Emptywheel Wins

It's a pleasure to discover journalists who actually studied when they were in school, instead of sleeping in preparation for gym class.

As Marcy Wheeler said today, there's at least one member of the mainstream press, Jay Newton-Small of Time, who can read and understand English:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has had a tough week — much of it her own making. But in looking at the substance of the accusations, it increasingly looks like she was right. Porter Goss was careful to parse his words in the conditional future tense when talking about what, exactly, he and Pelosi were briefed on in September 2002[.]
...
Bob Graham, who was theoretically in the room with Shelby, says he has no recollection of the meeting at all – this from a man who famously details his every waking minute. Perhaps the most astonishing response has been from the CIA Director Leon Panetta, who basically said: Don't trust our records. Which begs the question: what other issues have they kept questionable records on?

Pelosi's Probably Right

[links from original]

That latter question is something I pointed out in detail a couple of weeks ago. The fact that this was an events list that was reconstructed, badly as it turns out, from classified notes and recollections of six years ago ought to have been a big red flag for journalists looking at this thing. Marcy Wheeler was one of the few to get that. She then did her usually thorough job of deconstructing it.

This sounds like a good reason to once again urge anyone who can to contribute to Firedoglake's effort to support Marcy's work. Give her what you'd pay for a newspaper for a year, if you want to think of it that way. I'd rather pay someone like Marcy to dig for the truth than to pay someone like my local paper to lie to me.