Richard Leiby's profile in tomorrow's Washington Post is going to make it harder for his critics to continue their smear campaign: His fingers threaded a string of ornate black worry beads, common in the Arab world. They're from his days in Baghdad, where he was acting U.S. ambassador. In 1990, while sheltering more than a hundred Americans at the U.S. embassy and diplomatic residences, he briefed reporters while wearing a hangman's noose instead of a necktie — a symbol of... Read more
Whatever virtue there may be to being disciplined and staying on message, that benefit doesn't seem to outweigh the transparent cynicism of robotically concerted campaigns. Yesterday's White House-defender talking point was to argue that Valerie Plame wasn't really a covert operative, but merely an analyst. That strategy failed miserably because it was directly contrary to the facts as known — she was, in fact, a covert operative. Today's talking point is to go on the offensive, questioning the character and... Read more
President Bush's request of another $87 billion for securing and rebuilding Iraq has to be added to the $70 billion already spent there. Add to that $157 billion another $50 to $60 billion that various reports say will be needed and you've got a pricetag well over $200 billion. But there's another $200 billion lurking here as well — Iraq's existing foreign debt. In a case of "you broke it, you bought it," that debt gets inherited by the Coalition... Read more
Saw an MSNBC report this morning on the California campaign, examining the latest TV ads from Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger. "Examining" is actually too strong a word. The motif of the report was this: Downbeat, "negative" ads are bad and morally suspect. Upbeat, "positive" ads are unquestionably good. The Scwharzenegger ad they showed was certainly upbeat, but it was also vacuous, insubstantial and utterly lacking in content. Now granted, a lot of negative ads employ sleazy tactics — the... Read more
The transcript is finally up from today's Crossfire on CNN. Here is what Bob Novak had to say about Wilsongate: Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this. In July, I was interviewing a senior administration official on Ambassador Wilson's report when he told me the trip was inspired by his wife, a CIA employee working on weapons of mass destruction. Another senior official told me the same thing. As a professional journalist with 46 years experience in... Read more
Here's another article on an issue that burns me up. Auto insurers are using customers' credit ratings as a factor in pricing their insurance. The upshot — poor people pay more than rich people do. (See this earlier post.) As James Baldwin says, "It's expensive bein' poor." And it's not just auto insurance. More and more, credit rating is being used for all kinds of things other than extending credit. And in every case, what it means is that people... Read more
Today's "daily mis-lead" reminds us that President Bush promised to create 510,000 new jobs in 2003. You have to love the specificity of that number — not "half a million new jobs," but 510,000. Even stranger, the White House also predicted that the jobs bonanza would continue throughout 2004, with 891,000 more jobs created next year. The oddball concreteness of that number is downright goofy. But so was the baseless optimism of these predictions. As the misleader points out, so... Read more
It's time for all the peripheral, celebrity, vanity and joke candidates to accept reality and do the right thing. According to the latest CNN poll, a majority of Californians intend to vote "yes" on the recall, with action movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger leading with a purality of scab candidates. If this poll is accurate, and if nothing changes during the next week (both of which are big "ifs"), then Arnold Schwarzenegger will be governor of California on Oct. 8. This... Read more
Josh Marshall has posted excerpts of this morning's press gaggle with White House spokesman Scott McClellan. You can smell the panic and flopsweat even through the online transcript: QUESTION: Yes, but I'm just wondering if there was a conversation between Karl Rove and the President, or if he just talked to you, and you're here at this — McCLELLAN: He wasn't involved. The President knows he wasn't involved. QUESTION: How does he know that? QUESTION: How does he know that?... Read more
Rebecca Traister of The New York Observer (scroll down past Kate) reports on a really bad idea: November will see the debut of a new comic book from G.I. Joe publishers Image Comics. "Heaven’s War" focuses on the Inklings, the scholarly cabal that was centered around … C.S. Lewis … J.R.R. Tolkien and … Charles Williams. … According to an advertisement in the Previews catalog published by Diamond Comic Distributors Inc., the book will be set in 1938, with the... Read more
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