For Americans living in Japan, please note that DST took effect yesterday in the U.S., so the times have shifted. Remember to add that extra hour when you translate times–or to subtract the hour if you count backwards when you translate.

I don’t like using the “count backwards” 16- or 17-hour (west coast, PST) subtraction method of figuring out the time difference between here and there; 16 and 17 hours is a bigger number to subtract, and more often you cross day lines and it gets confusing, making errors that can wake your relatives up at unfortunate hours.

I prefer to add 7 or 8 hours (again, PST), then subtract a day. Two steps, separate, a lot easier to do. So right now, it’s 11:40 am on Monday in Japan. Add 8 hours (now that DST has kicked in; last week, it was 7 hours), making the time there 7:40 pm–and that by itself is often enough, the day of the week is not important, in my family at least. But if necessary, just subtract a day, and you get 7:40 pm Sunday in San Francisco.

I suppose it is less of an issue if the people you’re calling are on the east coast, and the difference is to add 11 hours or subtract 13 (10 and 14 when DST is not in action). But I still prefer the addition method.

Speaking of which, when is Japan going to get DST? The sun comes up at 4:30 am in the summer, way earlier than most people need. Great for the farmers, who had a controlling block of votes many years back (I wonder if they still do?), but lousy for the rest of us as it means early darkness and wasted sunlight. And I’m a late owl, and on my late-late nights I go to sleep as the sun rises, which feels strange. I remember on my visit to Spain last April, they not only had DST (“summer time” in Europe), but Spain was on the west edge of a wide time zone–the sun set at about 9 pm. Maybe not great for early risers, but I thought it was terrific.

Here are some more points of outrage, just part of the massive waves of dirty dealing, scandal and incompetence that has become apparent over recent weeks and months. To punctuate this, I would like to point out that if Clinton had done any of this, Republicans would be calling for his head. It is useful to imagine the name Clinton wherever you see Bush in this post and the last one, and you’ll have a slightly better ability to imagine the massive Republican outrage should that have been the case–and the total double standard that now exists, with the right wing claiming that we’re tired of scandal (until the next Democrat comes into office), and making weak attempts to rationalize, excuse, or much more often obfuscate Bush’s malfeasance.

One of those points is honesty. Remember how Bush was supposed to bring “honor and dignity” back to the White house? How they claimed that Clinton lied so much, and painted Gore as a liar even more so? And then it turns out Bush was lying through his teeth all along. He lied about not wanting to do nation-building, lied about his criminal record (I still can’t believe we elected, if you can call it that, a man with a criminal record, with a DUI, and a VP with two DUIs!); they lied about willingness to delve into deficit spending; they lied about the vandalism at the White House, about how the Clinton team ripped out the “W”s on the keyboards. And that was just the beginning. There were the unending lies about Iraq and Saddam Hussein and WMD. Now we have Bush lying to Congress about Medicare, Rice lying to everybody about everything, and even the formerly statesmanlike Colin Powell admitting that is “ironclad” evidence was, in retrospect, not so “solid” after all. Gee whiz, ya think?

Another lie being propagated right now is that Bush did everything possible to catch bin Laden–no, wait, he didn’t, but they were going after al Qaeda–no, no, that’s not right either, but they were all over the terrorism problem–well, actually not. But at least we can take heart in the reassurance that Bush & Co. couldn’t really have done anything to prevent 9/11. After all, the Clinton administration were such slackers, the election thing meant they had to get off to a late start, and by the time it was humanly possible to act, the terrorists were already in place and nothing could be done. Right? BZZZT. Nope. That’s wrong too. They were occupying their offices from early on, they were warned from the outset, vividly, about al Qaeda, a plan of action (let’s not quibble over words, Clinton’s people had a set of actions to take and it was thoroughly transmitted to Bush’s people), and Clarke was there trying and trying to push them into action–but they were too caught up in Star Wars missile defense, and terrorism played badly in that scenario, and they just gave it no credence. But most importantly, Clarke painted a very clear picture of how 9/11 could have been prevented, just as the Clinton WHite House prevented massive attacks planned by al Qaeda on American soil for the millennium celebrations:

CLARKE: Well, we’ll never know. But let me compare 9/11 and the period immediately before it to the millennium rollover and the period immediately before that. In December, 1999, we received intelligence reports that there were going to be major al Qaeda attacks. President Clinton asked his national security adviser Sandy Berger to hold daily meetings with the attorney general, the FBI director, the CIA director and stop the attacks. And every day they went back from the White House to the FBI, to the Justice Department, to the CIA and they shook the trees to find out if there was any information. You know, when you know the United States is going to be attacked, the top people in the United States government ought to be working hands-on to prevent it and working together.

Now, contrast that with what happened in the summer of 2001, when we even had more clear indications that there was going to be an attack. Did the president ask for daily meetings of his team to try to stop the attack? Did Condi Rice hold meetings of her counterparts to try to stop the attack? No.

And if she had, if the FBI director and the attorney general had gone back day after day to their department to the White House, what would they have shaken loose? We now know from testimony before the Commission that buried in the FBI was the fact that two of the hijackers had entered the United States. Now, if that information had been able to be shaken loose by the FBI director and the attorney general in response to daily meetings with the White House, if we had known that those two — if the attorney general had known, if the FBI director had known, that those two were in the United States, Larry, I believe we could have caught those two.

Now with Sibel Edmonds coming forward and saying that the information not only existed but was passed up to the administration, this suggestion has even more merit to it. There is an extremely high probability that had Gore been elected, then the information would have gotten through, and 9/11 would never have happened. Under Bush, though, the terrorists walked right in, because Bush & Co. were far too busy looking for missiles in the sky.

Then there is the business side, the money scandals. Has Ken Lay, Bush’s biggest contributor since 1994, been charged, let alone punished, for his massive fraud that so damaged the economy and stole the life savings of so many Americans? He never acted when Enron and other oil companies ripped Californians off to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. Cheney included all the oil companies, including Enron, to write the nation’s energy policy, and then tried like crazy to keep all of that a secret (it is now before the Supreme Court, where it will be ruled on by Cheney’s best bud, Antonin Scalia–gee, I wonder what he’ll decide on the matter?). And let’s not even get started on Halliburton.

What fewer people know is that Bush has long-time relations with the bin Laden family and the Saudi royal family. Bush Sr. as well as Jr. were getting massive funding and investment out of these people since the late 1970’s, the current Bush’s involvement beginning with his first business, Arbusto (“Bush” in Spanish), which Bush promptly bankrupted. But the relationship continues to this day, and was most clearly evidenced by Bush’s redacting a few dozen pages from an important terrorism report, pages which would have shown the Saudis as being very much behind Islamic terrorist groups; it was demonstrated strongly also in the few days following 9/11, when Bush had the entire bin Laden clan resident in the U.S. airlifted out, even as Americans were not allowed to fly.

On Al Franken’s new radio show, Michael Moore was a guest and they discussed a very applicable analogy to this situation. Imagine the following: after the Oklahoma bombing of the Murrah building by Timothy McVeigh, the FBI suspects McVeigh is the bomber and wants to talk to his family members. Clinton, however, gets the entire McVeigh family together, loads them on a plane, refuses to let the FBI question them in full, and instead carts the whole lot off to Paris, outside U.S. jurisdiction. And then we learn later that Clinton had substantial financial relationships with the McVeighs over the past two decades or more.

If that had ever happened, the right wing would have gone nuclear. Impeachment hearings would have started within minutes, and conservatives everywhere would be blasting Clinton from here to doomsday–and the Democrats probably would have been with them. But when the exact same scenario is played out by Bush, airlifting the entire bin Laden family from the U.S. while no U.S. citizen was allowed to fly, not letting the FBI question them thoroughly–and now we know that the bin ladens were financing Bush for many, many years… it defies belief that Bush can get away with this and no one seems to think that it is worthy of much attention.

For further information, I would direct you to buy House of Bush, House of Saud, and wait for Michael Moore’s new movie, Farenheit 911, slated for release this summer, before the election. It is absolutely unforgivable how slimy these associations Bush has and how he has unabashedly given massive favors to Halliburton, Enron execs, the bin Laden family and the Saudis in return for their long financial support for Bush and Cheney. You can say this about Bush: he is loyal, and is a politician that, when bought, stay bought.

And how about outright criminal activity? You know that Republicans were systematically stealing Democratic Senators’ files for a year and a half, leaking them to Fox News and conservative columnists, in violation of law. And even if you don’t consider lying to Congress about Medicare, or spending millions of federal dollars on fake Medicare ads that were thinly disguised campaign commercials, as crimes, then how about the Plame affair? First, Bush lies to Congress, the people and the world about Saddam building nukes, saying the he knew it was true because of British intel that said Hussein tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger–when in fact, his own intel people told him the claim was fake. Then former Ambassador Joseph Wilson had the courage to come forth and tell the truth about that, in response to which, the vicious Bush attack dogs made public the fact that Wilson’s wife was an undercover CIA operative, a federal felony punishable with prison time, and a crime that ruined the career of Wilson’s wife, and could have placed her and those she’d recruited in danger of being killed. The investigation into that now spans from Karl Rove’s office to Dick Cheney’s chief of staff and others in his office.

Truly, this administration’s staff has a vicious, bloodthirsty vindictive streak a mile and a half long. You speak out against them, and they will lie, cheat, steal, and commit federal crimes to dirty your name, ruin your career and drive you into hiding. And yet so many people–Paul O’Neill, Joseph Smith, Lawrence Lindsay, Anthony Zinni, Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, Richard Foster, the Medicare actuary, John DiIulio, and Richard Clarke–all viciously smeared by Bush & Co., and that’s just the people who used to work in the Bush administration!

Again, this is just too much, I’m getting overloaded by all of this. And again, there is so much more.

People, we have to talk about this! get these facts down, print these posts, email them to friends, get people talking and aware of all this, because the conservative media is hiding so much of it. I don’t know how many times I have spoken about facts like these with family and friends, and have gotten the reaction, “when did that happen?” because the news shows they watch and newspapers they read don’t report on them much at all. And yet, these are all documented facts, people. Talk! Let people know! Don’t wait, do it now!

Man, I gotta tell ya. There is just almost too much out there to be outraged about, it is hard to blog about it all, it feels just overwhelming. Let me see if I can’t list some of the stuff that has been coming out, being brief so that the overload factor doesn’t click in too fast.

Condoleezza Rice not testifying, until public criticism and pressure got so strong that Bush couldn’t keep up the fake pretense that there was some principle involved. So many lies here. The precedence? A joke–they had many options to get around that, including the one they eventually chose, to agree while specifically stating that this would not set a precedence. You see? Easy. Another lie: Condi wanted to testify, she just oh so much prayed she could testify, if only she was able to publicly talk about this under oath, it was her most treasured dream… God, please. She has lied so often, lies which are shown up not just by opponents and independents, but by her own people. Yeah, I’m absolutely sure she had a real jones for coming back and testifying under oath after all that.

And what is with this garbage about the 9/11 commission being a congressional body? It is nothing of the sort! Bush himself hand-picked the commission, it is an executive body–and Bush did that for the express purpose of preventing Congress from doing it, forming an investigation that might not go the way he wanted–not that this commission has been as submissive as Bush would have hoped. But make no mistake–it is not a congressional body, and therefore there is no conflict with having Rice or anyone else testifying.

Then there’s Sibel Edmonds, the FBI translator who was fired by the FBI in 2002 after she publicly criticized the FBI for incompetence. Edmonds called Rice’s claim that neither she nor other in the Bush administration got warning about 9/11, “an outrageous lie.” Rice said, “Despite what some have suggested, we received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles… “. Edmonds says that such intelligence was provided to administration officials. “We should have had orange or red-type of alert in June or July of 2001. There was that much information available,” she told Salon. Furthermore, “If you put this information [I saw] with other stuff they had from the Phoenix memo [about suspects taking flying lessons] and stuff coming in from field offices about flight schools, there is no way they can say they did not know. An idiot could work it out.” Edmonds testified about this to the commission, giving them “details of specific investigation files, the specific dates, specific target information, specific managers in charge of the investigation. I gave them everything so that they could go back and follow up. This is not hearsay. These are things that are documented. These things can be established very easily.” Her story has reportedly been corroborated by other sources within the FBI.

But we may not hear any more from Edmonds, she’s being muzzled. She’s been under a gag order from the Justice Department since 2002, and the Bush White House has been seeking to quiet her further under the rarely used “state secrets privilege.” How the hell is this a state secret other than to make secret the fact that the Bush administration was warned, ignored the warnings, and now is trying to cover that up and lie about it to the people and the Congress. (Again, Condi is dying to testify under oath about that?)

Additionally, Many others, including Richard Clarke, Gary Hart, and other players within and without the administration have told of their warnings to the Bush administration about 9/11. Condi Rice was scheduled to give a speech on threats to American security on 9/11 (yes, in 2001), and it focused on missile defense, but also mentioned a plethora of other items–but not one mention about al Qaeda. This at a time when the Bush administration is now insisting they were intently focused on al Qaeda!

There’s another story out that you may have missed because the White House did an expert job of slipping it in underneath other news more focused on by people. When they released the big news that they had flip-flopped and Rice would testify publicly under oath, they also released, in a by-the-way kind of manner, that Bush and Cheney would give their testimony together. In addition to the standing conditions that Bush and Cheney not testify under oath, or publicly, or to the whole commission, or for very long, they will now appear at the same time, which will not only further cut down the time they spend testifying, and further this would allow Cheney to shield Bush–who would likely come across as foolish were he to be there all by himself. When you investigate something, you don’t interview people together, you do it separately so you can compare the stories. This new unilateral demand has been glossed over by the media, but it should not be–it is a big deal. Just like it is a big deal that they refuse to testify under oath; after all, the main reason you refuse to testify under oath is because you want to lie about something and not be held accountable for it.

We’re seeing issue after issue, witness after witness, evidence and more evidence being hidden, unreleased, and classified (unless they want to use it to smear someone, then there’s no limit to what you can declassify), and the latest thing to be hidden by the White House is, believe it or not, 8,000 documents from the Clinton administration. The White House is now blocking the 9/11 commission from seeing those thousands of documents from the Clinton administration regarding security and 9/11. According to the New York Times, “Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said some Clinton administration documents had been withheld because they were ‘duplicative or unrelated,’ while others were withheld because they were ‘highly sensitive’ and the information in them could be relayed to the commission in other ways.” Yeah, I’ll bet. The commission has been cleared for highly sensitive documents, and they can sift through the documents themselves–this is just yet another way the administration controls the information that will eventually become public; you can bet that if those documents incriminated the Clinton administration, not only would they not keep them from the 9/11 commission, they would actively leak them to Fox News.

Then there was the entire Medicare scandal, where the Bush administration knowingly lied to Congress about the cost of Bush’s Medicare plan. The plan itself was bad enough for Democrats, of course, but it was actually so bad the there were Republicans who would never agree to it, saying that if it cost anything more than $400 billion. Bush & Co. then said, surprise surprise, that it would only cost $395 billion, a very convenient number right where the Republicans wanted it. But what they did not say was that it would actually cost $534 billion–and Congress passed the bill with the lying estimate, by five votes. Then a brave actuary, a guy named Rick Foster, realized that the number they were reporting was wrong, and told his bosses about it–who promptly threatened to fire him if he dared to speak a word of it publicly, or to Congress. And if that’s not enough, the White House additionally tried to lie to the American people, producing fake news story videos which amounted to nothing more than campaign commercials for president Bush, trying to get news programs to carry the commercials as real, with no disclaimers, no mention of the real source, no statement to the effect that the “reporters” and “real people” in the video were paid actors.

More on the issue side and less on the outrageous criminal acts side, there is the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which is nothing other than an attempt to slowly chip away at Roe v. Wade, trying in yet another way to laterally categorize a fetus as a person. This is in concert with the attack on fictional “partial birth abortion,” a painfully mangled, twisted and wholly exaggerated misrepresentation of a medical procedure which, while ugly (as nature often is), is absolutely necessary in a rare number of cases. If a fetus is non-viable (for example, if it developed with no brain) and any attempt to bear the child naturally or do a C-section would likely result in injury or death to the mother, the procedure is used. But to hear the religious right tell it, the procedure is used all the time to abort perfectly healthy babies as they are being born. Yet that atrocity of a piece of legislation was passed, laying yet another illegitimate brick in the wall to block reproductive rights.

Believe it or not, I am just getting started. There is a lot more. But I have been at this for a few hours and I have other things to do. But there will be more coming soon. It is just hard to try to get this all out without being overwhelmed.

One thing to do today: make a contribution to John Kerry. Man, oh man, do we ever need him right now. I will blog on that later.

The good news here helps Bush out some, and you can bet that after their long string of goofs, offenses, felonies and generally shooting themselves in the foot, they are going to take this one morsel and milk it within an inch of its life. After hugely disappointing job growth over the past 6-8 months, still 3 million jobs in the hole, March brings good news: 308,000 jobs were added to the workforce. Good news for you and your neighbors, but expect an overly-exuberant Bush White House to make this sound like every single thing Bush has done since January 2001 is now fully vindicated, end of story, go home and vote for Bush.

Of course, there is bad news, news which they won’t tell you about. For example, at the very minimum, 150,000 jobs must be gained every month just to tread water, because that number is needed to match population growth. Now look at the first three months of the year: January, 97,000; February, 21,000; and March, 308,000. That’s a total of 426,000 new jobs since the start of the year. In order to break even, we needed a minimum of 450,000. And that’s not even counting the deficient numbers for job growth since last August. Just for this year alone, we’re still 24,000 jobs in the hole, and in terms of how many jobs are needed to signal a recovery from the recession, we’re between 175,000 and 475,000 jobs behind. But what you’ll hear from the right wing is how this far exceeded expectations of 123,000 jobs–and they won’t tell you that the expectations were for poor growth, depressed because they expected a bad showing, and predictors had been embarrassed by way overestimating numbers in past months.

And there are more mitigating circumstances: 72,000 of those jobs for March were due to the end of a supermarket strike in southern California. Subtract those numbers and the totals are even less impressive. Also, the new jobs do not include any manufacturing jobs. these numbers just came out now, and so I can’t find details on exactly what the bulk of the jobs are

Nevertheless, the White House will no doubt spin this as just the beginning of a jobs boom, and true, that may be–but remember, in January, we thought we had an increase in job growth, up to 112,000, and that was touted as ‘just the beginning’ also–until February numbers were 21,000, and they downgraded the January figures by 15,000. April numbers will be better to indicate whether this is the beginning of a surge, or just another high blip with a disappointing follow-through.

One should also keep in mind that unemployment went up from 5.6% to 5.7%, mostly because more people renewed job hunting, and were unable to find jobs–a reminder that there are millions of people out there with no jobs, but who are not counted in the numbers.

Overall, a very mixed bag. Let’s see where it takes us. And in the meantime, don’t let the endless gleeful gloating by the Republicans get your hopes up–you’re still more likely to get a job at burger King than you are to get one at Chrysler. Wait and see where this takes us.

On the one hand, I really hope people find jobs. On the other hand, after doing such a botched-up job with the economy for more than three years, it galls me that Bush might get re-elected simply because of an arbitrary upsurge right near the election–and if it helps him out with votes, it might also help Bush to sell the ludicrous idea that excessively huge tax cuts for millionaires somehow bring about modest job growth three years later–and then we’ll all really be screwed. Four more years of this and the country will be utterly shot to hell. I hate to say it, but I kind of hope that a recovery will wait until December; better that a few people wait a few more months for jobs than to let the most recklessly dangerous president in recent memory to crush their hopes and dreams for several more years.

Last month was a record-breaker, with The BfAD going past 6000 visitors (I got 10,000 one month last year, but that was due to a very unusual link-in from macsurfer), with an average of 425 unique visitors per day. Eyelid twitching and gyoza recipes remain among the most popular, but my extensive review of Matrix Revolutions (212 views) and my special page detailing Bush’s sordid past got heavy traffic as well.

And now I seem to be getting a huge amount of traffic from my bits about Air America Radio; the stats aren’t in on that yet, but I’m getting lots of comments, and somehow I’m #1 on Google for the search “Air America radio Blog.” Cool.

UPDATE: Okay, here’s an interesting one. My blog post, titled “Air America Radio”, has been getting lots of comments from people who seem to think that it is actually the official blog for Air Americaa Radio. Someone asked if Sam and Janeane were reading the post now (who knows, maybe!), and 9 others followed with praise and commentary. This is a little surreal.

This one comes from the Bizarre And Funny file on Bush. David Letterman recently has been having fun with the presidential campaign, first with his “Unfair Edit” where people like Bush, Kerry, and Schwarzenegger had their words blatantly spliced so they said things like Kerry saying, “If I am elected/I make you this pledge/that I will be/utterly inept,” or Bush saying, “In two weeks/members/of my administration and this Congress/will be/in a prison cell.”

A more recent gag on Letterman is the use of footage of Bush on the campaign trail, with either Bush or the people around him coming across as being incredibly bored. But his latest jaunt into visual political humor has gotten entangled in sloppy journalism and perhaps even bizarre White House behavior–depending on how this plays out.

The Washington Post ran this lengthy article on it, but in short, Letterman made fun of Bush by showing selected clips of Bush giving a speech with people standing in the background–see the photo to right. The piece was called, “George W. Bush Invigorates America’s Youth.” The boy on bush’s right (your left) was engaging in various I’m-incredibly-bored behavior, including great yawns, nodding off to sleep and catching himself, and looking at his watch–while those around him completely ignore his behavior. The clips as presented by Letterman, I am told by my father, are incredibly funny. But that’s not the end of it.

UPDATE: I found a Real player version of the clip, at 2 MB in size. I don’t know if it’ll work this way, but see if you can view it.

The RealPlayer file doesn’t work for most people. Here is the YouTube version:

The next morning, CNN picked up the video shown by Letterman and aired it, giving him credit. Then they reported that the White House called and claimed that the tape had been doctored, edited to add the kid in. Then Letterman went on that night and claimed the tape was genuine. Then CNN claimed that the White House never called them.

So there’s quite the mix-up here. I’m just waiting to see the tape of that kid. Sounds hilarious.

Also funny: this. Reminds me of an editorial cartoon I did over 20 years ago for the Stanford Daily.

Well, Air America is on the Air, all right. I just woke up and heard the host on the phone with someone, arguing with them pretty vociferously. It sounded like quite a fight, they were overtalking, and at times, the host was nearly screaming at him, and the guest was really agitated. My first thought was, boy they really don’t screen the callers, and they just let the people who call in go too far–not to mention the host! And then, as I listened on, I slowly realized… the voice on the phone was Ralph Nader! And the host really got him pissed off! I mean, he was discombobulated, trying to get out his standard lines–but the host, Randi Rhodes, was really digging into him, telling him point-blank that we can’t afford him running and not accepting his usual platitudes… until Nader got so pissed off he shouted at her about her interviewing being really bad, and she was screwing up the first day of Air America, and he hung up, angrily. Wow. Now that’s an interview.

So, fortunately, we can get the streaming audio. Unfortunately, the web site has been so overwhelmed by visitors, they had to take it down and leave the main page as a simple link to their streaming audio (for the moment without any registration required).

I was able to catch only about ten minutes of Franken last night before falling asleep, and it looks like I’ll miss them on the repeat, dangit. I can only hope they’ll have it in the archive.

As Mark at VuDeja pointed out, Air America Radio is on the air. Their programming hasn’t started officially at this time, but an excerpt from the audio book version of “Lying Liars” (Chapter 13, on Bill O’Reilly). You have to sign up in order to listen to more than the sample; when you sign up, they give you:

Top 6 Reasons to join us:

1. John Ashcroft will know where to find you.
2. All our annoying pop-up ads are invisible.
3. Because they shut down the Dennis Kucinich dating chat room.
4. Our spam is vegetarian.
5. You like making up passwords.
6. You were banned from the Fox News website for having your own opinion.

I had a few problems signing up–a few server errors, and it took about a half hour before the confirmation-code email arrived, but after signing up, you can access the streaming audio (Real Audio, though their FAQ suggests Windows Media, Quicktime, and other media formats may be forthcoming). You can get the basic information, but a lot isn’t there yet (like the blogs), and searching around, I got a lot more server errors–probably a mix between this being a new site, and enthusiastic listeners bombarding the site.

They also mention that their two main shows (by Franken and Rhodes) are rebroadcast after 11pm, or 11 hours after their first broadcast. They also mention an audio archive, which appears to be at least a one-week record of their shows–or at least I hope so, as the timing of my schedule makes it likely that I will be asleep during the inaugural broadcast and working through the repeat.

More as it comes in–such as what time zone the scheduling is based on (they don’t seem to say!), and how the streaming stands up.

Buried under the news that Rice will testify under oath to the commission, is the new information on how Bush and Cheney will testify. Not only will they do so in private, not only will they not be under oath, and not only will the testimony be cut off after just one measly hour–but now they tell us that Bush and Cheney will appear together. Meaning that they will not even testify for an hour each, but more like just a half hour. And perhaps a huge chunk of that time will be dedicated to pre-written opening statements. In the end, neither Bush nor Cheney will have to answer more than just a few questions each.

Isn’t it great how Bush and Cheney are bending over backwards to help the committee?

By the way, expect Bush to claim later that it was their intent from the beginning to have Rice testify; this will fall in with Bush Revisionism that says that he intended to get Congressional approval and U.N. support for the Iraq war all along, and that he had stated before the election that he would allow a budget deficit if he “hit the Trifecta” of recession, national emergency and war. All of those claims are completely false.

Kerry has to get the word out better on his tax plans–it seems that Bush is being successful in smearing him on the issue. A CNN/Gallup poll had 58 percent saying that Kerry would raise their taxes (as opposed to 29 percent saying “no”). I seriously doubt that 58% of all Americans make over $200,000 a year, which is why Kerry should make the point more clear. From his web site:

John Kerry has a plan to cut taxes for middle class families and repeal the Bush tax cuts for families making over $200,000 to invest in health care and education. …

Specifically, he wants to protect the increases in the child tax credit, the reduced marriage penalty and the new tax bracket that helps people save $350 on their first level of income. He strongly disagrees with Democrats who want to repeal these tax cuts because it would cost a typical middle-class family with two children an additional $2,000. These families are often already struggling with higher health care costs and higher state and local taxes. In fact, John Kerry wants to give more tax breaks to the middle class with new tax credits on health care and college tuition.

Not being able to attack Kerry for that, Bush is–amazingly–going after Kerry on gas taxes. This coming from the “Enron President” who has overseen the biggest hike in gas prices in recent memory. Remember when people were wondering in Bush and Cheney’s strong oil ties would be used for the industry or to make the industry more reasonable? No more mystery there; Halliburton is bloated with your tax dollars, and while you’re being charged usurious prices at the pump, Ken Lay still hasn’t been charged with a single crime.

And yet Kerry will make gas prices higher? Bush’s claim is based on the fact that Kerry voiced support for a gas tax hike. Wow! Sounds like a dangerous tax-hiker, right? Except that Kerry voiced that support ten years ago, when prices were almost half of what they are now. And the support was fleeting, just a few mentions of it in the context of cutting the deficits at the time. And he never actually voted for it in the end. Well. Doesn’t sound like such a rabid tax-hiker, after all, does he? Factcheck.org does a great job of laying out the story.

But here’s a surprising kicker: far more recently, Bush’s chief economic advisor, much more vociferously proposed exactly the same tax! The advisor is Gregory Mankiw (remember, the guy who wanted to call fast food jobs “manufacturing”?), and in 1999 he suggested raising gas taxes by 50 cents a gallon as a way to offset other taxes. So if Kerry’s a gas-taxer, then how is Bush not? Both claims would be equally tenuous.

But when Bush attacks Kerry on taxes, he bends every perception to the breaking point. For example, Kerry not wanting to extend the massive tax cuts for wealthy Americans beyond its expiration date is a “tax hike.” Once Kerry voted to keep the tax on cigarettes the same, instead of cutting it in half. That’s another one of his famous “tax hikes.” Again, Factcheck.org fries Bush on the matter.

The fact is, the only people who are making more and paying less these days are millionaires and billionaires; the paltry three hundred bucks that some in the middle got has long been shot on higher prices at the pump, not to mention lower wages at work, if you’re lucky enough to have a job.

And yet still, the perception is that Bush is better on the issue. Well, start talking, people. Get the word out!

Air America Radio has changed their web site to an under-construction graphic (shown below) with radio frequencies to tune in on (sorry, dad, San Francisco is still not listed–but Fran, listen in at WLIB 1190 AM).

Looks like the New York Times was right about the webcasting! Great!

I can honestly tell you that I had concerns about the Bush administration and the GOP saying they want to declassify documents in the hope of showing contradictions in Richard Clarke’s testimony and prior statements. Because they feel so vulnerable on the issue of 9/11, because this was supposed to be their strength and because Clarke is such a credible witness, they have gone completely rabid in attacking him in every way imaginable. They’ve called him greedy, backstabbing, partisan, and most of all contradictory–a charge that was raised when they realized that they made him spin a background briefing in August 2002. That briefing by Clarke, meant to represent Rice, Fleischer and Bush, was the result of them telling him to stretch the truth as far as it would go before breaking it, which he refused to do–and now they use the fact that they made him spin for them in trying to make him look dishonest.

But that’s not even what is most disturbing–it’s the willingness, the almost ferocious intent of the Republicans to use classified material to their advantage. With echoes of the Valerie Plame affair (where senior officials in the White House made public a CIA operative’s identity as a way to attack her husband, who had publicly noted a lie by Bush), the administration is now having the CIA go through all the classified material on Clarke, to see what they can declassify. My own first reaction was, “I’ll bet the do a lot of cherry-picking and taking out of context to support their case as best they can, and suppress any and all materials that prove Clarke right, claiming that material cannot be declassified.”

Of course, I never expected that anyone would be able to prove it. But lo, just one day later, official sources told NBC News that they were doing exactly that:

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. [emphasis mine]

Amazing. Utterly amazing. You can probably expect “corrections” soon, that is if anyone in the press happens to notice it–it is buried at the bottom of the linked article.

Meanwhile, the Bush smear machine is going full-blast in accusing Kerry of raising every tax in sight. Kerry’s official stand is that he would repeal the Bush tax cuts for people making over $200,000 a year, and would cut taxes for people making less with targeted needs, and for businesses that keep jobs in the U.S.

Check out Kevin Drum’s analysis of Richard Clarke’s book. It’s a good one; brief, concise, to the point.

To those who said that Spain is “appeasing” the terrorists (a shameless attempt to paint them as Chamberlains) by their likely pull out of Iraq, please note that they are doubling their presence in Afghanistan. If they are appeasing al Qaeda, then why are they intensifying their hunt for him? Don’t make no sense, do it? Unless they aren’t appeasers, and simply disagree with the war in Iraq, separate from terrorism.

“President Bush said Saturday his tax cuts helped fuel the recent surge in home sales that has helped push homeownership to record levels in the United States,” or so CNN reports. Of course, that’s kind of predictable. If any good economic news, even meager portions of it, comes out, Bush assigns credit to his tax cuts; if any bad news comes out, then it’s Clinton or 9/11. Let’s face it–if his tax cuts, now three years on, were to have a clear-cut effect, we’d have noticed it by now. The pittance of good news about the economy now is not due to them, except perhaps in a secondary or tertiary way–but there a lot of negative stuff happening that they could easily be responsible for.

Rice’s excuse for not appearing in public, under oath, before the 9/11 commission, is “separation of powers,” based on executive privilege, a shaky concept at best. NSA’s and their staff have testified before, and the idea of privilege was something mostly invented by Nixon to keep them from having to testify before Congress. Also, the privilege could easily be protected by claiming that it was their choice to testify–just do that and everything would be hunky-dory. But still Rice is hiding behind the flimsy skirts of this artificial “principle.”

And how come the commission is a “congressional” body when it was hand-picked by President Bush?

Condoleezza Rice remains steady in her insistence that she, as National Security Advisor, should not appear before the 9/11 commission. Why? Because someone in her position should never testify on matters of policy in an investigation, as much as she desperately wishes she could testify. Yeah, right. Josh Marshall points out how insipid that excuse is. Not to mention that it apparently is OK for Rice to make it her new full-time job appear on pretty much every talk show in existence. How is that really different in terms of principle? It seems pretty likely, from her absolute refusal to testify now, and the many rather obvious lies she’s told, that if she appears before that commission, she believes that she’ll be ripped apart on a variety of issues.

Polling information taken after Richard Clarke’s revelations show that Bush’s ratings on handling terror have dropped significantly to 57% from a 70% last month suggesting that the massive, concerted character attacks on Clarke didn’t have much effect. Strangely, Bush’s poll numbers in terms of popularity and he remains neck-and-neck with Kerry in the race for president. The media suggests that perhaps the American people don’t factor terrorism handling as important in their consideration for who should be president, but frankly, I have the feeling that we’re still seeing the post-9/11 support-the-president factor at work here.

Consider that Bush’s natural state in polls is to drop steadily unless some crisis or important story bumps him up. Then consider that Bush has hit a basement plateau at just under 50%. Usually a president has about 30% to 35% as his absolute base, the number of people who’d vote for him no matter what. In the polls, though, Bush’s limit seems to be his current state, as he has hovered there for some three months now, despite bad news, embarrassments and massive foot-shooting that has been going on almost every day. How can that be?

I think what we’re seeing is an artificially enlarged base due to the post-9/11 factor, where people give nominal support to the president because that’s what people do in frightening times. The question is, does that kind of support translate to the ballot box? You’ll not be surprised when I tell you that I think the answer is “no.” What people tell the pollsters is not always what they decide to do at the polls. I recall back in 1992, when I was renting a room at a house in San Francisco while getting my B.A., my landlord, a Republican who many times spoke for Bush Sr. and against Clinton, surprised me near election day when he told me he’d be voting for Clinton. “I know that he’ll raise my taxes,” he told me sourly, ” but frankly I think that’s the right thing to do.” Before he voted, he was supporting his party, but when he went to the polls, he voted what he felt was right.

In terms of Bush’s current popularity, I think people are telling pollsters they support the presidency in a time of perceived crisis–but I really do not think that this necessarily translates to support for Bush. So many people have heard the sentiment that if you don’t support the president, then you are helping the terrorists, and I think a lot of people believe that. But when people go to the polls, I think they will vote not as a show of support, but based on what their beliefs are.

And let’s not forget the BlogD Mantra: turnout, turnout, turnout. That doesn’t show up in polls.

Every day now something comes up that further incriminates the Bush administration. Lies, offensive behavior, policy blunders, misinformation, and the occasional federal felony. If senior officials aren’t lying or handing out contradictory testimony, then a commercial or the president’s words offend a families of soldiers or 9/11 victims, or perhaps another improper business connection is revealed or, well, something. Today, it’s the administration’s claim that they were going after bin Laden hot and heavy before 9/11. No sirree, they were not asleep at the switch, not them.

At his 9/11 commission testimony, Colin Powell said:

Above all, from the start, the president by word and deed made clear his interest and his intense desire to protect the nation from terrorism. He frequently asked and prodded us to do more. He decided early on that we needed to be more aggressive in going after terrorists and especially al Qaeda.

However, look at this transcript from CNN, dated April 30, 2001:

The State Department officially released its annual terrorism report just a little more than an hour ago, but unlike last year, there’s no extensive mention of alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. A senior State Department official tells CNN the U.S. government made a mistake in focusing so much energy on bin Laden and “personalizing terrorism.” Still, Secretary of State Colin Powell says efforts to fight global terrorism will remain consistent. “

Not exactly consistent, is it? But perhaps they were secretly going after bin Laden and al Qaeda.

“Despite what some have suggested, we received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles….”

–Condoleezza Rice, op-ed in the Washington Post

“President Bush said they had no specific information about Sept. 11, and that’s accurate. But there was specific information about use of airplanes, that an attack was on the way two or three months beforehand and that several people were already in the country by May of 2001. They should’ve alerted the people to the threat we’re facing.”

–former FBI translator, Sibel Edmonds

Oops.

Our plan called for military options to attack al Qaeda and Taliban leadership, ground forces and other targets — taking the fight to the enemy where he lived.

–Condoleezza Rice, op-ed in the Washington Post

Gorelick: “Is it true, as Dr. Rice said, ‘Our plan called for military options to attack Al Qaida and Taliban leadership’?”
Armitage: “No, I think that was amended after the horror of 9/11.”

–9/11 Commission Testimony by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage

Oops again.

I guess it’s hard to get your stories straight when you’re lying so much.

This country needs a national goal for broadband technology, for the spread of broadband technology. We ought to have a universal, affordable access for broadband technology by the year 2007, and then we ought to make sure as soon as possible thereafter, consumers have got plenty of choices when it comes to purchasing the broadband carrier. See, the more choices there are, the more the price will go down. And the more the price goes down, the more users there will be. And the more users there will be, the more likely it is America will stay on the competitive edge of world trade.

–President Bush, March 26, 2004, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Well, goodie for him. Three years after the DSL market started to stagnate, he finally gets around to saying that we need cheap, universal broadband. And his only comment on how? Make sure there are plenty of choices. And he later added, we must not tax access (which I’m sure lots of people would have suggested as a way to make broadband cheaper).

Well, problem solved.

Yeah, right. There are quite a few problems that need to be solved, and I don’t really see Bush solving any of them. Japan surged ahead with their “e-Japan” strategy, and now 40 Mbps DSL is available to a very large percent of the population here, with 100 Mbps fiber optic also available to many, and other options like vDSL on their way. This was accomplished at least in part by government action, subsidizing loans for the construction of broadband infrastructure to the tune of a few billion dollars, something Bush does not have us doing yet. American efforts are less orchestrated and more scattershot; a national plan has not yet been established. In Japan, the “e-Japan” initiative aims for universal access of 30- to 100 Mbps by 2005. And since the tech bubble collapse in 2000, the quality of broadband in the U.S. for most has actually fallen, with prices remaining high. It is also arguable as to whether what is provided to Americans today can be called “broadband.” The FCC defines that as a 200 kilobit connection. That’s about 1/100th of what in Japan today is considered low-end DSL. And penetration in Japan is deeper, too; in 2001, the U.S. had more broadband penetration than Japan by at least a factor of two, but in 2003, Japan swept past the U.S., with more than double the connections, and that trend has likely continued or even accelerated in 2004, with most ISPs offering 40 Mbps+ DSL.

And that’s not even getting into problems more pervasive in the U.S., including “last-mile” costs for rural areas, and regulation concerns. If the U.S. is going to get universal broadband, much less cheap broadband, any time soon, Bush will have to get up off his butt and actually do something, as opposed to just making stirring references in speeches to homeowners in New Mexico. But don’t count on it–in areas such as education (“No Child Left Behind”), space exploration (the Mars mission), and fighting AIDS in Africa, Bush has talked big but in fact delivered next to nothing. He is the champion of the unfunded mandate. Expect his action on broadband to be the same.

In 1998, Microsoft did something that was widely protested: it tied its browser software to its operating system. This was part of Microsoft’s strategy to dominate the browser software market, and the trigger for a massive lawsuit by the U.S. government and many states against the software giant on antitrust grounds. While that suit was sabotaged in the end, a similar action is now entering a promising phase in Europe–but must first withstand similar attempts at sabotage. First, a bit of background.

Let’s go back in time a little. The first event of note happened at the beginning of the 80’s, when the Apple ][ computer dominated the PC market. IBM wanted to do that, so they created a new computer, the “IBM PC,” that would do the trick. When they went looking for an OS, they turned to Bill Gates, who was doing other work for them. Gates bought an operating system, Q-DOS, from another firm for $50,000 and presented it to IBM with the new name “MS-DOS” slapped onto it. But Gates did not want to simply sell it to them for a quick profit; he wanted to license it to them, allow them to include it with their computers for a fee, with Gates retaining ownership. IBM execs decided that the computer hardware was where the money was, and so they agreed with Gates’ request. That is now remembered as one of the most idiotic decisions in recent business history. Microsoft based their success on the ownership of that operating system.

One thing should be noted about Microsoft, and that is their quick & dirty approach to capturing a market. When a competitor comes out with software which Microsoft wants to dominate, it produces its own version as quickly as possible. The product is, at first, of extremely poor quality, and only becomes truly workable after several upgrades. One example of this is Microsoft’s operating system itself.

In 1993, when Apple released the Lisa (the precursor to the Macintosh), it became a public matter that Apple was switching to the GUI (Graphics User Interface), which used windows, icons and menus as visual metaphors for controlling the computer, as opposed to the text interface used by MS-DOS and other OS’s, which depended on specifically-typed and hard-to-learn text commands in order to operate. The GUI made it possible for anyone and their grandmother to use a PC. When Microsoft saw this happening, they knew they had to come out with a GUI OS as well, or wither and die. But there was not enough time to create a GUI OS from the ground up, so Microsoft slapped together a sloppy and barely workable GUI on top of MS-DOS. The sloppiness showed, and for many years, the OS was far inferior to the Macintosh, which premiered with a GUI in 1984. Eventually, however, after several revisions, MS Windows became more acceptable, but not until the 90’s. It took at least a decade for Microsoft to finally produce a ground-up GUI OS to take over the heavy lifting for MS-DOS, and that was Windows NT. While MS-DOS remained the center of Windows Home versions until 2001 (Windows 95, 98, and Me), NT took over completely when Windows XP was released. Along the way, they stole the best features of the Mac’s OS and made them their own.

So one might wonder, how come in the first several years, Microsoft captured so much of the market with an inferior OS? The main reason for that was IBM’s strategy for their platform, the IBM PC. While Apple computers are proprietary and can only be produced by Apple (save for an abortive experiment with clones some years back), the IBM PC was, from the start, open for any company to produce. So companies that wanted in on the market found the IBM PC (now just called “PC”) platform the way to go, and the intense competition and widespread production kept prices down, a necessity for many businesses. That, combined with Apple’s loss of direction while Steve Jobs was away, allowed the PC to dominate the market. And Microsoft dominated the PC.

That dominance is what has brought criticism of Microsoft, because of the way they use it. Microsoft does not only make the operating system, it also produces Microsoft Office (Which includes software for word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, scheduling and database), a browser, email, a music and video (“multimedia”) viewer, and others (such as Publisher for DTP and FrontPage for web page design). On the PC platform, Microsoft has many competitors for application software of that type–and those competitors have long cried foul over Microsoft’s oppressive tactics.

The Windows OS has been a cornerstone of those tactics. Since Microsoft controls the OS, it can use that control to give their application software an edge over competitors. Imagine if one business owned a shopping center, and rented out most of the space to other businesses, while keeping its own stores as part of the mall. Those mall-owned stores would be competing with other stores in the shopping center trying to sell the same goods. The business which owns the shopping center would have an unfair advantage over all the other shops. It could give the best locations to its own shops and make the other businesses operate in hard-to-find locations with little traffic. It could control the messages displayed on the main marquee of the mall, using it to advertise only its own stores. It could put bus stops and walkways so they led consumers to their own shops and away from other shops. It could keep information about the complex’s infrastructure (phones, electricity, water, etc.) secret and so control other stores’ use of those facilities.

You might ask, why don’t those stores just move to another mall? The answer is, because this is the mall that 95% of all people visit.

These are the kinds of things Microsoft does. Microsoft’s own software is featured in their OS to the exclusion of other companies’ software. Why do most people use the Internet Explorer browser? Because that’s what is on their desktop when they get the computer. An amazing number of people do not even know that other browsers exist. The OS and browser software together tend to steer people towards Microsoft’s products and services and away from those of others. And Microsoft keeps the source code of the OS a heavily-guarded secret, which allows their software to work smoothly with Windows, while other software by third-party companies struggles to keep up–not because of inferior design, but because Microsoft jealously guards the ability to interoperate with the OS so that they can stay on top.

Okay, another bit of history. In 1993, Marc Andreeson invented a new kind of software: the browser. The program that you use to view web pages, the one that practically started the entire Internet revolution and boom of the 1990’s. The first one he created at the University of Chicago, and it was called Mosaic. But then Andreeson started his own company and presented the Netscape browser. For many years, Netscape was the browser, the most popular, the gold standard.

Microsoft wanted to take that away from them. They created Explorer, and used their dominance of the Desktop to put Explorer before everyone’s cursor, meaning that anyone who wanted Netscape would have to (a) learn about it, and (b) go to the web site and download it. This was a huge disadvantage.

But in 1998, Microsoft went even further: they integrated the Explorer browser directly into the Windows Operating System. Open a folder in any Windows OS since Windows 98 (98, Me, 2000, XP). With standard settings, you should see an address bar, just like in a browser, and have the option to list Internet links in the toolbar of the window. Select the Tools menu and choose “Options,” and you’ll have the ability to enable browser-style or classic windows, even make files and folders appear like Internet hyperlinks, blue and underlined, which open with a single click. These and other browser features became an integrated part of the Operating System–meaning that you couldn’t remove them. And without removing them, Microsoft’s Explorer browser was even more ensured to remain the browser everyone used. Netscape, once the king of browsers, and with better features and operability than Explorer, lost the war. People stopped using it, not because it was worse, but because Microsoft abused it’s ownership of the Desktop and so pushed it into obscurity.

Today, Microsoft does the same thing with Windows Media Player, the app most people now use to play music and video files. Just like Explorer, it is the default player because Microsoft owns the Desktop and puts it, and nothing else, there.

So in 1998, the Justice department under the Clinton administration, with the cooperation of many state governments, initiated legal action against Microsoft. In 2000, a judge came very close to ordering Microsoft to be split in two–one company for the Windows OS, another for the application software, and Gates could only retain one. That possibility was temporarily set aside when a appeals court decided that the judge who handed down the initial verdict had tainted the proceedings by speaking about it to the media. The government still had the potential to ask for the breakup again with another judge, and had a good chance of winning. But then something happened which saved Microsoft’s bacon.

Bush got elected.

Microsoft contributed much to both parties, spreading the money around, but that didn’t work with Clinton. It did, however, with Bush, who got more donations from Microsoft than anyone else, and when bought, stays bought. Ashcroft was similarly a large Microsoft benefactor. Just five days before 9/11, John Ashcroft suddenly declared that the government would not ask for Microsoft to be split in two, a threat seen as the most potent weapon with which to make Microsoft behave. Ashcroft also ruled out forcing Microsoft to reveal its most important source code and letting other software vendors work on an even playing field. He also decided to allow Microsoft to continue bundling its own software with Windows and excluding other companies’ software. He nixed the plan to have a technical committee be a watchdog to see that Microsoft was following the settlement, and instead allowed Microsoft to police itself. It only demanded weak sanctions which were made almost toothless by vague language which Microsoft was able to weasel around. Even these weak sanctions would only last for five years.

Why did Ashcroft decide to unilaterally surrender all of his leverage and essentially surrender the case completely? According to Ashcroft’s DOJ, it was in order to “streamline the case with the goal of securing an effective remedy as quickly as possible.”

Well, Bush and Ashcroft may have been bought, but the rest of the world hasn’t. While Asian countries mull over what to do, the European Union has taken action: this week, EU trade regulators judged that Microsoft had violated antitrust laws in Europe, and declared that Microsoft would be fined $612 million, would be forced to sell a version without its own software loaded up front, and would be required to reveal its source code to competitors; and that a non-Microsoft committee would oversee the enforcement of those penalties. In other words, the EU did what Bush and Ashcroft sabotaged, short of being able to split Microsoft into two companies.

Well, Microsoft spent their money well, with ten congressmen, including prominent Republicans (Senate Majority leader Bill Frist and head of the Foreign Relations Committee Senator Richard Lugar) immediately pronouncing that the EU is headed towards a “trade war” if it carries out these sanctions.

A trade war? Because the EU didn’t get bought? Because they fined a company for antitrust and were right? How would this stifle U.S. trade at all? If anything, U.S. companies other than Microsoft have everything to gain from this, and it could open up a more competitive computer software market with great benefits to the industry and to consumers as well. But instead, the U.S. is going to engage in a damaging and expensive trade war in order to allow Bill Gates to keep his monopoly intact?

And don’t expect anything to happen soon. Microsoft immediately filed an appeal, and it will probably be five years before anything is decided–and it could drag on longer than that.

I can only post on this quickly as I get ready for work, but it appears that a long-overdue comeuppance is on its way: Tom DeLay will likely have to step down as House Majority Leader. Why? Because he will probably be indicted on felony charges of campaign finance abuses in Texas. Now, that sounds kind of like getting Al Capone for tax evasion, but it works for me.

In his own words:

KING: Was 9/11 preventable?

CLARKE: Well, we’ll never know. But let me compare 9/11 and the period immediately before it to the millennium rollover and the period immediately before that. In December, 1999, we received intelligence reports that there were going to be major al Qaeda attacks. President Clinton asked his national security adviser Sandy Berger to hold daily meetings with the attorney general, the FBI director, the CIA director and stop the attacks. And every day they went back from the White House to the FBI, to the Justice Department, to the CIA and they shook the trees to find out if there was any information. You know, when you know the United States is going to be attacked, the top people in the United States government ought to be working hands-on to prevent it and working together.

Now, contrast that with what happened in the summer of 2001, when we even had more clear indications that there was going to be an attack. Did the president ask for daily meetings of his team to try to stop the attack? Did Condi Rice hold meetings of her counterparts to try to stop the attack? No.

And if she had, if the FBI director and the attorney general had gone back day after day to their department to the White House, what would they have shaken loose? We now know from testimony before the Commission that buried in the FBI was the fact that two of the hijackers had entered the United States. Now, if that information had been able to be shaken loose by the FBI director and the attorney general in response to daily meetings with the White House, if we had known that those two — if the attorney general had known, if the FBI director had known, that those two were in the United States, Larry, I believe we could have caught those two. Would that have stopped…

CLARKE: Some people in the FBI knew. And if Condi Rice had been doing her job and holding those daily meetings, the way Sandy Berger did, if she had a hands-on attitude to being national security adviser, when she had information that there was a threat against the United States, that kind of information was shaken out in December 1999, it would have been shaken out in the summer of 2001, if she had been doing her job. — Transcript of the whole interview

Watching this guy, he comes across not just as credible, but as amazingly credible. In that his answers are clear, crystallized and consistent. Even in the face of all the mud thrown at him, he answered the charges with eminent believability and clarity. While Rice and Cheney’s claims are scattershot and inconsistent, Clarke’s response is well-thought out and demanded respect. I know, maybe that’s me, but it came across so strongly, I tend to believe it is not just me.

The man is not just criticizing Bush. He criticizes Clinton, and he criticizes himself. That is something Bush’s people are not doing–they are excusing themselves, covering for themselves. But no one, no one else has apologized to the American people the way Clarke has, so publicly, and so heartfelt–that was first-class, all the way. No one else has managed to be as non-partisan as Clarke has, criticizing anyone who deserved it, even himself, whatever their political affiliations. Right now, Clarke is coming across as the single most credible witness in the whole affair, and I am glad that he is making himself available as much as he is. I will be taking some points from his testimony and television appearances, and focus on his message in posts to come.

And here is the apology he made at the start of the hearings; while everyone else took that opportunity to lay out their version of events, Clarke chose to do this. See for yourself, and ask yourself if you can really say that this is not a class act:

I welcome these hearings because of the opportunity that they provide to the American people to better understand why the tragedy of 9/11 happened and what we must do to prevent a reoccurance.

I also welcome the hearings because it is finally a forum where I can apologize to the loved ones of the victims of 9/11.

To them who are here in the room, to those who are watching on television, your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn’t matter because we failed.

And for that failure, I would ask — once all the facts are out — for your understanding and for your forgiveness.

With that, Mr. Chairman, I’ll be glad to take your questions.