Tar Heel Tavern #35

Tar Heel Tavern #35


Graphic by Dmitri Rakov

Don't miss the Tar Heel Tavern at Laurie's Slowly She Turned blog. Her topic this week was "Oldies But Goodies". Thanks to Laurie for the excellent topic and to all Tar Heelers for the vibrant response.

One America Book Club: God's Politics by Jim Wallis

One America Book Club:
God's Politics by Jim Wallis



Click image to learn more about and/or order the book.

For the next six weeks or so, I'll be helping to facilitate a discussion about the motivational and inspiring book God's Politics by Jim Wallis at the One America website. I'm honored to join with Senator Edwards, Mrs. Edwards, and Jim Wallis in leading the Book Club discussion. I encourage all of you to read the book and to join the discussion.

God is not a Republican. Or a Democrat.

Faith and politics, in the past, have been two issues that are individually volatile and rarely discussed in a combined or holistic way. (My silly rule of thumb: If you can't discuss 'em at the dinner table without the mashed potatoes being thrown at you, they're volatile.) Denying that we are faithful people when making public policy is, in reality, a very unhealthy denial of our humanity and our values. Because of this book, I'm encouraged to be fearless in my quests for both asking for social change and pursuing national policy consistent with our traditional and common spiritual values. Politics and spirituality do not have to be at odds with one another. It is not necessary that the two should be separated, polarized, or put into competition with one another.

Visit the One America Book Club today.

Photo

A picture of me with my mother Rosabelle Hart Nagurney.

An Oldie But a Goodie

An Oldie But a Goodie


Dad and fellow band-members in front of the old Lakeshore Hotel at Sylvan Beach

That silver-haired daddy of mine was a cute l'il ol' cowboy in the day. Here he is at Sylvan Beach (an amusement area that dates well back into the 1880’s on Oneida Lake in Upstate NY) with his band from the early 1950s - The Santa Fe Riders. Dad is the wiry one with the black cowboy hat dipped so low that you can hardly see that handsome face of his!


Flyer from 1950s Sylvan Beach
credit: LaffLand

Sylvan Beach was once billed as the Playground of Central New York.

If you've ever been an American Bandstand fan, you'll appreciate this connection between Daddy and Dick Clark. They were once co-workers:



Dick Clark - 1954

As a teenager, Dick Clark began his career in broadcasting in 1945 in the mailroom of station WRUN in Utica, New York, working his way up to weatherman and then newsman. After graduating from Syracuse University in 1951, Clark moved from radio into television broadcasting at station WKTV in Utica. Here, Clark hosted Cactus Dick and the Santa Fe Riders, a country music program which became the training ground for his later television hosting persona.

Daddy and Dick were two fresh-faced teens who took different career paths. My father, while sticking with music as a second job most of his life (playing weddings and family parties on weekends), went on to become an electrical engineer, working with General Electric until retiring about thirteen years ago.

And you all know what happened to Cactus Dick. ;)

Note: Last December, Dick Clark suffered a mild stroke and has since been making great strides in therapy. Dick's good friend, Ed McMahon says that Dick's doing well. McMahon has recently said, "He's going out. He's going to dinner. One-hundred-percent mental capacity has returned -- almost one-hundred-percent physical capacity. He still has a few things to work out, but he's going to be on the New Year's Eve show. He'll be there this year. Isn't that nice?"

Here's wishing Dick a complete recovery and a swift and successful return to Times Square. We love ya, Dick.

Heaven

Heaven


photo by Jude Nagurney Camwell

"My only sketch, profile, of Heaven is
a large blue sky, and larger than the
biggest I have ever seen in June- and in
it are my friends - every one of them."

- Emily Dickinson

NYT Editor Misled By Judy Miller?

NYT Editor Misled By Judy Miller?

New York Times editor Bill Keller has accused Judith Miller of apparently misleading the newspaper about her dealings with Vice President Cheney's top aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby. This indicates the first public split between Miller and the Times' management. This is all in the wake of a memo to the Times staff in which Keller "distanced himself from Miller even while acknowledging several mistakes on his part." Some of Keller's comments:

"Until Fitzgerald came after her...I didn't know that Judy had been one of the reporters on the receiving end of the . . . whisper campaign" against Joe Wilson, the husband of CIA operative Valerie Plame.....

..."I should have wondered why I was learning this from the special counsel, a year after the fact." Citing a 2003 conversation with Miller that was recalled by Washington bureau chief Philip Taubman, Keller wrote: "Judy seems to have misled Phil Taubman about the extent of her involvement...."

".....if I had known the details of Judy's entanglement with Libby, I'd have been more careful in how the paper articulated its defense and perhaps more willing than I had been to support efforts aimed at exploring compromises."

[Howard Kurtz/WaPo]


Calame Speaks -
The Miller Mess: Lingering Issues Among the Answers

Mr. Keller acknowledged to me last week that his tendency to act slowly in response to criticisms about prewar coverage might have contributed to the dismay among readers and in the newsroom with the way The Times dealt with protecting Ms. Miller's confidential sources in the leak investigation......Mr. Keller is right. The paper should have addressed the problems of the coverage sooner. It is the duty of the paper to be straight with its readers, and whatever the management reason was for not doing so, the readers didn't get a fair shake...The most disturbing aspect of the Oct. 16 retrospective was its revelation of the journalistic shortcuts that Ms. Miller seems comfortable taking......

...Ms. [Jill] Abramson said that she did not recall Ms. Miller ever mentioning the confidential conversations she had with I. Lewis Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, who appears to be in the middle of the leak investigation. When I asked her, Ms. Miller declined to identify the editor she dealt with...If Ms. Abramson is to be believed, and I do believe her, this raises clear issues of trust and credibility. It also means that because Ms. Miller didn't let an editor know what she knew, Times readers were deprived of a potentially exclusive look into an apparent administration effort to undercut Mr. Wilson and other critics of the Iraq war....

....Another troubling ethical issue that I haven't yet been able to nail down is whether Ms. Miller holds a government security clearance - something that could restrict her ability to share with editors the information she gathers...

In Other Plamegate-related Stories:

AP/John Solomon - Times: Miller May Have Misled Editors

Andrew Sullivan has led me to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's website.

On the Keller memo, Andrew says:

I find it impressively honest and appropriately self-critical. I see no reason to doubt Keller's sincerity, but he also clearly screwed up. We'll hear more tomorrow from Calame. The two best commenters on all this so far are the peerless Jack Shafer and the shameless but, in this case, inimitable Arianna.

Maureen Dowd talks about Judy Miller and the Times management:

Judy is refusing to answer a lot of questions put to her by Times reporters, or show the notes that she shared with the grand jury. I admire Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Bill Keller for aggressively backing reporters in the cross hairs of a prosecutor. But before turning Judy's case into a First Amendment battle, they should have nailed her to a chair and extracted the entire story of her escapade. [NYT/Truthout

I've been saying this all along. The CIA leak was all about the selling of the Iraq war:

Lawrence Wilkerson (former chief of staff to former Sec'y of State Colin Powell) complained of a "cabal" between Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that bypassed normal decision-making channels when it came to Iraq and other national security issues. He described "real dysfunctionality" in the administration's foreign policy team and said that Mr. Powell's aides had thrown out "whole reams of paper" from the intelligence dossier developed by Mr. Cheney's staff for use in Mr. Powell's presentation of the case against Iraq to the United Nations in early 2003. [NYT-Stevenson/Jehl]

Rumors are flying that Cheney may step aside and that Condi may be elevated to VP. [USNews.com

Steve Clemons/Washington Note - WOW! Brent Scowcroft Lets it Rip (Like Larry Wilkerson) in Monday's New Yorker


On, no - not again. The MSM seem to be making this a partisan issue - when it's not!

Here's a newly minted bit of MSM groupthink that needs to be stamped out before it congeals into conventional wisdom: that only people on the left are upset about the way the White House used lies and deception to lead us into a reckless and unnecessary war. [Arianna Huffington

There's so much anger about the way citizens were misled toward the Iraq War - and so little accountability...

In Dante's "Inferno," deceivers are sentenced to have their souls encased in flames, hypocrites are forced to wear a cloak weighted with lead, and those who use their powers of persuasion for insidious ends are doomed to suffer a continual fever so intense that their body sizzles and smokes like a steak tossed on a George Foreman grill. Maybe Satan will give Bush, Cheney, Rove, Libby and their accomplices at the New York Times a three-afflictions-for-the-price-of-one deal……There is nothing more immoral in the life of a nation than waging an unnecessary war -- which Iraq surely is. It is time for America to confront the terrible truth that we have allowed ourselves to be blinded to. And it is way past time for those that led us into that war, from the White House Iraq Group to Judy Miller and the New York Times to be held accountable for their actions. [Arianna Huffington]

LA Times-Truthout: - Bush Critic Became Target of Libby, Former Aides Say

Shane/Johnston NYT - Leak Prosecutor Is Called Exacting and Apolitical

NYT/David Johnston - Cover-Up Issue Is Seen as Focus in Leak Inquiry

Ray McGovern/Truthout - Chickens Come Home to Roost on Cheney

Daily Kos/Armando - Raining on the Fitzmas Parade re: Billmon, Steve Gilliard, John Dean

The Sunday Business Post/Ireland - Plame affair threatens Bush

..there is nothing on the horizon that seems likely to arrest Bush's decline.

William Rivers Pitt/Truthout - Diary of a Plamegate Junkie (Humor)

GOP = Hoodwinkers

Today's GOP = Hoodwinkers

My grandchildren will benefit from the destruction of the jihadists and the rebuilding of the Gulf region, so it’s fair they bear some of these costs.
Jerry Bowyer - NRO

Will 'the grands' benefit from us owing our economic existence to China? Will they benefit from a wrong-minded foreign policy that will result in China securing cheap fuel from nations that we sanction and alienate? Will we be so beholden to China in our grandchildren's lifetime that we will have to make compromises in foreign policy that will be a certain bane to Human Rights? The looming U.S. inflation rate has been theatening to force us to make difficult consumer spending decisions. We can't afford the gas to get to work, let alone to take a vacation. Working their asses off for the few millionaires (at the expense of the many), the Bush administration isn't budging on putting off their precious tax cuts, ignoring the fact that tax increases might have offset the rise in spending from emergency bills for post-hurricane Katrina reconstruction. While the GOP is refusing to stall tax-cuts to their richest campaign contributors, squeezing us consumers will only make things worse, especially when there's no room to reduce government expenditures in "non-essential" areas. The poor in America are going to become poorer - and millions of the working poor will face abject poverty. Let's face reality - the budget deficit is going to seriously deteriorate. We'll be looking to China and some other Asian nations for funding of our increased requirements. The Fed is tightening their belt - which means we will have to tighten our belts. As global interest rates rise, so will costs of borrowing from China.

If we reduce spending elsewhere in order to fund Katrina rebuilding, then we’re borrowing money to build long-term capital assets.

If the GOP can dismantle the social safety net by "reducing spending elewhere," we are going to have a society that has lost the American dream of individual opportunity. If we continue to reward only the few with economic policy, we only raise the boats of the rich few while the many poor are sucked under the waves.

What would happen if the Asian central banks should suddenly refuse to add to their dollar holdings or even reduce them and instead decide to invest their surpluses in euros? Surely, such a reaction would lead to much international turbulence and severe economic crisis.....The present situation of American deficits and foreign credits may continue as far as the eye can see. After all, an old monetary order, which had been created at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, withstood much international disorder for more than thirty years. Some economists and their friends in government like to note the similarities of that order with the new. But this economist does not see the semblance. With his eyes on huge trade deficits and foreign debts and on grave international conflict and strife he braces for more commotion and crises to come. [Dr. Hans Sennholz - Daily Reckoning]

Following the current economic-policy direction of this country, a few of our grandkids will wind up fat and cozy. The vast majority of them will wind up making minimum wage, living from paycheck to paycheck, and clinging to a mythic American promise that today's GOP never intended to keep.

How much worse does it have to get before even the Freeper-types and Bush "Stepford town-hall-ers" discover that the Republicans have hoodwinked them?

Harvard: Keeping Children Safe, Healthy on Halloween

Keeping Children Safe, Healthy on Halloween
Tips from Harvard Health Publications

It's that time of the year once again.
There are some good common-sense tips for Halloween child-safety here from Harvard Health Publications. Excerpt:

Costumes are an essential part of Halloween fun, but hazardous situations can arise if a costume is made from the wrong materials or does not fit properly. "Every Halloween we see children brought to our emergency department with problems related to costumes. Masks that are ill-fitting interfere with vision, and outfits that are baggy or extend beyond ankles lead to trips and falls," said Harvard Health Letter advisory board member Dr. John T. Nagurney, who is an attending physician in emergency services at Massachusetts General Hospital.

________
Have you heard Bobby "Boris" Pickett's re-make of The Monster Mash?

We were hiking past the White House late one night
When our eyes beheld an eerie sight
The president appeared, with folks very strange
The zombies and vampires of global climate change
...sings Bobby Pickett in the Climate Mash.

Big Government Conservatives

Big Government Conservatives
Could there be a more frightening thought?

The belief that a child born into poverty is not trapped by the economic circumstances of his (or her) birth remains an ensconced part of the American dream, yet real numbers inform us that the American dream of exceptional opportunity may not be as true as we'd once thought. The gap between rich and poor has widened since 1970, and has particularly accelerated since the economy slowdown in late 2000. There is a significant link between federal tax policies and the well-being of the poorest living in America's cities. Hurricane Katrina revealed a lot of previously-hidden truths about poverty and the failures and shortfalls of federal and state legislation to help the working poor. We might have expected to see the Bush administration reconsidering the path they were taking on economic policy after Hurricane Katrina. Instead,

The Urban Institute-Brookings Tax Policy Center reports that the households with incomes more than $1 million a year are receiving tax cuts averaging $103,000 each this year, and two new tax cuts primarily benefiting the same group are slated to take effect Jan. 1. As the federal budget moves toward finalization, the Senate and House of Representative appear to continue to move forward on the pre-Katrina plan for $13 billion in proposed cuts in Medicaid and Food Stamps.
Journal Star - Lincoln, Nebraska

Should the nation proceed with these tax cuts at a time when many Katrina survivors remain in difficult straits, when huge sums are being discussed for Katrina relief and recovery, and when cuts in domestic programs — including programs for the poor — are slated for Congressional consideration this fall as part of the reconciliation bills?

In a nonpartisan Diageo/Hotline poll taken Oct. 12 to 16 and released this week, only 4 percent of people named cutting "spending for domestic programs, like health care and education" as the best way to pay for problems caused by Hurricane Katrina. But 31 percent said "delay or cancel tax cuts," and 27 percent said "cut spending for the war in Iraq."....So, as Republicans get pulled in several directions over the fiscal future, the party could also end up finding itself pulled toward trouble in next year's midterm elections. [Terry Neal - Cutting the Cost of Spending - WaPo]

See Center on Budget and Policy Priorities New Tax Cuts Primarily Benefitting Millionaires Slated to Take Effect in January (pdf)

Because of heavy Federal cuts to programs intended to alleviate poverty, the individual State governments have been under intense pressure to close their budget gaps in a weaker economy. Decisions forced upon States about decreased allotments for social programs have had a direct impact on lower income families, especially on the issues of unemployment, child care, and health/disability insurance. These decisions have made the poorest in our society less mobile.

Michael Harrington wrote about "The Other America" over 40 years ago. Even then, he realized that "the state governments in the U.S. have a political peculiarity that renders them incapable of dealing with the problems of poverty. They are, for the most part, dominated by the conservative rural elements. In every state with a big industrial population, the gerrymander has given the forces of rural conservatism two or three votes per person. So it is that the state legislatures usually take more money out of the problem areas than they put back into them. So it is that state governments are notoriously weighted in the direction of caution, pinchpenny economics, and indifference to the plight of the urban millions." Harrington said that it was a "noble sentiment to argue that private moral responsibility expressing itself through charitable contributions should be the main instrument of attacking poverty. The only problem is that such an approach does not work."

The Republican party is going to begin to come apart when Americans catch on to the fact that they are currently a party of narrow values, BIG government and radically Conservative politics. After Hurricane Katrina, moderate America is already beginning to shiver and give the cold shoulder to the GOP's hypocritical rhetoric.

Republicans are losing control of runaway deficits and the Iraq War (and the monster-sized spending accompanying it - with much of that money mysteriously disappearing in the appearently corrupt "new" Iraq). Gas prices are through the roof. Health care, even if you can obtain it or afford it, has a rapidly increasing price tag. Republicans in Washington have passed a Medicare bill that will create $139 billion in profits for pharmaceutical corporations, yet produces inflated prices for elderly consumers. No one bought the Bush line on privatizing (ie: dismantling) Social Security.

We need a new direction. The Democrats know it. They've been saying it for a long time now. The American people are agreeing. They want America to be governed as one America - not just for the few, but for everyone.

As for the failure of the GOP's policies, the proof is in the poverty.

Rice Won't Rule Out Force

Rice Won't Rule Out Force

Rice Won't Rule Out Force on Syria and Iran -

and I won't rule out more manipulation of intelligence to fit the foreign policy that always seems to keep the option of "force" at the front of the table rather than putting it in its proper place.

I won't rule out further misuse of our already-overstretched military.

I won't rule out the activation of a Military draft at a time when public confidence in the Iraq war is piddled away with every new revelation of a prior misleading by the Bush administration.

I won't rule out the probability that Bush will never change the course in Iraq.

I won't rule out the increasing growth of al Qaeda-type terror groups as the competitive race for hearts and minds in the Arab world is won by the wrong guys - all because of a wrong-minded policy that assumes that "speading democracy" is done at the butt of a gun pointed at regimes; bombs targeted on neighborhoods where the "wrong guys" happen to live and coexist beside the heart-mind targets. Shooting arrows into hearts is supposed to win people over - not kill them.

I won't rule out the probability that we could lose this war on terror if we can't find a way to culturally support the liberal-minded Arabs in the Middle East without bringing bloody violence to their doorsteps.

Refusing to rule out force should always be our nation's option, for government has a responsibility to provide National Security.

Condi talks tough - and leaders in the Middle East believe her - and with THIS administration, that is a problem, because it feeds into the terrorists' recruiting game.

Not cool, Condi.

"Opportunity Rocks" tour is Underway

"Opportunity Rocks" tour is Underway
Related post at the One America blog

"Join me in this cause. Let's end poverty as we know it in America, and let's create the kind of country that all of us can be proud of."

Senator John Edwards at UNC-Chapel Hill, Oct 17th

Senator Edwards is helping to launch a project called Opportunity Rocks with a two-week tour to ten colleges and universities. Opportunity Rocks is a project of the Center for Promise and Opportunity, of which Senator Edwards is the honorary chair.

The goal of the Opportunity Rocks tour is to get more young people involved in their communities and to encourage them to advocate and promote policies that expand opportunity.

• For more information on "Opportunity Rocks," see One America blog Oct. 7 - John Edwards Invites Young People to Join the Fight Against Poverty


Senator Edwards and Vanessa Cooper stand by a window frame in a house being built by Habitat For Humanity in New Haven, Ct on Wednesday. Cooper will own the house.(BOB CHILD / AP)

Senator Edwards made his third stop on the Opportunity Rocks tour at Yale University on October 19th. Adam blogs from New Haven, CT: "We spent the morning at a build site sponsored by the Greater New Haven Habitat for Humanity.....There were about 20 volunteers at the site. Bill wasted no time in getting a tool belt on Senator Edwards and putting him to work."

Media reports are drawing parallels between John Edwards and his fight against poverty and Robert F. Kennedy and the 1960s Civil Rights movement. "[John]Edwards said when he was a student, Bobby Kennedy had called attention to poverty in Appalachia. Edwards said the desperate poverty highlighted by Katrina could have a similar impact on the current generation." source: Edwards speaks on poverty - NewsObserver.com

On Tuesday, Senator Edwards said, "There is a hunger, a thirst in America for a national community again." Senator Edwards wants college students to increase their community service while [utilizing] the Internet and other tools to link up with like-minded peers across the country. "If we want to end poverty as we know it, we need to start a movement," he said. "We can't count on politicians in Washington, D.C."
source: AP/KansasCity.com

The tour is still due to make stops at:

Harvard University — October 20
Dartmouth College — October 21
University of Texas - Austin — October 24
University of California - Berkeley — October 25
University of Wisconsin - Madison — October 26
Florida A&M University — October 27
University of Michigan - Ann Arbor — October 28

Plamegate Tuesday

Plamegate Tuesday

Patrick J. Fitzgerald has zeroed in on the role of Vice President Cheney's office, according to lawyers familiar with the case and government officials....Fitzgerald has pressed witnesses on what Cheney may have known about the effort to push back against ex-diplomat and Iraq war critic Joseph C. Wilson IV...it is increasingly clear that Cheney and his aides have been deeply enmeshed in events surrounding the Plame affair from the outset....One former CIA official told prosecutors early in the probe about efforts by Cheney's office and his allies at the National Security Council to obtain information about Wilson's trip as long as two months before Plame was unmasked in July 2003, according to a person familiar with the account. [WaPo, Jim VandeHei and Walter Pincus]


John Hannah was told that he could face imminent indictment for his role in leaking Plame-Wilson’s name to reporters unless he cooperated with the investigation. So he's cooperating. [Raw Story]

The Daily News says that

Cheney and Libby spend hours together in the course of a day, which causes sources who know both men very well to assert that any attempts to discredit Wilson would almost certainly have been known to the vice president....."Scooter wouldn't be freelancing on this without Cheney's knowledge," a source told the Daily News. "It was probably some off-the-cuff thing: 'This guy [Wilson] could be a problem.'"...The News reported in July that Libby was "totally obsessed with Wilson." ...Whether that obsession amounts to criminal misconduct will be decided by Fitzgerald - but if Libby is indicted or implicated in wrongdoing, Cheney's reputation will suffer as well.

EJ Dionne says the Republicans can dish it out, but they can't take it.

An editorial in the latest issue of the conservative Weekly Standard is a sign of arguments to come. The editorial complains about the various accusations being leveled against DeLay, Libby, Rove and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and it says that "a comprehensive strategy of criminalization had been implemented to inflict defeat on conservatives who seek to govern as conservatives.".....I have great respect for my friends at the Weekly Standard, so I think they'll understand my surprise and wonder over this new conservative concern for the criminalization of politics. A process that was about "the rule of law" when Democrats were in power is suddenly an outrage now that it's Republicans who are being held accountable. [WaPo]

Josh Marshall wonders why on earth NYT editor Bill Keller would have given or allowed Judith Miller to take on Iraq-related assignments (post-WMD fiasco) that would have called into question her credibility and/or damage the public's trust in the major news daily.

blog!

blog!
How the Newest Media Revolution Is Changing Politics, Business, And Culture
by David Kline, Dan Burstein, Arne J. De Keijzer (Editor), Paul Berger (Editor)



I bought this book tonight. I'm sure you'll see me commenting about it in days to come.

My Favorite North Carolina T-Shirt

My Favorite North Carolina T-Shirt


John Edwards has made alleviating poverty the issue of his lifetime.


He's inviting young people to join him in the fight against poverty.


The Hurricane Katrina tragedy heightened public awareness of his
'Two Americas' message.



Elizabeth rocks!
She'd be a First Lady to rival Eleanor Roosevelt.
Check out her Bookclub.



*For Anton Zuiker (aka MisterSugar), who is this week's Tar Heel Tavern (#34) host.
Photo credit: Elizabeth - WFMY
All others: Ethan W. Camwell

AP: Punish Dems for Bush's Lies? Fire This Loser of a Writer!

AP: Punish Dems for Bush's Lies? Fire This Loser of a Writer!

The AP says Edwards, Other Democrats Could Be Punished in '08 for Iraq Vote

This headline is so Campaign 2004!
Has this AP writer been f**ing asleep?!

Potential Democratic presidential candidates who voted to give President Bush the authority to use force in Iraq could face a political problem -- they supported a war that their party's rank-and-file now strongly view as a mistake...Their pro-war votes -- cast three years ago -- could haunt them as they seek early support among die-hard Democrats and gauge whether to launch formal candidacies for the party's 2008 presidential nomination.

IS THIS SOME KIND OF A JOKE?!

Bush has made a long series of catastrophic decisions - with authority facilitated by lies which he told Congress. Since they impulsively and determinedly rushed into this disastrously-planned war, with every opportunity that arose to turn the course in Iraq around, the Bush administration has continued to take the same-style wrong turns.

The worst thing Bush has ever done is to have misled the American people and their Representatives. He failed to tell the truth about the 23 or so rationales he offered for going to war in Iraq. Was his purpose to mix the messages - and to confuse and mislead Congress? If not, that was still the result. The Downing Street memos have revealed that the Bush adminstration fixed the intelligence to fit their chosen policy - and it was a policy decided upon well before 9/11. The existence of weapons of mass destruction and the Al Qaeda-September 11 connection were proven to be totally false. Secretary of State Colin Powell has acknowledged that his appearance in front of the UN body in 2003 to beat the drums on WMD was a dreadful scar on his otherwise shining record.

Someone tell this AP writer (and whoever approved the headline) to GET FRIGGEN REAL!
I don't want to hear total crap like this anymore.

Democrats are not going to blame their own Representatives for being deceived by the (proven) deceitful Bush administration.

The failure to find WMD in Iraq resulted in two inquiries into prewar intelligence. One led by a partisan-laden Senate intelligence committee and the other by a White House-appointed panel. It should not be surprising that both panels confined themselves to investigating the intelligence community only, concluding that the White House was an "innocent victim" of bad intelligence. There was never a probe into the political use (and abuse) of the available intelligence by the Bush administration. Senate majority leader Bill Frist and majority chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Sen Pat Roberts made sure of it. (Yet partisan hack-journalist/male escort Jeff Gannon got an eyeful of a senstive INR report from an still-unknown one of the Republican sentries of WHIG.)

My prediction is that Democrats will unite and rightly point their fingers at the Commander in Chief. After all, he's the one who happens to be Republican and had loud and partisan Republican support for this war. He's the leader with the 39% popularity rating....the leader who has convinced a clear majority of Americans responding to polls that he misled this nation to war in Iraq.

John Kerry said this about Iraq last autumn during the campaign season, and he was right:

Before the war, before [Bush] chose to go to war, bi-partisan Congressional hearings... major outside studies... and even some in the administration itself... predicted virtually every problem we now face in Iraq.

This president was in denial. He hitched his wagon to the ideologues who surround him, filtering out those who disagreed, including leaders of his own party and the uniformed military. The result is a long litany of misjudgments with terrible consequences.

The administration told us we'd be greeted as liberators. They were wrong.

They told us not to worry about looting or the sorry state of Iraq's infrastructure. They were wrong.

They told us we had enough troops to provide security and stability, defeat the insurgents, guard the borders and secure the arms depots. They were wrong.

They told us we could rely on exiles like Ahmed Chalabi to build political legitimacy. They were wrong.

They told us we would quickly restore an Iraqi civil service to run the country and a police force and army to secure it. They were wrong.

That still holds true.
One year later, it's truer than ever.
Someone in charge should sit down with this AP journalist and have a chat.
It looks more like a Republican-paid ad than a piece of professional journalism.

Rove, if indicted, to take fall for WHIG

Plamegate:
Rove, if indicted, to take
fall for WHIG

Raw Story is reporting that Karl Rove - facing a possible perjury charge - will step down or take unpaid leave if he's indicted in the Plame investigation. The same goes for Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Source: Time Magazine

Rove apparently has plans to run interference for his fellow WHIG members.

A former White House official says Rove's break with Bush would have to be clean—no "giving advice from the sidelines"—for the sake of the Administration.

Severing his ties would allow Rove—who as deputy chief of staff runs a vast swath of the West Wing—to fight aggressively "any bull___ charges," says a source close to Rove, like allegations that he was part of a broad conspiracy to discredit Plame's husband Joseph Wilson. Rove's defense: whatever he did fell far short of that.

Rove will need to fight aggressively, and I'm sure that he will. I wonder how he thinks he will save his own tail without implicating any of the others.

Speaking of WHIG, William Rivers Pitt explains their role:

WHIG, and its intention to sell an unnecessary war to a shell-shocked public, is only half the story. The other half of the manipulative sales team could be found in the neighborhood occupied by the Department of Defense. The Office of Special Plans, or OSP, was created by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld specifically to second-guess and reinterpret intelligence data to justify war in Iraq. Think of it like baseball: the OSP pitched, and WHIG caught.....

And he takes it a step further..

"....However important Rove and Libby may be to this administration, neither represents the end of the story. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, with deliberation and intent, took this country to war in Iraq based on false premises, inflated intelligence and bald-faced scare tactics. They used September 11 against their own people to get what they wanted. That is the heart of this matter. If Fitzgerald's investigation ends at Rove and Libby, it will have ended too soon....

....Ambassador Joseph Wilson's public attack on Bush for using the now-rubbished Niger uranium evidence, his attack upon the entire rationale for invasion, was a direct and ominous threat to the latticework of disinformation and lies put forth by WHIG and OSP. They didn't attack Wilson's wife because they didn't like her, or because they were bored. They did it because Wilson could have almost singlehandedly dismantled the administration's case for war. They did it to warn any other insiders who might have wanted to talk that there would be serious consequences for public statements. The administration's case for war was championed not by Rove and Libby, but by Bush and Cheney. It was their party, and Wilson was looking to stop the music.

From: Cheney May Be Entangled in CIA Leak Investigation - Reuters:

Miller wrote in her Times article that Fitzgerald asked her to read that portion of the letter aloud to the grand jurors and asked for her reaction to Libby's words. She said that part of the letter had "surprised me because it might be perceived as an effort by Mr. Libby to suggest that I, too, would say we had not discussed Ms. Plame's identity. Yet my notes suggested that we had discussed her job." Bennett, Miller's attorney, yesterday called that part of Libby's letter "a very stupid thing to do." Other lawyers suggested it could become part of any obstruction-of-justice charge Fitzgerald might bring.

Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame may file a civil lawsuit against President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and others:

In an interview yesterday, Wilson said that once the criminal questions are settled, he and his wife may file a civil lawsuit against Bush, Cheney and others seeking damages for the alleged harm done to Plame's career. If they do so, the current state of the law makes it likely that the suit will be allowed to proceed - and Bush and Cheney will face questioning under oath - while they are in office. The reason for that is a unanimous 1997 U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling that Paula Jones' sexual harassment suit against then-President Bill Clinton could go forward immediately, a decision that was hailed by conservatives at the time.

Norm Solomon explains how NYT reporter Judith Miller functioned with more accountability to US military intelligence officials than to New York Times editors.

There's nothing wrong with this picture if Judith Miller is an intelligence operative for the US government. But if she's supposed to be a journalist, this is a preposterous situation - and the fact that the New York Times has tolerated it tells us a lot about that newspaper.

NOLA and the Levees

NOLA and the Levees

The public proved, after Katrina struck New Orleans, that they still generally expect an activist federal government to become directly involved in all aspects of rebuilding society after disaster strikes - yet the Bush administration threw some rhetoric around about the poor of New Orleans without the promise of much more than fairy-dust and good will from the private sector and faith-based charity to have every destitute person's back. (ie: laissez-faire extraordinaire.) Bush continues his shifting of resources from public entities toward private ones. I don't hear the Democratic leadership pounding on this point, and Americans seem to have been appeased by the Bush rhetoric. With much disaster-fatigue, Americans seem more than ready to forget what they saw on their TV screens overthe Labor Day holiday. Political talk shows burst with boring jabber-jawing about Harriet Miers - a woman we know nothing about. A mere 40 days after a Category 5 storm decimated a major U.S. city and drove the poor from their home and their roots, we are lucky to hear Fox News Sunday or Tim Russert give it a passing comment on the Sunday talk shows.

From this week's NYT

"..if the levees had performed as they were supposed to, the deaths in New Orleans proper, the scenes in the Superdome and the city's devastation would never have taken place.

Who is responsible? Many accusations, some of them valid, have been hurled at the Orleans Levee Board, a local body. But these accusations are irrelevant. The levee board did not design or build these levees. That was entirely the responsibility of the federal government, through the Corps of Engineers.

Just as a surgeon who improperly sutures an artery is responsible if the suture ruptures and the patient bleeds to death, the federal government is directly responsible for the loss of life and property in most of the city. Although people cannot sue the federal government as they could sue the surgeon, the government still has a moral obligation to repair the damage it caused and to try to make the victims' lives whole again.

But instead of helping, Treasury Secretary John Snow recently told Congress that the administration would not guarantee the city's municipal bonds. So the city government announced the layoff of 3,000 workers. The Catholic archdiocese will let nearly 900 go. The largest employer in the city, Tulane University, may soon have to make similar cuts, and Xavier and Dillard universities, also large employers, are in even more desperate straits. How does one rebuild a city if one destroys its public services and intellectual capital?

The reality of the problems that have arisen with Grover Norquist's radically conservative dream of bringing America all the way back to pre-New Deal days has reared its ugly head in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The poor really don't stand a chance with President Bush at the wheel, intent on governing as a Norquistian while drunk on the fermented wax of his own God-in-the ear rhetorical corn squeezings. How does America thrive if the government systematically destroys its social safety net?

Bush has adopted the worst of the Coolidge administration and has taken pains to avoid the best.

In 1927 the homes of roughly one million Americans - then nearly 1 percent of the American population - were flooded. President Calvin Coolidge recognized the responsibility of the federal government to fix that problem, and it did. Now New Orleans needs neither rhetoric nor "enterprise zones," but concrete and immediate help.

- After the Deluge, Some Questions by John Barry, a visiting scholar at the Tulane-Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research, is the author of "Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America."

"As Roosevelt and Hoover understood, only the state has the financial, organizational, and human resources—not to mention the accountability to the public—to combat disasters, undertake regional development, and address issues like class and racial stratification.

And yet, ironically, even amid our reverence for the market, a return to the pre-New Deal status quo is not about to occur. Just as the underappreciated popularity of Social Security produced a groundswell of opposition last spring to Bush's privatization plan, so the public's general expectations of an activist government created the near-universal outrage over the administration's failure to help Katrina's victims promptly.

Americans may talk a good game about the magic of the private sector, but we still depend crucially on Washington—a fact that tends to be realized only in times of crisis.

- Boston Globe, Oct 2 by David Greenberg, who teaches history and media studies at Rutgers University. He is writing a biography of Calvin Coolidge.

NY Times on Judy Miller

NY Times on Judy Miller

The NYT Judith Miller story is out - and there isn't a whole lot new if you've been following the story. Miller recaps her decision not to testify and to go to jail:

"....other reporters subpoenaed in the case said such waivers were coerced. They said administration officials signed them only because they feared retribution from the prosecutor or the White House. Reporters for at least three news organizations had then gone back to their sources and obtained additional assurances that convinced them the waivers were genuine.

But Ms. Miller said she had not gotten an assurance that she felt would allow her to testify. And she said she felt that if Mr. Libby had wanted her to testify, he would have contacted her directly.

It sounds as if Miller was being uber-protective, and I am concerned as to why she waited so long for special permission from Libby when we could see it was customary, by that time, for at least three other reporters to accept their sources' waivers. Legal pundit Jonathan Turley has said,

Other reporters got the same waiver that she got from the attorneys of Mr. Libby, and they accepted that waiver as they should. It was a valid waiver. She was the only one who refused. Most of us assumed that she was protecting somebody other than Libby. Libby's lawyers said they were floored when they found out that she claiming to protect their client. I think now the evidence indicates that she didn't have to go to jail, which has a lot of people are scratching their heads. [Huffington Post]

Miller told the Times she thought Libby's lawyer, Joseph Tate, was sending her a message that Libby did not want her to testify. According to Miller's and her attorney's account, Tate was seeking assurances that she would exonerate Libby. Tate called Miller's interpretation "outrageous." [Reuters]

What was this ultra-privileged relationship between Miller and the powerful war planners (including Libby) in the Bush administration? It seems to have surpassed the boundaries of ethical reason, and I'm not the only one who has noticed.

"Everyone admires our paper's willingness to stand behind us and our work, but most people I talk to have been troubled and puzzled by Judy's seeming ability to operate outside of conventional reportorial channels and managerial controls," said Todd S. Purdum, a Washington reporter for The Times."Partly because of that, many people have worried about whether this was the proper fight to fight."

I find Todd's statement to be in line with my own concern about Judith Miller's involvement in all of this - from the lead-up to the Iraq war to the present. Miller's own words tell us she was very careful to protect Dick Cheney:

"My interview notes show that Mr. Libby sought from the beginning, before Mr. Wilson's name became public, to insulate his boss from Mr. Wilson's charges," Miller wrote.....She said that in her recent testimony, Fitzgerald ``asked me questions about Mr. Cheney. He asked, for example, if Mr. Libby ever indicated whether Mr. Cheney had approved of his interviews with me or was aware of them. The answer was no." [Guardian Unlimited]

To see the Times and some others making a First Amendment heroine out of Miller is what I consider to be a inter-professional knee-jerk reaction. I suspect she was harboring potential criminals, albeit powerful potential criminals, to ensure the status of her future access to the most powerful in government. It's no great 1st Amendment defense of a "whistleblower"...it's a revolting thought..and it's certainly not a clear or glorious 1st Amendment defense example.

"If you want to know one big reason why the mainstream media reported so long and so erroneously about Iraq's weapons capabilities, look to Chalabi, who was the main source for New York Times reporter Judy Miller's horribly inaccurate reporting on the matter. Where the Times goes, the others will follow."

- a quote from William Rivers Pitt

Things that make you go "hmmmmmmmm....":

The notebook used by New York Times reporter Judith Miller for an interview with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff contained a name virtually identical to covert operative Valerie Plame's, the Times reported on Saturday. [Reuters]

....when the prosecutor in the case asked her to explain how "Valerie Flame" appeared in the same notebook she used in interviewing Mr. Libby, Ms. Miller said she "didn't think" she heard it from him. "I said I believed the information came from another source, whom I could not recall," she wrote on Friday, recounting her testimony for an article that appears today. [NYT]

Times Managing Editor Jill Abramson, asked what she regretted about the Times' handling of the Miller case, replied simply: "The entire thing." [NYT]

"On the Sunday talk shows of Sept. 8, Ms. Rice warned that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," and Mr. Cheney, who had already started the nuclear doomsday drumbeat in three August speeches, described Saddam as "actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons." The vice president cited as evidence a front-page article, later debunked, about supposedly nefarious aluminum tubes co-written by Judy Miller in that morning's Times. The national security journalist James Bamford, in "A Pretext for War," writes that the article was all too perfectly timed to facilitate "exactly the sort of propaganda coup that the White House Iraq Group had been set up to stage-manage.."
..What makes Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation compelling, whatever its outcome, is its illumination of a conspiracy that was not at all petty: the one that took us on false premises into a reckless and wasteful war in Iraq. That conspiracy was instigated by Mr. Rove's boss, George W. Bush, and Mr. Libby's boss, Dick Cheney.

- Frank Rich, NYT - Truthout

Miller's own statement My Four Hours Testifying in the Federal Grand Jury Room can be read HERE.

My notes indicate that well before Mr. Wilson published his critique, Mr. Libby told me that Mr. Wilson's wife may have worked on unconventional weapons at the CIA.

Miller indicates that Libby shifted leak-blame to the CIA:

I recall that Mr. Libby was displeased with what he described as "selective leaking" by the CIA. He told me that the agency was engaged in a "hedging strategy" to protect itself in case no weapons were found in Iraq. "If we find it, fine, if not, we hedged," is how he described the strategy, my notes show.

Curiously, that's the theme of a Bill Kristol Weekly Standard article today. Make the CIA look like the liberal (chortle) bad guys. Kristol seems to have taken it straight out of the Judith Miller playbook. As an American who values truth very highly, I don't want Judith Miller reporting news to me any longer. She coddles neoconservatives, if she is not one herself. They do not deserve the power they've held with the Bush administration.


Powerline Blog clings to a Stephen Hayes tale from the Weekly Standard about the 2004 Senate Intelligence report on WMD, headed up by super-partisan Sen Pat Roberts and released in 2004. Democrats never should have signed on to this report in 2004. See my post "Democrats far too passive on Senate Intelligence investigation."

Once again (as in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion), our Democratic representatives in the Senate are wimping out on us. They're allowing Senator Pat Roberts and his GOP partners on the Intelligence Committee to blame it all on bad intelligence and delay the next phase ("Phase Two"), which will be examining the administration's decision to invade Iraq (using/abusing the bad intelligence). The Senate Democrats "laid the groundwork for their own political defeat" last February when they agreed to delay the second phase of the investigation until after this November's election.

See my post from July 11, 2004: "I still believe Joseph C. Wilson IV:"

It's clear to me that the report will be
[ab]used by the Bush administration to attempt to legally snake out of its culpability in the treasonous outing of Mr. Wilson's wife.....

.....Would the fact that the Bush administration considered Plame's outing a necessity and an "unintentional" and legal consequence fly in the face of common sense? If it does fly, then I assure you..common sense is dead.. and the rule of law is a passe concept...and I am living in some alternative universe....

....The report throws up a smokescreen to make us wonder about Joseph Wilson's honesty in his prior statements about the Niger case, but in the end, the report is not conclusive and we are left to either believe Joseph Wilson's word or not. I tend to believe him over the others who consciously chose to leak his wife's classified identity and for whose motive I believe could have been nothing other than revenge (regardless of Wilson's role)....

.....Just as I believed there was no imminent threat to America all along based on the information I'd personally collected before the Iraq war, I continue to believe Joseph C. Wilson IV. He has my benefit of doubt.. and I hope he'll have yours, dear readers.

Consider the liars and the powers he's up against.

I went through Stephen Hayes' rehashing of events again and could find no mention of Michael Ledeen. From my own posting from this past summer:

Juan Cole has brought up the topic of Michael Ledeen as recently as yesterday. Mr. Cole tells us to check out Katherine Yurica's posting about Michael Ledeen and understand that Scooter Libby was the liaison to the CIA for the network that ran the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon - and this is highly significant to this entire story.

Libby's network was in competition with the CIA and many members wanted to permanently weaken the agency in favor of the Pentagon, since they had much more influence there.

The neocons of the Bush administration included members of our own Vice President's offices (if not the Vice President himself). The facts surrounding the creation of (false) justifications for the Iraq invasion has threatened to literally pour out of multiple leak sources, like a decayed old hose that's ready to burst. Judith Miller is an inextricable cog in the wheel of the tangled web of lies. How could she possibly separate herself when her involvement was incestuous?

Democrats - Keep Poverty Out in Front

Democrats - Keep Poverty Out in Front

I hope that Democrats will not take E.J. Dionne's post-Katrina words lightly:

"....the conservatives have moved the conversation to ideas that go back to Calvin Coolidge's low-tax economics from the 1920s. And they say liberals are the folks with the "old" ideas?If it didn't matter, I'd be inclined to salute the agenda-setting genius of the right wing. But since we need a national conversation on poverty, it's worth considering that conservatives were successful in pushing it back in part because of weaknesses on the liberal side.

Right out of the box, conservatives started blaming the persistent poverty unearthed by Katrina on the failure of "liberal programs." If there was a liberal retort, it didn't get much coverage in the supposedly liberal media. (My emphasis)

It's conservatives, after all, who spent almost a decade touting the genius of the 1996 welfare reform and claiming that because so many people had been driven off the welfare rolls, poverty was no longer a problem.

Risking criticism from those who lean liberal, former Sen. John Edwards came out after Katrina and spoke about one particular connection between poverty and children from fatherless homes - just one of the many social and cultural issues surrounding Poverty. Other Democrats might take Sen Edward's lead and seize the day on the issue of Poverty, speaking frankly, with undiluted conviction, about its social/cultural causes.

***********

Related Note: At Daily Kos, diarist "jasonwhat" is 'digging on' John Edwards' poverty center and 'digging on" Democrats who aren't afraid to stick to their convictions while seeing the big picture...not attacking every Republican move for the sake of the attack. He calls it "the middle ground between the Cindy Sheehans of the world and the Barak Obamas."

On Iraq's Election

Holding a successful election in Iraq today does not equate to "success," other than the success of having no bloodbath incidents. (Hey. Wow.) We can expect isolation of many who speak against the new government (likely seeing them executed.) Measure that against those who view this as just another step toward the "puppet-ization" of Iraq via the U.S. (ie: the many restless Sunnis who voted against the Constitution, knowing it will be passed without their minor representational desire.) In other words, it will not bring the insurgency to an end, and unless we get a hell of a lot more Iraqi troops trained, our troops will continue to be stuck smack dab in the middle of Iraq's civil battles. (Where they've never belonged - and why has it taken over two years to have produced so few trained Iraqi troops?) The Bush adminstration's course has been wrong and when you look at the future of our involvement, it's confusing - nearly meaningless. We're doing much more harm than good by staying after this Constitution is accepted by the people's vote. If we stay on and establish our military bases in Iraq (as we all know is happening), how can we convince the Iraqis interested in their own brand of democracy that they are not our newest playland for our war games in Iraq and Syria? (Here's a clue - we'll never convince them; backlash violence will continue for many, many years; and without the international community behind us and an America whose majority does not support this course, we may well lose the support of surrounding Middle Eastern nations).

Changing domestic policy and changing the course in foreign policy may have to mean changing parties in power. On Iraq, we may have to learn to separate the wheat (a convincing, worthy and attainable goal meant to truly foster democracy and cultural support in Iraq) from the chaff (ie: the many mistakes made by an extremely inept Commander-in-Chief in an unnecessary war of option which has caused thousands of unnecessary deaths).

Bush - Popular with 2%

Bush - Popular with 2%

A whopping 2% of African Americans appreciate the job President Bush is doing in office. At Anonymoses, Rob Urban comments:

1) 45% of white people think he's doing a GOOD job. That's really quite close to a majority. What would it take to constitute a BAD performance? It's just strange.

2) Black voters in America are a distinct group that can often be identified by zip code or neighborhood, and therefore can be disenfranchised in significant enough numbers to swing an election (as seems to have happened in Florida in 2000).

Rob's comments cause me to reflect upon the fact that, by policy, the Bush administration is failing to culturally integrate the poor who are returning to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and it may be a design for the political/electoral security of Republicans. Rather than providing housing vouchers to allow them to move into established neighborhoods with thriving public schools, poor blacks will be set up in trailer parks - isolated from the white community as before. Think about it. Keeping them in one zip code is the perfect opportunity to disenfranchise them when Novembers come.

RNC chair Ken Mehlman recently told the NAACP:

It's so fascinating to me that the leaders of the American civil rights movement drew so much strength and courage from the Old Testament....The prophets of the civil rights movement had much in common with the prophets of the Old Testament. They worried about the country they loved...they sought freedom and justice...and they spoke truth to power.

He's fascinated...mystified...bewitched...spellbound. Why? Is it because the far-right GOP leadership uses the Old Testament only for their gay-bashing and anti-women's rights references? It's obvious, by looking at their domestic policy, that social justice has not crossed their minds in any serious way.

It won't be possible for them to win fair and square next time. Too much damage. They'll have to cheat.

Last year, there was another 2% pointing to a major Bush failure.