Edgewise

Bannergate, or Bush accidentally tells the truth

OK, I'm being facetious. Bush's blatant lies (or disingenuous parsing of words, for the lawyers out there) about the photo-op "Mission Accomplished" banner, examined in the DNC's Kicking Ass weblog, don't stand up to the least bit of scrutiny, but of course it's more of an embarassment and a problem for his team being pushed off message than an actual scandal (although trying to put the blame onto the sailors was pretty low).

Actually, I think Bush accidentally revealed the truth in his ad lib about his advance men: "They weren't that ingenious, by the way," which he said in a sarcastic undertone. This utterance reveals that he probably thought the flight suit, carrier positioning, banner, and photo-opportunistic speech were great ideas at the time but has come to realize that they have turned into liabilities. Hence, I imagine, his irritation with his PR flacks.

Diebold story gets legs

I don't want to turn Edgewise into an all-Diebold-all-the-time weblog, but it seems that if we don't plug the most obvious risks to election integrity, then any other efforts to make change will be for nothing.

Dan Gillmor reports that Newsweek is now covering the issue:

Steven Levy (Newsweek): Black Box Voting Blues. The best minds in the computer-security world contend that the voting terminals can't... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

...and Scot Hacker reports of coverage of the (illegally?) leaked Diebold memos on the UC Journalism school's intellectual property Biplog:

Mary Hodder posted an entry in the J-School's bIPlog on the leak of certain internal Diebold memos. Diebold is sending cease and desist letters to universities whose students link to said leaks, and Swarthmore is falling for it. What's really amazing about the memos is what they reveal about the attitude of the company to which our government has given millions of dollars to build voting machines. Choice quote: "If voting could really change things, ..." [Birdhouse]

Paranoids have enemies, too

Others have complained about the way the Bush administration makes them start wanting to put on a tinfoil hat and join the conspiracy theorists. We're reasonable people and we resent having to seriously consider some of these scary tales of potential voter-fraud.

It's bad enough if it's already happened, but why does it seem so hard to make sure it never happens (again?) in the future? I can only hope that whoever is the eventual Democratic nominee will take the risk of unauditable, tamperable voting machines seriously as a threat to their chance of winning the election fair and square. If we roll over for this kind of thing, then we practically deserve to lose our franchise.

Votes don't belong in a relational database

Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Electrolite has been hammering away at the Diebold voting machines issue recently. This seems to be another one of those slowly unfolding stealth scandals (like the profiteering by Halliburton in Iraq) that hasn't yet come up with a hook that will make ordinary people see the danger. Who will tell the people?

In Hold it right there, a new troubling issue is brought to light, beyond the already troubling issues of the Diebold machines using proprietary (not open-source) technologies, the software being unauditable, the potential vulnerability to hacking, the lack of a paper trail, and the anomalous results (at far variance to last-minute polling, exacerbated by the folding-up of the media's exit-polling consortium).

This new issue? Why is Diebold using Microsoft Access, a relational database, to store votes? I realize this gets into a technical area that most of us don't feel qualified to count on, but the simplest explanation of a relational database is that it used to correlate information between two or more data tables. However, there's no reason why the software company providing the voting infrastructure should need to correlate any information beyond who got what vote:

Commenting on the general bogglement over the revelation that Diebold's e-voting systems rely on Microsoft Access, Jon Meltzer writes:

The real issue isn't Diebold trying to maximize its profit by using cheap labor and software tools; it's the very concept of an unauditable voting system. The problem would be no less severe if they were using a secure, unhackable implementation.

Erik Olson, who does this stuff for a living, asks what suddenly seems like a rather pertinent question: why on earth are they recording votes in a relational database at all?

There aren't supposed to be any relations in voting. [...] What other data are they creating relations to? This is even more contrary to the purpose of a voting machine than simple security.

At the end of a vote, the machine needs to produce the following data.

EXAMPLE PRECINCT
   FOO xxxx votes
   BAR xxxx votes
   ..............
   QUX xxxx votes
   --------------
   ALL yyyy votes

The precinct is a set field, determined by where the machine is set. Every other relation, other that "foo gets a vote," is antithetical to the secret ballot process, and should never be collected. Not time, not date, not who, where, why, whatfor, nothing! Give me a camera in the polling place--not in the booths, mind you--and a very accurate clock on the voting machine and the camera, and save the time voted with the vote, and I can tell you how almost every person in that polling station voted. Save machine number with that vote as well, and that becomes every voter. Period.

The fact that they are using a RDBMS is a declaration that they intend to treat voting as a relational database.

There's more in Erik's full comment, over in this thread. Meanwhile:

"Every other relation, other that "foo gets a vote," is antithetical to the secret ballot process, and should never be collected."

Right. Whether Access is on the voting machine itself, or being used on the voting data somewhere else, why on earth is it in use at all? The "relations" involved in vote-recording are completely trivial. The only sensible reasons to use a relational database are if you're planning to record data you shouldn't record, and to do things with it that you shouldn't do. [Electrolite]

This all worries me a great deal.

Spinning McGovern

Counterspin Central puts forward an interesting take on the Howard Dean as McGovern meme.

Great new conservative weblog

For the last year or so Sebastian Holsclaw has been holding his own, debating liberals and leftists in the comment sections of many popular left-wing weblogs. Holsclaw has distinguished himself in his intellectual honesty and willingness to entertain nuances that transcend the talking points of the day.

Now, Holsclaw has his own weblog where he can set his own agenda, and a built-in audience of active commenters gleaned from his journeyman participation on other blogs. I've added his weblog to my subscriptions and will add his headlines to the sidebar of this blog next time I update the template.

The other side of the orchard story

Mark A. R. Kleiman has been following the tree-destruction/collective-punishment story from Iraq and says that Jonathan Adler at National Review Online's weblog The Corner has turned up some information that rebuts the collective-punishment argument. Even if this new information is "thinly sourced," I'm still hoping it's got the essence right. I really don't want to believe we'd be that careless.

Straw poll

Wesley Clark and Joe Lieberman bow out of the Iowa Caucuses to make room for Adam Felber.

Failure to communicate

A week ago I read in the New York Times ("Republicans Debate Merits of Following Schwarzenegger to the Center") about a bunch of conservative Republicans spinning Schwarzenegger's election as a "fluke" (sounding like nothing so much as the spin of the mainstream Democrats here in California) and claiming that his pro-choice and other signal social-liberal views had not contributed to his success. One comment that stuck in my mind was from Stephen Moore (he's not just the president of the Club for Growth - he's also a client):

I don't think this means that the party nationally should move to the center in any way. The party that has to do some soul-searching right now is the Democratic Party.

How generous and broadminded of him, I thought to myself, to offer that frank advice to his political adversaries. Could it be however, that both parties could afford to spend some effort on searching for their souls? Democrats and Republicans have come unhinged from left and right, which have themselves come unhinged from liberalism and conservatism, which at this point seem to reflect mainly intuitive impulses.

Recently, Aaron Swartz took the left to task for failing to connect its message to a wider audience (Aaron is a teenaged programming prodigy and respected weblogger):

Today’s criticism of the left is that they blow tiny things out of proportion, whine about how awful they are, and then whine more about how their whining has had an effect. ... The first example is the PATRIOT Act. This darling of the left has been the subject of ACLU TV ads, Nightline episodes, and countless editorials and op-eds. If you went by the editorializing, the PATRIOT Act was the first step towards turning America into a police state where the Bill of Rights no longer applied. But when you look at the actual act, you find very little: some more surveillance authority, a nasty court, but it’s not like our fundamental freedoms are being taken away. I’d be much more concerned about being declared an enemy combatant and whisked off to a military prison. Or being held indefitely without charges as a material witness.

....

>So left, I ask, why are you wasting your time on this stuff? The public’s attention is precious, wouldn’t you rather talk about how Bush is giving money to Osama and giving his relatives free flights out of the country when all planes are grounded? Or how about how, while all but one of the hijackers were Saudis, we gave Saudi Arabia a free pass and in fact Bush hugged a member of the House of Saud just 48 hours after the attacks? Or maybe how the Clinton administration left a complete plan for dismantling Al Qaeda, and while the few holdovers from his administration were trying to get the President to carry it out, Bush went to his ranch to show the press his dogs? Perhaps remind folks about the public dismantling of environmental and other restrictions for large corporate donors? Or point out Bush’s lies about how everyone benefits from tax cuts for the rich? Or ask why Ashcroft is trying to jail pornographers, sellers of drug paraphanelia, and computer programmers when there’s supposedly a war on terrorism going on? Nah, you’re right, I guess it’s not important.

Oops, I forgot, I’m supposed to be attacking the left. What’s wrong with you, left? Have you lost all sense of proportion? I mean, yeah, it’s sad Valerie Plume [sic] was outted, but maybe you should worry about the rest of the population for a bit? Who knows, if you started talking to the public, you might even win an election one of these days!

[Aaron Swartz]

Now, I could quibble about Aaron's Internet-mediated view of politics and the left (EFF and other civil libertarian concerns loom larger online than off), but it's hard to argue with his basic point that the left isn't hammering away at a cohesive message the way the right tends to do with its comforting mantras ("lower taxes, reduce government," etc.).

I'd also add that the message should be positive, not just about what's wrong or corrupt or venal about Bush and much of the Republican apparatchik. There's needs to be an easy-to-grasp, positive agenda that's not just about hand-outs or stroking interest groups.

Which brings me back to soul searching. What do Democrats stand for? What does it mean to be a liberal in America? What is the political program of the left that transcends the "dialectics" of the past?

More sources for the orchard story

The Yellow Doggerel Democrat has been tracking down some alternative sources for the item about US / coalition troops uprooting orchards in Iraq.

Leaks and the leaky leakers who leak them

Eschaton has the Philadelphia Inquirer running this bit of Becket-like absurdity:

"Bush told his senior aides Tuesday that he "didn't want to see any stories" quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and that if he did, there would be consequences, said a senior administration official who asked that his name not be used."

Here's O-dub's take on it:

The idiots @ 1600 leaked an order to stop leaks:

Concerned about the appearance of disarray and feuding within his administration as well as growing resistance to his policies in Iraq, President Bush - living up to his recent declaration that he is in charge - told his top officials to "stop the leaks" to the media, or else.

News of Bush's order leaked almost immediately.

As Taegan says, "priceless". [Oliver Willis: Like Kryptonite To Stupid]

The myth of 'electability'

I knew Al Gore was sunk when Patrick Moynihan, in the course of endorsing Bill Bradley for president in the primaries leading up to 2000, pronounced Al Gore "unelectable." I didn't agree that this was necessarily the case, but I did feel that this curse would become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

In OpinionJournal, Harold Bloom writes that Wesley Clark is electable and that the other Democratic candidates are not. Dean is frequently called unelectable, or his electability is called into question.

All of this is a way of talking about a gut sense and intangibles such as charisma and whether you turn off more people than you turn on. Some people may or may not be electable, but I don't trust random commentators to discern this quality as if it's a kind of aura that only they can see.

Frankly, I don't even trust my own gut on this matter. I thought Jerry Brown was going to take the country by storm in 1992, especially when I saw my conservative father taking him seriously (while also seriously pondering another clearly unelectable candidate, Pat Buchanan).

If enough people vote together, anyone is electable.

In the desert, trees are life

I find the whole idea of U.S. troops imposing collective punishment by uprooting longstanding orchards to be sickening on so many levels that I've had a hard time coming up with what I want to say about it. Here's Patrick Neilsen Hayden, borrowed, quoted, and nested:

I've been trying all day to get my mind around this.

US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops.

The stumps of palm trees, some 70 years old, protrude from the brown earth scoured by the bulldozers beside the road at Dhuluaya, a small town 50 miles north of Baghdad. Local women were yesterday busily bundling together the branches of the uprooted orange and lemon trees and carrying then back to their homes for firewood.

Nusayef Jassim, one of 32 farmers who saw their fruit trees destroyed, said: "They told us that the resistance fighters hide in our farms, but this is not true. They didn't capture anything. They didn't find any weapons."

Other farmers said that US troops had told them, over a loudspeaker in Arabic, that the fruit groves were being bulldozed to punish the farmers for not informing on the resistance which is very active in this Sunni Muslim district.

"They made a sort of joke against us by playing jazz music while they were cutting down the trees," said one man. Ambushes of US troops have taken place around Dhuluaya. But Sheikh Hussein Ali Saleh al-Jabouri, a member of a delegation that went to the nearby US base to ask for compensation for the loss of the fruit trees, said American officers described what had happened as "a punishment of local people because 'you know who is in the resistance and do not tell us'." [...]

The children of one woman who owned some fruit trees lay down in front of a bulldozer but were dragged away, according to eyewitnesses who did not want to give their names. They said that one American soldier broke down and cried during the operation. When a reporter from the newspaper Iraq Today attempted to take a photograph of the bulldozers at work a soldier grabbed his camera and tried to smash it. The same paper quotes Lt Col Springman, a US commander in the region, as saying: "We asked the farmers several times to stop the attacks, or to tell us who was responsible, but the farmers didn't tell us."

"I came and called them by their long names, but they did not quiver, they did not hear or answer. They lay dead."

Iraqi blogger Riverbend discusses the preciousness of palm trees and citrus orchards to desert farmers, and the intense feeling for trees that results.

Juan Cole points out that if we are indeed destroying agriculture in order to punish whole populations for not informing, then we are in direct violation of the Geneva Convention, which specifically prohibits this sort of "collective punishment." (Commenter "ott", in the thread following this post at Whiskey Bar, provides the specific Convention passages that apply.)

Teresa, who knows something about growing up in a desert, nailed it in conversation this afternoon. "If I were a child, and remote, powerful strangers came and cut down my trees...I would never again believe that they were the good guys."

Me, I can't stop thinking about Ken MacLeod's point about "giant lizards from another star." [Electrolite]

I said nearly a year ago that we must seem like aliens from outerspace with our advanced tech (think "death rays") and total control of the skies.

In general, I support the military. There is a long military tradition in my family dating to the Civil War in this country. I had five uncles in the Pacific war and my father was a marine in the period between Korea and Viet Nam (fortunately). I like the civilian control we have over the military and I think that in some ways the military can be a progressive force in society, when adequately managed.

Having said all that, I also think it's possible for our military to be put to wrong uses, and I'm hoping there's a good explanation for the incidents referred to above, because if not - I think we're treading on dangerous ground, legally, ethically, and in terms of geopolitical strategy.

Dreier to challenge Boxer?

Sacbee blogger Dan Weintraub reports:

The Washington Times speculates that Rep. David Dreier, political-friend-in-chief to the new gov, might challenge Barbara Boxer for the U.S. Senate next year.... [California Insider]

Everyone's trying to read the tea leaves now with Schwarzenegger and just the other day someone was telling me that Dreier could have big ambitions.

Posted by xian at 3:01 PM

Kos handicaps the Dems

Daily Kos: State of the Democratic Race gives a reasonably good overview of Democratic candidate primary strategies and tactics at this sateg in the race.

An early Halloween in California

In Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle, Matier & Ross help get us into the Halloween spirit by reporting on two extremely creepy moments in California politics.

Extremely Creepy Moment Number One

At a bipartisan post-election party, M&R write: "The 70 or so people at the party also included a number of lobbyists, one of whom went up to Schwarzenegger and joked, 'Hi -- I'm one of those special interests you promised to get rid of.' At which point Gov. Arnold threw his arm around the guy and laughed, 'I lied.'"

Creepy? You betcha. Like a creepy laughing clown. With enormous biceps.

Extremely Creepy Moment Number Two

You'll remember that Democratic SF mayor Willie Brown was recently named one of the gazillion members of Arnold's gubernatorial transition team. Fine. You'll also remember that prior to the election, Willie was considered an outspoken opponent of the recall and big booster of Gray Davis.

In fact, after Brown was appointed to Arnold's transition team, an article in Friday's Chronicle paraphrased Brown's spokesman as saying that "The fact that Brown is a Democrat, helped lead the campaign against the recall and voted for Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante -- and still got tapped by Schwarzenegger to help put his new administration together -- is a hopeful sign for the future."

Fine. So Brown was an opponent of the recall. A great friend of Gray and Cruz. And now he's on Arnold's team. And that's just bipartisanship in action. Not creepy at all. In fact, it's borderline heart-warming. But wait...

In today's MR: "In a luncheon panel sit-down with us, at the Corporate Counsels Association convention in San Francisco, Brown confided: 'I was the one who told (Arnold) not to debate. I told him, 'You are already the star -- why debate? Why would you put up with talking to people that can only benefit from your presence?'"

So while he was out supporting Gray and Cruz, participating in strategy sessions and such, Brown was also offering friendly strategic advice to Arnold.

And now he's bragging about it.

Which is like, wow. Just incredibly creepy.

Thanks M&R! Happy almost-Halloween to you too.

Germans react to California recall

Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine notes that the German magazine Bild points to Schwarzenegger's success (and his "iron will") in a way that gives him the heeby-jeebies.

Jeff's reaction triggered these thoughts, which I first posted in his comment:

It could be seen as a sign of healed national relations that we could elect a German-accented Austrian to the prefecture of our largest province, but - speaking from California - it does give my gut the willies.

Easy populism and charisma, plus a fiery will to "sweep things clean" and shake things up. Sounds great, right?

With Orrin Hatch working on the presidency thing it gets a little creepier, but it may yet be the price of seeing a moderate Republican leader in my lifetime.

Liberal Californians (myself included) will probably hate him like we hated Reagan, and fail to realize that he is the most liberal Republican governor the state has had since the 1950s, just as cross-eyed conservatives in the '90s failed to realize that they were enjoying the most conservative Democratic presidency since John F. Kennedy or perhaps Wilson.

I've often thought that Bill Clinton would be a good candidate to run the EU or even come in as secretary general at the UN to put in place that new world order with blue helmets and black helicopters so eagerly feared by our militia brethren, but imagine a worldwide election for President of Earth between Slick Willie and der Gröpenführer!

White House Plame defense shaping up

Reading around at TPM and Orcinus today I can see the outlines of a White House defense for the burning of deep-cover CIA agent, Valerie Plame.

First, they will assert that the two senior administration officials (Possibly I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Elliott Abrams) who told Robert Novak that Joseph Wilson's wife was CIA and had recommended him for the Niger reconaissance job did so without knowing this information was classified. This would reconcile both the rumormill that fingered those two and the nondenial denials that say that they were not involved in and would not condone any "leaks of classified information."

This would also, presumably, clear them of criminal liability based on their lack of intent.

All other calls from the White House would then fall into the class of Rove's follow-up notifications to Washington journalists that Wilson's wife had become "fair game" due to the "inadvertant" leak of her undercover status.

In fact, a close reading of Novak's original column shows that sentence-by-sentence, Novak first asserted Valerie Plame's CIA status and in the subsequent sentence claimed that two senior administration officials told him merely that she was involved in the decision to send Joe Wilson to Africa. This makes it possible to assert that Novak may have learned of her status outside of the conversation in which he learned of her presumed involvement in the CIA decision about who to send to confirm or debunk the "yellowcake uranium" claims.

Between these clues, a presidential slip of the tongue, and a new Newsweek article by Michael "I Shot the Sheriff" Isikoff, a picture is taking shape of a White House more interested in identifying the "senior administration official" who tipped off the Washington Post to the referral from CIA to Justice than in outing the top aides who burned the CIA operative.

So there you have it, an innocent chance burning of an agent's cover (oopsie!), and then "fair game" to go after an administration critic's family (just politics as usual), capped by the leak to the Washington Post (betrayal!). I can see it now. How long before we hear that's their story and they're sticking to it.

Things I'm doing today to keep from feeling too blue

1. Finished the Franken book. That chapter on the Wellstone memorial is amazing. If you read nothing else in the book, read that one chapter. Angry. Honest. Uplifting.

2. Listened to Steve Martin off Fresh Air/NPR. I taped this the other day on my boom box. The tape had Simon and Garfunkel on it and you can still hear about 15% Simon and Garfunkel to the 85% Steve Martin in the mix. Sometimes there's inappropriate applause, which is nice.

(If anyone wants me to send them that tape when I'm done, to minimize their own Arnold blues, send me an email at vortex@mediajunkie.com and I'll ship it over. First come first serve, and all that.)

3. Played an old Leon Russell CD.

4. Had a bowl of soup at lunch.

5. Ate some cheese.

6. Thought about all those Kennedy's up on there on stage and how that really gripes my socks. But then decided that it probably griped the collective socks of the far right even more.

7. Let myself believe that we'll all look back on this as the pivotal moment that led to Democrat (?) Will Smith winning the presidency in a 2012 landslide. My "Fresh Prince of DC" bumper stickers are ready to go.

8. Ate more cheese.

And you?

Recommended spin: anti-incumbent fever

Last night while watching the election results and contemplating the inauguration of der Gropenfuhrer, I said to B that my spin on all this was going to be that the energy of the campaign (aside from the fanboy hero-worship) came from an anti-incumbent feeling and frustration with the economy and the budget deficit. Schwarzenegger kept his positions vague and allowed people to project their hopes onto him. I don't see any mandate for Republicanism in the state and certainly not for the moral fundamentalism of the people who control Republican primaries in this state.

So, who's the next incumbent to be turned out of office in a vote revolt against bad governance and a sick economy? Recall Bush!

I see that the Dean campaign see the same spin opportunity that I do. Great minds, etc.

The recall

owie.

Exit-polling myself

Because I don't really trust the Diebold voting machine that assured me that my vote this morning had been counted but gave me no receipt and is - as far as I can tell - unaudited and vulnerable to tampering, I'll put my votes on record here.

I voted No on the recall. I've never been that great a supporter of Davis, because he doesn't seem to stand for much, but I don't anticipate any improvements from Schwarzenegger.

I voted for Bustamante because he is the next in line in the party that won the last election, and I do not wish to see the recall strategists succeed. (I have more sympathy for the populist recall action-movie fans, who may not know any better.)

I voted No on Prop 53 because a big part of the state's budget problem is micromanagerial spending mandates like these (and like the schools proposition Schwarzenegger supported in the last election as his toe-in-the-water electoral gambit) chipping away at the discretionary part of the budget.

I voted No on Prop 54 because - like so many of Ward Connerly's initiatives - it is a wolf in sheep's clothing, hiding behind popuiar concepts such as privacy and legitimate ideals like that of the colorblind society we all hope to live in someday.

In which Bob Novak freaks me out

The people at NBC want to make you think.

You can learn more about life from five minutes of Ed, for example, or Scrubs, than you can from, like, 15 minutes of ABC's According to Jim.

This is all the more especially true for NBC's news shows.

Take, for instance, Tim Russert's "Meet the Press." Last Sunday, Russert took a quiet moment to ask notorious blabbermouth Bob Novak whether he had any regrets about his column from last July. The one in which he'd named Ambassador Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA employee who ... well ... you know the rest of that story.

And Novak said no. No regrets.

Well, OK, maybe one.

In the column, as you've likely heard a few times before, Novak had called Plame an operative, even though he'd thought she was an analyst. And then of course, later, we'd all find out that she really was an operative after all. Oh, what a delightful O. Henry-like twist!

So anyway, yes, Novak had one regret. But it wasn't that he'd accidentally exposed a CIA operative and everyone she'd ever talked with, met with, stood near, etc. And it wasn't that it was looking more likely each day that he'd done and gone compromised national security.

No, what he regretted was the imprecise word choice - operative instead of analyst - that left his original column accidentally accurate. Or something like that.

Here it is, in his own words, from the "Meet the Press" transcript:

Russert: Let me turn to The Washington Post. And, well, one last thing before I - do you regret printing her name?
Novak: Oh, being a columnist and reporter for this many years is sort of like never having to say you're sorry. But I regret one thing: I used the word "operative" foolishly, when I didn't know she was an operative, I didn't mean she was an operative. The rest of it I don't regret. I try to think, if that happened again tomorrow, with not knowing anything, and a senior official had made that point to me, I can't imagine I wouldn't print it."

And that was it. With his latest bit of all-new, yet closely related brainless blabber still echoing (blabber, blabber, blabber) in our ears, with all this awful mess he'd set off for his country, for his president. That was his only regret.

And true to form, as only NBC can do, this whole exchange left me thinking.

And I thought: "That Bob Novak. He is one freaky dude."

Novak still being used

It appears from numerous reports that Novak is still working the "slime" angle of the "slime and defend" strategy designed to discredit Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, (as partisans, ironically), with his latest broadcast of the name of Plame's former CIA front company.

As a willing tool in some kind of war between the White House and the CIA, Novak seems to be digging himself ever deeper. Josh Marshall thinks that widening the story to cover this feud doesn't do the White House any good, as it always circles back to the misuse of the intelligence and the deliberate misleading of the American public into an unwarranted war.

News that these classified-leak cases are hard to prove, despite the undeniable damage done to national security and the efforts to rein in weapons of mass distruction, left me feeling somewhat discouraged the other day, but then it occurred to me that the Republicans have it all backwards. They see calls for a special prosecutor as partisan, and prefer to stonewall and rely on their dependable Attorney General to "get to the bottom of" something that Bush either already knows or could know easily by sitting down with his Vice President and a few other key aides and having a serious heart-to-heart.

In fact, if those who leaked classified information (for tactical political advantage, no less) are never produced, and the White House manages to batten down the hatches and prevent the launching of an independent investigation, it won't change the fact that somewhere in the chain of custody of a state secret, the secret was handed over from someone authorized to know it to someone not so authorized. The crime remains, a crime that Bush the father has equated with treason.

So, maybe they think they can ride out the scandal in a lawyerly fashions, but what will they do if the next election rolls around and their designated opponent is able to complain about unrevealed traitors in the White House?

Ranking redux

Christian suggested I share my top-ten ranking of the Democratic candidates....

It's a rich field, with a whole generation's worth of 50-60 year-olds taking their best shot. You could make the case that this is the most top-heavy collection we've seen from either party in three decades.

There are five I like (Clark, Dean, Edwards, Kerry, Lieberman), one I like, but who's been statistically insignificant (Braun), and four that I'd rather see bow out:

• Graham - a good man. Experienced. Respected. Admiral Stockdale.
• Gephardt - another good guy. And more likable these last few weeks than he's been in years. But it's hard to get past his role in the painfully passive 2002 elections.
• Kucinich - yet another man of character. But just too far to the left. Too far. Hard to believe I'm actually saying that. If my misspent youth were a bag of Lays Potato Chips, spilling onto the living room floor, that "dink" you just heard would be the very last chip-fragment, bouncing lifelessly off tile.
• Sharpton - Very funny on The Daily Show the other night. But I grew up in the NY area. And the whole Tawana Brawley mess left me with such a negative impression of Sharpton that, funny or not, I'd really rather he stepped off the stage.

One last thought for your consideration:

Lieberman has a huge asset that's being completely overlooked. His name, "Lieberman," it's German for "lover man," or "man who loves." Seriously. I checked with my dad. So, like, if he was president, and he went to Germany, and he walked into a room, if he said "hi," the German people in that room could greet him in their native tongue by saying: "Hello, President Loverman."

Fantastic!

Ranking candidates for Kos

Daily Kos invites us to rank the Democratic primary candidates.

Here's mine.

1. Dean
2. Clark
3. Edwards
4. Kerry
5. Kucinich
6. Braun
7. Graham
8. Gephardt
9. Lieberman
10. Sharpton

Again, I'd support any of them against Bush.

Let's see if Dan would like to post his rankings.

A special prosecutor was good enough for Nixon

This whole question of reviving the independent council law used so effectively to torture Bill Clinton (when an ultrapartisan prosecutor was installed, unlike what Reagan and Bush were faced with for Iran-Contra - Lawrence Walsh only seemed partisan in the end after the stonewalling and before the pardons), and the attendant hypocrisy, misses the point.

Hillary Clinton doesn't need to call for the reinstatement of the law. We had a perfectly good underlying solution with the special prosecutor procedure. It worked with Nixon. It should be more than adequate for this Bush, even - or especially - with a squeaky-clean nonpartisan prosecutor-appointee managing the investigation.

Putting the focus back on the journalists is a clever ruse, similar to broadening the issue to leaks in general, but it skims over the felonious revelation of classified information by someone authorized to know it.

Call him or her the Missing Link. If Ashcroft identifies that person and the two callers (assuming the Missing Link isn't one of the callers), those like myself who called for a special prosecutor will have to admit that the appearance of a conflict of interest did not hinder the investigation. That remains to be seen. Scandals of the past have taught us, though, that any effort to manage an investigation, as well as the news coverage, of a story you don't control eventually looks worse than simply calling in a referee.

Two faces of Karl Rove

Months ago I suggested someone should be running a RoveWatch blog, and I nominated Oliver Willis. Oliver said that he felt that we should keep our focus on Bush and not any of his handlers, because of the way elections work. Bush is the front-man for the team, and so politically I agree with Oliver.

However, the Plame Affair now seems to bring Rove into play, either as an approver, an initiator, or an accessory after the fact (he supposedly made a number of calls after the Novak column in which he told reporters that Wilson's wife was now "fair game").

Now, to complement the Esquire article ("Why Are These Man Laughing?") that exposed the Mayberry Machiavelli complaints of John DiIulio and hinted at Rove's ruthless techniqes, we have this article by The Guardian's Washington correspond, Julian Border (Boy Genius or Turd Blossom?), playing on two of the president's "affectionate" nicknames for his svengali.

The fellow who wrote Bush's Brain (check his name, Jim or something Moore) has been all over the media lately, claiming that this agent-outing has all the hallmarks of a Rove dirty trick. He also makes the point that without Rove Bush never would have been governor of Texas, let alone President of the United States. According to Moore, Rove essentially molded George W. Bush the politician out of the raw clay of George W. Bush the goodtime semi-incompetent influence-peddling cheerleader.