THIS MODERN WORLD

I’m not doubting the reliability of Murray Waas or his sources, but I’m shocked that anyone would actually believe this crap :

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove personally assured President Bush in the early fall of 2003 that he had not disclosed to anyone in the press that Valerie Plame, the wife of an administration critic, was a CIA employee, according to legal sources with firsthand knowledge of the accounts that both Rove and Bush independently provided to federal prosecutors.

During the same conversation in the White House two years ago-occurring just days after the Justice Department launched a criminal probe into the unmasking of Plame as a covert agency operative-Rove also assured the president that he had not leaked any information to the media in an effort to discredit Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson. Rove also did not tell the president about his July 2003 a phone call with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper, a conversation that touched on the issue of Wilson and Plame.

I don’t doubt for a second that Murray Waas’ sources are correct about what the grand jury has been told, but let’s be serious here. What’s the more likely scenario? Karl Rove lying to the Patrick Fitgerald or George W. Bush?

Considering the connections the White House has at both the Justice Department and the CIA, they had to know that the shit was gonna hit the fan before the investigation officially started and that should have given them more than enough time to get their stories straight. After all, the first thing they teach you in “Criminal Conspiracies 101” is that you should always protect the boss. It’s especially true in this case since “the boss” has the power to pardon anyone who ends up getting in trouble along with the plausible deniability of being “in a bubble” and “completely retarded”. Assuming the indictments, trials, and convictions happen at a reasonable pace, we can start expecting those pardons after the mid-terms. Trust me, this article is just evidence that the fix has been in since Day One.

And before you starting thinking I’m a conspiracy theorist or something, I’ve got two words for you: Iran-Contra.

The Pentagon found nothing worth investigating in the story about the porn site trading free access to soldiers in return for their grisly war photos — but in what is described as an entirely unrelated development, the operator of the porn site has been arrested on obscenity charges.

Not that anyone wanted to, you know, shut the site down or anything.

The company making the Blinky and Sparky statues has gone out of business. I don’t really have any other details. They had a run of bad luck this summer, and over the past month or two they kind of stopped returning my emails.

I do know this: they created extraordinary things, and it’s really a goddamn shame that it played out this way.

If you managed to get your hands on one of the sets, well, treat them with care — they are now quite literally irreplacable. If you have an outstanding order that wasn’t filled, check with your credit card company, but my understanding is, no one was charged until the figures were shipped.

(Note to any other manufacturer who might be interested in picking up the baton here: whatever happened with this company, it wasn’t due to a lack of interest in these figures — the first run sold out immediately. From what I can piece together, the problem was probably too much interest — it overwhelmed them, they couldn’t keep up.)

All right, the hed’s a joke for Arrested Development fans — I really wish I’d thought of that name first. But it was the first thing that came to mind when a reader pointed me toward this wankery:

The liberals’ hope that Democrats can win back the presidency by drawing sharp ideological contrasts and energizing the partisan base is a fantasy that could cripple the party’s efforts to return to power, according to a new study by two prominent Democratic analysts.

In the latest shot in a long-running war over the party’s direction — an argument turned more passionate after Democrat John F. Kerry’s loss to President Bush last year — two intellectuals who have been aligned with former president Bill Clinton warn that the only way back to victory is down the center.

Democrats must “admit that they cannot simply grow themselves out of their electoral dilemmas,” wrote William A. Galston and Elaine C. Kamarck, in a report released yesterday. “The groups that were supposed to constitute the new Democratic majority in 2004 simply failed to materialize in sufficient number to overcome the right-center coalition of the Republican Party.”

Since Kerry’s defeat, some Democrats have urged that the party adopt a political strategy more like one pursued by Bush and his senior adviser, Karl Rove — which emphasized robust turnout of the party base rather than relentless, Clinton-style tending to “swing voters.”

But Galston and Kamarck, both of whom served in the Clinton White House, said there are simply not enough left-leaning voters to make this a workable strategy. In one of their more potentially controversial findings, the authors argue that the rising numbers and influence of well-educated, socially liberal voters in the Democratic Party are pulling the party further from most Americans.

Because, you know, Americans have just been trampling the weak and infirm in their rush to embrace the Democratic party these past five or six years. Damn those liberals for interfering!

But the most extraordinary bit comes in at the very end of the article:

They suggest that Democratic presidential candidates replicate Clinton’s tactics in 1992, when he broke with the party’s liberal base by approving the execution of a semi-retarded prisoner, by challenging liberal icon Jesse L. Jackson and by calling for an end to welfare “as we know it.”

And there you have the centrist wisdom in a nutshell: You want to win over some Republicans? Find yourself a retarded prisoner to execute.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 – The special prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case has summoned Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser, to return next week to testify to a federal grand jury in a step that could mean charges will be filed in the case, lawyers in the case said Thursday.

* * *
In recent days, Mr. Rove has been less visible than usual at the White House, fueling speculation that he is distancing himself from Mr. Bush or has been sidelined. But according to a senior administration official, Mr. Rove and his wife are on a long-planned trip visiting colleges with their teenage son. Several lawyers who have been involved in the case expressed surprise and concern over the recent turn of events and are increasingly convinced that Mr. Fitzgerald could be poised to charge someone with a crime for discussing with journalists the identity of a C.I.A. officer.

More.