Andrea Mitchell steps in it again: (+ defends Bob Woodward)

Imus got wind of her flopping around about her previous statements regarding Joseph and Valerie Wilson on his show 11/12, so he had her back on to clarify. She was fumbling and stumbling throughout the segment. It's "hard work" to carry water for the administration. Whether you like him or not, Don has one of the only shows that is able to get politicians and journalists on and he will ask them some tough questions that other outlets will not. Do you think Chris Matthews would hold her up to any kind of scrutiny?

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Her answers were ridiculous and she almost steps in it again as Imus asks her about this exchange.

Murray: Do we have any idea how widely known it was in Washington that Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA?

Mitchell: It was widely known among those of us who cover the intelligence community and who were actively engaged in trying to track down who among the foreign service community was the envoy to Niger. So a number of us began to pick up on that. But frankly I wasn't aware of her actual role at the CIA and the fact that she had a covert role involving weapons of mass destruction, not until Bob Novak wrote it.

(Rough transcript. Anyone want to write a transcript?)

Imus: It seems unclear what you said and perhaps you can clear it up about what you said back in Oct. of 2003---

Mitchell: I have been trying to figure out "what-the-heck" I was talking about, frankly. There is confusion because I am confused.

Imus: So when you told Alan Murray of CNBC, that it was widely known that his wife worked for the CIA-(interruption)--what were you drunk?

Mitchell: I don't even remember the deal...

(later)

Imus: His question seems plain...Imus: What this suggests to me is that you knew she worked at the CIA, but you didn't know what she did there. Isn't that fair-did you know that?

Mitchell-(garbled)

Imus: Why did you say that Andrea?

Mitchell: I messed up...(later)

Imus: Russert was a little short with me---almost like he was trying to hide something....

Imus laughing: I realized-well this is an unfair thing to say, I was gonna say- all you folks in Washington are all in bed with one another, but that would be an awful thing to say....

I can't agree with you more on that point. Listen to Andrea discuss Booby. She says Bob Woodward is a great journalist who made one "teenie-weenie" mistake. Notice she spews the beltway company line that they told him casually about Valerie and says that it wasn't "something important until it became important." I agree with Imus, she is drunk.

Andrea: Bob Woodward is a terrific reporter, there is no one like Bob Woodward. He has done extraordinary work---(later) If people make one mistake in the course of a thirty five year career when they have been bullet proof---

Then she says that we don't know if Libby is lying. I'm too tired to go on.....

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Andrea Mitchell asked a Villager health-care panel on her show today to discuss how Harry Reid can get to 60 votes with the public option since the "Gang of Four" refuses to budge and threatens to kill health-care reform entirely.

Mitchell: And Ruth Marcus, what do they do, how do they water down the public option to make it acceptable to some of the moderates but placate some of the more liberals?

Marcus: Well, it's the "and still placate some of the more liberals" is the hardest part. You're dealing with a very complex Rubik's cube really at this point because every time you change something to please someone, you're annoying someone else and potentially losing his or her vote.

But the public option, I think, could be scaled back. There is already something that Sen. Carper from Delaware is working on in terms of allowing it to take effect perhaps more quickly in states or immediately in states which have very high costs and other states could opt in. There is Sen. Snowe's old trigger option that one could still pull the trigger on, so there are ways of doing it.

I think that in the end it is possible to mollify enough of the centrist Democrats, perhaps even a Republican -- now that seems awfully remote. The president, I think, is going to have to tell the left wing of his party and the balking liberal Senators that it is crazy to pull down the entirety of health care over this one issue which the president has already said is not the be all end all of health reform.

It's always the liberals who need to compromise their positions to the conventional wisdom of the Villagers. The Gang of Four are all righteous and virtuous while liberals are out-of-control hippies who act like barking dogs. How dare they want to produce a real reform measure that could eventually provide true competition for the health care industry and that will help lower overall health care costs? Outrageous!

Remember, Marcus was being a concern troll the day after America elected Obama to the presidency with a mandate to overhaul health care and wrote a column telling him to not to govern from the left.

Yet the experience of President Bill Clinton's rocky early months -- remember gays in the military? the BTU tax? -- suggests the steep political price of governing in a way that is, or seems, skewed to the left. This risk is particularly acute for Obama, whose opponents have painted him as a leftist extremist. The good news is that his advisers seem exquisitely aware of this trap and determined not to fall into it.

As David Sirota wrote:

The standard lie about Clinton's failures aside (it was NAFTA, stupid), the last sentence is particularly odd. Obama's "opponents have painted him as a leftist extremist." Yet, that supposed "leftist extremist" won the largest presidential mandate in the last generation.

And somehow, having done that, we are supposed to believe that means he should tack to the right.

Say what?

Email Marcus and ask her why the Gang of Four aren't the real problem, since 56 other Senators are fine with the public option: marcusr@washpost.com

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Sometimes Andrea Mitchell can be a tool, but sometimes she acts like a journalist. Kit Bond was on a wanker role today on MSNBC and actually had Andrea Mitchell almost jumping out of her seat with his distortions of so many facts. Bond said that the Senate Armed Services Report was a partisan report and it was wrong. When he tried to say that Abu Ghraib was just a few rogue soldiers that's when Andrea got into it with him.

Senate armed services committee released an exhaustive report detailing direct links between the harsh interrogation programme of the CIA and abuses of prisoners at the US prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, in Afghanistan and at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

When Andrea brought this fact up to Kit, he called the SASC report lies...( rough transcript. Fill in the thread)

Mitchell: Do you really feel that the CIA/terror fighters are being stabbed in the back by the President's actions?

Bond: Yes, very clearly. by released these classified has put all the CIA under the gun.There could be prosecutions for following orders and there could be prosecutions in other countries.

Mitchell: ...the Bush administration lawyers, one a sitting federal judge, on the federal appeals court on the 9th circuit in San Francisco, so those legal opinions themselves are being questioned, the practice is being questioned, the chain of how these decisions led eventually to Abu Ghraib according to the Armed Services Committee report yesterday and your own committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee has released a time line that shows that Condi Rice and others as early as July, 2002 approved these techniques, your colleagues have done on the hill.

Bond: There are about five different questions in there. No 1, Abu Ghraib had nothing to do with intelligence, that was a bunch of rogue reservists from West Virginia

Mitchell: That's not what what the Armed Services Committee report says sir.

Bond: It's absolutely wrong. It is a DOD report, they did not have access to the classified information on Intelligence community and we will be doing a review of the intelligence committee. It did not , it did not have access to what the CIA was doing. To say that Abu Ghraib had anything to do with intelligence is flat wrong.

Mitchell: So you're saying the Armed Services Committee report was in error yesterday?

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This is really great news. A bill that's been held up by Republican Joe Barton looks to be a done deal now, MSNBC (12-04-06) fails to report that Barton was the main person holding up this very important bill. I wonder why? Andrea Mitchell and Chip only say that it's been stuck in the House. Check out this video where a parent with an autistic child is turned away from a meeting with Joe Barton.

Katherine Harris was on MSNBC trying to spin everything about her campaign. First she starts off by referring to the National Journal as "the liberal media". After that she tries to explain all her staffing turnovers. She is saying that they had to let people go. Funny since all the news about those changes had the staff quitting.

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After Harris tries to spin the 2000 election debacle, Andrea Mitchell says that Bush will be in Florida campaigning for Harris today, however the Republican gubernatorial candidate will not appear with Bush (which has the White House rather upset). Mitchell's reason for that? "He is busy cleaning out his sock drawer". Perhaps she should have just said that he didn't want to appear with Bush, like many other Republican candidates around the country.

I know it probably pained them to say it, but that's what Nora and Andrea Mitchell are calling the White House and the right wing bloggers for forcing the release of Saddam's documents.

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Their master plan of finding WMD's backfired on the Army of idiots. (rough transcript)

Mitchell: ...Peter Hoekstra in fact said, Quote: "Let's unleash the power of the Internet on these documents to see if there was a smoking gun on WMD's"---the intelligence experts were reluctant to release these documents..Skeptics at the time said that all this was being done by conservative bloggers and others on the Intelligence committees to try and bolster their argument that the war was in fact justified in the first place.

These specific dozen documents--they did have a blue print for making bombs and those technical documents could have been helpful to terrorists...The net affect would likely be that it would hurt the administration because it shows that they---once again---were the gang that couldn't shoot straight!---they forced the Intelligence community to do something that the experts didn't want to do and the President himself overruled John Negroponte on.

Sadly, No! has more...

Andrea Mitchell just reported that the CIA has fired an agent who failed a polygraph and admitted leaking classified information to Dana Priest of the Washington Post...
Priest won a Pulitzer Prize for: "Dana Priest won the beat reporting award for revealing that the CIA was using secret prisons in Eastern Europe to interrogate terrorism suspects."

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Andrea says that it also has been referred to the Justice Dept for possible criminal action.

Mitchell's being told about the firing actually violated Porter Goss's order within the CIA not to leak. Go figure. This definitely will have huge ramifications...

Keith had on Andrea Mitchell and Ex-CIA officer Melissa Boyle Mahle, to dig a little deeper on the Mary McCarthy story.
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Andrea says that Mary did meet reporters, but says she didn't leak classified information. The story unfolds.

Ex-CIA officer Melissa Boyle Mahle who maintains close contacts with CIA insiders reports that the leak investigation is considered to be a "witch hunt" by many inside the agency.

The reaction from some right wing bloggers over this story really goes beyond the pale. They think that-I kid you not-the secret prisons were all a cover to draw out leakers from the agency. Mark Kleiman digs up the facts. You have to read the post. It's some of the biggest conservative sites promoting this crazy idea.

( h/t David Edwards for the vid)

Olbermann goes over the newest released memo from The U.K on this segment. Keith blasts the Bush line of "no president wants to go to war, " after it reveals the war plans were already drawn up five days before Colin Powell went to the UN.
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Andrea Mitchell actually brings up the Downing Street memo (she doesn't call it that) and says war was inevitable from the start while she hits up on the "painting of a spy plane" to trick Saddam into firing at it so they could then justify invading Iraq.

Mitchell: It was very clear that George Bush was set on going to war...

NBC's statement is bizarre regarding Andrea Mitchell's question to Risen, asking if he had uncovered evidence that CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour was eavesdropped upon.

Jane links to Will Bunch-who asks: "Was Christiane Amanpour spied on -- and more importantly, if so, why?"

John and Duncan weigh in. I'm sure Sean Hannity has nothing to fear.