An Open Letter to Talking Points Memo re Joe Willson Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, July 3, 2007:

And with that knowledge, I have to say that the claim that Wilson's charges have been discredited, disproved or even meaningfully challenged is simply false. What he said on day one is all true. It's really as simple as that.

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There's a tendency, even among too many people of good faith and good politics, to shy away from asserting and admitting this simple fact because Wilson has either gone on too many TV shows or preened too much in some photo shoot. But that is disreputable and shameful. The entire record of this story has been under a systematic, unfettered and, sadly, largely unresisted attack from the right for four years. Key facts have been buried under an avalanche of misinformation. The then-chairman of the senate intelligence committee made his committee an appendage of the White House and himself the president's bawd and issued a report built on intentional falsehood and misdirection.

No one is perfect. The key dividing line is who's telling the truth and who's lying. Wilson is on the former side, his critics the latter. Everything else is triviality.

Dear TPM:

I respect Josh Marshall, recalling him fairly well from Princeton 15-odd years ago. Marshall has basic credibility with me, in that I have never seen a factual claim made by Marshall (or his staffers) proven false without an admission of that by Marshall. To my knowledge, not once. An 850 credit rating with me.

But Josh, in this post you have put your credibility on the line by calling out as liars those who have accused Wilson of being a liar. You have not stated that those claimants are mistaken, or that they are taking an overly aggressive read on ambiguous facts, or have made logical errors or communicated poorly. You have accused them of deceiving the public and the press with specific intent about Wilson's state of mind and accuracy in his initial statements, i.e the "strong" thesis.

As back-up, you claim yourself as an expert and, essentially, argue from your own authority only – you know that they are liars because you are the expert, therefore we are damn fools if we think otherwise. No links to your primary "ur-posts" in TPM on this topic, no itemization of FireDogLake's take down, etc. Now I believe that you ARE an expert, that you ARE right, that Wilson WAS right and that many of Wilson's accusers ARE liars and all are wrong. But I am a civil libertarian who hates George Bush and Cheney and their right-wing horde of orcs already, so that's not much of an act of faith to ask of me. That's belief, not knowledge on my part. Those who don't have my own liberal anti-Bush bias and my ancient acquaintance with Josh Marshall have no reason to be persuaded.

Just as not every decent soul in 1973 needed to be a hard-core Watergate conspiracy theorist, not everyone needs to be a deep-sea Plameologist. The finer points of the Plame/Wilson/Libby saga have not been my hobby. But if you take a very strong thesis accusing others of being liars, you must bring the back-up with you to retain your own credibility. Otherwise, it looks like irrational and irresponsible exuberance in defense of your admitted "friend" Joe.

Respectfully,


Bruce Godfrey

Booman Tribune: 100 Watergates Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

I have become so accustomed to criminal disregard for law, due process and clean, competent government from the Bush administration that I fear talking about him, knowing that the monotonous drone of "his entire administration is corrupt" will bore my readers to tears. So I talk about Amy Winehouse's soul singing, transit policy, local issues. How many different ways can one say that every time George Bush gets up out of the Lincoln Bedroom and puts on a suit, he is on the way downstairs to commit corruption, to violate the law, to excrete upon the Constitution, to take care of his boys, to corrode and erode our imperfect but still real distinction in form and substance from a banana republic? Every time 2 or 3 meet in Bush' s name, it appears to be a conspiracy against the law, good governance or due process.

Yet some show better firmitas and industria than I, fortunately; they show up and do their duty. Check out BooMan's 100 Watergates excerpting Henry Waxman's statement regarding the illegal use of the Republican National Committee email server for the conduct of massive amounts of White House business, undoubtedly as a means of defeating both history and law enforcement.

Compared to this, 18 minutes of "lost" tape was a lease law citation.

UPDATE: Maryland Conservatarian says I am "pretty upset" about this - true enough. Do check out his measured counterpoint and exposition on this and related themes.

How to Cross-Examine a Witness Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Brutal.



The Hatch Act bars the use of on-the-clock government personnel or government assets in the pursuit of partisan political operations. The statute predates World War II, and was signed approximately 19 years before the witness, GSA Administrator Lurita Doan, was born in 1958.

But even more importantly, what does winning the House and Senate for the GOP have to do with the GSA? Even if the Hatch Act did not prohibit it? The legitimate business of the GSA is government building maintenance and repair, not helping Ken Mehlman win elections in Pennsylvania or Ohio or Maryland. It's like expecting U.S. Attorneys to stop prosecuting cases by the book and instead use their offices to help their party's friends and ruin their political opponents. Thank goodness that went out with Nixon. Oh, wait....

I think she's lying, but that's my opinion of her demeanor and the reasonableness of her responses. She remembers the meeting, but knows that the questions will be more likely to go away if she doesn't feed them anything. Attending a meeting where the Hatch Act gets violated and further violations are solicited is something you would remember. Unless it's routine, which would be more damning. She may regret not pursuing Renaissance Literature more fully when all is said and done.

Rove should be great on the stand. He probably cannot claim executive privilege if the reports about him using RNC email accounts are accurate; no matter what Bush thinks, this is not a one party state in which the party is the government. The RNC is not the government and communications on its server are not what executive privilege protects. This explanation of the hazards of using non-White House email accounts to conduct White House business was helpful.

CNN: Microsoft Payola to Tech Blogger on Wikipedia Backfires Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

CNN.com, January 25, 2007:

Microsoft Corp. has landed in the Wikipedia doghouse after it offered to pay a blogger to change technical articles on the community-produced Web encyclopedia site.

While Wikipedia is known as the encyclopedia that anyone can tweak, founder Jimmy Wales and his cadre of volunteer editors, writers and moderators have blocked public-relations firms, campaign workers and anyone else perceived as having a conflict of interest from posting fluff or slanting entries. So paying for Wikipedia copy is considered a definite no-no.

...

Microsoft acknowledged it had approached the writer and offered to pay him for the time it would take to correct what the company was sure were inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles on an open-source document standard and a rival format put forward by Microsoft.

Spokeswoman Catherine Brooker said she believed the articles were heavily written by people at IBM Corp., which is a big supporter of the open-source standard. IBM did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

...

Wales said the proper course would have been for Microsoft to write or commission a "white paper" on the subject with its interpretation of the facts, post it to an outside Web site and then link to it in the Wikipedia articles' discussion forums.

Payola is lawful in tech writing and promotions, but it merits scorn if received for posting in blogs and quasi-blogging community online content fora. It violates the unwritten rules of good faith and fair dealing, which are part of the "human capital" that makes them work.

I have less of a problem with payola for comments as opposed to articles, for the simple reason that comments on most blogs have adopted a pretty much "anything goes that doesn't get you banned" ethos or culture. Plus the purpose of comment sections is often for every reader to rant or riff responsively, and so I think it's more assumed that anyone, including a shill, will get his riff. Plus, since comments are responsive, the general subject matter of the discussion will usually have to stay responsive to the post, or be deleted/ridiculed as non sequiturs; a payola "plan" cannot be meaningfully hatched and executed through mere comments.

In wikis, a new commentator can outright erase old content and replace it, yielding a potential conflict and potential deterioration of the quality of the wiki as a whole. This is as true for Crabopedia (or as one Annapolis staffer called it in an email to ne before apologizing, CraPopedia ;-) ) as for any other typical wiki. The eraser power is of greater concern to me than the power to add content.