'I saw papers that show US knew al-Qa'ida would attack cities with aeroplanes.'

Here.

Right-wing asshole blogger threatens to put pressure on lefty blogger Kos's advertisers.

I'm on the side of Kos and Steve on this one. Watch it, Glenn, you fourth-rate monkey. There are lots of lefty bloggers out there too -- enough to disrupt your shit. You link it, you've used your platform to endorse it, and you're targetted too.

The rest of this space is for Kos:

I was angry that five soldiers -- the real heroes in my mind -- were killed the same day and got far lower billing in the newscasts. I was angry that 51 American soldiers paid the ultimate price for Bush's folly in Iraq in March alone. I was angry that these mercenaries make more in a day than our brave men and women in uniform make in an entire month. I was angry that the US is funding private armies, paying them $30,000 per soldier, per month, while the Bush administration tries to cut our soldiers' hazard pay. I was angry that these mercenaries would leave their wives and children behind to enter a war zone on their own violition.

So I struck back.

Unlike the vast majority of people in this country, I actually grew up in a war zone. I witnessed communist guerillas execute students accused of being government collaborators. I was 8 years old, and I remember stepping over a dead body, warm blood flowing from a fresh wound. Dodging bullets while at market. I lived in the midsts of hate the likes of which most of you will never understand (Clinton and Bush hatred is nothing compared to that generated when people kill each other for politics or race or nationality). There's no way I could ever describe the ways this experience colors my worldview.

Back to Iraq, our men and women in uniform are there under orders, trying to make the best of an impossible situation. The war is not their fault, and I will always defend their honor and bravery to the end of my days. But the mercenary is a whole different deal. They willingly enter a war zone, and do so because of the paycheck. They're not there for humanitarian reasons (I doubt they'd donate half their paycheck to the Red Cross or whatever). They're there because the money is DAMN good. They answer to no one except their CEO. They are dangerous, hence international efforts (however fruitless they may be) to ban their use.

So not only was I wrong to say I felt nothing over their deaths, I was lying. I felt way too much. Nobody deserves to die. But in the greater scheme of things, there are a lot of greater tragedies going on in Iraq (51 last month, plus countless civilians and Iraqi police). That those tragedies are essentially ignored these days is, ultimately, the greatest tragedy of all.

How many of these chickenhawks on the right have seen war? A bunch of corpulent, entrenched, privileged white males stinking up the blogosphere and making threats. I've had enough.

...you can find ways to support Kos here.

PART I

Via Pandagon, looks like the Dem Party offices in Scottsdale, AZ have been broken into twice in the last few weeks.

The first time:

The only thing taken in the first incident was a computer's hard drive with information about precinct committee members, mailing lists and fund-raising.

The computer monitor and keyboard were left behind and there were no signs of forced entry in the burglary, said Detective Sam Bailey, a spokesman for the Scottsdale Police Department.

No sign of forced entry suggests either an inside job or a professional.

The second time:

On Thursday morning, volunteers discovered that the office's window at the reception area was broken overnight with a rock.

The rock appeared to be from a statue in the office complex. The vandal would have had to bypass three other offices to hit the Democrats' headquarters, Chusid said.

PART II

The author of "Home At War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans Movement" reported on March 25th that three boxes of FBI documents about the Vietnam War-era FBI surveillance of John Kerry were stolen from his home.

"It was a very clean burglary. They didn't break any glass. They didn't take anything like cameras sitting by. It was a very professional job," Nicosia said.

"Was it a thrill-seeker who wanted a piece of history? It could be," Nicosia said. "You'd think there was a very strong political motivation for taking those files. The odds are in favor of that."

"Dirty tricks" is too subtle. This is extralegal action and if it continues, may warrant serious (extralegal) action from the left.

I haven't really listened to Franken yet. Garafolo is sharper than I thought she would be.

The real star for me at this point is Randi Rhodes. She's sassy and ultra-smart, and she's very, very easy to listen to. No growing pains like the other non-radio people are clearly experiencing.

This will only be amusing to hardcore blog readers.

From Al Kamen's In The Loop:

Double or Nothing

The White House's request that Vice President Cheney and President Bush be together to chat with the 9/11 commission has sparked the usual snarky and wholly unfair media commentary about how Bush needs Cheney to get his story straight.

It could well be the other way around, as former New Jersey governor and commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean told reporters Wednesday.

"Can you say why you would agree to have the vice president and the president testify at the same time?" New York Post reporter Vince Morris asked Kean. "It seems . . . it might be to allow, you know, Mr. Cheney to help Mr. Bush with the answers. . . . It seems like it compromises your investigation to have them answer questions at the same time."

"Well, we recognize that Mr. Bush may help Mr. Cheney with some of the answers," Kean said to "scattered laughter," according to a transcript. "But . . . it was the suggestion of the White House," Kean said, "and it seemed to us, in exchange for getting all 10 commissioners to be able to ask any questions" and to have a staffer in there as well, "that we'd get the answers to the questions we needed to write the report."

They are just so unfair.

Brad DeLong has 'em. In addition, I'd ask about what she knows about the attempt to smear Clarke.

Here's an excerpt:

Q: Richard Cheney has claimed that before September 11, 2001, Richard Clarke was "out of the loop" on important counterterrorism matters. What important matters relevant to counterterrorism was Richard Clarke--the administration's counterterrorism coordinator--not informed of before September 11?

Follow Up Q: Whose policy decision was it that the counterterrorism coordinator would not be
allowed to coordinate--would not be informed of--important aspects of counterterrorism?

Follow Up Q: [If Rice backs Cheney] Wasn't this keeping the counterterrorism coordinator
from having the information he needed to do his job a really stupid idea?

Follow Up Q: [If Rice contradicts Cheney] So you are saying that Richard Cheney is not trustworthy?

Hott stuff.

Doing some research, and came across this little tidbit -- a blast from the past, if you will:

A Newport News [VA] woman charged with a felony for receiving oral sex in a car is challenging a state law that prohibits certain types of sex between consenting adults.

A police officer says he found the 21-year-old woman in a parked car receiving oral sex from a man about 3 a.m. Jan. 29. Both were charged with a felony under the statute for crimes against nature.

Ha ha! Funny, huh? But, y'know, things were different in 1952. A more innocent time. Blah blah blah.

Of course (not like you didn't see it coming), the punchline is that this tidbit is from yesterday's Newport News [VA] Daily Press. Unbelievable, right?

But there's even more. Jacob Levy over at Volokh has the story.

Mark Schmitt is enormously erudite and this piece is very, very good.

Here's an excerpt:

With the election of Bush, whose aggressive rejection of his father's Northeastern and Ivy League conservatism makes him the first president to come out of the tradition of the White South since Woodrow Wilson, the White South finally found its dream: it dominates national politics unchecked. It no longer holds the balance of power: Bush, Rove, DeLay, Lott and then Frist hold power, period. And the agenda of military spending, tax cuts, corporate subsidies, minimal social provision, and hate cloaked in religious/moral language, occasionally colored with populist rhetoric unrelated to the policies, which sometimes seems so strange to students of true conservatism, is not unfamiliar to the South. It is the same gruel that conservative Southern governors have been dishing out for dozens of years. The idea that government is an alien and oppressive force, while remaining dependent on military spending, development spending such as TVA, and subsidized industries such as oil and sugar, is a product of Southern, and to some extent Western politics.

Read the whole thing.

Yeah, normally I don't just repost Atrios' stuff, but on sheer principle, it must be said:

Do not fuck with Letterman.

Assholes.

That is all.

...ok, not so fast. Click here to watch the video in question (it's very, very funny).

...I don't even watch Letterman anymore, but you don't fuck with the master. Here is a longish clip of his response -- what you could call Step 1 of the Stern-ization of Letterman, maybe.

Iraqis chant anti-American slogans as charred bodies hang from a bridge over the Euphrates River in Fallujah, west of Baghdad, Wednesday, March 31 2004. Enraged Iraqis in this hotbed of anti-Americanism killed four foreigners Wednesday, including at least one U.S. national, took the charred bodies from a burning SUV, dragged them through the streets, and hung them from the bridge.

Calpundit Political Animal Kevin Drum is reporting that word on the street is that Gephardt has the inside track in the Veepstakes.

No no no no no no no noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo...

God, remember when the very first Clarke attacks were dribbling out? Seems like ten years ago! The first anti-Clarke broadside came from Drudge, in the form of a link to an older article by someone named George Smith. Smith has been a critic of Clarke for a long time, and has now gone public with a Voice article about his experience as an unwilling left-wing GOP attackbot.

I wrote this at the time:

This guy, George Smith, is no Clarke lover. He's had it in for Clarke since at least December 2000 ... Exactly what he's claiming Clarke failed to do is unclear, but Smith appears not to be a GOP Hack -- he's just being used.

This is what Smith has to say:

I'd written many columns about Clarke since 1998, all uniformly scornful and critical of his obsession with cyberterror. He bequeathed the nation a haystack of quotes leading idiots to believe terrorists were going to devastate us through computer networks. That, and a claim that the Freedom of Information Act was a legal impediment to the sharing of information, in need of an alteration to fix it.

...

There was no nuance—or recognition of anything other than good or wicked—anywhere. I was supposedly the proper expert arrived just in the nick of time, someone who took Richard Clarke "to task for having the audacity to write a book critical of the President's anti-terrorism efforts." Or I was a GOP mouthpiece, a "loyal shameless Bush Apologist and Academic Hit Man." Reality didn't fit what the howling mobs wanted.

What is true is that no one cursing or cheering Richard Clarke now cared a whit about him until Sunday night two weeks ago. And he was no stranger to 60 Minutes either, warning of terror in April 2000: "What if one morning we're told by the drug cartel in Colombia, 'Either the United States pulls out of Colombia, either the United States stops killing the cocaine plants, or else there'll be [a cyberattack] on Houston'?"

But maybe I am all screwed up and the people writing me weren't taunting proof of the hegemony of the American boob. Maybe Richard Clarke is (I challenge you to say this with a straight face while looking into a mirror) a "folk hero" or part of the "revenge of democracy" said to be coming to the Bush administration.

I would be willing to bet, though, that if the Dems, of which I am one—remember—won't fight their own battles and keep thinking that career apparatchiks bearing tattlers will win the election, they'll be thrown to statistics and the devil when it finally arrives.

The WaPo:

The new chief U.S. weapons inspector for Iraq reported to Congress today that no breakthrough has been made in the search for Saddam Hussein's chemical or biological weapons, but he said new information supports a theory that Iraq was developing a capability to produce them on short notice.

Uh-huh.

In his first appearance since replacing David Kay last January, Charles Duelfer this morning told the Senate Armed Services Committee he has refocused the work of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) to seek to determine Hussein's intention. He said this included what the former Iraqi leader ordered, whether weapons were hidden and "was there a plan for a break-out production capacity."

Making that task more difficult, he said, was that "some of these decisions may not have been recorded in traditional ways," and they "may have been orally transmitted or conveyed to only a select group, a trusted inner circle."

Oh, certainly.

...

After the morning session, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), ranking Democrat on the Armed Services panel, said that the unclassified version of Duelfer's statement given to reporters left out information in the classified report given to senators. The classified version, he said, "would lead one to doubt" what Levin described as Duelfer's "suspicions as to Iraq's activities."

To put it, um, mildly.

His "Letters From America" were exceptionally brilliant. It was always on late at night when NPR turned into the BBC for a few blessed hours. Hearing his voice, my (insomniac) hand would dart to my lil' clock radio's volume dial. Up with the volume! I had to make sure that I didn't miss anything he had to say.

...the NewsHour has a nice retrospective. Link to follow. Transcript here.

...Safire weighs in.

...Andrew Sullivan.