Eric Boehlert agrees with William Kristol when he says that Todd Purdum's piece must be wrong when he says that Hit's simply not possible that multiple individuals would have concluded that she had Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

First, my background: I lived in Alaska from 1963 to 1969, I was 7 when I left, and my father worked at various levels in the state and local government, being the head of planning for Governor Bill Egan, and head of the State Charter Commission.

He maintains the friendships that he made there, and as such, he is in touch with many people who are very much a part of the political scene there, particularly on the Democratic Party side.

The other thing to realize is just how tiny the political scene is there. Everyone knows, and meets, everyone else on an almost daily basis when the legislature is in session, so if one person made a comment, like "I was looking through the DSM IV, and 'Narcissistic Personality Disorder' matched Palin to a 'T," it could rapidly become a talking point.

This makes this story likely, but the email that I got forwarded to me by my dad pretty much makes it a almost certainly true.

I would note that my dad quoted this individual to me in October saying essentially the same thing.

----- Forwarded Message ----
From: -------
To: Mr Ron Saroff <-------->
Sent: Thursday, July 2, 2009 8:31:38 AM
Subject: FW: Politico.com:

Further amusement --this time amongst the R's. Lots of bad substantive stuff to say about Palin, but frankly I think the sexism is disgusting from both parties and elsewhere.

Check out this page:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/24392.html

I was one of the people who told TP [Todd Purdum] Sarah had a narcissistic personality disorder! And he told me I wasn't the first to say it.

Thank you,
THE POLITICO
Politico.com

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

One of the odd bit of news right now is that South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford has gone missing.

He ditched his security detail, he's turned off his cell phones, and no one can find him.

The interesting quote in the above story is from his wife:

Neither his wife, nor the state's lieutenant governor, nor police officials know where he is, South Carolina newspapers reported.

But Jenny Sanford told the Associated Press she wasn't worried.

"He was writing something and wanted some space to get away from the kids," she said while vacationing with the couple's four sons.

(emphasis mine)

She sounds to me like someone who is studiously avoiding trying to find the answer to this.

The real issue here is not Mark Sandford's personal life. It's the concern that self-hating individuals, and the closet does imply self-loathing, do not make good decisions on the public policy.

Here is a question, how many straight Republicans who practice marital fidelity does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: Either one can do it themselves.

Update:
The governor has been located.

He has been hiking along the Appalachian Trail....Yeah, sure, I believe that.

A commenter on the 2nd link nails it:

brads77 Jun 23, 2009 7:28:12 AM
The only reason this guy would have hiked the Appalachian Trail is because he wanted to visit the Home of Deliverance--thinking that the movie was a love story.

Brads77 owes me a screen wipe.

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

Great googly moogly, their latest brief in court is even more absurd than their DOMA brief.

Hell, it's more absurd than the Twinkie Defense, it's the Jon Stewart Defense:

A federal judge yesterday sharply questioned an assertion by the Obama administration that former Vice President Richard B. Cheney's statements to a special prosecutor about the Valerie Plame case must be kept secret, partly so they do not become fodder for Cheney's political enemies or late-night commentary on "The Daily Show."

...

....He told the judge that if Cheney's remarks were published, then a future vice president asked to provide candid information during a criminal probe might refuse to do so out of concern "that it's going to get on 'The Daily Show' " or somehow be used as a political weapon.

Gee, I wish that I could tell police investigating a crime to go pound sand because somehow it might be embarrassing.

Making this even more absurd is that this argument was first put forward by Bush's now disgraced acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel Stephen Bradbury. (See also here and here)

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

Some times you notice something, and think, "I'm gonna have to post about it later," and by the time you do, the story has changed.

This is particularly true in corruption cases, where things move rather quickly.

Case in point, the corrupt, self dealing Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Stephen Friedman, who, "bought shares in Goldman Sachs in December, profiting to the tune of $1.7 million."

Ordinarily not a problem, since the Federal Reserve does not regulate investment banks, but for a little fact, that in September, the Federal Reserve allowed Goldman Sachs to become a bank holding company, and hence was regulated by the Federal Reserve, and most particularly was regulated by, you guessed it, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

But of course, as Yves Smith so eloquently notes, "A Conflict of Interest is Not a Conflict of Interest If It Involves Goldman," or as he said to the Wall Street Journal:

Last week, following questions from The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Friedman, 71 years old, disclosed he would step down from the New York Fed at year end. In an interview, he said he made the decision because the waiver letting him own Goldman stock and be a Goldman director expires at the end of the year. He added: "I see no conflict whatsoever in owning shares."

Except of course, as Ms. Smith notes, he bought shares in a company that he was regulating, and he did so before the waiver was approved.

This is insider trading, pure and simple.

Of course, today we see have justice, Wall Street style, as Mr Friedman has resigned, effectively immediately, from the NY Fed.

That's it. He gets to walk way and keep his money, there will almost certainly be no criminal investigation.

This is business as usual, and, yet again, all roads on corruption lead back to Goldman Sachs, the BCCI of Wall Street.

Taking these racketeers down them down must be a government priority.

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

We are getting reports now of what Timothy "Eddie Haskell" Geithner's stress test has determined, and it's clearly not reality.

Bank	Needs Capitalization	Amount
Bank of America	Yes	$34 B
Wells Fargo	Yes	$15B
Citigroup	Yes	$5B
Morgan Stanley	Yes	$1-2B
Goldman	No
MetLife	No
JP Morgan Chase	No
Bank of NY Mellon	No
American Express	No
Capital One	No
BB&T	No

This is a damn joke.

You have one "oh my God" number, for Bank of America, and it's about 50% of their market cap, but Citi, which is clearly in much worse shape is somehow better capitalized by a factor of 6.

This is simply not true, even after BoA's disastrous acquisition of Merrill Lynch and Countrywide.

Also note this joint statement from the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve, FDIC, and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which, to my untutored eye, appears to say that they are going to go with their cockamamie scheme to claim that capital is increased by swapping preferred for common stock.

It's an accounting trick, and what's more, it's one where the taxpayer has just taken a second haircut.

They are making great theater by pretending to talk tough and giving a month for the banks that need to to present a plan to raise capital, and 6 months to have this plan in action, but it's all a lie, since the plan may very well be, "suck on this, taxpaying rubes".

I disagree with former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson's analysis, which is that they are selectively leaking to create confusion in order to keep people from looking at whether the test was too hard on the banks.

I think that his analysis is incomplete. The "stress test" begins and ends with public relations. It's a sham, and it has always been a sham, intended to show that the government was serious about reigning in the big banks, without actually engaging in the necessary actions, like seizure of insolvent institutions that would actually be required for it to work.

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

I've been following this for some time, and now we have a credible explanation from Laura Rosen as to why a further investigation might have been quashed by Alberto Gonzales, that you did not break the law until Dick Cheney and His Evil Minions^™ told you to break the law:

3. Did Goss no longer have authority to certify the FISA Warrant when the call in question happened? The Time 2006 magazine piece on Harman coming on the radar in the Aipac case says that the tapped conversaation in question in which the possible alleged-by-some quid pro quo occurred was in "mid 2005." A former intelligence official familiar with the matter told me that Goss had certified a FISA warrant to target Harman based on that intercepted communication, but didn't know exactly what time it had occurred.

But a former intelligence community source tells me that DCI Goss no longer legally had the authority to certify FISA warrants at all beginning January 1, 2005 when the law creating the Office of the Director of National Intelligence went into effect. So if Goss did try to certify a FISA warrant to target Harman in 2005, sources tell me that would be unkosher at best, and legally suspect. That authority was no longer in the Director of Central Intelligence's hands and had gone to the Director of National Intelligence.

(Emphasis original)

The idea that the Bush White House was paranoid about various players pursuing their own agendas is not hard to believe, since both paranoia and ignoring the law was SOP for them, and they would naturally assume that everyone else would do the same.

On a note regarding the coverage of the coverage, it gets more interesting.

BTD at Talk Left notices that Jeff Stein who broke the Harman wiretap story for CQ, threw a hissy fit over suggestions that he was spoon fed self-serving leaks from Porter Goss's staffers when he was in Congress and the CIA, aka the "Gosslings".

Of note is that he complains about Ron Kampeas at JTA, and Laura Rosen at Foreign Policy magazine, but studiously ignores Zachary Roth at TPMMuckraker, who actually lists the most prominent "Gosslings":

• Patrick Murray
  
• Jay Jakub
  
• Michael Kostiw
  
• Merrell Moorhead

Who are a veritable rogues gallery of weirdness, as Roth makes clear when he notes that, "It says something about this crew that perhaps the best-regarded of them [Michael Kostiw] had his career derailed for shoplifting pork products."

Stein does not deny that they are his sources in his rant, and given his studious avoidance of the article that names the "Gosslings" even while not outing them, it certainly reasonable to conclude that one of his major sources, and more likely most of his major sources for his initial story, are these "Gosslings".

That being said, the problem with what appears to be ass covering and political vendettas is that there appears to be no way that they can all lose.

As Atrios notes when he rightly excoriates Harman for her new found discovery of the potential for abuse of surveillance, there are no good guys here:

The absurdity is obvious. Dirty f@#$ing hippies like me were horrified at the illegal warrantless wiretapping program and general expansion of the surveillance state in part because of the potential for political abuse (frankly, given the rubber stamp FISA court and rubber stamp Congress what other point would there be?). Jane Harman and her pal Joe Klein heaped scorn on dirty f@#$ing hippies for such crazy views. Harman gets caught up in what appears to be a perfectly legal wiretap not aimed directly at her, though the release of the details of it might be evidence of the kind of political abuse possible in any surveillance program. Suddenly Harman is a staunch defender the right of People Like Jane Harman to not be wiretapped.

(@#$ mine)

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

Alan Greenspan saying that illegal immigration aids the US economy, because he's wrong about everything:

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said that illegal immigration makes a "significant" contribution to U.S. economic growth by providing a flexible workforce.

Greenspan, appearing before a Senate subcommittee today, said illegal immigrants provide a "safety valve" as demand for workers rises and falls.

On a more serious note, look at what he is saying when you tease out the meaning, he is saying that illegal immigration is good because it drives down wages.....That's what "flexible workforce" and "safety valve," mean.

Alan Greenspan has always been a big fan of cheap labor.

There is no doubt that illegal immigration adds to GDP. The question is whether it contributes to per capita GDP, or the slightly more nebulous and hard to measure concept of the well being of our society.

½ of Europe's population died during the heyday of the Black Death, and it is indisputable that the GDP of Europe was lower in the years following the Bubonic Plague outbreak than before.

What is also indisputable is that the standard of living of those remaining rose at the time, as can be seen through records of increased wages, and the frantic passage of (largely ineffective) laws intended to reign in wages and reduce worker mobility.

The end question is not what our immigration policy should be, but rather what should our society look like, and how to we create an immigration policy most consistent with our professed values that creates this society.

To my mind, this is best addressed by extremely aggressive laws targeting employers who deliberately or negligently hire illegals, and not by harsh measures taken against desperate economic refugees.

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

So, the latest New York Times OP/ED page conservative affirmative action case has his debut editorial for the paper, and what is his trenchant analysis?

It's that the Republicans should have nominated Richard Milhaus Cheney as their presidential nominee in 2008.

I guess that's because Cheney is such a photogenic and friendly dude, whether talking about his penis (top picture), or simply snarling at the American public (bottom).

Of course this is not really what the author believes. He wanted Cheney to run because he would have been beaten like a baby seal while showing how the right wing orthodoxy needs to be repackaged: It's simply link bait, as Froomkin notes.

He wants people to read him, so Douthat says something outrageous, and finishes with, "And when he went down to a landslide loss, the conservative movement might - might! - have been jolted into the kind of rethinking that's necessary if it hopes to regain power."

No. Simply put, he is being a tool to get buzz, and it increasingly appears that the Republican Neocons are simply some sort of truly subversive performance art group.

I miss William Safire, who while right wing, had a brain, and could actually string together words in an attractive way.

Between Tierney, Kristol, and now Douthat, it appears that the sure sign that you are really, really, stupid is getting a regular Times OP/ED slot.

Yes, I know, I am really describing him being an asshole, not stupid, but his argument boils down to, "We should have nominated Dick Cheney, and we would have lost much better."

That's Doug "The Stupidest Motherf^%$er on the Planet" Feith stupid, and the New York Times already has a surfeit of stupid among their regular columnists, with Maureen Dowd, who covers politics like she is a junior high schooler dissing a classmates choice in shoes.

Still it appears that but it appears that Andrew Rosenthal, the Editorial Page Editor, feels that they need some more stupid.

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

I "embraced and extended" this from a post on 40 Years in the Desert, where I note how well Rachel Maddow ties the torture issue together, and leaves a finger pointing to the very top.

She links torture to political needs, as opposed to security needs. ( below, 13:23)

So, we already have reports, the famous "Mayberry Machiavelli" quote, that there was really no policy apparatus in the Bush White House, just a political one.

We also know that they were waterboarding some suspects six times a day for at least a month, which only makes sense if you want to coerce a lie, as opposed to uncovering actionable information.

The need to torture was less a policy decision than one to justify and gain support for an invasion if Iraq, and this invasion was driven to a large degree by a political consideration that "finishing the job" there would secure reelection for George W. Bush.

So the alpha and omega of the decision to torture was really politics and electioneering.

And whose office did politics and electioneering go through?  Whose office was at the center of any discussion of political calculus?

Karl Christian Rove, that's who.

From a political standpoint, he has to realize that constantly bringing up Bush and Cheney hurts the Republican party that he professes to love, so why is he bring them back, if just to defend them?

The answer is that it's not about the Republican Party, it's about keeping Karl Christian Rove out of jail.

I watched Keith Olbermann's special comment from last night on Youtube, as I was too busy wrapping Passover to watch the show.

While I generally agree with him, I find him powerful even when I disagree with him, or find his conclusions lacking, as was the case last night, and I'm not referring to the Kaiser thing.^*


In this case, I believe that KO did not go far enough.

While he is correct that letting people off for "just following orders", as is implied by the statements that those , "carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice," will not be subject to prosecution.

This is wrong, and there is a bigger point, made ably by Glenn Greenwald, that there is a real and legalally binding obligation obligation under the Convention Against Torture, which was signed in 1988 and ratified in 1994, to actively pursue and prosecute torturers ( roll Article 7 para 7):

The State Party in territory under whose jurisdiction a person alleged to have committed any offence referred to in article 4 is found, shall in the cases contemplated in article 5, if it does not extradite him, submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.

This is not to say that refraining from after the little fish to target the big fish is a violation of this.

That is a legitimate prosecution strategy.

However, it increasingly appears that President Obama and Attorney General Holder do not intend to go after anyone, and in so doing, they are, but not going after anyone, witht he explanation that this is, "moving forward".

This is a obstruction of the prosecution of these actsis a war crime, and if this means no prosecution, it is an affirmative act to obstruct the course of justice.

Certainly, there are alternate venues, such as some sort of "Truth and Reconciliation Commission," but all indications are that the White House are fighting even this weak tea.

I bwelieve that, in the absence for support for some sort of fact official fact finding process, it makes Eric Holder and Barack Obama accessories after the fact to a crime against humanity.

In the short form, people who actively work to subvert any process of judicial or semi-judicial fact finding inquiry, outside of the context of legitimate activities of defense counsel, are war criminals, including the current President and Attorney General of the United States of America if they choose to continue this course.

That being, said, I am an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit,^‡ and I would be interested in hearing opinions from people with a deeper knowledge of both US and international law.

^*The Kaiser commited no war crimes by the standards of the day, notwithstanding the accusations of amputation Belgian babies hands^† made in the early days of the war. The rules had not yet caught up with the technology of war, and if the Kaiser were guilty, than every participant in the war would have been guilty.
^†Ironically, the Belgians, during the genocide phase of their rule over what was then the Belgian Congo DID require their native levees to return a human hand for each bullet fired, in order to prevent them from "wasting" bullets hunting game for food, along with holding families hostage, etc.
^‡I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

Peterr at Firedoglake was looking at job postings on the FDIC website, and saw something that was probably not intended for the general public, specifically some job postings by the FDIC that may indicate that there will be some very big fish on a path to be caught in the FDIC's net.

First, there is a posting for a Deputy Chief Accountant (announcement number 2009-EM-0096) who is responsible for, "identifying emerging accounting, auditing, and taxation issues, particularly those raising systemic concerns, for which the timely development of policy guidance for FDIC -supervised and -insured institutions and the Division's examination staff is critical" (emphasis mine).

"Raising systemic concerns?" Sound like anyone we know? As Peterr notes, it looks like part of their duties will be teasing out responsibilities amongst other financial regulators, which may involve putting a finger in the eye of Timothy "Too Big to Allow to Fail" Geithner's Treasury Department.

Additionally, there are two openings for two Senior Large Financial Institution Specialist (announcement number 2009-HQD-B1089) located in New York, NY and Charlotte, NC, which are where the HQ's of Citi and BoA are located, though obviously there are many financial institutions with headquarters in the New York City area, as well as a Chief, Examination Support and Risk Analysis Section (announcement number 2009-HQDEU-1113), who seems to be in charge of "Formulates, refines, and updates supervisory expectations relative to Basel II implementation efforts," which means risk evaluation of banks.

Additionally, we have Treasury announcing a delay in the reporting the results of the stress tests, "until after the first-quarter earnings season."

People do not delay good news.

I wouldn't expect anything this Friday on one of the big 20 financial institutions, but it could get interesting in a few weeks.

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

One of the things that concerns me the most is Obama's comfort in continuing to support Bush's assault on basic procedural civil rights because they serve to reinforce the power of what is now his office.

Case in point, the Pentagon's "privilege review team", which is now considering charges against a victim of the torture protocols created by the Bush Administration.

What they posted was a cover sheet naming the case, and quoting unclassified portions of a UK court ruling saying that it was up to the US to release it, followed by a version redacted by said privilege review team", which blacked out everything but the title of their report, which is clearly stamped "unclassified":

The privilege team argue that by releasing the redacted memo Reprieve has breached the rules that govern Guantánamo lawyers and have made a complaint to the court of "unprofessional conduct".

Stafford Smith described their actions as intimidation, saying the complaint "doesn't even specify the rule supposedly breached".

So, according to someone at the Pentagon, by sending an unclassified document to the president of the United States of America, they are in violation of regulations, and could face as much as 6 months in jail.

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

You know, for some time, it seems that any time someone complains that Obama's economic team is too close to the banks, the answer is that we are seeing some sort of chess game, and it's just that the White House is 3 steps ahead of everyone else.

I don't buy it. I think that Larry Summers just jumped the shark into accepting bribes, as this Wall Street Journal analysis of his 2008 disclosure forms shows.

Among other things, he got $5.2 million from hedge fund D.E. Shaw for his thoroughly part time (he was a full time professor at Harvard) position, and he got $2.7 million for speaking, with his fees ranging from, "$10,000 for a Yale University speech to $135,000 for an appearance paid for by Goldman Sachs & Co."

So we know that the market rate for his speeches is about $10K, but Wall Street investment firms were paying more than 10 times that in a year in which the Democrats were favored, and he was likely to be on the team of either Democratic nominee.

A Tiny Revolution went through his disclosure form (PDF) and came up with the following, with Merrill-Lynch being a week after the election, and Charles River Ventures being the day before:

• GIANT BAILOUT SECTOR
• Goldman Sachs: $202,500 (two speeches)
• Citigroup: $99,000 (two speeches)
• JP Morgan: $67,500
• Merrill Lynch: $45,000 (donated to charity)
• DOMESTIC FINANCIAL SECTOR
• Investec Bank: $157,500
• State Street Corporation: $112,500
• Pricewaterhouse Coopers LLC: $67,500
• Lehman Brothers: $67,500
• American Express: $67,500
• Siguler Guff & Company (private equity): $67,500
• TA Associates (private equity): $67,500
• Charles River Ventures (Venture Capital): $67,500
• FOREIGN FINANCIAL SECTOR
• Skagen Funds (Scandinavian mutual fund): $180,000 (three speeches)
• Centro de Liderazgo y Gestion (the Center for Leadership and Management, in Colombia): $112,500
• Association of Mexican Bankers: $90,000
• OTHER
• Securities Industry & Financial Markets Association: $33,750
• Pension Real Estate Association: $67,500
• Hudson Institute: $10,000

It should be noted that the Hudson institute is a very right wing "think" tank which has consistently been dogged by accusations of racism and Islamophobia, and it's at the same "market rate" as Yale.

I can't see this as anything but bribe taking, with the various financial institutions paying forward to get favorable treatment.

What sort of treatment were the looking for? Well, there was probably not a specific request, a quid pro quo, if you will, but something like the White House coming up with phony entities to act as intermediaries in order to skirt Congressional limitations on executive compensation:

The Obama administration is engineering its new bailout initiatives in a way that it believes will allow firms benefiting from the programs to avoid restrictions imposed by Congress, including limits on lavish executive pay, according to government officials.

Administration officials have concluded that this approach is vital for persuading firms to participate in programs funded by the $700 billion financial rescue package.

You know, the threat of being frog marched out of their workplace in handcuffs would work better.

The administration believes it can sidestep the rules because, in many cases, it has decided not to provide federal aid directly to financial companies, the sources said. Instead, the government has set up special entities that act as middlemen, channeling the bailout funds to the firms and, via this two-step process, stripping away the requirement that the restrictions be imposed, according to officials.

Although some experts are questioning the legality of this strategy, the officials said it gives them latitude to determine whether firms should be subject to the congressional restrictions, which would require recipients to turn over ownership stakes to the government, as well as curb executive pay.

The administration has decided that the conditions should not apply in at least three of the five initiatives funded by the rescue package.

...

Enough is enough.

This is more than being too close to the financial sector, this is corruption, and it pervades Obama's economic team.

Larry Summers, and possibly Timothy Geithner, need to spend more time with their families.

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

In his meeting with bank presidents, he said, "My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks."

True, and perhaps you would get better results if these people felt fear, rather than smugness.

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

So I was reading this account of a Seymour Hersh interview on Fresh Air in which he says that Cheney loyalists have been "burrowed" into sensitive government positions, and continue to feed him information:

"I'll make it worse. I think he's put people left. He's put people back. They call it a stay-behind. It's sort of an intelligence term of art. When you leave a country and, you know, you've been driven out the, you know, you've lost the war. You leave people behind. It's a stay-behind that you can continue to have contacts with, to do sabotage, whatever you want to do. Cheney's left a stay-behind. He's got people in a lot of agencies that still tell him what's going on. Particularly in defense, obviously. Also in the NSA, there's still people that talk to him. He still knows what's going on. Can he still control policy up to a point? Probably up to a point, a minor point. But he's still there. He's still a presence."

(Audio at bottom)

And the first thing that went through my head was, "People from the NSA are talking to a guy who orchestrated the outing of a covert CIA agent?"

Then I realized that the real question was, "Why does Richard Bruce Cheney still have a security clearance?"

Based on my reading of the entire Lewis "Scooter" Libby case, it's clear that Patrick Fitzgerald had concerns that Cheney was aware of the leaks on some level, though he lacked any hard evidence (missing emails anyone?) to go any further.

That being said, a security clearance is not a legal procedure, it's an administrative procedure, and to a significant degree, it is necessary for the holder of this clearance to show that they not a security risk, either intentionally or through negligence.

There is also an additional duty to report any credible potential security violations to the appropriate authorities.

This is a lower standard of proof than, for example, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, or obstruction of justice statutes.

There is therefore a significant concern that Dick Cheney violated the terms of his clearance, and pending an investigation, his clearance should be suspended pending an investigation.

Unlike a government employee whose livelihood is dependent on having a clearance, this should not provide an undue burden, and a hearing, with witnesses, including Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Mr. Cheney, testifying under oath, would be an appropriate venue to decide whether or not he was either deliberately or negligently cavalier with sensitive intelligence data.

Of course, if Mssrs Cheney or Libby were to make untrue statements in the process of giving their testimony, that would be a matter for the federal prosecutors.



Youtube link

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.