Tweety counts seven times that she has repeated her Bridge to Nowhere line. Meanwhile, as of 2:30 PM, ThinkProgress is up to 27 different uses of this line (including Palin’s 8th use of it today).

Meanwhile, one by one, the weight of this evidence has demonstrated to McCain’s former fans what a dishonorable, cynical creature John McCain has become. There was Mike Murphy, caught on live mike, admitting that the selection of Sarah Palin was cynical and gimmicky. And Joe Klein, labeling McCain’s pro-predator attack on Obama as  "one of the sleaziest ads I’ve ever seen in presidential politics." Even Mark Halperin called last nights piggy lipstick stunt the lowpoint of this campaign. 

Sully is just the latest of former McCain fans to grow utterly disgusted with this new cynical creature.

For me, this surreal moment – like the entire surrealism of the past ten days – is not really about Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or pigs or fish or lipstick. It’s about John McCain. The one thing I always thought I knew about him is that he is a decent and honest person. When he knows, as every sane person must, that Obama did not in any conceivable sense mean that Sarah Palin is a pig, what did he do? Did he come out and say so and end this charade? Or did he acquiesce in and thereby enable the mindless Rovianism that is now the core feature of his campaign?

So far, he has let us all down. My guess is he will continue to do so. And that decision, for my part, ends whatever respect I once had for him. On core moral issues, where this man knew what the right thing was, and had to pick between good and evil, he chose evil.

[snip]

McCain has demonstrated in the last two months that he does not have the character to be president of the United States. And that is why it is more important than ever to ensure that Barack Obama is the next president. The alternative is now unthinkable. And McCain – no one else – has proved it. 

These former fans may well be the biggest threat to McCain’s campaign. There’s nothing like a lover scorned and no one to better describe the profound depths of McCain’s cynicism than to have his former boosters describe their newfound revulsion. 

Yesterday, I posted on the McCain camp’s stunt to use false outrage over a common colloquialism to both distract from the mounting evidence that Governor Palin is a sham, and to cow the press into more deferential reporting. I promised to do a follow-up post, to catalog the good, the bad, and the ugly performance of the press in response. Below is a list of the articles that obviously came out of Jane Swift’s performance–I’ll update as new articles appear (and let me know what I’ve missed in the comments; h/t to cbl for an initial list of these, and to the FDL peeps for brainstorming on categories). 

Within categories, I’ve ranked coverage from high to low. Here’s the key to the rankings:

Pork-Buster: Not only did this journalist not buy the piggy lipstick stunt, recognizing a colloquialism for what it was, but in some way this story called out the larger context, in which the McCain campaign was trying to use their false outrage to distract or cow the press.

Kosher: This applies to outlets who obviously attended yesterday’s performance by Governor Swift, but didn’t find it newsworthy, as well as journalists who reported the McCain’s attempt to generate outrage, but then called it for what it was, a stunt.

Hamlet: This applies to journalists who responded to Swift’s stunt by presenting both the McCain claim and the Obama refutation, as if there were a real debate about what Obama meant in his comments. These journalists write with an absolute lack of discernment for truth, but instead pretend on-the-one-side-on-the-other-side journalism results in some kind of laudable objectivity.

"A wonderful, magical animal:" Named after Homer Simpson’s dreamy response to Lisa when she gave up pork (and meat more generally). Stories in this category acted just as the McCain hoped they might–by getting distracted by the shiny object of the false outrage.

Bought the Farm: For the Malkinites out there grateful to have been fed their daily outrage.

Pork-Buster

Mark Halperin, on AC360: Yes, Halperin. He nails the McCain ploy.

HALPERIN: Stop the madness. I mean, this is, I think — with all due respect to the program’s focus on this and to what David just said — I think this is the press just absolutely playing into the McCain campaign’s crocodile tears. I wouldn’t —

COOPER: Crocodile tears?

HALPERIN: Yeah. They don’t think this is sexist.

COOPER: They know exactly what it is.

HALPERIN: They know exactly what he was saying. It’s an expression. And this is a victory for the McCain campaign, in the sense that, every day, they can make this a pig fight in the mud. It’s good for them for them because it’s reducing Barack Obama’s message even more.

But I think this is a low point in the day in his — and one of the low days of our collective coverage of this campaign. To make even — to spend even a minute —

Chuck Todd, MSNBC: Calls it the shiny metal object it is. 

Ari Melber, Washington Indy:  Contextualizes the bogus claim in the false cry of sexism, though doesn’t contextualize the attempt to distract the press.

Kosher:

Marc Ambinder, Atlantic: A solid dismissal of the claim that Obama called Palin a pig.

Jake Tapper, ABC: Jake’s coverage of this has evolved over time–his first, pre-Swift impression was to connect Obama’s comment and Palin. But as time went on–and as he laid out Swift’s ridiculous performance in great detail, he ultimately judged it to be "full of half-truths and statements that weren’t true at all."

Mike Huckabee, Fox: Hannity attempts to co-opt him, Huckabee refuses.

First Read, MSNBC: Hidden within a description of both sides’ claims the piece includes the judgment, "it’s pretty clear that the "lipstick" remark wasn’t directed to Palin."

Hamlet

Kornblut and Shear, WaPo: Yes, they do point out that three women reporters on the conference call last night thought this was bullshit and the headline emphasizes that Obama was talking about McCain’s policies, but they still ultimately present this as an undecided issue.

AdNags: Notes that Obama’s claim came nowhere near a reference to Palin, but he still goes on to present both sides dutifully.

Shep Smith on Fox News Radio (via email from Mike Stark):

Shep Smith:  "Remember this?"
‘What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?  Lipstick’. 
Shep smith:  "Here’s Barack Obama yesterday."
‘you can put lipstick on a pig.  It’s still a pig.’ 
Shep Smith: The John McCain campaign is demanding an apology.  The Obama campaign claims that it’s a common phrase."

Reston and Nicholas, LAT:  The high point of this is that they note Huckabee thinks this is bull, but they don’t do any thinking themselves.

CNN: A classic Hamlet story.

Ben Smith, Politico: Smith started by relying on telepathy–or some secret means to interpret the thoughts of those at a rally he didn’t attend. But then he came back to give both sides.

Nedra Pickler: To the Pickler’s credit, at least this time she did give both sides, though the headline here sides with the McCain camp.

"A wonderful, magical animal"

Byron and K-Lo, The Corner:  Both note the skepticism of the reporters on the conference call though they do lay out Swift’s claims. (Victor Davis Hanson seems to be the only Corner writer who buys this shit.)

Foon Rhee, BoGlo: Nods to an appearance of objectivity, but ultimately offers up the entire story as a soap box for Massachusetts’ former governor.

Amy Chozick, WSJ: Includes both sides, but then somehow still concludes the statement was a play on Palin.

Pool Boy and Mike Allen: By putting the piggy lipstick claim in an article about "sharpened attacks" on Palin, Pool Boy and Mike Allen prove they haven’t lost their solicitous ways.

Chris Cilliza, WaPo: "It seems hard — if not impossible — to believe that Obama intended to equate Palin and a pig" but it doesn’t matter because "perception often matters more than reality."

Bought the Farm

Sean Hannity, Fox:  Attempts to co-opt Huckabee in his celebration of outrage; fails.

Carol Platt Liebau, Town Hall. This one’s almost worth reading for the claim that Obama–and not the crazy guy who already riled up the Russians in Georgia–might incite Putin to invade Europe.

Then observe this chronology.

Early today, John Fund wrote a WSJ op-ed claiming the DNC had "airdropped a mini-army of 30 lawyers, investigators and opposition researchers into Anchorage" to do oppo research. The DNC responded that this was a "flat-out absolute fabrication." Nevertheless, purportedly in response to this secret mini-army of oppo researchers, McCain’s campaign introduced a "Palin truth squad," featuring a mini-army of B-League Republican women to protect their precious Sarah Palin from evil falsehoods.

Problem is, the very first "falsehood" they tried to "rebut" is not, in fact, a falsehood at all. 

All: Please join us at 7:00pm ET for a conference call with Gov. Jane Swift, Chair of the Palin Truth Squad, to discuss Barack Obama’s "lipstick on a pig" comments today in Lebanon, VA. 

Rather, it is a completely manufactured smear, the McCain campaign claiming that when Barack Obama said of John McCain’s claim to be a maverick that  "you can’t put lipstick on a pig:"

Obama poked fun of McCain and Palin’s new "change" mantra.

"You can put lipstick on a pig," he said as the crowd cheered. "It’s still a pig."

"You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change.  It’s still gonna stink."

Of which the McCain campaign’s new "truth squad" claimed Obama was calling Sarah Palin, self-described pitbull in lipstick, a pig.

Christy’s got a run-down of how frequently people like Barack Obama and John McCain use this term–McCain even used it of Hillary Clinton’s health care plan (I understand Hillary’s been known to wear lipstick, too).

And though he propagates the suggestion that listeners might tie Obama’s comment to Palin, Jake Tapper has an otherwise damning descripton of former MA Governor Jane Swift’s pathetic attempt to spin this as an attack on Palin.

 And interestingly, the Truth Squad call was full of half-truths and statements that weren’t true at all.

Speaking on behalf of the McCain campaign, former Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift tonight flatly stated that Obama had called Palin a pig.

"[T]he formation of the Palin Truth Squad couldn’t have happened too soon, as we saw when Sen. Obama in Lebanon, Va., this evening uttered what I can only deem to be disgraceful comments comparing our vice presidential nominee Gov. Palin to a pig," Swift said.

"Sen. Obama owes Gov. Palin an apology," she said.

Asked why she was so confident Obama was "comparing" Palin to a pig, she said Palin was the only one of the four candidates on both parties’ tickets who wears lipstick.

"She is the only one of the four candidates for president, or the only vice presidential candidate who wears lipstick," Swift said. "I mean, it seemed to me a very gendered comment."

But, Swift added, if "as part of his apology Sen. Obama wants to say, no, he was calling Sen. McCain — who is a true hero in our country — a pig, then I suppose we could wait en masse for an apology to that, as well."

It was pointed out to Swift that, after the line about the pig, Obama had said, "You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called ‘change,’ it’s still gonna stink after eight years."

Swift then suggested that Obama was calling McCain a fish.

It continues on, with Jane Swift and her entire menagerie of imagined insults. Really. It’s that stupid.

Nevertheless, McCain’s campaign no doubt believe they can have Jane Swift repeatedly summon her best imitation of outrage and use it to distract reporters from the stories about Governor Palin’s lies.

And they may be right–tune in tomorrow for an inventory of how reporters respond to McCain’s pathetic ploy. 

But understand what is going on here. The McCain campaign has staked everything on Sarah Palin and their totally revamped campaign to run as the Maverick reform team. But that’s not going to work if the press continues to call bullshit on her bridge claims–and now her pig claims.

If Sarah Palin is shown to be what she is, a fan of pork and a seemingly gleeful liar, McCain has no campaign left.  And that’s why they’ve doubled down on their lies.

Brandon Friedman has a critical picture of how the head of Alaska’s National Guard flip-flopped on his opinion about Sarah Palin just as she was handing him an extra star. Apparently, her most significant act as Commander-in-Chief of the Alaska National Guard, thus far, is buying off a guy who then went on to shill for her.

But there’s actually more to the story–and it shows that, even according to this now-promoted shill, Sarah Palin has failed in the area where he most relies on her help, recruiting new members of the National Guard.

Here’s what Campbell had to say in his interview for the September 3 BoGlo story about Palin’s role in recruiting:

About 75 percent of the Guard’s budget, he said, is the purview of the National Guard Bureau in Washington, which is responsible for ensuring the Guard is prepared to be called up by the president in a time of war. Her primary role, he said, is in recruiting National Guard volunteers.

Campbell said he has met with Palin about once a month, but communicates with her by phone and email more frequently. Earlier this week, he noted, she ordered the Air National Guard to fly a planeload of supplies to hurricane victims in the Gulf Coast

"She is very much engaged in what we are doing and she asks a lot of questions," Campbell said. "Maybe not the most engaged, but definitely engaged.

She is very much involved in ensuring that I am recruiting enough people." [my emphasis]

That is, Sarah Palin’s primary role as Commander-in-Chief is ensuring the Alaska National Guard meets its recruiting targets.

But measured on those terms, Palin is a failure. That’s because Alaska has the worst recruiting record of all 50 states.

The Alaska National Guard, which Republicans are pointing to as an important national-security credential for vice presidential choice Sarah Palin, has personnel shortages that make its aviation units the most poorly staffed in the nation.

Just six months ago, Air Force Maj. Gen. Craig Campbell, the Alaska Guard’s top officer, warned in an internal memo that "missions are at risk." The lack of qualified airmen, Campbell said, "has reached a crisis level." [my emphasis]

Now, maybe when Campbell spoke of Palin’s great support for recruiting last week, he was describing a big turnaround in the state’s paltry recruiting. Except that, even though recruiting has improved of late, it’s still the worst in the nation.

According to the National Guard Bureau, the AKANG has the lowest personnel end strength in the nation. At just 84% assigned strength, the AKANG is one of only nine states currently below 90%. You will notice that since the letter was implemented in March of this year, the AKANG has increased from 81%.

And it sounds like it’s about to get worse. You see, those boosts in recruiting came about partly by withholding promotions if officers weren’t making sufficient effort to  recruit new Guardsmen. Yet the men and women in the AKANG just saw Campbell accept a promotion while all of their promotions are being held off because of a claimed "leadership deficiency" in the Guard–and at least one of them is pissed.

Craig Campbell, the Commissioner of DMVA and the Adjutant General of Alaska made a policy that there would be no Alaska Air National Guard promotions to Colonel, Lieutenant Colonel or Chief Master Sergeant without his personal approval.

The intent is to "motivate" these senior leaders to recruit more new people into the ANG. This policy has frozen the advancement of some very deserving individuals who have already earned the right to be promoted. As the Adjutant General, he has the right to institute any plan he wishes. This edict was tolerated by our loyal Guardsmen until the hypocrisy became overwhelming.

Evidently, General Campbell is receiving an unprecedented and undeserved promotion to three-star rank on Sept 7.

[snip]

General Campbell’s promotion will be a "state" promotion. He will be a three-star general only while on State business. In a very rank-conscious environment, this distinction will not be lost on the other Flag Officers. He will look the part of a three-star general but will not be regarded as one by the very people he needs to work with and influence.

This promotion will only benefit General Campbell who will trumpet his new rank. It will not be help further the cause of the Alaska National Guard or its loyal and now outraged members.

No one can be promoted to the top ranks because of perceived leadership deficiencies but even with his obvious leadership flaws, he has no reluctance whatsoever to accept a cosmetic promotion.

This is the state of Palin’s celebrated tenure as Alaska’s Commander-in-Chief: the worst record in the country on her primary task in the role.

By now you’ve heard of Sarah Palin’s brilliant way of easing tensions between family and career: she has billed Alaska for her girls to travel to her official events (Jane hits it here and Christy here).

In separate filings, the state was billed about $25,000 for Palin’s daughters’ expenses and $19,000 for her husband’s.

Flights topped the list for the most expensive items, and the daughter whose bill was the highest was Piper, 7, whose flights cost nearly $11,000, while Willow, 14, claimed about $6,000 and Bristol, 17, accounted for about $3,400.

One event was in New York City in October 2007, when Bristol accompanied the governor to Newsweek’s third annual Women and Leadership Conference, toured the New York Stock Exchange and met local officials and business executives. The state paid for three nights in a $707-a-day hotel room.

Think about it! If women everywhere just billed their employers for lugging their kids on business trips, it would strengthen families and make it easier for women to sustain vibrant careers. And I’m sure the corporations picking up the tab won’t mind about the cost, given the way it would strengthen families …

But that’s not the most interesting aspect of today’s Palin scandal du jour, IMO. I’m more interested in the way that Palin’s actions have effected a policy change that the Alaska Independence Party–those loony secessionists her husband was officially affiliated with not so long ago–has been pushing for some time.

Along with wanting to separate from America, you see, the AIP has long supported efforts to move the state capitol from Juneau to some place more central–some place like the Mat-Su Valley (Palin’s home) or Anchorage. And that’s what Palin has effectively done–at least in her role as Governor.

Palin’s Support for Moving the Capitol

As Governor, Palin’s first purportedly anti-Juneau act came when she took the oath–it in Fairbanks, not Juneau. Then, she told her Commmissioners they didn’t have to live in Juneau.

But overall in the last few months she’s seen less of Palin, who’s moved most of her operations up to Anchorage, the biggest city in Alaska and a place much friendlier to the sort of conservative pro-business pro-drilling stance that’s marked her tenure as governor. “She had started off by telling her Commissioners that none of them had to live in Juneau, which makes Juneauites nervous. We’re always convinced that they’re going to try and move the State Capitol again.”

In fact, when Palin called a special legislative session earlier this year to push through her pipeline plan, she wasn’t in Juneau that much.

Palin has spent little time in Juneau, rarely coming to the state capital except when the Legislature was in session, and sometimes not even then.

During a recent special session called by Palin herself, she faced criticism from several legislators for not showing up personally to push for her agenda.

Someone at the Capitol even printed up buttons asking "Where’s Sarah?"

But that’s just Sarah and her top aides–the Executive–that have effectively been working outside of Juneau.

She has also said she would not veto an ongoing attempt to move the legislature out of Juneau–even though the measure would bypass a measure passed in 1994 that gives Alaskan voters a say in whether the capitol will move or not. 

It seems that Governor Palin’s a pretty big fan of moving out of Juneau–or at least not being in Juneau.

Subsidies for an Expensive Policy

But that’s what today’s article is so interesting to me. Her per diem charges for being in Wasilla and commuting down to Anchorage effectively require the citizens of Alaska to subsidize a de facto move of the executive branch outside of Juneau.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has billed taxpayers for 312 nights spent in her own home during her first 19 months in office, charging a "per diem" allowance intended to cover meals and incidental expenses while traveling on state business. 

Sarah Palin has billed Alaska’s taxpayers for an executive that has worked in Wasilla for 312 out of the 645 days she has been governor. 

The AIP and Palin and Moving the Capitol

What makes this still more interesting is where Palin first got started in efforts to move the capitol–to a 2002 effort championed by the AIP to move the capitol to Palin’s own Mat-Su borough.

The chairman of the Alaskan Independence Party and two other sponsors of an initiative to move legislative sessions out of Juneau are one step closer to putting the question on the state ballot.

The group on Friday filed an application with the lieutenant governor¹s office for an initiative petition. If the state approves the application and the group collects about 29,000 signatures, voters will decide whether to move sessions to the Matanuska-Susistna Borough near Anchorage.

That’s not to say Palin supported it because the secessionists did–after all, her town of Wasilla stood to benefit if it could land the capitol. But it was a connection the AIP used to celebrate openly with the picture (above) of Palin signing their petition, which until recently was on the AIP’s own photo gallery.

I’ll leave it to the Alaska taxpayers to decide whether it makes sense to move their capitol to Anchorage. It surely offers some benefits, like road transportation for a significant proportion of the population and easy access to oil lobbyists (heh).

But for her own purposes, Sarah Palin has already largely decided that issue.  And billed the taxpayers accordingly.

So I was musing today that someone better keep count of all of Sarah Palin’s lies. And just as I was musing thusly, I learned that ThinkProgress is already keeping track, at least of the lie that even Howie Kurtz calls a whopper, the Bridge to Nowhere lie.

Good thing they jumped on this count: the McCain campaign is already up to 19 different re-tellings of the Bridge to Nowhere lie. These numbers are going to pile up.

Here’s where they’re keeping track–so if you spy the lie, make sure they’ve caught it. It also lists the 9 different times (as of Monday at 6 PM) a neutral source has debunked the lie.

Update: link to TP’s tracking document fixed.

It’s a tough concept, I know, one that Marc Ambinder either can’t–or won’t–understand. But let’s see if you all, in the comments, can help Ambinder out.

What’s the difference between this:

technically true, but functionally false

And this:

repeated, blatant lies

Or this: 

A serial liar

Or this:

A lying liar

Or this:

Completely divorced from reality

Go ahead–explain the difference to Ambinder!

Because Ambinder is cross that Matt Yglesias pointed out that he, Ambinder, has a role in whether people understand that Sarah Palin and John McCain made a claim that was "technically true, but functionally false" or whether they know that McCain has rolled out an entire campaign strategy built on repeated and shameless lies. It’s all just that "a small but significant fraction of the electorate seems astonishingly inured to misleading charges and negative attacks," according to Ambinder, it has nothing to do with the flaccidity of the press, because, after all, "the press has pointed out the Bridge to Nowhere exagerration ever since it was uncovered." No word on whether he finds McCain and Palin’s related claim that Palin–whose own projects McCain once singled out on his objectionable pork lists, whose own state still leads the country in per capita earmarks–is a great opponent of earmarks is just "technically true but functionally false, or whether it’s a cynical lie. No word on whether Palin’s clear fondness for the pork she claims to oppose undercuts the spin that she’s a maverick. No word on when the McCain campaign’s repeated insistence on the Bridge to Nowhere myth–or for that matter, its repeated, documented lies about Obama’s tax plan–becomes a story.

Because at some point, McCain’s cynical strategy to lie his way to victory threatens the entire principle of the objective press. If McCain can tell lies so brazen they’d make even Dick Cheney blush, and if the press does no more than simply correct them, once, quietly, politely, euphemistically, without noting that he and Palin repeat them in spite of all objective evidence, then the whole principle of objective truth has been replaced by the rule that whatever assertion gets repeated the most persistently will become "truth."

Journalists often say their job is to tell the truth. But Marc Ambinder, at least, doesn’t seem phased that Rick Davis and Steve Schmidt have declared open season (no doubt aerial hunting season) on that very principle.

At some point, McCain’s decision to run a campaign targeted against the very notion of objective truth–and those who try to expose it–needs to become the story. 

Update: Here’s Jamison Foser on the same topic.

A Court in the UK just convicted three men it had charged with plotting to make bombs from bottles of liquid and explode them on planes flying over the Atlantic.

Three Britons were found guilty on Monday of plotting to kill people using homemade liquid bombs, but a jury failed to agree that they intended to blow up transatlantic airliners.

After a five-month trial, the jury found Abdulla Ahmed Ali, Assad Sarwar and Tanvir Hussain guilty of conspiring to kill "persons unknown" but were not convinced by the prosecution’s case that they planned to target aircraft leaving London’s Heathrow airport headed for North America.

But it failed to convict a majority of the eight men it had charged.

The jury failed to reach a verdict in the case of four other defendants and an eighth was cleared on all counts. 

We’ll never know, but there’s a decent likelihood British officials could have convicted all the suspects had Bush and Cheney not prematurely trumped up these plans into a terror scare right before the 2006 elections.  As Ron Suskind described, Bush and Cheney pushed the Pakistanis to break this, in spite of demands from the UK that the investigators allow their work to continue to fruition.

NPR: I want to talk just a little about this fascinating episode you describe in the summer of 2006, when President Bush is very anxious about some intelligence briefings that he is getting from the British. What are they telling him?

SUSKIND: In late July of 2006, the British are moving forward on a mission they’ve been–an investigation they’ve been at for a year at that point, where they’ve got a group of "plotters," so-called, in the London area that they’ve been tracking…Bush gets this briefing at the end of July of 2006, and he’s very agitated. When Blair comes at the end of the month, they talk about it and he says, "Look, I want this thing, this trap snapped shut immediately." Blair’s like, "Well, look, be patient here. What we do in Britain"–Blair describes, and this is something well known to Bush–"is we try to be more patient so they move a bit forward. These guys are not going to breathe without us knowing it. We’ve got them all mapped out so that we can get actual hard evidence, and then prosecute them in public courts of law and get real prosecutions and long prison terms"…

Well, Bush doesn’t get the answer he wants, which is "snap the trap shut." And the reason he wants that is because he’s getting all sorts of pressure from Republicans in Congress that his ratings are down. These are the worst ratings for a sitting president at this point in his second term, and they’re just wild-eyed about the coming midterm elections. Well, Bush expresses his dissatisfaction to Cheney as to the Blair meeting, and Cheney moves forward.

NPR: So you got the British saying, "Let’s carefully build our case. Let’s get more intelligence." Bush wants an arrest and a political win. What does he do?

SUSKIND: Absolutely. What happens is that then, oh, a few days later, the CIA operations chief–which is really a senior guy. He’s up there in the one, two, three spots at CIA, guy named Jose Rodriguez ends up slipping quietly into Islamabad, Pakistan, and he meets secretly with the ISI, which is the Pakistani intelligence service. And suddenly a guy in Pakistan named Rashid Rauf, who’s kind of the contact of the British plotters in Pakistan, gets arrested. This, of course, as anyone could expect, triggers a reaction in London, a lot of scurrying. And the Brits have to run through the night wild-eyed and basically round up 25 or 30 people. It’s quite a frenzy. The British are livid about this. They talk to the Americans. The Americans kind of shrug, "Who knows? You know, ISI picked up Rashid Rauf."

DAVIES: So the British did not even get a heads-up from the United States that this arrest was going to happen?

SUSKIND: Did not get a heads-up. In fact, the whole point was to mislead the British…The British did not know about it, frankly, until I reported it in the book…

As Suskind describes in his book, 

The British model is, after all, to be patient, gather sufficient evidence to try terror suspects in open court, and get long prison terms, treating it all as a criminal matter rather than a historic–and terrorist-glamorizing–clash of power and ideology. As for Rashid Rauf, the British had even more specific plans. He was wanted for murder in the UK. The Brits were preparing a case, for the Pakistani police to arrest him, and have him extradited to England for trial, just like any murderer on the lam. Instead, he gets picked up by the notorious ISI, where he’ll be either tortured or feted–depending on the ISI’s complicated views of teh matter–and rendered unsuitable for public trial in the UK or anywhere else.

His arrest lights a fuse that will swiftly implode their entire investigation.

[snip]

British police slip into high gear. They race across metropolitan London, rounding up more than twenty suspects in a few hours, shutting down a yearlong operation in what can only be called a frenzy. The most knowledgeable British anti-terrorism officials are the most outraged. Before dawn breaks in the UK, they’re already assessing the damage from what one calls a "forced, foolish hastiness."

That frenzied attempt to salvage aspects of their investigation–caused by Bush’s desire for an election season stunt–led way to today’s convictions, certainly. But it also almost certainly led to an insufficient case against at least four or five suspected terrorists, not to mention the men the Brits didn’t charge.

But Bush and Cheney don’t care. The GWOT for them is one rolling press conference, not a serious pursuit to be conducted as if the outcome–and not the media buzz–mattered.

The Hill reports that, rather than forcing John McCain and a lot of endangered Republican incumbents to vote againt children’s healthcare again, Democrats in Congress are going to work on an energy bill that will include some allowance for drilling.

House Democrats are ready to propose an expansion of offshore drilling as part of a broader energy bill  they plan to introduce this month, according to a top Democrat.

Democratic Caucus Vice Chairman John Larson (Conn.) said the majority is prepared to back “responsible” offshore drilling through a bill that could be brought to the floor as early as next week.

[snip]

“We will consider responsibly opening portions of the Outer Continental Shelf for drilling while demanding that Big Oil companies use the leases they have already been issued or return them to the public,” Larson said Saturday in the Democratic response to the President’s radio address.

Larson said the legislation will also seek to curb excessive oil market speculation and call for a reinvestment of government royalties into alternative energy technology.

This is not actually news. When Obama said he would reluctantly accept more drilling as part of a package that included a lot of other, smarter energy policies, it became clear the party would follow his lead.

And, if it is done well, it might actually be brilliant jujitsu. If the bill were to define "responsible" by requiring that states agree to the drilling and by demanding that the drilling actually look like it would do some good, it would result in very little new drilling at all–because drilling is, from a policy standpoint, not "responsible." And a package could take the Republicans’ most successful (arguably, their only) policy recommendation, drilling, off the table for the election.

Of course, that all assumes this would be done well…

Meanwhile, in Alaska, the Caribou Barbie is trying to pull of her own energy jujitsu, though it’s not yet clear what that jujitsu might entail. Andrew Halcro reports that Governor Palin is trying to get the oil companies onto a conference call this week, but it’s not yet clear why she wants to talk. 

Governor Sarah Palin has requested a conference call this week with the CEO’s of the major oil companies playing a role in the potential development of Alaska’s natural gas pipeline.

The requested participants include Tony Hayward from BP, James Mulva from ConocoPhillips, Rex Tillerson from Exxon along with others. According to my source, no one knows exactly what the purpose of the call is, but some have never the less speculated.

Last week in her address to the nation, Palin stepped far over the line of truthiness (thanks Steven Colbert) when she told the country, "I fought to bring about the largest private-sector infrastructure project in North American history. And when that deal was struck, we began a nearly forty billion dollar natural gas pipeline to help lead America to energy independence."

Halcro lists the following possible reasons she’s requesting the call:

• She has realized she actually has to deliver on the promise she made in her acceptance speech–so she has finally decided to make nice with the oil companies and start negotiating terms for the natural gas project that will be economically viable for the oil companies.
• She wants to persuade the oil companies to stop referring to the massive new taxes she levied against them as a "windfall profits tax" (which of course Democrats support but McCain and the Republicans oppose strongly).
• She has realized she has to at least be speaking to oil company executives if she wants to claim to be an energy expert–so she has decided to play nice to achieve, at least, some dialogue.
• She wants to publicly browbeat the oil companies again, to bolster the McCain campaign’s claim to being assholes mavericks.

Mind you, that is all speculation from Halcro, not verified facts.

Now, Sarah Palin may be utterly inexperienced in most things that pertain to being a Vice President; she may be a more interesting subject for stories about her false maverickyness, her love of pork, and her lying. But she is definitely in a position to offer Republicans a story to tell about energy plans. We would do well to consider both these developments–Congress’ negotiation of an energy package and Palin’s attempts to do who knows what with the oil companies in AK–as two skirmishes in the battle over who gets to claim their party has a real plan to solve the current energy pinch. 

This may be one of the policy issues that could decide this election–whether one or both of these sides successfully pulls of their jujitsu. I say "may," because who knows whether it will remain the one policy issue on which Republicans outpoll Democrats, what with the price of a barrel of oil down to $107 but with OPEC threatening to cut production. But both sides are treating it as the one policy issue that one or another side might be able to show real progress on between now and the election.

Photo by kristen.

Boy, I thought it’d be hard to imagine an administration cozier with AT&T than George Bush’s–particularly since Bush replaced both Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett with AT&T lobbyist Ed Gillespie. But apparently, Rick Davis’ lobbying firm has been shacking up with AT&T:

So just how close are the ties between the McCain camp and AT&T? Well, AT&T shares a luxury skybox with Davis, Manafort Inc. at Nationals Stadium, which opened earlier this year and is home to the city’s baseball team. I say it “appears” because two sources, including one person who has been in the skybox, told me about the AT&T/Davis, Manafort luxury suite, but none of the relevant parties will comment on the matter. AT&T’s Washington lobbying office has not returned phone calls about the suite, nor has Davis, Manafort. Repeated attempts to seek comment from the McCain campaign have also been unsuccessful. Chartese Burnett, a spokeswoman for the Nationals, said the team does not disclose the holders of the luxury suites because of “privacy concerns.” But she did tell me that there are 66 suites at the stadium, which rent for between $160,000 and $400,000 per year.

There’d be nothing illegal about a shared arrangement. It would simply reflect the seamless web that exists between McCain and the lobbyists and special interests groups that he likes to criticize while out on the trail campaigning as a “maverick” and “change agent.” I just hope they get better iPhone service than I do.

 Now, for the record, Rick Davis thinks it’s "chasing ghosts" to go after the McCain team’s intimacy with big lobbyists.

WALLACE: Well, as a matter of personal privilege, I’m going to give you the opportunity to respond to David Axelrod, who said, you know, for all this talk about wait till we come in and shake the lobbyists, but the campaign team of McCain is filled with lobbyists or, in your case, former lobbyists. How do you respond?

DAVIS: Oh, I think that, you know, it’s just more of the same from David Axelrod. I mean, they’ve been running against ghosts of the past all along. And I think it just shows that they don’t really have anything to talk about.

If they want to run against Rick Davis or our campaign staff, let them. I think it’s hilarious. I think it’s a wonderful distraction from the real issues that we’re trying to debate.

It’s a classic example of a campaign that doesn’t have anything else to say, so they pick on staff.

But then, Davis couldn’t and didn’t actually refute Axelrod’s point: that the McCain campaign is infested with lobbyists. Also, I suspect Davis isn’t going to get as much mileage complaining that Obama is "picking on" staff as he has from complaining that Obama or the press are "picking on" poor Sarah Palin.

I’m mostly just curious how they "share" this box. Do they use it together, with Davis’ lobbyists entertaining clients on AT&T’s dime? Do they have a social secretary dedicated to ironing out timing conflicts? And have any of McCain’s big donors discovered an open door to this box?