Month: February 2006

VA Nurse Accused of Sedition for Criticizing Gubmint

Buck Banks

Exhuming McCarthy: Little did Veterans Administration nurse Laura Berg suspect that when she dashed off a letter to the editor of the Albuquerque weekly Alibi it would lead to her work computer being seized by her bosses, who also accused her of “sedition.” Let’s be clear here. Dr. Webster defines sedition as “the stirring up of discontent, resistance or rebellion against the government.” Judge for yourself if what Berg wrote, as reported in The Progressive, constitutes sedition:

“I am furious with the tragically misplaced priorities and criminal negligence of this government,” it began. “The Katrina tragedy in the U.S. shows that the emperor has no clothes!” She mentioned that she was “a VA nurse” working with returning vets. “The public has no sense of the additional devastating human and financial costs of post-traumatic stress disorder,” she wrote, and she worried about the hundreds of thousands of additional cases that might result from Katrina and the Iraq War.

“Bush, Cheney, Chertoff, Brown, and Rice should be tried for criminal negligence,” she wrote. “This country needs to get out of Iraq now and return to our original vision and priorities of caring for land and people and resources rather than killing for oil. . . . We need to wake up and get real here, and act forcefully to remove a government administration playing games of smoke and mirrors and vicious deceit.

Seditious? — “Bush, Cheney, Chertoff, Brown, and Rice should be tried for criminal negligence.”

Otherwise, many more of us will be facing living hell in these times.”

Thinking she wrote the letter on her work computer, her bosses at the VA seized her computer and, in a memo, accused her of sedition:

Mel Hooker, chief of the human resources management service at the Albuquerque VA, wrote Berg back on November 9 and acknowledged that “your personal computer files did not contain the editorial letter written to the editor of the weekly Alibi.”

But rather than apologize, he leveled the sedition charge: “The Agency is bound by law to investigate and pursue any act which potentially represents sedition,” he said. “In your letter . . . you declared yourself ‘as a VA nurse’ and publicly declared the Government which employs you to have ‘tragically misplaced priorities and criminal negligence’ and advocated, ‘act forcefully to remove a government administration playing games of smoke and mirrors and vicious deceit.’ ”

Berg has worked as a VA nurse for 15 years and is concerned for her job. The New Mexico office of the American Civil Liberties Union is working with her to clear her name, but so far, the VA has not admitted wrongdoing nor has it apologized.

Was Cheney Drunk at Time of Shooting?

Jon Ponder

In any other instance where one hunter shot another, the authorities would have undoubtedly tested the shooter’s blood alcohol. However, the Imperial Veep put a hold on speaking with investigators overnight, and then submitted to an interview by a sheriff.

What else was he could he be hiding:

Cheney spokesman Lea Anne McBride would not comment on whether the Cheney office or the White House would have ever released the information had the Caller-Times not contacted them.

The more than 18-hour delay in news emerging that the Vice President of the United States had shot a man, sending him to an intensive care unit with his wounds, grew even more curious late Sunday. E&P has learned that the official confirmation of the shooting came about only after a local reporter in Corpus Christi, Texas, received a tip from the owner of the property where the shooting occurred and called Vice President Cheney’s office for confirmation.

The confirmation was made but it is not known for certain that Cheney’s office, the White House, or anyone else intended to announce the shooting if the reporter, Jaime Powell of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, had not received word from the ranch owner…

The Cheney spokesman with whom Powell spoke, Lea Anne McBride, would not comment on whether the Cheney office or the White House would have ever released the information had the Caller-Times not contacted them.

Weather Report: No Blizzard on Us

Jon Ponder

Pictured above: Car belonging to friends of PR in NYC

Because we know you care, here’s the weather in the various corners of Pensito Review’s electronic garret:

Buck in South Florida: Tropical temps: 69 degrees.
Jon in West Hollywood: A scoosh warm for February – 86 degrees, clear skies, mild winds.
Trish in Northeast Florida:

Brisk 46 degrees but no snow. Photo in comments shows PR staff canine Pepsi dressed for cool weather outside NE Florida offices.

So how’s by you? If you live in the blizzard zone, tell us what we are missing. Leave a comment and tell us what’s up.

Whitewash: House GOP Katrina Investigation Blames Chertoff, Shields Bush

Jon Ponder

Fix is in: A report on the investigation into the Bush government’s bungled response to Hurricane Katrina by Republicans in the House of Representatives will be released this week. Excerpts that have been leaked to the media show that while the report criticizes President Bush, it lays the blame for his government’s response at the feet of Sec. of the Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) Michael Chertoff.

It may be cold comfort now but whether or not Republicans in charge of federal oversight impute Bush today, history will record that it was the president’s incompetence that created the crisis within the disaster that cost the lives of hundreds of Americans.

The current scapegoat, Michael Brown, who was fired in September because of his negligence in handling the disaster, has provided damning testimony against Chertoff, who was his boss.

You may recall that House Democrats refused to participate officially in the investigation because it was clear from the start that the Republicans’ over-arching motivation was to protect President Bush from blame.

Two Democrats from the region — Reps. Charlie Melancon and William J. Jefferson — did participate unofficially in the investigation, and from their statements it appears that the House GOP did indeed bend over backwards to let the president off the hook:

In their response [to the report], Melancon and Jefferson pointed out that the White House refused to release communications from Brown, who told the House committee and a Senate committee investigating the disaster response that he warned the White House in 30 conversations that he could not establish command and control, that the levees had failed and that he needed help.

“When the White House refused to provide any of these communications, the committee rejected our requests to subpoena them, effectively shielding the White House from scrutiny,” the two Democrats said.

The committee refused to provide a copy of its report to the Democrats, allowing them only to take notes as they read it in the committee staff offices, they said.

Once again, Republicans put their worship of George W. Bush and their quest for poltical power ahead of the national interest.

After Chertoff is gone, the next candidate for blame will probably be President Bush’s assistant Chief of Staff Joe Hagin, who took the most of the 30 calls from Brown that night. Republicans will blame him for not waking the president up to deal with disaster, or not dealing with it in the presidents’ stead.

They can set up all the scapegoats they want, but the buck stops at the top. It may be cold comfort now but whether or not Republicans in charge of federal oversight impute Bush today, history will record that it was the president’s incompetence that created the crisis within the disaster that cost the lives of hundreds of Americans.

Cheney Accidentally Shoots Fellow Hunter

Jon Ponder

So not making this up:

Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and wounded a companion during a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas, spraying the fellow hunter in the face and chest with shotgun pellets.

Harry Whittington, a millionaire attorney from Austin, was “alert and doing fine” in a Corpus Christi hospital Sunday after he was shot by Cheney on a ranch in south Texas, said Katharine Armstrong, the property’s owner.

He was in stable condition Sunday, said Yvonne Wheeler, spokeswoman for the Christus Spohn Health System in Corpus Christi.

Armstrong in an interview with The Associated Press said Whittington, 78, was mostly injured on his right side, with the pellets hitting his cheek, neck and chest during the incident which occurred late afternoon on Saturday.

She said emergency personnel traveling with Cheney tended to Whittington until the ambulance arrived.

Cheney’s spokeswoman, Lea Anne McBride, said the vice president met with Whittington and his wife at the hospital on Sunday. Cheney “was pleased to see that he’s doing fine and in good spirits,” she said.

New Orleans — And Even Brown? — Tell the Truth About Katrina

Trish

Gotta love the people of New Orleans as they put on Mardis Gras.

Brown: “Had there been a report coming out . . . that said, ‘Yes, we’ve confirmed that a terrorist has blown up the 17th Street Canal levee,’ then everybody would have jumped all over that

This year’s parade theme was C’est Levee, a pun on the French expression c’est la vie , or that’s life.

Floats and props built for the Saturday evening parade in the French Quarter included hand-pulled carts elaborately decorated with blue tarps, fake broken levees, cardboard travel trailers and effigies of Mayor C. Ray Nagin (D) and Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D).

One display asked France to buy Louisiana back, suggesting that the state might get better treatment from the French than it has from the U.S. government.

Indeed. As PR editor Jon notes, Bush Etc. didn’t give a crap about the people of New Orleans or the Gulf Coast, except for losing one day of vacation.

And even I had to hand it to Brownie the other day. He did a heckuva job at nailing the feeling at the White House and the Department of Homeland Security.

“Had there been a report coming out . . . that said, ‘Yes, we’ve confirmed that a terrorist has blown up the 17th Street Canal levee,’ then everybody would have jumped all over that and been trying to do everything they could,” Brown said.

But how do you exploit the weather for political gain? True, Bush did use it as a convenient exit strategy to get away from a summer of press coverage of Cindy Sheehan’s fruitless attempts to get him to acknowledge her. But let’s face it, a hurricane doesn’t offer the “talkin’ tough” and fanning-the-flames-of-fear opportunities of a terror attack.

Meanwhile, New Orleans makes the best of it.

The Mid-City parade, scheduled for Feb. 26, will have floats called “New Orleans Culture” — that’s culture as in mold — and “I drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was gone,” a bitter twist on the line from Don McLean’s “American Pie.”

List of Scooter Libby’s “Superiors” is Pretty Short

Trish

Columnist Cragg Hines notes the list of people who might have instructed Scooter Libby to tell members of the press that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent is pretty small.

Libby didn’t have that many “superiors.” Bush, Cheney and, at least organizationally, White House chief of staff Andrew Card.

As emerged in news reports, Libby told a grand jury that “superiors” told him to leak to reporters in June and July 2003 information about Iraq’s weapons capability. Let’s examine this megawatt info…

Libby didn’t have that many “superiors.” Bush, Cheney and, at least organizationally, White House chief of staff Andrew Card.

Or could there be some higher, metaphysical “superiors” being suggested, which would be interesting jurisprudentially if not strategically (unless there’s to be a sudden shift to an insanity plea)?

Hines adds that Bush keeps waffling on his response to the wrongdoing. My own personal theory is that Bush talked tough early on about firing people because he never thought he, Rove, and Cheney would be found out.

In the wake of his indictment, Libby resigned. But Bush’s deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove, who remains under investigation by Fitzgerald, has been shown to have leaked. He’s still firmly ensconced in the White House.

That, in part at least, is because Bush last summer moved the goal posts for what it takes to get the heave-ho.

“If someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration,” Bush said.

As I’ve noted before, that’s a lousy benchmark for someone who, as Bush did repeatedly in the 2000 campaign, swore he would uphold the “honor and dignity” of the White House.

Under Bush’s sliding standard of leaking as a firing offense, as long as Rove remains unindicted, he apparently can hang around.

Now we have Libby reaching for Cheney’s throat — at least as a pretrial tactic.

My problem is that I don’t believe that even if Bush fired Rove publicly that he would quit taking orders from him privately. Bush, who isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, needs Rove behind the scenes to think of…stuff. He’ll find a way to keep him on a payroll somewhere, and keep pulling the strings in the White House.

Was ‘Bubble Boy’ a Hoax?

Jon Ponder

At hearings into the Hurricane Katrina disaster by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Friday, Chairman Susan Collins and Ranking Member Joe Lieberman revealed that they had received conflicting testimony about what President Bush and other top officials knew about the extent of the damage after the storm hit New Orleans last summer.

The truth is, President Bush was neither clueless or misinformed. He just didn’t give a damn.

Katrina made landfall on Monday, August 29, 2005, at 7 a.m. For the next 48 hours, President Bush stuck to his schedule, relaxing at his vacation home in Texas and touring Arizona and California on Air Force One to appear at events that were political as well as official. The disaster escalated over the next two days almost entirely because federal help never came.

The Bush Administration’s response in the critical first 48 hours after landfall was a fiasco. By 72 hours into the disaster, Team Bush was facing a Category 5 political crisis. No presidential administration in memory had performed so poorly. They were drawing fire from their supporters — and even from their usually reliable stooges in the news media.

Gaming it out, Bush and his handlers realized that if they did not take corrective action immediately, the criticism could pave the way to nasty congressional hearings, at best, and criminal charges of official negligence, and worse.

Something had to be done. So they did what they do best: They created a new reality — a quasi-fictional version of events in which Bush and his lackeys were simply confused and misinformed, not apathetic about the loss of the last Democratic bastion in the South — and inserted it retrospectively into the narrative of the storm’s first 48 hours.

Using carefully coordinated statements in the media, both in public and anonymously sourced, Bush and his senior officials created a picture in the public mind of a president so out of touch with the country that he was simply unaware of the severity of the situation on the ground in New Orleans.

The created “Bubble Boy,” a caricature of President Bush who would appease public anger by excusing his negligence by tying it to his infamous lack of curiosity and aversion to watching the news. The strategy called for four parallel counter-attacks:

[…]

UAE Bans ‘Brokeback Mountain’

Jon Ponder

Government Censor: “The film will upset the people of this culture and tradition.”

But it’s not a cartoon:

The United Arab Emirates has banned Ang Lee’s acclaimed film Brokeback Mountain because of Islamic laws against homosexuality, reports the Khaleej Times.

“Brokeback Mountain is a film which has nothing positive about it. The portrayal of the sexual behavior of its main character is offensive to Eastern societies, particularly Muslims and the Arabs, since Islam forbids abnormal behaviors like homosexuality,” said Abdullah Al Amiri, chairman of the Committee of Financial, Economical, and Industrial Affairs of Sharjah Consultative Council. “The film will upset the people of this culture and tradition.”

Members of the Sharjah Consultative Council thanked the ministry of information for what the Times called “its efforts in protecting the society from unethical and immoral practices.” A member of the ministry told the Times that its censorship department was making a great effort to protect the country from movies that will destroy the values and morals of society.

Ken Starr Implicated in Forgery of Sworn Statements in Death Penalty Case

Jon Ponder

How now, Mr. Prosecutor:

“We showed each person the declaration on their behalf and they all said they didn’t say that,” — Spokesman for state Attorney General.

Lawyers for a death row inmate, including former Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr, sent fake letters from jurors asking California’s governor to spare the man’s life, prosecutors said Friday.

The jurors denied they thought Michael Morales deserved clemency because some of the testimony at his trial may have been fabricated, said Nathan Barankin, spokesman for Attorney General Bill Lockyer.

“We showed each person the declaration on their behalf and they all said they didn’t say that,” Barankin said.

San Joaquin County prosecutor Charles Schultz also said the letters sent to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last week were “untrue” and “pure fiction.”

…On Friday, the San Joaquin District Attorney’s office sent Schwarzenegger a new batch of sworn statements from five of those jurors saying they not only still supported capital punishment for Morales, but had never spoken with the defense investigator who claimed to have secured their signatures…

Morales is scheduled to be executed Feb. 21 for the rape and murder of a 17-year-old girl in San Joaquin County 25 years ago.