Tag: Scandals

Attorney Pay-Back Firing Goo Bound to Stick to White House

Trish

Damn good editorial in the Palm Beach Post on the Attorney General hearings, now set for Thursday.

The vice president, speaking on Face The Nation, pronounced the official White House spin: “This took place inside the Justice Department. The one who needs to answer to that and lay out on the record the specifics of what transpired is the attorney general.” But Mr. Cheney’s claim that “this took place inside the Justice Department” is ludicrous.

Cheney’s claim that “this took place inside the Justice Department” is ludicrous.

Even though hundreds of e-mails concerning the firings might be missing, enough exist to show that the White House was heavily involved…David C. Iglesias of New Mexico was fired after Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., complained to the White House about Mr. Iglesias’ failure to indict Democrats before last November’s elections. Before the firings were announced, Karl Rove assured the chairman of the New Mexico GOP that Mr. Iglesias “was gone.”

Not only does Mr. Gonzales have to claim that the White House didn’t play an improper role, he has to repeat the equally unbelievable claim that he didn’t play a central role – despite testimony to the contrary from his former chief of staff Kyle Sampson and Michael A. Battle, director of the office in charge of U.S. attorneys.

Even as Mr. Gonzales prepared last week for his testimony, another cover story was contradicted. Bush administration officials had claimed that no replacements for the attorneys had been chosen in advance. In fact, they had been. The White House wants to confine the scandal to Justice. But in all this, Alberto Gonzales clearly isn’t on his own.

The big question is, how much less approval can George Bush earn and still finish his term? We’re betting his ratings will go still lower, as even Republicans are repelled by his incompetence and deceit.

Virginia Tech: Most Deadly Shooting Attack in U.S. History

Jon Ponder

At least one gunman with a semi-automatic weapon went on a rampage at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg killing 31 people and wounding over a dozen more. It is the most deadly shooting attack in U.S. history. The killer is dead, possibly from a self-inflicted wound.

I just heard a former FBI agent on MSNBC call it a terrorist attack. This interesting because we are entering the season for terrorism in the United States. Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City on April 19. He chose that particular date because it was the anniversary of the fire at the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Texas, in 1993, in which 81 people died.

Adolph Hitler’s birthday on April 20 also tends to bring out the lunies on the right, including the high school boys who shot and killed 13 of their classmates and themselves at Columbine High School on Hitler’s birthday in 1999.

Remind me again why the Second Amendment guarantees people the right to buy these weapons of war?

Update: On CNN, a witness described the shooter as an Asian male who was wearing some sort of brown uniform.

Update 2: Keith Olbermann just reported that the shooter is a 24 year old Chinese national.

GOP Lawyers Argue President’s First Amendment Rights Supercede Protestors’

Jon Ponder

Denver three: After GOP goons threw three people out of a 2005 taypayer-funded presidential event in Denver because they appeared to be liberals — under their coats, they wore anti-Bush T-shirts and one of them had an antiwar bumpersticker on her car.

A lawyer for the Denver Three said if the government is allowed to exclude people based on their views “it guts the First Amendment.”

The “Denver Three” sued, claiming the government violated their First Amendment rights. Now lawyers for Bush’s goons are arguing that the president’s right to free speech is more important than the rights of mere citizens:

“The president’s right to control his own message includes the right to exclude people expressing discordant viewpoints from the audience,” states the brief, filed by attorneys Sean Gallagher, Dugan Bliss and others representing [Michael] Casper and [Jay] Klinkerman.

Gallagher said the White House was not involved in developing this strategy.

A lawyer for the Denver Three said if the government is allowed to exclude people based on their views “it guts the First Amendment.”

Bush Claims Secret Emails Have Been Erased

Jon Ponder

Yesterday, after the White House announced that emails sent by Karl Rove and others on its secret off-site email system had been erased, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, and chair of the Judiciary Committee said this:

“They say they have not been preserved. I don’t believe that!” Leahy shouted from the Senate floor as the dispute over the firing of federal prosecutors continued at a high pitch. “That’s like saying the dog ate my homework. It doesn’t work that way.”

“You can’t erase e-mails, not today. They’ve gone through too many servers,” said Leahy, D-Vt. “Those e-mails are there; they just don’t want to produce them. We’ll subpoena them if necessary.”

It sometimes surprises computer users to learn that it is very difficult to erase data from hard drives. When a file is deleted, it is actually simply renamed. Typically, the first couple of letters in the filename are replaced with wild card characters, such as “$_.” Recovering the missing file can be as simple as changing the name back to what it was originally.

The only certain way to erase data is to wipe the disk clean by reformating it, for example. Knowing this White House, I would suspect that the drives that once held Rove’s emails are all clean as a whistle by now.

Rudy Flubs Question on Terri Schiavo

Jon Ponder

It appears Rudy Giuliani can’t remember whether he was in favor of torturing a comatose woman by keeping her on life support for years after her brain had turned to mush:

“Can I ask you about Terri Schiavo?” a reporter asked at a press availability on April 4. “Did you support the congressional intervention to—”

At this point Mr. Giuliani cut in, according to a transcript provided by his campaign: “I believe I did. I don’t, I, it’s a while ago and I think I said that I thought every effort should be made to keep her alive. I don’t know that I supported the, the whole thing to the very end, but I am not sure now.”

Pushed by the reporter for a more specific (and coherent) answer about whether he thought the Schiavo intervention was appropriate, Mr. Giuliani said, “I thought it was appropriate to make every effort to give her a chance to stay alive.”

Lantos Confirms That Bush Pressured Olmert to Lie about Pelosi’s Syria Mission

Jon Ponder

As I speculated here, now confirmed:

Josh Marshall reports something I surmised almost from the beginning of the flap over whether or not Nancy Pelosi carried a message from Israel to Syria saying the former wanted peace talks with the latter. As soon as Pelosi made the diplomatic demarche public, Olmert denied it had ever existed. But no less an Israel hawk than Tom Lantos not only confirms that Pelosi delivered exactly the message conveyed to her by Olmert in Jerusalem, he also lays blame for the Olmert denial squarely at the feet of the White House.

DeLay: My Ouster Was ‘Same Process’ as Hitler Killing 6 Million Jews

Jon Ponder

Tom DeLay has a book out in which his ghost writer compared liberals to Hitler, He elucidated this point on David Goodman’s radio show yesterday:

DELAY: I am so outraged by this whole criminalization of politics. It’s not good enough to defeat somebody politically. It’s not even good enough to vilify somebody publicly. They have to carpet bomb you with lies and made up scandals and false charges and indicting you on laws that don’t exist. … It’s the same thing as I say in my book, that the Nazis used. When you use the big lie in order to gain and maintain power, it is immoral and it is outrageous…

It’s the same process. It’s the same criminalization of politics. it’s the same oppression of people. It’s the same destroy people in order to gain power. It may be six million Jews. it may be indicting somebody on laws that don’t exist. But, it’s the same philosophy and it’s the same world view.

Abu in Trouble: Gonzales Failing Prep for Testimony

Jon Ponder

“He’s not ready,” Tasia Scolinos, Gonzales’s public-affairs chief.

Last week, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales cleared his calendar for nearly two weeks in order to memorize answers to questions he might be asked under oath when he testifies before Congress on April 17.

The problem is, DOJ lawyers have forbidden Gonzales to have any contact with other witnesses, and since everyone close to him is on the witness list, he’s having a hard time getting his story straight.

The challenge facing Abu, one of Pres. George Bush’s most loyal flying monkeys, of course, is that he can’t tell the truth under oath without either perjuring himself or implicating flying monkeys higher up in the food chain, including Karl Rove and Bush’s former secretary, Harriet Miers, and maybe the president himself, in the scandal around the firing of U.S. attorneys late last year:

[Even] his own closest advisers are nervous about whether he is up to the task. At a recent “prep” for a prospective Sunday talk-show interview, Gonzales’s performance was so poor that top aides scrapped any live appearances. During the March 23 session in the A.G.’s conference room, Gonzales was grilled by a team of top aides and [GOP bigwigs] about what he knew about the plan to fire seven U.S. attorneys last fall. But Gonzales kept contradicting himself and “getting his timeline confused,” said one participant … His advisers finally got “exasperated” with him, the source added. “He’s not ready,” Tasia Scolinos, Gonzales’s public-affairs chief, told the A.G.’s top aides after the session was over…

The problem is, DOJ lawyers have forbidden Gonzales to have any contact with other witnesses, and since everyone close to him is on the witness list, he’s having a hard time getting his story straight.

While the attorney general studies his lines 24/7, and his underlings are all legally constrained from talking with him or each other (presumably) the Dept. of Justice is leaderless and rudderless.

Imus and the Media Whores

Jon Ponder

Digby:

I hear his disgusting show and hear them on it, kissing up to him like he’s some sort of oracle instead of a spoiled, petulant bully with an incoherent worldview. And I also listen to their complaints about the vituperation on the internet, how the bloggers — especially the “angry left” — are horrible people who treat them disrespectfully. And I have to laugh because I know that Don Imus can call them and their colleagues twits and pussies in Vanity Fair and they come back licking his boots, begging for more. And we know why.

They have earned their reputation — even some of the good ones, the ones who write things I like. When you sell your personal integrity for money to a racist scumbag like Don Imus, you have to expect that people are not going to treat you with a lot of respect.

Don Imus has been behaving badly and apologizing for it for many, many years. I expect he will continue to do so once he’s finished with his two week vacation. And all of these writers will once again make pilgrimages to his show and pledge fealty to him in order to sell books. Because, unlike those great basketball players he maligned so casually — they really are whores.

Don Imus is an Okie from Riverside, Calif.