BeldarBlog

Will the real Bill White please stand up? (And explain yourself!)

The Houston Chronicle article  is entitled "Scheme to confuse voters in mayor's race is thwarted," but that assumes voters can figure out what the scheme actually was — which, from all the press coverage so far, would be asking a lot!  Neither KTRK 13 nor KHOU 11 add significantly to the Chron's story (the former's just running an AP feed anyway, which has also been picked up by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Washington Times).   

What seems to be clear and undisputed is that a woman named Brenda Flores — variously described as a city-hall gadfly, an activist, and a crackpot — who, among other things, runs a website called HouSnitch.com, located someone named "William White" from a Houston low-income housing project, Acres Homes, and persuaded him to sign papers she provided to enter him into the Houston mayoral race.  Her means of persuasion was a sham transaction in which she gave him some $1200 in cash for a straw hat, perhaps along with some other perqs like a steak dinner and travel cash to lie low.  Her original intention was apparently to file those papers before the registration deadline for the mayor's race and thus inject confusion into the voters' minds between this ersatz candidate and the "real" (that is, high-profile you-know-him-from-his-TV-ads) candidate Bill White.

It also appears to be agreed by all involved that she had a change of heart and never filed the signed papers, having been persuaded not to during a visit to her home by the real-candidate Bill White, Congressman Chris Bell (D-Houston), and Metro board member Janie Reyes just before the filing deadline.

Finally, it appears that two days after the registration deadline, real-candidate White wrote Ms. Flores a check for $5000.

Beyond those facts — odd as they are themselves — everything else seems to be in dispute.  According to an account posted by someone named George Strong on his website — the reliability of which I certainly do not vouch for — Flores claims that the money she paid the ersatz William White originated as part of a $2600 cash payment to her (with another $2400 promised for later) by a campaign consultant working for rival Sylvester Turner's campaign, one Doris Hubbard.  But Hubbard claims the payment was for some sort of "early voting" organizational efforts in Spring Branch where Ms. Flores lives, not for campaign dirty tricks.  Turner, meanwhile, is denying any connection, but insinuates that real-candidate White has given in to extortion.

Strong's website purports to quote two fairly long "statements" of some sort that appear to be from real-candidate White and from Congressman Bell.  Again, I have no clue whether they're authentic; they're certainly amusing, and make Ms. Flores look like even more of a kook than does her own website — which is now filled with acknowledgements that she's been involved in dirty politics on someone's behalf.

According to the Chronicle, real-candidate White acknowledges payment of the $5k, but denies that it was a quid-pro-quo for Flores not filing the ersatz William White's candidacy papers; instead, he says, Ms. Flores had contacted Congressman Bell several times to say she "had been threatened" and feared retaliation if she didn't repay the money she'd gotten from the Turner campaign consultant (presumably Hubbard).  The Chron quotes White as saying, "So, I relied upon the judgment of an experienced and credible person," presumably meaning Bell, as to whether Ms. Flores really felt threatened.  Ms. Flores claims to have used the $5000 check to repay, via one Dennis Kaim, the $2600 cash she'd received from the Turner campaign — which leaves one wondering where the balance of that check is supposed to go!

Charles Kuffner calls it "the strangest story I've seen all year," and Kevin Whited opines that "any politician who finds himself drawn into schemes that involve writing checks to people like Ms. Flores is a fool."  Stephen Bates also is blogging about the story, but admits that he's confused too.  For my money, this local soap opera certainly makes the "Mrs. Wilson affair" seem cut and dried by contrast.

From what's presently known or reasonably inferable, it appears that the bad guy (by imputation from his consultant's actions, even if it was without his knowledge) is Turner.  It looks like his campaign was approached by a crackpot with a scheme for spreading some mayhem and decided to throw some seed money at it, hoping to maintain plausible deniability.  Personally, I frankly don't much care if that's true or not — it'd be a cold day in hell before Turner would get my vote for dogcatcher, and I think he'll end up running third in the election, leaving Sanchez and White in a runoff whether he's tarred with this attempted hoax or not. 

But I am very, very troubled by the still-open questions regarding real-candidate White's participation in this.  If the memo purportedly dictated by him, as it appears on Strong's website, is genuine, then it looks as if he responded to a tipoff by patiently talking Ms. Flores out of her dirty trick before it was sprung — appealing to her as a good Democrat, stressing his own campaign talking points, reasoning together with her — which would be fine, even admirable, on his part. 

But why the money, Bill?  "Congressman Bell told me to" ain't gonna cut it as an adequate explanation, and indeed tends to make you look worse!

• If you were the target of this crackpot's scheme, why would you feel obliged to get her off the hook with the Turner campaign consultant? 

• Why wouldn't you just tell her to go to the police if she was being threatened?  Or why didn't you go to the police? 

• And why did you give her more than — indeed, almost twice as much as — she claims to have ever gotten from the Turner campaign consultant, or to have paid back?  Were you just being casual — sloppy — with cash? 

• Were you buying silence? And if so, why?  If you're the victim of a dirty trick, why not expose the trickster (or her financiers, anyway)?

• Even if you felt sorry for her personally, do you think making a donation to her in her personal capacity was a proper use of campaign funds?

As I've posted in comments on various other websites and mentioned here as well, I know Bill White personally:   He was a year ahead of me at Texas Law School and I worked for him when he was editor-in-chief of the Texas Law Review.  From that experience, I can vouch that he is brilliant and hardworking.  I have many friends among his former law-practice colleagues at Susman Godfrey.  And I've never had any reason to doubt either his honesty or his judgment.   

For all of those reasons, I'm withholding judgment on this strange story.  But Bill — you got some more 'splainin' to do if you want my vote, my friend!  I'm hoping that there are key facts that are as yet unrevealed but that will make this all make more sense, and make your part in it, in particular, more understandable.  I'm hoping that because at best right now, this looks like a case of abysmal judgment on your part.   

Maybe Monday night's televised mayoral debate will shed some light.  This weird story has certainly upped my own incentive to watch it!

Texas 24, Kansas State 20

The 'Horns looked pretty good this afternoon against the first top-flight team they've faced since Arkansas.  They showed some poise to come from behind in the fourth quarter, although it looked like they were losing as many of the matchups in the trenches as they were winning.  Freshman QB Vince Young is just amazing to watch — and he appears to have ankles made of indestructable rubber. 

One has to hope this win will be a confidence builder, because they're going to need to be confident and at their very best against OU.

A struggle of wills, not of power

My liberal arts college education at Sodom-on-the-Colorado (UT-Austin) in the late 1970s made me a skeptic.  It almost went further:   I barely resisted becoming an absolute relativist, the sort of person who could argue, "Well, ya know, Sadaam had a point about ...."  If I'd given in to that, I'd be a much more dangerous person now, because the education I then received at law school turned me into a much better advocate for any given position.

Skepticism makes me ask myself, however, whether I'm missing something important when I read an op-ed that just seems to me to nail some issue or another.  When I find myself saying "Exactly!" two or three times per paragraph, afterwards I think, "Was this guy really that right?  Could anybody be?  Can this be that simple? What am I missing here?"

That's how I felt, for instance, after reading Victor Davis Hanson's new article in the National Review Online immodestly entitled "What's it All About?  Playing High-Stakes Poker Like Never Before."  Hanson's elegant and clear writing just electrifies me, and I think to myself, "How can anyone read this and not instantly recognize its truth?"  Commenting on the ongoing skirmishing in Iraq and its significance in the larger War on Terror, Hanson writes:

Our enemies fathom fully — if American pundits and professors cannot — the Western way of war, the lethality of which makes conventional opposition to an American military force on the field of battle tantamount to suicide. Thus the terrorists grant the success of U.S. efforts in a Panama, Serbia, Kuwait, and Iraq, but prefer to look instead to the messes of the last twenty years in Iran, Beirut, Mogadishu, and Haiti, concluding that there are still other ways to stifle the Americans. In other words, they see the war not in terms of power — ours is far greater — but of will, as a struggle in which we, for a variety of reasons, will not bring to bear all the resources that we can.

(Emphasis by Beldar.)  I genuinely fail to understand how anyone can fail to understand this.  And if you understand it, how can you fail to take the next very small step — understanding what it means about what we must do in the future?

So here we have the stakes in this last, big hand of Middle East poker. Our enemies are betting that our very freedom, affluence, raucous democratic politics, and shoot-from-the hip media will still prove true to form and thus, sooner or later, we will quit — especially as an election nears and the memory of 3,000 incinerated Americans fades.

In contrast, Mr. Bush's hunch is that the tragedy of September changed us all, and his own resoluteness will prove the better hand. In other words, as polls drop and sunshine supporters fold, he senses that America — and with it civilization — will still win, and in a very big way, thus ending for good this awful contest of the last quarter-century.

Again, this seems to me so obvious, so doubtlessly true, that I can't for the life of me work up a healthy case of skepticism. 

During the active-combat fighting in Iraq this spring, as I was driving my two youngest kids to school one morning, we were talking about the news, and my son Adam (age 10) asked me, "Dad, how do you know that Sadaam is bad?" 

And I said, "Well, Adam, for one thing, there's the way he treats people who disagree with him.  Sometimes he will take the whole family of a man who opposes him, and fly them up high in a helicopter, and then dangle the children by their feet out of the doorway, one at a time, and then drop them so that they fall." 

I stopped, because I could see that Adam had gone pale.  He was obviously contemplating what it would be like to be in that helicopter.  He could suddenly imagine his little sister, who he fusses and fights with constantly, being dangled, and then dropped.  "Daddy," he said softly, "that is very mean.  I understand now why we're fighting him."

It's that simple.  Any ten-year-old can understand it.  So why can't a college professor?  Why can't a senator?

When someone says to me, "We should pull out of Iraq and turn it over to the UN," for a moment I stand there gape-mouthed, my head tilted to one side, and my eyes unblinking.  I have to resist the urge to grab this person by the shoulders and shake him vigorously, shouting "Wake up!  Wake up, you fool!"  I have to repress fantasies of putting this person into the reclining chair from A Clockwork Orange, complete with eyelid-restraints, and playing for him over and over the movies of the jets crashing into the World Trade Center, the innocent civilians jumping, the buildings falling from the sky, the new widows standing on street-corners with photocopied "Have you seen my husband?" leaflets, the paramedics standing around with nothing to do because there were so few merely hurt and wounded.  I'd intercut those with scenes of mass graves in Iraq.  "Do you get it yet?  Huh?  Do you get it?" I'd scream at my interrogator.  "They want to kill you.  You can't talk them out of it.  They will laugh at your foolishness while they torture your children, while they feed them feet-first into the limb-chopping machine.  Do you get it yet?  Wake up!"

The way we would lose the struggle of wills would be by allowing ourselves to sink back into the false innocence and complacency that predated 9/11.  This central truth seems to me so blindingly obvious, so shatteringly simple, that I have trouble concealing my disgust with anyone who manages to delude himself into forgetting it. 

I simply have no more skepticism on this point; I cannot see it in shades of gray.

"Special counsel" versus "independent counsel" versus "career staff": Who should hunt down whoever blew Mrs. Wilson's cover?

Even for those who weren't already convinced by Lawrence Walsh's performance on Iran-Contra, the Kenneth Starr saga during Monicagate was pretty much the last nail in the coffin for the post-Watergate federal law passed authorizing "independent counsel" for cases deemed inappropriate for the Justice Department to handle through normal channels.   When it expired in 1999, that law was not much lamented, as evidenced by contemporaneous stories run by CNN and WaPo.  Senator Joe Lieberman was an exception then — so it's no surprise that in response to the Mrs. Wilson Affair, he's just proposed reinstating the independent counsel law with some modifications intended to address the main criticisms of the prior statute. 

"Chatterbox" Timothy Noah of Slate reacted to this proposal with a pithy reminder of those criticisms — first, that by "giving prosecutors unlimited funds, the law encouraged investigations that never ended, running up huge legal bills for targets who rarely ended up getting indicted, much less convicted"; and second, that the law "failed to insulate investigations from politics."  I entirely agree that Sen. Lieberman's proposal is a very bad idea.  And in any event there's no possibility that it could zip through Congress and be signed by the President with the same speed as the "Do Not Call List" corrective legislation; this affair, while not a genuine "crisis," just can't wait.

When the independent counsel law expired, it was replaced instead with a set of Justice Department regulations effective July 1, 1999 (initially published with commentary at 64 Fed. Reg. 37042 (1999), now codified without substantial change at 28 C.F.R. part 600, §§ 600.1 to 600.10 (2003)).  The commentary explains that these regulations permit

appointment of Special Counsel to investigate and, when appropriate, to prosecute matters when the Attorney General concludes that extraordinary circumstances exist such that the public interest would be served by removing a large degree of responsibility for a matter from the Department of Justice.

Section 600.1 of the regulations confers almost absolute discretion on the Attorney General by authorizing appointment of a Special Counsel when the AG

determines that criminal investigation of a person or matter is warranted and —

(a) That investigation or prosecution of that person or matter by a United States Attorney's Office or litigating Division of the Department of Justice would present a conflict of interest for the Department or other extraordinary circumstances; and

(b) That under the circumstances, it would be in the public interest to appoint an outside Special Counsel to assume responsibility for the matter.

While a Special Counsel is, according to the commentary, "free to structure the investigation as he or she wishes and to exercise independent prosecutorial discretion to decide whether charges should be brought," he may only do so "within the context of the established procedures of the Department" — and even then the regulations envision that

ultimate responsibility for the matter and how it is handled will continue to rest with the Attorney General (or the Acting Attorney General if the Attorney General is personally recused in the matter); thus, the regulations explicitly acknowledge the possibility of review of specific decisions reached by the Special Counsel.

The AG's discretion also includes selecting the Special Counsel (section 600.3), defining the scope of his mandate and approving any changes to it (section 600.4), presenting the Special Counsel with a list of DoJ staff to choose among (section 600.5), controlling the Special Counsel's budget (section 6.008), and even disciplining or firing the Special Counsel (section 600.7(c) & (d)).

A bevy of Democratic Senators — Schumer, Daschle, Biden, Levin, and Rockefeller —  are now demanding that Attorney General John Ashcroft appoint a Special Counsel under these provisions to investigate the leak regarding Mrs. Wilson.  They've given no very good reason for their demands other than their reflexive distrust of Ashcroft. 

So far, however, Ashcroft appears to be keeping the matter in-house at DoJ.  Although he personally has "not entertained questions about appointing a special counsel," and although Fox News claims that another administration official has stated that Ashcroft "would not likely appoint a special counsel," the preconditions for appointment cited by that unnamed official pretty closely track the regulations — which collapses Fox News' story back into "he'll appoint one only if he thinks he should appoint one."  And Rebecca Carr of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has this remarkable report:

John Dion, head of the [Justice D]epartment's counterespionage section, not Ashcroft, decided to initiate the investigation Friday into who identified [Mrs. Wilson], a CIA officer, to syndicated columnist Robert Novak and two Newsday reporters. As is the department's custom in such cases, he did not consult Ashcroft first.

(Emphasis added by Beldar.)  However, Carr goes on to report that the option of appointing a Special Counsel "has not been ruled out, according to Mark Corallo, chief spokesman for the Justice Department."  Indeed, section 600.2 of the regulations, which lists the "alternatives available to the Attorney General," expressly envisions that an AG can start the investigative ball rolling with career staff, without thereby foreclosing the option of switching:

When matters are brought to the attention of the Attorney General that might warrant consideration of appointment of a Special Counsel, the Attorney General may:

(a) Appoint a Special Counsel;

(b) Direct that an initial investigation, consisting of such factual inquiry or legal research as the Attorney General deems appropriate, be conducted in order to better inform the decision; or

(c) Conclude that under the circumstances of the matter, the public interest would not be served by removing the investigation from the normal processes of the Department, and that the appropriate component of the Department should handle the matter. If the Attorney General reaches this conclusion, he or she may direct that appropriate steps be taken to mitigate any conflicts of interest, such as recusal of particular officials.

Dana Milbank and Mike Allen at WaPo point out that according to a WaPo/ABC News poll, "[n]early seven in 10 Americans believe a special prosecutor should be named to investigate allegations that Bush administration officials illegally leaked the name of an undercover CIA agent."  Referring to a separate set of DoJ regulations regarding when and how DoJ can attempt to compel reporters to reveal sources (about which Prof. Eugene Volokh has recently blogged here, here, and here), they say:

Justice Department regulations may make it difficult for Attorney General John D. Ashcroft to leave the matter to his career staff, as he has proposed, particularly if journalists who received the leaks are to be questioned. The regulations state that "no subpoena may be issued to any member of the news media without the express authorization of the Attorney General."

I can't figure out what difficulties Milbank and Allen have in mind, however.  Section 600.7(a) of the Special Counsel regs would almost certainly require even a Special Counsel to follow the existing regs regarding compulsion of journalists, including getting Ashcroft's personal okay before issuing a subpoena to Robert Novak or any other journalist:

A Special Counsel shall comply with the rules, regulations, procedures, practices and policies of the Department of Justice. He or she shall consult with appropriate offices within the Department for guidance with respect to established practices, policies and procedures of the Department, including ethics and security regulations and procedures.

The same section permits a Special Counsel to go straight to the AG to ask permission to deviate from those rules, and section 600.7(b) provides that the AG should "give great weight to the views of the Special Counsel"; but provided that the AG notifies Congress when he's done so (section 600.9), an AG can still veto a Special Counsel's decisions, so he certainly has the power to turn down a Special Counsel's request to subpoena journalists.  If Milbank and Allen only mean that Ashcroft personally isn't likely to be able to stay altogether out of the loop (and weren't intending to suggest that these regs might oblige him to name a Special Counsel), I still don't catch the significance.  There's no reason to think that Ashcroft personally has any greater conflict of interest than any other political appointee at DoJ, even though he's the target of most of the left-wingers' venom; even Schumer et al. aren't calling for Ashcroft's absolute personal recusal.  [See second update below; text now edited to show strike-through wasn't correct. — ed.]

Thus, in terms of where the raw power is and will necessarily remain (at least absent a renewal of the independent counsel law), the appointment of a Special Counsel would not change anything.  At least in theory, a Special Counsel appointed under these regs is subject to an Archibald Cox-type "Saturday Night Massacre."  This prompts Chatterbox Noah to wonder whether appointment of a Special Counsel "is worth the bother."  I certainly agree with Noah that

[i]f John Ashcroft tries to strangle the [Mrs. Wilson] investigation, [it's] guarantee[d] that the fruits of that investigation will find their way into the news media. There are many obstacles to finding the White House's phantom leaker — leakers are notoriously difficult to identify — but political pressure is not one of them.

And I also am confident that within DoJ there are indeed seasoned, ethical, and capable career professionals who can and will do a bang-up, first-rate job.  Certainly the first reports about the DoJ staff handling the inquiry suggest that the "A Team" has been called in.

Moreover, I'm extremely skeptical of the general notion that every time someone can hypothesize a "political" connection to a proposed investigation, that automatically means that the Attorney General and the DoJ are "conflicted out."  It doesn't take me long to conclude, for instance, that we don't need a Special Counsel to figure out if the Iraq War was Vice President Cheney's payoff to Halliburton.  And my gut hunch continues to tell me that there is less to this whole affair than meets the eye — especially if one's eyeballing former Ambassador Joseph Wilson as he makes the rounds of the talk-shows, jokes about "who would play [his wife] in the movie," and (God help me, we've come to the point where I'm linking Maureen Dowd!) calls her "the real-life Jennifer Garner." 

What the Special Counsel procedures do accomplish, to the extent they actually have any significance, is to formalize the rules to be followed on what should be comparatively rare occasions when "the public interest," broadly defined, will genuinely be furthered by "removing a large degree of responsibility for a matter from the Department of Justice."  Deciding whether this is such an occasion is obviously a judgment call. 

Even if you think (as I do) that Amb. Wilson is a bozo, you probably hope (as I do) that his wife and any agents she may have run or contacts she may have made are all safe from retribution by enemies of the US.  But the crime — if one has been committed — was against the people of the United States.  There would be genuine value to the republic in reassuring its public that possible spy-outers are taken very, very seriously during wartime, and that political connections cannot shelter any such criminals.  Dubya's administration has always had an anti-leak passion that dates back to his personal fury at leakers who undercut the GHW Bush Administration for fun and profit during 1989-1993.  A nationally televised perp-walk would be a very good thing for the war effort if there are indeed grounds to believe — after a more detailed investigation than can be done in the popular press and the blogosphere — that a crime has in fact been committed here.  We can warm up the cell in between Jonathan Pollard and Aldrich Ames, perhaps. 

And if it turns out instead that no prosecution is warranted, it would be best for that conclusion to be presented by Ashcroft transmitting the Special Counsel's report to that effect to Congress, rather than just announcing it on his own say-so, if only for purposes of avoiding appearances of impropriety.

So if it were my call, I'd pull the trigger and appoint a Special Counsel now — and in fact I'd pre-authorize him to subpoena Novak or any other journalist and put him on a fast, wide track. 

And I even know the highly respected, unemployed ex-Justice Department professional, currently attending baseball games and touring California by bus, who I'd ask to take the job — a former US Attorney for the Southern District of New York who's widely acknowledged to be pretty committed when it comes to War on Terror issues:

Rudy Giuliani.

---------------------

UPDATE (Thu Oct 2 @ 9:30am):   Prof. Glenn Reynolds has graciously linked this post from InstaPundit, and also posted a terrific movie dialog quote and a reprint of a piece he wrote for Newsday in 1999 regarding the unlamented expiration of, and many flaws in, the Independent Counsel Act.  (Now I feel guilty that I didn't buy his very relevant book, Appearance of Impropriety, back in August despite our disagreement over Jamie Gorelick's conflict of interest.)   And Ernie the Attorney also seems to like Jennifer Garner — or at least appreciates my creativity in finding a way to include her picture in a post that's otherwise a bit heavy on citations to the Code of Federal Regulations.

UPDATE (Thu Oct 2 @ 5pm):   The New York Times reports that Attorney-General Ashcroft may indeed have personal ties to one potential suspect, Karl Rove, based on Rove having served as a consultant for Ashcroft in Ashcroft's own political campaigns for governor and then senator in Missouri.  Thus, contrary to what I wrote earlier, that may indeed pose a possible basis upon which Ashcroft might have to personally recuse himself, even if it didn't oblige whoever's next in line downstream to disqualify all of DoJ.  It should not, however, make any ultimate difference because someone acting in Ashcroft's place would essentially step into his shoes and wield all his powers — including the power to appoint a Special Counsel or to refuse to do so, and also including the power to decide whether to subpoena journalists like Novak to get at their leak sources.  And it could be that Ashcroft is hoping that an early vindication of Rove would solve the problem anyway.

Bizarre headine: "Dead pope will not be hammered"

I had to re-read this UPI article, but yes, there is a legitimate (sorta) reason for what initially struck me as a supremely tasteless headline.  On close examination, it's only a moderately tasteless headline.

Metrosexual backlash

The best line I've seen lately is from Stacey Pressman's article on ESPN's Page2 called "Nothing sexy about metrosexuals":

Call me crazy but I don't ever want to hear my boyfriend utter the word "jasmine," unless he's apologizing for something he did with a stripper.

New banner! Thanks, TypePad customer service!

The customer service people at

TypePad continue to amaze me.  This is what, my third or fourth unsolicited testimonial to them and their product?  As I've said before, the software is great as is; but it's improving rapidly; and best of all, by far, is the quick competence of the customer service crew, who I feel like I'm getting to know almost on a personal basis.

I decided I was tired of plain old text in the "banner" at the top of my blog.  I didn't know for sure what I wanted, but I wanted something new. 

TypePad makes posting a graphic for that purpose absolutely easy if you're using their many regular and highly customizable templates — check a box, navigate via a browse window to the graphic file you want to upload, click on the SAVE button. 

But I've long since gotten the tweakers' bug and have been messing with stuff which requires that I use "custom templates" — which are super-flexible, but require a bunch more patience, ingenuity, and/or programming skill.  Knowing some html is good, and I do; knowing some CSS (cascading style sheets, which is html on steroids) is better, and I don't (much, but I'm learning).  So switching to a graphic in one's banner with custom templates already in place is a leeee-dul bit trickier (although not nearly as hard in hindsight as I made it seem to be).

Anyway, to cut a long story short, about three exchanges with TypePad's cheerful customer service folks had me fixed up.  Voila, supra!  Super!  Did they say, "Hey, bozo, we're not your CSS instructors, go buy a book or take a course if you wanna be a website programmer"?  Nope.  Neither did they write the little bit of code I needed for me, either.  Instead, they gave me a couple of succinct pointers about how I could figure it out myself.  They taught me to fish instead of giving me a fish.  Or something.

I dunno whether I'll be as creative as Lileks is — he's got up a new banner graphic just about every week — but I might be, now that I know how it's done.  For the meantime, the planet graphic is something I picked because (1) it matches my color scheme, (2) it was easy to find, (3) it makes me think I'm seeming worldly (nyuk-nyuk-nyuk!), and (4) being that my blogging namesake is a conehead from Remulak, it seemed appropriate to start with a distant view of this crazy planet from some distance away, metaphorically, in the blogosphere.

Jeepers, Mrs. Wilson! Let's not all jump off into the deep end, okay?

I've just spent about three hours getting reasonably up to speed on the Robert Novak/Amb. & Mrs. Joseph Wilson/Tom Clancy affair that's been rocking the blogosphere today.  (Out of respect for statutes allegedly broken and confidences allegedly violated, I shall avoid using the maiden name of former Ambassador Wilson's wife, although I note that it appears to rhyme with "blame," "came," "dame," "fame," "flame," "game," "lame," "maim," "same," and "tame" — unless she gives it a French pronunciation, in which case I frankly don't give a damn.)

Tom Maguire has been blogging in Just One Minute about this story for some time, most recently here and here.  Daniel Drezner has moved from switching-party-level outrage to something less condemnatory and more openminded.  There are generally good-quality comments on their posts, and also on posts by Pejman Yousefzadeh (here and here, the latter of which includes quotes from and links to the relevant statutes, thank you!) in his blog, Pejmanesque.  Mark Kleiman is fairly hysterical repeatedly, and Kevin Drum of CalPundit is predictably witty and acidic and especially eager to quote Republicans who have been pottymouthed, but his comment sections go on and on without end, beyond what I am willing to parse or even wade through.  I no longer quote or link to, and rarely read, Josh Marshall, who I've concluded — based on his studied refusal to correct a significant and indisputable mistake about the recent history of Texas redistricting — lacks ethics and integrity; you can find him yourself if you wanna.  And don't forget Professor Reynolds at InstaPundit or the inestimable Jane Galt of the delightfully named Asymmetrical Information.  Finally, no round-up would be complete without Novak's latest ("There is no great crime here"), Amb. Wilson's backtracking ("I think I was probably carried away by the spirit of the moment. I don't have any knowledge that Karl Rove himself was either the leaker or the authorizer of the leak."), and Clifford May's argument that lotsa folks already knew of Mrs. Wilson's CIA connection before Novak ever published.

Whew!  Read all that and you'll know a lot about almost nothing.  Indeed, you'll see that some of the big news from yesterday or a few weeks ago (for example, Ambassador Wilson's rather premature and immature and unfounded reference to Karl Rove being "frogmarched out of the White House in handcuffs") has ... evanesced.  To say that there is conflicting information bouncing from the blogosphere to conventional media and back is a considerable understatement.

I have just three points to make at the moment (variations on comments I've left at various other blogs), and I'll try to be brief (by BeldarBlog standards):

1. The statute making it a crime to deliberately "out" a covert intelligence agent is important.  It's important that violators be caught and punished; but it's important that the innocent not be unjustly accused of violating it.  Broad-brush painting is extremely dangerous in this matter, especially now.

2. The fact that the CIA has asked DoJ to investigate emphatically does not mean — as Professor Kleiman among others asserts — that we can already "say with confidence that serious crimes against the national security were committed by at least two people."  The CIA unquestionably has a substantial interest in seeing that the statute is vigorously enforced, but that only means that it ought to report all plausible allegations of violation to DoJ — not that it should make any attempt to pass on the merits of such allegations itself!  The CIA has its own lawyers, yes, but their job is to keep the CIA from violating the laws (no simple or frivolous task); it does not have prosecutors.  CIA would be acting outside its mandate and competency if it were to dismiss any even remotely plausible allegations, and would be accused of cover-up by the very same people who are already calling for a special prosecutor.  DoJ, by contrast, exists for the exact purpose of gathering facts, analyzing and applying law to them, and prosecuting crimes if it finds probable cause to believe laws have been broken.  It has career prosecutors who have the trust of both Janet Reno and John Ashcroft, along with the experience and the security clearances to dig into this.  That CIA has referred this matter to DoJ means nothing more than that the rule of law is being pursued and enforced by the appropriate authorities, which is no small matter and a good thing in and of itself.  But as Prof. Kleiman might recall, there's also a role to be played by that other branch of government — you remember, the ones with the funny robes? — before anyone can conclude with reasonable confidence that someone, or anyone, is guilty of a crime!

3. The President ought not be "out in front" on this.  He has a role in setting and generally enforcing White House staff policy on leaks, it's true, and from all reports this administration has in general been the most leak-free and disciplined of any in recent history.  He also could have a role, hypothetically, in proposing further or amending legislation on this subject.  When and if anyone is convicted, finally, he may also have a role in reviewing any requests for executive clemency or pardons.  But there are extremely sound and long-recognized reasons for a President — any President — to avoid trying to do the DoJ's job for it, and to stay the hell out of an on-going DoJ investigation or prosecution.  Just as with the CIA and its lawyers, this would be outside his and his staff's field of competence and would inevitably look like a cover-up.  And a President has no business opining on any accused defendant's guilt or innocence before trial and the exhaustion of all appeals.  If you're such a Bush-hater, so committed a member of the Angry Left, that you believe seriously George W. Bush would approve of or condone this stuff, nothing he (or I or anyone else) could say or do now would convince you differently anyway.  And if instead you've got a clue about how Dubya actually feels on the subject of covert intelligence and the War on Terror, you don't need him holding a pep rally to be persuaded that he's already done what's appropriate — no more and no less — in terms of motivating DoJ's professionals in general.

I'll likely have more to say as things continue to develop.  What a surprise, eh?

No, it's not "Limbo!"

Raising the Bar begins today, thanks to the author of the Mellow-Drama blog, as a sort of Carnival of the Vanities/"best of the week's blawgs" for law and legal-related weblogs. 

The first week's listings are modest in number, perhaps reflecting the fact that most of the entries are self-nominated; as we all know, lawyers and law students are congenitally shy creatures.  However, I for one intend to participate weekly and will make an effort to try to nominate some of the folks who, for whatever reason, aren't self-nominating.

Shhhh! Truant Texas Dems™ tiptoe to US Supreme Court

I've previously expressed my opinion that the September 12th order of the three-judge panel in Barrientos v. Texas — the lawsuit filed in federal court in Laredo by the Truant Texas Dems™ (a/k/a "the Texas Eleven Ten") — is probably not a final, appealable order, but rather an interlocutory (mid-case) one.  I've also made clear my opinion that their chances of getting any relief in the US Supreme Court are slim and none, even if the order were appealable.  And in fact, the Dems may be doing their Republican opponents a favor by keeping the case open, since it might become a shortcut for the time-pressed GOP to get past inevitable lawsuits challenging whatever redistricting plan does emerge from the third special session, possibly sometime next week.

Nevertheless, lawyers for the Dems filed a three-page "Notice of Appeal" (60kb .pdf file) last Monday, September 22nd.

I'm surprised that they apparently did so with no fanfare:   I've seen no mention of this in the popular press or the blogosphere.  Nor is there any reference to it on, for example, the Texas Democratic Party website or the (re-named and regraphic'd, but not re-URL'd) Texas Ten website.  Given the eagerness with which the Dems' lawyers have sought out the TV cameras and newspaper reporters in the past, one wonders what accounts for this sudden shyness. 

Is it possible that they are capable of shame?