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The Courage to Be Less Wealthy

As a nation we urgently need to develop a disdain for people who are transfixed on wealth. We should never allow them to take public office -- never again. Sure, they can be wealthy, but obsessed with becoming ever more so or feathering the nests of their wealthy friends should exclude them from an ounce of our respect. We should honor, instead, people who have the courage to be less wealthy in order to assure that others do not suffer or who do so in order to find time to make positive contributions or even to be with their families. The CEO who refuses to take a huge salary when people at his company are being laid off or tolerating reduced salaries and the shareholders (wherever they are) who stand up and say, "Money isn't the only issue here." They should be the people we want to meet, the ones we long to listen to and the ones who we admire.

Portrait of The Racist As A Young Man

Ezra points to this fascinating profile of George Allen in the New Republic by Ryan Lizza. You really have to read it to believe it.
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It's hard to believe that they can't find a southern Republican who isn't a sadistic idiot to run for president, but I'm beginning to think that's the real problem. Guys like Bush and Allen are the best they can do. Clearly, all the smart southerners are Democrats.

According to one source close to the case, Rove is providing information on deleted emails, erased hard drives and other types of obstruction by staff and other officials in the Vice President's office. Pentagon sources close to Rove confirmed this account.

I listened to that pompous self-righteous blowhard Bill Bennett saying the other day that several reporters who won Pulitzers this year should be in jail. I guess the responsibility of being the Virtue Czar has finally driven Bennett daffy. If he can’t see that the problem is an administration that runs torture programs, gulags and illegal domestic spying programs, rather than reporters who find out about these programs and print the truth, then I say it’s time for a new Virtue Czar.

Jack Anderson was right: The people in government work for us. What they do is our responsibility because they do it in our name and with our money—that’s why we have a right to know about it.

The other day I heard a young man say, “I have an issue with torture.” Turns out he was offended by some scenes in a movie he’d been to. I have an issue with torture, too. I get upset when it’s real and it’s my country doing it. I guess I wouldn’t make a good Virtue Czar.

But protecting national security isn’t the purpose of investigating leakers who have exposed the scandalous underside of the Bush administration. Those investigations are meant to intimidate whistleblowers, dissidents and skeptical reporters—and to make sure we don’t know anything the White House doesn’t want us to know.

The Bush administration's promise that Iraq's reconstruction could be paid for with the country's own oil revenues was one of the many false assertions and assurances that ushered in the invasion. But unlike the predictions of weapons of mass destruction and streets filled with cheering Iraqis, this claim might have been at least partly true — if the administration had more carefully supervised the lucrative no-bid oil industry repair contract it awarded to a subsidiary of Halliburton, the firm formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney.
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How this costly and unnecessary failure came about was spelled out by James Glanz in a compelling investigative report in Tuesday's Times. He described the easily avoidable engineering errors that delayed the reopening of the crucial Fatah pipeline link while the contracted funds ran out and the security situation for reconstruction workers deteriorated drastically. It is instructive to recall the circumstances in which Halliburton was awarded this contract just prior to the Iraq invasion — with no competitive bidding. Later, when Democrats in Congress began raising questions, the Pentagon pointed to Halliburton's special expertise in oil-field management and its long experience working under Army Corps of Engineers' supervision.

BRUSSELS, Belgium - The CIA has conducted more than 1,000 clandestine flights in Europe since 2001, and some of them secretly took away terror suspects to countries where they could face torture, European Union lawmakers said Wednesday.

The Oilmen in the Oval, incompetent in so many ways, have brilliantly achieved one of their main objectives: boosting the fortunes of the oil industry and the people who run it.
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The U.S. could have begun developing alternative fuels 30 years ago if Dick Cheney hadn't helped scuttle an ambitious plan in the Ford administration.

By the time these guys get gas from cooking grease, global warming will have us cooked.

China and California have a lot to talk about. California's air pollution is increasingly made in China, and China's environmental solutions are increasingly made in California.

If we as citizens start out with an understanding that these people up there - the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all those institutions pretending to be "checks and balances" - do not have our interests at heart, we are on a course towards the truth. Not to know that is to make us helpless before determined liars.

4.25.2006 "Potheads and Sudafed" by JOHN TIERNEY

The Sudafed law gives you a preview of what's in store if Representative Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican, succeeds in giving the D.E.A. a role in deciding which new drugs get approved. So far, despite a temporary success last year, he hasn't been able to impose this policy, but the F.D.A.'s biggest fear is that Congress will let the drug police veto new medications. In that case, who would ever develop a better painkiller? The benefits to patients would never outweigh the potential inconvenience to the police.

4.24.2006 Glenn Greenwald:

If you say to a Bush follower - "we shouldn't be imprisoning people without trials and charges" or "we shouldn't be torturing people in secret gulags" or "the government shouldn't be eavesdropping on people without warrants" -- their answer will always be the same: these are very bad people to whom these things are being done -- they are "enemy combatants" -- and so none of it matters. In their mind, an accusation from the administration is tantamount to proof of guilt, a claim from George Bush of someone's status as a Terrorist equal to a conviction in a court of law. We place blind faith in our government and need no safeguards because what the Leader says is true and what he does is right. The minute he labels someone an "enemy combatant" -- without any review of any kind -- that person relinquishes all legal rights and anything is fair game.

The Illinois General Assembly is about to rock the nation. Members of state legislatures are normally not considered as having the ability to decide issues with a massive impact to the nation as a whole. Representative Karen A. Yarbrough of Illinois' 7th District is about to shatter that perception forever. Representative Yarbrough stumbled on a little known and never utlitized rule of the US House of Representatives, Section 603 of Jefferson's Manual of the Rules of the United States House of Representatives, which allows federal impeachment proceedings to be initiated by joint resolution of a state legislature. From there, Illinois House Joint Resolution 125 (hereafter to be referred to as HJR0125) was born.

But our Cold War presidents kept to the Kennan formula of containment plus deterrence, and we won the Cold War without escalating it into a nuclear war. Enter George W. Bush as the great exponent of preventive war. In 2003, owing to the collapse of the Democratic opposition, Bush shifted the base of American foreign policy from containment-deterrence to presidential preventive war: Be silent; I see it, if you don't. Observers describe Bush as "messianic" in his conviction that he is fulfilling the divine purpose. But, as Lincoln observed in his second inaugural address, "The Almighty has His own purposes."

Since a 1989 change following the Iran-contra scandal, the C.I.A.'s internal watchdog has been confirmed by the Senate and has reported to the Congressional intelligence committees as well as to the C.I.A. director, a shift intended to assure the position's independence.

Among the subjects handled by Mr. Helgerson's office was a report completed last year that faulted senior C.I.A. officials for lapses in the failure to prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But Mr. Goss kept the report classified and did not punish any of those named.

Former officials say the inspector general's office has also referred more than half a dozen cases of detainee abuse to the Department of Justice, but officials there have taken no action, except for a pending prosecution of one agency contract employee charged with beating an Afghan prisoner who later died.

Just as the news broke Wednesday about Scott McClellan resigning as White House press secretary and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove shedding some of his policy duties, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald met with the grand jury hearing evidence in the CIA leak case and introduced additional evidence against Rove, attorneys and other US officials close to the investigation said.

The grand jury session in federal court in Washington, DC, sources close to the case said, was the first time this year that Fitzgerald told the jurors that he would soon present them with a list of criminal charges he intends to file against Rove in hopes of having the grand jury return a multi-count indictment against Rove.

The rare firing last week of a CIA officer accused of leaking information to the news media stems both from the sensitivity of the subjects she allegedly discussed and the Bush administration's forceful efforts to block national security disclosures that have proved embarrassing or caused operational problems, according to current and former intelligence officials.
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The White House also has recently barraged the agency with questions about the political affiliations of some of its senior intelligence officers, according to intelligence officials.
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No decision has been announced on whether McCarthy might face further repercussions, such as a criminal prosecution. That decision would be made by the Justice Department, and would force a trial that several former intelligence officials said could wind up airing sensitive information as well as policy dissents.

Mr. Bush has to want to change. He has to want to change policies like those on Iraq, energy and taxes; practices like secrecy; and politics like those that cater only to his base. Is he a leader whose resolve will ultimately become self-defeating stubbornness, or is he capable of flexibility, like his hero President Reagan? Much rides on the answer.

Although Iraq may stand out for its singular incompetence, deception, bungling and corruption, it does -- Kinzer's book sadly reminds us -- join a long list of U.S. attacks on democratically elected (and U.S. supported rogue leaders who rebelled) governments that didn't toe the American foreign policy/economic interest line. Regime change isn't some sort of Bushevik innovation, although pre-emptive regime change is. The fact is America has always asserted its "right" to remove governments not to its liking when it was able to do so.

Perhaps that is why the leaders of both parties in Congress are so much less critical of Bush's Iraq folly than the American public in general.

Since the New Hampshire phone jamming scandal surfaced in 2003, the Republican National Committee and the New Hampshire Republican State Committee have spent nearly $6 million on the firms involved in the case

" Fueling the controversy is evidence that New Hampshire Democrats uncovered showing that two of lobbyist Abramoff's Indian-tribe clients cut checks to the New Hampshire Republican Party roughly equal to the costs of the phone jamming." (Here)

4.22.2006 Do we have the freedom to hear free speech? What is the sound of one hand clapping?

Josh Marshall: The grand ole daddy of special interest giveaways -- Congress to give away the Internet. This is serious. Find out more here.

Washington Post: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice leaked national defense information to a pro-Israel lobbyist in the same manner that landed a lower-level Pentagon official a 12-year prison sentence, the lobbyist's lawyer said Friday.
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The allegations against Rice came as a federal judge granted a defense request to issue subpoenas sought by the defense for Rice and three other government officials in the trial of Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman. The two are former lobbyists with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who are charged with receiving and disclosing national defense information.
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During Friday's hearing, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III said he is considering dismissing the government's entire case because the law used to prosecute Rosen and Weissman may be unconstitutionally vague and broad and infringe on freedom of speech.

The former highest ranking CIA officer in Europe, Tyler Drumheller, also says that while the intelligence community did give the White House some bad intelligence, it also gave the White House good intelligence - which the administration chose to ignore.
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"It just sticks in my craw every time I hear them say it's an intelligence failure. … This was a policy failure. … I think, over time, people will look back on this and see this is going to be one of the great, I think, policy mistakes of all time," Drumheller tells Bradley.

4.21.2006 "I have a question that i have not seen raised anywhere,If rove is no longer helping to make policy ( its a good thing) and is going to be working on the upcoming election, why is he still on the federal payroll. Isnt working on an election for a particular party a private job. Why is this being done on the taxpayer's dime?" , - stamper

4.21.2006 CrooksandLiars.com has the whole Bush/Rumsfeld "Henny Penny" video, with the announcement of Jon Stewart: "Stewart: Holy crap we're going to war with Iran..."

4.20.2006 "Our Dirty War" By BOB HERBERT

"Below the Radar: Secret Flights to Torture and 'Disappearance' " is the title of a recent Amnesty International report on the reprehensible practice of extraordinary rendition, a highly classified American program in which individuals are seized abducted without any semblance of due process and sent off to be interrogated by regimes that are known to engage in torture.

Some of the individuals swept up by rendition simply vanish.
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The Bush administration will never do the right thing when it comes to rendition. Congress needs to step in and thoroughly investigate this program, which is nothing less than a crime against humanity. Congress needs to investigate it, document it and shut it down.

The National Archives signed a secret agreement in 2001 with the Central Intelligence Agency permitting the spy agency to withdraw from public access records it considered to have been improperly declassified, the head of the archives, Allen Weinstein, disclosed on Monday.
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Like a similar 2002 agreement with the Air Force that was made public last week, the C.I.A. arrangement required that archives employees not reveal to researchers why documents they requested were being withheld.
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Michael J. Kurtz, the assistant archivist, who signed both agreements, could not be reached for comment last night.

4.19.2006 "The Decider Sticks with the Derider" Maureen Dowd:

The secretary made it sound as if the generals want him to resign because he made reforms. But they really want him to resign because he made gigantic, horrible, arrogant mistakes that will be taught in history classes forever

While I know the right thing is to keep all our options open, I have zero confidence in this administration's ability to manage a complex military strike against Iran, let alone the military and diplomatic aftershocks.

As someone who believed and still believes in the importance of getting Iraq right, (I believe that) the level of incompetence that the Bush team has displayed in Iraq, and its refusal to acknowledge any mistakes or remove those who made them, make it impossible to support this administration in any offensive military action against Iran.

I look at the Bush national security officials much the way I look at drunken drivers. I just want to take away their foreign policy driver's licenses for the next three years. Sorry, boys and girls, you have to stay home now or take a taxi. Dial 1-800-NATO-CHARGE-A-RIDE. You will not be driving alone. Not with my car.
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It would be nice to have the option of a diplomatic deal to end Iran's nuclear program but that will come only with a credible threat of force. Yet we will not have the support at home or abroad for that threat as long as Don Rumsfeld leads the Pentagon. No one in their right mind would follow this man into another confrontation and that is a real strategic liability.

The LA times story by Valerie Reitman describes seniors who shopped hard to find what looked like the best Medicare Part D benefit for them, only to go to Costco to pick it up and find out that the discount chain's over the counter price was less than they would be charged under Part D. Martin Brower, 77, found that his blood pressure medication would cost him $1.32 per pill, and be limited to 30 pills, under his "benefit." Costco would sell him, without subsidy, 100 pills for $1.13 each. Other examples followed.
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The finding has been borne out in a handful of surveys around the nation by program critics. For instance, a review by the Senior Action Network, a grass-roots advocacy group in San Francisco, found that Costco's prices on the top 100 drugs used by Medicare beat prices of all 48 plans in California in more than half the cases.
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If Congress, which is completely subservient to the pharmaceutical industry, won't let Medicare itself bargain with manufacturers to reduce the cost to government of these pills, maybe the real private-sector solution is to just let Costco's pharmacy division run the whole program. At least when you go to their web site, they list the (unsubsidized) retail prices of their drugs right up front. Not only that, the people they'd have to hire to take over Part D would have medical and other benefits, just like all Costco employees. What a deal.

"The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said it had obtained a copy of the verdict showing that Yahoo! Holdings (Hong Kong) helped Chinese police to identify Jiang by confirming that the e-mail account ZYMZd2002 had been used jointly by Jiang and another pro-democracy activist Li Yibing.

"Little by little we are piecing together the evidence for what we have long suspected, that Yahoo! is implicated in the arrest of most of the people that we have been defending," the group said

4.17.2006 "Rev. Moon's Conjugal Visitations" By John Gorenfeld, AlterNet

We all know the religious Right wants to tell us what we can't do in the bedroom, but no one asks what they want us to do instead.

4.17.2006 "Enemy of the Planet" By Paul Krugman

The people and institutions Exxon Mobil supports aren't actually engaged in climate research. They're the real-world equivalents of the Academy of Tobacco Studies in the movie "Thank You for Smoking," whose purpose is to fail to find evidence of harmful effects.
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But the fact is that whatever small chance there was of action to limit global warming became even smaller because Exxon Mobil chose to protect its profits by trashing good science. And that, not the paycheck, is the real scandal of Mr. Raymond's reign as Exxon Mobil's chief executive.

4.16.2006 "Maestro Cheney: Seven Days in July", Jeralyn Merritt

4.16.2006 New York Times editorial:

Mr. Bush did not declassify the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq — in any accepted sense of that word — when he authorized I. Lewis Libby Jr., through Vice President Dick Cheney, to talk about it with reporters. He permitted a leak of cherry-picked portions of the report. The declassification came later.

And this president has never shown the slightest interest in disclosure, except when it suits his political purposes. He has run one of the most secretive administrations in American history, consistently withholding information and vital documents not just from the public, but also from Congress. Just the other day, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told the House Judiciary Committee that the names of the lawyers who reviewed Mr. Bush's warrantless wiretapping program were a state secret.

With his Pentagon advisers Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, Rummy set up a State Department within the Defense Department in 2002, to run diplomacy, and established their own C.I.A. within the Defense Department to ferret out "evidence" of a Saddam-Al Qaeda link, when the real C.I.A. couldn't. Finally, they set up their own Defense Department within the Defense Department, snatching back power from a military establishment they felt had grown too cautious about risking troops in combat.

Does President Bush know this is going on? If he does, he would do the nation—and the Constitution—a big favor if he launched a different sort of pre-emptive attack and got rid of Rumsfeld now.

4.13.2006 "On Cheney, Rumsfeld order, US outsourcing special ops, intelligence to Iraq terror group, intelligence officials say" By Larisa Alexandrovna

The Pentagon is bypassing official US intelligence channels and turning to a dangerous and unruly cast of characters in order to create strife in Iran in preparation for any possible attack, former and current intelligence officials say.

One of the operational assets being used by the Defense Department is a right-wing terrorist organization known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), which is being “run” in two southern regional areas of Iran. They are Baluchistan, a Sunni stronghold, and Khuzestan, a Shia region where a series of recent attacks has left many dead and hundreds injured in the last three months.

An explanation of how to extract the administration's estimates of the distribution of tax cuts from the "Tax Relief Kit" is here. Here's the bottom line: about 32 percent of the tax cuts went to the richest 1 percent of Americans, people whose income this year will be at least $341,773. About 53 percent of the tax cuts went to the top 10 percent of the population. Remember, these are the administration's own numbers ­ numbers that it refuses to release to the public.

I'm sure that this column will provoke a furious counterattack from the administration, an all-out attempt to discredit my math. Yet if I'm wrong, there's an easy way to prove it: just release the raw data used to construct the table titled "Projected Share of Individual Income Taxes and Income in 2006." Memo to reporters: if the administration doesn't release those numbers, that's in effect a confession of guilt, an implicit admission that the data contradict the administration's spin.

4.13.2006 "AZ Governor Vetoes Fetal Pain Bill" by georgia10

The state House and Senate approved of the bill. Yesterday, Governor Janet Napolitano vetoed the measure.

"This bill represents an unwarranted intrusion by politicans into the doctor-patient relationship. The legislature should not attempt to substitute its judgment for that of trained physicians with respect to professional advice given to patients."

4.7.2006 If you can read this, Ma Bell is probably spying on you. Be afraid. -- Whistle-Blower Outs NSA Spy Room"

4.13.2006 What Recovery? By Max B. Sawicky

Because federal spending has increased, rather than fallen, the government has replaced reduced taxes with borrowed funds. The nation will have to pay interest on this accumulated debt indefinitely. Because Republicans have chosen this avenue for managing the nation's financies, a tax increase has been imposed upon future generations. No child will be left behind. The $880 billion the White House boasts of having kept "in the hands of the American people" are firmly attached to IOUs of equal amount.

I queried Powell at a reception following a talk he gave in Los Angeles on Monday. Pointing out that the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate showed that his State Department had gotten it right on the nonexistent Iraq nuclear threat, I asked why did the president ignore that wisdom in his stated case for the invasion?

"The CIA was pushing the aluminum tube argument heavily and Cheney went with that instead of what our guys wrote," Powell said. And the Niger reference in Bush's State of the Union speech? "That was a big mistake," he said. "It should never have been in the speech. I didn't need Wilson to tell me that there wasn't a Niger connection. He didn't tell us anything we didn't already know. I never believed it."

When I pressed further as to why the president played up the Iraq nuclear threat, Powell said it wasn't the president: "That was all Cheney." A convenient response for a Bush family loyalist, perhaps, but it raises the question of how the president came to be a captive of his vice president's fantasies.

More important: Why was this doubt, on the part of the secretary of state and others, about the salient facts justifying the invasion of Iraq kept from the public until we heard the truth from whistle-blower Wilson, whose credibility the president then sought to destroy?

On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."

The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.

A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq -- not made public until now -- had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president's statement.

The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped "secret" and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories.

Phone-Jamming Records Point to White House
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Key figures in a phone-jamming scheme designed to keep New Hampshire Democrats from voting in 2002 had regular contact with the White House and Republican Party as the plan was unfolding, phone records introduced in criminal court show.
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Virtually all the calls to the White House went to the same number, which currently rings inside the political affairs office. In 2002, White House political affairs was led by now-RNC chairman Ken Mehlman. The White House declined to say which staffer was assigned that phone number in 2002.

Earlier this month, the House effectively repealed more than 200 state food safety and public health protections. Say, when was the last time you enjoyed a little touch of food poisoning? Coming soon to a stomach near you. What was really impressive about H.R. 4167, the “National Uniformity for Food Act,” is that it was passed without a public hearing.
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The bill would automatically override any state measure that is stronger than federal law, the opposite of what a sensible law would do. The NRDC says state laws protecting consumers from chemical additives, bacteria and ingredients that can trigger allergic reactions would be barred, and that includes alerts about chemical contamination in fish, health protection standards for milk and eggs, and warnings about chemicals or toxins such as arsenic, mercury and lead. Happy eating, all.

The most heartening sign that all the spin in the world will not allow the administration to evade such questions was Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter's statement on Fox News Sunday that "there has to be a detailed explanation precisely as to what Vice President Cheney did, what the president said to him, and an explanation from the president as to what he said so that it can be evaluated." Specter, a Republican and a former district attorney in Philadelphia, is just the right man to take the lead in breaking the spin cycle.

4.9.2006 A 'Concerted Effort' to Discredit Bush Critic -- Prosecutor Describes Cheney, Libby as Key Voices Pitching Iraq-Niger Story By Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer

As he drew back the curtain this week on the evidence against Vice President Cheney's former top aide, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald for the first time described a "concerted action" by "multiple people in the White House" -- using classified information -- to "discredit, punish or seek revenge against" a critic of President Bush's war in Iraq.
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One striking feature of that decision -- unremarked until now, in part because Fitzgerald did not mention it -- is that the evidence Cheney and Libby selected to share with reporters had been disproved months before.
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A legal brief filed for Libby last month said that "certain officials at the CIA, the White House, and the State Department each sought to avoid or assign blame for intelligence failures relating to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."
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It was at that moment that Libby, allegedly at Cheney's direction, sought out at least three reporters to bolster the discredited uranium allegation. Libby made careful selections of language from the 2002 estimate, quoting a passage that said Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure uranium" in Africa.

The first of those conversations, according to the evidence made known thus far, came when Libby met with Bob Woodward, an assistant managing editor of The Washington Post, on June 27, 2003. In sworn testimony for Fitzgerald, according to a statement Woodward released on Nov. 14, 2005, Woodward said Libby told him of the intelligence estimate's description of Iraqi efforts to obtain "yellowcake," a processed form of natural uranium ore, in Africa. In an interview Friday, Woodward said his notes showed that Libby described those efforts as "vigorous.
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Fitzgerald said the grand jury has collected so much testimony and so many documents that "it is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to 'punish' Wilson."

Can a President or Vice President Unilaterally and Selectively Declassify?

Assuming that Libby's testimony is accurate, did the President do anything wrong by so declassifying the NIE? Given the fact that the national security classification system is created by executive order of the president, it would appear logical that the president has authority to unilaterally and selective declassify anything he might wish. However, that is not the way any president has ever written the executive orders governing these activities. To the contrary, the orders set forth rather detailed declassification procedures.

In addition, there is law that says that when a president issues an executive order he must either amend that executive order, or follow it just as others within the executive branch are required to do. At present, we have so few facts it is difficult to know what precisely Bush did and how he did it, and thus whether or not this law is applicable. There is also the problem that no one has standing in court to challenge a president's refusal to follow his own rules. But voters may take note of the disposition of this administration to play by the rules, and put a Democratic Congress in place to keep an eye on the last two years of the Bush/Cheney presidency.

What is apparent, however, based on Fitzgerald's filing, is that no one other than Bush, Cheney, Libby and apparently Addington was aware of this unilateral and selective declassification - if, indeed, the NIE was declassified. The secrecy surely suggests cover-up. For example, Fitzgerald notes that Libby "consciously decided not to make [then Deputy National Security Adviser] Hadley aware of the fact that defendant [Libby] himself had already been disseminating the NIE by leaking it to reporters while Mr. Hadley sought to get it formally declassified." (Also, CIA Director George Tenet apparently was not aware of the partial declassification by Bush.)

Whatever authority Bush may or may not have had, however, it is crystal clear that Vice President Cheney did not have any authority to unilaterally and selectively declassify the NIE.

Recently, Cheney made the public claim (to Brit Hume of Fox News) that he had authority to declassify national security information. Learning of this, Congressman Henry Waxman asked the Congressional Reference Service of the Library of Congress, which issues non-partisan reports, whether Cheney was right. CRS found that the Vice President has limited declassification authority, generally speaking. And their report shows Cheney had no authority in this instance - only in situations where the Vice President had been the authority to classify the material in the first place, could the Vice President have the authority to unilaterally declassify it.

The press has taken for granted that Bush authorizing Libby to leak classified information to a selected handful of reporters is legal. There is no question that a President has the power to declassify information. But a quick google search revealed a series of statutes and regulations which set out specific procedures that must be followed to classify and declassify information. No such procedures were followed by Bush.

4.8.2006 Maureen Dowd:

Scooter was so concerned about the propriety of the deal that he checked with the vice president's lawyer, David Addington, before he spilled. Addington, whose politics are to the right of Louis XVI, said, go right ahead. Now Black Adder has Scooter's job. Coincidence?
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If W. wants the information out, it's good for the country to make it public. If W. doesn't want the information out, it's bad for the country to make it public. L'état, c'est moi.

That's how we got mired in the Iraq war in the first place. The administration ruthlessly held back classified information that contradicted its bogus case for war, and leaked classified information that supported it.

The Bushies keep trying to manipulate reality, but reality bites back. That's not only crass politics. It's lethal politics. L'état, c'est mess

Mr. Libby did not assert in his testimony to a grand jury, first reported on the Web site of The New York Sun, that Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney had authorized him to reveal the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson. Mr. Libby is scheduled to go on trial next year on perjury and obstruction charges connected to the disclosure of Ms. Wilson's name.

The White House refused to discuss Mr. Libby's account, or say whether it differed with Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney's recollections of events, which the two men described in interviews with prosecutors. "We're not commenting on an ongoing legal proceeding," said Scott McClellan, Mr. Bush's press secretary.
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Mr. Libby discussed some of the conclusions of the intelligence report with Judith Miller, then a reporter for The New York Times, in a meeting on July 8, 2003, the court documents say. The previous day, the White House, for the first time, had publicly admitted that Mr. Bush's statement in the State of the Union address earlier that year, alleging that Mr. Hussein had sought uranium in Africa, should not have been in the speech.

A little more than a week later, under continuing pressure, the White House published a declassified version of the executive summary of the estimate, in an effort to make the case that Mr. Bush's statement had been justified by the intelligence community's best judgment.

By Mr. Libby's account to the grand jury, the presidential authorization to disclose selective parts of the intelligence estimate was made in advance of a meeting on July 8 between Mr. Libby and Ms. Miller. Mr. Libby brought a brief abstract of the N.I.E.'s key judgments to the meeting.
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The court filing said that Mr. Libby testified that he was supposed to tell Ms. Miller, among other things, that "a key judgment of the N.I.E. held that Iraq was 'vigorously trying to procure' uranium." Mr. Libby, the prosecutors, said, testified that the meeting with Ms. Miller was the "only time he recalled in his government experience when he disclosed a document to a reporter that was effectively declassified by virtue of the president's authorization that it be disclosed."

"Today the New York Times reports on testimony given to the House Judiciary Committee by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales — testimony which has a familiar ring. Here's the key paragraph:

Gonzales suggested on Thursday for the first time that the president might have the legal authority to order wiretapping without a warrant on communications between Americans that occur exclusively within the United States.

"I'm not going to rule it out," Mr. Gonzales said when asked about that possibility at a House Judiciary Committee hearing.

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I hate to sound all conspiratorial, but I think it's helpful to recall these curious bits of information that have popped up -- and to which we were never treated a full explanation. It's possible that Gonzales was being overly cautious in speaking before the House Intel Committee. But remember: On at least one other occasion when Gonzales chose his words carefully before a Senate committee, the result wasn't so great.

Libby "further testified that he at first advised the Vice President that he could not have this conversation with reporter Miller because of the classified nature of the NIE," the court papers said. Libby "testified that the Vice President had advised [Libby] that the President had authorized [Libby] to disclose relevant portions of the NIE."

Additionally, Libby "testified that he also spoke to David Addington, then counsel to the Vice President, whom [Libby] considered to be an expert in national security law, and Mr. Addington opined that Presidential authorization to publicly disclose a document amounted to a declassification of the document."

12.20.2006 Regarding "inherent authority", Cenk Uygur

President Bush is playing his favorite game -- opening up Pandora's Box and seeing what flies out. If you thought that was a bad idea in Iraq, wait till you get a load of it here.

Once you allow the President to be above the law, there is no telling what could happen. Even if you like this President, there will one day be a President you don't like quite as much. It's almost as if the founding fathers were right to limit the powers of the executive branch. Smart fellows, those founders were. Maybe it's not such a good idea to ignore that little constitution they wrote.

See also Murray Waas, (Here)

In the letter to Negroponte, Sen. Rockefeller complained: "I [previously] wrote both former Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) George Tenet and Acting DCI John McLaughlin seeking to determine what steps were being taken to address the appalling disclosures in [Woodward's book]. The only response that I received was to indicate that the leaks had been authorized by the Administration."

The "public's airwaves" apparently aren't "publicly available" to everyone.

Big Gain for Rich Seen in Tax Cuts for Investments
...
The analyses show that more than 70 percent of the tax savings on investment income went to the top 2 percent, about 2.6 million taxpayers.

4.4.2006 John Gilliom:

To live and die(bold) in Ohio

Ken Blackwell (R), the Ohio Attorney General, gubernatorial candidate and Old Testament thunderblaster, has had to announce that he held investments in Diebold, the constantly suspect Ohio election machines company. Diebold has been the subject of controversy since its (now ex) top boss promised to deliver Ohio to the Republicans in 2004 and has been under the shadows of numerous allegations and blown whistles since then. Blackwell, as Secretary of State, oversaw Ohio's move to new elections equipment and, according to the Plain Dealer, there are charges that the process favored Diebold.

A Senate Republican (Sen. George Allen) wants an Army general who drew criticism for church speeches casting the war on terrorism in religious terms to lead the U.S. special operations command.
...
In 2003, Boykin gave speeches at evangelical Christian churches in which he painted the war on terror as a Christian fight against Satan and suggested that Muslims worship idols. Boykin later apologized for his characterizations as conservatives rushed to defend him.

A Pentagon investigation the following year found that Boykin violated regulations by failing to make clear he was not speaking in an official capacity when he made the speeches, sometimes wearing his Army uniform. The probe also found Boykin violated Pentagon rules by failing to obtain advance clearance for his remarks.

President Bush pretended to go along when it was obvious he had lost the political fight. Then afterward he signed a signing statement that gutted the amendment. In essence, his signing statement attached to the bill said that he would not follow the law. Torture would continue.

And what did McCain do in response? Absolutely nothing.

Here's the difference between the average Republican voter and John McCain -- John McCain knows. The average voter can claim that he had no idea what Bush was up to, or in this case, what a signing statement means. Senator McCain can't make this claim. He knows exactly what they are up to. He knows exactly what that signing statement means. And he bows his head.

Tomgram: The Hyperpower Hype and Where It Took Us"Imperial overreach" is too fancy a term for what the Bush administration has actually done. While its officials have talked a great game when it came to achieving "victory" in Iraq and exporting democracy to the Middle East, its main exports have turned out to be mayhem and ruins. And those it can continue to export. With every new move, yet more rubble, yet more terror, and undoubtedly yet more terrorists in Iraq and, sooner or later, in the wider region will be created. This is where the most essential choices made by the President, Vice President, and their chosen officials in the days after September 11, 2001 have taken us.

Anyone thinking we are entering the end-game better wake up. Our neoconservative policy makers are still willing to risk the U.S. Army in a mad Middle East imperial scheme that composed the real reason for the Iraq war in the first place.

…Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), the panel's senior Democrat, said he was "inclined to believe" that censure by Congress is appropriate for Bush.

"We know the president broke the law," Leahy said. "Now we need to know why."

4.1.2006 Arianna:

Starting at the top. Two tobacco companies, Altria Group (formerly Philip Morris) and UST, gave $250,000 each (the maximum contribution) to President Bush's Inaugural Committee. Small price to pay when you consider that just six months after the inauguration, Bush's Justice Department, without explanation, reduced the settlement in the government's case against the tobacco industry from $130 billion to $10 billion.

And it probably didn't hurt that Karl Rove was on the Philip Morris payroll from 1991 to 1996, providing the company with the inside scoop on the politics of puffing.

The Lincoln Group was tasked with presenting the US version of events in Iraq to counter adverse media coverage. Here we present examples of its work, and the reality behind its headlines.

4.1.2006 "Let the prisoners pick the fruits," Mr. Rohrabacher said. "We can do it without bringing in millions of foreigners." via Digby