Jack Cafferty of the Cafferty Report talks about Vice President Cheney’s letter to the Secret Service asking for records of visitors to the Vice President’s residence to be destroyed.

Read more here

Go CREW Go!

And who would say any different?

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — A Saudi Arabian detainee died Wednesday at Guantanamo Bay prison and the U.S. military said he apparently committed suicide. Guards at the U.S. Naval Base in southeast Cuba found the detainee in his cell unresponsive and not breathing Wednesday afternoon, the U.S. military’s Southern Command said in a statement.

“They tried to save his life but he was pronounced dead,” said Mario Alvarez, a Miami-based spokesman for the command.

It would be the fourth suicide at Guantanamo since the prison camp opened in January 2002. On June 10, 2006, two Saudi detainees and one Yemeni hanged themselves with sheets. Details, including the prisoner’s name and manner of death, were not released.

A spokesman for detention operations, Navy Cmdr. Rick Haupt, declined to comment, referring questions to the Miami-based Southern Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Caribbean and Latin America.

More at AP

Some things never change……….

WASHINGTON (AP) — A half dozen federal investigations into the activities of Republican lawmakers are raising new worries for GOP leaders who hope to regain the House majority they lost last fall.

In recent weeks, two veteran Republicans surrendered prominent committee seats after FBI agents raided the offices of family businesses. Others have long-running investigations hanging over them. Some conservative activists are criticizing the party’s handling of the matters.

Democrats say at least six GOP House members are under some degree of Justice Department scrutiny, although Republicans question whether all the inquiries are active.

In pure numbers, Republicans are approaching the magnitude of their problem at this stage of the 2006 election cycle. Eventually, nine House Republicans faced FBI investigations. Four stepped down, and two - Reps. Randy “Duke” Cunningham of California and Bob Ney of Ohio - are in prison. Of the five who sought re-election, three lost and the other two remain under ethical clouds.

More at AP

By KELLEY HOLLAND
from The New York Times

Think of retirement and a picture emerges of a grand send-off at the office, followed by travel, hobbies, grandchildren, and a pension and a Social Security check to pay for it all. But after awhile, the retirement fund may start to feel a little skimpy, or the golf course a little dull - or both - and the concept of returning to work becomes, well, more than a concept.

But there’s a catch. When older workers look for jobs, they may get as much respect as Rodney Dangerfield.

It often takes many weeks, or even months, for older workers to find jobs, distinctly longer than their younger counterparts. In 2006, for instance, workers age 55 or older spent an average of 22 weeks looking for work. That was down from 24 in 2005, but still far longer than the 16-week job hunts of workers under 55, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In the same vein, a study by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, sampling employers in Massachusetts and Florida, found that younger workers were about 40 percent more likely to be called in for job interviews than were candidates 50 or older.

Difficulties persist for older job seekers, even as a growing number of companies encourage their employees to stay on by offering phased-in retirement and part-time work. The tightening labor market has not helped. Nor have warnings by some experts of a potential shortage of new workers. And the problem is likely to become more apparent as more baby boomers reach retirement age.

“If you want to work in retirement, don-t retire,” said Sara Rix, a strategic policy adviser at AARP who has analyzed the labor market. In other words, it may be a good time to be an older worker, but it is still hard to become one.

Gary Phelan, a partner at Outten & Golden, a firm specializing in employment law, says he hears periodically from older job seekers who believe they have lost out on jobs because of their age. Discrimination in hiring is hard to prove, he said, because the hiring process itself inevitably involves some discretion. But he says that he sees claims of age discrimination increasing in the workplace, and that he believes older workers- job-hunting difficulties are not abating. “Every day I hear when I represent someone in an age case, A-Well, I-m 58 and I have 30 years of experience and no one’s going to want to hire me,- ” he said. “And I have to acknowledge that yes, it’s going to be harder.”

Even when older workers are hired, he said, they sometimes wind up in jobs that pay less than their old ones or that require less expertise. “When most employers talk about diversity, they are rarely talking about age,” he said.

It’s unfortunate that many employers cannot see the advantage of more openness toward hiring older workers. There will be plenty of them in coming years: the number of workers 55 or older is expected to increase by 11 million from 2004 to 2014, accounting for most of the 17 million increase in overall employment, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And most workers say they plan to work in their retirement years, according to surveys by AARP and others.

Certainly, older workers may not be as physically nimble, and they may need some tutorials on technology. It is also true that older workers may want salaries that reflect their years of experience and that they are more likely to make use of health care coverage and, eventually, retirement benefits. But these workers also offer experience and perspective. They tend to be committed to their jobs, and are often willing to share their knowledge, perhaps by mentoring.

A study by Towers Perrin, and sponsored by AARP, on the business case for older workers analyzed a situation in which a hypothetical company actively recruited older workers so that the group represented 40 percent of new hires, compared with a more typical 20 percent. The average compensation costs for the new employees were no more than 1 percent higher than they would have been with a more typical mix of older and younger hires, the study found.

In the study, the high salaries that older workers sometimes command were related to experience, so younger workers with equally relevant and deep experience would have been paid the same. As for health care, the older job seekers tended to be relatively healthy and to have fewer dependents in need of insurance than the young workers did.

more from THE NEW YORK TIMES

The media’s compliance in the bending of the facts that led us into war is the focus of the new movie, “War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death”, by Norman Solomon and the Media Education Foundation.

DemocracyNow featured a good part of the new movie on their 5/29/07 broadcast. The media’s role in this war that was started by war crimes should see the media themselves be held accountable in that they let the world down with a lack of basic journalistic practices. Perhaps the internet’s growth of being a news outlet is a result of that and that will be the accountability factor seen by the media. DemocracyNow offers a good portion of the movie featured in a number of different video, audio and text versions.

The movie’s homepage is here

The homepage of DemocracyNow is here.

In order to see DemocracyNow please check out their TV listing here.

Their TV program audio is carried over many radio stations as listed here.

H/T JoeWo for this post!

Project for the New American Bachelor from AndyCobbonUTube

H/T Paul and Cam, who each sent this one in!

You could substitute Fredo’s name for Goldsmith’s and not know the difference.

From the Independent:

The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, is under growing pressure to disclose his advice to the Army on whether British soldiers in Iraq needed to comply with the Human Rights Act.

Human rights groups and lawyers acting for Iraqi victims of abuse claim Lord Goldsmith’s advice meant soldiers were told to ignore the human rights legislation when detaining civilians after the invasion in March 2003.

Yesterday, The Independent reported that emails sent between senior legal advisers showed there was disquiet among military lawyers about that advice.

Phil Shiner, of Public Interest Lawyers, who is representing Iraqi victims of abuse in the High Court, said: “It is a matter of public record that UK soldiers were hooding all detainees, sometimes with 3 sandbags and even with old plastic cement bags, and that this was going on in temperatures of 57C. Any right-thinking person knows this amounts to torture.

“I am astonished that the Attorney General’s legal advice could have been anything other than an unequivocal reminder that it is absolutely prohibited to torture… But the soldiers were not told this and there was still a debate going on at the highest level, even nine months after Baha Mousa died in British custody.”

What most of us had already known… and the shills and the hacks refused to accept:

MSNBC.com/Newsweek:

Was She or Wasn’t She?

Arguing that Libby deserves jail time, Fitzgerald says Plame was a covert agent.
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, Newsweek

May 29, 2007 - In new court filings, special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald has finally resolved one of the most disputed issues at the core of the long-running CIA leak controversy: Valerie Plame Wilson, he asserts, was a “covert” CIA officer who repeatedly traveled overseas using a “cover identity” in order to disguise her relationship with the agency.

If Republicans defended America, the Constitution and every American citizen with the same zest they do for each other, what a wonderful country this would be.

Libby’s advocates have also found allies on Capitol Hill. In an appendix to a new report released last week by the Senate Intelligence Committee about Iraq War intelligence, three Republican senators-including Kit Bond of Missouri, vice chairman of the panel-filed “additional views” harshly criticizing Valerie Wilson and her husband for allegedly misleading the committee in 2004 about the role she played in suggesting her husband’s trip to Niger to investigate reports that Iraq was seeking uranium from that country. Citing allegedly contradictory statements she has made more recently to a House committee, the GOP senators called for a re-interview of Valerie Wilson.

One of Libby’s most ardent defenders, Richard Carlson, a former chief of the Voice of America, who serves as a member of a defense trust set up for Libby, reacted harshly to Fitzgerald’s latest filings. “I think it’s certainly unseemly that he is kicking him while he’s down,” Carlson said. “For Fitzgerald, to get on his high horse, it’s disgusting and he should be ashamed of himself.”

I’ve seen many a comment made on other sites that he can’t win. I beg to differ… Fred will play very well with the Bush crowd.

Thompson wants to be 2008’s outsider

By Susan Page, USA Today

The most recent USA TODAY/Gallup national poll of Republicans and independents who “lean” Republican showed Thompson running third among potential GOP nominees with 13% support.

STAMFORD, Conn. - Politician-turned-actor Fred Thompson has been coy with audiences as he flirts with a bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

In an interview with USA TODAY, however, the former Tennessee senator not only makes it clear that he plans to run, he describes how he aims to do it. He’s planning an unconventional campaign using blogs, video posts and other Internet innovations to reach voters repelled by politics-as-usual in both parties.

“I can’t remember exactly the point that I said, ‘I’m going to do this,’ ” Thompson says, his 6-foot, 6-inch frame sprawled comfortably across a couch in a hotel suite. “But when I did, the thing that occurred to me: ‘I’m going to tell people that I am thinking about it and see what kind of reaction I get to it.’ ”

His late start carries some problems but also “certain advantages,” he says. “Nobody has maxed out to me” in contributions, he notes, and using the Internet already “has allowed me to be in the hunt, so to speak, without spending a dime.”

More at USA Today