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Archives for August 2005
Last on Sheehan
This post by Matthew Stinson is about the best thing I have seen written on the Crawford political circus I have seen yet.
And here is another opinion worth checking out.
And Peter Daou asks:
I posed the question in this space last week, and I’ll repeat it: what would happen if Rove-Plame or Cindy Sheehan got the Natalee Holloway treatment? Would it change the course of history?
While Rove/Plame has not been as sensationalized as Holloway, I fail to see any shortage of ink on the issue. I have a feeling the same will come of the Sheehan affair.
RINO Sightings
I am proud to bring you this weeks RINO Sightings, the other weekly Carnival. Unlike previous offerings, I don’t have a creative bone in my body, so there will be no poetry or song lyrics.
RINOS Foreign:
Meanwhile, Chris Tiberius takes the foreign press to task.
The Armies of Liberation looks at media manipulation by the Yemeni President.
RINOS Domestic:
The Louisiana Libertarian discusses the new FEC hire, Penny Nance, and what the future might hold.
Mark Coffey, in his brand new digs at Decision ’08, takes some time to use Chris Lehane as a punching bag.
The Big Cat Chrnicles examines Hillary Clinton, show-stopper.
The Searchlight Crusades looks at border control.
Classical Values takes people to task for careless rhetoric, notably James Wolcott.
The Heartless Libertarian provides a book review of The Fair Tax Book.
Pigilito examines an Intelligent Design article, while the Idiom looks at Bush’s ID comments.
Resistance is Futile is planning to enroll his children in Hogwarts. Seriously.
My Pet Jawa looks at the press infatuation with DKos.
Dean Esmay defends Roosevelt and Truman from war criminal charges.
Don Surber chronicles the wholesale slaughter caused by the WV DNR.
Some think Paul Hackett deserves a refund.
I honestly don’t know how to describe this offering from Orac Knows.
Say Uncle discusses ‘What is a Right?’
Restless Mania looks at recent IAEA proclamations regarding Iran.
Richard Bennett examines an autism study.
Michael Demmons discusses the ‘myth of public property.’
A.J. Strata looks at the Democrats and Cindy Sheehan.
That’s all folks. If I missed anyone, let me know. Next Week, RINO sightings will be hosted by the World According to Nick.
FBI/Congresssional Tensions
A report in the NY Times on the tensions between Congress and the FBI is worth your time:
Disputes between the Justice Department and some of its Congressional allies over the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s performance, leadership vacancies and management issues are spurring tensions at a time when the department is seeking to remake its antiterrorism operations.
Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, the influential chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in an interview on Friday that he was deeply dissatisfied with the pace of reforms at the F.B.I. and that he hoped the national intelligence director’s new role in overseeing its terrorism operations would spur greater accountability at the Justice Department.
“Bringing in the director of national intelligence is a firm statement of dissatisfaction with the performance of the bureau and the director,” Robert S. Mueller III, Mr. Specter said.
“When you have all these issues where the F.B.I. has not performed, there’s no doubt that the director is on the spot,” he said in perhaps his harshest criticism to date of Mr. Mueller’s performance. “He’s not responsible for 9/11 – the problems came before his watch – but that was four years ago, and we’ve expected a lot of things to happen since then that have not happened…”
Among the issues that have divided them are the failure of the bureau’s $170 million software overhaul, after repeated assertions by Mr. Mueller that it was on track, as well as F.B.I. turf battles with immigration agents, questions about the training and experience of bureau counterterrorism supervisors, and complaints from lawmakers who learned that Mr. Mueller had not been writing or reviewing written Congressional responses that bore his name.
Bureau officials said on Sunday that they were puzzled to learn of Mr. Specter’s criticism.
“We have a lot of people going after us lately, but it’s not like we haven’t made an amazing transformation,” said an F.B.I. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to jeopardize relations with Congress. “This is not the same agency it was four years ago.”
Officials at the Justice Department, which oversees the F.B.I., said they were confident the bureau was making strong progress in bolstering its counterterrorism operations, with new personnel moves announced just last week as part of a major restructuring. They added that they had full confidence in Mr. Mueller’s ability to reshape the agency…
Judiciary Committee members said that for the first time in memory, none of the most senior officials at the Justice Department – Mr. Gonzales, Mr. Flanigan, Robert D. McCallum Jr., the No. 3 official there, or Ms. Fisher, if she is confirmed – would have experience as a criminal prosecutor.
Justice Department officials said that while the department’s most senior officials might not have been criminal prosecutors, they all had significant experience in the department’s top priority, countering terrorism. They also said that Mr. Gonzales had surrounded himself with senior Justice Department advisers who had extensive experience as criminal prosecutors.
But Mr. Specter said the lack of criminal experience at the top of the department “does concern me.” He said that while there were “lots of first-class professionals” throughout the ranks of prosecutors, “there are tough judgment calls that have to be made at the top, and it’s good to have some experience on what criminal intent means when you have to make those decisions.”
Something else to keep an eye on. If anyone has anymore background else on this, please link it in the comments.
Daily Plame Flame Thread
Not sure what use the Daily Flame thread is, since flame wars have erupted in virtually every comment thread, but via Memeorandum, this story by Murry Waas that actually has new information:
Justice Department officials made the crucial decision in late 2003 to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the leak of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame in large part because investigators had begun to specifically question the veracity of accounts provided to them by White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, according to senior law enforcement officials.
Several of the federal investigators were also deeply concerned that then attorney general John Ashcroft was personally briefed regarding the details of at least one FBI interview with Rove, despite Ashcroft’s own longstanding personal and political ties to Rove, the Voice has also learned. The same sources said Ashcroft was also told that investigators firmly believed that Rove had withheld important information from them during that FBI interview.
Those concerns by senior career law enforcement officials regarding the propriety of such briefings continuing, as Rove became more central to the investigation, also was instrumental in the naming of special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald…
Also of concern to investigators when they sought Ashcroft’s recusal, according to law enforcement sources, was that a number among Ashcroft’s inner circle had partisan backgrounds that included working closely with Rove. Foremost among them was David Isrealite, who served as Ashcroft’s deputy chief of staff. Another, Barbara Comstock, who was the Justice Department’s director of public affairs during much of Ashcroft’s tenure, had previously worked for the Republican National Committee, where she was in charge of the party’s “opposition research” operations.
“It would have been a nightmare scenario if Ashcroft let something slip to an aide or someone else they had in common with Rove . . . and then word got back to Rove or the White House what investigators were saying about him,” says a former senior Justice Department official, familiar with the matter.
You know the drill.
Not a Job I Would Want
This has to be the worst part of an otherwise good job with a great salary and decent perks:
The grieving room was arranged like a doctor’s office. The families and loved ones of 33 soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan were summoned to a large waiting area at Fort Bragg, N.C. For three hours, they were rotated through five private rooms, where they met with President George W. Bush, accompanied by two Secret Service men and a photographer. Because the walls were thin, the families awaiting their turn could hear the crying inside.
President Bush was wearing “a huge smile,” but his eyes were red and he looked drained by the time he got to the last widow, Crystal Owen, a third-grade schoolteacher who had lost her husband in Iraq. “Tell me about Mike,” he said immediately. “I don’t want my husband’s death to be in vain,” she told him. The president apologized repeatedly for her husband’s death. When Owen began to cry, Bush grabbed her hands. “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” he said, though his choking voice suggested that he had worries of his own. The president and the widow hugged. “It felt like he could have been my dad,” Owen recalled to NEWSWEEK. “It was like we were old friends. It almost makes me sad. In a way, I wish he weren’t the president, just so I could talk to him all the time.”
Bush likes to play the resolute War Leader, and he has never been known for admitting mistakes or regret. But that does not mean that he is free of doubt. For the past three years, Bush has been living in two worlds—unwavering and confident in public, but sometimes stricken in private. Bush’s meetings with widows like Crystal Owen offer a rare look inside that inner, private world.
Last week, at his ranch in Texas, he took his usual line on Iraq, telling reporters that the United States would not pull out its troops until Iraq was able to defend itself. While he said he “sympathized” with Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, he refused to visit her peace vigil, set up in a tent in a drainage ditch outside the ranch, and sent two of his aides to talk to her instead.
Privately, Bush has met with about 900 family members of some 270 soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. The conversations are closed to the press, and Bush does not like to talk about what goes on in these grieving sessions, though there have been hints. An hour after he met with the families at Fort Bragg in June, he gave a hard-line speech on national TV. When he mentioned the sacrifice of military families, his lips visibly quivered.
Read the whole thing.
Watching A Train Wreck
I just watched Courtney Love on Comedy Central’s Friars Roast of Pamela anderson, and she was a a train wreck.
This Roast was, by far, the filthiest thing I have ever seen on television, and I hope Brent Bozell is in bed.
For that matter, I wish I was in bed, as the insomnia reaches day 5 or 6.