Twice in my life I have lived in rural paradises like Montana and I learned that contentment only goes so far and what I thrive on is irritation and dread. You need the city for that. 1) A guy walks down the avenue with his baseball cap backward on his head and you want to shake him until his contacts fall out. He is in his early 30s but still thinks of himself as an 8-year-old. He is Narcissus in sneakers. 2) People who, instead of saying, "That is so cool," say, "How cool is that?" A way of expressing enthusiasm without sounding enthusiastic. How dumb is that? 3) The man in the airport who is yelling to himself like an escaped lunatic and then I notice the dangly cellphone hanging off him. 4) Shrieky women in restaurants. You sit down and look at the menu and suddenly you're in a National Geographic special about orangutans, but it's not, it's just Girlfriends' Night Out, and they've had their first glass of merlot and gotten nice and loosened up and every 30 seconds there is an outburst of screeching. The alpha female shrieks and then they all do. 5) When I say "Thank you" to a younger person and he says, "No problem." That's a brushoff, not an acknowledgement. He is supposed to smile and say, "You're welcome." Or he could say, "It was my pleasure." A thank-you should not be brushed away like a housefly. You could be lying unconscious on the floor, your arms and legs twitching uncontrollably, and a paramedic puts the paddles on your chest (Stand back!!) and saves your life and you say, "Thank you, thank you, thank you, a thousand thank-yous," and he says, "No problem." How inappropriate is that?

Pick up a newspaper and read about Congress and you will find yourself yelling at walls and terrifying the cat. Last week, Congress moved to suspend habeas corpus, one thing that distinguishes a civil society from a police state. Reaction was muted.

Then the Party of Family Values was revealed to have protected a sexual predator in its midst until finally a reporter asked some pointed questions and the honorable gentleman resigned and ran off to recovery camp. This level of hypocrisy takes a person's breath away. You thought that Abramoff, Norquist, Reed and DeLay had established new lows, but the elevator is still descending.

The power of righteous vexation is what keeps so many old Democrats hanging on in nursing homes long past the time they should have kicked off. Ancient crones from FDR's time are still walking the halls, kept alive by anger at what has been done to our country. Old conservationists, feminists, grizzled veterans of the civil rights era fight off melanoma, emphysema, Montezuma, thanks to the miracle drug of anger.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and former Attorney General John Ashcroft received the same CIA briefing about an imminent al-Qaida strike on an American target that was given to the White House two months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The State Department's disclosure Monday that the pair was briefed within a week after then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was told about the threat on July 10, 2001, raised new questions about what the Bush administration did in response, and about why so many officials have claimed they never received or don't remember the warning.

One official who helped to prepare the briefing, which included a PowerPoint presentation, described it as a "10 on a scale of 1 to 10" that "connected the dots" in earlier intelligence reports to present a stark warning that al-Qaida, which had already killed Americans in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and East Africa, was poised to strike again.

Richard Clarke was at the July 10, 2001 meeting.

It's confirmed now. Condi was warned. She ignored it.

Some people just have an instinct about danger, military matters and a need to pull the trigger. Some don't. Condi doesn't, yet she was our national security adviser, now secretary of state. Few people have been less qualified for such exalted situations. Blood is on her hands, though that blood is splattered across the Bush administration, with most of it resting on Bush himself.

President Bush, on a campaign swing in the West, is arguing the Democratic Party is weak-kneed on national security and shouldn't be trusted to hold the reins of Congress.

"If you listen closely to some of the leaders of the Democratic Party, it sounds like - it sounds like - they think the best way to protect the American people is, wait until we're attacked again," Bush said Monday at a $360,000 fundraiser in Reno, Nevada, for state Secretary of State Dean Heller's congressional campaign.

Bush delivered the administration's oft-repeated claims about the Democrats as it struggles with persistent questions about a recent intelligence report that suggests the Iraq war has helped recruit more terrorists, and a new book, "State of Denial," by journalist Bob Woodward that contends Bush misled the country about the war.

In the fine tradition of George W. Bush standing under the "Mission Accomplished" sign, or any one of the Katrina backdrops (where no expense was spared to bring power to an area for a photo op, and then just as quickly cut off), we now have the head of the NRCC, Tom Reynolds, using small prop children as set decoration in a press conference devoted to the topic of…yes, predatory online sexual solicitation of minors.

Reporter: Congressman, do you mind asking the children to leave the room so we can have a frank discussion of this, because it's an adult topic. It just doesn't seem appropriate to me.

Reynolds: I'll take your questions, but I'm not going to ask any of my supporters to leave.

Reporter: Who are the children, Congressman? Who are these children?

Reynolds: Pardon me?

Reporter: Who are these children?

Reynolds: Well, a number of them are from the community. There are several of the "thirty-something" set that are here and, uh, I've known them and I've known their children as they were born.

Reporter: Do you think it's appropriate for them to be listening to the subject matter though?

Reynolds: Sir, I'll be happy to answer your questions, I'm still, uh…

Dear Democratic candidate for Congress,

If your consultants don't take this story [1] and combine it with this one [2], then add numerous references to this unbelievably outrageous stunt [3] and urge you to flay the Republicans over their dangerous incompetence, their sheer inability to perceive reality, their malicious lies, and their unparalleled moral hypocrisy... If instead, your consultants insist that in the next month you ignore all these genuine gifts so you can re-emphasize prescription drugs or concerns over the economy, fire them immediately, sue them for fraud, then grab them by their throats, stick 'em in an empty room and force them to listen to the complete recorded works of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Over and over. For a week. No. Make it two weeks.

There were two pieces of paper out there, one that we knew about and we acted on; one that happened in 2003 we didn't know about, but somebody had it, and, you know, they're trying - and they drop it the last day of the session, you know, before we adjourn on an election year. Now, we took care of Mr. Foley. We found out about it, asked him to resign. He did resign. He's gone. We asked for an investigation. We've done that. We're trying to build better protections for these page programs.

But, you know, this is a political issue in itself, too, and what we've tried to do as the Republican Party is make a better economy, protect this country against terrorism - and we've worked at it ever since 9/11, worked with the president on it - and there are some people that try to tear us down. We are the insulation to protect this country, and if they get to me it looks like they could affect our election as well.

Are you a Bush hater, so blinded by "primal" loathing for the president that you automatically dismiss everything he says or does?

It's one of the far right's favorite weapons: If anyone criticizes the administration, brand them a Bush hater. The implication is that no sane or fair-minded person could be appalled by this administration's policies. Any criticism of Bush must be caused by what columnist Charles Krauthammer described as "contempt and disdain giving way to a hatred that is near pathological."

I don't love George Bush, it's true. No matter how many times I urge myself to hate the sin but love the sinner, I just can't get there. But I don't hate Bush, either. I hope that he'll never personally experience any of the "alternative methods" of interrogation he's so willing to use on U.S. detainees; I hope he'll never lose a child to war; I hope he'll never experience the soul-sapping poverty to which his administration has abandoned so many Americans.

No, I don't hate George Bush.

But I sure hate what he's done to my country.

I hate the fact that Bush and the radicals in his administration play politics with patriotism, casting critics of misguided legislation on military commissions and wiretapping as "soft" on terrorism and telling us, as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld recently did, that "moral or intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong can weaken the ability of free societies to persevere."

… I hate the fact that after promising to unite us, this president has done his best to divide us. In Bush's America, there are real Americans and then there are the blue states … and the Democrats.

… I hate the fact that to Bush, having "values" seems to mean absolutist opposition to gay marriage and abortion and indifference to many forms of suffering. In Bush's America, preventing gay marriage is apparently more important than preventing cruel or degrading treatment of detainees, or helping the millions of Americans who struggle to make it from paycheck to paycheck.

… I hate the fact that Bush's reckless foreign policies have led many of our closest allies to regard this nation with contempt and fear. Increasingly, people around the world see the U.S. as a threat to global stability, not as a source of stability.

… I hate the fact that to Bush, the phrase "the buck stops here" is apparently as quaint as the Geneva Convention. He has yet to come clean about the degree to which he overstated the charge that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or on the lack of a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. In Bush's America, being president means never having to say you're sorry.

The United States is in trouble. The spread of militant Islamic extremism and WMD will pose dangers for decades to come, and global warming, disease and poverty are all serious threats. If we're going to respond to those threats, we need to pull together - and we need to stop letting the far right get away with dismissing all criticism of the Bush administration as irrational "hatred."

Bob Woodward reports in his new book, State of Denial, that President Bush loves to swap fart jokes with Karl Rove. Before a morning senior staff meeting in 2005, Woodward reports, Bush schemed to have Rove sit in a chair that triggered some sort of high-tech whoopee cushion activated by remote control. The prank was postponed in deference to news of the al Qaeda bombings in London. When the gag was carried out two weeks later, the room erupted in riotous laughter while Rove hunted down the culprit.

Perhaps you are puzzled that the president of the United States would embrace so eagerly a genre of humor that the typical male Homo sapiens stops finding irresistible around the age of 12. But Woodward is not the first to report on Bush's fondness for fart jokes, and Bush is not the first member of his family to display this particular affliction.

A robust tradition of fart jokes exists within Anglo-Saxon culture, going back at least as far as Chaucer, and the fart joke holds a venerated place in English politics. Legend has it that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, once farted in the presence of Queen Elizabeth I, whereupon he went into exile for seven years. On his return, the queen reputedly greeted, "My lord, we had quite forgot the fart." The story is no likelier true than the oft-repeated claim that de Vere wrote Shakespeare's plays, but its persistence testifies to a certain fascination. In the early 17th century, a fart during debate in the House of Commons inspired a satirical poem called "The Parliament Fart." It enjoyed wide and enthusiastic circulation for the next half-century. James Joyce's Ulysses, which many consider the United Kingdom's greatest contribution to world literature in the 20th century, has been described - by one of its admirers - as "a giant fart joke" dressed up with "references to English literature and all kinds of obscure learning." (The word itself appears four times, according to Amazon's search engine.)

Turning to the Bush clan, we learn in Kitty Kelley's book The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty that New Yorker writer Brendan Gill was once a guest of George H.W. and Barbara Bush at their summer house in Kennebunkport, Maine. Stumbling through the place late at night in search of something to read, the only volume he could find was The Fart Book. (It was therefore likely in vain that Chairman Mao, attempting to shock Bush père when he was U.S. liaison to China, used a Chinese vulgarism that translated to "dog fart," according to Tom Wicker's George Herbert Walker Bush: A Penguin Life.)

The most flatuphilic Bush family member appears to be Jonathan J. Bush, brother to the 41st president and uncle to the 43rd. In 2003, Lloyd Grove of the New York Daily News reported that Jonathan J., a money manger in Connecticut, stockpiled remote-control fart machines (possibly the same model used against Karl Rove) and gave them away as a gag to friends and relatives.

… Describing his father, Sen. Prescott Bush of Connecticut, to the Washington Post in 1986, Jonathan J. Bush said: "I never heard him fart." What at the time seemed an aptly humorous way to describe the probity of the Bush family's political patriarch may now require reconsideration as an earnest expression of filial regret.

We wonder how Republicans can keep throwing our nation's men and women in uniform - so many under the age of twenty - into the Iraq meat grinder without feeling something, anything at all. There's a disconnect that I had chalked up to simple elitism. Their kids weren't going to be dragged off that hellhole in the dessert anytime soon, so why should they care? Wars are for the unprivileged and voiceless to fight.

But the Foley scandal, and the inability of House Republicans to protect the teens in their own ranks, is positively mind-boggling. This isn't mere elitism at work. It is even worse than that.

What are the common threads here? Iraq has clearly become a political tool for the GOP, used to beat up Democrats as "weak" on "national security". Never mind the people who die on behalf of Rove's political talking points. And when a sexual predator endangers a safe Republican seat while threatening to cost the party a couple millions of dollars, what does the Republican leadership do? They cover it up. Power is everything. The lives of our soldiers and the well-being and safety of teenage House pages are all worth sacrificing in exchange for continued Republican dominance. What else will they sell out?

Everything.

There is nothing they won't sell out in the pursuit of power.

Nothing.

House Republicans responded to news that Mark Foley had a creepy interest in a sixteen-year-old page by talking among themselves and then asking Foley whether everything was copasetic. Republican Rep. Rodney Alexander contacts Republican House Speaker Hastert's office. Hastert's office tells Alexander's office to tell House Clerk Jeff Trandahl. Trandahl tells Republican Rep. John Shimkus, the chairman of the House Page Board. Shimkus doesn't tell Rep. Dale Kildee , the only Democrat on the House Page Board. So far as we can tell, he also fails to tell the House sergeant at arms, the law enforcement officer who sits on the House Page Board.

So what did Shimkus do? He says he took "immediate action" to investigate what he'd been told about Foley. And what was that "immediate action"? Shimkus and Trandahl ask Foley about the e-mail exchange. Foley says it's nothing. Shimkus and Trandahl tell him to leave the kid alone and to be mindful of his contacts with pages in the future.

End of story, case closed - except that somewhere along the way, Republican Congressional Campaign Committee chief Tom Reynolds tell Republican House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert about the email exchange. They don't do anything, either, and Hastert tells CNN this afternoon that, while he doesn't dispute that Reynolds told him about Foley, he honestly doesn't remember having had a conversation about it.

It reminds us of the time that Saddam Hussein insisted that he didn't have WMD, and the Republicans in Washington said, "Well, all right then," and got back to the business of fighting terrorism. Or the time that Bill Clinton said that he didn't have sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky, and all those House GOPers took him at his word and dropped the matter right there.

Uh-huh.

… Maybe Shimkus and Trandahl and Reynolds and Hastert wouldn't have learned anything more if they'd performed something resembling an actual investigation after they received word of Foley's emails. But within a day after ABC News put them out on the Web, former pages began coming out of the woodwork with much more serious stories about Foley. Isn't it at least possible that Shimkus and Trandahl and Reynolds and Hastert would have heard about those stories sooner if they'd done even a little bit of probing? Didn't they have a moral obligation to try?

"I don't think this is so much about Foley as it is about the handling of this," Rick Davis, a Republican strategist, said Monday as the drama rocked the House GOP five weeks before midterm elections, much to Democrats' delight.

"The question becomes who's getting thrown overboard besides Foley to get this to go away," said Tony Fabrizio, another GOP consultant.

The six-term Florida congressman resigned abruptly on Friday after reports surfaced that he sent salacious electronic messages to teenage boys who had worked as House pages. The tawdry turn of events set off finger-pointing among House Republicans and overshadowed what the GOP had hoped would be a triumphant final work week highlighting the party's national security credentials before the campaign's homestretch.

Now, the Republican Party - already facing an unfriendly political environment and the fallout from a new book critical of President Bush's handling of the Iraq war - finds itself knocked even further off message and working to contain the political damage.

The Mark Foley scandal has already accomplished two difficult feats: It has made a deeply unpopular Congress look even worse, and it has replaced Iraq and terrorism as Political Topic A. It's hardly the message-shift GOP leaders were looking for.

In the end, the political story may be that the ickiness of the disgraced congressman's Instant Messages swamps House Republicans. Who cares if GOP House leaders only saw hints of Foley's proclivities? Voters aren't sifting through the fine details. It's all too sickening. The judgment could be swift: Foley was a Republican, and the Republican leadership knew something, so out with the lot of them. If Democratic anger over this doesn't do in congressional Republicans, then disappointment and disillusionment at the whole sordid business will keep Republican voters home on Election Day.

Democrats would be happy with either outcome.

… It's clear that GOP leaders would like the political story to be about Mark Foley's unique sickness. The former congressman has done his best to help. First, he was really sick. Second, he resigned immediately and checked himself into rehab, citing both psychological and alcohol problems. He's literally taken himself out of the picture while at the same time enforcing the narrative that he was depraved but not part of a larger GOP problem.

That hasn't rescued the GOP leadership.

… Based on these e-mails, one of which asked for a young page's picture, GOP leaders met with Foley and told him to cut it out.

The question is whether Republican leaders were grossly negligent or clumsily stupid (great choice!). The former is a political disaster. The latter, less so. Clearly, they should have done more. Simply asking for a picture is beyond the pale. GOP leaders might not have done the right thing because they wanted to protect a safe GOP seat. But my reporting suggests for the moment that instead of being craven, they were just incompetent wimps. They knew Foley was gay and in the closet, and they just didn't want to get into whether he was following through on his flirting. When he explained that his e-mails were just a part of mentoring, they were probably relieved. Foley had given them an excuse they wanted to believe.

The ultimate judgment of this affair may be that it's just more dumb behavior by Republican leaders, and that may be enough to help Democrats with the midterm election, especially if this incident is seen as the final insult.

Straining to hold the party together five weeks from Election Day amid unfolding revelations about the case, Mr. Hastert and his leadership team held a conference call with House Republicans on Monday night and heard blunt advice and criticism from participants who pressed for further action to reassure voters.

"This is a political problem, and we need to step up and do something dramatic," Representative Ray LaHood of Illinois said afterward, adding that he had proposed abolishing the Congressional page program.

… Federal agents on Monday began contacting men who were in the Congressional page program in recent years, said government officials briefed on the matter, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to discuss the inquiry.

… At the White House, Tony Snow, President Bush's press secretary, initially characterized the scandal as "naughty e-mails," drawing a blistering response from Democrats who said his words suggested that Republicans did not understand the gravity of the situation.

… Mr. Hastert defended the Republicans' handling of a parent's complaint last year about communication from Mr. Foley to the parent's teenage son. But he acknowledged that the e-mail inquiring about the boy's well being and requesting a photo was potentially troubling.

"I think that raised a red flag, raised a red flag with the kid, raised a red flag with the parents," said Mr. Hastert, who repeated that he could not recall learning of the messages before news of them broke last week. But the speaker said he and others had been "duped" by Mr. Foley, who when questioned about the e-mail said it was an innocent effort to make sure that the young man, who was from Louisiana, had made it through Hurricane Katrina.

Representative John Shimkus, Republican of Illinois, and the House clerk, Jeff Trandahl, instructed Mr. Foley to break off any contact with the former page. At the time, Republicans did not purse the matter further, considering the case closed. "Would have, could have, should have," Mr. Hastert said, responding to questions about whether Republicans should have done more.

… Across the country, in competitive and noncompetitive races, Democrats seized on an issue that they said was resonating with voters. In an effort coordinated in Washington by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the party's candidates urged their Republican opponents to call for the resignation of Mr. Hastert and other leaders.

In Indiana, Baron Hill, a Democratic candidate for a House seat, asked the incumbent, Representative Mike Sodrel, a first-term Republican, to reject any financial contributions from the national party. In North Carolina, where Representative Robin Hayes, a Republican, is engaged in a tough campaign fight, the state Democratic Party issued a statement asking, "Who does Robin Hayes stand up for - Mark Foley and the Republican House leadership or under-age children?"

Rice said she cannot recall then-CIA chief George Tenet warning her of an impending al-Qaida attack in the United States, as a new book claims he did two months before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. "What I am quite certain of is that I would remember if I was told, as this account apparently says, that there was about to be an attack in the United States, and the idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible," Rice said.

A review of White House records has determined that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, did brief Condoleezza Rice and other top officials on July 10, 2001, about the looming threat from Al Qaeda, a State Department spokesman said Monday.

The account by Sean McCormack came hours after Ms. Rice, the secretary of state, told reporters aboard her airplane that she did not recall the specific meeting on July 10, 2001, noting that she had met repeatedly with Mr. Tenet that summer about terrorist threats. Ms. Rice, the national security adviser at the time, said it was "incomprehensible" she ignored dire terrorist threats two months before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. McCormack also said records show that the Sept. 11 commission was informed about the meeting, a fact that former intelligence officials and members of the commission confirmed on Monday.

When details of the meeting emerged last week in a new book by Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, Bush administration officials questioned Mr. Woodward's reporting.

Now, after several days, both current and former Bush administration officials have confirmed parts of Mr. Woodward's account.

Officials now agree that on July 10, 2001, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism deputy, J. Cofer Black, were so alarmed about an impending Al Qaeda attack that they demanded an emergency meeting at the White House with Ms. Rice and her National Security Council staff.

So, Rice briefed that an attack was coming. A month later the president is briefed that an attack was coming. He tells the briefer that he's covered his ass. A month later an attack happens. And Rice magically forgets all this stuff.

QALAT, Afghanistan U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Monday that the Afghan guerrilla war can never be won militarily and called for efforts to bring the Taliban and their supporters into the Afghan government.

The Tennessee Republican said he had learned from briefings that Taliban fighters were too numerous and had too much popular support to be defeated by military means.

"You need to bring them into a more transparent type of government," Frist said during a brief visit to a U.S. and Romanian military base in the southern Taliban stronghold of Qalat. "And if that's accomplished we'll be successful."

Sen. Mel Martinez, a Republican from Florida accompanying Frist, said negotiating with the Taliban was not "out of the question" but that fighters who refused to join the political process would have to be defeated.

"A political solution is how it's all going to be solved," he said.

If we're going to do this, just pull everyone out. Don't lend an imprimatur of legitimacy to it by shepherding these medieval savages into a U.S.-backed government. Pull out, admit defeat, and let the Taliban take back the country through force. Then we can really and truly be back to September 10, 2001. Minus a skyscraper or two.

Goodbye GOP.

Perhaps we should make peace with Zawahiri as well? Let's negotiate, and see what terms we can get as good dhimmis.

The hell with the lot of them.

… I don't need the goddamned Republican Party in power to sign "peace" deals with terrorists. I can get that easily enough from the Democratic Party. I've supported these vacuous, cowardly, inept, corrupt idiots for one reason - to fight terrorists.

If they want to sign peace deals with them, that's their decision. I and others can make another decision. The country may move in this direction, but we hardly have to endorse the decision by voting in favor of Quislings.

At least the Democrats talk tough about sending more troops to Afghanistan and killing Taliban fighters and capturing bin Laden.

If that really is no longer a GOP priority, then I am no longer a member of the GOP.

You stupid jagoffs [sic]. You've done just about everything possible to lose this election; it's only the base - ever hopeful and ever self-deluding - that's kept you from your goal.

Was governing too much a chore for you? Was it too distracting, taking you away from fundraisers and fucking Congressional pages?

The Democrats have complained for years the GOP wasn't serious enough about defeating Al Qaeda and the Taliban, that it was too focused on Iraq. Congratulations - you just took a talking point and made it an established fact.

Well, enjoy your minority status. The rest of us will try to rebuild to the extent we can a party that actually sees ending the Taliban and Al Qaeda as somewhat more critical than ending internet poker.

More... I had hoped that the GOP's fear of losing power had shook them out of their moronic, corrupt stupor. I thought July and August were enough to send them a message.

I guess not. They don't learn easy.

It will, in fact, take an electoral drubbing to make them understand.

So let the enlightening begin.

First the Pakistanis cut a truce deal with Al Qaeda and its tribal allies in the frontier territories, and now Frist and his sidekick Mel Martinez fly to Kabul and float this trial balloon.

Something big is up. Who knows? Maybe Dr. K doing his Nixon-goes-to-China thing.

But it's awfully hard to believe the Rovians are actually going to try to sell a negotiated settlement with the Taliban and/or Al Qaeda to the American public - not even after the election and certainly not as some sort of October surprise/political miracle weapon.

What would come next? A state visit from Bin Laden?

More likely, this is part of some half-hearted, fumbling effort to peel away the Taliban "moderates" and "bring them into the process," like the attempt to bring the Sunni into the big tent in Iraq - a ploy which, we now know, almost worked too well.

Either way, I think we can take a guess at the larger motive: To shore up (or at least simmer down) the Afghanistan front in advance of the attack on Iran.

… And now the Brits - "British troops battling the Taliban are to withdraw from one of the most dangerous areas of Afghanistan after agreeing a secret deal with the local people. It has now been agreed the troops will quietly pull out of Musa Qala in return for the Taliban doing the same."

My, this seems to be quite the day for cutting and running.

• A new book by the official court scribe describes an administration so inept, unorganized and incoherent that if most people were aware of the details, the president's fear campaign would blow back hard against him. If the terrorists really are coming to kill us in our beds any day now, then we are in deep shit with these guys in charge.
• We have more news this week-end that Karl Rove and the white house were actively and personally involved in all the Jack Abramoff congressional corruption scandals which feature ripping off taxpayers of many millions of dollars.
• It turns out that Bush fired Colin Powell.
• The intelligence community agree that the invasion of Iraq super-charged the extremist jihadist movement and is fuelling terrorism far more quickly and broadly than we would have had to deal with otherwise.
• We have officially sanctioned torture and the repeal of habeas corpus - at the least competent president in history's discretion.

… it looks like Mark Foley's raunchy emails are going to be the scandal that may just bring it home for November. They made their puritanical, moralizing bed, now their going to have to roll around in the muck and the mire they made it with. Let's let 'er rip.

First of all, Mark Foley is clearly one exceptionally screwed up dude. A semi-closeted gay Republican whose signature issue is online sex predators and missing kids sending sexually explicit IM's to congressional pages is one of the most blatant act of self-immolation I've ever seen.

But that's not the real scandal, is it? While I'm sure the religious right will make the same charges about "gayness" they always do when their institutional leaders turn out to be hypocrites and chickenhawks (in all senses of the word), Foley's unsavory habit of hitting on teenagers who worked at the capital and the GOP leadership's truly disgusting propensity to cover it up at all costs is the issue.

The politicians of the modern Republican Party are a bunch of Elmer Gantry's who sold a lot of Americans a bill of goods for a long, long time. I don't know if their supporters are ready to hear it, but I have to believe that if the leadership of the GOP congress allowing one of their own to sexually prey on sixteen-year-old male pages doesn't wake them up, nothing will. I am not sanguine.

No, there's no reason to be sanguine. Somehow this will be all Bill Clinton's fault. Watch for that.

Actually, that is underway - Brit Hume on Fox News -

It is very serious misbehavior on the part of Congressman Foley, whether it stems from arrogance or just weakness of the human flesh is another question. It's probably worth noting that there's a difference between the two parties on these issues. Inappropriate behavior towards subordinates didn't cost Gerry Studds his Democratic seat in Massachusetts, nor Barney Frank his. Nor did inappropriate behavior toward a subordinate even cost Bill Clinton his standing within the Democratic Party, even though indirectly he was impeached for it. Mark Foley found out about this, was found out to have done this, and he's out of office and in total disgrace in his party.

By now, you probably know about Rep Mark Foley stepping down after being revealed to be a sexual predator. Foley wasn't just caught sending creepy emails to underage boy(s), but some sexually explicit IMs. [ABC News has them in full here] You've also probably heard last night's revelation that some members of the House leadership were aware of the emails (at least) for almost a year and did nothing about it. But unless you've been glued to your computer all day, you may have missed all of the twists and turns the scandal has taken today. It's every man for himself as the GOP leadership is pointing fingers at each other.

I've been at this blog racket for almost six years. And usually you've got to really pore over the details to find the inconsistencies and contradictions. So I'm not sure I've ever seen this big a train wreck where leaders at the highest eschelons of power repeatedly fib, contradict each other and change their stories so quickly. It's mendacity as performance art; you can see the story unravel in real time.

… These fibs and turnabouts amount to a whole far larger than the sum of its parts. Even the most cynical politicians carefully vet their stories to assure that they cannot easily be contradicted by other credible personages. When you see Majority Leaders and Speakers and Committee chairs calling each other liars in public you know that the underlying story is very bad, that the system of coordination and hierarchy has broken down and that each player believes he's in a fight for his life.

As well they should be. Their careers are probably over at a minimum. There may be legal liability as well. And depending on how deep the cover-up goes, this could very well bring down the entire GOP with them. People who vote on "moral values" probably aren't going to like the fact that their party leaders have been covering up for a guy who asked an underage boy to "get a ruler and measure it for me." This is a milder form of the same sickness that brought down Cardinal Bernard Law and it'll bring down any Republican who sat on this information as well. As it should.

The news that House Republican leaders may have known about disgraced former congressman Mark Foley's behavior as early as several months ago is dynamite.

... If House Republican leaders really did avert their gaze from a problem they knew about, however, Foley could become the new Jack Abramoff. Except that whereas the details of Abramoff's were always a bit complicated for the public to follow closely, the accusations now leveled at Foley are much simpler and more appalling. Foley is on the verge of becoming the poster child of a party that is concerned about little more than preserving its power.

I think he's right. Even my eyes glaze over a bit when I try to remember everything that was going on with Jack Abramoff or even Duke Cunningham. But Foley? That's easy. He was preying on teenage pages, and the Republican leadership looked the other way and allowed it to continue for nearly a year. It doesn't get much easier than that.

This scandal may not expose systemic corruption the way the Abramoff scandal did, but it has plenty of legs. It involves sex, it involves cover-ups, it involves powerful players turning on each other to protect their own skins, and it involves lots of documentary evidence. Unlike the Abramoff scandal, this one is going to get covered in People magazine and the National Inquirer. It may finally be the GOP's Waterloo.

In Bob Woodward's highly anticipated new book, "State of Denial," President Bush emerges as a passive, impatient, sophomoric and intellectually incurious leader, presiding over a grossly dysfunctional war cabinet and given to an almost religious certainty that makes him disinclined to rethink or re-evaluate decisions he has made about the war. It's a portrait that stands in stark contrast to the laudatory one Mr. Woodward drew in "Bush at War," his 2002 book, which depicted the president - in terms that the White House press office itself has purveyed - as a judicious, resolute leader, blessed with the "vision thing" his father was accused of lacking and firmly in control of the ship of state.

I would have thought this was simply obvious, but a few people at dinner thought it might be useful to make the point plainly. The Bush administration is considering airstrikes against Iran. Some people think the decision has already been made to do it. Most people think this isn't totally clear, but some folks inside the government want strikes and may win the fight. The options being seriously considered all involve, basically, launching a surprise attack. This means, among other things, a war without any serious basis in domestic or international law. No UN resolution, no congressional resolution, just an order from the President to the relevant military assets. There'll be vague gestures in the direction of this or that - the crew that's argued the 9/11 Resolution repealed FISA and the 4th Amendment will argue that it authorized just about anything - but basically they'll just be making shit up which isn't at the end of the day, a novel situation for them to be in.

The War Powers Act states that "The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces." Meaning, in other words, that simply launching an attack on Iran would be illegal. Dick Cheney has, however, argued for decades that the War Powers Act is unconstitutional, so this isn't going to stop them. You'll be able to file an after-the-fact lawsuit, if you like, but that's not going to have much practical impact.

• Neighborhood Ghosts - Marlene Dietrich
• Norma Talmadge Glamour
• In Old Monterey
• Getting Real
• Ironwork
• Hidden Hideout
• Angels in the Neighborhood

• White Cars
• Red Cars
• Black Cars
• Green Cars
• Cute and Odd Cars

If you fight floods by constraining the river with levees, you create floods.

If you fight infection with shotgun dispersion of antibiotics, you create more, worse, infections by resistant bugs.

If you fight forest fires by putting out every fire, you create really big fires.

If you fight crime in poor minority neighborhoods by sending white cops in to break heads, you create crime.

If you fight misbehavior in children by beating them with a belt, you create misbehavior.

If you fight AIDS by attacking the CIA for inventing it, you get more AIDS.

If you fight impiety and unbelief by berating the congregation for being so small, you create more impiety.

I think the president may be mistaken.

Actually, 9/11 was mass murder, and it should have been treated as mainly a challenge for the police and intelligence services. Interpreting the 9/11 attacks as an act of war demanding military reprisal has only helped up the ante of violence throughout the world.

In other words, declaring "War on Terror" was a mistake. A big one. Hurt and angry, we overreacted to 9/11. Leaving aside, for the moment, the invasion of Iraq, which history, in 2031 or 2131, is likely to judge as one of the stupidest presidential decisions of all time, we would have been wiser to treat 9/11 as a crime rather than an attack.

I did not think at the time that declaring undeclared war in 2001 was a mistake. That day in September, I was just another guy trying to get into Manhattan to find my family. It was impossible. If someone had asked me then, as I sat in fifty-mile-long line of stopped cars, I might have been for using nuclear weapons to retaliate. But the history of the past five years has persuaded me that we should have concentrated our power and money, whatever it took, to find the people who did it and treat them as common criminals of the worst kind.

Instead, we fell into a well-laid trap: We declared war on Islam. We did exactly what the terrorists wanted. Osama bin Laden and his ilk were dedicated to re-starting the Crusades, hoping to provoke a running war between the evangelical modernity of the West and the more zealous faith of many, millions, of Muslims. And they did it, helped by our righteous anger.

I don't just mean that we are losing in Iraq. Personally, I don't think it matters whether we leave that sad country today or in ten years. We have been defeated there by our own arrogance and ignorance.

I found myself mentally composing an Op Ed piece about citizen impotence, and realized I didn't know enough about the two concepts that kept ringing around in my head: impeachment and no-confidence motions. Since I am at my desk at work, and supposed to be working, I resorted to Wikipedia to get a quick glimpse at their definitions.

Regarding no-confidence, I got a single sentence that confirmed what I suspected: "In presidential systems, the legislature may occasionally pass motions of no confidence, as was done against United States Secretary of State Dean Acheson in the 1950s, but these motions are of symbolic effect only."

Then, I continued in Wikipedia to impeachment, and was struck by the last sentence excerpted and copied here -

In the constitutions of several countries, impeachment is the first of two stages in a specific process for a legislative body to remove a government official without that official's agreement.

Impeachment occurs rarely enough for many in a country to misunderstand its nature. A typical misconception is to confuse it with involuntary removal from office; in fact it is only the legal statement of charges, paralleling an indictment in criminal law. An official who is impeached faces a second legislative vote (whether by the same body or another), which determines conviction, or failure to convict, on the charges embodied by the impeachment. Most constitutions require a supermajority to convict. George W. Bush must be impeached per a decree from God.

Of course, being Wikipedia, someone could edit it out soon, but as of ten minutes ago, it was there.

It's gone now, but Wikipedia is like that. People mess with the facts. They add their own "facts." That's one of the dangers of relying on Wikipedia.

But that was worth sharing with the Just Above Sunset community - the online salon, as it were - the small email forum where a lots of ideas get batted about.

Of course one friend from Canada had to chime in - "Dangers? Looks spot-on to me!"

Then there was this from our high school student in New Jersey - "At school when ever we do research papers the teacher always warns us against Wikipedia. Anyone could add information to that site. It's kind of depressing so many people rely on a source made up of information from totally unreliable sources."

Another reader -

Condi and Karl do the writing.

But then I just came across an editorial - "Insulting Bush Helps Our Enemies" - and I think to myself, Gosh, am I to blame for endangering America? Over my first cup of coffee, it strikes me that if the headline's true, well then his handlers "shudda taut about it" before they PUT HIM in HARM's WAY!

Now we're the guilty ones... hah!

"Insulting Bush Helps Our Enemies"

I do not believe that news headlines should take political sides, even though I do happen to agree with both assertions found in this headline:

(a) Yes, Bush certainly is insulting, and

(b) Yes, he certainly does help our enemies.

I agree that headlines ought to not take political stances, but I think it is unrealistic to expect a newspaper to be totally neutral because everyone has their own opinion. Also headlines that display a strong opinion are more likely to sell then those that are neutral due to the fact that those which are displaying an opinion usually have more exciting headlines.

I should mention I was being at least partly tongue-in-cheek when I said that I don't think headlines should take sides; I am ashamed to confess that I was mostly just using that line to set up the joke.

True, people have opinions, but I tend to be more trusting of news outlets that don't. The argument that objectivity, being impossible, should not even be strived for is usually put forth these days by "truth relativists," most of them cynical conservatives who don't believe in anything they hear anyway.

And the "whatever sells" argument, which has become all the rage in recent years when "serving the public interest" has taken a back seat to "enhancing shareholder value," doesn't work for someone like me who started in the news business forty years ago, back when informing the public was more important than "beating the street."

In fact, I'm not so rigid as to deny a newspaper the right to decide however it wants to tell its readers what's going on in the world, or even how to sell itself, but I will say that I certainly wouldn't buy, nor do I subscribe to, any newspaper that would sink so low as to try to get me to agree with it by the way it reports the news.

Not that I believe there ought to be a law against subjective news reportage; I just don't personally find it credible, and I try whenever possible to avoid wasting my time by reading or listening to it.

I should try being less cynical when looking at news sources. One day in my IPLE class (Institute for Political and Legal Education) we talked about how the media and other news sources affect people and how its role has changed over time - it was pretty interesting.

You're probably not really cynical per se. Maybe skeptical? I think of skepticism as cynicism's non-sociopathic cousin. Witness your healthy skepticism of Wikipedia. I myself went in a month or so back and edited their article on CNN, correcting what they said were the network's original bureaus. I was right, of course - I was there in 1980, helping to get them up and feeding video to Atlanta - but still can't help being suspicious of a medium that anyone out here can edit, almost with impunity.

Yep, news sources certainly have changed since this "new media" wave hit our shores. I like the quote I heard recently from an editor at (I think it was) the Sacramento Bee, who said something to the effect that, "Sure, we're still the gatekeepers, but apparently somebody went and knocked down the walls, and everyone's running right around us."

Why the change in media?

Follow the money!

Public ownership of media corporations and a general financially-based cynicism that grew in the 1990's especially, as too many Wall Streeters became heroes of the Quarterly earnings machinery, resulted in a distortion where corporations began to believe (or operate as if they believed) that earnings was the Mission of a corporation - which it ISN'T. This from a business school prof, mind you. Profit SHOULD be a Strategic Measure of success and NOT the purpose of the firm. The Purpose of a firm USED to be seen as fulfilling a consumer (aka social) need. IF a business doesn't fulfill a need it doesn't profit, and thus doesn't survive. So profits should be a metric or indicator but not a PURPOSE.

MBA students - and we've trained too many with too little context for Liberal Arts Decision Making - have been led to believe that maximizing profits in the short run is equivalent to maximizing profit in the long run. But privately held companies, that don't NEED to pay out larger and larger profits every three months, are inclined NOT take cash out of the system in excessive amounts. When the key decision-maker is also the primary beneficiary (stockholder, stakeholder) then appropriate short-term sacrifices are made when long-term gains require serious investment. Quarterly payouts take a backseat to smart long-term maneuvering in the marketplace, and to even greater profits in the long run.

The fallacy - in my humble opinion - of where the financial logic breaks down is in financial modeling. The models themselves (Capital Asset Pricing Model, Derivatives models, etc) are elegant and SHOULD actually fulfill the short term long term promise. HOWEVER - and here you can blame the accountants - LOL - the models DON'T work perfectly in reality because people (those accountants) CAN'T PREDICT THE FUTURE ACCURATELY. If people could foresee the future and put in highly accurate future data, then the financial models would indeed work perfectly and Wall Street would be vindicated. But we don't know the future. And the human condition within businesses means that we will ALWAYS forecast to the rosy scenario - we don't tell our boss the dirty downside - we forecast in ways that exaggerate the upside - for how else would we SELL OUR PROJECTS to decision makers? If we could foresee the unforeseen consequences of our current actions (which invariably are more costly than we can estimate BEFORE those new problems arise) we'd have perfect financial scenarios and short run would actually equal long-run best interests. (See the work of Peter Senge for interesting concepts about unforeseen consequences!)

This is a very convoluted way to say that in the 1990's greed took over America in ways that had been held in check in earlier times. We've always had greed but it hasn't been this institutionalized since... the 1880's maybe, before modern labor law was enacted to protect the worker. Here I might rely on others with deeper historical resources. But I'll guess industrial revolution was the last instance of unchecked greed at level equivalent to today. Needless to say, as money becomes king, content (in media in this case) takes back seat, and we get publishers who as a rule forsake balanced journalism in the name of increasing market share among greedy readers - more interested in shock value than newsworthiness of their news. I mean look at the OJ phenomenon and everything that has come since.

Greed has replaced human sensitivity as a social dynamic - and we can then begin to argue that the style of media itself continues to reinforce cynical world views. It's a vicious cycle. There's an interesting corollary in Wal-Mart playing upon our collective greed to support its lower price - always lower price - strategy (which often is NOT the case - they aren't ALWAYS the lowest retail price in town for all goods they sell, but they OWN that position in your head - the Power of Advertising!) And the way they can continually meet your demand for lower prices is to pay workers relative wages that are unsustainable - the old joke that as more and more people work for Wal-Mart, more and more can't afford to shop anywhere else, and at some point can't even to afford to shop at Wal-Mart. No joke. It's THEIR cost model! Where do all the profits go, you ask? To every investment fund that owns Wal-Mart stock. Venture a guess at how many Wal-Mart employees are invested in stocks! Does Wal-Mart have a retirement fund for employees? It doesn't have adequate health care coverage!

So we lose the middle class in America - day by day. The middle class that automation (and Henry Ford) built. The suburbs, the public school systems, the telephone and highway infrastructures of America - ALL affordable because of a huge middle class with disposable income - extra wealth beyond the bare necessities, and able to pay taxes. America's secret as a success story IS the middle class. The life and freedoms and luxuries we enjoy in the US are all here on the backs of the middle class. And it's going away - and going away by design as more and more money gets pushed upwards to fewer and fewer of the haves. It's not your grandfather's America anymore. Or your father's. Or your father's media. Or your father's politics.

Is it too late? Like global warming, is there a tipping point beyond which we're moving where the sins of our constant (quarterly) consumption can no longer be rectified even if we try? I trust not. I trust we're in a deep pendulum swing. And your generation will have grown up in this world of constant change - indeed accelerating change - with skills and attributes that will allow you collectively to snatch us from this path to some new direction - and with new sense of destiny and accomplishment.

And if not - well then we hand the baton to China. We've a run for a couple hundred years. Next...

Here's to picking up the challenge. All you need is a dream... and the determination not to let 'em get you down (Didn't Bono write a song like that? Kinda). You'll be in good company. I've got a daughter determined to contribute in a better way. Here's to pendulum swings!

With the possible exception of that stuff on financial modeling (which I didn't understand), I by and large agree with this take.

It's not that newspapers make a better profit margin than they did thirty years ago or so. In fact, I think margins for the owners have always been good and haven't changed much. What has changed are the owners themselves, along with new attitudes of what must be done to maintain those profits. Newspapers used to be largely owned by families and closely held companies controlled by those families, but I'm pretty sure they've mostly been taken over public corporations.

Please, nobody stop me from telling this story if they've already heard me say it, but when I went to work for Ted Turner in 1980, he owned about 87% of his company; by the time I left in 1985, he had given up voting control to his major backers, Time-Warner and TCI, and it was downhill for CNN ever since. Unlike in the days when that crazy drunken sailor was making all the decisions, huge mutual funds and pension funds now call the shots, and the reason I know these people care less about CNN showing us the world as they do about showing shareholders the money is this: All of my own money is in mutual funds, and if my fund doesn't perform, I find another one.

So it's the schmoe-on-the-street like me who really doesn't care about the way companies do business as much as how much money they can get out of whatever it is the companies do. In fact, corporate ownership has become at least one area where I think too much democracy can be a bad thing.

That's very interesting twist of the screw! Irony into which to sink your teeth! And a solid argument against privatizing social security!

Hmm. Maybe so, although probably not the best one I can think of.

To me, to "privatize" a "public" program means to "abolish" it. Do we really want to do that, we should ask ourselves (but often don't)? No, wait, someone suggests, we're not really "abolishing" the program, we're just "personalizing" it, giving Americans the chance to realizing a higher return on it! It's part of the "ownership society" thing, in which we do for ourselves instead of expecting government to do for us!

But the problem with what I'm sure Bush and his minion think of as an innovative and neat idea is that it takes both the "social" and the "security" out of "Social Security," which citizens seemed to sense, and which I hope is why the effort died.

Barely three months after the demise of Knight Ridder Inc., the same pressures that forced the storied newspaper publisher out of existence are shaking the foundations of another media empire.

But as Tribune Co. considers a potentially drastic makeover amid impatience on Wall Street, declining circulation and other issues, the third-largest U.S. newspaper company isn't necessarily facing a wholesale dismantlement or sell-off within the next few months.

The pressure on Tribune to act is intense, though. Tribune signaled a week ago its intent to make big changes, and CEO Dennis FitzSimons says all options are on the table.

While an outright sale of the company, as happened with Knight Ridder, may not be likely, several partial breakup scenarios are starting to emerge, ones the company will have to consider before investors force action.

The Los Angeles Times and other prize jewels all will be studied for what selling them would do to the company's stock, tax bills and future, even though FitzSimons insists the Times isn't for sale.

Tribune underscored its commitment to a significant overhaul on Thursday, saying it has hired Merrill Lynch and Citigroup as financial advisers and retained Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom as legal counsel for its independent board committee reviewing strategic options.

The Chicago Tribune last week cited unidentified sources as saying the company's preferred solution is to spin off many of its two dozen TV stations, sell several smaller papers among its eleven dailies and take the rest of the company private in a leveraged buyout.

That outcome, however, hinges on lots of buyers stepping forward with big checks at a time when the newspaper industry is under siege from Internet competition for its readers and advertising dollars. Other questions also hang over local television stations.

Tribune insisted until recently that such marquee assets as the Cubs or its Tribune Tower headquarters building were untouchable, as were businesses in its three major markets of Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. But many think that has changed as the stock continues to languish.

So far, the only reported inquiries into Tribune properties to have surfaced publicly in the last week are for smaller Tribune papers: The Morning Call in Allentown, Pa. and three Connecticut dailies - The Hartford Court, the Advocate of Stamford and the Greenwich Time.

Billionaire Ron Burkle, business leader Eli Broad and Hollywood mogul David Geffen have voiced interest in the Los Angeles Times, but no formal offer is said to have been made. A spokeswoman for Geffen's office declined comment and Burkle and Broad did not return phone calls.