DC gets the reflections of a blogger

Eleanor Clift has a piece in Newsweek about a briefing hosted by the New Politics Institute called "Reflections of a Blogger." The blogger who was reflecting was Markos Moulitsas. I went basically because I wanted to see Markos in person.

The event was packed and included in the audience some of the key DC-based political reporters. Besides Clift, I saw David Broder and Dan Balz from the Washington Post and Ron Brownstein from the LA Times. I really got the sense that people came to see Markos so they could gain insight in to the blog phenomenon. The session was two days after Paul Hackett's astounding showing in OH-02. That really woke up the DC establishment to the power of the blogs. Kos already posted his take on the Clift piece.

Believe it or not, blogs are a mysterious entity here in DC. John and I were talking tonight about weird that is. I can't tell you how many people in this town have said something like "I don't get the blogs" or "I have never looked at blogs" or "How do you get into the blogs." I think part of it is that people in DC are so used to thinking that there are barriers to participating in politics. Or they can't grasp that so much information and insight is available for free. Blogs are so much less complicated than people in DC want to make them. In so many ways, the blogosphere defies any of the conventional thinking that pervades the DC political punditry. And, the same old people and groups don't and can't control it.

Markos said one thing last week that I thought was very important, and it was probably lost on many. He said the blogs were non-competitive. That's also true. I don't think people in DC can grasp that concept either. I mean, even organizations that ostensibly support the same goals compete viciously with each other.

Anyways, I have to say it was great to see Markos in person. Even better, was watching how people were trying to process what he was saying. Read the rest of this post...

Sunday Night Open Thread

It's time for Entourage....love that Vince.

What'll be the big news this week? Read the rest of this post...

Isn't that special? Bush wakes up and finally arrests terrorist we let walk away 3 years ago

Check out this article from AP today:

A suspected Islamic militant deported to Britain was arrested Sunday on a U.S. warrant accusing him of taking steps to organize a training camp in Oregon to prepare jihad fighters in Afghanistan, police said.

The arrest of Haroon Rashid Aswat, a British citizen of Indian descent, comes as British prosecutors said they would consider treason charges against any Islamic extremists who express support for terrorism.

The U.S. warrant accuses Aswat of conspiring with others between October 1999 and April 2000 to set up a camp in Bly, Ore., aimed at training and equipping individuals to "fight jihad in Afghanistan," police said in a statement.

Aswat, 30, had been detained in Zambia since July 20, where he was questioned about 20 phone calls reportedly made on his South African cell phone with some of the bombers responsible for the July 7 transit attacks in London that killed 52 people and the four bombers. He was deported Sunday to Britain, said Zambian Home Affairs Secretary Peter Mumba.

Now read what I wrote two weeks ago in my column for Radar:

The British public’s ire over the bombings only increased after it was discovered that police had one of the suspects in custody months ago, but released him after determining he posed no threat. No doubt the Brits will be even more pissed once they realize the Bush administration twice botched efforts that could have helped prevent the attack.

The first screw up was back in 2002. According to the Seattle Times, the US had in its custody at that time Haroon Aswat, a man federal prosecutors believe helped set up a terrorist training camp in Bly, Oregon in late 1999. For reasons no one can quite figure out, John Ashcroft’s Justice Department blocked efforts by its own Seattle-based prosecutors to seek a grand-jury indictment of Aswat. Why is that relevant? Aswat has now been tied to the London bombings (the Brits think he was in cell phone contact with at least two of the bombers in the days preceding the attack).

And the fact that we put out an arrest warrant NOW begs the question of why didn't prosecute him three years ago when we had him?

Oh I'm sorry, Bush is on vacation. Never mind. Read the rest of this post...

Pentagon harasses, demotes and otherwise punishes black female whistleblower for taking on the white boys at Bush & Cheney Inc., Halliburton, etc.

Long and nasty story what they did to this woman, simply because she caught them. Read the rest of this post...

Bush Pal to Oversee Plame Leak Probe

Newsweek reports that there is possibly a new boss overseeing Fitzgerald:

Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum is "likely" to be named as acting deputy A.G., a DOJ official who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter tells NEWSWEEK. But McCallum may be seen as having his own conflicts: he is an old friend of President Bush's and a member of his Skull and Bones class at Yale.

And as Josh Marshall reports over at TPM Cafe, Bush has a history of getting rid of pesky prosecutors. If they did it for Abramoff, what will they do for Rove? Read the rest of this post...

Condi's delusions

Everything is just becoming hunky-dory:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says the insurgency in Iraq is losing steam as a political force, even as Democratic congressmen warned Sunday that violence jeopardizes plans for withdrawing some troops.

Rice, in an article appearing on Time magazine's Web site, argued against viewing the war solely through the rising death toll. More than 1,820 American troops have died in Iraq, at least 30 of them in the last week.

"It's a lot easier to see the violence and suicide bombing than to see the rather quiet political progress that's going on in parallel," Rice said.

Yeah, it's a lot easier to see the violence and suicide bombings because both are so prevalent. I guess if you ignore the dead soldiers and the dead Iraqis, this whole thing has been a smashing success.

Okay, so she and Bush have lied and lied and lied about Iraq. But now, we should believe them. Read the rest of this post...

Open Thread

And.... Read the rest of this post...

Team Bush DID Let Bin Laden Escape at Tora Bora

And people thought Bush and Company were keeping us safe from terrorism. Read this little item from Newsweek:

During the 2004 presidential campaign, George W. Bush and John Kerry battled about whether Osama bin Laden had escaped from Tora Bora in the final days of the war in Afghanistan. Bush, Kerry charged, "didn't choose to use American forces to hunt down and kill" the leader of Al Qaeda. The president called his opponent's allegation "the worst kind of Monday-morning quarterbacking." Bush asserted that U.S. commanders on the ground did not know if bin Laden was at the mountain hideaway along the Afghan border.

But in a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora—intelligence operatives had tracked him—and could have been caught. "He was there," Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK. Asked to comment on Berntsen's remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. "We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. "Bin Laden was never within our grasp."

Berntsen says Franks is "a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was. "In his book—titled "Jawbreaker"—the decorated career CIA officer criticizes Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department for not providing enough support to the CIA and the Pentagon's own Special Forces teams in the final hours of Tora Bora, says Berntsen's lawyer, Roy Krieger. (Berntsen would not divulge the book's specifics, saying he's awaiting CIA clearance.) That backs up other recent accounts, including that of military author Sean Naylor, who calls Tora Bora a "strategic disaster" because the Pentagon refused to deploy a cordon of conventional forces to cut off escaping Qaeda and Taliban members. Maj. Todd Vician, a Defense Department spokesman, says the problem at Tora Bora "was not necessarily just the number of troops."

Not necessarily??? Okay, refresh my memory. In December of 2001 wasn't Bin Laden the most wanted criminal in the world, bar none?

Course, no surprise, this means Bush lied about Bin Laden and Tora Bora, too. Read the rest of this post...

Do the Wash. Post -- and the GOP -- miss the contradiction?

The Washington Post has two stories that show a major disconnect within the GOP. And, the Post lets them get away with it....surprise, surprise.

First, Marchers Celebrate Voting Rights Act in Atlanta:

Thousands of marchers joined many of the icons of the American civil rights movement Saturday morning as they walked through the streets of Atlanta to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act and to built support for extending protections from that bill....The landmark law, which is set to expire next year, helped transform U.S. politics and led to rising numbers of minorities elected to govern. But some conservatives have suggested that parts of the law are no longer necessary, especially the section that requires nine states, mainly in the South, to seek federal approval of voting rules changes.

In other words, "conservatives" a.k.a. Republicans are threatening re-enactment of the Voting Rights Act. Then, there's this one,GOP Plans More Outreach to Blacks, Mehlman Says:

Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman stood before a roomful of black journalists last week fielding pointed questions about his party's mostly shaky relationship with black voters.

Asked about the southern strategy that used race as an issue to build GOP dominance in the once Democratic South, Mehlman acknowledged that Republican candidates often have prospered by ignoring black voters and even by exploiting racial tensions. But he pledged that such neglect is a thing of the past. "Our plan for 2006 and 2008 is to increase African American turnout," he said crisply.

So, the GOP wants to attract more minorities, while simultaneously undermining minority voting rights.

That's just brilliant. And I love this:

Often, Mehlman speaks in deeply personal terms. He told the black journalists that he views open housing, voting rights and civil rights bills passed in the 1960s as the most important laws of the 20th century.

Yeah, those voting rights were important in the last century. Not now. Read the rest of this post...

Open thread

Off to meet a friend, then drinks. Later.

A photo I took at the Louvre yesterday. With that nose, she's gotta be Greek ;-)

Read the rest of this post...

New poll: Fewer Americans think Bush is honest

Arrogant and dumb.

Less than half of Americans now say they think President Bush is honest, according to an AP-Ipsos poll taken at a time of increasing concerns about Iraq, a potential problem for a president who won re-election declaring that "people know where I stand."....

A solid majority still see Bush as likable and a strong leader, but a growing number view the president's confidence as arrogance, up from 49 percent in January to 56 percent now.

This is what happens when Republicans put all their eggs in the basket of a figure-head president. Bush was just a stand-in, like Dave in the movie "Dave," except Dave ended up being pretty good at his job and smarter than folks thought. "Bush" on the other hand was never anything more than a puppet, a stand-in, a foil for the GOP winning the election. They didn't care who they picked, they just wanted to win, so they picked Bush because they knew he was malleable and, well, dumb. And he's fulfilled their expectations, except now the public has caught on. Ha ha. Read the rest of this post...

Pentagon: We may bring some troops home from Iraq IF THINGS GET BETTER

Hello, rather large IF there, you think? What a ridiculous statement from the Pentagon, and it's even more ridiculous that the media would even cover such a ridiculous assertion. Of course things aren't getting better, so that caveat is meaningless - or, rather, it means everything. They won't decrease troops unless it's a Vietnam-style withdrawal without our tails between our legs because we lost and Bush screwed up.

I can see it now. Bush is going to start withdrawing troops next year because we lost and because his polls are heading so far south he doesn't have a choice. And he's just going to keep claiming, like he is now, that we're winning and that's why he can pull out. And in the meantime, Iraq will go to hell in a handbasket as every worst case nightmare in Iraq comes true. Read the rest of this post...

Liberal donors to funnel $80 million into new advocacy groups

Good. And note this key paragraph at the end of the article:

Liberal groups have been disproportionately dependent on one-year foundation grants for specific projects, Stein said, while the money flowing to conservative groups has often involved donors' long-term commitments with no strings attached.

Read the rest of this post...