NIGERIA UPDATE:
The army and navy forces in the Delta Region are facing better armed and equipped local gangs, and are not able to shut the gangs down. Tapping into oil pipelines and stealing oil continues, and this provides the gangs with a steady cash flow. The better armed gangs are branching out into more ambitious attacks on oil company operations in the Delta. Payrolls are a favorite target. The region is becoming more dangerous, and unruly.
Keep an eye on this.
IT’S A CLINTON-FEST AT KAUSFILES: Bill rages, Hillary scolds, and Kaus has a terrific time.
DAN RIEHL: “I submit that, not only does Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank unfairly play the race card against Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions; in his myopic view, he totally fails to see where and how it actually should be played on the issue of illegal immigration.”
UPDATE: He’s got more on ABC’s Hastert “scoop,” too.
BYRON YORK: “If House Speaker Dennis Hastert has his way, why should any member of Congress ever comply with a subpoena? And are the members who have complied with subpoenas in the past kicking themselves for being such saps?”
ORIN KERR IS TAKING SUGGESTIONS FOR CONGRESSIONAL HEARING TOPICS: He’s got some pretty funny ones to start with.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL reprinted my column on societal pressures against parenting. Ann Althouse linked it, which produced a bunch of interesting comments.
You should also read this piece by Robert Samuelson, who takes a somewhat different slant on the issue. And note this post on the media by Mark Daniels.
AUCTIONING A GOP SPINE INSERTION AT eBAY. (Via RedState).
I ASKED IF THEY HAD SOMETHING TO HIDE. THE ANSWER JUST MAY BE YES:
The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert, is under investigation by the FBI, which is seeking to determine his role in an ongoing public corruption probe into members of Congress, ABC News has learned from high level government sources.
Federal officials say the information implicating Hastert was developed from convicted lobbyists who are now cooperating with the government.
Perhaps the bizarre bipartisan reaction to the Jefferson search — and the lack of cooperation preceding it — stems from the fact that a lot of people in both parties have exposure here. And certainly if the Speaker is under investigation it’s easy to see why the FBI might be reluctant to rely further on the Sergeant at Arms and the Capitol Police.
UPDATE: I’ve got an email from Krista Cole in the House saying that the DOJ denies that Hastert is under investigation. The release, in its entirety: “Speaker Hastert is not under investigation by the Justice Department.”
Nothing on the DOJ webpage yet, though. But here’s a Reuters story.
MORE: Reader Chris Quincy emails: “One wonders if ABC would’ve sourced this more carefully if it were Nancy Pelosi.” It’s a rather surprising error. I wonder who ABC’s sources were?
But hey, they weren’t so much wrong as just too far ahead of the news cycle.
STILL MORE: Krista Cole emails the following statement from Dennis Hastert’s office: “The ABC News report is absolutely untrue. As confirmed by the Justice Department, ‘Speaker Hastert is not under investigation by the Justice Department.’ We are demanding a full retraction of the ABC News story. The Speaker’s earlier statement issued today accurately reflects the facts regarding this matter.”
Of course, if Hastert isn’t under investigation, we’re back to the question of why he’s waging an asinine crusade against the enforcement of laws against Congressional corruption.
MORE STILL: On that topic, Eugene Volokh writes: “I confess I’m pretty puzzled by Speaker Hastert’s theory here.”
EVEN MORE: More anti-Congress backlash. These guys really don’t understand how they come across.
AND FINALLY: ABC News is standing by the story.
COMING NEW YORK TIMES INDICTMENTS? I’m not going to get too far ahead of the news cycle on this one.
UPDATE: Related items from Michael Barone and Scott Johnson.
MARY KATHARINE HAM contrasts the prosecution of North Carolina’s Jeep Jihadi versus that of the Duke lacrosse players: “Taheri-azar and the Duke lacrosse players were all technically innocent until proven guilty. In one case, public officials, the press, and the local community did their best to deny the accused that particular courtesy of American justice. Tellingly, it was not the case of the murderous thug who confessed to attempting to kill his classmates, in a fashion reminiscent of Mohammad Atta, just for being non-Muslims—and then detailed his plans and motivations in letters to a local paper.”
CONGRESS MEMBERS AGREE: Congress is above the law!
House leaders of both parties stood in rare election-year unanimity Wednesday demanding the FBI surrender documents it took and remove agents involved in the weekend raid of a congressman’s office.
“The Justice Department must immediately return the papers it unconstitutionally seized,” House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said in a statement.
I say, search ’em all. Now. They must have something to hide, right? They certainly don’t mind much more intrusive paramilitary raids on the rest of us, even though the Fourth Amendment provides a lot more reason to doubt the validity of those than the Speech and Debate Clause provides where Congressional searches are concerned.
Read this post from Orin Kerr, too, on the weakness of the constitutional argument they’re making. There may be a prudential argument that searches like this are a bad idea — though, frankly, I don’t think a very convincing one — but to claim that the Constitution forbids the execution of a search warrant by law enforcement simply because the target is a Congressional office is weak and self-serving.
The leadership — of both parties — should be ashamed of this stunt. They should remember that the Constitution forbids titles of nobility, too, despite their effort to transform their positions into something very much like that.
MORE: Reader Peter Neva thinks my “search ’em all” reference was a serious call to ransack all Congressional offices. Uh, no. It’s a reference to this post. You’ve got to follow the discussion here, you know.
STILL MORE: Unlike me, Jonathan Andrew is all for searching them all, and thinks there’s no legitimate expectation of privacy in a taxpayer-funded Congressional office: “I hereby call for just that: What could they possibly have, in their official capacity as our representatives, to hide from us?”
We don’t disagree all that much: It’s in that spirit that I’ve supported applying the Freedom of Information Act to Congress.
AT BEST OF THE WEB, more criticism of Dennis Hastert’s claim of special privileges for Congress:
Hastert and Boehner’s objections are bound to rub many Republican constitutents the wrong way. After all, the first plank of the Contract With America was a promise to “require all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress.” Something like this makes it harder to argue that the GOP deserves to maintain its majority.
Indeed.
GOOGLE FUNDING MOVEON? Eli Pariser denies it.
EXPLOSION AND FIRE at the Istanbul airport.
InstaPundit’s Istanbul correspondent Claire Berlinski emails:
I’m back in Istanbul (I flew in yesterday and as usual missed the excitement). I’m looking out the window, but not seeing this big black cloud of smoke everyone’s talking about — then again, I’m a ways from the airport and don’t have an unobstructed view in that direction anyway. Thing is, everyone is saying that it doesn’t seem to be terrorism, but first, how on earth would they know — after all, the place is on fire so they can’t exactly be sifting through the evidence — and second, isn’t that exactly the place you’d target if you’re trying to injure the Turkish tourism industry right before high season? That is, after all, the PKK’s explicit and stated strategy. The building on fire, by the way, is reportedly near a hangar housing military aircraft. I don’t have any kind of inside information, I just think it’s a little odd that everyone is so quick to say this doesn’t seem to be a work of terrorism, since if I were a terrorist, that would look like one mighty tempting target to me. Then again, what I do see out my window is four Turkish workmen horsing around on rickety scaffolding that is, to put it mildly, not up to EU safety standards, so it also seems quite culturally plausible that someone at the airport just stubbed out a cigarette around a pile of inflammable chemicals or something.
Stay tuned.
UPDATE: Berlinski sends a photo (by her fiance David Gross) of the scaffold. Click “read more” to see it.
THE CLUB FOR GROWTH BLOG is praising Barney Frank. They’re right to.
BANNING REFERENCES TO AMERICANS AS “AMERICANS” seems to me to be taking “international friendliness” too far.
UPDATE: Here’s a press release denying that any such plan existed. (Via The Cranky Insomniac).
DETENTION FOR A BLOG ENTRY? I don’t think that high schools have any business punishing students for things they do when they’re out of school, whether or not they blog about them.
Plus, the weasel-phrase “illegal or inappropriate behavior” sets my teeth on edge. Do I trust a high-school principal to judge what off-campus behavior is “inappropriate?” I don’t really even trust them with regard to what’s happening on campus.
SOME THOUGHTS ON CONGRESS, MUBARAK, AND CHUTZPAH, over at GlennReynolds.com.
IN THE MAIL: Peter Beinart’s new book, The Good Fight : Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.
There’s an interesting debate going on in the book’s discussion forum,
UPDATE: An interesting Q&A with Jeffrey Goldberg, who’s got a new piece in the New Yorker on the Democrats’ prospects. It’s hard to argue with this: “The Democrats can probably win on the negatives for the 2006 elections, but those who think they can go negative and win the White House in 2008 are kidding themselves.”
Meanwhile, I’m not sure what this means: “‘Hillary for president’ rally draws 20 instead of hoped-for 200.” But it’s got to be making Al Gore and Mark Warner happy.
MORE ON THE MEDIA’S KATRINA DEBACLE:
Where to begin? As I’ve written before, virtually all of the gripping stories from Katrina were untrue. All of those stories about, in Paula Zahn’s words, “bands of rapists, going block to block”? Not true. The tales of snipers firing on medevac helicopters? Bogus. The yarns, peddled on Oprah by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and the New Orleans police chief, that “little babies” were getting raped in the Superdome and that the bodies of the murdered were piling up? Completely false. The stories about poor blacks dying in comparatively huge numbers because American society “left them behind”? Nah-ah. While most outlets limited themselves to taking Nagin’s estimate of 10,000 dead at face value, Editor and Publisher—the watchdog of the media—ran the headline, “Mortuary Director Tells Local Paper 40,000 Could Be Lost in Hurricane.”
In all of Louisiana, not just New Orleans, the total dead from Katrina was roughly 1,500. Blacks did not die disproportionately, nor did the poor. The only group truly singled out in terms of mortality was the elderly. According to a Knight-Ridder study, while only 15 percent of the population of New Orleans was over the age of 60, some 74 percent of the dead were 60 or older, and almost half were older than 75. Blacks were, if anything, slightly underrepresented among the dead given their share of the population.
This barely captures how badly the press bungled Katrina coverage. . . . And yet, an ubiquitous media chorus claims simultaneously that Katrina was Bush’s worst hour and the press’s best.
Read the whole thing. But what they learned was that if they all shouted lies in unison they could drive Bush down in the polls.
ED MORRISSEY ON THE JEFFERSON INVESTIGATION and the lame response from the Congressional leadership:
This can’t be the same Congress that issues subpoenas for all sorts of probes into the executive branch and the agencies it runs. Does Congress really want to establish a precedent that neither branch has to answer subpoenas if issued by the other, even if approved by a judge — which this particular subpoena was? . . .
Congress already has enough problems with corruption and scandal without adding even more arrogance to top it. If the leadership wants to argue that their status as elected officials somehow gives them the ability to disregard subpoenas and court orders, then the American people may want to trade that leadership to ensure that Congress understands that it operates under the same laws as the rest of us. Hastert and Boehner do not argue against an imperial presidency, but rather they are arguing for an untouchable political elite, where our elected officials risk nothing by taking bribes and selling their votes to the highest bidder. After all, the evidence of those transactions will almost always reside in their offices — and if they can ignore duly executed subpoenas and search warrants, then they can sell themselves at will.
This whole “cut their pay and send them home” thing is sounding better and better . . . .
Of course, if Hastert thinks the Democrats may take the House in November, this may be exactly the kind of precedent he wants to establish!
UPDATE: Jim Hoft doesn’t think that Hastert is that smart. Neither do I.
ANOTHER UPDATE: John Podhoretz:
There is every reason to believe that a member of the House of Representatives was using his physical office on Capitol Hill to hide evidence of massive bribe-taking — bribe-taking that has been caught on tape, by the way. That Congressman is a figure in the Democratic party. The Republican party has been reeling from bribery and corruption scandals of its own. So the Speaker of the House, the leader of Republicans in the House, actually complains to the president that the raid on the Democratic congressman’s office is an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers. In so doing, he reinforces the image that Congress, which almost never polices itself, cares less abou corruption than it does about its prerogatives. It also steps on the very important political story that might help diffuse the image of specifically Republican corruption. I don’t know how to put this any other way, and I’m sorry if it sounds insulting, but: Whether you consider him the leader of an institution whose standing among the public is at historically low levels and in need of drastic moral renovation or a leading partisan official whose team is in pretty bad shape and could use a bit of a boost, Denny Hastert is a blithering idiot.
It sure looks that way.
MORE: More unhappiness here. Really, are the Congressional Republicans trying to throw the 2006 race?
The last two weeks have seen an ambitious Taliban offensive shot to pieces. As many as a thousand Taliban gunmen, in half a dozen different groups, have passed over the Pakistani border, or been gathered within Afghanistan, and sent off to try and take control of remote villages and districts. The offensive was a major failure, with nearly half the Taliban getting killed, wounded or captured. Afghan and Coalition casualties were much less, although you wouldn’t know that from the mass media reports (which made it all look like a Taliban victory). The Taliban faced more mobile opponents, who had better intelligence. UAVs, aircraft and helicopters were used to track down the Taliban, and catch them. Thousands of Afghan troops and police were in action, exposing some of them to ambush, as they drove to new positions through remote areas.
Yes, as Bill Roggio noted, and Michael Yon confirmed, the news reports, rather exaggerated to begin with, are of the form “Dozens killed in renewed fighting,” without mentioning that most of those killed are people who should be killed.
DAN RIEHL thinks that Google is heading for a fall.
THIS SEEMS RATHER IRONIC:
The American Civil Liberties Union is weighing new standards that would discourage its board members from publicly criticizing the organization’s policies and internal administration.
“Where an individual director disagrees with a board position on matters of civil liberties policy, the director should refrain from publicly highlighting the fact of such disagreement,” the committee that compiled the standards wrote in its proposals.
“Directors should remember that there is always a material prospect that public airing of the disagreement will affect the A.C.L.U. adversely in terms of public support and fund-raising,” the proposals state.
Given the organization’s longtime commitment to defending free speech, some former board members were shocked by the proposals.
I don’t agree with those who demonize the ACLU, but I’m disappointed in how it has declined over the past decade or two. The ACLU has been corrupted by its dependence on a comparatively small fundraising base, something that’s common with nonprofits. The organization also seems to have been captured by the paid staff, which feels entitled to run things without the Board’s actual input That’s another common problem in the nonprofit world. But this is making clear just how far things have gone at the ACLU, at the expense of its ostensible mission.
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