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Not All the DOJ Missing Emails Are Missing
Hylas sends us to Democracy Now for a newscast on the missing emails, an interview with investigative journalist Greg Palast. Here's Palast talking about the fired US attorney from New Mexico, David Iglesias: "Iglesias believes the real reasons for the firings are in what are called the missing emails, emails sent by the [White House political advisor Karl] Rove team using Republican Party campaign computers, which Rove claims can't be retrieved. But not all the missing emails are missing. We have 500 of them. Apparently the Rove team misaddressed their emails, and late one night they all ended up in our inboxes in our offices in New York City." This story has had zero play in the US media; it's been being carried on the BBC.
A bit of history on Greg Palast; he's the guy who, on the BBC, broke the story about election irregularities in Florida before the 2000 election. Admittedly, a few days before, but it's still a bit of a scoop.
In the interview he claims to have sent them on to congress.
There is nothing weird about it if you know who owns the media and how they operate. Disney, Viacom, Timewarner, News Corp, Bertelsmann and GE own more than 90% of US media outlets. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_medi a_ownership for details. To get an inside view of how the media handle stories that are unwelcome to the establishment, I can recommend the following book: http://www.amazon.com/Into-Buzzsaw-Leading-Journal ists-Expose/dp/1591022304
It is much better than this!p alast+2000&search=Searchp alast&search=Search
He investigated the contract Jeb Bush gave to a company to filter out from the voter rolls the people who had no right to vote. He got their listings printed, and found out that they had prevented tens of thousands of african-americans from voting for no legal reason! As everyone knows african-americans almost always (95%) vote for the democrats. That is how the 2000 election really was stolen, and all US corporate media boycotted what he found, which only aired on the BBC.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=greg+
For more great videos by Palast about the 2004 election and more:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=greg+
Also do a serch on emule for other exclusive materials.
The article reads like a tongue-in-cheek joke with no facts. After reading that particular quote, with no text supporting it, I'm of the assumption that it was a joke. No national media is picking up on it just like no national media is picking up on the latest Doonesbury comic. Seriously, read the article. Does anyone else think that a mock play between Kevin Bacon and Tom Cruise can be considered a reputable source of news?
This article was written as a joke, and it appears that someone pulled out a choice quote and submitted it as news. What's next, The Onion?
Dekker Dreyer
Nice troll. Too bad it's not correct.
You are correct when you say the US Attorneys serve at the will of the President. Bill Clinton, when he came into office, fired all 83 US Attorneys and replaced them. So did Reagan and Bush, Sr.
Bush, however, not only did not do that, he waited until two years into his second term to fire eight attorneys which he had previously appointed!
Further, as is now becoming clear, the firings were not for performance reasons, but political reasons. In one case, the attorney was told he was being fired to make way for a former aide to Karl Rove. In another case, Iglesias, he was specificaly told his firing was not for performance reasons but political yet the White House and Gonzales kept saying, and still say to this day, that the firing was for performance issues.
As Iglesias said on Fox Noise, and as the transcript above shows, he asked for and was given permission to use the DOJ as a reference. If he was fired for performance reasons, why bother to give him a recommendation?
So what we have is an Attorney General who has been lying under oath about an incident which he apparently knew nothing about even though he heads the department. Let's see, lying under oath, can't recall information, doesn't know what's going on. Why does that sound familiar?
Keep up the trolling. We need the laughs.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
FTFA I mean, he's not necessarily the sharpest knife in the drawer, and he and his guys were mistyping their email addresses, sent them to georgewbush.org, instead of dotcom, which is an email domain owned by friends of ours, who shot them right to us.
Tequila - drink of the gods.
This is an issue because the subtext of all the stories is this: if you are a Democrat up for election you WILL be investigated, if you are a Republican you WILL NOT be investigated, if you are a Democrat at the DoJ you will be fired, if you are a Republican you will be promoted. Do you understand? The Department of Justice is a supposed to be a non-political department because no citizen who cares about this country wants a Soviet style DoJ where criminal investigations are based on political affiliation.
If you don't care about this now, you better not be bitching when a Democrat is President and the tides turn...
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
U.S. Attorneys are usually all replaced at the beginning of an administration. They are not supposed to be replaced in the middle of a term in order to obstruct justice.
While they are political appointees they do not occupy political positions. Supreme Court judges are political appointees too. They can't simply be yanked off the court by the president if he or one of his friends loses a court decision.
To get on the Supreme Court, a nominee has to be approved by Congress. Ordinarily that applies to U.S. Attorney nominees as well. (Even though they serve "at the pleasure of the president".) Specter's little Patriot Act amendment put an end to that. So now the president can simply fire a prosecutor if he or one of his friends get prosecuted, replace him with whomever he likes, and nobody can say a thing.
Now we have people in the president's own party demanding that his prosecutors bring bogus charges against their political opponents, rushed in time for elections. (Historically prosecutors have usually waited until after elections to avoid tainting them.) We have people in the president's own party having the prosecutors investigating them fired. We have prosecutors being replaced by guys who compile lists of registered voters in minority districts for mass voter challenges. We have prosecutors being replaced for investigating real crimes instead of wasting their time harassing voters with imaginary "voter fraud" cases. We have a Department of Justice that launches more than six corruption investigations of local Democratic politicians for every single investigation of a Republican. If you think this is a "non-story" you're out of your mind.
The underlying issue that were are hoping cracks some senior official heads (Gonzo and Rove would be a nice start) is voter fraud. The 8 who got fired, yeah, it's a bummer, but as you mentioned, not illegal. But, the ones who DIDN'T get fired, that is the problem. I live in Wisconsin, where one of the selected for replacement attorneys wound up keeping his job. He had a lowly admin official locked up for 4 months on trumped up corruption charges. And you can bet we got hammered by the "Doyle's aids are in prison due to corruption" adds in the build up the the election. Doyle still won the election, but it was much closer than it would have been otherwise. Fast forward to the actual court case for the accused, it lasted like 5 minutes, the Judge cleared her of any wrong doing, apologized to her, and admonished the attorney.
That case and many more like it, are the real issues. The things that will send people to jail. The hearings over the 8 that were fired have two goals: 1) a Perjury trap for Gonzo (who has done a remarkable job of avoiding them at the cost of all of his credibility) and 2) grounds to pull up more internal documentation (the missing emails). The theory being that the hearings over the purge is the crack in the Cadberry egg that will let us get to the gooey caramel middle.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Your thinking on the matter concerns me:
n zales/ I don't know anything about the site, but it's a nice summary and should have been the story the media told following the hearing that day. It gets to why this matters in a hurry, because it's not about hiring/firing.
The reason this _should_ be an issue is the principal of separation of powers has been sodomized by the current administration.
During the Clinton administration, there were just four people in the White House -- the President, the Vice President, the White House Counsel, and the Deputy White House Counsel -- who could participate in discussions with the Justice Department "regarding pending criminal investigations and criminal cases." There were just three Justice Department officials authorized to talk with the White House. This arrangement was intended restrict political interference in the administration of justice.
Yesterday in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said that it was important that the Justice Department "be independent from" the White House. But as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) pointed out, the firewalls that had existed during the Clinton administration have been ripped down. In the Bush administration, the rules have been rewritten so that 417 White House officials and 30 Justice Department officials are eligible to have discussions about criminal cases.
I copied this whole-cloth from http://thinkprogress.org/2007/04/20/whitehouse-go
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
You can't have it both ways. So which is it?
I'll tell you. You're pulling a "Choicepoint" by omitting things from the story. Yes, Ethel Baxter (D) created the felon list (and since you claim felons vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, she must have been thinking about her sworn election office duty instead of her party), but a very important change was made by the Republicans: the decision to allow false positives. Under Baxter's rules, doubt over the status of a voter removed them from the list. With the new Republican guidance, you could now stack the list. (Wikipedia has more.)
This isn't a partisan issue: either you're for fair elections, or you're not. We should attack every instance of fraud, regardless of who is skewing the system.
And when you're "debunking" the BBC of all sources, you should provide some of your own of similar stature.
Lies about crimes
Under Clinton, the top marginal tax bracket went from 31% @ $86,500, to 39.6 @ $288,350. Bush subsequently adjusted the top rate to 35% @ 311,950.
By comparison the top tax brack for most of the years of the "Reagan Boom" was 50% at around $170K or so, dropping to 28% at $32K under Bush.
These figures are not adjusted for inflation by the way.
The MEDIAN household taxation rates during
the Reagan budgets (1982-1989): 17.9,17.5,18.0,18.1,18.0,17.6,17.9,17.9
Bush HW (1990 - 1994): 17.9, 17.6, 17.4, 17.3,17.3
Clinton (1994-2001): 17.3, 17.3, 17.3, 17.4, 16.8, 16.9 16.6,15.3
Bush (2002-2003): 14.8, 13.8, 13.9
Note that each president's first year in office is under the prior president's budget.
Overall taxation rates dropped slightly during the Clinton years while the median taxation rate went down consistently and the top quintile rose significantly. Under the Bush administratio, there has been a substantial drop in effective taxation at the median income, but curiously only a slight drop is seen in the top quintile. The big tax breaks go to a tiny, tiny sliver of the top quintile.
This basically paints Clinton as overall a slight tax cutter who shifted the burden to the top quintile. Bush is a dramatic tax cutter who cut median and ultra-high income tax rates.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Your point would be well taken except that the DOJ is run by Bush Appointees.
Consider this from a Paul Krugman column dated, 3/9/2007:
"Donald Shields and John Cragan, two professors of communication, have compiled a database of investigations and/or indictments of candidates and elected officials by U.S. attorneys since the Bush administration came to power. Of the 375 cases they identified, 10 involved independents, 67 involved Republicans, and 298 involved Democrats. The main source of this partisan tilt was a huge disparity in investigations of local politicians, in which Democrats were seven times as likely as Republicans to face Justice Department scrutiny."
Then consider that with such intense scrutiny by Attoney Generals who "played ball" and didn't get fired, there was found only a handful of 'vote fraud' cases.