Year: 2006

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.

What’s Wrong With Rap Music?

Buck Banks

Rapping rap: In a guest commentary on The Black Commentator, Akweli Parker cuts loose on the current icons of rap music for their musical messages that glorify guns and drugs, and denigrate middle class values of hard work and achievement. Here are a couple of excerpts, but it’s worth reading the whole entertaining, insightful essay.

…. as we reflect on African Americans’ achievements this February during Black History Month, I find myself wondering just a bit more than usual, and a little more angrily than usual, What in the hell is going on with our music? It’s been hijacked by one-dimensional caricatures who stand to significantly retard, if not outright roll back, the progress African Americans have made in the past half-century.

……….

Yeah, I realize many of our brothers are born into poverty and despair, with seemingly few options besides “the trade” or other underground economy activities. But how do you explain immigrants of color who come to this country with less than nothing, and parlay it into the American Dream?

I have a theory: it’s that black peoples’ most visible role models are entertainers and athletes, admirable folks, but not the true bedrock of the upper middle class – that would be engineers, doctors, businesspeople and intellectuals.

Call me naive, but whatever happened to the quaint notion of conveying some type of pedagogic message in urban storytelling?

……….

Call me naive, but whatever happened to the quaint notion of conveying some type of pedagogic message in urban storytelling? MC’s like Grandmaster Flash, KRS-One, Public Enemy and Eric B. had it down. Somehow, they collectively managed to portray the gritty misery and violence of the streets, the sensuousness of black sexuality and that indispensable rap staple, shameless self-promotion, without promoting self-genocide.

………..

And so I make this simple plea: White people, since you are purportedly the largest purchasers of rap music – stop worshipping 50 and the nihilistic narcism of his music; same goes for other artistically devoid rap cartoons. Otherwise you’re encouraging them and setting back hard-working blacks. There are better rap acts more deserving of your money.

Brownie-Mail: Ex-FEMA Chief Threatens to Rat Out Bush

Jon Ponder

Demands Money and Political Cover to Keep Quiet

Ousted FEMA leader Michael Brown says he has emails from and to President Bush that were sent as New Orleans was being destroyed — and that if the Bushistas down’t pony up to cover his legal fees, he’s going to rat them out.

Too bad the Republicans in the Senate who are investigating the tragic bungling of the federal response to Katrina are powerless to get those emails otherwise. Oh, wait — this just in — they have subpoena power. (Not that Chairman Susan Collins will use it.)

From the Associated Press:

Former disaster agency chief Michael Brown is indicating he’s ready to reveal his correspondence with President Bush and other officials during Hurricane Katrina.

That’s unless the White House forbids it and offers legal support.

Brown’s stance, in a letter obtained yesterday by The Associated Press, follows senators’ complaints that the White House is refusing to answer questions or release documents about advice given to Bush concerning the August 29th storm…

In a February sixth letter to White House counsel Harriet Miers, Brown’s lawyer wrote that Brown continues to respect Bush and his “presidential prerogative” to get candid and confidential advice from top aides.

The letter from Andrew Lester also says Brown no longer can rely on being included in that protection because he’s a private citizen.

Libby Says Cheney ‘Authorized’ Him to Leak Classified Info to Reporters

Jon Ponder

Propaganda: A letter from CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald reveals that Scooter Libby has admitted handing over secret military information to reporters, including Judith Miller — and even told the grand jury that he did it at the behest of his boss, Vice President Cheney.

Lucky for Herr Cheney and his former Flying Monkey, leaking classified data is no longer considered to be a serious crime:

Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been “authorized” by Cheney and other White House “superiors” in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration’s use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records.

According to sources with firsthand knowledge, Cheney authorized Libby to release additional classified information, including details of the NIE [National Intelligence Estimate], to defend the administration’s use of prewar intelligence in making the case for war.

Libby specifically claimed that in one instance he had been authorized to divulge portions of a then-still highly classified [NIE] regarding Saddam Hussein’s purported efforts to develop nuclear weapons, according to correspondence recently filed in federal court by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

Beyond what was stated in the court paper, say people with firsthand knowledge of the matter, Libby also indicated what he will offer as a broad defense during his upcoming criminal trial: that Vice President Cheney and other senior Bush administration officials had earlier encouraged and authorized him to share classified information with journalists to build public support for going to war. Later, after the war began in 2003, Cheney authorized Libby to release additional classified information, including details of the NIE, to defend the administration’s use of prewar intelligence in making the case for war.

Poll: Bush Inspires Voters — To Vote Against Him

Buck Banks

Voting for regime change: Tired of George W. Bush’s lies, hubris, bullying, nonreading and the sound of his voice, Americans are ready to cast their votes to get rid of him and his corrupt cronies and toadies in Congress.

The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press finds:

Nine months before the midterm elections, the Democrats hold a sizable lead in the congressional horse race and an advantage on most major issues. Democrats lead by 50 percent-41 percent among registered voters in the test ballot, which is little changed from last September (52 percent-40 percent).

While retaining a huge advantage on traditional party strengths like the environment and health care, Democrats also are seen as better able to handle the economy (by 46 percent-36 percent) and reform the federal government (42 percent-29 percent). Terrorism, and to a lesser extent crime, remain the GOP’s only strong issues among 12 tested in the survey.

More registered voters see their congressional choice as a vote ‘against’ Bush
  • More registered voters see their congressional choice as a vote “against” Bush. Currently, 31 percent say they view their ballot as a vote against the president, compared with 18 percent who say they see it as a vote for the president. In February 2002, just 9 percent of voters said they were voting ‘against’ Bush, while 34 percent said they were voting “for” the president.
  • Democrats have advantage on issues, but not leadership. Slightly more Americans say the GOP has better political leaders (by 41 percent-37 percent).
  • Majority says congressional corruption is nothing new. Six-in-ten say these problems are no different than in the past, compared with 36 percent who believe that corruption is more common today. By 31 percent to 14 percent, more people say the Republican Party has greater involvement than the Democratic Party in congressional corruption. But fully a third (34 percent) volunteer that both parties are equally involved in corruption.
  • A growing number says health care system needs repair. About a third (32 percent) think the health care system should be completely rebuilt, up from 21 percent a year ago; another 46 percent say the health care system needs major changes.
  • Public satisfaction with the news media has rebounded. Currently 59 percent express a favorable opinion of the news media, up from 43 percent in December 2004. In addition, a solid majority (56 percent) says it is more important for the news media to report stories they feel are in the national interest, while just 34 percent believe it is more important for the government to censor news stories on national security grounds. In February 2003, somewhat fewer (50 percent) backed the media’s right to report.