Does anybody really believe that somebody would have walked into my office and said, oh, by the way, there's a chance of a major attack against the United States and I would have said, well, I'm really not interested in that information?

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full-field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers bin Laden-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group or bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives.

The briefing item reviewed past intelligence reporting, mostly dating from the 1990s, regarding possible al Qaeda plans to attack inside the United States. It referred to uncorroborated reporting that from 1998 that terrorists might attempt to hijack a U.S. aircraft in an attempt to blackmail the government into releasing U.S.-held terrorists who had participated in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. This briefing item was not prompted by any specific threat information. And it did not raise the possibility that terrorists might use airplanes as missiles.

We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the President and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an al Qaeda attack in the United States. DCI Tenet visited President Bush in Crawford, Texas, on August 17 and participated in PDB briefings of the President between August 31 (after the President had returned to Washington) and September 10. But Tenet does not recall any discussions with the President of the domestic threat during this period.

Although the FAA had authority to issue security directives mandating new security procedures, none of the few that were released during the summer of 2001 increased security at checkpoints or on board aircraft. The information circulars mostly urged air carriers to "exercise prudence" and be alert. Prior to 9/11, the FAA did present a CD-ROM to air carriers and airport authorities describing the increased threat to civil aviation. The presentation mentioned the possibility of suicide hijackings but said that "fortunately, we have no indication that any group is currently thinking in that direction."47 The FAA conducted 27 special security briefings for specific air carriers between May 1, 2001, and September 11, 2001.Two of these briefings discussed the hijacking threat overseas. None discussed the possibility of suicide hijackings or the use of aircraft as weapons. No new security measures were instituted.

Reform the Endangered Species Act. This law is an example of well-intended legislation that has had unintended consequences at the local level. We all share the desire to protect species. However, the act has resulted in more battles over land use than species it has saved. The law penalizes those with species on their land instead of incenting conservation. The law must be reformed to use incentives rather than penalties to create conservation opportunities and actually save species.

Thank you for contacting us regarding Mike McGavick's views regarding the federal government's recent Endangered Species Act listing of the southern resident killer whale population.

Mike is in complete agreement with the vast majority of Puget Sound citizens who believe that the orca whales are a remarkable animal that have gained a special identity in the Puget Sound, and he supports continued university and federal research to better understand and address potential causes of their decline. Mike also supports current locally-based efforts to develop a conservation plan to ensure the long-term health of orca whales.

The reality, however, is that the issue is more complex than just orcas -- it includes recovering Puget Sound Chinook salmon (which are also currently listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act), better understanding the conditions and health of the Pacific Ocean and its interaction with the whales and their food, and monitoring actions to ensure they are cost-effect and to alter when needed through adaptive management.

With regard to the Endangered Species Act, this listing and all listing under ESA are not panaceas. Mike believes that the Act appears too often in recent years to have been used as a tool for lawyers and the courtroom at an enormous waste of resources and at the costly price of discouraging people to work together to protect species and the environment. We absolutely must balance these important protections with a strong Pacific Northwest economy -- that's why so many people love living and working in Washington. If the Endangered Species Act needs to be improved to do that, then we should improve it. Mike supports collaborative processes such as the Puget Sound Shared Salmon Strategy to allow local ownership in the difficult policy decisions required to recover species, but that we can do more, including better use of hatchery facilities to rebuild naturally-spawning salmon stocks and ensuring the harvest of Puget Sound and Columbia River salmon does not interfere with recovery.

On a side note, Mike does not support breaching dams on the Snake and Columbia River—which are an important clean, renewable source of energy for Washington residents. Moreover, we can and should do more in the Puget Sound to aid orcas. More must be done to reduce predation of young salmon, protecting habitat, utilizing hatcheries to protect wild salmon, understanding and managing around changes to ocean climate and conditions, and ensuring harvest doesn't interfere with rebuilding salmon runs.

"It's not that we're against orcas or anything like that. ... It could be any other species. You know, we love orcas as much as anyone else. But here we believe there's a much larger legal issue that is at stake, and it just happens to involve orcas."

"There is no way to restore the culture without winning the war on terror. Conversely, the only way to win the war on terror is to win the culture war. Thus we arrive at a sobering truth. In order to crush the Islamic radicals abroad, we must defeat the enemy at home."

We're not the enemy, and if you engage us as the enemy, all you'll be doing is starting yet another war you can't win.

Our covert enemies are harder to identify, for they live in large numbers within our midst. And in terms of intentions, they are not enemies in the sense that they consciously wish to destroy our society. On the contrary, they enjoy our freedoms and often call for their expansion. But they have also been working, over many years, to undermine faith in our society and confidence in its goodness. These covert enemies are those among our elites who have promoted the ideas labeled as multiculturalism, moral relativism and (the term is Professor Samuel Huntington's) transnationalism.

We have always had our covert enemies, but their numbers were few until the 1960s. But then the elite young men who declined to serve in the military during the Vietnam War set out to write a narrative in which they, rather than those who obeyed the call to duty, were the heroes. They have propagated their ideas through the universities, the schools and mainstream media to the point that they are the default assumptions of millions. Our covert enemies don't want the Islamo-fascists to win. But in some corner of their hearts, they would like us to lose.

D'Souza shows that liberals—people like Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, Bill Moyers, and Michael Moore -- are responsible for fostering a culture that angers and repulses not just Muslim countries but also traditional and religious societies around the world. Their outspoken opposition to American foreign policy -- including the way the Bush administration is conducting the war on terror—contributes to the growing hostility, encouraging people both at home and abroad to blame America for the problems of the world. He argues that it is not our exercise of freedom that enrages our enemies, but our abuse of that freedom—from the sexual liberty of women to the support of gay marriage, birth control, and no-fault divorce, to the aggressive exportation of our vulgar, licentious popular culture.

The cultural wars at home and the global war on terror are usually viewed as separate problems. In this groundbreaking book, D'Souza shows that they are one and the same. It is only by curtailing the left's attacks on religion, family, and traditional values that we can persuade moderate Muslims and others around the world to cooperate with us and begin to shun the extremists in their own countries.

So are we seeing the beginnings of the Mark Foley-related backlash at the hands of religious and other conservatives against Republican gays with important Capitol Hill staff jobs?

When I tried to gauge that last week by phoning religious-conservative groups like the Alliance for Marriage and Focus on the Family, they demurred. Even the Family Research Council didn’t get back to me with a spokesman.

Anyway, I'm not taking it personally that Tony Perkins, the council’s president, devoted his Washington Update yesterday to the very matter I wanted to talk with him about.

In an item headlined, “Party of Whose Values?” he essentially seems to be accusing gay GOP staffers of being a fifth column within the congressional Republican power structure, thwarting legislative initiatives dear to social conservatives.

“Sunday's New York Times revealed that a homosexual former Clerk of the House of Representatives, Jeff Trandahl, was ‘among the first to learn' of Mr. Foley's’ messages to pages. The Clerk's job is described as a ‘powerful post with oversight of hundreds of staffers and the page program.’ This raises yet another plausible question for values voters: has the social agenda of the GOP been stalled by homosexual members and or staffers? When we look over events of this Congress, we have to wonder. This was the first House to pass a pro-homosexual hate crimes bill. The marriage protection amendment was considered very late in the term with no progress toward passage. Despite overwhelming popular approval, the party seldom campaigns as the defender of marriage. The GOP will have to decide whether it wants to be the party that defends the traditional moral and family values that our nation was built upon and directed by for two centuries. Put another way, does the party want to represent values voters or Mark Foley and friends?”

So Perkins is essentially accusing gay staffers of willfully sabotaging the gay marriage amendment while greasing the skids for its own hate-crimes legislation. Perkins doesn’t offer an explanation as to how non-gay members of Congress could be bamboozled to the point that they’d go along with legislative moves that would weaken their position with conservative voters.

But American history is littered with examples of powerful accusations being made in the absence of evidence. Think Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare of the 1950s.

The last line of Perkins’ is an unmistakable challenge to congressional Republicans. He is essentially putting the Republican Party on notice, saying it’s either us or them, the religious right’s agenda or that of gay Americans.

Yesterday also saw a column by Cliff Kincaid, editor of the conservative organization Accuracy in Media's AIM Report in which he shouts a similar rooftop warning about the damage gays in the congressional Republican establisment have done to the conservative agenda.

In the column titled "Homosexual Blackmail on the Capitol Hill, he said: "For the sake of honest and open government, not to mention protection of the children, the secret Capitol Hill homosexual network must be exposed and dismantled. But only Republican leaders can do that. Their failure to do so suggests that the network may go higher and deeper—and have more power—than even the New York Times article indicated."

So is this the start of a movement to purge gays from the senior staff positions on Capitol Hill? Such undertakings usually begin with jeremiads such as the ones we are witnessing that are then transformed into action.

The openly gay Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.,) in a recent question-and-answer session with the Advocate, a gay publication, expressed fears of such a result.

“This is a real crisis, since before, gays in the Republican Party were willing to be tolerated, but Republicans will now be more nervous having gay people in positions of power. They have been critical of people who are out and gay—there could be a real purge of gays in the Republican Party now. It's probably just enough for people to be perceived to be gay.”

If Republicans wind up losing the House or Congress entirely, and Foleygate comes to be seen as the event that put the Democrats over the top, the probability of such a bloodletting would seem to rise. It would not be the first gay purge in the nation's capital. "

The video cites this 9/24 article and quotes from the article, "Burner's charges hurt by inaccuracies."

The only problem is, that's not what the article says! Nowhere does the article "cry foul" against Darcy. Instead, it reports that the Reichert campaign was "crying foul."

In fact, the author, Jonathan Martin, doesn’t take a stand on who is correct and who is incorrect. What the article does say is, "[a]ds against both candidates contain inaccuracies" and prints pros and cons claimed by both campaigns. The print edition even sports the subtitle, "[c]laims by both sides are open to contention."

The words "charges" and "hurt" don't even appear in the article. You know, as in the quote "Burner's charges hurt by 'inaccuracies,'" a quote that they specifically attribute to the Seattle Times on 9/24/2006. The Seattle Times didn't say any such thing.

In other words, Reichert's ad "misquotes" the Seattle Times by ... umm ... making up new words and constructing a phrase that doesn't appear in the article!

At the bottom of each post you'll now see a "Spotlight" tag next to the permalink. Clicking it takes you to The Spotlight Project, which offers you a list of contact information which allows you to forward the post of your choice to specific journalists. I'll ask that folks consider several things when doing this:

-- Please be polite and reasonable. We don’t want folks to get angry and up-in-arms over a bunch of ad hominem attacks.

-- Since it's a serious tool that could have a profound effect as we try to re-shape the dominant narrative with key opinion makers, abusing it could not only lessen its effectiveness, it could neutralize it completely.

-- Praise is just as important -- if not more so -- than criticism.

-- We may have some initial birth pangs, so if you have any problems please report them here.

The bomb-grade plutonium that was on ice from 1994 to 2002 is now actual bombs. Try as you might to imagine a policy -- any policy -- which would have yielded a worse result than the one we will face Monday morning.

For instance, on the eve of talks with North Korea about their nuclear weapons, Bolton took a novel approach to public diplomacy and publicly called King Jong Il a "tyrannical dictator" and an "evil regime." The State Department was forced to send a replacement representative after North Korea responded by calling Bolton "human scum" and stating their objection to negotiating with him.

The defining encounter came in March 2001 when then-President Kim Dae Jung visited the White House only to be told that we were withdrawing support for his policy. As Jessica Matthews, head of the Carneigie Endowmentation, put it, President Bush "took the architect of the North-South reconciliation -- and publicly humiliated him."

Claim #7: "Darcy Burner wants to increase taxes by returning to the marriage penalty and wiping out half the child tax credit."

The Truth: Darcy Burner has never advocated, and she does not support, a return to the marriage penalty, wiping out the child tax credit, or implementing any other tax increase on working families or small businesses. We need to keep tax cuts that truly benefit working Americans. That's why Darcy will work to keep the state and local sales tax deduction, the college tuition tax deduction, the child tax credit, and to permanently repeal the marriage penalty. Darcy has been on the record for months in support of tax relief for working families. She has also publicly decried the failure of the Republican-led Congress to renew important tax relief measures, including an extension of the federal sales tax deduction for Washington State residents. Darcy believes strongly that when it comes to taxes working Americans are currently paying more than their fair share of taxes.

[These] are pure scare tactics designed to intimidate voters. But this is nothing new. Republicans have been using fear as a weapon for years. "If you vote for the Democrats, America will be less safe. (Hint - you don't want another terrorist attack, do you?)" "If you vote for the Democrats, your taxes will go up."

Let's get the facts straight here: it is in fact the Republicans and Dave Reichert who cannot be trusted with our nation's finances. Republicans have doled out tax breaks to the rich, while giving next to nothing to middle and low income families. Republicans are creating taxes on future generations with their incredible deficit spending and fiscal mismanagement.

Republicans reward their corporate and special interest friends with big subsidies and giveaways. They let corporate lawyers write our laws and let corporate executives have at our natural resources and public lands.

The conservative agenda has been a disaster for America. Dave Reichert has been a disaster. We can't afford to have someone in Congress who only does what the House Republican leadership tells him to. The same leadership, remember, that is more interested in winning elections then locking up sex predators.

YAKIMA -- There was shock among several students after learning their fall play would be postponed until next spring or possibly indefinitely.

"We'd brought it up in the meetings...there might be issues we never really expected it was going to be the school district," said drama club president and Davis senior Kristie Prescott.

Prescott and several drama club students decided to do the Laramie Project last month at the start of the school year. It's a play about the aftermath of a young Laramie, Wyoming man brutally murdered by two men for being gay.

But soon after, controversy erupted in the high school's community with students, their parents and even staff.

"When I read the play I didn't have a similar reaction," said Lee Maras, principal of Davis High School. "But the ones I did talk to didn't even want to read it, didn't even want to look at it - just felt it was inappropriate for our school."

In fact, the book reflects racial views that have now veered to the extreme. White America is changing color, Buchanan argues -- "one of the greatest tragedies in human history." The Mexican government is involved in a plot to take over the Southwestern United States, and parts of this country already look like the "Third World." The segregated South wasn't all bad "culturally" -- blacks and whites were united, after all. America, despite what its founders wrote, was a nation formed not on the basis of creed but rather a homogenous ethnic culture. To put it plainly, State of Emergency is a white nationalist tract. The thesis is that America must retain a white majority to survive as a nation. It is rooted in a blood-and-soil nationalism more blood than soil. The echoes of Nazi ideology are clear and chilling. As Buchanan helpfully explained to John King, who was interviewing him in one of his several CNN appearances: "We gotta get into race and ethnic questions."

State of Emergency unapologetically reflects Buchanan's insistence on the centrality of race to the United States and its culture. "This idea of America as a creedal nation bound together not by 'blood or birth or soil' but by 'ideals' that must be taught and learned ... is demonstrably false," Buchanan writes in the book.

Simply put, America is not a nation of ideas. It is a nation of people -- white people. Buchanan is especially overt in making this case when he endorses the view of his late mentor and editor Sam Francis, that American and European civilizations could never have been created without the "genetic endowments" of whites. He goes on to describe discussions of race as "the Great Taboo"; to ignore the role of race, he adds, is "like not telling one's doctor of a recurring pain that could kill you."

"Congratulations on the response to your book," said Lou Dobbs, the CNN anchorman who has made a profession of attacking illegal immigration in story after story after story, as he introduced his old CNN colleague. Dobbs then offered up his own view that President Bush was carrying on an "outright war" against middle-class Americans by allowing illegal immigration. Wrapping up the interview, Dobbs concluded: "The book is State of Emergency. It's No. 3 on the best-selling list. ... I'm going to repeat it one more time. The book is State of Emergency. Pat Buchanan, always good to talk to you. ... [Y]ou've got a lot of readers, so keep it rolling."

Once again, to make his case in State of Emergency, Buchanan relies on a trove of extreme-right sources. His urgent call for thwarting the "invasion" of non-European immigrants leans heavily on material written by hate group members or postings on hate sites, with citations to nearly every sector of the hate movement, from neo-Nazis to neo-Confederates. He cites the work of white supremacist James Lubinskas; Edward Rubinstein, of the white nationalist think tank National Policy Institute; Clyde Wilson, a board member of the racist and secessionist League of the South; and Wayne Lutton, a veteran immigrant- and gay-hater. Buchanan also quotes Lutton's anti-immigrant hate journal The Social Contract.