Unless I’m misreading his post, what the Council on Foreign Relations’ Michael Levi is telling us is that the core problem in the Iran nuclear situation is Iran’s objective need for nuclear weapons.
That’s maybe a cheeky interpretation of what he’s saying. But I think it gets to the nub of it. Take a look and tell me what you think.
Cunningham felon Mitchell Wade spends a quality moment at MZM headquarters with Reps. Virgil Goode (R-VA) and Eric Cantor (R-VA) back in better days in early 2003.
This is from a fundraiser Wade hosted for Goode at MZM’s DC headquarters.
K Street beckons for Tom DeLay if prison opportunity falls through. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.
America in good hands.
Pres. Bush: “I’m the decider, and I decide what’s best. And what’s best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense.”
Mark Schmitt takes on the ‘partisanship’ question at TPMCafe Book Club. He says Juliet’s book promotes a false symmetry between Dems and Republicans.
It’s sad the state we’ve gotten to where, apparently, even firing incompetent executive branch appointees amounts to a win for the terrorists. Back in ’04 we were still enough of a superpower that only turning out a president amounted to a win for the terrorists. That suggests that the terrorists truly have us over a barrel. We are so intimidated by them that we have to hold on to a failed defense secretary presumeably forever. Or until there are no more Muslims with a beef with us. Whichever comes first. It’s cool that we’re standing so tall.
Torture whistleblower gets blacklisted by DOD.
Some former employees’ impressions of Mitch Wade.
Let me tell you 
about a new project we’re working on and will have up online sometime next month.
If you were reading TPM a year or more ago, you know that we did very granular and detailed tracking of where key members of Congress were on the Social Security issue. Most political news outlets were focused on that debate in late 2004 and early 2005. But we focused on a slice of the debate that we had unique access to because of our readers in different districts. We heard what the members were sending in constituent emails; we got reports from town meetings; details that were showing up in the local press, and more.
We’re going to employ that model to follow this year’s mid-term elections. We’ll be picking thirty to forty House and Senate races. Mainly, we’ll choose the ones that seem genuinely in play, though we’ll also probably feature a few that are just inherently interesting, even if the eventual outcome appears fairly clear.
We’re setting up a special tabbed blog at TPMCafe, which will run live right through the November election. And there we’ll provide wall-to-wall coverage of every race we’re tracking — every poll, every detail about fundraising, who’s getting paid what, what’s getting said at town meetings, who’s running away from their old positions, bamboozling the press and so on. Everything you, the political junkie, need to keep your finger on the pulse of all these races.
The site will be run by our in-house staff and our crop of summer interns. But mainly we’ll need you — folks in the districts, reading the papers, attending the meetings, letting us know about mailings, telling us what you hear. A lot of it we’ll do like I did the Social Security stuff, getting your emails, passing on key details to readers. But we’ll also be posting reader reports as well.
Are you watching a race you think we should follow? Let us know. Are you in a district or state with a closely-watched race and interested in sending regular reports? Let us know that too.
Like each of our projects, it’s an experiment. We’re excited about this one. Stay tuned.
Safavian to Abramoff, April 30th, 2002: “My gut is telling me to take the GSA job before joining up with you and your band of merry men.” More of the courtship here.