Take a bow, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara -- scourge of kook corruption

A madcap novel of the sloppiest turf war ever launched by the Brooklyn mob. Kid Sally Palumbo has been a loyal servant to the Brooklyn Mafia for years. His specialty is murder, and he is so skilled at it that he has gotten the attention of Mafia boss Papa Baccala. But unfortunately for Kid Sally, murder pays poorly. He wants to make real dough, to get respect, and to be able to tell his colleagues where to sit when they eat dinner. In short, he wants to be boss. The job would be his for the taking -- if only Kid Sally weren't a Grade A moron. . .

-- from the Reader Store overview of the 1969 Jimmy Breslin novel based on the life of Mafioso "Crazy Joey" Gallo

by Ken

Or as the publisher's description of The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight (which you'll find on book sites all over the Internet) puts it, Kid Sally is "a would-be capo who 'couldn't run a gas station at a profit even if he stole the customers' cars.' " (The role was played in the much-enjoyed film version by a newcomer named Robert De Niro, who was cast when another young actor, Al Pacino, pulled out to play Michael Corleone in a big-money picture to be made based on Mario Puzo's The Godfather.)

So what does The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight have to do with the price of eggs? Well, the publisher's description notes that "the title has entered into the language as a catch phrase," and as the New York media overflow with tales of local political corruption, it's the image that keeps coming to mind.

The other day Howie walked us through the great breaking story about the roundup of a few NYS pols and assorted other characters in a grand conspiracy of electoral corruption ("Queens State Senator Malcolm Smith And A Gaggle Of Corrpt Republicans Arrested By The FBI"). It's a story that would have been even funnier if Jimmy Breslin were around to write it -- a story about a network of payoffs involving a phony Indian money guy named "Raj" and an Orthodox Jewish wheeler-dealer named "Mo" who was real but, alas for the conspirators, an already-cooperating witness.

All of this in the service of a scheme so preposterous -- and also, we should stress, so inconsequential -- as to represent a slander on any self-respecting corrupt pol. It all revolved around getting "Wilson Pikula"s, a peculiarly NYS institution, to enable washed-up African-American Democratic Queens State Senator Malcolm into the Republican mayoral primaries in NYC's five counties, where he would have had absolutely zero chance of doing anything except embarrassing. That is, even if a bunch of the bribe-takers hadn't taken the money and then reneged on their promises. (This possibility, we know from the government tapes, actually had occurred to Senator Smith. He just never figured out any way of dealing with it.)

I can't say I've read deeply in the paperwork that's been made available, but still -- really, now! As far as I can tell, there wasn't even any public money changing hands. Sure, if there were public officials taking bribes, they should be dealt with, though as soon as one learns that the crooked wheels of this conspiracy were oiled by a cooperating witness, one can be forgiven for wondering whether this whole nutty scheme would have been hatched, let alone gone anywhere, without government support.

Yet there it is: "political corruption," stopped dead in its tracks by the FBI at the behest of the fearless corruption-fighting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara. The other "corruption" scandals we've been hearing about from unflinching prosecutors -- both financial and political -- aren't as colorful, or entertaining, but they seem to me every bit as inconsequential.

Does anyone imagine for a second that any aspect of this nonsense has anything to do with the mountain of financial and political corruption, real corruption, that New York, both city and state, are choking under? The kind where the big-money players using influence and cash either to siphon money out of the public till or, more frequently, to manipulate the craven political actors to do their bidding and ensure a supercharged return on their investment?

Yet just the other day, DNAinfo.com, from which I've come to expect better, was touting: "Preet Bharara, New Sheriff of Albany, Eyed for Higher Office":

He's the star prosecutor who, in one week, has taken down one state senator, two assemblymen, a councilman and two GOP bosses in two alleged bribery plots that have rocked the political world.

And he hints more heads will roll.

It's just the latest in a series of high-profile catches for Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who has spent the last four years lassoing one corrupt city politician after the next — fueling renewed speculation that the self-appointed Sheriff of Albany might harbor political ambitions of his own. . . .

Bharara has spent the past four years in the headlines and splashed across magazine covers for his work taking down corrupt politicians, prosecuting terror suspects and insider trading, and recovering stolen cash, including the largest-known recovery in municipal contract fraud in U.S. history following the CityTime debacle.

This week, his takedowns included Queens State Sen. Malcolm Smith, City Councilman Daniel Halloran and Bronx Assemblyman Eric Stevenson in connection with two elaborate alleged bribery schemes, including one that tried to get Smith on the ballot for New York City mayor.

Since August 2009, he has nabbed a whopping 15 elected officials and associates in public corruption cases, including State Sen. Carl Kruger, who was sentenced to seven years in prison, and Councilman Larry Seabrook, who was sentenced to five years behind bars. To highlight his cases, the office created a colorful chart featuring all the names, positions, charges and outcomes of each of the arrests.

Non-New Yorkers may be forgiven for assuming that this roster of "elected officials and associates" must matter. Trust me, these are nobodies -- if possible, less-than-nobodies. Oddballs and odd men out, what we might call "kook corruption." Can we expect some poor schlepp of a state assemblyman to be tagged for collusion with a bunch of circus clowns getting out of a Volkswagen?

Whereas does anyone believe for a second that New York City (and State) isn't chock full of somebodies and supersomebodies in urgent need of indicting? The kinds of people who are tied into the kind of people who are real movers and shakers, and in their corruption make our political and financial cuture stink to high heaven?

Do we really have to ask, for example, how many prosecutions the U.S. attorney for the Southern District has launched involving actual actors in the financial meltdown that followed the blowing of the housing bubble? Is anyone else getting the feeling that, hand in hand with the financial concept of "too big to fail," we now have a legal category of candidate felons who are "too big to touch"?

In the nauseating DNAinfo.com puff piece, amid speculation that jobs Preet Bharara might be angling for are U.S. attorney general and director of the FBI, there is this curious note:

But one source in the Justice Department noted that, given the current political climate, there are not many open jobs for Bharara, who formerly served as chief counsel to Sen. Chuck Schumer, leading the 2006 Congressional investigation into the firings of United States attorneys under the Bush administration.

Now this is tantalizing, though I can't say for sure I know what it means. Is the idea that Preet is tainted for being too tough, too willing to investigate? We can't tell, because nothing more is made of it.

And all I can recall of what should have been one of the great scandals of the "Chimpy" Bush administration -- the politicization of the entire Executive Branch, including most unforgivably the Justice Department -- never became a scandal of any consequence. Faced with the stark perversion of the administration of law enforcement by the federal government, there should have been a rash of headlines, firings, indictments, and people in high places spending millions of dollars on PR "handlers."

Somehow it didn't happen, though. I'm sure Senator Schumer and his stalwart chief counsel tried their darnedest, but somehow it just wasn't good enough.

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Even low-rent thug Chris Christie has more political cred than the Obama administration -- but then, who doesn't?

“The most important thing in public life, in a job like governor, is for the people you’re representing to know exactly where you stand. People who disagree with me on things at least have a sense of comfort in knowing where I’m coming from.”

--NJ Gov. Chris Christie, quoted in today's NYT

by Ken

My position on Chris Christie hasn't changed since last year's New Jersey gubernatorial election, when he couldn't even muster a majority against widely despised incumbent Gov. Jon Corzine. The guy is a sleazy goon, who should by now be in prison following his first few trials, preparing for the next few, for his serial malfeasances as Rovean political-hack U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, the kind who served as an answer to the question posed by Paul Krugman among others: We know pretty well what those loyal GOP U.S.A.s who were shitcanned did to earn the wrath of Karl Rove (not devote themselves heart and soul to destroying political enemies), but what in God's name did the others have to do to keep their jobs? And of course we only know about the Christie U.S.A. scandals that have bubbled up through the muck of the political cesspool he presided over in Newark.

Now comes this report by the NYT's Richard Pérez-Peña, which includes this not entirely undeserved tribute:

Mr. Christie has turned out to be a far more deft politician than his detractors — and even some supporters — had expected, making few compromises as he pursues a broad agenda for remaking New Jersey’s free-spending political culture. So far, polls suggest, the public is giving him the benefit of the doubt.

“The most important thing in public life, in a job like governor, is for the people you’re representing to know exactly where you stand,” Mr. Christie said in an interview on Friday. “People who disagree with me on things at least have a sense of comfort in knowing where I’m coming from.”

Now, I think of Pérez-Peña as a good reporter by NYT standards, but those standards dictate that as a reporter you must never allow context to color what's in front of your eyes, guaranteeing that much of the paper's reporting manages to be "true" without being "the truth." And so it wasn't surprising that colleagues on the ground in New Jersey, and elsewhere around the country, were quick to call a foul on the beatification of the governor.

One financially focused colleague in the Garden State points out that all Christie is really doing is "implementing failed supply side/'trickle down' nonsense in the state," that his famously "austere" budget is full of "fees" that are really taxes, that his great triumph in clamping down on the permitted rate of property-tax increase merely whittles down a limit already in place, and that neither the old nor the new limit deals with any of the state's real problems, that "he is also taking a page right out of the Bush era playbook with a push for privatization of many services -- but it isn't going to save the much money," and is a potential for corruption catastrophe.

Another colleague thinks the property-tax cap looks like a replay of the stunt former Republican Gov. Christie Todd Whitman pulled when, for cheap short-term political gain in the early '90s, she lowered the state's income tax, insisting -- despite Democratic predictions to the contrary -- that it wouldn't lead to prperty-tax increases, thereby setting the stage for their explosive growth.

Yet another colleague suggests: "Christie's following a successful model: if you break public unions, cut revenues to education, attack public employees and pensions and cripple the property tax to help reduce government to the size of your bathtub, you can create . . . California."

And yet, and yet . . .

There's no question that the new governor has had more political success at the outset of his administration than anyone would have expected, especially when you consider that the killing economic problems besetting the states, which had a lot to do with former Governor Corzine's unreelectability, have only gotten worse since November. And I don't think the governor is wrong when he attributes his political successes to date to being (relatively) straight with his constituents, and acting decisively in accordance with his beliefs.

Do I have to underline the contrast with what's going on now in the White House? Where confusion about core principles is only surpassed by wishy-woshiness about implementing them.

In the matter of what those principles actually are, I've been meaning -- ever since I presented our friend Ian Welsh's brilliant analysis ("So THAT's Why we're in Afghanistan! It's 'military Keynesianism'") that the administration is stuck fighting in Afghanistan in good part because "war spending is one of the only reliable forms of stimulus he has" -- to pass on a piece Ian recirculated recently as "Obama's Personality," written originally in December 2006 [all emphasis added]:

I Believe Obama

One of my rules of analysis is that I believe people when they tell me who they are. That doesn't mean I believe everything they say - I never believed Bush was a moderate, for example, because I believed what he told me when he refused to correct obviously false budget numbers. His budget plan spent the surplus twice, and I believed that's what he would do. And, needless to say, I was right (well sort of, he spent even more than that, but you get the point.)

People tell you who they are all the time; all you have to do is listen, separate out the noise intended to distract you, and then believe them. Bush's record of failure at everything he did, for exmaple, was clear. His slurring of words and inability to talk coherently was clear. His code-speaking to the Christian right was clear. All these things were there to see in 2000.

So, let's talk about someone else. Obama. I've been listening to Obama and I've been hearing what he has to say. He's been pretty hostile to the netroots, contemptuous and dismissive, and I've heard that and I believe it. Obama is telling me he has no respect for the sort of people who make up the netroots. I think he's sincere - I don't think it's "just" a tactical move. He genuinely dislikes people getting worked up over issues. It makes him uncomfortable. He wants everything and everyone to be "nice". I believe him when his words and actions tell me that, just as when he backed down from McCain when McCain unfairly attacked him, I believed what that told me about his spine and about the fact that he prefers peace to conflict, even when he's in the right. I believe him when he says he admires John McCain and that he admires Joe Lieberman and I understand what that says about him (because, of course, if you actually follow McCain and Lieberman you know they aren't even close to men of their word. And Obama knows that.)

Obama has told me who he is, and I have listened. If he gets into power he will compromise/compromise/compromise, because he believes in it - not as a means, but as an end. He will shy away from big fights, because he doesn't like fighting. He may "believe" in universal healthcare, but he believes in compromise more. And I'm betting I know which belief will win out.

I'm sure many will disagree, but when people tell me who they are I listen. Obama has spoken, I've listened, and since I don't believe that compromise is an end rather than just a means, he's not the person I think should be president.

Again, this was written in 2006. Nevertheless, I really don't have anything to add!

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The mysterious, convenient solo-plane-crash death of "Karl Rove's IT guru" has to turn the soberest soul into a Konspiracy Kook

Thanks to Brad Blog for digging out this lovely photo. Brad recalls that Mike Connell "had reportedly been threatened by Karl Rove over the summer, just prior to being forced to testify by a federal judge in Ohio in a 2004 election fraud lawsuit."

"I'm loyal to my friends and I'm loyal to the Bush family."

-- the late Mike Connell

"I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist."

-- Teresa Nielsen Hayden

by Ken

I didn't pay much attention to this story at first. But it caught Howie's attention in Africa, and I took a closer look. Here is Lisa Derrick's account on FireDogLake's Campaign Silo:

Plane Crash Kills Rove IT Guy, Testified in OH Voter Fraud Case, Key in White House Email Scandal

By Lisa Derrick Saturday December 20, 2008 9:47 am

Mike Connell, Karl Rove's IT guru -- who was compelled six weeks ago to testify in an Ohio vote-tampering case -- was killed late Friday night in a solo plane crash. His plane crashed into the garage of an empty house. Per Cybrinth CEO Stephen Spoonamore, Connell was also considered "vital to uncovering the truth" about the missing White House emails considered a critical link to the Justice Department and White House's involvement in the firings of nine US attorneys.

According to Spoonamore, as reported by Rebecca Abrahams, at an October 11, 2006 meeting between Spoonamore, Connell, and GovTech Solutions President Randy Cole -- who ran and lost for State Representative in Ohio this election --

Connell asked him about ways to "permanently destroy hard drives." Spoonamore said "If this is what I think you're talking about, this meeting is over."

Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board are on site today. Investigations typically take weeks and even months or longer to complete, according to an FAA spokeswoman.

Connell, president of GovTech Solutions and New Media Communications, was a website designer and IT professional who created the website for Ohio's secretary of state Kenneth K. Blackwell that presented the 2004 election results in real time as they were tabulated.

Connell created websites for Blackwell's election runs was well as the one which tabulated and displayed votes in real time. During the 2004 elections, Blackwell was also chairman of Bush-Cheney 2004 reelection effort in Ohio, successfully leading the campaign for the 2004 Ohio Constitution Amendment banning state recognition of same sex marriage or civil unions. Blackwell was unseated in 2006 by Ted Strickland.

Connell refused to testify or to produce documents relating to the system used in the 2004 and 2006 elections until compelled by a judge on on November 1 of this year.

The Ohio RICO lawsuit King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association v. Blackwell, brought by Cliff Arnebeck, alleged alleging that vote-tampering during the 2004 presidential election resulted in civil rights violations. The lawsuit maintains that Karl Rove, with the assistance of Mike Connell, designed, built and directed a strategy to manipulate elections through the use of computers. On November 1, 2008, a judge ordered Connell to testify, though his resulting deposition two days later was disappointing to many. Connell's attorney advised him to not answer many questions including, "Who directed you to set up the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth IT Network?"

In addition to his with his work creating Blackwell's election websites and the anti-Kerry website swiftboatvetsfortruth.org, per reporter Rebecca Abrahams, Connell also developed websites for the House Intelligence, Judiciary, Financial Services, Ways and Means, and Administration Committees. The builder of RNC.org, and head of IT for the McCain campaign, Connell was also

the architect and cyber keymaster of George W. Bush election websites including GeorgeWBush.com and GWB43.com, the site Karl Rove used for 95-percent of his email communication. Connell is also the CEO of Govtech Solutions, the company responsible for building and managing congressional email servers and firewalls.

In 1999, Connell told Inside Business magazine, "I'm loyal to my friends and I'm loyal to the Bush family."

Let's pause here and take a deep breath before venturing into territory where sensible people really shouldn't be venturing. Breathe in, breathe out. Again.

Okay. So in other words:

* Mike Connell knew all of Karl Rove's electronic secrets. All of the systems by which Rove organized and exercised his control over the GOP and executive-branch propaganda operations, which of course were merged into a single operation,
went through Connell.

To the extent that communications were involved in Rove's far-flung machinations to subvert the Constitution and the whole body of federal law in order to perpetuate the totalitarian regime he had played such a large role in establishing, which is to say both his life's work and his every waking hour's occupation, to that extent, everything went through systems devised Connell. This included the creation of parallel e-mail systems devised to circumvent the government record-keeping requirements of federal law, and also to circumvent the requirements for separation of government business and partisan political activity, a separation that ran directly counter to the fundamental operating principle of the Bush regime, which was not only to break down the separation between government business and partisan political activity but to make them exactly the same thing.

* Clearly, e-mail communications were not only central to the political purge of U.S. attorneys who resisted participating in Rove's transformation of the Justice Dept. into an agency of political hatchet folk and partisan enforcers, but were central to the unraveling, documentation, and eventual prosecution of the various conspiracies.tiy, we'll never know.

* What's more, Connell was deeply involved with the Karl Rove of Ohio, former Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, including the period in which Blackwell likely oversaw the theft of the state's 2004 electoral votes for the presidential reelection campaign of George W. Bush, which enabled the never-elected president to steal a second term.

* Six weeks ago, after exhausting all efforts at stonewalling, Connell finally was forced to give a deposition concerning the Ohio electoral matters, though questions seem to have ranged into some of his other Rove-commissioned work.. He lawyered up, but what methods of persuasion might eventually have been brought to bear to persuade him to be more forthcoming, or what legal compulsions might in future have been applied to unearth what he knew about such other Rove secrets as the U.S. attorney firings, regarding which Rove himself is under increasing legal pressure to testy. Everything Connell knew about those activities also died with him in Friday night's plane crash.

* And that crash was of a single-passenger plane. All of a sudden, poof! No more Mike Connell. Oops. Well, accidents happen.

Now, I realize that this sounds like the most hysterical of conspiracy-mongering. It's just that where the activities of Karl Rove is concerned, it seems pretty clear that vast networks of conspiracies were in fact in daily operation, and that a substantial portion of the activity specifically involved bypassing or flouting the law. Where organized crime is concerned, such coincidences become automatically suspect, it seems hard to resist the suspicion that Karl Rove was a sort of operations manager for the most extensive political crime operation in the history of the republic.

Hmmm.


YOU ASK, WHO WAS MIKE CONNELL ANYWAYS?

Brad Blog has a veritable Mike Connell archive. The links are available on-site:

* 7/17/08: Ohio Attorney Files to Lift Stay on '04 Election Case, Cites Allegations, Evidence of Massive Fraud by a Number of GOP Operatives
* 7/22/08: GOP Tech Guru Mike Connell 'High IQ Forrest Gump...At Scene of Every Single Crime' Say Ohio Attorneys
* 7/24/08: Rove Threatened GOP IT Guru If He Does Not 'Take the Fall' for Election Fraud in Ohio, Says Attorney
* 7/25/08: Cliff Arnebeck, OH Attorney, Interviewed Live on Peter B. Collins Show
* 7/26/08: So Who Is Mike Connell? A Clip from 'Free For All' Gives You an Idea...
* 9/29/08: STAY LIFTED IN '04 OHIO ELECTION FRAUD CASE, GOP 'TECH GURU' SUBPOENAED
* 10/31/08: BREAKING: Federal Judge Compels GOP IT Guru Mike Connell To Give Deposition in Ohio '04 Election Case
* 11/24/08: 'Document Hold' Served by OH Attorney to GA SoS in Advance of State's U.S. Senate Run-off Election

LARISA ALEXANDROVNA REPORTS: "HE WAS AFRAID"

Raw Story, whose investigative team headed by Larisa Alexandrovna has been all over the Connell story, naturally is on this story too.

Alexandrovna revealed on her own blog that Connell was a source of hers, adding:

[H]e had information that he was ready to share.

You see, Mike Connell set-up the alternate email and communications system for the White House. He was responsible for creating the system that hosted the infamous GWB43.com accounts that Karl Rove and others used. When asked by Congress to provide these emails, the White House said that they were destroyed. But in reality, what Connell is alleged to have done is move these files to other servers after having allegedly scrubbed the files from all "known" Karl Rove accounts.

In addition, I have reason to believe that the alternate accounts were used to communicate with US Attorneys involved in political prosecutions, like that of Don Siegelman. This is what I have been working on to prove for over a year. In fact, it was through following the Siegelman-Rove trail that I found evidence leading to Connell. That is how I became aware of him. Mike was getting ready to talk. He was frightened. . . .

I am not saying that this was a hit nor am I resigned to this being simply an accident either. I am no expert on aviation and cannot provide an opinion on the matter. What I am saying, however, is that given the context, this event needs to be examined carefully. [emphasis in the original]

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The job of reclaiming the Justice Dept. from the Bush regime's wrecking ball is too big and too important to wait for a Democratic administration

As wacky as any of the other Federalist Society
wackos: Chief Justice John Roberts

On the one hand, you could argue that the executive-power-grabbing megalomaniacs of the Bush regime, while undeniably ruthless and insatiable in their lust for power, are in the end clueless morons. Because what happens if they actually succeed in overturning the Constitution and piling up all the power of the federal government in the executive branch -- and then have to turn all that power over to a Democrat when the country turns them out of office?

The other hand would be, I guess, that they don't worry because: (a) they don't believe any Democrat would dare try to assert the powers they've gathered unto themselves, which are actually for use only by far-right-wing Republican presidents, and (b) in any case they're prepared to turn on a dime and argue with equal ferocity and ruthlessness that for a Democratic president even so bold an act as drawing a breath would represent an intolerable usurpation of constitutional authority.

After all, we're not talking about people who are known for either rationality or consistency. They're only about getting their way, and I've got a feeling the day Chimpy the Prez ends his eight-year illegal squat in the White House, that will be the last we hear about the mystical -- and wholly mythical -- Unitary Executive, the all-powerful executive branch, until the next time wingnuts feel the Oval Office is again within reach of their beady clutches.

"Unitary Executive" -- or don't the wingnut law-mongers call it "the Doctrine of the Unitary Executive"? The better to make it sound as if there actually is such a thing. A "doctrine" indeed! Except that there is no such thing, not in or in any way connected to the Constitution. It's just a sick fantasy made up by dangerously psychopathic right-wingers, an authoritarian melange of bogus constitutionalese, gobbledygook, and garden-variety megalomania. What it seems to come down to is that these people for whatever reasons would like to recontour the model of government outlined in the Constitution to something closer to what you can find in Mein Kampf, with a president who's more or less interchangeable with the Reichsfuehrer of the Third Reich.

Apparently this is the sort of thing that passes for serious legal philosophy among the increasingly influential membership roster of the loony-tunes Federalist Society, which under the Bush regime has become, appallingly, a breeding ground not only for federal judges at the district and appellate levels, but for the Supreme Court itself.

I can't help feeling that most of this legal insanity is being let loose on the land because growing numbers of terminally repressed men have no safer or saner outline for all those raging hormones. In other words, the Republic has been put in peril because all these closet cases -- hetero as well as homo, they seem equally ashamed of and self-loathing over their sexual impulses -- need to be reintroduced to their trusty right (or left, as the case may be) hand?

Well, to judge just by Dick Cheney, he apparently doesn't get enough reinforcement of his manhood from hunting. Probably not enough, you know, release -- at least not of the kind he needs, not to be confused with the kind that puts his victims in the hospital.

Which brings me back to the U.S. attorney scandal. (Oh, you didn't realize that's what this was about?) For me, one of the greatest outrages of the Bush regime has been the systematic polliticization of the Justice Department, and one of my most agonized sources of frustration has been the inability to make this the raging issue it should be to ordinary voters -- why they should care, for example that U.S. attorneys, the legal point men who supervise the cadres of federal prosecutors in their districts, who oversee the administration of federal law, apparently have been transformed into bone-cracking enforcers, not prosecutors of the law but persecutors of the regime's political enemies. (And from what statistics we've been able to see, the Bush U.S. attorneys have gotten the message that their job is to prosecute almost exclusively Democrats.)

It's not an easy concept to define, this "rule of law" that we know instinctively is one of the fundamental components of our freedom. But it's pathetically easy to establish that when enforcement of the law is based, not on the fairest and most uniform possible application of law, but on the wishes of the people who control the legal system, you the rule of law is kaput.

No thanks to the regime's customary penchant for secrecy, we know by now that the wholesale firing of U.S. attorneys was pure and simple a political purge, and that it was moderated only by the realization that too flagrant a sweep of the "undesirables" among the USAs would draw the public attention that the firing program managed for so long to escape. But from what has been revealed, we have abundant indications that the only considerations according to which USAs were put on (or, rarely, taken off) the famous List were political.

And as many people have pointed out, the only thing scarier than the thought of purging competent USAs for insufficiently zealous political partisanship is the thought of what the un-purged ones did to keep their jobs. There are probably some honest and competent USAs who escaped the vengeance of (as best we can tell) Karl Rove, and if I were one of them, I would be as outraged as the good men and women who were improperly fired, because surviving the purge should be a mark of shame.

Oh, there are hardy warriors who haven't given up the fight, including watchdog groups like CREW and Judicial Watch. And the House Judiciary Committee is still trying to enforce its subpoenas of former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten to probe the firing process.

Yesterday the AP reported that "twenty former U.S. attorneys from both political parties sided with Congress and asked a federal judge on Thursday to settle a subpoena fight with the White House."

Ex-prosecutors side with Congress in subpoena case

By MATT APUZZO

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Twenty former U.S. attorneys from both political parties sided with Congress and asked a federal judge on Thursday to settle a subpoena fight with the White House.

The former prosecutors filed a friend-of-the-court brief in a lawsuit over whether Congress can demand documents and testimony from President Bush's closest aides.

The House Judiciary Committee wants to know whether some U.S. attorneys were fired for political reasons, an issue that helped lead to the resignation of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The White House says the president's former counsel Harriet Miers and chief of chief of staff Josh Bolten do not need to comply with the subpoenas, citing executive privilege, the principle that one branch of government can't make another branch do something.

Congress wants a judge to settle the issue but the Bush administration says the courts should not wade into a political dispute.

The list of former U.S. attorneys who filed the documents in U.S. District Court includes David C. Iglesias, who says he was fired as New Mexico's top prosecutor for political reasons. The prosecutors said that, without congressional oversight, presidents would be free to meddle in prosecutorial decisions.

"If permitted to enforce its subpoenas for documents and testimony, Congress has a unique ability to address improper partisan influence in the prosecutorial process," the former prosecutors wrote. "No other institution will fill the vacuum if Congress is unable to investigate and respond to this evil."

The prosecutors who signed on to the document are: Steve Sachs, who was appointed by President Johnson; George Beall, an appointee of President Nixon; Roxanne Conlin, James K. Robinson, Atlee W. Wampler III and Edward G. Warin, appointees of President Carter; Leon Kellner, Dan K. Webb and J. Alan Johnson, who were appointed by President Reagan; William Braniff, an appointee of the first President Bush; Zach Carter, Edward L. Dowd, B. Todd Jones, Doug Jones, Donald K. Stern, Sheldon Whitehouse and Alan Bersin, who were appointed by President Clinton; Bush appointees Iglesias and Matthew D. Orwig, and Richard Rossman, who was appointed by the court in 1980.

Four watchdog groups filed their own court papers Thursday also siding with Congress. Conservative groups Judicial Watch and the Rutherford Institute joined the Brennan Center for Justice and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, both liberal groups.

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If the Bush regime was to throw the Decider's boy toy Idiot Al "The Torture Guy" Gonzales overboard today, would his itty-bitty carcass make a splash?

It's a symptom of how clueless the Bush regime has become in its second-term wheels-fallen-off-the-bus phase that the "brains" there imagined, however briefly and half-heartedly, that they could contain the scandal of the purging of select U.S. attorneys by throwing Idiot Al the AG's chief of staff, Kyle Sampson (whose picture, by the way, seems to have been stripped out of Brigham Young University websites that once showed it proudly), to the sharks.

"Hey, it's worth a shot, no?" you can imagine the regime "brains" squealing even as they put their underlings to work concocting a Plan F, G, and H. "If nothing else, it'll buy us a news cycle's worth of time while we come up with some other way to change the subject, and who knows? Maybe by then nobody will still care."

Sampson is by all accounts the kind of worthless-punk scumbag that authoritarian regimes depend on: a thoroughly degraded and repulsive human being with no attributes except a cosmic ambition for power matched by a cosmic ruthlessness and servile doggedness. (We don't even have to look to his Mormonism to flesh out the picture of an out-and-out thug with a law degree on the make.)

We already know that our Kyle was angling to have himself installed as a U.S. attorney, a job for which he is lacking every imaginable qualification except that aforementioned law degree. The fact that no one in the upper echelons of the regime responded instantaneously, "The little shithead's either kidding or out of his frigging gourd," may tell us all we need to know about the regime's attitude toward U.S. attorneys, and indeed the entire Justice Department: In the regimists' view, the job of the Justice Department has nothing to do with justice, or fair application of federal law; it's only about furthering our political agenda--protecting our guys, no matter how crooked, and screwing theirs, no matter how innocent.

In most accounts, the slot into which our Kyle would have most comfortably fit was Karl Rove's. He was actually proposed as Karl's successor when it looked as if the then-minister of policy and propaganda (before he had the policy portfolio officially taken away, though one can wonder if the change was anything but titular) might have to be shelved for leaking Valerie Wilson's CIA identity. To give our Kyle his due, there's no question, from the e-mail trail we've already seen, that he was in the thick of planning and executing the U.S.-attorney purge, but it seems equally clear that, for all his skillful clawing and scratching, he was still way too far down on the food chain to qualify as more than a henchman.

Uncomfortably for the regime, Kyle's mouthpiece, Bradford Berenson, has been signaling that his client isn't necessarily inclined to go quietly--even after (as we now know) Idiot Al worked his tiny tushie off to find a place at DoJ for Kyle after his "resignation" as chief of staff. It's natural that attention should focus next on the idiot AG himself, but I've been trying to argue that in the regime's chain of ideas, he's still too humble a figure to make a proper target. He is so totally the Idiot George's hand-held stooge that it's doubtful any of the real power players in the regime think of him as anything but a less-well-behaved presidential pooch than the far abler, more principled and in general more highly respected Barney.

If it becomes necessary to throw Idiot Al overboard, I can't imagine that anyone in the regime would feel even a twinge except the Decider himself, who would be deprived of one of his last playmates from home. Luckily for him (though not so luckily for the people who unaccountably expect a showing of loyalty from him), he seems to have a pretty easy time getting over such rare twinges of conscience as he becomes aware of.

Even the wingnutosphere seems cheerfully resigned to the dumping of Tiny George's even tinier boy toy, though not without the ritual head-firmly-lodged-in-ass smear, namely the preposterous proposition that Idiot Al was more qualified to be AG than Janet Reno, an expression of the loony right's unfailing scum-sucking dishonesty and imbecility, reflecting:

(a) on a scale of zero to a zillion, absolutely zero knowledge of Idiot Al, and

(b) on a scale of zero to a zillion, absolutely zero knowledge of former AG Reno, and

(c) on a scale of zero to a zillion, an infinity of in-the-shallow-depths-of-their-souls loathing for everyone and everything that is intellectually or morally superior to them, meaning everyone and everything except their lying, brain-dead selves.

It would certainly be embarrassing for the regime to have to heave its attorney general over the side. But the fact is that beyond that momentary embarrassment, losing Idiot Al costs them almost nothing. The Justice Department will continue to run as the fiefdom of the regime's political masterminds (after all, neither Idiot Al nor his predecessor, "Honest John" Ashcroft, seems to have had much of a voice in the regime's policy-making), with just the additional complication of having to come up with an official replacement who can get through Pat Leahy's Senate Judiciary Committee without being laughed out of the room.

One of the people who gets it, not surprisingly, is Washingtonpost.com's peerless Dan Froomkin. Earlier today, while waiting for his Monday post to appear, I was catching up on his column from Friday, "The Politics of Distraction," and as usually happens, Dan sounds even smarter with the passage of time.

"As far as the White House public-relations machine is concerned," he started out--

here is all you need to know about the firing of eight U.S. attorneys last year: The Justice Department made some mistakes in how it communicated that those prosecutors were let go for appropriate reasons. And, oh yes, there is no evidence that White House political guru Karl Rove ever advocated the firing of all 93 U.S. attorneys previously appointed by President Bush.

But from the very beginning of this scandal, the central question has been and remains: Was there a plot hatched in the White House to purge prosecutors who were seen as demonstrating insufficient partisanship in their criminal investigations?

Everything else is deception or distraction.

After reviewing the latest developments, Dan concluded:

As I first wrote in Tuesday's column, the proposed housecleaning of all 93 U.S. attorneys is a red herring. Not only would firing all of them have been a political and logistical nightmare, but it would have been foolish from Rove's point of view. After all, the vast majority were apparently behaving exactly as he wanted -- as "loyal Bushies."

The key question, that the White House continues to duck: Did Rove approve of -- or perhps even conceive of -- the idea of firing select attorneys? And if so, on what grounds? The latest e-mails certainly indicate that he was involved very early on.

Right now, Washington is engaged in feverish speculation about whether Gonzales is in his last days, or even moments, as attorney general. But as I wrote in my Wednesday column, Gonzales is a diversion.

The mainstream media was slow to get hot on the trail of this story. . . . But now, the mainstream media is in danger of getting distracted by the White House razzle dazzle -- and, quite possibly, by the spectacle of Bush throwing Gonzales, one of his oldest friends, overboard.

Keep your eye on Karl Rove, people.

Keep your eye on Karl Rove, people. It was good advice on Friday, and it's good advice today.

The good news is that I don't think Senator Leahy is going to need much persuading.


UPDATE: NOR IS SENATOR SCHUMER

Crooks and Liars has it in black and white living color: Chuck Schumer says he has evidence that Gonzales lied under oath. The "under oath" part is what differentiates him from some of the other top dogs-- not Barney-- inside the Regime, who have been very careful to never swear to tell the whole-- or any part of-- the truth about anything. Schumer, in fact, told Meet the Press that the evidence is "overwhelming." So, while the Regime has been busy trying to smear the U.S. attorneys they fired for political expediency, Speaker Pelosi speaks for the majority of Americans when she announced today that "we need a new attorney general."

Now, back to Ken's point... what about Rove?

Update by Howie (And that was even before Schumer got Sampson to roll over on Gonzales.)

GLENN GREENWALD DISCUSSES PROSECUTORIAL INDEPENDENCE AND THE STATE OF BEING A REPUBLICAN SHILL

I ran into my old friend Seymour this weekend at a Dangerous Muse concert. Seymour, a lifelong Democrat, accused me of having a philosophy that says all Democrats are good and all Republicans are bad. He's half right. I explained to him about Rahm Emanuel, Steny Hoyer, Max Baucus and other members of the Money Party masquerading as Democrats. But he wasn't letting me off the hook with my matter of fact agreement with the second part of his characterization. "OK," said I. "Name me one good one; just one. Name one decent Republican member of Congress, one man or woman with a voting record that isn't absolutely horrendous, and I'll buy you a bottle of wine." (He's a lush and a cheapskate.) We then got into an endless argument as to whether or not Jacob Javits counted.

Javits hasn't been in government since 1980 and he died in 1986. Even Seymour had to admit that he couldn't name a decent Republican in government-- not one-- since then. This morning Glenn Greenwald's Salon column goes a long way towards explaining why: hypocrisy reigns as strongly on the ideological right as it always has. And, unlike in Jacob Javits' day, the GOP is nothing but the ideological right-- the very manifestation of hypocrisy. Gleenwald tackles it in terms of how GOP apologists try to justify the firing of the U.S. attorneys by the Bush Regime. Let Glenn take you through the tortured minds of Republican propagandists as they attempt to justify the politicization of the American justice system.

Originally I was going to use Glenn's column as an update to last night's post about how and why Gozales and Rove targeted Carol Lam. But after realizing that Glenn's assertions go far beyond the case of the U.S. attorneys and into the very heart of right-wing governance and their control of the mass media, I decided to offer it as a stand-along piece and urge all DWT readers to give it a read.

THE IRONY! THE IRONY! JERRY LEWIS SAID HE WOULDN'T GO DOWN ALONE, SO THEY FIRED CAROL LAM... & NOW KYLE SAMPSON SAYS HE'S NOT GOING DOWN ALONE EITHER

Tomorrow's New York Times has an ominous-- ominous for the Regime-- article about how Gonzales' fired chief of staff has no intention of being the fall guy for the Bush Regime on the politicization of the entire justice system of the United States. His lawyer, Brad Berenson, warned: "Kyle did not resign because he had misled anyone at the Justice Department or withheld information concerning the replacement of the U.S. Attorneys. The fact that the White House and Justice Department had been discussing this subject since the election was well known to a number of other senior officials at the department, including others who were involved in preparing the department’s testimony to Congress."

As the always perceptive Julia from Sisyphus Shrugged mentioned to me, "they just don't make Republican fall guys the way they used to." And Berenson is more than just some over-priced Washington shyster hustling to be part of the growing cottage industry of defending an ever-expanding array of Republicrooks being hauled before the bar of Justice. His last job as an associate counsel to... Gonzales, when he was Bush's White House attorney.

But don't start feeling sorry for Sampson. He's a vicious little monster who's badly in need of a silver stake. He was the GOP choice for replacing Rove as Lord High Executioner. According to Al Kamen in the Washington Post the Republicans have been grooming ole Kyle-- who even looks a little something like that the fat-faced Rove. "...there had been much concern last week that he [Rove] also might have to resign as a result of Fitzgerald's probe. The loss of Karl's familiar presence-- he's the last of the original "Iron Triangle" of Bush's Texas advisers still in the White House-- would have unsettled many younger aides. Fortunately, there's a ready replacement: D. Kyle Sampson, chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and formerly in the White House counsel's office. Maybe not exactly the same as Karl but..."

Libby Spencer over at The Impolitic scrutinizes and dissects the Regime's maneuvers to try to keep Gonzales, not to mention Rove, from having to resign. Sheryl Gay Stolberg tried to do the same thing at the New York Times, just not as well.

On a day when the main figure in another scandal, Valerie Wilson, was all over the airwaves with her testimony before a House oversight committee, the controversy over the prosecutors was yet another reminder for the Bush administration of the harsh realities of life under a Democratic Congress. Mr. Rove was at the center of that scandal as well, leaving some Republicans saying they feel as if they have seen this movie before.

With Mr. Bush looking more like a lame duck, Republicans are also concerned that the news coverage devoted to the prosecutors is taking up valuable time. Mr. Bush could not escape the issue on his trip to Latin America-- he wound up explaining his own role in the dismissals and proclaiming his confidence in Mr. Gonzales during a press conference in Mexico-- and now that he is back, the White House is in full damage-control mode.

“Every news day is valuable; you’d rather be on offense than defense,” Charlie Black, a Republican strategist close to the White House said Friday. “There’s some good news out of Iraq this week, and it’s getting relegated to A10.”

Republicans say that is unlikely to change in the immediate future. With the White House delaying until next week a decision on Mr. Rove’s testimony and pressure continuing to build for Mr. Gonzales to resign, the issue is likely to dominate the Sunday talk shows. For now, the best Mr. Bush’s aides can hope for is a quiet weekend for the president at Camp David.

But the trip got off to a rocky start; Mr. Bush’s motorcade got into a minor accident on the way.

But they can spin and maneuver all they want; the public has already figured out that it was all about politicizing the Department of Justice, something a new Newsweek Poll shows that nearly 60% of Americans believe. "Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed–including 45 percent of Republicans–say the ouster of the federal prosecutors was driven by political concerns. Those attitudes seem to reflect a broader view of the Bush administration’s approach. When asked if the administration has introduced politics into too many areas of government, 47 percent said they agree."

AND NOW THERE ARE THREE REPUGS CALLING FOR GONZALES' OUSTER. OK, WHAT ABOUT ROVE?

I'd like to report that a third shoe dropped on Gonzales' head today when California right-wing Congressman Dana Rohrbacher added his voice to the chorus of Republican legislators howling for the Attorney General's blood. But maybe we should just count House Members as half a vote. There's also some anonymous Republican strategist who says "Gonzales is finished."

At this point the White House seems ready to abandon Gonzales to save Rove, although with every passing hour more evidence comes out that Rove was the mastermind architect behind the whole operation. Over at HuffPo last night, Cenk Uygur wonders what so many of us are wondering now: "What I don't understand is why the American taxpayer has to pay for a political operative to operate out of the White House." He means Rove. The Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to subpoena him next week.

And, if you missed it, Sydney Blumenthal, has a great expose up at Salon called All Roads Lead to Rove. The short version: "The White House political director was clearly at the center of the partisan plot to fire U.S. attorneys, despite the administration's clumsy attempts to pretend otherwise." Hit the link if you want to read the very cogent case that shows clearly too much emphasis has been put on Gonzales' role and not nearly enough on Rove's.

With the new Gallup poll showing that Cheney's job approval has dropped another half dozen points to the lowest point ever and that by a margin of 3-1 Americans oppose Libby getting a pardon, it looks like this country has had about enough of Bush and his rogue regime. An editorial in this morning's New York Times is talking about how the White House has been (lamely) orchestrating a coverup in the Gozales-Rove politization of the Justice Department.

In its fumbling attempts to explain the purge of United States attorneys, the Bush administration has argued that the fired prosecutors were not aggressive enough about addressing voter fraud. It is a phony argument; there is no evidence that any of them ignored real instances of voter fraud. But more than that, it is a window on what may be a major reason for some of the firings.

In partisan Republican circles, the pursuit of voter fraud is code for suppressing the votes of minorities and poor people. By resisting pressure to crack down on “fraud,” the fired United States attorneys actually appear to have been standing up for the integrity of the election system.

John McKay, one of the fired attorneys, says he was pressured by Republicans to bring voter fraud charges after the 2004 Washington governor’s race, which a Democrat, Christine Gregoire, won after two recounts. Republicans were trying to overturn an election result they did not like, but Mr. McKay refused to go along. “There was no evidence,” he said, “and I am not going to drag innocent people in front of a grand jury...”

The United States attorney purge appears to have been prompted by an array of improper political motives. Carol Lam, the San Diego attorney, seems to have been fired to stop her from continuing an investigation that put Republican officials and campaign contributors at risk. These charges, like the accusation that Mr. McKay and other United States attorneys were insufficiently aggressive about voter fraud, are a way of saying, without actually saying, that they would not use their offices to help Republicans win elections. It does not justify their firing; it makes their firing a graver offense.

AND WHAT'S UP WITH ALBERTO TODAY? STILL HERE??? NOT FOR LONG

Mark Pryor (D-AR) just joined the Republicans to help defeat Harry Reid's binding resolution to start the process of ending the war, so I hate to give him any good press. But earlier today he went after Gonzales so strongly that it marks another highpoint in the effort to clean out the corrupt nest of criminals Bush has installed in the heart our government.

Arkansas Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor bluntly accused Attorney General Alberto Gonzales of lying to the Senate about replacing federal prosecutors with interim appointees and joined calls for Gonzales' resignation Thursday.

"When an attorney general lies to a United States senator, I think it is time for that attorney general to go," Pryor said on the Senate floor.

"He did not only lie to me as a person, but when he lied to me, he lied to the Senate and to the people I represent."

Today the Senate Judiciary Committee authorized the use of subpoenas to five Justice Department officials in the investigation into the dismissals of eight US attorneys.

But they better move fast; Bush seems to be getting ready to shove Gonzales overboard to save Rove. ABC-TV says that among the e-mail exchanges, obtained by the Senate, is one dated January 6, 2005 between then-deputy White House Counsel David Leitch and Gonzales' then Chief of Staff, Kyle Sampson. It shows Rove was already pushing for removal of all 93 U.S. Attorneys in January, 2005. "The e-mails also show that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales discussed the idea of firing the attorneys en masse weeks before he was confirmed as attorney general. The e-mails directly contradict White House assertions that the notion originated with recently departed White House counsel Harriet Miers, and was her idea alone."

Gosh; they've been lying to us? Oh, Ken already covered that yesterday. OK, Ken also went to James Madison High School in Brooklyn, just like Schumer and I, so let's give Schumer a chance today:

"I know, from other sources, that there is an active and avid discussion in the White House whether [Gonzales] should stay or not," adding that "the odds are very high that he will no longer be the attorney general."

Schumer also revealed that the emails leaked today came from a disgruntled Bush administration official. "One of the reasons everything is getting out here is that there are people, particularly in the Justice Department, who have been so disgusted with what’s happening that information is getting out," Schumer said. "And I think the White House and the Justice Department know it’s gonna get out whether they release it or not."

UPDATE: DID YOU GUESS GORDON SMITH WOULD BE THE SECOND REPUBLICAN TO CALL FOR GONZALES' OUSTER?

Gordon must really be scared of Oregon voters. Today he was the only Republican to jump ship on his war-mongering party when he voted to support Harry Reid's S.J. 9 resolution which would have started the process of getting us out of Iraq. And, if that wasn't enough to make him persona non grata at the White House, he then went and called for Bush to fire Gonzales. Two factors may have had some influence on Smith. As Jonathan Singer points out, his approval rating in Oregon shows his re-election is in jeopardy, and the Oregon state senate's anti-escalation resolution passed in committee with a very healthy 6-1 bipartisan vote; it hits the Senate floor for a vote on Monday.

Live from Mexico: It's that lying scumbag George Bush! But seriously, fuck "Idiot Al" Gonzales--the doodyhead-in-chief MUST RESIGN IMMEDIATELY!

Tonight on Countdown Keith Olbermann asked Richard Wolffe what the purpose might be of Bush's claiming, wrongly, that firing U.S. attorneys is "a customary practice." Wolffe professed himself stumped, since the claim is "patently false."

I'm sorry, Mr. Wolffe, that won't do anymore. You know perfectly well why Bush lies: because he CAN. He is a dimwitted bully fronting for a coaltion of alliances of traitorous, America-hating thugs. AND NO ONE PUBLICLY CHALLENGES THEIR LIES.

You know that what he said is "patently false"--a fancy way of saying "a big fat lie." We know it too. Everyone involved in the American justice system knows it. The only people who don't know it are the American people, who have been lovingly cultivated into their present state of violent, almost murderous obliviousness.

The lying scumbag Bush is either too stupid or too dishonest to live, let alone to occupy public office. It is now painfully obvious that there is no choice:

HE MUST RESIGN IMMEDIATELY! (And cart the beast Cheney off to hell with him.)

Of course lying is nothing new for him. This scumbag Bush has lied his head off ever since his cadres of hooligans got him installed, contrary to the clear will of the electorate, as president. On every matter of national importance, EVERY WORD THAT HAS EVER COME OUT OF HIS MOUTH HAS BEEN A LIE.

You could argue that given the depth of his arrogant ignorance--this is a creature whose one and only intellectual accomplishment is knowing NOTHING that's true about ANYTHING, and he brandishes his painstakingly constructed cluelessness as a lethal weapon against everyone who knows how stupid and ignorant he is--how can he know when he's lying?

But enough is enough. Could it be made any clearer that, on the entire range of issues his regime has involved itself in, his entire purpose in "communicating" with the American public has been to misinform them, with the intent of gulling them into supporting or at least tolerating policies that often run directly counter to their enlightened self-interest and, more generally, flatly contradict everything that's honest and decent in American life? He exists for the sole purpose of destroying our values and our constitutional system of government.

When he opens his lying mouth to say, while flashing the telltale smirk, that replacing U.S. attorneys is no big deal, it's done all the time, he MUST KNOW that this is an absolute and total lie. (And if he truly doesn't, that's all the more reason why he must resign immediately.) Every administration replaces all the U.S. attorneys at the outset. (Say, Chimpy, how many Clinton appointees are currently serving as U.S. attorneys?) However, once they're in office, U.S. attorneys are never replaced EXCEPT FOR CAUSE. And if that cause can be shown to be political, you have every right to expect the earth to tremble.

These people--and by "these people" I mean the architects of policy in the Bush regime, watched over (as far as I can determine) by Dick Cheney on international and economic issues, and by Karl Rove on social and political issues--have no regard for truth, as they have demonstrated at every conceivable opportunity. THEIR ONLY CONSIDERATION IS WHAT THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH. And they have pushed their disregard for truth and decency to the point where the operative question has become:

How do we KNOW we can't get away with something if we haven't TRIED?

We no longer have a system of opposing political beliefs, whether liberal vs. conservative or any other ideological "vs." Postmodern political strategists like Rove, abetted by the greedy and power-mad junk-Christian clergycrooks, have taken demonic possession of the mass of middle American grunt and sold them to the corporate heavy hitters who have resented for decades that Big Money has only bought them powerful influence instead of their rightful stranglehold on the political decision-making process.

People who feed on nothing but greed and hatred, who should by rights be locked away in prisons or mental institutions, control the minds of people who have betrayed their fundamental responsibilities as American citizens. The witless American sheep-people have gleefully made themselves so-far-unindicted co-conspirators in the wingnut campaign to destroy America of Washington and Jefferson and the rest of our founding fathers. The people not only tolerate Bush's lies, they demand them, even WORSHIP them.

Sometimes I try to imagine what goes on inside the head of someone like a brain-dead thug like Sean Hannity. I really don't think it's just the usual careerist cynicism that drives, say, Rush "Shaddup and Gimme My Damn Pills" Limbaugh. I think he is a believer. I just can't figure out, in what? All I can get to is that such people are so ragefully contemptuous of reality that they will defend to the death their right to be lied to. Okay, the death they probably have in mind is that of anyone who speaks up for reality. But it's the principle that counts.

The Bushlie about the U.S. attorneys is too grotesque even to be worth answering. But for the record, as far as anyone familiar with the history of the Justice Department knows, no administration has ever contemplated let alone carried out a mass firing of sitting U.S. attorneys (i.e., during a presidential term, or even in the second term of a two-term administration). It just isn't done, and for the most blindingly obvious reason: Our system of justice simply can't allow the appearance, let alone the reality, of federal prosecutors being partisan activists.

Then there's this hilarious busines about U.S. attorneys being fired for failing to aggressively pursue "voter fraud"! Jeez!

Oh, I'm sure there are Republicrook strategists who honestly do jerk off while fantasizing about using the U.S. attorneys as weapons in the high-power Republican election-stealing crusade. Presumably those U.S. attorneys who failed to launch anti-Democratic voting-fraud investigations know what the rest of us know: that a full and fair investigation of election tampering would result in the dismantling of the enitre Republican electoral operation.

(What do you say we start with Florida and Ohio, just for laughs?)

As we all know, election fraud and tampering have become a pillar of day-in, day-out Republican politics. A full-scale nationwide investigation that resulted in the malefactors being punished and the machinery of election fraud being permanently stripped out would probably result in no national Republican being electable for the next 20 years, and few Republicans at any level of governement except in the blood-reddest of red precincts. STEALING ELECTIONS HAS BECOME THE LIFEBLOOD OF REPUBLICAN POLITICS.

Which brings us back to Mr. Wolffe, and his puzzlement at the Bush strategy in making a claim that is "patently false."

There are so-called reporters--the Fox Noise crowd and their brethren in ideological hooliganism--who are either too stupid to know that this regime always lies or too cynical to care. (These would be people who, in other words, share the elite-wingnut view that lies in the service of their imagined "higher truth" are justified, possibly by God himself.) It's time for everyone else who sits or stands there when the regime honchos and its mouthpieces spew their filthy falsehoods to Draw a Line for Truth.

From now on, whenever Chimpy the Prez, or one of his masters or stooges, utters one of their rank falsehoods, I want to hear Mr. Wolffe and his colleagues shout back in unison:

LIAR! LIAR! LIAR!

Or, if you want to get fancy and introduce a bit of variety:

LYING SHITHEAD!

TRAITOROUS SCUMBAG!

DEVIL-WORSHIPPING DECEIVER

AMERICA-HATING CRIMINAL

Me, I'd be a happy, or at any rate happier, campier if from now on every lie uttered for the public record by the regime was greeted by a rousing chorus of:

LIAR! LIAR! LIAR!

I say the next out-and-out whopper the scumbag breaks off, he gets his carcass thrown in the slammer while the courts work out whether his "life sentence" should be of the natural-death variety or the kind that provided him so much entertainment when he was governor of Texas. You know, the kind that ends with lethal injection.

I'm just saying.

ABU GONZALES VS... EVERYONE ELSE

Hey, I was only watching CNN to see Patrick Leahy announce he was going to subpoena Karl Rove unless he came by the Senate Judiciary Committee voluntarily. The bonus was when Leahy lashed out at bumbling, floundering Alberto Gonzales. "The attorney general said, 'Well, there are some staff people or lower level people-- I am not sure whether I want to allow them to testify or not.' I said, 'Frankly, Mr. Attorney General, it's not your decision, it's mine and the committee's.' We will have some subpoenas." Smack! You been served, bitch! Or you will be soon.

Earlier. Gonzales had breezily let it out that he might make some time to visit Capitol Hill later in the week. He was way too busy today bouncing from TV station to TV station to try to muddy the waters about the political firings-- probably, as CREW points out criminal political firings-- that he perpetrated against 7 or 8 or 9-- no one is sure exactly because everything this Regime does is so shrouded in unprecedented secrecy-- U.S. Attorneys.

Gonzales' main point on TV was to repeat over and over and over that the most obvious thing about the mass firings, their political nature, was not so-- regardless of the fact that his assertion flies right in the face of the revealed e-mails. At NBC's Today he lied outright: "These firings were not politically motivated. They were not done in retaliation. They were not done to interfere in a public corruption case." Motivation is sometimes hard to prove, but it won't be in this case.

Over at the GOP's own propaganda network, he probably got to write his own softball questions. Asked at Fox & Fiends if the prosecutors were fired for poor performance or political reasons, Gonzales answered coyly: "I'll just say there was dissatisfaction...They were based upon not political pressure, but based on what we felt was best for the people in these respective districts."


At CNN's American Morning they wanted to know how involved he was in the decision making. That's a tough one for Gonzales who either has to come off as clueless and incompetent or criminal. Scapegoating an underling is always first on the mind of any Republican who gets caught doing something wrong. "I directed my chief of staff to lead that effort. Kyle Sampson has been involved in United States attorney decisions from the early days of the transition. He was, obviously, the perfect man for the job. I was aware of some conversations that were occurring with the White House. They were providing some input about the process, but I relied upon my chief of staff. I had confidence in my chief of staff to drive that process forward, to vet names throughout the department. And, obviously, when decisions were made or recommendations were made to me, I did sign off on those names. Understanding that these were names that had been vetted throughout the department, and that they would sign off at the White House." [This guy doesn't get embarrassed, does he?]

CBS' Early Show went right to the meat of the matter-- when is he resigning? "I didn't become attorney general by quitting. I work for the American people. I serve at the pleasure of the president of the United States. Obviously my job is easier if I have the confidence of Congress... but I'm going to be focused on serving the needs of the American people. Obviously we have an issue here that needs to be addressed. We are going to address that." I bet you're as relieved as I am.

Only one more (that I know about): Good Morning America had him on too-- to talk about his favorite chocolate chip cookies recipe but he did manage to sneak in a hint that he didn't have anything to do with anything; afterall, he's just the boss. "There were a number of factors that went into this decision that was made at the Justice Department and recommended to the White House... The rule of law has been respected here. What we focused on was the performance of U.S. attorneys. If the White House receives complaints from members of Congress those are going to be shared with the Justice Department... I'm focused on doing my job as attorney general. Obviously I'm not happy with the way some of decisions were made."

Yes, they were made-- and he isn't the only one not happy about them. While Republican legislators tried catching up with Chuck Schumer's calls for Gonzales to take a hike (more on that below) Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute (a right wing think thank) put the lie to all Gonzales' hapless blatherings. He said "there is no doubt that the ouster" [of the prosecu'tors] "was done for political reasons." And he reminds us that Gonzales "and his minions were eager to use a buried provision" [in the Patriot Act] "to avoid Senate scrutiny of their successors... No self-respecting conservative should let" any Attorney General, or any White House, "or any wielder of awesome government power, get away with this stuff."

Among the conservative members of Congress who seem to agree with Ornstein are Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) who is still admitting he's friends with Gonzales but said "he will have to answer for this." Sununu went further, demanding that Bush fire him. Lindsey Graham said the Department of Justice's handling was "clumsy and unseemly"-- and unless you're an anal retentive closeted gay person like Lin you don't know what a complete put-down that is, girl. McCain, muttering darkly that "it's not the way things should be done," said he supports an investigation into the firing (the prosecutors', not Gonzales'). And Darrell Issa (R-CA) said if Gonzales misled "he's got to go," and there are even rumors circulating that Rove wants to shove him overboard, give him some kind of medal and find someone new.

MORE PRESSURE ON GONZALES TO RESIGN-- BUT WILL IT EVEN MATTER?

Although we went to high school together-- James Madison in Brooklyn-- if you read DWT you probably know I haven't been all that enthusiastic about consummate Beltway Insider Chuck Schumer. He may not be as bad as Rahm Emanuel but... well, he may be. On the other hand, I've been scratching my head for the last couple of days and wondering where the rest of the Democratic jerk-offs have been as Schumer has been repeatedly calling on Gonzales to resign.

And sure enough-- here they come. ABC-TV is trumpeting an exclusive: Hillary thinks he should resign too. Go, Hill! On today's "Good Morning America," NY's junior senator endorses the proposal of NY's senior senator. "The buck should stop somewhere and the attorney general-- who still seems to confuse his prior role as the president's personal attorney with his duty to the system of justice and to the entire country-- should resign."

This afternoon, I noticed Dianne Feinstein distancing herself from Schumer on this but then I noticed Kennedy and then Reid agreeing with Schumer. Feinstein can be a real stick in the mud. I'd like to see more Democratic senators pile on and then, sooner or later, a couple of Republicans who want to keep their jobs after next year's election might come forward too. Dependable Regime rubber stamps like James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and Darrell Issa (R-CA) have been making grumbling noises for the folks back home. Sensenbrenner called Gonzales' department "dysfunctional" and Issa, who has taken heat for defending the firing of Lam told PBS yesterday that "if someone led us astray, they should resign, and I don't care how high it is, anyone involved with this coverup of giving us the truth needs to step down... I am including anybody who would mislead, deliberately mislead the Congress... If it's the attorney general who had a hand in it, then he has to step down." Some more of that and it'll be bye-bye, Alberto. Of course, he's still in a state of denial and told the Washington Post that he refuses to do the decent thing and step down. He accepts responsibility but only the nonconsequential Republican kind where nothing happens when you're caught red handed and forced to admit it. In this morning's Washington Post he washes his hands of determining his fate entirely: "I serve at the pleasure of the president of the United States. It's up to the president to decide if I should step down." He tried to blame everything in his aide, Kyle Sampson, the Regime's designated scapegoat. Gonzales' newest tact is "I was clueless." Senator Kennedy says he was clearly over his head and needs to resign.


Like I said when this first started breaking last week, the details of this smack of a nazification of the American justice system. They're treating the Justice Department the same way Hitler and his cronies treated the German justice system when they seized power 70 years ago, using it as an instrument of their party's consolidation of power and as a club to use against their partisan enemies.
"E-mails released yesterday show that White House deputy political director J. Scott Jennings communicated with Justice officials about the appointment of Tim Griffin, a former Rove aide, to be the U.S. attorney in Little Rock. Jennings used an e-mail account registered to the Republican National Committee, where Griffin had worked as an opposition researcher." It would be hard for anyone to argue that Griffin is qualified for the job, suitable for the job or that he would have had any chance whatsoever of being confirmed by the Senate had Rove not snuck him in.

Although Bush and President Bill Clinton each dismissed nearly all U.S. attorneys upon taking office, legal experts and former prosecutors say the firing of a large number of prosecutors in the middle of a term appears to be unprecedented and threatens the independence of prosecutors.

In defending themselves yesterday, Gonzales and the White House implicitly laid much of the blame for miscommunication with Congress on D. Kyle Sampson, who resigned Monday as Gonzales's chief of staff as the result of not telling other Justice officials about his extensive communications with the White House about the dismissals...

The Justice e-mails and internal documents, which were first reported yesterday by The Washington Post, show that political loyalty and positions on signature GOP policy issues loomed large in weighing whether a prosecutor should be dismissed. One e-mail from Sampson, for example, notes that the appointment of Griffin in Little Rock "was important to Harriet, Karl, etc."

The documents also illustrate that after nearly two years of debate, the dismissal of the seven prosecutors in December was carried out under a plan by Sampson that provided step-by-step guidance on how the prosecutors would be fired, who would be notified and how to deal with criticism. One section of the plan was titled "Preparing for Political Upheaval."

"I am concerned that to execute this plan properly we must all be on the same page and be steeled to withstand any political upheaval that might result," Sampson wrote to Miers and her deputy, William Kelley, on Nov. 15.

UPDATE: FIRST OUT OF THE STARTING GATE OVER ON THE FAR RIGHT: JOHN SUNUNU

Desperate to disprove his own 5 year record of completely rubber stamping every single monstrous proposal that the Bush Regime has sent down the pike, John Sununu (R-NH), thought to be the #1 most vulnerable GOP senator facing the voters in 2008, today announced he's backing Chuck Schumer's and Hillary Clinton's call for Gonzales to resign. "The president should fire the attorney general and replace him as soon as possible with someone who can provide strong, aggressive leadership prosecuting the war on terrorism, running the Department of Justice, and working with the president and Congress on important homeland security matters." Et tu, Sununu? Anyone want to take a guess who will be #3 (after Specter)?


UPDATE: IT GETS BETTER-- ROVE'S GETTIN' A SUBPOENA

You wondered why the Regime was so desperate that the Democrats not take back the Congress last year? You think anyone would have ever-- under any circumstances-- subpoenaed Karl Rove in the heyday of one-party, right-wing government? But this afternoon, our tribune, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), announced he will subpoena the much-loathed Rove."He can appear voluntarily if he wants," Leahy told Wolf Blitzer on CNN today. "If he doesn't, I will subpoena him." Those good ole rubber stamp days, huh fellas?