"Kick the darkness till it bleeds daylight." - Bruce Cockburn
If there is an all-out war between the United States and various radical Muslim groups worldwide, who would you rather have in charge — Democrats or Republicans?
Democrats 41%
Republicans 38%
Both the same
(not listed) 9%
Don't know
(not listed) 12%
"Yesterday the vice president was forced to admit what even an eighth-grade student knew: there is no Cheney branch of government. While the vice president's excuses may change, his desire to ignore the rule remains just as strong as ever. The vice president is unwilling to risk that the documents detailing the flawed intelligence or faulty assumptions that led us into the war in Iraq [sic]. He has been held unaccountable for six years, and now he wants to be held unaccountable in the historical record as well...
If his office is not in the executive branch, then there is no executive branch office to fund. And perhaps more importantly, it underscores that the vice president is not above the law, and cannot ignore the rules. The law should follow him, whatever branch of government he chooses to hang his hat in.
Report: Wasteful Government Spending at All-Time High
The U.S. government has committed to spend a record-high $1.1 trillion with companies holding government contracts "plagued by waste, fraud, abuse or mismanagement," according to a new report by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
The report blames the rise in bad spending on a sharp increase in noncompetitive contracting and a general increase in the use of private companies to perform government functions.
Under Dick Cheney, the office of the vice president has been transformed from a tiny acorn into an unprecedented giant oak. In grasping and exercising presidential powers, Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have embarrassed King George III.
The most recent invention we know of is the vice president's insistence that an executive order governing the handling of classified information in the executive branch does not reach his office because he also serves as president of the Senate. In other words, the vice president is a unique legislative-executive creature standing above and beyond the Constitution.
The House judiciary committee should commence an impeachment inquiry. As Alexander Hamilton advised in the Federalist Papers, an impeachable offense is a political crime against the nation. Cheney's multiple crimes against the Constitution clearly qualify.
Senate Panel Subpoenas White House Wiretapping Papers
By William Roberts
June 27 (Bloomberg) -- A Senate panel probing the National Security Agency's domestic wiretapping program issued subpoenas to the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney and the Justice Department for documents showing the Bush administration's legal justification for the secret surveillance.
``This committee has made no fewer than nine formal requests to the Department of Justice and to the White House, seeking information and documents about the authorization of and legal justification for this program,'' Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote in letters accompanying the subpoenas.
Those requests were ``rebuffed'' by a ``pattern of evasion and misdirection'' from administration officials, Leahy said.
The panel authorized Leahy to issue subpoenas on the secret surveillance on June 21. The panel is reviewing whether the White House properly developed a legal basis for the classified eavesdropping on the international phone calls and e-mails of suspected terrorist agents that was disclosed in December 2005.
"Our course in Iraq has lost contact with our vital national security interests in the Middle East and beyond. Our continuing absorption with military activities in Iraq is limiting our diplomatic assertiveness there and elsewhere in the world."
"The window during which we can continue to employ American troops in Iraqi neighborhoods without damaging our military strength, or our ability to respond to other national security priorities, is closing. The United States military remains the strongest fighting force in the world, but we have to be mindful that it is not indestructible."
HARTFORD, Conn. - Sen. Barack Obama told a church convention Saturday that some right-wing evangelical leaders have exploited and politicized religious beliefs in an effort to sow division.
"Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and faith started being used to drive us apart," the Democratic presidential candidate said in a 30-minute speech before the national meeting of the United Church of Christ.
"Faith got hijacked, partly because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, all too eager to exploit what divides us," the Illinois senator said.
"At every opportunity, they've told evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design," according to an advance copy of his speech.
"There was even a time when the Christian Coalition determined that its number one legislative priority was tax cuts for the rich," Obama said. "I don't know what Bible they're reading, but it doesn't jibe with my version."
Washington, D.C. – House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel issued the following statement regarding his amendment to cut funding for the Office of the Vice President from the bill that funds the executive branch. The legislation – the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill -- will be considered on the floor of the House of Representatives next week.
"The Vice President has a choice to make. If he believes his legal case, his office has no business being funded as part of the executive branch. However, if he demands executive branch funding he cannot ignore executive branch rules. At the very least, the Vice President should be consistent. This amendment will ensure that the Vice President's funding is consistent with his legal arguments. I have worked closely with my colleagues on this amendment and will continue to pursue this measure in the coming days."
Cheney Power Grab: Says White House Rules Don’t Apply to Him
by Justin Rood
Vice President Dick Cheney has asserted his office is not a part of the executive branch of the U.S. government, and therefore not bound by a presidential order governing the protection of classified information by government agencies, according to a new letter from Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., to Cheney...
In pointed letters released today by Waxman, ISOO’s Leonard twice questioned Cheney’s office on its assertion it was exempt from the rules. He received no reply, but the vice president later tried to get rid of Leonard’s office entirely, according to Waxman.
As there has been a lot said recently about the netroots and our influence on the Democratic Party, this is especially rewarding. Let’s just say we’ve ruffled some feathers. We’ve been called everything from “some guy named Vinnie in a bathrobe in an efficiency apartment” to “blogofascists.” Some critics dismiss us as useless elites, the “Metropolitan Opera crowd,” or a noisy Upper West Side cocktail party for the college graduate class. Still others take us to task for our vitriolic, unhinged tone.
The other day, Tim Russert agreed absolutely with his gracious host, the concerned centrist Sean Hannity, that the Democratic Party was being unduly influenced by bloggers, who were dragging the Party kicking and screaming to the Left. Then there is the criticism that we are fascists or Stalinists, demanding that everyone march in lockstep to the edicts of our leadership – generally assumed to be Markos, of Daily Kos, who apparently directs us with secret signals deeply embedded in the code of the Daily Kos website, while we carry on an elaborate ruse of spirited political debate and disagreement in public. We are, in short, something of an enigma. I like to call this phenomenon “Irrational Fear of Hippies.” And this has, in my view, become irrational fear of political passion.
Of all the criticisms I just mentioned, that is one that we are all willing to accept. We are passionate about politics, and in this era of Republican corruption, excess, and failure, that passion sometimes manifests itself as anger. But how can you not be angry? So many institutions have failed us in the last decade that being vitriolic seems the only sane response....
But all of us who blog in the progressive blogosphere have a common goal. It’s the same goal of virtually everyone in this room tonight. We want to begin a new era of progressive politics and take back America. We may argue about tactics and strategy, or the extent to which we are partisans versus ideologues (and believe me, we do), but there is no disagreement among us that the modern conservative movement of Newt and Grover and Karl and Rush has proven to be a dangerous cultural and political cancer on the body politic. You will not find anyone amongst us who believes that the Bush Administration’s executive power grab and flagrant partisan use of the federal government is anything less than an assault on the Constitution. We stand together against the dissolution of habeas corpus and the atrocities of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and we all agree that Islamic terrorism is a threat, but one which we cannot meet with military power alone. And yes, a vast majority of us were against this mindless invasion of Iraq from the beginning, or at least saw the writing on the wall long before Peggy Noonan discovered that George W. Bush wasn’t the second coming of Winston Churchill.
Sadly, we also all agree that the mainstream media is part of the problem. Democracy suffers when not being held accountable by a vigorous press. During the last decade, there have been three catalyzing events that drove people like me to the Internet, to research, investigate, and write about assaults on democracy itself. In 1998, the political media lost all perspective, and aggressively helped the Republicans pursue a partisan witch-hunt against a democratically-elected president and against the will of the people. The coverage of the presidential election of 2000 was legendary for its bias and sophomoric personality journalism. The press actually joined the Republicans in telling the majority who had voted for Al Gore to get over it. I don’t know about you, but I never got over it. And the third event (I don’t need to tell anyone in this room) was the almost gleeful support of the invasion of Iraq, a journalistic failure of epic proportions. If you had not been sufficiently aroused from your complacency by this time, you never would be.....
And so here we are – the famously vituperative, angry bloggers, standing before you today politely accepting this award as proud, full-fledged inheritors of the great liberal and progressive political traditions of America. On behalf of all of them and netroots activists, and especially on behalf of our dear friend, Steve Gilliard, a fighting liberal of both the old the new schools, I thank you again for inviting us to your party. Our party rages on, 24/7, all over the blogosphere, and we’d love it if all of you would stop by frequently. Thank you.
Question: How may Arabic speakers with 3/3 levels of proficiency are currently serving at Embassy Baghdad?
Answer: We currently have ten Foreign Service Officers (including the Ambassador) at Embassy Baghdad at or above the 3 reading / 3 speaking level in Arabic. An additional five personnel at Embassy Baghdad have tested at or above the 3 level in speaking. A 3/3 indicates a general professional fluency level.
COLUMBIA, South Carolina (AP) -- South Carolina Treasurer Thomas Ravenel, a former real estate developer who became a rising political star after his election last year, was indicted Tuesday on federal cocaine charges.
Ravenel is also the state chairman for former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign.
US agencies disobey 6 laws that president challenged
WASHINGTON -- Federal officials have disobeyed at least six new laws that President Bush challenged in his signing statements, a government study disclosed yesterday. The report provides the first evidence that the government may have acted on claims by Bush that he can set aside laws under his executive powers.
Stabilizing Iraq could take as long as a decade, says the U.S. commander in Baghdad. "In fact, typically, I think historically, counterinsurgency operations have gone at least nine or 10 years," Gen. David Petraeus said Sunday." - AP
Judge Orders FBI to Turn Over Thousands of Patriot Act Abuse Document
Just one day after a news that an internal audit found that FBI agents abused a Patriot Act power more than 1000 times, a federal judge ordered the agency Friday to begin turning over thousands of pages of documents related to the agency's use of a powerful, but extremely secretive investigative tool that can pry into telephone and internet records.
The Homeland Security Bill contains budget boosts to hire 3,000 new border security agents and double the amount of air cargo that is screened before being loaded onto passenger planes. It also roughly doubles grants given to localities for mass transit and port security.
"Texas hasn't gone Democratic in a presidential race in more than three decades. But the survey shows Republican contender Sen. John McCain essentially tied with Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton among registered voters, with McCain at 36% and Clinton at 35% in a head-to-head contest. Republican Rudy Giuliani and Clinton also are essentially tied, at 32%-31%.
In the poll, nearly two-thirds of Texans said the country was on the wrong track. Four in 10 called the Iraq war the nation's most important problem. One in 10 cited immigration."
Democrats subpoena Miers and Taylor
“Let me be clear: this subpoena is not a request, it is a demand on behalf of the American people for the White House to make available the documents and individuals we are requesting to help us answer the questions that remain,” Conyers said in a press release Wednesday announcing the subpoenas.
“They can have their votes of no confidence,” Mr. Bush said, “but it’s not going to make the determination about who serves in my government. This process has been drug out a long time. It’s political.”
Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania was among the few Republicans to vote to allow the resolution to proceed to a vote. “There is no confidence in the attorney general on this side of the aisle,” said Mr. Specter, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee. Even so, he predicted that the push to take the no confidence vote would just increase President Bush’s resolve to stand by the attorney general.
Baghdad, Iraq — The top American military commander for the Middle East has warned Iraq's prime minister in a closed-door conversation that the Iraqi government needs to make tangible political progress by next month to counter the growing tide of opposition to the war in Congress.
"They can have their votes of no confidence, but it's not going to make the determination about who serves in my government," Bush said in Sofia, Bulgaria, the last stop on a weeklong visit to Europe.
BAGHDAD -- U.S. military officials here are increasingly envisioning a "post-occupation" troop presence in Iraq that neither maintains current levels nor leads to a complete pullout, but aims for a smaller, longer-term force that would remain in the country for years.
This goal, drawn from recent interviews with more than 20 U.S. military officers and other officials here, including senior commanders, strategists and analysts, remains in the early planning stages. It is based on officials' assessment that a sharp drawdown of troops is likely to begin by the middle of next year, with roughly two-thirds of the current force of 150,000 moving out by late 2008 or early 2009. The questions officials are grappling with are not whether the U.S. presence will be cut, but how quickly, to what level and to what purpose.
One of the guiding principles, according to two officials here, is that the United States should leave Iraq more intelligently than it entered.
"But I‘ll tell you one thing...terrorism isn‘t explosions and death, terrorism is when you change your society because of those explosions and you become fearful to the point where you shut out immigration, you shut out student exchanges, you shut people out of buildings, you begin to act in an almost fascist manner because you‘re afraid of what might happen to you. That‘s when terrorism becomes real and frighteningly successful. That‘s what I believe, and that‘s why I question the way Giuliani has raised this issue. He raises it as a specter. In a weird way, he helps the bad guys."
I would do away with the policy of regime change, because what we're saying to everybody in Iran is, "Look, by the way, give up the one thing that keeps us from attacking you, and after that we're going to attack you."
"The President admits that he granted on 45 different occasions authorization for wiretapping without a FISA court warrant - what I call warrantless wiretapping outside the law. This is a felony. This is punishable by five years in jail. There is a prima facie case that they have engaged in a criminal conspiracy." - Congressmen Gerrold Nadler
NY Times Analysis: "With low approval ratings and the race to succeed him well under way, his ability to push his agenda has faded to the point where he can fairly be judged to have entered his lame duck period."
Schumer: Gonzales no-confidence vote Monday
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has led the investigation into the firing of several U.S. attorneys, announced Friday that a vote of no confidence in Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will be taken in the Senate Monday.
“If all senators who have actually lost confidence in Attorney General Gonzales voted their conscience, this vote would be unanimous,” the senator said.
However, Schumer added that he expects the president to pressure members of his party to vote against the measure.
“We will soon see where people’s loyalties lie,” he said.
"It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I'm not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hopes it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half the American people still believes that Saddam was connected to the attack.
"At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial was just unfortunate excess --- an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our news media. Now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsession that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time.
"Late in the summer of 2006, American news coverage was saturated with the bizarre false confession of a man who claimed to have been present at the death of JonBenet Ramsey --- the six-year-old beauty queen whose unsolved murder eleven years before was responsible for another long-running obsession. A few months prior to John Mark Karr's arrest in Bangkok, the disappearance of a high school senior in Aruba and the intensive search for her body and her presumed murderer consumed thousands of hours of television coverage. Both cases remain unsolved as of this writing, and neither had any appreciable impact on the fate of the Republic.
"Like JonBenet Ramsey, O.J. has recently been back at the center of another fit of obsessive-compulsive news, when his hypothetical confession wasn't published and his interviews on television wasn't aired. This particular explosion of "news" was truncated only when a former television sitcom star used racist insults in a night club. And before that we focus on the "Runaway Bride" in Georgia. And before that there was the Michael Jackson trial and the Robert Blake trial, the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy tragedy. And of course we can't forget Britney and KFed, and Lindsay and Paris and Nicole, Tom Cruise jumped on Oprah's couch and married Katie Holmes, who gave birth to Suri. And Russell Crowe apparently threw a phone at a hotel concierge.
"In early 2007, the wall-to-wall coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's death, embalming, and funeral plans and the legal wrangling over the paternity and custody of her child and disposition of her estate, served as yet another particularly bizarre example of the new priorities in America's news coverage.
"And while American television watchers were collectively devoting a hundred million hours of their lives each week to these and other similar stories, our nation was in the process of more quietly making what future historians will certainly describe as a series of catastrophically mistaken decisions on issues of war and peace, the global climate and human survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and fairness."
Al Gore.
"If Congress is going to get to the bottom of the scandal, it has to get the testimony of Mr. Rove, his aides Scott Jennings and Sara Taylor, Ms. Miers and her deputy, William Kelley.
"The White House has offered to make them available only if they do not take an oath and there is no transcript. Those conditions are a formula for condoning perjury, and they are unacceptable. As for documents, the White House has released piles of useless e-mail messages. But it has reported that key e-mails to and from Mr. Rove were inexplicably destroyed. At the same time, it has argued that e-mails of Mr. Rove’s that were kept on a Republican Party computer system, which may contain critical information, should not be released.
"This noncooperation has gone on long enough. Mr. Leahy should deliver the subpoenas for the five White House officials and make clear that if the administration resists, Congress will use all available means to get the information it needs.
"I believe the president is doing the right thing, and I think all we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on 9-11 and the naysayers will come around...."
--Arkansas GOP chief Dennis Milligan
Several GOP officials expressed support for Milligan Wednesday.
"Dennis is a new chairman and inexperienced at this point," said Reta Hamilton of Bella Vista, the state party's national committeewoman. "I'm sure he had good intentions with his comment, nothing derogatory either for the veterans or for the country or for President Bush or for anyone else."
"Those of us who fought to defend America won't even dignify Milligan's sick suggestion that Americans should die to justify the political argument for George W. Bush's failed policy in Iraq, other than to say he is a sick man and should step down," Iraq War veteran Jon Soltz, chairman and co-founder of VoteVets.org, said in a news release Wednesday.
When U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf described the alleged terror plot to blow up Kennedy Airport as "one of the most chilling plots imaginable," which might have caused "unthinkable" devastation, one law enforcement official said he cringed.
The plot, he knew, was never operational. The public had never been at risk. And the notion of blowing up the airport, let alone the borough of Queens, by exploding a fuel tank was in all likelihood a technical impossibility.
nd now, with a portrait emerging of alleged mastermind Russell Defreitas as hapless and episodically homeless, and of co-conspirator Abdel Nur as a drug addict, Mauskopf's initial characterizations seem more questionable -- some go so far as to say hyped.
"I think her comments were over the top," said Michael Greenberger, director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland. "It was a totally overstated characterization that doesn't comport with the facts."
Greenberger said he has no argument with police pursuing and stopping the alleged plotters.
"I think they were correct to take this seriously," he said. "... But there's a pattern here of Justice Department attorneys overstating what they have. I think they feel under tremendous pressure to vindicate the elaborate counterterrorism structure they've created since 9/11, including the Patriot Act."
WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison Tuesday for lying and obstructing the CIA leak investigation — the probe that showed a White House obsessed with criticism of its decision to go to war.
GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba (Reuters) - Judges in the U.S. war crimes tribunals at Guantanamo dropped all charges against the only two captives facing trial, rulings that could preclude trying any of the 380 prisoners any time soon.
MOSCOW — In a threat not uttered since the Cold War, Vladimir Putin said that Russia intends to aim its missile systems - potentially nuclear weapons - at targets in Europe in retaliation for the U.S. decision to establish antimissile bases there.
"I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country." - George W. Bush, 6/1/01
The Senate and House Intelligence Committees are asking former attorney general John Ashcroft to testify about a March 2004 hospital-room confrontation during which he refused to sign off on a continuation of President Bush's warrantless eavesdropping program, according to congressional and administration sources.
The sources, who asked not to identified talking about sensitive matters, said the Senate Intelligence Committee has tentatively scheduled a closed-door hearing for later this month. The panel plans to question Ashcroft, his former chief of staff David Ayres and former deputy attorney general James Comey about a heated dispute with the White House that roiled the Justice Department three years ago. The House committee is also planning a separate closed-door hearing with Ashcroft, according to a spokeswoman for Ashcroft.
The requests for Ashcroft's testimony reflect the mounting frustration on the part of committee leaders in both chambers who feel they have been denied vital information about the wiretapping issue by the Bush administration. Despite having received numerous private briefings from senior administration officials over the last year, members were stunned to learn just how deeply troubled the Justice Department was about aspects of the program -- a glimpse they got only when Comey publicly testified about the program at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last month.
Faced with significantly declining contributions from grassroots donors, the Republican National Committee has fired its entire team of telephone solicitors, according to a report in Friday's Washington Times. - Raw Story
A former British army commander has said there was "no way" the war in Iraq could be won and that allied forces should withdraw.
General Sir Michael Rose, a former commander of the UN peace force in Bosnia during the 1990s, said the American and British forces in Iraq were in an impossible situation.
"There is no way we are going to win the war and (we should) withdraw and accept defeat because we are going to lose on a more important level if we don't," he said.
While accepting the allied forces couldn't just "cut and run", Sir Michael said announcing a date for withdrawal would quell the widespread fighting between the Sunnis, Shias and Kurds.
"Give them a date and it is amazing how people and political parties will stop fighting each other and start working towards a peaceful transfer of power," he said.
VAN SUSTEREN: Do you have a single issue that make the most difference to you when you vote next time around?
TRUMP: Yes.
VAN SUSTEREN: Which is?
TRUMP: Get out of Iraq.
VAN SUSTEREN: How soon?
TRUMP: How about yesterday? We shouldn't have been there. We shouldn't have been there. It's ridiculous. We're overseeing a revolution. There's nothing we can do. Our soldiers were incredible. They won the war in one day. That was their job. Win the war. They're not policemen and they're acting as policemen, and they're getting killed acting as policemen. Get out of Iraq, and get out of it now.
VAN SUSTEREN: Were you one of those who thought we never should never gone in or after we went in, at some point you thought, we need to get out.
TRUMP: We never should have gone in.
VAN SUSTEREN: And you thought that from the beginning?
TRUMP: From the beginning.
VAN SUSTEREN: How do we get out? Just walk out at this point?
TRUMP: Just get out. Just get out. Our soldiers won the war. Get out.
VAN SUSTEREN: Why do you think the president won't get out?
TRUMP: He's stubborn -- very stubborn guy.
VAN SUSTEREN: You ever met him?
TRUMP: No, not really. I mean, I've seen him, I've been in rooms -- but not really.
VAN SUSTEREN: So his stubbornness is why.
TRUMP: He's a very stubborn guy and he's got people around him who I think are very poor, whether it's Rumsfeld and whoever. I mean, I could tell you lots of things about the people, but he's got some people around him that are very, very poor. Rumsfeld did a terrible disservice to this country by leading us in. Cheney, I don't know, it's just a very sad situation. But we should be out of Iraq, and be out of Iraq as soon as possible.
Chairman Nadler Announces Hearings Series: “The Constitution in Crisis: The State of Civil Liberties in America”
Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Subcommittee to Explore Administration Programs Threatening Americans’ Liberties;
Kicks Off with June 7 Hearing on NSA Wiretapping Program
...“Most importantly, we will carefully examine this White House’s seeming disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law,” added Rep. Nadler. “Secret, warrantless spying, the erosion of habeas corpus, the sanction of torture, and this Administration’s contempt for the other two branches of government - these issues demand close scrutiny and congressional action.”
"Q Tony, the Governor of Ohio, Ted Strickland, has written a couple of letters to President Bush, I don't know if you're aware of them, but he's asking for personal assurances from the President that the National Guard troops, before they get deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq, the equipment be there and that the training be adequate before they're sent off.
"MR. SNOW: Okay. I'm not aware of the Governor's letter, but we have always made it clear that nobody goes into combat without sufficient training and equipment, period. Now, a lot of that can be done in theater. It quite often is. But the most important reassurance, not only the forces, but their families need to know, is that if and when they go into combat, they will have the equipment they need, and they will have the training they need."
