(Cross-posted at the Huffington Post and Firedoglake.)

Consider this an open letter to the reporters covering the Lewis "Scooter" Libby perjury/obstruction of justice trial, as well as the rest of the Washington, D.C. media.

I spent Monday through Thursday of last week in your midst in the media room of the E. Barrett Prettyman courthouse, watching the trial as a credentialed blogger (representing Firedoglake, the Huffington Post, and Daily Kos).  Contrary to stereotypes of bloggers "hating the media," I saw how hard you all worked, spending eight hours in the courtoom every day and then spending even more time reading exhibits and writing stories.  I also saw your diligence, cross-checking facts with one another and firing off nasty looks at anyone who inadvertently interfered with your ability to hear each second of testimony.

(Cross-posted from Needlenose.)

If you're not following emptywheel's live-blogging of the Scooter Libby trial at Firedoglake, you're missing bombshells being dropped. This is former White House spokesliar Ari Fleischer, being asked about his lunch with Libby on July 7, 2003 (I've clarified EW's lack of punctuation):

Prosecutor: Had you ever had lunch with Mr. Libby?

Fleischer: No, sir.

[. . .]

P: What word did Libby use when he described Wilson's wife?

F: I remember him saying she works at the CIA, at the Counterproliferation Division.

P: Did you know what it meant?

F: Not in specific, I don't know enough about CIA inner structure to know what it means.

P: Her name -- how did he describe her name?

F: I believe he said Valerie Plame.

I guess we should have known it was too good to last.  In recent weeks, prominent Democrats have begun to find their public voice on national security issues -- finally summoning up the courage to challenge Dubya on the issues of Iraq and terrorism.  But since Friday, they haven't been quite so feisty, as the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday morning:

A day after a Detroit judge said the president "blatantly disregarded" the Constitution when he authorized the domestic surveillance program, top Republicans issued a stream of memos discussing her ruling and released a new Web ad accusing Democrats of being against terrorist surveillance.

. . . Democratic leaders, by contrast, after issuing a few terse comments on Thursday, have fallen largely silent.

Our traffic isn't huge -- about 1,500 to 2,000 unique visitors a day -- but it's not nothing, either.  And we like to humor ourselves that we're kind of like a cult band, not wildly popular ourselves but with an elite and influential following.  (Hey, laugh if you want, but at least Anthony Shadid, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Washington Post, said he was a reader, so I can die happy.)

But I didn't really think that anyone was paying that much attention until this morning, when someone from CENTCOM submitted a comment on something I'd written just a couple of hours earlier.

-- The governing Shiite religious parties appear likely to come close to, or even duplicate, the roughly 50 percent of the vote they won in January.

-- The much-hyped slate of former U.S.-installed prime minister Iyad Allawi is doing poorly, getting only 14% of the vote in Baghad (thought to be one of its strongholds).

-- Ahmad Chalabi, running on his own after being kicked out of leaving the Shiite alliance, is doing even worse, with only 0.3 percent of the vote in Baghdad and Basra.

This may mean that Chalabi doesn't even get a seat in the legislature. See the extended copy for some added context on the voting.

Between Rep. Murtha's blockbuster speech yesterday and the recent admissions by John Kerry and John Edwards that their pro-war votes in 2002 were mistakes, it's clear that momentum for the U.S. to withdraw is snowballing.  The American public is coming around to the views of the Democratic base, and politicians are finally following.

Unfortunately, I think this is happening almost too easily -- and in a way that threatens Democratic prospects in the long run.  Although I don't see any reason to doubt Rep. Murtha's sincerity, it seems clear that prominent Dems like Kerry and Edwards are turning against the war now for the same reason they voted for it originally: they're caving in to political pressure.

As welcome as it is for them to admit their errors, there's little in their statements that reframes the Iraq debate to keep Republicans from winning again (in 2008 or afterward) by reviving the same old us-strong, Dems-weak stereotypes.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote at Needlenose about Operation Blue Roof, the FEMA program for putting blue tarps on hurricane-damaged roofs across the Gulf Coast ... at an outrageously inflated rate of 10 times the normal price.

It's not as popular a topic as writing about Valerie Plame, Judith Miller, or Karl Rove, but it obviously strikes a chord for some people -- every few days, someone finds the post through a Google search and adds a comment about their personal experience.

Anonymous Liberal caught an important passage in Sunday's Washington Post Plame article:

By early June, several weeks before Libby is said to have known Plame's name, the State Department had prepared a memo on the Niger case that contained information on Plame in a section marked "(S)" for secret.  Around that time, Libby knew about the trip's origins, though in an interview with The Washington Post at the time, he did not mention any role played by Wilson's wife.

Is the Post hinting--in some cryptic sort of way--that Libby may have perjured himself? This paragraph seems to indicate that Libby knew the story behind Wilson's trip in early June, well before his conversations with Judith Miller. Doesn't that contradict Libby's grand jury testimony, as reported by the Post on Friday?

The short answer: Yes.  See the extended text for details, and take the poll.

We don't know who he will indict (if anyone), or when.  And even if he indicts Karl Rove on Monday, the legal case will be drawn out and obscured by the GOP/media smoke-and-mirrors crowd.

Rather than wait to jump on a legal bandwagon, we should recognize the huge values issue sitting right in front of us.  

Last night, Josh Marshall sounded the alarm about Shrubya's apparent intent to rebuild his political capital by flooding the hurricane-damaged Gulf Coast region with money.  It's also clear what Rove/Bush's cynical strategy is -- as with the war against Iraq, the Bushites see the Katrina recovery as a purpose above questioning.  Besides, how can Democrats possibly argue against federal spending?

But wait a second.  Are they daring us to use the populist, anti-big government rhetoric they spent decades promoting to the level of conventional wisdom?  All I can say is: Go ahead. Make my day!

You can bet that as the rebuilding of New Orleans progresses, the city will have to get a restraining order to keep Dubya away -- that's how desperate he is to put his face all over the "good news" of recovery after being AWOL when Hurricane Katrina struck.

There's not much hope of preventing the Orwell Bush administration from generating its own counter-flood of stage-managed positive images. But we can try to short-circuit their attempt to overwrite people's memories by connecting the current PR-driven courtship to the abdication of responsibility that preceded it.

I think one phrase captures it well: The fair-weather President. Stick that in the public consciousnessness, so that whenever people see sunny images of Dubya with his sleeves rolled up, they remember that when the storm came rumbling through, he was nowhere to be found.  For example:

It's great that the president is showing his commitment to the reconstruction effort. But New Orleans deserved more than a fair-weather President. And America deserves more than a fair-weather President.

Out of all the Katrina retrospectives this morning, the Washington Post's day-by-day reconstruction is inadvertently amusing because it gives  Bushite officials extensive opportunities to lie explain how Shrubya really was concerned about and engaged by the developing catastrophe -- it's just that all this decisive involvement somehow was imperceptible to the world at large.

As you might imagine, the multiple leaps of imagination required by this revisionist narrative leave a few logical holes in their wake.  (Details in post linked above, or extended entry.)

Recent shootings of Iraqi civilians, allegedly involving the legion of U.S., British and other foreign security contractors operating in the country, are drawing increasing concern from Iraqi officials and U.S. commanders who say they undermine relations between foreign military forces and Iraqi civilians.

. . . "These guys run loose in this country and do stupid stuff. There's no authority over them, so you can't come down on them hard when they escalate force," said Brig. Gen. Karl R. Horst, deputy commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, which is responsible for security in and around Baghdad. "They shoot people, and someone else has to deal with the aftermath. It happens all over the place."

But despite the lengthy post and 110+ comments, the discussion managed to miss what seems to be new details about the State Dept. memo ... details passed on by Colin Powell and/or his top aides to point a finger at Rove et al.

Stirling seems to want to accuse Powell of collaborating with the other Bushites to out Plame, but I think Powell was actually was pissed off by being used as a conduit (kind of like the WMD thing in general), and is belatedly exacting his revenge.

His rough transcript (the comment in parentheses is his, I think):

as we have told the Iraqi people that we will work hard to achieve a constitution whish everybody agrees upon and today we reciuved the draft(....Allahu akbar...Allahu akbar) BUT there are still a couple of issues which need to be disscussed in the next three days. All involved will try to achive at least partial agreement on someof these issues. The draft has been recieved and the issues will be discussed. The Assembly will in the mean time work on the rferendun laws.

god bless all and we shall meet in the next three days to resolve alll the issues still to be discussed. Thank you

No explanation whether they've voted another extension or found some other loophole to "approve" an unfinished draft. (UPDATE: See the extended copy.)

Taken at face value, the story examines the conflicting accounts of why Joseph Wilson was sent to Niger in 2002 -- was it because his wife suggested him, or not?

Although the article doesn't make this point explicitly, I think Pincus is intentionally noting that the version of events Rove, Libby, and whoever were blabbing to reporters before Novak outed Valerie Plame matches the classified State Dept. memo they claim wasn't their source ... and no other known account of how Wilson's trip happened.

The statement released by NBC last year just says, "he did not know Ms. Plame's name or that she was a CIA operative" -- the same "I didn't know her name, and I didn't know she was undercover" line of defense that Karl Rove has been spinning out through his lawyer.

What if someone asks him directly on "Meet the Press" this Sunday, "Did you tell Scooter Libby that Joe Wilson's wife works for the CIA?" Will he get so flustered that he storms off the set just like Bob Novak did?

(Condensed from a post at Needlenose on this and other Plame mini-scoops.)

For those who don't know, Morris wrote a smear book called Partners in Power in 1996 that accused Bill Clinton of not just being a cocaine addict but being involved in a coke-smuggling ring ... not to mention every other recycled wingnut claim Morris could find.

If you read his Plame timeline, basically he's taking published reports and adding "with Rice's approval" or "Rice was briefed on this" at every opportunity.  It smells in a big way, and I think Kossacks will be sorry if they put too much stock in it.  I have a detailed post at Needlenose with excerpts of Gene Lyons' debunking of Partners in Power, plus a listing of dubious items in the Morris timeline.  The short version, though, is that we should stay far away from anything Morris writes.