How Democrats Define Comity

The AP's David Espo gets behind the scenes in the hours after the announcement of the compromise on judicial confirmations that the Gang of 14 heralded as a new era of Senate comity. Far from an emergent period of truce and trust, Espo reports that Harry Reid and the Democrats immediately began planning the exploitation of the pact to their advantage even as the indulgent backslapping still echoed in the hallways:

The signatures of 14 Senate centrists, seven from each party, spilled across the last page of a hard-won compromise on President Bush's judicial nominees. But whatever elation the negotiators felt, the Senate's Democratic leader did not share it.

In the privacy of his Capitol office last Monday night, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., asked for commitments from six Democrats fresh from the talks. Would they pledge to support filibusters against Brett Kavanaugh and William Haynes, two nominees not specifically covered by the pact with Republicans?

Some of the Democrats agreed. At least one, Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, declined.

Details of Reid's attempt to kill the two nominations within minutes of the agreement, as well as other events during this tumultuous time, were obtained by The Associated Press in interviews with senators and aides in both parties. They spoke on condition of anonymity, citing confidentiality pledges.

It didn't take more than a few minutes for Reid to read between the lines of the MOU to see how to exploit it. In that, one has to give him a tip of the hat; he instinctively knew what seven Republicans couldn't grasp with two hands and a map. It also tells us that the rest of Bush's nominees have no chance of making it to a floor vote, not without going back to the Byrd option.

Pathetic.

UPDATE: Forgot to tip my hat to CQ reader Katy W for this one.

UPDATE II: Hard Starboard has some relevant thoughts, and a couple of updates. It seems the folks back home have made political life a little more comity-free for Lindsay Graham and Mike DeWine.

NARN At White Bear Lake Super-Store!

It's pretty quiet in the blogosphere for the holiday weekend -- but the Northern Alliance Radio Network will be live at White Bear Lake Superstore today at noon CDT! If you're not in the Twin Cities, you can listen on our live stream at AM 1280 The Patriot. We'll be talking about the judiciary, the compromise, as well as having local conservative columnist Katherine Kersten as our guest in the second hour. Be sure to call us at 651-289-4488 to join the conversation!

UPDATE: As always, it was a blast. I've posted a couple of pictures at the NARN site -- check them out!

The Rank And File Reply To Foley's Fables

Instapundit points to a response from Hiawatha Bray, a solid member of the Newspaper Guild, to president Linda Foley for her allegations of assassination policies against journalists. Bray published his open challenge to Foley on his blog Choose Honor, an excellent blog title considering the nature of this challenge:

I take my membership in the Guild very seriously. That's why I was dismayed to learn that you, the president of my union, made a speech on May 13 in which you asserted that the US military has deliberately killed journalists. The relevant portion of the speech was videotaped and is available for viewing here.

Since then, you have failed to provide supporting evidence for your remarks, but neither have you retracted them. I spoke with you at 11:10 AM today by telephone; union secretary-treasurer Bernard Lunzer was also on the call.

When I told you that I would publish your response to me on the Internet, you declined further comment--except for the following: "I am not going to discuss this with you on the eve of Memorial Day weekend."

This remark strikes me as extremely odd. I can't think of a better time to redeem the honor of the US military by beginning a serious investigation of outrageous conduct on its part. If our soldiers are deliberately killing journalists, it's our duty to publicize it, so that such a terrible stain on our nation's integrity may be quickly cleansed.

Foley has resurrected Eason's Fables all over again. While I don't believe Foley to be anywhere near as influential on the delivery of news to the public, as a journalist she should still have to produce evidence of such a conspiracy or retract her allegations. Like Jordan, Foley cannot use her position in the media establishment to toss around slanders and then object to being challenged about it on the basis of the calendar.

Read all of Bray's letter.

Haste Makes Waste, Even In Florida

Remember the hue and cry that ensued from the use of punch-card ballots in Florida for the 2000 election? After decades of use across the nation, we were led to believe that Florida voters suddenly became completely inept at punching ballots. New voting systems had to be bought, now, in order to save the poor incompetent dears from themselves. Anyone who balked or asked questions hated democracy, of course.

Unfortunately, millions of dollars later, those questions have not disappeared. Miami-Dade's new voting machines are heading for the scrap heap, a $25 million testament to impulse buying and a lack of proper time and effort for researching needs and requirements:

Miami-Dade County's elections chief has recommended ditching its ATM-style voting machines, just three years after buying them for $24.5 million to avoid a repeat of the hanging and dimpled chads from the 2000 election.

Elections supervisor Lester Sola said in a memo Friday that the county should switch to optical scanners that use paper ballots, based on declining voter confidence in the paperless touch-screen machines and quadrupled election day labor costs.

Fifteen of Florida's 67 counties chose touch-screen machines after the 2000 election fiasco. The machines have caused problems during at least six elections, including the September 2002 primary, when some polls could not open and close on time and Democratic primary results for governor were delayed by a week.

Perhaps some lessons can be learned from this fiasco, which will cost Florida residents another $12 million to correct, for the optical-scan ballots that require voters to fill in bubbles on a paper ballot (assuming we can trust them to use a pen properly).

Lesson 1: All balloting methods carry a certain margin of error. Voters aren't perfect, and they will make mistakes.

Lesson 2: Assumption of responsibility for correctly casting a ballot should be on the voter, not the system.

Lesson 3: One bad experience after over 40 years of service -- an experience that doesn't even relate to the machines themselves -- does not demand the wholesale replacement of an entire system of voting.

Lesson 4: When upgrading to new technology, it helps to have a clear statement of the system requirements -- say, a paper record for review. Obviously, if electoral laws require recount procedures be available, paper records must be produced to validate the results.

Lesson 5: Look around to see what works in other areas. Minnesota has used the optical-scan technology that utilizes a paper record but validates the ballot to be error-free before the voter leaves the polling station. From this report, that system looks to cost half as much as the ATM-style touchscreens that Miami-Dade bought anyway.

Florida can thank all the hysterics from the aftermath of the 2000 election for wasting millions of dollars on the wrong technology. In truth, they could have saved 99% of that cash by simply printing signs that stated that voters should double-check their punch cards for fully punched selections before leaving the booth, and therefore put the onus for reliable voting processes where it belongs: on the voters themselves.

McCain Rides To The Rescue Of Democrats Again

John McCain has decided to insert himself into the fray of yet another leadership debacle in the Senate, this time the John Bolton nomination to the UN. As Bill Frist embarrassed himself by scheduling Bolton for a floor vote by relying on the "comity" that McCain's last diplomatic effort yielded only to watch as the Democrats double-crossed him and filibustered Bolton, McCain launched his own initiative to reach an agreement -- by forcing the Republicans to capitulate yet again:

One of John R. Bolton's leading Republican backers, Senator John McCain of Arizona, signaled his support on Friday for a compromise in which the White House might allow Senate leaders access to highly classified documents in return for a final vote early next month on Mr. Bolton's nomination as United Nations ambassador.

The conciliatory signal from Mr. McCain came as Senate leaders traded blame over who was responsible for the miscalculation that led to Mr. Bolton's nomination being blocked Thursday. But the White House showed no sign that the Bush administration might change course.

"The Democrats who are clamoring for this have already voted against John Bolton," Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said in a telephone interview. "This is about partisan politics, not documents. They have the information they need."

Appearing on the Fox News Channel, Mr. McCain reiterated his support for Mr. Bolton. He also praised an argument made by, among others, Senator Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana, who has urged the administration to provide the Senate with more information related to Mr. Bolton's conduct. Senators calling on the administration to share the documents "have some substance to their argument," Mr. McCain said.

Once again, we have the senior Senator from Arizona falling all over himself to validate Democratic tactics while maximizing his weekend press profile. McCain has to be considered one of the leading dupes from the Seven Dwarves who fashioned the last capitulation, the one one which Frist relied when he scheduled the Bolton vote. McCain has to prove that the "comity" that he claims to have revived still exists, and so he has transferred the blame for this impasse from the Democrats to the White House.

However, McClelland is right. The holdup on Bolton has nothing to do with the documents the Democrats have requested. None of them plan on changing their vote based on whose names got redacted from the NSA intercepts. That has become just another red herring, as the New York Times reports, albeit buried at the bottom of the article:

The Congressional officials said three main factors ultimately turned the tide in favor of Mr. Biden and his main ally, Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut. One was the decision on Tuesday of Senator George V. Voinovich of Ohio, the sole Republican to have opposed Mr. Bolton at that point, to campaign actively against the nomination.

A second was a sign on Wednesday from another Republican, John Thune of South Dakota, that he, too, might oppose Mr. Bolton. The third factor, and perhaps the most important, Congressional officials said, was the success of Mr. Biden and Mr. Dodd in convincing fellow Democrats in dozens of phone calls that the vote was not about Mr. Bolton but about standing up for the Senate and its prerogatives against incursions by the executive branch.

Just as with the judicial confirmations, it has nothing to do with John Bolton as a nominee, but instead amounts to nothing less than a usurpation of power -- not just between the Senate and the Presidency, but a usurpation of majority rule. The Democrats have stopped pretending it has any other purpose.

That message has yet to reach John McCain, or he simply doesn't care. It gives him another opportunity to stick a white hat and ride a donkey to the rescue of the Democrats, whooping and hollering all along the way in order to make sure that every newspaper sees how reasonable he is. In his own way, he has become the Jimmy Carter and/or the Neville Chamberlain of the Senate: he jumps into disagreements and surrenders almost everything he can in order to wave a piece of paper over his head and claim victory.

I blame Bill Frist for this debacle more than John McCain, however. McCain is an unprincipled glory hound who stands ever ready to sell out the Constitution in order to get the attention he craves. It's Bill Frist's job to keep him on a short leash. If he's not up for that job, then he needs to turn it over to someone else -- someone who would have been bright enough not to bring Bolton's nomination to the floor this week in the first place.

Will The Tories Come Out Fighting?

Conservative Party leaders indicated yesterday that they plan on continuing their efforts to drive the Liberal minority government into collapse. The Tories plan on using their alliance with BQ to form a majority in committee and kill C-48, the $4.6 billion budget addendum that bought NDP support for Paul Martin and kept the Liberals in power -- a move which may have NDP leader Jack Layton rethinking his options:

The Conservatives say they will attempt to block the government's two budget bills from being passed before the House of Commons summer recess to protest against what they say is excessive and unaccountable spending.

And Conservative Leader Stephen Harper warned yesterday that his party may make further attempts to force an election, although he doubts they would succeed as long as the NDP supports the Liberals.

Tory House Leader Jay Hill said Liberal pledges to pass the budget before the June 23 summer recess amount to a “dream in Technicolor.” He said his party wants to take its time studying the bills in committee, where the Tories and Bloc Québécois have a majority.

I had not realized that the Tory-BQ alliance would result in a majority on the budget committees; I assumed that committee assignments would follow representation in the Commons. If they Tories succeed in bottling up portions of the budget, the Liberals could certainly paint Harper and the Conservatives as obstructionists and resurrect the "hidden agenda" argument against Harper once again. However, Adscam gives the Tories ample argument for a close reading of all budget issues. Martin's spending spree to hang onto power also bolsters Conservative efforts to slow down and carefully peruse the budget in committee, feeding their premise of cautious stewardship of taxpayer money in comparison.

In the case of C-48, the quick agreement between Martin and Layton resulted in a reported lack of detail which the Tories point out as a reason to take time for review. That may also be the excuse they give for killing C-48 in committee, pointing out that the lessons of Adscam teach that ambguity in budget issues inevitably lead to corruption. That would mean that the NDP wound up supporting the corrupt Liberal Party for no return whatsoever, making Jack Laytonthe biggest dupe in Canadian politics.

Layton is no fool, and he must have already seen this as a possibility. His finance critic, Judy Wasylycia-Leis, has publicly stated that any defeat of C-48 will end NDP support of the Liberals. That hardly sounds as if he's threatening the Tories; he's holding Paul Martin responsible for delivering C-48, and soon. That means Martin must somehow split the Tory-BQ alliance on the committee, or he must somehow get one or more members of the committee to cross the aisle.

Despite Harper's all-or-nothing rhetoric prior to the May 19th vote, this government still has no guarantee of survival. C-48 remains the keystone of their support, and control of it has passed to Martin's political opponents. If they choose to fight and remain united, they may still drive the Liberals out of power and get the election they want.

Doing The Math On The Judicial Compromise

The Washington Times notices that a number of President Bush's judicial nominees were left out of the agreement that supposedly ended confirmation filibusters, except under "extraordinary circumstances". Other pundits have noted the ambiguity of the memorandum; however, the Times' editorial board points out that some of those specifically ignored have waited as long or longer than the enumerated nominees, and suspects that they, too, have been thrown under the bus by the Seven Dwarves:

In a subsection of the memo --"Part I: Commitment on Pending Judicial Nominations" -- the senators specifically refer to five nominees. For three of these five so-called "pending" nominees (Priscilla Owen, Janice Rogers Brown and William Pryor), the gang committed themselves to permitting an up-or-down confirmation vote on the Senate floor. For the other two (William Myers III and Henry Saad) of the five "pending" nominees, the gang made no such commitment.

Again, what were the criteria? The delimiting criterion could not have been the fact that a "pending" nominee was simply someone who had been nominated by Mr. Bush during the 109th Congress. In fact, there have been 12 circuit-court nominations so far. Nor could the delimiting criterion be the fact that a "pending" nominee was someone whom the Judiciary Committee had already approved. Mr. Saad has not yet been approved by the committee. And Thomas Griffith, whom the committee approved 14-4 on April 14, was not considered to be a "pending" nominee.

Why did the seven Republicans ignore so many nominees who have been put forth this year by Mr. Bush? They are de facto "pending" nominees, are they not? In some cases, it is because "an unwritten aspect of the pact" called for Brett Kavanaugh and William J. Haynes II to be tossed overboard with Mr. Myers and Mr. Saad. Messrs. Kavanaugh and Haynes were nominated during the 108th Congress, would have been filibustered during the 108th by the Democrats if they had reached the floor and were renominated in February.

What about Terrence Boyle, who was first nominated in May 2001, renominated in 2003 and renominated in February? What about Richard Griffin and David McKeague, who were filibustered during the 108th and renominated this year? What about Susan Bieke Neilson? Renominated in 2005, she was approved by committee in October 2004 and would have been filibustered if she reached the floor.

Here is the real criterion: The 14 senators, including the seven Republicans, had to find the smallest number of nominees -- three (Justice Brown, Justice Owen and Judge Pryor) -- that would be guaranteed an up-or-down vote, on the one hand, and that would still exceed the number (two) that specifically would not be given such a vote, on the other hand.

A quick look at Arlen Specter's latest report from the Judiciary Committee confirms this count. The committee now has eleven pending nominations, which include nine nominated in the 108th Congress, most of those in 2003. These do not include anyone reported out of committee, such as Owen, Brown, or Pryor, nor does it include the three judges who did not get renominated by George Bush this session, such as Miguel Estrada, who lost patience with the nightmare. That would total seventeen, but Owen, of course, has been confirmed.

Of the sixteen left, the memorandum only addresses five -- which clearly indicates that there is more to this "compromise" than the participants want us to know. All that this document confirms is that three of these will get an up-or-down vote in the Senate. Three others have already been vanquished, and the other nine don't even rate a mention.

Why? The Democrats know who these nominees are. If they don't plan on filibustering them, why not just offer them up in the agreement to mollify the majority, or to get rid of one or more of the other three that they have vilified for years as "extremists" or "bad people"? The more one looks at who gets mentioned and who gets ignored, the more it looks like Saad and Myers will not be the last nominees to get tossed under the bus.

The Times does the math:

Democrats filibustered 10 appellate-court nominees during the 108th and would have filibustered another half dozen, if given the chance. Only seven of the filibustered 10 were renominated, giving the Democrats a victory over the other three. Only three of those seven are guaranteed an up-or-down vote by the Gang of 14. By our count, that's three for 16. Republican batting average: .187.

That's not even above the Mendoza Line for baseball, let alone anywhere near a political "compromise". That is a complete surrender. John McCain and the other members of the Seven Dwarves stripped the GOP of their majority status to guarantee less than 20% of their nominees a straight-up vote in the Senate. It's a shameful collapse of leadership and an abandonment of the trust GOP voters and activists put into the 2004 election that gave the Republicans an eleven-seat majority for this session.

Chirac Readies Post-Non Strategy: Blame Britain

Now that it appears inevitable that the French people will soundly reject the new EU constitution and reduce French influence in Europe dramatically, Jacques Chirac has readied his new political strategy for the debacle. Chirac will rely on centuries of French tradition -- and blame the British for their woes:

Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac will be pitched into a furious six-month dispute over the future direction of the European Union if the French people vote No to the EU constitution tomorrow.

Government sources are braced for the French president to round on the Prime Minister and blame him for making the constitution too "Anglo-Saxon" on economic issues and for plunging Europe into crisis as a result. ...

British diplomats believe that Mr Chirac will call for France, Germany and other nations to form a "core Europe" in which they can push ahead with integration without being held back by laggards such as Britain.

However, Mr Blair and Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, want to use Britain's six-month EU presidency, which begins on July 1, to argue that eurozone economies need flexible British and American-style economies rather than heavy regulation and tax harmonisation.

Actually, if Blair really wanted to destroy France, he should encourage Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder to form that "core Europe" -- so that both of their economies can go in their current direction, only much faster. Part of the disaster that the EU has become directly relates to its "core" countries failing to abide by their own economic and budgetary regulations.

The French don't recognize that, of course, which is why they have so strenuously opposed this draft. The French (and the Germans) believe that socialism and nationalized industry will revive the economy of Europe despite decades of evidence to the contrary. They do not want to face a competitive market which will force them to reform their labor laws and reduce their protectionism, changes Britain made more than two decades ago. After their embrace of private enterprise, the British won't go backwards to their 1970s stagnation, regardless of whether Chirac approves or not.

The truth is that France and Germany both need Britain in the EU more than Britain needs to enter it. If the French reject this, it gives Chirac the opening he needs to blame the terms of the new constitution on Tony Blair, hoping to take French minds off of the fact that Chirac negotiated these terms and up to now has endorsed it. It's a bit late for Chirac to point his Gallic finger across the channel and expect anyone but the French to buy his outrage now.

Of course, Chirac is only playing this for domestic consumption. However, earlier reports had Chirac considering another strategy of ignoring this plebescite and having the Assembly ratify the constitution separately, a plan which seems to have gone by the wayside. Chirac surely can't be seen imposing a British conspiracy to Anglicize France in defiance of French voters. Even Jacques Chirac isn't that self-destructive.

The Dog That Didn't Bark

Thomas Lipscomb continues to follow the Linda Foley story, this time on the pages of Editor & Publisher. Foley resurrected the Eason Jordan allegations that the US military had a policy of deliberate assassination of journalists, especially foreign journalists, in comments taped earlier this month. When Foley, head of the Newspaper Guild union, offered the same amount of evidence for this allegation as Jordan did -- none -- critics erupted with indignation.

However, as Lipscomb notes, darned few of those critics came from the newspaper journalists whom Foley represents. Lipscomb draws attention to this with an analogy from a Sherlock Holmes mystery:

Sherlock Holmes’s key clue to who stole the racehorse in “Silver Blaze” was a dog in the stall that didn’t bark. And something equally odd happened on the way to the Foley firestorm: To date, not a single pundit, editorial writer, or newspaper ran anything, with the exception of the Chicago Sun-Times story I wrote, a St. Paul Pioneer Press column by Mark Yost, and a Washington Times column item.

Clearly Foley was correct in assuming the Right was the only danger to her repetition of the statement that got Eason Jordan canned. The Mainstream Media couldn’t be bothered to cover “Easongate: The Sequel.” And positioning Foley as the gallant defender of the lives of journalists targeted by the U.S. military was inspired PR. After all, Sherlock Holmes’s dog didn’t bark because he was good friends with the thief. ...

If the most basic tenets of Journalism 101 are now no longer important enough for the media itself to honor and defend against their own members who violate them, where is the professionalism and the authority that is our main claim to writing the indispensable “first draft of history” – much less its value for sale? And if we lose sight of that irretrievably, who needs us? There are bloggers out there today with more credibility than Dan Rather, Mary Mapes, Eason Jordan, and Linda Foley combined, and their audiences are growing.

In fact, Foley's dodge received an assist from another serendipitous factor as well: she made her allegations at the time the Newsweek/Isikoff debacle broke. The outrage over Isikoff's deadly falsehood swamped out that of Foley's statement. Besides, no one really has heard of Foley before this happened, and unlike Eason Jordan, was not seen as being nearly as influential on news delivery. However, Lipscomb certainly nails the lack of response for Foley's charges among those whom she represents, and it shows a basic conflict of interest that has hampered the wide dissemination of Foley's slanders.

Read all of Lipscomb's column. As always, he does an excellent job in tying together many different threads into a cohesive portrait of a decaying Exempt Media.

The Comity Comedy Continues

Captain's Quarters would like to give the Captain Louis Renault award to the Seven Dwarves -- those Republican Senators who sold out the Constitution in the name of Senate "comity" and trust, who found out last night exactly how much value those commodities have on the other side of the aisle. After last night's filibuster of the confirmation of John Bolton left the US without an ambassador to the UN for another few weeks, these titans of insight expressed their shock that Democrats acted out of partisanship again:

The vote against cutting off debate over the confirmation of John R. Bolton to be ambassador to the United Nations, just as Congress was recessing for Memorial Day, left Republicans fuming and showed there is still some distance to travel to reach the new spirit of Senate comity that some believed was represented in the judicial pact announced Monday. ...

Its authors had said repeatedly that it was a testament to the ability of senators to trust one another. In the aftermath of the Bolton vote, some Republicans were asserting that Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, had been misled by his Democratic counterpart, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada. Mr. Reid, they said, had assured Dr. Frist there were sufficient votes to cut off debate and move toward a floor vote on Mr. Bolton. ...

Aides to Mr. Reid said he had provided no such assurances and, in fact, had warned Dr. Frist a few hours earlier that the effort to force a confirmation vote on Mr. Bolton could fall short. "I am disappointed that tonight we were unable to have a vote on Bolton," Mr. Reid said. "But it is not the fault of the Democratic caucus. We're not here to filibuster Bolton, we're here to get information." But it was not lost on Republicans that only a few hours before the Bolton vote, Mr. Reid delivered a tough speech at the National Press Club, where he assailed Republicans for pandering to the right wing and described the Senate agreement on judges as a potential "new beginning" for consensus in the Senate.

In fact, of the seven Democrats that picked the GOP's pockets on Monday, only three voted for cloture, less than half of the Left half of the New Comity Troupe. Mary Landrieu, Ben Nelson, and Mark Pryor -- all from red states -- voted to give Bolton a shot at confirmation. The other four voted for filibustering, using the flimsy excuse that the State Department hadn't supplied top-secret NSA transcripts to the same body which just two weeks ago had its leadership making public characterizations of highly-classified documents in order to smear a judicial nominee.

This resulted in these Renault moments for Senators who assured the public three days earlier, in an orgy of self-congratulation, that their acquiescence on minority extortion on interbranch affairs had ushered in a new era of bipartisanship:

"It is unfortunate," conceded Senator Mike DeWine, Republican of Ohio and a prominent member of the so-called Gang of 14 who drew up the judicial compromise. "It is too bad. But the deal was on judges, not anything else." ...

"This is what is disappointing," said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and another one of the Gang of 14. "The spirit of the deal was that we can do better if we all try."

For these three, and the other four who enabled them, the Not One Dime Campaign at CQ makes them our first recipients of the CLR Award. Rest assured that this will be the only donation we will be making to their campaigns in the future.

Not One Dime: Logo Contest

I have an appeal for all CQ readers regarding the Not One Dime campaign. Many of you have written to me in support of this effort to make our voices heard at the RNC by withholding donations to the NRSC until the GOP caucus improves its leadership in the Senate and starts acting like a majority party. In accordance with the enthusiastic response, I've registered a new domain -- www.notonedimemore.org -- and I need a logo for the effort which captures the essence of what we want. The plan for the moment is to have the new domain point to the Judiciary category on CQ, but a separate website may develop later.

I'd like to offer something for this contest besides the glory and fame that will surely follow the successful effort [cough, cough], but right now I don't have anything else in mind. However, I can promise the finalists that they will get plenty of CQ exposure, and hopefully we can rope Hugh Hewitt and other prominent blogosphere heavyweights into our efforts as well.

Submit designs to my usual e-mail address with the subject "Contest", so that I can sort through them quickly. I'll start with a deadline of June 15th, although that might get extended depending on what we receive by then. Thank you, and good luck!

UPDATE: Maybe we can sort out a Not One Dime League as well, using Blogrolling to initiate it. Thoughts?

UPDATE II: Timothy Goddard disagrees with me -- and he came up with a funny logo to demonstrate his opposition. He and I have a friendly debate going in his comments. If you jump in, be nice...

Morselli: Gagliano Was "The Big Boss"

The Gomery Inquiry heard the testimony of another colorful witness in the Adscam investigation, discussing cash payments and cronyism. Giuseppe "Joe" Morselli testified that Jacques Corriveau and Alfonse Gagliano directed the transfers of unregulated and unaccounted cash for fundraisers and politicians alike. Morselli admitted to keeping some of it for himself:

Former Liberal fundraiser Giuseppe (Joseph) Morselli told the Gomery inquiry yesterday that a friend of former prime minister Jean Chrétien asked him to intervene to restore sponsorship contracts for two music festivals.

After the request from Chrétien confidant Jacques Corriveau, Mr. Morselli said, he called the office of his long-time friend, Alfonso Gagliano, then the public works minister, and got half of the funding reinstated.

Mr. Morselli, a caterer and key figure in the sponsorship scandal, gave testimony that suggested he knew of illicit practices, but, when questioned further, stopped short of confirming them. His loose grasp of French kept several of his remarks vaguely cryptic.

He said he commonly saw cash being donated at the municipal, provincial and federal levels. But then he described it as petty amounts he would hand out to buy campaign workers pizza and doughnuts.

The "petty amounts" sometimes got as high as $5,000, which would keep an office well-stocked in pizza and doughnuts for weeks. Morselli admitted pocketing a like amount from Jean Brault that supposedly had been earmarked for Benoit Corbeil, but Morselli rationalized his embezzlement as a reimbursement for a similar donation he had already made.

Morselli didn't make as much of an impression with his testimony as he did with his personality, if the G&M account accurately reflects his performance. He sounded evasive and dismissive, while at the same time got combative with Justice Gomery, an odd reaction for someone who claims to have had no managerial responsibility for the machinations of Adscam.

Morselli did corroborate Beryl Wajsman's testimony in a couple of key elements. First, although the details didn't come out in Tu Ha's article, it sounds like the $5K that Morselli admitted pocketing was the same cash that Brault left on the table at the restaurant that some accused Wajsman of keeping. Wajsman's gripes about Daniel Dezainde -- mostly about Dezainde's racism -- also came up with Morselli:

Mr. Morselli admitted he got angry during a dispute with Daniel Dezainde, the Quebec wing director-general in 2001. He alleged that Mr. Dezainde made racist comments, calling his friend, fundraiser Beryl Wajsman, a "damn Jew."

"If I had a stick, I would have hit him. . . . It was the only time I lost my cool in several years."

Mr. Dezainde previously testified that he was so unnerved by Mr. Morselli he later sought RCMP protection.

That tends to establish Wajsman's contention that Dezainde had a long-standing beef with Wajsman, not one that came up after Wajsman's departure and based on Wajsman's heritage more than anything else. It also makes the argument between Morselli and Dezainde much more understandable and mundane, which reflects poorly on Dezainde's claims of intimidation. Telling off an anti-Semite is worlds apart from issuing Don Corleone-style threats.

Morselli doesn't appear to have moved the ball much in any direction, other than clear up some of the peripheral issues.

Reid: We're Tired Of You Amateurs, Losers, And Hacks Sniping At Us

Harry Reid continues to suffer from his terminal case of projection, the Washington Times informs us this morning. After months of bilious rhetoric from the Senate Minority Leader and his fellow Senate Democrats, Reid told the National Press Club yesterday that the country had tired of Republican partisanship:

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid yesterday in a speech laying out Democrats' agenda accused Republican leaders of being so consumed with partisan political "sniping" that they've neglected a troubled economy and a weak national defense.

"Democrats are the party of national security," Mr. Reid said at the National Press Club. "And we have an agenda to defend America from danger." ...

Mr. Reid said Republicans have squandered the first five months of this Congress breaking the Democratic filibusters against President Bush's judicial nominees, intervening in the Terri Schiavo case and trying to change the rules in the House ethics committee.

"Perhaps the greatest abuse of power is to have the ability to help but choose to do nothing," he said.

Specifically, Mr. Reid said Democrats want to increase the military by 40,000 troops, raise the minimum wage and allow cheaper generic drugs to be imported even if they violate patents held by American drug makers.

Mr. Reid also said, "Americans are sick and tired of getting caught in the crossfires of partisan sniping."

This recalls an incident from my childhood when my younger sister when running back to my mother, crying, "Mom -- Eddie hit me back!" Reid'c complaint is that Republicans fought back against Democratic obstructionism -- and he calls that partisan sniping. Shall we list the irrational partisan attacks involving the Senate under Harry Reid's stewardship of the minority?

* Democrats forced a debate on a state's presidential electors for the first time since 1876, despite not having any evidence whatsoever of any fraud, and despite much closer races in other states

* Democrats called an executive nominee a "liar" during floor debate, a breach of Senate etiquette

* Reid's reference to Henry Saad's FBI file, a highly confidential investigative file that even Saad can't access

* A continuing series of smears against sitting judges awaiting confirmation to the federal appellate court, undermining their authority in their current positions while they cannot respond to their own defense

* The continued indiscriminate use of the filibuster for every nominee whose politics they disagree with

And let's not forget Reid's own sniping, as the GOP reminded the press yesterday. This complaint comes from the man who publicly referred to his Senate counterpart, Bill Frist, as an "amateur". He told schoolchildren that Bush's judicial nominees were "bad people", and that an African-American woman and the daughter of sharecroppers (Janice Rogers Brown) wanted to return the country to slavery. Reid took the opportunity while Bush went on a diplomatic tour of Eastern Europe to celebrate the end of World War II to call him a "loser".

The Democrats, under the leadership of Harry Reid, Howard Dean, and Terry McAuliffe, have transformed themselves into a minority party that throws temper tantrums when it realizes what that status entails. They have behaved almost as badly as they possibly could, certainly much worse that Republicans did when they were the minority party for decades. For Reid to get up on stage and complain about partisanship after his record of prepubescent petulance makes him a stand-up comedian, not a politician, and about as far from a statesman as it's possible to get.

Not One Dime: Non-Nuclear Winter

Hugh Hewitt has an excellent column titled "Non-Nuclear Fallout" in today's Daily Standard, which discusses the winners and losers from the "aftermath of a sellout," as Hugh puts it. After today's latest display of the so-called new comity in the Senate, as the Democrats filibustered John Bolton's nomination despite an earlier promise by Harry Reid to allow a vote, Hugh's analysis rings even more true:

ON THE PRESIDENTIAL FRONT, it wasn't only McCain who lost big with the deal. So did Senator Bill Frist, at least for the moment, as legitimate questions are being raised about his ability to run the country when he cannot even corral his own caucus. Nebraska's Chuck Hagel contributed to the collapse of the caucus with his reprise of Hamlet on every Sunday show that would have him. Winners include Virginia's George Allen and Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney.

Hugh gives me a prominent mention in relation to the Not One Dime campaign, and its potential impact on the next election. Hugh has been a supporter of my effort to demonstrate the dissatisfaction with the Senate's majority caucus in their lack of urgency and unity in addressing the Constitutional affront that the judicial filibusters represent. However, he reminds his readers that my approach has its risks:

The National Republican Senatorial Committee finds itself receiving returned fundraising appeals with "not a dime more" scrawled on their letters. The brainchild of blogger Ed Morrissey, "not a dime more" conveys the refusal to send money to an organization pledged to the reelection efforts of Chaffee and Maine's Olympia Snowe. Of course cutting off the NRSC hurts all incumbents, but principled senators like Pennsylvania's Rick Santorum and Missouri's Jim Talent can go directly to donors via the web. It's the weak horses that like to fundraise as a field.

I have made clear from the beginning that I would continue to support Republican candidates that demonstrate a backbone and a commitment to the principles they so loudly espoused in the fall of 2004. People like me worked our hearts out to give the Republicans a solid majority in the Senate so that they could lead, especially on judicial nominations. Instead, we have leadership that has proven itself unable or unwilling to rise to the task they themselves set in the election.

That's what the Not One Dime campaign targets. When we donate to the NRSC, that money gets distributed by established party leadership in the Senate to campaigns around the country, as the leadership sees fit. That power essentially ties incumbents to the current leadership, because in order to ensure that they get enough funds to have a shot at winning, they need to be seen as supportive of the people holding the purse strings. If the NRSC hasn't got any money of its own, the leadership loses that influence, and the candidates have to put their loyalty elsewhere.

For the second time in a week, the Democrats have exposed Bill Frist as a well-meaning, ethical, but hopelessly outclassed Majority Leader. Frist wasted the momentum from the election and the Democrats' obvious obstructionism in January by stalling for months on addressing the judicial nominations, only bringing it up after the base finally erupted in anger and impatience. Instead of trying to consolidate whatever gains the GOP got out of the testicular bypass John McCain and Company foisted on Frist by pushing through the rest of the judicial nominees after Priscilla Owen's confirmation, Frist trusted Harry Reid and scheduled Bolton's nomination instead -- and got shafted. I warned the GOP earlier this week that this decision was a mistake.

The GOP needs new leadership in the Senate. It doesn't need millions of dollars flowing into the NRSC that will only strengthen Frist's grip on that position over the next year. I will instead donate to Mark Kennedy's upcoming campaign here in Minnesota and start building up donations for Norm Coleman's re-election in 2008, and look around for a close race where I can help a Republican with the courage of his or her convictions. The NRSC won't see any money from me until I know that the leadership it supports has both the competence and the strength to fight for its principles and to keep the caucus in line. I certainly won't donate to the NRSC while any chance remains that the Seven Dwarves who sold out the Constitution this week might get some of my cash from it.

Not One Dime. It's the only way we will force the GOP caucus to rethink its choice of leader, and the only way to be sure that our money won't wind up in the pockets of Lindsay Graham, Mike DeWine, John McCain, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, John Warner, or Lincoln Chaffee.

UPDATE: I'm honored to have Michelle Malkin join us! Welcome to all her readers.

If I'm Not Back By Tomorrow, Send Help (Updates!)

The new Sony VAIO laptop came in today, and it looks wonderful. I'm in the middle of transitioning my software and data from the Toshiba to the new system ... and of course, Windows XP won't recognize the home network, although I can get to the Internet just fine. I have the correct workgroup name and a unique computer name, but I can't see any of the other computers, including the old laptop. That means I have to use the portable hard drive to transfer files. Ecchh.

I'll hopefully get the core files transferred tonight so I can start blogging with the new laptop. In the meantime, check out Mitch at Shot In The Dark, who has been running a bleg for funds to get a much-needed laptop. He may buy the Toshiba from me, now that I've figured out why it wasn't working properly before, or he may do something different, but he's got a great blog and he needs a laptop to keep up. If you have a few bucks, toss it into Mitch's tipjar.

UPDATE 11:26 PM: Well, the network still isn't working, but I've loaded the basic software for blogging now, and it works great. I'm going to copy over more files overnight and get back to blogging in the morning.

UPDATE AND BUMP, 5-26 7:30 AM: Obviously, I've transferred enough to continue working. In fact, I want to make a special note about how easy it was to transfer my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles to the new computer. Quite literally, it took me about two minutes for each program to pull over my data and have it working perfectly, and I have extensive e-mail files. If one follows the easy instructions on the Mozilla site, it's almost idiot-proof.

Unfortunately, this idiot still has problems with the home network, although I'm getting tons of good advice. Just to let readers know, all of the computers on my network run XP Service Pack 2, so the problem isn't a mismatch of operating systems. The only one not connecting is the new Vaio. I'll play with it more tonight, using some of your helpful tips.

UPDATE III: Okay, problem solved -- I found the problem in Norton Anti-virus' firewall, thanks to a couple of tips from CQ readers. Once I added the other computer names to the Trusted list, I immediately accessed them and added in the printers and other equipment on the network. I'll be doing more updates and installations tonight to get the new laptop up to speed. Thanks again!

Tennessee Legislators Arrested In Corruption Scheme

Several Tennessee state legislators have been arrested by federal investigators after a two-year undercover operation that identified massive corruption in bribes and kickbacks. Most of those arrested have been Democrats, including two leaders of the party, one an uncle to rising Democratic moderate Rep. Harold Ford, Jr:

Four Tennessee lawmakers, a former lawmaker and two others were indicted Thursday amid a federal investigation into the business dealings of a state senator from Memphis from a powerful political family, officials said.

Those charged included the senator, John Ford; fellow Sens. Kathryn Bowers and Ward Crutchfield; state Rep. Chris Newton; and former state Sen. Roscoe Dixon. Newton is a Republican and the others are Democrats.

Federal authorities said during a news conference Thursday that the charges were extortion and accepting bribes following a two-year undercover operation dubbed "Tennessee Waltz." The grand jury returned the indictments in Memphis.

Ford has been under investigation for his consulting deals with companies doing business with the state.

His brother is former U.S. Rep Harold Ford Sr., who served in Congress for 11 terms. His nephew, Rep. Harold Ford Jr., has served five terms in Congress and on Wednesday entered the race for the Senate seat now held by Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist.

John Ford faces more problems than just corruption charges. He also faces charges of making threats to kill FBI agents, something that guarantees to make his nephew think twice before maintaining his challenge for Bill Frist's seat. From the LA Times/AP report on the investigation so far, it appears that John Ford was at the center of the corruption.

Republicans should be careful not to get too far ahead of themselves until the authorities can release information on the scope of the investigation. Right now, five of the six arrested and indicted are Democrats, including Memphis party leader and state representative Kathryn Bowers. However, corruption as a rule does not necessarily contain itself along partisan lines -- and any self-righteous backslapping now may appear pretty petty and shortsighted later on. Let's hope for everyone's sake that this is the extent to which the Tennessee legislature has been corrupted, and that they can bounce back quickly to address the legitimate business of the people.

UPDATE: GOP and the City has pictures of the allegedly corrupt politicians.

UPDATE II: Don't know why I didn't mention this earlier, but Bill Hobbs is all over this story, with excellent minute-by-minute coverage.

CBS Poll: Behind The Numbers

"Bush Out Of Touch," reads the CBS headline from their poll released today, and indeed that is what one of the poll's results show. However, CBS doesn't tell its readers that Bush's overall approval ratings actually increased as well:

Four months into his second term, President Bush is increasingly viewed as being out of touch with the American people, according to a CBS News poll.

Six in ten Americans say the president does not share their priorities, while just 34 percent say he does – the lowest numbers for Mr. Bush since the eve of his first inauguration. If there's any solace for Mr. Bush, it's that even fewer people, just 20 percent, say Congress shares their priorities.

Overall, slightly more Americans (48 percent) disapprove of the job the president is doing than approve (46 percent).

If readers click the link to the actual results, however, they will find that CBS found a much more ambiguous trend than their reporting suggests. In his overall job performance, Bush gained two points over the past month, from 44% to 46%. Americans gave the President a five-point boost in his campaign against terror with 58% now approving of his performance in that area. He also gained four points for his economic stewardship, although that only amounted to an anemic 38%, the same as his approval rating for Iraq, which only declined a single percentage point from last month.

There is plenty of bad news in the CBS poll, especially on Social Security, which has seriously eroded over the past couple of months. However, this poll certainly does not support the unbroken chain of gloom contained in the main CBS report of the survey. And even the true results have to be reviewed in light of the odd weighting given the sample taken by CBS (see page 5):

Total Respondents: 1150

*********************Unweighted*****Weighted

Total Republicans.......390............367

Total Democrats.........394............418

Total Independents......366............365

The new weighted numbers increase Democrats from 34.3% of the sample to 36.3%, while dropping Republicans from 33.9% to 31.9%, creating a gap that went from 0.4% to 4.4% in favor of Democrats. The CBS weighting puts Republicans on the same footing as independents, an unusual and unrealistic model for any polling sample.

It's not the first time that CBS skewed its polling samples to get the desired results, as CQ readers already know. It's interesting to note that even when they can't skew it badly enough to substantiate its editorial positions, CBS will simply mischaracterize its own poll in its reporting.

Syrian Operative Captured In Iraq?

The Daily Star in Lebanon reports that Iraqi security forces have captured a Syrian intelligence officer, one who staged a June 2003 attack on a television station owned by the late Rafik Hariri as a warning to get out of politics. The agent, Hussein Ahmed Tah, was captured in Baghdad attempting to bomb public facilities there as part of the so-called insurgency. If true, it may significantly shift Middle Eastern politics and strategy:

A Syrian intelligence officer detained in Baghdad has admitted to launching the missile attack on the late premier Rafik Hariri's Future Television in June 2003, according to Al-Rai al-Aam Kuwaiti newspaper. In an article published on Wednesday, the newspaper said Hussein Ahmad Tah, 32, was arrested by Iraqi police when he was attempting to assassinate employees in an Iraqi public institution. Following his arrest, Tah decided to admit to his previous crimes, among which is the Future TV bombing.

Tah said he worked for Syrian intelligence services, adding that he worked for a long time in Lebanon where he perpetrated several attacks. He then moved to Iraq, where he committed several attacks against mosques and Iraqi civilians. Security sources in Iraq said that Tah recounted the details of the attack on Future TV. The television station, situated near Raouche in Beirut, was attacked on June 15, 2003, resulting in the destruction of one of the newsrooms. No casualties were reported. The attack was considered as a message to then-owner of the station, former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Sources said the car used to perpetrate the crime was stolen in 1997 and hidden in a garage until the date of the attack. A previously unknown group called Jamaat Ansar Allah had held itself responsible for the attack in a statement issued the next day. However, Tah told Iraqi police that the group did not exist and that he had written and issued the statement.

Tah's statement makes an ironclad case for Assad's involvement in terrorism in the region and the attempt to undermine the democratization in Iraq. It does that so well that it may be best to wait for further corroboration before taking this as an established fact. Syrian intelligence agents building bombs in Baghdad spell big trouble for Bashar Assad, especially when they're not bright enough to avoid capture. The added bonus of finding one that can also substantiate Syrian involvement in attacks on Hariri puts it close to the "too good to be true" category.

If this can be substantiated -- and that may be a tall order -- it would corroborate our intelligence that Syria has at least assisted in the insurgency that has gripped the Sunni Triangle in Iraq since the end of the war. Once substantiated, then we need to take some action against the Syrian dictator that will push him from power. In the meantime, I think we can afford to wait for further evidence to support or refute this claim.

Freedom Means The Leeway Of Foolish Choices, Your Honor

An Indiana judge needs a remedial course in Constitutional law if this report in the Indianapolis Star accurately characterizes his custody decree. In determining custodial arrangements for a nine-year-old boy, Judge Cale Bradford instructed both parents to refrain from instructing their son in Wiccan beliefs, despite their shared religion not being a point of contention in their filings:

An Indianapolis father is appealing a Marion County judge's unusual order that prohibits him and his ex-wife from exposing their child to "non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals."

The parents practice Wicca, a contemporary pagan religion that emphasizes a balance in nature and reverence for the earth.

Cale J. Bradford, chief judge of the Marion Superior Court, kept the unusual provision in the couple's divorce decree last year over their fierce objections, court records show. The order does not define a mainstream religion.

Bradford's reasoning behind this ban? The boy attends a Catholic grammar school -- and the judge doesn't want the parents to "confuse" Junior with contradictory doctrine. The father attended the same school as a youngster, despite also being a non-Catholic, and along with his ex-wife considers this ruling a flagrant violation of both their parental rights and their right to free expression of their religious beliefs.

I carry no brief for Wicca, nor do I want to enter into a debate about its wisdom or foolishness. The important and relevant fact is that government has no business telling people how to practice religion unless the rites themselves break the criminal code (i.e., if someone practiced human sacrifice, etc). The child's attendance at a Catholic school has no relevance to the parents' practice, or even that of the child. Many non-Catholics send their children for Catholic education because of the quality of instruction delivered at these schools, and understand the trade-off of religious instruction.

Judge Bradford may have had some reason to make a ruling pertaining to the Jones/Bristol family had the parents made it an issue in their divorce and custody complaints. However, Wicca apparently is not an issue in this case, or at least it wasn't until Bradford made it one. In a minor defense of Bradford, however, he wasn't the first to bring it up. Indiana's Domestic Relations Counseling Bureau, which apparently does home studies on custody disputes, decided to take it upon themselves to issue a judgment on the parents' beliefs as part of its report.

Unless Indiana has some sort of exemption to the First Amendment of which I am unaware, the entire state government appears out of order regarding free religious practice. If the parents do no temporal harm to their child, it's no one's business how the Jones/Bristol family churches themselves. Perhaps a few days at Bishop Chatard High School would be in order for Judge Bradford and the people at DRCB.

Adscam Reaches Paul Martin's Office (Updated -- Not Quite!)

Testimony yesterday at the Gomery Inquiry put Adscam into the office of Prime Minister Paul Martin (not quite -- see Update II) for the first time yesterday, as one of the aides working directly for Martin revealed that part of his salary was paid not by the government but a key Adscam figure. Gaetano Manganiello told Gomery that he was not the only one in the PMO who received money from Adscam contractors, either:

Gaetano Manganiello testified that he was one of at least three party workers in the Quebec wing's Montreal offices in the late 1990s who were paid by Mr. Corriveau even though they did not work for his firm. Mr. Corriveau, a close friend of Mr. Chrétien and a key broker in the sponsorship affair, earned $8-million in sponsorship subcontracts, according to evidence presented at the inquiry.

Mr. Manganiello is on a paid leave from his job as a press office manager in the PMO. He is the first person working directly for Mr. Martin to admit to any direct role in the sponsorship affair -- though in a smaller fashion.

Documents tabled at the inquiry yesterday show that Mr. Corriveau's design firm, PluriDesign Canada Inc., paid Mr. Manganiello $4,846 in 1998 and $23,213 the next year.

Mr. Manganiello said he knew that another Liberal co-worker, Philippe Zrihen, was also getting a salary from PluriDesign while working for the party. And he testified that he had seen inquiry documents indicating that a third Liberal office employee had also been on PluriDesign payroll.

Manganiello provides critical testimony. This establishes both a motive -- a perceived money crunch -- and a link for the corruption to the top of the Canadian government. No possible excuse can be made for a government contractor to make off-the-record payments to the aides to Paul Martin, except the intent to influence Martin and/or evade and obstruct political finance regulations. Corriveau, as a beneficiary of so many Sponsorship Program contracts, made sure that the money Martin's government gave him kept coming by keeping Martin in charge. (See Update II at bottom.)

This should devastate the notion that Adscam originated and stayed with the Jean Chretien regime. Corriveau supposedly was Chretien's friend, not Martin's, but Pluri Design paid off Martin's office, not Chretien's, or at least not just Chretien's. The Liberals might still claim that Martin himself was not aware of this new graft, but that gets harder to sustain and increasingly becomes an irrelevant issue. Clearly, the PMO is Martin's responsibility, and it was his business to know that Corriveau cut checks to his direct employees. Manganiello drove around in a Dodge Caravan for months that Corriveau supplied -- it was hardly a secret that Pluri Design had bought these people.

For its part, the PMO has decided to praise Manganiello rather than bury him in an attempt to gloss over the explosive and damning revelation itself, and even give themselves credit for exposing the corruption:

In a written statement yesterday, the PMO stood by Mr. Manganiello and praised him for his testimony. "We're proud of the honesty and directness Mr. Manganiello showed. . . . Hopefully, Canadians will see his appearance as evidence that this Prime Minister and this PMO are wholly committed to seeing the commission's work discharged successfully."

Now that's chutzpah. The PMO didn't need Gomery to reveal that Pluri Design had paid the salaries of their employees, after all; they simply could have admitted that, either in Parliament or to the RCMP. It took over two years and an independent investigator to get that truth out to the Canadian electorate. That statement amounts to little more than an attempt to spin a catastrophe into something banal and unworthy of attention. The unfortunate part of Adscam for Canadians is that it truly may be all of the above.

UPDATE AND BUMP: More details on this new, direct link to Martin's office appeared in the Canadian Press story this morning:

He said the then-boss of the party's Quebec wing, Benoit Corbeil, approached him at the Montreal headquarters and said the party was in dire financial straights.

Corbeil said the party could no longer afford his salary but explained the Pluri Design graphic firm, owned by Jean Chretien's friend Jacques Corriveau, could step in to pay him, Manganiello testified.

"I was informed by Mr. Corbeil that Pluri Design would pay my salary but I would continue working at the Liberal party,'' Manganiello told the inquiry, saying he was on the firm's payroll for nine months.

"He (Corbeil) didn't tell me why, but in all fairness, I didn't ask why either.''

Under cross-examination from Liberal lawyer Doug Mitchell, Manganiello said he agreed to testify after receiving a call from a top official in Martin's office.

Manganiello said he provided information on the alleged payments to Scott Reid, Martin's director of communications, who then forwarded the information to a Justice Department official.

He also told the inquiry two other Liberal workers were on Corriveau's payroll. He identified the men as Philippe Zrihen and Jean Brisebois.

Keep an eye on how the press treats this Manganiello-Reid connection. The PMO will want Canadians to believe that they immediately disclosed these payments as soon as they knew about them. However, that still doesn't get anyone off the hook. The issue for Manganiello was that the Liberals couldn't afford to fund the positions any longer. Why, then, didn't anyone in the PMO question the continuing employment of Manganiello and the others despite cutting their legitimate funding? Because they knew full well that funding came from other sources -- private firms owned by Liberal cronies that benefitted from government contracting.

No matter how much the Liberals try to perfume that arrangement and its eventual exposure, it stinks.

UPDATE II: A Canadian reader who wishes to remain anonymous points out a chronological flaw in my report:

He testified that he received the cheques from Corriveau and the Groupaction car when he was working in the Montreal offices of the Liberal party in 1999.

This was before he worked at the PMO and before Martin was Prime Minister. He wasn't an aide to Martin until four years after he got the cheques and the van.

The Canadian reader is correct, and I am mistaken in this instance -- at least neither report shows Manganiello working for the PMO at the time of the payoffs. But that still begs the question of why the PMO would hire Manganiello after having worked under that arrangement in the past. Were they really that clueless, or simply presumed they'd never be caught?

Baghdad Sweep Coming

The London Telegraph reports this morning that Iraqis intend on conducting a major military sweep of Baghdad to combat the bloody series of bombings that have left hundreds of civilians and police dead. More than 40,000 Iraqi security troops will take part in this new operation, making it by far the most extensive military event in the nascent democracy's life:

More than 40,000 Iraqi troops are to be deployed in Baghdad to hunt down insurgents and their weapons, Iraq's defence minister has announced.

Sadoun al-Dulaimi said the force would include troops from the interior and defence ministries and would be by far the largest anti-insurgent operation carried out in Baghdad by Iraqi security forces.

He said: "We will divide Baghdad into seven main areas, and the number of the forces who will take part in the operation from the interior and the defence ministry will be more than 40,000 security men.

"We will also impose a concrete blockade around Baghdad, like a bracelet around an arm, God willing, and God be with us in our crackdown on the terrorists' infrastructure. "No one will be able to penetrate this blockade. You will witness unprecedentedly strict security measures."

Most significantly, no mention has been made of involvement by American troops. The Iraqis intend on securing Baghdad themselves, a good political choice and one that will underscore the nature of the insurgency as anti-democratic rather than anti-American. Undoubtedly, Americans will offer logistical support, and tactical support if needed, but the Iraqis have put themselves in command.

The number of troops being ordered into this operation must come as a surprise to Joe Biden and the New York Times. After all, it was just four months ago that they both argued that Iraq only had 4,000 or so fully-trained security personnel. Has American training improved so much that they have increased that number tenfold in 120 days? Or could it be that Condoleezza Rice knew what she was talking about during her confirmation hearings, and that Biden and the Paper of Record were only interested in spewing misinformation and derision rather than debating honestly?

New York Allowed Sex Offender To Be Foster Parent

The care of foster children remains a nightmare in American society. The majority of people who open their homes to these children do so for the best of reasons, but we expect the state that controls this system to do at least basic investigative checks before dumping their wards into the homes of strangers. New York apparently can't be bothered:

Authorities are investigating how a convicted rapist was allowed to serve as a foster parent to as many as 50 children before his past was discovered.

State laws prohibit all convicted felons, particularly those convicted of sex crimes or crimes of violence, from being foster parents or adopting children, except in rare instances.

But Nicholas Chaney told WWNY-TV in Watertown Tuesday that he may have cared for as many as 50 foster children since late 2001 and even adopted a child while living in upstate New York. Chaney said he listed his felony sex crime conviction on his foster parent application form when he signed up in November 2001.

When I adopted my son, I had to undergo an FBI background check and a home study conducted by the state of Minnesota, even though David had already lived with me for years and was my wife's son. I have no issues with that; I'd rather the state be safe now than sorry later. However, given the hoops I had to jump through just to adopt a child already in my home, New York's lackadaisical approach to Chaney's status boggles the mind. Didn't they bother to even fingerprint him before warehousing kids at his residence? Or did they merely shrug and hope he wasn't exactly what he turned out to be?

New York state officials promise an investigation into the county's approval of Chaney as a foster parent, but unless New York does something different than every other state, the adoption Chaney procured didn't come from Jefferson County but from Albany. Will the state investigate that as well?

Allawi Corroborates Abdullah On Zarqawi, Al-Qaeda Connections To Saddam

While Western press agencies continue to report years-old allegations of Qu'ran abuse from detainees as if they were new, the Exempt Media completely missed important corroboration from Iraq's new government that Saddam sheltered and even encouraged al-Qaeda terrorists during his reign of terror. CQ reader Jason Smith at Generation Why? notes this revelation from the Italian news portal AKI which confirms that Saddam's regime sponsored an Islamist conference and specifically invited AQ's #2 man and Zarqawi to attend:

The number two of the al-Qaeda network, Ayman al-Zawahiri, visited Iraq under a false name in September 1999 to take part in the ninth Popular Islamic Congress, former Iraqi premier Iyad Allawi has revealed to pan-Arab daily al-Hayat. In an interview, Allawi made public information discovered by the Iraqi secret service in the archives of the Saddam Hussein regime, which sheds light on the relationship between Saddam Hussein and the Islamic terrorist network. He also said that both al-Zawahiri and Jordanian militant al-Zarqawi probably entered Iraq in the same period.

"Al-Zawahiri was summoned by Izza Ibrahim Al-Douri – then deputy head of the council of the leadership of the revolution - to take part in the congress, along with some 150 other Islamic figures from 50 Muslim countries," Allawi said.

According to Allawi, important information has been gathered regarding the presence of another key terrorist figure operating in Iraq - the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

"The Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi entered Iraq secretly in the same period," Allawi affirmed, "and began to form a terrorist cell, even though the Iraqi services do not have precise information on his entry into the country," he said.

Last week, King Abdullah told a Saudi newspaper that the Jordanians knew Saddam to be sheltering Zarqawi in the last years of the Ba'athist reign of terror and demanded his extradition. Saddam refused to turn Zarqawi over to the Jordanians. Abdullah had been clear on that point; the Ba'athists had not claimed they could not reach him, but that they flatly refused to hand him over.

Last year, Stephen Hayes wrote about the Islamist conference in his book The Connection, which outlined a number of such ties between the Saddam regime and the AQ network, as well as other terrorists. Now that the new Iraqi government has possession of Saddam's old files, they have begun to corroborate Hayes' work. Far from being an enemy to the Islamists, Saddam reached out to the fanatics as an ally in order to covertly support attacks on Western nations, either directly or indirectly. The IIS records that Allawi has on Zawahiri shows that al-Douri -- currently running the ex-Ba'athist insurgency in Iraq -- knew who to contact in order to set up those connections.

Does the Exempt Media report this? Not to my knowledge. They have already set their story line on Saddam and terrorism, and they apparently have no interest in evidence that contradicts it. The media, however, stands willing to report every captured terrorist's claims of abuse as gospel truth, as well as the Amnesty International's hyperbolic rhetoric proclaiming the Gitmo detention center -- which houses illegal combatants captured in battle -- as the equivalent of the Soviet gulag. Small wonder the public continues to lose confidence in the integrity and the objectivity of American media outlets.

UPDATE: Amnesty International used the "gulag" reference, not the ACLU. CQ reader TomB noticed the error.

UPDATE II: For more media watchdog efforts, keep an eye on Media Slanders, brought to you by the same people who gave us Easongate.com.

Priscilla Owen Confirmed

The Senate has confirmed the nomination of Priscilla Owen to the Fifth US District Court of Appeals after four years of Democratic obstructionism. She received 56 votes for confirmation, including two from Democrats:

The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Priscilla Owen as a federal appellate judge, ending the four-year ordeal of the Texas jurist who was thrust into the center of the partisan battle over President Bush's judicial nominations.

The 56-43 vote to appoint Owen to the New Orlean-based 5th
U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was a consequence of an agreement reached earlier this week that averted, for the time being, a bitter dispute over Democratic use of the filibuster to block Bush's judicial choices.

Bush, pleased with the vote on a nominee he said would bring "a wealth of experience and expertise" to the bench, said it should be followed by others. "I urge the Senate to build on this progress and provide my judicial nominees the up-or-down votes they deserve," the president said in a statement.

Owen, said Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., "withstood an orchestrated partisan attack on her record."

Both Robert Byrd and Mary Landrieu crossed the aisle to support Owen's confirmation. The vote showed that the four-year wait to hold Senators accountable for their position on Owen owed more to partisan politics than any notion of her being the extremist bogeyman that Harry Reid made her out to be. This has always been about the Democrats demanding majority power without majority votes, and the temper tantrum they throw when voters strip them of power.

Next up for the Senate will be John Bolton, who got moved ahead of Janice Rogers Brown on the calendar. That's a mistake. Brown has waited longer than Bolton for action on her nomination, and the pressure of media and constituent curiosity about possible secret parameters of this Memorandum of Understanding between the 14 so-called centrist Senators will wane quickly. Frist should have acted on both Brown and Pryor while the momentum exists for speedy judicial confirmations. Bolton could have waited another two weeks.

Adscam Cost $355 Million: Auditors

Forensic accountants scouring the finances of the Sponsorship Program have found an additional $100 million in losses, bringing the total scam's loss to $355 million, according to their latest testimony:

The total amount of money lost in the sponsorship scandal now appears to be $355 million -- $100 million more than was originally thought.

"If you didn't like the sponsorship program to begin with, you've now got about a hundred million more reasons to not like it," CTV's Jed Kahane said Tuesday.

The new figure of $355 million is from the forensic accounting firm, Kroll Lindquist Avey, which was hired by the Gomery commission to examine sponsorship spending between 1994 and 2004.

Of this, the accountants have identified $51 million that went into the pockets of the well-connected ad firms, such as Groupaction, whose officers have testified that significant portions of the money went back to the Liberal Party. The estimate of cash given by Jean Brault alone runs to $2.5 million. However, the report does not appear to take into consideration the Liberal featherbedding that also occurred, according to several witnesses at the Gomery inquiry. That practice of adding Liberal party activists to the payroll of compliant ad firms allowed the Liberals to fund party activities through the Sponsorship payments to these ad firms, outside the reach of campaign-finance regulations and traditional audits.

The Liberals have already put $750,000 into trust for repayment of the cash traceable by check, an amount suprisingly close to that found by the auditors. One suspects that their own internal audit found exactly how much they would be asked to repay, and not a penny more. Since cash and in-kind contributions may never be fully identified, the Liberals may well have won their gamble -- if they can explain the difference between the documented $750,000 they took in and the $355 million the Canadian taxpayers lost. So far, the taxpayers haven't really demanded that accountability from Martin and the Grits, and they may well win by relying on the lack of Canadian outrage at the vast difference.

The Arrogant Regency

Tony Blankley writes today in the Washington Times that the new cabal of fourteen so-called centrists in the Senate represent a real threat to the traditional workings of Constitutional government. The bipartisan group resembles a regency, Blankley argues, and one that threatens to take over the entire business of the Senate:

Well, it would seem that the Senate has been placed in to receivership by 14 self-appointed trustees, several of whom are among the Senate's most wanton exhibitionists. Some of these ladies and gentlemen can be seen almost daily preening in front of television cameras confessing their moral superiority over their colleagues by virtue of their lack of firm convictions and their unwillingness to be team players. ...

Let no one assume that this little assemblage of selfless senators will limit the reach of their writ to the matter of judicial appointments. As if one couldn't guess, on Monday night Sen. Lindsey Graham — the Tom Sawyer of the Senate — looking all twinkly eyed and mischievous into the television camera, promised that the wonderful 14 would soon be announcing their plan to reform Social Security. Tomorrow the World!

So begins the Regency Period of the Senate. As long as these fourteen stick together, nothing can pass the Senate.

This is a failure of leadership. Not on Harry Reid's part; this arrangement suits Reid well, as he was not about to see much of his agenda get through the Senate regardless. No, this falls squarely on the shoulders of Bill Frist, who obviously lacks the capacity to instill party discipline on his fractious caucus. Had Tom DeLay, for all his flaws, been in charge of the Senate, this filibuster debate would have taken place in January, and he would have won it. And of the seven Senators who have now defied their party leadership, how many would have stood up to DeLay in a similar manner? Probably only McCain, and he would have been much more careful in doing so.

Now we have a situation where our hard-fought majority has completely dissipated, to be replaced by a board of trustees that have arrogated leadership to themselves without even consulting the members of their caucuses, especially those in the GOP. And as Blankley points out, they have no intention of giving up that power as long as they can stay united. They intend on delivering Lindsay Graham's Social Security package and forcing it down the Senate's throat, complete with tax increases and an abandonment of privatization and ownership of one's retirement funds, despite a similar system for Congressmen and Senators that far outperforms Social Security. What other deals have they cut in secret, back-room negotiations? We will soon find out.

The Republican caucus needs to decide whether they will elect their own leaders or get led around by the nose by their so-called "maverick" members the rest of the session. It would help if the Republicans would elect a real leader, one who can instill party discipline that carries meaningful consequences to those who try to create little star chambers instead of debating and deciding openly about policy and procedure. Until they do, Not One Dime goes to the NRSC.

Franken To Relocate To Minneapolis; Don King Next?

Michelle Malkin notes that Al Franken, the premier host of the dying Air America talk-radio network, will move back to Minnesota and broadcast his national show from the Twin Cities. Franken has lived in New York for decades, but returns to the Land of 10,000 Lakes for a particular purpose:

Radio host Al Franken, who is mulling a run against Republican Senator Norm Coleman in 2008, has purchased a town house on the edge of downtown Minneapolis and will establish residency in Minnesota.

"It's one of the things I need to do if I decide to make a run," Franken said from his current home in New York. "I haven't made the decision yet, but if I do, I'll have to have been living in Minnesota a while."

Franken might also want to make a run for the seat that Mark Dayton will vacate at the end of next year, hoping to retain the office for the Democrats by lending his star power, such as it is, to the effort. Could he be successful? Possibly; he certainly has a following in the Metro area, although his fan base probably represents that tiny minority that think titling a book with a reference to Rush Limbaugh's weight constitutes humor and including three variants of the work "lie" in another title constitutes biting political analysis. Oh, and let's not forget the massive packs of Stuart Smalley enthusiasts, too.

Of course, the same could have been said about Ronald Reagan and Bedtime For Bonzo (and often was). What counts in a political career is an ability to get one's thoughts and philosophy across in political settings and create a likable and open image with which people can relate. Fortunately, I have some experience with Al's ability to do just that from his time at the Republican National Convention last year. Here's Al working the room in Radio Row:

And here's Al disengaging from political debate before Security disengages him from the convention (note the quick work of Franken's staffers):

Nor was this a singular approach in Franken's political outreach. One should recall the incident in which Franken expressed his support for First Amendment rights by blindsiding a protestor at a Howard Dean rally, claiming that the demonstration infringed on Dean's civil rights.

If that's the kind of politics that Franken wants to bring to Minnesotans and to the DFL in this state, we welcome him to the 2006 Senate campaign, or 2008 when Norm Coleman runs again. We'll be here to document the even-keeled temperament and the dedication to open debate that Franken embodies during any or all campaigns in which he stomps runs.

UPDATE: Thanks to CQ reader RBMN for a link to the NY Post story.

NYT Hasn't Read The Constitution

I posted yesterday about editorial-board reaction to the compromise agreement on judicial confirmations, and noted that the New York Times had failed to comment on the development -- a surprising abstention, given their previous interest. The Gray Lady apparently took a day to mull it over, and came up with an unenthusiastic endorsement whose main complaints appear to be the Republicans who joined the centrists and a typical, if stunning, misrepresentation of Constitutional structure:

If nothing else, the deal to end the Senate's "nuclear option" showdown was heartening in that it did demonstrate that moderates still exist in Washington, and actually have the capacity to work together to get things done.

On the other hand, it's not terribly encouraging to see how low the bar is for joining the moderate camp. The seven Republicans who played the critical role in brokering an agreement include several staunch conservatives whose claim to centrism lies in their desire to avoid devoting the rest of the year to procedural battles between the hamstrung Democrats and the overbearing Republican majority.

Got that? The Times first gripe about this centrists' club is the membership, not the agreement itself. In fact, they make this bold statement and then -- typically -- fail to mention who they mean, even though it can only refer to seven Senators. Who are the conservative ideologues that the Times felt the centrists should scorn -- Lindsay Graham and Mike DeWine? Probably, and if the Times considers either of them staunch conservatives, it explains why they consider all of these judicial nominees to be extremists.

Their main beef, besides the signatories, is that some of Bush's nominees get votes. If that's the problem, why does the Times endorse this compromise at all? After all, did they expect a compromise to mean that the GOP wound up with nothing at all? Someone should buy the editorial board a dictionary, with a Post-It flag on the page containing the word "compromise" on it. It's certainly one thing to complain that a compromise was reached at all, especially when one felt that the issue involved a principle that needed to be resolved. It's another to say, "We're glad that a compromise was reached, but we object to one side getting anything they wanted."

While they're reading Websters, they should try re-reading the Constitution. The Times' editorial board saves their most ignorant rant for last:

While the idea of letting the majority rule is at the heart of much in American democracy, it has little to do with the Senate, where some members represent 10 times as many people as others. There is absolutely nothing unfair about allowing a minority that actually represents more American people to veto lifetime appointments of judges who are far outside the mainstream of American thinking.

It's been hard to find a more moronic argument for the continued filibustering of judicial nominations than this idiocy, and it's telling that it originated with such mental luminaries as Barbara Boxer and Joe Biden. The Constitution set up two branches of the legislature, one which expressly represented the population, and the other which represented the states equally. The responsibility for confirming executive appointments was given to the Senate specifically because it didn't represent populations, but because the states should have equal say in forming the upper echelons of the federal government. This foolish editorial simply ignores the text and history of the Constitution. The Times argues for a Senate model whose votes should be weighted by population -- which would make the Senate simply another House of Representatives.

Besides, in case the Times, Boxer, and Biden hadn't noticed, the GOP won a majority in the House last election, too. In fact, they increased their majority in both houses of Congress. The results of the last election, where the voters gave control of all three national institutions to the GOP, show clearly that the electorate wants the GOP to pursue their agenda, a result that the New York Times hasn't yet accepted despite it happening three times in a row now.

The clear ignorance of the Times' editorial board demonstrates once again the wisdom of their publisher in hiding their future statements from bloggers behind a $50 firewall. They've made themselves irrelevant through intellectual dishonesty and incompetence, and their disappearance from the public discourse should cause nary a ripple once they lock themselves away into their financial cloister.

No Filibuster On Bolton

In a report on the continuing opposition of George Voinovich to John Bolton for his confirmation as UN ambassador, the New York Times reports that the Democrats will remove the hold on his nomination and apparently will not start an expected filibuster:

One Democrat, Senator Barbara Boxer of California, had sought to block a Senate vote on Mr. Bolton, saying she would oppose any vote until the State Department provided documents related to the nomination that the department has so far refused to hand over.

On Tuesday afternoon, however, a spokeswoman for Ms. Boxer said she had decided to lift a hold on Mr. Bolton's nomination. Ms. Boxer's spokeswoman said she would join with Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware in agreeing to a Republican plan to move toward a vote on Mr. Bolton after allowing up to 40 hours of debate.

It appeared unlikely that any Senate Democrat would try to use a filibuster to block a vote, Senate Democratic officials said.

This comes as a surprise, given the weakness of Bolton among the GOP caucus. A filibuster would have been almost impossible to beat. This development may point to a secret by-agreement among the centrist Senators who imposed their settlement on judicial nominations on the majority yesterday. Barbara Boxer was not among them -- in fact, she voted against cloture on Priscilla Owen earlier today -- but she may have been persuaded to allow Bolton to pass to a full vote in exchange for the agreement on judges from the GOP faction.

Beyond that, Voinovich's continued offensive against Bolton will rankle the base, especially in light of fellow Ohioan Mike DeWine's participation in the confirmation agreement. Voinovich made his decision to abandon Bolton without bothering to show up to the committee hearings. He refused to meet personally with Bolton afterwards. Now with all of the shenanigans going on in the Senate, the last thing the GOP caucus needs is another "maverick" showing up the leadership and the White House.

Ohioans should add Voinovich to DeWine for the Not One Dime campaign. His intransigence should be a lesson to the GOP caucus that Bill Frist does not have what it takes to put the majority we fought so hard to elect to any good use at all.

Drinks Are On Me

Today, our family will celebrate my son's 21st birthday, and I thought I'd take an opportunity to tell you a little about my only child.

I married the First Mate when David was 9 years old (I adopted him later on), and we had our transition problems. In speaking to others about marrying into an existing family, I usually tell people it's like becoming the second Darrin on Bewitched; you know you have a new part, but you haven't got a clue about all the rules -- and, by the way, you're supposed to be on stage NOW. David has always had his own mind about things, and ... well, so do I. (As if you couldn't tell that from my blog.)

However, David always had something special about him, even when he drove me up a wall. We had all the normal teenager issues with him, especially early on, but even when he was young he could surprise me with a sudden insight that seemed to come out of nowhere. He developed a wizard-like ability in math and sciences even while he ignored just about every other subject in school. When he started dating the woman who's now our daughter-in-law, Missy, he buckled down in school and turned into an academic achiever that had me wondering if we'd gotten the wrong report cards in the mail.

In their senior year, however, Missy got pregnant. Every parent dreads that news, and the four of us worried about their future and their ability to finish high school. What none of us counted on was how much courage and tenacity that the two of them had developed in their quiet ways. Missy spent her entire senior year pregnant, and the first five or six months she was so sick that she had to be on home IVs to avoid dehydration. David would go to her house early and get her IV line started and then head out to school, where Missy would join him after her IV was finished. She and David not only finished their senior year but both got outstanding grades; David got the best grades of his life, turning into an A student. (Someday I'll write about the hostility they got from their school administration when they discovered that Missy intended on keeping the baby, but today's not the time.)

Three days before they graduated, we were blessed with our beautiful granddaughter Kayla, the Little Admiral. We thought that Missy would have to skip the ceremony, but once more we failed to consider a streak of iron in her that could easily be missed if you don't know her well. Not only did she attend her graduation while four grandparents took turns watching the Little Admiral, but she even attended an awards ceremony the day before that, checking out of the hospital an hour before it started.

Now David and Missy have been married almost three years, have a beautiful child, and both of them attend college and get good grades. Both will transfer to universities in the fall, David to the U of M, Missy to Augsberg. They've been wonderful and patient parents, and more than that, they've turned into wonderful, responsible, and terrific people. I'd love to claim all the credit for it, but having watched them tackle the world and win like they did, I'm just glad to know them and have them as family.

Happy birthday, David. Thank you for bringing Missy and Kayla into our lives and our family.

The Vanguard Of The New Comedy Comity

The Senate passed a cloture motion on the debate for Priscilla Owen's confirmation to the appellate court. Seventeen Democrats, despite yesterday's agreement and the unanimous accolades it received from Harry Reid and his crew, voted for a filibuster. Here's the Vanguard of the New Comity:

Biden, Del.; Boxer, Calif.; Cantwell, Wash.; Corzine, N.J.; Dayton, Minn.; Dodd, Conn.; Dorgan, N.D.; Feingold, Wis.; Kennedy, Mass.; Kerry, Mass.; Lautenberg, N.J.; Levin, Mich.; Lincoln, Ark.; Murray, Wash.; Reed, R.I.; Sarbanes, Md.; Stabenow, Mich.

Canadians Paying For Liberal Party PR Offensive

In a further twist to the Adscam scandal that has rocked Canada and nearly cost the Liberal Party its ruling status, records revealed at the Gomery Inquiry show that the Liberals have set up a "war room" for Gomery-related public relations using taxpayer money:

The Liberal government has set up a war room -- at a cost of about $1-million to taxpayers -- to handle the fallout from the Gomery commission.

Documents obtained by CanWest News Service through the Access to Information Act reveal the rapid-response war room, which is in almost daily contact with the Prime Minister's Office and the government's top bureaucrat, Alex Himelfarb, is operating out of the Privy Council Office.

The cost of the strategic office, which does everything from prepare answers for Question Period in the House of Commons to keeping the PMO abreast of testimony at the inquiry, covers the salaries of staff and expenses.

Paul Martin, in effect, has defended his party's money-laundering and tax-fraud operations by using even more taxpayer money for a public-relations campaign. In effect, it resembles the UN's oil-for-food defense, where they have continued to use the money that Turtle Bay took from the Iraqis for managing the program in order to cover up the corruption that took billions from the victims. While Martin's chutzpah has the virtue of a much smaller scale, it has the exact same vice of stealing from the same victims a second time to cover up the initial crimes committed against them.

The timing on this revelation seems suspiciously helpful to the Grits as well. Why didn't anyone mention this before the no-confidence vote? Perhaps because it might have affected the votes of the independents, such as Chuck Cadman. One wonders how he feels about his vote now, the one that kept the Liberals in office to continue their exploitation of tax money for their own political purposes.

Jack Layton also bears responsibility for this continuing embarrassment; the NDP leader should have insisted on full transparency on any such arrangement that could reflect poorly on his decision to ally himself with Martin and the Liberals. If he did insist on it and was not informed of this new scandal, then he should pull out of the alliance and call for a new confidence motion immediately. If he didn't bother to insist on disclosures, or if he knew about this and abetted it, then the NDP should demand his resignation, for incompetence if nothing else. If the NDP remains allied with the Grits, they have to accept complicity for the ongoing corruption this represents.

I seem to recall Canadian voters expressing discomfort with Stephen Harper's putative "hidden agenda". Have they had enough of Paul Martin's to finally demand a change?

UPDATE: Newsbeat1 has been keeping up with the forensic accountants and their testimony today. Be sure to keep checking back in with them.

Did Bush Win In Judicial Deal?

That's what the New York Times says this morning, in an analysis by Richard Stevenson that tries to look at the compromise as part of the overall power struggle for Bush's legislative agenda. Stevenson argues that the compromise frees up the most contentious and desired nominees for confirmation and the legislative process for more pressing issues, such as CAFTA and Social Security:

President Bush won enough from the bipartisan compromise on judicial nominees on Monday night to claim a limited victory, but he now faces a series of additional tests of his political authority, with the stakes extending to the fate of his second-term agenda.

On the plus side for Mr. Bush, the bipartisan agreement among 14 centrist senators expressly called for up-or-down votes on three of his nominees to federal appeals court seats, all but ensuring their confirmations, though it left in limbo the fate of two more. ...

In the days and weeks that follow, Congress will confront a proposed trade agreement with Central America, the confirmation of Mr. Bush's embattled choice as to be ambassador to the United Nations, an effort to rein in government spending and the first legislative steps toward overhauling Social Security - all topics on which Mr. Bush faces excruciatingly close votes in Congress, where Democrats are generally united against him and his own party is splintering around the edges.

Although the deal on judges announced by the 14 senators fell well short of the principle set out by Mr. Bush that all nominees get a vote on the Senate floor, the White House said it viewed the development as positive. Mr. Bush has always tried to create an atmosphere within the White House that takes the day-to-day bumps in stride and focuses on winning in the long run.

That would put the NY Times in the same category as Stephen Bainbridge, if the rest of the analysis followed the headline. However, Stevenson expresses more pessimism than optimism about Bush's ability to push his agenda through Congress, even one celebrating its supposed comity on C-SPAN for the last twelve hours:

But Monday evening's partial victory was hardly a display of overwhelming political strength. Beyond the judicial nominations, administration officials and their outside advisers recognize that the convergence of so many high-stakes issues in such a short period will shape public perceptions of Mr. Bush's power at a time when his approval ratings are already lackluster and his signature domestic initiative, remaking Social Security, is in trouble.

To some degree, the confluence of disparate issues is coincidence. But in another way it is the logical consequence of Mr. Bush's decision to expend his political capital, as he put it immediately after his re-election, to push through initiatives that he suggested voters had endorsed by putting him back in the White House.

In truth, Stevenson really gives a facile treatment of the compromise reached last night on confirmations, asserting it as a Bush victory with little evidence and even less analysis to support such a conclusion. Stevenson even states that the centrist coalition did little more than delay the inevitable on filibusters, meaning that both sides will wind up right back where they started -- probably on the first Supreme Court nomination. So why is this a Bush victory, when he could have easily had votes on all his nominees if two of the GOP Senators (Graham and DeWine) had remained with the GOP caucus?

If this analysis is the best that the New York Times can provide, they should hide it behind that $50 annual fee for their Op/Ed articles so that bloggers can't see these in the future.

Zell Miller Interview At Red State Rant

Lance at Red State Rant had a unique opportunity to interview one of the most fascinating people in politics over the past few years, firebrand Zell Miller, who defied his party and endorsed George Bush in 2004. Lance asked several bloggers, including myself, to submit questions for the interview and graciously asked them on our behalf. The first half of the interview has been posted today, and the second half goes up tomorrow.

Lance included one of my questions in today's post:

CQ: For such a consumer nation, America seems to do poorly “selling” ourselves overseas. How do you think we can improve in this area so that people understand what we stand for and what we believe, in the most positive light?

ZM: Well it would help if we had more in the media who understand that when they criticize America or the military or anything that relates to this country, when they criticize that, it's magnified many times over overseas. An example is the Newsweek situation. They should have known better than to have done that. Even if it's true they ought not to have printed it. It's not true, but even if it were true, they should not have printed it because they knew—anyone would know that it would cause riots, people being killed. There are certain things that the media should and should not do when we're at war, and we're at war.

What a great answer. Read all of Miller's answer at Red State Rant today and tomorrow.

Kerry Signed The 180?

Joan Vennochi reports in her Boston Globe column today that John Kerry has signed the SF-180 form that will release his entire military record. However, as even the liberal Vennochi acknowledges, with Kerry that means less than one might think (via Michelle Malkin):

During an interview yesterday with Globe editorial writers and columnists, the former Democratic presidential nominee was asked if had signed Form SF 180, authorizing the Department of Defense to grant access to all his military records.

''I have signed it," Kerry said. Then, he added that his staff was ''still going through it" and ''very, very shortly, you will have a chance to see it."

The devil is usually in the details. With Kerry, it's also in the dodges and digressions. After the interview, Kerry's communications director, David Wade, was asked to clarify when Kerry signed SF 180 and when public access would be granted. Kerry drifted over to join the conversation, immediately raising the confusion level. He did not answer the question of when he signed the form or when the entire record will be made public.

Several e-mails later, Wade conveyed the following information: On Friday, May 20, Kerry obtained a copy of Form 180 and signed it. ''The next step is to send it to the Navy, which will happen in the next few days. The Navy will then send out the records," e-mailed Wade.

Now, as Michelle notes, that request will take a few weeks for the Navy to process and provide a response. It may be the end of summer before any records are produced ... and it could be a cold day in Hell before all or any of it gets released to the media. In fact, Kerry could argue that signing it was all he agreed to do. When, he could say, did I commit to sending it to the Navy? You FOOLS! Mwa-HAHAHAHA!

All kidding aside, Kerry only agreed to sign off on the SF-180. He didn't agree to release every document that results from that request. The SF-180 will only release the information to Kerry, who can then cull the material for anything embarrassing before making it public. Vennochi herself appears to think that this may wind up being Kerry's stance after he sees the files:

Kerry insists ''The truth in its entirety will come out . . . the truth will come out."

Signing Form 180 is the first step. Releasing his entire military record to the public is the second.

It doesn't get any plainer than that.

We'll see. Somehow, with Kerry's track record, I suspect he'll find a rhetorical loophole he's left to allow him off the hook once the file arrives from the Navy.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin, in reference to my scenario above, recalls that the SF-180 makes all records public, which doesn't sound correct to me. CQ commenter Lew Clark elaborates:

The form authorizes the release of military records to a specific individual or entity. That individual/entity is designated in Part III of the form. Aditionally, in Part II of the form, the veteran designates whether an edited or unedited record is released. In Part II they can designate whether discharge information is released or not. That would be very important in the Kerry case based on questions about the nature of his discharge.

This first came up relative to President Bush based on a Freedom of Information Request (I forget who filed the request, News Organization, ACLU, ?). But, when Bush signed his SF 180 he authorized release of all his records to the organization that made the FOIA request.

I get no indication that Kerry has processed an SF 180 releasing all his military records, unedited to Judicial Watch. It appears, in fact, he has only authorized the release to himself. He/ his staff will then go through the records and re-release what they damn well please.

That was my understanding, based on hazy memories of the debate from last year. If anyone can substantiate or refute that, please e-mail me or comment on this post.

Isikoff: Deadly Mistake Will Be A "Blip"

Michael Isikoff appeared on the Charlie Rose show last night to discuss his now-discredited story about flushed Qu'rans at Guantanamo Bay. According to the AP, he acknowledged that his report had some role in the rioting that killed almost twenty people in the Middle East, but then predicted that the incident would just be a historical footnote:

Michael Isikoff, addressing the furor in an interview broadcast Monday night on "The Charlie Rose Show," said he regretted the possibility that his article, which has been blamed for violent protests in Muslim countries, may have spurred riots.

"It was terrible what happened," he told Rose. "Even if it was just a little bit that we contributed to the violence that went on over there, that was awful, terrible." ...

Isikoff said that he thought the error had harmed the magazine. "I think it has clearly done some temporary damage," he said. "It's thrown us off our game for a little bit," he said. "I think this will end up being a blip."

Isikoff doesn't sound terribly remorseful, at least not from Desmond Butler's report for the AP. He continued to blame the Pentagon for not stopping the report or objecting to it, and complained about the tightening of controls for anonymous sourcing that his false report generated at Newsweek:

He said that the reporters had provided the article in full to a senior Defense Department official. The official asked for a change of wording on a separate issue, but said nothing about the details concerning the Quran. ...

In its edition published Monday, Newsweek outlined new policies for the use of anonymous sources. Isikoff said that changes will include a push to get more material from sources put on the record.

"I got to tell you, as somebody who has reported for a long time on the intelligence and law enforcement field, that's going to be tough," he told Rose. "Some of the best stories that I've gotten, that others have written about this administration, about the previous administration, you have to rely on anonymous sources."

It's a good thing that Newsweek keeps issuing apologies while Isikoff keeps insisting that he did nothing wrong. Otherwise, people might get the idea that nothing really has changed with the mainstream media or that they haven't learned any lesson from their highly-publicized incidents of false reporting, like the Killian memos, Eason Jordan's accusations of military assassinations of journalists, or the desecration of Qu'rans.

If Newsweek sincerely meant what it has repeatedly said in its apologies and explanations, why is Isikoff not on board and still shifting blame to everyone but himself? Shouldn't these statements get him fired at some point, even if running false stories obviously doesn't get that result?

Welcome To Versailles, Circa 1921

While the venerable hands of John Warner and Robert Byrd applaud themselves and their twelve comrades for devising a compromise that supposedly ends the battle over judicial confirmations, the rest of the country on both sides of the political divide have woken to the fact that nothing has really been resolved. Even the one major daily whose editorial board lavished praise on the centrists reports in its front-page analysis that this peace treaty amounts to little more than a temporary cease-fire:

It means that at least three of the nominees who have been blocked for years will make it to the appellate courts, while at least two will not. Beyond that, without a total ban on judicial filibusters, as the nuclear option would have guaranteed, the president will not have such a free hand in selecting a Supreme Court nominee. He also will be under pressure from the moderates to work more cooperatively with the Senate on judicial nominations or face rebellion from at least some of them.

For that reason, the fragile compromise, stitched together in the office of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) just as the Senate began an all-night session, will not necessarily end the battle over the future shape of the judiciary. At best, the group produced a cease-fire in the judicial wars that will deal with nominees who long have been in the confirmation pipeline.

After that, no one can say with certainty whether the deal will stick, particularly if there is a Supreme Court nomination in the near future, as many anticipate. The 14 senators who joined hands last night said theirs is an agreement based on faith and goodwill, but there is no certainty or even commitment that they will continue to operate as a group once past the current nominees in question.

"I think they did what the Senate very often does," said Ross K. Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University and a longtime student of the Senate. "They kicked the can down the road. They basically postponed a crisis and set up the predicate for another one in the future on the Supreme Court nomination."

In other words, welcome to Versailles. The centrists who made their play for power last night have constructed an elaborately meaningless document that holds no one truly accountable for their actions and only applies to five of the controversial nominees, splitting them 3-2 for the Administration. It may sound Solomon-like, but in the end the nuclear option will return to the table as soon as the Democrats filibuster anyone outside of Saad and Myers. They have not ended the war, but have merely set the seeds for a more polarizing battle than ever before, as accusations of "bad faith" will now be added to the abuse-of-power allegations already bandied about so casually during this debate.

In the meantime, the GOP centrists will have explicitly endorsed the use of the filibuster in dealing with interbranch transactions, against the model of equality among the branches, while the Democrat centrists have betrayed the notion that ideology had nothing to do with their obstructionism. The only winners appear to be Priscilla Owen, Janice Rogers Brown, and William Pryor, and only because they've been allowed to escape.

Two Editorials, Two Directions, And A Significant Abstention

The fourteen Senators who banded together last night to reach a compromise on judicial confirmations expect, I'm sure, to bask in the glow of an approving Exempt Media blitz, and they will certainly receive that, to a certain extent. However, this morning's editorial pages from the three most influential newspapers demonstrates more diffidence than love.

The Washington Post treats the centrist minority as conquering heroes:

It is a demonstration, in an era of increasingly bitter partisanship, of what can still be accomplished through negotiation and the proffer of a modicum of trust across the aisle. Interest groups on both sides railed against compromise and threatened its architects; Senate leaders of both parties and the president did more to obstruct a deal than to facilitate it. The 14 senators nonetheless managed to put principle above self-protection.

Put principle above self-protection? What principle was that? Even the Washington Post can't identify it:

The deal is admittedly messy. Some nominees get votes, some still don't; the principle isn't terribly clear. It isn't specified what constitutes "extraordinary circumstances"; the members have to trust in one another's good faith. But the deal is far better than the alternative.

The principle that the Republicans gave up -- or put off, depending on how one interprets the agreement -- is that the Constitution sets the rules on interbranch transactions, not one branch over the other. This agreement endorses the use of the filibuster, an internal Senate rule, to block their Constitutional duty of advice and consent unless a supermajority can be achieved. As I wrote yesterday, filibusters are fine for legislation, but applying them to executive appointments puts the Senate above the Executive in a manner that contradicts the equal Constitutional status of the two branches.

Now, since even the Post's cheerleaders can't identify a single principle that this agreement preserves, I would have preferred that the principles of the Constitution had been protected instead. After all, that's what these fourteen men and women swore to do when they joined the Senate, an oath that both they and the Post have forgotten in their haste to protect their media images as reasonable centrists.

The adulation stops at the Post, at least this morning. Another of the triumvirate, the Los Angeles Times, scorns the deal and scolds the fourteen for not only blocking the elimination of the filibuster for judicial nominations but for keeping it at all:

Above all else, what the agreement preserves is the power of the Senate. Amid the press conferences and floor speeches, perhaps the most telling comment was that, with the deal, "the Senate is back in business."

The quote was from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), but the sentiment was near universal. In the Senate, business as usual too often amounts to delay and obstruction, and the chief enabler in this process is the filibuster. Under the terms of the deal announced Monday, Senate Democrats essentially agreed not to filibuster some of the president's judicial nominees if Senate Republicans agreed not to abolish the filibuster. We'll let you have this gun, Republicans told their colleagues, as long as you promise not to use it. ...

It hardly qualifies as commentary to note that politics trump principle in Washington. But it is worth pointing out that many of the same conservative Republicans who insisted that every judicial nominee deserves an up-or-down vote are threatening to filibuster a bill encouraging stem cell research. Many Democrats, meanwhile, came to realize that the filibuster is one of the shining jewels of American democracy only when they were in the minority.

As this page has argued, the filibuster is essentially a reactionary tool that unduly empowers obstructionist minorities. Due to its disproportional representation — California (population 36 million) and Delaware (population 830,000) each get two senators — minority rights are already well protected in the Senate. The filibuster, as an additional brake on democracy that goes beyond the constitutional framework to give individual senators even more power, should have been nuked for all purposes, not just in the context of judicial nominees.

I suspect that the LA Times identifies the "principle" that evades the Post's editorial board. The fourteen so-called centrists want to return to non-contention in the Senate, a place where no real conflict exists except a few debate sound bites to satisfy the red-meat portions of each party. After all, what do we have in this agreement that doesn't match up with the oldest form of politics: a secret agreement from a smoke-filled room among a handful of politicians working outside accountability and leadership? Many people, and not a few Senators, have lovingly referred to the "clubbiness" of the upper chamber, and now they have it back again. In truth, what they wanted was a lever to arrogate power back to a handful of Senators who will continue to work behind the scenes to undermine the will of American voters on both sides of the political divide, in the name of "compromise" and reasonableness.

Hey, Dred Scott was a compromise. So was Plessy v. Ferguson. Compromise doesn't equate to wisdom.

Speaking of wisdom, the centrists failed in achieving the Crown Jewel of editorial blessings, the New York Times. The Paper of Record suddenly went silent over arguably the biggest political story of the session. Instead of issuing hosannas for the centrists -- which they surely expected -- the Times instead focused on the big political issues of weapons in space, a report on Pat Tillman's death from friendly fire, and opposition to a West Side football stadium. Apparently, the Gray Lady couldn't find a principle at work, either.

The morning after their obscene display of effusive self-congratulation -- Robert Byrd even proclaimed that the Republic was saved, as if America had been built on and for the filibuster -- their target audience remains unimpressed. The centrists did no more than punt, and they stopped one of the more important debates that the Senate faced in years just to gain themselves the satisfaction of returning to secret handshake deals in back rooms rather than publicly representing their constituents.

Deconstructing The Deal

Based on reaction around the Internet, it appears that everyone except for the Senate and the media are unhappy about this compromise on judicial filibusters. Why? Let's take a look at the text of the deal and see if we can comprehend what each side won and lost.

Part I: Commitments on Pending Judicial Nominations

A. Votes for Certain Nominees. We will vote to invoke cloture on the following judicial nominees: Janice Rogers Brown (D.C. Circuit), William Pryor (11th Circuit), and Priscilla Owen (5th Circuit).

B. Status of Other Nominees. Signatories make no commitment to vote for or against cloture on the following judicial nominees: William Myers (9th Circuit) and Henry Saad (6th Circuit).

Obviously, this gives the White House three of the most contested and vilified judicial nominees in the process, although quite frankly, the Democrats never put together any good argument against any of these three. The Left has to be pulling their hair out over Janice Rogers Brown especially, as elevating a libertarian-conservative black woman will make it tougher to argue that the GOP opposes African-Americans in key positions. However, those are the only three guaranteed to get cloture out of five nominees mentioned.

Now in section B, the centrists have not pledged any guarantees of a vote for either Henry Saad or William Myers. However, they also do not call for either to be withdrawn, nor do they commit to blocking a vote. In fact, they have pledged to use their own discretion -- which may allow some of the Democrats to vote for cloture. I believe that both candidates may well get cloture, but that they have made a deal that some of the GOP centrists will vote against at least one of them in a floor vote, probably Saad. Saad may have sealed his own fate with his ill-advised e-mail attacking Debbie Stabenow in 2003, and the GOP may well have sacrificed him for that reason.

William Myers may just get filibustered, as the GOP probably doesn't want to give him up.

Now look at Part II:

A. Future Nominations. Signatories will exercise their responsibilities under the Advice and Consent Clause of the United States Constitution in good faith. Nominees should only be filibustered under extraordinary circumstances, and each signatory must use his or her own discretion and judgment in determining whether such circumstances exist.

B. Rules Changes. In light of the spirit and continuing commitments made in this agreement, we commit to oppose the rules changes in the 109th Congress, which we understand to be any amendment to or interpretation of the Rules of the Senate that would force a vote on a judicial nomination by means other than unanimous consent or Rule XXII.

Part A appears to agree to only participate in filibusters when personally convinced of extraordinary circumstances, which has been quoted elsewhere as signifying ethical issues and not ideology:

2. The fact that Senate Democrats are willing to allow cloture on Owen, Brown, and Pryor indicates that conservative judicial philosophy cannot be considered the basis for a filibuster, or an “extraordinary circumstance.”

The signatories may have agreed in this clause not to take direction from party leadership on filibustering or obstructionism, which for now means the Democrats. That would mean a coordinated filibuster might be enough to demonstrate bad faith ... or perhaps not. But in part B, it seems that the GOP signatories can exercise individual judgement on whether or not that is true. Its reliance on "continuing commitments" sounds like an out to bring back the Byrd option if the Democrats balk.

What does all this tell us?

1. Saad got tossed under the bus, although it may come from a failed confirmation vote rather than a filibuster, no matter what Reid says. If Reid demands a filibuster and all seven Democratic signatories support it, it will qualify as "bad faith," resulting in a resurrection of the Byrd option. I think all seven GOP signatories agreed to oppose Saad in a floor vote.

2. Myers may also have been tossed under the bus, although it looks from this that it may still be left to the individual conscience of the Senators.

3. Other than that, it appears that we have returned to status quo ante with an implicit admission from the GOP that filibusters are legitimate, and a matching one from the Democrats that they abused it. "Extraordinary circumstances" will probably be deciphered as ethics problems and not ideology, although the language after Part II-B seems to warn the White House about nominating strict ideologues to the bench from now on.

What we don't know is how this affects the rest of the nominees in the pipeline. One has to assume that the agreement explicitly names all those considered to have issues, and that all other nominees will be treated in accordance with the new rules from the centrists. That will prevail for as long as they can remain united in defense of their agreement.

In short, this could be merely objectionable and not a debacle, depending on how the GOP signatories interpret "extraordinary circumstances". One must suspect that this has already been defined confidentially within the group, and like Sean Rushton surmises, ideology doesn't play a part in it any longer. Under no circumstances can this be seen as a good deal for the Senate majority or for Constitutional rule. The net effect is that an even smaller minority in the Senate has hijacked the confirmation process than we saw during the filibusters -- and like all tyrannies, we can only hope for benevolent despotism rather than disaster.

And we can thank Bill Frist for his lack of leadership and resolve for taking a majority and turning it into a minority. Not One Dime for the NRSC as long as Frist remains majority leader, or for the Seven Dwarves ever. Patterico is on board with that pledge as well.

UPDATE: Mitch Berg starts off his open letter to Bill Frist thusly:

To: Bill Frist, US Senate. From: Mitch Berg, Schmuck Citizen and pissed-off former GOP contributor Re: Your Infinite Cretinism

Read the whole thing. God bless Mitch, he knows how to say what I really feel.

UPDATE II: I'm surprised that Hugh hasn't said much more than this:

It is impossible to say whether this is a "terrible" deal, a "bad" deal, or a very, very marginally "ok" deal, but it surely is not a good deal. Not one dime more for the NRSC from me unless and until the Supreme Court nominee gets confirmed, and no other filibusters develop. I won't spend money on a caucus supporting organization when the caucus can't deliver a majority. Mark Kennedy and other Senate candidates with spines, but not for the NRSC.

I suspect that Hugh wants to see how Saad and Myers gets handled by the 14 signatories as a signal flare for the rest of the slate. If the Democrats extend their filibusters and the GOP fails to respond, then we'll know the deal is a complete surrender. If both get defeated in a floor vote, we'll know the filibuster is dead for this session of Congress, barring ethics violations.

Deal Reached? (Live Blog)

News services are reporting that a centrist group of 12 Senators has reached a compromise on judicial confirmations:

Centrists from both parties reached a compromise Monday night to avoid a showdown on President Bush's stalled judicial nominees and the Senate's own filibuster rules, officials from both parties said.

These officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the agreement would clear the way for yes-or-no votes on some of Bush's nominees, but make no guarantee.

Under the agreement, Democrats would pledge not to filibuster any of Bush's future appeals court or Supreme Court nominees except in "extraordinary circumstances."

For their part, Republicans agreed not to support an attempt to strip Democrats of their right to block votes.

Under the agreement, Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen, nominated to a seat on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, would advance to a final confirmation vote.

If the Republicans have foresworn the Byrd option without an ironclad guarantee that the filibuster will not be used on nominees with majority support, then they have traded their hard-won majority for de facto minority status -- and the leadership will have to answer for this result. Let's see what the exact wording of the agreement will be. More later as it develops.

UPDATE: Coming into the middle of the press conference ... so far all I'm hearing is general rhetoric. "Good faith, mutual respect, and trust." Ooooo-kaaaaay. What are the particulars?

Michelle Malkin caught it from the beginning and says that Brown, Myers, and Owen will get their votes, although I think she means Pryor instead of Myers. Saad and Myers -- tossed under the bus.

Graham: "I changed my vote because we're at war and kids are dying." Strictly speaking, the kids swore to protect and defend the Constitution, while it sounds like these centrists just sold it out.

Fox News won't break away from the O'Reilly Factor? ...

So far, no one really has the agreement, but from what I've seen on television up to now, the GOP only got votes for 3 nominees and the Democrats still get to keep the judicial filibuster "under extraordinary circumstances." This is the exact scenario that I foresaw when I heard that the centrists were gathering in the smoke-filled room. They coughed up the Constitution and got guaranteed votes on less than half of their nominees.

Reid: "This is a significant victory for our country..." No, it's a significant victory for Reid. He just smoked Frist, and now he's using that hard-won "comity" to blast Bush and Cheney for power grabbing and perverting the Constitution. Yeah, great going, GOP.

Reid: Filibusters will continue on Saad and Myers.

Frist: Deal will require "careful monitoring". For what? You just gave away the store!

Frist is continuing to spin this into a win for the nominees, but it's not going to fly. The Democrats blocked at least two of the nominees and made no substantive guarantees to stop their obstructionism. He did say that "All options remain on the table, including the Constitutional option," but the momentum has clearly been brought to a halt.

This, in short, has been a clear victory for the Democrats and a massive failure for the GOP and the White House. The GOP just endorsed the filibuster, and will have no intellectual capacity to argue against its use later on. They sold the Constitution just to get less than half of its blockaded nominees through, and the result will be much less flexibility on future Supreme Court nominations.

Schumer: It's the White House's fault for not consulting with the Senate before making his nominations, like Clinton, Bush, and Reagan. Er, Chuck ... does the name Robert Bork ring a bell??

UPDATE: The Gang of Seven for the Republicans: McCain, Warner, Graham, Chaffee, Collins, Snowe, and DeWine. You can add Bill Frist to that list, for stalling this debate until the momentum from the previous election had dissipated.

The text of the agreement:

MEMORANDUM OF UNDERSTANDING ON JUDICIAL NOMINATIONS We respect the diligent, conscientious efforts, to date, rendered to the Senate by Majority Leader Frist and Democratic Leader Reid. This memorandum confirms an understanding among the signatories, based upon mutual trust and confidence, related to pending and future judicial nominations in the 109th Congress.

This memorandum is in two parts. Part I relates to the currently pending judicial nominees; Part II relates to subsequent individual nominations to be made by the President and to be acted upon by the Senate’s Judiciary Committee.

We have agreed to the following:

Part I: Commitments on Pending Judicial Nominations

A. Votes for Certain Nominees. We will vote to invoke cloture on the following judicial nominees: Janice Rogers Brown (D.C. Circuit), William Pryor (11th Circuit), and Priscilla Owen (5th Circuit).

B. Status of Other Nominees. Signatories make no commitment to vote for or against cloture on the following judicial nominees: William Myers (9th Circuit) and Henry Saad (6th Circuit).

Part II: Commitments for Future Nominations

A. Future Nominations. Signatories will exercise their responsibilities under the Advice and Consent Clause of the United States Constitution in good faith. Nominees should only be filibustered under extraordinary circumstances, and each signatory must use his or her own discretion and judgment in determining whether such circumstances exist.

B. Rules Changes. In light of the spirit and continuing commitments made in this agreement, we commit to oppose the rules changes in the 109th Congress, which we understand to be any amendment to or interpretation of the Rules of the Senate that would force a vote on a judicial nomination by means other than unanimous consent or Rule XXII.

We believe that, under Article II, Section 2, of the United States Constitution, the word “Advice” speaks to consultation between the Senate and the President with regard to the use of the President’s power to make nominations. We encourage the Executive branch of government to consult with members of the Senate, both Democratic and Republican, prior to submitting a judicial nomination to the Senate for consideration.

Such a return to the early practices of our government may well serve to reduce the rancor that unfortunately accompanies the advice and consent process in the Senate.

We firmly believe this agreement is consistent with the traditions of the United States Senate that we as Senators seek to uphold.

UPDATE II: DeWine, not Specter. I made the adjustment above.

Rassmussen: 57% Support Byrd Option

I missed this Rassmussen survey last week when it first came out. Based on their polling between May 12-13, Rassmussen reports that 57% of all Americans support changing Senate rules to ensure up or down votes by the full Senate on judicial nominees:

As the Judicial Nomination battle moves to its final days in the U.S. Senate, two weeks of partisan posturing have failed to change public opinion in a significant manner.

Today, 57% of Americans say that "Senate rules should be changed so that a vote must be taken on every person the President nominates to become a judge." That's unchanged from two weeks ago.

The only change of more than a point or two in the data came when we asked about the threat of some Democrats to procedurally shut down the Senate if the filibuster rules are changed. Two weeks ago, 51% of Americans were opposed to that strategy. Opposition to Democrats' retaliation has increased to 55% in the current survey.

Perhaps all the so-called "moderates" trying to compromise in order to allow for filibusters should understand that obstructionism doesn't play well with the electorate. The Democrats certainly read this report. No wonder they've backed off their threat to slow down or stop the Senate from conducting business if they lose. (h/t: Sun)

Not One Dime: Down To The Wire

In all probability, we are less than 24 hours from the Senate deciding whether to return to majority rule on confirmation of judicial nominees or an endorsement of the usurpation of nominating authority by the Senate minority. Various reports have moderates in both parties working towards compromises that might be acceptable to enough Senators in both parties to block the showdown on the Constitutionality of the filibuster as applied to judicial nominations, but time is quickly running out on such efforts. George Bush made his expectations clear this morning:

"My job is to pick people who will interpret the Constitution, not use the bench from which to write laws," Bush said from the White House. "And I expect them to get an up or down vote, that's what I expect. And I think the American people expect that as well — people ought to have a fair hearing and they ought to get an up-or-down vote on the floor."

As Hugh Hewitt noted this morning, the latest Senator to display some wobbliness is Lindsay Graham. Graham complained that the Senate has acted like "we're in the third grade," and pressed the case for a middle-ground solution. However, as I explained earlier today, any compromise that includes an endorsement of judicial filibusters in the future under any conditions isn't middle ground but a radical rewriting of the relationship between the Legislature and the Executive -- in effect, declaring Senate rules to override the Constitution on interbranch activity.

Please call Senator Graham's office today at 202-225-3121 to remind him of the need to preserve the Constitution. Right now, the lines are busy, which indicates that a number of people have already decided to make those calls. I called Senator Hagel's office instead and spoke to a staffer named Kelly, a kind and gracious person who took my information. Be kind and gracious in return to whomever you speak. Tell them that Not One Dime will be forthcoming for any Republican Senator who sells out the Constitution for the path of least resistance.

The pressing deadline may convince the wobblies to cut a deal. Make sure they know the consequences of such an act.

UPDATE: I spoke to a staffer at Senator Lindsay Graham's office and warned her of my reference to her boss in this post, and that some of you may be calling today to let them know how you feel. You can call 202-224-5972 to reach Senator Graham's office directly.

UPDATE II: Second Wobbly sighting -- Senator Mike DeWine of Ohio, from last Thursday:

When the talks broke up on Thursday night, one of the bargainers, Sen. Mike DeWine, R- Ohio said he wanted to reach an accord with Democrats so that both parties would stop using the filibuster.

But the tactic should remain on the shelf, he said, to be used only "in very extraordinary circumstances."

"If we are forced to go ahead and change the way the Senate operates, then that option of using the filibuster will be gone," he said. "We should have that option there in very extreme cases for the minority to be able to use a filibuster when the minority feels that it is needed.”

The Republic managed without it for 214 years, save on one occasion where a bipartisan effort defeated a cloture motion on Abe Fortas in 1968 to give Lyndon Johnson time to withdraw his nomination for Supreme Court Chief Justice, rather than get embarassed by seeing him defeated on an up-or-down vote by the full Senate. The filibuster is blatantly unconstitutional for confirmations on judicial nominations and needs to be eliminated.

Why Democrats Are The Radicals On Filibustering

The Democrats have recently begun a scare campaign that claims Republicans want to eliminate the filibuster altogether, not just for judicial nominations but also for legislation. This new conspiracy theory states that the GOP will set a precedent on Tuesday that makes it easy for the majority to cast off this particular Senate tradition. Unsurprisingly, John McCain mouthed this canard to the press:

"We're talking about changing the rules of the Senate with 51 votes, which has never happened in the history of the United States Senate," Mr. McCain said, adding that he was worried that eliminating the filibuster for judicial nominees would lead to the elimination of the 214-year-old parliamentary tactic altogether.

"If you have 51 votes changing the rules of the Senate, nominations of the president is next, and then legislation follows that, and we will now become an institution exactly like the House of Representatives," Mr. McCain [said].

McCain must have fallen asleep during Senate History Month, because the GOP won't be setting any precedent on Tuesday -- only following the four set by Robert Byrd and the Democrats. Byrd changed the filibuster rules four times during his tenure as Majority Leader, abetted in at least one instance by former VP Walter Mondale, who now writes silly op-eds about the danger of such maneuvers to the Republic. Instead of listening to his Republican colleagues and paying attention to the facts, however, McCain continues in his ongoing quest to pander to the anti-Republican sentiment in the press.

No one expects the GOP to eliminate the filibuster for legislation. Legislation originates within the Senate and is therefore an internal process, and the Senate is well within its power to regulate debate on its own terms for that purpose. However, the confirmation of executive appointments and treaties involve the power and responsibilities of the executive branch, and the Senate does not set the rules for those purposes. Those rules are governed by the Constitution, which calls for supermajorities only on specific items -- none of which are judicial appointments. This attempt by Democrats to apply an internal control to an external, interbranch function and Constitutional responsibility amounts to a usurpation of power by the Legislature, and worse, by a minority within the Legislature.

If the Democrats want judicial nominations to require a supermajority, they need to propose a Constitutional amendment to change the rules. That will require a supermajority within Congress and three-quarters of the states to ratify it, an impossible task, given that 214 years of our existence has never shown a need for such a rule. Further, the Democrats will never propose it, because it would expose them as the radicals of this issue, as opposed to their claims of GOP power-grabbing. Instead, they propose to pervert the Constitution and interbranch governance by smokescreens and intimidation -- and for the past two years, the GOP allowed them to get away with it.

That's why the GOP cannot compromise on the use of the filibuster. Any deal which includes its future use for judicial confirmations only endorses it as a legitimate tactic and seriously twists the Constitutional balance of powers. That should never be the basis of any compromise.

NOTE: I split this out from an earlier post, as it made better editorial sense to have this argument stand alone.

Newsweek's Pandering To Anti-Americanism Abroad

As the blog Riding Sun noted yesterday, the Qu'ran-flushing urban legend Newsweek printed earlier this month wasn't their first excursion into anti-American pandering abroad. In February, while they printed innocuous covers of George Bush and Oscar nominees for their American editions, the weekly magazine used this cover in Japan:

The translation of the headline is "The Day America Died," in an apparent reference to George Bush's re-election. Instead of informing us of our demise here in the States, however, Newsweek gave us a picture of George Bush with the headline, "America Leads ... But Is Anyone Following?" Apparently, Newsweek somehow believes that corpses lead and that some people follow them.

Magazines with foreign editions routinely edit for their target populations. However, Newsweek's editorial choices for Japan, a staunch ally of the US, do not appear to reflect their market but an editorial desire to undermine American ties to the Japanese -- a similar impulse as the publication of the false desecration story. It also demonstrates a pattern of anti-American sentiment and editorial direction at Newsweek that none of Richard Smith's non-apology apologies addresses.

Instead of putting the American flag in the trash, I'd suggest Americans put Newsweek and their reporters and editors there instead.

UPDATE: CQ reader Mr. Michael corrects me (ellipses in the original):

On the Newsweek covers.... check Riding Sun again; the "Bush" Cover is for the English Language International version... the Domestic Issue Cover showed three clods from Hollywood, with a cover story about the upcoming Oscars. The Anti-American 'news article' wasn't even IN the domestic version, but it was in the English Language International version... Cowards. They can undermine the U.S. in multiple languages, just not in America itself.

Thanks for the clarification.

George Allen Predicts Byrd Option Tomorrow

Despite the media grandstanding of John McCain in attempting to fashion a compromise that winds up tossing judicial nominees under the bus, fellow GOP Senator George Allen predicts that the Senate will be forced to adopt the Byrd option and rule filibusters out of order for judicial confirmations. Allen told ABC yesterday that the Republicans have the votes to do it on Tuesday:

Sen. George Allen, Virginia Republican, said yesterday that he doesn't think a compromise can be reached with Senate Democrats and predicted his party has the 51 votes needed to employ the so-called "nuclear option" that will prevent the filibustering of judicial nominees.

"I just think that it is not that big of a deal for senators to exercise their constitutional responsibility," Mr. Allen said on ABC's "This Week." "I think that we'll get the constitutional option done, and we'll vote on judges."

Also yesterday, Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, answered "yes" when asked on CBS' "Face the Nation" whether his party "has the votes to overturn this Senate rule."

In fact, the Democrats have already come to that conclusion. As the Washington Times notes, the Democrats in recent days have dropped the threat of stopping Senate business, spooked by the widespread comparisons to Newt Gingrich and 1995. Now they reject even the notion of a slowdown, as Chuck Schumer declared:

"We are not going to attempt to shut down the Senate," said Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat and early architect of the filibusters. "We are not going to attempt to slow down the Senate."

The new Democratic plan for retaliation, Mr. Schumer said, will be to "implement our strategy of basically trying to use the Senate rules to put items on the agenda that the American people care about."

"We are going to attempt to use the rules -- as well as outside pressure -- to force the Senate to take up agenda items that we haven't done before," said Mr. Schumer, who now heads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC).

That represents a significant climbdown from their earlier threats, and one that clearly shows they expect to lose. In truth, the Democrats had nothing to offer the GOP for a compromise. They refused to foreswear filibusters in the future in exchange for picking off one or two of the nominees, and without that, the GOP could not trust them to exercise any discretion of its use, especially given their track record. They've blocked a third of Bush's appellate-court nominees by filibuster, including several with the highest ABA ratings, an abuse that will cost them access to that tactic in the end.

Maybe They Should Have Chosen A Better Spokesperson

The Liberal Party sent new Cabinet minister Belinda Stronach to campaign in a critical federal by-election in Labrador this weekend in order to ensure the retention of a Commons seat for the Grits. While the seat in Goose Bay has historically been safe for the Liberals, with only one Tory elected in the last 50 years, the appearance of Stronach might not make for the best reminder of Liberal politics at the moment:

Belinda Stronach was among three Liberal cabinet ministers campaigning in Labrador yesterday, two days before an important federal by-election in the region.

The newly minted Human Resources Minister gave her first major speech since defecting from the Conservative Party last week, supporting Todd Russell in tomorrow's by-election to succeed the late Liberal MP Lawrence O'Brien.

If the Tories can pull off an upset, they can gain a seat in the Commons and once again have a thin majority for a new try at a no-confidence motion. Likely, however, Paul Martin will simply prorogue Parliament if the Liberals lose in Goose Bay, and may well keep Parliament out of session until next year, hoping for better political fortunes. After all, Martin has his budget, and he's met the requirements for this year in having Parliament in session. That already seems likely even without losing Goose Bay.

It's precisely that kind of machination that Stronach represents, especially in her new position as Human Resources minister. The G&M didn't give the gist of her speech, but her appearance must have seemed rather odd to the staunchly Liberal riding. Her recent defection cannot have built much trust in her convictions, and her opportunistic elevation to the Cabinet only reinforces the garage-sale tactics of the Martin government. The Tories in the riding, already seething from her betrayal, will build even more momentum in getting out the vote.

One wonders why Stronach has been asked to appear anywhere outside her own riding. Do the Liberals have a problem in getting more reliable campaigners on the road?

Arab World Recognizes Democratization Policy's Power

I missed this yesterday in my busy day, but don't miss it if you haven't yet read it. For those who doubt whether George Bush's policy of democratization as a weapon against Islamist terror in the Middle East will prove successful, Fouad Ajami writes about his experiences on a tour of the region and the recognition and admiration that Bush has achieved from Arabs in giving them hope for modernization and liberty. His essay, adapted by Opinionjournal from a recent lecture, makes clear that pursuing Scowcroftian "stability" no longer remained a possibility:

"George W. Bush has unleashed a tsunami on this region," a shrewd Kuwaiti merchant who knows the way of his world said to me. The man had no patience with the standard refrain that Arab reform had to come from within, that a foreign power cannot alter the age-old ways of the Arabs. "Everything here--the borders of these states, the oil explorations that remade the life of this world, the political outcomes that favored the elites now in the saddle--came from the outside. This moment of possibility for the Arabs is no exception." A Jordanian of deep political experience at the highest reaches of Arab political life had no doubt as to why history suddenly broke in Lebanon, and could conceivably change in Syria itself before long. "The people in the streets of Beirut knew that no second Hama is possible; they knew that the rulers were under the gaze of American power, and knew that Bush would not permit a massive crackdown by the men in Damascus."

My informant's reference to Hama was telling: It had been there in 1982, in that city of the Syrian interior, that the Baathist-Alawite regime had broken and overwhelmed Syrian society. Hama had been a stronghold of the Muslim Brotherhood, a fortress of the Sunni middle class. It had rebelled, and the regime unleashed on it a merciless terror. There were estimates that 25,000 of its people perished in that fight. Thenceforth, the memory of Hama hung over the life of Syria--and Lebanon. But the people in the plazas of Beirut, and the Syrian intellectuals who have stepped forth to challenge the Baathist regime, have behind them the warrant, and the green light, of American power and protection.

Ajami toured through Kuwait, Qatar, Iraq, and Lebanon, and kept hearing this refrain over and over again. He discovered a new Arab optimism in the future where before had existed a bitter Arab culture of fatalism and conspiracy theories about their oppression. Now, with the power of self-determination within their grasp, the Arabs appear ready to abandon both.

Nowhere has that been more evident, according to Ajami's observances, than in their media. The press under the various dictatorships remained strictly controlled, and usually relied on accusations of conspiracy theories that imagined Zionist influences on Western capitalists ever ready to exploit the Arabs and extend their poverty and misery. Now, Ajami notes, the Arab press has flourished and suddenly discovered objective journalism, at least as a concept. Iraq has over 250 dailies represented a wide variety of editorial outlooks, and all challenging each other to report truth rather than the wildest and most paranoid rumors.

Read all of Ajami's essay. His reporting on the progress in the Middle East remains singular, both in the extent of the travel and research Ajami performed and his willingness to part with an American media pessimism that almost rivals that of Arab press in days gone by.

Movie Review: Revenge Of The Sith (Spoilers!)

After spending the day cleaning out the office and the garage -- and really not finishing either after several hours, which should tell you all you need to know about the scale of the job -- I went out with my son and daughter-in-law to see Star Wars, Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith. The First Mate begged off, since she felt tired out from the day and also since she's successfully avoided experiencing any of the six Star Wars movies up to now, and didn't want to lose her perfect record.

** SPOILERS **

Plenty of bloggers have already commented on this film, and I've read their reviews, which helped in keeping my expectations in check going in. Because of that, and the fact that the last two movies had so many problems, I wound up pleasantly surprised by RotS. The movie starts at a fast pace, with the Clone Wars winding down and General Grievous on the run, with Chancellor Palpatine as a hostage. Obi-Wan and Anakin rescue Palpatine, which of course sets off a whole series of events, all of them bad. Anakin kills a "disarmed" Dooku, an unfortunate choice of words given Dooku's state when Anakin beheads him. It's not the last time the dialogue gives unintended laughs, either.

The next hour of the film focuses on exposition, traditionally the weak point of George Lucas' epic, and this episode is no exception.

The Jedis still operate in the dark as to Palpatine's secret identity as Darth Sidious, Dooku's master. This is a central weakness to the entire prequel trilogy; supposedly masters of the universe, these knights have no inkling of evil either from Palpatine or from Anakin, nor do they sense Anakin's paternity of Padme's pregnancy. One wonders exactly what the Jedi actually can sense with their powers, and it begs the question as to how they've ever been able to beat any Sith in their entire history.

At any rate, they have no clue, and in fact make the mistake of allowing Anakin to get too close to Palpatine. They then undercut him when his alliance with the Chancellor threatens them, and yet afterwards have the nerve to ask him to become their spy on Palpatine and his actions. All this proves is that the Jedi have to be the world's worst practitioners of psychology and politics even as they try to use both. Small wonder that Anakin dumps the Jedi; the Council has become so inept it's a wonder that he doesn't leave them strictly out of exasperation with their incompetence.

Meanwhile, Anakin starts to dream that Padme won't survive childbirth, and decides that this is a prophetic vision of the future. The entire Jedi council can't figure out that Anakin has any relationship with Padme, but Palpatine/Sidious has it all figured out. He reveals himself as the Sith Lord to Anakin and promises him that between the two of them, they can discover the secret to defeating death, which would allow Anakin to save Padme. Anakin betrays Sidious to Mace Windu, who immediately gathers a handful of Jedi to arrest him.

This is the crucial point of the first trilogy, and Lucas boots it. Windu declares Sidious under arrest, at which point Sidious busts a couple of moves and kills the other Jedi with Windu, who fights Sidious eventually to his advantage. Anakin shows up just as Windu has Sidious under the light-sabre, having weathered his Dark Side attack and reflected it back on Sidious, leaving him scarred and vulnerable. Instead of arresting Sidious, however, Windu wants him dead -- which is the same basic thing that Anakin did to Dooku that we're supposed to make us think that he's slipping closer to the Dark Side. Anakin betrays Windu and allows Sidious to kill him, at which point Anakin swears allegiance to Sidious and becomes Darth Vader, his Sith apprentice.

Fortunately, this is where the movie improves tremendously.

For the first time in Lucas' new set of films, we get truly heartbreaking emotion as Anakin flings himself into the Dark Side and the Clone Army betrays the Jedi, killing all but Yoda and Obi-Wan. The new battle scenes pick up the pace, and Natalie Portman embodies the disbelief that we can't really feel about Anakin's betrayal, thanks to Hayden Christensen's non-stop bad-boy attitude through two films now. However, with the secret out, Christensen becomes both haunted and vengeful, transforming into a killing machine as he wipes out the last of Sidious' rather clueless partners in his grasp for power. Yoda and Obi-Wan set out to destroy the two Sith lords, and Yoda can only manage a draw and a retreat, while Obi-Wan leaves Anakin for dead in a gruesome state ... but fails to finish him off.

And Padme? Anakin mistakes her arrival with Obi-Wan as a stowaway as a further betrayal and attacks her, causing her to lose any desire to live. She survives to give birth to Luke and Leia and dies of a broken heart. Padme dies in the end by Anakin's betrayal of the Jedi, not from childbirth itself, and while the Emperor lies to Anakin when he regains consciousness, it's close enough to the truth so that Anakin senses his culpability nonetheless. His entire betrayal of the Jedi was for nothing, and anything left of Anakin gets swallowed up by Darth Vader in that realization.

That makes the entire movie worth it, in my opinion. It has real emotion, real conflict, and real depth for the first time since The Empire Strikes Back. The acting and the dialogue has improved, although the latter only had one direction to go. Speaking of direction, that improved with this episode as well, especially in the pacing. The special effects don't overpower the movie as they seemed to do with Episodes 1 and 2. The last hour flew by and kept a grip on my attention.

If you want to view the movies in the new order, you're going to notice some problems. First, the inclusion of Obi-Wan at the childbirth makes a key sequence of ESB strange. Obi-Wan says to Yoda, "That boy is our last hope," and Yoda says, "No -- there is another." Wouldn't Obi-Wan already know that, seeing as how he watched Padme give birth to twins? In RotJ, Luke asks Leia if she remembers their mother, and Leia says all that she can remember was that she always seemed sad. Leia would have to have had one hell of a memory for that, as Padme dies about two minutes after Leia's born. More will probably occur to me when I go back and see the old trilogy again.

Don't worry about that too much. If you saw the first two installments of this trilogy, you'll love this episode. It's almost worth going back and seeing 1 and 2 again.

Newsweek: We're Really Sorry Even Though We Did Nothing Wrong

Newsweek again issued a mea culpa for its false report of Qu'ran desecration, this time issued from Richard Smith, the magazine's editor-in-chief. As in previous statements from the magazine, the apology comes complete with an explanation of how they didn't do anything wrong and that the Pentagon bears responsibility for not stopping them from printing the story:

As most of you know, we have unequivocally retracted our story. In the light of the Pentagon's denials and our source's changing position on the allegation, the only responsible course was to say that we no longer stand by our story.

We have also offered a sincere apology to our readers and especially to anyone affected by violence that may have been related to what we published. To the extent that our story played a role in contributing to such violence, we are deeply sorry. ...

One of the frustrating aspects of our initial inquiry is that we seem to have taken so many appropriate steps in reporting the Guantanamo story. On the basis of what we know now, I've seen nothing to suggest that our people acted unethically or unprofessionally. Veteran reporter Michael Isikoff relied on a well-placed and historically reliable government source. We sought comment from one military spokesman (he declined) and provided the entire story to a senior Defense Department official, who disputed one assertion (which we changed) and said nothing about the charge of abusing the Qur'an. Had he objected to the allegations, I am confident that we would have at the very least revised the item, but we mistakenly took the official's silence for confirmation.

As in Newsweek's earlier missives, they continue to apologive while claiming to lack understanding why the story went wrong. Never do they think to question the basic premise of what they were told. Did it make sense to anyone at Newsweek that interrogators would get better response from Islamists by desecrating their holy book? It didn't pass the smell test for me when I first heard it, and it still doesn't to this day. Newspaper reporters should have some sense of skepticism, especially in direct proportion to the sensationalism of the story, and Isikoff and his editors applied theirs in inverse proportion.

Another question is the newsworthiness of the story. Flushing Qu'rans breaks no Geneva Convention or treaty, and to describe it as "abuse" insults the readers' intelligence, even if true. Smith never addresses the editorial decision that concluded this story worthy of reporting, or on what basis that decision was made. Since Newsweek still has not reported the strict guidelines set down by the military for handling the Qu'ran, it hasn't even the excuse that they found someone violating a military rule. Clearly, Newsweek wanted to run with a sensational story despite a lack of any real newsworthiness, one that would generate a lot of publicity for the magazine. Who made that decision, and why? How will Newsweek stop that from happening again? Smith doesn't address that.

In short, while the pleas for mercy now originate at the top and use more effusive language, the message has remained the same -- we're sorry for doing nothing wrong, we won't explain our editorial decisions in running this story, and it's all the Pentagon's fault for not stopping us. Smith should have saved himself the trouble.

First Lady Takes Flack For Newsweek's Lie In Jerusalem

First Lady Laura Bush encountered vociferous protests in Jerusalem as she toured the city, trying to use her normally calming and diplomatic presence to encourage Palestinians and Israelis to push for a peaceful, negotiated resolution to the issues facing them. Instead, when she visited the mosque at the Dome of the Rock, militant-led protestors decried the visit in light of the false Newsweek reports of Qu'ran desecration:

Protesters besieged Laura Bush during her visit Sunday to two of Jerusalem's most sacred sites, with Israeli police locking arms to restrain the crowd and Secret Service agents packed tightly around America's first lady. ...

Anti-American sentiment is running high in the Mideast because of a variety of factors, including a now-retracted report in Newsweek that Pentagon investigators had found evidence interrogators at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, placed copies of the Quran, the Muslim holy book, in washrooms to unsettle suspects and flushed a Quran down a toilet.

"We in principle don't reject anyone's visit to the Al Aqsa Mosque (compound), but we see in the visit of Mrs. Bush an attempt to whitewash the face of the United States, after the crimes that the American interrogators had committed when they desecrated the Quran," the militant Islamic Hamas group said in a statement on its Web site.

Not that the Israeli extremists behaved much better at the Wailing Wall:

Mrs. Bush, who is on a tour intended partly to help defuse anti-American sentiment in the region, placed a note in the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest shrine. She wrote the note on the flight Sunday from Jordan to Israel, but wanted to keep the contents private, a spokeswoman said.

Dozens of protesters stood nearby, shouting, "Free Pollard now." Jonathan Pollard, an American Jew who is serving life sentence in a U.S. prison for spying for Israel, was a civilian intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy.

The first lady was mobbed by protesters and local reporters, and Secret Service agents and Israeli police had to physically hold back the crowd as she approached the wall.

Newsweek should take some pride in its accomplishment in dismantling American outreach efforts to moderate Muslims in the Middle East. They appear to have been very effective. As far as Jonathan Pollard goes, the Israelis knew what they were doing when they had him transmit classified material to them. He got what was coming to him, and he gets to live with it. If Pollard couldn't do the time, he shouldn't have done the crime.

Janice Rogers Brown vs Ted Kennedy On Free Speech

The Democrats in the Senate have complained that judicial nominee Janice Rogers Brown is outside of the mainstream, an extremist that threatens American personal freedoms. Ted Kennedy charges her with "a deep hostility to civil rights," which Charles Hurt notes in a short article in today's Washington Times. For Ted's idea of how freedom and civil rights should be protected, Hurt notes this passage from Brown's testimony at the Judiciary Committee:

Mr. Kennedy also expressed concern about a case Justice Brown handled involving racial slurs in the workplace and scolded her for not being more concerned about such behavior. Justice Brown wrote that the First Amendment guarantees free speech and prohibits the federal government from ordering a supervisor not to use racial slurs.

"How does that possibly advance the cause of justice and fulfill what we were trying to do to deal with this kind of verbal harassment in the civil rights laws?" Mr. Kennedy asked.

"Well, Senator," Justice Brown replied, "Let me say that I absolutely agree with you that no one should be subjected to this kind of harassment, to verbal slurs. ... All that I was saying in that case is that the damages remedy is a deterrent. I think that damages in this particular case would be totally effective because you're dealing with this corporation that is not going to want to go through this continually."

So Kennedy argues that the federal government should have the ability to impose speech codes in a private-sector workplace, while Brown argued that the corporation should be held responsible for its work environment instead. Which of these stances shows support for the First Amendment and civil rights? Which person in this instance supported the extreme remedy for a civil tort? No peeking at your neighbor's answer, kids ...

In truth, Brown represents the mainstream and supports civil rights far more than do Kennedy, Leahy, and the extremist wing of the Senate Democratic caucus. Those men would impose federal speech codes on the nation, forbidding the utterance of words and ideas they find repulsive -- and while in many instances they may be right in finding them repulsive, in many instances they would simply ban speech that contradicts their political point of view. That's why we have a First Amendment.

Live Blog: Howard Dean

9:01 - On filibusters: "We need more than one party in charge." Perhaps the Democrats could start winning majorities in order to ensure that.

9:04 - Confronted with Democrats' quotes opposing filibusters in the past, Dean changes the subjects. Now he's complaining about Bush's "town meetings" as an example -- WTF?

9:05 - First reference to Tom DeLay!

9:07 - He brought crib notes for his interview to cover his Tom DeLay. Cute.

9:08 - Russert plays the "jail sentence" clip, and Russert slams him with his earlier Osama quote. Response: "I don't think I'm prejudging [DeLay]." Then he says a jury will decide that, even though he hasn't even been indicted. Russert then reads Barney Frank's quote and Dean refuses to acknowledge the issue, saying that his "admonishments" by the House equals a criminal conviction in court.

9:10 - Howard thinks he's Harry Truman!

9:13 - Retraction on DeLay? "Absolutely not!"

9:14 - Russert confronts Dean on his remarks in Philadelphia Inquirer about being on message, and Dean excuses himself in light of the scandals involving Jack Abramoff. He describes Abramoff as Bush's chief fund raiser, but in truth Abramoff raised funds for all sorts of lobbies, and Democrats benefitted at least as much from Abramoff -- or at least they're wrapped up in the same scandals as Republicans involving Abramoff. Russert let him off the hook on that point.

9:16 - Social Security private accounts: "It's brought to you by the same people who brought you Enron." Enron cooked its books during the Clinton administration and got caught by the Bush administration during its first year in office.

9:19 - Republicans eeeeeevil? "Not as individuals ..."

9:20 - Dean's flogging the mercury-level meme again.

9:22 - Russert tackles the Saddam question by noting that Democrats insisted that Saddam was a threat -- like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton -- and Dean says that the President misled them by twisting the intelligence. The problem is that they said these things when Clinton was president as well, which Russert failed to note. Not only that, but the Senate has already completed its investigation and reported that Bush didn't twist the intelligence to support his conclusions on Iraq.

9:25 - "I will use whatever means I have to root out hypocrisy ... We have strong moral values in our party." See his comments on Osama and DeLay above for his tough stance on hypocrisy and morals.

9:27 - Democrats believe in individual rights and individual freedoms?

9:29 - Dean claimns that Democrats want to make abortions "rare", but Russert points out that Democrats have voted against every single restriction on abortion ever presented. Dean stammers back to the cliches.

9:32 - First break, and Dean ends by repeated the canard that abortions have gone up by 25% during Bush's term. I've debunked this before, but it just shows you how much the Democrats rely on urban legends for their arguments. (See also Michelle Malkin.)

9:39 - Schiavo: "This will be the turning point on ... instrusiveness."

9:41 - The Dean base, as Russert points out, hardly looks like the Democratic Party. Dean turns that around to an argument about his Christianity and says he will not be "lectured to" about his spirituality.

9:43 - Not one sitting Democratic governor has appeared with Dean at his fundraisers. Dean claims that when he was in Mississippi, four former governors appeared with him. If he keeps it up, he may have a lot more "former governors" to make those appearances nationwide.

9:44 - USA Today's article gets this response: "There's more petulance in that story than facts."

9:47 - On Bernie Sanders, self-proclaimed Socialist: "Bernie's a populist, not a Socialist." Russert: "It says in his book that he's a Socialist." Dean: "We're talking words. Bernie votes 98% of the time with the Democrats." Did Howard just admit that Democrats are Socialists?

9:49 - Interview concludes. Dean seemed awfully restrained this morning, but he still managed to continue to shoot himself in the foot. Most laughable was his contention that the Democrats represent the moderate position on abortion, which is only true if you buy into the Peter Singer point of view, where parents should be allowed to kill newborns if they appear unsatisfactory.

Most notable, I think, is his near-obsession with Tom DeLay. Clearly, DeLay worries the Democrats and they have targeted him for destruction in order to eliminate his influence. Dean gives the game away with his repetitive, Rain Man-like free association back to DeLay on almost every point during this interview. If DeLay has such a good chance of getting indicted for criminal behavior, why keep bringing him up? Why not just let the DA bring an indictment and let it speak for itself? Indictments and prison sentences aren't the point; crippling DeLay politically and the GOP by extension is what the Democrats want, and they're committing character assassination to ensure it.

I give Howard a C-. He should have kept the focus positive. Instead, he lashed out at DeLay and that kept him on the defensive with a reluctant Russert almost throughout the interview.

UPDATE: The Political Teen has video of Dean on DeLay.

UPDATE II: Transcript here.