Is John McCain saying one thing to white conservatives and another to Latinos on immigration? Jake Tapper talked to one attendee at McCain’s recent meeting with Hispanic Republicans in Chicago who says he did.
After months of battling, in the end the White House got exactly what it came for: broad surveillance powers and telecom immunity.
The vote in the House was 293-129.
Obama’s spokesman still doesn’t know his candidate’s position on the new FISA bill that passed the House today. The Senate vote is next week.
I’ve been noticing how Andrew Sullivan has been pushing the idea of Obama, if he wins in November, keeping Bob Gates on as Secretary of Defense. But now I see that Joe Klein’s pushing the idea. And now Noam Scheiber too.
So I’m going to be generous and excuse myself for not getting it earlier that Bob Gates must be actively pushing now to hold on to his job.
Now, those who have long memories, or really just medium length memories, will have a certain sense of deja vu. Gates was the CIA Director at the end of the first Bush administration. And he pretty publicly and aggressively auditioned for keeping the job under Bill Clinton. As it happens, Clinton dropped Gates to appoint Jim Woolsey, surely a contender for one of the worst, perhaps the worst appointment Clinton ever made. (Since leaving the administration in 1995 he’s focused primarily on giving Iraq conspiracy theorists a bad name.) So holding on to Bob Gates would have been a far superior choice, if that was the choice.
Let me be clear, I do not have a negative impression of Bob Gates. He’s mainly had the unlucky task of picking up after the mess created by Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and President Bush. My sense is that Gates is a pretty sane guy and highly capable foreign policy hand. And that’s managed to come through even through the heavily cloaking effect of having to operate within President Bush’s inane foreign policies. I don’t think I know enough about Gates or the particulars of his administration of the Pentagon — to the extent that can be distinguished from the necessity of operating under President Bush — to give any qualified appraisal of him. But certainly he is much more in the Scowcroft, rough-realist school than anything from the Bush mold.
But can we realize that this is simply impossible? I shouldn’t say impossible. Obama’s surprised me a number of times. And I’m not afraid to say, a number of times where I see in retrospect that he was right and I was wrong.
But consider it from this perspective. If Barack Obama is elected president in November it will be for many reasons. But preeminent among them will be the American people’s desire to decisively turn the page on the disastrous foreign policy — in all its permutations — of the Bush years, a foreign policy that has been characterized by belligerence and in the most direct sense by war, and one in which the Pentagon has played a dominant role, often at the expense of the Department of State. Elected on those terms, I simply do not see how an incoming President Obama can choose to keep on the man who ran the Pentagon on behalf of President Bush and executed his policies, regardless of the man’s qualifications in the abstract.
Late Update: A very knowledgeable DOD watcher I know tells me he’s pretty sure Gates doesn’t want to stay around past January 2009. I guess he really is a realist.
There were many entertaining moments in today’s Scott McClellan testimony. But I think the best had to be right-wing Rep. Steve King (R-IA) telling McClellan that if he wanted to be a true patriot he would have just shut up and taken the Bush administration secrets and crimes to the grave …
Steve King, We who are about to say the omerta, salute you!
Obama on the FISA ‘Compromise’ …
“Given the grave threats that we face, our national security agencies must have the capability to gather intelligence and track down terrorists before they strike, while respecting the rule of law and the privacy and civil liberties of the American people. There is also little doubt that the Bush Administration, with the cooperation of major telecommunications companies, has abused that authority and undermined the Constitution by intercepting the communications of innocent Americans without their knowledge or the required court orders.
“That is why last year I opposed the so-called Protect America Act, which expanded the surveillance powers of the government without sufficient independent oversight to protect the privacy and civil liberties of innocent Americans. I have also opposed the granting of retroactive immunity to those who were allegedly complicit in acts of illegal spying in the past.
“After months of negotiation, the House today passed a compromise that, while far from perfect, is a marked improvement over last year’s Protect America Act.
“Under this compromise legislation, an important tool in the fight against terrorism will continue, but the President’s illegal program of warrantless surveillance will be over. It restores FISA and existing criminal wiretap statutes as the exclusive means to conduct surveillance – making it clear that the President cannot circumvent the law and disregard the civil liberties of the American people. It also firmly re-establishes basic judicial oversight over all domestic surveillance in the future. It does, however, grant retroactive immunity, and I will work in the Senate to remove this provision so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses. But this compromise guarantees a thorough review by the Inspectors General of our national security agencies to determine what took place in the past, and ensures that there will be accountability going forward. By demanding oversight and accountability, a grassroots movement of Americans has helped yield a bill that is far better than the Protect America Act.
“It is not all that I would want. But given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as President, I will carefully monitor the program, review the report by the Inspectors General, and work with the Congress to take any additional steps I deem necessary to protect the lives – and the liberty – of the American people.”
Mark Schmitt argues that it’s not just new campaigns, but new issues that can win in the age of the internet.
Barack Obama and John McCain raised about the same amount of money in May. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Saturday Roundup.
Explaining how TPM works can be daunting, especially if you’re describing it to someone from a traditional journalism background or, say, older relatives for whom something as simple as email is still intimidating.
As most of you know, we have a bricks-and-mortar office in Manhattan. But that’s just the anchor for our operation. We have a reporter in DC, another reporter who works most of the week from Connecticut, and I’m in Missouri. So a third of our staff of nine is not based in the NYC office.
For that model to work, we rely some on phones, a lot on email, but primarily on Skype. That means a whole series of Skype chats going on at any one time between and among editors, reporters, and interns. Even most of the internal office interactions are via Skype, so that those of us not in the office proper can be kept in the loop. Picture a staff of mostly 20-somethings squeezed into a 700-some-odd-square-foot newsroom, hunched over their computers, fingers flying across their keyboards as they IM with colleagues who may be sitting right next to them.
As I say, it’s a hard arrangement to explain to the uninitiated. Spencer Ackerman, who used to work for us at TPMmuckraker, captured it pretty well in this blog post:
If you want to understand what it’s like to work at TPM, spend a couple days with your ten smartest friends and constantly IM with them. Set up IM windows for multi-person conversation, and break out those discussions with individual participants. And make the substance of those conversations deep-in-the-weeds investigative journalism. Make sure you don’t often go more than, say, two minutes without contributing to the discussion. And see if you can avoid being overwhelmed.
As odd as all that may sound, one of the most out-of-the-box things about TPM was that until Wednesday, I had never met any of our staff in person, including Josh, even though I’ve worked at TPM in one capacity or another for approaching two years now, the last 10 months as managing editor.
It had just worked out that way. Josh and I both have young kids. Travel is expensive. Whatever. A hundred reasons why it hadn’t happened yet. But since I was flying from St. Louis to Serbia this week, it made perfect sense to stop off at the office for a couple of days on my way back through New York.
There were suspicions among staff that I might not really exist. Maybe I was just Josh’s imaginary friend and that I would walk into the office, take off my sunglasses, and be revealed to be Josh himself. (When my kids were younger, their toddler-level understanding of my online work was that I had cleverly managed to squeeze the people I work with into my computer. It suggested that they thought I had superhero powers so I was content to let that misapprehension linger.)
I’m about to catch a flight out of JFK. After a week of Belgrade and NYC blogging, Missouri blogging doesn’t have quite the same allure, especially after such a beautiful day in NYC.
I walked from Chelsea all the way down to Wall Street — passing Philip Seymour Hoffman, or someone who bore a stunning resemblance to him, at a sidewalk cafe in Greenwich Village — before making my way back up to West 23rd. Not only had I never met my TPM colleagues, but I had never been to NYC before, a point of personal embarrassment I cringe to admit. So I wanted to soak up as much of the city as I could in the short time I had and by foot seemed like the best way to go.
I hope it’s not so long until my next visit.