Oklahoma Wanker of the Day...

Yeah.

This guy wants to stop the ACLU. If he thinks this is the real enemy, he needs to get back on his meds.

Good Lord.

-The Oklahoma Hippy

Oklahoma Wanker of the Day...

Yeah.

This guy wants to stop the ACLU. If he thinks this is the real enemy, he needs to get back on his meds.

Good Lord.

-The Oklahoma Hippy

It's seems Karl Rove may be stepping out on his wife...

Over at Radar, they have a piece about Rove:

As a string of foes from John McCain to Richard Clarke can attest, Karl Rove has never been shy about using personal attacks for political gain. But as the Valerie Plame scandal rages on, the Bush administration’s in-house bulldog may be forced to endure a taste of his own medicine.

Last Sunday, in a blistering column in the New York Times, Frank Rich charged that around the time the White House was leaking Plame’s undercover CIA status to friendly reporters, Rove’s office was publicly “outing” Jeffrey Kofman after the gay ABC correspondent reported on the flagging morale of American troops in Iraq. Rich angrily charged the Republican rumor-monger with fostering a “pervasive culture of revenge” in Washington. Now, in the same spirit, Rove’s critics are forcing the married pol to fend off a politically motivated campaign that focuses on his own personal life.

For years, political insiders in the Lone Star State have whispered about Rove’s close friendship with lobbyist Karen Johnson, a never-married, forty-something GOP loyalist from Austin, Texas. The two first became close when Johnson sat on the board of then-Governor George W. Bush’s Business Council over a decade ago. Their friendship reportedly deepened after Bush appointed Johnson—a little-known spokesperson for the Texas Good Roads Association—to a seat on his Transportation Department transition team in 2000. The plum appointment enabled Johnson’s lobbying firm, Infrastructure Solutions, to snare such high-paying clients as Aetna and the City of Laredo. Sources say Johnson now frequently travels between Washington D.C. and Austin, where she frequently appears at Rove’s side at parties and unofficial functions.

Although there is no evidence that their relationship is anything but professional, the close association between the married White House aide and the comely lobbyist has long raised eyebrows in conservative Texas circles. Asked about the pair, a prominent political journalist who has written extensively about Rove says, “I’ve heard the stories, but I would never write about Karl and Karen. If you want to keep your job as a reporter in Texas, you make believe you don’t see them together.”

That is interesting unto itself, but then comes the kicker from Kos:

In a fortuitous coincidence, Jerome and I have just finished interviewing a long-time Texas political writer here in Austin who says that Rove is absolutely having an affair with Karen. Rove is married and has a teenaged son. According to this writer, Rove's wife is a hardcore liberal. "I don't know how he and his wife get along," he said.

Well, quite obviously, they do not.

Some ironies are too sweet.

-The Oklahoma Hippy

It's seems Karl Rove may be stepping out on his wife...

Over at Radar, they have a piece about Rove:

As a string of foes from John McCain to Richard Clarke can attest, Karl Rove has never been shy about using personal attacks for political gain. But as the Valerie Plame scandal rages on, the Bush administration’s in-house bulldog may be forced to endure a taste of his own medicine.

Last Sunday, in a blistering column in the New York Times, Frank Rich charged that around the time the White House was leaking Plame’s undercover CIA status to friendly reporters, Rove’s office was publicly “outing” Jeffrey Kofman after the gay ABC correspondent reported on the flagging morale of American troops in Iraq. Rich angrily charged the Republican rumor-monger with fostering a “pervasive culture of revenge” in Washington. Now, in the same spirit, Rove’s critics are forcing the married pol to fend off a politically motivated campaign that focuses on his own personal life.

For years, political insiders in the Lone Star State have whispered about Rove’s close friendship with lobbyist Karen Johnson, a never-married, forty-something GOP loyalist from Austin, Texas. The two first became close when Johnson sat on the board of then-Governor George W. Bush’s Business Council over a decade ago. Their friendship reportedly deepened after Bush appointed Johnson—a little-known spokesperson for the Texas Good Roads Association—to a seat on his Transportation Department transition team in 2000. The plum appointment enabled Johnson’s lobbying firm, Infrastructure Solutions, to snare such high-paying clients as Aetna and the City of Laredo. Sources say Johnson now frequently travels between Washington D.C. and Austin, where she frequently appears at Rove’s side at parties and unofficial functions.

Although there is no evidence that their relationship is anything but professional, the close association between the married White House aide and the comely lobbyist has long raised eyebrows in conservative Texas circles. Asked about the pair, a prominent political journalist who has written extensively about Rove says, “I’ve heard the stories, but I would never write about Karl and Karen. If you want to keep your job as a reporter in Texas, you make believe you don’t see them together.”

That is interesting unto itself, but then comes the kicker from Kos:

In a fortuitous coincidence, Jerome and I have just finished interviewing a long-time Texas political writer here in Austin who says that Rove is absolutely having an affair with Karen. Rove is married and has a teenaged son. According to this writer, Rove's wife is a hardcore liberal. "I don't know how he and his wife get along," he said.

Well, quite obviously, they do not.

Some ironies are too sweet.

-The Oklahoma Hippy

Why is this happening?

This is fishy...

OKLAHOMA CITY -- State election officials say they'll use $33 million in federal money to install touch-screen voting machines by next year.

Election Board Secretary Mike Clingman says the government provided the money in response to the controversy in Florida over the 2000 presidential election.

Clingman says the new machines will probably use the same kind of ballot, but will include scanners designed to allow the blind and others with disabilities to cast a secret ballot for the first time.

Clingman says the state is working with federal officials to determine whether all of the state's 2400 precincts must have the new machines.

Copyright 2005 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed

Here's the link.

You have to understand that we use the world's easiest paper ballots that are marked with a felt tip pen and scanned with an optical scanner.

They're easy to use and completely reliable. There is no advantage in this as far as I can see. So, why touch-screen machines and why now?

Does anyone out there have any thoughts?

Why is this happening?

This is fishy...

OKLAHOMA CITY -- State election officials say they'll use $33 million in federal money to install touch-screen voting machines by next year.

Election Board Secretary Mike Clingman says the government provided the money in response to the controversy in Florida over the 2000 presidential election.

Clingman says the new machines will probably use the same kind of ballot, but will include scanners designed to allow the blind and others with disabilities to cast a secret ballot for the first time.

Clingman says the state is working with federal officials to determine whether all of the state's 2400 precincts must have the new machines.

Copyright 2005 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed

Here's the link.

You have to understand that we use the world's easiest paper ballots that are marked with a felt tip pen and scanned with an optical scanner.

They're easy to use and completely reliable. There is no advantage in this as far as I can see. So, why touch-screen machines and why now?

Does anyone out there have any thoughts?

Dude, WTF?

From the AP:

Gonzales Says He Told Card About CIA Probe

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Sunday that he notified White House chief of staff Andy Card after the Justice Department opened an investigation into who revealed a covert CIA officer's identity, but waited 12 hours to tell anyone else in the executive mansion.

The White House did not immediately respond to questions Sunday about whether Card passed that information to top Bush aide Karl Rove or anyone else, giving them advance notice to prepare for the investigation.

The full story can be found here.

-The Oklahoma Hippy

Dude, WTF?

From the AP:

Gonzales Says He Told Card About CIA Probe

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Sunday that he notified White House chief of staff Andy Card after the Justice Department opened an investigation into who revealed a covert CIA officer's identity, but waited 12 hours to tell anyone else in the executive mansion.

The White House did not immediately respond to questions Sunday about whether Card passed that information to top Bush aide Karl Rove or anyone else, giving them advance notice to prepare for the investigation.

The full story can be found here.

-The Oklahoma Hippy

Read this now.

Frank Rich gets it:

PRESIDENT BUSH'S new Supreme Court nominee was a historic first after all: the first to be announced on TV dead center in prime time, smack in the cross hairs of "I Want to Be a Hilton." It was also one of the hastiest court announcements in memory, abruptly sprung a week ahead of the White House's original timetable. The agenda of this rushed showmanship - to change the subject in Washington - could not have been more naked. But the president would have had to nominate Bill Clinton to change this subject.

When a conspiracy is unraveling, and it's every liar and his lawyer for themselves, the story takes on a momentum of its own. When the conspiracy is, at its heart, about the White House's twisting of the intelligence used to sell the American people a war - and its desperate efforts to cover up that flimflam once the W.M.D. cupboard proved bare and the war went south - the story will not end until the war really is in its "last throes."

Only 36 hours after the John Roberts unveiling, The Washington Post nudged him aside to second position on its front page. Leading the paper instead was a scoop concerning a State Department memo circulated the week before the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife, the C.I.A. officer Valerie Plame, in literally the loftiest reaches of the Bush administration - on Air Force One. The memo, The Post reported, marked the paragraph containing information about Ms. Plame with an S for secret. So much for the cover story that no one knew that her identity was covert.

But the scandal has metastasized so much at this point that the forgotten man Mr. Bush did not nominate to the Supreme Court is as much a window into the White House's panic and stonewalling as its haste to put forward the man he did. When the president decided not to replace Sandra Day O'Connor with a woman, why did he pick a white guy and not nominate the first Hispanic justice, his friend Alberto Gonzales? Mr. Bush was surely not scared off by Gonzales critics on the right (who find him soft on abortion) or left (who find him soft on the Geneva Conventions). It's Mr. Gonzales's proximity to this scandal that inspires real fear.

As White House counsel, he was the one first notified that the Justice Department, at the request of the C.I.A., had opened an investigation into the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife. That notification came at 8:30 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2003, but it took Mr. Gonzales 12 more hours to inform the White House staff that it must "preserve all materials" relevant to the investigation. This 12-hour delay, he has said, was sanctioned by the Justice Department, but since the department was then run by John Ashcroft, a Bush loyalist who refused to recuse himself from the Plame case, inquiring Senate Democrats would examine this 12-hour delay as closely as an 18½-minute tape gap. "Every good prosecutor knows that any delay could give a culprit time to destroy the evidence," said Senator Charles Schumer, correctly, back when the missing 12 hours was first revealed almost two years ago. A new Gonzales confirmation process now would have quickly devolved into a neo-Watergate hearing. Mr. Gonzales was in the thick of the Plame investigation, all told, for 16 months.

Thus is Mr. Gonzales's Supreme Court aspiration the first White House casualty of this affair. It won't be the last. When you look at the early timeline of this case, rather than the latest investigatory scraps, two damning story lines emerge and both have legs.

The first: for half a year White House hands made the fatal mistake of thinking they could get away with trashing the Wilsons scot-free. They thought so because for nearly three months after the July 6, 2003, publication of Mr. Wilson's New York Times Op-Ed article and the outing of his wife in a Robert Novak column, there was no investigation at all. Once the unthreatening Ashcroft-controlled investigation began, there was another comfy three months.

Only after that did Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel, take over and put the heat on. Only after that did investigators hustle to seek Air Force One phone logs and did Mr. Bush feel compelled to hire a private lawyer. But by then the conspirators, drunk with the hubris characteristic of this administration, had already been quite careless.

It was during that pre-Fitzgerald honeymoon that Scott McClellan declared that both Karl Rove and Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, had personally told him they were "not involved in this" - neither leaking any classified information nor even telling any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the C.I.A. Matt Cooper has now written in Time that it was through his "conversation with Rove" that he "learned for the first time that Wilson's wife worked at the C.I.A." Maybe it all depends on what the meaning of "telling," "involved" or "this" is. If these people were similarly cute with F.B.I. agents and the grand jury, they've got an obstruction-of-justice problem possibly more grave than the hard-to-prosecute original charge of knowingly outing a covert agent.

Most fertile - and apparently ground zero for Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation - is the period at the very outset when those plotting against Mr. Wilson felt safest of all: those eight days in July 2003 between the Wilson Op-Ed, which so infuriated the administration, and the retaliatory Novak column. It was during that long week, on a presidential trip to Africa, that Colin Powell was seen on Air Force One brandishing the classified State Department memo mentioning Valerie Plame, as first reported by The New York Times.

That memo may have been the genesis of an orchestrated assault on the Wilsons. That the administration was then cocky enough and enraged enough to go after its presumed enemies so systematically can be found in a similar, now forgotten attack that was hatched on July 15, the day after the publication of Mr. Novak's column portraying Mr. Wilson as a girlie man dependent on his wife for employment.

On that evening's broadcast of ABC's "World News Tonight," American soldiers in Falluja spoke angrily of how their tour of duty had been extended yet again, only a week after Donald Rumsfeld told them they were going home. Soon the Drudge Report announced that ABC's correspondent, Jeffrey Kofman, was gay. Matt Drudge told Lloyd Grove of The Washington Post at the time that "someone from the White House communications shop" had given him that information.

Mr. McClellan denied White House involvement with any Kofman revelation, a denial now worth as much as his denials of White House involvement with the trashing of the Wilsons. Identifying someone as gay isn't a crime in any event, but the "outing" of Mr. Kofman (who turned out to be openly gay) almost simultaneously with the outing of Ms. Plame points to a pervasive culture of revenge in the White House and offers a clue as to who might be driving it. As Joshua Green reported in detail in The Atlantic Monthly last year, a recurring feature of Mr. Rove's political campaigns throughout his career has been the questioning of an "opponent's sexual orientation."

THE second narrative to be unearthed in the scandal's early timeline is the motive for this reckless vindictiveness against anyone questioning the war. On May 1, 2003, Mr. Bush celebrated "Mission Accomplished." On May 29, Mr. Bush announced that "we found the weapons of mass destruction." On July 2, as attacks increased on American troops, Mr. Bush dared the insurgents to "bring 'em on." But the mission was not accomplished, the weapons were not found and the enemy kept bringing 'em on. It was against this backdrop of mounting desperation on July 6 that Mr. Wilson went public with his incriminating claim that the most potent argument for the war in the first place, the administration's repeated intimations of nuclear Armageddon, involved twisted intelligence.

Mr. Wilson's charge had such force that just three days after its publication, Mr. Bush radically revised his language about W.M.D.'s. Saddam no longer had W.M.D.'s; he had a W.M.D. "program." Right after that George Tenet suddenly decided to release a Friday-evening statement saying that the 16 errant words about African uranium "should never have been included" in the January 2003 State of the Union address - even though those 16 words could and should have been retracted months earlier. By the next State of the Union, in January 2004, Mr. Bush would retreat completely, talking not about finding W.M.D.'s or even W.M.D. programs, but about "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."

In July 2005, there are still no W.M.D.'s, and we're still waiting to hear the full story of how, in the words of the Downing Street memo, the intelligence was fixed to foretell all those imminent mushroom clouds in the run-up to war in Iraq. The two official investigations into America's prewar intelligence have both found that our intelligence was wrong, but neither has answered the question of how the administration used that wrong intelligence in selling the war. That issue was pointedly kept out of the charter of the Silberman-Robb commission; the Senate Intelligence Committee promised to get to it after the election but conspicuously has not.

The real crime here remains the sending of American men and women to Iraq on fictitious grounds. Without it, there wouldn't have been a third-rate smear campaign against an obscure diplomat, a bungled cover-up and a scandal that - like the war itself - has no exit strategy that will not inflict pain.

Here's the Link.

-The Oklahoma Hippy

Read this now.

Frank Rich gets it:

PRESIDENT BUSH'S new Supreme Court nominee was a historic first after all: the first to be announced on TV dead center in prime time, smack in the cross hairs of "I Want to Be a Hilton." It was also one of the hastiest court announcements in memory, abruptly sprung a week ahead of the White House's original timetable. The agenda of this rushed showmanship - to change the subject in Washington - could not have been more naked. But the president would have had to nominate Bill Clinton to change this subject.

When a conspiracy is unraveling, and it's every liar and his lawyer for themselves, the story takes on a momentum of its own. When the conspiracy is, at its heart, about the White House's twisting of the intelligence used to sell the American people a war - and its desperate efforts to cover up that flimflam once the W.M.D. cupboard proved bare and the war went south - the story will not end until the war really is in its "last throes."

Only 36 hours after the John Roberts unveiling, The Washington Post nudged him aside to second position on its front page. Leading the paper instead was a scoop concerning a State Department memo circulated the week before the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife, the C.I.A. officer Valerie Plame, in literally the loftiest reaches of the Bush administration - on Air Force One. The memo, The Post reported, marked the paragraph containing information about Ms. Plame with an S for secret. So much for the cover story that no one knew that her identity was covert.

But the scandal has metastasized so much at this point that the forgotten man Mr. Bush did not nominate to the Supreme Court is as much a window into the White House's panic and stonewalling as its haste to put forward the man he did. When the president decided not to replace Sandra Day O'Connor with a woman, why did he pick a white guy and not nominate the first Hispanic justice, his friend Alberto Gonzales? Mr. Bush was surely not scared off by Gonzales critics on the right (who find him soft on abortion) or left (who find him soft on the Geneva Conventions). It's Mr. Gonzales's proximity to this scandal that inspires real fear.

As White House counsel, he was the one first notified that the Justice Department, at the request of the C.I.A., had opened an investigation into the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife. That notification came at 8:30 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2003, but it took Mr. Gonzales 12 more hours to inform the White House staff that it must "preserve all materials" relevant to the investigation. This 12-hour delay, he has said, was sanctioned by the Justice Department, but since the department was then run by John Ashcroft, a Bush loyalist who refused to recuse himself from the Plame case, inquiring Senate Democrats would examine this 12-hour delay as closely as an 18½-minute tape gap. "Every good prosecutor knows that any delay could give a culprit time to destroy the evidence," said Senator Charles Schumer, correctly, back when the missing 12 hours was first revealed almost two years ago. A new Gonzales confirmation process now would have quickly devolved into a neo-Watergate hearing. Mr. Gonzales was in the thick of the Plame investigation, all told, for 16 months.

Thus is Mr. Gonzales's Supreme Court aspiration the first White House casualty of this affair. It won't be the last. When you look at the early timeline of this case, rather than the latest investigatory scraps, two damning story lines emerge and both have legs.

The first: for half a year White House hands made the fatal mistake of thinking they could get away with trashing the Wilsons scot-free. They thought so because for nearly three months after the July 6, 2003, publication of Mr. Wilson's New York Times Op-Ed article and the outing of his wife in a Robert Novak column, there was no investigation at all. Once the unthreatening Ashcroft-controlled investigation began, there was another comfy three months.

Only after that did Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel, take over and put the heat on. Only after that did investigators hustle to seek Air Force One phone logs and did Mr. Bush feel compelled to hire a private lawyer. But by then the conspirators, drunk with the hubris characteristic of this administration, had already been quite careless.

It was during that pre-Fitzgerald honeymoon that Scott McClellan declared that both Karl Rove and Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, had personally told him they were "not involved in this" - neither leaking any classified information nor even telling any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the C.I.A. Matt Cooper has now written in Time that it was through his "conversation with Rove" that he "learned for the first time that Wilson's wife worked at the C.I.A." Maybe it all depends on what the meaning of "telling," "involved" or "this" is. If these people were similarly cute with F.B.I. agents and the grand jury, they've got an obstruction-of-justice problem possibly more grave than the hard-to-prosecute original charge of knowingly outing a covert agent.

Most fertile - and apparently ground zero for Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation - is the period at the very outset when those plotting against Mr. Wilson felt safest of all: those eight days in July 2003 between the Wilson Op-Ed, which so infuriated the administration, and the retaliatory Novak column. It was during that long week, on a presidential trip to Africa, that Colin Powell was seen on Air Force One brandishing the classified State Department memo mentioning Valerie Plame, as first reported by The New York Times.

That memo may have been the genesis of an orchestrated assault on the Wilsons. That the administration was then cocky enough and enraged enough to go after its presumed enemies so systematically can be found in a similar, now forgotten attack that was hatched on July 15, the day after the publication of Mr. Novak's column portraying Mr. Wilson as a girlie man dependent on his wife for employment.

On that evening's broadcast of ABC's "World News Tonight," American soldiers in Falluja spoke angrily of how their tour of duty had been extended yet again, only a week after Donald Rumsfeld told them they were going home. Soon the Drudge Report announced that ABC's correspondent, Jeffrey Kofman, was gay. Matt Drudge told Lloyd Grove of The Washington Post at the time that "someone from the White House communications shop" had given him that information.

Mr. McClellan denied White House involvement with any Kofman revelation, a denial now worth as much as his denials of White House involvement with the trashing of the Wilsons. Identifying someone as gay isn't a crime in any event, but the "outing" of Mr. Kofman (who turned out to be openly gay) almost simultaneously with the outing of Ms. Plame points to a pervasive culture of revenge in the White House and offers a clue as to who might be driving it. As Joshua Green reported in detail in The Atlantic Monthly last year, a recurring feature of Mr. Rove's political campaigns throughout his career has been the questioning of an "opponent's sexual orientation."

THE second narrative to be unearthed in the scandal's early timeline is the motive for this reckless vindictiveness against anyone questioning the war. On May 1, 2003, Mr. Bush celebrated "Mission Accomplished." On May 29, Mr. Bush announced that "we found the weapons of mass destruction." On July 2, as attacks increased on American troops, Mr. Bush dared the insurgents to "bring 'em on." But the mission was not accomplished, the weapons were not found and the enemy kept bringing 'em on. It was against this backdrop of mounting desperation on July 6 that Mr. Wilson went public with his incriminating claim that the most potent argument for the war in the first place, the administration's repeated intimations of nuclear Armageddon, involved twisted intelligence.

Mr. Wilson's charge had such force that just three days after its publication, Mr. Bush radically revised his language about W.M.D.'s. Saddam no longer had W.M.D.'s; he had a W.M.D. "program." Right after that George Tenet suddenly decided to release a Friday-evening statement saying that the 16 errant words about African uranium "should never have been included" in the January 2003 State of the Union address - even though those 16 words could and should have been retracted months earlier. By the next State of the Union, in January 2004, Mr. Bush would retreat completely, talking not about finding W.M.D.'s or even W.M.D. programs, but about "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."

In July 2005, there are still no W.M.D.'s, and we're still waiting to hear the full story of how, in the words of the Downing Street memo, the intelligence was fixed to foretell all those imminent mushroom clouds in the run-up to war in Iraq. The two official investigations into America's prewar intelligence have both found that our intelligence was wrong, but neither has answered the question of how the administration used that wrong intelligence in selling the war. That issue was pointedly kept out of the charter of the Silberman-Robb commission; the Senate Intelligence Committee promised to get to it after the election but conspicuously has not.

The real crime here remains the sending of American men and women to Iraq on fictitious grounds. Without it, there wouldn't have been a third-rate smear campaign against an obscure diplomat, a bungled cover-up and a scandal that - like the war itself - has no exit strategy that will not inflict pain.

Here's the Link.

-The Oklahoma Hippy

GOP Propaganda Council Convenes...

Sounds like the West Wing is in full panic mode... The Hill is reporting that Cheney went last night to an emergency meeting of senior republicans with the intent of deciding what next week's talking points are going to be...

Cheney headed to Hill for evening meeting


Vice President Cheney is scheduled to attend a Republican Theme Team meeting this evening, according to an e-mail sent out by the office of Republican Conference Vice Chairman Jack Kingston (R-Va.).

Neither the conference nor the vice president’s office would confirm the topic of discussion for the evening meeting.

Because of security concerns, members were encouraged to RSVP for the event. Seating was limited.

The meeting was scheduled to be held in the Lincoln room within the Speaker’s Capitol chambers.

Patrick O’Connor

Here's the link.

-The Oklahoma Hippy

GOP Propaganda Council Convenes...

Sounds like the West Wing is in full panic mode... The Hill is reporting that Cheney went last night to an emergency meeting of senior republicans with the intent of deciding what next week's talking points are going to be...

Cheney headed to Hill for evening meeting


Vice President Cheney is scheduled to attend a Republican Theme Team meeting this evening, according to an e-mail sent out by the office of Republican Conference Vice Chairman Jack Kingston (R-Va.).

Neither the conference nor the vice president’s office would confirm the topic of discussion for the evening meeting.

Because of security concerns, members were encouraged to RSVP for the event. Seating was limited.

The meeting was scheduled to be held in the Lincoln room within the Speaker’s Capitol chambers.

Patrick O’Connor

Here's the link.

-The Oklahoma Hippy

DriftGlass has this exactly right...

Over at Drift Glass, a perfect piece of common sense:

Dear Freedom Lovers,

For the next ten days, please make sure every conversation you have with the press or with Republicans features the following three elements:

Step 1: “Because we believe so strongly in the Rule of Law, we will give President Bush’s nomination of John G. Roberts Jr. as an associate justice to the Supreme Court the time, attention and careful deliberation it deserves in five weeks, when the Senate reconvenes. In the mean time...”

Step 2: “Because we believe so strongly in the Rule of Law, we urge President Bush to repudiate the reckless, irresponsible and treasonous behavior of Karl Rove, and demand that Mr. Rove accept Personal Responsibility for his actions publicly apologize to the individuals he harmed, the security agencies he compromised and the America people, who’s trust he betrayed. We further urge President Bush to keep his word to the American people and fire Mr. Rove, as he promised he would do to ‘anyone involved’ in the Plame Scandal. And...”

Step 3: “Because we believe so strongly in the Rule of Law, we urge President Bush to keep his word to the American people, demand that anyone else involve in the reckless, irresponsible and treasonous behavior that let to the Plame Scandal come forward, apologize, and accept Personal Responsibility for their actions.”

Amen.

-The Oklahoma Hippy

DriftGlass has this exactly right...

Over at Drift Glass, a perfect piece of common sense:

Dear Freedom Lovers,

For the next ten days, please make sure every conversation you have with the press or with Republicans features the following three elements:

Step 1: “Because we believe so strongly in the Rule of Law, we will give President Bush’s nomination of John G. Roberts Jr. as an associate justice to the Supreme Court the time, attention and careful deliberation it deserves in five weeks, when the Senate reconvenes. In the mean time...”

Step 2: “Because we believe so strongly in the Rule of Law, we urge President Bush to repudiate the reckless, irresponsible and treasonous behavior of Karl Rove, and demand that Mr. Rove accept Personal Responsibility for his actions publicly apologize to the individuals he harmed, the security agencies he compromised and the America people, who’s trust he betrayed. We further urge President Bush to keep his word to the American people and fire Mr. Rove, as he promised he would do to ‘anyone involved’ in the Plame Scandal. And...”

Step 3: “Because we believe so strongly in the Rule of Law, we urge President Bush to keep his word to the American people, demand that anyone else involve in the reckless, irresponsible and treasonous behavior that let to the Plame Scandal come forward, apologize, and accept Personal Responsibility for their actions.”

Amen.

-The Oklahoma Hippy

Feeling even better about Roberts...

I just saw this quote from Queen Ann (Coulter):

Conservatism is sweeping the nation, we have a fully functioning alternative media, we’re ticked off and ready to avenge Robert Bork . . . and Bush nominates a Rorschach blot.

If Ann Coulter is that pissed off about this nomination, then he can't be all bad...

If you think you can read it without going blind or having explosive diarrhea, the full article can be found here.

-The Oklahoma Hippy

Feeling even better about Roberts...

I just saw this quote from Queen Ann (Coulter):

Conservatism is sweeping the nation, we have a fully functioning alternative media, we’re ticked off and ready to avenge Robert Bork . . . and Bush nominates a Rorschach blot.

If Ann Coulter is that pissed off about this nomination, then he can't be all bad...

If you think you can read it without going blind or having explosive diarrhea, the full article can be found here.

-The Oklahoma Hippy

Oh, and what do you think of the site's new look?

I'm not sure I'm staying with this template, but I might. It's pretty cool...

Anybody got some feedback?

-The Oklahoma Hippy

Oh, and what do you think of the site's new look?

I'm not sure I'm staying with this template, but I might. It's pretty cool...

Anybody got some feedback?

-The Oklahoma Hippy

Why I think Roberts is alright...

Sometimes, things come right down to a hunch...

As I watched President Bush introduce John Roberts last night I was really struck by how emotional the man was, and it spoke volumes to me.

John G. Roberts exudes humility. Last night I saw a man humbled by the honor which was just given to him, without a hint of a sense of entitlement.

When he spoke of the lump in his throat that he got every time he climbed the marble steps that led into the Supreme Court Building, it was genuine, and people can't fake that.

That tells me that this is a man with a respect for our system of government, a profound love and respect for the law, an appreciation for history and his place in it.

I believe Roberts is a man who will always place fidelity to our Constitution and a real sense of justice before all considerations, even his historical legacy. How often do you see that in any Justice on the US Supreme Court? He's the real deal.

It is rare that we see a man of this disposition in Washington, and I think he's an excellent choice for these reasons.

I don't have anything concrete, and I could always turn out to be wrong, but I just have a deep calm in my heart and absolutely no worries in my head that when he makes decisions they are going to be based soundly on constitutional principles with the most careful of considerations and reasoning behind them.

Will I always agree with his decisions? I find that highly unlikely, but I have absolutely no doubt that when read I will respect how he came to his decisions and feel assured of the sincerity of his view of the constitutionality in how the law was applied.

I wish I could give you something more definite, but I can't at this time. Only history will prove me right or wrong, but I can't help but feel that this is a man worthy of my respect and trust.

Do you guys have any thoughts?

-The Oklahoma Hippy

Why I think Roberts is alright...

Sometimes, things come right down to a hunch...

As I watched President Bush introduce John Roberts last night I was really struck by how emotional the man was, and it spoke volumes to me.

John G. Roberts exudes humility. Last night I saw a man humbled by the honor which was just given to him, without a hint of a sense of entitlement.

When he spoke of the lump in his throat that he got every time he climbed the marble steps that led into the Supreme Court Building, it was genuine, and people can't fake that.

That tells me that this is a man with a respect for our system of government, a profound love and respect for the law, an appreciation for history and his place in it.

I believe Roberts is a man who will always place fidelity to our Constitution and a real sense of justice before all considerations, even his historical legacy. How often do you see that in any Justice on the US Supreme Court? He's the real deal.

It is rare that we see a man of this disposition in Washington, and I think he's an excellent choice for these reasons.

I don't have anything concrete, and I could always turn out to be wrong, but I just have a deep calm in my heart and absolutely no worries in my head that when he makes decisions they are going to be based soundly on constitutional principles with the most careful of considerations and reasoning behind them.

Will I always agree with his decisions? I find that highly unlikely, but I have absolutely no doubt that when read I will respect how he came to his decisions and feel assured of the sincerity of his view of the constitutionality in how the law was applied.

I wish I could give you something more definite, but I can't at this time. Only history will prove me right or wrong, but I can't help but feel that this is a man worthy of my respect and trust.

Do you guys have any thoughts?

-The Oklahoma Hippy

My thoughts on Roberts...

I know this plays against the cartoonish stereotypes that people have about liberals, but I just wanted to say something about John G. Roberts...

From everything I have seen and read so far, he seems like a reasonable and contemplative jurist.

I don't have to agree with the guy politically, and I probably don't, but as long as his legal reasoning is sound and he approaches his job without an agenda, then I'm fine with him.

I've seen no indications that he's anything other this.

So, for my money, I say confirm him, no fuss no fight.

Who's shocked and surprised at this statement? If you are then you don't give me enough credit.

Yes it's true that I have a lot of personal animosity to most of the policies and rhetoric the comes from the right, but it is because I disagree with the policies and the rhetoric themselves, rather than just disagreeing because it comes from the other end of the political spectrum.

The problems that I have with the Bush Administration, and there are many, have never been about being a knee-jerk Bush hater.

The reason I have for my dissent are real and deliberate. The same goes when I can agree with decisions President Bush makes, and this nomination thus far seems to be one of those decisions, and I even laud the President' call for civility during this process.

Barring something that gives me a real reason to conclude otherwise, the choice of John G. Roberts as the nominee to the Supreme Court seems to have been handled in a serious way by serious people, and I respect their choice.

So, let the confirmation hearings be fair and reasonable, and if he shows himself to be the same, I offer my congratulations to Judge Roberts on this rarest of achievements.

Here's to Justice Roberts, and may God bless him for the process he is about to endure. May it be swift and painless.

-The Oklahoma Hippy

My thoughts on Roberts...

I know this plays against the cartoonish stereotypes that people have about liberals, but I just wanted to say something about John G. Roberts...

From everything I have seen and read so far, he seems like a reasonable and contemplative jurist.

I don't have to agree with the guy politically, and I probably don't, but as long as his legal reasoning is sound and he approaches his job without an agenda, then I'm fine with him.

I've seen no indications that he's anything other this.

So, for my money, I say confirm him, no fuss no fight.

Who's shocked and surprised at this statement? If you are then you don't give me enough credit.

Yes it's true that I have a lot of personal animosity to most of the policies and rhetoric the comes from the right, but it is because I disagree with the policies and the rhetoric themselves, rather than just disagreeing because it comes from the other end of the political spectrum.

The problems that I have with the Bush Administration, and there are many, have never been about being a knee-jerk Bush hater.

The reason I have for my dissent are real and deliberate. The same goes when I can agree with decisions President Bush makes, and this nomination thus far seems to be one of those decisions, and I even laud the President' call for civility during this process.

Barring something that gives me a real reason to conclude otherwise, the choice of John G. Roberts as the nominee to the Supreme Court seems to have been handled in a serious way by serious people, and I respect their choice.

So, let the confirmation hearings be fair and reasonable, and if he shows himself to be the same, I offer my congratulations to Judge Roberts on this rarest of achievements.

Here's to Justice Roberts, and may God bless him for the process he is about to endure. May it be swift and painless.

-The Oklahoma Hippy

It's Official: Bush has picked John G. Roberts Jr...

I don't know anything about him yet, but I'm sure we'll here a lot more in the coming hours.

I hope everyone has an appreciation for the magnitude of what we're about to expeirence.

[UPDATE]

From Washington Post:

Roberts grew up in Long Beach, Ind., and attended a private school in nearby LaPorte before going on to Harvard and Harvard Law School. He clerked for Judge Henry J. Friendly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, in New York, and later for Rehnquist, who was then an associate justice.

After that, he worked as a special assistant to U.S. Attorney General William French Smith and as an aide to White House counsel Fred Fielding -- who also mentored Luttig -- during the Reagan administration.

Roberts joined the Washington law firm of Hogan & Hartson in 1986, then went into President George H.W. Bush's administration, arguing cases before the Supreme Court as Solicitor General Kenneth W. Starr's principal deputy. He was nominated to the D.C. Circuit in 1992, but the appointment died when Bill Clinton succeeded Bush as president. Roberts returned to Hogan & Hartson, where he headed the firm's appellate practice and frequently argued before the Supreme Court. President Bush nominated him to the D.C. Circuit two years ago.

And this:

He put in his time advising the Bush legal team in Florida during the battle over the 2000 presidential election and has often argued conservative positions before the court -- but they can be attributed to clients, not necessarily to him.

That includes a brief he wrote for President George H.W. Bush's administration in a 1991 abortion case, in which he observed that "we continue to believe that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided and should be overruled."

Roberts won the case -- Rust v. Sullivan -- in which the Supreme Court agreed with the administration that the government could require doctors and clinics receiving federal funds to avoid talking to patients about abortion.

Read the rest here.


-The Oklahoma Hippy

It's Official: Bush has picked John G. Roberts Jr...

I don't know anything about him yet, but I'm sure we'll here a lot more in the coming hours.

I hope everyone has an appreciation for the magnitude of what we're about to expeirence.

[UPDATE]

From Washington Post:

Roberts grew up in Long Beach, Ind., and attended a private school in nearby LaPorte before going on to Harvard and Harvard Law School. He clerked for Judge Henry J. Friendly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, in New York, and later for Rehnquist, who was then an associate justice.

After that, he worked as a special assistant to U.S. Attorney General William French Smith and as an aide to White House counsel Fred Fielding -- who also mentored Luttig -- during the Reagan administration.

Roberts joined the Washington law firm of Hogan & Hartson in 1986, then went into President George H.W. Bush's administration, arguing cases before the Supreme Court as Solicitor General Kenneth W. Starr's principal deputy. He was nominated to the D.C. Circuit in 1992, but the appointment died when Bill Clinton succeeded Bush as president. Roberts returned to Hogan & Hartson, where he headed the firm's appellate practice and frequently argued before the Supreme Court. President Bush nominated him to the D.C. Circuit two years ago.

And this:

He put in his time advising the Bush legal team in Florida during the battle over the 2000 presidential election and has often argued conservative positions before the court -- but they can be attributed to clients, not necessarily to him.

That includes a brief he wrote for President George H.W. Bush's administration in a 1991 abortion case, in which he observed that "we continue to believe that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided and should be overruled."

Roberts won the case -- Rust v. Sullivan -- in which the Supreme Court agreed with the administration that the government could require doctors and clinics receiving federal funds to avoid talking to patients about abortion.

Read the rest here.


-The Oklahoma Hippy

I had never seen this quote before... I wonder why?

"One day the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in the United States will tear down the artificial scaffolding of Christianity. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."

-Thomas Jefferson in a Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823

I had never seen this quote before... I wonder why?

"One day the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in the United States will tear down the artificial scaffolding of Christianity. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."

-Thomas Jefferson in a Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823

Andrew Sullivan shines some light on the Bush Torture Policy...

So one of the big questions for me still remains: Is the torture of detainees an approved policy, or is it the work of a few bad apples?

Andrew Sullivan is circling in on an answer:

 

GENEVA SUSPENDED: We have new evidence that president Bush's suspension of the ban on torture under the Geneva Conventions and under American law was ordered over the objections of the judge advocate generals (JAGs) for the Army, Air Force and Marines. Money quote:

A law enacted in 1994 bars torture by U.S. military personnel anywhere in the world. But the Pentagon working group's 2003 report, prepared under the supervision of general counsel William J. Haynes II, said that "in order to respect the President's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign ... [the prohibition against torture] must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority." Haynes -- through Daniel J. Dell'Orto, principal deputy general counsel for the Defense Department -- wrote a memo March 17 that rescinded the working group's report, and Dell'Orto confirmed that withdrawal yesterday at the hearing. According to a copy of the memo obtained by The Washington Post, the general counsel's office determined that the report "does not reflect now-settled executive branch views of the relevant law."

Notice how broad the original exception was. It legalized torture anywhere for any POWs - not just enemy combatants - if the president so ordered. And we now have a precedent that would permit even legitimate U.S. POWs to be tortured in retaliation. We had a president declaring himself above the law, and he got his legal lackey, Alberto Gonzales, to rubber-stamp it. Does any sane person really believe that president Bush's personal suspension of the law against torture had nothing to do with the abuses that followed in every single theater of the war on terror? Or that his decision hasn't put U.S. soldiers now and in the future at greater risk even in conventional combat? Notice also how the military's legal representatives opposed it. The secretary of state opposed it. This was Bush's choice. The line from Abu Ghraib and Gitmo to the White House is perfectly straight. And people are fixating on Karl Rove?

You can find Sullivan's Blog here.

-The Oklahoma Hippy

Andrew Sullivan shines some light on the Bush Torture Policy...

So one of the big questions for me still remains: Is the torture of detainees an approved policy, or is it the work of a few bad apples?

Andrew Sullivan is circling in on an answer:

 

GENEVA SUSPENDED: We have new evidence that president Bush's suspension of the ban on torture under the Geneva Conventions and under American law was ordered over the objections of the judge advocate generals (JAGs) for the Army, Air Force and Marines. Money quote:

A law enacted in 1994 bars torture by U.S. military personnel anywhere in the world. But the Pentagon working group's 2003 report, prepared under the supervision of general counsel William J. Haynes II, said that "in order to respect the President's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign ... [the prohibition against torture] must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority." Haynes -- through Daniel J. Dell'Orto, principal deputy general counsel for the Defense Department -- wrote a memo March 17 that rescinded the working group's report, and Dell'Orto confirmed that withdrawal yesterday at the hearing. According to a copy of the memo obtained by The Washington Post, the general counsel's office determined that the report "does not reflect now-settled executive branch views of the relevant law."

Notice how broad the original exception was. It legalized torture anywhere for any POWs - not just enemy combatants - if the president so ordered. And we now have a precedent that would permit even legitimate U.S. POWs to be tortured in retaliation. We had a president declaring himself above the law, and he got his legal lackey, Alberto Gonzales, to rubber-stamp it. Does any sane person really believe that president Bush's personal suspension of the law against torture had nothing to do with the abuses that followed in every single theater of the war on terror? Or that his decision hasn't put U.S. soldiers now and in the future at greater risk even in conventional combat? Notice also how the military's legal representatives opposed it. The secretary of state opposed it. This was Bush's choice. The line from Abu Ghraib and Gitmo to the White House is perfectly straight. And people are fixating on Karl Rove?

You can find Sullivan's Blog here.

-The Oklahoma Hippy

I have not seen it put better than what John at Americablog posted...

I'm noticing more and more news stories getting very sloppy with the latest twist to the Rove story. What those stories are trying to say is:

1. Rove claims he learned about Plame being CIA from other journalists and not from government sources. Even were that true, it's irrelevant to a senior government official leaking the name of a CIA agent - it doesn't matter how he found out. He knows better, and he flagrantly risked national security for petty revenge.

2. Rove now claims he confirmed for Novak that he heard Plame was CIA, but that Novak asked him about her CIA connections first. Again, irrelevant. He confirmed an undercover CIA agent to a journalist, is he mad? I mean, if a journalist said "so, I hear we're invading Syria on August 15" would Rove respond, "yeah I heard that too"? No, he wouldn't. This kind of journalist prying happens all the time. But Rove decided to answer this time, putting our national security at risk.

3. Matt Cooper's notes show that it was ROVE who offered Plame's CIA connection to TIME magazine, without any prompting from Matt Cooper. So, the Novak story is irrelevant either way. All the Novak story shows is that there's now a pattern of Rove outing Plame as CIA to numerous journalists.

4. The White House lied to the press corp and the American people for two years, saying that Rove had nothing to do with the leak, and he did.

5. President Bush said he'd fire the leaker, and now he's backing off of his own word.

Those are facts.

Exactly.

-The Oklahoma Hippy

I have not seen it put better than what John at Americablog posted...

I'm noticing more and more news stories getting very sloppy with the latest twist to the Rove story. What those stories are trying to say is:

1. Rove claims he learned about Plame being CIA from other journalists and not from government sources. Even were that true, it's irrelevant to a senior government official leaking the name of a CIA agent - it doesn't matter how he found out. He knows better, and he flagrantly risked national security for petty revenge.

2. Rove now claims he confirmed for Novak that he heard Plame was CIA, but that Novak asked him about her CIA connections first. Again, irrelevant. He confirmed an undercover CIA agent to a journalist, is he mad? I mean, if a journalist said "so, I hear we're invading Syria on August 15" would Rove respond, "yeah I heard that too"? No, he wouldn't. This kind of journalist prying happens all the time. But Rove decided to answer this time, putting our national security at risk.

3. Matt Cooper's notes show that it was ROVE who offered Plame's CIA connection to TIME magazine, without any prompting from Matt Cooper. So, the Novak story is irrelevant either way. All the Novak story shows is that there's now a pattern of Rove outing Plame as CIA to numerous journalists.

4. The White House lied to the press corp and the American people for two years, saying that Rove had nothing to do with the leak, and he did.

5. President Bush said he'd fire the leaker, and now he's backing off of his own word.

Those are facts.

Exactly.

-The Oklahoma Hippy

What I think happened...

I am still working on documenting everything and adding links to original source material, so please be patient while that comes. Until then, you can read it with the caveat that revisions are still being made and changes are likely.

*********
So, let's take a look at this as part of a bigger story, and forgive me for the length.

The PNAC group takes positions all throughout the administration.

They immediately begin planning to invade Iraq, as has been PNAC's dream since the mid 90s.

Amhed Chalabi has been involved with this crowd on a social and professional level for years, and knows exactly what they want to hear and what they wish to do, so he figures he will help them pain their picture for the President and if he plays his cards right, perhaps he'll be the next President of Iraq.

Cheney's Energy Task force starts to meet. Lots of questions arise as to who is in the meetings and what is being discussed. Executive privilege is invoked.

This is exceedingly strange, because why should the cost of gasoline over the next five years or the cost of heating oil be such a big damn secret?

Now imagine for a second that this Energy Task Force was being included in the preliminary planning for an invasion of Iraq, and these energy companies will be expected to be involved to take over oil operations once we're in Iraq. Suddenly the secrecy behind the meetings would make sense.

FOIA requests are filed and the issue is litigated for years.

Later, Judicial Watch gets a document release that shows the Task Force was dividing up the oil fields amongst the world's major oil companies.

http://www.judicialwatch.org/071703.c_.shtml

If memory serves, there were whispers all over D.C. before September 11th, that the country should expect something to happen with Iraq in 2002 or 2003.

Josh tracked down for us that the Niger document seems to come from someone in the Italian intelligence service.

Hypothetically speaking, the plan is to set up Saddam by forging a memo that would indicate that Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium from Niger. Perhaps someone in our Government faked the document. Not wanting to taint our own experts on whom we may later have to rely on to "authenticate" the document for us, we get someone trust worthy, but not ask knowledgeable to take on the task. We end up with a somewhat convincing document, but we still let it with enough mistakes that a real expert could tell the difference with a little effort.

Then, quite unexpectedly given that we were so focused on Iraq, September 11th happens and the Administration has to regroup. They have the plan for Iraq in the works and as Bob Woodward wrote in Plan of Attack, Rumsfeld wanted to go after Iraq from the very beginning. No good targets and all that jazz.

They come to the conclusion they just couldn't sell it, and they go ahead and invade Afghanistan. They do a half-hearted job in Afghanistan, leaving Osama Bin Laden alive and on the loose and pivot their attention back to Iraq.

The original point of the document was to illustrate Iraq to be in violation of the original agreement that ended the Gulf War. The political boost that Bush received from 9/11 made the process even easier.

People now believed that terrorists were lurking everywhere wanting to kill us. There is anthrax in the mail and no duct tape to be found.

We go back to plan A and plan on using the Niger document to prove that Saddam is trying to build nuclear weapons, but more importantly they've added the new rationale to their case that he's working with Al Qaeda and they will be the recipients of these weapons.

Still being in its state of shock, a majority of this country doesn't question this shift in priorities.

During this time the office of Special Plans is created by Feith and Rumsfeld to allow them to paint the picture they wanted the world to see by cooking the intelligence through their office. Only people they trust are involved in this.

There is web of PNAC guys all working at this in different parts of the executive.

You have Rumsfeld and Feith at the Pentagon.

There is John Bolton over at State. He's there because they know that Powell is not going to go along with this plan, so they make no attempt to involve him. They get him placed exactly where they want him as Under Secretary over Arms Control and International Security.

You have Cheney in the White House overseeing this whole thing, while keeping Karl Rove in the loop so he can handle the politics of getting this war past congress and the American people.

The President shares a desire to see Saddam gone, but he is kept out of the loop to enough of a degree that he can maintain plausible deniability. The intelligence that he sees is very carefully put together to lead to very obvious conclusions.

The President is provided a certain version of the facts. He is faced with a very easy decision to invade based on those facts. He simply never questions what he is told, because he likes the answer he has.

At some point, the Niger document is put in front of the CIA's Counter Proliferation Division (CDP), and questions start to be raised.

At some point, the question is asked if we should attempt to determine if this Niger document as authentic or not. This isn't a question that the PNAC guys like, but they can't exactly say no. At this point, Mrs. Wilson suggests her husband for the trip. (Whether the suggestion of her husband was solicited or not doesn't really matter.)

As former ambassador to Gabon and former acting Ambassador to Iraq, he knows the people he needs to know and he has the connections he needs to have to really determine the document's authenticity.

Someone in the PNAC circle sees and opening in this, and sends word that Wilson is to be the guy to go.

The thinking goes like this: We know the document is fake, and we know whoever checks it out is going to come to this conclusion. Let's go ahead and send Wilson knowing we can use the nepotism argument to negate any inevitable critiques of the document that might arise.

Wilson returns, files his report about the document being a forgery and it is immediately ignored.


Along comes the State of the Union. We hear the 16 words. Joe Wilson writes his piece for the New York Times.

Walter Pincus indicated last week that the plan for discrediting Ambassador Wilson was in place in mid 2002. They were just sitting on it, waiting to use it if need be.

Sometime around now the government begins awarding no bid contracts to Halliburton to provide all kinds of services in the event of war. Think back to the Map of Iraq's oil fields obtained by judicial watch.

Wilson's Op-Ed is published and the plan is put into motion. Rove starts his wrecking machine and begins to leak to reporters their reasoning for ignoring Joe Wilson's claims that the document is a fake.

He returns calls to reporters who have left him messages about other things and at some point changes the subject to Iraq and slips them the info on Wilson and his wife.

The weak story about trying to warn reporters off the story isn't a lie and it isn't a revisionist history. It was just a really weak cover story Rove had planned on using since the moment he leaked the info.

Think about it. He's checked the law. Perhaps he asked someone he trusts to explain everything about the 1982 law against against identifying undercover operatives. He knows what exonerates him.

His leaks are very carefully scripted as have been all of his denials.

The conversation was very short
He did not use Mrs. Wilson's name
He never identifies her as an undercover agent
Plus, he demanded "Super Deep Background" anonymity for all of this
Novak, Miller, Cooper. He tells Chris Matthews that she's fair game.

Things don't go exactly to plan, because rather than the story becoming how untrustworthy Joe Wilson is, the story becomes about the leak. It's not too much of a problem, because the focus was no longer on the authenticity of the Niger document.

They allow the inspectors in, but do not allow them to finish. We claim that the inspectors' inability to locate any hint of WMD only means that Saddam is hiding them and that he's more desperate and might be ready to give them to terrorist or to use them himself rather than giving them up.

We go into Iraq over the hesitation and objections of most of the World's leaders.

True to the document from the energy task force, we secure the oil fields and not much else.

Things didn't go exactly as planned. We're still there. The PNAC guys haven't had enough stability and security to start the free market utopia they wanted to create in Iraq that would allow for the sale of cheap oil.

So the rest has been public and we're pretty clear on where it went from there.

So that’s my conclusion on what went down and why this leak occurred.

I have never been one to believe in conspiracy theories, because I had one very practical problem. People can’t keep secrets, and people aren’t perfect. Any plan is going to have flaws and any conspiracy is going to have people who talk.

But, if someone where to try to pull off a real conspiracy of huge proportions, big lie theory would work in their favor… for a while. But, people aren’t perfect and mistakes were made. People have talked.

What I am seeing going on right now is exactly how I imagine that such a conspiracy would unravel. Slowly, over the course of a long time, people who find out about small pieces of the story but not be able to connect the dots. But the picture is coming slowly into focus.

Most of what I have laid out in this post are commonly accepted facts with several moments of conjecture. I’m more convinced everyday that this is how it happened, or at least is pretty darn close.

The Leo Strauss school of political thought says that our leaders have a responsibility to convince the people of the grand destiny of America. He advocated using religion to control people and the focus on a great enemy to keep the masses from being idle. Most importantly, Strauss said that if you were the one spinning this “grand destiny” or pushing the religious values, it didn’t matter whether you believed it or not, as long as you were convincing in it’s presentation.

This is exactly how these people have governed. They have used religion to control people and they have repeated ad nauseum the refrain that it’s our responsibility to rid the world of evil. The repeated use of emotionally potent oversimplifications to keep people bought into this clusterf*** has been masterful in its simplicity.

Democrats don’t have the lock step message machine necessary to do this like the Republicans do. Democrats allowed the Republican Party the paint them as incompetent by claiming that they have no values, policies, ideas, or beliefs.

This is of course nonsense. Democrats share common beliefs and policy goals, but we don’t try to make sure that every single member of the party has a memo in their hand telling them what the 25 word refrain of the week is.

Good people who should no better went along with this whole mess within the republican establishment out of a misguided sense of party loyalty and sheer ambition.

When the Gingrich Revolution took over Congress in 1994, the rules of the game fundamentally changed. Politics became a brutal blood sport that fostered an environment of toxic partisan ship in this country. Congressional politics was no longer about a marketplace of ideas where real debate occurred and most Congressmen’s loyalties were still somewhat attached to the best interest of their constituents as well as their party.

No longer. It’s about subduing the political opposition. It’s about eradicating any obstacle that stands in the way of gaining more power and influence and eventually money.

We have to take a big step back in this country. We need to acknowledge what has happened and we must find some way to at least attempt some sort of reconciliation.

We allowed a small group of men to stage a war that had nothing to do with out security and everything to do with their personal ambitions.

The culture of corruption that has overtaken the Republican Party is a virus eating away at our society. We must put a stop to it, for I’m not sure how much more we can take.

What I think happened...

I am still working on documenting everything and adding links to original source material, so please be patient while that comes. Until then, you can read it with the caveat that revisions are still being made and changes are likely.

*********
So, let's take a look at this as part of a bigger story, and forgive me for the length.

The PNAC group takes positions all throughout the administration.

They immediately begin planning to invade Iraq, as has been PNAC's dream since the mid 90s.

Amhed Chalabi has been involved with this crowd on a social and professional level for years, and knows exactly what they want to hear and what they wish to do, so he figures he will help them pain their picture for the President and if he plays his cards right, perhaps he'll be the next President of Iraq.

Cheney's Energy Task force starts to meet. Lots of questions arise as to who is in the meetings and what is being discussed. Executive privilege is invoked.

This is exceedingly strange, because why should the cost of gasoline over the next five years or the cost of heating oil be such a big damn secret?

Now imagine for a second that this Energy Task Force was being included in the preliminary planning for an invasion of Iraq, and these energy companies will be expected to be involved to take over oil operations once we're in Iraq. Suddenly the secrecy behind the meetings would make sense.

FOIA requests are filed and the issue is litigated for years.

Later, Judicial Watch gets a document release that shows the Task Force was dividing up the oil fields amongst the world's major oil companies.

http://www.judicialwatch.org/071703.c_.shtml

If memory serves, there were whispers all over D.C. before September 11th, that the country should expect something to happen with Iraq in 2002 or 2003.

Josh tracked down for us that the Niger document seems to come from someone in the Italian intelligence service.

Hypothetically speaking, the plan is to set up Saddam by forging a memo that would indicate that Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium from Niger. Perhaps someone in our Government faked the document. Not wanting to taint our own experts on whom we may later have to rely on to "authenticate" the document for us, we get someone trust worthy, but not ask knowledgeable to take on the task. We end up with a somewhat convincing document, but we still let it with enough mistakes that a real expert could tell the difference with a little effort.

Then, quite unexpectedly given that we were so focused on Iraq, September 11th happens and the Administration has to regroup. They have the plan for Iraq in the works and as Bob Woodward wrote in Plan of Attack, Rumsfeld wanted to go after Iraq from the very beginning. No good targets and all that jazz.

They come to the conclusion they just couldn't sell it, and they go ahead and invade Afghanistan. They do a half-hearted job in Afghanistan, leaving Osama Bin Laden alive and on the loose and pivot their attention back to Iraq.

The original point of the document was to illustrate Iraq to be in violation of the original agreement that ended the Gulf War. The political boost that Bush received from 9/11 made the process even easier.

People now believed that terrorists were lurking everywhere wanting to kill us. There is anthrax in the mail and no duct tape to be found.

We go back to plan A and plan on using the Niger document to prove that Saddam is trying to build nuclear weapons, but more importantly they've added the new rationale to their case that he's working with Al Qaeda and they will be the recipients of these weapons.

Still being in its state of shock, a majority of this country doesn't question this shift in priorities.

During this time the office of Special Plans is created by Feith and Rumsfeld to allow them to paint the picture they wanted the world to see by cooking the intelligence through their office. Only people they trust are involved in this.

There is web of PNAC guys all working at this in different parts of the executive.

You have Rumsfeld and Feith at the Pentagon.

There is John Bolton over at State. He's there because they know that Powell is not going to go along with this plan, so they make no attempt to involve him. They get him placed exactly where they want him as Under Secretary over Arms Control and International Security.

You have Cheney in the White House overseeing this whole thing, while keeping Karl Rove in the loop so he can handle the politics of getting this war past congress and the American people.

The President shares a desire to see Saddam gone, but he is kept out of the loop to enough of a degree that he can maintain plausible deniability. The intelligence that he sees is very carefully put together to lead to very obvious conclusions.

The President is provided a certain version of the facts. He is faced with a very easy decision to invade based on those facts. He simply never questions what he is told, because he likes the answer he has.

At some point, the Niger document is put in front of the CIA's Counter Proliferation Division (CDP), and questions start to be raised.

At some point, the question is asked if we should attempt to determine if this Niger document as authentic or not. This isn't a question that the PNAC guys like, but they can't exactly say no. At this point, Mrs. Wilson suggests her husband for the trip. (Whether the suggestion of her husband was solicited or not doesn't really matter.)

As former ambassador to Gabon and former acting Ambassador to Iraq, he knows the people he needs to know and he has the connections he needs to have to really determine the document's authenticity.

Someone in the PNAC circle sees and opening in this, and sends word that Wilson is to be the guy to go.

The thinking goes like this: We know the document is fake, and we know whoever checks it out is going to come to this conclusion. Let's go ahead and send Wilson knowing we can use the nepotism argument to negate any inevitable critiques of the document that might arise.

Wilson returns, files his report about the document being a forgery and it is immediately ignored.


Along comes the State of the Union. We hear the 16 words. Joe Wilson writes his piece for the New York Times.

Walter Pincus indicated last week that the plan for discrediting Ambassador Wilson was in place in mid 2002. They were just sitting on it, waiting to use it if need be.

Sometime around now the government begins awarding no bid contracts to Halliburton to provide all kinds of services in the event of war. Think back to the Map of Iraq's oil fields obtained by judicial watch.

Wilson's Op-Ed is published and the plan is put into motion. Rove starts his wrecking machine and begins to leak to reporters their reasoning for ignoring Joe Wilson's claims that the document is a fake.

He returns calls to reporters who have left him messages about other things and at some point changes the subject to Iraq and slips them the info on Wilson and his wife.

The weak story about trying to warn reporters off the story isn't a lie and it isn't a revisionist history. It was just a really weak cover story Rove had planned on using since the moment he leaked the info.

Think about it. He's checked the law. Perhaps he asked someone he trusts to explain everything about the 1982 law against against identifying undercover operatives. He knows what exonerates him.

His leaks are very carefully scripted as have been all of his denials.

The conversation was very short
He did not use Mrs. Wilson's name
He never identifies her as an undercover agent
Plus, he demanded "Super Deep Background" anonymity for all of this
Novak, Miller, Cooper. He tells Chris Matthews that she's fair game.

Things don't go exactly to plan, because rather than the story becoming how untrustworthy Joe Wilson is, the story becomes about the leak. It's not too much of a problem, because the focus was no longer on the authenticity of the Niger document.

They allow the inspectors in, but do not allow them to finish. We claim that the inspectors' inability to locate any hint of WMD only means that Saddam is hiding them and that he's more desperate and might be ready to give them to terrorist or to use them himself rather than giving them up.

We go into Iraq over the hesitation and objections of most of the World's leaders.

True to the document from the energy task force, we secure the oil fields and not much else.

Things didn't go exactly as planned. We're still there. The PNAC guys haven't had enough stability and security to start the free market utopia they wanted to create in Iraq that would allow for the sale of cheap oil.

So the rest has been public and we're pretty clear on where it went from there.

So that’s my conclusion on what went down and why this leak occurred.

I have never been one to believe in conspiracy theories, because I had one very practical problem. People can’t keep secrets, and people aren’t perfect. Any plan is going to have flaws and any conspiracy is going to have people who talk.

But, if someone where to try to pull off a real conspiracy of huge proportions, big lie theory would work in their favor… for a while. But, people aren’t perfect and mistakes were made. People have talked.

What I am seeing going on right now is exactly how I imagine that such a conspiracy would unravel. Slowly, over the course of a long time, people who find out about small pieces of the story but not be able to connect the dots. But the picture is coming slowly into focus.

Most of what I have laid out in this post are commonly accepted facts with several moments of conjecture. I’m more convinced everyday that this is how it happened, or at least is pretty darn close.

The Leo Strauss school of political thought says that our leaders have a responsibility to convince the people of the grand destiny of America. He advocated using religion to control people and the focus on a great enemy to keep the masses from being idle. Most importantly, Strauss said that if you were the one spinning this “grand destiny” or pushing the religious values, it didn’t matter whether you believed it or not, as long as you were convincing in it’s presentation.

This is exactly how these people have governed. They have used religion to control people and they have repeated ad nauseum the refrain that it’s our responsibility to rid the world of evil. The repeated use of emotionally potent oversimplifications to keep people bought into this clusterf*** has been masterful in its simplicity.

Democrats don’t have the lock step message machine necessary to do this like the Republicans do. Democrats allowed the Republican Party the paint them as incompetent by claiming that they have no values, policies, ideas, or beliefs.

This is of course nonsense. Democrats share common beliefs and policy goals, but we don’t try to make sure that every single member of the party has a memo in their hand telling them what the 25 word refrain of the week is.

Good people who should no better went along with this whole mess within the republican establishment out of a misguided sense of party loyalty and sheer ambition.

When the Gingrich Revolution took over Congress in 1994, the rules of the game fundamentally changed. Politics became a brutal blood sport that fostered an environment of toxic partisan ship in this country. Congressional politics was no longer about a marketplace of ideas where real debate occurred and most Congressmen’s loyalties were still somewhat attached to the best interest of their constituents as well as their party.

No longer. It’s about subduing the political opposition. It’s about eradicating any obstacle that stands in the way of gaining more power and influence and eventually money.

We have to take a big step back in this country. We need to acknowledge what has happened and we must find some way to at least attempt some sort of reconciliation.

We allowed a small group of men to stage a war that had nothing to do with out security and everything to do with their personal ambitions.

The culture of corruption that has overtaken the Republican Party is a virus eating away at our society. We must put a stop to it, for I’m not sure how much more we can take.

Josh Marshall makes an excellent point...

From TalkingPointsMemo.com:

A point that hasn't been made yet.

Everyone I hear from today says that the White House is going after Joe Wilson hard in their background conversations with reporters. Apparently Karl Rove himself.

Their main hit apparently is that it was Valerie Plame who authorized Wilson's trip to Niger or was the one who sent him -- which is as false today as it was two years ago.

Now, that's as much an attack on Plame as it is on Wilson. Actually, even more of one on her since the subtext is that she was either engaging in nepotism or advancing some private political agenda.

So now we know that Karl Rove started attacking Valerie Plame to get his boss out of the soup. And now two years later he continues to attack her.

True to form to the last. And every reporter in town knows it. -- Josh Marshall

The longer the President waits to cut him loose, the more likely the whole administration's going down with him.

Now take a look at the Talking Points the RNC sent out today. Click here to read the memo.

I can't wait to see what Round 3 brings tomorrow.

-The Oklahoma Hippy

Josh Marshall makes an excellent point...

From TalkingPointsMemo.com:

A point that hasn't been made yet.

Everyone I hear from today says that the White House is going after Joe Wilson hard in their background conversations with reporters. Apparently Karl Rove himself.

Their main hit apparently is that it was Valerie Plame who authorized Wilson's trip to Niger or was the one who sent him -- which is as false today as it was two years ago.

Now, that's as much an attack on Plame as it is on Wilson. Actually, even more of one on her since the subtext is that she was either engaging in nepotism or advancing some private political agenda.

So now we know that Karl Rove started attacking Valerie Plame to get his boss out of the soup. And now two years later he continues to attack her.

True to form to the last. And every reporter in town knows it. -- Josh Marshall

The longer the President waits to cut him loose, the more likely the whole administration's going down with him.

Now take a look at the Talking Points the RNC sent out today. Click here to read the memo.

I can't wait to see what Round 3 brings tomorrow.

-The Oklahoma Hippy

The Rove-Plame scandal is not going away...

The White House is sticking with the strategy that has worked so often for them in the past when they've encountered unfriendly news. Stonewall until the story has simply been starved to death for lack of anything new to report.

It's not going to work this time.

The people in that make up the news media are usually reporting on the scandal rather than being an organic part of the story itself. In this case, the story involves reporters in jail, lies to reporters, and abuse of background sourcing by people in the administration.

Additionally, it has the added aspects of being related to the war, and how we dealt with the intelligence was vetted prior to a War that has become an albatross around the President's neck.

This story is not going to lose its signigicance to anyone in the press corps. They are not going to stop trying to get to the truth.

And honestly, I think the truth leads to the origin of the Niger Uranium document.

I have very good reason to believe that we faked it and planted it with the Itallian Intelligence service and then given back to us.

Think of it as setting up Saddam by laundering faked evidence.

This isn't as nutty as it sounds and I am working on documenting the whole thing so I can post it here. It's taking a while. Expect it by no later than next Monday if no one beats me to it.

-The Oklahoma Hippy

The Rove-Plame scandal is not going away...

The White House is sticking with the strategy that has worked so often for them in the past when they've encountered unfriendly news. Stonewall until the story has simply been starved to death for lack of anything new to report.

It's not going to work this time.

The people in that make up the news media are usually reporting on the scandal rather than being an organic part of the story itself. In this case, the story involves reporters in jail, lies to reporters, and abuse of background sourcing by people in the administration.

Additionally, it has the added aspects of being related to the war, and how we dealt with the intelligence was vetted prior to a War that has become an albatross around the President's neck.

This story is not going to lose its signigicance to anyone in the press corps. They are not going to stop trying to get to the truth.

And honestly, I think the truth leads to the origin of the Niger Uranium document.

I have very good reason to believe that we faked it and planted it with the Itallian Intelligence service and then given back to us.

Think of it as setting up Saddam by laundering faked evidence.

This isn't as nutty as it sounds and I am working on documenting the whole thing so I can post it here. It's taking a while. Expect it by no later than next Monday if no one beats me to it.

-The Oklahoma Hippy

Who the heck asked this question?

From today's White House Press Briefing:

QUESTION: Considering the widespread interest and the absolutely frantic Democrat reaction to Karl Rove's excellent speech to conservatives last month, does the president hope that Karl will give a lot more speeches?

MCCLELLAN: He continues to give speeches.

He was traveling this weekend talking about the importance of strengthening Social Security. And he's continued to go out and give speeches.

Everybody wants to know if Karl is being fired and/or going to prison and someone actually asked the question above?

Is Jeff Gannon back?

-The Oklahoma Hippy

Who the heck asked this question?

From today's White House Press Briefing:

QUESTION: Considering the widespread interest and the absolutely frantic Democrat reaction to Karl Rove's excellent speech to conservatives last month, does the president hope that Karl will give a lot more speeches?

MCCLELLAN: He continues to give speeches.

He was traveling this weekend talking about the importance of strengthening Social Security. And he's continued to go out and give speeches.

Everybody wants to know if Karl is being fired and/or going to prison and someone actually asked the question above?

Is Jeff Gannon back?

-The Oklahoma Hippy

Ed Klein smells a conspiracy?

From the Washington Post:

Despite the enormous hype surrounding Edward Klein's scathing and hearsay-filled book about Hillary Rodham Clinton, the author has been ignored by all but two television talk shows.

This collective cold shoulder hasn't stopped "The Truth About Hillary" from hitting No. 2 yesterday on the coveted New York Times list. "It's the biggest example to date of how major media censorship doesn't stop a book anymore from being a bestseller," Klein declares.

Censorship is clearly the wrong word, since networks have no obligation to interview any author. The refusal to book Klein could just as easily be viewed as the drawing of a line by news organizations over a highly personal attack that has drawn fire from several conservative columnists as well as those on the left.

"It's just been a total blackout," says Klein, adding that talk radio and some Web sites, including the Drudge Report, have driven sales of the book. "I definitely think there's something organized going on here."

Really? Is that really Ed's position? Since when can we Democrats organize anything? Don't get me wrong, the book was crap and that was so easy to prove that even Sean Hannity was going after Ed Klein about the book when Klein was on Hannity and Colmes.

When Sean Hannity thinks the book you wrote about Hillary Clinton is unfair and poorly researched, you have really managed to put together 300 pages of solid gold crap.

Congrats Ed. Your book sucks. But, just like with Coral Calcium, there are enough dumb people in the world that it is selling. Enjoy your money. You earned it by selling your integrity.

-The Oklahoma Hippy

Ed Klein smells a conspiracy?

From the Washington Post:

Despite the enormous hype surrounding Edward Klein's scathing and hearsay-filled book about Hillary Rodham Clinton, the author has been ignored by all but two television talk shows.

This collective cold shoulder hasn't stopped "The Truth About Hillary" from hitting No. 2 yesterday on the coveted New York Times list. "It's the biggest example to date of how major media censorship doesn't stop a book anymore from being a bestseller," Klein declares.

Censorship is clearly the wrong word, since networks have no obligation to interview any author. The refusal to book Klein could just as easily be viewed as the drawing of a line by news organizations over a highly personal attack that has drawn fire from several conservative columnists as well as those on the left.

"It's just been a total blackout," says Klein, adding that talk radio and some Web sites, including the Drudge Report, have driven sales of the book. "I definitely think there's something organized going on here."

Really? Is that really Ed's position? Since when can we Democrats organize anything? Don't get me wrong, the book was crap and that was so easy to prove that even Sean Hannity was going after Ed Klein about the book when Klein was on Hannity and Colmes.

When Sean Hannity thinks the book you wrote about Hillary Clinton is unfair and poorly researched, you have really managed to put together 300 pages of solid gold crap.

Congrats Ed. Your book sucks. But, just like with Coral Calcium, there are enough dumb people in the world that it is selling. Enjoy your money. You earned it by selling your integrity.

-The Oklahoma Hippy

Cat got your tounge Scott?

From today's gaggle:

The following is a excerpts of a rush transcript of the White House press briefing Monday...

QUESTION: Scott, can I ask you this: Did Karl Rove commit a crime?

MCCLELLAN: Again, David, this is a question relating to a ongoing investigation, and you have my response related to the investigation. And I don't think you should read anything into it other than: We're going to continue not to comment on it while it's ongoing.

QUESTION: Do you stand by your statement from the fall of 2003, when you were asked specifically about Karl and Elliot Abrams and Scooter Libby, and you said, "I've gone to each of those gentlemen, and they have told me they are not involved in this"?

QUESTION: Do you stand by that statement?

MCCLELLAN: And if you will recall, I said that, as part of helping the investigators move forward on the investigation, we're not going to get into commenting on it. That was something I stated back near that time as well.

QUESTION: Scott, this is ridiculous. The notion that you're going to stand before us, after having commented with that level of detail, and tell people watching this that somehow you've decided not to talk.

You've got a public record out there. Do you stand by your remarks from that podium or not?

MCCLELLAN: I'm well aware, like you, of what was previously said. And I will be glad to talk about it at the appropriate time. The appropriate time is when the investigation...

QUESTION: (inaudible) when it's appropriate and when it's inappropriate?

MCCLELLAN: If you'll let me finish.

QUESTION: No, you're not finishing. You're not saying anything.

You stood at that podium and said that Karl Rove was not involved. And now we find out that he spoke about Joseph Wilson's wife. So don't you owe the American public a fuller explanation. Was he involved or was he not? Because contrary to what you told the American people, he did indeed talk about his wife, didn't he?

MCCLELLAN: There will be a time to talk about this, but now is not the time to talk about it.

QUESTION: Do you think people will accept that, what you're saying today?

MCCLELLAN: Again, I've responded to the question.

QUESTION: You're in a bad spot here, Scott...

(LAUGHTER)

... because after the investigation began -- after the criminal investigation was under way -- you said, October 10th, 2003, "I spoke with those individuals, Rove, Abrams and Libby. As I pointed out, those individuals assured me they were not involved in this," from that podium. That's after the criminal investigation began.

Now that Rove has essentially been caught red-handed peddling this information, all of a sudden you have respect for the sanctity of the criminal investigation.

MCCLELLAN: No, that's not a correct characterization. And I think you are well aware of that.

We know each other very well. And it was after that period that the investigators had requested that we not get into commenting on an ongoing criminal investigation.

And we want to be helpful so that they can get to the bottom of this. Because no one wants to get to the bottom of it more than the president of the United States.

I am well aware of what was said previously. I remember well what was said previously. And at some point I look forward to talking about it. But until the investigation is complete, I'm just not going to do that.

QUESTION: So you're now saying that after you cleared Rove and the others from that podium, then the prosecutors asked you not to speak anymore and since then you haven't.

MCCLELLAN: Again, you're continuing to ask questions relating to an ongoing criminal investigation and I'm just not going to respond to them. QUESTION: When did they ask you to stop commenting on it, Scott? Can you pin down a date?

MCCLELLAN: Back in that time period.

QUESTION: Well, then the president commented on it nine months later. So was he not following the White House plan?

MCCLELLAN: I appreciate your questions. You can keep asking them, but you have my response.

QUESTION: Well, we are going to keep asking them.

When did the president learn that Karl Rove had had a conversation with a news reporter about the involvement of Joseph Wilson's wife in the decision to send him to Africa?

MCCLELLAN: I've responded to the questions.

QUESTION: When did the president learn that Karl Rove had been...

MCCLELLAN: I've responded to your questions.

QUESTION: After the investigation is completed, will you then be consistent with your word and the president's word that anybody who was involved will be let go?

MCCLELLAN: Again, after the investigation is complete, I will be glad to talk about it at that point.

QUESTION: Can you walk us through why, given the fact that Rove's lawyer has spoken publicly about this, it is inconsistent with the investigation, that it compromises the investigation to talk about the involvement of Karl Rove, the deputy chief of staff, here?

MCCLELLAN: Well, those overseeing the investigation expressed a preference to us that we not get into commenting on the investigation while it's ongoing. And that was what they requested of the White House. And so I think in order to be helpful to that investigation, we are following their direction.

QUESTION: Scott, there's a difference between commenting on an investigation and taking an action...

MCCLELLAN: (inaudible)

QUESTION: Can I finish, please?

MCCLELLAN: I'll come back to you in a minute.

QUESTION: Scott, (inaudible) president spoke about war on terrorism and, also, according to India Globe report there is bombings in London and also bombings in India. And at both places, Al Qaida was involved.

According to the India Globe and press reports, Pakistani television said that Osama bin Laden is now alive and they had spoken with him. And his group is (inaudible) terrorism around the globe is concerned.

Well, now, the major bombings after 9/11 took place in London and (inaudible) fighting against terrorism is concerned.

Where do we stand now? Really, where do we go from London as far as terrorism is concerned? How far can we go after Osama bin Laden now to catch him, because he's still in Pakistan?

MCCLELLAN: What occurred in London is a grim reminder that we are at war on terrorism. We are waging a comprehensive war on terrorism.

You heard the president talk earlier today to the FBI personnel and others who were at Quantico. And the president talked about our global war on terrorism. He talked about our strategy for taking the fight to the enemy, staying on the offensive, and working to spread freedom and democracy to defeat the ideology of hatred that terrorists espouse.

And the president pointed back to the 20th century. He pointed out that in World War II, freedom prevailed over fascism and Nazism. And in the Cold War, freedom prevailed over communism.

MCCLELLAN: Freedom is a powerful force for defeating an ideology such as the one that the terrorists espouse. And that's why it's so important to continue working to advance freedom and democracy in the broader Middle East. And that's what we will continue to do.

And the president also talked about the great progress we've made at home to protect the home front.

The families and friends of those who lost their lives in London continue to be in our thoughts and prayers. We know what it's like to be attacked on our own soil.

And that's why the president made a decision that we were going to take the fight to the enemy to try to disrupt plots and prevent attacks from happening in the first place. And that's exactly what we are doing.

But we're also going to work with the free world to support the advance of freedom and democracy in a dangerous region of the world. For too long we ignored what was going on in the Middle East. We accepted and tolerated dictatorships in exchange for peace and stability, and we got neither.

As the president said, free nations are peaceful societies. And that's why it's so important that we continue to support the advance of freedom, because that's how you ultimately defeat the ideology of hatred and oppression that terrorists espouse.

QUESTION: Does the president continue to have confidence in Mr. Rove?

MCCLELLAN: Again, these are all questions coming up in the context of an ongoing criminal investigation. And you've heard my response on this.

QUESTION: So you're not going to respond as to whether or not the president has confidence in his deputy chief of staff?

MCCLELLAN: You're asking this question in the context of an ongoing investigation, and I would not read anything into it other then I'm simply going to comment on an ongoing investigation.

QUESTION: Has there been any change, or is there a plan for Mr. Rove's portfolio to be altered in any way?

MCCLELLAN: Again, you have my response to these questions.

Givem' the old Razzle Dazzle....

-The Oklahoma Hippy