Life is so unfair. All Rick O’Donnell did was call for the elimination of Social Security when he was a young and irresponsible 24 year-old. Now he’s down 17 points to Dem Ed Perlmutter in the latest poll out of Colorado’s 7th District.
It was almost a year ago that I held the fundraiser to start TPMmuckraker.com. Don’t worry, this isn’t a lead in to a new fundraiser. I bring it up because this story from yesterday on Muckraker is just the kind of 
piece I was hoping the site would be putting out.
Ralph Hall is a long serving member of the House of Representatives. He used to be a Democrat, by far the most conservative in the caucus. He finally became a Republican in 2004.
Back in the 1990s he was apparently one of Jack Abramoff’s go-to guys. And in 1997 Abramoff was trying to help his clients in the Marianas deal with reports of the active sex trade they had going on the Islands. That and indentured servitude and a bunch of other stuff. But in this slice of the story it’s the sex trade. And at the time, attention was focusing on the story of a girl called “Katrina” (to protect her identity) who was snatched “away from her parents in the Philippines at the age of fifteen to work at a nightclub in the Northern Marianas. Once there, she was forced to sell drinks, dance naked, and perform videotaped ‘sex acts on stage with customers.'”
That really didn’t go down very well. So Abramoff went to Rep. Hall to take “Katrina” down a few notches.
See the rest of the story here.
Sabato now says he never personally heard Sen. Allen use the N-word in college but believes that he did based on “very credible testimony.”
Oops.
An editorial published recently in newspapers under a Miami Township congresswoman’s name was nearly identical to one released by another Ohio congresswoman in July.
An article ran under Rep. Jean Schmidt’s name in several southwest Ohio newspapers in late August and last week. It said the new Medicare prescription drug benefit is saving local seniors money.
Almost the same article was in a packet of materials produced by the House Republican Conference. The office of Rep. Deborah Pryce, a Columbus-area lawmaker who leads the House GOP group, inserted data for her central Ohio district and put it on her congressional Web site on July 10.
Some folks just can’t catch a break.
The scandal-rocked Buckeye State looks set for a Democratic rout this November. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.
So we have a bit more info on that Iraq-only NIE that Rep. Harman (D-CA) referred to yesterday. The president’s Homeland Security Advisor Frances Townsend confirmed its existence but said it won’t be released till January.
Townsend claimed the timing has nothing to do with the election, just the ordinary schedule. We’re looking into that.
We’ve got the relevant exchange from the press briefing posted over at TPMmuckraker.com.
(ed.note: Just a little editorial aside. Muckraker broke the story of the second NIE yesterday morning. Now it’s frontpage on CNN. More soon.)
Late Update: We’re now hearing Townsend’s statement in the briefing may have included some sleight of hand to confuse people as to which report is being discussed. We’ll have more on this shortly.
We’ll be bringing you a lot more reporting through the day on the various intel reports on Iraq and the War on Terror. But I wanted to raise one point about the limited release from yesterday.
The upshot of the report, as I read it, is that over the last five years we’ve actually done a pretty good job at disrupting and dismantling al Qaida. (That includes everything from eliminating their safe haven in Afghanistan, to making it harder for them to move money and communicate electronically, and killing or capturing a great number of the key leaders.) The problem is that in Iraq we’ve managed to create a whole new rallying cry for a new generation of terrorists. And because they’re more dispersed, both organizationally and geographically, we’re really not prepared to handle the threat they pose.
I raise this point because this is actually very close to the argument that James Fallows made in his article in what I believe is still the current issue of The Atlantic. I strongly recommend you read the article. The deeper point is that Iraq is simply not a key part of the War on Terror, as the president routinely claims. We’ve actually done fairly well in the actual War on Terror, in the sense of taking down the organization that attacked us on 9/11. Simultaneously we’ve both squandered hundreds of billions of dollars and a lot of valuable time and good will creating a new threat with the fiasco in Iraq.
One other point: We’ve spent this morning getting to the bottom of a number of questions about this Iraq-specific NIE. And Justin Rood is about to post on that over at TPMmuckraker.com. The upshot is that there’s ample evidence the administration is slow-rolling the report to get it out past the November election.
Surprised?
Late Update: Harman writes to Negroponte.
Is the White house slow-walking the Iraq NIE to get it out past the November election? Justin Rood gives us the low-down.