Several Republicans close to Bush said they believe the CIA leak investigation has taken a particular toll, reducing Rove's role in key decisions and prompting Bush to rely on other, less sure-footed advisers. One well-connected outside adviser cited the Miers pick as an example. He said even if Rove considered the selection a risk or mistake, he knew he was in no position to press Bush on it.Read More......
"My sense is Karl knows he has spent a lot of political capital with the president on this CIA leak case," the adviser said. "No matter how close Karl is to the president, there is a limit of how much capital you can spend even with a close, close friend."
White House press secretary Scott McClellan denied that Rove had little input in the Miers nomination. "I don't think that's an accurate reflection at all," he said. Asked if Rove's involvement in White House issues had shifted, McClellan said: "No. He continues to perform his duties."
Two Republicans close to the White House said officials are nervous that Rove and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the two most powerful staffers in the federal government, could be indicted by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald within two weeks. While the idea struck many on the Bush team as unfathomable a few months ago, now the common assumption is that both men could be in trouble.
Article VI of the Constitution states that “No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” As the New York Sun pointed out recently, it is the single most absolutist and emphatic sentence in the entire Constitution. For those who would say that just because President Bush considered Miers’ religion in nominating her, that doesn’t necessarily mean he was imposing any kind of “religious test,” I would implore you to think of it this way: if part of the reason the President nominated Miers was her religion, then that necessitates the fact that part of the reason other prospects were not nominated was because they did not have the same “quality” of religion that Harriet Miers did. Thus, they were subjected to a religious test by the President in considering them for an appointment to the Supreme Court. This is grossly unconstitutional, and if it is allowed to stand, it will be a tacit admission that the “Religious Test” clause has become outdated and inoperable, and we will be one major step closer to theocracy.He's right. This really is troubling. The Republicans, who claim to be such lovers of the constitution, are actually the folks most trying to trash that document and our entire democracy. But isn't that just like the new breed of Republicans running the party, do as they say not as they do. Read More......
Most of Iraq is in a state of anarchy, with insurgents controlling parts of Baghdad just half a mile from the so-called Green Zone, an Independent debate was told last night.Read More......
"The Americans must leave Iraq and they will leave Iraq, but they can't leave Iraq and that is the equation that turns sand to blood. At some point, they will have to talk to the insurgents.
"But I don't know how, because those people who might be negotiators the United Nations, the Red Cross their headquarters have been blown up. The reality now in Iraq is the project is finished. Most of Iraq, except Kurdistan, is in a state of anarchy."
"Every time I go to Baghdad it's worse, every time I ask myself how we can keep going. Because the real question is: is the story worth the risk?"
He attacked television reporters for flinching from depicting the everyday bloodshed on the streets of Iraq. "You can go and see Saving Private Ryan or Kingdom of Heaven, people have their heads cut off. When it come to real heads being cut off, you can't. I think television connives with governments at war."
"CNN has confirmed that the Texas prosecutor Ronnie Earle, who has already indicted Tom Delay twice, has issued a subpoena for the home records, incoming and outgoing calls, to the home of the former majority leader Tom Delay."Read More......
In what may turn out to be one of the biggest free-falls in the history of presidential polling, President Bush's job-approval rating among African Americans has dropped to 2 percent, according to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.Read More......
The drop among blacks drove Bush's overall job approval ratings to an all-time low of 39 percent in this poll. By comparison, 45 percent of whites and 36 percent of Hispanics approve of the job Bush is doing.
A few months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found Bush's approval rating among blacks at 51 percent. As recently as six months ago, it was at 19 percent.
Veteran conservative columnist and pundit John Fund asserts in the Wall Street Journal today that the offices of Vice President Dick Cheney and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales tried to block the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, RAW STORY has learned.Read More......
"A last minute effort was made to block the choice of Ms. Miers, including the offices of Vice President Cheney and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales," Fund claims. "It fell on deaf ears."
"Indeed, even internal advice was shunned," Fund adds. White House Chief of Staff Andrew "Card is said to have shouted down objections to Ms. Miers at staff meetings. A senator attending the White House swearing-in of John Roberts four days before the Miers selection was announced was struck by how depressed White House staffers were during discussion of the next nominee. He says their reaction to him could have been characterized as, "Oh brother, you have no idea what's coming."
Liberty Counsel, a conservative legal advocacy group with close ties to the Rev. Jerry Falwell, announced Tuesday that it is opposing Harriet Miers’ nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court....Yes, but it's the message Bush is sending, and frankly most of the religious right is sending. They know Americans (including most Republicans) can't stand them, that America doesn't support their extremist views (like butting themselves into the Terri Schiavo debate), and as a result the religious right and its political cronies in the GOP are simply terrified to publicly say what they really want - a Supreme Court justice who will overturn Roe v. Wade. They won't say it. And Bush won't say it. Why? Because they don't even have the courage of their own convictions. And that's because they know they don't represent real Americans.
"...selecting a nominee who has held her views in silence for 60 years sends a wrong message to conservatives - if you want to be appointed to the federal bench, you should keep your views to yourself. That’s a terrible message to send to our future leaders.”
This is rarely considered a crime. In the Plame case, it might technically be one, but it was not the intent of anyone to out a CIA agent and have her assassinated (which happened once) but to assassinate the character of her husband. This is an entirely different thing. She got hit by a ricochet.Ok, that's just stupid. No one would write such a thing unless they truly had no idea what it means to work with classified information or the intelligence community or in the entire field of foreign affairs. ANYONE who has dealt with highly classified information and CIA agents, and I have from my time on the Hill and during a summer job at State, is acutely aware that outing the identity of an undercover CIA agent - let alone one who works on weapons of mass destruction issues in the Middle East - is an extremely dangerous venture. I mean, it's hard to even explain what an obvious self-explanatory point this is.
More is at stake here than bringing down Karl Rove or some other White House apparatchik, or even settling some score with Miller, who is sometimes accused of taking this nation to war in Iraq all by herself. The greater issue is control of information. If anything good comes out of the Iraq war, it has to be a realization that bad things can happen to good people when the administration -- any administration -- is in sole control of knowledge and those who know the truth are afraid to speak up. This -- this creepy silence -- will be the consequence of dusting off rarely used statutes to still the tongues of leakers and intimidate the press in its pursuit of truth, fame and choice restaurant tables. Apres Miller comes moi.Actually, what we learnged as a result of this war is that our media isn't worth a hill of beans. The Washington Post, YOUR NEWSPAPER MR. COHEN, suggested in an editorial that only partisan critics would allege that the Bush administration intentionally lied about the WMD in Iraq. Now that we know this to be true, and are on the verge of having proof of a criminal conspiracy to do the same, you suddenly aren't interested because we're supposed to trust YOU to get the job done for us. Uh huh. We trusted you for five years. Look where it got us.
...Apparently Lewis Libby and Karl Rove, during the course of the special prosecutor's investigation, they almost certainly never thought that either Judith Miller or Matthew Cooper or the journals would cooperate. It's been very rare that a prosecutor – a federal prosecutor has been [inaudible] to pressure journalists into testifying against their will. It's very rare that journalists have testified, and it's almost a historical thing now for Judith Miller to spend 85 days in jail. So, I think it was -- Libby was apparently in the hope that Miller wouldn’t testify, as Karl Rove was, that Matthew Cooper wouldn’t.This is so true. Those lying traitors thought the press would protect them. And, they almost got away with it.
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