Well, the Bush Administration’s deadline to produce benchmarks for the situation in Iraq passed yesterday. Think Progress notes :

It turns out the administration is willing to do just about anything — including violate the law — to avoid giving Americans a detailed picture of conditions on the ground in Iraq. A Pentagon spokesperson told me today that those Iraq indicators have been “delayed” and that there is currently no specific date set for their release.

We’re more than two years into this thing and still don’t have any way to judge the success or failure of the Bush Administration’s execution of the war. Now that their irresponsibility has legal repercussions, I suggest everyone contact the ranking members of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittees and ask them to demand that Donald Rumsfeld be held in contempt of Congress :

Sen. Daniel Inouye
202-224-3934
202-224-6747 (fax)
Senator_Inouye@inouye.senate.gov

Rep. John Murtha
202-225-2065
202-225-5709 (fax)
murtha@mail.house.gov

Be nice. These are the ranking members, not the committee chairs. We all know that contacting a GOP leader and asking them to hold the Bush Administration accountable for anything is a waste of time. Hopefully these leaders from the “opposition party” will lead this fight in their respective houses.

Q Has [Karl Rove] apologized to you for telling you he is not involved?

MR. McCLELLAN: Helen, I’m not going to get into any private discussions.

Q He put you on the spot. He put your credibility on the line.

MR. McCLELLAN: And, Helen, I appreciate you all wanting to move forward and find the facts relating to this investigation. I want to know all the facts relating to the investigation.

Q You people are on the record, one quote after another.

MR. McCLELLAN: The President wants to get to the bottom of it. And it’s just not appropriate. If you’ll remember back two years ago, or almost two years ago, I did draw a line and I said, we’re just not going to get into commenting on –

Q You also made comments in defending Mr. Rove.

MR. McCLELLAN: We’re just not going to get into commenting on an investigation that continues. And I think you’ve heard me explain why I’m not going to do that. I do want to talk about this –

Q Do you regret putting yourself out on a limb, Scott?

MR. McCLELLAN: I do want to talk about this, and we will talk about it once the investigation is complete.

Stonewall Scotty is really milking the “while that investigation is ongoing, the White House is not going to comment on it” excuse for everything it’s worth. Since the White House has commented extensively on the leak previously, it’s a crap excuse. Then, there’s also this…

The special prosecutor investigating whether Bush administration officials illegally revealed the identity of a covert CIA operative says he finished his investigation months ago, except for questioning two reporters who have refused to testify.

Let’s hope the reporters in the gaggle remember this in time to call Scotty’s bluff tomorrow. The White House evasiveness is getting pretty tiring.

This bit from Salon does a good job in summing up the legalistic wingnut defense of Karl Rove :

As the Washington Post pointed out, “To be considered a violation of the law, a disclosure by a government official must have been deliberate, the person doing it must have known that the CIA officer was a covert agent, and he or she must have known that the government was actively concealing the covert agent’s identity.”

Based on Cooper’s e-mail with Rove, it isn’t clear that Rove knew Plame’s name. But even if Rove did know Plame’s name, which is likely, that fact is not as important as knowing her CIA status. In pointing out her occupation and association to Wilson, Rove was clearly identifying Plame. Was he then knowingly and deliberately disclosing a CIA operative? For that, Rove would have had to know that Plame was undercover. If he didn’t know that fact — if Rove knew Plame simply as Wilson’s wife who happened to work on WMD at the CIA — he didn’t commit a crime.

First of all, let’s cut through the “we’re still not sure that she was ‘covert’” line that a lot of conservatives are still clinging to. This investigation has been going on for almost two years now. Do you really think Fitzgerald would waste this much time and money on a snipe hunt that could be solved with a quick phone call to the CIA? Get serious guys.

Once we get into the Clintonian parsing of the word “knowingly”, things get really interesting. Having established that Plame was undercover and that Rove revealed that Plame was CIA, the question then becomes “Did Valerie Plame hide her undercover position at the CIA through a front job…at the CIA?” If you’re dumb enough to believe that, there’s nothing I can do to help you. For the rest of us, the fact that Rove knew about a connection between Joe Wilson’s wife and the CIA is damning enough to convict him.

While I’m on the subject of Plame’s undercover identity, do you guys remember this Washington Post article from Oct. 2003?

The leak of a CIA operative’s name has also exposed the identity of a CIA front company, potentially expanding the damage caused by the original disclosure, Bush administration officials said yesterday.

The company’s identity, Brewster-Jennings & Associates, became public because it appeared in Federal Election Commission records on a form filled out in 1999 by Valerie Plame, the case officer at the center of the controversy, when she contributed $1,000 to Al Gore’s presidential primary campaign.

After the name of the company was broadcast yesterday, administration officials confirmed that it was a CIA front. They said the obscure and possibly defunct firm was listed as Plame’s employer on her W-2 tax forms in 1999 when she was working undercover for the CIA.
. . .
The inadvertent disclosure of the name of a business affiliated with the CIA underscores the potential damage to the agency and its operatives caused by the leak of Plame’s identity. Intelligence officials have said that once Plame’s job as an undercover operative was revealed, other agency secrets could be unraveled and her sources might be compromised or endangered.

A former diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity said yesterday that every foreign intelligence service would run Plame’s name through its databases within hours of its publication to determine if she had visited their country and to reconstruct her activities.

This is much bigger than Valerie Plame. Due to the treasonous acts of Karl Rove et. al., any CIA agent that’s listed Brewster-Jennings & Associates as an employer has been compromised. The same goes for anybody that has vouched for Ms. Plame or vice versa. The simple disclosure of Valerie Plame’s identity has given foreign governments the seeds to unravel an unknowable chunk of our intelligence backbone.

Let’s not forget that Novak’s original column cites “two senior administration officials”. Just like Julius Rosenberg had his Ethel, Karl Rove’s got an accomplice in crime equally deserving scorn. The conventional wisdom for a while has been “Scooter” Libby, so there’s not much mystery there, but the bigger question is who else might be involved?

The word on the street had been that Fitzgerald had moved beyond the treason charge (which is harder to prove) and is in perjury and obstruction of justice territory. If that’s the case, the roster of usual suspects gets much bigger. In addition to Scooter and Turdblossom, any of the following people mentioned in this TalkLeft post could be in trouble :

Dan Bartlett

Ari Fleischer

Adam Levine

Cathie Martin

Scott McClellan

Mary Matalin

Dick Cheney

George W. Bush

They’ve all been interviewed by either the FBI and/or the grand jury. If Fitzgerald can prove that any of the above knowingly lied to help cover Rove’s ass, then this is going to get even more interesting.

Everybody go say hello to Henry Guy Byrne, 7 pounds and 5 ounces of pure awesome. Apparently lil’ H doesn’t cry at all. Or at least, he hasn’t much in these first 18 hours or so. He makes up for it with a lot of yawning, which is understandable considering how busy his day was yesterday.

You may know his dad through his infrequent posts here, but both mommy and daddy have great sites that are worth your time.

For those of you who enjoyed our animated short “Brother, Can You Spare A Job?”, Tom Neely recently completed a music video for our good friends The Muffs which you can check out by clicking on the screenshots below :

An excerpt from today’s gaggle :

QUESTION: You stood at that podium and said that Karl Rove was not involved. And now we find out that he spoke about Joseph Wilson’s wife. So don’t you owe the American public a fuller explanation. Was he involved or was he not? Because contrary to what you told the American people, he did indeed talk about his wife, didn’t he?

MCCLELLAN: There will be a time to talk about this, but now is not the time to talk about it.

QUESTION: Do you think people will accept that, what you’re saying today?

MCCLELLAN: Again, I’ve responded to the question.

QUESTION: You’re in a bad spot here, Scott…

(LAUGHTER)

… because after the investigation began — after the criminal investigation was under way — you said, October 10th, 2003, “I spoke with those individuals, Rove, Abrams and Libby. As I pointed out, those individuals assured me they were not involved in this,” from that podium. That’s after the criminal investigation began.

Now that Rove has essentially been caught red-handed peddling this information, all of a sudden you have respect for the sanctity of the criminal investigation.

This is starting to give me a stomach ache. The way we liberal bloggers have been following this, it’s easy to see this as an enormous game of partisan “Gotcha!” that we’re all wrapped up in.

Well, it’s not.

I know that evoking 9/11 is a game that both sides of the aisle like to play to smear the other side, but I honestly can’t shake the mental imagery of the last four years of bloody chaos. Usually my mind focuses on two or three images at a time. This morning, for example, it was the people diving out of the burning WTC towers to escape the smoke, the grainy video of Danny Pearl saying “I am a Jew” just prior to being beheaded, and the shredded double decker bus in London. Other times I think about the gaping hole in the Pentagon or the photos that leaked of row after row of American flag draped coffins. Whatever it it, the message that’s drilled into my subconscious is the same :

Thousands of people have been killed already, but there are still others out there who want to murder you right now.

September 11th obviously effected everyone in profound ways, so I would never imply that my grief and fear is something unique to one political persuasion or another. But it still puzzles me when something this big only seems to generate outrage on one side of the aisle.

Right now there are people who want to murder as many Americans as possible. It doesn’t matter to them who their victims voted for, what religion they are, if they’re rich or poor, black, white, whatever. As long as the bodycount is high, it doesn’t matter who gets hit. The fact that the WTC towers were financial centers was secondary to the fact that hitting the largest buildings in the country at mid-morning would maximize the terrorists’ bloodshed. With these people wanting to kill so indiscriminately, it seems that the best means to this end is to make sure that we stop the spread of the appropriately-named weapons of mass destruction.

Yet here we are, almost four years later, and we’ve got a situation in which we’re 99% certain that the right hand man to the guy who’s in charge of keeping our nightmares for becoming a reality has been undercutting efforts to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction. I honestly cannot understand why everyone who was effected by 9/11 isn’t outraged about this. I really can’t.

I don’t know what’s more frightening. Being kept up at night with neurotic fears about mushroom-clouds and evil terrorists, or the suspicion that the people who are supposed to be taking this fight seriously aren’t having the same nightmares.

Oh. my. god. This comment is so wrongheaded it even seems too stupid and insensitive for Bush (via Digby) :

After returning from the summit on Friday, Bush visited the British Embassy in Washington and signed a book of condolence and laid a wreath in front of the ambassador’s residence.

Bush said the London attacks were a reminder of the “evil” of the Sept. 11 attacks and underscored that the United States and its allies were fighting a “global war on terror.”

“We will stay on the offense, fighting the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them at home,” Bush said.

Gilligan and Gomer Pyle have nothing on this ignorant piece of shit. I still can’t believe this moron is the most powerful man on Earth. Please wake me up from this nightmare.

I dunno about you guys, but I find it embarrasing to think that we live in a country that’s so self-obsessed that every mass tragedy is followed up with a story about how many Americans were affected. Knowing the national identity of the people affted by yesterday’s mass murders changes nothing about the way I feel. Every death is tragic.

In case you missed it, William Rehnquist will be announcing his retirement today between 10AM and 11AM^{[1]Keep in mind that I’m currently typing this at 2:15 PM EST.}….and Justice Stevens…and maybe another justice too. Since I love irresponsible rumors as much as the next guy, lemme throw in that I heard from a source at the NY Times that Judith Miller’s source is Dick Cheney and that the only reason she went to jail is because the White House offered her an ambassadorship in exchange for her silence. Yeah…that’s it…

Have you guys seen this “exclusive” CNN report on some top secret government intelligence analysis center? They’ve been playing this video pretty regularly since yesterday’s bombings and every time I see it come on I keep thinking to myself “This looks incredibly fake.” In showing off the wonderful technology that is supposedly keeping us all safe, my mind keeps focusing on details that look cool on TV, but aren’t very practical in the real world :

There’s a conference room that has a table that can open up from an oval to a long one-sided shape that faces a video conference monitor (I’m assuming this is for the times when Dr. Evil is holding the world hostage again).

Some of the desks have a fancy camera aperture-esque hole that opens up to reveal a retractable computer.

The main room has one of those LED clocks that keeps changing time to tell you what time it is in different cities. Working for a company that spans multiple time zones, lemme tell you that this isn’t necessary for anyone who’s able to perform simple arithmetic.

My favorite detail is the red flashing alarm light. What’s the point of this light? Is it really for emergencies or is it just to impress the CNN people?

I’m not trying to start a conspiracy theory here. The office in the CNN report might be fake, but I think the more likely scenario is that the person who designed this office got a huge check from the government and felt free to waste it on meaningless bells and whistles. In my eyes, the fact that intelligence agencies are blowing cash like a mid-90s dot-com is just as disturbing.

Now is clearly not the time for petty partisan attacks. While it would be easy to throw in a jab at our “retarded cowboy” of a President, it wouldn’t be mature or contructive. That said, there are a lot of important questions raised by today’s attacks that deserve answers.

Do we have enough Arabic translators to interpret data as it comes into our various intelligence agencies? At this point, there’s no reason for us to have more than a day or two behind in translation.

Do our intelligence agencies have a sophisticated enough data analysis system to pick out, say, the term “King’s Cross” being used more frequently in disparate emails, telephone transcripts, or websites over the last week?

Are the American and British intelligence agencies sharing information? We already know the law enforcement branches aren’t communicating.

For me and many on the left, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that today’s attacks are proof that the Bush / Blair approach to fighting terrorism doesn’t work. I think that may be a bit simplistic since a statement like that assumes that terrorist attacks are something that can be prevented. I’m not sure about that and nobody will know whether these specific attacks could have been prevented until we have more information. So I’ll refrain from discussing specifics until the experts speak out.

But the knee-jerk response of lefties is mirrored by the response on the right that increasing violence over the last few years is somehow proof that the terrorists are “on the run”. Say what you will about the left’s supposedly misplaced priorities^{[1]Which I should mention right now is complete, utter bullshit. Aside from “blame America first” loonies that have been cherry-picked out of obscurity by the hyperpartisan right, the vast majority of liberals see terrorists as our nation’s greatest threat. Just because we criticize the methods that Bush / Blair use to fight terror doesn’t mean that we think terrorism isn’t worth fighting.}, the upside-down logic that terrorist attacks are signs that they’re in their “last throes” and other such nonsense is pathologically absurd. For war supporters, a two-year struggle against insurgents somehow validates initial projections that there wouldn’t be any ethnic strife in Iraq.

The only way we’ll ever be able to defeat terrorists is to finally have an open discussion about the best ways to defeat this enemy. There’s been plenty of debates on the margins, but until the people who make the decisions get over their “my way or the highway” hubris, we’ll be stuck on a path that, based on today’s events, looks doomed to failure.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming that silence means I don’t care. Sometimes I just don’t have anything constructive to add other than “Oh, shit.”

Here’s a question for Josh and Kevin. Putting aside the details of the crime that Judith Miller helped cover-up and my personal opinion of that political demon Karl Rove, why does Miller deserve any sympathy, much less the legal cover that she’d gain under a hypothetical federal shield law? Since, as she’s fond of reminding people, Judith Miller didn’t write a story about the Plame outing, her claims of privilege raise not out of any actual reporting, but rather her status as a reporter. Isn’t there a line to be drawn between allowing journalists the right to protect their sources and giving someone full-blown immunity from legal problems due to their occupation?

And people wonder why I call this an “online magazine”….

Hey guys, Cub Reporter Ross Lincoln here!

Billmon, in characteristic form, completely sums up pretty much everything imaginably wrong with the current political/journalistic landcape, and how that failure has led directly to the mess we’re in now, organized around a discussion of the failure of the so-called marketplace of ideas to successfully police itself.

To make his point, he begins discussing the real estate bubble we’re currently deluding ourselves into believing will last forever, and during this discussion brings up my personal vote for Chump of the Century, Irving Fisher. Fisher got me thinking about a lot of things. Before I get to that, first a bit about him.

He was a remarkable intellect and inventor, having earned a fortune inventing the ultimate business cliche and early 80s Weird Al reference, the Rolodex. By the 1920s he was Yale’s Professor of economics, where he suggested or helped to foster an number of important concepts that are now taken for granted. He is also (or darn well should be) famous for saying the following:

“Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” - Yale University, 1929.

Check that date. He made this hilarious statement less than a week before Black Thursday. When all indicators were pointing towards “Freak the heck out”, he was more than happy to step up and make all the jerks screwing with the economy feel better about what they had done.

I can almost imagine Fisher, in a typical 1920s “Nyeah see?” voice, getting up in front of the plutocrats to say “Don’t worry about it boys, it’s all covered, see? I’ve got a bead on the moneyline pallie, and all signs point to pennies from heaven! We’ll be rich see, rich! 23 Skidoo!”

As smart as he was, (and he was that), he wasn’t so smart that he wasn’t also a complete blistering idiot. His fate, painful to read about, dripping in glorious schadenfreude and smothered in a glazing of dense irony, was richly deserved. For making such an insanely wrong assertion, in a period when a man of his prestige should have known better, he not only lost his entire fortune in the crash, but his reputation never recovered. To this day, at least among economists and history nerds, his name is a byword for hubris, and what Alan Greenspan later (and quite hypocritically, I might add) called “Irrational Exuberance“. It was a ruin so cliched that even John Grisham would blush, before writing it into his latest legal “thriller” and cashing his latest underserved million dollar check.

Go and read the article, and come back for more of my meandering warbling on this topic.
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