Jane has a great Karl Rove Plamegate primer up tonight in case you’ve forgotten all the minutia of the case and want to get back up to speed.
Karl has now testified before the grand jury five times, which most lawyers say would never happen in a normal case. Karl, however, believes he can wiggle out of this so he keeps volunteering to go back to the grand jury and explain himself.
He has always thought he was very, very good at this kind of thing:
Rove was no lawyer but he carried a kind of preturnatural confidence in court cases. Like in his high school debates, he always felt better than anybody in the room. He could beat anybody with the strength of his argument or the weight of his will. When a team of blue-chip lawyers in a tobacco case grilled Rove for a deposition some years earlier, he was not just confident, but arrogant, fending off their questions with playful insults. On the stand in the Kay Bailey Hutchison trial, he was masterful in frustrating the prosecution. Now he had a former U.S. Attorney General in his cross hairs, and as Rove sat at the table in the federal courthouse, he turned his head slowly and looked over at the defense table with the thin sliver of a smile. It was a dark smile, determined, and there was not mistaking the message: You are my enemy and you will pay.(Bush’s Brain p. 190)
Waddaya think? Does the recently demoted Karl still have that kind of mojo? Or was it his “preturnatural confidence” that led him to think he could lie his ass off to the FBI and the Grand Jury and nothing would happen?
He doesn’t seem quite so formidable these days does he? A 32% approval rating and massive policy failure will do that to you.
Update: According to the Washington Post, Rove is using the “it would have been stupid to lie so it’s ludicrous that I would have done so” defense. It sounds like he’s as arrogant as ever.
Seeing The Forest has a list and relevant links to the representatives who can be moved on the Net Neutrality issue that comes to a committee vote today.
Click over and make a couple of calls if you have time. This issue sounds like the most boring thing in the world, but it could result in something quite terrible happening to the internet.
I saw this comment over on Political Animal yesterday that I think illustrates the issue quite well:
What the telecoms are trying to get away with is like this: suppose you ran a business, and your product was delivered by FedEx, with your customers paying FedEx for it. Now suppose FedEx came to you one day and said, “You are making a nice profit off our delivery service. Besides what your customers pay, I also want you to pay us for it, or else your deliveries are going to be a lot slower, if they make it there at all.”
(If only my ISP were as reliable as Fed-ex.)
Basically this is what they are trying to do. They want to shake down the content providers like Google for a piece of their action even though they are already being paid for their service by their customers.
And, of course, once we abandon the idea that ISP’s cannot decide what content to provide we open the door to them deciding they don’t want to provide certain content. Some may very well decide that they don’t like liberal bloggers who use the “f” word. And then where will we be?
So Rove is testifying before the GJ for the fifth time. John Amato says that Norah O’Donnell is reporting that he is going to be issuing a statement later today.
Am I the only one who thinks that’s strange? Has any witness to the GJ issued a statement after their testimony? Certainly, Rove hasn’t.
Allow me to don my tin foil sombrero for a moment here. What if this statement (if it even happens) is something truly meaningful? They just brought in Snow. Rove was demoted. Maybe he’s getting ready to …
Ok, I’m dreaming. Never mind.
update: Sid Blumenthal connects the Snow-Rove stories too.
update II: Luskin just released the statement, which says nothing. Actually, according to Wolf, it was written earlier and “embargoed” until after the testimony was over. Why the networks went along with that is anybody’s guess.
The statement:
Karl Rove appeared today before the grand jury investigating the disclosure of a CIA agent’s identity. He testified voluntarily and unconditionally at the request of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to explore a matter raised since Mr Rove’s last appearance in October 2005. In connection with his appearance, the special prosecutor has advised Mr Rove that he is not a target of the investigation. Mr Fitzgerald has affirmed that he has made no decision concerning charges. At the request of the Special Counsel, Mr Rove will not discuss the substance of his testimony.
Odd lawyerly sentence, ripe for parsing:
In connection with his appearance, the special prosecutor has advised Mr Rove that he is not a target of the investigation.
Why not just say the prosecutor has advised Mr Rove that he is not a target?
I was going to write about this Max Boot column, but Kevin beat me to it. Boot writes:
I want journalists to cover the present struggle as a fight between good and evil. And when the good guys — that would be U.S. officials — say that certain revelations would help the bad guys, I want them to be given the benefit of the doubt. So, I suspect, do most Americans.
Kevin replies:
Nice try, Max, but FDR earned the benefit of the doubt. This gang hasn’t. They’ve made it crystal clear that they consider the war on terror little more than a good campaign topic of unlimited duration.
Can you believe it? No matter how big a fuck up (like the fact that they insisted that we needed to invade a country on the basis of its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and it turned out there weren’t any!) this administration is supposed to be given the benefit of the doubt. Even when it comes to their assurances that they are only illegally wiretapping terrorists. Or that they are only torturing and imprisoning guilty terrorists. Or that they aren’t agitating for another war using exactly the same set of rationales they used for the earlier war. And on and on.
Apparently Boot would march off a cliff with Bush no matter what he does. Contrary to what he says, considering the current opinion polls, it appears that most Americans do not agree with him.
Gotta give her credit: When she’s on, she’s on. And in her latest column, she’s on:
Trying to calm the yips in his party and the country over exploding gasoline prices, the president sounded a bit like a wild-eyed Ozone Man himself yesterday, extolling the virtues of alternative fuel derived from cooking grease, sugar, grass, wood chips, soybean oil and corn.
But then he got ahold of himself. “You just got to recognize there are limits to how much corn can be used for ethanol,” he said, standing in front of a bucolic mural. “After all, we got to eat some.”
You could run a fleet of S.U.V.’s on the gas that W. was spewing about fuel.
…
The U.S. could have begun developing alternative fuels 30 years ago if Dick Cheney hadn’t helped scuttle an ambitious plan in the Ford administration.
By the time these guys get gas from cooking grease, global warming will have us cooked.
Whenever you visit a rightwing site, you are sure to see “those” tshirts. I saw an ad for them on the Washington Times the other day. Now, I know that wingnuts have great sense of humor as you can tell by the huge number of successful comedians and humorists on the right. (Dennis? PJ? Are you getting tired?)I assume that these t-shirts are what passes for humor in their lives.
They are big on gun stuff and death and violence but I just can’t help but notice that with only a few exceptions, these t-shirts aren’t about killing terrorists or fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here. This is what they’re all about:
Via TBOGG, I that Michelle Malkin, who has recently been posting the phone numbers of liberal college students on her blog and who subsequently had a full fledged fit claiming that her family was threatened in retaliation has a new web site (called “Hot Air,” I kid you not) that is sponsored by these t-shirts.
I have said before that while the left has plenty of people who cannot be called angels, it’s the right that makes a profit at this violent, eliminationist discourse. As long as they are selling this shit on their sites I can see no reason why we should listen to their whining about leftist incivility.
The GOP, as we all know, is desperately afraid of the possibility that the 2006 midterms will put Democrats in a position to hold some hearings. If we do get that lucky, I worry a bit that there may be a temptation to engage in overkill — a hundred hearings a day on a thousand subjects — when the smart play is to focus in a few key topics. The wildly underexplored subject of what’s been going on with the money being spent in Iraq strikes me as something that should be a prime candidate.
I agree with Matt that the Democrats need to be smart about how they go about investigating the Bush administration and should concentrate on the key areas that best illustrate their massive failure. I also agree that war profiteering is an overlooked subject that focuses on the corrupt crony capitalism that has fueled this administration from day one. (Jane was on this a year ago.) It’s long past time people started asking where in the hell all that money went.
I would suggest that the other two issues that are ripe for investigations, and which would capture the worst of the egregious actions of the Bush administration, are presidential abuse of power and the manipulation of intelligence and strategic errors of Iraq. Those are the areas in which it is important to demand accountability from the administration and demonstrate to the American people that mature, responsible leadership will not allow such behavior to go unpunished.
Republicans are working themselves into a frenzy about these impending investigations and they are worried for very good reason. They have treated the congress like their own private fiefdom and ignored every standard of normal political decency. It’s not going to be pleasant for them. But it is essential that this happen. No forgive and forget this time. It was the Democrats’ failure to follow through (after a good start in the post Watergate years) when Iran-Contra happened. They got spooked by Reagan’s mystique and Republican cant and it led to the revival of these pernicious, undemocratic practices that came out of the Nixon era. This time they went so far as to openly launch a pre-emptive war of aggression. We cannot allow that to happen again.
I’ve always thought that one of the perverse consequences of a libertarian utopian government that does nothing but national defense, policing and dispute resolution would be that this government would naturally seek to expand its powers in those areas. If a state’s only function is policing, it functions as a … police state.
We’ve watched the fake small government conservatives spend huge sums of money on war profiteering, oily pork and tax breaks for their rich contributors. But where they have really made their mark is with these ridiculously expanded executive and police powers. And they continue to suck up more of them every day:
Amid intense debate over how far the government can go to keep its secrets secret, Congress is taking up an expansive intelligence measure that proposes tougher steps in cracking down on leaks of classified information and authorizes broad arrest powers for security officers at intelligence agencies.
Provisions tucked into the legislation, which the House is expected to vote on as early as tomorrow, represent a major departure from traditional intelligence agency roles in plugging leaks and conducting domestic law enforcement, according to government watchdog groups and intelligence professionals.
If the measure is approved by Congress, the nation’s spy chief would be ordered to consider a plan for revoking the pensions of intelligence agency employees who make unauthorized disclosures. It also would permit security forces at the National Security Agency and the CIA to make warrantless arrests outside the gates of their top-secret campuses.
The new proposals, which have received little public attention, dovetail with an ongoing Bush administration crackdown on unauthorized leaks.
[…]
Critics described the potential penalties outlined in the measure as “draconian.”
“In a moment when the intelligence community should be looking forward toward what it does best, the arrest powers represent a step back toward the Nixon-era abuses,” said Jason Vest, an investigator with the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group.
The plan by Congress to target the pensions of intelligence agency employees would harm the overall spy effort, according to critics. Some, including former senior intelligence officials, warned that it would create an overly repressive environment within the agencies that could inhibit officers from speaking up, even internally, and discourage risk-taking.
The proposal to penalize leakers with loss of pension will do nothing “but keep good people from going to work in the [intelligence community] agencies,” according to a senior intelligence official, who was quoted anonymously yesterday in a letter to the House Intelligence Committee from the Project on Government Oversight.
[…]
The measure also directs Congress to conduct a study of possible new sanctions against those who receive leaks of classified information, including journalists.
Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert with the Federation of American Scientists, said that such sanctions would represent a significant departure by the government, which usually targets only the person who leaks information, not the recipient.
“That is not the prevailing understanding under the law,” he said. “If it were, [Washington Post reporter] Bob Woodward would not be a wealthy, best-selling author. He would be serving a life sentence.”
At the request of National Intelligence Director John D. Negroponte, the legislation would allow agency security forces at the NSA and CIA to make arrests outside the grounds of those agencies. Ware said the measure is “just clarifying the authority” of agency security officers “to arrest individuals.”
It would apparently overrule a written opinion by the Maryland attorney general’s office, which stated that the NSA’s police powers are limited to the agency’s grounds and to streets within a 500-foot perimeter of its Fort Meade campus.
The June 2005 opinion concluded that, under Maryland law, NSA officers “may make a citizen’s arrest” and would have no immunity from liability for their actions if they are outside their jurisdiction. It notes that NSA officers can only carry firearms within that jurisdiction. The bill would allow them to carry guns.
[…]
Loch Johnson, a top Senate aide on the Church Committee, which investigated CIA abuses in the 1970s, called it a “worrisome” expansion of power.
“That’s why we have the FBI and other law enforcement officials,” he said. “I don’t know that this needs to be an intelligence officer’s function. I wouldn’t think it should be.”
Aftergood termed the proposal “shocking” and said “it raises the specter of a secret police force that is unaccountable and operates outside of the normal law enforcement parameters.”
I know I feel safer already, don’t you?
This is the kind of stuff that’s going on right now in the Congress, even as the president’s approval rating sits in the low 30’s and the Republicans appear to be poised to lose their majority in the fall. They are like sharks, mercilessly pursuing their agenda no matter what is going on around them. They know that it is much more difficult to reverse this kind of thing than it is to enact it. Their gargantuan, national security bureaucracy replete with gun-toting NSA “security” authorized to arrest anyone they choose will be institutionalized and anyone who tries to end it will be tarred as a Democratic sissy for the next generation. If they can sneak this one through, they will.
This letter from the Project On Government Oversight to Rep. Peter Hoekstra and Jane Harmon outlines the various issues of concern. It’s hard to believe that these people would have the gall to use this leak controversy as an excuse to create two new secret police forces in the CIA and NSA, but that’s what they’re doing (among other heinous things.)
I will look forward to another sanctimonious lecture from intelligence chairman Pat Roberts on the horrors of unauthorized leaking when this legislation gets to the Senate. He knows wehat he’s talking about. After all, he committed one of the most egregious leaks in recent memory.
We’ve discussed the strange phenomenon of wingnut fascination with bestiality, specifically sex with dogs. And recently we’ve been treated to the ick inducing sight of seven year old girls dressing up in ball gowns and pledging to their fathers to remain “sexually pure” until daddy turns them over to their husbands.
Via Septic Tank at Kos, here’s another peek into the strange, disturbed world of rightwing moralist sexual imagination: teen sex cults. It has even infiltrated the hallowed halls of science at the FDA:
Attorneys for a New York women’s group plan to grill Food and Drug Administration officials this week about their failure to decide whether an emergency contraceptive pill called Plan B may be sold without a prescription.
Former FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford, Dr. Janet Woodcock, deputy operations commissioner, and Dr. Steven Galson, director of the FDA’s drug evaluation center, are to testify in court-ordered depositions to be taken by attorneys for the Manhattan-based Center for Reproductive Rights Wednesday through Friday in Washington, D.C., and Rockville, Md.
The women’s group seeks to force approval of over-the-counter sales of Plan B, which can prevent pregnancy if taken within 72 hours after unprotected intercourse.
Simon Heller, one of the attorneys, plans to quiz Woodcock on a March 23, 2004, staff memo suggesting she was concerned Plan B might lead to teenage promiscuity.
The FDA is only supposed to consider the safety and efficacy of drugs.
In the memo released by the FDA, Dr. Curtis Rosebraugh, an agency medical officer, wrote: “As an example, she [Woodcock] stated that we could not anticipate, or prevent extreme promiscuous behaviors such as the medication taking on an ‘urban legend’ status that would lead adolescents to form sex-based cults centered around the use of Plan B.”
Rosebraugh indicated he found no reason to bar nonprescription sales of Plan B.
“This was the level of scientific discourse,” Heller said in an interview, referring to concerns attributed to Woodcock. “I find it very odd that these people who are supposed to be responsible scientists and doctors are making up wacky reasons.”
Where do they come up with this stuff? I have to assume that Woodcock’s dark fantasies came from her own twisted imagination because I haven’t been able to find any other references to Plan B and teen-age sex cults. However, that’s not to say that there isn’t plenty of ludicrous paranoia out there about Plan B. The biggest purveyor of lies on this subject appears to be the Concerned Women For America (a cult if I’ve ever seen one) that writes volumes of misinformation and misleading blather about everything, but particularly sex.
Rather than reducing the core problem of young people engaging in sexual activity (which carries life-long consequences), it encourages sexual activity. An official survey revealed that MAP use among teenage girls in the United Kingdom more than doubled since it became available in pharmacies, increasing from one in 12 teen-agers to one in five. Among them were girls as young as 12. A girl who said she was 10 years old told the pharmacist “she had already used it four times.”
[…]
Even morning-after pill proponents agree that sexually active girls are likely victims of sexual abuse, and interaction with medical professionals is an important defense.
The Alan Guttmacher Institute reported: “The younger women are when they first have intercourse the more likely they are to have had unwanted or nonvoluntary first sex, seven in 10 of those who had sex before age 13, for example.”
…The rush to choose “pregnancy outcome options” may preempt efforts to rule out sexual abuse. “Sexual abuse is a common antecedent of adolescent pregnancy, with up to 66% of pregnant teens reporting histories of abuse…. Pregnancy may also be a sign of ongoing sexual abuse…. Boyer and Fine found that of 535 young women who were pregnant, 44% had been raped, of whom 11% became pregnant as a result of the rape. One half of these young women with rape histories were raped more than once.”
It should be noted that this same group enthusiastically endorsed the South Dakota abortion law that offers no exemption for rape or incest.
The Bangkok Post reported disturbing consequences of easy availability of the morning-after pill for the past 15 years, including:
Random studies showed that men are the most frequent buyers. “They buy the pills for their girlfriends or wives so that they don’t have to wear condoms and feel they’re at no risk of becoming a father afterwards. Some women I’ve spoken to said that they didn’t even know what they were taking; that the guy just said it was a health supplement,” said Nattaya Boonpakdee, program assistant at the Population Council (an agency dedicated to promoting and developing contraception and abortion methods).
“Although many feminists believe that the morning-after pill gives them more control over their own bodies, it would seem, judging from the few studies conducted so far, that it is actually being used by men to exploit women.”
This is more of that taking away women’s autonomy is really giving them “freedom” gibberish that these robotic forced birth freaks spew. They might as well be speaking in tongues for all the sense it makes.
They believe that the morning after pill is an abortion. But they would be against it even if it weren’t because it encourages promiscuity. Or it allows men to exploit women. Or it’s unsafe. Or it will give women emotional problems. Or physical problems because women who have abortions are more likely to die than women who don’t. Except they aren’t. But no matter, even if that isn’t true, there are always a thousand reasons why women should not be allowed to fuck. Pick one and run with it.
“The morning-after pill is a pedophile’s best friend,” Wendy Wright, senior policy director for Concerned Women of America, a public policy organization, said in a statement after learning of Galson’s decision. “Morning-after pill proponents treat women like sex machines.”
Pedophiles and sex-machines. Hoo baby. But hey, if it’s fantasies of teen sex cults that rev these gruesome, obsessive imaginations, have at it. It would be nice if the scientists at the FDA got their jollies elsewhere, however. This is important.
I have had the privilege of reading Glenn Greenwald’s new book, “How Would A Patriot Act” and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It is not just a litany of the gross abuse of power, the novel unconstitutional theories or the excessive fear mongering of the Bush years, although he lays them all out in frightening simplicity. This book is about how these actions debase our national character. I would submit that in this unpredictable era of global change, an immensely powerful nation like the US cannot lead, or even participate in any positive way, if the world believes it to be crassly amoral.
I’m not naive about American history. I know that the last two hundred plus years are rife with examples of our government failing to live up to its ideals. But for many of us who have grown up in the post World War II world of American dominance, watching our country casually discard its hard-won moral authority in favor of a childish insistence on “might makes right” is beyond disturbing. It hurts.
This is an issue with which every American, regardless of party, should be concerned. The founders knew that relying on the good will of men in power is stupid and we are seeing their predictions come true before our very eyes. The modern Republican leadership may currently have a monopoly on authoritarian impulses, but they are by no means the only people in this country who could be seduced by this Republican notion of executive authority. The constitution is what protects all Americans from the dark side of human nature when it has power over others, regardless of party or political philosophy. Those of us who worry about this usurpation of the constitution and degradation of the Bill of Rights know that this is not a passing fashion that will easily be tucked back into its former shape. Once you allow powerful men to seize power it’s awfully hard to persuade their successors to give it back.
As we go into this election season we are going to be talking a lot about what we stand for, what we believe and who we are as a party and as a country. This book is, in my view, necessary reading for everyone in the party who is working on our message. Unless we insist upon accountability for what these people have done, I fear that the country will not be able to recover. People need to see that our system of government can not only survive such assaults on its integrity, but that justice and the rule of law will reassert themselves under responsible leadership. It must be publicly demonstrated that this doctrine of unlimited presidential authority is unacceptable and Unamerican.
A distorted, authoritarian undemocratic view of American government has persisted now for more than a generation among certain conservatives. This philosophy has taken us from Watergate to Iran-Contra to Impeachment to the supreme court deciding a presidential election and the last five years of unprecedented assaults on the constitution in the name of a war that has no end. We need to drive a stake through the heart of this philosophy once and for all before it kills us. Greenwald’s book is one of the first stabs at doing that and it’s vital that the rest of us do our part.
If you believe as I do that this is the issue of our time, this book lays it all out in stark, clear prose. Send one to your Senator or congressman. They need to read it.
