“A man claims a woman wrongly adopted his lost parrot — and he can prove it if given a chance to question the bird in court.” —Salon (It all comes down to whether he can get the bird to whistle the theme from “The Andy Griffith Show” under oath.)

“…why not get rid of the radio, for products like headsets? Not with an infrared headset — we’ve considered that. There’s another option — magnetism.” —Boston Globe

Atmospheric ozone depletion vies with record late-’90s’ severity: “As expected, the ozone hole near Earth’s South Pole is back again this year. This year’s hole, being slightly larger than North America, is larger than last year but short of the record set on 2000 September 10. Ozone is important because it shields us from damaging ultraviolet sunlight. Ozone is vulnerable, though, to CFCs and halons being released into the atmosphere. International efforts to reduce the use of these damaging chemicals appear to be having a positive effect on their atmospheric abundance. The relatively large size of the ozone hole this year, however, is attributed partly to colder than normal air in the surrounding stratosphere.” —Astronomy Picture of the Day

“A half-Jew writes her own Yom Kippur prayer.” —Laurel Snyder, a ‘JewishyIrishy’ poet in Iowa City and editor of Land-Grant College Review, Killing the Buddha [via walker]. Today is the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, the holiest of the High Holy Days in the Jewish calendar, for those who hadn’t had the opportunity to notice.

I have previously written about The World Rock Paper

Scissors Society. Now comes word of the upcoming 2003 Rock Paper Scissors International

World Championships taking place on October 25th. They have a new Championship specific site. The organizers are expecting about 1000 of the World’s best players competing

this year and have athletes registered from the UK, 6 US States and Canada. Winner will receive $5000.00 (CDN) and will be able

to claim the title of RPS Champion of the World (2nd place $1500.00, 3rd

$500). Video clips in Quicktime format are available at the site.

All players note: “Legion of the White Fist” of Toronto, Canada has requested a team name change to “Legion of the Red Fist”. Please update your strategies accordingly.

Know your heroes, heroines — and history. “How well do you really know the famous figures that you love or love to hate?

This little wrap-up quiz offers some important facts that were barely, if ever, reported. It may raise your eyebrows and adjust the pedestals on which you placed some of your favourite icons. The chasm may be greater than you’d imagined.” From the people who brought you The Political Compass.

“Poet, painter, essayist, translator, and anarchist social critic, Kenneth

Rexroth was also a highly experienced camper and mountaineer. In 1939 he

wrote a guidebook, Camping in the Western Mountains,

which was never published. The complete text of this book is now being

reproduced for the first time at the online Rexroth Archive.” —Bureau of Public Secrets

“A majority of Americans have held at least one of three mistaken impressions about the U.S.-led war in Iraq, according to a new study released Thursday, and those misperceptions contributed to much of the popular support for the war.

The three common mistaken impressions are that:

• U.S. forces found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
  
• There’s clear evidence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein worked closely with the Sept. 11 terrorists.
  
• People in foreign countries generally either backed the U.S.-led war or were evenly split between supporting and opposing it.” —San Jose Mercury News
  

Beliefs were correlated with which news sources were people’s primary connection to world events.

Play long enough and you’ll get it [from boing boing‘s ‘web zen’ feature]

Related: The Wikipedia article on pangrams and a wonderful list of numerous pangrams and their relatives.

Has Bob Graham dropped out (Fox News)

of the presidential race or not? (Graham Campaign)

“Bush’s truth-defying crusade for war did not mark a shift for him.” Excerpted from The Nation editor David Corn’s new book, The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception“

“As George Bush’s poll numbers began seriously dwindling, Karl Rove and the White House political strategists decided to reach into their bag of tricks and come up with a good old staple of reactionary politics: homophobia.

The decision to scapegoat gay and lesbian Americans was poll-driven by an antigay backlash that gathered steam in the wake of the Supreme Court’s June 26 decision, in Lawrence v. Texas, striking down laws making gay sex between consenting adults illegal–the so-called sodomy laws. The backlash first surfaced in a July 25-27 Gallup poll…

Just two days after Gallup released its poll showing the backlash, Bush unexpectedly used a Rose Garden press conference to announce that he’d assigned lawyers to come up with a plan to stop gay marriage. Bush and the Republicans had been under enormous pressure from the Christian right and social conservatives–including National Review and The Weekly Standard–to support a Federal Marriage Amendment to the Constitution, which would ban recognition of any form of marriage between two persons of the same gender. (The FMA would also forbid giving same-sex couples the ‘legal incidents’ of marriage, thus vitiating the civil-union law in Vermont and any other state that followed suit.).” —Doug Ireland, The Nation

“Prosecutors will need an appeals court or military tribunal to restore the heart of their case against Zacarias Moussaoui, now that a judge has banned from the al-Qaida loyalist’s trial evidence related to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Exacting punishment for disobeying her orders, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema on Thursday barred the government from introducing any ‘evidence or argument that the defendant was involved in, or had knowledge of’ the suicide hijackings.

She also eliminated the death penalty in the only U.S. case spawned by Sept. 11, thereby knocking out some of the government’s most poignant evidence planned for the trial: photographs of victims and the cockpit voice recordings from United Flight 93, the jetliner that crashed in Shanksville, Pa.” —Salon

The judge’s order prohibiting the death penalty is based on Moussaoui’s inability to defend himself against the charges after government prosecutors defied the judge’s orders and denied Moussaoui access to three al Aqeda suspects in U.S. custody despite his assertion that they could prove his innocence of the charges against him. This would appear to make it more likely that Moussaoui’s trial will be moved to a military tribunal where his rights are not protected in this way.

Suicide show will go on, band leader says: “The leader of a band called Hell on Earth said Saturday he would defy threats of criminal charges and hold an Internet-broadcast concert featuring the suicide of a terminally ill fan.

Billy Tourtelot said in a phone interview that the concert and suicide would take place Saturday night in two separate, undisclosed locations in St. Petersburg. He wouldn’t give any details about the venues but said the band would broadcast the events on its Web page.” —Salon

“Make no mistake, Elia Kazan’s testimony before the HUAC committee was a big deal. Not just because he named names, though that was big enough.

It was a big deal because, if anyone had been in a position to stand up against the Committee and come away triumphant — front page triumphant — it would have been Elia Kazan. That’s why his testimony was on the front page of The New York Times. ” —Jeff Pevere, Toronto Star

“Derren Brown, the ‘psychological illusionist’, is determined to press ahead tomorrow night with a game of Russian roulette using a loaded gun live – more or less – on British television.

Howls of protest from anti-gun activists and senior police have failed to deter the British-born illusionist from a stunt that has proved fatal for magicians in the past.

At about 9.45pm, one of three people, chosen from 12,000 volunteers to assist, will load a live bullet into a handgun and hand it to Brown at a secret location outside the UK.

In the words of his publicity team, ‘he will then use his infamous ability to predict people’s behaviour to determine which of the numbered chambers contains the bullet’.

He will put the gun to his head, and pull the trigger until he comes to the live chamber, when he will fire the gun at the floor. He will shoot only if he is sure he has read the assistant’s mind correctly.” —Independent.UK

Why a Philadelphia hospital gave in to a racist demand: “Supervisors said they sought only to avoid a confrontation.” —Philadelphia Inquirer

Schwarzenegger Admired Hitler, Book Proposal Says: “A film producer who chronicled Arnold Schwarzenegger’s rise to fame as a champion bodybuilder in the 1970’s circulated a book proposal six years ago that quoted the young Mr. Schwarzenegger expressing admiration for Adolf Hitler.

The book proposal by the producer, George Butler, included what were presented as verbatim excerpts from interviews with Mr. Schwarzenegger in the filming of the documentary Pumping Iron. In a part of the interview not used in the film, Mr. Schwarzenegger was asked to name his heroes — ‘who do you admire most.’

‘It depends for what,’ Mr. Schwarzenegger said, according to the transcript in the book proposal. ‘I admired Hitler, for instance, because he came from being a little man with almost no formal education up to power. And I admire him for being such a good public speaker.’

In addition to the transcript, Mr. Butler wrote in his book proposal that in the 1970’s, he considered Mr. Schwarzenegger a ‘flagrant, outspoken admirer of Hitler.’ In the proposal, Mr. Butler also said he had seen Mr. Schwarzenegger playing ‘Nazi marching songs from long-playing records in his collection at home’ and said that the actor ‘frequently clicked his heels and pretended to be an S.S. officer.'” —NY Times

I’m no fan of Arnold’s, of course, but you do have to wonder about the timing of these revelations, which as dramatic as they are would have been newsworthy long before Schwarzenegger had any political ambitions. (Mickey Kaus agrees that it is a smear tactic that would not have had any effect on the election if it had not been raised at the last moment when Arnold did not have enough time to respond effectively, [although do ‘Arnold’ and ‘respond effectively’ in the same sentence amount to an oxymoron?] in contrast to the sexual abuse allegations, which Kaus says should have been brought up much sooner to allow them to snowball.) On the other hand, what was Schwarzenegger thinking when he bought the outtakes from Pumping Iron which contain the damning quotes back in 1991 (for more than $1 million) under an agreement that allows him to destroy the footage? He says he has not looked through the more than 100 hours of film to locate the controversial parts (or otherwise he would make them public now to prove his claim that they have been taken out of context). And Butler will not release the complete transcript of his interviews. (Kaus thinks Schwarzenegger probably has some leverage over him, having made him a small fortune when he bought the outtakes. Kaus also finds it implausible that Arnold, who he calls a “meticulous planner”, would not have screened the footage and identified the damaging parts.)

“The spat was just a sideshow. The shouting match between the liberal satirist Al Franken and the conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly captured on ‘Book TV’ this summer generated lots of headlines. But these days the toughest ideological warfare is playing out off camera, on the New York Times best-seller list.

For the first time in recent memory, The Times‘s list, the nation’s most influential barometer of book sales, is pitting liberals and conservatives against each other in roughly equal numbers, ending what some publishing executives say is nearly a decade of dominance by right-wing authors.

…Publishing executives offer several explanations for the about-face: growing dissatisfaction with the Bush administration, newfound liberal savvy about how to use television and radio for self-promotion, even a sudden loss of inhibition by the left.” —NY Times

A review of Quicksilver, which I’m immersed in now: “Stephenson clearly never intended Quicksilver to be one of those meticulously accurate historical novels that capture ways of thought of times gone by. Instead, it explores the philosophical concerns of today — or at least, the philosophical concerns of Stephenson. At its best, the novel does this through thrillingly clever, suspenseful and amusing plot twists. My favorite example is a section toward the end, when Eliza travels east on a spying mission and writes letters to one ambiguous ally in a many-layered code, knowing they will be intercepted and partly decoded by an ambiguous enemy, then further decoded by someone else.

But the novel is so swollen and overloaded that these delightful Stephensonian offerings are hard to follow — and even hard to identify. And ”Quicksilver” suffers from a problem common in parts of trilogies: it feels unresolved. Will it turn out to be the first third of a carefully constructed meta-novel, or a messy chunk of a bigger mess? Is it complex, or merely random? Only the next couple of thousand pages will say for sure.” — Polly Shulman, a freelance writer in New York, NY Times

The grantees are: Nawal Nour, a physician and director of the African Women’s Health Practice at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, whid treats conditions related to female circumcision; Angela Johnson, a children’s novelist and poet; Erik Demaine, a computer scientist; Pedro A. Sanchez, an agronomist who is the director of tropical agriculture at the Earth Institute at Columbia University; Peter Sis, an illustrator and author for children and adults; Tom Joyce, a blacksmith who lives in Santa Fe, N.M.; Loren Rieseberg, 42, a botanist at Indiana University at Bloomington; Guillermo Algaze, an archaeologist; James J. Collins, a biomedical engineer; Lydia Davis, a writer; Corrine Dufka, a human rights advocate; Peter Gleick, a conservation analyst; Osvaldo Golijov, a composer; Deborah Jin, a physicist; Sarah H. Kagan, a gerontological nurse; Ned Kahn, a science exhibit artist; Jim Yong Kim, a public health physician; Amy Rosenzweig, a biochemist; Lateefah Simon, a young women’s advocate; Sarah Sze, a sculptor; Eve Troutt Powell, a historian; Anders Winroth, a medieval historian; Daisy Youngblood, a ceramicist; and Xiaowei Zhuang, a biophysicist. —NY Times

“The Bush administration’s optimistic statements earlier this year that Iraq’s oil wealth, not American taxpayers, would cover most of the cost of rebuilding Iraq were at odds with a bleaker assessment of a government task force secretly established last fall to study Iraq’s oil industry, according to public records and government officials.” —NY Times

I am still looking for more on what I consider the most intriguing aspect of the Plame affair — what is behind the C.I.A. rebellion? This New York Times news analysis suggests the CIA was primed by its outrage over Condoleeza Rice’s unsuccessful attempt to shift the blame for the ’16 words’ in the State of the Union Address to Tenet. More important, having served under Bill Clinton, Tenet has a particular investment in the appearance of impartiality and nonpartisanship. Reading between the lines, it appears he has little concern over losing his job over this incident, already one of the longest-tenured CIA directors and having publicly ackonwledged that he is hankering to leave already. Ironically, the leak inquiry will probably extend his time here, as the White House will not want to be seen as dismissing its CIA director because of his agency’s accusations. The article skirts the issue of what elements at the CIA pushed the inquiry and what relationship they have to Tenet. Of course, internal CIA politics is opaque…

Related: Leak of Agent’s Name Causes Exposure of CIA Front Firm: “The leak of a CIA operative’s name has also exposed the identity of a CIA front company, potentially expanding the damage caused by the original disclosure, Bush administration officials said yesterday.” —Washington Post

Schwarzenegger Admired Hitler, Book Proposal Says: “A film producer who chronicled Arnold Schwarzenegger’s rise to fame as a champion bodybuilder in the 1970’s circulated a book proposal six years ago that quoted the young Mr. Schwarzenegger expressing admiration for Adolf Hitler.

The book proposal by the producer, George Butler, included what were presented as verbatim excerpts from interviews with Mr. Schwarzenegger in the filming of the documentary Pumping Iron. In a part of the interview not used in the film, Mr. Schwarzenegger was asked to name his heroes — ‘who do you admire most.’

‘It depends for what,’ Mr. Schwarzenegger said, according to the transcript in the book proposal. ‘I admired Hitler, for instance, because he came from being a little man with almost no formal education up to power. And I admire him for being such a good public speaker.’

In addition to the transcript, Mr. Butler wrote in his book proposal that in the 1970’s, he considered Mr. Schwarzenegger a ‘flagrant, outspoken admirer of Hitler.’ In the proposal, Mr. Butler also said he had seen Mr. Schwarzenegger playing ‘Nazi marching songs from long-playing records in his collection at home’ and said that the actor ‘frequently clicked his heels and pretended to be an S.S. officer.'” —NY Times

I’m no fan of Arnold’s, of course, but you do have to wonder about the timing of these revelations, which as dramatic as they are would have been newsworthy long before Schwarzenegger had any political ambitions. (Mickey Kaus agrees that it is a smear tactic that would not have had any effect on the election if it had not been raised at the last moment when Arnold did not have enough time to respond effectively, [although do ‘Arnold’ and ‘respond effectively’ in the same sentence amount to an oxymoron?] in contrast to the sexual abuse allegations, which Kaus says should have been brought up much sooner to allow them to snowball.) On the other hand, what was Schwarzenegger thinking when he bought the outtakes from Pumping Iron which contain the damning quotes back in 1991 (for more than $1 million) under an agreement that allows him to destroy the footage? He says he has not looked through the more than 100 hours of film to locate the controversial parts (or otherwise he would make them public now to prove his claim that they have been taken out of context). And Butler will not release the complete transcript of his interviews. (Kaus thinks Schwarzenegger probably has some leverage over him, having made him a small fortune when he bought the outtakes. Kaus also finds it implausible that Arnold, who he calls a “meticulous planner”, would not have screened the footage and identified the damaging parts.)

“A LifeGem is a certified, high quality diamond created from the carbon of your loved one [i.e. cremated remains — FmH] as a memorial to their unique and wonderful life.

The LifeGem diamond is more than a memorial to visit on the weekends… it is a way to embrace your loved one’s memory day by day. The LifeGem is the most unique and timeless memorial available for creating a testimony to their unique life.” There is another company out there sending out spam mail which supposedly sells you diamonds into whose natural flaws your loved one’s cremated remains have been injected.

These people are partnering with funeral service directors to offer their diamonds as part of their memorial services to grieving vulnerable easy marks.

As someone approaching the thirtieth anniversary of hanging up my razor for good, this is close to my heart (no, in reality closer to my neck, I guess; my beard is not that long these days).

“The World Beard and Moustache Championships will take place in Carson City, Nevada, on November 1, 2003. A panel of distinguished judges will determine which beards and moustaches in seventeen separate categories merit their owners the championship trophies and the coveted world champion titles. Special prizes will also be awarded to the youngest contestant, the contestant who traveled the farthest to attend, and the people’s favorite. ” The site has a number of photos of stupendous facial hair (the Germans seem to have us covered) and links to the winners of past competitions.

“For the past year, more than 140 New York City firefighters, some ailing from their work in the ruins of the World Trade Center, have walked into a seventh-floor medical clinic just two blocks from the former disaster site. Once inside, some have abandoned the medical care and emotional counseling provided to them by their own department’s doctors, and all have taken up a treatment regimen devised by L*. R*o*n H*u*b*b*a*r*d, the late science fiction writer and founder of the Church of S*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*y.

The firefighters take saunas, engage in physical workouts and swallow pills— all of which together constitute what for years has been known, amid considerable dispute*, as Mr. H*u*b*b*a*r*d’s detoxification program, one meant to wash the body of poisons or toxins. The firefighters are not charged for their trips to the clinic, called Downtown Medical.”—NY Times

*There is not really ‘considerable dispute’ about the merits of H*u*b*b*a*r*d’s program. The consensus is that it is quackery, plain and simple. If it works, it works as faith healing does, and at considerable expense to the patient in the sense that they must give up conventional medical treatments such as antidepressants or asthma inhalers. The paradigm of “sweating out toxins”, or otherwise purging them, has often been used in alternative healing regimens, with no believable basis. I watched a friend of mine, a medical student with two young children and what would have been a curable cancer if treated with a conventional oncological approach, die slowly and horribly because he would accept no treatment other than coffee enemas to purify himself and remove the toxins causing the tumor growth. Sheesh, a medical student! That wasn’t a S*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*y treatment but it might just as well have been. [thanks. abby]

…and they don’t even know how to spell it: “World War II had its ‘krauts,’ Vietnam had its ‘gooks,’ and now, the war on terrorism has its own dehumanizing name: ‘hajji.’

That’s what many U.S. troops across Iraq and in coalition bases in Kuwait now call anyone from the Middle East or South Asia. Soldiers who served in Afghanistan say it also is used there.

Among Muslims, the word is used mainly as a title of respect. It means ‘one who has made the hajj,’ the pilgrimage to Mecca.

But that’s not how soldiers use it.

Some talk about ‘killing some hajjis’ or ‘mowing down some hajjis.’ One soldier in Iraq inked ‘Hodgie Killer’ onto his footlocker.” —Raleigh News & Observer [via walker]

Poll Findings Come As White House Softens Denials: “Nearly seven in 10 Americans believe a special prosecutor should be named to investigate allegations that Bush administration officials illegally leaked the name of an undercover CIA agent, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll released yesterday.

The poll, taken after the Justice Department announced that it had opened a criminal probe into the matter, pointed to several troubling signs for the White House as Bush aides decide how to contain the damage. The survey found that 81 percent of Americans considered the matter serious, while 72 percent thought it likely that someone in the White House leaked the agent’s name.” —Washington Post As Lyn Millett suggested in comments below, there seems to be serious Pulitzer-stalking activity going on here at the Post. As she also suggested, perhaps I was underestimating the potential for a public outcry: “This is a very simple story for the general public, which consumes millions of Tom Clancy novels, to understand: White House outs spy, harms national security, for political reasons. ”

John Dean says the Bush team’s leaks are even viler than his former boss’s — and that Plame and Wilson should file a civil suit. —Salon

Why in the world has this story from my town apprently broken online first in the SF Chronicle? Radio host suspended for comparing gorilla to students in inner-city program:

“The co-host of a popular radio sports show was suspended Thursday for two days without pay for on-air comments comparing a zoo’s escaped gorilla to inner-city students who use a voluntary busing program known as Metco.

John Dennis of WEEI-AM apologized to listeners Wednesday for the remark he made two days earlier after seeing a newspaper photograph of the gorilla standing by a bus stop. He said the animal was ‘probably a Metco gorilla waiting for a bus.’

The state-run busing program lets minority children from the inner city attend schools in nearby suburbs.”

I saw Dennis’ ‘apology’ on local television news. To say the least, it was less than heartfelt. He gets several days’ suspension for comments that are more egregious than those which caused Rush Limbaugh’s resignation (San Jose Mercury)

from his ESPN football commentary position (although Limbaugh did not make any moves in the direction of offering his regret for his actions). The horrible sidebar to this story of the escaped gorilla (CNN)

is that he grabbed a toddler from its mother’s arms, threw her to the ground and trampled her. [I heard from a colleague at work that the little girl had died of her injuries, but words to that effect do not appear in the papers online.] This was the gorilla’s second escape from its enclosure at the notoriously mismanaged Franklin Park Zoo here in Boston.

And then there’s Arnold. I will just follow Craig in pointing you here for his apology (Washington Post) and here for an account of what he is (or isn’t) apologetic for (LA Times). Does he sound as if he is contrite or more as if he is dispatching a small nuisance issue that might interfere with his margin of victory?

It is hard to understand why it took a month for the ‘Plame Game’ to develop legs. David Corn deserves credit for breaking the story in mid-July in The Nation, and it has been doing the weblog scene ever since. This is much as it was with Bush’s uranium lie. The facts are put out there long, long before the mainstream press reaches a tipping point and starts bleating, sheeplike, about the ‘scoop’.

How big is this? Novak claims that his leak did little harm because Plame was merely an ‘analyst’, and not an ‘operative’. He says that CIA requests to journalists not to divulge covert data come in differing levels of insistence based on the danger of the security leaks, and that they were not very insistent in this case. But, as Eric Boehlert discusses in Salon, Novak’s attempts to softpedal the seriousness of the leak don’t quite hold water. First of all, analysts work undercover. In his Slate ‘Explainer’ column, Ed Finn lays out the levels of CIA cover (Flame was deeply burrowed in there) and why it is such a big deal that she was ‘outed’ — it is a felony and, as an analyst with years of experience on WMD, her discovery may compromise intelligence operations she has been involved in around the globe.

“Hard target” countries like China and North Korea often keep records of every known meeting between Americans and their scientists and officials. Almost certainly, those lists would have been frantically reviewed when Plame’s identity was revealed, and any sources she recruited could have been exposed.

Ex-CIA personnel are coming out of the woodwork left and right to confirm that Valerie Plame in particular was undercover for decades.

In publicly asking for an investigation of the ‘outing’, of course, the CIA is confirming that Plame was undercover. Although we cannot know how much damage has been done, we can assume that, for this to happen, they must have suffered some compromise.

As Jack Shafer points out in Slate, prosecuting the leakers is not going to happen. The CIA files complaints about leaks with the Justice Dept. every week (they are required to by law) and the investigations go nowhere even when the identity of the leaker is known. As CIA director Tenet said in his confirmation hearing in 1997, the effective thing to do when leakers are discovered is to fire them, not prosecute them.

Why did the administration leak Plame’s identity, and why in the world did the CIA go public with plans to have the leak investigated? As to the first of those questions, the back-and-forth banter is whether revenge was driving the White House sources. As an absurdist aside, Timothy Noah, in Slate, has a harebrained notion that the leakers intended to humiliate Wilson around the fact that he got a job through his wife. His argument is incoherent and seems to be designed merely to show us how clever he is in recalling neocon Adam Bellow’s recent book in praise of nepotism.

It does not seem to me that revenge works as an explanation. To be that petty when you would have to know you were violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (which, by the way, was prompted by George Bush’s father when he was CIA chief) and compromising national security seems more, umm, Nixonian than Shrubbish, regardless of what a cad I think Bush is. Ambassador Wilson himself feels the point was rather to intimidate future potential Bush administration critics.

Rafe Coburn, among others, suggests a more sensible explanation:

Those two people spread the word of Plame’s CIA employment so that they could allege that it was she, and not the White House, that suggested sending Wilson to look into the Niger mess. If, as was asserted originally, Wilson was sent to Africa in direct response to questions by Dick Cheney’s office, then the administration would have no excuse whatsoever for dismissing the findings that Wilson brought back (and thus putting the uranium line in the State of the Union address). So they told reporters that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA (which was classified) and that it was she who suggested sending him to Africa. The purpose was not to discredit Wilson nor was it revenge against him, rather it was a way of substantiating White House claims that they hadn’t seen Wilson’s report.

What is more difficult to understand is how the White House has lost its grip on the CIA enough that the latter could make a fuss about this matter. Has someone at the CIA gone rogue? Is this, as Bush defenders claim, a plot to discredit the administration? Or, perhaps, is the CIA’s public call for an investigation in some insidious way being orchestrated by the White House as part of their damage control efforts?

Will this become the next big Washington scandal, possibly the one that brings down the administration? I doubt it. Novak is not likely to give up his sources, like any good journalist, and it would be a political liability for the Democrats to push him too hard to violate the freedom of the press. What did Bush know and when did he know it? He is probably so insulated, particularly because the leakers knew their action was illegal, that it could never be established that he was a party to the ‘outing’. No White House tapes will emerge here. So this is not going to turn out to be an impeachable offense. Will it have an effect on the President’s polls or reelectability? Not unless the public understands enough about the intricacies of the situation — how deep was Plame’s cover? how damaging is outing her? — to get really bent out of shape. Outside of the pundits’ and webloggers’ universe, that is not going to happen.

So will the White House be planning just to hunker down and ride this one out, figuring the furor will dissipate long before the election season? Or is someone going to be a fall guy (which is not necessarily the same thing as asking who was actually responsible for the leak)? Before this broke, we watched the extraordinary scenario of the White House distancing itself from Dick Cheney’s remarks on the relationship between Saddam Hussein and Sept. 11th. Perhaps Cheney would be a good choice to stop the buck here as well? If there is a real candidate for mastermind here, my vote is for Rove, but he is made of teflon. It is generally acknowledged that the reason the IIPA was passed was to stop rogue CIA agent Philip Agee from naming names of covert operatives. Shouldn’t Rove, or whomever, be considered as traitorous and felonious as Bush’s father and his cronies thought Agee to be?

Turning back again to the question of the media’s conduct in this affair, Shafer, by the way, makes much of the fact that six other reporters apparently turned down the offered leak before Novak ran with it:

The hidden good news in the Wilson-Novak-Plame melodrama is that it disproves a thesis that jaundiced readers, myself included, have about the weakness Washington reporters have for anonymous sources bearing scoops. Any of the six journalists who were offered the Plame story and declined to run with it could have gotten some sort of career-enhancing bump out of it. That they ignored the calculated leak, and the story ended up with an opinion journalist who used it to make his political point, indicates a level of discipline I didn’t know existed in the press corps.

• Are they falling out of love? —Timothy Noah, Slate
• Rank and bile: “G.I.’s speaking out, angry vets signing petitions, generals attacking him. George Bush’s once-rosy relationship with the military is turning sour.” —Eric Boehlert, Salon

Glad tidings from Rafe Colburn? “I honestly have no idea whether George W Bush is going to be elected to another term, but I have some extremely anecdotal evidence that tells me that he may not. You may or may not know that I grew up in a small, ordinary town in Texas. I’ve been working on my parents for about three and a half years now to see Bush as I see him, the obstacle being that they are pretty dyed in the wool Republicans who voted for Bush twice for governor. About 6 or 8 months ago, they got fed up with this mad rush to war with Iraq and said flat out that they wouldn’t vote for him again…

Last night my mom told me that one of my aunts asked her flat out, ‘What are we going to do about Bush.’ This is a person who I could never in my wildest dreams imagine voting against Bush. She’s a social conservative and lifelong Republican from a family of lifelong Republicans who loves America in the ‘God Bless America’ sense. President Bush has lost her vote and support on the virtues of his behavior as President. If Bush is driving away people like my aunt, he’s done.”

“After six years of self-imposed exile, Tarantino is re-emerging with a movie that’s going to sell a mountain of popcorn, one so over-the-top it might bring Bill Bennett out of his self-imposed exile. Tarantino’s new Kill Bill, in theaters next Friday, is probably the most violent movie ever made by an American studio. It’s definitely the first one to merge the talents of Uma Thurman, David Carradine, and Zamfir the Master of the Pan Flute, precariously balancing them all on a sword’s edge.” —Village Voice