Looks like Bush’s lawyer-of-choice for the Plame Leak scandal has just the right kind of experience:

Mr. Sharp, who represented Gen. Richard V. Secord of the Air Force in the Iran-contra affair but is not widely known in Washington legal circles, could not be reached for comment late Wednesday.

David Corn on the gap between Bush’s rhetoric and reality in Afghanistan:

“The reports from Afghanistan, at least the ones I get, are very encouraging,” he said. “You know, we’ve got people who have been there last year and have been back this year [and they] report a different attitude. And they report people have got a sparkle in their eye. And women now all of a sudden no longer fear the future.” Sparkle in their eye? Does that information come from the sensitive intelligence reports Bush receives from the CIA? Bush should get out more–or, at least, read the newspapers (which he says he does not). The recent news from Afghanistan has been rather sparkle-free. Here’s a sampling.

Financial aid to Afghanistan has been paltry, despite Bush’s earlier promises. Measured per capita, financial assistance to Afghanistan has been lower than for Kosovo, Palestine, Haiti, and Rwanda, according to the Center on International Cooperation at New York University….Opium poppy production is dramatically on the rise, and poppy harvests are estimated to account for almost half of the gross domestic product…Attacks from the Taliban are up. Aid workers have been targeted, and nongovernmental organizations have pulled out of Afghanistan, slowing down the already slow reconstruction efforts. After five men who worked for the National Solidarity Programme, an NGO working southeast of Kabul, were killed, the group ended its work in 72 areas in the country…As for women’s rights, Amnesty International reports, “two years after the ending of the Taliban regime, the international community and the Afghan transitional administration, led by President Karzai, have proved unable to protect women. The risk of rape and sexual violence by members of armed factions and former combatants is still high. Forced marriages, particularly of girl children, and violence against women in the family are widespread in many areas.”…Recent talks between Karzai and warlords have raised the possibility of a power-sharing agreement between Karzai and these militia leaders that could undermine the democratic elections scheduled for September.

CIA Director George Tenet resigns for “personal reasons”:

Tenet’s resignation takes effect in mid-July, after which Deputy Director John McLaughlin will become the agency’s acting chief, Bush told reporters at the White House. Bush said that Tenet informed him of his decision Wednesday night. Bush said Tenet had done “a superb job for the American people.”…He had faced heavy criticism over the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, and on the war in Iraq, in which pre-invasion U.S. estimates that Iraq was amassing stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction now appear to have been incorrect.

In April, the panel investigating the September 11 attacks criticized the intelligence community and faulted Tenet for not having a management strategy to battle terrorism before the 9/11 attacks. Tenet told the panel that enormous progress had been made since the attacks, but said that the intelligence community would need “another five years to have the kind of clandestine service our country needs.” In February, Tenet defended his agency’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s military capabilities and denied allegations that the intelligence community overplayed the potential threat that Saddam Hussein had chemical or biological weapons…Tenet took responsibility for a later-discredited line in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address that alleged that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Africa, saying the CIA had seen and approved the speech before it was delivered, and he took responsibility for the mistake.

I am just shocked, shocked, shocked – I mean, they seemed like such nice guys:

When a forest fire shut down a major transmission line into California, cutting power supplies and raising prices, Enron energy traders celebrated, CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales reports. “Burn, baby, burn. That’s a beautiful thing,” a trader sang about the massive fire. Four years after California’s disastrous experiment with energy deregulation, Enron energy traders can be heard – on audiotapes obtained by CBS News – gloating and praising each other as they helped bring on, and cash-in on, the Western power crisis. “He just f—s California,” says one Enron employee. “He steals money from California to the tune of about a million.”…The tapes, from Enron’s West Coast trading desk, also confirm what CBS reported years ago: that in secret deals with power producers, traders deliberately drove up prices by ordering power plants shut down.

Before the 2000 election, Enron employees pondered the possibilities of a Bush win. “It’d be great. I’d love to see Ken Lay Secretary of Energy,” says one Enron worker. That didn’t happen, but they were sure President Bush would fight any limits on sky-high energy prices. “When this election comes Bush will f——g whack this s–t, man. He won’t play this price-cap b——t.” Crude, but true. “We will not take any action that makes California’s problems worse and that’s why I oppose price caps,” said Mr. Bush on May 29, 2001.

Why isn’t this being made into a campaign ad already?

Progressive Vote and We Count are surveying the views of progressive voters on John Kerry so as to amplify the voice of leftists and outside of the Democratic party. Help ’em out here.

The Yale UOC (Undergraduate Organizing Committee) website is newly updated by the awesome powers of Phoebe. Check it out for updates and backgrounds on our campaigns, archives of news articles and documents, and rocking pictures.

Human Rights Watch condemns Indonesia’s crackdown on dissent:

Indonesia’s decision to expel Sidney Jones, a prominent American political analyst, raises concerns about the country’s crackdown on critical observers ahead of the July 5 presidential election, Human Rights Watch said today. The Indonesian government has also announced that it has placed 20 international and local nongovernmental organizations on a “watch list” as threats to the country’s security. The decision to deport Jones, Indonesia country director for the International Crisis Group (ICG), appears directly related to her critical reporting on Indonesia. Last week Gen. Abdullah Hendropriyono, head of the country’s State Intelligence Agency (BIN), publicly stated that Jones’s reports were inaccurate and biased. ICG has regularly criticized Indonesian authorities about their response to the ongoing activity of the militant group Jemaah Islamiyah as well as the government’s responsibility for human rights violations during armed conflicts in the provinces of Aceh and Papua. Gen. Hendropriyono also accused 20 local and international nongovernmental groups of endangering national security in the period leading up to the presidential election on July 5. Indonesia’s national police chief, Da’i Bachtiar, has also said that his office is now monitoring the Indonesian and foreign activists who have been identified by BIN as possible security threats.
 

With 775 of 798 precincts reporting, Democrat Stephanie Herseth leads Republican Diedrich in the special election for the House from South Dakota by 2%. Looks like another small step in taking back the House.

City Limits Weekly reports on a new report from the Center for Immigrant Families on the insidious whitening of the West Side’s schools:

This week, CIF is releasing a report, “Segregated and Unequal,” showing how several public schools in the West Side’s former District 3—now part of Region 10—have become white-hot for white families, to the exclusion of others. The shift isn’t due to changing neighborhood demographics, said the center’s Ujju Aggarwal; rather, schools limit access to low-income, immigrant families of color through a “subtle process of low-level decisions”—by not translating information, by making parents jump through hoops to prove residency, or by asking for contributions for activities and supplies in the range of $700. CIF also pointed to one school that took students from outside its official zone for its gifted-and-talented program.

Coalition of South African Trade Unions General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi calls for South Africa to achieve a more just, more sustainable growth by questioning the postulates of neoliberalism:

“The fundamental problems of our economy are obvious: our economy is still dominated by a few individuals. Our economy is overwhelmingly dominated by the white population,” Vavi said…Cosatu said it identified with the recent UN Development Programme report on sustainable development showing that the government had dramatically improved services and social grants for millions of people and that the poverty rate had fallen from 51 percent to 48 percent. “It exposes the inequalities that stubbornly remain part of our social and political life, including the annual decline of wage share.” Vavi was gratified by what he called “government’s shift and rethink on privatisation”. He said the role of the state in the economy was becoming more visible than in the past, when “some people said the market should dictate everything”. The federation would soon be meeting public enterprises minister Alec Erwin to discuss whatever differences existed between Cosatu and the government on privatisation.