Everyone go read this report from Mud Flats regarding Sarah Palin’s ongoing troopergate scandal and her new attempts to subvert the investigation, and make sure you watch the ABC report at the end of the post.
Then, when you are done, think about McCain’s calls last night for reform and change, and then go google the phrase “Reformer with Results.”
When I said yesterday that we have been down this road before, I was not kidding.
Jack Abramoff, once a top Republican lobbyist on K Street, is asking a federal judge to show mercy when she sentences him Thursday in an epic corruption case that continues to rock Capitol Hill and the GOP establishment.
Abramoff, who is already serving a 70-month sentence stemming from his fraudulent purchase of a Florida casino-cruise ship company, will go before District Judge Ellen S. Huvelle to be sentenced in a scandal that resulted in a prison term for one former member of Congress, a dozen other guilty pleas by former Republican aides and officials, and new ethics legislation enacted at the start of the 110th Congress.
Has anyone been charged with anything? Is the media just ignoring this completely? Why have the authorities not had any press conferences to explain what kind of evidence they have to warrant this bullshit? What is going on?
On why the many houses matter. The point that Publius makes is not academic – many of John McCain’s character flaws can be traced to a near-lifetime of being sheltered behind vast wealth. Take his gambling habit.
“Enjoying craps opens up a window on a central thread constant in John’s life,” says John Weaver, McCain’s former chief strategist, who followed him to many a casino. “Taking a chance, playing against the odds.” Aides say McCain tends to play for a few thousand dollars at a time and avoids taking markers, or loans, from the casinos, which he has helped regulate in Congress.
Casino games are an unwinnable stupid tax, especially the games of chance that McCain compulsively favors. The only people who can afford to throw ‘a few thousand dollars at a time’ into a guaranteed losing game are either sheltered rich, or self-destructive addicts on a last bender before homelessness. McCain has been conditioned by life to believe that he can do whatever he wants because a bottomless pile of family money will shield him from consequences.
McCain’s public life reveals the same dynamic at play. He flies into uncontrollable rages at things that most of us consider normal (e.g., a Republican colleague criticizes a policy position). On foreign policy, supposedly the Republican candidate’s strong suit, McCain’s approach weirdly parallels his private weakness. It isn’t by accident that he attracted a coterie of neocon dregs with whom he surrounds himself. Beginning with Randy Scheunemann and running down the list, most of these guys disgraced themselves so badly in Iraq that they aren’t even welcome in many Republican circles any more. They’re reckless gamblers, creative destruction, roll the dice and see what happens types. If you disagree or god forbid, criticize their fragile egos then you’re a fucking Jew-hater terrorist who should be locked up until every American enemy has been killed.
Take a look at the guy in office right now. People who knew me in 2000 ask how I knew that the Bush administration would go bad in such an extreme way. The answer is Harken Energy, and any other thing that George Bush’s lesser son tried and failed to do until he hooked up with a decent pack of advisers for his Texas gubernatorial bid. Like most children with overindulgent, wealthy mothers George W. doesn’t take care of his toys.
John McCain may have once lived like a normal person, but by now he’s spent most of his adult life sheltered behind a bubble of vast wealth. In that way he resembles President Bubble Boy more than almost any office holder in DC. Some months ago I worked out how many things I need to cut back now that I’m paying for Honda Fit. Now I’m worried that the Sharp Edge and the excellent Turkish restaurant around the block will go under before the wife and I see it again. When do you suppose was the last time McCain had to think like that?
It is a late Sunday afternoon in April, and I am sitting in a condominium in Coronado, California, taking in the view of the gorgeous San Diego Bay with Cindy McCain. She closed on the place just two weeks earlier, and the only things unpacked so far are the family photos that dot almost every surface. It’s her family’s second condo in the building. “I like the ocean, and the kids love it here, and I love that,” she tells me, curled up on a nondescript couch that looks like it might have come with the apartment. “When I bought the first one, my husband, who is not a beach person, said, ‘Oh, this is such a waste of money; the kids will never go.’ Then it got to the point where they used it so much I couldn’t get in the place. So I bought another one.”
Remember that a war has to go incredibly, catastrophically bad for those in McCain’s social stratum to feel any pain. It isn’t class warfare to point out that extreme privilege breeds a mindset that isn’t compatible with good government. It’s simply an observation that anybody who works with adolescents can tell you: when indulgent parents take away consequences, kids often go feral. Four more years of that is something that I can do without.
The Bush/Cheney White House has “lost” almost a years worth of e-mail, and aww, gosh-darnit, it just looks like they won’t be able to recover them:
The White House is missing as many as 225 days of e-mail dating back to 2003 and there is little if any likelihood a recovery effort will be completed by the time the Bush administration leaves office, according to an internal White House draft document obtained by The Associated Press.
The nine-page outline of the White House’s e-mail problems invites companies to bid on a project to recover the missing electronic messages.
The work would be carried out through April 19, 2009, according to the Office of Administration request for contractors’ proposals, which was dated June 20.
Last week, the White House declined to comment on the document.
On Wednesday, the White House refused to talk about internal White House contracting procedures, but said the information is “outdated and seriously inaccurate.” It would not elaborate. The White House also declined to say whether it has hired a contractor for the work yet.
Such a terrible loss, and I hope no one tries to make political points out of this. It is just an accident that all these emails from a time when all sorts of extremely sensitive internal discussions were taking place just “disappeared.” Only a real leftard would assume malice.
Yes, there are all sorts of arcane legal arguments being made here (most of which I will openly admit to not understanding), but the gist of this story is that a judge tinkered with a jury in order to get the verdict the state wanted.
The Justice Department has proposed a new domestic spying measure that would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years.
The proposed changes would revise the federal government’s rules for police intelligence-gathering for the first time since 1993 and would apply to any of the nation’s 18,000 state and local police agencies that receive roughly $1.6 billion each year in federal grants.
Quietly unveiled late last month, the proposal is part of a flurry of domestic intelligence changes issued and planned by the Bush administration in its waning months. They include a recent executive order that guides the reorganization of federal spy agencies and a pending Justice Department overhaul of FBI procedures for gathering intelligence and investigating terrorism cases within U.S. borders.
Taken together, critics in Congress and elsewhere say, the moves are intended to lock in policies for Bush’s successor and to enshrine controversial post-Sept. 11 approaches that some say have fed the greatest expansion of executive authority since the Watergate era.
Welcome to the police state, bitches. And in case they do decide to go to trial, the judges will be happy to help the jury convict you.
All together now- “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about.” Our collective wars are killing this country.
A reluctant Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili said Friday he signed a cease-fire agreement with Russia and declared in the presence of the chief U.S. diplomat that the West had behaved in ways that invited the invasion.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she had been assured that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will sign an identical document. The United States says the pact protects the former Soviet republic’s interests despite concessions to Moscow.
“With this signature by Georgia, this must take place and take place now,” Rice said. She did not say what, if anything, the United States would do if Russia defies the truce.
As of late Thursday, Ankara, a NATO ally, hadn’t cleared any U.S. naval vessels to steam to Georgia through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, the narrow straits that connect the Mediterranean and the Black Seas, the officials said. Under the 1936 Montreaux Convention, countries must notify Turkey before sending warships through the straits.
Pentagon officials told McClatchy that they were increasingly dubious that any U.S. Navy vessels would join the aid operation, in large part because the U.S.-based hospital ships likely to go, the USNS Comfort and the USNS Mercy, would take weeks to arrive.
“The president was writing checks to the Georgians without knowing what he had in the bank,” said a senior administration official.
“The president got out in front of the planning when he talked publicly about using naval forces,” said a second senior administration official. “At that point we need to look at treaty obligations, our bilateral relations with the Turks and others, waterway restrictions and what kind of ships might be appropriate and usable — something like the Comfort or something already in the Med (Mediterranean).”
The U.S. officials requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly, because the issue is diplomatically sensitive or because the administration takes a dim view of officials who reveal its internal deliberations.
I am so inspired by our administration’s deft handling of the humanitarian aid aspect of this crisis that I broke out photoshop for the occasion.
At this point, I think it is fair to wonder if we can survive the next few months Bush is in office without nuclear armageddon.
A former driver for Osama bin Laden was sentenced today to 5 ½ years in prison for his material support for terrorism, a relatively light sentence that means the first detainee at Guantanamo Bay to face a full military commission trial could be released from custody in just five months.
The six military officers who found Salim Ahmed Hamdan guilty of terror charges yesterday came back with the sentence this afternoon, knowing that the judge in the case was going to give Hamdan credit for the five years and one month of his pre-trial incarceration at Guantanamo.
I suppose it is time once again to break out the giant “USA #1” foam finger to celebrate our glorious victory in the War on Terror, because that was certainly worth all the fuss. We went through several years of hell just to have a special tribunal convict someone for precisely what they confessed to, and then sentenced them to a half dozen years. Glad we did all that. Except, even now, it is all meaningless:
It is unclear what will happen to Hamdan after he finishes serving his remaining time, because military prosecutors and military commissions officials have argued they have the ability to hold enemy combatants indefinitely, until the end of hostilities in the so-called war on terror. While the Bush administration could order him held, officials could also transfer him to the custody of his home country, Yemen, or release him outright.
So why did we even have the damned tribunal in the first place? Seriously. If this makes a lick of sense to anyone, let me know. From where I am sitting, it just looks like more of the Bush administration DWTFTW.
Too bad. If this is true then Ron Suskind just got hit with the exact same trick that brought down Dan Rather: take a damaging true story (in this case, that the administration fabricated documents that made it look like Iraq had contact with al Qaeda and sought yellowcake from Niger) and preemptively leak it to a reporter with enough bogus details stirred in to discredit the reporter and the story itself. I don’t know whether or not Philip Giraldi has better contacts than Ron Suskind does, but it doesn’t help Suskind’s case that his two named sources are contradicting what they apparently told him in private.
More than that, using Doug Feith’s office makes more sense any way you look at it. You don’t have the many potentially unreliable layers through which the order would have to pass – unlike CIA, OSP was a nirvana of single-minded ideological purity. This assignment would fit neatly in the Iraq propaganda organizational flow chart as OSP, which is already knee-deep in Niger yellowcake forgeries.
If I’m right then we know what happens next. Powerline or an acceptable substitute will drum up the noise shortly, bury Suskind’s credibility and scare any other reporter away from ever touching the story again. Correct me if I’m wrong, but as I recall we never found out what kept the American president from reporting for duty at that Texas Air National Guard base.
The sad part is the debt limit was raised by $850 billion in October, 2007, and again last week by $800 billion. So the official “deficit” of $400 billion or so horribly, unbelievably, understates the real fiscal disaster that is the Bush economic record.
Add in the federal debt ceiling, and it’s a reminder of how deep in the red the government already is. The current debt limit of about $9.815 trillion will be exhausted this fall, and the Democrats’ new 2009 budget plan calls for raising the ceiling to $10.615 trillion — an $800 billion increase.
The U.S. budget deficit will widen to a record of about $490 billion next year, an administration official said, leaving a deep budget hole that will constrain the next president’s tax and spending plans.
The projected deficit for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 is higher than the $407 billion forecast by President George W. Bush in February. The bigger shortfall reflects dwindling tax receipts because of the U.S. economic slowdown, the cost of a $168 billion economic stimulus package and spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I fully expect McCain to release a commercial by the end of the day blaming this on Obama.
Former Justice Department counselor Monica M. Goodling and former chief of staff D. Kyle Sampson routinely broke the law by conducting political litmus tests on candidates for jobs as immigration judges and line prosecutors, according to an inspector general’s report released today.
Goodling passed over hundreds of qualified applicants and squashed the promotions of others after deeming candidates insufficiently loyal to the Republican party, said investigators, who interviewed 85 people and received information from 300 other job seekers at Justice. Sampson developed a system to screen immigration judge candidates based on improper political considerations and routinely took recommendations from the White House Office of Political Affairs and Presidential Personnel, the report said.
Goodling regularly asked candidates for career jobs: “What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?” the report said. One former Justice Department official told investigators she had complained that Goodling was asking interviewees for their views on abortion, according to the report.
The only question that matters is- will anyone be charged with anything? Will anyone suffer one bit for their malfeasance? Will anyone have their career arc impacted at all for willful criminal behavior?
The answer is- “Of course not.”
What a country. This is the kind of crap you need to keep in mind when you hear the braying jackasses accusing Democrats and other of not being patriotic. These scumbags, these perfect examples of the modern GOP, have routinely put party over country. The fact that they have the nerve to even show their faces in public, let alone accuse others of treason or treachery or question their patriotism is enough to make your blood boil.
Wall Street got drunk, it got drunk, (it’s one of the reasons I asked you to turn off your tv cameras.) It got drunk and now it’s got a hangover. The question is how long will it sober up, and not try to do all these fancy financial instruments.
And now we got a housing issue, not in Houston, and evidently, not in Dallas, because Laura was over there trying to buy a house today. (laugher.. Crawford!)
I like Crawford, unfortunately after eight years of asking her to sacrifice, I’m now no longer the decision maker. She’ll be deciding, thanks for the suggestion! I suggest you don’t yell it out when she’s here. Later, telling her “Hey honey, we’ve been on government pay now for 14 years… so go slow!”
It’s uh.. caused me to lose my train of thought. Anyway.
Now that he doesn’t have to pretend that he is an average everyday guy you want to have a beer with, the Crawford ranch is getting thrown under the bus. How long before it goes on sale (and, no doubt, will be bought, above market value, by one of the Bush/Cheney cronies, as that is an easy way to funnel some loot his way)? A year? Sixteen months?
By the way- government pay is $400k a year for Bush. Just an average guy, you know.
European terrorists are trying to enter the United States with European Union passports, and there is no guarantee officials will catch them every time, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Thursday.
Chertoff’s comments on Capitol Hill comes as the country is entering a potentially vulnerable period with the presidential nominating conventions coming up next month; the presidential election in November; and the transition to a new administration in January — all of which may be attractive targets for terrorists.
***
“The terrorists are deliberately focusing on people who have legitimate Western European passports, who don’t appear to have records as terrorists,” Chertoff told lawmakers. “I have a good degree of confidence we can catch people coming in. But I have to tell you … there’s no guarantee. And they are working very hard to slip by us.”
Chertoff also brings up the specter of the old stand-by, the dirty bomb. Really, there is so much gibberish here that it is hard to unpack it all. How we are becoming more “vulnerable” as a nation because of the upcoming conventions is beyond me, but they want you to think we are. Additionally, aren’t we all aware that there always remains the possibility that something will happen?
What, really, is the point of this nonsense other than typical fear-mongering?