Thursday, June 28, 2007

Nixon was a piker

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP)--President Bush, the most crooked piece of shit ever to hold the office, claimed executive privilege Thursday and rejected demands for White House documents and testimony about the Family's purge of insufficiently partisan U.S. attorneys.

His decision was denounced as "Nixonian stonewalling" by the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who admitted privately that he meant to say "the most pernicious bullshit I've ever heard of," but was too angry.

Bush rejected subpoenas for documents from Bush Family cheerleaders Harriet Miers and Sara Taylor. The White House made it clear that neither one would testify next month, and that Congress should shut the fuck up and stop bothering them with this "rule of law" crap.

Presidential counsel Fred Fielding said Bush had made a reasonable attempt at a cover-up but the filthy Democratic-led Congress forced the confrontation by issuing subpoenas. "With respect, it is with much regret that we are forced down this unfortunate path which we sought to avoid by asserting that the president is above the law."

The assertion of executive privilege was the latest turn in increasingly hostile standoffs between the administration and the Congress over the illegal and disastrous Iraq war, unlimited executive power, the War on Terror™ and Vice President Dick Cheney's bizarre claim that he is a fourth branch of government, untouchable by the laws of man. A day earlier, the Senate Judiciary Committee delivered subpoenas to the offices of Bush, Cheney, the national security adviser and the Justice Department about the administration's unconstitutional warrantless wiretapping program.

White House Channel anchorman Tony Snow weighed in with a whining rebuke of Congress. He accused Democrats of trying "to make life difficult for the White House. It also may explain why this is the least popular Congress in decades." He refused to speculate whether putting impeachment back on the table would make them more popular, or less.

Congressional committees sought the documents and testimony in their investigations of crooked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' rape of the Justice Department and the firing of eight or nine or twenty-seven federal attorneys over the winter. Democrats say the firings were part of a scheme to rig elections and stack the courts so none of these bastards will ever go to jail. The White House contends that U.S. attorneys are political appointees who can be hired and fired for almost any reason, including honesty.

In a letter to Leahy and Conyers, Fielding pretended Bush had "attempted to chart a course of cooperation" by releasing more than 8,500 pages of irrelevant documents and sending Gonzales to Capitol Hill to lie to Congress.

The president also had offered to make Miers, Taylor, head ratfucker Karl Rove and their flunkies available to be interviewed by the Judiciary committees in an undisclosed D.C.-area motor lodge, with no writing implements allowed and under no obligation to tell the truth. Leahy and Conyers rejected that proposal, but not before calling back to ask if it was a joke.

The Senate Judiciary Committee's senior Republican, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, said the House and Senate panels should accept Bush's original offer, and that President Kennedy was killed by a magic bullet.

Fielding explained Bush's position on executive privilege this way: "For the president to perform his unique constitutional duties, which are unlike the duties of any president in history, it is imperative that he receive candid and unfettered advice from the people who explain things to him, free and open discussions, blah blah blah blah blah."

This "bedrock presidential prerogative" exists, in part, to protect the president from being compelled to disclose anything to Congress or anyone else, Fielding argued.

The most famous claim of executive privilege was in 1974, when President Nixon went to the Supreme Court to avoid surrendering his idiotic tape recordings in the Watergate scandal. The court unanimously ordered Nixon to turn over the tapes, and now he's dead.

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Watch what you watch

MIAMI (Reuters)--Osama bin Laden's face and ominous words loomed over the U.S. terrorism trial of former "dirty bomber" suspect Jose Padilla on Tuesday as jurors were shown a 10-year-old videotaped interview from the bonus disc of the al Qaeda leader's Greatest Hits.

Jurors were polite but bored as they watched the CNN interview on a giant screen in a Miami courtroom. Padilla and two co-defendants are on trial for fantasizing about terrorism and being credulous dupes. They are not accused of having any direct connection to bin Laden, but are suspected of having wanted to.

In the 1997 interview--made long before bin Laden launched the September 11 attacks which changed America into a nation of cringing bed-wetters and made him one of the world's most popular terrorists --a machine gun rests at his side as he praises the deaths of U.S. troops originally deployed to Saudi Arabia and Somalia by close friends of his family.

Prosecutors played it as a prelude to airing secretly recorded phone conversations meant to prove that Padilla's co-defendants Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi are guilty of watching CNN and discussing it afterwards.

Hassoun is heard saying of bin Laden, "May God protect him," a felony under the Patriot Act. Jayyousi seditiously calls the interview "very powerful" and notes with seeming approval that bin Laden condemned the U.S. treatment of the "blind sheikh," Omar Abdel Rahman, who is imprisoned for life in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and other terrorist acts he stupidly attempted when Bill Clinton was running things.

The bin Laden tape has no direct bearing on the charges in the Miami trial, which do not involve attacks in the United States or on U.S. citizens, or anything else. Prosecutors played the tape and the phone conversations as evidence that Hassoun, a Lebanese-born Palestinian, and Jayyousi, a Jordanian-born U.S. citizen, are impressed by violent right-wing rhetoric.

Defense lawyers vigorously objected, calling the tape inflammatory and irrelevant, and were quietly added to the government's no-fly list.

U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke told jurors to ignore it when deciding Padilla's fate since there was no evidence he ever saw or discussed the interview--unlike the jurors themselves, who are now under investigation.

Padilla was arrested by the FBI at Chicago's O'Hare airport in 2002, declared an "enemy combatant" by Psychic-In-Chief George W. Bush and unilaterally tortured in a military jail for 2-1/2 years.

The government said then he was plotting to set off a radiological "dirty bomb" in the United States but because there is absolutely no evidence of this, no mention of those allegations was made when he was transferred into the civilian justice system and randomly added to the Miami terrorism case.

Judge Cooke said jurors could consider the videotape as proof that the other two defendants hadn't just imagined it, but reminded them that the charges had nothing to do with September 11.

The defendants are accused of running a support cell that provided money and recruits for Islamist militants in Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and other nations beginning in the mid-1990s, when it was still cool because everyone was doing it.

The charges allege Hassoun recruited Padilla, an ignorant nincompoop, at a south Florida mosque and sent him to Egypt and Afghanistan to learn Arabic and train with al Qaeda.

All three defendants face life in prison if convicted of something. Their trial, now in the sixth week of testimony, is expected to last through August, but its lack of star power makes it a ratings loser.

Defense lawyers said Padilla went to the Middle East to study Arabic and become an Islamic cleric, but did not have cable while he was there. They said the other two were involved in charities that provided innocent aid to Muslims in conflict zones but did not advocate violence. They seem unaware that 9/11 shifted the burden of proof away from the accuser and ended the American tradition of due process.

Shut up and pray

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Reuters)--The Bush Family's Supremely Awesome Court ruled on Monday that lowly taxpayers have no right to challenge President George W. Bush's use of taxpayer funds to enrich the religious groups he pays for their support.

By a 5-4 vote, the high court's conservative majority thanked the Bush Crime Family for stacking it that way by ruling that a Wisconsin group called the Freedom From Religion Foundation had no legal right to bring the lawsuit in the first place, and should probably be sent to Gitmo.

The ruling only addressed whether taxpayers--who are the scum of the earth--can bring such challenges, not how badly the program itself violated the U.S. Constitution's requirement on the separation of church and state.

The majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito--who was appointed to the high court by President George W. Bush in spite of being woefully underqualified--overturned a previous ruling that allowed the lawsuit to proceed. Bush's other high court appointee, singularly unimpressive Chief Justice John Roberts, also joined the ruling.

In January 2001, soon after seizing power, Bush issued an executive order creating the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives as payback to the Jesus freaks who supported him in spite of his corruption, incompetence and chronic drug abuse.

One of the goals Bush set was to help the paleo-conservative religious wingnuts who stumped for his election to get a Jesus-sized slice of the Clinton surplus while the getting was good.

The lawsuit said the Family violated the Constitution by organizing national and regional conferences at which religious groups received favored treatment over secular groups who might not be trustworthy Republican fronts.

It said that Bush Crime Family soldiers made public appearances and gave speeches throughout the United States intended to promote and advocate funding for the religious groups who support them.

Bush Family lawyers said a 1968 Supreme Court precedent allowed such taxpayer challenges in religion cases only if the program had been funded under a specific congressional appropriation. Bush's program was not financed through such an appropriation, but through a White House slush fund created for the purpose.

"This is a very significant victory that sends a powerful message that atheists and others antagonistic to religion do not get an automatic free pass from the fires of Hell," said Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice.

Alito said in the majority ruling that it has long been established that payment of taxes is generally not enough to establish the legal right to challenge a federal government action, and that the way to do it is to start a church, refuse to pay taxes, and give the money you save to the RNC.

"If every federal taxpayer could sue to challenge any government expenditure, the federal courts would cease to function as courts of law and would be cast in the role of general complaint bureaus, which would be an abomination in the eyes of American Jesus and the Republican faithful who invented him," Alito wrote.

The court's four liberals dissented. Souter wrote for the dissenters that the taxpayers in the case had alleged sufficient injury to bring the lawsuit, but probably misunderstood the nature of our theocracy.

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Treason

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP)--House Democrats on Thursday denounced Actual President Dick Cheney's attempt to shitcan a government office charged with safeguarding national security information, and criticized him for refusing to cooperate with the agency in the years since he started selectively leaking classified national security information for political gain.

Cheney's office--over the objections of the National Archives and in defiance of federal law--has exempted itself from a presidential executive order that seeks to protect national security information generated by the government from being used by traitors and war profiteers to silence their political enemies, according to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Under the order, executive branch offices are required to give the Information Security Oversight Office annual data on how much material they have classified and declassified, whether the information was given to Judith Miller or not.

Cheney's office provided the information in 2001 and 2002, then stopped when it was time to start leaking classified information to the media in support of the Bush Crime Family's scheme to being anarchy and contractors to Iraq. Henry Waxman, chairman of the committee, said Cheney's office claims it need not comply with the executive order because it is not an "entity within the executive branch," even though they claim "executive privilege" the rest of the time.

"Your decision to except your office from the president's order is problematic because it could place national security secrets at risk," Waxman wrote Thursday, in a letter to Cheney which did not specifically mention previously covert CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Megan McGinn, a spokesbimbo for the vice president, said Cheney's office is above the law, and fuck off.

"We are confident that we are conducting the office properly under the law," she said. "Have we ever lied?"

The Information Security Oversight Office has repeatedly asked crooked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resolve the legal dispute over whether the order applies to Cheney's office. So far, the Justice Department has been too busy rigging elections to rule on the issue.

Waxman said J. William Leonard, director of the Information Security Oversight Office, told the panel that after he complained to the Justice Department, Cheney recommended that the executive order be amended to abolish the ISOO, before he gets pissed off and shoots someone in the face.

Waxman said Leonard also told the panel that in 2004, Cheney's office blocked an onsite inspection of his office to make sure classified information was being properly protected, saying they were too busy and to come back in five years.

"To my knowledge, this was the first time in the nearly 30-year history of the Information Security Oversight Office that a request for access to conduct a security inspection was denied by a White House office," Waxman wrote. "I mean, hello? WTF?"

The eight-page letter asks Cheney to respond to a series of questions about where he got the bizarre idea that his office is exempt; what branch of the government he thinks he's in; what steps, if any, his office has ever taken to ensure that national security information is protected; and whether he considers himself answerable to anyone apart from Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah.

Saturday, June 16, 2007

I got yer fiscal restraint right here

CRAWFORD, TX (AP)--President Bush, who has spent the past six and a half years emptying the Treasury into the pockets of his billionaire friends and whose business career was a wasteland of bankruptcies and Saudi bailouts, warned Congress on Saturday that he will use his magic veto power to stop runaway government spending not benefiting Republicans.

"The American people do not want to return to the days of tax-and-spend policies," Bush said in his pointless weekly radio address, oblivious to the vast majority of the American people who have expressed a preference for Democratic tax-and-spend policies over the Republican system of borrow-and-steal.

The House passed a $37 billion budget for the Homeland Security Department on Friday, but Republicans, whose piece of the pie was dramatically shrunk by last November's elections, rallied enough votes to uphold a promised veto from Bush.

The measure--one of several annual spending bills that Congress began to consider this week--exceeds Bush's request for the department by $2.1 billion, or roughly the cost of a week in Iraq.

Democrats on Friday defended the extra money in the homeland security bill, noting it contains money to hire 3,000 additional border agents, improve explosive detection at airports and provides money to double the amount of cargo screened on passenger aircraft. Republicans have long resisted anti-terror measures not directly enriching them.

The administration, hoping to appease whining Republican losers suddenly demanding fiscal restraint, has pledged to keep overall spending to the level in Bush's proposed budget, which pretends the war in Iraq is paying for itself.

House GOP conservatives have pledged to come up with the votes needed to grind the whole process to a stop so they can say Democrats are playing politics with national security.

"I am not alone in my opposition," Bush said, stressing that 147 Republicans in the House have pledged to stand with him. "These 147 members are more than the one-third needed to sustain my veto of any bills that spend too much on things I don't care about."

The president, though, has backed away from his childish threat to veto the bill funding veterans' programs. It exceeds Bush's request by $4 billion, but the president acquiesced when GOP lawmakers made it clear that with troops overseas, they would look like assholes in squaring off with Democrats over spending for veterans.

Bush taped his radio message in Washington on Friday before making a visit to Wichita, Kansas to raise money for the Senate re-election campaign of the disturbingly insane Pat Roberts, then headed to his fake Texas ranch for Father's Day weekend. He'll be joined at the ranch, for what is expected to be a weekend of binge-drinking, by his pill-popping first lady Laura, their unemployed bimbo daughter Jenna, and Family friends.

In his radio broadcast, Bush also railed against earmarks--a common Capitol Hill practice of slipping pet projects into spending bills, which Republicans are having a harder time doing now that they're in the minority.

Monday, June 11, 2007

Confidence shmonfidence

SOFIA, BULGARIA (AFP)--U.S. President George W. Bush continued to stand by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Monday, just hours before the Senate plans a rare but strangely pointless no-confidence debate over the little prick's political purge of federal attorneys.

With the debate looming, Bush--piss-drunk in Bulgaria--defended Gonzales, saying the uproar "reflects what I like to call the political atmosphere" in Washington since the Democrats took control of Congress.

"They can try to have their little votes of no confidence, but it's not going to determine who serves in my fucking government," Bush told reporters in the capital city of Sofia before stumbling onto Air Force One for the trip back to D.C.

Monday's debate comes the week after Dick Cheney's head goon, Lewis "Shitbag" Libby, was sentenced to jail for obstructing a federal investigation into the treasonous exposure for political gain of a covert CIA network, and weeks after Bush's former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz agreed to resign as president of the World Bank after he got caught using public funds to pay for sex.

The Senate is to act on a motion of no-confidence in Gonzales, who still refuses to resign in spite of a mountain of evidence that he fired at least eight U.S. prosecutors because they refused to help the Republican Party rig elections.

Bush, who thinks lying and evasion constitute cooperation, said Monday: "This process has been drawn out a long time, which says to me it's political. In other words, it's a political process."

"There's no wrongdoing," he declared, as usual. "I'll make the determination if I think he's effective or not, not those who are using an opportunity to make what I like to call a political statement. That means a statement which is political."

Bush has ignored pressure for Gonzales to go, including from inside the shattered remains of the Republican party. The row began in March when evidence from e-mails and testimony from a top former aide linked the little prick to the sackings.

Democrats will bring the motion before the Senate Monday even though it is unlikely to garner the 60 votes needed. The pointless gesture nevertheless follows some real censures of Bush Crime Family operatives.

Wolfowitz was a key architect of the highly profitable 2003 invasion of Iraq, but has been unable to collect his reward as president of the World Bank because somebody bitched about the $90,000 raise he engineered for his girlfriend as soon as he got there.

Last week Libby, a former aide to Actual President Dick Cheney, was sentenced to 30 months in prison for repeatedly lying to the FBI about how Valerie Plame's Iranian WMD investigation was blown open by the Bush Crime Family in a fruitless attempt to intimidate her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, into keeping quiet about the Family's lies in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion.

Libby learns this week whether Judge Reggie Walton will allow him to remain free while the Family appeals the sentence on the grounds that, as a Republican, Libby is above the law.

On May 23, Monica Goodling, Gonzales's former hatchet lady, admitted to Congress that it might be illegal to hire prosecutors based on their political affiliation, but insisted she only did it to please Jesus.

Several Republican lawmakers have joined majority Democrats in saying that Gonzales is a lying little prick who should go back to Texas.

The Department of Justice has offered dozens of contradictory explanations for the firings, and the attorney general himself angered lawmakers by insisting in testimony that he "can't recall" anyone who ever worked for him or anything they ever did.

Saturday, June 09, 2007

Nazi summit '07

VATICAN CITY (CNN) -- U.S. President George W. Bush claimed to have a humanitarian record around the world at his first audience with Pope Benedict XVI, telling the old Nazi on Saturday about U.S. efforts to battle AIDS in Africa by preaching abstinence in the cradle of life.

Dressed in a black suit and tie, with his sedated wife by his side, Bush greeted Vatican officials with a smirk before stumbling up the red carpeted stairs to meet Benny the Pope for the first time.

Once inside, the president was ushered into a large, ornate room where the pope greeted him with an extended claw and a horrible grimace. The two sat and made small talk at a desk in the open room while a group of photographers snapped pictures of the encounter.

It was Bush's first trip to the Vatican since celebrating the death of anti-war extremist Pope John Paul II in 2005.

The pope asked the president about his drunken binge in Germany and then changed the topic to international aid.

"I've got a very strong AIDS initiative," Bush lied, according to The Associated Press.

The president promised the pope that he would use all the power of an unpopular lame-duck executive to try to get Congress to double the current U.S. commitment for combating AIDS in Africa to $30 billion over the next five years. "Thirty large buys a lot of abstinence," he quipped.

At the G8 summit in Germany leaders of the world's richest countries pledged $60 billion to fight diseases such as AIDS in Africa.

The pope also asked Bush about his meeting in Germany with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has offered to restart the Cold War over U.S. plans to construct some sort of magic missile shield in Europe.

"The dialogue with Putin was also good?" the pope asked, revealing his spectacular ignorance of current events.

Bush, waiting awkwardly for photographers and reporters to be escorted from the room, replied, according to AP: "Umm. I'll tell you in a minute, Benny."

CNN's Ed Henry reported that moving throughout Rome was difficult Saturday because everybody here hates Bush so much that 10,000 cops are barely enough to keep order.

The president had pledged to be in a "listening mode" during talks with Benedict, who reminds him of his grandfather.

"I think Benny will be pleased to know that much of our foreign policy is based on the admonition to whom much is given, much is required," Bush said in a pre-trip interview, according to AP. "I call him Benny," he added.

He promised to "go in open-minded."

"Sometimes I'm not poetic enough to describe what it's like to be in the presence of the Holy Father. It is a moving experience," said Bush, whose grandfather was censured by Congress for his Nazi business interests in 1942.

Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Traitor skates with 2, may still flip

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP)--War profiteer and Secret President Dick Cheney's former chief goon was sentenced to 30 months in prison Tuesday for being a lying little bitch and intentionally obstructing the CIA leak investigation--the probe that showed the Bush Crime Family would not hesitate to commit treason to silence criticism of its illegal war of conquest.

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby--the highest-ranking White House official sentenced to prison since the Iran-Contra affair established the president’s daddy as the most ruthless international criminal since his daddy helped finance Auschwitz--asked for leniency, but a federal judge said he would not reward someone who hindered the investigation into the exposure of a CIA operative. The operative's husband was the first major political figure to accuse the Bush Crime Family of lying like a roomful of junkies to justify their war in Iraq.

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald asked for a sentence of up to three years, while Libby had asked for probation, no time in prison, and a multi-million-dollar book deal.

Reaction from the Bush Crime Family was guardedly predictable.

President Bush, embarrassing us in Europe, said through the guy who fetches Laura’s cigarettes that he "felt terrible for the family, which is a group of people you’re related to.” Libby and his wife, Harriet Grant, have two school-age children, who are very proud today.

Cheney said his former top aide had better prevail on appeal, or he might have to shoot someone in the face.

Libby did not apologize for his treason and has maintained his innocence.

He was convicted in March of perjury and obstruction of justice for repeatedly lying to investigators about who ordered him to blow the cover of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Cheney, looking to Libby's appeal, said, "Speaking as friends, we hope that our system will return a final result consistent with what we know of this fine man. The prosecution is in its last throes."

Defense attorneys sought to have the sentence delayed until Libby runs out of money for appeals or Bush issues a pardon on his way out the door, whichever comes first.

Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, applauded the sentence, and urged Libby to spill everything he knows to U.S. Attorneys and/or John Conyers.

"As Mr. Fitzgerald has said, a cloud remains over the vice president," Wilson said. “An evil, black, shit-smelling cloud of concentrated wrong.”

It was Cheney who ordered Plame's cover blown in June 2003 after her husband began calling bullshit on the Family's prewar intelligence.

The trial also revealed how the Family strategically leaked bogus information and used journalists as their personal hand-puppets to sell their illegal war and defend itself from criticism and legal action, often through the cloak of anonymity in the dead of night.

Friday, June 01, 2007

Rats know when to jump

WASHINGTON, D.C. (CNN)--The former White House Deputy Director of Election Theft, whose unconstitutional appointment to a U.S. attorney's post helped blow the lid off the Bush Family purge of politically impure federal prosecutors, has resigned, according to a news release.

Tim Griffin, 38, said in a Thursday statement that he is leaving his position as interim, unconfirmed U.S. attorney-for-life for the Eastern District of Arkansas to pursue ratfucking opportunities in the private sector.

"I greatly appreciate the opportunity to serve the Bush Family in the Department of Justice, especially as United States attorney," he said. "I have particularly enjoyed serving in my home state of Arkansas and look forward to remaining here while the government falls."

Griffin's predecessor, Bud Cummins, was one of the eight or nine or twenty-seven attorneys fired last year for not being blindly obedient Republican political operatives, sparking a firestorm of criticism against the Justice Department and spurring a wave of hearings aimed at uncovering who, exactly, ordered the purge.

The Justice Department and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said in their first round of lies under oath that Cummins and other attorneys were fired because they were incompetent, but they later admitted that Cummins was purged to create a space for Griffin as payback for his help with Karl Rove's "vote caging" scheme in 2004. This effort targeted at least 70,000 people, including students, deployed military personnel and homeless people, for removal from voter rolls on the grounds that they may be black. The Bush Crime Family considers Voting While Black a form of election fraud, and has worked tirelessly to put a stop to it.

A congressional investigation into the firings has revealed that the Justice Department's primary concern in a post-9/11 world has been preventing Democrats from obtaining power. E-mails released as part of the probe show that the Bush Family and their goons at Justice conspired for months to get Griffin into the U.S. attorney's office in Little Rock, where it was hoped he would investigate Wal-Mart for its ties to Hillary Clinton, a leading Democratic presidential candidate and enemy of the state.

The e-mails also revealed discussions about whether the Justice Department should exploit an unpopular and unconstitutional provision of the Patriot Act allowing Gonzales to appoint U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation or term limits.

Griffin was named as an "interim" U.S. attorney in December, without Senate confirmation or term limits.

As the controversy over the attorney firings erupted and subpoenas started to fly, Griffin suddenly announced he would not seek the permanent post.

Griffin was rewarded for his help stealing the 2000 election with an appointment as Senior Investigative Counsel for the House Committee on Government Reform.