Why do 'liberal media' go so easy on Bush?
by Dave Zweifel
11/26/2007
http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/258763
We saw another example last week of the double standard that permeates so much of America's media these days, the media that so many conservatives claim are "too liberal."
A sneak peek at former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's soon-to-be-published book reveals that virtually every bigwig in the Bush administration passed along lies about who was involved in outing CIA agent Valerie Plame -- including the president himself.
McClellan in 2003 stood at the White House press room podium and said that neither Karl Rove nor Scooter Libby, the two most senior aides to George Bush and Dick Cheney, had anything to do with leaking to several members of the press that Plame was an undercover CIA agent. She was exposed in an apparent retaliation for a guest column her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had written for the New York Times, claiming that Bush had lied about Iraq's nuclear capabilities in his State of the Union address.
As it later turned out, not only was Bush's speech a lie, but McClellan's defense of Rove and Libby was also an outright lie. McClellan's memoir, to be published next spring, claims that five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in his telling that lie to the press and the rest of the nation: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff and the president himself.
But the McClellan excerpts got little play last week in our so-called anti-George Bush liberal media.
Contrast that with what would have undoubtedly happened had the president been Bill Clinton.
Not only would Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter have begun a 24/7 feeding frenzy, but every TV network and big city daily newspaper would have carried major stories about the president being fingered in another lie.
Wisconsin's own intellectual giant of a congressman, James Sensenbrenner, would have insisted on the House Judiciary Committee calling for an investigation that would surely lead to impeachment proceedings.
They did all that, after all, when Bill Clinton was caught lying about messing around with a White House intern. Had Bill Clinton lied his way into starting a war and then instructed his press secretary to tell the American people lies about underhanded dealings by his staff, the Washington politicians and the national press would have run the man out of town on a rail.
Perhaps this administration has lied to the American people so many times that it doesn't qualify as news anymore.
But, I say again, if a president can be impeached for lying about an extramarital affair, then why aren't we impeaching a president who lied to his country to start a war that is soon to have lasted five long years?
Dave Zweifel is editor of The Capital Times. dzweifel@madison.com
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Monday, November 26, 2007
Cowardly Nancy Pelosi, Democratic "leaders" PRETEND NOT TO NOTICE the POLITICAL HIT-MAN nature of Bush-Cheney "Justice" dept....
Nancy Pelosi is A DISGRACE and ENABLER of CORRUPTION and CRIMINAL CONDUCT in her role as the "opposition party" "leader" of Congress.
#1. Even with the former Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, having committed PERJURY within THE SPACE OF THREE SENTENCES in his under-oath senate testimony (Gonzales at one point stated, under oath, that when he had been White House Counsel, he had had "no intention of discussing the FISA surveillance bill" with the then surgery-incapacitated Attorney General John Ashcroft in Gonzales and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card's midnight visit to Ashcroft's hospital room; and two sentences later Gonzales conceding that he held the papers to modify those FISA surveillance statutes in his hand as he sought to have Ashcroft sign them) - NANCY PELOSI PRETENDS NOT TO NOTICE.
#2. Even with Special Prosecutor PATRICK FITZGERALD having done the HEAVY LIFTING - OBTAINING A _CONVICTION_ for PERJURY and OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE fromt Presidential Senior Advisor Lewis 'Scooter' Libby - who was concurrently VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY'S CHIEF OF STAFF - NANCY PELOSI has "LED" her cowardly Congressional Democrats to PRETEND NOT TO NOTICE! Even when the original "OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE" re the outing of a CIA agent to intimidate a war-critic whistleblower WAS COMPOUNDED when President Bush COMMUTED THE PRISON SENTENCE for Mr. Libby BEFORE he was even sentenced! And long before Mr. Libby revealed the full extent of his obstruction of that federal investigation. SPEAKER PELOSI PRETENDS NOT TO NOTICE the CONNECTION between President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and the OBSTRUCUTION OF JUSTICE, PERJURY, and original CRIME of OUTING an ENTIRE CIA UNDERCOVER ORGANIZATION.
#3. Now - on a THIRD CRIMINAL SCANDAL - Nancy Pelosi PRETENDS NOT TO NOTICE the Bush-Cheney administration USING FEDERAL PROSECUTORS to TARGET and ATTACK a sitting Democratic governor ON TRUMPED UP, BOGUS CHARGES.
NANCY PELOSI - DICK CHENEY and GEORGE W. BUSH's SINGLE BIGGEST ENABER in the entire world.
===============================================
The permanent Republican majority:
Part one: How a coterie of Republican heavyweights sent a governor to jail
Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane
Published: Monday November 26, 2007
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/timeline_don_siegelman_1126.htm
Part one of a Raw Story Investigates series on the architects and the execution of backroom Republican politics
For most Americans, the very concept of political prisoners is remote and exotic, a practice that is associated with third-world dictatorships but is foreign to the American tradition. The idea that a prominent politician -- a former state governor -- could be tried on charges that many observers consider to be trumped-up, convicted in a trial that involved numerous questionable procedures, and then hauled off to prison in shackles immediately upon sentencing would be almost unbelievable.
But there is such a politician: Don Siegelman, Democratic governor of Alabama from 1999 to 2003. Starting just a few weeks after he took office, Siegelman was targeted by an investigation launched by his political opponents and escalated from the state to the federal level by Bush Administration appointees in 2001.
Siegelman was ultimately charged with 32 counts of bribery and other crimes in 2005, just as he began to attempt a political comeback. He was convicted the following year on seven of those charges. Last summer, Siegelman was sentenced to seven years in prison and immediately whisked off to a series of out-of-state jails, not even being allowed to remain free on bond while his appeal was under way.
Shortly before the sentencing, however, suspicions expressed by Alabama observers that there was something "fishy" about the case -- as Scott Horton of Harper's Magazine would later put it -- began to reach the national stage. What initially appeared to be merely a whiff of possible political corruption became something stronger, with allegations that Karl Rove and the Bush Justice Department had been operating behind the scenes. And yet, despite these suspicions and the attempts of a few journalists to bring them to greater notice, Siegelman's case remains virtually unknown to most of America.
As a result, RAW STORY Investigates has decided to focus a series of reports, interviews, and investigative pieces over the next several weeks on Siegelman’s case. At the very least, the investigation will illuminate an incestuous pool of corruption in Alabama, with government officials, lobbyists, attorneys, and even judges behaving in ways that breach the public trust.
Part one: Don Siegelman, political prisoner
Governor Don Siegelman was a popular Democratic politician in a largely Republican state and was the only person in Alabama history to hold all of the state's highest posts. He served as Attorney General, Secretary of State, Lieutenant Governor and finally as Governor from 1999 to 2003.
On Election Day in November 2002, when the polls had closed and the votes were being counted, it seemed increasingly apparent that Governor Siegelman had been victorious in his re-election bid against Republican challenger Bob Riley. But then -- just as in the infamous Florida election of 2000 -- something strange happened in the tallying of the votes.
- Click here to see a timeline of the case.
As CNN reported at the time, there appeared to be two different sets of numbers coming through for one particular Alabama county:
“The confusion stems from two sets of numbers reported by one heavily Republican district,” the network stated.
“Figures originally reported by Baldwin County showed Siegelman got about 19,000 votes there, making him the state's winner by about two-tenths of 1 percent,” its reporter added. “But hours after polls closed, Baldwin County officials said the first number was wrong, and Siegelman had received just less than 13,000. Those figures would make Riley the statewide winner by about 3,000 votes.”
"Sometime after midnight, after the poll watchers were sent home, a small group there decided to recount the votes a third time," Siegelman told a news conference at the time. "No watchers legally entitled to be present were notified -- and then a different total was established."
The following morning, Alabama saw a new governor declaring victory in the election. But the story didn’t end there. It was only the beginning of a case that would turn the politics of dirty tricks into something far more sinister.
Riley's electoral victory rested on a razor-thin margin of 3,120 votes. According to official reports, Baldwin County conducted a recount sometime in the middle of the night on Nov. 6, when the only county officers and election supervisors present were Republicans. It was during this second recount that the shift in votes from Siegelman to Riley appeared. Although various computer “glitches” and technical anomalies occurred across the state, it is widely acknowledged that the Baldwin County recount is what decisively delivered needed votes to the Riley camp.
State and county Democrats quickly requested another Baldwin County recount with Democratic observers present, as well as a state-wide recount. But before the Baldwin County Democratic Party canvassing board could act, Alabama’s Republican Attorney General William Pryor had the ballots sealed.
Unless Siegelman filed an election contest in the courts, Pryor said, county canvassing boards throughout the state did not have the authority “to break the seals on ballots and machines under section 17-9-31” of the constitution.
But at the same time, other, more embarrassing questions involving the Riley camp and Alabama Republican officials appeared to have fallen off the radar.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Embarrassing questions
A RAW STORY investigation shows that as early as 1998, when Siegelman was first elected governor, Alabama corporate interests already saw him as a looming threat. (See timeline.) These interests were aligned with GOP operatives who would emerge again during the 2002 election cycle.
One of those well-known Republican operatives was William "Bill" Canary, who was a longtime Alabama hired gun before he became a Bob Riley campaign advisor in 2002. In 1994, Canary -- whose focus at the time was on defeating Democratic judges in Alabama -- brought in outside help in the form of yet another GOP operative by the name of Karl Rove.
At that time, Rove had been active in Republican political campaigns for more than 15 years and had recently been hired as an advisor to George W. Bush's campaign for governor of Texas. A wider public would learn of Rove only six years later, when he was tapped as Bush’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff after the 2000 election. Rove's name would then appear in almost every scandal involving the Bush White House, the most infamous of which involved revealing the name of a covert CIA officer as political retribution for her husband’s refusal to endorse bogus intelligence leading up to the Iraq war.
Rove and Canary managed Attorney General William Pryor's re-election campaign in 1998. It was Pryor who would later seal the Baldwin Country ballots in the 2002 governor's race, ensuring the victory of a candidate who had been advised by his own former campaign manager, Bill Canary. All three men -- Rove, Canary, and Pryor -- are also known to have a close political and social relationship. In addition, then-Lieutenant Governor Siegelman appears to have made an enemy of Pryor as early as 1997, when he criticized Pryor's close relationship with the tobacco industry.
After Pryor was re-elected as Alabama Attorney General in 1998, he almost immediately began the investigation into Siegelman which would eventually lead to Siegelman's conviction and imprisonment nearly a decade later.
Pryor's history and relationship with Canary and Rove should have been reason enough for the Alabama Attorney General to recuse himself from the November 2002 election controversy. But Pryor refused. The following April he was nominated by George W. Bush to serve as a federal judge on the Eleventh Circuit Court. He was eventually installed by a recess appointment, overriding the objections of Senate Democrats.
It would take a Riley campaign attorney -- long-time Alabama Republican Dana Jill Simpson -- to finally blow the whistle on the Republican governor. In a 2007 affidavit and sworn testimony, Simpson stated unequivocally that dirty tricks had sealed her boss’s victory in the 2002 election, and she named Karl Rove and the US Department of Justice as conspirators in the case.
Simpson had worked for the Riley campaign in 2002 as an opposition researcher, digging up dirt on then-Governor Siegelman. According to Simpson's May 2007 affidavit, Siegelman was pressured to concede the 2002 election because the Riley camp threatened to make public a set of photographs of one of Siegelman's supporters planting Riley campaign signs at a Ku Klux Klan rally. Simpson also stated that Canary had indicated that “Karl” -- by which she had no doubt he meant Karl Rove -- had taken a personal interest in the matter.
Simpson had been communicating with Siegelman attorney's before releasing her affidavit, and during that period her house was burned down and her car was run off the road.
Expanding on her original allegations, Simpson testified on Sept. 14 before lawyers for the House Judiciary Committee and dropped a bombshell revelation. In this additional testimony, Simpson described a conference call among Bill Canary, Governor Riley's son Rob and other Riley campaign aides, which she said took place on November 18, 2002 -- the same day Don Siegelman conceded the election. Simpson alleged that Canary had said that “Rove had spoken with the Department of Justice” about “pursuing” Siegelman and had also advised Riley's staff “not to worry about Don Siegelman” because “‘his girls’ would take care of” the governor.
The “girls” allegedly referenced by Bill Canary were his wife, Leura Canary -- who was appointed by George W. Bush in 2001 as the US Attorney for the Middle District of Alabama -- and Alice Martin, another 2001 Bush appointee as the US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. Simpson added that she was told by Rob Riley that Judge Mark Fuller was deliberately chosen when the Siegelman case was prosecuted in 2005, and that Fuller would “hang” Siegelman.
The Canary “girls,” the judge, and the jury
Siegelman case watcher have noted that the Canary “girls” would be instrumental in “taking care” of the governor by fixing the facts around his indictment. Yet it remains unclear what charges, if any, Siegelman was actually guilty of, because the process had become so politicized and the case so aggressively partisan.
Leura Canary had begun working on Siegelman’s case almost as soon she took office in 2001, when she federalized Attorney General Pryor’s ongoing state probe. It was that investigation that finally culminated in Siegelman's prosecution on corruption charges in 2005-06, just as he was again running for the governorship.
In 2002, after having spent more than six months investigating Governor Siegelman, Leura Canary was forced to recuse herself -- or at least give the appearance of doing so -- over her husband's connections to the Riley campaign. However, it is widely believed that she in fact continued to guide the case behind the scenes.
In 2004, charges of Medicaid bid-rigging were brought against Siegelman by the other one of Bill Canary's “girls,” US Attorney Alice Martin. These charges were eventually thrown out by a visibly exasperated Alabama judge.
After Siegelman indicated his intention to seek reelection in 2005, Canary’s original investigation resurfaced. Canary had never stopped pushing the investigation along, even against the advice of her professional staff, and in October 2005, Don Siegelman was once again indicted by a federal grand jury in Canary's district on 32 counts of bribery, conspiracy and mail fraud.
The Siegelman case was assigned to Judge Mark Fuller, a former district attorney whom George W. Bush had nominated for a federal judgeship in August 2002. Fuller was accused by his Siegelman-appointed successor in the district attorney's office of falsifying payroll records with intent to defraud the Alabama retirement system, leading him to back Riley during that year's election. This episode raises serious questions about Fuller's refusal to recuse himself and helps explain Rob Riley's alleged statement to Jill Simpson that Fuller would “hang” Siegelman.
The case dragged on until June 2006, shortly after Siegelman was defeated in the Democratic primary. A few weeks later, he was acquitted of 25 of the 32 counts against him, but he was ultimately convicted on the other seven, after the jury had deadlocked twice and been sent back to deliberate by Judge Fuller. During the trial itself there were many irregularities, including strong indications of jury tampering involving two jurors.
Siegelman was found guilty of accepting a $500,000 donation by HealthSouth founder Richard M. Scrushy in exchange for an appointment to the Alabama hospital regulatory board. The prosecution said the money had been used to pay off a state lottery debt, which Governor Siegelman's education campaign had incurred.
In Alabama, however, the lottery money is controlled by the legislature, not the Governor's office.
When it finally came time for sentencing, Judge Fuller imposed a sentence of seven years, four months and would not allow Siegelman to remain free while his case was under appeal. Within hours of his sentencing, Siegelman had been taken to a federal penitentiary in Atlanta.
In the days immediately following Siegelman's imprisonment, another set of strange occurrences further underscored the serious ethical and legal questions surrounding this case. First his lawyer's office was broken into, although the thieves took nothing of value and only appeared to have been looking for files. Then, ten days later, Siegelman was sent on an extended odyssey to prisons in Michigan, New York, Oklahoma and finally Louisiana -- during which time his attorneys were led to believe that he had been moved to Texas.
It was this final series of moves that brought this case to public notice and raised the ire of 44 former state attorneys general, who penned a letter to Congress asking that the case be investigated.
Click here to see a timeline of the case.
Tomorrow, Part II: Raw Story's exclusive interview with Dana Siegelman, Governor Siegelman's daughter.
Larisa Alexandrovna is managing editor of investigative news for Raw Story and regularly reports on intelligence and national security stories. Contact her at larisa@rawstory.com. Muriel Kane is Raw Story's research director.
#1. Even with the former Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, having committed PERJURY within THE SPACE OF THREE SENTENCES in his under-oath senate testimony (Gonzales at one point stated, under oath, that when he had been White House Counsel, he had had "no intention of discussing the FISA surveillance bill" with the then surgery-incapacitated Attorney General John Ashcroft in Gonzales and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card's midnight visit to Ashcroft's hospital room; and two sentences later Gonzales conceding that he held the papers to modify those FISA surveillance statutes in his hand as he sought to have Ashcroft sign them) - NANCY PELOSI PRETENDS NOT TO NOTICE.
#2. Even with Special Prosecutor PATRICK FITZGERALD having done the HEAVY LIFTING - OBTAINING A _CONVICTION_ for PERJURY and OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE fromt Presidential Senior Advisor Lewis 'Scooter' Libby - who was concurrently VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY'S CHIEF OF STAFF - NANCY PELOSI has "LED" her cowardly Congressional Democrats to PRETEND NOT TO NOTICE! Even when the original "OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE" re the outing of a CIA agent to intimidate a war-critic whistleblower WAS COMPOUNDED when President Bush COMMUTED THE PRISON SENTENCE for Mr. Libby BEFORE he was even sentenced! And long before Mr. Libby revealed the full extent of his obstruction of that federal investigation. SPEAKER PELOSI PRETENDS NOT TO NOTICE the CONNECTION between President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and the OBSTRUCUTION OF JUSTICE, PERJURY, and original CRIME of OUTING an ENTIRE CIA UNDERCOVER ORGANIZATION.
#3. Now - on a THIRD CRIMINAL SCANDAL - Nancy Pelosi PRETENDS NOT TO NOTICE the Bush-Cheney administration USING FEDERAL PROSECUTORS to TARGET and ATTACK a sitting Democratic governor ON TRUMPED UP, BOGUS CHARGES.
NANCY PELOSI - DICK CHENEY and GEORGE W. BUSH's SINGLE BIGGEST ENABER in the entire world.
===============================================
The permanent Republican majority:
Part one: How a coterie of Republican heavyweights sent a governor to jail
Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane
Published: Monday November 26, 2007
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/timeline_don_siegelman_1126.htm
Part one of a Raw Story Investigates series on the architects and the execution of backroom Republican politics
For most Americans, the very concept of political prisoners is remote and exotic, a practice that is associated with third-world dictatorships but is foreign to the American tradition. The idea that a prominent politician -- a former state governor -- could be tried on charges that many observers consider to be trumped-up, convicted in a trial that involved numerous questionable procedures, and then hauled off to prison in shackles immediately upon sentencing would be almost unbelievable.
But there is such a politician: Don Siegelman, Democratic governor of Alabama from 1999 to 2003. Starting just a few weeks after he took office, Siegelman was targeted by an investigation launched by his political opponents and escalated from the state to the federal level by Bush Administration appointees in 2001.
Siegelman was ultimately charged with 32 counts of bribery and other crimes in 2005, just as he began to attempt a political comeback. He was convicted the following year on seven of those charges. Last summer, Siegelman was sentenced to seven years in prison and immediately whisked off to a series of out-of-state jails, not even being allowed to remain free on bond while his appeal was under way.
Shortly before the sentencing, however, suspicions expressed by Alabama observers that there was something "fishy" about the case -- as Scott Horton of Harper's Magazine would later put it -- began to reach the national stage. What initially appeared to be merely a whiff of possible political corruption became something stronger, with allegations that Karl Rove and the Bush Justice Department had been operating behind the scenes. And yet, despite these suspicions and the attempts of a few journalists to bring them to greater notice, Siegelman's case remains virtually unknown to most of America.
As a result, RAW STORY Investigates has decided to focus a series of reports, interviews, and investigative pieces over the next several weeks on Siegelman’s case. At the very least, the investigation will illuminate an incestuous pool of corruption in Alabama, with government officials, lobbyists, attorneys, and even judges behaving in ways that breach the public trust.
Part one: Don Siegelman, political prisoner
Governor Don Siegelman was a popular Democratic politician in a largely Republican state and was the only person in Alabama history to hold all of the state's highest posts. He served as Attorney General, Secretary of State, Lieutenant Governor and finally as Governor from 1999 to 2003.
On Election Day in November 2002, when the polls had closed and the votes were being counted, it seemed increasingly apparent that Governor Siegelman had been victorious in his re-election bid against Republican challenger Bob Riley. But then -- just as in the infamous Florida election of 2000 -- something strange happened in the tallying of the votes.
- Click here to see a timeline of the case.
As CNN reported at the time, there appeared to be two different sets of numbers coming through for one particular Alabama county:
“The confusion stems from two sets of numbers reported by one heavily Republican district,” the network stated.
“Figures originally reported by Baldwin County showed Siegelman got about 19,000 votes there, making him the state's winner by about two-tenths of 1 percent,” its reporter added. “But hours after polls closed, Baldwin County officials said the first number was wrong, and Siegelman had received just less than 13,000. Those figures would make Riley the statewide winner by about 3,000 votes.”
"Sometime after midnight, after the poll watchers were sent home, a small group there decided to recount the votes a third time," Siegelman told a news conference at the time. "No watchers legally entitled to be present were notified -- and then a different total was established."
The following morning, Alabama saw a new governor declaring victory in the election. But the story didn’t end there. It was only the beginning of a case that would turn the politics of dirty tricks into something far more sinister.
Riley's electoral victory rested on a razor-thin margin of 3,120 votes. According to official reports, Baldwin County conducted a recount sometime in the middle of the night on Nov. 6, when the only county officers and election supervisors present were Republicans. It was during this second recount that the shift in votes from Siegelman to Riley appeared. Although various computer “glitches” and technical anomalies occurred across the state, it is widely acknowledged that the Baldwin County recount is what decisively delivered needed votes to the Riley camp.
State and county Democrats quickly requested another Baldwin County recount with Democratic observers present, as well as a state-wide recount. But before the Baldwin County Democratic Party canvassing board could act, Alabama’s Republican Attorney General William Pryor had the ballots sealed.
Unless Siegelman filed an election contest in the courts, Pryor said, county canvassing boards throughout the state did not have the authority “to break the seals on ballots and machines under section 17-9-31” of the constitution.
But at the same time, other, more embarrassing questions involving the Riley camp and Alabama Republican officials appeared to have fallen off the radar.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Embarrassing questions
A RAW STORY investigation shows that as early as 1998, when Siegelman was first elected governor, Alabama corporate interests already saw him as a looming threat. (See timeline.) These interests were aligned with GOP operatives who would emerge again during the 2002 election cycle.
One of those well-known Republican operatives was William "Bill" Canary, who was a longtime Alabama hired gun before he became a Bob Riley campaign advisor in 2002. In 1994, Canary -- whose focus at the time was on defeating Democratic judges in Alabama -- brought in outside help in the form of yet another GOP operative by the name of Karl Rove.
At that time, Rove had been active in Republican political campaigns for more than 15 years and had recently been hired as an advisor to George W. Bush's campaign for governor of Texas. A wider public would learn of Rove only six years later, when he was tapped as Bush’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff after the 2000 election. Rove's name would then appear in almost every scandal involving the Bush White House, the most infamous of which involved revealing the name of a covert CIA officer as political retribution for her husband’s refusal to endorse bogus intelligence leading up to the Iraq war.
Rove and Canary managed Attorney General William Pryor's re-election campaign in 1998. It was Pryor who would later seal the Baldwin Country ballots in the 2002 governor's race, ensuring the victory of a candidate who had been advised by his own former campaign manager, Bill Canary. All three men -- Rove, Canary, and Pryor -- are also known to have a close political and social relationship. In addition, then-Lieutenant Governor Siegelman appears to have made an enemy of Pryor as early as 1997, when he criticized Pryor's close relationship with the tobacco industry.
After Pryor was re-elected as Alabama Attorney General in 1998, he almost immediately began the investigation into Siegelman which would eventually lead to Siegelman's conviction and imprisonment nearly a decade later.
Pryor's history and relationship with Canary and Rove should have been reason enough for the Alabama Attorney General to recuse himself from the November 2002 election controversy. But Pryor refused. The following April he was nominated by George W. Bush to serve as a federal judge on the Eleventh Circuit Court. He was eventually installed by a recess appointment, overriding the objections of Senate Democrats.
It would take a Riley campaign attorney -- long-time Alabama Republican Dana Jill Simpson -- to finally blow the whistle on the Republican governor. In a 2007 affidavit and sworn testimony, Simpson stated unequivocally that dirty tricks had sealed her boss’s victory in the 2002 election, and she named Karl Rove and the US Department of Justice as conspirators in the case.
Simpson had worked for the Riley campaign in 2002 as an opposition researcher, digging up dirt on then-Governor Siegelman. According to Simpson's May 2007 affidavit, Siegelman was pressured to concede the 2002 election because the Riley camp threatened to make public a set of photographs of one of Siegelman's supporters planting Riley campaign signs at a Ku Klux Klan rally. Simpson also stated that Canary had indicated that “Karl” -- by which she had no doubt he meant Karl Rove -- had taken a personal interest in the matter.
Simpson had been communicating with Siegelman attorney's before releasing her affidavit, and during that period her house was burned down and her car was run off the road.
Expanding on her original allegations, Simpson testified on Sept. 14 before lawyers for the House Judiciary Committee and dropped a bombshell revelation. In this additional testimony, Simpson described a conference call among Bill Canary, Governor Riley's son Rob and other Riley campaign aides, which she said took place on November 18, 2002 -- the same day Don Siegelman conceded the election. Simpson alleged that Canary had said that “Rove had spoken with the Department of Justice” about “pursuing” Siegelman and had also advised Riley's staff “not to worry about Don Siegelman” because “‘his girls’ would take care of” the governor.
The “girls” allegedly referenced by Bill Canary were his wife, Leura Canary -- who was appointed by George W. Bush in 2001 as the US Attorney for the Middle District of Alabama -- and Alice Martin, another 2001 Bush appointee as the US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. Simpson added that she was told by Rob Riley that Judge Mark Fuller was deliberately chosen when the Siegelman case was prosecuted in 2005, and that Fuller would “hang” Siegelman.
The Canary “girls,” the judge, and the jury
Siegelman case watcher have noted that the Canary “girls” would be instrumental in “taking care” of the governor by fixing the facts around his indictment. Yet it remains unclear what charges, if any, Siegelman was actually guilty of, because the process had become so politicized and the case so aggressively partisan.
Leura Canary had begun working on Siegelman’s case almost as soon she took office in 2001, when she federalized Attorney General Pryor’s ongoing state probe. It was that investigation that finally culminated in Siegelman's prosecution on corruption charges in 2005-06, just as he was again running for the governorship.
In 2002, after having spent more than six months investigating Governor Siegelman, Leura Canary was forced to recuse herself -- or at least give the appearance of doing so -- over her husband's connections to the Riley campaign. However, it is widely believed that she in fact continued to guide the case behind the scenes.
In 2004, charges of Medicaid bid-rigging were brought against Siegelman by the other one of Bill Canary's “girls,” US Attorney Alice Martin. These charges were eventually thrown out by a visibly exasperated Alabama judge.
After Siegelman indicated his intention to seek reelection in 2005, Canary’s original investigation resurfaced. Canary had never stopped pushing the investigation along, even against the advice of her professional staff, and in October 2005, Don Siegelman was once again indicted by a federal grand jury in Canary's district on 32 counts of bribery, conspiracy and mail fraud.
The Siegelman case was assigned to Judge Mark Fuller, a former district attorney whom George W. Bush had nominated for a federal judgeship in August 2002. Fuller was accused by his Siegelman-appointed successor in the district attorney's office of falsifying payroll records with intent to defraud the Alabama retirement system, leading him to back Riley during that year's election. This episode raises serious questions about Fuller's refusal to recuse himself and helps explain Rob Riley's alleged statement to Jill Simpson that Fuller would “hang” Siegelman.
The case dragged on until June 2006, shortly after Siegelman was defeated in the Democratic primary. A few weeks later, he was acquitted of 25 of the 32 counts against him, but he was ultimately convicted on the other seven, after the jury had deadlocked twice and been sent back to deliberate by Judge Fuller. During the trial itself there were many irregularities, including strong indications of jury tampering involving two jurors.
Siegelman was found guilty of accepting a $500,000 donation by HealthSouth founder Richard M. Scrushy in exchange for an appointment to the Alabama hospital regulatory board. The prosecution said the money had been used to pay off a state lottery debt, which Governor Siegelman's education campaign had incurred.
In Alabama, however, the lottery money is controlled by the legislature, not the Governor's office.
When it finally came time for sentencing, Judge Fuller imposed a sentence of seven years, four months and would not allow Siegelman to remain free while his case was under appeal. Within hours of his sentencing, Siegelman had been taken to a federal penitentiary in Atlanta.
In the days immediately following Siegelman's imprisonment, another set of strange occurrences further underscored the serious ethical and legal questions surrounding this case. First his lawyer's office was broken into, although the thieves took nothing of value and only appeared to have been looking for files. Then, ten days later, Siegelman was sent on an extended odyssey to prisons in Michigan, New York, Oklahoma and finally Louisiana -- during which time his attorneys were led to believe that he had been moved to Texas.
It was this final series of moves that brought this case to public notice and raised the ire of 44 former state attorneys general, who penned a letter to Congress asking that the case be investigated.
Click here to see a timeline of the case.
Tomorrow, Part II: Raw Story's exclusive interview with Dana Siegelman, Governor Siegelman's daughter.
Larisa Alexandrovna is managing editor of investigative news for Raw Story and regularly reports on intelligence and national security stories. Contact her at larisa@rawstory.com. Muriel Kane is Raw Story's research director.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Carl Levin reveals his traitorous LIEBERMAN - AIPAC stripes: MORE NO-STRINGS FUNDING for Cheney-Bush's OPEN-ENDED WARS.....
Senator Carl Levin, so-called "moderate Democrat" senator from Michigan, once agains proves that the AIPAC Senators are far and away THE MOST VALUABLE Bush-Cheney unlimited war powers supporters in all of America.
More so than Rupet Murdoch and the right-wing corporate media..
More so than corporate America and the war industrial complex....
More so than the Right-Wing Protestant fundamentalists pro-war organizations
(Pat Robertson, Bob Jones University, the organizations left behind by Rev. Kennedy and Jerry Falwell).....
More so than the Republican Party...
When looking for the TRUE HARD CORE of SUPPORT for Bush-Cheney UNLIMITED WAR POWERS and ever-expanding wars, ONE NEED LOOK NO FURTHER than JOE LIEBERMAN, DIANNE FEINSTEIN, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (on the House Judiciary Commitee), and now CARL LEVIN joins his fellow AIPAC WAR-LOBBY UBER ALLES "Democratic" sell-out compatriots, who SEEK OUT DEMOCRATIC VOTES, campaign donations, and support, BUT THEN, WHEN it most counts, COME OUT AND VOTE to give Bush and Cheney EVER MORE WAR POWERS AND FUNDING.
------------------------------------------
Archbishop of Canterbury: US 'is worse than the British Empire at its peak'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=496299&in_page_id=1770
-----------------------------------------
Levin Says Democrats Won't Block Iraq Troop Funding
By Tina Seeley
Nov. 25 2007
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aEF6zN0Rnkas&refer=us
(Bloomberg) -- Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin said Democrats won't cut funding for U.S. troops in Iraq even as attempts to set a goal for a withdrawal are blocked by Republicans.
``We're going to fund the troops,'' Levin, a Michigan Democrat, said today on the ``Fox News Sunday'' program. ``No one's trying to undercut the military.''
Two Republican supporters of the current strategy in the war, Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John McCain of Arizona, accused Democrats of ignoring military commanders and the success brought about by the addition of about 30,000 U.S. troops earlier this year.
Democrats on Nov. 16 fell seven votes short of the 60 necessary to move forward with a $50 billion funding measure that would have set goals for removing U.S. troops from Iraq. With President George W. Bush threatening to veto any legislation that would put restrictions on the U.S. presence there, Democratic leaders said they may wait until next year to act on military funding requests. Bush is seeking about $190 billion to pay for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Levin said Senate Republicans opposed to setting any troop withdrawal goal are sending ``exactly the wrong message to the leaders of Iraq, that somehow or other, we're not going to put pressure on them to do what they promised to do.''
Setting Conditions
Graham, interviewed on the same program, disagreed.
``I cannot tell you how infuriating it is for me to sit here and listen to Congress trying to undercut a military commander and strategy that's produced results that are the precondition for reconciliation,'' Graham said.
McCain, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, said the U.S. is succeeding militarily in Iraq and that is helping the Iraqi political process.
``There is progress politically. There is a process of reconciliation,'' McCain said on ABC's ``This Week.''
The New York Times reported today that the Bush administration has scaled back its goals for progress from the Iraqi government. Some major benchmarks, such as passage of an oil-revenue sharing plan, may be pushed back, the Times reported, citing unidentified administration officials.
McCain said the Iraqi government may be able to approve legislation that would allow the return of former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party to government posts and hold provincial elections by the early part of 2008.
New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, said there has ``been no political progress'' in Iraq.
U.S. Withdrawal
``The best way to achieve a political solution in Iraq is to withdraw our forces,'' Richardson said on ABC. ``Our troops have become targets.''
Under a plan put forward by Army General David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, about 5,700 American combat troops are scheduled to leave Iraq by the end of the year. As many as 30,000 forces may be pulled out by the middle of 2008, leaving about the same number of U.S. troops in the country -- 130,000 -- that were there before Bush announced the deployment of additional combat units earlier this year to quell violence in Baghdad and western provinces.
As security has improved in the country over the past several months, about 1,500 Iraqis are returning daily from neighboring Syria alone, while another 500 leave Iraq for Syria, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. At the same time, the UN agency said Nov. 23 on its Web site that it isn't time yet to promote a large-scale return of displaced Iraqis because parts of the country remain volatile.
To contact the reporter on this story: Tina Seeley in Washington at tseeley@bloomberg.net .
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Senator Chriss Dodd bucks COWARDLY Pelosi and Reid: CALLS FOR INVESTIGATION into PERJURY and OBSTRUCTION of JUSTICE from White House...
Snator Chris Dodd bucks the cowering Democratic "leadership".
In calling for a SIMPLE investigation into PERJURY and OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE re the underlying crime of the Bush-Cheney White House "outing" a CIA agent to further their aims of invading Iraq in 2003, Chis Dodd is STANDING UP FOR the United States Constitution... something the Craven "WAR PARTY" in Washington (including Reid, Pelosi, Hoyer and other senior Democrats) REFUSE TO DO.
================================================
It Is Time to Investigate the White House's Betrayal of Trust
Chris Dodd
Posted November 21, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-dodd/it-is-time-to-investigate_b_73724.html
Our country has spent over four years attempting to unravel the story surrounding the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity by members of the Bush administration to a number of journalists. The leak jeopardized our national security and belies the administration's long standing claim that they and the Republican Party are best suited to keep America safe.
Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan was one of the key figures in the Bush administration's efforts to respond publicly to the investigation into the Plame leak. He spoke for the White House and he was the filter through which the public learned about which officials were and were not involved in the leak. Standing in front of the White House Seal, McClellan famously denied any White House involvement in the leak, "If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration."
Yesterday we found out that this simple statement attesting to McClellan's faith in the Bush administration's lawful behavior appears to be patently untrue. McClellan tells us, "I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the president himself."
We need to launch an immediate investigation to determine the facts of this case, the extent of any cover up and determine what the President knew and when he knew it. If in fact the President of the United of States knowingly instructed his chief spokesman to mislead the American people, there can be no more fundamental betrayal of the public trust.
That any White House official, let alone the President and the Vice President of the United States, would instruct others to mislead the American people about revealing the identity of a covert CIA agent is beyond unconscionable. It is an action that makes us less safe and secure. Worse still, it undermines the ability of our intelligence community to act with the confidence that their work will not be jeopardized in order to advance the partisan interests of one political party.
The American public deserves to know the extent of President Bush's involvement in both the leak of Valerie Plame's identity and what efforts, if any, he made to direct a cover up. Scott McClellan has brought forward a new piece to this sordid puzzle - it is time, once and for all, for the public to know the full story behind the betrayal of Valerie Plame by the Bush administration.
Learn more about my candidacy for the Presidency at ChrisDodd.com.
In calling for a SIMPLE investigation into PERJURY and OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE re the underlying crime of the Bush-Cheney White House "outing" a CIA agent to further their aims of invading Iraq in 2003, Chis Dodd is STANDING UP FOR the United States Constitution... something the Craven "WAR PARTY" in Washington (including Reid, Pelosi, Hoyer and other senior Democrats) REFUSE TO DO.
================================================
It Is Time to Investigate the White House's Betrayal of Trust
Chris Dodd
Posted November 21, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-dodd/it-is-time-to-investigate_b_73724.html
Our country has spent over four years attempting to unravel the story surrounding the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity by members of the Bush administration to a number of journalists. The leak jeopardized our national security and belies the administration's long standing claim that they and the Republican Party are best suited to keep America safe.
Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan was one of the key figures in the Bush administration's efforts to respond publicly to the investigation into the Plame leak. He spoke for the White House and he was the filter through which the public learned about which officials were and were not involved in the leak. Standing in front of the White House Seal, McClellan famously denied any White House involvement in the leak, "If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration."
Yesterday we found out that this simple statement attesting to McClellan's faith in the Bush administration's lawful behavior appears to be patently untrue. McClellan tells us, "I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the president himself."
We need to launch an immediate investigation to determine the facts of this case, the extent of any cover up and determine what the President knew and when he knew it. If in fact the President of the United of States knowingly instructed his chief spokesman to mislead the American people, there can be no more fundamental betrayal of the public trust.
That any White House official, let alone the President and the Vice President of the United States, would instruct others to mislead the American people about revealing the identity of a covert CIA agent is beyond unconscionable. It is an action that makes us less safe and secure. Worse still, it undermines the ability of our intelligence community to act with the confidence that their work will not be jeopardized in order to advance the partisan interests of one political party.
The American public deserves to know the extent of President Bush's involvement in both the leak of Valerie Plame's identity and what efforts, if any, he made to direct a cover up. Scott McClellan has brought forward a new piece to this sordid puzzle - it is time, once and for all, for the public to know the full story behind the betrayal of Valerie Plame by the Bush administration.
Learn more about my candidacy for the Presidency at ChrisDodd.com.
COWARDLY DEMOCRATS PRETEND NOT TO NOTICE yet MORE evidence of Bush, Cheney, Rove PERJURY, OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE, re the "outing" of CIA agent...
NANCY PELOSI, STENY HOYER, HARRY REID, JOHN KERRY, JOE BIDEN, HILLARY CLINTON, BARAK OBAMA... every one of the Senators and Representatives at the top of the Democratic Party power-structure are now, clearly, guilty of COLLUSION in the OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE by the Bush-Cheney White House re the outing of an undercover CIA agent to smear her war critic husband.
This scandal goes far beyond the White House 'merely' 'outing' one CIA agent.
To begin with, the disclosure of Valerie Plame's secret, NOC (non-official cover, i.e. a US spy in foreign countries) status as a CIA covert operatios officer ALSO DISCLOSED HER ENTIRE COVER ORGANIZATION, Brewster-Jennings Company, as a CIA front... and every officer associated with that company, and all their overseas contacts, were 'outed' as well.
Additionally, Vice President Cheney ordered, commissioned, and oversaw the "outing" of Ms. Plame as a means of intimidating and smearing her husband, retired Ambassador Joe Wilson, a prominent war critic who had exposed President Bush's use of the "Niger yellocake uranium for Iraq's WMD program" as a fabricated lie Mr. Bush was using to beat the drums for war vs. Iraq in his 2003 State of the Union speech.
The fallout from this scandal led to THE CIA TO DEMAND a FBI INVESTIGATION into the "outing" of their NOC agent and organization, which led to the creation of an INDEPENDENT PROSECUTOR. Patrick Fitzgerald led that prosecution, and despite the immense obstruction and deception efforts of the White House, WON A CONVICTION from a sympathetic jury for OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE an PERJURY by the President's senior advisor, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who was concurrently the Vice President's Chief of Staff.
Mr. Libby was a seasoned and experienced Washington lawyer and legal expert, who never in a million years would have "outed" an undercover CIA agent on his own initiative.
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY "leaders" ARE AWARE OF THESE FACTS: that VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY ORCHESTRATED, ORGANIZED, and ORDERED the "OUTING" of an undercover CIA agent to SMEAR and INTIMIDATE a prominent war critic, and to silence future whistleblowers.
THEY, the Democrat "leadership" ARE HAPPY with the American "NEWS" media PUTTING THE NATALIE HOLLOWAY STORY OVER, and ABOVE, the CLEAR and PERSISTENT EVIDENCE that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush OUTED a national security operative to further their war aims.
AS SUCH, THE DEMOCRATIC LEADEERSHIP is GUILTY OF COLLUSION in OBSTRUCTING JUSTICE, and IGNORING "High Crimes and Misdemeanors."
America isnow a nation with captive, servile, lying major media 'news' industry, operating, as it did during the segregation era, under ONE PARTY rule.
Prosecutor
This scandal goes far beyond the White House 'merely' 'outing' one CIA agent.
To begin with, the disclosure of Valerie Plame's secret, NOC (non-official cover, i.e. a US spy in foreign countries) status as a CIA covert operatios officer ALSO DISCLOSED HER ENTIRE COVER ORGANIZATION, Brewster-Jennings Company, as a CIA front... and every officer associated with that company, and all their overseas contacts, were 'outed' as well.
Additionally, Vice President Cheney ordered, commissioned, and oversaw the "outing" of Ms. Plame as a means of intimidating and smearing her husband, retired Ambassador Joe Wilson, a prominent war critic who had exposed President Bush's use of the "Niger yellocake uranium for Iraq's WMD program" as a fabricated lie Mr. Bush was using to beat the drums for war vs. Iraq in his 2003 State of the Union speech.
The fallout from this scandal led to THE CIA TO DEMAND a FBI INVESTIGATION into the "outing" of their NOC agent and organization, which led to the creation of an INDEPENDENT PROSECUTOR. Patrick Fitzgerald led that prosecution, and despite the immense obstruction and deception efforts of the White House, WON A CONVICTION from a sympathetic jury for OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE an PERJURY by the President's senior advisor, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who was concurrently the Vice President's Chief of Staff.
Mr. Libby was a seasoned and experienced Washington lawyer and legal expert, who never in a million years would have "outed" an undercover CIA agent on his own initiative.
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY "leaders" ARE AWARE OF THESE FACTS: that VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY ORCHESTRATED, ORGANIZED, and ORDERED the "OUTING" of an undercover CIA agent to SMEAR and INTIMIDATE a prominent war critic, and to silence future whistleblowers.
THEY, the Democrat "leadership" ARE HAPPY with the American "NEWS" media PUTTING THE NATALIE HOLLOWAY STORY OVER, and ABOVE, the CLEAR and PERSISTENT EVIDENCE that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush OUTED a national security operative to further their war aims.
AS SUCH, THE DEMOCRATIC LEADEERSHIP is GUILTY OF COLLUSION in OBSTRUCTING JUSTICE, and IGNORING "High Crimes and Misdemeanors."
America isnow a nation with captive, servile, lying major media 'news' industry, operating, as it did during the segregation era, under ONE PARTY rule.
Prosecutor
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Iraq- US using the military, Special Forces, Sniper teams as DEATH SQUADS in Iraq.....
Iraq's Laboratory of Repression
By Robert Parry
November 20, 2007
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/112007.html
The Bush administration is turning Iraq into a test tube for modern techniques of repression, from sophisticated biometrics that track populations to devastating weapons systems that combine night-vision optics from drone aircraft, heat resonance imaging and deadly firepower from the sky to kill suspected insurgents....
<< In other words, the evidence from these recent cases support the suspicion that President Bush and the U.S. military high command have transformed elite units, such as Special Forces and expert sniper teams, into “death squads” with a license to kill unarmed targets who are believed to be “bad guys.”
Though this reality has been the subject of whispers within the U.S. intelligence community for several years, it surfaced into public view with two attempted prosecutions of American soldiers, including Hensley, whose defense attorneys responded by citing “rules of engagement” that permit the killing of suspected insurgents.
The case of Army sniper Jorge G. Sandoval Jr., who served under Hensley, also revealed a classified program in which the Pentagon’s Asymmetric Warfare Group encouraged U.S. military snipers in Iraq to drop “bait” – such as electrical cords and ammunition – and then shoot Iraqis who pick up the items, according to evidence in the Sandoval case. [Washington Post, Sept. 24, 2007] >>
continued at http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/112007.html
Monday, November 19, 2007
Feckless Nancy Pelosi setting table for DEMOCRATIC DEFEAT in 2008...
FECKLESS Nancy Pelosi CARES ONLY ABOUT ONE THING: keeping the GRAVY TRAIN OF MONEY FLOWING to Democratic coffers, so Dems can purchase TV ad time and try to win elections with lame, fuzzy, "HEAR NO EVIL, SEE NO EVIL" campaign platforms.
While Republicans can make the Clinton's OVERNIGHT GUEST LIST into a FRONT-PAGE 'SCANDAL' (the so-called "LINCOLN BEDROOM 'SCANDAL'"), Democrats PRETEND NOT TO NOTICE SERIAL ABUSES OF POWER and CHRONIC LAWBREAKING by the Bush administration.
That is because Pelosi and the Democrats ARE BEHOLDEN TO THE SAME corporate LOBBYISTS who fuel the GOP-Bush/Cheney (and formerly DeLay or Gingrich or Trent Lott) machine.
BUT WHILE Republicans can get FREE MEDIA COVERAGE of their FAKE "SCANDAL" ACCUSATIONS AGAINST Democrats - worth TENS of MILLIONS of dollars in NEGATIVE CAMPAIGN ADS - the DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP _CAN NOT_ STAND UP AND DEFEND American workers, Citizen's rights, veterans treated to repeat, extended tours and contract extensions (a back-door draft), or American taxpayers forced to pay BILLIONS and BILLIONS and BILLIONS for REPUBLICAN CORRUPTION.
Madam Speaker, YOUR LEADERSHIP IS SO PATHETICALLY COWARDLY, THAT YOU CAN NOT EVEN BRING TO THE NATION's ATTENTION Mr. CHENEY'S FINANCIAL REWARDS for his conduct of the war, via his HALLIBURTON DEFERRED STOCK OPTIONS.
==================================================
Democrats Face a Shock in '08: They Could Lose
by David Lindorff:
Mon, 11/19/2007
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/lindorff/039
For Congressional Democrats, the train has already left the station -- and they're not on board.
A year after the election that gave them control of both houses of Congress, they are exposed as a feckless bunch of frauds posing as an opposition.
As long ago as last January, when the U.S. death toll in Iraq was almost 1,000 lower, and the civilian death toll in Iraq was over a hundred thousand lower, they could have brought an end to the conflict by simply refusing to approve any more money for the war.
Instead, they approved administration requests for several hundred billion dollars for expanding the number of troops from 140,000 to a current level of nearly 173,000 -- a post- invasion record.
They could have brought administration assaults on the Constitution to a screeching halt by initiating impeachment hearings against the president, the vice president, or against both of these criminal usurpers. Instead, the House leadership threatened anyone who might file impeachment bills with various punishments, reportedly ranging from loss of committee chairmanships to loss of access to Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee funding.
In the perverse "logic" of Democratic Party leaders, this do-nothing strategy was designed to bring Democrats a historic victory in 2008, when American voters, angry about the quagmire in Iraq, and disgusted with eight years of Republican misrule, would supposedly hand Democrats the presidency and healthy majorities in both houses of Congress.
But the American public is not that stupid. With Bush and Cheney leaving, they won't buy a campaign based on running against those two disasters.
Polls show that the majority of Americans are at least as disgusted at Democrats in Congress as they are with the Republicans -- maybe more so. Since last November, public approval of the new Democratic-led Congress has fallen from a post-election high of 65 percent to a current level of about 20 percent, depending on the poll. That's lower than President Bush's record low approval rating of 24 percent.
The only political entity with a lower approval rating than the Democrats in Congress at this point is Vice President Dick Cheney, currently at 11 percent, but being more popular than a blood-thirsty, power-crazed lunatic with a nuclear fetish is a pretty sorry claim to fame.
The dire situation facing Democrats is masked currently by the fake "excitement" being generated by all the corporate media coverage of the so-called "race" for the Democratic presidential nomination -- coverage artificially skewed towards just two or perhaps three of the candidates: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards. This coverage creates the illusion of some kind of groundswell of public excitement about the Democratic candidates. In fact none of them fares particularly well against Republican candidates, At this point, given the disastrous history of seven years of Republican rule in Washington, with the economy staggering, the dollar in freefall, oil prices at record levels, the country $8 trillion in debt, mortgage defaults at depression levels and the war in Iraq still without an end in sight, any Democrat should be trouncing any Republican candidate in the polls. Instead, the so-called "leading" Democrats are all neck-and-neck with their potential Republican opponents. (Evidence of how out-of-whack the corporate media coverage of the Democratic campaign is was provided at the CNN debate in Nevada last Sunday, when even in an auditorium packed with supporters of Clinton and Obama, the biggest applause came when Dennis Kucinich, a candidate almost ignored by moderator Wolf Blitzer, called for impeachment, and for ending the war immediately.)
The reason for this disconnect from reality is that while Democratic voters, as always, can be expected to go dutifully to the polls next November and cast their votes for whatever compromised and weak candidate their party puts up to run, the independent vote that put Democrats over the top in the 2006 off-year Congressional elections is gone.
Those voters, many of whom have long harbored a powerful antipathy towards both parties, the government, and the corporations that dominate the political process, came out in record numbers and voted Democratic in November '06 because, sick of the Bush/Cheney Administration, sick of five years of a phony "war" on terror, and sick of three years of the Iraq War, they turned to the Democrats, even in traditional "red" states and Congressional districts, in hopes that the Democrats would do what they were promising to do: end the war and defend the Constitution.
Now they have seen this hope was misplaced.
The Democrats had no intention of doing either thing, and indeed seem to be happy to see the war and the Bush Administration continue through the next election.
But 2008 will not be 2006. In 2006, those independents had reason to at least hope that the Democrats would really be different, that they would really act like an empowered opposition, that they would really do something to turn the country around.
In 2008, independents and even many Democratic voters know the Democrats will not be different from Republicans in any meaningful way on the two key issues -- ending the war and restoring the Constitution. Not only will the likely Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, not end the war in Iraq, but also because she is a woman, and has made it clear she wants to be perceived as being as tough as any guy, she is as likely as Bush to expand the war to Iraq or some other country during her first term of office -- maybe even more likely, if Bush doesn't do it first.
As for Congress, Democrats may be in for a big shock in 2008. Expecting major gains in both houses, they may find themselves surprised if the independent voters who came out for them in 2006 stay home, and leave the field to Republicans and nativist independents who base their votes on issues such as immigration and an unreasoned fear of terror -- both issues the Republican candidates plan to stoke.
There is still time for the Democrats to recover, but they won't do it on their own. The leadership of the party has lost its connection to the American people and to reality, and is living in a world of image management, corporate pandering, and inside-the-Beltway machinations.
With an overwhelming majority of Americans clearly in favor of an immediate end to the Iraq war, and a similar majority in favor of impeachment hearings against both Bush and especially Cheney, it is clear that the entire electoral situation would change overnight if Democrats in Congress announced there would be no more funding bills for the Iraq War -- only for withdrawal -- and that impeachment hearings were beginning.
This is not going to happen, though, without an even more forceful mass movement by the American people.
What we need is a tsunami of mail and phone calls to Democrats in Congress demanding both things. We need marches on the local offices of Democratic members of Congress. And finally we need mass resignations from the Democratic Party, with voters making the point directly and unambiguously that people are leaving the party until it acts decisively to end the war and to begin impeachment proceedings.
No more symbolic votes. No more posturing.
Only action.
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book, co-authored by Barbara Olshansky, is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
While Republicans can make the Clinton's OVERNIGHT GUEST LIST into a FRONT-PAGE 'SCANDAL' (the so-called "LINCOLN BEDROOM 'SCANDAL'"), Democrats PRETEND NOT TO NOTICE SERIAL ABUSES OF POWER and CHRONIC LAWBREAKING by the Bush administration.
That is because Pelosi and the Democrats ARE BEHOLDEN TO THE SAME corporate LOBBYISTS who fuel the GOP-Bush/Cheney (and formerly DeLay or Gingrich or Trent Lott) machine.
BUT WHILE Republicans can get FREE MEDIA COVERAGE of their FAKE "SCANDAL" ACCUSATIONS AGAINST Democrats - worth TENS of MILLIONS of dollars in NEGATIVE CAMPAIGN ADS - the DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP _CAN NOT_ STAND UP AND DEFEND American workers, Citizen's rights, veterans treated to repeat, extended tours and contract extensions (a back-door draft), or American taxpayers forced to pay BILLIONS and BILLIONS and BILLIONS for REPUBLICAN CORRUPTION.
Madam Speaker, YOUR LEADERSHIP IS SO PATHETICALLY COWARDLY, THAT YOU CAN NOT EVEN BRING TO THE NATION's ATTENTION Mr. CHENEY'S FINANCIAL REWARDS for his conduct of the war, via his HALLIBURTON DEFERRED STOCK OPTIONS.
==================================================
Democrats Face a Shock in '08: They Could Lose
by David Lindorff:
Mon, 11/19/2007
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/lindorff/039
For Congressional Democrats, the train has already left the station -- and they're not on board.
A year after the election that gave them control of both houses of Congress, they are exposed as a feckless bunch of frauds posing as an opposition.
As long ago as last January, when the U.S. death toll in Iraq was almost 1,000 lower, and the civilian death toll in Iraq was over a hundred thousand lower, they could have brought an end to the conflict by simply refusing to approve any more money for the war.
Instead, they approved administration requests for several hundred billion dollars for expanding the number of troops from 140,000 to a current level of nearly 173,000 -- a post- invasion record.
They could have brought administration assaults on the Constitution to a screeching halt by initiating impeachment hearings against the president, the vice president, or against both of these criminal usurpers. Instead, the House leadership threatened anyone who might file impeachment bills with various punishments, reportedly ranging from loss of committee chairmanships to loss of access to Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee funding.
In the perverse "logic" of Democratic Party leaders, this do-nothing strategy was designed to bring Democrats a historic victory in 2008, when American voters, angry about the quagmire in Iraq, and disgusted with eight years of Republican misrule, would supposedly hand Democrats the presidency and healthy majorities in both houses of Congress.
But the American public is not that stupid. With Bush and Cheney leaving, they won't buy a campaign based on running against those two disasters.
Polls show that the majority of Americans are at least as disgusted at Democrats in Congress as they are with the Republicans -- maybe more so. Since last November, public approval of the new Democratic-led Congress has fallen from a post-election high of 65 percent to a current level of about 20 percent, depending on the poll. That's lower than President Bush's record low approval rating of 24 percent.
The only political entity with a lower approval rating than the Democrats in Congress at this point is Vice President Dick Cheney, currently at 11 percent, but being more popular than a blood-thirsty, power-crazed lunatic with a nuclear fetish is a pretty sorry claim to fame.
The dire situation facing Democrats is masked currently by the fake "excitement" being generated by all the corporate media coverage of the so-called "race" for the Democratic presidential nomination -- coverage artificially skewed towards just two or perhaps three of the candidates: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards. This coverage creates the illusion of some kind of groundswell of public excitement about the Democratic candidates. In fact none of them fares particularly well against Republican candidates, At this point, given the disastrous history of seven years of Republican rule in Washington, with the economy staggering, the dollar in freefall, oil prices at record levels, the country $8 trillion in debt, mortgage defaults at depression levels and the war in Iraq still without an end in sight, any Democrat should be trouncing any Republican candidate in the polls. Instead, the so-called "leading" Democrats are all neck-and-neck with their potential Republican opponents. (Evidence of how out-of-whack the corporate media coverage of the Democratic campaign is was provided at the CNN debate in Nevada last Sunday, when even in an auditorium packed with supporters of Clinton and Obama, the biggest applause came when Dennis Kucinich, a candidate almost ignored by moderator Wolf Blitzer, called for impeachment, and for ending the war immediately.)
The reason for this disconnect from reality is that while Democratic voters, as always, can be expected to go dutifully to the polls next November and cast their votes for whatever compromised and weak candidate their party puts up to run, the independent vote that put Democrats over the top in the 2006 off-year Congressional elections is gone.
Those voters, many of whom have long harbored a powerful antipathy towards both parties, the government, and the corporations that dominate the political process, came out in record numbers and voted Democratic in November '06 because, sick of the Bush/Cheney Administration, sick of five years of a phony "war" on terror, and sick of three years of the Iraq War, they turned to the Democrats, even in traditional "red" states and Congressional districts, in hopes that the Democrats would do what they were promising to do: end the war and defend the Constitution.
Now they have seen this hope was misplaced.
The Democrats had no intention of doing either thing, and indeed seem to be happy to see the war and the Bush Administration continue through the next election.
But 2008 will not be 2006. In 2006, those independents had reason to at least hope that the Democrats would really be different, that they would really act like an empowered opposition, that they would really do something to turn the country around.
In 2008, independents and even many Democratic voters know the Democrats will not be different from Republicans in any meaningful way on the two key issues -- ending the war and restoring the Constitution. Not only will the likely Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, not end the war in Iraq, but also because she is a woman, and has made it clear she wants to be perceived as being as tough as any guy, she is as likely as Bush to expand the war to Iraq or some other country during her first term of office -- maybe even more likely, if Bush doesn't do it first.
As for Congress, Democrats may be in for a big shock in 2008. Expecting major gains in both houses, they may find themselves surprised if the independent voters who came out for them in 2006 stay home, and leave the field to Republicans and nativist independents who base their votes on issues such as immigration and an unreasoned fear of terror -- both issues the Republican candidates plan to stoke.
There is still time for the Democrats to recover, but they won't do it on their own. The leadership of the party has lost its connection to the American people and to reality, and is living in a world of image management, corporate pandering, and inside-the-Beltway machinations.
With an overwhelming majority of Americans clearly in favor of an immediate end to the Iraq war, and a similar majority in favor of impeachment hearings against both Bush and especially Cheney, it is clear that the entire electoral situation would change overnight if Democrats in Congress announced there would be no more funding bills for the Iraq War -- only for withdrawal -- and that impeachment hearings were beginning.
This is not going to happen, though, without an even more forceful mass movement by the American people.
What we need is a tsunami of mail and phone calls to Democrats in Congress demanding both things. We need marches on the local offices of Democratic members of Congress. And finally we need mass resignations from the Democratic Party, with voters making the point directly and unambiguously that people are leaving the party until it acts decisively to end the war and to begin impeachment proceedings.
No more symbolic votes. No more posturing.
Only action.
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book, co-authored by Barbara Olshansky, is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Dianne Feinstein, in Bowing to Grassroots, illustrates RIGHT-WING OBSTRUCTIONIST bias in Senate...
The Alpha & Omega of American politics - the ALLIANCE of so-called "liberal Democrats" in the House and Senate (and statehouses nationwide) with the RIGHT-WING REACTIONARY neo-con agenda (of which the Bush-Cheney administration is the perfect exposition, aka the "unilateral" dictatorial-powers presidency) is AT THE VERY HEART of America's 7 year march of ignomy and infamy, from STOLEN ELECTIONS to pre-9-11 INCOMPETENCE bordering on DERELICTION OF DUTY; to the still unsolved ANTHRAX ATTACKS, to the LIES-TO-WAR, to GROSS CORRUPTION in Iraq war contracts; to TORTURE and KANGAROO COURTS for female privates WHILE the president and vice president demand the 'right' TO TORTURE PRISONERS TO DEATH! - to massive economic job losses; to massive, nationwide billions-dollars credit crunch; ALL of these SCANDALS have a common denominator: THE COWARDLY DEMOCRATS in the Senate COULD NOT START and SUSTAIN A SINGLE FILIBUSTER AGAINST ANY OF THEM!
FOR SHAME, DEMOCRATS! The cowering Democrats in the senate (INCLUDING ALL FOUR presidential contenders!) CAN NOT POINT TO A SINGLE POLICY FILIBUSTER in the past 7 years, DESPITE the ATROCIOUS Bush-Cheney agenda, above!
This article by Howie Klein of Alternet and DownWithTyranny.com illustrates the dynamic... of how OBSTRUCTIONIST REPUBLICANS SEANTORS GET WHAT THEY WANT, even when they are in the MINORITY to the Democrat senate majority!
FOR SHAME! Democrats! When John F. Kennedy wrote "PROFILES IN COURAGE!" there is NOT ONE SENATOR TODAY who would rate mention in his book!
=======================================
Feinstein Buckles to Grassroots Pressure, FISA Bill Passes Without Telecom Immunity
Posted by Howie Klein, Down With Tyranny!
November 16, 2007.
This post, written by Howie Klein, originally appeared on Down With Tyranny!
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/rights/68114/
Howie Klein: Bush's main Democratic ally on the Senate Judiciary Committee, grudgingly voted for a bill that doesn't allow for retroactive immunity. Post Tools
Justice Dept Reopens Warrantless Wiretapping Inquiry Stymied by Bush
Faiz Shakir Think Progress
Earlier this evening the House passed by a vote of 227-189 a bill that would strengthen court oversight of government surveillanceand refused the Bush Regime's and their Republican rubber stamp allies' demands that law breakers inside the big telecom corporations be granted retroactive immunity for criminal behavior. Bush, of course, has vowed to veto the bill. He may not have to.
Obstructionists in the Senate are determined to kill the bill in the Senate. Today they suffered a mini-setback when Dianne Feinstein, Bush's main Democratic ally on the Senate Judiciary Committee, grudgingly voted for a bill that doesn't allow for retroactive immunity. Corporate hacks like Mitch McConnell (R-KY) went bonkers and are promising to filibuster it. Just so you don't get the idea that Feinstein has seen the light, just before she voted to allow the bill without the retroactive immunity go to the ful Senate, she had voted against Russ Feingold's amendment to specifically kill retroactive immunity.
Just minutes before the vote, the committee had voted 11-to-8 in favor of immunity for the phone companies.
Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Cal., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., voted with the nine Republicans on the panel in favor of preserving the immunity clause.
But in a strange twist that left many wondering what had happened, just minutes after this vote, Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, called for a separate vote to approve the bill without the section of the legislation with the immunity provisions.
The committee approved Leahy's call 10-9, along party lines.
So pressure on Feinstein needs to be maintained and increased. Today MoveOn joined the Courage Campaign to do this. And the Courage Campaign is not backing down and not taking any sops from Feinstein or her insider allies.
Speaker Pelosi's blog has all the details of what the House did pass and why it is important.
FOR SHAME, DEMOCRATS! The cowering Democrats in the senate (INCLUDING ALL FOUR presidential contenders!) CAN NOT POINT TO A SINGLE POLICY FILIBUSTER in the past 7 years, DESPITE the ATROCIOUS Bush-Cheney agenda, above!
This article by Howie Klein of Alternet and DownWithTyranny.com illustrates the dynamic... of how OBSTRUCTIONIST REPUBLICANS SEANTORS GET WHAT THEY WANT, even when they are in the MINORITY to the Democrat senate majority!
FOR SHAME! Democrats! When John F. Kennedy wrote "PROFILES IN COURAGE!" there is NOT ONE SENATOR TODAY who would rate mention in his book!
=======================================
Feinstein Buckles to Grassroots Pressure, FISA Bill Passes Without Telecom Immunity
Posted by Howie Klein, Down With Tyranny!
November 16, 2007.
This post, written by Howie Klein, originally appeared on Down With Tyranny!
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/rights/68114/
Howie Klein: Bush's main Democratic ally on the Senate Judiciary Committee, grudgingly voted for a bill that doesn't allow for retroactive immunity. Post Tools
Justice Dept Reopens Warrantless Wiretapping Inquiry Stymied by Bush
Faiz Shakir Think Progress
Earlier this evening the House passed by a vote of 227-189 a bill that would strengthen court oversight of government surveillanceand refused the Bush Regime's and their Republican rubber stamp allies' demands that law breakers inside the big telecom corporations be granted retroactive immunity for criminal behavior. Bush, of course, has vowed to veto the bill. He may not have to.
Obstructionists in the Senate are determined to kill the bill in the Senate. Today they suffered a mini-setback when Dianne Feinstein, Bush's main Democratic ally on the Senate Judiciary Committee, grudgingly voted for a bill that doesn't allow for retroactive immunity. Corporate hacks like Mitch McConnell (R-KY) went bonkers and are promising to filibuster it. Just so you don't get the idea that Feinstein has seen the light, just before she voted to allow the bill without the retroactive immunity go to the ful Senate, she had voted against Russ Feingold's amendment to specifically kill retroactive immunity.
Just minutes before the vote, the committee had voted 11-to-8 in favor of immunity for the phone companies.
Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Cal., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., voted with the nine Republicans on the panel in favor of preserving the immunity clause.
But in a strange twist that left many wondering what had happened, just minutes after this vote, Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, called for a separate vote to approve the bill without the section of the legislation with the immunity provisions.
The committee approved Leahy's call 10-9, along party lines.
So pressure on Feinstein needs to be maintained and increased. Today MoveOn joined the Courage Campaign to do this. And the Courage Campaign is not backing down and not taking any sops from Feinstein or her insider allies.
Speaker Pelosi's blog has all the details of what the House did pass and why it is important.
Saturday, November 17, 2007
At long last, Sen. Majority Harry Reid starts playing HARDBALL vs Bush-Cheney abuses of power..
GIVE 'em HELL, HARRY!
It has only taken the Democrats 7 - SEVEN - long years to notice that the Bush administration never "plays fair," and never misses an opportunity so push its agenda forward through secrecy, corruption, intimidation, smearing and sliming of its opponents, and outright lies - tactics which in several nation elections have resulted n the DISENFRANCHISEMENT of tens of thousands of American voters, and the frustration of tens of millions more in the past two presidential elections, alone.
Holding Congress through the Thanksgiving, and if need be Christmas holidays, is the LEAST Senator Reid and the Democratic Party can do to REPRESENT THE MILLIONS of us AMERICANS who are OPPOSED to the Bush-Cheney reactionary right-wing, "export war" agenda, and who are appalled at the serial abuses of power which the Democrats and "major media" constantly pretend not to notice.
=======================================
Reid to Keep Senate in Session to Prevent Recess Appointments
By Erin P. Billings
Roll Call Staff
Friday, Nov. 16, 2007
http://www.rollcall.com/issues/1_1/breakingnews/21044-1.html
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has decided to keep the chamber in session over the Thanksgiving break to block President Bush from making any unsavory recess appointments while Senators are out of town.
In a statement inserted in the record Friday, the Majority Leader said he will hold the Senate in a series of pro forma or nonvoting sessions to prevent the controversial practice. In the statement, Reid argued that nominations need to get on track, and that Bush has not met the Democrats “halfway” in agreeing to Democratically backed nominees to “important commissions.”
“While an election year looms, significant progress can still be made on nominations,” Reid said. “I am committed to making that progress if the President will meet me halfway.
“But that progress can’t be made if the President seeks controversial recess appointments and fails to make Democratic appointments to important commissions.”
Senate sources said Reid made the decision after he was unable to strike a deal with White House officials that would have allowed swift consideration of several key Democratic picks for the executive branch. In his statement, Reid points to the Federal Communications Commission, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and Nuclear Regulatory Commission as examples where Democratic choices have not been moved along.
“Up until recently, the President has generally discharged that obligation,” Reid said. “In the last several months, however, the administration has been stalling progress on Democratic appointments.”
Democrats have feared Bush would look to use the upcoming break to appoint some of his own nominees that may not otherwise clear the Senate. In particular, concerns have centered on the appointment of James Holsinger as surgeon general, who has met criticism from gay rights organizations and opposition from key Senate Democrats.
Sources familiar with the talks, however, said Holsinger has never been discussed as a possible recess nominee.
Holsinger notwithstanding, one Democratic source said the administration had made clear they planned to move some nominations through over the period that were unacceptable.
"They did float a number of recess appointments," this source said. "Some of them were very problematic."
This isn’t the first time Reid has considered keeping the Senate working over a break to prevent recess appointments. Following the Easter recess in which Bush made three controversial installments, Reid threatened to hold pro forma sessions during the monthlong August break.
Later, however, he backed off that threat after reaching a deal with the White House under which Democrats would clear a host of stalled nominations in exchange for a truce over the work period.
Reid said Friday that he has worked hard since then to move quickly on Bush’s nominations, particularly in confirming Michael Mukasey as the next attorney general. Reid opposed the nominee, who narrowly cleared the chamber last week.
“With the Thanksgiving break looming, the administration informed me that they would make several recess appointments,” Reid said. “I indicated I would be willing to confirm various appointments if the administration would agree to move on Democratic appointments.
“They would not make that commitment.”
It has only taken the Democrats 7 - SEVEN - long years to notice that the Bush administration never "plays fair," and never misses an opportunity so push its agenda forward through secrecy, corruption, intimidation, smearing and sliming of its opponents, and outright lies - tactics which in several nation elections have resulted n the DISENFRANCHISEMENT of tens of thousands of American voters, and the frustration of tens of millions more in the past two presidential elections, alone.
Holding Congress through the Thanksgiving, and if need be Christmas holidays, is the LEAST Senator Reid and the Democratic Party can do to REPRESENT THE MILLIONS of us AMERICANS who are OPPOSED to the Bush-Cheney reactionary right-wing, "export war" agenda, and who are appalled at the serial abuses of power which the Democrats and "major media" constantly pretend not to notice.
=======================================
Reid to Keep Senate in Session to Prevent Recess Appointments
By Erin P. Billings
Roll Call Staff
Friday, Nov. 16, 2007
http://www.rollcall.com/issues/1_1/breakingnews/21044-1.html
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has decided to keep the chamber in session over the Thanksgiving break to block President Bush from making any unsavory recess appointments while Senators are out of town.
In a statement inserted in the record Friday, the Majority Leader said he will hold the Senate in a series of pro forma or nonvoting sessions to prevent the controversial practice. In the statement, Reid argued that nominations need to get on track, and that Bush has not met the Democrats “halfway” in agreeing to Democratically backed nominees to “important commissions.”
“While an election year looms, significant progress can still be made on nominations,” Reid said. “I am committed to making that progress if the President will meet me halfway.
“But that progress can’t be made if the President seeks controversial recess appointments and fails to make Democratic appointments to important commissions.”
Senate sources said Reid made the decision after he was unable to strike a deal with White House officials that would have allowed swift consideration of several key Democratic picks for the executive branch. In his statement, Reid points to the Federal Communications Commission, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and Nuclear Regulatory Commission as examples where Democratic choices have not been moved along.
“Up until recently, the President has generally discharged that obligation,” Reid said. “In the last several months, however, the administration has been stalling progress on Democratic appointments.”
Democrats have feared Bush would look to use the upcoming break to appoint some of his own nominees that may not otherwise clear the Senate. In particular, concerns have centered on the appointment of James Holsinger as surgeon general, who has met criticism from gay rights organizations and opposition from key Senate Democrats.
Sources familiar with the talks, however, said Holsinger has never been discussed as a possible recess nominee.
Holsinger notwithstanding, one Democratic source said the administration had made clear they planned to move some nominations through over the period that were unacceptable.
"They did float a number of recess appointments," this source said. "Some of them were very problematic."
This isn’t the first time Reid has considered keeping the Senate working over a break to prevent recess appointments. Following the Easter recess in which Bush made three controversial installments, Reid threatened to hold pro forma sessions during the monthlong August break.
Later, however, he backed off that threat after reaching a deal with the White House under which Democrats would clear a host of stalled nominations in exchange for a truce over the work period.
Reid said Friday that he has worked hard since then to move quickly on Bush’s nominations, particularly in confirming Michael Mukasey as the next attorney general. Reid opposed the nominee, who narrowly cleared the chamber last week.
“With the Thanksgiving break looming, the administration informed me that they would make several recess appointments,” Reid said. “I indicated I would be willing to confirm various appointments if the administration would agree to move on Democratic appointments.
“They would not make that commitment.”
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Dianne Feinstein shows the DEMOCRATIC PARTY's TRUE FACE: she ENABLES the Bush agenda AT EVERY CRITICAL TURN....
AT LAST, AT LAST, PRAISE GOD, AT LONG LAST!
The "DEMOCRATIC" Party agenda of ABJECT, COMPLICIT COLLABORATION with, and SUBSERVIENCE TO, the Bush-Cheney Reactionary Texas Republican neo-Confederate/neo-conservative agenda is OUT IN THE OPEN for even the most provincial Americans to see.
ON EVERY MAJOR ISSUE or policy fight that determines MORE WAR POWERS for the Bush-Cheney administration, and MORE TRANSFER OF WEALTH from American working taxpayers to the Military/Industrial Complex and the Wealthy... DIANNE FEINSTEIN and her DEMOCRATIC SENATORS are THERE, either OPENLY VOTING WITH the Bush Republicans, or SITTING ON THEIR HANDS, NOT FILIBUSTERING to block that vote or issue!
FOR SHAME, DEMOCRATS!
#1. ...From helping Republicans QUASH the Black Congressional Caucus demand for a SIMPLE congressional investigation into massive vote-counting fraud in Katherine Harris/Jeb Bush's Florida in 2000, a BETRAYAL of HISTORIC PROPORTIONS, since there is probaly not one Democratic senator in the past 30 years who hasn't appealed to Black voters - as a defender of their interests and rights - for their votes. This DESPICABLE action (or inaction) on the part of the Democratic Senators, who REFUSED to sign on the the Black Congressional Caucus, has become THE BASIC TEMPLATE FOR ALL SENATE DEMOCRAT ACTIONS EVER SINCE: PUT THE 'DIGNITY" and "RESPECTABILITY" and "LEGITIMACY" of the Bush-Cheney administration (and the "belly-of-the-beast" Congress itself) OVER and ABOVE THE RIGHTS and CONCERNS of American voters, and specifically of Democratic voters.
#2. .....to ALLOWING the Bush-Cheney administration to OBSTRUCT a 9-11 Commission until 9-11 widows did the heavy lifting to demand its creation...
#3. ...to PRETENDING NOT TO NOTICE the ANTHRAX ATTACK investigation DEAD-END, after ONLY Democratic leaders were targeted by the supposedly "Arab" terrorist (what Arab terrorist with an ounce of self respect would target... Tom Daschle or... Patrick Leahy? - when a few similar letters sent to the Pentagon would have shut down the US military for several weeks?)
#4. ... to ALLOWING Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney to turn the 9-11 Commission into a NOT ONE PERSON CENSURED "lunchtime meet-and-greet" farce....
#5. ...to FAILING TO PURSUE Mr. Bush's (de facto) PARDON of Scooter Libby for PERJURY and OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE re the OUTING OF A CIA AGENT during time of war....
#6. ...to PRETENDING NOT TO NOTICE Mr. Bush's CLOSE CONNECTIONS to FRAUD-CONVICTED Chairman KEN LAY of ENRON and BRIBERY CONVICTED LOBBYIST Jack Abramoff...
#7. ...to DOING NEXT TO NOTHING to get at the heart of the PURGE-GATE SCANDAL, whereby Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and KARL ROVE SOUGHT to USE THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT to FILE FALSE PROSECUTIONS against DEMOCRATIC voter-activists and candidates to swing close elections to Republican incumbents....
#8. ...to ALLOWING the corporate "Major Media" to act as virtual PROPAGANDA MOUTHPIECES for the Republican Party, from Rush Limbaugh to Rupert Murdoch to the horrific 'reporting' of the Washington Post and New York Times, which is usually no more than a David Broder/George Will rough polish on the Rush Limbaugh/Karl Rove talking points of the day. (George Will still insists that global warming... despite the retreat of almost every glacier on earth - is nothing but a Commie/Democrat/socialist plot)....
..... AT EVERY TURN, the COMPLICIT Democratic Senators and Democratic House "leaders" ENABLE this out-of-control, rogue, extra-constitutional, DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS, police-state, keep-the-slaves-locked-down-on-the-plantation White House.
FOR SHAME! THIS IS A BETRAYAL, by the Democratic Party Leadership, of EPIC proportions.
Simply by helping the Republicans keep the REAL AGENDA of the radical right OFF of the front pages and out of the network news headlines, Democrats hope they can RUN FOR OFFICE on one agenda... and THEN RULE, ALONG WITH THE REPUBLICANS, from the DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSITE agenda.
SHEER TREACHERY! SHEER BETRAYAL! WHERE are the FILIBUSTERS?! WHERE are the DEMANDS that HARRIET MIERS and Joshua Bolton APPEAR BEFORE CONGRESS to answer Congressional subpoenaes?
WHERE is the "Democratic" Party COMMITTMENT TO EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW, to PROTECTING and PRESERVING the rights enumerated in the US Constitution, that THEY ALL SWORE an oath TO UPHOLD!
(short answer: All the above is SUBSERVIENT to the will of the BIG DONORS who fund BOTH the Democratic AND Republican Party.)
======================================
Feinstein Faces Dem Censure After Backing Mukasey
by Max Follmer, HuffingtonPost.com
November 12, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/11/12/feinstein-faces-dem-censu_n_72342.html
One day after voting to elevate a divisive conservative judge to the federal appeals court in New Orleans, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein was the president's guest aboard Air Force One. She had been invited to survey the damage from the recent spate of Southern California wildfires.
The senator later remarked privately that she found her conversation with Bush aboard Air Force One "illuminating," a source close to Feinstein told the Huffington Post.
Two weeks later, Feinstein was one of two Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee to vote to send Michael Mukasey's nomination to be the new attorney general to the full Senate. Her support helped turn the tide in favor of a nomination that faced an uncertain future after Mukasey refused to say whether waterboarding was torture.
When the full Senate voted, Feinstein was one of only six Democrats to vote in favor of confirming Mukasey.
Now, a coalition of progressive Democrats upset with Feinstein's controversial votes will ask the California Democratic Party to censure her at its executive board meeting this weekend, the Huffington Post has learned.
The move comes as Feinstein again finds herself under fire for saying Thursday that she now supports granting legal immunity to telecom companies that shared customer email and phone messages with the federal government as part of the warrantless surveillance program.
"Dianne Feinstein does not listen to the people of California," said Rick Jacobs, president of the Courage Campaign, a progressive organization in California. "She supports George Bush's agenda time after time."
Feinstein's office did not respond to messages seeking comment.
East Bay For Democracy, a chartered Democratic Club outside San Francisco, will introduce the censure motion on Saturday at the state party's executive board meeting in Anaheim. The Governing Board of the Progressive Caucus of the California Democratic Party and the Progressive Democrats of America are also backing the measure.
In addition to her move to back Mukasey, critics have lashed out at her decision last month to vote to confirm Judge Leslie Southwick to the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans. Southwick's opponents charged that his record on the bench in Mississippi demonstrated that he was both racist and homophobic. The Congressional Black Caucus, Human Rights Campaign and People for the American Way opposed his nomination.
The censure resolution faces an uphill battle. In order to be considered by the full executive board, it must first make it through the party's resolutions committee, which must approve the text unanimously.
The text of the resolution is below:
Whereas Senator Dianne Feinstein voted to support the nomination of Judge Michael Mukasey as United States Attorney General, thereby elevating to the highest position in law enforcement a man who refused to renounce the right of the President to resort to torture and who refused to recognize waterboarding as a form of torture, and by this action Senator Feinstein failed to oppose President Bush and failed to stand for the ideals of the Democratic Party, which abhors torture and stands firmly against its use by the United States at all times and places; and
Whereas Senator Feinstein voted to confirm Judge Leslie Southwick for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit despite his clear record of racism and gender discrimination, thus failing to stand firmly with the Democratic Party, which supports gender equality and opposes racism in any of its manifestations; and
Whereas these examples are far from the only instances where Senator Feinstein, after seeking and securing the support and endorsement of the California Democratic Party, has failed to support the policies and principles of our party
Therefore be it resolved that the California Democratic Party expresses its disappointment at, and censure of, Senator Feinstein for ignoring Democratic principles and falling so far below the standard of what we expect of our elected officials.
Monday, November 12, 2007
DIANNE FEINSTEIN FOLLOWS the LIEBERMAN path: ENABLES the REACTIONARY Right-Wing agenda of George W. Bush, BETRAYING Democratic voters and Americans..
BETRAYAL!
BETRAYAL is the SIGNATURE of the neo-con "Democrats" - "Democratic" Senator DIANNE FEINSTEIN votes for MORE WARS, MORE SURVEILLANCE, MORE REACTIONARY right-wing Bush apointees, and MORE UNLIMITED, NO OVERSIGHT, BLANK-CHECK WAR SPENDING.
Dianne Feinstein, like Senator JOE LIEBERMAN having attained the HIGHEST LEVELS OF AMERICAN POWER and influence, is no longer in the least bit interested in democratic principles, policies, voters, or even citizens.
============================
Dianne Feinstein -- Bush's key ally in the Senate -- to support telecom amnesty
Glenn Greenwald
Saturday November 10, 2007
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/11/10/feinstein/index.html
Two months ago, Dianne Feinstein used her position on the Senate Intelligence Committee to enable passage of Bush's FISA amendments, granting the President vast new warrantless surveillance powers.
Last month, Feinstein used her position on the Senate Judiciary Committee to ensure confirmation of Bush's highly controversial judicial nominee Leslie Southwick, by being the only Committee Democrat to vote for the nomination (The Politico: "Sen. Dianne Feinstein had emerged as a linchpin in the controversial nomination").
This week, Feinstein used her position on the Senate Judiciary Committee to enable confirmation of Bush's Attorney General nominee by ensuring that the frightened Chuck Schumer didn't have to stand alone (Fox News: "Schumer's and Feinstein's support for Mukasey virtually guarantees that a majority of the committee will recommend his confirmation").
And now, Feinstein is using her position on the Senate Judiciary Committee and Senate Intelligence Committee -- simultaneously -- to single-handedly ensure fulfillment of Bush's telecom amnesty demands, as her hometown newspaper, The San Francisco Chronicle, reports:
Feinstein backs legal immunity for telecom firms in wiretap cases
Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Thursday that she favors legal immunity for telecommunications companies that allegedly shared millions of customers' telephone and e-mail messages and records with the government, a position that could lead to the dismissal of numerous lawsuits pending in San Francisco.
In a statement at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is considering legislation to extend the Bush administration's electronic surveillance program, Feinstein said the companies should not be "held hostage to costly litigation in what is essentially a complaint about administration activities" . . .
Feinstein, D-Calif., plays a pivotal role on the Judiciary Committee, which has a 10-9 Democratic majority. If she joins committee Republicans in voting next Thursday to protect telecommunications companies from lawsuits for their roles in the surveillance program, the proposal -- a top priority of President Bush -- will become part of legislation that reaches the Senate floor.
BETRAYAL is the SIGNATURE of the neo-con "Democrats" - "Democratic" Senator DIANNE FEINSTEIN votes for MORE WARS, MORE SURVEILLANCE, MORE REACTIONARY right-wing Bush apointees, and MORE UNLIMITED, NO OVERSIGHT, BLANK-CHECK WAR SPENDING.
Dianne Feinstein, like Senator JOE LIEBERMAN having attained the HIGHEST LEVELS OF AMERICAN POWER and influence, is no longer in the least bit interested in democratic principles, policies, voters, or even citizens.
============================
Dianne Feinstein -- Bush's key ally in the Senate -- to support telecom amnesty
Glenn Greenwald
Saturday November 10, 2007
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/11/10/feinstein/index.html
Two months ago, Dianne Feinstein used her position on the Senate Intelligence Committee to enable passage of Bush's FISA amendments, granting the President vast new warrantless surveillance powers.
Last month, Feinstein used her position on the Senate Judiciary Committee to ensure confirmation of Bush's highly controversial judicial nominee Leslie Southwick, by being the only Committee Democrat to vote for the nomination (The Politico: "Sen. Dianne Feinstein had emerged as a linchpin in the controversial nomination").
This week, Feinstein used her position on the Senate Judiciary Committee to enable confirmation of Bush's Attorney General nominee by ensuring that the frightened Chuck Schumer didn't have to stand alone (Fox News: "Schumer's and Feinstein's support for Mukasey virtually guarantees that a majority of the committee will recommend his confirmation").
And now, Feinstein is using her position on the Senate Judiciary Committee and Senate Intelligence Committee -- simultaneously -- to single-handedly ensure fulfillment of Bush's telecom amnesty demands, as her hometown newspaper, The San Francisco Chronicle, reports:
Feinstein backs legal immunity for telecom firms in wiretap cases
Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Thursday that she favors legal immunity for telecommunications companies that allegedly shared millions of customers' telephone and e-mail messages and records with the government, a position that could lead to the dismissal of numerous lawsuits pending in San Francisco.
In a statement at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is considering legislation to extend the Bush administration's electronic surveillance program, Feinstein said the companies should not be "held hostage to costly litigation in what is essentially a complaint about administration activities" . . .
Feinstein, D-Calif., plays a pivotal role on the Judiciary Committee, which has a 10-9 Democratic majority. If she joins committee Republicans in voting next Thursday to protect telecommunications companies from lawsuits for their roles in the surveillance program, the proposal -- a top priority of President Bush -- will become part of legislation that reaches the Senate floor.
Friday, November 9, 2007
Hillary Clinton and the Dems: SLOW ON THEIR FEET... "slow thinkers" who manage to MUDDLE EVERY ISSUE....
A TERRFIC commentary by ALEXANDER COCKBURN captures the essence of the Democratic Party's COLLAPSE vs the Republican Juggernaut of the past decade (or 15 years) - the Democrat's INABILITY to coherently, articulately, and forcefully defend 300 YEARS of increasing human progress: INCREASINGLY BROAD ENFRANCHISEMENT; increasing economic upward mobility; increasing worker rights and workplace safety and security; increasing education access; and an egalitarian ideal of equality under law and reduced economic disparity, that saw such policies enacted as the GI Bill, Social Security, civil and voting rights, workplace rights, public health for millions, regulatoin of financial markets, etc. etc. etc.
Somehow, in the face of the Republican reactionary media machine of the past 15 years (ever since the end of the Cold War robbed Right-Wingers of an enemy they could hate and focus their efforts against) DEMOCRATS HAVE BECOME VOICELESS at defending that 300 years of American progress, from the European ENLIGHTENMENT which formed the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution, to the Magna Carta which came long before even the Enlightenment!
Detailing Bill Clinton's self-inflicted follies would take a book (or three), but suffice it to say Clinton, despited his vast political and personal skills, never understood the vehemence of the Right-Wing reaction ("blowback") to his election in 1992 (which to reactionary Right-Wingers was the distilled essence of all that was evil about the 1960s, desegregation, and an open, chaotic, 'ammoral' society.) (Note: Al Capone was running an entire EMPIRE of speakesies and cat-houses, right smack in America's "Heartland," long before anyone ever heard of hippies, free-love, or war- and civil rights protesters. America's "MORAL VALUES" scolds doth protest too much.) At every turn, Clinton GAVE THE ROPE that the white-collar Republican lynch-mob (shouted cries of "rape!" and "moral values" enabled Ken Starr to switch from a FINANCIAL Whitewater real estate investigation, over to the Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky "did she, or didn't she?" scandals.)
Worse, Clinton's narcissism ENABLED Republican reactionary policies, whether standing by idly as Yugoslavia descended into madness and mass murder (by comparison, GERMANY assisted the almost bloodless seccession of Slovenia from the collapsing Yugoslavia), or doing nothing to de-energize the Rawanda genocide, or, worst of all, Republicans hot on impeachment shouted "WAG THE DOG!" as President Clinton sought to bring justice to the Al Qaida terror organization which bombed two US embassies in Africa! And... NINE YEARS LATER - the current Republican administration - so hot to BOMB IRAN - STILL ALLOWS the perpetrator of the Embassy bombings in 1998, the USS Cole bombing in 2000, AND THE 9-11 ATTACKS in 2001... to OPERATE WITH NEAR IMPUNITY in much of Afghanistan and Pakistan!
ALL THE ABOVE FOLLIES were products of the shortcomings of the Clinton administration, powerless against Reactionary Republican sabotage and financial looting.
Unfortunately, HILLARY CLINTON is even less able to dance the political dance in real-time than her husband. The 800 lb gorrilla in every American's living room is THE ABUSES OF POWER, abject corruption, and gross INCOMPETENCE of the Bush-Cheney White House... but like most of the other Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton is FOLLOWING the DISMAL path set by Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, GIVING the Bush-Cheney White House a FREE PASS on ISSUE AFTER ISSUE, SCANDAL AFTER SCANDAL, fraud after fraud, failure after failure, lies-to-war, and now, MORE SABER RATTLING!
-------------------------------------------
Dance of the schizophrenic Democrats
By Aalexander Cockburn
November 8, 2007
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/index.php?storyID=9470
But Hillary Clinton doesn’t have her husband’s sure political feet...
Hillary has a ton of money and the solid support of the party's bosses, which is not surprising since the Clintons picked these bosses in the first place. A great many women in America want her to be president. Recovery is a process the Clintons have been refining ever since Hillary got herself into trouble with the voters of Arkansas back in 1978 for insisting that the first lady of that state be called Hillary Rodham, a stand on feminist principle she abandoned in time for the 1980 Governor's race.
At the very moment in February 1992 when Bill Clinton was battling political extinction in New Hampshire after disclosure of his affair with Gennifer Flowers (right), Hillary made one of her worst gaffes, again as a consequence of thinking too slowly. Hillary urged her husband to go on 60 Minutes.
In front of a vast national audience Bill, visibly ill at ease, admitted to causing pain to his family while denying that their marriage was merely an arrangement. "This is a marriage..." he asserted. Then Hillary broke in. Years of effort in burnishing Bill's image as
a Son of the South went up in smoke as she declared: "You know, I'm not sitting here like some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette."
The polls promptly showed Bill's numbers plummeting south of the Mason-Dixon line. An affair with Flowers was one thing, but insulting Tammy Wynette?
So Hillary will almost certainly tack to safety out of this mini-typhoon. But the bigger problem is not going away. There's a solid slice of the Old-Glory-loving superpatriots who will never, under any conditions, vote for Hillary Clinton a year from now. Every equivocation on immigrants, on the war, will be replayed mercilessly next autumn.
Hillary's best chance is to have the Republican vote split by the Evangelical Christians - unable to stomach a pro-abortion wife-hopper like Rudy Giuliani - running a candidate of their own. Some born-again type from the South.
Now there's a job for Bill if he really wants to make it up to Hillary.
Somehow, in the face of the Republican reactionary media machine of the past 15 years (ever since the end of the Cold War robbed Right-Wingers of an enemy they could hate and focus their efforts against) DEMOCRATS HAVE BECOME VOICELESS at defending that 300 years of American progress, from the European ENLIGHTENMENT which formed the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution, to the Magna Carta which came long before even the Enlightenment!
Detailing Bill Clinton's self-inflicted follies would take a book (or three), but suffice it to say Clinton, despited his vast political and personal skills, never understood the vehemence of the Right-Wing reaction ("blowback") to his election in 1992 (which to reactionary Right-Wingers was the distilled essence of all that was evil about the 1960s, desegregation, and an open, chaotic, 'ammoral' society.) (Note: Al Capone was running an entire EMPIRE of speakesies and cat-houses, right smack in America's "Heartland," long before anyone ever heard of hippies, free-love, or war- and civil rights protesters. America's "MORAL VALUES" scolds doth protest too much.) At every turn, Clinton GAVE THE ROPE that the white-collar Republican lynch-mob (shouted cries of "rape!" and "moral values" enabled Ken Starr to switch from a FINANCIAL Whitewater real estate investigation, over to the Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky "did she, or didn't she?" scandals.)
Worse, Clinton's narcissism ENABLED Republican reactionary policies, whether standing by idly as Yugoslavia descended into madness and mass murder (by comparison, GERMANY assisted the almost bloodless seccession of Slovenia from the collapsing Yugoslavia), or doing nothing to de-energize the Rawanda genocide, or, worst of all, Republicans hot on impeachment shouted "WAG THE DOG!" as President Clinton sought to bring justice to the Al Qaida terror organization which bombed two US embassies in Africa! And... NINE YEARS LATER - the current Republican administration - so hot to BOMB IRAN - STILL ALLOWS the perpetrator of the Embassy bombings in 1998, the USS Cole bombing in 2000, AND THE 9-11 ATTACKS in 2001... to OPERATE WITH NEAR IMPUNITY in much of Afghanistan and Pakistan!
ALL THE ABOVE FOLLIES were products of the shortcomings of the Clinton administration, powerless against Reactionary Republican sabotage and financial looting.
Unfortunately, HILLARY CLINTON is even less able to dance the political dance in real-time than her husband. The 800 lb gorrilla in every American's living room is THE ABUSES OF POWER, abject corruption, and gross INCOMPETENCE of the Bush-Cheney White House... but like most of the other Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton is FOLLOWING the DISMAL path set by Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, GIVING the Bush-Cheney White House a FREE PASS on ISSUE AFTER ISSUE, SCANDAL AFTER SCANDAL, fraud after fraud, failure after failure, lies-to-war, and now, MORE SABER RATTLING!
-------------------------------------------
Dance of the schizophrenic Democrats
By Aalexander Cockburn
November 8, 2007
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/index.php?storyID=9470
But Hillary Clinton doesn’t have her husband’s sure political feet...
Hillary has a ton of money and the solid support of the party's bosses, which is not surprising since the Clintons picked these bosses in the first place. A great many women in America want her to be president. Recovery is a process the Clintons have been refining ever since Hillary got herself into trouble with the voters of Arkansas back in 1978 for insisting that the first lady of that state be called Hillary Rodham, a stand on feminist principle she abandoned in time for the 1980 Governor's race.
At the very moment in February 1992 when Bill Clinton was battling political extinction in New Hampshire after disclosure of his affair with Gennifer Flowers (right), Hillary made one of her worst gaffes, again as a consequence of thinking too slowly. Hillary urged her husband to go on 60 Minutes.
In front of a vast national audience Bill, visibly ill at ease, admitted to causing pain to his family while denying that their marriage was merely an arrangement. "This is a marriage..." he asserted. Then Hillary broke in. Years of effort in burnishing Bill's image as
a Son of the South went up in smoke as she declared: "You know, I'm not sitting here like some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette."
The polls promptly showed Bill's numbers plummeting south of the Mason-Dixon line. An affair with Flowers was one thing, but insulting Tammy Wynette?
So Hillary will almost certainly tack to safety out of this mini-typhoon. But the bigger problem is not going away. There's a solid slice of the Old-Glory-loving superpatriots who will never, under any conditions, vote for Hillary Clinton a year from now. Every equivocation on immigrants, on the war, will be replayed mercilessly next autumn.
Hillary's best chance is to have the Republican vote split by the Evangelical Christians - unable to stomach a pro-abortion wife-hopper like Rudy Giuliani - running a candidate of their own. Some born-again type from the South.
Now there's a job for Bill if he really wants to make it up to Hillary.
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Congress FINALLY OVERRIDES WH veto! Bush veto tried to STIFF New Orleans flood victims AGAIN...
Congress Hands Bush First Veto Override
CHARLES BABINGTON
November 8, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20071108/congress-veto/
WASHINGTON — President Bush suffered the first veto override of his seven-year-old presidency Thursday as the Senate enacted a $23 billion water resources bill despite his protest that it was filled with unnecessary projects.
The 79-14 vote included 34 Republicans who defied the president. Enactment was a foregone conclusion, but it still marked a milestone for a president who spent his first six years with a much friendlier Congress controlled by his Republican Party.
Now he confronts a more hostile, Democratic-controlled legislature, and Thursday's vote showed that most of the Republicans will defy him on spending matters dear to their political careers.
The bill funds hundreds of Army Corps of Engineers projects, such as dams, sewage plants and beach restoration, that are important to local communities and their representatives. It also includes money for the hurricane-hit Gulf Coast and for Florida Everglades restoration efforts.
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The House voted 361-54 to override the veto Tuesday. Both votes easily exceeded the two-thirds majority needed in each chamber to negate a presidential veto.
The last such veto override happened when Congress dealt President Clinton the second of his two overrides in February 1998.
Bush vetoed no bills during his first five years in office. He has since vetoed a stem cell research bill twice, an Iraq spending bill that set guidelines for troop withdrawals, and a children's health insurance bill. House and Senate Republicans managed to sustain those vetoes.
But they broke ranks on the Water Resources Development Act, or WRDA, which Bush vetoed on Nov. 2, calling it too expensive. Thirty-four Republicans voted with the 43 Democrats and two independents to override the veto. Two Democrats, Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, voted with 12 Republicans to sustain Bush's veto.
His supporters have noted that the Army Corps has a backlog of $58 billion worth of projects and an annual budget of about $2 billion to address them.
The bill, the first water system restoration and flood control authorization passed by Congress since 2000, would cost $11.2 billion over the next four years, and $12 billion in the 10 years after that, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Flood protection projects along the Gulf Coast, including 100-year levee protection in New Orleans, would cost about $7 billion if fully funded. The bill approves projects but does not fund them.
Some of Bush's most ardent allies argued for the override. "This bill is enormously important, and it has been a long time coming," said Sen. David Vitter, R-La., whose state was hammered by Hurricane Katrina two years ago.
The bill "is one of the few areas where we actually do something constructive," said Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott, R-Miss. What Bush sees as pork barrel items, Lott said, "are good, deserved, justified projects."
"Almost every president opposes this type of bill," he said.
Democrats are sure to remind such Republicans of their rejection of Bush's budgetary concerns when debate turns to several spending bills he also vows to veto.
Democrats, frustrated by their inability to force Bush's hand on Iraq and other matters, clearly enjoyed their victory Thursday. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said the message to the White House was, "you can't keep rolling over us like this."
The bill would authorize the construction of navigation improvements for the Upper Mississippi River, at an estimated federal cost of $1.9 billion, and an ecosystem restoration project for the Upper Mississippi costing $1.7 billion.
The Indian River Lagoon project in the Florida Everglades would be funded at about $700 million.
The bill calls for an independent peer review process of all Army Corps projects costing $45 million or more, a bid to cut down on wasteful spending.
CHARLES BABINGTON
November 8, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20071108/congress-veto/
WASHINGTON — President Bush suffered the first veto override of his seven-year-old presidency Thursday as the Senate enacted a $23 billion water resources bill despite his protest that it was filled with unnecessary projects.
The 79-14 vote included 34 Republicans who defied the president. Enactment was a foregone conclusion, but it still marked a milestone for a president who spent his first six years with a much friendlier Congress controlled by his Republican Party.
Now he confronts a more hostile, Democratic-controlled legislature, and Thursday's vote showed that most of the Republicans will defy him on spending matters dear to their political careers.
The bill funds hundreds of Army Corps of Engineers projects, such as dams, sewage plants and beach restoration, that are important to local communities and their representatives. It also includes money for the hurricane-hit Gulf Coast and for Florida Everglades restoration efforts.
Top NewsTop Posts
Media: Cliff Schecter: Bill O'Reilly Suffers Another "Momentary" Lapse Of Reason
Business: Dan Solin: Smart Advice for the HuffPost Investor
Living Now: Miriam Novalle: The Power of Tea
Entertainment: Jamie Lee Curtis: I Am for the Writers -- and for Better Slogans
Politics: Rep. Louise Slaughter: A Story Ignored: Body Armor Executive Indicted for Massive Fraud
Entertainment: "Grey's Anatomy" Cast Joins Writers On Picket Line... Strike Hits New Orleans... Read HuffPost's Writers' Strike Opinion Page
Living Now: Yet Another Study: Abstinence Programs Do Not Work
Business: Ridiculously High Gas Prices May Crimp Holiday Shopping
Media: Rosie: MSNBC Deal Has Fallen Through
Politics: Iraq Authorizes Raids By Security Forces On Blackwater, Other War Contractors
The House voted 361-54 to override the veto Tuesday. Both votes easily exceeded the two-thirds majority needed in each chamber to negate a presidential veto.
The last such veto override happened when Congress dealt President Clinton the second of his two overrides in February 1998.
Bush vetoed no bills during his first five years in office. He has since vetoed a stem cell research bill twice, an Iraq spending bill that set guidelines for troop withdrawals, and a children's health insurance bill. House and Senate Republicans managed to sustain those vetoes.
But they broke ranks on the Water Resources Development Act, or WRDA, which Bush vetoed on Nov. 2, calling it too expensive. Thirty-four Republicans voted with the 43 Democrats and two independents to override the veto. Two Democrats, Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, voted with 12 Republicans to sustain Bush's veto.
His supporters have noted that the Army Corps has a backlog of $58 billion worth of projects and an annual budget of about $2 billion to address them.
The bill, the first water system restoration and flood control authorization passed by Congress since 2000, would cost $11.2 billion over the next four years, and $12 billion in the 10 years after that, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Flood protection projects along the Gulf Coast, including 100-year levee protection in New Orleans, would cost about $7 billion if fully funded. The bill approves projects but does not fund them.
Some of Bush's most ardent allies argued for the override. "This bill is enormously important, and it has been a long time coming," said Sen. David Vitter, R-La., whose state was hammered by Hurricane Katrina two years ago.
The bill "is one of the few areas where we actually do something constructive," said Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott, R-Miss. What Bush sees as pork barrel items, Lott said, "are good, deserved, justified projects."
"Almost every president opposes this type of bill," he said.
Democrats are sure to remind such Republicans of their rejection of Bush's budgetary concerns when debate turns to several spending bills he also vows to veto.
Democrats, frustrated by their inability to force Bush's hand on Iraq and other matters, clearly enjoyed their victory Thursday. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said the message to the White House was, "you can't keep rolling over us like this."
The bill would authorize the construction of navigation improvements for the Upper Mississippi River, at an estimated federal cost of $1.9 billion, and an ecosystem restoration project for the Upper Mississippi costing $1.7 billion.
The Indian River Lagoon project in the Florida Everglades would be funded at about $700 million.
The bill calls for an independent peer review process of all Army Corps projects costing $45 million or more, a bid to cut down on wasteful spending.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Nancy Pelosi JOINS the Bush-Rove-Cheney junta in TRYING TO CENSOR discussion of Administration wrongdoing from House Floor...
audio: Nancy Pelosi in her own words, AKNOWLEDGES "there is a strong body of support in the country that the president has INHERENT POWER from the constitution to... proceed [in any manner he chooses] and we're saying, 'That is just simply not so, we might as well JUST CROWN HIM KING AND GO HOME' if that were true."
EXACTLY, Speaker Pelosi! On the REAL ISSUES, YOU HAVE CROWNED Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney KING: you HAND OVER THE ENTIRE US taxpayer TREASURY to their tender mercies; YOU HAND OVER the Justice Department and enforcement of American law and the US Constitution to their tender mercies; you HAND OVER THE BLOOD OF OUR military to their CORRUPT, INCOMPETENT conduct of the war; you HAND OVER the US voting process to the CORRUPT INTIMIDATIONS of the Republican Party; and you HAND AMERICA's GOOD REPUTATION to those who, IN YOUR WORDS, operate "OUTSIDE THE LAW" - and you are NOT USING YOUR MOST POWERFUL MEANS to REIGN IN and LIMIT those abuses!
Not only are Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic "leaders" CORRUPT, COMPLICITY, COWERING, and treacherous... they are also CLUELESS as well!
For, as AferDowningStreet.com founder David Swanson explins, for the past 230 years THE PARTY THAT HAS BROUGHT IMPEACHMENT to the floor, and brougt the wrongdoings of the president then in power to the attention of the American public - HAS ALWAYS been boosted in the following election!
Whether the Republican radicals sweeping Congress after President Andrew Johnson was impeached in 1868, to President Franklin D. Roosevelt having to retreat under furious public and Republican pressure for "packing the Supreme Court" to President Truman, to the Democrats sweeping the Congress after Nixon was nearly impeached, to Democrats LOSING THE WHITE HOUSE and Congress AND THE SENATE after President Clinton faced an UNPOPULAR IMPEACHMENT by the LAME DUCK Tom "Hot Tub Tom" DeLay impeachment of 1998 -
NANCY PELOSI is listening to the SAME DLC "Democrat" ADVISORS WHO HAVE LOST ELECTION after ELECTION after ELECTION - she is ALLOWING THE ISRAEL LOBBY and WAR LOBBY and the Big Business lobbies to set her Foreign Policy agenda. It was ONLY the string of REPUBLICAN CORRUPTION SCANDALS which handed the Speaker's gavel to Mrs. Pelosi - NOT inherent brilliance or commanding leadership on her part. Indeed, just as John Kerry SAT ON millions of dollars worth of campaign funds in the last days of election 2004; and just as Hillary Clinton SAT ON her multi-million dollar war chest, refusing to assist close congressional challengers in the last days of election 2006; so to Pelosi, Rahm Emmanuel, and the DLC and DCCC poured many of their resources into losing campaigns for "CENTRIST" Democratic candidates, while not assisting some more "liberal" candidates who, for the want of a few thousands late campaign dollars, may have won some very close elections.
==========================
Debate on Cheney Impeachment Averted November 6, 2007
By JIM ABRAMS
Associated Press Writer
http://www.wtopnews.com/index.php?nid=116&sid=1287326
WASHINGTON (AP) - House Democrats on Tuesday narrowly managed to avert a bruising debate on a proposal to impeach Dick Cheney after Republicans, in a surprise maneuver, voted in favor of taking up the measure.
Republicans, changing course midway through a vote, tried to force Democrats into a debate on the resolution sponsored by longshot presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich.
The anti-war Ohio Democrat, in his resolution, accused Cheney of purposely leading the country into war against Iraq and manipulating intelligence about Iraq's ties with al-Qaida.
The GOP tactics reversed what had been expected to be an overwhelming vote to table, or kill, the resolution.
Midway through the vote, with instructions from the GOP leadership, Republicans one by one changed their votes from yes _ to kill the resolution _ to no, trying to force the chamber into a debate and an up-or-down vote on the proposal.
At one point there were 290 votes to table. After the turnaround, the final vote was 251-162 against tabling, with 165 Republicans voting against it.
"We're going to help them out, to explain themselves," said Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas. "We're going to give them their day in court."
Democrats countered by offering a motion to refer the proposal to the House Judiciary Committee for further study, effectively preventing a debate on the House floor. That motion passed by a largely party-line vote of 218-194.
The White House, in a statement, said Democrats were shirking responsibilities on issues such as childrens' health insurance "and yet they find time to waste an afternoon on an impeachment vote against the vice president. ... This is why Americans shake their head in wonder about the priorities of this Congress."
Kucinich has long pushed for a vote to impeach Cheney, but has failed to win the backing of the Democratic leadership. After Kucinich introduced the resolution, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., immediately moved to table it.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said "impeachment is off the table" and Congress is focused on responsibly getting U.S. troops out of Iraq, covering 10 million uninsured children and meeting national priorities long neglected by the Bush administration, said her spokesman Nadeam Elshami.
The resolution said that Cheney, "in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of vice president," had "purposely manipulated the intelligence process to deceive the citizens and Congress of the United States by fabricating a threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to justify the use of the U.S. Armed Forces against the nation of Iraq in a manner damaging to our national security interests."
The 11-page resolution also charged that Cheney purposely deceived the nation about an alleged relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida and has "openly threatened aggression against the Republic of Iran absent any real threat to the United States."
House approval of an article of impeachment sends the issue to the Senate, which has the constitutional authority to try and, with a two-thirds vote, remove a person from office.
___
The bill is H. Res 799.
On the Net:
Congress: http://thomas.loc.gov/
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Schumer, Feinstein FOLLOW LIEBERMAN TREACHERY: the AIPAC senators PUT ISRAEL, and US WARS, AHEAD of the US Constitution...
MORE on the Schumer-Feinstein BETRAYAL of American constitutional law; the ENABLING of the Bush-Cheney effort to CORRUPT THE US JUSTICE DEPARMENT, here;
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071102/wl_sthasia_afp/afghanistanunrest_071102180634
Republicans were able to make the Clinton White House overnight GUEST LIST into a "scandal" - the so-called "LINCOLN BEDROOM SCANDAL"!
Yet now, when corruption, lies-to-war, treasury-looting, stolen elections, torture, obstruction of justice and other criminal conduct of the Bush-Cheney administration create a veritable MOUNTAIN CHAIN of truly impeachable offenses...
... THE DEMOCRATIC SENATORS, and the House Democrat "leadership" FOLLOW THE LIEBERMAN 'pro-war and gut-the-Constitution' template at every turn; EVERY TIME the chips are down, the Dem 'leadership" ENABLES the Bush-Cheney administration assault on the Constitution....
MORE than RUPERT MURDOCH... MORE than Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling of Enron.. MORE than Exxon-Mobile and AEI (the almost wholly Exxon funded Washington DC "think tank" that the news media loves to portray as a quasi-governmental source)... MORE than Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Bob Jones University, and all the other right-wing moral values hypocrite scolds like Ted Haggert, Newt Gingrich, and Henry Hyde.... THE DEMOCRATIC SENATORS, and the Democratic "leadership" ARE THE BIGGEST ENABLERS of the Cheney-Bush ASSAULT ON THE US CONSTITUTION in all of AMERICA!
From their TREACHEROUS REFUSAL to sign on to the Black Congressional Caucus demand for a senate-cosigner for a simple Congressional Investigation into vote fraud in Florida in 2000;
- to REFUSING to DEMAND ANSWERS to the ANTHRAX ATTACKS on congress days after the horrendous 9-11 attacks...
- to first STONE-WALLING and then WHITEWASHING the 9-11 commission;
- to LIES TO WAR...
- to KANGAROO-COURT TRIALS to blame (female private) scapegoats and other white-wash cover-ups for TORTURE ordered from whithin the White House itself!!
- to GROSS CORRUPTION in war, Iraq reconstruction, FEMA, and other government contracts;
- the TALIBAN RESURGENT in Afghanistan, as US death toll Iraq and Afghanistan ESCALATES - under the TOTALLY GROSS, INCOMPETENT, CORRUPT "leadership" of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney....
- to STOLEN ELECTIONS 2002, 2004, 2006 (NORM COLEMAN beat FORMER VICE PRESIDENT WALTER MONDALE, who stepped in following the untimely demise of Senator Paul Wellstone and family, who was cruising to a 10-point reelection victory before their plane slammed into the ground weeks before election 2002??);
- to the politicized Justice Department (which is already preparing to file false prosecutions to influence the 2008 elections)....
- Bush-Cheney CONTINUE TO OBSTRUCT Congressional Subpoenaes!
DICK NIXON WAS IMPEACHED FOR OBSTRUCTING SUBPOENAES!
This Democratic Congress doesn't have ONE HALF the committment of the 99th Congress! http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071105/ap_on_go_co/house_contempt;_ylt=AtzzL83FqBbvTQ34Hv8FUPOs0NUE
FOR EVERY Bush administration outrage, THE DEMOCRATIC 'LEADERSHIP" is there ROLLING OUT THE RED CARPET for the NEXT Bush-Cheney assault on American rights and constitution law!
Just LISTING the Democratic TREACHERY takes a half-page, for only the biggest, most glaring, most criminal betrayals alone! (And in our above list, we didn't even mention "outing a CIA undercover NOC officer to intimidate whistleblower war critics, and the OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE which was a prerequisite for the theft of election 2004!)
SCHUMER and FEINSTEIN's BETRAYAL - a subset of the Cheney-Bush administration's POLITICIZATION of the US Justice Departmanet - is simply ANOTHER in the long line of Democrat "leadership" TREACHERY, and is all tne more PREDICTABLE, because Feinstein and Schumer are two of the 10 AIPAC Democrat senators.
FOR SHAME, Senators! Putting the War Industry and the neo-con lobby AHEAD OF YOUR OATHS to the US Constitution!
========================================
Schumer, Feinstein ‘surprise’ thwarts efforts on Mukasey
By Manu Raju
November 06, 2007
http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/schumer-feinstein-surprise-thwarts-efforts-on-mukasey-2007-11-06.html
The coordinated statements released late Friday afternoon by two Democratic senators that they would break ranks and support President Bush’s attorney general nominee largely muted opposition from a Democratic base that has become increasingly frustrated with Congress, activist leaders said Monday.
Sens. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) effectively thwarted plans by the activist left to use the weekend to mobilize ahead of Tuesday’s Judiciary Committee vote and pressure wayward senators to reject the nominee, activists said.
“It was a surprise attack,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the Washington legislative office for the American Civil Liberties Union, which wants the Judiciary Committee to defeat the nomination. “There was a limited opportunity to say much about what Schumer and Feinstein had done because the timing was very cleverly calculated to avoid scrutiny.”
With the support of Schumer, Feinstein and the committee’s nine Republicans, Mukasey has garnered enough support to clear the panel and move to the Senate floor.
Before Feinstein’s announcement, sent to the media by e-mail at about 4:28 p.m., the nomination had seemed in doubt, especially after Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) announced his opposition to Mukasey at a 3 p.m. news conference in Burlington, Vt. Leahy became the fifth Judiciary Committee Democrat to announce his opposition over Mukasey’s refusal to state explicitly that the interrogation technique known as waterboarding constitutes torture.
Hours before Leahy’s press conference, however, Schumer in a telephone call already had laid out his thoughts to the chairman and also relayed a message that Feinstein had planned to support the nominee, according to aides.
But Schumer and Feinstein withheld announcing their decisions until late that afternoon. For Schumer, a decisive meeting came later in the day, around the same time as Leahy’s press conference. Mukasey assured him he would enforce any law Congress passes to explicitly state that certain interrogation techniques — such as waterboarding — are illegal under U.S. torture laws.
“Judge Mukasey is a lawyer’s lawyer. He will not leap to quick judgments,” Schumer said in his statement. “When we want him to do so, such as on torture, we will be disappointed. But when he resists those in the administration who want quick and facile answers . . . it is they who will be disappointed.”
The New Yorker, one of the most outspoken critics of the Bush administration, had been in an awkward position because he recommended Mukasey for the post before Democratic opposition grew. Both Schumer and Feinstein said they believed a Mukasey Justice Department would be markedly better than the tumultuous tenure of the resigned Alberto Gonzales.
Feinstein had made up her mind Thursday that she would support the nomination, but her office was still finalizing a statement when they caught wind of Schumer’s decision on Friday, one of her aides said. They decided to withhold the statement until Schumer was ready to make his announcement after both his afternoon meeting with Mukasey and the Leahy press conference. She followed up with a guest column explaining her views in Saturday’s edition of the Los Angeles Times.
“Judge Mukasey’s answers were quick and to the point, and reflected an independent mind,” Feinstein said in the column. “I truly believe he will be a strong advocate for the American people.”
By issuing coordinated statements late on a Friday afternoon, the senators employed the old Washington trick of breaking news at the end of a news cycle. Simultaneously, they undermined efforts by both the left and the right to pressure them into voting either for or against the nominee.
But they also undermined Leahy’s announcement, which would have dominated the weekend’s news. A Judiciary Committee aide, however, said there was no ill-will towards the senators for doing that.
“As you know, Sen. Leahy and Sen. Reid have not made this a caucus vote,
and as chairman, Sen. Leahy has not twisted any arms,” the aide said, referring to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). What he does feel strongly about is knocking down, during this debate, the falsehood that waterboarding is not already torture and illegal.”
One leader of an activist group opposed to the nomination said the coordinated statements by the senators had a “chilling effect” on efforts to drum up opposition over the weekend.
“They wanted to decrease the intense focus on the two of them, and each reinforces the other by doing this together,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond. “It takes some of the heat off of each of them.”
Feinstein is familiar with being the lone Democrat to side with Republicans on the Judiciary Committee. She did so in August by joining all nine Republicans in voting for the nomination of Leslie Southwick for a lifetime seat on a New Orleans-based appeals court – over the strong objections of the other nine committee Democrats because of the nominee’s civil rights record.
Among some activist groups, the feelings are still raw with Feinstein for not joining Democrats to defeat the Southwick nomination in the committee. More broadly, the base has grown increasingly angry at Democrats for capitulating to Republicans on major issues, such as the Iraq war and Bush’s domestic spying program.
One leading Democratic activist expected Schumer to get earfuls during fundraisers for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which he chairs. Also, one grassroots group, Democrats.com, has called for a moratorium on donations to the committee, which is trying to expand the Democratic majority in the Senate.
It’s unlikely that calls to cut off donating to the DSCC will pick up steam, activists said.
Even though Mukasey’s nomination is virtually assured, activists are still planning on airing their concerns. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights is putting together a letter laying out its opposition and the concerns of a slew of other left-leaning groups.
Saturday, November 3, 2007
GUTLESS Pelosi, Reid, Leahy, Rockefeller Schumer, Feinstein BETRAY America, Democratic voters YET AGAIN.....
GUTLESS 'Democratic' 'leaders' Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Senator Patrick Leahy, Senator Jay Rockefeller, Senators Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, (et al, ad naseum) are UP TO THEIR DIRTY OLD TRICK AGAIN: they TALK "opposition!" to the GROSS ABUSES OF POWER (up to abject corruption and criminality) of the Bush-Cheney adminstration..... but then when it comes time to stand up, they instead ROLL OVER, effectively ROLLING OUT THE RED CARPET for the NEXT Bush-Cheney atrocity.
As remarked in our previous post, DIANNE FEINSTEIN and CHUCK SCHUMER have ROLLED OUT THE RED CARPET for Bush's "DROWNING IS GOOD ENOUGH FOR WITCHES!" Attorney General nominee. NICE TO SEE YOUR 'leadership' TAKE AMERICA BACK TO THE SALEM WITH TRIALS, Chuck and Dianne! "If a woman DROWNS when she is dunked in the water, she is innocent... but if she survives, she is a witch and must be killed forthwith!" Senators, you should be proud of yourselves!
For that matter, JUDICIARY COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN PAT LEAHY should also be PROUD OF HIMSELF - he is the so-called "chairman" of the so called "JUDICIARY COMMITTEE" but his real title should be "SERVANT TO THE NAKED EMPEROR," for letting Feinstein and Schumer kiss Mr. Bush's derriere in such grotesque fashion.
AND AS USUAL, NANCY PELOSI and HARRY REID PRETEND that there is NOTHING THEY CAN DO... they, too, are SERVANTS TO THE NAKED EMPEROR.
Will American democracy survive the gutless cowards and treacherous politicians who 'lead' the Democratic Party?
=============================
Whose Congress Is It?
http://www.populist.com/07.20.edit.html
President George W. Bush has shown that with support from his dead-ender Republican allies in Congress he can prevent good bills from becoming law. Now let’s hope that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid can stop bad bills from becoming law.
BUT DON'T COUNT ON IT AFTER the Democratic "leaders'" GUTLESS PERFORMANCES in the last week.
House Democrats from the Judiciary and Intelligence committees drafted a bill that would revise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to replace a stopgap measure that was hurriedly passed this summer. The new bill would maintain court jurisdiction over domestic wiretaps. The Dems refused to consider the White House’s demand of immunity for US phone companies that cooperated with the administration’s illegal wiretaps, at least until the White House produces long-sought documents on the origin and extent of the eavesdropping.....
As remarked in our previous post, DIANNE FEINSTEIN and CHUCK SCHUMER have ROLLED OUT THE RED CARPET for Bush's "DROWNING IS GOOD ENOUGH FOR WITCHES!" Attorney General nominee. NICE TO SEE YOUR 'leadership' TAKE AMERICA BACK TO THE SALEM WITH TRIALS, Chuck and Dianne! "If a woman DROWNS when she is dunked in the water, she is innocent... but if she survives, she is a witch and must be killed forthwith!" Senators, you should be proud of yourselves!
For that matter, JUDICIARY COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN PAT LEAHY should also be PROUD OF HIMSELF - he is the so-called "chairman" of the so called "JUDICIARY COMMITTEE" but his real title should be "SERVANT TO THE NAKED EMPEROR," for letting Feinstein and Schumer kiss Mr. Bush's derriere in such grotesque fashion.
AND AS USUAL, NANCY PELOSI and HARRY REID PRETEND that there is NOTHING THEY CAN DO... they, too, are SERVANTS TO THE NAKED EMPEROR.
Will American democracy survive the gutless cowards and treacherous politicians who 'lead' the Democratic Party?
=============================
Whose Congress Is It?
http://www.populist.com/07.20.edit.html
President George W. Bush has shown that with support from his dead-ender Republican allies in Congress he can prevent good bills from becoming law. Now let’s hope that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid can stop bad bills from becoming law.
BUT DON'T COUNT ON IT AFTER the Democratic "leaders'" GUTLESS PERFORMANCES in the last week.
House Democrats from the Judiciary and Intelligence committees drafted a bill that would revise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to replace a stopgap measure that was hurriedly passed this summer. The new bill would maintain court jurisdiction over domestic wiretaps. The Dems refused to consider the White House’s demand of immunity for US phone companies that cooperated with the administration’s illegal wiretaps, at least until the White House produces long-sought documents on the origin and extent of the eavesdropping.....
Friday, November 2, 2007
As we predicted, Treacherous AIPAC Senators FEINSTEIN, SCHUMER gut the fight against GESTAPO TORTURE tactics...
Dianne Feinstein, Charles Schumer, and AIPAC - the end of American democracy?
THEY'RE AT IT AGAIN!
THE TREACHEROUS 'Democratic' Senators GUT OPPOSITION to the Bush-Cheney administration AT EVERY OPPORTUNITY, because the AIPAC (Israel-American Jewish) lobby loves having the US military in the Mideast waging wars and killing people.
In this case, senators CHARLES SCHUMER and DIANNE FEINSTEIN pick up the "PRO TORTURE, PRO WAR" baton from Senator Joe Lieberman. AS we here at DemNation have PREDICTED, AT EVERY CRITICAL OPPORTUNITY, another AIPAC SENATOR comes out of the woodwork to GUT the building OPPOSITION to Bush-Cheney abuses of power, and as usual, the Democrat 'LEADERSHIP' falls right in line, PRETENDING that they are PUTTING UP an OPPPOSITON FIGHT to Bush co, while they know damn well they are MERELY GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS of opposition, BUT ARE ACTUALLY _ENABLING_ Bush Co policies, in this case ILLEGAL SPYING, TORTURE, and POLITICIZATION OF THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT IN ADVANCE OF the 2008 elections.
THIS IS SHEER TREACHERY on a world-class scale, on the part of SCHUMER, FEINSTEIN, and America's treacherous, craven, ENABLING Democrat Party.... ENABLING, that is, the Bush-Cheney administration to TRASH THE US CONSTITUTION,TORTURE, arrest, and intimidate anyone they please, and STEAL YET ANOTHER ELECTION.
THE TREACHEROUS AIPAC SENATORS (and the entire Democrat 'leadership') GIVE Mr. BUSH WHAT HE WANTS - even as they PRETEND to offer an opposition party.
SHEER TREACHERY!
MORE on Schumer's "ISRAEL uber America" bias...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-clemons/benchmarking-schumer-on-j_b_70910.html
Two Democratic Senators involved in that part of the Bolton battle -- one on the Foreign Relations Committee and one not -- told me personally that Senator Schumer called them to say "a vote against Bolton is a vote against Israel."
Well, who does Schumer work for? The United States or Israel? And how ridiculous is that statement anyway?! Democrats and Republicans both have been excellent stewards of the US-Israel relationship in the United Nations.
=========================================
MORE on Schumer's COMPLICITY with the CORRUPTION of JUSTICE in America under Bush: In announcing his intention to confirm Mukasey for AG, Schumer PRETENDS NOT TO NOTICE that White House is WITHHOLDING, CENSORING, OBSTRUCTING JUSTICE on 600 pages of ABRAMOFF DOCUMENTS, lobbyist JACK ABRAMOFF _CONVICTED OF BRIBERY_ and CORRUPTION, SENATOR CHARLES SCHUMER an ENABLER of OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE in a CRIMINAL CONVICTION full accounting to the American people!
CORRUPTION, THY NAME IS CHARLES SCHUMER!
===============================
MORE on Schumer, Feinstein's PLAYING ALONG with BUSH CORRUPTION of justice!
White House Withholds 600 Pages of Abramoff Documents.
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/10/31/white-house-withholds-600-pages-of-abramoff-docs/
Today, House Oversight Committee chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) wrote to White House Counsel Fred Fielding and requested that the administration hand over more than 600 pages of documents relating to the White House’s activities with fallen lobbyist Jack Abramoff. From Waxman’s letter
========================================
MORE on Feinstein, Pelosi's WHITEWASHING Bush-Cheney-Rove CORRUPTION of Justice Department!! The Bush Dept. of Justice is a snake-pit of corruption, up to and including possibly FRAUDULENT PROSECUTIONS against Democratic activists and candidates in close elections; i.e. USING the US Justice Department as a MAFIA ENFORCEMENT RACKET to steal elections!!
GOP lawyer ties Rove to Siegelman case
THE HILL Thu Oct 11, 2007
96% Average Credibility
http://www.newsique.com/politics/gop_lawyer_ties_rove_to_siegelma/
House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) on Wednesday released an interview with GOP lawyer Dana Jill Simpson implicating former White House adviser Karl Rove in the prosecution and conviction of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman (D) on corruption charges.
==================================
Mukasey Wins Support from Key Senators
NPR.org, November 2, 2007 ·
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15883844
President Bush on Friday kept up a spirited defense of Michael Mukasey's nomination, saying "he's plenty qualified to be attorney general" just after landing in Columbia, S.C. The president was helping to raise money for the re-election of Sen. Lindsey Graham (left) and to make a speech about the war against terrorism. AP
NPR.org, November 2, 2007 · Two key Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sens. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), say they will support Judge Michael Mukasey to be the next attorney general. That makes Mukasey's confirmation almost certain.
His confirmation has been in doubt the past few days, and looked particularly doomed Friday after Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said he'd join some of his Democratic colleagues in voting "no" on Mukasey.
Sens. Schumer and Feinstein announced their support for Mukasey shortly after, saying the Justice Department is in desperate need of effective leadership.
The biggest snag for Mukasey was his refusal to categorically define waterboarding as torture. Waterboarding is an interrogation technique that simulates drowning. Mukasey has said he finds it personally repugnant, but he would not say it's illegal.
That caused Leahy to announce his opposition to the nominee Friday. "No American should need a classified briefing to determine whether waterboarding is torture," Leahy said.
"I like Michael Mukasey. I wish that I could support his nomination. But I cannot," Leahy said. "America needs to be certain and confident of the bedrock principle — deeply embedded in our laws and our values — that no one, not even the president, is above the law."
Leahy's chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee gives him considerable power to influence the outcome of the vote. But with the support of Sens. Schumer and Feinstein, Mukasey's confirmation is almost certain.
The Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote on Tuesday, after which it will go to the full Senate.
Schumer has taken credit for getting Mukasey's name before President Bush as an acceptable nominee after the troubled tenure of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
But declining support among the panel's Democrats threatened to prevent Mukasey's nomination from making it to the full Senate for a vote. Four other Democrats on Leahy's committee have already said they will not support the former judge.
On Thursday, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA), also a member of the Judiciary Committee, said he would vote against Mukasey.
Kennedy said Mukasey's unwillingness to equate the interrogation practice of waterboarding with torture increases the chances that it will be used against U.S. troops.
Meanwhile, President Bush on Friday kept up a spirited defense of Mukasey's nomination.
"He's a good man. He's a fair man. He's an independent man and he's plenty qualified to be attorney general," Bush said of Mukasey, just after landing in Columbia, S.C.
It was the second day in a row that Bush has pleaded with senators to approve the man he chose to succeed Gonzales as the nation's top law enforcement official.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), a member of the Judiciary Committee who is backing the embattled judge, joined Bush on the airport tarmac for the president's statement. The president was in South Carolina to help raise money for Graham's re-election and make a speech about the war against terrorism.
A day earlier, Bush warned that the Justice Department would go without a leader in a time of war if Democrats thwarted Mukasey.
Bush said Thursday that if the Judiciary Committee were to block Mukasey because of his noncommittal stance on waterboarding, it would set a new standard for confirmation that could not be met by any responsible nominee for attorney general.
There is a way for Mukasey to get a full Senate vote even if committee Democrats unite in opposing him. The Senate Judiciary Committee could agree to advance the nomination with "no recommendation," allowing Mukasey the chance to be confirmed by a majority of the 100-member Senate. Several vote-counters in each party have said Mukasey probably would get 70 "yes" votes in such a scenario.
From NPR reports and The Associated Press
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