More from the purported whistleblower:

Sibel Edmonds said she spent more than three hours in a closed session with the commission’s investigators providing information that was circulating within the FBI in the spring and summer of 2001 suggesting that an attack using aircraft was just months away and the terrorists were in place. The Bush administration, meanwhile, has sought to silence her and has obtained a gagging order from a court by citing the rarely used “state secrets privilege”.
She told The Independent yesterday: “I gave [the commission] details of specific investigation files, the specific dates, specific target information, specific managers in charge of the investigation. I gave them everything so that they could go back and follow up. This is not hearsay. These are things that are documented. These things can be established very easily.”
She added: “There was general information about the time-frame, about methods to be used� but not specifically about how they would be used� and about people being in place and who was ordering these sorts of terror attacks. There were other cities that were mentioned. Major cities with skyscrapers.”
. . .
Mrs Edmonds, 33, says she gave her evidence to the commission in a specially constructed “secure” room at its offices in Washington on 11 February. She was hired as a translator for the FBI’s Washington field office on 13 September 2001, just two days after the al-Qa’ida attacks. Her job was to translate documents and recordings from FBI wire-taps.
She said said it was clear there was sufficient information during the spring and summer of 2001 to indicate terrorists were planning an attack. “Most of what I told the commission � 90 per cent of it � related to the investigations that I was involved in or just from working in the department. Two hundred translators side by side, you get to see and hear a lot of other things as well.”

As the article indicates, it’s currently not possible to verify Ms. Edmond’s claims without seeing the evidence. Moreover, she was working backward with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. Still, if her allegations are true, they will expose yet another systematic White House effort to mislead the American public:

“President Bush said they had no specific information about 11 September and that is accurate but only because he said 11 September,” she said. There was, however, general information about the use of airplanes and that an attack was just months away.
To try to refute Mr Clarke’s accusations, Ms Rice said the administration did take steps to counter al-Qa’ida. But in an opinion piece in The Washington Post on 22 March, Ms Rice wrote: “Despite what some have suggested, we received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles, though some analysts speculated that terrorists might hijack planes to try and free US-held terrorists.”
Mrs Edmonds said that by using the word “we”, Ms Rice told an “outrageous lie”. She said: “Rice says ‘we’ not ‘I’. That would include all people from the FBI, the CIA and DIA [Defence Intelligence Agency]. I am saying that is impossible.”

This is the third time I’ve linked to stories regarding Ms. Edmonds. First, from a federal employee’s trade publication, second from Salon, and now from the British press. Where’s the mainstream U.S. media? The New York Times? The Washington Post? The 24-hour news channels? Ealier today they were all over a press conference which revealed the breaking news that there are “inconsistencies” in the investigation of a once-missing college student. How about some investigative journalism to uncover what’s going on in the halls of power?

A few weeks ago, in testimony not widely covered by the press, Allan Greenspan sang the praises of adjustable-rate mortgages. Given that fixed-rate mortgages are at near-record lows, and that interest rates are expected to raise sooner or later, many analysts have questioned these remarks.
Benjamin Wallace-Wells views Greenspan’s speech as a sign of an approaching decline in the housing market. The current recovery has largely been fueled by a wave of mortgage refinancings, which have pumped money into consumer’s hands. This cycle may be near an end, and Greenspan’s comments are calculated to squeeze one last round of cash out of homes.
Moreover, Wallace-Wells contents that housing prices in some markets are not sustainable:

Truth is, in most of the country there’s no housing bubble. Perhaps the crucial ratio from which economists determine whether housing markets are out of whack is the ratio of home prices to annual income. In most of the country, it is modest, 2.4:1 in Wisconsin, 2.2:1 in Kentucky, 2.9:1 in Illinois.
Only in about 20 metro areas, mostly located in eight states, does the relationship of home price to income defy logic. The bad news is that those areas contain roughly half the housing wealth of the country. In California, the price of a home stands at 8.3 times the annual family income of its occupants; in Massachusetts, the ratio is 5.9:1; in Hawaii, a stunning, 10.1:1. To some extent, there are sound and basic economic reasons for this anomaly: supply and demand. Salaries in these areas have been going up faster than in the nation as a whole. The other is supply: These metro areas are “built out,” with zoning ordinances that limit the ability of developers to add new homes. But at some point, incomes simply can’t sustain the prices. That point has now been reached. In California, a middle-class family with two earners each making $50,000 a year now owns, on average, an $830,000 home. In the late 80s, the last time these eight states saw price-to-income ratios this high, the real estate market collapsed.

This argument about inflated housing prices seems strong. But people have been talking about a housing bubble for a year or more, and it has yet to become evident. So we’ll continue to wait and see.

. . . at Inn of the Last Home.

In a comment below, Len suggests the reason Bush and Cheney insist on testifying before the 9/11 Commission together is so they can coordinate their memories. Ron Hutcheson elaborates further:

As anyone who has ever watched a cop show knows, witnesses and suspects are best grilled alone to expose any inconsistencies in their stories.
“Get ’em alone, keep ’em alone, and don’t even let them talk to each other immediately after, if you can help it,” former New York police detective Robert Louden said Wednesday, recalling the tactics he used during his 21 years on the force. “In an ideal world, you want them separated.”
But Louden, who now teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said normal rules don’t necessarily apply to a case involving the president.
Bush insisted on the joint appearance in agreeing to take questions from all 10 members of the panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. He initially had offered to meet only with the commission’s top two members, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, the chairman; and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, the vice chairman.
No date has been set for the tag-team testimony. The arrangement virtually eliminates any possibility of divergent answers from Bush and Cheney, and lets Bush pass off any question he’d rather avoid and makes it impossible for the commission to ask either man any follow-up questions.

Speaking of memory, it Richard Clarke’s is looking better and better as more facts emerge. And those who attempted to question his credibility are looking, well, discredited:

On Sept. 11, 2001, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to outline a Bush administration policy that would address “the threats and problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday” — but the focus was largely on missile defense, not terrorism from Islamic radicals.
The speech provides telling insight into the administration’s thinking on the very day that the United States suffered the most devastating attack since the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor. The address was designed to promote missile defense as the cornerstone of a new national security strategy, and contained no mention of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or Islamic extremist groups, according to former U.S. officials who have seen the text.

The odd thing is that in and of itself, Clarke’s “scoop”–that terrorism wasn’t an urgent Bush administration priority prior to 9/11–is largely already factored into the electorate and probably doesn’t have a huge political impact. Voters are willing to give the government some leeway in not anticipating the extent of the al Qaeda threat. But this administration is so obsessed with image management that they go all out on the war path against anyone who dares question their carefully-crafted myth.

Matt Feeney writes on the turn of SportsCenter in not-so-flattering terms:

It’s strange that ESPN added Dream Job to its lineup since they already have a show in which aspirants compete, with an irritating surfeit of eagerness and theatrical sarcasm, to capture the singular vibe of Dan and Keith. It’s called SportsCenter.

Feeney goes on to contrast the current anchors with the legendary Dan Patrick/Keith Olbermann duo. Strangely, in diagnosing the current SC cast’s shortcomings, Feeney omits who in my view is one of the worst anchors, the ironically casted host of Dream Job, Stuart Scott, whose “hip” gibberish can be hazardous to your vocabulary.
Apart from the anchors, SportCenter–and much of ESPN for that matter–has gotten far too cute and full of itself. Outside of football season, I usually find it a chore to watch the show for more than a couple of segments. Guess I’ve developed the short attention span and can’t handle much more. Ironic, given that that’s the type of viewer ESPN apparently targets.