Year: 2007

U.S. Attorney Says He Felt ‘Pressured’ By GOP Pols

Jon Ponder

At congressional hearings yesterday into the firing of eight U.S. attorneys by the Bush Justice Dept. last Descember, David Iglesias, who was the federal prosecutor in New Mexico, accused two GOP members of Congress from the state — Sen. Pete Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson — of trying to pressure him on investigations in the Albuquerque office.

Asked by Schumer if he felt pressured by [Rep. Heather Wilson’s] call, Iglesias replied: “Yes sir, I did.”

Iglesias, a Republican, said the motivation of both Domenici and Wilson was political.

About Sen. Domenici:

…Iglesias told senators he felt sickened when Domenici hung up on him after being told that indictments in a corruption case against Democrats would not be handed down before the November elections.

“He said, ‘Are these going to be filed before November?'” Iglesias recalled. “I said I didn’t think so. And to which he replied, ‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’ And then the line went dead.”

Iglesias said he received the call from Domenici at home on Oct. 26 or 27 and that it lasted two minutes, “tops.”

“I felt leaned on. I felt pressured to get these matters moving,” Iglesias testified. Asked by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., whether such a call was unusual in Iglesias’ experience, the former prosecutor answered, “Unprecedented.”

About Rep. Wilson:

Iglesias told the panel he received a call from Wilson in mid-October in which she asked him about sealed indictments a topic prosecutors cannot discuss. Wilson’s question “raised red flags in my head,” Iglesias said.

“I was evasive and nonresponsive to her question,” Iglesias told the panel, saying he talked generally about why some indictments are sealed. “She was not happy with that answer. And she said, ‘Well I guess I’ll have to take your word for it.” The call ended almost immediately, Iglesias said.

Asked by Schumer if he felt pressured by that call, Iglesias replied: “Yes sir, I did.”

Other testimony revealed that the U.S. attorney in Arkansas was let go only to be replaced by a protege of Karl Rove named Tim Griffin, who has since decided not to stay on in the position because of the “partisan circus” around his appointment.

The committee also released an email from one of the fired prosecutors to his colleagues recounting a phone conversation he’d had with a a senior Justice official in February warning him to keep quiet about the firing or risk becoming the target of a Bush administration smear campaign.

Haggard’s Church Lays off 44 People While Paying Him $130,000 Per Year

Jon Ponder

The True Life megachurch in Colorado Springs that was founded by Ted Haggard, the drug-addled self-hating homo evangelist, has laid off 44 people — approximately 12 percent of its employees — saying the Haggard scandal has negatively affected the church’s fundraising.

“As a pastor he never had to pay for his cars or his house (and he has a huge house with a pool and maids) and he got that 130k salary not to mention all the money he made from his books.
— Former church employee

Haggard was fired last November after it was revealed that he had sex with a gay prostitute and had purchased a large quantity of crystal meth. Yet the church continues to pay Haggard’s $130,000 annual salary, at least through this year.

A former church employee said in comments to Pensito Review:

I just got laid off … from New Life Church … If we weren’t paying him all of this money, people who worked there and weren’t the ones lying and deceiving the church would have been able to keep their jobs.

But no, we are going to pay Ted the one who lied to us all, deceived us all and was the one who did somthing wrong.

As a pastor he never had to pay for his cars or his house (and he has a huge house with a pool and maids) and he got that 130k salary not to mention all the money he made from his books.

This is wrong, it’s all wrong, he has ruined many peoples lives. He has left many people jobless and hurt. I hate New Life church and I am glad that God freed me from that place.

Repost: VP Medical Shocker – Cheney Secretly Underwent Cardiectomy in 2006

Jon Ponder
In light of news yesterday that Vice Pres. Cheney has been diagnosed with deep vein thrombosis, or DVT, commonly known as a blod clot, we are republishing this story about his radical cardiectomy from January 2006. — Eds

Useless organ removed: According to an unidentified source at George Washington University Hospital, Vice Pres. Dick Cheney secretly underwent a radical cardiectomy Monday night. The source said the surgery began about 3:20 AM and took about 50 minutes to perform.

“It was determined that the patient had no more use for the organ,” said the source, who witnessed the removal of the vice president’s heart. “He had not used it in a long, long time. Plus, he needed to lose a little weight.”

The hospital staff member – who declined to be identified due to fear of retaliation – also took a photo of the heart (shown above) which was described as “resembling a lump of coal.”

A spokesman for the hospital, Dr. Raji Guphta, refused to comment on any medical attention given the vice president except to confirm what had been reported earlier – that Cheney experienced shortness of breath and was given an EKG at about 3:00 AM.

However, when asked if a human being can live without a heart, Dr. Guphta replied, “No.”

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity citing “fear for the lives of my children,” would neither confirm nor deny that Cheney had his heart removed.

House Subpoenas Two More Fired U.S. Attorneys for Hearings Today

Jon Ponder

The House Judiciary Committee will now hear from two more fired U.S. Attorneys at its hearings today into the mass firing of prosecutors by the Bush administration in December. However, it is unclear how cooperative the fired prosecutors will be since all of them are Republicans.

The new witnesses, Daniel G. Bogden of Nevada and Paul K. Charlton of Arizona join David Iglesias of New Mexico, Carol Lam of San Diego, John McKay of Seattle, and H.E. “Bud” Cummins of Little Rock, Ark.

Iglesias has charged that two senior Republicans from New Mexico, Sen. Pete Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson, tried to influence an ongoing investigation and then had him fired because he would not cooperate with them.

New Governor: Dump “Darkeys” and Faux Florida State Song

Trish

Among the many controversies (and we’ll get to some in later posts) that Florida’s new kinder, gentler Republican-lite governor, Charlie Crist, has brought about is whether to change the state song. Even those of us who never really knew we had a state song can guess what it might be. That’s right, Stephen Foster’s classic, “Old Folks at Home,” popularly known as “Way Down Upon the Suwannee River.”

Pennsylvanian Stephen Foster never set foot in Florida, and his song wasn’t even about Florida until Foster realized that “Swanee” sounded better than “Peedee,” the river in South Carolina he originally sought to memorialize

It all started when Crist — who can’t pass a day without being compared to California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger for his “populist,” centrist, two-month-old leadership — decided to forgo the playing of the state song during his inauguration ceremony. No one seemed to miss it at the time, what with all the other festivities, but later Crist was asked to explain the omission.

”There are lyrics in it that are, in the opinion of some, a derogatory reference to some time in our historical past that involves slavery,” Crist said. ”I can’t condone it.”

Since he said that, people like me who know the first couple of lines and then hum, have been wondering what the actual lyrics are, and how this got to be Florida’s state song. What the research turns up is fascinating.

For starters, Pennsylvanian Stephen Foster never set foot in Florida, and his song wasn’t even about Florida until Foster realized that “Swanee,” as he spelled it, sounded better than “Peedee,” the river in South Carolina he originally sought to memorialize.

Wait, it gets better. Foster wrote the song in 1851 for E.P. Christy and his traveling show, “Christy’s Minstrels.” It sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and by the 1880s, was credited with starting Florida’s tourist industry. But a look at the lyrics is enough to make you recoil, or guffaw, or both. […]

Hawaiian Rep Calls Bush Emergency Iraq Budget “Baloney”

Trish

U.S. Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D — Hawaii), has given us talking points for when Republicans start claiming Democrats are the bad guys by refusing to keep up Bush’s sham emergency funding of his wars of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan. Abercromie is chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces, and he’s followed the money trail.

Some of the so-called emergency replacement items in the 2007 request won’t even be available until 2010 or later

The Bush administration has asked Congress to approve $93.4 billion in emergency funding for Iraq and Afghanistan for the rest of 2007 and another $141.7 billion for next year. This, on top of a proposed 2008 defense budget of $481.4 billion.

Please note that the two supplemental appropriations requests are termed “emergency,” which ought to mean unexpected or unpredictable costs. But the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been funded through emergency spending requests since they began. …

Why is a supplemental request the budget vehicle of choice? Because as an emergency measure, it doesn’t count against the budget ceiling that Congress adopts to guide spending, and therefore isn’t figured into government estimates of our annual budget deficit. So, for the last four years, these emergency spending bills have helped President Bush obscure the true cost of the war.

As “emergency” legislation, these supplemental requests don’t get the same scrutiny as regular annual appropriation bills. In fact, for the last five years, there’s been heavy pressure from the administration and the Republican majority in Congress to approve them quickly and without argument. Those who have opposed, or even questioned, any part have been accused of “not supporting our troops.”

The Bush administration is already saying that if it doesn’t get everything it wants — or if Congress adds requirements for troop readiness or demands for protective equipment — our men and women in combat will run out of bullets or be left stranded in the desert.

Baloney.

[…]

PBS to Air Inconvenient Truths About Mormons — and Romney

Trish

PBS is working on a two-part special on Mormons, set to air April 30 and May 1. The Boston Globe’s Alex Beam says it could hurt Republican presidential candidate Gov. Mitt Romney, since the less Joe Sixpack knows about the tenets of the cult (oops, I said the C-word), the better.

“PBS claims it has 75 million viewers a week…It’s bad math for the Mittster”

The Salt Lake City-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormons call themselves, cooperated with “The American Experience ” and “Frontline, ” the show’s co-producers. [Filmmaker Helen] Whitney in turn pays the church the compliment of taking its faith very seriously indeed. The positives are there for all to see: the Mormons’ triumph over persecution in mid-century America; the dramatic “exodus” from Illinois to Utah, the “country no one else wanted,” according to Wallace Stegner, a great admirer of the Mormon pioneers; the devotion to family and community.

But also on view are doctrines and practices that most Americans would view as strange…

“The Mormons” even tackles the ultimate red herring, “celestial marriage,” Joseph Smith’s term for polygamy…”The Mormons” estimates that 30,000 to 60,000 fundamentalist believers practice polygamy. Whitney has footage of 11 happy children passing plates around the dinner table, with three mothers and a father in attendance. Heather has three Mommies! Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

Michael Sullivan, “Frontline” executive producer for special projects, calls the project “respectful but frank. We’re not out to get the Mormons.” He says “there is a small section on Romney” in the portion of the documentary that is still being edited. Romney declined to be interviewed for the show.

What does it all mean? PBS claims it has 75 million viewers a week. Let’s say one-tenth — no, one-twentieth — of that audience watches “The Mormons.” That’s almost 4 million men and women who will know more about the Mormon faith than Romney might wish them to know. It’s bad math for the Mittster.