Bush and Rove have spent the last five years doing everything in their power to hide the true conservative agenda from the American people. We get shit like Clean Skies Initiative, Healthy Forrest Initiative and Death Tax.

Furthermore, Bush has done everything to hide the costs of their conservative ideology — passing budgets that exclude budget items like the cost of the war and so on.

So after five years … he delivers, instead, two stealth candidates. This was supposed to be their “coming out” party, and yet Bush refuses to let them out of the closet.

Republicans are losing ground with the American people… The conservative agenda is not a dominant ideology, otherwise they wouldn’t be so loath to give it to us unvarnished. It is a minority ideology. Yet the conservative yahoos don’t get it. They think they’re in the majority and can’t fathom why Bush won’t let them party out in the open.

So therein is Bush’s dilemma. Sabotage the conservative movement by announcing its principles with a bullhorn (precisely what a Prescilla Owens would’ve done), or suffer conservative discontent by keeping them locked up in the basement.

Bush chose the latter.

— Kos

Associated Press:

Federal prosecutors have accepted an offer from presidential adviser Karl Rove to give 11th hour testimony in the case of a CIA officer’s leaked identity but have warned they cannot guarantee he won’t be indicted, according to people directly familiar with the investigation.

Rove has been warned that he might be indicted.

The persons, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because of grand jury secrecy, said Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has not made any decision yet on whether to file criminal charges against the longtime confidant of President Bush or others.

The U.S. attorney’s manual requires prosecutors not to bring witnesses before a grand jury if there is a possibility of future criminal charges unless they are notified in advance that their grand jury testimony can be used against them in a later indictment.

Rove has already made at least three grand jury appearances and his return at this late stage in the investigation is unusual.

The prosecutor did not give Rove similar warnings before his earlier grand jury appearances.

Waiting to exhale: The recent detection of tularemia bacteria on Washington’s National Mall on the weekend of the big anti-war rally to protest the war in Iraq brought to light the BioWatch program. Most of us probably forgot that George Bush announced the implementation of the BioWatch program during his 2003 State of the Union address.

The program falls under the general auspices of the Department of Homeland Security, and also involves the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the FBI and the National Security Agency. It is shrouded in secrecy.

The function of the BioWatch Program is to detect the release of pathogens into the air, providing warning to the government and public health community of a potential bioterror event. While there is limited federal government description of the BioWatch Program, there have been media reports describing the functional concept. According to these reports, aerosol samplers mounted on pre-existing Environmental Protection Agency air quality monitoring stations collect air, passing it through filters. These filters are manually collected at regular, reportedly 24-hour, intervals and are analyzed for potential biological weapon pathogens using polymerase chain reaction techniques.

While filters from the BioWatch program were initially shipped to and tested at a federal laboratory in California, state and local public health laboratories now perform the analyses. News reports suggest that the system tests for pathogens that cause anthrax, smallpox, plague and tularemia (a bacterial illness, sometimes called “rabbit fever”), but the entire list of pathogens is not publicly available.
[…]

The Washington Post reported yesterday that small amounts of a bacterium that causes “rabbit fever” were found on Washington’s National Mall on the weekend of Sept. 24-25, 2005 — the same weekend that thousands of protesters marched against the Iraq War. But U.S. health authorities did not announce it until Saturday, Oct. 1 — a week later.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said several government environmental air monitors in the Mall area detected low levels of Francisella tularensis, a bacterium that causes tularemia, commonly known as rabbit fever. Public health agencies have had no reports of any related human or animal illnesses caused by the bacteria.

The CDC said it issued an alert on Friday night, Sept. 30, 2005, as a precaution so medical personnel were aware of the situation and could report any suspected cases. Tularemia does not transmit from person to person and can be effectively treated with readily available medicines, the CDC said. Symptoms usually appear three to five days after exposure, but in rare cases can take up to two weeks.

Symptoms of the disease include sudden fever, chills, headaches, conjunctivitis, diarrhea, muscle aches, joint pain, dry cough and progressive weakness. District of Columbia health officials told local radio station WTOP on Saturday, Oct. 1, that the detected bacteria was not harmful and probably occurred naturally.

The CDC waited a week to notify city officials of the detected
bacteria because it took that long to test the samples at labs and confirm its presence, the radio station reported.
[…]

• White House staffer indicted in Abramoff investigation: David H. Safavian, the former head of procurement policy for the White House budget office was indicted Wednesday on charges of obstructing investigators and lying about his ties to Jack Abramoff, the Washington lobbyist who is at the center of a federal investigation that has brought Representative Tom DeLay under scrutiny.
• Pentagon analyst admits giving secrets to Israel: A former U.S. Defense Department analyst pleaded guilty to charges he gave classified military documents to unauthorized individuals.Lawrence A. Franklin, 58, who worked on the Pentagon’s Iran desk, pleaded guilty today in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, to three counts. He faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine on the most serious of the charges.
• Commerce Dept. clamps down on weather service media contacts: We really are living under a Soviet-style propaganda system. The Department of Commerce has issued a blanket media policy to employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), requiring that all requests for contact from national media be first approved by the Department.

A Supreme mole: Yesterday, we suggested that the nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court was an attempt by the Bush team – particularly Vice President Cheney and Karl Rove – to plant a crony among the Supremes because they knew Treasongate indictments were imminent, and therefore it might be useful to have an operative on the inside should congressional investigations move toward impeachment.

Last night, we learned that the Capitol is awash in rumors on two fronts related to the CIA Leak investigation. First, there is word that the special prosecutor will soon issue 22 indictments in the matter; and secondly, Rove’s attorney, Robert Luskin, refused to confirm or deny whether Rove had received a letter from the prosecutor naming him as a target of the investigation, which is significant because Luskin had earlier categorically denied that Rove was a target.

Now comes this from the rightwing, Unification Church-owned Washington Times:

Senior Bush adviser Karl Rove was “very involved” in President Bush’s Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, who was selected in part because she has no judicial track record, according to a Republican with close ties to the administration.

“We know that Rove was very involved in the process, and he’s certainly well tuned in to the Hill and how it works,” said GOP strategist Charlie Black. “I suspect the Senate leadership might have given him the advice to take into consideration on how hard or how easy someone would be to confirm.”

This nomination is starting to look like an attempt at Machiavellian intrigue by a desperate bunch of political yahoos.

UPDATE: Rove Will Testify in CIA Leak Case for Fourth Time