One of Ours

The White House on Thursday asked the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to give national security adviser Condoleezza Rice another opportunity to talk privately with panel members.

The White House said, in a letter to the commission chairman and vice chairman from counsel Alberto Gonzales, that such a session would allow her to clear up "a number of mischaracterizations of Dr. Rice's statements and positions."...

...Gonzales also sought to set the record straight about the obligation of a presidential aide to testify publicly. He said that statements that other national security advisers have testified before Congress in open sessions were wrong.

Previous testimony from national security advisers have either been in closed session or involved potential criminal wrongdoing, making those situations markedly different from the current one, Gonzales said. In fact, the more common occurrence is for national security advisers to decline to appear publicly, he said...

Bush's remarks at the RTCA dinner have proven to be a tad controversial. But so hilarious! He led by observing that Donald Rumsfeld's favorite show is "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," and then suggesting that the "Fab Five" give Ashcroft a makeover. Soooo funny!
If you're not getting the joke, let me explain: See, in order for Ashcroft to be on "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," Ashcroft would have to be straight.
No, wait, that's not it....

...Under the plan, which is nearing approval, smaller, relatively spartan bases would be established in Romania and possibly Bulgaria, and designed for the rapid projection of U.S. military power against terrorists, hostile states and other potential adversaries.

Farther east, in Central Asia, bases in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan that were established in 2001 to support the war in Afghanistan would be preserved as training sites and as staging areas that U.S. forces could use in emergencies.

In Asia, about 15,000 troops out of a total presence of about 100,000 would be withdrawn, mostly by streamlining administrative staffs of the U.S. military commands in South Korea and Japan, the officials said. But much of that reduction could be offset by a buildup of personnel and aircraft in Guam and the possible stationing of another aircraft carrier battle group in either Guam or Hawaii, the officials said. The Pentagon plan also calls for new training and staging areas in Australia and expansion of military ties with Singapore and Thailand.

U.S. officials have said before that they intended to eliminate a number of large, full-service Cold War bases abroad and construct a network of more skeletal outposts closer to potential trouble spots in the Middle East and along the Pacific Rim. But neither the proposed size of the reductions in Europe and Asia nor details about locations of the new sites were previously disclosed.

The realignment would amount to a dramatic change in how U.S. forces are positioned around the globe. Some of the troops now overseas would be brought home, while vital equipment would be dispersed more widely to enable more nimble dispatch of forces. Another major objective, officials added, is to deepen military ties and joint training with a greater number of allies in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Africa and Southeast Asia...

...Four days ago a car bomb exploded at the front gate (a few kilometers from where I work). It shook all the buildings on base. There were several Iraqis killed but there were surprisingly few casualties for the size of the explosion. Every day the base receives mortar or rocket fire but it is mostly ineffective. A rocket attack two nights ago wounded one soldier (shrapnel in the buttocks) but there hasn't been a death in months. There is a good system to hunt down those who are firing the mortars and rockets and we are already getting better at responding. While it seems dangerous, I think if you talk to most soldiers here they would say that they feel very safe here on Anaconda. The 1st ID soldiers are the only ones walking around in helmets and our bullet proof vests...

Georgia Sen. Zell Miller, a Democrat who has endorsed President Bush, took the reins on Wednesday of a "Democrats for Bush" group and slammed John Kerry as "out of step" with the party's past leaders.

Miller accused Kerry, the Democratic challenger to Bush and a Senate colleague from Massachusetts, of abandoning longtime Democratic Party principles on tax cuts and foreign policy...

Ron Brownstein makes a reasonably compelling case for why Kerry isn't likely to get quite as much mileage out of the revelations disclosed in Richard Clarke's book and this week's 9/11 commission hearings as you might expect:

...most Republicans remain cautiously optimistic that this week's events won't significantly erode public approval of Bush's handling of the terrorist threat. They base their view largely on the belief that that confidence is rooted in real-world events--the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan and of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and, above all, the absence of additional attacks inside the United States since that searing day in 2001...

...People aren't going to judge Bush on the basis of what the commission says; they are going to judge him on the basis of performance," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, an independent polling organization...

...doesn't this logic go out the window if there's a terrorist attack in the United States between now and the election?...Whereas the conventional wisdom up to this point more or less held that another attack would aide Bush's reelection (though that CW took a bit of a hit after the attacks in Spain), wouldn't the practical effect of the Clarke book and the 9/11 commission hearings be to make Bush extremely vulnerable politically in that scenario? It would very quickly connect the current abstract criticism to first-hand experience ...

Though major combat is over in Iraq and Afghanistan, George W. Bush likes to describe himself as a "war president." No doubt that's partly because he and his campaign team think that such an image will help him get re-elected...

...Although polls suggest that Bush should feel good about his prospects in November, he shouldn't expect that wartime leadership will ensure his victory. On the contrary, his best hope may be convincing the public that he also knows how to talk about peace and problems at home...

...Bush is more popular than either Johnson or Truman was in his final year in office. The occupation of Iraq, for all its headaches, hasn't become the national migraine that Korea was in 1952 or Vietnam was in 1968. But the experience of these presidents may still be instructive. Although Americans will rally behind military actions, their appetite for such adventures is fickle and must be watched carefully . Presidents who can't detect a shift in the prevailing mood, and who can't assure the public that they're eager to deliver peace, may rapidly squander the vast capital they reaped from having gone to war.

...deterioration of the national parks is an old story, attributable in large part to "park barrel" politics. Over the years, Congress kept adding more parks to the system, which necessitated reducing the funds available to maintain the existing ones. Some of the new parks lived up to their billing as natural or historical treasures. But others were back-door economic development projects for areas in decline. As a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in 1995, Chatterbox wrote about one particularly glaring example of the latter: Keweenaw National Park in Calumet, Mich., an abandoned mining town whose enticements included slag piles … crumbling commercial buildings … a Superfund site … and, oh yes, a retail complex, whose construction on park grounds seemed to be the main purpose of the exercise. A better-known example is the Steamtown National Historic Site, a glorified railroad museum in Scranton, Pa...

...But the memo to the Northeast region states the Park Service's intention to do precisely the opposite, "so that it won't cause public or political controversy." In pursuing this goal, the park superintendents are instructed never to use the word "cut" publicly to describe the budget, er, reductions:

Randy felt that the issuance of a press release was the most problematic. He suggested that if you feel you must inform the public through a press release on this years [sic] hours or days of operation for example, that you state what the park's plans are and not to directly indicate that "this is a cut" in comparison to last year's operation. If you are personally pressed by the media in an interview, we all agreed to use the terminology of "service level adjustment." ….

This isn't just Orwellian. It's stupid, too, because the laws of physics dictate that memos like this will always get leaked to the press. A silver lining to the Bush administration's secrecy policy, at least as it's carried out at the Park Service, is that it's laughably inept.

...As several commenters have pointed out, Clarke is the exception to this rule. He admitted that both he and the governments he worked for hadn't done enough.

And why the snark? Two reasons:

Terrorists hijacked a bunch of planes and killed 3000 people on 9/11. In retrospect, of course we didn't do enough before then to stop al-Qaeda, and it's hardly shameful to say so. But none of these guys have the self-respect to admit it.

I'm all for point scoring, but I just don't think all this blather about whether we took al-Qaeda seriously before 9/11 is meaningful. See the first point above. It's what happened after 9/11 that should be getting more attention.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) has begun quiet discussions with a handful of colleagues about the possibility that he will have to step down from his leadership post temporarily if he is indicted by a Texas grand jury investigating alleged campaign finance abuses.

...Republican Conference rules state that a member of the elected leadership who has been indicted on a felony carrying a penalty of at least two years in prison must temporarily step down from the post.

I actually like George Bush compared to Tom DeLay. Few things would make me happier than to see the former bug exterminator get squashed himself.

Please, please, please make this happen. Ple-e-e-e-ease!

...I would encourage readers to check out a site called the Cost of War, which includes a running ticker of the estimated costs of the Iraq war and occupation...

...Like any other choice, the decision to invade Iraq implies a year's worth of opportunity costs: Options not taken, programs not funded, problems left unsolved during the past 365 days...

...Absent the war, the president could have still had his tax cut and paid for every state program that was shorted during the past two years. Sure, we'd still have nearly a trillion dollars in federal deficits during the past two years, but that's thanks to a unified Republican government that thinks 'fiscal discipline' means punishing anyone who criticizes or even points out their budgetary recklessness. But at least the states would be fiscally stronger...

… The opportunity costs of decisions made by our leaders are borne, in varying ways and to varying degrees, upon all of us -- or, in the case of the borrow-and-spend crowd occupying the Oval Office, borne upon not only all current taxpayers, but on our children and grandchildren as well. The liberation of Iraq has been and will continue to be costly, and we've just entered Year Two. But the president continues to justify his actions by speaking as infrequently as possible about the pricetag. He does so precisely because he does not want Americans taking the opportunity to think about the costs of Iraq thus far, and those that will follow. Those are the 'opportunity costs' the president wants to avoid most of all...

For the past 25 years, I've woken up to the voice of one man: Bob Edwards, the host of NPR’s "Morning Edition." Now that he's been ousted, who will guide me through those early-morning hours?

I suppose it was bound to happen: 'Tis the season to drop-kick venerable news legends, after all. But where one might understand retiring august talking heads like Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings -- television does have a thing about youth -- what's NPR's rationale for canning Bob Edwards?...

More than a thousand school students in Boston unexpectedly get a snow day today -- oh wait, no, that's a day off so President Bush can raise more money for his re-election campaign...

..."It's a sad situation that you have to close off school because of a fund-raising event," said Roger F. Harris, Renaissance headmaster. Indeed.

But here's what's edging out reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic for those 1,425 students: About 500 people, paying $2,000 a pop, will listen to the president deliver a speech, "but in order to hold down costs there will be no food or entertainment," the Globe reports.