This is a treat.
Foleygate may be an added burden for the GOP to take into next month’s election. But November 7th is really about the style of 
government the Bush administration has brought to this country and the war in Iraq — two things that are very much intertwined.
Today, the American adventure in Iraq has settled down to a regular schedule of disaster and bloodletting, with routine deaths of American soldiers, escalating sectarian attacks killing Iraqis on a far larger scale and an atmosphere of paralysis at home over what to do about what Tom Ricks aptly calls a fiasco.
But there was an earlier period when the body counts were far smaller but the groundwork was being laid for the coming carnage and collapse: during the period of the Coalition Provisional Authority under Jerry Bremer.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran was the Baghdad Bureau Chief for the Washington Post during 2003 and 2004. So he was there and probably saw as much of what happened as any American journalist. His book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone came out last month. And Monday through Wednesday of next week he’s going to join TPMCafe’s Table for One to talk about his book, describe what he saw in Iraq and answer your questions.
Join us.
Let’s not mince words: President Bush is a profound threat to the US constitution.
From the AP …
President Bush, again defying Congress, says he has the power to edit the Homeland Security Departmentâs reports about whether it obeys privacy rules while handling background checks, ID cards and watchlists.
In the law Bush signed Wednesday, Congress stated no one but the privacy officer could alter, delay or prohibit the mandatory annual report on Homeland Security department activities that affect privacy, including complaints.
But Bush, in a signing statement attached to the agencyâs 2007 spending bill, said he will interpret that section âin a manner consistent with the Presidentâs constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch.â
His contempt for the rule of law needs to be ended.
I’m shocked, shocked, I tell you. That Drudge bamboozlement about the Foleygate cybersex IMs being a ‘prank’. The kid’s lawyer says Drudge’s piece was “a piece of fiction.”
Here at TPM we’re putting out more and more material each day. And with the political news world more or less exploding or in meltdown (pick your metaphor), we’ve gotten an increasing number of readers asking if we can come up with some way to distill our best posts and the most important news of the day into a series of easy (and hopefully fun) digestible nuggets that we can send out to get each day started.
So starting next Tuesday we’re going to be debuting the admittedly-none-too-creatively-named TPM Daily Digest.
Every weekday, a little before 9 AM on the East Coast, we’ll send out a short email with a few key nuggets of news and quotes, what we think are some of our best posts from the last 24 hours that you might have missed and articles from the morning’s papers you’ll want to read. Think of it as a quick curtain-raiser for the news of the day and a heads up on what to expect. A primer for the day’s news along with links to some news you might have missed — all packaged together in the TPM style.
For the first four weeks, we’ll obviously be heavily focused on the November election. So we’ll start with a half dozen of what we think are the most important polls released in the past 24 hours, along with key dispatches on races around the country.
We’ll try to make it fun. If you’re interested, just sign up at the little email sign-up form at the top of the TPM post column on the right where it says ‘TPM Daily Digest’.
(pub.note: We respect your privacy. So your email address will never be sold, rented, given away, shared or anything else. It will only be used to send you our daily update.)
The grand Republican strategy for containing the damage from Foleygate: hunker down and hope. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.
Denny Hastert told by Republican higher-ups to cut the half-brained conspiracy chatter.
Mark Foley loved to talk about masturbating — turns out, it’s a common GOP trait.
My my my. Oh what a tangled web we weave when at first we practice to bamboozle.
Way, way back on June 29th, frustrated that chronic Social Security bamboozler Mike McGavick, Republican senate candidate in Washington, wouldn’t give a straight answer on his position on whether or not to phase out Social Security and replace it with private accounts, we actually launched a special TPM Media contest to see who could get a straight answer out of the guy.
Then the next day, in response to our contest and general efforts to shed some light on the murky darkness of McGavick’s bamboozlement, David Postman of the Seattle Times interviewed McGavick to find out what the deal was. McGavick gave a fairly poll-tested but still relatively straight forward response. McGavick, wrote Postman, “wants a phased-in system of individually controlled, privately managed retirement accounts that could provide a 
higher yield than the government-run system, but would come with a lower guaranteed payment.”
McGavick also told Postman that on Social Security he wants “to get this out of the political world and into a thoughtful space.”
Anyway, with the exception of a few moments of recidivist bamboozlement, that’s where the matter stood for the past few months. McGavick didn’t really want to discuss the issue. But when pressed he conceded he was for phasing out Social Security as it now exists and replacing it with a system of private accounts. McGavick never uttered a peep saying Postman got anything wrong. His campaign even excerpted Postman’s piece on its campaign blog, as a pointer for understanding his position.. And that’s where the matter stood.
That is, it stood there until this week when his opponent, Maria Cantwell, ran a radio ad criticizing the position he took in his interview with Postman.
Now suddenly McGavick says Postman got it all wrong. Now McGavick says he actually doesn’t want the private account managed privately. He wants the government to manage the private accounts.
Says McGavick …
I don’t want it privately managed, either by Wall Street or that individual. What I want is a government-run program, with money going into an account. It would be managed by the government.
And now he says Cantwell has to take down her ad because it doesn’t reflect his true position. At least after changing it for the tenth time. Can anyone take this dude even remotely seriously? And how am I supposed to run Social Security contests with any sense of predictability or finality when we’ve got serial bamboozlers like Mike McGavick out there constantly changing their positions?
I need Regis here to give McGavick one of those, “Is that your final answer?” lines.
(ed.note: In private McGavick is known for supporting hardline privatization of Social Security. He just fibs about his position in public.)
Late Update: Maybe give a holler to the Postman guy at the Seattle Times and thank him for braving the hot swamps of McGavick’s bamboozlement.
Who will call them on it?
Will you?
TPM Reader MW just sent us in this email …
While you and the Hill report that Foley’s IM’s were given to ABC by a GOP aid, Newt G was reported on NPR last night saying that it is a Democrat election gambit and the assertion was not challenged in the report. Again last night on CNN they reported Hastert’s comments that the Dems did it and on NBC’s Today this morning, the same unchallenged reporting of GOP assertions were made. Eventually it will become the “truth” that the Dems did it unless the mainstream media do real reporting.
This kind of stuff really irritates me.
On CNN and in the Washington Post yesterday, reporters duly noted that the Republicans who are parrotting this argument do so with no evidence and that there’s no evidence to back it up.
But this is insufficient.
Every news organization that is aggressively reporting this story knows in basic outlines who the ultimate sources of these IMs were and how they made their way into the hands of the media. So they know not only that there is ‘no evidence’ for the GOP line but that it is actually false. Given that the Republicans who are spouting this line make no effort even to offer evidence, I think it is a fair conclusion that not only is the claim false but that these professional bamboozlers like Gingrich know it’s false.
In other words, they’re lying. And the news organizations publishing what they say know they’re lying.
Saying there’s ‘no evidence’ doesn’t cut.