Tomorrow's NYT: “She has to win both Ohio and Texas comfortably, or she’s out."

Tomorrow's NYT:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and her advisers increasingly believe that, after a series of losses, she has been boxed into a must-win position in the Ohio and Texas primaries on March 4, and she has begun reassuring anxious donors and superdelegates that the nomination is not slipping away from her, aides said on Monday.

Mrs. Clinton held a buck-up-the-troops conference call on Monday with donors, superdelegates and other supporters; several said afterward that she had sounded tired and a little down, but determined about Ohio and Texas.

They also said that they had not been especially soothed, and that they believed she might be on a losing streak that could jeopardize her competitiveness in those states.

“She has to win both Ohio and Texas comfortably, or she’s out,” said one superdelegate who has endorsed Mrs. Clinton, and who spoke on condition of anonymity to share a candid assessment. “The campaign is starting to come to terms with that.” Campaign advisers, also speaking privately in order to speak plainly, confirmed this view.

Several Clinton superdelegates, whose votes could help decide the nomination, said Monday that they were wavering in the face of Mr. Obama’s momentum after victories in Washington State, Nebraska, Louisiana and Maine last weekend....

Some donors also expressed concern about a widening money imbalance between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton: Obama fund-raisers say he is taking in roughly $1 million a day, while Clinton fund-raisers say she is taking in about half of that, mostly online. Mrs. Clinton’s aides say that the campaign was virtually broke as of the Feb. 5 primaries, but that finances have stabilized.

Hat tip, reader Tom. Read More......

Gee, wonder who FOX is for?

(Hat tip, reader Jordan.) Read More......

Bush to Congress: fix the problems that I created

If only it wasn't a joke. If Congress doesn't dish it back firmly onto his lap, they deserve their lower-than-whale-crap numbers. Read More......

Hillary says 'Democratic activists' and black voters don't matter

No word on whether Latinos and women don't matter as well, but I'm guessing since they're voting blocs that actually favor Hillary, they're probably okay.

Here is what Hillary had to say today about you 'activists' and blacks who vote in the Democratic primaries. You see, you don't really count.

Hillary Clinton on Monday explained away Barack Obama's clean sweep of the weekend's caucuses and primaries as a product of a caucus system that favors "activists" and, in the case of the Louisiana primary, an energized African-American community.

She told reporters who had gathered to watch her tour a General Motors plant here that "everybody knew, you all knew, what the likely outcome of these recent contests were."...

Noting that "my husband never did well in caucus states either," Clinton argued that caucuses are "primarily dominated by activists" and that "they don't represent the electorate, we know that."

Well, no Democratic primary or caucus represents the electorate because they generally are comprised of Democrats (same goes for the GOP nomination process). Duh. But that's not what Hillary really means. She means that Obama's victories don't really count because "activists" and "blacks" voted for him. So let's recap: These are the victories that don't matter in a Democratic primary:

States with activists
States with minorities who favor one candidate over another
States where polls predict in advance that one person may win

That leaves, what exactly? States with white people where there's a tie? Markos has more.

PS Team Clinton gets bonus points for reminding everyone, again, that Obama is black. Read More......

Anti-McCain Obama parody hits nearly 200k viewers in one day

This doesn't happen. It's nearly impossible to get that many viewers in one day on YouTube without putting on black eyeliner and crying. I've been talking to my friends in town who make these kind of videos for a living, and they said that it's very hard to break even 40,000 views TOTAL on a political video on YouTube, let alone 200,000 in one day. I'm just so damned proud of my friend Andy Cobb and his brilliant group of actor friends out in LA. They did this for free on a whim.

Read More......

Still Broken: exclusive excerpt from my new book on Iraq

The first public excerpt of my new book, Still Broken, which recounts my time as an intelligence officer for the Defense Department, where I worked on (and in) Iraq for the Defense Intelligence Agency. The book tells the story of my time there, encountering the kind of political manipulation and incompetence that continue to cripple our efforts against terrorism and in Iraq. I hope you'll check it out, and this passage doesn't really need any introduction:

The first sign of trouble came during the transition from the outgoing personnel to our group, their replacements. For the life of us, we couldn’t figure out what the hell they had been doing.

“It’s a database, see, with all the names and locations of potential shithead activity in this area, and it’s taken a lot of time to develop, and—”

“Okay, okay, but how much actionable material have you produced?”

“...Actionable?”

The whole point of a counterinsurgency mission is to utilize actionable intelligence, which is basically what it sounds like: intelligence you can act on, either strategically or, more likely, at the tactical level. In-country Defense Department intelligence is heavily weighted toward supporting the shooters, but the group we replaced seemed to be providing a circular function, in that they
produced materials for . . . one another. Nothing was broadly important enough to pass up to leadership, and nothing was specific enough to pass down to units.

It became apparent that our assignment was not the counterinsurgency mission we’d anticipated. To some extent we were set up as a new and unique group from DIA. Our leadership told us that we were the largest cohesive DIA group to deploy to Iraq, as previous volunteers had been sent to fill individual slots in a wide variety of operations. We were supposed to be the connection between the field and the DIA element in DC, and we had just spent months learning about the history of the insurgency, beneficial and ineffective COIN techniques, and the intricacies of Iraqi tribes, religious groups, militias, and political organizations. This knowledge was supposed to make us a crack team of area experts, able to assist action units in the front and support the Iraq team in the rear (back in Washington). We were geared up to apply social network theory, create a better understanding of the insurgency and its accelerants, use a variety of analytical tools that would help identify insurgents and pinpoint the most crucial members of various groups, and employ our strategic acumen to assist policymakers. We were the heavy hitters, DIA’s contribution to the Combined Intelligence Operations Center or CIOC (pronounced sy-ock) -- the hub for U.S. intelligence in Iraq. But when we settled in, we realized that there was basically no mission for us. . . .

(Book available here!) Read More......

Hillary To Washington Blade: I Talk About Gay Rights All The Time

Good for her. Any time a presidential candidate, or any senior political figure, is willing to embrace the gay community, it's a net plus for everyone. I know that sometimes we think these kind of comments from politicians are pandering, or worse, empty promises - and sometimes they are both - but, even if they're empty, they still move the culture very slightly towards the side of tolerance. And that is always a good thing. Especially since you won't hear a lot of Republican presidential candidates touting their pro-gay bona fides. I'd also add that you'd better believe that Hillary and Obama, and all Democrats, are being told by some adviser somewhere to ditch the gays. So the very fact that they don't is still a step in the right direction. Of course it's not everything, but it is something.

Yet another reason why, regardless of who wins the Dem nomination, Hillary and Obama, the Democrat will be far better on so many issues than McCain or Huckabee. Read More......

DOD intelligence official to Puerto Rican staffer: “You’ve clearly adapted and assimilated.... And you speak English so well!”

From CQ:

On another occasion the boss sauntered up to a U.S.-born Hispanic on the team and asked, “So, Jose, what do you think of these immigration protesters?” He clearly disapproved.

Jose, of Puerto Rican heritage, demurred.

“Look at you,” the boss added, “You’ve clearly adapted and assimilated. . . . And you speak English so well!”

This is from a Congressional Quarterly review of Alex's new book. The review is great, you can read excerpts after the jump...

Pentagon Intelligence Unit Comes Off Like M*A*S*H in New Book

Anyone who’s spent time in uniform will recognize the stories that A.J. Rossmiller tells in “Still Broken: A Recruit’s Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, From Baghdad to the Pentagon.”

Like the Army field hospital so authentically portrayed in M*A*S*H, Rossmiller’s memoir of two years as a Defense Intelligence Agency Iraq analyst is darkly funny, with its own versions of Hawkeye, B.J., Colonel Potter, and of course, Frank Burns.

Unfortunately, it’s all too true. And frightening, from the viewpoint of national security.

In M*A*S*H, the good guys usually win.

But at the DIA, in Rossmiller’s telling, victories were rare. The intelligence analysts’ carefully researched and sourced reports on Iraq were usually at odds with the rosy pronouncements of Bush administration hawks, and regularly quashed or re-written. No matter how often their forecasts proved to be accurate, or how little evidence their bosses marshalled to contradict them, the analysts were constantly browbeat and berated for being “too negative.”....

After six months, Rossmiller left Baghdad with an assignment to the Pentagon to analyze intelligence and prognosticate on the chaotic Iraqi government. His entire time there, he and many other analysts never had their own desks or computers. Many of the computers weren’t equipped with the proper software to allow access to both top secret and unclassified materials.

To Rossmiller, the DIA’s Iraq intelligence teams, located in temporary, cramped offices along a hard-to-find hallway off a corridor, seemed like a nuisance or afterthought.

Unfortunately, one of his worst Baghdad bosses landed there, too, a right-wing war booster who was “running around the office and asking people what they were working on so he could add his opinion (that is, inject his ideology)” into their intelligence reports....

More on Alex's book here. Read More......

Oil prices up thanks to Exxon

At this point, I don't really care about the feud between Exxon and the loony Chavez. They both deserve each other so listening to either side cry about the money that the other is trying to take means nothing. If it's not Exxon and Venezuela it's Shell and Nigeria or some other heated conflict with an oil company and another area. For anyone paying attention, there's an obvious trend. The oil companies are involved with conflict somewhere and then prices go up, again. This is a rich mans game of chicken that doesn't mean anything outside of their elite circle though for the rest of the world it means higher prices. Thanks for nothing. Read More......

Tom Lantos, Holocaust survivor, Dem congressman, has died

A good man.

Lantos, who referred to himself as "an American by choice," was born to Jewish parents in Budapest, Hungary, and was 16 when Adolf Hitler occupied Hungary in 1944. He survived by escaping from the labor camp and coming under the protection of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who used his official status and visa-issuing powers to save thousands of Hungarian Jews.

Lantos' mother and much of his family perished in the Holocaust.

And yes, he was a vigorous supporter of the Iraq war, but even our heroes are permitted a few mistakes in life, albeit big ones. Read More......

Cheney bashes YouTube, fears lawsuit may expose his staff to public humiliation

A bit late for that.

The office of Vice President Dick Cheney is seeking to block the release of videotaped depositions given by two aides who witnessed a physical encounter between an Iraq war opponent and Cheney.

In a motion filed Saturday, Cheney's office contended that the videotapes could be used to invade the privacy and embarrass two aides called to testify about the encounter in a civil lawsuit.

The motion for a protective order expressed particular concern that both aides' faces could wind up on YouTube.com.

"As courts have recognized, using digital technology, a video recording can easily be 'cut and spliced,' so as to embarrass and even humiliate a witness," Cheney's lawyers wrote in a U.S. District Court filing.

"That much can readily be seen from a visit to YouTube. . . . A simple query using the search term 'deposition' yields over 400 video clips, in which many of the deponents are made to look boorish, mendacious, or unintelligent."

Read More......

My book: "Still Broken"

NOTE FROM JOHN: AJ and I accidentally posted at the same time, so I buried his post about his new book, out tomorrow. I'm bumping it so that folks can check it out. As you already know, AJ is a great writer, and thinker, about defense issues, and especially Iraq. He's part of the generation that was inspired by 9/11 to public service (he went to work at the Pentagon as an intelligence officer covering Iraq during the war), and then disillusioned by the Bush administration's failures. The book comes out from a Random House subsidiary tomorrow, and we're trying to get as many pre-orders in as possible, it helps the rankings. So please do check out the book, and if the spirit moves you, pick one up - it's only $16 hard-cover.


My book, Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon, is out tomorrow, and I hope you'll consider buying it. If you order today, you'll get it by the end of the week, and I think readers will find it engaging and enlightening. It tells the story of my time at DIA, both in Baghdad and at the Pentagon, where the intelligence process is corrupted by political influences and incompetence -- meaning that the problems that led to 9/11 and the WMD debacle are not only continuing, but in fact becoming institutionalized.

A bit of background: I began writing for AMERICAblog nearly two years ago. After leaving my position as an Intelligence Officer for the Department of Defense, working on (and in) Iraq for the Defense Intelligence Agency, I wasn't sure what to do. I had left without having lined up my next job, which was a little scary, but I simply couldn't say in the politicized and manipulated process that I ultimately came to believe was hurting our nation's security. I emailed several progressive bloggers, and several progressive think tanks, to offer my help and expertise in the service of reality-based Iraq and foreign policy analysis; I wanted to contribute to the dialogue from a position of having experienced and seen much of what other people could only speculate about.

John and Joe were the only people I heard back from. We got together for coffee -- with John later telling me he was totally weirded out by my "I'm a former intel officer, just writing to say I appreciate your stuff and would be happy to chat if you're interested" email -- and what was supposed to be a 30 minute introduction turned into a two hour conversation. A few days later, I was writing for this site, and I've loved every day of it ever since.

I've been lucky, in many ways: I've been able to gain a platform on these issues over the course of the past two years. On the "establishment" side, I'm a Fellow with the (fantastic) National Security Network think tank, and, as of tomorrow, a published author. And as y'all know, I'm also a card-carrying member of the blogosphere, regularly writing here and occasionally contributing to HuffPo, the American Prospect (and its blog TAPPED), the Guardian, and other leading news outlets. It's a pleasure and a privilege to have this kind of audience, particularly in service of adding to the conversation about what I believe is the most important political issue of our time.

My book will, I hope, allow the reality-based message on Iraq to reach even more people. Again, Still Broken tells the story of my time at DIA, both in Baghdad and at the Pentagon, and it's an easy read. I'll have more details, reviews, and comments throughout today and this week, and there's tons of information about it already at the website, www.StillBroken.com. But you all know me, you know my work, and you know it'll be good. So check it out. Read More......

You saw the Obama video, now watch the McCain one

Please watch this. It's from my friend Andy Cobb and his brilliant cast of insane comedians and actors out in Hollywood. (For anyone who hasn't seen the Obama video, you can watch it here first to get a flavor of the parody.) I laughed out loud.

Read More......

G7 finance ministers told of "prolonged adjustment" in economies

Losing hundreds of billions is not something any economy can shake off right away. Wall Street is also afraid to lose the great stars of big finance so no only did they pay them handsomely for the subprime junk, they're still throwing money around in order to keep everyone from jumping to the next company. Throwing more money, a lot of money, at these people isn't going to help get beyond this self made problem any faster.

Somehow missing in this review is the complete failure by all of the G7 governments in regulation. They all knew what was going on and none took any action. Money was flowing and life was good. Thanks in for the great leadership and I guess we'll find the bill is in the mail.

One culprit was the lavish performance-pay regime on Wall Street and in the City, which, they say, 'encouraged disproportionate risk-taking with insufficient regard to longer-term risks'. The secretive 'off balance sheet' accounting used by many banks to hide their borrowing was also criticised.

But the investors who bought securities backed by the shaky American mortgages did not escape blame either: the report identified 'poor investor practices, including excessive, too often mechanical, reliance on credit rating agencies'.

Read More......

Monday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

It is bitterly cold in DC today...and much of the nation. Bitter.

Why is it that every tim e I look at my tv I see Mike Huckabee being interviewed? He is everywhere.

Start threading the news and stay warm.. Read More......

Bin Laden, Taliban, al-Qaida support plummets in Pakistan

In 2004, the BBC released a powerful series called The Power of Nightmares, The Rise of the Politics of Fear. It is about the parallel rise of radical Islam and the radical neocon right since the 1950s. (View online here.) One issue that the three part documentary covered was the rise and then hard fall of radicals in places such as Algeria. Indiscriminate killing and a steady blood bath in the name of the cause has lowered support for the movement time after time. The documentary is well worth viewing.

The poll suggests Pakistanis are looking to peaceful opposition groups after months of political turmoil and a wave of suicide attacks.

In the latest bloodshed, a bomber blew himself up at an opposition rally in the northwestern town of Charsadda on Saturday, killing 27 people and injuring 50.

According to the poll results only 24 percent of Pakistanis approved of bin Laden when the survey was conducted last month, compared with 46 percent during a similar survey in August.

Backing for al-Qaida, whose senior leaders are believed to be hiding along the Pakistani-Afghan border, fell to 18 percent from 33 percent.

Read More......

Bush pushes EU for even more police state tactics on flights

Bush has no issue with asking for even more details on passengers coming from Europe - soon pushing for advanced notifications before even buying a ticket - yet in the US anyone can buy a gun with less information. Last time I checked, many more people die from guns in the US than from terrorism, but no, we would never want to disrupt the god-given right to buy an AK-47. Bush even wants to know who pushed granny or a sick child to the gate in a wheelchair. If only this administration showed as much interest in monitoring business activity that is costing American jobs and retirements.

The demand to put armed air marshals on to the flights is part of a travel clampdown by the Bush administration that officials in Brussels described as "blackmail" and "troublesome", and could see west Europeans and Britons required to have US visas if their governments balk at Washington's requirements.

According to a US document being circulated for signature in European capitals, EU states would also need to supply personal data on all air passengers overflying but not landing in the US in order to gain or retain visa-free travel to America, senior EU officials said.

And within months the US department of homeland security is to impose a new permit system for Europeans flying to the US, compelling all travellers to apply online for permission to enter the country before booking or buying a ticket, a procedure that will take several days.

Read More......

British Olympic team ordered to remain silent while in China

Obviously athletes are going to be there to compete in whatever it is that they do, but to specifically order the team to not discuss anything that may be politically sensitive is pathetic. I think China will be just fine regardless of what an athlete from a foreign country might say, but the UK Olympic association sure is taking a hit on the issue of freedom of speech. This is not exactly what I would expect from an otherwise democratic country that values freedom of speech. If China is unable to handle a few words in English by foreigners (and I believe they can) then they have much bigger problems. What an incredibly stupid and cowardly idea by the BOA. Read More......