No More Pardons

Go sign John Conyers' letter to the preznit to not pardon any of the Traitorgate principals. Via The Green Knight by way of Shakey's Sis.

Kinky Update

As we all know, Kinky Friedman is running for Gubernador de Tejas. He has been noticed by the Independent (UK) via Kinky's site.

For the first few months of his campaign, conventional wisdom had it that Friedman's candidacy was itself a joke, a way of sticking it to Texas's luridly headline-worthy establishment without committing himself to much more than a stream of one-liners to entertain the crowds. Certainly, he can be counted on to show up to events in his trademark jeans, cowboy hat and leather waistcoat, puffing on a fat Cuban cigar as he goes through his well-rehearsed paces.

By now, though, it is clear the campaign is much more than a joke. Kinky has been earning himself both attention and warm praise in the Texas media for his witty articulation of a commonly felt disgust at the state's political leadership. He's running at a more than respectable 18 per cent in the latest opinion poll Ð with more than a year to go before election day.


Perhaps most significantly, the Texas establishment is floundering all around him. Tom DeLay, overlord of the state's congressional delegation, has just been charged with conspiracy and money-laundering. Public opinion is appalled at the governor and the legislature for relegating the Texas school system to 50th place among the 50 states.

The road ahead is complicated, however, by Texas's deep resistance to independent candidates. Not only can Friedman not take part in the primaries next March. He actually has to convince tens of thousands of voters not to vote in the primaries and sign a petition supporting his candidacy in the November general election instead. "Save yourselves for Kinky!" is the watchword.


At a typical recent event outside a coffee shop in Wimberley, in the hill country not far from Austin, the Texas capital, Friedman was greeted more like a rock star than a politician. A jokey country band called the Pluckin' Idiots warmed up for him, and the crowd, arrayed on three sides of a courtyard, cheered his every line. Some were liberals, some conservatives. Soon they were all chanting: "Kinky for governor! Why the hell not?" Kinky himself deadpanned: "Bring me whatever you've got. I'll sign t-shirts, posters, bumper stickers. I'll sign anything except bad legislation."

I'd vote for him in a heartbeat if I didn't have to move to Texas. Maybe an absentee ballot...

It's a byooty-ful day...

...in Ah-nold's Neighborhood.

Dick at the Heart of Darkness

Tennessee Guerilla Women brings us Maureen Dowd.

The shocking thing about the trellis of revelations showing Dick Cheney, the self-styled Mr. Strong America, as the central figure in dark conspiracies to juice up a case for war and demonize those who tried to tell the public the truth is how unshocking it all is.

It's exactly what we thought was going on, but we never thought we'd actually hear the lurid details: Cheney and Rummy, the two old compadres from the Nixon and Ford days, in a cabal running the country and the world into the ground, driven by their poisonous obsession with Iraq, while Junior is out of the loop, playing in the gym or on his mountain bike.

Mr. Cheney has been so well protected by his Praetorian guard all these years that it's been hard for the public to see his dastardly deeds and petty schemes. But now, because of Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation and candid talk from Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Wilkerson, he's been flushed out as the heart of darkness: all sulfurous strands lead back to the man W. aptly nicknamed Vice.

MoDo's in good form today. Go read.

Rats . . . leaving

Rook has the story of one of the first.

It's closin' in....

Raw Story

Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked the grand jury investigating the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson to indict Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Bush's Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, lawyers close to the investigation tell RAW STORY.

Fitzgerald has also asked the jury to indict Libby on a second charge: knowingly outing a covert operative, the lawyers said. They said the prosecutor believes that Libby violated a 1982 law that made it illegal to unmask an undercover CIA agent.

Those close to the investigation said Rove was offered a deal Tuesday to plead guilty to perjury for a reduced charge. Rove's lawyer was told that Fitzgerald would drop an obstruction of justice charge if his client agreed not to contest allegations of perjury, they said.

Rove declined to plead guilty to the reduced charge, the sources said, indicating through his attorney Robert Luskin that he intended to fight the charges. A call placed to Luskin was not returned.

Anybody who's spent a little time in the real world knows this: If you did the crime, TAKE THE DEAL! When you get found guilty, and you will, the penalty will be more severe for taking up the court's time with a bullshit defense.

Of course, if you didn't do the crime you should fight it. Chances are that you will be convicted anyway.

As long as Rove is convicted, I don't give a shit whether or not he actually did it, although I am sure he did. I don't care. He has to go down. It's the first step on the way to the top.

Hypocrite

More on Repub fluffer Kay Bailey Hutchinson:

BACK in 1999 when the U.S. Senate tried and ultimately acquitted President Bill Clinton after he was impeached by the House, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas had no doubt about the seriousness of the alleged crime. Clinton stood accused of lying under oath and obstructing the investigation of his relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky.

"What would we be telling Americans," Hutchison asked, "if the Senate of the United States were to conclude: The president lied under oath as an element of a scheme to obstruct the due process of law, but we chose to look the other way. I cannot make that choice. I cannot look away."

[. . .]

If Hutchison found perjury and obstruction reason enough to throw a president out of office, surely those offenses would be sufficient cause to charge people if they obstructed a probe of a potential violation of national security laws. The unmasking of a covert CIA operative can have life and death consequences for previous associates met over the years in countries around the world.

Public officials such as Sen. Hutchison do not enhance their stature when they seem to support one standard of justice for officials of the opposing party and another for their own. What was good for the Democratic goose in the Clinton impeachment trial should be good enough for the Republican gander in the Plame investigation.

From the Houston Chronicle via Maru.

I love this. The Repubs are showing their hypocrisy daily and they're doing it for all the world to see. Americans might have painfully short memories, but the GOP beat the Clinton impeachment drum so loudly, people can't forget. Do any Repubs have credibility anymore?

Vice President for Torture

That's the headline for this WaPo editorial:

VICE PRESIDENT Cheney is aggressively pursuing an initiative that may be unprecedented for an elected official of the executive branch: He is proposing that Congress legally authorize human rights abuses by Americans. "Cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners is banned by an international treaty negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified by the United States. The State Department annually issues a report criticizing other governments for violating it. Now Mr. Cheney is asking Congress to approve legal language that would allow the CIA to commit such abuses against foreign prisoners it is holding abroad. In other words, this vice president has become an open advocate of torture.

The NYTimes weighs in as well:

Amid all the natural and political disasters it faces, the White House is certainly tireless in its effort to legalize torture. This week, Vice President Dick Cheney proposed a novel solution for the moral and legal problems raised by the use of American soldiers to abuse prisoners and the practice of turning captives over to governments willing to act as proxies in doing the torturing. Mr. Cheney wants to make it legal for the Central Intelligence Agency to do this wet work.

President Bush's threat to veto the entire military budget over this issue was bizarre enough by itself, considering that the amendment has the support of more than two dozen former military leaders, including Colin Powell. They know that torture doesn't produce reliable intelligence and endangers Americans' lives.

But Mr. Cheney's proposal was even more ludicrous. It would give the president the power to allow government agencies outside the Defense Department (the administration has in mind the C.I.A.) to mistreat and torture prisoners as long as that behavior was part of "counterterrorism operations conducted abroad" and they were not American citizens. That would neatly legalize the illegal prisons the C.I.A. is said to be operating around the world and obviate the need for the torture outsourcing known as extraordinary rendition. It also raises disturbing questions about Iraq, which the Bush administration has falsely labeled a counterterrorism operation.

Absolutely despicable. About what I've come to expect from that homunculus (reference to the bad guys in "Fullmetal Alchemist").

As a Nation that tells the world how much we respect human rights and how they should too, we've either got to try to live up to our ideals or just fuckin' scrap 'em. I prefer the former.

Still Hungry?

Another Repug needs to eat his words (via Is That Legal):

That Was Now, This Is Then


John Hinderaker yesterday:
Tomorrow may bring indictments of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby on charges that can charitably be described as trivial. Tonight, one of our readers urged us to link to President Bush's great speech to the Joint Armed Forces Officers' Wives' group rather than being distracted by the minutiae of the day.

John Hinderaker, December 17, 1998:
"Like many others, we have been frustrated by the apparent inability of much of the American public to take the Clinton scandals seriously. "It's not about sex," we have patiently repeated to our benighted friends. "It's about perjury. It's about obstruction of justice. The sex is only incidental. At most it was the motive for the crimes. You wouldn't think murder was unimportant just because the motive for the murder was sex, would you?" So goes our argument."

Maybe those poor folks at Powerline need a hug.

Gary Hart Commentary

Via Americablog:

Here is the crime in outing of CIA agent

It is now fashionable among columnists supporting the Bush administration, New York Times journalist Judith Miller, Robert Novak and the increasing network of senior administration officials implicated in the Valerie Plame Wilson outing to say, "So what? Where's the crime?"

The federal statute making it a criminal penalty to knowingly divulge the identity of anyone working undercover for the Central Intelligence Agency was not enacted in a vacuum. In the early 1970s, in part as a result of the radicalization of individuals and groups over the Vietnam War, a former CIA employee named Philip Agee wrote a book revealing the identities of several dozen CIA employees, many under deep cover and some including agency station chiefs in foreign capitals.

Many of the countries in which those CIA employees were working themselves had extremely radical and violent elements stirred to hatred over their opposition to America's conduct in the Vietnam War. So, by revealing their identities, Agee had knowingly and willingly placed these American citizens at risk. Violent consequences were predictable.

Richard Welch, a brilliant Harvard-educated classicist, had been stationed in Greece as CIA station chief only a few months before he was murdered, by a radical Greek terrorist organization called the 17th of November, in the doorway of his house in Athens on Dec. 23, 1975. Had Agee not divulged his name, there is every reason to believe that Welch would be alive today after decades of loyal service to his country.

...The political irony of all this is that conservative elements in America have always proclaimed themselves more concerned than anyone else with national security, the sanctity of classified information, protection of sources, support for our intelligence and military services, and so on. At radical times in our past, irresponsible leftist groups thought it was their duty to try to reveal the names of CIA agents. Now, under a conservative administration, it is these conservative national security champions who are saying, with regard to the "outing" of a CIA undercover officer, "Where's the crime?"

...So, there's the crime. To casually and willfully endanger the life of an undercover CIA agent is a felony. You either believe in taking the laws of the United States seriously or you do not. Citizens - even highly placed ones - do not get to pick and choose which laws they will obey and which they will not. Miller and her publisher may think she's a hero, but I don't. It is well established that there is no First Amendment protection for a journalist or anyone else to withhold evidence of a crime.

There is one final irony to this story. On Christmas Eve in 1975, I got a call at my home from the director of the CIA, William Colby. He asked if I would intervene with the White House to obtain presidential approval to have Welch buried at Arlington National Cemetery, a hero fallen in service to his country. I quickly called President Ford's chief of staff on Colby's behalf and made the request. Within two hours, the president had agreed to sign the order permitting Welch to be buried at Arlington.

The chief of staff's name was Richard Cheney.

Unbelievable

ABC's Terry Moran: Has Vice President Cheney ever lied to the American people?

Did you see Snotty's face after he was asked that question? I thought he would finally break down and either laugh insanely and lose control of his bodily funcions, or begin sobbing uncontrollably. Then you saw something go 'click' behind his eyes and he lied again with a straight face. Amazing. I'm no pshrink but anybody who can do that has some serious wiring problems. Did we collect every sociopath in the country and turn the White House into a halfway house for 'em?

Hungry?

Time for Repubs to eat their words:

Bill Frist (R-TN): To not remove President Clinton for grand jury perjury lowers uniquely the Constitution's removal standard, and thus requires less of the man who appoints all federal judges than we require of those judges themselves.

I will have no part in the creation of a constitutional double-standard to benefit the President. He is not above the law. If an ordinary citizen committed these crimes, he would go to jail.

Lindsey Graham: Should he be impeached? Very quickly; the hardest decision I think I will ever make. Learning that the president lied to the grand jury about sex, I still believe that every president of the United States, regardless of the matter they called to testify about before a grand jury should testify truthfully and if they don't they should be subject to losing their job.

I believe that about Bill Clinton and I'll believe that about the next president. If it had been a Republican, I would have still believed that and I would hope that if a Republican person had done all this that some of us would've went (sic) over and told him, You need to leave office. [em in original]

[. . .]

Lots more at Jane's.

All you tight-assed Jesus freaks who think an extra-marital blowjob is the end-all better get in touch with reality. If you hadn't impeached Clinton, we wouldn't be in this position right now. If your boys would have been out getting their cocks sucked instead of plotting the rip-off of the American people, they wouldn't be facing the possiblity of another Watergate right now. Idiots, morons, assholes, the lot of you.

Miers Watch

Michael Stickings over at The Reaction, a guy I love because he tries to be as objective as possible, has been on a Miers watch. As he explains it:

...mostly focusing on the schisms on the right (but adding some liberal and moderate reaction, too -- plus my own views). So far, I've done three installments...

Here, here, and here. Check him out if you haven't already.

Come on down!

Via the Alternate Brain Mail Bag from Steve Clemons:

An uber-insider source has just reported the following to TWN:

1. 1-5 indictments are being issued. The source feels that it will be towards the higher end.

2. The targets of indictment have already received their letters.

3. The indictments will be sealed indictments and "filed" tomorrow.

4. A press conference is being scheduled for Thursday.

The shoe is dropping.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

2000

I'm too pissed off. Go see Glen.

The Italian Connection

From UPI

The CIA leak inquiry that threatens senior White House aides has now widened to include the forgery of documents on African uranium that started the investigation, according to NAT0 intelligence sources.

This suggests the inquiry by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald into the leaking of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame has now widened to embrace part of the broader question about the way the Iraq war was justified by the Bush administration.

There can be few more serious charges against a government than going to war on false pretences, or having deliberately inflated or suppressed the evidence that justified the war.

And since no WMD were found in Iraq after the 2003 war, despite the evidence from the U.N. inspections of the 1990s that demonstrated that Saddam Hussein had initiated both a nuclear and a biological weapons program, the strongest plank in the Bush administration's case for war has crumbled beneath its feet.

The marketing is over but the war goes on. The press is baying and the law closes in. The team of Bush loyalists in the White House is demoralized and braced for disaster.

As my Swabbie friends would say, "Stand by for a ram." I hope it takes three days just to read the indictments.

Rain

It's raining in New York again. I'm sick of it. Yes, it could be a lot worse, but I work in the shit. I'm so waterlogged, I'm waiting for moss to start growing in the crack of my ass.

Quote of the Morning

From the CultureGhost:

It would seem that as a nation we are becoming stupider by the hour. Go ahead, teach intelligent fuckin' design, your children are already bloody morons to begin with...

Indictment fever

Okay, I'm out of my mind. Jane and ReddHedd have had me entralled every day over the ins and outs of this case and now I feel like I'm coming to the end of an Agatha Christie novel. I wanna know whodunit. Gimmie an 'I'. Gimmie an 'N'. Gimmie a 'D' . . . Come on, Fitz, let's bring it.

National Treasure

------------------------------------------------------
MSNBC Breaking News
------------------------------------------------------

Civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks has died, NBC News has learned.

We've lost more than we will ever realize.