Dahlia Lithwick: It's impossible to draw neat lines around which elements of the mushrooming U.S. attorneys scandal violate the law and which are encompassed in Bush's larger worldview that life happens at the pleasure of the president. But these discussions raise the bigger question: How can the president ever break a law, so long as he insists he is the law? And how can the rest of us know if he's broken a law, if we've absolutely no idea what he's been doing?

4.30.2007 Robert D. Novak:

Over a dozen years, I have had many such conversations with Hagel, but not for quotation. This time, I asked him to go on the record about his assessment of what the "surge" has accomplished. In language more blunt than his prepared speeches and articles, he described Iraq as "coming undone," with its regime "weaker by the day." He deplored the Bush administration's failure to craft a coherent Middle East policy, blaming the influence of deputy national security adviser Elliott Abrams. via Christy Hardin Smith

4.30.2007 NYT, By HELENE COOPER and JIM RUTENBERG

Bush administration officials have been scratching their heads over steps taken by Prince Bandar's uncle, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, that have surprised them by going against the American playbook, after receiving assurances to the contrary from Prince Bandar during secret trips he made to Washington. via Christy Hardin Smith

4.30.2007 SANDMONKEY:

You know what happened to the pressure in Washington. The Democrats won the Congress. There is no more pressure coming from Bush because he is not able to push people anymore to do those things. He is not able to push the Egyptian government anymore because the American public is suddenly not interested in reforming the Middle East because of what's going on in the Iraq. So suddenly the Egyptian government is not afraid of the American pressure. They are doing whatever they want to do. They are beating up demonstrators, they are cracking down on activists, they are changing the constitution, and eroding civil liberties once and for all and they are using proxies to take down bloggers.

We cannot on the one hand say that we stand for basic principles of fairness in jurisprudence, in the right of representation for the accused, and on the other hand say that an accused at Guantanimo is entitled only to a drive-by defense and whatever rights we happen to be in the mood to give them that particular day as the mood strikes us. The hypocrisy of decrying just this sort of governmental tactic in other nations as a false front that belies preconceived verdicts — and then practicing it in these quasi-judicial forums at Guantanimo is not lost on dictatorships and despots around the world.

4.30.2007 Matt Stoller

This notion that the winner of the debate is who says 'I will bomb the %#^%@ out of someone' the fastest is not only stupid, it's insane. Obviously the first thing the President should do is (a) see to emergency response to take care of American citizens and (b) look at intelligence to make sure the country is no longer under threat. It is not only a sign of maturity to make those points, it is a sign of insanity to say that the first thing you will do is retaliate. That is a more extreme position than that of George W. Bush, who took a month before beginning an assault on Afghanistan.

In fact, the greatest American entrepreneurial vigor comes from people who, rather than build anti-competitive regulatory roadblocks to innovation, must in fact fight against them while shouldering the burden of societal subsidies to corrupt pharmaceutical companies and the insurance lobby through ever rising health care costs. As leaders in smaller organizations who know more of their employees personally, they are far more aware of the value and growth potential inherent in human capital when you invest in people and put them in situations that make best use of any given person's natural talents. There's an incredible amount of leverage and profit in finding out what people do best and helping them grow.

...as Floyd Norris recently reported in The Times, there is a more disturbing possibility. Instead of investing in physical capital, many companies are using profits to buy back their own stock. And cynics suggest that the purpose of these buybacks is to produce a temporary rise in stock prices that increases the value of executives' stock options, even if it's against the long-term interests of investors.

It's not a far-fetched idea. Researchers at the Federal Reserve have found evidence that company decisions about stock buybacks are strongly influenced by "agency conflicts," a genteel term for self-dealing by corporate insiders. In the 1990s that kind of self-dealing often led to excessive investment, which at least left a tangible legacy behind. But today the self-interest of management may be standing in the way of productive investment.

... Palfrey already has named her first name, as it were, on her website, where she has posted a court document from April 12 in which she alleges formal US naval commander Harlan Ullman was a "regular customer" whom she needs to subpoena.

Ullman, with James Wade, developed the military doctrine of "shock and awe" used by US government in its invasion of Iraq.

4.28.2007 BUYING THE WAR: Watch the Show

4.27.2007 "River" is leaving Baghdad. See "Baghdad Burning"

4.27.2007 Senior Official Linked to Escort Service Resigns

As the Bush administration's so-called "AIDS czar," Tobias was criticized for emphasizing faithfulness and abstinence over condom use to prevent the spread of AIDS.

Tobias, who before resigning was the director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, told ABC News that since Palfry's operation has been shut down he has begun using a new escort service "with Central Americans" to send over young girls to not have sex with him. Foreign Assistance? International Development? Clearly, the man was just doing his job!

4.27.2007 Christie Hardin Smith seems happy that James Comey will be testifying in the DOJ Attorney Firings investigation. He was strong about backing Fitzgerald in the Plame case, just before he left the DOJ. However, he left DOJ for a cushy job at Lockheed Martin, which does a lot of business with the Bush Admistration. He may not want to show and tell.

4.27.2007 NYT Editorial

It can be hard to tell whom the Bush administration considers more of an enemy at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp: the prisoners or the lawyers.
...
It’s obvious why the administration is attacking the lawyers. It does not want the world to know more than it already does about this immoral detention camp. And brave lawyers have helped expose abuse and torture there, as well as detentions of innocent men ­ who are a large portion, if not a majority, of the inmates at Guantánamo Bay. The Bush administration does not want these issues aired in public, and certainly not in court.

Mr. Bush thinks that he has the right to ignore the Constitution when it suits him. But this is a nation of laws, not the whims of men, and giving legal rights to the guilty as well as the innocent is a price of true justice. The only remedy is for lawmakers to rewrite the Military Commissions Act to restore basic rights to Guantánamo Bay and to impose full accountability for what has happened there.

4.26.2007 Political Briefings At Agencies Disclosed -- White House Calls Meetings Lawful By R. Jeffrey Smith

Scott J. Bloch, director of the Office of Special Counsel, alluded to the multiple briefings in an interview Monday, saying that "we have had allegations" and "received information" about similar talks that were held elsewhere besides GSA.

"Political forecasts, just generally . . . I do not regard as illegal political activity," Bloch added. But he said his office would examine whether it was appropriate to use federal facilities or resources as well as review exactly what was said. "Where you cross the line is where you get into the slant of someone being elected or defeated" or trying to get a political party into or out of power, he said.

I had coffee the other day with Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, and she mentioned that since the murders of Robert Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, well over a million Americans have been killed by firearms in the United States. That’s more than the combined U.S. combat deaths in all the wars in all of American history.

“We’re losing eight children and teenagers a day to gun violence,” she said. “As far as young people are concerned, we lose the equivalent of the massacre at Virginia Tech about every four days.”

The dispute is the latest and perhaps the most significant clash over the role of lawyers for the detainees. “There is no right on the part of counsel to access to detained aliens on a secure military base in a foreign country,” the Justice Department filing argued.

Under the proposal, filed this month in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the government would limit lawyers to three visits with an existing client at Guantánamo; there is now no limit. It would permit only a single visit with a detainee to have him authorize a lawyer to handle his case. And it would permit a team of intelligence officers and military lawyers not involved in a detainee’s case to read mail sent to him by his lawyer.

The proposal would also reverse existing rules to permit government officials, on their own, to deny the lawyers access to secret evidence used by military panels to determine that their clients were enemy combatants.

Many of the lawyers say the restrictions would make it impossible to represent their clients, or even to convince wary detainees — in a single visit — that they were really lawyers, rather than interrogators.

It is one thing to counsel park rangers and docents to be respectful of visitors and their beliefs, as pointed out on the NPS site, but quite another to encourage them to explain creationism to park visitors in contravention of policy section 7.5.3 (quoted above). The presence of “creationism” within a discussion of “knowledge of the resource” and tied to an example of “accuracy” is not credibly or even arguably about visitor relations; this is an assault upon the ability of science to distinguish explanations that come with evidence from those that are contradicted by evidence, and privileging the unevidenced claims. It is contrary even to the plain meaning of the lead sentence of the paragraph within which it is embedded. That’s not knowledge, and it sure isn’t accurate.
...
The book approval process that NPS requires combined with the Park Service Review criterion of accuracy in materials offered for sale in park bookstores means that every anti-science title stocked and sold in park bookstores sends the clear message that NPS approves of the content as an accurate account of its subject matter. This is not a matter of “book-banning” or censorship; this is a matter of a dereliction of responsibility to conform to established policies by a government entity. Placement of a book in a NPS park bookstore means much more than a commercial vendor like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Borders stocking a title. Those firms do not vouch for the accuracy of what they sell to the public; the National Park Service does.

"The people at OSHA have no interest in running a regulatory agency,” said Dr. David Michaels, an occupational health expert at George Washington University who has written extensively about workplace safety. “If they ever knew how to issue regulations, they’ve forgotten. The concern about protecting workers has gone out the window.”

4.24.2007 Low-key office launches high-profile inquiry -- The Office of Special Counsel will investigate U.S. attorney firings and other political activities led by Karl Rove. By Tom Hamburger

the Office of Special Counsel is preparing to jump into one of the most sensitive and potentially explosive issues in Washington, launching a broad investigation into key elements of the White House political operations that for more than six years have been headed by chief strategist Karl Rove.

The new investigation, which will examine the firing of at least one U.S. attorney, missing White House e-mails, and White House efforts to keep presidential appointees attuned to Republican political priorities, could create a substantial new problem for the Bush White House.

Muckraker has the slides: (Here pdf)

4.24.2007 Rove's Investigator Is Also Under Investigation By David Korn

It is a dizzying situation. The investigator investigating officials who oversee the agency that is investigating the investigator. Forget firewalls. This looks more like a basement flooded with backed-up sewage--with the water rising.

4.24.2007 Bloch vs Rove? By Andrew Sullivan

If the name Scott Bloch doesn't ring any bells for you, I cannot say the same for me. This is the same Scott Bloch who refused to enforce Clinton administration protections for gay and lesbian federal employees. Whatever else he is, Bloch is no liberal. If he is taking on the Rove machine, then the internecine Republican war is deepening.

4.24.2007 Here is some background on Scott Bloch by Carpetbagger, written two years ago and here is a rant by The General.

4.24.2007 "Rep. Renzi steps down from House panels"

See also: Delays in Renzi Case Raise More Gonzales Questions By JOHN R. WILKE and EVAN PEREZ

As midterm elections approached last November, federal investigators in Arizona faced unexpected obstacles in getting needed Justice Department approvals to advance a corruption investigation of Republican Rep. Rick Renzi, people close to the case said.
...
Meanwhile, Mr. Renzi, first elected to Congress in 2002, was fighting to hold on to his seat. In September, President Bush hosted a fund-raiser in Scottsdale on his behalf. About the same time Mr. Charlton was added to a list of prosecutors "we should now consider pushing out," wrote Mr. Gonzales's then-chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, in a Sept. 13, 2006, email to then-White House counsel Harriet Miers. The email is among thousands that the Justice Department has released in response to congressional inquiries into the dismissal of the U.S. attorneys.

The outbreaks point to a need to change the way the agency does business, said Robert E. Brackett, director of the FDA's food-safety arm, which is responsible for safeguarding 80 percent of the nation's food supply.

"We have 60,000 to 80,000 facilities that we're responsible for in any given year," Brackett said. Explosive growth in the number of processors and the amount of imported foods means that manufacturers "have to build safety into their products rather than us chasing after them," Brackett said. "We have to get out of the 1950s paradigm."
...
In the peanut butter case, an agency report shows that FDA inspectors checked into complaints about salmonella contamination in a ConAgra Foods factory in Georgia in 2005. But when company managers refused to provide documents the inspectors requested, the inspectors left and did not follow up.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who declined to comment yesterday, has said management problems with Reading First "reflect individual mistakes." But Doherty said nearly every aspect of the program was carefully monitored by the department and the White House, where Spelling was Bush's top education adviser.

"This program was always firmly under the watch and control of the highest levels of the government," Doherty said.

4.23.2007 "President is destroying faith in justice system" By Douglas Turner

4.23.2007 Today's Must Read By Paul Kiel

4.23.2007 "Decorated Texas Vet Presents G-Dub With A Purple Heart"

4.23.2007 Few Specifics Evident As Padilla Trial Nears By Peter Whoriskey

At a pretrial hearing in which defense attorneys complained about the ethereal nature of the alleged conspiracy, U.S. District Judge Marcia G. Cooke, in a startling aside, seemed to agree.

The indictment "is very light on facts," she told prosecutors.
...
"Describing the entire jihad movement as a single conspiracy is a bit of stretch," said Robert M. Chesney, a Wake Forest University law professor and a moderate on the issues who has written extensively about terrorism prosecutions. "At trial, they're going to have to be more specific."
...
The charges revolve around an "inchoate crime . . . rather than any particular completed operation," federal prosecutor Brian K. Frazier told the judge. "It's very hard to particularize."

There are two ways to describe the confrontation between Congress and the Bush administration over funding for the Iraq surge. You can pretend that it’s a normal political dispute. Or you can see it for what it really is: a hostage situation, in which a beleaguered President Bush, barricaded in the White House, is threatening dire consequences for innocent bystanders ­ the troops ­ if his demands aren’t met.

4.21.2007 Did "Voter Fraud" Charlatan Thor Hearne Urge White House to Can Cummins? By Howard Beale

So Thor Hearne, who through his work with the Bush DOJ on hyping voter fraud claims developed strong connections with Main Justice bigwigs, also had quite a bit at stake when the DOJ began investigating his friend Governor Blunt for a scheme his firm helped implement. The U.S. Attorney investigating Blunt, Bud Cummins, then had his legs cut out before the investigation was finished. Few people would have been as well-positioned as Hearne to intervene with the Department of Justice and help scuttle the investigation into Governor Matt Blunt.

4.16.2007 The Talented Mr. Griffin-- The senators grilling Alberto Gonzales should ask him about Arkansas’ new U.S. attorney—and his history of suppressing minority voters By Greg Palast

4.21.2007 Dick Cheney:

"Although the current political environment in our country carries echoes of the hard left in the early '70s, America will not again play out those old scenes of abandonment, and retreat, and regret," Cheney said. "Not this time, not on our watch.... We will press on in this mission, and we will turn events towards victory."

The US State Department has so far failed to respond to requests to reawaken a highly praised medical program aimed at saving military and civilian lives in war-torn Iraq. The program used voluntary US doctors and other personnel to provide computer technology and training to medical students in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities.

American doctors donated free time to advise the Iraqi medical system and eventually videoconference critical medical procedures directly to Iraqi medical personnel at several burdened hospitals countrywide. Medical communications facilities eventually hooked into 39 Iraqi electronic medical libraries and communication facilities. Last year it "outfitted four high-end, videoconferencing facilities at medical schools in Baghdad, Basra, Erbil and Mosul," according to program officials. More

Lawmakers and the U.S. inspector general have accused KBR, formerly a division of Halliburton Co., which was once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, of abusing federal rules in record-keeping on the current contract. Nearly $2 billion in overpricing on the contract has been identified by Pentagon auditors and government investigators, lawmakers said
...
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the committee, cited several examples of contract abuse, including KBR allegedly billing the federal government for millions of meals that were never delivered, overstating labor costs by 51 percent, or $30 million, and purchasing between $40 million and $113 million in vehicles that weren't needed.
...
Democratic senators repeatedly questioned the Army's decision to keep the sole-source pact with KBR even as multiple audits the last three years suggested evidence of widespread fraud and abuse.

Bolton said the volatile nature of the war in Iraq and the unanticipated need for additional resources prevented the Army from launching a new competition until now.

The largest private enrollment is in health maintenance organizations, which typically deliver care a bit more cheaply than standard Medicare and should not need their 10 percent subsidies, on average, to compete. The biggest subsidies ­ averaging 19 percent above cost ­ go to private fee-for-service plans, which are the fastest-growing part of the Medicare Advantage program. Unlike the H.M.O.’s, which at least manage a patient’s care and bargain hard with doctors and hospitals, these plans ride on the coattails of standard Medicare, typically providing access to the same doctors and paying them at the same rates. Thanks to the big subsidies they get, such plans are often a good deal for beneficiaries, charging less for the same benefits or adding benefits without raising prices.

"President Bush was pleased with the attorney general's testimony today. After hours of testimony in which he answered all of the senators' questions and provided thousands of pages of documents, he again showed that nothing improper occurred. He admitted the matter could have been handled much better, and he apologized for the disruption to the lives of the U.S. attorneys involved, as well as for the lack of clarity in his initial responses," Perino said.
...
Several other officials said Republicans have begun discussing a possible replacement.

One name that consistently comes up is Ted Olson, former solicitor general. Olson is seen as having the experience, reputation and credibility needed to steer the department for the next year and a half, through the end of Bush's term.

Digby asks, "Is this some kind of a joke?"

See also: You'll recall, Dear Reader, that Ted Olsen tried to persuade the Supremes to let the Executive Branch create a moral and legal black hole at Gitmo where they would have exclusive power to hold and interrogate people without judicial oversight. (Here)

By April 2004, three separate cases — Rumsfeld v. Padilla, Rasul v. Bush, and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld — converged on the Court in the same argument cycle, along with another high-profile case, Cheney v. United States District Court, now best known for Scalia’s refusal to recuse himself even though he’d gone duck hunting with the appellant, Vice President Dick Cheney. Olson argued two of the four cases, and Clement argued two — Padilla and Hamdi. (Here)

oral arguments were heard on April 20. Ted Olsen, the US solicitor general who lost his wife in 9/11, argued for the government. (Here)

... on April 28, 2004. Clement, then deputy solicitor general, was arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court that Congress, in its post-9/11 authorization of military force, had also in effect given the green light to the military detention of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen arrested on American soil. Testing the limits of Clement’s argument, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked whether the same congressional resolution would authorize “mild torture” of detainees. “Some systems do that to get information,” she said. Clement replied sharply: “Well, our executive doesn’t.” (Here)

At the Pentagon's behest, the network sat on exclusive, shocking photographic evidence that American military guards had been abusing Iraqi inmates. Then, after holding the piece for two weeks, CBS reversed course and ran it on the April 28 60 Minutes II, when Dan Rather disclosed the delay. (Here)

4.20.2007 "Vermont Senate adopts resolution seeking impeachment of Bush, Cheney"

4.20.2007 Gonzales v. Carhart Our Faith-Based Justices

What, then, explains this decision? Here is a painfully awkward observation: All five justices in the majority in Gonzales are Catholic. The four justices who are either Protestant or Jewish all voted in accord with settled precedent. It is mortifying to have to point this out. But it is too obvious, and too telling, to ignore. Ultimately, the five justices in the majority all fell back on a common argument to justify their position. There is, they say, a compelling moral reason for the result in Gonzales. Because the intact D & E seems to resemble infanticide it is "immoral" and may be prohibited even without a clear statutory exception to protect the health of the woman

Here's a quote from Albert Einstein: "if the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man." Well, guess what?

Are mobile phones wiping out our bees? -- Scientists claim radiation from handsets are to blame for mysterious 'colony collapse' of bees

Mr. Gonzales was even unable to say who compiled the list of federal attorneys slated for firing. The man he appointed to conduct the purge, Kyle Sampson, said he had not created the list. The former head of the office that supervises the federal prosecutors, Michael Battle, said he didn’t do it, as did William Mercer, the acting associate attorney general.
...
But if we believe the testimony that neither he nor any other senior Justice Department official was calling the shots on the purge, then the public needs to know who was. That is why the Judiciary Committee must stick to its insistence that Mr. Rove, Ms. Miers and other White House officials testify in public and under oath and that all documents be turned over to Congress, including e-mail messages by Mr. Rove that the Republican Party has yet to produce.

You might think that the Gonzales case will affect only one infrequently used medical procedure, intact dilation and evacuation (D&E).

Think again.

Justice Kennedy argues that the government may ban intact D&E because it has the right, under the Casey decision, to ensure that a woman's choice is informed. Kennedy then argues that given a mother's natural love for her child, some women will regret having abortions after the fact. And some women may especially regret having an abortion if they knew the details of the procedure-- intact D&E-- used to perform the abortion. Hence, Kennedy argues, the state may ban that procedure, because it will cause some women not to have abortions, and because it will force doctors to "find different and less shocking methods to abort the fetus in the second trimester."

There is a problem with this argument-- it would seem that the proper remedy is to inform the woman and then let her decide if she wants to undergo the intact D&E procedure. But at the very least, Kennedy's argument suggests that the state could take the lesser step of requiring doctors to inform the woman about all the details of the D&E procedure she will have to undergo and about what will happen to the fetus.

If that is correct, then Gonzalez v. Carhart is quite important. It might lead states to pass a wide range of new laws under the rubric of "informed consent" that would require doctors to show women the results of ultrasound imaging of the fetus before it is aborted, to describe in gruesome detail how the fetus will be terminated, dismembered and removed, to offer the state's views on the existence of any pain the fetus might feel when it is destroyed; and, in general, ratchet up the emotional anxiety of women who are about to undergo abortions.

... Whitehouse tried to get Gonzales to understand that it would also be improper to fire a U.S. attorney for a generally political reason -- that attempting to discourage U.S. attorneys who might follow in Carol Lam's path, for instance, would be improper. Gonzales didn't seem to grasp the idea.

4.19.2007 By Greg Gordon, MClatchy Newspapers

For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates. More

"For anti-abortion activists, this case has never been about just one controversial procedure. They have correctly seen it as a wedge that could ultimately be used to undermine and perhaps eliminate abortion rights eventually. The court has handed the Bush administration and other opponents of women’s reproductive rights the big political victory they were hoping to get from the conservative judges Mr. Bush has added to the bench. It comes at a real cost to the court’s credibility, its integrity and the rule of law."

The Court affirms that it has the right to choose.

Have top political appointees at the Justice Department politicized the hiring of new career employees there? That's what a number of longtime Justice Department employees want to know as Attorney General Alberto Gonzales heads to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday to testify about the sacking of eight U.S. attorneys.
...
So, in their own words, the career employees did some checking of their own. They reportedly detected a "common denominator" for "most of those" struck from the interview list: They had "interned for a Hill Democrat, clerked for a Democratic judge, worked for a 'liberal cause' or otherwise appeared to have 'liberal' leanings. Summa cum laude graduates at both Yale and Harvard were rejected for interviews."

Letter of concerned, anymous Justice Department employees (Here) See also article at speaker.gov

4.17.2007 NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Americans often misunderstand genocide, assuming it is impossible to stop because it is driven by millenniums of racial or ethnic hatreds. But historically genocide has mostly been rooted in cool, calculated decisions by national leaders that the most convenient way to solve a problem or stay in power is to scapegoat and destroy a particular group. So it has been in most past genocides, and so it is again in Darfur.
...
All this makes genocide easier to stop than people imagine. Where it arises from a weighing of costs and benefits, then it is possible for outsiders to impose additional costs and change the outcome. That’s what we need to do. The U.S. should lead other countries in pushing hard on all sides for a negotiated peace agreement among the warring factions, for that is ultimately the best hope to end the slaughter in Darfur and in neighboring areas in Chad and the Central African Republic.

The attorney general has a difficult needle to thread: He must correct his earlier comments that he had limited knowledge and involvement in the firing process, without making it look as if he had intentionally misled the public. He must give a plausible explanation for both the firings and the muddled response from his department, without appearing incompetent to lead. And he has to do it all under oath.

Mr. Casper and Mr. Klinkerman lost their motion for dismissal, and this week their lawyers filed an appeals brief arguing that their clients had the right to take action against Mr. Young and Ms. Weise precisely because the two held views different from Mr. Bush’s.

Norman, what have you done? AT&T won't let me read my e-mail.

4.16.2007 A Woman Wrongly Convicted and a U.S. Attorney Who Kept His Job By ADAM COHEN

But even if there were no discussions, Mr. Biskupic may have known that his bosses in Washington expected him to use his position to help Republicans win elections, and then did what they wanted.

That would be ironic indeed. One of the biggest weaknesses in the case against Ms. Thompson was that to commit the crime she was charged with she had to have tried to gain personally from the contract, and there’s no credible evidence that she did. So Mr. Biskupic made the creative argument that she gained by obtaining “political advantage for her superiors” and that in pleasing them she “enhanced job security for herself.” Those motivations, of course, may well describe why Mr. Biskupic prosecuted Ms. Thompson.

Five days later, on July 27, ethics committee chairman Ad Melkert formally advised Mr. Wolfowitz in a memo that "the potential disruption of the staff member's career prospect will be recognized by an in situ promotion on the basis of her qualifying record . . ." In the same memo, Mr. Melkert recommends "that the President, with the General Counsel, communicates this advice" to the vice president for human resources "so as to implement" it immediately. Yeah, Right.

Bottom line: Gonzales and his deputy, Paul McNulty, initially told Congress that the firings were due to “performance-related” problems. Battle, who actually did the firings, said that in seven of the eight cases, this just wasn’t true. And since it was his job to supervise the department’s 93 U.S. attorneys, Battle was in a position to know.

I can’t wait to hear Gonzales’ explanation.

The infiltration of the federal government by large numbers of people seeking to impose a religious agenda ­ which is very different from simply being people of faith ­ is one of the most important stories of the last six years. It’s also a story that tends to go underreported, perhaps because journalists are afraid of sounding like conspiracy theorists.

But this conspiracy is no theory. The official platform of the Texas Republican Party pledges to “dispel the myth of the separation of church and state.” And the Texas Republicans now running the country are doing their best to fulfill that pledge.
...
Next week Rudy Giuliani will be speaking at Regent’s Executive Leadership Series.

Rove and company were well-aware of their legal obligations to preserve their communications, and were equally aware that using their White House emails to communicate would result in such preservation. This lengthy record by the Bush administration of finding ways to "lose" key documents relevant to investigations and judicial proceedings ought to leave little doubt about the corrupt intent motivating this behavior.

Countless e-mails to and from many key White House staffers have been deleted -- lost to history and placed out of reach of congressional subpoenas -- due to a brazen violation of internal White House policy that was allowed to continue for more than six years, the White House acknowledged yesterday.

Nobody in his right mind defends what Imus said. Certainly not Imus. For decades, he has been an equal-opportunity offender. For many the combination of this style plus his contrasting high-quality guest list add up to the program's quirky appeal. But it was inevitable that one day, as just happened, a land mine was stepped on by the risk-taking host. It shouldn't be confused with Hiroshima.

“This was the commission’s own study and it agreed in advance to how it would be done, but the most important part of it got dropped from the final version,” said Representative José E. Serrano, Democrat of New York and chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee that oversees the commission. “I don’t see how you can conclude that politics were not involved.”

The emerging story centers on the Department's Civil Rights Division, which enforces the nation's anti-discrimination laws. Several veterans of the Division have spoken out recently, describing imperious political appointees who obstruct prosecution of civil rights cases and re-route the Division's staff to other types of work. According to a working paper by Joseph Rich, who spent almost 37 years in the Division's voting rights section, this internal sabotage has "resulted in an alarming exodus of career attorneys--the longtime backbone of the Division that had historically maintained the institutional knowledge of how to enforce our civil rights laws." Numerous reports have suggested that those chased out are being replaced by political loyalists who mostly lack civil rights experience: according to an investigation by the Boston Globe, only 42 percent of the lawyers hired between 2003 and 2006 had civil rights backgrounds, whereas 77 percent of those hired in the preceding two years had such backgrounds.
...
Efforts to quietly colonize the Executive Branch's professional corps are less visible, but arguably more pernicious, than the mischief surrounding the mass firing of U.S. Attorneys. When an appointing president's term ends, his slate of U.S. Attorneys can be replaced wholesale. But federal civil service protections--which exist to insulate bureaucrats from politics and cronyism--prevent subsequent administrations from revamping the career staff. Recruiting lawyers broadly sympathetic to the administration's views is certainly legitimate. But draining the Department of seasoned, committed experts and replacing them with inexperienced loyalists has the potential to undermine the Department's work, even after the administration ends. Even if a new administration realigns the Department's priorities, an entrenched career staff may obstruct those efforts through a combination of intransigence and incompetence. In other words, the Bush administration may succeed in permanently de-activating laws it disagrees with by smashing the machinery for enforcing them.

Nearly half (48 percent) of the public rejects the scientific theory of evolution; one-third (34 percent) of college graduates say they accept the Biblical account of creation as fact. Seventy-three percent of Evangelical Protestants say they believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years; 39 percent of non-Evangelical Protestants and 41 percent of Catholics agree with that view. (Here)

4.2.2007 Distract and Disenfranchise Paul Krugman

Several of the fired U.S. attorneys were under pressure to pursue allegations of voter fraud ­ a phrase that has become almost synonymous with “voting while black.” Former staff members of the Justice Department’s civil rights division say that they were repeatedly overruled when they objected to Republican actions, ranging from Georgia’s voter ID law to Tom DeLay’s Texas redistricting, that they believed would effectively disenfranchise African-American voters.

The investigation of the firings of the United States attorneys seems to be closing in on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who should have been fired weeks ago. But Congress should bring equal scrutiny to the more powerful Mr. Rove. If it does, especially by forcing him to testify in public, it will find that he has been at the vortex of many of the biggest issues they are now investigating.