Attorney General Alberto Gonzales Resigns

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales finally resigned today. The NY Times, CNN, MSNBC and Yahoo News are already reporting it and floating that the Bush Administration's first choice to replace him is "Gut Feeling of a Terrorist Attack" Michael Chertoff.

Yep, the hack in charge of the Department of Homeland Security who hasn't really done a very good job. DHS jobs remain unfilled and DHS employees rank the department as the very worst to work for. Just what we need after how the Department of Justice under Gonzales treated career prosecutors who worked hard for their country but weren't blind Bush loyalists.

It's one Bush crony after another in this Administration.

According to Yahoo, the interim replacement will be another Bush Appointee, Solicitor General Paul Clement. The sad thing there is, the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a request to Clement to charge Gonzales with perjury for the lies he told on Capitol Hill under oath. Clement didn't bother to respond.

Gonzales and Bush seemed to not care about the heat from Congress, media and the public before. Why resign now? What changed?

Good question. One can only guess but I doubt it's a fit of conscience. They don't have those.

Let's just hope that the Chertoff speculation is just that. We can all recall his crisis experience with Katrina. He'll be just another Bushbot who will follow the Bush/Cheney doctrine of fucking the Constitution and rule of law at every turn. And remember the AG just got the rights to oversee the wiretapping program.

They want nothing but complete and utter elimination of the Constitution and other branches of government and will not stop until Bush is the unitary executive with full control of everything. Anything less is treason to them. All hail the new Hitler.

-Rp

Impeachment! Finally! Well... sort of.

And it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. Well the Democrats in their efforts to set the record straight about what 'baby steps' actually are, have moved forward to begin impeachment investigations on one member of the Bush Administration. I thought the picture on the left was appropriate since it looks like a downward spiral in which metaphorically the entire Administration has been in since they stole re-election in 2004 (make no mistake about it they stole it and here's some new voter suppression details that have made their way out of the RNC from that election).

Anyway, MSNBC reported that House Democrats will introduce a bill tomorrow that requires the House Judiciary Committee to begin impeachment investigations against Gonzo.

From Crooks and Liars:



Windows Media Video: Play | Quicktime Video: Play

It's about time but still not enough. The only way to get these criminals out of office is full impeachment.

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Now some quick takes on other stuff from this past weekend...

At the CNN/Youtube debates the buzz afterwards surrounded on a riff Hillary Clinton gave towards Barack Obama based on his take on diplomacy. The question was whether the candidates would meet with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Kim Jong-Il of North Korea or Mahmoud Ahmenijhad of Iran in the first year of their Presidency. Obama said that he would and pointed to the Bush Administration's dismal record in meeting with countries that we have disagreements with and in essence using diplomacy as a reward only to those that agree with us.

Hillary countered that she didn't want a meeting in the first year without some sort of preconditions and essentially pawned the concept off to her subordinates to handle as she felt they would get too much PR out of a meeting with the President of the United States.

I see Hillary's point, but it's wrong. Now let me clarify. I am undecided for 2008. Unlike the 2004 race when I knew John Kerry was my guy by February 2003, nobody stands out to me as someone I can fully support. I have heard Obama be wrong on a variety of topics as well (see: aggression towards Iran) so this is not me picking a side in the overall race.

I believe that the President is someone who for the good of our nation, needs to meet with leaders even if they disagree with us or would publicize the meeting to the rest of the world. If we're concerned about going to meet with Kim Jong-Il in North Korea or Ahmenijhad in Iran, don't. Meet in a neutral location and have a summit with countries from the region.

One of the most spiteful things the Bush Administration has done is to shelf diplomacy and push it off on other countries in the region. With North Korea he put the pressure on Russia, China, Japan and South Korea to carry the water for American policies. Some of those countries are not in full agreement with our policies. But it's just like Bush to outsource work that Americans should be doing.

While they did that, idiot boy ran his mouth about an 'axis of evil' and scared North Korea and Iran into speeding up their nuclear programs.

Now I'm not saying Hillary would do that but it's clear that we need to meet with other leaders and hear them out. We may not agree with them on every issue but we don't have to.

When Russia was at the height of the cold war standoff with us we couldn't find much of anything to agree about with them and they were far more dangerous than Chavez, Jong-Il, Ahmenijhad and Castro combined. Yet we met with them in summits and when that didn't work we communicated with them. President John F. Kennedy had Tommy Thompson (no not the moronic former Governor of Wisconsin)as an ambassador there and he spoke with members of Nikita Khrushchev's regime frequently.

By staying in contact Kennedy had an idea of how to address him and empathize with what our enemy ultimately wanted. Did he want nuclear war? No. And I highly doubt North Korea or Iran do either. Khrushchev wanted to look good in the standoff with the U.S. to his own people and because we were smart enough to talk to him and see his side we were able to get them to stand down and a nuclear weapon was never launched in over 40 years of conflict.

Here meeting with our enemies may give them political clout at home but it also gives them piece of mind that we're not looking to attack them for their oil or to overthrow their governments. In turn we can offer Iran and North Korea light water reactors to help with their energy needs and then receive concessions in return in the human rights and diplomatic fields.

It's to everyone's benefit that Americans stand up and converse with everybody. It prevents conflict, gives the people of those countries less of a reason to hate us and ultimately attack us and it provides us with more respect and better standing in the world. Which at this point, is desparately needed. Point goes to Obama.

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-The Republican Presidential Candidates are refusing to do the Youtube debates. And with good reason. After all if you were an insensitive racist warmonger, wouldn't you be afraid to take questions from the public? Besides if these guys learned anything from Bush it's that Republicans only look good when they pre-screen audiences, have them sign loyalty oaths and then broadcast the ones where people fawn over them. Otherwise you could end up with another "Macaca" incident.

Funniest thing about it is the RNC asked their supporters to send in as many slanted questions as they could to play gotcha with Democrats. I suppose that's how they got this idiot's question in there. Of course Biden's response to it was hilarious.

-Rp

Contempt of Congress citation sent to House; White House calls it "pathetic".

Let's put all the speculation in a few of the more recent posts on here, aside. After all we're just speculating now on the worst possible scenarios. Of course the last time I did that was in 2000 when Bush was running for office. I told people he would go to war, destroy the environment, wreck our economy and disregard law like he did in Texas when he had Alberto Gonzales covered his DUI charge.

Of course I didn't realize how much worse it would be than my most extreme predictions. Whenever you rally against a candidate you really dislike more times than not you exaggerate their worst flaws to try to dehumanize them. I guess nothing I could do would dehumanize Bush enough to the crimes he has committed now.

The saddest part is, the American people didn't wake up even by 2004 and made it close enough for them to steal the election from a good man, John Kerry. And now as I predicted after that election, Bush would do as he pleased thinking this was some sort of mandate from the American people and worse, facing no relection to keep him accountable.

What Bush didn't count on was the American people finally catching on by 2006 and electing a Democratic Congress to perform oversight and try to make him accountable.

So when Bush tried to turn the Department of Justice (among other government agencies) into a political arm of Karl Rove and the Republican party, Democrats decided to serve up subpoenas, hold hearings and finally for once make Bush accountable.

The problem is, as shown by his disregard for FISA laws and his signing statements on bills that say that passed laws will only be considered advisory, Bush doesn't care about hearings or upholding the law.

So he stonewalled the committee and told Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers to refuse subpoenas.

The House Judiciary Committee voted 22-17 (yes, there were 17 angry Republican white men in that room trying everything they could to derail the motion) to send the citation to the House for a full vote where Democrats easily hold the majority.

That means this will go to the courts in which Bush still has an advantage thanks to his packing the courts with right wing cronies.

Still in the face of finally having to uphold the law, Tony Snow pretty much summed up the White House's disdain for laws and the constitution (which gives these authorities to Congress).

From The Swamp:

“From our view, this is pathetic,’’ said White House spokesman Tony Snow, suggesting that the Justice Department will make its own findings about any referral for prosecution of contempt and that this likely is “not likely to go anywhere... What you have right now is partisanship on Capitol Hill.’’

Wow. It's hard to fathom from a group of people who break every law they see, the word pathetic coming out unless it was a self description.

So now we go and play ball in the courts. Of course the way this Administration is going, they'll just pardon their own anyways.

Call your Representatives and Senators and tell them to impeach! Anything less will not stop these bastards!

-Rp

Looks like the US Attorney Scandal just got Local...

Interesting news.

From WISCTV:
Milwaukee U.S. Attorney To Be Interviewed In Attorney Probe
Interviews Were Requested By House Committee

MILWAUKEE -- A U.S. House committee looking into the recent firings of eight federal prosecutors listed U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic of Milwaukee among the additional individuals that it wants to interview as part of the probe.

House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers sent the request to Acting Assistant Attorney General Richard Hertling, asking to interview them "on a voluntary basis" regarding the firings.

Biskupic, an appointee of President George W. Bush, said over the weekend that he had been told his name was on a list of targeted prosecutors whose performance and loyalty to Bush were questioned.

Things aren't looking good for Bush on this front. He should try to get people thinking he's Presidential in some other way. :insert sarcasm: Maybe he'll get lucky and another national tragedy like the Virginia Tech shootings will occur to help boost his popularity ratings again.

According to CNN's Suzanne Malveaux, he does well in these. :shakes head in disbelief:

Well, except when he waits FOUR DAYS to address those poor Katrina victims and then took a nice little photo op tour while there. Not to mention the inaction there. New Orleans has still not recovered and FEMA has messed up in every way possible, including evicting people from their trailers and giving them no place to live to letting food that was meant for relief spoil recently.

And oh yeah he did squander the World's goodwill after 9/11 so standing on that rubble and declaring war against al-Qaeda didn't help unify anyone since they were already unified previously and it ended up declaring a war that he never actually ended up carrying out correctly as Osama Bin Laden is still roaming free..

Okay so how exactly are these good moments for him?

-Rp

The Real Problem With The US Attorney Scandal

If you're not a political wonk who understands the process involved, think about the idea of a politician taking office and firing an entire department of people when they are elected just to install their own. That doesn't seem too strange to the average person. When you add the gravity that these are the US Attorneys who are hired to be America's prosecutors of crime in each and every state, well that makes it slightly different.

Prosecutors as well as District Attorneys and most Judges are supposed to be above the political frey. They are defending us after all. The Attorney General also is not the President's personal attorney, they're the people's attorney. Except it hasn't been that way for the past six years.

One can make certain arguments about Clinton eliminating all 93 US Attorneys when he took office and try to point the finger at him as an example (after all isn't he to blame for everything the Right gets themselves into?) but Bush wiped out all those attorneys and started fresh once again in 2001. The process is what it is, even though I have to concede some serious personal misgivings with it.

What made Bush's appointments different is what makes all of his appointments to every office different. There was a partisan bent with hopes of personal gain. These people were put in place in hopes that Karl Rove could use them as Bush's personal campaign legal team. The US Attorneys would be pressed to prosecute Democratic corruption (digging for whatever they could get them on, even if there wasn't much to the charges), to avoid prosecuting Republican wrongdoing and to prosecute cases that made the President look strong, like immigration.

Somehow the US Attorneys became a tool for the RNC to use and not defenders of the public interest.

A perfect case came up in Wisconsin of this ridiculous use of power.

Georgia Thompson, a state purchasing employee who is supposed to make purchases based on saving the Wisconsin taxpayer as much money as possible, bought travel plans through a travel agency that just happened to contribute to Governor Jim Doyle's 2002 campaign.

Two major points must be made.

1. Good luck finding a company that doesn't politically contribute to anybody. Until there is public financing of campaigns this is the system we live in. Companies contribute and often times because of similar philosophies with the person they supported are in line when government contracts are being handed out. There is no proof this happened in this case but if you want to bark up that tree take a look at every contributor to Bush and what they have been given in return. Namely Halliburton.

2. It's just a fact that with as many government officials as a State has that bulk purchasing travel plans is the most cost effective way to save money. Government officials are very much like sales people and they need to make trips to other states and countries to broker deals and bring business to the state.

So Georgia, who was not acting out of partisanship but rather trying to save her fellow Wisconsin taxpayers money and doing what her job as a State Purchasing Agent required, was an easy target for Republicans looking to smear Doyle and help Mark Green with the Governor's race.

Bush appointee Steven Biskupic prosecuted the case and has quite the Republican ties. He is the brother of Outagamie County DA Vince Biskupic who unsuccessfully ran as the Republican candidate against Democratic candidate Peg Lautenschlager in the State Attorney General's race. Not to mention a friend of the now in prison on corruption charges (surprise he was a backer of the Bush Campaign in 2000 as well), former Winnebago County DA, Joe Paulus.

Biskupic got a conviction and Republicans everywhere tried to use this to muddy the waters and make Doyle look dirty. It worked to some degree but not enough to swing an election in which they thought they had a close race and instead Doyle came out well ahead.

The election cycle is over and Georgia Thompson, convicted and used as a weapon had to spend 4 months in prison as a political casualty. A victim of how Republicans view people, as pawns in their corrupt system of greed.

The Circuit Court of Appeals nearly laughed the case out of court when they finally heard it.

One judge actually said:

"I have to say it strikes me that your evidence is beyond thin," federal Appeals Judge Diane Wood told prosecutors. "I'm not sure what your actual theory in this case is."

TalkLeft has a very well done rundown of the case.

Now what makes this disturbing is it's not the first time the GOP has used the US Attorney's office, just in the State of Wisconsin to do their political bidding. They tried and failed to get Milwaukee voter fraud allegations prosecuted that turned out as most GOP allegations do, to be bunk.

The point harkens back to the partisan nature in which the DOJ has operated.

Take a look at this list of local public elected officials prosecuted by the Bush DOJ from 2001-2006. Take a look at all those Ds for Democrats. Either Democrats are the most corrupt group ever or Bush is totally going after political enemies to have complete control over everything in this country.

I can't recall a DOJ that was ever this partisan before. Even under Bill Clinton, his own appointee Janet Reno greenlighted the Investigation into Clinton's Whitewater dealings.

But as it turns out most of these DOJ officials are ideologues. Part of the machine that is the Christo-facist Right. Graduates of dubious Universities such as Regent which is a newer college controlled by Pat Robertson type evangelicals that teach a certain mindset rather than challenging their students with multiple perspectives. There are 150 of these graduates working in Bush's DOJ as we speak.

They are not educated in a way that promotes careful deliberation or even respect for the law. They know only God's law and just as Bush continues to usurp the Constitution, they are doing the same in making the DOJ just another weapon in the Republican Party's arsenal.

The DOJ has been prosecuting all the Democrats it can on the local level to get them ejected from office and make the Democratic party appear corrupt to build a longterm majority for Republicans. After all it's usually local officials that step up and run for larger offices later and this is stopping many candidates and killing their credibility before they even get that far. For non-elected officials, the DOJ keeps tabs on protesters and puts them on "terrorist watch lists".

As I have said before, the actions of Rove and Bush make Watergate seem pretty tame.

It's no wonder why the only people that are doing investigations that anybody is approving of are the Democrats. It's been just three months in power and every branch on the tree which Dems have shook has seen countless scandals fall out. Imagine how many there might be after two years of this!

The approval of Congress is up to 40% the highest it's been in over a year. Let's just hope that as the approval trajectory for Congress moves higher in light of their investigations and finally showing some backbone to this Administration, that they continue to uncover and hopefully derail the grand design that Rove implemented by making the DOJ and even the GSA work as RNC political departments.

-Rp

Beating the Bush with the Co-Equal Branch

Well it sure has been one depressing week if you were on the Bush-as-almighty-god bandwagon hasn't it?

You have Alberto Gonzales screwing up a perfectly good plan to eliminate prosecutors that were either going after Republican corruption or not working quick enough for upcoming elections on cases where Democrats were targeted. And then you have the entire Department of Justice going cannibal on one another as they eat themselves alive trying to save their skins.

You also have Democrats thickening their skin and setting timelines and benchmarks on this President and his war before issuing him any more money to fight it. Frankly this should have happened from the beginning but since the sheep that was the Republicans in Congress felt they should give their king total and absolute power, they were just giving the guy blank checks.... which he was signing over to political contributors. Nice...

All the while humvees and soldiers weren't given proper armor, the VA and Walter Reed funding was cut and veterans were put in harm's way constantly. I mean really, how dare Democrats for wanting to get them out of those conditions! Traitors!

It's pretty humorous to the 70% of America who aren't with this President to even contemplate the arguments this guy is making.

He's arguing that calling members of the administration to testify under oath is somehow unprecedented and against executive privilege even though the Republicans called the entire Clinton Administration to the hill to do just that with 1,052 subpoenas to 141 Administration officials resulting in 568 hours of depositions.

He's arguing that putting strings on the troops prevents the commanders from doing their job and that it will somehow prevent success in Iraq.... as if all the blank checks provided a heaping dose of successes in the past.

Democrats are finally toughening up. Sure they aren't going full blown impeachment but they are taking progressively stronger stances to Bush and his Administration's imperial power grab.

Henry Waxman is now investigating ANOTHER LAW Bushco may have broken about White House Records, and he sent an incredibly biting letter to Condi about her ignoring his letters.

It's only a matter of time before the illegal wiretaps are on the investigation block.

I can only imagine how many Americans will be in shock when they hear what comes out of that. All those, "I don't care because I am not doing anything wrong" apologists are going to get a wakeup call when they realize what and who the White House has been wiretapping.

It's conjecture only at this point but I have a pretty strong suspicion that the White House has used this power in a way that made Nixon look like a confident, at peace with the world Saint. Watergate will look less like paranoia run amok as it will be like a jaywalking charge in comparison to vehicular manslaughter.

That's how much worse I anticipate Bushco's actions will end up looking. We can only wait and see. For now, open up the popcorn as it looks like two years of criminal hell for the most delusional bunch ever to seize power in Washington.

-Rp