In Texas, over the last decade, only one hunter in 26,000 has been involved in a hunting accident.

In 2005, only one in 36,000 was involved in a hunting accident.

In fact, there were 1.1 million hunting licenses issued in Texas last year but only 30 reported accidents.

Pretty remarkable that Dick Cheney is in such select company. To read some of these sorry stories - of which Dick Cheney's is now one - click here (PDF). And if you do, you'll learn something even more amazing.

In 2005, only ONE hunting accident in the entire state of Texas involved alcohol. One accident, one million licenses. Yep, that makes Dick Cheney - who drank the day he shot Harry Whittington - one in a million. And just why are alcohol-related hunting accidents so rare? Conservative Tucker Carlson explains:

I think Cheney gets to do pretty much whatever he wants, which is why he got to have a beer at lunch on a hunt. I've been on dozens of hunts, there's no beer served as lunch. You can't drink a beer if you shoot, period. Doesn't matter if you're shooting five hours after, you're not allowed to do it. This is the only time I've ever heard of it, and I think he gets to do it because he's the Vice President. So no, I don't think his doctor's going to tell him to not have a beer. (Emphasis added.)

Or, as the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department puts it simply in the report I linked above:

Alcohol and hunting don't mix.

Dick Cheney managed to have a one-in-a-million accident because he refused to play by the rules. I am not surprised in the least: This shooting accident is simply a metaphor for how Cheney and the entire administration have always operated.

Hackett’s scorching rhetoric earned him notoriety and cash on the campaign trail. He declared that people who opposed gay marriage were "un-American." He said the Republican party had been hijacked by religious extremists who he said "aren't a whole lot different than Osama bin Laden." Bloggers loved him, donors ponied up, while Democratic Party insiders grumbled that he wasn't "senatorial."

Swift boats soon appeared on the horizon. A whisper campaign started: Hackett committed war crimes in Iraq—and there were photos. "The first rumor that I heard was probably a month and a half ago," Dave Lane, chair of the Clermont County Democratic Party, told me the day after Hackett pulled out of the race. "I heard it more than once that someone was distributing photos of Paul in Iraq with Iraqi war casualties with captions or suggestions that Paul had committed some sort of atrocities. Who did it? I have no idea. It sounds like a Republican M.O. to me, but I have no proof of that. But if it was someone on my side of the fence, I have a real problem with that. I have a hard time believing that a Democrat would do that to another Democrat."

In late November, Hackett got a call from Sen. Harry Reid. "I hear there’s a photo of you mistreating bodies in Iraq. Is it true?" demanded the Senate minority leader. "No sir," replied Hackett. To drive home his point, Hackett traveled to Washington to show Reid's staff the photo in question. Hackett declined to send me the photo, but he insists that it shows another Marine—not Hackett—unloading a sealed body bag from a truck. "There was nothing disrespectful or unprofessional," he insists. "That was a photo of a Marine doing his job. If you don’t like what they're doing, don't send Marines into war."

A staffer in Reid's office confirmed that Hackett had showed them several photos. "The ones I saw were part of a diary he kept while serving in Iraq and were in no way compromising. The one picture in question depicted Marines doing their work on what looked like a scorching day in Iraq," said the aide.

But the whispering continued, and Hackett was troubled. "It creates doubt and suspicion," Hackett told me, saying his close supporters were asking him privately about the rumors. "It tarnishes my very strength as a candidate, my military service. It's like you take a handful of seeds, throw them up in the wind, and they blow all around and start growing. It really bothered me."

Hackett backers suspected the smear was being floated by Sherrod Brown’s campaign. A senior Brown staffer angrily dismissed the charge this week as "ridiculous."

Brown campaign spokesperson Joanna Kuebler declined to respond to the rumors. She offered this prepared statement: "This campaign has never been about Paul Hackett or about Sherrod Brown. This campaign is about the hard working people of Ohio, and what Republican corruption has done to them."

Hackett wanted to fight to the finish. He raised nearly a half-million dollars in the last quarter of 2005, matching Brown’s fundraising. But Brown entered the Senate race with $2 million in the bank, a strategic cushion. Early polls show both Brown and Hackett running in a dead heat against DeWine. An internal poll done in February for the Hackett campaign that was obtained by the Cleveland Plain Dealer showed Brown leading Hackett by 20 points, but Hackett took the lead if voters simply heard both candidates' bios. The analysis concluded, "If Paul Hackett can raise the funds necessary to communicate his message to the voters of Ohio, he will present Sherrod Brown with a formidable challenge in May."

With the very real prospect of a smear against him going public late in the campaign—a la the Swift Boating of John Kerry—Hackett knew that dollars would be especially important for him. "If I don't have the $2 million or $3 million it would take to respond in the final weeks, to influence the battlefield with my message, then I would just be reacting and I'll get trounced," said Hackett.

Hackett had demonstrated his ability to shake money from donors during a January fundraising roadshow in California and New York. But he soon discovered that top Democrats were attempting to cut off his money. The hosts of a Beverly Hills fundraiser for Hackett received an e-mail from the political action committee of Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) that concluded, "I hope you will re-consider your efforts on behalf of Hackett and give your support to Sherrod." Waxman’s chief of staff, Phil Schiliro, said the e-mail was only sent to a handful of people and that "it probably came from a suggestion from the Sherrod Brown campaign."

Michael Fleming, who manages Internet millionaire David Bohnett's political and charitable giving, was one of the recipients of the Waxman email. Bohnett has given to hundreds of progressive candidates, but Fleming says, "This was the first time I had ever gotten an email or communication like that. I find it discouraging and disheartening. It's unfortunate that the powers that be didn't let the people of Ohio figure this out. We should be in the business of encouraging people like Paul Hackett and viable progressive candidates like him to run. The message instead is don't bother, it's not worth your time."

The Bush administration on Thursday rebuffed criticism about potential security risks of a $6.8 billion sale that gives a company in the United Arab Emirates control over significant operations at six major American ports.

Lawmakers asked the White House to reconsider its earlier approval of the deal.

The sale to state-owned Dubai Ports World was "rigorously reviewed" by a U.S. committee that considers security threats when foreign companies seek to buy or invest in American industry, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones said.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, run by the Treasury Department, reviewed an assessment from U.S. intelligence agencies. The committee's 12 members agreed unanimously the sale did not present any problems, the department said.

"We wanted to look at this one quite closely because it relates to ports," Stewart Baker, an assistant secretary in the Homeland Security Department, told The Associated Press. "It is important to focus on this partner as opposed to just what part of the world they come from. We came to the conclusion that the transaction should not be halted."

The unusual defense of the secretive committee, which reviews hundreds of such deals each year, came in response to criticism about the purchase of London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co.

The world's fourth-largest ports company runs commercial operations at shipping terminals in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia.

Four senators and three House members asked the administration Thursday to reconsider its approval. The lawmakers contended the UAE is not consistent in its support of U.S. terrorism-fighting efforts.

"The potential threat to our country is not imagined, it is real," Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., said in a House speech.

• After the Taliban takes control of the area around Kandahar, Afghanistan, in September 1994, prominent Persian Gulf state officials and businessmen, including high-ranking United Arab Emirates and Saudi government ministers, such as Saudi intelligence minister Prince Turki al-Faisal, frequently secretly fly into Kandahar on state and private jets for hunting expeditions. [Los Angeles Times, 11/18/01] General Wayne Downing, Bush's former national director for combating terrorism, says: "They would go out and see Osama, spend some time with him, talk with him, you know, live out in the tents, eat the simple food, engage in falconing, some other pursuits, ride horses. One noted visitor is Sheik Mohammed ibn Rashid al Maktum, United Arab Emirates Defense Minister and Crown Prince for the emirate of Dubai." [MSNBC, 9/5/03] While there, some develop ties to the Taliban and al-Qaeda and give them money. Both bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar sometimes participate in these hunting trips. Former US and Afghan officials suspect that the dignitaries' outbound jets may also have smuggled out al-Qaeda and Taliban personnel. [Los Angeles Times, 11/18/01]



• October 1996-early 2002: Arms Dealer Aligns with Taliban and ISI
  
  Russian arms merchant Victor Bout, who has been selling weapons to Afghanistan's Northern Alliance since 1992, switches sides, and begins selling weapons to the Taliban and al-Qaeda instead. [Los Angeles Times, 1/20/02; Los Angeles Times, 5/17/02; Guardian, 4/17/02] The deal comes immediately after the Taliban captures Kabul in late October 1996 and gains the upper hand in Afghanistan's civil war. In one trade in 1996, Bout's company delivers at least 40 tons of Russian weapons to the Taliban, earning about $50 million. [Guardian, 2/16/02] Two intelligence agencies later confirm that Bout trades with the Taliban “on behalf of the Pakistan government.” In late 2000, several Ukrainians sell 150 to 200 T-55 and T-62 tanks to the Taliban in a deal conducted by the ISI, and Bout helps fly the tanks to Afghanistan. [Montreal Gazette, 2/5/02] Bout formerly worked for the Russian KGB, and now operates the world's largest private weapons transport network. Based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bout operates freely there until well after 9/11. The US becomes aware of Bout's widespread illegal weapons trading in Africa in 1995, and of his ties to the Taliban in 1996, but they fail to take effective action against him for years. [Los Angeles Times, 5/17/02] US pressure on the UAE in November 2000 to close down Bout's operations there is ignored. Press reports calling him "the merchant of death" also fail to pressure the UAE. [Financial Times, 6/10/00; Guardian, 12/23/00] After President Bush is elected, it appears the US gives up trying to get Bout, until after 9/11. [Guardian, 4/17/02; Washington Post, 2/26/02]



• May 26, 1997: Taliban Government Is Officially Recognized by Saudis
  
  The Saudi government becomes the first country to extend formal recognition of the Taliban government of Afghanistan. Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates will follow suit. On 9/11, these three countries are the only countries that officially recognize the Taliban. [9/11 Congressional Inquiry, 7/24/03 (B)]



• September 21, 1999: German Intelligence Records Calls Between Hijacker and Others Linked to al-Qaeda
  
  German intelligence is periodically tapping suspected al-Qaeda operative Mohammed Haydar Zammar's telephone, and on this day investigators hear Zammar call hijacker Marwan Alshehhi. Officials initially claim that the call also mentions hijacker Mohamed Atta, but only his first name. [New York Times, 1/18/03; Daily Telegraph, 11/24/01] However, his full name, "Mohamed Atta Al Amir," is mentioned in this call and in another recorded call. [Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2/2/03] Alshehhi makes veiled references to plans to travel to Afghanistan. He also hands the phone over to Said Bahaji (another member of the Hamburg cell under investigation at the time), so he can talk to Zammar. [Stern, 8/13/03] German investigators still do not know Alshehhi's full name, but they recognize this "Marwan" also called Zammar in January, and they told the CIA about that call. Alshehhi, living in the United Arab Emirates at the time, calls Zammar frequently. German intelligence asks the United Arab Emirates to identify the number and the caller, but the request is not answered. [Der Spiegel, 2/3/03]
  
  
• 
  June 29, 2000-September 18, 2000: Hijackers Receive $100,000 in Funding from United Arab Emirates Location
  
  Someone using the aliases "Isam Mansour," "Mustafa Ahmed al-Hisawi," "Mr. Ali," and "Hani (Fawaz Trdng)" sends a total of $109,910 to the 9/11 hijackers in a series of transfers between these dates. [9/11 Congressional Inquiry, 9/26/02; Financial Times, 11/30/01; MSNBC, 12/11/01; New York Times, 12/10/01; Newsweek, 12/2/01] The money is sent from Sharjah, an emirate in the United Arab Emirates that is allegedly a center for al-Qaeda's illegal financial dealings. The identity of this moneyman "Mustafa Ahmed al-Hisawi" is in dispute. It has been claimed that the name "Mustafa Ahmed" is an alias used by Saeed Sheikh, a known ISI and al-Qaeda agent who sends the hijackers money in August 2001. [CNN, 10/6/01]



• 
  September 8-11, 2001: Last-Minute Money Transfers Between Hijackers and United Arab Emirates
  
  The 9/11 hijackers send money to and receive money from a man in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) who uses the aliases "Mustafa Ahmed," "Mustafa Ahmad," and "Ahamad Mustafa." [MSNBC, 12/11/01] This "Mustafa" transfers money to Mohamed Atta in Florida on September 8 and 9 from a branch of the Al Ansari Exchange in Sharjah, UAE, a center of al-Qaeda financial dealings. [Financial Times, 11/30/01] On September 9, three hijackers, Atta, Waleed Alshehri, and Marwan Alshehhi, transfer about $15,000 back to "Mustafa's" account. [Time, 10/1/01; Los Angeles Times, 10/20/01] Apparently the hijackers are returning money meant for the 9/11 attacks that they have not needed. "Mustafa" then transfers $40,000 to his Visa card and then, using a Saudi passport, flies from the UAE to Karachi, Pakistan, on 9/11. He makes six ATM withdrawals there two days later, and then disappears into Pakistan. [MSNBC, 12/11/01] In early October 2001, it is reported that the financier “Mustafa Ahmed” is an alias used by Saeed Sheikh. [CNN, 10/6/01] It will later be reported that Saeed wired money to Atta the month before. These last-minute transfers are touted as the “smoking gun” proving al-Qaeda involvement in the 9/11 attacks, since Saeed is a known financial manager for bin Laden. [Guardian, 10/1/01]



• September 9, 2001: Internet Forum Message Warns of 9/11 Attack
  
  A message is posted on Alsaha.com, a website based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, warning of the 9/11 attack. It proclaims that in the next two days, a "big surprise" is coming from the Saudi Arabian region of Asir, the remote, mountainous province that produced most of the 19 hijackers who struck on September 11. Since 9/11, the FBI and CIA have closely monitored this website as "a kind of terrorist early-warning system" due to its popularity with Muslim fundamentalists. However, it is doubtful if they were monitoring the site before 9/11, or noticed this message. [Newsweek, 5/25/03]

It was enough for Weir to absorb his discombobulated performance last night in the men's free skate, to have been flummoxed by transportation woes, plunging from silver to fifth by the end of his Winter Games experience.

"My biorhythms were off," Weir explained, smiling. He later added: "I know it was a bad performance. I'm surprised I'm as high as I am."

As usual, he was candid while unveiling the reasons for his flaws on the ice, using the occasional punch line to lighten the mood and defuse his disappointment.

Weir mania was over. It was colorful while it lasted.

His e-mail inbox swelled from 25 fan letters in a single download to almost 900 before his long program.

"A friend called me and said I made someone's Web site as a D-list celebrity," Weir said. "Hey, I'm Kathy Griffin."

Griffin, a self-celebrated D-lister, has a show on Bravo. Weir had the world to himself for the past week.

During an interview with The Chicago Tribune this week, the former skater Rudy Galindo, openly gay for a decade, mocked the news media for not prying more.

"He's drinking tea with his pinkie finger in the air," Galindo said. "And he's so over the top and feminine, why is everybody asking him about his 'style' and not just ask him if he's gay?"

Weir, in fact, addressed that issue for everyone. Just before he left his post-performance interview, he discussed what he thought about the Tribune piece.

"Why doesn't anyone ask about Bode Miller or ask Michelle Kwan if she is a lesbian?" Weir said.

He provided an equally direct response on his Web site when a fan recently speculated about his sexual orientation. "I like nice things, and beautiful things, so if that is the only way people are determining that I swing one way or the other, then to me, that's sad," Weir wrote, adding, "I am who I am, and I don't need to justify anything to anyone."

He isn't required to satisfy anyone's curiosity. He doesn't need the validation. He is guided by his confidence and by working-class parents who nurtured his individuality from the start.

One day, Weir may discover a way to detail his playground survival to help a child who has been the victim of spitballs and noogies and threats from bullies. Sometimes, as Battiste described, Weir can sound as if he has a chip on his shoulder when talking about his past.

"He is a role model in how he has achieved a goal," Battiste said. "But he hasn't really said, 'This was my childhood and here's how I dealt with it.' Maybe he will. I have to keep reminding myself that Johnny is still young."

He is 21. But in his crestfallen state last night, he seemed to grow up. Weir took his disappointment with grace, lauding his Russian idol, Yevgeny Plushenko, for winning the gold medal in a runaway performance.

"There are years between Plushenko and everybody else," Weir said. "Plushenko has been competing since I started skating. It's a distance in maturity."

In his own way, Weir was making up for the maturity gap by handling his performance debacle with the same openness that he treated his success after the short program put his name in headlines.

"I was thinking too much," Weir said. "I'm disappointed with the way I skated, but not with missing a medal."

He was frazzled when a shuttle bus to the rink altered its timetable without notice, picking up on the half hour instead of every 10 minutes. Weir had to flag down a volunteer for a ride in a car. He dashed into a packed Olympic arena late and never recovered from the panic attack.

"I didn't feel into the ice," Weir said. "I had a transportation problem, but that's just an excuse."

He blamed himself in the end. In the month since he won the United States nationals, Weir had been nothing but perky, a joy. Last night he was refreshing even in his dark moment.

Greenland's glaciers are melting into the sea twice as fast as previously believed, the result of a warming trend that renders obsolete predictions of how quickly Earth's oceans will rise over the next century, scientists said yesterday.

The new data come from satellite imagery and give fresh urgency to worries about the role of human activity in global warming. The Greenland data are mirrored by findings from Bolivia to the Himalayas, scientists said, noting that rising sea levels threaten widespread flooding and severe storm damage in low-lying areas worldwide.

The scientists said they do not yet understand the precise mechanism causing glaciers to flow and melt more rapidly, but they said the changes in Greenland were unambiguous -- and accelerating: In 1996, the amount of water produced by melting ice in Greenland was about 90 times the amount consumed by Los Angeles in a year. Last year, the melted ice amounted to 225 times the volume of water that city uses annually.

"We are witnessing enormous changes, and it will take some time before we understand how it happened, although it is clearly a result of warming around the glaciers," said Eric Rignot, a scientist at the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The Greenland study is the latest of several in recent months that have found evidence that rising temperatures are affecting not only Earth's ice sheets but also such things as plant and animal habitats, coral reefs' health, hurricane severity, droughts, and globe-girdling currents that drive regional climates.

[snip]

The implications are global," said Julian Dowdeswell, a glacier expert at the University of Cambridge in England who reviewed the new paper for Science. "We are not talking about walking along the sea front on a nice summer day, we are talking of the worst storm settings, the biggest storm surges . . . you are upping the probability major storms will take place."

People like Gedalyia who see George Bush as a figure of phallic greatness live in a fantasy world where the "vast majority" of people support Bush's policies and actions, and criticizing the Leader's actions -- especially those designed to heroically protect us -- will therefore lead to certain electoral defeat, even though every available fact demonstrates that the opposite is true.

People like that are beyond the reach of reason, because the fulfillment which they derive from being a Bush follower and all of the ritualistic, risk-free chest-beating which that entails renders them indifferent to rational discourse. This genuinely brilliant analysis by Digby -- which dissects the grotesque episode in which the mushy Chris Matthews drooled with sad, needy homoerotic reverence over Bush's strutting around on that aircraft carrier in his little pilot outfit, while G. Gordon Liddy expressed overt admiration for Bush's masculine package -- remains the gold standard for understanding why and how meek male losers find such personal satisfaction and fulfillment by being a Bush follower. It is as physically unpleasant as it is important to understand.

On a personal level, the Cheney-Whittington accident was a sad but unremarkable event. Two men go hunting. Both are sloppy, and one friend shoots another. The victim is suffering but gracious. The shooter is anguished in his guilt.

"The image of him falling is something I will never be able to get out of my mind," Dick Cheney told Brit Hume yesterday, adding, "It was ... one of the worst days of my life."

Afterward, he looked back, relived the moment and took responsibility. "It was not Harry's fault. You can't blame anybody else," Cheney said. "I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend."

In normal life, people would look at this event and see two decent men caught in a twist of fate. They would feel concern for the victim and sympathy for the man who fired the gun.

But we in Washington are able to rise above the normal human reaction. We have our jobs. We have our roles.

So in the days following the Cheney-Whittington accident, liberal pundits had to live up to their responsibility to manufacture a series of unsubstantiated allegations while turning the episode into a Clifford Odets-style tale of plutocrats gone wild. "Was he drunk? I mean, these are ultrarich Republicans, at a weekend, fun-time hunting," the pundit Lawrence O'Donnell wondered on MSNBC.

Meanwhile over at the blogosphere, the keyboard jockeys had a responsibility to sniff up vast conspiracies and get lost in creepy minutiae. "The 50,000 acre Armstrong Ranch is in Kenedy County. So I figure the Armstrongs probably have a lot of pull in county government. So, just a question: how thorough was the investigation of what happened?" the influential blogger Josh Marshall queried darkly. Earlier, he veered off, as he must, into picayune and skin-crawling theorizing about the path the pellets took through Whittington's body:

[snip]

Meanwhile we in the regular media have our own stereotypes to guide us. We are assigned by the Fates to turn every bad thing into Watergate, to fill the air with dark lamentations about cover-ups and appearances of impropriety and the arrogance of power. We have to follow the money. (So was born the stories of the potentially missing $7 hunting license.) We are impelled to elevate horse race over substance and write tales in which the quality of the message management takes precedence over the importance or unimportance of what's being said.

Then, rushing to the footlights, come the politicians, with their alchemist's ability to turn reality into spin. It would have been natural, and probably smart, for some politician to put politics aside and say simply that Cheney and his friend were to be sympathized with at this moment. But life is a campaign, and they are merely players.

Republicans have been hammering the notion that the President’s actions were not only legal but absolutely necessary to prevent our children from being blown up, while Democrats have nervously suggested that maybe this wasn’t entirely proper but maybe we should also just ask the President how we can help to make what he wants to do legal.

And even with all of that, a plurality – almost a majority – believe that the President broke the law, and an overwhelming majority are open to the possibility that he did. Given the dynamic among politicians and the media, that is really an extraordinary result. So what explains the Democrats’ irrational and factually baseless fear of pursuing this scandal?

The central premise of conventional political wisdom is that Democrats are chronic losers whose real views are overwhelmingly rejected by most Americans. As a result, they can’t say what they really believe because what they really believe is embraced only by a handful of freaks and outcasts on the coasts and the "heartland" is repulsed by what they believe. As a result, if they want to win elections, they have to dress up what they think in much more moderate and Republican-accommodating language, constantly genuflecting to basic Republican premises but only nitpicking on the corners, because otherwise, normal Americans will continue to be repelled by their angry, radical agenda.

How many times do we hear that - from the media, from pundits, in the blogosphere, even from Democratic consultants? If there is such a thing as conventional wisdom, it’s that.

What is so unbelievable about this world-view is that it is so plainly predicated on falsehoods, on factually false premises. Let’s use the war in Iraq as an example. According to this prevailing wisdom, anyone who opposes the war on Iraq, who thinks it’s a mistake, who doesn’t pay homage to the President’s "go-on-offense-against-the-terrorist" routine when it comes to Iraq, is a pacifistic, out-of-the-mainstream loser who is an embarrassment to the Democrats and is the type of person who has to be repudiated and hidden if the Democrats have any hope of winning every again.

That notion is as widely accepted as it is false.

[snip]

The radical, out-of-the-mainstream view is not that the war in Iraq is a mistake. That is, quite solidly, the majority view. The radical view is that we did the right thing by invading Iraq. And yet, if you listen to the blogosphere, and more importantly, the establishment media, the premise is always that anyone who strongly condemns the war in Iraq (e.g. Howard Dean, Jack Murtha, etc.) is a fringe radical who is sinking the Democrats’ electoral chances. But the facts demonstrate that the opposite is true. A lopsided majority hold that view.

If a Democratic politician were to say that the U.S. was not winning the war in Iraq, swarms of media pundits and Bush followers would decree that Democrat to be an untrustworthy out-of-the-mainstream cretin who cannot be trusted and who Democrats must repudiate unless they want to keep losing elections. And yet, by a lopsided 65-31 margin, Americans agree with that view. The out-of-the-mainstream view is the one the media has depicted as being the only acceptable view - that we did the right thing in invading Iraq, that we are winning there, that questioning the wisdom of our ongoing occupation is "what Karl Roves hopes for" because it will doom the Democrats to defeat.

Democrats have to realize -- and now -- that nobody outside of the core Bush cultists even listens to these manipulative appeals any more. They worked in 2002 and 2003; they don’t work anymore. The well has run dry. All of the public relations stunts over the last month - the Heroic Salvation of Los Angeles, the new scary bin Laden tape where he copies Democratic talking points, the oh-so-tough-and-resolute State of the Union strutting – it all fell on deaf ears and achieved nothing.

[snip]

Are Americans running into the arms of the President because they perceive that Democrats are trying to prevent him from eavesdropping on Osama bin Laden? No, no such thing is happening. The opposite has happened. After two months of the news being dominated by this scandal, Bush’s approval ratings are back in the 30s and everyone has abandoned him other than the cultists who form his base and will never abandon him.

The National Counterterrorism Center maintains a central repository of 325,000 names of international terrorism suspects or people who allegedly aid them, a number that has more than quadrupled since the fall of 2003, according to counterterrorism officials.

The list kept by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) -- created in 2004 to be the primary U.S. terrorism intelligence agency -- contains a far greater number of international terrorism suspects and associated names in a single government database than has previously been disclosed. Because the same person may appear under different spellings or aliases, the true number of people is estimated to be more than 200,000, according to NCTC officials.

U.S. citizens make up "only a very, very small fraction" of that number, said an administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of his agency's policies. "The vast majority are non-U.S. persons and do not live in the U.S.," he added. An NCTC official refused to say how many on the list -- put together from reports supplied by the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency (NSA) and other agencies -- are U.S. citizens.

The NSA is a key provider of information for the NCTC database, although officials refused to say how many names on the list are linked to the agency's controversial domestic eavesdropping effort. Under the program, the NSA has conducted wiretaps on an unknown number of U.S. citizens without warrants.

The government has been trying to streamline what counterterrorism officials say are more than 26 terrorism-related databases compiled by agencies throughout the intelligence and law enforcement communities. Names from the NCTC list are provided to the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), which in turn provides names for watch lists maintained by the Transportation Security Administration and other agencies.

Civil liberties advocates and privacy experts said they were troubled by the size of the NCTC database, and they said it further heightens their concerns that such government terrorism lists include the names of large numbers of innocent people. Timothy Sparapani, legislative counsel for privacy rights at the American Civil Liberties Union, called the numbers "shocking but, unfortunately, not surprising."

"We have lists that are having baby lists at this point; they're spawning faster than rabbits," Sparapani said. "If we have over 300,000 known terrorists who want to do this country harm, we've got a much bigger problem than deciding which names go on which list. But I highly doubt that is the case."

Asked whether the names in the repository were collected through the NSA's domestic intelligence intercept program, the NCTC official said, "Our database includes names of known and suspected international terrorists provided by all intelligence community organizations, including NSA."

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee last week that he could not discuss specifics but said: "Information is collected, information is retained and information disseminated in a way to protect the privacy interests of all Americans."

Congress appeared ready to launch an investigation into the Bush administration's warrantless domestic surveillance program last week, but an all-out White House lobbying campaign has dramatically slowed the effort and may kill it, key Republican and Democratic sources said yesterday.

The Senate intelligence committee is scheduled to vote tomorrow on a Democratic-sponsored motion to start an inquiry into the recently revealed program in which the National Security Agency eavesdrops on an undisclosed number of phone calls and e-mails involving U.S. residents without obtaining warrants from a secret court. Two committee Democrats said the panel -- made up of eight Republicans and seven Democrats -- was clearly leaning in favor of the motion last week but now is closely divided and possibly inclined against it.

They attributed the shift to last week's closed briefings given by top administration officials to the full House and Senate intelligence committees, and to private appeals to wavering GOP senators by officials, including Vice President Cheney. "It's been a full-court press," said a top Senate Republican aide who asked to speak only on background -- as did several others for this story -- because of the classified nature of the intelligence committees' work.

Lawmakers cite senators such as Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) to illustrate the administration's success in cooling congressional zeal for an investigation. On Dec. 20, she was among two Republicans and two Democrats who signed a letter expressing "our profound concern about recent revelations that the United States Government may have engaged in domestic electronic surveillance without appropriate legal authority." The letter urged the Senate's intelligence and judiciary committees to "jointly undertake an inquiry into the facts and law surrounding these allegations."

In an interview yesterday, Snowe said, "I'm not sure it's going to be essential or necessary" to conduct an inquiry "if we can address the legislative standpoint" that would provide oversight of the surveillance program. "We're learning a lot and we're going to learn more," she said.

Private citizens have been enlisted to blame the victim. Maybe poor Mr. Whittington put himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. But he was, after all, behind Vice, not in front of him. And the hunter pulling the trigger is supposed to make sure he has a clear shot. Wouldn't it be, well, classy for Shooter to express just a bit of contrition and humility?

Instead, the usual sliming has begun, with the Cheney camp trying to protect the vice president by casting a veteran hunter as Elmer Dud.

Scott McClellan told the White House press corps that Katharine Armstrong, a lobbyist with government ties who owns the Texas ranch (and whose mother, Anne, was on the Halliburton board that hired Mr. Cheney as C.E.O.), "pointed out that the protocol was not followed by Mr. Whittington when it came to notifying the others that he was there."

As the story of the weekend's bizarre hunting accident is wrenched out of the White House, the picture isn't pretty: With American soldiers dying in Iraq, Five-Deferment Dick "I Had Other Priorities in the 60's Than Military Service" Cheney gets his macho kicks gunning down little birds and the occasional old man while W. rides his bike, blissfully oblivious to any collateral damage. Shouldn't these guys work on weekends until we figure out how to fix Iraq, New Orleans, Medicare and gas prices?

This version of "The Most Dangerous Game" neatly follows the four-step Bush-Cheney cycle:

Step 1: Set out to pick off what you think is an easy target, like quail this time or pen-raised and netted pheasant in the past, or a certain sanction-caged Iraqi dictator.

Step 2: In the corrupt company of lobbyist-contractor friends, botch things up. Ignore the peril at hand — as with, oh, Osama at Tora Bora, or Katrina, or the Iraq occupation — and with steely resolve, indulge your raging incompetence. (Oops.)

Step 3: Stonewall. Resist giving Congress information about 9/11 or Katrina; don't tell the public how you're tapping phones at home, setting up gulags abroad and making war and energy policy in secret. Why give the taxpayers, who are ponying up for these weekend hunting trips, the extraordinary news that Vice shot his hunting companion in the face and chest? Scott McClellan knew before yesterday's White House briefing at noon that Mr. Whittington was worse, but did not tell the reporters. He left that to Corpus Christi doctors, who spun the heart attack as "an inflammatory response to a metallic foreign BB."

Step 4: Admit no mistakes. Express sympathy. Blame the victim without leaving fingerprints by outsourcing the smear to the private sector.

Maybe there is a more appealing American athlete at the Winter Games than Weir, but it’s doubtful. This is a 21-year-old who mopped his own floor in the athletes’ village because he thought it was dirty. He looks like a sprite, a handsome elf. But he talks like he’s in the grip of truth serum.

For his long program, Weir hasn’t decided whether to attempt a quadruple jump. It depends entirely on his mood, how he feels when he gets out of bed that day. “I could very likely wake up and feel horrible, like Nick Nolte’s mug shot,” he said.

It's an area often located in the bowels of a venue featuring sweaty athletes fresh from competition and weary reporters fenced in like dairy cattle. The exchange is usually brief and unremarkable.

That is, unless, the competitor is a male figure skater wearing a sequined swan costume accented by a single orange glove representing a beak. Say hello to Johnny Weir - and goodbye to the trail of audio cliches.

[snip]

In a 12-minute mixed zone improv, Weir touched on the following subjects: Russian culture. Mopping his Olympic village floor. Rhinestones. The chances of motherhood for a Chinese skater who fell Monday night. A police mug shot of Nick Nolte.

Weir is as much a genuine article as the black and silver swan suit he calls "Camille." He is talented. He is insightful. He is funny. He is just what figure skating needs. Weir is a whoopie cushion placed on the Queen Mum's royal throne.

He makes the uptight figure skating community nervous every time he opens his mouth. And that's a good thing. The skater who called himself "princessy" upon his arrival at the Olympic Village a week ago renewed his grievances with the hired help.
"It's drab and it's dirty, no matter how many times I mop the floor," Weir said. "I mopped it and it's still dirty."

You would almost feel insulted if it wasn't coming from the same guy who thinks his butt looks big in his rhinestoned and sequined costume.

"I'm very princessy as far as travel is concerned,'' he said. "I hate carrying my own luggage. The beds aren't very soft. I'm roughing it. For me, it's the same as going out in the woods.''

You don't find many guys saying they like to be princessy, but that's Weir. Some of you won't care about that, and some will roll your eyes at figure skating.

But give Weir a minute here. It is his ability and willingness to express himself, through clothes, music, athleticism, that is making him America's best figure skater.

This is about honesty and artistry. Weir is a character, yes. But he might be the most honest person you will meet. He is honest with himself, honest about himself, about his feelings, his surroundings. And he is so well in touch, and so athletic, too, that it works to put him in contention to win a medal.

Let me address this head-on: This isn't about whether he's gay because we don't know that, and it's none of our business anyway.

But he is so openly flamboyant, so effeminate in a flaunting sort of way, that he's a test of the homophobic, not-that-there's-anything-wrong-with-that crowd anyway.

"It's over, it's done,'' he said after his routine. "It's Valentine's Day. I can go buy myself a rose and some chocolate now.''

"I'm roughing it," he said, chuckling some more. "It'd be the same as me going out into the woods, I think. Camping. Camping."

Outlandish remarks are not unusual for Weir, who describes himself as a "wild card" for a medal but is more likely to be left in the dust next week by Russia's Evgeni Plushenko.

Weir, 21, got into trouble with U.S. Figure Skating officials last month when he described the tempo of a competitor's short program as "a vodka-shot, let's-snort-coke kind of thing." He's also previously described his costumes to "an icicle on coke" and "a Care Bear on acid."

But he refuses to bow to any sort of self-censorship.

"I think people are definitely very wary of what's going to come out of my mouth and they're very worried about the kind of image I'm portraying for figure skating, as far as I've heard," he said. "That's cool. People should stay scared."

When a TV reporter asked him to say hello to his fans back home in Newark, Del., - an almost compulsory event at Olympic news conferences - Weir was gracious and thanked the "many people who have touched my life and enriched it and helped me get to the point where I'm at."

Then, as if to prove that there's no muzzling him, Weir went a little further. He also mentioned "a lot of people there, though, that didn't support me at the beginning, so all of a sudden, they are. And that's not something that I enjoy. I don't like two-faces."

"So, to those people, you know, you can - you can do your thing, and it just shows that with proper support and proper encouragement, you can go very far even if there are people that are detracting from everything."

But this is exactly the kind of tepid politics that will relegate the Democrats to permanent minority status in Congress. The party has in Hackett the Barack Obama of 2006 -- an infinitely marketable rising star. And Hackett's biggest upside is that his unimpeachable patriotism helps inoculate the entire party against charges of being pussies on national security issues, and his leadership might even help the party craft a coherent stance on the Iraq war.

The Democrats have an opportunity to hold Hackett up on a national stage as the new, red-state-friendly, populist face of the party. But the powers that be are trying to shunt him back to a local race that will be nothing more than a side-show come November.

Imagine if the party establishment were a producer evaluating the talent of George Clooney back in his ER days. Instead of recognizing his breakout potential and giving him a shot at the silver screen, they're encouraging him to re-up for reruns as the best little pediatrician on television.

The real issue, it seems to me, is that Hackett is a loose canon. He swears. He says impolitic, un-poll-tested things. He criticizes the party leadership for steering the Democrats into an electoral ditch.

Sherrod Brown? He is nothing if not a "safe choice."

Committing to a candidate like Hackett means committing to changing business as usual -- and despite their mounting losses, the Democratic establishment seems to have an unholy commitment to the status quo.

Peter Banko, the hospital administrator at Christus Spohn Hospital Corpus Christi-Memorial, said Harry Whittington had the heart attack early Tuesday while being evaluated.

He said there was an irregularity in the heartbeat caused by a birdshot pellet, and doctors performed a cardiac catheterization. Whittington expressed a desire to leave the hospital, but Banko said he would probably stay for another week.

The White House has decided that the best way to deal with Vice President Dick Cheney's shooting accident is to joke about it.

President Bush's spokesman quipped Tuesday that the burnt orange school colors of the University of Texas championship football team that was visiting the White House shouldn't be confused for hunter's safety wear.

"The orange that they're wearing is not because they're concerned that the vice president may be there," joked White House press secretary Scott McClellan, following the lead of late-night television comedians. "That's why I'm wearing it."

The president's brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, took a similar jab after slapping an orange sticker on his chest from the Florida Farm Bureau that read, "No Farmers, No Food."

"I'm a little concerned that Dick Cheney is going to walk in," the governor cracked during an appearance in Tampa Monday.

Thank You

Today I am announcing that I am withdrawing from the race for United States Senate. I made this decision reluctantly, only after repeated requests by party leaders, as well as behind the scenes machinations, that were intended to hurt my campaign.

But there was no quid pro quo. I will not be running in the Second Congressional District nor for any other elective office. This decision is final, and not subject to reconsideration.

I told the voters from the beginning that I am not a career politician and never aspired to be – that I was about leadership, service and commitment.

Similarly, I told party officials that I had given my word to other good Democrats, who will take the fight to the Second District, that I would not run. In reliance on my word they entered the race. I said it. I meant it. I stand by it. At the end of the day, my word is my bond and I will take it to my grave.

Thus ends my 11 month political career. Although it is an overused political cliche, I really will be spending more time with my family, something I wasn’t able to do because my service to country in the political realm continued after my return from Iraq. Perhaps my wonderful wife Suzi said it best after we made this decision when she said "Honey, welcome home." I really did marry up.

To my friends and supporters, I pledge that I will continue to fight and to speak out on the issues I believe in. As long as I have the microphone, I will serve as your voice.

It is with my deepest respect and humility that I thank each and every one of you for the support you extended to our campaign to take back America, and personally to me and my family. Together we made a difference. We changed the debate on the Iraq War, we inspired countless veterans to continue their service by running for office as Democrats and we made people believe again. We must continue to believe.

Remember, we must retool our party. We must do more than simply aspire to deliver greatness; we must have the commitment and will to fight for what is great about our party and our country; Peace, prosperity and the freedoms that define our democracy.

Rock on.

Paul Hackett

And unless Ms. Kwan's bubbly personality keeps endorsement deals coming, her early departure could also be bad news for her pocketbook. The 25-year-old figure skater's lucrative contracts with Coca-Cola and Visa are near an end — and marketing experts say it is now less likely she will be landing big new deals anytime soon. Coca-Cola and Visa say they had no plans to use her beyond the Olympics.

"I think the problem now is that instead of people looking at her as a gold medal winner, they're looking at her with a little, 'oh, I'm so sorry for her,' " said Bob Dorfman, the executive vice president and creative director for Pickett Advertising in San Francisco and the author of The Sports Marketers' Scouting Report, a quarterly analysis of athletes' endorsement potential. "You want to feel good when you look at her, but instead you're feeling bad. So I can see some marketers turning away from her because of that."

Coca-Cola and Visa would not disclose how much Ms. Kwan has been paid for her services; marketing executives say such deals are usually in the low seven-figure range.

Iraq war veteran Paul Hackett, who gained popularity for his staunch criticism of President Bush, has dropped out of the Democratic race for U.S. Senate in Ohio, according to a published report.

Hackett told The New York Times for Tuesday's editions that the same party leaders who urged him to run for Senate after his political debut in a House race last year had turned on him.

"This is an extremely disappointing decision that I feel has been forced on me," Hackett said.

Soon the national party came courting: Hackett met several times with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Sen. Chuck Schumer, chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), both of whom encouraged him to run for the seat of Ohio’s senior senator, Republican Mike DeWine, in '06. Hackett said he would—after been told by Ohio Congressman Sherrod Brown that he wasn’t planning to run—and on October 3 he publicly threw his hat in the ring.

Then, last week, his phone rang again. It was Sherrod Brown calling to tell Hackett he’d changed his mind: he was running after all. Then Schumer called, and this time he wasn’t delivering a pep talk. Hackett got the distinct sense that he was being asked to make way for the party insider. "Schumer didn’t tell me anything definitive," he says. "But I’m not a dumb ass, and I know what he wanted me to do."

DSCC spokesman Phil Singer insists that "We didn’t play any role in bringing Brown in. We were as surprised as anyone else when he decided to reconsider."

The unmasking of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson by White House officials in 2003 caused significant damage to U.S. national security and its ability to counter nuclear proliferation abroad, RAW STORY has learned.

According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran.

Speaking under strict confidentiality, intelligence officials revealed heretofore unreported elements of Plame's work. Their accounts suggest that Plame's outing was more serious than has previously been reported and carries grave implications for U.S. national security and its ability to monitor Iran's burgeoning nuclear program.

While many have speculated that Plame was involved in monitoring the nuclear proliferation black market, specifically the proliferation activities of Pakistan's nuclear "father," A.Q. Khan, intelligence sources say that her team provided only minimal support in that area, focusing almost entirely on Iran.

[snip]

Three intelligence officers confirmed that other CIA non-official cover officers were compromised, but did not indicate the number of people operating under non-official cover that were affected or the way in which these individuals were impaired. None of the sources would say whether there were American or foreign casualties as a result of the leak.

Why was the White House relying on a Texas rancher to get the word of Cheney's hunting accident out over the weekend, asked Gregory, accusing McClellan of "ducking and weaving."

"David, hold on… the cameras aren't on right now," McClellan replied. "You can do this later."

"Don't accuse me of trying to pose to the cameras," the newsman said, his voice rising somewhat. "Don't be a jerk to me personally when I'm asking you a serious question."

"You don't have to yell," McClellan said.

"I will yell," said Gregory, pointing a finger at McCellan at his dais. "If you want to use that podium to try to take shots at me personally, which I don't appreciate, then I will raise my voice, because that's wrong."

"Calm down, Dave, calm down," said McClellan, remaining calm throughout the exchange.

"I'll calm down when I feel like calming down, Gregory said. "You answer the question."

"I have answered the question," said McClellan, who had maintained that the vice president's office was in charge of getting the information out and worked with the ranch owner to do that. "I'm sorry you're getting all riled up about."

"I am riled up," Gregory said, "because you're not answering the question.

McClellan insisted he understood that reporters deserve an answer.

"I think you have legitimate questions to ask," the press secretary said. "The vice president's office was the one that took the lead to get this information out... don’t know what else to tell you... That's my answer."

Now, in order to be considered a "liberal," only one thing is required – a failure to pledge blind loyalty to George W. Bush. The minute one criticizes him is the minute that one becomes a "liberal," regardless of the ground on which the criticism is based. And the more one criticizes him, by definition, the more "liberal" one is. Whether one is a "liberal" -- or, for that matter, a "conservative" -- is now no longer a function of one's actual political views, but is a function purely of one's personal loyalty to George Bush.

[snip]

What it takes to make someone a "conservative" in [Brent] Bozell's eyes is the same as what is required in the eyes of all Bush followers -- a willingness to support Bush's actions because they are the actions of George Bush.

We see the same thing happening to hard-core conservative Bob Barr due to his criticism of Bush's violations of FISA . Similarly, the minute a Senator with years of conservatism behind them deviates from a Bush decree on a single issue, they are no longer "conservative." George Voinovich became a "liberal" the minute he refused to support John Bolton’s nomination; John Sununu is now "liberal" because he did not favor immediate renewal of every single provision of the Patriot Act which Bush demanded, and Senators like Chuck Hagel and John McCain long ago gave up any "conservative" status because of their insistence on forming opinions that occasionally deviate from the decrees from the White House.

People who self-identify as "conservatives" and have always been considered to be conservatives become liberal heathens the moment they dissent, even on the most non-ideological grounds, from a Bush decree. That's because "conservatism" is now a term used to describe personal loyalty to the leader (just as "liberal" is used to describe disloyalty to that leader), and no longer refers to a set of beliefs about government.

That "conservatism" has come to mean "loyalty to George Bush" is particularly ironic given how truly un-conservative the Administration is. It is not only the obvious (though significant) explosion of deficit spending under this Administration – and that explosion has occurred far beyond military or 9/11-related spending and extends into almost all arenas of domestic programs as well. Far beyond that is the fact that the core, defining attributes of political conservatism could not be any more foreign to the world view of the Bush follower.

As much as any policy prescriptions, conservatism has always been based, more than anything else, on a fundamental distrust of the power of the federal government and a corresponding belief that that power ought to be as restrained as possible, particularly when it comes to its application by the Government to American citizens. It was that deeply rooted distrust that led to conservatives' vigorous advocacy of states' rights over centralized power in the federal government, accompanied by demands that the intrusion of the Federal Government in the lives of American citizens be minimized.

Is there anything more antithetical to that ethos than the rabid, power-hungry appetites of Bush followers? There is not an iota of distrust of the Federal Government among them.

[snip]

Indeed, as many Bush followers themselves admit, the central belief of the Bush follower's "conservatism" is no longer one that ascribes to a limited federal government -- but is precisely that there ought to be no limits on the powers claimed by Bush precisely because we trust him, and we trust in him absolutely. He wants to protect us and do good. He is not our enemy but our protector. And there is no reason to entertain suspicions or distrust of him or his motives because he is Good.

[snip]

We have heard for a long time that anger and other psychological and emotional factors drive the extreme elements on the Left, but that is (at least) equally true for the Bush extremists. The only difference happens to be that the Bush extremists control every major governmental institution in the country and the extremists on the Left control nothing other than the crusted agenda for the latest International A.N.S.W.E.R. meeting.

And the core emotions driving the Bush extremists are not hard to see. It is a driving rage and hatred – for liberals, for Muslims, for anyone who opposes George Bush. The rage and desire to destroy is palpable.

Whittington has long been active in Texas Republican politics; he was named by then-Gov. George W. Bush to the Texas Funeral Service Commission, which was involved in a major scandal investigating improperly licensed embalmers in Dallas during Shrub's tenure. The company, Kenyon International, has a subsidiary, SCI, that landed a Katrina body-counting contract. See this earlier Blend post.

One of the first things my dad taught me was how to move around in the woods or in a field to maximize my safety. Aside from the blaze orange requirements today for visual safety, you stay behind the person with the gun, you keep your muzzle pointed away from people and dogs who are your companion animals (and reports are that they were using dogs to flush out the birds, so guns would have been pointed skyward to minimize potential accidents for the dogs), and you never, never, NEVER squeeze off a round without first ascertaining the entire visual in front of where you will be shooting, within the designated path of your particular firearm (different guns have different ranges and shot patterns, depending on caliber and load) -- in other words, look very carefully before you ever pull the trigger.

That Mr. Whittington was in the line of sight for Dick Cheney is regrettable. But no matter whether Whittington walked into the line of sight or whether Cheney turned to shoot at quail and placed Whittington within his line (which is a more likely hunting scenario, given that you generally try to walk up on a hunting party from behind if at all possible if you are at all experienced, to minimize possible accidents), it is the hunter's responsibility at all times to be secure in what he is seeing before he ever pulls the trigger. Period.

And no amount of trying to spin this to a press corps who has never fired a shotgun takes away from the fact that the shooter always has the obligation to ensure safety before pulling the trigger. ALWAYS.

Not doing so as a kid would have gotten me a serious butt whipping and worse. My dad was very, very serious about it, having known idiots who went out in the woods and caused just this sort of accident. You never, ever shoot without looking very carefully first. Cardinal rule of gun safety number one.

[snip]

And call me crazy, but a blast from a 28-gauge shotgun that puts you in the ICU isn't something that's just a surface scrape or anything. It hurts like hell. And no amount of calling it a "spray" or "being peppered" or whatever takes away from the fact that: this man was shot, at close range, by the Vice President of the United States, who then told no one in the American public -- and no one else did either, including the local police -- for 22 hours.

Something is weird about this. I can't put my finger on what it is, and I'm awaiting a read of whatever police report gets released, but the whole narrative is odd. And reeks of covering for something.