Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Rover Fraud

by digby

McClatchy finally gets to Rove’s speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association that I’ve been writing about for some time:

The administration’s interest in replacing some U.S. attorneys, in voter fraud and in voting rights has sometimes had a political tinge, however.

Bush has acknowledged hearing complaints from Republicans about some U.S. attorneys’ “lack of vigorous prosecution of election fraud cases,” and administration e-mails have shown that Rove and other White House officials were involved in the dismissals and in the choice of an aide to Rove to replace one of them. Nonetheless, Bush has refused to permit congressional investigators to question Rove and others under oath.

Last April, while the Justice Department and the White House were planning the firings, Rove gave a speech in Washington to the Republican National Lawyers Association. He ticked off 11 states that he said could be pivotal in 2008. Bush has appointed new U.S. attorneys in nine of them since 2005: Florida, Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Arkansas, Michigan, Nevada and New Mexico. U.S. attorneys in the latter four were among those fired.

Rove thanked the audience for “all that you are doing in those hot spots around the country to ensure that the integrity of the ballot is protected.” He added, “A lot in American politics is up for grabs.”

Taken together, legal experts and other critics say, the replacement of the U.S. attorneys and the changes in Justice Department voting rights policies suggest that the Bush administration may have been using its law enforcement powers for partisan political purposes.

[…]

Rove talked about the Northwest in his speech last spring to the Republican lawyers, and voiced concern about the trend toward mail-in ballots and online voting. He also questioned the legitimacy of voter rolls in Philadelphia and Milwaukee.

One audience member asked Rove whether he’d “thought about using the bully pulpit of the White House to talk about election reform and an election integrity agenda that would put the Democrats back on the defensive.”

“Yes, it’s an interesting idea,” Rove responded.

(There’s much more to this very interesting story at the link.)

I speculated last fall that Rove quite cannily planned to use the electoral integrity meme that had grown up in liberal circles since the 2000 elections and turn it back on the Democrats. He’d certainly had experience with similar strategies.

Here’s a case from earlier in Rove’s career:

Newspaper coverage on November 9, the morning after the election, focused on the Republican Fob James’s upset of the Democratic Governor Jim Folsom. But another drama was rapidly unfolding. In the race for chief justice, which had been neck and neck the evening before, Hooper awoke to discover himself trailing by 698 votes. Throughout the day ballots trickled in from remote corners of the state, until at last an unofficial tally showed that Rove’s client had lost—by 304 votes. Hornsby’s campaign declared victory.

Rove had other plans, and immediately moved for a recount. “Karl called the next morning,” says a former Rove staffer. “He said, ‘We came real close. You guys did a great job. But now we really need to rally around Perry Hooper. We’ve got a real good shot at this, but we need to win over the people of Alabama.'” Rove explained how this was to be done. “Our role was to try to keep people motivated about Perry Hooper’s election,” the staffer continued, “and then to undermine the other side’s support by casting them as liars, cheaters, stealers, immoral—all of that.” (Rove did not respond to requests for an interview for this article.)

The campaign quickly obtained a restraining order to preserve the ballots. Then the tactical battle began. Rather than focus on a handful of Republican counties that might yield extra votes, Rove dispatched campaign staffers and hired investigators to every county to observe the counting and turn up evidence of fraud. In one county a probate judge was discovered to have erroneously excluded 100 votes for Hooper. Voting machines in two others had failed to count all the returns. Mindful of public opinion, according to staffers, the campaign spread tales of poll watchers threatened with arrest; probate judges locking themselves in their offices and refusing to admit campaign workers; votes being cast in absentia for comatose nursing-home patients; and Democrats caught in a cemetery writing down the names of the dead in order to put them on absentee ballots.

As the recount progressed, the margin continued to narrow. Three days after the election Hooper held a press conference to drive home the idea that the election was being stolen. He declared, “We have endured lies in this campaign, but I’ll be damned if I will accept outright thievery.” The recount stretched on, and Hooper’s campaign continued to chip away at Hornsby’s lead. By November 21 one tally had it at nine votes.

The race came down to a dispute over absentee ballots. Hornsby’s campaign fought to include approximately 2,000 late-arriving ballots that had been excluded because they weren’t notarized or witnessed, as required by law. Also mindful of public relations, the Hornsby campaign brought forward a man who claimed that the absentee ballot of his son, overseas in the military, was in danger of being disallowed. The matter wound up in court. “The last marching order we had from Karl,” says a former employee, “was ‘Make sure you continue to talk this up. The only way we’re going to be successful is if the Alabama public continues to care about it.'”

Initially, things looked grim for Hooper. A circuit-court judge ruled that the absentee ballots should be counted, reasoning that voters’ intent was the issue, and that by merely signing them, those who had cast them had “substantially complied” with the law. Hooper’s lawyers appealed to a federal court. By Thanksgiving his campaign believed he was ahead—but also believed that the disputed absentee ballots, from heavily Democratic counties, would cost him the election. The campaign went so far as to sue every probate judge, circuit clerk, and sheriff in the state, alleging discrimination. Hooper continued to hold rallies throughout it all. On his behalf the business community bought ads in newspapers across the state that said, “They steal elections they don’t like.” Public opinion began tilting toward him.

The recount stretched into the following year. On Inauguration Day both candidates appeared for the ceremonies. By March the all-Democratic Alabama Supreme Court had ordered that the absentee ballots be counted. By April the matter was before the Eleventh Federal Circuit Court. The byzantine legal maneuvering continued for months. In mid-October a federal appeals-court judge finally ruled that the ballots could not be counted, and ordered the secretary of state to certify Hooper as the winner—only to have Hornsby’s legal team appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which temporarily stayed the case. By now the recount had dragged on for almost a year.

When I went to visit Hooper, not long ago, we sat in the parlor of his Montgomery home as he described the denouement of Karl Rove’s closest race. “On the afternoon of October the nineteenth,” Hooper recalled, “I was in the back yard planting five hundred pink sweet Williams in my wife’s garden, and she hollered out the back door, ‘Your secretary just called—the Supreme Court just made a ruling that you’re the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court!'” In the final tally he had prevailed by just 262 votes. Hooper smiled broadly and handed me a large photo of his swearing-in ceremony the next day. “That Karl Rove was a very impressive fellow,” he said.

I don’t know why people can’t wrap their minds around the fact that one of Karl Rove’s specialties is stealing elections, but there are piles and piles of evidence that it is. (You’d think 2000 would have been enough to seal his reputation…)

I do not make this argument to suggest that Rove wasn’t trying to employ the Justice Department for voter suppression efforts. That’s been going on for decades. But I believe that Rove was also taking it to the next level, preparing to use the electoral mistrust caused by the stolen election in 2000 and the shennanigans in Ohio in 2004 to gin up a national GOP campaign to complain of Democratic voter fraud — and bring into question all close elections in which Democrats prevailed.

Rove understands that these issues are as much about politics and public perception as anything else. That example from Alabama tells you how he subtly influences the legal system through public pressure and ultimately brings it down to sheer political muscle. He either uses the public’s existing predjudices or creates new ones to make the people see elections as not a matter of accepted law and practices but rather a function of the political strength of the political machine — much like the old Big City machines, but on a national level.

Karl Rove meddling with any kind of voter integrity project, pro or con, should set off deafening alarms. Cheating and stealing and dirty tricks are what he does. The minute his name was brought into this scandal, a full and thorough investigation was required.

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All Scandals Are Not Created Equal

by digby

Kinsley thinks we liberals are being dishonest and that if the shoe were on the other foot we would be defending a Democrat in Bush’s position. Uhm, no. I wouldn’t, anyway.

Among other things, I have a real problem with any government lying the nation into a war and then escalating it against the will of the people for inscrutable reasons. We went down that road not all that long ago and it was mostly Democrats in the congress (and virtually all Democrats in the streets) who led the way against their own leadership — leadership, I might add, who had done truly heroic work on issues dear to their hearts. I suspect that the cynics of that time were railing against the liberals being so disloyal. And liberals still pay the price today for doing it. Perhaps that’s foolish. I call it citizenship.

It’s true that when Clinton was under seige, I was outraged by the scandal machinery that sprang up because it was all based on murky Arkansas whispers and salacious gossip that the congress and the press were using as some sort of proxy for what they called “character.” They had to reach so far as to write about Chelsea Clinton’s slumber party guests and investigate the official Christmas card list to find evidence of abuse of power.

So I agree that the political scandal culture is generally absurd. There is an element of posturing and hypocrisy on all sides, to be sure. But that doesn’t mean that the substance of all scandals are equally (un)serious or that you can simply ignore corruption and then earnestly go about winning elections and governing with good intentions. (Hint: the Republicans tend to turn the scandal machine on you anyway.)

Kinsley still wonders why the firing of officials at the beginning of Clinton’s term is any different since presidents always have a right to fire anyone in the excutive branch and Clinton may have had political reasons for doing so. Fine, I guess we have to spell it out again. Everyone accepts and even expects that a president will replace US Attorneys when he comes into office particularly when the presidency changes parties. Democrats and Republicans have different legal priorities and the people assume the Department of Justice will change focus when a new president of a different party takes office.

What they don’t expect is that the political apparatus of the White House will use the Department of Justice as a tool to protect criminal wrongdoing among their own and trump up charges against their political opponents. That is not just a different focus or legal prioity. That’s corruption, pure and simple, and may constitute obstruction of justice. (And believe me, if there had been any evidence that Clionton had such motivations the Republican congress would have investigated it in 1994 when they took office. They investigated everything.) Which leads us to this clarification by Kinsley:

Rereading what I wrote a couple days ago in this blog, one thing does bother me (and AnaMarie rightly called me on it, as did a couple of commentors). I seem to have displayed a cavalier attitude about official lying. I stand by my description of the administration as “comically mendacious”—anyone who hasn’t been entertained by the tango of mid-course corrections is missing a real treat. But it’s also serious. I do tend to think that the solution is in electoral politics—punish liars by voting against them– and not in subpoenas and hearings and special prosecutors and impeachment talk and all the other paraphernalia of scandal.

Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so? But it makes it a little bit hard to achieve if the White House is manufacturing voter fraud cases that have the potential to turn elections, doesn’t it? It seems to me that the white house tampering with the machinery of elections through back channels, which is obviously what happened here, might just be considered a hindrence in the furtherance of that laudable democratic goal. After the election in 2000, I think it pays for the Democrats to be vigilant on that score.

This scandal didn’t occur in a vacuum. It’s not as if it is the first instance of this executive branch running wild and doing whatever they want regardless of the rules or the law. This is, after all, an administration that secretly legalized torture. I don’t think it’s wrong to make a fairly knee-jerk assumption that they have an agenda that is not readily apparent and which might run afoul of normal government practices. Every time someone finally manages to turn over a rock they find a fetid pile of corruption and abuse.

The Republican Party has become authoritarian and unethical to an extreme. The lessons they have taken from the constitutional usurpation they attempt every time they gain the presidency are clear: they believe they have nothing to lose, at least long term, by abusing the power of their offices. They know that the Democrats will rail ineffectually until they win the presidency, at which point the Republicans will use the tools of scandal against them, even if they have to blow up watermelons in the back yard to do it. There are always some unsavory elements in government, but in the modern era this kind of institutional corruption started in the Nixon administration and then escalated through Reagan and Bush II. (Bush I only played really rough when it looked like he was going to lose his election.) Each of those presidencies had serious scandals concerning abuse of presidential power. I don’t think it’s paranoid to see a pattern.

These current scandals are about some fundamental, constitutional issues, not just delicious tabloid investigations into the current sex life or past penny ante financial dealings of the president that allegedly illuminate some vastly important facet of his “character.” Even if the Republicans are conveniently pursuing power for its own sake and are more than willing to jettison all their beliefs about executive privilege and the prerogatives of the “commander in chief” when the shoe is on the other foot, the underlying battle is real. The presidency of the United States is the most powerful office on the planet and determining the boundries of that power is important, regardless of how droll you find all the political posturing that goes along with that.

If Kinsley truly believes that the way to deal with this kind of thing is simply to win elections (and I assume lead by example) then it’s doubly important to rein in this authoritarian impulse and establish with the public that they will not play the game this way. It is not enough in our cynical time to simply say that they will turn over a new leaf. They must show how far the other side has gone and ensure that they are held responsible for it.

I’ve watched this creeping authoritarianism for more than 30 years now. It’s not a figment of my imagination and I’m damned tired of jaded political pundits telling me to lighten up. These same people told me that it didn’t matter if Ronald Reagan had a secret government working out of the basement of the white house (Oliver North is so awesome in his uniform!) and it didn’t matter if George Bush Sr pardoned all the criminals in that scandal and it didn’t matter if a partisan congress impeached a president over sex. We were told to “get over it” when Bush’s henchmen manipulated every political lever they could find in his brother’s and father’s political machinery to take office in 2000 — and then decided to govern as if they’d won in a landslide. Then came illegal war, torture, spying on citizens, denial of habeas corpus and all the rest. Excuse me, but I’m not going to sit around and chuckle knowingly that this is “just the way it is.” It isn’t. History proves that very bad things can happen to good countries. Only fools pretend that great nations can’t go down the wrong road.

The public is waking up and hopefully they will deny the Republicans power for a while. But until this authoritarian zombie is finally killed, the country is in danger of more of these “misbegotten, stupid, ill-advised wars” and imperial presidencies each time the Republicans manage to sully the Dems sufficiently to regain power.

I know that such silly, naive righteous indignation amuses the chattering classes to no end. That’s exactly why so many people believe they are a big part of the problem.

Update: Another hippie hysteric, John Dean, weighs in on the creeping authoritarianism.

Update: Josh Marshall, explains the scandal’s details so even Michael Kinsley can understand them.

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Easy To Be Hard

by digby

In case anyone was wondering who was in charge, I think this pretty much answers the question:

In his first weeks as defense secretary, Robert M. Gates repeatedly argued that the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had become so tainted abroad that legal proceedings at Guantánamo would be viewed as illegitimate, according to senior administration officials. He told President Bush and others that it should be shut down as quickly as possible.

Mr. Gates’s appeal was an effort to turn Mr. Bush’s publicly stated desire to close Guantánamo into a specific plan for action, the officials said. In particular, Mr. Gates urged that trials of terrorism suspects be moved to the United States, both to make them more credible and because Guantánamo’s continued existence hampered the broader war effort, administration officials said.

Mr. Gates’s arguments were rejected after Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and some other government lawyers expressed strong objections to moving detainees to the United States, a stance that was backed by the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, administration officials said.

As Mr. Gates was making his case, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice joined him in urging that the detention facility be shut down, administration officials said. But the high-level discussions about closing Guantánamo came to a halt after Mr. Bush rejected the approach…

The article says wait to see what happens to Abu in this latest scandal, but that’s silly. Gonzales isn’t the decider. It’s Crazy Dick — and he’s not budging.

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Guess What?

by digby

We haven’t been screaming into the void.

Public allegiance to the Republican Party has plunged during George W. Bush’s presidency, as attitudes have edged away from some of the conservative values that fueled GOP political victories, a major survey has found.

The survey, by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, found a “dramatic shift” in political party identification since 2002, when Republicans and Democrats were at rough parity. Now, 50% of those surveyed identified with or leaned toward Democrats, whereas 35% aligned with Republicans.

What’s more, the survey found, public attitudes are drifting toward Democrats’ values: Support for government aid to the disadvantaged has grown since the mid-1990s, skepticism about the use of military force has increased and support for traditional family values has decreased.

The findings suggest that the challenges for the GOP reach beyond the unpopularity of the war in Iraq and Bush.

“Iraq has played a large part; the pushback on the Republican Party has to do with Bush, but there are other things going on here that Republicans will have to contend with,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew center. “There is a difference in the landscape.”

[…]

The current gap between Republican and Democratic identification — which Pew measured by counting people who said they leaned toward a party as well as those with firm allegiances — is the widest since the group began collecting data on party allegiance in 1990.

As recently as 2002, the two parties were tied, with each drawing support from 43% of those surveyed. But Democrats have gained an advantage over Republicans almost every year since.

Kohut said the spread between the parties mostly reflected the defection of independents from the GOP more than a more favorable assessment of the Democrats.

The survey found that the proportion of those expressing a positive view of Democrats has declined since January 2001 — when Bush took office — by 6 percentage points, to 54%. But the public’s regard for Republicans has cratered during the Bush years, with the proportion holding a favorable view of the GOP dropping 15 points, to 41%.

Although Republicans rode to political power calling for smaller government, support for government action to help the disadvantaged has risen since the GOP took control of Congress in 1994. At that point, a Pew survey found that 57% said the government had a responsibility to take care of people who could not take care of themselves; now, 69% said they believed that.

On the other hand, support for Bush’s signature issue — a strong, proactive military posture — has waned since 2002, when 62% said that the best way to ensure peace was through military strength. In the recent poll, 49% said they believed that.

On social issues, the survey found that support for some key conservative positions was on the decline. For instance, those who said they supported “old fashioned values about family and marriage” dipped from 84% in 1994 to 76% in the recent survey. Support for allowing school boards to have the right to fire homosexual teachers has dropped from 39% in 1994 to 28%.

People get tired of being lectured all the time by santimonious tight-asses. And if you are going to start wars for no good reason you’d better “win” the damned thing.
Their party is morally and intellectually bankrupt and the only way they can function is to cheat.

I don’t know if it’s morning in America, but the country seems to be waking up.

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Ditto

by digby

I agree with K-Drum. Wow. Just wow.

I America wants Joe McCarthy for president (I know Ann Coulter does) then this is the guy for them. Run, Newt Run.

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Good Bushie

by digby

Sidney Blumenthal concurs with me that this scandal is all about Rove. Today we see another example with this article about Kevin Ryan in the San Francisco US Attorney’s office, the one braindead crank that everyone agrees needed to be fired:

The “company man” hired and fired by the Bush administration as U.S. attorney in San Francisco was a loyal Republican the administration wanted to keep on — until it appeared he could become a public relations liability.

Unlike seven other fired federal prosecutors who may have run afoul of the administration for political reasons, San Francisco U.S. Atty. Kevin Ryan was a team player for Bush and had influential Republican support. A friend of the president even went to bat for Ryan after his firing.

“You would have to know Kevin,” said UC Hastings College of the Law professor Rory Little. “You can’t find a stronger supporter of the Bush administration agenda.”

His tenure, however, was plagued by morale problems and accusations that he was a bad manager. A number of the office’s most experienced lawyers left.

Despite his problems, which were well documented in legal newspapers, Justice officials wanted to keep Ryan on, even as they plotted the firings of other U.S. attorneys. It was only when a Democratic judge threatened to go to Congress to raise a public fuss over an excoriating written evaluation of Ryan’s office that Ryan was put on the termination list, according to e-mails released by the White House.

Ryan was, by all acounts, a typical Bush administration crony — unqualified, unfocused and hyper-political. And when he got into trouble, certain very high level California Republicans burst into action:

Some lawyers in San Francisco speculated that Ryan hung on so long because of strong political connections. One of them, Gerald Parsky, a Los Angeles-based Republican fundraiser who vetted federal appointments in California for the Bush administration, quickly came to Ryan’s aid.

“FYI,” William Kelley, the deputy White House counsel, e-mailed Sampson on Dec. 7. “Jerry Parsky has put in an outraged call protesting the fact of Ryan’s departure.”

The e-mail warned that Parsky was scheduled for lunch with Bush the following week.

Parsky’s intervention spurred more e-mails. William Kelley, an aide to White House political strategist Karl Rove, told Sampson that “Ryan is the only one so far calling in political chits (which is reason enough to justify the [firing] decision, in my view), but Karl would like to know some particulars as he fields these calls.”

Ryan, however, sought to assure the Bush administration that he would not cooperate with critics of the firings.

In an e-mail to Sampson, Elston said Ryan’s former deputy had called and assured him that Ryan was not returning telephone calls from Feinstein or Carol Lam, the ousted U.S. attorney in San Diego.

“He wanted us to know that he’s still a ‘company man,’ ” Elston wrote.

They didn’t like it that he had called in his chits, but were later reassured that he had promised not to make a stink. How very cosa nostra of him. I’m sure the plan was to reward him quite nicely.

The interesting person in this is Parsky, a California GOP kingpen and confidante of Karl Rove:

Parsky, an investment banker in Los Angeles, chaired the Bush effort in California, and even though the GOP ticket was soundly whipped-Al Gore won the state by 12 percentage points-Parsky has become an extraordinarily influential figure in Bush’s circle of advisers. Virtually unknown in Washington, Parsky talks to top Bush aide Karl Rove several times a week (that’s in addition to their regular politics-and-policy phone conversation every Sunday). He’s deeply involved in some of the president’s top-priority initiatives, including Social Security reform and the selection of federal judges.

Parsky also used to be a partner in Gibson Dunn and Crutcher, Ted Olsen’s law firm, which serendipitously hired the LA US Attorney Amy Yang and gave her a plum job just as her office was homing in on GOP appropriations czar, Jerry Lewis. It’s possibly a coincidence, but the Republican party in California has always operated as a very clubby (and ruthless) bunch. And they are extremely powerful people in the national party — they have big money and big cred. Two of the last five GOP presidents hailed from the Golden State.

The other thing about this particular email exchange that I find intriguing is that Ryan assured the Justice department that he wasn’t taking calls from Carol Lam. Why was that? And why would he know that this would be of interest to the Justice Department in assuring them that he would play ball? Had he been told not to by someone?

It’s all very interesting. When you combine this with the other big revelation of the day from the former prosecutor who handled the tobacco litigation and news that there is some evidence that the Department has been playing sfot and loose with Abramoff and this may end up being one of the biggest scandals ever.

As I only half jokingly said yesterday, I thought I was pretty clear eyed about this administration and yet I’m a bit gobsmacked by the US Attorney scandal. I’m a member of the Watergate generation — the first political event I followed as a teen-ager was the hearings. I am well aware of the proclivity of Republicans to engage in dirty politics. But I honestly never thought that they’d let Karl Rove near the Justice Department and I honestly never thought that so many Justice department lawyers would go along with this. They aren’t in the military, they have no obligation to follow their “commander-in-chief” no matter what. They could have spoken out before now and if they had to they should have resigned. This calls the integrity of all of them into question.

That it took this much for anyone to stand up says everything you need to know about our political culture and the total destruction of the concept of integrity. And we can thank all those good Republicans from Ken Lay to Jerry Parsky to Jack Abramoff to Alberto Gonzales to Karl Rove to George W. Bush to Antonin Scalia for that. For the past ten years, Republicans at all levels of society have well and truly trashed this place.

Update: Speaking of integrity…

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Saving The Children

by digby

The last refuge of the Republican:

“I’m not going to resign. I’m going to stay focused on protecting our kids,”

I think this may finally emerge as one of the official GOP talking points. They’ve already trotted out the porn rationale for the prosecutor in Sin City and I suspect this may end up being added to their all-purpose illegal immigrant rationale. In fact, if they could combine them — illegal immigrant porn moguls — they’d have a perfect wingnut narrative.

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Confederacy Of Dunces

by digby

I am not a scientist and I don’t pretend to understand all the details of the global warming debate. But compared to the ignoramus Fox All-Stars I’m Carl Sagan.

Mort Kondracke did say that he called up the head of Matinal Academy of science to find out the truth and they said there is consensus, but he got all nervous and started stuttering like Woody Allen when allegedly straight news rerporter Brit Hume got indignant and said that “scientific consensus” is what the say when they don’t have any scientific facts. He went on to note that the temperatures have been colder lately. I’m not kidding.

It’s very sad to see Nina Easton, who has done good work in the past, make Mara Liasson look like Amy Goodman with her scoffing at what the fey Beltway Boyz called Al Gore’s “hysterics.” She said that Al Gore wants the entire country to completely grind to a halt and do nothing but deal with global warming, which is completely false. He believes it should be a priority, as do all thinking people, but I’ve never heard him say that it trumps every other concern. It’s a ridiculous Fox-style line of bullshit. She’s literally in bed with John McCain’s staff, so I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising (not that she mentions that.)

And they all quoted the highly dubious New York Times article like it was the oracle of Delphi. Funny that.

I think my favorite thing about the know-nothing wingnut argument is that Al Gore is said to be all hysterical on this silly little problem by the same people who are screeching like howler monkeys that the oceans don’t protect us anymore and “they’re” comin’ to kill us in our beds! The fact that ridding ourselves of our dependence on oil might mitigate both of these problems escapes their notice. But then, they are incredibly stupid.

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I Was Born Yesterday

by digby

I know that the cognoscenti think all this talk about politicization of the Justice Department is silly Claud Rainsing on the part of cynical Democratic partisans, but when you see things like this, you have to realize how ugly this US Attorney scandal really is:

Today, the nonpartisan congressional watchdog Democracy 21 sent a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty asking whether there had been political interference in the investigation and prosecution of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

I hadn’t even thought about that up to now — I guess I’m just another of those fools who believed that professional US Attorneys, even ambitious Republican ones, would neither risk their reputations nor the public’s faith in the rule of law by helping cover up the vast network of GOP corruption. It never occurred to me that the political arm of the Justice Department would have the balls to interfere in such high profile cases for fear of a revolt from the US Attorney’s themselves. I assumed that the wheels of justice moved slowly and that if they didn’t indict high profile political figures it was because the cases were too murky and would risk a very public failure.

Then came the firings and we find that throughout the country these Republican prosecutors have been targeting Democrats. (And we can speculate as Christy at FDL does here on the possible method to their madness.) I now realize that I honestly did not think that even this criminal administration would go so far as to allow Karl Rove to have a hand in the Justice department and I never considered that US Attorney’s were doing his bidding.

Why I was so naive, I do not know. Tom Delay, after all, is still free. I guess I still thought that there were certain limits, even for this administration.

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Cure For Amnesia

by digby

Tony Snow is saying that there’s simply no reason for Rove and Miers to go under oath or even a transcript of their “interview” to be created if the congress really wants to get the truth.

He had no information on the “18 Day Gap” and seems not to be aware that Karl Rove just recently came within a hairs breadth of being indicted for lying to the FBI and and perjuring himself before a Grand Jury. See, he apparently has a terrible disease that renders him an amnesiac until he’s facing indictment, at which point he suddenly uncovers e-mails which jog his memory and he “amends” his statements.

Getting the truth from this disabled fellow in simple interviews has already proven to be a big waste of time. Better to just put him under penalty of perjury from the beginning. Recent history shows that he can barely remember his name unless he’s facing jail time.

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