by TChris

Golden rule days:

President George W. Bush's chief of staff Andrew Card and other top White House officials started attending classes on ethics and the handling of classified information on Tuesday in response to the indictment of a top aide in the CIA leak investigation.

Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, was expected to attend one of the classes scheduled for Wednesday.

Cheney's new chief of staff, David Addington, was also scheduled to attend, the White House said.

Bush and Cheney seem to be cutting class.

The CIA has referred the leak of secret prison locations that appeared in the Washington Post to the Justice Department for investigation. This is the same way means by which the criminal investigation began into PlameGate.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the issue deals with classified information, said the referral was made shortly after the Nov. 2 story. The leak investigation into the disclosure of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity came about through the same referral procedure. The Justice Department will decide whether to initiate a criminal investigation.

The polls should be closing soon. I haven't followed the elections around the country today, so here's a place to discuss them. Corzine in NJ and Bloomberg in NY appear to be winners. Who else, and what if anything do today's results portend for 2006?

Check out what local progressive political bloggers are saying about the elections:

• Virginia
• New Jersey
• California
• Ohio

More local blogs are on Blogpac. Just click inside the map for the state you are interested in.

Wow. A new Pew Research poll shows that 79% of Americans believe the indictment of Cheney's Chief of Staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby is important to the country. Pew's summary of findings are here.

And Bush's base is weakening:

Will PlameGate and other Administration missteps affect today's elections around the country? Another question: Will today's voting be an indicator for the 2006 elections?

Too funny. This morning, Sen. Frist and Rep. Hastert sent a letter complaining about leaks of the locations of secret prisons that found their way into the Washington Post. The New York Times reported on the letter here.

But, it has backfired.

But today, in an off-camera meeting with reporters, Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) revealed that the leak likely came from a Senator or Senate staffer who attended a GOP-only meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney last week, where the detention centers were discussed.

Crooks and Liars has the video from CNN's Situation Room today. Raw Story has the letter which Frist at first said he didn't sign and then it turned out that he did sign it.

Judge Alito is making the rounds of Senators on the Judiciary Committee. Today, several senators expressed contentment with his answers about Roe v. Wade. They say he believes it is very strong precedent. Of course, that is no guarantee of how he would vote on the issue.

"He basically said ... that Roe was precedent on which people, a lot of people, relied, and had been precedent now for decades and therefore deserved great respect," [Joseph]Lieberman told reporters.

When will the Senators move on to ask questions about other issues? Half the cases before the Supreme Court are criminal cases. Why aren't the Senators asking him to demonstrate that he would be fair in deciding these cases despite having spent his entire career before becoming a judge as a prosecutor or attorney for the Government?

James Carroll does an excellent job of eviscerating Dick Cheney in today's Boston Globe.

At world-shaping moments across a generation, Cheney reacted with an instinctive, This is war! He helped turn the War on Poverty into a war on the poor. He helped keep the Cold War going longer than it had to, and when it ended (because of initiatives taken by the other side), Cheney refused to believe it. To keep the US war machine up and running, he found a new justification just in time. With Gulf War I, Cheney ignited Osama bin Laden's burning purpose. Responding to 9/11, Cheney fulfilled bin Laden's purpose by joining him in the war-of-civilizations. Iraq, therefore (including the prewar deceit for which Scooter Libby takes the fall), is simply the last link in the chain of disaster which is the public career of Richard Cheney.

[Via Atrios, who also points us to this excellent Digby post.]

Update: Big thanks to Matt, Mike Ditto and Big Tex and Ron. I have it now.

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There's a picture here(number ten in the series) that I can't figure out how to copy because it's in a macromedia flash series. Does anyone know how to copy it? You'll understand when you see it. If you figure it out, I'd really like to have a copy.

Wal-Mart: the High Cost of Low Price is opening next week with free screenings across the country. Here are the details:

Next week, Robert Greenwald's latest documentary film WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price will premiere at an astonishing 6,000+ homes, churches, family businesses, schools, living rooms, community centers, and parking lots across the country -- a true people's premiere.

You are invited to join tens of thousands of people for this unprecedented event. The movie exposes the truth about Wal-Mart and questions the corporation's impact on the American economy. The people's premiere will reveal the growing public concern over Wal-Mart, and the growing inequality in America.

In related Wal-Mart news, a federal search warrant unsealed in a case against Wal-Mart alleges that two senior Wal-Mart execs knew the company's contractors were hiring undocumented workers.

A second lawyer for a co-defendant of Saddam Hussein has been shot and killed. I realize that lawyers are not the most popular people in our society, but still, this should be attracting more attention.

Adil Muhammed al-Zubaidi was killed when three gunmen in a red Opel shot at the car he was driving in Baghdad. His passenger, another of the lawyers involved in the trial, was hurt.He had represented ex-Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, one of Saddam's longtime aides, in the Dujail case -- the first trial of alleged crimes against humanity by the former regime. It was not immediately clear whom the injured attorney, Thamer Hamoud Hadi al-Khuzai, was representing in the case.

Why aren't these lawyers being provided with security guards? Apparently, Sadoon Janabi, the lawyer who was gunned down on October 20, had refused protection. It should be mandatory.

Tom DeLay has a new Democratic judge, Senior Judge Pat Priest. His lawyers have filed a motion to change venue out of Travis County, which they contend is too Democratic to be fair to DeLay, to Fort Bend county, where DeLay resides. The next court date will be November 22.

The brief filed by DeLay's lawyers said the role he played in dividing the county into three congressional districts during the 2003 congressional redistricting battle had made him "unpopular" in Travis County. He called Austin "one of the last enclaves of the Democratic Party in Texas."

The brief also said Austin media coverage of the investigation conducted by Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle had been "unrelenting and highly unfavorable."

Kevin Drum reports there have been 47 constitutional amendments proposed in the last year. He lists them all.

The Constitution is not a rough draft. We don't need any of them.