The scandal that wouldn’t die

The investigation surrounding the outing of a CIA official is far from over, even after the vice president’s chief of staff was indicted and forced to resign Friday. The premise, that Valerie Plame’s name was leaked to the press to hurt her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, not only made sense, but it also fits in with tactics the Bush administration had used before: If you can’t dispute the veracity of an opponent’s claims, utterly destroy their credibility by any means necessary.

Interestingly enough, the president himself declared his chief adviser Karl Rove to be the “architect” of his re-election and political strategy when he publicly accepted John Kerry’s concession earlier this year. But even before this, Rove’s use of character assassination-tactics was hardly a secret. Now Rove still remains under investigation for involvement in the leak.

In the past, such tactics worked quite well for Bush, at least in short-term goals. Bush’s primary campaign in 2000 did not completely manage to convince the public that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a decorated war hero and prisoner of war in Vietnam, was unpatriotic. But it worked well enough to sow a deep-rooted seed of mistrust in most voters’ minds, and Bush emerged victorious. To top it, the Bush campaign under Rove’s leadership managed to muddy the waters in the disputed 2000 presidential election — even if Al Gore had emerged as president, he would have been unable to govern because his credibility had been all but destroyed in the process.

In 2004, the Bush team did similar things to John Kerry, attacking not his weaknesses, but those traits the public perceived as his strengths just enough to undermine his standing as war-time leader.
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Bush Picks Alito for Supreme Court

AP wire 3 minutes ago:

President Bush, stung by the rejection of his first choice, nominated conservative judge Samuel Alito on Monday to replace moderate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in a bid to reshape the Supreme Court and mollify his political base.

(…) So consistently conservative, Alito has been dubbed “Scalito” or “Scalia-lite” by some lawyers because his judicial philosophy invites comparisons to conservative Supreme Court Justice

Antonin Scalia. But while Scalia is outspoken and is known to badger lawyers, Alito is polite, reserved and even-tempered.AP

Bush it attempting to replace a moderate woman with a far-right, male candidate. This is going to get ugly.

UN ‘invited’ to inspect Guantanamo Bay

The Pentagon has “invited” the United Nations to inspect its facilities at Guantanamo Bay saying it has “nothing to hide.” BBC

Really? Why then did it take the Pentagon three years to comply with the U.N.’s initial request that was issued back in 2002? Could it be that it had to clean up its act first?

Seeing that even now the UN inspectors will not be able to actually talk to the 500+ inmates who have been held there for years, it certainly seems that way.

Tampa halts pat-downs of sports fans

A Hillsborough judge on Thursday ordered a halt to pat-down searches before Tampa Bay Buccaneers games at Raymond James Stadium.

Hillsborough Circuit Judge Perry A. Little issued the temporary injunction nearly two weeks after high school civics teacher Gordon Johnston, 60, sued the Tampa Sports Authority, claiming its decision to implement the searches was unconstitutional. < SP Times

In other news: Vice President Dick Cheney supports torture of foreign inmates by Americans. link

Seems to me that a re-assesment of priorities is in order.

Political Site of the Day

Some noteworthy accolades of late: Tuesday SebiMeyer.com was the pick of the day at aboutpolitics.com, a Web site that picks one political Web site each day. The site claims to be “in the eighth year of reviewing the best political sites on the Internet!” Thanks!

In other news: I finally figured out why comments on this site had been disabled for the last several days and fixed the problem. Details inside.
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White House strategy: change the subject

The LA Times lays it out quite well: The White House intends to simply change the subject when the unavoidable indictmets are handed down. It’s a tried and true method with the Bush team. The only problem with this becomes obvious when you read this quote:

We’ve got a lot of work to do, and so we don’t have a lot of time to sit back and think about” possible indictments, Bush spokesman Scott McClellan said Wednesday, reflecting the strategy. “We’re focusing on what the American people care most about, and that is winning the war on terrorism, succeeding in Iraq, addressing high energy prices … and helping the people in the Gulf Coast region recover and rebuild.” LA Times

Iraq is a mess, energy prices keep rising, and nobody in their right mind can say the U.S. is winning the war on terror. It’s hard to change the subject to a “better” topic if all topics are equally uncomfortable for the administration.

So good luck with that.

Plame investigation could bring down house of cards

It looks more and more like the Plame investigation has the potential to become the Bush’s administration’s Watergate. By getting a foot in the door of the White House the investigation surrounding the CIA leak may finally be proved that the Bush administration rigged the intelligence it provided to Congress.

There is for example this piece in today’s National Journal that re-opend this very subject. The paper lays out how Cheney, seen here pimping the war on Meet the Press, ordered his chief of staff Lewis Libby to withhold proof that the White House rigged the information. By withholding the information of how the administration originally withheld information from Congress, VP Cheney may have stepped into a trap that is only now springing on him.

It’s complex, but the Plame investigation seems to be the trigger that brings down the house of cards that has been constructed over the past 5 years.

Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources.

Among the White House materials withheld from the committee were Libby-authored passages in drafts of a speech that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered to the United Nations in February 2003 to argue the Bush administration’s case for war with Iraq, according to congressional and administration sources. The withheld documents also included intelligence data that Cheney’s office — and Libby in particular — pushed to be included in Powell’s speech, the sources said. National Journal

2,000 dead American soldiers: Why?

This has got to be one of the best opinion cartoons I’ve ever seen. Mike Lukovich composed the question on everybody’s mind out of the names of the dead.

(click for full scale image)

Exxon Mobil posts record quarterly profit of $9.9 billion

Is this fair?

Exxon Mobil Corp. on Thursday posted a quarterly profit of $9.9 billion, its biggest ever and one of the largest in U.S. corporate history, as it raked in a bonanza from soaring oil and gas prices. Reuters

Mier’s withdraws nomination to Supreme Court

Just in case you’ve been living under a rock: Harriet Miers has withdrawn her nomination to the Supreme Court this morning.

Of course her withdrawal doesn’t mean the next nomination will be any better. In fact it’s going to be even more tricky now for Bush to to nominate someone who can be confirmed by both far right conservatives, moderate Republicans (I am told there are some) and Democrats without them losing face. It’s going to be a tough stunt to pull off after this debacle.

But the real question is why the White House waited 24 days of criticized and ridiculed only for the nomination to be withdrawn. It certainly did not help Bush’s approval ratings and only got more embarrassing as time went on.

Mier’s letter of withdrawal here.

Full indictments ahead

For several days now hints have been dropped that today indictments in the Plame investigation are to be expected. Now it seems that such indictments could go even higher up in the White House’s pecking order than Karl Rove, potentially all the way up to VP Dick Cheney himself.

Cheney’s “problem” is that his chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby testified he first heard the name “Plame” and her identity as CIA operative from the press. But as notes taken by Libby prove, Cheney himself informed Libby that Valerie Plame was a CIA operative. This occurred well before the name “Plame” hit any newspaper’s pages and weeks before any of the reporters involved started asking questions concerning Plame. (New York Times story with all the details here.)

It is obvious that Libby’s original testimony in front of a federal grand jury and his own notes are contradictory. An indictment of Libby is therefore almost to be expected and he may face charges of perjury.

But it also means the vice president himself could be indicted as the grand jury now has proof, provided through Libby’s own notes, that Cheney fed Libby classified information that eventually found its way to the press.

President Bush has publicly stated he’d fire anybody who leaked the name “Plame.” So is he going to be forced to fire his own VP, along with a considerable number of White House staffers?

Even if it will not come to that this whole affair could not come at a worse time for the Bush administration. Key Republican members of Congress are facing unrelated criminal investigations, Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers is hitting one snag after another and the U.S. death toll in Iraq is expected to hit 2,000 any day now. And all that little more than one year away from the 2006 midterm election.

Rosa Parks dies at 92

Rosa Parks, a black seamstress whose refusal to relinquish her seat to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery, Ala., almost 50 years ago grew into a mythic event that helped touch off the civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s, died (today) in Detroit. She was 92 years old.

(…) For her act of defiance, Mrs. Parks was arrested, convicted of violating the segregation laws and fined $10. In response, blacks in Montgomery boycotted the buses for nearly 13 months while mounting a successful Supreme Court challenge to the Jim Crow law that enforced their second-class status on the public bus system. New York Times

Journalist Convicted of Blasphemy in Afghanistan

Let freedom ring (sic):

For the first time since the fall of the Taliban’s Islamic government four years ago, a journalist has been convicted by a Kabul court under the country’s blasphemy laws.

Ali Mohaqiq Nasab, the editor of “Women’s Rights,” a monthly magazine for women, was sentenced on Saturday to two years in prison by Kabul’s primary court. The sentence will automatically be reviewed on appeal. New York Times:

arrest warrant issued for DeLay

Oh, the irony. In past election cycles the GOP has stooped to new lows in terms of smear campaigns. Even GOP candidates like Sen. John McCain, a decorated POW, were attacked for not being “patriotic.” Here’s a poster Democrats could use in 2006: GOP bigwig DeLay’s mug shot.

A Texas court issued a warrant Wednesday for former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to appear for booking, where he is likely to face the fingerprinting and photo mug shot he had hoped to avoid.

Bail was initially set at $10,000 as a routine step before his first court appearance on conspiracy and money laundering charges. Travis County court officials said DeLay was ordered to appear at the Fort Bend County jail for booking. AP

Bill Gates dumps dollar for euro

Bill Gates openly stated he is pulling out of the dollar and is instead investing in euros. Microsoft’s co-founder has made many mistakes in the past (I write this on an Apple computer, so I may be biased), but this is a wise move, indeed. He’s probably not the last one to pull out of the U.S. currency.

Bill Gates, whose net worth of $46.6 billion makes him the world’s richest person, is betting against the U.S. dollar.

“I’m short the dollar,” Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corp., told Charlie Rose in an interview late yesterday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “The ol’ dollar, it’s gonna go down.”

Gates’s concern that widening U.S. budget and trade deficits are undermining the dollar was echoed in Davos by policymakers including European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

The dollar fell 21 percent against a basket of six major currencies from the start of 2002 to the end of last year. The trade deficit swelled to a record $609.3 billion last year and total U.S. government debt rose 8.7 percent to $7.62 trillion in the past 12 months.

“It is a bit scary,” Gates said. “We’re in uncharted territory when the world’s reserve currency has so much outstanding debt.” Bloomberg

Update:This particular post generated so many links from other sites that a lot of spam was hitting the comments, crashing the comments on all other posts. I had no other choice but to disable comment posting on this entry.

Sometimes waiting pays off

An election that occurred four weeks ago is also still grabbing headlines. The question of who will emerge as new chancellor following the German general election has been settled — and it’s a woman — but the terms under which the new “grand coalition” will operate still have to be reached. The election managed to prove that democracy can be messy and take time, but it works as long as all parties involved are committed to it.

The long trek toward a new government started in May when Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s party, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), lost a regional election in Germany’s most populated state, North Rhine Westphalia (NRW).

The left-leaning SPD has always received solid support from NRW, as the area includes many industrial areas and accounts for nearly a fifth of Germany’s gross domestic product. This time, the result was disastrous for the SPD. It only garnered 37.1 percent of the vote, the party’s worst result in the area in 50 years. Unpopular economic reforms that cut social benefits to make them economically feasible were blamed. The cuts had been aimed at lowering the nation’s unemployment figures and making its budget feasible, but all fallout was directed squarely at Schröder’s leadership and voters in NRW used the election to send a message.
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Guardian: Bush told Blair of ‘going beyond Iraq,’ targeting Saudi Arabia, Iran and others

George (W) Bush told Tony Blair shortly before the invasion of Iraq that he intended to target other countries, including Saudi Arabia, which, he implied, planned to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
Mr Bush said he “wanted to go beyond Iraq in dealing with WMD proliferation, mentioning in particular Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan,” according to a note of a telephone conversation between the two men on January 30 2003. Guardian

‘Terrorist’ du jour: White House correspondent Helen Thomas

In a twist that was surreal even for the Bush White House, longtime correspondent Helen Thomas was accused of being a terrorist.

Transcript inside. (Or just wait for it to come up on the Daily Show next week)
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Business as usual until the end

The question is, how long can the Bush administration keep this up?

Karl Rove nosed his Jaguar out of the garage at his home in Northwest Washington in the predawn gloom, starting another day in which he would be dealing with a troubled Supreme Court nomination, posthurricane reconstruction and all the other issues that come across the desk of President Bush’s most influential aide.

But Mr. Rove’s first challenge on Wednesday morning came before he cleared his driveway: how to get past the five television crews and the three photographers waiting for him. He flashed his blinding high beams into the camera lenses and sped by.

That is the way things are for the Bush White House these days. The routines are the same. But everything, in the glare of the final stages of a criminal investigation that has reached to the highest levels of power in Washington, is different.
New York Times

Past fumbles already stopped Bush’s Social Security “reforms” before it even got onto the Senate floor. Midterm elections are little over a year ago. I very much doubt it can keep up appearances that long.

The saddest part, from the administrations point of view, is still that they had it all. White House, Congress and even a shot at rigging the Supreme Court to be leaning conservative for years to come. Instead it over-reached and ignored rules wherever it saw fit. Now that it stands the risk of losing most of its power the administration has nobody to blame but itself.

BNN: Bush announces Iraq exit strategy employing U.S. suicide bombers

President George W. Bush today outlined a new strategy for Iraq that was no longer relying on “conventional military strategy” to win the war. Speaking in the Rose Garden at the White House Bush said that his top advisers were in agreement: U.S. armed forces were “dropping like flies” due to suicide bombers. The new strategy would therefore call for U.S. military to also be deployed as suicide bombers.

“It’s the only way we can win this,” Bush said. “(Secretary of Defense Donald) Rumsfeld wanted a fighting force as small as possible. This works.” He then added that it would also help with veterans’ benefits. “We have been slowly cutting away at the folk’s benefits. We did so in quiet. This way is more efficient.” (Veterans’ care lacking at best)

Speaking to BNN after the press event, longtime military analyst Chuck N. Awe said the strategy may work. “Let’s face it,” Awe said, “it makes more sense than past strategies concerning Iraq.”

White House adviser Karl Rove added the president himself had tested the equipment to be used for suicide bombings during last year’s election. His revelation that the president had worn such equipment during the presidential debates finally put an end to speculation what the bump on Bush’s back had been. (Bush wired again during second debate?)

Rove said, “It is true that Dub… that the president was talking to me when he said ‘let me finish.’ He wasn’t doing too well and was afraid I’d start pushing buttons in order to take (John F.) Kerry out.”

PS: Satire!

‘al-Qaeda’s letter’ outlines strategy to topple new Iraq

US intelligence released the full text of a letter sent from Ayman al-Zawahiri to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Notably the letter enumerates four goals al-Qaida wants to achieve in order to win Iraq for good:

The first stage: Expel the Americans from Iraq.

The second stage: Establish an Islamic authority or amirate, then develop it and support it until it achieves the level of a caliphate- over as much territory as you can to spread its power in Iraq, i.e., in Sunni areas, is in order to fill the void stemming from the departure of the Americans, immediately upon their exit and before un-Islamic forces attempt to fill this void, whether those whom the Americans will leave behind them, or those among the un-Islamic forces who will try to jump at taking power.

There is no doubt that this amirate will enter into a fierce struggle with the foreign infidel forces, and those supporting them among the local forces, to put it in a state of constant preoccupation with defending itself, to make it impossible for it to establish a stable state which could proclaim a caliphate, and to keep the Jihadist groups in a constant state of war, until these forces find a chance to annihilate them.

The third stage: Extend the jihad wave to the secular countries neighboring Iraq.

The fourth stage: It may coincide with what came before: the clash with Israel, because Israel was established only to challenge any new Islamic entity.

Al-Qaida has a strategy for Iraq. Would be nice if the U.S. government had one too. Of course the strategy al-Qaida now outlines would be impossible if the U.S. had not gone in and toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime, thereby creating a power vacuum.

The letter also points out that al-Qaida itself perceives the real danger to al-Qaida leaders not to come from U.S. forces, but from the Pakistani army in tribal areas in Pakistan’s border territories with Afghanistan. This is the area that was hit by a massive earthquake over the weekend.

Full letter as PDF available here: link

Torturing international relations

You’d think a self-proclaimed fan of freedom such as President George W. Bush would be onboard when it came to banning torture. But his recent threat to veto a bill that would effectively ban U.S. personnel from engaging in torture is proof that the president is trying to keep doors open that should never have been opened in the first place.

Prisoners released from the internment camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have repeatedly alleged they were mistreated. Most of the inmates of Guantanamo Bay have been held for several years without access to a lawyer and even without formally being charged. This flies in the face of the U.S. Bill of Rights, but since the camp is conveniently located away from American soil, the Bush administration argues it does not apply.

Amnesty International, the Red Cross and other human rights groups have been largely stonewalled in their attempt to corroborate reports of torture. Access to the facility is so limited that even the total number of inmates remains disputed. As of June, the number is said to be around 520.

In conjunction with the well-known pictures of inmates being mistreated in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, reports of cruel conditions or full-blown torture gain in credibility. The death of at least one “ghost,” a prisoner without documentation held by U.S. intelligence, further backs up the claim that the United States may be involved in torturing inmates in locations such as Guantanamo Bay and secret prisons in other locations.

The existence of such secret prisons and the method of handing over prisoners to foreign governments, which then do the “dirty work” on our government’s behalf, are also becoming more and more credible. One case of such “torture tourism” is Maher Arar, a 35-year-old Canadian engineer who claims to have been “apprehended” while switching planes in New York. He was then deported to Syria where he was held for 10 months and tortured. The New York Times has corroborated most of his claims, which begs the question of whether this was an isolated case.

Up to now, the Bush administration has been successful at keeping its hesitation to ban torture out of the public view. But Bush is threatening to veto a bill solely because an amendment attached to the bill would ban U.S. personnel from engaging in practices deemed “cruel, inhumane or degrading.”

The bill’s amendment was authored under the leadership of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, and was passed by an impressive 90-9 vote in the Senate despite Bush’s veto threat.
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The story so far

Today’s New York Times boils it down for us:

The conservative uproar over Ms. Miers underscores how difficult it has been for Mr. Bush to pull his own party together as he faces a variety of problems on other fronts: his administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina; a leak investigation involving his chief political adviser, Karl Rove; the indictment of Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, who was the House majority leader; and, most recently, the decision by a top Justice Department nominee to withdraw amid questions over his ties to a Republican lobbyist accused of fraud.

Only a week ago, Republicans were saying they looked forward to a new Supreme Court nominee because it would give them something to rally around, providing a welcome distraction from the Bush administration’s problems. But the nomination of Ms. Miers only served to roil a party that is already divided over domestic matters like Social Security and how to pay to rebuild the Gulf Coast.
New York Times

The emperor’s new pants are on fire

President George W. Bush not only extended his stay at the White House during the general election last year, his party also managed to increase its majority hold in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. It was an impressive feat, and the administration must have thought it could do no wrong with such an overwhelming hold on the nation’s power centers. But following a number of indictments, ongoing scandals and the already disastrous yet quickly deteriorating situation in Iraq, the GOP has successfully done what Democrats couldn’t manage in last year’s election: illustrate the shortcomings ranging from trivial to catastrophic within the administration.

The situation in Iraq, for example, continues to spin out of control. It’s been doing so ever since Bush prematurely proclaimed “mission accomplished” in May 2003, but during the election the GOP successfully convinced the public the “liberal media” was focusing on the bad news while ignoring progress being made.

Now with the death toll of American soldiers alone passing 1,900 with no end in sight, the president himself recently warned tough times lay ahead. This was little more than an acknowledgment of what his military advisers had been saying for months.

The public is now more aware of the fact that it was the president’s own insistence that put American soldiers in Iraq. It is also increasingly aware that while Bush told his opponent Al Gore during a televised debate in 2000 he did not believe U.S. forces should engage in “nation building” unless a clear exit strategy was laid out in advance, his insistence to “stay the course” and lack of an exit strategy continue to make American troops a target.

In the 2000 election Bush vowed to “restore honor” to the White House, yet it is becoming clearer by the day that a top adviser within the White House leaked the identity of a CIA operative in order to undermine the credibility of a political opponent.

Federal auditors also ruled Friday it was illegal for Bush aides to pay “journalists” for favorable coverage, a tactic the administration repeatedly employed while attempting to drum up support for its policies.

In 1992 and 1994, the call to restore order to what was publicly perceived as a dysfunctional government helped Republicans take power of the House and Senate for the first time in decades. Democrats now have the potential to take a similar route to regain power in next year’s midterm elections.
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