Sunday evening toons: Un-scary bathrooms now, un-scary bathrooms tomorrow, un-scary bathrooms forever!

Stuart Carlson rises above even the p3 Pick of the Week or Best of Show to capture the the George Wallace-style, historically-retarded, standing-in-the-schoolhouse-door, business that's currently in operation in the once-temporarily-evolved-but-not-since-Art-Pope-brought-out-his-checkbook state of North Carolina. I confess: I was slow to get the extent to which the war on gay marriage in 2004 and 2006 was encouraged – if not initiatied – at the highest levels of the Republican party (*cough!* *cough!* *Turdblossom!*) less on the merits of the case, such as they were, but for the cynical purpose of getting out the Christian conservative vote. I'm older and arguably wiser now, and I have no illusions about the sudden outbreak of "bathroom bills" during this electoral season. No illusions. None.

On other matters, there's a worthless little turd who made news this week by planning to auction off the gun that made him famous. Nothing about him today, no matter how good your toon was, because.

And here's a free joke for the Monday late-night monologue writers: Trump's new campaign hats say "Make America Budweiser Again." You're welcome.

Today's toons were selected by a bunch of nameless white guys in a smoke-filled room from the week's offerings at McClatchy DC, Cartoon Movement, Go Comics, Politico's Cartoon Gallery, Daryl Cagle's Political Cartoons, About.com, and other fine sources of toony goodness.

p3 Picks of the week: Henry Payne, Steve Sack, Joel Pett, Lalo Alcaraz, Tom Toles, Signe Wilkinson, Brian McFadden, Matt Weurker, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Best of Show: Jeff Danziger.

p3 Legion of Merit: Darrin Bell.

p3 Award for Best Adaptation from Another Medium: Mike Luckovich.

Ann Telnaes creates an image that I wish I could un-see, but I can't.

Mark Fiore imagines what was unthinkable only a year ago.

Tom Tomorrow returns us to the continuing adventures of the reality TV star who was saturated by gamma radiation.

Keith Knight pays tribute to the fauna of his newly adopted state.

Reuben Bolling brings the latest installment of the gradual transformation of the GOP into something from the 1930s-1940s era Universal Studios. (Spoiler: It may be time to take the pitchforks and torches away from the villagers.)

Red Meat's Ted Johnson and Milkman Dan share a home-cooked meal.

The Comic Curmudgeon uncovers a new and disturbing variation on the "If Pluto is a dog, then what is Goofy?" puzzle.

Comic Strip of the Day gets a two-fer: First comes the whaling on the Cult of the Meaningless Statistic in sports coverage. Totally deserved, by the way; it's hard to believe that the companies that supply those pointless numbers, and the sports producers who feature them, have found a way to make televised baseball more boring than it already was, but they have. I have a part-time gig that involves staring at Sports Center over and over again for a few hours (and no, I don't want to talk about it), and so I recently saw and resaw this tidbit: Both the Cubs and the Sox had started their 2016 seasons with 20-game winning streak, something that apparently last happened in 1917. My question is: If it only happens once a century, is it really worth knowing about? And second, no exceptions for cartoonists.

"Ah, 'abba-dabba' yourself!" "The Hyp-Nut-Tist," directed by Dave Fleischer in 1935, was the 21st of the Fleischer Studios Popeye cartoons, and the first outing by Gus Wickie voicing Bluto (uncredited, same as Billy Costello and Mae Questel as Popeye and The Slender One, respectively, and musical director Sammy Timberg). I always wondered: Where did Olive wander off to while Popeye and Bluto were beating the crap out of each other, and why was it that the only way you could come out of the hypnotic spell was to have Bluto land on you (Popeye), or fall out of a prop tree (Bluto), or get slugged by Popeye (Olive)? Couldn't someone just snap their fingers or something?

The Right-Sized Oregon Toon Block:

Ex-Oregonian Jack Ohman wants to believe.

Documented Ex-Oregonian Jen Sorensen sympathizes with those who want to stop the madness.

Matt Bors explores the Goldilocks Theory of center-left politics.

Jesse Springer has some fun with the first rule you learn when you move to my adopted home state. (The second is that it's the "coast," not the "beach.")

Test your command of the toon-captioning Force at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.) And you can browse The New Yorker's cartoon gallery here.

The p3 Sunday Comics Read-Along: Pearls Before Swine, Doonesbury, Rhymes with Orange, Zits, Adam @ Home, Mutts, Over the Hedge, Get Fuzzy, Prince Valiant, Blondie, Bizarro, Mother Goose & Grimm, Rose is Rose, Luann, Hagar the Horrible, Pickles, Rubes, Grand Avenue, Freshly Squeezed, The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee, and Jumble.

At the academy, they said I was mad!

The conventional wisdom about Karl Rove – back when he was Bush's Brain, and paid for it with the presidential nickname "Turdblossom" – was that he was a genius. (Of course, back in 1994 they said that about Gingrich, too.)

Almost ten years ago, in one of the very first posts here at p3, I put my foot down on that. Rove was smart in his own way, sure – even Junior was, in his own way – but Rove's unique gift wasn't his ability to think up ideas no one had ever thought before. It was his ability to look at ideas that others had also considered, but rejected because the collateral damage was too great compared to any short range political gain – and then go ahead anyway because he didn't care.

Charlie Pierce helpfully collects the same sort of he's-a-genius stories – even from Mother Jones! – about Texas madman Ted Cruz, and concludes:

Over the last two days, the Tailgunner has put his off-the-charts intellect to interesting use. First, he argued that repealing the Citizens United ruling would enable the federal government to take Saturday Night Live off the air and declare political satire to be illegal, which is just nutty. Then he went before an audience of Christians of Middle East origins and got booed off the stage.

I shudder to think what he might have done had he not been so off-the-charts brilliant.

The unforgiving minute: “. . . but I play one on TV.”

Regarding the possibility (at the moment, the far-too-remote possibility) of popular backlash against the increased level of warrentless surveillance directed upon Americans, or anyone else who gets sucked up in the Great National Security Hoover, no less an authority on liberty, common defense, and domestic tranquility than Karl Rove recently spoke up with some impatience:

You cannot turn on a cop drama on television where there is not somebody who’s pinging somebody’s cell phone or taking a look at the phone calls made from some landline or telephone booth to help solve some crime on television.

Now, I know what you're going to say: Those examples are ridiculous. They prove nothing. Jack Bauer and Chloe O'Brien weren't really government counterterrorism agents. Abby Sciuto and Tim McGee aren't really forensics specialists with mad hacker skillz working for NCIS.

Fair enough.

But on the other hand, Rove worked as chief of staff for a man who wasn't really elected President of the United States, and no one seems to care much about that niggling detail anymore.

So cut my man Karl some slack. He's been there.

Minute's up.

Quote of the day: Electability

Remember -- it hasn't been that long -- when people began saying that Ronald Reagan, despite his elevation to sainthood by the current Republican party, nevertheless probably couldn't even get the GOP nomination now?

Now comes Paul Waldman at TPM to make a fairly convincing case that it's been taken it to the next level:

The George W. Bush of 2000 probably couldn't get the nomination of today's Republican Party.

Waldman continues:

All his talk of how he had worked with Democrats in the Texas Legislature and how he wanted to end Washington's partisan rancor would have gotten him branded a squish who couldn't be trusted. You can argue that Bush fooled the country into thinking he was more moderate than he actually was (I'd agree). But after a few months on the trail, nobody is going to think Rick Perry is a uniter. And that's why he has a pretty good shot of being the Republican nominee.

There's something to think about: Bush trashed our economy on behalf of the wealthy and the corporations, lied his way into war with Iraq, took every opportunity to hobble the government's ability to enforce regulations or pursue justice, and polarized the nation to an extent beyond anything in living memory via Karl Rove's "fifty-percent-plus-one" political strategy.

But, only twelve years later, can it be that he's probably not toxic enough to get nominated by his own party?

The unforgiving minute

With due respect to Crooks and Liars: As far as Cheney and Rove are concerned, predicting a terrorist attack on Obama's watch isn't "betting"--it's a no-lose proposition.

If another attack fails to happen, they're still getting to stoke their own media-sanctioned relevance, plus the opportunity to throw red meat to their dwindling base.

And, of course, if another attack does occur, it's all up-side for them.

As long as the media listens to them, they can't lose.

Minute's up.

Reading: "God kinda goes, No, I really don’t think so."

Reading Vanity Fair's oral history of the Bush White House is a necessary act of political masochism, in a "those who don't are doomed to repeat it" way.

The experience feels like having stitches removed by pulling them knot-side through, and it's curiously silent on the outing of CIA covert operative Valerie Plame as political payback in 2003, but otherwise it's compelling. Once you start reading, you won't be able to stop until you reach the end.

You'll be relieved that in 20 days Bush and his cronies will finally be out of the White House; and you'll be angered all over again at the damage to our nation already done and the damage yet to show itself--and the fact that they'll emerge largely beyond the reach of the law for their long list of offenses.

"Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House" is going on the Readings list in the sidebar.

Send Karl Rove to prison

Robert Greenwald and the never-say-die folks at Brave New Films have put together this primer on the issues:

In a statement announcing the release of the video and the accompanying petition project, Greenwald writes:

All we have to do is pressure the 40 members of the House Judiciary Committee, make them hold Rove in contempt and send him to jail. We've never had such a direct opportunity to hold Rove accountable. No, this is not enough punishment for his years and years of crimes, but it's a huge start, and will send a very clear message to the entire Bush administration.

I'm sympathetic--believe me, I'm sympathetic--but any sentence about making a member of the Bush Mafia face justice that begins with the words "All we have to do is . . . " has a pretty starry-eyed view of the last two years of the HJC in action (and we won't bother mentioning the six years before that).

Also, let's be clear about one other thing: If the thought of letting Rove see a little time behind bars--even if it's only an hour or two, while he waits for Ted Olson to personally post his bail--pleases you because it sends a message to the entire Bush administration, I'm glad for you. Personally, I don't think the administration gives a crap about any message it gets sent (ask the EPA).

I think the reason for sending Karl Rove to prison for breaking the law is to send Karl Rove to prison for breaking the law.

The unforgiving minute

Karl Rove frets in today's WSJ: "Can Barack Buy the Presidency?"

You can appreciate his alarm over such a precedent: In Rove's America, the presidency is not to be purchased like a candy bar at a 7-Eleven.

It's to be stolen, like a candy bar at a 7-Eleven.

Minute's up.

What made Rove great as a political director isn't much use now

(Updated below.)

(Hat-tip to Doctor Beyond for sending this item along, with the comment, "Isn't Rove describing the guy he got elected the last two times?")

ABC News' Christianne Klein reports that at a breakfast with Republican insiders at the Capitol Hill Club this morning, former White House senior aide Karl Rove referred to Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, as "coolly arrogant."

"Even if you never met him, you know this guy," Rove said, per Christianne Klein. "He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."

Maybe my partisan filters are too firmly locked in place, but I can't imagine how anyone--even an Obama-hater or a Democrat-hater or a black-hater who was just looking for any excuse--could really see this when they look at Obama. Not that Obama is immune to unflattering caricature--but this simply doesn't fit. Not even close. The attempt to make it fit seems downright odd.

Country club? Martini? Snide? This guy?

As Doctor B notes, it's a much more recognizable sketch of Bush (except the drink is wrong).

This supports my original theory about Rove, which is that he isn't particularly smart or insightful, just that he had one single idea (break the mechanisms of government in order to make the Republicans the permanent ruling party for the next couple of generations) and absolutely no conscience whatsoever.

He didn't even come up with any plans for implementing his one single idea that a lot of other people couldn't have come up with too, and maybe did. The only real advantage he ever had was that, while other strategists might say, "Yeah, that would work, but it would be illegal, or at least do more harm than good," Rove didn't care.

That's great when you've got your hands directly on the levers of power (i.e., the levers inside Bush the ventriloquist's dummy). But when you're relegated to being an adviser or pundit, the complete absence of a conscience is still handy but not nearly as useful or important as being able to come up with ideas that are at least arguably popular. Rove was never interested in or capable of doing that.

Rove will become like Gingrich. Republican true-believers and the talking-heads shows will trot him out in tribute to how important he used to be, but no one will really listen to his advice anymore. This morning's breakfast remarks will be a case in point.


Update: Digby thinks Rove's remark was smarter than I do, that it's code-word racism (think: uppity) pitched at dog-whistle frequency for the base. I'm sticking with Ockham's Razor on this one: You have to assume fewer unseen things to conclude it was fairly dumb, not very clever. I think Digby probably had it right when she just called it "absurd." But I could be wrong--it is Digby.

Corrections

(Updated: dead video link fixed.)

Stock analysts call it a "correction" when a stock or an index dips significantly after a prolonged, generally upward trend.

In December 2006, five weeks after widespread Republican losses in the 2006 general election and his own firing, Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense, had his own sense of what a "correction" would be:

RUMSFELD: That's what I was just going to say. This President's pretty much a victim of success. We haven't had an attack in five years. The perception of the threat is so low in this society that it's not surprising that the behavior pattern reflects a low threat assessment. The same thing's in Europe, there's a low threat perception. The correction for that, I suppose, is an attack.

(It's good to be reminded what a maimed soul Rumsfeld was, isn't it?)

Yes, Mr. Secretary, that's the problem with terrorists: You can't always count on them to attack us when it's politically useful for the Republican Party.

Fortunately, the Bush administration had the next best thing: The Homeland Security Advisory System, better known as the color-coded threat-level indicator. Let's review how that's worked out:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

If your browser won't display the embedded version, click here.

I offer another example of a "correction:"

As Americans became increasingly and rightly cynical about the "threat-level-orange" tactics between 2003 and mid-2006, it has become less useful to the Bush administration as a distraction from revelations of its own mistakes, deceptions, and incompetence, or from events which display the increasing support of Americans for Democratic candidates and policies. The result has been a "correction" in the Bush admnistration's reliance on conveniently-timed threat warnings, following a generally-upward trend for four years.

In fact, the last time Homeland Security announced that the threat level was being raised to "High" (Orange) or "Severe" (Red) was August 10-14, 2006, in the run-up to the 2006 mid-term elections.

We can't account for this by saying that our continuing military presence in Iraq has curbed terrorism, since the opposite appears to be true: The failed state of Iraq has become a breeding ground for terrorism.

And we can't say that the Bush administration has abandoned the tactic of trumped-up fear of terrorism to protect itself politically, since Bush, Cheney, and their various enablers continue to publicly link Saddam to al Qaeda, speculate about which Democratic candidate bin Laden prefers, and so on.

And I suppose some brave soul might even advance the case that, following electoral defeat after defeat and saddled with the strongest disapproval by the American people in memory, the Bush administration has finally learned its lesson and realized that it's morally wrong, that it's not worth winning if the only way you can do it is to corrupt the very form of government you claim to be defending--if that brave soul wanted to be laughed out of the room.

No, I think we have to conclude that the Bush administration has discontinued its attempts at fear-by-threat-level for the same reason--the only reason--it ever abandons such disreputable tactics: It no longer works.

Think of it as a correction.


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Rove bails

(Updated below.)

In a story most people didn't expect to be discussing this morning, Karl Rove will be leaving his job as deputy chief of staff at the end of the month.

As a long-time political opponent is said to have remarked when he heard that Richard Nixon had died: "Hm. I wonder why he did that?"

The "why" question is answered by the WSJ article, although the reasons given seem transparently unlikely:

The WSJ interview reports that Rove is departing his White House post "for the sake of my family." This is a rather uncharacteristically obvious falsehood from the normally sly Rove, since it's a matter of record Rove's family were sacrificed in satanic acts of ritual cannibalism to guarantee the 2004 electoral votes of Ohio and Florida.

NPR coverage this morning has repeated the claim that the timing of Rove's bail-out is shaped by the current lull in bad political news for the White House: After avoiding indictment in the Plamegate investigation (since the one man whose testimony almost certainly would have put Rove's head in the noose heroically chose to perjure himself and accept a presidential commutation of his entire sentence rather than tell the truth) and with congressional investigations accumulating evidence that Rove was involved in, if not the architect of the wide-ranging plan to politicize the Justice Department including the firing of politically incompliant US Attorneys, this might be a good time for Rove to get out.

Rove insists in the WSJ article that he is not "leaving to please the mob"--by which term he apparently means the Democratic leadership of Congress and the majority of Americans.

Rove made a number of other predictions in the interview, including: The nomination of Hillary Clinton, who would lose to an unnamed Republican candidate, the rising of Bush's presidential approval numbers. improved conditions in Iraq following the military surge, and the triumphant arrival of the Titanic into New York Harbor. Good to see the Professor hasn't lost his touch.

Since Bush--in what can only be termed an astonishing coincidence--has already asserted his presidential prerogative to prevent even former White House staffers from testifying to Congress, in the name of executive privilege, we should assume Rove's departure will contribute nothing toward the process of exposing and curbing the lawlessness of the Bush Administration.

Normally we wait until the actual day of departure before doing this, but Rove, like the political regime of which he was the architect, is a special case. So we hereby advance-award Karl our special p3 "Good Riddance" bumper sticker.

Update: Jane at FireDogLake points out something about this unfolding story that is exasperating: Given that Rove's explanation for his departure is simply not to be believed, it's irritating as hell to realize that many or most of the Beltway reporters covering this story know more than they're telling, because loyalty to their tribe and sources trumps loyalty to their profession or their readers.

She also cites, in ascending order of threat level to Rove--and through him, to the White House and the Republican Party--the three legal jams most likely to be the actual cause of Rove's departure.

Smith and the salmon: If everyone's interests lie in the same direction, do you really need a conspiracy?

TJ at Loaded Orygun has exposed and connected more dots in the Gordon Smith/Klamath Basin affair.

On one side, you've got Dick Cheney, for whom the Klamath Basin decision was all about using his bureaucratic powers to curb agency regulation of corporate activities in general. On the other, you've got Karl Rove, for whom the overriding concern was the electoral math for 2002, 2004, and beyond.

And somewhere in the middle is Oregon's junior Senator who, as LO shows, seems to be almost prescient in his ability to politically surf the waves Cheney was creating (as well as being ready to seize any local advantage Rove's political calculus would create for him).

We're finally there. I've been waiting for weeks to say it:

What did Gordon Smith know, and when did he know it?

Stay tuned.

The IG's 2004 report to Kerry re Northwest water policy

Following up:

Here's the (apparently) complete text of the Interior Dept.'s IG 2004 report, at the request of Senator (and then presidential candidate) John Kerry, into the decision-making by the Interior Department behind releasing Klamath Basin water, needed by protected Coho salmon, for irrigation on local farms:

March 1, 2004

The Honorable John F. Kerry
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510-2102

Dear Senator Kerry:

This is in response to your August 6, 2003 letter in which you requested that the Office of Inspector General (OIG) conduct an investigation into the Department’s management of water resources in the Klamath Basin. You directed our attention to a July 30, 2003 article in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Oregon Water Saga Illuminates Rove’s Methods with Agencies” and called into question the Interior Department’s ability to meet its legal responsibilities in the Klamath Basin.

In your letter, you aptly observe that “[c]ommercial fishermen, Native Americans, irrigators, conservationists and federal officials have been engaged in a contentious regulatory proceeding over water management in the Klamath Basin that dates back several years.” Clearly, the management of the water resources in the Klamath River Basin Project by the Department of the Interior has been fraught with criticism and contention from all sides, two of which are within the Department of the Interior itself. The concerns you advanced based on the issues raised in the Wall Street Journal article, as well as those raised in other venues, made the Klamath matter ripe for investigation by the OIG.

As outlined in my letter to you dated August 28, 2003, the OIG focused its investigation on three areas:

1. What would be the normal regulatory process in a matter such as this, assuming that this was an Administrative Procedures Act-governed regulatory matter.

2. What actually did happen in the administrative process in the Klamath Basin matter.

3. How the Klamath Basin matter deviated from the norm (if at all) with special attention being paid to:

a. The science
b. Any suppressed information
c. Any evidence of political interference

In conducting our investigation, we interviewed all of the key individuals – some of them several times – who were involved with the Klamath River Basin Project. These individuals represent all aspects of involvement in the Klamath Project – from staff-level employees of the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR), the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) to the highest-level decision makers within the Department; the independent scientists charged with reviewing competing reports and information; and the government scientist who filed for Whistleblower protection with the Office of Special Counsel. We reviewed hundreds of documents, including the documents contained in the Administrative Record supporting BOR’s final decision regarding the Klamath Project’s Operations, as well as documents filed with the United States District Court for the Northern District of California where suit had been filed challenging BOR’s decision-making process.

As a result of our investigation, we found fiercely competing interests among the Klamath Tribes, irrigators, fishermen, environmentalists and even among opposing Federal officials relating to the use and/or conservation of limited water resources in the Klamath Project. We also found that these interests have highly charged differences of opinion concerning what constitutes the best scientific and commercial data available, how the Project should be operated, and how to accommodate specific, diverse and competing interests. Unfortunately, when the competing interests are mutually exclusive of one another – as in the Klamath matter – accommodation becomes impracticable.

We determined that the administrative process followed in this matter did not deviate from the norm. Our review of the available documents and the rulings of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California support the conclusion that the Department had compiled the necessary information to support its various decisions related to the Klamath Project.

None of the individuals we interviewed – including the Whistleblower – was able to provide any competent evidence that the Department utilized suspect scientific data or suppressed information that was contained in economic and scientific reports related to the Klamath Project. To the contrary, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences in its Final Report, issued October 2003, specifically disagrees with the criticism that had been directed against the Federal agencies for using “junk science”. This position is bolstered by the findings of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, which concluded that in light of the conflicting state of scientific evidence, the decisions were based on the best available science at the time.

Finally, we found no evidence of political influence affecting the decisions pertaining to the water in the Klamath Project. The individuals at the working-levels denied feeling pressured at all. Based on our experience in past OIG investigations, these would have been the most likely sources to provide evidence of such influence. Higher-level decision makers, both political and career, also denied feeling any political pressure to render a decision one way or another. Collectively, these decision makers described a process of thorough and thoughtful consideration of all the competing interests and requirements, although frustrated by the fact that certain interests and requirements were mutually exclusive. The consistent denial of political influence by government officials was corroborated by the view of the outside scientists and one former DOI official, all of whom denied feeling any pressure – political or otherwise.

While we confirmed a passing reference to the Klamath River Basin Project during an otherwise-unrelated presentation to senior Interior officials, we found nothing to tie Karl Rove’s comments or presentation to the Klamath decision-making process. The former DOI official, who had spoken to the Wall Street Journal about Rove’s presentation, clarified to our investigators that his use of the term “chilling effect” was not related to the Klamath Project. Of the multiple DOI officials we interviewed who attended the presentation, only one person specifically recalled the context in which Rove mentioned Klamath. This official recalled that Rove merely cited Klamath as an example of the complex problems the Department had to deal with.

The complexity of the issues involved and the ferocity of the debate clearly fueled the flames of suspicion and distrust in this matter. Based on the results of our investigation, however, we conclude that the Department conducted itself in keeping with the administrative process governing the Klamath Project, that the science and information utilized supported the Department’s decisions, and that no political pressure was perceived by any of the key participants.

I hope this information puts to rest your concerns. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to call me at (202) 208-5745.

Sincerely,


/signed/
Earl E. Devaney Inspector General

United States Department of the Interior
OFFICE OF INSPECTOR GENERAL
Washington, DC 20240

At a whopping 1064 words, this could easily be mistaken for the cover letter to an actual report, but carrying the tiny thing over to the light we discover that this is, in fact, the complete works.

(Actually, it appears that if you request an investigation from the IG and, in his judgment, he comes up with nothing, you get a brief, detail-free letter like this, but if there appears to be something potentially actionable--if, say, it looks like the owner of the Washington Redskins is cutting down trees he shouldn't be--you get more specifics, although sometimes more redactions, too.)

You'll notice this report is conspicuously short on proper nouns--like names. Rove's name is mentioned in passing, but there's also no indication that anyone at the White House was contacted directly in connection with this (although we know that both Gordon Smith and Greg Walden contacted the White House about it at the time).

Many questions here: What to make of the competing science claims upon which the final DOI decision was (and wasn't) based? How diligently did the IG look into "evidence of political interference?

But I'm still curious about this: There's considerable evidence now indicating that by 2002 Karl Rove was happily throwing compliance with the 1939 Hatch Act (its full name, by the way, is "An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities," and now you know why)* under the train.

But how aware was Smith that Rove was blurring of the political/civil service lines here in Oregon as he was running for re-election?

(Hat tip to TJ for helping bag this. The boy does love his work.)


*And yes, that would be the same Hatch Act that fuming Clinton- and Gore-phobes pointed to in 1996 in that flap about Gore using White House phones for making donor calls.

Where's the outrage now, guys?

Salmon don't vote. Dead salmon, doubly so.

Last week we were looking at how the dead-fish smell of Karl Rove's plan to wring the maximum Republican vote-getting potential out of ever cabinet department (starting with throwing the Hatch Act out the window) made its way, via the Klamath River, into the 2002 re-election of Gordon Smith.

In a nutshell: Rove's traveling PowerPoint show in early 2002, revving up cabinet department and agency support for GOP candidates that fall, stressed Gordon Smith's re-election vulnerability. Some weeks later, the Dept. of the Interior apparently overruled and overrode science in hand to make sure Klamath River water would be available to area farms (part of the GOP base in Oregon), even at the cost of the endangered Coho salmon whose survival depended on the river running at full.

Over at Loaded Orygun, TJ does a nice bit of assembling a the suspects in the drawing room, and comes up with what I think might be the real dog that didn't bark in the night:

An investigation [by the Interior Department's inspector general, at the request of Senator John Kerry] was done into the possible influence of the White House--but the prime target's top aide can't even remember that there was one, and no pertinent emails outside of White House channels were ever reviewed.

Nobody ever said that an IG investigation has to feel like a full cavity search, but when its occurrence escapes the target's notice, it's fair to wonder if perhaps it might have been carried out with a little too much of the lace hanky touch.

LO's post features a nice document dump, linking to a lot of good background reading on the whole megillah.

Me, I'd love to see that IG report too. Especially in view of Earl E. Devaney's testimony last fall to a House Government Reform subcommittee:

Simply stated, short of a crime, anything goes at the highest levels of the Department of the Interior. [...] Ethics failures on the part of senior department officials -- taking the form of appearances of impropriety, favoritism and bias -- have been routinely dismissed with a promise "not to do it again."

Earl E. Devaney is the Interior IG who signed off on that March 1, 2004 report to Senator John Kerry concluding that there was "no basis" for claims that Rove was meddling in the Klamath Basin decisions.

"Short of a crime?" We'll see.

The Hatch Act, Gordon Smith's 2002 re-election, and 30,000 dead Coho salmon

The House investigation into the US Attorney rigging scandal and the Jack Abramoff scandal have cast some light into some of the darker corners of Gordon Smith's 2002 Senate re-election campaign.

It's a good reminder that Rove's plan to corrupt as much of the government as he could by 2008--happening largely unnoticed until a Democratic Congress finally re-established the principle of congressional oversight--was having consequences for Oregon as early as 2002:

In January 2002, at a retreat in West Virginia, Karl Rove gave a PowerPoint presentation to at least 50 managers at the Department of the Interior to discuss polling data, and emphasized the importance of getting Oregon Senator Gordon Smith, a Republican, reelected that year.

The way to get Smith reelected to another term, Rove reportedly told the Interior Department officials, would come via the agency's support of a highly controversial measure: diverting water from the Klamath River Basin to farms in the area that were experiencing unusually dry conditions, thereby supporting the GOP's agricultural base.

Details of Rove's involvement in influencing the Interior Department to reverse its policies with regard to the Klamath River basin have been previously reported. But questions about why a political operative like Rove was influencing agricultural and environmental policy decisions, possibly in violation of the law, and whether he pressured cabinet officials to reverse policy to get Republicans reelected were raised again last month during a sworn deposition Rove's former executive assistant, Susan Ralston, gave to Congressional investigators probing Rove's role in the US attorney scandal and his and other White House officials connections with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

A transcript of Ralston's deposition was released on Monday by Congressman Henry Waxman, the Democratic chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

According to Congressional investigators Rove used the PowerPoint presentation at the West Virginia retreat to solicit Republican donors. But Rove's priority was to ensure that farmers in Oregon got the additional water they wanted from the Klamath River, so Senator Smith would be reelected. President Bush lost Oregon by less than one percent in the 2000 presidential election to Al Gore, according to polling results from the Associated Press.

Laying the groundwork to get Smith reelected, Rove set up a cabinet-level task force on Klamath River issues to specifically study whether diverting water from Klamath River to farmers would hurt the endangered Coho salmon population. The task force Rove set up gave the impression that the administration was going to take an unbiased look at the situation.

According to Michael Kelly, a National Marine Fisheries Service biologist, that wasn't the case. Kelly spoke out publicly in 2003 alleging that he was subjected to political pressure and ordered to ignore scientific evidence that said the plan would likely kill off tens of thousands of Coho salmon, and to support the Klamath River low-water plan Rove wanted enacted to help farmers, who Rove saw as a crucial part of the Republican constituency in the state.

In March 2002, in a sudden reversal of a long standing policy, then Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton and Senator Smith held a joint press conference in Klamath Falls and opened up the irrigation system releasing thousands of gallons of water to 220,000 acres of farmland. The policy shift left the Klamath River basin with unusually low river flows that summer and ended up killing more than 30,000 endangered Coho salmon - the largest fish kill in the history of the West. But the move, as orchestrated by Rove, ended up getting Smith reelected that November.

House testimony has revealed that Rove's traveling PowerPoint show was probably a screaming violation of the laws against the use of civil servants for partisan political advantage.

Most of this is not really news. The story was reported at the time by those left-wing muck-rakers at the Wall Street Journal, although specific evidence that the Rove presentation might well be in violation of the Hatch Act were either as-yet unnoticed or scrubbed clean.

Still, a number of suggestive hints were there in that 2003 Journal article that the politicization of the cabinet departments--including the transformation of the Department of Interior into an auxiliary wing of the GOP re-election machine--was already well underway, and slipping into gear on Gordon Smith's behalf:

His [Rove's] remarks weren't entirely welcome -- especially by officials grappling with the competing arguments made by environmentalists, who wanted river levels high to protect endangered salmon, and Indian tribes, who depend on the salmon for their livelihoods. Neil McCaleb, then an assistant Interior secretary, recalls the "chilling effect" of Mr. Rove's remarks. Wayne Smith, then with the department's Bureau of Indian Affairs, says Mr. Rove reminded the managers of the need to "support our base." Both men since have left the department.

An Interior spokesman, Mark Pfeifle, says Mr. Rove spoke in general terms about the Klamath conflict in the course of a broader discussion. Without directing a policy outcome, Mr. Pfeifle says, Mr. Rove simply "indicated the need to help the basin's farmers." In the end, that is what happened when Interior reversed its previous stance and released more water. […]

With the benefit of hindsight, we can safely agree: Rove certainly wasn't interested in a policy outcome per se--only a political one. If it could have been demonstrated that, instead of mollifying the Klamath basin farmers, Smith's 2002 re-election hinged on putting up those 30,000 Coho salmon in the Presidential Suite at the Ritz-Carlton, they'd be there right now, ordering cut-plug herring from room service and watching on-demand movies.

More hints from that 2002 WSJ article--biologist Kelly wasn't just "under political pressure;" he'd actually sought government protection as a whistle-blower:

A National Marine Fisheries Service biologist, Michael Kelly, has asked for protection under federal "whistle-blower" laws, saying he was subjected to political pressure to go along with the low-water plan and ordered to ignore scientific evidence casting doubt on the plan. This month, a federal judge ruled the administration violated the Endangered Species Act in the way it justified the water diversion.

And finally, this gem from the Journal article, suggesting that Smith isn't the only part of this fish tale that stinks:

A few weeks ago, the federal Bureau of Reclamation in Klamath Falls warned farmers that the department would curtail the irrigation flow. Irate, Republican Rep. Greg Walden began making calls to protest. His first one went to Mr. Rove's office.

Within hours, the idea was dropped. Interior officials say managers from two cabinet departments agreed on a way to avoid it.

"Within hours." You've really got to love service like that.

Was Smith aware that the actions taken by Rove in the Klamath River basin to help his 2002 re-election were part of Rove's larger efforts to illegally politicize every part of the Federal government? I have no idea. But it's still a hell of a statistic: 30,000 dead Coho salmon, to boost Smith's campaign over the top.

Remember that the next time you hear Smith (or Walden) trying to position himself as environmentally friendly for re-election season.

Taking the Fifth--it's the new black

Via TPM Muckraker comes this news:

Karl Rove’s former secretary, Susan Ralston, will plead the Fifth if she is forced to testify about White House dealings with Jack Abramoff, according to a memo released by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform today.

Ralston gave a voluntary deposition to the committee on May 10, where she said if subpoenaed, she would invoke her Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

Which puts Ralston in the same fashion league with Monica Goodling over at the Department of Justice, who got her own immunity deal last month.

Gotta wonder just how big a powder keg these people are sitting on.

Meanwhile, here's looking forward to the day when "the new black" becomes "the new orange" (jumpsuit).

Reprise: The most beautiful sound I ever heard

It's been a tough week to be Alberto Gonzales--never a situation you'd really want to find yourself in anyway, I'd think, but worse now than usual.

Gonzales and his people have pretty evidently been lying to Congress under oath. Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, knows this. Gonzales knows Leahy knows. Everyone in Washington knows Gonzales knows Leahy knows.

Thus the almost unbelievable sight of a United States Attorney General spending the month of April desperately, and none too successfully from the sound of it, cramming like a hungover sophomore for his Senate testimony tomorrow--testimony where, if he and his department are as Simon-pure as the administration claims, he should have nothing more challenging to do than tell the truth.

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales has retreated from public view this week in an intensive effort to save his job, spending hours practicing testimony and phoning lawmakers for support in preparation for pivotal appearances in the Senate this month, according to administration officials.

After struggling for weeks to explain the extent of his involvement in the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, Gonzales and his aides are viewing the Senate testimony on April 12 and April 17 as seriously as if it were a confirmation proceeding for a Supreme Court or a Cabinet appointment, officials said.

Ed Gillespie, a former Republican National Committee chairman, and Timothy E. Flanigan, who worked for Gonzales at the White House, have met with the attorney general to plot strategy. The department has scheduled three days of rigorous mock testimony sessions next week and Gonzales has placed phone calls to more than a dozen GOP lawmakers seeking support, officials said.

Gonzales is seeking to convince skeptical lawmakers that he can be trusted to command the Justice Department after the prosecutor firings, which he initially described as an "overblown personnel matter." Subsequent documents and testimony from his former chief of staff have shown that Gonzales was regularly briefed on the process, revelations that have led to calls for his resignation.

Justice officials and outside experts said the effort is further hampered by legal conflicts among Gonzales and his senior aides. Top Democrats have also accused department officials of misleading Congress in previous testimony, leading Justice lawyers to insist on limiting contact between key players to avoid allegations of obstructing a congressional investigation, officials said.

Digby notes that, with two days still to go before Gonzales has to testify, he's already publicly rehearsing saying "I don't recall" to questions he hasn't been asked yet.

And, while we're on the general subject, Karl Rove's getaway to Oregon last weekend probably didn't do much to help him forget his troubles, either. Rove, you might recall, is at the center of a story involving five million missing emails sought by congressional investigators, emails that are most likely covered by the Presidential Records Act of 1978:

A lawyer for the Republican National Committee told congressional staff members yesterday that the RNC is missing at least four years' worth of e-mail from White House senior adviser Karl Rove that is being sought as part of investigations into the Bush administration, according to the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

GOP officials took issue with Rep. Henry Waxman's account of the briefing and said they still hope to find the e-mail as they conduct forensic work on their computer equipment. But they acknowledged that they took action to prevent Rove -- and Rove alone among the two dozen or so White House officials with RNC accounts -- from deleting his e-mails from the RNC server. Waxman (D-Calif.) said he was told the RNC made that move in 2005.

His own people had to specifically prevent Rove from deleting his email records? Should we conclude that direct instructions from a Special Counsel not to do so just, you know, slipped his mind?

And--alas for the White House--the story doesn't stop there, since the don't-delete-the-emails instructions date back to the beginnings of the Scooter Libby Plamegate investigation.

And if the U.S. Attorneys scandal leads straight to Gonzales's door, and the missing documents problem points directly and personally at Rove, the Libby trial was always a load of birdshot aimed directly at the Vice President's face.

Representative Henry A. Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, yesterday sent a letter to Gonzales asking that all nongovernment e-mails sent by White House officials be preserved.

Waxman cited media reports alleging that Rove has sent 95 percent of his e-mails via a nongovernment account, and expressed concern that many of those e-mails apparently were not preserved.

Waxman said his committee would examine whether e-mails were deleted in violation of the Presidential Records Act.

The fact that e-mails are missing was noted -- but not widely and publicly noticed -- in the perjury trial of Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

In January 2006, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald sent a letter to Libby's lawyer that noted that "we have learned that not all of the e-mail of the Office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process of the White House computer system."

And how do we know what fragmentary bits we do know about Gonzales's stretchers, Rove's fast ones, and Cheney's schemes?

I'll give you a hint:

It's an eight-letter Latin word that can be translated as "under pain."

One of my best bits of parody in the last couple of years--and most from the heart, I might add--got lost in the post-election roar last November. I'm reprinting it here, with a slightly-updated title (because when I published it originally, it wasn't clear that the Dems had recaptured the Senate). I'm giving it a second outing partly because, unlike some of the other bits of fugacious ephemera I've banged out over the years (to borrow a Lehrer-ism) this one seems to have some staying power in the struggle to keep up with current events. (And partly for the pleasure of remembering the works of Frank Jacobs, another of my literary heroes.)

Without further ado:

A Brief Lyric On The Occasion of the Democrats Recapturing Control of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives After 14 Years of Republican Mismanagement, Incompetence, Corruption, and Dereliction of Duty

The most beautiful sound I ever heard:
Subpoena,
Subpoena, Subpoena, Subpoena . . .

Watch Republicans freak at a single word:
Subpoena,
Subpoena, Subpoena, Subpoena . . .

Subpoena!
The Dems finally get to subpoena,
And oversight will be
So painful for the GOP.

Subpoena!
They'll long for the days of Katrina.
Gonzales will work late,
To get his stories straight,
You'll see.

Subpoena!
Say it loud and Karl Rove starts forgetting,
Say it soft and watch Tony Snow sweating.

Subpoena!
Dick Cheney will choke on subpoenas.

The most beautiful sound I ever heard:
Subpoena.

Reading: Kinsley on intellectual dishonesty

Everyone's taking a whack at it: Why is it that Rove Republicans just lie and lie and lie some more--and never get called on it in any serious way?

(Yes, yes, of course Dems lie too, but you and I both know they're mere hobbyists compared to the professionals running the GOP and the right-wing media. Be serious.)

I think the answer I find most convincing so far comes from Michael "Kinsley's Law of Gaffes" Kinsley, because--like Hercule Poirot at the end of "Murder on the Orient Express"--he lets no one off the hook: everyone committed the murder.*

The great flaw in American democracy is not electoral irregularities, purposeful or accidental. It’s not money (which, even under current law, cannot in the end actually buy votes). It’s not even the inexplicable failure of all other Americans to vote my way or of politicians to enact my own agenda. It’s not the broken promises and the outright lying, although we’re getting close. The biggest flaw in our democracy is, as I say, the enormous tolerance for intellectual dishonesty. Politicians are held to account for outright lies, but there seems to be no sanction against saying things you obviously don’t believe. There is no reward for logical consistency, and no punishment for changing your story depending on the circumstances. Yet one minor exercise in disingenuousness can easily have a greater impact on an election than any number of crooked voting machines. And it seems to me, though I can’t prove it, that this problem is getting worse and worse. […]

Intellectual dishonesty can’t be banned or regulated or “capped” like money. The only way it can be brought under control is if people start voting against it. If they did, the problem would go away. That’s democracy.

Kinsley's piece is going onto the Reading's list in the sidebar.

*Oh yeah--look out, spoiler alert.

Anti-incumbency: The new black?

His creepy chumminess to Bush and Rove, and his refusal to reconsider his support for the Iraq war were part of the reason that Joe Lieberman lost the CT Dem primary earlier this month, but part of it is a mood of "throw the bums out" that seems to be settling over a lot of voters--both Democrats and Republicans.

Just ask soon-to-be-former Alaska Governor Frank Murkowski:

Republican Gov. Frank Murkowski, stung by accusations of arrogance and stubbornness, lost his bid for a second term Tuesday after polling last in a three-way GOP primary.

Sarah Palin, a former Wasilla mayor, won the Republican nomination for governor after capturing 51 percent of the vote. Former state legislator John Binkley came in second with 30 percent and Murkowski polled just 19 percent.

"We expected to win, we didn't win, so we'll support the nominee," Murkowski said after arriving at election headquarters to concede. […]

Murkowski, 73, sought to make the primary a referendum on his proposal to build a $25 billion natural gas pipeline to Canada, calling the project "the greatest significant event since statehood."

His approval ratings have skidded over the past four years because of much-criticized decisions such as appointing his daughter to his U.S. Senate seat and purchasing a state jet after his request for the aircraft was denied by both the federal government and state Legislature.

In the campaign's final days, Murkowski also was stung by the partial shutdown of the Prudhoe Bay oil field, where production was cut in half earlier this month because of leaks and corrosion. The governor's opponents accused his administration of allowing the oil company BP PLC to go years without proper maintenance of its facilities.

Kos makes a couple of barbed observations on the subject over at DailyKOS.

Remember, though: Murkowski may have gotten stomped, but he deserves credit for actually conceding when he lost fair and square--a basic skill Republicans (both natural and synthetic) are increasingly unable to master.

CT Dem primary: The morning after

The NYTimes got it right (and Portland's newspaper of record didn't) about what the Lieberman loss means: Democrats in Connecticut know that accommodating the Bush administration is not--cannot be--moderation:

The rebellion against Mr. Lieberman was actually an uprising by that rare phenomenon, irate moderates. They are the voters who have been unnerved over the last few years as the country has seemed to be galloping in a deeply unmoderate direction. A war that began at the president’s choosing has degenerated into a desperate, bloody mess that has turned much of the world against the United States. The administration’s contempt for international agreements, Congressional prerogatives and the authority of the courts has undermined the rule of law abroad and at home.

Yet while all this has been happening, the political discussion in Washington has become a captive of the Bush agenda. Traditional beliefs like every person’s right to a day in court, or the conviction that America should not start wars it does not know how to win, wind up being portrayed as extreme. The middle becomes a place where senators struggle to get the president to volunteer to obey the law when the mood strikes him. Attempting to regain the real center becomes a radical alternative.

When Mr. Lieberman told The Washington Post, “I haven’t changed. Events around me have changed,” he actually put his finger on his political problem.

And this is why the outcome of yesterday's CT primary is important in Portland, Oregon, as it is in Portland, Connecticut--and in Poughkeepsie, Peoria, and Petaluma.

Courtesy of Arivosis, here's the shorter Lieberman campaign message from now until the general election:

The Democratic party has been taken over by extremists who don't remember September 11 and who are soft on national security.

Don't expect to hear much else from Joe during his campaign as a soi-disant "independent;" Take this away from him and he's shooting blanks. But do expect to hear it a lot; expect to hear it on Imus, the 700 Club, and Hannity & Colmes, and expect it to be repeated endlessly by such true defenders of Democratic Party purity as Limbaugh, O'Reilly, and Coulter.

There is, of course, a word for Senate candidates who base their campaign on nothing more than attacking the Democratic party: The word is "Republican."

Which brings up this odd rumor reported by George Stephanopoulos:

According to a close Lieberman adviser, the President's political guru, Karl Rove, has reached out to the Lieberman camp with a message straight from the Oval Office: "The boss wants to help. Whatever we can do, we will do."

What I find puzzling about this story is that, from the sound of it, it was leaked from the Lieberman camp.

I can easily imagine Rove's office making the offer, and leaking it, simply to create mischief; and I can imagine a politically and ideologically rudderless Lieberman campaign accepting the offer but learning just enough from last night's thumping to keep the arrangement a secret as long as possible. I mean, when the Pennsylvania GOP rents out the Green Party like a Grange Hall to help get Santorum elected, anything's possible.

But for Joe's own people, less than 24 hours after losing a primary election because he was seen to be far too accommodating to the right-wing extremists running the government, to themselves publicly announce that they're fielding an invitation from Karl "Heart of Darkness" Rove himself to help their campaign . . . why would any Democrat touch Lieberman again without a level 3 hazmat suit?