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The "Friday" Report

by Mark Gisleson

REALLY LATE UPDATE: Apparently late Friday night wasn't good enough for the Caspar Milquetoasts over at the 9/11 commission. They waited until today to issue a subpoena threat for "several highly classified intelligence documents" from the White House. Here's the link, but the bottom line is that former Republican Governor Thomas Keane still hasn't issued any subpoenas, and he saved his "fiery" bluster for Saturday, making sure the administration wouldn't be overly embarrassed.

And, as usual when the New York Times decides to "slow walk" a story they can't otherwise ignore, some of the best quotes come at the very end of the article:

Slade Gorton, a Republican member of the panel who served in the Senate from Washington from 1982 to 2000, said that he was startled by the "indifference" of some executive branch agencies in making material available to the commission. "This lack of cooperation, if it extends anywhere else, is going to make it very difficult" for the commission to finish its work by next May, he said.

Timothy J. Roemer, president of the Center for National Policy in Washington and a former Democratic member of the House from Indiana, said that "our May deadline may, in fact, be jeopardized — many of us are frustrated that we're still dealing with questions about document access when we should be sinking our teeth into hearings and to making recommendations for the future."

Congress would need to approve an extension if the panel requested one, a potentially difficult proposition given the reluctance of the White House and many senior Republican lawmakers to see the commission created in the first place.

"If the families of the victims weighed in — and heavily, as they did before — then we'd have a chance of succeeding," said Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who was an important sponsor of the legislation creating the commission. He said that, given the "obfuscation" of the administration in meeting document requests, he was ready to pursue an extension "if the commission feels it can't get its work done."

UPDATE: Another Blackhawk down.

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Mark A.R. Kleiman has the two best links for explaining the Republicans' current efforts to blame this war on the CIA. Click here for the Washington Post story of record, and here for the CNN spin cycle dissection (courtesy of Sen. Jay Rockefeller, who's doing a great job of monitoring Sen. Pat Roberts' yeoman-like disinformation efforts). Josh Marshall is following this story closely, and speculates on what's really going on (here and here). [The Globe and Mail, The Age, Al-Jazeera, NYTimes, Voice of America]

Marshall also wrote recently about Grover Norquist's incredibly extensive ties to radical Muslims:

My sense has always been that Norquist got into the Islam business back in the late 1990s when it looked like a growth industry for the Republican coalition.

He had a lot of ideas about Muslims being natural cultural conservatives and free marketeers, and so forth. This three-cheers for Muslim capitalism! conference in Doha is a prime example.

His 'Islamic Institute' is run out the offices of his main operation, 'Americans for Tax Reform.' (I just checked the website and apparently it's now 'The Islamic Free Market Institute.' So, you know, Mohamed von Hayek.)

In any case, after 9/11 came along he probably realized that he might have gotten tied up with at least a few questionable characters. But he was too proud to admit he'd been naive and then just dug himself deeper.

That's always been my sense. But when people start getting arrested, maybe it's time to give the whole thing a closer look.

Via Atrios, Body and Soul reports that the Eastern European undocumented workers nabbed in those Wal-Mart raids were making as little as two dollars a day. ???!!! Seems to me that an aggressive federal prosecutor could go after Wal-Mart and the subcontractor for enslaving these hapless immigrants. This is more than a labor law violation. Two dollars a day might buy the groceries in parts of Bangladesh, but in the United States prison workers make that much an hour (there is no other legal comparison).

Also courtesy of Atrios, here's Dwight Meredith on why school vouchers are unconstitutional in thirty states. Ironically, the root cause of all these state constitutional amendments was virulent anti-Catholicism.

Billmon nails down the details on just how failed the Madrid "fundraiser" for Iraq really was. It's my tax dollars too, but it's hard to blame other countries for not wanting to chip in to bail us out of this unholy and totally unnecessary mess.

Steve Gilliard spotted this Courier-Journal article on the GOP's decision to put "Election Day challengers" into 59, mostly black, voting places in the Louisville area. Gilliard accurately assesses the situation:

Hmmm, yet another case of nigger vote suppression.

It didn't work in 1965, it won't work now. But the Dems should pick the richest, whitest counties in the state and do the same. See how quickly this plans dies.

In the real world, most of these people are long time, regular voters and know the people at the polling stations. This is just legal intimidation.

[link — scroll down to "GOP to put challengers in black voting precincts"]

If you didn't read yesterday's Mark Crispin Miller Diebold story, here's a link to Black Box Voting and the original story on how Diebold's voting machines may have provided the catalyst for the television network's decision to "uncall" Florida for Gore. More and more and more the bits and pieces come out. Florida was stolen, the Supreme Court anointed a cheater, and tens of thousands have died as a result. Is Ashcroft's DOJ investigating? Are bears Catholic? Does the Pope . . . well, you get the idea.

Here in Minnesota, and at dozens of locations around the country, it's Wellstone World Music Day. Skip a game or two and listen to some music and think about the Wellstone legacy. It's also the 74th anniversary of the first recording of "Happy Days Are Here Again."

Posted by Steve Perry at October 25, 2003 11:39 AM

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