He declines interviews with me, but agrees to CNN and NPR.

He's making money off of his "scoops."

His reporting while in California was critized as deeply dishonest and partisan, especially with regards to Congressman Darrell Issa's campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1998.

And Lichtblau's been waging a "war against the war" since 2002. (More here and here.)

Given Lichtblau's past agenda journalism and absurd defenses for his recent stories, when will MSM turn its attention on to the motives of one of its own?

Does anyone in MSM have the courage and the skills to ask whether Eric Lichtblau is a partisan anti-Bush/GOP hack dressed up as a "journalist," willing to write stories that assist terrorists so long as they hurt Republicans?"

Eric Lichtblau is one of the authors of the New York Times' piece from June 23 that I believe has assited terrorists in eluding capture. He has denied this, and when he and I appear on CNN's Reliable Sources on Sunday, he'll make the same claim.

I wrote about it briefly in my Townhall.com column this morning, and Tom Macguire has ben dealing with variants of the argument as well.

But given this "no harm, no foul" defense is likely to be the last refuge for an elite media staggered by the public's anger, it deserves a little more detail.

First, the Los Angeles Times' Doyle McManus has admitted to me on air (transcript here) that the stories "conceivably" could help terrorists avoid capture.

Once any sort of possibility is allowed, the argument is over, as no one in the meida can quantify the risk, and ifit can't be quantified, it can't be justified. You cannot "balance" what you cannot "weigh."

So Lichtblau has adopted the only defensible rhetoric, but using it reveals himself to be either disingenuous or simply not very bright.

First, and most obviously, consider how many terrorists there are in the world. That number is, at a minimum, in the tens of thousands.

Unless each of them had detailed knowledge of Swift and how it worked, then those that didn't but gained that knowledge immediately after publication or will have that knowledge passed to them by trainers down the road will be better prepared by that information to elude capture.

Lichtblau and his enablers respond that "everybody" knew and the Administration loudly proclaimed that terrorist financing was under surveillance. This transparent dodge is akin to arguing that because everyone knows that police try and catch speeders, that every motorist knows every speed trap, radar gun and mounted camera deployed around the country.

Illustration: Does Mr. Lichtblau want to bet that the Canadian cell or the Miami cell knew what Swift was, or that 7,800 institutions routed all their finances through one system in Belgium that the U.S. had access to?

Better yet, Mr. Lichtblau ought to read his original story, in which this disclosure is made:

The idea for the Swift program, several officials recalled, grew out of a suggestion by a Wall Street executive, who told a senior Bush administration official about Swift's database. Few government officials knew much about the consortium, which is led by a Brooklyn native, Leonard H. Schrank, but they quickly discovered it offered unparalleled access to international transactions. Swift, a former government official said, was "the mother lode, the Rosetta stone" for financial data.

Lichtblau's story also noted that "the banking program is a closely held secret," and that it was "hidden," no doubt because of the scale of the operation was simply not understood even by sophisticated terrorists:

Swift's database provides a rich hunting ground for government investigators. Swift is a crucial gatekeeper, providing electronic instructions on how to transfer money among 7,800 financial institutions worldwide. The cooperative is owned by more than 2,200 organizations, and virtually every major commercial bank, as well as brokerage houses, fund managers and stock exchanges, uses its services. Swift routes more than 11 million transactions each day, most of them across borders.

The cooperative's message traffic allows investigators, for example, to track money from the Saudi bank account of a suspected terrorist to a mosque in New York. Starting with tips from intelligence reports about specific targets, agents search the database in what one official described as a "24-7" operation. Customers' names, bank account numbers and other identifying information can be retrieved, the officials said.

That terrorists clearly did not understand the net that had been thrown out --at least until last Friday-- is also proven by Lichtblau's own words. here are the key paragraphs:

The Swift data has provided clues to money trails and ties between possible terrorists and groups financing them, the officials said. In some instances, they said, the program has pointed them to new suspects, while in others it has buttressed cases already under investigation.

Among the successes was the capture of a Qaeda operative, Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, believed to be the mastermind of the 2002 bombing of a Bali resort, several officials said. The Swift data identified a previously unknown figure in Southeast Asia who had financial dealings with a person suspected of being a member of Al Qaeda; that link helped locate Hambali in Thailand in 2003, they said.

In the United States, the program has provided financial data in investigations into possible domestic terrorist cells as well as inquiries of Islamic charities with suspected of having links to extremists, the officials said.

The data also helped identify a Brooklyn man who was convicted on terrorism-related charges last year, the officials said. The man, Uzair Paracha, who worked at a New York import business, aided a Qaeda operative in Pakistan by agreeing to launder $200,000 through a Karachi bank, prosecutors said.

In terrorism prosecutions, intelligence officials have been careful to "sanitize," or hide the origins of evidence collected through the program to keep it secret, officials said.

Hambali was called the Osama of Asia, a smart and deadly killer who had mastermined the Bali attack, the attack on the Marriott in Indonesia, and at the time of his capture in August, 2003 --due to Swift-- was said to be planning suicide attacks on a summit of world leaders in Thailand scheduled for October of 2003.

Hambali's organization clearly didn't understand Swift's reach, but it does now. And you can be sure it is going back as best it can over Hambali's steps before capture to figure out the weak link that brought the mastermind to justice. Whatever mistake was made, it won't be made again.

More to the point, the article alerts terrorists and their sympathizers of the degree of sophistication and sensitivity we have developed. There's always --in every organization-- a smartest guy and a dumbest guy. Now they know the dumbest guy can bring the end of the smartest guy with an ATM transaction or a Western Union payout, or a mosque wire-transfer from Saudi Arabia, or even a laundered New York ExIm transaction.

This was a world wide alert in cap letters, which included an aside that previous official accounts about how X or Y was captured "sanitized" the use of the Swift data.

Finally there is the shock effect of this story. Terror bosses around the globe might well have been sticklers for operational security and the use of non-bank measures, but there is always the grind on security that comes about when routine sets in.

It is why fire alarm batteries aren't changed, or why "Top Secret" files are wrongly left on desks, or locks are left unlocked. People, even terrorist killers, get sloppy.

Every terrorist director of internal security got a gift last week. They got a road map with much better graphics and a prop for all their training sessions.

Eric Lichtblau and all who attempt to argue that "no harm was done" are simply unwilling to deal with their responsibility. To their recklessness must also be added an indifference to facts and logic that calls into question their basic competence.

By the way, the panel on Sunday's Reliable Sources, hosted by the always fair Howard Kurtz, will be Lichtblau, former Des Moines Register editor and former Washington Post Ombudsman Geneva Overholser and columnist Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post.

Normally a three-to-one MSM to new media line up wouldn't be fair, but in this instance, the actions of the papers are so obviously wrong and so widely reviled, don't be discouraged from watching.

UPDATE:

An e-mail from a smart guy:

greetings,

Not A Good Day, indeed.

let me add my .02....

while everything you say about the current situation is TRUE, however please allow me to suggest that the LONG TERM impact here is EVEN WORSE...

Since St. Jimmy sent St Stan down to Langley to show the Peasants how
"Honorable Ladies and Gentlemen" did Intelligence...

...we have increasingly made our National Intelligence infrastructure
subject to the whims and fancies of both Pop Culture and post-modern
Political Correctness, it has long been a point that anyone "bold" enough to suggest "Active Measures", was treated as a Pariah, (i think this goes a long way to explaining the Situational Derangement of guys like Richard Clarke and Michael Scheuer, who were reportedly for much more muscular counter-intelligence efforts from the late 80's thru the late 90's, all to no avail)

This produces situations where even Slick Willy thought that dropping a few dozen cruise missiles on goat herds in the middle of the desert passed for a legitimate response to a increasingly deadly opponent.

My Argument:

If the Times*2 do not experience ***GENUINE PAIN*** here, we will be
effectively giving a "pocket veto" over intelligence operations to the Main Stream Media, as conflict-adverse incumbents both elected and bureaucratic, will gauge all potential covert ops in terms of political blowback when the Op is blown in the MSM....

this will, i contend, in addition to fostering EVEN MORE caution amongst the Intelligence Mandarins regarding Ops, will effectively give a COST-FREE veto over Plans and Ops to every employee of an Intelligence Agency, who is willing to invest in a cellular phone call to a reporter from a MSM outlet willing to print/broadcast it...

And if Times*2 aren't REALLY SPANKED HERE, that will be very, very many MSM entities....

Godspeed and Blue Skies!

I will be speaking at the Cedar Valley Church in Bloomington Minnesota this weekend. If you are in the area, I am sure you would be welcomed.

Please note that there are two locations. I'll be at the Bloomington Campus on Sunday morning, and the Egan Campus on Saturday evening.

As with the House Resolution, I am informed that the Senate Resolution does not name the Times Two.

From Powerline's Lt. Colonel:

That members of Congress will vote to send troops into battle but they lack the courage to take a principled stand against the NYT and other media outlets that actively undermine our national security.

I cannot imagine the thought process here, except one of fear of the New York Times, and as with the House Resolution, I hope senators amend this or defeat it.

UPDATE:

The draft resolution, said to have been authored by Senator Cornyn, names a date on which damaging stories ran, but not the New York Times or Los Angeles Times.

Thus the AP affiliate in Fresno is blasted along with the papers which did the damage. Courageous, that. Fear of the big dog, so they'll kick the puppies.

UPDATE 2:

From Polipundit guest milblogger Oak Leaf, on the Hamdan ruling, a sentiment that parallels reaction to the Congressional collapse of courage:

I wasted 12 months of my life in Afgahnistan for this.

Support by the military in the GWOT is going to collapse.

UPDATE: This opinion will go from a ripple to a wave throughout the uniformed military. We were slapped by John McCain last December. Today, we are slapped by the Supreme Court. This afternoon, I am removing myself from the volunteer list at Human Resources Command-St. Louis to re-deploy. I will not be the only one.

UPDATE:

Great letter to the editor. One portion:

As a 22-year veteran of military service and someone who has held a top-secret security clearance, I am outraged about these acts by partisan critics of the president who are using their placement and access within the government to undermine the war on terror and place all of us at greater risk.

These individuals need to be identified and brought up on charges of treason for leaking classified information to the media. I urge folks to contact their nationally elected represenatives and request that these crimes be investigated.

Tomorrow's vote is instead a choice on what the House might have said and what it did say. And what it proposes to say is a half measure. It should be defeated, and the leadership should bring forward a resolution that let's its "yes" be "yes" and its "no" be "no." Congressman Oxley has, in my opinion, fundametally misunderstood the stakes. Perhaps he willrealize his error and withdraw his ill-worded resolution.

You can register your opinion with the Speaker and Majority Leader Boehner via the number 202-224-3121.

Perhaps the United States Senate will represent the people, and not compromise with elite opinion and the comforts of the Beltway. Here's part of my conversation with Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Pat Roberts today:

HH: And Chairman Roberts, I want to go back, then, to the question. In your opinion, knowing what you know now, did the release of Monday's story, just the SWIFT program, assist terrorists in eluding capture?

PR: Oh, I don't think there's any question.

HH: All right. Now I want to quote to you [LAT Washington bureau chief Doyle] McManus saying...on your oversight: "We went to Congress to figure out what it was, he said, and it turned out that, a few members had been briefed, and that the Intelligence Committee as a whole hadn't been briefed until after Treasury began to believe the story was likely to come out. So if the question of briefing Congress goes to important issues of oversight, the oversight, I think any fair-minded person would say, that there was a minimal form of oversight. It wasn't complete oversight."

Was he wrong?

PR: Well, I would say he's wrong. I've been briefed, and I know other members of the Intelligence Committee have been briefed, staff has been briefed, leadership has been briefed.

So the New YorkTimes and the Los Angeles Times were "wrong." And wrong on an issue of life or death for future victims of terror, wrong on an issue on which the president and the vice president have been very clear. Wrong on a defining issue for the country: Should these two newspapers pass without rebuke for the damage they did?

Some staff on the papers are denying they did harm, and other MSMers are rallying to their argument, like Tom Brokaw. Still others are hiding from hard questions.

They will be encouraged by the House resolution, with its refusal to close with the central issue of accountability. These two papers were asked by the officials charged with the public's safety not to publish the stories they published. They published them anyway. This is a debate over that behavior. The House resolution refuses to engage the debate, and it should be defeated.

The question before the Congress, the one on which the House --inexplicably, and to the shame of the GOP majority there, has apparently punted-- is did the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times injure the war effort by assisting terrorists in avoiding capture?

All the rest is posturing.

The resolutions in both House and Senate are being brought forward because of the stories from Friday.

Not referencing the stories is clearly understood by observors to be an acknowledgment that these papers are privileged in a way soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines are not: They get to make mistakes, and not be called to account.

If the House and Senate don't call them to account, and with specificity, these papers and others will repeat their behaviors.

I just don't see how a civilian could vote for a non-specific resolution and look a military man or woman --or the family of one of the fallen-- in the eye and say: "We spoke for you. We voted a non-specific resolution of condemnation of various behaviors that might hurt the war effort and lead to the escape of terrorists from justice."

What a horrible joke. What an insult to the military. What a terrible insult to the fallen.

The House should defeat Resolution 895, and its serious members demand a real rebuke to the scribblers who endanger the effort.

And the United States Senate should not commit a similar error.

202-224-3121.

UPDATE:

The Washington Post reports:

The House resolution does not mention any news organization by name, a decision that resulted from closed-door GOP discussions in which some urged colleagues not to overdo media-bashing.

I wish I had a tape of that session. Who urged such an absurd and harmful indecision? Chris Shays? It is not "media-bashing" to condemn the release of information that assists terrorists in eluding capture. By refusing specificity, the resolution in fact descends to "media-bashing." This is what passes for reason in the GOP caucus? If so, the caucus needs new leadership.

UPDATE:

Powerline's Scott Johnson asks the Congress to be as blunt as Sgt. Boggs and Lt. Cotton.

Here's my Townhall column on the Times Two, "Some of My Best Friends Are Journalists."

California Medicine Man reacts here.

And here is how Mitt Romney reacts to the Times Two:

HH: Did you have a reaction, Governor, having just returned from Iraq and Afghanistan recently, on the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times publishing the classified stories that they did Friday last?

MR: You know, I find it inexplicable and inexcusable. You recognize that we are at war, and that publishing the intelligence capabilities and processes and procedures of our intelligence community is something which puts us in a jeopardized position, it puts us in peril, and it's inexcusable. And I just find it just extraordinary, and I can't imagine what kind of outcry there would be, had the same thing occurred during the Second World War.

I hope the House majority figures out clarity by the day's end, and that the Senate starts there.

UPDATE:

Justice Kennedy's concurrance in Hamdan closes with this pointed instruction to the Congress:

In light of the conclusion that the military commissions at issue are unauthorized Congress may choose to provide further guidance in this area. Congress,not the Court, is the branch in the better position to undertake the “sensitive task of establishing a principle notinconsistent with the national interest or international justice.” Banco Nacional de Cuba v. Sabbatino, 376 U. S. 398, 428 (1964).

There are four votes on SCOTUS for expansive presidential power in this war, but when it comes to trying terrorists, Justice Kennedy wants the Congress to announce specifically what procedures govern.

I disagree with his assessment, but if Congress will simply get serious about the war, neither is today's decision a disaster. No one is leaving Gitmo, and the SCOTUS continues to dodge any serious interference with the war, though narrowly.

The draft House resolution does not name the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

How can the Congressional majority be this lame.

It is a war. If you don't treat it like a war, nobody else will.

UPDATE:

Initial reaction from callers and e-mails to the resolution's refusal to specify last Friday's stories in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times is overwhelmingly negative --a fearful refusal to confront the powerful MSM that once again insults the intelligence of voters, but especially does not convey the seriousness of the breach.

I wonder what Sgt. Boggs thinks of the Resolution?

From N.Z. Bear, a suggestion: Rewrite the resolution and send us both the new language.

Meanwhile on Hardball yesterday, Tom Brokow closes ranks with his MSM pals, but reveals himself to be quite ignorant of intelligence gathering in the process:

"I don't know of anyone who believes that the terrorist network said "Oh my God, they are tracing our financial transcactions? What a surprise!" Of course they knew they were doing that."

Best e-mail:

Kofi Annan must have consulted with the House. Nothing else makes sense.

Good news: Lots of new judicial nominees, including Debra Livingston --but for the Second Circuit, not the D.C. Circuit as I had been tipped last month.

Bad news: No nominee for either of the two D.C. Circuit vacancies, the most important openings of them all.

Reactions at ConfirmThem.

The start of a new Screedblog:

It seems like the New York Times is revealing all our national security secrets, but relax: they have their limits. If the Times learned that US troops were force-feeding Gitmo detainees with Coca-cola, they wouldn’t publish Coke’s secret formula. They might get sued. If there’s a CIA program that uses offensive cartoons of Mohammed to communicate with agents, they’ll keep mum, lest they have to publish the images. They might get stabbed. But secret law-enforcement-type programs as classified as the access code to the Times top-floor elevator? Fair game. You’ve the right to know.

Read it all.

And check back later at Radioblogger.com for transcripts of Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, and Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens all commenting on the Times Two controversy.

UPDATE:

From a very smart correspondent:

To: Hugh Hewitt
Subject: EXACTLY RIGHT -- REVERSE ENGINEERING

greetings,

i know that you know this, but Hitch should also be smart enough to figure this out...

Just as our own military does a formal, requisite, post-mortem operational analysis, at virtually every level of command, now more politically correctly known as "Lessons Learned" or perhaps more humoursly (?) "Morning After" analysis,

the PUBLIC portions of; The 9/11 Commission Report, The Butler Report AND the US Senate Select Intelligence Committee all make it very clear that our foes COMMUNINCATE relentlessly over EVERY significant operation win and LOSS they have, and they expend considerable effort to learn from all their operational discontinuities....

for just one clear simple example; NOW for all the early phase operations on the AQ side that have been "off net" for a while, they will go down operational checklists to see what operational phase that their individual ops were at, and for all of those that were in a "funding" operational phase, they will explore through their
Saudi/Yemeni/Sudanese/Afghani/Pakistani bankers the Who/What/When/Where/Why and How of their funding movements and NEVER use them (or anything like them) EVER AGAIN,,,

BTW, it is a trivial thing to run a pattern analysis on the internet web traffic that is currently crawling the SWIFT website and all related online SWIFT resources, and you can bet that there will soon be a "book' of what funding sources to NEVER USE....

Let's hope it is as tough as Sgt. Boggs' letter.

Who will step up in the senate?

UPDATE:

Some e-mailers, particulalry from the left, see a conspiracy of silence in the condemnation being directed at the Times Two, and not the Wall Street Journal. Patterico covered the key distinction days ago:

Some commenters and bloggers have suggested that the Wall Street Journal is equally culpable as the New York Times and Los Angeles Times for leaking classified information about a successful anti-terror program. Now that I have had a chance to read the full Wall Street Journal piece, I disagree.

Based on my reading of the relevant articles, the responsible parties here are only the New York Times and the L.A. Times. The Wall Street Journal simply printed a story using on-the-record interviews with named government officials who knew the East and West Coast Timeses were going to print the story anyway.

The key questions are: 1) which papers were conducting an investigation by speaking with anonymous officials about classified information? and 2) which papers were asked by the government not to print the stories? The answer to both questions, based upon reading the stories, is: the New York Times and the L.A. Times — not the Wall Street Journal.

Jeff Jacoby's Boston Globe column treats the Times two and their most visible critics in the military.

Sgt. Boggs has responded to some of the coverage at his blog, and has a particular response to the Los Angeles Times' Doyle McManus:

In an Los Angeles Times Doyle McManus:" target="_blank">interview with the Los Angeles Times Washington bureau chief Doyle McManus, Hugh Hewitt tells Mr. McManus that I and fellow soldiers are angry over his paper’s choice to publish stories involving secret information and that we believe they directly affect our lives. Mr. McManus chose to respond with a typical response for someone who knows nothing about the military.

“Well, I respect Sgt. Boggs, and I respect what he's doing for our country. I think accusing newspapers of causing the deaths of soldiers over the last several years because of a story that was printed last week probably adds more heat than light to this discussion.”

What actually adds heat to the situation Mr. McManus is your paper’s choice to publish sensitive information. I am merely expressing what I and, from the comments I have received in the past two days, many Americans feel. And if you want light to come to the situation why don’t you and the rest of the editors who chose to publish the story come out and start answering the tough questions without placing the blame on people like myself.

Read all of Sgt. Boggs' response, and all of the comments. I'm sure he'd welcome a comment or two when you visit there.

It would be a good thing if Mr. McManus responded directly to Sgt. Boggs, whose service Mr. McManus assured us appreciates. Appreciates enough, perhaps, to reply to?

For easy reference, Lt. Cotton's letter is here.

I refused to clink on any of the links in this John hawkins piece, because I suspect there will be a big "gottcha, dummy" sign at the other end.

I mean, this can't be true, right?

I'd trust a Nigerian banker contacting me by e-mail about the Irish lotto winnings he has on reserve for me before I'd go with an astrologer stock-picker/pumper.

Hawkins, you must think we are pretty dumb.

Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey oversees the coalition effort to train and equip the Iraqi army and police. I interviewed him yesterday. If you are interested in the specifics of the effort to produce a self-sufficient Iraqi army and security force, read the transcript.

Yes, it is also a big win for the GOP, and Tom DeLay's legacy is secure, as is the House majority in all probability if it continues to prosecute the war and defend its conduct.

But it is primarily a win for the control of political line-drawing by legislative boundries:

"We reject the statewide challenge to Texas redistricting as an unconstitutional political gerrymander," Kennedy wrote.

If representative government means anything, it means that elected officials make decisions on these matters, not judges beyond the recall of voters.

The opinions are here.

Other key portions of Kennedy's opinion:

That the federal courts sometimes are required to order legislative redistricting, however, doesnot shift the primary locus of responsibility....Quite apart from the risk of acting without a legislature’sexpertise, and quite apart from the difficulties a courtfaces in drawing a map that is fair and rational, see id., at 414–415, the obligation placed upon the Federal Judiciaryis unwelcome because drawing lines for congressional districts is one of the most significant acts a State can perform to ensure citizen participation in republican self-governance. That Congress is the federal body explicitly given constitutional power over elections is also a noteworthy statement of preference for the democratic process. As the Constitution vests redistricting responsibilities foremost in the legislatures of the States and in Congress, alawful, legislatively enacted plan should be preferable to one drawn by the courts.

and

In sum, we disagree with appellants’ view that a legislature’s decision to override a valid, court-drawn plan mid-decade is sufficiently suspect to give shape to a reliable standard for identifying unconstitutional political gerrymanders. We conclude that appellants have established no legally impermissible use of political classifications. For this reason, they state no claim on which relief may begranted for their statewide challenge.

The Court's direction on the non-constitutional claims means some minor redrawing of boundries:

The districts in south and west Texas will have to be redrawn to remedy the violation in District 23, and we have no cause to passon the legitimacy of a district that must be changed.

But this is not the key portion of the decision. The decision today protects the role of state legislatures and of the voters who elect them against interference by federal courts except when uncosntitutional standards such as race are employed in the drawing of district lines.

Howard Kurtz atetmpts to rally some sympathy for the Times Two, and unfortunately stumbles into the Bay of Pigs Club, from which exit is almost impossible. Once you buy into the use of a "might have been" (and a mightily mischaracterized one at that) to justify the publication of secrets that could help terrorists elude capture, there's no argument left because the "Bay of Pigs" mantra is an appeal to fiction, not to fact or history.

No major media outlet in the United States has ever knowingly, and over the objection of the United States government, ever published classified information that could assist the nation's enemies. Period. What the New York Times has done --and the Los Angeles Times copied-- is without precedent, which is why a Congressional response is so necessary, and hopefully forthcoming soon.

Kurtz notes that "[m]ost Democratic lawmakers, meanwhile, lay low," adding that "Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid sidestepped a question yesterday about whether the Times should be prosecuted."

In fact, lawmakers of both parties are for the most part "laying low," and that is not distinguishing them in the eyes of the public interested in seriousness about the war.

If it is a war -and it is-- and if the disclosures helped our enemies --and they did-- Congress should draft, debate and vote on resolutions condemning the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times by name.

The First Amendment protects the press in most of its operations and from almost all prior restraints on publication.

But not from deserved criticism from the genuine representatives of the people.

Marc Danzinger has much more on the subject of what went wrong at the Times Two.

UPDATE: The Real Ugly American notes the House is getting its act together.

Now where's the Senate?

Tim Chapman is asking the right questions.

Look, the flag amendment presents an interesting debate, but the national security does not turn on its fate.

Last week's Senate resolution and the House resolution the week before mattered a great deal, but their effect is being reduced by inaction by the House and Senate on the real damage done by the New York Times and Los Angeles Times.

So, where's the leadership, the draft resolutions, the debate and the vote? What's the plan? A letter from Chairman Roberts is great, but it isn't the First Branch speaking to the Fourth, which is what needs to happen. Soon.