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From The Bhc at Shockfront:
1) Invade their country - check
2) Kill their leaders - check
3) Convert them to Christianity - not quite check, but working on it.
The post also goes covers the thousands of Iraqis that took to the streets to protest "enduring" American bases. Apparently the Iraqis are not so gung ho about us Americans staying for a 100 years.
From the NY Times:
Fifty-four former state attorneys general filed a brief Friday supporting the appeal of former Gov. Don Siegelman of Alabama, convicted two years ago on bribery and corruption charges in a prosecution depicted by his supporters as politically motivated.
Robert Abrams, a former New York attorney general and an author of the brief, said the document was unprecedented in bringing together a large number of former top state judicial officers, mostly Democrats but also some Republicans. Mr. Abrams said it reflected “strong feelings” that an injustice had been done to Mr. Siegelman, a Democrat who was freed on bond from a federal prison in March after serving nine months...
“This number is extraordinary,” said Mr. Abrams, a Democrat who once headed a national association of state attorneys general. “It reflects strong feelings that there should not be inappropriate inhibitions on people’s rights to participate in the political process. The country’s got to guard against politically inspired prosecutions.”
Jeffrey A. Modisett, a former Indiana attorney general and a Democrat, said of the prosecution: “I think it’s deeply, deeply troubling, and I’m very saddened to say it’s indicative of the way too many investigations and prosecutions have taken place under this administration.”
Famed Charles Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi says George W. Bush should be prosecuted for murder.
"The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder" (Vincent Bugliosi)
Please. Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay explain at McClatchy:
Here's what happened, based entirely on our own reporting and publicly available documents:
* The Bush administration was gunning for Iraq within days of the 9/11 attacks, dispatching a former CIA director, on a flight authorized by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, to find evidence for a bizarre theory that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. (Note: See also Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill on this point).
* Bush decided by February 2002, at the latest, that he was going to remove Saddam by hook or by crook. (Yes, we reported that at the time).
* White House officials, led by Dick Cheney, began making the case for war in August 2002, in speeches and reports that not only were wrong, but also went well beyond what the available intelligence said at that time, and contained outright fantasies and falsehoods. Indeed, some of that material was never vetted with the intelligence agencies before it was peddled to the public.
* Dissenters, or even those who voiced worry about where the policy was going, were ignored, excluded or punished. (Note: See Gen. Eric Shinseki, Paul O'Neill, Joseph Wilson and all of the State Department 's Arab specialists and much of its intelligence bureau).
* The Bush administration didn't even want to produce the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs that's justly received so much criticism since. The White House thought it was unneeded. It actually was demanded by Congress and slapped together in a matter of weeks before the congressional votes to authorize war on Iraq.
* The October 2002 NIE was flawed, no doubt. But it contained dissents questioning the extent of Saddam's WMD programs, dissents that were buried in the report. Doubts and dissents were then stripped from the publicly released, unclassified version of the NIE.
* The core of the administration's case for war was not just that Saddam was developing WMDs, but also that, unchecked, he might give them to terrorists to attack the United States. Remember smoking guns and mushroom clouds? Inconveniently, the CIA had determined just theopposite: Saddam would attack the United States only if he concluded a U.S. attack on him was unavoidable. He'd give WMD to Islamist terrorists only "as a last chance to exact revenge."
* The Bush administration relied heavily on an Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi, who had been found to be untrustworthy by the State Department and the CIA. Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress were given millions, and produced "defectors" whose tales of WMD sites and terrorist training were false, fanciful and bogus. But the information was fed directly to senior officials and included in official White Housedocuments.
* The same INC-supplied "intelligence" used in the White House propaganda effort (you got that bit right, Scott) also was fed to dozens of U.S. and foreign news organizations.
* It all culminated in a speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003 making the case against Saddam. Virtually every major allegation Powell made turned out later to be wrong. It would have been even worse had not Powell and his team thrown out even more shaky "intelligence" that Cheney's office repeatedly tried to stuff into the speech.
* The Bush administration tried to link Saddam to al Qaida and, by implication, to the 9/11 attacks. Officials repeatedly pushed the CIA for information on such links, and a separate intel shopwas set up under Defense Under Secretary Douglas Feith to find "proof" of such ties. Neither the CIA nor anyone else ever found anything resembling an operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaida.
* An exhaustive review of Saddam Hussein's regime's own documents,released in March 2008, found no operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaida.
* The Bush administration failed to plan for the rebuilding of postwar Iraq, as we were perhaps the first to report. The White House ignored stacks of intelligence reports, some now available in partially unclassified form, warning before the war about the possibilities for insurgency, ethnic warfare, social chaos and the like.
We could go on, but the rest, as they say, is history.
That's what happened.
Former prosecutors challenge White House immunity claim...
Twenty former U.S. attorneys, both Republicans and Democrats, urged a federal judge Thursday to intervene in a constitutional battle over whether two White House officials should be forced to testify before Congress about the firings of nine U.S. attorneys.
The former top prosecutors, including two who served under President Bush, argue in court papers that the judge should reject the Bush administration's assertion of blanket immunity for presidential chief of staff Joshua Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers in the congressional investigation.
Democrats in the House of Representatives say they were forced to sue in March, more than a year after they launched the probe, because the administration has refused to allow Miers and Bolten to provide crucial information about the reasons the prosecutors were fired. The case also could determine how former presidential adviser Karl Rove responds to a subpoena in a related congressional investigation.
The lawsuit accuses administration officials of injecting partisan considerations into the firing decisions and making "questionable or outright false statements" in subsequent explanations to Congress.
"In Justice: Inside the Scandal That Rocked the Bush Administration" (David Iglesias)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Now Flux has built his own media bus that runs on waste vegetable oil and is equipped with satellite internet access. He is touring the country to get to all the big political events including the Democratic and Republican conventions. He will also be there if there is another Katrina style catastrophe.
In any case, he is now looking for two things: (1) journalists who want to come aboard for a while, and (2) some dollars to offset his internet costs. Should you want to support this type of independent journalism go here.
Betsy Sallkind is funny. Here she does a short political standup routine followed by her ridiculously hilarious squirrel impression.
Created by and starring Jerry O'Connell and Brandon Johnson. My only question is how in the hell can these guys put in all the time and effort into making this and not know how to spell Hillary.
The more I see and hear Missouri congressional candidate Byron DeLear in action the more impressed I become. Today he posted a "Talk Nation" radio interview (with transcript) at Daily Kos that is hella good. Listen to it, read it and please help spread the word about DeLear.
It would be a good thing to get rid of DeLear's warmongering Bush crony opponent Todd Akin. And it would be a GREAT thing to replace Akin with the progressive DeLear.
Also see my brief interview with DeLear and a conversation I videotaped with DeLear and Gore Vidal.
Mark Impomeni is a blogger/propagandist at AOL's “Political Machine” and at RedState.com. You can read the back story to this video at this post and read my back and forth with Impomeni at this article he wrote about Karl Rove's appearance on This Week with George Stephanopoulos.
The gist of the story is that despite Karl Rove repeatedly refusing to deny involvement in the Don Siegelman prosecution to Stephanopoulos, Impomeni headlined his story about the interview, “Rove Denies Tampering With Investigation”. This is precisely the type of cover Rove was looking for from the media despite his careful language never denying anything.
When confronted with many examples of headlines opposite to his own, Impomeni wrote: “If this were any other figure but Rove, the media would be reporting the comments exactly as I am”. Thus, Impomeni thinks himself the only one with any journalistic integrity. But it gets worse:
“Raw Story, Josh Marshall, The Carpetbagger Report, Mother Jones, Huffington Post, News Corpse, Veracifier, and Crooks and Liars at a minimum are hardly bastions of independent and unbiased journalism. I personally would also question MSNBC and Dan Abrams.”Hence the video labeling Mark Impomeni “Today's Worst Person In The World”.
Technorati Tags: Don Siegelman, Karl Rove, Mark Impomeni, Political Machine, AOL, RedState.com
Another double segment by Dan Abrams begins with House Judiciary Committee member Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL). Schultz says that Congress will pursue the case to the maximum extent possible in order to get Rove to testify. And when Abrams brings up the possibility of arrest, Schultz states:
"Well, if that's what it takes. We really cannot allow the co-equal branch of government, the legislative branch, to be trampled upon by the executive branch."
Abrams devotes the second segment to the issue of executive privilege. First fired US Attorney David Iglesias responds to Karl Rove's ridiculous notion about executive privilege stated on Sunday:
"This is America. We believe in the rule of law. You can't just ignore a subpoena. If a court or Congress gives you a subpoena you've got to show up and then claim the privilege. What Rove is saying, like Miers and Bolton before him, is that we can just ignore it. As somebody once famously said, there is no legal controlling authority for that."
But Georgetown University Law School professor, Paul Rothstein, sees it differently arguing (amazingly) that the President can claim executive privilege because (1) "Karl Rove is such a high advisor to the President", and (2) this is an inquiry into the President's control over the Justice Department" which "is in the executive branch which the President heads".
However, the Professor later goes on to state executive privilege would not be a barrier to getting Rove's testimony if real illegality could be shown, thus negating his two prong justification and proving he is full of it.
Abrams concludes the segment by stating, "Let's remember, Congress can deal with this in their own way, if they so choose. There is a little jail. a little holding cell in the bottom of the Congress."
Thank you Larry Beinhart for finally putting together a clear article for all to read about Gore's win and the massive coverup by the mainstream media led by the NY Times:
The New York Times: "STUDY OF DISPUTED FLORIDA BALLOTS FINDS JUSTICES DID NOT CAST THE DECIDING VOTE."
If you were still interested, after the headlines, and bothered to read the stories, it didn't get much better. I read it in the New York Times. Frankly, I missed the key paragraph, until I saw it pointed out in an article by Gore Vidal. I subsequently went back and read all the stories. The Times was the worst in terms of active misdirection. They spent the first three paragraphs supporting the headline and they explicitly stated that Bush would have won even with a statewide recount. Finally, in the fourth paragraph -- if you got that far -- was the statement quoted above:
"If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards, and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won, by a very narrow margin."
There it was. A very simple statement. Al Gore got more votes in Florida than George Bush. It is also very well buried. It had arcania about chads on both sides of it. Even so, as if in a panic to make sure that nobody might think that it mattered that Al Gore got more votes than George Bush, the Timesdismissed what the Consortium had spent a million dollars to find out: "While these are fascinating findings, they do not represent a real-world situation. There was no set of circumstances in the fevered days after the election that would have produced a hand recount of all 175,000 overvotes and undervotes." Even though that would seem to be a fairly obvious interpretation of the law and it is what was found when someone actually did sit down and count the votes.
PLEASE READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE!
"Wag the Dog: A Novel" (Larry Beinhart)
Last Thursday Keith Olbermann began an excellent conversation with George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley about Karl Rove being subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee by stating:
“Joe Wilson's dream of watching Karl Rove frog marched out of the White House in handcuffs is long since gone. But a new dream has been born tonight. What about a Turdblossom perp walk out of the front door of Fix news.”Later that night I asked Ambassador Joe Wilson to comment on Olbermann's statement and the Karl Rove subpoena. While Ambassador Wilson was unsure whether or not Congress will be able to get to Rove, he was certainly supportive of the effort:
“Whether they will actually be able to get to Karl I don't know. But it's great to keep the pressure on him. It forces him back on defense. It's amazing to me the extent to which these guys have operated with absolute impunity, absolute disregard for American law and American jurisprudence.”
Technorati Tags: Ambassador Joe Wilson, John Conyers, Karl Rove, Valerie Plame
