Ah, the trials and tribulations of being a federal worker. One of them involves a general prohibition against political activity whilst working. It's a good rule, but it does get tough when one hears some truly ridiculous tripe and can't do anything about it at the time (like call in to a radio show and ask questions that would leave someone babbling incoherently). One must wait until later, and post upon one's blog instead.

Case in point: John Stossel on Air America's "Morning Sedition" yesterday. Mr. Stossel is a true-believer libertarian, and used his time on air to spout typical libertarian nonsense about how the government is coercive, the free market is perfect, etc.

Anyway, for a thorough debunking of this sort of thing, I highly recommend Mike Huben's Critiques of Libertarianism web site.

Were I of a conspiratorial mindset, I'd say someone is trying to stop Air America and keep Talk Radio a Right Wing monopoly. Since I'm not, I'll just report that it would appear that the fledgling radio network is having some trouble with a couple of its stations:

After just two weeks of broadcasting, Air America Radio, the fledgling liberal talk-radio network featuring Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo, was pulled off the air Wednesday morning in Chicago and Los Angeles, the network's second- and third-largest markets, in a payment dispute that shows no sign of quick resolution.

Arthur Liu, owner of Multicultural Radio Broadcasting, which owns Air America affiliates WNTD-950 AM in Chicago and KBLA-1580 AM in Los Angeles, said Air America bounced a check and owes him more than $1 million. Air America and Multicultural had entered into a time brokerage agreement in which the network was essentially renting Multicultural's airtime, Liu said.

. . .

According to [Air America executive vice president and general counsel, David] Goodfriend, the dispute centers on the Los Angeles station during the period after Air America had begun leasing airtime in early February, but before the network actually launched in late March. During those months, he charged, KBLA was broadcasting Spanish-language programming provided by Multicultural.

Goodfriend said he learned last week that Liu and Multicultural had been "double-dipping," selling that same airtime to others. As a result, he said, the network declined to make scheduled payments for KBLA unless Multicultural agreed to credit Air America for the extra money Multicultural made. Air America did not bounce any checks, he said.

Let's hope this gets ironed out quickly. In the mean time, a live feed is still available online from several sources.

My, but I'm getting tired of the now-typical media meme, "if you're for George Bush, you'll likely believe him, and if you're against him, you won't". It's the latest version of "he said, she said", and although it may be true in many cases, it's trivially so. As with earlier versions it amounts to little more than a lazy press refusing to fact check various issues.

Enough, already. The nation's partisan divide is well-known. Bush made several statements last night that were either self-contradictory or contradicted known facts. That is the story. In an age of Google, Lexis-Nexis and online availability of virtually every fact imaginable, it's inexcusable.

John Ashcroft's Blind Justice

Seems as though blaming mistakes upon others is just the Republican way. While Ashcroft was hiding a statue's breasts he was figuring out more ways to hide the truth about what he did not want to hear about. He told Thomas Pickard that he didn't want to hear about terrorist threats.

I guess it didn't matter to him, as he was a lucky ducky -- getting to fly on private planes and leaving the risk of flying commercial to the peasants.

Being a Missouri resident, I guess I lost my ability to have even a modicum of respect for a man that pours Crisco oil on his head so that he can believe that he is special.

Larry Johnson, writing for Tompaine.com, pretty much sums up why the Bushies are so terrified of the current 9/11 inquiry and the August 6, 2001 PDB:

At a minimum, the details in the 6 August PDB should have motivated Rice to convene a principals' meeting. Such a meeting would have ensured that all members of the president's national security team were aware of the information that had been shared with the president. George Bush should have directed the different department heads to report back within one week on any information relevant to the Al Qaeda threat. Had he done this there is a high probability that the FBI field agents concerns about Arabs taking flight training would have rung some bells. There is also a high probability that the operations folks at CIA would have shared the information they had in hand about the presence of Al Qaeda operators in the United States. While Condoleezza Rice is correct that there was no "silver bullet" in that PDB, she conveniently ignores the huge pieces of the puzzle that were in the hands of various members of the U.S. government.

The administration evidently believes that if it says something loudly and frequently enough, the public will believe it, no matter what "it" is. This is why it has taken the absurd step of releasing a document, then publicly and furiously telling everyone what the document means -- with their explanations being in plain contradiction to the document's text.

Several of my fellow Weasels have now reached the conclusion that the November elections will amount to little more than a bloodbath. I'm rapidly coming to the same conclusion: I feel that Mr. Bush's candidacy is just about unsalvageable at this point. The question remains, of course, just how much of the damage will also tar the GOP in general; Congressional Repubs have been quietly distancing themselves from the White House for some time. Given their "asleep at the switch" response to the Bush administration's behavior (doesn't lying to Congress count as a "high crime"?), they may find that Mr. Bush's coattails are indeed very, very long.

Over at Daily Kos, we have a post that discusses the reasons for recent polling results that find, while most Americans still believe invading Iraq was the right thing to do, Bush is getting very low marks for his handling of the situation.

Additionally, polling continues to indicate most Americans react very negatively to attempts to pin any responsibility for the 9/11 attacks on the Bush administration.

In the first case, the post hypothesizes that the reason for the discrepancy is that most Americans believe America will be more secure with a stable and democratic Iraq in place. While I agree that this is likely a factor, I would imagine that another is simply the fact that most Americans were tired of dealing with Saddam. They had the impression of him as having thumbed his nose at us and the world for 10 years, despite losing the Gulf War, and they wanted him finally taken care of. It remains to be seen how bad things in Iraq will have to get before that sentiment is re-thought.

In the second case, I don't find it surprising that most Americans have trouble shifting any blame for 9/11 to the White House. What happened was profoundly traumatic, and it's far easier to cast blame for such a terrible thing on the "bad guys" alone. I believe that would only change if incontrovertable evidence came to light that Bush was explicitly warned about 9/11 coming, and did nothing. Perhaps even that wouldn't be enough: the evidence might have to show collusion.

I don't believe, however, that this means most Americans are incapable of deciding that the Bush administration's response to terrorist threats pre-9/11 was inadequate, nor that his response post-9/11 has been less than stellar.

Ultimately, no sentiment is immune to modification -- at some point, Americans may decide it really wasn't so bad having a pipsqueak like Saddam in power, just as there might be a tipping point in which many Americans suddenly -- and perhaps, violently -- decide Bush shared responsibility for 9/11. The former will likely be an easier change than the latter.

Although it seems clear to me that the Bush administration did not take reasonable steps before September 11 to stop the attacks on New York and Washington DC, it is far more important, IMHO, to review what the administration has done since. Ranging from a disastrous invasion of Iraq (irrelevant to fighting terrorism) to fighting reform efforts such as federalizing airport security, gun fingerprinting, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, stabilization of post-war Afghanistan and simple funding increases for anti-terrorism, the administration has proven long on rhetoric and very, very short on action.

We will never know whether reasonable steps taken before 9/11 would have prevented the disaster. Certainly, "shaking the trees" to obtain information regarding suspects could have been fruitful: several of the hijackers were known al-Qaeda types, and the FBI was aware, at least at the agent level, that some of them had been taking flying lessons. That's how the millenium attacks were thwarted under the Clinton administration: by holding near-daily meetings of senior administration officials and department heads to share information and compare notes.

But we can say, with certainty, that since 9/11, a) George Bush should have known better, and b) his actions haven't reflected an understanding of what's best for the American people.

Jonathan's blog of Arpril 11 concerning adminstration failures, I think hits home. (if it hasn't been read, it should be)

I certainly agree, which prompts a question in my mind. I can see earlier, before solid information was made public, where there might be some legitimate questions whether people in and out of government really had "all the facts" as they tried to raise red flags on terrorism and other issues. And that the administration (even if we didn't agree with them) were doing their level best to "do good by this country".

But as these pieces come out that more and more justifies fears that a number of us have had, where it is becoming "plain as the nose on one's face" that they are/were either incompetent, criminal, negligent, partisan or any/all combinations thereof, how can people STILL walk in lockstep behind this crew?

Are we that fearful, or what? I'm afraid I *really* don't understand it. And I don't believe that there exists a simple straightforward answer to that question, either. It goes too much to the heart of what we as a people and a nation are (becoming).

I feel strongly that the bums MUST be thrown out (and most likely will be) this fall, but I, for one will feel no real satisfaction when they go.

Because the mentality that permitted them to flaunt their control still exists, and will continue to do so after the people are gone.

My apologies for not posting more often -- the trials and tribulations of a working guy. As a federal employee with a one-hour commute (each way), my blogging time is somewhat limited. And there's so much to talk about!

OK, on to the topic that's on everyone's mind. 9/11 and the Bush administration.

My take on this is somewhat complex, thanks in no small part to the confusing (and confused, and contradictory) defense that the Bushies have attempted to mount over this issue.

The release of the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing memo has, more than anything, simply confirmed what we already knew: the Bushies were warned about an increasing and dire threat.

As the American Prospect's Tapped has pointed out, Dr. Rice and her testimony are an exercise in contradictions. On the one hand, we have a strong, competent woman (Dr. Rice) who claims she wanted a comprehensive strategy for dealing with al Qaeda before 9/11 (no more "swatting at flies"). On the other hand, she claims that she didn't follow up on repeated, serious warnings about impending al Qaeda attacks because no one told her to. Likewise, while Rice claims Mr. Bush was fully aware of the threat and understood it, Bush himself has said he didn't view terrorism as an "urgent threat" before 9/11. Given the ominous and relevant warnings he was clearly receiving in his daily briefings, it would seem that either a failure to view terrorism as an urgent threat or a failure to act on that threat would be damning.

(I also agree with those who conclude that the August 6, 2001 PDB was not, as Dr. Rice characterized it, an "historical document". Nor is it true, we can say now, that we had no warning of terrorist threats here at home, as Dr. Rice asserted. I believe Dr. Rice, on several occasions, has demonstrated either a severely distorted viewpoint or a disturbing willingness to dissemble about known facts.)

So, to my mind, the conclusions we can draw are these: Mr. Bush and the administration were repeatedly warned about an imminent and gathering threat to the American people. These warnings included enough detail to focus some counterterrorism efforts, although they clearly did not involve targets conveniently painted on the World Trade Center by Al Qaeda. Administration officials not only did not act on that information in a reasonable manner (increased airport security; enhanced survelliance of known Al Qaeda sympathizers; getting all department heads and cabinet members together for high level meetings; forwarding warnings on to law enforcement; "shaking the trees" of the various deparments down to the local agent level to see what we knew; promoting the Counterterrorism Czar position back to its status at the end of the Clinton administration); they failed to act at all, even indirectly (failed to increase funding for counterterrorism when it was requested, for example).

The potential reasons for these failures are numerous, but I feel what happened was a combination of administration figures misunderstanding their jobs (a notion that, like Dr. Rice, the rest of the Bushies felt they really didn't have to do anything; they were basically there to collect a paycheck, and the problem was being taken care of by underlings) and misunderstanding the problem (they felt the real issue was nations such as Iraq, not transnational terrorist organizations). Both of these issues were evidently recognized by people in the administration such as Clarke, who fought to get the Bushies more involved and keep their focus on the real threat. It obviously wasn't enough, and it took 3000 dead Americans to change things.

Whether or not this failure is forgivable will obviously depend upon the person, as will a willingness to chance such a failure in the future. For myself, I believe most senior administration officials have demonstrated viewpoints that are quite at odds with factual reality, which basically means it takes hundreds of citizens killed to get something through their heads. I'm not comfortable with such people in office.

The Bushies's actions since 9/11 are another matter, and have proven disquieting, to say the least. The invasion of Iraq demonstrates that the Bush adminstration either continues to believe nations are the primary threat, or worse, that catastrophic attacks are fair game for selling pre-existing agendas. Either way, my impression that the Bushies should not be trusted to handle the threat remains strong.

The administration is trying to portray the information before 9/11 as very sketchy, leap to the conclusion that nothing could have stopped 9/11, and hope people don't notice the fact that, somewhere in the middle, the administration failed to take any action on the information it actually received. The administration should at least admit that it failed to do what it could have done. We'll never know whether it would have been enough. But it would have left the administration with more than empty excuses and outright lies.