With such strong qualifications for office, who would have imagined such a thing could happen?

Officials in Indiana and Washington said they were dumbfounded by a statement U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris, of Sarasota, made about a terrorist plot to blow up a power grid in Indiana.

During a speech to 600 people Monday in Venice, Harris either shared a closely held secret or passed along secondhand information as fact.

A staff member of the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which oversees the nation's intelligence operations, said he had heard of no such plot, and Indiana officials in the county where the power grid is located were at a loss to explain where the information originated.

In an interview Tuesday, Harris would not reveal the name of the mayor who told her about the threat or provide further details.

She said in the speech that a man of Middle Eastern heritage had been arrested in the plot and that explosives were found in his home in Carmel, a suburb north of Indianapolis.

Carmel Mayor James Brainard and a spokesman for Indiana Gov. Joe Kernan said they had no knowledge of such a plot. Brainard said he had never spoken to Harris.

This piece in the local paper has more on her shenanigans.

Today the Times reports that the the SEC has fined Halliburton $7.5 million for, in effect, defrauding its shareholders.

The charges stem from a change in accounting

This change came just as Halliburton was struggling with falling share prices that threatened to sink its proposed merger with Dresser Industries.

Again from the Times ...

It reported a 34 percent gain in profit for the quarter, far better than other oil services companies were reporting, and Mr. Cheney said then that "Halliburton continues to make good financial progress despite uncertainties over future oil demand."

The commission said yesterday that the gain would have been just 6.7 percent without the undisclosed change in accounting policies.

This is sorta like, "Hey, we just changed the temperature reading in our refrigeration trucks from Fahrenheit to Celsius without telling you. So what's the problem?"

The SEC and the even the Times goes to some length to avoid the colloquial term for this sort of behavior: i.e., fraud. The SEC did levy the fine. And it did point the finger of blame at two lower levels Halliburton officials. Yet the SEC, in the words of the Times, "did not detail the extent to which [Cheney] was aware of the change or of the requirement to disclose it to investors." And not surprisingly, in the article, Cheney's lawyer, Terrence O'Donnell is trumpeting the results of the investigation as a clean bill of health for Cheney.

Now, with a whitewash, you might at least expect that Cheney would be denying knowledge that this took place, as implausible as it might sound. But he won't. After taking down O'Donnell's crowing about the results of the investigation, the Times asked whether Cheney "had been aware of the effect of the accounting change on the company's profits." But O'Donnell wouldn't answer.

So here you have the Vice President of the United States. His company gets caught in about as clear a case of cooking the books to inflate profits as you can imagine during the time he was CEO. (His salary and bonuses are tied to company profits.) And he won't even go to the trouble of denying that he was aware of the wrongdoing.

Can we have some more aggressive reporting on this one?

Double-decker preemption? This from Gen. Tommy Franks this morning on CNN ...

With respect to WMD, ... I've had a couple reporters ask me the same question, 'Do you think that since we didn't find this WMD, do you think it's a mistake?' And I look and hopefully give a wry smile and say "Do you think it would be better to have left this regime to build it?" I think we are far better served that the regime of Saddam Hussein no longer stands in Iraq.

Very wry.

Alan's moment draws near!

According to Reuters, Illinois Republicans have narrowed their choice of senate candidates

Like Keyes', Barthwell's possible nomination would seem to indicate that the Illinois GOP is encountering some difficulty finding first-tier candidates to oppose Mr. Obama. During her brief stint at the drug czar's office one of her most noteworthy accomplishments seems to have been getting written up in a "hostile workplace memorandum" for "lewd and abusive behavior."

In the words of the Associated Press, "In front of her staff, Andrea Grubb Barthwell made repeated comments about the sexual orientation of a staff member and used a kaleidoscope to make sexually offensive gestures ..."

The staffer in question later told the investigator that he found her comments "lewd, derogatory and called into question his heterosexuality."

A kaleidoscope, you ask?

Thus the AP ...

The lewd and abusive behavior finding stemmed from a Dec. 19, 2002, staff gathering. Barthwell made comments about a staff member's sexual orientation after the staff member misspoke in an earlier conversation, the memorandum said.

"Dr. Barthwell made reference to this staff member sitting on men's laps. A kaleidoscope pointed upward was placed on a chair by Dr. Barthwell as the staff member was about to sit down," it said.

"Dr. Barthwell suggested that the staff member would want to cut the cake available for the gathering because the knife was 'long and hard' and he might 'enjoy handling it.' When the cake was cut, Dr. Barthwell referred to the pieces as 'most' or 'beefy' and she said to the staff member, 'I know you like it big and meaty.'"

Notwithstanding the strong social skills one might infer from that anecdote, the report also said that Barthwell's staff "almost uniformly stated their fear and discomfort with what they consider to be unusual behavior patterns and displays of temper."

In a short interview, Barthwell told the AP that the incident shouldn't be a factor in her candidacy. "I think it's something that was in the past, something we dealt with and it was resolved to everyone's satisfaction," she said.

So that's Barthwell.

Say what you will about Alan Keyes, I think we can be confident that when he starts saying unfortunate things about homosexuality he'll drive home his point with Aristotle and 'natural law' rather than kaleidoscopes.

Given all this, besides the fact that he's completely crazy, I think Keyes might likely be a less embarrassing figure to have in the senate than Barthwell. The man is not without his engaging qualities, after all, as one quickly realized reading Michael Lewis' masterful coverage of the 1996 presidential primary campaign in The New Republic.

You also didn't need to see Keyes diving into a portable mosh pit (set up by an as-yet-pre-iconic Michael Moore after a Republican presidential debate in 2000) and crowd surfing to the sounds of Rage Against the Machine to know that Keyes would probably be quite a guy to party with so long as the festivities were conducted in accordance with the laws of nature and nature's god.

In a classic Keyes' comment, both inane and inspired, he later defended the mosh pit episode, in the face of Gary Bauer's criticisms at the 2000 New Hampshire debate, as an ... well, it really deserves to be quoted in full ...

Admittedly, I was willing to fall into the mosh pit. But I'll tell you something. Do you know why I did that? Because I think that exemplifies the kind of trust in people that is the heart and soul of the Keyes campaign. It's about time we got back to the understanding that we trust the people of this country to do what is decent. And when you trust them, they will in fact hold you up - whether it is in terms of giving help to you when you are falling down, or caring for their own children.

So I thought that as an emblem of that trust, it was the right thing to do. And anyway, my daughter thought it was a good idea.

How can you not love the guy a little after reading that? Whackjob or not ...

In any case, with such politically viable options to choose from, you might think the Illinois Republican bosses would pick someone without so much baggage, like Jack Ryan, for instance. But according to Reuters, they'll crown either Keyes or Barthwell during their conclave tomorrow.

Do not miss this very important article that not only covers the exceptionally good reportage of Knight-Ridder reporters Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay on the WMD claims, but also the costs of aggressively bucking the administration line.

'Non-factual statements' my vice president told me ...

You'll notice that today in Hot Springs, Arkansas Vice President Dick Cheney blamed Democrats -- particularly

"The only thing I can think of to do [to lower prices]," said Cheney in response to a question about gas prices, "is to keep pushing hard to enact a comprehensive energy plan on a national basis." But Kerry and Edwards, who voted against the administration's energy bill, "weren't with us in trying to come up with a national energy policy."

Yet, the Energy Department's own study of the bill -- a study requested by Senator John Sununu (R-NH) -- said its effect on prices, even years into the future, would be "negligible".

My friend Steve Clemons has been threatening for some time to start a blog of his own. And now he finally has with his new site, The Washington Note. His first post is about former CIA Director and Ahmed Chalabi advocate Jim Woolsey.

I'll be returning to this site again and again, as Steve is one of the most connected guys in DC and knows the inside line on just about everything.

I just hope he updates the site often enough.

Serendipity is part of the magic of the newspaper. Not the newspaper as a concept, or simply the work of hundreds of news professionals at the big dailies, but the physical artifact itself: the bundle of paper with numerous articles on various topics

The key being that even if you're focused on articles on topics A & B, you're bound to have your attention focused on articles on topics C & D, articles that actually turn out to interest you a great deal but which you wouldn't have thought to look for on your own.

The web has made that factor of serendipity all the more apparent to me because I've seen how focused -- and thus, in key respects I think, impoverished -- the web has allowed my newspaper reading to become. (Of course, the web has also allowed us all to have instant access to newspapers around the world -- something once possible only for heads of state and CEOs, if even for them).

As you no doubt know if you read this site on a regular basis, there are a host of topics that interest me a great deal -- basically, national politics, intelligence, foreign policy and military affairs. The web allows me to focus in on those topics. And I've found over time that I end up never seeing a lot of stuff I would have seen if I were still reading the paper paper.

In any case, largely for this reason I've started experimenting with getting the 'electronic' editions of the Times and the Post -- something which is now available for many papers, but not all.

Basically what you get is an exact copy of the physical newspaper on your computer, the same layout, the color, the ads, everything. The Times and the Post both use proprietary services, each of which I'd call 'okay' in terms of ease of use and navigation, though the Times set up seems marginally better. (I'm still getting the feel for them -- so that's a tentative judgment.)

One thing that strikes me about these services is that the papers don't seem at all serious about marketing them. First of all, they get almost no play on the sites themselves. And, more telling, they are outrageously expensive, as compared to the actual physical paper itself. I can't imagine I'll keep subscribing to the electronic edition of the Times, for instance, because it seems to cost as much to subscribe to as the paper paper itself.

Price aside, that almost seems galling on first principles.

In any case, here's an article today in the Times that I don't think I would have seen otherwise.

The article describes a new Spanish government proposal to finance all major religions in Spain. Spain already subsidizes the Catholic Church to the tune of $170 million a year -- no small sum in a country with a population of 40 million. Technically, the subsidy is temporary -- under an agreement brokered after the end of the Franco regime. But in practice it's permanent.

The new proposal is nominally couched in terms of equality and equity. But the Ministry of Justice and counterterrorism officials who are pushing the idea are quite open with the fact that the real aim is to wean Islamic organizations and mosques from funding from militant groups abroad.

George W. Bush, August 2nd 2004: “Let me talk about the intelligence in Iraq. First of all, we all thought we’d find stockpiles of weapons. We may still find weapons. We haven’t found them yet. Every person standing up here would say, 'Gosh, we thought it was going to be different.; As did congress, by the way. Member of both parties. And the United Nations. But what we do know is that Saddam Hussein had the capability of making weapons. And ... umm … but let me just say this to you. Knowing what I know today, we still would have gone on into Iraq. We still would have gone to make our country more secure. He had the capability of making weapons. He had terrorist ties. The decision I made was the right decision. The world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power.”

It certainly doesn't seem like there's much time to make a drama out of the Illinois senate race. But comedy, it seems, is still a possibility.

The Chicago Sun-Times is reporting that the Illinois GOP is now trying to draft Alan Keyes to run against Barack Obama for the seat being vacated by retiring Senator Peter Fitzgerald.

According to a member of the Illinois Republican State Central Committee, Keyes, a Maryland resident, "said that he was open to the idea. And he felt that Obama didn't really represent the views of the people of Illinois."

For more on Keyes, the self-proclaimed 'Quintessential American', see this page on his website.

"White House and Bush campaign officials have long said that the details [of White House counterterrorism proposals] matter far less than the pictures and sounds of Mr. Bush talking in any way about his campaign against terrorism, which polls show

Ain't it the truth!

But wouldn't it be nice if we had a press which would make some effort to point out instances where the 'details' utterly belie what the president says he's doing?

The issue here is the president's supposed embrace of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, particularly on the creation of a new National Intelligence Director under whom the heads of the various intelligence agencies would operate.

I was working on another project pretty much constantly through most of the day and heard discussion of this on the cable networks, particularly CNN. What I heard there was that the president had embraced the commission's recommendation on this point while only disagreeing on whether this new head of national intelligence would be housed within the White House or have cabinet rank status outside the White House structure.

Yet it turns out that this is but one, and not at all the most significant way in which the policy the president has embraced differs from that of the commission. In fact, when you look closely at it, it's nothing like what the commission recommended at all. The president went out into the Rose Garden, said he was adopting the commission's proposals. But in fact he was doing close to the opposite, doing more or less what they said shouldn't be done.

The key point made by the commission, you'll remember, is that the new NDI would have to have budgetary authority across the various intelligence agencies and the ability to hire and fire senior managers. As the Times makes clear, the president's proposal does none of those. Indeed, the dailies do a pretty good job making this clear. The Post says that ...

Bush's statement embraced the two most significant of the 37 recommendations by the commission that investigated the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but with significant limitations. Under his plan, the new intelligence chief would lack the authority over budgets, hiring and firing that the commission had envisioned.

If anything, though, even that doesn't quite do it justice.

You'll remember that we already have a national director of intelligence, someone in charge of overseeing the work of all the various American intelligence agencies. That person is the DCI, the Director of Central Intelligence.

The only problem is that for a variety of reasons, some intentional, some historical and some incidental, the DCI does not really serve that function. In fact, the current set-up can reasonably be viewed as a worst of both worlds scenario since the DCI doesn't have this broad supervisory function and yet -- as we saw in the Iraq WMD debate -- the DCI can improperly tilt joint national intelligence findings in favor of his agency, the CIA.

Now, if you go back and read the actual 9/11 Report you'll see that the commissioners description of the organizational shortcomings of the DCI post reads more or less exactly like the description of the new post the president outlined today.

I quote from page 410 ...

The current DCI is responsible for community performance but lacks the three authorities critical for any agency head or chief executive officer: (1) control over purse strings, (2) the ability to hire or fire senior managers, and (3) the ability to set standards for the information infrastructure and personnel.

And it gets better.

The Times article notes that the president said that while the new NID wouldn't have full control of the purse strings, he or she would have a 'coordinating' role in budgeting.

Yet, in the very next paragraph of the report, the commissioners note how this doesn't cut it.

Again on page 410 (emphasis added) ...

The only budget power of the DCI over agencies other than the CIA lies in coordinating the budget requests of the various intelligence agencies into a single program for submission to Congress.The overall funding request of the 15 intelligence entities in this program is then presented to the president and Congress in 15 separate volumes.

Now, for what it's worth, I'm not at all happy with the way that the dynamics of the election year are rushing the process of adopting this list of recommendations which, at the end of the day, is still the product of a small group of people, done with relatively little open debate. But there's still the issue of truth in advertising and whether the press -- and particularly the electronic press -- only pays attention to the "pictures and sounds" rather than the details of what the White House is actually doing.

The Post's Tuesday editorial notes this ... well, how shall we say it ... lack of candor, but still refers to it in bland terms.

Saith the Post: "Mr. Bush cast the plan he unveiled yesterday, to create a director of national intelligence and a national counterterrorism center, as embracing the commission's recommendations. In fact the administration's proposals differ in critical respects."

What's more, this is such a pattern for this White House that you'd think the Kerry campaign, and the Dems on the Hill, would get hold of this as a pretty manageable critique of this administration: That is, you just can't trust them.

What this White House says it's doing and what it's actually doing seldom turn out to be the same thing.

America Coming Together has a mock George W. Bush commercial featuring the still-living but yet already immortal Will Ferrell, and it's hilarious.

I'm not sure what I think of their 'Stop the Fraud' petition seemingly aimed at getting the FCC to crack down on "misleading, deceptive and fraudulent advertising." Actually, I think I know what I think of it -- I don't like it. But the faux-commercial is funny. And ACT's get-out-the-vote work for this November is extremely important.

Now the Bush-Cheney political campaign is telling all who will listen that they will spend the next month running a massive ad campaign (with a price tag of $30 million and no doubt supplemented by on-message talking points sent out to the all the

(As a side note, this telegraphing of a looming attack is classic Rove -- a topic we'll return to.)

This makes sense on a number of levels.

First, the Kerry campaign now faces about four weeks of serious strategic vulnerability. They're now under the post-convention public financing caps, while the Bush campaign is not. That means that they're going to be hard pressed to match that spending dollar for dollar since they've now got a static budget that has to last them through the end of the election.

Hopefully for them the Democratic party and other independent Dem-oriented groups, while not allowed to formally coordinate on such things, will have Kerry's back on this during this period.

The more discussion-worthy point, however, is the use of humor as a political weapon -- mockery, derision, diminishment.

Republicans are very good at this. And it can be a tool that is deceptively difficult to respond to or combat. Effective mockery is 'sticky', hard to shake off, hard to parry. And it appeals to people's appetite for fun and humor.

Indeed, it's not just contemporary Republicans who have a knack for this. There seems to be something intrinsic to the reactionary or right-leaning mentality that gravitates toward this method of political combat. Think of the Tory pamphleteers and essayists of the 18th century in Great Britain or others of a more recent vintage in the US.

This is potent stuff. And Democrats would do well not only to be on their guard but consider applying this approach to the current president, who is more than a bit ripe for such treatment.

Today, the Sunday Times of London reports that the Italian middle-man who provided the notorious Niger uranium documents to Italian journalist Elizabetta Burba (she

I can vouch for the accuracy of this account since I have been working on this story for six months. In fact, I interviewed the Italian middle-man in question two months ago at a restaurant in mid-town Manhattan -- the details of that interview I describe below.

This all requires a bit of explanation. So here goes …

Back on June 17th, I wrote that I and several colleagues were working on a story that might cause quite a stir in Washington when it was published. That story was (and is) about the origins of the forged Niger uranium documents. Since January my colleague Laura Rozen and I have been reporting on this story for an article that will appear in The Washington Monthly. We’ve also been working in collaboration on this story with an American TV network.

At the time I wrote that post, I thought the story was going to appear in late June, thus my oblique mention of it on the site. It’s now slated to appear later this month.

The reasons for the delay in publication are difficult to describe before the piece runs. But, as you can see, we’ve now been scooped on one part of the story – to my transcendent mortification. So let me share with you some details of what we’re working on and expand on what the Times has reported.

What’s long been known about the Niger documents is that an Italian ‘security consultant’ tried to sell them to an Italian journalist named Elisabetta Burba. Burba’s editor at Panorama, in turn, instructed her to take them to the US Embassy in Rome. That is how they came into the hands of the American government.

The question has always been, who’s the ‘security consultant’? Did he forge the documents? And, if not, where did he get them?

You’ll remember that in late June there was a piece in the Financial Times which alleged various evidence for the proposition that Iraq had in fact sought to purchase uranium from Niger. The story also suggested that the 'security consultant' was himself the likely forger of the documents and that this 'scam' had only served to obscure the real evidence of the sale of uranium to Iraq.

This is untrue on several counts. The 'security consultant' wasn't the forger -- a fact well-known by the FT's Italian government sources. And we have little doubt that the information about him contained in the FT article was provided by Italian intelligence sources to get out ahead of the information they knew the 'security consultant' and others had already provided to us -- specifically, their own complicity in the dissemination of the documents.

So who's the 'security consultant'?

The ‘security consultant’ is a small-time information peddler who buys and sells information in the netherworld of diplomatic, intelligence and media circles in Rome. His clients include foreign intelligence services and also the Italian media. He is himself a former member of SISMI.

He received the forged documents from a current SISMI officer who works in the division specializing in weapons proliferation.

We know the identity of both men. Both are in their early 60s. The identity of the ‘security consultant’ we’ve agreed not to disclose. We will publish the identity of the SISMI officer in the upcoming article.

Here are the basic outlines of what happened.

In early 2000, the ‘security consultant’ was approached by a former colleague from SISMI whom he'd known for some twenty five years. This current SISMI officer told him that he had a source in the Nigerien Embassy in Rome, that they (i.e. SISMI) had no more use for her, but that she could be a source of valuable information for him if he put her on a monthly retainer. They were washing their hands of her, he said. But she could be of use to him.

The ‘security consultant’ met with the woman in question and agreed to pay her 500 euros a month for various documents and materials which came into her hands in the course of her work for the Embassy. Most of the material in question had nothing to do with Iraq or WMD. It dealt primarily with immigration into Italy and Islamist activities in North and Central Africa --- topics of concern to at least one of the 'security consultant's' longstanding clients.

What wasn’t clear at the time, however, was that SISMI hadn’t washed their hands of this Niger Embassy employee at all. She remained a SISMI asset. In fact, the relationship which the SISMI officer had set up was intended to serve as a conduit through which SISMI could conceal its role in the dissemination of what proved to be disinformation.

This was how the forged documents came into the security consultant’s hands.

You’ll remember that most of the papers in the bundle of Niger-uranium documents that arrived at the US Embassy in Rome were actually authentic. It was only a subset of the documents --- those specifically related to the alleged Niger-Iraq transactions and a couple others --- that were bogus.

In late 2001, the SISMI officer brought the Niger Embassy employee a packet of documents --- those later identified as forgeries --- and instructed her to slip them in with the other documents she was providing to the ‘security consultant’ on an on-going basis.

She mixed those documents in with authentic documents which she had access to in the course of her work at the embassy. She then passed those documents --- again, a mix of authentic and forged ones --- to the ‘security consultant’.

The Financial Times article led to a surge of articles and commentary suggesting that the forged documents were only a minor part of the case for the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. But, as we've noted earlier, that's a willfully misleading account, one which both the Butler Report and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report helped to further.

Contrary to arguments that there was lots of independent evidence of uranium sales between Iraq and Niger, US government sources have told us that almost all of the important evidence derived from the phony documents. Specifically, it came from summaries of the documents Italian intelligence was distributing to other western intelligence agencies -- including those of the US, Britain and France -- in late 2001 and 2002.

The US has long known that the Italians had the forged documents in their possession at least as early as the beginning of 2002. And what we've uncovered is that at the same time Italian intelligence operatives were surreptitiously funnelling copies of the documents to this document peddler with the knowledge that he would sell them to other intelligence services and likely to members of the Italian press.

Now, a few more notes on the ‘security consultant’. The Financial Times story said that he “had a record of extortion and deception and had been convicted by a Rome court in 1985 and later arrested at least twice.” Several of the particulars here are incorrect. But he does have a criminal record. And I’m told by a very reliable source that he is now trying to sell his the detailed version of his story to members of the British press for 30,000 euros. Whether he's successful in doing so we'll probably find out in the next few days.

We already have his account. And needless to say, we didn’t pay him. But it’s reasonable to ask how trustworthy his account is since he seems to be someone of rather less than spotless integrity. The answer is that we’ve confirmed the key details of the story I outlined above independently.

More to follow ...

There have been various stories over recent months of people being ejected from Bush rallies for wearing anti-Bush t-shirts and stuff of that sort, with the rationale often being a rather improbable concern for security.

But this Dick Cheney speech

According to this Associated Press story, certain members of the public were required to sign a pledge to endorse President Bush in order to get tickets.

Dan Foley, a Bush campaign spokesman interviewed for the article, tried to argue that the tactic was "a security step designed to avoid a disruption" and said that at least some of the people required to sign the pledge had called from a phone which showed up on caller-ID as ACT (Americans Coming Together), a liberal voter mobilization group.

This article in the Albuquerque Journal, however, says the policy was much more general.

The plan was to limit the tickets "to people with a record of supporting the GOP— or to others willing to sign a statement saying they support President Bush's re-election."

Continues the Journal article ...

Yier Shi, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee in Washington, D.C., said today's rally was meant to reward and enthuse Bush-Cheney supporters, not to be a forum to preach to skeptics.

Democrats, independents and others were welcome to attend the speech, he said— as long as they like Bush and Cheney.

(See also this other article on the topic in the Albuquerque Journal.)

For all the ridiculousness of this loyalty oath mumbo-jumbo, I think Shi's rationale is a pretty apt description of the Bush-Cheney election strategy, and one of the clearest signs of their problems.

A lexicographical note on 'stem-winder'.

Late on Thursday evening I said that John Kerry's speech wasn't a 'stem-winder' and that he was smart not to have tried to

However, since then, while most readers have responded to my discussion of the speech itself, perhaps a dozen have written in to say that I used the term incorrectly, that it refers to a boring and long-winded speech rather than a rousing one.

I, for one, have never heard this meaning. For all the adaptability and ambiguity of certain words, it seems odd that one word should have two diametrically opposite meanings. And the two dictionaries I consulted seem to back me up.

Merriam-Webster defines the word thus ...

Main Entry: stem-wind·er
Pronunciation: -"wIn-d&r;
Function: noun
1 : a stem-winding watch
2 [from the superiority of the stem-winding watch over the older key-wound watch] : one that is first-rate of its kind; especially : a stirring speech

American Heritage defines it this way ...

SYLLABICATION: stem-wind·er
PRONUNCIATION: stmwndr
NOUN: 1. A stem-winding watch. 2. A rousing oration, especially a political one.

In other words, the dictionary meaning seems pretty clear. Yet enough people are familiar with this opposite meaning that it too must have some currency. That left me wondering whether this was a corruption of the original meaning of the term that has gained currency in recent years. And this article, also sent along by a reader, suggests that is precisely what has happened.

Great moments in Republican outreach ...

This from the running Thursday night commentary on National Review Online from Barbara Comstock, former spokesman for John Ashcroft at the Justice Department, former lead investigator for Dan Burton back in the glory days, and now power lobbyist ...

However, there are some things that did strike me about this odd man.

John Kerry once administered CPR to a hamster. This was one of the poignant vignettes we learned tonight from one of his daughters. Is there some gerbil-loving swing demographic out there we are trying to connect with? His daughter told this story as if we could all relate to this "human" moment of mouth-to-mouth contact with a rodent. I think I can speak for most parents, that while we might lay down our lives for our children; we see no need to swap spit with vermin.

...

John Kerry may have been able to breath life into a hamster; and he may have been able to breath some hope (or is it help?) into the gerbil-loving delegates; but he's still a strange, Herman Munster-like figure to me.

No mention of the inveterate Bush hatred among the gerbil-lovers. But presumably that's for another column.

I just read this article in the Times, billed as Cheney's counterattack against the Democratic ticket, figuring it would be filled with various distortions and untruths I could pick apart.

Really, though, there's not much there to pick apart, because there's simply not much there. Some boiler plate about raising taxes, the troop funding vote run-around and some stuff about John Edwards hair -- that's about it.

If the Times author is reasonably conveying Cheney's message, it's awfully weak stuff.

Now this is rich.

President Bush's new line of attack is that John Kerry is a man of few achievements.

"My opponent has good intentions," the president said

This might be a plausible line of attack coming from another opponent. Unlike, say, Russ Feingold or Ted Kennedy, there's no prominent piece of legislation with Kerry's name on it, though admirers of Kerry point to his critical role in a series of high-profile Senate investigations.

But coming from George W. Bush? A guy whose handlers had to get some of the more gullible run of journalists to refer to his life before he turned forty as his 'lost years'?

I mean, even if you grant that Bush's presidency has been a tenure of transcendent achievement (and it has undoubtedly been eventful), it's a bit hard to get around the fact that even by his own account he spent his first five decades kicking back, living off family connections and playing solitaire.

It's certainly true that Mr. Kerry said certain things in his war protestor days that can now be used against him with some audiences. But until he was well into middle-age President Bush's most noteworthy public utterances seem to have been limited to various invocations and inflections of 'par-TAY' and reciting the alphabet under legal compulsion.

(I'd be surprised if the Kerry camp didn't use this as another opening to highlight the difference between how these two men spent their twenties.)

It's also another case of the Bush campaign's internally contradictory lines of attack.

John Kerry: highly ambitious and grasping ne'er-do-well.

George W. Bush: man of action, sword of steel.

In the Boston Globe this morning, Tom Oliphant, no foe of Mr. Kerry, says the nominee "essentially blew an opportunity he may not get again until the debates with Bush this fall" and "muffed an opportunity to hone great material into a powerful

I know what he's referring to: Kerry's sometimes rushed delivery. But this seems like a needlessly harsh appraisal and a distorted impression of the speech itself.

From the start of Kerry's speech I could tell that he kept talking into rising applause -- something like the rhetorical equivalent of spitting into the wind. He would nail a good applause line and then rush into the next verse of the speech.

In many cases I wondered or worried that some of those lines couldn't be heard over the din, though I suspected that television microphones would do a better job keeping Kerry's voice audible over the crowd.

At the time this struck me as a function of Kerry's lack of expertise as a public speaker. A master like a Clinton or an Obama can make magic of those moments, half-heartedly trying to talk over the crowd, only to let them again and again beat him back with their cheers. Kerry mowed right through them, though perhaps it was simply that Kerry had a speech he could only get through if he took few or no breaks for sustained applause.

In any case, I really didn't think it was nearly so big a deal as Oliphant did. But I'd be curious to hear others' opinions.

The reference to CNN last night was to their running live on-air the panicked reactions of the convention director as the balloons failed to drop precisely on schedule. Originally it may have been a glitch. But they seemed to keep it running long after they could have rectified the problem.

Another good take on the speech is Will Saletan's in Slate. I remember looking out into the audience at various of those moments of thunderous, almost defeaning response that Will mentions and thinking, they sowed the wind.

A brief note or follow-up on the Kerry speech.

A number of readers have written in to say they were wowed by the speech and ask why I led off saying that it wasn't a 'stem-winder'.

To me there's no contradiction. The term 'stem-winder' isn't

But I don't think that's the kind of public speaker Kerry is. And he was wise not to try to be something he's not. He didn't try to be a master of rhetoric or tear into the crowd like those others. This was a well-written, powerfully delivered speech. And what occurred to me as I listened to it was how well the convention planners had used the earlier evenings events and speeches to tee the moment up for him.

I mean that not just in the sense that there's an effort to build excitement for the main event or talk up the candidate --that's a given. I thought they did a good job at playing Kerry up as a forceful and decisive leader. And that allowed him to suit his strengths as a speaker to the moment, to slide his speech-making right into that path they'd carved for him when his moment came.

Of course, I still haven't seen the video of the actual TV-version of the speech. I'm still going on what I saw in the hall, watching the back of his head as he delivered. So perhaps my opinions are still premature.

And a final point, for what it's worth. I talked to numerous reporters in the minutes and hours after the speech. And I think it would be fair to say that every person I spoke to told me that Kerry had exceeded their expectations.

Great work CNN! (You'll understand soon enough ...)

Not a stem-winder -- and Kerry would have been foolish to try. But a solid speech. And I thought he hit all the right points -- with the right emotional tenor. In a way, sitting in the hall and watching the back of Kerry's head most of the time is no way to judge how it appeared on TV. But that's my snap judgment.

"I want an America that relies on its own ingenuity and innovation - not the Saudi royal family."

Paging Adel Al-Jubeir ...

For the last four days, this convention hall has always been in motion -- people milling on and off the floor, in and out of the stands, the ever-present floor ushers -- the only real extremists in the whole place -- hustling people out of the aisles.

No one is moving from their seats. No one is leaving the floor, because if you do, you can't go back down. I'm sitting just up and back to the side of the podium and looking out over the crowd, it -- or they -- look like nothing so much as a vast carpet of people, all watching intently, no floor to be seen anywhere.

The crowd was certainly more roused in Barack Obama's speech; but not at any other time has their attention been more rapt.

Cleland just introduced Kerry. More later ...

Actually, apropos of the previous post, the real sucker on this one seems to be MSNBC rather than CNN. At least thus far. As of 5:43, the Ghailani capture is the headline

As with the earlier post, I'd be much obliged if anyone can tell me whether any of the MSNBC talking heads note the earlier published report in one of America's most respected political magazines (see previous post) about the White House's pressure on Pakistan to produce an al Qaida bad guy during the Dem convention.

Finally, right now I'm watching Wolf Blitzer on his little CNN news perch right off the convention floor doing a live shot. If he's talking up the al Qaida story, why not have on Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic, to talk about their above-mentioned story? I'm sure Peter would be happy to come on. And I just saw him here in the Fleet Center not more than twenty minutes ago.

Just-in-time-production?

See CNN's Breaking News Alert: "Security forces have captured a high-level al Qaeda operative in a raid in central Pakistan, Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat said."

Then, after you see that, remember that we noted

Reuters is reporting that the guy they've served up may be a Tanzanian involved in the 1998 African embassy bombings. So apparently they couldn't come up with bin Laden himself.

But here's the thing. I'm not going to be able to watch the television coverage of this throughout the day. But many of you will. So I'd be very, very curious to hear whether when, oh say, CNN goes on about how this al Qaida guy has been hauled in they will mention at all, or with any consistency, that one of the most respected political magazines in the United States reported just weeks ago on the pressure the administration has been placing on the Pakistanis to serve up an al Qaida bad guy on this day.

Will they make the obvious connection? Or will they just ignore it?

This is just the latest, but perhaps the most blatant, example of how this administration has placed politics and, really, political dirty tricks above national security itself, and along the way persisted in defining political deviance down until tactics we used to associate with banana republics start to seem commonplace here.

And while we're at it, this is yet another example of how truly important it is that we democratize the Middle East. Because once we have, some of them will be able to come back here and redemocratize us.