Day: November 18, 2005
Fitzgerald Calls a Second Grand Jury in Bush CIA Leak Investigation
Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said in court filings that the ongoing CIA leak investigation will involve proceedings before a new grand jury, a possible sign he could seek new charges in the case.by…
Earlier this week Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward disclosed that he testified under oath to Fitzgerald that a senior Bush administration official had casually told him in mid-June 2003 about CIA operative Valerie Plame’s position at the agency.
Fitzgerald’s comments about bringing proceedings before a different grand jury were contained in court filings in which he backed off seeking a blanket order to keep all documents in the CIA leak case secret.
Rightwing ‘Intellectual’ Slams Intelligent Design
Calls it phony: Conservatives are, by definition, anti-intellectual, especially in the Bush era, so what gets written by the smarty-pants among them can be viewed with some suspicion. This is especially so if that smarty-pants is Charles Krauthammer, a colunnist for the Washington Post and one of the hordes of Gop apologists on Fox News.
But in a column today under the headline, “Phony Theory, False Conflict: ‘Intelligent Design’ Foolishly Pits Evolution Against Faith,” Krauthammer takes the central tenet at the heart of rightwing anti-intellectualism:
Let’s be clear. Intelligent design may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud. It is a self-enclosed, tautological “theory” whose only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific knowledge — in this case, evolution — they are to be filled by God. It is a “theory” that admits that evolution and natural selection explain such things as the development of drug resistance in bacteria and other such evolutionary changes within species but also says that every once in a while God steps into this world of constant and accumulating change and says, “I think I’ll make me a lemur today.” A “theory” that violates the most basic requirement of anything pretending to be science — that it be empirically disprovable. How does one empirically disprove the proposition that God was behind the lemur, or evolution — or behind the motion of the tides or the “strong force” that holds the atom together?
GOP’s Answer to Crises: Senate Passes $60 Bil Tax Cut
A $60 billion bill the Senate passed to continue expiring tax cuts and shelter 14 million families from higher taxes faces a White House veto threat because it also includes a hefty tax increase for oil companies.
The legislation passed by senators early Friday would spare millions of families from paying increased taxes through the alternative minimum tax. Much of the bill, passed 64-33, preserves tax cuts approved in previous years that are set to expire unless lawmakers keep them alive.
But unlike a bill assembled by the House tax writing committee, it does not preserve lower tax rates for capital gains and dividends scheduled to disappear at the end of 2008. Congress lowered the maximum tax rate on that investment income to 15 percent in 2003, and many Republicans want to act this year to keep those rates in place in 2009 and 2010.
It was doubtful whether the House would vote on its bill before leaving for the Thanksgiving holiday. “It’s a possibility that we’ll move it if we’re ready to move it,” Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said early Friday. “We’ll have to see where the votes are.”
