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This Political Spin Was 180 Degrees
No Backtracking From Envoy to Iraq
Our man in Baghdad, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad , is one stand-up guy. Last month, The Washington Post published a June 12 cable from him 7to the State Department that recounted the increasing dangers and harassment faced by Iraqi staff working in the embassy's public affairs office.
All embassy cables carry an ambassador's name, whether written by the ambassador or not. This one, contradicting President Bush 's rosy assessments on his trip to Baghdad that same week, caused a bit of a fuss.
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Sign Up for RSS FeedSen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing last week, gave Khalilzad an open door to disavow it. "Now, we've seen your cable," she said, "which I'm sure you didn't write, but had your name on it --"
"No, no, I stand behind that cable," he interjected.
"That's fine," she said. "The cable in which [staff said] they're very worried."
"I salute the courage of the Iraqis who work with us," he said. "In the difficult circumstances, they come every day to the embassy and work. And that cable was a factual cable that I stand behind."
Fence Isn't Making Good Neighbors
Remember the $60,000-plus fence to be put on the east side of the Capitol so tourists can enjoy a fine view while construction continues on the delayed Capitol Visitor Center? It came up again at the weekly bipartisan House-Senate leadership staff meeting last week on the center. There was much concern because of spiraling costs.
We've got to live within the budget, said Ted Van Der Meid , a top aide to House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), prime mover of the fence.
"Excuse me," Secretary of the Senate Emily Reynolds said, "I hope you won't take this as a cheap shot, but this is coming from the guy building the fence to nowhere?"
He took it as a cheap shot.
Must Have Been the 'Car Talk' Jingle
Funny thing happened last week at the Bureau of Land Management when someone in the communications shop tried to call up the National Public Radio Web site to review a report on BLM activities. The staffer got this instead:
"webwasher Notification
"Request Blocked by DynaBLocator
"Your request to URL 'http://www.npr.org/' has been blocked by the WebWasher DynaBLocator module. The URL is listed in categories (Music) which are not allowed by your administrator at this time."
Some employees suspected politically motivated chicanery against NPR. (The site apparently was not blocked in other parts of the Interior Department.)
The BLM communications office notified the information technology people that it needed access to any site that provides news, even if it belongs to a radio station that plays music at times.
We're told the IT folks said a non-political computer program was to blame for what the netminders called "blacklisting." The site was promptly unblocked, or "whitelisted."
