Media manipulation by the right-wing to influence public perception has been a decade-long tactic to undermine voter registration in America. While the current media frenzy surrounding the community organization ACORN is only partly related to voter registration efforts, it is important to note that the attacks have been built on a foundation of misinformation and media manipulation by the right-wing over several years, largely surrounding the myth of "voter fraud."
Health care is a struggle. I get it. But getting rid of Karl Rove's DOJ hit squad? C'mon!
Don Siegelman-the most high-profile victim of Rove's skullduggery-has launched a campaign to do just that. Of course, it goes without saying that there shouldn't have to be such a campaign. It's ludicrous that Obama didn't fire the whole lot of GOP political appointees in the DOJ on day one. But he didn't. So now it falls to us to pressure him to do the right thing.
Earlier this month, I was fortunate to join many friends from here and all around the country at Netroots Nation and discuss some of the victories we have achieved together.
Specifically, I mentioned the success we had seen in urging the House Committee on the Judiciary to force Karl Rove to testify and admit his role in the firing of U.S. Attorneys while issuing "non-denial-denials" about his role in my prosecution.
That's something we never could have achieved without the support of the netroots and the Daily Kos community. I can't thank you enough for your steadfast support. But, this fight is not over; not for me, not for Karl Rove, and not for our democracy.
That's why, at my Netroots Nation panel, I launched a new campaign, www.FireRovesProsecutors.com, dedicated to seeing those Rove-vetted U.S. Attorneys and appointees still poisoning the Department of Justice removed from their positions - ending their ability to threaten our democracy.
When he wrote the diary, over 5,000 people had already sent email messages to the White House demanding the removal of Rove's prosecutors. We need to do our bit to raise those numbers.
The news today in New Jersey is that the former top aide to Chris Christie while he was in the U.S. Attorney's office- Michele Brown- resigned amid revelations that she was still paying off a $46,000 personal loan to him. Brown was serving in the U.S. Attorney's office after Christie became a candidate raising questions about whether she owed him favors and would carry out investigations/indictments on his behalf.
On top of it, acting U.S. Attorney, Ralph Marra- who replaced Christie upon his resignation to run for Governor- complained that Gov. Jon Corzine's campaign successfully targeted the office with a Freedom of Information request for Christie's records on no-bid contracts he awarded during his tenure, among other incidents. He's also in some trouble of his own.
Marra, in the e-mail obtained by The Star-Ledger, confirmed he is facing an internal ethics inquiry over public comments he made last month. Justice Department officials are looking into whether Marra's statements during a news conference after a corruption sweep may have helped Christie's campaign for governor.
Maybe it's the original Rove connection, but something about this feels like another version of Fitzmas is coming, and like Joe says, that there's more to this sleazebag Christie coming down the pipe.
Jon Corzine is on the OpenLeft/BlogPAC Better Democrats page. Here's another few shekels to him for pure smarts on the FOIA request. And another couple to keep Christie out of the Governor's mansion.
Amid all the health care reform goings-on in the last few weeks, it has been fun to take a break from that and watch the walls (hopefully) closing in on Karl Rove. Today it's reported in all the major outlets that he was much more deeply involved in the U.S. Attorneys' firings than he said he was, and even Harriet Miers is pointing fingers at him. Whether or not this means Fitzmas or something close to it again, I am unsure, but he may finally be getting what's coming to him, even if it takes many more months.
The more immediate impact is on the NJ-Gov race, where progressive governor Jon Corzine has been trailing Chris Christie recently. There hasn't been much discussion at OpenLeft about the race, but Chris Christie is this supposedly apolitical U.S. Attorney who engineered prosecutions and convictions of many high-profile NJ politicians, Dems and Republicans alike. Well, as Sam Stein reports today, he wasn't really all that apolitical. Rove has been advising Christie on making connections to start his run at the governor's mansion.
In an on-the-record interview with the House Judiciary Committee on July 7, 2009, the former Bush strategist acknowledged that he had held several conversations with current GOP candidate Chris Christie over the course of several years regarding the possibility of running for the governor's chair.
Christie, Rove said, was interested in mounting a bid and "asked me questions about who -- who were good people that knew about running for governor that he could talk to."
This damning news sure as hell raises a lot of Nixonian questions about Christie (per the Corzine camp's ad), including how his gubernatorial strategy was linked to who he decided to prosecute. If even Harriet Miers says Rove called New Mexico Attorney David Iglesias a "serious problem" and that he wanted "something done" about it, what direction did Rove give Christie on who should have been prosecuted in NJ?
isn't the point that whatever he did, whether misdemeanor or felony or a slap on the wrist subject, it's almost beside the point when there's misconduct like this in a democratic system of justice? There's no choice, right? You don't withhold evidence from the defense, no matter what."
DAngelus is certainly right that there's more to the issue than just the prosecutorial misconduct. There is still the matter of Stevens being a crook. But what's the bigger issue here, particularly given the scope of prosecutorial misconduct over the last 8 years?
"There seems to be substantial evidence of prosecutorial and other misconduct in my case, that would dwarf the allegations in the Stevens case," the former Alabama governor told TPMmuckraker in an interview moments ago....
And, as he has before, Siegelman framed his case as part of a wider effort to get to truth about politicization of the Justice Department during the Bush years. "Who at the Department of Justice abused their power, and why?" he asked. "Was Karl Rove directing the show?"
Even bigger than the issue of prosecutorial misconduct, however, is the over-arching issue of restoring the rule of law. As in holding Bush Administration officials accountable for torture, and other criminal policies.
I supported Wesley Clark and Dennis Kucinich in the Democratic primaries, and for bloggers driven by ideology and idiots on Daily Kos intoxicated by TV charisma, this pairing was more or less incomprehensible, but for anyone looking around for an honest candidate, it was obvious. Kucinich and Clark were the only honest Democrats in the race.
Did it really matter?
Suppose there's a candidate (like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton) who bullshits almost constantly (like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton), but promises low taxes, world peace, free medicine, cheap gas, new frontiers in renewable energy, tolerance for gays, more jobs, better jobs, better schools, a huge defense establishment, and ... did I mention low taxes?
Doesn't it make sense to vote for a candidate who promises you a package of wonders for cheap, in the hope that the laws of physics and economics and even the axioms of mathematics will undergo a miraculous transmogrification immediately after election day, and our elected Messiah will transform five loaves and two fishes into a feast for everybody?
No.
It makes about as much sense to elect Obama or Clinton or Bush or McCain or that other Clinton or Reagan or that other Bush as it makes to award the Nobel Prize in Physics to a candidate who promises to simplify the laws of physics into one easy-to-remember formula that any idiot can understand, on the basis of mathematics that everybody knows is bullshit.
The Presidency of the United States really is a job for a rocket scientist, meaning somebody outstandingly more intelligent than you and me, and if we can't find anybody more intelligent than you, at least we have to try, and the obviousness of this maxim for almost everybody is convincingly demonstrated by the fact that we haven't elected a President without an Ivy-League diploma since 1984.
So almost everybody more or less accepts the fact that we live in a monstrously complicated world, and nobody but a genius can sort out all the conflicting advice that constantly rains down on every President, and somehow maintain the equilibrium of our monstrously complicated nation. But genius expresses itself in an infinite number of categories, and because we are weak, foolish creatures, we keep electing geniuses in the category of bullshit.
It gets worse.
As recently as 1996, we could still find a genius-bullshitter who was also appealing enough on TV to get himself elected, but no such individual appeared in 2000, and the era of Siamese Presidents was inaugurated by the mutant-hybrid Howdy-Doody-and-the-Devil frontman-puppetmaster combination of George W. Bush and Karl Rove, now replaced in the Oval Office by David Axelrod and Barack Obama.
These new twinsies have already managed to dump trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars into black holes only thinly disguised as stimuli and bailouts, with no end in sight, and nothing like an honest explanation of any of it even expected by anybody except a few out-and-out drool-buckets at the very bottom of the category of idiots who elected the current monstrosity-hybrid of a bullshit genius.
I also like voting for geniuses, as long as they're honest, and only a few months before the beginning of the Democratic primary season, I still had two to choose from, although the Rhodes Scholar Wesley Clark fit a lot more obviously into that high-falutin' category than the indomitable little ex-mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, but Dennis Kucinich is so honest, and his honesty keeps so much bullshit from getting in his way, that now his incredible clairvoyance about the many boondoggle-bailouts looks infinitely more like genius than the bullshit-twin-geniuses we foolishly installed in the Presidency, along with all their fumbling, bumbling Ivy-League assistants.
The appeals court ruling that upheld most of the charges against former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman has drawn critical commentary from Scott Horton at Harpers and emptywheel at FireDogLake, both worth reading in their entirety.
In particular, Scott notes:
nearly all the disclosures that undermined confidence in the fairness of the Siegelman trial occurred after the trial record was closed-and none of these disclosures were examined by the Court of Appeals. Even though the appeals court looked into jury misconduct, it did not have before it the much more powerful evidence of misconduct that a whistleblowing member of the prosecution team subsequently disclosed to the Justice Department-because the Bush Justice Department, in violation of its plain ethical duties, chose to keep all of that secret. So although an appeal has been taken and resolved, not one of the truly significant issues with the Siegelman case was ever briefed or argued. That remains for the future.
emptywheel is more specific:
But note, in particular, the centrality of Nick Bailey's testimony in the Court's decision to uphold most of the convictions.
That's important because--as 60 Minutes reported on its piece on Siegelman--there are allegations Prosecutors coached Bailey's testimony and then did not turn over notes from that coaching to Siegelman's defense team to use to impeach Bailey
And then goes on to quote from a previous post by Horton back in last July. The upshot is that this ruling has barely scratched the surface of the wrongdoing alleged in this case.
Karl Rove testifying before the House Judiciary Committee under penalty of perjury is one of those things you always wish for and work toward, but never quite imagine actually happening until you see the headline. A pinch-me-I-must-be-dreaming moment along the lines of Barack Obama becoming President or the Philadelphia Phillies winning the World Series. Well, Obama is firmly in the White House and the Phils are reigning champs, so why the hell shouldn't Rove be under the spotlight of congressional scrutiny?
After all, we've been pushing for months to Send Karl Rove to Jail. Last summer, I went down to DC and delivered a petition with over 127,000 signatures to Rep. Linda Sanchez, a House Judiciary Committee (HJC) member who has led the charge against Rove. That petition helped persuade the HJC to hold Rove in contempt for failing to comply with a congressional subpoena. Now, that push has finally resulted in Rove testifying before the HJC about his involvement in the US attorneys scandal and the wrongful prosecution of former Alabama governor Don Siegelman.
Imagine being about to interrogate someone as diabolically deceitful as Rove for the role he played in the politicization of the Justice Department. Imagine being able to pore over the five boxes of internal White House memos and e-mails that the HJC will finally get to examine. Keep in mind this is the same scandal that already was a huge black eye for the Bush administration when it ruined Alberto Gonzales' career. Who knows what justice Congress now has in store for Rove!
Rep. John Conyers has subpoenaed Karl Rove again to testify about White House influence on the prosecution of Don Siegelman, but Rove's lawyer claims that executive privilege invoked by President Bush still applies, and Obama is bound by his oath of office to maintain Constitutional separation of powers by endorsing Rove's immunity and instructing the Attorney General to resist the Congressional subpoena. So...
Will Obama support executive privilege for Rove, or not?
Otherwise Obama has to give up his pipe-dreams of bipartisanship, and declare all-out war on Republicans by nullifying the claim of executive privilege and forcing Rove to testify, and it's war because the former President and Vice-President are only one step behind Rove as targets for prosecution. This would be the mythical equivalent of kidnapping Merlin from a Republican Camelot, and the boy-king Arthur W. Bush would be honor-bound to rally his knights in exile and storm the White House!
Or will Obama betray the credulous peasants who made him their king, and ally himself instead with the dark hordes of disorder and eternal sorrow?
Both alternatives are obviously impossible, and if Barack Obama is squeezed into the infinitesimal branch-point of this paradox, then the Universe will accordingly fall into a Logical Singularity where all known laws of physics and politics will be abrogated!
Our world will be swallowed by a black hole of Chaos and Unreason!
Bipartisanship is Obama, and Obama is bipartisanship, from his first real blip on the national radar at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, right through his otherwise incomprehensible and completely useless attempt to rally Republican support for his economic stimulus with humongous tax-cuts.
No entity can act in absolute opposition to its essence! Obama cannot abandon bipartisanship and declare war on Republicans by seizing their Merlin.
But not even the original Merlin could so mystify the rubes that they accept Obama's Department of Justice defending Karl Rove against a Congressional subpoena!
It's like biting the head off a chicken and screaming "Hail Satan!"
If Obama is rejected by his outraged base, his fragile identity would be undone, the mask of Barack Obama, Progressive Hero, would disappear, and only the original face of Little Orphan Obama would remain, abandoned by Dad and dumped on the grandparents by Ma Dunham, desperately cobbling together a credible persona in the lily-white paradise of a Hawaiian prep-school.
Obama cannot return to that nightmare of anomie! But he cannot make war on Republicans! Neither A or Not-A!
A logical apocalypse!
So anyone who wants our old familiar Universe to creep along through the next Great Depression that is already rolling down upon us, and anyone who wants a ring-side seat when either India and Pakistan or North and South Korea take that last little step into nuclear war and poison what's left of our already almost poisonous atmosphere...
Anyone who wants to survive for the next few years of our miserable future should call, write, or email John Conyers and tell him to stop squeezing Barack Obama into a paradoxical branch-point that will plunge our Universe into the nothingness of Singularity and Annihilation!
But there's obviously room for reasonable people to disagree on this issue, and maybe it's just as well to skip the last few chapters of humanity's absurd tragedy or sad farce, and let the whole thing disappear in one painless, illogical poof!
Here's Karl Rove, bragging about Bush's literary tastes.
Mr. Bush's 2006 reading list shows his literary tastes. The nonfiction ran from biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, Babe Ruth, King Leopold, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, LBJ and Genghis Khan to Andrew Roberts's "A History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900," James L. Swanson's "Manhunt," and Nathaniel Philbrick's "Mayflower." Besides eight Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald, Mr. Bush tackled Michael Crichton's "Next," Vince Flynn's "Executive Power," Stephen Hunter's "Point of Impact," and Albert Camus's "The Stranger," among others.
Turning to the Bush clan, we learn in Kitty Kelley's book The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty that New Yorker writer Brendan Gill was once a guest of George H.W. and Barbara Bush at their summer house in Kennebunkport, Maine. Stumbling through the place late at night in search of something to read, the only volume he could find was The Fart Book.
I sort of understand Rove's strategy of insisting that George W. Bush is an intellectual heavyweight, even though he's obviously just a dolt that loves fart jokes. Rove enjoys tweaking liberals by preying on their insecurities, which he used to do when he was powerful and the Bush administration was taken seriously by insisting that they were effete eggheads out of touch with the real America. Only, now, there's nothing whatsoever admirable about the Bush Presidency and no one really believes Rove is a political genius, and so Rove is reduced to pretending that Bush is some sort of bookworm. Take that, liberals! Or something like that.
I think someone should establish a musty hospice for the careers of dated political operatives, and stick Rove there. Oh wait, an embarrassing political attic already exists, and it's called Fox News.
The case of former Alabama governor Don E. Siegelman just keeps getting "curiouser and curiouser." Remember-the "crime" that Siegelman was convicted of was appointing a campaign contributor to a position he had already held previously. If this is a crime, then probably every governor in the country over the past half century is a criminal, too.
Now Time is reporting that a whistleblower has turned over some internal prosecution e-mails (pdf) to the Justice Department and the House Judiciary Committee, revealing two types of forbidden communication during the investigation and trial, which have remained hidden until now. First, they show that Leura G. Canary, the conflict-ridden US Attorney who began the investigation, but then recused herself, did not remain uninvolved in the case, as recusal requires. (Canary's husband, was a close friend of Karl Roves and top GOP operative in the state.) Second, they show that there was communication between the jurors and the prosecutorial team, facilitated by the U.S. Marshalls.
In an eight-page letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, John Conyers, chair of the House Judiciary Committee wrote:
This information, including the attached documents, raises serious questions regarding possible misconduct by the Siegelman prosecution team, including the aparent failure to disclose to the Court or to defense counsel communications received from one or more members of the Siegelman jury while the trial was underway, and also the fialure of United States Attorney Leura Canary to fully honor her recusal from this case."
Siegelman says that new revelations about his prosecution amount to "outrageous criminal conduct in the US Attorney's office and the Department of Justice," and are "more frightening than anything that has come before." And he believes that his case is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of politicized prosecutions by DOJ.
At the same time, however, an article by Charlie Savage at the NYT raises questions over whether this and other investigations really will proceed vigorously under an Obama Administration.
Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way, a progressive policy think tank that leans Democratic, said he sees parallels between Obama's plan and Clinton's pledge in 1992 to cut the White House staff by 25 percent - the symbol of his overall platform to reduce and reorganize government in a year when, like 2008, "change" was a more popular mantra than "experience."
"His staff will struggle to comply with what will eventually feel to them as arbitrary rules," said Bennett, a former Clinton administration aide. "I go back to the Clinton vow to cut the White House staff by 25 percent. It was arbitrary and capricious. It was very hard to do and caused significant trouble, and he got zero political benefit out of it."
Norm Ornstein also gets in a few digs. You know, can't they wait until Obama wins to start telling him why he shouldn't run an open administration?
Insurers, automakers and American subsidiaries of foreign banks all want the Treasury Department to cut them a piece of the largest government rescue in U.S. history.
It's a grab bag! Can I have some?
Democrat Paul Kanjorski in Pennsylvania is just not doing well. This ad isn't helping, making him look old and out of it.
Do we really need 60 Senators to pass legislation? Sheldon Whitehouse doesn't think so.
"If the White House political team can't figure out a way to get two Republican senators to vote with us between Air Force One, tea at the White House, U.S. attorneys and judges and dams and roads and ambassadors and all that other stuff, somebody should take them out to the woodshed. Sixty is less a magic number than a zone."
New York's going to lose 40,000 Wall Street jobs. I don't know how the city's going to deal with that.
Yesterday, I complained about things that will continue to frustrate me after the impending Democratic landslide is complete. Today, I'd like to balance that out with a series of things that I won't miss after the huge Democratic victories this year. In the extended entry, I list a whole bunch of them.
That's Mitt Romney calling McCain out on lying, following on Karl Rove's assertions that McCain has "gone too far." This is starting to look coordinated, and Rove doesn't speak out of turn for no reason. Either there are some very angry conservative insiders knifing McCain or this is part of some dramatic PR ploy in which McCain will somehow be portrayed as a hero.
I don't know, it's a little spooky.
Update: My mistake. This video is from the primaries.
The Obama campaign must be troubled by the professional feminist wing of its support, which just can't help itself, it must comment endlessly on Sarah Palin. And then conservatives happily respond, and we spend another news day talking about Sarah and her rifle, Sarah and the polar bears, Sarah and her pregnant daughter, and so on and so forth. Did even the brilliant Karl Rove realize how bountiful a gift the Palin selection would be to the McCain campaign? How is it that our news continues to be dominated by this lady, veering the election (permanently, apparently) off the winning issue for Obama, the economy, and making it all about populist style, where he loses?
Well, let's have Katha Pollitt of The Nation magazine (which fronts its page today with 'Sarah and the polar bears' (gee, the environmentalists can't help making it 'all about Sarah' either!) help you there. This 'important feminist' (her heretofore mucho Obamaism taking a backseat for however long) just can't help herself, in her latest column -- Lipstick on a Wingnut (a way to talk about or to right-wing Christians that ain't) -- she has to keep up the attacks on Palin, and she's willing to make them anti-feminist, whatever will make sure we all know that the Palins of this world will never usurp the culturally 'liberal' feminist leadership. Here's the anti-feminist rant parts of just the first paragraph:
the supremely under-qualified Sarah Palin
She talks incessantly about being a mother of five
[She] uses her newborn, Trig, who has Down syndrome, as a campaign prop.
If you wonder how she'll handle all those kids and the Veep job too, you're a super-sexist.
Palin . . . went back to work when Trig was three days old
her five-months-pregnant 17-year-old, Bristol
Okay, and in sum: even if it were strategically not dumb-assed to help keep the focus 'Palin 24/7', that's a non-rational, insinuating, anti-feminist, and non-issues-focused first paragraph.
But back to my main amazement: Will the (ostensibly all establishment Democrat) 'leaders' of the feminist 'community' ever get off Sarah Palin ass? Well, nope, I don't think so, not even if it fatally hurts Obama's chances of winning in November. Why? Well, besides pressing their most cherished 'culturally correct' buttons, Palin is a challenge to feminist officialdom's authority:
"In a world of 1s and 0s...are you a zero, or The One?" The Matrix (1999)
The recent line of right-wing attacks on Barack Obama have been to emphasize his popularity and turn it against him by painting him as nothing more than a celebrity -- "an empty suit" was the phrase I heard one pundit use. Right-wing trolls and bloggers have commonly taken to referring to Senator Obama online as "The One." This attempt at sarcasm is a reference to the character 'Neo' from the movie, The Matrix. As they do this, I have to wonder if they realize who this makes them in their self-created Matrix scenario: Agents? Sentinels? If, in a world of ones and zeros, Barack Obama is "The One," what is John McCain?
I was perusing some of the book chats at FireDogLake, when I stumbled over this tidbit that needs a little more attention, in a chat about Paul Alexander's biography on Karl Rove, Machiavelli's Shadow:
Others mentioned mentors. For much of his career, Rove has said Lee Atwater was a friend and mentor. Friends of Atwater told me that Atwater never really liked Rove and did what he could to stay away from him.
A useful reminder that even vile scumbags like Lee Atwater don't like other vile scumbags. It must be really awful to be a powerful Republican. All that money, but you loathe and are loathed by everyone around you. I guess they deserve each other, but I still pity them. They live an unending Faustian bargain.
Two weeks ago, I called attention to some informal advising of the McCain campaign being done by my namesake Karl Rove. Rove attempted to keep scrutiny at bay by repeatedly comparing his relationship to campaign officials as casual "chit chat," though his own words from a February appearance at the University of Pennsylvania remain indicting (excuse me, I just like to use that word whenever possible when discussing Rove):
He should take a biographical tour to the places in the country that have made him who he is. Go to the Naval Academy and talk about the values he learned there. Then he should go to Pensacola, Florida and Corpus Christi, Texas where he was trained as a naval aviator, and talk from the heart and the call to service. Go to Meridien, Mississippi and Jacksonville, Florida and talk about what he learned about leadership commanding the largest naval air squadron in the United States...And he should give a speech in Sedona, Arizona and talk about the people and places in his hometown that affected him.
The coincidence of this advice and McCain's subsequent Service to America tour caught my eye, and more recently that of the National Journal, whose Peter Stone has uncovered even more indicting evidence of Rovism within the McCain camp:
After leaving the White House in August, for example, he restarted his old consulting firm, Karl Rove & Co., which has been widely distributing projections of the nation's electoral map for 2008. Some of these maps-branded with the firm's name-were prominently displayed at a March briefing by the McCain campaign's then-top media adviser, Mark McKinnon, according to Salon.
Recent developments revolve around Rove's connection with the conservative political action group Freedom's Watch. Board member William Weidner told the Journal that Rove had been advising the organization's strategy, which figures to play as heavily in the POTUS08 campaign as funds will allow. Rove has made sure to stay close to those funds as well, maintaining an advisory relationship to Freedom's Watch's principal financial backer, Las Vegas casino magnate (and notorious union buster) Sheldon Adelson. Make no mistake, the 527 campaign against Barack Obama will get lower, nastier and more Rovian with each dollar Bush's Brain can squeeze from plutocrat Adelson.
So Karl Rove has taken to advising the presidential campaign of John McCain from outside and in. Check out the extended entry for an updated timeline on the architect's blueprints...
Last week on ABC's This Week, senior Republican operative and current pundit Karl Rove denied having any role, either informal or formal, in the McCain campaign. Rove would like to deny his role in the campaign so that he's seen as credible by pundits as having an independent, albeit conservative, voice. After all, if you are perceived of as 'on message' for a campaign, you have much less credibility in pushing campaign talking points. If you look at the evidence however, it's quite clear that Rove has a direct pipeline into the strategy that McCain is pursuing.
It's a stupid game that media pundits play. Let's first look at the denial.
George Stephanopoulos: ...of course he was President Bush's former deputy chief of staff and political strategist-an informal advisor to John McCain's campaign. You just heard David [Axelrod]...
Karl Rove: I wouldn't, I wouldn't even go that far-informal advisor-no way.
GS: Well you pass on information to them. You give them your advice.
KR: Chitchat.
GS: Chitchat? Ok, well I think that justifies, that qualifies as informal, but let's move on...
A timeline of Rove-McCain chitchat awaits you in the extended entry
