December, 2005 "If America Left Iraq -- The case for cutting and running" by Nir Rosen

2.15.2006 Maureen Dowd:

A reporter, surprised, pressed Mr. McClellan: "The vice president did not call the president to tell him he was the shooter?"

Usually when there's a White House cover-up, the president's in on it.

The American Bar Association denounced President Bush's warrantless domestic surveillance program Monday, accusing him of exceeding his powers under the Constitution.
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The ABA has urged Congress to affirm that when it authorized Bush to go to war, it did not intend to endorse warrantless spying.

The group also called on Congress to investigate the president's program to determine its legality, the extent of telephone and e-mail spying, and whether information obtained through the program was used in legal proceedings.

2.12.2006 Jane Hamsher:

So Dick Durbin had to bite his tongue and watch the country go to war on what he knew to be a steaming pile bullshit because the NIE was classified and he couldn't speak about the INR dissent. The public remained blissfully ignorant and thousands died.

But Cheney told Scooter he could fling it around like a dirty napkin while he and Judy were buttering each other's toast at the St. Regis for no other purpose than perpetuating a public, ass-covering hoax.

2.12.2006 "The Raid..." Riverbend

T. was playing idly with her mobile phone, trying to send a message to a friend. "Hey- there's no coverage here… is it just my phone?" She asked. J. and I both took out our phones and checked, "Mine isn't working either…" J. answered, shaking her head. They both turned to me and I told them that I couldn't get a signal either. J. suddenly looked alert and made a sort of "Uh-oh" sound as she remembered something. "R.- will you check the telephone next to you?" I picked up the ordinary telephone next to me and held my breath, waiting for a dial tone. Nothing.

"There's no dial tone… but there was one earlier today- I was online…"

J. frowned and turned down the radio. "The last time this happened," she said, "the area was raided."
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It's almost funny- only a month ago, we were watching a commercial on some Arabic satellite channel- Arabiya perhaps. They were showing a commercial for Iraqi security forces and giving a list of numbers Iraqis were supposed to dial in the case of a terrorist attack… You call THIS number if you need the police to protect you from burglars or abductors… You call THAT number if you need the National Guard or special forces to protect you from terrorists… But…

Who do you call to protect you from the New Iraq's security forces?

2.12.2006 NYT OP ED: The Trust Gap

According to Mr. Gonzales, the administration can be relied upon to police itself and hold the line between national security and civil liberties on its own. Set aside the rather huge problem that our democracy doesn't work that way. It's not clear that this administration knows where the line is, much less that it is capable of defending it. Mr. Gonzales's own dedication to the truth is in considerable doubt. In sworn testimony at his confirmation hearing last year, he dismissed as "hypothetical" a question about whether he believed the president had the authority to conduct warrantless surveillance. In fact, Mr. Gonzales knew Mr. Bush was doing just that, and had signed off on it as White House counsel.

The White House did not fully engage the president or "substantiate, analyze and act on the information at its disposal," failing to confirm the collapse of New Orleans's levee system on Aug. 29, the day of Katrina's landfall, which led to catastrophic flooding of the city of 500,000 people.

I like the bit about the White House's failure to "fully engage the president." The sort of strong leader Bush's supporters imagine him to be does not need to be "engaged" by his staff in the face of a national catastrophe. He engages all by himself, as soon as the Director of the National Weather Service tells him what's coming. And once engaged, he uses all the power he has to make sure that things are done right. If things aren't moving fast enough, he makes them move. If lines of command are confused, he clarifies them. If people are not getting results, he rides herd on them until they do.

... As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, until this year budget documents contained a standard table titled "Impact of Budget Policy," which summarized the effects of the administration's tax and spending proposals on future outlays and revenues. But this year, that table is missing. So you have to do some detective work to figure out what's really going on.

Now, the administration has proposed spending cuts that are both cruel and implausible. For example, administration computer printouts obtained by the center show that the budget calls for a 13 percent cut in spending on veterans' health care, adjusted for inflation, over the next five years.

The lawmaker, Representative Heather A. Wilson of New Mexico, chairwoman of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence, said in an interview that she had "serious concerns" about the surveillance program. By withholding information about its operations from many lawmakers, she said, the administration has deepened her apprehension about whom the agency is monitoring and why.
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Ms. Wilson, who was a National Security Council aide in the administration of President Bush's father, is the first Republican on either the House's Intelligence Committee or the Senate's to call for a full Congressional investigation into the program, in which the N.S.A. has been eavesdropping without warrants on the international communications of people inside the United States believed to have links with terrorists.

FRESH IDEA FOR NY TIMES 'REPORTERS'/EDITORS... Try reporting facts instead of White House spin. The fact of this matter is that unless you all know something that neither the Congress nor the Country seems to know, you have no idea whether the illegal warrantless NSA domestic spying program is eavesdropping on people "believed to have links with terrorists."

We realize the White House would like you to report it that way -- and though you scored many points with them doing exactly that prior to the War in Iraq, we'd have hoped you'd have learned a lesson by now. Apparently you haven't.

The fact that nobody outside of the Administration has any idea who is being tapped is just one of the reasons Ms. Wilson is calling for a full investigation. Had you read your own article, you might have understood that.

Last year, even though Bush talked endlessly about the supposed joys of private accounts, he never proposed a specific plan to Congress and never put privatization costs in the budget. But this year, with no fanfare whatsoever, Bush stuck a big Social Security privatization plan in the federal budget proposal, which he sent to Congress on Monday.

• (1) The President is now claiming, and is aggressively exercising, the right to use any and all war powers against American citizens even within the United States, and he insists that neither Congress nor the courts can do anything to stop him or even restrict him.
• (2) This scandal is not about liberalism or conservatism, but is about core American political values.
• (3) Do we want to radically change the way our Government works for the next several decades all because of Al Qaeda?

2.8.2006 Robert Scheer:

In order to pay for the money pit that is Iraq, the Bush budget demands draconian cuts in 141 domestic programs, led by a $36 billion cut in Medicare spending for the elderly over the next five years. This from a president re-elected after promising to expand rather than curtail health-care services to seniors.

Many of the other proposed cuts are equally obscene, such as the termination of $1 billion in child-care funds over five years, and the complete elimination of the Commodity Supplemental Food Program that provides food assistance to low-income seniors, needy pregnant women and children.

2.7.2006 "Trial of the True Believers"By Onnesha Roychoudhuri, AlterNet. via True Blue Liberal "The mindset that led Enron to defraud millions of people is the same that created the Bush administration's legal quagmires."

The alternate reality that Skilling and Lay had so successfully fabricated, by keeping it sealed off from the public and using every loophole to keep afloat, collapsed as soon as the public started asking questions. And while the illegitimacy of the company's deals revealed Enron to be a house of cards, the repercussions from its collapse -- high energy prices, the loss of jobs and retirement funds -- remain a stark reminder of the very real consequences of allowing those with a fervent ideology access to unchecked power. For those so driven, facts become secondary, mere details to be fabricated in order to further furnish their version of reality.
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By seeking out loopholes in laws in order to fit their agenda, and deluding the public (and possibly themselves) into thinking that these things were done in public interest, both Enron and the Bush administration have proven masters of generating alternate realities. They are symbols of a new paradigm wherein claims of following the specific letter of the law are accompanied by an incredible contempt for the substance of it.

Many of those following the Enron trial have argued that this case will set a precedent for what will and will not be tolerated in the business world. But the implications of the trial stretch much further. This trial is less about the laws that Skilling and Lay broke and more to do with whether or not supposedly "good intentions" and a deliberately skewed sense of reality can excuse unconscionable actions.

As I see it, both the decision to commission and publish the cartoons and the riots that followed simply defy comprehension not because one couldn't predict the consequences but because one could, with depressing ease. Unless they come to their senses, the white do-gooders are gonna get us all killed in their crusades. And the recipients of all this do-gooding are gonna do the exact same thing when their fury at the do-gooders is cynically stoked and channelled into senseless destructiveness and murder.

In short, no more cartoon riots. No more cartoon editors. No more cartoon evil cavemen. And no more cartoon American administrations. It's time not to listen to what our gut says, it's time to give it some alka-seltzer and get it to shut up so we can think.

( approximately) "But how do we know that the next president, he or she, won't be so scrupulous, won't get involved in data mining?" Gonzales asked for a short recess.

Of course Gonzales begins his Opening Statement by quoting Osama bin Laden and Zawahri. We used to quote Madison, Jefferson and Lincoln to decide what the principles of our Government are going to be. Now we quote Al Qaeda. The Administration wants Al Qaeda and its speeches to dictate the type of Government we have. It is the centerpiece of everything they do and say.

One smart anthropologist reinforcing the idea that "mirroring" ­ assuming other cultures think like us ­ doesn't work would be a lot more helpful than all of the discredited intelligence agencies that are costing $30 billion a year to miss everything from the breakup of the Soviet Union to 9/11 to no W.M.D. to Osama's hiding place to the Hamas victory.
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But, hey, how could the Bushies have known that occupying a Middle East country ­ and flipping the balance of power from one sect to another ­ without enough troops to secure it could go wrong? Who on earth could predict the inevitable?

NEW YORK - A federal judge blasted former Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman on Thursday for reassuring New Yorkers soon after the Sept. 11 attacks that it was safe to return to their homes and offices while toxic dust was polluting the neighborhood.

U.S. District Judge Deborah A. Batts refused to grant Whitman immunity against a class-action lawsuit brought in 2004 by residents, students and workers in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn who said they were exposed to hazardous materials from the destruction of the World Trade Center.

"No reasonable person would have thought that telling thousands of people that it was safe to return to lower Manhattan, while knowing that such return could pose long-term health risks and other dire consequences, was conduct sanctioned by our laws," the judge said.
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Quoting a ruling in an earlier case, the judge said a public official cannot be held personally liable for putting the public in harm's way unless the conduct was so egregious as "to shock the contemporary conscience." Given her role in protecting the health and environment for Americans, Whitman's reassurances after Sept. 11 were "without question conscience-shocking," Batts said.

A former U.S. occupation official in Iraq pleaded guilty Thursday to conspiring to steal more than $2 million and rigging bids on $8.6 million in reconstruction contracts.
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Bloom, a U.S. citizen who lived in Romania for many years, and five U.S. Army Reserve officials have been implicated with Stein in the theft and kickback scheme, according to court records.
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Because he was convicted of fraud in 1996, Stein was a felon and could not buy weapons in the United States. Instead, he said he had others buy guns in Illinois, Minnesota, North Carolina and Virginia.

2.1.2006 "As Alito takes Supreme Court seat, Ohio GOP guts election protection"

2.1.2006 Glenn Greenwald:

In fact, as Cindy Sheehan was being dragged out of the Royal Speech, His Majesty was regaling us with the importance of respecting civil debate, the virtues of diversity and freedom, and the need to protect minority views. It's as if there was some universal force that wanted to provide the most compelling demonstration possible of how disingenuous his speech was, and came up with the idea of having Cindy Sheehan dragged out of the hall for doing nothing other than wearing a t-shirt politely expressing criticism of Bush's war.
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As the Bynum court explained: "Believing that the Capitol Police needed guidance in determining what behavior constitutes a 'demonstration,' the United States Capitol Police Board issued a regulation that interprets 'demonstration activity,'" and that regulation specifically provides that it "does not include merely wearing Tee shirts, buttons or other similar articles of apparel that convey a message. Traffic Regulations for the Capitol Grounds, § 158" (emphasis added).