Dueling leaks

If the Supreme Court nominee announcement was intended to distract everyone from Plamegate, it worked.
For about 24 hours.
Here's Thursday's front page story in the Washington Post -- 'Plame's Identity Marked As Secret' which describes the State Department memo that Powell was supposedly carrying around Air Force One on the trip to Africa and which said that "The paragraph identifying [Valerie Wilson] as the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV was clearly marked to show that it contained classified material at the 'secret' level, two sources said. The CIA classifies as 'secret' the names of officers whose identities are covert . . . Anyone reading that paragraph should have been aware that it contained secret information . . . It is a federal crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, for a federal official to knowingly disclose the identity of a covert CIA official if the person knows the government is trying to keep it secret."
I also have the impression from this story that the Fitzgerald investigation staff (and maybe Powell, too) are countering with their own leaks the heavy spinning of leaks from the GOP usual suspects about Rove's Sargeant Schultz imitation -- he knew nu-thing, NU-THING!

"Delayed indefinitely" or "still on the docket"?

The Globe and Mail: Mad-cow case delayed indefinitely
Well, I'm not sure I would use the term "indefinitely" for this delay -- when the written reasons why the appeal court overturned Judge Cebull's injunction are received, then the Judge will decide whether to schedule another hearing.
The Billings Gazette reported the story this way last Friday: "A hearing on a request for permanent injunction against Canadian live cattle entering the United States is still on the docket of U.S. District Judge Richard Cebull in Billings. The judge will make no decision on the July 27 trial until he has reviewed the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals' reasons for dissolving his preliminary injunction, issued March 2, his law clerk said Friday afternoon. "
Cebull's injunction in March was pretty supportive of R-CALF's case in just about every respect.

The USDA has evidenced a preconceived intention, based upon inappropriate considerations, to rush to reopen the border regardless of uncertainties in the agency's knowledge of the possible impacts on human and animal health. Deference cannot be given to an agency that has made the decision to open the border before completing the necessary scientific analysis or risks to human health. The USDA cannot favor trade with Canada over human and animal health within the U.S. . . Plantiff has demonstrated the numerous procedural and substantive shortcomings of the USDA's decision to allow importation of Canadian cattle and beef. The serious irreparable harm that will occur when Canadian cattle and meat enter the U.S. and co-mingle with the U.S. meat supply justifies issuance of a preliminary injunction preventing the expansion of imports allowed under the Final Rule pending a review on the merits. As the States of Connecticut, New Mexico, North Dakota, Montana, Nevada, South Dakota and West Virginia have stated in the Amicus Curiae Brief: "The threats are great. Delay is prudent and largely harmless."

As well as the brief from seven states, the U.S. congress also passed in March a joint motion of disapproval of the border reopening.
So I don't think we can assume we are out of the woods quite yet.

"It coulda been worse" -- what a resounding endorsement!

Yale law professor Robert W. Gordon provides some initial reactions to Bush's supreme court nominee John Roberts:

Roberts is a very conservative nominee. Both business and social conservatives will support him strongly . . . his career locates him solidly on the far right of today's Court, the Rehnquist-Scalia-Thomas wing . . . All the indications are that he will become another vote to expand presidential power in national-security affairs, to limit the federal government's authority to regulate business and the environment and protect civil rights, to make it harder for women, minorities, labor and the disabled to pursue practical remedies in the courts, and to favor a larger role for religion in public life and as object of public subsidy. He is most likely to do this incrementally, case-by-case, rather than by sweeping new doctrines. My guess is that he would not vote to overrule Roe v. Wade but would sustain state efforts to chip away at abortion rights. On economic liberties, however, he might well be a more adventurous innovator. He wrote articles as a law student suggesting that courts use novel theories of the Takings and Contracts clauses of the Constitution to strike down state action affecting business (such as legislation creating new rights for workers). He has done advisory work for right-wing public-interest firms like the Washington Legal Foundation. He may well be a quiet but effective influence for the piecemeal demolition of the regulatory welfare state. Because his style is quiet and low-key, he is more likely to attract votes of fellow Justices than the inflammatory Scalia and the mediocre Thomas. Roberts will be very hard to challenge, because all Bush's choices were bound to be bad and this one could have been much worse.

Actually, maybe not. Sure, Bush could have pandered to the Christian Right by nominating Judge Roy Moore, but he, like Bolton, is such a controversial figure that he would never have been confirmed. A stealth conservative like Roberts will attract just enough Democratic support to be confirmed -- just in time to rule on these cases, and perhaps also on Rove's conviction.

It's all going according to plan -- but it's Iran's plan

Robert Scheer writes about Iraq's dangerous new friend, Iran.
So the United States has destroyed their army as an effective fighting machine and strangled their economy and destroyed their reputation for abiding by the rule of law and killed or injured tens of thousands of people -- all for the sake of establishing in Iraq a religious fundamentalist regime which prefers to ally with Iran.

Forced democratization of Iraq, according to its neocon architects, was supposed to secure oil for the U.S., protect Israel, open markets to Western corporations and, oh yeah, maybe even decrease terrorism. After the invasion, however, the U.S. . . . was loath to allow elections, because their outcome would probably not produce a pliant government. Then Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the Shiite religious leader, threatened to take his followers into the streets against the foreign occupation if one-person-one-vote elections were not allowed. And when it became clear the "wrong" guys might win the elections the U.S. was forced to hold, the Bush White House, according to an investigative article by Seymour Hersh in the current New Yorker, tried to buy the vote for former CIA asset Iyad Allawi. When Allawi's slate was soundly defeated, what was Bush to do? With absolutely nothing having gone right in Iraq between the successful military invasion and the inspiring election nearly two years later, he had no choice but to embrace the winners — mostly Shiite, mostly fundamentalists — as the saviors of a free and democratic Iraq. Sadly, they are nothing of the sort. In Basra, where they have been in power since the U.S. invasion, religious thugs are in de facto control, applying more oppressive theocratic rules over women's behavior and other basic human rights than neighboring Iran. Even worse, their victory has fueled fierce Sunni resentment, and the accompanying insurgency has begun targeting Shiite civilians with the clear goal of fomenting ethnic war. Over the weekend, more than 100 people were killed by suicide bombers. Sistani himself denounced what he ominously said was now a "genocidal war." Facing that hideous possibility, is it surprising to find the Iraqi government looking for help from powerful Iran? No, but it certainly poses a problem for the White House, which now finds itself putting American soldiers' lives on the line every day to prop up an active ally of the country that we claim, with some plausibility, funds anti-Israeli and other terror groups and is bent on making its own nuclear bomb. Somewhere a guy named Osama bin Laden must be laughing.

And Iraqi prime minister Jafari paid tribute to the shrine of Ayatollah Khomeini.

'The difference is to the human spirit'

Canada adopts gay marriage law
Next step is royal assent.

The Senate erupted in a loud cheer as it adopted the Liberal government's Bill C-38, which will give gay and lesbian couples the right to marry in courthouses and city halls across the country. The 47-21 vote came after years of court battles and debate that divided families, religious groups and even political allies. Three senators abstained. There are currently 95 sitting senators and 10 vacancies. The final word in the debate came from a Liberal senator who read to the hushed chamber an e-mail from a Yukon constituent. 'You have no idea what a difference it makes to the human spirit to know that you are treated equally under the law,' said Ione Christensen, the 71-year-old senator from Whitehorse.

But even now, some just do not get it.

"Let the country speak at the next federal election," Tory Senator Gerry St. Germain said hours before the bill passed. "Let's not pass this legislation now. Let's wait. Let's make (the election) a referendum on this bill."

Equal rights are NOT a voting issue. Rights are an expression of law, not of opinion.
We can have elections about government policies and government actions, like war or peace, trade, protectionism, immigration, interest rates, wage controls, federalism, etc etc -- these are things over which government has a choice, so it is quite right that Canadians should decide on what policy they want government to follow. But once the courts have declared that the charter mandates equal rights, it is no longer a matter of government choice whether to follow the court decision or not -- the court decision is the law of the land unless the notwithstanding clause is enacted.

Rice? Are you kidding?

Buzzflash links to this story - Some in GOP Hope Rice Runs for President - by titling its link this way "Some in GOP Want Someone Who Was Warned of 9/11 and Did Nothing to Replace the Man in Charge of Our National Security Who Was Warned of 9/11 and Did Nothing". Says it all, really.

Hate-preach

Is there something in the communion wine these days that makes Anglicans and Catholics and now Baptists so prone to hate-preach?
From Steve Gilliard, we get notice of a sermon by Washington DC Baptist minister Willie Wilson, who is noted in Washington now for trying to organize another Million Man March. So he decided it was timely and appropriate for him to hate-preach against gay people, as described in this story - Minister's fiery anti-gay sermon riles activists.
Two quotes from the speech just cry out to be highlighted:

Lesbianism is about to take over our community. I’m talking about young girls. My son in high school last year, trying to go to the prom, he said, ‘Dad, I ain’t got nobody to take to the prom because all the girls in my class are gay. There ain’t but two of them straight and both of them are ugly. I ain’t got nobody to take to the prom.’ Now, can I talk here? I ain’t homophobic, because everybody in here got something wrong with him . . .

Well, no wonder nobody would date this boy -- just how attractive does he sound to you? Telling a boy you are gay may have become the ultimate turn-down line in high school these days. And here's another quote, even funnier:

Can't make no connection with a screw and another screw. The Bible says God made them male and female . . . there is something unique to man and unique to woman and it takes those two things to complement each other. You can't make a connection with two screws. It takes a screw and a nut!

Well, I'll say!

Westmoreland gone at last

Vietnam-Era Commander Westmoreland Dies
There are many things written in this article that upset me, but mainly that Westmoreland lived to be 91 when Americans and Vietnamese died by the hundreds of thousands 35 years ago. Here one of the most annoying parts ot this story: Westmoreland "contended the United States did not lose the conflict in Southeast Asia. 'It's more accurate to say our country did not fulfill its commitment to South Vietnam,' he said. 'By virtue of Vietnam, the U.S. held the line for 10 years and stopped the dominoes from falling.' " 60,000 Americans dead and this jerk wanted more to die just because he could not bring himself to admit that Vietnam was simply not 'winnable' against the North Vietnamese.

Hooray!

CBC Saskatchewan - Truckload of Canadian cattle enters U.S.: "A truck carrying live Canadian cattle crossed the border from Ontario into the United States on Monday morning, after a ban of more than two years was lifted."
Finally.

POWs this time?

'Canada's JTF-2 to hunt al Qaeda in Afghanistan' and when we catch some, are we going to turn them over to the US again, to disappear in Guantanamo or some other secret US prison, or will we treat them as prisoners of war, the way they are supposed to be treated?

This Canadian Press photo shows JTF2 soldiers with Afghan prisoners in 2002, who apparently were turned over to the US.

Pining for the good old days

Ohhh, poor babies!
In this story about the Senate hearings on the gay marriage bill, "Church to restrict baptism of gay couples' children", a Catholic cardinal complains about all the problems that it will cause when Canada requires that everybody be treated fairly and equally. "If I take the example of the ceremony of baptism, according to our canon law, we cannot accept the signatures of two fathers or two mothers as parents of an infant," Cardinal Ouellet told the committee. "With a law that makes these unions official, situations of this will multiply and this threatens to disturb not just the use of our territory, but also our archives and other aspects of the life of our communities."
Ohhh, isn't that just so sad, too bad. It would have been so much easier to continue to discriminate, I guess, rather than to review your church policies and maybe consider changing them. If only Canadian society didn't insist on gay people being treated like everybody else, then the Catholic church would be free to continue to treat gays like dirt. Damn you, Canadian society!
So difficult to live in the 21st century, isn't it, when you really want to live in the 17th or 18th -- when Catholics and Protestants were slaughtering each other across Europe and the Inquisition was running around burning people at the stake. Ahhh, the good old days.

What's it all about, Georgie?

Frank Rich, in his column Follow the Uranium, cuts through the bullshit and focuses on what it'a all about -- the lies told by Bush and Cheney to start the war in Iraq.

. . . we shouldn't get hung up on [Rove] . . . [or] Matt Cooper or Judy Miller or the Wilsons or . . . Robert Novak. This scandal is not about them in the end, any more than Watergate was about Dwight Chapin and Donald Segretti or Woodward and Bernstein. It is about the president of the United States. It is about a plot that was hatched at the top of the administration and in which everyone else, Mr. Rove included, are at most secondary players. This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit . . . is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war . . . and its omniscient author is Dick Cheney. . . Once we were locked into the war, and no W.M.D.'s could be found, the original plot line was dropped with an alacrity that recalled the "Never mind!" with which Gilda Radner's Emily Litella used to end her misinformed Weekend Update commentaries on "Saturday Night Live." The administration began its dog-ate-my-homework cover-up, asserting that the various warning signs about the uranium claims were lost "in the bowels" of the bureaucracy or that it was all the C.I.A.'s fault or that it didn't matter anyway, because there were new, retroactive rationales to justify the war. But the administration knows how guilty it is. That's why it has so quickly trashed any insider who contradicts its story line about how we got to Iraq, starting with the former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill and the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke. Next to White House courtiers of their rank, Mr. Wilson is at most a Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. The brief against the administration's drumbeat for war would be just as damning if he'd never gone to Africa. But by overreacting in panic to his single Op-Ed piece of two years ago, the White House has opened a Pandora's box it can't slam shut . . .

Divine Rights

Krugman's column this morning provides an object lesson for all of us living in democracies, from both sides of the blogosphere: nothing is perfect. Every political party. even your own, is sometimes wrong. Every political leader, even one you revere or love, makes mistakes.
Just because he's the leader of your country doesn't mean that everything he does is right.
We should all repeat this, as a mantra, five times a day. Otherwise, as we indulge in our partisan rants and ravings, its just too easy to fall into the same kind of thoughtless, unprincipled, knee-jerk, hero-worship cult which appears to be taking over US politics.
From Krugman's column: Karl Rove's America:

What Mr. Rove understood, long before the rest of us, is that we're not living in the America of the past, where even partisans sometimes changed their views when faced with the facts. Instead, we're living in a country in which there is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical truth. In particular, there are now few, if any, limits to what conservative politicians can get away with: the faithful will follow the twists and turns of the party line with a loyalty that would have pleased the Comintern . . . there's no question that [Rove] damaged national security for partisan advantage. If a Democrat had done that, Republicans would call it treason. But what we're getting, instead, is yet another impressive demonstration that these days, truth is political. One after another, prominent Republicans and conservative pundits have declared their allegiance to the party line. They haven't just gone along with the diversionary tactics, like the irrelevant questions about whether Mr. Rove used Valerie Wilson's name in identifying her . . . or the false, easily refuted claim that Mr. Wilson lied about who sent him to Niger. They're now a chorus, praising Mr. Rove as a patriotic whistle-blower. Ultimately, this isn't just about Mr. Rove. It's also about Mr. Bush, who has always known that his trusted political adviser . . . is a thug, and obviously made no attempt to find out if he was the leaker. Most of all, it's about what has happened to America. How did our political system get to this point?

I think that frankly, sir, people don't give a damn. Too many people can't be bothered reading up on issues and thinking about things and formulating their opinions -- that's too much work. Its easier just to go along to get along.
Particularly easy is to fall into the belief that the leader is always right just because he's the leader. And seeing this happen to a democracy as long-established as the US is just a little scary for the rest of us -- will there come a time when our own democracy is just too much work, where it will be easier to just go along with every crackpot, harebrained spin cycle of "our party" and "our leader" than to consider a contrary position?
That path leads to the divine right of kings.

How stupid (etc, etc): part 2

Rove Reportedly Held Phone Talk on C.I.A. Officer. This NYT story makes no sense.
We're supposed to believe the story of an anonymous source that it was actually Novak who told Rove that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA. And then, apparently, Mr. Motor Mouth just passed the rumour on to Cooper without really checking it or thinking much more about it. So see, folks, Rove is innocent -- innocent, I tell you!
The bullsh*t meter is clanging loudly.
Wilson's op ed was published July 6 and the Rove-Novak conversation happened July 8. The discussion about Wilson -- which was the biggest story on the planet that week -- supposedly happened only casually, at the end of Novak's discussion with Rove about homeland security hirings. The mythical Rove-Novak "Homeland Security personnel" discussion is perhaps not quite as incredible as the mythical Rove-Cooper "welfare reform" discussion three days later, but its close -- and once again, with Cooper, the Wilson discussion supposedly happened only casually at the end of the phone call.
This charming Novak tale doesn't explain at all how Rove apparently "knew" that Valerie Wilson had suggested or mentioned that her husband knew people in Niger. And it doesn't explain why Rove told Chris Matthews that "Wilson's wife is fair game". And particularly it doesn't explain the actions of Rove's lawyer over the last week -- do you think if Rove actually had heard the Plame information casually from Novak in the first place, that his lawyer wouldn't have found a way to mention this at some time in the last week?
They must think we're pretty dumb.

Congratulations, Simon Pole

Progressive Bloggers in Wikipedia
Hey, the Progressive Bloggers made it into Wikipedia.
And congratulations particularly to Simon Pole who led the charge to save the PB listing, and posted dozens of times to inform the Wiki editors about the significance of the Progressive Bloggers site. I think Canadian political blog sites will have an easier time in the future getting their entries onto Wikipedia because Simon kept hammering home the importance of political blogging in the Canadian political scene, and also ensured that the Wiki editors learned about the differences between the US and Canada in terms of the blogosphere.