You only get one chance to hold on to your credibility. My team, which holds temporary custody of the Department of Justice, has blown it in this case. The Department of Justice will be paying for it for some time to come. Lots of sound investigations and convictions are now going to be questioned. That is a crying shame, because most of the 110,000 employees to whom the attorney general referred in a recent news conference, are neutral, nonpartisan public servants and do incredible work. A lot of President Bush’s political appointees have done a lot of great work, too. Sadly, because of the damage done by this protracted scandal, which the administration has handled poorly at every turn, none of that good work is currently being recognized. And more ominously, the credibility of the Department of Justice may no longer be, either.
The Bush Administration is ratcheting up the pressure on Syria:
The State Department in recent weeks has issued a series of rhetorical broadsides against Syria, using language harsher than that usually reserved for U.S. adversaries. On Friday, the administration criticized a planned visit there by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
“It’s the new Cuba – no language is too tough,” said one of the officials, who like others insisted on anonymity to discuss internal government planning.
The campaign appears to fly in the face of the recommendations last December of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which urged President Bush to engage diplomatically with Syria to stabilize Iraq and address the Arab-Israeli conflict. The White House largely ignored that recommendation, agreeing only to talk with Syria about Iraqi refugees and to attend a Baghdad conference where envoys from Iran and Syria were present.
Some officials who are aware of the campaign say they fear its real aim is to weaken or even overthrow Assad and to ensure that he can’t thwart the creation of an international tribunal to investigate the February 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. A U.N. report has implicated Syrian and Lebanese officials in the murder.
The officials say the campaign bears the imprint of Elliott Abrams, a conservative White House aide in charge of pushing Bush’s global democracy agenda.
Elliott Abrams–with the way Republicans rehabilitate their own, Kyle Sampson will be attorney general in 20 years.
Judith Miller: The media should have “hung together” instead of caving in to Patrick Fitzgerald’s subpoenas.
Jon Alter writes about his cancer, which, happily, is in remission.
As anyone who has paid a lick of attention to the U.S. Attorney scandal knows, it is just one example–perhaps the most egregious example–of the Bush Administration’s deep and widespread politicization of the Justice Department:
No other administration in contemporary times has had such a clear pattern of filling chief prosecutors’ jobs with its own staff members, said experts on U.S. attorney’s offices. Those experts said the emphasis in appointments traditionally has been on local roots and deference to home-state senators, whose support has been crucial to win confirmation of the nominees.
The pattern from Bush’s second term suggests that the dismissals were half of a two-pronged approach: While getting rid of prosecutors who did not adhere closely to administration priorities, such as rigorous enforcement of immigration violations and GOP allegations of voter fraud, White House and Justice officials also have seeded federal prosecutors’ offices with people on whom they can depend to carry out the administration’s agenda.
Jonathan Landay explores the curious case of Amir Mohamed Meshal, a U.S. citizen with alleged, albeit obscure, ties to al Qaeda who fled the fighting in Somalia earlier this year, was detained upon his arrival in Kenya, reportedly with U.S. help, and was subsequently deported to Ethiopia, where he now sits in a secret prison in the custody of Ethiopia’s intelligence service, even though the FBI interviewed him twice and declined to pursue charges. Confused? Landay maps out what is known to this point about the status of the 24-year-old from New Jersey.
As I’ve mentioned, we’re working on a redesign of this site. And that process has meant putting a lot of time into thinking about web design. Not just the pure aesthetics of what looks nice or doesn’t — but how news reporting and political writing can best be arranged on a page.
One thing that recently occurred to me — obvious, but it had never occurred to me — is how print newspapers are highly formulaic in their graphic presentation. They’re pretty much all the same with relatively minor differences at the margins. There’s the tabloid and the broadsheet. But within those two broad categories the basic way layout is remarkably similar — at least in comparison to the wild variety of modes of presentation on the web. To get some examples, see this page from Newseum, which shows daily front pages of hundreds of newspapers around the country and around the world.
I bring all this up because there are two questions I want to throw out there. One is, which papers do you think are the best designed ones on the web? The second is a bit broader. Is a basic formula emerging for publishing ‘newspapers’ on the web? Are certain idioms and styles becoming more and more common while fewer and fewer papers diverge radically from the standard model?
For my money, the New York Times is a very nicely designed site. The Post, on the other hand, just a did a limited redesign. And I think the result is disappointing. They tried to make the front page less busy and add more white space. But the result has an oddly unsegmented and ordered quality. And the fonts seem lifeless. (Yes, you can tell I’ve been thinking a lot about news site design.)
One of the design issues that interests me most about newspapers online is how you recapture the topical serendipity that is a lot of the magic of real newsprint. As you’d probably expect, I gravitate pretty heavily toward political coverage. And in doing so I miss a lot of stuff I don’t know I want to read. I want to read that story on such and such in India or … well, I don’t know what it is. That’s the point. But I want to read it. And it will enrich my day and turn my mind in different directions. Newsprint has that quality that you see these pieces sitting alongside the articles you’re accustomed to reading. There are various ways designers try to capture this experience online — mostly by putting collections of story links adjacent to the article you’re reading. But somehow it’s not quite the same.
Your thoughts about newspaper design online? And what do you think — setting aside the underlying quality of the journalism — is the best designed newspaper website?
Pete Domenici and Heather Wilson, the New Mexico pols whose phone calls to then-U.S. Attorney David Iglesias ultimately lit the fire under Purgegate, have been laying low, but the Post has a nice takeout on how close their political relationship has been from the very beginning and remains to this day. Says Domenici’s chief of staff of the role his boss had in first getting Wilson elected to Congress, “It was substantially more than an endorsement.” All of which helps explain why Domenici would take such an interest in Wilson’s re-election last fall, going so far as to call Iglesias to pressure him to bring corruption indictments against state Democrats before election day.