<< Failure on the part of Congress to obtain testimony from this former attorney general, who is now a material witness, on the original NSA legislation, who it was that sent Andrew Card and Alberto Gonzales to visit him, what they discussed, and what role the White House plays in this so-called grand political theatre will constitute a breach of contract between government and the people, and an ethical lapse of seismic magnitude. Whether one votes no confidence in the current attorney general or not, the Senate must get to the truth, once and for all, even if it means they must put John Ashcroft on the stand. >>
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Paging John Ashcroft
Jayne Lyn Stahl
Posted May 30, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jayne-lyn-stahl/paging-john-ashcroft_b_50091.html
As he lay in his now famous hospital bed after gallbladder surgery, then attorney general, John Ashcroft, received a call from then White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, asking if he and the president's counsel Alberto Gonzales could pay him a visit. Mrs. Ashcroft reportedly declined. Minutes later, according to Newsweek, the phone rang again, only this time the identity of the caller remains unknown. The response to that request was in the affirmative. So it
was then that, shortly before he resigned in 2004, John Ashcroft received a bedside visit which has come under increasing scrutiny, and has led to an atmosphere of what the president calls "grand political theatre."
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Next month, the Senate will hold a vote of no confidence hearing for Alberto Gonzales, and it's time to call upon the one person in the room at the time who can answer essential questions as to what was said, what the NSA program looked like in its original state, why he refused to sign off on the legislation, and what role the president had in this whole affair. It's time for the Senate to subpoena John Ashcroft and, if necessary, provide him with the same limited immunity that was given Monica Goodling in exchange for talking.
That Ashcroft thought the program was illegal, and that more than two dozen members of the Justice Department, including then director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, threatened to resign over the executive branch attempt to monitor even greater number of Americans communications without a court order, we know, but his refusal to approve the program was not merely heroic, but shocking in light of some of the shady, and legally dubious post-9/11 prosecutorial gestures. Even a cursory look at some high profile litigation in which Mr. Ashcroft was involved peripherally will reveal just how egregious the initial NSA surveillance legislation must have been.
Back in April, 2003, Ashcroft was admonished by a federal judge for violating a gag order in the trial of four Detroit men who were indicted for operating a terror cell. He is also said to have ignored gag orders in the case of John Walker Lindh leading one observer to remark that "It is especially disturbing that it is the Attorney-General himself who has violated court orders and ethics rules." (FindLaw)
As recently as last September, a judge in Idaho denied a request to grant absolute immunity to the former attorney general from testifying in an indictment of the government for the wrongful arrest of Abdullah al Kidd as a material witness in a computer terrorism case. Should the case go to trial, and Mr. Ashcroft be compelled to testify, he will now have to answer allegations, under oath, that he was himself responsible for compromising Kidd's rights by "creating a national policy to improperly seek material witness warrants in an effort to arrest individuals without probable cause." (Jurist) Importantly, the judge's ruling prohibits the government from pre-emptive strikes against its own citizens, and a policy of "preventively" detaining suspects by labeling them material witnesses.
So, taken in context, we have a former attorney general who has defied explicit court orders, and spoken to the press about high profile terror cases, as well as one who attempted to detain suspects without probable cause defying efforts to bully him into approving a warrantless surveillance program that was brought to him, ostensibly for signing, at his hospital bed. What in the hell was in that program that prompted an anti-terror hawk to stand up to this president when he was in no condition to do so, and who better to answer that than Mr. Ashcroft himself?.
Failure on the part of Congress to obtain testimony from this former attorney general, who is now a material witness, on the original NSA legislation, who it was that sent Andrew Card and Alberto Gonzales to visit him, what they discussed, and what role the White House plays in this so-called grand political theatre will constitute a breach of contract between government and the people, and an ethical lapse of seismic magnitude. Whether one votes no confidence in the current attorney general or not, the Senate must get to the truth, once and for all, even if it means they must put John Ashcroft on the stand.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Cowardly Democrats IGNORE the CIA-OUTING scandal leads - which POINT TO Vice President Cheney.
Are the cowardly Democrat leaders merely cowardly ENABLERS - or treacherously COMPLICIT?
EVERY TIME the nation's Democratic voters, party activists, minority vote activists, and civil rights advocates feel that the LATEST CRIMINAL SCANDAL to swirl around the Bush-Cheney-Rove White House might be the one that undoes that administration and leads to true justice being applied - they are SADLY DISAPPOINTED by the cowardly and craven Democratic leadership, who seem to agree with President Nixon, Vice President Cheney, and President George W. Bush that "IF THE PRESIDENT DOES IT, IT MUST NOT BE ILLEGAL."
After JACK ABRAMOFF was CONVICTED of soliciting DOZENS OF BRIBES - the COWARDLY Democratic leadership ALLOWED the Bush White House to DODGE responsibility for any connection (much less close connections) with the disgraced lobbyist - WHO HAD ATTENDED meetings at THE WHITE HOUSE MANY TIMES OVER.
When professional male prostitute JEFF GANON got a Secret Service press pass - despite his up-and-running "top" (butch) gay prostitute web site - the COWARDLY DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP was SILENT AS CLAMS.
And, of course, when the Bush-Rove-Cheney White House "SHOPPED AROUND" the secret, undercover ("covert operations officer") identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson to intimidate and discredit ("smear") her war-critic husband
- the COWARDLY DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP, and especially presidential candidate John Kerry - REFUSED TO MAKE AN ISSUE OF IT.
JOHN KERRY, JOE LIEBERMAN, and the 'Democratic' leadership - on the above and dozens of other issues (9-11 commission whitewash, Lies-to-war, Torture, illegal surveillance, Iraq contracts fraud and corruption, neglect of veterns, etc., etc., etc., ad naseum) - THE BEST ENABLER and COMPLICIT co-conspirators the Bush-Cheney-Rove Republican Party could hope for!
===========================================
Fitzgerald Again Points to Cheney
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/05/29/BL2007052901024.html
Special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald has made it clearer than ever that he was hot on the trail of a coordinated campaign to out CIA agent Valerie Plame until that line of investigation was cut off by the repeated lies from Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Libby was convicted in February of perjury and obstruction of justice. Fitzgerald filed a memo on Friday asking U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, who will sentence Libby next week, to put him in prison for at least two and a half years.
Despite all the public interest in the case, Fitzgerald has repeatedly asserted that grand-jury secrecy rules prohibit him from being more forthcoming about either the course of his investigation or any findings beyond those he disclosed to make the case against Libby. But when his motives have been attacked during court proceedings, Fitzgerald has occasionally shown flashes of anger -- and has hinted that he and his investigative team suspected more malfeasance at higher levels of government than they were able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
In Friday's eminently readable court filing, Fitzgerald quotes the Libby defense calling his prosecution "unwarranted, unjust, and motivated by politics." In responding to that charge, the special counsel evidently felt obliged to put Libby's crime in context. And that context is Dick Cheney.
Libby's lies, Fitzgerald wrote, "made impossible an accurate evaluation of the role that Mr. Libby and those with whom he worked played in the disclosure of information regarding Ms. Wilson's CIA employment and about the motivations for their actions."
It was established at trial that it was Cheney himself who first told Libby about Plame's identity as a CIA agent, in the course of complaining about criticisms of the administration's run-up to war leveled by her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson. And, as Fitzgerald notes: "The evidence at trial further established that when the investigation began, Mr. Libby kept the Vice President apprised of his shifting accounts of how he claimed to have learned about Ms. Wilson's CIA employment."
The investigation, Fitzgerald writes, "was necessary to determine whether there was concerted action by any combination of the officials known to have disclosed the information about Ms. Plame to the media as anonymous sources, and also whether any of those who were involved acted at the direction of others. This was particularly important in light of Mr. Libby's statement to the FBI that he may have discussed Ms. Wilson's employment with reporters at the specific direction of the Vice President." (My italics.)
Not clear on the concept yet? Fitzgerald adds: "To accept the argument that Mr. Libby's prosecution is the inappropriate product of an investigation that should have been closed at an early stage, one must accept the proposition that the investigation should have been closed after at least three high-ranking government officials were identified as having disclosed to reporters classified information about covert agent Valerie Wilson, where the account of one of them was directly contradicted by other witnesses, where there was reason to believe that some of the relevant activity may have been coordinated, and where there was an indication from Mr. Libby himself that his disclosures to the press may have been personally sanctioned by the Vice President." (My italics.)
Up until now, Fitzgerald's most singeing attack on Cheney came during closing arguments at the Libby trial in February. Libby's lawyers had complained that Fitzgerald was trying to put a "cloud" over Cheney without evidence to back it up -- and that set Fitzgerald off. As I wrote in my Feb. 21 column, the special counsel responded with fire: "There is a cloud over what the Vice President did that week. . . . He had those meetings. He sent Libby off to [meet then-New York Times reporter] Judith Miller at the St. Regis Hotel. At that meeting, the two-hour meeting, the defendant talked about the wife. We didn't put that cloud there. That cloud remains because the defendant has obstructed justice and lied about what happened. . . .
"That's not something that we put there. That cloud is something that we just can't pretend isn't there."
To those of us watching the investigation and trial unfold, Cheney's presence behind the scenes has emerged in glimpses and hints. (The defense's decision not to call Cheney to the stand remains a massive bummer.) But I suspect that people looking back on this story will see it with greater clarity: As a blatant -- and thus far successful -- cover-up for the vice president.
The Coverage
What little traditional media coverage there was of Fitzgerald's filing focused on sentencing issues.
Michael A. Fletcher writes in The Washington Post: "Former top Bush administration aide I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby should spend 30 to 37 months in prison for obstructing the CIA leak investigation, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald contended in court documents filed yesterday.
"Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, has shown no remorse for lying to investigators and 'about virtually everything that mattered' in the probe of who disclosed the identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame to the media in 2003, Fitzgerald wrote."
Matt Apuzzo writes for the Associated Press: "In court documents, Fitzgerald rejected criticism from Libby's supporters who said the leak investigation had spun out of control. Fitzgerald denied the prosecution was politically motivated and said Libby brought his fate upon himself."
"'The judicial system has not corruptly mistreated Mr. Libby,' Fitzgerald wrote. 'Mr. Libby has been found by a jury of his peers to have corrupted the judicial system.'"
Apuzzo does, however, note a key issue at next week's hearing: "Walton, who has a reputation for handing down tough sentences, . . . faces two important questions: whether to send Libby to prison and, if so, whether to delay the sentence until his appeals have run out."
As Josh Gerstein wrote in the New York Sun on Friday: "[T]he real cliffhanger at the sentencing hearing, set for June 5, is not what punishment Judge Reggie Walton imposes, but whether he allows Libby to remain free while pursuing his appeal. . . .
"Bail for Libby would amount to a reprieve for President Bush, who would then have until next year to make the politically sensitive decision about a pardon for the former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney. However, if the judge orders Libby jailed forthwith, Mr. Bush will face intense and immediate pressure from many of his supporters to commute the sentence or grant a pardon."
Gerstein also provides some important background: "Federal law dictates that bail pending appeal be denied unless the appeal raises 'a substantial question of law or fact' that could reverse the conviction or have a significant affect on Libby's sentence. . . .
"During the trial, Judge Walton expressed little concern that the appeals court would disagree with his rulings. 'If I get reversed on that one, maybe I need to hang up my spurs,' he said after deciding a dispute stemming from Libby's decision not to testify in his own defense."
The Mockery of Bloggers
Nexthurrah blogger Marcy Wheeler blogs at the Guardian about how Libby's "defense team solicited his friends and associates to write letters to the judge arguing that Libby deserves a reduced sentence. Last Friday, Libby's lawyer Bill Jeffress submitted a filing opposing the release of those letters to the public. In it, he writes: 'Given the extraordinary media scrutiny here, if any case presents the possibility that these letters, once released, would be published on the internet and their authors discussed, even mocked, by bloggers, it is this case.' "
Concludes Wheeler: "Jeffress' invocation of bloggers is a cheap attempt to dismiss precisely what bloggers bring: an appropriate scrutiny of the motivations and actions of those who lied us into war and outed Valerie Plame."
Plan B?
There are conflicting reports out of the White House about plans for Iraq. Among the possibilities: Officials are planning for the aftermath of the surge's success; officials are planning for the aftermath of the surge's failure; both; or neither. Yet another possibility: Officials are just trying to muddy the debate.
David E. Sanger and David S. Cloud wrote Saturday in the New York Times: "The Bush administration is developing what are described as concepts for reducing American combat forces in Iraq by as much as half next year, according to senior administration officials in the midst of the internal debate.
"It is the first indication that growing political pressure is forcing the White House to turn its attention to what happens after the current troop increase runs its course.
"The concepts call for a reduction in forces that could lower troop levels by the midst of the 2008 presidential election to roughly 100,000, from about 146,000, the latest available figure, which the military reported on May 1. They would also greatly scale back the mission that President Bush set for the American military when he ordered it in January to win back control of Baghdad and Anbar Province. . . .
"Officials say proponents of reducing the troops and scaling back their mission next year appear to include Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. They have been joined by generals at the Pentagon and elsewhere who have long been skeptical that the Iraqi government would use the opportunity created by the troop increase to reach genuine political accommodations."
But Michael Abramowitz and Peter Baker wrote Sunday in The Washington Post that the White House disputed the Times report. They write: "The administration is trying to make judgments about where it will be in the months ahead, and officials are discussing possibilities accordingly. The scenarios for troop withdrawal are based on the premise of a successful 'surge.' There is also discussion about what to do if the buildup plan fails, but officials are unwilling to discuss it with outsiders even privately."
On Benchmarks
Julian E. Barnes writes in the Los Angeles Times: "U.S. military leaders in Iraq are increasingly convinced that most of the broad political goals President Bush laid out early this year in his announcement of a troop buildup will not be met this summer and are seeking ways to redefine success.
"In September, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, is scheduled to present Congress with an assessment of progress in Iraq. Military officers in Baghdad and outside advisors working with Petraeus doubt that the three major goals set by U.S. officials for the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki will be achieved by then."
Memorial Day
Deb Riechmann writes for the Associated Press: "President Bush paid tribute Monday to America's fighting men and women -- 'a new generation of fallen leaders' - in a solemn Memorial Day visit to the national burial ground for war heroes. . . .
"At least 3,452 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the war in Iraq in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count."
Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes in the New York Times: "President Bush used his traditional Memorial Day address at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday to speak directly, in deeply personal terms, to the families of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, assuring them that Americans 'will never forget the terrible loss you have suffered.' . . .
"The speech stood in stark contrast to one delivered on Saturday by Vice President Dick Cheney at another military venue: the United States Military Academy at West Point. Speaking to 978 academy graduates, Mr. Cheney delivered a sharp and at times bellicose defense of the administration's policies.
"'We're fighting a war on terror because the enemy attacked us first, and hit us hard,' he said, adding, 'Nobody can guarantee that we won't be hit again.'"
Another choice bit from Cheney's speech: "As Army officers on duty in the war on terror, you will now face enemies who oppose and despise everything you know to be right, every notion of upright conduct and character, and every belief you consider worth fighting for and living for. Capture one of these killers, and he'll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States. Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away."
As blogger Digby put it: "He's explicitly saying that only a bunch of girly-men with 'delicate sensibilities' need the protections of the Geneva Conventions or the Constitution of the United States. He isn't proud of them. He thinks they make the US weak and it's obvious that he'd be thrilled to take a match to both the treaty and the constitution."
Bush's Opinion
I often wonder why more news stories don't start: "President Bush yesterday again denied reality. . . . "
And then along comes this delightful surprise from Jennifer Loven of the Associated Press: "Confronted with strong opposition to his Iraq policies, President Bush decides to interpret public opinion his own way. Actually, he says, people agree with him.
"Democrats view the November elections that gave them control of Congress as a mandate to bring U.S. troops home from Iraq. They're backed by evidence; election exit poll surveys by The Associated Press and television networks found 55 percent saying the U.S. should withdraw some or all of its troops from Iraq.
"The president says Democrats have it all wrong: the public doesn't want the troops pulled out -- they want to give the military more support in its mission.
"'Last November, the American people said they were frustrated and wanted a change in our strategy in Iraq,' he said April 24, ahead of a veto showdown with congressional Democrats over their desire to legislation a troop withdrawal timeline. 'I listened. Today, General David Petraeus is carrying out a strategy that is dramatically different from our previous course.'
"Increasingly isolated on a war that is going badly, Bush has presented his alternative reality in other ways, too. He expresses understanding for the public's dismay over the unrelenting sectarian violence and American losses that have passed 3,400, but then asserts that the public's solution matches his.
"'A lot of Americans want to know, you know, when?' he said at a Rose Garden news conference Thursday. 'When are you going to win?'
"Also in that session, Bush said: 'I recognize there are a handful there, or some, who just say, "Get out, you know, it's just not worth it. Let's just leave." I strongly disagree with that attitude. Most Americans do as well.'
"In fact, polls show Americans do not disagree, and that leaving -- not winning -- is their main goal. . . .
"Bush aides say poll questions are asked so many ways, and often so imprecisely, that it is impossible to conclude that most Americans really want to get out. Failure, Bush says, is not what the public wants -- they just don't fully understand that that is just what they will get if troops are pulled out before the Iraqi government is capable of keeping the country stable on its own. . . .
"Independent pollster Andrew Kohut said of the White House view: 'I don't see what they're talking about.'"
Senate Intel Redux
Walter Pincus and Karen DeYoung write in The Washington Post on Saturday: "Months before the invasion of Iraq, U.S. intelligence agencies predicted that it would be likely to spark violent sectarian divides and provide al-Qaeda with new opportunities in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a report released yesterday by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Analysts warned that war in Iraq also could provoke Iran to assert its regional influence and 'probably would result in a surge of political Islam and increased funding for terrorist groups' in the Muslim world."
James Gerstenzang writes in the Los Angeles Times: "In early 2003, even as their deputies were receiving the intelligence community papers, top administration officials -- among them Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- publicly speculated that U.S. troops would be greeted warmly as liberators and gave no hint that some analysts were raising red flags about difficulties to come."
Here's the full report.
Darfur Watch
Michael Abramowitz and Debbi Wilgoren write for The Washington Post: "President Bush is increasing pressure on Sudan's government to cooperate with international efforts to halt violence in its troubled Darfur region, where the White House said almost three years ago that genocide was taking place.
"In a brief address that included sharp criticism of Sudanese president Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Bush said the Treasury Department will step up efforts to squeeze the Sudanese economy by targeting government-run ventures involved with its booming oil business, which does many of its transactions in U.S. dollars. Bush also announced sanctions against individuals, which aides said would target two senior Sudanese officials and a rebel leader who are all suspected of being involved in the violence in Darfur."
Rove and the GOP Implosion
Jeffrey Goldberg writes in the New Yorker: "The West Wing of the White House tends to have a funereal stillness, even in the best of times, which these are not. The President's aides walk the narrow corridors with pensive expressions and vigilantly modulated voices. By contrast, Karl Rove's office has an almost party atmosphere. Rove, the President's chief political adviser -- the 'architect,' Bush has called him, of his 2004 victory over John Kerry -- has been a man of constant troubles: Valerie Plame troubles, U.S. Attorney-firing troubles, and, most of all, collapse-of-the-Republican Party troubles. Yet his voice is suffused with bonhomie, his jokes are bad and frequent, his enthusiasm is communicable; he resembles an oversized leprechaun, although one with unconcealed resentments and a receding hairline."
But now Rove, "the man Bush has called his 'boy genius,' is among those being blamed by conservatives for the Party's problems -- blame that he shares with others who have attempted to transform the party."
Among the blamers is Newt Gingrich, who criticizes "Rove's 'maniacally dumb' strategy in 2004, which left Bush with no political capital. 'All he proved was that the anti-Kerry vote was bigger than the anti-Bush vote,' Gingrich said. He continued, 'The Bush people deliberately could not bring themselves to wage a campaign of choice' -- of ideology, of suggesting that Kerry was 'to the left of Ted Kennedy' -- and chose instead to attack Kerry's war record."
EVERY TIME the nation's Democratic voters, party activists, minority vote activists, and civil rights advocates feel that the LATEST CRIMINAL SCANDAL to swirl around the Bush-Cheney-Rove White House might be the one that undoes that administration and leads to true justice being applied - they are SADLY DISAPPOINTED by the cowardly and craven Democratic leadership, who seem to agree with President Nixon, Vice President Cheney, and President George W. Bush that "IF THE PRESIDENT DOES IT, IT MUST NOT BE ILLEGAL."
After JACK ABRAMOFF was CONVICTED of soliciting DOZENS OF BRIBES - the COWARDLY Democratic leadership ALLOWED the Bush White House to DODGE responsibility for any connection (much less close connections) with the disgraced lobbyist - WHO HAD ATTENDED meetings at THE WHITE HOUSE MANY TIMES OVER.
When professional male prostitute JEFF GANON got a Secret Service press pass - despite his up-and-running "top" (butch) gay prostitute web site - the COWARDLY DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP was SILENT AS CLAMS.
And, of course, when the Bush-Rove-Cheney White House "SHOPPED AROUND" the secret, undercover ("covert operations officer") identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson to intimidate and discredit ("smear") her war-critic husband
- the COWARDLY DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP, and especially presidential candidate John Kerry - REFUSED TO MAKE AN ISSUE OF IT.
JOHN KERRY, JOE LIEBERMAN, and the 'Democratic' leadership - on the above and dozens of other issues (9-11 commission whitewash, Lies-to-war, Torture, illegal surveillance, Iraq contracts fraud and corruption, neglect of veterns, etc., etc., etc., ad naseum) - THE BEST ENABLER and COMPLICIT co-conspirators the Bush-Cheney-Rove Republican Party could hope for!
===========================================
Fitzgerald Again Points to Cheney
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/05/29/BL2007052901024.html
Special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald has made it clearer than ever that he was hot on the trail of a coordinated campaign to out CIA agent Valerie Plame until that line of investigation was cut off by the repeated lies from Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Libby was convicted in February of perjury and obstruction of justice. Fitzgerald filed a memo on Friday asking U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, who will sentence Libby next week, to put him in prison for at least two and a half years.
Despite all the public interest in the case, Fitzgerald has repeatedly asserted that grand-jury secrecy rules prohibit him from being more forthcoming about either the course of his investigation or any findings beyond those he disclosed to make the case against Libby. But when his motives have been attacked during court proceedings, Fitzgerald has occasionally shown flashes of anger -- and has hinted that he and his investigative team suspected more malfeasance at higher levels of government than they were able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
In Friday's eminently readable court filing, Fitzgerald quotes the Libby defense calling his prosecution "unwarranted, unjust, and motivated by politics." In responding to that charge, the special counsel evidently felt obliged to put Libby's crime in context. And that context is Dick Cheney.
Libby's lies, Fitzgerald wrote, "made impossible an accurate evaluation of the role that Mr. Libby and those with whom he worked played in the disclosure of information regarding Ms. Wilson's CIA employment and about the motivations for their actions."
It was established at trial that it was Cheney himself who first told Libby about Plame's identity as a CIA agent, in the course of complaining about criticisms of the administration's run-up to war leveled by her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson. And, as Fitzgerald notes: "The evidence at trial further established that when the investigation began, Mr. Libby kept the Vice President apprised of his shifting accounts of how he claimed to have learned about Ms. Wilson's CIA employment."
The investigation, Fitzgerald writes, "was necessary to determine whether there was concerted action by any combination of the officials known to have disclosed the information about Ms. Plame to the media as anonymous sources, and also whether any of those who were involved acted at the direction of others. This was particularly important in light of Mr. Libby's statement to the FBI that he may have discussed Ms. Wilson's employment with reporters at the specific direction of the Vice President." (My italics.)
Not clear on the concept yet? Fitzgerald adds: "To accept the argument that Mr. Libby's prosecution is the inappropriate product of an investigation that should have been closed at an early stage, one must accept the proposition that the investigation should have been closed after at least three high-ranking government officials were identified as having disclosed to reporters classified information about covert agent Valerie Wilson, where the account of one of them was directly contradicted by other witnesses, where there was reason to believe that some of the relevant activity may have been coordinated, and where there was an indication from Mr. Libby himself that his disclosures to the press may have been personally sanctioned by the Vice President." (My italics.)
Up until now, Fitzgerald's most singeing attack on Cheney came during closing arguments at the Libby trial in February. Libby's lawyers had complained that Fitzgerald was trying to put a "cloud" over Cheney without evidence to back it up -- and that set Fitzgerald off. As I wrote in my Feb. 21 column, the special counsel responded with fire: "There is a cloud over what the Vice President did that week. . . . He had those meetings. He sent Libby off to [meet then-New York Times reporter] Judith Miller at the St. Regis Hotel. At that meeting, the two-hour meeting, the defendant talked about the wife. We didn't put that cloud there. That cloud remains because the defendant has obstructed justice and lied about what happened. . . .
"That's not something that we put there. That cloud is something that we just can't pretend isn't there."
To those of us watching the investigation and trial unfold, Cheney's presence behind the scenes has emerged in glimpses and hints. (The defense's decision not to call Cheney to the stand remains a massive bummer.) But I suspect that people looking back on this story will see it with greater clarity: As a blatant -- and thus far successful -- cover-up for the vice president.
The Coverage
What little traditional media coverage there was of Fitzgerald's filing focused on sentencing issues.
Michael A. Fletcher writes in The Washington Post: "Former top Bush administration aide I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby should spend 30 to 37 months in prison for obstructing the CIA leak investigation, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald contended in court documents filed yesterday.
"Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, has shown no remorse for lying to investigators and 'about virtually everything that mattered' in the probe of who disclosed the identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame to the media in 2003, Fitzgerald wrote."
Matt Apuzzo writes for the Associated Press: "In court documents, Fitzgerald rejected criticism from Libby's supporters who said the leak investigation had spun out of control. Fitzgerald denied the prosecution was politically motivated and said Libby brought his fate upon himself."
"'The judicial system has not corruptly mistreated Mr. Libby,' Fitzgerald wrote. 'Mr. Libby has been found by a jury of his peers to have corrupted the judicial system.'"
Apuzzo does, however, note a key issue at next week's hearing: "Walton, who has a reputation for handing down tough sentences, . . . faces two important questions: whether to send Libby to prison and, if so, whether to delay the sentence until his appeals have run out."
As Josh Gerstein wrote in the New York Sun on Friday: "[T]he real cliffhanger at the sentencing hearing, set for June 5, is not what punishment Judge Reggie Walton imposes, but whether he allows Libby to remain free while pursuing his appeal. . . .
"Bail for Libby would amount to a reprieve for President Bush, who would then have until next year to make the politically sensitive decision about a pardon for the former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney. However, if the judge orders Libby jailed forthwith, Mr. Bush will face intense and immediate pressure from many of his supporters to commute the sentence or grant a pardon."
Gerstein also provides some important background: "Federal law dictates that bail pending appeal be denied unless the appeal raises 'a substantial question of law or fact' that could reverse the conviction or have a significant affect on Libby's sentence. . . .
"During the trial, Judge Walton expressed little concern that the appeals court would disagree with his rulings. 'If I get reversed on that one, maybe I need to hang up my spurs,' he said after deciding a dispute stemming from Libby's decision not to testify in his own defense."
The Mockery of Bloggers
Nexthurrah blogger Marcy Wheeler blogs at the Guardian about how Libby's "defense team solicited his friends and associates to write letters to the judge arguing that Libby deserves a reduced sentence. Last Friday, Libby's lawyer Bill Jeffress submitted a filing opposing the release of those letters to the public. In it, he writes: 'Given the extraordinary media scrutiny here, if any case presents the possibility that these letters, once released, would be published on the internet and their authors discussed, even mocked, by bloggers, it is this case.' "
Concludes Wheeler: "Jeffress' invocation of bloggers is a cheap attempt to dismiss precisely what bloggers bring: an appropriate scrutiny of the motivations and actions of those who lied us into war and outed Valerie Plame."
Plan B?
There are conflicting reports out of the White House about plans for Iraq. Among the possibilities: Officials are planning for the aftermath of the surge's success; officials are planning for the aftermath of the surge's failure; both; or neither. Yet another possibility: Officials are just trying to muddy the debate.
David E. Sanger and David S. Cloud wrote Saturday in the New York Times: "The Bush administration is developing what are described as concepts for reducing American combat forces in Iraq by as much as half next year, according to senior administration officials in the midst of the internal debate.
"It is the first indication that growing political pressure is forcing the White House to turn its attention to what happens after the current troop increase runs its course.
"The concepts call for a reduction in forces that could lower troop levels by the midst of the 2008 presidential election to roughly 100,000, from about 146,000, the latest available figure, which the military reported on May 1. They would also greatly scale back the mission that President Bush set for the American military when he ordered it in January to win back control of Baghdad and Anbar Province. . . .
"Officials say proponents of reducing the troops and scaling back their mission next year appear to include Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. They have been joined by generals at the Pentagon and elsewhere who have long been skeptical that the Iraqi government would use the opportunity created by the troop increase to reach genuine political accommodations."
But Michael Abramowitz and Peter Baker wrote Sunday in The Washington Post that the White House disputed the Times report. They write: "The administration is trying to make judgments about where it will be in the months ahead, and officials are discussing possibilities accordingly. The scenarios for troop withdrawal are based on the premise of a successful 'surge.' There is also discussion about what to do if the buildup plan fails, but officials are unwilling to discuss it with outsiders even privately."
On Benchmarks
Julian E. Barnes writes in the Los Angeles Times: "U.S. military leaders in Iraq are increasingly convinced that most of the broad political goals President Bush laid out early this year in his announcement of a troop buildup will not be met this summer and are seeking ways to redefine success.
"In September, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, is scheduled to present Congress with an assessment of progress in Iraq. Military officers in Baghdad and outside advisors working with Petraeus doubt that the three major goals set by U.S. officials for the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki will be achieved by then."
Memorial Day
Deb Riechmann writes for the Associated Press: "President Bush paid tribute Monday to America's fighting men and women -- 'a new generation of fallen leaders' - in a solemn Memorial Day visit to the national burial ground for war heroes. . . .
"At least 3,452 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the war in Iraq in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count."
Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes in the New York Times: "President Bush used his traditional Memorial Day address at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday to speak directly, in deeply personal terms, to the families of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, assuring them that Americans 'will never forget the terrible loss you have suffered.' . . .
"The speech stood in stark contrast to one delivered on Saturday by Vice President Dick Cheney at another military venue: the United States Military Academy at West Point. Speaking to 978 academy graduates, Mr. Cheney delivered a sharp and at times bellicose defense of the administration's policies.
"'We're fighting a war on terror because the enemy attacked us first, and hit us hard,' he said, adding, 'Nobody can guarantee that we won't be hit again.'"
Another choice bit from Cheney's speech: "As Army officers on duty in the war on terror, you will now face enemies who oppose and despise everything you know to be right, every notion of upright conduct and character, and every belief you consider worth fighting for and living for. Capture one of these killers, and he'll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States. Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away."
As blogger Digby put it: "He's explicitly saying that only a bunch of girly-men with 'delicate sensibilities' need the protections of the Geneva Conventions or the Constitution of the United States. He isn't proud of them. He thinks they make the US weak and it's obvious that he'd be thrilled to take a match to both the treaty and the constitution."
Bush's Opinion
I often wonder why more news stories don't start: "President Bush yesterday again denied reality. . . . "
And then along comes this delightful surprise from Jennifer Loven of the Associated Press: "Confronted with strong opposition to his Iraq policies, President Bush decides to interpret public opinion his own way. Actually, he says, people agree with him.
"Democrats view the November elections that gave them control of Congress as a mandate to bring U.S. troops home from Iraq. They're backed by evidence; election exit poll surveys by The Associated Press and television networks found 55 percent saying the U.S. should withdraw some or all of its troops from Iraq.
"The president says Democrats have it all wrong: the public doesn't want the troops pulled out -- they want to give the military more support in its mission.
"'Last November, the American people said they were frustrated and wanted a change in our strategy in Iraq,' he said April 24, ahead of a veto showdown with congressional Democrats over their desire to legislation a troop withdrawal timeline. 'I listened. Today, General David Petraeus is carrying out a strategy that is dramatically different from our previous course.'
"Increasingly isolated on a war that is going badly, Bush has presented his alternative reality in other ways, too. He expresses understanding for the public's dismay over the unrelenting sectarian violence and American losses that have passed 3,400, but then asserts that the public's solution matches his.
"'A lot of Americans want to know, you know, when?' he said at a Rose Garden news conference Thursday. 'When are you going to win?'
"Also in that session, Bush said: 'I recognize there are a handful there, or some, who just say, "Get out, you know, it's just not worth it. Let's just leave." I strongly disagree with that attitude. Most Americans do as well.'
"In fact, polls show Americans do not disagree, and that leaving -- not winning -- is their main goal. . . .
"Bush aides say poll questions are asked so many ways, and often so imprecisely, that it is impossible to conclude that most Americans really want to get out. Failure, Bush says, is not what the public wants -- they just don't fully understand that that is just what they will get if troops are pulled out before the Iraqi government is capable of keeping the country stable on its own. . . .
"Independent pollster Andrew Kohut said of the White House view: 'I don't see what they're talking about.'"
Senate Intel Redux
Walter Pincus and Karen DeYoung write in The Washington Post on Saturday: "Months before the invasion of Iraq, U.S. intelligence agencies predicted that it would be likely to spark violent sectarian divides and provide al-Qaeda with new opportunities in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a report released yesterday by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Analysts warned that war in Iraq also could provoke Iran to assert its regional influence and 'probably would result in a surge of political Islam and increased funding for terrorist groups' in the Muslim world."
James Gerstenzang writes in the Los Angeles Times: "In early 2003, even as their deputies were receiving the intelligence community papers, top administration officials -- among them Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- publicly speculated that U.S. troops would be greeted warmly as liberators and gave no hint that some analysts were raising red flags about difficulties to come."
Here's the full report.
Darfur Watch
Michael Abramowitz and Debbi Wilgoren write for The Washington Post: "President Bush is increasing pressure on Sudan's government to cooperate with international efforts to halt violence in its troubled Darfur region, where the White House said almost three years ago that genocide was taking place.
"In a brief address that included sharp criticism of Sudanese president Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Bush said the Treasury Department will step up efforts to squeeze the Sudanese economy by targeting government-run ventures involved with its booming oil business, which does many of its transactions in U.S. dollars. Bush also announced sanctions against individuals, which aides said would target two senior Sudanese officials and a rebel leader who are all suspected of being involved in the violence in Darfur."
Rove and the GOP Implosion
Jeffrey Goldberg writes in the New Yorker: "The West Wing of the White House tends to have a funereal stillness, even in the best of times, which these are not. The President's aides walk the narrow corridors with pensive expressions and vigilantly modulated voices. By contrast, Karl Rove's office has an almost party atmosphere. Rove, the President's chief political adviser -- the 'architect,' Bush has called him, of his 2004 victory over John Kerry -- has been a man of constant troubles: Valerie Plame troubles, U.S. Attorney-firing troubles, and, most of all, collapse-of-the-Republican Party troubles. Yet his voice is suffused with bonhomie, his jokes are bad and frequent, his enthusiasm is communicable; he resembles an oversized leprechaun, although one with unconcealed resentments and a receding hairline."
But now Rove, "the man Bush has called his 'boy genius,' is among those being blamed by conservatives for the Party's problems -- blame that he shares with others who have attempted to transform the party."
Among the blamers is Newt Gingrich, who criticizes "Rove's 'maniacally dumb' strategy in 2004, which left Bush with no political capital. 'All he proved was that the anti-Kerry vote was bigger than the anti-Bush vote,' Gingrich said. He continued, 'The Bush people deliberately could not bring themselves to wage a campaign of choice' -- of ideology, of suggesting that Kerry was 'to the left of Ted Kennedy' -- and chose instead to attack Kerry's war record."
Dems enable - ENCOURAGE - Republican VOTER SUPPRESSION, pretend not to notice record of Rove assistant Tim Griffin, now US Atty. Arkansas...
Dems enable - and thereby ENCOURAGE - serial, chronic, and systematic Republican VOTER SUPPRESSION tactics. The Democrat 'leaders' PRETEND NOT TO NOTICE the "PURGE-GATE ousting of US Attorney Bud Cummins (a qualified, competent, and duly confirmed REPUBLICAN prosecutor) from Arkansas - to be replaced by Karl Rove's assistant Tim Griffin as the US Attorney for Arkansas.
Investigative reporter Gregg Palast accuses the Democrats of knowingly being party to racist disenfranchisement tactics in the Republican voter suppression agenda. There is little evidence to suggest that Palast is exaggerating or being hyperbolic in his charges.
Certainly, the Democrats are putting NO effort into broadly, publicly, and passionately FIGHTING AGAINST those Bush-Rove-Cheney serial, systematic VOTER DISENFRANCHISEMENT tactics.
If true, this is a BETRAYAL - of American voting rights and American democracy itself - of historic proportions.
=====================================================
Democrats Fail in Election Oversight
By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
Posted on May 29, 2007, Printed on May 29, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/52383/
On Tuesday at a long-awaited hearing on the recent purge of federal prosecutors, Monica Goodling, the former top-ranking Justice Department official at the center of the scandal, said in her opening statement that Paul McNulty, the deputy attorney general, was not fully candid with the committee when he discussed "allegations" that Tim Griffin, the Karl Rove protégé and new U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Arkansas, was involved in "caging" when Griffin worked for George W. Bush's 2004 reelection campaign.
Caging is an old voter suppression tactic whose roots go back to the Reconstruction era when Southerners targeted African-Americans voters. The modern version is associated with Republicans, which were barred by federal court in the 1980s from using the tactic to suppress minority voters. Modern caging involves sending registered letters to an opponent's supporters. If the mail is returned or is not accepted, then those sending the letter -- such as Republican partisans in 2004 -- will challenge the intended recipient's right to vote at their polling place.
On Election Day, a Republican poll challenger will wait for the voter to arrive and then challenge their right to vote by saying they don't live at the address on their registration. The voter has to prove otherwise. People are caged or kept from voting this way. The tactic, like the rash of states that in 2006 imposed voting I.D. card requirements, are intended to keep minority voters from casting ballots.
Federal prosecutors like Tim Griffin are supposed to defend voting rights, not suppress them -- which is what made Goodling's statement so startling. But this week the Judiciary Committee was more concerned about the firing of federal prosecutors and didn't pursue the "caging" reference until Rep. Linda Sanchez, the committee's first Latina member, asked Godling to "explain" it.
REP. SANCHEZ: Can you explain what caging is? I'm not familiar with that term.
MS. GOODLING: You know, my understanding -- and I don't actually know a lot about it -- is that it's a direct-mail term that people who do direct mail -- when they separate addresses that may be good versus addresses that may be bad -- that's the best information that I have, that it just -- that it's a direct-mail term that's used by vendors in that circumstance. ( transcript) The Democratic congresswoman's question period soon ended, and no one else followed up. It's hard to know what is more upsetting, the failure of the Judiciary Committee to open a high-profile door into GOP election fraud in 2004, or Goodling's apparently successful attempt to whitewash caging as a "direct-mail" technique.
If only Rep. Sanchez recalled the January 2005 report issued by the Democratic staff of the committee she sits on, "Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio," which detailed numerous ways Ohio's Democratic voters saw their votes suppressed and rejected in 2004 -- including caging. Perhaps then the Judiciary Committee -- and the press and public -- would see that the Bush administrations ethos of winning at all costs extends not just to picking partisan prosecutors but doing whatever it takes to win presidential elections. (Read the Judiciary Committee report here.)
As the 2005 Judiciary Committee report notes, Republicans in Ohio used many tactics to discourage likely Democratic voters from voting and having those votes count. More than 35,000 caging letters were sent out by the GOP. Thousands of GOP poll challengers were recruited. At the last minute, however, a federal court stuck down the Republican caging efforts in Ohio in 2004. As the Committee report stated, "Although the 'caging' tactics targeting 35,000 new voters by the Ohio Republican Party were eventually struck down, it is likely they had a negative impact on the inclination of minorities to vote."
The caging tactics were discriminatory and illegal, but they were not unique among the tools and tactics employed by Republicans to reelect the president. The scandal caused by the recent firing of U.S. attorneys -- apparently because they would not pursue voter fraud cases, according to recently discovered secret White House emails -- is but the tip of the GOP election iceberg. Summed up, the GOP's strategy was to shift the focus to problems with individual voters -- with charges of voter fraud -- while diverting attention from the party's systematic attempt to tilt the administration of the 2004 election. Individual voter fraud pales in comparison to systematic election fraud.
Again, the Judiciary Committee's 2005 Democratic staff report describes the GOP's systematic efforts to tilt Ohio's electoral playing field. Those efforts included changing voter registration and provisional ballot rules at the last minute, which caused thousands of ballots to be rejected. On Election Day, the state's Democratic strongholds saw voting machine shortages and the biggest voting machine malfunctions. While everything that could go wrong seemed to go wrong in Democratic districts, Ohio's GOP districts had a notable absence of comparable problems.
The firing of federal prosecutors has revealed much about the tactics and mindset of the president's top operatives and a compliant Justice Department. While the White House emails show top-ranking Republicans wanted federal prosecutors to file voter fraud cases against Democrats, the Judiciary Committee report found much more extensive voter fraud was perpetrated on behalf of Republicans, such as in rural Perry County, where "there appears to be an extraordinarily high level of 91 percent voter registration, yet a substantial number of these voters have never voted and have no signature on file." Of these, 3,100 voters registered on Nov. 8, 1977, a year with no major election. That is what systematic election fraud looks like.
Goodling's reference to U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin's role with "caging" on the 2004 Bush reelection campaign might yet shine a light into the dark practice of tilting elections that the GOP seems to have mastered -- and not just in Ohio. But the return of the Jim Crow tactic was not the topic that the Judiciary Committee Democrats wanted to hear about this week. Instead, the oversight hearing overlooked one of the day's biggest bombshells.
Steven Rosenfeld, is co-author, with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, of "What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election" (The New Press, 2006).
Investigative reporter Gregg Palast accuses the Democrats of knowingly being party to racist disenfranchisement tactics in the Republican voter suppression agenda. There is little evidence to suggest that Palast is exaggerating or being hyperbolic in his charges.
Certainly, the Democrats are putting NO effort into broadly, publicly, and passionately FIGHTING AGAINST those Bush-Rove-Cheney serial, systematic VOTER DISENFRANCHISEMENT tactics.
If true, this is a BETRAYAL - of American voting rights and American democracy itself - of historic proportions.
=====================================================
Democrats Fail in Election Oversight
By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
Posted on May 29, 2007, Printed on May 29, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/52383/
On Tuesday at a long-awaited hearing on the recent purge of federal prosecutors, Monica Goodling, the former top-ranking Justice Department official at the center of the scandal, said in her opening statement that Paul McNulty, the deputy attorney general, was not fully candid with the committee when he discussed "allegations" that Tim Griffin, the Karl Rove protégé and new U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Arkansas, was involved in "caging" when Griffin worked for George W. Bush's 2004 reelection campaign.
Caging is an old voter suppression tactic whose roots go back to the Reconstruction era when Southerners targeted African-Americans voters. The modern version is associated with Republicans, which were barred by federal court in the 1980s from using the tactic to suppress minority voters. Modern caging involves sending registered letters to an opponent's supporters. If the mail is returned or is not accepted, then those sending the letter -- such as Republican partisans in 2004 -- will challenge the intended recipient's right to vote at their polling place.
On Election Day, a Republican poll challenger will wait for the voter to arrive and then challenge their right to vote by saying they don't live at the address on their registration. The voter has to prove otherwise. People are caged or kept from voting this way. The tactic, like the rash of states that in 2006 imposed voting I.D. card requirements, are intended to keep minority voters from casting ballots.
Federal prosecutors like Tim Griffin are supposed to defend voting rights, not suppress them -- which is what made Goodling's statement so startling. But this week the Judiciary Committee was more concerned about the firing of federal prosecutors and didn't pursue the "caging" reference until Rep. Linda Sanchez, the committee's first Latina member, asked Godling to "explain" it.
REP. SANCHEZ: Can you explain what caging is? I'm not familiar with that term.
MS. GOODLING: You know, my understanding -- and I don't actually know a lot about it -- is that it's a direct-mail term that people who do direct mail -- when they separate addresses that may be good versus addresses that may be bad -- that's the best information that I have, that it just -- that it's a direct-mail term that's used by vendors in that circumstance. ( transcript) The Democratic congresswoman's question period soon ended, and no one else followed up. It's hard to know what is more upsetting, the failure of the Judiciary Committee to open a high-profile door into GOP election fraud in 2004, or Goodling's apparently successful attempt to whitewash caging as a "direct-mail" technique.
If only Rep. Sanchez recalled the January 2005 report issued by the Democratic staff of the committee she sits on, "Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio," which detailed numerous ways Ohio's Democratic voters saw their votes suppressed and rejected in 2004 -- including caging. Perhaps then the Judiciary Committee -- and the press and public -- would see that the Bush administrations ethos of winning at all costs extends not just to picking partisan prosecutors but doing whatever it takes to win presidential elections. (Read the Judiciary Committee report here.)
As the 2005 Judiciary Committee report notes, Republicans in Ohio used many tactics to discourage likely Democratic voters from voting and having those votes count. More than 35,000 caging letters were sent out by the GOP. Thousands of GOP poll challengers were recruited. At the last minute, however, a federal court stuck down the Republican caging efforts in Ohio in 2004. As the Committee report stated, "Although the 'caging' tactics targeting 35,000 new voters by the Ohio Republican Party were eventually struck down, it is likely they had a negative impact on the inclination of minorities to vote."
The caging tactics were discriminatory and illegal, but they were not unique among the tools and tactics employed by Republicans to reelect the president. The scandal caused by the recent firing of U.S. attorneys -- apparently because they would not pursue voter fraud cases, according to recently discovered secret White House emails -- is but the tip of the GOP election iceberg. Summed up, the GOP's strategy was to shift the focus to problems with individual voters -- with charges of voter fraud -- while diverting attention from the party's systematic attempt to tilt the administration of the 2004 election. Individual voter fraud pales in comparison to systematic election fraud.
Again, the Judiciary Committee's 2005 Democratic staff report describes the GOP's systematic efforts to tilt Ohio's electoral playing field. Those efforts included changing voter registration and provisional ballot rules at the last minute, which caused thousands of ballots to be rejected. On Election Day, the state's Democratic strongholds saw voting machine shortages and the biggest voting machine malfunctions. While everything that could go wrong seemed to go wrong in Democratic districts, Ohio's GOP districts had a notable absence of comparable problems.
The firing of federal prosecutors has revealed much about the tactics and mindset of the president's top operatives and a compliant Justice Department. While the White House emails show top-ranking Republicans wanted federal prosecutors to file voter fraud cases against Democrats, the Judiciary Committee report found much more extensive voter fraud was perpetrated on behalf of Republicans, such as in rural Perry County, where "there appears to be an extraordinarily high level of 91 percent voter registration, yet a substantial number of these voters have never voted and have no signature on file." Of these, 3,100 voters registered on Nov. 8, 1977, a year with no major election. That is what systematic election fraud looks like.
Goodling's reference to U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin's role with "caging" on the 2004 Bush reelection campaign might yet shine a light into the dark practice of tilting elections that the GOP seems to have mastered -- and not just in Ohio. But the return of the Jim Crow tactic was not the topic that the Judiciary Committee Democrats wanted to hear about this week. Instead, the oversight hearing overlooked one of the day's biggest bombshells.
Steven Rosenfeld, is co-author, with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, of "What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election" (The New Press, 2006).
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Not even 4 months into the 110th Congress, CAPITULATION to Bush reveals dirty secret: Democrats did not so much EARN the majority, as fall into it...
Not even 4 months into the 110th Congress, CAPITULATION to Bush on the open-ended Iraq occupation funding bill reveals the Democratic leadership's dirty little secret: Democrats did not so much EARN the majority vote in November 2006, as they fell into the majority due to the tide of one Republican scandals breaking, one after another, into the evening news and morning papers.
And many of those scandals, we now know, were the LAST GASP of an INDEPENDENT federal criminal justice department. The LIBBY CONVICTION, the CUNNINGHAM CONVICTION, the BOB NEY CONVICTION, even the Jack Abramoff SERIAL BRIBERY CONVICTIONS - ALL of those convictions MAY NEVER HAVE HAPPENED, had the current crop of Bush-loyalist US Attorneys been in office when those cases were first brought up for investigation and later prosecution. THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN SMOTHERED by the Bush-loyalists US Attorneys - just as the FIRING of US Attorney CAROL LAM _short-circuited_ the aggressive prosecution of Dusty Foggo and other Republicans linked to the Cunningham BRIBERY CONVICTION.
The Democratic Leadership - ENABLERS of FRAUD, CORRUPTION, and MASSIVE VOTER DISENFRANCHISEMENT.... COMPLICIT with Republican CRIMES, even those that target the Dems OWN VOTING BASE and campaign activists.
And many of those scandals, we now know, were the LAST GASP of an INDEPENDENT federal criminal justice department. The LIBBY CONVICTION, the CUNNINGHAM CONVICTION, the BOB NEY CONVICTION, even the Jack Abramoff SERIAL BRIBERY CONVICTIONS - ALL of those convictions MAY NEVER HAVE HAPPENED, had the current crop of Bush-loyalist US Attorneys been in office when those cases were first brought up for investigation and later prosecution. THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN SMOTHERED by the Bush-loyalists US Attorneys - just as the FIRING of US Attorney CAROL LAM _short-circuited_ the aggressive prosecution of Dusty Foggo and other Republicans linked to the Cunningham BRIBERY CONVICTION.
The Democratic Leadership - ENABLERS of FRAUD, CORRUPTION, and MASSIVE VOTER DISENFRANCHISEMENT.... COMPLICIT with Republican CRIMES, even those that target the Dems OWN VOTING BASE and campaign activists.
Democratic Leaders are ENABLERS and COMPLICIT with the CRIMINAL CONDUCT of the Bush-Cheney administration
Over the past six years EVERY outrage, atrocity, and illegal action by the Bush administration has been, in the end, met with a "BUSINESS AS USUAL" attitude by the Democratic Congress.
- Illegal, felonious, massive purge of LEGAL Florida voters in the 20000 Florida presidential election? YAWNS from the Democrats of the House and Senate.
- KARL ROVE, Ari Fliescher, and the incoming Bush-Cheney press staff create a "Clinton-Gore staffers TRASHED White House property!" 'scandal' OUT OF THIN AIR - without a SINGLE PHOTOGRAPH OF EVIDENCE? - The Cowardly Democrats of the Senate BEND OVER BACKWARDS to CONFIRM, without pocket-veto or filibuster, ALL of Bush's partisan nominees.
- After warnings from Business Week magazine, ENRON melts down contemporaneously with the 9-11 attacks (that is, within 9 months of the Bush administration's inaugueration) - Senate Majority Leader TOM DASCHLE bends over backwrds to KEEP A SENATE ENRON INVESTIGATION -OUT- of national news (by allowing Senate Gov't. Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman to smoother an actual, aggressive investigation).
- Deputy Secretary of War PAUL WOLFOWITZ personally visits Iraq, and specifically ABU GHRAIB prison - where Iraqi prisoners are being "softened up" by their American prison guards, in premeditated preparation for "intensive interrogation" practices by military intel, CIA, and even private mercenaries in Uncle Sam's pay - and when the sadism and 'abuse' photos of Abu Ghraib become world news a month or two later, the cowardly Democrats sit on the sidelines as the Donald Rumsfeld Department of Defense runs KANGAROO COURTS that convict female, volunteer privates (and their low-level NCO superiors) of 'ABUSE' - WHILE the Bush-Cheney administration ASSERT THE 'RIGHT' TO TORTURE PRISONERS, TO DEATH if need be!
- John Kerry runs for president in 2004, pledging (as VP candidate Joe Lieberman had 4 years earlier) to "FIGHT" for Democratic voters and constituents. Kerry immediately makes the Democratic nominating convention ABOUT HIMSELF, starting a long campaign season where he basically REFUSES TO CONFRONT the awful, deceptive, bullying record of President Bush. KERRY STANDS THERE like a STUFFED-SHIRT PUNCHING BAG as Bush accuses the Dem candidate of being "a FLIP FLOPPER," Kerry too stupid, too cowed, or too compromised to point out that it was President Bush who FLIP-FLOPPED on his "get Osama bin Laden dead-or-alive" pledge. (Just a few months later, as the president was getting excited about his Iraq invasion, Mr. Bush said of Osama bin Laden "he no longer concerns me that much any more.")
- Running a pathetic and apathetic campaign was only the prelude to Kerry THROWING IN THE TOWEL his post-election battle - selling MILLIONS of Democratic voters DOWN THE RIVER.
- Democrats were heading for resounding, dismal defeat in the 2006 election, when, out of nowhere, the Mark Foley scandal broke across papers nationwide - reminding the public of ALL THE OTHER Republican scandals, from Bob Ney to Jack Abramoff to Randy "Duke" Cunningham to the illegal "outing" of an undercover CIA agent BY THE WHITE HOUSE, to the lies-to-war runup to the Iraq invasion.
UNTIL THE FOLEY SCANDAL crashed across American newspapers and TV newscasts, THE DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP had NO PLANS, determination, or resolve to highlight the above long series of Bush-Republican CRIMINAL SCANDALS.
In sum, for DOING NOTHING to publicize the above Bush administration/Republican CRIMINAL CONDUCT, the Democratic 'leadership' - Senator Reid, Senator Kerry, Senator Clinton, Senator Dodd, Senator Biden, the House Democratic leadership - are enablers, ARE COMPLICIT with those crimes.
FOR SHAME! America's government, ruling party, and even opposition party are all now determined by STRETCHING THE LIMITS of ILLEGAL "shocking lawlessness" conduct.
=========================================
- Ginsburg gasps -
by Ruth Marcus
Thursday, May 24, 2007
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-marcus_24edi.ART.State.Edition1.438f8eb.html
RUTH MARCUS says it's time to fret when even this justice is shocked by executive hubris
Patrick Philbin is an unlikely victim of the war on terror. In fact, he's one of its chief legal architects.
Mr. Philbin's conservative bona fides are unimpeachable. Law clerk for federal appeals judge Laurence Silberman, the ideological godfather of scores of conservative lawyers, then for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
As a Justice Department official, he wrote a memo in November 2001 concluding that the president had the "inherent authority" to establish military commissions to try detainees. Wrong, the Supreme Court eventually said.
Mr. Philbin co-authored a memo the next month finding that federal courts had no power to hear habeas corpus petitions by Guantánamo Bay detainees. Wrong again, said the Supreme Court.
This wasn't merely a lawyer zealously representing a client. Mr. Philbin, now in private practice, urged Congress in March not to close Guantánamo and transfer detainees here. Prisoners then "arguably will have constitutional rights" that they'll seek to assert, he warned.
Mr. Philbin seemed like a shoo-in to become deputy solicitor general. But even he was not a true enough believer for the administration's executive-power zealots, chiefly David Addington, now chief of staff to Vice President Cheney.
His fault? Manning the legal barricades against the administration's efforts to coerce Attorney General John Ashcroft to approve its extralegal warrantless wiretapping. Mr. Philbin was in Mr. Ashcroft's hospital room in 2004 when Al Gonzales and Andrew Card arrived for the Wednesday Night Ambush.
Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey referred to Mr. Addington's revenge in his Senate testimony last week by mentioning "one particular senior staffer of mine ... had been blocked from promotion, I believed, as a result of this particular matter. ... That was Mr. Philbin."
Mr. Philbin's out of government now. So, too, aside from FBI Director Robert Mueller, are the rest of those who stood up to the administration. Mr. Addington and Mr. Gonzales remain. That should chill anyone who believes in the rule of law, not rule by presidential fiat.
As Mr. Comey was testifying, another episode in the administration's assault on the rule of law was unfolding down the street, before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The issue in that case boiled down to just how limited will be the limited role that remains for Guantánamo detainees' lawyers and the courts, now that Congress has acceded to the administration's effort to strip the courts of habeas corpus jurisdiction.
When appearing before the Combatant Status Review Tribunal that decides whether they are enemy combatants, Guantánamo detainees don't have the right to a lawyer – just a "personal representative" who isn't obliged to maintain client confidentiality. Detainees hear only a summary of the evidence against them, and rulings can be made on the basis of hearsay or evidence obtained through coercion. Detainees have the burden of proving they are not enemy combatants – but have little practical ability to obtain helpful evidence. If, somehow, the tribunal finds in favor of the detainee, military authorities can call for a second or even a third "do-over."
The appeals court represents detainees' one, brief shot at a real legal process – though just how real remains to be determined. Last week, the wrangling was partly over what material lawyers could examine in representing their clients. The detainees' lawyers are seeking access to all the information the government has collected about the detainees – not just material selected for presentation to the tribunal.
The government contends that lawyers need only the material shown to the tribunal. No need to look further, the government says, because if there were any "exculpatory" material helpful to the detainees, the rules would have already required that it be turned over.
This is so maddeningly circular, so Catch-22 meets George Orwell, that it provoked an outburst from Chief Judge Douglas Ginsburg, a conservative Reagan appointee. "How can they assert that something is missing if they don't know what's present?" he asked the government's lawyer, Douglas Letter.
"What you're describing is a complete, a wholesale complete departure from any kind of adversarial system."
"Yes," Mr. Letter replied.
It is a terrifying legal worldview that drives a Patrick Philbin out of government and that leaves a Douglas Ginsburg sputtering in amazement at executive overreaching.
Ruth Marcus is a member of The Washington Post editorial page staff. Her e-mail address is marcusr@washpost.com.
- Illegal, felonious, massive purge of LEGAL Florida voters in the 20000 Florida presidential election? YAWNS from the Democrats of the House and Senate.
- KARL ROVE, Ari Fliescher, and the incoming Bush-Cheney press staff create a "Clinton-Gore staffers TRASHED White House property!" 'scandal' OUT OF THIN AIR - without a SINGLE PHOTOGRAPH OF EVIDENCE? - The Cowardly Democrats of the Senate BEND OVER BACKWARDS to CONFIRM, without pocket-veto or filibuster, ALL of Bush's partisan nominees.
- After warnings from Business Week magazine, ENRON melts down contemporaneously with the 9-11 attacks (that is, within 9 months of the Bush administration's inaugueration) - Senate Majority Leader TOM DASCHLE bends over backwrds to KEEP A SENATE ENRON INVESTIGATION -OUT- of national news (by allowing Senate Gov't. Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman to smoother an actual, aggressive investigation).
- Deputy Secretary of War PAUL WOLFOWITZ personally visits Iraq, and specifically ABU GHRAIB prison - where Iraqi prisoners are being "softened up" by their American prison guards, in premeditated preparation for "intensive interrogation" practices by military intel, CIA, and even private mercenaries in Uncle Sam's pay - and when the sadism and 'abuse' photos of Abu Ghraib become world news a month or two later, the cowardly Democrats sit on the sidelines as the Donald Rumsfeld Department of Defense runs KANGAROO COURTS that convict female, volunteer privates (and their low-level NCO superiors) of 'ABUSE' - WHILE the Bush-Cheney administration ASSERT THE 'RIGHT' TO TORTURE PRISONERS, TO DEATH if need be!
- John Kerry runs for president in 2004, pledging (as VP candidate Joe Lieberman had 4 years earlier) to "FIGHT" for Democratic voters and constituents. Kerry immediately makes the Democratic nominating convention ABOUT HIMSELF, starting a long campaign season where he basically REFUSES TO CONFRONT the awful, deceptive, bullying record of President Bush. KERRY STANDS THERE like a STUFFED-SHIRT PUNCHING BAG as Bush accuses the Dem candidate of being "a FLIP FLOPPER," Kerry too stupid, too cowed, or too compromised to point out that it was President Bush who FLIP-FLOPPED on his "get Osama bin Laden dead-or-alive" pledge. (Just a few months later, as the president was getting excited about his Iraq invasion, Mr. Bush said of Osama bin Laden "he no longer concerns me that much any more.")
- Running a pathetic and apathetic campaign was only the prelude to Kerry THROWING IN THE TOWEL his post-election battle - selling MILLIONS of Democratic voters DOWN THE RIVER.
- Democrats were heading for resounding, dismal defeat in the 2006 election, when, out of nowhere, the Mark Foley scandal broke across papers nationwide - reminding the public of ALL THE OTHER Republican scandals, from Bob Ney to Jack Abramoff to Randy "Duke" Cunningham to the illegal "outing" of an undercover CIA agent BY THE WHITE HOUSE, to the lies-to-war runup to the Iraq invasion.
UNTIL THE FOLEY SCANDAL crashed across American newspapers and TV newscasts, THE DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP had NO PLANS, determination, or resolve to highlight the above long series of Bush-Republican CRIMINAL SCANDALS.
In sum, for DOING NOTHING to publicize the above Bush administration/Republican CRIMINAL CONDUCT, the Democratic 'leadership' - Senator Reid, Senator Kerry, Senator Clinton, Senator Dodd, Senator Biden, the House Democratic leadership - are enablers, ARE COMPLICIT with those crimes.
FOR SHAME! America's government, ruling party, and even opposition party are all now determined by STRETCHING THE LIMITS of ILLEGAL "shocking lawlessness" conduct.
=========================================
- Ginsburg gasps -
by Ruth Marcus
Thursday, May 24, 2007
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-marcus_24edi.ART.State.Edition1.438f8eb.html
RUTH MARCUS says it's time to fret when even this justice is shocked by executive hubris
Patrick Philbin is an unlikely victim of the war on terror. In fact, he's one of its chief legal architects.
Mr. Philbin's conservative bona fides are unimpeachable. Law clerk for federal appeals judge Laurence Silberman, the ideological godfather of scores of conservative lawyers, then for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
As a Justice Department official, he wrote a memo in November 2001 concluding that the president had the "inherent authority" to establish military commissions to try detainees. Wrong, the Supreme Court eventually said.
Mr. Philbin co-authored a memo the next month finding that federal courts had no power to hear habeas corpus petitions by Guantánamo Bay detainees. Wrong again, said the Supreme Court.
This wasn't merely a lawyer zealously representing a client. Mr. Philbin, now in private practice, urged Congress in March not to close Guantánamo and transfer detainees here. Prisoners then "arguably will have constitutional rights" that they'll seek to assert, he warned.
Mr. Philbin seemed like a shoo-in to become deputy solicitor general. But even he was not a true enough believer for the administration's executive-power zealots, chiefly David Addington, now chief of staff to Vice President Cheney.
His fault? Manning the legal barricades against the administration's efforts to coerce Attorney General John Ashcroft to approve its extralegal warrantless wiretapping. Mr. Philbin was in Mr. Ashcroft's hospital room in 2004 when Al Gonzales and Andrew Card arrived for the Wednesday Night Ambush.
Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey referred to Mr. Addington's revenge in his Senate testimony last week by mentioning "one particular senior staffer of mine ... had been blocked from promotion, I believed, as a result of this particular matter. ... That was Mr. Philbin."
Mr. Philbin's out of government now. So, too, aside from FBI Director Robert Mueller, are the rest of those who stood up to the administration. Mr. Addington and Mr. Gonzales remain. That should chill anyone who believes in the rule of law, not rule by presidential fiat.
As Mr. Comey was testifying, another episode in the administration's assault on the rule of law was unfolding down the street, before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The issue in that case boiled down to just how limited will be the limited role that remains for Guantánamo detainees' lawyers and the courts, now that Congress has acceded to the administration's effort to strip the courts of habeas corpus jurisdiction.
When appearing before the Combatant Status Review Tribunal that decides whether they are enemy combatants, Guantánamo detainees don't have the right to a lawyer – just a "personal representative" who isn't obliged to maintain client confidentiality. Detainees hear only a summary of the evidence against them, and rulings can be made on the basis of hearsay or evidence obtained through coercion. Detainees have the burden of proving they are not enemy combatants – but have little practical ability to obtain helpful evidence. If, somehow, the tribunal finds in favor of the detainee, military authorities can call for a second or even a third "do-over."
The appeals court represents detainees' one, brief shot at a real legal process – though just how real remains to be determined. Last week, the wrangling was partly over what material lawyers could examine in representing their clients. The detainees' lawyers are seeking access to all the information the government has collected about the detainees – not just material selected for presentation to the tribunal.
The government contends that lawyers need only the material shown to the tribunal. No need to look further, the government says, because if there were any "exculpatory" material helpful to the detainees, the rules would have already required that it be turned over.
This is so maddeningly circular, so Catch-22 meets George Orwell, that it provoked an outburst from Chief Judge Douglas Ginsburg, a conservative Reagan appointee. "How can they assert that something is missing if they don't know what's present?" he asked the government's lawyer, Douglas Letter.
"What you're describing is a complete, a wholesale complete departure from any kind of adversarial system."
"Yes," Mr. Letter replied.
It is a terrifying legal worldview that drives a Patrick Philbin out of government and that leaves a Douglas Ginsburg sputtering in amazement at executive overreaching.
Ruth Marcus is a member of The Washington Post editorial page staff. Her e-mail address is marcusr@washpost.com.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Cowardly Democrats selling their voters, consitutents, AMERICA - DOWN THE RIVER, on issue after issue...
WHERE do we even start? EVERYONE in America knows that going to LAW SCHOOL is an arduous task... That law school students are expected to MEMORIZE obscure case law, rulings recorded years ago in legal texts, that they should be able to research all through the legal procedings of decades past to support or refute a given case in their future careers as lawyers.
Yet on matters of conduct and direction at the VERY CORE of US Justice Department, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales stated "I can't recall," or "I can't remember," or "I don't know the answer to that question" TIME AFTER TIME AFTER TIME in testimony before the House and Senate judiciary committees.
The Attorney General's testimony appeared, at times, to contradict itself - to make him appear to by lying under oath - and that impression has been supported by the testimony of other senor Justice Department officials, under sworn testimony before Congress, including Deputy Attorney General Paul McNolty, Kyle Sampson, and, today, Monica Goodling.
YET AT EACH AND EVERY STEP OF THE WAY on the issue of "Purge-gate" - the FIRING of qualified, competent, and successful US Attorneys, to be replaced by those who in some cases had NO PROSECUTORIAL EXPEIENCE AT ALL - the Cowering Democratic Leadership JOINS THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION and Washington punditocracy "Conventional Wisdom" in saying "NO PROBLEM HERE! Using the US Justice Department as an arm of the Republican Party - to DISENFRANCHISE and INTIMIDATE LEGAL VOTERS - is acceptable procedure."
PURGE-gate lawlessness - 'caging' voter lists, obstruction of justice, illegal wiretaps, possible perjury under oath - is only ONE FACET of the lawlessness that PERVADES THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION.
Vice President Dick Cheney OWNING HALLIBURTON STOCK OPTIONS, WHILE DIRECTING NO-BID, NO OVERSIGHT CONTRACTS TO IRAQ, should certainly be another example of LAWLESSNESS from within the Bush adminstration THAT IS IGNORED BY DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP.
So to is the CIA-OUTING SCANDAL, and Presidential Political Advisor Karl Rove's role in the original, illegal "Outing" of an undercover CIA operation (to discredit a critic of the White House's pshing the Iraq war); his role in the OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE that pushed that scandal beyond the 2004 presidential election (with the abject complicity of the cowardly John Kerry campaign); and the PERJURY Mr. Rove skirted in pursuit of that obstruction of justice.
The Democratic Leadership NEVER sought to aggressively TIE President Bush to Ken Lay and the chronic FRAUD of the ENRON meltdown - despite Enron and Mr. Lay being Mr. Bush's number one campaign contributors from his two Texas gubernatorial races through his presidential primary, presidential election, and Florida recount legal battle.
IN SHORT, the Democratic "LEADERSHIP" has played HEAR NO EVIL, SEE NO EVIL, SPEAK NO EVIL" of Bush administration LAWLESSNESS for so long, and so consistently, that BEING COMPLICIT with Bush administration lawlessness IS NOW THE DEFINING CHARACTERISTIC of the Democratic "leadership."
COMPLICITY - in LAWLESSNESS - SELLING American voters, citizens, workers, pensioners, and constituents DOWN THE RIVER, because Democrats have made themselves addicted to big campaign donors and corporate lobbyist fundraising.
========================================
(Note: behind the USA Today and DOJ double-speak, this story captures ATTORNEY GENERAL Alberto Gonzales DENYING ANY ROLE or RESPONSIBILY in drawing up the list of US Attorneys to be FIRED ("purged") by the Bush administration, and tries to LAY THE BLAME for the selection of those purged US Attorneys at the feet of an underling - Deputy AG McNulty - who is on the way out (has resigned from) the Department of Justice. This is of course DESPICABLE that the Attorney General of the United States makes himself out to be a useless, uninformed, no-responsibility drone.
The only question is, "WHICH is MORE DESPICABLE - the Bush Administration PURGING competent, successful US prosecutors to replace them with unqualified "Heck of a job, Brownie" partisan HACKS - - - or the fact that after "Heckuva job Brownie" has enterted the American lexicon as a symbol of corruption, incompetence, and partisan cronyism, the COWARDLY DEMOCRATS offer NO ENERGETIC or compelling answer to President Bush doing the SAME THING TO THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT that he did to FEMA before Hurrican Katrina exposed his rank cronyism there.)
Gonzales: McNulty knew best about firings
USA Today - Staff and wire-service reporters
May __? 2007
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-05-15-gonzales-firings_N.htm?csp=34
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Tuesday that his deputy, who is resigning, was the most important player in the controversial decision about which U.S. attorneys should be fired last year.
Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, who said Monday that he will leave his post this summer for financial reasons, is the highest-ranking Justice Department official to step down since the issue over the firings erupted this year.
McNulty's testimony in February helped ignite the firestorm that has led to calls in Congress for Gonzales to resign.
Yet on matters of conduct and direction at the VERY CORE of US Justice Department, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales stated "I can't recall," or "I can't remember," or "I don't know the answer to that question" TIME AFTER TIME AFTER TIME in testimony before the House and Senate judiciary committees.
The Attorney General's testimony appeared, at times, to contradict itself - to make him appear to by lying under oath - and that impression has been supported by the testimony of other senor Justice Department officials, under sworn testimony before Congress, including Deputy Attorney General Paul McNolty, Kyle Sampson, and, today, Monica Goodling.
YET AT EACH AND EVERY STEP OF THE WAY on the issue of "Purge-gate" - the FIRING of qualified, competent, and successful US Attorneys, to be replaced by those who in some cases had NO PROSECUTORIAL EXPEIENCE AT ALL - the Cowering Democratic Leadership JOINS THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION and Washington punditocracy "Conventional Wisdom" in saying "NO PROBLEM HERE! Using the US Justice Department as an arm of the Republican Party - to DISENFRANCHISE and INTIMIDATE LEGAL VOTERS - is acceptable procedure."
PURGE-gate lawlessness - 'caging' voter lists, obstruction of justice, illegal wiretaps, possible perjury under oath - is only ONE FACET of the lawlessness that PERVADES THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION.
Vice President Dick Cheney OWNING HALLIBURTON STOCK OPTIONS, WHILE DIRECTING NO-BID, NO OVERSIGHT CONTRACTS TO IRAQ, should certainly be another example of LAWLESSNESS from within the Bush adminstration THAT IS IGNORED BY DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP.
So to is the CIA-OUTING SCANDAL, and Presidential Political Advisor Karl Rove's role in the original, illegal "Outing" of an undercover CIA operation (to discredit a critic of the White House's pshing the Iraq war); his role in the OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE that pushed that scandal beyond the 2004 presidential election (with the abject complicity of the cowardly John Kerry campaign); and the PERJURY Mr. Rove skirted in pursuit of that obstruction of justice.
The Democratic Leadership NEVER sought to aggressively TIE President Bush to Ken Lay and the chronic FRAUD of the ENRON meltdown - despite Enron and Mr. Lay being Mr. Bush's number one campaign contributors from his two Texas gubernatorial races through his presidential primary, presidential election, and Florida recount legal battle.
IN SHORT, the Democratic "LEADERSHIP" has played HEAR NO EVIL, SEE NO EVIL, SPEAK NO EVIL" of Bush administration LAWLESSNESS for so long, and so consistently, that BEING COMPLICIT with Bush administration lawlessness IS NOW THE DEFINING CHARACTERISTIC of the Democratic "leadership."
COMPLICITY - in LAWLESSNESS - SELLING American voters, citizens, workers, pensioners, and constituents DOWN THE RIVER, because Democrats have made themselves addicted to big campaign donors and corporate lobbyist fundraising.
========================================
(Note: behind the USA Today and DOJ double-speak, this story captures ATTORNEY GENERAL Alberto Gonzales DENYING ANY ROLE or RESPONSIBILY in drawing up the list of US Attorneys to be FIRED ("purged") by the Bush administration, and tries to LAY THE BLAME for the selection of those purged US Attorneys at the feet of an underling - Deputy AG McNulty - who is on the way out (has resigned from) the Department of Justice. This is of course DESPICABLE that the Attorney General of the United States makes himself out to be a useless, uninformed, no-responsibility drone.
The only question is, "WHICH is MORE DESPICABLE - the Bush Administration PURGING competent, successful US prosecutors to replace them with unqualified "Heck of a job, Brownie" partisan HACKS - - - or the fact that after "Heckuva job Brownie" has enterted the American lexicon as a symbol of corruption, incompetence, and partisan cronyism, the COWARDLY DEMOCRATS offer NO ENERGETIC or compelling answer to President Bush doing the SAME THING TO THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT that he did to FEMA before Hurrican Katrina exposed his rank cronyism there.)
Gonzales: McNulty knew best about firings
USA Today - Staff and wire-service reporters
May __? 2007
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-05-15-gonzales-firings_N.htm?csp=34
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Tuesday that his deputy, who is resigning, was the most important player in the controversial decision about which U.S. attorneys should be fired last year.
Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, who said Monday that he will leave his post this summer for financial reasons, is the highest-ranking Justice Department official to step down since the issue over the firings erupted this year.
McNulty's testimony in February helped ignite the firestorm that has led to calls in Congress for Gonzales to resign.
"Cynical Democrats INDIFFERENT to suffering of US troops & Iraq civilians? You Bet!"
"Cynical Democrats INDIFFERENT to suffering of US troops & Iraq civilians? You Bet!" - Thomas de Zengotita, contributing editor, Harper's magazine, at HuffingtonPost.com)
ACTUALLY - we are not entirely unsypathetic with this Democratic leadership example of "REAL POLITIK" in action, of the sort that Henry Kissinger was famous for. OUR BIGGER COMPLAINT is not that the volunteer troops in Iraq are being used as window dressing by the ghoulishly incompetent, corrupt, and increasingly dictatorial Bush administration, but that the Democratic leadership IS ALSO "GOING SOFT" on the Bush administration here in America and in Washington -
- GIVING CHENEY A FREE PASS for his HALLIBURTON stock-options!
- GIVING BUSH a FREE PASS for having put an UNQUALIFIED PARTY HACK with NO DISASTER RELIEF EXPERIENCE - Mike Brown - in charge of FEMA before the Katrina hurricane hit the Gulf Coast...
- GIVING KARL ROVE a FREE PASS for his role in CIA-OUTING-gate, the OBSTRUCTION of JUSTICE that followed first reports of that scandal, and then giving Karl Rove a SECOND FREE PASS for his role in US ATTORNEY PURGE-gate, aka "the use of vast US criminal justice powers to CRIMINALIZE Democratic vote-registration activists, as if this were Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, or the Segregation-era Deep South (USA)!
- GIVING Alberto Gonzales a FREE PASS for LYING to Congress and the American public - NO ONE passes Law School and the Bar Exam, "FORGETTING" important meetings they held mere months earlier.
- Just as the Democratic Senate GAVE the Jeb Bush/Katherine Harris campaign a FREE PASS for MASSIVE VOTER DISENFRANCHISEMENT in Florida in 2000 (Dem Senate Leadership REFUSING to sign-on to the Black Congressional Caucus demands for a simple Congressional investigation into those massive trashed-votes problems.)
- Just as the Congressional Democrats ALLOWED the Bush administation to make the 9-11 Commission into a paper circus, Mr. Bush's CONTEMPTOUS REFUSAL to appear under oath with the dignity his massive failures preceeding 9-11 should have demanded.
(And it was only because of the relentless efforts of the 9-11 widows, NOT the Democratic leadership, that there was a 9-11 Commission at all.)
Clearly, the Democratic "LEADERSHIP" are NOT LEADING on these and other issues, but are FOLLOWERS - FOLLOWERS of the inside-the-beltway DC "CONVENTIONAL WISDOM."
We remind - the DC "CONVENTIONAL WISDOM" as spouted by the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, and other organizations (much less the right-wing 'news' sources Washington Times, Fox 'news', and Wall St. Journal) is NOTHING MORE THAN THE KARL ROVE/RUSH LIMBAUGH TALKING POINTS, given a brief polish and spin by the David Broders, George Wills, and other pooh-bah millionaires of the DC punditocracy class.
IT IS LONG PAST TIME that the Democratic "leadership" STOPPED TAKING ITS MARCHING ORDERS and leadership cues FROM RUSH LIMBAUGH, KARL ROVE, and the DC punditocracy class!
=================================================
House Democrats Cave on War Funding? Basic Principles of Judo
by Thomas De Zengotita
May 21, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-de-zengotita/house-democrats-cave-on-w_b_49093.html
Ok, there they all were this evening, looking Memorial Day in the eye, and sending Bush his war funding without timelines. A bill full of language authored by John Warner, as a matter of fact. But one that also included a rise in the minimum wage and hurricane relief. There they were: Pelosi, Hoyer, Obey, Emanuel.
CAVING.
But look, these people aren't stupid. They know what they're doing. The real issue is does the anti-war progressive base know what it is doing? Is it focused on making sure that Democrats win the White House in '08 and keep control of both houses of Congress? Or is it focused on a genuinely radical anti-corporate, anti-imperial, anti-globalization long term agenda for which the fate of Democrats in '08 is just an incidental tactical issue?
Someday I'll sketch out what the strategy and tactics should be for the genuine radicals. But for those progressives who want to ensure a Democratic sweep in '08, here's the deal. Judo is all about falling backwards after pretending to shove forward. Judo is all about flipping the opponent by virtue of his own weight as he leans into the emptiness of your caving.
What House Democrats are trying to guarantee is this: the Iraq war belongs to Bush and the Republican Party now -- and so it must when the election of 2008 rolls around. That's what they want to guarantee above all else.
Cynical? Indifferent to the suffering of US troops and Iraqi civilians?
You bet.
Welcome to the political world of grown-ups who hold office and have institutional responsibility.
Myself, I'm Peter Pan...
Send to a friendPost a CommentPrint PostRead all posts by Thomas de Zengotita
ACTUALLY - we are not entirely unsypathetic with this Democratic leadership example of "REAL POLITIK" in action, of the sort that Henry Kissinger was famous for. OUR BIGGER COMPLAINT is not that the volunteer troops in Iraq are being used as window dressing by the ghoulishly incompetent, corrupt, and increasingly dictatorial Bush administration, but that the Democratic leadership IS ALSO "GOING SOFT" on the Bush administration here in America and in Washington -
- GIVING CHENEY A FREE PASS for his HALLIBURTON stock-options!
- GIVING BUSH a FREE PASS for having put an UNQUALIFIED PARTY HACK with NO DISASTER RELIEF EXPERIENCE - Mike Brown - in charge of FEMA before the Katrina hurricane hit the Gulf Coast...
- GIVING KARL ROVE a FREE PASS for his role in CIA-OUTING-gate, the OBSTRUCTION of JUSTICE that followed first reports of that scandal, and then giving Karl Rove a SECOND FREE PASS for his role in US ATTORNEY PURGE-gate, aka "the use of vast US criminal justice powers to CRIMINALIZE Democratic vote-registration activists, as if this were Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, or the Segregation-era Deep South (USA)!
- GIVING Alberto Gonzales a FREE PASS for LYING to Congress and the American public - NO ONE passes Law School and the Bar Exam, "FORGETTING" important meetings they held mere months earlier.
- Just as the Democratic Senate GAVE the Jeb Bush/Katherine Harris campaign a FREE PASS for MASSIVE VOTER DISENFRANCHISEMENT in Florida in 2000 (Dem Senate Leadership REFUSING to sign-on to the Black Congressional Caucus demands for a simple Congressional investigation into those massive trashed-votes problems.)
- Just as the Congressional Democrats ALLOWED the Bush administation to make the 9-11 Commission into a paper circus, Mr. Bush's CONTEMPTOUS REFUSAL to appear under oath with the dignity his massive failures preceeding 9-11 should have demanded.
(And it was only because of the relentless efforts of the 9-11 widows, NOT the Democratic leadership, that there was a 9-11 Commission at all.)
Clearly, the Democratic "LEADERSHIP" are NOT LEADING on these and other issues, but are FOLLOWERS - FOLLOWERS of the inside-the-beltway DC "CONVENTIONAL WISDOM."
We remind - the DC "CONVENTIONAL WISDOM" as spouted by the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, and other organizations (much less the right-wing 'news' sources Washington Times, Fox 'news', and Wall St. Journal) is NOTHING MORE THAN THE KARL ROVE/RUSH LIMBAUGH TALKING POINTS, given a brief polish and spin by the David Broders, George Wills, and other pooh-bah millionaires of the DC punditocracy class.
IT IS LONG PAST TIME that the Democratic "leadership" STOPPED TAKING ITS MARCHING ORDERS and leadership cues FROM RUSH LIMBAUGH, KARL ROVE, and the DC punditocracy class!
=================================================
House Democrats Cave on War Funding? Basic Principles of Judo
by Thomas De Zengotita
May 21, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thomas-de-zengotita/house-democrats-cave-on-w_b_49093.html
Ok, there they all were this evening, looking Memorial Day in the eye, and sending Bush his war funding without timelines. A bill full of language authored by John Warner, as a matter of fact. But one that also included a rise in the minimum wage and hurricane relief. There they were: Pelosi, Hoyer, Obey, Emanuel.
CAVING.
But look, these people aren't stupid. They know what they're doing. The real issue is does the anti-war progressive base know what it is doing? Is it focused on making sure that Democrats win the White House in '08 and keep control of both houses of Congress? Or is it focused on a genuinely radical anti-corporate, anti-imperial, anti-globalization long term agenda for which the fate of Democrats in '08 is just an incidental tactical issue?
Someday I'll sketch out what the strategy and tactics should be for the genuine radicals. But for those progressives who want to ensure a Democratic sweep in '08, here's the deal. Judo is all about falling backwards after pretending to shove forward. Judo is all about flipping the opponent by virtue of his own weight as he leans into the emptiness of your caving.
What House Democrats are trying to guarantee is this: the Iraq war belongs to Bush and the Republican Party now -- and so it must when the election of 2008 rolls around. That's what they want to guarantee above all else.
Cynical? Indifferent to the suffering of US troops and Iraqi civilians?
You bet.
Welcome to the political world of grown-ups who hold office and have institutional responsibility.
Myself, I'm Peter Pan...
Send to a friendPost a CommentPrint PostRead all posts by Thomas de Zengotita
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
FEAR is the DEFINING CHACTERISTIC of Democrats in Congress: FEAR of calling the Bush-Cheney-Rove admin. to account...
What can we say? FEAR is now the DEFINING CHARACTERISTIC of the Democrats who ostensibly "REPRESENT" the millions of voters who voted them into office.
- Democrats DID NOTHING to back the Black Congressional demands for a Congressional investigation into massive Florida voter disenfranchisement in 2000...
- the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate stood - useless and mute on the sidelines - as Karl Rove and the Republican smear machine tarred departing Clinton-Gore White House staffers as "TRASHING the White House" - WITHOUT ONE SINGLE PHOTOGRAPH OF EVIDENCE.
- Tom Daschle and Joe Lieberman SMOTHERED an aggressive investigation into ENRON fraud in 2002, robbing Democratic candidates of their best issue that mid-term election (the opportunity to tie George W. Bush to Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and systematic Enron fraud) - thereby handing the Senate majority back over to the Republicans, despite Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords courageously handing the Senate Majority BACK to an underserving Daschle a few short months before. (Daschle, the Senate Majority Leader from a small state, went down to ignominous defeat, his photo juxtaposed with those of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in Republican smear-campaign TV ads.)
- In 2004, John Kerry REFUSED to make the scandal of the criminal "OUTING" of an entire CIA operation (Brewster-Jennings co.) from WITHIN the Bush White House into a campaign issue, among other egregious Kerry campaign failures that left Democratic voters, donors, and activists feeling as if their candidate had "taken a fall."
- Despite the CIA refering the illegal "Outing" of its CIA covert operations officer and entire operation to the FBI, and despite Independent Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald winning a laborious and thorough conviction against Senior Presidential Advisor Lewis "Scooter" Libby (who was concurrently the Vice President's Chief of Staff), the Democrats REFUSED to follow through on the CRIMINAL PERJURY and OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE convictions, demanding the White House answer to that scandal, and the role that White House Political Advisor Karl Rove played in the criminal scandal.
- When a tide of scandals and corruption circling the White House finally drove American voters to vote, by default, for the (Democratic) opposition, the Bush White House enacted its long-planned PURGE of US Attorneys, in an effort to intimidate minority and Democratic voters with accusations and prosecutions aimed at Democratic vote registration activists. The Democrats response has been tepid, indeed, it is REPUBLICAN senators who are more vocally calling for Attorney General Gonzales resignation...
... AND DEMOCRATS are AFRAID to even MENTION the name of the mastermind of "Purge-gate" - their old nemisis, KARL ROVE.
- and, as well, the Democrats are marked by THEIR FEAR to TIE Vice President Cheney to his HALLIUBURTON STOCK OPTIONS
HALLIBURTON...
CIA-outing scandal, perjury, obstruction of justice...
Jack Abramoff's close ties to the White House...
Katrina disaster incompetence and fraud reconstrucion contracts....
Karl Rove's role in the CIA outing scandal and PURGE-gate US Attorneys scandal...
ON EACH OF THE ABOVE ISSUES, FEAR of President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Karl Rove IS THE cowering Democrat's DEFINING characteristic.
The Democratic leadership would rather court their industry and wealthy donors, and take orders from the Washington DC punditocracy "Conventional Wisdom," THAN STAND UP FOR THE RULE OF LAW and the rights of their own, Democratic voters.
- Democrats DID NOTHING to back the Black Congressional demands for a Congressional investigation into massive Florida voter disenfranchisement in 2000...
- the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate stood - useless and mute on the sidelines - as Karl Rove and the Republican smear machine tarred departing Clinton-Gore White House staffers as "TRASHING the White House" - WITHOUT ONE SINGLE PHOTOGRAPH OF EVIDENCE.
- Tom Daschle and Joe Lieberman SMOTHERED an aggressive investigation into ENRON fraud in 2002, robbing Democratic candidates of their best issue that mid-term election (the opportunity to tie George W. Bush to Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and systematic Enron fraud) - thereby handing the Senate majority back over to the Republicans, despite Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords courageously handing the Senate Majority BACK to an underserving Daschle a few short months before. (Daschle, the Senate Majority Leader from a small state, went down to ignominous defeat, his photo juxtaposed with those of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in Republican smear-campaign TV ads.)
- In 2004, John Kerry REFUSED to make the scandal of the criminal "OUTING" of an entire CIA operation (Brewster-Jennings co.) from WITHIN the Bush White House into a campaign issue, among other egregious Kerry campaign failures that left Democratic voters, donors, and activists feeling as if their candidate had "taken a fall."
- Despite the CIA refering the illegal "Outing" of its CIA covert operations officer and entire operation to the FBI, and despite Independent Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald winning a laborious and thorough conviction against Senior Presidential Advisor Lewis "Scooter" Libby (who was concurrently the Vice President's Chief of Staff), the Democrats REFUSED to follow through on the CRIMINAL PERJURY and OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE convictions, demanding the White House answer to that scandal, and the role that White House Political Advisor Karl Rove played in the criminal scandal.
- When a tide of scandals and corruption circling the White House finally drove American voters to vote, by default, for the (Democratic) opposition, the Bush White House enacted its long-planned PURGE of US Attorneys, in an effort to intimidate minority and Democratic voters with accusations and prosecutions aimed at Democratic vote registration activists. The Democrats response has been tepid, indeed, it is REPUBLICAN senators who are more vocally calling for Attorney General Gonzales resignation...
... AND DEMOCRATS are AFRAID to even MENTION the name of the mastermind of "Purge-gate" - their old nemisis, KARL ROVE.
- and, as well, the Democrats are marked by THEIR FEAR to TIE Vice President Cheney to his HALLIUBURTON STOCK OPTIONS
HALLIBURTON...
CIA-outing scandal, perjury, obstruction of justice...
Jack Abramoff's close ties to the White House...
Katrina disaster incompetence and fraud reconstrucion contracts....
Karl Rove's role in the CIA outing scandal and PURGE-gate US Attorneys scandal...
ON EACH OF THE ABOVE ISSUES, FEAR of President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Karl Rove IS THE cowering Democrat's DEFINING characteristic.
The Democratic leadership would rather court their industry and wealthy donors, and take orders from the Washington DC punditocracy "Conventional Wisdom," THAN STAND UP FOR THE RULE OF LAW and the rights of their own, Democratic voters.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Purge-gate: Karl Rove & George Bush's effort to use Justice Department as a VOTE STEALING, VOTER INTIMIDATION machine....
In our previous post, we wrote that over the past decade-and-half (basically since the end of the Cold War robbed Right-Wing intellectuals and political leaders of their "evil empire" enemy), Republicans have MASTERED the black art of MAKING DEMOCRATS LOOK LIKE EFFIMINATE, wimpy caricatures.
But on the issue of SYSTEMATIC VOTER DISENFRANCHISEMENT, there is more than a grain of truth to Republican accusations and caricatures, for the Repubs know that all they have to do is shout "LAW AND ORDER!" and "MORAL VALUES!" and "VOTER FRAUD!" and their Democratic adversaries will RUN FOR THE HILLS - leaving their own voters, and even their own candidates - hanging out to rot in the breeze.
In 2000 Al Gore bought into the Republican cries of "MORAL VALUES!" not only in nominating "moral values" hypocrite Joe Lieberman to be his running mate - but in REFUSING TO CO-SIGN the Black Congressional Caucus DEMANDS for an investigation into massive Republican election fraud in the Florida 20000 vote (non-) recount.
Senator John Kerry went Gore's campaign ONE WORSE, presidential candidate kerry abjectly REFUSING to counter President Bush's charges of "FLIP FLOPPER!" by replying that it was Mr. Bush who had RENEGED on his "I'll get Osama bin Laden DEAD OR ALIVE!" pledge, in a video photo-op at ground zero, then less than a year later (when the US mission in Afghanistan was being sold short in order to shift US troops to the pending invasion of Iraq) the same Mr. Bush declared "Osama bin Laden DOESN'T CONCERN ME THAT MUCH ANYMORE.
Mr. Kerry's refusal to aggressively CONFRONT Bush's record was a betrayal of all the activists, donors, and Democratic voters who put their hearts into his campaign - hoping to have a FIGHTER represent their hopes and convictions, and instead getting a stuffed-shirt punching bag.
And in 2002, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, and Senate Govt. Affairs Committee Chairman Senator Joe Lieberman - SOLD THOUSANDS of Enron workers, pensioners, investors, and customers DOWN THE RIVER by REFUSING to hold thorough and aggressive investigations into Enron fraud. (Such an investigation would ultimately be held in the trial of Enron executives Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and others who were convicted of fraud for overstating that company's profits and setting up shell subsidiaries to siphon off what profits there were.)
Thus, in at least the past two presidential elections, and the 2002 midterm election, Democrats are DEFINED as - selling their own constituents down the river. And even in the 2006 mid-term election, there is compelling evidence that 18,000 voters were ROBBED OF THEIR VOTES in Florida District 13 voting (The seat Katherine Harris gave up in her senate campaign.) Karl Rove Republicans are already working on similar tactics for the NEXT election, while Democratic leadership PRETENDS NOT TO NOTICE this egregious THEFT of thousands of votes in the past election!
In his most recent editorial, exiled investigative reporter Greg Pallast makes the charge that Democratic leadership CONCIOUSLY sells minority voters down the river, in a "belly-of-the-beast" alliance with neo-segregationist Bush-GOP leadership. That charge may or may not be overstated - but just as President Bush claimed that "OSAMA BIN LADEN NO LONGER CONCERNS ME", the Democratic leadership has an APPALLING record of not being concerned by massive Republican VOTE-STEALING and VOTER DISENFRANCHISEMENT techniques. ==================================================
Efforts to stop `voter fraud' may have curbed legitimate voting
By Greg Gordon
McClatchy Newspapers
May 20, 2007
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/nation/17256012.htm?source=rss&channel=krwashington_nation
WASHINGTON - During four years as a Justice Department civil rights lawyer, Hans von Spakovsky went so far in a crusade against voter fraud as to warn of its dangers under a pseudonym in a law journal article.
Writing as "Publius," von Spakovsky contended that every voter should be required to produce a photo-identification card and that there was "no evidence" that such restrictions burden minority voters disproportionately.
Now, amid a scandal over politicization of the Justice Department, Congress is beginning to examine allegations that von Spakovsky was a key player in a Republican campaign to hang onto power in Washington by suppressing the votes of minority voters.
"Mr. von Spakovsky was central to the administration's pursuit of strategies that had the effect of suppressing the minority vote," charged Joseph Rich, a former Justice Department voting rights chief who worked under him.
He and other former career department lawyers say that von Spakovsky steered the agency toward voting rights policies not seen before, pushing to curb minor instances of election fraud by imposing sweeping restrictions that would make it harder, not easier, for Democratic-leaning poor and minority voters to cast ballots.
In interviews, current and former federal officials and civil rights leaders told McClatchy Newspapers that von Spakovsky:
-Sped approval of tougher voter ID laws in Georgia and Arizona in 2005, joining decisions to override career lawyers who believed that Georgia's law would restrict voting by poor blacks and who felt that more analysis was needed on the Arizona law's impact on Native Americans and Latinos.
-Tried to influence the federal Election Assistance Commission's research into the dimensions of voter fraud nationally and the impact of restrictive voter ID laws - research that could undermine a vote-suppression agenda.
-Allegedly engineered the ouster of the commission's chairman, Paul DiGregorio, whom von Spakovsky considered insufficiently partisan.
Von Spakovsky, who declined to comment on these allegations, is among more than a dozen present and former Justice Department officials drawing congressional scrutiny over the administration's alleged use of the nation's chief law enforcement agency for partisan purposes.
Congressional committees investigating the firing last year of nine U.S. attorneys are looking into allegations that prosecutors nationwide were urged to pursue voter fraud to build a basis for tougher ID laws.
Von Spakovsky, who had been a longtime voting rights activist and elections official in Georgia before serving at Justice, accepted a presidential recess appointment to a Republican slot on the Federal Election Commission in December 2005. He is scheduled to appear at a June 13 confirmation hearing before the Senate Rules and Administration Committee.
The House Administration Committee is also inquiring into von Spakovsky's communications with the Election Assistance Commission, a tiny agency that implemented a 2002 election reform law and serves as a national election information clearinghouse.
The bipartisan, four-member commission stirred a political tempest last year when it delayed the release of voter fraud and voter ID law studies, saying that more research was needed. A House panel revealed last month that the fraud study's central finding - that there was little evidence of widespread voter fraud - had been toned down to say that "a great deal of debate" surrounded the subject.
Commissioners rejected as flawed the second study's finding that voter ID laws tend to suppress turnout, especially among Latinos, and ordered more research.
Rich said that von Spakovsky usurped his seat on a commission advisory panel in 2004, although the law creating the panel allocated that spot for the Voting Rights Section chief "or his designee." Rich said he was not consulted.
After the commission hired both liberal and conservative consultants to work on the studies in 2005, e-mails show that von Spakovsky tried to persuade panel members that the research was flawed.
In an Aug. 18, 2005, e-mail to Chairman DiGregorio, he objected strenuously to a contract award for the ID study to researchers at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law, who were teaming with a group at Rutgers University. Von Spakovsky wrote that Daniel Tokaji, the associate director of Moritz' election program, was "an outspoken opponent of voter identification requirements" and that those "pre-existing notions" should disqualify him from federal funding for impartial research.
The criticism was ironic coming from von Spakovsky, who a few months earlier had written the anonymous article for the Texas Review of Law and Politics, in which he called voter fraud a problem of importance equal to racial discrimination at the polls. Von Spakovsky acknowledged writing the article after joining the FEC.
Months after its publication, he participated in the department's review of Georgia's photo ID law, as required under the 1965 Voting Rights Act for election laws passed in 16 Southern states. After the department approved it, a federal judge struck it down as akin to a Jim Crow-era poll tax on minority voters.
Rich called von Spakovsky's failure to withdraw from the case "especially disturbing, given the clear ethical concerns" over his prior work as a Georgia elections official and the bias in his article.
Von Spakovsky's tone toward DiGregorio grew increasingly harsh in 2005 as the chairman refused to take partisan stands, said two people close to the commission who declined to be identified because of the matter's sensitivity.
Their differences seemed to come to a head last year over two issues raised by Arizona's Republican secretary of state, Janice Brewer, who was implementing the toughest state voter identification law in the nation. In April 2005, the Justice Department erroneously advised her that Arizona did not need to offer a provisional ballot to those lacking proof of citizenship.
E-mails suggest that von Spakovsky contacted an aide to Missouri Republican Sen. Kit Bond, who inquired of DiGregorio whether the commission was "seriously considering taking a position against" the department on the provisional ballot question.
DiGregorio sent a testy message asking von Spakovsky if the note from Capitol Hill was "an attempt by you to put pressure on me."
"If so, I do not appreciate it," he wrote.
The next day, von Spakovsky wrote DiGregorio that he thought they "had a deal" under which the department would reconsider its position on provisional ballots if the commission would allow Arizona to modify the federal voter registration form to require proof of citizenship.
"I do not agree to `deals,' especially when it comes to interpretation of the law," DiGregorio replied.
Last September, the White House replaced DiGregorio with Caroline Hunter, a former deputy counsel to the Republican National Committee. DiGregorio confided to associates that he was told that von Spakovsky influenced the White House's decision not to reappoint him, said the two people close to the panel.
Asked about his ouster, DiGregorio said only that he "was aware that Mr. von Spakovsky was not pleased with the bipartisan approaches that I took."
But on the issue of SYSTEMATIC VOTER DISENFRANCHISEMENT, there is more than a grain of truth to Republican accusations and caricatures, for the Repubs know that all they have to do is shout "LAW AND ORDER!" and "MORAL VALUES!" and "VOTER FRAUD!" and their Democratic adversaries will RUN FOR THE HILLS - leaving their own voters, and even their own candidates - hanging out to rot in the breeze.
In 2000 Al Gore bought into the Republican cries of "MORAL VALUES!" not only in nominating "moral values" hypocrite Joe Lieberman to be his running mate - but in REFUSING TO CO-SIGN the Black Congressional Caucus DEMANDS for an investigation into massive Republican election fraud in the Florida 20000 vote (non-) recount.
Senator John Kerry went Gore's campaign ONE WORSE, presidential candidate kerry abjectly REFUSING to counter President Bush's charges of "FLIP FLOPPER!" by replying that it was Mr. Bush who had RENEGED on his "I'll get Osama bin Laden DEAD OR ALIVE!" pledge, in a video photo-op at ground zero, then less than a year later (when the US mission in Afghanistan was being sold short in order to shift US troops to the pending invasion of Iraq) the same Mr. Bush declared "Osama bin Laden DOESN'T CONCERN ME THAT MUCH ANYMORE.
Mr. Kerry's refusal to aggressively CONFRONT Bush's record was a betrayal of all the activists, donors, and Democratic voters who put their hearts into his campaign - hoping to have a FIGHTER represent their hopes and convictions, and instead getting a stuffed-shirt punching bag.
And in 2002, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, and Senate Govt. Affairs Committee Chairman Senator Joe Lieberman - SOLD THOUSANDS of Enron workers, pensioners, investors, and customers DOWN THE RIVER by REFUSING to hold thorough and aggressive investigations into Enron fraud. (Such an investigation would ultimately be held in the trial of Enron executives Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and others who were convicted of fraud for overstating that company's profits and setting up shell subsidiaries to siphon off what profits there were.)
Thus, in at least the past two presidential elections, and the 2002 midterm election, Democrats are DEFINED as - selling their own constituents down the river. And even in the 2006 mid-term election, there is compelling evidence that 18,000 voters were ROBBED OF THEIR VOTES in Florida District 13 voting (The seat Katherine Harris gave up in her senate campaign.) Karl Rove Republicans are already working on similar tactics for the NEXT election, while Democratic leadership PRETENDS NOT TO NOTICE this egregious THEFT of thousands of votes in the past election!
In his most recent editorial, exiled investigative reporter Greg Pallast makes the charge that Democratic leadership CONCIOUSLY sells minority voters down the river, in a "belly-of-the-beast" alliance with neo-segregationist Bush-GOP leadership. That charge may or may not be overstated - but just as President Bush claimed that "OSAMA BIN LADEN NO LONGER CONCERNS ME", the Democratic leadership has an APPALLING record of not being concerned by massive Republican VOTE-STEALING and VOTER DISENFRANCHISEMENT techniques. ==================================================
Efforts to stop `voter fraud' may have curbed legitimate voting
By Greg Gordon
McClatchy Newspapers
May 20, 2007
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/nation/17256012.htm?source=rss&channel=krwashington_nation
WASHINGTON - During four years as a Justice Department civil rights lawyer, Hans von Spakovsky went so far in a crusade against voter fraud as to warn of its dangers under a pseudonym in a law journal article.
Writing as "Publius," von Spakovsky contended that every voter should be required to produce a photo-identification card and that there was "no evidence" that such restrictions burden minority voters disproportionately.
Now, amid a scandal over politicization of the Justice Department, Congress is beginning to examine allegations that von Spakovsky was a key player in a Republican campaign to hang onto power in Washington by suppressing the votes of minority voters.
"Mr. von Spakovsky was central to the administration's pursuit of strategies that had the effect of suppressing the minority vote," charged Joseph Rich, a former Justice Department voting rights chief who worked under him.
He and other former career department lawyers say that von Spakovsky steered the agency toward voting rights policies not seen before, pushing to curb minor instances of election fraud by imposing sweeping restrictions that would make it harder, not easier, for Democratic-leaning poor and minority voters to cast ballots.
In interviews, current and former federal officials and civil rights leaders told McClatchy Newspapers that von Spakovsky:
-Sped approval of tougher voter ID laws in Georgia and Arizona in 2005, joining decisions to override career lawyers who believed that Georgia's law would restrict voting by poor blacks and who felt that more analysis was needed on the Arizona law's impact on Native Americans and Latinos.
-Tried to influence the federal Election Assistance Commission's research into the dimensions of voter fraud nationally and the impact of restrictive voter ID laws - research that could undermine a vote-suppression agenda.
-Allegedly engineered the ouster of the commission's chairman, Paul DiGregorio, whom von Spakovsky considered insufficiently partisan.
Von Spakovsky, who declined to comment on these allegations, is among more than a dozen present and former Justice Department officials drawing congressional scrutiny over the administration's alleged use of the nation's chief law enforcement agency for partisan purposes.
Congressional committees investigating the firing last year of nine U.S. attorneys are looking into allegations that prosecutors nationwide were urged to pursue voter fraud to build a basis for tougher ID laws.
Von Spakovsky, who had been a longtime voting rights activist and elections official in Georgia before serving at Justice, accepted a presidential recess appointment to a Republican slot on the Federal Election Commission in December 2005. He is scheduled to appear at a June 13 confirmation hearing before the Senate Rules and Administration Committee.
The House Administration Committee is also inquiring into von Spakovsky's communications with the Election Assistance Commission, a tiny agency that implemented a 2002 election reform law and serves as a national election information clearinghouse.
The bipartisan, four-member commission stirred a political tempest last year when it delayed the release of voter fraud and voter ID law studies, saying that more research was needed. A House panel revealed last month that the fraud study's central finding - that there was little evidence of widespread voter fraud - had been toned down to say that "a great deal of debate" surrounded the subject.
Commissioners rejected as flawed the second study's finding that voter ID laws tend to suppress turnout, especially among Latinos, and ordered more research.
Rich said that von Spakovsky usurped his seat on a commission advisory panel in 2004, although the law creating the panel allocated that spot for the Voting Rights Section chief "or his designee." Rich said he was not consulted.
After the commission hired both liberal and conservative consultants to work on the studies in 2005, e-mails show that von Spakovsky tried to persuade panel members that the research was flawed.
In an Aug. 18, 2005, e-mail to Chairman DiGregorio, he objected strenuously to a contract award for the ID study to researchers at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law, who were teaming with a group at Rutgers University. Von Spakovsky wrote that Daniel Tokaji, the associate director of Moritz' election program, was "an outspoken opponent of voter identification requirements" and that those "pre-existing notions" should disqualify him from federal funding for impartial research.
The criticism was ironic coming from von Spakovsky, who a few months earlier had written the anonymous article for the Texas Review of Law and Politics, in which he called voter fraud a problem of importance equal to racial discrimination at the polls. Von Spakovsky acknowledged writing the article after joining the FEC.
Months after its publication, he participated in the department's review of Georgia's photo ID law, as required under the 1965 Voting Rights Act for election laws passed in 16 Southern states. After the department approved it, a federal judge struck it down as akin to a Jim Crow-era poll tax on minority voters.
Rich called von Spakovsky's failure to withdraw from the case "especially disturbing, given the clear ethical concerns" over his prior work as a Georgia elections official and the bias in his article.
Von Spakovsky's tone toward DiGregorio grew increasingly harsh in 2005 as the chairman refused to take partisan stands, said two people close to the commission who declined to be identified because of the matter's sensitivity.
Their differences seemed to come to a head last year over two issues raised by Arizona's Republican secretary of state, Janice Brewer, who was implementing the toughest state voter identification law in the nation. In April 2005, the Justice Department erroneously advised her that Arizona did not need to offer a provisional ballot to those lacking proof of citizenship.
E-mails suggest that von Spakovsky contacted an aide to Missouri Republican Sen. Kit Bond, who inquired of DiGregorio whether the commission was "seriously considering taking a position against" the department on the provisional ballot question.
DiGregorio sent a testy message asking von Spakovsky if the note from Capitol Hill was "an attempt by you to put pressure on me."
"If so, I do not appreciate it," he wrote.
The next day, von Spakovsky wrote DiGregorio that he thought they "had a deal" under which the department would reconsider its position on provisional ballots if the commission would allow Arizona to modify the federal voter registration form to require proof of citizenship.
"I do not agree to `deals,' especially when it comes to interpretation of the law," DiGregorio replied.
Last September, the White House replaced DiGregorio with Caroline Hunter, a former deputy counsel to the Republican National Committee. DiGregorio confided to associates that he was told that von Spakovsky influenced the White House's decision not to reappoint him, said the two people close to the panel.
Asked about his ouster, DiGregorio said only that he "was aware that Mr. von Spakovsky was not pleased with the bipartisan approaches that I took."
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Repubs have "Mastered the art of making Democrats look like EFFIMINATE CARICATURES."
In a perceptive if not OBVIOUS commentary, Arianna Huffington writes:
<< Republicans have also mastered the dark art of REDUCING THEIR OPPONENTS to EFFIMINATE CARICATURES. They have regularly succeeded in EMASCULATING Democratic candidates. And not just any Democrats but Democrats who were actually decorated war heroes with Silver Stars and Purple Hearts. >>
<< Of course, THE DEMOCRATS have often MADE IT ALL TOO EASY for the GOP to fit them into this EMASCULATED narrative. Jimmy Carter, with his sweaters and his malaise and the in-need-of-Viagra visual of those helicopters crashing in the Iranian desert. And Michael Dukakis, well, what kind of man was he if he wouldn't want the death penalty even for the guy who theoretically raped and murdered his wife? He couldn't handle Bernie Shaw, how was he going to deal with the Soviet Union? >>
In 2000, Al Gore REFUSED to point out that Texas Governor George W. Bush's entire record as governor was one of SLASHING funding for programs like pre-school, after-school, and health-care programs for Texas schoolchildren who most needed those programs (which would of course allow their parents to work), while giving huge, BUDGET-BUSTING TAX CUTS to Texas' wealthiest corporations and billionaires.
In 2002, then Senate MAJORITY LEADER Tom Daschle (and Senate Govt. Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman) REFUSED to TIE ENRON corporation and Ken Lay to Bush - even though Enron and Lay were George W. Bush's biggest contributors in Bush's 2 gubernatorial races, his 2000 Republican primary race, his 2000 presidential race, AND his Florida (non-) recount legal battle. Daschle went down to ignominious re-election defeat (his photo placed side-by-side with those of Saddam Hussein and Osam bin Laden in Republican "soft on terror" TV ads) despite the advantages of a tiny state (population) having Daschle as the Senate Majority Leader.
In 2003, California Governor Gray Davis REFUSED to PROSECUTE for criminal conspiracy those Enron traders and others in the electric industry who were CREATING POWER OUTAGES and shortages by COORDINATED PLANT SHUTDOWNS and deliberate power grid overloads.
And, in 2004, clueless (if not treacherous) Senator John Kerry REPEATED Al Gore's anemic strategy of "HEAR NO EVIL, SEE NO EVIL, _SPEAK NO EVIL_ of George W. Bush's mal-administration," Kerry, too, going down to ignominious defeat, almost certainly Kerry was robbed of his winning Ohio electoral votes, and as well (quite probably) what should have been his popular vote majority in some western states like New Mexico, Nevada, and even Iowa.
Today, in the spring of 2007, the leading Democratic candidates are WELL ON THE WAY to REPEATING the disastrous campaigns of Gore, Daschle, and Kerry, REFUSING to talk about the elephant in the room - the criminal activities swirling around Alberto Gonzales, Vice President Cheney, and from within the White House itself. (i.e. Karl Rove's role in CIA-outing scandal, the obstruction of justice that pushed that scandal past the somnolent Kerry campaign in 2004, and the Rove "double-dipping in criminal conduct" PURGING of US Attorneys to OBSTRUCT prosecutions of senior Republican officials, including cases that were then on-going in relation to the Congressman ('Duke') Cunningham bribery conviction - cases which have since been DROPPED or faded from the news.
====================================
Bill Maher, Frank Luntz, and the Limitations of Reframing Reality
Arianna Huffington
05.13.2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/bill-maher-frank-luntz-_b_48378.html
At the moment, everyone is giving advice to the Democrats about how to beat the Republican spinmeisters. Even Republican spinmeisters. On the latest Real Time with Bill Maher, it was GOP language guru Frank Luntz dishing out advice to me, Paula Poundstone, and anyone else who would listen.
Frank is the supreme reality reframer who took the estate tax and turned it into the "death tax," turned school vouchers into "opportunity scholarships," and turned drilling for oil in a wildlife preserve into "responsible energy exploration."
It is Frank's contention that the reason Democrats keep losing presidential races they should win is that they are too critical, too negative, and too angry. Really? Anyone remember the '04 Democratic convention where the Kerry campaign had put the kibosh on all expressions of anger and Bush-bashing?
But is it surprising that watching your country led into a disastrous war with all the attendant damage to national security provokes anger in sentient beings?
Frank also insisted that Democrats keep losing because they only talk about what they are against, never what they are for.
"Bring the troops home, and end the war... How is that not knowing what we are for?" asked Paula.
Bill framed the question as a mystery: How can the Republicans keep electing what he evocatively called 'You fucking kidding me?' candidates:
Richard Nixon? You fucking kidding me? Ronald Reagan? You fucking kidding me? George W. Bush? You fucking kidding me?!
I don't think it's a mystery at all. I've written extensively about how the Republicans have used fear to scare their way to victory (see here, here, and here). Fear is their go-to play. Mushroom clouds as smoking guns! Terror alerts any time the poll numbers take a dip! And isn't it interesting how we have the Fort Dix arrest of the gang that couldn't jihad straight just as Bush's approval rating hits a record low? When the president warned that if we didn't fight them over there, we'd have to fight them over here, I never imagined that ground zero would be Circuit City.
Republicans have also mastered the dark art of reducing their opponents to effeminate caricatures. They have regularly succeeded in emasculating Democratic candidates. And not just any Democrats but Democrats who were actually decorated war heroes with Silver Stars and Purple Hearts.
Just imagine: George McGovern was a World War II fighter bomber pilot who flew 35 missions and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery under fire. And the Republicans successfully painted him as a yellow-bellied, panty-waisted pacifist-coward.
And John Kerry was transformed from a decorated Vietnam War hero who volunteered for duty into a Chablis-sipping, windsurfing, French-loving, croissant-eating wuss, while Bush, Cheney and all the rest of the Deferment Gang got to pretend they were take-no-guff-from-terrorists bad-asses.
Of course, the Democrats have often made it all too easy for the GOP to fit them into this emasculated narrative. Jimmy Carter, with his sweaters and his malaise and the in-need-of-Viagra visual of those helicopters crashing in the Iranian desert. And Michael Dukakis, well, what kind of man was he if he wouldn't want the death penalty even for the guy who theoretically raped and murdered his wife? He couldn't handle Bernie Shaw, how was he going to deal with the Soviet Union?
Since the political use -- and abuse -- of language was the recurring theme of our whole Real Time discussion, I had to bring up my favorite linguistic moment of the week: After Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius' claimed that the response to the Greensburg tornado was hampered because so many National Guardsmen and their equipment are in Iraq, Tony Snow took umbrage, saying: "There's a lot of stuff available."
Stuff? Was he suggesting his brother-in-law had a tractor he was willing to loan the governor? Or maybe Snow got two power saws last Christmas, so Kansas could have one that had never been used and was still in the box.
The truth is that no matter how often the White House attempts to spin the domestic collateral damage from the war by attacking the messengers (remember how they did the same thing to Louisiana's governor after Katrina?), the facts don't lie: the Kansas National Guard is operating with only 40 to 50 percent of its equipment. And there are similar problems all over the country.
Indeed, the Government Accountability Office released a report in January concluding that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have "significantly decreased" the amount of National Guard equipment available here at home, while stateside units face an increasing number of threats.
There are currently over 25,000 National Guardsmen in Iraq, with another 13,000 slated to be deployed as part of the surge. And every guardsman who is in Iraq is one less guardsman who can help out in Kansas or with the California fires or the Missouri flooding or whatever other disasters -- or terrorist attacks -- might be coming our way.
After years of successful spinning, Frank Luntz and the Republican Party are suddenly coming face to face with the limits of reframing: Our safety and security have been severely undermined by the war in Iraq (Tony Snow's "stuff" not withstanding); and it's getting harder and harder to reframe Democrats as ineffectual eunuchs when a ballsy woman is leading the charge in Congress.
Angry? You bet. Bush and company have turned America into a collection of Howard Beales: we're mad as hell and we're not going to allow reality to be reframed anymore.
Watch the exchanges with Frank, Bill and Paula here.
Send to a friendPost a CommentPrint PostRead all posts by Arianna Huffington
<< Republicans have also mastered the dark art of REDUCING THEIR OPPONENTS to EFFIMINATE CARICATURES. They have regularly succeeded in EMASCULATING Democratic candidates. And not just any Democrats but Democrats who were actually decorated war heroes with Silver Stars and Purple Hearts. >>
<< Of course, THE DEMOCRATS have often MADE IT ALL TOO EASY for the GOP to fit them into this EMASCULATED narrative. Jimmy Carter, with his sweaters and his malaise and the in-need-of-Viagra visual of those helicopters crashing in the Iranian desert. And Michael Dukakis, well, what kind of man was he if he wouldn't want the death penalty even for the guy who theoretically raped and murdered his wife? He couldn't handle Bernie Shaw, how was he going to deal with the Soviet Union? >>
In 2000, Al Gore REFUSED to point out that Texas Governor George W. Bush's entire record as governor was one of SLASHING funding for programs like pre-school, after-school, and health-care programs for Texas schoolchildren who most needed those programs (which would of course allow their parents to work), while giving huge, BUDGET-BUSTING TAX CUTS to Texas' wealthiest corporations and billionaires.
In 2002, then Senate MAJORITY LEADER Tom Daschle (and Senate Govt. Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman) REFUSED to TIE ENRON corporation and Ken Lay to Bush - even though Enron and Lay were George W. Bush's biggest contributors in Bush's 2 gubernatorial races, his 2000 Republican primary race, his 2000 presidential race, AND his Florida (non-) recount legal battle. Daschle went down to ignominious re-election defeat (his photo placed side-by-side with those of Saddam Hussein and Osam bin Laden in Republican "soft on terror" TV ads) despite the advantages of a tiny state (population) having Daschle as the Senate Majority Leader.
In 2003, California Governor Gray Davis REFUSED to PROSECUTE for criminal conspiracy those Enron traders and others in the electric industry who were CREATING POWER OUTAGES and shortages by COORDINATED PLANT SHUTDOWNS and deliberate power grid overloads.
And, in 2004, clueless (if not treacherous) Senator John Kerry REPEATED Al Gore's anemic strategy of "HEAR NO EVIL, SEE NO EVIL, _SPEAK NO EVIL_ of George W. Bush's mal-administration," Kerry, too, going down to ignominious defeat, almost certainly Kerry was robbed of his winning Ohio electoral votes, and as well (quite probably) what should have been his popular vote majority in some western states like New Mexico, Nevada, and even Iowa.
Today, in the spring of 2007, the leading Democratic candidates are WELL ON THE WAY to REPEATING the disastrous campaigns of Gore, Daschle, and Kerry, REFUSING to talk about the elephant in the room - the criminal activities swirling around Alberto Gonzales, Vice President Cheney, and from within the White House itself. (i.e. Karl Rove's role in CIA-outing scandal, the obstruction of justice that pushed that scandal past the somnolent Kerry campaign in 2004, and the Rove "double-dipping in criminal conduct" PURGING of US Attorneys to OBSTRUCT prosecutions of senior Republican officials, including cases that were then on-going in relation to the Congressman ('Duke') Cunningham bribery conviction - cases which have since been DROPPED or faded from the news.
====================================
Bill Maher, Frank Luntz, and the Limitations of Reframing Reality
Arianna Huffington
05.13.2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/bill-maher-frank-luntz-_b_48378.html
At the moment, everyone is giving advice to the Democrats about how to beat the Republican spinmeisters. Even Republican spinmeisters. On the latest Real Time with Bill Maher, it was GOP language guru Frank Luntz dishing out advice to me, Paula Poundstone, and anyone else who would listen.
Frank is the supreme reality reframer who took the estate tax and turned it into the "death tax," turned school vouchers into "opportunity scholarships," and turned drilling for oil in a wildlife preserve into "responsible energy exploration."
It is Frank's contention that the reason Democrats keep losing presidential races they should win is that they are too critical, too negative, and too angry. Really? Anyone remember the '04 Democratic convention where the Kerry campaign had put the kibosh on all expressions of anger and Bush-bashing?
But is it surprising that watching your country led into a disastrous war with all the attendant damage to national security provokes anger in sentient beings?
Frank also insisted that Democrats keep losing because they only talk about what they are against, never what they are for.
"Bring the troops home, and end the war... How is that not knowing what we are for?" asked Paula.
Bill framed the question as a mystery: How can the Republicans keep electing what he evocatively called 'You fucking kidding me?' candidates:
Richard Nixon? You fucking kidding me? Ronald Reagan? You fucking kidding me? George W. Bush? You fucking kidding me?!
I don't think it's a mystery at all. I've written extensively about how the Republicans have used fear to scare their way to victory (see here, here, and here). Fear is their go-to play. Mushroom clouds as smoking guns! Terror alerts any time the poll numbers take a dip! And isn't it interesting how we have the Fort Dix arrest of the gang that couldn't jihad straight just as Bush's approval rating hits a record low? When the president warned that if we didn't fight them over there, we'd have to fight them over here, I never imagined that ground zero would be Circuit City.
Republicans have also mastered the dark art of reducing their opponents to effeminate caricatures. They have regularly succeeded in emasculating Democratic candidates. And not just any Democrats but Democrats who were actually decorated war heroes with Silver Stars and Purple Hearts.
Just imagine: George McGovern was a World War II fighter bomber pilot who flew 35 missions and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery under fire. And the Republicans successfully painted him as a yellow-bellied, panty-waisted pacifist-coward.
And John Kerry was transformed from a decorated Vietnam War hero who volunteered for duty into a Chablis-sipping, windsurfing, French-loving, croissant-eating wuss, while Bush, Cheney and all the rest of the Deferment Gang got to pretend they were take-no-guff-from-terrorists bad-asses.
Of course, the Democrats have often made it all too easy for the GOP to fit them into this emasculated narrative. Jimmy Carter, with his sweaters and his malaise and the in-need-of-Viagra visual of those helicopters crashing in the Iranian desert. And Michael Dukakis, well, what kind of man was he if he wouldn't want the death penalty even for the guy who theoretically raped and murdered his wife? He couldn't handle Bernie Shaw, how was he going to deal with the Soviet Union?
Since the political use -- and abuse -- of language was the recurring theme of our whole Real Time discussion, I had to bring up my favorite linguistic moment of the week: After Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius' claimed that the response to the Greensburg tornado was hampered because so many National Guardsmen and their equipment are in Iraq, Tony Snow took umbrage, saying: "There's a lot of stuff available."
Stuff? Was he suggesting his brother-in-law had a tractor he was willing to loan the governor? Or maybe Snow got two power saws last Christmas, so Kansas could have one that had never been used and was still in the box.
The truth is that no matter how often the White House attempts to spin the domestic collateral damage from the war by attacking the messengers (remember how they did the same thing to Louisiana's governor after Katrina?), the facts don't lie: the Kansas National Guard is operating with only 40 to 50 percent of its equipment. And there are similar problems all over the country.
Indeed, the Government Accountability Office released a report in January concluding that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have "significantly decreased" the amount of National Guard equipment available here at home, while stateside units face an increasing number of threats.
There are currently over 25,000 National Guardsmen in Iraq, with another 13,000 slated to be deployed as part of the surge. And every guardsman who is in Iraq is one less guardsman who can help out in Kansas or with the California fires or the Missouri flooding or whatever other disasters -- or terrorist attacks -- might be coming our way.
After years of successful spinning, Frank Luntz and the Republican Party are suddenly coming face to face with the limits of reframing: Our safety and security have been severely undermined by the war in Iraq (Tony Snow's "stuff" not withstanding); and it's getting harder and harder to reframe Democrats as ineffectual eunuchs when a ballsy woman is leading the charge in Congress.
Angry? You bet. Bush and company have turned America into a collection of Howard Beales: we're mad as hell and we're not going to allow reality to be reframed anymore.
Watch the exchanges with Frank, Bill and Paula here.
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Thursday, May 17, 2007
Gonzales LIED UNDER OATH: Democrats have an ability AND AN OBLIGATION to remove the PERJUROUS Attorney General....
<< James B. Comey, the straight-as-an-arrow former No. 2 official at the Justice Department, yesterday offered the Senate Judiciary Committee an account of Bush ADMINSTRATION LAWLESSNESS SO SHOCKING it would have been unbelievable coming from a less reputable source. >>
IF "SHOCKING LAWLESSNESS" by the Attorney General does not warrant IMPEACHMENT, then we are no longer a nation of laws.
Having, finally, NOTICED this "shocking LAWLESSNESS" on the part of the Bush administration, the lying Washington Post also has an OBLIGATION - to report, TRUTHFULLY and HONESTLY - of ALL THE OTHER CASES of LAWLESSNESS by the Bush-Rove-Cheney presidency.
And the Democrats, too, have a duty and an obligation to RESTORE AMERICA to the RULE OF LAW.
======================================
Mr. Comey's Tale
A standoff at a hospital bedside speaks volumes about Attorney General Gonzales.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/15/AR2007051501945.html
JAMES B. COMEY, the straight-as-an-arrow former No. 2 official at the Justice Department, yesterday offered the Senate Judiciary Committee an account of Bush administration lawlessness so shocking it would have been unbelievable coming from a less reputable source. The episode involved a 2004 nighttime visit to the hospital room of then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft by Alberto Gonzales, then the White House counsel, and Andrew H. Card Jr., then the White House chief of staff. Only the broadest outlines of this visit were previously known: that Mr. Comey, who was acting as attorney general during Mr. Ashcroft's illness, had refused to recertify the legality of the administration's warrantless wiretapping program; that Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card had tried to do an end-run around Mr. Comey; that Mr. Ashcroft had rebuffed them.
Mr. Comey's vivid depiction, worthy of a Hollywood script, showed the lengths to which the administration and the man who is now attorney general were willing to go to pursue the surveillance program. First, they tried to coerce a man in intensive care -- a man so sick he had transferred the reins of power to Mr. Comey -- to grant them legal approval. Having failed, they were willing to defy the conclusions of the nation's chief law enforcement officer and pursue the surveillance without Justice's authorization. Only in the face of the prospect of mass resignations -- Mr. Comey, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and most likely Mr. Ashcroft himself -- did the president back down.
As Mr. Comey testified, "I couldn't stay, if the administration was going to engage in conduct that the Department of Justice had said had no legal basis." The crisis was averted only when, the morning after the program was reauthorized without Justice's approval, President Bush agreed to fix whatever problem Justice had with it (the details remain classified). "We had the president's direction to do . . . what the Justice Department believed was necessary to put this matter on a footing where we could certify to its legality," Mr. Comey said.
The dramatic details should not obscure the bottom line: the administration's alarming willingness, championed by, among others, Vice President Cheney and his counsel, David Addington, to ignore its own lawyers. Remember, this was a Justice Department that had embraced an expansive view of the president's inherent constitutional powers, allowing the administration to dispense with following the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Justice's conclusions are supposed to be the final word in the executive branch about what is lawful or not, and the administration has emphasized since the warrantless wiretapping story broke that it was being done under the department's supervision.
Now, it emerges, they were willing to override Justice if need be. That Mr. Gonzales is now in charge of the department he tried to steamroll may be most disturbing of all.
IF "SHOCKING LAWLESSNESS" by the Attorney General does not warrant IMPEACHMENT, then we are no longer a nation of laws.
Having, finally, NOTICED this "shocking LAWLESSNESS" on the part of the Bush administration, the lying Washington Post also has an OBLIGATION - to report, TRUTHFULLY and HONESTLY - of ALL THE OTHER CASES of LAWLESSNESS by the Bush-Rove-Cheney presidency.
And the Democrats, too, have a duty and an obligation to RESTORE AMERICA to the RULE OF LAW.
======================================
Mr. Comey's Tale
A standoff at a hospital bedside speaks volumes about Attorney General Gonzales.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/15/AR2007051501945.html
JAMES B. COMEY, the straight-as-an-arrow former No. 2 official at the Justice Department, yesterday offered the Senate Judiciary Committee an account of Bush administration lawlessness so shocking it would have been unbelievable coming from a less reputable source. The episode involved a 2004 nighttime visit to the hospital room of then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft by Alberto Gonzales, then the White House counsel, and Andrew H. Card Jr., then the White House chief of staff. Only the broadest outlines of this visit were previously known: that Mr. Comey, who was acting as attorney general during Mr. Ashcroft's illness, had refused to recertify the legality of the administration's warrantless wiretapping program; that Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card had tried to do an end-run around Mr. Comey; that Mr. Ashcroft had rebuffed them.
Mr. Comey's vivid depiction, worthy of a Hollywood script, showed the lengths to which the administration and the man who is now attorney general were willing to go to pursue the surveillance program. First, they tried to coerce a man in intensive care -- a man so sick he had transferred the reins of power to Mr. Comey -- to grant them legal approval. Having failed, they were willing to defy the conclusions of the nation's chief law enforcement officer and pursue the surveillance without Justice's authorization. Only in the face of the prospect of mass resignations -- Mr. Comey, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and most likely Mr. Ashcroft himself -- did the president back down.
As Mr. Comey testified, "I couldn't stay, if the administration was going to engage in conduct that the Department of Justice had said had no legal basis." The crisis was averted only when, the morning after the program was reauthorized without Justice's approval, President Bush agreed to fix whatever problem Justice had with it (the details remain classified). "We had the president's direction to do . . . what the Justice Department believed was necessary to put this matter on a footing where we could certify to its legality," Mr. Comey said.
The dramatic details should not obscure the bottom line: the administration's alarming willingness, championed by, among others, Vice President Cheney and his counsel, David Addington, to ignore its own lawyers. Remember, this was a Justice Department that had embraced an expansive view of the president's inherent constitutional powers, allowing the administration to dispense with following the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Justice's conclusions are supposed to be the final word in the executive branch about what is lawful or not, and the administration has emphasized since the warrantless wiretapping story broke that it was being done under the department's supervision.
Now, it emerges, they were willing to override Justice if need be. That Mr. Gonzales is now in charge of the department he tried to steamroll may be most disturbing of all.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Democrats were on "Auto-capitulation" as Republicans used corruption, 9-11 fear, as engine for one-party dictatorship....
<< During this time, it seemed that the dream of establishing a One-Party-Rule in the USA was happening. That it was already a permanent reality. Democrats were weak and disorganized. Most of those who remained in Congress after 2002 seemed to be on AUTO-CAPITULATION to Bush and the Republicans. >>
All through the 1980s and 1990s, with an explosion leading up to and after the 2000 election, the Republican Party used CORRUPTION as an engine to power their drive for one-party rule. Daily Kos (www.DailyKos.com) contributor Dengre has set out to compile an on-going list of Republican corruption and criminality, and this web post is peppered with words like "criminality" and "crime wave" and "corruption," but sad to say, with the CONVICTIONS of Abramoff, Ney, Skilling, Lay, Cunningham, and others, it looks like the Republican Party of 2007 truly does resemble the slave-owners of the ante-bellum South, who thought that they were entitled to engage in the massive chattel slave trade, and to whip or beat slaves to death, in the pursuit of wealth and their own "private property rights."
WILL the Democrats contine the sad (if not sordid) record of the past - the "AUTO-CAPITULATION" to the rampant corruption and gross criminality of the Bush-Cheney-Rove administration?
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/5/14/13220/6198
All through the 1980s and 1990s, with an explosion leading up to and after the 2000 election, the Republican Party used CORRUPTION as an engine to power their drive for one-party rule. Daily Kos (www.DailyKos.com) contributor Dengre has set out to compile an on-going list of Republican corruption and criminality, and this web post is peppered with words like "criminality" and "crime wave" and "corruption," but sad to say, with the CONVICTIONS of Abramoff, Ney, Skilling, Lay, Cunningham, and others, it looks like the Republican Party of 2007 truly does resemble the slave-owners of the ante-bellum South, who thought that they were entitled to engage in the massive chattel slave trade, and to whip or beat slaves to death, in the pursuit of wealth and their own "private property rights."
WILL the Democrats contine the sad (if not sordid) record of the past - the "AUTO-CAPITULATION" to the rampant corruption and gross criminality of the Bush-Cheney-Rove administration?
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/5/14/13220/6198
Big Business (DLC) Democrats get House leadership - to support Union-busting, enviro-gutting, consumer ripoff "Free Trade Pact"?
David Sirota does yeoman's work, trying to unravel the SECRETIVE "Free Trade Pact" being written by industry lobbyists, and pushed by the Bush administration, Republican Party, and DLC (corporate) Democrats - who have apparently won the support of the House Leadership in trying to ram this union-busting, enviro-gutting, consumer trashing deal past a somnlent public and cravenly complicit press/media.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/journalism-becomes-stenog_b_48333.html
Here is the lying money-quote from the New York Times' furious pushing of the "Free Trade Pact" in Steven R. Weisman's NY Times article:
<< Democrats said the accord would be a major victory in their campaign to ensure that trade deals provided for the rights of workers to organize and that trading partner countries banned child labor and slave labor. >>
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/10/business/trade.php
As Sirota points out - THE PACT DOES NOTHING OF THE KIND!
Which is why it is OPPOSED by unions, environmental groups, consumer protection groups, and other PUBLIC INTEREST GROUPS across the country.
It is long past time that the Democratic leadership divorce itself from the sellout "CONVENTIONAL WISDOM" of the DC & NY punditocracy class - which is to say the professional liars whose job it is is to put a polished spin on Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh's talking points.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/journalism-becomes-stenog_b_48333.html
Here is the lying money-quote from the New York Times' furious pushing of the "Free Trade Pact" in Steven R. Weisman's NY Times article:
<< Democrats said the accord would be a major victory in their campaign to ensure that trade deals provided for the rights of workers to organize and that trading partner countries banned child labor and slave labor. >>
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/10/business/trade.php
As Sirota points out - THE PACT DOES NOTHING OF THE KIND!
Which is why it is OPPOSED by unions, environmental groups, consumer protection groups, and other PUBLIC INTEREST GROUPS across the country.
It is long past time that the Democratic leadership divorce itself from the sellout "CONVENTIONAL WISDOM" of the DC & NY punditocracy class - which is to say the professional liars whose job it is is to put a polished spin on Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh's talking points.
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Louisiana Democrats setting themselves up for CA-style INFAMY: IF you DON'T GO AFTER BUSH/Halliburton CORRUPTION, the Republicans WILL BLAME YOU!
STUPID, COWERING Democrats REPEAT the ignomious stupidity of California Governor Gray Davis: TOO STUPID, COWARDLY, and IMPOTENT to GO AFTER Enron's MASSIVE FRAUD vs. California electricity consumers, Davis went down to pathetic DEFEAT in the recall election that seated Republican Arnold Schwarzennegger in the California governor's mansion.
IF Democratic 'leaders' ARE TOO STUPID, COWARDLY, and INCOMPETENT to CONFRONT Bush/HALLIBURTON or Bush/ENRON CORRUPTION, that robs and devastates their constituents and citizens - THEY DESERVE IGNOMY and INFAMY.
In this case, before our eyes, President George W. Bush is USING a natuaral disaster (Hurricane Katrina), and USING the federal treasury (Halliburton and Blackwater billion-dollar no-bid, no-oversight contracts) to DISENFRANCHISE thousands of Louisiana voters - by seeing to it that New Orleans has NO master environmental plan to coordinate reconstruction in that city, thereby driving residents away.
AND STILL the cowering Democrats CAN NOT MAKE THAT OBVIOUS ARGUMENT FORCEFULLY - thereby SELLING citizens, constituents, and voters DOWN THE RIVER to Republican, big-business, and media CORRUPTION.
========================================
Fed Up in Louisiana
By Jonathan Capehart
Saturday, May 12, 2007; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/11/AR2007051101984.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) went off. Not in a girls fighting, "Hold my earrings!" kind of way. But in a blunt manner befitting a chief executive who endured the worst natural and engineering disaster in U.S. history, who continues to battle Washington for federal assistance, and who is not running for reelection.
We met in Blanco's imposing office on the fourth floor of the state Capitol in Baton Rouge on Wednesday. After watching her testify pleasantly before state legislative committees on behalf of her insurance reform package and for an expansion of Louisiana's Child Health Plus program, I was floored by her "bring it on" forthrightness as she talked about her dealings with Washington after Hurricane Katrina.
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco (By Bill Haber -- Associated Press)
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"I feel like in the last 3 1/2 years I have put in eight years' worth of work," Blanco said with an exasperated laugh. Her performance during Katrina was roundly criticized and her approval ratings in Louisiana, which rival those of President Bush nationally, never recovered. Rep. Bobby Jindal, a Louisiana Republican who wants to replace Blanco, had a 24-point lead over her in a January poll. Blanco denies that her weak standing played a role in her March announcement that she would not seek a second term.
When I asked the governor if she were as baffled as I by the level of resistance in Congress and in the White House to helping Louisiana with post-Hurricane Katrina recovery (the continuing refusal to waive the onerous 10 percent match required by the Federal Emergency Management Agency comes to mind), Blanco let 'er rip.
"It's all political," she began. "You know, this country's run on politics. But when a disaster comes that is not what you expect, you expect a human reaction, not a political reaction. And I will tell you, there's a void," Blanco drawled, "a total void of human response. And it's extremely discouraging as an American citizen. It makes me angry and extremely disappointed."
That's not to say the Bush administration hasn't ponied up for the Pelican State. So far, $42 billion, not including flood insurance payments, has flowed to Louisiana. Blanco acknowledged this, and then added, "But I would just have to say it's not good enough."
The experience of securing that funding and trying to get access to it has not been pleasant. "I absolutely hated the idea of having to go to Washington, D.C., to deal with the last Congress, because their attitude was brutal," she said. "The old Congress made us feel like we were pretty stupid for standing in the way of the hurricane and that we were asking for far too much assistance.
"They ignored the fact that it wasn't the hurricane, per se, that caused our damage," Blanco explained in a forceful, yet measured, tone. "It was the failure, an engineering failure, of the federal levees that caused our enormous grief. If we had not had levee failures, people would have walked home, and today we would not even be sitting here talking about it." She did say the new Congress was "definitely more interested in trying to help us."
Blanco would not take the bait and say that New Orleans and Louisiana as a whole have been abandoned by Washington, but she was not shy about denouncing the bureaucratic roadblocks and the duplicative and sometimes contradictory rules and regulations of the Department of Housing and Urban Development and FEMA for spending the money allocated, that have slowed the pace of recovery. "It feels like the federal government is choking us to death," Blanco said. "And they will not; they are totally resistant to releasing the bonds that hold us. It's like living in a torture chamber."
And what about Louisiana's history of corruption? Might that not have played a role in the bad attitudes on Capitol Hill? "In my book, that's the biggest crock of excuses that I've ever heard," Blanco thundered. "Louisiana has had its own negative experiences, but we don't hold the corner on corruption." She went on to say, "We've not been accused of wasting a single nickel. We have extraordinary review practices embedded in everything that we do. And now we're being accused of being overly attentive to fraud avoidance and holding back the recovery."
Blanco had a message for the hundreds of members of Congress who have come through Louisiana since Katrina. "They have seen with their own eyes," she said. "They need to look in their own hearts to decide what they would want to happen in their own states if something of this magnitude did as much damage. Where would their people be?"
The writer is a member of the
IF Democratic 'leaders' ARE TOO STUPID, COWARDLY, and INCOMPETENT to CONFRONT Bush/HALLIBURTON or Bush/ENRON CORRUPTION, that robs and devastates their constituents and citizens - THEY DESERVE IGNOMY and INFAMY.
In this case, before our eyes, President George W. Bush is USING a natuaral disaster (Hurricane Katrina), and USING the federal treasury (Halliburton and Blackwater billion-dollar no-bid, no-oversight contracts) to DISENFRANCHISE thousands of Louisiana voters - by seeing to it that New Orleans has NO master environmental plan to coordinate reconstruction in that city, thereby driving residents away.
AND STILL the cowering Democrats CAN NOT MAKE THAT OBVIOUS ARGUMENT FORCEFULLY - thereby SELLING citizens, constituents, and voters DOWN THE RIVER to Republican, big-business, and media CORRUPTION.
========================================
Fed Up in Louisiana
By Jonathan Capehart
Saturday, May 12, 2007; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/11/AR2007051101984.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) went off. Not in a girls fighting, "Hold my earrings!" kind of way. But in a blunt manner befitting a chief executive who endured the worst natural and engineering disaster in U.S. history, who continues to battle Washington for federal assistance, and who is not running for reelection.
We met in Blanco's imposing office on the fourth floor of the state Capitol in Baton Rouge on Wednesday. After watching her testify pleasantly before state legislative committees on behalf of her insurance reform package and for an expansion of Louisiana's Child Health Plus program, I was floored by her "bring it on" forthrightness as she talked about her dealings with Washington after Hurricane Katrina.
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco (By Bill Haber -- Associated Press)
Who's Blogging?
Read what bloggers are saying about this article.
ravings of a semi-sane madwoman
African American Political Pundit
African American Political Pundit
Full List of Blogs (7 links) »
Most Blogged About Articles
On washingtonpost.com | On the web
Save & Share Article What's This?
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"I feel like in the last 3 1/2 years I have put in eight years' worth of work," Blanco said with an exasperated laugh. Her performance during Katrina was roundly criticized and her approval ratings in Louisiana, which rival those of President Bush nationally, never recovered. Rep. Bobby Jindal, a Louisiana Republican who wants to replace Blanco, had a 24-point lead over her in a January poll. Blanco denies that her weak standing played a role in her March announcement that she would not seek a second term.
When I asked the governor if she were as baffled as I by the level of resistance in Congress and in the White House to helping Louisiana with post-Hurricane Katrina recovery (the continuing refusal to waive the onerous 10 percent match required by the Federal Emergency Management Agency comes to mind), Blanco let 'er rip.
"It's all political," she began. "You know, this country's run on politics. But when a disaster comes that is not what you expect, you expect a human reaction, not a political reaction. And I will tell you, there's a void," Blanco drawled, "a total void of human response. And it's extremely discouraging as an American citizen. It makes me angry and extremely disappointed."
That's not to say the Bush administration hasn't ponied up for the Pelican State. So far, $42 billion, not including flood insurance payments, has flowed to Louisiana. Blanco acknowledged this, and then added, "But I would just have to say it's not good enough."
The experience of securing that funding and trying to get access to it has not been pleasant. "I absolutely hated the idea of having to go to Washington, D.C., to deal with the last Congress, because their attitude was brutal," she said. "The old Congress made us feel like we were pretty stupid for standing in the way of the hurricane and that we were asking for far too much assistance.
"They ignored the fact that it wasn't the hurricane, per se, that caused our damage," Blanco explained in a forceful, yet measured, tone. "It was the failure, an engineering failure, of the federal levees that caused our enormous grief. If we had not had levee failures, people would have walked home, and today we would not even be sitting here talking about it." She did say the new Congress was "definitely more interested in trying to help us."
Blanco would not take the bait and say that New Orleans and Louisiana as a whole have been abandoned by Washington, but she was not shy about denouncing the bureaucratic roadblocks and the duplicative and sometimes contradictory rules and regulations of the Department of Housing and Urban Development and FEMA for spending the money allocated, that have slowed the pace of recovery. "It feels like the federal government is choking us to death," Blanco said. "And they will not; they are totally resistant to releasing the bonds that hold us. It's like living in a torture chamber."
And what about Louisiana's history of corruption? Might that not have played a role in the bad attitudes on Capitol Hill? "In my book, that's the biggest crock of excuses that I've ever heard," Blanco thundered. "Louisiana has had its own negative experiences, but we don't hold the corner on corruption." She went on to say, "We've not been accused of wasting a single nickel. We have extraordinary review practices embedded in everything that we do. And now we're being accused of being overly attentive to fraud avoidance and holding back the recovery."
Blanco had a message for the hundreds of members of Congress who have come through Louisiana since Katrina. "They have seen with their own eyes," she said. "They need to look in their own hearts to decide what they would want to happen in their own states if something of this magnitude did as much damage. Where would their people be?"
The writer is a member of the
Friday, May 11, 2007
Congressmen GET IN SHOUTING MATCH - with Karl Rove! Unfortunately, it is REPUBLICAN Representatives.... but can Dems be far behind?
<< Regardless, [Republican Congressmen] LaHood and Meyer GOT INTO A SHOUTING MATCH [with Bush Political Affairs Chief KARL ROVE and WH Congressional Liason Dan Meyer] as emotions ran high and VOICES WERE RAISED yesterday morning in the White House while lawmakers were waiting to meet with first lady Laura Bush, according to two legislators who witnessed the exchange. >>
--------------------------------------
Bush Aides [KARL ROVE!] Berate [SHOUT AT!] 2 GOP Congressmen
By Jonathan E. Kaplan
May 11, 2007
http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/bush-aides-berate-gop-members-2007-05-10.html
Top Bush administration officials lashed out at a pair of House Republicans at the White House yesterday after details about a contentious meeting between President Bush and GOP legislators were leaked to the media earlier this week.
The CONFRONTATIONS are the latest indications of an INTENSIFYING RIFT between Bush and congressional Republicans.
Reps. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) attracted the ire of White House officials for allegedly speaking to reporters about a Tuesday meeting between Bush and centrist Republicans on the Iraq war. Details of the contentious meeting first emerged Wednesday evening and attracted Page 1 headlines yesterday.
Sources said that Dan Meyer, Bush’s liaison to the House, confronted LaHood while White House political strategist KARL ROVE REBUKED [Congressman] Kirk. It is unclear if LaHood or Kirk were the originial sources for the stories, but LaHood was quoted in one of the articles
--------------------------------------
Bush Aides [KARL ROVE!] Berate [SHOUT AT!] 2 GOP Congressmen
By Jonathan E. Kaplan
May 11, 2007
http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/bush-aides-berate-gop-members-2007-05-10.html
Top Bush administration officials lashed out at a pair of House Republicans at the White House yesterday after details about a contentious meeting between President Bush and GOP legislators were leaked to the media earlier this week.
The CONFRONTATIONS are the latest indications of an INTENSIFYING RIFT between Bush and congressional Republicans.
Reps. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) attracted the ire of White House officials for allegedly speaking to reporters about a Tuesday meeting between Bush and centrist Republicans on the Iraq war. Details of the contentious meeting first emerged Wednesday evening and attracted Page 1 headlines yesterday.
Sources said that Dan Meyer, Bush’s liaison to the House, confronted LaHood while White House political strategist KARL ROVE REBUKED [Congressman] Kirk. It is unclear if LaHood or Kirk were the originial sources for the stories, but LaHood was quoted in one of the articles
"TOOTHLESS Democrats" ENABLE Bush's scorn of American citizens
Richard A. Stitt: When Will The Democrats Catch Up With The Dixie Chicks?
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Thu, 05/10/2007 - 3:17pm. Reader Contribution
A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Richard A. Stitt
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/1002
Leaving no doubt that the war in Iraq has no end, Bush has instructed his toady generals to proclaim that the surge of troops must continue through at least the beginning of next year. By then of course, we most likely will have gone through several charades where Democrats send forth funding bills with accountability restrictions while Bush continues to veto anything and everything that might have to do with compromises to end the fiasco and sectarian civil war in Iraq.
A toothless Democratic Party controlled U.S. Congress is as much a gift to Bush and as fortuitous an event as was the horror of 9/11 when his approval poll numbers were hovering near 50% and falling.
After 9/11, even though G.W. Bush was AWOL for three days following that catastrophe, he emerged in full Karl-Rove-scripted photo op propaganda mode as he stood on the pile of rubble that was once the site of the World Trade Center, one arm around a firefighter and bullhorn in the other screeching that we would get even with those who caused this catastrophe.
His poll numbers soared to over 90% approval and remained at stratospheric levels for a period not seen by any preceding president. War, as it turned out, became Bush's elixir and his entire raison d'être.
Nobody should expect the inflexible, sclerotic G. W. Bush to waver one bit on ending the most defining event in his 6 years of occupancy of the White House. Bush and his Republican thralls, with the exception of a handful of renegade apostates, will ride this war horse right through the end of 2008, claiming that to do otherwise will result in al Qaeda following us home where Americans will have to fight them off in the aisles of Wal-Mart.
The majority of Americans want an end to this senseless slaughter of U.S. military and innocent Iraqi citizens in a country that was never a threat to our interests or security. But in truth, the majority of Republicans love this war and apparently cheer on the daily body count. The daily body count, at least as interpreted by the Bush loyalists, is "proof that the surge is working." They proclaim that anyone who dares to oppose the "commander guy" who has said "War is on my mind," "I'm the war president," and "I'm the decider" is unpatriotic, un-American and a traitor to our country. The latest polls say that 75% of the Republican base support Bush and his war with no end.
All the Bush Bootlicking Republicans will soon be on the trading block and Bush's CEO suits-in-waiting, the toady generals, once again must answer to the American people on November 2008. Then the sheep-minded minority party Republicans will be diminished to being nothing but an entourage of Bush dead-enders, scratching their vacant heads, wondering why War Forever didn't register with the American voters at the polls.
Clearly, the mainstream media have aided this administration from the get-go. One only needs to read the feel-good media minder stories written by the likes of The New York Times' Judith Miller and the ubiquitous pro-war New Republic to understand the euphoria that celebrated the preemptive war and dismissed the war's critics as traitors who, as Bush's Press Secretary Ari Fleischer proclaimed, "You better watch what you say and watch what you do."
The mainstream media, however, issued their belated mea culpas and self-recriminations much in the same vein as CIA director George Tenet, whining that somehow their words and statements (such as Tenet's "slam dunk" on WMD) had been taken out of context. Now they admit they should have held the warmongering Bush administration to account for the carnage that has ensued as a result of the lies, deceit, and incompetence in waging a preemptive war under false pretexts, steamrollered by neo-cons such as Paul Wolfowitz (now under investigation at the World Bank), Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Dick Cheney, and other policymakers whose ignorance of the Middle East countries led them to believe they could convert the entire region to democracy at the end of a gun barrel.
It is a war that even as late as last summer when Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki stood with his entire parliament and denounced Israel in the Lebanon-Israeli conflict, while they simultaneously gave their support to the terrorist group Hezbollah, where the mainstream media have remained inexplicably mute. Where is the outrage from the mainstream media over this horrific fact? Where is the "beacon of truth" once ascribed to the Fourth Estate to be the watchdogs of freedom and liberty?
The Republicans' message to the U.S. military fighting to perpetuate Bush's anti-Semitic Shiite Islamic Iraq regime of Nouri al-Maliki in the meantime is, "Keep on fighting and dying, GI!" They have learned nothing since November 2006 nor will they learn anything in 2008 because they never understood a thing about democracy to begin with. The people, not the "commander guy" and his corrupt, rubber stamp Neanderthal Republicans, are in charge.
We know the American voters finally caught up with the Dixie Chicks on November 7, 2006 when Bush's gutless, rubber stamp Republican congress was toppled from power. One of the looming questions that the majority of Americans are still asking is: "When will the Democrats catch up with the voters and the Dixie Chicks?"
A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
Richard A. Stitt
Austin, Texas
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Thu, 05/10/2007 - 3:17pm. Reader Contribution
A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Richard A. Stitt
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/1002
Leaving no doubt that the war in Iraq has no end, Bush has instructed his toady generals to proclaim that the surge of troops must continue through at least the beginning of next year. By then of course, we most likely will have gone through several charades where Democrats send forth funding bills with accountability restrictions while Bush continues to veto anything and everything that might have to do with compromises to end the fiasco and sectarian civil war in Iraq.
A toothless Democratic Party controlled U.S. Congress is as much a gift to Bush and as fortuitous an event as was the horror of 9/11 when his approval poll numbers were hovering near 50% and falling.
After 9/11, even though G.W. Bush was AWOL for three days following that catastrophe, he emerged in full Karl-Rove-scripted photo op propaganda mode as he stood on the pile of rubble that was once the site of the World Trade Center, one arm around a firefighter and bullhorn in the other screeching that we would get even with those who caused this catastrophe.
His poll numbers soared to over 90% approval and remained at stratospheric levels for a period not seen by any preceding president. War, as it turned out, became Bush's elixir and his entire raison d'être.
Nobody should expect the inflexible, sclerotic G. W. Bush to waver one bit on ending the most defining event in his 6 years of occupancy of the White House. Bush and his Republican thralls, with the exception of a handful of renegade apostates, will ride this war horse right through the end of 2008, claiming that to do otherwise will result in al Qaeda following us home where Americans will have to fight them off in the aisles of Wal-Mart.
The majority of Americans want an end to this senseless slaughter of U.S. military and innocent Iraqi citizens in a country that was never a threat to our interests or security. But in truth, the majority of Republicans love this war and apparently cheer on the daily body count. The daily body count, at least as interpreted by the Bush loyalists, is "proof that the surge is working." They proclaim that anyone who dares to oppose the "commander guy" who has said "War is on my mind," "I'm the war president," and "I'm the decider" is unpatriotic, un-American and a traitor to our country. The latest polls say that 75% of the Republican base support Bush and his war with no end.
All the Bush Bootlicking Republicans will soon be on the trading block and Bush's CEO suits-in-waiting, the toady generals, once again must answer to the American people on November 2008. Then the sheep-minded minority party Republicans will be diminished to being nothing but an entourage of Bush dead-enders, scratching their vacant heads, wondering why War Forever didn't register with the American voters at the polls.
Clearly, the mainstream media have aided this administration from the get-go. One only needs to read the feel-good media minder stories written by the likes of The New York Times' Judith Miller and the ubiquitous pro-war New Republic to understand the euphoria that celebrated the preemptive war and dismissed the war's critics as traitors who, as Bush's Press Secretary Ari Fleischer proclaimed, "You better watch what you say and watch what you do."
The mainstream media, however, issued their belated mea culpas and self-recriminations much in the same vein as CIA director George Tenet, whining that somehow their words and statements (such as Tenet's "slam dunk" on WMD) had been taken out of context. Now they admit they should have held the warmongering Bush administration to account for the carnage that has ensued as a result of the lies, deceit, and incompetence in waging a preemptive war under false pretexts, steamrollered by neo-cons such as Paul Wolfowitz (now under investigation at the World Bank), Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Dick Cheney, and other policymakers whose ignorance of the Middle East countries led them to believe they could convert the entire region to democracy at the end of a gun barrel.
It is a war that even as late as last summer when Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki stood with his entire parliament and denounced Israel in the Lebanon-Israeli conflict, while they simultaneously gave their support to the terrorist group Hezbollah, where the mainstream media have remained inexplicably mute. Where is the outrage from the mainstream media over this horrific fact? Where is the "beacon of truth" once ascribed to the Fourth Estate to be the watchdogs of freedom and liberty?
The Republicans' message to the U.S. military fighting to perpetuate Bush's anti-Semitic Shiite Islamic Iraq regime of Nouri al-Maliki in the meantime is, "Keep on fighting and dying, GI!" They have learned nothing since November 2006 nor will they learn anything in 2008 because they never understood a thing about democracy to begin with. The people, not the "commander guy" and his corrupt, rubber stamp Neanderthal Republicans, are in charge.
We know the American voters finally caught up with the Dixie Chicks on November 7, 2006 when Bush's gutless, rubber stamp Republican congress was toppled from power. One of the looming questions that the majority of Americans are still asking is: "When will the Democrats catch up with the voters and the Dixie Chicks?"
A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
Richard A. Stitt
Austin, Texas
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