THIS MODERN WORLD

Slowly, the corporate media begin to pay attention. There’s the Newsweek story, of course, which is less specific than Lawrence O’Donnell indicated each week, but still alludes strongly to Rove’s involvement:

Now the story may be about to take another turn. The e-mails surrendered by Time Inc., which are largely between Cooper and his editors, show that one of Cooper’s sources was White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, according to two lawyers who asked not to be identified because they are representing witnesses sympathetic to the White House. Cooper and a Time spokeswoman declined to comment. But in an interview with NEWSWEEK, Rove’s lawyer, Robert Luskin, confirmed that Rove had been interviewed by Cooper for the article. It is unclear, however, what passed between Cooper and Rove.

It also got a mention in the Times over the weekend, though admittedly buried deep in a story about Bush’s July 4 travels:

Karl Rove, his senior adviser, rode the flight from Washington to West Virginia but did not respond to requests for an interview over his reported role in a controversy that threatens to put two reporters in jail. Newsweek had reported over the weekend that Mr. Rove had talked to Matthew Cooper of Time magazine for an article about Valerie Plame, a C.I.A. operative whose name was illegally disclosed by an unidentified White House official in a case now under investigation.

The Newsweek article did not identify Mr. Rove as that source, but Bush critics have been eager to tie him to the leak. Outside the presidential rally in Morgantown, one protester made reference to the case, holding a sign that read: “Jail Karl Rove.”

The Times also had a story this morning about Wilson and Plame which doesn’t mention Rove at all, but I wouldn’t read too much into that just yet. The Times is always initially reluctant to acknowledge other people’s scoops, and anyway, the piece reads like something that was in the can last week so somebody could take the holiday weekend off (it’s datelined July 1).

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One of the most giggle-inducing talking points of this scandal came early on, as right-wing bloggers in places like Tennessee and Wisconsin began to suddenly pose as well-connected Beltway insiders, assuring their readers that “everyone already knew that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent!” Well, I’m not as in-the-know as our right-wing blogging friends, but I did have coffee not long ago with a writer whose name you would almost certainly recognize (given that you are the sort of person who visits online magazines like this one), and interestingly, this writer — who is genuinely privvy to DC insider gossip — did not put Rove at the very top of the suspects list. Which is only to point out that Rove’s guilt in this matter has apparently not been the conventional wisdom in DC that you might suppose. So who knows what surprises await us?

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While I’m on the topic, I’m reminded of the second most giggle-inducing talking point regarding Wilson, which was the argument that Bush did not specifically mention Niger in the State of the Union address in which he famously warned of yellowcake uranium being funnelled from an African country to Iraq. The implication apparently being that the yellowcake allegation was true, it just wasn’t coming from Niger, but rather some unspecified other African country…the name of which, despite all the grief the Bush administration took for incompetence and/or lies in the runup to war, was never announced, leaked, or even hinted at by the Administration or any of its apologists.

Occam’s Razor is in no danger of being blunted due to overuse by these people.

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Update…more from O’Donnell, who clearly wants to own this story:

(Rove’s attorney) Luskin then launched what sounds like an I-did-not-inhale defense. He told Newsweek that his client “never knowingly disclosed classified information.” Knowingly. That is the most important word Luskin said in what has now become his public version of the Rove defense.

Not coincidentally, the word ‘knowing’ is the most important word in the controlling statute ( U.S. Code: Title 50: Section 421). To violate the law, Rove had to tell Cooper about a covert agent “knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent’s intelligence relationship to the United States.”

So, Rove’s defense now hangs on one word — he “never knowingly disclosed classified information.” Does that mean Rove simply didn’t know Valerie Plame was a covert agent? Or does it just mean that Rove did not know that the CIA was “taking affirmative measures” to hide her identity?

In Luskin’s next damage control session with the press, let’s see if any reporter can get him to drop the word ‘knowingly’ from the never-disclosed-classified-information bit.

Astonishingly, I agree with Tierney this morning. Responses to Kelo seem mostly to be breaking down on a liberal/conservative split, with liberals on the approving, or at least ambivalent, side. Which, I have to admit, puzzles me. Personally, I’m glad to see so many of our conservative friends finally beginning to develop a healthy distust of government/corporate collusion (now if only they’d extend it to, say, Halliburton’s role in Iraq). I’m just not sure why anyone on my side of the fence would feel anything but disgust. Kelo is essentially a decision in favor of trickle-down economics: clear out the poor folks, bring in some businesses, and if all works according to plan the new tax revenue will make it all worthwhile. But these things often do not work according to plan:

Frank Bugryn Jr.’s family, for instance, owned about 30 acres in Bristol when the city told him in the mid-1990’s that it wanted an industrial park on his property. Ms. Bugryn’s parents had bought the property in 1939 and left it to him and his three siblings in 1970, he said. Mr. Bugryn, 83, a retired brass-mill foreman, planted about 500 Christmas trees on the property about 10 years ago and watched them grow 20 to 30 feet high. When the government officials came knocking, they told him they wanted to put a distribution center on his property. He was totally unprepared.

“I never though that this would happen,” he said.

Mr. Bugryn fought the condemnation in court. When he lost, the United States Supreme Court would hear the case. The city paid $1.8 million for the property, and about $100,000 for the five-bedroom house Mr. Bugryn built, and then bulldozed it, he said. He now lives with his wife, Mary, in a one-story ranch house in Bristol.

“My sisters and I were hoping to live there until we passed away,” he said. “I wanted to die there and give it to the kids.”

Nothing has yet been built on the property. Jonathan Rosenthal, executive director of the Bristol Redevelopment Authority, said the legal battle with the Bugryns delayed the project. The anchor tenant, which had agreed to allow the Bugryns to live on the property for the rest of their lives as the industrial park was built, dropped out of the project while the fight dragged on, Mr. Rosenthal said. The authority received a $1.2 million federal grant to prepare the property for development and has been showing it to potential tenants, he said.

Here’s how the SCOTUS fight‘s gonna go down (via Matt) :

While some focused on whom Bush’s choice will be, others mapped out strategy for the period after he decides. Senate Republicans made plans to begin hearings as quickly as possible after the nomination, focused not on the candidate’s positions on hot-button issues but on legal credentials.

A Republican planning document provided to The Washington Post described the need to avoid disclosing the nominee’s “personal political views or legal thinking on any issue.”

This is the exact same tactic they’ve taken with the seven (of more than 200) judicial nominees that the Democrats blocked. In the face of perfectly acceptable questioning, they refuse to respond and declare the Democrats to be obstructionists. They’ll probably get away with it this time too, since even when the Democratic cooalition is its strongest, there are still enough DINOs in the Senate to break a filibuster.

The only way the GOP can get the American people to go along with their plans is through lies, rhetorical misdirection, and stonewalling. Cowards.

He beat me to it. I just want to add, per his penultimate paragraph, that given the amount of noise Bill O’Reilly in particular has been making lately about liberal media types “undermining the war effort,” I eagerly await Mr. No Spin Zone’s impassioned denunciations of Karl Rove. Frankly, the only intellectually consistent thing O’Reilly could do would be to demand Rove’s resignation and imprisonment, as frequently and bombastically as possible.

…and then there’s this.

Things could get interesting very quickly.

It’s official! Karl Rove is the man who leaked the identity of an undercover CIA agent who specialized in weapons of mass destruction :

I revealed in yesterday’s taping of the McLaughlin Group that Time magazine’s emails will reveal that Karl Rove was Matt Cooper’s source. I have known this for months but didn’t want to say it at a time that would risk me getting dragged into the grand jury.

McLaughlin is seen in some markets on Friday night, so some websites have picked it up, including Drudge, but I don’t expect it to have much impact because McLaughlin is not considered a news show and it will be pre-empted in the big markets on Sunday because of tennis.

Since I revealed the big scoop, I have had it reconfirmed by yet another highly authoritative source. Too many people know this. It should break wide open this week. I know Newsweek is working on an ‘It’s Rove!’ story and will probably break it tomorrow.

In other news, Aldrich Ames is spending the rest of his life in prison for revealing the names of undercover CIA agents.

Considering the enormity of the nuclear proliferation threat that we currently face and the fact that this leak happened in the middle of a war that was ostensibly about stopping the spread of WMD’s, Karl Rove deserves nothing less than to join Benedict Arnold and Julius Rosenberg in the history books as men whose names are synonymous with “traitor”. And anyone who helped cover up for these crimes should join Rove in jail or on the gallows. This not only means the occupants of the West Wing (every one of whom should be subjected to a polygraph test) but the partisan cowards in Congress who have shirked their constitutional duty in order to protect a treasonous scumbag.

As far as the right-wingers are concerned, I’ll be eagerly awaiting your condemnation of Rove. Considering how quick you are to judge any liberal criticism of the execution of these twin wars as “undermining the war effort”, you’re now faced with evidence that one of the most powerful Republicans in Washington actively worked to undermine the effort to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Motives are irrelevant (both Rove’s for leaking and yours for helping cover-up). If you’re serious about the very real threat of terrorism to the United States, then you’ve got to be honest enough to admit that spreading the name of CIA agents through the press could seriously harm our ability to stop terrorists from getting their hands on nuclear material.

Still waiting for more evidence? Well, let’s just hope the smoking gun against Karl Rove and his accomplices doesn’t come in the form of a mushroom cloud…