(continued)

Hit: In the Los Angeles Times, the always-intelligent Thomas Powers explains that Bush was forced to make public the new, bombshell National Intelligence Estimate, which says Iran is no longer trying to make a nuclear bomb (the one Huckabee didn't notice)—because the only thing worse than having the White House announce it would have been for the Administration's enemies to leak it. "One of the basic laws of intelligence is that no big secret can be kept that can be written on the back of an envelope," Powers writes. "The fact that the NIE says what it says, and its release, both show that the White House has lost control over American intelligence. This good news probably needs a lot of hedging and qualification, but it is good all the same."

Hit: Keith Olbermann is beyond apoplexy over the the new NIE: "We have either a president who is too dishonest to restrain himself from invoking World War Three about Iran at least six weeks after he had to have known that the analogy would be fantastic, irresponsible hyperbole, or we have a president too transcendently stupid not to have asked—at what now appears to have been a series of opportunities to do so—whether the fairy tales he either created or was fed were still even remotely plausible."

Hit: Writing on the same subject in the New Yorker, Steve Coll reminds us that Sy Hersh first reported one year ago that the CIA was "challenging the White House's assumptions about how close Iran might be to building a nuclear bomb." Coll says the new estimate proves that "the Cheney regency persists, and that the vice president and his neoconservative protégés in the Administration have continued to exaggerate and misuse intelligence to advance preconceived policies—in this case, a policy of militant confrontation with Iran, salted by public misstatements of what was known or knowable about the Iranian nuclear threat."

Hit: In Salon, Mark Follman speaks with Flynt Everett, a former senior director on Bush's National Security Council, who says, "I think the president knew this was coming, and I think he was deliberately shifting his rhetoric ... I think they were trying to redefine the problem with the idea that they could kind of blunt the impact of the NIE by doing this. I think they miscalculated."

Hit: Worried that the good news about Iran will reduce America's chances to start a new war because of nuclear proliferation? Worry not! A series of fascinating articles in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Guardian details American fears about who would control Pakistan's nuclear arsenal if President Musharraf is deposed. According to the Times, after much debate, we decided not to share PALS—"permissive action links," which are designed to prevent a weapon from detonating without proper codes and authorizations—with the Pakistanis. Instead of PALS, according to the Journal, the Pakistanis are using the "Personnel Reliability Program," which includes "a battery of checks aimed at rooting out human foibles such as lust, greed, or depression that might lead one to betray national secrets." The new Pakistani program delves into personal finances, political views, and sexual histories." Still don't feel safe?

Good News: "The U.S. has long had contingency plans in place under which American Special Forces operatives would deploy to Pakistan to secure nuclear-weapons sites in the event of an Islamic takeover."

Bad News: "Some U.S. military and intelligence personnel fear that there may be additional weapons sites that the U.S. doesn't know about."

Best News of All: The Guardian says we have contingency plans for a full-scale occupation of Pakistan, including sending U.S. and British troops to steal Pakistan's nukes and take them to a secret storage depot in New Mexico or a "remote redoubt" inside Pakistan; sending U.S. troops to Pakistan's northwestern border to fight the Taliban and al Qaida; and initiating a U.S. military occupation of the capital, Islamabad, and the provinces of Punjab, Sindh, and Baluchistan if asked for assistance by a fractured Pakistan military, so that the U.S. could shore up President Pervez Musharraf and General Ashfaq Kayani.

Now there's a foolproof solution.

Your Tax Dollars at Work: The New York Times estimates that up to one-third of U.S. spending on Iraqi contracts and grants goes missing.

Hit: On the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Michel Calhoun, president of the Center for Responsible Lending, managed to cut through all of the palaver about the subprime mortgage crisis. The salient points:

* Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson exaggerated the number of borrowers who might benefit from the Administration's plan of private relief by a factor of almost 10. Paulson said the program would help 1.2 million people. Calhoun said the real number is closer to 145,000.

* The typical family who got a subprime loan was not out speculating on some investment property: "The typical subprime loan is a borrower simply refinancing their existing home to help pay off some credit card debts, get money for tuition."

* This crisis was created largely by bad lending practices that were at the time very profitable for the lending industry.

* A typical subprime borrower would see their payments go from like $1,500 to $2,200 a month, even with no change in market interest rates, "And that's why we're seeing all these foreclosures, and that's why the crisis is here."



Winner (??): Fallen media baron Conrad Black sounds cavalier as he awaits sentencing for his role in pilfering millions of dollars from shareholders. Just before he was sentenced to 6 and a half years in prison, the 63-year-old gave the rhetorical finger to the prosecution, telling the Canadian Broadcasting Company that "prison would be a bore, but quite endurable. But Tony Holden, like many others, finds Black's new biography of Richard Nixon to be an unholy mess:

"His exasperating prose style throbs with such phrases as the 'boosterish scatology' of Nixon's school and the 'rubesville environment' of his hometown. When the Watergate tapes become public, the 'shrieks of outrage' that greet the expletives deleted from the President's tape-recorded conversations amount to 'another herniating levitation of pandemic hypocrisy.'"

Sinners: The one-third of the American people whom the Los Angeles Times identified as xenophobes, because they favor the denial of social services to undocumented workers, including emergency room care. The Times followed the thread with a story that described an Iowa town—with only 50 foreign-born citizens—where immigration has become a hot issue.

More of the Same: Ryan Lizza's colorful New Yorker piece on the increasingly extremist approach to immigration in the Republican primary.

Winner: Kevin Drum, for telling us everything we need to know about the CIA's destruction of its torture tapes, including the fact that George ("We do not torture") Bush was personally responsible for persuading the CIA to torture al Qaeda operatives.

	Meet the Press (NBC–Russert)	Face the Nation (CBS–Schieffer)	This Week (ABC–Stephanopoulos)
White Men	2	4	15
White Women	0	4	4
Black Men	0	4	0
Black Women	0	0	1
Gay People	0	0	0

Research assistance: Thomas Rogers, Richard Vanderford
Seen Something? E-mail to alert me to anything you see that warrants high praise or high dudgeon.

---

Charles Kaiser is the author of The Gay Metropolis and 1968 in America. He has been media editor for Newsweek, a member of the metro staff of the New York Times, and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where he covered the press and book publishing. To learn more, visit charleskaiser.com.


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