It Was Libby talked to Miller -- Do I Win a Prize?

This is fun. The Plame game has been going on all summer, and I participated fully. And now we find out it was Scooter!

Judith Miller has agreed to testify before the Grand Jury investigating the outing of CIA covert operative Valerie Plame. She apparently received a personal release from I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby allowing her to reveal him as her source. Scooter
is VP Cheney's Chief of Staff.

I just had to sign in and holler out a big I told ya so. I wrote about it back in August.

Sorry to be so smug. But it's a fun smug.

Chew the fat; speak out. Indeed. Thanks Judy!

A First? Bush Calls for Sacrifice -- and Oil Conservation

Of course, George Bush reads my blog.

I am like all those famous bloggers who point it out when what they talk about in their blogs comes true. So, yes, Bush is now asking people to drive less because he read my blog and had a change of heart.

Tuesday's NYT reports that Bush says, "We can all pitch in." And, in a strongly worded call for conservation (not), Bush suggested that, uh, maybe if people could, if it's not too much trouble, skip taking "a trip that's not essential, that would be helpful."

The Times also goes on to report that, "On Capitol Hill, senior Republicans called for new legislation that they said would lower energy costs by increasing supply and expanding oil refining capacity over the long run."

Once again, the Republican party is coming out with tough but innovative approaches to dealing with our energy needs. Who would have thought to increase supply, or -- better yet -- expand refining capacity?

Oh, that's right. That's exactly what Cheney's secret energy commission came up with years ago. You know, the commission that invited Kenneth Lay in for some serious face time.

With this imaginative two-pronged approach, the president and congress have settled the issue at last. Let's stop worrying about oil for now and turn our energies to wiping out the worst of our problems: pornography. That is the pressing issue for Bush now.

Chew the fat; speak out.

Response to Disaster: Emphasize Rise in Oil Prices

I know that we depend on oil. I know that Dick Cheney doesn't believe in conservation as a viable response to our need for oil.

I also know that even though it is logical for oil prices to go up when there is a disruption in the transportation and production of oil -- as was brought about by Katrina and now again by Rita -- the oil companies are extracting huge profits from these conditions. In fact, the trials of the oil industry are central to concerns in the business world.

Since Bush leads a faith-based, Texas-based Presidency, one can't help but associate the concerns of the oil industry with the concerns of Bush and his cronies.

So what are we to make of the obssession with how disaster affects oil? Why don't we talk about global warming, endangered water supplies, the development and man-made destruction of barrier islands, and social infrastructures that ignore poor people?

It is cliche to say that Iraq is about oil. Why is Katrina about oil? Why is Rita about oil? How many ways does the focus on oil help us understand what is so perverted about this Presidency?

Chew the fat; speak out.

Nasty Hit for Blogging: New York Times Now Charging for Columnists

I give in. I need to talk about blogs. It is a self-conscious act, I know, but with the Roberts nomination likely in the can and Katrina in the Bush spin zone, now is the time to talk about blogs.

As we all know, the New York Times is now charging for electronic access to its columnists. The writers affected by this new restriction include David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, Thomas L. Friedman, Bob Herbert, Nicholas D. Kristof, Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, and John Tierney. If you want to read them online from now on, it will cost you either 7.95 a month or 49.95 a year.

I think the NYT knows they can start charging for its best columnists because they know so many bloggers turn to those voices to read excellent writing on topical issues. We (bloggers) read electronically, often exclusively. We need excellent, experienced opinion to keep our world spinning.

While there remain fantastic bloggers whom we are, of course, free to read (see blog roll to the right), the blogging voice is slightly different from the NYT voice. As much as NYT deserves sharp criticism for its editorial policies, the writing remains excellent. It is different from blogs for several reasons, and here are just a few:

Their columnist positions are highly competitive. NYT top columnists make healthy annual wages because they publish books and travel the country on the lecture circuit, in addition to guesting on TV and radio.

Their writing appears less often, and, thus, statistically, the odds are greater that we will be exposed only to their better stuff. Bloggers regularly lay it out there several times a day. We read more of them, so we see more of their flabbier stuff. That's just the nature of blogging.

NYT columnists, in most cases, have been doing what they do longer than bloggers. Think about it: blogging is only a few years old. While many bloggers come from veteran careers as top journalists, the form is different. Therefore, they really have not been blogging, strictly speaking, for as long as the restricted NYT columnists have been doing their columns (and yes, I know that some of the writers I've listed above have not been working for NYT that long, but they all are experienced hard copy/print writers used to working with editors, deadlines, engaged audiences, etc.).

The NYT has an editing support system not readily available to bloggers. Even if columnists don't submit their work to editors (and virtually all do, really), they know they must reach the NYT standard, or else they will be taken to task or taken off the paper.

Why do I bother stating all these obvious little asides? Because I think we need access to these columnists. I think the blogging world benefits from their input. In a roundabout way, electronic access to NYT columnists is part of the blogging world. And NYT is taking advantage of this by charging a lot of money for access.

I suspect most bloggers would be hesitant to add a new expense to their budgets. Alas, I suspect most will have to. We can't afford more expense!

I wonder how the writers themselves feel about this turn of events. Fewer people will read them. For most writers, a loss in audience is a major blow. How will they react?

Chew the fat; speak out.

Bush Acknowledges Responsibility

President Bush showed a new approach yesterday when he acknowledged that he must take responsibility for the federal government's incompetence in responding to the disasters in the wake of Katrina. While his admission is, on the face of it, a welcomed turn of attitude, many observers willl rightly hold onto the cynical and political spirit behind most of Bush's moves of the past.

He has never admitted any mistakes, despite a failure to discover weapons of mass destruction and overwhelming evidence of systemic torture in U.S. prisons in Iraq and Gitmo. He has not fired Karl Rove, even though Rove exposed a covert CIA operative.

Therefore, it remains to be seen how this admission will play out as Bush proceeds with further political behavior. His speech Thursday from LA will represent a significant view into his current understandings of his failures in responding to Katrina -- and how those failures exposed an ignorance of the plight of poor and Black Americans.

I would be very happy to see a new part of Bush open up to the public. I would welcome a humble attitude that is backed up by concrete proposals to make the system work right.

Somehow I do no expect much. I expect some predictable references to doing a better job in the future and working together. I expect some implicit or explicit reference to getting beyond partisanship. I expect him to praise the people who went in and did their jobs at the time, but I do not expect him to show an understanding of how those jobs work and how the federal government can change in order to support the people who do respond effectively to disaster. I don't expect him to understand that people who sacrifice cannot do it alone, and that a U.S. President has the power to lift that spirit up and inspire others -- if the timing is right and the support is wisely spent.

No, I do not expect Bush to demonstrate a clear-headed, rational understanding of how to deal with catastrophe. I somehow get the creepy feeling that the thrust of his remarks will be about having faith and working with faith-based organizations to help out the people affected by Katrina.

Many people understand the practical, realistic ways that sacrifice works and why it is important to help out whenever you have a chance. While it does take a lot of faith, it is not the role of the President to exploit that faith in the wake of his own failures.

Well, let's see what he says tomorrow.

In the meantime, chew the fat; speak out about what you know.

Women's Votes Will Take Back the Country from the Bushies

Now that Katrina has exposed the failures of an over-privileged president and the cronies he put in positions of power (a la FEMA's Brown, and Homeland Security's Chertoff), I can only look toward the future when we can clear out the incompetents by voting them out of office.

Ariana Huffington and her magazine of bloggers, The Huffington Post, have been riding close watch on the administration, since long before Katrina.

Long before HuffPo came into view, Maureen Dowd was in the White House analyzing presidents. Her criticisms of GWB have been particularly damning and artfully written.

These leaders in political commentary may inspire other women to see through the political opportunism the Bush administration has been benefitting from as we have sent our sons and daughters to be killed in a war that remains unexplained. In this time of war, Bush has kept criticism at bay by playing the patriotism card again and again. Now that the dead are floating in one of our greatest American cities, he cannot claim that analysis of his policies is a form of anti-Americanism.

I do believe that Bush has now lost women's votes. He has also lost any hope of the Black vote (that even harrassment in Florida cannot keep away). And when I speak of Bush votes, I do mean Republican votes -- those politicians who have lined up behind Bush in unquestioning unity as the Bush Empire has consolidated its power ever since a biased Supreme Court triggered this scary era.

I have appreciated other blogs that have printed columns in full, so if you have been missing Dowd's recent opionion pieces, or just didn't check her today, see below for the latest in brilliant political writing.

When you're done, chew the fat; speak out.

September 7, 2005
Haunted by Hesitation
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON

It took a while, but the president finally figured out a response to the destruction of New Orleans.

Later this week (no point rushing things) W. is dispatching Dick Cheney to the rancid lake that was a romantic city. The vice president has at long last lumbered back from a Wyoming vacation, and, reportedly, from shopping for a $2.9 million waterfront estate in St. Michael's, a retreat in the Chesapeake Bay where Rummy has a weekend home, where "Wedding Crashers" was filmed and where rich lobbyists hunt.

Maybe Mr. Cheney is going down to New Orleans to hunt looters. Or to make sure that Halliburton's lucrative contract to rebuild the city is watertight. Or maybe, since former Senator John Breaux of Louisiana described the shattered parish as "Baghdad under water," the vice president plans to take his pal Ahmad Chalabi along for a consultation on destroying minority rights.

The water that breached the New Orleans levees and left a million people homeless and jobless has also breached the White House defenses. Reality has come flooding in. Since 9/11, the Bush administration has been remarkably successful at blowing off "the reality-based community," as it derisively calls the press.

But now, when W., Mr. Cheney, Laura, Rummy, Gen. Richard Myers, Michael Chertoff and the rest of the gang tell us everything's under control, our cities are safe, stay the course - who believes them?

This time we can actually see the bodies.

As the water recedes, more and more decaying bodies will testify to the callous and stumblebum administration response to Katrina's rout of 90,000 square miles of the South.

The Bush administration bungled the Iraq occupation, arrogantly throwing away State Department occupation plans and C.I.A. insurgency warnings. But the human toll of those mistakes has not been as viscerally evident because the White House pulled a curtain over the bodies: the president has avoided the funerals of soldiers, and the Pentagon has censored the coffins of the dead coming home and never acknowledges the number of Iraqi civilians killed.

But this time, the bodies of those who might have been saved between Monday and Friday, when the president failed to rush the necessary resources to a disaster that his own general describes as "biblical," or even send in the 82nd Airborne, are floating up in front of our eyes.

New Orleans's literary lore and tourist lure was its fascination with the dead and undead, its lavish annual Halloween party, its famous above-ground cemeteries, its love of vampires and voodoo and zombies. But now that the city is decimated, reeking with unnecessary death and destruction, the restless spirits of New Orleans will haunt the White House.

The administration's foreign policy is entirely constructed around American self-love - the idea that the U.S. is superior, that we are the model everyone looks up to, that everyone in the world wants what we have.

But when people around the world look at Iraq, they don't see freedom. They see chaos and sectarian hatred. And when they look at New Orleans, they see glaring incompetence and racial injustice, where the rich white people were saved and the poor black people were left to die hideous deaths. They see some conservatives blaming the poor for not saving themselves. So much for W.'s "culture of life."

The president won re-election because he said that the war in Iraq and the Homeland Security Department would make us safer. Hogwash.

W.'s 2004 convention was staged like "The Magnificent Seven" with the Republicans' swaggering tough guys - from Rudy Giuliani to Arnold Schwarzenegger to John McCain - riding in to save an embattled town.

These were the steely-eyed gunslingers we needed to protect us, they said, not those sissified girlie-men Democrats. But now it turns out that W. can't save the town, not even from hurricane damage that everyone has been predicting for years, much less from unpredictable terrorists.

His campaigns presented the arc of his life story as that of a man who stumbled around until he was 40, then found himself and developed a laserlike focus.

But now that the people of New Orleans need an ark, we have to question the president's arc. He's stumbling in Iraq and he's stumbling on Katrina.

Let's play the blame game: the man who benefited more than anyone in history from safety nets set up by family did not bother to provide one for those who lost their families.

With Katrina's Death Toll and Skyrocketing Gas Prices What Does a Leader Look Like?

The image here was posted on the White House website as a featured photograph. It is apparently meant to represent the most poignant image of the president's leadership today, Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2005.

In one sense, the meaningful hand gesture and the forthright posture might suggest determined leadership.

Upon further reflection, however, this image communicates that the president is a little lost, and, in reacting to his lost feeling, intends to bully everyone around him into listening to his off-the-cuff observations. The eyes are narrow and a little crossed. The lips are pursed and suggest a partonizing tone.

The lips are the predominant feature here, and, for me, they are a good example of how I may see GWB one way while others see him completely differently.

This picture looks like a man who is out of his element and is trying to appear in charge. He looks like someone who feels he is being charming, when, in fact, he is being threatening.

Clearly, other viewers of this image will have an entirely different reaction.

What is your opinion of the leadership suggested by this image?

Chew the fat; speak out.

Mismanagement from the Business Model Prez

Many, many people have been trying to point out problems to George Bush. He truly seems unable to understand.
I remember when Bush and his supporters stressed how efficient and effective government would be using a business model. In the course of this presidency, we have seen how such models work in the business world (Enron, etc.).

In the political world, with the leadership in the Iraq war and now the leadership of the response to Katrina, we see how such a business approach really works. You starve your social programs and your emergency response in order to feed to the exciting aggression of expansion (beefing up pro-business policies, colonizing Iraq). When reality sets in and problems start to make the veneer of success crack, the response to these difficulties exposes the incredible incompetence of those in charge.

Yes, Iraq is a quagmire comparable to Vietnam.

Yes, NOLA is underwater and American citizens are dying in the streets.

True character is illustrated by the decisions an individual makes in a time of crisis. Perhaps now everyone will see how destructive this man and his policies are for our nation.

Let's chew the fat; speak out.

From CIA Plame Game to Katrina Blame Game: Yes, It Is Time to Ask Questions

Dear Mr. Vice President:

Where are you now?

We are hearing again that now is not the time to hold anyone accountable.

The preemptive excuse-making logic goes like this: thousands of people are in trouble. Let's all pull together and take care of them first. Then we'll have time to figure out who's responsible.

Problem is, we've heard this logic too many times before. Indeed, it has served as a very effective way to make us stuff our questions and sit silently as catastrophe works itself out. Problem is, when you set to work on a problem so huge, it is easy to forget altogether how it started. And by the time you have made any headway, you are too exhausted and thankful to reflect on the source of the problem.

As Americans, we are hesitant to look the gift horse of success in the mouth and ask why we had to go to all this trouble in the first place.

Deferring the tough questions leaves us with a maddening chicken and egg problem that has characterized Bush's argument about Iraq for two years.

He claims that we need to be in Iraq to battle the terrorists. But there is some pretty convincing evidence that the terrorists wouldn't be there if we hadn't attacked Iraq. So, from one angle, Bush policies caused the presence of terrorists. And so, the quagmire that is the battle in Iraq is a result of poor policy.

It is very hard to argue that angle now that we are already up to our eyeballs in the flood of the insurgency in Iraq. Bush policies have brought us to this terrible crossroads where we cannot stay without losing more lives in a futile battle, and we cannot leave without abandoning the people we have thrown into war.

And so onto New Orleans: If we do not take the time now to question why we were not prepared for Katrina or why the levee projects and FEMA were made disfunctional because of Bush cutbacks to basic government services, then we likely will never have a chance to look harshly on those policies. Using its standard operating procedure, the Administration will drag its feet in answering questions and the American press and public will tire of the process -- or be distracted by some other crisis.

For instance, how interested do you suppose we are in the plight of the outed CIA agent Valerie Plame?

How long will it take for Cindy Sheehan to fade from our memories?

How concerned is the average American about the permanent tax cuts for the rich that are on the table RIGHT NOW, waiting for a vote?

These problems will fade for Bush.

I argue that we do have a right to ask questions.

The greater percentage of the poor Black people searching the stores in New Orleans for food and water are not the problem -- yet technically they are looters. Keep an eye on how Bush will try to emphasize the crime angle. He will say nothing about the lack of Federal support for first responders and other emergency services that should have been up and ready to go long before Katrina even hit.

Bush and Bush supporters tell us not to politicize this disaster. But watch how every move will be a political one. And it will not be what he says or what he does that will communicate his concerns. It will be what he does not say and does not do. The things he neglects will show us what is really important to him.

Let's chew the fat; speak out.

Hungry, Angry Refugees in the U.S.

While thousands of people below cry out for help, George W. Bush cannot see them from thousands of feet above. How distant is his connection to what really is taking place on the ground?

I just returned from two weeks travelling the Pacific Northwest. Even before the disaster, Katrina, I could see and feel the anger and the danger. People are tightening up their hearts. Crime is closer. Everybody is ready to stretch the truth and rip you off in a soft con.

We are sick of being taken advantage of, and so we all have our own little pre-emptive wars to launch. We are acting like refugees in our own country, on the run from a government that not only gave up on us, but has been using our sense of duty and patriotism to wage an unjust war and neglect the problems at home.

And now with Katrina we get first hand evidence of what that neglect can lead to. Ignore global warming, and your hurricanes get stronger. Ignore levee building, and one of the most beautiful and distinctive cities in the world (that everyone knows is below sea level) is flooded, its poorest citizens -- mostly black -- left literally stranded.

It is no secret that funding for levee improvement in Lousianna was diverted to pay for the war in Iraq. It is no secret that an overwhelming percentage of the Army Reserves from Lousianna are not at home to protect and help their families and neighbors during this extreme time of need, but they are in Iraq fighting a war that has no clear plan.

The dissatisfaction with our leadership was showing long before this terrible natural disaster hit. People feel poor. Insurance rates go up while salaries stay stagnant. Gas prices skyrocket while, well, we know who is profitting.

Yes, it really is this bad. Yes, our president's policies have driven us into this situation. Yes, we are in more danger than we were before Bush became President.


We appear to be in the process of being waved to. Goodbye indeed.

Let's chew the fat. Speak out.