Tuesday, November 20, 2007

McClellan points finger at President Bush
and Karl Rove

By: Mike Allen
Nov 20, 2007 01:05 PM EST

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan names names in a caustic passage from a forthcoming memoir that accuses President Bush, Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney of being "involved" in his giving the press false information about the CIA leak case.

McClellan’s publisher released three paragraphs from the book “WHAT HAPPENED: Inside the Bush White House and What’s Wrong With Washington.”

The excerpts give no details about the alleged involvement of the president or vice president.

But McClellan lists five top officials as having allowed him inadvertently to mislead the public.

“I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the seniormost aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby,” McClellan wrote.

“There was one problem. It was not true.”

McClellan then absolves himself and makes an inflammatory — and potentially lucrative for his publisher — charge.

“I had unknowingly passed along false information,” McClellan wrote.

“And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff and the president himself."

McClellan says he was in that position because he trusted the president: "The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”

In recent conversations and in his many public speaking engagements, McClellan has made it clear he retains great affection for the president.

But White House sources have long said that Rove and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff, allowed McClellan to suggest day after day that they had no involvement in the publication of the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Later testimony showed that they did, although neither was the original source of the leak.

A federal jury found Libby guilty of on perjury and obstruction charges, and Bush later commuted his 30-month sentence.

In an appearance on CNN’s “Larry King Live” in March, the day Libby was found guilty, McClellan said Bush did not originally know about the involvement by his aides.

McClellan told King: “I spoke with those individuals, … and those individuals assured me they were not involved in this. … said what I believed to be true at the time. It was also what the president believed to be true at the time based on assurances that we were both given. Knowing what I know today, I would have never said that back then.”

Friends say McClellan was privately bitter and hurt.

He and Rove had come to Washington from Texas together.

“Scottie,” as Bush called him, had worked in the Texas governor’s office, making him one of the president’s longest serving aides.

McClellan, an Austin native, was White House press secretary from 2003 to 2006. Before that, he was traveling press secretary for the Bush-Cheney campaign of 2000.

When McClellan announced his resignation in April 2006, he and the president embraced during a tearful appearance on the South Lawn.

Bush said: “I thought he handled his assignment with class, integrity. ... One of these days he and I are going to be rocking on chairs in Texas, talking about the good old days and his time as the press secretary. And I can assure you I will feel the same way then that I feel now, that I can say to Scott, 'Job well done.'”

Now they’ll have even more to talk about.

The 400-page hardcover, with a price of $27.95, is set for publication April 21.


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"Kill the Cable!"
The Ultimate Oil Leak

"Kill the cable, kill the cable," shouted the security guard as he burst through the double doors into the media room at the Intercontinental Hotel in Riyadh, followed by Saudi police.

It was too late.

A private meeting of Opec leaders, gathered this weekend in Riyadh for the cartel's third meeting in its 47-year history, had just been broadcast to the world's media for more than half an hour after a technician had mistakenly plugged the TV feed into the wrong socket. The facade of unity that the cartel so carefully cultivates to a world spooked by soaring oil prices was shattered.

Sometimes, such innocent mistakes can have far-reaching economic and political consequences. Commodity and currency traders said this weekend that oil prices would surge again on Monday -- possibly breaking the $101 per barrel record set in the late 1970s -- while the already battered dollar would fall further on the back of the unintentional broadcast.

On Friday night, during what the participants thought were private talks, Venezuela's Oil Minister Venezuela Rafael Ramirez and his Iranian counterpart Gholamhossein Nozari, argued that pricing -- and selling -- oil using the crippled dollar was damaging the cartel.

They said Opec should formally express its concern about the weakness of the dollar when the cartel makes its official declaration at the close of the summit today. But the Saudis, the world's largest oil producers and de facto head of Opec, vetoed the proposal. Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi Foreign Minister, warned that even the mere mention to journalists of the fact that leaders were discussing the weak dollar would cause the US currency to plummet.

Unfortunately his words and those of everyone at the meeting were being broadcast via a live television feed to a group of astonished reporters. "I couldn't believe it," said one who was there. "When I realised they didn't know they were being broadcast live, I frantically started taking notes."


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Monday, November 19, 2007

ENVIRONMENT
'Final Warning To Humanity'

"[T]he world's scientists have spoken, clearly and in one voice," said U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, on the most recent report of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). After a rigorous multi-stage review process that includes 2,500 scientific expert reviewers, 800 contributing authors, and 450 lead authors representing 130 countries, the IPCC warns that "all countries" will be affected by climate change if carbon emissions continue to spiral.

By 2100, global average surface temperatures could rise by between 1.1 and 6.4 degrees celsius, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could lead to an eventual rise in sea levels of up to 1.40 meters.

With "strikingly" blunt language, the report reads like "a final warning to humanity," notes Time magazine. "What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment," declared IPCC chairman Dr. Rajendra Pachauri.

DEBATING WAYS TO BATTLE WARMING: This weekend, Grist and Living on Earth sponsored a presidential candidate forum to discuss ways to tackle climate change, in partnership with the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund, California LCVEF, Center for American Progress Action Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund, and the Presidential Forum on Renewable Energy.

The event was attended by Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), former senator John Edwards, and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH). "[R]educing oil dependence and global warming is the second most important issue among independent voters," states Daniel Weiss of the Center for American Progress.

With "little disagreement among them" on the urgency of climate change, Clinton and Edwards emphasized the need to reduce emissions by 80 percent by 2050, consistent with the goals of the IPCC, along with a mandatory cap on greenhouse emissions. Such plans to combat global warming can be undertaken with a very modest reduction in global annual GDP growth of 0.12 percent, notes Pachauri.

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Sunday, November 18, 2007

Yahoo Settles Lawsuit With Chinese Dissidents


Nov. 13, 2007 at 1:32pm Eastern by Barry Schwartz

Yahoo Settles With Chinese Dissidents from the Wall Street Journal reports Yahoo has settled the lawsuit brought to them over the two Chinese dissidents who were jailed illegally due to Yahoo handing over evidence to the Chinese government. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but we do know Yahoo has agreed to pay the legal fees of those who sued the company. More coverage is also coming out from other sources; see Techmeme for a full recap.

Yahoo's CEO and General Counsel were recently grilled by Congress over this case. Yahoo's executive vice president and general counsel, Callahan, also made a public apology to the families of the dissidents.

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