Friday, February 25, 2005
Gannon: My posts may seem excessive, but this Scandal will matter if we get the info around…and to the right people. Developments:
Some House and Senate Dems have gotten involved in the scandal.
1) Reps. John Conyers (Ranking Member, House Judiciary Committee) and Louise Slaughter (Ranking Member, House Rules Committee) have asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to include Jeff Gannon/James Guckert in an investigation of "whether the Administration violated the ban on prepackaged news stories by siphoning print stories to James D. Guckert, also known as "Jeff Gannon."
2) Conyers and Slaughter wrote to US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who is investigating the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, urging him to subpoena Gannon's daily diary.
3) Joe Biden: Caught him on Bill Maher’s how, calling for a congressional investigation. But, he has refused to sign on to the letter of Dick Durbin, saying that it isn’t a ‘congressional investigation.’ How typical http://americablog.blogspot.com/
Some 2nd tier papers are covering, editorializing. The Atlanta-Journal Constitution is covering it, the Detroit Free Press is editorializing (below) as well as the Tampa Tribune. Hello, Majors… Yet, ABC, CBS, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, others have ignored it thus far.
“How is it that an administration that screened thousands of people for attendance at Bush campaign rallies repeatedly let a fake reporter into the sanctorum of the White House pressroom under a false name? Who was running that background check? How could a president who declares that national security is his prime concern be so ill served for nearly two years by his own security detail? and the Atlanta Tribune, but not yet the biggies.”- Detroit Free Press
Our dumb, misinformed public: Still: Harris Poll Gads
The latest Harris Poll conducted following the recent elections in Iraq finds that on many aspects U.S. adults have not changed their basic views about Iraq with one important exception: The number of adults who favor bringing troops home in the next year has increased significantly to its highest level since October 2003 when Harris Interactive® first measured the public’s opinions on this issue.
64 percent believe that Saddam Hussein had strong links to Al Qaeda (up slightly from 62% in November).
61 percent believe that Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, was a serious threat to U.S. security (down slightly from 63% in November).
More surprising perhaps are the large numbers (albeit not majorities) who believe the following claims not made by the president and which virtually no experts believe to be true:
47 percent believe that Saddam Hussein helped plan and support the hijackers who attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001 (up six percentage points from November).
44 percent actually believe that several of the hijackers who attacked the U.S. on September 11 were Iraqis (up significantly from 37% in November).
36 percent believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded (down slightly from 38% in November).http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=544
What’s Happening, Iraq: Bombings, of course, and the police, the constant targets, seem to be “completely compromised by the insurgents.” http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0224/p06s01-woiq.html."
Bush Trip: Germans don’t play ball
A Town Hall meeting, said to have been intended as the "main highlight" of Bush's visit to Germany, was dropped from his schedule after German officials were "unwilling to permit a scripted event with questions approved in advance." http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,343281,00.html
Bush met no ordinary Germans, was totally in a bubble, and despite the many smiles, it was hard not to notice that European leaders are “increasingly united against U.S. positions and feel emboldened to go their own way.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48365-2005Feb23.html
Canada says no to Missile Shield:
Paul Martin, the prime minister, has secretly conveyed the decision to Washington despite a personal request from President George W Bush to think again.
The decision was made public yesterday by Pierre Pettigrew, the foreign minister, after months of equivocation.
"After careful consideration of the issue, we have decided that Canada will not participate in the US ballistic missile defence system,'' he told MPs.
The decision would not "in any way" hurt ties with the United States, he said.
The move was especially surprising given Mr Martin's previous backing for the system, which America hopes can be used to shoot down incoming missiles.
His defence minister, Bill Graham, had also expressed his support for the project.
But the prime minister faced strong opposition from his backbenchers amid growing anti-American sentiment and charges that Mr Bush was seeking to militarise space.
The decision is believed to mark the first time in decades that Canada had refused a US request to join a strategic programme to defend the North American continent. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/02/25/wcanada25.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/02/25/i
Scott Ritter: Unreliable? Some on the Left find him wildly inconsistent. One such post, from Siva Vaidhyanathan, questions his predicting the bombing of Iran in June, posted here previously.
Ritter is rather undependable and unstable. The Clinton administration had serious problems with his behavior, even investigating him for espionage. I have never been able to make sense of Ritter. One month he seems brilliant and principled. The next he seems frenetic and vindictive. Ritter was right both in 1998 and 2002 about the lack of weapons in Iraq. But so were a lot of people. Broken clocks and Scott Ritter can be right twice a day. Of course, Ritter had many good sources in Iraq. So it's not surprising that he knows a few things about it. But he never served in Iran. So besides picking up The New Yorker, how would he know stuff? http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/
The Falling Dollar: Tom Friedman. Not a fan, but helpful that he’s on it.
The dollar is falling! The dollar is falling! But the Bush team has basically told the world that unless the markets make the falling dollar into a full-blown New York Stock Exchange crisis and trade war, it is not going to raise taxes, cut spending or reduce oil consumption in ways that could really shrink our budget and trade deficits and reverse the dollar's slide.
This administration is content to let the dollar fall and bet that the global markets will glide the greenback lower in an "orderly" manner…
When a country lives on borrowed time, borrowed money and borrowed energy, it is just begging the markets to discipline it in their own way at their own time. As I said, usually the markets do it in an orderly way - except when they don't. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/24/opinion/24friedman.html?hp
Standards of Journalism Are we surprised that Fox News plays loose with AP dispatches? Have we not descended FAR below this level so as to make this news hardly startling?
Since April 2002, FOX News has consistently doctored Associated Press articles featured on the FOX News website concerning terrorist attacks in the Middle East to conform to Bush administration terminology. Without any editorial notation disclosing that words in the AP articles have been changed, FOX News replaces the terms "suicide bomber" and "suicide bombing" with "homicide bomber" and "homicide bombing" to describe attackers who kill themselves and others with explosives. In at least one case, FOX News actually altered an AP quote from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) to fit this naming convention, and then revised it to restore the quote without noting either the original alteration or its correction. http://mediamatters.org/items/200502230006
Loose Nukes: Belated policy initiative-increasing security at the Russian nuclear depots
Under the planned agreement, U.S. and Russian officials would accelerate long-delayed security upgrades at Russia's many poorly protected nuclear facilities, jointly develop emergency responses to a nuclear or radiological terrorist attack, and establish a program to replace highly enriched uranium in research reactors around the world to prevent it from being used for weapons, the U.S. officials said.
Although details were still being negotiated last night, the joint statement to be released at the presidential summit in Bratislava, Slovakia, could be used as a counterpoint to the rising tension in U.S.-Russian relations over Putin's crackdown on domestic dissent. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48465-2005Feb23.html
Children Left Behind: Fault-finding the Administration policy:
Concluding a yearlong study on the effectiveness of President Bush's sweeping education law, No Child Left Behind, a bipartisan panel of lawmakers drawn from many states yesterday pronounced it a flawed, convoluted and unconstitutional education reform initiative that had usurped state and local control of public schools.
The report, based on hearings in six cities, praised the law's goal of ending the gap in scholastic achievement between white and minority students. But most of the 77-page report, which the Education Department rebutted yesterday, was devoted to a detailed inventory and discussion of its flaws.
It said the law's accountability system, which punishes schools whose students fail to improve steadily on standardized tests, undermined school improvement efforts already under way in many states and relied on the wrong indicators. The report said that the law's rules for educating disabled students conflicted with another federal law, and that it presented bureaucratic requirements that failed to recognize the tapestry of educational challenges faced by teachers in the nation's 15,000 school districts. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/24/education/24child.html?pagewanted=print&position
Luntz Playbook. Well, this isn’t surprising either. The Republican strategist-consultant urges his minions to keep the public from looking at the facts by talking terror, avoiding facts, spinning the old lies that have worked. Think Progress digests the 160 pages and spits out some pointers.
In his memo on how to manipulate American perception on the economy, right-wing spinmeister Frank Luntz advises conservatives to “resist the temptation’ to use facts and figures about the economy. (You know, all those pesky statistics about lower wages, unemployment, skyrocketing deficits, etc.) Instead, he advises, you can’t go wrong if you continuosly remind people about the terrorist attacks of 9/11. “This is the context that explains and justifies why we have $500 billion deficits, why the stock market tanked, why unemployment climbed to 6%.”
Oh, yes, he advises preying on the emotions tied to the terrorist attacks to distract Americans from the truth about the economy, writing, “Much of the public anger can be immediately pacified if they are reminded that we would not be in this situation today if 9/11 had not happened.” It’s also an easy way to get President Bush off the hook: Luntz points out that convincing people that the struggling economy is a consequence of 9/11 (as opposed to, say, Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy) will convince people “it is unfair to blame the current political leadership”
Finally, Luntz advises, 9/11 is the perfect way to dodge responsibility for sinking the country in red ink. In a section headed “Without the context of 9-11, you will be blamed for the deficit,” he points out “supporters are inherently turned off to the idea of fiscal irresponsibility.” The best way to counter that fact? “The trick then is to contextualize the deficit inside of 9/11.” http://thinkprogress.org/index.php?p=309
Kansas Prosecutor Investigating Late-Term Abortion Patients. The AG, an anti-abortion activist, is taking his next step.
Attorney General Phill Kline, a Republican who has made fighting abortion a staple of his two years in the post, is demanding the complete medical files of scores of women and girls who had late-term abortions, saying on Thursday that he needs the information to prosecute criminal cases.
Mr. Kline's efforts to obtain records from abortion clinics follows his failed attempt last year to require the state's health workers to report any sexual activity of girls younger than 16, the age of legal consent in Kansas. Health-care providers sued, and a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/25/national/25kansas.html?
Pentagon Aggressivity: They’re trying to send commandos into various countries, by-passing the State Department, part of a two year old battle between the State Department and Pentagon.
The Pentagon is promoting a global counterterrorism plan that would allow Special Operations forces to enter a foreign country to conduct military operations without explicit concurrence from the U.S. ambassador there, administration officials familiar with the plan said.
The plan would weaken the long-standing "chief of mission" authority under which the U.S. ambassador, as the president's top representative in a foreign country, decides whether to grant entry to U.S. government personnel based on political and diplomatic considerations.
The Special Operations missions envisioned in the plan would largely be secret, known to only a handful of officials from the foreign country, if any. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A48522-2005Feb23?language=printer
-R
Some House and Senate Dems have gotten involved in the scandal.
1) Reps. John Conyers (Ranking Member, House Judiciary Committee) and Louise Slaughter (Ranking Member, House Rules Committee) have asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to include Jeff Gannon/James Guckert in an investigation of "whether the Administration violated the ban on prepackaged news stories by siphoning print stories to James D. Guckert, also known as "Jeff Gannon."
2) Conyers and Slaughter wrote to US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who is investigating the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, urging him to subpoena Gannon's daily diary.
3) Joe Biden: Caught him on Bill Maher’s how, calling for a congressional investigation. But, he has refused to sign on to the letter of Dick Durbin, saying that it isn’t a ‘congressional investigation.’ How typical http://americablog.blogspot.com/
Some 2nd tier papers are covering, editorializing. The Atlanta-Journal Constitution is covering it, the Detroit Free Press is editorializing (below) as well as the Tampa Tribune. Hello, Majors… Yet, ABC, CBS, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, others have ignored it thus far.
“How is it that an administration that screened thousands of people for attendance at Bush campaign rallies repeatedly let a fake reporter into the sanctorum of the White House pressroom under a false name? Who was running that background check? How could a president who declares that national security is his prime concern be so ill served for nearly two years by his own security detail? and the Atlanta Tribune, but not yet the biggies.”- Detroit Free Press
Our dumb, misinformed public: Still: Harris Poll Gads
The latest Harris Poll conducted following the recent elections in Iraq finds that on many aspects U.S. adults have not changed their basic views about Iraq with one important exception: The number of adults who favor bringing troops home in the next year has increased significantly to its highest level since October 2003 when Harris Interactive® first measured the public’s opinions on this issue.
64 percent believe that Saddam Hussein had strong links to Al Qaeda (up slightly from 62% in November).
61 percent believe that Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, was a serious threat to U.S. security (down slightly from 63% in November).
More surprising perhaps are the large numbers (albeit not majorities) who believe the following claims not made by the president and which virtually no experts believe to be true:
47 percent believe that Saddam Hussein helped plan and support the hijackers who attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001 (up six percentage points from November).
44 percent actually believe that several of the hijackers who attacked the U.S. on September 11 were Iraqis (up significantly from 37% in November).
36 percent believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded (down slightly from 38% in November).http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=544
What’s Happening, Iraq: Bombings, of course, and the police, the constant targets, seem to be “completely compromised by the insurgents.” http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0224/p06s01-woiq.html."
Bush Trip: Germans don’t play ball
A Town Hall meeting, said to have been intended as the "main highlight" of Bush's visit to Germany, was dropped from his schedule after German officials were "unwilling to permit a scripted event with questions approved in advance." http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,343281,00.html
Bush met no ordinary Germans, was totally in a bubble, and despite the many smiles, it was hard not to notice that European leaders are “increasingly united against U.S. positions and feel emboldened to go their own way.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48365-2005Feb23.html
Canada says no to Missile Shield:
Paul Martin, the prime minister, has secretly conveyed the decision to Washington despite a personal request from President George W Bush to think again.
The decision was made public yesterday by Pierre Pettigrew, the foreign minister, after months of equivocation.
"After careful consideration of the issue, we have decided that Canada will not participate in the US ballistic missile defence system,'' he told MPs.
The decision would not "in any way" hurt ties with the United States, he said.
The move was especially surprising given Mr Martin's previous backing for the system, which America hopes can be used to shoot down incoming missiles.
His defence minister, Bill Graham, had also expressed his support for the project.
But the prime minister faced strong opposition from his backbenchers amid growing anti-American sentiment and charges that Mr Bush was seeking to militarise space.
The decision is believed to mark the first time in decades that Canada had refused a US request to join a strategic programme to defend the North American continent. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/02/25/wcanada25.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/02/25/i
Scott Ritter: Unreliable? Some on the Left find him wildly inconsistent. One such post, from Siva Vaidhyanathan, questions his predicting the bombing of Iran in June, posted here previously.
Ritter is rather undependable and unstable. The Clinton administration had serious problems with his behavior, even investigating him for espionage. I have never been able to make sense of Ritter. One month he seems brilliant and principled. The next he seems frenetic and vindictive. Ritter was right both in 1998 and 2002 about the lack of weapons in Iraq. But so were a lot of people. Broken clocks and Scott Ritter can be right twice a day. Of course, Ritter had many good sources in Iraq. So it's not surprising that he knows a few things about it. But he never served in Iran. So besides picking up The New Yorker, how would he know stuff? http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/
The Falling Dollar: Tom Friedman. Not a fan, but helpful that he’s on it.
The dollar is falling! The dollar is falling! But the Bush team has basically told the world that unless the markets make the falling dollar into a full-blown New York Stock Exchange crisis and trade war, it is not going to raise taxes, cut spending or reduce oil consumption in ways that could really shrink our budget and trade deficits and reverse the dollar's slide.
This administration is content to let the dollar fall and bet that the global markets will glide the greenback lower in an "orderly" manner…
When a country lives on borrowed time, borrowed money and borrowed energy, it is just begging the markets to discipline it in their own way at their own time. As I said, usually the markets do it in an orderly way - except when they don't. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/24/opinion/24friedman.html?hp
Standards of Journalism Are we surprised that Fox News plays loose with AP dispatches? Have we not descended FAR below this level so as to make this news hardly startling?
Since April 2002, FOX News has consistently doctored Associated Press articles featured on the FOX News website concerning terrorist attacks in the Middle East to conform to Bush administration terminology. Without any editorial notation disclosing that words in the AP articles have been changed, FOX News replaces the terms "suicide bomber" and "suicide bombing" with "homicide bomber" and "homicide bombing" to describe attackers who kill themselves and others with explosives. In at least one case, FOX News actually altered an AP quote from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) to fit this naming convention, and then revised it to restore the quote without noting either the original alteration or its correction. http://mediamatters.org/items/200502230006
Loose Nukes: Belated policy initiative-increasing security at the Russian nuclear depots
Under the planned agreement, U.S. and Russian officials would accelerate long-delayed security upgrades at Russia's many poorly protected nuclear facilities, jointly develop emergency responses to a nuclear or radiological terrorist attack, and establish a program to replace highly enriched uranium in research reactors around the world to prevent it from being used for weapons, the U.S. officials said.
Although details were still being negotiated last night, the joint statement to be released at the presidential summit in Bratislava, Slovakia, could be used as a counterpoint to the rising tension in U.S.-Russian relations over Putin's crackdown on domestic dissent. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48465-2005Feb23.html
Children Left Behind: Fault-finding the Administration policy:
Concluding a yearlong study on the effectiveness of President Bush's sweeping education law, No Child Left Behind, a bipartisan panel of lawmakers drawn from many states yesterday pronounced it a flawed, convoluted and unconstitutional education reform initiative that had usurped state and local control of public schools.
The report, based on hearings in six cities, praised the law's goal of ending the gap in scholastic achievement between white and minority students. But most of the 77-page report, which the Education Department rebutted yesterday, was devoted to a detailed inventory and discussion of its flaws.
It said the law's accountability system, which punishes schools whose students fail to improve steadily on standardized tests, undermined school improvement efforts already under way in many states and relied on the wrong indicators. The report said that the law's rules for educating disabled students conflicted with another federal law, and that it presented bureaucratic requirements that failed to recognize the tapestry of educational challenges faced by teachers in the nation's 15,000 school districts. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/24/education/24child.html?pagewanted=print&position
Luntz Playbook. Well, this isn’t surprising either. The Republican strategist-consultant urges his minions to keep the public from looking at the facts by talking terror, avoiding facts, spinning the old lies that have worked. Think Progress digests the 160 pages and spits out some pointers.
In his memo on how to manipulate American perception on the economy, right-wing spinmeister Frank Luntz advises conservatives to “resist the temptation’ to use facts and figures about the economy. (You know, all those pesky statistics about lower wages, unemployment, skyrocketing deficits, etc.) Instead, he advises, you can’t go wrong if you continuosly remind people about the terrorist attacks of 9/11. “This is the context that explains and justifies why we have $500 billion deficits, why the stock market tanked, why unemployment climbed to 6%.”
Oh, yes, he advises preying on the emotions tied to the terrorist attacks to distract Americans from the truth about the economy, writing, “Much of the public anger can be immediately pacified if they are reminded that we would not be in this situation today if 9/11 had not happened.” It’s also an easy way to get President Bush off the hook: Luntz points out that convincing people that the struggling economy is a consequence of 9/11 (as opposed to, say, Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy) will convince people “it is unfair to blame the current political leadership”
Finally, Luntz advises, 9/11 is the perfect way to dodge responsibility for sinking the country in red ink. In a section headed “Without the context of 9-11, you will be blamed for the deficit,” he points out “supporters are inherently turned off to the idea of fiscal irresponsibility.” The best way to counter that fact? “The trick then is to contextualize the deficit inside of 9/11.” http://thinkprogress.org/index.php?p=309
Kansas Prosecutor Investigating Late-Term Abortion Patients. The AG, an anti-abortion activist, is taking his next step.
Attorney General Phill Kline, a Republican who has made fighting abortion a staple of his two years in the post, is demanding the complete medical files of scores of women and girls who had late-term abortions, saying on Thursday that he needs the information to prosecute criminal cases.
Mr. Kline's efforts to obtain records from abortion clinics follows his failed attempt last year to require the state's health workers to report any sexual activity of girls younger than 16, the age of legal consent in Kansas. Health-care providers sued, and a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/25/national/25kansas.html?
Pentagon Aggressivity: They’re trying to send commandos into various countries, by-passing the State Department, part of a two year old battle between the State Department and Pentagon.
The Pentagon is promoting a global counterterrorism plan that would allow Special Operations forces to enter a foreign country to conduct military operations without explicit concurrence from the U.S. ambassador there, administration officials familiar with the plan said.
The plan would weaken the long-standing "chief of mission" authority under which the U.S. ambassador, as the president's top representative in a foreign country, decides whether to grant entry to U.S. government personnel based on political and diplomatic considerations.
The Special Operations missions envisioned in the plan would largely be secret, known to only a handful of officials from the foreign country, if any. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A48522-2005Feb23?language=printer
-R
