Bob J. Perry strikes again. The GOP stalwart and financier of 527 groups like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004 and the Economic Freedom Fund this year has donated $2 million to a 527 group called Americans for Honesty on Issues, according to a recently filed FEC report.
According to the New York Times:
The leader of Americans for Honesty on Issues is Sue Walden, a close ally of Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader who left Congress amid questions on ethics and fund-raising. Ms. Walden has also raised money for President Bush and served as an adviser to Kenneth L. Lay, the former chief executive of Enron who died in July.
The group has already spent almost $1.5 million in attack ads on Democratic candidates. MyDD has the rundown on which districts Americans for Honesty on Issues has targeted.
Update: FEC reports this past week show that Bob Perry has also contributed $1 million to the Free Enterprise Fund, which has begun running TV ads against Ned Lamont in Connecticut.
--David Kurtz
The federal corruption investigation of Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) first reported yesterday by McClatchy has been confirmed by the Philadelphia Inquirer and the AP. h/t Laura Rozen.
--David Kurtz
GOP grumblings about the White House not being prepared for a loss in November:
"They aren't even planning for if they lose," says a GOP insider who informally counsels the West Wing. If Democrats win control of the House, as many analysts expect, Republicans predict that Bush's final two years in office will be marked by multiple congressional investigations and gridlock."The Bush White House has had no relationship with Congress," said a Bush ally. "Beyond the Democrats, wait till they see how the Republicans–the ones that survive–treat them if they lose next month."
A Democratic victory of any kind will be a rude welcome back to the reality-based world for Bush. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
--David Kurtz
Rep. Chris "that ain't torture, it's sex" Shays (R-CT) has suddenly found his moral compass, blasting his own party's campaign committee for distributing a flyer claiming his opponent wants to have coffee with the Taliban.
--David Kurtz
Is the Dem tide putting Sen. Menendez back on top?
You have to look long and far this season to find a Democratic candidate who is not exceeding expectations for their race. But one of the few has been right next door here in New Jersey, in the race between Sen. Bob Menendez (D) and Tom Kean, Jr. (R). (Menendez was a congressman appointed to serve by Gov. John Corzine (D) to serve the remainder of Corzine's term in the senate.) Here's our list of the polls in that race going back to July. The race has always been close and most of the polls, I think, have been within the margin of error. But the pattern is still pretty clear. Kean took the lead in September after being close behind for most of summer. But that lead now seems to have vanished. Seven polls have come out in October. Kean was ahead only in one, and that one was released ten days ago. If you toss out the Zogby poll which has Menendez up by ten points (I'm having less and less confidence in Zogby's numbers), Menendez's average lead is only like 3 or 4 points. The statisticians will note that that's probably not a statistically signficant margin. But when all the polls are coming up with the same narrow margin, I think you can say that Menendez is now back on top.
Normally, an incumbent under 50% with that kind of narrow 'lead' is in trouble. But Menendez isn't really quite the incumbent. And with the probable Democrat tide, I think that will be enough.
I'll be curious to see how much the Republicans pour into this race over the next three weeks. It could end up being the race that decides who's in the majority next year.
--Josh Marshall
The plot thicks yet again.
Korenna Kline, spokesperson for Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-AZ), abruptly resigned yesterday.
This comes just a few days after Kolbe issued a written statement about the Foley matter that contradicted in key respects comments Kline had already made about Kolbe's knowledge of Foley's problem with pages.
A staffer for a retiring congressman finding new employment before the term ends is not terribly unusual, but there is more going on here than simply new employment opportunities.
--David Kurtz
I wanted to go back to that excellent Washington Post piece on the increasing frequency with which the President declares world events "unacceptable," because it raises another issue, one which has been irking me since the North Korean nuclear test last weekend.
The issue, which Josh has raised in part, is this: Why do commentators continue to describe the President as a "hard-liner" on North Korea? That seems to me to be a disservice to the hardliners and to give the President far too much credit.
Just yesterday in the Wall Street Journal (no link), no less a Bush critic than Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Colin Powell's chief of staff at the State Department, asserted that Bush's hardline on North Korea has failed.
I have no doubt that there are genuine hardliners within the Administration who urged covert and overt military action against North Korea early in the President's first term, and certainly in response to the breakdown of the Agreed Framework. Every Republican Administration is going to have its share of Curtis LeMays.
But those true hardliners have not prevailed in the internal Administration struggle over whether the U.S. should lead with the carrot or with the stick. What has emerged as U.S. "policy" is inertia. No carrot. No stick. No nothing, unless cheap rhetoric about what is "unacceptable" counts for something.
There are quite reputable people in foreign policy circles, like former Defense Secretary William Perry, who have advocated much tougher measures against North Korea than Bush has adopted. Perry, for instance, proposed publicly earlier this year that the U.S. hit the DPRK's new ICBM with a U.S. cruise missile while it was still on the launch pad, before a test flight could be conducted.
The sad truth is that we have virtually no good options for putting the North Korean nuclear genie back in the bottle, and I am quite convinced that our military options at the moment range from bad to worse (and that the current Administration would be unable to competently execute any military option).
But in the same way that it is a mistake to conclude that the Clinton Administration offer of a carrot was a failure, it is a mistake to conclude that the stick has failed, too. Both may be needed in the future.
All that we can say with any certainty is that paralysis has failed to achieve our objective of a non-nuclear Korean peninsula. And paralysis, if I may say, is unacceptable.
--David Kurtz
Former Rep. Gerry Studds (D-MA), the first openly gay member of Congress, whose name has been in the news lately because, like Mark Foley, Studds had his own "page problem," died Saturday.
--David Kurtz
This is good stuff:
President Bush finds the world around him increasingly "unacceptable.". . .
[A] survey of transcripts from Bush's public remarks over the past seven years shows the president's worsening political predicament has actually stoked, rather than diminished, his desire to proclaim what he cannot abide. Some presidential scholars and psychologists describe the trend as a signpost of Bush's rising frustration with his declining influence.
In the first nine months of this year, Bush declared more than twice as many events or outcomes "unacceptable" or "not acceptable" as he did in all of 2005, and nearly four times as many as he did in 2004. He is, in fact, at a presidential career high in denouncing events he considers intolerable. They number 37 so far this year, as opposed to five in 2003, 18 in 2002 and 14 in 2001.
More on this later . . .
--David Kurtz
Invading liberal hordes from the Bay Area making it tough on GOP Reps. Pombo and Doolittle.
--David Kurtz
As long as the Washington Post is talking about the beautiful Democratic faces to watch, we might as well give equal time to the GOP beautiful people.
For those of you who don't keep up with these things (I don't either, but some of our fearless readers do), here's the background. Country music star Sara Evans has filed for divorce, and it has gotten pretty nasty. I'll spare our more tender readers the allegations (porn) Evans is making (adultery) about her husband (a former GOP candidate for Congress).
Wait, former GOP candidate for Congress?
Yep. Ran for Congress in Oregon in 2002.
Funny thing is, his campaign website is still up--at least until this post it was. So you can see some of your GOP faves (President Bush) with the happy couple. There's even a photo touting the beauty of GOP women.
See what that WP front page has done? Now we're all wallowing in the gutter.
--David Kurtz
Caution: The front page of the Washington Post will make you hurl your Cheerios this morning:
Attractive politicians have an edge over not-so-attractive ones. The phenomenon is resonating especially this year. By a combination of luck and design, Democrats seem to be fielding an uncommonly high number of uncommonly good-looking candidates.The beauty gap between the parties, some on Capitol Hill muse, could even be a factor in who controls Congress after Election Day.
I know, it's no more hackneyed than the analysis Broder regularly churns out, but Page 1? Maybe I'm just grumpy today.
--David Kurtz
Huge amount of independent expenditures today by the NRCC: $9.3 million.
Here are the biggest hits:
$424,948.80 against Democratic challenger Darcy Burner in the WA-8;
$571,073.60 against Democratic challenger Patrick Murphy in PA-8;
$657,276.80 against Democratic challenger Joe Sestak in PA-7;
$652,884.80 against Democratic challenger Lois Murphy in PA-6;
$579,187.60 against Democrat Zack Space in the race for Bob Ney's open OH-18 seat;
$521,985.88 against Democratic incumbent Rep. Melissa Bean in IL-8;
$436,881.00 against Democratic challenger Ron Klein in FL-22;
$417,933.39 against Democratic challenger Ken Lucas in KY-4;
A whopping 99% of today's expenditure was for negative advertising.
--David Kurtz
Curt, welcome to the party. Yet another endangered GOP incumbent is under federal investigation.
--Josh Marshall
Boehner: Dems should be punished at the polls for not reporting our GOP pedophilia sooner.
--Josh Marshall
And then there were two? The Justice Department is "looking into allegations" relating to a rafting trip that Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) took with two Congressional pages in 1996.
--Paul Kiel
Sen. Allen's (R-VA) name shows up on a court record in 1974. An arrest? An unpaid parking ticket? Is there more than one George Felix Allen in Virginia?
We're trying to find out more.
--Josh Marshall
Question: Should Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) not be expelled from the House of Representatives now that he has pled guilty to repeated instances of bribery, public corruption and other bad acts?
Yes, needless to say, he says he's going to resign in a "few weeks", according to his lawyer. And he's not on the ballot for reelection.
But just as a matter of principle, shouldn't someone who has said in open court that he accepted bribes in exchange for services as congressman just be booted? Not, hang around until the end of the year to finish up his congressional business?
--Josh Marshall
I really used to think Rep. Chris Shays (R-CT) was a pretty reasonable guy. Not in the party I prefer and voting for the wrong leadership in the House, but a reasonable enough guy.
But I don't see how you call Abu Ghraib a 'sex ring' rather than 'torture'.
Does he think the Iraqis in those pictures were a bunch of swingers?
--Josh Marshall
Won't have Bob Ney to kick around anymore.
Update: Actually, it turns out that we'll have at least a "few weeks" more of kicking.
--Paul Kiel
When Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) appears before the judge today to say he's sorry for taking Jack Abramoff's bribes, will he finally resign from Congress? That and other news of the day in today's Daily Muck.
--Paul Kiel
This is surprising. We were supposed to think that Kirsten Gillibrand's race against Rep. John Sweeney (R-NY) just hadn't caught fire and was pretty much done. But CQ has just moved the race into the toss-up category. This is one we're going to be watching really closely.
For background, see this golden oldie from November 22, 2004 in which mutliple Sweeney constituents try in vain to get an answer out of Sweeney about whether or not he voted for the DeLay Rule.
Here's the results of Justin Rood's investigation of whether the kid in the background of this Sweeney frat house picture was smoking a joint (alas, he was not). Remember, back in April, Sweeney showed up sloshed at a frat house in the district and proceeded to have himself photographed with cracking up college kids who posed with him like he was ... well, like he was.
Then, again, who can forget Rep. Sweeney's many legislative fact-finding excursions aboard yachts provided by the National Marine Manufacturers' Association.
The list just goes on and on.
And, actually, isn't he about due for another boffo moment?
--Josh Marshall
TPM Reader CH on whether it's all Foley ...
You will soon post on the "is it all Foley?" question, and I wanted to submit my 2 cents in advance. Here's the thing about the Foley scandal: it gives people space to change their minds about things. Think about when you've admitted a mistake or accepted someone's knockdown argument on a topic you believe in strongly. Sure, you look at the facts and exercise your capacity for reason. But there is an emotional component too, and it's a lot easier to change your mind when the other person, or in this case the general public mood, makes it OK for you to shift your perspective.
That's what Foley has done--provided an emotional space within which people can reevaluate their views without having to question themselves or their previous beliefs too deeply. I believe there has been a growing sense in the country that things are going badly, very badly, on all sorts of fronts. Foley, frankly, doesn't have much to do with that. But now it's OK to step up and say, "Hell with it, I'm tired of this crap." And change your vote.
I think CH is on to something here. I'd been thinking along the lines of a slightly different take. But I think we're getting at the same basic point. To me, you look at the basic numbers going back many months and they're simply terrible for the Republicans. There was a halt in the deterioration and then a very small but discernible rebound in early-mid-September, tied largely to the 9/11 anniversary. Among the political class that very small stabilization was very over-interpreted. Then came the NIE, more bad news out of Iraq, Woodward and then Foley.
In discussing the dynamics of elections we're all always groping around trying to find the least inapt metaphor. But my hunch is that that late September bad news for the White House didn't cut short a GOP resurgence. The blip was more of an Indian summer or dead cat bounce.
At the same time, Foley does seem to have been a deal clincher for a substantial number of people. Not that more than a very few people are going to consciously or affirmatively vote on the basis of Foleygate. But in our own lives we all have moments where we're frustrated, more frustrated, passively angry and then at one crystalizing moment something clicks in your head and you say, Enough. I'm done. And then you act.
I think that's something like what we've seen over the last two weeks, though we won't be able to know for sure until after election day. There's been a tremendous dissatisfaction in the country on many fronts. But it's been amorphous and latent. Or perhaps better to say people hadn't yet had to concentrate on just how they were going to act on those sentiments. Partisan identification also does weird stuff to people. For instance, is it really true that 40% of the public is satisfied with the job the president has done on Iraq? Objectively, I find that difficult to believe. But Republicans are Republicans. And for a lot of committed partisans, the Dems say No, so they say Yes. What the question in becomes somewhat beside the point. And, yes, same on both sides. My point is only that strong partisan identification props up support for things people probably don't really, in their heart or hearts, support.
In itself, Foleygate isn't going to drive many people's votes. And even fewer will admit that it has in polls. But I think Foley has provided a collective gut-check moment for the country, when perhaps a critical portion of the country has said, Enough. it's not about Foley. It's really about everything that has come before. But it's allowed people to step back, take in the whole picture and say: No, I'm done.
--Josh Marshall
The Times and the Post both have matter-of-fact run-downs of Kirk Fordham's testimony Thursday before the House Ethics Committee. The juicy details were behind closed doors. But the essential story is this: he said under oath what he told the FBI and the press last week -- that he warned Denny Hastert's Chief of Staff about Foley three years ago, that Palmer went as far as to meet with Foley and that Palmer told Fordham that he'd discussed the matter with Speaker Hastert.
That leaves two possibilities. Fordham is lying. Or the story put together by Hastert's staff two weeks ago is bogus, Palmer is lying and Hastert is lying. Real life seldom leaves such cut-and-dry alternatives. But in this case both sides have dug themselves in on very specific and unambiguous versions of what happeend.
The weak link may be Palmer's oddly broad and ambiguous denial of Fordham's account. Last week he said simply: "What Kirk Fordham said did not happen."
If you want to get squirrelly about, that might simply mean that it didn't happen in precisely the way Fordham said it. Maybe Fordham says they spoke in person when Fordham remembers them speaking on the phone. In other words, it may really be a classic non-denial denial.
In the real world, though, if he's lying, he's done and so is Hastert. It's just a matter of who gets to them first, the investigators or the voters.
--Josh Marshall
This analysis of the internal numbers out of the latest Gallup poll provides a very clear sense of why so many Republicans are shaking in their boots waiting the results of the November election. Gallup divided respondents into "white frequent churchgoers", "white infrequent churchgoers" and "all others."
Here we what are perhaps the two major cleavages in contemporary American politics -- religion and race. And we're looking at them through a rightward prism.
Whites tend to vote Republican as a group, if by not that great a margin. And strong religious identification/church attendance is a very strong indicator of Republican party affiliation. So "white frequent churchgoers" should be -- and through most of my adult life -- have been the sweet spot of the electorate for the Republican party.
Yet, according to this latest Gallup survey, Republicans are only coming in even with this group. If that number is even close to on the mark and remains so for the next four weeks you can be next to certain that the Democrats will blow the Republicans out in the House and very likely win back control of the senate too.
You see this in this graph. Anything above the dotted line is the margin of Democratic advantage. So in August infrequent churchgoing whites were favoring the Democrats by 12 points. Now they do so by 26 points.
As I think I've made clear a number of times in recent weeks I am very much in the 'believe it when I see it' campaign when it comes to November. But this is the core of the modern Republican party. And they can only split the votes evenly with Democrats in this core group, election day will really be a disaster.
The only thing this break down leaves me wanting to know more of is a denominational breakdown. I'd be particularly curious to see the breakdown between churchgoing Catholics and evangelicals.
Here's another look at the same process. Over at TPM Election Central, Matt Corley looked at two of the most watch election rating sites, CQ Politics and the Cook Political Report.
He found that over the two week period since Foleygate blew up on September 29th, no few than 30 House races had their ratings changed. And 29 of those were moves favoring the Democrats.
That is a sign both of tremendous flux and a decisive movement in one direction.
Next up, is it really all Foley?
--Josh Marshall
Momma don't take my 501(c) status away: A new Senate Finance Committee report busts Abramoff-tied charities, including Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, for possible violations of law and tax code.
--Justin Rood
I don't know if the Democrats are going to win back the House this year. And I'd really caution people against falling under the false assumption that anything is in the bag at this point. But I am starting to become cautiously optimistic that Joe Donnelly (D-IN) is just a few weeks away from sending Rep. Chris "the Count" Chocola (R-IN) packing. And that would end the one man reign of evil Chocola has brought to the House of Representatives since 2002.
You may think 'evil' is too strong a word. But a lot of conservatives bewail the fact that in modern secular society we are too cautious about using terms like 'good' and 'evil'. So I figure Chocola is as good a candidate as any. See his record of Social Security bamboozlement here.
On our IN-2 page we've now got eight polls going back to July 18. Two of those are sponsored by Dems, one by Republicans. But of those eight, Chocola has been behind every time, though three times within the margin of error. Four of those polls are from the last eight days.
Constituent Dynamics out today has the Count down by 4 points. A GOP poll out yesterday has him down by 1%. A Dem poll has him down 16 points. And a Zogby poll from October 4th has him down 10 points. Of all the independent polls, the closest is the one out today that has him down 4 points. The others have him at a 10, 10, 8, 8 and 5 point deficit.
If you're in Indiana's 2nd district, drop us a line and let us know how it looks to you on the ground.
--Josh Marshall
Roll Call (sub.req.): Rep. Shimkus to testify before Ethics Committee Friday.
--Josh Marshall
Ha! Okay, this is funny. Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) is going to campaign against Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH), the representative who called him a coward last year on the House floor.
--Josh Marshall
Is making detainees drop acid one of the US government's new 'alternative interrogation techniques'?
Update: It seems the government has been very slow to release Jose Padilla's medical records.
--Josh Marshall
House Republicans pull the plug on efforts to knock of four Democratic incumbents.
House Republicans are scaling back television advertising reserved for four Democratic-held seats in Ohio, South Carolina and West Virginia, officials said Wednesday, fresh evidence of the party's struggles as it tries to retain its majority.At the same time, GOP strategists signaled they intend to spend nearly $1 million in an attempt to hold the seat recently vacated by Rep. Mark Foley. The Florida Republican quit Congress last month after being confronted with sexually explicit computer messages he sent to teenage male pages.
These late in the campaign redirections of money happen every cycle. And both parties will be shifting money from less to more promising opportunities. But this is another sign that Republicans can see it's all defense this cycle.
--Josh Marshall
Mark Warner (D-VA) begging off a 2008 presidential run?
Update: Yup. Here's Warner's statement.
--Josh Marshall
We've known for a while that the House leadership leaned on Mark Foley to run for one more term in Congress before cashing in and becoming a lobbyist -- even if that meant keeping the House pages on their toes for two more years avoiding the F-man's constant advances. But apparently they weren't the only one. It now seems that Karl Rove also got into the act and threatened Foley's future lobbying career if he didn't stick it out in Congress for two more years.
--Josh Marshall
The House ethics committee investigation isn't wasting any time in their probe of the Foley scandal. That and other news of the day in today's Daily Muck.
--Justin Rood
Jonathan Weisman has a good piece in the Post tomorrow about the progress of the Hous Ethics Committee investigation into Foleygate. The first sentence outlines the basic story: "With House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert denying personal knowledge of former representative Mark Foley's activities, investigators for the House ethics committee are bearing down on three senior members of Hastert's staff to determine when they learned of Foley's actions and whether they passed on their knowledge to the speaker."
With that in mind, it occurred to me that you can't really cover or follow a scandal unless you know who the key players are.
Denny Hastert, of course, you know.
This is Scott Palmer, Hastert's Chief of Staff. He has been the focus of many recent Foleygate articles, but you may never have seen him. I'm impressed here by his John Grisham film 'heavy' look.
Palmer is sticking with the story that he didn't hear anything about Foley and pages until late 2005. But if Kirk Fordham, Chief of Staff to Foley and later Rep. Tom Reynolds, is telling the truth, Palmer was told repeatedly and went saw far as to meet with Foley to get him to cut it out.
According to Weisman's piece, a good candidate for the Hastert staffer most likely to get thrown under the bus is this guy, Ted Van Der Meid, counsel to Speaker Hastert. He even looks a bit worried, doesn't he?
Finally, in the trio of key Hastert staffers under scrutiny is Michael Stokke. He's Deputy Chief of Staff to Hastert. But he's really more of a political fixer.
Those are the three key Hastert staffers under the microscope.
Also of possible interest are the two page supervisors.
Peggy Sampson is the page supervisor for the Republicans.
Here she's going to speak with the Ethics Committee earlier this week.
And here is her Democratic counterpart, page supervisors Wren Ivester.
Tomorrow, if you don't remember, Kirk Fordham, who is shaping up to be the key player in the drama, is going to speak to the Ethics Committee.
--Josh Marshall
If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.
The AP's John Solomon take another shot at nailing Harry Reid.
--Paul Kiel
The National Republican Congressional Committee sends out a mailer attacking Dem Tammy Duckworth on Social Security that looks oddly similar to an official Federal mailing.
--Paul Kiel
Hastert to resign!
Well, at least according to K.A. Paul, the loopy evangelist who met with Hastert yesterday.
--Paul Kiel
From today until November 7th, every morning we're going to be sending out a short list of what we believe are the most important polls of the previous 24 hours. If you'd like to receive our update, sign up in the sign up form right there on the right in the top post.
--Josh Marshall
Rajiv Chandrasekaran responds to former CPA deputy Dan Senor's comments on Rajiv's book.
--Josh Marshall
I'm curious to hear from you on this. We're listening to the Bush press conference here. And evaluating it as objectively as I can, it really sounds like a train wreck. The last question had a line in it asking the president if he feels 'like the walls are closing in on him' with declining support for his Iraq policy. The other questions have been pretty relentlessly negative. And the more pointed ones the president hasn't been able answer, even with effective bamboozlement. But tell me. How do you think it's going?
Late Update: That's got to be the slogan, my failed diplomacy has 'new equity partners'.
--Josh Marshall
Just listening to this press conference, I'm really surprised his handlers had him hold this sort of appearance. His statement was a long meandering catalog of his policies -- a bit confused, with various defenses, none that great. Just in terms of effective communication, I would have thought they would have had him hit a few basic points -- international threats, make tax cuts permanent, etc. But my gut tells me anybody on the fence at this point would not feel reassured or heartened by what the president is saying.
On North Korea, needless to say, he fibbed about the basic issue, elided the key points. We'll see if the press teases out what he ignored and misstated. He let the Agreed Framework lapse. The excuse is alleged (and probably true) uranium enrichment research, which wouldn't have come to fruition for many, many years. The result was ramping back plutonium production which has now already created a bomb. The president's boast is that his failed negotiations have more participants around the table.
Wow.
--Josh Marshall
Does President Bush have an incentive to whip up a crisis over North Korea? Consider the incentives. Or rather consider whether there is any dirty laundry that could be uncovered during the president's last two years in office if the Democrats gain control of one or both houses of Congress. Do the math.
--Josh Marshall
Bush press conference at 11 AM. Will he get any real questions about North Korea? What would you ask?
--Josh Marshall
Conservatives' left-wing Foleygate conspiracy theory takes another hit. That and other news of the day in today's Daily Muck.
--Paul Kiel
Will someone come out and say what a monumental twit Condi Rice is as Secretary of State.
Here's the CNN brief on their article about Rice blaming Bill Clinton for the president's latest failure.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday defended the Bush administration's refusal to hold bilateral talks with North Korea in the face of Pyongyang's claim of a successful nuclear test. She told CNN the Clinton administration tried that approach in the 1990s and it had failed.
Bill Perry has a good rejoinder to this nonsense on the Post oped page.
But let's review the salient facts one more time.
"Failure" =1994-2002 -- Era of Clinton 'Agreed Framework': No plutonium production. All existing plutonium under international inspection. No bomb.
"Success" = 2002-2006 -- Bush Policy Era: Active plutonium production. No international inspections of plutonium stocks. Nuclear warhead detonated.
Face it. They ditched an imperfect but working policy. They replaced it with nothing. Now North Korea is a nuclear state.
Facts hurt. So do nukes.
--Josh Marshall
There's a fascinating article in tomorrow's Post about the decline of cursive handwriting. I'm 37. And I certainly remember fairly intensive instruction in handwriting -- first block letters and then the more daunting and advanced cursive handwriting, with the dreaded off-white paper with one solid line, one dotted below it, and another solid beneath the dotted one -- all to keep your letter creations bounded and in check. But, I guess not surprisingly given the ubiquity of computers and keyboards these days, instruction in handwriting has dwindled to almost nothing.
According to the article, primary school teachers spend ten minutes a day or less on the subject.
Another interesting factoid. When the SAT introduced written essays in 2006, only 15% of students wrote their essays in cursive. The rest printed them.
Not only do many young people today have difficulty writing cursive, many also have difficulty reading it. And that seems to be one of the main remaining reasons it's taught -- to maintain some basic level of cursive literacy.
On first blush, it seems hard to figure that young people would really have a hard time reading cursive writing. But it actually makes sense to me. In a former life I was studying to be an Early Modern historian -- focusing on the 17th and 18th centuries.
Read cursive handwriting from people who lived a hundred years ago, even up to close to two hundred years ago, and as long as their handwriting isn't especiallys sloppy, it's not too difficult to read.
Reading 17th century English handwriting, even after quite a lot of practice, was a task I at least found extremely challenging. Some words or passages of words I was never able to decipher. (As a side note to this point, I had historians of earlier periods -- who often covered longer spans of time in their area of specialty -- tell me that one got to know eras of relatively good penmanship and ones that were atrocious and almost impossible to decipher.)
So does it matter? Do we really need to drill kids to learn cursive when it's a skill they just won't use very much except to sign their name?
Possibly so. The article points to some research that suggests that cursive handwriting leads to cognitive advancement. Kids who learn cursive handwriting express themselves in more complex thoughts. Given the tie-ins between cognitive development and hands, I guess this isn't that surprising.
Here's a question. When you jot things down in your daily life or take notes, do you write in cursive? I found that as I got older, late adolescence through early adulthood I guess, my cursive writing slowly died away and was replaced by a sort of hybrid of printing with a little cursive thrown in.
I'm looking here in one of the tablets I take notes in during the day. And the way I write isn't really quite either. But it's closer to print than cursive. How about you? How do you write when you put pen to paper? And how old are you?
--Josh Marshall
Bill Perry, who was Sec Def from 1994 to 1997, has a good column on North Korea in tomorrow's Post. This passage captures the heart of the problem with Bush administration policy ...
For almost six years this policy has been a strange combination of harsh rhetoric and inaction.President Bush, early in his first term, dubbed North Korea a member of the "axis of evil" and made disparaging remarks about Kim Jong Il. He said he would not tolerate a North Korean nuclear weapons program, but he set no bounds on North Korean actions.
The Bushies claim that the Clinton policy was all carrots and no sticks. Not true when you consider we threatened war over the plutonium issue in 1994 -- and like all effective threats of force, it succeeded in getting the North Koreans to sit down and negotiate. But the Bush policy has been no carrots and no sticks. President Bush won't tolerate a nuclear North Korea. But he won't do anything about it either. Clearly, in Bushspeak 'won't tolerate' just means some high politics equivalent of 'I'll be vewwy, vewwy mad.'
As Perry says, harsh rhetoric and inaction.
--Josh Marshall
John McCain seems to have some difficulties with physics and the historical record in his attempt to blame Bill Clinton for the latest crisis on the Korean Peninsula.
Said the Arizona Senator: "I would remind Senator (Hillary) Clinton and other critics of the Bush administration policies that the framework agreement of the Clinton administration was a failure."
Some basic facts.
The 1994 crisis came about because the North Koreans were producing weapons-grade plutonium. Under the Agreed Framework, they agreed to shutter the plutonium production facility and put the already produced plutonium under international oversight.
In return, the US promised aide, help building lightwater reactors (which don't help with bombs) and diplomatic normalization.
That agreement kept the plutonium operation on ice until the end of 2002.
President Bush came to office wanting to pull out of the agreement and did so when evidence surfaced suggesting that the North Koreans were secretly trying to enrich uranium (a separate path to the bomb).
The bomb that went off yesterday was made with plutonium, the same stuff that was off-limits from 1994-2002. In all likelihood some of the same stuff that was on ice from 1994-2002.
To the best of my knowledge, no one thinks the North Koreans are close to having enough uranium to make a nuclear weapon that way. And it's not even completely clear they were ever trying to enrich uranium.
So Clinton strikes a deal to keep plutonium out of the North Koreans' hands. The deal keeps the plutonium out of reach for the last six years of Clinton's term and the first two of Bush's. Bush pulls out of the deal. Four years later a plutonium bomb explodes.
Clinton's fault, right?
There's certainly an argument to be made that you don't make agreements with parties you don't trust, like the North Koreans. And perhaps President Bush would have had some leg to stand on if he'd pulled out of the Agreed Framework and replaced it with something better -- either force or a better agreement. But he didn't. He just did nothing for four years. Now we have plutonium, probably uranium and actual bombs. And according to McCain, it's all Bill Clinton's fault.
(ed.note: As a somewhat separate matter, there is legitimate debate about who was more responsible for the breakdown of the Agreed Framework. Neither side lived up to what it had promised. But that's another story. The key though is what exploded Sunday night.)
--Josh Marshall
Okay, we're very big on reader participation and do-it-yourself muckraking here at TPM. And a bunch of new publicly available tools for such muckraking just went live today. So if you like to rake some of your own muck, check this out.
--Josh Marshall
You figure the Hastert-Foley drama is getting pretty much wall to wall coverage. But here's another bizarre chapter of the story. Apparently, Hastert has now sought the solace of a prayer meeting with a disgraced would-be-evangelist who, among other things, was caught faking his own leper colony. That and he takes credit for getting Charles Taylor to step down as Liberian dictator and other international hat tricks.
--Josh Marshall
Duke Cunningham: The Full Jailhouse Letter Revealed.
Give it a read and ponder how this fool ever made it into Congress.
--Josh Marshall
Former House Clerk Jeff Trandahl to break silence on Foleygate.
Update: False alarm.
--Josh Marshall
Rajiv Chandrasekaran begins his discussion about the Green Zone and the Coalition Provisional Authority rule in Iraq at TPMCafe's Table for One.
--Josh Marshall
To Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-AZ), it's just "not clear" if he alerted the Republican leadership about Mark Foley's page problem back in 2000 -- maybe it will become clearer when he talks to investigators? That and other news of the day in today's Daily Muck.
--Paul Kiel
With yesterday's apparent nuclear test in North Korea, foreign policy again comes back to center stage. And fortuitously this week, TPMCafe Book Club is discussing the new Princeton Project on National Security's final report: "Forging a World of Liberty Under Law, U.S. National Security In The 21st Century."
Participating in the discussion are John Ikenberry, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Daniel Drezner, David Rieff, Stephen Walt and Peter Trubowitz
--Josh Marshall
Jane's Defense Weekly, a premier source on this sort of thing, says that if the initial reports of a .55 kT (half a kiloton) blast are correct "it would suggest that the test had been a "pre- or post-detonation" event (ie a failure), as it had been anticipated that North Korea's first nuclear test would have a significantly higher yield."
--Josh Marshall
Speaker Hastert and his staff still claim that the first they heard of Mark Foley's page problem was in late 2005. Yet since last Friday a series of published reports have come out that have left that story in tatters. A bunch came out over the weekend. And they can be hard to keep track of. So we've put together a brief chronological narrative of what we now know and the order of each revelation.
Hastert now figures he can brazen this one out because there are so many stories floating around that people won't line them up in order and realize what they show.
Read it over and it's hard to come to any conclusion but that that Hastert and especially his Chief of Staff Scott Palmer have been caught in a lie.
If you're following this story, definitely read this post. Then ask yourself how it is Scott Palmer still has a job.
--Josh Marshall
TPM Reader RT takes some grim solace from the possibility that the North Korean bang may have been a bust ...
So the Bush approach to NK is all blustery talk and very little delivery department. The NK approach to weapons research is very little bang for all the bluff.Do these two deserve each other or what?
In Karl's grand quest to dumb down expectations, we are left with two miserable failures hell bent on World War III. The only thing saving the planet is the only thing they succeed at - being incompetent.
Maybe Mark Foley should mediate a measuring of State Wangs to settle which fool is the victor.
Very shrill on that last point.
--Josh Marshall
No one seems willing to come out and say it yet. But it's really starting to look like that North Korean nuclear test didn't work. An unnamed intel official tells the Times that "We have assessed that the explosion in North Korea was a sub-kiloton explosion." I don't want to wade very far in at all on the technical details of evaluating this blast. I can't imagine a topic more distant from any expertise I have. But that would be really, really small for a nuclear blast.
Is it possible that the North Korean nuclear test was as big a failure as President Bush's nuclear policy?
Late Update: From what I can tell, the foreign press is entertaining the thought that this might have been a failed test more than the US press. The French Defense Minister has already said the meager yield suggests the test may have failed. I'd like to follow this closely. So if you see press reports that shed more light on this question, please let me know.
--Josh Marshall
Don't think Bush failed on North Korea? Ask Donald Gregg, former Ambassador to South Korea and Bush's dad's National Security Advisor while he was Vice President. Gregg thinks he did.
--Josh Marshall
Loyal to the last.
You remember Peter Roskam. He's the Social Security bamboozler running for Congress in Illinois' 6th district, who accused his opponent, Iraq war double amputee Tammy Duckworth of wanting to 'cut and run'.
On Thursday he's holding a fundraiser headlined by Denny Hastert and President Bush.
--Josh Marshall
With all the calamities befalling the GOP, it's hard to keep all the scandals straight. Republicans might even be nostalgic for the time when Jack Abramoff seemed like their worst problem.
But despite the fact that it's been pushed off the front page, the Abramoff scandal is still going strong. Over at TPMmuckraker, we spoke with Peter Stone, the author of Heist, a new book on Abramoff, about how Abramoff operated and where the investigation's going next.
--Paul Kiel
Kevin Drum has more on the question of whether this was actually a failed nuke test.
--Josh Marshall
Yet another SurveyUSA poll on Hastert.
Resign from Congress: 45%
Resign Leadership only: 25%
Remain Speaker: 26%
--Josh Marshall
From the annals of catastrophic success. This graf from Glenn Kessler's piece in the Post tells the tale ...
Yet a number of senior U.S. officials have said privately that they would welcome a North Korean test, regarding it as a clarifying event that would forever end the debate within the Bush administration about whether to solve the problem through diplomacy or through tough actions designed to destabilize North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's grip on power.
Translation: The Cheneyites have always wanted a policy of force and confrontation with the NK's. They deep-sixed the Agreed Framework (which kept the plutonium out of commission from 1994-2002). Now they feel confrontation is a fait accompli.
Remind you of anything?
--Josh Marshall
More from Fred Kaplan in the Washington Monthly in 2004 on how President Bush got us into this jam in North Korea.
--Josh Marshall
The House ethics committee has already begun conducting interviews in their Foley investigation. That and other news of the day in today's Daily Muck.
--Paul Kiel
We'll need to wait a few more hours for confirmation. But initial signs suggest that the US picked up the seismic signature of the underground nuclear test the North Koreans are claiming to have carried out. We've been pretty sure for some time that the North Koreans had developed a nuclear capacity. This would not only confirm that assumption, but the decision to conduct the test will be interpreted as a sign of belligerence that will send ripples throughout the region, probably first through Japanese rearmament.
For the US this is a strategic 
failure of the first order.
The origins of the failure are ones anyone familiar with the last six years in this country will readily recognize: chest-thumping followed by failure followed by cover-up and denial. The same story as Iraq. Even the same story as Foley.
North Korea's nuclear program has been a problem for US presidents going back to Reagan, and the conflict between North and South has been a key issue for US presidents going back to Truman. As recently as 1994, the US came far closer to war with North Korea than most Americans realize.
President Clinton eventually concluded a complicated and multipart agreement in which the North Koreans would suspend their production of plutonium in exchange for fuel oil, help building light water nuclear reactors (the kind that don't help making bombs) and a vague promise of diplomatic normalization.
President Bush came to office believing that Clinton's policy amounted to appeasement. Force and strength were the way to deal with North Korea, not a mix of force, diplomacy and aide. And with that premise, President Bush went about scuttling the 1994 agreement, using evidence that the North Koreans were pursuing uranium enrichment (another path to the bomb) as the final straw.
Remember the guiding policy of the early Bush years: Clinton did it=Bad, Bush=Not whatever Clinton did.
All diplomatic niceties aside, President Bush's idea was that the North Koreans would respond better to threats than Clinton's mix of carrots and sticks.
Then in the winter of 2002-3, as the US was preparing to invade Iraq, the North called Bush's bluff. And the president folded. Abjectly, utterly, even hilariously if the consequences weren't so grave and vast.
Threats are a potent force if you're willing to follow through on them. But he wasn't. The plutonium production plant, which had been shuttered since 1994, got unshuttered. And the bomb that exploded tonight was, if I understand this correctly, almost certainly the product of that plutonium uncorked almost four years ago.
So the President talked a good game, the North Koreans called his bluff and he folded. And since then, for all intents and purposes, and all the atmospherics to the contrary, he and his administration have done essentially nothing.
Indeed, from the moment of the initial cave, the White House began acting as though North Korea was already a nuclear power (something that was then not at all clear) to obscure the fact that the White House had chosen to twiddle its thumbs and look the other way as North Korea became a nuclear power. Like in Bush in Iraq and Hastert and Foley, the problem was left to smolder in cover-up and denial. Until now.
Hawks and Bush sycophants will claim that North Korea is an outlaw regime. And no one should romanticize or ignore the fact that it is one of the most repressive regimes in the world with a history of belligerence, terrorist bombing, missile proliferation and a lot else. They'll also claim that the North Koreans were breaking the spirit if not the letter of the 1994 agreement by pursuing a covert uranium enrichment program. And that's probably true too.
But facts are stubborn things.
The bomb-grade plutonium that was on ice from 1994 to 2002 is now actual bombs. Try as you might it is difficult to imagine a policy -- any policy -- which would have yielded a worse result than the one we will face Monday morning.
Talking tough is great if you can make it stick and back it up; it is always and necessarily cleaner and less compromising than sitting down and dealing with bad actors. Talking tough and then folding your cards doesn't just show weakness it invites contempt. And that is what we have here.
The Bush-Cheney policy on North Korea was always what Fareed Zakaria once aptly called "a policy of cheap rhetoric and cheap shots." It failed. And after it failed President Bush couldn't come to grips with that failure and change course. He bounced irresolutely between the Powell and Cheney lines and basically ignored the whole problem hoping either that the problem would go away, that China would solve it for us and most of all that no one would notice.
Do you notice now?
--Josh Marshall
See the US Geological Survey's alert about a 4.2 seismic 'event' in North Korea.
--Josh Marshall
With the traffic to TPM and our other sites growing rapidly in advance of the elections, we're installing some new hardware this evening to ensure we can handle the load. TPM Readers shouldn't notice anything. But in case there are a few hiccups, that's why.
--Josh Marshall
All indications at this point are that the North Koreans have conducted a nuclear weapons test. According to CNN:
Late Sunday in Washington, the U.S. military told CNN it believed the report to be true, but was working to fully confirm it.Senior U.S. officials said they also believed the test took place.
This is a strategic disaster of the first order.
--David Kurtz
Well, Foley may get pushed off the front page.
North Korea claims it has successfully completed its first nuclear test.
And some South Korean officials say there are signs it's true.
Developing . . .
Update: From the AP:
North Korea said Monday it has performed its first-ever nuclear weapons test. The country's official Korean Central News Agency said the test was performed successfully and there was no radioactive leakage from the site."The nuclear test is a historic event that brought happiness to the our military and people," KCNA said.
South Korea's Yonhap news agency is reporting that government officials said North Korea performed its first-ever nuclear weapons test Monday.
South Korean officials could not immediately confirm the report.
South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun convened an urgent meeting of security advisers over the issue, Yonhap reported.
Late update: AP reporting that the test occurred 9:36 p.m. EDT Sunday. You can't very well hide a nuclear test, so American officials already know whether it occurred. Any unusual activity at State or Pentagon tonight?
--David Kurtz
This is big:
A Republican congressman knew of disgraced former representative Mark Foley's inappropriate Internet exchanges as far back as 2000 and personally confronted Foley about his communications.A spokeswoman for Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) confirmed yesterday that a former page showed the congressman Internet messages that had made the youth feel uncomfortable with the direction Foley (R-Fla.) was taking their e-mail relationship. . . .
The revelation pushes back by at least five years the date when a member of Congress has acknowledged learning of Foley's behavior with former pages.
That's not the other shoe dropping, that's Imelda Marcos' whole closet.
--David Kurtz
TPM Reader MA checks in:
If only Democrats could plan a bit more than a half-step ahead, they'd pay close attention to what Baker is cooking up, as it were.The emerging plan for the next couple of years seems to be to attempt to pile on Democrats with the accusation of "cut and run" prior to the midterm elections and then to shift gears, declare limited victory in Iraq and propose a timetable for withdrawal AFTER the midterm elections and before the next general election.
The Iraqi people want a timetable for us to get out of there as do the American people. The only other option is to ramp up the forces there to the half-million or more necessary to secure the country -- a plan that, with the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and other potential threats -- would almost surely entail reinstating the draft, something that the GOP will NEVER do in the leadup to a presidential election.
Democrats need to see what's coming -- and advocate for what they believe. I suspect that they will almost always be losers in the war debate since they were dumb enough to back Bush in the first place and they'll always be the ones who didn't have the guts to say what they knew was the right thing to say WHEN it needed to be said. If there charge against Bush is that he got it all wrong -- that just makes them look like the idiots they were for jumping on his bandwagon.
Still, they need to tell the public what's going on, that even as the GOP numbly repeat their "cut and run" charge, they are plotting to announce a plan for troop withdrawals after the elections, and they need to take the initiative to come up with a least-worst withdrawal plan and make that an issue NOW before Republicans steal it from them.
I think MA is correct on the GOP plans for Iraq, and I touched on this a while back. But the larger issue he is getting at applies well beyond Iraq.
The Democrats have to make sure that they frame the election in the next few weeks in such a way that they can convert the political momentum of victory into a strong post-election political position on a range of issues.
For example, prior to the Foley scandal, I think it would have been difficult for the Democrats to persuasively argue that their victory was a mandate for fundamental political reform. But now the issue of scandal and corruption has been clearly framed, and Democratic victory would carry with it a strong mandate to clean up public corruption.
Winning the election must of course be the first priority, but it's time to be thinking ahead.
--David Kurtz
Remember our good friend Dusty Foggo? Former No. 3 at CIA. Buddy of Brent Wilkes. Under federal criminal investigation.
Colorful little piece in tomorrow's Washington Post unrelated to any of the above, except that it hints at the politicization of the Agency under Porter Goss:
Foggo, according to Berntsen, stated flatly that Goss wanted no more books published by current or former CIA officials. Actually, according to a statement Berntsen filed last week in his ongoing lawsuit against the agency, Foggo's language was a little more colorful: "Mr. Foggo stated 'we will have no more books. I will redact the [expletive] out of your book so no one will want to read it.' "
The CIA's offical review board redacted 5 pages of the 400-page manuscript, then sent it on to the Directorate of Operations, which redacted 70 pages.
--David Kurtz
Wolf goes and gets all journalistic on us--pugilistic even. The victim? The very deserving Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC), who has been making baseless charges about Democratic involvement in the Foley scandal. See the video here.
Update: Atrios comes to McHenry's defense. Sort of.
--David Kurtz
So now we know that the triggering event for that 2002 or 2003 meeting between Kirk Fordham and Scott Palmer was Mark Foley's showing up drunk at the page dorm. You would think that might get the Speaker's attention, no?
--David Kurtz
Six months to stabilize Afghanistan, says the NATO commander there, or 70 percent of the population will switch sides to the Taliban.
--David Kurtz
I've always thought of Rep. Ray Lahood (R-IL) as a moderate Bob Michel Republican. Desperate times call for desperate measures, I suppose, and apparently that means everyone in the GOP has to drink the Kool-Aid.
Lahood, appearing on Face the Nation this morning, lauded Denny Hastert as an paragon of ethics and good government:
He took care of Tom DeLay, his best friend. When Tom was having ethical problems, the speaker went to him and asked him to leave. When he appointed Duke Cunningham to the Intelligence Committee, he went to Duke and made sure he wasn't on the Intelligence Committee after it was disclosed he took $2.3 million. And when Bob Ney was appointed chairman of the House Administration Committee, he was appointed by Speaker Hastert. Speaker Hastert went to him and told him to step down from that committee after the Abramoff disclosures.
Setting aside Hastert's obviously bad record of appointing good people (or is it good record of appointing bad people?), Lahood knows this version of events isn't accurate. Not even close.
Delay hung on for months, years even, under an ethical cloud. Just this weekend it was reported that Hastert's staff was instrumental in passage of the Delay Rule, which would have permitted Delay to remain as majority leader even after a felony indictment against him, until public outcry forced the GOP caucus to rescind the rule change.
Duke was gone from Congress so fast it made your head spin. I can't find any record of Cunningham stepping down from the Intel Committee before he resigned from Congress, which he didn't do until he entered his guilty plea to the corruption charges. The Duke story broke in June 2005. He announced in July 2005 that he wouldn't seek re-election. In November 2005, he entered his guilty plea and announced his resignation from Congress. In December 2005, the Intel Committee announced a shuffle of positions resulting from Duke's departure. In April 2006, Hastert announced Duke's replacement on the committee. Nothing in that timeline suggests early intervention by Hastert.
As for Ney, there is some truth to Lahood's assertion, but an incomplete half truth at best. Hastert did push him to resign his chairmanship, but not until after Jack Abramoff's guilty plea. In bears noting that as of right now Ney is still a Member of Congress.
Hastert has stonewalled, resisted, enabled, ignored, participated--well, you get the idea. He is the longest serving GOP Speaker in history. One of the most corrupt Congresses in history is his legacy. He built it. He owns it.
--David Kurtz
The AP has a lengthy investigative report out on Sen. George Allen's personal finances. The piece focuses on stock options that the Virginia Republican failed to report on his Senate financial disclosure report. I'm still working through the article, but a lot of it looks like it plows the same ground as this American Prospect piece which ran last month.
Late Update: We have word that Allen has responded to the AP story. "I don't even know what 'stock options' means. I just made the term up. I have never used that term in my private life." Maybe so, but we understand that the use of "stock options" began in French colonial North Africa, where Allen's mother was raised. We're looking into it.
--David Kurtz
Radioactivity Watch: Speaker Hastert disinvited from October 17th Manhattan fundraiser for Rep. Sweeney (R-NY).
Late Update: I was thinking maybe we should be calling Hastert the Speaker pro tem, a little latinate snark. Too much? Okay, we'll think about it.
--Josh Marshall
What did NRCC Chairman Tom Reynolds know and when did he know it? His former chief of staff, Kirk Fordham, isn't saying. And Fordham's lawyer declined to tell our Election Central.
--David Kurtz
The Navy lawyer whose successful defense of Osama bin Laden's driver led to the Supreme Court's landmark Hamdan decision has been passed over for promotion.
Under the Navy's "up or out" promotion system, the decision forces Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift into early retirement. He learned of the decision about two weeks after this summer's ruling in Hamdan, which was a historic rebuke to the Bush Administration, and not long after the National Law Journal named Swift one of the top 100 lawyers in America.
Military promotion practices are notoriously byzantine and take into account many factors, but I think it's safe to say that this is a disgrace and a black-eye for the Navy.
--David Kurtz
In sign of Foley fallout, new poll shows Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY) in serious re-election trouble.
--David Kurtz
In Foley investigation, FBI interviews former page now serving in Iraq . . .
--David Kurtz
Justin has your Sunday morning Foley roundup . . . plus a former page tells the LA Times he had sex with Foley. And every scandal needs a theme song.
--David Kurtz
