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In a speech last month to soldiers at Fort Bragg, N.C., President Bush pointed to the Iraqi elections and efforts to improve roads, schools and basic services. "Rebuilding a country after three decades of tyranny is hard, and rebuilding while at war is even harder. Our progress has been uneven, but progress is being made."
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said yesterday that he spoke with White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. immediately after learning that the Justice Department had launched a criminal investigation into the leak of a CIA operative's identity. But Gonzales, who was White House counsel at the time,waited 12 hours before officially notifying the rest of the staff of the inquiry.
[...]"I specifically had our lawyers go back to the Department of Justice lawyers and ask them, 'Do you want us to notify the staff now, immediately, or would it be okay to notify the staff early in the morning?' And we were advised, go ahead and notify the staff early in the morning, that would be okay." He said most of the staff had left by the time the Justice Department called and that "no one knew about the investigation."
But he acknowledged telling one person: "the chief of staff. And immediately the next morning, I told the president. And shortly thereafter, there was notification sent out to all the members of the White House staff," Gonzales said.
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), appearing on the same program, questioned why Gonzales would not have notified the staff immediately by e-mail and suggested that Fitzgerald pursue whether Card may have given anyone in the White House advance notice of the criminal investigation.
"The real question now is, who did the chief of staff speak to? Did the chief of staff pick up the phone and call Karl Rove? Did the chief of staff pick up the phone and call anybody else?" Biden asked.
FITZGERALD: So, Mr. X -- is it alright if I call you Mr. X?
MR. X: Yes, that's fine.
FITZGERALD: Why did you approach Robert Novak on the street? Did someone ask you to approach Robert Novak on the street?
MR. X: Yes, someone did.
FITZGERALD (raises eyebrows): Really?
MR. X: Yes. It was my wife. We're from Dubuque, and were visiting Washington, DC, and we were lost near Metro Center, and she insisted that I ask the next pedestrian for directions -- you know how men hate to ask directions, right?
FITZGERALD: Yes, yes, I know. You may leave now, Mr. X. Thanks for your help. And please don't speak to the press about this -- it could, uh, be embarrassing.MR. X: For me?
FITZGERALD: No, for me.
The study drew its conclusions by tallying lobbying registrations filed with the Senate and the Justice Department. It classified as eligible to lobby lawmakers who did not leave Congress to take other jobs in government or were not incarcerated.Comedy!
A new study has found that 43 percent of the 198 House and Senate members who left government to join private life since 1998 have registered to lobby. Of the 36 senators who left during that period, half have joined the lobbying ranks.Please read the story. It's one of the far-too-invisible forces that is undermining democracy at every turn, and giving even more advantage to those with money.
[...] Congressional historians say that lawmakers rarely became lobbyists as recently as two decades ago. They considered the profession to be tainted and unworthy of once-elected officials such as themselves. And lobbying firms and trade groups were leery of hiring former members of Congress because they were reputed to be lazy as lobbyists, unwilling to ask former colleagues for favors.
But that began to change noticeably in the late 1980s. The reasons include sky-high lobbying salaries, a growing demand for lobbying services by industry, heavy turnover in Congress, and a change of control in the House of Representatives a decade ago, which opened the way for a flood of new GOP lobbyists.
KANSAS CITY, Missouri (AP) -- It may be President Bush's nickname for key political adviser Karl Rove, but some editors don't think it belongs in their newspapers. About a dozen papers objected to Tuesday's and Wednesday's "Doonesbury" comic strips, and some either pulled or edited them.OK, so let's get this straight: Nonstop blood and violence on TV, including FX's shameless new bloodsoaked series about the Iraq War? NO PROBLEM!
The White House on Monday warned Democrats not to make extensive requests for Roberts' legal writings as a lawyer for previous Republican administrations, saying many such documents are "out of bounds."
Why didn't they just nominate a paper bag, then? A lifetime appointment to the highest court requires the closest scrutiny. He has virtually no paper trail as a judge, but he has been a lawyer, and a government lawyer, for quite a long time.
Personally, I'd like to know more about his role advising Jeb Bush during the November, 2000 election mess in Florida.
WASHINGTON, July 23 - Vice President Dick Cheney is leading a White House lobbying effort to block legislation offered by Republican senators that would regulate the detention, treatment and trials of detainees held by the American military.
[...] The legislation, which is still being drafted, includes provisions to bar the military from hiding prisoners from the Red Cross; prohibit cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees; and use only interrogation techniques authorized in a new Army field manual.
[...] According to Senate officials, Mr. McCain is considering introducing four amendments. One would set standards for interrogating military detainees and would limit them to techniques outlined in a new Army field manual. It would not cover the Central Intelligence Agency.
A second provision would require that all detainees held by the military be registered with the International Committee of the Red Cross. This measures seeks to prevent the holding of unregistered prisoners, or ghost detainees, in Iraq and Afghanistan and at other military sites.
Mr. McCain is also weighing a provision to prohibit the practice of seizing people and sending them abroad for interrogation. This practice has become the subject of mounting international criticism, as some of the countries involved are known to use torture. It has caused a deepening rift between the United States and some of its strongest allies.
Finally, Mr. McCain's amendment would bar cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment of detainees in American custody. This would effectively prohibit not only physical abuse but also practices like placing women's undergarments on the heads of Muslim male prisoners in an effort to humiliate them.
Just in case you've already forgotten the first graf of this story, it said that the White House, led by Vice President Cheney, is lobbying -- hard -- against this bill. A bill to explicitly outlaw torture -- which is already outlawed by a variety of international treaties and agreements to which the United States is a party.
Oh, international law, schminternational schlaw!
Amazing.
In that spirit, the fold-out cover of the new [Regan Press] catalog also features "ripped from the headlines" clips about one of Ms. Regan's favorite subjects: her impending move to Los Angeles.
In announcing the relocation in April, Ms. Regan spoke of her idea to create a sort of literary salon in Hollywood, where television and film executives would meet with authors over cappuccino while Ms. Regan conducted her radio talk show nearby.
CUT TO: Shuttle astronauts eating meal before boarding craft(And I'm a big supporter of the space program. Erg.)
ASTRONAUT 1: Well, thank goodness they'll be crossing their fingers as they light those solid rocket boosters that can't be turned off.
ASTRONAUT 2: Yeah, that's good enough for me! Because billions of dollars of technology should always rely on crossed fingers to work properly! Especially when there are seven lives on the line!
In the largest study of chemical exposure ever conducted on human beings, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday that most American children and adults were carrying in their bodies dozens of pesticides and toxic compounds used in consumer products, many of them linked to potential health threats.Erg.
LONDON, England (AP) -- About 3.6 million people face starvation in the West African nation of Niger unless the international community responds urgently to the food crisis there, the aid agency Oxfam said Thursday.(P.S. OK, Cheney didn't really say that. I confess.)
Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world, was devastated by an invasion of locusts that ate everything green last year and was then hit by drought that lasted until earlier this month. The U.N.'s humanitarian chief, Jan Egeland, said earlier this week that 2.5 million people in landlocked Niger were in desperate need of food after the world community ignored U.N. appeals for urgent aid. Oxfam estimated that almost one million children were at risk.
The sex scenes, inserted in a game whose main character seeks bloody vengeance on gang-filled streets while pickup scantily clad women, had prompted outrage from parent's groups and politicians including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-New York. (emphasis mine)Read the article.
"He has been too benevolent," she said. "He's right that a happy employee is a productive long-term employee, but he could force employees to pick up a little more of the burden." (my emphasis added)And that's for a company already trading at 23 times earnings, where employees and customers are happy -- 44.6 million Americans, a whopping one in five adults, has a Costco card. A Wall Street analyst -- indeed, anyone in America -- who uses the phrase "force employees to pick up a little more of the burden" should be chased out of the country.
Prompted by questions raised in a report by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the prosecutor, Jennifer Joyce, hopes to decide once and for all whether Mr. Griffin was guilty or innocent - though she acknowledges that 25 years later it may be hard to do more than show the flaws in the earlier prosecution.
Still, should Ms. Joyce, the St. Louis circuit attorney, demonstrate Mr. Griffin was not the killer, as the report and even some members of the victim's family contend, it would be the first proven execution of an innocent person, so far as death penalty advocates or opponents can recall.
Even with that antitrust case on his record, Roberts' conservative record is one that businesses are expected to strongly support.CUT TO: Working people, corporate fist, fade to black...
"If business had serious objections to him, he wouldn't have been nominated," said Greg Valliere, political economist with Stanford Washington Research Group.
In fact, the Bush administration reportedly did go over its potential nominees with business groups in an effort to build support for what is likely to be a bruising confirmation battle over social issues such as abortion and right to die.
"He has recent experience in business cases. He writes very careful, narrowly crafted opinions. And he's a very smart person who is not committed to his ideology. You are in a room with him and he exudes good judgment," appellate attorney Robert Gasaway told the Wall Street Journal. Gasaway, who's with Kirkland & Ellis, has helped business groups vet the nominee list.
June marked the ninth time in the last 12 months that employer payrolls came in weaker than forecasts. The 146,000 jobs added last month is barely enough to keep up with growth in the labor force, according to most economists, and it trailed the average increase of about 172,000 jobs a month added over the last 12 months.How, pray tell, can the unemployment rate drop if the number of jobs created doesn't even keep up with the growth in the labor market? Oh, I remember: It's because the "unemployment rate" doesn't tally people who have given up looking for work, but they never seem to mention that in these terribly written news stories. [SHEIN BROKEN RECORD ALERT!] The stats we use -- and that the media slavishly report -- are just meaningless to working people. They are only good for hiding what's really going on.
Some have questioned whether Bush's strategy to fight the terrorists abroad so "we do not have to face them at home" is working when terrorists are planting bombs on London's public transportation. Great Britain is a key member of the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq.What a jerk.
Bush's homeland security adviser, Fran Townsend, defended the strategy during an interview on "Fox News Sunday." The war in Iraq, she said, attracts terrorists there "where we have a fighting military and a coalition that can take them on and not have the sort of civilian casualties that you saw in London." (emphasis mine)
"Even as the average worker's wages are stuck in neutral, corporate profits, professionals' incomes, gains from investments and executive compensation - the kind that frequently comes in the form of stock options - are all surging, supporting healthy gains in the economy.CUT TO: Rippling muscles on the backs of American working people, who are sacrificing to enhance corporate profits.
"Profit has roughly doubled in the last year on revenue growth of about 40 percent," said Alex Mann, co-owner of Clicktime.com, a company in San Francisco that sells time-sheet applications over the Internet. "The top-line growth was very satisfying. There's been very strong growth in the amount left for compensation of the owners and for profits." (emphasis mine)
Amazon.com spokeswoman Patricia Smith said a few thousand customers mistakenly received the notices. "It was a complete goof on our end," Smith said. "I don't know if it was human error or computer error, but the bottom line is, it was an error."P.S. It's not my new favorite Web site. I was totally kidding. Because my new favorite Web site is actually www.tomknowspsychiatry.edu
Still, some fans weren't convinced their books would arrive quickly enough.
"I got one of those e-mails," reads one post on fan Web site mugglenet.com. "I'm getting a second copy at midnight just in case, because if it doesn't arrive I'm canceling my transaction. I'm still furious."
