Pacific Views

Sunday's Post

Rice thrown to wolves, CIA won't take fall

Just weeks ago, Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, made a trip to the Middle East that was widely seen as advancing the peace process. There was speculation that she would be a likely choice for secretary of state, and hopes among Republicans that she could become governor of California and even, someday, president.

But she has since become enmeshed in the controversy over the administration's use of intelligence about Iraq's weapons in the run-up to war. She has been made to appear out of the loop by colleagues' claims that she did not read or recall vital pieces of intelligence. And she has made statements about U.S. intelligence on Iraq that have been contradicted by facts that later emerged.

...When the controversy intensified earlier this month with a White House admission of error, Rice was the first administration official to place responsibility on CIA Director Tenet for the inclusion in Bush's State of the Union address of the Africa uranium charge. The White House now concedes that pinning responsibility on Tenet was a costly mistake. ...

Make sure and read to the end, where a White House staffer is quoted accusing a CIA official of spinning 'conspiracy theories.' It's a great article, but it just ticks me off no end that this information has taken this long to come out. Long enough for everyone who originally found fault with the intelligence to be publicly smeared as conspiracy theorists, themselves.

Another Military Spouse Told Off For Email

...The message said that "certain people are getting their soldiers in trouble," and that the unit's e-mail list has been sent to the Pentagon "for possible security violations and will be closely monitored." ...

Profile of Joe Trippi

Trippi is the campaign manager for former Vermont governor Howard Dean. At 47, he is a veteran field operative who in the course of a long career in presidential politics has gone from slogger to blogger. "We're blending the shoe leather and the mouse pads," Trippi said...

Trippi seems an unlikely person to help lead the Internet revolution in politics, a rumpled and sometimes controversial personality who broke into national politics doing the gritty and old-fashioned work of organizing. Now he is a little like one of those Silicon Valley entrepreneurs of the late 1990s.

Will the start-up company called "Dean for America" grow almost exponentially -- the political equivalent of the old Moore's Law of computing power -- or burst like the speculative tech bubble that laid waste to the dreams of so many young tech executives? ...

Conventional Tax Wisdom Challenged

...In a memo he sent out earlier this month, Greenberg, a sometime adviser to Bill Clinton and Al Gore, argued, on the basis of a June poll of 1,000 likely voters, that the Bush tax cuts and the Republican approach to taxes command only "lukewarm support." Further, he said, "The voters are angry about taxes, not because they think their taxes are too high, but because the wealthy and corporations do not pay their fair share."

Rather than making the past three years of tax cuts permanent, as Bush proposes, voters prefer shutting "the loopholes and tax shelters used by the wealthy and corporations" and requiring high-income people to pay Social Security taxes on all of their earnings, Greenberg said. ...