The CQ Interview & Podcast: Rep. J.D. Hayworth

Earlier this afternoon, I had an opportunity to interview Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-AZ), who came to Congress during the heady days of the Contract With America and the rise of the Republican majority. Rep. Hayworth has written a new book that has just been released by Regnery, Whatever It Takes: Illegal Immigration, Border Security, and The War On Terror. The Congressman took an hour out of his day to talk to CQ about illegal immigration, the guest worker proposal, and how the open border in the south presents a clear and present danger to American security.

It's fair to say that Hayworth has a front-row seat to the many issues that illegal immigration causes. He has lived most of his adult life in Arizona, one of the front-line states in the massive long-term invasion (as he sees it) across the Mexican border. The lack of action from the federal government, especially post-9/11 has continually frustrated him as it has a number of his colleagues in the Southwest. He sees that the time may have finally come for Washington to do something about stemming the flow, even if only for national-security purposes, but he believes tthat the current efforts towards a guest-worker program will not work.

I took the opportunity to speak with Hayworth at length about immigration, and found him to be a fascinating and well-schooled spokesman for the effort to close the southern gap in our defenses. We also talked at length about reform, lobbying, and the upcoming election for the Majority Leader's office. He did not endorse any candidate, although he did say that John Shadegg, as his colleague from Arizona, has his attention. He wants to wait to see if the three contenders will agree to a debate, preferably public. Hayworth talked about the public nature of a process that normally would have taken place in quiet caucuses.

Hayworth also acknowledged that Jack Abramoff had contributed money to his campaign as well, and seemed pleased to be able to address the issue during our interview. Hayworth comes from a state that has a large Native American population that had long supported him, and his answers to my questions on reform and the Abramoff scandal are very interesting.

The interview ran to 57 minutes, and I have broken it up into four separate podcasts -- the first podcasts for Captain's Quarters, and hopefully the lead of a series of interviews for downloading by CQ readers, and listeners now as well. The links for the four parts are below:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

For those who have CQ in their RSS feedreader, podcasts will show up in this URL when I post them.

UPDATE: I added the RSS feed to iTunes, but I don't know when it will start showing up.

Liberal Misstep On Anti-Americanism

Canada may suddenly be hip with Americans, but it might surprise people on both sides of the border that Americans still retain some popularity among Canadians. The Washington Post reports on the upcoming Canadian election today by covering the backlash from Paul Martin's clumsy attempt to leverage the relatively low anti-American sentiment in Canada to turn his disastrous campaign around:

Polls show a deep antipathy among Canadians toward the Bush administration, made more acute by the invasion and occupation of Iraq. That has carried over to a more general anti-Americanism, and academics here have made a cottage industry of talking about the divergence of values between Canadians and Americans.

Martin sought to corral that sentiment by portraying Harper as dangerously pro-American. But the strategy appeared to backfire in this campaign, exacerbating his slide in the polls.

"In the last campaign, those attack ads worked. This time they won't. People are just fed up," said Peter Bryce, 46, a financial manager who said the political rally in this town west of Toronto was the first he had attended.

Martin makes the same mistake that European leaders have made in their tired strategies of blaming America for their own shortcomings -- it doesn't work as a long-term approach. Gerhard Schroeder finds himself working for Vladimir Putin instead of running Germany because his electorate finally got disgusted with his sabotage of what had been a strategic security and economic partnership with the US. Canadian voters simply have seen through the ruse much more quickly than the Germans, perhaps because of the context of explicit Liberal corruption for this election.

Unfortunately, the Post doesn't provide much more coverage of the issues in play for the upcoming vote. That tends to underscore the notion of American apathy towards its biggest trading partner, an apathy that remains inexplicable to me. Americans know more about the electoral politics of Britain and France than they do about Canada, and probably less about the trade relationship. The American media may also pay the price for missing the huge political story about to play out to its conclusion Monday.

Final Ipsos Poll Shows Tory Lead At 12

Ipsos has come out with its final polling for the Canadian election, and the numbers show Stephen Harper and the Tories rolling to a resounding victory in two days. The Tories now have a twelve-point gap over the Liberals and still have an edge in Ontario, the Liberal power base:

As the 39th general election enters its final days, it now seems almost certain that when the votes are counted on Election Day, Conservative Leader Stephen Harper and his family will have a new home address at 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa as he becomes the new Prime Minister of Canada.

A new national Ipsos Reid survey of 2000 Canadians, conducted for CanWest News Service/Global News from January 17-19th, frames the Conservatives holding 38% of federal votes (+1 point) and taking a 12-point lead over the Liberals (26%, -3 points) into the final election weekend. The NDP at 19% (+1 point) and the Green Party at 5% (unchanged) remain static in the polls.

Meanwhile, in Quebec, the Conservatives at 27% (+6 points) are now attracting nearly double the percentage of federal votes than are the Liberals (14%, -10 points) - the Bloc holds steady with 46% support (+3 points).

And while there has been speculation from many of a tightening vote scenario in the crucial province of Ontario, this trend does not appear evident: The Conservatives at 38% (-2 points) have maintained a lead (now at 4 points) over the Liberals (34%, -3 points) in this province. However, rising Liberal fortunes in the city of Toronto alone, which will not produce any new seats for the Party, has perhaps been at the root of this speculation.

Based on the numbers, Ipsos predicts an overwhelming plurality for the Tories of 147 seats, while the Liberals may wind up fighting for second place with Bloc Quebecois, both of which could win 59-63 seats. The stunning rejection of Liberal rule by a Canadian electorate that had largely been presumed to be detached and bored with politics and scandal will not just rock the political world but call into question the reporting of Canadian media, the independence of Canadian polling, and the conventional wisdom spooned out by pundits on both sides of the border. It's difficult to believe that this kind of quantum shift merely occurred over three weeks.

Stay tuned. Canada is about to erupt.

Iraq Elections Force Compromise

As expected, the Shi'ites have won an overwhelming plurality in the National Assembly from their elections last month, but failed to carry an outright majority. Instead, Iraqi political leaders will try to fashion a national-unity coalition that includes Shi'ites, Kurds, and Sunnis, the latter of whom imrpoved their showing to finish second:

The first official results in Iraq's landmark December elections showed Friday that the Shiite and Kurdish coalitions once again dominated the voting, but came up just short of the two-thirds majority needed to form a government on their own.

Sunni Arab parties won 58 of the new Parliament's 275 seats - the second-largest bloc of seats - giving them a much stronger political voice than they had before. That raised hopes that the Sunnis, who dominate the insurgency, might choose the political process over violence, and underscored the looming question of what role they would play as Iraq's leaders begin negotiating in earnest to form their first full-term government. ...

Some Sunni Arab leaders said they would mount a legal challenge to the election results, which they believe were marred by widespread fraud that favored Iranian-backed Shiite parties. But they conceded that the challenge was unlikely to succeed, and also made clear that they would not follow through on earlier threats to boycott the political process.

"We will deal with this subject positively," said Mahmoud Mashadani, a Sunni and leading member of the Iraqi Consensus Front, which won 44 seats. "We will not ask our members to go home. We will tell them to go to the Parliament."

Obviously this comes as excellent news in the progression from dictatorship to democracy. We are seeing a profound change in attitude from the Sunnis now that they have had a taste of being locked out of an election. This time around they voted in huge numbers. The Times doesn't get around to reporting it until well past the jump, but the voter turnout rate among the Sunnis were in the 80s and 90s. Anbar province, where most of the insurgency based itself until dislodged by the Marine Corps and Iraqi forces, had an 86% turnout rate, while Salahuddin turned out at 96%.

The new government should definitely try their best to include some key Sunnis in the power structure as a reward for their participation. The Kurds and Shi'ites understand that the long-term payoff of such integration will oustrip any perceived short-term power grab that would come from locking them out. The US and other coalition partners will undoubtedly lobby for that result, but I suspect that they will be preaching to the choir on this question.

Having a significant Sunni voice in the new government will take the rest of the steam out of the native "insurgency" and leave al-Qaeda exposed. AQ knows it, which is why they've been throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the local police and especially journalists, in a last-ditch attempt to unnerve and derail the West's plans for the complete liberation of Iraq. The Iraqis themselves have delivered a message to Zarqawi: you've lost, and it's time to leave.

Rove Outlines 2006 GOP Strategy

Leaving no doubt that he once again commands the strategy of the GOP, Karl Rove joined RNC chair Ken Mehlman for the winter meeting to lay out the battle plan for this year's midterm elections. Unsurprisingly, the GOP will push national security as its main theme:

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove offered a biting preview of the 2006 midterm elections yesterday, drawing sharp distinctions with the Democrats over the campaign against terrorism, tax cuts and judicial philosophy, and describing the opposition party as backward-looking and bereft of ideas.

"At the core, we are dealing with two parties that have fundamentally different views on national security," Rove said. "Republicans have a post-9/11 worldview and many Democrats have a pre-9/11 worldview. That doesn't make them unpatriotic -- not at all. But it does make them wrong -- deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong." ...

It was four years ago this week when Rove, appearing at another meeting of the RNC, said Republicans would make terrorism a central issue of the 2002 midterm elections. Rove's remarks infuriated Democrats, who protested that, until then, Bush had stressed bipartisanship and national unity in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

And in four years, the Democrats have not learned a damned thing about national security. Four years ago, Rove spoke to the political situation as it was -- highly partisan on the war and Iraq. Far from the rosy picture of bipartisan comity they now paint of the immediate post-9/11 period, Democrats balked at military action in Afghanistan, arguing that the Soviets and the British had both broken armies in that country during the past century. MoveOn protested continuously about the "violence" and predicted a winter disaster on the scale of Napoleon in Russia. Action against Iraq had come into debate by this point and would consume the 2002 election cycle, not to mention the partisan recriminations flying all over Washington over the success of the 9/11 attacks.

Four years later, the Democrats still argue for withdrawal and isolationism. Their only coherent strategy offered is a "strategic redeployment of troops over an event horizon", which translates to "retreat until we're out of sight of the battlefield". And that's just on offense. For national defense, the Democrats want to impeach the President for conducting surveillance on international communications on people identified by evidence and intel as terrorists, including the common-sense tracking of such calls into and out of the US to identify potential terrorist cells before they strike here. Their leadership knew of this program and all its implications since the month after 9/11 and have been continuously briefed ever since, and not one of those briefed have called for an end to the NSA program -- not one.

Democrats have one strategy, and it boils down to I Hate George. Rove and Mehlman simply want to show America that on national security, they have some 'splainin' to do.

Even Liberal Leadership Fleeing To Tories

The election-eve weekend started off rather strangely for Canadians, or perhaps not, considering the circumstances of the election itself. In a late move, the Liberal president of an Toronto riding has endorsed the Conservative candidate as a protest against Liberal Party tactics:

The president of a west-end Toronto Liberal riding association resigned Friday, saying he can no longer back the party's candidate Michael Ignatieff.

Ron Chyczij, of the Etobicoke-Lakeshore Federal Liberal Association, said he was now endorsing Conservative candidate John Capobianco adding he could no longer "in good conscious" support Ignatieff.

"After the nomination fiasco, I've purposely waited on the sidelines to see if Michael Ignatieff can in some way redeem himself as a credible Liberal candidate in this riding. I regret to conclude this has not happened," Chyczij said in a statement.

Members of the local riding association have cried foul over the Liberal party's strategy of parachuting the so-called "star candidate" into the riding. A number of protesters booed and interrupted Ignatieff during his nomination meeting last December.

Ignatieff, 58, is an internationally recognized scholar and journalist who was born in Toronto but has lived in the U.S. for the past two decades.

The Liberals apparently carpetbagged a quasi-American into Toronto, and not just any American; this one supports the war in Iraq and the North American missile shield -- both of which the Liberal Party opposed rather vehemently. However, Ignatieff's selection for this riding generated a lot of controversy when the Liberal Party locked its offices early on the last day to file candidate papers, barring the entry of local Liberals into the race and potentially giving Ignatieff a much more difficult run at the Commons.

Now the riding president has decided to abandon the candidate altogether, and with just a couple of days before the election, it leaves considerable egg on Liberal faces in Toronto and not many options. One has to wonder why the Liberals felt so strongly that they could not field a local candidate in west Toronto, one that more closely reflected the Liberal Party stance. After all, the Grits have tried to paint Stephen Harper as a Tory version of George Bush who would send Canadian troops into Canada and jump at the first chance to join the missile-shield program -- and then they freeze out locals for a man who publicly supports those same positions?

Kate at Small Dead Animals points out another scandal involving the Liberal Party in Edmonton. According to the Tory campaign of Laurie Hawn, the Liberals have shown themselves to be the party of the little people -- actually, they'd have to be very little to fit into the mailboxes they used as registration addresses in her riding:

# Almost 100 apparently nonexistent addresses in Edmonton's downtown core - in some cases, the addresses listed fictional residences in between two genuine buildings # Hundreds of people registered to vote out of their law offices, medical offices, accounting offices, and Government of Canada offices - in some cases these may be genuine errors, but in other cases, entire families are registered to vote out of high rise office space # Dozens of people registered to vote out of office towers, but who did not list a suite number, causing the address to read similarly to ordinary residences - in many cases, these people are also registered to vote in other ridings using their home addresses, and in other cases, voters living in other ridings are only registered in Edmonton Centre # Dozens of people registered to vote out of small mail box locations and from self-storage yards - there is no legitimate way for a person to appear on the list of Electors from a self-storage yard # Eighteen people registered to vote out of a truck stop # People registered to vote out of karaoke bars, lingerie stores, dance lounges, galleries, etc...

This is starting to sound like an American election!

Is This Zawahiri's Eulogy?

A Islamist website posted an audiotape today of a recording by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the first since a Hellfire missile took out at least three of his lieutenants last week. A new tape would have confirmed a miss against the attack's primary target, but the tape contains no references to current events. In fact, the only references made in the tape were to martyrs of the battles that immediately followed 9/11 and from the invasion of Iraq in 2003:

An audiotape from al-Qaida's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahri, was posted Friday on an Islamic Web site, but U.S. officials said the recording does not appear to have been made recently and may even date back years.

In the audiotape, al-Zawahri read a poem praising "martyrs of holy war" in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. The tape made no mention of a Jan. 13 U.S. airstrike in Pakistan that was targeting al-Zawahri and killed four al-Qaida leaders. ...

The purported al-Zawahri tape made no statement, and instead the voice on it was heard reading a long poem honoring "martyrs of jihad," or holy war.

He dedicated the poem to "all Muslim brothers everywhere, to the mujahedeen (holy warrior) brothers in Islam's fortified borderlines against the Zionist-Crusader campaign in Palestine and Iraq, Afghanistan and
Chechnya."

He said the poem had reminded him of colleagues who died in the jihadist cause, mentioning several by name — but not including any of the figures believed killed in the Pakistan strike.

It would seem that the intent of posting this recording could be to reassure AQ agents that the chief of operations still lives, and that he intends to continue in the fight. It could also just be a random tape that someone wanted to post for its message, its call to martyrdom. However, it could be something else entirely; it could be a eulogy for a martyred leader. The selection of Zawahiri reading a poem of martyred warriors sounds a bit too coincidental, especially given the circumstances of the missile attack.

A quick review: the CIA gets intel that Zawahiri and several high-level AQ leaders will meet to discuss plans for a spring offensive in Afghanistan in a compound in Damadola. In at least two separate attacks, Hellfire missiles blow up three of the buildings in the compound, killing a number of people. At first, the Pakistanis tell the US that all of the dead were civilians, a family of jewelers -- but we find out that at least five bodies got immediately carted away by "foreigners" before anyone could get a chance to see them. We then find out that at least three of the dead were indeed high-level AQ operatives ... who showed up even after Zawahiri decided not to come?

Why would they show up to a planning meeting if the decision-maker had canceled out?

And were the three people identified as having been killed really so important that their bodies could not be left behind for identification?

Now, a couple of weeks afterward, we have a tape of Zawahiri recalling martyrs by name, but not those who died in Damadola, and giving a poetry reading extolling the virtues of martyrdom by referencing battles long since past. It sounds quite a bit like an Islamist giving Zawahiri an opportunity to eulogize himself.

Dems Admit Election-Day Sabotage

Four of five Democratic activists charged with election-day sabotage took an eleventh-hour plea deal that convicted them of misdemeanors for slashing tires on GOP-rented vans on Election Day 2004. Despite doing over $5,000 worth of damage and perhaps keeping hundreds of voters from getting to the polls, the quartet will not have to serve any prison time in exchange for their guilty pleas (via The American Mind, who has a good roundup of reaction):

In an unexpected twist in the Election Day tire-slashing trial, four former Kerry-Edwards campaign staffers, including the sons of U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Milwaukee) and former Acting Mayor Marvin Pratt, have agreed to plead no contest to misdemeanors.

The plea agreements came in the middle of jury deliberations after an eight-day trial on felony property damage charges that carried potential 3 1/2 year prison terms upon conviction. The fifth defendant in the case was acquitted by the jury later in the afternoon.

Michael Pratt, 33, Sowande Omokunde, 26, Lewis G. Caldwell, 29, and Lavelle Mohammad, 36, have all pleaded no contest to misdemeanor counts of criminal damage to property. Omokunde is Moore's son.

Prosecutors will recommend probation sentences as part of the deal, and that the four together pay $5,317 in restitution for the damaged tires.

In light of the acquittal of the fifth defendant, some might think that the prosecutor made the right decision in offering the plea. It puts the Democrats on record as admitting to electoral fraud; it guarantees that these four men will have a police record and will make it difficult for them to continue playing any significant role in politics, at least in the near term; and it closes a case with some kind of conviction, as opposed to the mistrial or outright acquittal towards which it appeared to be heading.

I agree that shifting down to a misdemeanor may well serve the overall interest of justice, but not a lack of jail time. Wisconsin, like Minnesota and a number of other states, have lax registration requirements and even less rigorous enforcement of the law and investigation into fraud. When something this blatant arises, it calls for strict prosecution and an example for others tempted to try it again. This was no mere act of youthful vandalism -- it was a crime against people who could not get themselves to the polls to vote, by the party that claims to care for the helpless and disadvantaged. It also appears to have been a conspiracy of sorts, as it involved quite a few of the lower-level Democratic activists, two of whom have parents as elected representatives. That kind of betrayal should have resulted in more than just restitution and community service.

The judge does have the discretion to reject the terms of the deal, or to accept the pleas but still include some jail time. Let us hope that the judge in this case values the credibility of the electoral system more highly than the prosecutor, and certainly more highly than the well-connected defendants who will appear for final sentencing later.

Jawa Report Celebrates 2nd Blogiversary ... In Style

How many weblogs get a chance to celebrate an anniversary by helping to catch a would-be Islamist terrorist?

Well ... at least one!

Congratulations, Rusty, and happy 2nd blogiversary!

G&M Playing With Polls?

Today's Globe & Mail reports that Stephen Harper has suddenly lost ground in polling this week as the Monday election draws near -- but then puts the Tory lead at the same nine-point margin that has been the consensus for over two weeks:

The Conservative Party's lead in the polls has narrowed to nine percentage points as voters in Ontario and Quebec have second thoughts about a Stephen Harper government.

The latest poll for The Globe and Mail and CTV by the Strategic Counsel shows national support for the Conservatives has dropped to 37 per cent from 41 per cent, while support for the Liberals has risen to 28 per cent from 25 per cent. Backing for the New Democratic Party dipped one percentage point to 16 per cent.

The race has tightened in the face of a Liberal advertising attack on Mr. Harper and an anti-Tory offensive in Quebec by the Bloc Québécois and Liberals, which have warned of the front-running party's social-conservative leanings, said Allan Gregg, chairman of the Strategic Counsel.

I do not recall a report of a sixteen-point lead over the Liberals at the national level. Had I read that, I would have considered such a report an outlier, as other polling indicated a fairly stead nine-to-ten point lead, about what the G&M shows now. Arguing that Harper has somehow strayed from the "script" appears to be a cover for getting the G&M polling back into line with what other polling services have reported all along.

That lead still could get a majority government, but as CQ has noted all along, it's a long shot. It likely will result in an overwhelming plurality, and along with BQ's partnership should allow for a good basis for a thorough housecleaning in Canadian government. That's what truly scares the Liberals about Harper.

The DoJ Defends The Administration On Intercepts

Raw Story acquired a draft of an official Department of Justice memorandum that gives the legal justifications for the warrantless NSA intercepts authorized by the President. Raw Story has the PDF as a link on its site, but in the interest of splitting the bandwidth investment, I'll host it here as well. Readers who have followed the story here as well as at Power Line or The Volokh Conspiracy won't find anything terribly surprising, but those who have not followed the actual legal arguments might find themselves surprised just how much supporting precedent exists for the authorization and subsequent approvals by the Attorney General.

The text of the summary includes these arguments:

As the President has explained, since shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, he has authorized the National Security Agency (“NSA”) to intercept international communications into and out of the United States of persons linked to al Qaeda or related terrorist organizations. The purpose of these intercepts is to establish an early warning system to detect and prevent another catastrophic terrorist attack on the United States. This paper addresses, in an unclassified form, the legal basis for the NSA activities described by the President (“NSA activities”).

On September 11, 2001, the al Qaeda terrorist network launched the deadliest foreign attack on American soil in history. Al Qaeda’s leadership repeatedly has pledged to attack the United States again at a time of its choosing, and these terrorist organizations continue to pose a grave threat to the United States. In response to the September 11th attacks and the continuing threat, the President, with broad congressional approval, has acted to protect the Nation from another terrorist attack. In the immediate aftermath of September 11th, the President promised that “[w]e will direct every resource at our command—every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every tool of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every weapon of war—to the destruction of and to the defeat of the global terrorist network.” President Bush Address to a Joint Session of Congress (Sept. 20, 2001). The NSA activities are an indispensable aspect of this defense of the Nation. By targeting the international communications into and out of the United States of persons reasonably believed to be linked to al Qaeda, these activities provide the United States with an early warning system to help avert the next attack. For the following reasons, the NSA activities are lawful and consistent with civil liberties.

The NSA activities are consistent with the preexisting statutory framework generally applicable to the interception of communications in the United States—the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”), as amended, 50 U.S.C. §§ 1801-1862 (2000 & Supp. II 2002), and relevant related provisions in chapter 119 of title 18.1 Although FISA generally requires judicial approval of electronic surveillance, FISA also contemplates that Congress may authorize such surveillance by a statute other than FISA. See 50 U.S.C. § 1809(a) (prohibiting any person from intentionally “engag[ing] . . . in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute”). The AUMF, as construed by the Supreme Court in Hamdi and as confirmed by the history and tradition of armed conflict, is just such a statute. Accordingly, electronic surveillance conducted by the President pursuant to the AUMF, including the NSA activities, is fully consistent with FISA and falls within category I of Justice Jackson’s framework.

Even if there were ambiguity about whether FISA, read together with the AUMF, permits the President to authorize the NSA activities, the canon of constitutional avoidance requires reading these statutes in harmony to overcome any restrictions in FISA and Title III, at least as they might otherwise apply to the congressionally authorized armed conflict with al Qaeda. Indeed, were FISA and Title III interpreted to impede the President’s ability to use the traditional tool of electronic surveillance to detect and prevent future attacks by a declared enemy that has already struck at the homeland and is engaged in ongoing operations against the United States, the constitutionality of FISA, as applied to that situation, would be called into very serious doubt. In fact, if this difficult constitutional question had to be addressed, FISA would be unconstitutional as applied to this narrow context. Importantly, the FISA Court of Review itself recognized just three years ago that the President retains constitutional authority to conduct foreign surveillance apart from the FISA framework, and the President is certainly entitled, at a minimum, to rely on that judicial interpretation of the Constitution and FISA.

Finally, the NSA activities fully comply with the requirements of the Fourth Amendment. The interception of communications described by the President falls within a well-established exception to the warrant requirement and satisfies the Fourth Amendment’s fundamental requirement of reasonableness. The NSA activities are thus constitutionally permissible and fully protective of civil liberties.

The memorandum runs 42 pages and proceeds from this summary to highlight each of these precedents and explain in detail their application to the question at hand. Lawyers will find nits to pick on individual application of laws and precedents, but the overall argument shows that the White House relied on a well-established series of laws, precedents, and interpretations of Constitutional authority to conclude that they not only had the authority to order the NSA program, but that failing to do so may have been a dereliction of their duty while under attack from an outside force. It also shows that far from relying on a concept of an "imperial presidency", the White House carefully considered the laws and precedents guiding this activity and tailored the program to meet it -- and when the AG felt that the program needed changes to continue to meet its legal obligations, the administration suspended the program until those changes could be implemented and an auditing process put in place.

In short, the White House makes a good case, and at the very least deserves the benefit of the doubt on legality.

UPDATE: The Washington Post reports on this memorandum in this article by Carol D Leonnig, which notes that the Congressional Research Service provided an analysis of the law and came up with a different conclusion:

In the past two weeks, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has released two reports suggesting significant legal flaws in the president's program. One analysis concluded that the warrantless surveillance effort directly conflicts with Congress's intentions in passing the FISA law. It also found that the rest of the administration's legal justifications were "not as well-grounded" as the administration asserted.

A second CRS report, released Tuesday, concluded that the administration appears to have violated a national security law by failing to brief the full House and Senate intelligence committees on the program in 2001. The administration limited its briefings instead to the two most senior members on each committee.

However, like the New York Times, the Post fails to report that the CRS anayses were prepared by Alfred Cumming -- the same Alfred Cumming who gave John Kerry $1,250 for his run against George Bush in the 2004 election cycle, as first reported by Tom Maguire. Leonnig also includes some questionable quotes in opposition to this memorandum:

"You could review the entire legislative history in the authorization to use military force and I guarantee you won't find one word about electronic surveillance," Bamford said. "If you review the legislative history of FISA, you will find Attorney General Griffin Bell testifying before the intelligence committee saying this was specifically passed to prevent a president from claiming inherent presidential powers to do this again."

To do exactly what again? Bell wanted FISA to keep a president from snooping on domestic political opponents again, not from conducting wartime espionage against an enemy that Congress specifically tasked the Executive to fight. And if the entire legislative history of the United States cannot come up with a single reference to electronic surveillance and intelligence during wartime, then (a) the silence makes it legal, not illegal, and (b) it just proves that Congress doesn't have a lot of expertose in warfare. How long have we had wireless communications now -- a century? Does Bamford argue that breaking the Japanese diplomatic and military codes during World War II somehow constitutes a felony, since according to Bamford the legislature never considered it as part of a military effort during wartime?

Foolishness such as this will leave us all woefully unprotected for the next terrorist attack -- after which we'll appoint another commission that will take three years and tell us we should have done what Bush has done all along. I'd rather skip the part where we get attacked and just continue with the program at hand.

Swann Takes Flight In PA

Former Pittsburgh Steeler great Lynn Swann has overtaken Governor Ed Rendell in the Rassmussen poll by two percentage points, after being down to Rendell by two touchdowns last November. This provides an ill omen for Democrats and their national strategy over the next two years if the Swann momentum continues:

Our latest poll of the race for Pennsylvania governor shows Republican Lynn Swann, the former receiver for the Pittsburgh Steelers, narrowly leading Democratic Governor Ed Rendell 45% to 43%.

Fifty-four percent (54%) of voters view Swann favorably; 47% view Rendell favorably.

Swann formally declared his candidacy just two weeks ago, on January 4. But he has enjoyed early success in securing endorsements from two of six regional caucuses in his quest for the party nomination. The Republican state Committee will endorse a candidate on February 11. ...

Although Swann has just announced his candidacy in a formal sense, he has been visibly preparing for a run for close to a year. If elected, he would be the first black to serve as Pennsylvania's governor.

Governor Rendell has often been regarded as a potential candidate for President. Many believe his popularity helped John Kerry win the state in 2004.

The Democrats have a number of their hopes pinned on Pennsylvania, and almost all of them depend on the electoral success of their stalwart, Ed Rendell. Rendell, as Rassmussen notes, allowed John Kerry to barely take Pennsylvania away from George Bush by less than the gap in the supposedly disputed state of Ohio. Since then, RNC chair Ken Mehlman has made a point of conducting outreach missions into Philadelphia, Rendell's power base. Mehlman convinced Swann to run for governor and has converted prominent African-American figures to the GOP. Last week, Justice Sunday III took place in a predominantly black church in North Philly, where white and black Christians united to defend their rights to celebrate their faith publicly -- and to express their political views, which increasingly converge these days.

Mehlman's efforts have begun paying dividends. Rendell, who could have been excused for thinking his re-election was a slam dunk just a few weeks ago, now appears to be sinking visibly against the popular Swann. (The Steelers' Cinderella run in the playoffs can't be hurting Swann, either.) If Rendell can't hold the governor's chair in November, it opens the possibility that Swann may carry Rick Santorum along with him, a Senate seat that the Democrats had calculated as their best opportunity for a takeaway from the GOP this cycle. Worse yet, it means that Swann will run Pennsylvania in 2008, when the state and its 20 electoral votes play a critical role in another contentious presidential race. If the race gets close and the Democrats come up one big state shy of a return to the White House, it may come down to the GOP stealing a march on the Keystone State.

(via Redstate)

Osama Bin Trucin'

Osama bin Laden finally came up for air this afternoon with an audio tape that alternately threatened and cajoled the American people to end the war on terror. Bin Laden claimed that attack preparations continue to proceed apace regardless of our efforts to stop them, but offered a "long-term truce" if we promised to withdraw from the Middle East and rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan:

Osama bin Laden warned in an audiotape aired Thursday that his fighters are preparing new attacks in the United States but offered the American people a "long-term truce" without specifying the conditions. ...

The CIA has authenticated the voice on the tape as that of bin Laden, an agency official said. The al-Qaida leader is believed to be hiding in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Beyond confirming that bin Laden remains alive, the tape could be aimed at projecting an image of strength to al-Qaida sympathizers and portray the group as still capable of launching attacks despite blows against it, analysts said. ...

"The delay in similar operations happening in America has not been because of failure to break through your security measures," he said. "The operations are under preparation and you will see them in your homes the minute they are through (with preparations), with God's permission."

He offered a "long-term truce with fair conditions that we adhere to. ... Both sides can enjoy security and stability under this truce so we can build Iraq and Afghanistan, which have been destroyed in this war.

"There is no shame in this solution, which prevents the wasting of billions of dollars that have gone to those with influence and merchants of war in America," he said.

Oddly, Osama has apparently started a book club, perhaps thinking that after his terrorist career winds up, he can remake himself into the next Oprah. He recommended that Americans read The Rogue State, an anti-American polemic by socio-anarchist William Blum. The Amazon entry notes that Gore Vidal recommends this book, which should give anyone an indication of its direction. However, a review from a reader in Mexico seemed particularly apt:

Why does the whole world hate America? I'm not sure the whole world does, actually. How do I know this? Well, every time I fly into LAX, JFK or Miami Intl. I feel like I've arrived in Calcutta. Those airports are so crowded with 3rd Worlders trying to get in to the oppressive, war-criminal America that they'll stand patiently in line for hours waiting to pass Customs and Immigration. Oh, and speaking of exporting your awful culture to other countries, I wouldn't be surprised to see one of these families roasting a goat on the floor on my next trip north. So don't believe it guys, you're doing just fine. For every hysterical old hippie like Blum there are 1000 3rd Worlders voting with their feet. I mean, when's the last time you saw boat people LEAVING America?

So why did the audio tape just surface now? An audio-only presentation isn't exactly unprecedented, but usually only occurs when OBL and his number-two Ayman al-Zawahiri get separated. The latest on the attack in Damadola has Zawahiri escaping the bomb blast, but his media-relations expert dying in his place. It may have been a quickly-made effort to assure AQ operatives around the world that the entire command structure of the terrorist organization did not dissipate in the light of a Hellfire missile.

This wouldn't be the first time Osama has indicated that he would accept a truce (MEMRI says a correct translation has Osama accepting one if America offers it, not the other way around, h/t CQ reader TW). It's important to remember that a strict Muslim would only honor a truce until he gains the upper hand over an infidel, at which point he would be obligated to renew his jihad. Any offer of truce, either to give one or to accept one, shows that the Muslim believes himself to be at serious disadvantage. That Osama takes the time to discuss a truce in both countries where America has hit his network hard shows that AQ has taken huge body blows. Unlike in 2004, when he used the offer of truce to split the coalition, this time he's aimed the offer at Americans to try to stop the annihilation of his forces.

He cannot win against the American military; he can only win when he deploys against American civilians. And Osama knows it, even if some of our less-enlightened politicians fail to realize it.

UPDATE: For those like Richard_223 in the comments that doubt my analysis of Muslim truces, CQ readers should familiarize themselves with the history of hudna, a history that the Exempt Media repeatedly ignores:

Hudna has a distinct meaning to Islamic fundamentalists, well-versed in their history: The prophet Mohammad struck a legendary, ten-year hudna with the Quraysh tribe that controlled Mecca in the seventh century. Over the following two years, Mohammad rearmed and took advantage of a minor Quraysh infraction to break the hudna and launch the full conquest of Mecca, the holiest city in Islam.

When Yassir Arafat infamously invoked Mohammad's hudna in 1994 to describe his own Oslo commitments "on the road to Jerusalem," the implication was clear. As Mideast expert Daniel Pipes explained, Arafat was asserting to his Islamic brethren that he will, "when his circumstances change for the better, take advantage of some technicality to tear up existing accords and launch a military assault on Israel." Indeed, this is precisely what occurred in Sept. 2000 when Arafat & Co. launched a terror assault upon Israeli citizens. ...

What Westerners need to do is to read Islamic scripture and learn that in Islam there is no concept of permanent submission to any other power than God's. Treaties mean nothing. Beware the hudna.

Moderate Muslims such as the Turks would likely honor the Western concept of truce, but there is no chance at all that Islamist zealots would ever permanently submit to infidels, even under the most modest of conditions.

The Three Calls

The blogosphere made a bit of history today in an effort to push a reform effort onto the GOP by engaging three candidates for a critical leadership position in public campaigning for the effort. Usually, party leadership gets chosen in closed processes, elected among members of the House or Senate via back-channel negotiations, arm-twisting, vote-counting, and back-slapping. With a major ethics scandal staring the Republicans in the face, however, the blogosphere and talk radio (especially Hugh Hewitt) have demanded that the candidates address their wider constituencies and conduct the election in the open.

Today that process resulted in unprecedented conference calls between leading House candidates for Majority Leader and center-right and conservative bloggers. Reps. John Shadegg, John Boehner, and Roy Blunt (current majority whip and front-runner for ML) held separate calls with a changing list of bloggers. CQ fortunately caught all three, but even had I not been able to do so, they have been recorded and hosted at QandO (Shadegg, Boehner) and Radioblogger (Blunt). Transcripts of earlier Hewitt interviews with all three can be found at Radioblogger as well, with links at Truth Laid Bear, who arranged the calls.

I didn't ask many questions -- none at all of Shadegg, and then one each of Boehner and Blunt about eliminating the BCRA. I got mostly the same answer (they both opposed the BCRA, both of them think that overturning it is more of a long-term than short term process). For the most part, I just listened to the candidates' opening statements and then the back-and-forth that ensued. Most of the positions taken by one are shared by the other two, so belaboring the individual politics gets us nowhere closer to an answer as to the best candidate for the position.

Shadegg's call sounded the least organized and most wide open, and Shadegg himself seemed at times a bit flustered by the wide range of questions. I think that he expected the issues to focus on the scandal du jour, but most bloggers wanted to know what kind of Majority Leader these three will be outside of the immediate need to respond to the ethical scandal. I know the wider focus surprised me a little. Shadegg's responses seemed genuine, and he had a very engaging air about him. Shadegg is the only candidate who specifically went after one of his opponents in the race, talking at length about Blunt and his capability for retaliation if crossed.

Boehner seemed more prepared for the call, at least at first. Part of that may have been the effect of the bloggers just finishing up with Shadegg, but it appeared that Boehner was a bit smoother and more collected. The format remained wide open and the call lasted as long as the bloggers had questions, as I recall. Boehner answered at length on all questions.

In contrast, Blunt came across as controlling and a bit defensve at finding himself at the cente of all this attention. By far the most structured of the three conference calls, Blunt's also was the shortest and the least informative. While there was no one phrase I could produce to give the sense in a nutshell, I felt welcomed by Blunt but at the same time it seemed that he was at least nonplussed at our interest in what Hugh would call inside baseball. Also, i note that his office promoted the event via e-mail both before and afterwards, using Matt Margolis' post that took a little swing at his opponents for not ensuring his invitation to their call.

So how do determine who to endorse for the post? Their politics are almost identical, and their efforts at reform will probably all be the same. I decided on three qualities: ability to deliver, commitment to reform, and the impact on GOP national standing each would have if selected.

Ability to deliver: As Majority Whip, one would have to give Blunt the edge here. He's played the inside game for a while and has the experience to get the votes when needed. John Boehner has an edge over Shadegg here for second place, but it's close.

Commitment to reform: I'd put Blunt at third place here. Not that he isn't committed to reform -- I think all three men are -- but based on the experience of the conference calls, I don't think that ethics reform has the same priority for him as it does Boehner and Shadegg. I'd give the edge to Shadegg here. He spoke more about ethics than either of the other two, who seemed more focused on the wider tasks of majority leadership -- and maybe that's what others want, but I think ethics reform has to come first right now.

Impact: Without a doubt, I think Shadegg has the strong edge in this category. Electing Shadegg as the Majority Leader will send a clear message that the GOP caucus will focus on ethics and reform in the latter half of this Congress. Boehner comes in a close second, while Blunt's election may signal more of a traditional business-as-usual message to the rank and file, and to the electorate.

That's why I'm going to thank all three gentlemen for their gracious and unprecedented access to the system, but endorse John Shadegg for Majority Leader. I think that he needs some smoothing out, but that his outsider status will lend considerable weight to reform efforts in the House.

Blunt predicts, though, that he already has the votes. We shall shortly know whether that's the case.

ADDENDUM: Here are the links to the other attendees (thanks, NZ Bear!):

N.Z. Bear, The Truth Laid Bear

Hugh Hewitt, HughHewitt.com

La Shawn Barber, La Shawn Barber's Corner

John Hawkins, Right Wing News

Jon Henke / Dale Franks, QandO

James Joyner, Outside The Beltway

Mike Krempasky, Redstate.org

Michelle Malkin, MichelleMalkin.com

Greg Patterson, Espresso Pundit

Kevin Aylward, Wizbang

Be sure to check out their sites for their own perspective on the conference calls.

UPDATE: Timothy Goddard asks a good question in the comments:

I've got an honest question I'd love to hear your thoughts on. You give Shadegg the edge in 2 of the 3 categories, but those both seem to me to be temporary categories. A year from now, no one's going to care much about the specifics of whatever lobbying reform package get passed (except maybe for grumpy congressmen who miss their free meals). Any politically beneficial impact from "cleaning house," as it were, will be long since dissipated. But we'll still need someone who can get bills passed. It sounds like you think Blunt will do a better job of that. Is Shadegg a permanent solution to a temporary problem?

Timothy, as usual, makes a good point. Here's my best answer -- in order for reform to be taken seriously, I think we need to look past the temporary/permanent aspect of this question. I think reform needs to remain as a priority, and by that I mean real reform. That will take much longer than this session of Congress to accomplish, both in ethics and in governmental reach. I think Shadegg will have more of a commitment to seeing that through than others who might stop at making a few Congressmen grumpy, and he still can learn how to get bills passed, if he indeed has any shortcomings in that area.

The Problems Of Success

It appears that the Conservatives might run into self-imposed limitations of success in Quebec, where their sudden popularity surprised even the most optimistic of party leaders. Vaulting over the Liberals for second place in popular polling, the Tories do not have the ground support for GOTV efforts -- and that might limit their gains to a dozen ridings in the province:

Conservatives say they may have difficulty cashing in on their new-found popularity in Quebec because they don't know who many of the voters are and they face problems getting some of them to the polls.

The lack of organization will force the party to focus hard on 10 to 12 seats it thinks it can win, but it will have to rely on momentum to take a second tier of seats where it has little or no organization. ...

Recent opinion polls have the Tories hovering around 30 per cent in popular support in Quebec, but capturing that level of the vote will be difficult because the spadework required to deliver it has not been done. The Conservatives have been in decline in the province since 1993, save for electing a handful of members in 1997 under then-Tory-leader Jean Charest.

Currently, the Tories have no MPs from Quebec after a 9% showing in the last elections there. Bloc Quebecois captures a majority of seats from the disaffected province, but the Liberals usually scoop up the rest. The Tories could have reversed that this election, but without having invested in what looked like a losing cause as little as two months ago, they may leave some ridings for the Liberals to squeeze out for themselves.

The problems of sudden success, however, seem to hardly matter -- especially when one looks at the collapse of the Liberals nationwide and contemplates their predicament.

Does John McCain Stand For Anything?

Senator John McCain, widely expected to run for President in 2008 and likely to garner significant support, has a reputation in the media as both a conservative and a "maverick" for opposition to his party's policies. He legitimized the Gang of 14 rebellion in the Senate last year and extended the standoff over Senate filibusters. McCain also pushed through one of the worst pieces of legislation ever to come out of Congress -- the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which violates the First Amendment by curtailing political speech by every organization except newspapers within 60 days of an election. He teamed up with George Soros and sucked up a lot of money for himself and his staff in that effort to end checkbook politics.

Despite all of this, McCain still carries the patina of conservativism due to his staunch pro-life views. Or does he? In a new development, it seems that McCain has now aligned himself with a new movement to bolster pro-choice Republicans. Christine Todd Whitman started IMP-PAC as an adjunct to her book, It's My Party, Too, and an effort to expand the influence of pro-choicers. The strategic partners for IMP-PAC include Planned Parenthood, two different Republican pro-choice groups, and WISH List, which supports pro-choice women for Republican primaries. According to the National Review's Kelly Conway, John McCain has joined its advisory board:

Whitman is trawling for dollars to help her new “It’s My Party Too PAC” (“IMP-PAC”), which shares the name (and the anti-conservative drumbeat) of a book she wrote that was released a year ago. IMP-PAC is described in the letter as “a political action committee, a movement really, dedicated to supporting fiscally conservative, socially progressive moderate Republican candidates at all levels of government.”

One of IMP-PAC’s beefs is with opponents of embryonic stem cell research who, the letter claims, ruined U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s presidential aspirations when he changed his position on stem cells and announced support for increased government funding for it. As a member of the IMP-PAC Steering Committee, the letter suggests, you might rub shoulders with such members of its Advisory Board as former President Gerald Ford, former U.S. Senator Bob Dole and Senator John McCain.

Does Senator McCain stand for anything except elections any more? Is there any there there, or is McCain now merely the Chauncy Gardener of American politics with a keener intellect, willing to reflect whatever it takes to get more power for himself?

EU Starts Pressing For IAEA Referral On Iran

European diplomats, apparently agreeing with Condoleezza Rice's diagnosis on the usefulness of further talks with Iran on nuclear disarmament, have started circulating a draft resolution demanding that the IAEA refer Teheran to the United Nations Security Council for further action:

EU powers began circulating a draft resolution on Wednesday for a February 2 meeting of the U.N. nuclear watchdog asking it to report Iran to the Security Council, but Russia was seeking moves that stopped short of a formal referral. ...

The governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency will hold an emergency meeting that day on Iran's nuclear work at the request of European Union powers, an IAEA spokesman said.

France, Britain, Germany and the United States are expected to push to have Tehran referred to the U.N. Security Council after it resumed research that could be used for generating electricity or making atomic bombs.

But EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said European states were considering a Russian proposal that could delay a formal referral of Iran to the council.

Speaking to reporters during a visit to Washington, Solana said Russia had suggested the IAEA emergency meeting should call for a special U.N. Security Council session to debate Iran's case, but that there be no formal referral to the council at that time.

Russia wants to have the UNSC debate possible resolutions and then refer the matter back to the IAEA, which the Iranians have managed to successfully stall for years. Despite its offer to handle all of Iran's uranium enrichment, which both sides regarded as a viable solution, Iran continues its enrichment while the debate continues. Both France and the US reject further talks with Teheran while the Iranians continue with that process; the French flatly turned down an Iranian request for negotiation earlier this week.

The Iranians, meanwhile, have busied themselves by talking with Third World members of the IAEA governing board to block the EU/US action, if taken. Teheran wants to control the IAEA through greasing palms in places like India and Syria, where the new oil minister and Ahmadinejad himself are expected to cut deals for votes during visits this week. Russia, meanwhile, continues to enable the Iranians by trying to assist the stall tactics. Commentators talk about how a nuclear Iran on their border doesn't serve Russian interests, but it appears that Vladimir Putin has more interest in looking strong and influential than he does in securing his border from nuclear-armed Islamofascists. It wouldn't be the first time in a century that a short-sighted Russian strongman enabled a group of fascist lunatics to push the world to the brink of war through dithering and finally betraying those who relied on him to help contain a global threat.

It's far past the time to push the IAEA into action. We need to start thinking about skipping over that step if these delays allow the Iranians to thoroughly co-opt the nuclear agency and self-refer Iran to the UNSC.

UN Peacekeeping Via The Murtha Method

The Ivory Coast erupted into chaos yet again overnight, with opposing gangs roaming the streets and committing violence despite the presence of United Nations peacekeepers tasked with defending a cease-fire between the two sides of the Ivorian civil war. One UN contingent finally opened fire to protect themselves, killing four Ivorians, while another shot weapons in the air and fired teargas to cover their retreat:

IVORY COAST, once one of the wealthiest countries in Africa, was close to its second civil war in five years yesterday as gangs of armed thugs loyal to President Gbagbo ran amok across the southern half of the country.

A 300-strong contingent of Bangladeshi UN troops was forced to withdraw after an attack on their base at Guiglo, 300 miles west of Abidjan, the commercial capital. At least four people died when the peacekeepers opened fire to defend themselves.

Another contingent of 70 international peacekeepers was evacuated from the town of Douéké. Peacekeepers at the UN headquarters in Abidjan fired in the air and used teargas to keep the thugs at bay. Businesses across the city closed as Mr Gbagbo’s supporters blocked roads with burning tyres and stopped vehicles.

The UN has assigned 6700 troops to the Ivory Coast to act as "peacekeepers", and so far it appears that they have acted in the grand tradition of all UN peacekeeping missions -- they run when the shooting starts. We have seen it in throughout Africa and most egregiously in the Balkans, where Srebrenica paid the price for believing that the UN actually defends people from attack by armed forces. The UN has no will to actually fight when pressed; the only "action" one gets from a typical deployment of UN peacekeepers these days is the kind of action one gets in the red-light districts of Amsterdam, usually involving starving women and children forced to debase themselves for scraps of food from the troops.

Unbelievably -- or maybe not -- this is the same kind of deployment with which Brent Scowcroft recommended replacing American troops earlier this week, in a Washington Post op-ed. On Monday, Scowcroft wrote without a hint of irony (emphases mine):

he United Nations could be asked to assume a greater role in providing a more ecumenical political umbrella and expertise in building and coordinating institutions, programs and structures. After all, the United Nations played a significant role after the demise of Saddam Hussein's regime, until a bomb explosion prompted its exit from the country. The coalition forces are themselves in Iraq pursuant to a Security Council resolution. And U.N. personnel figured prominently in managing the recent parliamentary election. A U.N. presence of such magnitude, however, would require a dedicated security force, to prevent a repetition of the 2003 tragedy.

In other words, we need to prevent the 2003 tragedy of a single bombing by terrorist groups by removing American troops and putting the same people in charge who commit a Jack Murtha-style "strategic redeployment" after every explosion. And if the UN doesn't use American troops, Scowcroft has a suggestion as to where the UN can find troops to support the new Iraqi democracy -- from such democratic strongholds as Egypt, Bangladesh, Morocco, with financial support from surrounding Arab states that have been cheerleading so strongly for democracy to replace their dictatorships.

One would like to think of Scowcroft as a satirist, but unfortunately he believes in what he writes. Perhaps he sees the Ivory Coast mission as a great UN success, even as the situation erodes the deterrent nature of the UN peacekeeping forces even further. Scowcroft and Murtha would be laugh-out-loud hilarious if their military and diplomatic efforts didn't have such deadly consequences, if ever adopted.

Clinton Cover-Up In Barrett Report: Daily News

The New York Daily News reports that the long-awaited Barrett report on the investigation into Henry Cisneros will claim that the Clinton administration actively covered up a tax-fraud case against the former HUD Secretary, and that the Hillary crony in charge of the IRS at that time played a key role in killing the investigation:

A special prosecutor's long-delayed report charges that a coverup at senior levels of the Clinton administration killed a tax fraud case against ex-cabinet member Henry Cisneros, the Daily News has learned.

David Barrett's 11-year, $23 million probe, which will be released tomorrow, states in stinging terms that this Clinton coverup succeeded.

Cisneros was forced to admit in 1999 that he had made secret payments to a mistress before serving as Clinton's secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Barrett investigated tax fraud charges stemming from those under-the-table payments.

Then-IRS Commissioner Peggy Richardson, a close friend of Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), was involved in efforts to quash the probe, a source close to the case alleged.

But Richardson's role was cut from Barrett's report, which went through 26 drafts, because Democratic law firm Williams & Connolly successfully pressured Barrett to remove a section of the report naming her, a source said.

In a strange twist to the case, Cisneros' defense attorney now works at the IRS as chief of internal affairs. Cono Namorato refused to comment on the allegations in the Barrett report. Barrett alleges that Richardson and Barry Finkelstein, an attorney with the IRS, fixed the probe by assigning it to two low-level, inexperienced attorneys. A whistleblower, IRS criminal investigatgor James Filan, tried to blow the cover-up out of the water, but in the end did not succeed.

The report, if the Daily News has its facts straight, will prove explosive to the 2006 re-election effort of Hillary Clinton, but even more damaging to her expected run at the Presidency in 2008. For instance, Williams and Connolly not only represents Cisneros in this probe, but also has as clients a couple named Bill and Hillary Clinton. It seems as though burying this report and getting a series of redactions helps a number of their clients out, a kind of anti-conflict of interest in this case. And it seems more than passingly strange that Cono Namorato winds up running the IRS division that would have been tasked with discovering a cover-up and malfeasance involving a former client after he gets done representing him.

Someone has a lot of explaining to do. And while she tries to come up with an explanation, this will remind everyone what a "culture of corruption" really looks like, as this will bring up the ethical morass of the Clinton years all over again. The Democrats may well have to rethink their electoral theme for 2006 -- again.

The Bomb Maker Who Missed Dessert

After the CIA dropped a bomb on a compound in Damadola, Pakistani sources tried to play off that the American attack had killed a family of jewelers as they sat down to dinner. Tonight we find out that one of the gems who didn't make it to dessert was none other than chief al-Qaeda WMD and explosives expert Midhat Mursi, also known as Abu Khabab al-Masri, the terrorist leader who trained shoe bomber Richard Reid:

ABC News has learned that Pakistani officials now believe that al Qaeda's master bomb maker and chemical weapons expert was one of the men killed in last week's U.S. missile attack in eastern Pakistan.

Midhat Mursi, 52, also known as Abu Khabab al-Masri, was identified by Pakistani authorities as one of four known major al Qaeda leaders present at an apparent terror summit in the village of Damadola early last Friday morning.

The United States had posted a $5 million reward for Mursi's capture. He is described by authorities as the man who ran al Qaeda's infamous Derunta training camp in Afghanistan, where he used dogs and other animals as subjects for experiments with poison and chemicals. His explosives training manual is still regarded as the bible for al Qaeda terrorists around the world.

It seems that the nice family dinner that the media attempted to portray more resembled the Corleones than the Bradys. Pakistan now admits that the dinner was instead a summit for al-Qaeda leadership, perhaps a planning session, demonstrating that American intel in the Damadola region may outstrip that of the Pakistanis themselves. Included in the dead were two other key AQ leaders: Khalid Habib, the al Qaeda operations chief for Pakistan and Afghanistan, and Abdul Rehman al Magrabi, a senior operations commander for al Qaeda. The purpose of the meeting was to plan for attacks on American positions in Afghanistan.

Now, of course, that planning and finance will not take place, and AQ will have to gather less experienced and less connected replacements for those three. No one knows yet who the other two dead terrorists were. The possibility exists still that Ayman al-Zawahiri died in the attack as well, but even if he missed the party, he knows that the Americans have drawn a close bead on him. He also knows that we will not withhold our attack out of shyness or an unwillingness to engage based on which side of the border Zawahiri dips his bread.

Sleep tight, old man. We'll be coming for you soon.

Lobby Loophole Should Get Closed First

The Washington Post notes a rather large loophole in the new ethics package touted by the GOP for reforming Congress, one which could generate even more lobbying cash for the coffers of DC politicians, if handled correctly. While the proposal bans gifts and specific kinds of travel reimbursements, it ironically leaves others in place as long as lobbyists supplement them with cash:

Lawmakers are about to bombard the American public with proposals that would crack down on lobbyists. Several prominent plans, including one outlined yesterday by House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), would specifically ban meals and privately paid travel for lawmakers.

Or would they?

According to lobbyists and ethics experts, even if Hastert's proposal is enacted, members of Congress and their staffs could still travel the world on an interest group's expense and eat steak on a lobbyist's account at the priciest restaurants in Washington.

The only requirement would be that whenever a lobbyist pays the bill, he or she must also hand the lawmaker a campaign contribution. Then the transaction would be perfectly okay.

Apparently Hastert and other Republicans wanted to separate lobbying reform from campaign-finance reform, especially considering the difficult debate surrounding the last, disastrous approach to the latter issue, the BCRA. Unfortunately, that won't be possible, and any real reform should address both anyway. The two share some problems in common, notably a series of loopholes that favor insiders with access (lobbysists in this case, the Exempt Media in the BCRA). The Hastert proposal makes for a well-intentioned effort but sets up a big failure down the road.

Money will flow through any system put in place, find the loopholes, and exploit them as surely as water finds the crevices in rocks and splits them over time. Politicians and lobbyists have no stake in sealing the lawmaking process off from the enormous stacks of cash that activists generate to promote their causes, no matter how just or unjust they may be. And while the quality of leadership, especially in ethical transparency, needs an upgrade for both political parties, the only real solution is to take the money and the power out of the federal government. The true problem lies with the amount of power that the federal government wields and the vast sums of money it skims off of the American consumer and economic system to fund itself. As long as that continues, there will always be lobbyists looking to redirect it to their clients, politicians willing to take a piece of the action to deliver it, and the ethicists will always be one scandal behind in preventing it.

Pakistanis Concede Terrorists Among Damadola Dead

The Pakistanis now concede that despite its initial denials, the airstrike on the house in Damadola from unmanned CIA drones killed a number of AQ terrorists that had come to dinner in the village of Damadola. At first they insisted that the dead comprised nothing but local civilians, but yesterday changed their claim:

The provincial government said Tuesday that in addition to 18 civilians, four or five foreign militants were killed by the American airstrikes on the village of Damadola on Friday, but that their bodies were removed from the scene by companions. In all, 10 to 12 militants had been invited to a dinner in the village that night, it said.

The findings, the first official statement that militants had been among those killed, were from a preliminary joint investigation at the scene by government agencies.

The initial investigation found the attack was "directed against some foreign terrorists who were present in the area at the time of occurrence," the statement said, quoting Fahim Wazir, the political administrator of the Bajaur region, where the attacks took place.

The bodies of the "foreigners", as the Pakistanis call AQ terrorists, got pulled out and transported away quickly by others of their party to escape identification, the Pakistani government now says. That indicates two very clear results from this raid:

1. Its success; the intel proved correct even if Zawahiri failed to show for the dinner.
2. The high level of the people who were killed.

The only reason to take five bodies out of the wreckage before getting out is that the identities of those five bodies would make a difference to the efforts of al-Qaeda. Otherwise, why bother with the high risk of remaining in a targeted zone to retrieve dead bodies and transport them out of Damadola while leaving other bodies behind? If one Predator had dropped a few missiles, others might soon have come along to scout the mission and finish off anyone left scurrying around the blast site -- and yet the survivors made a point of taking the bodies with them. The only reason for taking that kind of chance would be to keep the West from knowing exactly who died, and that would only make sense if they knew that the West knew the identity and rank of the dead.

Does that mean that Zawahiri could have been one of the five? It's still possible; it's been a few days, and we still haven't heard from Zawahiri. We probably took out a good chunk of Zawahiri's staff at the least, making it much more difficult for the terror network's #2 to communicate through normal AQ channels. The damage done to AQ at Damadola could be enormous.

The Dishonesty Of The New York Times

The New York Times puts out another article attacking the inclusion of the notorious "sixteen words" in the 2003 State of the Union address that the Bush administration long ago conceded should not have been in the speech. These 16 words started the CIA on its mission to discredit George Bush by sending its partisan, spook spouse and former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, to Niger for a couple of drinks with the country's Prime Minister. On his return and oddly unencumbered by the normal non-disclosure agreements that the CIA requires for other contractors, he leaked his impressions through Nicholas Kristof at the Times and Walter Pincus at the Washington Post before writing an op-ed under his own name, declaring that Bush had lied about uranium sales to Iraq.

Once again, Eric Lichtblau and the NYT rehash this issue, and once again, they handle it dishonestly:

A high-level intelligence assessment by the Bush administration concluded in early 2002 that the sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq was "unlikely" because of a host of economic, diplomatic and logistical obstacles, according to a secret memo that was recently declassified by the State Department.

Among other problems that made such a sale improbable, the assessment by the State Department's intelligence analysts concluded, was that it would have required Niger to send "25 hard-to-conceal 10-ton tractor-trailers" filled with uranium across 1,000 miles and at least one international border.

The analysts' doubts were registered nearly a year before President Bush, in what became known as the infamous "16 words" in his 2003 State of the Union address, said that Saddam Hussein had sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Lichtblau even gets a quote from Joe Wilson himself at the end of the article, but Lichtblau's framing highlights the dishonesty at the heart of this article and Wilson's three-year passion for attacking the Bush administration:

Mr. Wilson said in an interview that he did not remember ever seeing the memo but that its analysis should raise further questions about why the White House remained convinced for so long that Iraq was trying to buy uranium in Africa.

"All the people understood that there was documentary evidence" suggesting that the intelligence about the sale was faulty, he said.

Once again, the Times conflates two different questions and in doing so misrepresents the intelligence that both the British and Wilson himself found. The first question, which prompted this release of material, is whether the Nigeriens were likely to sell and transport uranium to Iraq. The second question is whether Saddam Hussein was still making the attempt to buy uranium at all, from Niger as well as anywhere else. All of Iraq's uranium had been sealed by the UNSCOM team and was out of Saddam's reach, at least while UNSCOM remained in Iraq. Had Saddam sought uranium from any other source, it would prove that Saddam intended to rebuild his WMD nuclear program.

It really shouldn't be that difficult to figure out that the two questions are not mutually exclusive, and that they mean two very different things. Joe Wilson found that out himself and reported it to the CIA, as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence determined in 2004:

[Wilson's] intelligence report indicated that former Nigerien Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki was unaware of any contracts that had been signed between Niger and any rogue states for the sale of yellowcake while he was Prime Minister (1997-1999) or Foreign Minister (1996-1997). Mayaki said that if there had been any such contract during his tenure, he would have been aware of it. Mayaki said, however, that in June 1999,(REDACTED) businessman, approached him and insisted that Mayaki meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" between Niger and Iraq. The intelligence report said that Mayaki interpreted "expanding commercial relations" to mean that the delegation wanted to discuss uranium yellowcake sales. The intelligence report also said that "although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to the UN sanctions on Iraq."

As has been discussed many times in the past, the Nigeriens only export four commodities: livestock, cowpeas, onions, and uranium -- and only one of those would require secret negotiations with Saddam's Iraq. Mayaki told Wilson that he was sure that Saddam was trying to procure another source for uranium and declined to meet with the Iraqi delegation.

That showed the CIA assessment to be accurate -- that an actual sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq would be unlikely to proceed. However, it also showed that Saddam Hussein, as late as 1999, continued in his efforts to procure uranium to replace that which UNSCOM had confiscated. Why would Saddam need uranium? The only reason was to restart his moribund nuclear-weapons program.

Reread the opening paragraphs from Lichtblau again. He deliberately varies from one question to the other as if the two have an identical meaning. It's the same trick employed in Wilson's original op-ed; both start off by talking about the fact that no sale had been completed -- a true statement -- and then substitute that for no attempt to purchase uranium had been made, a complete falsehood that Wilson's own report proves.

Bush, in fact, turned out to be correct in his "sixteen words," a fact not lost on British intelligence, who have all along insisted that Saddam had tried to buy uranium, and not just from Niger. The SSCI report makes this dodge very transparent, but the Paper of Record never bothers to research its findings whenever reporting on this subject.

Jon Stewart On The Democratic Campaign

Normally I'm not a big fan of Jon Stewart, but I left The Daily Show on tonight while I worked on a couple of other tasks. Stewart reviewed the pandering done by Hillary Clinton and Ray Nagin yesterday, as well as the shoutdown Nancy Pelosi received on Saturday when she (rationally) suggested to her constituency that their concerns on the war would best be addressed electorally in 2006 during a visit to San Francisco. At the end of the segment, titled "Donkey Show", Stewart noted this:

So the Democratic platform appears to be ... Democrats are our government's slaves [Hillary added to graphic] ... New Orleans can't be rebuilt without Willy Wonka [Nagin added to graphic] ... and voting is for pussies [Pelosi added to graphic].

Good luck in 2006, everybody!

That's One

Ben Nelson of Nebraska became the first Senate Democrat to declare himself in support of Samuel Alito for confirmation to the Supreme Court. Nelson, who has to defend his seat this year in a state that went to Bush by over 30 points in 2004, will probably not start an overwhelming trend but will prevent a filibuster nonetheless:

Ben Nelson of Nebraska, a moderate voice in the U.S. Congress, on Tuesday became the first Senate Democrat to announce his support for conservative Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, who is expected to be confirmed later this month by the full Republican-led Senate.

"I have decided to vote in favor of Judge Samuel Alito," Nelson said in a statement issued by his office.

"I came to this decision after careful consideration of his impeccable judicial credentials, the American Bar Association's strong recommendation and his pledge that he would not bring a political agenda to the court," Nelson said.

Republicans thought that Nelson might back Alito, if for no other reason than to ensure against an embarrassing challenge from the GOP in November on the issue. That does make it much more difficult for the Democrats to stage a filibuster, with both Nelson -- a Gang of 14 member -- and Dianne Feinstein opposing the manuever. Harry Reid could lose no more than two more Democrats to sustain one, and at least four more have the same red-state issue as Nelson. Nelson says that the filibuster has no real support anyway:

"I think there won't be a filibuster. I have not heard very many people even talking about it," Nelson told Fox News.

The Alito nomination should have sailed through the Judiciary Committee today, but got postponed yet another week as the Democrats reneged on an earlier arrangement to put the one-week delay into the start of the hearings instead of at the vote. That's the best that the impotent Democrats can do -- display their inability to affect the legislative schedule, a problem they created from breaking deals such as the delay waiver. No matter; Frist has already canceled the Senate's one-week vacation to get the confirmation completed before the State of the Union speech by the President.

The impotence may last as long as the Alito membership of the Court if the Democrats can't bring themselves to grow up.

First Mate Update: Bad News

I'm afraid today hasn't been a good day for the First Mate and I. Today she started her third week of treatment for her polyoma virus infection, and her blood pressure and creatinine levels have gone up rather dramatically since last week. The doctors informed us today that the FM will need a new kidney and that we probably can't expect too much more function from the current transplant. The average wait for a cadaver donor in this part of the country is four to five years, which means that she'll need to go back on dialysis if the treatment can't recover at least some part of the current transplant's function.

Fortunately at this point, it doesn't appear that she has a problem with the pancreas transplant, so she doesn't have to go back on insulin. She will have to continue with the IV treatments this week, and then she will have to follow up once a week with extra anti-virals for a while. After that, we're hoping that she can stop with the IV treatments and take oral medication in its place. She's exhausted and pretty dispirited about the developments today, but we're hoping that we can get lucky in finding another donor.

Your prayers have been much appreciated, and we certainly can use more of them in the future.

UPDATE: When you have this many commenters and a whole bunch of Southern Baptists on your side, it's hard to remain dispirited about the chances of recovery. Thanks ever so much for all the thoughts and prayers.

Hillary On MLK Day: Senate Democrats Are Slaves

Hillary Clinton told a crowd gathered for her Martin Luther King Day speech in Al Sharpton's Harlem church that Congress under Republican control is the same as slavery and that the Republican leadership act as the overseers:

Martin Luther King Jr. fought four decades ago to free black Americans from the legacy of slavery. Yesterday, Senator Clinton compared the Republican leadership of the current House of Representatives to the very idea the civil rights leader dedicated his life to fighting.

"When you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run - it has been run like a plantation," she said. "You know what I'm talking about."

Mrs. Clinton, who was addressing a packed house at the Reverend Al Sharpton's annual Martin Luther King Day event at Canaan Baptist Church in Harlem, continued: "It has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary point of view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard. The Senate's not that bad, but it's been difficult. It's been difficult."

Is she out of her mind? First her husband decides somehow that he is an African-American by claiming to be the "first black President" because he comes from a broken family. Now Hillary, who by the way carpetbagged her way into the Senate by running for election for a state in which she'd never lived, now claims she's a slave because the Democrats can't get a majority in either house of Congress.

Perhaps the descendants of Harriet Tubman will recreate the Underground Railroad and shuttle the poor Democratic wretches from the "plantation" on which they toil in DC to, say, Canada. I don't think they'll find much resistance -- until they actually cross the 49th Parallel. I know most of us won't miss them a bit.

That victimization and self-pity for a group of rich idiots like Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Clinton herself, and the rest of the incompetent boobs of the Democratic power structure typifies the worldview of the loony left wing. Their lack of ability simply can't be their own fault, and their lack of connection to voters can't have anything to do with their failed policies and empty, hysterical rhetoric. It must be the fault of eeeeeeeeeevil Republicans, the "slavemasters" of Congress who actually won more elections, got more votes, and continue to grow their majority status despite the absolute self-assurance of Democrats who think they should be granted control despite the outcome of the elections.

File this one for 2008.

The Masque Slips

Whenever politicians outside the US find themselves in poll trouble, desperation appears to drive them towards one strategy that has shown itself most fallible: anti-Americanism. Gerhard Schroeder tried it and it eventually buried him. Now Paul Martin, drowning in an unprecedented popular collapse in Canada, has let his anti-US face show in the waning hours of his grip on power in Ottawa:

Amid growing signals of panic in the Liberal ranks, the party has launched a series of crudely anti-American commercials. One stated that victory for the 47-year-old Tory leader, Stephen Harper, would "bring a smile to George W Bush's face".

Another described Mr Harper as "pro-Iraqi war, anti-Kyoto, socially conservative... Bush's new best friend".

But despite strong anti-Americanism among voters, the adverts have had little effect on the polls. Voters appear far more concerned about domestic issues such as corruption. ... The latest polls give the Conservatives a 10-point lead over the Liberals, with some showing a widening gap between the two parties.

As I've said before, politics and dating have at least one thing in common: desperation is not an aphrodisiac. The obvious distress of the Liberal Party might well lift the Tories to a majority government. Ipsos has the gap widening overnight to 12 points nationally (38-26) and in the Liberal power base of Ontario (39-35). The projected seat totals show the Tories coming ever closer to a majority victory, a stunning reversal of fortune for Stephen Harper and his party.

CQ will be live-blogging the Canadian elections on the 23rd. Be sure to keep checking here for updated results.

Which Is It?

The New York Times updates its NSA exposé today in yet another self-contradictory follow-up that points out yet again the bias of the reporters at the heart of the story, and perhaps the bias of their sources as well. The Risen/Lichtblau story gets thinner and thinner even as the editors of the Gray Lady do their best to dress it up. In an installment titled "Spy Agency Data After Sept. 11 Led F.B.I. to Dead Ends", Lichtblau & Co. do their best to minimize the benefits of the program:

In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic.

That's the lead of the story, and the article meanders along like that for over fifteen paragraphs, until the reader gets to this passage:

The law enforcement and counterterrorism officials said the program had uncovered no active Qaeda networks inside the United States planning attacks. "There were no imminent plots - not inside the United States," the former F.B.I. official said.

Some of the officials said the eavesdropping program might have helped uncover people with ties to Al Qaeda in Albany; Portland, Ore.; and Minneapolis. Some of the activities involved recruitment, training or fund-raising.

So recruitment, training, and funding terrorists on American soil suddenly doesn't equate to "active al-Qaeda networks"? Since when? The FBI should tell us if it considers those functions as beneath its dignity to stop within the United States, because most Americans would beg to differ. And if one really digs into the article, Lichtblau supplies the specifics of the cases:

By contrast, different officials agree that the N.S.A.'s domestic operations played a role in the arrest of an imam and another man in Albany in August 2004 as part of an F.B.I. counterterrorism sting investigation. The men, Yassin Aref, 35, and Mohammed Hossain, 49, are awaiting trial on charges that they attempted to engineer the sale of missile launchers to an F.B.I. undercover informant.

In addition, government officials said the N.S.A. eavesdropping program might have assisted in the investigations of people with suspected Qaeda ties in Portland and Minneapolis. In the Minneapolis case, charges of supporting terrorism were filed in 2004 against Mohammed Abdullah Warsame, a Canadian citizen. Six people in the Portland case were convicted of crimes that included money laundering and conspiracy to wage war against the United States.

Not only did the NSA discover these conspiracies, but their evidence apparently led to convictions in the one case that has gone to trial.

No one expects every call, or even most calls, to have anything of value. Signal intel takes patience and time; sometimes messages only acquire meaning when combined with a pattern of other traffic, and it takes a long while to build that kind of intel base for evaluation. For those who want to know about such matters, the Ultra program at Bletchley Park in WWII makes a great example. Breaking the Enigma code was the most spectacular accomplishment, but people forget that the Ultra team also developed a massive card system that allowed the codebreakers to garner an encyclopedic knowledge of German personnel and facilities, allowing the Allies to anticipate strategies and tactics based on the most benign of communications.

The FBI, however, apparently doesn't like the fact that this program is run outside of its control. Even the Times alludes throughout the article that the FBI actively seeks to minimize the benefits of the NSA program because they can't control it themselves. It's a continuation of the same cross-agency feuding that has always existed in the American intelligence community. The 9/11 Commission said that slapping an extra two layers of bureaucracy to the top would eliminate it, but as most of us pointed out, all it did was make intel that much harder to rise to the top.

AJ Strata has more thoughts on this.

Iran Blinks?

In an apparent reversal of their previous stance, Iran has now welcomed a Russian proposal to enrich Iranian uranium themselves and thus control the fuel cycle, allowing Iran to generate power without creating fissile material for a weapon. The Iranians had rejected an identical Russian overture earlier, arguing that they had a sovereign right to enrich their own uranium:

A POTENTIAL breakthrough in the nuclear stand-off with Iran came last night when the Iranian ambassador in Moscow praised a proposal to move Tehran's uranium enrichment programme to Russia.

As Britain, the United States, Russia, France and China met in London yesterday to discuss how to handle Iran's illegal nuclear development, the country was facing the growing certainty that it would be referred to the UN Security Council.

While China remained resolutely silent on the possibility of sanctions - a move which it has the power to veto - Russia made significant moves towards the western stance on Iran's nuclear programme.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, said last night that his position is "very close" to that of the United States and Britain. And it appeared that he could hold the key to a resolution when Iran's ambassador to Russia, Gholamreza Ansari, welcomed an offer to move the Iranian uranium enrichment programme to Russia.

Such a move would mean Iran, which is developing a missile which could reach Israel, could not acquire enough material for a bomb.

"As far as Russia's proposal is concerned, we consider it constructive and are carefully studying it. This is a good initiative to resolve the situation. We believe that Iran and Russia should find a way out of this jointly," said Mr Ansari.

The mullahs may finally have realized that the game was over when Russia and China both announced that they would not oppose a referral of the Iranian standoff to the UN Security Council -- a precursor to crippling economic sanctions. That's not to say that they've given up on the nuclear weapons they obviously covet; it's that the mullahs realize that by breaking the seals on their uranium-enrichment facilities, they may have overplayed their hand.

Expect the Iranians to cozy up to Russia and especially China in the weeks ahead while dragging out the negotiations on this point. They will work to exploit any rift they can find between the two Asian giants and the West in order to play both sides against the middle. Once they see any daylight, the Iranians will push the gap as wide as possible in order to get back to doing its own enrichment. Only through constant vigilance will Iran stick to this deal -- and if that sounds a lot like Europe in the 1930s to you, it does to me, too.

The Pat Robertson Of New Orleans?

Perhaps the people of New Orleans can appreciate the irony of Ray Nagin and his outbursts, but it doesn't appear to play very well on a national stage. Nagin managed a daily double of foot-in-mouth disease today, first by declaring that hurricanes were God's punishment for the war in Iraq and also unnamed sins of the black community, and then used Martin Luther King Day to declare that New Orleans would once again be a "chocolate city":

Mayor Ray Nagin suggested Monday that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and other storms were a sign that "God is mad at America" and at black communities, too, for tearing themselves apart with violence and political infighting.

"Surely God is mad at America. He sent us hurricane after hurricane after hurricane, and it's destroyed and put stress on this country," Nagin, who is black, said as he and other city leaders marked Martin Luther King Day.

"Surely he doesn't approve of us being in Iraq under false pretenses. But surely he is upset at black America also. We're not taking care of ourselves."

Nagin also promised that New Orleans will be a "chocolate" city again. Many of the city's black neighborhoods were heavily damaged by Katrina.

If that kind of rhetoric had come from the mouth of Pat Robertson -- and if we wait a few days, it just might! -- the national news media would have pilloried him for being a racist and a Christian extremist. In fact, the notion of Robertson equating hurricane activity to God's wrath over whatever bothers Robertson most at the moment generated a Dateline Hollywood satire involving Ellen DeGeneres, one that was so believable that Snopes felt forced to debunk it.

As far as being a "chocolate city", one of the strengths of New Orleans as an American city has been its diversity, or so we have heard from its citizens. Black, white, brown, yellow, red -- all live together in relative harmony in the Crescent City. Are we to understand now that some of its citizens will not be welcomed back with equal enthusiasm? Of course not -- but Nagin certainly makes it sound that way. Of all days to make that pronouncement, the day celebrating a man martyred for the cause of a color-blind society gives Nagin's pronouncement an added dimension of stupidity.

Nagin will likely escape mainstream media abuse over his impolitic statements, but if so, then the media should ask themselves why it holds Nagin less responsible for his speech than it does a certifiable nut like Pat Robertson.

Katzenbach Wants To Disarm America For Repentance Of His Own Sins

Today's LA Times contains an essay from former Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, writing on the occasion of Martin Luther King Day to do penance for his sins against the martyred civil-rights leader. It is a curious kind of penance, however, that rationalizes Katzenbach's sins while forcing the entire nation to do his penance for him. Katzenbach played a key role in the FBI tapping of King's telephones in the 1960s, but now -- forty years afterwards -- wants to eliminate wiretaps altogether while we're at war with Islamist terrorists:

In October 1963, Hoover requested Atty. Gen. Kennedy to approve a wiretap on King's telephone. At that time, taps had to be approved by the attorney general and did not require court approval in the form of a warrant. The basis for the tap was King's close association with Stanley Levison, who Hoover said was a prominent member of the Communist Party with great influence over King in civil rights matters. ...

When Hoover asked for the wiretaps, Bobby consulted me (I was then his deputy) and Burke Marshall, head of the Civil Rights Division. Both of us agreed to the tap because we believed a refusal would lend credence to the allegation of communist influence, while permitting the tap, we hoped, would demonstrate the contrary. I think the decision was the right one, under the circumstances. But that doesn't mean that the tap was right. King was suspected of no crime, but the government invaded his privacy until I removed the tap two years later when I became attorney general. It also invaded the privacy of every person he talked to on that phone, not just Levinson.

King had been accused of no crime, and neither had Levinson; the FBI offered no proof that Levinson even belonged to the Communist Party, nor explained why that would have justified tapping one of the country's pre-eminent civil-rights activists (and the one who espoused non-violence, as opposed to others such as Malcolm X). Yet Katzenbach and Kennedy readily acquiesced to the tap, supposedly so Hoover could then discover that Hoover was wrong.

Anyone buying that explanation? Did Hoover often take such steps merely to satisfy his own curiosity? Hoover's secret files on political players had become well-known to almost everyone in Washington, especially to the Kennedys who had to frequently deal with their consequences while Jack was president. Katzenbach as either a babe in the woods then, or isn't being particularly honest now.

Now Katzenbach wants America to disavow wiretaps altogether and cynically uses King Day to stump for that position. However, the two situations hardly prove analogous. Today we face an enemy that has already killed thousands of Americans in a sneak attack, using our open communications networks to stage and time the attacks for maximum effectiveness. In order to stop the next attack, we need to have the ability to grab data from those phone sets that have connections to al-Qaeda based on evidence and testimony -- and to do it quickly. The calls that get intercepted cross international boundaries, so domestic calls still require (and get) warrants. The numbers come from captured phones and computer equipment directly tied to terrorists. Under those circumstances, the use of warrantless wiretaps makes sense and has prevented attacks on America, according to one Senator who participated in the briefing sessions from the NSA program.

CQ reader Corky B reminds us of the work of David Kahn, who wrote a seminal book on cryptography in 1967 titled The Codebreakers. The book details the efforts to capture the Purple traffic from Imperial Japan's diplomatic corps over cable wires just prior to World War II. That effort had been illegal then, under the FCC law of 1934:

"The first task of OP20-G and S.I.S. was to obtain raw material for the cryptanalysts. And in peacetime America that was not easy."

"Section 605 of the Federal Communications Act of 1934, which prohibits wiretaps, also prohibits the interception of messages between foreign countries and the United States and territories. General Malin Craig, Chief of Staff from 1937 to 1939, was acutely aware of this, and his attitude dampened efforts to intercept the Japanese diplomatic messages coming into America. But after General George C. Marshall succeeded to Craig's post, the exigencies of national defense relegated the problem in his mind to the status of a legalistic quibble. The cryptanalytic agencies pressed ahead in their intercept programs. The extreme secrecy in which they were cloaked helped them avoid detection. They concentrated on radio messages, since the cable companies,in general refused to turn over any foreign communications to them. Consequently, 95 percent of the intercepts were radio messages. The remainder was split between cable intercepts and photographs of messages on file at a few cooperative cable offices."

Should we have impeached FDR and court-martialed General Marshall for taking the extraordinary steps they did in protecting America from attack as best they could? And remember, this took place before hostilities began with Japan, not after Pearl Harbor. George Bush and the NSA went by a narrower interpretation of the law before 9/11 and we paid the price for it.

If Katzenbach needs to do penance for his sins against Martin Luther King, let him offer his apologies to the King family directly. We don't need to disarm our defenses for the sake of Katzenbach's conscience. (via Power Line)

Non-Fatal Combat Casualties Down Over A Quarter In 2005

USA Today reports that a key measure of combat dropped significantly in Iraq last year, showing that the number of attacks on US troops fell significantly in Iraq between 2004 and 2005:

The number of U.S. troops wounded in Iraq fell by more than a quarter in 2005 from a year earlier, Pentagon records show. Military officials call that a sign that insurgent attacks have declined in the face of elections and stronger Iraqi security forces.

The number of wounded dropped from 7,990 in 2004 to 5,939, according to the Defense Department. There hasn't been much change in the number of deaths, however. Pentagon figures show 844 U.S. troops were killed in the Iraq war during 2005, compared with 845 in 2004.

The DoD attributes the steady number of combat deaths with the use of more sophisticated and powerful bombs by the enemies in Iraq. These result in more deaths per attack, but the number of attacks directed at American forces has substantially decreased between 2004 and 2005. This belies the notion spread by Democrats such as Jack Murtha that Americans have been increasingly targeted by insurgents and terrorists in Iraq. In fact, the Iraqis themselves have borne a progressively higher cost of these attacks -- one of the reasons that the insurgency faces a major support problem now from even the Sunnis who want to see an end to American "occupation".

The Chicken Littles once again fail to match their hysterical rhetoric to the facts at hand, and suffer an even greater loss of credibility as a result.

The Subtext Of The Alito Hearings

Both the New York Times and Washington Post attempt to capture the subtext of the Alito confirmation hearings, with the former trying to tackle the question seriously and the Post taking a more playful attitude with the question. The New York Times's analysis concludes that the dubious spectacle has created much more room for debate on the legal status of abortion than either side thought possible after the 2004 election:

Just a little over a year ago, senators of both parties said publicly that it would be almost impossible for a Supreme Court nominee who disagreed openly with the major abortion rights precedents to win confirmation. ...

The shift in the politics of the abortion rights issue was clear early in the hearings. On the first day of questioning, when the parties laid out their arguments and public opinion began to form, only two Democratic senators, Ms. Feinstein and Charles E. Schumer of New York, made abortion rights a central focus.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the senior member and liberal stalwart, aimed their questions primarily at other issues like presidential and executive power. And when they later returned more fully to abortion rights, they often talked more euphemistically of a right to privacy.

Republicans, in contrast, appeared to relish bringing up the subject. In the first round, the chairman of the committee, Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania and a supporter of abortion rights, called abortion the "dominant issue" of the hearings. Several Republican opponents of abortion rights - Senators Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Sam Brownback of Kansas, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Mike DeWine of Ohio - dwelled on the prospect of overturning abortion rights decisions.

In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Brownback said he was heartened by the hearings. He argued that in the 2004 elections, Republicans had showed Democrats that "we can run on abortion rights and win the public," adding, "they are trimming their sails some on it."

An offhand remark by Arlen Specter just after the election that he intended as friendly advice to the President not to send obviously pro-life candidates to fill Supreme Court nominations reflected the conventional wisdom -- that the American electorate would consider such a nominee as too radical for confirmation. However, the American electorate has swung towards a considerably pro-life position, and furthermore, more and more people now believe that the issue should still be open for debate and decision in the legislature, not the federal bench. Specter nearly lost his chairmanship after giving that "advice", especially since the White House had decided to back Specter over a more conservative primary challenger who gave Specter a tough run.

The debate over abortion has never gone away, and as science teaches us more about embryonic development, the question of killing a foetus for the convenience of the mother becomes more and more complicated. The electorate has the sense that Roe stole the ability of the people to make their own decision about policy regarding abortion and created an unresolvable political impasse as a result. The usurpation of authority that the Court committed also poisoned its role in America's governing system, with the current poisonous tone for Supreme Cout and federal appellate bench confirmation hearings resulting from that point.

If anything, the Alito hearings show that the issue of abortion has become an albatross around the necks of Democrats.

The Post's Dana Milbank takes a lighter look at the hearings by asking their resident computer guru to review the transcript and count words and phrases from the testimony. In three paragraphs, Milbank points out exactly why the hearings became such a farce and a hysterical witch-hunt, demeaning the Senate much more than the attempted smear campaingn could ever have hurt the candidate himself:

By the numbers, Judge Alito's language was painfully cautious. He mentioned " stare decisis " -- respect for precedents (i.e., Roe v. Wade ) 68 times. But he mentioned "abortion" only 23 times and hardly used the word "overturn" at all. Among his top three-word phrases: "I don't know" (29 times). Among his top four-word phrases: "I would have to" -- as in, "I would have to know the arguments that are made" before answering the question (21 times).

The nominee relied heavily on the language of law books, mentioning "Humphrey's Executor" (whoever he is) 10 times, "undue burden" 10 times, and "jurisdiction" 25 times.

The senators spent less time in the legal gobbledygook and more time scoring political points. Democrats mentioned "Vanguard," a reference to a conflict-of-interest for Alito, 68 times. They invoked Roe 59 times, and "CAP," a controversial group Alito joined, 29 times. "Above the law" came up a dozen times, and "the unitary executive" -- an extreme view of presidential power -- 14 times.

If nothing else does, this proves that the Democrats had no intention of allowing the candidate to get consideration based on the merits of his qualifications. They put much more effort into muckraking than asking substantive questions regarding his job qualification and judicial track record. It was a pathetic, shameful performance that will and should take the Democrats years for atonement.

Steelers Survive Steal, Referees To Beat Indy

The Pittsburgh Steelers stunned the Indianapolis Colts today, 21-18, knocking the Colts out of the playoffs just a month after the Colts had challenged the 1972 Dolphins for the only perfect season in NFL history. The Steelers had to hold off a late charge from Peyton Manning as well as two bad calls by the referees, one which almost handed the game to Indianapolis:

The Pittsburgh Steelers gave the Colts every opportunity to steal their playoff game Sunday.

In the zany, final moments of a true thriller, Indy couldn't figure out how to take it.

So the Steelers survived a goal-line fumble by Jerome Bettis and one of the most mysterious replay reversals in NFL history to shatter the Colts' dream season with a 21-18 win. Pittsburgh (13-5) became the first sixth seed to make a conference championship game and will journey to Denver next Sunday for a shot at the Super Bowl.

They will do so breathlessly.

This victory should have been so much easier. The Steelers dominated the Colts (14-3) until a fourth quarter with almost unimaginable twists and turns that ended when Mike Vanderjagt missed his first field goal at home, wide right from 46 yards. Vanderjagt then slammed his helmet to the turf, obviously forgetting how fortunate he was to have the chance.

The Troy Palomalu interception could not have been more clear; both his knees hit the turf while he possessed the ball and rolled over twice, fumbling only after he got up to run the ball and quickly covering it himself. The referee's decision to reverse the call on the field stunned even the Colts, although they quickly took advantage of it to score their final touchdown. After converting the two-point play, the Colts defense gave the offense one more chance to win the game, but the Steelers shut the Colts down on their own two-yard line with 80 seconds left in the game.

In a weird finish, the Steelers could not just take a knee because the Colts had all three of their timeouts left -- and it would have forced Pittsburgh to kick a field goal and give the ball back to Manning with a six-point deficit. Instead, they gave the ball to the Bus, who hadn't lost a fumble all year -- and he promptly coughed it up in a play that looked reminiscent of the Eagles-Giants Pisarcik play. Only a foot tackle by Ben Roethlisberger saved the game for Pittsburgh. Unbelievably, Vanderjagt missed a 46-yard field goal wide right -- and I mean wide, wide, WIDE right -- to lose the game to Pittsburgh.

The other terrible call actually was a non-call in the first half. The Steelers had already established a 14-0 lead over the Colts and had their offense moving again. Roethlisberger threw to Antwaan Randle El downfield about twenty yards, well within field-goal range and for what would have been a first down. Nick Sharper, who played through an injury inflicted by his wife last night (a stab wound to his thigh that required three stitches), tackled Randle El well before the ball arrived, which bounced off of his hands. No flag came out despite the clear mugging that Sharper put on Randle El, and the drive stalled out, allowing the Colts to answer with a field goal.

Now the AFC championship looks much different than it did yesterday. Denver will host the game instead of traveling to Indy, which will make Broncos fans delighted. However, Pittsburgh plays well outside and in tough weather, and they match up well with Denver on both sides of the line. Both teams have to be happy with today's results.

Feinstein: Forget The Filibuster

Dianne Feinstein stuck a fork into Democratic plans to delay the Alito confirmation earlier today, officially running up a white flag in the Democrats' war on judicial nominations for the time being. The California Senator and one of the few Judiciary Democrats to not embarrass herself during the hearings disregarded the advice of her leadership and declared that Samuel Alito deserves his up-or-down vote from the full Senate:

A Democrat who plans to vote against Samuel Alito sided on Sunday with a Republican colleague on the Senate Judiciary Committee in cautioning against a filibuster of the Supreme Court nominee.

"I do not see a likelihood of a filibuster," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. "This might be a man I disagree with, but it doesn't mean he shouldn't be on the court."

She said she will not vote to confirm the appeals court judge, based on his conservative record. But she acknowledged that nothing emerged during last week's hearings to justify any organized action by Democrats to stall the nomination.

Harry Reid wanted his caucus to keep their counsel quiet until Wednesday, but Feinstein sees the writing on the wall. Perhaps alone out of her entire caucus on Judiciary, Feinstein understands the damage the Democrats inflicted on themselves with their performance last week. It may not hurt right away, but the sheer impotence the Democrats displayed in their inability to rattle Alito or derail his performance -- indeed, in his ability to make the same three senior members of the Committee (Schumer, Kennedy and Biden) behave like idiots -- will resonate much as the same result did after the Roberts hearings. The Democrats have lost even the Exempt Media as apologists and have them demanding deference to electoral results.

In short, they've lost, and further delay only makes them look more foolish and for a longer period of time.

Tigerhawk points out today that the Gang of 14 deal looks pretty good right now. I agree with him that it has taken a bite out of the Democrats' ability to use the filibuster and strip the White House of its ability to have its nominees treated with the deference Bush's election should have given them. I'll agree with him that it has worked out better than I predicted -- but what it has enabled are these terrible smear campaigns as the Democrats and their allies attempt to gin up the "extraordinary circumstances" they believe will justify a filibuster. You can thank the Gang of 14 for the debacle of the show-trial Samuel Alito endured this week.

And where, exactly, have the nominations of Brett Kavanaugh and Henry Saad gone?

Even The Media Gives Up On The Filibuster

Two of the most important liberal newspapers editorialize against using a filibuster on the confirmation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. The Los Angeles Times takes the opportunity to call out one specific Democratic member of Judiciary while reminding his party that elections have consequences -- and one of them is the ability to shape the federal bench:

WHO SAYS YOU DON'T LEARN much from judicial confirmation hearings? We learned an awful lot about Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) last week. He was among the senators who seemed to use more of their time lecturing instead of listening to the Supreme Court nominee, Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. ...

Alito would not have been our choice to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the court. It is understandable that, unlike now-Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., he may not win many Democratic votes. Conversely, there are no legitimate grounds to entertain a filibuster of this nominee, or to be overly shocked that he is the sort of justice Bush would select.

Bush never made any secret of his desire to put conservative jurists on the highest court, and he was elected to the presidency twice. One of the perks of the presidency, besides not having to sit through confirmation hearings, is shaping the Supreme Court. And one of the obligations of senators in the minority, after forcing a nominee to listen to them, is allowing the president's nominee an up-or-down vote.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post goes farther than the LAT, outright endorsing Alito's confirmation on the same grounds:

A Supreme Court nomination isn't a forum to refight a presidential election. The president's choice is due deference -- the same deference that Democratic senators would expect a Republican Senate to accord the well-qualified nominee of a Democratic president.

And Judge Alito is superbly qualified. His record on the bench is that of a thoughtful conservative, not a raging ideologue. He pays careful attention to the record and doesn't reach for the political outcomes he desires. His colleagues of all stripes speak highly of him. His integrity, notwithstanding efforts to smear him, remains unimpeached. ...

Supreme Court confirmations have never been free of politics, but neither has their history generally been one of party-line votes or of ideology as the determinative factor. To go down that road is to believe that there exists a Democratic law and a Republican law -- which is repugnant to the ideal of the rule of law. However one reasonably defines the "mainstream" of contemporary jurisprudence, Judge Alito's work lies within it. While we harbor some anxiety about the direction he may push the court, we would be more alarmed at the long-term implications of denying him a seat. No president should be denied the prerogative of putting a person as qualified as Judge Alito on the Supreme Court.

And while the New York Times maintains an Alito silence on its own editorial pages today, its reporting from Washington clearly shows that the Democrats have started to awaken to this political reality:

Disheartened by the administration's success with the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., Democratic leaders say that President Bush is putting an enduring conservative ideological imprint on the nation's judiciary, and that they see little hope of holding off the tide without winning back control of the Senate or the White House.

In interviews, Democrats said the lesson of the Alito hearings was that this White House could put on the bench almost any qualified candidate, even one whom Democrats consider to be ideologically out of step with the country.

That conclusion amounts to a repudiation of a central part of a strategy Senate Democrats settled on years ago in a private retreat where they discussed how to fight a Bush White House effort to recast the judiciary: to argue against otherwise qualified candidates by saying they would take the courts too far to the right.

All that strategy proved was that Democrats had no clue about the role of a "loyal opposition" in American politics, and that their time in the wilderness had come none too soon. Not only did both parties use federal bench appointments in three successive election cycles -- each one won by the GOP -- but obstructionists such as Tom Daschle lost their seats on that issue alone.

Elections have consequences. So does the kind of McCarthyite smear jobs the Democrats attempted this week with Alito as part of its strategy to attack George Bush by ruining the reputation of his nominee, a longtime and exemplary member of the federal bench, through baseless allegations of bigotry and misogynism. The only way that the Democrats could possibly make themselves look worse on the dawn of the 2006 election cycle would be to delay or filibuster the obviously-qualified Alito's confirmation after a week of making idiots out of themselves.

Have We Given Up On Iran?

That's what The Scotsman reports, stating that European and American officials have resigned themselves to a nuclear Iran. After a good cop/bad cop approach by the EU and America, neither group believe sanctions will have any affect and Europe will not support military action as an alternative:

Officials in London and Washington now privately admit that they must face the painful fact that there is nothing they can do, despite deep suspicions that Tehran is seeking to develop nuclear weapons under cover of researching nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

Yesterday a defiant Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said his country would not be deflected from its right to develop nuclear technology by referral to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions. ...

Publicly, the US and Britain, the two countries that have adopted the most hawkish stance, are pressing for international action to stop Iran. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said last week that it was time for the UN to confront Iran's "defiance" over its nuclear programme, while British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw insisted that sanctions were now "on the table".

But behind the scenes there is no stomach for a fight. The US is the only country that could take military action. But with the US military already seriously overstretched in Iraq and with the mid-term congressional elections approaching there is no impetus in the White House or in Congress for another military adventure. ...

Sanctions, too, are being dismissed by government officials. "Sanctions hardly ever work anyway and can harm the people rather than the government," a source close to the Foreign Office said. "Anything else we do is highly unlikely to divert Tehran away from developing nuclear technology."

If true, this story provides a depressing development in our face-off with Teheran. In a moment where we need to unify the West against a threat that directly impacts all of our forces concentrated in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, the last quality we should display is defeatism and fatalism. The Iranian Guardian Council wants to bluff us off indefinitely until it develops the nuclear weapons that they believe will cause a standoff with the West, and fatalism on our part will create that result.

Unfortunately, what it won't provide is MAD-style deterrence from using the weapons against us. With the Soviets, their calculations remained within the rational limits of existence. They knew if they unleashed their nuclear weapons against us or one of our allies -- say, Israel -- we would have fired back with an annihilation-level counterstrike. That balance kept the so-called Cold War from being fought on a global basis; instead, we fought proxy battles around the world to keep the balance of power until Reagan came along and bankrupted the Soviets through modernization of the weaponry and new efforts such as SDI.

The Iranians do not see the world in the same way. The radical Shi'ites of Qum practice a Messianic vision of Islam, one in which going out with a bang has a higher value than survival. The mullahs will not be deterred by overwhelming American strength in this area, and will consider a Teheran-for-Israel trade to be well worth the effort and loss of Iranian life.

MAD only works as a doctrine when both sides have the same stake in survival.

On the plus side, the Scotsman appears to have sourced this story rather thinly. To my best reading of this article, it appears that the entire premise has its basis from a single source in the British Foreign Office -- not exactly a place of great enthusiasm for military adventure, like our own State Department. Let's hope that the Scotsman just got the attention of one particular pessimist on a rainy day, and that our combined diplomatic corps has not gotten to the stage of shrugging their shoulders at a nuclear-armed Iran.