One of my favorite places to eat in Bali was blown up today.

David M. Barrett was appointed to the Office of Independent Counsel on May 24, 1995, and charged with investigating whether or not then-Clinton administration housing secretary Henry Cisneros lied to the FBI about how much he had paid his former mistress to keep quiet about their affair. Four and a half years and $10 million later, on September 7, 1999, Cisneros pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor charge and agreed to pay a $10,000 fine ; Barrett, in exchange for the guilty plea, agreed to drop 18 felony counts against Cisneros.

The first vague stirrings were felt on Monday, October 3, when emails originating from friends and relatives of Department of Homeland Security officials made the rounds among a small group of New York’s elite. Thanks to pressure on the media from “federal and local authorities”, the lower classes didn’t hear anything until after Bush’s Iraq/Terrorism speech on Thursday the 6th, when “Washington signed off on the declassification process” necessary for alerting the public.

The New York Times is in trouble. The company’s stock has dropped nearly 30% this year; a voluntary buyout program this summer, aimed at cutting the newsroom staff by about 20 employees, is being followed by a hiring freeze and the elimination of another 45 newsroom jobs (and another 500 throughout the company); the paper’s flagship product, the daily columnists, have been sequestered behind a subscription wall; and executive editor Bill Keller is juggling a hand grenade in the person of Times reporter Judy Miller, who appears to be heavily involved in the investigation of the White House leak exposing Valerie Plame as a covert CIA operative and whose involvement is wrecking the paper’s coverage of the investigation.

The New York Times published two long-awaited stories on reporter Judith Miller’s involvement in special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation of a White House leak outing CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame Wilson, wife of former US amabassador Joseph Wilson. As was widely predicted the stories, one from Times staff writers and the other from Miller, did not fail to disappoint.

First, the big news: special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has, according to the New York Daily News, acquired what an anonymous source who has testified to the Plame grand jury described as “a senior cooperating witness.” The implication is that this is a recent development; if true, it would indicate that someone involved in the case has arrived at the point where Fitzgerald seems scarier than the Bush White House, which is saying quite something. Much to be hoped for and taken with a large grain of salt, but that’s not why we’ve gathered here tonight.

The oldest piece of advice in political science is to move to the center. If you’re losing elections, take a more moderate position (or highlight the issue areas where you are already moderate) and your fortunes will improve. But what happens when you move to the center and you still lose?
This is precisely what [...]

Indictments arising from the invesitgation into the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame seem inevitable. Although news reports in recent days have focused upon the escalating troubles of senior White House official Lewis Libby and his boss, Dick Cheney, the two are far from the only White House nobility whose names have surfaced in connection with the investigation. Periodic bursts of leaks from lawyers and other sources, most of which seemed to be either warning shots from one subject of the investigation across the bows of others or responses to those shots, have introduced a whole raft of White House and other administration heavyweights into the mix. Here’s a look at some of those names and how they became connected with the investigation, along with a look at what we can expect from Republicans and the chattering class following the indictments.

Laura Rozen reports today that the head of Italian intelligence met quietly with Stephen Hadley, then the deputy National Security Advisor, shortly before the forged Iraq-Niger-uranium documents that played such a prominent role in the administration’s wars against Iraq and former ambassador Joe Wilson made their way from an Italian information broker to an Italian reporter and thence to the US embassy in Rome and on to the CIA.

Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is expected to reveal tomorrow whether he has handed up indictments arising from his investigation into the July, 2003, outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson. With the prosecutor’s office hermetically sealed against leaks — a circumstance that has official Washington fuming — most of what we know, or are told we know, comes from anonymous grand jury witnesses and leaks from lawyers and other interested parties associated with Fitzgerald’s subjects. During the past week, and especially the past 48 hours, the leak machine has gone nuts.

Bush is feeling a bit like Napoleon after Waterloo and needs to be cheered up by Turdblossom about as much (Sure, it hurts to be defeated by a guy with a first name like “Beef”, but now you can take that vacation on a nice secluded island, now you won’t have to listen to any more short jokes, now you can stop wearing that ridiculous hat, NOW comes Miller time).

If you’re looking for an argument in favor of overthrowing the Democartic party old guard, you won’t do better than the one Clinton White House counsel Lanny Davis advances in his bizarre New York Times op-ed piece today.

BTC News has launched a new weblog to provide updates on news and events we think will be of interest to our readers and that we don’t have the time to cover in depth as we do here. Bad Crow was officially launched today, and we encourage our readers to visit the new site and let us know what you think of it and what issues you would like us to cover on it.

White House reporters were not thrown completely off the Plame scent by the Alito nomination today. David Gregory and Terry Moran led the charge against Scott McClellan, landing some hard-hitting nibbles in the course of challenging the White House’s credibility.