Day: January 27, 2006

Bush Removes Abramoff Prosecutor by Promoting Him to Judge

Jon Ponder

New low: Just when you think you’ve seen the bottom of the Bush team’s depravity and corruption — or is it just monumental cluelessness? — they manage to come up with something new that is positively jawdropping.

Hillman serves as chief of the department’s public integrity section. Must be that special Republican “integrity” that allows you to take a cushy job in return for pulling the investigation off the White House.

Yesterday President Bush nominated Noel Hillman, the lead prosecutor in the Abramoff case, to a lifetime judicial appointment.

Just to make it even more perfect, Hillman serves as chief of the department’s public integrity section. Must be that special Republican integrity “integrity” that allows you to take a cushy job in return for pulling the investigation off the White House.

Yup! No appearance of impropriety here. Just move along folks, move along.

Late word: Hillman has already resigned from the Abramoff case in order to get fitted for his new black robes.

No telling what evidence about Rove, Cheney, Bush and Abramoff was shredded in Hillman’s office yesterday.

Pensito Review: Off the Wires

Buck Banks

New Bolivian Leader Cuts Salary in Half
LA PAZ, Bolivia – New President Evo Morales cut his salary by half and ordered that no Cabinet minister collect a higher wage than his own, with the savings earmarked for hiring more public school teachers. In totally unrelated news, today the U.S. Congress voted itself a raise and cut education spending.

Chinese New Year Banquets Get Flashier
BEIJING – Picture this: Lobster cooked eight ways. Sharks’ fin bathed in a rich brown sauce. Stewed bird’s nest sweetened with apricots. Abalone braised until tender. The bill: $24,500. Getting your stomach pumped — priceless.

Vatican May Reach Out to Other Religions
VATICAN CITY – The Vatican is exploring whether to expand its Catholic-Jewish dialogue to include Muslims, although talks are at a very early stage, a Vatican official said Friday. He added that there are no plans to expand the dialogue to include American evangelical Christians. “We won’t parlay with a bunch of mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, Bible-thumping Jesus freaks,” he said.

Judge to Rule on Merit of Christ Case
VITERBO, Italy – An Italian judge heard arguments Friday on whether a small-town parish priest should stand trial for asserting that Jesus Christ existed. The priest could face additional charges for claiming that Jesus was a white man with long brown hair and blue eyes, “just like in the pictures.”

Activists Hold Separate Forum in Venezuela
CARACAS, Venezuela – The World Social Forum started as an alternative to the market-friendly World Economic Forum, but now there’s an alternative to the alternative. Call us when there’s an alternative to the alternative’s alternative.

Canada Reasserts Arctic Sovereignty
TORONTO – Canada’s next prime minister used his first news conference Thursday to tell the United States to mind its own business when it comes to territorial rights in the Arctic North. “Thanks to George Bush’s environmental policies, your part of the Arctic has already melted,” he added.

Playing Bush’s Get Out of Jail Free Card

Trish

Leonard Pitts can just quit writing now because I don’t think he will surpass this essay.

Remain true to the ideals that have guided us for 230 years or surrender them on the altar of expedience because we were too scared to live up to them

Karl Rove said in a speech last week that this year’s midterm election will be about security. So you know it will be about fear…

Hurricane Katrina has shown that the government could not effectively manage a catastrophe whose place and time it knew in advance…So yes, a national conversation about security could hardly be more timely. But it would be naive to think that’s what Rove meant.

…Experience tells us that with this crew, ”security” is just a code word for fear. So this election will hinge on making people think terrorists are going to get ’em if they don’t vote Republican.

A ruinous war fought under false pretenses? Sept. 11.

Indefinite detention of alleged terrorists? Sept. 11.

Torture? Sept. 11.

The right of the people to dissent? Sept. 11.

Spying on Americans in violation of federal law? Sept. 11.

A growing record of incompetence and lies? Sept. 11.

Fear is the president’s Get Out Of Jail Free card.

…what is at stake this year is not the fortunes of a party but the character of a nation. The choice is simple: remain true to the ideals that have guided us for 230 years or surrender them on the altar of expedience because we were too scared to live up to them.

Make no mistake: America is not for wimps. It takes guts to be an American, to believe in the rule of law, the freedom of dissent, the dignity of woman and man even when — especially when — it is more expedient not to. To be an American is to commit a daily act of faith.

NSA Stayed On-Task Under Clinton

Trish

The Week Magazine:

Every three hours, the agency’s spy satellites pull in enough information to fill the Library of Congress

The National Security Agency — so secret it is jokingly referred to as “No Such Agency” — has “wrapped the earth in a spectral web of electronic surveillance,” says Patrick Radden Keefe, author of the book, Chatter. Every three hours, the agency’s spy satellites pull in enough information to fill the Library of Congress. Its main antenna farms — one in West Virginia and the other in Washington state — can capture all international communications with the U.S. The NSA, which is the largest employer of mathematicians in the world, can then “mine” the data to detect suspicious patterns of communication that indicate the possibility of terrorist ties or activity. During the Clinton administration, the NSA reportedly inaugurated a sophisticated electronic eavesdropping system called Echelon. Though the NSA has never acknowledged Echelon’s existence, numerous press reports indicate that the system monitors telecommunications all over the world for words that might signal discussion of terrorist plots.

So what you’re saying is the last time anyone took effective action to defuse terrorism was during the Clinton administration?

Poll: 76% Think Bush Should Disclose Abramoff Contacts

Jon Ponder

Our photos: President Bush told reporters yesterday that photos of him with disgraced Republican operative Jack Abramoff were “irrelevant.”

Not that it matters to His Munificence, but according to a new Washington Post/ABC poll, the citizenry does not agree:

The survey found that three in four–76 percent–of all Americans said Bush should disclose contacts between aides and Abramoff while 18 percent disagreed. Two in three Republicans joined with eight in 10 Democrats and political independents in favoring disclosure, according to the poll.

Even two-thirds of Bush worshippers want the contacts released. That in itself is astounding.

Even two-thirds of Bush worshippers want the contacts released. That in itself is astounding.

One point that begs mentioning: The photos do not belong to George W. Bush or even the White House. They were paid for by you and me, and the little people out there who pay taxes.

Only an aristocrat would claim privilege over taxpayer funded photos.

Another point: Can you imagine what would have happened if the Clinton White House had claimed privilege over photos of Bill and Monica?! What howl there would have been from the Congress and the traditional media.

Today, they’re so cowed by Bush and his imperial pretensions that there is barely a whimper.

Cowardly Bush Terrified of Octogenerian Reporter

Jon Ponder

President Scared to Take a Question from Helen Thomas

According to DrudgeReport.com, at his impromptu “news” conference yesterday, President George W. Bush was scared shitless of columnist Helen Thomas, 85, and refused to call on her, even though she was seated in the front row:

President Bush today again avoided taking a question from White House doyenne Helen Thomas during his 45-minute press conference, even though he took questions from every reporter around her front-row, center seat.

“He’s a coward,” Thomas said afterward. “He’s supposed to be this macho guy. He’ll take on Osama bin Laden, but he won’t take me on.”

Thomas, who worked as the UPI White House reporter for 57 years and is now a columnist, raised her hand every time the president was concluding an answer to a reporter’s question, but he never called on her.

She had a few questions in mind, though. “I wanted to ask about Iraq: ‘You said you didn’t go in for oil or for Israel or for WMDs. so why did you go in?’ ”

With Hiring of Bill Bennett CNN Continues Goose-Step March to the Right

Buck Banks

Crazy like Fox: With the announcement that it has replaced pundit-troll Robert Novak with super-moralist Bill Bennet, CNN is continuing its slouch toward Wingnutland. The radio talk-show host and former Reagan and Bush One administration flunky is the latest conservative pundit hired by CNN, following its recent signing of radio talk-show host Glenn Beck.

The press release contained an strange sentence:

Bennett will be one of CNN’s political commentators as part of the network’s continuing effort to bring a broad range of perspectives to its viewers.

The only perspective Bennett brings is Bennett’s, unfortnately. In the June 2003 issue of Washington Monthly, Joshua Green’s article, “Bookie of Virtue,” painted a portrait of Bennett as an Old Testament preacher of morality and dictator of mores, and a bit of flame at the slots:

For more than 20 years, as a writer, speaker, government official, and political operative, Bennett has been a commanding general in the culture wars. As Ronald Reagan’s chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, he was the scourge of academic permissiveness. Later, as Reagan’s secretary of education, he excoriated schools and students for failing to set and meet high standards. As drug czar under George H.W. Bush, he applied a get-tough approach to drug use, arguing that individuals have a moral responsibility to own up to their addiction.

But while bashing wife-swapping and the “Rikki Lake Show,” Bennett was conspicuously quiet on the topic of gambling, for good reason, according to Green:

Bennett has been a high-roller since at least the early 1990s. A review of one 18-month stretch of gambling showed him visiting casinos, often for two or three days at a time (and enjoying a line of credit of at least $200,000 at several of them). Bennett likes to be discreet. “He’ll usually call a host and let us know when he’s coming,” says one source. “We can limo him in. He prefers the high-limit room, where he’s less likely to be seen and where he can play the $500-a-pull slots. He usually plays very late at night or early in the morning–usually between midnight and 6 a.m.” The documents show that in one two-month period, Bennett wired more than $1.4 million to cover losses.

Bennett claims his style of gambling is “moral”:

“I play fairly high stakes. I adhere to the law. I don’t play the ‘milk money.’ I don’t put my family at risk, and I don’t owe anyone anything.”

Well, that’s a comfort, and something viewers should keep in mind as Bennett carries on about how the rest of us should behave and whose values we should emulate. Seems to me that CNN is taking a big gamble, not only on Bennett and Glenn and the new rightism of its broadcasts, but that its viewers want more Fox and less balance in their TV punditry.