Andthensome

Starting to sing

I like to think the bad guy gets it in the end. Out of the countless abuses that have taken place during the last 8 years of the Bush administration Alberto Gonzales politicization of the DoJ is perhaps the most sinister. Their role is crucial to the balance of powers - they protect us, the people. Under Bush & co the turned the tables and became a machine to keep the neo-conservatives in power. It has become clear that a Bush crony might not become president (enter Obama) and I think people recognizing that fact will start to cut deals.

Murray Waas reports on the website of the Atlantic that Alberto Gonzales is now telling investigators that he was being personally directed by President Bush when, as White House counsel, Gonzales made a much-discussed late-night visit in 2004 to the hospital room of then Attorney General John Ashcroft, in order to get Ashcroft to certify that the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program was legal.

And if you don't think these guys deserve what is coming:

They Don't Care

I am just saying, is it too much to ask that they follow the laws? From CREW:

Today in CREW v. Cheney, District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued an order directing the parties to confer on the need for discovery before briefing on the merits. This order follows her ruling on Saturday ordering the vice president and the Office of the Vice President (OVP) to preserve all records, widely defined, as the law requires. Anne Weismann, CREW’s chief counsel said today: By this order, the court appears to recognize the need for additional fact-finding beyond what the OVP has attested in sworn declarations it is preserving and we anticipate that it will lead to depositions of White House officials in the very near future. In the lawsuit, which was filed on September 9, 2008, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington was joined by historians and archivists against Vice President Cheney, the OVP and the National Archives and Records Administration because of their unlawfully narrow interpretation of their obligations under the President Records Act.

Dick Cheny to the US: Go Fuck Yourself.

Your government at work

Take a break from the stench of the presidential elections and watch Kyle "Dusty" Foggo give up his fellow workers, countrymen and eventually the president of the US. Apparently, one way to get off of a criminal inditement is to try to introduce confidential evidence, and then have your co-conspiritors deny that evidence as unadmissible. Since the evidece is is unadmissible, you can then try to go off. Nice.

A former top CIA official accused of corruption and fraud is threatening to expose the identities of numerous agents and programs as part of his defense, prosecutors said. In a court filing, prosecutors allege that former CIA executive director Kyle "Dusty" Foggo is trying to gum up the works of his trial, scheduled for November, by delving into classified information that is irrelevant to his case. Foggo is charged with 28 counts of wire and mail fraud, unlawful money transactions and making false statements. Prosecutors say Foggo has threatened "to expose the cover of virtually every CIA employee with whom he interacted and to divulge to the world some of our country's most sensitive programs - even though this information has absolutely nothing to do with the charges he faces."

Great.

Some of those ...

Let our voices be heard

This is how we roll

Howard Dean breaking it down on John McCain at the National Review.  This scandal is too good.  I would have preferred for it to come out in like October or something.

Dean: Yes, he certainly has [damaged his campaign]. This goes all the way back to the Keating Five Scandal and the S & L scandals, where he took a hundred thousand donations, rode on corporate jets and then intervened on Charles Keating's behalf -- and again and again we see this. We even saw -- it's so hypocritical -- we even saw that he is trying to harass Barack Obama about whether he's going to take public financing in the campaign, and he forewent his own public financing in the primaries after getting a loan, based on the idea that he might take public financing.

This is not a guy who is a reformer. He talks about change, and he makes a big deal about not being like Bush when in fact he is Bush. He voted for Bush's tax cuts after saying he didn't, and has been responsible for a $6 trillion national debt that our children are going to have to pay. He thinks we ought to stay in Iraq for 100 years. He thought it was great that the president vetoed health care for our kids under 18. This is four more years of George Bush, and I don't think the American people are going to buy it.

America: It was nice while it lasted

Following in the steps of AG, Mukasey is no better.  What erks me is these cocksuckers will get away with it. From TPM:

Attorney General Michael Mukasey is back on the Hill today, testifying to the House Judiciary Committee. Paul Kiel is covering it at TPMmuckraker.

So far, he's dropped two big bombshells. DOJ will not be investigating:

(1) whether the waterboarding, now admitted to by the White House, was a crime; or

(2) whether the Administration's warrantless wiretapping was illegal.

His rationale? Both programs had been signed off on in advance as legal by the Justice Department.

Cynics may argue that those aren't bombshells at all, that the Bush Administration would never investigate itself in these matters. Perhaps so. But this is a case where cynicism is itself dangerous.

We have now the Attorney General of the United States telling Congress that it's not against the law for the President to violate the law if his own Department of Justice says it's not.

It is as brazen a defense of the unitary executive as anything put forward by the Administration in the last seven years, and it comes from an attorney general who was supposed to be not just a more professional, but a more moderate, version of Alberto Gonzales (Thanks to Democrats like Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer for caving on the Mukasey nomination.).

President Bush has now laid down his most aggressive challenge to the very constitutional authority of Congress. It is a naked assertion of executive power. The founders would have called it tyrannical. His cards are now all on the table. This is no bluff.

Don't you get it?  Its ok to do it, as long as we say it was ok to do it.  See these are the new rules of government.  Nice.

Brilliant

Top 10 things overheard at Dick Cheney's Birthday Party.  Letterman Rocks!

Obama-rama

Interestingly a couple of the guys at work follow the primaries enough so that we can talk about them, which is pretty good considering they are not Americans.  A couple of interesting questions came up.  Who pays for the primaries?  I guess that is the DNC and the RNC respectively.  What do canidates do after the primaries?  I am not sure.  There is quite a bit of time between the primaries and the conventions, so I guess they go around calling each other cocksuckers and stuff.  Anyway, Obama is the man and the polls show him to be closing in.

So sad

Man the economy, by that I mean the global economy, is going down the tubes.  Whose fault could that be? Tax cuts and an expensive war.  None of that is Paulson's fault, but a pictures is worth 1,000 words, no?

Your tax dollars at work

This is ironic:

With the original First Amendment "Freedom of Speech" looking on, admirers of the U.S. Constitution in the Washington D.C. National Archives Building today were ordered to leave for wearing tee-shirts reading "Impeach Bush and Cheney."

The National Archives and all other government buildings belong to the people.  Unless this 56 year-old woman was causing a security threat, I don't think they had a reason to kick her out.  Fuck them.