Ummm….I told you so. Two weeks ago when everyone was buzzing about The National Journal report that Rove lied to George Bush, I wrote :

I don’t doubt for a second that Murray Waas’ sources are correct about what the grand jury has been told, but let’s be serious here. What’s the more likely scenario? Karl Rove lying to the Patrick Fitzgerald or George W. Bush?

And it turns out, Rove didn’t lie to Bush after all :

Other sources confirmed, however, that Bush was initially furious with Rove in 2003 when his deputy chief of staff conceded he had talked to the press about the Plame leak.

Bush has always known that Rove often talks with reporters anonymously and he generally approved of such contacts, one source said.
. . .
A second well-placed source said some recently published reports implying Rove had deceived Bush about his involvement in the Wilson counterattack were incorrect and were leaked by White House aides trying to protect the President.

“Bush did not feel misled so much by Karl and others as believing that they handled it in a ham-handed and bush-league way,” the source said.

But here’s something to chew on. What if both stories are correct? On the surface, they seem contradictory, but let’s look at that National Journal piece again (emphasis added) :

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove personally assured President Bush in the early fall of 2003 that he had not disclosed to anyone in the press that Valerie Plame, the wife of an administration critic, was a CIA employee, according to legal sources with firsthand knowledge of the accounts that both Rove and Bush independently provided to federal prosecutors.

Isn’t it equally plausible that both of these stories tell different sides of the same story? Let’s assume for a moment that Murray Waas’ sources didn’t lie to him about what Bush and Rove told Fitzgerald. If that’s the case and today’s story is also true, then we’ve got a President who’s in “cover your ass” mode. Regardless of whether or not the President was under oath, lying to federal prosecutors seems like a pretty clear case of obstruction of justice.

Of course, proving the President’s involvement is another matter entirely. Can Fitzgerald prove that the President lied? If the rumors are correct that someone in the Administration has “flipped”, then there’s a good chance that the President’s “displeasure” towards Rove was well known within the White House. After all, this is a President who wears his heart on his sleeve getting pissed at his most trusted advisor over an issue that everyone was talking about. This wouldn’t just get the rumor mill buzzing, but would likely lead to some communications within the White House about the President wanting everyone to get their shit together. Remember, the big news out of today’s scoops isn’t just when the President found out but his anger that his team “did a clumsy job”. A single saved email along these lines and some fibbing by the President about what he knew and when he knew it could be all the rope Fitzgerald needs to hang Bush out to dry.

Okay, I get the whole Freakonomics thing, but c’mon. This is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard :

But with a fine of just $50 for the first offense, the law doesn’t provide much financial incentive to pick up after your dog. Nor does it seem to be vigorously enforced. Let’s pretend that 99 percent of all dog owners do obey the law. That still leaves 10,000 dogs whose poop is left in public spaces each day. Over the last year, the city ticketed only 471 dog-waste violations, which suggests that the typical offender stands a roughly 1-in-8,000 chance of getting a ticket.
. . .
Here’s an idea: DNA sampling. During the licensing procedure, every dog will have to provide a sample of saliva or blood to establish a DNA file. Then, whenever a pile of poop is found on the sidewalk, a sample can be taken to establish the offender’s DNA. (Because stomachs and intestinal walls shed so many cells, poop is in fact a robust DNA source; during a murder trial in Indiana in 2002, the defendant was convicted in large part because the dog poop in his sneaker tread linked him to the scene of the crime.) Once the fecal DNA is matched to a given dog’s DNA file, the dog’s owner will be mailed a ticket. It might cost about $30 million to establish a DNA sample for all the dogs of New York. If people stop violating the law, then New York has spent $30 million for cleaner streets; if not, the $30 million is seed money for a new revenue stream.

Unfortunately, there’s a big drawback to this plan. In order to match a pile of poop with its source, you will need to have every dog’s DNA on file – and in 2003, the most recent year on record, only 102,004 dogs in New York were licensed. Even though a license is legally required, costs a mere $8.50 a year and can be easily obtained by mail, most dog owners ignore the law, and with good reason: last year, only 68 summonses were issued in New York City for unlicensed dogs. So even if the DNA plan were enacted today, most offenders would still go unpunished. In fact, it stands to reason that the typical licensed dog is less likely to offend than the typical unlicensed dog, since the sort of owner who is responsible enough to license his dog is also most likely responsible enough to clean up after it.

How, then, to get all of New York’s dogs licensed? Instead of charging even a nominal fee, the city may want to pay people to license their dogs. And then, instead of treating the licensing law as optional, enforce it for real. Setting up random street checks for dog licenses may offend some New Yorkers, but it certainly dovetails nicely with the Giuliani-era “broken windows” approach to low-level crime.

So, once you get over the initial costs of setting up the dog shit crime lab and paying every dog owner to register their dogs, all you have to pay for is for the extra cops to act as canine brownshirts (no pun intended) to shake down doggies for their papers and an enormous bureaucracy to collect and DNA test as much shit as they can scoop up. Doing a quick Google search, it looks like a cheap consumer DNA test is around $200. Even if you take into account that the price would be reduced due to volume of tests and the assumption that the government would set up its own testing facility, you’ve gotta wonder how many turds they’ll need to test for every $50 ticket.

What’s worse is that the DNA argument is preceded by this incredibly misguided analogy :

Might there be a way to get rid of dog poop without getting rid of the dogs? It might help for a moment to think of a dog as if it were a gun. Using laws to eliminate guns has proved extremely difficult. A given gun lasts a very long time, and as with dogs, guns are widely loved. But getting rid of guns should never have been the point of gun control; the point, rather, ought to be getting rid of the misuse of guns – that is, the use of guns in crimes. Consequently, the most successful policies are those that directly punish misuse, like mandatory prison sentences for any crime involving a gun. In California and elsewhere, such measures have substantially reduced gun crime.

This conveniently omits the fact that more analogous ideas such as mandatory DNA testing for capital crimes and a ballistics fingerprint database have been very controversial proposals. Unless they’re thinking about a three-strikes law for dog crap, they’d probably be better off dropping this bit before pursuing this pipe dream any further.

And before anyone thinks I’m not seeing the humor in a bit of Swiftian self-satire, here’s how their “no, we’re serious” conclusion :

Before you dismiss the entire dog-DNA idea as idiotic – which, frankly, we were about to do the moment it popped into our heads – consider this: it turns out that civic leaders in Vienna and Dresden have recently floated the same idea. (Indeed, one Vienna politician cited Mayor Giuliani as his inspiration.) Closer to home, an eighth-grade girl in Hoboken, N.J., has also proposed the DNA solution.

That’s right. We should take this proposal seriously because it’s supported by a 12-year-old girl.

C’mon guys, let’s not fall for this one again. The “Cheney will resign” rumors are sooo last year. This year, the misleading buzz is about Supreme Court resignations. I gotta admit though, this is a good one. Condi taking over the VP spot would give the Republican 2008 contest a shot in the arm. Plus, despite my problems with her, it would be interesting to see the vice presidency in the hands of its first female, first African-American, and first lesb-

…well, you know…

We all know that intelligent design is bad science, it it turns out that it’s bad design too (via Kottke):

In 1802, the English philosopher William Paley, in a kind of predecessor to ID, famously used the case of coming across a rock and a watch in a field. Unlike the rock, the watch consists of the complex interplay of a number of moving parts, each of which is required to make it function. “The inference is inevitable,” said Paley. “The watch must have a maker.”
. . .
Let’s say that instead of a watch in that field, we take the example of an observer coming across an iPod at a trade show. It is a sleek, well-crafted device that has a clever interface and seems to hold thousands of songs. The observer is curious: How could this small object perform these miraculous tasks? He would like to pry it open and figure it out, but there is just something so compelling about the smooth white exterior. It just seems too perfect to disturb, to interrogate. Its microchip architecture is just too complex.
. . .
In the real world, design is Darwinian. To consider the iPod, it did not spring fully formed from the mind of a powerful Designer, but rather it represents one distinct point on a long evolutionary timeline. We would have to go back at least as far as the introduction of recorded music, then trace the increasing portability of that music, through car radios and miniaturized transistor radios after World War II. We would then have to move from the transistor radio with single earpiece to the stereo cassette Walkman, which gave the user the opportunity to listen to what they wanted, when they wanted, in a hermetically sealed mobile environment.

The Walkman, and later the Discman (for tapes were made extinct), laid the social groundwork for the iPod: the idea — and it was a radical one — that it was acceptable to walk around encased in one own’s music. And before the iPod, of course, there were any number of MP3 players (the latest evolutionary medium), each of which were severely limited by their capacity or clunky controls. In their fossilized remains we can see how the iPod came into being, the ideal melding of what was then the most advanced hard drive and an elegant, almost “natural” interface — topped off by styling that was rather divine.

B-b-b-but if I can’t understand it, then it must be the work of god.

President Bush seems to be generating headlines for once again refusing to say whether or not he’d fire Rove over Treasongate. Meanwhile, Time is reporting that Rove plans to resign if indicted and Slate is already predicting what might happen in a Rove-free White House. Regardless of whose sources say what, I think the reports of Rove’s impending dismissal are a bit premature. The way I see it, the more likely scenario is for the President to move the bar again and say something along the lines of “I’ve said all along that I’d fire anyone in this Administration that was convicted of a crime.”

Why would the President do something so politically foolish? (Other than the fact that he’s a moron.) Because George W. Bush is stubborn as a mule and loyal to a fault. These qualities always take precedence over whatever direction the political winds are blowing. That’s why he stood by Rumsfeld while the Abu Ghraib scandal threatened his re-election chances. More recently, the President, who was irritated by conservative opposition to Alberto Gonzales, nominated someone to the Supreme Court whose only qualification is personal loyalty.

With a Rove indictment, I think the President’s reaction will be to close ranks around his guy. Does that preclude Rove from resigning himself? Of course not, but let’s remember that the vast majority of retirements in Washington are of the “was asked to tender his resignation” variety. If Bush isn’t gonna stab his boy in the back, then the only exit-scenario would involve Karl Rove putting his agenda ahead of his own ego. Don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.

Jeez. Based on the GOP party line about “Criminalizing Politics” and “Criminalizing Conservatives”, you’d think that something that was previously legal was being…y’know, criminalized. I’ve been under the impression that money laundering, insider trading, and treason were already considered crimes…

If history is a reliable indicator of conservative wonkishness, the next logical step will be a Republican movement to “deregulate” any blatantly criminal behavior that benefits the GOP. After all, it worked so well with price fixing, environmental destruction, and union-busting.

In about three weeks, there’s going to be a host of ballot initiatives here in California courtesy of our crappy actor/governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. I’m going to spend a few posts going through the various ballot measures and give my thumbs up or down. In the past, I’ve tried covering everything in one post, but that proved to be a little unwieldy. So I’ll be breaking things up a bit.

Proposition 73 – From the description in the voter’s information guide :

WAITING PERIOD AND PARENTAL NOTIFICATION BEFORE TERMINATION OF MINOR’S PREGNANCY. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT.

Amends California Constitution, prohibiting abortion for unemancipated minor until 48 hours after physician notifies minor’s parent/legal guardian, except in medical emergency or with parental waiver.

Defines abortion as causing “death of the unborn child, a child conceived but not yet born.”

Permits minor to obtain court order waiving notice based on clear, convincing evidence of minor’s maturity or best interests.

Mandates various reporting requirements.

Authorizes monetary damages against physicians for violation.

Requires minor’s consent to abortion, with certain exceptions.

Permits judicial relief if minor’s consent coerced.

In theory, I agree with parental consent laws. If I were a parent, I’d hate to think that my daughter was receiving medical care without my consent, but you’d have to be pretty obtuse to believe that this is about a “parent’s right to know”. In 1953, a state law was passed to allow minors to receive pregnancy-related medical care without a parent’s permission, but Prop 73 isn’t aimed at overturning that law, but modifying the existing law so that it doesn’t cover abortions. If you’re anti-abortion, this makes sense, but to hide behind the “parents deserve to know” argument is disingenuous. Especially since the first line of the pro-argument is “In California, a daughter under 18 can’t get an aspirin from the school nurse, get a flu shot, or have a tooth pulled without a parent knowing.” Shouldn’t all of these hypothetical parents be equally concerned about their daughter receiving prenatal care such as a cervical exam or a Pap test? You’d think…

As far as the “death of the unborn child” controversy is concerned, the proposed constitutional section begins with “For purposes of this section, the following terms shall be defined to mean…”. That, to me, seems to indicate that the proposed wording would only apply to the parental notification section. Not that it matters much to me, since I think this is a blatantly dishonest bill designed to chip away at the abortion. Call me a centrist, but I believe there probably is a little room to compromise when it comes to abortion, but this isn’t it. Hiding behind your children isn’t the way to reach that middle ground.

In summary, I’m voting NO on this one. If the proponents of this change to the California constitution really believed the words they were speaking, they’d be fighting to overturn the 1953 law that allows minors to receive pregnancy-related medical care without parental notification, not amending the constitution to put limits on abortion.

A few months ago, I found a stack of old issues of Popular Science in a vintage furniture store. Since they were only $1 each, I went ahead and picked up as many as I could afford. Now that there’s finally a scanner in my household, I can share some of the more bizarre bits with you. Like this…

That grumbling you hear out east is a minority party slowly waking up from its decade-long hibernation :

Key Democratic sources say Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other House leaders are putting the finishing touches on what arguably will be Democrats most detailed “positive” election-year agenda since the party lost power more than a decade ago. Pelosi has been coordinating with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), key Democratic strategists, advisers and outside interest groups on the policy platform as well as the party’s broader 2006 message.
. . .
An early draft of the agenda outlines the specific initiatives House Democrats will pledge to enact if given control of the House. Leaders have been working on the document for months, and have already started encouraging Members to unify around it and stick to its themes.

Among the proposals are: “real security” for America through stronger investments in U.S. armed forces and benchmarks for determining when to bring troops home from Iraq; affordable health insurance for all Americans; energy independence in 10 years; an economic package that includes an increase in the minimum wage and budget restrictions to end deficit spending; and universal college education through scholarships and grants as well as funding for the No Child Left Behind act.

Democrats will also promise to return ethical standards to Washington through bipartisan ethics oversight and tighter lobbying restrictions, increase assistance to Katrina disaster victims through Medicaid and housing vouchers, save Social Security from privatization and tighten pension laws.

This all sounds good, but vaguely familiar. I agree with the vague outline here, but I’d advise against presenting a laundry list without making the fiscal insanity of the GOP leadership a central issue. I’ve seen Democratic leaders propose bold plans like this plenty of times. The problem isn’t the plans themselves, but the fact that the public doesn’t really pay much attention.

Writing in the NY Times today, Walter Cronkite has a good idea on that front. (via MyDD)

The key to a Democratic success in next year’s Congressional election is clearly in the party leadership’s coming up with a campaign that does not concentrate on the Bush administration’s failures but offers alternative programs to fix what it believes is wrong with the Republican agenda.

A suggestion by which the Democratic Party could command the greatest public attention for its positive agenda: It could within weeks call an extraordinary midterm convention to draw up its platform.

The convention would not need to be expensive. The delegates could be those who attended the 2004 convention. Their meeting would be open to the public and of course the press.

In sharp contrast to the secrecy of the Bush administration, it would let the public, if only remotely, share in the construction of the Democratic platform.

Of course that last line is the rub in this particular plan. If the public barely pays attention to the current quadrennial conventions already, why would they care about a lefty pep-rally that the major networks wouldn’t even bother to carry live?

The answer to that is to have the convention a purpose beyond being a stadium-sized cheering section. Publicly play up the minor divisions within the party ranks (ie. how quickly we should get out of Iraq and what method to use to provide universal healthcare) to provide a little suspense in the lead-up to the delegates’ vote to approve the party platform. Use the convention to actually construct (in Cronkite’s words) the Democratic platform. Have the speakers from competitive Senate and House races, along with potential 2008 Presidential nominees, give keynote speeches about the various aspects of the Democratic message. And write off the inevitable complaints from GOP stalwarts as the “bitter complaints of an out-of-touch party that’s been corrupted by a decade in power”.

Most of all, stop being such chickenshits and let everyone talk. The conservative Democrats will still offer more progressive ideas than anything currently coming out of Washington and the super-liberal Dems will at least show than Democrats aren’t completely devoid of emotion. The Democrats have a golden opportunity to offer the public something different. Don’t blow it by focus-grouping your hearts, guys.

For those of you who saw the “New Rules” segment from Real Time with Bill Maher (video at C&L), lemme just go on record as saying that I was comparing George Bush to the Village People last year. Then again, considering how much Bush loves to play dress-up, it’s not that big a leap to make. I just wish he’d try wearing a competent leader costume.

Hey Dr. Dobson, you might wanna shine your boycottin’ shoes. Remember when your magazine supported this campaign?

“Merry Christmas” once appeared in store windows and on the balloons at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parades. But many stores and other businesses have long since stopped offering such greetings to their shoppers, even in their advertising. Instead, they serve up an all-inclusive stew of generic slogans, as if Christmas itself is no big deal.

If you’re tired of hearing “happy holidays” and “season’s greetings” instead, Manuel Zamorano has a campaign for you.

He’s leading a nationwide boycott of Federated Department Stores, the company that owns Macy’s, over its exclusion of the word “Christmas” in advertisements and window displays.

Well, it looks like your new best friend, the one whose only qualification for the Supreme Court is being a fundamentalist Christian, is one of those God-hating secularists.(via The Carpetbagger Report)

I worked with Miers at the White House. Though my interaction with her was limited, since I was merely a Presidential Writer and she was the Staff Secretary, I had a unique experience with her. In 2001, I was given the task of writing the President’s Christmas message to the nation. After researching Reagan, Bush, and Clinton’s previous Christmas messages, I wrote something that was well within the bounds of what had been previously written (and in case you are wondering, Clinton’s messages were far more evangelical than the elder Bush’s).

The director of correspondence and the deputy of correspondence edited and approved the message and it was sent to the Staff Secretary’s office for the final vetting. Miers emailed me and told me that the message might offend people of other faiths, i.e., that the message was too Christian. She wanted me to change it.
. . .
Some will probably write that incident off as an insignificant, almost meaningless, occurrence. And perhaps it is. But Miers purposefully sought to dilute the Christianity of the message, thus revealing to me at least a willingness to compromise unnecessarily without outside pressure.

If Dr. Dobson and his ilk want to be intellectually consistent, they should go with their persecution complex and oppose Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court.

President Bush, the future administration of President Hillary Clinton would like to thank you in advance for your stellar pick of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court. Miers’ strict constructionist views regarding Article II of the Constitution and the protection of executive power will come in very handy. With the Court firmly opposed to judicial activism, Mrs. Clinton can more freely pursue agenda items such as mandatory abortions, making it a felony to mention Jesus in public, a socialist approach to taxation and healthcare, and the further spread of homosexuality in our public schools. It’s nice to know that we’ve got a leader who stands firmly on the principle that the President can do whatever he/she wants without the oversight of the Legislative or Judicial branches. Praise Allah for your fantastic choice.

The President-in-exile speaks :

“I have absolutely no plans and no expectations of ever being a candidate again,” Gore told reporters after giving a speech at an economic forum in Sweden.

When asked how the United States would have been different if he had become president, though, he had harsh criticism for Bush’s policies.

“We would not have invaded a country that didn’t attack us,” he said, referring to
Iraq. “We would not have taken money from the working families and given it to the most wealthy families.”

“We would not be trying to control and intimidate the news media. We would not be routinely torturing people,” Gore said. “We would be a different country.”

Are you sure you don’t wanna run again? Pretty please??

After James Dobson spent the last week bragging about the insider information he received about Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, the Focus on the Family founder went to the airwaves yesterday to cover his ass (via C&L) :

What did Karl Rove say to me that I knew on Monday that I couldn’t reveal? Well, it’s what we all know now, that Harriet Miers is an Evangelical Christian, that she is from a very conservative church, which is almost universally pro-life, that she had taken on the American Bar Association on the issue of abortion and fought for a policy that would not be supportive of abortion, that she had been a member of the Texas Right to Life. In other words, there is a characterization of her that was given to me before the President had actually made this decision. I could not talk about that on Monday. I couldn’t talk about it on Tuesday. In fact, Brit Hume said, “What church does she go to?” And I said, “I don’t think it’s up to me to reveal that.”
. . .
We did not discuss Roe v. Wade in any context or any other pending issue that will be considered by the Court. I did not ask that question. You know, to be honest, I would have loved to have known how Harriet Miers views Roe v. Wade. But even if Karl had known the answer to that and I’m certain that he didn’t, because the President himself said he didn’t know, Karl would not have told me that.

In other words, though his certainty about how Miers would rule on Roe is the reason for his endorsement, it never even occurred to actually ask about Miers’ views on abortion. Hey James, is lying a “family” value?

To translate my feelings about Dobson into a phrase easy for his followers to understand, I think the man’s getting way too big for his britches. It’s one thing to be outspoken on your own radio show about a political issue, but let’s not forget that Dobson also participated in the Administration’s conference calls to conservative activists as well. He’s gone from objective bystander to fully-integrated cog in the spin machine.

Dobson’s part-time job as a Bush shill is just the latest attempt to fully integrate himself into the political establishment. He wants to be an insider so bad it hurts, as you can tell from the first two paragraphs of his official biography :

For James Dobson, the stakes on November 2, 2004—Election Day—couldn’t have been higher. The renowned child psychologist, best-selling author, popular radio host, and founder of Focus on the Family had devoted his entire life to the preservation of the family, and now all he held dear seemed to be hanging in the balance. Although he had rarely before campaigned in a way that could be considered strictly partisan, this election year Dobson had become convinced that he had no choice but to jump into the political fray with both feet. And when he did, he determined to give all he had for the cause.

By the time the 2004 campaign was over, Beltway heavyweights from Tom Daschle to Arlen Specter, media pundits, Democratic operatives, Focus on the Family listeners, and Dr. Dobson readers from coast to coast had gained a much better appreciation for who Dobson was and what he could accomplish.

Dobson seems keen on reinventing himself as a kingmaker in the Pat Robertson mold, and he’s already had good practice in using his multimedia empire to go after Big Brothers Big Sisters, Procter & Gamble, Disney, Macy’s, and Microsoft. The Miers nomination is just the latest test to see if Dobson’s homophobic armies can be mobilized to support political friends as efficiently as they’ve been used to destroy corporate enemies. There was a time when political activity was seen as an unseemly diversion from “God’s work”, but selling Jesus to the already-saved doesn’t feed the ego the way it used to.

Considering the direction that Dobson is steering his career, I think it’s just a matter of time before his hubris brings him down. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if God’s humble servant eventually finds himself brought down by a scandal. Real or fake, white collar crime or sexual affair, at some point Dobson’s activism is going to catch up to him. I can’t wait to see it.

Kevin’s raining on the parade of liberal bloggers excited by the latest development in the Plame case, Judy Miller “finding” some notes regarding conversations she had will Scooter in June 2003 :

Let’s assume this conversation is actually “crucial,” as Waas says. After all, if it’s just a random loose end or a bit of extra confirmation for something Fitzgerald already knows, then there’s not much point in worrying about it. So let’s stipulate that something meaningful is going on here.

If that’s the case, it could mean one of two things. Option 1: it’s crucial because the conversation in June is a smoking gun that provides Fitzgerald the evidence he needs to hand down indictments. Option 2: the content of the conversation itself isn’t important. What’s crucial is that no one mentioned it in their previous testimony, and that means Fitzgerald now has a potential perjury rap he can use as leverage to coerce additional testimony out of Libby (or possibly Miller).

Do you see the problem here? Both of these options imply that Fitzgerald doesn’t yet have much of a case. Either he needs testimony about the June conversation — which he only learned about “days ago” — because after two years of investigation it’s his best hope of proving that someone leaked Plame’s name, or else he needs it in order to browbeat testimony about the leak from someone else. Or worse, it means he’s given up on the leak and is trying to construct perjury or obstruction of justice charges that he thinks he can make stick instead.

I think this is all based on a pretty narrow definition of the word “crucial”. Granted, I’m just brainstorming here, but I can imagine a number of scenarios in which the June 2003 memo could be considered “crucial” without actually risking the possibility of indictments :

The notes provide details on further conspirators beyond Libby and Rove.

The notes give Fitgerald the information needed to expand the scope of his inquiry into the Niger forgeries themselves, the Administration’s use of misinformation to sell the Iraq war, etc.

The notes give enough specific detail to allow Fitzgerald to seek indictments under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act instead of the easier to prosecute Espionage Act.

I’ll leave further speculation to the more experienced Plameologists, but I think the question of if there will be indictments is all but settled at this point.