1. Atrios comments on the widening scope of the Plame inquiry; others suggest Rove may well be in legal jeopardy on this.
2. Author Bruce Sterling reproduces comments by Tom Dachle concerning the administration’s abuse of power.
3. Sidney Blumenthal echoes Daschle’s concerns in this Guardian editorial.

Oh, and the White House is also blocking the release of Clinton-era papers requested by the 9/11 commission. Er, why might that be?

A mysterious and shadowy mailing list post sent us off to this blog, which reproduces a bit of the transcript from Clarke’s appearance on NPR‘s Fresh Air. A bit, just to tease:

GROSS: You say in your book that you think invading Iraq actually increased the problem of terrorism. CLARKE: Well, in three ways. First of all, it’s costing us $180 billion in the first two years, and may be even more than that. That money could have been used to reduce our vulnerabilities here at home. […] Well, many things in the United States are not protected. There’s a long list of vulnerabilities which we could reduce. […] But we didn’t do that. And in large part we didn’t do that because the money that would have been necessary is being spent on Iraq. So that’s the first thing: It’s costing us the alternative of reducing our vulnerabilities. Second, actual military and intelligence assets that were in Afghanistan — looking for al Qaeda, looking for bin Laden — were removed and sent to Iraq. Now, in the last few weeks, they’ve been returned. But that’s two years too late. Two years during which al Qaeda has morphed into a hydra-headed organization with independent organizations and independent cells, and likely the group in Madrid. So we didn’t go after al Qaeda the way that we should have. And we didn’t secure Afghanistan. There are more police in Manhattan — not the city of New York, but just Manhattan — there are more police in Manhattan than the United States put troops into Afghanistan. And yet we were supposed to secure and stabilize the country so that never again would it be a base for terrorism. We were supposed to be draining the swamp. Well, we haven’t. And one of the reasons we haven’t is that we withheld forces that should have been going into Afghanistan. We withheld them for the war in Iraq. […] The third way is that, al Qaeda had been saying, bin Laden had been saying, that the United States is the “new crusader,” the new westerner come to occupy an Arab country, an oil-rich Arab country. And we did exactly that. We did exactly what bin Laden said we would do: We invaded and occupied an oil-rich Arab country that had not been threatening us. And the sights on Arab television of American troops fighting in Iraq, and now occupying Iraq, have infuriated Arab opinion. […] We can’t just arrest and kill terrorists. Even Donald Rumsfeld figured that out. In his internal memo in the Pentagon, which leaked, he said it may be the case that we’re turning out new terrorists faster than we’re killing and arresting them. He’s right; we are. And we have to win the war for ideas. And we can’t do that so long as we are reviled by occupying a country like Iraq.

Jack Beatty’s The Faith-Based Presidency appears in the March Atlantic; while certainly partisan, it’s hard to find fault with his point.

Several hundred protestors converged on Karl Rove’s home over the weekend. (Washington Post link; username nogators@nogators.com, password nogators for access.)

He didn’t take it well, apparently.

Update: additional coverage at CNN, which sensibly doesn’t require registration.

Cousin Charles — who is not a racist, but who still shouldn’t be on the appeals bench, as recess appointments are cheesy — was on 60 Minutes last night. It appears he came off well, which is nice. It’s always pleasant to see national media do a story on Mississippi that doesn’t make us look like unreconstructed rubes.

All of us, anyway.

As it happens, Ashcroft may have the first post-9/11 terror convictions overturned because of gross prosecutorial misconduct.

It looks an awful lot like a Catholic Church employee has been fired for supporting John Kerry.

TomPaine.com has a fine rundown of the positions of this administration by version number, a la software.

KOMPRESSOR FOR PRESIDENT

Some of you have asked for a brief rundown of the political sites I read (and cite) here at Heathen. In no particular order, the usual suspects include:

• Talking Points Memo, by Josh Marshall
• Slacktivist, whose current post comparing Bush and Blair is well worth reading
• Lawrence Lessig, on issues of copyright and law
• The Agonist, who publishes far faster than we can possibly keep up with
• Eschaton, by the pseudonymous Atrios
• Billmon’s Whisky Bar
• Groklaw, covering SCO v. IBM & related issues

There are, of course, countless other sources worthe perusing, typically written by thoughtful people and usually devoid of the kind of rancor and shouting that typifies broadcast media. Read on.

Must be that pesky “oath” thing.

Condi Rice is wasting no time in attempting to spin-doctor and rebut Richard Clarke’s testimony, but she’s not doing a very good job of it. In refusing to testify to the Commission proper, she asserts at least two very odd things.

First, there’s the whole issue of refusing to testify under oath, but having no compunctions about saying whatever she wants while in the safety of her own office (and without threat of perjury indictments). There’s definitely something screwy about that.

Second, as Josh Marshall has pointed out, the historical precedent for aides refusing to testify isn’t as clearly on her side as she appears to think; there’s even precedent for people in precisely her position testifying under oath before such commissions (Brzezinski in 1980; Berger in 1997). Of course, Marshall’s source — the Congressional Research Service — also lists five examples when presidential aides refused to testify; anybody want to bet which administration employed four of those five?

Is that really a parallel this administration wants to encourage?

Fred Kaplan at Slate shows us how we can tell that Dick Clarke Is Telling The Truth.

Atrios quotes an excerpt from a statement by Tom Daschle. Read it.

Bush is awful busy wrapping himself in the “leadership” he showed following 9/11, and doing his level best to make it look like his administration was caught flat-footed by the ineptness of the Clinton folks.

Trouble is, it’s just not true:

Richard Clarke was Director of Counter-Terrorism in the National Security Council [under Clinton]. He has since left. Clarke urgently tried to draw the attention of the Bush administration to the threat of al Qaeda. Richard Clarke was panicked about the alarms he was hearing regarding potential attacks. Clarke is at the center of what has since become a burning controversy: What happened on August 6, 2001? It was on this day that George W. Bush received his last, and one of the few, briefings on terrorism. According to reports, the briefing stated bluntly that Osama bin Laden intended to attack America soon, and contained the word “hijacking.” Bush responded to the warning by heading to Texas for a month-long vacation. It is this briefing that the Bush administration has refused to divulge to the committee investigating the attacks. There was not a single Republican member of Congress who ever raised a single question or put a query to the Clinton National Security Council about its efforts against terrorism before the attacks. When the Clinton team left office, their National Security group conducted three extensive briefings of the incoming Bush people. The attitude of the Bush people was, essentially, dismissive, that it was a “Clinton thing.” Condoleezza Rice has admitted that the massive file on al Qaeda and bin Laden left for her by outgoing National Security Advisor Sandy Berger went completely unread until the attacks had taken place. This happened despite the fact that Berger told her during one such briefing, “I believe that the Bush Administration will spend more time on terrorism generally, and on al-Qaeda specifically, than any other subject.”

Now, I’d like to see the source for the August 6 anecdote, but the balance — that the outgoing terrorism czar warned Bush’s people in January, and that warning went unheeded — isn’t even contested by Bush’s own administration. THAT is what Kerry should be saying to Rove’s ads about Bush’s 9/11 “leadership.”

(Via Tbogg.)

Many sources point us to this piece by Timothy Noah at Slate discussing the ongoing pattern of dogma over empiricism promulgated by this administration. If you think facts have a place in policymaking, you disagree with the folks in charge.

Fortunately, at least where “facts” and “Iraq” intersect, someone’s been keeping track of what they said.

MoveOn has a great little clip of Rummy lying his ass off, and then getting called on it.