Condoleezza Rice

Earlier today the Bush administration made clear they don't intend to intervene in the negotiations between the Iraqi government and several large oil companies.

 

Chuck Schumer, along with Claire McCaskill and John Kerry, responded quickly with a letter to Condoleezza Rice asking her to prevent the deals from going forward until there is an oil-revenue sharing law.

Both Schumer and Kerry are on the Senate Finance Committee; Kerry and McCaskill are both surrogates for Barack Obama, whose campaign has been going after John McCain for McCain's new, oil company-friendly position on offshore drilling.

Here's the release along with the letter (which, weirdly, doesn't include McCaskill's name at the end of it).  read more »

Sort of like the idle Colin Powell rumors that swirled before the 1996 and 2000 Republican conventions, we’ve been forced this campaign cycle to endure months of sporadic chatter about Condoleezza Rice’s supposed candidacy for the number two spot on the G.O.P. ticket.

Except that the speculation may have just taken a twist that the Powell talk never did: There’s suddenly reason to believe there might be something to it.  read more »

This statement just came in from Hillary Clinton's Senate office:

This morning, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice contacted Senator Clinton in order to inform her that the Senator's passport file was breached in 2007. The State Department will be briefing Senator Clinton's staff this afternoon to provide details about the recent unauthorized breaches of passport records.  read more »

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The most important question, “Is human rights more important than American national security?”, did not create a stir. But Obama answered it best.  read more »

The White House has of late turned its attention to an unlikely candidate: the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.  read more »

Hevesi: toast.

It should be quite a scene this morning.

First phrase of Fred Dicker's story: "Sealing his political doom..."

A lot of people want his job.

His temporary replacement may be Jack Chartier, Peggy Lipton's friend.

Times' editorial page on Hevesi's replacement: "This choice should be about credentials, not patronage." What's Rohatyn up to?

The Times Union has big scoop on the Joe Bruno story: a source says the Feds are investigating him for mail fraud and money laundering. Fraud is how they got Jack Abramoff.

More Joe Bruno resignation chatter. One possible successor: Nassau County State Sen. Dean Skelos.

Brooklyn State Sen. Martin Golden on Bruno resignation talk: "very premature."

Welcome ant overlords! Larry Silverstein bashes Pataki, praises Spitzer: "these guys are not political hacks."

You sure about that?

Bloomberg backs Badillo. Anyone talked to Virgil Goode about this?

New upstate Rep. Kirstin Gillibrand is high on the GOP's list of vulnerable House freshmen.

Condi Rice says the Iraq War was "worth it."

Path train riders: How was your commute this morning?

The Devils' new Newark arena has a nickname: The Rock.

Hillary is covering all the bases.

-- Andrew Rice

In today's Quinnipiac poll, 45 percent of voters said Condoleezza Rice is the most powerful woman in the country.

That's compared to 29 percent who said the same thing about Hillary Clinton, and 23 percent who said it about Nancy Pelosi.

Regardless of who voters support in a presidential race, 56-41percent said Hillary is qualified to be president.

Not directly related, but also interesting:

"American voters oppose by 52 - 45 percent laws allowing same-sex couples to form civil unions and oppose 63 - 34 percent allowing same-sex couples to marry."

-- Azi Paybarah

An important piece in the Forward this week suggests that Bush is at last going to do something about Israel/Palestine so as to try and redeem his failed policies in the Middle East and restore American legitimacy in the world. The Forward quotes Philip Zelikow, an assistant to Condoleezza Rice, speaking at the pro-Israel thinktank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy:

Zelikow said that the Europeans and the moderate Arabs are America's most important allies in confronting Iran and Islamist terrorism, "and some sense of progress and momentum on the Arab-Israeli dispute is the sine qua non for them to cooperate actively with the United States on lots of other things that we care about.

"We can rail against that belief; we can find it completely justifiable. It is a fact. That means an active policy on the Arab-Israeli dispute is an essential ingredient to forging a coalition that deals with the most dangerous problem."

Sine qua non. Nice. The daybreak moment is reflected by MJ Rosenberg on the IPF Forum:

This is something new: the realization by Washington that movement on the Israeli-Palestinian issue is not only right, it is essential if the United States is to achieve progress anywhere in the region.

Under Secy' of State Karen Hughes said the same thing earlier this week (on CNN or MSNBC) before Bush's appearance at the U.N. "Everywhere I go," she said, people talk about Israel/Palestine; we're going to get moving on that one.

One can only hope. Naturally, the Forward's Ori Nir reports that the Israelis are disturbed by the pressure. It means doing something about the hated occupation. But it's worth considering that the uptick in Arab prestige achieved by the Lebanon war may actually further the possibility of a deal.

"[A] central feature of the Arab Israeli conflict [is that] Israel's military victories and the Arabs' humiliating defeat could never be the prelude to peace," Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Foreign Minister, has written. The '67 war, for instance, bolstered Israel's tendency toward unilateralism and suspicion of Arab motives. "It took the recovery of Arab pride and a serious setback for Israel in 1973, as well as the national trauma and collective soul-searching that followed, to make the Israelis and their leaders ripe for compromise."

Maybe that's happening now, maybe Bush, punctured by his Iraqi nightmare, is actually doing some soul-searching. Someone lend him a penlight.

How scary must the New York Times legal department be when Salon is forced to run a second and much-expanded correction to a story they've already corrected and removed from their site?

The crux of the correction, regarding a piece by Debbie Nathan on Kurt Eichenwald's internet-child-porn reporting, is an amplification of the right of the Times—and of you!—, as per federal law, to inadvertently view kiddie porn. (Here we come a-trolling, XTube.com!)

Even though Salon is The Transom's sworn life-long enemy, we'll admit it's clear they nobly did the right thing. Still, ya just can't help but feel terrible watching such a legal beat-down. Watching the Salon-Times legal department match-up is sort of like watching Condoleeza Rice and Scooter Libby mash a bag full of kittens.

With Condoleezza Rice pressing for a cease-fire and a particularly high weekly toll in civilian casualties, we asked Congressman Eliot Engel -- one of the more vocal politicians urging strong support for Israel's actions on "the frontline of terror" -- whether his attitude had evolved at all since the beginning of hostilities.

Here was Engel's emailed reponse to our question:

"I believe there should be a cease-fire but only after it can be guaranteed that Hezbollah will not be able to threaten Israel from South Lebanon. The international forces should be deployed to keep Hezbollah out of Southern Lebanon."

Sounds like a yes, sort of.

--Jason Horowitz

More evidence that Rudy Giuliani's liberal social positions are either a) unimportant to the national Republican base or b) unknown to them.

A new Gallup poll finds that "only three candidates would be acceptable to a majority of Republicans." The are, in order: Giuliani with 73%, Condoleezza Rice with 68% and John McCain with 55%.

Read the whole summary here.

-- Josh Benson

Right now, the first line of Condoleezza Rice's resume is that as national security adviser, she drank the neocon Kool-Aid and spouted bad intelligence leading to the Iraq war. Interviewed by PBS's Frontline for the on-line documentation of its "Dark Side" documentary, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, tries to explain Rice's failure:

We had a one-word description of the National Security Council... and that one word was "dysfunctional" ....

I asked myself many times: "How that could be? How could a woman as competent as Dr. Rice seemed to be—indeed, Secretary Powell had told me she was a sort of a protégé of his—[head up an organization that] could be so dysfunctional?" ... I'd say simply she had her eye on the prize, and the prize was a Cabinet position—and a particular Cabinet position, secretary of state—and as national security adviser, one works one's ambitions to achieve that position.

I'm not saying that in a pejorative sense. That's the way people work, more by establishing an intimacy with the president than by bringing discipline and balance to a decision-making process, because when you bring discipline and balance to a decision-making process, you oftentimes have to make an enemy of people—of the vice president, for example; you have to make an enemy of the secretary of defense; and on occasion you may even have to speak truth to power with regard to the president of the United States....

If your main goal is building intimacy... when it comes time to discipline the process, when it comes time to make the process work, So when it comes time to tolerate dissent and allow balance into the discussions, you don't always side for that discipline and that balance, but you get your job.

Few would disagree that George Bush is the worst president since—at least—Herbert Hoover. Bill Clinton will have a roll of historical toilet paper trailing off his heel wherever he goes, thanks to his bad judgment in the Paula Jones case, but George Bush is forever manacled in history's dank dungeon by his bad judgment on Iraq.

Herewith, a Hail Mary play for Bush 43.

The other night, Charlie Rose asked Tim Russert who Bush would want to follow him as President. Great question, Russert said. Then he said that if Cheney was somehow forced to leave the VP spot, Bush's choice would be Condoleezza Rice. The two get along, he trusts her.

Bush should be the decider right now. He should seek the resignation of the toxic Buddha and nominate Rice to step in, under his 25th Amendment powers. Notwithstanding the complete disaster that Bush has unleashed on the world and on world opinion of the U.S., naming the first black vice president, and the first woman, would make all of us proud of him in spite of ourselves—including historians.

Is Condi Rice's warm-and-fuzzy opening to Iran, after President Ahmedinejad's man-to-man letter to President Bush, a signal of a sharply soft turn in an Administration desperate to shore up public trust, not just in Europe but in the U.S.A.? I think so. The Secretary of State came off as lovely, thoughtful and transparent in interviews on two network shows last night, the News Hour then Hardball. ( Would that her predecessor had been so empowered three years ago.) Maybe this is the twilight of the cabal, which never set any value, pace Leo Strauss, on transparency. Note neoconservative Michael Rubin's 5:56 a.m. apprehension on the National Review website..

New York Times Congressional reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg will be moving to cover the White House, filling the paper's last vacancy on that beat. Stolberg will be taking the spot currently held by Elisabeth Bumiller, who is scheduled to go out on book leave in June to spend a year writing a biography of Condoleezza Rice.

"I’m honored the Times thought of me," Stolberg said by phone April 6. "I think I have big shoes to fill."

Earlier this year, White House reporter Richard Stevenson was promoted to deputy Washington bureau chief. His seat was filled by Jim Rutenberg. Times sources said it remains undecided if the Washington bureau will bring in anyone to fill Stolberg's old position. Currently, David Kirkpatrick and Carl Hulse cover Congress. --Gabriel Sherman

The 11 paintings by Shirley Jaffe on display at Tibor de Nagy Gallery make for the finest exhibition  read more »

A couple of blog observations worth repeating:

Over at Alarming News, Karol offers a reality check on Rudy and the blogosphere's other 2008 darlings, Condi Rice and Wes Clark. It's the usual story: too liberal, too many marriages. We'll see.  read more »

And one of the died-in-the-wool liberals at the Daily Gotham is bummed by a couple of Freddy's ads on black radio:

"Frankly, I don't care about his past and I don't feel like I need to know about his hard-knock childhood. Seriously, this is a tired theme that was beat to its final death in the recent presidential campaign with John Edward's 18 millionth mention of his father's tough life as a millworker."

As of this week, the New York Times is operating under a new stylebook rule: "Dr." is for doctors who are doctoring--not philosophizing, and certainly not running the Senate. Dr. should be used in all references for physicians or dentists whose practice is their primary current occupation, or who work in a closely related field, like medical writing, research or pharmaceutical manufacturing: Dr. Alex E. Baranek; Dr. Baranek; the doctor. (Those who practice only incidentally, or not at all, should be called Mr., Ms., Miss or Mrs.) Anyone else with an earned doctorate, like a Ph.D. degree, may request the title, but only if it is germane to the holder's primary current occupation (academic, for example, or laboratory research). For a Ph.D., the title should appear only in second and later references. The holder of a Ph.D. or equivalent degree may also choose not to use the title. Do not use the title for someone whose doctorate is honorary.

The rule, standards editor Allan M. Siegal wrote in a staff e-mail, is meant "to level the playing field when we write about politics and public life, removing any suggestion of special authority that might attach to people who use a title that isn't relevant to the field in which they are working or competing."

Such as? "There are many examples," Times spokesperson Toby Usnik writes, "including Senator Bill Frist and Howard Dean."

And Henry Kissinger, Ph.D.? Is his title germane to his work?

"The point is mostly (no pun intended) academic," Usnik writes, "since Henry Kissinger always preferred us to call him Mr., and we did. (Condoleezza Rice also prefers Ms.)

"If Kissinger were in government service today, and teaching was not his primary occupation," Usnik continues, "he would be Mr. under our current rule, and we would not ask for a preference."

In fact, a pass through the archives reveals that under the old system, Mr. Kissinger and Ms. Rice didn't always get treatment befitting their modesty. Usage went both ways; even sometimes--for Ms. Rice, under joint bylines--in the same piece.

Number of appearances of selected honorifics in the two years prior to the new rule:

"Mr. Frist" 34 "Dr. Frist" 205

"Mr. Dean" 65 "Dr. Dean" 830

"Mr. Kissinger" 47 "Dr. Kissinger" 3

"Ms. Rice" 400 "Dr. Rice" 20  read more »

"Mr. Erving" 0 "Dr. J" 4

For those of us who can't wait for 2008 and 2009, we offer two items for your reading enjoyment: a novel based on a Hillary-Condoleeza 2008 race, and a 2-page spread on Bill Thompson's presumptive mayoral run in 2009.

The main characters of "The Color of Demons"(!), due out May 1, are "modeled on Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice." According to the authors, brothers David and Nathan Martin, "Few things excite the hearts and minds of the thinking and reading public as a presidential campaign...[so] we paired up the most scintillating candidates we could think of."

Hmmm.

But if that's too much of a beach read, there's always this week's Our Town profile on the city comptroller, titled "The Mayor in Waiting?" In the article Bill explains why he, and Betsy are not facing Republican challengers: " 'it's not to Mike Bloomberg's advantage' to have a candidate on that ballot line, he thinks."  read more »

The article goes on to quote the Republican-friendly former Mayor Ed Koch saying, "following the re-election of Bloomberg, Bill Thompson will be a candidate for mayor, and he will win."

Until the very moment when the White House announced Colin Powell's resignation by "mutual" agreemen  read more »

With Republicans up to and including the President blatantly distorting what John Kerry said about d  read more »

On Aug.  read more »

On the evening of April 5, the television was buzzing with wall-to-wall coverage of the 9/11 commiss  read more »

Condoleezza Rice has told everyone willing to listen that she wishes for nothing more than the oppor  read more »

According to contemporary political lore, the Bush clan exalts loyalty above every other virtue.  read more »

To those who insist they see no difference whether George W.  read more »