I love my boy....

In bird news, Tweet 2 was plucking Peach's head, so we had to trade in Tweet 2. I just cant borrow anymore trouble, and taking home birds who are already showing behavioral problems is not a good idea. So, after some trials with other Green Cheek Conures who also attacked the little Yellow Peach, we settled on Tweet 3, who seems to get along with Peach great and is very gentle...and also a Yellow Sided Green Cheeked Conure. This whole time I was playing with my friends the Green Ring Necks, 2 of whom are really friendly and so sweet. I actually have a little tug-o-war bird movie that Im trying to figure how to post here...but more on that as I have the time.
My beautiful boy is in the hospital, and overcoming quite a bad thing...but is one of the bravest people that I have ever known....I miss him horribly and cant wait till visiting hours tomorrow.
Just to round it all out, my pup, Angelina, a small rescue Boston Terrier, who has been very sick in the ...um...maybe almost a year, since we've had her...is sick again and sort of lame. Lyme disease? ...no fever...who knows? So, its back and forth to the vet, with the bird store still being my favorite stop if I can cram it into these busy days. The new babies are so incredible. I will have to get some pictures of them....they are just fantastic.

My cousin, Faye, from Cape Cod is somewhere in Greenwich right now setting up her art show at the Bruce Museum and going to stay in the guest spot here...but I doubt Ill see much of her unless I can get to the show in the next couple of days. Catch it if you can..she is the cool metal worker with the beautiful fire screens and other great artwork that she hand fashions by welding and ingenuity.

On to politics and mainly what I could read in waiting rooms today...I am sorely behind on whats happening in the world...except for the weather of course, and the deluge which is running thought my basement as I type! I am getting a sump pump for myself as soon as possible! It didnt used to be this floody here but the whole climate is changing and what was a once a year thing has now happened 4 times in 2 weeks!


Today Tom Friedman has a piece in the Times about how global outsourcing is coming back around in a huge cycle...almost as if soon India will be outsourcing jobs back to the decimated American cities that used to have secure jobs for Americans with hope of someday seeing their kids go to college and having a retirement of sorts. When the jobs come back around they will be very low wage and with no security, but hell, like the "manufacturing" jobs that are flooding back into America to take the place of the outsourced tech jobs, they are at least jobs that can be counted...for people who keep track of these things on paper.
Yeah...but how do we guarantee that everyone makes a living wage all the way around? If everything comes round again, do the salaries bounce back or have wages, security, and benefits been permanently lowered? I dont believe that outsourcing is about any sort of global movement and lifting the second or third worlds out of poverty, but rather about making more money for the top officers of corporations...you can say that people in small villages in India are lifted out of poverty by making 2 cents a day, but what about the people who used to have those jobs? Are they not then plunged into poverty themselves? The money saved goes directly into profit margins and out of the pockets of workers, thus creating new poverty in the places where the jobs previously were...How does that help the global economy besides lining the pockets of a select few?
Pay everyone a fair wage and give them benefits...tax the jobs outsourced rather than giving corporations a tax break for every job outsourced...Use the taxes to help retrain the people who are out of a job and to help small business grow.....regulate this stuff just a little and then see how far this idea goes before we see the corporations roll back into town espousing a "purely American made and supported brand."....

May 19, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Outsourcing, Schmoutsourcing! Out Is Over
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I was on my way from downtown Budapest to the airport the other day when my driver, Jozsef Bako, mentioned that if I had any friends who were planning to come to Hungary, they should just contact him through his Web site: www.fclimo.hu. He explained that he could show people online all the different cars he has to offer and they could choose what they wanted.

"How much business do you get online?" I asked him. "About 20 to 25 percent," the Communist-era-engineer-turned-limo-proprietor said.

The former secretary of state James Baker III used to say that you know you're out of office "when your limousine is yellow and your driver speaks Farsi." I would say, "You know that the global economy is spinning off all kinds of new business models when your Hungarian driver has his own Web site in English, Magyar and German — with background music."

Jozsef's online Hungarian limo company is one of many new business models I've come across lately that are clearly expanding the global economy in ways that are not visible to the naked eye.

I was recently interviewing Ramalinga Raju, chairman of India's Satyam Computer Services. Satyam is one of India's top firms doing outsourced work from America, and Mr. Raju told me how Satyam had just started outsourcing some of its American work to Indian villages. The outsourcee has become the outsourcer.

Mr. Raju said: "We told ourselves: if business process outsourcing can be done from cities in India to support cities in the developed world, why can't it be done by villages in India to support cities in India. ... Things like processing employee records can be done from anywhere, so there is no reason it can't be done from a village." Satyam began with two villages a year ago and plans to scale up to 150.

There is enough bandwidth now, even reaching big Indian villages, to parcel out this work, and the villagers are very eager. "The attrition level is low, and the commitment levels high," Mr. Raju said. "It is a way of breathing economic life into villages." It gives educated villagers a chance to stay on the land, he said, and not have to migrate to the cities.

A short time later I was interviewing Katie Jacobs Stanton, a senior product manager at Google, and Krishna Bharat, founder of Google's India lab. They told me that Google had just launched Google Finance, but what was interesting was that Google Finance was entirely conceived by the Google team in India and then Google engineers from around the world fed into that team — rather than the project's being driven by Google headquarters in Silicon Valley.

It's called "around sourcing" instead of outsourcing, because there is no more "out" anymore. Out is over.

"We don't have the idea of two kinds of engineers — ones who think of things and others who implement them," Ms. Stanton said. "We just told the team in India to think big, and what they came back with was Google Finance." Mr. Bharat added: "We have entered the generation of the virtual office. Product development happens across the global campus now."

Last story. I'm in gray Newark speaking to local businessmen. I meet Andy Astor, chief executive of EnterpriseDB, which provides special features for the open-source database called PostgreSQL. His primary development team, he tells me, consists of 60 Pakistani engineers in Islamabad, who interact with the New Jersey headquarters via Internet-based videoconferencing.

"The New Jersey team — software architects, product managers and executives — comes to work a couple of hours early, while the Islamabad team comes in late, and we have at least five to six hours per day of overlap," Mr. Astor said. "We therefore have multiple face-to-face meetings every day, which makes a huge difference for communication quality. ... We treat videoconference meetings as if we were all in the same room."

What all these stories tell me is that we are seeing the emergence of collaborative business models that were simply unimaginable a decade ago. Today, there are so many more tools, so many more ideas, so many more people able to put these ideas and tools together to discover new things, and so much better communications to disseminate these new ideas across the globe.

If more countries can get just a few basic things right — enough telecom and bandwidth so their people can get connected; steadily improving education; decent, corruption-free economic governance; and the rule of law — and we can find more sources of clean energy, there is every reason for optimism that we could see even faster global growth in this century, with many more people lifted out of poverty.

And now for some Krugman:

May 19, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Coming Down to Earth
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Um, wasn't the stock market supposed to bounce back after Wednesday's big drop?

We shouldn't read too much into a couple of days' movements in stock prices. But it seems that investors are suddenly feeling uneasy about the state of the economy. They should be; the puzzle is why they haven't been uneasy all along.

The rise in stock prices that began last fall was essentially based on the belief that the U.S. economy can defy gravity — that both individuals and the nation as a whole can spend more than their income, not on a temporary basis, but more or less indefinitely.

To be fair, for a while the data seemed to confirm that belief. In 2005, the trade deficit passed $700 billion, yet the dollar actually rose against the euro and the yen. Housing prices soared, yet houses kept selling. The price of gasoline neared $3 a gallon, yet consumers kept buying both gas and other items, even though they had to borrow to keep spending (the personal savings rate went negative for the first time since the 1930's).

Over the last few weeks, however, gravity seems to have started reasserting itself.

The dollar began falling about a month ago. So far it's down less than 10 percent against the euro and the yen, but there's a definite sense that foreign governments, in particular, are becoming less willing to keep the dollar strong by buying lots of U.S. debt.

The housing market seems to be weakening rapidly. As late as last October, the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo housing market index, a measure of builders' confidence, was still close to the high point it reached last summer. But on Monday the association announced that the index had fallen to its lowest level since 1995.

Finally, there are preliminary indications that consumers, hard-pressed by high gasoline prices, may be reaching their limit.

The National Retail Federation, reporting on a new survey, warns that "while consumers have seemed resilient in the face of higher energy costs, a tipping point may soon be in sight."

I can't resist pointing out that the Bush administration's response to the squeeze on working families has been, you guessed it, to accuse the news media of biased reporting.

On May 10 the White House issued a press release titled "Setting the Record Straight: The New York Times Continues to Ignore America's Economic Progress." The release attacked The Times for asserting that paychecks weren't keeping up with fixed costs like medical care and gasoline. The White House declared, "But average hourly earnings have risen 3.8 percent over the past 12 months, their largest increase in nearly five years."

On Wednesday Treasury Secretary John Snow repeated that boast before a House committee. However, Representative Barney Frank was ready. He asked whether the number was adjusted for inflation; after flailing about, Mr. Snow admitted, sheepishly, that it wasn't. In fact, nearly all of the wage increase was negated by higher prices.

Meanwhile, the return of economic gravity poses a definite threat to U.S. economic growth. After all, growth over the past three years was driven mainly by a housing boom and rapid growth in consumer spending. People were able to buy houses, even though housing prices rose much faster than incomes, because foreign purchases of U.S. debt kept interest rates low. People were able to keep spending, even though wages didn't keep up with inflation, because mortgage refinancing let them turn the rising value of their houses into ready cash.

As I summarized it awhile back, we became a nation in which people make a living by selling one another houses, and they pay for the houses with money borrowed from China.

Now that game seems to be coming to an end. We're going to have to find other ways to make a living — in particular, we're going to have to start selling goods and services, not just I.O.U.'s, to the rest of the world, and/or replace imports with domestic production. And adjusting to that new way of making a living will take time.

Will we have that time? Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, contends that what's happening in the housing market is "a very orderly and moderate kind of cooling." Maybe he's right. But if he isn't, the stock market drop of the last two days will be remembered as the start of a serious economic slowdown.

"Lunacy as an explanation..."

Truthout Editorial

Politics, or Insanity? By Molly Ivins
Tuesday 16 May 2006
Plan to militarize Mexican border is sheer madness or blatant pandering.
Austin, Texas - I hate to raise such an ugly possibility, but have you considered lunacy as an explanation? Craziness would make a certain amount of sense. I mean, you announce you are going to militarize the Mexican border, but you assure the president of Mexico you are not militarizing the border. You announce you are sending the National Guard, but then you assure everyone it's not very many soldiers and just for a little while.
Militarizing the border is a totally terrible idea. Do we have a State Department? Are they sentient? How much do you want to infuriate Mexico when it's sitting on quite a bit of oil? Bush knows what the most likely outcome of this move will be. He was governor during the political firestorm that ensued when a Marine taking part in anti-drug patrols on the border shot and killed Esequiel Hernandez, an innocent goat-herder from Redford, Texas. That's the definition of crazy - repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
I suppose politics could explain it, too. It's quite possible that lunacy and politics are closely related. It's still damned hard cheese for the Guard, though. The Guard is heavily deployed in Iraq, currently 20 percent of those serving, down from 40 percent last year. Some soldiers are sent back for multiple tours. Lt. Gen. James Helmly, head of the Army Reserve, said the Reserve is rapidly degenerating into "a broken force" and is "in grave danger of being unable to meet other operational requirements." Happy hurricane season to you, too. The Guard is also short on equipment and falling short on recruiting goals.
But right-wingers are very unhappy with Bush right now, and this is a strong, red-meat gesture that will make them happy, even if it does nothing to shut down the border. You want to shut down illegal immigration? You want to use the military as police? Make it illegal hire undocumented workers and put the National Guard into enforcing that. Then rewrite NAFTA and invest in Mexico.
Meanwhile, further proof that the entire party is cuckoo comes to us with the passage of another $70 billion tax cut for the rich. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says the average middle-income household will get a $20 tax cut, while those making more than $1 million a year will get nearly $42,000.
The Washington Post editorialized, "Budgetary dishonesty, distributional unfairness, fiscal irresponsibility - by now the words are so familiar, it can be hard to appreciate how damaging this fiscal course will be."
Both President Bush and Veep Cheney are still going around claiming if you cut taxes, your tax revenues increase. No, they don't. Now we're just in whackoville. It's not true. Their own economists tell them it's not true, but they go about claiming it is with the same desperate tenacity they clung to false tales of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. How pathetic.
Speaking of lunacy, the saddest report from Iraq is that American soldiers showing signs of psychological distress and depression are being kept on active duty, increasing the risk of suicide. The Hartford Courant reports that even soldiers who have already been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome are kept on duty. This has led to an increase in the suicide rate - 22 soldiers in 2005. And as I have reported before, the military is unprepared to deal with the flood of head cases coming back from Iraq. How many ways can we mistreat our own soldiers, while the right makes this elaborate show of devotion to "the troops"?
The consistent pattern that runs through all these problems is the failure to distinguish fantasy from reality. Mexican immigrants keep crossing the border because they can get jobs here - and most of those jobs are provided by companies whose CEOs support George W. Bush. That's where he can have an impact on the problem, should he choose to do so.
The $70 billion tax cut is part of a continuing right-wing fantasy going back to the Laffer Curve. Of course, clinging to demonstrably false economic precepts is understandable when you benefit from them, but at some point reality does intervene.
As for the Iraq fantasy and those who pushed it on a reluctant country through lies, disinformation and bending intelligence - isn't there a law against that?

Border Patrol Idiots.....

Jeb and "the brown ones" are sitting at home on the couch with Grandpa Bush and Bar, watching their young idiot son trying hard not to sneer (the intensive non-sneering coaching is almost starting to pay off...Too bad he cant actually move his eyes a little wider apart physically somehow, that creep!) as he reveals a plan that doesn't seem much like a plan and more like a skim the surface of something that is gonna screw not only American workers but the slave workers that he is giving to his big corporate cronies...The Bush family's use of the few "brown ones" amongst them is pathetic and pandering, as if to show how nice they are to their maids and nannies...We even married one!!...And his Spanish sucks...So there!
Olberman immediately said that there were no details to the "plan," which was what I just said, and then he had to defer to Chris Matthews to try to decipher what the hell the plan consists of, as if Chris knows anything beyond his careful go-with-the-flowing-crap, which ensures that he has carefully ridden the side of the fence with the best numbers all along....a worker identification card (tamper proof like the voting machines, don't you know...) and making it illegal for corporations to hire immigrants without the cards. Isn't that sort of reminiscent of something like a...a...green card? Yes! Its a new green card, but its an ACME made one that explodes if you tamper with it! So, of course the immigrants wont be able to counterfeit it...Nope...And if maybe a suicide bomber or two make a coat out of the ones that fall off the plane load likely to be stolen right away, well, we can start again....No paper trail? No problem!! We don't need no stinking paper trails!
Did I tell you yet about the new Halliburton tamper proof card corporation? They have this cool new explosive technology!
OK...So, the big deal is the card...And someone is getting a kickback on this....And it wont work. For this he preempted TV?

What Bush really doesn't want to talk about is that he is going to send the National Guard to patrol the border. We have hardly any National guardsman available and hurricane season is once again upon us! The Guard equipment is still in Iraq and the military is stretched to breaking. The levees have not been fixed in the coastal areas that are in danger, the weather patterns are getting harder and harder to predict, and we know that there is a disaster coming.
There is no way to do Iraq, border patrol, natural disaster preparedness, and the possibility of Iran, without a draft or without pulling out of Iraq at least partially.
The one thing that Matthews said that makes sense in all of this is that Bush doesn't have much of a problem with the Democrats (as far as Durban's Dem reply goes.) But, that his real problem and argument is with his conservative base. Ha, ha, is all I have to say about that!
If it wasn't so dangerous and scary, it would be sort of funny to just stand back and let them spiral down.

But, I keep thinking of bloated dead people floating down the street in New Orleans, and how badly things are still there now. The real danger that New York City could be hit by a storm just as destructive is terrifying, and it hit home here last year when there were severe wind storms that overwhelmed responders and people were without electricity for over a week, while trees blocked main streets and roads, and crushed houses sat for days and days. No one came, and it was a big wake up call.
My friends at the firehouse up the street say that basically, in this very wealthy area, if there is any sort of even mild disaster, we are screwed. They cant handle much more than one housefire at a time, much less a disease outbreak or huge storm. Add to that our close neighbor, the Indian Point Nuclear plant and...Yes, we are screwed....Just like people all over the country.

Something that is incredibly disconcerting is how out of touch with America Bush is. How can his advisors not tell him that he is preempting the finale of Grey's Anatomy, and most importantly disrupting Prison Break and 24!!! For christ's sake...those of us who are behind and taping these things have now had to readjust all of the the VCRs in the house....I want a TiVo!!...2 or 3 TiVo's! And off goes Bush leaving me with Howie Mandell and his suitcases of money or not....
How sick is that?

Above are some pictures from the highlight of our trip to Baltimore, which was the Aquarium/Australia/birds exhibit thing in the harbor. I wish I could make that trip (or any trip,) sometime without moody kids with a plan of their own.
The hotel was so great...Maybe Ill live in one of those full service luxury apartment buildings one day, that is part condo, part hotel....I guess I cant stand to have people (servants) around, and I'm always all tied up in tipping and weather I do it enough or right ...And why are these people serving me anyway?...So maybe not. Its just so nice to have someone bringing coffee and tea in the morning and making the bed....

One thing that really gets me when I travel outside of my bubble is how many people are traveling for fun and experience, and how badly everyone seems to eat; how uncomfortable they are and unable to breathe, and yet they keep eating. I had a hell of a time finding anything that I could eat at all. There was much fudge and fried this and that, which I just cant get myself to stomach...So I grabbed salad here and there...And thank GOD Starbucks is everywhere! I felt very crowded and hot out there in the mass of tourists and, there was the issue of an electric harbor boat that one could rent...I wanted to see how far I could get but was shot down by sourpass boys who had other plans.
I guess I got pretty far, all in all, considering the traffic, accidents, and lines.
I love my EZ Pass!


In more trying matters,
Will has been really sick from some medicine that he is now off of, but its made things a little harrowing the past few days. I somehow muddle through whatever I have to, and I'm pretty strong and level headed about things, but this has been frightening. Sometimes everything seems very fragile in life... sometimes it all hits the fan at once.


...The traffic was horrible and there were gas lines in NJ like I haven't seen since the 70's. But then, the gas was only $2.76 on the highway and $3.19 in town, which I would have gladly taken to avoid the 40 minute lines....But I was gonna run out of gas. Oh well.

Anyway Toto, there's no place like home...Tomorrow is definitely gonna be better, and I cant wait to see my birds!

Mommy!!

Happy Mom's day from the strange world of Baltimore Sunday morning, where its hard to find the political talk shows, and who cares anyway, because apparently its all Laura Bush, all the time!
A special HMD goes out to my homegirl Claire, lost somewhere in Southern Sweden choreographing dance and forwarding something so much more important than the crap that we deal with here, like the arts and what is good and creative about humans! ...and to Goddaughter Stella...well, you know....! Isnt she beautiful?


Here is that very cute Al Gore clip from SNL, which would be hilarious if it werent so tragic.
We are in serious trouble in this country and I guess that if you cant laugh about it....well, I may be getting past laughing and into... I dont know what country I live in anymore....

I had a great but exhausting day yesterday at the harbor/horrid Warhammer convention/aquarium/birding/wild boys making potty jokes all night, and alot of room service...now Ive got to contemplate getting into the gym (across the hall) and shower and ready to hit the road back home. I have a sunburn!!
I miss my dogs so much!!..And my baby birds too!
I should be missing my Mom and the family stuff going on with grandpa at my sister's house, but Im pretty happy not to be there with all the crap flying round my family these days. Thanks for handling it all Mom. You know I just cant take it right now.
I just want to get home an lay in a pile of dogs for a while.
After the nightmare drive here, complete with big accident that held us up for 2+ hours at the Delaware Bridge.
Im not a great traveller, as much as I love hotels and seeing other places, I get homesick and miss my animals too much after a day or two. My best vacations have been when I go to the cape and put the dogs in a vacation kennel where I can see them at least once a day!

So...Im coming home!

Here is Rich for all of you non-select readers out there....
Many pictures to follow when I get 'em home and downloaded.
I need suggestions on good bluetooth cameras with a big zoom and good dim or night shot. My tiny Cascio is fantastic for macro to snapshot and little films but anything beyond a headshot sucks.

Welcome back to Frank Rich...boy, did I miss you!!

May 14, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Will the Real Traitors Please Stand Up?
By FRANK RICH
WHEN America panics, it goes hunting for scapegoats. But from Salem onward, we've more often than not ended up pillorying the innocent. Abe Rosenthal, the legendary Times editor who died last week, and his publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, were denounced as treasonous in 1971 when they defied the Nixon administration to publish the Pentagon Papers, the secret government history of the Vietnam War. Today we know who the real traitors were: the officials who squandered American blood and treasure on an ill-considered war and then tried to cover up their lies and mistakes. It was precisely those lies and mistakes, of course, that were laid bare by the thousands of pages of classified Pentagon documents leaked to both The Times and The Washington Post.
This history is predictably repeating itself now that the public has turned on the war in Iraq. The administration's die-hard defenders are desperate to deflect blame for the fiasco, and, guess what, the traitors once again are The Times and The Post. This time the newspapers committed the crime of exposing warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency (The Times) and the C.I.A.'s secret "black site" Eastern European prisons (The Post). Aping the Nixon template, the current White House tried to stop both papers from publishing and when that failed impugned their patriotism.
President Bush, himself a sometime leaker of intelligence, called the leaking of the N.S.A. surveillance program a "shameful act" that is "helping the enemy." Porter Goss, who was then still C.I.A. director, piled on in February with a Times Op-Ed piece denouncing leakers for potentially risking American lives and compromising national security. When reporters at both papers were awarded Pulitzer Prizes last month, administration surrogates, led by bloviator in chief William Bennett, called for them to be charged under the 1917 Espionage Act.
We can see this charade for what it is: a Hail Mary pass by the leaders who bungled a war and want to change the subject to the journalists who caught them in the act. What really angers the White House and its defenders about both the Post and Times scoops are not the legal questions the stories raise about unregulated gulags and unconstitutional domestic snooping, but the unmasking of yet more administration failures in a war effort riddled with ineptitude. It's the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press's exposure of it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at risk and potentially sabotaged national security. That's where the buck stops, and if there's to be a witch hunt for traitors, that's where it should begin.
Well before Dana Priest of The Post uncovered the secret prisons last November, the C.I.A. had failed to keep its detention "secrets" secret. Having obtained flight logs, The Sunday Times of London first reported in November 2004 that the United States was flying detainees "to countries that routinely use torture." Six months later, The New York Times added many details, noting that "plane-spotting hobbyists, activists and journalists in a dozen countries have tracked the mysterious planes' movements." These articles, capped by Ms. Priest's, do not impede our ability to detain terrorists. But they do show how the administration, by condoning torture, has surrendered the moral high ground to anti-American jihadists and botched the war of ideas that we can't afford to lose.
The N.S.A. eavesdropping exposed in December by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The Times is another American debacle. Hoping to suggest otherwise and cast the paper as treasonous, Dick Cheney immediately claimed that the program had saved "thousands of lives." The White House's journalistic mouthpiece, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, wrote that the Times exposé "may have ruined one of our most effective anti-Al Qaeda surveillance programs."
Surely they jest. If this is one of our "most effective" programs, we're in worse trouble than we thought. Our enemy is smart enough to figure out on its own that its phone calls are monitored 24/7, since even under existing law the government can eavesdrop for 72 hours before seeking a warrant (which is almost always granted). As The Times subsequently reported, the N.S.A. program was worse than ineffective; it was counterproductive. Its gusher of data wasted F.B.I. time and manpower on wild-goose chases and minor leads while uncovering no new active Qaeda plots in the United States. Like the N.S.A. database on 200 million American phone customers that was described last week by USA Today, this program may have more to do with monitoring "traitors" like reporters and leakers than with tracking terrorists.
Journalists and whistle-blowers who relay such government blunders are easily defended against the charge of treason. It's often those who make the accusations we should be most worried about. Mr. Goss, a particularly vivid example, should not escape into retirement unexamined. He was so inept that an overzealous witch hunter might mistake him for a Qaeda double agent.
Even before he went to the C.I.A., he was a drag on national security. In "Breakdown," a book about intelligence failures before the 9/11 attacks, the conservative journalist Bill Gertz delineates how Mr. Goss, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, played a major role in abdicating Congressional oversight of the C.I.A., trying to cover up its poor performance while terrorists plotted with impunity. After 9/11, his committee's "investigation" of what went wrong was notoriously toothless.
Once he ascended to the C.I.A. in 2004, Mr. Goss behaved like most other Bush appointees: he put politics ahead of the national interest, and stashed cronies and partisan hacks in crucial positions. On Friday, the F.B.I. searched the home and office of one of them, Dusty Foggo, the No. 3 agency official in the Goss regime. Mr. Foggo is being investigated by four federal agencies pursuing the bribery scandal that has already landed former Congressman Randy (Duke) Cunningham in jail. Though Washington is titillated by gossip about prostitutes and Watergate "poker parties" swirling around this Warren Harding-like tale, at least the grafters of Teapot Dome didn't play games with the nation's defense during wartime.
Besides driving out career employees, underperforming on Iran intelligence and scaling back a daily cross-agency meeting on terrorism, Mr. Goss's only other apparent accomplishment at the C.I.A. was his war on those traitorous leakers. Intriguingly, this was a new cause for him. "There's a leak every day in the paper," he told The Sarasota Herald-Tribune when the identity of the officer Valerie Wilson was exposed in 2003. He argued then that there was no point in tracking leaks down because "that's all we'd do."
What prompted Mr. Goss's about-face was revealed in his early memo instructing C.I.A. employees to "support the administration and its policies in our work." His mission was not to protect our country but to prevent the airing of administration dirty laundry, including leaks detailing how the White House ignored accurate C.I.A. intelligence on Iraq before the war. On his watch, C.I.A. lawyers also tried to halt publication of "Jawbreaker," the former clandestine officer Gary Berntsen's account of how the American command let Osama bin Laden escape when Mr. Berntsen's team had him trapped in Tora Bora in December 2001. The one officer fired for alleged leaking during the Goss purge had no access to classified intelligence about secret prisons but was presumably a witness to her boss's management disasters.
Soon to come are the Senate's hearings on Mr. Goss's successor, Gen. Michael Hayden, the former head of the N.S.A. As Jon Stewart reminded us last week, Mr. Bush endorsed his new C.I.A. choice with the same encomium he had bestowed on Mr. Goss: He's "the right man" to lead the C.I.A. "at this critical moment in our nation's history." That's not exactly reassuring.
This being an election year, Karl Rove hopes the hearings can portray Bush opponents as soft on terrorism when they question any national security move. It was this bullying that led so many Democrats to rubber-stamp the Iraq war resolution in the 2002 election season and Mr. Goss's appointment in the autumn of 2004.
Will they fall into the same trap in 2006? Will they be so busy soliloquizing about civil liberties that they'll fail to investigate the nominee's record? It was under General Hayden, a self-styled electronic surveillance whiz, that the N.S.A. intercepted actual Qaeda messages on Sept. 10, 2001 — "Tomorrow is zero hour" for one — and failed to translate them until Sept. 12. That same fateful summer, General Hayden's N.S.A. also failed to recognize that "some of the terrorists had set up shop literally under its nose," as the national-security authority James Bamford wrote in The Washington Post in 2002. The Qaeda cell that hijacked American Flight 77 and plowed into the Pentagon was based in the same town, Laurel, Md., as the N.S.A., and "for months, the terrorists and the N.S.A. employees exercised in some of the same local health clubs and shopped in the same grocery stores."
If Democrats — and, for that matter, Republicans — let a president with a Nixonesque approval rating install yet another second-rate sycophant at yet another security agency, even one as diminished as the C.I.A., someone should charge those senators with treason, too.
NY Times..........................................