My esteemed colleague Garance Franke-Ruta has some new exclusive goods on George Allen and his stock options:

On October 20, 2000 — just 18 days before former Virginia Governor George Allen was elected to the U.S. Senate — Xybernaut, a Virginia-based technology company, on whose board Allen served, held an early annual shareholder meeting and awarded Allen a tidy bonus of 50,000 stock options. Allen was granted the stock as part of his re-election to the board at a time when polls showed him to be the favorite in the impending senate election against Democrat Chuck Robb, and when it was clear that he would have to resign his board seat if and when he became a senator. Senate rules forbid members from serving on corporate boards.

The issuance of these options, whose existence is confirmed by the Form Five filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that The American Prospect is posting in conjunction with this piece, raises questions about why Xybernaut (which filed for bankruptcy in 2005) granted them to Allen so soon before his election to the Senate, and what, if anything, the company expected in return for them. Stock options, a controversial form of director compensation, “are designed to encourage future risk taking and align the interest of the director with the interests of the shareholder,” says attorney Beth Young, a corporate governance expert now lecturing at Harvard Law School. Re-electing a director who might have to resign within weeks “is a little unusual,” she says, and granting him additional options prior to his anticipated departure at an early annual meeting is “very unusual.”

It looks, in other words, like Xybernaut (see more on them) found themselves a clever way to de facto keep paying Allen even while he took office as a US Senator.

This morning on MSNBC, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) apologized for his comments on Monday. “Of course I’m sorry for the botched joke,” he said, calling his comments “pretty stupid.” Watch it:

About hour later, Tony Snow said the following on CNBC:

All you have to do is say, I apologize. I said something, it came out wrong, I’m sorry. And instead, what Sen. Kerry has done, is he’s tried to whip it into a big thing…

That’s exactly what Kerry has said. According to the White House, the story is over.

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Transcript: Read more

Someone forgot to send John Derbyshire the memo: “John Kerry is awful, and anything we can do further to degrade his political prospects is worth doing. But really, I saw a clip of him making the much-deplored remark, and it was obvious that the dimwit in Iraq that he referred to was George W. Bush, not the American soldier. It was a dumb joke badly delivered, but his meaning was plain. My pleasure in watching JK squirm is just as great as any other conservative’s, but something is owed to honesty. There’s a lot of fake outrage going round here.”

K-Lo denies that the Corner’s all-misrepresenting-Kerry-all-the-time strategy is “part of any kind of coordinated response.” That’s just silly. In the new information age, pretty much all responses are coordinated responses. Statements and press releases get emailed around lightning quick, and it’s perfectly clear on any given day what it is the Powers That Be would like me to be writing about. That doesn’t mean anyone needs to take the bait — I haven’t, for example, been plugging the Allen Assault Gambit story — but people know what’s on-message and what isn’t. The fact that Kerry’s “insult” to the troops is not only a trivial matter, but wasn’t actually an insult is immaterial; this is the distraction the GOP wants today, and it’s a distraction conservative pundits are happy to provide.

Here is how the Pentagon publicly described the situation in Iraq in an email newsletter sent out on Monday:

Here’s how the Pentagon described the situation in Iraq in a classified briefing conducted just days earlier, according to a report in the New York Times. From a secret slide called “Index of Civil Conflict”:

Americans deserve to be told the truth about what’s going on in Iraq.

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