Listening to that obnoxious ass, Henry Waxman, saying in opening statements of his show hearing, that Valerie Plame’s identity was “one of our nation’s most closely guarded secrets.” I’ll bet he managed to say it with a straight face, too.

[Update a few minutes later]

Mark Hyman explains:

Plame had been living in the U.S. for several years when her identity was revealed in Novak’s 2003 column. The Intelligence Identities Protection Act was crafted not to protect Plame and other classified employees from the FedEx driver, the Safeway cashier, or from threats commonly found in the school carpool line. The Act was to protect the identities of classified employees (typically known as “case officers”) and their contacts while overseas.

The first person to bust Plame’s identity was likely Plame herself. In using a commercially available data base it took me less then three minutes to learn that Plame had listed “American Embassy, New York, NY 09255” in 1991 as her official address. This, it turns out, was the APO address for the U.S. Embassy in Athens, Greece. Cover busted.

In addition, Brewster-Jennings & Associates was the name of the fictitious company she used as her cover story that she was a business consultant living and working in Europe. Another three-minute database research revealed that Brewster-Jennings reported annual sales revenues of $60,000 and a work force of only a single employee (presumably Plame). Even the most gullible foreign intelligence service would not swallow the whopper that the so-called Brewster-Jennings company could afford to send its only employee to work in Europe on total revenues of $60,000 a year.

[Update a few minutes later]

Bob Novak is now pointing out the absurdity of a “covert operator of the CIA” who drove to and from Langley every day.

[Update in the late afternoon.]

Tom Maguire, who despite his ongoing desecration of the Instapundit web site, remains the go-to guy on these issues, doesn’t think that the pro-Wilson folks had such a great day. He also thinks that Valerie has some ‘splainin’ to do.

[Update at 4 PM EST]

Cliff May writes that if Valerie Plame did recommend her husband for a Niger trip, it wouldn’t have been the first time she did such a thing.

[OK, one more]

Scott Ott has broken the code.

…and it’s permanence:

A big part of the problem is our outmoded civil-service system that makes it too hard to hire good employees and too hard to fire bad ones. The bureaucracy has become gargantuan, making accountability and reform very difficult.

Faced with this managerial swampland, the number of talented executives willing to come to Washington continues to dwindle. Those who do accept the challenges usually want to tackle big national goals in the few years they spend in public service instead of fighting their own agencies. So the bureaucracy just keeps rolling along.

And anyone who thinks that things would be better if we changed parties in the White House are deluding themselves.

Apparently it was a “someone else’s culpa.” I always love that passive voice. It takes me back to the nineties.

Cliff May:

Bill Clinton lied to a grand jury. As a result, he did not lose his job, did not go to jail and soon thereafter became a multi-millionaire, lionized and celebrated in his party and around the world.

If that

Rich Lowry:

The jarring spectacle of jurors expressing support for, or at least indifference toward, an executive act to wipe away the conviction that they just handed down is a damning statement about Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. It means that he had sufficient evidence to convince a handful of people drawn from Washington, D.C.

Rich Lowry:

The jarring spectacle of jurors expressing support for, or at least indifference toward, an executive act to wipe away the conviction that they just handed down is a damning statement about Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. It means that he had sufficient evidence to convince a handful of people drawn from Washington, D.C.

Rich Lowry:

The jarring spectacle of jurors expressing support for, or at least indifference toward, an executive act to wipe away the conviction that they just handed down is a damning statement about Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. It means that he had sufficient evidence to convince a handful of people drawn from Washington, D.C.

There’s been a lot of Buzz about Fred Thompson getting into the race, and some have been talking him up as Reagan reincarnate (though I think that a stretch). I think that he’s got a very big skeleton in his closet, though, that he’d have to exorcise to have a chance:

Thompson was one of only four Republican senators to endorse McCain

DC gun control laws have been stricken down, in accordance with the (properly interpreted) Second Amendment. It’s probably a good bet that this will go to the Supreme Court (which may get an opportunity to clarify Miller so that we can finally put a stake through the heart of the nonsensical “collective right” argument). This seems like a pretty big deal to me.

[Via Instapundit]

[Update a few minutes later]

If Giuliani has any political acumen whatsoever, he will laud this ruling, and pledge to nominate judges that would uphold it.

[Update after noon]

As Kathryn Jean Lopez notes, it would be useful to hear from all of the presidential candidates (both parties) on this issue.

[Late afternoon update]

For those who (like people in comments who shall remain nameless…errrr…unless you read the comment) are concerned that this won’t be heard by the court, Glenn Reynolds has a roundup of links on the subject, some of which lead to arguments that it’s very likely to (by Volokh, at least).

Of course, going to the SC is a double-edged sword. Given the current composition, be careful what you wish for…

The WSJ has a piece today on the continuing decline of my home state, where I still have family. It really makes all that nonsensical talk a few years ago about trying to amend the Constitution so that Granholm could run for president seem even more absurd.