Well, Fitzmas is past. Miers is history. Bush’s next SCOTUS pick won’t be known til next week. For the first time in ages, I don’t have a big day-job or moonlighting weekend project. My wife’s out of town on business. My kid’s away at college. Fall has finally arrived. The day is cool, crisp and windy, what I used to think of in my student days as Nietzsche Weather, when you want to go find an abyss to laugh over.In sum, it is, as Chris Schenkel used to always say, a Fine Day for Football. So in a few hours, I’ll try to find something red and black to wear, and mosey over to the local sports bar to watch the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party, Georgia versus Florida. Now to yankees and other outsiders, this rivalry probably sounds like the Bud Bowl or something–a drinking contest between two party schools.But it’s a serious thing down there, made more vicious, oddly enough, by the rivalry’s recent pattern of total domination by one team or the other.Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Georgia routinely won, often coming from behind to rout the Gators in the second half. At one point in early 80s, I watched the game with a work colleague who had gone to Florida. As the third quarter ended, Florida had a small lead, but Georgia had begun one of those soul-crushing long ball-control drives that were the hallmark of the Vince Dooley era, and my friend got up and turned off the television. “Don’t you want to watch the fourth quarter?” I asked. “I’ve been watching this fourth quarter for fifteen years,” he wearily replied. Sure enough, Georgia won. In the 90s, with the return to Gainesville of The Evil Genius (a.k.a., the Ball Coach, Steve Spurrier), Florida dominated the series, especially during the tenure in Athens of Spurrier’s polar opposite, the honorable but less-than-cerebral good-ol-boy Ray Goff (“If Georgia had to hire a Danny-Ford-type coach, they should have hired Danny Ford,” quoth one Dawg Fanatic friend of mine). With both universities beginning to establish themselves as regional academic powers, the intellectual gap on the football field was painful for Georgia fans.Now both teams have Genius coaches. Georgia is undefeated, but its quarterback and moral leader, D.J. Shockley, will miss the game with a sprained knee. If Georgia wins, the post-game assessments will write themselves, because Shockley’s replacement is a third-generation Dawg named Joe Tereshinski III, whose major role in his two previous years in Athens was as long snapper on punts. Either way, it ought to be fun. For once, Georgia is playing in the day’s marquee game. I won’t have to beg Mike the Bartender to find an obscure screen on which to watch my team. I can make barking noises on kickoffs without pretending to undergo a coughing fit. Yes, it’s a fine day for football.

Having just watched, along with the whole hep political world, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s press conference, I think you can boil off the legalese and go with his baseball metaphor for what he was saying about the strange decision to prosecute someone for lying about a crime for which no one has been indicted.”Scooter” Libby (nicknamed, ironically, after baseball great Phil “Scooter” Rizutto) is, according to Fitzgerald, the guy who threw sand in the umpire’s face when the dark-robed arbiter was trying to figure out why the pitcher threw at the batter’s head.This implies that (1) the investigation may have in fact determined who leaked Valerie Plame’s name, even though key issues like the “pitcher’s” motives and knowledge about Plame’s undercover status have been so far obscured, making an indictment impossible; (2) Libby’s real crime was to throw the investigation off course until the Grand Jury commission expired; and most importantly (3) the underlying crime is still under investigation, and could be exposed by new information or by disclosures Libby now makes at trial, or in order to cop a plea.If that’s right, and especially if Fitzgerald is implying that Libby deliberately lied to protect somebody else, then another big shoe could later drop, even if it occurs after Fitzgerald’s investigation is concluded.So much for my analysis as a non-practicing attorney, which is free advice and worth it.As for the broader issues raised by this case and by the withdrawal of the Harriet Miers nomination, I recommend you check out the DLC’s take today, which among other things, suggests that Karl Rove has no business working in the White House whether or not he someday winds up in the hoosegow:

As for today’s news from the special prosecutor, the fact that the indictment of the vice president’s chief of staff was not accompanied by the indictment of the president’s de facto chief of staff is apparently being greeted in some quarters as a victory for George W. Bush. That’s a perfect example of a dangerously low standard of public service.We care too much about the office of the Presidency to wish indictments upon anyone. For the same reason, we believe that for the sake of that office, President Bush should not wait for Patrick Fitzgerald to tell Karl Rove to go.Whether or not he was criminally involved in the Valerie Plame leak case, there’s no doubt Rove is openly and notoriously involved in an ongoing effort to create a politics of maximum partisan polarization, infecting every institution of our democracy.From that perspective, it’s beside the point that Rove may well escape a long vacation in one of our fine federal correctional institutions. If he truly wants to clear the air, the president should direct Rove to take a permanent vacation from the White House. Let him practice his dark arts at the Republican National Committee or some other venue far from official policymaking circles, and let him be accompanied by the other permanent-campaign warriors who have infested the people’s institutions.

Those Democrats who are disappointed that on “Fitzmas” they got coal in their stockings from “Fitzy Klaus” need to keep focused on the larger story of this administration’s overall abuses of power.

Wow, that was fast.And that’s about all that needs to be said about the White House’s decision to pull this doomed nomination before it tore up the shaky coalition that is today’s GOP. The timing was almost certainly affected by the anticipated landfall of Hurricane Patrick today; at the very least, the announcement of his findings will make the Miers withdrawal a one-day story (at least until her replacement is named), and some folks think it was a hasty gesture of surrender to conservatives whose support will soon be needed on other fronts.As Miers’ agony ends, I’m glad Senate Democrats were spared the agony of deciding whether to administer the coup de grace to this nomination, knowing that the next name on Bush’s list could be a howler.

As you may have heard, the White House has decided to put W. out there to promote his alleged successes, in order to distract attention from his rather conspicuous failures of late. The first installment of this happy talk offensive occurred in Washington today, when the president delivered pithy remarks about his economic and fiscal policies.Much as I generally avoid extended exposure to Bush rhetoric, I really encourage you to read this speech in its entirety, to get a grip on the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the current administration’s economic policies.The economy is peachy keen, he says, thanks to his tax cuts, which need to be made permanent.Fiscal problems? This president, who has yet to veto a single spending bill (or any bill, for that matter), is “working with congressional leaders” to get spending under control, apparently by cutting Medicaid, food stamps, child support enforcement, and other programs benefitting unimporant political constituencies.Energy costs going crazy? Time to suspend environmental regulations, beef up–or pork up–subsidies for oil and gas producters, and then definitely begin oil drilling in the Alaska Natural Wilderness Reserve.Health care costs bandrupting businesses and decimating families? Let’s trot out HSAs, AHPs, and every other marginal right-wing idea for undermining broad risk pools and larger coverage.Boomer retirement crisis? Bush trots out his weariest rhetoric for Social Security privatization.Personally, what bugged me most about Bush’s speech was its casual failture to announce, explain or embrace any sort of basic macroeconomic strategy for the country.Pardon me for being nostalgic, but I believe every advanced industrial nation ought to have such a strategy. We certainly had one during the Clinton administration.Why not announce one now?Because they (1) can’t admit mistakes; (2) consider revenue and spending commitments to “our team” as sacred; and (3) basically don’t think Americans are capable of basic math–these guys are incapable of a coherent, consistent budget or economic strategy.And it continues today.

It’s a old maxim that in Washington, when breaking news is anticipated, there’s an inverse relationship between the amount of actual information available and the breadth and intensity of rumors. So it goes with the Patrick Fitzgerald investigation of the Valerie Plame leak.Best I can tell, Fitzgerald’s investigation itself is pretty damn close to leak-proof. Hence, the speculation about its impending fruits is reaching levels of near-hysteria in Washington. Will Cheney be implicated? If so, does his implication implicate Bush himself? Did Rove roll over on Scooter Libby, not only exculpating himself but reinforcing his legend as the guy you don’t ever want to mess with? Will Fitzgerald wind up doing nothing, to the shock and disappointment of Democrats and the great relief of Republicans?Who knows? Nobody knows. The tiny trickle of actual news dribbling out today is tantalizing but inconclusive: reports of Fitzgerald paying a visit to Rove’s lawyer, and of FBI agents creepy-crawling the Wilson-Plame neighborhood to find out if it was common knowledge Plame was with The Company.There’s a general expectation that action will be taken tomorrow, but maybe not until Friday, and of course, Fitzgerald could actually hold over the Grand Jury for another week, raising the rumor noise to a high-pitched chattering whine.This is the perfect atmosphere for the Washington Insider Jiveass, who in the absence of real information, feeds the beast of speculation with wild claims backed by shadowy Sources. My colleague The Moose and I had a semi-serious conversation today about how easy it would be to set Washington on its ear by posting especially lurid speculation of our own: unconfirmed reports of beefed-up security in the office of John McCain, waiting in the wings to replace a disgraced Dick Cheney; Sources describing a stricken president weeping in the Rose Garden at the certain loss of his Pilot, Karl Rove; spot checks revealing a vast and coordinated wave of heavily tattooed bicycle messengers delivering multiple “target letters;” Grand Jurors with relatives in Red States suddenly stepping down. In today’s atmosphere, almost anything would get batted around Washington and beyond.I’ve always defined the Washington Insider Jiveass as someone who constantly seeks to know something unimportant fifteen minutes before anyone else. But when it comes to something important, the Washington Insider Jiveass seeks to convey exclusive knowledge of something unknowable close enough to real news events to get attention, yet far enough in advance to avoid looking stupid when it turns out very differently.That’s why this is the Day of the Jiveass in Washington; indeed, it’s a veritable Jiveass Jamboree.

Here’s how Andrew Kohut describes the latest findings of the Pew Research Center on public attitudes towards major U.S. institutions and their leaders, released today:

Americans express increasingly negative views of a wide range major institutions, reflecting strong discontent with national conditions. Over the past year, ratings have tumbled for the federal government and Congress. And it is not just Washington institutions that are being viewed less positively. Favorable opinions of business corporations are at their lowest point in two decades. And in the face of high energy prices, just 20% express positive opinions of oil companies.Favorable ratings for the federal government in Washington have taken a hard hit, falling from 59% last year to 45% currently. The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted among 2,006 Americans from Oct. 12-24, finds that even positive views of the military, while still very high, have slipped slightly (from 87% in March to 82%). Just two institutions are unscathed by public discontent. Ratings for the Supreme Court and the news media were unchanged compared to previous surveys.

All this bad news about public assessments of the folks running the country, and even their corporate sweethearts, should be good news for Democrats, right? Well, it’s more accurate to say that it creates an opportunity for good news for Democrats in the future. As virtually every poll has shown for some time, Pew finds that sinking assessments of the GOP have not exactly translated into rising assessments of the Donkey Party. After three months of trouble in the GOP ranks, the favorable/unfavorable ratio for the Republican Party has dropped from 48/43 in July to 42/49 today. The Democratic Party’s ratio has changed from 50-41 to 49-41 over the same period.This should be a familiar anomaly for Democrats, since it was a central feature of the 2004 presidential cycle. All year long, Kerry strategists (and for that matter, people like me) stared at the stubbornly high “wrong track” numbers and became convinced that eventually all these unhappy campers would drift into the challenger’s column, giving the Democratic candidate a sure boost in the home stretch. And indeed, this belief clearly had an impact on the Kerry campaign message; anodyne slogans like “New Directions for America” and “A Stronger America” were basically just welcome signs for the “wrong track” voters sure to abandon Bush if given a clear alternative.It didn’t happen, probably in part because voters viewed Democrats as much as if not more than Republicans as the “wrong track” party on some issues, including culture, integrity, and “big government,” and because Democrats never offered a tightly constructed argument about exactly how they would do a better job on the most important concerns of wavering voters.We’re at a similar juncture today, except that (1) Republican vulnerability is much greater than in 2004, and (2) Democrats don’t have the focal point of a presidential candidacy to drive home a clear and compelling message.The Democratic ability to overcome this second obstacle will go a long way towards determining whether 2006 is one of those snarling, low-turnout, plague-on-both-houses elections with mixed results, or a 1994-style wave that sweeps Republicans out of office.We now have just over a year to paint some bright and unmistakable signposts that remind voters exactly who built the wrong track this country is on, and point to the path not taken that’s still available with new leadership.

As the Harriet Miers nomination slouches slowly towards the Senate, it’s hard to get a real handle on who, exactly, in the conservative constellation has bitten the bullet–or to put it another way, the hand that used to feed them–and come out against W.’s buddy.Ah, but now there’s a web page, WithdrawMiers.org, that is providing an updated list of organizations, individuals and newspapers which have called on Bush to withdraw the nomination. (It’s not exclusively a conservative list, and may become less so as Democrats begin to weigh in). All the big names you’d expect are on this list: Will, Buchanan, Krauthammer, Frum, Kristol, Schlafly, Bork and Noonan; along with publications like National Review and organizations like the American Conservative Union.Just as interestingly, the page lists those “deeply concerned” about Miers, i.e., leaning against, but not yet off the cliff. And there you find nine Republican U.S. Senators, plus Robert Novak, Paul Weyrich, Gary Bauer, the Family Research Council, Grover Norquists’s Americans for Tax Reform, and The Wall Street Journal.These lists show abundantly how much the fault lines on Miers cut across the Cultural Right. James Dobson’s supporting her, but the closely related Family Research Council and its famous former director Bauer are leaning against her. The National Right To Life Committee is on board for Harriet, but the Republican National Coalition for Life is urging her withdrawal. Cultural Right Warhorse Pat Robertson is thundering threats against Senator who dare obstruct her confirmation, but Cultural Right Warhorses Schlafly, Buchanan, and Weyrich appear to be feeding the revolt.Maybe somebody will do up one of those handy-dandy charts that list the major constellations of the conservative universe, and who’s bickering with whom in the same solar system. But until then, WithdrawMiers.org is the place to check for trends.

Amidst this week’s three-ring circus imvolving the Fitzgerald indictment rumors, the Miers fiasco, and Tom DeLay’s court appearance, you may have missed an important GOP sideshow: the collapse of a House Republican effort to patch together an amended federal budget resolution to pay for a small portion of the Katrina recovery effort. Read all about it on the DLC site, and be sure to follow the link to Gov. Tom Vilsack’s op-ed on how to help pay for the Gulf Coast recovery. Vilsack wouldn’t mess with Medicaid or food stamps; does not rely on the brain-dead approach of across-the-board cuts; and while he identifies far more spending savings than the House GOP green eyeshades, he also doesn’t ignore the immorality of implementing new tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, either.

Byron York, White House reporter for National Review, put up an online article this afternoon suggesting that the team lobbying for Harriet Miers’ confirmation is “gloomy and demoralized,” not due to external conservative opposition to the nomination, but because her “courtesy visits” to the Senators who will determine her fate are not going well.

Strategists working with the White House in support of the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers are becoming increasingly demoralized and pessimistic about the nomination’s prospects on Capitol Hill in the wake of Miers’s meetings with several Republican and Democratic senators. On a conference call held this morning, they even discussed whether Miers should simply stop visiting with lawmakers, lest any further damage be done — and so that time spent in such get-acquainted sessions will not cut into Miers’s intensive preparation for her confirmation hearing….”The number of participants [in the pro-Miers conference calls] is declining,” says one knowledgeable source. “With Roberts, these calls occurred five or six or seven times a week. Pretty early on, the calls on Miers were scaled back to twice a week. That says something in and of itself.””It’s been a gradual descent into almost silence,” says a second source of the calls. “The meetings with the senators are going terribly. On a scale of one to 100, they are in negative territory. The thought now is that they have to end….Obviously the smart thing to do would be to withdraw the nomination and have a do-over as soon as possible. But the White House is so irrational that who knows? As of this morning, there is a sort of pig-headed resolve to press forward, cancel the meetings with senators if necessary, and bone up for the hearings….””Demoralization and pessimism?” the source continues. “That’s been a constant. We’re in the various stages of grief.”

Now I realize that the magazine Byron York works for is one of the major sources of the conservative revolt against Miers. But he’s a solid, old-school reporter, and moreover, the fact that people involved in the Miers lobbying operation are talking to him, even on “deep background,” is significant in itself. Like John Fund’s leak-fed revelations about the incompetent vetting of Miers in the White House, it shows that Republican discipline has completely broken down. And that has to be freaking out the White House as much as anything else. In any given meeting or conference call to bolster the nomination, the spin team must be constantly asking themselves: Who can we trust?

In response to my last post suggesting that the Miers nomination saga might have taken another strange turn with the revelation of her 1989 support for the Human Life Amendment, I was put in my place by a number of friends and correspondents who reminded me how remarkably uncontroversial support for the HLA used to be in conservative circles; so uncontroversial, indeed, that it didn’t seem odd for a city council candidate to embrace it to get a local endorsement.And in fact, yesterday’s revelation didn’t seem to much impress Miers’ conservative opponents; they’re not even talking about it. Indeed, the only discussion of the material released by the Senate about Miers yesterday on sites like The Corner and Red State involves derisive comments about her answer to the Judiciary Committee question about “judicial activism.” (BTW, the constant use of passive verb constructions indicates that Miers herself, or someone immersed in her Collected Works, filled the thing out).What many conservatives have been talking about, from the very beginning, is a point that Jonathan Chait riffs on brilliantly today at the New Republic site: how little political capital the White House seemed willing to spend on a crucial Supreme Court nomination.There’s an almost universal conviction among conservative Miers-o-phobes that Bush could have rammed a qualified and unambiguously Scalia/Thomas-type jurist through the Senate (probably anybody to the left of Janice Rogers Brown) if he had really wanted to. Sure, it might have required some serious arm-twisting, and maybe a resort to the Nuclear Option, but the deal about Supreme Court nominations is that it requires just 50 of 55 Republican votes to put somebody on the Court for a lifetime. And Bush wouldn’t do it. He came to the eve of the long-awaited Armaggedon, and flinched.As Chait points out, what galls cultural conservatives most about this decision is that it was diametrically opposed to the White House M.O. on economic issues:

When it comes to tax cuts, regulation, or other controversial budget changes, Bush’s Republicans usually muscle their legislation through both Houses of Congress without any votes to spare. (Last week’s House vote to ease oil refinement restrictions-during which the GOP leadership extended a five-minute vote to 45 minutes while they twisted enough arms to prevail 212 to 210–is a typical display). The goal is always to win as many benefits as possible for the party’s business and donor base.

Actually, as Mark Schmitt likes to point out, the GOP often seems determined to win votes without any significant Democratic support, in part because they don’t want to compromise, but also because they deeply believe that maximum partisan polarization is in their party’s long-term interest.So why, ask cultural conservatives, isn’t that the case with their own most important priority? And all the rationalizations the White House has been providing for the Miers choice–Bush’s loyalty to his friend, her “stealth credentials” as an evangelical Christian, Karl Rove’s distractions, Andy Card’s sponsorship, Bush’s low poll numbers, etc., etc.–add insult to injury. On something this big, how was it possible for Bush to stray so far from the obvious course of giving the Right what it wanted and what he had the power to give? That’s a hard question to answer without quickly concluding that Bush just didn’t care enough to get it Right.