They should probably hurry before Barry from Chicago...

• Is Vermont really going to pull off seceeding from the USA? - Backwards typist
  • They should probably hurry before Barry from Chicago... - watcher
  • More states need to follow suit - hmmm
    • My state has already laid down restrictions from the - federal government...thank God! nm
  • Thomas Naylor, founder, said it was gaining - momentum BIG TIME...and he was a dem!! nm

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    Sunday 16 October 2005

    There hasn't been anything like it since Martha Stewart fended off questions about her stock-trading scandal by manically chopping cabbage on The Early Show on CBS. Last week the setting was Today on NBC, where the image of President Bush manically hammering nails at a Habitat for Humanity construction site on the Gulf Coast was juggled with the sight of him trying to duck Matt Lauer's questions about Karl Rove.

    As with Ms. Stewart, Mr. Bush's paroxysm of panic was must-see TV. The president was a blur of blinks, taps, jiggles, pivots and shifts, Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post. Asked repeatedly about Mr. Rove's serial appearances before a Washington grand jury, the jittery Mr. Bush, for once bereft of a script, improvised a passable impersonation of Norman Bates being quizzed by the detective in Psycho. Like Norman and Ms. Stewart, he stonewalled.

    That stonewall may start to crumble in a Washington courtroom this week or next. In a sense it already has. Now, as always, what matters most in this case is not whether Mr. Rove and Lewis Libby engaged in a petty conspiracy to seek revenge on a whistle-blower, Joseph Wilson, by unmasking his wife, Valerie, a covert C.I.A. officer. What makes Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation compelling, whatever its outcome, is its illumination of a conspiracy that was not at all petty: the one that took us on false premises into a reckless and wasteful war in Iraq. That conspiracy was instigated by Mr. Rove's boss, George W. Bush, and Mr. Libby's boss, Dick Cheney.

    Mr. Wilson and his wife were trashed to protect that larger plot. Because the personnel in both stories overlap, the bits and pieces we've learned about the leak inquiry over the past two years have gradually helped fill in the über-narrative about the war. Last week was no exception. Deep in a Wall Street Journal account of Judy Miller's grand jury appearance was this crucial sentence: Lawyers familiar with the investigation believe that at least part of the outcome likely hangs on the inner workings of what has been dubbed the White House Iraq Group.

    Very little has been written about the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG. Its inception in August 2002, seven months before the invasion of Iraq, was never announced. Only much later would a newspaper article or two mention it in passing, reporting that it had been set up by Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff. Its eight members included Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby, Condoleezza Rice and the spinmeisters Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin. Its mission: to market a war in Iraq.

    Of course, the official Bush history would have us believe that in August 2002 no decision had yet been made on that war. Dates bracketing the formation of WHIG tell us otherwise. On July 23, 2002 - a week or two before WHIG first convened in earnest - a British official told his peers, as recorded in the now famous Downing Street memo, that the Bush administration was ensuring that the intelligence and facts about Iraq's W.M.D.'s were being fixed around the policy of going to war. And on Sept. 6, 2002 - just a few weeks after WHIG first convened - Mr. Card alluded to his group's existence by telling Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times that there was a plan afoot to sell a war against Saddam Hussein: From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.

    The official introduction of that product began just two days later. On the Sunday talk shows of Sept. 8, Ms. Rice warned that we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud, and Mr. Cheney, who had already started the nuclear doomsday drumbeat in three August speeches, described Saddam as actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. The vice president cited as evidence a front-page article, later debunked, about supposedly nefarious aluminum tubes co-written by Judy Miller in that morning's Times. The national security journalist James Bamford, in A Pretext for War, writes that the article was all too perfectly timed to facilitate exactly the sort of propaganda coup that the White House Iraq Group had been set up to stage-manage.

    The administration's doomsday imagery was ratcheted up from that day on. As Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus of The Washington Post would determine in the first account of WHIG a full year later, the administration's escalation of nuclear rhetoric could be traced to the group's formation. Along with mushroom clouds, uranium was another favored image, the Post report noted, because anyone could see its connection to an atomic bomb. It appeared in a Bush radio address the weekend after the Rice-Cheney Sunday show blitz and would reach its apotheosis with the infamously fictional 16 words about uranium from Africa in Mr. Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address on the eve of war.

    Throughout those crucial seven months between the creation of WHIG and the start of the American invasion of Iraq, there were indications that evidence of a Saddam nuclear program was fraudulent or nonexistent. Joseph Wilson's C.I.A. mission to Niger, in which he failed to find any evidence to back up uranium claims, took place nearly a year before the president's 16 words. But the truth never mattered. The Bush-Cheney product rolled out by Card, Rove, Libby & Company had been bought by Congress, the press and the public. The intelligence and facts had been successfully fixed to sell the war, and any memory of Mr. Bush's errant 16 words melted away in Shock and Awe. When, months later, a national security official, Stephen Hadley, took responsibility for allowing the president to address the nation about mythical uranium, no one knew that Mr. Hadley, too, had been a member of WHIG.

    It was not until the war was supposedly over - with Mission Accomplished, in May 2003 - that Mr. Wilson started to add his voice to those who were disputing the administration's uranium hype. Members of WHIG had a compelling motive to shut him down. In contrast to other skeptics, like Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency (this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner), Mr. Wilson was an American diplomat; he had reported his findings in Niger to our own government. He was a dagger aimed at the heart of WHIG and its disinformation campaign. Exactly who tried to silence him and how is what Mr. Fitzgerald presumably will tell us.

    It's long been my hunch that the WHIG-ites were at their most brazen (and, in legal terms, reckless) during the many months that preceded the appointment of Mr. Fitzgerald as special counsel. When Mr. Rove was asked on camera by ABC News in September 2003 if he had any knowledge of the Valerie Wilson leak and said no, it was only hours before the Justice Department would open its first leak investigation. When Scott McClellan later declared that he had been personally assured by Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby that they were not involved with the leak, the case was still in the safe hands of the attorney general then, John Ashcroft, himself a three-time Rove client in past political campaigns. Though Mr. Rove may be known as Bush's brain, he wasn't smart enough to anticipate that Justice Department career employees would eventually pressure Mr. Ashcroft to recuse himself because of this conflict of interest, clearing the way for an outside prosecutor as independent as Mr. Fitzgerald.

    Bush's Brain is the title of James Moore and Wayne Slater's definitive account of Mr. Rove's political career. But Mr. Rove is less his boss's brain than another alliterative organ (or organs), that which provides testosterone. As we learn in Bush's Brain, bad things (usually character assassination) often happen to Bush foes, whether Ann Richards or John McCain. On such occasions, Mr. Bush stays compassionately above the fray while the ruthless Mr. Rove operates below the radar, always separated by a layer of operatives from any ill behavior that might implicate him. There is no crime, just a victim, Mr. Moore and Mr. Slater write of this repeated pattern.

    THIS modus operandi was foolproof, shielding the president as well as Mr. Rove from culpability, as long as it was about winning an election. The attack on Mr. Wilson, by contrast, has left them and the Cheney-Libby tag team vulnerable because it's about something far bigger: protecting the lies that took the country into what the Reagan administration National Security Agency director, Lt. Gen. William Odom, recently called the greatest strategic disaster in United States history.

    Whether or not Mr. Fitzgerald uncovers an indictable crime, there is once again a victim, but that victim is not Mr. or Mrs. Wilson; it's the nation. It is surely a joke of history that even as the White House sells this weekend's constitutional referendum as yet another victory for democracy in Iraq, we still don't know the whole story of how our own democracy was hijacked on the way to war.

be paying tax on his cigarettes, but the tax certainly will have no economic or social impact on him.  Does he actually purchase his own?  Or does he have 'people' to do that for him? RHIP.

This country has a long and notorious history of trying to prohibit certain bahaviors either by outlawing them, or by taxing them.  As for outright prohibiting or taxing out of existence ANYTHING (tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, hard drugs, prostitution, pornography, owning a gun, owning gold, using incandescent light bulbs, driving an SUV, eating fast fooods, earning more than $250K) we all know how well this concept has worked in the past.  Tell us that 'for our own good' or for an even more nebulous reason 'the good of society'  or even more vague 'for the good of the entire planet' certain behaviors must be stopped and we will certainly find a way around it.  Only the really fearful law-abiding citizen will obey, the rest, people who previously were not criminals, will become criminals to keep from being bossed around.

The only exception that comes right to my mind is segregation.  That actually was a combination of social pressure and legislation.  And it did not happen until the social climate was ready to accept it.  It wasn't without a fight, but it was something the majority of reasonable and right-thinking could understand was the right thing to do.

be paying tax on his cigarettes, but the tax certainly will have no economic or social impact on him.  Does he actually purchase his own?  Or does he have 'people' to do that for him? RHIP.

This country has a long and notorious history of trying to prohibit certain bahaviors either by outlawing them, or by taxing them.  As for outright prohibiting or taxing out of existence ANYTHING (tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, hard drugs, prostitution, pornography, owning a gun, owning gold, using incandescent light bulbs, driving an SUV, eating fast fooods, earning more than $250K) we all know how well this concept has worked in the past.  Tell us that 'for our own good' or for an even more nebulous reason 'the good of society'  or even more vague 'for the good of the entire planet' certain behaviors must be stopped and we will certainly find a way around it.  Only the really fearful law-abiding citizen will obey, the rest, people who previously were not criminals, will become criminals to keep from being bossed around.

The only exception that comes right to my mind is segregation.  That actually was a combination of social pressure and legislation.  And it did not happen until the social climate was ready to accept it.  It wasn't without a fight, but it was something the majority of reasonable and right-thinking could understand was the right thing to do.

It's no secret how corrupt Chicago politics are (& Illinois as a whole).  They have the highest tax in the nation--10.25%!  My sister lives there, and earns an excellent salary, yet gets taxed to death.  Chicago is also quite fond of nepotism as well.  We're talking dead voters and also taxes for all kinds of environmental stuff.  Let us now forget the state tax as well.

Totally militant politics!

//

good things to come.  As Bank of America acquires Merrill-Lynch (whose CEO has the utter gall to request a $10 million bonus pay-out after the ML sell-out) they are refusing credit to Republic Windows and Doors out of Chicago after receiving $15 billion in TARP funds.  The workers are fighting back to recover the pay and benefits they have already earned and their governor is backing them up.  Now that's what I'm talkin' about !

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aw5QzWC86Vl8&refer=home

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/23/AR2008102302081.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Right-wing rants that cite email sources are suspect at best.  Google any one heading included in yesterday's post and discover links to the "common sense" of the Getting' After Left show and a barrage of right-wing blogs.  Surprise, surprise. 

BODY COUNT 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_cities_by_crime_rate

Despite being the 3rd largest US city, Chicago's murder rate ranks 20th behind much less populous cities Baltimore MD, Newark NJ, St. Louis MO, Oakland CA, Cincinnati OH, Buffalo NY, Kansas City MO, Miami FL, Pittsburg PA,  and Cleveland OH.  Guess who is ranked #21 (same general category)?  That would be McC's hometown of Phoenix Arizona.  Chicago has experienced an overall decline in crime since the 1990s.

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/

You seem to be equating Iraq fatalities to murder.  I agree.  On that Iraq body count figure, since you are talking civilians in Chicago, it is only fair to include those folks in your first six months of 2008 figure.  In 2008, the average daily violent occupation-related loss of life via suicide attacks, vehicle bombs, gunfire and executions is 27 x 182.5 days in first six months = 4,927 + you 221 = 5148.  While we are at it, may as well throw out that total civilian body count in Iraq, the very most conservative documented count being 88,373, or World Trade Center x30.   

"COMBAT ZONE"

Naturally, no reliable data is available on this claim, it being a subjective pronouncement that seeks to pontificate.

STATE PENSION FUND

Here we see the smear leap from the Chicago to the state level...an apples to oranges, smoke and mirrors maneuver the GOP attack machine thought they might slip by unattentive readers.  OK.  Let's go there.  As recently as February of this year, we find the following:  http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/2008/02/25/daily29.html

Center on Budget and Policy and Priorities:  McCain's red state:  Arizona Budget Deficit Worst in the Country.  Follow link for all the fascinating details.     

http://www.cbpp.org/1-15-08sfp.htm  Info updated 08/05/08

For starters, state budget deficits are ranked in terms of shortfall percentages.

In the US, 29 states face budget shortfalls totaling 48 billion in 2009.  Notice how similar this 29-state total is to the amount in the GOP smear that claimed a $44 BILLION dollar deficit IL pension plan funds.   Arizona's shortfall percentage = 17.8%, now in second place behind the nations most populous state, California.  Illinois' shortfall percentage = 6.6%, making AZ's budget deficit nearly 3 times that of IL.  So, if we hold dems (and by pub logic, O) responsible for Chicago, then who, pray tell is responsible for Arizona, the political culture from which JM comes from? 

COUNTY SALES TAX

To suggest that any party's local (especially municipal or county) tax schemes would be reproduced on a national level is downright ridiculous.  Tax structures are entirely different and wildly varied from state to state.  Speaking of states, I came across this link http://www.fairtaxation.org/facts/sales_tax_rank.php which shows the Arizona sales tax rate ranks higher (#10) at 7.8% than Illinois at 7.6%. 

CHICAGO SCHOOLS WORST IN NATION

I bit hard to address this second subjective pronouncement that seeks to pontificate.  In terms of WHAT exactly is it the worst?  They are certainly not an uneducated bunch of folks: 

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a80Zfbu_.k4g&refer=us  University of Chicago has produced 82 Nobel prize winners and 10 Nobel Prize winners in economics, more than any university in the US.  The John Bates Clark Medal, bestowed every two years, recognizes the nation's most outstanding economist under 40.  U of Chicago has produced more than any other US institution, 6 out of the 31 recipients.  Seems like those Chicago economists are sort of, well....exceptional. 

I really could go on and on about Chicago's booming economy but I am out of time here.  Maybe later then. 

again, and the Chicago Tribune is hardly a conservative paper...and note what Clinton's deputy Atty General Jamie Gorelick said

*****

The passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978 did not alter the constitutional situation. That law created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that can authorize surveillance directed at an agent of a foreign power, which includes a foreign terrorist group. Thus, Congress put its weight behind the constitutionality of such surveillance in compliance with the law's procedures.

But as the 2002 Court of Review noted, if the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches, FISA could not encroach on the president's constitutional power.

Every president since FISA's passage has asserted that he retained inherent power to go beyond the act's terms. Under President Clinton, deputy Atty. Gen. Jamie Gorelick testified that the Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes.

FISA contains a provision making it illegal to engage in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute. The term electronic surveillance is defined to exclude interception outside the U.S., as done by the NSA, unless there is interception of a communication sent by or intended to be received by a particular, known United States person (a U.S. citizen or permanent resident) and the communication is intercepted by intentionally targeting that United States person. The cryptic descriptions of the NSA program leave unclear whether it involves targeting of identified U.S. citizens. If the surveillance is based upon other kinds of evidence, it would fall outside what a FISA court could authorize and also outside the act's prohibition on electronic surveillance.

*****

So the writer of the article determined, as backed up by Dep. Atty. General, Jamie Gorelick that FISA really left an open loophole, and the ultimate decision on how far to persue a particular person lies with the president.