ZARQAWI STORY CONFIRMED....Two years ago, Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News reported that a few months after 9/11 the Pentagon drafted multiple plans to hit the camp of Abu Musab Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda terrorist who had taken up residence in Iraq's northern no-fly zone, outside Saddam Hussein's control. George Bush, however, refused to authorize a military strike.

I've written about this multiple times (I used to jokingly call it my "monthly Zarqawi post"), but Miklaszewski's story always had a big problem: it was based on anonymous sources, which made it easy for the White House to ignore. Today, however, the Australian show Four Corners has gotten confirmation of the story from Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit:

He told Four Corners that during 2002, the Bush Administration received detailed intelligence about Zarqawi's training camp in Iraqi Kurdistan.

...."Almost every day we sent a package to the White House that had overhead imagery of the house he was staying in. It was a terrorist training camp...experimenting with ricin and anthrax...any collateral damage there would have been terrorists."

So why wasn't Bush willing to hit Zarqawi, a known al-Qaeda terrorist in a known location? Scheuer says he was told it was because Bush was afraid of annoying the French — a theory that seems a bit of a stretch, non? Others believe it was because Zarqawi was politically convenient: having him alive allowed Bush to pretend that Saddam was "harboring terrorists," thus providing useful ammunition for the war.

Whichever it is, we now have a credible source telling us on the record that the Zarqawi story is true. We could have gotten him, but we chose not to. Perhaps someone will start off Tony Snow's White House career on the right foot by asking him about it on Monday.

SECRECY....Via Andrew Sullivan, Mark Silva of the Chicago Tribune writes that Dick Cheney refuses to follow the orders even of his own boss:

A standing executive order, strengthened by President Bush in 2003, requires all agencies and "any other entity within the executive branch" to provide an annual accounting of their classification of documents....Explaining why the vice president has withheld even a tally of his office's secrecy when such offices as the National Security Council routinely report theirs, a spokeswoman said Cheney is "not under any duty" to provide it.

Other executive agencies have complied with the order, but not the OVP. Not only does Cheney think he can ignore congressional legislation, he apparently thinks he can ignore executive orders too.

Read the whole thing for an excellent rundown of the vastly increased secrecy that George Bush has imposed on the federal government since he took office. (Not just since 9/11. Since he took office.) And while you're at it, read today's Boston Globe article about Bush's startling fondness for presidential signing statements that assert his authority to ignore, among other things, "military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, 'whistle-blower' protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research." And remember: these are complaints about laws passed by his own party.

For more on this, including links to some more detailed analysis, check out my post on the topic of the "unitary executive" from last January.

ENERGY IDIOCY....I'll confess that I'm a little tired of columns expressing outrage about our bipartisan temper tantrum over $3 gasoline — where were these guys last year when Dick Cheney's energy industry giveaway passed? — but there's certainly no arguing with the underlying charge:

Most Republicans, constrained by an ideological resistance to federal regulation, have always opposed tougher mandates. But achieving better fuel economy was once a passion of Democrats. In 1990, 42 of the Senate's 55 Democrats — about three-fourths — voted to require automakers to reach 40 mpg by 2001. That bill drew 57 votes overall, but failed amid opposition from President George H.W. Bush and a Republican-led filibuster.

Idiots. But then there's this:

Under pressure from the auto companies and auto workers, Democrats have retreated ever since. President Clinton didn't seriously try to raise fuel economy standards. Last year, a proposal from Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) to require a 40-mpg average for cars by 2016 drew just 28 votes; only about half of the Senate's 44 Democrats voted yes. Those voting no included every Senate Democrat considering a 2008 presidential bid.

Idiots. Mileage standards work. If we had passed that bill in 1990, oil consumption in the United States would probably be 10% lower than it is today at virtually no cost to the economy and no inconvenience to consumers. That's a savings of about a billion barrels of oil a year — and there are other things we could do to double that number with only modest pain.

(And ANWR? If Republicans were willing to act like grownups on the efficiency side, I'd say we should just open the damn thing up. It won't make a lot of difference, but at the same time, it also won't cause very much damage.)

Of course, the best time to have done those things was ten years ago. But the second best time is right now. It's not too late to grow up.

TONY SNOW....I was over at my sister's house today helping her get her new DSL connection up and running on her new laptop — which worked fine, thankyouverymuch, but boy, those Verizon people really want you to use Outlook Express — and the subject of Tony Snow came up. Why does everyone think his appointment is such a big deal, we wondered? It turns out Michelle Cottle wonders too:

Insomuch as journalists are longing for someone to deliver more entertaining sound bites as he spins them silly and to stroke their famously fragile egos even as he stonewalls them through the next three years, then, yeah, Snow should dramatically improve media relations. But beyond that, I'm not sure anyone should get all that excited about the new era of openness at the Bush bunker.

I wouldn't be sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for that either — although I imagine Snow will be a little more Ari Fleischer-like when it comes to smoothing out the rough edges of the Bushian spin machine. Really, though, it's a sign of just how dysfunctional the Bush administration is that something as trivial as getting a new press secretary has everyone swooning. Get a grip, people.

Oh, and one more thing. Did you know that you can put a wireless router right next to a microwave oven and it still works fine? Well, you can.

DC EVENT ROUNDUP....On Sunday there's going to be a massive rally on the Mall in Washington DC to urge the United States to take action against the genocide in Darfur. Information here. Starting time is 2 pm.

On a much smaller scale, Joanne Jacobs, author of Our School, is hosting a "bookraiser" at WEDJ, a DC performing arts charter school, on May 11. Starting time is 5:30 pm. Information here. Bring a book for the school library!

MAY DAY....Conservatives are plenty pissed over the massive boycott planned for May 1 to highlight immigrant demands for "nothing less than full amnesty and dignity for the millions of undocumented workers presently in the U.S." But where, Chris Kromm asks, is the progressive blogosphere?

In sharp contrast to the right-wing websites, a glance at today's front pages of DKos, Huffington Post, Eschaton, Talking Points Memo and Think Progress — to pick some progressive heavyweights — reveals they have nothing to say about May 1....What's going on? Why is the progressive blogosphere so completely out of touch?

For better or worse, I've been taking some of my cues on this subject from Los Angeles lefty Marc Cooper, who's been following the immigration debate for years and has sensibilities roughly similar to mine. Here's what he says:

There is a definite time and place for this sort of tactic, and it isn't here or now. Boycotts are powerful and volatile weapons used as a last resort to bust open dams of dogged resistance. You don't use them when the political tide is even vaguely flowing in your direction.

....That's why the larger institutional players in the pro-immigrant movement prefer an after-school (and after-work) rally over an intentionally punitive boycott and walkout. They argue that such an escalation could alienate lawmakers and the public just when political sentiment is shifting more toward immigrants. The positive message of demanding inclusion in the United States would be replaced by a more negative and divisive signal.

I'm cautious by temperament, so I don't really trust my own reaction to the boycott. Still, there's no question that backlash is a real concern, and a militantly confrontational strategy strikes me as pretty risky right now. More importantly, though, I figure that if Marc, who shares neither my caution nor my inexperience at political protest, thinks the boycott is a bad idea, then there's a good chance it's a bad idea. So for now, that's where I stand.

LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT....You know how liberals used to vent about how they were going to move to Canada if George Bush won the 2004 election? Well, it turns out that offhand comments like that can be used against you in a court of law. Johnny Depp is suing some developers for blocking the view from his multimillion dollar mansion, and their defense isn't that he's wrong, but that he said he wasn't going to live there anyway:

Depp asserts that the project would block the view his two children have while playing outside the 7,430-square-foot home. Backers of the development dispute that. They say that Depp has declared that the youngsters — Lily-Rose, 6, and Jack, 4 — will be raised in France, where he and French actress and singer Vanessa Paradis live.

....Developer Joseph Emrani...said he challenged Depp's representatives. "They said, 'The kids are playing over there and they don't want it to block their view.' I mentioned that his children live in Paris, and one of them said, 'That's very personal and we don't want to get involved with that.' "

Yo ho ho. No freedom fries for Lily-Rose and Jack!

THE COMMON GOOD...."Common good" is the watchword of the week — as in, "If liberals want to win elections, they need to appeal to the common good and ditch the Balkanized identity politics of the 60s and 70s." Mike Tomasky says it here, and John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira explain at considerably greater length here, here, here, and here. I haven't yet read all of this stuff myself, but there's pushback already. Max Sawicky goes first:

There is something disturbing in the idea of African-Americans or women as constituencies or interest groups. It's practically an insult. "Interest" connotes a quest for privilege or advantage or narrow benefit. It discounts claims to fundamental rights. We will always need rights, as long as people are treated as less than human.

And Matt Yglesias has a different criticism:

I think it's indicative of the sort of problems Democrats face that in part four of the Teixeira/Halpin epic on "The Politics of Definition" ideas about defining progressive national security policy come third on the list behind ideas about defining progressive economic policy and defining progressive culture/values policy. It's also tellingly problematic that of the five bullet points on foreign policy, one ("Transform existing global institutions to better control the downsides of globalization") is more-or-less just an extension of liberal economic policy and another ("Create the political will and leadership to finally address global warming") is an extension of liberal environmental policy....There's nothing wrong with either of those ideas. But insofar as the public has doubts about Democrats as leaders of American's national security apparatus, we all know that those aren't the subjects the doubts are about.

I tentatively agree with Max and Matt, and I have yet another critique to add to theirs. But I'll save it until I've read and digested all these pieces over the weekend. I'll bet you can't wait, can you?

CRAFTY LIBERALS....Over at NRO, Byron York writes:

[Glenn Greenwald's] How Would a Patriot Act? appears to have become something of a (quiet) publishing phenomenon, outperforming — at least in the early stages — other, higher-profile anti-Bush books, not to mention all the other best-sellers on the list these days. Why? No one seems to know. "We're often caught by surprise by these," says Tom Nissley, senior books editor for Amazon.com.

This is what passes for a mystery these days? On Tuesday, big liberal blogs started pushing their readers to pre-order Greenwald's book on Amazon, with the specific goal of driving up its Amazon ranking. And it worked. Mystery solved.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, York's article contains some useful advice: "We rank by orders, not by sales," Nissley says. "We only count orders — we count an order of 1,000 copies the same as an order of one." So if you're trying to goose somebody's ranking, be sure to place five orders for one book each instead of one order for five books.

WAR BY SEPTEMBER?....Rosa Brooks is not exactly a neocon alarmist, a fact that makes her prediction of an Israel-Iran war sometime in the next five months more provocative than it might be coming from, say, Charles Krauthammer or Bill Kristol. From her LA Times column today:

Russian leaders continue to mouth the usual diplomatic platitudes about democracy and global cooperation, but Russia is actually playing a complex double game. On Tuesday, Russia launched a spy satellite for Israel, which the Israelis can use to monitor Iran's nuclear facilities. On the same day, Russian leaders confirmed their opposition to any U.N. Security Council effort to impose sanctions against Iran, and their intention to go through with the lucrative sale of 29 Tor M1 air defense missile systems to Iran.

....The upcoming deployment of Tor missiles around Iranian nuclear sites dramatically changes the calculus in the Middle East, and it significantly increases the risk of a regional war. Once the missile systems are deployed, Iran's air defenses will become far more sophisticated, and Israel will likely lose whatever ability it now has to unilaterally destroy Iran's nuclear facilities.

The clock is ticking for Israel. To have a hope of succeeding, any unilateral Israeli strike against Iran must take place before September, when the Tor missile deployment is set to be completed.

....Unfortunately, the Bush administration appears to be asleep at the wheel, too distracted by Iraq, skyrocketing gas prices and plummeting approval ratings to devote any attention to Russia's potentially catastrophic mischief.

The Tor deal was announced a few months ago, and the United States has objected to it several times since, most recently last week. Beyond that, I have no clue if this sale is as provocative as Brooks claims. Does anyone else?

SPECTER TO GET TOUGH?....Arlen Specter claims that he's so frustrated over the Bush administration's refusal to answer questions about the NSA's domestic spying program that he might actually do something about it:

In a warning to the White House, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said he planned to introduce legislation that would cut off funds for the surveillance program, which he described as a threat to civil liberties and a violation of domestic espionage laws.

...."What's the use of passing another statute if the president won't pay any attention to it?" Specter said. "When you talk about withholding funds, there you're talking about a real authority."

I imagine that, as usual, someone from the White House will coo soothing words in Specter's ears and he'll back down, but who knows? Maybe this time he'll demonstrate some spine and do what's right. A few supportive calls and emails couldn't hurt. Contact info is here.

WRONG TRACK....The New York Times reports that the Commerce Department is expected to announce strong economic growth Friday morning. But something strange is going on:

In the most recent CBS News poll, conducted last month, 55 percent of respondents rated the economy as good, even though 66 percent of Americans said the country was on the wrong track. In 23 years of polling by CBS, only once — in late 2005 — did a higher percentage of people say the country was on the wrong track.

That is unusual. Normally people are pretty satisfied when the economy is strong. Perhaps the explanation is lower down in the article:

Spending by upper-income families appears to be driving much of the economy's growth. The average hourly wage for rank-and-file workers — who make up roughly 80 percent of the work force — has fallen by 5 cents in the last four years, to $16.49, after inflation is taken into account.

Yep, that might account for it. For most of us, trickle-down economics is more like Republican water torture.

AUTHENTICITY....Ryan Lizza's profile of presidential hopeful George Allen is mostly notable for its evidence of Allen's youthful Confederate sympathies, but there's a subtext to the whole thing that might be even more important. Here is George Allen, man of the people, in action at a political shindig in Virginia:

As the scrum breaks up, Allen turns away and spits a long brown streak of saliva into the dirt, just missing one of his constituents, a carefully put-together, blonde, ponytailed woman approaching the senator for an autograph. She stops in her tracks and stares with disgust at the bubbly tobacco juice that almost landed on her feet. Without missing a beat, Allen's communications director, John Reid, reassures her: "That's just authenticity!" It's a word they use a lot it the Allen world — "authenticity."

The press corps is a sucker for "authenticity," and it's something that both George Bush and John McCain have cleverly exploited — because for most reporters, speaking in complete sentences or having smart ideas about policy are way less important than being a "straight talker" or "comfortable in your own skin." But just as McCain's embrace of Jerry Falwell has shown him to be a wee bit less of a straight talker than his handlers claim, Allen's "authenticity" also turns out to be barely skin deep. See, Allen didn't grow up in the South at all. He grew up in Chicago and California:

In Palos Verdes, an exclusive cliffside community, he lived in a palatial home with sweeping views of downtown Los Angeles and the Santa Monica basin. It had handmade Italian tiles and staircases that his eccentric mother, Etty, designed to match those in the Louvre. "It looks like a French château," says Linda Hurt Germany, a high school classmate.

....While there, [Allen] became obsessed with the supposed authenticity of rural life — or at least what he imagined it to be from episodes of "Hee Haw," his favorite TV show, or family vacations in Mexico, where he rode horses. Perhaps because of his peripatetic childhood, the South's deeply rooted culture attracted him....Whatever it was, Allen got his first pair of those now-iconic cowboy boots from one of his father's players on the Rams who received them as a promotional freebie. He also learned to dip from his dad's players. At school, he started to wear an Australian bush hat, complete with a dangling chin strap and the left brim snapped up. He wore the hat for a yearbook photo of the falconry club. His favorite record was Johnny Cash's At Folsom Prison.

Ed Kilgore explains why we should care about this, even though it's long in the past:

As a native southerner, I find this weird and a bit troubling. Personally, I have all sorts of issues with the Confederate Flag and the whole self-destructive cult of the Lost Cause. But I do understand its appeal to people who have grown up saturated in southern culture; I may sometimes consider them SOBs, but they are my SOBs. The idea of young, incredibly privileged, golden-boy-quarterback George Allen of California choosing to embrace southern shibboleths at the precise moment, in the late 1960s, when they were most associated with atavistic racial attitudes, bothers me a lot.

Allen may reasonably claim that what he did as a teenager four decades ago shouldn't be held against him now. But the consistent evidence in Lizza's piece that Allen's red state good 'ol boy schtick is little more than a personal invention, carefully cultivated and maintained through the years, should at least give the press corps pause as they cover his campaign. They've gotten suckered by this act before, and both McCain and Allen are currently gearing up to sucker them again with the same song in a different key. Caveat emptor should be their watch phrase this time around.

PANDERING FOR DUMMIES....I realize that high gasoline prices bring out the worst in everybody, but Senate Republicans have surely given new meaning to the word "pandering" with today's proposal:

Most American taxpayers would get $100 rebate checks to offset the pain of higher pump prices for gasoline, under an amendment Senate Republicans hope to bring to a vote Thursday...."Our plan would give taxpayers a hundred dollar gas tax holiday rebate check to help ease the pain that they're feeling at the pump," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist announced Thursday.

A hundred dollar rebate! It's bad economics, bad policy, bad optics, and the palpable stink of election-year desperation all rolled into one fetid package. But at least it's means tested!

Frist said the rebates would go to single taxpayers making less than $125,000 per year, and couples making less than $150,000.

Whew. For a minute there I thought they were just being frivolous about this. But as long as Bill Gates doesn't get a rebate check, sign me up.

ROMNEY REDUX....The Note today highlights a "must-read!!" column by Bob Novak that carries the headline: "Religion may hinder Romney in '08." Regular Monthly readers will find Novak's argument familiar, and somewhat similar (point-by-point, actually) to a piece we ran by yours truly last September.

For good reason, I wouldn't expect an acknowledgement from Novak. On the contrary, I'm actually glad to see that his reporting--he's obviously much more sourced-up on the Republican side than I am--bears out the same argument I made last year. Most Christian Right leaders wouldn't be gauche enough to say it publicly, but they have a serious problem with Romney's Mormonism. I still find it likely that they would oppose him in the primaries but support him if he won the GOP nomination. But Novak says maybe not even then.

For the record, I think that's pretty appalling. There is no religious test in this country, and we shouldn't tolerate the de facto application of one. But it has to be said that this is the bed the GOP has made for itself by emphasizing the importance of a candidate's personal faith and by making the Christian Right such a critical part of its political base. If Romney's Mormonism makes it impossible for him to win, it will be the GOP's fault.

PORT SECURITY....Is 100% scanning of all containers coming into American ports an unrealistic goal? Republicans may think so, but experts say otherwise:

This is not a pie-in-the-sky idea. Since January 2005, every container entering the truck gates of two of the world's busiest container terminals, in Hong Kong, has passed through scanning and radiation detection devices.

Images of the containers' contents are then stored on computers so that they can be scrutinized by American or other customs authorities almost in real time.

....If they agreed to impose a common security fee of roughly $20 per container, similar to what passengers are now used to paying when they purchase airline tickets, they could recover the cost of installing and operating this system worldwide. This, in turn, would furnish a powerful deterrent for terrorists who might be tempted to convert the ubiquitous cargo container into a poor man's missile.

Hong Kong's pilot program has scanned 1.5 million containers in the past two years and officials there report that it hasn't slowed down operations in any way. The cost to install high-end scanners at ports worldwide would be around $1.5 billion, and not only would it improve port security immediately, but the resulting database of scanned images would be useful for both intelligence agencies and law enforcement.

So why are Democratic proposals to require 100% scanning routinely voted down by Republicans — as they were once again yesterday? Because it's unrealistic? Or because Republicans are afraid to tell their campaign contributors that they're going to have to pay a security fee of $20 per container?

YOU'D THINK IT GREW ON TREES....You want to know how much money oil companies are making lately? Well, ExxonMobil just announced profits of $8 billion in one quarter and their stock dropped on the news. Wow.

HEAR NO EVIL, SEE NO EVIL.....Greg Sargent has more on the delaying game being played by Senate Intelligence Committee chair Pat Roberts. He's confirmed that Roberts quietly allowed a key deadline for his committee's investigation into intelligence manipulation to slip weeks ago, with no indication of when, if ever, Roberts plans to meet it. Now that the subject of the committee is possible misconduct by President Bush, Roberts obviously has no intention of ever allowing anything to see the light of day.

PUTTING FEMA OUT OF ITS MISERY....A new report says FEMA is FUBAR:

Crippled by years of poor leadership and inadequate funding, the Federal Emergency Management Agency cannot be fixed, a bipartisan investigation says in recommendations to be released Thursday.

....Describing FEMA as a "shambles and beyond repair," [Republican Senator Susan] Collins said the overall report "will help ensure that we do not have a repeat of the failures following Hurricane Katrina."

This is truly remarkable. FEMA was a fine organization for eight years under Bill Clinton, widely recognized as one of the best run agencies in the federal government. But after a mere five years of George Bush's stewardship there's now a bipartisan consensus that it's so rundown that the only choice is to get rid of it and build a completely new agency in its place. Astonishing.

DEMOCRATS AND BLOGS....Here's an interesting tidbit. The Diageo/Hotline poll recently surveyed registered Democrats, and one of the questions they asked was about blog readership, something I'm not sure I've seen before in a mainstream poll.

According to the survey, 17% of the respondents read a political blog several times a week or more. In other words, there are roughly 10 million registered Democrats who read blogs on a regular basis. That's a lot.

NET NEUTRALITY....THE CURRENT RULES....Just in case you're curious, here are the current principles of net neutrality that were adopted by the FCC last August. These principles would be enforced by the Barton-Rush bill if it were passed in its current form:

The Federal Communications Commission today adopted a policy statement that outlines four principles to encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of public Internet:

1. Consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice.

2. Consumers are entitled to run applications and services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement.

3. Consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network.

4. Consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers.
   

Although the Commission did not adopt rules in this regard, it will incorporate these principles into its ongoing policymaking activities. All of these principles are subject to reasonable network management.

The Barton-Rush bill instructs the FCC to enforce these principles if a complaint is submitted, but does not allow the FCC to proactively create new regulations based on them.

Note that these principles prohibit internet providers from blocking access to sites, but do not explicitly prohibit degradation of service. It's an open question how the FCC will interpret "access" if someone ever lodges a complaint alleging that a network provider has deliberately degraded performance in a way that effectively prevents a site or application from working properly.

Note also that these principles do allow internet providers to create special high-speed lanes that they can offer for a price to specific customers. The most likely customers for such a service are video-on-demand providers.

Conversely, Ed Markey's amendment, which failed 34-22 today, would have specifically prohibited network providers from impairing or degrading performance and would have required them to operate "in a nondiscriminatory manner so that any person can offer or provide content, applications, and services through, or over, such broadband network with equivalent or better capability than the provider extends to itself or affiliated parties, and without the imposition of a charge." In other words, no special high-speed toll lanes.

This is just FYI.

PLAME UPDATE....Karl Rove testified today for the fifth time before the grand jury investigating the Valerie Plame case, and it appears that his testimony revolved around former Time magazine reporter Viveca Novak (no relation to Robert Novak). Here's a recap:

1. Rove originally testified that he had never spoken to Time reporter Matt Cooper about Plame.

2. Later, Rove admitted that he had, in fact, spoken to Cooper. His excuse for his earlier testimony was that he had had a simple memory lapse and had forgotten about the conversation.

3. However, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald (or so it was rumored) didn't buy the "I forgot" story and was ready to indict Rove for perjury. But then he held off. This was apparently due to a last-minute conversation he had with Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin.

4. What Luskin told Fitzgerald was that Rove really had forgotten about his conversation with Cooper — and what jarred Rove's memory was a conversation Luskin had with Novak, who told him offhandedly that Cooper had spoken to Rove and everyone in the Time newsroom knew it. Luskin immediately went to Rove, initiated a massive search of Rove's email, and eventually discovered that, yes, Rove really had spoken to Cooper. That was what caused Rove to go back to the grand jury and correct his testimony.

5. But is that really true? The reason nobody knew about the phone call in the first place is that it wasn't entered in Rove's phone log, and Raw Story claims that Rove's secretary has testified that Rove specifically told her not to log it. Needless to say, that's mighty incriminating behavior. However, no other news account that I know of has confirmed this.
   

So: did Rove really forget? Or did he lie and then correct his testimony only when he knew he was about to get caught?

Perhaps the best clue is whether Fitzgerald asked Rove to testify (which Fitzgerald might do just to clear up some loose ends) or whether Rove volunteered to testify (which Rove wouldn't do except as a last ditch effort to keep from being indicted). So far, reports are distinctly mixed on this point.

It's all still rumors so far, though. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Luskin released this statement after Rove's testimony:

In connection with this appearance, the Special Counsel has advised Mr. Rove that he is not a target of the investigation. Mr. Fitzgerald has affirmed that he has made no decision concerning charges.

That's pretty weaselly language, so it's hard to know what to make of it. Luskin doesn't say that Rove isn't a target, only that he's not a target "in connection with this appearance." As for bringing charges, there's no telling what "no decision" means. Maybe he's waiting to see if Rove cooperates in testimony against someone else. Maybe that's just boilerplate stuff that prosecutors say until the day they hand down an indictment. Who knows?

IMMIGRATION UPDATE....Via Mickey Kaus, John O'Sullivan writes about the immigration debate in the New York Post today and has some kind words for Bill Clinton:

I recently suggested — wrongly — that there had been little or no enforcement of employer sanctions since the passage of the 1986 amnesty law....That was not quite accurate. The Clinton administration in fact managed some (albeit patchy) "internal" enforcement of employer sanctions. For instance, the period 1995-1997 saw 10,000 to 18,000 worksite arrests of illegals a year. Some 1,000 employers were served notices of fines for employing them.

Under the Bush administration, however, worksite arrests fell to 159 in 2004 — with the princely total of three notices of intent to fine served on employers. Thus, worksite arrests under President Bush have fallen from Clintonian levels by something like 97 per cent — even though 9/11 occurred in the meantime.

Unlike O'Sullivan, I don't especially want to deport the 12 million illegal immigrants currently in the country. However, he's right that tighter border security is unlikely to make a dent in illegal immigration as long as there are jobs waiting on this side of the border. All it really does is motivate illegals to stay here permanently once they've made it across, since they know what a pain it will be to get back in if they ever leave.

But — there's an alternative. Don't worry so much about the workers themselves, and instead crack down on employers. If the total cost of employing illegals — i.e., actual cash wages plus fines and possible criminal charges — goes up, employers will simply decide it's cheaper and more convenient to increase the cash part of that wage equation and hire American citizens instead. And if jobs for illegal immigrants dry up, illegal immigration will dry up too.

And the best part is that it's free! Make the fines big enough and the enforcement consistent enough, and the fines pay most of the cost of the enforcement. Couple it with more generous quotas for legal immigration, and the whole "illegal" part of the immigration problem could dry up almost entirely within a few years. It's as close to a free lunch as you can get.

Of course, there's that whole "cracking down on corporations" thing, which isn't exactly a strong point for today's Republican Party. After all, you don't want to piss off K Street! On the other hand, Michelle Malkin promises on behalf of her merry band of xenophobes that if George Bush supports anything resembling common sense on immigration, "This is not going to be forgotten."

Rock, meet hard place. I know you're going to get along famously.

HEALTHCARE UPDATE....Here's the latest on America's (very) rapidly declining healthcare infrastructure. A new survey from the Commonwealth Fund reports that middle and high income workers aren't doing too badly — though they're doing worse than they were five years ago — but that workers with incomes less than $35,000 are in free fall. Five years ago 17% of moderate income workers were uninsured; today that figure has skyrocketed to 28%. And a whopping 41% were without health coverage at some point during the year.

Providing healthcare for the poor and working class isn't the only reason to support a sensible national healthcare plan. Cost, efficiency, peace of mind, and increased choice are equally important drivers. But when nearly half of even those who are solidly in the working class don't have medical coverage during some or all of each year, we're in trouble.

Needless to say, George Bush's beloved "ownership society" isn't the solution. It's the problem. There's no way to fix our dysfunctional healthcare system until we stop forcing corporations to be healthcare providers in addition to whatever their actual line of business is. As these figures show, they don't want to be in the healthcare business, and more and more of them are bailing out. It's time to face reality on this.

LOOSE LIPS....Max Boot is unhappy that Pulitzer Prizes were awarded this year to stories that exposed an illegal domestic spying program and the torture of prisoners in a secret network of prisons in Eastern Europe. It wouldn't have been tolerated during World War II, he says:

I want journalists to cover the present struggle as a fight between good and evil. And when the good guys — that would be U.S. officials — say that certain revelations would help the bad guys, I want them to be given the benefit of the doubt. So, I suspect, do most Americans.

Nice try, Max, but FDR earned the benefit of the doubt. This gang hasn't. They've made it crystal clear that they consider the war on terror little more than a useful campaign topic of unlimited duration.

MANIPULATING INTELLIGENCE....Having slightly defended the honor of Senate Intelligence Committee chair Pat Roberts a few minutes ago, let's switch gears and rip right back into him. You may recall that back in 2004, Roberts divided his committee's investigation of prewar intelligence into two parts: Phase 1 assessed the intelligence agencies themselves, and Phase 2 was supposed to investigate possible prewar manipulation of intelligence by the Bush administration.

Needless to say, the purpose of this was political: it allowed the committee to blast the intelligence community before the 2004 election, but put off the delicate topic of administration malfeasance until after the election.

But then it got even worse: even after the election was over, Roberts still showed no inclination to go ahead with Phase 2. It just dropped into a black hole. Finally, a year after the election, with no progress apparent, Harry Reid dramatically shut down the Senate as a way of forcing Roberts to follow through on his promise. Roberts reluctantly said he would.

But guess what? There's another election coming up this year, and you know what that means. The Hill reports:

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said he wants to divide his panel’s inquiry into the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq-related intelligence into two parts, a move that would push off its most politically controversial elements to a later time.

....Questions about the Bush administration’s handling of pre-war intelligence have new political relevance as the midterm elections draw nearer. Public concern about the war in Iraq is considered a major reason for Bush’s low job approval rating, which, in turn, is widely viewed as harmful to congressional Republicans’ political fortunes.

What a worm. We keep hearing that the intelligence committees in Congress are a rare example of sober, bipartisan consensus, but Roberts apparently subscribes to Grover Norquist's definition of bipartisanship: it's date rape. It looks like Roberts is still bound and determined to loyally do whatever it takes to cover up the Bush administration's prewar manipulations.

Via Greg Sargent, who suggests that Jay Rockefeller, the ranking Dem on the committee, needs to grow a pair this time around and not let Roberts get away with this. Sam Rosenfeld agrees. So do I.

WAAS ON ROBERTS....Did Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, tip off Saddam Hussein at the beginning of the Iraq war that we had infiltrated his inner circle? Murray Waas says yes:

On March 20, 2003, at the onset of military hostilities between U.S. and Iraqi forces, Roberts said in a speech to the National Newspaper Association that he had "been in touch with our intelligence community" and that the CIA had informed President Bush and the National Security Council "of intelligence information from what we call human intelligence that indicated the location of Saddam Hussein and his leadership in a bunker in the suburbs of Baghdad."

....At the time, it was one of the most sensitive secrets in government that the CIA had recruited Iraqi nationals who claimed to have infiltrated Hussein's inner circle to be able to follow his movements at the onset of war....Whether or not Roberts' comments were inadvertent, former intelligence officials said, they almost certainly tipped off the Iraqi dictator that there were spies close to him. "He [Roberts] had given up that we had a penetration of [Saddam's] inner circle," says a former senior intelligence official. "It was the worst thing you could ever do."

But it doesn't look that way to me. Via Nexis, here are some quotes from various news accounts about the strike on Saddam's bunker, all from March 20-22:

• Washington Post: Other officials said the CIA had gathered highly sensitive and reliable electronic and other information, using a wide range of assets — from humans in some proximity to the compound to image-snapping satellites miles above.

• Associated Press: Officials said the surprise attack was the product of a complex operation that benefited from human intelligence....

• Toronto Globe and Mail: Sources said the strike, which destroyed a home in Baghdad, was targeted using information from "highly placed Iraqis," who knew the movements of Saddam. Military sources said the site was pinpointed using "human intelligence" and electronic wizardry.

• Los Angeles Times: Hussein "has to start thinking, 'How did they know this and who is telling them?' " said one military intelligence official. The objective, the official said, is to make Hussein "even more paranoid than he has already been."

• Boston Herald: U.S. officials said they hoped the surprise attack, if it didn't kill Hussein, at least would leave him distrustful of his inner circle and suspecting betrayal by one of his advisers.
  

Waas quotes an unnamed Republican congressional aide who says that Roberts' remark was a "dumb act," and that might be true. At the same time, it looks like (a) an awful lot of other people were saying the same thing and (b) intelligence officials were hoping that Saddam would conclude we had a mole in high places. I'm no fan of Roberts, but this seems like a pretty weak indictment.

KATRINA AND GLOBAL WARMING....So maybe Hurricane Katrina was a result of global warming after all. Here's the latest:

"The hurricanes we are seeing are indeed a direct result of climate change and it's no longer something we'll see in the future, it's happening now," said Greg Holland, a division director at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

Holland told a packed hall at the American Meteorological Society's 27th Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology that the wind and warmer water conditions that fuel storms that form in the Caribbean are "increasingly due to greenhouse gases. There seems to be no other conclusion you can logically draw."

....Holland, director of the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology Division of the federal research center, said tropical storm anomalies in the 1940s and 1950s can be explained by natural variability.

But he said carbon dioxide started changing traceable patterns in the 1970s and by the early 1990s, the atmospheric results were affecting the storm numbers and intensities.

"What we're seeing right now in global climate temperature is a signature of climate change," said Holland, a native of Australia. "The large bulk of the scientific community say what we are seeing now is linked directly to greenhouse gases."

There are still some doubters, but it looks like the connection between Katrina and global warming is hardly the laughable notion conservatives made it out to be last year. In fact, it's very nearly conventional wisdom.