Assuming he has one.

From the Washington Post: [MORE . . .]

I published a story last week that discussed Senator Norm Coleman’s cozy relationship with several of his campaign donors. Coleman’s office declined repeated requests for comment, but I said I would update the story if he ever offered a reply. He finally did–at a press conference last Friday. (I’ve been traveling for much of the past week and also re-interviewing my sources, or I would have noted this already.)

I had reported that Coleman’s wife, Laurie, was employed by The Hays Companies, a risk management and commercial insurance firm whose executives, spouses and employees had donated generously to Coleman between 2002 and 2006. I’d also reported that two sources had told me that Minnesota businessman Nasser Kazeminy (who previously paid for Coleman’s travel to the Bahamas and to Paris) had in the past covered the bills for Coleman’s lavish clothing purchases at Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis. [MORE . . .]

It’s not as though no one saw it coming. Here’s the economist Michael Hudson, writing in the May 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine: “The reality is that, although home ownership may be a wise choice for many people, this particular real-estate bubble has been carefully engineered to lure home buyers into circumstances detrimental to their own best interests…. The bubble will burst, and when it does, the people who thought they would be living the easy life of a landlord will soon find that what they really signed up for was the hard servitude of debt serfdom.” [MORE . . .]

The last hundred days of any presidency are frequently known as “legacy time.” The die may be cast, but the occupant of the White House begins making plans to leave and wonders inevitably about how he will be seen by posterity. So what image will dominate the Bush presidency? The Iraq War? The management of Hurricane Katrina? The meltdown of the financial markets? I believe one issue is likely to shape the historical perception of the Bush 43 presidency: torture. And as Team Bush prepares its spectacular finale, its darkest secrets keep bubbling to the surface. Just two weeks ago, Condoleezza Rice’s lawyer, John Bellinger, confirmed to Senator Levin that Rice led the discussions at Principals’ Committee meetings of the NSC with Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Cheney and others at which specific torture practices were okayed. On Monday, the producers of a new documentary (airing Thursday night on WNET) posted a U.S. military memorandum confirming administration authorization the use of torture techniques as part of the standard operating procedures for prisoners at Guantánamo. And today, the Washington Post drops another bombshell:

The Bush Administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency’s use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects — documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public. The classified memos, which have not been previously disclosed, were requested by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet more than a year after the start of the secret interrogations, according to four administration and intelligence officials familiar with the documents. Although Justice Department lawyers, beginning in 2002, had signed off on the agency’s interrogation methods, senior CIA officials were troubled that White House policymakers had never endorsed the program in writing.

[MORE . . .]

From the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform:

A draft Committee report circulated by Chairman Waxman finds that in the months before the 2006 elections, the White House Office of Political Affairs “enlisted agency heads across government in a coordinated effort to elect Republican candidates to Congress,” directing them “to make hundreds of trips—most at taxpayer expense—for the purpose of increasing the electability of Republicans.”

In recent days both the Washington Post and the New York Times have lionized Brooksley E. Born, who during her 1996 to 1999 tenure as head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) pushed to regulate the trading of derivatives. “A decade ago, long before the financial calamity now sweeping the world, the federal government’s economic brain trust heard a clarion warning and declared in unison: You’re wrong,” a Post article from today opened.”

That “clarion warning,” said the story, was issued by Born and was “met with hostility” by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt Jr.—“all Wall Street legends, all opponents to varying degrees of tighter regulation of the financial system that had earned them wealth and power.” [MORE . . .]

…and will return next week.

From my colleague Scott Horton:

This spring, PBS’s distinguished Frontline series aired a mildly critical account of the lead-up to the Iraq War entitled “Bush’s War.” As the airing of the program was announced, the Bush Administration proposed to slash public funding for PBS by roughly half for 2009, by 56% for 2010 and eliminating funding entirely for 2011. Did PBS get the message? Perhaps.

On Thursday evening WNET in New York will air an important new documentary by Emmy and Dupont Award winning producer Sherry Jones entitled “Torturing Democracy.” It appears on WNET and several other affiliates independently because PBS would not run the show—at least not until President Bush has left office.

The world economy continued its collapse. The Dow Jones Industrial Average declined 22 percent over eight days, Wall Street lost $2.4 trillion in market value, and Iceland went bankrupt.^{1 2} The head of the International Monetary Fund warned that the world was on the “brink of systemic meltdown,”³ and Democrats in Congress called for a $150 billion economic stimulus plan to rebuild America's crumbling infrastructure.⁴ Barack Obama called for firms that create jobs to be rewarded with tax credits and for a moratorium on foreclosures;⁵ John McCain refused to answer questions about his economic plan, but was reportedly considering a cut in the capital gains tax.⁶ “I'm not sure anyone is FDR this time,” said one historian of Wall Street. “I don't think either candidate has a clue what they're dealing with here.”⁷ General Motors was talking to Chrysler about a merger,⁸ and a yachtmaker in Snohomish, Washington, announced it would lay off 780 employees and close its doors.⁹ The British funeral-services industry faced a backlog of hundreds of corpses as undertakers, unable to obtain credit, refused to perform burials for the poor until the government guarantees reimbursements.¹⁰ Britain, France, Germany, and other European nations agreed to provide hundreds of billions of dollars to guarantee loans and to prop up banks, leading to a 936-point rally in the Dow,¹¹ and the big counter in New York City that tracks the national debt ran out of digits.¹² [MORE . . .]

From ABC News:

West Palm Beach Congressman Tim Mahoney (D-FL), whose predecessor resigned in the wake of a sex scandal, agreed to a $121,000 payment to a former mistress who worked on his staff and was threatening to sue him, according to current and former members of his staff who have been briefed on the settlement, which involved Mahoney and his campaign committee. Mahoney, who is married, also promised the woman, Patricia Allen, a $50,000 a year job for two years at the agency that handles his campaign advertising, the staffers said…

Mahoney was elected two years ago following the abrupt resignation of his disgraced predecessor, Republican Mark Foley, whose lewd internet messages to teenage boys and Congressional pages created a national outrage. The affair between Mahoney and Allen began, according to the current and former staffers, in 2006 when Mahoney was campaigning for Congress against Foley, promising “a world that is safer, more moral.”

At the time, Mahoney’s campaign ads featured a picture of him with his wife, Terry, with the line, “Restoring America’s Values Begins at Home.”

From May 1955

The stunt book–wherein our author undertakes an activity of dubious or dangerous oddity and emerges, huzzah, with an inspiring tale of unlikely trancendence–has its risks. It is one thing to read about an average Joe’s sixty seconds in professional sports, but perhaps another to experience the drama of an average Jane’s year without shopping. The most interesting (to me, of course) of the recent stunt books is surely Ammon Shea’s latest, Reading the OED, a book that put me in the mind of my favorite stunt book, Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). Whereas Shea’s is the story of his sitting down to read through the 21,730 pages of the twenty volumes of the 2nd edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in one year, Webster’s was the tale (embodied) of his sitting down and, over the course of twenty-seven years, writing the last English dictionary composed by a single individual. [MORE . . .]

Senator Norm Coleman in a nice suit

Senator Norm Coleman’s office continues to hedge when asked about his relationship with donor Nasser Kazeminy. MinnPost.com provides some background:

I had heard this allegation [about a businessman buying suits for Coleman] before it became public and had asked [the senator’s campaign manager] Sheehan whether the senator had an arrangement with a businessman to pay for his clothes. He told me no, and I did not pursue the matter. But I now understand that to have been a technical, but not candid, answer…

• In August, I heard a tip that a wealthy local businessman had an arrangement with Coleman under which the senator could pick out whatever clothes he wanted and the businessman would pay the bill. Not wanting to be tricky, I directly asked Cullen Sheehan whether there had ever been any such arrangement.

 He replied that Coleman had disclosed all gifts he was required to disclose. 

I suggested that this non-denial denial seemed to lend credibility to the rumor. The question was not about the reporting requirements but about whether Coleman and the businessman had any such arrangement.

• On the second round, Sheehan repeated that all required disclosures had been made and added: “No, he has never had such an arrangement.”

I left the story there for several weeks, until the Harper’s piece ran. I called Sheehan back and asked if he was prepared to rebut the Harper’s piece, or whether he had been less than candid with me when he told me that Coleman “never had such an arrangement.”

• After a couple of rounds of Coleman-disclosed-everything-he-was-required-to-disclose, Sheehan told me that his no-such-arrangement answer to me had been based on the word “arrangement.” In other words, Sheehan was not denying that Coleman received clothes from Kazeminy, only that he never had an “arrangement,” such as the one I suggested by my question, under which Coleman could pick out whatever clothes he wanted and Kazeminy would pay the bills.

 Sheehan never did say that Kazeminy has bought clothes for Coleman, but he might as well have. If Kazeminy had never bought clothes for Coleman, he could have laid the matter to rest any time, but instead he has given artful answers, not fully responsive to the questions.

MinnPost.com also writes: [MORE . . .]

We will all be able to sleep more soundly tonight knowing that a serious criminal has been apprehended. The Associated Press reports:

David Kernell, 20, of Knoxville, Tenn. entered the plea in federal court in Knoxville, the same day prosecutors unsealed an indictment charging him with intentionally accessing Palin’s e-mail account without authorization. Kernell, an economics student at the University of Tennessee, was brought into court wearing handcuffs and shackles on his ankles.

He was released without posting bond, but the court forbade him from owning a computer and limited his Internet use to checking e-mail and doing class work.

[MORE . . .]

Alfred Nobel, wondering: can the United States

produce great literature?

No one would think to begrudge the grower of a prize-winning pumpkin tipping the scales at a country fair. Pity, though, the poor writer saddled with similar, heavyweight fortune. With any honor bestowed, she is guaranteed equal obloquy. Both Doris Lessing and Elfriede Jelinek, with their recent $1,415,969.81 checks (at today’s rate for 10,000,000 Swedish Kroner), also earned the opprobria of professional readers who took some measure of glee in dismissing work more polysemous than one might have been led to suppose. [MORE . . .]

When last spotted, Professor S. Frederick Starr was snuggling up with Washington lobbyists employed by the Kazakh government. Starr, the one-time Soviet advisor to President Reagan who currently heads the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), is now teaming up with former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld in another venture of dubious academic integrity.

Rumsfeld, who has kept a low profile since being fired from his post as Secretary of Defense, has created a foundation whose goals include “encouraging young people to go into government” and generating “support for Central Asian republics.” One of its major grants, I’ve been told, went to fund a new CACI fellowship program for “young leaders” from the region. The first group of fellows has just arrived at CACI. [MORE . . .]

An American cattleman.

The U.S. Senate and House of Representatives passed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. The legislation, which originated as a three-page proposal by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and grew to 451 pages after House and Senate negotiations, established the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to grant the Secretary of the Treasury up to $700 billion to buy troubled assets owned by financial institutions, to allow the Treasury to limit executive compensation and “golden parachutes” at those institutions, and to establish an oversight board to monitor the Treasury. The act also provides wooden arrow manufacturers an exemption from excise tax. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rushed the legislation to President George W. Bush, who signed it and promised that the United States would maintain “a leading role in the global economy.” “If I were dictator,” said Senator John McCain, who voted for the act, “which I always aspire to be, I would write it a little bit differently.” McCain also suggested the act be vetoed because it included so much pork. “No matter what the stakes are,” he said, “you've got to stop this.”^{1 2 3 4 5} California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger emailed Paulson to say that he may need a $7 billion loan for the state,⁶ and in Akron, Ohio, a 90-year-old woman named Adele Polk shot herself in the chest as police tried to evict her from her foreclosed home. “I saw that blood,” said a neighbor, “and I said, 'Oh, no. Miss Polk musta done shot herself.'” Responding to public outcry, Fannie Mae forgave Polk's mortgage, which will allow her to return home if she recovers from her wounds.⁷ After the bailout was signed into law, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell below 10,000 for the first time in five years. “Today,” said an income strategist, “is watching the sky fall.”⁸ [MORE . . .]