Fold, Spindle, Mutilate

According to a CBS News poll released last Monday, the “favorability” rating of Vice-President Dick Cheney has sunk to a new low. How low a low? Well, that evening, Jon Stewart, as part of the buildup to the “Daily Show” star’s going global on Oscar Sunday, was the guest on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” When King barked out the number—“Cheney eighteen per cent”—Stewart, citing another well-known poll result, observed solemnly, “Four out of five dentists surveyed recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum.” That is, the proportion of Americans who have a favorable opinion of Cheney is outweighed by the proportion of dentists who recommend sugary gum for their patients who chew gum.

The Vice-Presidency isn’t what it used to be. No one bothered to rate the favorability of Garret Hobart, Charles Dawes, or Alben Barkley. But the clout of that once legendarily insignificant office has been growing for half a century. In his time, Walter Mondale was history’s most powerful Vice-President. So was Al Gore in his. But Cheney is an order of magnitude different. For a number of reasons—his bureaucratic ruthlessness, his domineering influence over a feckless President who seems fated to remain forever inexperienced, his will to power combined with an alleged lack of ambition to succeed his nominal boss—he is universally agreed to be one of the two most powerful officials in the executive branch of the federal government, though it is not universally agreed which one. Truly, this is the Bush-Cheney Administration, in alphabetical order. The hyphen looks like a coy equal sign—not the towhook it was for Clinton-Gore, Reagan-Bush, Carter-Mondale, and Nixon-Agnew, to say nothing of Hoover-Curtis and Roosevelt-Garner.

That same CBS News poll put President Bush’s favorability rating at twenty-nine per cent, also a personal worst. It would be natural to attribute the eleven-point gap to the unpleasantness two weeks earlier at the Armstrong ranch, in Texas. Among respectable commentators, the predominant view of that unfortunate occurrence has been that it was much ado about not very much. As scandals go, this was, like the Vice-President’s lunchtime refreshment, small beer. An accident, nothing more. A private matter, essentially.

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posted @ 11:37 PM EDT

President Bush’s domestic policy advisor, Claude A. Allen, has resigned to spend more time with his family, the White House said.

Bush's latest success came as part of a supposed "concession" to Congress that would grant two new Republican-controlled seven-member subcommittees narrow oversight of Bush's warrantless wiretapping of Americans.

While "moderate" Republican senators - Mike DeWine of Ohio, Olympia Snowe of Maine, and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska - hailed the plan as a retreat by the White House, the deal actually blesses Bush's authority to bypass the courts in spying on Americans and imposes on him only a toothless congressional review process.

Indeed, the congressional plan may make matters worse, broadening the permissible scope of Bush's wiretaps to include Americans deemed to be "working in support of a terrorist group or organization."

Given Bush's record of stretching words to his advantage - and his claim that anyone who isn't "with us" is with the terrorists - the vague concept of "working in support" could open almost any political critic of the Bush administration to surveillance.

Plus, the only check on abuses would be the closed-door oversight work of the seven-member panels, which would only be informed of a warrantless wiretap after it had been in place for 45 days. Republicans also would have four of the seven seats on each subcommittee and any dissent from the minority Democrats would be kept secret.

In other words, the plan would let Bush and his Republican congressional loyalists conduct wiretaps of anyone whose activities might be called supportive of terrorists, while any Democratic critic would be muzzled from saying anything publicly under penalty of law.

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posted @ 10:56 PM EDT

President George W. Bush's defeat over the Dubai ports deal has put him in the weakest political position of his presidency.

Some of his former supporters are now questioning whether the president can regain the initiative during his remaining three years in the White House.

"If this was a European parliamentary system, it would have been a vote of no-confidence," said Ed Rollins, a top political adviser to President Ronald Reagan and now a Republican strategist.

An AP/Ipsos poll on Friday found that confidence in the president continued to fall, even among Republicans. Two-thirds of Americans said the country was now on the wrong track, up from 61 per cent a month ago, and 77 per cent believed a civil war would break out in Iraq.

On Thursday, Dubai Ports World, the state-owned company which had acquired five US port terminal facilities as part of its $6.8bn purchase of P&O, was ordered by the ruler of Dubai to divest the ports in the face of congressional opposition.

That may not be enough to end the controversy, however. A person close to the deal said last night that DP World would not necessarily sell all of its interest in P&O's US assets and could retain as much as 49 per cent.

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posted @ 09:34 PM EDT

-- Tim Grieve
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posted @ 03:49 AM EDT

Last Thursday morning, in one of the smaller function rooms at the National Press Club, in Washington, an ad-hoc bunch of amateurs, once-weres, might-bes, and goo-goos floated an initiative that, with a little luck, could enable our ramshackle republic to take a long, and long overdue, step toward a more perfect union. The idea behind their initiative is this: that the President of the United States should be elected by the people of the United States.

This idea is neither new nor outlandish, but for most of the past couple of centuries it has been dismissed as unachievable. The Electoral College is enshrined in the Constitution itself, so getting rid of it would require the concurrence of two-thirds of both houses of Congress plus three-quarters of the state legislatures. That’s not going to happen.

But maybe it doesn’t have to. The promoters of the Campaign for a National Popular Vote, as they’re calling themselves, have come up with an elegant finesse. Instead of trying to change the Constitution, they propose to apply it, one bit in particular: Article II, Section 1, which instructs each state to “appoint” its Presidential electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Here’s how the plan would work. One by one, legislature by legislature, state law by state law, individual states would pledge themselves to an interstate compact under which they would agree to award their electoral votes to the nationwide winner of the popular vote. The compact would take effect only when enough states had joined it to elect a President—that is, enough to cast a majority of the five hundred and thirty-eight electoral votes. (Theoretically, as few as eleven states could do the trick.) And then, presto! All of a sudden, the people of all fifty states plus the District of Columbia are empowered to elect their President the same way they elect their governors, mayors, senators, and congressmen. We still have the Electoral College, with its colorful eighteenth-century rituals, but it can no longer do any damage. It becomes a tourist attraction, like the British monarchy.

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posted @ 01:27 AM EDT

For three days in October of 2003, Tom DeLay left his duties as majority leader of the House of Representatives and worked out of the Texas state capitol, in Austin. During the previous year, DeLay had led his Republican colleagues there in an effort to redraw the boundaries of the state’s congressional districts. For more than a century, congressional redistricting had taken place once every decade, after the national census, but the Texas Republicans were trying to redraw lines that had been approved just two years earlier. Several times during the long days of negotiating sessions, DeLay personally shuttled proposed maps among House and Senate offices in Austin. Once, when reporters glimpsed DeLay striding through the corridors of the state capitol, they asked him about his role in the negotiations. “I’m a Texan trying to get things done,” he said.

Before the end of the month, the Republicans had pushed their plan through both houses, and it paid off in November of 2004. The Texas delegation in the House of Representatives went from seventeen to fifteen in favor of the Democrats, to twenty-one to eleven in favor of the Republicans. Martin Frost was the third-ranking Democrat in the House when the Republicans eliminated the district he had represented for twenty-six years. “I knew what DeLay was doing,” Frost told me. “I didn’t like it, but he wasn’t just trying to get me, he was trying to get as many Dems as possible. I went ahead and ran in one of the other districts. It was almost impossible to win, and I didn’t. But I went out with my boots on.”


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posted @ 01:20 AM EDT

illustration: Mirko Ilic

The Lou Dobbs show, CNN, 2/22/06:

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): The oil-rich United Arab Emirates is a major investor in The Carlyle Group, the private equity investment firm where President Bush’s father once served as senior adviser and is a who’s who of former high-level government officials. Just last year, Dubai International Capital, a government-backed buyout firm, invested in an $8 billion Carlyle fund.

Another family connection, the president’s brother, Neil Bush, has reportedly received funding for his educational software company from the UAE investors. A call to his company was not returned.

Then there is the cabinet connection. Treasury Secretary John Snow was chairman of railroad company CSX/. After he left the company for the White House, CSX sold its international port operations to Dubai Ports World for more than a billion dollars.

In Connecticut today, Snow told reporters he had no knowledge of that CSX sale. “I learned of this transaction probably the same way members of the Senate did, by reading about it in the newspapers.”

Another administration connection, President Bush chose a Dubai Ports World executive to head the U.S. Maritime Administration. David Sanborn, the former director of Dubai Ports’ European and Latin American operations, he was tapped just last month to lead the agency that oversees U.S. port operations.

The hideous complexity of President Bush's prescription-drug program has reduced elderly Americans—and their children—to tears of bewildered frustration. The multiple options when you sign up, each with its own multiple ceilings and co-payments; the second round of red tape when you actually want to acquire some pills; the ludicrously complex and arbitrary standards of eligibility, which play a cruel and pointless game of hide-and-seek as they lurch up and down the graph paper like drunks: Suddenly a mystery is solved—so, this must be what he means by "compassionate conservatism."

Thus Bush's only major domestic accomplishment in six years as president has not achieved its intended purpose of cementing the affection of senior citizens for the Republican Party. Many Republicans are sobbing with frustration, too. It is one thing to put aside your principles and spend hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on the largest expansion of the welfare state since the Great Society if it is going to help you to win elections (so you can pursue your dream of smaller government). It is another to sell your soul and not get anything for it. No one looks more foolish than a failed cynic.

But, look on the bright side, say the Bushies. The wretched thing does seem to be restraining drug prices and costing the government less than it was supposed to. The current cost estimate is only $678 billion over 10 years. That's down 8 percent from the previous estimate of $737 billion. Cool. But when the prescription-drug benefit was enacted in 2003, it was supposed to cost $400 billion over 10 years. As disenchanted conservative Bruce Bartlett retails in his new book about the Bush presidency, delicately entitled Impostor, there was a mini-scandal and an official investigation when it came out that the administration was hiding its own estimate of $534 billion. When the dust settled, that figure had become $557.7 billion.

Who believes any of these numbers? Do you? I will bet anyone a month's supply of Lipitor, collectible in 2016, that the 10-year bill will be more than $678 billion. Any takers?


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posted @ 03:48 AM EDT

But Bush's passionate defense of the United Arab Emirates and the ports deal inevitably raises questions -- not only about the due diligence of his administration in this instance but about his and his family's long-standing ties to the Persian Gulf sheikdoms, and specifically to the UAE's rulers. His insinuation that skepticism is equivalent to bigotry cannot deflect such concerns, which first arose in the months after the 9/11 attacks.

By now, everyone paying attention to the furor over the Dubai ports deal should be aware of the UAE's mixed record with regard to terror and global security. The Emirates' ruling families formerly maintained close relationships with the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, whose hunting camps in Afghanistan they frequented; two of the 20 hijackers in the 9/11 plot were UAE nationals who used safe houses and banks in Dubai; and the A.Q. Khan nuclear smuggling network also used facilities there to mask its operations. Since 9/11, however, the Emirates have cooperated with U.S. operations against al-Qaida, and their state-owned corporations have eagerly participated in American attempts to improve transportation security.

What seems worrisome even to some who might ultimately accept the Dubai ports deal is the "casual attitude" of the Bush administration in vetting the company, as Sen. Carl Levin put it. Considering the history of Bush entanglement with the oil despots of the Gulf, that lax indulgence was bad policy and worse politics.


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posted @ 03:03 AM EDT

Mr. Santorum preferred to honor a previous engagement more than 100 miles away.
There he told reporters for the first time that "maybe some blame"
for the war's "less than optimal" progress belonged to the White House.
This change of heart had nothing to do with looming revelations of how the new
Iraqi "democracy" had instituted Saddam-style torture chambers. Or
with the spiraling investigations into the whereabouts of nearly $9 billion
in unaccounted-for taxpayers' money from the American occupation authority.
Or with the latest spike in casualties. Mr. Santorum was instead contemplating
his own incipient political obituary written the day before: a poll showing
him 16 points down in his re-election race. No sooner did he stiff Mr. Bush
in Pennsylvania than he did so again in Washington, voting with a 79-to-19 majority
on a Senate resolution begging for an Iraq exit strategy. He was joined by all
but one (Jon Kyl) of the 13 other Republican senators running for re-election
next year. They desperately want to be able to tell their constituents that
they were against the war after they were for it.

They know the voters have decided the war is over, no matter what symbolic
resolutions are passed or defeated in Congress nor how many Republicans try
to Swift-boat Representative John Murtha, the marine hero who wants the troops
out. A USA Today/CNN/Gallup survey last week found that the percentage (52)
of Americans who want to get out of Iraq fast, in 12 months or less, is even
larger than the percentage (48) that favored a quick withdrawal from Vietnam
when that war's casualty toll neared 54,000 in the apocalyptic year of 1970.
The Ohio State political scientist John Mueller, writing in Foreign Affairs ,
found that "if history is any indication, there is little the Bush administration
can do to reverse this decline." He observed that Mr. Bush was trying to
channel L. B. J. by making "countless speeches explaining what the effort
in Iraq is about, urging patience and asserting that progress is being made.
But as was also evident during Woodrow Wilson's campaign to sell the League
of Nations to the American public, the efficacy of the bully pulpit is much
overrated."

Mr. Bush may disdain timetables for our pullout, but, hello, there already
is one, set by the Santorums of his own party: the expiration date for a sizable
American presence in Iraq is Election Day 2006. As Mr. Mueller says, the decline
in support for the war won't reverse itself. The public knows progress is not
being made, no matter how many times it is told that Iraqis will soon stand
up so we can stand down.

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posted @ 03:55 PM EDT

If the Times of London today is right and Hadley was Woodward's direct source, that raises a very important question: Was Hadley ordered to leak Plame's name to the press by his boss at the time, Condi Rice? In other words, Rice may not have been Woodward's direct source as she claims - but that doesn't mean she didn't give the order. Remember, as I wrote back in July, Wilson's New York Times op-ed was a direct indictment of Rice, meaning she had a personal motive. And it would be extremely hard to imagine Hadley acting alone with such a coordinated hit job on a CIA officer...Stay tuned.

Posted by David Sirota at 10:44 PM |
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posted @ 03:14 AM EDT

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She defied the Taliban, now secret poet killed by husband

Christina Lamb

SHE risked torture, imprisonment, perhaps even death to study literature and write poetry in secret under the Taliban. Last week, when she should have been celebrating the success of her first book, Nadia Anjuman was beaten to death in Herat, apparently murdered by her husband.


The 25-year-old Afghan had garnered wide praise in literary circles for the book Gule Dudi, or Dark Flower, and was at work on a second volume.

Friends say her family was furious, believing that the publication of poetry by a woman about love and beauty had brought shame on it.

"She was a great poet and intellectual but, like so many Afghan women, she had to follow orders from her husband," Nahid Baqi, her best friend at Herat University, said.

Farid Ahmad Majid Mia, 29, Anjuman's husband, is in police custody after confessing to having slapped her during a row. But he denies murder and claims that his wife committed suicide. The couple had a six-month-old son.

The death of the young writer has shocked a city that prides itself on its artistic heritage. It has also raised uncomfortable questions about how much the position of women in Afghanistan has improved since the fall of the Taliban four years ago.

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posted @ 03:11 AM EDT

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Security adviser named as source in CIA scandal

Michael Smith and Sarah Baxter

THE mysterious source who gave America’s foremost journalist, Bob Woodward, a tip-off about the CIA agent at the centre of one of Washington’s biggest political storms was Stephen Hadley, the White House national security adviser, according to lawyers close to the investigation.

Woodward, the Washington Post reporter who broke the Watergate scandal that forced President Richard Nixon out of office, has refused publicly to divulge the name of his informant without permission, which has thus far been withheld.

The naming of CIA agent Valerie Plame as the wife of Joseph Wilson, the former US ambassador sent to Niger to investigate disputed claims that Saddam Hussein was trying to purchase uranium yellowcake for the manufacture of nuclear weapons, led to the indictment last month of Vice-President Dick Cheney’s top aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, for lying to a grand jury.

It is an offence in America to reveal the identity of a covert agent, although doubts remain about Plame’s precise status.

A spokeswoman for the National Security Council (NSC) denied that Hadley was the journalist’s source. However, in South Korea on Friday during an official visit with President George W Bush, Hadley dodged the question.

“I’ve also seen press reports from White House officials saying that I am not one of his sources,” Hadley said with a smile. Asked if this was a yes or no he replied: “It is what it is.”

A White House official said the national security adviser’s ambiguity was unintentional and repeated that Hadley was not Woodward’s source. But others close to the investigation insisted that he was.

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posted @ 02:54 AM EDT

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Iraq War Debate Eclipses All Other Issues

GOP Flounders as Bush's Popularity Falls; Democrats Struggle for a Voice

By Jonathan Weisman and Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writers

After largely avoiding the subject since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, lawmakers are suddenly confronting the issue of President Bush's handling of the war. The start hasn't been pretty.

Political stunts by both parties have created an air of acrimony that is infecting the parties' entire agendas. The bitterness reached a new high -- or low -- on Friday when House Republicans forced a late-night vote on a resolution for immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces.

The resolution failed, 403 to 3, but only after members nearly came to blows when a GOP newcomer suggested a veteran Democratic military hawk was a coward.

"Iraq is now a cloud over everything," said Stuart Rothenberg, a nonpartisan political analyst specializing in Congress. "It's the 800-pound gorilla in the room."

"I feel like every morning, I wake up, get a concrete block and have to walk around with it all day," said first-term Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who came to the Senate with an ambitious agenda to overhaul Social Security and the tax code. "We can't even address the issues."

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posted @ 02:03 AM EDT

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An Open Letter to Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald

From Former White House Counsel John W. Dean

By John W. Dean
FindLaw.com

Friday 18 November 2005

The Honorable Patrick J. Fitzgerald
Special Counsel
Bond Federal Building
1400 New York Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530

Dear Special Counsel Fitzgerald:

Excuse my being so presumptuous as to send you this open letter, but the latest revelation of the testimony, before the grand jury, by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward has raised some fundamental questions for me.

In your post as Special Counsel, you now have nothing less than authority of the Attorney General of the United States, for purposes of the investigation and prosecution of "the alleged unauthorized disclosure of a CIA employee's identity." (The employee, of course, is Valerie Plame Wilson, a CIA employee with classified status, and the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.) On December 30, 2003, you received a letter from the Deputy Attorney General regarding your powers. On February 6, 2004 you received a letter of further clarification, stating without reservation, that in this matter your powers are "plenary." In effect, then, you act with the power of the Attorney General of the United States.

In light of your broad powers, the limits and narrow focus of your investigation are surprising. On October 28 of this year, your office released a press statement in which you stated that "A major focus of the grand jury investigation was to determine which government officials had disclosed to the media prior to July 14, 2003, information concerning Valerie Wilson's CIA affiliation, and the nature, timing, extent, and purpose of such disclosures, as well as whether any official made such a disclosure knowing that Valerie Wilson's employment by the CIA was classified information."

If, indeed, that is the major focus of your investigation, then your investigation is strikingly limited, given your plenary powers. To be a bit more blunt, in historical context, it is certainly less vigorous an investigation than those of your predecessors who have served as special counsel - men appointed to undertake sensitive high-level investigations when the Attorney General of the United States had a conflict of interest. (Here, it was, of course, the conflict of Attorney General John Ashcroft that led to the chain of events that resulted in your appointment.)

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posted @ 01:52 AM EDT

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Woodward & Washington's 'Tipping Point'

By Robert Parry

In my book, Secrecy & Privilege, I track how the Washington press corps changed from the Watergate/Vietnam era of the 1970s, when journalists took some pride in challenging the powerful, to the Iraq War, when many national news outlets cowered and fawned before a White House that equated skepticism with disloyalty.

This gradual but unmistakable shift in the ethos of Washington journalism marked a hard-fought victory for conservatives who invested billions of dollars over the past three decades in building a media/political machine for gaining as much control as possible of the information flowing through the nation’s capital to the American people.

Journalists who bucked the trend confronted ugly attacks from right-wing media “watchdogs,” almost inevitable betrayal by news executives, and dashed careers. Journalists who played along were rewarded with fame, money and access.

Today, no journalist personifies this transformation more than Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, who made his name unraveling Richard Nixon’s Watergate cover-up but now has been caught misleading the public while protecting the Bush administration’s cover-up of a scheme to smear an Iraq War critic.

Yet the entanglements of the Washington Post’s most famous journalist – and the New York Times star reporter Judith Miller – in advancing propaganda themes from George W. Bush’s White House also have tugged Washington’s Establishment to the edge of what might become a historic tipping point.

Because of the investigation into the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame, the incestuous relationship between big media and the Bush administration has been stripped bare as never before. The exposure has reached a stage where the American people might finally realize that the reality of Washington is much different than they were led to believe.

While conservatives will still complain about the “liberal media,” it’s now clear that the supposed flagships of that “liberal media” – the Washington Post and the New York Times – mostly were sailing in Bush’s press armada. That alignment made sense because the most effective way to protect one’s career was to keep out of the Right’s line of fire.

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posted @ 01:47 AM EDT

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posted @ 01:21 AM EDT

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How the depleted uranium madness is affecting everyday Americans

Radioactive Tank No. 9 comes limping home

by Bob Nichols

"RADIOACTIVE" is stenciled on Abrams tanks in these pictures taken Oct. 13, 2005, in Topeka, Kansas.

Photo: Chris Bayruh

Across the plains of Kansas, destroyed, radioactive
Abrams tanks, perched on railroad flatcars, rolled towards an uncertain
future. Only one thing was certain. They would be radioactive forever.
This would be their everlasting death mask. The Pentagon deceptively
calls it "depleted uranium."

The Abrams tanks are constructed with a layer of radioactive uranium
metal plates. The big tanks fire a giant uranium dart at 2,100 mph,
much faster than an F-16 fighter aircraft, mach III to airplane
pilots and very, very fast to the rest of us.

American taxpayers paid to ship the tanks to Iraq and to return
them for disposal or re-building in the United States. The tanks
are 12 feet wide and weigh a stout 70 tons, or 140,000 pounds.

The enduring vigorous stupidity of the U.S. military pretends
that radiation is one of those things that if you can't see it,
it can't hurt you. They are thoroughly delusional, of course. A
National Academy of Sciences report released June 30, 2005, finds
that there is no safe level of radiation. Any radiation is bad.

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posted @ 12:50 AM EDT

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The Man Who Sold the War

Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war

By JAMES BAMFORD

The road to war in Iraq led through many unlikely places. One of them was a chic hotel nestled among the strip bars and brothels that cater to foreigners in the town of Pattaya, on the Gulf of Thailand.

On December 17th, 2001, in a small room within the sound of the crashing tide, a CIA officer attached metal electrodes to the ring and index fingers of a man sitting pensively in a padded chair. The officer then stretched a black rubber tube, pleated like an accordion, around the man's chest and another across his abdomen. Finally, he slipped a thick cuff over the man's brachial artery, on the inside of his upper arm.

Strapped to the polygraph machine was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan and was now determined to bring down Saddam Hussein. For hours, as thin mechanical styluses traced black lines on rolling graph paper, al-Haideri laid out an explosive tale. Answering yes and no to a series of questions, he insisted repeatedly that he was a civil engineer who had helped Saddam's men to secretly bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The illegal arms, according to al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells, hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest medical facility in Baghdad.

It was damning stuff -- just the kind of evidence the Bush administration was looking for. If the charges were true, they would offer the White House a compelling reason to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. That's why the Pentagon had flown a CIA polygraph expert to Pattaya: to question al-Haideri and confirm, once and for all, that Saddam was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

There was only one problem: It was all a lie. After a review of the sharp peaks and deep valleys on the polygraph chart, the intelligence officer concluded that al-Haideri had made up the entire story, apparently in the hopes of securing a visa.

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posted @ 12:16 AM EDT
The ax begins to fall on the Abramoff gang

As if Republican legislators didn't have enough to worry about these days, what with Bush's plummeting poll numbers, Democrats on the (anti) warpath, grand jury investigations, and daily reports of fraud and death in Iraq, today the long simmering Abramoff lobbying scandal boiled over.

As reported by numerous outlets, Michael P.S. Scanlon, a business associate of Abramoff's, was charged today with conspiring to defraud multiple Native American tribes of millions of dollars.

Salon obtained a copy of the Justice Department filing; you can read it here.

By midafternoon, Roll Call was reporting that Scanlon had already reached a plea agreement with prosecutors and would testify against Abramoff.

But Abramoff and Scanlon aren't likely to be the only ones who take a fall. The Justice Department filing charges that Scanlon did "knowingly conspire, confederate and agree with Lobbyist A [Abramoff]" to "corruptly offer and provide things of value, including money, meals, trips and entertainment to federal public officials in return for agreements to perform official acts benefitting Scanlon, Lobbyist A, and their clients."

Note the plural with respect to "federal public officials." One member of the House of Representatives, widely believed to be Robert Ney, an Ohio Republican, is specifically singled out in the filing, though only under the pseudonym "Representative #1." Ney is known to have attended the infamous golf trip to Scotland in 2002 that was paid for by Abramoff. But Abramoff's net spread very, very wide. As legislators prepare to split town for Thanksgiving, one wonders how many of them are going to have a happy holiday.

-- Andrew Leonard

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posted @ 11:59 PM EDT

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Woodward's disgrace

He was once a great journalist, but his obsession with "access" turned him into a palace courtier and shill for the GOP.

By Joe Conason

Forced to reveal his strange secret about the Valerie Plame case, Bob Woodward has humiliated his trusting bosses at the Washington Post and exposed something rotten at the center of journalism's national elite. By withholding critical information from the Post's editors and pretending to be a neutral observer, Woodward badly compromised the values that he and his newspaper once embodied. A living symbol of the great constitutional role of a free press -- to hold government accountable -- has evidently degenerated into another obedient appendage of rogue officialdom.

With his relentless pursuit of "access," the literary formula that has brought him so much money and fame, Woodward placed book sales above journalism. Boasting of his friendly relationship with the president who facilitated his interviews with administration officials, he now behaves like the journalistic courtiers of the Nixon era.

To those who have observed Woodward's career since the glory of Watergate, including readers of his many bestselling books, the change in his role and outlook have long been obvious. For him, the cultivation of high-ranking sources is the very essence of journalism. And while there is no question that reporters owe a duty of confidentiality to their sources, it is also true that they owe candor to their colleagues and transparency to their readers.

Sadly, Woodward not only served as a silent accomplice of the Bush White House in its attack on Plame and her husband, Joseph Wilson, but went much further by publicly criticizing special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of that attack -- and suggested repeatedly, up to the eve of the indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, that the investigation should be curtailed. Now, instead, his own admission of involvement may have figured in Fitzgerald's indication Friday that he plans to call a new grand jury in the case.

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posted @ 11:48 PM EDT

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The Yes-Man

President Bush sent Porter Goss to the CIA to keep the agency in line. What he’s really doing is wrecking it.

By Robert Dreyfuss

Exactly as intended, Porter Goss has hit the Central Intelligence Agency like a wrecking ball.

The former Florida congressman, who had an undistinguished career as a CIA operations officer in the 1960s, came to the agency in September 2004 after serving seven years as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. With his staff in tow -- a collection of Capitol Hill aides nicknamed “the Gosslings” -- Goss bowled into the CIA’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters, scattering senior officials like so many duckpins. In mid-September, Robert Richer, the newly installed deputy director of operations and a former Near East Division chief, quit in disgust. The newspapers duly reported Richer’s departure. But he is only the tip of a Titanic-sized iceberg.

Since Goss took over, between 30 and 90 senior CIA officials have made their exit, according to various sources, some fleeing into retirement, others taking refuge as consultants. Others, unable to retire, have stayed, but only to mark time at the agency. Morale, already low after several years during which the CIA was accused of a series of intelligence failures related to September 11 and Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, is now at rock-bottom. The agency’s vaunted Near East Division, in particular, which served as the “pointy end of the spear,” as one CIA veteran put it, in simultaneous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the “global war on terror,” has been decimated.

And the agency has been locked down tight: After a decade during which the CIA prided itself on a new openness, shedding some of its legendary obsession with secrecy, neither Goss nor anyone else in the organization is giving interviews or bothering to explain the CIA’s workings.

Appointed to lead the agency in the midst of a heated presidential campaign, Goss’ primary mission, according to numerous former CIA officials -- including some only recently departed -- was to yank Langley onto President Bush’s political team. His immediate goal in 2004 was to block what had been, until then, a stream of damaging leaks of information about CIA intelligence reports that ran contrary to the White House’s rosy optimism about Iraq and U.S. anti-terrorism efforts. More broadly, the Goss team clamped down on dissenting views and radically politicized the CIA’s leadership. Even worse, say former agency officials, Goss has acquiesced in the dismantling of the CIA itself, which has bowed too easily to the supremacy of the new director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, who spent his days in Baghdad contradicting the CIA’s clear-eyed battle reports.

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posted @ 07:40 PM EDT

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posted @ 07:30 PM EDT

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Is American Gun Culture 'Crazy?' Perhaps Not

Germans for the most part dislike firearms, and are taught to lock their doors and rely on the police when faced with an imminent threat. So what's it like for a young German couple living in gun-loving, gun-dependent America? According to this personal account from Germany's Stern magazine, members of the U.S. Immigration an Naturalization Service ought to take care when coming to call!

By Milan Obradovic

Translated By Hartmut Lau

Living in America

We Germans abhor firearms, even for self-defense, but we insist on having four locks securing each of our home’s doors. Americans own two semi-automatic 9mm pistols, but like to leave their doors unlocked. Which one of us is actually more schizophrenic?

The door to our place doesn’t inspire very much confidence. Rickety plywood, just like the outside walls - if you can even legitimately describe stucco-covered wood as a "wall." If somebody wanted to break into our place, he could kick the wall in as easily as he could the door. There’s no feeling of security, even though we actually have two doors, a normal one and a pretty stable screen door and four locks between the two of them.

Since we’re good Germans, we lock all four locks whenever we leave the house, even if it’s only for half an hour. After all, you can’t rely on the neighbors if something dodgy happens. But what if we’re at home and there nevertheless is a break-in? For example, by some frustrated crack-heads? We think, "Nah, that’ll never happen." And it better not, because even though we could buy a gun here without any problem, my wife won’t allow such a thing in the house. We’d be helpless in an emergency.

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posted @ 07:19 PM EDT

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Fool Me Twice

We can't challenge the fraud in the 2004 election -- but we can keep it from happening again. TAP talks to Mark Crispin Miller, author of Fooled Again.

By Julia Gronnevet

If you had to narrow everything down to a sentence, what would you say the book is about?

Well, it would be a long sentence! I would say that the book is a plea for electoral reform based on careful demonstration of the many ways in which the Bush Republicans stole the last presidential election. My aim is not to challenge the outcome, because there’s no constitutional way to do that. Rather, it is to get that scandal to reverberate, to provoke or inspire reform of our whole electoral system, which is a shambles.

Voter fraud existed yesterday and today. How do you see today’s tactics as different from ones used in the past?

I’m not arguing that election fraud is something new. As Andrew Gumbel demonstrates in Steal This Vote, we’ve had this problem from the beginning and [from] both parties. The Democrats are hardly innocent. But there is something new that’s happened here. This theft of votes was unprecedented in scale. I also think that the use of touch screen voting machines to commit fraud is unprecedented. We don’t like to state the fact that we don’t live in a democracy. And I think we don’t like to say that we’ve made no progress. [But] what I argue is that the era of Jim Crow is back, with far more sophisticated methods, and with a far larger constituency to disenfranchise. I think that the Bush Republicans are quite racist and they are obsessed with disenfranchising black people. The old racist animus lives in that faction of that party now. But I also think that it only starts with people of color, but it includes everyone in this country who goes against the fanatical mission of Bush Republicans.

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posted @ 07:02 PM EDT

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For a G.M. Family, the American Dream Vanishes

By DANNY HAKIM

FLINT, Mich. - Four generations of the Roy family relied on General Motors for their prosperity.

Over more than seven decades, the company's wages bought the Roys homes, cars and once-unimaginable comforts, while G.M.'s enviable medical and pension benefits have kept them secure in their retirements.

But the G.M. that was once an unassailable symbol of the nation's industrial might is a shadow of its former self, and the post-World War II promise of blue-collar factory work being a secure path to the American dream has faded with it.

After a long slide, it now looks like the end of an era. "General Motors, when I got in there, it was like I'd died and went to heaven," said Jerry Roy, 49 - who started at G.M. in 1977 and now works on an assembly line at a plant operated by Delphi, the bankrupt former G.M. parts unit that was spun off in 1999.

When Mr. Roy was hired at G.M., nearly three decades ago, his salary more than doubled from his job at a local supermarket. He traded in his five-year-old Buick for a new Chevy and since then he has done well enough to buy a pleasant house on a lake near Flint.

But now he faces the prospect of either losing his job or accepting a sharp pay cut. And for those coming after him, "it's just sad that it's ending, that it looks like this," he said. In his hometown, he added, "all these places that used to be factories are now just parking lots."

Those factories supported the Roy family for generations.

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posted @ 06:48 PM EDT

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Need To Know

Gerald Lechliter, the retired officer who traced Bush’s military record, has assigned himself a new task -- deciphering the Plame investigation.

By Greg Sargent

Does anybody remember Gerald Lechliter?

In the home stretch of the 2004 presidential campaign, Lechliter, a retired army colonel from Delaware with a bit of spare time on his hands, wrote a 32-page analysis of George W. Bush’s military records that showed that Bush had shirked his duty. Lechliter sent it to The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, who wrote a column, “Missing in Action,” that called Lechliter’s missive “the most meticulous examination I’ve seen of Mr. Bush’s records.” Lechliter helped revive the story, and his analysis was subsequently cited in publications all over the country.

Well, it turns out that Lechliter has done it again. And this time, he has trained his sights on the outing of Valerie Plame.

Lechliter -- who claims 25 years experience in the intelligence field -- has penned a detailed analysis of the Plame affair, and Patrick Fitzgerald’s duty as special counsel, that he has sent to Fitzgerald. He also sent a copy to the Prospect. Lechliter -- operating on his own time again -- did a close reading of the regulations governing both the proper treatment of classified information and the authority delegated to Fitzgerald. And what he came up with is worth a look -- after all, the credibility he earned when he broke ground on the story of Bush's records last year has earned him the right to another hearing.

Lechliter’s most interesting conclusion is this: Contrary to what some pundits have said, it may in fact have been a violation of federal regulations for senior administration officials -- even those who did not disclose her identity -- to privately discuss Plame’s identity among themselves. Intriguingly, Lechliter also concludes that Fitzgerald could, if he chose to, recommend administrative disciplinary measures against those officials, even if they have not done anything clearly illegal. Such recommended measures, he says, might include firing such officials or revoking their security clearances.

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posted @ 06:33 PM EDT

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posted @ 06:23 PM EDT

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"A Moral Disaster of Monumental Proportions"

Bryan Lentz

The holiday spirit is clearly not alive and well in Washington, DC.

Early this morning, so-called Republican moderates showed their true colors by falling in line with Tom Delay and approving $7.8 billion in loan cuts to college students, $4.9 billion in cuts to child support enforcement, $11.4 billion in Medicaid cuts, and a $796 million reduction in food stamp funding.

Later today we can expect them to add insult to injury by approving $57 billion in new tax cuts, most of which benefit households with annual incomes of over $1 million.

The voters of my congressional district in southeast Pennsylvania should be particularly outraged because our congressman -- and my Republican opponent -- Rep. Curt Weldon, cast the deciding vote for this heartless and irresponsible measure.

Make no mistake about it. This plan isn't moderate. It isn't mainstream. It isn't even conservative. It's radical, it's selfish, and it's cruel.

Because of the Republican budget plan, 295,000 people, many of them working poor, will lose their access to food stamps, millionaires will get yet another tax break from the Republican Congress, and the federal budget deficit will increase by anywhere between $7 billion and $35 billion, depending on the final outcome of the budget reconciliation process.

Perversely, one of the prime targets of this so-called austerity package is children. Remember that in families living below the poverty line, child support accounts for 25 percent of total household income. The Republican budget plan will enable deadbeat parents to avoid child care payments estimated at $21 billion and will literally prevent thousands of kids from getting the minimum food, shelter and clothing they need to survive.

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posted @ 04:13 PM EDT

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Fmr. DeLay Aide Cooperating With Prosecutors...
Sends Jolts Through GOP Congress...

DeLay Ex-Aide to Plead Guilty in Lobby Case

By ANNE E. KORNBLUT

Michael Scanlon, a former top official for Representative Tom DeLay and onetime partner of the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, has agreed to plead guilty in a deal with federal prosecutors, according to his lawyer. The deal reveals a broadening corruption investigation involving top members of Congress.

Criminal papers filed in federal court outlined a conspiracy that not only named Mr. Scanlon but also mentioned a congressman, identified only as Representative No. 1, as part of the exchange of favors from clients funneled to lobbyists and officials.

This was the first time that a member of Congress, identified by lawyers in the case as Representative Bob Ney, Republican of Ohio, has been implicated in criminal papers as part of the inquiry, which has sprawled from Indian casinos to the lucrative lobbying firms of Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Scanlon and then reached to the Republican leadership.

Federal prosecutors announced a single conspiracy charge against Mr. Scanlon on Friday, in advance of a Monday court hearing at which he is expected to plead guilty in exchange for his cooperation. Investigators accused Mr. Scanlon of conspiring to defraud Indian tribes of millions of dollars as part of a lobbying and corruption scheme.

Mr. Scanlon, 35, is a former spokesman for Mr. DeLay. News of his cooperation with law enforcement officials sent a jolt through the Republican majority in Congress.

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posted @ 03:42 PM EDT

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Session Exposes Political Risks Ahead for G.O.P.

By CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON, Nov. 19 - It was a bitter and fitting final note for a discordant Congress.

The ugly debate in the House on Friday over the Iraq war served as an emotional send-off for a holiday recess, capturing perfectly the political tensions coursing through the House and Senate in light of President Bush's slumping popularity, serious party policy fights, spreading ethics investigations and the approach of crucial midterm elections in less than a year.

Capitol Hill was always certain to be swept up in brutal political gamesmanship as lawmakers headed into 2006 - the midpoint of this second presidential term and, perhaps, a chance for Democrats to cut into Republican majorities or even seize power in one chamber or the other.

The ferocity of the fight in the House over a withdrawal from Iraq shows that the war may command the high ground in the coming electoral contest, and that the course of events in Iraq - whether a new government takes hold, whether the violence continues, whether American troops are still committed in large numbers and still being killed by the scores each month - will be of prime political consequence here.

But when lawmakers return next month they face other, immediate challenges that also carry substantial political risks. Some are matters related to the war, like the continuing debate on the treatment of detainees in the campaign against global terrorism. Others are the kind of domestic pocketbook issues that Congress must deal with every year - including contentious tax and spending measures - but have been impossible to resolve this year, even with one party in control of both houses.

Not just the war, but a whole series of events have turned what would have been a tough season for the Bush administration and the Republican majority into an extremely daunting one, sowing dissent among the majority's rank-and-file and providing opportunities for Democrats, who continue to have problems of their own.

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posted @ 02:03 PM EDT

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Three days that transformed America

By MARTIN SIEFF
UPI Senior News Analyst

WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 (UPI) -- On Thursday, a Democratic national politician for the first time managed to do what former Vice President Al Gore, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, their running mates and more than $150 million of Democratic consulting and campaign resources signally failed to do in more than five years and two national elections: He mauled President George W. Bush.

"The war in Iraq is not going as advertised. It's a flawed policy wrapped in illusion. The American public is way ahead of the members of Congress," said Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania as he called for an immediate U.S. withdrawal from that country.

"The United States and coalition troops have done all they can in Iraq. But it's time for a change in direction," Murtha said. "Our military is suffering. The future of our country is at risk. We cannot continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action in Iraq is not in the best interest of the United States of America, the Iraqi people or the Persian Gulf region. "

Murtha's blistering speech Thursday could have been easily shrugged off if it came from Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, the late Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, or even Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. But Murtha had been gung ho for the war and accepted the intelligence evaluations at face value that were presented to Congress arguing the necessity of it.

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posted @ 01:58 PM EDT

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The Dark Side of American Empire

Two Recent French books, one by Roger Martin and the other by Stephane Spoiden, seek to demystify some of the deep-rooted cliches of American society. This book review from France's socialist newspaper l'Humanite is a look at American history and politics through the eyes of two French authors.

By Isabelle Richet*
Translated By Pascaline Jay