CREW: Millions of White House emails have been deleted

I found this through TMP Muckraker, and it is just astounding! This is from The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington:

In a startling new revelation, CREW has also learned through two confidential sources that the Executive Office of the President (EOP) has lost over five million emails generated between March 2003 and October 2005. The White House counsel’s office was advised of these problems in 2005 and CREW has been told that the White House was given a plan of action to recover these emails, but to date nothing has been done to rectify this significant loss of records.

This story is also being reported in Americablog, Think Progress, Crooks and Liars, and Daily Kos. Five million email letters were deleted, and the Bush White House has not done anything yet to recover these emails. It is rather ironic that as we find out about this latest story on the missing emails, the Bush White House acknowledges that they may also be missing some emails regarding the attorney purge scandal. Congress needs to start issuing subpoenas on the White House emails, the email servers, and the backup tapes before the administration attempts to delete everything they can in order to hide their corruption. And the subpoenas shouldn't stop at just the Bush White House. Congress also needs to issue subpoenas on the Republican National Committee email servers, hard drives, and backup tapes as well, in order to recover the emails from the RNC email accounts that the White House staffers have been using to circumvent White House security and documentation measures. It has already started with the Senate Judiciary Committee issuing subpoenas against the White House emails. Now both the Senate and the House must expand their investigation into this Bush White House corruption and gather all of these emails from both the White House and the Republican National Committee.

You can read the full CREW report here.

Leahy: Bush aides lying about e-mails

This is off MSNBC News:

WASHINGTON - President Bush's aides are lying about White House e-mails sent on a Republican account that might have been lost, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy suggested Thursday, vowing to subpoena those documents if the administration fails to cough them up.

"They say they have not been preserved. I don't believe that!" Leahy shouted from the Senate floor.

"You can't erase e-mails, not today. They've gone through too many servers," said Leahy, D-Vt. "Those e-mails are there, they just don't want to produce them. We'll subpoena them if necessary."

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said there is no effort to purposely keep the e-mails under wraps, and that the counsel's office is doing everything it can to recover any that were lost.

"The purpose of our review is to make every reasonable effort to recover potentially lost e-mails, and that is why we've been in contact with forensic experts," he said.

Leahy scoffed.

"I've got a teenage kid in my neighborhood that can go get 'em for them," he told reporters later.

Senate Democrats continued to toughen their stance against the White House over the firings of eight prosecutors over the winter.

After his speech, Leahy's committee approved - but did not issue - new subpoenas to compel the administration to produce documents and testimony about the firings.

Democrats say the firings might have been improper, but that probe yielded a weightier question: Whether White House officials such as political adviser Karl Rove are intentionally conducting sensitive official presidential business via non-governmental accounts to evade a law requiring preservation - and eventual disclosure - of presidential records.

I am just amazed at the outright lies this Bush administration keeps telling the American people here. When you have White House aids, such as Karl Rove, using a Republican-sponsored email system and RNC-provided laptop computers as a means to avoid any type of congressional oversight into this administration. The corruption runs deep into this administration, which makes the Nixon administration's Watergate scandal seem like a church picnic. It is all about not leaving any type of paper or electronic trail--this administration doesn't want any records of illegal activities to be revealed. Consider this McClatchy story:

WASHINGTON - White House officials said Wednesday that some presidential aides may have improperly used a back-channel e-mail system to conduct government business.

A conference call that was intended to clear up questions about the use of a Republican Party-sponsored e-mail system at the White House, however, left many questions unanswered. It's still unclear whether White House aides used the outside e-mail system to try to keep their communications secret and how many e-mails might have gone astray.

Some communications that have come to light suggest that officials may have used the outside system to conceal some of their communications.

"I now have an RNC blackberry which you can use to e-mail me any time. No security issues like my WH email," Susan Ralston, a former Rove aide, told now-disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff in a 2001 e-mail.

White House officials were unable to say whether e-mails sent through the outside system could be retrieved. Congressional investigators want to see any back-channel e-mails that might shed light on the firings of eight U.S. attorneys last year.

No security issues like my WH email. No electronic trail. This allows Ralson to conduct whatever illegal or corrupt activities she wants to for this Bush White House. All for the accumulation of power, money, one political party domination of the government. It really doesn't matter what the reason for these illegal activities are. What matters is that this is an administration that will do anything it can to maintain absolute power that it has accumulated over the past seven years.

That is what this scandal is really about.

Army soldiers to serve 15-month extended tours in Iraq

Looks like the Bush administration is well on their way towards completely destroying the Army. From The Washington Post:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced this afternoon that all active-duty Army soldiers currently deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan could serve extended tours of up to 15 months in combat, meaning more than 100,000 troops now at war probably will be kept overseas three months longer than their expected one-year deployments.

The new Pentagon policy also means that tens of thousands of Army troops headed to Iraq and Afghanistan in coming months likely will serve tours 25 percent longer than the one-year tours the Army has had in place for the two conflicts over the past five years.

Gates said the change is necessary to prevent five Army brigades from deploying to combat before they complete a desired 12-month rest period at home and to give predictability to soldiers and their families.

So instead of 12-month tours, the more than 100,000 troops will be kept in Iraq for 15 months. The Army cannot find enough bodies to replace their already worn-out troops, so they've been lowering their standards for recruits. The Army has had to offer bigger bonuses, and raise the age limit to make up for the falling enlistment numbers. There is even a strange idea of allowing foreign citizens to join the U.S. Army as a fast-track means of gaining U.S. citizenship. And while the Army was able to achieve their recruiting goals for 2006, the Army can only lower their standards so far before they realize the sad truth that young Americans are not joining the military because of this unpopular war in Iraq. This breakdown in the Army is starting to show with this 15-month extended tour being forced on the troops.

It is going to get worst over the next year.

WaPost: 3 Generals Spurn the Position of War 'Czar'

Excuse me, but isn't the president suppose to be the "Commander-in-Chief?" And if so, then why does President Bush need a "War Czar?" From the Washington Post:

The White House wants to appoint a high-powered czar to oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with authority to issue directions to the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies, but it has had trouble finding anyone able and willing to take the job, according to people close to the situation.

At least three retired four-star generals approached by the White House in recent weeks have declined to be considered for the position, the sources said, underscoring the administration's difficulty in enlisting its top recruits to join the team after five years of warfare that have taxed the United States and its military.

"The very fundamental issue is, they don't know where the hell they're going," said retired Marine Gen. John J. "Jack" Sheehan, a former top NATO commander who was among those rejecting the job. Sheehan said he believes that Vice President Cheney and his hawkish allies remain more powerful within the administration than pragmatists looking for a way out of Iraq. "So rather than go over there, develop an ulcer and eventually leave, I said, 'No, thanks,' " he said.

The White House has not publicly disclosed its interest in creating the position, hoping to find someone President Bush can anoint and announce for the post all at once. Officials said they are still considering options for how to reorganize the White House's management of the two conflicts. If they cannot find a person suited for the sort of specially empowered office they envision, they said, they may have to retain the current structure.

It would appear to me that the Bush administration is trying to find another scapegoat to pin this latest troop surge failure on, thus absolving President Bush from any blame or responsibility for getting the U.S. into this disaster of a war in Iraq. It is not the president's fault--it is the war czar's fault!

Of course, never mind that the president is the Commander-in-Chief....

Bush almost blows himself up with a hydrogen-powered hybrid car

Ford President Alan Mulally, right, had to be quick on his feet to make sure President Bush plugged a power cord into the right socket on a Ford hydrogen-electric plug-in hybrid. Mark Wilson / Getty Images

I found this story through Crooks and Liars, so I went to the original source at The Detroit News:

Credit Ford Motor Co. CEO Alan Mulally with saving the leader of the free world from self-immolation.

Mulally told journalists at the New York auto show that he intervened to prevent President Bush from plugging an electrical cord into the hydrogen tank of Ford's hydrogen-electric plug-in hybrid at the White House last week. Ford wanted to give the Commander-in-Chief an actual demonstration of the innovative vehicle, so the automaker arranged for an electrical outlet to be installed on the South Lawn and ran a charging cord to the hybrid. However, as Mulally followed Bush out to the car, he noticed someone had left the cord lying at the rear of the vehicle, near the fuel tank.

"I just thought, 'Oh my goodness!' So, I started walking faster, and the President walked faster and he got to the cord before I did. I violated all the protocols. I touched the President. I grabbed his arm and I moved him up to the front," Mulally said. "I wanted the president to make sure he plugged into the electricity, not into the hydrogen. This is all off the record, right?"

The only comment I would have on this story can be perfectly expressed with this classic YouTube video:



God bless Monty Python.

Monday Schoolhouse Rocks--I'm Just a Bill

What can I say? If there are two top Schoolhouse Rock songs that we GenXers (I was born in 1965) remember from our Saturday morning cartoons, the first would be Conjunction Junction, and the second would be I'm Just a Bill. I still catch myself singing those two songs in the back of my mind at times. And yes, I learned my government from this song--it probably explains why I even got my BA degree in Political Science. So here are the lyrics of I'm Just a Bill. And here is the video from YouTube:



How I hope and pray that they will,
But today I am still just a bill.

Hunger strike breaks out at Gitmo

This is from The New York Times:

A new, long-term hunger strike has broken out at the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, with more than a dozen detainees subjecting themselves to daily force-feeding to protest their treatment, military officials and lawyers for the detainees said.

Lawyers for several hunger strikers said their clients’ action were driven by harsh conditions in a new maximum security complex to which about 160 prisoners have been moved since December.

The 13 detainees now on hunger strikes is the highest number to endure the force-feeding regimen on an extended basis since early 2006, when the military broke a long-running strike with a new policy of strapping prisoners into “restraint chairs” while they are fed by plastic tubes inserted through their nostrils.

The hunger strikers are now monitored so closely the they have virtually no chance to starve themselves. Yet their persistence underscores how the struggle between detainees and guards at Guantánamo has continued even as the military has tightened its control.

“We don’t have any rights here, even after your Supreme Court said we had rights,” one hunger striker, Majid al-Joudi, told a military physician, according to medical records released recently under a federal court order. “If the policy does not change, you will see a big increase in fasting.”

A military spokesman at Guantánamo, Cmdr. Robert Durand of the Navy, played down the significance of the current hunger strike, describing the prisoners’ complaints as “propaganda.”

A couple of items here. First, we've got 13 inmates going on this hunger strike as a protest against the harsh conditions they face in Gitmo. They still have no legal rights, no charges have been leveled against them, no trial, and no cross-examination of the evidence against them. The Bush administration has not only locked them up and threw away the key here, but the administration has placed them in a new maximum security complex for which they are just rotting away. And of course, the U.S. military is calling this "propaganda." Continuing with The NY Times story:

Newly released Pentagon documents show that during earlier hunger strikes, before the use of restraint chairs, some detainees suffered sharp weight losses. A handful of those prisoners lost more than 30 pounds in a matter of weeks, the records show. By comparison, the current hunger strike — in which 12 of the 13 were being force-fed as of Friday — seems almost symbolic.

For instance, the medical records for Mr. Joudi, a 36-year-old Saudi, show that when he was hospitalized on Feb. 10, he had been fasting for 31 days and had lost more than 15 percent of his body weight.

By the time he was transferred a few days later to a “feeding block” where hard-core hunger strikers are segregated from other prisoners, his condition had stabilized and his weight was nearly back to its ideal level for a man his size. (His exact weight gain was not recorded.)

Lawyers for several detainees being held in the new maximum security complex, called Camp 6, compared it to “super-max” prisons in the United States. The major differences, they said, are that the detainees have limited reading material and no television, and that only 10 of the roughly 385 men at Guantánamo have been charged.

The Camp 6 inmates are generally locked in their 8-by-10-foot cells for at least 22 hours a day, emerging only to exercise in small wire cages and shower. Besides those exercise periods, they can talk with other prisoners only by shouting through food slots in the steel doors of their cells.

“My wish is to die,” one reported hunger striker in the camp, Adnan Farhan Abdullatif, a 27-year old Yemeni, told his lawyer on Feb. 27, according to recently declassified notes of the meeting. “We are living in a dying situation.”

[....]

Camp 6 was originally designed as a modern, medium-security prison complex for up to 200 inmates, with common areas where they could gather for meals and a large, fenced-in athletic field where they might jog or play soccer outside the high, concrete walls.

But after a riot last May and the suicides of three prisoners in June, the unit was retrofitted to limit the detainees’ freedom of movement and reduce the risk that they might hurt themselves or attack guards, military officials said.

Senior officials expressed concern in interviews about how prisoners would react to the greater isolation in Camp 6. Most had been held on makeshift blocks of wire-mesh cells that — while often hot, noisy and lacking privacy — allowed them to communicate easily, pray together and even pass written messages.

Guantánamo’s other maximum-security unit, Camp 5, has pods of cells that face each other across a short hallway, allowing the roughly 100 detainees there to converse fairly easily. In Camp 6, the prisoners can see one another from their cells only when one of them is being moved. At other times, they look out on the stainless-steel picnic tables in the common areas they are not allowed to use.

Lawyers for half a dozen Camp 6 detainees said their clients were uniformly despondent about the move even though, as military officials note, the new cells are 27 square feet larger than the old ones and have air-conditioning, nicer toilets and sinks, and a small desk anchored to the wall.

“They’re just sitting on a powder keg down there,” said one lawyer, Sabin Willett, who, like others, described an atmosphere of growing desperation among the prisoners. “You’re going to have an insane asylum.”

This is how the Bush administration fights The Great War on Terror--building what amounts to concentration camps for these supposed terrorists. Lock them up and throw away the key. Deny them any legal rights. Let them rot away.

Read the entire article.

Occidental CEO got more than $400 million in 2006

More excessive CEO paychecks here. From Reuters News:

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Occidental Petroleum Corp.'s chairman and chief executive took in more than $400 million in compensation last year, the company said in a filing, one of the biggest single-year payouts in U.S. corporate history.

The largest part of Ray Irani's 2006 payout was $270.2 million from the exercise of options awarded from 1997 to 2006, representing more than 7.1 million shares, according to the company's annual proxy statement, which was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in March.

Irani also received $93.3 million in stock and dividends from a deferred stock program when the company closed the plan in October due to increases in liability and expenses for the program, the company said.

Irani's salary in 2006 was $1.3 million and his cash bonus was $1.4 million, according to the filing. But stock and option awards and other benefits lifted his 2006 compensation to $55.6 million, the proxy said.

In the proxy, the company said that from December 1990 -- when Irani succeeded Armand Hammer as chief executive -- through 2005, the company's stock rose to about $40 a share from $9 and its total shareholder return was 699 percent.

Now maybe Irani deserves this huge paycheck due to Occidental's performance. I'm not sure. But what I will say is that Irani's excessive paycheck will entice other CEOs to back to their boards and demand even bigger salaries for their positions--regardless of their own performance. This corruption in CEO pay will continue on.

Happy Easter Yeggs!

Happy Easter Yeggs.

Happy Easter! Yes, the Easter Bunny is coming with LOTS of brightly-colored Easter Eggs. Unfortunately, the Easter Bunny seems a little sad, having to deliver all these eggs to so many people. He needs some help! And who would be the perfect bunny to help him, but Bugs himself. The Happy Easter Rabbit--HOORAY!

I found one of the best cartoons to celebrate Easter--the 1947 Looney Tunes classic Happy Easter Yeggs, starring that famous rabbit Bugs Bunny and directed by Robert McKimson. So as you're stuffing your face with jelly beans and Cadbury Eggs, make sure you have enough room for Easter Rabbit Stew, take a moment to enjoy this wonderful Easter cartoon from YouTube:



And remember, Doc, keep smiling!

Attorney Scandal Part Deux--Shake up at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Minnesota

If the scandal involving the eight U.S. attorneys, who were fired by the Bush administration to be replaced by Bush loyalists, was bad enough, there apparently is a new scandal brewing in the U.S. Attorney's office in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Talking Points Memo is all over this new scandal here, here, and here. I'm going to start with this Fox 9 KMPS News story on this scandal:

MINNEAPOLIS -- It’s a major shakeup at the offices of new U.S. Attorney Rachel Paulose.

Four of her top staff voluntarily demoted themselves Thursday, fed up with Paulose, who, after just months on the job, has earned a reputation for quoting Bible verses and dressing down underlings.

Deputy U.S. Attorney John Marty is just one of the people dropping themselves in rank to simply a U.S. Attorney position. Also making the move are the heads of Paulose’s criminal and civil divisions and the top administrative officer.

The move is intended to send a message to Washington – that 33-year-old Paulose is in over her head.

Paulose was appointed before the 8 U.S. Attorneys were given their pink slips, but she has deep connections to the scandal.

Rachel K. Paulose has drawn criticism since her swearing-in ceremony last month as the United States attorney in Minneapolis. Jean Pieri/St. Paul Pioneer, via Associated Press.

She was a special assistant to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, worked as a senior counsel for deputy attorney general Paul McNulty and is best buds with Monica Goodling – the assistant U.S. Attorney who recently took the Fifth rather than testify before Congress.

Add to the suspicions the fact that Minnesota’s former U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger stepped down just as the White House was developing its hit list.

Heffelfinger responds to questions whether he was forced out by saying, “emphatically no.” But there’s been a lot of speculation that Heffelfinger, a moderate Republican, may have been able to read the writing on the wall.

And indeed, some of the early White House memos indicate three people on the hit list resigned before they could be fired.

Paulose was not available for comment on the shake-up.

So we've got four U.S. attorneys demoting themselves because they do not like Paulose's "quoting Bible verses and dressing down underlings." And this demoting is taking place among the top staff there--not only is the Deputy U.S. Attorney demoting himself in protest, but also the heads of the "criminal and civil divisions and the top administrative officer." This is a huge message that is being sent by the staff to the Bush White House on Paulose's qualifications and competence regarding this job. In other words, the staff is saying that Paulose is not qualified to hold this position at U.S. Attorney.

But there is more to this story. According to WCCO Channel 4 News:

The four top administrators in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Minnesota have resigned their administrative positions. According to highly placed sources, the administrators have quit in protest over the job being done by Rachel Paulose, the U.S. Attorney for Minnesota.

[....]

The Bush Administration did not want to see this happen and in an eleventh hour attempt to prevent it, sent a top justice official to Minneapolis Thursday to mediate the situation. The mediation failed.

[....]

Late Thursday afternoon the four top administrators in her office resigned their management positions in protest of what three well-placed sources say was "a highly dictatorial style" of managing.

Paulose confirmed that John Marti, a first assistant U.S. attorney, Erika Mozangue, head of the office's civil division, and James Lackner, who heads the office's criminal division, have "decided to go back to being prosecutors," said her spokeswoman, Jeanne Cooney.

Minneapolis Star-Tribune confirmed that Paulose's staff quit their management positions due to Paulose's "management style and communication than politics." In addition, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that the Department of Justice is sending a top official to help Paulose:

A Justice Department official in Washington is expected to return to Minneapolis next week to help run the U.S. attorney's office in Minnesota, according to an attorney with knowledge of an upheaval that led three lawyers to quit their management jobs Thursday.

The official, John Kelly, the chief of staff and a deputy director in the U.S. attorney's executive office in Washington, may wind up being tapped to be the first assistant to U.S. Attorney Rachel Paulose in Minneapolis, the attorney said Friday.

Kelly's potential role in quelling turmoil in the 110-person office underscores the dissatisfaction among some prosecutors with the 34-year-old Paulose's management style, which several sources described as abrasive and, at times, disrespectful.

[....]

Kelly first came to Minneapolis at Paulose's request to try to bridge the divide between Paulose and her top assistants, said the attorney, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for job protection. But they resigned later that day to return to prosecuting cases full time.

"She had briefed him that there was an uprising," the attorney said. Initially, Kelly was scheduled to have short interviews with the attorneys but the meetings went nearly two hours, the attorney said.

Paulose declined to comment on Friday after issuing a brief statement. "We have work to do," the statement said. "The office remains focused on our law enforcement priorities and service to this community." The Department of Justice did not respond Friday to the Star Tribune's requests for comments.

[....]

A second federal attorney, also speaking on the condition of anonymity because of worries about job security, described an office environment in Minneapolis in which lawyers and support staff felt that they would face retribution from Paulose if they disagreed with her.

"Disagreement is treated as disloyalty," the attorney said.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune gives an example of Paulose's "disagreement is treated as disloyalty," here:

One case that caused a rift in the office soon after Paulose started involved a narcotics case, according to the two federal attorneys.

Paulose ordered that an internal memo be prepared for high-ranking Justice Department officials who would be coming to Minneapolis from Washington to highlight the office's high-profile cases, the attorneys said.

Paulose instructed the head of the narcotics section, Andy Dunne, to state in the memo that prosecutors had won convictions that ended drug dealing by St. Paul's Latin Kings gang, they said.

Dunne was told by Paulose to say that the Latin Kings were the biggest gang in St. Paul and that the office's recent convictions would stop the so-called Latin King Nation, the attorneys said.

But Dunne told Paulose he couldn't abide by the request, one of the attorneys said, and when he refused, Dunne was forced to give up his position as chief of the narcotics section. Dunne would not comment Friday.

Another attorney, who has knowledge of office operations, said Dunne and several others stepped down because of the way Paulose treated them. "It gets to the point where you can't manage in that environment," said the attorney, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Paulose has clearly defined her prosecution priorities: guns, child porn, immigration enforcement, public corruption and methamphetamine trafficking.

As a result, some enforcement programs have been scaled back, one attorney said. Among them: going after landlords who have not removed lead paint from their properties, easing up on enforcement of laws protecting people with disabilities and health care, that source said.

Al Durand, the office administrator who took early retirement in February after 26 years, said Paulose had a tendency to micromanage people in the office. "She got involved in a lot more detail than previous administrations ever did," he said.

That is the new scandal here. Interestingly enough, this latest scandal is starting to be picked up by mainstream media outlets of The New York Times, USA Today, Yahoo News, Forbes, and numerous other news organizations. What we have here is that the Bush White House decided to appoint their own little political "Bushie loyalist" in this position of the U.S. Attorney for Minneapolis. Unfortunately, Rachel Paulose, who the Bush White House appointed into this attorney slot, turned out to be a Bible-quoting, tin-pot dictator, who was clearly not qualified for this job. This is another example of nepotism, and cronyism on the Bush administration's part in rewarding friends and political supporters with top government jobs.

Update: I've been thinking about this story here. I know that there have been plenty of previous administrations that have engaged in some type of cronyism, appointing political friends and perhaps family members into government jobs. But I don't think I've ever seen the amount of cronyism that has taken place with this Bush White House. Rachel Paulose was a Bushie loyalist who was rewarded with a position as U.S. Attorney in Minneapolis. We've seen how Karl Rove's aid Timothy Griffin was appointed as a U.S. Attorney for Arkansas--just before the 2008 presidential elections can take place, with Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton running. You can bet that Griffin will his attorney position to initiate political investigations into former president Bill and Hillary Clinton's past--Whitewater Part Two? There is this April 4, 2007 ABC News story reporting that President Bush appointed businessman Sam Fox as U.S. ambassador to Belgium in a recess appointment. Fox contributed $50,000 to the conservative group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which was responsible for airing a series of controversial ads attacking 2004 Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry's Vietnam military record. Senate Democrats opposed Fox's nomination. Then there is Michael D. Brown--Heckuva-Job Brownie! Brown was appointed to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency by President Bush, despite having no experience in disaster planning. Brown's "qualifications" for managing FEMA was his 11 years of managing the the Arabian Horse Association. If anything, Hurricane Katrina clearly showed just how damaging the Bush administration's cronyism has destroyed the U.S. government's ability to protect and help its citizens in times of emergency. And I have found even more examples of Bush cronyism here, here, here, here, and here. And the Bush cronyism isn't confined to domestic politics. There have been a number of reports documenting Bush cronyism in Iraq, and even Homeland Security. And finally, let's not forget that President Bush selected his White House counsel Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court, only to have Miers withdrawal her nomination from Senate questions regarding her qualifications, and lack of judicial record.

It is just incredible.

U.S. attorney scandal--Gonzales aid Monica Goodling resigns

This is off MSNBC.Com:

WASHINGTON - A top aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales abruptly quit Friday, almost two weeks after telling Congress she would not testify about her role in the firings of federal prosecutors.

There was no immediate reason given, but Monica M. Goodling’s refusal to face Congress had intensified a controversy that threatens Gonzales’ job.

She resigned in a three-sentence letter to Gonzales, calling her five-year stint at Justice an honor and telling him, “May God bless you richly as you continue your service to America.”

Asserting her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, Goodling had rejected demands for a private interview with a House committee investigating the firings of eight U.S. attorneys.

She was senior counsel to Gonzales and was the department’s White House liaison before she took a leave amid the uproar over the ousters.

The Justice Department declined comment on the resignation.

Goodling is at the center of the controversy because, as the bridge between the Justice Department and the White House, she may be best suited to explain how deeply Karl Rove and other members of President Bush’s political team might have been involved in the firings. Congress also wants her to testify on Gonzales’ role in light of his shifting explanations.

Her resignation came less than two weeks before Gonzales’ own planned testimony to Congress, which may determine his fate as attorney general. Several Republican lawmakers have joined Democrats in calling for his resignation or dismissal over the firings and other matters at Justice.

Goodling’s attorney, John Dowd, confirmed she had resigned but declined further comment.

I'm not sure if Goodling has become another scapegoat in protecting Gonzales and the Bush administration from further political damage in this attorney scandal. Or is Goodling leaving the Justice Department as a means to avoid even becoming more embroiled into this scandal than she already is?

CBS News has some more interesting information regarding Goodling:

Goodling, 33, is a graduate of Regent University School of Law in Virginia Beach, Va., which was founded by the Rev. Pat Robertson. CBS News correspondent Howard Arenstein reports that, in a scandal which has been about filling legal positions with so-called "loyal Bushies," she has been described as one of the enforcers of that loyalty.

While Goodling is no longer a federal employee, her change in professional status will likely not change her status in the investigation; she still can and probably will continue to invoke her right to remain silent, at least for now, CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen said.

"The question everyone will be asking this weekend is whether this career move by Goodling means that she intends to take a different strategy when it comes to the Congressional investigation into the firing of those eight U.S. Attorneys," Cohen said. "My guess is that she won't — that her lawyers already have convinced her that, whether she is a government employee or a private individual, she still can better protect herself by refusing to answer questions before Congress."

So Goodling was a graduate of a law school founded by Pat Robertson, and that she is considered a "loyal Bushie." It is possible that Goodling is trying to protect both herself and the Bush administration through her invocation of the Fifth Amendment rights in refusing to testify before Congress. Now that Goodling is out of DOJ, I wonder if Congress will grant Goodling immunity from prosecution in exchange for her testimony. And if Congress does grant Goodling immunity from prosecution, will Goodling agree to testify?

Ford CEO: $28M for 4 months work

This is off CNN.Com:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Struggling Ford Motor Co., which posted a record $12.7 billion net loss in 2006, gave its new CEO Alan Mulally $28 million for four months on the job, according to the company's proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission Thursday.

The Ford (Charts) pay package for Mulally comes on top of the $7.4 million that aerospace company Boeing (Charts) had previously reported paying him for his eight months running that company's commercial aircraft unit before he made the move to Ford at the beginning of September.

Mulally's pay package at Ford included a $7.5 million hiring bonus, as well as $11 million that Ford described as an offset for forfeited performance and stock option awards at Boeing. In addition he received $55,469 for relocation costs and temporary housing.
Big Three sales slide continues

His base salary was $666,667, which works out to annual pay of about $2 million. He also received restricted stock grants, which the company valued at $920,404, as well as 3 million stock options valued at $7.8 million. The stock options are not yet exercisable, and they have an exercise price of $8.28, or about 4 percent above current prices.

The details of the compensation packages and costs come as Ford moves ahead with plans to close plants and cut more than 30,000 hourly positions from the company in an effort to stem losses.

The company had disclosed in a footnote buried on page 228 of an earlier filing with SEC that Mulally saw the value of his stock bonuses increase to $6 million from the originally agreed upon $5 million "after reviewing the company's 2006 performance results and Mr. Mulally's leadership role in progressing his key priorities."

The filing was made the day after Mulally was the keynote speaker at the start of the New York auto show.

And how is Ford doing? Well, check out this CNN.Com story on the Big Three auto sales figures:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- U.S. sales at the traditional Big Three U.S. automakers continue to lose share to Toyota and other import brands in March, although sales at troubled Ford and Chrysler rebounded enough from weak February results to beat forecasts.

[....]

Ford (Charts) reported a 9 percent decline in sales to 264,975 vehicles. But the company had warned last week that it was looking a double-digit declines from what had been its best sales month of 2006, and sales tracker Edmunds.com had forecast a 17 percent drop in sales for the nation's No. 2 automaker.

The sales represented a 26 percent jump from the weak February sales total.

Ford saw good sales from its crossover vehicles, which are a vehicle is similar to an SUV with a more car-like driving characteristics. But it saw a drop in sales for the nation's best-selling vehicle, the F-Series pickup. Sales of the F-series were down 15 percent from a year ago.

George Pipas, the Ford director of sales analysis, said part of the decline was due to the cuts in production of the F-Series last year in the face of soft sales, which left dealers with a 40 percent reduction in F-Series inventory than a year ago.

"Maybe we went too far with production cuts at end of last year," said Pipas. "Hindsight is always 20-20. But when you're down 40 percent in inventory, a 15 percent decline in sales doesn't look so bad."

I should also point out that in a January 23, 2007 CNN story, Ford Motor Company planned to close 14 manufacturing plants in North America and lay off between 25,000-30,000 workers. The employee layoffs represent "about 18 to 21 percent of the [Ford] employees in its North American auto operations." Ford also plans to make cuts in its management, "trimming its officer ranks by 12 percent and its salaried work force by about 4,000 in the first quarter of this year." And finally, in this March 1, 2007 New York Times story, Ford is reporting that its restructuring program will cost around $11.18 billion. A February 28, 2007 Reuters story provides an interesting detail regarding the Ford restructuring, saying that Ford estimates that its North American operations will continue to lose money until 2009, and will run through $17 billion in cash over the next three years. This is the current state of Ford's woes.

And Ford CEO Alan Mulally is getting $28 million for the first four months on this job?

I will admit that I have a hard time justifying why anyone should receive $28 million for four months worth of work--especially in a company that has lost $12.7 billion for 2006. I've seen plenty of crooked CEOs who walked away with huge salary and compensation packages after sending their companies into the ground. Mulally has only been on the job at Ford for only four months. But still, $28 million for those four months? It is outrageous! If Mulally is able to pull Ford out of this mess, then give him the big pay package. But until then, he is going to have to show both Ford, and the shareholders, that he can do the job here to be paid this huge pay package. And if he can't, then he shouldn't be paid one frickin' dime! Because right now, I don't see a "white knight" in Alan Mulally riding to Ford's rescue from its auto woes.

I see another crooked, greedy CEO here ready to steal whatever he can from Ford Motor Company, before throwing Ford's lifeless, bankrupt corpse into the trash.

Bill O'Reilly goes bonkers in a fight against Geraldo Rivera

I'm not sure where to file this YouTube video under:



Rivera is right. This is not about illegal immigration, but rather about drunk driving. Had these two young girls been killed by a drunk driver who was an American citizen, this story would have been ignored. The only reason this story is on O'Reilly is because Alfredo Ramos is an illegal immigrant. This gives O'Reilly a chance to score political brownie points by blasting the Virginia Beach local law enforcement, the Mayor Oberndorf, and Virginia's Democratic governor Tim Kaine for supposedly not enforcing this nation's illegal immigration laws, when our own federal government--under this Bush White House--has so spectacularly failed in adopting a comprehensive immigration policy.

Still, it is rather ironic watching these two blowhards duking it out on Fox News.

Friday Fun Stuff--Disease underlies Hatfield-McCoy feud

Jerry Hatfield, left, and Ron McCoy pose for a photo at the Hatfield-McCoy feud marker in Pikeville, Ky., on June 7, 2001. They were attending the annual Hatfield-McCoy Reunion Festival that runs over the weekend in the area .The most infamous feud in American folklore, the long-running battle between the Hatfields and McCoys, may be partly explained by a rare, disease inherited by the McCoy clan that can lead to hair-trigger rage and violent outbursts.(AP Photo/Rhonda Simpson)

I found this Yahoo News story to be rather interesting. Now I'm not sure if this disease was the sole cause for the long-running feud, but I will say that its existence within the McCoy family kept the feud between the two clans going. Either way, it is certainly a fascinating detail to consider within the history of this long-running feud.

The most infamous feud in American folklore, the long-running battle between the Hatfields and McCoys, may be partly explained by a rare, inherited disease that can lead to hair-trigger rage and violent outbursts.

Dozens of McCoy descendants apparently have the disease, which causes high blood pressure, racing hearts, severe headaches and too much adrenaline and other "fight or flight" stress hormones.

No one blames the whole feud on this, but doctors say it could help explain some of the clan's notorious behavior.

"This condition can certainly make anybody short-tempered, and if they are prone because of their personality, it can add fuel to the fire," said Dr. Revi Mathew, a Vanderbilt University endocrinologist treating one of the family members.

The Hatfields and McCoys have a storied and deadly history dating to Civil War times. Their generations of fighting over land, timber rights and even a pig are the subject of dozens of books, songs and countless jokes. Unfortunately for Appalachia, the feud is one of its greatest sources of fame.

The Hatfield clan poses in April 1897 at a logging camp in southern West Virginia. The most infamous feud in American folklore, the long-running battle between the Hatfields and McCoys, may be partly explained by a rare, disease inherited by the McCoy clan that can lead to hair-trigger rage and violent outbursts.(AP Photo)

Several genetic experts have known about the disease plaguing some of the McCoys for decades, but kept it secret. The Associated Press learned of it after several family members revealed their history to Vanderbilt doctors, who are trying to find more McCoy relatives to warn them of the risk.

One doctor who had researched the family for decades called them the "McC kindred" in a 1998 medical journal article tracing the disease through four generations.

"He said something about us never being able to get insurance" if the full family name was used, said Rita Reynolds, a Bristol, Tenn., woman with the disease. She says she is a McCoy descendant and has documents from the doctor showing his work on her family.

She is speaking up now so distant relatives might realize their risk and get help before the condition proves fatal, as it did to many of her ancestors.

Back then, "we didn't even know this existed," she said. "They just up and died."

Von Hippel-Lindau disease, which afflicts many family members, can cause tumors in the eyes, ears, pancreas, kidney, brain and spine. Roughly three-fourths of the affected McCoys have pheochromocytomas — tumors of the adrenal gland.

The small, bubbly-looking orange adrenal gland sits atop each kidney and makes adrenaline and substances called catecholamines. Too much can cause high blood pressure, pounding headaches, heart palpitations, facial flushing, nausea and vomiting. There is no cure for the disease, but removing the tumors before they turn cancerous can improve survival.

Affected family members have long been known to be combative, even with their kin. Reynolds recalled her grandfather, "Smallwood" McCoy.

"When he would come to visit, everyone would run and hide. They acted like they were scared to death of him. He had a really bad temper," she said.

Her adopted daughter, another McCoy descendant, 11-year-old Winnter Reynolds, just had an adrenal tumor removed at Vanderbilt Children's Hospital. Teachers thought the girl had ADHD — attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Now, Winnter says, "my parents are thinking it may be the tumor" that caused the behavior. "I've been feeling great since they took it out."

Winnter Reynolds, left, and her mother Rita work on some of the homework, Thursday, April 5, 2007, in Bristol, Tenn. The shool work was missed because of surgery Winnter had to remove tumors that she developed because of Von Hippel-Lindau disease. Her extended family has this disease that has been traced back to the McCoy family of the Hatfield and McCoy feud fame. (AP Photo/Earl Neikirk)

Her adoptive father, James Reynolds, said of the McCoys: "It don't take much to set them off. They've got a pretty good temper.

"Before the surgery, Winnter, when we would discipline her, she'd squeeze her fists together and get real angry and start hollering back at us, screaming and crying," he said.

As for the older McCoys, "they just started dropping dead of the tumors," he said. "They didn't know what it was. A name wasn't really put on the disease until 1968. That's when one of my brothers-in-law had to have surgery, to have some tumors removed in his brain. They started to notice tumors occurring in each of the family members."

Dr. Nuzhet Atuk at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and geneticists at the University of Pennsylvania studied the family for more than 30 years, Rita Reynolds said.

"They went back on the genealogy and all of that stuff," she said. "They called it madness disease. They said that it had to be coming from the VHL. Our family would just go off, even on the doctors."

Now 85 and retired, Atuk said he could not talk about his work because of medical confidentiality.

Rita Reynolds had two adrenal tumors removed a few years ago. Her mother and three brothers also had them. So do McCoy descendants in Oregon, Michigan and Indiana, she said.

"When you have these tumors, you're easy to get upset," said Rita's mother, Goldie Hankins, 76, of Big Rock, Va., near the Kentucky-West Virginia border. "When people get on your nerves, you just can't take it. You get angry because your blood pressure was so high."

Still, many are dubious that this condition had much of a role in the bitter feud with the Hatfields, which played out in the hill country of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia for decades.


This an undated file photo of William Anderson 'Devil Anse' Hatfield. The most infamous feud in American folklore, the long-running battle between the Hatfields and McCoys, may be partly explained by a rare, inherited disease, that McCoy descendants apparently have that can lead to hair-trigger rage and violent outbursts. (AP Photo)

Some say the feud dates to Civil War days, when some members of the families took opposite sides. It grew into disputes over timber rights and land in the 1870s, and gained more notoriety in 1878, when Randolph or "Old Randal" McCoy accused a Hatfield of stealing one of his pigs. The hostilities left at least a dozen dead.

"The McCoy temperament is legendary. Whether or not we can blame it on genes, I don't know," said Ron McCoy, 43, of Durham, N.C., one of the organizers of the annual Hatfield-McCoy reunion. "There are a lot of underpinnings that are probably a more legitimate source of conflict."

"There was a lot of inter-marrying" that could have played havoc with the gene pool, he conceded.

Another relative, Bo McCoy, of Waverly, Ohio, said he had never heard talk of the disease although he has been diagnosed with a different adrenal gland problem — Cushing's syndrome.

Even Reo Hatfield, who drafted the "truce" the two families famously signed in 2003 to officially end hostilities, doubted the role of the McCoys' disease in the feud.

"I would be shocked" if doctors blamed it on illness, he said.

Altina Waller, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut and author of a book about the feud, agreed.

"Medical folks like to find these kinds of explanations. Like the Salem witchcraft thing. That book came out about how that was caused by wheat that was grown that had this parasite or mold or fungus or something that caused everybody in Salem to go nuts," she said.

"How does it explain the other dozen or so feuds that I've looked at in other places?" she asked, citing disputes over coal and other issues. "The rage and violence as such was not confined to McCoys."

She acknowledges that an argument could be made for seeing the McCoys as the more aggressive of the clans.

"One of the reasons the McCoys don't like me as much in the Tug Valley as the Hatfields do is that I seem to suggest that Randal McCoy, the patriarch of the family, was sort of irrational and flamboyant and did jump to, into wanting violence more than, say, Anderson Hatfield," Waller said.

These days, the "feud" has taken a far more civil tone and all but disappeared, members of both families say. The last time it surfaced was in January 2003. McCoy descendants sued Hatfield descendants over visitation rights to a small cemetery on an Appalachian hillside in eastern Kentucky. It holds the remains of six McCoys, some allegedly killed by the Hatfields.

Cheney lurking behind The Shrub

All I'm going to say is this is creepy....From YouTube:



Are we looking at The Puppetmaster pulling the strings on his puppet?

The New York Times has got a great picture here:

President Bush in the Rose Garden on Tuesday. Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Obama raised $25 million in political campaign contributions

Well, this is a surprise! From The Washington Post:

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) raised at least $25 million for his presidential campaign in the first quarter of the year, putting him just shy of Sen. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner, who made a splash with her announcement Sunday that she had drawn a record-breaking $26 million.

Obama appears to have surpassed Clinton in several ways: He reported donations from 100,000 people, double the 50,000 people who gave to the New York senator's campaign. He raised $6.9 million through donations over the Internet, more than the $4.2 million that Clinton raised online.

And of Obama's overall receipts, $23.5 million is eligible for use in the primary contests. Clinton officials have declined to disclose how much of her cash is available for the primaries -- rather than designated for the general election and therefore blocked off unless she wins the nomination -- raising suspicions that she raised less for the primaries than Obama did.

What can I say, but we've got ourselves a major horse race going on between Hillary and Obama. Both candidates have raised about the same amount of money for the election, and you can bet that they have each other targeted in the crosshairs as we edge closer to the Iowa caucus. The WaPost article did provide an interesting detail regarding Obama's fundraising:

Although Obama has essentially built his campaign operation from scratch over the last few months, advisers to rival candidates point out that he has hired skilled fundraising veterans, such as his national finance director Julianna Smoot, not just relying on an organic, grassroots movement to take shape around him.

Still, the data suggested that Obama's strategy of holding low-dollar events in addition to massive $1 million galas had succeeded, at least for now. He held numerous events that cost $25 or $100 per ticket, in an effort to bring in younger, first-time donors who could be tapped again for future donations because they had not yet reached the $2,300 limit for contributing to the primaries. (Donors can give another $2,300 to each candidate for use in the general election).

"This overwhelming response, in only a few short weeks, shows the hunger for a different kind of politics in this country and a belief at the grassroots level that Barack Obama can bring out the best in America to solve our problems," Obama's finance chair, Penny Pritzker, said in a statement today.Clinton, with the help of her high-wattage husband, former President Bill Clinton, raised about $10 million in large events at the end of the quarter. Neither Clinton nor Obama has specified how much cash they will have on hand, after accounting for expenses, when the full financial reports are turned into the Federal Election Commission on April 15.

It is interesting to see just how different the styles of fundraising that both Clinton and Obama have developed over the course of this presidential campaign. Obama has made an effort to target lower donation, first-time fundraisers with his cheaper, $25 to $100 per ticket political rallies. This effort is certainly going to make him popular among the younger Democratic voters here. In contrast to Obama, the image of Senator Hillary Clinton's fundraising would probably be the "massive $1 million galas" which bring in the high-rolling political donations. That is not to say that Clinton would not also attend the $25-per-ticket political rallies, nor would Obama shy away from the $1 million galas. But I do wonder if that is the perception that is starting to formulate within the Democratic voters' minds now.

Romney tops GOP pack in fundraising

This is off The Washington Post:

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney provided a jolt to the Republican presidential contest yesterday, reporting a haul of $21 million in the first three months of the year, as Sen. John McCain of Arizona posted a lackluster third-place finish that even his campaign manager called a disappointment.

As campaigns release their first meaningful fundraising figures in what appears certain to become the most expensive presidential campaign in history, McCain's $12.5 million total also put him behind former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who leads the Republican field in public polls and reported taking in $15 million in the first quarter.

Among Democrats, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) has set the pace for the field so far, reporting Sunday that she had raised $26 million in combined primary and general election funds and transferred an additional $10 million from her Senate campaign account. Her total was followed by that of former North Carolina senator John Edwards, who raised $14 million. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois has so far declined to release figures for his campaign.

The totals of the major contenders easily surpassed the record $8.9 million raised by Al Gore in the first three months of 1999.

Romney has labored in single digits in polling but has been an aggressive fundraiser. He launched his campaign with a "National Call Day" at the convention center in Boston in January, where nearly 400 of his supporters, including Meg Whitman, the chief executive of eBay, and Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt called friends to ask them to back Romney. The event raised a whopping $6.5 million in a single day.

But the showing by McCain, who had been ordained the front-runner in the GOP contest from Day One and had worked to win over many of the fundraising Pioneers and Rangers who helped fill President Bush's coffers in 2000 and 2004, was a surprise to both analysts and rival campaigns. Most characterized the numbers as an unexpected sign of distress for a campaign that has been building its machinery for eight years and was one of the first to set up a fundraising committee.

"By any historical measure, $12.5 million is a lot of money," said Alex Vogel, a Republican strategist not affiliated with any candidate. "But McCain was the front-runner for so long, the expectation was he would not come in third."

First I will say that I'm just amazed at the amount of money that all of these candidates have raised. When you compare these numbers to what Al Gore raised in 1999, it is just astounding.

Now for the GOP. Mitt Romney came in first on the fundraising race, taking in $21 million, while McCain only took in $12.5 million for third place behind Giuliani's $15 million? The WaPost story makes it appear that Romney is a stronger fundraiser than an overall presidential candidate. But I think there is more here. The GOP has a problem regarding this 2008 presidential race. They are saddled with a Republican president that is languishing in the public opinion polls at 30-36 percent. The Republicans have been branded as a pro-war party, where the U.S. is stuck in a no-win war in Iraq, and where the American public has both accepted the no-win status of the U.S. in Iraq, and where the American public is supporting a withdrawal timeline to pull the U.S. out of the Iraq war--something that the Bush administration and the Republican Party refuses to accept. The Religious Right conservatives do not like McCain, nor do they like Romney, who is a Mormon. The Republican Party loves to talk about "family values," however two of the front-running presidential candidates of McCain and Guiliani have had multiple marriages and divorces, while the supposed-polygamy-loving-Mormon Romney has only been married once. It is like there is a schizophrenia taking place within the Republican Party where the party faithful and party leaders are begrudgingly accepting the supposed McCain front-runner status, but are desperately seeking a new "heir" to the Bush throne. And while these GOP leaders are desperately seeking their new "heir," they are trying to ignore Romney, who is actually turning out to be the front-runner in his ability to raise such a large amount of cash this early in the game.

As for the Democratic side, I'm not surprised about Hillary Clinton's status here. I wish the Obama campaign released their own fundraising figures, to compare with boht Clinton and Edwards numbers. It is interesting that Clinton was the top fundraiser from both the Democratic and Republican contenders, raising $26 million, with Romney coming in second at $21 million. We'll just have to see what takes place over the course of this year, and into 2008 with the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary.

Staffing problems in the Bush White House

There have been some stories that have come out over the past couple of days that seem unrelated. Or are they? I'm going to start with this March 29, 2007 New York Times story on ex-Bush aid Matthew Dowd losing faith in President Bush:

AUSTIN, Tex., March 29 — In 1999, Matthew Dowd became a symbol of George W. Bush’s early success at positioning himself as a Republican with Democratic appeal.

A top strategist for the Texas Democrats who was disappointed by the Bill Clinton years, Mr. Dowd was impressed by the pledge of Mr. Bush, then governor of Texas, to bring a spirit of cooperation to Washington. He switched parties, joined Mr. Bush’s political brain trust and dedicated the next six years to getting him to the Oval Office and keeping him there. In 2004, he was appointed the president’s chief campaign strategist.

Looking back, Mr. Dowd now says his faith in Mr. Bush was misplaced.

In a wide-ranging interview here, Mr. Dowd called for a withdrawal from Iraq and expressed his disappointment in Mr. Bush’s leadership.

He criticized the president as failing to call the nation to a shared sense of sacrifice at a time of war, failing to reach across the political divide to build consensus and ignoring the will of the people on Iraq. He said he believed the president had not moved aggressively enough to hold anyone accountable for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and that Mr. Bush still approached governing with a “my way or the highway” mentality reinforced by a shrinking circle of trusted aides.

“I really like him, which is probably why I’m so disappointed in things,” he said. He added, “I think he’s become more, in my view, secluded and bubbled in.”

In speaking out, Mr. Dowd became the first member of Mr. Bush’s inner circle to break so publicly with him.

He said his decision to step forward had not come easily. But, he said, his disappointment in Mr. Bush’s presidency is so great that he feels a sense of duty to go public given his role in helping Mr. Bush gain and keep power.

Here is a top strategist, who was once a Texas Democrat, that switched political parties and his allegiances to the Bush administration. He worked for six years in the Bush White House, and was a member of the Bush team that successfully tarred Senator John Kerry as a flip-flopper on the Iraq war during the 2004 presidential campaign. What is so amazing here in this NY Times story is how Dowd has become so disillusioned by the hard-lined, neoconservative governing approach that this administration has forced on both the Democrats, and practically half the country. According to the NY Times:

Mr. Dowd said he decided to become a Republican in 1999 and joined Mr. Bush after watching him work closely with Bob Bullock, the Democratic lieutenant governor of Texas, who was a political client of Mr. Dowd and a mentor to Mr. Bush.

“It’s almost like you fall in love,” he said. “I was frustrated about Washington, the inability for people to get stuff done and bridge divides. And this guy’s personality — he cared about education and taking a different stand on immigration.”

[....}

[Dowd] said he thought Mr. Bush handled the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks well but “missed a real opportunity to call the country to a shared sense of sacrifice.”

He was dumbfounded when Mr. Bush did not fire Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld after revelations that American soldiers had tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Several associates said Mr. Dowd chafed under Mr. Rove’s leadership. Mr. Dowd said he had not spoken to Mr. Rove in months but would not discuss their relationship in detail.

Mr. Dowd said, in retrospect, he was in denial.

“When you fall in love like that,” he said, “and then you notice some things that don’t exactly go the way you thought, what do you do? Like in a relationship, you say ‘No no, no, it’ll be different.’ ”

He said he clung to the hope that Mr. Bush would get back to his Texas style of governing if he won. But he saw no change after the 2004 victory.

He describes as further cause for doubt two events in the summer of 2005: the administration’s handling of Hurricane Katrina and the president’s refusal, around the same time that he was entertaining the bicyclist Lance Armstrong at his Crawford ranch, to meet with the war protester Cindy Sheehan, whose son died in Iraq.

“I had finally come to the conclusion that maybe all these things along do add up,” he said. “That it’s not the same, it’s not the person I thought.”

He said that during his work on the 2006 re-election campaign of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, which had a bipartisan appeal, he began to rethink his approach to elections.

What is important to understand about this Dowd story is that we have a Bush White House that not only governs from the hard right, but also equates compromise and bipartisanship with weakness. The NY Times story shows so many examples of this administration's refusal for compromise--from refusing to meet with war protester Cindy Sheehan, to defending their positions regarding secret prisons, torture, illegal wiretappings, domestic spying, the attorney purge, and even the administration's latest refusal to accept any withdrawal timetables from the war funding bill. What we have here is a hard-lined neoconservative administration that has circled its wagons and will both lie to the American people and maliciously attack anyone who does not conform to their hard-lined agenda. It is going to be interesting to see how this Bush administration will react to this Dowd story, and the mainstream media's reflections on this story.

Here is a second story here to chew on. I found this McClatchy story, titled Bush losing key adviser on Iraq:

WASHINGTON - President Bush is losing his top day-to-day adviser on Iraq, the White House confirmed Monday.

Meghan L. O'Sullivan, who has played a key behind-the-scenes role in implementing Bush's controversial Iraq policies over the past four years, will leave later this spring.

Her departure, which follows that of her deputy, could leave the White House with a vacuum of long-term experience on Iraq policy, and it comes as Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress prepare for a showdown over withdrawing U.S. troops.

O'Sullivan, 37, known for her 100-hour work weeks and steady optimism over the eventual outcome in Iraq, said in an interview that with the completion of months-long reviews of policy in Iraq and Afghanistan - which she also oversees - she felt it was the right time for a change.

"There's never a good time to leave this kind of job. ... But (I decided) this would be as good a time as any," she said, adding that she was happy with the outcome of both reviews.

O'Sullivan, who says she's uncertain of her next job, helped craft the strategy that Bush announced in January, including an increase of 28,000 U.S. troops to help secure Baghdad.

[....]

Stanford University professor Larry Diamond, who worked in Baghdad with O'Sullivan during Bremer's tenure, called her an amazingly quick study of Iraqi politics.

She "came in with very little knowledge of Iraq when the war began," Diamond said, but by the time she left some Iraqis were calling her "the Gertrude Bell of the American mission" - a reference to the British civil administrator who helped create Iraq in the early 1920s.

Still, Diamond said, O'Sullivan's time at the White House has been "during a period where our policy has failed, and our situation in Iraq has, at best, stagnated and I think, by many objective assessments deteriorated disastrously. You can hardly call her tenure a success."

O'Sullivan isn't one of the neoconservatives who advocated the U.S. invasion. In fact, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld briefly removed her and others from an advance Pentagon team in March 2003. Yet O'Sullivan never wavered in public or private from optimism that the U.S. effort in Iraq would succeed.

The big question I have to ask here is why is Meghan L. O'Sullivan leaving her position as the top adviser to President Bush on Iraq, even at this point where President Bush is in a major fight with the Democratic Congress over an emergency war funding bill that includes a withdrawal timetable. Has O'Sullivan become disillusioned with that hard-lined position this administration has taken on the war in Iraq--even at the point of going against the opinion of the American people, as measured by the public opinion polls? According to McClatchy, O'Sullivan crafted the Bush troop surge. She is the point lady on the Bush administration's side of this entire debate. And now she is leaving the Bush team.

It is not just O'Sullivan here. I found this third, small story over at TPM Muckraker reporting even more Bush White House staff changes:

White House political director Sara Taylor is out the door at the White House, according to Washington Wire. Taylor came up a number of times yesterday during the Kyle Sampson hearing as having worked closely with Sampson (along with another Karl Rove aide Scott Jennings) to install Rove's former aide Tim Griffin as the U.S. Attorney in eastern Arkansas.

"Barry Jackson, a longtime aide to Karl Rove, also is thought to be leaving soon.... All the departures appear to be more-or-less routine turnover," reports the Washington Wire.

And let's not also forget the resignations that resulted from the attorney purge over at the Department of Justice--Kyle Sampson, and Monica Goodling, who has taken an indefinite leave of absence.

Something is going on within the Bush administration regarding staffing problems. For about six years, the administration staff has been a well-oiled machine--a political one-party machine that has been using the tools of the federal government to assert this one-party political ideology. But ever since the Democrats have taken control of Congress, and have been able to assert some type of checks against this Bush White House, this well-oiled machine has started to sputter. Dowd and O'Sullivan appear to be rank-and-file Republicans, and not the neoconservatives. I wonder if both Taylor and Jackson are also rank-and-file Republicans as well. If they are, then what we could be seeing now is the beginnings of an exodus of GOP staffers who may either be disgusted with the neocon agenda within the Bush White House, or may finally realize the writing is on the wall for this administration. If that is the case, then we may be seeing even more lower-level Bush staffers leaving the White House.

Obama: Congress will fund Iraq war if Bush uses veto

I found an interesting post on the Democratic strategy regarding the Iraq war funding at Mahablog. Mahablog cites a USA Today story, regarding Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama's comment on Congress breaking down and passing a supplemental war funding bill:

From USA Today:

SIOUX CITY, Iowa (AP) — If President Bush vetoes an Iraq war spending bill as promised, Congress quickly will provide the money without the withdrawal timeline the White House objects to because no lawmaker "wants to play chicken with our troops," Sen. Barack Obama said Sunday.

"My expectation is that we will continue to try to ratchet up the pressure on the president to change course," the Democratic presidential candidate said in an interview with The Associated Press. "I don't think that we will see a majority of the Senate vote to cut off funding at this stage."

Obama has made his opposition to the war a centerpiece of his campaign and has used it to differentiate himself from rival Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

[....]

Given that Bush is determined to veto a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, Congress has little realistic choice but to approve money for the war, Obama said.

"I think that nobody wants to play chicken with our troops on the ground," said Obama. "I do think a majority of the Senate has now expressed the belief that we need to change course in Iraq.

"Obviously we're constrained by the fact that a commander in chief who also has veto power has the option of ignoring that position," Obama said.

The Senate last week approved a bill providing $123 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would order Bush to begin withdrawing troops within 120 days of passage while setting a non-binding goal of ending combat operations by March 31, 2008.

Obama, if you want the Democrats to lose the 2008 elections for both control of Congress, and the White House, then making such an asinine comment as to claiming that Congress has no choice but to fund the war is the perfect strategy for a Democratic defeat. What you have just said here is that the Democrats should just cave in to the Bush veto, and give the president the money he wants for continuing this war--without the timetable. This is unacceptable! What you are proposing is that the Democrats should continue playing rubber-stamp to this Bush White House here. That is a strategy for defeat.

Obama, why don't you look at the public opinion polls regarding Iraq. Here is a March 13, 2007 CNN Poll showing 60 percent of Americans wanting to see U.S. troops pulling out, either immediately or within a year. Here is a March 26, 2007 Pew Research poll showing 59 percent of the American public supporting a bill withdrawing American forces by August 2008. Here is a February 25, 2007 Washington Post/ABC News poll showing 56 percent of Americans favoring a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. Here is a March 31, 2007 Newsweek poll showing 57 percent of Americans favoring a withdrawal from Iraq. And finally, you can go to The Polling Report and view a number of other poll results showing that the American public favors a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. Obama, you do not break down and play chicken here against the Bush veto on Iraq--that is what the Republican Party, and the Bush White House want you to do! Consider this from The Washington Post:

Backed by a unified party and fresh from a slew of legislative victories, Democratic leaders appear to believe there is hardly any territory they cannot stray onto, a development that has Republican political operatives gleeful and some Democrats worried. Rep. Tom Cole (Okla.), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, warned of a "political price" at the polls: "If they let their constituents and their ideology drive them past the point where the American people are comfortable, they will find how quickly the voters will react."

[....]

Most Republicans are convinced the president will win his veto standoff over House and Senate war spending bills that would impose mandatory troop withdrawals from Iraq.

"It's going to be like the government shutdowns" of 1995 and 1996, predicted Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.). "The Democrats' honeymoon is fixing to end. It's going to explode like an IED."

What you have to remember here Obama, is that the Republicans are scared of what the polling data is currently showing--Americans want out of Iraq within a year. What you are seeing here is GOP spin, trying to force the Democrats to admit defeatism on Iraq--Cole's supposed warning that the Democrats will pay a political price with the public opinion polls, or Kingston's comparison of the Iraq showdown with the budget conflicts between House Speaker Newt Gingrich and President Bill Clinton in 1995 and 1006. Or even worst, President Bush's own remarks, saying that Congress will be to blame for his veto on the troop funding bill. The Republicans want the Democrats to think this way. That is the only way the Republicans can win in this debate. Obama, instead of saying that Congress should cave in to the president's demands, you should be demanding that the Bush White House be accountable for this Iraq war. We'll give you the money, but there had better be measurable benchmarks showing progress in the Iraq war within a year--otherwise we pull the troops out! If President Bush vetoes this current war funding bill, then you pass another war funding bill with another withdrawal timetable. Remember, the Democrats have got the support of the American people behind these troop withdrawal bills, as you can see by the polls. In this game of chicken, you don't blink--you force the Bush White House to blink.

That is how you can win in 2008.

According to Crooks and Liars, Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI), and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), have introduced a bill requiring the President to redeploy U.S. troops from Iraq 120 days from enactment, while also ending funding for the war after March 31, 2008. This is huge. The Democrats are basically saying to the Bush White House, if you veto the withdrawal timetable in the emergency funding bill, then we're going to cut the Iraq war funding all together. The days of blank checks are over.

The troops are coming home in late 2008, or early 2009.

Supreme Court orders EPA to regulate car emissions

This is a major case. From The Washington Post:

The Supreme Court today ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider its refusal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, narrowly siding with 12 states and various environmental groups in a battle with the Bush administration over global warming.

In a 5-4 decision, the court ruled after a four-year court battle that the EPA has "a statutory obligation" under the Clean Air Act to regulate cars' emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. It said the agency based its refusal to do so on "impermissible considerations" in an arbitrary and capricious way and that it must take a fresh look at the issue, grounding its reasons for action or inaction on the law.

The ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA represented a sharp rebuke to the Bush administration, which has steadfastly resisted mandatory limits on greenhouse gases on grounds that such restrictions would harm the U.S. economy. The administration has also disputed scientific evidence that global warming is a largely man-made phenomenon, contending that the jury is still out on the extent of the role that natural factors are playing in the current climate change trend.

In reaching its decision, the court's majority ruled that carbon dioxide and other emissions that trap heat in the earth's atmosphere fit the definition of "air pollutants" under the Clean Air Act and that the government thus has the authority to regulate them.

"EPA has offered no reasoned explanation for its refusal to decide whether greenhouse gases cause or contribute to climate change," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority. Joining him were Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and Anthony M. Kennedy.

Dissenting were the four most conservative members of the court: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

What is important about this case is that it forces the EPA to set standards for regulating "greenhouse gases" emissions on the auto industry. The Bush administration has been hiding behind two arguments in resisting such greenhouse gases regulations--that such regulations would harm the U.S. economy, and that there is no scientific evidence supporting greenhouse gases as causing global warming. The Supreme Court has rejected the EPA, and the Bush administration's, arguments on this environmental issue. Now the EPA is being forced to set standards on these gases, thus requiring the auto industry to develop technologies reducing such gases to be incorporated into new cars for sale in the U.S. Now the Bush administration's EPA will probably set the most lax standards they can for curbing greenhouse gases on the auto industry. But if a Democratic president is elected in 2008, then you are going to see an EPA that will institute much stronger standards for curbing greenhouse gases on the auto industry. This is going to force the auto industry to develop new technologies to make their cars more environmentally friendly.

This is going to be interesting to watch.

Monday Schoolhouse Rocks--Ready or not, here I come!

I love this song! This Schoolhouse Rock song has got a fast, easy-to-memorize beat. If you want to memorize your multiplication tables, then Schoolhouse Rock is the way to go!

So let's play a little Hide and Seek:

Now everybody try to find a good hidin' place
This old tree is gonna be the base
I'm gonna close my eyes and hide my face
And count to a hundred by fives
Ready? Go!

From YouTube:



Ready or not, here I come!