Ted Barlow lays it out so clearly that even a “confused” warblogger can understand it. Short, sweet and grammatical.
Also, via Atrios, former CIA employee Larry Johnson, who among other things is listed as a Fox News contributor, tells the NewsHour that Valerie Plame “has been under cover for three decades.”
But I still can’t square the […]

From Juan Cole:

And that is the greatest irony of all. Ms. Plame, who really was working to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction, has been ruined by persons who only pretended to do so for political gain, and whose invasion of Iraq did nothing to make the US one whit safer.

Okay, that’s almost certainly a lie - but it’s the only one you need. (Via Crooked Timber.)

Plame Game apologists have been linking to a Clifford May article on NRO in which he claims, basically, that “everybody knew” that Valerie Plame “worked for the CIA.”

That wasn’t news to me. I had been told that — but not by anyone working in the White House. Rather, I learned it from someone who formerly […]

Transcript of today’s Crossfire, from which Matt Drudge pulled Robert Novak’s opening statement. (See a couple of items below.)

Come to think of it, a fun Washington fact I learned years ago from my buddy Toiler, who really is an analyst for the CIA. If someone asks him where he works, he has to tell them he works for the CIA. He is not to lie or dodge the question. Why? So he won’t […]

Until recently I could believe that ressentiment was a malady unique to the Left. Damn the Bush Administration for stealing that, too. Glenn Reynolds in a long, Pooh-Bearlike item on Plame Game:

This seems like a case of manufactured outrage to me. I rather doubt that most of the people who are so exercised here were […]

Jessica Mathews in the Post today:

At CPA planners are deep into nearly every crevice of national government, from the postal service to tax policy, from finance to telling Iraqi teachers how they could teach better. A lot of this could be and should be left to Iraqis to decide eventually, even if we’re convinced that […]

In his actual column today, Robert Novak reports on the current, less optimistic mood at the Bush White House re the 2004 elections. Now some Repubs are wondering not How can Bush lose? but How can Bush win? Some stuff about electoral maps. But the big concern is fundraising:

Dramatic deterioration in the outlook over the […]

I would have written exactly the same demolition Sean Collins wrote of that comic-book equivalent of stadium rock, the recently concluded “Hush” storyline in Batman, except that
o I’m just not that gonzo funny;
o I had the sense to bail on the series several months ago.
The good news is, even if you were even […]

Fun with English Grammar. Compare this sentence

Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this.

with this one:

Nobody in the Bush administration leaked this to me.

Different, huh? Naturally, the first is what Matt Drudge reports Robert Novak as saying. (Hat tip to Atrios.)
The Drudge link will decay. The text attributed to Novak runs

Nobody in the […]

Bits of news this antiwar, pro-market weblog briefly acknowledges with the intention of coming back to later:
US poverty rate increases over last year.
Polls show most Iraqis think the invasion was worth it to get rid of Saddam.
(Re the latter, Newsday’s analysis will also be worth going into.)

From Middle East Newsline:

LONDON [MENL] — Al Qaida has warned its agents that the Islamic insurgency movement has been infiltrated by the United States.
An unidentified Al Qaida spokesman has warned that Al Qaida forces in Iraq appear to have been infiltrated by the United States in cooperation with unspecified Arab intelligence services. The spokesman, […]

Hey, what’s that wine-dark cloud roiling the political waters? Why - I do believe it’s blood.
I also believe that, when this story initially surfaced during the summer, among the few hawks that acknowledged it, one explanation advanced was that Plame probably wasn’t really a CIA officer, a low-level asset at best, if that.
This isn’t a […]

As mentioned in the fitness blog item below, I have been inveigled into “experimenting” with civil war reenactment. As I am not quite 43 yet, I will later claim this for a youthful indiscretion. My big day is October 18 at Cedar Creek in the Shenandoah Valley, when I join the Brady Sharpshooters (of some […]

Weight 165 pounds, waist just over 33″. Stalled, basically. I’d love to lose five more pounds of fat, but they ain’t coming off so far. This was Bad Boy Week too - I skipped all my aerobics sessions except one, imagining to make it all up with
The Andersonville Diet - Actually, this overstates the privation […]

Thanks to the kindness of Mr. Bruce Baugh, I’m now a paid-up member of Rock Scissors Blog - at least, I assume the others paid the same as I did (nothin’). Bruce has invited me and unspecified others to help liven the place up, so if it’s hot abstruse RPG theory you’re looking for, stop […]

Joining the discussion are actual gay guy Alan Sullivan of Fresh Bilge and straight married woman Sappho of Nole Irritare Leones - also a disquisition on gender roles and bullying by Camassia. Every one of them is worth reading. Brief responses:
I’ll pretty much sign on to every word of Camassia’s item (which does not address […]

I’d like to join a group RPG-oriented blog, one with an emphasis on theory. (Not computer RPGs but the tabletop kind.) Alas, the only one I know of has a membership of high-powered professionals and is dormant. If you run one I can join, please let me know.
Also, if you’d like to bankroll the nationwide […]

Via Gjovaag and others: Operation Comix Relief aims to donate comics to wounded and ill US soldiers in Iraq. No fair dumping all your copies of 1602 and Batman: Hush on our fighting men and women, though - they’ve got enough problems.
I can not personally vouch for this particular charity, so donate at your own […]

Via Laura “Tegan” Gjovaag, this report that cartoonist Lynn Johnston “plans on ending her strip ‘For Better Or For Worse’ in a few years.” Better would be a report that Lynn Johnston will use arcane rituals to blot the memory of For Better or for Worse from the minds of man,” but sometimes you take […]

Eve wonders what a hardcore libertarian like me is doing arguing the details of same-sex marriage rather than simply insisting that marriage be treated as just another contract, outside the purview of the state entirely. It’s a fair question. I do think of marriage as, among other things, a contract, and as something that implicates […]

Dr. Manhattan tips me to Gregg Easterbrook’s series of imprecations against DC/Maryland utility PepCo for the quality of their post-Isabel power-restoration efforts. His thesis is that PepCo has deliberately dragged their feet because a long outage suits them: they want a sustained blackout fresh in the minds of the utility commission when they press for […]

So Edward Said is dead. I never liked him. In my neoliberal days I actively disliked him. (It got me a discount on my New Republic subscription.) Even after going completely off the reservation on foreign policy issues, I still didn’t like Said because he blathered. He was an unusually bad writer even for a […]

Noah Shachtman reports that the “BRIDE OF ‘TIA’ LIVES.”

“Pursued with a minimal public profile and lacking a polarizing figure like Adm. Poindexter to galvanize opposition, NIMD has proceeded quietly even as TIA imploded,” Aftergood writes.

Excuse me a second while I am not surprised.