jwalker: a temporary "surge" in troop levels

The Justice Department is investigating whether the director of a multibillion-dollar oil-trading program at the Interior Department has been paid as a consultant for oil companies hoping for contracts.
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The Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, which oversees royalty collections, is now the target of multiple investigations by Congress and the Interior Department’s inspector general.

Those investigations are focused on allegations that the agency ordered its own auditors to abandon claims of cheating by large oil companies; that the agency’s arcane rules for calculating sales value and royalties make it easier for companies to understate their obligations; and that the agency’s basic sources of data are riddled with inaccuracies and are unreliable.

"Our busy first work period will begin in both the House and the Senate with ethics and lobbying reform so that we can change the way Congress works and do the real work we were elected to do. Next, we will take up a long-overdue increase in the minimum wage to give millions of American families an opportunity to achieve the American Dream, reform the Medicare Prescription Drug program to save seniors, the disabled, and American taxpayers money, and act on the 9/11 Commission Recommendations to fully secure our ports and borders and ensure that our first responders have the resources they need to keep America safe.

"As we move into the second work period, we will work toward full-funding of stem cell research, address global warming and put America on a path toward energy independence, ease the financial burden of college tuition to increase accessibility for hardworking students and their families, strengthen and rebuild America's military, enact comprehensive immigration reform, and enact pay-as-you-go legislation so that Congress has to cover its costs just like American families do.

And, on the Iraq war, Reid made it clear that a change is coming in Iraq policy and that hearings on the Bush administration's conduct of the war and manipulation of Intelligence leading to that quagmire are on the way.

"The days of putting party loyalty ahead of the interests of our troops an the American people are over," said Reid. "Democrats will work with Republicans to bring oversight and accountability to the Bush Administration's conduct of the war and ensure a new policy that meets the conditions on the ground, ensures that the Iraqi government takes responsibility for its own future, and allows our troops to come home."

guitarjon123:

President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant, the Daily News has learned.

The President asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open people's mail under emergency conditions.

That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed, say experts who have reviewed it.

Over the next few weeks, Senate Democrats plan to hold at least 11 hearings just on Iraq. In the House, one of the Democrats' most dogged investigators is waiting to spring his committee on a different mission - suspected government fraud.

From the war to environmental policy and secret surveillance, the Democrats who now control both the House and Senate are armed with subpoena power and ready to summon panels of witnesses.

These newly empowered Democrats plan to put the Bush administration under scrutiny like never before.

Rather than deploy additional forces to Iraq, we believe the way forward is to begin the phased redeployment of our forces in the next four to six months, while shifting the principal mission of our forces there from combat to training, logistics, force protection and counter-terror. A renewed diplomatic strategy, both within the region and beyond, is also required to help the Iraqis agree to a sustainable political settlement. In short, it is time to begin to move our forces out of Iraq and make the Iraqi political leadership aware that our commitment is not open ended, that we cannot resolve their sectarian problems, and that only they can find the political resolution required to stabilize Iraq.

Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat and a judiciary committee member, said, "Why it took five years to go to even this secret court is beyond comprehension."

Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the judiciary committee, said, "It is regrettable that these steps weren't taken a long time ago."

Last year a federal judge in Detroit ordered the Bush administration to stop the surveillance because it violates Americans' civil rights.

The Bush administration has appealed the ruling to a federal appeals court, where the case is pending. The administration immediately told the court of Bush's decision.

At issue is how the secret panel of judges will consider evidence when approving government requests to monitor suspected al-Qaida agents' phone calls and e-mails between the United States and other countries.

Until last week, the National Security Agency conducted the surveillance without a court warrant. But the Justice Department announced Wednesday that the FISA court, as it is known, began overseeing the program with a Jan. 10 order.

Gonzales, testifying Thursday front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he may not be able to release details of the order.

``Are you saying that you might object to the court giving us a decision that you publicly announced?'' committee chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., asked. ``Are we Alice in Wonderland here?''

This is not the "rubber stamp" Congress that the 109th Congress was. It might be far worse. So far this Congress has already given the military the power to put civilians under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) in violation of the Constitution. They have already signed of on a Resolution that would allow our military to fire on and kill Iranians that they find in Iraq. What message is this resoulution supposed to convey to the world? If Iranians were to fire on US Troops weeks ago, how would American soldiers differentiate them from Iraqi insurgents? Wouldn't the US Military fire back as a matter of self defense? Why do we need a resolution to authorize the military to kill Iranians unless we were sending a threat to Iran? Why was it necessary? How many Iranians are in Iraq? Have US Forces ever NOT fired on the enemy during any circumstances? What made this resolution necessary now?

More than 30 years after Vietnam, Warner is once again watching as generals propose additional troops. But this time, he's not staying silent. In a rebuke to President Bush, Warner is leading an effort to have the U.S. Senate declare a lack of confidence in the administration's plans to send 21,500 additional soldiers into the Iraqi war zone.

White House officials were taken aback by the move, which is striking because of Warner's stature, both in the Republican Party and as one of the country's most ardent supporters of the military. But Warner, who once was married to Elizabeth Taylor, has an almost mythic popularity, which has made it impossible for Bush allies to demonize him on the issue.

Democrats who control Congress turned up the heat on President Bush's global warming policy Tuesday at an oversight hearing where witnesses claimed White House political operatives stifled government scientific findings on climate change and other topics.

Republicans on the panel said Democrats were using the scientists to make their own political statements. California GOP Rep. Darrell Issa questioned whether the surveyed scientists were a "self-selected" group that was dissatisfied with the Bush administration.

"It's a stunning personal experience to hear directly from scientists whose life work has been compromised, who live in fear of retaliation or compromised careers if they adhere to their code of ethics as scientists," he said.

Two private advocacy organizations, the Government Accountability Project and the Union of Concerned Scientists, presented the committee with findings from in-depth interviews of 40 government scientists and a survey of nearly 300 more.

Nearly half said they had seen or personally experienced pressure to eliminate the words "climate change" and similar terms from reports and other communications. Two in 5 said they had seen or personally experienced changes or edits that altered the meaning of their scientific findings.

Cheney's notes, which were introduced into evidence Tuesday during Libby's perjury and obstruction-of-justice trial, call into question the truthfulness of President Bush's vehement denials about his prior knowledge of the attacks against Wilson. The revelation that Bush may have known all along that there was an effort by members of his office to discredit the former ambassador begs the question: Was the president also aware that senior members of his administration compromised Valerie Plame's undercover role with the CIA?

Further, the highly explicit nature of Cheney's comments not only hints at a rift between Cheney and Bush over what Cheney felt was the scapegoating of Libby, but also raises serious questions about potentially criminal actions by Bush. If Bush did indeed play an active role in encouraging Libby to take the fall to protect Karl Rove, as Libby's lawyers articulated in their opening statements, then that could be viewed as criminal involvement by Bush.

jwalker: Cheney's Handwritten Notes Implicate Bush in Plame Affair

A long-awaited report on the veracity of pre-war Iraq intelligence has found that a secretive policy shop exaggerated the Iraqi threat, providing the White House with cherry-picked information about links between Iraq and al Qaeda. The shop, operating out of the Pentagon, was set up by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Its goal was to lay the groundwork for a pre-emptive military strike against Iraq.

The report would appear to confirm British intelligence assertions that surfaced in a document widely referred to as the Downing Street Memo that the facts against the threat posed by Iraq were being fixed around the Bush administration's policy leading up to the invasion of Iraq.

After Feith's OSP concocted its cock-and-bull story about Iraq, they had the temerity to take it over to the CIA and present it to a team of professional analysts there. George Tenet, after listening politely to Feith's team on August 15, 2002, quietly asked his staff to stick around after the OSP briefers departed. The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency reviewed Feith's conclusions (apparently there were some two dozen or more pieces of "evidence") and promptly disagreed with more than 50 percent of it, Gimble said. Five days later, they all met once again, and the CIA pointedly offered to footnote Feith's report with strident objections of its own. Feith's team said thanks--and then promptly set up an appointment to brief the White House, without so much as adding a single CIA footnote. Needless to say, that briefing was widely cited by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and others--and it was helpfully leaked to The Weekly Standard, which printed it nearly verbatim. Later, when asked why he kept insisting that Iraq and Al Qaeda were allies, Cheney pointed to the Weekly Standard article to support his charges!

Bizarre as all this is, it is important to remember that because of these lies, America went to war against a country that had never attacked the United States, that had no weapons of mass destruction and that had no ties to Al Qaeda or 9/11. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead, along with 3,109 Americans.

Steel: I think a good gift for the President would be a chocolate revolver. and since he is so busy, you'd probably have to run up to him real quick and give it to him.

~Deep Thoughts

Two veteran Republican lawmakers and a top GOP leadership aide contacted prosecutors who later were fired. All three denied wrongdoing.

Democratic-run committees in both the House and Senate are investigating the firings of eight U.S. attorneys. Six of those prosecutors told Congress on Tuesday they felt pressured by the interventions.

Just hours after Attorney General Alberto Gonzales dismissed the hubbub as an "overblown personnel matter," a Republican senator Thursday mused that Gonzales might soon suffer the same fate as the canned U.S. attorneys.

A short time later, Gonzales and his security detail shuttled to the Capitol for a private meeting on Democratic turf, bearing two offerings...

The Bush administration misused its authority and improperly obtained personal information about people in the US on hundreds of occasions, according to a report released by a US Justice Department watchdog.

Robert Mueller, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said he was to be held accountable for the abuses, which involved the improper use of so-called national security letters, which allowed the FBI to obtain personal information, including telephone, banking, and e-mail records.

Democrats controlling Congress are confronting President Bush on a broad range of issues regarding his handling of the war in Iraq, and the larger war on terrorism, as well as domestic issues. Congressional committees have launched investigations on numerous topics, including U.S. efforts to train Iraqi military forces, waste by military contractors, and the treatment of terrorist suspects.

Presidents do have the right to fire their top prosecutors without explanation or apology. And clearly the history of dismissals is dotted with an occasional political firing.

What isn't true is that presidents customarily get rid of so many of their hand-chosen U.S. attorneys at once. Bush canned seven on one day in December after firing another one last summer.

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"The president has a right to have his own people there and expect them to follow the broad policy of an administration," Burnham says. What's "really wrong," he says, is for the administration to get involved in particular cases and nudge prosecutors one way or the other.

Even-handed law enforcement depends on keeping political considerations -- or the appearance of partisanship -- out of decisions about who gets prosecuted and who doesn't.

And yet, some of the U.S. attorneys Bush fired had either prosecuted Republicans or had been urged by Republicans to more fervently pursue allegations of Democratic voter fraud.

jwalker: Bush Cynicism on Law Shows Up in Firings

Clinton ... fired another [U.S. attorney] who was said to have bitten a topless dancer on her arm, having retreated to a strip joint after losing a big case, according to the Congressional Research Service.

MarianneScott: Two new funny video clips with G.W.Bush:
"Bush Decides to Start Thinking" and
"Bush said 'SHIT' - G.W. Bush explains what it's like to be a President" .

You can watch it on: http://www.palavestra.com/originalvideos.htm

Very funny!
:D

Bush also said he would fight any move to subpoena the advisers. "If the staff of a president operates in constant fear of being hauled before congressional committees... the president would not receive candid advice and the American people would be ill-served," he said.

Grim-faced and sometimes even looking pained, Mueller testified at the panel's second hearing into a Justice Department inspector general's report this month that revealed abuses in the FBI's use of documents called national security letters to gather data.

Reviewing headquarters files and four of 56 FBI field offices, Inspector General Glenn Fine found 48 violations of law or presidential directives during 2003-2005. He estimates there may be up to 3,000 unidentified or unreported violations throughout the FBI.

Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., served notice: "We're going to be re-examining the broad authorities we granted the FBI in the Patriot Act." House Judiciary committee members delivered a similar message last week.

The Supreme Court ruled today, in what amounts to a rebuke of the Bush administration, that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate carbon dioxide from automobile emissions, and that it has shirked its duty in not doing so.

In a 5-to-4 decision, the court found that the Clean Air Act expressly authorizes the E.P.A. to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, contrary to the E.P.A.’s contention, and that if the agency still insists that it does not want to regulate those emissions, it must give better reasons than the “laundry list” of invalid considerations it has offered so far.

Mr. President, meet the Constitution. Constitution, I'd like to introduce you to President George W. Bush. It's been a long six years since Mr. Bush took office, and it's high time the two of you got to know each other - especially with that whole oathy-type thing. It's probably going to be easier to do all that "preserve, protect, and defend" thing if you have some sort of vague sense of what it is you are defending.

This overdue introduction is particularly necessary today because the president, in his Rose Garden press conference, demonstrated a particularly egregious failure to comprehend one of the most basic principles of our system of government.
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If Congress sends him a military funding bill that the President does not believe he can live with, he can veto the bill. If Congress cannot override the veto, the funding bill does not become law. Congress is not, however, then obliged to send him another funding bill that doesn't have the things he found objectionable. Congress can send him the same damn bill again, with the same strings attached, and that is exactly what they should do if that happens.

As far as I can tell, the only difference between what the President is trying to pull here and what goes on when the cops are staring down someone who has a gun to a hostage's head is the scale. The President is standing there, and his message comes down to this: "OK, Congress. Give me the money, no strings attached, or the troops get it." It's extortion by threat on a massive scale, and the military are the ones being threatened.

...members of Congress, as well as the media and the American people, need to recognize that what is at stake now is not Alberto Gonzales' career. It is George Bush's presidency.
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Bartlett inadvertently acknowledged Bush involvement in the most serious aspect of the scandal: the politicization of prosecutions. Of course, Bush will claim ignorance of specific firings. So be it.

What Bartlett gave us in March was confirmation that the president was aware of, indeed supportive of, efforts by key players in his own party to prod U.S. Attorneys to do their bidding. That bidding was never ill-defined; Republicans at the state level and in Washington wanted federal prosecutors to launch conveniently-timed investigations and prosecutions that might harm Democrats, and to back off inconvenient inquiries into the actions of Republicans.

mcgarpat: Gonzales is a pawn. The admin has higher sights.