"Two simple points:"

-- FMArouet21st

Yep. See how easy that is to make a specific case?

Damn, I have steam coming out of my ears! Can anybody help me find David Gregory's email address?

It doesn't happen often, but you're wrong about this one.

What would you have had Rockefeller and Harmon do? Would you have them getting classified briefings and then telling the world the contents of those briefings?

Regardless of their political thoughts, feelings, beliefs or whatever, they were required to keep the secrets. The law does not say they should keep the secret unless they don't agree politically with the people who told them the secret.

I agree with you that both of these Democrats are useless to us. But I believe that because of their public actions, not because they took an oath of secrecy and kept that oath.

Perhaps you'd feel better about them if they were serving life in prison for disclosing secret intelligence?

It is a fascinating subject and can provide hour (if not years) of lofty entertainment include delving into quantum indeterminacy.

WT nevertheless managed to compress the most important point in one phrase. "whether or not we have free will; we must act as though we do"

The alternative is the stuff of distopia.

The Bush regime has only shown contempt for the normal American checks and balances on the executive branch; Congress and the courts.

And why not? With every outrage they've committed -- whether blatant perjury, ignored subpoenaes, or destroyed or "missing" evidence, our democratic (small 'd') institutions have failed in their responsibilities -- most notably the press, as Glenn has conclusively proved on numerous occasions.

If we've learned nothing yet about the Bush regime, only the credible threat of impeachment hearings would have any meaningful leverage over these outlaws -- and that was preemptively "taken off the table."

Once again, evil triumphs when good men do nothing.

This is Gregory

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3660744/

Sorry, the information posted at the link is probably not what you had in mind, but it might be a place to start if no one comes up with something more direct.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3660744/

It is all relevant but what is most relevant is putting pressure on the one man who is in the cat-bird seat, Mulkasey. Your post wasn't doing that. Your post was basically about throwing the bums out. My stance is f'k a bunch of that and just deal with the issue at hand. kitt

Exactly, although I want the bums out, and brought to justice, not just the Republicans, the Dems too. You want to work the system as it is now, presumably because you still see value in it. I don't. I believe the system is broken, and must be repaired first, it's been unresponsive to the people too long, on too many fundamental issues.

As for the party loyalty thing, that comes from what now appears to me to be a knee jerk response from some quarters to any criticism of the Democratic Party (in terms of delivering results), particularly of Bill Cliton's policies and those of his wife. We are generally told to shut up because the "GOP is much worse" and/or because we "feed into Republican memes".

Forgive me for not having noticed your posting history attesting to your independent mind; do I take it you are no partisan then, just that you believe the current system will correct itself if we just keep playing by its rules, within its confines?

I hadn't found that. I instead ran across some other link saying that messages wouldn't be forwarded directly to (I think the term used was) "personalities"...

When I was in college and the war was in Vietnam, the term "co-opted" came into use to describe just what seems to have happened to Jay Rockefeller and Jane Harman. The sly authoritarians let gullible opponents in on some secret stuff and maybe share a little bit of power and some interesting tidbits that are useful to the opponents, and the former opponents are quickly on board or at least too compromised to speak up.

It happened to me when I was in college, not on the war but a minor issue, and I saw through it in a few weeks. I and the issue were minor enough that I wasn't compromised by the tidbit, which was only a complement to me from a dean.

more Jokeline

But it wasn't just the intelligence community that had been trying to prevent the war hawks in the Administration from bombing Iran. The Secretaries of State and Defense and the leaders of the uniformed military had decided that diplomacy was the best way to deal with an admittedly hostile and dangerous foe in Tehran. Almost exactly a year ago, after the firing of Donald Rumsfeld, the President met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the "Tank," the Pentagon's secure facility. Bush asked the Chiefs about attacking Iran. He was told that a bombing campaign could do severe damage to Iran's military and nuclear facilities, but the Chiefs said they were opposed to such a strike because of the probable "blowback." The Iranians, Bush was told, could make life very difficult for the U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq. They could shut off the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, thereby creating a global economic crisis. And they could use the threat of Iran-sponsored terrorist attacks on the American homeland

At about the same time, a new NIE on Iran was meandering through the intelligence community. A senior U.S. intelligence official told me last week that the report was prepared to say with a "moderate" degree of certainty that Iran had stopped its nuclear-weapons program, but the information wasn't very conclusive. That finding would have put the U.S. in the same camp as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) — deeply concerned about the Iranian efforts to enrich uranium but skeptical about the regime's efforts to fashion that uranium into a bomb.

Iran's Nukes: Now They Tell Us?

By Joe Klein, Thursday, Dec. 06, 2007

Do you think Joe Klein will ever consider actually attributing a source to a set of asserted facts? Especially now, that he's received such public attention about the accuracy of his reporting about FISA. Without EW's sleuthing we probably would not have come to recognize Klein's source in his FISA article as crazy Pete Hoekstra. No! Klein attributes with no more specificity that claiming "Republicans believe" and "Democrats believe." From reading Klein’s column, it seems all news in Washington is without attribution. Without attribution there is no context. Do you think Klein bothered to get corroborating evidence or did he just sidle up to one insider and steno the conversation, all attempts to corroborate or further legitimize the assertion non existent?

Jokeline: Repeating, without attribution, single-source?, and specious claims on-line and in print for Time Magazine…. because he loves politics.