Looks like Britain's Independent is running with a story that an FBI agent is saying she saw pre-9/11 papers that specifically warned al Qaeda was angling for an attack on U.C. cities using airplanes:

A former translator for the FBI with top-secret security clearance says she has provided information to the panel investigating the 11 September attacks which proves senior officials knew of al-Qa'ida's plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened.

She said the claim by the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that there was no such information was "an outrageous lie".

Sibel Edmonds said she spent more than three hours in a closed session with the commission's investigators providing information that was circulating within the FBI in the spring and summer of 2001 suggesting that an attack using aircraft was just months away and the terrorists were in place. The Bush administration, meanwhile, has sought to silence her and has obtained a gagging order from a court by citing the rarely used "state secrets privilege".

. . .

"President Bush said they had no specific information about 11 September and that is accurate but only because he said 11 September," she said. There was, however, general information about the use of airplanes and that an attack was just months away.

There's more. I don't know how accurate this is, but she obviously claims to have given the info to the Commission. I guess we'll just have to see how it plays out...

To absolutely no one's surprise, George Bush is now playing up the just-released March jobs report. The report, which showed some 308,000 jobs created during the month, is the first bit of good jobs news since Bush took office. It's literally the first time Bush has even approached typical Democratic levels of job creation, even for one month.

So, will this be a one-month flash-in-the-pan, or are we looking at a trend? And how would each impact the election?

Clearly, some modest jobs gains this year will help Bush's election chances. At the same time, there are very troubling aspects of Bush's tenure that remain ready-made talking points for Democrats, regardless of whether job creation like this continues.

• Despite his claims, Bush literally has had no economic plan whatsoever. His sole focus on the economy was the use of any economic condition as an excuse to enact tax cuts focused heavily on the wealthy. Given our vast past experience with economic downturns, it is fair to say there are many things Bush could have done to foster job creation. Instead, Bush's attitude appears to have been that the economy would take care of itself, and all he had to do was cut taxes and spin whatever happened.
  
• If Bush had done anything to promote job growth, we would have been looking at this sort of job creation at least a year earlier.
  
• Bush's lack of economic plan or promotion of job creation means that, no matter what happens, he's going to finish his term with the worst economic record in history and the worst job creation record since Hoover.
  
• Bush's team has repeatedly made promises they knew they couldn't keep, and even decent job growth from here on out won't make up for it. For example, Bush promised some 5.4 million new jobs in 2003 and 2004 if his tax cuts had been enacted. And his latest economic forecast promoted the idea that job growth in 2004 would average 320,000 per month. Either way, his economic promises have turned out to be snake oil.
  
• Bush's non-plan has had two very discernable results: the worst job-creation since World War II and the highest deficit in history.

In summary, the March job creation level was good. It hardly makes up for the rest of Bush's truly abysmal record, and has very little relation to anything Bush has actually done. Bush has made pie-in-the-sky promises that haven't been borne out. When he inanely touts the March job growth as evidence that his "economic policies are working", just remember: overall, his "economic policies" don't even deserve an "F":


(courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics)

It stands to reason that Bush will promote the March results. But hopefully, a little perspective will prevail.

While John Kerry is proposing solutions to problems, all the Bushies can do is distort Kerry's record and run around claiming against all evidence that things are just dandy. Who would you rather have as president?

It's also quite telling that, given all the resources at Bush's disposal (and his evinced willingness to use them), they still have to distort and fabricate facts in order to attack Kerry. If anything, Kerry's actual record is probably pretty tough to view in a negative light. The fact that the Bushies are spreading so much dishonest stuff about Kerry means there may be a bit of a reckoning down the road, when Kerry has the resources to respond more widely.

Today's dishonesty alert comes to you directly from the Bush Campaign. I found it in my email inbox this afternoon:

Dear Jonathan,

John Kerry supported a 50 cent per gallon increase in the gas tax, which would cost the average American family $657 a year.

Today, Bush-Cheney '04 unveils the Kerry gas tax calculator, so voters can find out exactly how much Kerry's gas tax increase would cost them at the pump.

How much would it cost you? Find out today!

Based on the car you drive the Kerry gas tax calculator will show you how much John Kerry's 50 cent gas tax would cost your family. Planning a trip? The gas tax calculator will give you directions, and let you know how much more you'd be paying if you add in Kerry's tax. Just go to:

http://www.GeorgeWBush.com/Calculator/

Sincerely,

Terry Nelson
National Political Director

Signing emails such as these with a "sincerely" simply must be a bit of a joke to campaign insiders.

Of course, the actual facts of the matter are somewhat different than this email implies. Surprise, surprise: the Bushies are using rather creative interpretations of the facts to make their claims. Since Kerry has never voted for, sponsored or co-sponsored a 50-cent gas-tax increase, perhaps what the Bush campaign means is that John Kerry really wanted to increase gas taxes by 50 cents? This would be in keeping with their M.O.: after all, while they claimed Saddam actually had weapons of mass destruction and plans to use them to kill us all, what they really meant was they knew Saddam had thought about them wistfully at some point in the last 10 years.

You just can't make this stuff up. Oh, wait! I guess you can; the Bushies do, every day.

Determined to keep their dishonesty in front of the public for all to see, we now have this from the administration:

U.S. officials told NBC News that the full record of Clarke’s testimony two years ago would not be declassified. They said that at the request of the White House, however, the CIA was going through the transcript to see what could be declassified, with an eye toward pointing out contradictions.

Let's translate this: "we think people are completely stupid. They will therefore have no problem with us releasing out-of-context, creatively selected portions of Clarke's testimony designed to make it look like he's contradicting himself".

And if that's not what they're doing, they're even more stupid than we could have imagined. They've just restored Clarke's image as a popular hero, and solidified theirs as corrupt power-abusing hucksters. Let's hope the press doesn't miss the implications.

"The Washington Blame Game"

Much to our collective relief, Karen Hughes is back as an advisor to Bush. And she displayed her knack for generating simplistic soundbytes by distilling all the concern and tough-minded analysis of 9/11 failures and successes into one phrase: "The Washington Blame Game". As though Washington is the only place where gross negligence can get you in trouble.

There are two purposes for looking at what happened before and after 9/11. One would, indeed, to be to generate recriminations. But the other would be to make sure it doesn't happen again.

If you own a store and money gets stolen, you don't accuse police investigators of playing "a blame game" if they point fingers at the cashier on duty. You don't say, "oh, well, let's let bygones be bygones for the good of the store". You get to the bottom of what happened; otherwise, it will likely happen again. If that involves firing incompetent or criminal staff, then that's the way it has to be.

Karen Hughes, with her folksy Texas insight and motherly manner, would doubtless like to have everyone forget that 3000 people were killed on 9/11/2001. To her way of thinking, trying to get to the bottom of what happened amounts to playing a "game". Typical Washington: don't fix anything, just find a scapegoat, right? It couldn't be that we're talking about actual, bona fide negligence and incompetence; naw, it has to be that we're just looking for someone to blame.

Put simply, Hughes is an enabler and a defender of corruption, misleadership and incompetence. As such, she's not even in the running for serious discussion on the matter.

No, Ms. Hughes, 9/11/2001 wasn't a game. The families of the dead don't think the 9/11 commission and testimony are a game. And making sure that travesty never happens again damn sure isn't a game. If that means throwing your former boss out on his rear, then so be it.

Update: I finally thought of how to encapsulate the above. Perhaps, instead of "playing the Washington Blame Game", Hughes would prefer a nice game of "the Texas No Accountability Game", also known as "Enron-ball". Unfortunately, here in Washington, when 3000 Americans are killed there is usually a call to figure out if we need to make changes, including personnel re-assignments, to make sure it doesn't happen again. Go figure.

Condi Rice and the Oath of Doom

As is all over the news, Dr. Condoleeza Rice is still refusing to testify under oath before the 9/11 commission. The Bush administration's position on this (that there's no precedent for such a thing happening) is thoroughly wrong and hair-splitting, and has mystified policy experts.

My take on things is pretty simple: absent any evidence to the contrary, it would appear that the one thing the administration is more afraid of than Dick Clarke's book is Condi Rice under oath. Perhaps there's some other reason for their hard-line stance against Dr. Rice testifying under oath, but as things stand it appears to me that the administration has calculated that the one way things could get worse would be if 1) Dr. Rice were caught in an obvious falsehood or contradiction under oath, and accused of perjury (a very real possibility, given the frequency with which she's been contradicting herself and known fact), or 2) under tough, detailed quesitoning, Dr. Rice admitted the administration didn't act on specific warnings before 9/11 and/or moved immediately, despite all evidence to the contrary, to blame Iraq for 9/11.

As I said, perhaps there's a more innocuous reason for the stance the White House has taken. But given the political damage Dr. Rice not testifying has been generating, it would seem the White House thinks things could get much, much worse. That, alone, is reason enough to probe further into what we don't yet know.

Credibility Express derails again

Looks like the White House is backing away from its claims that Bush didn't pull Richard Clarke aside immediately post 9/11 and ask that he look for a link between 9/11 and Saddam. This, of course, follows the debunking of the claims (which were intended to discredit Clarke) by eyewitnesses to the meeting.

Of course, the Bushies are claiming it was innocuous -- Bush just wanted to "cover all the bases". Technically, this is a bit stronger of a position, since it becomes a "he-said-she-said" issue. After all, maybe Clarke misinterpreted Bush's intent. Maybe he really doesn't like Bush, and heard what he wanted to hear.

However, the fact that 1) they denied the meeting in the first place, 2) despite the clear implication that the lack of a link was made perfectly clear, the Bushies still implied links between Saddam and 9/11 in the runup to the Iraq War (which some of them are still doing), and 3) it had already been made clear to Bush and his advisors long before 9/11 that there was no Iraq-sponsored terrorism effort, against the U.S., this is still a very problematic position for the administration in which to be.

Canaries in the Coalmine

From the annals of the hotsheets, we find the supermarket tabloid Globe claiming there's a "John Kerry sex disease scandal".

Now, the Globe is about as reliable as Condi Rice, and no, I don't have to read the story to know that. But here's something interesting: in 1992 when Clinton's adversaries were first getting started, the Globe was where some of the early fabrications appeared. Furthermore, from Joe Conason, we hear that some of the usual suspects in the Right Wing Slime Network are getting back in the game.

So, the question becomes: is Globe serving as a sort of early-warning system that the tall-tale-tellers are revving up their engines? And would it be possible, this time around, to identify them early on?

It would be very, very nice to be ready to nip any pseudo-scandals in the bud. I know how difficult that can be, but it would be a heck of a lot better than waiting for Jeff Gerth, Michael Isakoff or their equivalents to get suckered once again into giving mainstream credibility to a new round of out-and-out lies...

Comments welcome.