A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

George W Bush… Thy name is Nixon.

As per the CIA… There is something Oedipal about what’s going on here. It took a Salon column to bring this home to me, but… the CIA is George Herbert Walker Bush’s baby. Rummage through the Weekly Standard’s line against the CIA, right-wing radio, and take a look at the “purging” that’s taken place.

I first knew about Oedipus, somewhere in my early teens, from The Doors song “The End”. You know, Jim Morrison bails out “The Killer Awoke Before Dawn. He put his boots on. And he took a page through the ancient gallery and he walked on down the Hall!” … “Father — yes son — I want to kill you.” “Mother, yes son… I want to…” Unintelligible on the album, but apparently according to that book Nobody Gets Out Here Alive, in concert with his mother in attendence Morrison made a point to prolong the use of the “f” word here.

Really. Who’d have thought the man would kill himself at such a young age?

Okay. Never mind. Cleanse everything with “Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine,” and move on. The West is the Best, I hear.

According to the oh-so-reliable “Capitol Hill Blue” (ahem) from a few months back, Bush’s inner circle shrunk to Condi Rice, Laura, and his mom. But Capitol Hill Blue works off of our prejudices and lingering suspicions. Still, Capitol Hill Blue works in the way of showing where the Zeitgist works us toward. When the History of the Bush Presidency is written, Oedipal will have many references in the index page.

Word on the street is that Karl Rove is being Indicted this week. Thursday it will be made public, if my understanding of how the news-media is manipulated. (You release news on Thursday evening if you want the public and the talking heads to talk about it all weekend and linger in everyone’s head the following top of the week; you release it Friday evening if you want it to be buried.) This goes back to one huge part of both the Nixonian impulse to pubish thy enemy and the Oedipal instinct to destroy your dad’s Institution… Joseph Wilson.

Everything rolls back to two items here, early on in the controversy. An episode of “Buchanan and Press” where a figure of some credibility more or less named by not naming Scooter Libby. And Joseph Wilson at an event presented by…

Um… Jay Inslee, Congress-critter of Washington State… once upon a time of that famed Fourth Congressional District, but he fled that district for greener pastures, and now serves Suburban Seattle…

Where Wilson named Karl Rove and said he knew what he was doing when he named Rove. I can’t google quickly the exact quote so I leave it at that.

Nothing much more needed to be said about it. The discrediting effort of Joseph Wilson has always looked to me like a Rube Goldberg Machine, Oscam’s Razor need not apply, because everything suspiciously just drifts back to those two early-in-the-game events.

Doomed voice. Doomed background music. Emphasis on the “says”.

“Eric Sten says he’s ‘Standing up for Portland’.”

Wait. Wait. This is good. I know the final sentence of this ad already! Okay. Is it “Maybe it’s time for Eric Sten to quit standing up, and just sit down.”?

aaaannnnddd, after the typical litany, we get to…

“Maybe it’s time for Eric Sten to quit standing up, and just sit down.”

Bingo! Bool-yah! And Woot!

Gawd I love these political advertisements sometimes. Just cut and paste and let her rip!!

I mulled over this book, Three Presidents and Their Books: The Reading of Jefferson, Lincoln, & F. D. Roosevelt, at a book store a few days back. I shrugged it off. Why Jefferson, Licoln, and FDR? Why not, say, Teddy Roosevelt?

Never mind. The books we associate with the current president are My Pet Goat, which isn’t really a book but is a story within a Reading Primer, and The Very Hungry Caterpillar, his answer to a question of what his favourite kid’s book was/is, a book published when Bush attended Yale. (Maybe he read it to his kids, and liked it then? Who knows?) Then there’s that book on Acheson he said he was reading during the 2000 campaign, and when quizzed on stammered in a way suggesting that he obviously had not read it. And there’s Michael Crichton’s book of fiction, an attack on Global Warming that Bush praised as Science.

I looked over the Clearance pile of books. A lot of political books have a short shelf-life. It seems to be an obligation these days for a politico seeking the president to release a book just prior to his presidential campaign, and so what does one do with a book by Lamar Alexandar, or for that matter Dan Quayle?

But the books that I have to wonder about are, say, this:

Bush Country : How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane, by John Podhoretz.

Jee whiz, that book looks out of date these days. Can we tap our fingers at John Podhoretz and ask his thoughts on the “driving of liberals inane” with the “great president Dubya” these days? Oh how the Worm Turns! And churns.

Here are the great “crazy liberal ideas” that he dispels in this book:

#1: Bush is a moron. #2: Bush is a puppet. #3: Bush is a fanatic. #4: Bush is Hitler, only not as talented. #5: Bush isn’t protecting you. #6: Bush wants to bankrupt the government. #7: Bush is a cowboy. #8: Bush is a liar.

I thought Bush wanted you to think he was a cowboy. Or at least, he wanted the “red-staters” to think he was a cowboy.

Other than that… I’ve got nothing. I’m thinking of writing a long dissertation on Bush’s puppet-act, but…

Maybe I’ll wait for his approval rating to jump up to 35% before I do that. It seems like I’m just kicking at a corpse at this point in time.

“I am astonished as anyone has ever been that anyone is running for public office in Alabama on that platform,” he said.

Okay. I’ll give you three guesses on what platform somebody is ASTONISHED that a man is running in THE STATE OF ALABAMA for public office on.

The clock is ticking.

Democratic Party leaders are wondering what to do about a candidate for attorney general who denies the Holocaust occurred and wants to “reawaken white racial awareness.”

I don’t know where this “astonishment” comes from. After all, as the song goes, In Birmingham, we love our governor. But maybe I’m just exhibiting a bit of anti-Southern prejudice here.

Actually, this candidate does a double-whammy that I’d thought was impossible. Not only does he embarrass the great state of Alabama, but he embarrasses Atheists.

Larry Darby, the founder of the Atheist Law Center, made an abortive bid for the AG job as a Libertarian in 2002, but only recently have his views on race and the Holocaust come to light.

Which is what Atheism (and the more commonly held Secularism) needs down there in the Bible Belt: an association with Anti-Semitism and White Power. Did he found this organization before coming fore-bore public with his other views which, frankly are probably only slightly more controversial for Alabama than his Atheism?

Darby said he will speak Saturday near Newark, N.J., at a meeting of National Vanguard, which bills itself as an advocate for the white race. Some of his campaign materials are posted on the group’s Internet site.

“It’s time to stop pushing down the white man. We’ve been discriminated against too long,” Darby said in the interview.

The answer to the question of “what to do about him” is simply to have the other guy win the primary by as large a margin as possible, and then move on, never speaking to this guy again. It may be only a slight embarassment if he ends up in double digits, as oppossed to the regular band of misfits that crawl about in the back of election campaigns across the country with one or two percent of the vote. As it were, the Democratic Party of Alabama is crying over a man with twelve percent support in a poll with a five percent margin of error, and for all we know the bulk of the support comes from people who love the name “Darby”, or just know this sign and agree with the sentiment:

With or without the vaguely creepy white suit and hat.

Ever since William Henry Harrison who only served as president for a handful of weeks what has happened to the winner of every 4th election in the us? Possible extra point for why.

I am very tempted to give a false answer to this question to lead this student essayist completely astray. Something about a kid just typing in an essay question grates at me — and by that I mean word-by-word and not “subject” or even assortment of words designed to lead directly to an answer. The problem there is that I cannot, off the top of my mind, come up with an absurd yet plausible-enough response, in part because the question itself comes across as absurd. I must have missed that History lesson.

Every fourth election? Well, every fifth election brings us the “Curse of the Zeros”, and the supposed death of a president, but the answer of “why?” can only bring the this.

But every fourth election would bring us 1856, 1872, 1888, 1904, 1920, 1936, 1952, 1968, 1984, and 2000. I could sort out the winners of these contests, and I think I have them in my head (Buchanan, Grant, Cleveland, Roosevelt, Harding, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and … er… Up for Dispute.) It looks arbitrary to me. Good luck with that one! Your teacher is weird.

“The skull of the worthy Geronimo the Terrible, exhumed from its tomb at Fort Sill by your club and Knight Haffuer is now safe inside the T- together with is well worn femurs, bit and saddle horn,” Mead wrote.

“I was stunned and I felt a little bit like I had stumbled on an illicit treasure and something that does not belong to me and something the world should know about,” he said.

[…]

Let’s hope this is just a myth. Let’s hope the folks who lead our country have much better judgment, respect for history and sensitivity than this legend suggests.

It’s never been proven, but a recently discovered 1918 letter written by a Skull and Bones member has brought some credence to the suspicion. If so, Skull and Bones and its reported high-profile members, including President Bush, Sen. John Kerry, members of Congress and plenty of others in academia and corporate America, should know what’s needed to make amends.

……………………..

What, exactly, can George W Bush and Senator John Kerry do to make amends for their forebears of an elite club grave-robbing a Native American burial ground and stealing the corpse of a Native American chief and Icon? Maybe it’s one more slap in the face for a vanquished culture, but somehow an “I’m sorry for… um… that” does not cut it.

There’s a certain frustration with regards to Skull and Bones. When asked about it, Bush shuts up. When asked about it, Kerry shuts up. Or so went the Meet the Press interviews. The charade of Skull and Bones commences through adulthood, and is taken more seriously than it seemingly deserves.

The rub comes in with, say, Gary Trudeau. He will float in a Skull and Bones satire from time to time. Why is it that the politicians who are or would be president go dead serious on the topic, and the cartoonist behind a comic strip can pass over the ludicrousness of… (ahem)

… the world’s most socially irredemable Fraternity.

Regarding Geronomo’s Skull. Does it just sit there, in a dark cavern? Locked away or prominently displayed? More importantly, wouldn’t it smell after a while? I am aware that the members of Skull and Bones, being the elite and being of the upper-most class of our nation, with wealthy alumni tossing whatever money is needed for the upkeep of Skull and Bones, means that they can afford any and all preservatives to keep the skull from rotting, but isn’t there only so much you can do before it goes from being this “oh so cool” object to being something you just kind of wish you never had?

I think Daniel Pinkwater wrote about what that must be like.