Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Where Is The Iron Lady When You Need Her?

by digby

An American citizen is missing in Iran, the State Department said today.

Sources tell ABC News that the missing American was a former FBI agent, although they stressed that he was now a private citizen and that his trip to Iran was on “private business” and not associated with official U.S. matters.

State spokesman Sean McCormack said that the United States had been monitoring this case for several weeks and today had sent a message to Iran through diplomatic channels for more information on his whereabouts.

State Department officials say that Iran has yet to respond with any information. Because the United States does not have diplomatic relations with Iran, the message was passed on by the Swiss Embassy in Tehran.

McCormack said the United States had been in touch with the man’s family and employer, who were the first ones to report him missing. A senior State Department official tells ABC News the man was last seen in early March in Iran.

The official says that right now nobody seems to know where he is, but that the United States is asking Iran for any information because that’s where he was last seen. According to one official, there is “no reliable information” that the American is being detained by Iran.

McCormack denied any connection between this case and that of the 15 British sailors and marines being held by Iran for allegedly straying into Iranian waters in the Persian Gulf.

“There is no linkage with this or any ongoing cases that may have been in the news recently,” he told reporters.

Well that’s a relief.

I doubt that certain influential people in the right wing noise machine will agree, however. I suspect they will be screaming to high heaven by the end of the week. They were already up in arms about the British sailors and Tony Blair’s “wimpy” response.

Here’s a little excerpt from the Fox All Stars from last week:

Kondracke: I’ve got to say , Tony Blair is not exactly acting like Margaret Thatcher would act under these circumstances. He’s acting like Jimmy Carter would act. It’s “tip-toe” you know. one idea that I heard today was that britain might threaten to close an Iranian port and if the Iranians said, well, you don’t have any ships around to do that — oh yes, we do, we have submarines and they wouldn’t know where the submarines are and close down a port and ratchet up the problem.

Hume: Does that come from someonw who knew that the Brits might do this?

Kondracke: Uhm. No.

Barnes: Hey they could use American ships. There are two carrier groups in the gulf. And I would think that the thing President Bush would have done would have been to call Tony Blair and say, “Look, these are your people and we’ll back you on whatever your policy is, including a military option if that is what has to take place.”

Hume: Our correspondent James Rosen is reporting that this is a series of steps, that you sort of walk through the UN to try to get this to something that might matter…

Barnes … that’s a strategy of “strong letter to follow.” It’s really not much.

Hume: Is it worth going to the UN at all?

Barnes: Well, you know, they’re “low keying” it …

Hume: Well, that’s a first step

Barnes: I know, but the last step is some resolution sanctioning the Iranians and they’re already defying another one in the nuclear…

Easton: …the British…you’ve gotta be careful with this regime. This reveals a regime that wants to be considered a government. It’s already been marginalized with the sanctions that the UN passed by the security counsel this Saturday. They’re acting like a rogue terrorist outfit. Trotting this woman out. The letter. They’re acting like a terrorist organization. They’re a terrorist organization with a lot of economic power. Already we saw oil prices spike up. There’s analysts saying it could go up as high as 80,90,100 dollars a barrel…

Barnes: … the point she’s making is that they’re making money on this. The longer they keep it going. Look, there’s one thing you could do and it doesn’t mean shooting at anybody and that’s we could block the ships from leaving port with oil. Just block then in the gulf. We could do it. We certainly have the naval power there to do it.

Easton: You have to weigh the cost of doing that. Obviously that would be a huge economic shock.

Barnes: That would be up to the British.

Kondracke: You would think this would offer an opportunity to those in the west — the president, by the way, has not said a word about it, he’s letting Tony Blair handle it — but this would be an opportunity to rally everybody involved as to the nature of this regime. This is totally blackmail. They are behaving utterly irresponsibly on the nuclear front and on this front and this is the time to put the whammy on them.

Hume: How?

Kondracke: By going to the Europeans and saying now is the time for real sanctions. the Russians don’t want to go along but the Europeans, the allies of Tony Blair, could certainly do it.

Hume: You think for the sake of 15 British sailors you could get places like France…?

Kondracke: Right now it’s 15 British soldiers, it could be anybody’s soldiers, it could be anybody’s civilians. This is hostage taking. And it’s illegal by every rule of international law. This is an outlaw rogue regime and it ought to be treated like one.

Barnes: It’s up to the British to decide. Look, you know President Bush would be glad to be condemning the Iranians every day if Tony Blair said it would help. But remember the British, in the first place, when the Iranians snatched the 15 in Iraqi waters, not Iranian waters, there was a British ship that could have fired on the Iranians. They could have stopped it. And they didn’t. And they’ve followed pretty much a wimpy policy since then. And they haven’t gotten anybody back either.

It’s hard to believe that any of those people are over the age of 17, but there you have it. Even if Tony Blair has managed to retain enough sanity not to fall for such sophomoric foreign policy “advice” it is quite worrisome that the spoiled miscreant in the White House might not be able to resist responding to such taunts. He certainly won’t want to face again the harsh reaction he faced from the right over this. The empty codpiece is all he’s got left.

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Screwball

by digby

When the Washington Nationals play their home opener this afternoon at RFK Stadium, the president won’t be there to toss out the ceremonial first pitch.

For the second straight year, reports the Washington Post, President Bush has turned down an invitation to participate in a Washington baseball tradition started by President William Howard Taft in 1910.

Mr. Bush was there in 2005, to help celebrate the return of the nation’s pastime to the nation’s capital after a 33-year absence, but last year he left the first-pitch duties to Vice President Cheney. This year, neither man will be there.

The Post says that except for during World Wars I and II, only two other presidents have missed two opening days in a row – Woodrow Wilson and Richard Nixon.

So why can’t Mr. Bush, an ardent baseball fan and former part owner of the Texas Rangers, make it out to the ballpark this year? A White House spokeswoman says Mr. Bush will be in Washington today, but “it’s not possible with his schedule. … It just wasn’t going to work out.”

With the president’s approval ratings stuck below 40 percent, was Mr. Bush concerned that he might get booed? “No,” the spokeswoman said. “Certainly not.”

Somebody’s going to be mighty deflated:

Going back to 9/11, Matthews found himself blown away not by Bush’s political or military response but by his ability to throw a baseball. He compared the man to–I kid you not–Ernest Hemingway. “There are some things you can’t fake,” he explained breathlessly. “Either you can throw a strike from sixty feet or you can’t. Either you can rise to the occasion on the mound at Yankee Stadium with 56,000 people watching or you can’t. On Tuesday night, George W. Bush hit the strike zone in the House that Ruth Built…. This is about knowing what to do at the moment you have to do it–and then doing it. It’s about that ‘grace under pressure’ that Hemingway gave as his very definition of courage.”

Oooh baby.

Actually Bush made quite clear his definition of courage many years ago:

“I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes.”

What a man, what a man, what a mighty dumb man.

Be sure to read the whole Alterman piece on Tweety’s man crushes. I’ve been sayin’ it for years. Why just last week he drooled all over Tom Delay and Fred Thompson and even gushed about how much he loved Dick Armey because he was a “Knights of Columbus”(?) kind of guy. This is a very confused fellow.

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June Cleaver Democrats

by digby

Matt Stoller does good work here taking this egregious WaPo Jonathan Weisman piece apart. He also addresses the one quote that came leaping out at me when I read it:

Leon E. Panetta, who was a top White House aide when President Bill Clinton pulled himself off the mat through repeated confrontations with Congress, sees the same risk. He urged Democrats to stick to their turf on such issues as immigration, health care and popular social programs, and to prove they can govern.

“That’s where their strength is,” Panetta said. “If they go into total confrontation mode on these other things, where they just pass bills and the president vetoes them, that’s a recipe for losing seats in the next election.”

I don’t know about anyone else, but when I read that my immediate reaction was as if he’d said:

“You girls need to stick to the subjects people think you’re good at — cooking and cleaning and childcare. That’s where your strength is. If you try to confront the big boys on the important stuff like national security, war and foreign policy, it’s a recipe for losing seats.”

This, by the way, was the advice coming from the establishment Dems for years. Here’s the memo(pdf) that Stan Greenberg, Bob Shrum and James Carville sent around in 2002 before the Iraq war vote:

This decision will take place in a setting where voters, by 10 points, prefer to vote for a Member who supports a resolution to authorize force (50 to 40 percent).2 In additionwe found that a Democrat supporting a resolution runs stronger than one opposing it. For half the respondents, we presented a Democratic candidate supporting the resolution. Among these voters, the generic congressional vote remained stable, with the Democrats still ahead by 2 points at the end of the survey. In the other half of the sample, we presented a Democrat opposed to the resolution. In this group, the Democratic congressional advantage slipped by 6 points at the end of the survey.

[…]

The debate and vote on the resolution will bring closure on the extended Iraq debate that has crowded out the country’s domestic agenda as Congress concludes. But there is substantial evidence, as we indicated at the outset, that voters are very ready to turn to domestic issues. It is important that Democrats make this turn and provide a compelling reason to vote Democratic and turn down the Republicans.

In this survey, we tested two message frameworks – one offers a transition to the domestic agenda (“We need independent people in Washington who will be a check on what is going on and pay attention to our needs at home”) and one focuses on corporate influence (“Washington should be more responsive to the people and less to big corporate interests”). Both frameworks defeat the Republican alternative that begins with support for the President’s efforts on security.

(To be fair, they did say that the vote was one of conscience and gave advice on how to make the argument most effectively if you were going to vote against the war.)

But it is worth noting that we lost that election and the vote for the war has twisted presidential candidates up in knots ever since then. This was just terrible advice. There was never going to be any margin in Democrats backing Bush’s war if it went well and if it didn’t, voting for it would dog them.

And at the crux of it was the notion that Americans want Democrats to talk about domestic issues and all this national security stuff is something to get off the table. It just doesn’t work that way. The issues are the issues and Democrats have to address them with seriousness of purpose no matter what they are.

Even if you buy into this ridiculous mommy party/daddy party nonsense, as the establishment seems to do, you should ask yourself if “mommy” has any responsibility for keeping the family safe and being a good neighbor or if she’s just supposed to sit at home and care for the grandparents and tend the childrens’colds? No healthy family that I know of divides the labor like that in the modern world and this outmoded stereotype of Democrats as June Cleaver almost killed us.

The 50’s sitcom fantasy of the good wife is not a definition of leadership, whether it’s as a parent or a president, and Democrats who persist in seeing the two parties this way need to take a look at their assumptions. People care about domestic matters and foreign policy and national security and health care and —- everything. These things are prioritized according to circumstances and the times, but the responsibility for the whole panoply of issues falls to every politician who seeks office. You don’t get to take any issues off the table and any party that does that is in trouble.

I would suggest that it was when the Democrats finally took the issue of Iraq seriously that the country began to take them seriously. And it wasn’t because it was a “daddy issue.” It was because it was the most important issue on the table. It still is.

There are a number of domestic issues that are also becoming priorities and people will expect the Democrats to deliver. And they will, I have no doubt. The Democrats are brimming with ideas from all over the political spectrum about how to deal with economic policy, health care, immigration, labor etc. But they are going to have to walk and chew gum at the same time. In fact, after the mess the Republicans have made, they are going to have to walk, talk, dance and levitate while blowing bubbles in order to set things straight. But they have to do them all and they have to do them well. Ignoring the illegal Iraq occupation and the ever expanding list of Bush crimes won’t make them go away.

Update: Greg Sargent reads all the articles in the Washington Post so the writers and editors don’t have to. Unsurprisingly, he finds that their latest poll contradicts everything Weisman said.

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Digging The Dirt

by digby

Following up on my post below and Dennis Hartley’s DVD wish list from last night, I would like to add “Digging The Dirt”, the BBC documentary about the Bush oppo shop of the 2000 election, to my list. It should be required viewing for the House and Senate Judiciary Committees so they can better understand the kind of people Bush installed in the Justice Department.

The link above has a couple of clips (Josh Marshall features a bit more, here) and a transcript, so it’s at least possible to get a sense of the show.

Here’s an interesting excerpt, featuring both Tim Griffin, the recently installed US Attorney in Arkansas and Mark Corallo the spokesman who replaced Barbara Comstock at the DOJ. (Monica Goodling is in the film but doesn’t speak):

MARSHALL
Tim Griffin and his colleagues do oppo – opposition research. It means they look for any slip by the enemy – Al Gore.

GRIFFIN
Research is a fundamental point. We think of ourselves as the creators of the ammunition in a war. Research digs up the ammunition.

MARSHALL
You make the bullets.

GRIFFIN
That’s right, we make the bullets.

MARK CORALLO
I’m ready to just respond to anything that Gore says.

MARSHALL
And they feed their anti-Gore research to the American press and TV.

CORALLO
It’s an amazing thing when you have top line producers and reporters calling you and saying “We trust you, we need your stuff.”

It’s actually not really amazing at all. The Bush hit squad knew the media were openly hostile to Gore from early on in the campaign:

To read the major newspapers and to watch the TV pundit shows, one can’t avoid the impression that many in the national press corps have decided that Vice President Al Gore is unfit to be elected the next president of the United States.

Across the board — from The Washington Post to The Washington Times, from The New York Times to the New York Post, from NBC’s cable networks to the traveling campaign press corps — journalists don’t even bother to disguise their contempt for Gore anymore.

[…]

From the media’s hostile tone, one might conclude that reporters have reached a collective decision that Gore should be disqualified from the campaign.

At times, the media has jettisoned any pretext of objectivity. According to various accounts of the first Democratic debate in Hanover, N.H., reporters openly mocked Gore as they sat in a nearby press room and watched the debate on television.

Several journalists later described the incident, but without overt criticism of their colleagues. As The Daily Howler observed, Time’s Eric Pooley cited the reporters’ reaction only to underscore how Gore was failing in his “frenzied attempt to connect.”

“The ache was unmistakable — and even touching — but the 300 media types watching in the press room at Dartmouth were, to use the appropriate technical term, totally grossed out by it,” Pooley wrote. “Whenever Gore came on too strong, the room erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting down some hapless nerd.”

Hotline’s Howard Mortman described the same behavior as the reporters “groaned, laughed and howled” at Gore’s comments.

Later, during an appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, Salon’s Jake Tapper cited the Hanover incident, too. “I can tell you that the only media bias I have detected in terms of a group media bias was, at the first debate between Bill Bradley and Al Gore, there was hissing for Gore in the media room up at Dartmouth College. The reporters were hissing Gore, and that’s the only time I’ve ever heard the press room boo or hiss any candidate of any party at any event.”

You can understand why the Republican dirty tricksters seemed so confident about their ability to get members of the press corps to do their bidding. They had the same agenda. This November 2000 review of the film by Martin Lewis in TIME magazine shows the media were all too eager to help the Republicans advance their campaign narrative — a narrative that I believe was at least partially devised because they knew the media’s pre-existing loathing of Gore would make it irresistable. A loathing, by the way, that could be traced to the far too cozy relationships the press developed with the rightwing character assassins during the Lewinsky scandal when they were among that small minority of Americans who believed that Clinton should be driven from office over that ridiculous, trumped up sideshow:

The Bush campaign’s brilliant intuition was that if this unattractive trait [embellishing his accomplishments] could be vulcanized as being the CORE of Gore rather than just one of the many aspects – good and bad of a man – then they were made. How to do this? Simple. Establish a massive database of every utterance in Gore’s 26 years in public service – and then pounce on any and every discrepancy – like a bulldog lawyer seeking to impeach a witness. It wouldn’t matter how tiny the variance. Any deviation could be characterized as an embellishment… an exaggeration… an untruth… a dishonesty… and then finally the word that would superglue Gore to Clinton. A lie.

Nail Gore on sufficient discrepancies – AND be certain to trumpet each and every occurrence as yet another example of an established pattern – and the Gore goose would be cooked.

The BBC documentary shows how this worked in brilliant detail.

Lewis also noted:

During their months of filming BBC producers also observed producers for NBC’s Tim Russert among others calling to enquire if the team had any new material.

He claims it happened on both sides, but there is little doubt that the GOP narrative about Gore was hugely favored by the press during the election; they treated Bush as if he were a living example of “honor and integrity” and therefore “the better man” than the lying Al Gore. (They also liked Bush better because his campaign served lobster and Dove bars on the plane instead of those granola bars that icky old Al Gore served. And they wonder why we call them mediawhores…)

The Daily Howler has chronicled this story in more detail than I would even attempt to distill here. But after revisiting those archives and seeing how many of the assassination squad are involved, it’s obvious to me that the ethical squalor of the Bush oppo-research crew of the 2000 campaign has played a role in these Justice Department scandals. As I wrote below, alarm bells should have been clanging all over Washington when Bush gave important jobs in the Federal Police agencies to these political hatchet-people. Even Nixon didn’t install G. Gordon Liddy as a senior advisor to John Mitchell.

And given that, I have a question. Tim Russert and many members of the DC press corps clearly had relationships with Comstock, Griffin, Carollo and Goodling in their capacity as dirt delivery people in 2000. So why hasn’t even one of them brought it up? Are they “protecting their sources” again?

How much do they know that they aren’t telling us about this one do you suppose?

Update: Thisarticle by Josh Green in The Atlantic (subscriber only — sorry) also discusses the film and how Tim Griffin, our new US Attorney was promoted from his assistant Prosecutor job in 2004 to return to the Bush campaign to head it’s dirty tricks division. That’s quite the unusual revolving door, don’t you think? And it sure does make the appointment to Arkansas US Attorney in advance of the 2008 election all the more suspicious.

What was remarkable about the 2000 effort was the degree to which the process advanced beyond what Barbara Comstock, who headed the RNC research team, calls “votes and quotes”—the standard campaign practice of leaving the job of scouting the target to very junior staff members, who tend to dig up little more than a rival’s legislative record and public statements. Comstock’s taking over the research team marked a significant change. She was a lawyer and a ten-year veteran of Capitol Hill who had been one of Representative Dan Burton’s top congressional investigators during the Clinton scandals that dominated the 1990s: Filegate, Travelgate, assorted campaign-finance imbroglios, and Whitewater. Rather than amass the usual bunch of college kids, Comstock put together a group of seasoned attorneys and former colleagues from the Burton Committee, including her deputy, Tim Griffin. “The team we had from 2000,” she told me recently, to show the degree of ratcheted-up professionalism, “were veteran investigators from the Clinton years. We had a core group of people, and that core was attorneys.”

Comstock combined a prosecutor’s mentality with an investigator’s ability to hunt through public records and other potentially incriminating documents. More important, she and her team understood how to use opposition research in the service of a larger goal: not simply to embarrass Gore with hard-to-explain votes or awkward statements but to craft over the course of the campaign a negative “storyline” about him that would eventually take hold in the public mind. “A campaign is a lot like a trial,” Comstock explained. “You want people aggressively arguing their case.”

Update II: Thanks to my favorite tipster BB, I’m reminded of this bizarre tale about Comstock from Blinded By The Right:

One night in the winter of 1995, as the scandal over the firings of workers in the White house travel office reached a crescendo on the Hill [think about that —d] I received a late night telephone call from one of Ted’s colleagues on an investigative committee, Barbara Comstock. Around the committee, the two Barbaras [Comstock and Olsen] were known s “the Barbarellas,” a reference to the 1968 movie starring Jane Fonda as a space-age vixen whose cosmic adventures take her to bizarre planets via rocket ships. Late night calls from Barbara Comstock were not unusual. She often telephoned with the latest tid-bit she had dig up in the thousands of pages of administration records she pored through frantically, as if she were looking for a winning lootery ticket she had somehow mislaid. A plain woman with tousled reddish brown hair, she once dropped by my house to watch the rerun of a dreadfully dull Whitewater hearing she had sat through all day. Comstock sat on the edge of her chair shaking, screaming over and over again, “Liars!” As Comstock’s leads failed to pan out and she was unable to catch anyone in a lie, the Republican aid confided that the Clinton scandals were driving her to distraction, to the unfortunate point that she was ignoring the needs of her own family. A very smart lawyer by training and the main breadwinner for her charismatic, happy-go-lucky husband and kids, Comstock remarked that maybe she couldn’t get Hillary’s sins off her brain “because Hillary reminds me of me. I am Hillary.” In this admission a vivid illustration of a much wider “Hillary” phenomenon can be seen. Comstock knew nothing about Hillary Clinton. Comstock’s “Hillary” was imaginary, a construction composed entirely of the negative points in her own life.

Comstock invited me to go along on an expedition to the Washington home of senior White House aid David Watkins, the central figure in the travel scandal Olsen and Comstock were probing. A short time later, Republican lawyers Comstock, Olson, and other congressional investigators, including David Bossie, and Whitewater investigator Christopher Bartomolucci, pulled up outside my house in an SUV. Though I wasn’t sure what the group hoped to accomplish — they were visibly frustrated with their inability so far to incriminate Watkins — I went along for the ride. Olsen explained that Congressman Sonny Bono had cleared us into the privated, gated community where both Bono and Watkins lived, in the northwest section of Georgetown. When we arrived at our destination, Olsen giddily leapt from the truck, trespassed onto Watkins’s property, and hopped down a steep cliff that abutted his home. Barbara peered into Watkins’s window where she observed him — watching television. No crime there. (Blinded by The Right by David Brock, p 208,209.)
.

(Keep in mind that this is the same Comstock who is defending Scooter Libby despite his conviction of perjury and obstruction.) What an excellent choice to have in the United States Justice Department.

And it’s just great to have Tim Griffin, Barbara “I am Hillary” Comstock’s little errand boy down in Arkansas with the full force of the federal government behind him, too.

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Caught In The Buzzsaw

by digby

TPM highlights this interesting profile of our little friend Monica Goodling at Law.com. She is, as Pach at FDL pointed out last night, a protege of recent Libby flack Barbara Comstock, the best GOP oppo character assassin since Don Segretti. Comstock brought Goodling with her into the Justice department after their stint ended as RNC oppo “researchers.”

Comstock is a very special operative, involved in the seamiest of hit jobs over the last decade. That she was allowed anywhere near the federal legal apparatus is shocking in itself:

Comstock…was viewed with suspicion by many career employees as someone more apt to look out for the personal interests of the Attorney General and political interests of the Republican party during her tenure, three Department officials said in interviews.

While at the RNC, Comstock was in charge of the Republican party’s “opposition research.” Prior to that, she was investigative counsel of the House Committee on Government Reform, then chaired by Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.). Burton broke precedent with his predecessors who focused on the workings of government agencies, to instead focus almost exclusively on investigations of then President Clinton.

She was in the middle of the Plame leak when she was a Justice and inside the department was widely considered one of the reasons that Ashcroft had to recuse himself:

Several senior federal law enforcement officials in recent days have spoken privately among themselves of what they believe to be an increasing necessity by Attorney General John Ashcroft to formally recuse himself from any further role in the probe as to who leaked the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame. Their concerns have intensified as investigators have begun to interview a number of personal friends and political associates of Ashcroft.

That belief among the senior law enforcement officials has only intensified in recent days since as many as a half-dozen White House officials have been asked by federal investigators about contacts they had with the Republican National Committee and conservative political activists. Investigators apparently are looking at whether the contacts were aimed at discrediting Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.

So, the political operative/Justice Department nexus has been a subject of some consternation for some time in DOJ circles.

Today the Washington Post shows that “Brownies” were baked in to the Justice Department all over the place:

About one-third of the nearly four dozen U.S. attorney’s jobs that have changed hands since President Bush began his second term have been filled by the White House and the Justice Department with trusted administration insiders.

The people chosen as chief federal prosecutors on a temporary or permanent basis since early 2005 include 10 senior aides to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, according to an analysis of government records. Several came from the White House or other government agencies. Some lacked experience as prosecutors or had no connection to the districts in which they were sent to work, the records and biographical information show.

The new U.S. attorneys filled vacancies created through natural turnover in addition to the firings of eight prosecutors last year that have prompted a political uproar and congressional investigations.

No other administration in contemporary times has had such a clear pattern of filling chief prosecutors’ jobs with its own staff members, said experts on U.S. attorney’s offices. Those experts said the emphasis in appointments traditionally has been on local roots and deference to home-state senators, whose support has been crucial to win confirmation of the nominees.

The pattern from Bush’s second term suggests that the dismissals were half of a two-pronged approach: While getting rid of prosecutors who did not adhere closely to administration priorities, such as rigorous pursuit of immigration violations and GOP allegations of voter fraud, White House and Justice officials have seeded federal prosecutors’ offices with people on whom they can depend to carry out the administration’s agenda.

[…]

As Congress pursues its investigation, some Democrats have indicated they want to explore who has been hired, in addition to the firings that have been the focal point of hearings on Capitol Hill — and of calls from both parties for Gonzales to resign.

“If we have eight U.S. attorneys dismissed because they were not ‘loyal Bushies,’ then how many of the remaining U.S. attorneys are?” asked Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), borrowing a phrase that Gonzales’s former chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, used in an internal e-mail to describe criteria by which prosecutors were chosen to be fired.

And that brings us back to Ms Goodling:

Interviews for U.S. Attorney replacements took place with only a handful of people: David Margolis, the department’s top-ranking career official and a 40-plus year veteran; a member of the White House Counsel’s Office; the head of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys; and Goodling.

Charles Miller, whom Gonzales appointed as interim U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia, interviewed with the panel in the fall of 2005. “They asked me what I’d done to support the president,” Miller says. It wasn’t a question Miller expected. He told them he’d voted for Bush.

But a former prosecutor who did not get a U.S. Attorney post was left with a sour feeling after his interview in 2006. “Monica was in charge, in essence, of the interview,” recalls the former supervisory assistant U.S. Attorney. “I walked out of that room and thought, ‘Wow, I’ve just run into a buzz saw.'”

And again, what were the Pat Robertson’ U grad Goodling’s primary qualifications before joining the Department of Justice? She worked with Barbara Comstock and Timothy Griffin (the US Attorney from Arkansas who Rove pushed through under the patriot act) at the Bush Cheney oppo research department in 2000.

It doesn’t automatically make her a criminal, but it sure stinks of unethical politicization of the Justice Department.

I heard Orrin Hatch filibuster for what seemed like hours this morning on Meet the Press about how there wasn’t a “shred of evidence” that there was any wrongdoing. Well, except for the totally unethical phone calls by Domenichi and Iglesias and the US Attorneys’ publicly stated suspicion that they were let go for partisan political reasons, I suppose not. But they need to lay off the tequila if they actually expect to get the benefit of the doubt about their good intentions after they populated the Justice Department with dirty tricksters in extremely sensitive jobs.

Many of us were told to pipe down when we complained that the Justice Department and the NSA had been involved in spying on Americans with no oversight. But now that we know that Barbara Comstock, Monica Goodling and Tim Griffin, Karl Rove’s personal smear artists, were promoted to the highest reaches of the federal police agencies with access to records on their political opponents and every other American, then it’s clear that we weren’t suspicious enough. At this point, I think we have to assume that with these people in charge and having the use of all the new powers of the Patriot Act, there have been no limits at all on the partisan, political use of the government’s investigative powers.

I am no longer confused about why Monica Goodling took the fifth. I have little doubt that there are many crimes that took place and she’s not taking any chances. This is bigger than the US Attorney scandal.

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Socks, Scissors, Paper

by digby

As we listen to Roger Ailes and Brit Hume howl about how Fox is just another news outlet, fair and balanced and unafraid, let’s ponder the fact that in the midst of several dozen unfolding scandals, they have put their unlimited resources toward an exposé of only one. It’s called “Socks, Scissors, Paper: The Sandy Berger Caper”, in which a massive cover-up is alleged. Who did the covering I don’t know, but I’m sure that all the brainwashed ditto-heads will have all the details by tomorrow morning.

Please tell me again why the Democratic party cooperates with these propagandists because I just can’t seem to remember.

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Saturday Night At The Movies

Release Me

By Dennis Hartley

Although the DVD format has been with us now for a good ten years, there is still a surprising amount of “back catalogue” that remains unreleased, for one reason or another.

In many cases, I’m sure lawyers are involved; estate wrangling, music soundtrack publishing issues, etc., but I suspect the biggest problem is the disconnect between the powers that be at the major releasing studios and the true movie buff zeitgeist .

There are some companies that “get it” (Criterion, Anchor Bay, Blue Underground, HVE, Kino, Rhino and New Yorker Video come to mind) but they seem few and far between.

I could easily list 100 titles, but here are my top ten desires on the “wish list”-

“Mickey One” – 1965 film from director Arthur Penn stars Warren Beatty as a stand up comic on the run from the mob. A Kafkaesque, noirish vision filmed in exquisite B&W.

“The Friends of Eddie Coyle” – I’ve discussed this lost 70’s noir gem before; Robert Mitchum at his world-weary best as an aging hood. Great support from Peter Boyle.

“O Lucky Man!” – The late Lindsay Anderson’s masterpiece remains MIA, despite a huge cult fan base. Thankfully, Alan Price’s magnificent soundtrack is available on CD.

“The New Age” – Overlooked yet brilliant mid-90’s social satire from writer-director Michael Tolkin (“The Rapture”). Great performances from Judy Davis and Peter Weller.

“Serial” – Another social satire, targeting a group of self-absorbed California trendies living in Marin county in the late 70’s. Hilarious stuff. With Martin Mull and Tuesday Weld.

“Dreamchild” – Unique 1985 entry blends Jim Henson’s muppetry with the poignant real-life story of the relationship between Lewis Carroll (Ian Holm) and young Alice Liddell.

“Stardust” – 1974 film starring British rocker David Essex in a stunning “rise and fall” portrait of a decadent, self indulgent rock star. (BTW its “prequel”, “That’ll Be The Day”, is in print.)

“Liquid Sky” – Sci-fi/androgynous alien love story/punk rock/ heroin chic/downtown NYC art scene satire has to be seen to be believed! (Was briefly available but went quickly out of print.)

“Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains” – Another cult favorite, starring a very young Diane Lane as the nihilistic leader of a feminist punk rock band. (Beware of the DVD-R bootlegs!)

“The Decline of Western Civilization” – Penelope Spheeris’ vital document of the early 80’s LA punk rock scene remains curiously unavailable. Darby Crash lives!

And now for some Good News: A few gems scheduled to see the light of day in 2007 –

April 3: “Bedazzled” and “Royal Flash”.

April 10: “Brute Force ” (Film noir classic)

April 17: “Thieves Like Us” (Overlooked Altman) and “Bye Bye Brazil”

May 15: “Vengeance Is Mine ” (Classic Japanese crime thriller)

May 22: “Prince of the City ”, “Straight Time” and “Steelyard Blues”

Sometime in June: According to their website, Criterion is releasing Lindsay Anderson’s “If…”, which I hope indicates that “O Lucky Man” (see above) could be in the works!

So what titles are you lusting after? Do tell!

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“Base” Motivation

by digby

So President Bush’s former pollster, Matthew Dowd has publicly repudiated his old boss in an intereview in the New York Times because he is so dissapointed that bush has not been the kind of uniter he thought he would be:

Ex-Aide Details a Loss of Faith in the President

In 1999, Matthew Dowd became a symbol of George W. Bush’s early success at positioning himself as a Republican with Democratic appeal.

A top strategist for the Texas Democrats who was disappointed by the Bill Clinton years, Mr. Dowd was impressed by the pledge of Mr. Bush, then governor of Texas, to bring a spirit of cooperation to Washington. He switched parties, joined Mr. Bush’s political brain trust and dedicated the next six years to getting him to the Oval Office and keeping him there. In 2004, he was appointed the president’s chief campaign strategist.

Looking back, Mr. Dowd now says his faith in Mr. Bush was misplaced.

In a wide-ranging interview here, Mr. Dowd called for a withdrawal from Iraq and expressed his disappointment in Mr. Bush’s leadership.

He criticized the president as failing to call the nation to a shared sense of sacrifice at a time of war, failing to reach across the political divide to build consensus and ignoring the will of the people on Iraq. He said he believed the president had not moved aggressively enough to hold anyone accountable for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and that Mr. Bush still approached governing with a “my way or the highway” mentality reinforced by a shrinking circle of trusted aides.

Boy, aint it the truth. And where would he have gotten that idea that was a good idea, do you suppose?

A former Democratic consultant, Matthew Dowd was the chief campaign strategist for Bush-Cheney 2004 and director of polling and media planning for Bush-Cheney 2000. Here, he describes how, even as the Florida recount was progressing, he and Karl Rove were already thinking about a re-election campaign in the event that Bush won. Dowd tells FRONTLINE that while most of the resources in the 2000 campaign were devoted to trying to win over independents, his post-election analysis showed that only 6 to 7 percent of the electorate was truly “persuadable.”

This is a transcript of that interview conducted on Jan. 4, 2005.

Let me go back to 2000 for just a minute. … Where did this idea of a base strategy come from? And was it as revolutionary then as it was reported as being when we all look back? When did you first hear about it? Is it your idea?

Well, it’s interesting. Obviously, as you looked at 2000, approached 2000, motivating Republicans was important, but most of our resources [were] put into persuading independents in 2000. One of the first things I looked at after 2000 was what was the real Republican vote and what was the real Democratic vote, not just who said they were Republicans and Democrats, but independents, how they really voted, whether or not they voted straight ticket or not. And I took a look at that in 2000, and then I took a look at it, what it was over the last five elections or six elections.

And what came from that analysis was a graph that I obviously gave Karl, which showed that independents or persuadable voters in the last 20 years had gone from 22 percent of the electorate to 7 percent of the electorate in 2000. And so 93 percent of the electorate in 2000, and what we anticipated, 93 or 94 in 2004, just looking forward and forecasting, was going to be already decided either for us or against us. You obviously had to do fairly well among the 6 or 7 [percent], but you could lose the 6 or 7 percent and win the election, which was fairly revolutionary, because everybody up until that time had said, “Swing voters, swing voters, swing voters, swing voters, swing voters.”

And so when that graph and that first strategic imperative began to drive how we would think about 2004, nobody had ever approached an election that I’ve looked at over the last 50 years, where base motivation was important as swing, which is how we approached it. We didn’t say, “Base motivation is what we’re going to do, and that’s all we’re doing.” We said, “Both are important, but we shouldn’t be putting 80 percent of our resources into persuasion and 20 percent into base motivation,” which is basically what had been happening up until that point, because of — look at this graph. Look at the history. Look what’s happened in this country. And obviously that decision influenced everything that we did. It influenced how we targeted mail, how we targeted phones, how we targeted media, how we traveled, the travel that the president and the vice president did to certain areas, how we did organization, where we had staff. All of that was based off of that, and ultimately, thank goodness, it was the right decision.

That is a huge part of why the “compassionate conservative” turned into a total wingnut. Dowd is very modest these days about his part in that. In fact, he didn’t mention it at all in the NY Times article and the reporter didn’t bother to mention it either. But let’s just say that I’m a little bit skeptical about Matthew Dowd’s sincerity about anything. He went from being a Democrat in 1999 to jump on the Bush train, advised him that he pretty much didn’t need to bother trying to answer to anybody but his rabid wingnut base and now that it’s all fallen apart he’s boo-hooing to the NY Times about he feels betrayed.

He claims to be a believer so maybe he can have a conversation with his priest or pastor about where he might have gone wrong in all this. I don’t think the rest of us can give him absolution.

Update: Julia sends along this little tid-bit from Adam Nagourney in the NY Times, back when Dowd was strutting in 2003:

This shift signals that the 2004 election will have a much greater reliance on identifying supporters and getting them to the polls. That would tip the balance away from the emphasis on developing nuanced messages aimed at swing voters, who make up 10 percent to 20 percent of the electorate, pollsters said.

The change has the potential, several strategists said, of encouraging the presidential candidates to make the kind of unvarnished partisan appeals that they once tried to avoid out of concern of pushing away independent-minded voters. “If both sides are
concerned about motivating their base, the agenda difference between the two is much more dramatic,” Mr. Dowd said. “I actually think it could make for a much more interesting election.”

Oh my yes.

H/T BB
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Piss Donohue

by digby

I’m sorry to have to say this because I am generally pretty tolerant of religion and try to be respectful of others’ beliefs. But until the Catholic Church steps up and says that this screaming nutcase Bill Donohue and his band of freaks don’t speak for them, I’m going to have to assume that the Catholic Church agrees with his lunatic ravings. This is getting completely ridiculous:

A planned Holy Week exhibition of a nude, anatomically correct chocolate sculpture of Jesus Christ was canceled Friday amid a choir of complaining Catholics that included Cardinal Edward Egan.

The “My Sweet Lord” display was shut down by the hotel that houses the Lab Gallery in midtown Manhattan, said Matt Semler, the gallery’s creative director. Semler said he submitted his resignation after officials at the Roger Smith Hotel shut down the show.

The six-foot sculpture was the victim of “a strong-arming from people who haven’t seen the show, seen what we’re doing,” Semler said. “They jumped to conclusions completely contrary to our intentions.”

But word of the confectionary Christ infuriated Catholics, including Egan, who described it as “a sickening display.” Bill Donohue, head of the watchdog Catholic League, said it was “one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever.”

Here is what Donohue actually wrote on his website, via feministe:

Catholic League president Bill Donohue outlined his game plan today:

“The Roger Smith Hotel is located in the heart of New York City, and it boasts on its website that its Lab Gallery ‘is a high traffic, fast paced’ venue. Indeed it is: the gallery is located on street level, easily accessible to the public. But it is sure bet that in the years to come there will be little in the way of high traffic coming from the Christian community.

“As I’ve said many times before, Lent is the season for non-believers to sow seeds of doubt about Jesus. What’s scheduled to go on at the Roger Smith Hotel, however, is of a different genre: this is hate speech. And choosing Holy Week—the display opens on Palm Sunday and ends on Holy Saturday—makes it a direct in-your-face assault on Christians.

“All those involved are lucky that angry Christians don’t react the way extremist Muslims do when they’re offended—otherwise they may have more than their heads cut off. James Knowles, President and CEO of the Roger Smith Hotel (interestingly, he also calls himself Artist-in-Residence), should be especially grateful. And if he tries to spin this as reverential, then he should substitute Muhammad for Jesus and display him during Ramadan.

“I am contacting hundreds of organizations about this assault. Our allied list contains scores of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu organizations, as well as secular groups, that share our concerns about religious hate speech and the degradation of our culture. The only thing that those who operate the Roger Smith Hotel understand is when they get hit in the pocket book. So that’s exactly where we’ll hit them. The boycott is on.”

The “boycott” was successful:

The hotel and the gallery were overrun Thursday with angry phone calls and e-mails about the exhibit. Semler said the calls included death threats over the work of artist Cosimo Cavallaro, who was described as disappointed by the decision to cancel the display.

“In this situation, the hotel couldn’t continue to be supportive because of a fear for their own safety,” Semler said.

Yes, it’s a good thing these conservative Christians aren’t like those horrible Muslims.

So, what did this horrible example of Catholic hate speech look like?

Oh, wait, that’s not it. That’s from the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican. (Ooops. How embarrassing.)

Here it is:

Oh, heck. Wrong again. That’s the statue of David, the most famous sculpture in the world. My bad.

Here’s the offending sculpture:

Since the Vatican itself is a veritable sausage fest, and its most renowned artist, Michaelangelo, sculpted the most famous nude Biblical figure in history, it simply cannot logically be the nudity that’s the problem for the Catholic League. (Lord knows, the Catholic League is nothing if not logical.)

So it must be the medium. The fact that it is sculpted in chocolate is so offensive to Donohue’s thugs that they are issuing death threats to those who display such alleged blasphemy. I don’t exactly understand why that would be. Chocolate is no more meaningful than clay or bronze or marble. It doesn’t carry any scatalogical meaning nor is it thought of as derisive in any way. Perhaps the Catholic League could distribute its list of approved artist materials so that they won’t run afoul of the rules and cause themselves to be threatened with death and boycott or accused of hate speech.

It’s really too bad the artist didn’t think to do it in cartoon form because the entire right wing would be in a frenzy defending his right to free speech. Indeed, he would have become a martyr for all of western civilization. Unapproved sculpting materials, on the other hand, are so far out that death threats are entirely appropriate.

Why is it that I have such a problem understanding the alleged principles the religious conservatives lives by? And why am I so unimpressed with the leaders of a great religion who allow people to act like cretins in their name and yet cover up much more serious crimes against actual human beings?

I’ll have to think about that some more.

Update: Crooks and Liars has the video of Donohue “debating” the artist on Anderson Cooper’s show. This guy is Joe McCarthy on steroids .

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Christian Soldiers

by digby

The other night I wrote a post about the Bushie Best and Brightest in which I noted that more than 150 Pat Robertson U (Regent university) graduates had been hired by the admnistration. In doing some research on the post below, I once again came across this article from last fall in the New York Review of Books by Gary Wills called “A Country Ruled By Faith” that further illuminates how this came about:

The head of the White House Office of Personnel was Kay Coles James, a former dean of Pat Robertson’s Regent University and a former vice-president of Gary Bauer’s Family Research Council,[2] the conservative Christian lobbying group that had been set up as the Washington branch of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. She knew whom to put where, or knew the religious right people who knew. An evangelical was in charge of placing evangelicals throughout the bureaucracy. The head lobbyist for the Family Research Council boasted that “a lot of FRC people are in place” in the administration.[3] The evangelicals knew which positions could affect their agenda, whom to replace, and whom they wanted appointed. This was true for the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, and Health and Human Services—agencies that would rule on or administer matters dear to the evangelical causes.[4]

The White House was alive with piety. Evangelical leaders were in and out on a regular basis. There were Bible study groups in the White House, as in John Ashcroft’s Justice Department. Over half of the White House staff attended the meetings. One of the first things David Frum heard when he went to work there as a speech writer was: “Missed you at the Bible study.”[5] According to Esther Kaplan:

Aside from Rove and Cheney, Bush’s inner circle are all deeply religious. [Condoleezza] Rice is a minister’s daughter, chief of staff Andrew Card is a minister’s husband, Karen Hughes is a church elder, and head speechwriter Michael Gerson is a born-again evangelical, a movement insider.[6]

Other parts of the administration were also pious, with religious services during the lunch hour at the General Services Administration.[7]

Faith-Based Justice

The labyrinthine infiltration of the agencies was invisible to Americans outside the culture of the religious right. But even the high-profile appointments made it clear where Bush was taking the country. One of his first appointments, for the office of attorney general, was of the Pentecostal Christian John Ashcroft, a hero to the evangelicals, many of whom had earlier wanted him to run for president— Pat Robertson had put up money for his campaign. As a senator, Ashcroft had sponsored a bill to protect unborn life “from [the moment of] fertilization.” As soon as he was nominated to be attorney general, the Family Research Council mobilized women to lobby at Senate offices for his confirmation.[8] The evangelicals had long been familiar with Ashcroft’s piety. He told an audience at Bob Jones University that “we have no king but Jesus,” and called the wall of separation between church and state a “wall of religious oppression.”[9]

After his nomination but before his confirmation, Ashcroft promised to put an end to the task force set up by Attorney General Janet Reno to deal with violence against abortion clinics —evangelicals oppose the very idea of hate crimes. The outcry of liberals against Ashcroft’s promise made him back off from it during his confirmation hearings. In 2001, there was a spike in violence against the clinics —790 incidents, as opposed to 209 the year before.[10] That was because the anthrax alarms that year gave abortion opponents the idea of sending threatening powders to the clinics—554 packets were sent. Nonetheless, Ashcroft refused for a long time to send marshals to quell the epidemic.[11]

That was one of many signs that this administration thought of abortion as a sin, not as a right to be protected. The President himself called for an amendment to the Constitution outlawing abortion. He called evangelical leaders around him to celebrate the signing of the bill banning “partial birth abortions.” The signing was not held, as usual, at the White House but in the Ronald Reagan Building, as a salute to the hero of younger evangelicals. Ashcroft moved enforcement of the ban to the Civil Rights Division, a signal that evangelicals appreciated, implying that the fetus is a person with civil rights to be protected.[12] Then, in what was called a step toward enforcement, Ashcroft subpoenaed hospitals for their files on hundreds of women who had undergone abortions —Democrats in Congress called this a major invasion of privacy.[13]

Ashcroft’s use of the Civil Rights Division for religious purposes was broader than his putting partial-birth abortion under its jurisdiction. Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten, two critics of Republican policies, write in One Party Country:

In 2002, the department established within its Civil Rights Division a separate “religious rights” unit that added a significant new constituency to a division that had long focused on racial injustice. When the Salvation Army— which had been receiving millions of dollars in federal funds—was accused in a private lawsuit of violating federal antidiscrimination laws by requiring employees to embrace Jesus Christ to keep their jobs, the Civil Rights Division for the first time took the side of the alleged discriminators.[14]

Little did he know that the Regent brigade were also down and dirty Justice Department party loyalty enforcers. Apparently blind fealty to Bush and the GOP is the way you show your love for Jesus.

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