What Novak didn't say

Let's be clear: Bob Novak had every right to publish Valerie Plame's CIA identity.
As he correctly asserts, her identity bore on an important political story: her husband Joseph Wilson's CIA connection.

Yet, in his memoir, The Prince of Darkness, the septuagenarian makes it appear that, as a journalist, he can dish it out, but as a subject of a news controversy, he can't take it. Clearly he is bitter at how he was treated by his peers with respect to Plame. His account focuses on his specific role and rarely mentions the names of other journalists also ensnared in the controversy, excepting those who wrote what he considers to be inaccurate reports about him.

Novak makes a strong case for the theory that the ultraleft whipped up the Plame controversy as a means of attacking Bush, who had been hell on plugging leaks.

So I have to wonder, why does he join the ultraleft and others in ignoring Bush's impeachable behavior in the Plame probe. Either Bush and Cheney committed perjury about secetly declassifying Plame's identity or they kept silent and allowed a special prosecutor probe for no other reason than to spare themselves political embarrassment prior to the 2004 election. A woman was jailed for three months while they dummied up.

Now why doesn't Novak feel outraged at Bush and Cheney for doing so much damage to freedom of the press by their unseemly silence? Isn't he bothered by the fact that Bush and Cheney stayed silent while journalists were pressured to reveal sources, with one going to prison, but then opened up at the last minute when it appeared that Cheney might face indictment? He joins ex-spook chief Tenet in publishing a memoir that conspiratorially ignores a point so dangerous to the bad guys.

A previous draft of this post misspelled Novak.

America's economy in hands of wingnuts
Any business in America can now have its secret transactions and dealings examined by faceless security people, who need only say that they think someone in another country -- who might be linked to terrorists -- might somehow be connected to the business. Thank you Comrades, for a wonderful new security tool, pushed through by a sinister cabal of those posing as persons on the right and left wings.

That follows Bush's recent signing of an executive order giving the Treasury Department the right to -- without warning and due process of law -- seize the assets of any American or any American business if there is somehow a whiff of association with people who might be violent. Got that?

Putin or the Chinese politburo would be proud.

Bush and Cheney have turned out to be wolves wearing "pro-business" clothing. If placating the oligarchs who run greedy cartels is pro-business, then America is in real trouble.

Bush and Cheney have managed to divert the defense resources of America into what should have been a strategically minor matter (dealing with terrorists) and away from the threat of communism, which still exists while at the same time driving up the price of oil as a result of a bad war and reviving Russia's superpower ambitions.
Oil-rich Russia has now resumed daily long-range bomber sorties, as had been the custom of the old Soviet Union, which KGB veteran Putin tends to glorify.

In fact, the mix of economic capitalism and political KGBism or communism found in Russia and China is nothing new. Lenin instituted such measures in the 1920s in his New Economic Policy, which was eventually scrapped by Stalin's collectivizations.

No wonder the markets are jittery. Why should anyone have confidence with radicals in the White House?

Blog goes blank during debate
An email debate among scientists and academics was occurring when a curious thing happened. Google's spam patrol blanked out the related site Kryptograff.blogspot.com which included a summary of the NIST's secnario for 9/11. So the interested parties could not refer to it.

The last I looked, there was nothing on that blog that looked like spam. However, this account has been plagued with a number of morphing bugs, which Google apparently refuses to acknowledge or correct.

On the 911science blog, posts have been deleting themselves without my permission. In one case, I took the precaution of making a mirror page of one post. The last time Google shut down one of these blogs, they left the read privilege. This time, the read privilege has been denied also. Result: a useful summary was taken out of circulation during an important debate.