Plamegate, Watergate, fossil fuel, and Dick Cheney

There were a couple of items that broke late yesterday that seem to be more bad news for the Cheney administration regarding le affaire Plame. First, from the front page of this morning's WaPo:

Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward testified under oath Monday in the CIA leak case that a senior administration official told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame and her position at the agency nearly a month before her identity was disclosed.

So you really ought to go and read the whole piece, because there are several things revealed that portend to be big trouble for a lot of people. More:

Woodward did not share the information with Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. until last month, and the only Post reporter whom Woodward said he remembers telling in the summer of 2003 does not recall the conversation taking place.

"The only Post reporter" is Walter Pincus, who among the members of the MSM has done the yeoman's labor unwinding this tangle. Still more:

Woodward's testimony appears to change key elements in the chronology Fitzgerald laid out in his investigation and announced when indicting Libby three weeks ago. It would make the unnamed official -- not Libby -- the first government employee to disclose Plame's CIA employment to a reporter. It would also make Woodward, who has been publicly critical of the investigation, the first reporter known to have learned about Plame from a government source.

The testimony, however, does not appear to shed new light on whether Libby is guilty of lying and obstructing justice in the nearly two-year-old probe or provide new insight into the role of senior Bush adviser Karl Rove, who remains under investigation.

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Rove, said that Rove is not the unnamed official who told Woodward about Plame and that he did not discuss Plame with Woodward.

Got all that?

"A senior administration official" -- not Libby, not Rove -- told Woodward about Valerie Wilson first. Beforethe leak trickled to Novak, Judy Miller, Tim Russert, or any of the other reporters. Woodward didn't think it was important enough to mention this to his boss until a month ago -- coincidentally about the time Patrick Fitzgerald indicted Scooter Libby -- but Woodward claims he did mention it to the WaPo writer leading the CIA leak investigation, who claims he doesn't remember that happening.

Bob Woodward is on the record as having called the special prosecutor's investigation into the leaking of a CIA agent's name "laughable" and the consequences of that leak "quite minimal".

Editor and Publisher has more.

There is certainly a few best-selling books' worth of irony here, with Bob Woodward being eyebrows-deep in the government's deception as opposed to his '70's role as intrepid reporter, but for now I'd rather speculate on the unnamed official who leaked to him.

It's "Big Time" Dick Cheney, I'm guessing.

Speaking of Vice President Marquis de Sade, his oil task force is also Page A-1 in the Post today:

A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress.

The document, obtained this week by The Washington Post, shows that officials from Exxon Mobil Corp., Conoco (before its merger with Phillips), Shell Oil Co. and BP America Inc. met in the White House complex with the Cheney aides who were developing a national energy policy, parts of which became law and parts of which are still being debated.

So you're telling me that the oil company CEOs lied about this? Imagine that. Lying to Congress is still a crime, though since they weren't sworn, the crime isn't perjury.

Where's the Vice President going to be for the next few days?

Yesterday he got jeered at a ceremony in Tennessee honoring Howard Baker, who had a small role in Watergate if I recall correctly. Something related to a question regarding 'what did the President know and when did he know it' kinda thing. I hear he's planning on being in Houston next month ...

W: "YOU screwed up, you trusted us"

That's the abridged version of what Fred Kaplan is saying. It's worth repeating his words, though:

President George W. Bush has suddenly shifted rhetoric on the war in Iraq. Until recently, the administration's line was basically, "Everything we are saying and doing is right." It was a line that held him in good stead, especially with his base, which admired his constancy above all else. Now, though, as his policies are failing and even his base has begun to abandon him, a new line is being trotted out: "Yes, we were wrong about some things, but everybody else was wrong, too, so get over it." ...

Let's go to the transcript:

Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs.

This is not true. Two bipartisan panels have examined the question of how the intelligence on Iraq's WMDs turned out so wrong. Both deliberately skirted the issue of why. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence deferred the second part of its probe—dealing with whether officials oversimplified or distorted the conclusions reached by the various intelligence agencies — until after the 2004 election, and its Republican chairman has done little to revive the issue since. Judge Laurence Silberman, who chaired a presidential commission on WMDs, said, when he released the 601-page report last March, "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us agreed that that was not part of our inquiry." ...

That's why more than a hundred Democrats in the House and Senate—who had access to the same intelligence—voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.

This is the crucial point: these Democrats did not have "access to the same intelligence." The White House did send Congress a classified National Intelligence Estimate, at nearly 100 pages long, as well as a much shorter executive summary. It could have been (and no doubt was) predicted that very few lawmakers would take the time to read the whole document. The executive summary painted the findings in overly stark terms. And even the NIE did not cite the many dissenting views within the intelligence community. The most thorough legislators, for instance, were not aware until much later of the Energy Department's doubts that Iraq's aluminum tubes were designed for atomic centrifuges—or of the dissent about "mobile biological weapons labs" from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. ...

What we didn't know—and what the Democrats in Congress didn't know either—was that many insiders did have reasons to conclude otherwise. There is also now much reason to believe that top officials—especially Vice President Dick Cheney and the undersecretaries surrounding Donald Rumsfeld in the Pentagon—worked hard to keep those conclusions trapped inside.

Everything this administration does has the stench of deception around it.

Gammage for Governor?

A couple of sites are reporting that Bob Gammage, a Democrat with a long resume' in state party politics -- mostly recently as a Texas Supreme Court Justice -- is considering a run for Governor.

The links above have all the earmarks of a viral marketing campaign , complete with an e-mail posted here (scroll down to the comments) from Gammage soliciting "your honest, unvarnished and critical opinions" about his prospects.

I am fully supporting the candidacy of Chris Bell, but if Gammage intends to make it a contested primary in March, I think that would be a good thing for the Democratic Party.

Judith Miller To Take Job Actually Carrying Libby's Bags

(The header above and the article below from Tom Burka's Opinions You Should Have:)

Will Continue Work She Started As Reporter At NY Times

Reporter Judith Miller announced today that she will resign from the staff of the New York Times to take a job with White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Miller testified recently before a federal grand jury concerning conversations she had with Libby about CIA agent Valerie Plame.

"Working directly under Scooter seemed like a natural move," said Miller. Miller may also assist Libby with some deep cleaning of intransigent stains in his apartment. "Yes," Miller confirmed, "I will continue to do his dirty work."

Miller has come under fire lately for a 'chummy' relationship with Libby that some say clouded her reporting on Iraq's alleged WMD. Miller wrote five crucial articles advancing the Cheney administration's claims that Iraq possessed WMD, although she later admitted that those articles were "kind of wrong."

"Oops," she said, smiling and shrugging her shoulders.

Responding to critics who alleged that it was, at the very least, poor journalism to uncritically report as fact unsupported theories advanced by President Cheney and Scooter Libby, Miller said, "I can only be as ethical as my sources."

Miller recently spent 85 days in jail to protect the identity of a source whose name she cannot recall.

John Crony-n gets choreographed

by Ralph Reed. I knew he was gay ...

Former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed claimed in a 2001 e-mail to a lobbyist that he choreographed John Cornyn's efforts as Texas attorney general to shut down an East Texas Indian tribe's casino.

The lobbyist was Jack Abramoff, who is under federal investigation along with his partner Michael Scanlon, on allegations of defrauding six Indian tribes of about $80 million between 2001 and 2004. The e-mail, along with about a dozen others, were released last week as part of the investigation. In 2001, Abramoff was working as a lobbyist for the Louisiana Coushatta tribe to prevent rival gaming casinos from siphoning off its Texas customers. He paid Reed as a consultant, and Reed lobbied to get the Alabama-Coushatta and Tigua casinos closed in Texas.

In the Nov. 30, 2001, e-mail, Reed told Abramoff that 50 pastors led by Ed Young, of Second Baptist Church in Houston, would meet with Cornyn to urge him to shut down the Alabama-Coushatta tribe's casino near Livingston, Texas. He said Young would back up the request in writing.

"We have also choreographed Cornyn's response. The AG will state that the law is clear, talk about how much he wants to avoid repetition of El Paso and pledge to take swift action to enforce the law," Reed wrote. "He will also personally hand Ed Young a letter that commits him to take action in Livingston."

Cornyn, now a Republican U.S. senator, had filed a lawsuit in 1999 to shut down a casino operated by the Tigua tribe in El Paso, saying it violated the state's limited gambling laws. In 2002, federal courts shuttered the Tiguas' casino and Cornyn used that ruling to shut down the Alabama-Coushattas' casino.

The entire article, including the transcripts of the e-mail exchanged between Reed and Abramoff about Cornyn, can be found here.

Here's a question for my local paper, the Houston Chronicle: do you plan on investigating this and/or covering it yourselves or are you just going to rely on the wire reports?

(So far, the Austin American Statesman has an identical wire story. Houston Chronicle, nada. Dallas Morning News, zip. Thanks to Sean Paul at The Agonist for the tip.)

Update (11/14): Charles Kuffner has been all over this from the beginning, which was over a year ago.

In honor of her father, on Veterans' Day

My friend Lisa wrote this, and I post it here in its entirety:

I have been thinking about my father a lot lately. It seems like every time we pass another milestone in the Iraq War death count, I think about my dad. No, he didn’t die in a war, but I still believe that war killed him … slowly.

It really saddens me to hear about every new life lost, but for each one of them, how many others’ lives have been irrevocably changed? I was too young to know who my father really was before Viet Nam, but I still realize how it changed him. I was 17 when that realization sunk in.

I was in an advanced history class in high school, which encouraged unusual class projects and different perspectives as opposed to memorization of names and dates. When we reached the Viet Nam era, I had the idea to do an interview with my father about his experiences and how they affected him. He agreed. I had two weeks to write the report. Somehow the weeks passed with him managing to put me off several times.

Finally, the day before it was due, he sat down with me. I asked him to tell me about what it was like. He stared across the room and did not speak. His eyes welled up a bit. He shook his head gently and said, “I’m sorry. I can’t.” He stood and left the room.

Initially, as a rather normal selfish teenager, I wondered, “How the heck am I gonna do this report?!” But then I realized the importance of those two short sentences. It had been almost 17 years, and all he could say was “I’m sorry. I can’t.” That spoke volumes about the horror he had been through. I ended up doing a report on PTSD in Viet Nam veterans and made an A.

In addition to the weight of the terrifying memories, my father also suffered from numerous health problems. Some he believed were related to chemical exposure, most were from alcohol abuse and smoking, both habits he picked up during the war. He would eventually die from cancer, with few treatment options due to damage to his heart and liver.

I often feel like I was cheated. We had a tumultuous family life. Beer was the wall between him and us. At times I thought he hated me because it made him so moody. I was cheated out of having a closer relationship with him, and I was cheated in years as he died in only his 50s. I believe it was war that cheated me and him. I believe that the horrors he experienced changed him forever, and he was unable to cope with it in any other way than by staying numb.

The scene from Fahrenheit 911 that moved me the most was of a young, fresh-faced kid with a hollowness in his eyes talking about his experience. He said, “Every time you kill someone, you can't do it without killing a piece of yourself.” I wondered how many pieces of himself had died already.

I was raised to be patriotic. I even won a scholarship for an essay on patriotism. I love my country, warts and all. I respect people like my father who devote their life’s work to serving their country. I respect them regardless of what mission they are sent on. More than respect, I stand in awe of their commitment. But I respect and love them so much that I can’t bear the thought of them risking death, injury, and emotional trauma for a cause that is not just. They are precious, a resource not to be wasted. It is an INSULT to their honor to use them in an immoral war based on lies and manipulation.

MY troops deserve more respect than that!

My father deserves more respect than that!

Every soldier who has ever served his/her country deserves the knowledge that they and all who come after them will be serving NOBLE causes. It is our duty to ensure that for them.

That is why I march. Justice, to me, is to hold this administration accountable for disrespecting our armed services by committing them to a cause that is beneath them.

I want justice in honor of my father, who gave his life for his country. It just took a long time to happen. I want justice for the men and women we have lost in this war. I want justice for the ones who will come back and never fully recover. I think this justice is also a way of paying respect to the veterans who have served us over the ages. It says “The country you protected strives to live up to your honor.”

Thank you, Dad. I know I didn’t say it enough while you were alive. And thank you to all of you who have committed to protecting me.

"Everything was all right so long as the children didn't look over the roof at the bodies floating past."

From behind the paywall at Texas Monthly, the account of two New Orleanians, as told to John Spong in the Astrodome:

TEN ROWS OF COTS and two thousand or so people away, a couple in their fifties, Benjamin and Ermica Wilson, sat next to each other on a cot with a Bible. He was a big man, wearing a black T-shirt and a black New York Mets cap. She was much smaller, in bright purple sweatpants and a white T-shirt covered in little purple flowers.

Benjamin said they’d gone to their Ninth Ward church, St. Mary of the Angels, to weather Katrina. When the water rose too high in St. Mary’s, they’d climbed to the roof with their own family of 18, from Benjamin’s mother on down to his young nieces and nephews, plus about 75 other people. They were up there for two nights.

“We had a grill up there,” said Benjamin, “and I put a life jacket on and swam to my mother’s house to get meat from the freezer. We had pork chops, ribs, smoked sausage. My mother made a pot of gumbo for everybody, and my wife made a pot of chili. It seemed like we were stretching those five loaves and two fishes. Everything was all right so long as the children didn’t look over the roof at the bodies floating past.

“The worst part was at night. It was pitch-black. No street lights or lights in the buildings because there was no electricity. It was dead silent except the sound of people trapped in their attics screaming as the water rose..."

Update (11/12): People Get Ready has some photos of St Bernard's Parish.

"We do not torture."

Then I suppose it depends on what your definition of the word 'torture' is.

Or 'we'.

Or 'not'.

Prop 2 post-analysis

I've been ruminating on the declaration of bigotry overwhelmingly displayed on Tuesday by my fellow Texans, and while thinking of something to say that had the right amount of bitterness, as well as a root cause for the landslide of ignorance demonstrated at the polls, found two articles which contained both.

sui generis expresses the frustrations of us 26 percenters quite clearly, and from the first-person POV (my edits appear in red, blue, and bold):

I couldn't help but notice that your newspapers actually called it a "Texas Upholds Gay Marriage Ban", instead of "Upholds Straight Marriage Defense", but we knew that's what you meant all along.

To the 535,000 people who voted in Texas to recognize same sex marriages, many of which already exist but not yet legally: thank you, from the bottom of our hearts for being remarkable, principled, fair minded and decent humans. You did the right thing, and it means more than is possible to put into words. You recognized that my love for my family is as fierce and as powerful and as consuming as your love is for your family, and you did the right and decent and moral thing, as you would have done for your own family. Thank you, thank you.

The rest of you three out of four Texans, you can go f*** yourselves, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart, for being the (lots of expletives deleted) shitbag throwback worthless waste of piss poor protoplasm that you are. I wouldn't give you my piss to drink if you were dying in the desert today...

The next time you ask for money for breast cancer at the supermarket, I want to know which way you voted. The next time a fireman stops me in traffic with a boot collecting for charity, I want to know which way you voted. The next time your kids come to my home by the busload for Halloween or Scouts or school trips, I want to know which way you voted; the next time you call me to get a cat out of your tree, pick your ancient husband up off the bathroom floor, or to rake your leaves or help find your kid's dog, because I know that three out of four of you voted to make and keep my family illegal. You will be held accountable.

Three out of four of you voted to make my family's life as difficult and as fragile as possible. Three out of four of you voted that my evil little nephews have a greater claim on my estate than my life partner of 9 years, or my adopted children as long as I live in the state of Texas. Three out of four of you voted to keep my life illegal and invalid. Three out of four of you assaulted my family, stepped out of your busy little evil lives and into mine to tell me, with the weight of the law, what is right for me, by taking away my rights. Three out of four of you had better watch your back now, you will be held accountable.

I want vengeance. I want to hurt your families the way you've hurt mine; legally, financially, socially. I want to figuratively slam you up against the wall and ask you why you think that the green-eyed marriage ban is moral, or why you think that the asian-american marriage ban or the red-headed marriage ban is moral or why you petty little judgemental sons of bitches think that the gay marriage ban is moral. I want to know why you think that discriminating against my family is a family value.

I want to know why you think my family means less to me than your family means to you, why you think I should feel any less angry or devastated than you would if your family was assaulted by three out of four people that you know. I am hurting today and deeply, profoundly, even dangerously angry today, and there isn't a lot that I can do for the pain and the rage I feel except to vent it here.

We knew it was coming, like knowing that getting pushed down the stairs means you probably will break an arm doesn't make it hurt any less when you break it. How can we support what is right and decent in society when society won't be right and decent to us?

We're not waiting for your permission to live our lives. We are already married for all intents and purposes. We already have families, we just have to work A LOT harder to keep bigots from hurting us, from interfering with our families in the name of "morality" and "family values". But a clear warning here: if you get in the way of me and mine at the hospital, you will require the services of a hospital, and I mean that literally, not figuratively. If you decide that my children no longer belong to me or that I can't live with the person I love for the rest of my life, I can't say in public the lengths I would go to to disabuse you of that notion, but I will invoke Darwin ...

Just for the record here, I'm comfortably hetero, in addition to being happily married. But there are gay members of my immediate family who have fought for years for the rights Prop 2 now denies them by constitutional fiat, and I profoundly feel the impact of what this means for them.

That it was a prominent number of minority voters in Democratic precincts -- who attend church regularly -- who voted to deny those rights is particularly galling:

Blacks and Hispanics who traditionally vote Democratic strongly backed the state's gay marriage ban at the ballot box this week, sometimes outpolling Republicans, analysts said Wednesday.

That broad interest across political lines contributed to the highest participation in a constitutional amendment election since 1991, with roughly 18 percent of registered voters turning out for Tuesday's election.

Republican Gov. Rick Perry rallied his evangelical, socially conservative base on the issue, but political analysts said Proposition 2's success doesn't necessarily predict future success for individual politicians.

"I don't see how it can be useful for a party or a candidate because this so transcends all the political parties and the typical categorizations," said Kelly Shackelford, president of the conservative Free Market Foundation, which backed the amendment.

"We didn't even call Republican homes. *cough*bullshit*cough* We called Hispanics, African-Americans and rural Texas voters. That's where the numbers were," he said.

Others agreed, noting that religion and family values resonate in traditionally Democratic precincts with large minority populations.

On the single issue of defining marriage as between a man and a woman, minorities often voted as favorably and sometimes more favorably than higher-income Republican precincts, said political scientist Tim O'Neill at Southwestern University in Georgetown.

There's about a dozen more nuggets of wisdom in that Chron article, so go read it all. Last paragraphs:

(Rice University political scientist Bob) Stein said the Proposition 2 election probably did little to change the dynamic of the GOP primary for Perry because he already had the support of solid social conservatives.

"What Perry did with the evangelicals was an organizational effort," Stein said. "Liberals tend to view those people as rabid dogs. They're not. They're sophisticated. They're organized. Church is just another organization."

Remember this for the near future: Prop 2 was just a dress rehearsal for the GOP GOTV effort in advance of the primaries in March and the general election in November. Bear in mind the words of former DeLay press secretary and Abramoff cohort Michael Scanlon:

"The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees," Scanlon wrote in the memo, which was read into the public record at a hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. "Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them."

Boy, we still have a lot of work to do.

A good start toward taking our country back

** Kaine wins in Virginia, Corzine in New Jersey. Handily. In fact, we should've paid Dubya's traveling expenses to stand beside other Republicans. (Oh wait, we did.)

** A gay marriage amendment actually failed (in Maine).

** Californians don't like their governor (again).

** Locally, the man who may be the strongest Democrat in the South won re-election with over 90% of the vote. There's rumors -- and not just on the internets -- that he'll run for something statewide next. I personally hope it's against Senator Torture in 2008.

** ... and ...
Texas Bloggers have banded together to ask our readers to nominate a Texan for our very own blogger version of the mainstream media's favorite attention grabber, the "Person of the Year"! Join us by nominating a Texan that has made the most impact this year, be it good or bad, evil or embarassing. We're accepting nominations from you through November 23 and we'll post your Texan of the Year by December 1st. Email your nominations to: Texanoftheyear@gmail.com

All of your favorite Texas political blogs -- left, right, and center -- are participating. Each of us will write our own post about the winner, so on December 1st you'll have lots of different opinions but they'll all come from the same source, you ... the smartest people in Texas.