Pwned By Bill Ayers, Ferchrissakes

You don't need to respect Bill Ayers' past actions to respect the unbelievable stupidity of the wingnut faction.

[Y]ou shouldn’t believe everything you hear about me, [Ayers said,] you know nothing about me. I said, I know plenty–I’m from Chicago, a conservative blogger, and I’ll post this [...]

Then unprompted he said–I wrote Dreams From My Father. I said, oh, so you admit it. He said–Michelle asked me to. I looked at him. He seemed eager. He’s about my height, short. He went on to say–and if you can prove it, we can split the royalties. So I said, stop pulling my leg. Horrible thought. But he came again–I really wrote it, the wording was similar. I said I believe you probably heavily edited it. He said–I wrote it. I said–why would I believe you, you’re a liar.

He had no answer to that. Just looked at me. Then he turned and walked off, and said again his bit about my proving it and splitting the proceeds.

Unbelievably, a good bit of the wingnutosphere picked this up and ran with it today.

Ayers is messing with conservatives. People he’s duped so far: Jonah Goldberg, his mother Lucianne Goldberg, Tom Maguire, Dennis Byrne, Carol Platt Lieblau, and a bunch of other conservatives, some of whom try to split the difference by suggesting that Ayers is revealing a little bit of truth behind the sarcasm. How embarrassing.

More morons believing that Bill Ayers would just blurt out a wingnut conspiracy theory here. If Confederate Yankee is the smartly suspicious one in this scenario, your movement is bankrupt.

IOKIYAR

Van Jones was kicked out of the Administration, the story goes, because he was a Truther. The Congressman giving the GOP response to the President's health care speech tonight, Charles Boustany, is a Birther.

BOUSTANY: Well, it's certainly being looked at.

STARK: What do you personally believe, I mean -- do you think there's a question here?

BOUSTANY: I think there are questions, we'll have to see.

OK, queue the feeding frenzy, then. Obviously, we won't have a double standard on conspiracy theorists based on political ideology, right?

Um, never mind.

Truthers, Birthers, And Their Proper Side Of The Fence

I've seen Van Jones speak and had the opportunity to talk to him at the DNC last year. I'm going to rerun a bit of that discussion and have you tell me if these are the words of a Communist:

On green jobs, which is Jones' real focus area, he stressed that we need to move the environmental conversation from a cultural one to a political one. The green-collar economy "can be a place for people to earn money, not spend money. We need collective action for green citizenship, to create the jobs of the future in a Green New Deal. As long as carbon is free we're never going to move forward." He was pleased by the recent efforts by municipalities and states (green jobs bills have been passed in Massachusetts and Washington state, and the US Conference of Mayors is on board as well), but recognizes that the federal government must be involved as well. "This is about laws, not gizmos. Technology cannot be the savior. This has to be a bottom-up, inside-outside AND a top-down strategy. If the Feds are MIA, human life will be MIA in the future."

We talked about the offshore drilling debate, where Jones clearly stated that the Republicans won the day by lying to the American people. He had three major points:

• There is no such thing as American oil. There is oil drilled by multinationals that is sent overseas to China and India. American offshore driling will do nothing to solve any American oil problems.

• We banned drilling in offshore areas not to save birds and fish, but because of coastal families and coastal communities, because kids were walking into the water and coming out with oil on them, because property values were plunging. Democrats should not be willing to throw away America's beauty for a 2-cent solution in 10 years.

• We've seen the new phenomenon of the "dirty greens," who want to have an "all of the above strategy" on energy, with solar and wind, but also clean coal and drilling offshore and shale and all these dirty polluters. "All of the above" is not a strategy. It's not a wise choice, but a stupid swipe at a persistent problem.

That sounds like pretty mainstream liberal conceptions on energy and the environment. Jones was an activist who went into the government because he saw the need for a federal strategy to deal with green jobs.

But because he was previously involved with Color of Change, who has engineered a successful boycott of Glenn Beck, the Foc News crew has wanted to collect Jones' scalp. So they point to comments and replay them over and over. Not really anything he did, but things he said (ooh, he called Republicans assholes! What delicate sensibilities these chaps have), things he's signed. Although, I have to agree, this was certainly a mistake.

President Obama’s “green jobs czar” Van Jones has been targeted again and again by conservatives for his controversial views and now they’ll have another item to use as fodder.

Mr. Jones signed a statement for 911Truth.org in 2004 demanding an investigation into what the Bush Administration may have done that “deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.”

Jones has thus far apologized for prior statements and said he didn't agree "now or ever" with the 911 Truth letter. But if he has to leave his job at the White House, that will be the reason. And he absolutely made a mistake

But it brings up something interesting. There are now around a dozen Republican members of Congress who have co-sponsored legislation, essentially asking the President to reveal his birth certificate. The Birther phenomenon is at least as crazy and irresponsible as the Truther phenomenon. Why would it be OK to have 12 members of Congress who are conspiracy theorists, and not one in the White House? Now, the members of Congress would tell you they're not conspiracy theorists. So would Van Jones.

The range of debate that's acceptable and unacceptable keeps changing, somebody send me a scorecard.

Give A Wingnut An Inch, He'll Take A Mile

Republicans have gotten increasingly crazy. Ideas that would have been laughed out of a Birch Society meeting now get the full treatment on cable and throughout the media. The "Nancy Pelosi is trying to feminize America by taking the patriotic music off the Capitol hold music!!!1!" non-story springs to mind. But this is all being driven by success. How it works is:

1) Wingnuts throw a hissy fit
2) Democrats try to be reasonable by offering a concession
3) Repeat

To wit:

The President is giving a national address to schoolchildren on September 8, the first day of school. It will stress the virtues of hard work. The wingnuts think he's recruiting a Hitler youth brigade. They point to some supplementary materials containing the suggestion to kids to "Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president," clearly pointed at helping him realize their own goals, since the speech is about kids working hard and bettering themselves. Off that thin strand we have this confab:

Gordon directed me to the official teaching materials that the Department of Education has posted. Gordon especially took exception to this part of the materials: "Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals." I pointed out that this item came from a list of bullet points headed "Extension of the Speech," which clearly means it's in the context of the speech on personal responsibility and academic goals.

But Gordon begged to differ. "Why are you willing to accept that in good faith, the Obama administration is asking them to write a letter in the context of the speech," said Gordon, "but you're not willing to accept in our release, where we're saying there's no guidelines that it has to be in the context of the speech?" [...]

"Our point is that there are some questions about this address that need to be answered, and parents need to be given the option to choose whether or not their children who are students are going to be expected to watch this propaganda in a public school," Gordon later explained. "Students can't pray in school, but they can discuss new ideas and actions that the President is challenging them to think about. Well, I know that a lot of the President's ideas don't reflect my values and don't reflect the values that I would be teaching my children. And to be quite honest, there are a lot of the President's ideas that I wouldn't want my children discussing in a public school. It's not appropriate, the place for that is in the home."

I asked Gordon how this is any different from presidents routinely visiting classrooms, or the President's Challenge in gym classes (which I certainly hated, being the non-athletic nerd that I am). "This is different than trying to make sure that you have a good level of physical fitness," she said. "It would be a different if President Obama were going into a particular classroom on the first day of school and encouraging students to work hard and achieve academic goals. It's diff from sending out a blanket set of guidelines for a specific address that is supposed to be shown in every school, talking about how you can help the President advance his new ideas."

That's just plain crazy.

And so the Department of Education responded by altering their supplementary materials, in essence admitting that they were wrong in the first place.

If this is a bar fight primary, the Democrats are spitting up blood in preparation to spit up more blood. So conservatives learn that the way to win is to freak out in the craziest way possible and watch Democrats try to placate you.

Meanwhile a report shows that gun shows are the leading source of violent crimes in North America, and 2/3 of the vendors are unlicensed, but I see a hissy fit neither here, there, or anywhere...

Shiny Object

At a time where all the policy focus is on reforming health care for the first time in a generation, white reporters everywhere are obsessed with the story of a black man arrested in his own home for daring to be angry about it, and how terrible it was for the President to speak on behalf of those in such a circumstance. Similarly, while health care and urgent domestic issues demand attention, the wingnuts want to talk about Obama's birth certificate and some grand conspiracy to plant certificates of live birth in Hawaii and articles in the local paper 47 years ago in the hopes that later on a biracial kid growing up on the islands in the 1960s would fulfill the obvious goal of becoming President. G. Gordon Liddy was absurd and doddering last night on Hardball. He lied about a deposition from Obama's grandmother that the President was born in Kenya, a result of mistranslation. But you know what he did? He ate up five and a half minutes on prime time cable TV. I know that Chris Matthews was basically beating up on Liddy and the Birther movement in general. But that old saying about how there's no such thing as bad publicity? It's especially true when time is finite.

Bill Scher sees a linkage between those willing to believe the Birther nonsense and those willing to believe in the myth of socialized medicine in the Obama health care plan.

The Birther movement has received renewed attention in recent days, after video of a Birther-dominated congressional town hall surfaced, and CNN's Lou Dobbs attempted to legitimize the conspiracy theory.

Less noticed is the propensity of Birthers to also believe the other conservative conspiracy theory: President Obama's health care plan is a socialist takeover of our medical system.

The long-standing high-traffic conservative website World Net Daily regularly leads its front page with the latest Birther news, but that is directly followed by the latest "socialized medicine" news. (Well actually, sandwiched between the two sets of conspiracies are the all important "Special Offers!" -- such as "Turn $200 investment into $1 million. Sound impossible?")

Beneath its Birther fever swamp, World Net Daily offers the "Breaking News" that Congress plans mandatory "counseling" for seniors that will "attempt to convince seniors to die," (the latest smear job from the discredited Betsy McCaughey) and the "Exclusive" that congressional members have exempted themselves from the public plan option (it's so "exclusive" to WND because the opposite is true.)

And at that infamous town hall for (non-Birther) Rep. Michael Castle, the loud Birther crowd also gave cheers and applause to an audience member who ranted: "if we let the government bring in socialized medicine, it will destroy this thing faster than the twin towers came down.”

I just think it's about distraction. The Birther movement exists to rally a certain group of people and get the media chasing after them. It's a sideshow, and it makes for good TV. In the 1990s it was the murder of Vince Foster and a whole other lot of insane conspiracy theories. It made the more plausible but just as wrong conspiracy theories easier for the media to swallow. It's Overton Window stuff to the extreme. But in the short term, it just kicks the debate away from the focus sought by the White House and the majority of the country. The same with the Gates comments.

The media fail to see their role in all of this. They are not bystanders. They make editorial decisions to follow one story over another. They can devote resources wherever they choose. They could convene panels of health care policy experts and go over the issue that affects everyone's life in a visceral way. Or they could focus on the sideshow. They choose the latter, and that choice is not "driven by events," or whatever they would say to cover themselves.

...Howard Fineman, of all people, saying the same thing on Countdown. Of course, then he'll go on another MSNBC show and participate in the scrum.

Conservatives Now So Crazy They Think Obama Is Closing Chrysler Dealerships for Political Advantage

I'm a little late to this, but let me agree that the idea of Barack Obama having nothing better to do than to punish conservative car dealers for their donations to Republicans was always going to end up as a massive FAIL. Car dealers are a conservative lot - older, more male, more suburban, more business-friendly and more wealthy than the general population. Nate Silver does with graphs and statistics what should be immediately clear.

Overall, 88 percent of the contributions from car dealers went to Republican candidates and just 12 percent to Democratic candidates. By comparison, the list of dealers on Doug Ross's list (which I haven't vetted, but I assume is fine) gave 92 percent of their money to Republicans -- not really a significant difference.

There's no conspiracy here, folks -- just some bad math.

One of the insaneosphere denizens explains why they'll keep pushing this despite the lack of evidence.

Of course I want this looked into, of course. It's my guess it's a non-story, not my expert opinion.

But the MSM is so ridiculously biased that they make honesty a dangerous and politically counterproductive business.

The only way to even get the MSM to do their jobs and take a look is to pressure them by claiming Worst Scandal Eveh, even if we don't all necessarily buy that. But we have to claim that in order to spur any sort of media interest whatsoever. (That interest, of course, coming in the form of stories like Conservatives Now So Crazy They Think Obama Is Closing Chrysler Dealerships for Political Advantage, which isn't exactly the headline we seek, but that's the best we can hope for from the MSM.)

I obliged Ace with the suggested headline.

I understand the persecution complex; it's been conservative bread-and-butter for years. But that's quite an interesting admission, that the right will literally run with anything, no matter the truth, just to start up the Wurlitzer and make the media dance. That this ends up making them look relentlessly stupid in the end apparently doesn't matter.

No Self-Awareness

Sarah Palin endorseses reproductive choice.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told an antiabortion audience in Indiana on Thursday night that, "for a fleeting moment," she considered having an abortion after learning that her son Trig would have Down syndrome.

The experience, she added, "now lets me understand a woman's, a girl's temptation to maybe try to make it all go away."

Ultimately, Palin said, she decided she had to "walk the walk" concerning her long-standing antiabortion views. She avoided using the word "abortion" in her speech, preferring the phrase "change the circumstances."

"I had just enough faith to know that my trying to change the circumstances wasn't any answer," said Palin, the featured speaker before 3,000 people at a banquet in Evansville.

In other words, she considered her options, and made the one best suited for her. As John Cole says, "There is a name for when women who are pregnant are allowed to determine whether or not they keep their baby or have an abortion. It is called pro-choice."

Interesting sentiment at an anti-abortion rally, no? And I assume we've got it on tape, considering all the government spies and black helicopters at the event.

(I think I heard Jonathan Alter last night make the additional point that any doctor Palin consulted during that "fleeting moment," under her view of the world, would be in jail right now.)

DFHs 1, Sen. Hatch -2,384

What Josh Orton said.

Here's Senator Hatch, member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, back in June of 2008, laughing off "onerous" oversight provisions for the FISA bill:

Orrin Hatch, wrong. The "tinfoil hat" brigade, right. Again. Why, here's one of those mad hatters right now!

“Since 2001, I have spent a lot of time in the Intelligence Committee, the Judiciary Committee, and on the floor of the Senate bringing attention to both the possible and actual effects of legislation that has dangerously expanded the power of the executive branch to spy on innocent Americans. Despite these efforts, Congress insisted on enacting several measures including the USA PATRIOT Act, the Protect America Act, and the FISA Amendments Act, embarking on a tragic retreat from the principles that had governed the sensitive area of government surveillance for the previous three decades. Congress must get to work fixing these laws that have eroded the privacy and civil liberties of law-abiding citizens. In addition, the administration should declassify certain aspects of how these authorities have been used so that the American people can better understand their scope and impact.”

Of course, now that there's a DEMONCRAT in the White House, Hatch will probably don the aluminum foil himself. We are all conspiracy theorists now.

A couple other advances on this: Spencer Ackerman has the list of who potentially could be the mystery member of Congress who was wiretapped by the Bush Administration's NSA. The clues we had were: member of Congress who went on a trip to the Middle East in 2005-2006. That narrows it down to 27 potentials.

Also, Sen. Feingold had an interesting discussion in open testimony that hinted at this on Feb. 25 with David Kris, the nominee for Assistant Attorney General.

SEN. FEINGOLD: We had an opportunity -- and you can respond in a minute -- but we had an opportunity earlier today to discuss in a classified setting specific concerns I have about how the FISA amendment act has been implemented. Without discussing those specifics in an open hearing, do you agree that there are serious problems that need to be corrected?

MR. KRIS: Senator, I do, I appreciate very much the meeting we had this morning, you raised a number of concerns that I as an outsider had not appreciated and you certainly got my attention. I have been thinking about it since we met and if it's even possible you increased my desire to, if I were to be confirmed, to get to the bottom of the FISA amendments act and I hope if I am confirmed that I can take advantage of your learning of others on the committee and the intelligence committee to see how best to make any necessary improvements.

You may guess that none of this came from my cable news teevee this morning.

...UPDATE: DiFi says she'll hold a hearing. Maybe she can investigate her own vote to give away these massive spying powers to the NSA.

American Moron

Michael Scherer thinks he's found a nut by announcing that the Obama Administration, slightly busy with the financial crisis and the unemployment rate soaring and foreclosures and the stimulus and two wars, are the prime movers in pushing a "Limbaugh strategy." Scherer thinks the whole thing was cooked up by Administration officials even though James Carville and Paul Begala, the ringleaders of the strategy, aren't Obama officials.

I guess Robert Gibbs impersonated Rush on the air that day when he said he hoped Obama fails. That was the prime mover of this whole thing, and it happened before Obama was even inaugurated. Just because this is an obsession of the corporate media doesn't mean the White House is pulling the strings. It means the media is too stupid to follow the real stories shaping our lives.

Eric Boehlert and Greg Sargent demolish this. I guess it simply never occurred to Scherer that nature abhors a vacuum and somebody had to take the leadership role in the Republican Party, leading to this internal war. No, Republicans could never be that disorganized. It has to be something DEMOCRATS did.

Stupid Democrats.

But If You Try Sometime, You Just Might Find, You Get What You Need

Jerome Corsi arrested:

A leading American neo-conservative author has been detained by immigration authorities in Kenya as he tried to launch a book smearing Barack Obama.

Jerome Corsi, of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth fame, was this morning being held after failing to reckon with Obamamania.

He had been planning to launch his book, entitled The Obama Nation Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, before travelling to one of Nairobi’s slums to donate money to the Senator’s half-brother George, who was found living in squalid conditions two months ago.

But officers swooped hours after Dr Corsi was described as "author of a smear crusade" by local newspapers.

Immigration officials claim he had been detained because he did not have a work permit, however one of Dr Corsi's assistants said he was "just answering some questions".

"We have been given water and are very comfortable," the assistant said.

I'm sure this will be given as perfect evidence that Obama's jack-booted thugs are detaining serious opponents. You know, maybe getting the work permit would have been an option.

There are similar conspiracies running through the rat wheel brains of wingnuts over NBC pulling an SNL sketch off of Hulu - a sketch which is still on YouTube and aired on national television, so I'm missing the "censorship" part. BTW, considering that the sketch, which blamed wealthy Jewish bankers for the economic crisis in extremely familiar terms, approaches defamation, scrubbing the site is probably a good idea from a financial standpoint. Also, George Soros sought to stop the bailout, but you know, never mind.

Conspiracy theories and persecution complexes really are the last refuge for these scoundrels.

The Sorority Made Him Do It

Was he trying to get the attention of someone who looked like Jodie Foster?

The top suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks was obsessed with a sorority that sat less than 100 yards away from a New Jersey mailbox where the toxin-laced letters were sent, authorities said Monday. Multiple U.S. officials told The Associated Press that former Army scientist Bruce Ivins was long obsessed with the sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma, going back as far as his own college days at the University of Cincinnati.

The officials all spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case publicly.

The bizarre link to the sorority may indirectly explain one of the biggest mysteries in the case: why the anthrax was mailed from Princeton, N.J., 195 miles from the Army biological weapons lab the anthrax is believed to have been smuggled out of.

This is some major bullshit right here. Why would Ivins' obsession with some random sorority have anything to do with mailing letters made to look like they came from Muslim extremists to Patrick Leahy, Tom Daschle, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings? This "he was a woman-hater" narrative has nothing to do with the crime committed. And as usual for this case, contradictory information shows up later in the article - nobody can place Ivins at the mailbox or even in New Jersey at the time of the mailings.

Meanwhile the feds are dying to close this probe and wash their hands of it. And yet all the leaks coming out are from unnamed government scientist sources (just like the unnamed sources that led ABC News astray with the bentonite story in late 2001).

This case stinks on ice, and it always has. Somebody tried to frame Dr. Ayaad Assaad before anybody was even killed:

On Oct. 2, Ayaad Assaad, a U.S. government scientist and former biowarfare researcher, received a call from an FBI agent asking him to come in for a talk. It was well before anthrax panic gripped the nation -- in fact, it was the same day that photo editor Robert Stevens, 63, was admitted to a Florida hospital. It wasn't until the next day that Stevens was diagnosed with inhalation anthrax, and another two days later, on Oct. 5, when he would become the first of five eventual fatalities caused by the apparent bioterrorist attack.

The day after hearing from the FBI, Assaad met with special agents J. Gregory Lelyegian and Mark Buie in the FBI's Washington field office, along with Assaad's attorney, Rosemary McDermott. They showed Assaad a detailed, unsigned, computer-typed letter with a startling accusation: that the 53-year-old Assaad, an Environmental Protection Agency scientist who filed an age discrimination suit against the U.S. Army for dismissing him from a biowarfare lab, might be a bioterrorist.

"Dr. Assaad is a potential biological terrorist," the letter stated, according to Assaad and McDermott. The letter was received by the FBI in Quantico, Va., but Assaad did not learn from the FBI where it had been mailed from. "I have worked with Dr. Assaad," the letter continued, "and I heard him say that he has a vendetta against the U.S. government and that if anything happens to him, he told his sons to carry on."

According to Assaad, "The letter-writer clearly knew my entire background, my training in both chemical and biological agents, my security clearance, what floor where I work now, that I have two sons, what train I take to work, and where I live.

What the hell is going on here?

We Have The Worst Conspiracy Theorists

So imagine that you have two incidents. Both are considered terrorism, both are connected by the policymakers to an Iraq war they desire, and both are used as a casus belli to gin up support for that war.

One is a dynamic attack with documentary evidence of planes crashing into large buildings, 3,000 people dead, a terror group which takes responsibility for it, evidence of the hijackers boarding the planes and taking control of them, audio of the cockpits during the hijacking, etc., etc.

The other is this strange series of biochemical agents delivered through the mail, most of them are sent to media and leading Democrats in Congress, nobody takes responsibility, the mystery of who sent them is not solved for years, the notes enclosed in the envelopes crudely say things like "We have this anthrax, take penacillin now, Death to America, Death to Israel, Allah is great," and nobody can completely figure out the motive or who would have the means to pull this off, although the speculation is typically focused on government research labs.

You mean to tell me the cottage industry of conspiracy theories is over the FIRST one?

And before labeling me as making a false equivalence between 9/11 and the anthrax attacks, in their own way they were just as scary. I remember weeks of palpable fear, especially with their timing right after the WTC attack. Everyone in the country gets mail; not everyone gets on an airplane or works in a national landmark. The random death of the old lady in Connecticut, taking it outside the realm of postal workers and media/political figures, was particularly frightening. And there's no doubt that the recipients of the letters looked extremely calculated, designed to provoke a response of fear in the corridors of power, an upset of the social order.

Now we have thrown into this mix the strange suicide of Bruce Ivins, who reportedly was about to be charged with the anthrax mailings (he was informed of the investigation and subsequent talks with his lawyer acknowledged that charging was imminent).

Ivins, whose name had not been disclosed publicly as a suspect in the case, played a central role in research to improve anthrax vaccines by preparing anthrax formulations used in experiments on animals.

Regarded as a skilled microbiologist, Ivins also helped the FBI analyze the powdery material recovered from one of the anthrax-tainted envelopes sent to a U.S. senator's office in Washington.

Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital after ingesting a massive dose of prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine, said a friend and colleague, who declined to be identified out of concern that he would be harassed by the FBI.

This is after the government had to pay almost 6 million dollars to Stephen Hatfill, another government scientist originally tabbed as a "person of interest" in the case. That had to happen before they could charge Ivins, apparently. Ivins worked at AMRIID, the Army's institute for infectious diseases. His brother spoke to his mentality.

The eldest of his two brothers, Thomas Ivins, said he was not surprised by the events that have unfolded.

"He buckled under the pressure from the federal government," Thomas Ivins said, adding that FBI agents came to Ohio last year to question him about his brother.

"I was questioned by the feds, and I sung like a canary" about Bruce Ivins' personality and tendencies, Thomas Ivins said.

"He had in his mind that he was omnipotent."

There is a trail of strange and almost wingnutty letters to his local paper. But Ivins was one of those stereotypical quiet scientists, not the profile of a bioterrorist, and subsequent reporting shows that he was found unconscious in his home months ago, was admitted to a psychiatric facility recently after threatening co-workers, and seemed to have a mental breakdown from the strain of the investigation.

Despite the allegations -- and even after Ivins's apparent plunge into mental illness -- longtime friends and colleagues say it is inconceivable that Ivins could have been a bioterrorist. Many contend that he was driven to depression and suicide because of months of hounding by federal investigators.

"He just looked worried, depressed, anxious, way turned into himself," recalled W. Russell Byrne, an infectious-disease specialist who last saw Ivins on a recent Sunday at St. John the Evangelist, the Roman Catholic church in Frederick to which they both belonged. "It would be overstating it to say he looked like a guy who was being led to his execution, but it's not far off."

The "official story" continues today with an implication that he stood to make money off of his inventions of bioterror vaccines, but the story gets the timelines all wrong (the vaccines were sought even before 9/11 and well before the anthrax attacks) and even inside the story there's an admission that Ivins' take would have been in the tens of thousands.

There's a possibility that Ivins wanted more resources to go to bioterror and so he sent these mailings without expecting anyone would die, but that doesn't answer all the questions raised. In a seminal post, Glenn Greenwald asks about ABC News' breathless assertion at the time that Iraq was surely involved in the dispensing of anthrax based on this new information.

If the now-deceased Ivins really was the culprit behind the attacks, then that means that the anthrax came from a U.S. Government lab, sent by a top U.S. Army scientist at Ft. Detrick. Without resort to any speculation or inferences at all, it is hard to overstate the significance of that fact. From the beginning, there was a clear intent on the part of the anthrax attacker to create a link between the anthrax attacks and both Islamic radicals and the 9/11 attacks.

During the last week of October, 2001, ABC News, led by Brian Ross, continuously trumpeted the claim as their top news story that government tests conducted on the anthrax -- tests conducted at Ft. Detrick -- revealed that the anthrax sent to Daschele contained the chemical additive known as bentonite. ABC News, including Peter Jennings, repeatedly claimed that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax was compelling evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks, since -- as ABC variously claimed -- bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program" and "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons."

ABC News' claim -- which they said came at first from "three well-placed but separate sources," followed by "four well-placed and separate sources" -- was completely false from the beginning. There never was any bentonite detected in the anthrax (a fact ABC News acknowledged for the first time in 2007 only as a result of my badgering them about this issue). It's critical to note that it isn't the case that preliminary tests really did detect bentonite and then subsequent tests found there was none. No tests ever found or even suggested the presence of bentonite. The claim was just concocted from the start. It just never happened.

That means that ABC News' "four well-placed and separate sources" fed them information that was completely false -- false information that created a very significant link in the public mind between the anthrax attacks and Saddam Hussein. And look where -- according to Brian Ross' report on October 28, 2001 -- these tests were conducted:

And despite continued White House denials, four well-placed and separate sources have told ABC News that initial tests on the anthrax by the US Army at Fort Detrick, Maryland, have detected trace amounts of the chemical additives bentonite and silica.

That's where Ivins worked.

Like I said, we have terrible conspiracy theorists. Because it's not much of a leap, when you consider that the very lab from which the attacks are now alleged to have originated is the same one that leaked false intel to ABC News linking the attacks to Iraq; when the attacks were designed to scare media and political elites into believing that Muslims could reach them through the postal system; when one of the signature pieces of evidence shown by Colin Powell at the UN for war with Iraq was a small vial of anthrax; when you read this incredible admission from elite pundit Richard Cohen:

Anthrax. Remember anthrax? It seems no one does anymore -- at least it's never mentioned. But right after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, letters laced with anthrax were received at the New York Post and Tom Brokaw's office at NBC. . . . There was ample reason to be afraid.

The attacks were not entirely unexpected. I had been told soon after Sept. 11 to secure Cipro, the antidote to anthrax. The tip had come in a roundabout way from a high government official, and I immediately acted on it. I was carrying Cipro way before most people had ever heard of it.

For this and other reasons, the anthrax letters appeared linked to the awful events of Sept. 11. It all seemed one and the same. Already, my impulse had been to strike back, an overwhelming urge that had, in fact, taken me by surprise on Sept. 11 itself when the first of the Twin Towers had collapsed. . . .

...when you recognize that politicians like John McCain set to linking anthrax to Iraq almost immediately; when you learn that, despite Ivins repeatedly being linked to leaked anthrax spores and residue, the government sought to blame it on Stephen Hatfill, a separate fall guy...

I mean there's a rich amount of material here for any "Truther" to make use of. And in this case, the questions are very real and very vital. There must be a full investigation.

Dude, It TOTALLY Happened This Way

The Titanic truth movement begins. Don't tell ANYONE I linked to it. This is the kind of stuff that'll get you killed. Open your eyes, sheeple!