It just gets more and more bizarre. From The Navy Times:

The threatening radio transmission heard at the end of a video showing harassing maneuvers by Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz may have come from a locally famous heckler known among ship drivers as the “Filipino Monkey.”...

In recent years, American ships operating in the Middle East have had to contend with a mysterious but profane voice known by the ethnically insulting handle of “Filipino Monkey,” likely more than one person, who listens in on ship-to-ship radio traffic and then jumps on the net shouting insults and jabbering vile epithets....

Rick Hoffman, a retired captain who commanded the cruiser Hue City and spent many of his 17 years at sea in the Gulf was subject to the renegade radio talker repeatedly, often without pause during the so-called “Tanker Wars” of the late 1980s.

“For 25 years there’s been this mythical guy out there who, hour after hour, shouts obscenities and threats,” he said. “He could be tied up pierside somewhere or he could be on the bridge of a merchant ship.”

And the Monkey has stamina.

“He used to go all night long. The guy is crazy,” he said. “But who knows how many Filipino Monkeys there are? Could it have been a spurious transmission? Absolutely.”

Here again is the audio (mp3) of that radio transmission.

On a more serious note, the BBC reports that "Iranian speedboats approached US warships in two previously undisclosed incidents in the Strait of Hormuz in December."

The changes keep on coming in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. Less than a month ago, former voting section chief John "minorities don't become elderly the way white people do: They die first" Tanner got canned. And today, his replacement, Christopher Coates, a veteran of the section, demoted Tanner's controversial deputy chiefs, Susana Lorenzo-Giguere and Yvette Rivera. The changes were announced in an email to voting section staff.

The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility is investigating whether Lorenzo-Giguere had filed certain lawsuits in order to get paid while living at her Cape Cod beach house. Tanner was under investigating for approving the arrangement. Both were accused by former section lawyers in complaints to OPR and the inspector general of seeking reimbursement for official travel.

Rivera has been accused of discriminating against African-American employees. She oversaw the important Section Five unit, which has the responsibility of reviewing election laws in parts of the country with a history of discrimination. Encouragingly, her replacement is Tim Mellett, one of the staff attorneys who in 2003, found that Tom DeLay's Texas redistricting plan violated the Voting Rights Act, a finding that was overruled by political appointees.

So it seems that the voting section is truly entering a new era. Whether the voting section will reassume its traditional responsibility of protecting African-American voters from discrimination is another question. Only time will tell.

Here's a rundown on the latest at McClatchy.

The day is drawing nigh when the limits of Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson's chutzpah will be tested.

Late last year, Johnson, over the unanimous objection of his staff, arbitrarily denied California's petition to limit greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks. He was even told that the EPA would lose the case if California sued -- which they did, as expected, along with fifteen other states.

But even before that fore-ordained court fight takes place, Johnson will have to face Congress. First up is the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, of which Barbara Boxer's (D-CA) the chair. A hearing is set for January 24th, when Johnson will get to explain his rationale in person. Here's his two page denial letter as a preview -- which Cali Attorney General Jerry Brown called "shocking in its incoherence and utter failure to provide legal justification for the administrator's unprecedented action."

In a committee hearing in California yesterday, Brown urged Boxer to not be subpoena-shy, since Johnson has still not provided the requisite supporting legal and technical documents for the decision (after reviewing California's petition for more than two years, Johnson only issued that two page denial). From The Los Angeles Times:

"Subpoena these guys," he urged Boxer. "Send the marshals out. Get them to tell us under oath. They are not going to get away with this. Sooner or later, we are going to uncover real corruption . . . that is dangerous to California and to the whole world."

Brown said that the Bush administration may be able to delay court action a year, until the president's term is over, but that Congress may be able to speed the process. "What you have is a bunch of scofflaws in the White House," he said. "This fellow Johnson is becoming a stooge in a really pathetic drama that hopefully will not play out much longer."

Yesterday we gave you the rundown on Common Sense Issues, a nonprofit group that's been phoning millions of voters in key primary states on behalf of Mike Huckabee. The automated calls ask voters about their views on certain hot-button conservative issues and then provide a barrage of facts demonstrating that Huckabee is stronger.

I spoke with the group's executive director Patrick Davis this morning and asked him to lay it all out for me. Where was the group active? How many calls had they made? And were the calls illegal?

In addition to the approximately 850,000 calls in Iowa and 1 million in South Carolina, the group made 800,000 in New Hampshire, and already hundreds of thousands in Florida (he said it wasn't up to a million "yet"). They're on the phones currently in Michigan, he said, and have reached on the order of two million homes. All the calls are generally identical, he said, with some exceptions.

For instance, the group is calling independent and Democratic homes in Michigan, encouraging them to cross over and vote for Huckabee in the Republican primary because "they don't have much of a choice on their ballot," Davis explained. A commenter to yesterday's post, ROSS in Detroit, said he'd received one of these calls, writing:

"I'm in MI near Detroit. My ZIP Code is heavily Dem. I just got one of the push poll robocalls described. It urged me as a Democrat to cross over and vote in the GOP primary for Huckabee! It was immediately clear at the beginning of the 2 min 45 sec call that this was in favor of Huckabee. . . . ."

See below for another description of the calls by another TPM reader.

Davis defended the calls, saying that the group's activities were "well within federal law." And he repeated the group's explanation as for why these weren't push polls (imitations of polls meant to disperse negative information). Every call is unique, he said, because of the group's "personal identification artificial intelligence" technology. And "every bit of it is factual."

Read more »

Joshua Henderson, the Marine who unleashed a 200 round barrage of bullets from his M240 that killed as many as 19 Afghans last March, asserts that he will testify only if he is granted immunity. Other Marines have testified that Henderson fired as many as 10 times and that they did not see any evidence of hostile gunmen or incoming rounds. (LA Times)

The House and Senate Judiciary Committees want more information about former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s no-bid contract to monitor out-of-court settlements of criminal allegations. The contract is worth between $28 million and $52 million. (New York Times)

John McCain's presidential campaign might have broken its own rules by including its fundraising list as collateral for a bank loan. The campaign had promised its donors that it would not sell their information. (Politico)

Read more »

As far as international incidents go, this one's a little baffling.

On Tuesday, we gave you the rundown of Sunday's incident in the Strait of Hormuz, when three hulking American naval ships were greeted by five Iranian speedboats. U.S. officials said that the boats maneuvered aggressively, dropped two white boxes in the water, and issued threats over the radio. Just when the boats were getting too close for comfort, they said, and the Americans were preparing for a warning shot, the boats sped away.

On Tuesday, the Pentagon released an edited video of the incident, which you can see here:

On the audio (mp3) of the radio communication, a voice slowly pronounces the words "I am coming to you," and then as the American tries to communicate, says, "You will explode after a few minutes."

But since then, the American version of the incident has undergone a revision. The radio threat, the Navy now admits, may not have come from the Iranian boats after all. The voice, a number of observers have pointed out, seems to come out of nowhere and doesn't have the expected engine noise in the background, and in fact, The Washington Post reports, the accent doesn't even sound Iranian.

The Iranians, meanwhile, have steadfastly insisted that nothing of this sort ever happened. To that effect, they released a video yesterday of a completely ordinary greeting between Iranian and naval vessels. But it's impossible to tell whether it's even the same incident. U.S. officials say that it's not.

So.... It remains unclear what happened really happened there and why. William Arkin of the Post's Early Warning blog suggests that Iran "wanted to send a not-so-subtle message to their Persian Gulf neighbors that they could disrupt the flow of oil and that any U.S.-Iranian confrontation would hurt the pocketbooks of the ruling sheiks."

The Bush administration took the ball and ran with it, playing up the "confrontation," though President Bush seemed to indicate an initial dearth of talking points. He regained his footing later, warning of "serious consequences" if it happened again. And if it does happen again, maybe it will all seem less strange.

It's not much of a mystery which candidate the nonprofit group Common Sense Issues supports. After all, they run a website called Trust Huckabee. And they've made millions of calls in key primary states on Mike Huckabee's behalf.

From the various reports, the automated calls are transparent examples of push polls -- i.e. calls posing as polls, but really intended to give negative information about a particular candidate.

Common Sense has some considerable experience with this. In the 2006 elections, the group paid for calls attacking Democrats in at least five states. The robo calls followed their favored formula -- extremely leading questions followed by a barrage of "facts." In Maryland, voters were asked whether they supported medical research experiments on unborn babies. In Tennessee, voters were asked "Would you prefer to have your taxes not raised, and if possible, cut?" and then "Do you believe that foreign terrorists should have the same legal rights and privileges as American citizens?" You can listen to one of the Tennessee calls here. Always, the "facts" based on the voter's response.

When I talked to one of the leaders of the group, he told me that the questions used "accurate characterizations," and added: "There are a fair number of things that are unpleasant to talk about, but that doesn't make [our questions] any less accurate."

The group doesn't mind pushing the envelope. Since December, they've paid for calls supporting Huckabee in Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, and South Carolina; because they are robo calls, they've been able to reach hundreds of thousands of households (1 million in South Carolina and Michigan each, and approximately 850,000 in Iowa). Florida is apparently next. The group also ran a TV ad in Iowa which you can see on their website called "Who Can You Trust?" Just in case voters didn't get the message, they were directed to CannotTrustMittRomney.com, which includes a series of old TV clips of Romney proclaiming his pro-choice stance.*

Read more »

Well, Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA) finally made his much-anticipated announcement, and curiously enough, the ongoing federal investigation and his near-certain defeat in the Republican primary apparently didn't figure into his decision to retire. From the AP:

Republican Rep. John Doolittle of California, who is under investigation in a congressional lobbying scandal, said Thursday that he'll retire from Congress at the end of his current term.

"My wife, Julie, and I have made this decision after much prayer and deliberation. It was not my initial intent to retire, and I fully expected and planned to run again right up until very recently," Doolittle said after addressing supporters in his Northern California district.

"But it distilled upon us that we were ready for a change after spending almost our entire married lives with me in public service. We are at peace with this choice and look forward to starting a new chapter in our lives."

The criminal case is tied up in litigation right now, as he's contested a Justice Department subpoena for congressional records. But that should be wrapped up eventually, so that Doolittle really can get started with that "new chapter" in his life.

Update: The complete statement is below.

Read more »

As far as Blackwater's many sins go, this one's pretty minor. But it's got that special Blackwater touch.

Back in 2005, The New York Times reports, a Blackwater helicopter dropped tear gas (CS gas) on a checkpoint in Baghdad's Green Zone. "An armored vehicle on the ground also released the gas, temporarily blinding drivers, passers-by and at least 10 American soldiers operating the checkpoint.... A number of Iraqi civilians, both on foot and in cars waiting to go through the checkpoint, were also exposed. " The gas, which the American military itself "can use only under the strictest conditions and with the approval of top military commanders," causes burning eyes, skin irritation, coughing, difficulty breathing and sometimes even vomiting.

Blackwater's explanation, by way of spokeswoman Anne Tyrell, was that "a CS gas canister was mistaken for a smoke canister and released near an intersection and checkpoint." If there was some mistake, both the helicopter and the vehicle on the ground seem to have been mistaken. Oops.

Oddly enough, Army officers told the Times that "the Blackwater convoy appeared to be stuck in traffic and may have been trying to use the riot-control agent as a way to clear a path." Now, how blinding everyone in the area would help traffic to clear isn't immediately clear to me. Nor is it clear to Capt. Kincy Clark who was hit by the gas and wrote, "Why someone would think a substance that makes your eyes water, nose burn and face hurt would make a driver do anything other than stop is beyond me.”

Note: Blackwater hired its third lobbyist recently.

I'd hoped they were just wild rumors, but alas! From the AP:

Republican Rep. John Doolittle, who is under investigation in a congressional lobbying scandal, plans to announce his retirement from Congress on Thursday, according to a Republican official who spoke with Doolittle.

With a full-blown criminal investigation in the works, Jose Rodriguez, the CIA official who ordered the destruction of the torture tapes, says, via his lawyer Bob Bennett, that he's not testifying about it to Congress without immunity. He'd been scheduled to speak to the House intelligence committee next week as part of their investigation.

If the committee did give him immunity, it could potentially compromise the criminal investigation. If they didn't, he'd probably spend most of his time pleading the Fifth. Bennett first signaled this course last month, when he warned that Rodriguez wouldn't cooperate with a "witch hunt."

The Washington Post adds that criminal investigators haven't given him access to records about the destruction and that "most defense attorneys would advise a client against testifying or cooperating with a congressional investigation without access to such documents."

Only one officer, Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, was charged with a crime as result of the mistreatment and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Jordan was convicted last year on a single charge of disobeying orders not to discuss the Abu Ghraib investigation, but he has now been cleared of all responsibility for that crime. Jordan was never involved in any of the abusive practices carried carried out in the prison. (Washington Post)

A new survey by the World Health Organization concludes that 151,000 Iraqis have died from violence following the U.S. invasion and that 9 out of 10 of those deaths resulted from U.S. military operations, insurgent attacks, and sectarian warfare. The study also found a 60% increase in nonviolent deaths. The good news is that the death toll is one-quarter of the number given by Johns Hopkins University’s study in 2006. (Washington Post)

Given Democrats’ objections to the NSA’s warrantless eavesdropping and the White House’s insistence on immunity for telecoms that executed the NSA program, the Bush administration is seeking a temporary fix to keep the program alive beyond its February 1 expiration date. A permanent settlement seems unlikely because while the Senate could push through a bill with immunity, the House is moving in the opposite direction. (Newsweek)

Read more »

Remember all that stuff about benchmarks? You know, measurements of progress by the Iraqi government? Well, that was last year.

There's a new catchphrase in town: "Iraqi solutions." And it means that while the Iraqis might have failed to accomplish just about all the goals the U.S. set, that's OK, and you gotta just roll with it and let the Iraqis do their thing.

Here's how it goes, from The Washington Post:

From Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker to Army privates and aid workers, officials are expressing their willingness to stand back and help Iraqis develop their own answers. "We try to come up with Iraqi solutions for Iraqi problems," said Stephen Fakan, the leader of a provincial reconstruction team with U.S. troops in Fallujah.

In many cases -- particularly on the political front -- Iraqi solutions bear little resemblance to the ambitious goals for 2007 that Bush laid out in his speech to the nation last Jan. 10. "To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country's economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis," he pledged. "Iraqis plan to hold provincial elections later this year . . . the government will reform de-Baathification laws, and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq's constitution."...

To Crocker, the meaning of "Iraqi solutions to Iraqi problems" is "blindingly obvious. Iraq has got a government. It's got a system. It's got provincial governments. It's got a military and a police. And it has leaders of all of these things who increasingly take themselves seriously as leaders."

The New York Times noted this reduction in expectations last year, but it didn't have the requisite branding. Now it does. Some, however, are unimpressed with the rollout. The Post quotes a retired British general as saying that this supposed "dawning of reality" is a "cynical use of language" used "to camouflage past errors."

Whether it's realism or cynicism you can decide. An Army official favorably quotes Lawrence of Arabia as proof that this is an old, tried solution: "Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly."

Unfortunately, it's that "tolerable" part that's the sticking point.

Yesterday, the D.C. watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a criminal complaint against Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA), calling for an investigation of whether she'd been bribed to deliver a $2 million earmark. The basic facts, as laid out in a December 20th Washington Post piece, I said, "weren't pretty."

Well, late yesterday, Landrieu's office finally, after having remained silent for nearly three weeks, responded, providing a number of facts that substantially changed the story.

The story had been that Randy Best, the longtime Bush supporter who founded Voyager, had struggled to find a senator willing to give his company, the Voyager literacy program, funding for the Washington, D.C schools. In the fall of 2001, he finally landed an interview with Landrieu. Shortly after that, someone from Landrieu's office contacted him to see if he might host a fundraiser. He said yes, ultimately delivering $30,000 to Landrieu's campaign (despite his Republican ties) through Voyager executives; four days after that, he landed his earmark, which provided $2 million to the D.C. schools for use on Voyager... even though the schools hadn't asked for it. As far as things on the Hill go, it seemed like a pretty tidy quid pro quo.

But yesterday Landrieu's office provided a letter showing that, in April of 2001, Paul Vance, the superintendent of the D.C. public schools, had written Landrieu, then the ranking member on the D.C appropriations subcommittee, and Sen. Mike DeWine (R-OH), then the chair, to ask for funds for Voyager. And they produced another showing that three weeks later, on May 15, 2001, Landrieu wrote to DeWine to request $3.5 million for the program's use in D.C.

Read more »

One less thing for the administration to worry about. From the AP:

A federal judge refused on Wednesday to delve into the destruction of CIA interrogation videos, saying there was no evidence the Bush administration violated a court order and the Justice Department deserved time to conduct its own investigation.

Update: It looks like the long-held secrecy of the black sites and the existence of the video tapes may have saved the administration here. From Judge Henry Kennedy's decision (read it here):

The 2005 Order prohibits [the administration] from destroying evidence regarding any torture, mistreatment, or abuse of detainees that occurred at Guantánamo Bay. Petitioners do not assert that the destroyed tapes depict interrogations that occurred at Guantánamo Bay and respondents have represented to the court that the interrogations depicted on the tapes did not occur there. To the contrary, the videotapes were recorded in their entirety in 2002 before either of the suspected Al Quaeda operatives shown on the tapes had been at Guantánamo Bay.... Therefore, petitioners’ motion will be denied.

From The Hill:

According to three well-placed Republican sources, former Rep. Richard Pombo (R-Calif.) — who lost his seat amid ethics allegations — has called on longtime friend Doolittle to not seek reelection in the interest of keeping the district a GOP stronghold. In the last Congress, Pombo was a panel chairman while Doolittle was a member of GOP leadership.

Pombo could not be reached for comment.

Pretty much as expected, with Judge Anthony Kennedy as the key swing vote. From the AP:

The Supreme Court appeared reluctant Wednesday to strike down the nation's strictest requirement that voters show photo identification before being allowed to cast a ballot....

"You want us to invalidate the statute because of minimal inconvenience?" Justice Anthony Kennedy said near the end of an hour-long argument. Kennedy, often a key vote, appeared more willing than some to consider changes to the law....

Chief Justice John Roberts, an Indiana native, and Justice Antonin Scalia indicated strong support for the state law. Justice Clarence Thomas said nothing, but most often votes with his conservative colleagues....

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg focused her questions on the difficulties for indigent voters who lack IDs. Why, she asked, can't the state allow those voters to sign the sworn statement on Election Day, which would eliminate the second trip to the county courthouse?

Told Indiana wants to avoid congestion at the polls, Ginsburg said the state wants to have it both ways because it argues relatively few people are affected by the law. "If there are so few of them, I don't understand why they should be put to the burden," Ginsburg said.

Here's a detailed rundown from SCOTUSblog.

Yesterday, we reported that the administration's scheme to pack the Civil Rights Commission with Republicans was on shaky legal footing.

But a TPM reader made a good observation. The packing scheme relies on Republican commissioners changing their party affiliation to "Independent" after they've been appointed, thus creating room for more Republicans to be appointed (there can be no more than four commissioners at any one time from a single party).

The Republicans who've switched their affiliation, of course, have denied changing them just to create more room for other conservatives. Abigail Thernstrom was no different, telling the Boston Globe's Charlie Savage that she'd just decided that she'd be "most comfortable" as an independent.

But her comfortability level appears to have abruptly changed. In December, the president reappointed her to the commission, but this time as a Republican, after one of the four Republican nominees left. The move also allowed her to become the commission's vice chairman. (Update/Correction: Bush actually promoted Thernstrom to be vice chair in 2004 -- ironically, six weeks after her first party registration change.)

So to retrace her steps: she was first nominated as a Republican, then registered as an independent, then was re-nominated as an Republican. With that move, the commission's conservative majority drops to five to two -- it's not clear yet who the eighth nominee will be, or what party he or she will represent. But not to worry: the committee can move forward on business with a simply majority, so the commission's direction shouldn't change that much.

We gave a rundown of the possible effects of the FEC's shutdown on the 2008 election last week. The Washington Post reports that until one side budges, the two remaining commissioners will show up in the meantime "to offer advice instead of binding decisions on questions from political campaigns."

A federal magistrate is giving the White House five business days to report on whether computer backup tapes contain copies of millions of e-mails that disappeared from computer servers during the government’s investigation into the Valerie Plame affair. Two federal laws mandate that the White House preserve e-mails and other records. The National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington have filed suit to ensure that the White House complies with the relevant federal laws. (AP)

The Department of Defense’s Inspector General refuses to investigate former Halliburton/KBR employee Jamie Leigh Jones’ allegations of gang rape by fellow employees in Baghdad because he asserts that the Justice Department is looking into the matter. Though the alleged rape happened in 2005, both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have failed to get answers from the Bush White House on the status of Leigh’s complaint. (ABC’s “The Blotter”)

Concerned that ethics allegations surrounding John Doolittle's (R-CA) ties to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff might sink his re-election chances and cost the party a seat in Congress, Republican leaders are urging the California representative to retire. (The Hill)

Read more »

Today, the Supreme Court will hear arguments as to whether Indiana's voter ID law breaks the law. If a law disenfranchises thousands of voters (mostly poor and minorities) to prevent a phantom crime, is that ok?

Of course, it's rare to hear the Republican supporters of voter ID laws admit that there's no evidence that voter impersonation, the kind of voter fraud the laws are meant to stop, occurs.

But that's just what happened yesterday when Warren Olney of KCRW's To The Point pressed Todd Rokita (R), Indiana's secretary of state and a named defendant in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board.

Have any cases of voter impersonation been prosecuted in Indiana? was the simple question. And as Olney pressed, Rokita went from one fallback argument to another. It started with this revealing exchange:

Q: ...Have there been cases in Indiana where people represented themselves as somebody else in order to be able to vote?

Rokita: Oh yeah, we suspect it happens all the time.

Q: You suspect?

Rokita: Mm hmm.

Q: Have you got any cases proven?

Rokita: Well, are you saying you want to define whether or not there’s fraud based on whether or not it’s prosecuted? Is that the question?

From there, Rokita argued that there is fraud (it "exists almost on a daily basis"), but that it's nearly impossible to prosecute due to the ephemeral nature of the crime. And it tends not to be a priority for prosecutors due to all the other violent and horrible stuff they need to prosecute. And even if there hasn't been any such voter fraud (and I'm not saying that there isn't), we have a right to protect ourselves from it; "You have the right to build a firehouse before you get burned by the fire."

It bears mentioning here that the Justice Department under George Bush has indeed made prosecuting voter fraud a priority -- and came up empty. That fact hasn't stopped voter ID law proponents from claiming hundreds of demonstrated cases of voter fraud. It's quite a morass of innuendo, but the Brennan Center (which has filed an amicus brief with the law's opponents) undertook the staggering task of disproving every one of those claims one by one. It's a 75 page document (pdf).

The lawyers actually arguing the case before the court today are likely to be more eloquent than Rokita, but the arguments will essentially be the same. So take a look at the relevant excerpts from the interview below.

via Rick Hasen.

Read more »

From Roll Call (sub. req.):

Sen. Larry Craig’s (R-Idaho) legal team filed a brief Tuesday in the Minnesota Court of Appeals seeking to overturn a lower court’s ruling preventing him from withdrawing his guilty plea.

The brief argues that the Hennepin County district court “abused its discretion” by refusing to allow Craig to withdraw his guilty plea in a ruling on Oct. 4. Craig filed a notice of appeal on Oct. 15 and briefs were due on Jan. 8.

The state now has 45 days to respond.

From The Los Angeles Times:

Alarmed at the increasingly populist tone of the 2008 political campaign, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is set to issue a fiery promise to spend millions of dollars to defeat candidates deemed to be anti-business.

"We plan to build a grass-roots business organization so strong that when it bites you in the butt, you bleed," chamber President Tom Donohue said....

Although Donohue shied away from precise figures, he indicated that his organization would spend in excess of the approximately $60 million it spent in the last presidential cycle. That approaches the spending levels planned by the largest labor unions....

"I'm concerned about anti-corporate and populist rhetoric from candidates for the presidency, members of Congress and the media," he said. "It suggests to us that we have to demonstrate who it is in this society that creates jobs, wealth and benefits -- and who it is that eats them."

Here's President Bush today when he was asked about Sunday's incident in the Strait of Hormuz, where, according to U.S. officials, a small group of Iranian speedboats issued threats to American ships and then fled just as the Americans were about to open fire:

I'm not sure what happened to the talking points on this one, because all Bush could bring himself to say was that it was "a provocative act," and (after several more seconds of silence) "they should not have done it." Hardly what you'd expect given the show they put on last year.

Back in November, The Boston Globe's Charlie Savage reported on how the Bush administration had stacked the U.S. Civil Rights Commission with Republicans -- two GOP commissioners had switched their registration to independents after being appointed, clearing the way for the administration to appoint two more Republicans. The scheme was entirely legal, the administration said, and the Justice Department, in a memo from the Office of Legal Counsel, had said so. But now a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has found the OLC memo "problematic" and says that if someone were to challenge the arrangement in court, the administration would probably lose.

You can read the report, which was prepared at the request of counsels on the Senate Judiciary Committee staff, here.

The commission was created by the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and is supposed to serve as a watchdog for discrimination. But there hasn't been much of that during this administration. Savage reported that the coup shifted "the commission's emphasis from investigating claims of civil rights violations to questioning programs designed to offset the historic effects of discrimination."

Here's how the scheme works. The commission has eight members. By law, no more than four of them can be from any one party -- usually meaning that there are four Dems and four GOPers. But since two of the commissioners changed their party affiliation to independents after they were appointed, the commission now has only two Dems, two "independents," and four Republicans.

Read more »

You might say there's an art, a finesse to earmarking. And Sen. Mary Landrieu's (D-LA) $2 million earmark in 2001 to the Voyager literacy program was bad art.

The Washington Post laid it all out in a big piece late last year: four days after getting a heap of campaign contributions from Voyager executives and relatives, Landrieu delivered the earmark, which provided the money to city school officials in Washington, D.C. on the condition that it be used on Voyager.

Now the D.C. watchdog Citizens for Responsibility for Ethics in Washington says the feds should investigate whether Landrieu was bribed. The group filed complaints today with the Justice Department, two U.S. attorneys offices, and the Senate Ethics Committee based on the earmark.

The basic facts aren't pretty. Voyager's founder Randy Best is a Texan and Bush supporter (he signed up to be a Bush Pioneer in 2000, but apparently didn't raise enough money to qualify). He only approached Landrieu in 2001 after striking out on the Republican side of the aisle; when he hired a second lobbyist for help, they approached Landrieu. After an apparently positive meeting between Best and Landrieu, someone from her office approached Best to see if he would host a fundraiser for her. Voyager executives and relatives delivered $30,000 in contributions for Landrieu, and "most had never before given to a Democrat running for Congress." Four days later, Landrieu followed through for Voyager. Over the years, Voyager execs and relatives gave her almost $80,000.

Read more »

Pretty uninspiring stuff. Here's what Rep. John Doolittle's (R-CA) staffer has for pushback of yesterday's report that he won't be seeking reelection. From the AP:

On Monday Doolittle indicated he would soon disclose his plans.

"I am writing to invite you to a Team Doolittle Briefing. Please join with our key supporters for news about our plans for 2008," Doolittle wrote in an e-mail to supporters that was posted on a political blog in his district....

Separately, Doolittle organized a staff meeting for Wednesday and invited some former aides, according to one of the people invited. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the event was not public.

Doolittle's chief of staff, Ron Rogers, said that Doolittle met quarterly with supporters and the events were nothing unusual.

"His current plans are to seek re-election," Rogers said.

"I'm not going to speculate about what's going to happen in the future," he said.

Update: Here's video of a testy Doolittle shot back in 2006, just before he narrowly won reelection in his heavily Republican district:

In recent months Congress has had its turn in scrutinizing Secretary of State Rice’s poor performance in supervising private security contractors and the construction of the U.S. embassy in Iraq. Now, the U.S. Foreign Service is weighing in Rice’s leadership – via the American Foreign Service Association survey - and forty-four percent of respondents have rated Rice’s performance as “poor” or “very poor” and asserted that "developments of the last few years" leave them less inclined to complete their careers in the Foreign Service. (Washington Post)

A federal judge in the trial of Jose Padilla denied the request of lawyers for one of Padilla's co-defendants for access to classified information that might be relevant to the case, ruling that the government had already met its requirement to turn over evidence. Defense lawyers for Adham Hassoun, Padilla's recruiter, had argued that the CIA's destruction of videotapes of interrogations called into question their client's conviction. (New York Times, Miami Herald)

Recent scrutiny of U.S. immigration policy and efforts to standardize immigration laws have led the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to re-examine Violence Against Women Act visas (sub. req.). The program has protected more than 30,670 immigrants married to abusive U.S. spouses since 1994, but many of those visas are now in limbo or jeopardy and some of the abused women may face deportation. (Sacramento Bee)

Read more »

It's been nearly a year since the Bush Administration mounted a public relations campaign accusing Iran of arming insurgents in Iraq. If that was a campaign to generate enough public support to go on the offensive against Iran, it failed. But relations between the two haven't exactly warmed since -- nor, it's safe to say, has the administration's trigger finger gotten any less itchy.

Which makes this worrying:

We're coming at you, the Iranian radio transmission warned. Your ships will explode in a couple of minutes.

The United States and Iran reached the verge of a military confrontation early Sunday after five Iranian patrol boats sped toward the USS Port Royal and two accompanying ships as they crossed the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf. The Iranian vessels, manned by the Revolutionary Guard Corps, broke into two groups and "maneuvered aggressively" on both sides of the U.S. ships, coming as close as 500 yards, recounted Vice Adm. Kevin J. Cosgriff, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command.

After the radio transmission, two of the Iranian boats dropped "white box-like objects" into the water, Cosgriff said. The U.S. ships responded with evasive maneuvers, radioed warnings to the Iranians and sounded ships' whistles, while ordering increased readiness of their own vessels. After their messages were not heeded, the U.S. ships prepared to fire in self-defense, but the Iranians abruptly turned and sped north toward their territorial waters.

As the U.S. officials tell it, this was either an aborted attack (the little white boxes were mines) or a sort of mock attack (the boxes were just little boxes) meant to test how U.S. vessels react.

Meanwhile, the Iranians say that there were no aggressive maneuvers, no boxes, no threatening radio transmissions.

Perhaps most intriguing about the episode is that Pentagon officials say that the five speedboats belong to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Last year, the administration focused on the Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force as the ones responsible for arming Iraqi insurgents -- and made quite an effort to argue that the Quds Force was necessarily acting with the authorization of the Iranian government. In October, the Bush administration imposed sanctions on the Revolutionary Guard and the Quds Force. So maybe this is just another chapter in that back and forth. Or maybe it's something more.

Right after last night's Republican Fox News debate, Frank Luntz appeared to demonstrate that, based on his focus group of New Hampshire Republicans, Mitt Romney was the big winner.

But as Josh pointed out, the group's unanimity of opinion and blind insistence on Romney's rout had a suspicious air to it.

Along those lines, a number of bloggers have pointed out that one man in the focus group actually appeared in a prior Luntz Fox News focus group four months prior. Both were gatherings in New Hampshire (at the same Manchester, New Hampshire restaurant, it appears) of approximately 30 New Hampshire voters -- according to the lead-in last night, Luntz's group were registered Republican undecideds. Although Luntz doesn't identify the man by name in both segments, he's easily identifiable through his appearance and voice -- either that, or he's got an identical twin.

While this isn't necessarily evidence that Luntz has used actors or plants in his segments, it "says there's something sloppy at best about his recruitment process, Mark Blumenthal, a veteran of the polling business and founder of Pollster.com, told me. "If you see a respondent show up twice, it's a sign of professional respondents leaking through."

But when I spoke to Luntz today, he said that he uses repeat participants by design. In a segment to air on Fox News tonight, he said, there should be a "bunch of people" who had been in prior focus groups, some of them participating as early as May of last year. "It allows me to see how people's opinion have changed over time," he explained. "I'm trying to isolate that moment that made the difference."

When asked about the charge that he'd used actors or plants, his already rapid speech accelerated: "That's ridiculous.... I'm sure that the person who said that doesn't have a PhD, probably doesn't have a masters, and doesn't know what they're talking about."

He's conducting a "study of human behavior" with his dial tests (a mechanism that registers viewers' moment by moment reaction) he said, not a traditional focus group. And if you "want to understand how people change their points of view, you have to ask them over time and multiple times. This is how social biologists do it. This is anthropology.... If you're goal is to study how opinions change over time, of course you've got to call them back."

Read more »

Say it ain't so, John!

The California Majority Report reports that Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA), one of the long-time subjects of the Jack Abramoff investigation, "will announce that he will not seek re-election." That could come as soon as this week, reports John Bresnahan of The Politico. Back in September, Doolittle proclaimed "I am running again. Period."

Ever since Doolittle refused to plead guilty, the Justice Department has evidently been building a bribery case against him. Doolittle, meanwhile, has made quite a pastime of demanding that the DoJ fish or cut bait. All that tough talk hasn't helped his fundraising, and his campaign has increasingly been drained by payments to his wife for her purported fundraising work. Things just aren't like they used to be during the glory days before Abramoff's downfall.

From Newsweek:

George Tenet, who was CIA director when the tapes were made, will be represented by former FBI general counsel Howard Shapiro. Roy Krieger, a Washington lawyer who has represented about 100 CIA employees, says that two agency officers have approached him about representation, though neither has retained him yet.

For the CIA spooks involved, cost is a serious issue. Krieger says legal expenses for each employee could reach "hundreds of thousands" of dollars; the CIA will not foot the bill. In anticipation of just such a scenario, however, the agency some years ago began encouraging its employees to purchase special liability-insurance policies from Wright & Co., a Virginia firm that specializes in coverage for government investigators. A Wright spokesman had no response to questions about whether claims have been filed for legal fees in connection with the tapes inquiry.

Apparently the Pakistani government is having trouble selling their sun roof assassination theory to American officials. From The Wall Street Journal:

U.S. intelligence officials and diplomats increasingly believe former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto died from a gunshot wound, placing Washington at odds with Islamabad over the cause of her death.

The government of President Pervez Musharraf has held Ms. Bhutto died on Dec. 27 from a fractured skull, sustained when the shock wave from a suicide bombing threw the opposition politician against the lever of her vehicle's sunroof.

But U.S. officials said information independently gathered from Pakistan, including eyewitness accounts and video footage, left few doubts that Ms. Bhutto was shot by one or more assailants. "There is a consensus emerging that she must have been shot," said a U.S. administration official working in Pakistan.

Call it a lack of imagination.

Guantanamo Bay is not the only overseas military prison that is posing problems for the the Bush administration. The secretive American detention center at the Bagram military base – constructed as a temporary site after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 – now holds 630 prisoners. The International Committee of the Red Cross alleges that some detainees are subjected to cruel treatment that violates the Geneva Conventions. (Herald-Tribune)

Former White House economic adviser Lawrence B. Lindsey lost his job shortly after he broke from White House talking points and estimated (six months before the U.S. invasion of Iraq) that the war would cost between $100 billion and $200 billion. Lindsey’s new book What a President Should Know . . . But Most Learn Too Late explains how he came up with that number and admits that putting "out only a best-case scenario without preparing the public for some worse eventuality was the wrong strategy to follow.” (Washington Post)

The judge in the case of former Allegheny County coroner Cyril Wecht has agreed to drop 43 of the 84 charges against Wecht and ruled that they cannot be refiled. Wecht's defense attorneys, who have argued that Wecht is being prosecuted for political reasons, objected to the prosecution's original motion to drop the charges, which would have allowed them to be filed again at a later date. Last week an appeals court refused to grant the defense's request to remove the judge from the case. (Pittsburgh Tribune)

Read more »

It's pretty fitting that one day after one of the biggest events this campaign season, the New Hampshire primaries, the Supreme Court will be hearing arguments on a case that could significantly affect the 2008 election: the fight over Indiana's voter ID law.

The issues behind Crawford v. Marion County Election Board are pretty simple to understand. The Indiana law, passed by Republicans, prevents citizens from voting without a picture ID, and they say it will stop voter fraud, though they can't point to a single instance of criminal voter impersonation occurring in the state. It is a solution in search of a problem.

Or rather, it's a solution to a very different problem. In this issue of New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin writes that the voter ID laws, which Republicans have pushed in states throughout the country, are a reminder that, though racism has disappeared from mainstream political discourse, "racial discrimination itself" has not been banished from politics:

“Let’s not beat around the bush,” Terence T. Evans, the dissenting Court of Appeals judge in the Indiana case, slyly wrote. “The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly-veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic.” He’s not the only one to notice: the three federal judges who approved the Indiana law were appointed by a Republican President; the lone dissenter was appointed by a Democrat. It was also Republican-dominated legislatures that produced the Indiana and Georgia laws, both of which were signed by Republican governors.

Who are the “certain folks,” in Judge Evans’s delicate phrase, that the Indiana law is trying to discourage? The best answer can be found in a friend-of-the-court brief in the case filed by twenty-nine leading historians and scholars of voting rights. They concluded that the Indiana law belongs to a malign tradition in “this nation’s history of disfranchising people of color and poor whites under the banner of ‘reform.’ ” Such measures as the poll tax and literacy tests, they write, were “billed as anti-fraud or anti-corruption devices; yet through detailed provisions within them, they produced a discriminatory effect (often intended) within the particular historical context.” So it will be in Indiana, where the law creates a series of onerous barriers to voting.

And don't forget that the United States government, by way of the Justice Department, has weighed in to support the Republican side of the argument. As election law expert Rick Hasen has pointed out, the fight over voter ID laws has been strictly partisan -- Republicans push and support the laws, Republican-appointed judges uphold them, and recently Republican secretaries of state have written amicus briefs in support of Indiana's law. So the Bush Administration's decision shouldn't surprise.

The court will deliver a decision by late June, in time to affect the November elections. As for what's likely to happen Wednesday, Toobin himself is not optimistic about the outcome of the arguments:

As a general matter, in recent years the Court has been reluctant to find what is charged in this case: a violation of the constitutional guarantee of equal protection of the laws. (The notable exception, to belabor the issue, was for a plaintiff named George W. Bush.) In the end, though, it will not be the judiciary that rescues democracy; whatever the obstacles, the problems with the ballot box must be solved at the ballot box. In the end, though, it will not be the judiciary that rescues democracy; whatever the obstacles, the problems with the ballot box must be solved at the ballot box.

Note: Here's The New York Times' rundown of the case.