NYT editor: Judy misled us

She's toast.

The New York Times' Judith Miller belatedly gave prosecutors her notes of a key meeting in the CIA leak probe only after being shown White House records of it, and her boss declared Friday she appeared to have misled the newspaper about her role.

In a dramatic e-mail, Executive Editor Bill Keller wrote Times' employees he wished he'd more carefully interviewed Miller and had "missed what should have been significant alarm bells" that she had been the recipient of leaked information about the CIA officer at the heart of the case.

"Judy seems to have misled (Times Washington bureau chief) Phil Taubman about the extent of her involvement," Keller wrote in what he described as a lessons-learned e-mail. "This alone should have been enough to make me probe deeper."

Keller said he might have been more willing to compromise with Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald "if I had known the details of Judy's entanglement" with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

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Harriet supported diversity

Oh Harriet, you sound almost progressive. Did W. know about this?:

Miers, the first woman president of the Texas Bar, vowed in her first interview with the Texas Law Journal as president to "be inclusive of women and minorities."

During her tenure, she championed the cause of increasing the number of female and minority lawyers in the bar's own leadership ranks and in law firms across the state, writing that "we are strongest capitalizing on the benefits of our diversity."

As you can imagine, the right wingers hate that:

"Those are quotas," said Roger Clegg, the general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative group opposed to affirmative action. The fact that Miers "did not create the quota systems but only perpetuated and endorsed it doesn't make it less disturbing," he said.

NOTE FROM JOHN: Well, using that logic, her very appointment is a quota since Bush said he was intent on appointing a woman. And the religious right/conservative point of view as to who should be the nominee is a quota since they're insisting it must be a conservative. Read the rest of this post...

My CNN appearance will air tomorrow, Saturday, at 7:30pm (or so) Eastern

We taped it tonight, but it won't air until Saturday. It's a relatively quick segment, right after a segment where they interview one of their Arab-word reporters about Muslim reaction to Saddam Hussein's trial. Read the rest of this post...

Wilson and Plame preparing lawsuit against Bush administration

Fun, fun, fun. Plame and Wilson's lawyer is Chris Wolf, my friend who is also representing the gay couple suing USA Next over the illegal use of their wedding photo in the anti-AARP social security ads (the status on that case: We're stil waiting to here back from the judge on the defendants' motion to dismiss the case).

I'm going to be interviewing Chris in-depth once (if) the indictments come down (right now, they're obviously waiting to see what happens before they go public).

From UPI

Joseph Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame are preparing to file a civil suit against Bush administration officials.

Plame was the covert CIA agent allegedly unmasked by the White House. Now she is preparing to file a civil lawsuit against the Bush administration officials who may have disclosed her identity and scuttled her career, Salon.com reported Thursday.

"There is no question that her privacy has been invaded. She was almost by definition the ultimate private person," said the couple's attorney, Christopher Wolf.

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The latest fix from Reuters on Plame-gate

Okay, not really a whole lot new here for those obsessive types who are monitoring every development. However, the important thing, for all us obsessive types, is that it confirms everything still appears headed in the right direction:

Prosecutors investigating the outing of a covert CIA operative opened a Web site on Friday to post possible indictments next week and were said by lawyers in the case to be focusing on whether top White House aides tried to conceal their actions from investigators.

Karl Rove, President George W. Bush's top political adviser, and Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, are at the center of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Plame's identity was leaked to the media after her diplomat husband, Joseph Wilson, challenged the Bush administration's prewar intelligence on Iraq.

The lawyers, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said Fitzgerald appeared likely to bring charges next week in the nearly two-year leak investigation.

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I'm back from Boston and exhausted

Boston was great. I went up to the Kennedy School at Harvard today to talk about blogging to a study group Judy Woodruff was hosting. Mike Krempasky of RedState.org was my counterpoint. It was really interesting.

Judy did an amazing job of leading the discussion, especially for someone who doesn't know blogs that well. I've done a number of these "blog" panels. This was the first that I felt was well done and actually interesting and worthwhile. Mike was quite interesting as well. He's very good at what he does, and he's quite personable. And before any of you freak out for me saying that, well, get over yourselves. It's actually okay - some would even say a good thing - to learn that some of your ideological opponents are nice people. Once we lose our humanity we're no better than the folks we're fighting. I really liked Judy too. We ended up grabbing lunch together in the airport, just the two of us, and she's just a very interesting person. And hell, how often do you get to have lunch with Judy Woodruff?

Anyway, very cool day. And networked with a few Harvard students afterwards. We're planning beeg trouble for moose and squirrel. More on that when our plan gels :-)

Now, I'm off to take a quick nap because I'm scheduled to be on CNN tonight at around 8:15PM-ish Eastern time. Talking about Valerie Plame and Harriet, I think. Blogger stuff. Should be fun. Read the rest of this post...

Open Thread

It's the weekend... Read the rest of this post...

US oil firm pleads guilty to kickbacks in Iraq oil-for-food scandal

This has been a real black eye for a program that was supposed to be about helping people. There is plenty of blame to go around between the UN and powerful governments around the world but unfortunately the wingnuts have chosen to only focus on the French and Russians but this guilty plea makes it clear that Americans were every bit as guilty as anyone else involved. Read the rest of this post...

Froomkin: Fitz has a new web site

Well, well, well. I admit, I love reading Froomkin's column every day. Today's has a very interesting development:

Special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has just launched his own brand-new Web site.

Could it be that he's getting ready to release some new legal documents? Like, maybe, some indictments? It's certainly not the action of an office about to fold up its tents and go home.

Fitzgerald spokesman Randall Samborn minimized the significance of the Web launch in an interview this morning.

"I would strongly caution, Dan, against reading anything into it substantive, one way or the other," he said. "It's really a long overdue effort to get something on the Internet to answer a lot of questions that we get . . . and to put up some of the documents that we have had ongoing and continued interest in having the public be able to access."

OK, OK. But will the Web site be used for future documents as well?

"The possibility exists," Samborn said.

OK, OK, we won't read anything in to this. Sure we won't. This is like when your parents put the really big present under the tree.

OK, OK, we just want to read the indictments here next week. Because that grand jury expires one week from today. Please, please, please.... Read the rest of this post...

Andy Card needs to be with Bush this weekend

Why, we ask? The Providence Journal reports that WH Chief of Staff Andy Card had to cancel a GOP fundraiser in RI this weekend:

"All we know is that the White House called and said he had to be with the president," Morgan said. "He needs to be at Camp David this weekend."

Oh, to be a fly on the wall at Camp David this weekend. The possibilities of why Card needs to be there are endless. Who else will be there? Let's ruminate on this....

Thanks to reader KAS for the tip. Read the rest of this post...

During Katrina, FEMA's priority was getting food...for Brownie

FEMA released the email traffic during Katrina. This interaction pretty much sums it up:

On Aug. 31, Bahamonde e-mailed Brown to tell him that thousands of evacuees were gathering in the streets with no food or water and that "estimates are many will die within hours."

"Sir, I know that you know the situation is past critical," Bahamonde wrote. "The sooner we can get the medical patients out, the sooner we can get them out."

A short time later, Brown's press secretary, Sharon Worthy, wrote colleagues to complain that the FEMA director needed more time to eat dinner at a Baton Rouge restaurant that evening. "He needs much more that (sic) 20 or 30 minutes," Worthy wrote.

"Restaurants are getting busy," she said. "We now have traffic to encounter to go to and from a location of his choise (sic), followed by wait service from the restaurant staff, eating, etc. Thank you."

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Open Thread

What are you hearing? Read the rest of this post...

Alleged video of US soldiers burning Taliban bodies now online

You can watch it here. Basically, the video is at the beginning and end of a larger foreign newscast about the story.

But hey, I'm sure there's no way to tell if those are REAL American soldiers or real bodies or even real fire. Read the rest of this post...

Another Karen Hughes Smackdown

Last time Turkey. This time in Indonesia. Our image chief just isn't feeling the love:

U.S. goodwill envoy Karen Hughes got a earful from a group of mostly female Indonesian Muslim students on Friday, who expressed anger at the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and attacked Washington's foreign policies.

Tasked by U.S. President George W. Bush to polish America's image overseas, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy is in Jakarta to meet leading Muslim clerics and students during a tour of the world's most populous Muslim nation.

"Why does America always act as if they were the police of the world?," Barikatul Hikmah, a 20-year-old student at the Syarif Hidayatullah University asked Hughes.

Read the rest of this post...

WH planning for Post-Rove Era

Okay, if you are getting overly excited about Fitzmas, read this latest from the Washington Post with caution. It is delicious reading about the stressed out White House staff freaking out about their leader, Karl Rove:

With special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald driving his CIA leak investigation toward an apparent conclusion, the White House now confronts the looming prospect that no one in the building is eager to address: a Bush presidency without Karl Rove. In a capital consumed by scandal speculation, most White House senior officials are no more privy than outsiders to the prosecutor's intentions. But the surreal silence in the Roosevelt Room each morning belies the nervous discussions racing elsewhere around the West Wing.

See, the White House staffers are tense because they know what their colleagues did. They know how those guys operate. This was standard operating procedure for the Rove/Bush team. They just thought they would never get caught. But, now, they're all trying to figure out what went wrong:

At the heart of all those discussions is Rove. With the deceptive title of deputy chief of staff, Rove runs much of the White House, including its guiding political strategy and many of its central policy initiatives. "Karl is the central nervous system right now, and that's obviously a big thing -- not only politically, but now he's in that big policy job," a former White House official said.

At the White House and among its close allies, discussion about Rove's fate is verboten -- in part out of fear and in part out of ignorance about what his legal vulnerability actually is. "No one in the White House wants to talk about an indictment," another former official said. "No one wants to believe anything's going to happen." Nor do people easily discuss other staff changes. "Anyone who talks about that kind of stuff should be shot," said a third Republican with close ties to the White House.

Tough crowd. See, in a real administration that cared about national security, anyone who committed treason, like Rove, would have been shot.

Anyway, the whole article is worth a read. Just take deep breaths. It's just an appetizer. Read the rest of this post...

6:12 AM is just wrong

I can't believe people actually get up at this hour. I'm up because I'm heading to Boston shortly with Mike Krempasky of RedState.org to speak about blogging and journalism at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, & Public Policy at Harvard this morning. We were invited by CNN's Judy Woodruff, to speak to her study group on "The Effect of the Internet/Blogosphere on Journalism." Should be fun, but for the fact that this hour of the morning is just wrong.

I've spoken on panels with Mike before, I like him. He's quite smart and interesting. He helped engineer Rathergate, and yeah yeah, I know, we don't like that, but it really was amazing to hear on our previous panel how they did it. It was quite well done.

Mike's commenters on his blog were less kind about me (of course, I can only imagine what you guys are gonna write). I just had to post this comment:

You're a better man than I, Mike, for being willing to sit alongside Aravosis, who is undoubtedly one of the most loathesome specimens in the blogosphere.

I like that :-) Read the rest of this post...

Is Carnival charging a premium to US taxpayers?

Sounds like their $236M contract with the government might be just a bit more than their usual fees. How patriotic of them. Read the rest of this post...

Roche doing the right thing re: Tamiflu

I'm generally not a big fan of Big Pharma, but Roche is making a very positive move right now, meeting with four outside companies that could participate in manufacturing more Tamiflu, an anti-viral for treating bird flu. (Many thanks to Tom in AZ for correcting me about calling it a vaccine. I've had an awful week, with my little niece of nephew losing their young father so I completely messed up and wasn't thinking when I called Tamiflu a vaccine. As Tom in AZ has kindly pointed out, the US government has been working on a vaccine so let's hope for the best on that treatment.)

It is critical that production gets ramped up quickly so that everyone has access to a drug that could protect them if they become ill. Tamiflu will take months to produce, but it is promising to hear that Roche is actively trying to do something about the massive shortage of supplies. In the long run, it benefits everybody. Now if only we can get the Bush administration to target a more serious goal and not just a few percent of the US population. Read the rest of this post...

The Harriet Comedy of Errors Show

Brought to you by the Bush White House:

Two months after engineering a nearly flawless confirmation process for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the Bush administration's bid to add Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court has been so riddled with errors, stumbles and embarrassing revelations that some lawmakers and other observers find it hard to believe it emanates from the same White House.

At one key juncture after another, Miers has faltered where Roberts glided. Her courtesy calls on the Judiciary Committee's top two senators prompted conflicting tales of curious comments that she may or may not have made. Her answers to the committee's questionnaire included a misinterpretation of constitutional law and were deemed so inadequate that the panel asked her to redo it. She revealed one day that her D.C. law license had been temporarily suspended -- and said the next day that the same thing had happened in Texas -- because of unpaid dues.

Most glaring of all, say activists in both parties, the White House failed to foresee the outcry from conservative activists who are leading the opposition while liberals mostly stand on the sidelines in amazement.

The reviews are in. This show is definitely very entertaining. Worth watching. You'll get a lot of laughs watching the antics of the hapless Bush White House. What other surprises and shenanigans do they have in store for us? Read the rest of this post...