Small Wars Journal reports that Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, IV, Commanding General of the Army Combined Arms Center (CAC), “one of the Army’s leading intellectual hubs,” has issued a memorandum directing students and faculty to learn more about blogging:

Command and General Staff College faculty and students will begin blogging as part of their curriculum and writing requirements both within the .mil and public environments. In addition CAC subordinate organizations will begin to engage in the blogosphere in an effort to communicate the myriad of activities that CAC is accomplishing and help assist telling the Army’s story to a wide and diverse audience.

As part of this effort, CAC has even started its own blog. But as Noah Shachtman notes, “It’s a position that appears to run counter to stated Pentagon policy. YouTube is officially banned on military networks. Personal blogs cannot be maintained during duty hours. Many influential blogs are blocked. Stringent regulations, read literally, require commanding officers to review each and every item one of his soldiers puts online.”

Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) campaign has recently begun purging itself of lobbyists. Yesterday, a fifth aide resigned because of lobbying ties. Yet McCain is still refusing to fire certain top aides, like campaign manager Rick Davis, who is a former lobbyist. Charlie Black, another former lobbyist who is McCain’s senior adviser, told reporters today that “Rick Davis and nobody else at his firm either has been a registered lobbyist in five years.” CNN’s Dana Bash reports today, however, that Davis’s old firm “can still use his name to recruit business since it’s still on the letterhead.” Watch it:

Additionally, Black’s claim that neither Davis nor his anyone at his firm have been registered as lobbyists in five years appears to be false. Here’s an image of a lobbying report from 2005 that has Davis listed as an “individual who acted as a lobbyist.”

It seems that Haim Saban, a major Clinton donor and also the primary financial backer of Brookings’ Middle East policy output, tried to bribe the Young Democrats of America into throwing their superdelegate support to Hillary Clinton. Sleazy, if true, and it certainly seems to be true.

Earlier this month, the Pentagon released a document dump in response to the New York Times’s expose on its military analyst program. The documents raise questions about White House involvement in the program, which it previously denied.

For example, a March 16, 2006 e-mail from a Pentagon staffer said he or she was “hoping to have Hadley brief these guys [military analysts] next week,” referring to National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Pentagon official Dallas Lawrence added, “Id love to see if we ocould get them in with potus as well. (I think that was submitted to karl and company…last week),” suggesting involvement in the program from then-Bush adviser Karl Rove.

In today’s White House briefing, a reporter asked spokesperson Scott Stanzel about these e-mails and meetings. Without denying White House involvement, Stanzel defended the program, saying it is the equivalent of giving information to someone who writes for a “liberal blog”:

But it’s not unusual for administration officials to brief people who are talking about our plans and our policies… just like I’m standing here answering your question and you go out on your liberal blog and talk about, you know, the way that you see things, we brief people who talk about the president’s policies.

Watch it:

As the reporter noted, however, the White House’s meetings with Pentagon officials and military analysts were “kept secret.” In contrast, the White House press briefings where the “liberal” reporter receives his information are available on cable television. “You can talk to the Defense Department. It was their program,” said Stanzel when asked why the meetings were not public.

Stanzel also ignored the fact that the military analysts often had “ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess.” A Fox analyst, for example, was “seeking contracts worth tens of millions” of dollars while giving on-air assessments of the Iraq war. Liberal bloggers, on the other hand, generally do not have multi-million dollar government contracts at stake in their writing.

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Today, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D) vetoed a bill that would require voters starting in 2010 to show identification at the polls. In her veto message, she said, “[N]o elected official should support enacting new laws discouraging or disenfranchising any American who has been legally voting for years.” Sebelius added that the bill “seeks to solve a problem of voter fraud which does not exist in our state.”