Creedence Clearwater Revival
Fortunate Son

Comments OffToggle Meta

Ahhhhh they needed “experts” to tell them this? I’m not the sharpest pencil in the box and I knew this. Russ Feingold covered all bases. I guess he figured he better have experts testify so his fellow Senators can’t say they can do nothing to stop the war.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Congress has the power to end the war in Iraq, a former Bush administration attorney and other high-powered legal experts told a Senate hearing on Tuesday.

With many lawmakers poised to confront President George W. Bush by voting disapproval of his war policy in the coming days, four of five experts called before the Senate Judiciary Committee said Congress could go further and restrict or stop U.S. involvement if it chose.

“I think the constitutional scheme does give Congress broad authority to terminate a war,” said Bradford Berenson, a Washington lawyer who was a White House associate counsel under Bush from 2001 to 2003.

“It is ultimately Congress that decides the size, scope and duration of the use of military force,” said Walter Dellinger, former acting solicitor general — the government’s chief advocate before the Supreme Court — in 1996-97, and an assistant attorney general three years before that.

The hearing was frequently punctuated by outbursts from more than a dozen anti-war protesters, who were asked several times to be quiet but not thrown out.

Read more at YahooNews

Comments OffToggle Meta

Clinton, by 2009, Obama by 2008…… can I get a 2007?

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Likely presidential contender Senator Barack Obama (news, bio, voting record) called for the removal of all US combat forces from Iraq by March 31, 2008, to counter what he called President George W. Bush’s “failed policy of escalation.”

“The American people have waited, the American people have been patient. We have given chance after chance for a resolution that has not come,” Obama said on the floor of the US Senate, as he pledged to introduce legislation calling for the troop pull out.

“The time for waiting in Iraq are over. The days of our open-ended commitment must come to a close, and the need to bring this war to an end is here,” said the Illinois Democrat, a leading contender for his party’s presidential nomination in 2008.

“In a civil war where no military solution exists, this redeployment remains our best leverage to pressure the Iraqi government to achieve the political settlement between its warring factions that can slow the bloodshed and promote stability,” Obama said.

The legislation he proposed, dubbed the “Iraq War De-escalation Act of 2007,” would reverse what Obama called the administration’s “dangerous and ill-conceived escalation.”

Read more at YahooNews

Comments OffToggle Meta

Chalk one up for the good guys.

WASHINGTON - A former Pentagon contractor has been sentenced to nine years in prison for helping steer millions of dollars in Iraqi reconstruction aid to a businessman in exchange for plane tickets, watches, alcohol, cigars and sexual favors.

Robert Stein, 52, of Fayetteville, N.C., was also ordered Monday to forfeit $3.6 million and serve three years’ probation, the Justice Department said.

Stein served as a comptroller and funding officer for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. He pleaded guilty in February 2006 to bribery, money laundering conspiracy and other charges.

He admitted conspiring with Philip H. Bloom, a U.S. citizen with businesses in Romania, Bruce D. Hopfengardner, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves, and others including several high-ranking Army officers.

Bloom, who controlled companies in Iraq and Romania, bid on projects using dummy corporations and Stein ensured that one of the firms was awarded the contract, according to court documents. Bloom received over $8.6 million in rigged contracts, prosecutors said.

The businessman allegedly showered Hopfengardner and Stein with luxury gifts such as cash, premium airline seats, jewelry and sexual favors from women at his Baghdad villa.

Prosecutors said Bloom laundered over $2 million in reconstruction money that Stein and others stole. The money was laundered through Bloom’s foreign bank accounts and kicked back to Stein and other officials, prosecutors said.

Hopfengardner and Bloom have pleaded guilty and await sentencing.

Comments OffToggle Meta

Call me crazy, but all this talk of Iran supplying weapons, and now being blamed for the kidnapping and murders of U.S. soldiers last week is pure propaganda. It’s making me sick. This asshole is trying to lie us into another war, IMO.

WASHINGTON, D.C. - A plan by the Bush administration to release detailed and possibly damning specific evidence linking the Iranian government to efforts to destabilize Iraq have been put on hold, U.S. officials told FOX News.

Officials had said a “dossier” against Iran compiled by the U.S. likely would be made public at a press conference this week in Baghdad, and that the evidence would contain specifics including shipping documents, serial numbers, maps and other evidence which officials say would irrefutably link Iran to weapons shipments to Iraq.

Now, U.S. military officials say the decision to go public with the findings has been put on hold for several reasons, including concerns over the reaction from Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - as well as inevitable follow-up questions that would be raised over what the U.S. should do about it.

U.S. reaction to continued Iranian meddling in Iraq also was the subject Tuesday of a Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing for John Negroponte, in line to become the nation’s No. 2 diplomat.

During pointed questioning, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., told Negroponte, “What I think many of us are concerned about is that we stumble into active hostilities with Iran without having aggressively pursued diplomatic approaches, without the American people understanding exactly what’s taking place.”

Read more at…..where else?…….FoxNews

Comments OffToggle Meta

Lou Dobbs reports on White House deleting text of Climate Change Reports
This is nothing new in that science is not science anymore but rather a tool for the White House to promote whatever agenda it wishes. These scientists are under oath as they discuss their reports being altered by political operatives to downplay the threat of Global Warming.
H/T Joe for this post!

Comments OffToggle Meta

Congressman Jack Murtha went to Iraq and found the Private Mercenaries that are being paid huge amounts of money for things our regular Army used to do are running wild. Murtha is looking forward to holding hearings to find out the truth about the Privagte Mercenaries in Iraq. OH- the biggest mercenary corporation of course is run and owned by a huge Bush supporter who is a multi millionaire. What a coincidence!
H/T Joe for this post!

Comments OffToggle Meta

MIAMI — The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday reinstated the most serious terror charge against accused al Qaida operative [tag]Jose Padilla and his two co-defendants[/tag], overturning a Miami court’s ruling that the charge duplicated allegations in the indictment’s other two counts.

The three judge panel which heard the case earlier this month wrote that the counts were interrelated but not the same because each required a separate element of proof.

The murder conspiracy count thrown out by U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke in August carried a possible life sentence, while the two remaining terror charges carried a total possible sentence of 20 years.

“We are gratified by the 11th Circuit’s swift decision and look forward to presenting the evidence at trial,” U.S. Attorney R. Alexander Acosta said in a statement.

Lawyers for Padilla and co-defendants Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi have 21 days to ask for a rehearing. The case is set for trial April 16.

Read more at the Sun Sentinel

Comments OffToggle Meta

No shock here…..

The FBI appears to have adopted an invasive Internet surveillance technique that collects far more data on innocent Americans than previously has been disclosed.

Instead of recording only what a particular suspect is doing, agents conducting investigations appear to be assembling the activities of thousands of Internet users at a time into massive databases, according to current and former officials. That database can subsequently be queried for names, e-mail addresses or keywords.

Such a technique is broader and potentially more intrusive than the FBI’s Carnivore surveillance system, later renamed DCS1000. It raises concerns similar to those stirred by widespread Internet monitoring that the National Security Agency is said to have done, according to documents that have surfaced in one federal lawsuit, and may stretch the bounds of what’s legally permissible.

Call it the vacuum-cleaner approach. It’s employed when police have obtained a court order and an Internet service provider can’t “isolate the particular person or IP address” because of technical constraints, says Paul Ohm, a former trial attorney at the Justice Department’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section. (An Internet Protocol address is a series of digits that can identify an individual computer.)

Read more here

Comments OffToggle Meta

The Lone Wolf…..again. This guy is the ONLY person in congress who is willing to do the right thing. He voted against the war, he was vehemently against the Patriot Act, the Detainee Bill, and now he’s the only one willing to take action that will actually stop this war.

Senate Democrats oppose the war in Iraq, they just don’t plan on stopping it.

They have discovered that standing up to the president is not quite as easy as vilifying him.

Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., has decided, however, to challenge what he calls the “timidity” of Democratic leaders. He is going to introduce legislation cutting off funding for the Iraq war and he may do it, he told me, as early as this week.

I reached him by telephone Monday in Fond du Lac, Wis., where he was conducting one of his “Listening Sessions” with voters during a snowstorm.

I asked him whether Democratic voters were further to the left than their elected leaders, especially their presidential candidates, when it came to the war.

“That is not only true of Democrats,” Feingold said, “it is true of the public as a whole. The mainstream view of the American people is to get out of Iraq.”

Read more at Politico.com

Comments OffToggle Meta

A set of talking points sent out yesterday by the staff of House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) encouraged House Republican press staff to use a quote from Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) — a onetime Democrat — as a means of attacking Democratic resolutions calling for US redeployment.

The full talking points leaked to RAW STORY are printed below. They carried the image above in an html-formatted email.

“House and Senate Democrat leaders have stated they oppose the increase in troops, and their whole idea of troop ‘redeployment’ would amount to little more than pulling out our troops and walking away,” the release says.

“As Senator Joseph Lieberman (ID-CT) [sic] told the Wall Street Journal last week:

“The people in Congress, and the public, were quite right in saying the president’s got to come up with a different approach. And he did. It’s better than any other plan I’ve seen because it holds the hope of success. Most of the other plans are effectively just giving up and walking away.”

President Bush and Vice President Cheney have both recently applauded Lieberman in public comments the last few weeks, raising the possibility that the highlighting of Lieberman’s comments may have been a coordinated effort.

Read full article at RawStory

H/T to ‘QvQ’ for post!!

Comments OffToggle Meta

Nothing like a cold beer, a good cigar, and Da Bears!

Comments OffToggle Meta

WASHINGTON (AP) - A Senate Republican on Tuesday directly challenged President Bush’s declaration that “I am the decision-maker” on issues of war.

“I would suggest respectfully to the president that he is not the sole decider,” Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said during a hearing on Congress’ war powers amid an increasingly harsh debate over Iraq war policy. “The decider is a shared and joint responsibility,” Specter said.

The question of whether to use its power over the government’s purse strings to force an end to the war in Iraq, and under what conditions, is among the issues faced by the newly empowered Democratic majority in Congress, and even some of the president’s political allies as well.

No one challenges the notion that Congress can stop a war by canceling its funding. In fact, Vice President Dick Cheney challenged Congress to back up its objections to Bush’s plan to put 21,500 more troops in Iraq by zeroing out the war budget.

Underlying Cheney’s gambit is the consensus understanding that such a drastic move is doubtful because it would be fraught with political peril.

Read more here

Comments OffToggle Meta

Oh God help us……..

President Bush has signed a directive that gives the White House much greater control over the rules and policy statements that the government develops to protect public health, safety, the environment, civil rights and privacy.

In an executive order published last week in the Federal Register, Mr. Bush said that each agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee, to supervise the development of rules and documents providing guidance to regulated industries. The White House will thus have a gatekeeper in each agency to analyze the costs and the benefits of new rules and to make sure the agencies carry out the president’s priorities.

This strengthens the hand of the White House in shaping rules that have, in the past, often been generated by civil servants and scientific experts. It suggests that the administration still has ways to exert its power after the takeover of Congress by the Democrats.

Read more at the NewYorkTimes

Comments OffToggle Meta

Comments OffToggle Meta