Major Political Changes in the USA

[DudeAsInCool]

Gore campaign team assembles in secret

Friends of Al Gore have secretly started assembling a campaign team in preparation for the former American vice-president to make a fresh bid for the White House. Two members of Mr Gore's staff from his unsuccessful attempt in 2000 say they have been approached to see if they would be available to work with him again.

Mr Gore, President Bill Clinton's deputy, has said he wants to concentrate on publicising the need to combat climate change, a case made in his film, An Inconvenient Truth, which won him an Oscar this year.

But, aware that he may step into the wide open race for the White House, former strategists are sounding out a shadow team that could run his campaign at short notice. In approaching former campaign staff, including political strategists and communications officials, they are making clear they are not acting on formal instructions from Mr Gore, 59, but have not been asked to stop.

Source

[DudeAsInCool]

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.

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.

First, the inquiry comes from inside the administration, not from Democrats in Congress. Second, unlike the splintered inquiries being pressed on Capitol Hill, it is expected to be a unified investigation covering many facets of the political operation in which Rove played a leading part.

"We will take the evidence where it leads us," Scott J. Bloch, head of the Office of Special Counsel and a presidential appointee, said in an interview Monday. "We will not leave any stone unturned."

Read more at the LATimes

[DudeAsInCool]

Network Hosting Attorney Scandal E-Mails Also Hosted Ohio's 2004 Election Results

By Steven Rosenfeld and Bob Fitrakis, Free Press. Posted April 23, 2007.

Did the most powerful Republicans in America have the computer capacity, software skills and electronic infrastructure in place on Election Night 2004 to tamper with the Ohio results to ensure George W. Bush's re-election?

Read More

[DudeAsInCool]

Sen Harry Reid (Dem - Nevada), after being chastized by the President and VP Cheney for saying the Iraq War has been lost: "I'm Not Going To Get Into A Name-Calling Match With Somebody Who Has A 9 Percent Approval Rating"

[DudeAsInCool]

Political Briefings At Agencies Disclosed

White House Calls Meetings Lawful

White House officials conducted 20 private briefings on Republican electoral prospects in the last midterm election for senior officials in at least 15 government agencies covered by federal restrictions on partisan political activity, a White House spokesman and other administration officials said yesterday.

The previously undisclosed briefings were part of what now appears to be a regular effort in which the White House sent senior political officials to brief top appointees in government agencies on which seats Republican candidates might win or lose, and how the election outcomes could affect the success of administration policies, the officials said.

The existence of one such briefing, at the headquarters of the General Services Administration in January, came to light last month, and the Office of Special Counsel began an investigation into whether the officials at the briefing felt coerced into steering federal activities to favor those Republican candidates cited as vulnerable.

Such coercion is prohibited under a federal law, known as the Hatch Act, meant to insulate virtually all federal workers from partisan politics. In addition to forbidding workplace pressures meant to influence an election outcome, the law bars the use of federal resources -- including office buildings, phones and computers -- for partisan purposes.

Read more at The Washington Post

[DudeAsInCool]

U.S. media have lost the will to dig deep

A changed news culture has let several important investigative stories slip through the cracks.

By Greg Palast, GREG PALAST is the author of "Armed Madhouse: From New Orleans to Baghdad -- Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild."

April 27, 2007

IN AN E-MAIL uncovered and released by the House Judiciary Committee last month, Tim Griffin, once Karl Rove's right-hand man, gloated that "no [u.S.] national press picked up" a BBC Television story reporting that the Rove team had developed an elaborate scheme to challenge the votes of thousands of African Americans in the 2004 election.

Griffin wasn't exactly right. The Los Angeles Times did run a follow-up article a few days later in which it reported the findings. But he was essentially right. Most of the major U.S. newspapers and the vast majority of television news programs ignored the story even though it came at a critical moment just weeks before the election.

According to Griffin (who has since been dispatched to Arkansas to replace one of the U.S. attorneys fired by the Justice Department), the mainstream media rejected the story because it was wrong.

"That guy is a British reporter who accepted some false allegations and made a story up," he said.

Let's get one fact straight, Mr. Griffin. "That guy" is not a British reporter. I am an American living abroad, putting investigative reports on the air from London for the British Broadcasting Corp.

Read more of this editorial at the LA Times

[DudeAsInCool]

Senate Subpoenas Gonzales on Rove E-Mail

WASHINGTON — Senators subpoenaed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales Wednesday, ordering him to provide all e-mails related to presidential adviser Karl Rove and the firings of eight federal prosecutors.

"It is troubling that significant documents highly relevant to the committee's inquiry have not been produced," Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., wrote in a letter to Gonzales. The subpoena gives Gonzales until May 15 to turn over the information.

Not accepting the White House's explanation that some of the Rove-related e-mails may have been lost, Leahy subpoenaed any in the custody of the Justice Department. Leahy pointed to Rove's lawyer's statement that some of those the White House claims might be lost had been turned over to U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald as part of the investigation into the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity.

Read More

Inside the West Wing the lowering atmosphere of dread is like that of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Pit and Pendulum:" "Down -- steadily down it crept." - Sidney Blumenthal

[slum_goddess]

Inside the West Wing the lowering atmosphere of dread is like that of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Pit and Pendulum:" "Down -- steadily down it crept." - Sidney Blumenthal

i'm feeling a huge case of Schadenfreude coming on here. just sayin'.

[DudeAsInCool]

The Bush administration has withheld a series of e-mails from Congress showing that senior White House and Justice Department officials worked together to conceal the role of Karl Rove in installing Timothy Griffin, a protégé of Rove's, as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas.

The withheld records show that D. Kyle Sampson, who was then-chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, consulted with White House officials in drafting two letters to Congress that appear to have misrepresented the circumstances of Griffin's appointment as U.S. attorney and of Rove's role in supporting Griffin.

Read More

[DudeAsInCool]

May 12-13, 2007 -- Hookergate involves fired US Attorney. US District Judge for the District of Columbia Gladys Kessler, a Clinton appointee, has re-issued an order prohibiting DC Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey from releasing any more phone lists of her Pamela Martin & Associates customers. Secrecy of the phone records has been a priority for DC Assistant US Attorney William Cowden. Palfrey released her 10 years of customer phone records to ABC's "20/20" before Kessler's March order prohibiting such a release took effect. As WMR reported, ABC and Disney, under pressure from the Bush White House, killed the story and stated that there were no "newsworthy" names on the Madam's list. WMR has been informed by three well-placed sources that Vice President Dick Cheney, while a part-time resident of McLean, Virginia and while serving as Halliburton's CEO, was a customer of the DC Madam.

Source

Do you know why we’re underwhelmed by this rumor? Because even if it’s a fact, which it probably is, there’s no way it would have any impact on Cheney’s “career.” This is a draft-dodging half-human war criminal with a pregnant lesbian daughter who tells senators to fuck themselves and shoots his own friends in the face. Ordering an outcall hooker is positively innocent compared to the well-known things Cheney does every day.

Wonkette

[DudeAsInCool]

Iraq - A Big Business For Private Contractors

[DudeAsInCool]

Carter: Bush 'Worst In History' in World Relations

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) - Former President Carter says President Bush's administration is "the worst in history" in international relations, taking aim at the White House's policy of pre-emptive war and its Middle East diplomacy.

The criticism from Carter, which a biographer says is unprecedented for the 39th president, also took aim at Bush's environmental policies and the administration's "quite disturbing" faith-based initiative funding.

"I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history," Carter told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in a story that appeared in the newspaper's Saturday editions. "The overt reversal of America's basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including those of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me."

Read More

[DudeAsInCool]

Bush To Be Dictator If Catastrophic Emergency

The Bush administration has released a directive called the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive. The directive released on May 9th, 2007 has gone almost unnoticed by the mainstream and alternative media. This is understandable considering the huge Ron Paul and immigration news but this story is equally as huge. In this directive, Bush declares that in the event of a “Catastrophic Emergency” the President will be entrusted with leading the activities to ensure constitutional government. The language in this document would in effect make the President a dictator in the case of such an emergency.

Read More

[DudeAsInCool]

President Carter calls the Bush Regime the worst in history - Listen Here

[DudeAsInCool]

The Future Of America Is At Stake

Investigative reporter Greg Palast says 4.5 million votes will be shoplifted in 2008, thanks largely to the “Rove-bots” that have been placed in the Justice Department following the U.S. Attorney firings. Being the guy who uncovered the voter “purge lists” of 2000 that disenfranchised black voters, he’s worth listening to, even if the mainstream press chooses not to.

Read More

[DudeAsInCool]

Send Wolfowitz to Iraq, Says GOP Lawmaker

Paul Wolfowitz may have been ousted from his post at the World Bank, but a free-speaking GOP lawmaker has an idea to keep the so-called "architect" of the Iraq War from standing in the unemployment line.

"I would like to suggest...that maybe we give Paul Wolfowitz a new job and send him over [to Iraq] as mayor," said Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., "since the neocons got us in over there."

Read More

[DudeAsInCool]

Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal slams Bush in her op-ed:

..."The White House doesn't need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don't even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.

For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad.

But on immigration it has changed from "Too bad" to "You're bad."

The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic--they "don't want to do what's right for America." His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, "We're gonna tell the bigots to shut up." On Fox last weekend he vowed to "push back."

Read More

Peggy should give some credit where credit is due - we libs have been preaching the same mantra well before Bush was elected. I don't understand how the man can stay in power when the whole country is against him...

[slum_goddess]

don't understand how the man can stay in power when the whole country is against him...

by keeping US all afraid? only a guess, mind.

[DudeAsInCool]

by keeping US all afraid? only a guess, mind.

the fear factor is no longer working. the dems think they could impeach him, but at this stage of the game, they would rather prepare for the takeover in 2008

[DudeAsInCool]

Official: Cheney Urged Wiretaps

Stand-In for Ashcroft Alleges Interference

Vice President Cheney told Justice Department officials that he disagreed with their objections to a secret surveillance program during a high-level White House meeting in March 2004, a former senior Justice official told senators yesterday.

The meeting came one day before White House officials tried to get approval for the same program from then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, who lay recovering from surgery in a hospital, according to former deputy attorney general James B. Comey.

Comey's disclosures, made in response to written questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee, indicate that Cheney and his aides were more closely involved than previously known in a fierce internal battle over the legality of the warrantless surveillance program. The program allowed the National Security Agency to monitor phone calls and e-mails between the United States and overseas.

Comey said that Cheney's office later blocked the promotion of a senior Justice Department lawyer, Patrick Philbin, because of his role in raising concerns about the surveillance.

..."Mr. Comey has confirmed what we suspected for a while -- that White House hands guided Justice Department business," said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). "The vice president's fingerprints are all over the effort to strong-arm Justice on the NSA program, and the obvious next question is: Exactly what role did the president play?"

Read More

[DudeAsInCool]

From the Berkeley Place Music Blog::

Here’s an email from a guy who was a staunch republican in 2004. . .

A few major Bush accomplishments

1. Filled every level of government with incompetent ideologues

2. Ruined the reputation and standing of our country across the world

3. Invaded another country without a good reason then managed it so poorly so as to require an American occupation for at least a decade.

4. Turned the largest budget surplus ever into the largest deficit ever

5. Decimated the EPA. Raped the clean water act. Generally surrendered the environment to big oil, coal, logging chemical and agriculture

6. Ignored global climate change at possible the most crucial period possible.

7. Concentrated wealth in for the very rich at the expense of the middle and lower classes.

8. Moved the tax burden to wages and off of capital gains thus making working for a living harder and living off of trust funds easier.

9. Expanded the power of the executive branch while at the same time removing both its credibility and accountability

10. Forced government into areas where it doesn’t belong (FCC regulating content, set the stage for a roe v. wade reversal)

11. Filled the education system with costly and pointless bureaucracy while cutting social programs

12. Put 1 million more children into poverty and removed health care from a similar number

13. Broke the military

14. Allowed the American broad band internet access to drop to 16th out of the top 16 industrialized nations

15. Blocked election reform

16. Vetoed stem cell research

17. Encouraged torture and violations of the Geneva Convention

18. Effectively cut funding to police and fire departments across the country and sent the National Guard to Iraq while we are “at war with terrorists”

19. Allowed 9/11 to happen (this is a bit of a stretch but it was on his watch)

20. Bred a new generation of terroists while doing nothing to protect us against them

21. Spent close to a billion $ on a missle defense plan that cannot possibly work with current technology. (current switching rates for the circuits used in missles are not fast enough to make the changes required to knock a nother missle out of the air.)

22. Ruined our relationship with many allies ( Russia springs to mind.)

[DudeAsInCool]

Abu Ghraib Investigator Points to Pentagon

The Army two-star general who led the first investigation into detainee abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq believes that senior defense officials were involved in directing abusive interrogation policies and said that he was forced to retire early because of his pursuit of the issue, says an article to be published tomorrow in the New Yorker magazine.

Read more The Washington Post and Seymour Hersh's profile of Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba in The New Yorker

[DudeAsInCool]

Special Counsel Probe Into Rove’s Politicization Of Government Advances

The Office of Special Counsel, which has already recommended that GSA chief Lurita Doan be suspended or fired for participating in partisan activities while on the job, is now moving forward with its investigation of nearly 20 other administration agencies.

Eighteen agencies have been asked by the Office of Special Counsel to preserve electronic information dating back to January 2001 as part of its governmentwide investigation into alleged violations of the law that limits political activity in federal agencies.

The OSC task force investigating the claims has asked agencies, including the General Services Administration, to preserve all e-mail records, calendar information, phone logs and hard drives going back to the beginning of the Bush administration. The task force is headed by deputy OSC special counsel James Byrne.

The White House has admitted that roughly 20 agencies have received a PowerPoint briefing created by Karl Rove’s office “that included slides listing Democratic and Republican seats the White House viewed as vulnerable in 2008, a map of contested Senate seats and other information on 2008 election strategy.”

Politicization of the federal government has been illegal for decades. The 1939 Hatch Act specifically prohibits partisan campaign or electoral activities on federal government property, including federal agencies.

Read More at Think Progress

[DudeAsInCool]

Bush should be tried as a war criminal after impeachment says former Reagan official

Prominent Conservative Leader says Government in Hands of Psychopaths. Paul Craig Roberts said that the US government is in the hands of dangerous psychopaths who are a disgrace to the human race and who should be arrested as war criminals and turned over the the Hague.

Former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury Dr. Paul Craig Roberts expressed his dire warning that the US government has fallen into the hands of Neo-Con psychopaths.

Roberts went further than he has ever gone before in stating that the Neo-Cons were worse than Hitler and Stalin because they publicly embrace torture and pre-emptive war, something that past despots at least tried to hide.

Read More

[DudeAsInCool]

Bush Aides' Misuse of E-Mail Detailed by House Committee

White House aides made extensive use of political e-mail accounts for official government business, despite rules requiring that they conduct such business through official communications channels, according to new evidence disclosed yesterday by congressional investigators.

The Republican National Committee told the investigators that White House senior political adviser Karl Rove alone sent or received more than 140,000 e-mails between 2002 and 2007, more than half of which involved individuals using official ".gov" e-mail accounts, a report from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said. The RNC said it still has copies of those e-mails.

Former Rove assistant Susan B. Ralston affirmed in a deposition released by the committee that her ex-boss used his political e-mail account "most of the time."

Read more at The Washington Post