* atlas vblogged from someone's bathroom - complaining that 'they' bring down all the good conservatives, like, ummmm, Richard Perle. oh, and john bolton is lincolnesque, but the msm doesn't report it. how embarrassing (you'd think!)
* laura:
"The pattern to the US attorney firings? McClatchy: "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.""
* laura:
"It's against the law for the FBI to misuse NSLs and exigent circumstance letters as the DOJ IG has established it has, but a law to date violated by the law enforcers and therefore with no enforcement. What would be the result for "John Doe" to violate his seemingly unlawful gag order and appear say on 60 Minutes and blow this out of the water? For the ACLU to line up all of the recipients of NSLs it has been asked to represent? What would that be? A dozen? Twenty? A hundred? Five hundred? Or perhaps, that a TV news investigation program show them anonymously, in accordance with their gag orders, as various tools (voice disguise, etc.) would allow? Officials would be resigning and fired faster than you can say "Walter Reed," one can imagine. And let's just imagine that at some point in the next two years, not just the recipients of the unlawful NLSs, e.g. the Internet service providers, banks and telephone companies, but the targets of the illegal information requests, are identified? What will be their recourse to hold their government accountable? Most of all, how much of this will be determined to have been about issues unrelated to terrorism at all? How much of this was an excuse to spy on lots of people for whom it couldn't get warrants? 140,000 NSLs is a lot; is every one in 30,000 Americans really a legitimate subject in a terrorism investigation? That's kind of hard to believe."
* digby:
"San Diego does seem to be the nexus of a lot of very high level GOP interest and influence. It is the home of massive defense spending and the corruption that goes with it. Very important GOP appropriations poohbahs hail from there and close environs. And it turns out that a member of the college Republican mafia led by Rove, Norquist, Reed and Abramoff, was running the party down there --- and he's just been elevated to an extremely important party post prior to a presidential election.
There are dots lying around all over the place looking for connection. If the state were run by something other than a cartoon robot, it might even be possible to go at this from that direction, but I doubt we'll see it."
1 comment:
It's no coincidence that the Rove speech was delivered to the Republican National Lawyers' Association. There's an interesting article here (pdf warning) which lays out the group's origins and functions. The short version is that in the early 80's, after the RNC was hit with a consent degree for illegally purging minority voters, the RNLA was quite deliberately founded as an alternative vehicle for vote suppression and other electoral chicanery. Here's a passage on its role in the 2000 Florida recount:
Executive Director Thielen gives this account of the organization’s involvement in the 2000 recount: "After election day, RNLA members were dispatched by party organizations and campaigns to multiple locations within several states. When it became clear that the final result in Florida would determine the outcome of the presidential election, members were concentrated there." Thielen adds, "had it not been for the preeminent litigators retained by the campaign entities and the volunteer attorneys who spent weeks defending the intent of voters before canvassing boards, the will of the nation’s voters would surely have been thwarted." Underlining the organization’s enhanced status among Republicans, White House counsel Albert Gonzales told the group, "You know, I must confess I groaned when I was first asked whether I would be willing to address another group of lawyers. However, when I found out this group included many lawyers that helped secure the election for George W. Bush, I quickly reconsidered."
Chief Justice John Roberts' involvement in the 2000 recourt was due to his position as a long-standing member of RNLA, and the group has targeted vulnerable states in every election since then.
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