduction and not get all clunky and misdirected, as here.  Soldiering on:

At a recent fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton, the  billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett said that rich guys like him weren’t paying enough. Mr. Buffett asserted that his taxes last year equaled only 17.7 percent of his taxable income, compared with about 30 percent for his receptionist.

Mr. Buffett was echoing a refrain that is popular in some circles. Last year, Robert B. Reich, labor secretary during the Clinton administration, wrote on his blog that “middle-income workers are now paying a larger share of their incomes than people at or near the top.”

“We have turned the principle of a graduated, progressive tax on its head,” Mr. Reich added.

This is the Reich post in question and it includes a caveat (emphasis added) given short shrift by Prof. Mankiw:

Second, if you consider not just income and capital-gains taxes but all the taxes people pay – including payroll taxes and sales taxes – you find that middle-income workers are now paying a larger share of their incomes than people at or near the top. We have turned the principle of a graduated, progressive tax on its head.

Prof. Mankiw cites a CBO study of the Federal tax burden which does incorporate Social Security and Medicare but omits state and local taxes and sales taxes.  Excise taxes do appear in the study, but they are Federal excise taxes:

Excise taxes are assumed to fall on households according to their consumption of taxed goods (such as tobacco and alcohol). Excise taxes that affect intermediate goods, which are paid by businesses, are attributed to households in proportion to their overall consumption. CBO assumes that each household spends the same on taxed goods as similar households with comparable income in the Consumer Expenditure Survey.

All that said, I very much doubt that Reich is right about this.

Prof. Mankiw does explain the Buffet baffler:

One might wonder how Mr. Buffett gets away with a tax rate of only 17.7 percent, while a typical millionaire is paying so much more. Most likely, part of the answer is that Mr. Buffett’s income is made up largely of dividends and capital gains, which are taxed at only 15 percent. By contrast, many other top earners pay the maximum ordinary income tax rate of 35 percent on their salaries, bonuses and business income.

...

Another piece of the puzzle is that Mr. Buffett’s tax burden is larger than it first appears, because he is a major shareholder in Berkshire Hathaway.

When the C.B.O. studies the tax burden, it includes all federal taxes, including individual income taxes, payroll taxes and corporate income taxes. In its analysis, payroll taxes are borne by workers, and corporate taxes by the owners of capital. For the richest 1 percent of the population, 9.3 percentage points of their 31.1 percent tax rate comes from the taxes that corporations have paid on their behalf. The corporate tax would undoubtedly loom large if the C.B.O. were to calculate Mr. Buffett’s effective tax rate.

I suspect that Mr. Buffet understands these points but chose to de-emphasize them for poltical reasons.

Prof. Maknkiw then attempts to illuminate the "fair share" debate:

None of these calculations, however, say whether the rich are paying their fair share. Fairness is not an economic concept. If you want to talk fairness, you have to leave the department of economics and head over to philosophy.

The quintessential political philosopher of modern liberalism is John Rawls, the author of the 1971 classic “A Theory of Justice.” Professor Rawls concluded that the primary goal of public policy should be to redistribute resources to help those at the very bottom of the economic ladder. If Professor Rawls were alive today, he would most likely want to raise the top income tax rate of 35 percent in order to finance a more generous safety net. And for much the same reason, he would probably raise taxes on the middle class as well.

Professor Rawls would get a vigorous debate from his Harvard colleague, the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick. In his 1974 book, “Anarchy, State, and Utopia,” Professor Nozick wrote: “We are not in the position of children who have been given portions of pie by someone who now makes last-minute adjustments to rectify careless cutting. There is no central distribution, no person or group entitled to control all the resources, jointly deciding how they are to be doled out. What each person gets, he gets from others who give to him in exchange for something, or as a gift. In a free society, diverse persons control different resources, and new holdings arise out of the voluntary exchanges and actions of persons.”

To libertarians like Professor Nozick, requiring the rich to pay more just because they are rich is little more than officially sanctioned theft.

Prof. Mankiw closes with a question:

There is no easy way to bridge this philosophical divide, but the political process will, inevitably, try to forge a practical compromise among those with wildly divergent views. At the 2000 Republican National Convention, the candidate George W. Bush made clear where he stood: “On principle, no one in America should have to pay more than a third of their income to the federal government.” As judged by the C.B.O. data, he has accomplished his goal.

A question for any political candidate today is whether he or she agrees with the Bush tax ceiling. If not, how high above a third is he or she willing to go?

Well, well - in my own non-bid for a Nostradamus, let be predict that Dems will fret (loudly) that plenty of "the rich" are *not* paying one third, regardless of whether the CBO says that on average and as a group they nearly are (I am rounding the average rate of 31.1% paid by the top 1% to one third).  In any case, the top 5% pay a mere 28.5% on average, so there is plenty of room for a rate hike there.

And Dems will want an end to all sorts of quirks in the tax code, such as the treatment of carried interest in hedge fund investment partnerships.  Hmm, there is a possible Republican slant here - will any candidate call for tax equity amongst millionaires, and insist that hedge fund gurus should pay taxes at the same rate as software savants (gee, don't they have a lot of deferred capital gains?) or legal eagles?

MORE:  Mark Thoma recycles an interesting post on some principles of tax fairness.

Why Is This Man Smiling?

Peggy Noonan rails against George Bush:

As I watched the news conference, it occurred to me that one of the things that might leave people feeling somewhat disoriented is the president's seemingly effortless high spirits. He's in a good mood. There was the usual teasing, the partly aggressive, partly joshing humor, the certitude. He doesn't seem to be suffering, which is jarring. Presidents in great enterprises that are going badly suffer: Lincoln, LBJ with his head in his hands. Why doesn't Mr. Bush? Every major domestic initiative of his second term has been ill thought through and ended in failure. His Iraq leadership has failed. His standing is lower than any previous president's since polling began. He's in a good mood. Discuss.

As Dan Riehl notes, she admired Reagan's optimism.  I suppose it all depends on context - sometimes the glass really is half empty, and sometimes it is a specimen cup.

Andrew Sullivan is peering into the Mirror of Desire:

I've gone through the same cycle as Peggy, just a little sooner. I'm just alternately very angry and very sad now, and trying to figure out how we can repair the damage - globally and domestically. So far, I have only one serious, provisional thought in that respect: Obama. No one else seems close to being up to it.

Why Obama of the non-resume might be able to perform this miracle is utterly mysterious, but that is an integral part of his appeal.

"We Only Need To Get Lucky Once"

Conrad Black and his codefendants were found guilty on a few of the charges against them.  Mark Steyn opines:

The government alleged three schemes - the "US scheme", the "CanWest scheme", the "perks scheme" - and upgraded them to racketeering, and threw in tax fraud. They lost on racketeering and tax. They lost outright on two-thirds of the schemes. And on the remaining scheme - the "US scheme" - they lost on everything but the APC non-compete fee. Yet, absent successful appeals, four men could be spending the rest of their working lives in jail. The US Attorney's office might usefully adopt as its motto the IRA's message to Mrs Thatcher after the Brighton bombing, "You have to be lucky every time. We only have to be lucky once."

Annual Youth Survey - All Good News

The NY Times (AP) tells us that all the news about America's youth is good:

Positive Trends Recorded in U.S. Data on Teenagers

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON, July 12 (AP) — Fewer high school students were having sex and more were using condoms in 2005, according to the latest government report on the well-being of the nation’s children.

The teenage birthrate hit a record low.

More young people were finishing high school, and more tots were being read to.

It is good news on a number of crucial indicators of health, experts said about the report. It is scheduled to be released Friday by the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, a consortium of federal agencies that includes the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the Census Bureau and the Administration for Children and Families.

Have a great weekend.

Maybe McCain Was Right About The Sweaters

The latest on the meltdown of the McCain "campaign":

1.  No controlling fundraising authority: Campaign related phone calls from the Senate may violate the same rules McCain razzed Gore about in 2000.

2.  "Gay sweaters" made me do it:

In the final days of his imploding candidacy, John McCain has taken a page out of Richard Nixon’s play book, finding increasingly bizarre explanations for his political failures. Strangest of all: He reportedly feels his handlers forced him to wear “gay sweaters.”

3.  Blame Florida:

An official with the John McCain presidential campaign was arrested for allegedly soliciting oral sex from a policeman in Florida yesterday.

Bob Allen, a member of the Florida House of Representatives, is one of six Florida co-chairs for the Arizona Republican senator's 2008 White House bid. 

4.  Two top Iowa staffers exit.

McCain is a great American, but not so great a candidate.

Judge Walton Actually Rejects A Fitzgerald Argument!

Judge Walton has opined (NY Sun, 10 page .pdf) that Libby can spend two years of supervised release without first doing jail time, as contemplated by the relevant statutes.

However, Judge Walton actually disagreed with Special Counsel Fitzgerald as to the reasoning:

Judge Walton rejected an argument by the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, that Libby was eligible for supervised release under the letter of the law because he was in the custody of the Marshals Service while being fingerprinted and photographed. "It is difficult to imagine anyone who would be in need of assistance to ‘transition [back] to community life' after spending several hours undergoing routine processing," the judge wrote.

Since the White House, the prosecution, and the defense all agreed that the supervised release should remain in place, no appeal on that issue seems likely.

That puts Fitzgerald's record with Walton at about 99-3.

Loved The New Harry Potter Film

My older teenager, who loves the books but has not liked a Potter film yet, raved about the latest.

And for folks trying to get clues on the impending resolutions in the soon-to-be-released Book Seven, plot points that seem vital in Book Five were dropped from the movie.  This may mean something since Ms. Rowling consults on the scripts and presumably guides the director on Important Clues.

Two examples - in Book Five, Ron, Harry et all pretty clearly (OK, clear if you are an obsessive fanatic, and I have several in the household) find the horcrux recovered by "RAB".  The movie skips right past that, which *might* make one wonder whether that point is being de-emphasized for Book Seven.  We will know soon enough, but I don't doubt there was a horcrux at Grimauld Place.  (But did Kreacher abscond with it?)

And my pet theory about Snape's motivation took on water - Snape's memory of his worst day included his snarl at Lilly Evans (eventually, Lily Potter) that she was a mudblood.  Since Snape and Lily were two of the best potioners in the history of Hogwarts, I am betting they had some kind of a bond, and that Snape had a huge, mostly unrequited crush on her.  Consequently, when Voldemort killed her he became a Dead Wizard Walking (or apparating, or whatever) and Snape has just been marking time until he can whack him.  Snape is not really "good" or "evil" in the sense of being on either Dumbledore's side or Voldemort's - he is on Snape's side, but that will be fine for the good guys.

This theory also explains Snape's troubled relationship with Harry, who is the son of the woman he loves and a man he hates.  Awkward.  But Snape won't be letting anyone kill Harry; Snape's issue is whether he can kill Voldemort before Harry does (bet on Harry).

SINCE YOU ASK: No, I can't wait.  Even though I have been waiting since July of 2000.

That Went Well

Joe Wilson's appearance before the House Judiciary Committee to opine on Presidental pardoning power was not exactly the coronation his wife enjoyed before Waxman's Oversight hearing a few months back.

Per The Hill, House Republicans outnumbered Democrats in attendance and, although the liveblog is confusing, they certainly spent time gunning for Joe.

Rep. Issa (R - CA) suggested that Valerie herself might be a candidate for a perjury investigation and Presidential pardon one day:

Issa: Whether we can get more mileage out of disclosure of CIA Agent, we’ve reduced it, I apologize if I feel that this is hypocritical event. If we were having the discussion we should be having, the question of the President’s clemency, should be our inquiry today. All of us together talked about how when Ford restored a certain amount of confidence, pardoning Nixon so the nation could get on with it’s work, not bc it was popular because it allowed the government to move on, it should be taken in the same light. We have had a lot of politics on this for a long time. I hope he believes me at my word, I believe that his wife will soon be asking for a pardon. She has not been genuine in her testimony before Congress, if pursued, Ambassador Wilson and Valerie will be asking to put this behind us. I do not believe this was good use of the Committee’s time. I hope we will have a real debate about proper use of clemency.

Mr. Issa's stalking point seems to be Ms. Plame's denial of involvement of a role in launching her husband's trip; eventually, the liveblog refers to the Feb 12 memo from Ms. Plame that was recently released through the additional views of Vice Chairman Sen. Bond as part of the most recent Senate report on intelligence.

To that let's append her testimony to Waxman and a summary of her nnow-classic "Walking-By Guy" explanation of how Joe was tapped for the trip to Niger.

Winning Hearts And Minds, Losing Votes

McQ discusses Kimberly Kagan's WSJ piece whose headline is "The "surge" is working. Will Washington allow the current progress to continue?"

For the record, let's note that Ms. Kagan, although eminently qualified to opine on this, was a member of the group that first proposed the surge and is married to Frederick Kagan, its chief proponent.

I am puzzled by this from Ms. Kagan (my emphasis):

As a result, sectarian violence is down. The counterinsurgency strategy has dramatically decreased Shiite death squad activity in the capital. Furthermore, U.S. and Iraqi special forces have removed many rogue militia leaders and Iranian advisers from Sadr City and other locations, reducing the power of militias.

As a consequence, execution-style killings, the hallmark of Shiite militias, have fallen to the lowest level in a year...

I thought I saw a recent report that executions in Baghdad had ticked up.  I may be misremembering, but still, I hope to pin that down when time permits.

HERE WE GO:  From the July 2 Times:

Iraqi Civilian Casualties Declined in June, Officials Say

BAGHDAD, Monday, July 2 -- American and Iraqi officials said Sunday that they saw a decline in the monthly civilian casualty count in June, a development that occurred as the American troop increase reached full strength.

However, the size of the decline was hard to gauge because death counts in Iraq are highly inaccurate. Some bombing victims' bodies are never recovered, families often collect their dead before they can be counted by officials, and the dead bodies found around Baghdad, while generally taken to the city morgue, are sometimes taken to hospitals where they may not be counted.

An American military spokesman, Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, said there had been only ''a slight decrease in the month of June.'' He added that it was ''a potential downward trend'' and that the military would be closely watching the numbers in the coming weeks. The Americans do not make specific figures public.

He added that American and Iraqi troops were just two weeks into a major operation against Sunni insurgents in the belts around Baghdad. ''We can't tell yet the effect we're having,'' he said. ''But reducing deaths in the civilian population is why we're doing what we're doing.''

Iraqi officials estimated that civilian deaths nationwide had dropped 36 percent in June, down to about 1,200. Civilian casualties in May had topped 1,900, they said. The Web site icasualties.org, which tabulates news reports of civilian deaths, put the number of deaths in June at about 1,342, down from 1,980 in May.

In Baghdad, 730 civilians were reported killed in June from assassinations, bombs or small-arms fire. That was down from 1,070 in May, a decline of almost 32 percent, an Interior Ministry official told The New York Times.

However, the number of dead bodies found in Baghdad, a measure of sectarian killings, while lower in June than in May, was still higher than in April, according to the Interior Ministry official. In April, there were 411 dead bodies found in Baghdad; in May, there were 726; in June, the number dropped to 540.

The last paragraph cited is the one that seems to have stayed with me.

STILL MORE:  From the July 12 Times comes support for Ms. Kagan:

The new military figures come from a sheaf of colored charts and graphs prepared by the American military command for submission to the White House. The documents say that sectarian killings in Baghdad declined to 300 in June, when the American force reached full strength, from 1,650 in January. Nationally, sectarian killings declined to 650 in June from 2,100 in January, according to the documents. The number of “high profile” bombings, including suicide attacks, fell below 90 in June from more than 180 in March.

"Whispering Truth To Power"

Ruth Marcus of the WaPo assesses Barack Obama's performance before the NEA:

...then Obama tiptoes into the minefield of merit pay for teachers, so delicately that he does not actually utter the words "merit pay" until the question and answer session.

"If you excel at helping your students achieve success, your success will be valued and rewarded as well," he says -- but he hastens to add that this must be done "with teachers, not imposed on them, and not based on some arbitrary test score."

This is whispering truth to power. But for the teachers, Obama's words are fingernails on a chalkboard. They fall silent, except for scattered boos, as he mentions a modest new program in Minnesota.

She does note that Mr. Obama showed more courage than any of the other Democrats.

The EduWonk has thoughts as well.

If Only If They Had A More Diverse Jury...

From the Chi Trib: "Black Jury Deadlocked".

Oh, wait...

A Chicago federal jury weighing fraud charges against former Sun-Times publisher Conrad Black said today it was deadlocked.
 
"We have discussed and deliberated on all the evidence and are still unable to reach a unanimous verdict on one or more counts. Please advise," jurors wrote in a note to the U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve this afternoon.
 
In court, St. Eve responded by rereading a portion of the jury instructions which advised the panel to act in good faith and attempt to reach a verdict before sending the 9 women and 3 men back to the jury room to continue deliberations.
 
Tuesday was the ninth day of jury deliberations. The trial began March 20.

Mark Steyn has been covering and blogging this trial and Patrick Fitzgerald himself has led the prosecution, so away we go.

More from MSNBC, whose headline inspires musical memories - "Black jury told to resume after deadlock".  Oh, I do get a kick out of this.

GOOD POINT:  I need to get serious - Sirius Black, that is.  Any chance of Conrad getting his old cell at Azkaban?

THEY WOULDN'T SAY THAT ABOUT AN IRISH JURY:  Let's not look for any headlines along the theme of "Black Jury Hung".

Hillary Killed Diana! [Rewrite: Hillary! Killed Diana?]

Mickey Kaus is almost there... and you know we are rooting for him.

OK, we have the Matt Cooper Memorial Headline with the Hillary! commemoration.  Our work here is done.

Johnny Mac, Are You Coming Back?

What's left of McCain's campaign seems to have collapsed:

WASHINGTON (AP) - John McCain's campaign manager and chief strategist quit Tuesday, the second major staff shake-up in a week for the Republican presidential candidate who trails his rivals in money and polls.

In a statement, the Arizona senator said Terry nelson and John Weaver offered their resignations, "which I accepted with regret and deep gratitude for their dedication, hard work and friendship."

Apparently Mark Salter, McCain's long-time chief of staff and co-author, is also stepping down, but not without a cryptic parting comment:

"Outside of the planet, there is no one more important to me than John McCain. I will continue to help in any way I can."

Outside the planet?  Huh?  Is Galactus on the way?

Marc Ambinder has a quick version of the inside story - a "Nelson out" faction ultimately prevailed, but not before Salter and Weaver were swept up as well.

Well - the media could not love McCain because of his view on the war and the right could not love him because of his view on immigration (and campaign finance reform, and the role of evangelicals); the rest was just thrashing around.

Paging Clarence Page

Chi Trib columnist Clarence Page begins his effort to debunk the Libby "myths" with a burst of optimism:

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions," the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a scholarly New York Democrat, used to say, "but not their own facts." Sorry, "Pat." But, my e-mail box runneth over with misconceptions from readers who feel entitled to their own facts about President Bush's commutation of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's jail sentence.

Apparently believing that turnabout is fair play, Mr. Page then projects a few "facts" of his own:

And, yes, Armitage did leak Plame's name to columnist Robert Novak, who was the first to report it to the public. But Armitage was not the first or the only leaker.  Weeks before Novak reported Plame's name in his July 14, 2003, column, Libby revealed Plame's CIA job in meetings with then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller on June 23 and July 8. Novak also received confirmation of Armitage's tip from Karl Rove, Bush's senior political adviser. Rove also discussed Plame, without mentioning her name or covert status, with Matt Cooper, then of Time magazine.

Well, then, a week and a half before Libby's June 23 conversation with Judy Miller, Armitage leaked the Plame info to Bob Woodward - c'mon, this was much-discussed and the tape of the Armitage leak was played back at the Libby trial.

I am not going to claim that this invalidates Mr. Pages point that there were more leaks than Armitage's for Fitzgerald to probe, but please - after claiming allegiance to the facts he ought to follow his own flag.

That said, I am touched by Mr. Page's deference to every pronouncement made by Special Counsel Fitzgerald; I wonder if Mr. Page takes every word of a prosecutor as gospel in other cases (good news for Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani if true!).  Here we go:

Time to call in the truth squad: Contrary to the drumbeat of misinformation and dis-information that you may have heard on various talk shows, Valerie Plame was a covert agent under the relevant 1982 law that makes it a crime to disclose the identity of a covert intelligence officer. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald cleared up that dispute in a memorandum during the sentencing phase of Libby's trial. "It was clear from very early in the investigation," he wrote, "that Ms. Wilson qualified under [the 1982 law] as a covert agent whose identity had been disclosed by public officials, including Mr. Libby, to the press." Four days later, Fitzgerald filed an "unclassified summary" of Plame's CIA employment which described her work as including "at least seven" overseas trips as chief of a unit working on Iraq weapons issues.

Indeed Fitzgerald did, as previously discussed.  Mr. Page seems eminently satisfied after reading the word of the special counsel.  Left unanswered:

Why hasn't the CIA Counsel been able to definitively opine on this?  From Bob Novak in April:

On March 21, Hoekstra [Ranking Republican on the House Intel Committee] again requested the CIA to define Mrs. Wilson's status. A written reply April 5 from Christopher J. Walker, the CIA's director of congressional affairs, said only that "it is taking longer than expected" to reply because of "the considerable legal complexity required for this tasking."

Why didn't Fitzgerald's filing include any analysis or briefing prepared by the DoJ?  Or is a simple "it was clear" enough to resolve the issues for Mr. Page, particularly about whether the Intelligence Identities Protection Act requires foreign travel or a foreign posting?

Why didn't Fitzgerald, or later Congressman Waxman, present a simple bit of information easily available in Ms. Plame's personnel file, to with, the last date for which she received credit for service abroad as per her pension?  it's in her classified file, and surely if they can tell us she took seven trip they can tell us her last credit was received in, e.g., 2002.  Why so coy?  This was in the Times:

The letter [from the CIA human resources are to Ms. Plame], from February 2006, was entered into the Congressional Record by Representative Jay Inslee, Democrat of Washington, in January 2007. Mr. Inslee was introducing legislation to allow Ms. Wilson to qualify for a government annuity.

The letter said that Ms. Wilson had worked for the government since Nov. 9, 1985, for a total of “20 years, 7 days,” including “six years, one month and 29 days of overseas service.”

Easy for Fitzgerald or Waxman to get, yet somehow impossible for the rest of us - why is that?

I hope as Mr. Page contemplates his allegiance to facts he also contemplates these unanswered questions.  His email is posted at the bottom of his column.

MORE:  Yes, it was just a few short days ago we noted Mr. Page's disassociation from a reality-based perspective ion the comparison of Libby and Rita, when he wrote that Mr. Rita had no prior criminal record.  In reality, Mr. Rita had been convicted of perjury in a gun related investigation in 1986, well before his recent conviction in a gun-related investigation.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions.

 

Thank Heaven For Studies (Ongoing...)

Via Drudge we get the shocking news that women are "drawn to men with muscles".  I am able to complement this carefully-designed study with a bit of field research, since I stumbled across a recent People magazine bringing us up to speed on the "Single & Sizzling Men of '07".  Let's see:

MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY

The Hottest Bachelors cover star is renowned for his rakish smile, sparkling eyes and – how could we forget? – his killer abs.

Whatever.  Frankly, this part of the purportedly serious study strikes me as a joke:

He and colleagues interviewed 99 male undergraduates about their sexual histories. Muscular men were twice as likely to have had more than three sex partners than less-built types.

Kidding?  I'll bet right now that the ability to pack on muscle is correlated with testosterone levels, which may also be correlated with sex drive.  Geez, just a guess.  More from the AP:

Frederick and colleagues also asked 141 college women to look at six standardized silhouettes of men ranging from brawny to slender. Most preferred a toned man who was more likely to commit over a muscle-bound man they perceived as more volatile, aggressive and dominant.

No relative rankings of toned womanizers versus brawny committed homebuilders?

Which way to the beach...

Novak, By The Book

A book excerpt presents Robert Novak's latest version of his fateful chat with Richard Armitage about Joe Wilson's wife:

Armitage was giving me high-level insider gossip, unusual in a first meeting. About halfway through our session, I brought up Bush's sixteen words. What Armitage told me generally confirmed what I had learned from sources the previous day while I was reporting for the Fran Townsend column.

I then asked Armitage a question that had been puzzling me but, for the sake of my future peace of mind, would better have been left unasked.

Why would the CIA send Joseph Wilson, not an expert in nuclear proliferation and with no intelligence experience, on the mission to Niger?

"Well," Armitage replied, "you know his wife works at CIA, and she suggested that he be sent to Niger." "His wife works at CIA?" I asked. "Yeah, in counterproliferation."

He mentioned her first name, Valerie. Armitage smiled and said: "That's real Evans and Novak, isn't it?" I believe he meant that was the kind of inside information that my late partner, Rowland Evans, and I had featured in our column for so long. I interpreted that as meaning Armitage expected to see the item published in my column.

The exchange about Wilson's wife lasted no more than sixty seconds.

Interesting.  This old post has the Novak version before he was willing to name Armitage; here is Novak (post-"Hubris") rebutting Armitage's version.

There are subtle shifts in the story - now we are told that "He mentioned her first name, Valerie", a detail not presented earlier.

And conspiracists and fantasists will love the news that "What Armitage told me [about the Sixteen Words] generally confirmed what I had learned from sources the previous day while I was reporting for the Fran Townsend column."  Ahh!  So Novak was sniffing around the uranium/Niger/Wilson story before he talked to Armitage!  Well, let me aid the conspiracists for a moment.  From Novak:

When I went to my office Monday, July 7, 2003, Joe Wilson was not in the forefront of my mind. Frances Fragos Townsend was. She had just been named deputy national security adviser at the White House though her background was in liberal Democratic politics, including Attorney General Janet Reno's inner circle during the Clinton administration. Her appointment was a political mystery of the kind I had been exploring for forty years in my column.

OK, we have had that before - the prevailing version as told by Murray Waas has been that the Townsend column came out on July 10; Rove defended her to Novak at length on the 8th or 9th, and then Novak slipped in a question about Wilson's wife and Karl responded with "I heard that, too".

But now Novak tells us that the Townsend column was written on July 7.  Hmm - in that case, what did he and Karl find to talk about on July 8 or 9?  Or had Rove "heard that, too" in a chat with Novak on the 7th even before Novak met with Armitage?

My circle-squaring guess is this - Novak means that the Townsend column was mostly written on the 7th, not completed and filed - from glancing at it, it appears that all of Karl's homework in defense of Ms. Townsend earned him this sentence near the close:

Townsend did not return my telephone calls. The White House official representing her said National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice obtained endorsements of her by Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller and CIA Director George Tenet.

I will further wager that the White House had pretty convincing phone logs documenting a Novak-Rove chat on the 8th or 9th, and that Fitzgerald had testimony from Rove's underlings supporting the notion that a Townsend briefing book was prepared for Rove for a mid-week phone call.

But whatever - loose the hounds!

Novak also emphasizes this in his new excerpt:

Then, in the last week of June 2003, Armitage's office called to agree unexpectedly to my request and set up the appointment for July 8.

It is important to note that Armitage reached out to me before Joe Wilson went public on the New York Times op-ed page and on "Meet the Press" with an account of his Niger report...

Well then, let's also note that Armitage, Colin Powell's deputy, leaked to Bob Woodward prior to the Wilson op-ed; the Sixteen Word debacle was buzzing before the Wilson op-ed, and as the public face of the Administration who had made the WMD case against Saddam to the UN (without citing the uranium angle), Colin Powell almost surely felt that the claim that the Administration lied cut a bit close to home.  Was Armitage enlisted to salvage Powell's reputation?  Geez, if only Special Counsel Fitzgerald had wondered or cared.

Trophy Wives

Beldar exhausted the subject of Fred Thompson's marriage to Jeri Kehn when this subject surfaced a month ago.  The Captain was good yesterday.

Libby's Motive - Maybe Patrick Fitzgerald Can Help Matt Yglesias

Matt Yglesias and Brendan Nyhan are having an interesting back and forth as to why Libby lied and what it means for his commutation.  Let me volunteer Special Counsel Fitzgerald's help on this plaintive plea from Matt Yglesias:

Bottom-line, I think it's rock solid that Bush abused his power, and until someone can offer a plausible account of what kind of non-criminal conduct Libby is helping to cover-up, I'm not going to be too upset if people assume that what's being covered-up was, in fact, a crime.

Here is Special Counsel Fitzgerald from a 2006 filing (p. 26) in which he tackled the question of motive (but do keep in mind - jurors like motive as part of the narrative but it is not a legal requirement for conviction in a perjury/obstruction trial):

Defendant’s request for discovery to show an absence of motive to lie or conceal his conduct overlooks the fact that even the materials defendant appended to his motion show that in early October 2003 (when defendant first gave his story) there would be great embarrassment to the administration if it became publicly known that defendant had participated in disseminating information about Ms. Wilson’s CIA employment, and defendant would have had every reason to assume he would be fired if his true actions became known.

But if June 2006 seems too long ago, here is Jeralyn Merritt's summary of the prosecution close from the Libby trial (the speaker was Peter Zeidenberg):

Mr. Libby and motive to lie.  He agrees with Wells that people have to have a motive to lie.

Libby knew there was a criminal investigation. He knew the FBI wanted to talk to him about it. Zeidenberg tells them to look at Libby's non-disclosure agreements. He knows that he can't even be negligent about classified information. Zeidenberg plays the video of Scott McClellan.

There's no question Libby has reason to think that at a minimum, he's going to be fired. He went to the VP and said he wanted to be cleared like Karl Rove had been cleared.

He cooked up the story about reporters being the source of his knowledge so that it would make his conduct appear innocuous.

This is a case about lying, not conspiracy or scapegoats. There's no White House or NBC conspiracy. He's here because of his own choices and decisions. He decided to lie to the FB and grand jury.

And here we go from Fitzgerald's "cloud over what the Vice President did" close:

But the thing about it is, when you look back at something that happened, history always looks inevitable. At the time he [Libby] was sitting there with a motive to lie. He had a problem. There was an investigation, got security clearances, going to lose his job, they’re talking about firing people and he planted his feet and told the Vice President, I did not leak to Novak.  I did not leak classified information.

I don't know if that helps, but it looks like the official government speculation.

The gist is that Libby feared loss of security clearances, firing, and embarrassment to the Administration.  As a bonus, let me speculate that Libby was specifically worried that Dick Coronary might be dumped from the 2004 ticket if his role in the Plame debacle was sufficiently awkward.

And do keep in mind - the specific points on which Libby were convicted were pretty tangential to whether he discussed Ms. Plame with Cheney and whether he or Cheney were aware of her classified status.  Consequently there are plenty of modified Libby stories that would clear the points on which he was convicted yet still minimize Cheney's role, if he is ever asked to re-tell his tale. 

Frankly, I await the day when Congress or the courts prepare an impeachment/indictment of Cheney on the word of a convicted perjurer who testified to memory problems (although the commutation serves to increase his possible credibility - would he even get a hearing if his testimony would lead to a reduced sentence?).  But until that day comes, I have Comedy Central.

Anniversaries

Should we be wishing each other a Happy Joe Wilson Day?  It was a mere four years ago that his star shone ever so brightly across the firmament (OK, infirm-ament) with his NY Times op-ed, his Meet The Press engagement with Andrea Mitchell, and his WaPo interview with Walter Pincus.

And in a few days it will be a mere three years since his star was eclipsed somewhat by the release of a Senate Intelligence report; Susan Schmidt of the Wapo had the first resulting Wilson debunking (I took a tasteless victory lap myself), and Matthew Continetti of the Weekly Standard had lots of fun.  Bob Somerby plowed through Joe Wilson's subsequent explanations and prevarications.  And lest we forget, Joe was cut loose from the Kerry campaign.

But keep the candle burning!  Josh Marshall amuses us with this, from earlier this week:

Here on the Times Oped page you'll see David Brooks column claiming that the information Joe Wilson brought before the public four years ago turned out to all be a crock, a bunch of lies...

...

And with that knowledge, I have to say that the claim that Wilson's charges have been discredited, disproved or even meaningfully challenged is simply false. What he said on day one is all true. It's really as simple as that.

Of course, Dr.Marshall is far too sly a fox to actually specify just what it is that Joe Wilson charged, so it is a bit easier for him to defend his position.  And of course, the Wilson story as presented anonymously by Kristof and Pincus in May and June of 2003 was different from the story told by Wilson himself in July. (Kristof May 6; June 13; Pincus June 12)

Both Kristof and Pincus reported that Wilson debunked the forged Niger documents; Wilson did not make that claim publicly and explained that the reporters misquoted him.

Kristof explained that Wilson was sent "at the behest" of he Vice President; Wilson modified that claim, but even after Wilson's own op-ed Chris Matthews and Sen. Rockefeller stuck to the Kristof script.  I can't resist a flavor but you have to picture Matthews gyrating and drooling yourself:

MATTHEWS: At the behest of the vice president's office, the CIA was tasked by the vice president's office to do it. Senator, isn't that right?

ROCKEFELLER: That is correct.

GERGEN: Well, I thought what he said in "The New York Times" was -- in his piece, was that he was asked by the intelligence agencies for whom he had worked, they paid his way. He went pro bono in terms of his...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: At the request of the vice president's office. Right, Senator?

ROCKEFELLER: Absolutely correct.

Wilson was also adamant that his report settled the Niger question and that his wife played no role in sending him.  It is pretty clear that, his interpretation notwithstanding, his report did not settle the issue.  And after the release of her email seemingly nominating him for the job, is anyone still pretending that Ms. Plame played no role in sending her husband?

On the WMD issue, Joe's pre-war position was that Saddam had some chemical and/or biological capability; he became a lot smarter after the invasion, as did we all.

Well - do I have a point?  Not really; Wilson is not the one who was swept up in the legal process.