Vice President Cheney is CONTEMPTUOUS of Congress; of American voters, and of the Constitutional form of American government. By former VP Mondale...

WELL! Finally we have a BRIGHT SIDE to the horrible, anemic, appalling presidential campaign of (former Vice President) Al Gore and his running mate, Senator Joe Lieberman, in 2000. In that campaign, (then) Vice President Gore had to take on an insurgent campaign for the Democratic nomination from former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley. Bradley might have been an all-American sports hero as a basketball star in both college and the NBA, but after Newt Gingrich led the Republicans to retake Congress in 1994 (mosly by villifying Democrats as "tax and spend librul Democrats," even though "liberal programs" are what set the Depression- and pre-Depression era America apart from the WWII winning superpower that President Roosevelt's New Deal ushered in), Bradley LEFT THE FIGHT, giving up an almost guaranteed re-election to drop out of the senate in the 1996 race, thereby adding another Senate seat to the Republican gains of those years.

Unfortunately, Bradley take-no-prisoners insurgent campaign from the "left" side of the Democratic agenda forced Gore to tack "right" to woo more "mainstream" voters, as eight long years of Clinton bashing by Republicans had made many Americans feel as if Democrats in general (and the civil rights/"free love" era of the 1960s in particular) were the root of all social wrongs in America, the so-called "Moral Values" agenda.

During this era (the eight long years of Clinton-hating from the radical right) the New York Times, Washington Post, and other media "leaders" joined in the Clinton bashing for fun an profit (culminating in the absurd notion that the Clintons had no right to invite guests to spend the night at the White House, the so-called "LINCOLN BEDROOM SCANDAL!"), blaring headlines and bold-type accusations guaranteed to pique the curiousity of news readers. Along the way the media executives also signed on the Radical Right agenda of TAX CUTS FOR THE WEALTHY, and other pro-business policies, mainly reduction in regulations and oversight for businesses in general, and a green-light for MEDIA CONSOLIATION in particular.

Enter, in 2000, Halliburton CEO and Chairman DICK CHENEY. The MYTH was that, as CEO and Chairman of a successful company, Dick Cheney was a good business leader. Actually, Cheney's leadership of Halliburton Co. was almost as DISASTER for that company, Cheney having arranged the buyout of DRESSER INDUSTRIES by Halliburton, a move that put Dresser's billions of dollars worth of potential ASBESTOS LIABILITIES right on the table of Halliburton's boardroom and investors! As a radical-right die-hard, Cheney felt certain he could get Congress to mitigate - throw out - all the employee lawsuits against Dresser for years worth of hazardous asbestos exposure, which had killed dozens of workers and given cancer to hundreds more. Somehow Cheney finessed the Dresser disaster, mostly by using his contacts deep in the US government (he had been Secretary of Defense under Bush Sr.) and Republican congress to reward Halliburton with multi-million dollar huge government contracts. (Ironically, as Secretary of Defense, Cheney had been THE most ardent supporter of radical defense CUTS as the Soviet Union dismantled itself and ended the Cold War. Cheney's "NO SOFT LETDOWN" budget-slashing ruthlessness, to areas of the nation's economy that had been dependent on defense contracts for 5 decades (such as the northeast corridor around Boston, and the huge Lockheed and Boeing plants on the west coast), were devastating, and helped transform the "PEACE DIVIDEND" and euphoria over the demise of the Soviet Union, into the Bush1 recession of the early 1990s. (Besides slashing defense spending with "no soft letdown" which decimated the US economy, the other major cause of the Bush1 Recession was the TRILLION DOLLAR S&L debacle, taxpayers being forced to pay off $500 billion in S&L bad loans, which, with interest still compounding a decade later, led to a trillion dollars of taxpayer moneyies going to the S&L debacle..)

Besides ruthlessly SLASHING "his own" defense industries in the early 1990s (most of those defense/military contractor companies tending towards the conservative side of the aisle), besides being an industry CEO who worked to TOSS OUT thousands of asbestos (cancer) lawsuits, there was one other side of Dick Cheney which the public tended not to notice, BECAUSE DEMOCRATS RAN SUCH ANEMIC "opposition research" efforts: Dick Cheney had been DEALING WITH SADDAM HUSSEIN as Chairman of Halliburton, and, indeed, in the late 1990's Cheney had used EUROPEAN SUBSIDIARIES to funnel millions of dollars of contracts to Saddam's Iraq - WHILE THE UNITED STATES WAS LEADING AN ECONOMIC EMBARGO of Iraq!

The Washington Post: "HALLIBURTON's IRAQ DEALS GREATER THAN CHENEY HAS SAID", June 2001
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/sanction/iraq1/oilforfood/2001/0627chen.htm

This, clearly, is a story the Washington Post SHOULD HAVE WRITTEN _BEFORE_ the presidential election of 2000, NOT after that election! That Halliburton Chairman and CEO DICK CHENEY could be SUPPLYING IRAQ in DEFIANCE of a US-enforced UN embargo, an action that CLEARLY RAN COUNTER to public opinion in America at the time, would be a preview to the newly installed vice president's SCORN FOR BOTH American publica opinion, and the Congress.

The "good news" is that, in Vice President Dick Cheney and in President George W. Bush, we Americans have an almost perfect expression of the true radical right agenda: a deep, pathological SCORN and CONTEMPT for American voters, the American Congress, and even American democracy itself. The only question is, "Will Americans fight to retake their democracy, or will the 'DARK SIDE' of Mr. Cheney's contempt for congress, scorn for public opinion, and dismissal of 'a decent respect to the opinions of mankind' prevail?"

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Answering to No One -
[i.e. Vice President Cheney is contemptuous of Congress, Scorns any oversight and American voters]
By Walter F. Mondale
Sunday, July 29, 2007; B07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/27/AR2007072702126_pf.html

The Post's recent series on Dick Cheney's vice presidency certainly got my attention. Having held that office myself over a quarter-century ago, I have more than a passing interest in its evolution from the backwater of American politics to the second most powerful position in our government. Almost all of that evolution, under presidents and vice presidents of both parties, has been positive -- until now. Under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, it has gone seriously off track.

The Founders created the vice presidency as a constitutional afterthought, solely to provide a president-in-reserve should the need arise. The only duty they specified was that the vice president should preside over the Senate. The office languished in obscurity and irrelevance for more than 150 years until Richard Nixon saw it as a platform from which to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 1960. That worked, and the office has been an effective launching pad for aspiring candidates since.

But it wasn't until Jimmy Carter assumed the presidency that the vice presidency took on a substantive role. Carter saw the office as an underused asset and set out to make the most of it. He gave me an office in the West Wing, unimpeded access to him and to the flow of information, and specific assignments at home and abroad. He asked me, as the only other nationally elected official, to be his adviser and partner on a range of issues.

Our relationship depended on trust, mutual respect and an acknowledgement that there was only one agenda to be served -- the president's. Every Monday the two of us met privately for lunch; we could, and did, talk candidly about virtually anything. By the end of four years we had completed the "executivization" of the vice presidency, ending two centuries of confusion, derision and irrelevance surrounding the office.

Subsequent administrations followed this pattern. George H.W. Bush, Dan Quayle and Al Gore built their vice presidencies after this model, allowing for their different interests, experiences and capabilities as well as the needs of the presidents they served.

This all changed in 2001, and especially after Sept. 11, when Cheney set out to create a largely independent power center in the office of the vice president. His was an unprecedented attempt not only to shape administration policy but, alarmingly, to limit the policy options sent to the president. It is essential that a president know all the relevant facts and viable options before making decisions, yet Cheney has discarded the "honest broker" role he played as President Gerald Ford's chief of staff.

Through his vast government experience, through the friends he had been able to place in key positions and through his considerable political skills, he has been increasingly able to determine the answers to questions put to the president -- because he has been able to determine the questions. It was Cheney who persuaded President Bush to sign an order that denied access to any court by foreign terrorism suspects and Cheney who determined that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to enemy combatants captured in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Rather than subject his views to an established (and rational) vetting process, his practice has been to trust only his immediate staff before taking ideas directly to the president. Many of the ideas that Bush has subsequently bought into have proved offensive to the values of the Constitution and have been embarrassingly overturned by the courts.

The corollary to Cheney's zealous embrace of secrecy is his near total aversion to the notion of accountability. I've never seen a former member of the House of Representatives demonstrate such contempt for Congress -- even when it was controlled by his own party. His insistence on invoking executive privilege to block virtually every congressional request for information has been stupefying -- it's almost as if he denies the legitimacy of an equal branch of government. Nor does he exhibit much respect for public opinion, which amounts to indifference toward being held accountable by the people who elected him.

Whatever authority a vice president has is derived from the president under whom he serves. There are no powers inherent in the office; they must be delegated by the president. Somehow, not only has Cheney been given vast authority by President Bush -- including, apparently, the entire intelligence portfolio -- but he also pursues his own agenda. The real question is why the president allows this to happen.

Three decades ago we lived through another painful example of a White House exceeding its authority, lying to the American people, breaking the law and shrouding everything it did in secrecy. Watergate wrenched the country, and our constitutional system, like nothing before. We spent years trying to identify and absorb the lessons of this great excess. But here we are again.

Since the Carter administration left office, we have been criticized for many things. Yet I remain enormously proud of what we did in those four years, especially that we told the truth, obeyed the law and kept the peace.

The writer was vice president of the United States from 1977 to 1981.

Attorney General Gonzales duplicitious testimony spurs Senate request for PERJURY inquiry

F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday.

The news is fast and furious in the 3 days since Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' disgraceful third appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the committee holding hearings into Gonzales' role in the "purging" of qualified US Attorneys by the Bush White House (throught the Department of Justice) in the aftermath of election landslide wins for Congressional Democrats in the November 2006 elections.

Media and White House talking points attempt to downplay or mislead on the controversy. The heart of the "Purge-gate" controversy is the attempts by the Bush White House to use the most powerful prosecutors in the US government, the US Attorneys, as election influencing partisans - a systematic and chronic effort directed by the White House and administered through Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to purge notn-partisan US Attorneys from office and fill those vacancies with the most partisan of Bush loyalists, in order to get the new, replacement US Attorneys to file bogus criminal indictments against vote-registration activists in the days and weeks immediately before elections.
This simple story - firing non-partisan (but all purged prosecutos were Republican Bush appointees!) US Attorneys to replace them with unqualified party hacks, in order to swing elections by filling false and malicious prosecutions at Democratic-leaning voter-registration activists - becomes COMPLEX and CONFUSING in the retelling, with the many names, places, and secretive White House and Department of Justice meetings and orders numbing the senses of readers, writers, and news viewers.

The second confusing aspect of the Attorney General's testimony before Congress is regarding the immediate cause of then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales' late-night visit to the bedridden, sedated, and recovering from surgery John Ashcroft, who was then Attorney General. The White House - which is to say President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Political Affairs Director Karl Rove, sent White House Counsel Gonzales, and then White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, to the hospital room of (then) Attorney General John Ashcroft, specifically to get the hospitalized Ashcroft to sign an extension of one of the Bush White House's signature programs, the TSP "terrorist surveillance program," which had expired in March 2004. The TSP is a quasi-illegal surveillance, or wiretapping, data-mining, and electronic spying program, potentially ovr any and all American citizens at the president's direction, with no judicial or congressional oversight or restraints.
In an earlier campaign speech, President Bush had arrogantly declared to his audience "Let me be perfectly clar - wiretapping requires a warrant." But in a text-book ecample of Mr. Bush' pathological disconnect (which is to say pathological lying) not only was President Bush being duplicitous in his "let me be perfectly clear - wiretapping requires a warrant" comment, but the the TSP NO OVERSIGHT electronic spying on ANY and ALL Americans, at the executive's sole discretion, was THE SIGNATURE domestic program of Mr. Bush's White House's "war on terror," in terms of domestic policy. (In tandem, that is, with Bush's other domestic policy priorities, such as forcing working Americans to shoulder the burden for tax cuts for the wealthy in time of war; and using the entire federal budget, US Treasury, and specifically US military & war on terror expenditures as slush-funds for cronies, i.e. "PRIVATIZING" the military and war on terror as FOR PROFIT ENTERPRISES for well connected companies who could be counted on to send some of their millions in profits back to the RNC and White House campaigns.)

SPYING on Ameican citizens; warrantless, no oversight, no restraint electronic surveillance; using US Attorneys to file false and malicious prosecutions against Democratic voter registration acitivists in order to criminalize those efforts and thereby tar and smear Democratic Party candidates and thus swing elections to their Republican opponents; using the White House Chief of Staff (Andrew Card) and White House Counsel (then Alberto Gonzales) as a strong-arm hit team to strong-arm a bedridden and sedated Attorney General (then John Ashcroft) to sign an authorization form despite his being sedated and having recused himself from power.... the only thing "confusing" about "Purgegate" and Mr. Gonzales' in-your-face lying testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee is the sheer depth and breadth of President Bush, his White House and his Justice Department's efforts to undermine Ameican democracy, by CRIMINALIZING the opposition party, and by attempting to make the ENTIRE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT an electioneering arm of the White House.

Purge-gate and related election-fraud scandals are thus an on-going, steadfast effort to make the entire American populace vulnerable to the strong-arm intimidations of the White House.

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Acting Attorney General Comy, the #2. offical at the Department of Justice (as snap-quoted from PBS News Hour highlights Friday July 27) - "I was very upset at what I saw, it looked to me as an attempt to take advantage of a very sick man."
(The effort by then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, and then White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, to get the sedated and recovering-from-surgery Attorney General John Ashcroft to sign a document extending Mr. Bush's no-warrants, no oversight, no restraints domestic spying program.)


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/26/washington/26cnd-gonzales.html

http://www.boston.com/news/local/rhode_island/articles/2007/07/26/whitehouse_seeking_special_counsel_to_investigate_gonzales_1185471092/


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FBI Director Mueller Testimony contradicts Attorney General Gonzales' testimony from previous Day
By David Johnston and Scott Shane
July 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/27/washington/27gonzales.html

WASHINGTON, July 26 — The director of the F.B.I. offered testimony Thursday that sharply conflicted with Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales’s sworn statements about a 2004 confrontation in which top Justice Department officials threatened to resign over a secret intelligence operation.

The director, Robert S. Mueller III, told the House Judiciary Committee that the confrontation was about the National Security Agency’s counterterrorist eavesdropping program, describing it as “an N.S.A. program that has been much discussed.” His testimony was a serious blow to Mr. Gonzales, who insisted at a Senate hearing on Tuesday that there were no disagreements inside the Bush administration about the program at the time of those discussions or at any other time.

The director’s remarks were especially significant because Mr. Mueller is the Justice Department’s chief law enforcement official. He also played a crucial role in the 2004 dispute over the program, intervening with President Bush to help deal with the threat of mass resignations that grew out of a day of emergency meetings at the White House and at the hospital bedside of John Ashcroft, who was then attorney general.

In a separate development, Senate Democrats, who were unaware of Mr. Mueller’s comments, demanded the appointment of a special counsel to investigate whether Mr. Gonzales committed perjury in his testimony on Tuesday about the intelligence dispute. The Senate Judiciary Committee, meanwhile, issued a subpoena to Karl Rove, the White House senior political adviser, and another presidential aide, J. Scott Jennings, for testimony about the dismissal of federal prosecutors, another issue that has dogged Mr. Gonzales.

White House officials said the Democrats had engaged in political gamesmanship.

“What we are witnessing is an out-of-control Congress which spends time calling for special prosecutors, starting investigations, issuing subpoenas and generally just trying to settle scores,” said Scott M. Stanzel, a White House spokesman. “All the while they fail to pass appropriations bills and important issues like immigration reform, energy and other problems go unanswered.”

The conflict underscored how Mr. Gonzales’s troubles have expanded beyond accusations of improper political influence in the dismissal of United States attorneys to the handling of the eavesdropping program, in which Mr. Gonzales was significantly involved in his previous post as White House counsel.

“I had an understanding that the discussion was on a N.S.A. program,” Mr. Mueller said in answer to a question from Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat of Texas, in a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.

Asked whether he was referring to the Terrorist Surveillance Program, or T.S.P., he replied, “The discussion was on a national N.S.A. program that has been much discussed, yes.”

Mr. Mueller said he had taken notes of some of his conversations about the issue, and after the hearing the committee asked him to produce them.

An F.B.I. spokesman declined Thursday night to elaborate on Mr. Mueller’s testimony.

In a four-hour appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Mr. Gonzales denied that the dispute arose over the Terrorist Surveillance Program, whose existence was confirmed by President Bush in December 2005 after it had been disclosed by The New York Times. Mr. Gonzales said it centered on “other intelligence activities.”

Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said Thursday night that Mr. Gonzales had testified truthfully, saying “confusion is inevitable when complicated classified activities are discussed in a public forum where the greatest care must be used not to compromise sensitive intelligence operations.”

The spokesman said that when Mr. Gonzales had said there had been no controversy about the eavesdropping operation, he was referring only to the program to intercept international communications that Mr. Bush publicly confirmed.

“The disagreement that occurred in March 2004 concerned the legal basis for intelligence activities that have not been publicly disclosed and that remain highly classified,” Mr. Roehrkasse said.

The four senators seeking an inquiry into Mr. Gonzales’s testimony sent a letter to the Justice Department saying “it is apparent that the attorney general has provided at a minimum half-truths and misleading statements.”

The senators asked for the appointment of a special counsel. While the Justice Department is not obliged to act on their request, the letter reflected the chasm of distrust that has opened between lawmakers on the Judiciary Committee and Mr. Gonzales.

The senators who signed the letter were Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, Dianne Feinstein of California, Charles E. Schumer of New York and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. Ms. Feinstein, Mr. Feingold and Mr. Whitehouse are members of the Intelligence Committee and have been briefed on the intelligence programs at issue.

The senators’ letter was sent to Paul D. Clement, the solicitor general, because Mr. Gonzales is recused from investigations of his own conduct. In addition to his statements to Congress about the intelligence controversy, the letter raised the possibility that Mr. Gonzales had lied about the prosecutor firings.

In what amounted to a warning to the attorney general, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, sent Mr. Gonzales the transcript of Tuesday’s hearing, asking him to “mark any changes you wish to make to correct, clarify or supplement your answers so that, consistent with your oath, they are the whole truth.”

Similar requests are routinely sent to witnesses after hearings, but Mr. Leahy’s pointed language underscored his view of the seriousness of the dispute over Mr. Gonzales’s veracity.

Still, neither Mr. Leahy nor Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the committee’s top Republican and a tough critic of Mr. Gonzales, joined in the call for a perjury investigation.

“I don’t think you rush off precipitously and ask for appointment of special counsel to run that kind of an investigation,” Mr. Specter said.

Doubts about Mr. Gonzales’s version of events in March 2004 grew after James B. Comey, the former deputy attorney general, testified in May that he and other Justice Department officials were prepared to resign over legal objections to an intelligence program that appeared to be the N.S.A. program.

Mr. Gonzales’s testimony Tuesday was his first since Mr. Comey’s account drew national attention. He stuck to his account, repeatedly saying that the dispute involved a different intelligence activity.

Mr. Gonzales described an emergency meeting with Congressional leaders at the White House on March 10, 2004, to discuss the dispute. That evening, he and the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., went to the hospital bedside of Mr. Ashcroft in an unsuccessful effort to get his reauthorization for the secret program.

Lawmakers present at the afternoon meeting have given various accounts, but several have said that only one program, the Terrorist Surveillance Program, was discussed.

In addition, in testimony last year, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who was the N.S.A. director when the program started and now heads the Central Intelligence Agency, said the March 2004 meeting involved the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

More Articles in Washington »

White House calls Speaker Pelosi's 110th Congress "PATHETIC." Miers & Bolton are in CONTEMPT of it. And the AG committs PERJURY with Impunity...

video: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales "CONTRADICTS" his own testimony, under oath, during Congressional hearings before Senate Judiciary committee on Tuesday, July 24, 2007. The current Attorney General perjured himself within the span of four sentences, at one point stating that he had not gone to see (then) Attorney General John Ashcroft to get the hospitalized, recovering from surgery Attorney General Ashcroft to discuss the "terrorist surveillance act" (warrantless wiretapping), but moments later, admitting that he (then White House Counsel Gonzales) had gone to the hospital room to see Attorney General Ashcroft to attempt to get Ashcroft to sign the document extending the TSA act.

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Speaker of the 110th Congress Ms. Nancy Pelosi should know, that just yesterday White House spokesman Tony Snow said that congressional hearings to compel testimony from the Attorney General Alberton Gonzales were "PATHETIC."

That former White House official Harriet Miers, and current White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolton, are CONTEMPTUOUS of Congress, they are both IGNORING a congressional subpoenae that seeks to compel them to testify honestly about the "PURGING" of US Attorneys nationwide immediately after election 2006, an effort by Karl Rove and the Bush White House to turn the entire US Justice Department into an electioneering-arm of the Republican Party. This effort by the Bush White House involves getting United States prosecutors to make FALSE ACCUSATIONS, and thus run PERJUROUS PROSECUTIONS of innocent Americans, in order to swing close elections to the Republican Party, making "SCANDALS" of EVERY RACE where the Democrats were close to their Republican opponents, by charging Democratic candidates and vote-registration activists with fraud and other crimes.

And, just two days ago, the Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, openly MOCKED a Senate congressional hearing, Mr. Gonzales having the temerity to try to tell senators that he had not gone to see then Attorney General John Ashcroft, recovering in a hospital bed from surgery, about getting approval for the "TSA" terrorist surveillance act... yet, within the next few moments, one of the senators compelled Mr. Gonzales to admit that he went to that hospital room seeking Ashcroft's signature on the document which would have extended the TSA "warrantless eavesdropping" program for another extended period!

The question is, "WHAT ARE SPEAKER PELOSI and her Democratic leaders going to do about this challenge to the Congress, this OPEN CONTEMPT, this OPEN SCORN, this undisguised PERJURY; all being ORDERED from the White House by the President, Vice President, and Political Affairs Director to OBSTRUCT JUSTICE, and to lay the groudwork for yet another stolen election in 2008, when the entire US Department of Justice will be in the VOTER INTIMIDATION business?

Thus far, the Speaker's response is as predictable as it is anemic, which is, sad to say, despicable. For eight long years Republicans assaulted the Clinton White House, leading in 1998 to the IMPEACHMENT of President Clinton, with impeachments supporters and leaders pounding the mantra "the president lied under oath! His administration is an assault on the very fabric of American governance!"

Yet today, when the ATTORNEY GENERAL of the United States feels free to COMMITT PERJURY about an issue that is at the very heart and soul of American governance - the right of citizens to be free from wrongful prosecutions that seek to eleminate democracy itself! - the Speaker is trying to pretend it is "business as usual," and the Congress is planning to take a summer recess.

It is SHAMEFUL that Speaker Pelosi does not respond to White House contempt and obstruction using the full force of the law - using the constitutional powers vested in Congress, vested in her office. It is BEYOND SHAMEFUL that the Democratic "leadership" allows the Bush-Rove-Cheney administration to TARGET innocent American citizens with FALSE ACCUSATIONS and MALICIOUS PROSECUTIONS.
SELLING Democratic voters and American citizens down the river has now become standard operating procedure for the Democratic "leadership.'

Time for Senator Leahy, Speaker Pelosi, to back IMPEACHMENT of Alberto Gonzales....

A MOST EXCELLENT summary of the Bush Justice Department "Purge-gate" scandal, an overview of how Karl Rove and George W. Bush used Alberto Gonzales to try to make the US Justice Department a whooly-owned subsidiary of the radical-right wing of the Republican Party. This relatively short article is packed with information about the unfolding of the PURGE of competent US Attorneys who would NOT make FALSE, PERJUROUS accusations against Democratic vote-registration activists in time to influence close elections, but for our post, we will concentrate on Mr. Palmero's discussion of the influence of the Democratic Leadership's thus-far attempts to DOWNPLAY the scandal, in order to AVOID a CONSTITUTIONAL CONFRONTATION with the Bush White House.

<< Dennis Kucinich is on the right track by bringing forth articles of impeachment against Dick Cheney, BUT DEMOCRATIC PARTY LEADERS are NOT BACKING HIM. The milquetoasts in the leadership are TOO SCARED scared of the political risks in addressing the Constitutional crisis that the Bush-Cheney team has dropped in their laps.

The political effects of playing nice with Bush and his cronies are threefold:

1). It DEMORALIZES THE DEMOCRATS' BASE that was instrumental in putting the Congress in the hands of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid;

2). It EMBOLDENS the Bush Administration and Congressional Republicans to stonewall, and ENERGIZES _THEIR_ SUPPORTERS by showing they have the guts to stand and fight; and

3). It SHIFTS THE FOCUS from what the Bush regime has wrought these past six years -- a ghastly record the GOP wants swept under the rug -- and gets people thinking about the elections of 2008, instead of the malfeasance we should be attacking right now.

[In this, the Democrat "leadership" is ENABLING the tried-and-true Rovian media PR tactic of DIVERTING attention from the REAL ISSUES, just as the mantra of the Bush administration for six long years has been "WAR ON TERRA!" to justify their ENTIRE RAFT of regressive, extra-legal, anti-constitutional policies and using the entire federal government - billions of TAXPAYER DOLLARS - as a slush-fund for the Republican Party.]

Meanwhile, Bush seems to be following a script taken from 1968, that of President Lyndon B. Johnson: kick the disastrous, unpopular war to the next administration to deal with.

The Democrats can regain their momentum only by getting tough on Iraq and aggressively investigating the pervasive corruption of the Bush Administration. If witnesses duck subpoenas, the committee chairs must slap contempt of Congress charges on them and demand the convening grand juries.

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Can We Please Impeach Gonzales Now?
by Joseph Palermo
July 24, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/can-we-please-impeach-gon_b_57616.html?view=print

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's performance testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee was nothing more than a desperate attempt to cover up the gross improprieties of the Bush White House. The chronology of events that led to the firing of the eight United States Attorneys last December seems to have gone something like this:

Karl Rove produced a list of U.S. Attorneys to be canned for not being sufficiently partisan in the cases they chose to prosecute.

Gonzales signed off on the political purge without so much as a second thought because he knew that's what the White House wanted. Gonzales did not question the merits of Rove's list, or look at the performance evaluations, or even give courtesy calls to the targeted attorneys. Gonzales fired them in a pretty brutal manner, but what would you expect from a guy who argued in favor of torturing people?

Karl Rove intended the purge of the U.S. Attorneys to accomplish at least four simultaneous results:

1). Stop or obstruct investigations into Republican public corruption cases. Rove wished to block future "Duke" Cunningham-type prosecutions from emerging that could damage Republicans in 2008.

2). Make it clear to the other eighty-five U.S. Attorneys their jobs were on the line if they did not show sufficient fealty to Rove's political project. The firings threatened them with the prospect of being replaced by "loyal Bushies," (as Sampson put it). Any U.S. Attorney found to be overly aggressive in prosecuting Republican officials on corruption charges might end up with his or her head on a platter.

3). Pepper into the U.S. Attorney offices new super-loyal Republican partisans who would initiate spurious lawsuits against Democratic officials in vital swing districts and states that could be helpful in 2008. Rove wanted to promote prosecutors in the mold of Milwaukee's Steven Biskupic, who brought a groundless suit against a subordinate of Wisconsin's Democratic governor so his Republican challenger could run TV attack ads slamming him for "corruption." (Judge Diane Wood of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh District subsequently tossed out the case saying the evidence was "beyond thin," but not before the political damage had been done.)

4). Direct the new Rove loyalists in the U.S. Attorney offices to employ their powers to assist Republican voter-suppression activities with the aim of disfranchising African-American and other Democratic voters through specious "voter fraud" cases.

Gonzales owes his entire legal career to George W. Bush. In his confirmation hearing he promised to cast off his role as Bush's consigliere when he became head of Justice Department. This promise has been proven hollow.

It is time for Chairman Patrick Leahy of the Senate Judiciary Committee to take the gloves off.

The "Bushies," (as they like to call themselves), have shown they are geniuses at covering their tracks, destroying incriminating evidence, disavowing close ties with identified perps, and having fits of selective amnesia. Even when there is overwhelming evidence of fraud, false statements, and stealing they have been largely successful in stonewalling Congress.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is given a free ride to cover up the fact that the Department of Justice under his leadership became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party.

Dennis Kucinich is on the right track by bringing forth articles of impeachment against Dick Cheney, but Democratic Party leaders are not backing him. The milquetoasts in the leadership are too scared of the political risks in addressing the Constitutional crisis that the Bush-Cheney team has dropped in their laps.

The political effects of playing nice with Bush and his cronies are threefold:

1). It demoralizes the Democrats' base that was instrumental in putting the Congress in the hands of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid;

2). It emboldens the Bush Administration and Congressional Republicans to stonewall, and energizes their supporters by showing they have the guts to stand and fight; and

3). It shifts the focus from what the Bush regime has wrought these past six years -- a ghastly record the GOP wants swept under the rug -- and gets people thinking about the elections of 2008, instead of the malfeasance we should be attacking right now.

Meanwhile, Bush seems to be following a script taken from 1968, that of President Lyndon B. Johnson: kick the disastrous, unpopular war to the next administration to deal with.

The Democrats can regain their momentum only by getting tough on Iraq and aggressively investigating the pervasive corruption of the Bush Administration. If witnesses duck subpoenas, the committee chairs must slap contempt of Congress charges on them and demand the convening grand juries.

The House Judiciary Committee should immediately draw up articles of impeachment against Alberto Gonzales; we've listened to his lies long enough. Gonzales is the low hanging fruit for the Democrats. Gonzales should be impeached for lying to Congress and implementing Karl Rove's partisan project at the Justice Department. Only a full on Constitutional showdown this summer can begin to heal the wounds George Bush has inflicted on our republic.

Bush's Attorney General lies to Senators, again, in miserable appearance before committee....

President Bush's Attorney General, Alberton Gonzales, lied to Senators while under oath in a Senate hearing yesterday (which is the definition of perjury), but despite dancing up to the line of actually saying "LYING" and "PERJURY" the senators, both Republican and Democrat, broke out their college thesauruses and used EVERY WORD BUT the plain English "lying."

"deceit"
"intentionally misleading"
"untruthful"
"misleading"
"discrepancy"

The Senator's unwillingness or inability to come out and say "Attorney General Gonzales is LYING to us, and should therefore be removed from office" serves to remind us why then Texas Governor George W. Bush's "STRAIGHT SHOOTER" campaign of 2000 was so popular with many American voters (despite the fact that the Texas governor was being anything but honest and straight-forward about his controversial past history and career record, in which his campaign effectively suppressed questions into his AWOL status, any criminal convictions he may have had, his DUI conviction, his "dumping" of Harken energy stock, and his insider status in the Texas Rangers stadium consortium, among other details that Mr. Bush was far less than forthcoming.)

The question today is, are the Senators merely courtiers - will they accept the insulting, incompetent, deceitful answers of the Attorney General as the price of maintaining their exalted status in Washington? - or will they actually insist that justice and constitutional oversight be maintained in American government, at the expense of confronting the Bush-Rove-Cheney-Gonzales White House?

One has to give the president and his minions credit: despite being mired down in an unpopular war, despite a long list of criminal activities from within the White House, including (but not limited to) former VP Chief of Staff Lewis 'Scooter' Libby's perjury and obstruction of justice CONVICTIONS, despite having approval ratings that put them on the level of a frog in a mudhole, the president and his officials can turn the entire US senate into a useless debating society - a debating society that is afraid to even use the word "lying"!

The fates, or gods on Mt. Olympus, must be laughing at the American congress....officials from the White House can't tell the truth, about anything, if their lives depended on it, and still the majority party can't bow down to the emperor with no clothes fast enough!

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


Special Prosecutor Weighed for Gonzales
Lara Jakes Jordan
July 24, 2007


Compare other versions »
WASHINGTON — Angry senators suggested a special prosecutor should investigate misconduct at the Justice Department, accusing Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Tuesday of deceit on the prosecutor firings and President Bush's eavesdropping program.

Democrats and Republicans alike hammered Gonzales in four hours of testimony as he denied trying, as White House counsel in 2004, to push a hospitalized attorney general into approving a counterterror program that the Justice Department then viewed as illegal.

Gonzales, alternately appearing wearied and seething, vowed anew to remain in his job even as senators told him outright they believe he is unqualified to stay.

He would not answer numerous questions, including whether the Bush administration would bar its U.S. attorneys from pursuing contempt charges against current and former White House officials who have defied congressional subpoenas for their testimony.

"It's hard to see anything but a pattern of intentionally misleading Congress again and again," Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., told Gonzales during the often-bitter Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. "Shouldn't the attorney general of the United States meet a higher standard?"

"Obviously, there have been instances where I have not met that standard, and I've tried to correct that," Gonzales answered.

The hearing rekindled a political furor that began with last year's firings of nine U.S. attorneys and led to disclosure of a Justice Department hiring process that favored Republican loyalists. Gonzales has soldiered on with Bush's support, despite repeated calls for his resignation and questions about his role in a hospital room confrontation with then-Attorney General John Ashcroft over whether to renew a classified but potentially illegal national security program.

"Of course the president continues to have full confidence in the attorney general," White House spokesman Tony Fratto said after the hearing ended. "We have every reason to believe that the attorney general testified truthfully."

In one withering exchange, Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., noted a potential need for a special prosecutor to bring contempt citations against two White House officials who have refused to testify about the U.S. attorney firings. The House Judiciary Committee will vote Wednesday on the citations against Bush chief of staff Josh Bolten and former presidential counsel Harriet Miers.

Normally, the U.S. attorney in Washington would bring such criminal contempt cases to a federal grand jury for possible indictment and prosecution. But the Justice Department, in a letter sent to lawmakers Tuesday, said criminal contempt of Congress law "does not apply" to the president or his aides when they invoke executive privilege.

Despite repeated questions, Gonzales refused to say whether he would allow a presidentially appointed prosecutor to investigate White House aides who Bush has said are covered by executive privilege and therefore exempt from talking.

That leaves open the door for presidents to shut down the checks-and-balances of congressional oversight, Specter said.

"You're asking me a question that's related to an ongoing controversy," Gonzales protested.

Specter, top Republican on the panel, said he was merely asking if Gonzales recognized the constitutional problem at hand.

"Would you focus on my question for just a minute, please?" Specter asked.

He added: "I'm not going to pursue that question, Mr. Attorney General, because I see it's hopeless. ... You're the attorney general, and you're also a lawyer. And we're dealing with a very fundamental controversy."

In another flashpoint, Gonzales denied he tried to pressure the ailing Ashcroft into renewing the counterterror program in March 2004, as recounted in testimony earlier this year by former Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey. At the time, Ashcroft refused to give his OK to Gonzales and then-White House chief of staff Andy Card, saying he had delegated authority to make that decision to Comey, who questioned the program's legality.

Gonzales described the encounter at Ashcroft's hospital bedside as having come at the bidding of congressional leaders who urged the administration to continue the program. He said he and Card "didn't press him. We said, 'Thank you,' and we left."

"We went there because we thought it was important for him to know where the congressional leadership was on this," Gonzales said.

Later, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Gonzales was "untruthful" Tuesday in describing the White House meeting where the congressional leaders supposedly approved continuing the program. Former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, who also would have been included, said in a statement he has "no recollection of such a meeting and believe that it didn't occur."

"I am quite certain that at no time did we encourage the AG or anyone else to take such actions," Daschle said in the statement in response to reporters' questions.

Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said Gonzales stands by his testimony.

Senators furiously accused Gonzales of misleading them a year ago when he testified there were no internal objections to the eavesdropping program that targeted suspected terrorists in the United States. Gonzales, however, said the hospital confrontation dealt with a different intelligence program that he would not identify.

"The disagreement that occurred, and the reason for the visit to the hospital, senator, was about other intelligence activities," Gonzales said.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., said Gonzales' refusal to answer direct questions about the program demonstrated deceit.

"How can you say you should stay on as attorney general when we go through exercises like this?" Schumer asked. "You want to be attorney general, you should be able to clarify it yourself."

"There's a discrepancy here in sworn testimony," added committee chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. "We're going to have to ask who's telling the truth, who's not."

After numerous apologies and promises to repair the Justice Department, the normally placid Gonzales was visibly frustrated and at times angered at senators unwillingness to move past the controversy. He flinched as the hearing ended and protesters loudly heckled him as he shook lawmakers' hands.

Yet Gonzales also tried to appease senators who asked why he hasn't resigned.

"Would you please explain to us why the administration of justice and the American people would not be better served by somebody sitting in the office who does not have all of the problems that you possess with respect to believability, credibility, confidence, trust?" asked Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis.

"Ultimately I have to decide whether or not it would be better for me to leave or just stay and try to fix the problems," Gonzales said with a rueful smile. "I've decided to stay and fix the problems."

Speaker Pelosi ENABLES the media to IGNORE, TRIVIALIZE White House OBSTRUCTION of lawful Congressional subpoenaes...

"PANEL PUSHES CONTEMPT ISSUE" ??!

WHAT the hell does that headline in today's South Florida [Ft. Lauderdale] Sun-Sentinel mean? Does "panel" mean a subcommittee of a local condominium co-op, or perhaps a town council facing down one of its members?

For a real-life translation of this confusing, anemic headline, let's pretend that President Clinton were still in office.... here's how the Sun-Sentinel headline would read:

"PRESIDENT CLINTON ORDERS STAFFERS to DEFY CONGRESS -
OBSTRUCTS Congressional Subpoena"!!

That the "major media" can portray the serial, obstructionist, arrogant, and even criminal conduct of the Bush-Rove-Cheney White House under such anemic, wishy-washy, muddy headlines, buried on page A-3 where only political junkies will find it, illustrates how callow, vacillating, and enabling the Democratic 'leadership' is.

Speaker Pelosi is now the biggest ENABLER of White House misconduct in the entire nation, her REFUSAL to TIE the Purge-gate, CIA-outing, obstruction of justice, and now obstruction of subpoena issues TOGETHER,
_ALLOWS_ the Bush White House to muddy and confuse each of those issues... which all have the central nexus of CRIMINAL CONDUCT from WITHIN the White House!

By failing to UNITE or tie-together those issues, Speaker Pelosi is ALLOWING the Rove Republicans to MARGINALIZE and INTIMIDATE Judiciary Chairman Conyers; to DISMISS those Representatives who have signed on to the Impeachment bill, and allowing the Republicans and press-media to IGNORE the MAJORITY of American voters polled who believe the impeachment of the Vice President is warranted by the extra-legal if not outright criminal actions from the Vice President's office.

And that poll, of course, comes despite the FAVORABLE coverage the administration gets from the media, as today's "Panel pushes contempt issue" muddy headline and story, buried on page three of the Sun-Sentinel, so effectively demonstrates.


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

Panel pushes contempt issue
Bush's ex-aides are likely to face vote in full House

By Richard B. Schmitt, Los Angeles Times
July 24, 2007
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/nationworld/sfl-flaattorneys0724nbjul24,0,925935.story

WASHINGTON The House Judiciary Committee said Monday that it would move forward with contempt of Congress proceedings against President Bush's chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, and former White House counsel Harriet E. Miers for refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas pertaining to the firing of eight U.S. attorneys last year.

The panel's chairman, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., said the committee would vote Wednesday on a resolution to hold both Bolten and Miers in contempt for refusing to turn over documents and testimony sought by the panel in the politically charged case.

The decision ratchets up a battle between Congress and the White House in which the Bush administration has sought to invoke executive privilege to keep documents about the firings under wraps. The resolution would go to the House floor for a vote if, as expected, the committee approved it.



Only twice since the Watergate investigations of the mid-1970s has the full House voted to hold an administration official in contempt of Congress. In 1982, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Anne Gorsuch refused to turn over documents; a year later another EPA official, Rita Lavelle, refused to appear before a House committee. The Justice Department refused to prosecute Gorsuch, and Lavelle was acquitted in court.

"This investigation, including the reluctant but necessary decision to move forward with contempt, has been a very deliberative process, taking care at each step to respect the executive branch's legitimate prerogatives," Conyers said.

"I've allowed the White House and Ms. Miers every opportunity to cooperate with this investigation, either voluntarily or under subpoena. It is still my hope that they will reconsider this hard-line position, and cooperate with our investigation so that we can get to the bottom of this matter," he said.

Congressional investigators have reviewed thousands of pages of Justice Department documents and testimony, but the investigation has hit a wall at the White House, which has declined to make officials available for public questioning under oath.

The administration has offered to make some officials available for private questioning without a transcript and without the opportunity for follow-up questions. Legislators have said those conditions are unacceptable.

"It seems now that we have a fishing expedition that's woefully short on fish," White House spokesman Tony Snow said Monday. "This is one of these things where Congress can get its facts and do its due diligence without having to get to this point, and we continue to hold open the possibility of accommodation."

Under federal law, being in contempt of Congress is a misdemeanor, and cases are referred to the U.S. Attorney's office for the District of Columbia for prosecution. The penalty is one to 12 months in jail and $100 to $1,000 in fines.

The Los Angeles Times is a Tribune Co. newspaper.

Bush-Rove-Cheney White House CONTEMPTUOUS of cowering Democrats in Senate & Congress..

Wow, you really have to hand it to George Orwell... even though he had the model of the Soviet and Nazi purges (mass-murder dictatorships) to base his political novels on, it is still quite amazing to behold just how precient he was about the demise of American and English democracies. OK, he was off by two dozen years... in 1985 America still had a functioning democracy, but come 2000, we Americans actually installed a president-'elect' in the White House who said "This would be a lot easier if it was a DICTATORSHIP, so long as I'm the dictator."
CNN transcript, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0012/18/nd.01.html

This was more than a subliminal slip or comedic snip on the part of George W. Bush - it was a reflection of his core ideology, born and nurtured through his entitled upbringing in segregated Texas, that the American public - 'the masses' - (especially in the case of Blacks, Mexicans, other minorities in America, and even poor white trash), are entirely UNFIT to govern themselves, and must be RULED by the modern iteration of the ante-bellum slave-owning aristocracy. (Today the oil- and resource-extraction billionaire barons of Texas and the deep south, who have, through the Bush administration, formed an autocratic alliance with the barons of finance, media, and Wall St., the AIPAC lobby, and the 'military-industrial-congressional complex.' See Michael Lind's landmark exposition, "Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics."


Notice how, in keeping with the above alliances of the media with the oil barons, finance barons, and the military-industrial complex congressional barons, that the WASHINGTON POST spins this entire article, from the first paragraph on, in terms of "CHALLENGE TO THE DEMOCRATS," instead of how they would have spun it had President Bill Clinton IGNORED and DEFIED congressional subpoenaes for any of 1,000 such subpoeanaes issued by the Republican Congress to the Clinton White House all through the 1990s.

(In which case the Washington Post headline would have been written "President Clinton DEFIES CONGRESS, REFUSES TO COMPLY WITH ANY FUTURE SUBPOENAES.")

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

Broader Privilege Claimed In Firings
White House Says Hill Can't Pursue Contempt Cases
[aka "Bush Administration SNUBS CONGRESS, refuses oversight, contemptuous of Congressional Subpoenaes.]

By Dan Eggen and Amy Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, July 20, 2007; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/19/AR2007071902625.html

Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege.

The position presents serious legal and political obstacles for congressional Democrats, who have begun laying the groundwork for contempt proceedings against current and former White House officials in order to pry loose information about the dismissals.

Under federal law, a statutory contempt citation by the House or Senate must be submitted to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, "whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action."

But administration officials argued yesterday that Congress has no power to force a U.S. attorney to pursue contempt charges in cases, such as the prosecutor firings, in which the president has declared that testimony or documents are protected from release by executive privilege. Officials pointed to a Justice Department legal opinion during the Reagan administration, which made the same argument in a case that was never resolved by the courts.

"A U.S. attorney would not be permitted to bring contempt charges or convene a grand jury in an executive privilege case," said a senior official, who said his remarks reflect a consensus within the administration. "And a U.S. attorney wouldn't be permitted to argue against the reasoned legal opinion that the Justice Department provided. No one should expect that to happen."

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly, added: "It has long been understood that, in circumstances like these, the constitutional prerogatives of the president would make it a futile and purely political act for Congress to refer contempt citations to U.S. attorneys."

Mark J. Rozell, a professor of public policy at George Mason University who has written a book on executive-privilege issues, called the administration's stance "astonishing."

"That's a breathtakingly broad view of the president's role in this system of separation of powers," Rozell said. "What this statement is saying is the president's claim of executive privilege trumps all."

The administration's statement is a dramatic attempt to seize the upper hand in an escalating constitutional battle with Congress, which has been trying for months, without success, to compel White House officials to testify and to turn over documents about their roles in the prosecutor firings last year. The Justice Department and White House in recent weeks have been discussing when and how to disclose the stance, and the official said he decided yesterday that it was time to highlight it.

Yesterday, a House Judiciary subcommittee voted to lay the groundwork for contempt proceedings against White House chief of staff Joshua B. Bolten, following a similar decision last week against former White House counsel Harriet E. Miers.

The administration has not directly informed Congress of its view. A spokeswoman for Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), the Judiciary Committee's chairman, declined to comment . But other leading Democrats attacked the argument.

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) called it "an outrageous abuse of executive privilege" and said: "The White House must stop stonewalling and start being accountable to Congress and the American people. No one, including the president, is above the law."

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) said the administration is "hastening a constitutional crisis," and Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) said the position "makes a mockery of the ideal that no one is above the law."

Waxman added: "I suppose the next step would be just disbanding the Justice Department."

Under long-established procedures and laws, the House and Senate can each pursue two kinds of criminal contempt proceedings, and the Senate also has a civil contempt option. The first, called statutory contempt, has been the avenue most frequently pursued in modern times, and is the one that requires a referral to the U.S. attorney in the District.

Both chambers also have an "inherent contempt" power, allowing either body to hold its own trials and even jail those found in defiance of Congress. Although widely used during the 19th century, the power has not been invoked since 1934 and Democratic lawmakers have not displayed an appetite for reviving the practice.

In defending its argument, administration officials point to a 1984 opinion by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, headed at the time by Theodore B. Olson, a prominent conservative lawyer who was solicitor general from 2001 to 2004. The opinion centered on a contempt citation issued by the House for Anne Gorsuch Burford, then administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

It concluded: "The President, through a United States Attorney, need not, indeed may not, prosecute criminally a subordinate for asserting on his behalf a claim of executive privilege. Nor could the Legislative Branch or the courts require or implement the prosecution of such an individual."

In the Burford case, which involved spending on the Superfund program, the White House filed a federal lawsuit to block Congress's contempt action. The conflict subsided when Burford turned over documents to Congress.

The Bush administration has not previously signaled it would forbid a U.S. attorney from pursuing a contempt case in relation to the prosecutor firings. But officials at Justice and elsewhere say it has long held that Congress cannot force such action.

David B. Rifkin, who worked in the Justice Department and White House counsel's office under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, praised the position and said it is consistent with the idea of a "unitary executive." In practical terms, he said, "U.S. attorneys are emanations of a president's will." And in constitutional terms, he said, "the president has decided, by virtue of invoking executive privilege, that is the correct policy for the entire executive branch."

But Stanley Brand, who was the Democratic House counsel during the Burford case, said the administration's legal view "turns the constitutional enforcement process on its head. They are saying they will always place a claim of presidential privilege without any judicial determination above a congressional demand for evidence -- without any basis in law." Brand said the position is essentially telling Congress: "Because we control the enforcement process, we are going to thumb our nose at you."

Rozell, the George Mason professor and authority on executive privilege, said the administration's stance "is almost Nixonian in its scope and breadth of interpreting its power. Congress has no recourse at all, in the president's view. . . . It's allowing the executive to define the scope and limits of its own powers."

Research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.

Speaker Pelosi OBSTRUCT an honest and energetic discussion of Impeachment....

Dear Speaker Pelosi:

DO NOT REPEAT the mistake of the COWARDLY Senate Democrats, who REFUSED to SIGN-ON TO the Black Congressional Caucus' demands for a simple investigation into the massive voter fraud in Florida (and probably other states) in 2000.

Our esteemed Democratic "leaders" in the senate (including the fightin'est Dem. of them all, Senator Paul Wellstone), made the decision NOT to sign on to the Black Congressional Caucus (BCC) demand for investigation... because Washington, and America, bought into the notion that challenging the Bush-Cheney campaign's claims of victory would bring on a "CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS."

HELLO?! Six years later, we Americans face a FULL BLOWN CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS - a president who declares the right to SELECTIVELY DISCARD _ANY PORTION_ of laws duly approved by congress that he so feels like.

David Swanson has been doing yeoman work on the Impeachment issue, and he brings us to the obvious question: "DOES PRESIDENT BUSH have BLACKMAIL photos of Speaker Pelosi?"

Unfortunately, the more mundane answer is that "SPEAKER PELOSI IS FOLLOWING in the footsteps of the complicity, complacent, cowering, servile Democrats of the Senate, who REFUSED TO UPHOLD AMERICAN LAWS in the 2000 election, thereby handing George W. Bush and Dick Cheney the OPPORTUNITY to steal more elections, do nothing to prevent 9-11; do nothing to bring to justice the Anthrax terrorist(s); did nothing to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, and then LIED the nation into a war of conquest and aggression.

Dear Madam Speaker - GO WITH JUSTICE! Go with truth, justice, and the American way! UPHOLD _YOUR OWN OATH_ to uphold the US Constitution! Let freedom ring, and let America once again be the "HOME OF THE FREE and the LAND OF THE BRAVE," instead the home of the fearful and the land of cowering, complicit legislators who take their orders from corporate lobbyists."

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

Bush Has Photos of Pelosi
Submitted by dswanson on Sun,
2007-07-15 02:17.
By David Swanson
http://www.davidswanson.org/?q=node/864


Bush has photos of Pelosi doing… WHAT?

Here's the situation Nancy Pelosi finds herself in. A full 54% of Americans and 76% of Democrats want Dick Cheney impeached. Cheney's 13% favorability makes him the least popular president or vice president ever. The Washington Post reports that Republicans are turning against Cheney. By failing to act, the Democratic Congress has made itself less popular than Bush. Were the Congress to impeach Cheney and the Senate to acquit him, the Democrats would win a significant majority in the Senate because the public would toss some Republicans who voted for Cheney out on their asses. So, the Democrats would not just do the right thing for the future of our nation but achieve electoral victories by moving on impeachment, whether they manage to succeed with it or not. There's no known downside to trying.

Could there be an unknown downside? Could there be a reason we don't know about to explain Pelosi's unconstitutional position that Congress will not impeach no matter what? Couldn't Pelosi point out at least that she was only talking about Bush? Couldn't she allow justice to run its course for Cheney?

Could it be that Bush and Cheney have photos of Nancy Pelosi doing something she wouldn't want us to see?

Democratic voters are SECOND CLASS CITIZENS - Rethugicans can FILIBUSTER ANYTHING, while cowering Dem leaders are SUBSERVIENT to Right-Wing agenda....

The Democratic "leadership" is at least TRYING, but the bottom line.. despite dump-trucks worth of DC "conventional wisdom" media 'reporting' BS.... is that REPUBLICANS can FILIBUSTER ANY ISSUE, AT ANY TIME, while Democrats ARE SECOND CLASS CITIZENS.. who couldn't sustain a filibuster to censure Dick Cheney, if the Vice President were seen raping little boys on the White House lawn....

(Which, actually, IS exactly what the Vice President ORDERED US soldiers to do to young "detainees" at Abu Ghraib and other American run prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

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


Republicans block vote on troop withdrawal

Senate Iraq withdrawal plan fails
By Richard Cowan and Thomas Ferraro
Wed Jul 18, 2007
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSWBT00728220070718

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush's Republicans blocked a Democratic plan to withdraw U.S. combat troops from Iraq by the end of April 2008 to cap a rare round-the-clock U.S. Senate debate on Wednesday.

On a vote of 52-47, backers fell short of the needed 60 to clear a Republican procedural hurdle and move toward passage of the measure opposed by the White House.

Critics called the marathon session, which had featured cots, pillows and toothbrushes, a theatrical stunt by Democrats frustrated by their inability to keep a 2006 campaign vow to end the increasingly unpopular war.

But Democrats described the debate as a bona fide wake up call to pressure wavering Republicans, many of whom are up for re-election next year, to break ranks with Bush and demand a change in course for the war.

Democrats had hoped the showdown vote would be a possible defining moment in the ongoing clash with Bush over the Iraq war. Coinciding with a candlelight vigil by war protesters nearby, the long night's debate drew a majority of senators but appeared to change few minds.

The outcome, though expected, had an air of solemnity as weary senators voted while seated quietly behind their desks.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada urged support for the measure, which would have begun troop withdrawals within 120 days. "Bring them (U.S. combat troops) home. Let them come home," Reid declared.

"It couldn't be clearer that if you give this president a choice, he will stay hunkered down in Iraq until the end of his failed presidency," Reid said.

COLD PIZZA AND COTS Continued...

Democratic "Leadership" FAILS America - even combat-vet Senator Reed SURRENDERS to Righty talking points.. with NO FIGHT!

newsflash: July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate: "Al Qaida is RECONSTITUTED, now aggressively seeking to SEND TERRORIST ATTACK CELLS TO AMERICA."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/17/washington/17cnd-terror.html

WHERE is the Democrat OUTRAGE, "President Bush PLEDGED TO GET Osama bin Laden.. IN SEPTEMBER 2001!"??

WHY do the Cowardly Democrats prefer to hand AMERICA's BLOOD AND TREASURE over to the Bush administration, NO QUESTIONS ASKED, to DEMANDING that President Bush answer for INCERASING THE THREAT of GLOBAL TERROR to America in the past 5 years?"

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

Nothing illustrates how thoroughly the Democratic Party "leadership" has FAILED America, than this sad little story in an almost anonymous The_Nation article, about an almost anonymous (and soon to be forgotten) appearance of Democratic Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) during a PBS Newshour interview the other night.

The Nation article (by Nicholas von Hoffman) and Senator Reed's appearance on Newshour will soon be forgotten (if they were ever noticed in the first place) - BUT one can bet the farm, that BRAINDEAD Democrats, 5, 10, or 50 weeks downs the road, will STILL have NO COUNTER to Republican smear attacks and "major media" talking points.

WHERE is the Democrat's anger... WHERE IS THEIR OUTRAGE?

When the Republicans accuse Democrats of "CUTTING AND RUNNING" from Iraq.. the Democrats SHOULD IMMEDIATELY RESPOND, "President Bush, Vice President Cheney,and Secretary of War Rumsfeld _CUT_ US troops from Afghanistan, and ALLOWED Osama bin Laden to _RUN_across the border at Tora Bora, BEFORE THE JOB there (of capturing bin Laden and routing Al Qaida in Afghanistan) WAS DONE!"

When Republicans and Righty media apologists (Howard Kurtz at the Washington Post) insist that Senator Vitter's used of prostitutes was "A PRIVATE MATTER," and that since he has sought "FORGIVENESS FROM GOD and his wife" - the scandal is now past history, Democrats should respond that not only was Senator Vitter pushing for the IMPEACHMENT of President Bill Clinton based on Ken Starr's $70 million federally funded investigation into the Monica Lewinsky affair, but that Senator Vitter WAS ENGAGING IN ADULTERY and hiring prostitutes AT THE SAME TIME HE WAS HYPOCRITICALLY demanding the IMPEACHMENT of President Clinton.

The radical Right got immense mileage pushing the "Clintons killed Vince Foster" conspiracy (among many other hate-Clinton conspiracy allegations). Not only do Democrats refuse to point out that Democratic Senators and "liberal media" editors were the ONLY TARGETS of the Anthrax terror letters, but that the MURDER OF US POSTAL WORKERS in those anthrax attacks HAVE NOT BEEN SOLVED by the Bush administration - which CLAIMS to be the "war on terror" experts!

Democrats REFUSE TO FIGHT BACK in vocally EXPOSING CONTRACT FRAUD AND CORRUPTION in Iraq war contracts... in the same way that they REFUSED to LINK George W. Bush to ENRON FRAUD, and Ken Lay. Mr. Lay was only Mr. Bush's #1. campaign donor through two Texas gubernatorial camapaigns, the 2000 Republican primary campaign, the 2000 Republican presidential campaign, AND the 2000 Florida recount battle. President Bush snatched Enron senior executive Thomas White out from under the very collapsing Enron in late 2001 to make him Secretary of the Army - to do to the Army (bleed it dry from the inside out with "privatized contracting") what Enron executives did to Enron. And Democrats NEVER stood up and fought for California rate payers EXTORTED by Enron price-fixing and energy gouging in California.

And SOMEONE in the US Congress - some DEMOCRATIC Senators - APPROVED the confirmation of Michael "Heckuva job Brownie" Brown to be the DIRECTOR of FEMA, the nation's disaster relief agency....despite Brown not having ANY EXPERIENCE in disaster relief!

WHAT THE HELL HAS BECOME of America's "opposition" DEMOCRATIC PARTY, that they are almost as cowed, complicit, and subservient today, as they were in the days when they CONFIRMED MICHAEL BROWN to be the Director of FEMA without a filibuster fight?!

COWED, CORRUPTED, COMPLICIT, they dare not confront the major media or even Karl Rove... today's Democratic 'leaders' are SUBSERVIENT to Bush, Rove, Cheney, and their "major media" talking points! Their LAME performance is ROBBING America of an articulate, cohesive, energetic opposition party!

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


Where Is the Anger?
Nicholas von Hoffman
07/16/2007
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters?bid=45&pid=214493


The other night Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, was on the PBS NewsHour to debate the Iraq mess with Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island. She wiped up the floor with him. Cleaned the man's clock.

She stuck him with the "cut and run" epithet; he took it and did not fight back. Call him a perfect gentleman or call him a perfect wuss. The guy is a West Point graduate, he served with 82nd Airborne Division and was an Army Ranger. With a resumé like that the Senator ought to give as good as he gets, but he was defenseless against Hutchison's charges that he was playing politics with the war. She administered a total smackdown on this weaponless Democrat.

It was a typical of Democratic performances in the face of Republican onslaughts. When Bush and the Republicans pour on accusations of cowardice, weakness, softness toward the enemy, irresponsibility, isolationism and defeatism, they don't answer. They just take it.

Democrats act as though somebody had put a cork in their mouths when Bush and his crew accuse them of "politicizing" the war. This accusation from a bunch who run on the war in every election.

Democrats do not talk back about the stupidity of Bush's orders to stand and fight to the last soldier, the mess in Afghanistan, the grafters, his bungling, his wrecking the United States Army and Marine Corps, his lies about our fighting foreign Al Qaeda fanatics in Iraq, his staffing the Department of Homeland Security with jerks and fools, his stubborn dunderheaded-ness. Bush is a dream target and the D's are shooting spitballs in his direction.

You would think the Democrats had their mouths duct-taped when the Republicans shout "You're micro-managing the war." When do the Democrats in Congress answer, micro or macro, somebody had better manage the damn war?

Over the last months Bush has been putting serving generals in uniform on TV to sell his line but not a word from the Democrats that active-duty generals have no business in politics. The Republicans have won a lot of elections by labeling the Democrats as wuss and wimp party--and the current crop of D's is doing nothing to dispel the impression that none of ‘em have onions.

Where is their passion? We are talking about war here, folks, about people getting killed, about life and death. Where is the spine? Where the guts? WHERE IS THEIR ANGER?

Nancy Pelosi: currently the world's #1 ENABLER of the Dick Cheney-George Bush dictatorial "war on terror" governance of America....

Who knew? Nancy Pelosi, satisfied and cheerful with the trappings of being the first woman Speaker of the House in US history, has joined the list of George W. Bush's female enablers.

Speaker Pelosi, in REFUSING to fulfill her constitutional obligations to uphold her oath of office to defend the US Constitution from all threats domestice and foreign - against the criminal and unconstitional conduct of the Bush-Cheney White House (from obstruction of justice, to lying a nation into war, to holding secret meetings to determine the nation's entire energy policy [dependence on imported oil, at that]; to illegal spying on American citizens without warrants or oversight; to "outing" undercover CIA operatives as a means of smearing administration critics; to using secretive, no-audit software to steal elections; to using private contractors as a means to reward political allies at the expense of American taxpayers; to ordering the US military to engage in torture, while running kangaroo courts to try and convict lowly female volunteer privates of "abuse".... etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum) now joins the ranks of KAREN HUGHES, CONDOLEEZA RICE, HARRIET MIERS, and other women in the circle of George W. Bush, women whose number-one job has been to ENABLE and SUPPORT their boss.

Harriet Miers helped George W. Bush pioneer the technique of using huge government contracts to reward supporters - and in return get huge KICKBACK campaign donations. As head of the Texas State Lottery Commission, Ms. Miers tore up a billion-dollar lottery contract with the state-certified low-bidder, and instead awarded that contract to a company whose chief lobbyists. Ben Barnes, had helped to quash Bush's Vietnam war era "AWOL" episode from Texas Air National Guard records.
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=46665

Karen Hughes helped portray George W. Bush as an "honest talker" and a "straight shooter" - despite his glaring AWOL Air National Guard record during the Vietnam war; despite Mr. Bush having "dumped" Harken Energy company stock while on the Board of Directors of that company, without prior SEC notification, and in advance of a revised Profit/Loss statement that turned Harken's stated "profits" into a sea of red ink; despite Mr. Bush's cover-up of a DUI arrest and conviction... and in addition, Ms. Hughes was at the very epicenter of Mr. Bush's campaign efforts (led by campaign advisor Karl Rove) to _smear_ political opponents, up to and including the campaign to portray departing Clinton-Gore staffers as "trashing" White House property... without one photograph of evidence.

Condoleeza Rice, despite being warned, in advance, by both the Director of the CIA and the national "Counter Terror Czar," that "Al Qaida is determined to attack in America" was UNABLE to get President Bush or Vice President Cheney to do ANYTHING to make a potential hijacking or attack even a little more difficult - not even a "General Traveller's Advisory," an almost routine and low-cost method to alert aircrews and the flying public of potential air-travel hazards. And, of course, after the Bush administration's FAILURE to prevent the 9-11 attacks, Ms. Rice immediately became one of the administration's most vocal "hawks," banging the national propaganda drum (nightly 'news' and press-media reports) for an invasion of Iraq in early 2003.

To that list of Mr. Bush's ENABLING WOMEN, we now must add NANCY PELOSI, the ostensibly "Democratic opposition" leader of Congress. Ms. Pelosi is now operating in her COMFORT ZONE - comfortably leading Democratic congressional FUNDRAISING efforts, but doing VERY LITTLE to MOLD, SHAPE, or LEAD the national NARRATIVE - the all-important "conventional wisdom" news narrative - about the urgency to confront and call the Bush White House to account before the White House both "RUNS THE CLOCK OUT" on their term of office... and potentially presents the world and nation with MORE abuses of power as FAIT ACCOMPLI.

In this case, the EXPANSION of the Bush-Cheney war in Iraq to include the BOMBINGS OF IRAN, which at the very, very, very least would trigger huge hikes in oil and gas prices, and STIMULATE MORE anti-American RADICALIZATION of the Muslim nation of Pakistan. But from Mr. Cheney's point of view - and that of Exxon, Halliburton, Chevron, and BP, soaring oil prices are merely the REWARDS of doing business.

NANCY PELOSI has NOTHING TO SAY about Dick Cheney and George Bush using the WARTIME POWERS of the US presidency as a means of BYPASSING CONGRESS and AVOIDING the will of the American people.

She now joins Hughes, Rice, Miers, and the fresh-out-of-law-school youmg women installed in the Department of Justice by the Bush White House, Ms Pelosi essentially advancing White House goals and policies...

Who cares about DICK CHENEY's influence on EXANDING US wars, when you can play as the leader of Congress, and rake in those guaranteed big business campaign donations? To steal a para-phrase from former First Lady Barbara Bush, why should Nancy Pelosi worry HER "beautiful mind" (and time in the elaborate Speaker's office) about female privates SENT TO PRISON for following the administration's TORTURE policies... or worry about CIA undercover operations OUTED from the very offices of the West Wing on direct orders from Vice President Cheney.... or worry about the US military troops being sent back on FIFTH and SIXTH tours of duty to Iraq and Afghanistan, so Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney can continue to sell their war as not impacting the American public?


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

Cheney pushes Bush to act on Iran


· Military solution back in favour as Rice loses out
· President 'not prepared to leave conflict unresolved'

Ewen MacAskill in Washington and Julian Borger
Monday July 16, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2127115,00.html

photo - Dick Cheney, left, favours military threats, Condoleezza Rice, centre, prefers diplomacy. George Bush, right, has sided with Cheney. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP



The balance in the internal White House debate over Iran has shifted back in favour of military action before President George Bush leaves office in 18 months, the Guardian has learned.
The shift follows an internal review involving the White House, the Pentagon and the state department over the last month. Although the Bush administration is in deep trouble over Iraq, it remains focused on Iran. A well-placed source in Washington said: "Bush is not going to leave office with Iran still in limbo."


The White House claims that Iran, whose influence in the Middle East has increased significantly over the last six years, is intent on building a nuclear weapon and is arming insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The vice-president, Dick Cheney, has long favoured upping the threat of military action against Iran. He is being resisted by the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and the defence secretary, Robert Gates.

Last year Mr Bush came down in favour of Ms Rice, who along with Britain, France and Germany has been putting a diplomatic squeeze on Iran. But at a meeting of the White House, Pentagon and state department last month, Mr Cheney expressed frustration at the lack of progress and Mr Bush sided with him. "The balance has tilted. There is cause for concern," the source said this week.

Nick Burns, the undersecretary of state responsible for Iran and a career diplomat who is one of the main advocates of negotiation, told the meeting it was likely that diplomatic manoeuvring would still be continuing in January 2009. That assessment went down badly with Mr Cheney and Mr Bush.

"Cheney has limited capital left, but if he wanted to use all his capital on this one issue, he could still have an impact," said Patrick Cronin, the director of studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

The Washington source said Mr Bush and Mr Cheney did not trust any potential successors in the White House, Republican or Democratic, to deal with Iran decisively. They are also reluctant for Israel to carry out any strikes because the US would get the blame in the region anyway.

"The red line is not in Iran. The red line is in Israel. If Israel is adamant it will attack, the US will have to take decisive action," Mr Cronin said. "The choices are: tell Israel no, let Israel do the job, or do the job yourself."

Almost half of the US's 277 warships are stationed close to Iran, including two aircraft carrier groups. The aircraft carrier USS Enterprise left Virginia last week for the Gulf. A Pentagon spokesman said it was to replace the USS Nimitz and there would be no overlap that would mean three carriers in Gulf at the same time.

No decision on military action is expected until next year. In the meantime, the state department will continue to pursue the diplomatic route.

Sporadic talks are under way between the EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, and Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, on the possibility of a freeze in Iran's uranium enrichment programme. Tehran has so far refused to contemplate a freeze, but has provisionally agreed to another round of talks at the end of the month.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, has said that there are signs of Iran slowing down work on the enrichment plant it is building in Natanz. Negotiations took place in Tehran last week between Iranian officials and the IAEA, which is seeking a full accounting of Iran's nuclear activities before Tehran disclosed its enrichment programme in 2003. The agency's deputy director general, Olli Heinonen, said two days of talks had produced "good results" and would continue.

At the UN, the US, Britain and France are trying to secure agreement from other security council members for a new round of sanctions against Iran. The US is pushing for economic sanctions that would include a freeze on the international dealings of another Iranian bank and a mega-engineering firm owned by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Russia and China are resisting tougher measures.

15 Representatives (Congress) and Senator Boxer now support IMPEACHMENT of Vice President Dick Cheney...

A Senator Speaks Up
Barbara Boxer: "Impeachment should be on the table"
comments she called in to the Ed Schultz Show
7/11/07

She was the only Senator who cared to examine the credibility of the election results in Ohio. She is the only Senator willing to stand with 54 percent of Americans for the rule of law now. What would we do without Barbara Boxer?

Please call her at 202-224-3553 and thank her, and ask her to please speak with Nancy Pelosi.

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

15 Congress Members for Impeachment
by David Swanson
Wed, 2007-07-11
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/24531


Congressman Sam Farr (D., Calif.) is the latest member of Congress to respond to intense pressure from his constituents and co-sponsor H Res 333, articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney. The official list of co-sponsors at thomas.loc.gov includes 11 names, plus the original sponsor Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D., Ohio). That makes 12. In addition, Congressman Bob Filner (D., Calif.) has said he will sign on, and has said so publicly in media interviews including this one: http://www.atlantaprogressivenews.com/news/0189.html

That makes 13, or 14 with Farr. Then there is Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. (D., Ill.) who has not signed onto H Res 333 or introduced his own articles of impeachment against Cheney or Bush, but who recently released this statement:

"In her first weeks as leader of the Congress, Speaker Nancy Pelosi withdrew the notion of impeachment proceedings against either President Bush or Vice President Cheney [actually she did that 8 months earlier, and Jackson began parroting her line right away, but who's counting]. With the president's decision to once again subvert the legal process and the will of the American people by commuting the sentence of convicted felon Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, I call on House Democrats to reconsider impeachment proceedings. Lewis Libby was convicted of lying under oath to cover up the outing of active, undercover CIA agent, Valerie Plame. It is beyond unthinkable that the president would undermine the legal process to protect a man who engaged in treason against the United States government, threatening the security of the American people. In November's election, voters put Democrats in charge of Congress because they believed our pledge of oversight and accountability. Now it's time for us to honor that pledge. The Executive Branch should be held responsible for its illegalities. Our democratic system is grounded in the principle of checks and balances. When the Executive Branch disregards the will of the people, our lawmakers must not be silent. Today's actions, coupled with the president's unwillingness to comply with Senate and House inquiries, leave Democrats with no other option than to consider impeachment so that we can gather the information needed to achieve justice for all Americans."

If Jackson signs onto H Res 333, there will be 15 cosponsors.

Sam Farr represents Santa Cruz, California, the first city in the country to have passed a resolution demanding impeachment. Santa Cruz city council passed that first resolution in 2003, and passed another in 2006. Santa Cruz is also home to COIN (Coalition for Impeachment Now) led by local organizers Sherry Conable and Louis LaFortune. Following Santa Cruz's lead, a total of at least 79 towns and cities have passed resolutions demanding the impeachment of Cheney and / or Bush: http://impeachpac.org/resolutions-list

Of all the polling companies in the United States, only one has ever polled, and only once, on whether Americans want Cheney impeached. 54 percent of Americans and 76 percent of Democrats said Yes. http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/polling

Counting Farr and Jackson, a total of 3 percent of Congress Members and 6 percent of Democratic Congress Members have taken the position shared by over three-quarters of Democrats, 51 percent of Independents, and 17 percent of Republicans around the country.

Meanwhile, Cheney's popularity has reached a record low, with 13 percent of the country in favor of his performance. And that figure actually comes from May, prior to the most recent few scandals and exposed abuses of power: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/09/polls-cheney-nears-quayle-as-least-popular-veep

What will it take for Congress to act? The majority of the people want it, and the least popular Vice President in history can't be all that intimidating, can he? Isn't it time we started intimidating him? http://www.impeachcheney.org

People from around the country are headed to Washington on July 23rd to find out whether pressure from the citizens of this republic counts for anything anymore: http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/24450

Gonzales LIED to Congress when he said he knew of no abuses of P.A.T.R.I.O.T act abuses....

IF the Democratic Party leadership can not use the powers vested by the Constitution in Congress to legislate (create) AND UPHOLD the laws of the land, then the Democratic Party is a FRAUD - ENABLERS _masquerading_ as an opposition party.

The Constitutional power to "LEGISLATE" laws IMPLIES that those laws WILL BE ENACTED and upheld... otherwise Congress is nothing but a billion-dollar acting session. IF a law falls short of its intended purpose, of tramples on constitutional rights and liberties, then Congress is expected to correct those flaws.

IGNORING the wholesale ABUSES and NEGLECT of Congressionally passed laws is not what the framers of the Constitution had in mind... indeed, the Constitution VERY SPECIFICALLY gives the Congress the right to PASS LAWS _DESPITE_ the president's opposition. (The "override veto" clause.)

JUST because the Democratic Party has been a miserable failure at OVERRIDING Presidential vetoes, does NOT mean that Congress is supposed to be a null and moot, for-show-only debating society!

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


Gonzales Was Told of FBI Violations
After Bureau Sent Reports, Attorney General Said He Knew of No Wrongdoing

By John Solomon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 10, 2007; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/09/AR2007070902065.html?hpid=topnews

As he sought to renew the USA Patriot Act two years ago, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales assured lawmakers that the FBI had not abused its potent new terrorism-fighting powers. "There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse," Gonzales told senators on April 27, 2005.

Six days earlier, the FBI sent Gonzales a copy of a report that said its agents had obtained personal information that they were not entitled to have. It was one of at least half a dozen reports of legal or procedural violations that Gonzales received in the three months before he made his statement to the Senate intelligence committee, according to internal FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The acts recounted in the FBI reports included unauthorized surveillance, an illegal property search and a case in which an Internet firm improperly turned over a compact disc with data that the FBI was not entitled to collect, the documents show. Gonzales was copied on each report that said administrative rules or laws protecting civil liberties and privacy had been violated.

The reports also alerted Gonzales in 2005 to problems with the FBI's use of an anti-terrorism tool known as a national security letter (NSL), well before the Justice Department's inspector general brought widespread abuse of the letters in 2004 and 2005 to light in a stinging report this past March.

Justice officials said they could not immediately determine whether Gonzales read any of the FBI reports in 2005 and 2006 because the officials who processed them were not available yesterday. But department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said that when Gonzales testified, he was speaking "in the context" of reports by the department's inspector general before this year that found no misconduct or specific civil liberties abuses related to the Patriot Act.

"The statements from the attorney general are consistent with statements from other officials at the FBI and the department," Roehrkasse said. He added that many of the violations the FBI disclosed were not legal violations and instead involved procedural safeguards or even typographical errors.

Each of the violations cited in the reports copied to Gonzales was serious enough to require notification of the President's Intelligence Oversight Board, which helps police the government's surveillance activities. The format of each memo was similar, and none minced words.

"This enclosure sets forth details of investigative activity which the FBI has determined was conducted contrary to the attorney general's guidelines for FBI National Security Investigations and Foreign Intelligence Collection and/or laws, executive orders and presidential directives," said the April 21, 2005, letter to the Intelligence Oversight Board.

The oversight board, staffed with intelligence experts from inside and outside government, was established to report to the attorney general and president about civil liberties abuses or intelligence lapses. But Roehrkasse said the fact that a violation is reported to the board "does not mean that a USA Patriot violation exists or that an individual's civil liberties have been abused."

Two of the earliest reports sent to Gonzales, during his first month on the job, in February 2005, involved the FBI's surveillance and search powers. In one case, the bureau reported a violation involving an "unconsented physical search" in a counterintelligence case. The details were redacted in the released memo, but it cited violations of safeguards "that shall protect constitutional and other legal rights." The second violation involved electronic surveillance on phone lines that was reinitiated after the expiration deadline set by a court in a counterterrorism case.

The report sent to Gonzales on April 21, 2005, concerned a violation of the rules governing NSLs, which allow agents in counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigations to secretly gather Americans' phone, bank and Internet records without a court order or a grand jury subpoena. In the report -- also heavily redacted before being released -- the FBI said its agents had received a compact disc containing information they did not request. It was viewed before being sealed in an envelope.

Gonzales received another report of an NSL-related violation a few weeks later. "A national security letter . . . contained an incorrect phone number" that resulted in agents collecting phone information that "belonged to a different U.S. person" than the suspect under investigation, stated a letter copied to the attorney general on May 6, 2005.

At least two other reports of NSL-related violations were sent to Gonzales, according to the new documents. In letters copied to him on Dec. 11, 2006, and Feb. 26, 2007, the FBI reported to the oversight board that agents had requested and obtained phone data on the wrong people.

Nonetheless, Gonzales reacted with surprise when the Justice Department inspector general reported this March that there were pervasive problems with the FBI's handling of NSLs and another investigative tool known as an exigent circumstances letter.

"I was upset when I learned this, as was Director Mueller. To say that I am concerned about what has been revealed in this report would be an enormous understatement," Gonzales said in a speech March 9, referring to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller. The attorney general added that he believed back in 2005, before the Patriot Act was renewed, that there were no problems with NSLs. "I've come to learn that I was wrong," he said, making no mention of the FBI reports sent to him.

Marcia Hofmann, a lawyer for the nonpartisan Electronic Frontier Foundation, said, "I think these documents raise some very serious questions about how much the attorney general knew about the FBI's misuse of surveillance powers and when he knew it." A lawsuit by Hofmann's group seeking internal FBI documents about NSLs prompted the release of the reports.

Caroline Fredrickson, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the new documents raise questions about whether Gonzales misled Congress at a moment when lawmakers were poised to renew the Patriot Act and keenly sought assurances that there were no abuses. "It was extremely important," she said of Gonzales's 2005 testimony. "The attorney general said there are no problems with the Patriot Act, and there was no counterevidence at the time."

Some of the reports describe rules violations that the FBI decided not to report to the intelligence board. In February 2006, for example, FBI officials wrote that agents sent a person's phone records, which they had obtained from a provider under a national security letter, to an outside party. The mistake was blamed on "an error in the mail handling." When the third party sent the material back, the bureau decided not to report the mistake as a violation.

The memos also detail instances in which the FBI wrote out new NSLs to cover evidence that had been mistakenly collected. In a June 30, 2006, e-mail, for instance, an FBI supervisor asked an agent who had "overcollected" evidence under a national security letter to forward his original request to lawyers. "We would like to check the specific language to see if there is anything in the body that would cover the extra material they gave," the supervisor wrote.

Sometimes the FBI reached seemingly contradictory conclusions about the gravity of its errors. On May 6, 2005, the bureau decided that it needed to report a violation when agents made an "inadvertent" request for data for the wrong phone number. But on June 1, 2006, in a similar wrong-number case, the bureau concluded that a violation did not need to be reported because the agent acted "in good faith."