Immigrant Bill, Lacking 15 Votes, Stalls in Senate: The immigration overhaul that was endorsed by President Bush has been stalled as "senators rejected a Democratic call to move toward a final vote on the compromise legislation after Republicans complained they were not given sufficient opportunity to reshape the bill. Supporters of cutting off the debate got only 45 of the 60 votes they needed; 50 senators opposed the cutoff." The immigration bill is dead for the rest of this year. And since next year is an election year, I would doubt that the Senate would even bring it up for another debate.
Cheney urged wiretaps: This Washington Post article is just damning:
Vice President Cheney told Justice Department officials that he disagreed with their objections to a secret surveillance program during a high-level White House meeting in March 2004, a former senior Justice official told senators yesterday.
The meeting came one day before White House officials tried to get approval for the same program from then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, who lay recovering from surgery in a hospital, according to former deputy attorney general James B. Comey.
Comey's disclosures, made in response to written questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee, indicate that Cheney and his aides were more closely involved than previously known in a fierce internal battle over the legality of the warrantless surveillance program. The program allowed the National Security Agency to monitor phone calls and e-mails between the United States and overseas.
Comey said that Cheney's office later blocked the promotion of a senior Justice Department lawyer, Patrick Philbin, because of his role in raising concerns about the surveillance.
What is so incredible here is that Vice President Cheney not only disagreed with Justice Department officials on the illegal secret domestic spying program, but that Cheney retaliated against those officials who disagreed with him by blocking the promotion of senior Justice Department lawyer Patrick Philbin. Even worst is that White House officials pushed to get a hospitalized John Ashcroft to approve this illegal program--you have to wonder if Dick Cheney was involved in pushing Ashcroft to approve his illegal domestic spying program. Has there ever been another government official that has exuded such evil as that of Dick Cheney?
War czar nominee says Iraq government unprepared to make reforms: This McClatchy story is now reporting that Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, who is President Bush's "war czar," believes that there is no military solution to the war in Iraq, and that the Iraqi government has "very little progress" in ending the ethnic civil war there. In other words, Iraq is going to hell in a handbasket. But Lute also "promised to give Bush his unvarnished military advice and to keep the lives of U.S. military men and women foremost in this thinking as the administration shapes its war policy." So we've got to keep the troops in Iraq for the next couple of decades, or at least until Iraq becomes like Korea.
No comments:
Post a Comment