Expect light posting today as Mrs. O'Toole File and I fill our hearts with good cheer, and kick off the holiday season with ... a trip to the $@#$*@# mall. Things should be back to normal tonight.
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ABC News is reporting that a Massachusetts software firm with several sensitive government contracts may be an al Qaeda front.

The Quincy, Mass., firm, Ptech, makes software and is allegedly secretly owned by Qassin al-Kadi, one of 12 Saudi businessmen accused of funneling millions of dollars to al Qaeda.

U.S. government investigators told ABCNEWS' chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross that there are fears al Qaeda may have had access to some of the government's most closely held secrets through the company, which provided computer software for the FBI, the Navy, the Air Force and the agency that handles nuclear weapons security.

Sometimes, even bloggers find themselves at a loss for words...
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Family members of 9/11 victims are angry that incoming Majority Leader Trent Lott has blocked former Sen. Warren Rudman's appointment to the commission investigating the attacks.

Stephen Push, a spokesman for the families, said they believed that Mr. Rudman was the only Republican both highly qualified to participate in the investigation and sufficiently independent of his party's leadership to ensure a thorough and impartial inquiry.

Republican aides on Capitol Hill confirmed his account, saying Mr. McCain was supportive of Mr. Rudman but that there was an impasse with Mr. Lott over his appointment. (Washington Post)

Right now, Republicans enjoy an enormous level of public trust on national security matters. Stupid stunts like this that just reek of Beltway business-as-usual are an excellent way to help Democrats get back in the game.
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"Affirmative action is a grievance machine: That is probably the worst thing about it. The Michigan Law School rejects the vast majority of people who apply for admission. Only an unidentifiable few are victims of reverse discrimination, but for each one there are dozens or hundreds who believe they are racial victims or suspect that they might be. A feeling of grievance can be real even when the grievance itself is not."
Michael Kinsley, in Slate
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Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen understands why so many Democrats are having such a hard time coming to grips politically with the Bush presidency; they just can't get their heads around the fact that he's not the idiot they want him to be. Until they do, the Bush Express is just going to keep rolling along.
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Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina turns one hundred today, a milestone that will be marked by parties at the White House and throughout his (my) home state. It's tempting to simply congratulate the senator on a long and successful life in public service, and move on. But like the man said, that would be wrong.

Simple longevity can't excuse the role Senator Thurmond played in stoking the fires of racial discord at a particularly difficult moment in this nation's history. At the same time, those actions cannot erase the enormous personal valor he demonstrated on D-Day, landing his glider on the beaches of Normandy as a forty-year-old man. His life stands as a testament to the messy complexity of real human beings, and as a rebuke to those who peddle the simple-minded Manichaeanism that dominates our political discourse today.

Someday, a great biography of this complicated man will be written, and I can't wait to read it. For now, two cheers for Senator Thurmond on his one hundredth birthday.
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The loyal PPC staff was up into the small hours last night making a number of changes to the site, most of them intended to "enhance readability," as the word mavens of digital design like to say. Take a look around, and let me know what you think.
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Not surprisingly, Glenn Reynolds has a sensible take on the success of Fox News, and what that means for Democrats.

In other words, instead of a Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy at work, we are seeing the market, now freed from anticompetitive constraints, serving a large group of customers who were dissatisfied with earlier offerings and who now have some options. Not surprisingly, those who benefited from the old system aren't happy with the results.

Democrats may be tempted to quibble with the phrase "benefited from" -- after all, they did lose five out of six presidential elections between 1968 and 1988, a period when traditional network news was still the only meaningful game in town -- but the point Reynolds makes here is an important one for Democrats to understand and accept: Fox News exists for sound economic reasons, and it's not going anywhere. Quit complaining, and get to work developing a strategy to deal with it.
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Like Howell Raines, I have my hobbyhorses, and chief among them (at the moment anyway) is the fervent belief that the first major pol who blogs and blogs well will reshape the way professionals think about the Internet as a political tool. And as I was editing my bookmarks this morning, removing Marshall Whitman's now-defunct Bull Moose blog, it occurred to me that his new boss would be the perfect test case. If Mr. Straight Talk himself got into the blogging business and truly learned to communicate effectively in this still-new medium, he might well be known one day as the Jack Kennedy of the Internet.
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After watching John Kerry fairly closely for the past couple days, I have a question: Haven't any of his advisers told him that it's political suicide to run for president without a message? Because, as far as I can tell, he doesn't have one.

Oh, I see some carping about the current administration's foreign policy. And I see a whole boatload of bad economic statistics. But I don't see anything even resembling a modern campaign message. (Maybe I should issue my own Kerry challenge, the O'Toole File version of Where's Waldo -- Find John Kerry's Message.)

Three days ago, when I assumed that his campaign was ready for prime time, I thought this whole pre-announcement announcement gambit was a pretty good idea. Now ...
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Political junkies, rejoice: The Note has returned.
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The whole DiIulio flap is Stockman/Greider redux -- fascinating to policy wonks and Beltway insiders, but utterly irrelevant from a political standpoint. Real people just don't care about this kind of thing.

UPDATE: If you haven't read it yet, the full text of DiIulio's letter to Esquire reporter Ron Suskind is here.
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Blogger Pro is very buggy this morning. Posts appear where they belong, or, then again, maybe they don't; they're archived, or they're not; the permalinks lead where they're supposed to, or they send you someplace else entirely. I'm trying to catch these errors and correct them as they happen. Please accept my apologies in advance if things seem a little, well, ... odd as you try to navigate the site today.
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James Fallows thinks 11/28 will eventually be seen as a worse day for civil aviation than 9/11. I'm afraid he's right.

I avoid making predictions. But I'll risk this one because if it's wrong everyone will be glad, including me. The prediction is that Nov. 28, 2002, the day terrorists shot surface-to-air missiles at a chartered Israeli airplane in Kenya, will be a more important divide in the history of airline travel than Sept. 11, 2001. Here's the reason: We can be fairly sure that attacks like those on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon will never happen again. We can be equally sure that other missile attacks will occur and that they will succeed. So, while the effects of Sept. 11 have slowed the airlines with ponderous layers of security, the effects of Nov. 28 could add a level of danger that deeply affects people's willingness to fly.
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Now that the debate over tax cuts -- particularly cuts that primarily benefit those with high incomes or serious family money -- has seemingly become a permanent feature of American politics, it seems time to ask whether political journalists have some sort of disclosure obligation regarding their financial stake in the races they cover.

Currently, it's a given that reporters should disclose any past or present financial relationships they have with the subjects of their stories. If a business scribe, for example, takes a few thousand dollars to speak at a corporate convention, he's expected to tell his readers about it the next time he writes about that company. Most would agree that that's a pretty sensible policy.

So why should political journalists get a pass, particularly when the sums of money involved are potentially much greater? For instance, a network news superstar earning several million dollars a year has a huge financial stake in the outcome of next year's expected battles over making President Bush's tax cut permanent, and the possible elimination of the estate tax. Isn't that something her viewers should know? And if those policies are actually enacted, the same journalist will likely find herself covering the reelection campaign of a sitting president whose actions have directly benefited her to the tune of hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of dollars. If that doesn't require some sort of meaningful disclosure, I don't know what does.

This post isn't meant as an attack on either high-priced TV talent or upper-income tax cuts. I'm just throwing the whole question of disclosure out there for debate. If you'd like to weigh in, send me an e-mail. I'll print the best responses as they come in over the next few days.
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TNR's Noam Scheiber welcomes John Kerry to the 2004 presidential field with a withering analysis of the senator's recent foreign policy pronouncements.

He [Kerry] doesn't offer a positive vision of America's role in the world so much as a collection of cloying, mostly procedural, criticisms of the Bush administration. For example, when Tim Russert [on Sunday's Meet the Press] asked whether he would favor unilateral action if Saddam doesn't accurately account for his weapons arsenal, Kerry simply complained that a unilateral war would impose huge financial costs -- not to mention "the damage that could be caused to our relationship all across the globe with countries that we need." True enough. But presumably there are some situations in which the benefits of unilateral action would outweigh the costs. Kerry gave no indication that he'd thought about what those might be.

More on Kerry's nascent presidential bid later.
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Political Professional News returns today with all new links and stories about the business of politics. If inside baseball is your sport, check it out.
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On Friday, I called Tom Daschle's recent comments about Rush Limbaugh "silly, post-election whining." Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh proved he could be just as childish.

"He attacked my president," Limbaugh said of Daschle on CNN's Reliable Sources. "He attacked our effort in the war on terrorism. He said he sees no evidence of any victory because we haven't gotten bin Laden. He's out there broadcasting this to the world. This is getting such coverage who knows what kind of aid and comfort it might be providing the people that we're attempting to bring to justice here, either legally or militarily."

These two need to grow up. As a leader in the US Senate, Mr. Daschle must have better things to do than to spend his time contemplating Rush Limbaugh's place in Mrs. Clinton's vast right-wing conspiracy. And as a genuine patriot himself, Mr. Limbaugh should know better than to cavalierly accuse a decent, loyal American of providing "aid and comfort" to the enemy in a time of national peril.

After 9-11, most American's realized that the world had changed, and that our leaders had to put aside the divisive, slash-and-burn politics of the last thirty years. They understood that our country was under attack by a ruthless enemy who wanted nothing less than our complete destruction.

Memo to Messrs. Daschle and Limbaugh: It still is.
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It's official. John Forbes Kerry (bio, online office) tells NBC's Tim Russert he's running for president.
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"To what extent is this part of the larger Saudi effort to co-opt our organizations? For too long we've depended too often on overseas financing to keep our institutions alive. This comes at the price of our intellectual independence and integrity."
Mairaj Syed, UCLA graduate student in Islamic studies, in an article in today's LA Times
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