ARTS & FARCES internet

How much longer can the Bush administration dodge addressing the Downing Street memo, the document containing minutes of a meeting wherein Bush plots the US invasion of Iraq eight months prior to it happening? My guess is, not much longer at all. We covered this at Utne (top item) the week after Greg Palast broke the story, and it still hasn’t gotten much corporate media play.

But now there’s a new website, The Downing Street Memo, that’s getting a lot of attention in the blogosphere:

The contents of the memo are shocking. The minutes detail how our government did not believe Iraq was a greater threat than other nations; how intelligence was “fixed” to sell the case for war to the American public; and how the Bush Administration’s public assurances of “war as a last resort” were at odds with their privately stated intentions.

No one has disputed the document’s authenticity, and Representative John Conyers (D-Michigan) is pressing a citizen’s petition to force Bush to answer five simple questions with regard to the material contained in the Downing Street Memo.

Claiming to be the most comprehensive sustainability study to date, SustainLane has released its sustainability rankings for 25 US cities across 12 categories. No surprises at the top-level overall ratings:

1. San Francisco
2. Portland
3. Berkeley
4. Seattle
5. Santa Monica

But drilling down into the data for the individual cities sheds light in some much-needed corners. Looking at Minneapolis, for example (my hometown, Saint Paul, isn’t on the list) reveals that we’re doing pretty well with water and air quality (both second best in the country), planning, energy/climate policy, and knowledge-base but absolutely horrendous in LEED (Leadership in Environmental & Energy Design) building and zoning.

What can we learn from the recent unveiling of Deep Throat? Mark Felt, the high level executive at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, pointed to a level of corruption in politics and government that has likely become even more systemic and suspect.

We can observe first hand that the intrinsic value of protected news sources cannot be overstated. We can remember that a democracy doesn’t handle “secrets” very well. Imagine what the Patriot Act can now do for the likes of the power seekers that lurk among us today. Would Deep Throat even survive in today’s world?

The passage of time has given us FBI mismanagement of taxpayer’s money; the mega-corporate mergers and malfeasance of the last decade, and government agency default on the public interest. Suddenly, a web of internal spies, secret surveillance, dirty tricks, and cover-ups looks much more like “bid-ness as usual” than a conspiracy-laden hot news story.

Of course, at this critical juncture and in the interest of disclosure, President Bush courageously “hinted” he will not grant access to documents regarding John Bolton prior to his confirmation as the U.N. ambassador.

Anyone care to scream?

If you care about the impact your work has on the world, you might be interested in participating in David Batstone‘s Triple P Scale survey. It only takes a couple minutes and the aggregate data—to be released on Labor Day—should be quite interesting.

The survey is an inventory of 12 questions that can help form the basis of how we talk about passion, purpose, and profit (the Triple P Scale).

Deep Throat, W. Mark Felt, has outed himself in—of all peculiar places—a Vanity Fair article written by his lawyer friend John D. O’Connor. Sucks to be Bob Woodward today. I guess we’ll find out how much on Thursday when Woodward’s account of his relationship with Deep Throat will be published in the Washington Post.

There’s something, I don’t know… ineffably and deeply disturbing about the Post running a wire story about Deep Throat revealing himself with the killer final graf: “The Washington Post had no immediate comment.” Of course the Post followed up later in the day with a confirmation from Bob Woodward:

The confirmation came from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story, and their former top editor, Benjamin C. Bradlee. The three spoke after Felt’s family and Vanity Fair magazine identified the 91-year-old Felt, now a retiree in California, as the long-anonymous source who provided crucial guidance for some of the newspaper’s groundbreaking Watergate stories.

W. Mark Felt, now a 91 year-old retiree was, at the time of Watergate, second-in-command at the FBI. Nixon passed Felt over for the FBI directorship, choosing instead then-assistant attorney general L. Patrick Gray.