Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
Not long ago, after Supreme Court Justice David Souter supported the seizure of private property in the Kelo decision, a collection of activists decided to take Souter at his word and exercise eminent domain on his house in Weare, New Hampshire in order to build a hotel. Freestar Media wanted to bring the foolishness of Kelo to Souter's doorstep -- literally. And despite Souter's popularity among his fellow New Hampshire citizens, they have surprisingly looked at Freestar's efforts with understanding, if not outright support[...]I don't know what sort of precedent there is for this sort of blowback on a Supreme Court Justice, but it's strangely exhilarating.
How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities - but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.
WASHINGTON, (AP) -- Democratic Sen. John Kerry urged the White House on Friday to release "in their entirety" all documents and memos from Supreme Court nominee John Roberts' tenure in two Republican administrations.Is this guy serious? This is the guy that allowed his candidacy for the Presidency to be wrecked because he didn't want people to see his own records ---including the awful truth that George W. Bush was a better student than he was.
"We cannot do our duty if either Judge Roberts or the Bush administration hides elements of his professional record," said the Massachusetts senator who was his party's presidential candidate last year.
Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper said Sunday that Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, told him Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and that Lewis Libby, chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, confirmed that piece of information.What does this have to do with the State Department memo?
[...] it turns out a key portion of a two-year-old State Department memo that is now at the center of the controversy was classified — and that could mean leaking it was a crime.No, no: this is a news report, see. There's no editorializing here at all. And how did this memo make it all the way to "the center of the controversy"? Because CBS News and the other subsidiaries of al-Jazeera say so. Beeyotch. But don't miss the non sequitur that comes in at the second-to-last paragraph:
At the time the State Department wrote its memo, the administration's key rationale for war in Iraq was crumbling. No weapons of mass destruction had been found and some key intelligence used to make the administration's case had proven false. An internal war raged inside the administration over who was to blame.
Karl Rove has admitted to discussing Wilson's wife with at least one reporter. But Rove's attorney says that the first time Rove saw — or even heard about the state department memo — was when investigators showed it to him.But what does Karl Rove have to do with anything else in the story? So far, the only person we know for sure that this classified State Department memo was delivered to was the fucking Secretary of State himself ---the great, untouchable Colin Powell. I mean, why would Rove be walking around with a secret State Department memo? That was what Powell was doing! Go look it up in the Los Angeles Times:
The memo was sent by State Department officials to then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who according to news reports has testified before the grand jury. Powell had the memo with him on Air Force One when President Bush traveled to Africa on July 7, 2003, the day after Wilson's piece was published, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation.Hmmm. I dunno. Maybe it was Colin Fucking Powell who leaked Plame's name. Is anybody thinking of that possibility? Maybe. They're thinking of lots of things (my emphasis added):
What happened on Air Force One has been of interest to prosecutors, who want to know whether anyone who saw the memo learned Plame's identity and told it to journalists.
A State Department analyst who had attended the meeting at which the CIA decided to dispatch Wilson to Africa to check out the story kept the notes from that session, the former official said. The notes mentioned that Wilson's wife had suggested sending Wilson.See? You knew that this had to somehow be tied back to the White House and, of course, the Architect. Powell may not be responsible for any leaks because the White House handled the memos at some point. The custodians of the chain are stirring now!
After getting [Deputy Secretary of State Richard] Armitage's request, the State Department's then-intelligence chief, Carl Ford, ordered the original memo — along with the analyst's notes about that meeting — to be sent to Powell, the former official said. Ordinarily, the memo would have been transmitted directly to Powell over the State Department's secure communications lines. But because Powell was traveling with Bush, the memo was transmitted via the White House operations center.
Because both documents were classified, it would have been necessary for someone on the plane to sign for having received them from the White House operations center, the former official said. But once someone signed for them, the document could have been passed around freely on the plane among senior officials who had security clearances.Yeah, that's true. So wouldn't it be neat to know whether Karl Rove was on Air Force One that day and actually saw the memo? Let's find out.
Security forces in the Sudanese capital manhandled U.S. officials and reporters traveling with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, marring her round of congratulatory meetings with leaders of the new unified government. Rice demanded an apology, and got it.What the hell? They say that NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell got muscled out of the room, too.
“It makes me very angry to be sitting there with their president and have this happen,” she said. “They have no right to push and shove.”
Rice made her remarks to reporters after she and her entourage boarded an airplane to fly from the capital to a refugee camp in the Darfur region. At the camp, she said the United States would hold the Sudanese government to account if it fails to end the refugee crisis.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the Sudanese foreign minister responded to Rice’s demand for an apology by telephoning her aboard the plane to express regret for the incidents at the ultra-high-security residence of Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir.
Twice, Sudanese guards’ hostility toward members of Rice’s entourage devolved into shouts and shoving.
As Rice’s motorcade arrived at the residence, armed guards slammed the gate shut before three vehicles could get in, including those carrying Rice’s interpreter and other State Department officials who were supposed to attend her meeting with el-Bashir.
After protests, the officials were eventually allowed in. But guards repeatedly pushed and pulled Rice senior adviser Jim Wilkinson, and at one point he was shoved into a wall.
“Diplomacy 101 says you don’t rough your guests up,” Wilkinson said later.
The NYT editorial [see here -- TP] notes that while Time Magazine reporter Matthew Cooper was able to provide testimony and avoid jail because of a "specific waiver" of confidentiality from Rove, Miller "says she has not received any such thing from her sources." It also says that "coerced waivers of confidentiality are meaningless."So, basically, Judy Miller is with the CIA. Or Halliburton. I'm not sure which. But she's a pariah of some kind among the Left.
But we don't actually know that the waivers were coerced, and we don't know why, if Rove gave Cooper a "specific [noncoerced] waiver," Miller could not obtain one as well.
How are we to believe Miller, given her past track record, in misrepresenting her sources and their agendas, at great cost to this country? When the people of the United States were reading Miller's articles during the months leading up to the war with Iraq, reasonable people could have concluded that Miller had real, unbiased, credible and diverse sources. Eventually, we learned from an internal memo from Miller herself, that most of her reporting of WMD evidence came from an Iraqi exile with low general credibility who was hoping to lead a post-Saddam regime.
In the beginning of Wednesday's Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing for Bush nominee John G. Roberts Jr. Chairman Orrin Hatch praised Democrat Sen. Charles Schumer of New York for asking "intelligent" questions, but then Hatch switched gears.How many punk rock points does Hatch get for that?
"Some [of his questions] I totally disagree with," Hatch of Utah said. "Some I think are dumbass questions, between you and me. I am not kidding you. I mean, as much as I love and respect you, I just think that's true."
A stunned Schumer asked if he heard the chairman correctly, to which Hatch said yes. Again, Schumer asked Hatch if he would like to "revise and extend his remark," congressional speak for change his mind.
A former trial attorney, Hatch replied: "No, I am going to keep it exactly the way it is. I mean, I hate to say it. I mean, I feel badly saying it between you and me. But I do know dumbass questions when I see dumbass questions."
Because it is our destiny.
I want you to hear what Senator Dianne Feinstein, of California, said the other day. She said, "We have scrubbed the area and have no reported abuses." She was speaking about the Patriot Act. I want you to remember that the next time you hear someone make an unfair criticism of this important, good law. The Patriot Act hasn't diminished American liberties; it has helped to defend American liberties.As I've written here before, the craphounds on the Left want you to think that Bush is destroying the Constitution. What fucking nonsense. He hasn't done enough to crack down on infiltrators and subversives.
So, with things not going well for the White House in its efforts to manage the drip-drip-drip damage from the Plame outing, something needed to be done to redirect attention away from the White House’s role in a national security breach towards something else. And after telling reporters late last week that his Supreme Court choice would be named sometime between July 26th and July 28th to allow the Senate a minimal amount of time as possible to go through the candidate’s background in advance of the court’s opening session in the first week of October, the White House has decided to push up Bush’s announcement of his Supreme Court selection to tonight to take attention away from the Plame outing.I didn't know, of course, that the President had actually telegraphed his moves and motivations to the press like that, but whatever. By unconscionably burdening the Senate with an extra ten days to deliberate on their confirmation or denial of his nomination, Bush has once again proved that he is, in fact, Adolf Hitler.
And could the possibility that Plame's cover has long been blown explain why the CIA was unconcerned about assigning a one-time covert agent to a job that had her walking in and out of CIA headquarters every day? Could it explain why the Wilsons were sufficiently indiscrete to pose in Vanity Fair, and, indeed, to permit Joseph Wilson to pen a highly public op-ed regarding a sensitive mission to which his wife — the covert agent — energetically advocated his assignment? Did they fail to take commonsense precautions because they knew there really was nothing left to protect?And be sure not to miss the link to a .pdf file of that brief. Everybody who's anybody in Big Media signed off on it. Why?
We'd probably know the answers to these and other questions by now if the media had given a tenth of the effort spent manufacturing a scandal to reporting professionally on the underlying facts. And if they deigned to share with their readers and viewers all the news that's fit to print ... in a brief to a federal court.
4) The first one to say that Plame, Wilson's wife, was a secret agent -- a “top-secret operative” -- was David Corn in the left-wing magazine, The Nation, based on his conversations with Joe Wilson. Corn also first raised the idea that a crime had been committed, that people in the Bush administration committed the crime, that they did so not because they had anything against Plame but rather as a bank-shot way to punish Wilson.Hmmm. So far, no word on whether David Corn has been subpoenaed by Pat Fitzgerald.
The heads of departments and agencies with organizations in the Intelligence Community or the heads of such organizations, as appropriate, shall:With a high-profile prima facie case of a possibly illegal disclosure, what choice did DCI George Tenet have? He was already pissed at being used as a fall guy over the Iraqi WMD issue and may have seen the referral of the case as a means of hitting back. But, better still, he was required by statute to go to the Department of Justice. And he did, although only informally, it seems, just days after Novak's column appeared. It wasn't until a couple of months later that Tenet officially requested an investigation. Which is what's been going on ever since.
(a) Report to the Attorney General possible violations of federal criminal laws by employees and of specified federal criminal laws by any other person as provided in procedures agreed upon by the Attorney General and the head of the department or agency concerned, in a manner consistent with the protection of intelligence sources and methods, as specified in those procedures;
(b) In any case involving serious or continuing breaches of security, recommend to the Attorney General that the case be referred to the FBI for further investigation[...]
When Novak told a CIA spokesman he was going to write a column about Wilson's wife, the spokesman urged him not to print her name "for security reasons," according to one CIA official. Intelligence officials said they believed Novak understood there were reasons other than Plame's personal security not to use her name, even though the CIA has declined to confirm whether she was undercover.It's kind of hard not to notice that the CIA is itself confirming here that Plame was with the Company ---right down to the details of her future assignments. Maybe Patrick Fitzgerald should look into that, too.
Novak said in an interview last night that the request came at the end of a conversation about Wilson's trip to Niger and his wife's role in it. "They said it's doubtful she'll ever again have a foreign assignment," he said. "They said if her name was printed, it might be difficult if she was traveling abroad, and they said they would prefer I didn't use her name. It was a very weak request. If it was put on a stronger basis, I would have considered it."
After his conversation with Mr. Cooper, The Associated Press reported Friday, Mr. Rove sent an e-mail message to Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser, saying he "didn't take the bait" when Mr. Cooper suggested that Mr. Wilson's criticisms had been damaging to the administration.Huh? What's Rove saying here? That poor old Matt Cooper was trying to elicit an unguarded remark from him about the President's detractors ---and the Architect wouldn't go all the way?