Tuesday, March 13, 2007

A Gonzales Primary Update



This just in from ABC News: "In an exclusive interview to air Wednesday morning, March 14, on "Good Morning America," Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, for the first time called for the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales." HRC wasn't going to let Edwards enjoy his first-to-call-on-Gonzales-to-resign status for very long. See below.

24 comments:

kathleen said...

Will Fitzgerald and Plame be testifying before congress this week? Will go hunting

kathleen said...

Valerie Plame To Testify Before Congress
Lawmakers Probing How White House Handled Exposed CIA Operative's Identit(AP) Valerie Plame, the CIA operative exposed after her husband criticized President Bush's march to war, will testify next week before lawmakers probing how the White House dealt with her identity, the chairman of the panel said Thursday.

Also invited to testify March 16 before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is Patrick Fitzgerald, who this week won conviction of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby of obstruction and perjury in the case, said Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif.

Plame has accepted the invitation, Waxman said, but Fitzgerald has not responded.

In a letter to the prosecutor, Waxman proposed a meeting with ranking Republican Tom Davis of Virginia to discuss the terms of any testimony.

kathleen said...

Congress Demands Rove Testimony on Attorney Firings By Paul Kane
The Washington Post
Monday 12 March 2007
Congressional committees are now demanding the testimony of President Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, in the burgeoning investigation into the reasons behind the unusual firings of eight U.S. attorneys last year.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has helped lead the Senate Judiciary Committee's examination of the dismissals of the federal prosecutors, cited new reports connecting Rove to those who wanted to oust at least one of the U.S. attorneys.

"There's an emerging pattern that is extremely disturbing and everyday the sanctity of U.S. Attorneys as neutral enforcers of law without fear or favor is diminished," Schumer said. "We will get to bottom of this."

The House Judiciary Committee is also requesting testimony from Rove as well, but it's unclear whether either of the panels will actually subpoena his appearance before the committees. Unlike Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, whose agency is directly overseen by the judiciary panels and can easily be compelled to testify in Congress because of the large sway they hold over his agency, Rove has no Capitol Hill committee with direct oversight of his work.

Rove allegedly spoke with the chairman of the New Mexico Republican Party in late 2005 about the performance of then-U.S. Attorney David C. Iglesias, with the local official urging his ouster because of the pace of investigations into local Democrats.

Iglesias was fired on Dec. 7, along with six other prosecutors that day, and has since alleged that Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) and Rep. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.) pressured him regarding the same corruption probe as the local GOP official.

Domenici and Wilson have denied the charges, and the Senate Ethics Committee is examining the incident to measure the appropriateness of Domenici's phone call to Iglesias.

Last week, after a closed-door meeting in the Capitol with Schumer and other Judiciary Democrats, Gonzales agreed to allow five of his top aides to be interviewed by committee staff. The interviews will most likely be in private, and Schumer said last week he hopes to wrap them up within two weeks.

Now Schumer wants Rove added to the list along with those five staffers, who will be interviewed without facing subpoenas.

In addition, the House Judiciary Committee has also requested the testimony of former White House Counsel Harriet Miers, the onetime Supreme Court nominee whose office had a hand in at least approving of the prosecutor firings.

kathleen said...

How dare you Pelosi! Barely scratched the surface and she gets hammered. Sound famaliar?BLOG | Posted 03/13/2007
AIPAC Disses Pelosi
Ari Berman

House Minority Leader John Boehner got a standing ovation when he voiced his continued support for the war in Iraq at AIPAC's annual conference today. When his counterpart, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, dared to criticize the war, she heard boos.

"Any US military engagement must be judged on three counts--whether it makes our country safer, our military stronger, or the region more stable," Pelosi told 5-6,000 AIPAC supporters. "The war in Iraq fails on all three scores." First came light applause, followed by catcalls and boos, The Hill reported.

The disrespect toward Pelosi is all the more remarkable given that House Democrats yesterday bowed to AIPAC's wishes and removed language from the Iraq supplemental spending bill prohibiting President Bush from attacking Iran without Congressional approval, as I reported earlier today.

AIPAC's continued support for the war in Iraq proves how disconnected the organization is from mainstream Jewish Americans. According to a recent Gallup poll, Jewish Americans oppose the war in Iraq more vigorously than any other religious group in the US. Seventy-seven percent of US Jews (and 89 percent of Jewish Democrats!) believe the war in Iraq was a mistake.

By speaking to AIPAC, Pelosi is giving the organization legitimacy that it doesn't deserve.

kathleen said...

@ The Nation

Pelosi's Disastrous Misstep on Iran
When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her allies in the chamber's Democratic leadership initially accepted that spending legislation designed to outline an Iraq exit strategy should also include a provision barring the president from attacking Iran without congressional approval, they opened up a monumental discussion about presidential war powers.

Saladin said...

OFF with the peoples heads! It's all their fault we're all going to die! We are exhaling CO2, time for the taxman to step in! Stop breathing everyone or you're DOOMED!!!!! You disgusting parasites, how DARE you darken the perfect and balanced earths doorstep. When it's time for total chaos, let a mile wide meteor do the job, as nature intended, idiots!

O'Reilly said...

I hate to be the skunk at the garden party but I think it should be said, Mr. Corn's coverage of politics over the last week has been skin deep voyerism.

Stories such as "Edwards calls for Gonzalez resignation... Clinton calls for Gonzalez resignation... Newt confesses triste." Is this the kind of information on which Americans will base their voting decision?

You'd think there was nothing important happenning in the world except an election in November 2008.

I'm glad to see Kathleen's posts above. I'm interested in the same stories. Thanks Kathleen.

A recent CNN Poll determined 7 of 10 Americans oppose a pardon for Scotter Libby's 4 count conviction; lying, perjury and obstruction of justice in the CIA leak investigation. This is great news for the rule of law. About 12% don't know. 18% are authoritarian Bush apologists who think it is constitutionally impossible for powerful people to behave like criminals.

capt said...

Pelosi's Betrayal



"Antiwar" Democrats cave on Iran

[…]

Are all congressional Democrats fools, or liars? I would say both, but that's hardly unusual when it comes to politicians, regardless of party affiliation. The question is: will their ostensibly "antiwar" base allow them to get away with it? Where are the fabled "netroots" on this? Apparently nowhere to be seen.

Speaking of being seen: this is a perfect opportunity to point out that there's going to be a demonstration outside of Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco office, on the steps of San Francisco's Federal Building, at noon on Monday, March 19, the fourth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war. The address is 450 Golden Gate, between Polk and Larkin. Go here for more information.

Show up and let the speaker of the House, who poses as an opponent of Bush's crazed foreign policy, know that her complicity in the president's rush to war with Iran is inexcusable, and needs to be reversed. I don't often endorse demonstrations, but this one is vitally important: time is of the essence. As U.S. warships – two aircraft carriers – take up positions in the Persian Gulf, menacing Iran, amid a stream of hostile rhetoric and accusations aimed at Tehran by this White House, it's time to step out and stand up against Pelosi's shameful betrayal.

More HERE

*****end of clip*****

Forget about the first 100 hours. We have not hit 100 days and nothing to stop the Iraqi quagmire, nothing to slow the Busheney juggernaut to war in Iran.

I think the Democratic majority celebrations were a bit premature. The proof is in their acts not in their words.



capt

capt said...

10 out of 10 could oppose a pardon, popularity has never been the basis of poor politics.

UGH!



capt

capt said...

Antiwar Radio: Charles Goyette Interviews David Corn



David Corn Washington editor of the Nation and co-author of Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War discusses his fun humiliating George F. Will on ABC’s This Week for his blatant hypocrisy, why Libby deserved to be convicted, why it’s a canard that Armitage was the first to reveal Wilson’s wife to Novak, Cheney’s role in lying us into war and punishing those who contradicted him, the time Novak lied directly to my face about Rove and whether the Democrats will ever get their act together and hold real investigations.

MP3 here. (18:52)

David Corn is the Washington editor of The Nation, the oldest political weekly in America, and a Fox News Channel contributor. He writes on a host of subjects, including politics, the White House, Congress, and the national security establishment. He has broken stories on George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, Colin Powell, Rush Limbaugh, Enron, the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA leak case, the Pentagon, and other Washington players and institutions. He currently writes a web column for The Nation called "Capital Games."

More HERE

*****end of clip*****

A good interview even if Mr. Corn is just phoning it in.



capt

O'Reilly said...

Lying to Congress has become a Republican principle, literally
Glenn Greenwald

Lying to Congress is what this administration generally -- and the DOJ specifically -- has done continuously. They lied to Congress about the FBI's use of NSLs in order to induce re-authorization of the Patriot Act, and -- now that those lies are exposed -- they are now forced to retract those statements and change their false testimony made under oath. Alberto Gonzales made repeated false statements to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the state of the President's eavesdropping activities, some of which he had to retract and some of which he still has not. And, of course, the false statements made over the years to the Congress by the administration regarding Iraq are literally too numerous to chronicle.

None of these acts occur in isolation. They are all part of the broader view of the Bush administration that the President's power cannot be constrained by the law or by the Congress. They believe they have the right to lie to Congress about their behavior, even though lying to Congress is, as Atrios noted today, a felony. LINK

O'Reilly said...

Good post Capt!

O'Reilly said...

The reason that lying to Congress is a felony is because Congress is composed of the representatives of the American people, and when executive branch officials lie to Congress, they are lying to the country. They subvert the entire constitutional order by preventing the American people from exercising overisight over the executive branch through their representatives in Congress, and it turns the President into an unchecked, unaccountable ruler. That is precisely why lying to Congress is considered to be virtuous and an entitlement by this administration and the movement which spawned it (the truly bizarre demands for Lewis Libby's pardon further reflect not merely an indifference, but this same admiration, for those who lie in pursuit of The Right-Wing Cause).

-Greenwald

capt said...

Beards - and polio - in Taliban country



PESHAWAR - "Shaving beard isn't done here. Contact only for hair cut," reads a sign pasted outside the entrance of a barber's shop in Upper Dir, a rugged and mountainous district in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP) that borders Afghanistan.


All the barber shops in Timergarah, the district headquarters, and Munda have stopped providing shaving services since leaflets advising them that it was Islamic to grow a beard were distributed by an unnamed group last Tuesday.

On March 4, there were explosions inside two saloons, a music shop and four other shops in the adjoining Bajaur Agency, part of the Federally Administered Tribal Agencies along the restive Afghan border. The Taliban have banned music in the tribal areas, and have started fining taxi drivers found listening to music.

According to news reports, a video shop in front of a police station in Bannu, the home town of NWFP Chief Minister Akram Durrani, was attacked by armed men suspected to be Taliban on February 27, who destroyed compact-disc players and CDs of Urdu, English and Indian films.

More HERE

*****end of clip*****

Thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars later and nothing has changed much.



capt

O'Reilly said...

Ode to the Dirty F*cking Hippies of the blogosphere in general and Josh Marshall in particular...

Kudos to Jay Carney of Time for acknowledging his error in judgment in being dismissive of this story, and giving credit to Josh Marhsall and others in the blogosphere who kept pushing it. Says Carney: "The blogosphere was the engine on this story, pulling the Hill and the MSM along. As the document dump proves, what happened was much worse than I'd first thought. I was wrong. Very nice work, and thanks for holding my feet to the fire."

That's a pretty significant acknowledgment from Time's Washington Bureau Chief. Like with anything else, the more interaction there is with bloggers, the more difficult the caricatures will be to sustain.

-- Glenn Greenwald

O'Reilly said...

g'night Capt! Hold down the fort.

capt said...

The Taliban's brothers in alms



ISLAMABAD - The initial shots in the Taliban's spring offensive have already been fired in southwestern Afghanistan, and the chances of the insurgents winning against some of the best-equipped soldiers in the world are being keenly assessed.

At the same time, across the border in the heart of Pakistan's capital Islamabad and beyond, the Taliban's seedlings are growing into trees.

The spread of Taliban-style radical Islam, which has already taken control of large areas of the tribal regions of North and South Waziristan and North West Frontier Province, poses a renewed threat to the military-led government of President General Pervez Musharraf. And it is a battle that could also have far-reaching consequences for the Taliban in Afghanistan, who draw much of their support from within Pakistan.

Recent protests by female students from a seminary in Islamabad, which resulted in the government having to back down, illustrate the power and support of radical clerics in the country.


More HERE

*****end of clip*****

We (western powers) have no credibility in the region thanks to Crusader Bunnypants and his merry band of neocons.



capt

capt said...

The Seymour Hersh Mystery



A Journalist Writing Bloody Murder…
And No One Notices


[…]

To summarize, if Hersh is to be believed – and as a major journalistic figure for the last near-40 years he certainly deserves to be taken seriously – the Bush administration seems to be repeating the worst mistakes of the Reagan administration and of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, which led inexorably to the greatest acts of blowback in our history. Given what we already know about the Bush administration, Americans should be up nights worrying about what all this means now as well as down the line. For Congress, the media, and Americans in general, this report should have been not just a wake-up call, but a shout for an all-nighter with NoDoz.

In my childhood, one of the Philadelphia papers regularly ran cartoon ads for itself in which some poor soul in a perilous situation – say, clinging to the ledge of a tall building – would be screaming for help, while passersby were so engrossed in the paper that they didn't even look up. Now, we have the opposite situation. A journalist essentially writing bloody murder in a giant media and governmental crowd. In this case, no one in the mainstream evidently cares – not yet anyway – to pay the slightest attention. It seems that there's a crime going on and no one gives a damn. Think Kitty Genovese on a giant scale.

More HERE

*****end of clip*****

Seems too easy to just ignore the elephascist in the tent?



capt

capt said...

G'nite O'Reilly,

Good posts yourself!




capt

capt said...

"Elephascists"

h/t to IBW (in a monstrous way!)



capt

O'Reilly said...

A you fit to be kept in a stupor with noble lies and pious frauds? Greenwald has a good post up on a the firm hold neoconservatives have in influence over George Bush. As Strauss scholar Shadia Drury documented -- "those in power must invent noble lies and pious frauds to keep the people in the stupor for which they are supremely fit"



The president receives "lessons" from his neoconservative tutors

Glenn Greenwald

Last week, George Bush hosted what he called "a literary luncheon" to honor "historian" Andrew Roberts. Accounts of that luncheon -- which describe the "lessons" the guests taught the President (and they call them "lessons") -- really provide an amazing glimpse into the Bush mindset and his relationship with neoconservatives. LINK

capt said...

Hillary Clinton Tries To Woo Voters By Rescinding Candidacy
(satire)



DES MOINES, IA—Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton officially rescinded her bid for president at an Iowa campaign appearance Saturday.

"Just two months ago, I promised that I'd listen to every voice through my town hall meetings, web chats, and trips to communities across the country," said Clinton, whose opponents have accused her of being out of touch with average voters. "America, you spoke clearly and with conviction—and I listened. And so I say to you today: Let the conversation end."

Polls showed that immediately following her speech, Clinton's approval numbers skyrocketed all across the South, wide swaths of the Midwest, scattered pockets of the Northeast, and in California, Alaska, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota, Hawaii, and Ohio.


More HERE

*****end of clip*****

"Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit."
~ Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)



capt

capt said...

"Friends Of Israel" Envision "Final Holocaust"; "Jew Toast"



[also see PEEK story AIPAC's Anti-Semite and AIPAC Speaker's Illuminati Conspiracy Video [VIDEO]]

In previous installments of an ongoing series, I've examined the beliefs of Pastor John Hagee, founder of "Christians United For Israel", an ostensibly pro-Israel lobby whose members seek to trigger a Mideast conflict they hope will spiral into a devastating world war that will cause Global mass death and the death of 2/3 of Jews in Israel. Hagee, who calls for a preemptive nuclear strike on Iran and also states that will trigger the apocalyptic war he craves, has also warned in his sermons about a conspiracy of "Illuminati" and international bankers seeking to create a "New World Order". John Hagee spoke, before many US Senators and Congress members, to a cheering crowd, at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's annual convention last Sunday evening :

That leading US politicians now happily appear at public events with, cheer on, and consent to share the stage with a man who advocates a fringe conspiracy theory some would call anti-Semitic and urges a "preemptive" use of nuclear weapons in order to cause widespread nuclear war indicates the extent to which US political and religious culture has lurched far right, towards what some call an "apocalyptic death cult", over the past four decades since the era in which Lyndon Johnson's 1964 presidential campaign devastated Barry Goldwater's presidential hopes by airing just one time a 30 second TV commercial, the "Daisy" ad, that effectively tarred Goldwater as eager for nuclear war. Now, for Republican politicians wooing a key bloc of evangelical GOP voters, public expressions of nuclear blood lust are no longer stigmatized or politically toxic ; they are an asset

Pastor John Hagee's warmly received AIPAC speech illustrates the extent to which political leaders who espouse ideology that in the 1960's was considered to be scandalously close the extreme end of the political spectrum can now expect to broadcast their views from a national stage.

More HERE

*****end of clip*****

More on AIPAC, Hagee and some of our "progressive" politicians.



capt

capt said...

New Thread!