Pull up another chair at the table.
Reed-Abramoff emails tie Sen. Cornyn (R-Bush) to Gambling-funded Anti-Gambling Crusade Scam-o-rama.
--Josh Marshall
What a sorry, sorry, unfortunate president -- caught in his lies, his half-truths, his reckless disregard ... caught with, well ... caught with time. Time has finally caught up to him. And now he doesn't have the popularity to beat back all the people trying to call him to account. He could; but now he can't. So he's caught. And his best play is to accuse his critics of rewriting history, of playing fast and loose with the truth -- a sad, pathetic man.
Chronicling the full measure of the Bush administration's mendacity with regards to the war is a difficult task -- not because of a dearth of evidence for it but because of its so many layers, all its multidimensionality. It's almost like one of those Russian egg novelties in which each layer opened reveals another layer beneath it. Hard as it may be, in the interests of getting Mr. Bush past the phases of denial and anger, let's just hit on some of the main themes.
1. Longstanding effort to convince the American people that Iraq maintained ties to al Qaida and may have played a role in 9/11. This was always just a plain old lie. (And if you want to see where the real fights with the Intelligence Community came up, it was always on the terror tie angle and much less on WMD.) The president and his chief advisors tried to leverage Americans' horror over 9/11 to gain support for attacking Iraq. Simple: lying to the public the president was sworn to protect.
2. Repeated efforts to jam purported evidence about an Iraqi nuclear weapons program (the Niger canard) into major presidential speeches despite the fact the CIA believed the claim was not credible and tried to prevent the president from doing so. What's the explanation for that? At best a reckless disregard for the truth in making the case for war to the American public.
3. Consistent and longstanding effort to elide the distinction between chem-bio-weapons (which are terrible but no immediate threat to American security) and nuclear weapons (which are). For better or worse, there was a strong consensus within the foreign policy establishment that Iraq continued to stockpile WMDs. Nor was it an improbable assumption since Saddam had stockpiled and used such weapons before and, by 2002, had been free of on-site weapons inspections for almost four years. But what most observers meant by this was chemical and possibly biological weapons, not nuclear weapons. Big difference! The White House knew that this wasn't enough to get the country into war, so they pushed the threat of a nuclear-armed Saddam for which there was much, much less evidence.
4. The fact that the administration's push for war wasn't even about WMD in the first place. Scarcely a week goes by when I don't get an email from a reader who writes, "I always knew that Saddam didn't have WMDs. How is that you, with all your access and reporting, didn't know that too?" Good question. They were right. And I was wrong. But like many things in this reality-based universe of ours, this was a question subject to empirical inquiry. No one really knew what Saddam was doing between 1998 and 2002. And US intelligence made a lot of very poor assumptions based on sketchy hints and clues. But the solution, at least the first part of it, was to get inspectors in on the ground and actually find out. That is what President Bush's very credible threat of force had done by the Fall of 2002. But once there the inspectors began making pretty steady progress in showing that many of our suspicions about reconstituted WMD programs didn't bear out, the White House response was to begin trying to discredit the inspectors themselves. By early 2003, inspections had shown that there was no serious nuclear weapons effort underway -- the only sort of operation which could have represented a serious or imminent threat. From January of 2003 the administration went to work trying to insure that the war could be started before the rationale for war was entirely discredited. They wanted to create fait accomplis, facts on the ground that no subsequent information or developments could alter. The whole thing was a con. It wasn't about WMD.
Beneath these top-line points of dishonesty, there were second order ones, to be sure -- claims that the entire war would cost a mere $50 billion, insistence that the whole operation could be managed by only a fraction of the number of troops most experts believed it would take. Of course, these may be categorized as willful self-deceptions or gross irresponsibiity. And thus they are properly assigned to different sections of the Bush-Iraq Lies and Deceptions (BILD) bestiary than the cynical exploitation of lies and attempts to confuse proper.
In the president's new angle that his critics are trying to 'rewrite history', those critics might want to point out that his charge would be more timely after he stopped putting so much effort into obstructing any independent inquiry that could allow an accurate first draft of the history to be written. In any case, he must sense now that he's blowing into a fierce wind. The judgment of history hangs over this guy like a sharp, heavy knife. His desperation betrays him. He knows it too.
--Josh Marshall
Very interesting news out of Italy this morning, and news which appears to confirm a theory advanced recently by a poster at theleftcoaster.com (big coup for him, about which I'll explain more later). As you know, I've reported that the second report from Italian intelligence to the CIA about the Niger-Iraq story, the report in February of 2002, was a text transcription of what would later turn out to be one of the forged documents.
But there's one more small detail, reported this morning in La Repubblica. The report sent over from Italy removed the out-of-date names (one of the key reasons they were spotted later as forgeries) and replaced them with the correct names. In other words, there seems to have been a conscious effort to cover up the fact that the documents were bogus, to clean them up, as it were.
This raises a number of questions, which I'll try to address in a subsequent post. I'm running between meetings this morning. But for now one more detail.
La Repubblica has confirmed that three days after SISMI sent its original report to the CIA on October 15th, 2001, Nicolo Pollari himself followed up with another report on October 18th. This follow-up was in response to a CIA query about the quality of the sourcing behind the report on the 15th.
Pollari told the CIA that the report was quite credible and that the information originated with a woman working for SISMI in the Niger Embassy in Rome.
More soon on what this all means.
--Josh Marshall
Frist manages to mix being a doofus with immoral embrace of torture.
Rewarded with a choice headline.
CNN/AP Headline: "Frist concerned more about leaks than secret prisons."
--Josh Marshall
Drudge reports this as an excerpt from Arthur Sulzberger discussing the Judy Miller debacle from an appearance this evening on Charlie Rose ...
THIS PALES BY COMPARISON TO THE JASON BLAIR, IT'S NOT EVEN ON THE SAME SCALE. JASON BLAIR AND THE ISSUES THAT FLOW FROM THAT, THOSE WERE FUNDAMENTAL ISSUES INVOLVING NOT JUST A REPORTER, BUT A WHOLE SERIES IN "THE NEW YORK TIMES." THAT WAS HARD. AND MY FAMILY STOOD BY ME LIKE A BULLWARK. AND THEY DID THIS TIME, TOO.
He really doesn't get it, does he?
Sure, Jayson Blair's transgressions were open-and-shut journalistic capital offenses. No question it was terrible and that his career was over. But, honestly, what were the real world consequences of his misdeeds? Pretty minimal.
And the Miller fiasco? Well, yes, more complicated. But the real world consequences? Immeasurably greater. And the paper's dragged out, compromised way of dealing with the whole mess? He really doesn't seem to grasp what happened.
--Josh Marshall
Quote of the Day ...
Rep. David Dreier (R-CA): "We are not cutting Medicaid for those truly in need."
Apparently they're only cutting benefits for upper and middle-income Medicaid beneficiaries.
--Josh Marshall
Today's an example of one of the reasons I'm eager to have a blog-reporter not just literally up on capitol hill but more generally following all the ins and outs of what's going on up there.
What we're seeing today are the cascading effects of the breakdown of Republican party discipline, beginning with the collapse of the president's popularity (especially the rather sudden recognition of that fact within Washington) and echoing out from there.
Moderate Republicans have toed the Bush line because they've believed he could protect them, as indeed he has. They don't believe that now. So a lot of them don't want to go into the election next year with ANWR drilling hanging over them.
They balk on the left and then in response the 'wingers on the other right refuse the compromises they've agreed to. Suddenly the whole thing starts to pull apart since there's no centripetal force, no organizing power to hold things together -- sort of like Hobbesian state creation run in reverse.
The recognition has sunk in: The president is unpopular and weak. And it's every Republican for him or herself.
And did I mention, pass the popcorn?
--Josh Marshall
From a knowledgeable observer on the hill ...
Two important developments today point to the Bush administration’s collapse of support on Capitol Hill. The first involves the House dropping ANWR from their spending reconciliation bill because 22 moderate Republicans refused to support the measure on the floor if included (no telling yet whether it will pass even w/ ANWR dropped bc of food stamp and child support collection cuts). The next involves the postponement of the tax reconciliation mark up in the Senate Finance Committee, where Olympia Snowe (generally prone to caving after getting the call from Andy Card) refused to buckle and support extension of the capital gains and dividend tax cuts – a signature WH priority. Tax cuts used to be a cakewalk for the WH, now they cant even get them out of committee.
More to follow.
--Josh Marshall
It just occurred to me that even if Democrats manage to totally blow this coming election cycle and don't make substantial pick-ups in November, we're still virtually guaranteed twelve months of watching Republicans furiously working to find ways to stab each other in the back.
So, really, even the fall-back is pretty decent.
Just a thought.
--Josh Marshall
You've probably already seen this article in today's New York Times on Justice Department interest in an offer Jack Abramoff apparently made to President Omar Bongo of Gabon to set up a meeting with President Bush for the sum of $9 million.
This makes me curious again to know more about the foreign lobbying and foreign business dimensions of Abramoff's work.
For instance, documentary evidence made available to us shows that in the summer of 2004 (after the scandal phase of Abramoff's career was well underway), he was working with Marina Nevskaya and her company Naftasib to secure oil exploration and drilling concessions from The National Oil Company of Liberia.
Abramoff spokesman Andrew Blum had no comment when asked today about the Abramoff-Nevskaya-Liberia dealings.
Nevskaya and Naftasib, you may remember, are the ones that underwrote the DeLay/Abramoff 'fact-finding' trip to Moscow in 1997.
Anyone know more about this Liberian oil exploration angle to the Abramoff story? I'm all ears.
--Josh Marshall
We've had a number of emails in from folks asking how they can contribute money to support the new site we're launching (described here yesterday). First, let me assure that we will go to great lengths to help facilitate your desire to contribute funds for our new project. But not quite yet.
As I mentioned yesterday, Sunday is the fifth anniversary of Talking Points Memo. (Here was the first post.) So next week is 5th Anniversary week here at TPM and we're going to be holding a fundraiser to support the expanded coverage we're planning of scandal-ridden Capitol Hill and the 2006 election cycle.
More on all of this shortly.
--Josh Marshall
Just out from Roll Call (sub. req.) ...
With Jon Corzine (D) trading in his title of Senator for governor-elect of New Jersey, the formal jockeying to replace him accelerated Wednesday, as the Congressional Hispanic Caucus formally endorsed Rep. Bob Menendez (D) for the post.Corzine will have the power to appoint his Senate successor once he is inaugurated as New Jersey’s chief executive on Jan. 17, but has been mum on his plans for succession during the duration of the gubernatorial campaign and in the hours since his election victory on Tuesday.
But New Jersey Representatives eager for Corzine’s appointment broke their silence Wednesday, with a vengeance.
“I’d like to say my own record of 31 years of service in New Jersey, my understanding of average New Jerseyans and my leadership in the House would make me a valuable addition to the U.S. Senate,” Menendez said in an interview.
Will be interesting to watch.
--Josh Marshall
The Italian Connection, Part III
I discussed in installments one and two of this series my early reporting on the origins of the Niger forgeries and how we later learned the identity of, and made contact with, the man at the center of the drama: Rocco Martino. As I discussed in the earlier installments I was working with a team from 60 Minutes, sharing sources, each of us pursuing the Niger story for publication in our separate mediums.
I first met Martino at a restaurant in mid-town Manhattan in early June 2004. He’d come to New York to be interviewed for the upcoming segment on 60 Minutes and also, per our arrangement, to be interviewed by me. I should add that in this conversation and in the subsequent ones I will describe I always spoke to Martino through a translator, though there were occasional moments, and more over time, when it seemed he had some working command of English.
In the various press accounts that have appeared over recent months Martino is often described as ‘dapper’ or refined in appearance. And that is largely correct. In fact there was a genteel quality in his appearance and manner that belied the scrounging, always-desperate-for-money life which we learned he had led.
Martino was in his mid-sixties, thickly-built and robust for his age. In notes I took when I met with him for the final time two months later I described him as “all gray on the sides, salt & pepper on top, dark complected, thick mustache, mainly grey, S&P in middle, thick features, delta nose, bags chiseled under eyes.”
In its essential outline, Rocco’s story was a simple one. From the beginning, he insisted that he did not forge the documents. And he never claimed to have direct knowledge about who did. But the trail led back to SISMI – Italian military intelligence – through a former colleague named Antonio Nucera, a SISMI colonel working in the '8th division', which worked on counter-proliferation and weapons of mass destruction.
As Martino told me in a subsequent conversation, once he’d become far more candid, he had known Nucera for more than twenty-eight years. They’d first met not long before Martino had entered SISMI in 1976. And they’d remained in regular contact after he left the organization a decade later.
As Martino described it, their ongoing contact served two purposes. Nucera was Martino’s point of contact for the on-going work he did for SISMI for years after leaving the service. And Nucera was also the conduit through whom he kept SISMI abreast of his work for other clients – a key issue, since some were intelligence agencies of other countries.
SISMI is notorious for being riven by factionalism and deeply politicized. But Martino described Nucera as apolitical, a man who followed orders, not someone who would get involved in something like the documents caper on his own account or out of a personal ideological motivation. Whatever Nucera’s role, Martino believed he would have been acting on orders from above.
The chain of events leading to the documents began when Nucera approached Martino with a proposition. Nucera explained that SISMI had long had a woman working in the Nigerien Embassy in Rome, in spy jargon, a SISMI ‘asset’. Earlier she had been employed at another African Embassy in Rome, then too working for SISMI. Now, though, the agency was done with her.
But Martino, being in the business of buying and selling information, could perhaps take her on. She could provide information on immigration from Niger and Islamist groups in Western Africa. He would pay her, as SISMI had. And she would pass on to him, as she once had to SISMI, documents she copied or stole from the Embassy.
Martino met with the woman and ironed out just such an arrangement.
That was in March 2000.
The documents, which would later become notorious as the ‘forged dossier’, didn’t come to Martino in a single bundle. They came slowly over many months. First came the ‘codebook,’ then other documents included the dossier, some of which were genuine. The purported ‘accord’ came last, some time late in 2001.
In the next installment, how Martino initially withheld key information, new evidence that corroborated his story and SISMI's role, and how SISMI began campaigning against the planned story on the Niger papers even before it appeared.
--Josh Marshall
In the Post, Walter Pincus suggests members of the senate intel committee are making some progress in coming up with a roadmap for pursuing 'phase two' of the Iraq WMD investigation, the part focused on how administration officials used the intelligence they were provided.
--Josh Marshall
A little earlier this evening I linked to this post from young DC blogger Kris Lofgren who got into the AEI Chalabi speech today and managed to score a few moments of quality time with Christopher Hitchens to boot.
In his post he tells us ...
Hitchens then turned the subject back to Chalabi, his good friend. I asked him if he thought Chalabi had been passing American intelligence to the Iranians. "No," he insisted. "It's possible that with his training, you know, at [The University of] Chicago that with his own ability he was able to crack the codes. He is a mathematical genius. His expertise is cryptology. It is possible that he broke the codes himself." (This is a paraphrase since I was walking down M Street and crossing Connecticut Avenue all while being amazed that I was having an actual conversation with Christopher Hitchens at the time). Now, I don't believe this for one second. Why would Chalabi be trying to break American codes in his spare time anyway? Who does that if they are friendly to us? Suspicious, I say.
Now, I have to confess that I'm so pitiful at math that in high school I could barely crack a passing grade in trig. In fact, on more than one occasion I failed to crack it entirely. But why go into that?
In any case, even a math fool like me knew enough to laugh out loud when I read that. I'd love to hear Hitchens give a ten minute description of how he thinks modern cryptography works exactly.
Then TPM Reader TT wrote in with even more laughs ...
In that article you linked to by the blogger who saw Chalabi speak at the AEI, Hitchens claims that Chalbi may have broken our or the Iranians' codes (it isn't clear which) himself. That is quite simply the most preposterous story I have ever heard in my life. Chalabi would have about the same chance of breaking our or the Iranians' codes as of building his own nuclear bombs.Moreover, Chalabi did not specialize in cryptology but in group theory. There is no evidence that he is a mathematical genius, either -- his publication record is not impressive.
I am a research mathematician who works in an areas pretty close to cryptology.
Quite simply, there is no way to take anything Hitchens says seriously ever again. Next to him, Scotty Mac is a paragon of credibility.
Aside from Hitchens' speculation that Chalabi sat around using our diplomatic or military codes (some encrypted diplomatic cables he'd pulled out of the air, I assume) as some brainiac's version of a Rubik's Cube to pass the time while he wasn't busy with embezzlement or forgery, this really is an example of the dingbat personality cult Chalabi managed to assemble around himself in DC.
Has Hitchens run his theory past Ahmad himself?
--Josh Marshall
Norman Podhoretz has penned a version of the 'everyone said they had WMD' line defending President Bush and Co. in the new edition of Commentary. Call it the higher mumbojumbo. Kevin Drum does a very nice and understated job of dismantling the argument. It's well worth a few moments of your time to read (Kevin, not Norm). He hits all the right points.
--Josh Marshall
The Hill has a nice package of pieces chronicling the full measure of not-ready-for-prime-time goofballery behind that leak investigation Frist and Hastert called for.
From article one ...
Rank-and-file members of the House and Senate intelligence committees said they were in the dark yesterday about the timing and logistics of a possible joint investigation into alleged leaks from the Central Intelligence Agency, and there were strong indications that congressional action could be preempted by a potential Justice Department probe.
Article two ...
Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) contradicted the House Intelligence Committee when they called for an investigation into a specific leak case, the question of who divulged classified information about CIA-run prisons in Eastern Europe.
And of course, number three ...
A leak suspected to have come from the office of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) complicated, confused and nearly derailed a joint effort by Senate and House Republican leaders to seek an investigation of the unauthorized release of classified information.
Forget the insider trading thing. Can we just get an investigation going into whether Bill Frist is too big a goof to be in the senate?
--Josh Marshall
A young DC blogger gets into the Chalabi speech at AEI and shares with us his close encounter with Ahmad and his pal Christopher Hitchens.
--Josh Marshall
TPM Reader JP checks in ...
Josh,Thanks for the excerpt from the Nelson Report. Glad to see adult establishment types finally smelling the coffee.
One more thing: with all the disgusting details emerging about the administration's pro-torture policies, how do they now explain the prosecution of Lyndie England, et al? It's clear this goes all the way to the top. So why is she and her boyfriend rotting in Leavenworth while Dick and Don still roam free? I'd like to hear Scott McClellan answer that one.
John
What's the answer to that exactly?
--Josh Marshall
Matt Yglesias has a good catch fact-checking Ahmad Chalabi's excuse and dodge of the day on why he fed a stream of liars and con-artists to US intelligence agencies. Actually, it's not even much a fact check. Matt just looked up the page from the Silbermann-Robb Report that Chalabi kept referring to today at AEI. Take a look.
--Josh Marshall
A snippet out of this evening's Nelson Report ...
Scandals..on the torture scandal part of the ongoing psychodrama called America, the political theme is that the Republican Leadership continues to trip all over itself, contradicting each other, insulting each other, and generally looking like incompetent fools. This is almost too much for the Democrats, who can hardly believe what they see unfolding, and who thus, so far, remain in something of a comic stupor, pending an organized, coherent attack.But things are happening, and Senate Dems are coalescing around efforts to force real hearings on the misuse of Iraq war intel, and the torture scandal...even as the Republicans flounder between trying to deny everything, while simultaneously excusing or explaining it away. Latest example...former Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, whom, you will recall, was forced to resign for insensitive racial remarks, is clearly revenging himself with comments that it was a fellow Republican who leaked the “CIA torture” story to the Washington Post last week.
On the larger topic, law and morality...the ethic of being an American leader, and its betrayal by the Bush Administration...the NY Times today details last year’s CIA Inspector General’s classified report that Bush Administration torture directives carried out by the Agency “might violate some provisions of the International Convention Against Torture...”and remember we warned last night that the CIA pros have it out for the White House, and will not rest until responsibility for torture, as Iraq WMD, is laid at the foot of the political bosses responsible, consequences come what may.
On the CIA IG’s report on violating international law, note the word “might”? We checked with a highly informed/involved former State Department source. His comments: “...in 1988 when John Whitehead signed the Convention in New York, and then later, when we ratified it, we enacted domestic laws where necessary to make it ‘the law of the land.’ When we made our report, for example, as required by the Convention we had this to say to the UN, copy to the Senate:
‘Torture is prohibited by law throughout the United States. It is categorically denounced as a matter of policy and as a tool of state authority. Every act constituting torture under the Convention constitutes a criminal offense under the law of the United States. No official of the government, federal, state or local, civilian or military, is authorized to commit or to instruct anyone else to commit torture. Nor may any official condone or tolerate torture in any form. No exceptional circumstances may be invoked as a justification of torture. US law contains no provision permitting otherwise prohibited acts of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment to be employed on grounds of exigent circumstances (for example, during a ‘state of public emergency’) or on orders from a superior officer or public authority, and the protective mechanisms of an independent judiciary are not subject to suspension.’ (Report of the United States to the UN Committee against Torture, October 15, 1999, UN Doc. CAT/C/28/Add.5, February 9, 2000, para. 6.)
Note the language -- as is in the Convention's title -- about other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. It's not merely torture....” (End of comments by our source.)Hummm....sounds like a pretty solid case for an impeachment proceeding, were there anything resembling either a sense or shame, or national ethics, in the Leadership of the House of Representatives and Senate. Something to be argued out in the 2006 Congressional campaigns?
They've brought us very, very low.
--Josh Marshall
It ain't just in Virginia. Bush is poison in Arizona too. Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-AZ) says he wouldn't want W. to campaign for him in Arizona.
--Josh Marshall
Alan Blinder, former Vice Chairman of the Board of
Governors of the Federal Reserve, speaks out on liberalism and free trade at TPMCafe Book Club.
--Josh Marshall
Let me expand a bit on my earlier comments about redistricting reform.
For most of the time I've been actively interested in politics I've been at best skeptical about a lot of what you might call good government reformism. Part of that is just temperamental. To the extent there's substance behind it, I've always felt that there's a strain of 'goo-goo' reform which puts procedural cleanliness over substantive good results for ordinary citizens -- effective provision of services, real representation of different interests in society, and so forth.
Hovering behind these ideas is a recognition that there were strong anti-democratic tendencies in the original Progressive movement, though they did not define the entirety of it. And most important, I think if you look back over the history of the US, our most effective reforms have not come in complex regulatory regimes but in systems which effectively balance different powers and interests against each other. And that still makes me less than a total optimist about the potential of effective campaign finance reform.
All that said, though, sometimes the ship of state just gets too overrun with barnacles and the whole thing has to be scraped clean. And we're clearly at one of those points. One needn't indulge utopian fantasies about abolishing government corruption or dealing a death blow to the power of monied interests in politics. All that is necessary is a recognition that reform is a cyclical process needed to keep the government healthy and functioning. And we're overdue for real reform.
Gerrymandering has been around, literally, since the country began. But I'm persuaded by the argument that computers and data technologies have substantially increased the ability of those in power to shape districts to perpetuate their power.
The real proof though is the sclerotic House of Representatives. Set aside the fact that it's now controlled by a corrupt Republican machine. The House is designed to be the part of the federal government most responsive to the changing views of the public. But it's pretty clear that that role has now been taken over by the senate. I think there's probably a decent argument that more seats are in play in the senate in most cycles these days than in the House -- not just in percentage terms but in absolute terms too. And that's just crazy. The power of money in politics is more tied up with that of non-competitive districts than we might think.
Already this morning I've had a reader write in to tell me that the problem isn't gerrymandering but the increasing trend toward geo-communal self-segregation. Liberals move where there are lots of liberals; conservatives do the same, etc. I don't doubt that's part of it. But I don't think that explains it all either. And if it is a big part of the equation, perhaps we need to rejigger the redistricting calculus a bit to inject some more play into the system.
Tell me what you think.
--Josh Marshall
Real life is harder to keep to the script. Arnold got waxed in California. All eight Arnold-powered initiatives went down to defeat last night.
When I last checked last night it looked like the anti-labor initiative might win. But that one went down too. (In this post at TPMCafe Jo-Ann Mort explains how it was a good night for organized labor all across the country.)
The one note of ambivalence for me was Prop. 77, Arnold's redistricting initiative. I'm not crazy about the idea of Republicans using redistricting reform to knock off Democrats while ramming through the most outlandish gerrymanders in the states they control (like Texas, for instance). But I'm more and more convinced that redistricting reform is a key plank in any serious reform agenda for this country. Not just a cudgel to loosen up entrenched GOP power in the House, but a genuine reform aimed at making politics more responsive to the popular will. In some ways I think it may prove more important than campaign finance reform, though I believe that is a key part of reform too.
Correction: There were eight initiatives in California. And they all went down. But only four of them were Arnold-backed.
--Josh Marshall
We've already gotten a number of very promising applications for the job opening TPM is now hiring for. But I wanted to take a moment to explain a bit more about what we're doing -- partly for potential job applicants, but much more for readers of this site.
One of the most inspiring things about the blog phenomenon is the sheer multiplicity of differet forms created within the basic genre -- even within the relatively small niche of blogs devoted to politics. You've got a site like CrooksandLiars.com, for instance, which in addition to a lot of conventional text blogging, provides this amazing service of hosting more or less instantly available video snippets of most all the happenings on the day's political news shows that people on the web are talking about.
The blogging that I've done over the last five years -- TPM's Five Year Anniversary is coming up this Sunday, by the way -- has taken a number of different forms, several of which, over the last year especially, I really never would have expected. But two have always been the ones I've most gravitated toward.
First is blog as distiller of information. It's a cliche to say how we're all overloaded with information today with the proliferation of news outlets. But it's quite a thing to actually consider in some detail how true it actually is.
A dozen years ago, only an extremely small minority of people had access to any newspapers beside their local paper and perhaps the New York Times, USA Today or the Wall Street Journal, which have a national or quasi-national distribution.
Today anyone with an Internet connection has immediate access to every major paper in the country and the great majority of local papers which contain all manner of information flying beneath the radars of the big regional outlets. That of course doesn't even touch on international papers, native online news outlets, websites for the news networks and much else.
If you're trying to keep up on the Social Security fight or the Abramoff story, for instance, there's just a huge amount of information out there. And one of the things I've tried to do with this site is piece those stories together, put reporting in context or take disparate bits of information appearing in different pieces of reporting and fitting them together into some larger whole.
I still do a lot of original reporting. But not infrequently I have these sort of embarrassing conversations where someone will say, 'Hey, amazing reporting you did on such and such' when actually I didn't do any 'reporting' at all. It was just piecing material together from different news sources and working from tips and leads from readers.
Occasionally, I'll get interviewed about blogs. And I always make the point that 'the media' functions like an ecosystem with a heavy measure of interdependence. Without newspapers and, to a lesser extent, the electronic media, blogs would have very little raw material to feed on. They're heavily dependent on reporting by conventional journalists, either to criticize or to build on.
But blogs have eked out a niche too. Since they're not chained to particular formats of writing, the daily news cycle or the news 'peg', they can focus in on the progress of a particular story in a way that is very difficult to do within the conventions of newspaper reporting.
In any case, that's one focus of mine, one thing I like in blogs.
The other is original reporting.
Few blogs do a lot of original reporting. And that's mainly because it's time-consuming and expensive to support. I've always done quite a bit of it. But that's mainly because for most of the time I've been running TPM I was a freelance journalist trying to scrape together a living by writing constantly. And that left me with lots of material I could use for the site.
In any case, this post wasn't intended as a disquisition on blog theory. But that's the model of blogging that interests me.
And the stories that interest me right now are a) the interconnected web of corruption scandals bubbling up out the reining Washington political machine and b) the upcoming mid-term elections.
I cover a little of both. And I've particularly tried to give some overview of the Abramoff story. But I'm never able to dig deeply enough into the stories or for a sustained enough period of time or to keep track of how all the different ones fit together. That's a site I'd like to read every day -- one that pieced together these different threads of public corruption for me, showed me how the different ones fit together (Abramoff with DeLay with Rove with the shenanigans at PBS and crony-fied bureaucracies like the one Michael Brown was overseeing at FEMA) and kept tabs on how they're all playing in different congressional elections around the country.
That's a site I'd like to read because I'm never able to keep up with all of it myself. So we're going to try to create it.
I don't imagine it will be easy. But it will be an experiment with a new sort of journalism. And I think we'll be able to put something together that the readers of this site will enjoy and find useful. And we're going to try to do that by mobilizing the resources we've already built with TPM and TPMCafe. To start we're going to try to raise money from TPM Readers to jumpstart a salary or two for the person or persons who will do most of the work producing the site. Then we're hoping that over time we can support the effort through selling advertising, an ability we're already investing a good deal of time in building up to support the two sites we currently run.
Finally, we have you. Now, yes, I know that sounds like the most eye-roll-inspiring drivel or flattery. But it's quite true in a very concrete sense.
TPM has a monthly audience of about 3/4 of a million people. And on weekdays we get anywhere form a couple hundred to upwards of a thousand emails (the weekday average seems to be a bit over three hundred). And those messages together amount to a huge nationwide information gathering apparatus. Some emails are just pointers from people with expertise in some area I happen to be writing about. Others turn out to be 'sources' in the conventional journalistic sense. Many more, though, are just pointers to news stories bubbling up beneath the radar of the national political press.
I really can't overemphasize how essential those emails are to producing this site. Just by way of example, when I was focused in on the Social Security debate earlier this year, that was only remotely possible because I had people in almost every congressional district keeping me updated on what was being reported in their local papers, what their member of Congress was saying back in the district, what mailers they were sending out and so forth.
That's something that most reporters don't have access to. But, like a number of other high-traffic blogs, we do. We won't be trying to compete with conventional news outlets. Like I said above, sites like this wouldn't be able to survive without newspapers and news networks to cull information from. But we can produce our own unique sort of wall-to-wall, constantly updated coverage.
I hope the end result will be one you'll want to read and support. And I'm betting we'll be able to find one or two canny and hard-working reporter-bloggers to help us do it.
More on all of this very soon.
--Josh Marshall
What do you think tonight's election results mean? That's what we're discussing now in this thread at TPMCafe. Tell us what you think.
--Josh Marshall
Isn't it supposed to be those other guys who run the torture chambers in Eastern Europe? I can never keep track of these things.
--Josh Marshall
TPM Reader TF checks in ...
I don’t think anyone has mentioned this but didn’t Trent Lott himself continue to leak classified information in his comments off camera to CNN today?If he was in that Republican only Senator’s meeting with Cheney last week and then confirms today that what was in the Dana Priest article last week was classified and discussed behind closed doors with Cheney, the CONFIRMATION of classified information has occurred.
As I recall from the whole Rove / Libby issues even the confirmation of classified information is a violation. Lott has basically confirmed today the off the books CIA prisons are real and that he got a classified briefing from Cheney. He basically confirmed the entire Wapo article, which I believe might be a violation itself!
So many complexities transitioning a democracy into a repressive regime.
--Josh Marshall
Steve Clemons is doing a nice run-down this evening of the various crimes, bad acts and generic villainies of Ahmad Chalabi, who's coming to DC tomorrow to hang with friends at the American Enterprise Institute and hobnob with high-ranking administration officials. Steve even has a few choice morsels that many Chalabi-watchers don't know about -- like the strong belief at the CIA that he tipped off Saddam about a CIA-backed coup because they refused to cut him in on the action.
In any case, I'm enjoying life up here in the Big Apple -- almost exactly a year now. But tomorrow's a day I'll regret that I don't still live in the nation's capital. Because I'd like to be on hand, or at least nearby, when Chalabi heads back to what is, at least the metaphorically, the scene of the crime.
Actually, a few days ago I suggested to Steve that one way to dramatize what this man has been responsible for would be to have some folks on hand to attempt a citizen's arrest of Ahmad Chalabi. Nothing by force, mind you. All non-violent. Just walk up to the man, put a hand on the shoulder, announce that they're taking him into custody in a citizen's arrest and offer to escort him to the Justice Department building for questioning. If some of his goons or the AEI rent-a-cops man-handle these patriots, then at least the point is made.
Steve appears to have looked into this now though and found that the DC Citizen's Arrest law requires that the arrestor see the bad-actor in the actual commission of a felony. Perhaps someone can consult an attorney to see what the possibilities are. On the other hand, perhaps some of those high-ranking administration officials Chalabi's going to meet with can effect an arrest since they've probably witnessed some of his bad acts.
In any case, if you're there on the scene to protest tomorrow -- at 2 PM at 1150 17th St NW -- send us in reports, send us in pictures. We'll post the good stuff so TPM Readers around the country can see ordinary Americans protesting against this shark and his friends who've brought him back into American waters.
--Josh Marshall
President Bush swung into Richmond last night to push his guy Jerry Kilgore past the finish line in Virginia. But tonight Kilgore came up short. Tim Kaine is the next governor of the state. And as Ed Kilgore (no relation) explains here, the scope of Kaine's win is actually more impressive than the top-line number would indicate.
The accepted verdict on what a given election 'means' most often boils away too much of the complexity and causes behind what happened. But this was a bad night for President Bush. The Kilgore goof is an emblematic example. But you can see it in other races too. President Bush wasn't that popular in November 2002. But he delivered for his party. He was a fairly unpopular incumbent running for reelection in 2004. But he won.
Few will admit it publicly. But I think a lot of Republicans will look at what happened tonight and see that something has changed. President Bush was a liability, even for a Republican in a tomato red state like Virginia. They won't say it. But watch what they do. Actions speak louder than words.
--Josh Marshall
TPM Reader MO from the great state of Minnesota checks in ...
The mayor's race here is another indication of the feeling about Bush.A Democratic challenger is looking to unseat a Democratic incumbent -- looks like it's going to be close to 70 % to 30%. the difference between them? hardly matters, except that the soon-to-be crushed incumbent endorsed Bush for President last year.
We St Paul Democrats don't take kindly to that sort of thing in our mayors. So we fixed it.
Is that an 'L' on the president's forehead?
--Josh Marshall
Now, as you've probably heard, Speaker Hastert and Sen. Frist have called for an investigation into the Washington Post story which revealed the existence of secret interrogation (torture) facilities the United States is running in Eastern Europe.
No doubt, this will spawn a wave of complaints that this is the logical result of the investigation of the White House's effort to betray a serving covert CIA operative as a way of attacking her whistle-blowing husband.
We're all supposed to go chasing our tails now, agonizing over how to distinguish between these two cases.
But actually, let's not.
It was wise of Pat Fitzgerald not to seek indictments for the mere disclosure of classified information, both on the basis of prudence and also the questionable interpretation of the law that defines such disclosures as illegal.
The most obvious way to distinguish these two cases is to observe that Congress, in its wisdom, chose to make this particular sort of disclosure a felony, different in kind rather than degree from all others.
The prosecutor apparently did not believe or does not yet believe that he has enough evidence to prosecute anyone under that law. Instead, he indicted Libby for repeatedly, and it seems unambiguously, lying to investigators and seeking to obstruct the investigation in an effort to shield the vice president, who was certainly party to the effort.
Setting aside the legal particulars, we can observe the difference between betraying the identity of own of the country's own spies as a tool of government policy and revealing information about government policy to the press.
A disntinction with no grey areas? No. But life is built on distinctions reasonable people are forced to make every day.
What we have here is an administration under the sway of men with lawless and authoritarian tendencies. Betraying one of the country's own spies to cover up revelations about dishonest actions in leading the country to war, attempts to squelch the press to hide government policy of supporting torture. These actions are all cut from the same cloth: cover-ups and secrecy to hide lies and dishonorable acts, all backed by force and disregard for the law.
Now it seems Sen. Lott is telling reporters he thinks the leaks came from Republicans, which is at least one more sign that there are a growing number of Republicans more interested in their country's honor than in the Cheney gang's governance by violence and lies.
Let them investigate Republicans, Democrats; let them take it before judges. Whatever. Lies beget coverups which beget more law breaking into a spiralling cycle. The executive is in corrupt hands. Nothing will change till that does.
--Josh Marshall
As those of you who are TPMCafe regulars already know, we're hosting a forum this week at TPMCafe Book Club on former Clinton National Economic Advisor Gene Sperling's new 
book, The Pro-Growth Progressive.
More broadly we've set this Book Club up as an exchange on Democratic economic and trade policy.
Which direction for Democrats? Particularly as we move toward the 2006 and later the 2008 election cycles. A neo-Clintonite economic policy or a more populist approach with greater skepticism about the generation-long move toward global trade liberalization.
We've put together a group that, I think, captures the range of opinions and viewpoints now on offer -- Sperling, Alan Blinder, Bob Borosage, Jason Furman, Jamie Galbraith and David Sirota. TPM regulars like Matt Yglesias, Ed Kilgore and others will probably be chiming in too.
So stop by, let us know what you think, and join the discussion. The sparks are already flying and we expect more.
--Josh Marshall
Someone was willing to say it: Chalabi deserves a subpoena, not photo-ops with administration bigwigs. See Rep. Miller's (D-CA) speech on the floor of the House just yesterday.
--Josh Marshall
White House Kremlinology. Tom DeFrank reads the tea leaves and the whispers about the eroding bond between President Bush and Dick Cheney.
--Josh Marshall
Stop the presses! Sen. Rockefeller raises the possibility that investigation investigators might need to investigate!
Here's a Walter Pincus article from tomorrow's Post which describes a basic disagreement shaping up between how Sen. Rockefeller (D-WV), the ranking member on the senate intel committee, and Chairman Roberts (R-KS) want to pursue "phase two" of the investigation into the Iraq WMD debacle. "Phase two", remember, is the part of the investigation where they'll look at how the administration used or misused intelligence.
Roberts' approach is to take the administration statements and line them up against intelligence reports. If they match up, no problem. As Pincus writes ...
Under last year's agreement [which Roberts wants to follow], it was unclear whether the committee would consider whether there were contradictory or competing intelligence reports circulating at the time public statements were made that could call them into question, or whether the panel would simply check to see whether each statement could be backed up by at least one piece of intelligence.For example, in a Sept. 8, 2002, appearance on CNN, Condoleezza Rice said Iraq was receiving "high-quality aluminum tubes that are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs." At the time, there were serious disagreements within the intelligence community over whether those tubes were meant for centrifuges -- which can be used to extract weapons-grade uranium -- or whether they were meant for anti-aircraft rockets, which proved to be the case. If it could be shown that there was at least one intelligence report that substantiated Rice's statement, that might be enough to justify her statement under terms of the panel's earlier agreement.
Rockefeller has a different approach ...
Under Rockefeller's desired approach, Rice could be interviewed to ask her what intelligence she based her statements on, and whether she was aware of the contrary views.
If you're going to investigate how policy-makers used intelligence, can there be any serious pretense that you're conducting a serious investigation if interviewing the policy-makers themselves is off-limits?
And another question. If what Roberts wants is really closer to last year's agreement than what Rockefeller is now pushing for, what was Rockefeller thinking last year when he agreed to it?
--Josh Marshall
It seems the president's defenders have fallen back on what has always been their argument of last resort -- cherry-picked quotes from Clinton administration officials arranged to give the misleading impression that the Clintonites said and thought the same thing about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as the Bushies did.
Not true.
But even arguing on this ground understates the full measure of administration mendacity in the lead up to the war since it ignores half the story. WMD was only half the administration equation for war. The other half was Iraq's alleged ties to Islamist terrorist groups like al Qaida and including al Qaida. On top of that, of course, was the big enchilada, the Cheney favorite, those frequent and intentionally ambiguous suggestions that Saddam Hussein played a role in the 9/11 attacks.
The administration has always been able to fall back upon the fact that as much as they hyped and exaggerated the evidence of Iraqi WMD, the folks in the intelligence community made plenty of mistakes on their own.
But the claims about Iraqi ties to al Qaida were always USDA-approved Grade-A crap.
That's where the most blatant political pressure on analysts happened. And that's where Doug Feith's operation at the Pentagon and its pipeline to Vice President Cheney's Office played their most nefarious role "stovepiping" nonsense about a grand Osama-Saddam axis.
Yet, that story has not gotten much of any scrutiny or investigation.
Whether it was lies or just reckless disregard for the truth. They should be held accountable.
--Josh Marshall
A weird and very disturbing story.
The Hill reports that Emilia DiSanto, chief investigator for Finance Committee Chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley, was accosted outside her home last Wednesday evening and beaten repeatedly with a baseball bat. The article says she was later "treated for significant upper-body injuries [and] nine staples were needed to close her head wound."
Investigators seem to believe that the attack was related to her work on the hill.
--Josh Marshall
On Tom DeLay's latest lawyering to get off the conspiracy charges on a technicality or preserve his right to trial by a jury of fellow conservatives (noted here), TPM Reader CM chimes in as follows ...
Ronnie Earle should simply ask the judge, "If Travis County is too liberal for DeLay to get a fair trial, then why is it that 2 of 3 U.S. Representatives representing Travis County are Republicans? Why are both state school board members representing Travis County Republicans? If you lump in State Senators and State Reps, too, you get a total of 7 Republicans and 6 Democrats." I'd say it looks more than fair to Republicans.Hoist him on his own petard, perhaps...
Good point.
--Josh Marshall
Paying the piper?
Tom DeLay's lawyers are now arguing that for their client to get a fair trial there needs to be a change of venue, particularly somewhere other than "liberal" Travis County, home of the state capital and in the jurisdiction of DA Ronnie Earle.
Given all the other malarkey DeLay is floating about the criminal justice system being rigged against conservatives, I guess we shouldn't be surprised.
But look at the specific issue they seem to be pushing.
This from the AP ...
Defense attorneys argue that DeLay has been vilified in liberal Travis County, which was split into three different congressional