Bad Deeds for 4-16-07

Gonzales Claims Contradicted Again – The former Justice Department official who carried out the firings of eight U.S. attorneys has told congressional investigators that – despite Atty. General Alberto Gonzales’s public claims to the contrary – several of the prosecutors had no performance problems and that a memo on the firings was distributed at a meeting attended by Gonzales. One day before he faces Congress in a last-ditch effort to restore his credibility, a new poll shows that a majority of Americans think Gonzales is lying and should lose his job.

DOJ Documents Contradict Sampson, Describe Effort to ‘Muddy Coverage’ – The latest document dump from the Justice Department is barely a couple hours old, and has already yielded two gems: first, an e-mail from Gonzales’s former chief of staff Kyle Sampson suggesting replacements for seven U.S. attorneys sent nearly a year before their dismissal, contradicting Sampson’s congressional testimony. Then there’s the e-mail from the DOJ’s spokeswoman to top White House officials, describing the Department’s efforts to “muddy the coverage” of the fired prosecutors’ qualifications one day before several of those prosecutors appeared before Congress.

Report: France Warned US of Al Qaeda Plot in Early 2001 – A French intelligence service learned as early as January 2001 that al-Qaeda was working on a plot to hijack U.S. airliners and passed the information on to the CIA, according to a report published Monday in French newspaper Le Monde, citing 328 pages of classified reports on the terrorist network written up between July 2000 and October 2001.

The Decider can’t decide – Asked at a recent news conference about congressional war powers, President Bush acknowledged that lawmakers are “exercising [their] legitimate authority” in seeking a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, seemingly contradicting a March 19 White House statement that such bills are an unconstitutional challenge to the President’s authority.

American Enterprise Institute fellow continues to claim links between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al Qaida terrorists – Richard Perle, the American Enterprise Institute fellow who helped build the case for the Iraq War prior to the US invasion in 2003, appeared on CNN’s ‘Late Edition’ with Wolf Blizter last night and continued to cling to the existence of links between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al Qaida terrorists.

White House wants it ‘difficult for people to vote’ – On Sunday’s edition of ABC’s This Week, pundit Robert Reich suggests the core issue behind the US attorney firings and missing White House emails. Reich says, “I think the question here is that once you start asking, ‘Should the emails have been disclosed?’ — ‘Which emails to disclose?’ — is that the public loses sight of what the big issue is in the background.” Reich continues, saying, “The issue at stake here has to do with what the White House was trying to do with the US attorneys. What the White House was trying to do in terms of, perhaps, creating a public image of voter fraud across this country that would entitle the White House to make it more difficult for people to vote.

Ultra-Conservative Bill Kristol says Don Imus controversy is spectacle of liberalism in America – Fox News employee Bill Kristol, a founding member of the Project for a New American Century and a founder, together with Fox’s Rupert Murdoch, of the Weekly Standard magazine, which is owned by Fox’s parent company News Corp., weighed in on the Don Imus controversy last night (April 15, 2007) on Fox News Sunday. Kristol said, “I think this has been such a spectacle of vulgarity and idiocy and pomposity and hypocrisy on all sides, that it’s hard to believe anything good will really come out of it but it’s been fun for conservatives to watch. You know, basically it’s just been an incredible spectacle of liberalism in America. …”

Ann Coulter to get Coulter $30,000 plus travel expenses to preach hate and intolerance at a university – The Livingston Economic Club (LEC) has opted to pay Coulter $30,000 plus travel expenses to preach hate and intolerance to a crowd of 200+ at Cleary University in October. Even worse, Coulter kicks off the Cleary University Founders Week Celebration. Contact the Livingston Economic Club at lec@cleary.edu, or call them at 734.929.9107, if you think that Coulter is over the line on decency. More contacts to e-mail or call at the link below:

Regular watchers of Fox News found to be among least knowledgeable Americans – A new survey of 1,502 adults released Sunday by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that Americans who scored the highest in knowledge of national affairs were regular watchers of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and the Colbert Report. Virtually bringing up the rear were regular watchers of Fox News. Only 1 in 3 could answer 2 out of 3 questions correctly. Fox topped only network morning show viewers.

 

 

Wolfowitz: An Example of NeoCon Principals in Microcosm – The saga of Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank really is indicative of the US under neo-con control: A crony with fairly insubstantial bona fides within the arena is appointed to a position of critical importance on the world stage solely on the basis of his connections to ideological brothers. He then bullies and pushes his own arrogant notions, alienating his colleagues and promotes more cronies (and love interests) without regard to appearances. Then when the house of cards inevitably comes tumbling down, he pleads ignorance or cries victim and must send out other cronies to argue for his job. How many times have we seen this pattern–with very little variation–play out again and again in the Bush White House? There is one passage in a Washington Post report that may be a much larger issue than his promoting of his girlfriend:

“Both staff and management also have raised concerns over what several described as Wolfowitz’s insistence that the bank accelerate its lending to Iraq and open an office there.

A principal architect of the Iraq war as deputy defense secretary during President Bush’s first term, Wolfowitz has pressed the issue in the bank against strong concerns about security and poor governance in Iraq.”

Regards,

Jim