Condi Rice promises a “review” of Blackwater following last weekend’s incident, but the company is already back in business in Iraq.
Fired Seattle U.S. Attorney John McKay was given the Courageous Award by the Washington State Bar Association last night. (Thanks to TPM Reader DC for the link.)
How would John Edwards have voted on the resolution condemning the MoveOn ad were he still in the Senate? We have the answer.
In response to a FOIA request, Gen. Petraeus’ command has released to our Spencer Ackerman its methodology for calculating sectarian deaths. Sectarian deaths were a metric that Petraeus highlighted during his congressional testimony but until now how sectarian deaths were defined and counted remained unknown. Spencer has the details.
Earlier this year, we ran a brief contribution/subscription drive to raise funds to beef up our DC muckraking capacity. So for those of you who contributed here’s one example of your dollars at work.
We’ve been having a national conversation over the last several weeks about Gen. Petraeus’s report and whether his claims were an accurate picture of what’s happening on the ground in Iraq. (In some ways, that’s what the on-going Moveon/’Betray Us’ ridiculousness is all about.) Particularly, are civilian deaths up or down? And just how was Gen. Petraeus’s command counting since his numbers of civilian deaths seemed so different from those media organizations were coming up with.
Gen. Petraeus himself wouldn’t really discuss his command’s methodology when he testified before Congress last week. But TPMmuckraker’s Spencer Ackerman kept digging, as you’ve likely seen in his on-going reports. Two weeks ago Spencer filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the DOD and Gen. Petraeus’s command in Baghdad. And today he got the information we were looking for.
Here’s Spencer’s report and here are the documents we received detailing how Petraeus came up with his numbers.
I don’t know about you. But as the election season starts to heat up I become sort of a junkie for the several political futures markets that exist on the web. If you’re not familiar with them, they are (depending on how they’re described) either betting sites or ‘futures markets’ in which you put down real money based on what you believe is the most likely outcome of this or that political race or outcome. Who’s going to be the Democratic nominee? Which party will win the presidency in November 2008? Will this or that fading candidate bail out before the end of the year.
The key is that people are putting real money on the line. So as long as there are enough participants in the markets, they should give a decent read of conventional and/or informed opinion on the likely outcomes of the races.
In practice, they tend to function a lot like real world markets — pretty decent predictors of outcomes, broadly speaking, but with a real tendency toward group-think and exaggerations of conventional wisdom.
One thing my extremely unsystematic observation of the markets over the last few years is that they seem to skew slightly Republican. And I’ve wondered whether this may be an example of some skew in the participants in the market toward GOP-leaning speculative investors — or as Grover Norquist would put it, the ‘investor class’.
One of the best known of these sites is the Iowa Electronic Markets, which is run by the faculty at the University of Iowa Tippie College of Business, as a research and teaching tool to learn about the function of markets and stuff like that. Other sites, like Intrade or Tradesports.com, are basically betting sites. But it’s basically the same difference.
So tonight, I took a look at the futures on the nominations. And here’s the one for the Dems …
(You can click on the graph to go through to a larger and more legible image of the graph on Iowa Markets site.)
As you can see the big story is the chasm that has opened up between Hillary and Obama starting a bit more than six weeks ago. Hillary was the favorite through most of the Spring and Summer. But then it became something like a blow-out — 70/20. I must say I don’t quite get that spread. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking that I don’t want the race to be over before it starts. But I think those numbers are a bit out of whack.
Your thoughts?
Then there’s the Republican spread.
As you can see it’s pretty all over the place. Which seems basically accurate. The one thing that catches my eye is that the increasingly ridiculous Fred Thompson has managed to sneak barely ahead of Mitt Romney.
And finally, who wins in November 2008? The Dems or the GOP candidate?
Again, no big surprises here. I’d say that’s a reasonably accurate take on what the next cycle portends.
Thoughts?
I try not to get too worked up over the hassles of airport security. Officials are well-intentioned and trying to provide a crucial public service. Fine.
But when federal officials maintain travel records on Americans that keep track of everything from destinations, to travel companions, to reading materials, one can’t help but wonder if some reasonable lines are being crossed.
The U.S. government is collecting electronic records on the travel habits of millions of Americans who fly, drive or take cruises abroad, retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan to stay, the personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books that travelers have carried, according to documents obtained by a group of civil liberties advocates and statements by government officials.
The personal travel records are meant to be stored for as long as 15 years, as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s effort to assess the security threat posed by all travelers entering the country. Officials say the records, which are analyzed by the department’s Automated Targeting System, help border officials distinguish potential terrorists from innocent people entering the country.
The Automated Targeting System isn’t exactly new; it’s been used to screen passengers since the mid-1990s. Apparently, though, officials are monitoring personal travel habits in a way that hadn’t been acknowledged before.
At a minimum, I can’t help but think Bill O’Reilly needs to get out more. He explained the other day, on the air, that he and Al Sharpton had dinner together in Harlem, and O’Reilly was amazed by what he found. Regrettably, he wasn’t talking about the food.
“[W]e went to Sylvia’s, a very famous restaurant in Harlem. I had a great time, and all the people up there are tremendously respectful. They all watch The Factor. You know, when Sharpton and I walked in, it was like a big commotion and everything, but everybody was very nice.
“And I couldn’t get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia’s restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it’s run by blacks, primarily black patronship.”
On the same program, O’Reilly was describing his experience to NPR’s Juan Williams. “There wasn’t one person in Sylvia’s who was screaming, ‘M-Fer, I want more iced tea,'” O’Reilly said, adding, “You know, I mean, everybody was — it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn’t any kind of craziness at all.”
It might not have been quite so offensive if O’Reilly didn’t sound so surprised.