The Slacktivist writes about the conundrum we face in handling Iraq’s foreign debt (and ongoing reparations to Kuwait).

Spinsanity has a strange item wherein they criticize various pundits and Presidential candidates for making ad hominem attacks on John Ashcroft. Tarring John Ashcroft is bad if you’re trying to launch a substantive debate about how civil rights are respected by our government, but it’s good if you’re trying to score points against the Bush administration, and that’s the objective here. When Bush nominated Ashcroft for the Attorney General spot, he knew that Ashcroft would draw exactly this sort of fire — the flip side is that religious conservatives loved him at the time (I don’t know if they still do). Many Democrats wanted to block his nomination because he was (and is) so odious, but Russ Feingold said that Bush should get the cabinet he desires, and then should be held to account for it when the time comes. The time has come. Ashcroft has been as bad as everyone said he’d be, and now we get to beat the Bush administration over the head with it. That’s politics.

Bruce Sterling: Ten Technologies That Deserve to Die. It’s hard to pick a favorite from the list.

This is funny. (Via Unqualified Offerings.)

Jack Shafer wrote a Slate piece today that outdoes all the weblog entries I’ve read on bringing the world up to date on l’affair de Valerie Plame. He also suspects that not much will come of it, in the end.

Bush supporters who are in disbelief about l’affair de Valerie Plame seem stuck on the revenge motive (also here) as the reason why the unnamed White House staffers did the outing. Revenge clearly was not the motive. The motive, when you look back on the original Novak column, is apparent:

Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson’s wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. “I will not answer any question about my wife,” Wilson told me.

First of all, from day one we see that two “senior administration officials” are mentioned, not one, as was confirmed this weekend in the Washington Post. Those two people spread the word of Plame’s CIA employment so that they could allege that it was she, and not the White House, that suggested sending Wilson to look into the Niger mess. If, as was asserted originally, Wilson was sent to Africa in direct response to questions by Dick Cheney’s office, then the administration would have no excuse whatsoever for dismissing the findings that Wilson brought back (and thus putting the uranium line in the State of the Union address). So they told reporters that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA (which was classified) and that it was she who suggested sending him to Africa. The purpose was not to discredit Wilson nor was it revenge against him, rather it was a way of substantiating White House claims that they hadn’t seen Wilson’s report.

Update: obviously I’m completely in the grips of this story and can’t help but post about it more than I should, but if you really want to follow what’s going on, turn to Mark Kleiman and Josh Marshall.

Another update: here’s why I think that the administration has been caught dead to rights, knows it has been caught dead to rights, and is just trying to keep its head down and skate through at this point. One thing we know for sure is that someone who knew the true identity of Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife leaked that information to at least Robert Novak. Clearly whoever did this broke the law and to some degree hindered our efforts to keep track of weapons of mass destruction worldwide. Regardless of your position on the story, you can’t argue with those facts, right?

So if the Bush defenders are right and this is somehow a plot against Bush, then we’ve entered bizarro world. Either Novak lied about his sources or his sources are disloyal senior administration officials looking to bring Bush down. In either case, wouldn’t the administration have launched a full court press to figure out who the leakers are back in July? If someone is feloniously leaking information to journalists and simultaneously trying to bring down the sitting administration, wouldn’t logic demand an investigation to find and lynch the leaker? Instead the administration has ignored this incident entirely. If this was a betrayal of Bush by someone in the executive branch, then it makes no sense that the Bush administration officials who are commenting on the affair are so blas

Phil Carter has an interesting post that describes how our invasion of Iraq may have aided al-Qaeda in several ways. First, by alienating foreign governments that could be helping us shut down al-Qaeda’s financial and logistical networks, and second by increasing passive support for the organization and providing them with a new crucible in which terrorists are forged (taking the place of Afghanistan under Soviet occupation).

John Schwartz in the New York Times: The Level of Discourse Continues to Slide, a discussion of the PowerPoint culture. The problem isn’t the tool, it’s the presenters. In college, I attended scads of boring lectures with bad overhead slides. PowerPoint has just made creating bad presentations accessible to everyone. One trend that I really do find disturbing is the increasing use of PowerPoint at all levels of education. The idea that students in junior high are writing reports in PowerPoint makes me a bit ill. That said, taking PowerPoint away wouldn’t solve anything. You’d just go to meetings and listen to boring presentations that included even worse visual aids than the awful PowerPoint slides that we put up with these days.

Update: Don Box has some tips on giving a technical presentation.

Juan Cole reports this morning that the United States (as the occupying power in Iraq) is now legally responsible for paying reparations to Kuwait for Iraq’s invasion in 1990. Paul Bremer has asked Kuwait’s government to suspend the reparations, but they have refused. There’s probably more to the story, but that looks like serious ingratitude to me. We got Kuwait out from under Saddam’s thumb in 1990, and then in 2003 we made sure that his regime would never threaten Kuwait again (Saddam wasn’t much of a threat to us, but he was always a threat to Kuwait), and they’re leaving us on the hook for the reparations? What’s going on here?

Cole also adds some depressing context to the Iraq poll numbers that were much discussed last week. Apparently the results of the polling are not as rosy as most of the people citing the poll would have you believe.

Much like the Trent Lott story, which went dormant for awhile after being initially reported and then exploded, the administration leak of Valerie Plame’s identity as an undercover CIA agent is becoming big news after going away for a month or so. The Washington Post has gotten an unnamed “senior administration official” to acknowledge that two other “senior White House officials” leaked her identity to six journalists in order to discredit her husband, Robert Wilson, who had torn down the “uranium from Niger” bit in the State of the Union address. If the Justice Department follows up, then we could see some grand jury action in the relatively near future. I’ll admit to some schadenfreude here, but let’s face it, giving up the identities of undercover CIA agents in order to score political points is repugnant.