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• What We Really See: GOP Senators Question Sotomayor (Oliver Willis)
  

  >> …Now, I’m a-looking here at your papers and such and I see where you sez, that you’re a wise latin-a.
  >> Well actually Senator, that pull quote misrepresents the full context of what I was saying…
  >> Well I gotta say ma’am, I’m mighty unnerved. Powerful unnerved by the sen-ti-ments you got here on this paper.
  

  While the script is great, it’s the “Dukes of Hazzard” stills captioned by each line that elevates this to high art.

• Similarly, What are we being asked during our confirmation hearings? (Brando, “Circle Jerk at the Square Dance”)
  

  12) Why do you hate white people?
  11) Let me elaborate: why do you hate white guys?
  10) Given that 106 white men have served on the Supreme Court, do you feel that you’re receiving preferential treatment?
  9) Related question: if Latinas are so wise, how come they have never served on the Supreme Court?
  [...]
  4) If you were a tree, would you be the kind of tree that would let a white family build a house out of her?
  3) If you had a cat trapped in a tree, would you let a white firefighter get the cat out of the tree? Follow up question: what color is your cat?
  2) We noticed that you’re wearing a white cast on your ankle. Do you find plaster racist? What about white bones?
  1) Why are you so obsessed with race?

• Caption contest:
  

  1) Oh the humanity
  2) Hit and bun
  3) I was dreaming that I was driving this big wienermobile into this little garage, and when I woke up I was.
  4) You should see the mayonnaise spill inside.

• Goldman Sachs in Talks to Acquire Treasury Department (Borowitz Report)
  

  The Goldman spokesman said that the merger would create efficiencies for both entities: “We already have so many employees and so much money flowing back and forth, this would just streamline things.”Mr. Hestron said the only challenge facing Goldman in completing the merger “is trying to figure out which parts of the Treasury Dept. we don’t already own.”

  Goldman recently celebrated record earnings by roasting a suckling pig over a bonfire of hundred-dollar bills.

• “We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission,” stated Harry Schoell, Cyclone’s CEO.
  Well, shoot, that woulda been cool.

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THE COMPLEAT “Good for a Grin” and “Heh !ndeed” posts
CREDITS where due: Brando, Wienermobile, and ‘hit and bun’ via Lori Learned Robinson, Goldman Sachs update via Steve Bremner, reassurance that futuristic military robots will not kill and eat me via Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

Quick followup on the tragicomic “pay to play” scandal at the Post mentioned below, via Marcy Wheeler (”emptywheel”) — this Paul Farhi item (”Internal Review Launched on Post Salon Proposal“) in the newspaper on Tuesday:

Weymouth yesterday appointed the newspaper’s general counsel, Eric Lieberman, to review the discussions that led to the controversy. The review, along with a parallel inquiry by Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli and Senior Editor Milton Coleman, is aimed at avoiding another episode that could damage the paper’s reputation.

“We think we know what happened, but we want to know if there were any details we missed or if there was something we overlooked,” Weymouth said in an interview. “If any of our business practices aren’t clear, we’ll amend them.”

Weymouth was allegedly on vacation when the flyer was released, but I should think “buy the boss a Blackberry and CC her when inviting guests to her home” was already S.O.P. Also, it’s becoming clear this wasn’t just the new guy’s (Charles Pelton, a Post marketing executive) fault:

But while Post executives immediately disowned the flier’s characterization, senior managers had already approved major details of the first dinner. They had agreed, for example, that the dinner would include the participation of Brauchli and some Post reporters; that the event would be off the record; that it would feature a wide-ranging guest list of people involved in reforming health care; and that it would have sponsorship. [...]

The only unresolved question was whether the first event would have multiple sponsors or a single one. Brauchli and Weymouth have said they preferred multiple sponsors, to dilute the influence of any particular sponsor. Yet when Weymouth’s office sent out e-mail invitations to the event early last week, only one sponsor, Kaiser Permanente, was listed. (Kaiser officials have said they had not decided whether to participate.)

Seems to me like they should just leave Farhi on the case. But you’ve got to love the approach — pioneered, perhaps, by Rumsfeld after the Abu Ghraib story broke — of siccing multiple investigations on an issue, the better to pretend those in charge are as shocked, shocked! as the rest of us. As Wheeler observes,

This all feels so DC.

Kathy — can I call you Kathy? great! — I’ve been a little upset about the story in Politico last week about how you and the Washington Post were going to hold pay for play issue “salons”, where companies could pay anywhere from $25,000 to $250,000 to have off the record discussions with top of the line, elite journalists and government policy makers.

Now obviously this was mishandled from the start; these “salons” — heck, let’s just call a spade a spade and call ‘em policy brothels — are a great idea, but the product rollout was terrible.  Like you told your loyal servant Howie Kurtz the day the story broke, “This should never have happened. The fliers got out and weren’t vetted. They didn’t represent at all what we were attempting to do.”

But I still accept your abject weekend apology in the Washington Post.  Like you wrote, this was a venture that just “went off track,” – kind of like a dog that slipped its leash; I mean, who’s really to blame for that?

After all, how could you be blamed for some business plan by some guy you employ to hold a policy brothel in your home? Sure, the Washington Post business vice president guy — Charles Pelton — said that “newsroom leaders, including Brauchli, had been involved in discussions about the salons and other events,” but seriously: who’s going to believe a guy who can screw up a nice racket like this one?

For my part, I can’t wait for whatever it was you were attempting to do.  Like the flyer said — “Spirited? Yes. Confrontational? No.” I’m sure I speak for most captains of industry when I say now that’s the way I like my journalists, all shy and respectful, in the “intimate and exclusive” privacy of your own home.  I don’t know which of the talent in your stable you were “inviting” to these “salons,” Kathy, but I tell you what: you take a fresh young fella like Ezra Klein, why, it’d be a crying shame not to try to make a little money off him.  You brought him in off the mean streets of the blogosphere, you gave him a nice home — you have an investment to recoup! I’m sure there’s many an “underwriter” who’d gladly pay for even just a kind word from him.

For his part, Ezra still seems to hope that “salons could be profitable after all”; as long as everything’s on the record the way you (now) agree it should be.  So he’s not against the “pay to play” part — tough as that might be on little papers that can’t attract the high rollers, or the little nonprofit citizens groups who either can’t afford to get past the doorman, or won’t suck up to the “underwriters.”  Not his problem — and not ours either, Kathy!

Kathy, like you, I think there’s got to be some “legitimate way to hold such events” — there’s too much money at stake for there not to be!  However the events eventually do work, you’re right to want to“review the guidelines for them with The Post’s top editors and make sure those guidelines are strictly followed.” As long as those “guidelines” have 3 or 4 zeroes at the end of ‘em, I’m sure old Fred Hiatt will play ball — heck, just a couple of zeroes would probably get you some of the, you know, less discriminating boys.  Am I right or am I right, Jackson?

I’ve been saying for a long time that the way the Post and the Times do journalism only makes sense if you figure they’re doing it for the influence, not for the readers.  Thanks for proving me right, Kathy — it might have been better if you’d piled up some board memberships instead, but now that it’s out in the open, go make it profitable!

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EDIT, 7/7: D’oh. Weymouth, not Graham.
UPDATE, 7/20: prompted by Nell, I lay a figurative flower wreath at the Internet Archive link to Media Whores Online, 2000-2004.
UPDATE, 7/26: In an e-mail, eRobin went “policy brothels” one better with “message parlors.”  Also, on his July 10 “Journal,” Bill Moyers delivered a homily for the ages on the subject. Among the many good parts:

Remember, the invitation promises this private, intimate, and off-the-record dinner is an extension “of THE WASHINGTON POST brand of journalistic inquiry into the issues, a unique opportunity for stakeholders to hear and be heard.” Let that sink in. The “stakeholders” in health care reform in this case do not include the rabble — the folks across the country who actually need quality health care but can’t afford it. If any of them showed up at the kitchen door on the night of this little soiree, a bouncer would drop kick them beyond the beltway.

Josh Marshall relays Charlie Cook’s report about the reaction of Republican staffers to the news of Senator Ted Stevens’ (R-AK) conviction:

Only the most partisan of Democrats or cold-hearted of people would fail to have some compassion or sympathy towards a party for which virtually everything has gone wrong. Someone recently likened it to watching a wounded dog kicked.

Stevens is one of the nine “Nazgul” (Republicans all, natch) who even voted against the torture amendment — McCain’s last decent act before he, too, joined the torturers with the Military Commissions Act. Today’s Republican Party deserves no sympathy — just a good old-fashioned “Raiders of the Lost Ark” mountaintop meltdown.

So here’s one cold-hearted partisan saying OK, maybe this Republican Party’s like a poor old wounded dog — but the thing’s rabid, too.  Put it out of its misery.

An American News Project report via Real News Network

The sums involved may seem paltry — but maybe that just proves how cheap a Congresscritter vote can be: “94 House Democrats who reversed their earlier position and voted in favor of immunity got an average of $8,359 from telecom PACs since 2005.” On the other hand, Senator Jay Rockefeller — who you’d think would be rich enough not to need it — got $51,500 this year alone. Guess it’s true — you don’t get rich by spending money. (Pretty wicked reporting of this in the video, watch for it around 1:40.)

There’s a storm brewing out in Nevada that ought to be much bigger than the one surrounding Eliot Spitzer: people’s health and lives are at risk because of shoddy medical practices — and neglectful oversight.

As the Wall Street Journal’s Scott Hensley explains, a Las Vegas endoscopy clinic has been reusing syringes; everyone subsequently tested with reused syringes is potentially exposed to infected equipment (see here for a graphic). Six cases of acute hepatitis C have been traced to the clinic, and as many as 40,000 people are at risk for hepatitis B, hepatitis C, and HIV according to the Las Vegas Sun.

My Vegas friend Paul is blogging about it:

With more and more revelations regarding Dr. Dipak Desai’s criminal malfeasance coming to light, many people are asking why his clinics were able to operate as long as they did without any sort of oversight by the relevant State inspection boards. It turns out that the Nevada State Health Division’s Licensure and Certification Bureau has not inspected the clinics since at least 2004, and even then they were not fully inspected. The last complete inspection of the clinics was performed in 2001.

The Division has not been able to hold clinics accountable and ensure public health and safety because Gov. Jim Gibbons cut 10 surveyor positions from the budget and refused to sign any bill raising taxes or fees on medical clinics to pay for the needed health surveyors. It should come as no surprise that Gov. Jim Gibbons is a Republican.

There’s more; the doctor involved is close enough with Governor Gibbons to have been on his health care working group transition team — and was the head of the state board of medical examiners until 2003.

As predictable as the fact that a GOP governor is in the middle of the mess is said governor’s reaction to the mess. Via the San Jose Mercury News, AP’s Brendan Riley reports:

[Gibbons] … said more staffing is akin to more Highway Patrol troopers to nab reckless drivers, adding, “You do not have enough patrolmen to stop everybody who makes a mistake. We could inspect (surgical centers) annually and then pretty soon, have we done overkill?” [...]

While the Gibbons administration has been criticized for the level of its monitoring, the governor said the issue isn’t a new one and the focus now should be “not on assessing blame or pointing fingers.”

Don’t worry, I’m done with you for now, Governor Overkill.

We’ve seen this before, of course: a pattern of deliberate neglect of safety, levees, infrastructure, or anything else that might be worthwhile government functions by ideologues more interested in cutting government than in protecting the public welfare. Rick Perlstein has been writing about what he calls “E. coli conservatism” ever since the incidents of tainted spinach and other produce of last year.* The pattern is similar: in the name of “small government,” abuse-detecting (and -deterring) inspections were getting short shrift:

The Associated Press studied the records and found that between 2003 and 2006 the Food and Drug Administration conducted 47 percent fewer safety inspections. FDA field offices have 12 percent fewer employees. Safety tests for food produced in the United States have gone down by three quarters—have almost ground to a halt—in the previous year alone. [...]

Paul Krugman summed it up last May — and found an interesting intellectual ancestor for Governor Gibbons:

The economic case for having the government enforce rules on food safety seems overwhelming. Consumers have no way of knowing whether the food they eat is contaminated, and in this case what you don’t know can hurt or even kill you. But there are some people who refuse to accept that case, because it’s ideologically inconvenient.

That’s why I blame the food safety crisis on Milton Friedman, who called for the abolition of both the food and the drug sides of the F.D.A. What would protect the public from dangerous or ineffective drugs? “It’s in the self-interest of pharmaceutical companies not to have these bad things,” he insisted in a 1999 interview. He would presumably have applied the same logic to food safety (as he did to airline safety): regardless of circumstances, you can always trust the private sector to police itself.

Gratuitous (well, not entirely gratuitous) Friedman-bashing aside, I hope Governor Jim “Overkill” Gibbons supplants Governor Spitzer on the “Above the Fold of Shame” soon — or even just joins him there. But I’m not holding my breath.

And if he doesn’t, we’ll deserve the kind of country we’re getting: better at monitoring our bank statements and phone calls to catch a philandering governor (and headlining the results) than at monitoring our food and medical systems to keep thousands healthy. You might say E. coli conservatism just went viral.

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* Here’s a list, via the Campaign for America’s Future search engine.
CROSSPOSTED TO “American Street“

The Sunday Times Online reported today that…

…foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions. [...]

…one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan…

“He was aiding foreign operatives against US interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.”

– For Sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets Sunday Times Online, 1/6/08

The source is Sibel Edmonds, an FBI translator fluent in Farsi and Turkish, who was assigned to a backlog of untranslated documents and wiretaps in 2002. Following what she saw as an unsuccessful effort in late 2001 to enlist her in espionage similar to that reported above, Edmonds reported the Americans involved to the FBI — and was fired for her trouble in March 2002.* In his 2005 Vanity Fair piece “An Inconvenient Patriot,” David Rose described what came next:

But being fired is one thing. Edmonds has also been prevented from proceeding with her court challenge or even speaking with complete freedom about the case.

On top of the usual prohibition against disclosing classified information, the Bush administration has smothered her case beneath the all-encompassing blanket of the “state-secrets privilege”—a Draconian and rarely used legal weapon that allows the government, merely by asserting a risk to national security, to prevent the lawsuits Edmonds has filed contesting her treatment from being heard in court at all. According to the Department of Justice, to allow Edmonds her day in court, even at a closed hearing attended only by personnel with full security clearance, “could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the foreign policy and national security of the United States.”

Using the state-secrets privilege in this fashion is unusual, says Edmonds’s attorney Ann Beeson, of the American Civil Liberties Union. “It also begs the question: Just what in the world is the government trying to hide?”

Now we have a better idea.

Remarkably, Ms. Edmonds couldn’t get any major American news organization to agree to publish her allegations naming names. It’s really a bit of a shame the story is getting crushed by ObamaNewHampshireIowaEdwardsClintonHuckabeeRomney, and one may wonder why Ms. Edmonds took so long to go to foreign media with her story, which even as reported in outline form before now seemed like a huge scandal. The answer may have to do with libel laws abroad, or at least in the U.K., that are more protective of public figures than they are in the United States. Certainly no names were named in the Times Article.

However, Ms. Edmonds has now published a “State Secrets Privilege Gallery” on her own web site (”Just A Citizen“) with unlabeled photographs of well known Defense Department and intelligence figures like Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Brent Scowcroft, and Congressmen Dennis Hastert, Richard Livingston, Stephen Solarz, and Art Lantos, to name a few — the full list is spelled out by lukery (”Let Sibel Edmonds Speak”). The intent appears to be to imply names to put to the allegations in the Times story, without taking the legally fraught step of connecting every dot in writing.

Whoever the weak links in the American chain turn out to be, the nexus of espionage that Edmonds’ story describes is unsettling indeed:

The Turks and Israelis had planted “moles” in military and academic institutions which handled nuclear technology. Edmonds says there were several transactions of nuclear material every month, with the Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. “The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States,” she said.

If the Israeli angle is true as well, it seems plausible that they were trying to get information about how to build “better” nukes of their own, though I suppose there are Israelis who’d sell nuclear plans to Pakistan. The Times provides a timeline of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons development at the end of the story, and most reactions understandably focus on that country.* Jim Henley (”Unqualified Offerings”) writes, “The thing that most struck me is how much, over the decades, Pakistan has acted not at all like a client state of the US.”

The Turkish Connection
True. I’d add, though, that most of the article tends to point our good friend Turkey’s way in that respect. The Congressional involvement implied by Ms. Edmonds’ photo gallery is certainly all connected to Turkey; sometimes the worthy Congressmen involved were impressed that Turkey has been willing to work with Israel diplomatically and militarily, sometimes they’ve been impressed with Turkish money (Livingston’s lobbying firm is on an annual $1.8M retainer by the Turkish government), and sometimes both. Edmonds says Mr. Hastert may not have been willing to wait to get out of office before pocketing his payoffs. Rose:

[Edmonds] reported hearing Turkish wiretap targets boast that they had a covert relationship with a very senior politician indeed—Dennis Hastert, Republican congressman from Illinois and Speaker of the House since 1999. The targets reportedly discussed giving Hastert tens of thousands of dollars in surreptitious payments in exchange for political favors and information.

What sort of political favors? In an interview with Amy Goodman, Rose says that in secret testimony, Edmonds told Congressional investigators that Speaker Hastert may have sold out his support for the Armenian Genocide Resolution in 2000, withdrawing it just before a final vote:

One of the Turkish targets of these wiretaps claimed that the price for getting Dennis Hastert to withdraw the resolution would be $500,000. Now, I do emphasize there’s no evidence at all that he received such a payment, but that is what is said to have been recorded in one of the wiretaps.

Thus, it’s not all about nukes; denial of the Armenian Genocide is a centerpiece of Turkish policy, since acknowledging it would invite reparations claims — and might undermine the political legitimacy of a Turkish republic that has long and strenuously denied many of its founders’ responsibility for that genocide.

But it is likely very much about money in any case. Since 9/11, Turkey is the 7th largest recipient of military “aid” from the United States,** and Turkish military officials — who wield constitutional power in that country as designated arbiters of the secular tradition in that country — are both well placed and not reluctant to profit from sidelines, or recycle some of that largesse in ambitious ways. Entrepreneurism being universal, and absolute power notoriously corrupting absolutely, it would be little wonder if Turkish military and intelligence might go into all kinds of unexpected business sidelines.

We’ll just have to hope that responsible, upstanding people in Islamabad — and not Al Qaeda — were the final destination for any nuclear secrets said entrepreneurs got their hands on.

CROSSPOSTED TO “American Street”

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* Indeed, I wonder if Benazir Bhutto’s assassination was an additional reason Edmonds went to the Times. The stated reason, however, was that she “approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.” Joseph Cannon (”Cannonfire”) writes the story was probably this one about Louai Sakka (or Sakra), an Al Qaeda operative now jailed in Turkey. The “hall of mirrors” feeling about the story deepens in that Sakka is apparently linked to many Western intelligence services, according to a CooperativeResearch.org article citing the 9/11 Commission and media reports.
** $1.325 billion from 2002-04, according to PublicIntegrity.org. Countries receiving more aid — or “aid” — were Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, Afghanistan, and Colombia, with figures ranging from $9 billion to $2 billion over the same time period.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I’d be remiss not to mention that I’ve often written often about the Armenian Genocide and the struggle to have it acknowledged as such. (See, e.g., 90 years ago: Armenian Genocide Begins and Another Day, Another Turkish New Lira for the Washington Post) While I like to think I’d feel this way in any case, I’m married to an Armenian American.

From the New York Times article “Report Says Iraq Contractor Is Hiding Data From U.S.,” by James Glanz and Floyd Norris:

A Halliburton subsidiary that has been subjected to numerous investigations for billions of dollars in contracts it received for work in Iraq has systematically misused federal rules to withhold basic information on its practices from American officials, a federal oversight agency said yesterday. [...]

The oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, said KBR had refused to disclose information as basic as how many people are fed each day in its dining facilities and how many gallons of fuel are delivered to foreign embassies in Iraq, claiming that the data was proprietary, meaning it would unfairly help its business competitors.

So the United States outsources a function of the military and the State Department to a private company — and then can’t find out what that company is doing!? KBR should be fired and barred from future government work — as should those who hired it in the first place. Via MediaBloodhound and Avedon Carol (”The Sideshow”).

Lest I forget, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction is Stuart W. Bowen, Jr. — a.k.a. one of the last honest Republicans.

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UPDATE, 11/3: Solved that problem — Bowen just got his pink slip. Via Avedon Carol (”The Sideshow”)

While the first, last, and only pre-bad-news GOP instinct may be to “cover it up and hope it goes away,” the first post-bad-news instinct seems to be “rescue the money“:

Mr. Foley, who served on the House Ways and Means Committee, was a prolific fund-raiser. His campaign account had a balance of $2.7 million at the end of August, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.

Carl Forti, the communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said Sunday that the committee would gladly accept Mr. Foley’s money or part of it to devote to House races. Mr. Foley already gave $100,000 to the committee in July, campaign records show, as part of the party’s Battleground Program, to which members are asked to contribute.“The money is in the control of Mr. Foley,” Mr. Forti said. “Whatever he decides to do with it is up to him.”

(Reported by Carl Hulse and Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times, via TPM.)

Stuff like this is why I can’t keep myself from returning to this story. It’s almost awesome in its pristine amorality, like something a nature TV program would show: the colony loses a worker, dismembers its remains, keeps going. See also the media worker ant frantically trying to spin the news, no matter how mindlessly. Nest in danger! Must repair damage!