How much does it cost to throw a party?

• How much does it cost to throw a party? - sm
  • Why don't they BYOB? - sbMT
    • Excellent idea - New Englander
      • Tell you what. - sm
    • Then we'd have to endure that "dignity of the office" slam - jj
  • Hmmm......(sm) - Just the big bad
    • Right on, JTBB. W's $40M makes O's $21M - pale by comparison.
  • What's the problem? - not tax dollars
    • Wrong - it's about the O, always has been - jm
    • why not put the money to better use - cj
      • Why not let them - (sm)
  • Halliburton had 8 years of - ditzil
  • Well, I h ave to jump in here - gourdpainter
  • Good question - Frankie Goes to Hollywood

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    Sunday 16 October 2005

    There hasn't been anything like it since Martha Stewart fended off questions about her stock-trading scandal by manically chopping cabbage on The Early Show on CBS. Last week the setting was Today on NBC, where the image of President Bush manically hammering nails at a Habitat for Humanity construction site on the Gulf Coast was juggled with the sight of him trying to duck Matt Lauer's questions about Karl Rove.

    As with Ms. Stewart, Mr. Bush's paroxysm of panic was must-see TV. The president was a blur of blinks, taps, jiggles, pivots and shifts, Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post. Asked repeatedly about Mr. Rove's serial appearances before a Washington grand jury, the jittery Mr. Bush, for once bereft of a script, improvised a passable impersonation of Norman Bates being quizzed by the detective in Psycho. Like Norman and Ms. Stewart, he stonewalled.

    That stonewall may start to crumble in a Washington courtroom this week or next. In a sense it already has. Now, as always, what matters most in this case is not whether Mr. Rove and Lewis Libby engaged in a petty conspiracy to seek revenge on a whistle-blower, Joseph Wilson, by unmasking his wife, Valerie, a covert C.I.A. officer. What makes Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation compelling, whatever its outcome, is its illumination of a conspiracy that was not at all petty: the one that took us on false premises into a reckless and wasteful war in Iraq. That conspiracy was instigated by Mr. Rove's boss, George W. Bush, and Mr. Libby's boss, Dick Cheney.

    Mr. Wilson and his wife were trashed to protect that larger plot. Because the personnel in both stories overlap, the bits and pieces we've learned about the leak inquiry over the past two years have gradually helped fill in the über-narrative about the war. Last week was no exception. Deep in a Wall Street Journal account of Judy Miller's grand jury appearance was this crucial sentence: Lawyers familiar with the investigation believe that at least part of the outcome likely hangs on the inner workings of what has been dubbed the White House Iraq Group.

    Very little has been written about the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG. Its inception in August 2002, seven months before the invasion of Iraq, was never announced. Only much later would a newspaper article or two mention it in passing, reporting that it had been set up by Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff. Its eight members included Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby, Condoleezza Rice and the spinmeisters Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin. Its mission: to market a war in Iraq.

    Of course, the official Bush history would have us believe that in August 2002 no decision had yet been made on that war. Dates bracketing the formation of WHIG tell us otherwise. On July 23, 2002 - a week or two before WHIG first convened in earnest - a British official told his peers, as recorded in the now famous Downing Street memo, that the Bush administration was ensuring that the intelligence and facts about Iraq's W.M.D.'s were being fixed around the policy of going to war. And on Sept. 6, 2002 - just a few weeks after WHIG first convened - Mr. Card alluded to his group's existence by telling Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times that there was a plan afoot to sell a war against Saddam Hussein: From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.

    The official introduction of that product began just two days later. On the Sunday talk shows of Sept. 8, Ms. Rice warned that we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud, and Mr. Cheney, who had already started the nuclear doomsday drumbeat in three August speeches, described Saddam as actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. The vice president cited as evidence a front-page article, later debunked, about supposedly nefarious aluminum tubes co-written by Judy Miller in that morning's Times. The national security journalist James Bamford, in A Pretext for War, writes that the article was all too perfectly timed to facilitate exactly the sort of propaganda coup that the White House Iraq Group had been set up to stage-manage.

    The administration's doomsday imagery was ratcheted up from that day on. As Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus of The Washington Post would determine in the first account of WHIG a full year later, the administration's escalation of nuclear rhetoric could be traced to the group's formation. Along with mushroom clouds, uranium was another favored image, the Post report noted, because anyone could see its connection to an atomic bomb. It appeared in a Bush radio address the weekend after the Rice-Cheney Sunday show blitz and would reach its apotheosis with the infamously fictional 16 words about uranium from Africa in Mr. Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address on the eve of war.

    Throughout those crucial seven months between the creation of WHIG and the start of the American invasion of Iraq, there were indications that evidence of a Saddam nuclear program was fraudulent or nonexistent. Joseph Wilson's C.I.A. mission to Niger, in which he failed to find any evidence to back up uranium claims, took place nearly a year before the president's 16 words. But the truth never mattered. The Bush-Cheney product rolled out by Card, Rove, Libby & Company had been bought by Congress, the press and the public. The intelligence and facts had been successfully fixed to sell the war, and any memory of Mr. Bush's errant 16 words melted away in Shock and Awe. When, months later, a national security official, Stephen Hadley, took responsibility for allowing the president to address the nation about mythical uranium, no one knew that Mr. Hadley, too, had been a member of WHIG.

    It was not until the war was supposedly over - with Mission Accomplished, in May 2003 - that Mr. Wilson started to add his voice to those who were disputing the administration's uranium hype. Members of WHIG had a compelling motive to shut him down. In contrast to other skeptics, like Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency (this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner), Mr. Wilson was an American diplomat; he had reported his findings in Niger to our own government. He was a dagger aimed at the heart of WHIG and its disinformation campaign. Exactly who tried to silence him and how is what Mr. Fitzgerald presumably will tell us.

    It's long been my hunch that the WHIG-ites were at their most brazen (and, in legal terms, reckless) during the many months that preceded the appointment of Mr. Fitzgerald as special counsel. When Mr. Rove was asked on camera by ABC News in September 2003 if he had any knowledge of the Valerie Wilson leak and said no, it was only hours before the Justice Department would open its first leak investigation. When Scott McClellan later declared that he had been personally assured by Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby that they were not involved with the leak, the case was still in the safe hands of the attorney general then, John Ashcroft, himself a three-time Rove client in past political campaigns. Though Mr. Rove may be known as Bush's brain, he wasn't smart enough to anticipate that Justice Department career employees would eventually pressure Mr. Ashcroft to recuse himself because of this conflict of interest, clearing the way for an outside prosecutor as independent as Mr. Fitzgerald.

    Bush's Brain is the title of James Moore and Wayne Slater's definitive account of Mr. Rove's political career. But Mr. Rove is less his boss's brain than another alliterative organ (or organs), that which provides testosterone. As we learn in Bush's Brain, bad things (usually character assassination) often happen to Bush foes, whether Ann Richards or John McCain. On such occasions, Mr. Bush stays compassionately above the fray while the ruthless Mr. Rove operates below the radar, always separated by a layer of operatives from any ill behavior that might implicate him. There is no crime, just a victim, Mr. Moore and Mr. Slater write of this repeated pattern.

    THIS modus operandi was foolproof, shielding the president as well as Mr. Rove from culpability, as long as it was about winning an election. The attack on Mr. Wilson, by contrast, has left them and the Cheney-Libby tag team vulnerable because it's about something far bigger: protecting the lies that took the country into what the Reagan administration National Security Agency director, Lt. Gen. William Odom, recently called the greatest strategic disaster in United States history.

    Whether or not Mr. Fitzgerald uncovers an indictable crime, there is once again a victim, but that victim is not Mr. or Mrs. Wilson; it's the nation. It is surely a joke of history that even as the White House sells this weekend's constitutional referendum as yet another victory for democracy in Iraq, we still don't know the whole story of how our own democracy was hijacked on the way to war.

cabbages and rotten eggs at the guy.  Where do you get the 'nads to stand up there and keep sellin' when the customers just ain't buyin'?  And whether he's one of the 'good ones' or not, he sounds just like every other politician, doesn't he?  'I've devoted my life to service.....You're mad.  I hear you and Washington hears you.'   Riiight!  I hope we don't lose our fury and momentum before next year.  A good out with the old/in with the new dustup in 2010 would have them shaking in their shoes for 2012. 

I heard that Perez gave her zero points for her answer.  If he was being at all fair, she would have gotten something for her answer; it was a good answer, and her opinion, but he didn't agree with it. 

She was in the lead before this question, so yes, I believe it did. 

else against the wall, may be it will stick.

Maybe we should acknowlege that whoever volunteers for the job has ulterior motives. 

What if we then select our candidates at random, like we do jurors for jury duty.  We select a slate of candidates that are average people with average lives, give them the chance to decline or get excused for good reason, then give them time to present a platform and vote on which one of them gets the office.  Derails the good old boy network completely.  We couldn't guarantee the new candidates wouldn't be greedy, but their greed would at least be less organized and not part of the sophisticated behind the scenes network that exists today.

out the tests for those firerighters who studied hard and earned those promotions and didn't get them merely because they were all white with one hispanic man.  To me...that is racism right there.  They didn't get the promotions because of their skin color.  Had they been a more motley crew of races, they would have gotten those promotions.  It is truly a sad day when hard work and studying doesn't benefit you because your skin color isn't that of a minority. 

I'm all for equal rights between the races and all of these firefighters were given the same studying materials and the same amount of time to study.  How can you take away those promotions from the people who studied hard and scored the highest merely because most of them are white? 

This doesn't present a very good opinion of this judge so far to me.  She also made a comment about how with her experience and her being a latino women, she could make better decisions than a white male.  Racism?  Hello?  If  a white man had said that he could make better decisions than a black man, woman, or latino.....OMG.....the race card would have been thrown out and that would have been the end of his career.  Why is it that minorities are allowed to say racist things and be racist and that is okay, but the moment a white person says something remotely racist.......that is the end of that person's career.  More double standards.

With all the hoop-lah about Obama "refusing" to submit to interview with Focks, seems McCain is throwing another temper tantrum (which I did see on CNN, but could not find to include in this post.  He cancelled his scheduled appearance on Larry King over what he considered to be an "over-the-top" inerview between Campbell Brown and Tucker Bounds. 

Here's a link to an article about the cancellation.  I could not get good audio on their link to the interview video, so I am providing this second link where I could:

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/09/02/mccain-cancel-cnn/

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/212194.php

Any comments from the gallery? 

Iraq = $333 million per day.  S-CHIP = $19 million per day.  Hmm, if we can "find" money for one, don't you think we can find money for the other.  Again, I ask, "What would Jesus do?"  What would the leaders of any religion recommend?  I think they would recommend taking care of our most innocent souls.

The cigarette tax would go a long way in covering the program, but I think our government could come up with money to fund the rest.