Yet another court asks the Bush regimistas: What the hell kind of drugs are you people on? PLUS: Obama team forces political hack out at the CDC

Don Chimpy and Bush regime consigliere Big Dick swear they won't tell no stinkin' lies 'lessin' they feel like it, and if we don't like it, we can sue!

by Ken

You have to love those "law 'n' order" types who, given a badge, go on what looks to all outward appearances like a drunken binge to see how many laws they can break before somebody carts them off to either the pokey or the loony bin.

Here in NYC we had it with the Divine Rudy. He made his name, you'll recall, as the battling federal prosecutor who cleaned up Dodge. Not included in the legend is the epilogue: It seems as if just about everybody who appealed a Rudy-won conviction got it reversed. The general appeals court response to Rudy's prosecutions seems to have been: "Oh jeez, you gotta be kidding."

So the people of NYC elected the Divine Rudy mayor, and he went on a crime spree that would have made Al Capone envious. With that scarifying sneer on his puss which still sends shivers down my spine, he not only broke but spat on every law that either offended his sense of righteousness or interfered with his megalomaniacally self-appointed messianic mission. His attitude was: "Chuck you, Farley. If you don't like it, why dontcha sue? Huh? HuH?"

And in astonishing numbers, they did. The city must have had an entire cadre of lawyers at work defending those lawsuits. And as if that wasn't expensive enough for NYC taxpayers, here too the judges and juries sitting on those cases seem to have wondered what kind of drugs the Divine Rudy was on, and kept awarding plaintiffs juicy cash prizes.

This seems to be the legal model for the Bush regime's approach to (sneer, sneer!) "the law." This and, of course, the famous Nixon doctrine that "if the president does it, it's legal." (Really scary thought: Can you imagine what the Sainted Rudy could do with this kind of "get out of jail free" card? The mind boggles.) It's kind of a stretch to imagine that Chimpy the Prez ever gave deep thought to this subject -- or any other. Does anyone believe, for example, that our Chimpy came up with the idea for all those extra-constitutional "signing statements" on his own? This is a man who's barely up to the concept of signing his name.

But "Big Dick" Cheney, now that's another story -- a story I'm going to assume DWT readers are only too familiar with. Which brings us to the latest installment of Bush Regime Law 'n' Disorder, which a listserv colleague passed along with the note: "I haven't seen much buzz on this, so here ya go, from the Friday news dump."

Judge hands loss to White House on visitors logs

By PETE YOST

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Friday rejected the Bush administration's latest attempt to keep secret the identities of White House visitors and declared that it engaged in illegal record-keeping practices.

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth concluded that the practices in dispute took place before October 2004 when the Secret Service transferred large numbers of entry and exit logs to the White House and then deleted internal Secret Service copies of them.

The practices ended, the judge said, after various private organizations went to court in an effort to gain access to the logs.

Lamberth's ruling brushed aside the government's argument that revealing Secret Service logs would impede the president's ability to perform his constitutional duties.

The court said that the likelihood of harm is not great enough to justify curtailing the public disclosure goals of the Freedom of Information Act.

A watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, asked for the records to determine whether nine conservative religious leaders visited the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney's residence in October 2006.

Lamberth's decision means the government will have to find other legal grounds if it wants to block release of the Secret Service logs.

While the case was a setback for the Bush White House, the effect of the administration's claim of a presidential communications privilege succeeded in dragging out the lawsuit filed in October 2006.

[Etc. etc. etc. At this point, can't we all write this story ourselves?]

In other words, now that the gang has vamoosed with the loot, maybe we can find out for a fact that it was indeed the energy barons who helped Big Dick formulate his "energy policy," under which those barons proceeded to pile up profits the like of which no one in human history had ever dared even to imagine? Got it -- just checking.


POSTSCRIPT: IN SOME WAYS, AT LEAST, THE LONG NATIONAL
NIGHTMARE IS OVER -- CDC POLITICAL HACK IS MOVED OUT

How many departments, agencies, and offices under control of the White House has the Bush regime perverted in the interest of extremist ideology -- and often in the financial interest of greedy Republicronies? Maybe it would be easier if we put it the other way: Is there any federal department, agency, or office that the regime didn't politicize?

It seems a lot of people concerned with public health, including the survivors of the wreckage at the Centers for Disease Control, are breathing loud sighs of relief if not actually breaking out the champagne at the news that the six-year tenure of Dr. Julie Gerberding (described by the colleague who passed this story on as "a one-person public health wrecking ball") is drawing to a close, as reported yesterday by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It appears that, contrary to the assertion in the "brief written statement" provided by the CDC in response, Dr. Gerberding has been doing everything in her power to try to stay on, and a lot of people were afraid she might succeed.

CDC director Gerberding resigns at Obama's request

By ALISON YOUNG

CDC Director Julie Gerberding's controversial tenure will end Jan. 20 — after Barack Obama is sworn in as president, employees of the Atlanta-based agency were informed in an email sent late Friday evening. . . .

"As part of the transition process, the Administration requested resignation letters from a number of senior-level officials, including Dr. Julie Gerberding. This week, the Administration accepted Dr. Gerberding's resignation, effective January 20. As Dr. Gerberding noted in a November e-mail to CDC leadership, she has always expected that she would be leaving after the administration changes," [a "brief written statement" from the agency] said. . . .

Gerberding's six years leading one of the nation's most trusted institutions were marked by numerous controversies, from allegations that she allowed politics to interfere with science to concerns that her strategic decisions incapacitated the agency's ability to respond in a public health crisis. . . .

[F]or much of her tenure, many CDC employees lacked confidence in her vision for the agency. Just 48 percent of CDC staff said they had a high level of respect for the agency's senior leaders, according to results released last year of a federal survey of government employees.

Last year, congressional investigators concluded the CDC failed "in almost every respect" to protect Hurricane Katrina's victims from dangerous formaldehyde fumes in government-provided trailers. And Gerberding was accused of playing politics by refusing to reappoint the director of the agency's worker safety division -- a man widely respected by business leaders, labor unions and lawmakers.

Gerberding drew fire from Democratic lawmakers in 2007 when she delivered testimony to Congress about the health effects of climate change that had been censored by the White House.

In 2003 Gerberding launched a massive reorganization of the CDC that many employees say plunged the nation's 9-1-1 system for public health into turmoil and caused an exodus of key scientific staff.

In December 2005 five former CDC directors sent Gerberding a highly unusual joint letter warning that the agency was in trouble in the wake of her reorganization. They were alarmed by the departures of critical staff.

Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, who preceded Gerberding as CDC director and was one of the authors of the letter, served on the Obama transition team for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. HHS is the parent agency of the CDC.

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