Prairie Weather

Details, details

Canada says it has discovered a strain of bird flu among healthy wild birds in the provinces of Quebec and Manitoba. An official said it would take a number of days to determine whether the birds are carrying the strain of the avian flu that is lethal to humans... here...

A pastor was electrocuted during a baptism in Waco, Texas, after grabbing a microphone while partially submerged. Rev Kyle Lake, 33, was standing in a small pool used for baptisms at the University Baptist Church when he was electrocuted on Sunday morning. Rev Lake reached out to adjust a nearby microphone and... here...

A conservative group pushing for a $4-billion security fence along the Mexican border has run a TV ad showing the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center while claiming "illegal immigration from Mexico provides easy cover for terrorists."...  But statistics show twice as many come across the Canadian border. And so far we have little or no evidence that any of them are terrorists. Furthermore,  all the 9/11 hijackers had visas and entered the US legally , mostly through Orlando, Miami, Washington, or New York. None came across the Mexican border.... here...

A 14-year-old Washington boy was charged with sexual harassment after hanging around outside a school homecoming dance dressed as a penis... here...

William Shatner passed a kidney stone... here...

CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News provided imbalanced coverage of the October 31 nomination of federal appeals court judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the Supreme Court -- Republicans, conservatives, and pro-Alito guests dominated the networks' coverage; far outnumbering Democrats, progressives, and Alito critics.... here...

Libby has a lot to live up to as a conservative author of erotic fiction. As an article in SPY magazine pointed out in 1988, from Safire (“[She] finally came to him in the bed and shouted ‘Arragghrrorwr!’ in his ear, bit his neck, plunged her head between his legs and devoured him”) to Buckley (“I’d rather do this with you than play cards”) to Liddy (“T’sa Li froze, her lips still enclosing Rand’s glans . . .”) to Ehrlichman (“ ‘It felt like a little tongue’ ”) to O’Reilly (“Okay, Shannon Michaels, off with those pants”), extracurricular creative writing has long been an outlet for ideas that might not fly at, say, the National Prayer Breakfast. In one of Lynne Cheney’s books, a Republican vice-president dies of a heart attack while having sex with his mistress... here...

The increasingly out-of-control House of Representatives has made the threat to our system of justice even greater by inserting a raft of provisions to enlarge the scope of the federal death penalty. In a breathtaking afterthought at the close of debate, the House voted to triple the number of terrorism-related crimes carrying the death penalty. The House also voted to allow judges to reduce the size of juries that decide on executions, and even to permit prosecutors to try repeatedly for a death sentence when a hung jury fails to vote for death... here...

It is good to have my friend back in the Oval Office. I say, "my friend," because it seems like we see each other a lot... here...

"Scott, congratulations on your very calm and unflappable demeanor. I'm just wondering, are you happy in what you do...?"... here...

US planning for Cuba's "transition" after the demise of Fidel Castro has entered a new stage, with a special office for reconstruction inside the US State Department preparing for the "day after", when Washington will try to back a democratic government in Havana. The inter-agency effort, which also involves the Defense Department, recognises that the Cuba transition may not go peacefully and that the US may have to launch a nation-building exercise... Wholesale engagement is envisaged post-Castro, including immediate assistance so that "schools are kept open and provided with new instructional material and staff"... here...

Karl Rove cleverly offered up Harriet Miers to depress the base, so that when we got Alito, everyone was four feet off the ground ecstatic, as opposed to saying, "that’s what we reasonably expected." They didn’t plan it this way, of course. But that’s the effect it has. Everybody is so pleased, everybody is so happy. Alito is one of seven or eight Bo Derek 10s that were out there, for the purposes of judicial philosophy... here...

An RAF officer is about to be tried before a military court for refusing to return to Iraq because the war is illegal. Malcolm Kendall-Smith is the first British officer to face criminal charges for challenging the legality of the invasion and occupation... here...

The long nightmare won't really be over until journalists ask themselves: what did we know, when did we know it, and why didn't we tell the public?... here...

Questions not raised

About the only good that could have come out of Berlusconi's visit to the White House today would have been a couple of pointed questions from reporters about the Niger documents scandalo.   

But the press conference was cancelled.*

What with Alito and all.

I agree with Josh Marshall and mourn the loss of opportunity.

*Update:  Josh Marshall reports today (11/1) the following:

I reported that the Bush-Berlusconi press conference had been cancelled and I suggested that it had happened because both were worried about taking questions about the brewing Niger-Uranium controversy. The two also refused to take any questions when they appeared in front of reporters before their meeting in the White House. The report of the cancellation came out of the Italian press. But I'm now told, by a reliable source, that there was actually no press conference scheduled. I think what this means is that the decision not to hold a press conference was made before it ever made it on to the schedules handed out to reporters. So I think the underlying issue is the same. But I just wanted to clear that up.

In his following post, he finds there is more (and also nothing) said about the Berlusconi visit.

The big fight

Alito's decisions, particularly those in the areas of women's right and civil rights in general, are important in themselves.  But for me the most interesting aspects of this nomination are

1) the fact that, in their treatment of Miers, the right wing has sanctified the "litmus test."  Religious belief and specific questions about attitudes towards abortion are no longer off limits; and:

2) there is probably going to be one helluva fight.  That fight will be divisive, probably result in use of the "nuclear" -- excuse me "constitutional nuclear" -- option and will probably reunite the fragmented right.

The question is, how can Democrats use the battle to not only to solidify and expand  their support but to muddy and even destroy the hoped-for unity in the Republican Party.  After all,  Democrats in the Senate handle this fight may well decide 2006 Congressional elections.  Are Reid and Kennedy the strategists needed for the job?

And one more question.  I join many who believe the Republican Party doesn't want Roe overturned -- recognizing that it could decimate support for the Party in the future.  How can the left use that ambivalence to disconcert the Republicans and fracture their political support?

Disinfo

Watch for this latest piece of right wing disinfo:  the "nuclear option" has become the "constitutional nuclear option" and sometimes just the "constitutional option."  The memo from Republican leaders to the media must have gone out about an hour before Alito's nomination was announced.

Samuel Alito Jr. nominated

... The 55-year-old jurist was Bush's favorite choice of the judges in the last set of deliberations but he settled instead on someone outside what he calls the "judicial monastery," the officials said. Bush believes that Alito has not only the right experience and conservative ideology for the job, but he also has a temperament suited to building consensus on the court. A former prosecutor, Alito has experience off the bench that factored into Bush's thinking, the officials said.

While Alito is expected to win praise from Bush's allies on the right, Democrats have served notice that his nomination would spark a partisan brawl. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, said Sunday that Alito's nomination would "create a lot of problems."...

So consistently conservative, Alito has been dubbed "Scalito" or "Scalia-lite" by some lawyers because his judicial philosophy invites comparisons to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. But while Scalia is outspoken and is known to badger lawyers, Alito is polite, reserved and even-tempered... ABC News...

In another context, Billmon points to a piece by Victor Davis Hanson in the National Review, posted several days ago:

For good or evil, George W. Bush will have to cross the Rubicon on judicial nominations, politicized indictments, Iraq, the greater Middle East, and the constant frenzy of the Howard Dean wing of the Democratic party — and now march on his various adversaries as never before. He can choose either to be nicked and slowly bled to death in his second term, or to bare his fangs and like some cornered carnivore start slashing back.  

Before Harriet Miers, conservatives pined for a Chief Justice Antonin Scalia, with a Justice Roberts and someone like a Janice Rogers Brown rounding out a battle-hardened and formidable new conservative triad. They relished the idea of a Scalia frying Joe Biden in a televised cross-examination or another articulate black female nominee once again embarrassing a shrill Barbara Boxer — all as relish to brilliantly crafted opinions scaling back the reach of activist judges. That was not quite to be.

But now, with the Mierss[sic] withdrawal, the president might as well go for broke to reclaim his base and redefine his second term as one of principle rather than triangulating politics. So he should call in top Republican senators and the point people of his base — never more needed than now — and get them to agree on the most brilliant, accomplished, and conservative jurist possible. He should then ram the nominee through, in a display to the American people of the principles at stake.

Alito is known to be "meticulous and quiet" -- and for a decision requiring women to consult their husbands before having an abortion.

But I wouldn't mind seeing an attempt to fry the slippery Senator Biden even if it did require turning on a TV.

Yellow cake, Feith, Ghorbanifar, and that Rome meeting

Josh Micah Marshall has been sniffing out* the truth about Niger yellow-cake for well over a year with his colleagues, Laura Rozen and Paul Glastris.

It's as well to keep an eye on Talking Points Memo for developments in this story, a story which reaches back to Iran-Contra, and which has implications I believe Patrick Fitzgerald has had to confront during his investigation. 

Whether Fitzgerald backs off or not, bloggers (myself included) who have pursued this story in the past will undoubtedly continue to pursue it, with or without the knowledge that the Justice Department is also doing so.

The plot is thick with serious implications for the Bush presidency -- for both Bush presidencies, père et fils  -- and for the many neo-conservative advisors and officials who have served in Republican administrations since the early '70's.  The roots run wide and deep on this story.  One can see why George W. Bush, early in his presidency, would use an Executive Order to close off presidential documents from public view.

Late last night, Josh Marshall posted another piece on the Niger documents mystery and wrote this:

...Quite a lot of information seemed to suggest that the Italian government played a large role in the story of the Niger forgeries, even if it might be an innocent or unwitting one. Yet neither the CIA nor the FBI, a knowledgeable source told me, seemed intent getting to the bottom of what had happened.

In addition to these clues, there was one more piece of information. And here is where the two streams of information I noted above flowed together. A US government source pointed me toward a series of suspicious points of overlap between the forgeries story and a series of unauthorized meetings between Italian intelligence figures, two Pentagon employees working under Doug Feith, other Americans and the disgraced Iran-Contra figure Manucher Ghorbanifar. (These meetings were the subject of an article ("Iran-Contra II?") I published with Laura Rozen and Paul Glastris in the Washington Monthly in early September 2004.) Around the same time, another source -- this one outside the US government – told me a murky series of details about the meetings which purported to connect them to the emergence of the forgeries in Rome in October 2002.

Here's the Marshall, Rozen, Glastris article from late August 2004

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* "Sniffing out."  We are obsessed with sniffing in this household this morning having dealt, late Saturday night, with a dog who had his first tangle with a skunk.  He continues to carry around a smell which repeated baths using all kinds of "sure-fire" skunk remedies won't kill.  This morning, at 5:30, I managed to corner the skunk in the garage -- dog having gotten sprayed again -- and get in an incompetent, hysterical whack or two with a broom  The skunk spat and hissed like an angry cat, but remained sassy and completely unfazed.  Shot-gun?  Trap?  What's next?