By the time a report purporting to debunk the science of climate change was discredited, it had already made the rounds and accomplished its main purpose: giving climate change deniers a peg to hang their hats on.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, on the Wikileaks cable saying he parties hard: “Once a month, I throw dinner parties at my houses, where everything takes place in a proper, dignified and elegant way.”
House Dems are saying they’re going to push through with a vote on a middle-class only tax bill vote this week.
Sen. Susan Collins now says she’d be more likely to vote for the START Treaty in the Senate if the first or second President Bushes spoke out in favor of it.
House Democrats are actually planning to bring a middle class tax cut extension only to a vote this week. That’s a pretty dramatic turnaround from the days right after the election when the White House was signaling that it would go along with an extension of the tax cuts for all income levels. It also seemed extremely unlikely that if the Democrats didn’t have the spine to bring the tax cuts up for a vote before the election that they’d find the wherewithal to do it after getting shellacked in the midterms. But a vote is virtually assured at this point.
All that being said, it’s very uncertain that there are enough votes to pass the middle class cuts only. And in case you hadn’t noticed, there’s not exactly a rip-roaring public campaign by Democrats in Congress or by the White House to rally support and drum up votes.
Obama’s federal worker pay freeze is a budget gimmick that Republicans can love.
We’ve given explicit marching orders to our editors and reporters not to get distracted by the ‘meta’ part of the wikileaks story and just focus on the details unearthed. So let me take the opportunity to perhaps contradict those marching orders and share some initial thoughts on the meta front.
First, we’re covering all the details we can find. So that puts some real limits on how much we can credibly criticize the way these cables came to light. I’m also not sure we would have made different decisions than, say, The New York Times, if we’d been given the opportunity to report out the cables in advance of their release. And of course we here at TPM like every other news organization routinely file FOIA requests on the reasoning that it’s in the public interest to get as much as possible of the inner workings of government exposed to the public. Read More
This is sort of a side note on the larger Wikileaks question. But in reading various commentary on the Cables story I see again and again references to government secrecy, over classification and so on. But very few of the documents seem to have been highly classified or even very far up to secrecy totem pole. Indeed, if I’m understanding the origin of the leak — or as much as we think we know about it — the reason these cables were accessible is because they were not highly classified. And thus in the post-9/11 effort to make sure information could flow freely between different parts of the government — connecting the dots and so forth — they were placed on a system where a lot of people in government could access them. As I said, this doesn’t necessarily speak to the big questions people are talking about. But this whole question seems more like one of confidentiality — the fact that the nation’s diplomats do not immediately release their internal communications — than ‘secrecy’ per se.