US Attorney Hanky Panky--Take Two

Fallout continues regarding the forced replacement of US Attorney's by the Bush Administration and the curious relationship between the characteristics of the attorneys ousted and those of their replacements. This Talking Points Memo asks the question, "Now, why would Karl Rove want his top oppo researcher being the US Attorney in Arkansas for the next two years?"

Why, indeed.

Further, Arkansas Attorney John Wesley Hall Jr has filed a 16 page motion declaring that Griffin's appointment was unconstitutional. For those not interested in deciphering all 16 pages, the following is considered the gist of the thing:

An example [of how the Attorney General could use the new law to circumvent Senate confirmation], one that might be called extreme but is not the slightest bit implausible, is this: The President appoints a qualified “strawman” (or woman) as a United States Attorney that the President knows will be confirmed by the Senate at the beginning of the President’s term of office. The Senate advises and consents to the appointment, and the U.S. Attorney is sworn in. Shortly after that, the Attorney General removes the U.S. Attorney and appoints a replacement who never has to face the Senate, and it turns out that the replacement U.S. Attorney is inexperienced or unqualified for the job or a blatantly political appointment that no one can understand would qualify as “the principal federal law enforcement officers in their judicial districts.” Conceivably, under the Attorney General’s interpretation of his appointment power in § 546(c), an incompetent or a blatantly politically appointed* U.S. Attorney could hold office like this for seven and a half years, or even longer, assuming the President is re-elected, without ever facing Senate confirmation over his or her qualifications.

Thanks to the elections last fall, the democrats are in the position to dig into this thing, and they are. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is slated to lead a hearing before the Judiciary Committee on Feb. 7 on the topic of "Preserving Prosecutorial Independence: Is the Department of Justice Politicizing the Hiring and Firing of U.S. Attorneys?" No witnesses have been announced.

Meanwhile, Sen. Dianne Feinstein's (D-CA) bill to fix the loophole allowing administration appointees to U.S. attorney spots to serve indefinitely could see some action. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), the ranking member on the Judiciary Committee panel, expressed "qualified support" for the measure and asked to work with Feinstein on it, according to his spokeswoman, Courtney Boone.

White House Handpicking US Attorneys

Some folks are starting to notice how the Bush Administration is using an obscure part of the Patriot Act signed into law March 2006 by President Bush.

SEC. 502. INTERIM APPOINTMENT OF UNITED STATES ATTORNEYS.
Section 546 of title 28, United States Code, is amended by striking subsections (c) and (d) and inserting the following new subsection:
`(c) A person appointed as United States attorney under this section may serve until the qualification of a United States Attorney for such district appointed by the President under section 541 of this title. '.

The gist is that this allows the White House to basically replace US Attorneys across the country with anyone they please without the requirement of Senate approval. Prior to this act, Senate approval was necessary.

The law went into affect in March. By June, the White House was in gear. In Arkansas, Bud Cummins was ousted without reason and replaced by Karl Rove disciple Timothy Griffin. The White House is replacing US Attorneys throughout the country with handpicked successors more loyal to their cause. So far, the list of those replaced includes:

San Francisco: Kevin V. Ryan
Nevada: Daniel Bogden
San Diego: Carole Lam
New Mexico: David Igleslias
Arizona: Paul K. Charlton
Seattle: John McKay
Little Rock (Ark.): Bud Cummins
Los Angeles: Debra Wong Yang

What’s going on? Well, in the case of Carole Lam, we know she was focusing her attention on the Duke Cunningham, who sought and accepted bribes from defense contractors.

Democrats noticed last week. Diane Feinstein delivered a speech to the Senate the morning of January 16, 2007. Two days later, at an oversight committee hearing, Feinstein grilled Attorney General Gonzales:

"How many U.S. Attorneys have been asked to resign in the past year?" Feinstein asked Gonzales.
"You're asking me to get into a public discussion of personnel issues," Gonzales replied.
"I'm asking you to give me a number."
"I don't know the answer to that question," said Gonzales.
"You didn't know the answer when we spoke on Tuesday, but you said you would find out," Feinstein pressed.
Gonzales referred to a letter his office had sent Feinstein earlier in the week on the issue.
"I read the letter," Feinstein shot back. Gonzales denied the administration had any tricks up its sleeve and was only trying to do what was best.
"Do you deny that your office has asked U.S. Attorneys to resign in the past year?" Feinstein asked.
"I don't deny that," Gonzales said. "But that happens in every administration, during different periods for different reasons. . . Some people should view that as a sign of good management."

Another suggestion is that the WH is placing key republican attorneys into these positions to fatten republican resumes for future possibilities.

It couldn't possibly have anything to do with investigations or the oversight of investigations into hanky panky profiteering of the friends and favorites of a certain Vice President?

Naw.

Washington Vehicles

Tucson, Arizona. I surprise no one when I state that I am a supporter of Congresswoman Giffords and think highly of her. I think she is intelligent, very well educated, hard working, informed, and has her heart in the right place. This will be my position until events prove me wrong.

Our Congresswoman is featured in an article in this morning’s Daily Star. I read it, and this is one of those occasions where I chose to read the comments posted by the enlightened set of folks that choose to submit their two cents online. As has been noted by Tedski and other respectable bloggers, some of the comments posted at the online Star are hateful, racist, disgusting stuff, but I cannot resist remarking that one commentator, in a twist of creativity I find somewhat remarkable, has contemptuously compared our Congresswoman to a 1953 Buick.

OK, fine. I confess I giggled slightly and the idea of comparing personalities to cars did become rather compelling, and what's good for the goose is good for the gander, so I thought I might suggest some appropriate car comparisons for some of the other officials we have representing us, er, representing something, in Washington, DC.

For Karl Rove, I think this Fiat captures the gist of what is going on, in particular the headlights. I don't know who would buy a vehicle that looks like this. Even more perplexing is considering who would design a vehicle like this.









John Kyl is perhaps best captured by this Ford Edsel, the product of automotive designers who had clearly marched to the beat of a different drummer, one who had played too many times for Lawrence Welk.







Let's face it, John McCain's image and persona have devolved over time, so the vehicles of choice for him have also switched models. Back in 2000 when he challenged Bush for the nomination, another vehicle would apply, but today, this Reliant has the salient features that make it a good choice.

For our Vice President, there is something about this 1974 Blackhawk that nails it. You just know that something is up and not right with anyone driving this vehicle. Something dark, twisted, and evil lurks at the soul of such a thing. Pathology is buried in there somewhere. Steer clear whenever possible. Be afraid, for there truly is cause for fear.

With respect to our esteemed Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice (is all of this really happening?!), I really struggled. No vehicle could quite capture, well, what there is to capture. After considerable reflection and more time than I care to admit, I think the Pontiac Aztek, a vehicle brought forth by the inspiration of individuals clearly under the influence of controlled substances, captures it best. Keep in mind the truly mysterious nature of the cosmos. There are people living on this planet that designed this vehicle. Think about that.














Finally, we get to George Dubyah. What vehicle could possibly capture the essence of our President? I thought about this for some time. There are so many vehicles that have been designed and built throughout the world and throughout history. Searching around, I finally found a car that just does it. The visual is perfect. It captures everything there is to say.

Hillary, Obama, Giuliani, and McCain

Well, Hillary surprised no one by announcing her candidacy for President, and I stand by my assertion that barring a GOP meltdown of some kind, she will lose in the general election.

From the Gallup Poll conducted January 12-14 among democratic primary voters:

Hillary Rodham Clinton 29
Barack Obama 18
John Edwards 13
Al Gore 11
John Kerry 8
Joe Biden 5
Bill Richardson 3
Wesley Clark 2
Al Sharpton 1

In the same poll, Hillary facing Obama alone, she draws 53% against his 39%. A Zogby poll conducted a week earlier for the most part replicated the results, as do a bunch of other polls.

For the GOP, we have:

Rudy Giuliani 31
John McCain 27
Newt Gingrich 10
Mitt Romney 7
George Pataki 3
Tommy Thompson 2
Jim Gilmore 2
Sam Brownback 1
Mike Huckabee 1
Chuck Hagel 1
Condoleezza Rice 1

I don’t glean much meaning from the General Election polls, except to state what I have already stated, Hillary is toast against Giuliani and her chances against McCain are now somewhat tied to Iraq. If Iraq deteriorates badly enough, the debt continues to soar, and the Bush administration remains on its knees servicing the almighty Halliburton, McCain might falter.

Polls aside, neither Hillary nor any other democratic nominee is going to face Guiliani because the GOP is not going to nominate him. This Giuliani stuff is just noise, for being a reasonably intelligent person, he is not a Neanderthal. This means that he supports reproductive freedom, stem cell research, gay rights, gender equality, and all of those things that make the Falwell and Robertson people go batshit. Unlike McCain, he has not endorsed the banning of abortion even in the case in incest and rape and is not on a mission from God to round up all of the homosexuals into Auschwitz style death camps for immediate extermination and incineration.

OK, I exaggerate. Or do I?

Yes, Barack Obama is African American and has a funny name, but that is not what concerns me. What concerns me is his lack of tenure. I am open to debate on this one, but it just feels “too early.” My meters say this is a campaign in preparation for a campaign. The 2008 effort on the part of Obama is laying track for a subsequent attempt that will indeed bear fruit. He has that Kennedy "rock star" dynamic, and he is on a collision course with occupying the White House, unless someone shoots him first, and that is no attempt to be funny. We know what happened to JFK and RFK. I could not be more serious or sober. Obama is an assassination waiting to happen, and I hope he and his close circle understand this and exercise caution. I truly fear for this man’s life and pray that my concerns do not materialize.

Against Mitt Romney or Sam Brownback, Hillary will win. As I’ve already posted, Romney’s nomination will attract the brightest of spotlights to the Mormon religion, and its polytheistic, carnal god, and misogynist beliefs will drop the jaw of Joe America. Romney cannot replicate Kennedy’s September 1960 speech addressing his Catholicism.

In relativistic terms, Catholics and Protestants are IDENTICAL when placed in contrast with Mormonism. Again, the Mormons believe men can become God. No kidding. What God is now, a practicing Mormon MAN can become. This is off the Christian map.

With all due respect to the man, Kerry stinks as a Presidential candidate. I cannot believe any democrats think he should be nominated again. What are they thinking?

It’s easy to sit here and criticize everyone, so what would be positive? What do I think is a great ticket? I’ll tell you. The strongest democratic ticket, one that would be virtually bulletproof in the general election and against which the GOP would flounder miserably, is Gore/Clark. The Gore/Clark ticket would trample anything the GOP could put together.

Not only is this ticket fabulous before the election. This ticket is fabulous for what would occur after the election. For both the country and the planet, this is the ticket from heaven. Gore/Clark would be the savior from grace rescuing us from Satanic Bush/Cheney Hell. If it happened, I would cry. It won’t.

Copper Trauma

Tucson, Arizona. Well, something is happening in San Manuel today that may or not be noticed by most of the folks in Tucson, but it strikes at the heart of your humble blogger, who spent several years in San Manuel at the Best Copper Smelter in the World, run by one of the best corporations to ever operate in human history, Magma Copper Company.

Executives from all over the world flew into Arizona and paid $10,000 each just to sit in on one of our meetings. Clinton's labor secretary Robert Reich dispatched key people to San Manuel to learn what was going on, resulting in CEO Burgess Winters flying to DC to meet with President Clinton, who was jaw dropping blown away when he heard what we were up to.

Unfortunately, a company called BHP paid $2.4 BILLION to buy Magma and then took over, the dumbest dipshit nimrod collection of bungleheads I'd ever encountered in the corporate world. They utterly ruined the place in three years and lost every penny of that $2.4 Billion plus a lot more. BHP Stockholders were furious as this slashed the BHP stock price, so Board Chair and CEO John Prescott as well as arrogant jack ass Jerry Ellis were fired. New CEO Paul Anderson called the entire BHP organization a "dysfunctional family" and grabbed a machete for each hand. He hacked the place to smithereens, and the blades reached San Manuel. All workers lost their jobs.

Today, the smoke stacks were demolished, and the material posted at the link is well worth seeing. I was there. Today, billions and billions of dollars worth of copper are virtually unretrievable because BHP flooded the underground San Manuel mine, so instead Canadian-based Augusta Resource Corporation is going to scrape it off the Rosemont Ranch in the Santa Rita mountains, a move futilely resisted by our politicians who cannot stop it from happening. Perhaps it will make enough money to attract the attention of BHP Billiton.

Should BHP Billiton purchase the Augusta Resource Corporation, management with the IQ's of retarded cinder blocks will take over and insist workers extract the copper with soggy peanut shells. The workers will be blamed when productivity plummets, and they will close the place and lay everyone off.

Some of the displaced workers might even turn into bloggers.

Looking the New Way Forward

Well, apparently it is a foregone conclusion that tomorrow Bush is going to announce a "surge" of "fresh" US Troops into Iraq. First of all, do we have any "fresh" soldiers? Where are they going to come from? The top military official in the region, General John Abizaid, warned Congress in November last year that more troops are not the solution. Just about everyone is saying a military solution is not possible. Both Generals Colin Powell and Wesley Clark think more troops are a lousy idea. What does Bush do? Ignore General Powell. Ignore General Clark. Replace General Abizaid.

Don't we learn? Just last summer 14,000 U.S. troops moved into Baghdad to stabilize the place, and violence in Iraq actually escalated. The Pentagon’s own statistics show that weekly attacks increased by 15 percent while the number of Iraqi civilian casualties increased by 51 percent over the previous reporting period (which concluded in May 2006). The November 2006 version of the Department of Defense report, Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq, reported a 22 percent rise in violence from August to November 2006.

Well, McCain and Lieberman seem to think this is a good idea, but have they said what these troops will actually do? Congresswoman Heather Wilson, R-N.M., an Air Force veteran and member of the House Intelligence Committee who had just returned from Iraq, lambasted Bush's war leadership as lacking "a clarity of mission."

Oh really? Directly from this LA Times article: "defense officials say the U.S. commanders in Iraq have not settled on what that mission should be."

They apparently agree, however, that the new units should be given "clear instructions."

Is this really happening?

Islam's Dissenting Voices / Systemic Rape?

Well, folks that read the comments can note I got a visit from an Iranian blogger named Uspace who has a blog called Hard to Swallow. Well, went to his blog, and have clearly distinguished for myself that there is indeed an upper limit to the density of hyperlinks in blog text. Uspace has sailed well past this limit.

What a hornet’s nest. First, learned a new word, dhimmitude, per the link the Islamic system for governing populations conquered during the jihad wars. Dhimmitude is apparently an integrated system based on Islamic theology.

The rabbit hole led to another blog, Infidel Bloggers Alliance, which is not the least bit shy in its criticism of Islam, a website truly after Glenn Beck’s heart. For those that don’t remember, in a one hour CNN Special Exposed: The Extremist Agenda Beck compared Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to a modern day Hitler seeking to establish the Islamic version of a Third Reich converting or killing the rest of the world. I said at the time that no way did Ahmadinejad have that kind of grip, and recent Iranian elections support the view that he cannot consolidate forces behind him in a way that comes close to the Fuhrer.

Now, whether the Infidel blog is racist or the recognition of reality is beyond my depth, but it links to a video that was apparently too much for YouTube (a video that is too much for YouTube?!), and only Ifilm has it.

There seems to be growing noise legitimate or not about statistically significant rapes and gang rapes perpetrated in Norway, Sweden, and other European countries. I can't read Swedish, but the Expressen article points to a growing conversation about Muslim men and this notion that Islam beliefs about jihad and women include rape, as discussed in this Jihad Watch article, which extends the conversation to what is happening in Darfur. Here is an Irish Viewpoint using the same photo of the Swedish victim as the Expressen article.

Dissenting voices from within Islamic nations are using the internet to reveal other violence apparently condoned by the system. While not as gruesome as a beheading, this stoning video should not be viewed by the easily disturbed.

With some history in the mining industry, I have a good grasp of the concept of extracting what is good from a very large pile and discarding the rest. I think the better analogy is the physician treating cancer, faced with the challenge of eradicating what is bad without harming the rest.

What a mess.

Pat Robertson Predicts Mass Killing

Well, there are stories coming out that Pat Robertson has had another conversation with God, and the Lord shared with him that there would be another "mass killing" by terrorists in the United States this year. Now the Lord, he said, would not specifically say that the attack would be nuclear, but he was left with that impression. God reported that this would involve major cities, but apparently not the small Pennsylvania town Robertson slated for Armageddon due to a vote by its school board. God apparently felt the school board didn't meet the bar for biblical obliteration.

A couple years ago, Robertson's talks with God here spoke of the prompt removal of justices from the Supreme Court. More significantly, God told him that the terrorist threat would diminish in 2005. Quoting prophet Robertson directly: If I'm hearing God right, we will see a tremendous incident of miracles in the year 2005. ... God's spirit is going to be moving in dramatic power around the world. And his spirit is going to be touching the hearts of many in the Muslim world and they will be turning to the gospel, to Jesus Christ. I think many of them already are, but this is going to be an acceleration that will really amaze the world. ... 'Revival will break out throughout the Muslim world, my [God's] truth will penetrate their hearts. The hold of that falsehood that has gripped them will be broken.'

I'm thinking maybe we should buy Pat a copy of Eternal Forces, a five shot Americano from Starbucks, and pro Jesus chearleaders. He can use his regular dialogs with God to discover non-violent methods to defeat the Army commanded by the Anti-Christ.