Bush admin. PURGE of US Attorneys aimed at STOPPING prosecutions into Republican malfeasance and criminal conduct...aka OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE

<< In testimony that got so embarrassing for the White House that the Republicans tried to cut it off, Mr. Sampson simply ended up making it clearer than ever that the eight prosecutors were FIRED for POLITICAL REASONS.

He [Sampson, the Chief of Staff to the Attorny General] provided more evidence, also, that the attorney general and other top Justice Department officials were DISHONEST [lying] in their initial statements about the firings.
Mr. Sampson FLATLY CONTRADICTED the attorney general’s claim that he did not participate in the selection of the prosecutors to be fired and never had a conversation about “where things stood.” Mr. Sampson testified that Mr. Gonzales was “aware of this process from the beginning,” and that the two men regularly discussed where things stood. Mr. Sampson also confirmed that Mr. Gonzales was at the Nov. 27 meeting where the selected prosecutors’ fates were sealed. >>
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That is, ON MULTIPLE OCCASSIONS, not only was Attorney General Alberto Gonzales PRESENT as the PURGING of US Attorneys for political reasons was being discussed... but those firings were THE CENTER and focal point of those discussions. Short of "fly on the wall" video documentation, this is SWORN EVIDENCE that the nation's Attorney General is a LIAR and possibly a perjurer; in addition to the underlying crime of ATTEMPTING TO OBSTRUCT JUSTICE in the prosecution of Republican criminals, so to further Republican political election gains.

THE NATION'S ATTORNEY GENERAL appears to have been part of a process to ALLOW REPUBLICAN OPERATIVES to COMMITT CRIMES (bribery, conspiracy, contract fraud) unimpeded, IN ORDER TO MAINTAIN a REPUBLICAN MAJORITY in Congress.

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"STORY TIME" in Senate Investigations
New York Times unsigned (editorial board) op-ed
March 30, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/30/opinion/30fri1.html

In his Senate testimony yesterday, Kyle Sampson, the former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, tried to be a “loyal Bushie,” a term Mr. Sampson used in his infamous e-mail message to describe what he was looking for in United States attorneys. But if Mr. Sampson was trying to fall on his sword, he had horrible aim. In testimony that got so embarrassing for the White House that the Republicans tried to cut it off, Mr. Sampson simply ended up making it clearer than ever that the eight prosecutors were fired for political reasons.

He provided more evidence, also, that the attorney general and other top Justice Department officials were dishonest in their initial statements about the firings.

Mr. Sampson flatly contradicted the attorney general’s claim that he did not participate in the selection of the prosecutors to be fired and never had a conversation about “where things stood.” Mr. Sampson testified that Mr. Gonzales was “aware of this process from the beginning,” and that the two men regularly discussed where things stood. Mr. Sampson also confirmed that Mr. Gonzales was at the Nov. 27 meeting where the selected prosecutors’ fates were sealed.

The hearing brought out evidence that Mr. Sampson also may have made false statements. A Feb. 23 letter to Congress based on information from Mr. Sampson stated that Karl Rove was not involved in replacing the United States attorney in Arkansas with Timothy Griffin, Mr. Rove’s former aide. Mr. Sampson could not convincingly explain why he wrote that, when he had said in an e-mail message two months earlier that getting Mr. Griffin appointed was “important” to Mr. Rove. He finally acknowledged that he had discussed the appointment with Mr. Rove’s two top aides.

The senators questioning Mr. Sampson pointed to a troubling pattern: many of the fired prosecutors were investigating high-ranking Republicans. He was asked if he was aware that the fired United States attorney in Nevada was investigating a Republican governor, that the fired prosecutor in Arkansas was investigating the Republican governor of Missouri, or that the prosecutor in Arizona was investigating two Republican members of Congress.

Mr. Sampson’s claim that he had only casual knowledge of these highly sensitive investigations was implausible, unless we are to believe that Mr. Gonzales runs a department in which the chief of staff is merely a political hack who has no hand in its substantive work. He added to the suspicions that partisan politics were involved when he made the alarming admission that in the middle of the Scooter Libby investigation, he suggested firing Patrick Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago who was the special prosecutor in the case.

The administration insists that purge was not about partisan politics. But Mr. Sampson’s alternative explanation was not very credible — that the decision about which of these distinguished prosecutors should be fired was left in the hands of someone as young and inept as Mr. Sampson. If this were an aboveboard, professional process, it strains credulity that virtually no documents were produced when decisions were made, and that none of his recommendations to Mr. Gonzales were in writing.

It is no wonder that the White House is trying to stop Congress from questioning Mr. Rove, Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel, and other top officials in public, under oath and with a transcript. The more the administration tries to spin the prosecutor purge, the worse it looks.

Washington Post notices Karl Rove's role in GSA-gate. House committee seeks answers from Rove about politicizing GSA for partisan purposes....

Washington Post notices GSA-gate: Attempts by the Karl Rove Office of Political Affairs of the Bush White House to use GSA programs to assist Republican candidates, and delay those GSA programs that would help Democratic incumbents in election 2008.



Panel Asks Rove for Information on '08 Election Presentation

By Scott Higham and Robert O'Harrow Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 30, 2007; A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/29/AR2007032901962_pf.html


The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee sought more information yesterday about a presentation by a White House aide given to political appointees at the General Services Administration that discussed targeting 20 Democratic congressional candidates in the next election.

In a letter to White House political affairs director Karl Rove, the committee chairman, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), asked about the Jan. 26 videoconference by Rove deputy J. Scott Jennings, which was directed to the chief of the GSA and as many as 40 agency officials stationed around the country.

Jennings's 28-page presentation included 2006 election results and listed the names of Democratic candidates considered beatable and Republican lawmakers thought to need help. At a hearing Wednesday about the GSA, Waxman said the presentation and follow-up remarks allegedly made by agency chief Lurita Alexis Doan may have violated the Hatch Act, a law that restricts federal agencies and employees from using their positions for political purposes.

In yesterday's letter, Waxman asked Rove who prepared the presentation and whether Rove or Jennings consulted with anyone about whether it might be in violation of the Hatch Act. Waxman also asked whether Rove or any members of his staff have given the same or similar PowerPoint presentations to political appointees at other government agencies.

The PowerPoint presentation was a focus of Waxman's hearing Wednesday into Doan's 10-month tenure and into allegations that she has acted inappropriately. Doan denied the allegations at the hearing.

Six political appointees at the GSA who participated in the videoconference said Doan asked at the conclusion how the agency could help GOP candidates win in the next elections, according to a letter Waxman sent to Doan.

During the hearing, Doan said at least 10 times that she does not recall asking employees to help the GOP or does not recall details about the presentation.

The matter is being investigated by the independent Office of Special Counsel.

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said the presentation was not out of the ordinary.

"There is regular communication from the White House to political appointees throughout the administration," he said.

House committee investigates GSA Administrator LURITA DOAN for hosting WH Political Affairs Deputy "Target Democrats in 2008" conference at the GSA...

The Washington Post notices the House investigation "GSA headquarters and administrator used by KARL ROVE's office to TARGET Democrats in election 2008."

Rep. Bruce Baley (D-Iowa) questions LURITA DOAN, President Bush's Administrator of the General Services Administration, about a power-point slide presentation Ms. Doan attended in the GSA offices presented by Mr. SCOTT JENNINGS. A power-point presentation PREPARED BY THE WHITE HOUSE POLITICAL OFFICE of KARL ROVE, during which Republican campaign strategy from 2006 and for 2008 was discussed by Mr. Jennings.

Here is Mr. Jennings job description from the official White House (US govt.) website:
<< The President has named J. Scott Jennings as Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of Political Affairs. >>
That is, DEPUTY DIRECTOR of POLITICAL AFFAIRS.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/02/20060203-11.html

UNDER OATH, and during hearings conducted by the House Govt. Oversight Committee's Congressional hearings into GSA misconduct, Ms. Doan repeatedly declared that she has "NO RECOLLECTION" of the topics discussed or details described at the meeting she attended... despite the fact that it was conducted by the White House's own DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF POLITICAL AFFAIRS!

Ms. Doan claims not to recall the meeting in general, nor the topics discussed and power-point slides of the meeting, stretch credibility for a political appointee getting her marching orders directly from a senior White House official. But those details are damning indeed. One slide was headlined "THE TOP 2008 HOUSE TARGETS, TOP 20."

Rep. Baley, member of the Gov't. Oversight Committee: "There can be no dispute from the contents of this slide, that this slide is depicting Rpeublican targets that are identifying Democratic seats that are vulnerable in 2008... and shows district by district those seats.
That this is a partisan political meeting, it occured on GSA property during work hours, and that what was discussed at this meeting had NOTHING to do with the GSA's core purpose or procuring supplies and managing buildings."

Ms. Doan: "This is not my slide presentation... I am asking you to ask Mr. Jennings, this is his product, he was a guest at our meeting."

Rep. Baley: And according to those sources, you stated "HOW CAN WE USE GSA TO HELP OUR CANDIDATES IN THE NEXT ELECTION." I am reminding you that you are under oath, can you tell the committee, can you tell the committee whether you made that statement?

Ms. Doan: I do understand that I am under oath, and can honestly say that I DO NOT RECOLLECT SAYING THAT.

Rep. Baley: Well when the presentation begins with the White House Office of Political Affairs on the cover slide, and the slide presentation has multiple references to the Republicans vaunted 72 hour get-out-the-vote effort and its impact on a host of important Congressional races, which is what's contained on the other slides within this presentation, I think that American taxpayers have a right to know if the only team being helped in this effort was the Republican Party team.


Ms. Doan certainly provides a good example of what the Bush administration looks for in a federal agency leader: absolute dedication to Republican partisan control of government; a memory faulty at recalling such partisan attempts to control an agency for political purposes; and an ability to cast scorn on all those who question those leadership priorities.

At the end of this video clip Ms. Doan incorrectly addresses Representative Baley as "Senator Baley", then retracts herself by saying "I'm sorry, I accidentally promoted you," then retracted her slip-up by mocking "I'm sorry for the DEMOTION," as if being a US elected Representative (Congressman) is a trifling job! A trifling observation on our part, perhaps - but SWARMY is the BEST adjective we can come up with Ms. Doan, a GSA administrator who claims NOT TO REMEMBER what SHE SAID at a very important, high-profile "not for general distribution" meeting held by the president's own Deputy Director of Political Affairs, in GSA headquarters... and she tops that failed memory with a glib putdown of Congress as a "demoted" second sister to the Senate!

Senate squarely rejects BushCo blank-check for unlimited war... Vice President and his vote left hanging in capitol elevator...

After six long years of Republican malfeasance, the people of America, through their elected representatives in Congress and the Senate, have finally laid down a line in the sand... the President of the United States is NO imperial dictator, he is NOT granted licese to license to spend the nation's blood and treasure in wars marked by cruelty (torture), incompetence, duplicity, and outright corruption, without oversight or limits.

The current Vice President, while Secretary of Defense for the previous President Bush (Sr.), agreed with the president at the time that invading Baghdad with the US led Gulf War 1 coalition would destroy the alliance forged to expel Iraqi armies from Kuwait, and would subject US and alliance troops to a festering guerrilla insurgency, if not an outright civil war. The Iran-Iraq war which had ended just 3 years previously (1988) had seen five-hundred-thousand combat deaths (500,000 kia) on each side; and while the armies may have been exhuasted, the potential for guerrilla war and insurgency was ever-present even then. (Not that Vice President Cheney or President George H.W. Bush (Sr.) should get a "free pass" for encouraging the post-war anti-Saddam rebellion, and then having US forces do NOTHING as Saddam's executioners massacred the resistance with helicopter gunships that the United States could easily have prohibited Saddam's troops from using.)

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Senate backs troop withdrawal from Iraq
By Richard Cowan, Reuters
March 27, 2008
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070327/pl_nm/iraq_usa_congress_dc;_ylt=At0ZMdMN43hIXLIbg4EzF.DMWM0F


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Senate on Tuesday endorsed a March 31, 2008, target date for withdrawing American combat troops from Iraq, prompting the White House to threaten a veto and moving Congress a step closer to a showdown with President George W. Bush over the war.

By a vote of 50-48, the Senate defeated an amendment that would have stricken the withdrawal language from a $121.6 billion bill that mostly would fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

With the outcome in doubt, Vice President Dick Cheney was on hand in the Capitol in case he was needed to cast a tie-breaking vote.
A final vote on the bill is expected this week.
Following the vote, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino cited "encouraging signs" lately in Iraq. "The president is disappointed that the Senate continues down a path with a bill that he will veto and has no chance of becoming law," she added.

But Democrats showed no signs of backing down.

"This war is not worth the spilling of another drop of American blood," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (news, bio, voting record), a Nevada Democrat, said in pleading for the troop withdrawal plan included in the money bill.

Speaking to reporters following the Senate vote, Reid countered the White House veto threat, saying, "We would hope that the president understands how serious we are and the American people are and that, rather than making all the threats that he has, let's work with him" toward a compromise.

In action unrelated to the Iraq war, the Senate attached to the spending bill a minimum wage hike for some of the lowest-paid U.S. workers, along with tax cuts for small businesses.
The Senate troop withdrawal vote came four days after the House passed its version of a war-spending bill setting a mandatory September 1, 2008, deadline for getting all U.S. combat troops out of Iraq.
Under the Senate bill, which is still being debated, the United States would begin a phased withdrawal of troops this year with the goal, not the requirement, that it be completed by March 31, 2008.
Tuesday's vote in the Senate marked progress for Democrats in that chamber, who failed recently to pass a similar, nonbinding resolution calling for a troop withdrawal.

TWO REPUBLICANS JOIN
Two Republicans joined most Democrats in supporting the troop withdrawal goal.

Sen. John Warner, the Virginia Republican who has criticized Bush's plans to send about 30,000 more troops to Iraq, nonetheless pleaded for eliminating the withdrawal timetable from the legislation.
"It would be the bugle of retreat. It would be echoed and repeated from every minaret throughout Iraq that coalition forces have decided to take the first step backwards," said the former Senate Armed Services Committee chairman.

After the Senate finishes the bill, House and Senate negotiators will try to work out a compromise, which is expected to contain a troop withdrawal timetable.
The next stop is the White House and Bush's promised veto, unless a deal is worked out.

If there is a veto, Congress does not appear to have the votes to overturn Bush. Lawmakers would then try to write a new war-funding bill. It is unclear whether that would be a straightforward spending bill with no strings attached, or some new language on bringing the war, now in its fifth year, to an end.
Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat, said the U.S. troop presence "is a catalyst for violence in Iraq and in the region." He pointed out that once the new funds are approved, Congress will have provided $448 billion for the war in Iraq.

(Additional reporting by Susan Cornwell and Tabassum Zakaria)

PURGE-GATE a PREMEDITATED EFFORT by KARL ROVE to SMEAR Democratic candidates & voters in election 2008...

The "mainstream media" or even conservative Democrats and "middle America" independents might point out that this article is written by a blogger... but so what? At one time Bank of America was a local bank serving a San Francisco minority neighborhood... at one time AOL was used only by computer geeks, and at one time a band of Patriots dressed up as Indians defied the king and greatest empire in the world to throw some East India company monopoly tea into Boston Harbor!

Here, in an article by Arlen Parsa, we see all the major points of PURGE-gate put together: that of the 11 states that KARL ROVE defined in an April 2006 speech as key to Republican election plans in 2008, fully NINE of them had new, partisan Republican prosecutors installed in place of the ousted US Attorneys....

<< ...that Thor Hearne, who had been both General Counsel to the Bush-Cheney 2004 election campaign and also Executive Director of the GOP front group "American Center for Voting Rights" or ACVR, [had been] engaged in voter suppression efforts via phony propagandistic reports on American's non-existent "voter fraud" epidemic since 2004....>>

and that <<...three of the US Attorneys Bush has nominated since the 2004 election were, remarkably enough, from the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, which has been criticized for implementing policies which unfairly disadvantage poor, often minority voters whose political tendencies historically favor Democrats. >>

PURGE-GATE is no more, and no less, than a question of "can American democracy endure in a nation beset by monumental inequity in American economic life - beween the concentration of monstrous wealth on one end and economic disenfranchisement on the other - and by a nation teetering on the edge of military rule, where a single major terrorist attack could unleash massive forces of government repression and reprisals, and even an end to free elections?"

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Evidence Suggests U.S. Attorney Firings May Have Been Part of White House Scheme to Help Game 2008 Election
BLOGGED BY Arlen Parsa ON 3/26/2007 10:35AM
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4324



Karl Rove Associate and GOP Operative Tim Griffin's Appointment in Arkansas --- and Others Like it --- Are Worth Noting as the Scandal Continues to Unravel...
Guest Blogged by Arlen Parsa

Details continue to drip out from the U.S. Attorney Purge scandal which seem to suggest that electoral politics --- and perhaps the 2008 election in particular --- may well have been at the heart of the White House/Dept. of Justice scheme to strategically place partisan operatives where they might be most useful prior to the next Presidential Election.

One such detail revealed itself on Tuesday March 20th when Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR) appeared on MSNBC's Hardball to discuss the recent purge of several US Attorneys by the Bush Administration. Host Chris Matthews opened the segment by asking Pryor how much he knew about the White House's decision to replace the US Attorney in his state, Bud Cummins, with one of Karl Rove's associates, a partisan operative named Tim Griffin.

Pryor criticized the Attorney General for firing Cummins and replacing him with Griffin, who had very little professional experience in Arkansas and had only recently moved there when Cummins was fired in December of 2006. Cummins on the other hand, who George W. Bush himself had appointed in 2001, had been well respected, competent and non-partisan (despite personally being a Republican).

But the real bombshell came near the end of the interview....

Cummins told Matthews before going on the air that he had heard a "conspiracy theory" about why the Administration had chosen to replace Cummins with Griffin, and Matthews asked him about it a short time later when they were live. "Well," Pryor said, slightly uncomfortable. "There’s kind of a conspiracy theory about that."

"Some people have pointed to that, said isn’t that strange, here [the Administration is] putting in a maybe highly-political US Attorney in Hillary Clinton’s backyard... Isn’t that odd right before the Presidential race?" Pryor explained.

The implication was that if Republicans had a partisan prosecutor in Arkansas where the Clintons lived while Bill had served as governor during the 1980s, he would be able to drudge up old political dirt on the couple in time for the 2008 elections.

Pryor was quick to add that he didn't personally subscribe to the theory, but that it was just speculation he had been hearing among political insiders.

But Griffin's nomination wasn't the only one with political and electoral undertones that might not bode well for Democrats in 2008. In fact, a report from the McClatchy Newspaper syndicate last Friday indicated that the Bush Administration has replaced US Attorneys in several key states, just in time for the 2008 Presidential election.

In April 2006, Karl Rove gave a keynote address to the National Lawyers Association, a partisan legal group. "He ticked off 11 states that he said could be pivotal in 2008," McClatchy recalled in their report.

"Bush has appointed new U.S. attorneys in nine of them since 2005."

Incidentally, during the same speech, Rove also acknowledged his friend, Thor Hearne, who had been both General Counsel to the Bush-Cheney 2004 election campaign and also Executive Director of the GOP front group "American Center for Voting Rights" or ACVR, which has engaged in voter suppression efforts via phony propagandistic reports on American's non-existent "voter fraud" epidemic since 2004 (BRAD BLOG's extensive coverage of ACVR can be found here. The group's website has suddenly disappeared since the U.S. Attorney Purge scandal has come to light.)

"I ran into Thor Hearne as I was coming in," Rove told the audience. "He was leaving; he was smart, and he was leaving to go out and enjoy the day."

"I want to thank you for your work on clean elections," he continued. "I know a lot of you spent time in the 2004 election, the 2002 election, the 2000 election in your communities or in strange counties in Florida, helping make it certain that we had the fair and legitimate outcome of the election," Rove told the Republican attorneys.

Rove compared elections in "some parts of the country" to those that take place in third-world dictatorships where the "guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored sunglasses." Whether he was aware of the irony of his comments is still unknown.
He also compared elections in "some parts of the country" to those that take place in third-world dictatorships where the "guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored sunglasses." Whether he was aware of the irony of his comments is still unknown.

In any event, three of the US Attorneys Bush has nominated since the 2004 election were, remarkably enough, from the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, which has been criticized for implementing policies which unfairly disadvantage poor, often minority voters whose political tendencies historically favor Democrats.

And Griffin himself had allegedly been involved with voter suppression. Griffin, as investigative journalist Greg Palast discovered in 2004, was one of the RNC operatives that had thought up a complicated scheme to disenfranchise Americans who did not respond to letters sent to their home addresses. Victims of the scheme whose votes were thrown away, Palast reported, included homeless people, and black soldiers serving overseas who obviously could not respond to mail, marked with "do not forward" instructions, delivered to their home addresses.

The scheme Griffin played a role in also reportedly targeted predominately African American areas in swing states such as Florida.

Griffin recently dismissed Palast's reporting in a radio interview. "I'm intimately familiar with [Palast's] allegations. That is a web article on the Internet. It's patently false," he pointed out, as if a "web article," and "on the Internet" no less, might marginalize the facts of the report. Yet Griffin may not have been so intimately familiar with the allegations from that "web article on the Internet" after all: They were aired during a report by Palast, as filed on the television program "Newsnight" for the BBC. (A video of the original report can be found on YouTube).

When Justice Department and White House officials first tried to explain the US Attorney firings, they claimed that several of the prosecutors who had been forced to resign had refused to follow up on allegations of "voter fraud". Some immediately recognized that "voter fraud" allegations have been the weapon of choice, of late, by Republicans attempting to make it more difficult for certain groups of Americans --- particularly those in minority areas whose voters do not typically lean GOP --- to vote, by pushing new regulations and disenfranchising Photo ID legislation as a "protective measure".

The DoJ claims that the firings were "voter fraud" related raised some skepticism at BRAD BLOG and elsewhere, and even led to the New York Times editorial page to sharply criticize the supposed rationale for the firings. It is perhaps ironic that the public explanation the Administration has given for firing the prosecutors --- specifically related to elections --- may ultimately draw more attention to what some suspect is a deeper scheme to set up a system of disenfranchisement just in time for the 2008 elections.

At least one Arkansas newspaper has called for Griffin's resignation since the US Attorney scandal began, and he has said that he would only stay until the Administration found a suitable replacement. The White House has privately worried that Griffin would not be able to pass muster in Senate confirmation hearings, which he would be required to undergo if he wanted to keep his current job. The loophole in the PATRIOT Act which allowed Griffin and others to bypass the normal confirmation process was recently closed by the Senate in a vote of 94-2. The House is expected to pick up the matter soon.

Senator Feinstein calls on Attorney General Gonzales to resign...

When Senator Dianne Feinstein, whose most powerful supporters (donors) are the huge California military/defense industry and AIPAC lobby, calls for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign for his role in the partisan purging of competent, capable, and productive US Attorneys, it is clear that Mr. Gonzales' partisan machinations - and obfuscation in testimony to the US Senate, bordering on obstruction of justice - are more than even 'moderately conservative' Democratic leaders can stand.

The White House's PURGE of US Attorney's was no more and no less than a systematic effort to take America back to the days of segregation; to the days of one party rule in the Deep South. Ironically, it was the DEMOCRATIC PARTY that once maintained one-party rule throughout the segregation era; for the former slave-states rejected out of hand all Republican candidates, as the Republican Party had been the party of Abraham Lincoln, emancipation, and the Civil War. But starting in 1948 (with Strom Thurmond's "Dixiecrat" defection from the Democratic Party; Thurmond ran in 1948 as the Dixiecrat candidate for continued segregation) the most reactionary and conservative leaders and voters departed from the Democratic Party... and wound up in today's Republican Party. (See Michael Lind's "George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics" for the sweeping history of neo-segregation politics in America and the Deep South from before the Civil Rights era to today.)

During the segregation era, the autocracy (the wealthy elite who controlled politics) could effectively DISENFRANCHISE millions of voters simply by smoothering any outspoken candidates in the Democratic primary, which was controlled by the eilte. This political tactic allowed segregation and disenfranchisement laws to remain as state laws despite America fighting two word wars to "make the world safe for democracy," and despite the 15th Amendment which declared unambiguously "The Right to vote SHALL NOT be abridged."

Today, the radical right-wing of the Republican Party wants to reassert some of that autocratic rule, by using the entire federal law enforcement structure - prosecutors, partisan judges, and US Attorneys - as an INTMIDATION and PERSECUTION arm of the Republican Party; to swing close races (races made close through years of Republican state and federal gerrymandering, see Tom DeLay gerrymandering of Texas only two years after a previous voting census) by INVESTIGATING leading opposition candidates in the weeks leading up to elections, forcing those candidates to hire legal counsel and rebut press stories of alleged (by partisan activists) "vote fraud."

USING US Attorneys as a strong-arm intimidator of Democratic candidates was at the very heart of the Bush White House PURGE of REPUBLICAN US Attorneys (Republican prosecutors who were not energetic and partisan enough at prosecuting hysterical allegations against Democratic candidates), and not only was Attorney General Gonzales party to that un-American PURGE, but he has repeatedly lied about his involvement in the purge to the press, public, and Congress.

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Senator Feinstein calls for Attorney General Gonzales to resign
By ERICA WERNER, Associated Press Writer
Sunday, March 25, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/03/25/politics/p071921D65.DTL&type=politics


Sen. Dianne Feinstein called Sunday for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign over the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, saying he'd lost her confidence and hadn't told her the truth.
Feinstein, D-Calif. and a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, had held off on calling for Gonzales to step down even as many leading Democrats and some Republicans did so in recent weeks.
"I believe he should step down. And I don't like saying this. This is not my natural personality at all," Feinstein said on Fox News Sunday. "But I think the nation is not well served by this. I think we need to get at the bottom of why these resignations were made, who ordered them, and what the strategy was."
Justice Department documents released Friday show that despite contending he was not involved in any discussions about the impending dismissals of federal prosecutors, Gonzales participated in a meeting where such plans were discussed.
Feinstein said that after seeing those documents she concluded Gonzales no longer should keep his job.
"Attorney General Gonzales has the view that he serves two masters, that he serves the president and that he serves as the chief law enforcement officer," said Feinstein. "He serves one master, and that's the people of this country."
Feinstein is particularly concerned over the dismissal of former U.S. Attorney Carol Lam in San Diego who was fired while prosecuting a corruption case stemming from the conviction of jailed ex-GOP Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham.
Feinstein suspects a connection and highlighted her concerns about that and other aspects of the situation in a speech on the Senate floor in January. She also introduced legislation to undo a change in the Patriot Act allowing the administration to appoint U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation. After that she got a call from Gonzales.
"You have to understand, he called me when I began to become involved in this," Feinstein said. "He told me I didn't know my facts, I didn't know what I was doing. It turns out he wasn't telling me the truth then, either."
California also lost a second U.S. attorney in the group firing, Kevin Ryan of San Francisco.
A Justice Department spokesman did not immediately respond to an e-mail message seeking comment Sunday.
The Justice Department has denied any connection between public corruption cases that Lam and other prosecutors were pursuing and their dismissals in December.
Feinstein's bill to reverse the Patriot Act language on U.S. attorneys passed the Senate March 20.

Cheney, of HALLIBURTON SALES TO IRAQ infamy, says "Dems undermine troops"...

Make no mistake: the reasons millions of Americans have had to endure the plagues of the Bush-Rove-Cheney administration for the past 6 years is because the Al Gore campaign in 2000 REFUSED to make an issue of then recently-resigned HALLIBURTON Chairman and CEO DICK CHENEY's many corporate sales dealings with Saddam Hussein's Iraq (and Iran and Libya and other such "rogue" nations).

HAD the Gore campaign made effective use of "OPPO RESEARCH" ('opposition research') to uncover even a partial extent of Cheney's dealings with Iraq and Iran, through Halliburton's European subsidiaries, it would have put the Bush-Cheney campaign ON THE DEFENSIVE, and seriously undermined their "STRAIGHT TALKER" and "MORAL VALUES" campaign themes.

So, today the Vice President who insists on NO accountability for mercenaries, no-bid contracts, and missing billions from HIS management of the Iraq war (including his ONGOING HALLIBURTON STOCK PORTFOLIO) is back to beating his favorite drum, "Democrats undermine the war!"

Just documenting the amazing duplicity, corruption, incompetence, and brazen hypocrisy on the part of our ammoral vice president is a challenge of patience and exasperation!


<< Vice President Dick Cheney on Saturday accused the Democrat-led House of not supporting troops in Iraq and of sending a message to terrorists that America will retreat in the face danger.

"They're not supporting the troops. They're undermining them," Cheney told a gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition..in Florida. >>
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Cheney: House is undermining the troops
By BRIAN SKOLOFF, Associated Press
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070325/ap_on_re_us/cheney_troops;_ylt=Aiuwpf0YvXa8nCaCJHZrT7HMWM0F


MANALAPAN, Fla. - Vice President Dick Cheney on Saturday accused the Democrat-led House of not supporting troops in Iraq and of sending a message to terrorists that America will retreat in the face danger.

"They're not supporting the troops. They're undermining them," Cheney told a gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition at the oceanside Ritz-Carlton hotel in Manalapan, Fla., about 60 miles north of Miami.

On Friday, the House voted to clamp a cutoff deadline on the Iraq war, agreeing by a thin margin to pull combat troops out by next year.

The $124 billion House legislation would pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this year but would require that combat troops come home from Iraq before September 2008 — or earlier if the Iraqi government does not meet certain requirements.

Cheney called it a myth that "one can support the troops without giving them the tools and reinforcements they need to carry out their mission."

President Bush has threatened to veto the legislation. Cheney said Bush will not withdraw troops before there is stability in Iraq.

"The American people have lost faith in the president's conduct of this war," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., said after the passage. A message seeking comment was left with Pelosi's office Saturday.

Congressman Murtha champions Pelosi's Iraq war funding bill...

This excellent Bob Burnett editorial doesn't even mention Representative John Murtha (D-PA), but CSPAN carried Murtha's speech from the House floor, in which Rep. Murtha rattled off a list of the appropriations - billions of dollars - the Democrats had ADDED to the Bush-Republican war-budget request.

We had received an anti-war e-mail or op-ed (by Dave Sirota among others)decrying the INCREASED Dem. outlay for war spending OVER the Bush-Republican-administration requests as proof of the Democrat's HAWKISH, neo-con and AIPAC tendencies. But as Mr. Murtha explained forcefully to the (near empty) House chamber and CSPAN viewers, many of the budgetary increases were for NON-FIGHTING expenditures - foremost among them VETERANS CARE.

Among the active military budget increases, Murtha explained that many were to insist that US troops committed to the Iraq hellhole be ADEQUATELY TRAINED and PREPARED... BEFORE they got there! There were other provisions to bolster the size of the US military NOT deployed in Iraq (by 50,000 active duty?). But Mr. Murtha made forcefully clear - the increase in troop numbers were NOT a carte-blanche for Mr. Bush to send MORE and MORE and MORE troops to Iraq - on the contrary, the Bush admin. and Department of Defense had to CERTIFY that troops were fully trained and equipped BEFORE deployment; AND the Bush White House had to demonstrate SOME MEASURE OF ACCOMPLISHMENT - 'benchmarks' - BEFORE wholesale committing fresh waves of troops.

We salute Mr. Murtha for his forceful, impassioned leadership, and for assisting Speaker Pelosi in the "hearding cats" effort to get anti-war Democrats to sign on to the bill. We won't go into Mr. Murtha falling for the administration's lies-to-war rational in late 2002 and the spring of 2003; indeed, there are STILL millions of Americans who take at face value the Bush administration's conflicting, often duplicitous rationals for war.

BUT the Pelosi Congress has FINALLY put real limits on the UNLIMITED, SPLURGE ALL YOU WANT 'leadership' of the Rove-Bush-Cheney White House, and hopefully the Democrats will more forcefully DEMAND that the press/media more accurately report on both the war and the failed Bush administration leadership from this point on.

-------------------------------------------------

Pelosi's Triumph
Bob Burnett
03.24.2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-burnett/pelosis-triumph_b_44145.html

Friday's vote against the war in Iraq was a double triumph: A landmark vote to put an end to the mad policies of George Bush and an unusually unified stand by a Democratic Party often distinguished by its disunity. The leader who brought Democrats together was Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

H.R. 1591, The US Troop Readiness, Veterans' Health and Iraq Accountability Act, calls upon President Bush to use common sense in his management of the Iraq conflict. The contents of H.R. 1591 have been largely overlooked in the debate about the philosophical issues behind the bill: whether or not it is the roll of Congress to exercise oversight of the President in his role as commander-in-chief. Republicans say no: any attempt to reign in Bush's policies in Iraq amounts to "micro-managing" the conduct of the war. Democrats say yes: Congress has the constitutional duty to check the war powers of the President; particularly when that President is George Bush, someone whose judgment has proved to be consistently off the mark.

The contents of H.R. 1591 reflect the will of the American people, who have soured on this war and Bush's leadership. Americans want our troops to be fully funded, but don't want the duration of the war to be open ended: a point Bush steadfastly ignores.

The March 6th Gallup Poll results mirror the intent of H.R. 1591. Fifty-nine percent of respondents oppose Bush's "surge" plan: his addition of 21,500 troops to those already in Iraq. Fifty-seven percent support setting a cap on the number of troops in Iraq. Sixty percent support establishing a "timetable" so that troops are withdrawn "by the end of next year." Seventy-seven percent support "requiring U.S. troops to come home from Iraq if Iraq's leaders fail to meet promises to reduce violence there." However, sixty-one percent of Gallup Poll respondents oppose "Denying the funding needed to send any additional U.S. troops to Iraq." In other words, Americans don't want more troops sent to Iraq, believe there needs to be a plan to bring them home, but want to fully fund them while they are there: they want the contents of H.R. 1591.

Given the fact that H.R. 1591 so closely follows the reasoning of the American people, the wonder is that it did not pass by more than a six-vote margin (218-212). To be noted is the fact that all but two Republicans voted against it: yet another indication that when it comes to national security, Republicans are lemmings, totally willing to let mad George lead the United States off a cliff.

What's equally amazing is the fact that all but fourteen Democrats voted for H.R. 1591. Republicans may be lemmings, easily led in a destructive direction, but all too often Dems have been cats: unwilling, as a group, to be led in any direction. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi managed to unite all facets of Congressional Democrats: Conservatives--so called "blue dogs", Centrists, and Progressives. That's the real triumph in this vote: Democrats united against this war. Joined together to express the will of the American people. And, to stand for a clear alternative to Bush's "stay until we win" philosophy.

It's worth remembering that there were those who felt Pelosi was an unlikely choice to unify House Democrats. Critics argued that Dems needed someone more like burly Republican Dennis Hastert, a former wrestling coach, or the Machiavellian Newt Gingrich to whip them into shape. But it was petite, feminine Nancy Pelosi who became the first woman chosen as Speaker of the House of Representatives. And Pelosi--an outspoken opponent of this war from the onset; one of the few Democrats who voted against the Congressional authorization for the war; and the only member of the 2002 House Leadership who said Iraq was not an imminent danger to the United States--who secured the Democratic votes necessary to pass "The US Troop Readiness, Veterans' Health and Iraq Accountability Act." Nancy Pelosi, an unabashed liberal.

It was Speaker of the House Pelosi who managed to herd the Democratic Congressional cats and head them in a direction that reflects the will of the American people. Therefore, H.R. 1591 is Speaker Pelosi's triumph. A triumph that all progressives should savor. A liberal woman is providing the leadership required to extricate the United States from Iraq.

H.R. 1591 is a good first step towards ending the dreadful war in Iraq. It's an indication that Democrats have unified to oppose President Bush's ill-conceived and reckless plans. And an indication that Nancy Pelosi is a leader to be reckoned with.

PURGE-gate was nothing more nor less than an attempt to recreate SEGREGATED America, using the justice department to CRIMINALIZE any opposition....

We are delighted that someone out there in America-land has cut-to-the-chase about PURGE-GATE: that it is the penultimate KARL ROVE effort to SMEAR any and all political opponents. In his long, sordid, despicable career Mr. Rove has had to rely on others, and his own dark efforts, to smear political opponents who stood in the way of his candidate's election. On the eve of election 2004, Rove saw the opportunity to create the ultimate smear machine: use the federal government to harass, indict, and prosecute any political opponents based on the shouted accustions of "VOTE FRAUD!" by Republican partisan opperatives.

Perhaps the classic such effort that launched Rove's success streak at smearing opponents was his efforts as campaign manager for a Texas local election candidate. Rove called the police with "the discovery" of an electronic recording "bug" planted in his office. The resulting police investigation was reported in local newspapers just a day or two before election, and suspicion that the other candidate had authorized the 'bug' closed the polling gap for Rove's candidate, who won a come-from-behind election just a day or two later. Filing a FALSE POLICE REPORT is a criminal activity; It was discovered later that the "bug" that had been installed had a battery life of only a few hours. That is, the bug was completely worthless as a campaign surveillance device, much less worth justifying the risk of sending one's own campaign operative into hostile territory to to plant such a bug.

This past year or two, Mr. Rove has seen himself in position to execute the ultimate political "Dirty Trick" - USE THE ENTIRE US GOVERNMENT to SMEAR, by accusation and indictment, anyonewho is putting up a stiff race against annointed Republican candidates and incumbents.

Mr. Blumenthal's choice of the words "HIGH INQUISITION" are no exaggeration - Mr. Blumenthals himself went through what we have called for a decade "A WHITE-COLLAR LYNCH MOB," whereby the sheer volume and ferocity of federal charges and investigations forces a target to cough up tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to defend his or herself; much less the strain of trying to perform professionally at one's job while dodging reporters, subpoenas, and indictments. (After being indicted for PEJURY and OBSTRUCTION of justice, VP Chief of Staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby had to resign his position and launch a major Republican defense fundraising operation. Indeed, the great responsibility of justifying such charges, by obtaining a solid conviction by jury trial, was the main reason that federal prosecutor PATRICK FITZGERALD did NOT file charges for the underlying crime of "outing" an undercover CIA operation against Mr. Libby. Prosecutor Fitzgerald realized that such a case would have been 3 times as large and unwieldy as his limited perjury and obstruction case; and had he failed to obtain a conviction he, too, could have been accused of launching a "white collar lynch mob" against a senior White House official. Indeed, the main talking points of Bush administration supporters and apologists is that Libby WAS "UNFAIRLY" prosecuted for activities (perjury and obstruction of justice) for which "there was no underlying crime.")

The Reactionary Republicans who drove the impeachment of President Bill Clinton are, in many cases, nostalgic for the days of SEGREGATION, whereby an entire class of American voters - minorities - were DISENFRANCHISED and deprived of their legal rights by state and local officals - under the enabling, apathetic gaze of the US federal government. FOR ONE HUNDRED YEARS, even though the 15th Amendment declared "THE RIGHT TO VOTE SHALL NOT BE ABRIDGED," the "right to vote" WAS ABRIDGED, as (almost) all of America pretended not to notice.

We applaud Mr. Blumenthal for his depiction of Karl Rove's latest scandal as an effort to REINSTITUTE the TERROR of state-sanctioned PERSECUTION of citizens, and can only express our frustration that the New York Times, Washington Post, Time-Warner (owner of CNN) and other AIPAC dominated news outlets are enablers of this systematic effort to persecute political freedom in America.


What Bush is hiding
by Sidney Blumenthal at Salon.com
March 21, 2007
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/03/22/attorneys/

In the U.S. attorney scandal, Alberto Gonzales gave orders, but he also took them -- from Karl Rove, who plotted TO TURN THE FEDERAL CRIMINAL JUSTICE system into the REPUBLICAN HOLY OFFICE of the INQUISITION.

Mar. 22, 2007 | Leave aside the unintentional irony of President Bush asserting executive privilege to shield his aides from testifying before the Congress in the summary firings of eight U.S. attorneys because the precedent would prevent him from receiving "good advice." Leave aside also his denunciation of the Congress for the impertinence of requesting such testimony as "partisan" and "demanding show trials," despite calls from Republicans for the dismissal of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Ignore as well Bush's adamant defense of Gonzales.

The man Bush has nicknamed "Fredo," the weak and betraying brother of the Corleone family, is, unlike Fredo, a blind loyalist, and will not be dispatched with a shot to the back of the head in a rowboat on the lake while reciting his Ave Maria. (Is Bush aware that Colin Powell refers to him as "Sonny," after the hothead oldest son?) But saving "Fredo" doesn't explain why Bush is willing to risk a constitutional crisis. Why is Bush going to the mattresses against the Congress? What doesn't he want known?

In the U.S. attorneys scandal, Gonzales was an active though second-level perpetrator. While he gave orders, he also took orders. Just as his chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, has resigned as a fall guy, so Gonzales would be yet another fall guy if he were to resign. He was assigned responsibility for the purge of U.S. attorneys but did not conceive it. The plot to transform the U.S. attorneys and ipso facto the federal criminal justice system into the Republican Holy Office of the Inquisition had its origin in Karl Rove's fertile mind.

Just after Bush's reelection and before his second inauguration, as his administration's hubris was running at high tide, Rove dropped by the White House legal counsel's office to check on the plan for the purge. An internal e-mail, dated Jan. 6, 2005, and circulated within that office, quoted Rove as asking "how we planned to proceed regarding the U.S. attorneys, whether we are going to allow all to stay, request resignations from all and accept only some of them, or selectively replace them, etc." Three days later, Sampson, in an e-mail, "Re: Question from Karl Rove," wrote: "As an operational matter we would like to replace 15-20 percent of the current U.S. attorneys -- the underperforming ones ...The vast majority of U.S. attorneys, 80-85 percent I would guess, are doing a great job, are loyal Bushies, etc., etc."

The disclosure of the e-mails establishing Rove's centrality suggests not only the political chain of command but also the hierarchy of coverup. Bush protects Gonzales in order to protect those who gave Gonzales his marching orders -- Rove and Bush himself.

"Now, we're at a point where people want to play politics with it," Rove declared on March 15 in a speech at Troy University in Alabama. The scene of Rove's self-dramatization as a victim of "politics" recalls nothing so much as Oscar Wilde's remark about Dickens' "Old Curiosity Shop": "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing."

From his method acting against "politics," Rove went on to his next, more banal talking point: There can be no scandal because everyone's guilty. (This is a variation of the old "it didn't start with Watergate" defense.) "I would simply ask that everybody who's playing politics with this, be asked to comment on what they think of the removal of 123 U.S. attorneys during the previous administration and see if they had the same, superheated political rhetoric then that they've having now." Instantly, this Rove talking point echoed out the squawk boxes of conservative talk radio and through the parrot jungle of the Washington press corps.

Indeed, Presidents Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Reagan replaced the 93 U.S. attorneys at the beginning of their administration as part of the normal turnover involved in the alternation of power. A report issued on Feb. 22 from the Congressional Research Service revealed that between 1981 and 2006, only five of the 486 U.S. attorneys failed to finish their four-year terms, and none were fired for political reasons. Only three were fired for questionable behavior, including one on "accusations that he bit a topless dancer on the arm during a visit to an adult club after losing a big drug case." In brief, Bush's firings were unprecedented, and Rove's talking point was simply one among several shifting explanations, starting with the initial false talking point that those dismissed suffered from "low performance."

"Administration has determined to ask some underperforming USAs to move on," wrote Sampson in a Dec. 5, 2006, e-mail to associate attorney general Bill Mercer. Yet the Associated Press reported on Tuesday, March 20: "Six of the eight U.S. attorneys fired by the Justice Department ranked in the top third among their peers for the number of prosecutions filed last year, according to an analysis of federal records. In addition, five of the eight were among the government's top performers in winning convictions."

When the scandal first broke, Rove personally offered a talking point on one of those fired, claiming on March 8 that the U.S. attorney for San Diego, Carol Lam, "refused to file immigration cases ... at the direction of the Attorney General, she was asked to file, and she said I don't want to make that a priority in my office." Though there was pressure on Lam to pursue more immigration cases, a heated issue for Republicans, three months before she was dismissed, the Justice Department had sent a letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., noting that Lam's office had devoted "fully half of its Assistant U.S. Attorneys to prosecute criminal immigration cases."

Nor was the U.S. attorney for Washington state, John McKay, dismissed for "low performance." On Aug. 9, 2006, Sampson recommended him for a federal judgeship, writing in an e-mail: "re: John, it's highly unlikely that we could do better in Seattle." Yet, less than a month later, on Sept. 13, Sampson placed McKay on a list titled: "[U.S. Attorneys] We Now Should Consider Pushing Out." McKay was removed from favored status, according to his own sworn testimony before the Congress, because of his refusal to prosecute Democrats on nonexistent charges of voter fraud after the Democratic candidate for governor won by a razor-thin margin in 2004. McKay said he received telephone calls from Ed Cassidy, chief of staff to Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., and state Republican Party chairman Chris Vance pressuring him to open a probe. Now, McKay has called for a special prosecutor to investigate the firings.

McKay's case parallels that of David Iglesias. As Iglesias wrote in the New York Times in an article titled "Why I Was Fired": "Politics entered my life with two phone calls that I received last fall, just before the November election. One came from Representative Heather Wilson and the other from Senator [Pete] Domenici, both Republicans from my state, New Mexico. Ms. Wilson asked me about sealed indictments pertaining to a politically charged corruption case widely reported in the news media involving local Democrats. Her question instantly put me on guard. Prosecutors may not legally talk about indictments, so I was evasive. Shortly after speaking to Ms. Wilson, I received a call from Senator Domenici at my home. The senator wanted to know whether I was going to file corruption charges -- the cases Ms. Wilson had been asking about -- before November. When I told him that I didn't think so, he said, 'I am very sorry to hear that,' and the line went dead. A few weeks after those phone calls, my name was added to a list of United States attorneys who would be asked to resign -- even though I had excellent office evaluations, the biggest political corruption prosecutions in New Mexico history, a record number of overall prosecutions and a 95 percent conviction rate."

Domenici and Wilson have both hired lawyers, given that they could potentially face prosecution for obstruction of justice. Their possible legal vulnerability and that of other Republicans across the country suggests a major reason why Bush is fighting to keep Rove from testifying before the Congress under oath.

McKay's and Iglesias' cases, as they explain them, involve efforts to pressure U.S. attorneys to launch investigations solely for political motives. The U.S. attorneys decided that evidence was lacking for such probes, and they were accordingly punished. Meanwhile, four of those fired were guilty of offenses of commission, not omission, having begun legitimate public corruption investigations of Republican officials.

Lam, who had successfully prosecuted Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, was following the trail by investigating his associates, defense contractor and Republican fundraiser Brent Wilkes, and Wilkes' best friend, Dusty Foggo, the No. 3 ranking official at the CIA, the chief of contracting; and Rep. Jerry Lewis, a California Republican.

Daniel Bogden, the U.S. attorney for Nevada, was investigating whether Gov. Jim Gibbons "accepted unreported gifts or payments from a company that was awarded secret military contracts when Mr. Gibbons served in Congress," according to the Wall Street Journal.

H.E. "Bud" Cummins, the U.S. attorney for Arkansas, was investigating conflict-of-interest corruption involving state contracts that Missouri governor Matt Blunt granted to Republican contributors. In October 2006, Cummins announced he would not seek indictments. But his statement just came four weeks before the election for the U.S. Senate seat in Missouri that the Democratic candidate, Claire McCaskill, won narrowly. Cummins told the Los Angeles Times, "You have to firewall politics out of the Department of Justice. Because once it gets in, people question every decision you make. Now I keep asking myself: 'What about the Blunt deal?'"

Paul Charlton, the U.S. attorney for Arizona, was investigating Rep. Rick Renzi, R-Ariz., for allegedly corrupt land deals and introducing legislation to benefit a major campaign contributor. Charlton was curiously accused of not filing obscenity cases, which, in fact, he did pursue.

In each of these public corruption cases, it is reasonable to assume that the relevant Republican political figures either themselves complained or complained through surrogates about the U.S. attorneys to Rove, the matrix of national GOP politics. But which officials -- instead of foolishly making direct calls to the U.S. attorney, like Domenici and Wilson -- went through Rove to stymie the investigations (or rush them, if they were targeting Democrats)? Then, what did Rove say about the individual U.S. attorneys to the White House Office of Legal Counsel and officials in the Justice Department?

Bush's resistance to having Rove placed under oath or even having a transcript of his testimony appears to be a coverup of a series of obstructions of justice. The e-mails hint at the quickening pulse of communications between the White House and the Justice Department. But only sworn testimony can elicit the truth.

On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee issued five subpoenas, including one for Rove, and on Thursday the Senate Judiciary Committee plans to follow suit. With these subpoenas, a constitutional battle is joined. "The moment subpoenas are issued, it means that they have rejected the offer," said White House press secretary Tony Snow. Bush is barricading his White House against the Congress to prevent its members from posing the pertinent question that might open the floodgate: What did Karl Rove know, and when did he know it?


-- By Sidney Blumenthal

With each new unfolding "INDEFENSIBLE" scandal, political support for Bush fades away....

<< With every unfolding crisis, President Bush is finding fewer allies in his corner. Republicans are ever more nervous about the Iraq war, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' problems, FBI abuses of the Patriot Act and the botched treatment of war wounded at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. >>
<< "I think Republicans are in a very awkward position of having to defend a number of INDEFENSIBLE acts," said GOP strategist Scott Reed. "It's causing them to move into the every-man-for-himself mode." >>

[note: the above list of current scandals doesn't even include torture, lies-to-war, gross corruption in war contracts, Vice President Cheney's lucrative Halliburton portfolio, President Bush's career-long ties with Enron and Enron Chairman Ken Lay; the use of beyond-the-law mercenaries; the reliance on Diebold vote machines to provide "winning" unverifiable, no-recount vote totals; or the Bush administration's premeditated efforts to make America MORE dependent on foreign oil, so to boost the profits of his oil company allies. If Mr. Bush and his administration have fewer and fewer allies, it is because all of America is becoming wise to his agenda of "some people say you are the elite - I call you my core supporters" that Mr. Bush smirked to high-rolling Republicans at a fundraising dinner shortly after the tragedy of 9-11 - a mere prelude to the oceans of red ink that is the Bush "tax the poor to enrich the wealthy, and use the 'war on terra' to crush opposition" agenda.]

========================================

Second Term Blues
by Tom Raum, AP
March 20, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20070320/second-term-blues

WASHINGTON — With every unfolding crisis, President Bush is finding fewer allies in his corner. Republicans are ever more nervous about the Iraq war, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' problems, FBI abuses of the Patriot Act and the botched treatment of war wounded at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

As Bush and congressional Democrats clashed on Tuesday over the Gonzales matter, even the Republicans still standing with the president on Iraq were having a hard time supporting him on domestic measures, reluctant to take stands that could be used against them politically. In fact, supporting the president on Iraq may be making it easier for them to oppose him on other measures unpopular with their constituents.

"I think Republicans are in a very awkward position of having to defend a number of INDEFENSIBLE acts," said GOP strategist Scott Reed. "It's causing them to move into the every-man-for-himself mode."

These have not been good days for the administration. The Senate voted 94-2 on Tuesday to end Gonzales' authority to fill U.S. attorney vacancies without Senate confirmation. The House is to vote this week on a war spending bill that would effectively withdraw U.S. combat troops by fall 2008. Competing threats of presidential vetoes and congressional subpoenas fill the air.

More and more, there's less Bush can do to reward Republicans for backing him _ or punish those who don't.

"Support for President Bush becomes less important the closer we get to the election," said Republican consultant Rich Galen. "I'm not sure he'll be totally irrelevant, but certainly there will be more time, attention and money spent on propping up and/or defending the emerging front-runner, and then the party nominee, than the outgoing president."

Gonzales has a constituency of one _ Bush himself _ and never built a base of support in the Senate. So now there are few lawmakers ready to ride to his rescue. Bush suggested it didn't matter and voiced strong backing on Tuesday for his longtime friend. "He's got support with me," the president said in a late-afternoon session with reporters at the White House.

The fact that Gonzales' role in last December's firing of eight U.S. attorneys has become such a political firestorm is evidence itself of Bush's waning influence, growing GOP unease and the eagerness of now-majority Democrats to flex their subpoena-issuing muscle. It's doubtful the affair would have gotten so much attention when Republicans controlled both chambers.

"This is just a taste of what it's going to be like for the next two years," said former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas. He told NBC's "Today" show the White House "ought to be fighting back" harder.

Bush and congressional Democrats sparred after the Justice Department released more than 3,000 pages of internal e-mail in defense of the firings and the White House on Tuesday offered to make political strategist Karl Rove and former counsel Harriet Miers available for congressional interviews _ but not testimony under oath.

Democratic leaders quickly rejected the offer and insisted testimony be on the record and under oath. That brought a warning from Bush to Congress to not "head down the partisan road of issuing subpoenas." He said he was not about to "go along with a partisan fishing expedition."

Even popular presidents go through the second-term blues as they see their influence and power begin to ebb. But Bush's woes are magnified by his own low approval ratings _ at 35 percent in an AP-Ipsos poll this month and lower in several other national polls _ and the unpopularity of the Iraq war.

Kenneth Sherrill, a political science professor at Hunter College in New York, said the intense unpopularity of the war _ which this week entered its fifth year _ is making it harder for Bush to mobilize national majorities on other issues such as Gonzales, immigration overhaul and extending the No Child Left Behind Act.

"Republicans who are running for re-election don't want to be brought down by their association with this administration," Sherrill said.

The war, despite its unpopularity, "is a harder issue to defect on. Ideological Republican voters tend to still be supporters of the war," Sherrill added.

This latest new distraction for the White House comes on top of the Walter Reed scandal, revelations that the FBI improperly collected personal and financial records of Americans, and the perjury and obstruction conviction of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff.

"Problems beget problems. Failures beget failures," said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. He acknowledged that Democrats were capitalizing on opportunities as they arise to try to ratchet up pressure on the GOP administration and its congressional allies.

Part of this reflects a recognition that, rhetoric aside, Democrats lack the votes to block the president from pursuing the war until the end of his term, Mellman said. Bush announced in January that he was sending in 21,500 more troops, and has since increased the number to nearly 30,000, including support troops.

Though sometimes grumbling, Republicans for the most part have supported the troop buildup.

"There is only one way to do the right thing for our troops and for the safety and security of future generations of Americans, and that is to fully fund those fighting for victory ... with no strings attached," said House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio.

But that doesn't mean Republicans are happy about it.

___

EDITOR'S NOTE _ Tom Raum has covered national and international affairs for The Associated Press since 1973.

CNN: Salt Lake City Mayor CALLS for IMPEACHMENT of President Bush...

"Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors" - Article II, Section 4. US Constitution


The IMPEACHMENT of George W. Bush is now, finally, hitting "mainstream" America, with CNN's Wolf Blitzer noting that the Mayor of Salt Lake City, Mr. Rocky Anderson, has called for impeachment of the president based on "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" against the US Constitution, our government and people.

Unfortunately, as with King George III of England or a Saudi oil monarch, President George W. Bush thinks that he IS the United States Government. (Disgraced and indicted former House Republican leader TOM DeLAY once said the same thing - "I am the US government" when told that government no-smoking laws prohibited him from smoking cigars in a Washington DC restaurant.)

http://www.cnn.com/video/partners/clickability/index.html?url=/video/politics/2007/03/19/slc.mayor.int.cnn
Mayor Anderson:
If impeachment were ever justified, this certainly is the time. This president, by engaging in such incredible abuses of power, breaches of trust with both the Congress and the American people, misleading us into this tragic, unbelievable war; the violation of treaties, other international law, our own constitution, our own domestic law,and then his role in heinous human rights abuses. I think all of that together would call for impeachment, and certainly would communicate to the rest of the world that "That is not who we are as the American people."

[Blitzer quotes Constitution Article II, Sec. 4]

Mayor Anderson: ....We're talking about "HIGH CRIMES and MISDEMEANORS." And what the founders and those engaged in the ratification debate had clearly in mind, and this was derived from the British, is that these are political crimes, abuses of power, during the debate they even talked about a president LYING TO CONGRESS WOULD CONSTITUE GROUNDS FOR IMPEACHMENT. What this president has done in violation of our laws,they never contemplated that it would have to be a violation of criminal laws; but abuses of power injurious to our nation, and we've got it in spades, there's never been a time when impeachment was more appropriate than now."

[Blitzer contests whether Bush knowingly lied to the American people and Congress to build his case for the invasion of Iraq...]
Blitzer: You say he's lied to the American people, he lied to Congress what are you refering to specifically... its one thing to mislead, its another thing to say HE LIED:

Mayor Anderson: Well, he knew, he had the National Intelligence Estimates, where the State Department's own intelligence agencey, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, told him that they completely disagreed, as did his Department of Energy, with this whole notion that those aluminum tubes that Saddam Hussein was acquiring could be used to build up a nuclear capability. The State Department's own intelligence bureau made clear four months [before the war started], this is in October 1st 2002, National Intelligence Estimate, said that there is NO COMPELLING EVIDENCE he's building up a nuclear capability.

[Blitzer mentions then Director of the CIA George Tenet told the president "It's a Slam Dunk, Mr. President" then what would you do?]

Mayor Anderson: Well, what I would do is if the State Department's own intelligence agency telling me just exactly the opposite, and they put it in writing and they said they found it "highly dubious," those were their words, this whole notion that Saddam was trying to buy uranium from Niger, and I had that information, I'd feel like I'd either have to clear it up, and get everybody on board, get a clear consensus, or DISCLOSE IT TO CONGRESS and the American people." [i.e. the conflicting evidence used to justify an attack on Iraq].

CNN video:
http://www.cnn.com/video/partners/clickability/index.html?url=/video/politics/2007/03/19/slc.mayor.int.cnn


================================

Salt Lake City Mayor calls for Bush's impeachment

Monday, March 19, 2007
http://www.cnn.com/POLITICS/blogs/politicalticker/2007/03/salt-lake-city-mayor-calls-for-bushs.html

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- He's a mayor in a state that President Bush carried by 46 percentage points in the 2004 election, but Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson told CNN Monday he thinks it's time the president should be impeached.

"We think if impeachment were ever justified, this certainly is the time," Anderson, a Utah Democrat, told CNN's Wolf Blitzer. "This president, by engaging in such incredible abuses of power, breaches of trust with both the Congress and the American people, and misleading us into this tragic, unbelievable war, the violation of treaties, either international or our Constitution -- our own domestic law, and then his role in heinous human rights abuses, I think all of that together calls for impeachment and certainly would communicate to the rest of the world that is not who we are as the American people." (Watch video: Mayor calls for Bush's impeachment)

Anderson also accused the president of deliberately lying about intelligence findings leading up to the war.

"He had the National Intelligence Estimates where the State Department's own intelligence agency, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, told him that they completely disagreed, as did his Department of Energy, with this whole notion that those aluminum tubes that Saddam Hussein was acquiring could be used to build up a nuclear capability," Anderson said. "And what the founders and those who engaged in the ratification debate had clearly in mind, and this was derived from the British, is that these are political crimes."

Anderson also called Congressional Democrats "timid," claiming they are withholding impeachment charges for political reasons.

"I think that they have got 2008 clearly in view," he said. "I think the Democratic Party, frankly, has been incredibly timid. And I think that there is a lot of culpability certainly with Congress and certainly with many of the Democrats in Congress."

-- CNN Ticker Producer Alexander Mooney

George W. Bush has BETRAYED America; his presidency embodies venality, lawlessness, arrogance, and treachery....

<< Betrayal is a strong word that has several meanings: One is "to be unfaithful in guarding, maintaining, or fulfilling." Closely related is "to deceive, misguide, or corrupt." Most of us who oppose the Administration blend these two notions of betrayal: unfaithfulness and deception.....

[We] Believe George Bush betrayed the oath he swore to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Used the specter of 9/11 to promote his "wartime" power as commander-in-chief, operate as if Congress and the courts did not matter.
Looking back on six years of the Bush Administration, it's obvious George Bush is not remotely the person he claimed to be. He deceived the electorate: Instead of ushering in a "responsibility era" he oversaw a period of unparalleled venality. Instead of upholding the laws of the land he ran roughshod over them. Instead of governing from a higher standard he brought dishonor and indignity to the presidency. Instead of proving worthy of America's trust, his conduct led many Americans to disbelieve every word he says. George W. Bush has not merely been a bad President. He has been a treacherous President.
>>

Bush's Politics of Betrayal
Bob Burnett
03.20.2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-burnett/bushs-politics-of-betray_b_43835.html

Madam Speaker: IMPEACHMENT of Vice President no longer "a choice," but now A DUTY....

We have heard, only two persons removed, that the #2. Congressional leader - that would be Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer, Majority Leader in the US Congress - has said that the IMPEACHMENT of the president or vice president is completely off the agenda of House Democratic leaders BECAUSE THE DEMOCRATS THEMSELVES are afraid that the impeachment of the Vice President would lead to the impeachment of the president; and either the Democrats would have to face a sitting president in the 2008 election, or Speaker of the House NANCY PELOSI would become president as per the succession as detailed in the US Constitution; or more specifically the duly ratified 25th Amendment to that Constitution.

We heard the above in an audio clip from the Big Ed Schultz radio show (Jones radio network); Mr. Schultz telling his listeners that he had spoken personally to Rep. Hoyer earlier by phone, to arrive at the above conclusion, and we have no reason to doubt his personal account.

But Mr. Hoyer's comment was before we heard the first person testimony of Ms. Valerie Plame, the "COVERT OPERATIONS OFFICER," according to her own sworn testimony, "outed" by the Washington press after a concerted effort by the Vice President's office and senior White House staffers to "shop" Ms. Plame secret, classified identity to the DC press corps.

And Mr. Hoyer's "no impeachment" resolve was before the true import of the V.P. Chief of Staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby PERJURY and OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE convictions had fully permeated official Washington.

True, the national press/media is duly trying to DISCOUNT the importance of the Libby convictions and Plame testimony; our local paper, of substantial circulation, put the "Plame testifies before Congress" story in a tiny, 2-inch by 2-inch square in the bottom left corner of the front page, while the sinking of an old freighter to make an underwater reef took up the entire above-fold front page. The editor and publisher of that paper care not a whit about the MILLIONS of taxpayer dollars spent investigating and then prosecuting the illegal "leak"; they care not a whit that the president once vowed to "FIRE ANYONE FROM MY ADMINISTRATION WHO ILLEGALLY LEAKED SECRET CIA INFORMATION" - and then never requested an internal WH investigation into that leak!

IF the Democrats allow this White House to DESTROY covert operations, covert operations officers, overseas allies and "assets" (as foreigners who assist such covert operations, often at risk of their own lives, are clinically labelled) with premeditation and purpose, then our Democratic leaders stand for nothing... certainly not for the rule of law and not for the supremacy of our constitutional model of government.

Compared to this grave responsibility, who becomes president by default in late 2007 or early 2008 fades to irrelevance. Not to mention that the Bush-Cheney administratioin AVOIDING any such censure - even an impeachment that does not carry through in the senate - will give the Republican Party political "ammunition" for decades to come, that it was only the Democrats who undermined the war; and not the felonious behavior of the administration's leaders.
(story, bottom. Immediately below, Vermont towns draft short and succinct Articles of Impeachment.

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Opinion
Vermont Votes to Impeach Bush/Cheney

by John Nichols
Wed Mar 7, 7:36 AM ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20070307/cm_thenation/1172344;_ylt=Ap4l.wIJTvGAHRaQgcB.ByMDW7oF



The Nation -- When Vermont Governor Jim Douglas, a Republican with reasonably close ties to President Bush, asked if there was any additional business to be considered at the town meeting he was running in Middlebury, Ellen McKay popped up and proposed the impeachment of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

The governor was not amused. As moderator of the annual meeting, he tried to suggest that the proposal to impeach -- along with another proposal to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq -- could not be voted on.

But McKay, a program coordinator at Middlebury College, pressed her case. And it soon became evident that the crowd at the annual meeting shared her desire to hold the president to account.

So Douglas backed down.

"It became clear that no one was going home until they had the chance to discuss the resolutions and vote on them," explained David Rosenberg, a political science professor at Middlebury College. "And being a good politician, he allowed the vote to happen."

By an overwhelming voice vote, Middlebury called for impeachment.

So it has gone this week at town meetings across Vermont, most of which were held Tuesday.

Late Tuesday night, there were confirmed reports that 36 towns had backed impeachment resolutions, and the number was expected to rise.

In one town, Putney, the vote for impeachment was unanimous.

In addition to Governor Douglas's Middlebury, the town of Hartland, which is home to Congressman Peter Welch (news, bio, voting record), backed impeachment. So, too, did Jericho, the home of Gaye Symington, the speaker of the Vermont House of Representatives.

Organizers of the grassroots drive to get town meetings to back impeachment resolutions hope that the overwhelming support the initiative has received will convince Welch to introduce articles of impeachment against Bush and Cheney. That's something the Democratic congressman is resisting, even though his predecessor, Bernie Sanders, signed on last year to a proposal by Michigan Congressman John Conyers (news, bio, voting record) to set up a House committee to look into impeachment.

Vermont activists also want their legislature to approve articles of impeachment and forward them to Congress. But Symington, also a Democrat, has discouraged the initiative, despite the fact that more than 20 representatives have cosponsored an impeachment resolution.

"It's going to be hard for Peter Welch and Gaye Symington to say there's no sentiment for impeachment, now that their own towns have voted for it," says Dan DeWalt, a Newfane, Vermont, town selectman who started the impeachment initiative last year in his town, and who now plans to launch a campaign to pressure Welch and Symington to respect and reflect the will of the people.

It is going to be even harder for Governor Douglas, who just this month spent two nights at the Bush White House, to face his president.

After all, Douglas now lives in a town that is on record in support of Bush's impeachment and trial for high crimes and misdemeanors.

For the record, Middlebury says:
----------------------------------------------------

We the people have the power -- and the responsibility -- to remove executives who transgress not just the law, but the rule of law.

The oaths that the President and Vice President take binds them to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." The failure to do so forms a sound basis for articles of impeachment.

The President and Vice President have failed to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution" in the following ways:

1. They have manipulated intelligence and misled the country to justify an immoral, unjust, and unnecessary preemptive war in Iraq.

2. They have directed the government to engage in domestic spying without warrants, in direct contravention of U.S. law.

3. They have conspired to commit the torture of prisoners, in violation of the Federal Torture Act and the Geneva Convention.

4. They have ordered the indefinite detention without legal counsel, without charges and without the opportunity to appear before a civil judicial officer to challenge the detention -- all in violation of U.S. law and the Bill of Rights.

When strong evidence exists of the most serious crimes, we must use impeachment -- or lose the ability of the legislative branch to compel the executive branch to obey the law.

George Bush has led our country to a constitutional crisis, and it is our responsibility to remove him from office.

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Madam Speaker: Impeachment Proceedings Against Cheney is No Longer a Choice
March 17, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-abrams/madam-speaker-impeachmen_b_43723.html


Dear Madam Speaker:

You have taken the reins of the House with skill and vigor. In just 10 weeks you have passed important legislation and struggled to cobble together a meaningful opposition to the Iraq War. Now, however, you have an obligation---to convene an investigation into impeaching Dick Cheney---that cannot be avoided without violating your own oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.

I have been writing here for nearly 2 months that the uncontroverted evidence at the Libby Trial demonstrated that Dick Cheney provided aid-and-comfort to enemies of the United States. (see here)

Today, Valerie Plame testified before the House Government Operations Committee. In addition to confirming her covert status (reconfirmed by the DCI in a written statement) at the time she was outed, she directly stated that her network, and her project that dealt with counterproliferation, was compromised.

Dick Cheney informed Libby of Plame's CIA employment, and started the process to discredit the Wilsons' revelation that Saddam Hussein had not tried to purchase uranium in Niger by falsely stating that Plame sent her husband on some boondoggle. (Imagine the Wilsons' pillow talk: Valerie: "Darling, I think you need a vacation from your retirement. Why don't you go away for a week?" Joe: "Well, may be you're right, I have been relaxing poorly." Valerie: "Why don't you go to the Riviera?" Joe: "Nah, that wouldn't be any fun. I think I'll go to Niger. My birthday's coming up, and I'm told they make a killer yellowcake".).

The Republic Party called Victoria Toensig, a former Intelligence Committee staffer, to rebut both Plame and the DCI, claiming she was not covert within the meaning of a particular statute. Ridiculous as that is, it really does not matter for Cheney's culpability. Plame testified that her outing, not the statute or legal definitions, compromised her operation and her network. The most benign term to describe her outing, which she used, was "recklessly". Since we know that Cheney was quite deliberate in mounting a campaign against the Wilsons, and was told of Plame's CIA status, we also know that the outing was more than reckless.

To make the argument as favorable as possible to Cheney, however, let us assume that his actions were "reckless" and no more. If a Vice-President of the United States is reckless with respect to US national security, and provides aid-and-comfort to enemies of the United States, has he not violated his oath of office? Should anyone continue in the Office as Vice-President of the United States, a sacred trust, if he has treated national security recklessly?

Madam Speaker, investigating Dick Cheney to determine if articles of impeachment should be brought is no longer a choice, it is your duty. Otherwise, reckless (or, more likely, deliberate) behavior compromising the national security of the United States will go unpunished. And, if Patrick Fitzgerald says it would be inappropriate for him to testify about the results of his investigation, remind him that he spent taxpayers' money, and that impeachment is not a criminal trial, but rather an action for removal for malfeasance of office.

As Sir Edmund Burke wrote, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing."

Cowering Senate Democrats leave it to House to investigate Rove's continued "Classified" security rating....

Those Americans who have been paying attention understand that Karl Rove is the very essence of a political bully - he and the Vice President orchestrated an entire cabal of White House officials to "shop" the name of CIA Covert Operations Officer Valerie Plame Wilson around to Washington press reporters, hoping that one or several of those reporters would write Plame's name into an article that would unmask her secret identity worldwide.

And the president is caught there on audio and video tape, saying "IF there is a leaker from within my White House, I will ask them to resign."

But as we heard from the Republican Representatives, and from former Republican official Victoria Toensig yesterday at the House Committee conducting the CIA 'outing' hearings, the new White House defense for the allegations of "outing" CLASSIFIED INFORMATION to the press and world, is that NO ONE KNEW Ms. Plame was actually "covert."

IF this excuse is truly the reason Ms. Plame's identity was mentioned so frequently and casually by senior White House officials - what Ms. Plame calls "AN ABUSE" of her covert identity - then it was a GRAVE BREACH OF the DETAILED RULES for dealing with classified government information; and there should have been a COMMENSURATE INTERNAL INVESTIGATION into abuse of security clearances.

If, on the other hand, senior White House officials DID realize that Ms. Plame's very covert identity was in fact CLASSIFIED information - and those White House officials systematically "outed" her identity to the DC press corps anywayws, then THAT is a SERIOUS CRIME, one that former President George H.W. Bush (Sr.) declared was "most insidious treason" when he attended the 1999 ceremony at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to mark the new law specifically making a felony of such an activity.

Either way, THERE WERE EITHER SERIOUS CLASSIFIED SECURITY BREACHES from WITHIN the Bush-Cheney White House, OR THERE WAS A CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY to DESTROY the covert identity of a CIA agent, and an ENTIRE CIA cover company (Brewster-Jennings Energy Consultants Co., what Ms. Plame explained was a large and meticulously crafted COVERT OPERATIONS NETWORK - a large and expensive network casually tossed into the trash-heap by the Bush White House, in all probability that "trashing" effort overseen by KARL ROVE if not by the Vice President himself.

Not only did President Bush feign IGNORANCE that a covert CIA operation had been destroyed..... not only did President Bush feign ignorance that that disclosure had come from within his own White House regarding that infamous July 14, 2003 article 'outing' Ms. Plame by Chicago Sun-Time writer BOB NOVAK.. BUT today, in March of 2007, the Bush White House HAS YET to run even a PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION into the use of CLASSIFIED INFORMATION in a reckless, abusive, or even merely "casual" way.

And, as usual, our SENATE DEMOCRATS are SO CONCERNED WITH UPHOLDING the STATUS QUO - million dollar campaign donations from wealthy donors and corporations - that they see to not notice, or not care, about ABUSE OF CLASSIFIED INFORMATION from within that Bush White House.

Karl Rove and the Bush-Cheney legacy of ruin, abuse of power, and obstruction of justice....

Recently Karl Rove has been indirectly quoted (in news service reports) as telling fellow Republicans that had it not been for SCANDALS breaking in the news just weeks before election 2006, then Republicans would have retained control of the Congress in that election.

Well, true... IF you take away the JACK ABRAMOFF _BRIBERY_ scandal (found GUILTY under federal prosecution); the BOB NEY BRIBERY scandal, the DUKE CUNNINGHAM BRIBERY scandal, the TOM DeLAY resign-from-Congress-under-indictment SCANDAL, and the MARK FOLEY using Congressional teenage pages as dating-service scandal, then, indeed, the Republicans may well have won that election.

But then again, IF you take away "Former Secretary of Defense DICK CHENEY, and then current Secretary of Defense DONALD RUMSFELD, did EXACTLY NOTHING when told by the CIA director George Tenent, IN PERSON, all through the summer of 2001:

"Al Qaida attacked the USS Cole successfully in October of 2001 using a suicide-bomb attacker, and they are DETERMINED TO ATTACK _IN THE USA_ in a large and spectacular manner, probably by attempting to hijack airliners"....

- well, IF you take away the GROSS NEGLIGENCE and DERELICTION OF DUTY of those two (former or current) Secretaries of Defense (Rumsfeld and Cheney) when presented with compelling documentation that America was under threat... then there MIGHT HAVE BEEN _SOME_ PREPARTIONS to make the 9-11 plot just a tad more difficult... possibly a "GENERAL TRAVELLER's ADVISORY" such as the FAA issues routinly, on every day of the year, to warn American passengers and crews that some destinations may be hazardous to travel through, for example routine traveller's advisories about flying to Haiti or Yemen or any other dangerous destinations.

Clearly, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld OBSTRUCTED _ANY_ possible preparations to make the 9-11 plot more difficult in the long summer of 2001, thereby leaving American airline passengers and aircrews as sitting ducks when the terrorist hijackers eventually carried out their plot.

Now, getting back to KARL ROVE: Karl Rove's SPECIALTY, his DEFINING CHARACTERISTIC, is ABUSE OF POWER.

Without even going into the long train of Mr. Rove's abusive and possibly criminal election violations, let's just look at his "IF Republicans had avoided those scandals, they would have won election 2006" statement at face value:

Clearly, Mr. Rove does not think the BRIBERY and CORRUPTION crimes were the problem... it was the fact that those crimes were PROSECUTED and won CONVICTIONS in the headlines that were the problem!

Mr. Rove would like to be able to OBSTRUCT JUSTICE!

Indeed, we know that one of the prosecutors PURGED by Attorney General Gonzales at the behest of the Bush-Rove White House was... CAROL LAM, the US Attorney who SUCCESSFULLY PROSECUTED Representative Cunningham!

Make no mistake: KARL ROVE is all about PURGING from the government anyone who does not put PERSONAL ALLEGIANCE to George W. Bush and the Republican Party ABOVE the rule of law.

Senate Dems to hold - CIA "outing" HEARINGS! That is 3 sets of hearings on possible violations or criminal conduct by Bush-Cheney White House!

In our previous 2 posts we highlighted that the Democrats are going to hold investigative hearings into the ILLEGAL WIRETAPPING scandal ("NSA hearings", the Bush-Cheney White House attempting to justify the massive, no-oversight, no warant electronic surveillance of American citizens as a matter of NSA national security), and the Democrats are also set to investigate the "US Attorneys PURGED at behest of Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales, and other Republican officials" scandal... and now a THIRD important set of hearings is about to take place, the investigation into how the OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE and PERJURY CONVICTIONS of former Presidential staffer (and Vice Presidential Chief of Staff) Lewis "Scooter" Libby was actually tied to the underlying scandal of "OUTING" an undercover CIA operative, AND HER ENTIRE undercover CIA cover-company, as means of political retribution against an outspoken administration lies-to-war critic.

Make no mistake: IF "outing" an undercover CIA operative were NOT a crime, the CIA would not have forwarded a request to the FBI to investigate that 'outing,' and the FBI would not have taken up the case.

And, the "outing" of CIA undercover "NOC" operative Valerie Plame - "non-official-cover" means an agent has NO protection from the US government, and can be tried for espionage by any foreign government should that agent be arrested there - did not merely ruin her undercover career; the illegal, White House orchestrated "outing' wiped out her ENTIRE COVER ORGANIZATION, "Brewster-Jennings Energy Consultants Co.", and potentially put EVERY foreigner who ever dealt with that company in peril. (When FBI spy Robert Hanssen sold US secrets to Russian agents in the 15 years leading up to 2001, at least 2 of America's double-agents in Russia were executed, and probably many more Russian "assets" were compromised.)
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/2/20/205551.shtml

What is amazing, when you start to LIST the sins, follies, and potential crime of the Cheney-Bush White House, is to realize that ANY ONE of them would have WITHOUT DOUBT resulted in the IMPEACHMENT of President Bill Clinton. Not only did the Republican Congress actually IMPEACH President Clinton for "lying" about a brief affair, but before anyone had ever even heard of Monica Lewinsky, the Republicans and their media/press allies had made the Clinton's guest-list INTO A MAJOR "SCANDAL', the so-called "LINCOLN BEDROOM SCANDAL"!!!

Astounding: the Republicans got press-media "TRACTION" on a half-a-dozen fabricated scandals ("Travel-office firings," "Vince Foster suicide," "stealing White House furniture," and the entirely fabricated "White House trashing" scandals - but today, because of the "war on terror," the Bush White House has been able to forestall ANY congressional oversight on dozens of GENUINE scandals and potential administration lawlessness!

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Democrats to open hearings on CIA leak
By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer 2 hours, 56 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - Democratic lawmakers are eager to hear from outed CIA operative Valerie Plame as they try to make political fodder out of the 2003 leak scandal.

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Plame was scheduled to testify before a congressional committee Friday, but it was unlikely the hearing would offer any new information about the Bush administration's discussions of her employment at the spy agency.

"Valerie's going to be talking in general about the need to protect intelligence assets," her attorney, Melanie Sloan, said prior to her appearance before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. "She's basically talking about how important national intelligence is and about how leaking is bad."

Her prepared testimony would take about five minutes, Sloan said, and wouldn't include any behind-the-scenes details about the CIA or the White House.

The man with that kind of information is Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who spent years investigating the leak and interviewed President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and several top aides and journalists.

But Fitzgerald isn't talking, citing federal rules prohibiting such discussions. And nobody from the White House involved in the leak was scheduled to testify. Nor was someone from the State Department, where the leak of Plame's identity originated.

That leaves Plame to tell her story to lawmakers. She believes she was outed as retaliation against her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who criticized the Bush administration's prewar intelligence on Iraq.

Wilson has written a book and Plame has one expected out soon. They are also suing Cheney and others, claiming their constitutional rights were violated.

Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., says he wants to know whether the White House appropriately safeguarded Plame's identity. During the obstruction of justice and perjury trial of Cheney's former top aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, it was revealed that many in the Bush administration knew Plame worked for the CIA but not that it was classified.

Fitzgerald never charged anyone with the leak and he told Waxman he could not discuss his thoughts on the case.

Scheduled to testify Friday were attorney Mark Zaid, who has represented whistle-blowers; attorney Victoria Toensing, who said early on that no law was broken and has criticized the CIA's handling of the case, and J. William Leonard, security director of the National Archives, who was to discuss general procedures for handling sensitive information.

James Knodell, director of the White House security office, also could attend to discuss general security procedures, committee officials said.