The Next Hurrah

We're Still Waiting...

by emptywheel

As I understand it, we're still waiting for "the letter" from DOJ that will tell us what we already know--these people are a bunch of sophists.

While we're waiting, though, this is the most detailed account of the letter from DNI Mike McConnell (as I understand it, Specter said on Wolf Blitzer that he still expects a letter from DOJ):

"I understand that the phrase 'Terrorist Surveillance Program' was not used prior to 2006 to refer to the activities authorized by the president," Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell wrote in a letter to Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa.   

McConnell's letter comes a week after Gonzales insisted to the committee that the hospital confrontation was about some other program he would not name because it was classified. Gonzales repeatedly denied that the internal disagreement was about the "program the president has confirmed."

As McConnell noted, Bush did not disclose the existence of the program until after The New York Times revealed it in December 2005.

[snip]

Confirmed only in February as the national intelligence director, McConnell indicated the Justice Department helped define the distinction about the surveillance program.

"The details of the activities changed in certain respects over time and I understand from the Department of Justice these activities rested on different legal bases," McConnell wrote in his one-page letter.

Right. So a guy who wasn't even read into the program when all this headfakery happened, now explains with a straight face that the name TSP didn't exist until 2006--pretty much admitting they invented the Orwellian name to give definition to the legal parts of the larger program they were willing to admit to.

And McConnell appears to be speaking second-hand about the changing legal rationalizations for the program. That is--like Congress, he has not seen the legal justifications that were deemed so troublesome by Comey.

What does it mean that, pushed into a corner, the White House and DOJ seem unprepared to have anyone fully briefed on the program talk about? Does it suggest that they're to the point where the next admission is to the full illegality of the program?

YearlyKos Timing

by emptywheel

I'm madly cleaning the house (trust me, a very rare event chez emptywheel) in some kind of mad guilt for leaving mr. e-dub and McC alone again while I'm in Chicago at YKos. So I thought it a good time for a last post until I get to Chicago tomorrow mid-day (well, you know how promises like that go).

I'm hoping I'll get to put more faces to names among our readers (heck, I hear some of my blog-mates may come out of the woodwork, too). Our "Live-blogging the Libby Trial" (me, Christy, and Shelly Snook from the Courthouse, along with Jeralyn keeping us in line) is at 9:30 on Thursday, which is likely before a lot of you get in. Then, rumor has it, I'm doing a book-signing at 2PM on Thursday. Other than that, I'll just be wandering the halls aimlessly, mourning the chocolate fountain I bitched about last year.

Drop a note in the comments if you'll be at YKos, so I know to keep a look-out for you.

Cheney Must Be a "Big Fan of Al's"

by emptywheel

As he said in yesterday's CBS interview.

Cheney, asked in an interview with CBS radio whether Gonzales should keep his job, replied: "I do. I'm a big fan of Al's."

Because he seems to have caught Al's "Cannot Recall Flu."

On Sunday, Josh Marshall pointed out that the New York Times editorial on the potential need to impeach Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said that “Vice President Dick Cheney sent Mr. Gonzales and another official to Mr. Ashcroft’s hospital room to get him to approve the wiretapping.” As Marshall noted, before the editorial, Cheney’s involvement in the incident had never been established.

Today on CNN, in a preview of his interview with the Vice President tonight, Larry King said he asked Cheney about the allegation. “I asked the Vice President about that and the story that he was the one that asked him to go,” said King. “And he said he had no recollection.”

“He did not want to deal with specifics, which tells me, they’re looking at trouble,” King added. “If you don’t want to deal with specifics…I think you’re looking at trouble and you’re looking the other way if you’re denying it.”

I seem to recall (see, I haven't been kissing either Cheney or Gonzales!) that I floated a $700 million bet that Cheney had sent Gonzales and Card. Anyone still want to take that bet?

The Check's In the Mail

by emptywheel

Hey, Scottish Haggis!?!?!? What happened to that letter from the White House you promised us?

According to RawStory, it's still in the mail. Or maybe it's not coming after all.

The White House has refused to comply with a Republican senator's request for information about Alberto Gonzales's conflicting testimony on a secret surveillance program by a 12 p.m. Tuesday deadline.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said yesterday that he requested from the Bush administration a "letter addressing that question [of Gonzales' veracity] from the administration" by noon Tuesday. He promised to release the letter to the media, but so far the word from Judiciary Committee staff is that no letter has arrived.

It is unclear whether the administration is refusing Specter's request outright or is simply tardy in delivering its response. A spokeswoman for Sen. Patrick Leahy, the committee chairman who also is expected to receive the administration's response, told RAW STORY early Tuesday afternoon that no letter had arrived yet.

Specter's office was releasing little information Tuesday.

Your guess is as good as mine what happened to Specter's love letter. Some possibilities:

• Dick heard about the promised letter and stole all of Bush's crayons
• With Mike Gerson gone, the White House can't think of a new fancy acronym--Not-TSP--that they can use to parse wildly some more
• The White House forgot that there was a still-unresolved anthrax attack on the Senate, and so mail takes a while to get to Senators
• The White House has decided to call Scottish Haggis' bluff--they're going to blow him off entirely, because they strongly suspect (with good reason) that he's just not going to do anything to stop them
• The White House is trying to postpone sending the letter--which may well admit to having broken the law--until after Congress passes some changes to FISA

Why Does Lurita Doan Still Have a Job?

by emptywheel

It has been over 50 days since Scott Bloch, the head of the Office of Special Counsel, sent Bush a letter advising that Lurita Doan be disciplined severely for her violations of the Hatch Act. Yet there she is, still in charge of the government's credit cards as the Administrator of the GSA.

If Doan weren't a Bush appointee, her fate would be clear--she would have been fired fifty days ago. But in this case, Bush has to fire her himself. And it appears that he has no intention of doing so.

I know that this will surprise no one. After all, Bush effectively pardoned the guy who was covering up Bush's own involvement in the leak of Valerie Wilson's identity. So why wouldn't he effectively pardon the gal who decided to brainstorm ways to use government resources to get Republicans elected? And also, ensured that a company, Sun Microsystems, under active investigation for ripping off the federal government by charging it more than it charges private companies, would continue to be able to rip off the government.

There's one more implication of this. If Bush isn't going to fire Doan, then he's surely not going to fire anyone else who might be found guilty of Hatch Act violations in Scott Bloch's larger investigation into the White House's politicization of the entire government (okay, I'm exaggerating slightly). You know ... people like Scott Jennings and Monica Goodling. Or the big target, Karl Rove.

Bush has basically made it legal for top appointees to hijack our federal government for the exclusive use of the Republican party. Stalin would be proud.

Operation Secret Squirrel

by emptypockets

Iraqi and Iranian news media are proving that silly season is a cross-cultural phenomenon by giving wind to conspiracy theories about the British military depositing metazoan "bioweapons," including badgers, snakes, and rabid dogs, in the country as a Parthian gift. The New York Times derides the naivete of these nervous villagers:

The Iranian news media have gotten in on the act too, claiming that foreign forces have been fitting squirrels with miniaturized surveillance devices and sending them scurrying across the border to spy. Iranian news reports, monitored by the BBC, recently referred to 14 spy squirrels being captured by alert Iranian intelligence officials before the animals could take action against the nation.

It's a fun story. Now, if only the NYT had shown a similar skepticism five years ago when reporting the over-the-top bioweapon conspiracy theories that got us into this mess in the first place.

Scottish Haggis' 18 Hours

by emptywheel

What is it with news outlets and the who, what, why, when, where of briefings? The Hill, in its description of Specter's 18 hour deadline for the Administration, names neither all the people who briefed Specter (it reveals Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell was one of the briefers) nor all the people who got briefed ("other Senators," Specter says). Though some of this is Specter, once again, trying to be clever, rather than any fault of The Hill.

Most likely, the Administration is being forced to come out with the earthshattering revelation that ... they've been parsing wildly to avoid admitting they've been breaking the law. Wow. Big news, huh? Wake me up for that revelation, would you?

But Specter seems determined to make it work to save Gonzales' job, because he says it's "premature to consider" forcing Gonzales out of the job. (Is this Specter's last ditch attempt to undercut Jay Inslee's impeachment resolution?)

Apparently, some things never change. Specter will always, ultimately, dig up weasely ways to help the Administration while he kids himself that he's being tough. And Gonzales will alway lie.

Media Narrative: The Mainstream Is Now "The Left"

by DemFromCT

One fascinating piece of fallout from the collapse of Bush popularity is the now-entrenched media idea that Democratic presidential candidates will "tack left" as they are "pushed and prodded" by the netroots and others on their way to the 2008 primaries. However, responsible coverage also adds just how far out of the mainstream current Republican thinking is:

Reconciling the divergent needs of economically-downscale voters, culturally liberal upscale voters, and essential swing- and/or centrist voters will not be easy.

These difficulties pale in comparison, however, to those facing the Republican Party and its candidates for the nomination.

In a reversal of past patterns, the conflicts in this cycle between the Republican primary electorate, on the one hand, and general election voters, on the other, are far more severe than on the Democratic side of the aisle. The continuing support among Republican voters for both President Bush and his policies in Iraq has pushed all the leading GOP candidates well outside mainstream views on ending the war, the issue most likely to dominate 2008.

The potential for conflict between Republican Party orthodoxy and more moderate general election voters was graphically displayed at a Columbia, South Carolina Republican Party debate on May 15, when the audience erupted in cheers as Rudy Giuliani endorsed the use of torture.

The rallying cry that Bush isn't a conservative is a weak one. And Digby has already captured the angst as the self-appointed centrists (who really are Establishment conservatives) try and apply outdated and inaccurate labels that better position themselves far more than enlighten their audience.

In any case, as Rasmussen points out, progressive has a more positive connotation than moderate or conservative (liberal is out of favor). When it comes to conservative, Bush and the GOP have sullied the brand.

For some, it may seem strange to distinguish between a candidate who is like Reagan and a candidate who is politically conservative. But, that gap has arisen because the definition of conservative has been altered by the more recent GOP leadership in Congress and the White House. Also, of course, being compared to Reagan ascribes some personal characteristics that cannot be captured in an ideological label.

These two themes – Reagan good, Bush bad and the American consensus on issues like Iraq, stem cell research, health care and government's (non-Norquist) role in tackling the problems of the 21st Century – will flavor the description of where the public and the candidates are described as falling within the political spectrum, particularly by the establishment punditocracy. And the more the political center moves away from the failed establishment (not just Bush but the people that supported him, including the pundits) and back to mainstream sensibility, the more that the 'left' label will be hurled in desperation, as if it matters to the pragmatic American public. It's good for fund raising on the right, I suppose, but it won't help the GOP come election day.

Update on the Debt Limit

So now it's official--Treasury Secretary Paulson says that the federal government will hit the current debt ceiling of $8.965 trillion in early October.  And he says Congress needs to act to raise the debt limit for the fifth time during Bush's presidency.  In September.  Right around the report from General Petraeus that will give Bush his marching orders on Iraq, and Congress will finally deal with the war funding issues, and right in the middle of the debates on the appropriation bills. 

The Herald Tribune notes that 

Economists doubt Congress will refuse to raise the limit. A federal default is considered unimaginable because it would rattle bond markets, force interest rates higher and shake the economy. (snip)

In the past, Treasury has resorted to numerous accounting maneuvers to pay its bills while the government waited for Congress to expand its borrowing authority. Paulson argued against being forced to use such measures, saying they "would create unnecessary uncertainty for the financial markets and result in costs to the government." Such actions, he said. "should be reserved only for extraordinary circumstances, and should be avoided."

But these are extraordinary times.  To many of us, we are already in a constitutional crisis, with an incompetent and mendacious Attorney General presiding over an overtly political Justice Demartment that serves the interests of the GOP and its patrons rather than the country as a whole; with a President and Vice President who consider themselves a unitary monarch and thumb their collective nose at the Congress; and a Congress that has so far mostly been afraid to see much less do its constitutional duty in this crisis.

So maybe the debt limit will become a factor in the war funding battle and the fight over the appropriations bills, at least eight of which (out of 12) Bush has already threatened to veto.  Clinton won the showdown with Newt Gingrich in 1995 because the public supported the programs that he wanted funded, and viewed Gingrich, who refused to pass a funding bill after Clinton's veto, thereby shutting down the government, as a Grinch.  Now it is Bush who is unpopular.  But does the public still support the kind of spending that the Dems champion?  Part of Bush's strategy has been to make government look so incompetent that it undermines public support for government programs, traditionally part of the Dems'  appeal.  But it is likely the public still supports funding security measures at the ports, higher education, children's health and the myriad of other programs included in the spending bills. 

Every confrontation actually weakens the Bush/Cheney regime, because it fractures the GOP coalition; this one is no exception.  The Dems need to play their full funding hand and play it well, and that includes not rolling over prematurely on raising the debt limit.  There are a great many things the Bush/Cheney regime can do on their own, but authorizing borrowing and spending are the two big things that they can't do alone.  Congress must get something tangible on the war in return for accommodating Bush/Cheney's fiscal needs. 

Dick on Libby

by emptywheel

Actually, Dick's comments about Libby are actually pretty interesting, so I thought I'd give them their own post. [My transcription.]

CBS: Have you spoken to your former top aide since his verdict?

Dick: I have.

CBS: Can you tell us anything about that conversation?

Dick: No. I've seen him socially on a number of occasions.

CBS: Do you believe the commutation that President Bush gave Scooter Libby for his prison term was enough, or if you had been President would you have granted a full pardon?

Dick: I thought the President handled it right. I supported his decision.

CBS: Did you disagree with the guilty verdict in the case?

Dick: I did.

CBS: Even though the President said he respects that verdict?

Dick [evil Cheney laugh]: I still ... you asked me if I disagreed with the verdict and I did.

CBS: Do you think Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald went too far in pursuing a prosecution of Scooter Libby?

Dick: Well, I don't want to go beyond where I have already. The matter's still pending before the Courts, um, there's an appeal pending, um, on the question and I don't want to um elaborate further.

See, if you disagree with the verdict, then there's only one reason to call for commutation rather than pardon. One. And that's because you want Libby to retain Fifth Amendment privilege.

It's also rather interesting the way Dick got all fumbly as soon as questions moved to Fitzgerald. Does Dick worry that he's not out of Fitzgerald's sights, yet? Because if he is, he surely ought not be having all these "met him socially on a number of occasions" meetings. After all, it was one of those "meet me socially in Jackon" visits where Cheney and Libby compared notes on Libby's perjurious story.