The WaPo reports that all the firms suspected in the emerging UN "oil-for-food" scandal have been named. dKos readers may recall that originally no US firms were named due to "right of privacy," while--no surprise--names of European firms, especially French, that had done business with Iraq were released. Now four US firms have been identified:

The list includes direct sales to Texaco, which bought $28.3 million in oil, and Mobil Export Corp., which paid $152 million. Purchases by Chevron Products Co. and Phoenix came to $140.2 million and $162.25 million, respectively. The overall U.S. stake in Iraq's oil market was far greater. But U.S. oil companies, who consumed more than 40 percent of Iraq's exported oil, were forced to purchase through foreign traders.

These four are probably the ones Andrea Mitchell alluded to recently as "R" (ie, Republican") Texas oil companies who'd done illegal business with Iraq. Another question arises: are companies who purchased oil through foreign traders also culpable here?

There was an earlier diary post about Steve Kurtz, an artist detained by the FBI in Buffalo for suspicion of bio-terrorism. I write to give some more background about Kurtz and his art group Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) and to urge dKos to support their legal defense fund. Kurtz's wife, Hope Kurtz, passed away from a heart attack in their home, where authorities found art materials they mistook for bio-weapons.

In seeking charges against these artists, the FBI is seeking charges against an influential group of social activists and theorists. To put things in perspective: I regularly teach courses on civil disobedience, where students study CAE alongside Thoreau, Gandhi, King, and ACT-UP. The significance of CAE: digitizing and globalizing civil disobedience.

Kossacks might be especially interested in CAE's first two books (available free online), The Electronic Disturbance and Electronic Civil Disobedience, both from the mid-1990s. In them, CAE argues that in becoming electronic, power has gone nomadic and virtual, thus making traditional civil disobedience increasingly ineffective. CAE thus calls for developing electronic forms of civil disobedience. Significantly, a more recent CAE text, Digital Resistance, contains a chapter that analyzes the increasing tendency in public discourse to treat civil disobedience as a form of terrorism. Patriot Acts I and II, as many folks know, introduce measures to counter "domestic terrorism": I suspect CAE may be looking at such charges.

After learning that NPR had announced that it would be reassigning Bob Edwards and then reading his critical speech on the media given at UK (posted here), I wrote the NPR Ombudsman stating that I would no longer donate to them, also saying that if they replaced him with Cokie, I would urge all my friends, family, and colleagues to stop donating, too.

In response, I received an email note from Bob Edwards, though sent via NPR Communications.

Newsday reports that the grand jury investigating the Plame affair has subpoenaed the phone records of (drum roll, please) AIR FORCE ONE. (What is it with W and airplanes, for christ's sake?) But wait: there's more (cue the frog march music, which seems to be becoming an opera):

"Also sought in the wide-ranging document requests contained in three grand jury subpoenas to the Executive Office of President George W. Bush are records created in July by the White House Iraq Group, a little-known internal task force established in August 2002 to create a strategy to publicize the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

"And the subpoenas asked for a transcript of a White House spokesman's press briefing in Nigeria, a list of those attending a birthday reception for a former president, and, casting a much wider net than previously reported, records of White House contacts with more than two dozen journalists and news media outlets."
 

CNN reports that some families of 9-11 victims are upset with the new Bush ads using images of the event. In addition to the online story, CNN showed the ads on one of its news shows and received angry phone calls and email. Karen Hughes is doing the rounds on the morning news shows, defending the ads.

In another Bush media coup, US Newwire reports that the "General  President of the International Association of Fire Fighters, AFL-CIO (IAFF), Harold Schaitberger, issued the following statement today after President Bush unveiled new political ads that use images of fire fighters in September 11, 2001 attacks for political gain."

Does everything Bush touches turn to shit, or what?

This just in: NYTimes reports that the CIA has launched an enquiry into Bush's daily briefings, what intelligence is "read" was to him in lead up to the war. That would be Condi's responsibility, no? Prepare the plank.

What with the Plame affair: make that "planks."

Spring massacre, anyone?

There's an interesting story in the Post today about Colin Powell's testimony before the House International Relations Committee. Under grilling by House Democrats, Powell's calm and patient demeanor gave way to something else.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, a retired four-star general known for his even temperament, paused yesterday during a congressional hearing to berate a Hill staffer for shaking his head as Powell offered a defense of his prewar statements on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction. [...] "Are you shaking your head for something, young man, back there?" Powell asked. "Are you part of these proceedings?"

Then, when Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) suggested that Pres. Bush had been AWOL, Powell snapped back, "I won't dignify your comments about the president because you don't know what you are talking about."

Let the backfilling begin.

The NY Times and the BBC are reporting that US intelligence has found a document addressed to al Qaeda leaders asking for assistance in starting sectarian violence in Iraq.

Several things are worth noting about this story and its spin.

                                                                 

After reading through last nights diaries by David and Paleo and reading through the many comments, I 'd like to rework an image I dropped somewhere but will pick it up again here.

For a moment, forget who's on the surfboards (Clark, Dean, Edwards, Kerry, etc): there's a tidal wave of activated Dems out there. Some might call these voters sheep or lemmings or whatever but DEMS ARE VOTING IN RECORD NUMBERS. There is MUCH more excitement about this race than in 2000. This is a good sign, both for Dems and for anyone who wants BushCo defeated.

CNN is now reporting that a grand jury has been convened for the Plame affair.

Just when you remembered it had been forgotten.

Bill Kristol has given a wonderful gift to Howard Dean on one of the most amazing days of his amazing campaign: a thoughtful and overwhelmingly positive op/ed piece in the WP. At least two things make Kristol's article significant (I say "at least two" to encourage folks to add others).

Dana Milbank has this story comparing George W. Bush to Richard M. Nixon. Milbank cites Nixon historian David Greenberg, who argues that the similarities are stylistic, not ideological, Bush II being more Reaganesque in his conservatism. However, there are also some substantive overlaps noted as well, such as Nixon's and W's reliance on key advisors rather than the Cabinet.

Further, given all the comparisons--right, wrong, misleading, and insightful--between Vietnam and Iraq, this Nixon-Bush pairing may have some useful legs (and lame ones as well). At the same time, it can produce some telling contrasts. For instance: Nixon micro-managed his way into Watergate; Bush seems buffered in a Reagan-like "relaxed management style." Nixon had little use for his VP; Bush, well, seems to answer to Cheney. Nixon also had to contend with a hostile Democratic Senate and House; Bush has had two rubber stamps. Nixon went to China to meet Mao: where can Bush go--to the Afghan-Pakistan border to meet Osama or to Tehran to meet Khamenei?

But Milbank also stresses a potential problem shared by Nixon and Bush: avoiding the press. Folding the press into the mix: Nixon had Woodward and Bernstein, Bush has ...
Milbank and Frankel?

In his latest NYT op-ed, "Mistakes Were Made," William Safire offers up a series of 10 potential "mea culpas" from various quarters, ranging from London's "amalgam of isolationists, pacifists and anti-Blair leftists" to Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and George Tenet to Wesley Clark to "hawkish idealists" like himself (for believing Iraqi scientists would come forward to reveal where biological weapons were hidden).

Kos readers can sort out for themselves the different levels of disingeniousness on which Safire operates in this latest article, as he mixes a few genuine insights with several backhanded "mea culpas," while at the same time continuing the serial leakage of the Feith-based memo that "reveals" the "decade-long links" between Osama and Saddam (a memo, Safire writes, that is now "the subject of an automatic leak investigation -- yet another time-wasting mistake").

But was it forgetfulness, cold calculation, or yet another mistake on Safire's part that, out of all the mistaken people he cites, one name is curiously missing? In the spirit of helping him correct this chilly and subtractive mistake, perhaps we should add to Safire's Mistakes. Here are some initial additions:

11. George W. Bush's campaign pledge that he'd be a "uniter, not a divider."
12. George W. Bush's SOTU allegation that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the US on the basis of (forged) documents from Niger.
13. George W. Bush's call to Iraqi insurgents to "bring'em on."
14. George W. Bush's infamous "Mission Accomplished" photo-prance atop the USS Lincoln.
15. George W. Bush's decision to deliver the world this ultimatum: "you're either with us or against us."

By adding this one name to Safire's list, we can also connect the dots to Bush 41, who as VP admitted that "mistakes were made" in connection to Iran-Contra, the Reagan-era scandal whose "government within a government" now appears quaint when compared to Bush 43's stovepiping, special planning, Halliburt'ing administration.

You've got to give the guy credit. David-I've-got-a-turd-in-my-pocket-Brooks produces the most consistently "no brain, no past" op/ed pieces of any writer in a major newspaper. As Todd Gitlin put it in his recent TAP essay "Brooks No Argument", "The smile that creeps over his lips as he gets off a mot of chastisement is pleasantly self-regarding: Look, ma, no guilt."

In his latest heap of creep, "Words into Plowshares", Brooks chastises both W and Dean for employing and encouraging discourse that will keep the US at war. "I don't mean the war in Iraq. I mean the war at home. I mean the partisan war between Republicans and Democrats that rages every day in Washington and produces behavior that would be unacceptable in any other arena of life.  I mean the war that poisons our airwaves, clogs up our best-seller lists and stagnates our politics."

While going after Bush, Brooks' real target, of course, is Dean, who according to him, is a "man [who] hates his opponents. His kind thrives only during times of domestic war." Oh yeah? Then how does one explain the Gingrich-Graham(s)-Atwater-Delay-Helms-Limbaugh-Phelps-O'Reilly-Coulter kind who have thrived so well for nigh on twenty years? Could it be, perhaps, that the right wing has been engaged in unacceptable behavior for all this time, with the help of wink-wink-nudge-nudge-got-a-turd-in-my-pocket types like David Brooks to provide it a "nice guy" appearence from time to time?

Dean may have some warts, but in case David Brooks hasn't noticed, the GOP has steadily grown into a pus-filled, bile-spewing, cancerous cesspool in which float little smiley-faced turds like himself. The Dems have taken the shit for far too long, and if their performance at the recent Republican sponsored, 40-hour spewathon in the Senate is any indication, they're starting to find their spines and their voice, and Dean is helping them learn to fight and speak out.

Earth to f**king Brooks: Dean isn't the only angry voice. Listen to Europe, the Mideast, Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Pacific. America could become the Nazi Germany of the 21st-century, led by Bush and turds like you, smiling all the way.

With what tone does one dissent to shit like that?

It had to come sooner or later, but Lieberman has decided on sooner and offered a "fresh start" by raising the flag against Dean's Confederate flag comment and foregoing of public financing in a new TV ad broadcast in New Hampshire.

Lieberman Ad Singles Out Democratic Rival
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 14, 2003

WASHINGTON (AP) -- In the first presidential campaign ad that singles out a Democratic rival, Joe Lieberman criticizes front-runner Howard Dean for his Confederate flag comment and his rejection of public financing.

Lieberman, trailing his major rivals in New Hampshire polls, does not mention Dean by name in the television spot that began airing there Friday. However, the subject is clear when he says, ``I don't think it's right to have raised a divisive symbol like the confederate flag. Or to give up on principles like limiting the amount of money in campaigns.''

Full story here.

As reported elsewhere, a  
new NH poll shows Lieberman trailing Dean by a couple of light years.

I've grown tired of responding to the charge that  "Dean will be McGovern all over again" by simply saying "no, he won't," "Dean's a moderate, not a liberal," etc. So rather than keep repeating these responses over and over again to Republicans and anti-Deaniacs, what if we stopped running away from the association and instead turned it to our advantage.

To that end, I ask fellow Kossacks to test out this meme/idea/response:

"McGovern is to Dean what Goldwater was to Reagan: a harbinger of things to come."

Wadda think?