U.S. Attorneys scandal update
LR is still more or less on hiatus, but I wanted to pass along some links on this. Can I just say how refreshing it is that some of the Bushite outrages, that used to be only really mentioned in the blogosphere and on Democracy Now and ignored by 95+% of the country, are being taken up by Congress? As I told maggiesox (who's been posting a lot of good stuff on the scandals), nothing Bush is revealed to have done surprises me anymore. What leaves me stunned is that it's broken through to Big News. Gotta love a Democratic majority.
Following Bush's reasonable proposal, Arlen Specter, who occasionally seems reasonable, but usually turns out to be spineless and worse-than-useless, tried to say, well, if we don't like what we get, we can subpoena them later. And Leahy went off.
No, no, what we're told we can get is nothing, nothing, nothing. We're told we can have a closed door meeting, with no transcript, not under oath, limited number of people and the White House would determine what the agenda is. That to me is nothing.
CNN said something simpering about how Leahy seemed to be a bit angry, but fuck 'em, it was a thing of beauty.
Tony Snow wrote an op-ed about how presidents shouldn't hide behind executive privilege... in 1988. That's not terribly surprising. What's more surprising is that he's been called on it to his face. Now Snow is saying "Congress doesn't have oversight ability". Wha?!
In the blogosophere, Glenn Greenwald dug up that op-ed, and other noteworthy right wing quotes from the Clinton era, and has been scathing on the whole scandal. A Kossack asks, What's Bush's game? And Christy at FireDogLake alerts us to a theory about why Bush may be protecting Gonzales: the firings were at Rove's behest. Bush is protecting himself.
However, should Gonzales resign and you guess the exact date and time correctly, True Majority will give you a year's supply of Ben & Jerry's. The freezer aisle has a well-known liberal bias.
Btw, if you're worried about the alleged "voter fraud" by Democrats that the attorneys weren't pursuing indictments against, don't worry: voter fraud doesn't mean to them what it means to us:
The very short version of this story is that Republicans habitually make claims about voter fraud. But the charges are almost invariably bogus. And in most if not every case the claims are little more than stalking horses for voter suppression efforts... Why didn't the prosecutors pursue indictments when GOP operatives started yakking about voter fraud? Almost certainly because there just wasn't any evidence for it.
So there ya' go. Oh, and it's been pushed off the front burner, but Congress also held hearings on the Plame outing last week. That investigation the White House should and said they would conduct, into who leaked classfied information? They never did. Hey, it's not like they didn't already know who did it.
Following Bush's reasonable proposal, Arlen Specter, who occasionally seems reasonable, but usually turns out to be spineless and worse-than-useless, tried to say, well, if we don't like what we get, we can subpoena them later. And Leahy went off.
No, no, what we're told we can get is nothing, nothing, nothing. We're told we can have a closed door meeting, with no transcript, not under oath, limited number of people and the White House would determine what the agenda is. That to me is nothing.
CNN said something simpering about how Leahy seemed to be a bit angry, but fuck 'em, it was a thing of beauty.
Tony Snow wrote an op-ed about how presidents shouldn't hide behind executive privilege... in 1988. That's not terribly surprising. What's more surprising is that he's been called on it to his face. Now Snow is saying "Congress doesn't have oversight ability". Wha?!
In the blogosophere, Glenn Greenwald dug up that op-ed, and other noteworthy right wing quotes from the Clinton era, and has been scathing on the whole scandal. A Kossack asks, What's Bush's game? And Christy at FireDogLake alerts us to a theory about why Bush may be protecting Gonzales: the firings were at Rove's behest. Bush is protecting himself.
However, should Gonzales resign and you guess the exact date and time correctly, True Majority will give you a year's supply of Ben & Jerry's. The freezer aisle has a well-known liberal bias.
Btw, if you're worried about the alleged "voter fraud" by Democrats that the attorneys weren't pursuing indictments against, don't worry: voter fraud doesn't mean to them what it means to us:
The very short version of this story is that Republicans habitually make claims about voter fraud. But the charges are almost invariably bogus. And in most if not every case the claims are little more than stalking horses for voter suppression efforts... Why didn't the prosecutors pursue indictments when GOP operatives started yakking about voter fraud? Almost certainly because there just wasn't any evidence for it.
So there ya' go. Oh, and it's been pushed off the front burner, but Congress also held hearings on the Plame outing last week. That investigation the White House should and said they would conduct, into who leaked classfied information? They never did. Hey, it's not like they didn't already know who did it.