Hatchet Men

Okay. So, as Joe Conason points out, James Dale Guckert has long been a loyal GOP operative and helped current-South Dakota Senator Thune defeat Tom Daschle through an unrelenting on-line smear campaign. Bought and paid for, of course, by Thune and the GOP.

And as Ari Fleischer reveals, Guckert was cleared from on-high (under his Gannon alias), despite his overt ties to GOP fund-raising organizations.

All right. So, we've revealed Guckert as a scumbag, a liar, and a political hack. But he was working for someone. Someone planted him there in the first place. Someone cleared him. Someone granted him sweeping access to the White House, as well as classified CIA information. Someone fed him GOP talking points and set his agenda.

And now it's time for the investigation to uncover who THAT person was.

I know who's on the short list.

Karl Rove, the master of evil himself.

And this is why it's important: we all know how close Rove is to the President. And we all know that these types of dirty tricks are just par for the course for Rove. It smacks of his handiwork. And should we discover a direct link from Guckert to Rove...well, it becomes pretty obvious, then, who leaked Valerie Plame's identity. Which is a felony.

On the surface, it seems pretty sloppy of Rove. Planting a gay gigolo and known political hack as a fake White House reporter? Not very subtle. But then again, it's the perfect cover. If Guckert starts talking...well, his credibility is already shot. If he starts naming names - like Rove - who's gonna believe him? After all, he's just a lying male escort. And a gay one, at that. His word against Rove. But I think they've gotten cocky. They are vulnerable now. Don't forget what they did with Monica...and how an investigation into a lousy land deal in Arkansas led to impeachment charges over a blowjob.

The pressure is on - and the fact that Ari Fleischer is so vocally covering his ass all of a sudden means that this story could have major implications. But only if it's followed up upon. Now's the time to find the link that leads to the holy grail - Karl Rove. And how appropriate if the ultimate Hatchet Man is brought down as a result of his own botched hatchet job.


UPDATED: It goes without saying that Daily Kos has done a fantastic job of pulling all the Gannon/Guckert threads together. Here are a few more round-ups of the story thus far:

Linking Gannuckert to the planted TANG memos.

Double G on Cooper. No, not like that.

How's the media covering Gannuckert?

And of course, the Plame connection.


Americablog has also taken the lead on this story and has been a fantastic resource.

Menawhile, Opus worries for the poor guy's safety. And probably rightly so. He's outlived his usefulness. And Guckert's death would certainly kill the story - so to speak - and fan the idea that the Left persecuted this poor sap. One more thing to watch out for...

While you were out...

Everyone is up in arms over the Social Security fight...and meanwhile, the Administration has jammed this terrible piece of legislation through Congress.


So, while no one's looking, giant corporations (tobacco, oil, asbestos...so many giant, faceless companies) get massive protection from wrongdoing, and the individual once again gets screwed. Federal courts are less likely to hear the class action lawsuits, forcing many corporate fraud cases to be heard on an individual basis. Many of these cases against big companies are won because of the large amount of people affected...by limiting class action lawsuits, corporations skirt the system as THEIR high-priced, well-paid, professional lawyers can potentially prove that individual cases of fraud and abuse are isolated incidents, when the abuse could be rampant across the country. But no jury will ever hear the evidence of abuse from these other cases now...because, you kow, all these high profile court cases were just...frivolous.

So. The response to Enron, Tyco, Worldcom, etc.? Protection from the law.

As an added slap in the face, the bill also limits the lawyers' fees, eradicating any incentive for lawyers to take these cases. See - trial lawyers, they make their money by winning cases like these against sleazy corporations. Corporate lawyers, on the other hand, are on retainer. They work for these companies. They're on salary. They make huge amounts of dollars, whether or not they win their cases. But now, these new limits will make it like a public defender - working pro bono - going up against OJ Simpson's lawyers. See the problem? The deck continues to get stacked against all of us "regular" folk...

Passing the Guck(ert)

Sidney Blumenthal illustrates how this administration is undermining the legitimacy of an independent press with all their dirty tricks. As he concludes:

But the affair's longer-run implication is the Republican effort to sideline an independent press and undermine its legitimacy. "Spin" seems too quaint. "In this day and age," said McClellan, waxing philosophical about the Gannon affair, "when you have a changing media, it's not an easy issue to decide or try to pick and choose who is a journalist." The problem is not that the White House press secretary cannot distinguish who is or is not a journalist; it is that there are no journalists, just the gaming of the system for the concentration of power.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos updates us on the White House gigolo, pointing out how obvious it is that the White House aided and abetted James Guckert.

And of course, the mainstream tv media has been diligently following this case...oh, wait. They're not. Sigh.

UPDATE: Keith Olbermann rocks. Primetime coverage and ...what is that? It appears to be actual, investigative reporting. Hope springs eternal.

Syria-sly

Quote the President:

We've recalled our ambassador, which indicates that the relationship is not moving forward, that Syria is out of step with the progress being made in a greater Middle East, that democracy is on the move. And this is a country that isn't moving with the democratic movement. (emphasis mine)

This is how he talks. Seriously.

Getting Local: The MCAS and Expectations

I read an article in The Boston Globe this morning that set me off into a bit of a lather.

It seems that the state's Higher Education Commissioner, David P. Driscoll, is reluctant to raise the standards for graduation when it comes to student scoring on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System because it would mean that fewer students graduated every year. As it stands now, a perfect score on the MCAS is a 280, and a minimum of 220 is needed for graduation. To achieve a standard considered 'proficient, a student must score a minimum of 240. A student scoring 220 and, therefore, qualifying for a diploma, is only considered to have 'partial' command of the material on the test (which, at this point, is limited to math and english).

What Driscoll is implying is that it's better to graduate more underprepared students than it is to keep them in school until they can be considered 'proficient'. So, as a philosophy of our public education, we are now expected to be more concerned with allowing as many people to graduate as possible, rather than ensuring that in order to qualify for graduation, our students are as prepared as possible - at least as far as the standards of a flawed test are concerned.

There is the issue of minority students, and the fact that many more of them would not qualify for graduation should the bar be raised. But the problem here is really more fundamental with where we set the bar. The problem is that our public education is clearly failing our kids, no matter what their race, or their economic situation. We should not be required to lower, or keep low, our standards of education in order to keep pushing students through the system. The debate over the standards for graduation under the MCAS system is merely a fight over recognition of the larger problems that loom in public education.

It seems to me that whole point of the MCAS is to provide a standard of education across the board (albeit one that ignores the hard and social sciences in its evaluation). If the state is going to set such a standard, shouldn't the standard be one of general proficiency? And if such a standard is set, shouldn't the schools be provided with the resources that they need to bring every one of their students, regardless of socio-economic status, up to those standards?

We shouldn't be having a debate over whether to raise the standards for our kids' education to the level of proficient. We should be demanding that our public school systems meet those standards and surpass them with every student in the system. By passing and graduation students with less than a general proficiency in not only math and english, but also the sciences, we are shortchanging both the students themselves, and also the health of our own future. Well educated people create more jobs, earn better wages, and keep our country at the forefront of innovation. By demanding less than proficient skills from our students, and not funding the development of those proficiencies in our students, we are mortgaging our own future as a strong society, and theirs as productive parts of that society.

Until face the real issues here, and stop debating ways to artificially boost graduation rates by lowering standards, our kids, and the future of our economy and society, will suffer.

Gannon fodder

If this were a movie, the revelation that a potential GAY PROSTITUTE was posing as a White House journalist and had access to classified CIA documents would be the smoking gun needed to bring down a corrupt government, drunk on its own power. And everyone would say, "That's so contrived. That could never happen in real life."

Well, welcome to real life.


It's too bad that the left has jumped the gun on this story - as our friend Paul notes, we've blown our load. Not enough main stream media interest had been generated yet before EVERYTHING we had was on the table. Way to go, poker face. The Monica story took some time to build steam, forcing then-President Clinton to address it on National TV. AND THAT'S WHEN THEY GOT 'IM. We haven't forced ANYTHING. And now they know what we've got. The White House and the GOP have disowned Guckert faster than you can say Talon News, and still, does the average Joe and Jane American know who this douchebag is? Nope.


Meanwhile, Guckert is keeping his mouth shut, so there goes any chance that we'll get him to further incriminate himself.

And while Daily Kos tells us why this all matters and Media Matters spells out his connection to the "Plame Leak", the Wingnuts are already 'tsk-tsk'ing the bloggers for "ruining" this poor man's life. Cry me a river.

It's hypocrisy revealed. It's state sponsored propaganda and the majority of Americans are content with allowing this to happen. It's 1984 and the Ministry of Truth, but instead of rebellion against Big Brother, most people are scrambling to get a job with The Party, hoping to take credit for punishing free-thinkers like Winston. We are living in an age of Doublethink, where contradictions are accepted and we don't let facts get in the way of our perceptions.

Have fun at Joycamp.

Tightening the belt

You know things are bad for the economy when the President calls for cuts in Missile Defense spending. Ah, but before you start praising the GOP for being so fiscally conservative and responsible, realize that:

If approved by Congress, the cuts will reduce the Missile Defense Agency's 2006 budget to about 7.8 billion dollars from about 8.8 billion dollars the previous year.

Personally, I think $7.8 billion is still too much money to be spending on a system with a 20-plus year record of failure, including this week's most recent failed attempt.

Even the Pentagon is hedging its bets on the potential for a real success:

Pentagon spokesperson Larry Di Rita stated that the Ground-based Midcourse Missile Defense System being deployed in Alaska and California has, at best, a “nascent operational capability.” It is unclear what he meant by this, as “operational capability” has a very specific meaning for Pentagon weapons programs: in order to reach this level of development, they must have passed very explicit testing milestones. According to Di Rita, “We haven't made a declaration that we are now hereby operational. I don't know that such a declaration will ever be made,” and, instead, there will be a “focus on testing and evaluation of the system." This comes on the heels of a flight test failure in December 2004. Di Rita explained the Pentagon’s attitude toward missile defense: “The system is what it is, and it will get better over time.”
(Defense Daily, Jan. 18, 2005)

The Center for Defense Information has a pretty good breakdown of just what's wrong with pouring billions of dollars - not to mention wasted time, energy, and resources - into the doomed Star Wars program.

If Missile Defense were an after-school program, you can bet your Halliburton stocks that Dubya would have cut it already. Funny how double standards work.

Blowing Off Steam

Damn, that's some vitriol...

I like it.

Right Hook

Via The Left Coaster, here's a column by Paul Craig Roberts, both a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during the Reagan Administration and a former associate editor for the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Roberts, a conservative and a Republican, takes the gloves off and goes to town on the Bush administration and its foreign policy blunders relating to Iraq and the Middle East. It's a damning account that includes the following graf:

"There is no possibility of the US imposing its will on the Muslim world. By its behavior the Bush administration is confirming Osama bin Laden's propaganda and breeding more terrorists. Much better to address the causes of Muslim discontent--America's enabling of the Israeli government's mistreatment and dispossession of the Palestinians, and America's export of "culture" that glorifies the sexual promiscuity of women."

Could this be the beginning of a conservative backlash against the remarkably non-conservative and misguided policy-making of the current administration? Let's hope so.

First Spongebob, now Dirty Harry

Frank Rich dives into the apparent turbulence (careful, potential plot spoiler) from the wingers regarding Clint Eastwood's acclaimed Million Dollar Baby (also covered by Dowd). Now, I haven't seen it yet, so I can't comment first hand, but apparently Rush Limbaugh and Michael Medved are claiming that Eastwood (a former Republican mayor of Carmel, CA, for cripes sake) is pushing a liberal agenda (warning, NewsMax link) in his film. Eastwood has denied all accusations and, according to Rich's piece, seems a little taken aback by all the hate.

I guess a lot of conservative talk-show hosts have been giving away the ending of this film (which I won't do here) for quite some time now, in hopes of driving down the box office returns. Seems it hasn't worked so well.

Rich and Dowd illustrate just how crazy these wingnuts can be when they whip themselves into a lather over something. It really bugs me that, in our current political climate, both sides have so readily adopted the "you're with me or against me" stance that Bush made so popular in the days following 9/11. America should be about argument, discourse, and general disagreement that leads to progress and compromise. What it shouldn't be is the domination of a lock-step, single-minded mentality and knee-jerk righteous condemnation. This isn't a trend that's isolated only in the right or in the left, but it seems that we may be losing track of what it is that makes our country so great: the freedom not only to disagree, but also to create controversial art, and, for that matter, be total idiots if we so choose. That's the whole point of that little First Amendment thingy we've got. Not to be confused with the Twenty-first Amendment, which is pretty good, too.

There's more written on this here and here but they contain spoilers, so advance at your own risk.