Me: Frank Lynch

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For something less spontaneous, I maintain The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page (over 1,800 Johnson quotes), with a weekly essay springing from one of Johnson's quotations.

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This is not me. You don't need to be running in order to have questions about the current administration. (Tip of the hat to my brother John, who has the best damned web site on André Bazin on the planet.)
Link 6:43 PM

Hans Blix remains an unpleasant memory who conservatives wish could be forgotten. In his column today, William Safire focuses on the collapse of claims that Bush lied to get us into Iraq. Naturally, he doesn't mention that the committee report which complained of problems with the CIA is not the final word: sometime after the election, the Senate Intelligence Committee will issue a report which focuses on what the Administration did with the intelligence it received. But that's after we vote. In the meantime, Safire shores up Bush by completely leaving Blix out of the picture. The inspections turned up too little reason to go to war, and rather than question the intelligence, Bush pushed harder for war. "Time is running out" was his refrain. Running out for what? Was he double-parked or something? When provided with conflicting evidence, he chose to ignore it. (And, as far as we know, he never asked Tenet why a case which he doubted could be considered a "slam dunk." Bush himself had doubts about the argument, and chose to suppress them, maybe? Maybe even lied to himself? Could that be what that prayerful walk was all about?)
Link 11:49 AM

Where does your tip money go? If you're dining in a nice restaurant in Denver, you can't guarantee that the help gets all of your tip. There's an illegal practice in some of them where the restaurant skims money to defray the costs associated with accepting credit cards. On any given night, it may not be much out of someone's pocket, but one waiter complains that it's cost him $640 in eight months. They shouldn't be bearing that burden. And if you've ever worked for a privately-held company, you know how difficult it is to raise the courage to point abuses like this out.
Link 11:35 AM

If everyone cherry-picks, then how about some independent analysis? AG John Ashcroft has released a report praising the productivity of the Patriot Act in solving crimes. Personally, I don't doubt for a moment that it's prevented some terrorism and brought terrorists to justice. But everything is a trade-off, and Knight-Ridder notes that...

the 29-page report showed that the law - an expansion of police and surveillance powers touted as a cornerstone in the Bush administration's legal war on terrorism - also has been used in regular criminal cases, such as child pornography and kidnapping.

The report made no mention of two of the Patriot Act's most controversial provisions, which allow FBI agents to search library records and conduct secret "sneak and peek" searches, which require warrants but no prior notification.

Critics seized on those omissions and accused Ashcroft of handpicking cases that helped make his case supporting the law.

Thankfully, not even all the bill's supporters are numb to the process.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, who appeared with Ashcroft on Tuesday, said the Patriot Act had saved lives, and he accused its critics of hypocrisy.

"The people who criticize the Patriot Act cherry-pick their contentions the same way," the Wisconsin Republican said.

So who wants to be even-handed first, and do an open and independent analysis so we know what the trade-offs are before the act is renewed? What makes me think that John Ashcroft won't go first?
Link 11:11 AM

Unlike the cakewalk in Iraq, no one said it would be easy, but it was, and so I'm finally experimenting with comment space here. For now, it's only on the pictures, and if managing them is as easy as setting it up was, they'll start to proliferate throughout my other posts. (But I won't be adding them to old posts.)

Speaking of that "cake walk," I really think Ken Adelman was only talking about the initial reactions our forces would meet in Iraq. I don't think he bothered to project what it would be like afterwards (a failure, that...) Anyway, today's New York Times reviews a book by Rashid Khalidi, and finds him, well, damned angry about the arrogance of the invasion.
Link 10:55 AM

Pushing the envelope in costume design. Friends know the pride I took in my Halloween costume last year, which combined silliness and gore in a way that amused even the youngest kids. I've been flummoxed over what to do, but now I know what a real costume is: Mr. Fish Tank Head!
Link 10:16 PM

Differing approaches to Constitutional Conservatism. I'm of the belief that constitutions shouldn't be changed willy nilly; and while I admit that I don't know enough of all the issues involved, it's noteworthy that the UK's House of Lords put its foot down regarding devolving the Lord Chancellor post into three separate posts. (The Lord Chancellor, of course, is the one who sits up all night, unable to fall asleep.) Even though the Lord Chancellor himself seemed resigned to progress ("The time has come to accept this fundamental change"), others were unmoved, with Lord Howe having referred to the proposal as "constitutional vandalism."

Now, I confess I don't know how often the UK revises its constitution. But we can contrast the attitudes of their upper house with the periodic interest the Bush administration has shown in revising ours. In the last few years, Bush has expressed support for at least five amendments to our constitution. Really: I'm not sure what all the fuss is about an activist judiciary...
Link 8:55 PM

Data without action. It doesn't take a philosophy degree to understand that information without implications has limited value. What do you do with it? (In my marketing research days, we talked about this as the "actionability" of information.) Congress's General Accounting Office has issued a report which is critical of the Department of Homeland Security because it warnings raise alarms without directing specific actions. I'm glad to hear this being raised, seeing as how the Department has been asking for specific criteria to delay the Presidential election in case of a crisis. Perhaps they're hoping that an arbitrary color change without anything else might be sufficient?
Link 1:47 PM

A deafening silence which probably means "guilty as charged." A spokesperson for General Electric "declined to comment" on a Washington Post article on how GE has shaped a tax bill to its advantage. The US government has to withdraw export subsidies because they violate free trade agreements — and the revisions have resulted in a law (not yet passed) which would not only cost US taxpayers more, but would give companies like GE incentives to build operations overseas rather than here in the US. Essentially, through your taxes, you would get to pay companies to outsource. I thought the whole idea of outsourcing was that it was supposed to be economically superior on its own, without our help?
Link 9:47 AM

Are party conventions about marketing? I'm not sure who the target market for this is.
Link 9:51 PM

"There is such a thing as society." Does this sentence mean anything to you? Does it serve as a reminder about our priorities? "A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization," said Johnson to Boswell. Nice of Gordon Brown to outline planned spending increases in the UK budget for health, education, and housing. It will come at the expense of government employment rolls, but if that means greater service while delivering higher efficiency, that's not a bad thing.
Link 9:35 PM

Why bother to include all the facts? Over at NRO, Peter Kirsanow complains about John Kerry reminding audiences of the voting problems in Florida in 2000. His overall point — that far fewer African Americans were disenfranchised in Florida than was rumored — may be true (I don't know) but there's a lot to question about the way Kirsanow supports his arguments.

For one thing, Kirsanow writes "The myth that President Bush lost the popular vote, even though a million black Democrats were supposedly disenfranchised, has also become a verity." Perhaps it's merely sloppiness on Kirsanow's part, that he didn't write his sentence as "lost the popular vote in Florida," but it's certainly no myth that Bush lost the popular vote nationally. And there were many ways in which ballots were reviewed that showed, by the standards which the Bush campaign asked for in recounts, Gore would have won. So there's something a bit, er, if not unctuous than disingenuous in claiming with certainty that it's merely a "myth."

Another frail leg Kirsanow leans on is the overall rate of "spoiled" ballots in Florida 2000. By this point, we should all understand the limitations of referring to averages, but Kirsanow points to Florida's 2000 spoilage rate of 3% and finds that it's not so bad. But he is able to go a bit deeper into the spoilage (but only a bit) and mention that "in 24 of the 25 counties with the highest ballot spoilage — er, disenfranchisement — rates, the county supervisor was a Democrat." What he doesn't point out, in writing more deeply, is who the voters were whose votes were spoiled. (In counting votes, votes count more than supervisors.) As Greg Palast has pointed out,

Of Florida's sixty-seven counties, Gadsden has the highest proportion of black residents: 58 percent. It also has the highest "spoilage" rate, that is, ballots tossed out on technicalities: one in eight votes cast but not counted. Next door to Gadsden is white-majority Leon County, where virtually every vote is counted (a spoilage rate of one in 500).

How do votes spoil? Apparently, any old odd mark on a ballot will do it. In Gadsden, some voters wrote in Al Gore instead of checking his name. Their votes did not count.

Harvard law professor Christopher Edley Jr., a member of the Commission on Civil Rights, didn't like the smell of all those spoiled ballots. He dug into the pile of tossed ballots and, deep in the commission's official findings, reported this: 14.4 percent of black votes--one in seven--were "invalidated," i.e., never counted. By contrast, only 1.6 percent of nonblack voters' ballots were spoiled.

Florida's electorate is 11 percent African-American. Florida refused to count 179,855 spoiled ballots. A little junior high school algebra applied to commission numbers indicates that 54 percent, or 97,000, of the votes "spoiled" were cast by black folk, of whom more than 90 percent chose Gore. The nonblack vote divided about evenly between Gore and Bush. Therefore, had Harris allowed the counting of these ballots, Al Gore would have racked up a plurality of about 87,000 votes in Florida--162 times Bush's official margin of victory.

Kirsinow has no patience for this kind of detail, or he'd have included it in his column. Instead, he sloughs off these arguments as "cynical efforts." (This is all without mentioning, of course, the butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County. At the end of the day, it couldn't be clearer that more voters in Florida wanted Gore than Bush. This is not a myth.)
Link 10:05 AM

A mere what — 14? months after the end of "major combat operations" in Iraq — an agreement has been reached with Syria to seal its borders with Iraq so that insurgents don't wander into the Arab world's latest democracy haphazardly. That's a good thing, don't you think? Of course, you have to wonder why these kind of negotiations weren't an early stepping stone in our successful plan to make things better for the world. OK, so my language is a harsh, but this should have been underway before we invaded. And it's only happening now. I have trouble interpreting this otherwise than the low priority which Bush places on international relations: how could you invade a country with lofty goals of establishing a beachhead without considering the neighbors?
Link 8:58 PM

The State of Florida has decided to abandon its flawed effort to purge voter rolls of ex-felons. Here's hoping they don't replace it with some procedure even more embarrassing!
Link 11:12 PM

States' rights and equal protection. Sometimes I wish I was a Constitutional lawyer. The process Florida used to purge convicted felons from voter rolls in 2000 was very controversial, and may well have cost Gore the election because of inherent biases and loose criteria for matching innocent people up against recorded felons. The company which did the matching for the State of Florida said it warned the State that its requested criteria would lead to far too many false positives, and says the State "wanted there to be more names than were actually verified," according to the linked article. The issue hasn't gone away: a new procedure adopted in an attempt to avoid problems is still causing trouble. The list shows very different results for African Americans and Hispanics.

• African Americans account for about half of the list, although they are only 11% of the state's population. As a group, African Americans tend to vote Democratic.
• Hispanics seem woefully under-represented on the list: of 48,000 entries, only 61 are Hispanic (Hispanics represent about 8% of Florida voters, and tend to vote Republican). This problem seems to occur because the felon database doesn't consider Hispanic as a category under race, unlike Florida documents.

The result may be unintentional, since the process was agreed to by the State and civil rights plaintiffs. But that made me ask: how do other states do it?

I don't know that answer yet, but I've learned from the Miami Herald that across the country, very few states purge ex-felons from their lists: only six, including Florida. (Tampa Bay Online says seven.) So I have an additional question now: why do some states do this, while most don't? Why is an ex-felon on Florida entitled to less participation that an ex-felon elsewhere?

The fourteenth amendment pertains to equal protection, and was one of the main arguments used in Bush v Gore court cases. Do state laws trump the 14th Amendment? Like I said, I wish I were a Constitutional lawyer sometimes.
Link 8:53 AM

Bush still defends going to war, saying that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power. But let's say that's true, just for argument. If you had 883 American lives to lose and hundreds of billions of dollars to spend, would this have been the best way to make the world better or safer? I think not.
Link 5:23 PM

This is not good. I can't spend the day reading the Senate Intelligence Committee report, but in addition to what I'd read about biases, bad intelligence, and too great a willingness to discount information which went against the grain, it seems as if critical procedures which are normally in place were abandoned. From Page 7 of the Conclusions document:

The presumption that Iraq had active WMD programs was so strong that formalized IC (Intelligence Community) mechanisms established to challenge assumptions and "group think," such as "red teams," "devil's advocacy," and other types of alternative or competitive analysis, were not utilized. The Committee found no evidence that IC analysts, collectors, or managers made any effort to question the fundamental assumptions that Iraq had active and expanded WMD programs, nor did they give serious consideration to other possible explanations for Iraq's failure to satisfy its WMD accounting discrepancies, other than that it was hiding and preserving WMD. The fact that no one in the IC saw a need for such tools is indicative of the strength of the bias that Iraq had active and expanded WMD programs.

Translation? The deck was stacked. Procedures are there to correct for errors, but an intellectual arrogance led to their being set aside.

I don't expect Bush to have asked Tenet "Did you use Red Team analyses?" but I really want to know if he asked Tenet to support a slam dunk characterization of a case he'd already expressed a problem with.
Link 2:36 PM

Hans Blix vindicated. Along with France, Germany, and Russia, who tried to stop us from going to war. I don't see any other way to read this. Thank God for Old Europe, huh? The inspections were our last great chance to find out the truth about WMD in Iraq, and we didn't believe them.
Link 12:26 AM

Until Fox News Channel starts providing transcripts on its web site, it will lack an element of the accountability one finds at CNN. CNN opens itself to criticism when it makes mistakes, and providing transcripts of its programs means that everything which is said is easily referred to and disseminated. But not so at Fox. These thoughts occur to me because I just noticed that the stock market is up so far this morning; that could change, of course, but being on the upside reminded me of something Neil Cavuto said on Tuesday (around 1 PM) about John Edwards' selection as Kerry's vice- presidential candidate. At the time, the markets were down, and Cavuto was claiming that the markets were responding with fear of Edwards as an anti-corporate lawyer.

What Cavuto didn't say, of course, was that oil price increases were roiling the markets, nor that Wall Street is also not fond of the deficits which Bush has added to everyone's tax burden. Nope, Cavuto didn't say that, and because there are no transcripts up at Fox you'll just have to take my word for it.

Because I was in-flight on Jet Blue (watching on DirectTV) and had no access to CNN, I resigned myself to watching Fox, and also saw their noontime host David Asman interview Hillary Clinton's former spokesperson. His angle in interviewing her was completely about what Edwards' selection might mean for Clinton's political plans. Her former spokesperson (I wish I could tell you her name, but without a transcript...) deflected Asman's suggestions that the Edwards selection had any impact, saying that Clinton had repeatedly said she didn't want to be Vice President or President; but Asman would not be dissuaded, saying something like "we know she has ultimate designs on the White House." A completely unsubstantiated, baseless statement, thrown out perhaps as a bone to Fox's conservative audience which quakes in constant fear over the Hillary Under the Bed. But without a transcript, the comment remains a mere throwaway on television. And Fox remains unaccountable. No wonder Cheney likes it so much!
Link 10:17 AM

Paging Rosemary Woods. Rosemary Woods. Rosemary Woods? Documents which might have added clarity to whether or not Bush skipped out on his National Guard service were inadvertently destroyed.

Military records that could help establish President Bush's whereabouts during his disputed service in the Texas Air National Guard more than 30 years ago have been inadvertently destroyed, according to the Pentagon.

It said the payroll records of "numerous service members," including former First Lt. Bush, had been ruined in 1996 and 1997 by the Defense Finance and Accounting Service during a project to salvage deteriorating microfilm. No back-up paper copies could be found, it added in notices dated June 25.

The destroyed records cover three months of a period in 1972 and 1973 when Mr. Bush's claims of service in Alabama are in question.

In all seriousness, the gaps in White House Watergate tapes produced by Rosemary Woods' triple lutz (while spinning around in her office) were more critical than this. But isn't this loss convenient?
Link 12:25 AM

The White House's ability to manipulate opinions through half truths is a force to be reckoned with. Yeah, when you get down to the actual words, they never did say Iraq was an imminent threat, even though Bush acted like he was calling for his brown pants. Even that bit in the 2003 State of the Union address that his followers use as evidence that he didn't feel the threat was imminent could, on careful parsing, be construed as a mere hypothetical.

And yeah, Bush and Cheney will hold their breath 'till they turn blue to say they never said Iraq had anything to do with 9/11, but the two were mentioned together so frequently, you'd have to be a blockhead to not get their meaning. And the US answered: upwards of 60% thought there was a connection, and upwards of 60% supported the war. Did this belief drive support the war? Uh, bear in the woods, Pope Catholic, Rose Kennedy black dress. Did the administration respond to this misperception in a timely fashion? Bush never made a statement about "we've seen no evidence Iraq was involved" until September 2003, during a brief Q&A over a cabinet meeting.

Lastly, the White House studiously avoided correcting a March 2003 statement VP Cheney had made on NBC's "Meet The Press" that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons (a statement, to remind you of the timeline, made before the invasion) until Cheney appeared on the same program in September 2003, well after the correction could have had an impact on public support for the war.

What's the current relevance of this?

Predictably, Kerry's wise choice of John Edwards for his VP slot has already drawn barbs from the Bush-Cheney campaign. Bush has said that Cheney is fit to be President, unlike Edwards. This is of course hogwash: there's nothing presidential about Cheney's inability to integrate information regarding the lack of substantive ties between Iraq and al Qaeda, nor his lack of statesmanship when he told Senator Leahy to go f*** himself. Similarly, hosting Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia on a hunting trip while the Supreme Court was deciding a case on Cheney (need he open his files on the Energy Panel he led?) put the onus on Scalia to make a recusal decision. Cheney should have known, in advance, not to invite him. Instead, the embarrassing decision was put upon Scalia.

Because we have already seen the way this administration will launch the war ships on the basis of flimsy evidence, Bush's reassurance that Cheney is ready to serve as a President doesn't cut butter.

Another question already making the rounds is Edwards demon history as a trial lawyer. The argument comes down to blaming the victims for the crimes of the perpetrators. If there were no crime, there would be no suits. And, while Bush et al may hype rising insurance premiums for malpractice and so on, consumer groups suggest that awards haven't increased: rising premiums are due more to the bad investments which insurance companies have made, which subsidize their pay outs. (See here and here.)

Now, carefully considered, the arguments of the Bush-Cheney campaign bounce off. And it's heartening to read an article like this one at CBS, which speaks of Edwards' resilience. But truth, unfortunately, is not the coin of the realm. It will be up to every Kerry supporter to be on top of the facts and be able to speak about the facts when talking to friends about the election. The White House has shown their skills at twisting the truth: it will be up to others to untwist it.
Link 9:43 PM

How will this clear Bush? Having not read the Senate report for which this remark is the basis, I don't see how this will put Bush in the clear:

[CIA analysts'] defective judgments were passed to CIA Director George Tenet and fed into the key prewar intelligence assessment of Iraq's weapons program that was given to President Bush and Congress in October 2002, he said.

Chambliss declined to reveal details, saying the misjudgments would be set out in a long-awaited report that the committee is scheduled to release Friday.

"There were a number of situations where unreasonable conclusions were reached," Chambliss said. "Some of it related to the information itself. The information was faulty. Some of it was good information that was not substantiated and turned out to be incorrect."

Chambliss said the report would absolve Bush and Tenet of accusations that they had misled the nation with allegations that Iraq had programs to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. U.S. inspectors have found no evidence of such programs.

"I would say it's a total vindication of any allegations that might ever have been made about what the administration did with the information," Chambliss said.

Here are my problems. Remember how the White House recommended we read Woodward's Plan of Attack? And remember how in it, Bush was initially skeptical of the WMD case he'd been presented by the CIA, and Tenet reassured him it was a "slam dunk"? Remember how Bush asked Tenet "Why is it a slam dunk?" If you don't remember Bush asking, it may be because the question wasn't asked. And didn't he once say something to the effect that one of the benefits of being President is that you get to ask the questions?

I think we have to be careful here: this could be an effort to save Bush's hide. Any CEO would have asked for the supporting information for a decision like war, and not merely relied on others.

UPDATE, 3:23 PM: When Woodward's book came out, here's what John King, CNN White House correspondent said on Newsnight With Aaron Brown:

KING: But while forcefully taking issue with a few key points, overall senior White House officials say they like the book. They say it portrays the president to ask tough questions before making the decision to go to war. And as you noted, Aaron, go to the Bush-Cheney campaign Web site, click where it says suggested reading and there it is, "Plan of Attack" by Bob Woodward.

The Bush-Cheney web site still recommends Woodward's book. So I repeat: if Bush asks the tough questions, why didn't he ask Tenet why the Iraq-WMD case was a "slam dunk"? And why is Chambliss so confident that poor analyses at low levels of the CIA absolve Bush, who asks the tough questions?
Link 2:55 PM

Machiavelli is reserved for the White House's use. New Jersey's governor McGreevey has been isolated in an indictment (not indicted) for political corruption. McGreevey says it's an attempt by Federal prosecutors to smear him, and some Democrats think that since the lead prosecutor has been occasionally mentioned as a gubernatorial candidate, that it may be politically motivated. But McGreevey's participation seems to have been signaled by mentioning a philosopher...

During that brief meeting, at the East Brunswick Hilton, Mr. McGreevey made a reference to the political philosopher Machiavelli, which prosecutors contend was a code word that Mr. Halper and Mr. D'Amiano had devised to signal their illicit intentions.

In the indictment, the person who made the Machiavelli reference is identified only as "State Official 1," but Mr. McGreevey has acknowledged meeting with Mr. Halper and making the comment. On Tuesday he said that his allusion to Machiavelli was simply a coincidence and he was unaware of any code words or illegal deals to exchange political favors for campaign contributions.

On Wednesday, Mr. McGreevey said he now viewed his meeting with Mr. Halper as part of the United States attorney's elaborate effort to ensnare him in an illegal scheme.

"There were three separate attempts to have me do something wrong," Mr. McGreevey said defiantly. "And of course, I did not."

Mr. Lawler went a step further, theorizing that Mr. D'Amiano might have coaxed the governor into making a reference to Machiavelli, either by mentioning the name or by "the power of suggestion."

Of course, the Feds hate it when someone outside of the White House invokes their patron saint.
Link 10:00 AM

So where was I over a long holiday weekend? Skip below if you don't care, but we went to North Palm Beach, where I was raised, a suburban community nothing like Palm Beach if you don't know. The main event was the fireworks on the 4th, which are lit very close to my folks' back porch, and we even felt embers fall on us at one point. Other experiences were drift fishing and a trip to Pelican Island, the nation's first wildlife refuge. Drift fishing provided no edible fish on this trip: Ab caught a bonito, which we were told aren't good for eating, and I caught something very big but couldn't land it: it snapped my line before we could get it in the boat. But it did give me headache while I fighting me. As for Pelican Island, that's a sad tale: thousands of pelicans roost there every night at sunset, so it's a special place for them. Yet it's constantly vulnerable to erosion because of the wake from passing boats, it being in the middle of the Intracoastal waterways of Indian River lagoon. It's now half the size it was a hundred years ago, and no one knows what the birds would do if their habitat were to disappear.
Link 9:57 PM

Many happy returns. I just finished watching this episode of The Prisoner with my 11-year old, who has long known of my affection for this series, and agreed to watch this episode with me. I gave her a reasonable preamble, and told her that many fans consider it the finest of the lot. Still, it was tough for her to feel enthusiasm, because although there is a good degree of tension throughout, there's a sense of progress; about 80% into it, she asked why so many people consider it the best, and I had to tell her to wait 'till the end. After the end, she understood, but still there was no shriek of "way cool, dad!" Maybe she'll like "The Schizoid Man" more...
Link 9:14 PM

Oh, what a relief! The Department of Health and Human Services conducted an internal investigation into the events which occurred while the Medicare bill was in Congress, and while the investigation showed that an ex-official did threaten one of the actuaries with his job should he share pertinent cost projections with Congress, the internal investigation decided no laws were broken. Isn't that good news? A Department of the Bush Administration has decided that nothing wrong was done. That makes me feel better. Especially since the opinion came from the Health and Human Services Department, which has shown itself to be so proud of the program that it circulated what amounted to propaganda videos to local news stations, disguised as news stories. Surprisingly, there are no expressions of any consciousness that, legal or not, it was wrong to withhold the information. Government agencies are not information gods; they harm the country by not being forthcoming. Such audacity!
Link 4:35 PM

Sorry, Mr. Vice President: no sale. The 9/11 Commission has decided that VP Cheney doesn't have any additional information on Iraq-al Qaeda ties.

"After examining available transcripts of the Vice President's public remarks, the 9-11 Commission believes it has access to the same information the Vice President has seen regarding contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq prior to the 9-11 attacks," Kean and Hamilton said in their statement yesterday.

Cheney spokesman Kevin Kellems said the vice president welcomed the commission's statement because it "puts to rest a non-story."

"As we've said all along, the administration provided the commission with unprecedented access to sensitive information so they could perform their mission," Kellems said. "The vice president critiqued some press coverage of the staff report. He did not criticize the commission's work."

Don't you just love that spin from Cheney's staff? Cheney created the controversy by holding to his unfounded beliefs of ties; his staff now tries to position it as if it were the media which was the problem.

Cheney should have realized, long ago, that his opinions were unsupported; CIA director Tenet has said in Senate testimony that he has had to reign Cheney in after his statements, but this hasn't stopped ol' Shoot From The Hip Dick.
Link 7:50 AM

I doubt very much that William Safire will include today's column in any book of his best. It's an offhand consideration of what John Edwards brings to the ticket, and it reads as if he'd originally hoped he'd have been able to submit some evergreen column he'd blown the dust off, only to find he had to do a little work. There's just so little thought to the piece: he speaks to one senator who discounts Edwards' ability to bring a single swing state, and from there proceeds through a series of superficial observations such as...

Consider Kerry's choices for a running mate. John McCain turned it down both privately and publicly, and Joe Biden didn't want the job enough. Bob Graham might have helped in Florida, but his diary obsession would have generated sustained media derision. Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack would have triggered a nationwide "Who?"

The serious alternative was Representative Dick Gephardt. The Missourian abandoned by union labor in the primaries is solid and experienced in both domestic and foreign affairs, and might even have delivered Missouri, but he is the Man from Dullsville. He would have been Kerry's Cheney — the pick of confidence.

Timber like Bob Graham is dealt with as if it were a toothpick, never mentioning, for instance, his national security credentials, years as a popular governor, years in the senate, background in Florida — it's as if Safire is too busy to get to a "flaw" to give the matter any serious thought. The diary-keeping, of course, is no flaw, just an idiosyncracy; if the media try to make it a problem, well, Safire is part of that media and should try to combat it.

Similarly with other candidates: no genuine discussion of their merits. (Gephardt has plenty of flaws Safire could have gone into, like the low proportion of Democrats in the House of Representatives; as the former party leader in the House, Gephardt bears some responsibility there.)

Who thinks Safire passes for a writer these days?
Link 7:28 AM

John McCain prefers Bush over Kerry: and what else? I haven't seen the latest ad the Bush-Cheney campaign has developed, which has McCain endorsing Bush, and seems to find its purpose from rumors that Kerry did a dance with McCain to persuade McCain to join him on the ticket. But unless something substantive is produced by Bush or McCain regarding an offer (e.g., a specific offer of the Vice-Presidential slot), it could fall on its face, because campaigns conduct exploratory interviews with many potential candidates. For instance, the Kerry campaign considered 25 different candidates, according to one consultant.

But simply saying that McCain endorses Bush over Kerry only goes so far. According to factcheck.org, McCain's Bush hug is not unqualified, and preference shouldn't be interpreted as approval. McCain has expressed reservations about both Bush's conduct of the war and his economic policies, the two major platforms of the reelection campaign. How long before Kerry puts those statements in an ad?
Link 11:19 PM

Sorting through data to arrive at wisdom is one of the primary responsibilities of an intelligence agency. That was my first reaction to today's account in the New York Times that the CIA had not told Bush that relatives of Iraqi scientists were reporting that weapons programs had been abandoned. The CIA's decision to disregard those reports as scattered and invalid could be interpreted as the flip side of all the unfounded information which Doug Feith had accumulated regarding connections between Iraq and al Qaeda. In the case of Feith, he had aggregated stray bits of tips into a memo, a memo which the Pentagon disavowed for its inconclusiveness. It happens on both ends, I guess.

But first reactions shouldn't rule the day, of course, and when the Times report is seen as part of a pattern there's cause for greater concern. In a critical argument of the run-up to war, John Judis and Spencer Ackerman noted that too often, contrary information in CIA analyses were being relegated to footnotes:

In the late summer of 2002, Graham had requested from Tenet an analysis of the Iraqi threat. According to knowledgeable sources, he received a 25-page classified response reflecting the balanced view that had prevailed earlier among the intelligence agencies--noting, for example, that evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program or a link to Al Qaeda was inconclusive. Early that September, the committee also received the DIA's classified analysis, which reflected the same cautious assessments. But committee members became worried when, midway through the month, they received a new CIA analysis of the threat that highlighted the Bush administration's claims and consigned skepticism to footnotes. According to one congressional staffer who read the document, it highlighted "extensive Iraqi chem-bio programs and nuclear programs and links to terrorism" but then included a footnote that read, "This information comes from a source known to fabricate in the past." The staffer concluded that "they didn't do analysis. What they did was they just amassed everything they could that said anything bad about Iraq and put it into a document."

There's more. What about Hussein Kamel, the Iraqi defector who had claimed that Iraq had disarmed years before we invaded? Did his claims get considered in the analyses?

And when you realize that in early 2003 even President Bush wasn't satisfied with the CIA's WMD argument for invading Iraq — only to be reassured by Tenet that it was a "slam dunk," according to Bob Woodward's book — you get a sense of the implications of withholding even scattered information from scientist's families. Such information might have tempered a characterization of it as a slam dunk.

Intelligence agencies may not see it as their role to be uncertain, but I would think that would be appropriate when you're talking about war.
Link 7:39 PM

John Edwards is a fine choice for the Kerry ticket, no matter how the Republicans try to spin it. Complaints about his supposed lack of foreign policy experience are easily turned around: all one has to do is look at where we are with Bush to know that his accrued foreign policy experience has been disastrous. Are we expected to want to stay the course with Bush when he's been a failure in this area? And Edwards is only running for Vice-President. Bush's failures are as obvious as the continents in a picture of Earth; not just the failure to build a genuine coalition ver Iraq, but the alienation of long-standing allies; the problems we've had with North Korea; the way he's endangered Blair's position in the UK... Should I go on? And against this, they complain about Edwards' "lack" of experience? Uhh, let's remind ourselves that Edwards has experience, as a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence.
Link 6:41 PM

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