I don’t know why Obama’s crew are so anti-Schweitzer, but he’s the guy they need to have out there. He’s one of the few who really knows energy: resourcing, realities etc.

Almost no one knows that the majority of US home energy is coal generated. Yes, coal is dirty and environmentally damaging to both mine and burn. OTOH, there is technology in abundance and up and coming to tremendously ameliorate both of those issues – if there had been an energy policy in place 8 years ago we would be on the cusp of massive improvements on a clean[er] coal front. Not the answer or the end run, but if Obama’s crew had been on their game, they had a real opportunity to use the existing antagonism between big coal and big oil to their advantage, and to really improve the lives of miners, the environment domestically and to bootstrap some countries like China will be burning coal out the wazoo and who are finally getting very interested in cleaner coal tech.

Oh well, I’m off the rails into the fatalism ditch these days.

OT – So the WaPo story (ies by now) that TomR linked to are from a book that is about to come out by wapo reporter, Barton Gellman? How long is it that he knew the piece of info that the “45 day renewals” being signed off on were MILITARY ORDERS? WTH is going on with these guys, sitting and sitting on info until it becomes pretty freaking much TOO LATE for it to be used to any effect?

Gellman, Lichtblau, Goldsmith – they’re like a new sect of Later Day Saints, the Much Too Later Days cult.

Anyway – a freakin military order and that only comes out now?

Gellman’s narrative on who knew what, when, seems awfully swiss cheesey to me, although as an effort to do pro-PR for some of the loyal Bushies that weren’t in the VP’s office and shift all the bad-PR to a single locus it’s less holey – more munsterish.

He tries to make it sound like the AG and DAG were not in the loop at all, until Goldsmith and Comey arrived – and that it was ONLY Addington and Yoo. But that doesn’t jive with Lichtblau’s story that Larry Thompson quit signing FISCt wiretap requests bc he was so afraid of liability (and isn’t Thompson the forgotten musketeer always and always – even though he earned his badge on the GITMO torture field trip). He tries to make it sound as if the AG didn’t really have any responsiblity for asking questions before signing off on the legality of using a military order for massive felony domestic surveillance and he was just a likeable clueless guy and gosh golly, if only he’d known what he was signing he might not have signed it.

I’m also trying to figure out how they go from Goldsmith not being allowed to talk to even the AG at first, to Comey wandering off to talk to Scott Muller about Teh Program (I guess Muller won’t be losing any sleep over his torture role and the dead, maimed and missing as long as he gets some nice PR as “getting it” on the Unconstitutional Domesitic Military Surveillance program)which has to again make you wonder who all was authorized to discuss teh program and whether Muller was also left off of the “Addington and Yoo were the only guys who knew” summary. I’m guessing the guy you can trust to make sure missionaries and their infants are blown out of the sky and sent to their death with no consequences is a guy you can trust with illegal surveillance, but maybe not. Good to know he “got it” on the surveillance front though.

Aand while Gellman seems to want to paint Hayden as more loyal and committed but just doddering and not with it, the takeaway I get (and I’m biased and obviously don’t know everything Gellman *knows* from his *sources*) is that Hayden misrepresented the program over and over. Which leaves me to wonder if it really was that Goldsmith and Philbin “understood this activity much better than Michael Hayden did” (a statement attributed to Comey) or whether Hayden was just much more shamelessly willing to disinform? Certainly, his disinformative dissertations on the fourth amendment not including any reference to probable cause, lined up side by side with his eructations on all the *training* NSA gets on the 4th and his seeming under oath fabrications to Congress in the 9/11 hearings that NSA was operating under the same rules after 9/11 as before —- it’s amazing a uniform can withstand that kind of dishonor and not spontaneously disintegrate.

And then there’s hiding the existence of EOs, typed over in the VPs office by Addington, and those presidential papers were not disclosed to the staff secretariat, kept in the VPs safe, and not entered as presidential papers, classified or otherwise. I guess some of that may account for things like the more recently released opinions from DOD not having any listed classification authority on them. They were “classified” by virtue of being locked in Cheney’s safe.

It’s all beyond sordid and the fact that so many reporters have been in lockstep with the DOJ crew (that they are trying to lionize now) in covering up anything even minimally important about the stories until way too late for any real action – it’s hard to stomach.

A god damned (in the old testament sense) military order used to blatantly violate domestic law to the tune of inumerable felonies – and it all waits until after Obama’s embrace of the concept of handing out amnesty to corporations for fascist interaction with an imperial presidency before it gets a public mention.

I thought the reference by Comey to those “poor people” in Congress was an extra nice touch. There’s a boy with politician writ large on him. And then there was Mueller, whispering in Ashcroft’s ear that he had met his test from God. OK, not so much when he let children be disappeared and a nation lied into a war that created the largest refugee crisis in the world and deciminated our economic and moral and rule of law foundations, and no so much when he got the three pointer in his one on ones with Kevin Ring, where they got together on making sure that national security reports didn’t reach Congress if they might mean that an Abramoff lobbying client would be unhappy – but still, a big ol test from God was met.

I’m sorry, but on the list of poor people victimized by the Bush DOJ, Bushie Congresses and Bush, poor Ashcroft and the poor Congressmembers aren’t down on the list – they aren’t on it at all, except in the acknowledgements due to co-drafters.

Gellman tries to make it sound as if the only thing the gang of 8 was asked was if it could push through legislation for the unconstitutional program without tip offs. That sure makes it sound like they were all on board to continue the program, though, even if he tries to make it sound as if they were given a loaded question. And Lamberth is in the second article, calling a spade a spade. Bush could have gotten any damn thing he wanted from “poor people” like Jay Rockefeller in Congress, as Lamberth point out, “But they wanted to demonstrate that the president’s power was supreme.”

It’s interesting to see torture field tripper Wray gets his five seconds too, as boldly saying he would kowabunga with the rest of DOJ leadership. And Townsend gets her halo too, with references to her suveillance expertise somehow managing to leave out her “uneasy” relationship with the FISCt resulting from her own dodgy tactics.

The PR fairy was very thorough in the dust that was sprinkled. After finishing those two pieces I felt like I’d been at a slumber party for 5 yo girls who illadvisedly given way too much glitter to play with.