Labels: Rudy Giuliani

Labels: Alpha Dogs, bloggers

Labels: music

Labels: Television News

Military leaders are struggling to choose Army units to stay in Iraq and Afghanistan longer or go there earlier than planned, but five years of war have made fresh troops harder to find.

Faced with a military buildup in Iraq that could drag into next year, Pentagon officials are trying to identify enough units to keep up to 20 brigade combat teams in Iraq. A brigade usually has about 3,500 troops.

The likely result will be extending the deployments of brigades scheduled to come home at the end of the summer, and sending others earlier than scheduled.

Nearly 90 percent of Army National Guard units in the United States are rated "not ready" -- largely as a result of shortfalls in billions of dollars' worth of equipment -- jeopardizing their capability to respond to crises at home and abroad, according to a congressional commission that released a preliminary report yesterday on the state of U.S. military reserve forces.

The report found that heavy deployments of the National Guard and reserves since 2001 for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for other anti-terrorism missions have deepened shortages, forced the cobbling together of units and hurt recruiting.

"We can't sustain the [National Guard and reserves] on the course we're on," said Arnold L. Punaro, chairman of the 13-member Commission on the National Guard and Reserves, established by Congress in 2005. The independent commission, made up mainly of former senior military and civilian officials appointed by both parties, is tasked to study the mission, readiness and compensation of the reserve forces.

"The Department of Defense is not adequately equipping the National Guard for its domestic missions," the commission's report found. It faulted the Pentagon for a lack of budgeting for "civil support" in domestic emergencies, criticizing the "flawed assumption" that as long as the military is prepared to fight a major war, it is ready to respond to a disaster or emergency at home.

Labels: debt, George W. Bush, idiocy, Iraq, terrorism

Labels: Iraq, Veterans Affairs

Maron has so far hosted two shows on Air America radio, both in the morning and the evening, and there’s a rumor going around that he may be in talks for a third. “I don’t know if that’s going to happen yet,” Maron said. “They’re trying to get me to go back, but when you’ve been in a difficult relationship it’s hard to keep going back. We’ll see what happens but I certainly miss doing that. I miss getting up in the morning and doing all kinds of funny stuff and breaking news and yelling…I miss doing the morning show. You guys used to get it [in Chicago], but I don’t remember what station. I’ve done two shows for them. I’ve done an evening show and a morning show and they want me to come back and I’m still talking to them about it.

Labels: Marc Maron

Labels: homeownership, wildlife

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich acknowledged he was having an extramarital affair even as he led the charge against President Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair, he acknowledged in an interview with a conservative Christian group.

"The honest answer is yes," Gingrich, a potential 2008 Republican presidential candidate, said in an interview with Focus on the Family founder James Dobson to be aired Friday, according to a transcript provided to The Associated Press. "There are times that I have fallen short of my own standards. There's certainly times when I've fallen short of God's standards."

Gingrich argued in the interview, however, that he should not be viewed as a hypocrite for pursuing Clinton's infidelity.

"The president of the United States got in trouble for committing a felony in front of a sitting federal judge," the former Georgia congressman said of Clinton's 1998 House impeachment on perjury and obstruction of justice charges. "I drew a line in my mind that said, 'Even though I run the risk of being deeply embarrassed, and even though at a purely personal level I am not rendering judgment on another human being, as a leader of the government trying to uphold the rule of law, I have no choice except to move forward and say that you cannot accept ... perjury in your highest officials."

Labels: hypocrisy, Newt Gingrich

This is topical TV as competitive sport. There are the late shows, the late-lates, the Comedy Centrals, "Saturday Night Live," MadTV. Even Fox News entered the fray with its conservative-bent "1/2 Hour News Hour." Plus, HBO is planning to throw into the mix "The Gaggle," to cover the 2008 elections -- hosted by a rotating younger demo of political pundits, like former Wonkette blogger Ana Marie Cox, stand-up comic Marc Maron and Republican operative Mike Murphy.

HBO is developing a political satire series, "The Gaggle," to bolster its lineup during the campaign for the White House in 2008.
Named for the informal kibitzing between White House beat reporters and the press secretary that takes place before the televised briefing, "The Gaggle" will cast a younger generation of political journalists in a political opinion show that uses comedy as one of its key drivers.

Appearing in the first pilot, performed live at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, was Ana Marie Cox, the former Wonkette blogger and author of political novel "Dog Days"; standup comedian Marc Maron; and Republican operative Mike Murphy, who managed campaigns for California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and 2008 presidential aspirant Mitt Romney.

The show will differ from HBO's "Real Time With Bill Maher" in that it will tap a younger, snarkier group of up-and-coming political journos, and no particular host will drive the show's agenda.

Labels: Marc Maron

Candidate Clinton, Embracing the Trite and the True

By Dana Milbank
Friday, March 9, 2007; Page A02

Are you in it to win? Would you regard civil rights as the gift that keeps on giving? Do you believe in the American Dream, stupid?

If you answered yes to any of the above, you might consider supporting Hillary Clinton, the person to send to the White House when you care enough to send the very best. More than any other candidate, Clinton has brought the sensibility of Hallmark greeting cards to the 2008 presidential race.

Yesterday, the Democratic front-runner took a number of provocative stands as she spoke about soldiers and veterans at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank:

"If you serve your country, your country should serve you."

"I'm here to say that the buck does stop with this president."

"Let us work . . . to take care of those who are taking care of us."

The controversy didn't end there. She also offered her view that American soldiers are simultaneously "giving their all," "holding their breath" and "stretched to the breaking point." Candidate Cliche continued: "Who's on their side? Who's standing up for them? . . . We owe these young men and women the very best."

We do not owe them the very best rhetoric, however. Abraham Lincoln gave the last full measure of devotion to support-the-troops language 142 years ago, when he called on the nation "to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan." Yesterday, Clinton had this to say of the troops: "They don't have the luxury of passing the buck to somebody else. They step forward and they step up."

In fairness, the current occupant of the White House has left future generations little to work with, should they ever decide to etch his words in marble. Bring 'em on? Smoke 'em out? With us or against us? But Clinton's platitudes are deliberate, not innate. As the Democrats' front-runner, she needs to be as anodyne as possible if she is to overcome her polarizing reputation.

Labels: Hillary Clinton, idiocy, Washington Post

For those of us living in the Garden State, the growing scandal over the firing of federal prosecutors immediately brought to mind the subpoenas that Chris Christie, the former Bush “Pioneer” who is now the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, issued two months before the 2006 election — and the way news of the subpoenas was quickly leaked to local news media.

The subpoenas were issued in connection with allegations of corruption on the part of Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat who seemed to be facing a close race at the time. Those allegations appeared, on their face, to be convoluted and unconvincing, and Mr. Menendez claimed that both the investigation and the leaks were politically motivated.

Mr. Christie’s actions might have been all aboveboard. But given what we’ve learned about the pressure placed on federal prosecutors to pursue dubious investigations of Democrats, Mr. Menendez’s claims of persecution now seem quite plausible.

In fact, it’s becoming clear that the politicization of the Justice Department was a key component of the Bush administration’s attempt to create a permanent Republican lock on power. Bear in mind that if Mr. Menendez had lost, the G.O.P. would still control the Senate.

For now, the nation’s focus is on the eight federal prosecutors fired by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. In January, Mr. Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee, under oath, that he “would never, ever make a change in a United States attorney for political reasons.” But it’s already clear that he did indeed dismiss all eight prosecutors for political reasons — some because they wouldn’t use their offices to provide electoral help to the G.O.P., and the others probably because they refused to soft-pedal investigations of corrupt Republicans.

In the last few days we’ve also learned that Republican members of Congress called prosecutors to pressure them on politically charged cases, even though doing so seems unethical and possibly illegal.

The bigger scandal, however, almost surely involves prosecutors still in office. The Gonzales Eight were fired because they wouldn’t go along with the Bush administration’s politicization of justice. But statistical evidence suggests that many other prosecutors decided to protect their jobs or further their careers by doing what the administration wanted them to do: harass Democrats while turning a blind eye to Republican malfeasance.

Donald Shields and John Cragan, two professors of communication, have compiled a database of investigations and/or indictments of candidates and elected officials by U.S. attorneys since the Bush administration came to power. Of the 375 cases they identified, 10 involved independents, 67 involved Republicans, and 298 involved Democrats. The main source of this partisan tilt was a huge disparity in investigations of local politicians, in which Democrats were seven times as likely as Republicans to face Justice Department scrutiny.

How can this have been happening without a national uproar? The authors explain: “We believe that this tremendous disparity is politically motivated and it occurs because the local (non-statewide and non-Congressional) investigations occur under the radar of a diligent national press. Each instance is treated by a local beat reporter as an isolated case that is only of local interest.”

And let’s not forget that Karl Rove’s candidates have a history of benefiting from conveniently timed federal investigations. Last year Molly Ivins reminded her readers of a curious pattern during Mr. Rove’s time in Texas: “In election years, there always seemed to be an F.B.I. investigation of some sitting Democrat either announced or leaked to the press. After the election was over, the allegations often vanished.”

Labels: Alberto Gonzales, Paul Krugman

Labels: bloggers

The first thing that made me feel creepy about the program was the sight of an Orthodox Jew (the filmmaker, Simcha Jacobovici) supposedly discovering a tomb containing the bones of Jesus, Mary Magdalene and their alleged family. Before I go on, let me first say that I do not believe that it is the place of anyone to make other people feel foolish about following their faith. If this was indeed the tomb of Jesus, then not only is the Christian Testament false but, worse, Christianity is a cruel deception, à la “The Da Vinci Code,” foisted on the world by Jesus' panicky followers to help market a faith led by a dead messiah. I don't think that is how Christianity was born, and I don't think interfaith relations are improved when a Jewish filmmaker implies such a thing. At least Dan Brown is not Jewish, and at least he thinly disguised his anti-Christian screed as a novel. For a Jew to produce a documentary film that supposedly disproves both Jesus' celibacy and his resurrection is bad ecumenical business. I feel the same way about Jews defending Nazis who want to march through Jewish neighborhoods. Perhaps somebody should do it, but Jews should not be defending the rights of the killers of Jews. There has been so much blood and suffering, so much venom and so much hatred in past Jewish-Christian relations. How are we helped in our efforts to heal our wounds and the wounds of our world by trying to refute the foundations of the other's faith?

Long before the DaVinci code, my reading had convinced me that Jesus and Mary of Magdala would have had to be married. Jesus was a nice Jewish boy and a rabbi, and as a Jewish boy with a Jewish mother he would have been under enormous pressure to be married. The whole concept of celibacy among priests did not become a rule until the early fourth century CE; previous to that time the first pope, St. Peter, is known to have been a married man and subsequent popes and bishops were married, many with children. This became a problem as the early church began amassing property since children become heirs and inherited the priestly property. It was only after the early fourth century that church writers began to expound on the horrors of women and their sexuality.

There is no evidence of any celibate Jewish priests during the time of Jesus. Christian writers like to quote Jesus's words as indicating a preference for celibacy when he said, "there are those who have renounced marriage for the sake of the kingdom of heaven." But earlier translations reveal this quote to actually be "some have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven." Matthew 19.12 This is a good example that shows how retranslating the bible has twisted all of the original meaning out of the story in order. The eunuch statement follows a strict teaching about the sanctity of marriage and equates divorce to adultery, after which the followers of Jesus say "then it is better never to marry." Jesus then makes the statement that some are born eunuchs and some become eunuchs by their own hand.

[snip]

One of the more interesting points of the film was the likelihood that Mary of Magdala may have become a respected priestess of Jesus's teachings after his death, a concept that rehabilitates Mary's reputation from the whore of the bible to a woman with spiritual power. Long before the DaVinci Code the Nag Hammadi scrolls included a Gospel of Mary, indicating that she was in fact one of the apostles with her own story to tell. If this is true, it is a major turnabout in the entire Christian epic that forces a question of the story as a whole.

Labels: Christianity, faith, Jesus Tomb

Ursa non Grata

Internal memorandums circulated in the Alaskan division of the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service appear to require government biologists or other employees traveling in countries around the Arctic not to discuss climate change, polar bears or sea ice if they are not designated to do so.

[snip]

In December, the Bush administration, facing a deadline under a suit by environmental groups, proposed listing polar bears throughout their range as threatened under the Endangered Species Act because the warming climate is causing a summertime retreat of sea ice that the bears use for seal hunting.

Environmentalists are trying to use such a listing to force the United States to restrict heat-trapping gases that scientists have linked to global warming as a way of limiting risks to the 22,000 or so bears in the far north.

It remains unclear whether such a listing will be issued. The Fish and Wildlife Service this week held the first of several hearings in Alaska and Washington on the question.

Over the past week, biologists and wildlife officials received a cover note and two sample memorandums to be used as a guide in preparing travel requests. Under the heading “Foreign Travel — New Requirement — Please Review and Comply, Importance: High,” the cover note said:

“Please be advised that all foreign travel requests (SF 1175 requests) and any future travel requests involving or potentially involving climate change, sea ice and/or polar bears will also require a memorandum from the regional director to the director indicating who’ll be the official spokesman on the trip and the one responding to questions on these issues, particularly polar bears.”

The sample memorandums, described as to be used in writing travel requests, indicate that the employee seeking permission to travel “understands the administration’s position on climate change, polar bears, and sea ice and will not be speaking on or responding to these issues.”

Labels: Christofascist Zombie Brigade, Newt Gingrich

In September 2005, I wrote a column for the campus newspaper that blasted the anti-military bias among my fellow students at Columbia University. In addition to being an American studies major at Columbia, I am a Marine Corps reservist, and my comrades in arms were proud of me once that column had turned into appearances on "The O'Reilly Factor" and "Hannity & Colmes" and an opinion piece for the New York Post. None of those media outlets knew who I had been before I was a Marine, an Ivy Leaguer and an outspoken defender of the military.

Up until last weekend, Salon and the rest of the left-wing media had largely ignored me. Given the left's constant talk about equality, discrimination, minority rights and systemic oppression, I thought the fact that I was a Latino Marine, a nontraditional, 36-year-old Ivy League student and a 100 percent flag-waving red-blooded Reagan Republican would make my point of view interesting, but so be it. Everything is political now, and even the double standards have talking points.

Then came last weekend. I was invited to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, an annual convention of the right attended by more than 5,000 people, to accept the Jeanne Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom Award. It was recognition for what I'd said in print and on-air about anti-military attitudes on campus. During CPAC, I had my picture taken with the controversial conservative pundit and author Ann Coulter.

Coulter's comments about John Edwards drew unprecedented attention to this year's CPAC. Then, after a while, some of that attention was turned on me.

[snip]

Porn reduces the mind and flattens the soul. I don't like it. That's not hypocrisy talking; that's just experience. I sometimes think of myself, ironically, as a progressive: I started off as a liberal but I progressed to conservatism. Part of that transformation is due to my time in the industry. How does a conservative trace his roots to such distasteful beginnings? I didn't like porn's liberalism. In porn, everything taboo is trivialized and everything trivial is magnified.

Being in the adult entertainment industry was sort of like being in a cult, and like all followers of a cult, I have a difficult time figuring out when I stopped believing in the party line. I can tell you, though, that by the time I finished my brief tour of the major studios, I was pretty disgusted with myself. It was an emotional low, and the people who surrounded me were like drug dealers interested only in being with the anesthetized in order not to shake off the stupor of being high.

Why did I become a conservative? Just look at what I left, and look at who is attacking me today. Let's face it: Those on the left who now attack me would be defending me if I had espoused liberal causes and spoken out against the Iraq war before I was outed as a pseudo celebrity. They'd be talking about publishing my memoir and putting me on a diversity ticket with Barack Obama. Instead, those who complain about wire-tapping reserve the right to pry into my private life and my past for political brownie points.

Sure, I had my picture taken with Ann Coulter. I don't agree with what she said, but anyone in the military would defend her right to say it. I'm not apologizing for it. I'm also not going to claim I'm sorry for leaving a long-ago summer job off my curriculum vitae. A lot things in my life don't add up, but then I was never good at math. It's just a part of my past, and as anyone who reflects on the past realizes, it contributes to who I am today.

Labels: Ann Coulter, hypocrisy

Labels: Scooter Libby

Following the furor over President Bill Clinton’s last-minute pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich (among others), Bush made it clear he wasn’t interested in granting many pardons. “We were basically told [by then White House counsel and now Attorney General Alberto Gonzales] that there weren’t going to be pardons—or if there were, there would be very few,” recalls one former White House lawyer who asked not to be identified talking about internal matters.

The president has since indicated he intended to go by the book in granting what few pardons he’d hand out—considering only requests that had first been reviewed by the Justice Department under a series of publicly available guidelines.

Those regulations, which are discussed on the Justice Department Web site at www.usdoj.gov/pardon, would seem to make a Libby pardon a nonstarter in George W. Bush’s White House. They “require a petitioner to wait a period of at least five years after conviction or release from confinement (whichever is later) before filing a pardon application,” according to the Justice Web site.

[snip]

Moreover, in weighing whether to recommend a pardon, U.S. attorneys are supposed to consider whether an applicant is remorseful. “The extent to which a petitioner has accepted responsibility for his or her criminal conduct and made restitution to ... victims are important considerations. A petitioner should be genuinely desirous of forgiveness rather than vindication,” the Justice Web site states.

Of course, there is nothing that requires Bush to follow these guidelines in reviewing a pardon for Libby (whose lawyer, Ted Wells, stated on the courthouse steps Tuesday that he intended to push for a retrial, adding that he has “every confidence that Mr. Libby will be vindicated.”) As Love, the former pardon attorney, points out, “the president can do whatever he wants.” Both Clinton and Bush’s father, President George H.W. Bush (who pardoned Casper Weinberger among other Iran-contra figures), bear that out.

Still, Bush himself publicly reaffirmed his determination to stick to the Justice pardon guidelines as recently as last month. In a Feb. 1 interview with Fox News anchor Neal Cavuto, Bush was asked about whether he would pardon Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, two former U.S. Border Patrol agents convicted of shooting a Mexican drug dealer who was fleeing across the border into Mexico.

[snip]

“I’m saying … there is a process in any case for a president to make a pardon decisions. In other words, there is a series of steps that are followed, so that the pardon process is, you know, a rational process,” the president answered.

Doug Berman, a Ohio State University law professor who specializes in pardons, said the president may have just been pointing to the Justice Department process as a way to “avoid responsibility” for the political flap over the Border Patrol agents’ case. But Bush has always used his pardon power sparingly—dating back to his days in the Texas governor’s mansion.

Labels: Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Scooter Libby

Insurgents have sought to intensify attacks during a Baghdad security crackdown and additional U.S. forces will be sent to areas outside the capital where militant groups are regrouping, the new commander of U.S. forces in Iraq said Thursday.

U.S. Gen. David Petraeus said the troop buildups outside Baghdad will focus on Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, a growing hotbed for suspected Sunni extremists fleeing the U.S.-Iraqi security operation in Baghdad.

But Petraeus stressed that military force alone is "not sufficient" to end the violence in Iraq and political talks must eventually include some militant groups now opposing the U.S.-backed government.

"This is critical," Petraeus said in his first news conference since taking over command last month. He noted that such political negotiations "will determine in the long run the success of this effort."

Petraeus listed a series of high-profile attacks since U.S. and Iraqi forces began the security sweep three weeks ago, including a suicide blast at a mostly Shiite university and an assassination attempt against one of Iraq's vice presidents.

The Pentagon has pledged 17,500 combat troops to the capital. Petraeus has said the full contingent should not be in place until early June. He declined to say how many U.S. forces will be deployed to Diyala, which the group al-Qaida in Iraq has made one its main staging grounds.

Military officials believe many insurgents have shifted from Baghdad to Diyala to escape the security operation.

Why in the world is anyone surprised that the Bush administration has not been taking good care of wounded and disabled American troops?

Real-life human needs have never been a priority of this administration. The evidence is everywhere — from the mind-bending encounter with the apocalypse in Baghdad, to the ruined residential neighborhoods in New Orleans, to the anxious families in homes across America who are offering tearful goodbyes to loved ones heading off to yet another pointless tour in Iraq.

The trial and conviction of Scooter Libby opened the window wide on the twisted values and priorities of the hawkish operation in the vice president’s office. No worry about the troops there.

And President Bush has always given the impression that he is more interested in riding his bicycle at the ranch in Texas than in taking care of his life and death responsibilities around the world.

That whistling sound you hear is the wind blowing across the emptiness of the administration’s moral landscape.

U.S. troops have been treated like trash since the beginning of Mr. Bush’s catastrophic adventure in Iraq. Have we already forgotten that soldier from the Tennessee National Guard who dared to ask Donald Rumsfeld why the troops had to go scrounging in landfills for “hillbilly armor” — scrap metal — to protect their vehicles from roadside bombs?

[snip]

Have we forgotten that while most Americans have sacrificed zilch for this war, the mostly uncomplaining soldiers and marines are being sent into the combat zones for two, three and four tours? Multiple combat tours are an unconscionable form of Russian roulette that heightens the chances of a warrior being killed or maimed.

In the old days, these troops would have been referred to as cannon fodder. However you want to characterize them now, their casually unfair treatment is an expression of the belief that they are expendable.

[snip]

There is something profoundly evil about a country encouraging young men and women to go off and fight its wars and then shortchanging them on medical care and other forms of assistance when they come back with wounds that will haunt them forever.

Labels: George W. Bush, Iraq, Veterans Affairs

Labels: Fox News, Scooter Libby

BLITZER: He, according to this jury, men and women of his peers, he's convicted of lying to the FBI, lying to a federal grand jury. Presumably he's going to jail, at least for some period of time.

Was justice served?

TOENSING: Well, I didn't think justice was served by bringing the case in the first place.

I had never heard...

BLITZER: But you can't justify lying to a federal grand jury...

TOENSING: Well, wait a minute...

BLITZER: ... or obstructing justice.

TOENSING: That's not (UNINTELLIGIBLE) -- but, Wolf, there's a difference between lying and two witnesses' memories differing. I mean look at how the inconsis...

BLITZER: These aren't just two witnesses. These were like 10 wit -- nine witnesses...

TOENSING: (UNINTELLIGIBLE)...

BLITZER: ... said they discussed her identity with him...

TOENSING: Right.

BLITZER: ... before he claims he learned about it from...

TOENSING: And he...

BLITZER: ... Tim Russert.

TOENSING: The charges were only, because -- trust me, Fitzgerald would have brought more if he had had that kind of -- any kind of inconsistency with someone else -- were Matt Cooper and Tim Russert. And so those are two people.

And guess what?

They had all kinds of problems with what they remembered.

BLITZER: Yes, but there was a lot of...

TOENSING: Witnesses at the trial...

BLITZER: ... other witnesses -- there were a lot of other witnesses...

TOENSING: But witnesses at the trial just...

BLITZER: ... who said that -- prosecution witnesses -- who said they discussed her identity with him...

TOENSING: Right.

Guess what?

Let's just take Ari Fleischer, who is a fine man, an honest man. And he said that he remembered talking about it with "Scooter" Libby. But he said he never talked about it with Walter Pincus, the "Washington Post" reporter.

And what did Walter testify to?

I'm sure you know. He said oh my goodness, in the middle of the conversation, Ari Fleischer interrupted me and said, hey, you know, his wife works for the CIA.

This is why prosecutors -- and, Wolf, I don't know of another case where it's just a memories differ kind of case...

BLITZER: But...

TOENSING: You usually have to have something else, like Martha Stewart, there was witnesses there that she asked me to lie. You have none of that in this case and...

BLITZER: But are you questioning Patrick Fitzgerald, his integrity?

TOENSING: Oh, absolutely.

I'm not questioning...

BLITZER: He wasn't... TOENSING: I questioned his judgment because...

BLITZER: But, you know, he was named the special counsel by John Ashcroft, the attorney general.

TOENSING: Well, I wrote an article that questioned this...

BLITZER: He's an attorney...

TOENSING: ... his capability.

BLITZER: And he's a U.S. attorney in Chicago.

TOENSING: That's right.

BLITZER: So he comes with a really credible reputation.

TOENSING: Yes, well, I'm not alone in questioning his judgment in pursuing a case where you don't have evidence more than just some other witnesses...

Labels: Scooter Libby

Judge Walton read the query sheet I'd marked earlier.

You know someone on the prospective witness list?

I do. Bob Woodward was my boss at the Washington Post for three or four years.

Would you tend to give his statements more credibility than the statements of other witnesses?

I immediately picture a party Woodward hosted at his Georgetown home for the Metro staff about 25 years ago. When I went looking for my girl friend, I found her with some copy aides and reporters in an attic piled high with boxes of files for one of his books.

"Unbelievable," said one of the reporters. "Look at the file labels. This entire box is backup for one interview."

But not infallible. Didn't he write two different books about going to war in Iraq?

Know anyone else on the list?

Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus. I don't think I ever spoke to him during my 10 years at the Post, but twice in the last 14 months we talked at parties thrown by a mutual friend.

Anyone else?

Until a year or so ago, Tim Russert was a neighbor. His back yard and mine shared an alley and a basketball hoop where our sons played. I attended a few neighborhood barbecues in his back yard.

Attorneys at both tables are suppressing "aint this a small town" grins.

Do you know Judith Miller?

No. And yet. I remember a scathing column about Miller in the New York Times and volunteer that I went to grade school with its author, Maureen Dowd. (Maureen had a crush on my brother Kevin. Her older brother Kevin was something of a hero to my youngest brother Brendan after he showed up to coach his grade school football team one Saturday morning in a convertible, with a gorgeous woman in a black cocktail dress in the front seat, and what appeared to be an empty bottle of champagne on the floor. They'd obviously been up all night. He obviously had game.)

I'm not eager to be on any jury for a six week trial, especially with a recently published novel to pimp. But the suggestion that I might lay down for a fellow journalist is starting to irritate. I had to work too hard to become a reporter. Started in the basement of the Washington Post pushing 400 pound rolls of paper to the presses, blah, blah, blah.

"From where you sit I'd be skeptical too," I tell them. "But I've also heard good things about Mr. Libby." Pregnant pause. "A friend who played in a 40 and older touch football league with him says he has a good arm."

Actual snickering.

One of the lawyers asks me the subject of my 2005 non-fiction book.

"Spying."

"You wrote about the CIA?"

"I did." The perfect storm.

Yet here I am.

Labels: Scooter Libby

Labels: Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby

It's just another Halliburton oil and gas operation. The company name is emblazoned everywhere: On trucks, equipment, large storage silos and workers' uniforms.

But this isn't Texas. It's Iran. U.S. companies aren't supposed to do business here.

Yet, in January, Halliburton won a contract to drill at a huge Iranian gas field called Pars, which an Iranian government spokesman said "served the interests" of Iran.

[snip]

Halliburton says the operation — videotaped by NBC News — is entirely legal. It's run by a subsidiary called "Halliburton Products and Services Limited," based outside the U.S. In fact, the law allows foreign subsidiaries of U.S. corporations to do business in Iran under strict conditions.

[snip]

Still, Halliburton stands out because its operations in Iran are now under a federal criminal investigation. Government sources say the focus is on whether the company set out to illegally evade the sanctions imposed ten years ago.

For Halliburton to have done this legally, the foreign subsidiary operating in Iran must be independent of the main operation in Texas. Yet, when an NBC producer approached managers in Iran, he was sent to company officials in Dubai. But they said only Halliburton headquarters in Houston could talk about operations in Iran. Still, Halliburton maintains its Iran subsidiary does make independent business decisions.

[snip]

Halliburton says it is unfairly targeted because of politics, but recently announced it is pulling out of Iran because the business environment "is not conducive to our overall strategies and objectives."

...if their old boss Dick Cheney manages to get his way and the US attacks Iran, would Halliburton get government compensation for it's destroyed equipment and potential profits?

And I can't help but wonder what the outcry would be from the right if it were a company Barack Obama used to run that was doing business in Iran.

Labels: Dick Cheney, Halliburton, Iran

Clinton Plans Major Appeal to Women

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will begin an ambitious effort on Tuesday to enlist thousands of women to play roles in her presidential campaign, hoping to build on the enthusiasm her candidacy has stirred among female voters at early campaign events.

Labels: Hillary Clinton

Pull on rubber gloves, darling, and scour something to within an inch of its life...Because ours is the way of the scrub brush, and you have the mop-fu in your blood!

Ann Coulter, fresh from implying that John Edwards is a "faggot," now has a statement on her Web site saying Edwards campaign manager David Bonior "is fronting for Arab terrorists."

Coulter made the homophobic slur about Edwards, a Democratic presidential candidate married to a woman, during a Friday speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Soon after, Bonior announced he was sending out a fund-raising letter seeking "Coulter Cash" to "show every would-be Republican mouthpiece that their bigoted attacks will not intimidate this campaign."

A copy of Bonior's letter was posted on Coulter's Web site, with this note underneath: "It's always good to divert Bonior from his principal pastime which is fronting for Arab terrorists."

Bonior was elected to Congress half a dozen times in Michigan, and served in Vietnam.

Labels: Ann Coulter, insanity, John Edwards

Labels: Ann Coulter, John Amaechi

Ms. Readling, a 50-year-old real estate agent, is one of nearly 47 million people in America with no health insurance.

Increasingly, the problem affects middle-class people like Ms. Readling, who said she made about $60,000 last year. As an independent contractor, like many real estate agents, Ms. Readling does not receive health benefits from an employer. She tried to buy a policy in the individual insurance market, but — having had cancer — could not obtain coverage, except at a price exceeding $27,000 a year, which was more than she could pay.

[snip]

Today, more than one-third of the uninsured — 17 million of the nearly 47 million — have family incomes of $40,000 or more, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a nonpartisan organization. More than two-thirds of the uninsured are in households with at least one full-time worker.

Ms. Readling’s experience is typical; people who have had serious illnesses often have difficulty obtaining insurance. If coverage is available, the premiums are often more than they can afford.

While the government does not have an official definition of “middle class,” one commonly used point of reference is the median household income, which was $46,326 in 2005.

Katherine Swartz, a professor of health policy and economics at Harvard, said the soaring cost of health care was a major reason for the increase in the number of uninsured. She said it also reflected long-term changes in the economy, like the decline in manufacturing jobs and the growth in the share of workers in service industries and small businesses, which are less likely to provide health benefits.

Moreover, Ms. Swartz said, “Companies have become more aggressive in hiring people as temporary or contract workers with no fringe benefits.”

[snip]

“I am scared to get married because I don’t have insurance,” Ms. Readling said. “If I have to go to the hospital and I can’t pay my hospital bills, what happens? Do they go after him? Can they take your home?”

To collect unpaid medical bills, health care providers often obtain judgments against a patient’s spouse, as well as the patient, and file liens against their homes. Ms. Readling says she does not own a house, but her fiancé does.

[snip]

Ms. Readling said it was stressful enough visiting doctors every few months for her cancer follow-ups. Without coverage, she said, the experience is even more stressful.

“When you go to any medical person and they ask for your insurance card, you are so ashamed because you have to say, ‘I don’t have insurance,’ ” Ms. Readling said. “You just feel like you are dirt.”

Ms. Readling said she often woke up at night, terrified of the cost of getting sick without insurance.

“Anything that goes wrong with my health could destroy me financially,” Ms. Readling said. “I could be ruined.”

She said she had never voluntarily allowed her insurance to lapse and could not understand why she was being blackballed.

“What did I do wrong?” Ms. Read-ling asked. “Why am I being punished? I just don’t understand how I could have fallen through this horrible, horrible crack.”

Knowing her health benefits from her prior job would expire in January 2006, she began shopping for a new policy in May 2005. But in June 2005, she learned she had cancer.

“At that point,” Ms. Readling said, “I called everybody I could think of, begging for help. But no insurer would touch me.”

Labels: health care

Ray Oliva went into the spare bedroom in his home in Kelseyville, Calif., to wrestle with his feelings. He didn't know a single soldier at Walter Reed, but he felt he knew them all. He worried about the wounded who were entering the world of military health care, which he knew all too well. His own VA hospital in Livermore was a mess. The gown he wore was torn. The wheelchairs were old and broken.

"It is just not Walter Reed," Oliva slowly tapped out on his keyboard at 4:23 in the afternoon on Friday. "The VA hospitals are not good either except for the staff who work so hard. It brings tears to my eyes when I see my brothers and sisters having to deal with these conditions. I am 70 years old, some say older than dirt but when I am with my brothers and sisters we become one and are made whole again."

Stories of neglect and substandard care have flooded in from soldiers, their family members, veterans, doctors and nurses working inside the system. They describe depressing living conditions for outpatients at other military bases around the country, from Fort Lewis in Washington state to Fort Dix in New Jersey. They tell stories -- their own versions, not verified -- of callous responses to combat stress and a system ill equipped to handle another generation of psychologically scarred vets.

[snip]

Sandy Karen was horrified when her 21-year-old son was discharged from the Naval Medical Center in San Diego a few months ago and told to report to the outpatient barracks, only to find the room swarming with fruit flies, trash overflowing and a syringe on the table. "The staff sergeant says, 'Here are your linens' to my son, who can't even stand up," said Karen, of Brookeville, Md. "This kid has an open wound, and I'm going to put him in a room with fruit flies?" She took her son to a hotel instead.

"My concern is for the others, who don't have a parent or someone to fight for them," Karen said. "These are just kids. Who would have ever looked in on my son?"

Capt. Leslie Haines was sent to Fort Knox in Kentucky for treatment in 2004 after being flown out of Iraq. "The living conditions were the worst I'd ever seen for soldiers," he said. "Paint peeling, mold, windows that didn't work. I went to the hospital chaplain to get them to issue blankets and linens. There were no nurses. You had wounded and injured leading the troops."

Hundreds of soldiers contacted The Washington Post through telephone calls and e-mails, many of them describing their bleak existence in Medhold.

During a White House meeting last week, a group of governors asked President Bush and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about their backup plan for Iraq. What would the administration do if its new strategy didn't work?

The conclusion they took away, the governors later said, was that there is no Plan B. "I'm a Marine," Pace told them, "and Marines don't talk about failure. They talk about victory."

In the weeks since Bush announced the new plan for Iraq -- including an increase of 21,500 U.S. combat troops, additional reconstruction assistance and stepped-up pressure on the Iraqi government -- senior officials have rebuffed questions about other options in the event of failure. Eager to appear resolute and reluctant to provide fodder for skeptics, they have responded with a mix of optimism and evasion.

Labels: Republic Party, Veterans Affairs, Walter Reed