Q&A: Turkish political crisis

* guardian: "Q&A: Turkish political crisis"

* via froomkin:

""Two U.S. House Democrats have signed on as co-sponsors to Dennis Kucinich's resolution seeking to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney. They are William Lacy Clay, from St. Louis, and Jan Schakowsky, of Chicago.""

interesting.

* nyt op-ed:

"IF Alberto Gonzales will not resign, Congress should impeach him.
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Impeachment is in bad odor in these post-Clinton days. It needn’t be. Though provoked by individual misconduct, the power to impeach is at bottom a tool granted Congress to defend the constitutional order. Mr. Gonzales’s behavior in the United States attorney affair is of a piece with his role as facilitator of this administration’s claims of unreviewable executive power.
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The president may yet yield and send Mr. Gonzales packing. If not, Democrats may decide that to impeach Alberto Gonzales would be politically unwise. But before dismissing the possibility of impeachment, Congress should recognize that the issue here goes deeper than the misbehavior of one man. The real question is whether Republicans and Democrats are prepared to defend the constitutional authority of Congress against the implicit claim of an administration that it can do what it pleases and, when called to account, send an attorney general of the United States to Capitol Hill to commit amnesia on its behalf."

* john:

"When your head of state, your commander in chief, the man in charge of the only remaining superpower in the world, is a total freaking moron, it matters."

* Larisa at Cannon's:

"Once you understand that (the niger forgeries) was part of a larger mechanism, then the next logical question would be, who had the ability and authority to organize, fund, and control the mechanism? This is where you are not far off with regard to Clarridge, but again, for the wrong reasons.

Just as in Iran Contra, the operational role was given to the NSC, which once again housed one of the most criminal people ever to have served in any administration, Eliott Abrams. The rest of the NSC consisted of Cheney loyalists like Rumsfeld and so forth. Cheney set the policy, NSC carried it out via creating a secondary intelligence outfit, an illegal one at that, running out of the DOD known as the OSP, with Shulsky reporting to Abrams and Hadley.
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To focus on Martino and/or Ledeen, again, is to miss the actual real scandal here: that the NSC on order of the VP created an illegal channel of intelligence in the DOD in order to fabricate evidence to lead us into an illegal war (and likely using taxpayer money to accomplish this task). That is what I think McGovern was attempting to say, although I may be wrong, it is my interpretation."

* Ken has some details regarding the Stuart Bowen complaint:

"It’s hard to know what to make of some of the allegations I’m told are in the report; it’s possible that they are being made by people out to get Bowen and Cruz. But Bowen is apparently charged with spending many hours on www.match.com and arranging dates during work hours, and Cruz reportedly told employees that she was a Wiccan who could cast spells on people, and said she preferred hiring young “hunks” to work in the office. She is also accused of propositioning junior employees in a crude fashion, once even proposing a threesome."

* josh:

"Lam was in the midst of an historic public corruption investigation targetting White House allies on Capitol Hill, White House appointees at the CIA and -- though it's seldom been discussed publicly and the evidence remains murky -- I suspect, appointees at the Department of Defense.

The mere fact that DOJ officials can apparently point to no discussions, thought process or paper trail of any deliberations about how Lam's firing would affect these cases speaks volumes. And when you look at the whole picture you see that everything about Lam's firing comes down to corruption cases stemming out of the Cunningham investigation.

And look what Lam was told by McNulty's nominal deputy (see this post for McNulty's apparent power at DOJ) Michael Elston when she asked for a brief reprieve to deal with these highly sensitive cases. He made clear she was to be gone in "weeks, not months" and that the order for her firing was "coming from the very highest levels of the government."

Those, again, are Lam's words from her written responses to congressional interrogatories. If they're accurate, what do you think 'very highest levels of the government' means? And if this is all about disagreements over immigration enforcement policy, why the rush?"